Back to Beauty?: On Steiner's Venus in Exile

Wendy Steiner's Venus in Exile: the Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art traces the dismissal of beauty and the feminine subject in the realms of Modernist art and literature of the past century. Steiner mainly focuses her critique on avant-garde art where Kantian notions of transcendent and detached, disinterested beauty seem to have resulted in "masculine" works where women, beauty, ornament and domesticity come to lose their place. Very early on in her text, Steiner contrasts a Kantian notion of beauty with the aesthetic theory latent in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and eventually suggests a societal revision of aesthetics in ways that pull us toward Shelley's critique. It is clear that Steiner sees the 21st-Century as having much potential for bringing back beauty (albeit a beauty that has been somewhat transformed by the Modernist history that has preceded it). Steiner seems to find hope in a renaissance of beauty as bodily, pleasurable and world in which generosity, love and making oneself again through a recognition of the Other are once again valued.

For me, Steiner's text was a wonderful pulling together of some pieces (and critiques) that I was struggling to give voice to. I appreciated the through examples she gave to demonstrate (instead of telling us) just how significant the departure of beauty was on many facets of life from home decorating, photography, novels, and art. I would imagine that Steiner's audience is more heterogeneous than some of the previous texts we've read in that she gives a lot of context information and, while she does assume background knowledge of art and literature, I was able to engage in her argument even when I was unfamiliar with a particular painting or novel.

I very much enjoyed Steiner's discussion of ornament and domesticity; however, these parts of the book left me with some questions regarding what was happening and going on in domestic spheres of life within certain cultural pockets despite the general devaluation of the beautiful. That is, while Steiner's project traces high art and lauded literature, I kept wondering what was going on in everyday society in the homes and lives of women who most likely did not leave ornament and domesticity behind (think, working-class womens' decorations/clothing as being called "gaudy"). Granted, Steiner does give mention to decorating books, fashion magazines and photography in a few places throughout her book; yet, I was wondering about who--despite its lack of popularity and cultural prestige--has clung to notions of beauty throughout the 20th century--who were the guardians of beauty and now that beauty is becoming in vogue again, how will this same groups relationship to beauty be changed? The reason I ask this question is that it seems to me that Steiner seems to be suggesting a cultural force (because of need and desire of individuals and society as a whole it seems) back toward beauty. Yet, a focus on the avant-garde then fails to recognize which people have held on to this notion all along and their role (if any) in how beauty will become re-appropriated in high art. I want to know more about the relationships between the avant-garde movement and "common" or "lower-end" consumption" as I think these relationships are crucial for thinking through what the renaissance of beauty will do to and for those who have less available power. Hmm...I hope this is making sense...I guess I'm just trying to reign in the hopefulness Steiner has for a return to beauty because I'm skeptical about what that shift will actually do for those that have been left out of Modernist art. Will the return of beauty be just a reorganization of the relationships to it in ways that make access to what is deemed valuable and artistic less available?

Rancière & Bourriaud, kind of...

Okay, so on Monday night I found out that I ordered the wrong Bourriaud book from Amazon so my reading of Relational Aesthetics has been shaped by some of the .PDF essays from the book that I've been able to track down on the internet. I had imagined, at the time, that I could focus my post here on Rancière, but then, well, I read Rancière and I must confess that this may be an "interesting" post...

Both of the texts for this week seem to share in common a focus on the public and an embracing of the connectivity of life in generally and the role of aesthetics in this connectivity. For Bourriaud, this connectivity (or, more specifically here, relationality) moves art and aesthetic experience from the realm of the private into the realm of the public. In other words, the value of art rests in its potential to bring people in relation to one another in particular ways an in specific cultural contexts. For Rancière, the role connectivity comes in somewhat differently through the connection between aesthetics and politics.

From what I can discern, Rancière seems to be suggesting that aesthetics is deeply entangled with (not necessarily causally, though) politicization and subjectivation and most fundmentally, with experience. Rancière is concerned throughout these interview-essays, among other things, with mapping out the relationship between the visible and the sayable and although I know that these ideas are central to his overall argument, I'm confused about what exactly he is doing with them. Hopefully this will become clearer before class...

I guess I'll stop here and revisit this writing when I am clearer about some of this and have more productive/focused questions and useful things to say...

Back to the Body: Bourdieu and Eagleton

Our texts for this week, Eagleton and Bourdieu, both seem to take up an interest in aesthetics alongside a renewed focus on the body. While the interest in the body is perhaps much more explicit in Eagleton, it is taken up centrally (albeit often implicitly for our reading today) in Bourdieu through his discussion of acquiring competencies and educational, symbolic and cultural capital--and to go beyond our reading some, what he fleshes out as the notion of the habitus in the later chapters of the book. While aesthetics for Eagleton have some radical potentials, Bourdieu's take on the social role of aesthetics and on how aesthetics are embodied seems to imply a more deterministic view. That is, Bourdieu seems to see less opportunity to use taste/art in ways that break down or challenge the system; rather, he suggests that while individuals attempt to move within this system they often ultimately end up unconsciously reifying the system all together through, for example, conspicuous consumption.

I'm interested, then, in talking about how Eagleton's view of the role of the body (and also subjectivity), when juxtaposed with Bourdieu's sense of the embodiment of taste and aesthetics, might suggest as we move forward in the course. In his introduction, Eagleton describes the aesthetic in the following way:

The aesthetic is at once, as I try to show, the very secret prototype of human subjectivity in early capitalist society, and a vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thought. It signifies a creative turn to the sensuous body, as well as an inscribing of that body with subtly oppressive law; it represents on the one hand a liberatory concern with concrete particularity, and on the other hand a specious form of universalism. If it offers a generous utopian image of reconciliation between men and women at the present divided from one another, it also blocks and mystifies the real political movement towards such historical community. Any account of this amphibious concept which either uncritically celebrates it or unequivocally denounces it is thus likely to overlook its real historical complexity (9).

Given Eagleton's passage here, how might we talk about bodies, subjectivity and the aesthetic as Eagleton sees these in relation to how Bourdieu might see these? What room for change and shift does Eagleton afford? Where are these affordances located (if at all) in Bourdieu's text?

I'm also interested in Eagleton's description of the Bourgeois social order--particularly in terms of how it seems to correspond with Bourdieu's focus on social practice and other minutiae such as taste. Eagleton states:

The ultimate binding of bourgeois social order, in contrast to the coercive apparatus of absolutism, will be habits, pieties, sentiments and affections. And this is equivalent to saying that power in such an order has become aestheticized. It is at one with the body's spontaneous impulses, entwined with sensibility and the affections, lived out in unreflective custom. Power is now inscribed in the minutiae of subjective experience, and the fissure between abstract duty and pleasurable inclination is accordingly healed (20).

What does this passage suggest about the ideology of aesthetics and, as Bourdieu would point to, taste?

Williams & Bérubé

Both of the texts for this week, although written decades apart, move us toward a forging of culture with art. While Williams' text accomplishes this through a series of chapters which take up Marxist concepts in service of a materialist critique, Bérubé's text contextualizes the place of aesthetics within the contemporary academy (English departments in particular) to demonstrate the the rifts between cultural studies and "the beautiful" are created due to a misinterpretation of the role of cultural studies. Essentially, ideology and art/the beautiful, although they have developed varying academic traditions, are quite compatible if we shift our focus to begin to look at what Bérubé calls "cultural forms".

Speaking of forms, I'm interested in the shape that Williams' writing took. Although I appreciated the detailed and often seemingly painstaking tracing of terms, I found it interesting that these terms were written about in ways that relied upon neatly-bound splits in chapter or section (something Williams claimed to theoretically be working against). Anyway, moving on from my grumbling, I specifically appreciated the following passage in the "Ideology" section:

....'thinking' and 'imagining' are from the beginning social processes...and (they) become accessible only through unarguably physical and material ways: in voices, in sounds made by instruments, in penned and printed writing, in arranged pigments on canvas or plaster, in worked marble or stone. To exclude these material social processes from the material social process is the same error as to reduce all material social processes to mere technical means for some other abstracted 'life'. The 'practical process' of the 'development of men' necessarily includes them from the beginning, and as more than some technical means for some quite separate 'thinking' and 'imagining' (62).

For me, this spot in the text was one of the most explicit places that clearly speaks to not only a critique of Marxist aesthetic theory but also affords a critique of the early aesthetic canon which heavily relied upon abstract notions of the aesthetic and beauty as being at odds with everyday process and practice (which Williams argues are a part of one another to begin with). I appreciate the moment, then, when Bérubé makes an argument for breathing as having an aesthetics and this section begins to address my concerns at the beginning of the semester a to how we see the mundane as being divorced from the aesthetic.

What was most surprising to me, though, given Williams' critique, is that it seems as though Bérubé is writing about a split within academia between cultural studies and aesthetics that, at its root, stems from the issue that Williams is first writing about in the late 70s. That is to say, it is interesting how the social and cultural trajectories of the two fields Bérubé writes about often see themselves as incompatible despite the work that has insisted upon a connection between the two.

Anyway, in terms of our class discussion tonight, I'd like to talk more about Bérubé's use of the terms instrumentality/noninstrumentality of art. I feel like these are key to the main arguments in the texts today as well as key concepts for addressing how the concepts of art (materiality) and the social and cultural are being explicitly brought back together.