On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges [1 ed.] 1527535231, 9781527535237

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On the Ugly

On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges

Edited by

Jane Forsey and Lars Aagaard-Mogensen

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges Edited by Jane Forsey and Lars Aagaard-Mogensen This book first published 2019 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady StephensonLibrary, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright© 2019 by Jane Forsey,Lars Aagaard-Mogensen and contributors

All rights

for this book reserved. No part ofthis book may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any fonn or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior pennission ofthe copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-3523-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-3523-7

Aclmowledgements: An early version ofBart Verschaffel's article appeared in Dutch in De Witte Raaf, no. 185: 1-3. An earlier version of Jane Forsey's article appeared as "The Aesthetic Force ofthe UnpleasanC inEventalAesthetics 15,1 (2016): 15-24, and in French inSur laLaideur, edited by Bertrand Naivin. Paris: Editions Complicites, 2017; Bertrand Naivin's article and a version of Jonathan J ohnson' s article appeared in French in that volume. All articles printed here by courteous pe:rrnissions.

CONTENTS

Preface

.......................................................................................................

vii

The Idea of Ugliness Chapter I

......................................................................................................

3

On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two Sources of Ugliness Bart Verschaffel Chapter II

17

...................................................................................................

O n the Beautiful and the Ugly HelTIlan Parret Chapter III

29

.................................................................................................

The Seductive Allure of the Macabre: Challenging the Pleasure Principle Meng-Shi Chen Kantian Conceptions of the Ugly Chapter N

.................................................................................................

47

Understandings of Ugliness in Kanf s Aesthetics Jonathan Johnson Chapter V

..................................................................................................

67

Kanf s Sublime and Ingeinous Insights into Judgements of the Ugly Erin Bradfield Chapter VI .................................................................................................

85

This Might be Unpleasant Jane Forsey The Ugly and Art Chapter VII

................................................................................................

The Critical Power of Ugliness Rachel Silverbloom

95

vi

Contents

Chapter VIII

............................................................................................

107

Andy Warhol: The Ugly Aestheticism ofPost-modemity Bertrand Naivin Bibliography Contributors Index

............................................................................................

.............................................................................................

........................................................................................................

123 131 135

PREFACE

The Challenge of the Ugly Ugliness has long been seen as a spoiler of aesthetic welfare. The ugly IS an unwelcome phenomenon that, like a weed in a garden, should be avoided in---or eradicated from-landscapes, artworks, quotidian objects and even human beings, to be replaced by its purported converse, beauty. To assert that an object, a vista or a people is rich because it has much ugliness seems absurd; the ugly carmot be said in praise of anything, nor is it praised. To admire a thing because it is ugly would baffle most: "Why did you pick that? Because it is so ugly!" must be said in jest. "I must aim to make tbis as ugly as possible;" "this is nearly fiinshed, I only need to add some ugliness"-comes off as manifest nonsense. Umberto Eco, in his compilation of synonyms of the ugly, attests to its unwelcome nature: it is "repellent,

horrible,

horrendous,

disgusting,

disagreeable,

grotesque,

abominable, repulsive, odious, indecent, foul, dirty, obscene, repugnant, frightening, abject, monstrous, horrid, horrifying, unpleasant, terrible, terrifying, frightful, nightmarish, revolting, sickening, fetid, fearsome, ignoble,

ungainly,

disfigured.'"

displeasing,

tiresome,

offensive,

deformed,

and

In short, the ugly hardly seems a notion upon which one

would like to, or should prefer to, dwell, in practice or in theory, especially in the area of aesthetics, given its main occupations with the beautiful, the sublime, the picturesque, the tasteful and tbe pleasurable. Indeed,

in

the

first

treatise

on

ugliness,

by

nineteenth-century

philosopher Karl Rosenkranz, attention to tbe ugly appeared as necessary for systematic completion: an investigation of ugliness was an inseparable part of a complete aesthetic study of beauty. "[B]iology also concerns itself with the concept of illness, ethics with that of evil, legal science with injustice, [and] tbeology with tbe concept of sin"-the ugly was given place as a distasteful but necessary part of the dialectic of human experience that, like cancer and murder, must nevertheless be understood.2 Yet

such

dismissals,

or

grudging

considerations, are

too

quick.

Aesthetic experience, as the attention to, or contemplation of, sensory

1 Umberto Eco, Ed. On Ugliness (New York: Rizzoli, 2011), "Introduction," p. 16. 2 Karl Rosenkranz,Aesthetics a/Ugliness (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 25.

viii

Preface

appearances, must surely include phenomena that do not immediately delight or please us. To exclude the ugly from the realm of the aestlietic is to ignore a great number of our experiences on the one hand, and to valorise a greater few of them on the other. The ugly is ubiquitous: we are all familiar with, have spotted, have remarked upon: ugly behaviour, ugly animals, cars, plants, artworks, buildings, designs, fashions; we have all had experiences of, as Eco noted, the tasteless, the distasteful, the grotesque and the deformed. A science of sensory experience should surely have room for these as well: the question is just

how.

'What is the ugly? Is it a mere negation of beauty, a lack of, or a deficit in, aesthetic value? Or is it, somewhat paradoxically, an aesthetic property or value of its O\vn, albeit a negative one? That is, are ugly things

actually

ugly in some real sense, or do they just fail to have even minimal characteristics or properties of beauty? Certainly that was the general view in medieval philosophy, where ugliness did not merit philosophical attention because there was, in fact, nothing to attend

to,

but merely a

regrettable absence that failed our attempts at aesthetic contemplation, or, worse, led us astray from the divinity of the beautiful. Post Rosenkranz, the ugly was no longer seen as a lack of beauty, or its opposite: something that was "not beautiful" was not thereby ugly: it could be aesthetically neutral, or at the zero point on some aesthetic scale of value, as Robert Stecker has argued, being without aesthetic interest, and therefore that to which we would be aesthetically indifferent.' Equally, a thing that is "not ugly" is not tliereby beautiful: it could be simply unobtrusive, as Verschaffel has argued in this volume, or somehow beneath our notice. The dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly has, in recent years, been reconceptualised, and the starting premise for the contributors to this collection is that an aesthetic experience of ugliness is indeed possible, although tliey differ in how they seek to characterise it. Parret, for instance, places the ugly as being beyond the sublime, as does Bradfield, while Verschaffel conceives of it as the "aestheticisation" of the monstrous or the disgusting. Naivin, by contrast, understands the ugly in telTIlS of the superficiality of post-modem society, where the tragic and disastrous become the decorative or the entertaining, as exemplified in the works of Andy Warhol. Silverbloom argues instead, tlirough Adomo, that ugliness has moral power-that it is more primordial than beauty, and that

3 Robert Stecker here implicitly echoes Frank Sibley's characterisation in "Some Notes on Ugliness," in Approach to Aesthetics: Col/ectedPapers on Philosophical Aesthetics, Ed. John Benson et a/., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 1 90-206. See Stecker's "Carroll's Bones," The British Journal ofAesthetics, 46 (2006): 282286, p. 284.

On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges

ix

its role is to reflect the suffering and pain of our culture in order to denounce it: the force of art in all its ugliness, she suggests, is to function as critique. But to separate ugliness from beauty as being ontologically distinct, or on a different scale of value altogether, is often to then bind it to other phenomena, like the sublime and the monstrous, or to other values, like the moral or the political. The difficulty in tackling tlie metaphysical question of the nature of ugliness lies in part in how to approach it: on its O\vn, as an independent phenomenon or fmm of experience; as somehow indelibly bound up with beauty, as its opposite (or its complement); or, again, as related to some other aesthetic category, from which it emerges, or which it perverts. These difficulties form one thread of consideration that runs through the present collection. The ugly engenders a second and equally problematic dichotomy, when we turn to consider its value in our experiences of it, a dichotomy between pleasure and displeasure, or pain. Almost without exception, aesthetic experience has been linked to pleasure: the beautiful has been seen as that which pleases us in our response to sensory stimuli, and the ugly, as displeasing, has on this account been dismissed as having no aesthetic value for us. The question of whether the aesthetic has to do with beauty only is equally the question of whether it has to do with pleasure, and witli pleasure of a particular kind. And the problem tliat tlie ugly poses in this regard is whether it is intrinsically dis-pleasurable-if so, can it be considered a bona fide fmm of aesthetic experience? This question cuts to the core of presumptions about the nature of aesthetic experience in general, and indeed threatens the historical complacency of the discipline. Silverbloom suggests that the import of tlie ugly as cultural critique is to cause displeasure, and with it self-realisation. Bradfield similarly suggests tliat the disharmony and displeasure of experiences of tlie ugly can expand the bounds of our faculties, and even engender the fmmation of community. Iohnson takes on the problem of displeasure in the growing body of Kantian scholarship, where the debate surrounds tlie possibility of experiences of the ugly within Kant's aesthetics. If judgements of tlie beautiful involve the harmonious and purposive free play of the cognitive faculties-tliat is pleasing to us-must the ugly thereby be disharmonious, contra-purposive and displeasurable? Or is it a case of the malfunction of the faculties and thus beyond the aesthetic altogetlier? Iohnson concludes that there must be a place for ugliness in aesthetic experience, and suggests, with Verschaffel, that it can be both offensive and fascinating at once, providing a fmm of pleasure of a particular kind. Forsey, in a discussion of a related Kantian notion of the unpleasant, argues that while

x

Preface

we do not enjoy it, the unpleasant is uniquely motivational in a way that disinterested judgements of beauty are not. Chen addresses what has been called the paradox of pleasure, or the paradox of negative emotion, most directly, in a Nietzschean analysis of our attraction to horror films, ugliness, and even public torture. What he calls the "seductive allure to life" in negatively pleasurable experiences is in fact a mirror of human nature, if not an example of the human condition as the will to power. The eight papers collected here, unique as each is in its approach to the ugly, all share in seeking to expand the scope of aesthetic theory, and to prise it away from its traditional pIe-occupation with beauty and with aesthetic pleasure. While focusing on the puzzle that ugliness presents, the authors' responses to it nevertheless delve into some of the deepest concerns of philosophical aesthetics broadly understood, and suggest that, in different ways, the ugly provides an intensification of our sensory experience that is equally deserving of theoretical attention. While in recent years the ugly has been gaining some philosophical attention, this has largely been in the context of Kantian scholarship. What we offer here is the first collection of papers that explore the ontological and axiological problems of the ugly, from a rich diversity of perspectives.

THE IDEA OF UGLINESS

CHAPTER I ON THE AESTHETIC GAZE, BEAUTY AND THE Two SOURCES OF UGLINESS BART VERSCHAFFEL

Do you know any means of suppressing what arises from the things you see? Paul Valeryl Beauty, in all its myriad forms, was a central topic in literature and philosophy until the end of the eighteenth century. Ugliness, by contrast, was seldom written about, or only incidentally and indirectly. The puzzling thing about ugliness, as Aristotle had already noted, was that even the banal or ugly could be rendered interesting or beautiful through artful depiction. There is "beautiful" and "beautiful-ugly," but the artfully­ ugly is not the same as ugly art. When it came to the philosophy of art, this insight fostered an appreciation of beauty's magical and, above all, deceptive power. Comparatively little thought, however, was devoted to a precise formulation of what "ugliness" might signify. The theories of the sublime, the

picturesque and

the

fantastic, which originated

in the

eighteenth century, generally follow the same trajectory: they analyse how something initially perceived (or sensed) as possessing a "negative" aesthetic value can nevertheless, quite unexpectedly, be experienced as "positive." Everything that is menacing and dangerous, with the power to annihilate our very existence, seems to send a pleasant shiver dO\vn our spines. The irregular, rough or

weathered, incomplete, immature or

anecdotal might also-contrary to all classical standards of beauty-be regarded as charming. And the forced, whimsical and bizarre can prove strangely entertaining. The (theoretical) interest in ugliness first emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, mainly amongst the German

1 (Euvres, I (ed. Pleiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 328, trans. from the French: "Sais-tu quelque mayen de reprimer ce qui surgit de la vue des chases?"

4

Chapter I

"idealist" thinkers and literati, and reached an early pinnacle in

Aesthetics a/Ugliness (1 853)

The

by Karl Rasenkranz2 But these authors also

looked more deeply, in a Hegelian sense, into the way in which ugliness­ understood as the opposite or negation of the various fOlTIlS of beauty­ could be aestheticised and "idealised" through artistic representation. Moreover, they assessed how variants of ugliness could be integrated into a broader and more complex notion of beauty: "[Art] must show us ugliness in the full compass of its mischief, but it must do this nevertheless with the ideality with which it handles the beautiful .

. .

".3

The great Enlightenment thinkers analysed the concept of beauty from the perspective of aesthetic

which they considered to be

judgement,

statements about an object's inherent nature. At the heart of all subsequent discussions lay the question of whether "beauty" was intrinsic---either because of an object's appearance, and/or method of manufacture, and/or how

well

form

follows

Bestimmungsgrund

function-or

a

matter

of

taste. Either

the

(ground of determination) of aesthetic judgement lies

in the object itself, or in the subject. Despite the infinite range of indeterminate

positions

that

can

exist

between

the

extremes

of

"objectivist" and "subjectivist" aesthetics, the debate is umesolvable. Yet this question is based on the premise that an aesthetic experience bears a "natural" correlation to reality. In other words, it is assumed that the aesthetic gaze is perpetually and universally accessible to mankind, and that "aesthetic judgement" is simply a special form of general human cognition. Now, the appearance of things-for example, fmm, pattern, colour

and

luminosity-undoubtedly

influences

everything

that

we

perceive and experience, feel and do. We are all responsive to shapes and can recognise rhythms and colour combinations. The awareness of fmm can, however, be discounted in many practices and modes of experience. It has no independent existence, per se, as "the aesthetic experience." The aesthetic gaze implies an appreciation of "pure appearances," whereby the aspect of an object is somewhat disconnected from its function, value, and meaning. The aesthetic experience presupposes that an object's appearance is isolated and given independent consideration. This bears an extraordinary, sophisticated, and profoundly artificial relationship to reality. In any case,

Asthetik des Hdsslichen (Ditseingen: Reclam, 2007). For the German language development of the theory of ugliness I have used Wemer JlUlg Schoner Schein der Hdsslichkeit oder Hasslichkeit des schonen Scheins. Asthetik und Geschichtsphilosophie im 19. Jahrlnmdert (Berlin: AthenalUll, 1987). 3 Rosenkranz, op. cif. , p. 47, trans. from the German: "[Die Kunst] muss uns das Hassliche in der ganzen Scharfe seines Unwesens vorfohren, aber sie muss dies dennoch mit derjenigen Idea/itat tun, mit der sie auch das Schone behandelt." 2 K. Rosenkranz,

On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two SOillces of Ugliness the

locus

and

importance

of the

aesthetic

experience,

and

5 more

fundamentally its availability, is far from evident. A society/culture must pelTIlit and tolerate this abstraction: focusing exclusively on appearances while disregarding an obj ect's value and function is often inappropriate and can, on occasion, be downright disrespectful

or

outrageous. An

aesthetically-abstracting attitude can offend multiple kinds of political, moral, or religious engagement with the subj ect matter. Isolating and appreciating appearances, regardless of their moral value or usefulness, is therefore a cultural issue. And even when aesthetic detachment is developed as a "possibility" within a culture, it inevitably remains a question of individual attainment. It is also a social or class issue. The concrete manner through which this disinterested gaze is made possible and accessible-the codes and

settings

that people use, in various

contexts, to look with a disinterested and dispassionate eye-varies. But this does not mean that the logic and conditions of the aesthetic gaze and experience carmot be discussed in general terms. The aesthetic gaze or approach is related to, and supported by, the specific way in which the obj ect presents itself:

the circumstances

pertaining to its perceptual presence. It implies that the "tenebrous" senses of smell, taste and touch are circumvented by physical distance, attitude or obstacles, and that the perception and attention are charmelled towards "pure visuality" or sound. An object will often be coded as "spectacle" or "perfolTIlance", thus as something enacted or played, which implies that it is somehow "not real," or belongs to an alternative reality. The apparatus of showing and exhibiting focuses the attention, and both frames and isolates an obj ect, thereby making it independent of the world. This has the effect of neutralising the involvement that would automatically be engendered by physical proximity. "Showing" or "exhibiting" might range from simply pointing at something to christening it as "art". The codes and/or physical distance can be communicated and imposed by a wide range of devices, including shop windows, plinths, dishes, frames or windows, glass plates and vie\vpoints; or, in the theatre, the proscenium that separates the audience from the "unreal" space of the perfolTIlance. The most important means of establishing aesthetic distance-so that we are confronted with pure visuality and, at the same time, a form of "unreality"-is,

and

always

will

be,

the image:

representation by

similitude. Both perfolTIlances and images readily lend themselves to aesthetic appreciation. Anyone who has internalised the aesthetic approach will fmd themselves able to look at ahnost anything as they might a performance or picture-just as one can listen to ambient noise as to a kind of music. The distance that allows one to see something "aesthetically"

6

Chapter I

might only be a question of attitude and perspective, therefore, which makes it unique to

the eye of the beholder. Taken to a logical conclusion, everything from an "aesthetic" perspective.

one might, in principle, assess

But it would still seem that this form of appreciation, whether rightly or wrongly, presents too many "technical" conditions; and we tend to concur that it is both wrong and inappropriate to treat everything as an aesthetic obj ect. "This is beautiful" and "that is ugly" are not opposites and nor are they the two extremes of a continuum. To say that something is "not beautiful" does not automatically mean it is ugly, and to pronounce something as "not ugly" does not equate to it being beautiful. To declare something "beautiful" or "ugly" is to deploy one of two distinct forms of aesthetic appreciation, each of which similarly privileges and isolates an object, thereby setting it at an "aesthetic distance". It becomes an opposite, therefore, of all that is "nOlmal". Or, in other words, it differs from the myriad of aesthetically-neutral objects that sink without a trace into the quagmire of unobtrusiveness. The "not-ugly" and "not-beautiful" can thus be categorised as "ordinary." Aesthetic appreciation-whether positive or negative-is a fonn of individualisation: both appraisals accord the obj ect a status that transcends the ordinary or normal.4 The beautiful and the ugly therefore are both

outstanding,

albeit in vastly divergent ways and on

disparate grounds. Experiencing beauty or confronting ugliness are two completely distinct things, with very different issues at stake. The aesthetic experience is oriented towards immediate impressions and presupposes that the act of contemplation detaches the appearance from the object, and hence the latter's existence and agency in the world vis-a-vis its origin, meaning, value, function, purpose. Experiencing a spring day or a landscape, a melody or a physique as "beautiful," and expressing this perception, implies that one is impressed by the mere appearance or (visual) inexhaustibility of what is seen or heard, devoid of vested interests or intention to profit from it, and without any comparative assessment against established criteria (such as the idea of perfection or a moral consideration). I would argue, however, that this "disinterested pleasure," as Kant tenns it, is structurally associated with another element. This is our surprise that beauty does, in fact, exist: "A thing of beauty is incredible-and exists."5 Crucially, beauty is always "new" and exceptional, and therefore unexpected. It takes us by surprise, and this because of its incomprehensibility and deviation from our expectations of "nonnality." 4 !hid., pp. 190ff. 5 Paul Valery, Cahiers,

11, ed. Pleiade, (Paris: Gallimard, 1 974), p. 962; translated from the French: "La belle chose est incroyable - et est."

On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two SOillces of Ugliness Consequently, a thing of beauty always seems "subjective universality"

that

characterises

expresses the claim that something

is, in

The Kantian

improbable.

aesthetic

7

judgement

thus

fact, genuinely beautiful, i.e. that

it goes beyond individual "preferences" or "tastes." An experience of beauty is akin to a

broadening of reality. And because

the manifestation of

beauty presents a paradox-being both implausible and yet irrefutable­ the implication is that a new reality outshines the one we already know. The experience of beauty, therefore, entails far more than a simple delight in the appearance of something: it always involves a

discovery.

Beauty

functions as an "ontological threshold." But the discovery is made through a coincidental, fortunate encounter: one needs to be present at

that specific

time and place for it to be seen or heard. The certainty that beauty "has happened" is only given through a subjective, personal and unique experience. It privileges both a moment and an individual. Beauty is thus existentially anchored

and

can

mark

someone's

life.

The

so-called

"judgement of beauty" therefore does not articulate a verifiable opinion on a "state of affairs." It does not aim at a scientific description of reality, which

relates to the objective properties of objects. It belongs to a

language-game of a completely different order. To judge something as beautiful, therefore, is to bear

witness:

it is the statement of a universal

truth as revealed to one person via a unique experience.6 Classical aesthetics posited ugliness as a

negative principle and

examined whether it might "dissolve" within something beautiful (and thus lend beauty a specific "colouring")-and if so, by what means. Twentieth-century

philosophical

reflections

on

themes

such

as

the

"fomlless" and the "abject," concomitant with developments in modem and contemporary art, have contributed to the insight that ugliness carmot only be defmed in negative terms, or merely reduced to an absence of beauty. Ugliness is a thing unto itself; it has an independent status. Beauty triumphs over the ordinary and augments what already exists. The

Wohlgefallen

[aesthetic pleasure 1 is coupled with the affirmation of

this surprising emichment of reality. Ugliness, in contrast, is not "new." It does not amaze or surprise; it does not come on top of what exists but, instead, cleaves onto the "nOlmal world," and is immediately recognised. Ugliness is a

revenant:

it is pelTIleated by a resistance or force that

precedes the ordinary world. Enlightenment theories of aesthetics assumed that ugliness, and the sense of something being ugly-like the notion of beauty-was "natural," a primary mode of being (for objects) or of

6 I developed this argument more fully in "Fatale waarheid: bemerkingen bij het esthetisch oordeel en de schoonheidservaring," De zaak van de lams!. Over kennis, kritiek en schoonheid (Ghent: A&Slbooks, 201 1).

8

Chapter I

experience (for humans). Everything in existence was believed to be either beautiful or ugly to a greater or lesser extent, and thus experienced as such, with the many guises of ugliness, like those of beauty, individually linked to specific feelings and emotions. Attempts were made to identify and classify these myriad kinds of ugliness and to correlate them with the responses they engendered. The "experience of ugliness," though, is even more specific and quite distinct from that of beauty. It is not ugliness as such that elicits rejection or disgust. Aesthetic appreciation-the ability to apprehend something as ugly and give it a name-already involves the processing and mastery of primary emotions and reactions that

precede the

aesthetic. "Ugliness" is the aesthetic mode of appearance for everything that erupts "from below" to disrupt the "ordinary" or "normal" Of, in short, our whole, life-sustaining world. With ugliness, the threat of the monstrous and a risk of contamination by the formless shines forth. Normality is threatened, disturbed or ruptured in two radically different ways: by the monstrous or terrifying-Rosenkianz uses the word [deformity]; or by the formless or disgusting-which he called

Ab/arm Ungestalt

[formlessnessJ.' One can, admittedly, easily conjure up disgusting monsters. But the monstrous, as such, is not disgusting, and the formless is not, as such, terrible.

The monstrous is "a deviation from nature," the fruit of "an efficient cause that claims onmipotence, a will that strives to compete with nature, and a tortured and dominant matter;" the monstrous is "uncarmy.,,8 It proves the fragility of fmm and the uncertainty of order. The monstrous is the uncontrolled, disorganised and defmmed, it engenders and encourages caprices and excesses; it is the advent of chaos. Or, as Lucretius described it, monsters are primordial remnants that lurk beneath the wafer-thin crust of what we call "nature" and of man-made order and "nmmality." And the ultimate example of monstrosity is clearly the "deformity-humanity" (Rosenkianz calls it "the ugliest ugly".)' Deformity threatens ruin and destruction. It is dangerous, spreads panic, paralyses or petrifies, and causes all in its path to flee. The triad of monstrous, grey Graiae-the

op. cif., p. 12. monstre dans I 'art occidental. Un probleme esthetique (Paris: Klincksieck, 2004), pp. 2 1 , 24-25; translated from the French: "un ecart par rapport a la nature;" "une cause efficiente qui se veut toutpuissante, d'unevolonte qui veut rivaliser avec la nature et d'une matiere torturee et dominee;" "inquietante etrangete." 9 Rosenkranz, op. cif., p. 12; translated from the German: "das hiisslichste hiissliche. " 7 Rosenkranz,

8 Gilbert LascaultLe

On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two Somces of Ugliness

9

triplet sisters of the fearsome Gorgons Medusa, Skylla and Echidna-are Horror (Enyo) Terror (Deino) and Destruction (Persis). lO Formlessness, on the other hand, is vague, viscous and glutinous, weak, decayed, diseased and rotten, with the most pungent variant being bodily secretions (the "abject"): Georges Bataille's squashed spider or worm. At its core is Verwesen [putrefaction], or organic decay: not dying or dead, but "dos Entwerden des schon Toten" [the decomposition of the already dead]. The human body reverts to waste or "remains"-teeming, nameless, soulless life: "we are more disgusted and repulsed by the appearance of life in what is already itself dead."" A lack offorrn radiates negativity; an encounter with the formless is contagious, sticky and contaminating: it attacks the Gestalt and identity, provokes revulsion and disgust, makes one recoil and retch; it must be kept at bay, and all contact immediately remedied by purification, cleansing, "disengaging" and vomiting, or through (ritual) laughter. 12 A direct confrontation with the monstrous or the fmmless invokes archaic and automatic responses that precede every possible fmm of aestheticisation or "experience of ugliness:" the actual confrontation with a heinous creature, or pus for example, never directly inspires aesthetic appreciation, or even a "judgement of ugliness." Rather, they provoke the primary reactions and operations that neutralise the imminent threat. All 1 0 For the literature on the monstrous see, in addition to Lascault (with an extensive bibliography), David Leeming, Medusa in the Mirror of Time (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), and Jean Clair, Medusa. Contribution a une Anthropo!ogie des arts du visuel (Paris: Gallirnard, 1989). II Rosenkranz, op. cif., p. 294; translated from the German: "Der Schein des Lebens im an sich Toten ist das unendlich Widrige im Eke!haften. " 1 2 The "Writings of Georges Bataille were essential to the introduction of the formless (and disgusting) as a theme in art and art theory. He, in turn, drew upon anthropological studies of primitive religions and rituals, especially on the subject of "purity" (Mary Douglas, Emile Dmkheim, Mircea Eliade, Roger Caillois). Inspiring is the collection of texts gathered in Traverses 37. Le degoitt, published by Centre Georges Pompidou in April 1986. The most important overview and first conceptualisation of the artistic use of "formless," before it became concentrated upon the physical and abject, is the exhibition catalogue L 'informe. Mode d'emp!oi, curated by Yve-Alain Bois & Rosalind Krauss (paris: Centre Pompidou, 1996): Fonn!ess. A Users Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). The couple of pages that Rosenkranz dedicated to the subject are certainly grund!egend [fundamental]: see op. cif., about "Das Ekelhafte" [the disgusting], pp. 293-303. See also Aurel Kolnai Eke!, Hochmut, Hass. Zur Phdnomeno!ogie feindlicher Gefiih!e (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2007), and the recent survey: Winfried Menninghaus Eke/: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 201 1).

10

Chapter I

societies

develop

a "culture" to

deal

with these things.

Religions,

particularly, offer many solutions, including myths and a whole range of ceremonies and magical practices, from exorcisms, ritual insults and cursing, to sacrifices, purification and simply "laughing it off." It took centuries of arduous effort to wrest theatrical and visual fOlTIlS of representation from their original religious contexts and, furthermore, to sufficiently divest them of their magical aspects. In so doing, perfOlmances and images could finally be put to "artistic" use-not only as a way of "playing" with meaning (probably the first and ultimate type of artistic "work"), but also as a method of isolating appearances and offering them up for aesthetic appreciation. The difficult and profoundly artificial base operation of aestheticisation does not primarily preclude, contrary to expectation, the finding of beauty in ugliness. What it does imply is that everything monstrous or disgusting can successfully be kept at mm's length and subj ected to scrutiny, whereupon it becomes innocuous, or merely "ugly," i.e. practically hannless, and perhaps even ridiculous. The

sight of what is

effectively monstrous or disgusting therefore becomes, in

the worst case, merely "unpleasant"-a "lingering emotion" associated with the origin of this "ugly appearance." Rosenkranz noted that a painting of the Raising of Lazarus is powerless to convey the human stench of death: the viewer "is only forced to

think

of the superficial beginning of

decay."13 Elsewhere, he refers to the fresco of the

Triumph of Death

in the

church Carnpo Santo of Pisa, a detail of which depicts a noble hunting party pinching their noses as they ride past a corpse in an open grave: "we see this well enough, but we do not smell it."14 Indeed, to find something "hideously ugly" already presupposes an aesthetic distance, one that has terminated the primary automatic reactions. The detachment implied by an experience of ugliness, therefore, is much more complicated, ambiguous and tainted than

an

encounter with beauty.

It

conceals

a

greater

involvement and deeper significance than is associated with the latter, whereby the engagement follows disinterested contemplation and is related to the existential meaning of a life-changing moment and unexpected discovery. It is possible, just as with beauty, that the isolation and contemplation of ugliness occurs through

the eye of the beholder.

Yet because the

experience of ugliness does not commence with "disinterest" but with a primary,

pre-aesthetic

engagement, it is much more problematic. A

1 3 Rosenkranz, op. cit., p. 297; translated from the German: "doch eben mw an einen oberjlachlichen Beginn der Verwesung zu denken hat." 1 4 Ibid., p. 295, translated from the German: "Wir sehen dies wohl, aber wir riechen es nicht. "

On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two SOillces of Ugliness

11

specific "disposition" of the attention rarely suffices. Special resources and specific contexts, such as the arts, seem necessary to the successful neutralisation and reduction of the impending monstrosity or invading fOlmlessness. Once distilled to a mere image or appearance-reduced to pure visuality and "unreality" -it can be "aesthetically appreciated" and be deemed (merely) "ugly." Here, tbe effective medium par excellence is undoubtedly representation, or the image/likeness. Perhaps the paralysing, lethal or contagious potency of the monstrous and disgusting can never be fully neutralised, but an image can tone it do\Vll, just enough for it to be viewed. Their powers can be captured and imprisoned when reflected in a picture or performance. This is what I will call the

"medusa strategy."

Rationalist and ahistorical aesthetic theories mistakenly interpret the emotions involved in disliking an unpleasant picture as a response (or reaction) to ugliness itself. The aestbetically-distant relationship with tbe "ugly" always cloaks a specific stance towards the monstrous and/or disgusting. Our dealings with ugliness-the "aesthetic" rejection-are always existentially loaded, motivated by other concerns, and somewhat archaic. Our familiarity with ugliness means that we view it as par for the course. "The intricate, the contradictory, the amphibious, and therefore even the unnatural, the criminal, the strange, even the mad" is always interestingY It can even

fascinate:

something of the ancient and well­

knO\Vll shines through but must remain suppressed and concealed. A hint of obscenity hangs over the ugly. (And the reverse might also be true. Rosenkranz was probably right to say that everything phallic, tbough venerated by religion, is ugly when viewed aesthetically and so call1lot be idealisedlaestheticised: "All phallic gods are ugly.")16 It is not a question, therefore, of whether something ugly can still be regarded as "beautiful." "Ugliness," as such, is the result of the "aestheticisation" of the monstrous or disgusting. But it can also lend a

frisson

to works of art when added in

small doses. The different and more primal level at which tbis engagement occurs is the very reason that its (carefully controlled) "appearance" in art can be far more gripping and intense tban the presence of beauty. The ever-ambiguous satisfaction that one feels at the sight of (a successful artistic representation of) ugliness-such as, for example, in one of the variations of the "sublime," or as an ingredient of the picturesque or fantastic-is not derived from the pleasantness of its "pure appearance" but from the realisation that a risky enterprise has succeeded. It is not the 15 Ibid., p. 104; translated from the German: "[dJas Verwickelte, das Widersprnchvolle, das Amphibolische und daher selbst das Unnatiirliche, das Verbrecherische, das Seltsame,ja Wahnsinnige." 1 6 Ibid., p. 223; translated from the German: ''Alle phallischen Gdtter sind Hiif3lich."

12

Chapter I

appearance, as such, that we admire, but the triumph of the depiction: we are amazed that the hideous-monstrous and/or disgusting-which we would never dare confront-has been tamed through visualisation and can now be viewed with "detachment." Artworks can, it would seem, keep the monster in check and produce complex, equivocal experiences in which unease at the recognition of a dangerous enemy is mingled with gratitude at its imprisonment, as well as a sense of elation. To illustrate how the "aesthetic" dispositive can neutralise the monstrous and disgusting and, furthemlOre, lend meaning and value to "ugliness," I would like to cite Inspirations mediterram}ennes by Paul Valery.17 In this published lecture, Valery describes how the Mediterranean Sea formed its own sensibilite. He illustrates his point via two "impressions," both of which had a decisive, profound and lasting impact upon his psyche. These did not stem from the beautiful, or a "pure appearance," but from the successful way in which, by quasi-artistic strategies, the terrible became visible and, quite exceptionally, even the disgusting. The first of these is a consummate and classic example of the sublime vista and the power of the romantic "landscape gaze.,,18 'When describing a panoramic view of the harbour and sea from the courtyard of his fmmer school, Valery wrote: "for me there is no spectacle to compare with what can be seen from a terrace or a balcony pleasantly situated above a harbour."19 The view combined the "unifonn simplicity of the sea" with "closer by, the lives and industry of humans, those who traffic, build, maneuvre.,,20 On one side: the sea, the eternal, natural, unchangeable primordial source, "a nature eternally primitive, untouched, unchangeable by man." On the other: the coastline, where the sea and the earth collide and the passage of Time is revealed, "the erratic work of time, continually reshaping the shore ...".21 And on the shoreline, the trifling works of men that are accorded such significance: "the reciprocal work of man-the

17 "Inspirations mediterraneennes," Essais quasi politiques, (Euvres 1, ed. Pleiade, (Paris: Gallirnard, 1 957), pp. 1084-1098. 18 For an interesting series of essays on the sublime landscape see the catalogue Le Paysage et la question de sublime (Musee de Valence, 1997). 19 Valery, op. cif., p. 1 084; translated from the French: "ce que l 'on voit d'une terrasse ou d'un balcon bien place au-dessus d'unporf." 20 !hid., p. 1085; translated from the French: "la simplicite generale de la mer" and "la vie et l 'industrie humaines, qui trafiquent, construisent, manoeuvrent tout aupres." 21 !hid., p. 1085; translated from the French: "une nature eternellement primitive, intacte, inalterable par l 'homme ... " and "l 'oeuvre irregulier du temps quifac;onne indefiniment le ravage."

On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two Somces of Ugliness

13

accumulation of constructions with their geometric forms, straight lines, planes and arcs---contrasting with the disorder and accidents of natural fOlTIlS."22 The blind, irregular effects, the dangerous natural "disorder" that carmot be conquered or regulated, are encapsulated within an image of the world, positioned alongside and amongst the perfect man-made chaos. In a parallel passage in a different text, Regards sur la mer, Valery placed greater emphasis on the inhuman and "monstrous" aspect of the sea and natural time, and the genuine disparity in which man arranges his insignificant history: "for is this not the exact frontier at which the eternally wild, brute physical nature, the unfailing primitive, the ever­ virginal, meet face to face the works of the hands of man, the earth arranged, symmetries ordained, solids drawn up in ranks, energies directed and opposed, and the whole apparatus of an effort of which the evident principle is finality, economy, the appropriate, foresight, hope."23 The coast is where Nature confronts "the contrary will of edification, voluntary labour, and the rebelliousness" of man.24 The truth is, though, that "these peaceful depths" can stir at any moment, whereupon the sea "suddenly crashes upon the monstrous pedestals of emerging lands, assails, crushes, devastates the populated continents, ruins cultures, buildings, and all of life."" From the appropriate distance and height of the school courtyard, therefore, we are both cognisant of the danger and in thrall to its magnificence: "the gaze enfolds the human and inhuman at a sweep.,,26 The impending monstrosity, the eternal and irreconcilable battle between nature's indifference and animalism, which comprises the truth of human 22

!bid., p. 1085; translated from the French: "1 'fPUvre reciproque des hommes, dont les constructions accumulees, les fonnes geometriques qu 'ils emploient, la ligne droite, les plans ou les arcs s 'opposent aux desordre et aux accidents des formes naturelles." 23 "Regards sur la mer," Pieces sur L 'Art, (Euvres 11, ed. Pleiade, (Paris:Gallimard, 1 960), p. 1340; translated from the French: "N'est-ce point ici lafrontiere meme ou se rencontrent eternellement smtvage, la nature physique brute, la presence toujours primitive et la realite toute vierge, avec I'oeuvre des mains de I 'homme, avec la terre modijiee, les symetries imposes, les solides ranges et dresses, l'energie deplacee et contrariee, et tout l 'appareil d'un effort dont la loi evidente est!malite, economie, appropriation, prevision, esperance." 24 "Inspirations mediterraneennes," op. cif., p. 1085; translated from the French: "la volonte contraire d'edijication, le travail volontaire, et commerebelle". 25 "Regards sm la mer," op.cif., p. 1 1 36; translated from the French: "se heurte tout it coup mt socle monstrueux des terres emergees, assaille, ecrase, devaste les plates-formes populeuses, ruine les cultures, les demeures et toute vie." 26 "Inspirations mediterraneennes," op. cif. , p. 1085; translated from the French: "L 'reil ainsi embrasse it lafois I 'IuJmain et l 'inhumain."

14

Chapter I

existence, is here aestheticised and "resolved" into the "sublime"-but only in an image, and only so long as it lasts. (When the horror of the monstrous is entirely neutralised and the threat no longer recognised, therefore, the sublime or downright "ugly" becomes ridiculous: the monster is caricatured and/or becomes comical: a big friendly giant.) The category of the sublime has been used since the eighteenth century, from Burke to Kant and in GelTIlan idealism, to describe the successful artistic aestheticisation of the monstrous/terrible, or the inhuman/unnatural. It was only much later, principally in the field of late twentieth-century French philosophy, that the category was also linked to the formless/disgusting. The sight of mountains from an aeroplane window, the raging sea crashing against the rocks, or the vast vault of the Pantheon that floats in the air for a thousand years: these all cause an involuntary shudder born out of a real but distant threat of annihilation. But does this really equate to the "safe" contemplation (for example, in an art gallery or museum context) of the disappearance and dissolution of form? Valery did not describe his second impression as sublime but used the word "beauty"-a "hideous beauty" [d'une affreuse beaute]. Before presenting his story, he even apologised for any offence he might cause. As a young boy, Valery decided to take a swim in the harbour. On the day in question, the local fishermen had landed huge catches of tuna fish. Before diving from the jetty, he gazed into the water: "Looking down all at once, I saw only a few feet away, in the marvellously still and transparent water, a hideous and resplendent chaos that made me shudder. Things of nauseating red, masses of a delicate pink, or of a deep and sinister purple, lay there ... "27 'What Valery saw, just before jumping, were the red, pink and purple guts that the fishermen, as was customary, had thrown back into the sea: "I recognised with horror the dreadful heap of viscera and entrails, I could neither flee nor endure what I saw, for the disgust caused by the charnel house struggled in me against my sense of the real and exceptional beauty of that confusion."28 Valery subsequently 27 !bid., p. 1088; translated from the French: "Tout a coup, abaissant le regard, j 'apen;us a quelques pas de moi, sous l 'eau merveilleusement plane et transparente, un horrible et splendide chaos qui me fit ji-emir. Des choses d'une rougeur eal!urante, des masses d'un rose delicat ou d'une pourpre profonde et sinistre, gisaient Ia ... " 28 !bid., p. 1089; translated from the French: "Je reconnus avec horreur l 'affreux amas des visceres et des entrailles . . . . Je ne pouvais nijuirni supporter ce queje voyais, car le degoi1t que ce charnier me cm/sait le disputait en moi a la sensation de bem/M reelle et singuliere de ce desordre."

On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two SOillces of Ugliness

15

gives an elaborate, colourful description of the "disorder." He provides a masterful summary of the ambiguous and paradoxical nature of the experience, in which he was "tom between repugnance and interest, between flight and analysis." And he correctly pinpoints the locus of tbe conflict in the difference between the primary, total, gut reaction (l'ame, or the soul) and the aestbeticising detachment (l'Oi!i4 or the eye): "the eye admired what the soul abhorred."29 \¥hat Valery's description illuminates, in my view, is the gulf between the sublime (in which the monstrous is recognisable and the danger botb still palpable and alive) and tbe "disgusting" that (in the above spectacle, at least) is completely overridden and unexpectedly gives way to a vision of hideous beauty [affreuse beaute,] or even actual beauty [d'me beaute reelle.] What might be regarded as "repulsive" certainly can, with a kind of artistic pirouette, also be aestheticised and linked to the sublime as, for example, in one of tbe many kinds of Orgientheater [Theatre of Orgies.] With the sublime, however, the threat of the monstrous is merely curbed: the danger is ever present. By contrast, the "disgusting" vision in Valery's second "impression" is real and only "artistically" neutralised by the eye of the beholder in conjunction with the sea. Here, the aestheticisation is brought about by literally disabling the senses of touch, taste and smell­ through which tbe "impure contact" is either made impossible or perfectly hatmless-thus reducing the disgusting-fOlmless tuna entrails to an almost abstract spectacle of free and random shapes and colours that can be regarded as "pleasant," while they might never be sublime. Unless, of course, along with Lyotard and other deconstructionist thinkers, that term is extended to encompass every philosophical collision with the "other" or the "strange," every "margin" of the understanding, or is even used to orchestrate the ecriture itself into a "terrifying tbreat." (Wben tbe turbulence that emanates from the formless-disgusting is completely neutralised, but not transfOlmed artistically into the "abstract-beautiful," and the origin of the image remains recognisable, it transforms into the gross, vulgar and scabrous-comic.) The wonder of Valery' s narrative lies in his discovery of the power of the aesthetic gaze before he even knew that such a thing as "art" existed. Art produces an identical effect to tbat of the harbour water upon tbe entrails. The blue sea acted as a transparent "medium" that eliminated the smell (also "taste") and tbe possibility of contact and, in so doing, transfOlmed the entrails into a purely visual apparition and spectacle: "but

29 Ibid., p. 1089; translated from the French: "divise entre la repugnance et I'interet, entre lafuite et I 'analysis L 'reil aimait ce que I 'rime ahhorrait." . . .

16

Chapter I

art is comparable to that limpid and crystalline depth through which I saw those hideous things.,,}O The disgusting pertains to the mouth, nose, stomach and fingers, not the eyes or the mind. For nothing is disgusting to the faculty of sight ... but we need art to glimpse what we dare not, or carmot, look in the eye.

30 !bid., p. 1089; translated from the French: "Mais l 'ar! est comparable a cette limpide et cristalline epaisseur a !ravers laquelle je voyais ces chases atroces: il nousfait des regards qui peuvent tout considerer."

CHAPTER 11 ON THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE UGLY HERMAN PARRET

1. The question "what is beauty" has had, since Plato, a prominent place in Western philosophy. Yet aesthetics as a scientific, philosophical discipline having beauty as its object begins in the first half of tbe eighteentb century with Alexander Baumgarten who invents the concept aesthetica and establishes its domain of research. An important ambition of this new philosophical discipline consists in the construction of so­ called "aesthetic categories," "aesthetic values" or "aesthetic predicates." Throughout the entire history of aesthetics the beautiful and tbe sublime have served as the central aesthetic categories. Thus the question was: under which condition can the predicate "beautiful" or "sublime" be ascribed to an object, a situation or an event? FurthelTIlore, a problem was raised, which I will hereby particularly attend to, namely whetber tbe ugly can be considered as an aesthetic category. Is there an aesthetic experience of the ugly? Or even: what is the relation between the ugly and tbe beautiful? One can indeed ask the pertinent question regarding the significance of such an abstract discussion about "aesthetic values." One can above all have doubts about the relevance of aesthetic categories such as the beautiful and the sublime in relation to contemporary art or to the contemporary experience of art. Has the ugly maybe become tbe only valid aesthetic predicate in the guise ofJormlessness and the abject? However, both in tbe production and tbe tbeory of art, the decline of beauty is a certainty. Maybe, as Adorno has already argued, beauty-and then tbe "new beauty"---can only be approached by taking distance from tbe beautiful. This witbdrawing beauty still fascinates: it haunts us constantly, it does not let go of us. After the nineteenth century, the ascension of the beautiful and the sublime follows Hegel, who is largely responsible for tbe idea of the "decline of beauty." But the destruction of beauty can be even more radical. There is a tendency nowadays to link the experience of the

18

Chapter II

beautiful to a conservative political position, to the bourgeois culture, to a regressive social taste. The very idea of modernity would then be essentially linked to the condenmation of the beautiful as aesthetic value and norm. That is why it is maybe better to no longer use the telTIl "beautiful" altogether and that happens often nowadays. The term "beautiful" is being used less and less when visiting museums or listening to a concert, while the predicate interesting prevails upon beautiful. The times are long gone when Baudelaire proffered beauty as the only "right" label that could determine his love for art. This retreat is echoed in Paul Valery's jest: "Beauty is a kind of death." Antonin Artaud, together with the artists Soutine and Bacon, join forces and turn "beauty" into "cruelty" [cf1Jaute] and sadomasochism. The most contemporary art certainly questions the existence, the significance and the value of the beautiful in favour of the new, the intense, the uncanny, as Deleuze writes somewhere. Our time concentrates on all sorts of mutations, our mentality has become time-sensitive and all this disputes the beautiful since beauty is unchanging and stable. Beauty is calm, serene and hannonious, and brings about only contemplation. From Breton to Lyotard, precisely this becomes a subject of a fundamental criticism. "Beauty will be convulsive or not at all," writes Breton. The introduction of the unconscious welcomes us into the age of the Differend [le differendJ, including a revaluation of the instant and of instability, disorder and imperfection. Valery concludes that aesthetics is no longer a science of the beautiful but it became a science of sensations, a science of a convulsive subjectivity whose sensitivity functions chaotically and is context-dependent. Indeed, contemporary art has subverted the classic aesthetics of the beautiful. However, this cannot result in an a priori, global and desperate renunciation of the idea of beauty. This problematisation described above raises new questions that I shall approach in the following. Is there a formless beauty? Does formlessness lead to ugliness? Can one aesthetically experience ugliness? 2. Firstly, I shall determine what beauty cannot be. A particularly fashionable and seductive yet suspicious conception of the beautiful is found in the sociology of taste, like the way Bourdieu elaborates it in his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979). In this epoch-making study, Bourdieu is interested in the variety of things that are found beautiful. He explains the experience of beauty from the perspective of more global social phenomena. For instance, the greater the knowledge of art and its enjoyment, the higher the education and the social status. Bourdieu does not hesitate to return to his argument that aesthetic

On the Beautiful and the Ugly

19

"taste" is nothing but a means for the social elite t o display its superiority. He concludes that beauty is a political means that structures social relationships. Art enthusiasts in our society are thereby snobs manipulating a cruel thing in order to exclude other people. But, against Bourdieu, the question can be asked whether everyone who is highly educated is also open to art. Are not things more complex than that? FurthemlOre, Bourdieu's sociology deals only with general models of reaction and not at all with individual experiences. The social distribution is not essential to the insight into the love for art but rather, I think, the psychological embeddedness of the feeling of beauty. Another exceptionally strong paradigm for the explanation of the "subjective" feeling for beauty is equally reductionist. It is the biological evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary biologists argue that the love of beauty is necessary for survival. Attachment to beauty benefits human self-preservation and thereby it became a basic human skill. Think of the Venus ofUrbino, of all the representations of Venus from the Renaissance, of all female figures that Titian painted. The allure of all these female bodies would be related to procreative mechanisms, just like the muscular athletic bodies of the representations of Apollo and Adonis attest to the virility of the fighter or the hunter, thus to the power of survival. This does not seem to be the case in a lot of contemporary art, like Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud for instance, where the male-female contrast is settled so to speak. 'What is beauty then? Are there possible theories as alternatives to sociologism and biologism? In the following I shall discuss a few other theories of beauty: object- and subject-oriented theories on the one hand and, on the other hand, perspectives on beauty where sensibility and materiality play a central part as distinct from perspectives that appeal to the supersensible. Object-oriented theories of beauty attempt to conceptually grasp the "secret" characteristics of the beautiful. These are the theories of proportion, the perfect composition, the sinuous lines and the fOlTIl- and function dialectics. They pretend to be objective. The doctrine of proportion, harmony, perfect symmetry, geometrical purity, of Pythagoras (the right angle, the bodily proportions) about Palladio (a colunm must be nine times higher than its width) up to Marilyn Momoe (the ideal breast circumference) are all doctrines that reduce the experience of beauty to a concept; to an insight into a relation according to a given ratio; to the insight into the structure of the cosmos in its entire ideality. Such aesthetics are called formal but there are many kinds of "formalisms" that are, for that matter, well matched. Generally, formalisms consider the

20

Chapter II

essence of beauty as a characteristic of a holistic nature: beauty is the rule of the whole, of the combination of separate elements, of interrelations and juxtapositions within the object. The particular elements must go hand in hand in a "composition" without losing their identity through their relationship to a totality. Functionalist theories of beauty are equally object-oriented and objectifying. A functionalist aestbetics teaches us that visual pleasure is found in tbe objects' adequate usability. According to functionalism, the integrity of an object consists in the perfect combination of fonn and function: the more the function determines the fmm, the more beautiful the object is. Such a tbeory of beauty pleads for the removal of all redundancies, for the purely decorative, for the elimination of everything that can seem frivolous, gracious, and elegant. This functionalist perspective is difficult to sustain. Duchamp's tbeory of the readymade argues tbat for tbe object to be seen as object of art it has to lose its function. A functionalist theory of art is also counter-intuitive: what about the beauty of colours? What is the function of colours in tbeir combinations and abstraction? On the other hand, there are subject-oriented perspectives that highlight the subjective reaction of the one experiencing, cultivating and valuing the beautiful. The experience of beauty concerns the state of someone's mind [GemuthV This subject-oriented aesthetics can be considered the "Copernican revolution" in the history of theories about beauty. It was linmanuel Kant and his Critique of Judgement (1790) that introduced this idea. The aesthetic experience, the intensity of the gratification, even tbe feeling of bliss (Kant speaks of Wohlgefallen, a state of being well-disposed) in tbe contact with natural beauty or with tbe beauty of an artwork become the theme of philosophical aesthetics. Kant is clear regarding this: an aesthetic experience is impossible without a feeling of gratification, without a special "mood" and this "mood" is intimate, personal, and subjective. Moreover, no moral or political engagement, no interests or any other desires may disturb this "mood." The reception of the latter condition, the disinterestedness, has been especially problematic. Nietzsche, for instance, considered it purely hypocritical and James Joyce, in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young 1 Translator's note: the GelTIlan term Gemiith is hereby translated as 'mind' just to follow the existing English translations of Kant's Third Critique. However, the meaning of this German word does not refer to concepts, knowledge or any detelTIlination about an object (as the word "mind" suggests) but rather to the mind's disposition, to the feeling of the mind's faculties caught in a reflexive stance, without an actual content.

On the Beautiful and the Ugly

21

Man, makes Stephen Daedalus reproach his friend Lynch: " I told you that

one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?" Kant, by contrast, will insist that the feeling of beauty has nothing to do with desire. According to Kant, beauty frees us from the dungeon of desire because desire and beauty are of different orders. Being touched [Ruhrung] is thus central in this subject-oriented approach: beauty must move us to tears; it is in and through beauty that we discover our deepest "self' or, as Plotinus thought, "the divine in us." Beauty leads to an "inner fusion," a fusion of what we actually are and what we should have been. No wonder that the romantics, since Schiller, have considered the feeling of beauty as the longing for subjective perfection: beauty leads to an "aesthetic paradise" which is actually the postulate of aestheticism: longing for beauty fills our entire existence. Within this subject-oriented paradigm another equally important polarity can be discovered, namely the one between theories of beauty that rest entirely on the subject's sensibility and theories of beauty that appeal to a capacity that allows us to "get in touch with" the supersensible. The fact that beauty is "the divine in us," as Plotinus argues, or that it leads to an "aesthetic paradise," points out that the kind of mind which experiences beauty is "directed" towards the supersensible that Kant stipulated as the idea that "transcends" all sensitivities and even some sensitivities that are transfonned by the imagination. 3. In the following I take up the Kantian subject-oriented position and argue that beauty is the correlate of the mind detennined by an intense, sensuous impression that brings pleasure and aims at a transcendental idea. This detennination excludes some alternatives like, among others, all objectivist theories both fonnalistic and functionalistic but also theories of beauty where the dimension of pleasure is considered as exclusively sensuous. Now I would like to approach a somehow more difficult "category:" the ugly. Is the ugly opposed to beauty? Does it make sense to speak about the beauty of the ugly or about the beautiful representation of the ugly? Is ugliness necessary in order to speak about the beautiful? In chapter V of his History of Beauty (2004) Umberto Eco discusses the so­ called "beauty of monsters." He returns to this subject in his more recent On Ugliness (2007) where he puts forward, next to an extended iconography of ugliness, a coherent philosophical theory that passes through the entire art history and philosophy of art until the present. Eco argues, among other things, that in many cultures the depictions of disfigured, horrifying beings (priapos, the Minotaur, the Cyclopes) are

22

Chapter II

positively valued. With Aristotle, he points out that art can also always depict ugly beings in a beautiful way and that it is precisely the beauty of the confrontation that makes the ugly acceptable. He writes: "The Ugliness that repels us in nature exists, but it becomes acceptable and even pleasurable in the art that expresses and shows 'beautifully' the ugliness of Ugliness. n2 The representation of the ugly can be extended: scenes of torture, agony and sorrow next to the monstrous and to physical disfiguration. Still, the degree of acceptance of "beautiful" representations of such scenes seems to seriously differ: from the depiction of Satan or of a satyr to the photograph of a concentration camp or a video of the collapsing Twin Towers, it becomes more and more difficult to find these representations "beautiful." The 9/11 event was, according to Karlheinz Stockhausen, the most sublime spectacle ever-but he insulted a great many others with this statement. Philosophers and especially theologians (in Antiquity and in the scholastic Middle Ages) conceived a theoretical explanation for the presence of the ugly in art, namely that the created universe is a whole that has to be valued in its totality. The Creation is seen as a whole where shadows make the light shine in a more beautiful marmer and where the ugly belongs to a general order and it can accordingly look beautiful. Order may be beautiful in its totality but this order makes room for the monstrous that contributes to the balance within this order. According to this philosophical argument, the universe's beauty increases due to its diversities. The ugly, the monstrous will keep on charming and fascinating. When moving from the representation of the ugly (the "beauty of the devil") to the representation of evil, a positive evaluation becomes more difficult but not completely impossible. The "aesthetics of evil" prevails at the end of the nineteenth century in the decadentism of, for instance, Oscar Wilde, or in Arthur Rimbaud's radical "derangement of all the senses." The aesthetic appreciation of ugliness remains controversial. It is all the more remarkable that very little philosophical research has been done on the aesthetic phenomena of ugliness. An exception is Karl Rosenkranz's The Aesthetics af the Ugly (or the despicable), published in 1853 (four years before Baudelaire's The Flawers af Evil). In this work Rosenkranz puts forward a dialectical, Hegelian approach to the ugly, completely in line with medieval holistic theology: no beauty without ugliness, no ugliness without beauty. Paradoxically, Rosenkranz was Kant's successor at the University of Konigsberg and still he breaks down the Kantian aesthetics at its foundation. Rosenkranz comes up with a phenomenology

2 Urnberto Eco, ed. History a/Beauty (New York: Rizzoli, 2004), p. 1 3 3 .

On the Beautiful and the Ugly

23

of ugliness: he brings together in a dialectical fashion the beauty of proportions and of general fOlmalness and the fOlmlessness or the absence of formalness. Surely this is orthodox Hegelianism: by introducing the aesthetic experience in temporality, in historicity, in the dialectical history of humanity, the dualism of the beautiful and the ugly must come to an end. Rosenkranz explicitly relates ugliness, evil, and the diabolical. In a classic Hegelian gesture, the negative is sublated into the ugly. This is not my position but still, the aesthetics of Rosenkranz was well received. Indeed, this unique Aesthetic of the Ugly has a double significance. On the one hand it concerns an exceptionally systematic and strong theory where ugliness is related to the play of fOlmalness and formlessness and, on the other hand, the ugly is set against a uniquely detailed phenomenology and is (partly) ratified with adjacent aesthetic categories like the vulgar, the base, the repulsive, the caricatural, the ghostly and so on. Rosenkranz does not hesitate at all: there surely is an aesthetic experience of the ugly. That this is so for Rosenkranz is coherent within a Hegelian aesthetics yet within the Kantian paradigm, to which I subscribe, the question remains whether a pure aesthetic experience of the ugly is possible. In the following I shall briefly examine the Kantian suspicions regarding this issue in order to subsequently look at the relevance of such a discussion for the comprehension of contemporary art production. 4. Each aesthetic category is not merely descriptive, it also includes an axiological value: it values either "favourably" and positively or "unfavourably" and negatively. Some categories oscillate between the two values. Take "nice," that is generally "fairly positive" but often very quickly disappears and loses its value. The axiological values of these categories are often shifting and it is difficult to weigh up their pros and cons. And still, it seems that the ugly has for everyone an unfavourable and negative value without any succession towards the positive. To say that an object is ugly does not just mean to affirm how an object is but what is its value. To predicate ugliness to an object is an aesthetic sentence. To say that an artwork is ugly is to argue that it failed due to some technical incapability or imperfection. Ugliness in nature is deemed a mistake in the Creation. Consequently, an individual animal that is monstrous is considered as an exception within the species, as a failure of nature. My first conclusion is: it is impossible to make an abstraction of the axiological character of the ugly. Ugliness is not a descriptive but an evaluative category and has a necessary affective meaning. In GelTIlan hasslich means both "hateful" and "ugly" and also the etymology of the

24

Chapter II

French

laid

shows that it comes from the Getman word

leiden,

to suffer.

Already this etymology points out the great affective weight of the French

telTIl laid In Dutch

too,

lelijk,

even in the most quotidian meaning, has an

inauspicious connotation. Ugliness is fOlmless and lacks internal structure, balance and symmetry. The ugly is not complete, it deviates from the norm. This is how one grasps the meaning of ugliness. The predicate "ugly" is also difficult to grasp from a logical point of view. The ugly is, logically, not the opposite of "beautiful" and that is why the ugly and the beautiful are not

contradictory

but rather logically

antipodal:

they exclude

each other but they do leave the door open to neutral intermediary terms: "not-beautiful" and "not-ugly" do not coincide with "ugly" or "beautiful." Another complex problem concerns the possibility of an

aesthetic

experience of the ugly. Kant does not provide an ultimate solution to this problem. The "Analytic of the

sublime"

could provide a possible answer

since in the experience of the sublime the imagination is hurt, and yet still there is pleasure. Pain mediates the pleasure that one experiences in the sublime. The experience of the sublime brings the mind into a state of tension and relaxation. 'What is significant is that even in this situation the mind is still able to have an

aesthetic

experience. Still, there is a border in

the "rape" of the imagination. One type of transgression is inadmissible and if this border is trespassed then the domain of the aesthetic is left behind. Here one has to take up the technical aspect of the Kantian argument. Kant distinguishes in §26 of the the

monstrous [Ungeheuer]

Critique ofJudgement between colossal [kolossalisch]. The colossal, the "just too big" are still within the

and the

the monlUllental, the gigantic,

aesthetics of the sublime. Think of the immense dimensions of Christo's works that our imagination can hardly grasp. The colossal offers indeed a typical strategy for the sublime in contemporary arts. But opposed to that and on the other side of the border there is the

monstrous.

An object is

"monstrous" when, due to its fOlmlessness, it completely paralyses the mind. 'While the

colossal

incites a feeling of the sublime, the

paralyses and impairs the mind and this is precisely what the

monstrous ugly does.

Maybe there are degrees of ugliness but the "ultimate ugliness," the monstrous, eliminates even the possibility of an aesthetic experience. Thus, in §26 of the

Critique of Judgement

one can find a criterion to

distinguish the sublime from the ugly. The same distinction appears in

Kant's Anthropology. Kant distinginshes between two sorts of "magnitudes:" the magnitudo reverenda and the magnitudo monstruosa. The magnitudo reverenda is a magnitude that compels respect like, for instance, in the passion of astonishment. This is exactly the kind of "magnitude" whose effect is the sublime. The opposite of this is the

magnitudo monstruosa-

On the Beautiful and the Ugly

25

this is a "magnitude" that brings about deterrence [Abschreckung], dread and a strong anxiety. Kant calls this, in his Critique of Judgement, the monstrous [Ungeheuer] which destroys imagination and whose violence is so intense that the pain is unbearable. Here, there is no mediation of pain and pleasure like in the experience of the sublime. This is the domain of the "ultimate ugliness," which is actually unimaginable and whose affective effect is disgust [Ekel] or loathing. But Kant is not always just as clear in the delineation of the sublime and the ugly. Yet an attentive reading of the Critique ofJudgement and of the Anthropology allows me to formulate a double conclusion. First of all, as it has been sho\Vll hereby, the ugly carmot be conceived as contradictory to the beautiful but rather it has to be grasped in its relation to the sublime: the ugly is "on the other side" of the sublime, beyond the sublime, as radically unconceivable and ungraspable by our representational faculties and our imagination. Consequently, there is no place for the very concept of an aesthetic experience of the ugly, not in Kant and at the same time not in classical aesthetics. An aesthetic experience of the ugly is impossible due to the complete deferment and paralysis of our human faculties. Ugliness is outrageous: during such an experience our mind undergoes a feeling of disgust and such a disgust allows no aesthetic relation but merely a moral attitude. After all, this is how I began this analysis of the ugly: in the domain of the ugly the spontaneous reaction is axiological. We are forced to take a moral stance in the presence of the ugly and thereby another interest of reason than the pure aesthetic interest motivates us. 5. Even though in the foregoing I have argued that a classic aesthetic theory of the ugly is not possible, this does not imply that an "experience of ugliness" is impossible. Furthermore, the contemporary visual arts frequently elicit just such an experience. This means that the beautiful is no longer a pertinent aesthetic category to be employed in characterising the contemporary object of art and that more pertinent predicates have to be sought. For that purpose one can appeal to the "subversive" Kantian category of the monstrous [Ungeheuer] that Kant himself placed outside the aesthetic domain. A few contemporary philosophers can also help us, who argue that the monstrous, in its unconceivable character, is actually the thingness: the "Thing" or "the Thing as the umeachable object," as Lacan calls it, matter without fmm; or the "Differend," as Lyotard calls it. The bulk of contemporary visual arts would then show nothing but an (uncontrollable, unconscious) drive to reification. Contemporary arts are

26

Chapter II

fascinated with the Thing which withdraws itself from any limitation and fOlmatioll. The entire history of art has been a conflict between/arm and matter. This has been preeminently the case with the great modernists, like Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Mondrian. The antagonists of this conflict came to the fore in the sixties of the last century: one sees an extreme formalism (or conceptualism) over against an extreme materialism. The attraction of the naked and brute material thingness catches the attention of many significant guiding figures of the contemporary arts, from Beuys to Kienholz to McCarthy and Kelly. Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss offered an outstanding analysis of this dynamic in their book Formless (1997). Three phases can be distinguished in the battle against fmm as it is embodied in the contemporary arts: anti-form, formlessness, and the abject. Robert Morris conceived in the sixties of the notion of anti-form as a reaction against classical art which held in esteem the solidity and the nobility of materiality. Morris pleaded for horizontality and banal materials (felt, disposable and synthetic materials); he argued for flaccidity, slime, fluidity and the fold. Formlessness brings us even closer to the ground and the accidental while Bataille's notion of "scatological matter" illustrates this approach towards matter. According to Bois and Kraus, the abject is reached when also evoking entropy and pulsation. Entropy concerns the general transience of matter; pulsation concerns rhythmic temporality as an outburst of bodiliness, or the pulsation of desire ("the pulse of life"). According to Julia Kristeva, the "abject" is the junction between subject and object, being no-Ionger­ subject and the not-yet-object, the undifferentiated and unutterable membrane which provokes a physical disgust. Such a description fits harmoniously in with the Kantian Ungeheuer. Art history has known many periods that aimed at "materialism." In the twentieth century, for instance, think of informal art or arle povera. From the sixties, the modernist paradigm's change of direction to the contemporary arts has surely confirmed the glory of materialism. With Serrano and McCarthy, materialism reaches its climax and also its ugliness. Radical materialism is, of course, the universe of the ugly, the mutilated flesh, the decay, the melt do'Wll, the work of the heterogeneous "Outside," of the unutterable that penetrates the absolute triumph of matter over fmm, a far-reaching destabilisation of our classifying categories and our artistic concepts.

On the Beautiful and the Ugly

27

6. I conclude these reflections on the beautiful and the ugly with four statements. As my first statement I argue that classical aesthetics, founded on the aesthetic category of the beautiful, goes along with the idea that the experience of the beautiful is an anthropological necessity. People need beauty and that is the case in all cultures. Everyone seems to have a feeling that our existence is impoverished without the experience of the beautiful. Of course, such an existential necessity brings about a nostalgia for beauty wherever beauty is absent. Maybe this first statement sounds too humanistic and idealistic and it might not even comply at all with the present needs of the contemporary man. Maybe today we need more provocation, authenticity, and excitation, and the contemplative attitude that the beautiful compels us to take is no longer attractive. This pure "well-being" which is found when confronted with beauty seems to us even odd and egocentric. Collective enthusiasm seems to us even more moral than pure individual pleasure. Still, it seems to me, notwithstanding this rise of exciting and sometimes destructive vital forces, that the nostalgia for the beautiful and thereby the aesthetic attitude of contemplation and serenity is unavoidable and even ineradicable. This brings me to my second statement The beautiful as the central aesthetic category undoubtedly designates classical art, modernity included (hence up to 1960) and so beauty is definable within classical art theory and aesthetics. Kant's "Analytic of the beautiful" is here the model and the prototype. It offers the most adequate and universal deductive reconstruction of the state of mind that is "moved" by beauty. Further I declare, and this is my third statement, that in contemporary, so-called post-modern times beauty is dethroned. No ttAbuse of Beautytt warns a still nostalgic Arthur Danto .' It is absolutely clear that there are no longer any central and peripheral aesthetic categories. There is no longer a hierarchy between the manifold aesthetic predicates that culminate with the beautiful. The reference term most frequently used is equally the least specific, the most general: interesting. Artworks are or are not interesting. The semantics of the "interesting" is the following: the "interesting" is that which solicits my interest or, even better, the interests of my faculties. I think of the classic (Kantian) division of the interests of my faculties: the cognitive·intellectual faculty of knowledge, the pragmatic (community· oriented) moral faculty, and the affective aesthetic faculty. Nowadays, when calling an art object "interesting," one no longer declares anything

The Abuse ofBewty: Aesthetics and the Concept ofArt (La Salle IL: Open Court Publishing, 2003).

3 Arthur Danto,

28

Chapter II

about the specific faculties that are addressed. Calling something "interesting" has cognitive, moral and aesthetic connotations. The dethronement of beauty concerns, amongst other things, the dissipation of the borders between the classical faculties of the subject. And my fourth statement summarises what has been said previously about the ugly. Here too, Kant was the initiator. The ugly is not considered as opposed to the beautiful but as a continuation of the sublime: the extremely-sublime is ugly. The ugly is thus not an aesthetic value or category but a post-aesthetic one. And so Kant meets Lyotard. The "value" of contemporary arts consists in infringing upon our imagination, raping it, so that violent effect of the contemporary object of art brings about an immediate axiological-moral reflex regarding the identity, the authenticity, the integrity of being human. Hence, contemporary arts can no longer be judged and valued according to the quality of the aesthetic categories, beginning with the beautiful, but according to the intensity of the impact on the interests of our faculties. Let us calls this the new "aesthetic excellence" or even, if it does not sound too paradoxical and ironic, the "new beauty."

CHAPTER III THE SEDUCTIVE ALLURE OF THE MACABRE: CHALLENGING THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE MENG-SHI CHEN

I have heard of men who have travelled into countries where horrible executions were to be daily witnessed, for the sake of that excitement which the sir;ht of sufferinr; never fails to r;ive ... You will call this cruelty. I call it curiosity. Charles Robert Maturin1 As far as the term "aesthetics", which stems from the Greek word aesthesis, meaning "sense perception" or "sensation", is concerned, the aesthetic seems to be inevitably linked with the feelings of pleasure (and dis-pleasure), for pleasure is the simple, if not fundamental, sensational feeling of our direct and transient conscious experience. To say whether a certain artwork gives us pleasure or not is many times tantamount to the expression of how we like it, and this seemingly unavoidable link presumes that there is a unique pleasure arising from aesthetic appreciation, as Jerrold Levinson points out: "[w]ithout a distinction of aesthetic pleasure taken in an artwork and other pleasures to be had from it, it is unlikely one will be able to explain satisfactorily what the proper appreciation of art-that is, its appreciation as art-might consist in.,,2 However, while the terminology of "aesthetic pleasure" has been systemised and popularised in the discourses of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, it seems equally inevitable that our grasp of aesthetic appreciation, in tellllS of our sensual or emotional responses to works of 1 Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (Lincoln NE: Nebraska University Press. 1961). pp. 160-163. 2 Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca NY: Comell University Press. 1996). p. 3.

30

Chapter III

art, has been repeatedly confronted with the ambiguity of pleasure especially in reactions to works of art that arouse negative emotions. It is widely assumed that many people seem to derive pleasure from horror movies and novels, from artworks that are ugly or which seem designed to shock, terrify, and disgust us. Yet why are some people so willing to put themselves through disturbing experiences that certain works of art provide? Or to put it simply, how can we find pleasure in painful experiences? This conundrum is knO\vn as the paradox of negative emotion, or sometimes the paradox of horror.3 Apparently, to answer these questions is at the same time to reaffinn the widely-accepted hypothesis that the aesthetic is linked with pleasure or that pleasure is essential to aesthetic experience. I nonetheless would like to argue that such questions arise from this problematic linkage by uivestigatuig the perplexing reactions to spectacles that provoke negative emotions. Instead of discussing how artistic or fictional works, best exemplified by horror films perhaps, terrify and disgust us yet apparently and paradoxically appeal to us at the same time, and instead of discussing ugliness broadly as found in nature and art, I have chosen an alternative example in an attempt to highlight the problematic of a hedonic approach to this enigmatic phenomenon. By presenting seeing as an activity in which affective power manifests itself, I have chosen to focus on the spectatorship of cruel public execution. It is an excellent example because long before the age of media, along with capitalist modernity and mass re­ production, public executions, designed to be fearful and spectacular as Foucault aptly points out, were always "live shows" that had direct impacts on collective feelings and thus were unquestionably powerful in telTIlS of the spectators' affective reactions to these distasteful sights.4 The initial concern is that the desire to experience the intensity and limits that are far beyond the banality of our daily lives, (as revealed in the popularity of horror movies), has never faded away since the time when public displays of execution were overwhelmingly popular. To draw a parallel between watchuig horrendous scenes of public execution in pre-modern times and watching horror movies in modern days may overlook the seriousness of law, justice and state power embodied in the fOlTIler as if it also reflects the marked characteristic of the latter-the sheer consumption of entertaining commodities-still, there 3 For recent discussions of this paradox, see Suffering Art Gladly: The Paradox of Negative Emotion inArt, ed. Jerrold Levinson, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macrnillan, 2014). 4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 23-31.

The Seductive Allure ofthe Macabre

31

is historical evidence that public executions had largely been regarded as good entertainment accompanied by perplexing pleasure s To be attracted by the sight of atrocity, torture, pain and suffering is definitely not rare. On tbe other hand, it is indisputable tbat some people enjoy being exposed to feelings of peril and insecurity. For them a moderate dose of hazard could animate them and add pleasure to routine, if not boring, daily life. To draw tbe parallel between tbe spectatorship of public execution and horror movies is tberefore to highlight tbe perplexing desire and fascination of these "moderate" feelings of horror and danger. Very often, seeking and chasing excitement with a moderate dose of hazard eventually turns into mundane pleasure in modem times, which seems to naturally explain why some people are so willing to experience such seemingly unpleasant spectacles. Given that the success of the modern entertainment industry is usually based on mass psychology associated with hedonism, it is not without reason to think of the pursuit of pleasure as the main reason. This is why my first task is to trace the possible origin of the hedonistic hypothesis as the detelTIlinant motive for seeking seemingly unpleasant experiences and point out the problems this hypothesis may encounter. No Cruelty, No Festival

Both Nietzsche 6 and Foucault present outstanding arguments, in On the Genealogy of Morality and Discipline and Punish respectively, to convince us that our cruel tendency has not been swept away by the disappearance of tbe public display of cruel punishment. As Nietzsche reminds us of the old proverb-no cruelty, no festival-the cruelty 5 There is a vivid example described by Charles Dickens on the night of November

13, 1 849: "\¥hen I came upon the scene at midnight the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting they came from a conCOlise of boys and girls already assembled in the best places, made my blood nUl cold. As the night went on screeching, laughing, and the yelling in strong chorus of the parodies of negro melodies with the substitution of Mrs. Manning for Susannah were added to these . . . Fighting, fainting, whistling, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowds by the police with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment." Cited in RR Wilson, The Hydra 's Tale (Edmonton: Alberta University Press, 2002), p. 139. 6 I refer to Beyond Good and Evil, ed. R-P. Horstrnann, J. Norman, trans. J. Norman, (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 2002), hereafter BGE; On the Genealogy ofMorality, ed. K-A. Pearson, trans. C. Diethe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 997), hereafter GM; and The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufrnann and R J. Hollingdale, (New York: Viking Press, 1968), hereafter WP.

32

Chapter III

disclosed in various fOlTIlS of corporeal punishment seems to inevitably include feelings of pleasure. Based on Nietzsche's articulation, it is easy to assume that it is the mundane characteristics and inescapable tendency of cruelty to generate pleasure in us that made people thrill at the public displays of execution common in the old days. Cruelty embodied in such forms of punishment might be just a small piece of the bloodiness of our civilization. And if we then include the mundane phenomena of the popularity of fictional and artistic representations of cruelty, and its related matters-violence, terror, ugliness, disgust and evil, etc., all of which can be reflected in severe punishment-we actually do not need Nietzsche and Foucault, not to say Sade, to remind us of our true nature, although their profound insights are extremely valuable. However,

I

will argue here that in terms of the appeal of the spectacle

of torture, to experience pleasure is nonetheless not the appropriate reason for crowds to gather around the execution grounds, whether or not pleasure might arise from a sense of justice or cruel intention. The assumption that the spectacle of cruel punishment attracts crowds because there is pleasure in watching a criminal being cruelly tortured is suspect. To be attracted is not the same as feeling pleasure. The pleasure principle as the premise of the attraction of cruel spectacle should be put into question. After analysing Nietzsche's arguments on how pleasure and punishment seem naturally yoked together, we will see how inevitable it is that such an interpretation becomes a dead end if it is based on a pleasure principle. By tracing Nietzsche's accounts in the following,

I

will show

why the connections between punishment and pleasure are emphatically discussed by him and what problems he may encounter and settle.

Dismissing the Pleasure-oriented Hypothesis

In

the

second

essay

of

his

Genealogy,

Nietzsche

questions the

hypothesis that punishment arises from our sense of justice while strongly holding the view that punishment can nonetheless generate pleasure. Nietzsche's conviction has not only disintegrated the pseudo-hypothesis that justice plays a role in stimulating the enjoyment of scenes of cruel punishment but also the assumption that enjoyment of others' suffering is an unavoidable and even necessary condition in human history. As far as historical origin is concerned, if punishment stems from ideas of justice the triumph of which would bring us joy, then the hypothesis that we cheer the wrongdoers' sufferings in the punishment they deserve is verified. The speculation that punishment originated from a sense of justice sounds reasonable and natural to us, yet the issue of origin, as one

The Seductive Allure ofthe Macabre

33

of Nietzsche's projects in his Genealogy, is commonly treated as that of instinct and natural phenomena which makes us miss an opportunity for further investigation. In fact, punishment was never meted out because of a sense of justice in telTIlS of a "primitive" motivation, Nietzsche suggests.7 To avoid the overly simple reduction of the origin as some English genealogists did, after he denies the hypothesis that punishment arises from our senses of justice, Nietzsche offers us a different view, located in a more economic and material thesis, that seems to solve the enigmatic question of why and how pleasure might be coupled with punishment. Based on the etymological similarity of the German words Schuld [guilt] and Schulden [debts], Nietzsche develops a concept that to feel guilty for doing something wrong to someone is to owe him a debt, and therefore an equivalence must be sought after the asymmetry of the economic relationship between debtor and creditor has been created. We can see how Nietzsche presents the correlation of punishment and pleasure based on the debtor-creditor relationship from the following arrangement of his arguments: •

•

• •

•

It is a fact that the state of equivalence (or economic parity) makes us feel pleasure in mutual relationships. If the equivalence is damaged, as happens bet\.veen a debtor and a creditor, to reach the state of equivalence again some compensation must be made. And the compensation can be provided through the debtor's suffering. Therefore if the debtor suffers (which means he is making repayment), the creditor must have pleasme (because of his feeling of compensation and the return to equivalence). But to what extent can the debtor's suffering be a compensation and make the creditor feel pleasure? To the degree that to make someone suffer is pleasurable.

While Nietzsche's arguments sound sharp enough to articulate the inseparable connection between punishment and pleasure, it nonetheless seems that Nietzsche cannot or does not want to go further to answer the question of why causing someone to suffer is pleasurable; he instead treats 7 "That inescapable thought, which is now so cheap and apparently natural, and

which has had to serve as an explanation of how the sense ofjustice came about at all on earth, 'the criminal deserves to be punished because he could have acted otherwise,' is actually an extremely late and refined fonn ofhmnanjudgement and inference; whoever thinks it dates back to the beginning is laying his coarse hands on the psychology of primitive man in the \VTong way." GM, II: p. 4.

Chapter III

34

it as an acknowledged fact. Nie!zsche's psychological interpretation of how pleasure might arise in cruel punishment therefore depends on the repetition of an empirical depiction rather than moving toward a satisfactory explanation. However, Nietzsche himself seems to have sensed this problem and argued: I say all this in speculation: because such subterranean things are difficult to fathom out, besides being embarrassing; and anyone who clumsily tries to interject the concept "revenge" has merely obscured and darkened his own insight, rather than clarified it ( revenge itself just leads us back to the same problem: "how can it be gratifying to make someone suffer"?) 8

Does Nietzsche try to tear down all tbe explanatory hypotbeses he makes just to point out tbe difficulty or even impossibility of figuring out how it might be gratifying to make someone suffer? What difficulties does Nietzsche confront here? Can we provide any supplementary explanation for Nietzsche in order to clear away these difficulties? Later we will realise that Nietzsche's "ironic" statement above actually saves him from the pitfall of the pleasure principle which he so detests. If we follow Nietzsche's "logic" from the very beginning, we can first notice that Nietzsche adopts the model of economics and locates the issue in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor which is "as old as the very conception ... referring back to the basic fOlTIlS of buying, selling, bartering, trade and traffic.''9 It is the point of view of economy that makes Nie!zsche inevitably concerned about efficiency. This is why when the paradoxical task of nature-to breed animals with tbe prerogative of promise-is revealed by Nietzsche in the outset of the second essay of Genealogy: memory, pain, suffering and cruel punishment carmot but enter into the process as they play the role of accelerant for fulfilling tbe task. Likewise, following this logic based on the viewpoint of economy and efficiency, pleasure can also play the role as an incentive to fulfill the task-that the pursuit of equivalence and compensation through cruel punishment brings about pleasure helps human animals achieve the goals of progress and development. This supplementary explanation nonetheless merely highlights the nature of cruelty---{;ruelty must entail pleasure (if not cruelty is pleasure), for cruelty as inflicting pain on otbers has already presupposed pleasure. Although tbis just reminds us of the nature of cruelty, it nonetheless helps us question the hypothesis that pleasure comes from a sense of justice, for 8 Ihid., II, p. 6. 9 Ihid., II, p. 4.

The Seductive Allure ofthe Macabre

35

pleasure does not need to arise from the sense of the triumph of justice if it can simply be found in the cruelty of punishment itself. Yet as far as our core question-why there is pleasure in sensing another's suffering (or any artwork that arouses negative emotion)-is concerned, the problem is not solved at all. Besides, to say that pleasure, by which is entailed inflicting pain on others, is the incentive to fulfill the mandate of nature just highlights the paradoxical nature of tliis task, and what is even more problematic, it turns on a hedonistic argument that Nietzsche questions a 10t,10 for it is tantamount to saying that the deepest motivation of cruelty is the pursuit of pleasure. The Pitfall of Hedonism

What hedonism argues is that all human action is motivated by tlie pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain. As we have seen above, it turns out to be highly problematic if we try to adopt the hedonistic approach to solve tlie riddle of why tliere is pleasure in painful punishment. As Ivan SolI points out in his eloquent essay, Nietzsche not only detests hedonism but also tries hard to replace it with a conception of will to power tliat further builds up his whole philosophical enterprise ll The switch of the issue from the pleasure principle to power leads Soll to argue that "the satisfaction [of the creditor] tlien consists more in my [tlie creditor's] power to make him [the debtor] suffer than ui the mere occurrence of his suffering ... it is not the mere occurrence of suffering in others that gratifies me but my being able to make them suffer."12 Yet although S011's ancillary interpretation replaces the pleasure principle witli power to explain why cruelty is so prevalent, it nonetheless gets bogged down in the mystery of how there is pleasure ui cruelty. A problem related to the old philosophical question about other minds is revealed by SolI: if there is really pleasure arising from another's pain, how does one know the other is really feeling pain and suffering so as to feel that pleasure? "Why should another's happiness or unhappiness 10 Nietzsche clearly raises a critical voice to hedonism and its related psychology of moral concepts: "[h]edonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudamonianism: these are all ways of thinking that measme the value of things according to pleasure and pain, which is to say according to incidental states and trivialities." BGE, p. 225. 1 1 Ivan SolI, "Nietzsche on Cruelty, Asceticism, and the Failme of Hedonism," Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche 's On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht, (Berkeley CA: California University Press, 1994), pp. 168- 1 7 1 . 1 2 Ibid., p. 175.

36

Chapter III

produce a similar state in me?" he asksY To solve this problem, SolI adopts a Wittgensteinian approach and argues that it is through "belief' that the torturer, or the creditor in Nietzsche's terms, can assure himself that the sufferer, the debtor, is feeling pain.14 The idea of the requirement of belief also corresponds to theories emphasising aspects of cognition entailed in emotions. What they argue is that a full and complete emotion arises in a context where some propositionally fOlTIlulated thought grounds and explains its occurrence. By such accounts fear, for instance, entails holding a belief that one is in danger. "No belief, no emotion" turns out to be an important idea held by cognitivist theories of the emotions.15 Whereas the idea of linking emotion with cognition as Sol1 and other cognitivist theorists do may be persuasive, it is partially due to the requirement of belief that makes Sol1's approach problematic. While Sol1 seems to offer a plausible way to explain how there might be pleasure from the feeling of another's pain, we can nonetheless notice that his power-oriented approach, according to him intended by Nietzsche, actually does not save us from the pitfall of pleasure/pain-oriented hedonism, for his explanation starts with and sticks to the premise of the pleasure principle, even though the pleasure is now caused by the feeling of power. That said, the requirement of "belief' in our knowledge of another's feeling more or less presumes the motivation of hedonistic intention-I must first believe that you are suffering when I torture you because I want to feel pleasure from your suffering. But what is contrary to the hedonistic intention should be: I do not need to believe you are suffering because I do not need to feel pleasure (or I do not care if I feel pleasure) when I punish you; I simply have the power (feel powerful) to do so. Sol1 unfortunately 1 3 Ibid., p. 172. 1 4 Ibid., p. 173. Although SolI does not explicitly state that his argmnent is enlightened by Wittgenstein, a famous passage regarding the knowledge of pain is as follows: '''I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am'. Yes: one can make the decision to say 'I believe he is in pain' instead of 'He is in pain'." Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 303. The requirement of belief points out the very essence of pain my mvn pain absolutely cannot be doubted, while another's pain can absolutely be doubted as Elaine Scarry's pioneer study on pain shows us. See The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 4,7,13. 1 5 Noel Carroll terms it a "cognitive/evaluative theory" by saying that "a concmrent emotional state is one in which some physically abnormal state of felt agitation has been caused by the subject's cognitive construal and evaluation of hislher situation." See The Philosophy ofHorror, or, Paradoxes ofthe Heart (New York & London: ROlitledge, 1 990), p. 27.

The Seductive Allure ofthe Macabre

37

attaches his supplement of Nietzsche's explanation to the motivation of pleasure but not power as he had intended to do, and consequently it turns out to be at variance with what Nietzsche says about the trait of pleasure and its relations with power in The Will to Power: "pleasure is only a symptom of the feeling of power attained, a consciousness of a difference (-there is no striving for pleasure: but pleasure supervenes when that which is being striven for is attained: pleasure is an accompaniment, pleasure is not the motive-).,,16 To challenge hedonism by trying to replace the pleasure principle with the will to power while searching for the solution in the fonner is just what Nietzsche says of the English psychologists who lack "historical spirit": "it is obvious that the real breeding-ground for the concept 'good' has been sought and located in the wrong place by this theory [of the English psychologists' moral genealogy]: the judgement 'good' does not emanate from those to whom goodness is sho\Vll! Instead it has been 'the good' themselves.,,17 Yet one may realise that it is obviously difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the feeling of pleasure from that of power. As Henry Staten accurately points out, what Nietzsche means by pleasure in the quotation in the above paragraph is ambiguous-whether it is in the ordinary sense of enjoying a great meal or in a deeper sense of fulfilling a difficult task or conquering a tough situation is not totally decided. Yet as long as it is discussed with power, it seems to relate to the latter-to pleasure in the deep sense. Pleasure can be regarded as a supplement of the will to power but not as belonging to the essence of the will to power.18 That said, the will to power can be pleasurable but it is not that the will to power is pleasurable. In this sense, the counterexample of the requirement of belief in a hedonistic approach is verified-to exercise or feel power, the torturer does not need to hold any belief concerning the sufferer's pain. So far we have seen, whether from my 0\Vll or SolI's supplementary explanations, that there arises a persistent problem in explaining how one might feel pleasure upon another's pain, and inevitably this turns into a hedonistic result for which the paradoxical relation between pleasure and pain is arguably unsolvable as far as hedonism itself is concerned. Indeed, there is a serious fault-line that makes the above problem persistent: the premise that there is pleasure in making others suffer has repeatedly been taken as the approach toward the explanation of the "appeal " ("allure " or "attraction ") of cruelty as proclaimed in the old proverb-no cruelty, 16

WP, p. 688. GM, I, p. 2. 18 Henry Staten, Nietzsche 's Voice (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 90.

17

38

Chapter III

no festival. But if there is a cheerful and festive feature in public displays of cruelty and torture it is not because witnessing them is pleasurable but because they are simply attractive. The attraction of something does not need to presuppose the pleasure of experiencing it. And this is so, not just for experiences of cruelty and horror, but also for ugliness in art and the world.19 The Genuine Seductive Allure to Life

From the analysis of Nietzsche' s accounts of the relationship between pleasure and punishment, we can fmd that trying to explain the appeal of cruelty and its spectacle based on the pleasure principle unfortunately leads us nowhere. Despite treating the proposition-"there is pleasure in watching the sufferings of others"-as merely a depicted, hypothetical fact, we seem unable to give further explanation as to why it happens. We can also see that there is a possibility that Nietzsche's raising the issue of the relationship between pleasure and punishment was to bring out discussions of moral conceptions of responsibility, guilt, and bad conscience rather than verifying the hypothetical claim that cruel punishment and its spectacle do engender pleasure. All these may indicate that the explanation of the appeal of the spectacle of cruel punishment 1 9 In terms of how one might be attracted to apparently horrendous scenes of cruel plUlishrnent, there is another weakness or aperture in Nietzsche's accolUlts. Nietzsche deals largely with a pleasure that comes from the one who enjoys another's suffering and simultaneously is the agent of that suffering, i.e. the enjoyment of creditors is from the pain and suffering that the debtors must compensate. Yet given the fact that most onlookers around execution grolUlds are unlikely to be the agents of the criminal's sufferings, the crucial question is how Nietzsche can say about these innumerable cases that one person enjoys the sufferings of others that he himself does not bring about. How can some onlookers enjoy the criminal's being tortured if the criminal's misdeeds do not directly cause them any loss and pain? SolI reckons that, with Nietzsche's theoretical commitment, it is not difficult for someone to argue the case in dealing with this issue. He thus offers an assumptive account by arguing that it is through the process of identification located in the power relation that one person may enjoy the suffering of another but is not the agent of that suffering: "where the person who enjoys the suffering of another is not also the agent of that suffering, the satisfaction can be located in a sense of power only to the extent that the spectator can identify wifh the perpetrators of the suffering," (Op.cif.). Again, SolI seems to have solved the problem with the notion of identification operated by power, but if we look closer, we will find that he does not get himself off the hook from the pleasure principle and is thus lUlable to really replace it with the concept of power.

The Seductive Allure ofthe Macabre

39

based on the pleasure principle is a nonstarter since it wrongly assumes that people derive pleasure from the spectacle and that pleasure is all they are seeking. If the problem caused by the viewpoint of the pleasure principle does not appear to be too serious in Nietzsche's treatment of the relationship of punishment and pleasure, it is partially because Nietzsche handles it as a mere "postulation," as Nietzsche himself notes in the Genealogy. Indeed, it is not until the third essay of Genealogy, the topic of which is asceticism, that the problem of the pleasure principle is fully exposed. Whereas the satisfactions of cruelty raise the issue of why the pain and sufferings of others can be "pleasurable" or enjoyable for me, those of asceticism pose the greater enigma of how my 0\Vll pain and suffering can be "pleasurable" or enjoyable for me. And solving this enigma based on the pleasure principle just adds substantially to the problem of self­ contradiction, for the motivation of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is now disturbed. The disorder of the originally assumptive pleasure/pain relations thus poses the problem of how to think of a pleasure that transcends the distinction between pain and pleasure. As Staten points out: "the notion of self-enjoyment [that joy and pain spill over into each other] in a way names the central problem of Nietzsche's thought from beginning to end.,,20 We may wonder if this kind of approach to pleasure/pain relations embodied in asceticism can prevent us from falling into the overly simple explanation based on the pleasure principle. So far my discussion of Nietzsche's ideas about pleasure and punishment have stayed on the "primitive" stage, i.e. the pre-modem age when public displays of execution were still popular. Yet anyone familiar with Nietzsche's projects knows that Nietzsche goes much further (and deeper) in arguing about the issue of enjoyment and cruelty. What is more uncarmy and "interesting" compared with the relatively naIve enjoyment of barbarian cruelty is the phenomenon of asceticism where the enjoyment of self-directed cruelty takes place. Yet the development from barbarians who hurt others and enjoy watching others suffering to ascetics who hurt themselves and turn into spectators of their own suffering seems to mark a split that is not determined by collected history but individual psyche, for the "wild animal"-cruelty-has not been killed at all but just "sublimated";21 and the "monster"-asceticism-is not "inscribed in the records of human history as an exception and curiosity" but "one of the most wide-spread and long-lived facts there are."22 In this sense, although 20 Gp. cif. , p. 88. 2 1 BGE, p. 229; GM, Ill, p. 1 1 . 22 GM, II, p. 6.

40

Chapter III

Nietzsche's treatment of asceticism is profound, we probably don't need to move from pre-sublimated history of barbarian cruelty to the stage of asceticism to see how the pleasure principle may pose problems, nor do we need self-enjoyment to think of a pleasure that transcends the distinction between pleasure and pain. Regarding the reasons for the appeal of the spectacle of cruel punishment that might transcend the distinction between pleasure and pain, there are good lessons that we can learn from "primitive," if not barbarian, peoples: "[w]hen suffering is always the first of the arguments marshaled against life, as its most questionable feature, it is salutary to remember the times when people made the opposite assessment, because they could not do without making people suffer and saw first-rate magic in it, a veritable seductive lure to life," says Nietzsche.23 Is it not the "seductive allure" that has the power to "ignore" pleasure and pain? The fascinating power of allure not only has the potential to transcend pleasure and pain but also beauty and ugliness, as echoed by Aurel Kolnai in his account of disgust: "[t]here is without doubt a certain invitation hidden in disgust as a partial element, I might say, a certain macabre allure."24 It is not ridiculous to imagine that some onlooker might be disgusted by the process of public execution while completely submitting to the allure of macabre images. Gathering round the execution ground and thrilling at the horrendous scene can be a kind of self-exploration that experiences the blurred border of life and death and tantalises the edge of tolerance. Beyond Pleasure and Pain

By "genuine seductive allure to life", what Nietzsche means here may have a larger import that refers to the state of our "existence" than to the mere consideration of the spectacle of cruelty and pain. However, given that the festive characteristics of the spectacle of cruel punishment may be a mirror of human nature as revealed by Nietzsche, it is not a bad idea if we take the seductive allure (of pain and suffering in life) as the isomorphic interpretive telTIl. Seductive allure indicates our conflicting desire(s), which is vividly depicted by Socrates in his account of the story in which Leontius is attracted by the dead bodies that lay at the place of public execution:

23 Ibid., p. 7. 24 Aurel Kolnai, Disgust (La Salle IL: Open Court Publishing, 2004), p. 42.

The Seductive Allure ofthe Macabre

41

I once heard a story which I believe, that Leontius the son of Aglaion, on his way up from the Piraeus lUlder the outer side of the northern wall, becoming aware of dead bodies that lay at the place of public execution at the same time felt a desire to see them and a repugnance and aversion, and that for a time he resisted and veiled his head, but over-powered in despite of all by his desire, with wide starring eyes he rushed up to the corpses and cried, There, ye \\'fetches, take yom fill of the fme spectacle!25

While enjoyment is not particularly emphasised, many agitating aspects of desire, aversion, and attraction are elicited in this vivid story. Apparently, Leontius, who is not presented as a person of unusual disposition but just a man walking home, faces the conflicts of his desires and fails to resist the nasty one-the desire to see the grisly sight of corpses with putrid and repugnant smells. His feeling ashamed of the desire to look at the corpses indicates the psychological and ethical dilemma he faces. Plato recognises this conflicting nature of the allure of unpleasant objects, and regards it as a symptom of a fractured mind at war with itself. (In contemporary terms, consider our fascination at truly ugly things, or people, or our inevitable "rubber-necking" at car crashes and domestic house fires.) This seductive allure caused by conflicting desire is something like a "troubled fascination." The presupposition here is that fascination is supposed to come with pleasure, therefore it troubles us if something fascinates us painfully. It troubles us because we tend to take it for granted that pleasure and pain are opposites; and here the problematic issue of pleasure returns. But are pleasure and pain really opposites? Nietzsche argues that they are not: Pain is something different from pleasme I mean it is not its opposite . there are even cases in which a kind of pleasure is conditioned by a certain rhythmic sequence of little lUlpleasmable stimuli: in this way a very rapid increase of the feeling of power, the feeling of pleasure, is achieved ... it seems, a little hindrance that is overcome and immediately followed by another little hindrance that is overcome and immediately followed by another little hindrance that is again overcome this game of resistance and victory arouses most strongly that general feeling of superablUldant, excessive power that constitutes the essence ofpleasme.26

25 Plato, Republic IV, eds. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, trans. P. Shorey, The Collected Dialogues ofPlato (princeton NI: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 682. 26 WP, p. 699.

42

Chapter III

The reason to support Nietzsche's argument that pleasure and pain are not opposites is that pleasure may arise from the alleviation of antecedent conditions such as pain (which causes hindrance) and desire (the will to overcome the hindrance). 'While Nietzsche's argument here is close to Freud's concepts of pleasure in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, there is another physiological aspect that makes us think of them as opposites: we tend to try to understand pleasure in the same terms that it is natural to understand pain, which is as a sensation located in a specific spot of our body. We can find Aristotle's treatment of pleasure, especially in Nichomachean Ethics, quite helpful in clarifying the features of pleasure that are not necessarily opposite to those of pain. For Aristotle, pleasure is not a unitary phenomenon.27 Unlike pain, pleasure does not designate any specifically recognisable sensation or state of feeling. We can sense the sweetness in our mouth and feel pleasure when we eat candy, but to say that this feeling of pleasure is seemingly "happening" in our mouth as an opposite sensation to a toothache or any other oral pain is not accurate, for pleasure does not take place in a specific spot of our body like pain. One may argue that pain is not or carmot be directed to objects that share particular features. Yet so far as physical sensation is concerned, there is absolutely no doubt about the pain, which we feel the same way every time unless there is a malfunction in our sensory system. As the above examples show, we can see what Aristotle means when he notes that "as pleasant things differ, so do the pleasures arising from them.,,28 And "each of the pleasures is bound up with the activity it completes."29 In this sense, reducing the different feelings of enjoyment of different activities to pleasure is a somewhat loose way to generalise our feelings, and this is echoed in Nietzsche's critique of the terminological usage of pleasure and displeasure: "Displeasure" and "pleasure" are the most stupid means imaginable of expressing judgement: which naturally does not mean that the judgement made audible in this mallller must be stupid. The abandonment of all substantiation and logicality, a Yes or No in the reduction to a passionate desire to have or a rejection, an imperative abbreviation whose utility is lUlmistakable: this is pleasme and displeasme. It originates in the central sphere of the intellect; its presupposition is an infinitely speeded-up

Nichomachean Ethics, trans. W.D. Ross, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), see esp. Book X. 28 Ibid., 1 1 53a 6-7. 29 Ibid., 1 1 75 129-30.

27 Aristotle,

The Seductive Allure ofthe Macabre

43

perception, ordering, subsumption, calculating, inferring: pleasure and displeasure are always terminal phenomena, not "causes" .30 Nietzsche's statement here is apparently against the hedonistic view I reviewed, that the ultimate motivation for human beings is pleasure. The presupposition of pleasure that Nietzsche refers to---ordering, subsumption, calculating, inferring-could be based on self-interest and become a convenient tool for making cultural, political or moral judgements. It is probably because of this potential for embellishing judgements, be they negative or positive, that Enlightenment theories of the aesthetic, with Kant's as the best example, wrenched pleasure free from states of self­ interest and advocated a notion of disinterested pleasure, which can thus save beauty from the satisfaction of desire. That pleasure is such a serviceable term may explain why speculations about the aesthetic have been so inevitably linked with pleasure, yet we have seen how Nietzsche deconstructs the presupposition of pleasure in the spectatorship of cruel punishment,

which

provides

us

with

an

alternative

example

for

considering a certain aesthetic experience in which the boundary between pleasure and pain is blurred. If Nietzsche demystifies the paradoxically emotional reactions generated by the spectacle of punishment and suffering, he meanwhile reminds us of the gratification of the desire to take up voluntary sufferings, dark yet all­ too-human,

perhaps

without

specific

and

concrete

meaning,

and

to

experience the intensity and limits that are far beyond the banality of daily life. This desire, inflamed by macabre allure, has never faded away since the time when the public display of execution was overwhelmingly popular. Beyond the spectatorial experience of cruel punishment, I hope to some degree also to have provided an alternative approach to grasp our perplexing response to art with apparently unbearable themes of negative emotions; to our fascination with the ugly, the cruel and the macabre in art and life; and to have offered a different perspective for fathoming the seemingly inevitable yet problematic linkage of the aesthetic and pleasure in the meantime.

30 WP, p. 669.

KANTIAN CONCEPTIONS OF THE UGLY

CHAPTER IV UNDERSTANDINGS OF UGLINESS IN KANT' S AESTHETICS JONATHAN JOHNSON

"Uglifying" Kant's Aesthetics

The focus on beauty for most of the history of aesthetics may be largely to blame for the dearth of writings on ugliness. But new explorations of the 'ugly in itself' have started to make up for this historical lack. Some recent offerings explore the range of grotesquery through collecting instances of ugliness, as does Umberto Eco's encyclopedic On Ugliness,l or selecting cultural conceptions, as Gretchen E. Henderson's Ugliness.2 Yet it is enticing to look back to more systematic treatments of aesthetics for glimpses of ugliness as situated in larger contexts. Works that methodically describe ugliness are notoriously scarce, and when discussion of ugliness arose in these contexts it was usually wedded to beauty. As Ronald Moore notes in his entry "Ugliness" in the Oxford Encyclopedia ofAesthetics: "As nearly everyone agrees, the chief point of the standard deployment of this concept is to mark a pronounced contrast or distance between objects we call ugly and those we call beautiful."} But there are a few extensive explorations, as in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful4 and Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness .' 1 Umberto Eco, ed. On Ugliness, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Rizzoli, 2007). 2 Gretchen E. Henderson, Ugliness (London: Reaktion Books, 2015). 3 Ronald Moore, "Ugliness", Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 4 vols., ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988): 417-421, p. 417. 4 Edrmmd Bmke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Bewtijul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Longinus' treatment of the sublime, which -..vith Burke and Kant sets out the negative features of types of sublime experiences.

48

Chapter IV

More often the search for ugliness in aesthetic systems requires us to try and reconstruct what a writer might have said about the disconcerting expenence. Looming large on the list of systems from which scholars have tried to tease out a notion of ugliness is the writing of Immanuel Kant. Much of Kant's system of aesthetics is contested, not only in its intricacies but also in its tenor (Adomo once claimed "Hegel and Kant were the last who, to put it bluntly, were able to write major aesthetics without understanding anything about art")6 and yet Kant's writings inarguably changed the course of aesthetic discussions. As a small example, we may find much of the modern focus on subjective response rather than objective phenomena as the results of Kant's system. Writing on how Kant's thought affected the history and philosophy of art, Mark Cheetham notes that "his experimental supposition 'that objects must COnfOlTIl to our knowledge' .. established the mind's capacities as constitutive of the only reality we can know-while positing the necessity of a noumenal thing-in-itself-it follows that his will always be an aesthetics of reception, of how mind shapes its world."7 If Kant's writings helped to set up this divide between the knower and the knO\vn, it also reinforced the idea of not only beauty, but ugliness also being merely "in the eye of the beholder." Further, giving an account of ugliness, or negative aesthetic judgements in Kant's mature system of aesthetics (as found in the Critique of the Power of Judgement)' is desirable for a number of reasons. An ability to account for such judgements would tie up some loose ends for readers of the Third Critique. To begin with, Kant himself makes mention of such negative judgements alongside positive judgements (CPJ "Introduction" 5 Karl Rosenkranz,Aesthetics o/Ugliness (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Written in the early 1 9th century, this German work only recently was translated into English by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich. Pop and Widrich also produced an excellent collection entitled Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (London: LB. Tamus, 2014). "While mentioning Kant, they do not explore the large body of secondary literature surrounding Kantian ugliness. 6 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 334. 7 Mark Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 8. 8 Hereafter I will abbreviate this work as CPJ, and where possible refer to section munbers ("§") rather than pagination which varies among translations; I use the translation of Werner S. Pluhar, (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987). If citing an author's quote of CPJ I leave the quote as given in their translation. This paper limits its scope largely to CPJ although Kant "Wrote a munber of other treatises touching on aesthetic concerns.

Understandings of Ugliness in Kanfs Aesthetics

49

vii and § 1) without full elaboration. Yet he also makes claims which might be taken as disallowing any negative aesthetic judgements (e.g. seemingly linking reflective formal judgements with only pleasure and beauty in "Introduction" vii). There are also varieties of judgement which come tantalisingly close to the borders of negative aesthetic judgements such as in the discussions of what Kant calls adherent/dependent beauty (e.g. § 1 6) and the sublime (e.g. §27), without fully answering the problem of ugliness itself-what Kant would have called "pure" ugliness (as counterpart to "pure" beauty).9 Outside of these internal questions, some scholars have said Kant's entire account of aesthetics hinges on his allowance for these types of judgements. Henry Allison states that "the inclusion of space for such negative judgements is criterial for the adequacy of an interpretation of Kanf s theory of taste."lO Others note the modem use of explicitly negative aesthetics in the arts and seek to reconcile this with Kant's aesthetics.ll Finally, the puzzling nature of ugliness in Kant's framework has given rise to literature debating its place, and by doing so prompted detailed discussion of what exactly Kant means in a number of the most foundational sections of CPJ. 12 For all of these reasons it has behooved many writers to try and parse ugliness and negative judgements in Kanf's aesthetics. In examining those scholars who have made the attempt I contend that we also find valuable conceptions of ugliness that either arise from the existing Kantian framework or impose themselves as necessary to any satisfying account of ugliness, Kantian or otherwise. My objective in this exploration is not to solve the question of ugliness in Kant, but rather to view the literature as evidence of ugliness' multifaceted nature. As such my focus will be on presenting their take on Kant's aesthetics, rather than Kant's aesthetics itself-although much comes through in their writings. I shall first discuss examples of those scholars who hold that Kant either disallows, or should

9 Kanfs notion ofpurity in aesthetic judgements is explained in the next section. 10

Henry Allison, Kant's Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 54. II This is one of the pillsuits in Mojca Kiiplen's "The Aesthetic of Ugliness A Kantian Perspective," Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 5, (2013): 260-279. 12 The importance of the discussion slllTounding Kanfs contribution (or lack thereof) to the aesthetics of ugliness was underscored by a recent analytical philosopher "Writing on ugliness Paris Panos who notes that most of the rigorous analysis of ugliness has taken place in literature on Kantian aesthetics. See Panos, "The Defonnity-Related Conception of Ugliness," The British Journal a/Aesthetics, 57,2 (2017): 139-160.

50

Chapter IV

not allow, pure ugliness into his system of aesthetics. Secondly, I introduce a number of scholars who contend that Kant does indeed have a place for ugliness (pure and otherwise) in his system.13 For both sets I note the ways in which they attempt to place negative aesthetic judgements in Kant's system. Finally, I enumerate the marmer in which these scholars have viewed ugliness itself, and thereby demonstrate how ugliness forces itself into any thorough account of aesthetic experience. This exploration shows us something of the emotional, visceral, and cognitive force of the repulsive, unsettling, disgusting, and many other fOlTIlS of the ugly. Woven through this conclusion is the ability of artisans and audiences to tolerate, accommodate, and even embrace ugliness in contexts of art and aesthetic pleasure. Kant's Complexity-Where to Place Ugliness?

Before delving into those writers who carmot find a place for ugliness Kanfs system of aesthetics, I would like to make a note about explanations of the system itself. Kant's writing is notoriously complicated, and even assuming a view that the CPJ presents a unified account of our power of aesthetic (and teleological) judgement, the experts explaining his account are seldom unified in explicating it.14 That being the case, I call1lot give a gloss of Kant's labyrinthine system here, but only note a few key points at the onset along with a disclaimer. The disclaimer first: those familiar with Kanfs Critical system see that a number of telTIlS m

1 3 Mary Troxell also divides the discussion of Kantian ugliness in this way, but her survey is limited in scope. See her "Kant and the Problem of Ugliness," Kant Und Die Phi!osophie in Weltbiirgerlicher Absicht: Akten des XI Kant-Kongresses 2010 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 301-310. Her work contains a helpful synopsis of A.W. Moore's view against Kantian ugliness, from his "Beauty in the Transcendental Idealism of Kant and Wittgenstein," The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 29 (1987): 129-137. 1 4 The complexity has led some critics to find CPJ irretrievably obtuse. Such is the case of David Berger, who claims "at times, it appears to be a morass of hesitant claims, or worse yet, contradictory ones . . . Truth be told, there is much in Kanfs aesthetic theory that he did not settle; nor did he pretend otherwise," Kalll's Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2009), p. xi. While I do not believe that CPJ is so inscrutable, such comments do show the degrees of confusion which Kanfs argumentation can inspire. For digestible treatments of the aesthetics of CPJ, I follow Wenzel's An Introduction to Kant's Aesthetics (Oxford: Blacbvell, 2005), Henry Allison, op.cif., and John Zarnmito's historical masterpiece The Genesis of Kalll's Critique of Judgement (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).

Understandings of Ugliness in Kant's Aesthetics

51

from Kant's precise technical repertoire developed i n earlier stages of his architectonic are also redeployed in his aesthetic writings. But for those less familiar with his system these tenns ordinarily have far different meanings: words like "intuition," "imagination," "subl:im.e," "pure," "disinterested" and others mean something different in Kanfs realm than they do in everyday parlance. Where these occur, the context will help make sense of their specialised use. Further, I intend that the writers surveyed below will themselves provide several entry-points for discussion of Kanfs views, and so I will not delve into their complexities before they are presented. Yet I would like to cue the reader into :im.portant distinctions for Kant's study of our judging things as beautiful (and by extension, ugly).15 Kant spends some time discussing types of pleasure which are agreeable (which is akin to satisfaction) and dependent or adherent beauty which for him is in reference to concepts or ideas. Both of these judgements are interested, which is not the same as "interesting," but speaks more to our having a "vested interest" in the object. These types of judgements are put to use in a variety of ways (among them judgements of artistry), but they are not Kanf s main focus in the aesthetic portion of CPJ. Instead Kant is concerned with something he calls "pure" aesthetic judgements of beauty. There are a number of requirements for an aesthetic judgement to be pure, most of which relate to Kanfs four moments.16 Alix Cohen summarises these as: (1) (Quality) Disinterested pleasure (2) (Quantity) Universal liking (3) (Relation) Pmposiveness without a pmpose (4) (Modality) Necessary liking1 7

1 5 The CPJ is aimed at a treatment of the subject's ability and actions in judging, and those looking for insight into the objects of aesthetic judgement may find themselves stymied. My own research explores occasions of Kant's scant definite treatment of the object in another paper comparing Kant's mathematical sublime and the Chinese art of penjing miniatures. See my "Miniature Majesty: Engaging Penjing and the Kantian Sublime," presented at the Society for Intercultural Philosophy, Vielllla, 2016. 1 6 See especially CPJ § 1-22, or the concise treatment of Kant's "Moments" in Wenzel's Introduction, op.cif. 1 7 Alix Cohen, "Kant on the Possibility of Ugliness," The British Journal of Aesthetics, 53 (2013): 199-209 (discussed below). I have removed Cohen's italicization emphasising the positive aspects in judgements of beauty (pleasure, pmposiveness, liking).

52

Chapter IV Yet rather than focusing on one of these moments, the judgement of

taste itself is where Kant scholars tend to place or debar ugliness. For Kant, when a subj ect contemplates input (by means of what he calls

intuition) tbere may be a free play of our cognitive powers (namely our imagination, which handles the representations, and understanding, which in determining judgements processes this infOlmation by means of concepts), which is

harmonious and pleasurable.

The italicised words and

phrases are all key elements of Kant's account of our subj ective judging, and among these elements we will find disagreements over ugliness unfolding.

Disallowances of Ugliness-The Unthinkably Ugly Foremost among those refusing to find a place for ugliness in Kant's system is Paul Guyer. In a provocative article Guyer tackles the question of whether or not Kant can countenance pure ugliness, and answers with a resounding "No."18 What makes his article especially provoking is that he argues the concerns causing ugliness to be rejected as a pure aesthetic judgement extend to beauty as well, and Kant's pursuit of even pure beauty is seen as impossible.

In

a sense Guyer's pursuit of pure ugliness

ends up destroying pure beauty as well. But how does this happen in his account? Guyer examines part of what sets aesthetic judgements apart from otber types of judgement. Kant holds tbat aestbetic judgements (judgements of taste) are a species of reflective determining/determinative judgements.

judgement as distinguished from The latter are involved in our more

routine cognitions, in which we receive sensory input and make sense of them. Without going into details which would demand a review of tbe

First Critique, obj ect

(or

Guyer finds it impossible that we would consider an ugly

any object) without determining what it is first-if we are to

have reflecting aesthetic judgements about a thing, we must have a sense of what the tbing

is.

At the risk of oversimplifying a nuanced argument,

Guyer disbelieves we can have reflective judgement

pure

from (i.e. free

of) determining judgements. Along the way Guyer (perhaps taking a cue 1 8 Paul Guyer, "Kant and the Purity of the Ugly," Kant e-Prints, 3,3 (2004): 1 - 2 1 . Along with Wenzel, whose -writing I examine below, Guyer's article serves a s a "roll call" for -writers on Kant and ugliness; he references Hud Hudson, Henry Allison, Reinhardt Brandt, Miles Rind, David Shier, Christian Wenzel, Christian Strub, and Dieter Lobmar; but does not include the -writings ofMojca Kiiplen, Alix Cohen, Garrett Thomson, Theodore Gracyk, Sean McConnell, or more recently, Mary Troxell and Matthew Coate.

Understandings of Ugliness in Kanfs Aesthetics

53

from Wenzel) notes Kant's earlier writings gave ugliness more meaning than a simple lack (or privation).19 As on a mathematical scale or line, Kant seems to say beauty lies at one end along the line, from whence one could pass to neutrality, and on to ugliness, which was not simply beautys "contradictory opposite. ,,20 Guyer also gives an enlightening exploration of how we might arrive at varieties of indifference or displeasure but his strongest claim is in denying Kant any recognition of pure ugliness, and by extension questioning pure beauty. Here is Guyer's conclusion:

while Kant obviously recognises the existence of ugliness, he does not hold that our experience of ugliness is a pme aesthetic experience. The ugly is what we find physically disagreeable or morally offensive, and although the latter experiences place limits on the freedom of our imagination in its play with the understanding, they are not themselves pure aesthetic experiences. In the end, all of our experiences of such hannony [between imagination and lUlderstanding] are also associated with ideas of reason through the intermediary of aesthetic ideas, and thus our experiences of beauty, just like those of the ugly and the sublime, are impme rather than pure. 21 Moving from what we might call Guyer's strictly cognitive concern, there are refusals of Kantian ugliness based on a mixture of cognition and emotion. Such is the case for David Shier, who locates the dilemma in the aforementioned

harmony

in aesthetic judgements.22 On the way to his

conclusion Shier summarises many crucial points well, among them Kanf s self-inflicted mystery of ugliness by means of incompleteness and failure to address a point Ibat Kant himself raised (by reference to "pleasure or pain," "satisfaction or dissatisfaction").23 Shier also gives concise summaries of the "two faculties involved in cognition." Although the outcome (and process) is different in determining and reflecting judgement, the "set pieces" are the same: "the imagination, by which the manifold of intintions is assembled and apprehended; and Ibe understanding,

1 9 For example, Kant's essay Attempt to introduce the concept of negative magnitudes into philosophy, [ 1 763]. As Guyer notes, the importance of this essay is also emphasised by Allison and Wenzel in their texts that I reference. 20 Kant as quoted by Guyer, Ibid., p. 3. 2 1 Ibid., p. 20[, 22 David Shier, "Why Kant Finds Nothing Ugly," The British Journal ofAesthetics, 3 8,4 (1998): 412-418. Wenzel responded to this a year later in his quizzically titled article "Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?" The British Journal ofAesthetics, 39,4 (1999): 416-422. 23 Shier, p. 412, in reference to CPJ sections such as § 1 3 .

54

Chapter IV

by which the intuitions are united by means of concepts. In judgement, these two cognitive faculties are related to each other. ,,24

In

reflective judgement the subj ect isn't determining things but is

experiencing hannonious free play of the above faculties. Shier notes many things about this hannony, but his point of emphasis is on its

1) All 2) harmonious free play is

pleasing nature. His argument might be described as follows: judgements of taste have harmonious free play; pleasurable; impossible.

3) negative judgements of taste about free (pure) ugliness are (3) results because for Shier any judgement of taste would lose

its purity/freedom if it was displeasurable-which for Shier means dishannonious. But does ugliness, or a pure negative judgement of taste have to be pegged at disharmony? This question will be taken up by Wenzel in the next section. Shier does try to imagine where else negative elements might fit in Kant's pure aesthetic judgements,25 but several factors convince him that judgements of taste always involve pleasure. Therefore, for Shier's account of Kant, ugliness is not a judgement of taste. Shier recognises the oddity of such a conclusion yet insists it is how Kant must be read: "within Kant's aesthetics, and contrary to the obvious fact of the matter, negative judgements of taste about free beauty are quite impossible. ,,26 Another writer disallows Kantian ugliness thiough a complex linkage with Kantian morality, by means of teleology. Garret! Thomson sets out to prove that if Kant admitted pure ugliness (impure is allowed), the entire aims

of

CPJ

would

be

derailed.27

In pursuing

this

aim

Thomson

immediately claims that pure ugliness would be a simple reversal of pure beauty: "the feeling of ugliness is a pure and disinterested disgust, and when we judge something to be ugly we speak in a universal voice, implying tbat others ought to agree witb US."28 While the assertion of pure 24 Ibid., p. 413f. 25 Such as in a faihrre "to excite . . . harmonious free play," or in something that can

"actively thwart this state of mind," !bid., p. 417. !bid., p. 418. It is worth noting that Shier often intones "negative judgements of taste" as being in reference to "free beauty," and the reader may sense from this a vestigial view of ugliness as necessarily in reference to beauty. 27 Garret Thomson, "Kant's Problems with Ugliness," The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 50,2 (1992): 107-15, which Guyer systematically (though briefly) rebutted in "Thomson's Problem's with Kant: A Comment on 'Kant's Problems with Ugliness ," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50,4 (1992): 3 17-19. 28 Thomson, p. 107; his use of disgust is perhaps a misstep, as "Writers like Mojca Kiiplen, in "Disgust and Ugliness: a Kantian Perspective," Contemporary Aesthetics, 9 (201 1): 1-21, and Carolyn Korsmeyer, in Savoring Disgust (Oxford: 26

'

Understandings of Ugliness in Kanfs Aesthetics

55

ugliness' disharmonious nature has been explored by others, the force of Thomson' s argument rests on the perceived consequences for Kant if pure ugliness exists. Thomson infonns his readers that the

CPJ aims to

"bridge

the theoretical and practical realms"-by which he refers to the First and

Second Critiques,

with their respective interests in reason and morality.

Drawing from the teleological sections of

CPJ

(especially §61 onwards),

he explains Kant's position that we must view nature as understandable, and in doing so regard it teleologically 29 Finding something purely ugly and located in the natural world of experience would contradict this assumption of purpose

(telos), and thus also undercut what Thomson holds CPJ in bridging understanding and morality.

to be the endeavour of

Simply-if unconvincingly-put: "morality precludes ugliness" and "[i]f pure natural ugliness exists, the

Critique ofJudgement fails

to bridge the

theoretical and practical realms. "30 'Whether or not the argument holds, Thomson's writing does point the reader towards implications for morality bound up in beauty and ugliness.31 Other rej ections of pure ugliness or pure negative aesthetic judgements in Kant find their obj ections in the shared or connnunicable nature of judgements of taste. 'While many writers refer to

Harmah

Ginsborg's

writings on Kant,32 Allison mentions that in unpublished correspondence Ginsborg had emphasised that for Kant "universal communicability" is itself pleasurable, so "universally communicable displeasure" has "no

Oxford University Press, 2011), highlight that Kant holds a specifically dismissive opinion of disgust as disparate from other forms of ugliness. See the interesting subject at §48. 29 Thomson, p. 1 09f. Both Kant and Thomson are clear that this is not necessarily a claim of how things are, but rather how we judge them to be in order to lUlderstand them. 30 Ibid., pp. 1 15, 107. 3 1 Matthew Coate's recent article, "Kant on the Possibility of Ugliness," The British Journal ofAesthetics, 58,1 (2013): 51 -70, also plays up such implications. But Coate's argmnent is that ugliness' contrapmposiveness results in an evocative failme: " . . . it conveys only a sense of pme senselessness or absurdity," p. 70. It seems Coate's position could fit within the framework of Alix Cohen's position, and although Coate mentions her \Vfitings, he mainly (incorrectly, I think) takes issue with an aspect of her gloss of disgust/loathing. Coate, like Henderson, is one of the few authors to explore East Asian aesthetics in relation to ugliness though only briefly. 32 See for example, Hannah Ginsborg "Aesthetic judging and the intentionality of pleasure," Inquiry, 46,2 (2003): 164- 8 1 .

56

Chapter IV

place."33 Taking Kanf s description that this communicability is linked with pleasure, Ginsborg seems to say that ugliness' obviously displeasing nature precludes it from being a pure judgement of taste. While we might avoid this conclusion by unlinking communication from that which is communicated,

such a suggestion provokes thought about ugliness'

communicability or expectations of such.34

In a different light but still

in reference to Ginsborg, Berger gives what

appears to be his own claim that judgements of taste are so individualised that a universally descriptive system (even one as subjectively grounded as CPJ) probably cannot provide an account for ugliness in its necessarily autonomous actuality.

Taste, I argue, manifests a robust individualism and autonomy that cognitive and linguistic norms lack. Thus, any interpretation that seeks to forge a fundamental connection between cognitive and aesthetic nonnativity faces a dilemma: either it loses its grip on the role that cognitive norms play in the everyday activities of human beings, or it is forced to take an analogous conception of general human agreement as part of the very idea oftaste. 35 Berger's claim is an example of skepticism of the CPJ system altogether, and while it fails to account for how Kant

might have

viewed

pure negative judgements of taste (having rej ected Kanfs view of judgements of taste altogether) it does demonstrate how a concern for displeasure and distaste forces a reconsideration of Kant's aesthetic.36 Coleman also critiques the system itself, and says that Kant ought be as suspicious of a "pure" aesthetic judgement (negative and positive) as he is

33 This is Allison's summary of Ginsborg's position. He disagrees, saying "there is nothing inherently problematic in a lUliversally cornrnlUlicable state of displeasme," op. Cif., p. 1 1 5. 34 Thomson notes that Ralf Meerbote ("Reflection on Beauty", Essays in Kant's Aesthetics, eds. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982: 55-86)) has a similar reason for disallowing pure judgements of taste: if they are universal they refer to something "invariant between people." Thomson states Meerbote viewed this as the categories, and this reference disallows pure ugliness, (ibid). 35 Berger, op.cif. , p. 2 1 . 3 6 In the pages preceding the above quote Berger examines disagreements over taste as regards agreeableness, dependent beauty, and pme judgements of taste, ibid. , pp. 14-16.

Understandings of Ugliness in Kanfs Aesthetics

57

suspicious of our ever acting perfectly morallyY If we can never know ourselves in the latter, how could we in the fmmer? In a similar vein of system-dismissal, the mid-nineteenth-century explorer of ugliness Karl Rosenkranz felt that Kanf s aesthetic would not admit of a convincing account of ugliness. Though

Rosenkranz

was not interested

in

interacting

with

the

constraints of pure versus dependent judgements (perhaps by dint of his being in favour of realism (objectivism) contra the subj ectivism of the CPJ), his assertions do speak to notions of purity in ugliness. Though Rosenkranz confused (intentionally?) Kanfs use of

interest with its

more

common use, he first seems to hint at elements of a pure Kantian ugly before voiding it by highlighting ugliness' association with concepts of beauty. As in pure judgements, "Kant says with justice that the beautiful is what without interest is liked universally; the ugly, then, is what without interest is disliked universally."38 The foregoing seems aimed at fitting Kanfs requirements, but the following might not: "All determinations of ugliness as reflective concepts, contain in themselves a comparison with those positive concepts of beauty that they posit negatively."" Kant would have us view reflective judgement apart from definite conceptions, and Rosenkranz here says we may only have negative judgements of taste in relation to preconceived standards. Most of the deniers of pure ugliness in Kanf s CPJ would admit that Kant

could

concede

ugliness

III

varIOUS

kinds

of

judgements

(disagreeableness, or dependent ugliness). But Kant's real interest is in his conception of pure beauty, and pure judgements of taste. This is why the above writers have focused on the purity of such judgements and why they have found such rigorous standards as Kant's to be too stringent for a pure ugliness. Interestingly, many have felt the whole enterprise flounders by failing to account for concerns raised in examining this sort of ugliness. The authors I describe below are just as individualistic in their approaches, but they argue there is a place for pure displeasure, or pure negative judgements of taste in Kanfs aesthetics. Following that survey, I will collate insights from both the negative and the positive views of Kanfs reckoning with ugliness.

37 Francis Coleman,

The Harmony of Reason: A Study in Kant's Aesthetics (Pittsburgh PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1974), pp. 80-84. 3 8 Rosenkranz, op.cif. , p. 83. 39 Ibid. p. 235. It is interesting to note that Rosenkranz clearly holds that we might naturally take Kant's identifications of agreeable, beautiful, and sublime and reverse them to find ugly negations of each, (p. 1 1 6f) Alix Cohen's paper provides an interesting exercise in such an endeavour.

58

Chapter IV

Allowances of UgJiness-The Diversity of UgJiness A number of the positive accounts of Kant' s ability to accommodate a pure ugliness came about in response to the articles

of dismissal

mentioned above. This will fmm a partial structure to my ordering of the following authors. Hence, I first examine responses to Guyer's seminal article "Kant and the Purity of the Ugly," but

as

many writers on Kantian

ugliness refer to Guyer's contentions there is a variety to choose from. I would like to start with Cohen's "Kant on the Possibility of Ugliness," not only because it substantively interacts with Guyer's concerns, but also because it ties up a number of loose ends that I have left undone until this point. Cohen begins with two helpful distinctions:

1)

"that ugliness should be

defmed as the contrary of beauty," and 2) "Kant's account of aesthetic judgement commits him not only to tbe existence of the ugly, but to tbe

40

distinction of two kinds of ugliness. ,,

The latter concerns the pure and

impure, which though many other \Vfiters recognised, Cohen provides a most elaborate explanation of.

She enumerates examples of impure

ugliness, and the ways in which they are impure. I italicise the words indicating Kantian "impurity":

1) "Conceptual Ugliness" which is "the contrary of adherent beauty ... it fails to meet the criteria spelt out by the concept that specifies how it ought to appear." 2) "Emotional Ugliness" which "contravenes Oill emotional interests," by means of "the negative feelings associated with [the object]." 3) "Distasteful Ugliness" in which we cannot differentiate "between the representation of the object and the object itself" Further, "I cannot adopt a disinterested perspective on it and judge the work of art aesthetically. " 4) "Disgusting Ugliness" in which "I believe I ought not to apprehend it aesthetically ... from a moral standpoint." This listing of the varieties of impure ugliness helps us to focus on what exactly Kant

would not

be considering if he were to consider an

impure ugliness. \¥bile these four distinctions are indeed helpful, I feel

op. cif., p. 199. In a footnote Cohen also refers to the "threefold distinction between the beautiful, the ugly, and the aesthetically indifferent." The "distinctions" mentioned in her introduction go beyond this scale.

40 Cohen,

Understandings of Ugliness in Kanfs Aesthetics that

(3)

and (4), upon examining

CPJ

59

§48, may actually be the same

judgement.41 Having cleared the ground of impure ugliness, Cohen can now describe her Kantian account of pure ugliness. As she does so she also answers Guyer's concern by contending that we may "simultaneously" have cognitive harmony (determining judgements) and aesthetic harmony (reflective judgements).42 In this way we are able to see an object, know what it is and still have an aesthetic experience in the encounter. This "multi-tasking" helps ease readings of much of CPJ (e.g., § 16) and avoids Guyer's collapsing of the reflective into the detelTIlinative. It also allows Cohen to make her

0\Vll

claim that pure ugliness is a case of "aesthetic

disharmony [in which] I would be experiencing/oul play rather than free play between imagination and understanding."43 Her innovation is in the coinage of the term "foul play", which-somewhat like free play-is only ever defined by Cohen as a feeling. Whereas free play is a feeling of pleasure, foul play is a feeling of displeasure. In conclusion she rehearses the other forms of ugliness (listed above), and by elimination identifies a left-over displeasure whose only explanation can be a foul play of the faculties. Following Kant's four moments (cf. above) she describes this ugliness as:

(1 ') Disinterested displeasure (2') Universal validity (3') Confrapurposiveness without a purpose (4') Necessary disliking Though these defmitions still leave much room for investigation, they do point at more ways which ugliness might appear (for Kant) in a pure aesthetic judgement. Like Guyer, the next scholar I will consider has done a great service in reviewing not only most of the literature on ugliness and negative judgements in Kant, but also in explaining the various ways in which the 4 1 See Kiiplen, "Disgust and Ugliness: A Kantian Perspective,"

op.cit., for an interesting treatment of disgust itself, not only in a Kantian but also in phenomenological, psychological, and sociological senses. Kiiplen highlights the sensory nature of disgust (as does Korsmeyer) which I believe explains how (3) and (4) in Cohen's account can be singular. My view here is unrelated to Coate's disagreement with Cohen per "loathsomeness" I think the bivalenced, negative/positive tension as discussed by Cohen and others is fair both to Kant and the phenomenon of the classical notion of "disgust." 42 Cohen, p. 205f. 43 Ibid., p. 206. My emphasis.

60

Chapter IV

riddle might be solved.44 Without re-sketching all of the possibilities that Wenzel introduces, I will simply touch on the solutions he proposes for placing pure ugliness in Kant. Like eohen and Guyer, Wenzel alerts us to the three potential verdicts in judgement of taste (beautiful, neutral, and ugly). But unlike Guyer, Wenzel differentiates between cognitive and aesthetic harmony. He also sets up a threefold distinction in types of

purposiveness: 1)

"in the relation of the objects to the faculties of

imagination and understanding;"

2)

"in the relation of these faculties to

each other while contemplating the obj ect;" relation to cognition in general. "45

In

3) "in the relation of this very

his discussion of purposiveness he

also disputes Hudson's emphasis on "contrapurposiveness" as distinguishing ugliness.46 Likewise in another article Wenzel (by way of Guyer) lists the possible ways in which we cognise, or have harmonious play of the two faculties.47 All of this parsing and division is done by Wenzel in order to make room for a pure judgement of ugliness to be found in

disharmony.

Whereas Shier had claimed that the "free play" and "harmony" need to be pleasurable, Wenzel contends for a "free

disharmonious play of imagination

and understanding" in which "their dishannonious relationship is not suitable for the possibility of subsuming the representation of our imagination (intuition) under a concept of the understanding."48 As Cohen earlier reminded us, the feeling of pleasure (or in ugliness, displeasure) does maintain a bellwether role in Kant's judgements of taste-though the depth of discussion of cognition may cause us to forget this. Wenzel does not see the displeasure as destroying the free play or the judgement. But I

a priori Grounds in Kant," Kant-Studien, 103 (2012): 472-493, which while sillveying much groundwork he laid earlier, provides a roll-call of ugliness (and negative judgement) investigators enhancing Guyer's list, (cf. note 1 8 above). 45 Wenzel, "Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?", op. cif. , which, as the title suggests, responds to Shier. Particularly interesting is Wenzel's citation of many passages outside of the CPJ where Kant discusses ugliness, (p. 418). While Wenzel's argument does find a believable place for ugliness, in the section above it is not clear that Wenzel's division entirely addresses Shier's claim about "cognition in general" (e.g. Shier, p. 416). 46 Addressing Hudson, op.cif., Wenzel says Hudson dealt with levels ("degrees") of "attunement," and ugliness would be the "worst" of these. The idea of degrees is shared with McConnell, cf. below though McConnell focuses Hudson's idea of contrapurposiveness. 47 Wenzel, "Do Negative Judgements of Taste Have a priori Grounds in Kant?", p. 483f. 48 Wenzel, "Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?", p. 421. 44 See especially Wenzel's "Do Negative Judgements of Taste Have

Understandings of Ugliness in Kanfs Aesthetics

61

will note here that in Wenzel's account-and some o f the accounts below-being focused on the interaction of the faculties

does engender the

idea of confusion also attending ugliness (i.e. as being ''unsuitable for cognition").49 The next scholar blends an exploration of Kant's system with a phenomenological account of experiences of ugliness. Mojca Kuplen notes that ugliness is beauty's opposite, but also provides a constructive account of how

ugliness-even

experience.

50

in

Kant's

restrictions-is

a

rich

aesthetic

As noted above, Kuplen pays careful attention to Kant's

special treatment of disgust

as

being impure in a very particular way, but

like Wenzel she holds that the place for a pure ugliness is in disharmony. But she builds upon this premise in an attempt to solve "the paradox of ugliness" in which ''we can like, attend to, and value something that we

prima facie do not like, find positively displeasing or even repellent. "5 1

Unlike Cohen, Kiiplen says that our aestbetic judgement is "subsequent" to nOlmal determining cognition, and also that aesthetic judgements of

52 \¥bile Kuplen makes

taste about an obj ect are made "regarding its fonn. ,, other distinctions (such

as

differentiating between aesthetical and logical

reflective judgements), her aim is to explore why we choose to interact with dishannonious ugliness, and does so by means of emphasising free play (in her terms, "free imagination"):

The feeling of displeasure in an ugly object depends on the experience of a dishannony between the free imagination and understanding. But if the attention to ugliness depends on the free play of imagination itself, regardless of whether this imagination is in dishannony with the lUlderstanding, then one can explain the concmrence of displeasure at an ugly object and continued attention to it . . . So while displeasure by itself would cause us to withdraw om attention from the cause of the displeasme, the degree of free play produced by an ugly object nevertheless holds our attention. 53

49 Ibid., p. 422. Perhaps Troxell's view of Kantian ugliness as being somewhat unthinkable, or against conceptualising (as seen in her ekphrasis of the sloth), is akin to this kind of confusion. 50 I here focus on Kiiplen "The Aesthetic of Ugliness A Kantian Perspective," op. cif. Also useful is "Disgust and Ugliness," op.cif. Recently Kiiplen has published a book-length discussion of Kantian ugliness: Beauty, ugliness and the free play of imagination: An approach to Kant's aesthetics (Cham: Springer, 2015). 5 1 Kiiplen, "The Aesthetic of Ugliness", op.cif., p. 261. 52 Ibid., pp. 267, 269. 53 Ibid., p. 276.

62

Chapter IV One of the strengths of Kiiplen' s approach is that it helps explain the

conundrum of common aesthetic encounters with types

of ugliness.

Sometimes we attend to those experiences which ostensibly are repellent. Allison comes to an opposite conclusion, though by nearly the same means. I have already noted Allison's insistence that negative judgements of taste must be, and can be, accounted for in Kant's system of aesthetics. The strength of Allison' s writing on the subj ect (like Wenze!'s) is that he systematically treats the issues at hand. Like Wenzel and Kiiplen, he claims a pure ugly would be related to disharmony-though in a sense of failure

or frustration. For Allison, reflective judgement "can issue in either

a disinterested liking or disliking," of which the latter occurs when said judgements "fail to produce a harmonious relation of the faculties." A free play is still involved, but is in "a state of dishatmony, where the faculties hinder rather than help one another in their reciprocal tasks, thereby producing a mental state of disinterested displeasure and a negative judgement of taste."54 If all of the above sounds stultifying for the experience, it seems that such an impression is part of Allison's aim. Although his emphasis on disharmony is shared with Kiiplen, she sees the free play as engaging (and somewhat enduring) and Allison instead finds the ugly forcing an end to the experience: "the endeavour of the mental state to preserve itself in its free play is frustrated, and instead of lingering in contemplation, the activity is abandoned. ,,55 A different kind of abandonment takes place in Gracyk's account of ugliness.56 He suggests that aesthetic judgements involve a kind of passage of time, in which the viewer is processing the fmm-or fmmlessness-of the representation. For those familiar with the

CPJ the telTIl

fOlTIllessness

might connote Kant's sublime (a type of two-step judgement which is initially negative but ultimately felt positively), and Gracyk does contend that sublimity occurs when a judgement of fOlTIllessness is rescued from the unpleasing

lack of organisation and purposiveness

in such

an

experience. He states that "judgements of sublimity are a method of compensating for formlessness. . .

I take it that cases where no such

compensation occurs are simply judged as cases of ugliness. ,,57 In addition to his focus on "formlessness" (to partially explain displeasure) and "time-

54 Allison, op.cif., pp. 1 16-1 1 7. 55 Ibid., p. 1 3 1 . 5 6 Theodore A. Gracyk "Sublimity, Ugliness, and Formlessness in Kant's Aesthetic Theory," The Journal o/Aesthetics andArt Criticism, 45 (1996): 49-56. 57 Ibid., p. 52. Troxell notes that A.W. Moore also brought sublimity into his discussion of Kantian ugliness but to such a deflationary extent that potential ugliness became sublime. See Troxell, op. cif., pp. 305-306.

Understandings of Ugliness in Kanfs Aesthetics

63

order" (to help explain how two subjects at two moments in time might disagree), Gracyk also has an idea of ugliness as degrees of conformity to unity.58 The ugly thing must have "minimal unity" to be an obj ect, but either doesn't go beyond such minimality, or is "accompanied by non­ unified elements which are just too obtrusive to

allow continuous

apprehension of the fOlTIlal connections which are present. "59 As we have seen in others, this kind of ugliness is contingent on our inability to make sense of the experience. Lastly, I will mention McConnell, whose article "How Kant Might Explain Ugliness" echoes others in retaining free play but seems to also retain the harmony. Playing off of Shier and Wenze! 's dispute, one might rename McConnell's article "Why Kant finds

almost everything Ugly," for

he seems to have the broadest placement of ugliness surveyed. Though one of McConnell's stated aims is to "conduct a comprehensive critical review of the arguments presented on each side of the debate,'>6O the novelty

of his

argument

is

in

emphasising

levels/ratios/degrees

of

judgements. He claims that "the harmonious free play of the faculties always has a concomitant feeling of pleasure in the sense of a feeling located somewhere on the pleasure scale or continuum. ,,61

In the

course of his article McConnell says that a judgement of beauty

is per "a wholly unified obj ect, an obj ect that exhibits total realisation of the indeterminate unifying rule." Such a high bar means that judgements of beauty are

either/or propositions-either

something is beautiful, or it is

not. But ugliness has degrees and is entirely more prevalent: "anything

2

else leads to the ugliness rating. ,,6 While he has much more to say in his article, this claim of gradated ugliness is interesting, though problematic in reckoning with common accounts of ugliness. Among the problems is the disappearance of neutral judgements, and challenges for beauty when encountering a "more beautiful" experience. In any case, McConnell's view lies at one end of the spectrum of Kantian placements of ugliness. I

58 Ibid. Both "formlessness" and "time-order" are treated especially in pages 5155. 59 Ibid., p. 55. Gracyk actually concludes that for Kant, all objects are beautiful. However, we "fail to maintain a constant state of aesthetic pleasure due to Oill hlUllan finitude." 60 Sean McConnell, "How Kant Might Explain Ugliness," The British Journal of Aesthetics, 48,2 (2008): 205-228, p. 205. 61 This was noted above (footnote 46) in regard to Hudson, but McConnell cites Gracyk as his starting point in this discussion, (p. 21 7f). 62 Ibid., p. 220.

64

Chapter IV

have noted those who found no place for such judgements, and now closed with a view which finds them nearly everywhere in the reahn of taste.

Conclusion-Kantian Portraits of Ugliness Having reviewed both sides of the divide regarding the possibility of Kant's view on pure negative judgements of taste, I may readily compile the insights these writers give us into perceptions of ugliness. Some of these writers have been led to fashion ugliness strictly within the boundaries of Kant' s system, while others have decided the Kantian moId (as they conceived it) must be broken to accommodate ugliness. Others aimed at both and attempted to

square Kanf s aesthetics with the

undeniable experience of ugliness. Here are their gleanings, and the interesting views of ugliness they provoke. First, many writers emphasised the (Kuplen, Wenzel, Allison, Shier,

disharmonious et al.), but did so in

nature of ugliness various ways. For

these, ugliness speaks to an experience which seems out of tune with the marmer in which our minds process aesthetic experiences.

In the words

of

some, this disharmony signals that cognition would fail (Wenzel). But is such a cognitive concern really the source of what we feel in ugliness? Ugliness

seems

more

than

incomprehensibility.

Others

found

this

dishannony so disconcerting that we cannot "linger" on the experience (Allison). This does resonate with some forms of ugliness. But strangely, we often find ourselves engagnig with (or enj oying?) ugly forms. Writers like Kiiplen held that our aesthetic taste still relishes the free play that even ugliness can inspire. Other writers claimed that these types of judgements in general are not black and white but can be "more or less": Wenzel, Guyer and others presented a range from beautiful to neutral to ugly. This seems truer than a distinct alternative. Yet others who did take the idea to the extreme distinctions said that

most

of our judgements of taste should

come up with an ugly verdict (McConnell) . On the other hand, some said that aesthetic judgement itself (according to Kant) would always have to be pleasant (Shier) . These somewhat unbelievable positions do lead us to ask certain questions about ugliness:

Is there a way to contemplate

anything and make it beautiful (or ugly)? Perhaps an aesthetic attitude which can positivise or problematise any experience? Are there some people whose cognitive, aesthetic,

or

moral abilities allow them to

willfully differ ni their aesthetic experience? It seems that there are people who can, but perhaps they bring to the experience elements which are outside pure consideration of fmm. This leads us to the next set of insights focused on ugliness' referentiality.

Understandings of Ugliness in Kanfs Aesthetics

65

We were reminded by many writers that judgements of ugliness are directed towards obj ects, though Kant was interested mainly in our judgement, not the object. Guyer, Cohen, and others might have disagreed about

how

recognising objects and reflecting on objects happen, but most

allowed the viewer a chance to know

what was

ugly. This speaks to the

fact that (despite CPJ's subj ective focus) we recognise something in or about the object of experience which we do not like-which displeases us. The question carmot be escaped: does ugliness come in only by means of form-something distinct (or delinked) from knowing what the thing

is meant to

is,

or

be? Or is our idea of ugliness only related to such concerns

(and thus impure in the Kantian sense)? McConnell mentioned the idea of an artist who strives towards realisation of beauty (any lack for McConnell is ugly)-and I agree that in the artist's striving we find evidence of a struggle with more purely formal concerns. Further, how can an artist intend to use ugliness, whether fOlTIlal or conceptual, and then convey this intent? Clearly many artists can. Perhaps this leads to a need to rethink Kant's discussion of genius along negative as well as positive lines. These kinds of questions were helped by writers like Cohen and lead to a third set of observations about ugliness: it has a variety of types. She noted that ugliness can mean something fails to measure up to what it should be, or even to the standard of beauty, (along with Rosenkianz and McConnell). Ugliness can indicate that we have emotional baggage which causes the association to be negative. Ugliness can even strike us so forcefully, and arrestingly-as in the case of disgust-that we cannot distinguish between the representation and the thing itself (Kiiplen, Korsmeyer and Cohen) . Even apart from all of these a pure, Kantian ugliness begs for reference to unity (McConnell), "cognisability" (Wenzel, Allison,

et al.) or some mysterious "ought."

Ideas of "ought" led some writers to Kantian morality, which seems crucial to the latter half of CPJ and the enterprise as a whole. Is ugliness itself immoral? Can entertaining it be immoral (Cohen)? Might ugliness in nature cause a teleological view to be impossible (Thomson, Coate and Troxell)? Why are we offended by ugliness, and to what is it an affront? Who-in nature-has failed, or what has gone wrong in the appearance of ugliness? What does this expectation (even in nature) tell us about ourselves

as

aesthetic

beings?

In

a

sense

ugliness

speaks

to

our

community: as with Kantian beauty we feel that we should be able to communicate

ugliness

to

others,

even

though

we

find

it

to

be

inexpressible. If there is pure ugliness, it is something that other people should judge in the same way, based on our shared sensibilities. Writers like Cohen highlighted this truth even while affirming that ugliness can

66

Chapter IV

also be indefinable. It seems that this communicability should stand even with the concerns of precision in judgement. Coleman doubted we could ever know the depth of our aesthetic purity; after all, how often can we say precisely

what

is ugly about a piece or perfOlmance? Berger likewise

thought that each individual with their own experience and personality would necessarily have a unique account of beauty and ugliness. The large and growing body of literature dealing with Kant and ugliness may seem at times to be an example of the subj ect: confusing, conflicting, and at times incomprehensible. But even in this sense it serves as a testimony to ugliness' undeniability. Allison believed there

must be

a

place in Kant's system for negative judgements of taste, because the system seemed to demand it. But for aesthetics in general we may say that there

must

be a place in any system for ugliness, because it forces

consideration of the system itself.

In all the myriad ways we are met with,

and meditate on, ugliness, the experience fOlTIlS a riddle with which we must reckon. By taking the above literature into consideration

en masse I

have shown that ugliness can be described as simultaneously stultifying and enlivening, offensive and fascinating, and raising as many questions about the experiencer as it does the experience.

CHAPTER V KANT' S SUBLIME AND INGENIOUS INSIGHTS INTO JUDGEMENTS OF THE UGLY ERIN BRADFIELD

I shall explore the question of whether Kanf s theory in the

Judgement can

Critique of

account for judgements of taste regarding the ugly. While

there has been much debate regarding this issue in recent decades, many scholars consider the hannonious free play of the faculties to be central to this question. Hannony between the imagination and understanding is stressed in a series of articles regarding pure judgements of taste of the ugly beginning in the mid-1990s and extending into the 2000s. I shall here investigate the status of harmony in relation to judgements of taste and assess whether harmony among these faculties is necessary to free play. In order to do so, I compare three cases and consider how they relate to cognitive activity: judgements of taste of the beautiful, sublime experience, and judgements of taste regarding works of genius. I argue that pure judgements of taste of the ugly are indeed possible by analysing the cognitive activity produced in the aforementioned cases. These instances show that in Kant's system, cognitive harmony may not be necessary to free play. Rather, disharmony can also be produced by our aesthetic experience with the sublime, works of genius, and the ugly. I argue that in spite of the contrapurposiveness and disharmony that experience with the ugly spurs, it nonetheless can serve to further cognitive activity and quicken the mind, cultivate taste, and develop community, thus revealing a higher, and perhaps unexpected, purposiveness.

Harmony and Pure Judgements of Taste: The Beautiful as a Test Case As a basis for considering whether judgements of taste of the ugly are possible on Kant's terms, we must first establish Kant's position regarding

68

Chapter V

judgements of taste of the beautiful, (Kant's focus in

Judgement,

The Critique of

specifically in the "Analytic of the Beautiful") 1 As a general

sketch, Kant's aesthetic theory as presented in the

Critique ofJudgement disinterested; 2) our judgements of taste be subj ectively universal; 3) our mental state be marked by the free play of the imagination with the understanding; and 4) requires

that:

1)

our judgements of taste be

we be able to express this common state of mind to others through judgements

of taste.

According

to Kant, in

order

to

express

our

judgements of taste as universally derived claims of beauty, in a way that is not merely the communication of our preferences and opinions, but is still not based on laws or detelTIlinate concepts, we must share the same mental state. That is, we must judge in a way that is disinterested and not based upon experience or specific concepts. As Kant argues, we must judge art from a pure and impartial position in which no prejudices, biases, or inclinations impinge upon our judgements. This ensures that our judgements of taste are pure. As a result, everyone ought to agree with our assessments of whether something is beautiful because we occupy the same disinterested, unbiased mental state. This shared feeling based upon the relationship of our imagination and the understanding is required in order to establish our "sensus communis" or "common sense" of taste in Kant's terminology 2 The precondition for the possibility of this subj ective universality is a mental state marked by the free play of the imagination and understanding. Not only do we deem Ibat others ought to agree with our judgements of taste, but we demand assent to them.3 Some recent articles on Kant and the ugly add an additional condition to the aforementioned sketch of what is necessary to Kant's account of judgements of taste in the "Analytic of the Beautiful:" The free play of imagination and understanding must be

harmonious.

At first blush, this

might appear to be a straightforward statement. However, the claim

1 Throughout this essay, I focus on beauty and ugliness in art rather than in nature. 2 Immanuel Kant, The Critique ofJudgement, trans. Wemer Pluhar, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), §40. Kant states, "Instead, we must [here] take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by all of us] i.e. a power to judge that in reflecting takes accOlUlt (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else's way of presenting [something], in order as it were to compare our 0\Vll judgement with human reason in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones, an illusion that would have a prejudicial influence on the judgement." Cf., §20, and "Introduction," pp. lx, lxii. Subsequent citations will provide section number, Ak. pagination, and reference to page munber in Pluhar's translation. 3 !hid., §8, Ak. 214, pp. 57-58; §36, Ak. 289, p. 153.

Kanfs Sublime and Ingenious Insights into Judgements of the Ugly regarding

the

interconnection

(and perhaps

put more strongly,

69 the

dependence) of the free play of the faculties upon their harmonious relationship is quite contentious and warrants further examination. David Shier's argument in "Why Kant Finds Nothing Ugly" and Sean McConnell's argument in "How Kant Might Explain Ugliness" treat free play as dependent upon the hannonious relationship of the imagination and the understanding 4 They proceed to argue that judgements of taste of the ugly do not exhibit this hannonious relationship among the faculties. Therefore, they argue, judgements of the ugly are not possible utilising Kanf s framework. Put differently, this proposed "necessary" hannony serves as the cornerstone of arguments against the possibility of pure judgements of the ugly.

In

other arguments, the issue of hannony figures quite differently,

offering an opportunity to present a case for how pure judgements of the ugly may indeed be consistent with Kanfs system. Christian Wenzel argues in "Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?" that we can have a

disharmonious

free play of the imagination and the understanding based primarily upon evidence from the Reflections, the Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy, and to a lesser extent, from The Critique ofJudgement S At first, Wenzel focuses on showing that there is an a priori basis for judgements of the ugly and that these judgements serve as counterparts to a priori judgements of the beautiful. He goes on to argue that for Kanfs account in

The Critique of Judgement

to have

traction, we must have the ability to disagree about judgements of taste, requiring that one individual can claim that claims that

"X

"X is

beautiful" while another

is ugly." Moreover, Wenzel argues that ugliness is a

positive quality, not a mere lack of beauty. In other words,

our judgements

of taste of the ugly are not just the recognition of a lack of beauty; they pick out some positive, and in this case, ugly, quality. This means that

In

what

"X is ugly" are significantly different claims.6 follows, I make a complementary argument to Wenze! 's

"X

is not beautiful" and

by

exploring whether we must have a hannonious relationship between the imagination and understanding in order to make a pure judgement of taste. Utilising evidence from

The Critique ofJudgement, I argue that disharmony

among the faculties is consistent with free play, looking in particular to

4 See David Shier, "\¥by Kant Finds Nothing Ugly," The British Journal of Aesthetics, 38,4 (1998): 412-418 and Sean McConnell, "How Kant Might Explain Ugliness," The British Journal ofAesthetics,48 (2) (2008): 205-228. 5 See Christian Wenzel, "Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?" The British Journal of Aesthetics, 39,4 (1999): 416-422. 6 Ibid., p. 416 and p. 4 1 8 .

70

Chapter V

our responses to sublime experience and works of genius as support for this point.

I

further argue that this dishannonious and contrapurposive

state of the faculties shows us a way to understand how judgements of the ugly are possible within Kant's theoretical framework and what purpose such dishatmony ultimately serves. My argument aims to preserve the free play of the faculties, but also to open up the possibility that not all judgements of taste are hannonious, nor do they have to be harmonious given Kant's commitments.

This position helps to account for both

positive aesthetic experience of pleasure and negative aesthetic experience of displeasure in response to art. My argument allows for a way to square the idea that our faculties must experience free play in order to make a pure, disinterested judgement of taste, with the dishannony or displeasure that we sometimes experience in response to art.

Free Play and the Case for Disharmony

In

part, my inspiration for this argument regarding freedom and

dishannony stems from a disagreement with David Shier 's position in "Why Kant Finds Nothing Ugly."

In

the final paragraph of this article,

Shier summarises his argument quite succinctly:

Since harmonious free play is always pleasurable, and since all judgements of taste are accompanied by harmonious free play, it follows that every judgement of taste must be accompanied by the feeling of pleasme in the subject. But any judgement of taste in which the subject's feeling is that of pleasme is, by definition, an affirmative judgement of taste. Therefore, within Kanfs aesthetics, and contrary to the obvious fact of the matter, negative judgements of taste about free beauty are quite impossible ? Although

I fmd his overall argument to be remarkably clear, I disagree I object, in particular, to Shier's premise that connects free play with a hannonious relationship between the faculties. I grant that harmonious free play results in a feeling of pleasure. However, I

with Shier's conclusion.

disagree with the notion that all judgements of taste must be accompanied by

harmony. Could some judgements disharmonious free play instead?8

of taste be accompanied by

7 Shier, op. cit., p. 4 1 8 . 8 "While I focus on the work o f Shier as my example here, the issue of harmony permeates contemporary scholarship on Kant and the ugly. For scholarship on the issue of harmony in relationship to judgements of the ugly see Sean McConnell, "How Kant Might Explain Ugliness," op. cif. ; David Shier, ""Why Kant Finds

Kanfs Sublime and Ingenious Insights into Judgements of the Ugly

71

In order to address this question regarding hannony, let me first consider what Kant means by "free play." There are several different senses of freedom built into Kant's phrase that require further elaboration. First, we must consider freedom as it is related to Kant's notion of "disinterested interest" in the "Analytic of the Beautiful." Here, Kant argues that our judgements should not be biased or prejudiced by personal inclination towards or interest in the object's existence.9 Kant further claims that we ought to have a disinterested interest in the object as we contemplate and judge it.10 We can extend this reasoning to argue that we should not be biased by personal inclinations

against

the object or its

existence either, as might be the case in our experience of ugly obj ects. As Wenzel argues, notliing about tlie ugly seems to imply that we could not be free to contemplate it in a disinterested way. Wenzel ponders,"If I see something and find it ugly, why should it not occupy my mind? Why should I not contemplate it, although witli displeasure?"ll We should be free to contemplate the ugly in a disinterested fashion just as we are to contemplate the beautiful, especially because we are judging the form of the object, rather than its content or subj ect matter. Second, a lack of prejudice is connected to the notion that we judge freely when we are not constrained or guided by a detelTIlinate concept in judging the obj ect. Injudgements of taste, we do not refer the given obj ect to a specific concept with which to compare or judge it. This, properly speaking, is what makes judgements of taste aesthetic ratlier tlian logical in nature. There is no detelTIlinate concept with which we can compare the obj ect in question in order to judge it. In § l of the

Critique ofJudgement,

Kant states:

If we wish to decide whether something is beautiful or not, we do not use lUlderstanding to refer the presentation to the object so as to give rise to cognition; rather, we use imagination (perhaps in cOllllection with lUlderstanding) to refer the presentation to the subject and his feeling of pleasure or displeasme. Hence a judgement of taste is not a cognitive judgement and so is not a logical judgement but an aesthetic one, by which Nothing Ugly," op.cif.; Paul Guyer, "Kant and the Pmity of the Ugly," Kant e­ Prints, 3,3 (2004): 1 - 2 1 ; Christian Wenzel, "Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?", op.cif. ; and Hud Hudson, "The Significance of an Analytic of the Ugly in Kanfs Deduction of Pure Judgements of Taste," in Kant's Aesthetics, eds. Ralf Meerbote and Hud Hudson, (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1991) pp. 87-103. 9 Kant, §2, Ak. 204, p. 45. 10 Ibid. 11 Wenzel, p. 421 .

72

Chapter V we mean a judgement whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective . . . here the subject feels himself, [namely] how he is affected by the presentation. 1 2 The

lack

of

a

detelTIlinate

concept

sets

our

imagination

and

understanding into motion. It activates them into free play searching for the concept that will fit our aesthetic experience in order to judge whether the obj ect is beautiful or not. Kant further argues:

If, then, we are to think that the judgement about this lUliversal communicability of the presentation has a merely subjective determining basis, i.e. one that does not involve a concept of the object, then this basis can be nothing other than the mental state that we find in the relation between the presentational powers [imagination and understanding] insofar as they refer a given presentation to cognition in general. When this happens, the cognitive powers brought into play by the presentation are in free play, because no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition. 1 3 Taking these passages in conjunction, judgements of taste regarding the ugly can satisfy both conditions of freedom outlined here, and therefore are consistent with Kant's position in

The Critique ofJudgement.

Just as in the case of the beautiful, when judging ugly obj ects, we should not (and need not) refer the object to a detelTIlinate concept. Moreover, in principle, we can be disinterested in ugly objects if we judge from an unbiased and unprejudiced standpoint, just as with judgements of the beautiful. As I argued earlier, if we judge the form of the object, it should not affect our disinterested contemplation of the object if it happens to be

4

ugly. 1

Now, having established the possibility of free play with respect to judgements of taste of the ugly, let me turn to the question of harmony and disharmony in relationship to such free play. Consider the following argument (a counter-argument to Shier of sorts) about Kanf s theory in

The Critique ofJudgement: 1 . All judgements of taste involve free play of the imagination and understanding.

1 2 Kant, § 1 , Ak. 204, p. 44. 1 3 Ibid., §9, Ak. 217, p. 61-62. 1 4 There is certainly more to say about cases in which we are not disinterested but judge the object ugly. However, that falls outside the scope of this paper.

73

Kanfs Sublime and Ingenious Insights into Judgements of the Ugly 2. But not all free play involves a harmonious relationship among the faculties. 1 5 3. Harmony among the faculties implies or gives rise to pleasme. 4. Judgements of taste in response to pleasme are judgements of taste of the beautiful. 5. Disharmony among the faculties implies or gives rise to displeasme or negative pleasme. 6. Judgements of taste in response to displeasure or negative pleasure are judgements of taste ofthe ugly. 7. Therefore, Kanfs system accommodates both positive and negative judgements of taste. 8. Therefore, Kanfs system accommodates judgements of taste about the beautiful andjudgements of taste about the ugly.

In

order to support what I take to be the key and most contentious

claim in my argument, premise two, I will turn to

Judgement and

The Critique of

cases in which we experience displeasure based upon the

relationship among our faculties.

In the sections that follow, I will explore

sublime experience and works of genius in order to show how each spurs displeasure and disharmony in aesthetic response.

Sublime Experience Having

established the possibility

of free play with respect to

judgements of taste of the ugly, let me turn to the question of harmony and disharmony in relationship to free play. The relationship of our faculties in sublime experience illuminates our investigation of the cognitive activity underlying judgements

of taste

of the

ugly.

In particular,

sublime

experience shows a case in which we experience both pleasure

and

displeasure in response to aesthetic experience. Kant begins the "Analytic of the Sublime" by comparing the feelings we have in response to the beautiful and the feelings we have in response to the sublime. 'Whereas the beautiful inspires restful contemplation and pleasure, the sublime inspires a feeling of indirect pleasure, displeasure, negative pleasure, seriousness, or respect.16 Recall that contemplation of the beautiful enlivens the individual. As Kant puts the point in the "Analytic of the Beautiful," "the subj ect feels himself' and experiences

1 5 This is the key premise of my argument. I will provide support for this claim in the argmnents that follow regarding the analysis of sublime experience and works of genius. 1 6 Kant, §23, Ak. 245, p. 98.

74

Chapter V

pleasure in response to art.17 Sublime experience, on the other hand, forces an individual to recognise the superiority of the rational vocation of his cognitive powers (reason) over the greatest power of sensibility (imagination). Sublime experience is both a source of pleasure and displeasure for the subj ect due to the tension among the faculties. This is due to the failure of the imagination to achieve its given goal of apprehending various intuitions and then comprehending them. As such, Kant variously refers to our feeling in response to "displeasure,"18

"negative

sublime

pleasure,"19

experience as "agitation,"20

one marked by "respect"21

and

"vibration, with a rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same obj ect."22 The imagination hits its limit and then attempts to exceed it in order to be adequate to its vocation. As Kant puts the point, the imagination pours forth all the more powerfully when it confronts its boundaries:

[What happens is that] om imagination strives to progress towards infinity, while our reason demands absolute totality as an idea, and so [the imagination], our power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that idea. Yet this inadequacy itself is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have a supersensible power; and what is absolutely large is not an object of sense, but is the use that judgement makes naturally of certain objects so as to [arouse] this (feeling), and in contrast with that use any other use is small. Hence what is to be called sublime is not the object but the attunement that the intellect [gets] through a certain presentation that occupies reflective judgement Sublime is what even to be able to thinkproves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard ofsense. 23 Sublime experience forces the imagination to recognise its inadequacy, because just as the imagination strives to accomplish its goal of presenting in a single intuition a totality or unity, it is unable to do so. \¥bile apprehension

proceeds

to

infinity,

(continually

grasping

intuitions),

comprehension (joining these intuitions together into a unity) reaches its

1 7 Ibid., 18 Ibid., 1 9 Ibid., 20 Ibid., 2 1 Ibid., 22 Ibid., 23 Ibid.,

§1, Ak. 204, p. 44. §27, Ak. 259, p. 1 1 6. §23, Ak. 245, p. 98. §24, Ak. 247, p. 1 0 1 , and §27, Ak. 258, p. 1 1 5. §27, Ak. 257, p. 1 14. §27, Ak. 258, p. 1 1 5. §25, Ak. 250, p. 106.

Kant's Sublime and Ingenious Insights into Judgements of the Ugly

75

limit.24 There is pleasure in stretching the imagination's boundaries, but displeasure in confronting the imagination's limits. As Kant puts the point, "he has the feeling that his imagination is inadequate for exhibiting the idea of a whole, [a feeling] in which imagination reaches its maximum, and as it strives to expand that maximum, it sinks back into itself, but consequently comes to feel a liking . . . ".25 Although sublime experience highlights a strained relationship among our

faculties

(imagination

and reason

as

well

as

imagination

and

understanding), it is nonetheless purposive for us because it manifests the superiority of reason, according to Kant. As Kant articulates the point,

The quality of the feeling of the sublime consists in its being a feeling, accompanying an object, of displeasure about om aesthetic power of judging, yet of a displeasme that we present at the same time as purposive. What makes this possible is that the subject's 0"Wll inability lUlcovers in him the consciousness of an lUllimited ability which is also his, and that the mind can judge this ability aesthetically only by that inability."26 Kant claims that while sublime experience may expose the inadequacy of imagination (the sublime's contrapurposiveness), it also reveals our higher vocation and forces us to recognise the superiority of reason over our other faculties and over Nature (the sublime's purposiveness). sublime

experience

helps

us

to

In

discover the power

other words,

of pure and

independent reason as a supersensible faculty.27 As has been sho\Vll in this section, sublime experience is a source of both

pleasure

and

displeasure.

It

indicates

a

conflict,

tension,

or

dishmmonious relationship among the faculties. As aforementioned, such experience generates a feeling of respect in which we recognise reason as our most powerful faculty. As the imagination stretches its boundaries and encounters its limits, it pours forth all the more powerfully. As it does so, it engages with the understanding and experiences a kind of play. To be clear, this play may be of a different sort than we experience in our

24 As Kant argues, " . . . comprehension becomes more and more difficult the farther apprehension progresses, and it soon reaches its maximum For when apprehension has reached the point where the partial presentations of sensible intuition that were frrst apprehended are already beginning to be extinguished in the imagination, as it proceeds to apprehend further ones, the imagination then loses as much on the one side as it gains on the other; and so there is a maximmn in comprehension that it cannot exceed," ibid., §26, Ak. 252, p. 108. 25 Ibid., §26, Ak. 252, p. 109. 26 Ibid., §27, Ak. 259, p. 1 1 6. 27 Ibid., §27, Ak. 259, p. 1 1 5.

76

Chapter V

encounters with beauty because it does not involve restful contemplation. Rather, encounters with the sublime would generate a kind of serious, tense, or even violent play. Insofar as the imagination and understanding engage with one another in enlivened and spring

sublime

into action.

response to the sublime,

experience, both faculties are

The displeasure we experience in

in conjunction with the resulting

stressed

relationship among the faculties, leads to a disharmonious, frustrated play in which the faculties pour forth all the more powerfully. In the next section,

I

will explain how frustrated play is present in the case of works

of genius in order to further the overall argument regarding the possibility of disharmonious play and ofjudgements of taste of the ugly.

Works of Genius Before turning to works of genius and the complication they present for the relationship of the faculties, it is crucial to investigate Kant's notion of aesthetic ideas.28 Kant asserts that an aesthetic idea is a "presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, to which no detelTIlinate concept is adequate, so that no language can express it completely and also allow us to grasp it. "29 We search for a unified concept (or set of concepts) by which to comprehend the meaning of the art we encounter, yet the multitude of partial and related presentations makes this process difficult. Kant states:

Now if a concept is provided with [unterlegen] a presentation of the imagination such that, even though this presentation belongs to the exhibition of the concept, yet it prompts, even by itself, so much thought as can never be comprehended within a determinate concept and thereby the presentation aesthetically expands the concept itself in an unlimited way, then the imagination is creative in [all of] this and sets the power of intellectual ideas (i.e. reason) in motion: it makes reason think more, when prompted by a [certain] presentation, than what can be apprehended and made distinct in the presentation (though the thought does pertain to the concept of the object [presented]). 30 Thus, the excess of aesthetic ideas stretches the bounds of our concepts. The result is a struggle to fit our experience into a concept that is too

28

This will further develop Oill understanding of aesthetic experience of all types, including Oill experience of the beautiful. 29 Ibid., §49, Ak. 3 14, p.182. 30 Ibid., §49, Ak.. 3 14-315, p. 1 83 .

Kanfs Sublime and Ingenious Insights into Judgements of the Ugly

77

constrictive for it. While concepts fail to adequately capture the meaning of the work of art, we still attempt to find them. Because our ready-to­ hand concepts are too narrow, too weak, or both, to engage adequately with works of art, the surplus produces further thought and activity in the attempt to process and comprehend it. Kant argues that because aesthetic ideas challenge and stretch conceptual boundaries, they expand the mind itself. Aesthetic ideas activate and quicken the mental faculties through the excess that they contain.

[W]e present something that prompts the imagination to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words. These aesthetic attributes yield an aesthetic idea, which serves the mentioned rational idea as a substitute for a logical exhibition, but its proper function is to quicken [beleben] the mind by opening up for it a view into an immense realm of kindred presentations that give the imagination a momentum which makes it think more in response to these objects, though in an lUldeveloped way, than can be comprehended within one concept and hence in one determinate linguistic expression. 3 1 Aesthetic ideas quicken the mind to engage in what Kant calls reflective judgement,

in which we search for the right concept to

apprehend a sensuous particular. The imagination strives to attain its goal of fitting a concept to the presentations. This quickens the faculties and thus drives more cognitionY Put another way, aesthetic ideas "make reason think more" by trying to join together a multiplicity of partial and kindred presentations. It is interesting to note that Kant comments on the undeveloped activity of the mind here. The faculties spring into action, but they are not well directed. The understanding is unable to craft a concept that fits the experience and the imagination is unable to successfully join together the multiplicity of presentations due to the excess of aesthetic ideas. Compare this scenario to the outpouring of the imagination that occurs in response to sublime experience. The imagination pours forth with the aim of being adequate to its vocation, but struggles to achieve its goal.

These cases hold interesting parallels regarding dishatmonious

mental activity and the resulting feelings of pleasure and displeasure. To continue, the work of art both stimulates our cognitive faculties and also frustrates them; we are unable to fully cognise our experience and yet

3 1 Ibid., §49, Ak. 3 15, p. 1 83 - 1 84. 32 Ibid., §49, Ak. 3 1 5, p. 183. ef. "Translator's Introduction," §2, xxx-xxxix, especially xxxviii-xxxix; §9 on the harmony of the faculties, Ak. 2 1 8-219; and §35, Ak. 287.

78

Chapter V

are driven to do so all the same.

For Kant, this is both a source of pleasure

and displeasure for the subject. This excess is pleasurable because it enlivens our faculties; we gain even more pleasure in our attempt to make something productive out of this excess. It results in the expansion of the mind beyond its current bounds and in the quickening of its faculties. This expansion and quickening of the mnid are part of what we like about art and why we fnid it to be valuable. The displeasure, on the other hand, stems from the inability to fully align all the presentations into a single, well-fOlmed concept or expression. We can compare this situation to what occurs in sublime experience in terms of both pleasure and displeasure. On the one hand, we experience pleasure based upon the stretching of our faculties and the desire to reach each faculty's vocation; on the other hand, we experience displeasure and frustration as those same faculties reach their limits. A parallel situation occurs in response to aesthetic ideas. This process is exacerbated with works of genius due to the way that they "set the rule to art" through their innovative

exemplarity.

Because

they make

a new

contribution

to

communication and culture, works of genius are even more difficult to comprehend, and thus, they increase the struggle of the imagination and the understanding.

In response to

sublime experience and works of genius,

there is a tension among the faculties based upon the drive to be adequate to their vocation coupled with the inability to complete the task in question. The imagination, in particular, struggles to grapple with these expenences. With this prelude on the complexity of aesthetic ideas in mind, let me turn to works

of genius more directly in order to understand the

complications they present for our faculties. Kant defines genius as "the talent (natural endowment) that gives the rule to art. Snice talent is an innate productive ability of the artist and as such belongs itself to nature, we could also put it this way:

Genius is the innate mental predisposition [ingenium] through which nature gives the rule to art."33 To explani, Kant

claims that works of genius must be more than just innovative. They must also be exemplary. The art cannot simply be novel; it must also have some quality that sets it apart and by which it becomes an exemplar for future works to follow. Such art sets a (new) rule to art and thereby offers a new model in the sphere of aesthetic expression. Simply put, genius is the

33 Kant, §46, Ak. 307, p. 174. Kant uses the term "genius" in a slightly different sense than we might today. Genius is the force or power [Gewalt] of nature working through the subject; an individual is not a genius, but rather, she exhibits genius. Put differently, genius is nature in the subject. This force is what makes works of art Geistreich, or "full of spirit," ibid., §47, Ak. 308, p. 176.

Kant's Sublime and Ingenious Insights into Judgements of the Ugly

79

talent, endowed by nature, through which subjects give the rule to art through original and exemplary art-making.34 Kant further establishes the importance of genius by claiming that "fine art cannot itself devise the rule by which it is to bring about its product. Since, however, a product can never be called art unless it is preceded by a rule, it must be nature in the subj ect (and through the attunement of his powers) that gives the rule to art, in other words, fine art is possible only

as

the product of genius."35 Moreover, since the rule isn't

supposed to "hover before the eyes of the artist,"36 the new rule can only be discerned in retrospect when it becomes a guide for future works. This does not mean that the productions are wholly

unruly,

but only that rules

didn't guide the production process. Instead, the rules are the

result of the

new work inspired by genius. Because the rule does not precede the production, but emerges only afterward, there is no ready-to-hand guide to understanding or connnunicating about works of genius. Thus, clarity of expression in making judgements proves even more difficult when dealing with works of genius because there is no established rule to follow in one's judgements of ingenious work. Again, just

as

in the case of sublime

experience, works of genius engender a tense relationship among the faculties. Insofar as fine art carmot advance without the creativity of the imagination, genius is crucial to the development of art and expression. But because works of genius introduce new rules to art, we may have difficulty understanding and communicating about them. Kant pushes the conflict to a critical level, arguing that genius requires "wing clipping," (a fmm of restriction on expression) in order to promote connnunication and culture. Kant claims:

Taste, like the power of judgement in general, consists in disciplining (or training) genius. It severely clips its wings, and makes it civilised, or polished; but at the same time it gives it guidance as to how far and over what it may spread while still remaining purposive. It introduces clarity and order into a wealth of thought and hence makes the ideas dmable, fit for approval that is both lasting and lUliversal, and [hence] for being followed by others and fit for an ever advancing culture. 37

34 Ibid., §46, Ak. 307-308, p. 175-176. 35 Ibid., §46, Ak. 307, p. 175. 3 6 !bid., §45, Ak. 307, p. 174. Kant states, "There must be no hint that the rule was hovering before the artist's eyes and putting fetters on his mental powers." 37 Ibid., §50, Ak. 3 1 9, p. 1 88.

80

Chapter V Kant praises the imagination (and thereby genius) for provoking much

thought that cannot be contained in a single concept,38 for "mak[ing] reason think more,"39 and for quickening the mental faculties through increased activity.40 Note the similarity in response to aesthetic ideas and to sublime experience. Genius spurs activity that enlivens the mind, quickening the faculties. Nonetheless, as Kant indicates in this passage, genius is expected to advance culture, but it must be "tamed" or "refined" before it can do so. As genius moves beyond the strictures of taste and towards the establishment of new rules and modes of artistic expression, taste restricts it. 'When taste and genius come into conflict, Kant is willing to sacrifice this natural talent to the purposes of culture.41 As stated above, wing clipping is done in order to refine ingenious ideas and make them durable and lasting.

This

durability

is

attained

through

civilising

genius' s

expressions, making them fit for and understandable by culture. From there, we can deduce that taste clips the wings of genius for the sake of

communication,

through which culture advances. Put another way, Kant

values understanding and communication over innovation in expression. As he frames the issue, innovative but nonsensical expressions are restricted for the sake of expressions that will make a "greater" contribution to mutual understanding.42 'While genius moves culture and communication forward, it is in jeopardy if its expressions are too wild or nonsensical. That is, Kant values understanding over imagination in telTIlS of advancing culture. So what does this tension imply about the relationship of the faculties in response to works of genius? Kant promotes the free play of imagination and understanding, but only until a conflict arises. Then the freedom of the imagination must submit to the rule-boundedness of the understanding.

This restriction doesn't destroy the free play of the

faculties, however. Instead, it forces the imagination to hannonise with the

3 8 Ibid. , §49, Ak. 3 14, p. 1 82. 39 Ibid. , §49, Ak. 3 14, p. 1 83. 40 Ibid. , §49, Ak. 3 15, p. 1 83 - 1 84. 4 1 Kant is explicit about this point: Only when a conflict arises between taste and genius does he side with taste in products of art, §50, Ak. 320, p. 1 8 8f. 42 Kant states: "Therefore, if there is a conflict between these two properties [taste and genius] in a product, and something has to be sacrificed, then it should be on the side of genius; and judgement, which in matters [Sachen] of fine art bases its pronOlUlcements on principles of its 0\Vll, will sooner permit the imagination's freedom and wealth to be impaired than that the understanding be impaired," Kant, §50, Ak. 320, p. 1 88-189.

Kanfs Sublime and Ingenious Insights into Judgements of the Ugly understanding in a way that limits its

0\Vll

81

freedom to an extent.43 While

there is a tense relationship between imagination and understanding, Kant nonetheless argues that they can be made to

adapt

to one another­

through the power of judgement. Imagination should not be lawless in its freedom; rather, it should be made to confOlm to the understanding. Due to their conflict in response to works of genius, the imagination and understanding are in a tense or potentially

disharmonious relationship.

The

way Kant frames the point in the above passage suggests that while limits should be placed on the imagination's freedom, dishatmonious but lawful free play with the understanding is still possible. Moreover, Kant suggests that the imagination and understanding may be made to hannonise with one another, "adapting" to one another more carefully through the power of judgement. The case of works of genius has much in common with the foregoing cases of the beautiful and the sublime. In sublime experience and works of genius, the faculties are in a disharmonious relationship in which the possibility of play is preserved. The complication that we find with works of genius regards the issue of freedom rather than hatmony, especially when we investigate the restriction of wing clipping. \¥bile above, I discussed the issue of freedom from the perspective of the relationship of the faculties, here it is important to consider the restriction on freedom of expression

that

wing

clipping

presents.

Certainly,

the

limiting

of

expression for the sake of culture restricts the freedom of works of genius as well as our responses to them. This leads to further concerns regarding marginalisation

and

censorship.

So

while Kant

advocates

for

the

importance of works of genius, he also argues that works of genius need a fonn of restriction called "wing clipping" in order to contribute to communication and culture.

43 Kant makes a similar point in the "General Comment on the First Division of the Analytic": "It seems therefore that only a lawfulness without a law, and a subjective hannony of the imagination with the understanding without an objective hannony where the presentation is referred to a determinate concept of an object is compatible with the full lawfulness of the understanding (which has also been called purposiveness without a purpose and with the peculiarity of a judgement of taste," Ak. 241, p. 92. Here, Kant makes the point that in pme judgements of taste the imagination is not referred to a determinate concept of the object, even if the imagination obeys the laws of the understanding.

82

Chapter V

Conclusion: The Implications of Contrapurposiveness Throughout my analysis, I have drawn parallels among aesthetic experiences of the beautiful, the sublime, and works of genius in order to show how the activity of the faculties in these cases is similar to our experience of the ugly. A disharmonious, but nonetheless free relationship of the faculties shows how pure judgements of the ugly are possible within Kanf s system in

The Critique of Judgement.

As a conclusion to this

argument, I will briefly show how our experience of the ugly in art is contrapurposive for our faculties, but purposive for our growth as critics and community members. First, I show how the contrapurposiveness of the ugly may inspire a tension among the faculties, and thus, function in a fashion similar to the sublime. Second, I argue that experience with ugliness in art can be beneficial to our aesthetic training. Finally, I argue that the ugly in art can serve as an opportunity for community fOlmation or solidification. First, as Kant argues, sublime experience is a source of both pleasure and displeasure for us. On the one hand, our faculties are enlivened as the imagination stretches its boundaries in order to forge a concept that fits the experience. On the other hand, the tension created by the inability of the imagination to be adequate to its vocation is a source of displeasure. Nonetheless, Kant claims that the sublime reveals the superiority of reason over imagination and nature. The recognition of reason's superiority is one of the most productive aspects of sublime experience. Moreover, in spite of the sublime's contrapurposiveness, thwarting the imagination's goal, it also exercises and stretches our faculties. So too, the ugly in art may exercise and expand the bounds of our faculties in a way similar to sublime experience. If we allow the ugly to occupy our minds, we may experience a similar form of mental grappling to that generated by sublime experience.44

In

spite of the disharmony and displeasure we experience,

this mental activity could expand the bounds of our faculties. As we attempt to understand our aesthetic experience and to judge the (ugly) art in question, our faculties are enlivened and honed. Second, gaining experience with both the beautiful and the ugly in art could be educative for us as critics of art. Through such experience, we can develop the delicacy of our faculties, and thereby, become better able to judge art. If we practice in this way and strive to be unprejudiced, we can develop taste that is fit to be followed by others. As Hume wrote:

44 Wenzel, p. 421. Recall Wenzel ponders "If I see something and find it ugly, why should it not occupy my mind? "Why should I not contemplate it, although with dis­ pleasme?"

Kanfs Sublime and Ingenious Insights into Judgements of the Ugly

83

a true judge in the fine arts is observed, even dming the most polished ages, to be so rare a character: strong sense, lUlited to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.45 Hume argues that one can develop the skills required to become a discerning judge of the arts. In part, such a critic must be able to recognise both the beauty and the defects in art. If one is unable to do so, "[hle must conclude, upon the whole, that the fault lies in himself, and that he wants the delicacy, which is requisite to make him sensible of every beauty and every blemish, in any composition and discourse. ,,46 Thus, the ugly may be purposive insofar as it expands our arsenal of aesthetic considerations and our practice in aesthetic judgement of beauty and blemish. The ugly could serve as an important contrast with the beautiful, thereby helping us to discern which qualities we find beautiful or ugly in art. While this is a Humean line of argument, Kant would certainly endorse the honing of our faculties through repeated unbiased practice. Just as experience with the ugly could help us to broaden our aesthetic horizons, so too could our experience with the challenges presented by works of genius. This leads to my final point regarding the development of community through judgements of both the beautiful and the ugly. While Kant presents disgust as a limit case-as that which one cannot be disinterested in due to the visceral nature of our responses-ugliness spurs dishmmony among our faculties from which we can gain adequate distance in order to make disinterested judgements of taste-and to exchange them with others. I have argued elsewhere that works of genius can spur community fOlmation based on interest in understanding and communicating about specific works of art or artists.47 So too, the ugly in art may generate discussion that ultimately leads to community fOlmation based upon interest in

a

given work

or

artist, for reasons

of approbation

or

disapprobation.48 Because of how personal our responses to art are it is

45 David Hurne "Of the Standard of Taste," Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), p. 241. 46 Ibid., p. 236. 47 See Erin Bradfield, "Productive Excess: Aesthetic Ideas, Silence, and Community," The Journal ofAesthetic Education, 48,2 (Smnmer 2014): 1-15. 48 "While I shall not discuss it here, there is much to be said regarding what happens when the ugly in art generates approbation and whether a depiction of ugly subject-matter can be transfigmed if successfully rendered aesthetically. So too,

84 important to

Chapter V consider how negative judgements

of taste

relate

to

community fOlmation and maintenance through the preservation of free expression in and about art.

there is much to be said regarding the relationship of the ugly, the disgusting, and the horrific in art. That however is the subject of another paper.

CHAPTER VI THIS MIGHT BE UNPLEASANT JANE FORSEY

When I bought my current home, I announced that I simply could not live in it until the rooms had been painted. They were what one might euphemistically describe as somewhere between apricot and salmon, but to my mind they were really what in my childhood was called "fleshtone" Crayola Crayon (one in a package of colouring sticks) . Further, the walls had a slight sheen to them, making them

sweaty fleshtone Crayola Crayon,

or maybe feverish fleshtone Crayola Crayon. Never mind the structural work required on an old wooden house exposed to Canadian prame winters-like a new roof, perhaps-it was the paint that had to go. Immediately. Now, it should be clear that I found the walls ghastly, even dreadful. And I hope it is equally apparent that my response to them was aesthetic, although in this case negatively so. But what is particularly interesting is that my judgement was attended by a spur to action: I did not simply dislike or reject the walls (I did buy the house, after all): instead I strove to change them. And this kind of response-that is simultaneously negative but creatively motivating-holds some aesthetic promise. As a reader of Kant, my impulse has been to call this a judgement of the unpleasant: I would like to suggest that it is an aesthetic category worthy of consideration. 'When philosophy talks about aesthetic experience, it is most often in terms of our

responses:

to art and (natural) beauty for instance, and largely

with responses that are pleasurable and positive, as we see with Kant's judgements of the beautiful. But I think that the aesthetic tenor of our lives is more complex than this, and can engage us more actively. One of the goals of the recent movement in Everyday Aesthetics has been the inclusion in the scope of aesthetic experience

action

rather than mere

observation. Yuriko Saito, for instance, seeks to include aesthetic responses that "do not presuppose or lead to such spectator-like experiences but rather prompt

us

towards actions" such as cleaning, purchasing and

86

Chapter VI

repairing, such things as dilapidated buildings, rusty cars and dirty linens.1 Finding a way to articulate the centrality of the aesthetic for our quotidian lives and activities is what underlies my interest in those moments when its force is, at least initially, negative. For my case, those fleshtoned walls presented an obstacle to where and how

I would live-an obstacle, in fact, I in which I would dwell, with all of

to the aesthetic quality of my daily life. And in seeking to change them, had to creatively reimagine the space

its possibilities, and decide what was needed instead of that colour to make the space one which would provide me with experiences that were positive rather than negative.

In short, I had to

be aesthetically creative and active

rather than merely responsive. The notion of the unpleasant can capture this. But let me first distinguish it from two other negative aesthetic ideas. The unpleasant is not the ugly. A sick person can look ghastly without also looking ugly 2 A certain shirt can look dreadful on you without thereby being an ugly shirt. And apricot, while perhaps awful on a living­ room wall, is not itself an ugly colour (at least not when found on an apricot). We tend to use these terms as though they were synonymous with ugliness, but there is an important conceptual difference between them. The purely ugly, or what is judged to be ugly

tout court,

if one takes a

Kantian approach to these matters, will have certain characteristics that the unpleasant does not have: the judgement will be disinterested, subj ectively universal, and involve the free play of the cognitive faculties. That is, judgements of the ugly will have the same logical structure as judgements of free beauty, acting as a negative mirror of them. 3 And ugliness will, like Kantian beauty, invite us to

linger.

The ugly does not provoke desire or

aversion-it is disinterested-but it can fascinate us.4 Judgements of the 1 Yuriko Saito,

Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 10, 5 1 . 2 G.E. Henderson, "The Concept of Ugliness," The British Journal ofAesthetics, 6 (1966): 21 9-229; p. 222. Henderson uses the term "ugliness" throughout her paper, but distinguishes between kinds of ugliness in a way that is similar to Kant's distinction between the ugly, the unpleasant and the disgusting. 3 There has been a great deal of debate in recent years about whether ugliness can be made consistent with Kantian aesthetic theory. I will bypass this debate and note only that ifthere is such a thing as pure ugliness, it will have the features that I have described. Please see Ionathan Iohnson, "Understandings of Ugliness in Kant's Aesthetics," Chapter IV of this vohune, for a discussion of recent scholarship on Kant and the ugly. 4 Christian H. Wenzel, "Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?", The British Journal of Aesthetics, 39,4 (1999): 416-422, p. 4 1 8 . A commentator described this fascination as "it's horrid but I can't stop watching," which well captures what I seek to describe here.

This Might be Unpleasant

87

ugly (and warty toads get a lot of press here) are made by us as mere spectators, and like judgements of the beautiful, involve no direct call to action. Saying "this toad is ugly" or "this Francis Bacon painting is ugly" does not imply any revulsion, or desire to turn away from what we are viewing-it can, indeed, draw us in. The unpleasant is also not the disgusting. The disgusting, Kant writes, destroys all "aesthetical satisfaction;" when encountered we "strive against it with all our might."5 Disgust is visceral; it does not just repel us but physically revolts us, as with rotten food, or a decaying corpse.6 We rej ect the obj ect before aesthetic judgement can even occur.7 'What disgusts us is immediate and quite personal but it need not be ugly: snakes, animal entrails, a placenta display what many would find to be beautiful colours or shapes in another context. But if and when we are disgusted by these things, our capacity for disinterested reflection is destroyed through their forceful imposition on our (visual, olfactory) senses: we often react with

nausea.

With the disgusting, we are either simply repelled, or at best

attempt to eradicate the offending obj ect, as when one finds maggots in the garbage, or cockroaches on the stove. But the disgusting is not an aesthetic response, and from it we are never

inspired.

The unpleasant stands between the ugly and the disgusting, as neitber inviting us to linger nor driving us away, but as an aesthetic response that is uniquely motivating. And it will bear a similar structure to Kant's account of tbe pleasant. The unpleasant is a feeling--{)f displeasure (and the pleasant a feeling of pleasure)-tbat is grounded in direct physical sensations rather than in tbe complex workings (or free play) of our cognitive faculties at some degree of distance. Even so, the story of the unpleasant is not a strictly causal one, as it also involves an aesthetic judgement. We have a sensation and feel displeasure from it. Experiences of the ugly also bring about feelings of displeasure: the difference between them is in the "relations of representations to the feeling of pleasure and pain"8 and not in the feelings themselves. That is, the displeasure of the unpleasant stems from a judgement that is interested, and provokes desire, whereas the displeasure of the ugly is disinterested and desire-free. Kant's examples of tbe pleasant are primarily gustatory, which may be why it has been seen as wholly subj ective. But he also states tbat this kind

5 Irnrnanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgement, trans. lH. Bemard, (New York: Hafner, 1951), §48,Ak. 3 12. 6 Henderson, p. 220. 7 Mojca Kiiplen, "Disgust and Ugliness: A Kantian Perspective," Contemporary Aesthetics, 9 (201 1): 1-21, p. 1 2 . 8 Kant, §5, Ak. 209.

88

Chapter VI

of aesthetic judgement regards not only "the taste of the tongue, the palate and the throat, but . . . whatever is pleasant to anyone's eyes and ears"­ that is, to the full range of our sensations, including those that have long been considered the sole domain of beauty.9 Still, a gustatory example may help us on our way. Black licorice,

I must

confess, has an extremely

unpleasant taste: it gives me immediate displeasure (yuck!) and my judgement about it is negative. This judgement leads to desire: licorice to be unpleasant, and when

I

I

judge

represent it as being what has

displeased me, my desire is provoked; in this case a desire to avoid not just licorice, but all similar things: ouzo, Sambuca, fennel, aniseed, and so on. This is not a purely automatic response, because it involves both judgement and a mental representation. That is, my response is not visceral but rational, and results in my willed actions (of avoidance in this case) that are "directed and described by concepts,"lO i.e. of my have that yuck-factor, and my their relatives).

deciding

or

knowing what things choosing to avoid them (and

The unpleasant begins with physical

sensations, but

engages our higher faculties because we are making judgements, thinking conceptually, and in response, generating rationally willed desires. With the disgusting we do none of these things (but are merely repelled), and with the ugly we are disinterested and our judgements produce no desires at all (which is why we can linger over that hideous toad). Judgements

of the unpleasant are

indeed subjective rather than

universal. As we learn from Kant's famous canary wine example, when say licorice is unpleasant,

I really ought to say it is unpleasant to me,

as

I I

relate the sensation to my 0\Vll feeling of displeasure. This "taste of sense" as Kant calls it, "lays do\Vll mere private judgements"l l which are empirical. However, what is often overlooked is that, like many other empirical rules, these judgements can make claims to general validity. Kant notes that "actually there is often found a very extended concurrence in these judgements,"12 as we can see with cultural preferences in gustatory tastes-pigs' feet for some, goats ' heads for others-and with historically changing trends in fashion and decorating: from bell bottoms to skinny jeans, and from shag carpeting to hardwood floors. The unpleasant is more modest than the universalising demands of ugliness and beauty, but need not be completely personal: it can speak to at least relative, general trends.

9 Ibid., §5, Ak. 212. 1 0 Rachel Zuckert, "A New Look at Kanfs Theory of Pleasme," The Journal of Aesthetics andArt Criticism, 60,3 (2002): 239-252, p. 246. 1 1 Kant, §7, Ak. 2 1 2 . 1 2 Ibid., §7, Ak. 2 1 3 .

This Might be Unpleasant

89

This gives us a basic accOlmt of the unpleasant. My desire to avoid licorice is a desire for less, just as a judgement of the pleasant, as of chocolate, provokes a desire for more. But there is little creativity or inspiration associated with food aversions, except of a very simple kind: if there were nothing to eat but licorice, I might be prompted to creatively mask its flavour, as when children use ketchup to cover the foods they don't like. Yet this is hardly the positive aesthetic engagement I first proposed. A basic account of the unpleasant involves a largely negative outcome of a negative judgement: what I am after is a positive outcome, one that provides a more interesting aesthetic response. For this, let me return to the more complex example of the walls of my house. They brought about immediate displeasure but, having bought the house, I could not merely avoid them. To live in the house was to encounter those walls on a daily basis. Nor could I eradicate them: a house needs walls, after all. And to get rid of the fleshtone was not to get rid of colour altogether: whatever I did, I would still have walls, and they would still look like

something. The question that emerged was what I wanted

instead of fleshtone, and

here the creative space opens up. This "instead of' is open-ended and rife with possibility. To attend to my desire to be free of fleshtone, I had to consider what

would

please me, what I could replace it with. And this

could be a great range of things: a different colour of paint, rolled, sponged

or splashed on the walls; wallpaper; hung

fabrics;

wood

paneling---even shag carpet, I suppose. But whatever it would be, I would have to engage imaginatively with the problem that the unpleasant posed to me, and produce a positive solution to it. How creative and engaged I was in response to the walls is also open­ ended: I could have undertaken a study of colour theory; taken courses in interior design; experimented; or simply hired a decorator. But even in the last instance, I would still have had to choose from suggestions posed to me. If I did not-if I simply said "do more engaged than I

am

something,"

I would have been no

with the avoidance of licorice. (And, as avoidance

goes, I could probably also have taken a drug that would have made me oblivious to the walls, but this is not the positive aesthetic activity I

am

trying to illustrate here.) The unpleasant provides an

for

opportunity

aesthetic action: it is not one that we are compelled to accept. But when we do accept it, when our initial negative judgements give rise to an imagining of what the "instead of' could be, we are, I think, more fully engaged aesthetically in our lives than when we simply survey the beauty or ugliness that we see around us. The unpleasant brings with it-in fact, initiates-creative action, and the unpleasant is perhaps the only fmm of

90

Chapter VI

aesthetic judgement to do so. The beautiful and the ugly do not motivate on a Kantian account; the disgusting merely repels. The unpleasant then is as a catalyst for aesthetic action; it provides a particular problem to be worked on, that focuses our attention. And in so doing, it gives rise to quite complex and nuanced aesthetic choices and decisions. With the walls, just as mere avoidance was insufficient, so too was simply choosing another colour that I liked better than fleshtone: some colours I like-black, for example-would not have improved the walls of the house at all. How to fix the fleshtone problem involved, for me, considerations of the style of the house, the size and shape of the rooms, the amount and direction of the light, the colour of the hardwood floors, and so on. These fOlTIlS of engagement are open-ended yet at the same time quite specific to the problem at hand. They involve choices, desires, and actions. They are constrained-by the negativity of the original judgement, to be sure, and also by the physical, logical, economic and even conceptual limitations of the problem posed to us. But they are free and open-ended in that within these parameters, our activities are guided by the full spectrum of our imagination and creativity (or, we hire decorators). 'When we consider our daily lives and activities, experiences of pure beauty are just not that common (unless we are very fortunate) . We are more often mucking about with what pleases and displeases us, with what to preserve-or have more of-and what to avoid, or alter, or eradicate, or tranSfOlTIl. We are concerned with-and affected by-questions of how and where to live; of gardens and homes and offices; cars, kitchens and fashions; of making these spaces and things ones of comfort and pleasure. This mucking about, I think, constitutes the larger part of our lives and activities and has an important aesthetic element. To make something better, or good enough, or just right, as Saito has noted, begins with a judgement that it is somehow lacking and needs our attention and care. If I have made the beginnings of a case for the unpleasant as an aesthetic category, does it not still remain private and purely personal? After all, the previous O\vners of my house clearly chose and favoured fleshtone for their decor. Was all of my creative activity directed only at pleasing

myself!

If so, how much philosophical interest can the unpleasant

have? I'd like to end with a suggestion that the unpleasant has a broader reach than the wholly subj ective, that it can extend to others, even if it cannot achieve the kind of universality that Kant hoped for with pure judgements of taste. Both Saito ' s and Kant's examples are in fact unhelpful for a more robust account of the unpleasant: hers, because judgements about dilapidation, dirt, and so on are what she calls "moral-

This Might be Unpleasant

91

aesthetic"13 judgements, which have an objective aspect that involves all of us; his because his examples of gustatory taste involve each of us alone. Let me return to the gustatory for a moment: instead of focusing on choosing or avoiding foods because of my

0\Vll

palate, where there is

indeed no arguing about taste, let us imagine that I am cooking for others, who have been invited to dine. Of course I want them to have a pleasant experience-I want to arouse their desire to return, and I want to please their palates too (or at least not revolt them). That is, my creative activity in the kitchen concerns a community of others if not a universal one. Kant did note that the unpleasant and the pleasant can make claim to general validity, and not mere personal satisfaction. There are historically and culturally specific gustatory nOlTIlS that we follow when entertaining, including time of dinner, courses served and in what order, utensils used, and so on. These norms are decidedly not universal but nor are they merely personal idiosyncratic choices. Having "taste" here refers not merely to our

0\Vll,

but to a taste and pleasure that is, however locally,

shared. Similarly, painting the walls of my house was not an act merely designed to bring me a private pleasure, but to make my home a welcoming place for friends and family, a space of hospitality and enjoyment. My actions in countering the unpleasant need to be seen in a larger context. It is not that I expect guests to share my taste in colour, or that I "impute" or "ascribe" the same judgements to others, as Kant claims, in judgements of beauty, that we dO.14 But my striving, I wish to suggest, was also not wholly self-regarding, and the aesthetic force of the unpleasant lies in part in the way that it involves us in a community of others, however small or local that community may be. 'What we are aiming for in making something better, or good enough, or just right, in those actions that range beyond the merely private, is that that something will be better or good enough for others too. Even such a modest notion as that of the unpleasant can have this effect: it points to the power of the aesthetic in our lives.

1 3 Saito, op. cif., p. 208. 1 4 Kant, §8,Ak. 216.

THE UGLY AN D ART

CHAPTER VII THE CRITICAL POWER OF UGLINESS RACHEL SILVERBLOOM

Theodor Wiesengnmd Adomo begins his book

Aesthetic Theory

by

calling into question whether, in a world marked by violence and terror, art has a "right to exist."l The concept driving works of art was once

autonomy;

in the history of traditional German aesthetics, philosophers

lauded beautiful works of art for their representation of self-rule and freedom from external violence or domination-works of art were only valid

as

art (and, for long, valid art and beautiful art meant the same

thing,) insofar as they appeared to be free of heteronomy altogether. As such, art has long been thought to serve as a "paean" of the real-a utopian reflection of the reality that produced them; they served as an aesthetic "consolation" for the world's immanent failures and limitations, by re-presenting it as a beautiful work of artistic genius.2 As eighteenth­ century Gennan philosopher Friedrich Schiller noted, in nature true autonomy is seemingly impossible and heteronomy is found everywhere, whereas in art, nature

appears

free.3 This aesthetic representation of

freedom consoles us about our impoverished reality by presenting the possibility of imagining it otherwise; beautiful art teaches us, Schiller thought, how to realise the freedom that appears only as illusion in the work of art. However, Adomo notes, this "affitmative essence" of art has become "insufferable" in a world that is becoming more and more difficult to redeem, the violence of which is impossible to avoid or explain away. As

something

like

"freedom

as

autonomy"

becomes

increasingly

unthinkable in reality, its representation in art can no longer console us,

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. & trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, (Minneapolis MN: Minnesota University Press, 1997), p. 1 . Henceforth: AT. 2 AT, p. 2. 3 Friedrich Schiller, "Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried K6rner" [1793], Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. Jenny M. Bernstein, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 23. Henceforth: Kallias.

96

Chapter VII

especially once we acknowledge the ways in which the representation of freedom in beautiful art is itself grounded in heteronomous violence. As Schiller-an

advocate

of beauty for social transfOlmation-acknowledged,

beauty in art is made possible only through the concealment of the teclmique through which form

is

imposed upon the material.

The

appearance of freedom through aesthetic beauty is achieved, Schiller concedes, through the subservience of the particular to the universal, the erasure or exclusion of whatever does not consent to the formal rule, and an attempt to hide this very process of domination. A few questions follow this admission: How can beautiful art teach

us

to actualise a freedom that

it can only pretend? Can aesthetic beauty make good on its promise to show us how to become more beautiful, more free? Or is it rather the case that the deceptive element of beauty undelTIlines not only its

own

autonomy but also its ability to transfOlTIl our social relations? According to Adomo, it is precisely this failure of beauty to make good on its promise of freedom or of happiness that makes it no longer tolerable.

In

light of the

unfreedom

that persists in reality in spite of

beauty's promise, it seems that an insistence on beautiful art can only reinforce our present social conditions. Beautiful art, according to Adorno, "achieves an unreal reconciliation at the price of real reconciliation."4 It is precisely a turn away from the conciliatory understanding of art that Adomo urges us to consider. Rather than console our impoverished present through the presencing of some utopian future, art must spit reality back at us, with all of its flaws, its contradictions, its ugliness. If art is to be critical of its present, it must no longer attempt to proj ect a redemptive future toward which we should strive, but instead it must respond to the urgent demand of the present to expose its immanent violence. He writes, "[i]f thought is in any way to gain a relation to art it must be on the basis that something in reality, something back of the veil spun by the interplay of institutions and false needs, objectively demands art, and that it demands an art that speaks for what the veil hides.'" Using Adomo's

Aesthetic Theory

for support I would like to suggest

that if art is to be critical and potentially transfonnative, it can only do so (or perhaps it does so by

ugliness.

best)

insofar as it is characterised not by beauty but

Against a long-standing tradition in aesthetics, I am not

convinced by the long held association between the beautiful, the good, and the true-in fact, I think it is the presupposition of their affinity that has enabled the wrongful justification of so much violence. I think that

4 AT, p. 72. 5 AT, p. 26.

The Critical Power of Ugliness

97

Adorno provides the tools to begin to pull apart these long-standing presuppositions about ugliness and to expose the ways in which these associations serve only to maintain the hegemony of the beautiful, its "manipulative, 'composed' violence," and the despotic social order by which it can so easily be appropriated.6

In

order to understand why ugly art is so fit for critique, we must first

consider: What does it mean for art to be critical in the first place, and how is this made possible? Critique, in the sense I am employing it here, is a practice of bringing to light the underlying, perhaps concealed, mechanisms of culture, and showing how that which it violently excludes or conceals is constitutive of its very existence. My notion of critique, according to this defiintion, is thus undeniably Adornian; I hold that critique disrupts the social order by exposing its cracks and scars, as they would be viewed "from the standpoint of redemption."7 What the standpoint of critique requires, according to this definition, is a position that stands at the boundary of culture and its constitutive outside; this is precisely the standpoint, I will argue, of ugly works of art (although, not

only

such

works). The artwork is both an integrated part of social reality and yet, at the same time, its

0\Vll

indigestible outside or excess. Art resides in a

liminal space that is both historically and socially constituted, and yet, at the same time, preserves some degree of distance that makes critique possible. Adorno 's aesthetics, I think, provides a particularly helpful framework through which the critical power of art can be more thoroughly examined, since it lays out for

us

the way in which artworks resemble the ideological

dialectic at work in its social reality and, at the same time, expose and/or enact its dialectical self-undelTIlining. He reminds us that every artwork, in its production of a seemingly self-enclosed unity that exists apart from the empirical world of means and ends, strives toward its Indeed, artworks appear to have a life of their

0\Vll,

0\Vll

"self-identity."8

in which the relation of

their parts to their whole serves no purpose that can be found

beyond the

artwork; this is, in part, what grants art its semblance of autonomy. This self-seclusion and wholeness is precisely what is

denied,

Adomo claims,

to individuals in an industrialised, capitalist society, in which the meaning of every individual part is made identical to a whole from which they are, in fact, alienated.

In

their rej ection of the empirical world, artworks are

able to "speak in a fashion that is denied to natural objects and the subjects 6 AT, p. 48. 7 Adomo, Minima Moraba: Reflections from Damaged Life, [ 1 9 5 1 ] trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, (London: Verso, 1974), p. 247. 8 AT, p. 4.

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Chapter VII

who make them . . . by virtue of the communication of everytbing particular in them."9 In this way, artworks escape the utter arbitrariness of the empirically existent. However, this semblance of autonomy is only one element of the artwork. In the same moment that the artwork proclaims its freedom and its self-sufficient meaning, it negates this very autonomy in its unavoidably artifactual character. As products of social labour, caught up

within a commodified art world,

works of art undermine their

autonomy through tbeir entrenchment in tbe very empirical world that they rej ect. Indeed, it is to this world that they owe their very existence. Thus, the artwork is constituted by a fundamental, irresolvable

tension

between

its fmm and its matter. If its fmm, on the one hand, proj ects the image of its autonomy and self-identity, its content or material exposes its empirical element. This self-subversion of the artwork's autonomy can lead either to its ideological re-appropriation by culture

or to its eruption within that culture

as its very critique. If this fundamental tension is covered over or mitigated through an artwork's assimilation by the commodified art world or through its conciliatory offering of cathartic pleasure, the artwork remains entrenched within the ideological dialectic of nature and its domination that it reproduces on the level of its

0\Vll

inner relation

between fmm and matter. If, on the other hand, the artwork's tension goes umesolved and sustains its visibility, it presents a potentially fecund site for a critical examination of the contradictions and violence of social relations that it presents, at a distance, in the aesthetic.

[The artwork's] immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to it but resembles it without imitating it. The aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive laboill and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production . are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations of production. lo In their resemblance o f the dialectic present i n social relations, artworks uniquely are equipped to serve as "answers to the puzzle externally posed to them.,,11 But rather tban preserving what has been

lost

in reality through a utopian image of a redeemed future, Adomo argues that artworks are critical in their resemblance and exposure of the dialectic that is actively at work within the present. The tension within the artwork,

9 AT, p. 5. 1 0 Lac.cif. 1 1 Lac. cif.

99

The Critical Power of Ugliness

he claims, is inextricably tied to the tension of its particular historical context, and the very dialectic that constitutes the artwork mirrors the social-empirical dialectic from which it turns away. The violence endemic to

social

reality

is reproduced

in the artwork

as the violence

of

fOlmalisation. 'What is essential in order for the artwork not to simply imitate, but rather to give visibility to, the violence of its external world is the refusal to conceal or disguise this inner tension; instead, artworks must explicitly bear the "fissures" and scars that occur in the process of fOlTIlal integration (and its material resistance).12 Beautiful art, I argue, is ill-equipped to bear the "fissures" of social reality precisely because it operates by means of the concealment of tension and the erasure of its scars. To create a beautiful work of art, the task of the artist's technique is to erase any trace of the material of the work in order to allow the fOlTIl, alone, to capture our attention and prevent the understanding from reflecting on the determinate ground of the artwork. Beautiful works of art are able to appear free because they conceal the heteronomy that, in fact, makes them possible. As Schiller writes in his letters to Gottfried K6rner,

In [a beautiful] artwork, the matter must lose itself in the fonn, the body in the idea, the reality in appearance ... If the carved colunm reveals its origin in stone even in a single mark, which originates not from the idea but from the nature of the material, its beauty suffers; for there is heteronomy. 1 3 There does not exist a single work of art that has not been produced through heteronomy. And yet, as John Lysaker urges us to consider in his essay "Extolling Art in an Intolerable World,"14 when we visit an art museum and are mesmerised by beautiful works of art, how often do we, in that moment, wonder about the source of the oil used to make the paints? The method used for its extraction? The mode of its transport, and what fuelled its journey? Who paid for it? Whose labour made it possible, and what were its conditions? All of these questions and their answers remain woven into the fabric of the canvas, or sedimented in the veins of a marble sculpture-and yet it is these conditions that recede from view through the technique of the artist, in the production of a beautiful work of art. The spell of the beautiful-its ability to draw us in, to suspend the surrounding world, to halt our reflection-requires that the conditions of

1 2 AT, p. 7. 1 3 Kallias, p. 1 79f. 1 4 Jolm Lysaker, "Extolling Art in an Intolerable World," The Journal of Speculative Philasaphy, 2 1 , 1 (2007): 46-60.

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Chapter VII

its existence remain indeterminate, and that we sustain an attitude of indifference toward them. The moment we begin to search for the cracks in the sculpture, the uneven clump of paint left by a brushstroke, we no longer perceive the work's beauty, which is made possible through its fmm, and instead investigate its materiality, and therefore its conditions of production. Again, Schiller tells us, "[b]eauty does not belong to material but exists only in its handling. ,,15 When the material and its manipulation shows itself either intentionally or through a lack of skill on the part of the artist, the work becomes

ugly.

Schiller explains that a work of art is ugly

when it is "determined not by the idea but the medium . . . [T]he mediocre artist shows himself (his depiction is subj ective), and the bad artist shows his material . . . "16 It is clear, then, that for Schiller (whom I take as just one representative of this view), the appearance of freedom or autonomy through beauty does not occur because the work is

in fact free, but rather

because of an expert concealment of the material of the work, and the erasure of the mutilations of technique.

In

a refusal of the false promise of beauty, Adorno offers a negative

imperative that art must fulfil if it is to be tolerable any longer: "There should no longer be anything that is not specific."17 This imperative that the particular should be primary is carried out by ugly works of art, in which the universal law of form fails to appropriate and unify the particular elements of the work. Thus, as artist David Beech insightfully noted, Adomo seems to indicate a "counter-promise" of ugliness that stands in direct opposition to the unredeemed promise of the beautiful.18 The counter-promise of ugly art is to renounce the false tranquillity of the beautiful, to refuse to conceal tension where it exists, and to resist fOlmalisation and appropriation by an aesthetic call to order.

In

ugly art,

the traces of fOlTIlal violence are not erased-on the contrary, they are made radically explicit and call for our attention. Thus it is important to ask: what

is

ugliness, and how can it achieve this task of making the

invisible traces of violence visible once again? To talk about the ugliness of reality is one thing, but what role can or does ugliness play

III

aesthetics? 'What does ugly art consist in and how does it succeed as critique? The history of traditional German Aesthetics to which Adorno is responding has very little to say about ugliness. Until Adomo, the ugly

1 5 Schiller, Kallias, p. 1 80. 1 6 Lac. cif. 1 7 AT, p. 45. 18 David Beech, "On the Counter-Promise of Ugliness," Art Monthly, 344 (March 201 1): 5-9, p. 5.

The Critical Power of Ugliness

101

had either been excluded as non-aesthetic, insofar a s aesthetic categories must produce a feeling of pleasure,

or

it may be included, but only as the

negative image of beauty-as the fOlmless, the raw, the deformed, and the degenerate. Adorno, pushing against this tradition, insists that not only must we reject this notion of the ugly as the entirely relational, negative counterpart to beauty, but that we also must flip its genealogical script. We must not only admit that the ugly

is,

but that it is actually more primary,

more primordial, than beauty. Adorno suggests that the role of the ugly in archaic or primitive art was to reflect the suffering, pain, and fears of a given culture or society. The representation of images of terror intimated and in some ways expiated the anxieties of existence and the fragility of life. Beauty, on the other hand, emerged as the "renunciation of what was once feared. "19 This repudiation of the fears and suffering of existence first engendered the ugly

as

ugly and gave birth to

its counter-image:

hatmonious existence, freedom from nature's domination, a life without suffering. In its exile of these fearsome images, however, beauty did not therefore armihilate their source-it merely condemned their expression and put them out of view. This genealogy offered by Adomo certainly seems to speak to the typical rebukes against the ugly. There is often an ethical component either explicitly or implicitly at work in the condenmation of ugliness as perverse or degenerate. Indeed, there have been fairly recent attempts, by thinkers including Elaine Scarry, to revitalise beauty on the basis of its supposedly ethical power. Like Schiller, Elaine Scarry, in her book

Being Just,

On Beauty and

claims that beauty is linked to justice, fairness, and goodness;

to disavow beauty in favour of ugliness would be to forsake the hope of ethical life.20 To abandon beauty's promise risks surrender to disorder, disunity, selfishness, and violence. The condemnation of depictions of suffering and fear in ugly art for their "perversity" and "degeneracy" is thus an attempt to distance oneself from such suffering and hold out on the hope for reconciliation. Adorno anticipates this position; he 'Wfites, "The aesthetic condenmation of the ugly is dependent on the inclination . . . to equate, justly, the ugly with the expression of suffering and, by projecting it, to despise it.,m Adorno acknowledges that the association with ugliness and suffering is apt; this association, however, does not justify its exile from the aesthetic as non-viable art, especially if we want art to open the path to something

1 9 AT, p. 47. 20 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (princeton NI: Princeton University Press, 1999). 2 1 AT, p. 68.

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Chapter VII

like justice. Indeed, it is ugliness that forces us to face this suffering and acknowledge it so that we might begin to consider how the world might be otherwise, rather than live happily on in the spell of beauty, satisfied with the false appearance of justice.

In

thinking through this concern, it is

perhaps helpful to take up Mark Cousin's insight in his essay, "The Ugly," which suggests that society views ugliness

as

a kind of stain that threatens,

through sheer proximity, to infect subj ectivity and the moral realm. The ugly, like the stain, "must be c1eansed."22 Similarly, Adomo describes the way in which a society that clings to the promise of freedom is compelled to expunge anything that is not beautiful in order to sustain its appearance of autonomy. It is not difficult to see the repressive element within this desire to cleanse the ugly in order to preserve the moral integrity of society. As artist David Beech puts it, clinging to beauty in the hopes of moral preservation amounts to a "trading in of the promise of happiness for the production of social complicity.

In

short, a call to order.'>23 As

Adorno reminds us, "Hitler's empire put this theorem to the test . . . The more torture went on in the basement, the more insistently they made sure that the roof rested on columns. ,,24 The task of art today, according to Adomo, is

not

to defend ugly art

against the charge of degeneracy or perversity; instead, art must "[meet] this rebuke by refusing to affirm the miserable course of the world

as

the

iron law of nature. ,,25 Art, if it is not to console us, must take up the cause of the ugly, but not through an attempt to integrate it, mitigate it, or to make it more socially palatable. "Rather, in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its

0\Vll

image."26

Ugly art's critical element is the eruption of what does not belong and

cannot be made congruous

from out of the fOlmalising, rational rule that

exerts its control over both the artwork and the world in which it is produced. As such, ugliness is undeniably antagonistic; it takes the "scars" of our world, puts them in plain view, and denies us the catharsis of aesthetic pleasure. Through it, we are offered a "language of suffering" that is difficult or impossible to find in other fonns of discourse.27 The visible struggle between the material and the form of these works, and the

22 Mark Cousins, "The Ugly," A4 Files, no. 28, (Architectural Association School of Architecture, 1994): 61 -64, p. 63. 23 David Beech, "On the COlUlter-Prornise of Ugliness," op.cif., p. 5. 24 AT, p. 48. 25 AT, p. 68. 26 AT, p. 48. 27 "Language of Suffering" is used as a title of a section in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, though it does not appear exactly this way within the text itself.

The Critical Power of Ugliness

103

cruelty of their own self-undennining (their expression of the violence of formalisation through formalisation - albeit a failed or only partial one), gives voice to the way in which, as John Lysaker writes, "we too would speak for ourselves as ourselves, but seem able only to do so through what

28

the market affords us: employment, possessions, pop songs, etc. ,,

The

failure of fonnalism in ugly art to express the truth of its material, but rather only to impose a rational structure upon it, holds up a mirror to the frequent failure of social discourse to serve as a means of genuine individual expression. We speak our protest to social reality in a language given to us by that social reality, a language that demands that we obey certain rules of iterability in order to be heard. Ugly art exposes this struggle and offers an avenue to acknowledge it, take it seriously, and begin to consider how to make things otherwise, whereas beautiful art covers over this tension and its violence, and too often leads to a complacent pleasure in the false appearance of reconciliation. 'Whereas the beautiful must conceal the imposition of the fonnal rule, the ugly exposes the rule 's violence and tbe world that exiles and excludes all that does not submit to it. To take one example, I'd like to pause for a moment to look at a rather famous work of art that has been turned to by Adorno and by art collectives in recent times who have been wielding ugliness as a means of social critique in a way that embraces Adomo's thought. Picasso's

Guemica was painted in response to the bombing

of the town of Guemica

in northern Spain by Nazi German and Fascist Italian warplanes at tbe request of Spanish Nationalists. Most of those who died in tbe bombing were unanned civilians, including children. Picasso's painting, in its chaos and confusion, in its strangeness, and its simultaneous presentation of sharp and ambiguous shapes, manages to make tangible the very tension and anxiety of tbe reality it depicts. It is a work that seems to explode from all sides and in all directions. Its violation of traditional artistic form through its rendering of existence in a fragmentary way offers a glimpse of the

inability to

capture,

in

a unitary

and

hannonious

whole,

the

multiplicity of human experience; and yet, as a work of art, it expresses this failure

through the vehicle of the aesthetic whose

foundation rests on

that gesture of totalisation and unification. Its self-undermining elevates the impact of its expression; it brings to light the violence of the call-to­ order of the work of art and, simultaneously, the resistance to that call.

Guemica

28

succeeds as a site of critique, Adomo explains, because it is felt

Lysaker, op. cif., p. 52.

1 04

Chapter VII

as a "wound of society."29 He continues, "The socially critical zones of artworks are those where it hurts; where in their expression, historically

}O

detelTIlined, the untruth of the social situation comes to light. ,, 'While today, Picasso's

Guemica is displaced from its

original context,

and so may have lost the critical power (and the ugliness) that it once had, it has been co-opted by contemporary artists in ways that seem to resituate the artwork in a different historical moment and thereby revitalise its capacity for critique. In

2006, Retort,

a San Francisco-based collective of

artists, writers, educators, and activists, incorporated Picasso's

Guemica

into a multi-media art installation called "Afflicted Powers," which included a six minute film, in the style of detoumement, that spliced black and white images from the Spanish Civil war and video clips from demonstrations against the Iraq war. Throughout the film, the various clips and images flip back and forth rapidly and, layered on top of one another, produce a dizzying and disorienting effect. As Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen describes it in his essay "Art, War, and Counter-Images," "The horrors of the past and of today [are1 fused in a nightmare image of war and destruction."31 The walls of the room were plastered with pamphlets that were compiled for antiwar protests in San Francisco in the bombing of Lebanon in

2006.

2003

and during

Among the pamphlets from

2003,

the

following statement could be read: "The best we can offer is negative wisdom, addressed to comrades in a dark and confusing time. The answer to War is not Peace. 'War is the health of the state', as Randolph Bourne indelibly put it, but so is the so-called Peace that the state stage-manages for us . . . "32 Retort's message, like Adorno's, is that the task of art, if it is to be a site of social critique and resistance, is

not to

offer us some affimmtive

symbol of freedom and happiness toward which we must aspire. The power of installations like Retort's and of pieces like

Guemica

is in their

refusal to offer an image of hope or of peace that can serve as "an ally of repression."33 Instead, ugliness offers only a "negative wisdom"-that the state of things is intolerable, unacceptable, and that, as Adomo put it, "it is for the sake of the beautiful that there is no longer beauty; because it is no longer beautiful. ,,34 29

AT, p. 237. 30 Lac. cif. 3 1 Mikkel Bolt Rasrnussen, "Art, War and Counter-Images," The Nordic Journal of

Aesthetics, 44-45 (2012-2013): 9 1 - 108, p. 97. 32 Ibid., p. 99. 33 AT, p. 238. 34 AT, p. 73.

The Critical Power of Ugliness

105

There is, of course, much more to be said about the critical power of ugliness: not only in tenns of parsing out its many siblings and iterations (the abj ect, the disgusting, the deformed, etc.) but also in terms of its appearance in reality-how might these reflections of the power of ugly art translate onto ugly bodies, their treatment in society, and their potential for establishing sites of critique and resistance? The modest hope of this essay, however, has been merely to begin to raise one possible route for thinking through the critical power of ugliness in art. It is no coincidence, I would

argue,

that times

of strife

and

war

have

always had their

corresponding artistic movements, and that these movements are often faced with the task of resisting their exile in the name of their "degeneracy." Adorno gives us the tools to begin to see the ways in which art exposes and resists the violence of the world from which it emerges. Whether we turn toward beauty or toward ugliness to perform the task of critique could make the difference between perpetuating ideology or forging a resistance against it.

CHAPTER VIII ANDY WARHOL: THE UGLY AESTHETICISM OF POST-MODERNITY BERTRAND NAIVIN

Pop is usually knO\vn as the artistic movement that broke the classical distinction between high art and low art. If Kant in the eighteenth century distinguished between agreeable and fine art, Andy Warhol plays with this hierarchy. Despite this, he continues to use historical art genres by producing portraits (stars and notable people), still lifes

(Flowers

and

Carnpbell's soup cans), self-portraits and historical and social paintings (Death and Disaster Series). But he does so as a chronicler of his time. He makes

art works that look

like

industrial posters

and mechanical

representations of society that seem without any point of view. Pop is then known as the movement of the "cool." Warhol portrays the lightness and the fim of 1960s consumer and leisure society. Thus, his work looks like an apologia of stars and glamour, money and luxury, a production of funny and decorative images. But ugliness is a central part of his work too. First, he destroys the heroic artist figure by a child-like copying of images found in magazines. He proclaims indeed that he started art at seven years old. By making art with the simplicity of an uncultnred child, he replaces the image of the historic "artist-engineer" that started with the Renaissance. He does not paint historical symbols of fine culture but meticulously reproduces the ugly taste of a materialist and infantile society. This infantile side of consumer society is visible in his religious paintings, too. Classic masterpieces of Catholic art are reproduced as simple colourings. Da Vinci 's

Sistine Madonna

Last Supper

(1494-1498) and Raphael's

(1513-15 14) become ugly reproductions of ugly re­

copying. The pop artist does not just reproduce the original work or his 0\Vll

reproduction. He reproduces its colouring in transposition. This

sacrilegious act makes Warhol an ugly artist who does not respect the

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Chapter VIII

great symbols of Art History. Preferring a black

&

white plain drawn

version to the coloured painted original, taking these masterpieces from a colouring book rather than an art catalogue, he drops the classic figure of the august artist for the uncultivated American child one. Painting becomes play, an ugly recreation that differs from the historical artist's erudite activity. By

doing

so,

he

echoes

a prophesy

of Hege! 's.

The

German

philosopher announced the coming of the end of art. Why? Because we stopped kneeling down in front of paintings as in the time of religious icons. What would Hegel have thought about a civilisation that prefers a colouring to the original painting? Yes, art was dying in the sixties, because it was the era of an ugly culture, a society of the banal and the reproducible, the derived product and the cult of mass recreation. It was a world where images represented pin-ups rather than the Madonna or an ancient goddess. Warhol "painted" the ugliness of this low culture that displayed the taste of the "Everyday man." But among all of Warhol's themes, his fascination with catastrophes and suicides reveals an important part of his work. From

1962, he began to

reproduce press images of crashes, suicides, and electric chairs. This ugly side of his era doubles then the bad quality of the press photographs he took from popular magazines: ugly images of ugly faces of a post­ modernity devoted to fun and consumption. Warhol was fascinated by the treatment of death and disaster by mass media. He questioned our perception of the mass reproduction of disasters or death.

In the nineteenth

century, Edmund Burke defined the "sublime" as a kind of terrifying event that disturbs our purposes, troubles the normal course of our life, and erases our way of thinking. But what happens when this terrifying event is reproduced multiple times?

Death and Disasters The first "Disaster" work was

129 Die in Jet.

Made in

reproduces a plane crash photograph found in the June the

4 1962

1962,

it

edition of

New York Mirror. We see in it an aircraft tail lying in a field. The "129 Die" legend seem to be a big tragedy. But Warho!'s

wreck and the

version is the third one made of this event. 'What should we think about this time lag between the original event and

us

seeing this work in an art

gallery? Let us consider the effect of the "image" on the disaster event Warhol uses for this reproduction. The original photograph seen in the newspaper is still able to touch us. We are horrified by this destroyed plane and more so by the front page

Andy Warhol: The Ugly Aestheticism of Post-modernity headline

"129

109

Die." We can still empathise with these poor men, women

and children, victims of this accident. "Still," because the photograph published in the press is like a lost relic. The event, the crash, was horrible. Ifwe were dO\vn there, we would have been horrified, anguished, scared, panicked. But we weren't. We see the accident through the press image. Then, the immediacy and the brutality of the event is, as through a filter, fixed by and under the photographic image. We can dine or speak with a friend while looking at a crash scene. This would be impossible with the real disaster scene. It echoes Plato 's image theory in

Republic.

The

Based on the figure of a bed, he sees the image of this bed as a

representation of another representation, the artisan's creation. But if this version is "real," the painter's version is like a ghost, a virtual image. This view presents the image as a loss, the loss of the idealistic first bed, its origin, and also a loss of the reality of the version made by the carpenter. We can use this metaphor to illustrate the loss of reality produced by this image in our newspaper. The first crash was the one where these

129

victims died that the article talks about. The second "crash" is the one photographed by the journalist on the scene. And last, the third "crash" is this image reproduced on the newspaper' s front page. This therefore loses a big part of the force of the original crash. It's like a star; something we see while the real crash is long over. Warhol understood this very well. He saw mass media as productions of avatars of life. And this production effected for him a loss of reality which is strengthened by the bad quality of these images. Often small, in black and white, they build a barrier between the event and us. This border is the image. This border is the image reproduced in several, indeed many copies. This border is the absence of qualities of these mass images. These images are then like images of images where all nuances of reality are erased by their black and white tones. The blood has the same colour as a tree leaf, and happiness looks like drama. In

129 Die in Jet,

the airplane

tail on the ground is then like a geometric figure, a triangle, as in a composition by Kandinsky. No trace of victims, no horror, just this figure and these words that look like abstract signs too. We look at the image, we read the words, but we feel nothing. Also, the ugliness of the actuality is re-imagined, and the drama the newspaper describes to us is as though contained by this image. We don't smell the strong odour of the burning jet, we don't hear the victims crying. We are protected by this image. Reading our paper or watching our television, we look at world drama through the filter of the page or of the television screen. This

anaesthetic

effect

of the

mass

image

is

also

due

to

its

reproducibility. Talking about this work, Warhol questioned the impact of

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a drama seen several times. Responding to G.R. Swenson in November

1963

in the art journal

ArtNews,

he said: "when you see a gruesome

picture over and over again, it really doesn't have any effect."l The loss of aura of the industrial image theorised by WaIter Benjamin points to another loss: of our sensibility and our compassion. Passing our time surrounded by images (the press, television, advertising, and now those on our computers and our smartphones), we don't distinguish between them anymore. A soda can and a car crash are both images. As a portrait of Marilyn and a Campbell's soup can are both "Warhols." The image hides the subj ect. And the ugliness becomes consumable. For this reason, Warhol's silkscreens are all made by the same process. He changes neither his gesture nor colours if he reproduces Da Vinci' s

Mona Lisa

or an electric chair. Both are images, both are black

&

white

screens he pastes on a painted canvas. Warhol liked the image more than the photograph. Photography is a kind of reference to reality. An image is like a ghost without flesh. This ghost can then be reproduced. Without details, in low definition, this past is an abstract of a crash, an abstract of a person: a lifeless visual obj ect. We remember that Marshall McLuhan distinguished between cold media and hot media. With his low definition, Warhol's silkscreened spectrum is cold, but not to invite us to consider the image

or to embody

it. It is cold because it creates a distance between the

event and us. The "aestheticisation" of disaster produced by Warhol accentuates this distance. A jet crash, road victims, black people attacked by police dogs, an electric chair, all of these dramas simply become aesthetic. They are all images without real subj ects, spectra of bygone events. The ugliness is then dissolved in these coloured dramas. Let us turn to

(Green Burning Car J).

This silkscreen, made in

Green Car Crash 1963, is composed of

eight reproductions of a press photograph showing a car crash. This image is copied on a canvas Warhol painted in green. Their arrangement seems to be random. Some of them are pasted side-by-side, some overlap. This produces a grey and black toned composition on a green background to the point where at first we don't see the details of the original picture but these repeating vertical lines (of the tree) and of some sort of burning suns (the rear wheel of the overturned car). We can appreciate the coloured effect of the piece, without considering the drama. This is like a pattern he accumulates, a variety of forms and tones, a fOlTIlal abstract. We don't see the death but the colour. We don't see the "Car Crash," we see the

1 "What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters," I'll be your Mirror (New York: First Carron & Graf Editioll, 2004).

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"Green." Our attention is kept by tbe aestbetic effect of tbe whole. And this is the post-modem ugliness Warhol tried to reproduce-or produce all by himself: a kind of distance to the tbings, a cool detachment tbat is produced by a life lived through the screen of our television or tbrough tbe press, which is particularly visible in tbis photograph. We see an overturned and burning car. The driver has just been ej ected and is hanging from a tree. The engine' s smoke hides tbe right part of the image, and the body frames the left part in a morbid way. But tbe background of this dark composition reveals another ugliness. The car crashed in a residential area. We can see a pavilion behind it with a garden and trees. But what is more troubling is this man who walks by without seeming to notice or care about this drama. Hands in his pockets, he seems not to see tbe dead body and continues tranquilly on his walk. This composition shows two things. First, that mass media import the violence of the world into our homes. The post-modem individual does not just live his life any more. TV and now the Internet make him live in the world's troubles all day long. We, some of us anyway, care sometimes more about a star's pain than our loved one's. And the fights on the other side of the world seem very insubstantial. We breakfast while watching human tragedies and we are connected to the world's suffering. But this proximity creates another ugliness. This the walking man reveals. By watching all these atrocities, all these ugly sides of life through the media screen, we become as though blind to their reality. The world becomes a floating frame, like a silkscreen pattern. Again, the image replaces the subj ect. The walker then represents the post-modem individual in his detachment. He saw tbis ugly scene, but he did not look at it. He did not see a dead man or a destroyed car but just fOlTIlS and colours. He represents our "hypervisual" post-modernity. Living in images, the visual supplants our other senses. But more, the visual is a blind looking, an act without thinking. We "see" but we do not "look at." Why? We see because we do not want to look at. The French essayist Gilles Lipovetsky defmes this new society as a loss of sense.2 The American sixties proclaimed indeed a new cult: tbe cult of fun. After the genocide perpetrated in tbe Nazi camps and the Nagasaki and Hiroshima nuclear explosions, living in the fear of a new atomic attack (the cold war), while society was shaken by social troubles (minority fights for their rights, antifeminism, sexual liberation, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations), people needed some fun. Mass media gave it to them. Then, this cult of fun will lead to an

2 Gilles Lipovetsky. L 'ere du vide. Essais sur / 'individualisme contemporain, (Paris: Gallirnard, 1983).

Chapter VIII

1 12

obligation of "coolness." With this, we'll have to enj oy, we'll have to have fun. Warhol can then reproduce a car crash, but in a cool way. He can show dead bodies, but coloured. The attraction of death that every culture has expressed is reduced in this way. Thanks to the coloured background, a car crash or a suicide becomes aesthetic. Because it's floating on a green surface too, the dead body of Evelyn McHale who jumped from the Empire State Building observation deck on May

1 1947

looks like she is

sleeping. Moreover, here again, we do not at first see the body or the head. We just see some fabric and the coloured contrasts of the dark and lighted parts of the image. Maximised, they transfonn an ugly suicide image taken from

Life

magazine into an abstract composition. There again, the image

replaces the subj ect. And death becomes decorative.

In

the thirties, Walter Benjarnin warned us of how photography

aestheticised the world, including its dark side. The German philosopher criticised the power of this form of media that embellished reality. He wrote:

"The World Is Beautiful is the title

of the well-known picture book

by Renger-Patzsch in which we see the New Objective photography at its peak. It has succeeded in turning abj ect poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an obj ect of enjoyment."} Rather, the photographer should show the real world, the people fighting for their rights and for their lives. He called for the artist to not be a maker of fOlTIlS, but a producer of revolution by making his technique reflect his message. The engineer artist has then to adapt his artistic expression that Benjamin calls "apparatus" "to the ends of the proletarian revolution."4 The first American photographers did this by showing poor people, proletarians, workers and the dark reality of modem city life. They photographed accidents and murders, child labour and unsanitary living conditions. Alfred Stieglitz began in

1907

with his

Steerage

showing the

social composition of modem life, with wealthy people on top and poor people below, followed in

1916

by Paul Strand's

Blind Woman.

Then

Jacob Riis, Weegee, Lewis Rine, Walker Evans and Dorotea Lange photographed the misery of the crisis of modernity with full frontal portraits of American people and their real way of life. But this changed with mass media and its way of consuming actuality. Tragedy becomes a show. Newspapers and television screens repeat the same disasters. Death is everywhere. But the media industry has to make it attractive. Ugly news then has to be like movie scenes. Victims are in this way like one-day stars, and ugliness becomes videogenic and

3 "The Author as Producer," Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1998), p. 95. 4 Ibid., p. 102.

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photogenic. The news relates the world's stories. We find this fascination for showing disasters in Warhol's work. He makes formal the actuality of human dramas. If Warhol said that he believed he was in a movie when Valerie Solanas shot him in

1986,

the media industry shows the world' s

ugly face a s a movie. The suffering car crash victims, the woman's dead body, can also be nice images we could fix on our living room walls. Another suicide can become a

Velvet Jumping Man,

or pink in another

version, repeated or reproduced on canvas. Warhol makes aesthetic the ugly actualities of his time. By this, he showed his society as a farce. How ironic is the

1967 Electric Chair.

Behind what was a sinister death machine is painted a green and pink background. Looking at this silkscreen, we could forget the ugly reality of this "annchair." Reproduced in several versions, multiplying its colours, Warhol's chair loses the dramatic charge of the original black and white photo. This killing machine becomes pleasant, almost channing. More, it looks like a toy. And by this gap between reality and its Warholian version, the pop artist represents post-modernity as a farce, a joke. 'What is this society where we can appreciate the view of a death machine? How is it possible to find aesthetic a woman falling from a building? What is charming in a fatal accident? The ugliness of post­ modem America is then this loss of gravity that reveals a loss of senses. Making ugly reality aesthetic shows the ugliness of the time, the ugly face of an area obsessed by the aesthetic and by fun. And this obsession leads to a feeling of emptiness that is accentuated by these works where Warhol made a painting behind an electric chair or a Mao portrait silkscreen. These scribblings can be seen first as the fight of the materiality of painting against the spectral silkscreen. The artistic part of Warhol tries to express a romantic soul but the screen of the mass media industry keeps it a prisoner of its flatness. But we can see it as a desire to restore volume to these floating images too. Warhol explained that he did that because people always wanted more. More effects, more colours. More semblance of painting. And it works. Visiting the last

Warhol Shadows

exhibition in Paris with a friend,

she told me that she liked the painting effects of the Mao Series. Warhol satisfies gesture painting enthusiasts, but more, makes aesthetic an ugly scribbling that has been carelessly made.

Portraits and Polaroids This tension between a flat silkscreen motif and a scribbled background is visible in his worldly portraits too. Let

us

consider the

1975

portrait of

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Chapter VIII

Leo Castelli. The silkscreened face of the well-known art dealer shows the gallerist as a serious man. His jacket, his shirt and his tie are signs of both a classic and original person. His expression is serious. But behind this flat, black and white austere image Warhol created an ugly painting. Big and rushed brushstrokes cover the canvas. The colours are ugly too. The green is like acid, the pink and the orange are heavy and the blue under the eyes is electric. Looking at these flashy tones, these channless colours, we remember Roland Barthes, who wrote about plastic in Mythologies: As for "colours, . . . it seems capable of retaining only the most chemical-looking ones. Of yellow, red and green, it keeps only the aggressive quality, and uses them as mere names, being able to display only concepts of colour."5 Indeed, these artificial tones replace the classic natural colours made by natural pigments. All chromatic nuances are synthesised and colours appear hard and heavy. Plastic "concepts of colour" replace Fauvism's taste for pure colour. This becomes an abstract without character. Quickly made by the industry, quickly put on the canvas-and quickly seen. Wbat is remarkable is the difference between this background and the face it is also supposed to colour. Looking at this portrait, we can see that the colour always goes beyond the lines of the face. Thus, what is supposed to be the flesh of the art dealer or at least of the painted portrait does not correspond with the skin, the silkscreen. Then, it represents the Roman origin of "imago," the mask that Romans made from the faces of the dead. In Castelli's portrait, the "imago" floats over the painting. But this painting is an ironic recollection of Abstract Painting and its gesture is cult as well. Warhol's is not an invocation of primal human or animal nature. The pop artist does not lose control of himself when he paints. His gesture is more like a caricature ofPollock's and De Kooning' s styles. Considering this, the portrait signals the end of the romantic idea of "being" as Sartre understood it. The Post-modem subj ect is not a constant "being" but plays at different "beings" all day long. Also, Castelli's face is a mask. Talking about Francis Bacon's work, Gilles Deleuze distinguished the "head" from the "face. ,,6 The first is our primal part. The second is a social construction. Warhol's portraits show the post-modem mask as an empty shell and replace the Deleuzean head with a kitsch scribbling. The random aspect of his

gesture and these

artificial

colours

are then

expressions of an industrial being. Castelli looks like a grotesque clown. By that, he reveals the ugly side of a public figure who is usually shown embellished by the media. We can

5 Mythologies (paris: Od. du SemI, 1957), p. 160f. 6 Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation [ 1 9 8 1 ] (paris: ed. du SeuiI, 2002), p. 27.

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think of D a Vinci 's grotesque faces. But they represented the sliding aspect of ugliness, human nature moving from human to animal, from beauty to ugliness. Warhol's portraits represent the move from individual to image. The brushstrokes materialise the artist's gesture, and through it, the individual. But their plastic and random aspect coupled with this silkscreened "imago" reduces the individual to a flat image. Mechanical colours made by a mechanical hand, a mechanical face painted by a mechanical artist. This

industrial

technique

reveals

another

aspect

of ugliness

in

Warhol's work. He rejected historical artistic techniques in favour of industrial ones. The choice of silkscreen illustrates that. This is most explicit in works where we see this painted background. This can then be seen as the tradition being muted by mass media images. Even when he photographs, Warhol uses an ugly photographic form: Instant photography. Invented by Edwin H. Land in

1937, this photographic

practice and these cameras symbolise amateur photography. Its inventor indeed created it to please his young daughter. Because he photographed her, she wanted to see the images he made. Land had the idea to create a machine that could show the image instantly. The practice of amateur photography results then in the origin of the Polaroid. For that, instant photography is an ugly form of photography. Not complicated like the first daguerreotypes, it gives you immediately the image that you made. This means that we don't need to wait while the picture goes to the laboratory in order to see it. We don't have to wait or to be patient. It is like a toy for impatient children (a form of instant gratification). After the "Kodaker" and the "press button" culture, the Polaroid then embodied the holiday. Amateur photographers take holiday pictures but they take a "photographic holiday," too. This is not a serious form of photography. It is a recreation and the instant revelation of pictures is its real enjoyment. Instant photography created photographic toys too. Mostly small, solid and heavy, a Polaroid is not a durable image. It is an object that we put in our pocket, we pin on the wall, and that we use carelessly. The ugliness of this form of photography is that instant photography is really an "instant" photograph. Wlien we used a roll of filin, we had to choose on the contact sheet which image we would enlarge, reveal and fix. Just as Robert Doisneau took the time to select a good moment, the one that contained the whole scene, the one that would be able to be "read," silver photography is made by time. The past of the photographer 's gaze and culture with the present of the photographic "shoot" are both accomplished by the future of image interpretation. We also make photographs to display them on a wall, a mantelpiece or in an album. It is

1 16

Chapter VIII

different with Polaroid. It is just an unpretentious moment. It is then an unpretentious photograph. In consequence, we can write or draw on it. First to mark the "instant" that it fixed, but also as a fmm of personalising it. The ugliness of Polaroids is then the unpretentiousness of these visual objects we manipulate and we recover by signs and script that are often unreadable. If he is more knO\vn for his silkscreens, Warhol made a lot of Polaroids. He used the legendary SX-70 camera model, which was automatic and easy to use. During parties at the Factory, when he was in his holiday house in Montauk, on his travels, he held his camera and photographed stars and party guests, his friends or banal scenes like underwear floating in a shop window, a Campbell's soup can or himself sneezing. He became a sort of "self-paparazzi." These images are unframed and seem "natural." The flash flattens the colours of the party scenes and the people are mostly drunk. These "po la" are sometimes covered over by messages written quickly with a rough marker. The spontaneity of the Polaroid is then coupled with the spontaneity of these ugly inscriptions. For these reasons, Polaroid is an ugly form of photography because it denies the photographic values that so many photographers fought for. The ugliness of these images are a sort of post-modem "hyperimagism." Watching mass media images all day long, living with stars through cinema, TV or the celebrity press, with an intrusive publicity and the actuality that brings the world's rumours into our living rooms, we need to produce our 0\Vll images in the same way. Warhol illustrates this need that French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote about in Un art moyen (1965). Photographing anything, anytime and anywhere, populating our world with our images, and for Warhol, making close and familiar people who are usually seen in mass media as unattainable as "stars." In Warhol's Polaroids they are not beautiful as in Harcourt photographs but ugly in opposition to the mass media's artificial beauty. Their ugliness is their normality. Thus, photographed with a Polaroid, his portraits are ugly photographs that Warhol makes aesthetic with the silkscreen. He makes aesthetic works from ugly images. And by this, he shows an empty aestheticism. Some people just want to be a "Warhol." They don't want to show a part of who they are, they just want to be a Warhol image to mark their social success. The productive process of their portraits fulfils them. First, he photographs the famous. They come to the Factory like the nineteenth-century bourgeois came to the photographer's studio. They provide their "social" faces because they want to become a Warhol product, as if to mark their

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social rank as worldly or celebrated. Warhol installs tbem in front of a blank wall, to make a neutral image. He takes several photos, sometimes hundreds, all with his Polaroid. After tbat, when the model is gone, he tranSfOlTIlS this image into a silkscreened pattern. This reduces the details to a cliche. Then, he covers a canvas with acrylic paint, carelessly, as we have seen. This marks thus a "two-faced" portrait. The scribbling can be seen as the ugliness of their vanity. As Warhol said, they always wanted more. He paints their "underface" to satisfy them, like a candy given to a capricious kid. The carelessness of these painted backgrounds represents the ugliness of tbe individual. The 1973 Senator Burda portrait represents this too. With its red background, traces of red paint on his lips and his cheek, and the scribbling of red and yellow paint on his jacket, he looks like a pathetic clo'Wll, like someone roughed up by irreverent kids, stoned after a show. He reminds one at a certain point of Rembrandt's last self­ portrait. An old man whom masquerading has consumed. But the rich and successful editor is proud to pose in front of Elvis's painter. But Warhol shows us the unrevealed face of this famous figure. We surely remember what tbe French modem poet Charles Baudelaire wrote about photographs in the nineteenth century. "From this moment on, the vile society ran, as a Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on steel. ,,7 Warhol's Polaroids of the famous show the ugliness of the sixties' media, as the industrial production of stars condemned to die. The vileness of Daguerre's modern society mentioned by Baudelaire becomes the ugliness of Warhol's Polaroid portraits. With photography, art no longer portrays goddesses or outstanding personalities but "Everyday man." This vileness reminds us of the one Nietzsche criticised in Euripides's tragedy. It proclaims the victory of daily life in a society that wants to see its face on images and that wants to think about itself. The absolute falls down on the modem city streets. Warhol shows this evolution and its mass media turn by his fascination with the world of money. If classic artists immortalised persons who marked tbeir time because they marked history too, Warhol portrays only men and women who have enough money to become a Warhol product. They become a "new" kind of Campbell's soup, a new Marilyn. If historical portraits were able to incarnate a nation, a value, a virtue, Warhol's portraits represent only money and the power of media. Because of tbis, their painted backgrounds can be seen as a scribbled identity. In

7 " 1 859 exhibition," Ecrits sur l 'ar! (paris: Librairie Generale de France, colI. Le Livre de poche, 1999), p. 363.

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Byzantine icons, the painter applied seven layers of gold foil on a wooden board. These materialised tbe eternal nature of God. The painter took tbe time to represent a figure that was at the origins of our world and will be at its end. The classic portrait painter took the same time to make an image of someone who would remain in the world's memory. By contrast, Warhol's portraits are quickly made for people who will quickly disappear from the common memory. And why? Because they are not produced by history. They are only made by money. And thus, tbeir portraits are made for money. Anyone who had 2000 dollars was able to have his Warhol portrait. These kinds of portraits could then be reproduced. This multiplication shows the loss of aura as predicted by Benjamin. If photography and cinema began the progressive end of the image's aura, these portraits show the end of the personal aura. Quickly made, they are often reproduced several times on canvas or in different coloured versions. This demonstrates a person who became a simple social image, like a reproducible mask without a soul. Made in 1974, the two Valentino portraits show tbe stylist as drawn on the painting. There's no link between this thinking face and tbis painting Warhol made with brushes and his fmgers. To the contrary, the beauty of this fashion icon is as though rushed by the ugliness of this dabbling and these strange colour choices. Green, velvet and red make of one of these works a heavy painting. We find the same tbing in the 1973-1974 Heiene Rochas portrait, bright pink and painted as though rendered by a child. The rough treatment of these glamourous figures is interesting because they reveal the ugliness of a society focused on luxury. Mr. and Mrs. Krull's portraits represent anotber kind of ugliness. Iftbe scribbling seemed to simulate a "handmade" impression, other works produced flattened images, without qualities or presence. The businessman and his wife are then like drawings coloured by a child. Charmless, these works reveal another ugliness, individuals transfOlmed into those of coloured drawings. We have then an ugly aestheticism. Warhol's painting "style" is indeed a low version of Abstract Painting. This early American art movement is reduced to its caricature. This style was chosen to embody the European client "culture," too. But it does so in a "low-cost" way. A sort of low-cost style with a low-cost painting. He does not paint, he colours; he does not represent, he reproduces. When he photographs his subjects, Warhol is like a sort of "low-cost" photographer. First, he is like an amateur who photographs friends of his or "friends" of friends. He does not use professional equipment and he does not need to know professional techniques of developing. He just

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presses the button and the image comes out. He is like a fashion photographer too. But if they consider the use of Polaroid as a step in the preparation of a real shoot, Warhol keeps these without trying to make a better picture later. So the "low-cost" aspect of his work resides in its fascination with paparazzi photography, too. \¥hen a journalist asked him what photographic work he liked, Warhol talked about a paparazzi's photograph printed on nice paper. By this fascination, he seems to be claiming it to be an "ugly" photograph. This practice represents indeed the ugly aspect of photography. The paparazzi steal images of "stars," they photograph well-known people only chosen for their celebrity and they often make poor quality images (unframed and blurred). They are often compared to scavengers, living from others' misfortunes. In contrast with photojournalists, paparazzi don't photograph history but only the present. By contrast to art photographers, they don't make works for exhibitions or art books but only for popular magazines that we read and throw away. With his declaration, his use of the automatic camera to photograph people of ephemeral fame, Warhol couples Nadar's figure with the paparazzi one. He reproduces the tradition of the posed session in the artist's studio but in order to produce low-cost images. He can then be seen as the official paparazzi of mass culture. With that, he changes the figure of the modem artist. If Kandinsky saw the artist as leading humanity and always ahead of his time, the pop artist is the "dumb" reproducer of the bad taste of his time. If the artist was once the creator of beauty, he is now the creator, or reporter, of ugliness. Thus, ugly photography directs Warhol's work. He first takes images in low definition. \¥hen he reproduces the Marilyn portrait, he does not directly take the original version photographed by Gene Korman in 1953 as a publicity still for the film Niagara. He picks its reproduction from a magazine. This image is already an impoverished one. The quality of the paper loses some of the original tones and contrasts. Then, he continues this impoverishment by cutting the face to make a silkscreen pattern from it. This move from a photograph to silkscreen means also an erasure of all the medium tones of the photograph and all of its details. The original photograph where we were able to see the reliefs of the face makes way for a flat version without gradation. To use Warhol's terminology, the image replaces the photograph. The photo still fully contained the model. The image is empty, a flat pattern to reproduce without passion. Warhol's work is then based on an ugly aestheticism. To consider this, let us think about the 1962 Marilyn x 100. Made by the same screen, all of the faces are different and show the act of the mass reproduction of identity. Some of the "Marilyns" are as though disappearing; others are over-full of

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painting, as though suffocating. By doing this, if the work seems to pop with its smiling pattern and these glowing colours, it reveals a part of ugliness too. His use of Polaroids reveals the same thing. This photographic toy is indeed the expression of a teenage society who wants to play with and consume cool experiences. This "cool" becomes the new absolute value in a post-modernity obsessed by a need for fun. Photographing is then a play, neither an art nor a science. Warhol as Image

We find again the culture of fun in the mask Warhol wore. During interviews, he had indeed a sort of rictus, as a frozen half smile. This facial expression was like an artificial mask. It was like Warhol played at being "Warhol." Never natural, the pop artist thus embodied Charles Melman's definition of the "liberal man." In a book of meetings with Jean-Pierre Lebrun, the French psychoanalyst describes the face of this "zero-gravity man"8 without any conscience looking as though neutral and insignificant to be the mask of a moving subjectivity. "You never really know what the person thinks who is talking to you, as if he knows some fixed thing himself."9 Similarly, Warhol looks unthinking, as a machine or a tape recorder that would only have the "erase" button as he once said he wanted to be. To cite again Da Vinci's grotesque faces, these represented the move from human to animal, from beauty to ugliness. Warhol's grotesqueness shows the move from human to machine, from natural to artificial, from face to mask. This post-modern mask is then closed in on itself. It is no more the face Emmanuel Levinas saw as openness to the other. lO The mask is closed, as a barrier protecting his real emotions and thoughts, if any. This protection is the same as the creams Warhol put on his skin. He was indeed obsessed by his skin problems and tried to cover them with cosmetics. This covering process is the same as wearing a mask. He hides his real nature under an artifice, a sort of layer of "cool." A photograph taken by Yousuf Karsh shows Warhol as though covering his face with invisible paint in 1979, as ifhe were varnishing himself. He engages in this covering process to represent the sixties as a society obsessed with "cool." No problems-political, emotional, or social-but a star who always smiles, but smiles that become ugly because forced. In

8 L 'homme sans gravite (paris: Denoel, colI. "Folio essais," 2002). 9 Ibid., p. 1 15f. 1 0 Totalite et infini, essai sur I 'exteriorite, 1 9 7 1 .

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one of his self-portraits made i n 1979 with a Polaroid he has on his shoulder, he smiles with a tilted head that mimics the orientation of the camera. His head is thus a sort of second camera. But this smile is frozen, forced and looks like a wince. Thus, the obligation of cool Warhol incarnates here turns into a grotesque wince. Marilyn's beautiful smile thus becomes an ugly grimace too. Nothing-skinny or political, emotional or social-but a frozen smiling face. No diseases, no disasters, but a multi-coloured death too. The pop ugly aestheticism is then an expression of a mass consumer society that wants to cover up the diseases of its time by industrial agreement and lightness. Just as Carnpbell's soup is an artificial substitute of the homemade, the post-modem culture, smile and aestheticism are diminished versions of the real ones, a stereotypical attitude that the banal consumer imitates without passion or thinking. This mask testifies to the colonisation of the human being by industry, just as Edgar Morin considered the human soul as the last Africa colonised by the mass media. ll Warhol, more than other pop artists, represented the ugly aestheticism of his post-modernity. He showed in his works and his attitude a statement of "cool" that transfOlmed all of life to nice images, even the worst part of it. Violence, death machines, accidents, suicides are sho\Vll as coloured and decorative compositions that we could hang on our living-room walls. The ugly becomes aesthetic and in parallel the aesthetic becomes ugly. Beautiful media masks of worldly people and stars reveal an ugliness varnished or backgrounded, and the required smile of this leisure society becomes a grotesque wince. Now, selfies seem to continue this post-modern ugly aestheticism in a hyper-modernity 2.0. As Warhol colouring a car crash or a suicide, a lot of selfie makers photograph themselves during funerals or during a suicide or catastrophic scene. The morbid was aesthetic; it is now fUllllY and "likable" via Facebook or Instagrarn. And what about the current fashion of "duck face" or "sellofies" that consist of photographing oneself with an excessive pout or with one's face covered and defOlmed by scotch tape? These selfies are indeed expressions of a society where the serious is defiintively banished and the old value of beauty is replaced by a funny ugliness. The ugly aestheticism of our post- and hyper-modemity reveals a valueless society where individuals want to play with a vulnerable present menaced by crisis and by an impossible and anguished future. A world of boring "being" that needs fun to forget a society without an absolute.

1 1 L 'Esprit du temps I, Nevroses (paris: Grasset, 1962).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Professor Lars Aagaard-Mogensen's numerous published works include Culture and Art (Humanities Press, 1976), Art in Culture I-Ill (Communication & Cognition, 1985), 5 Essays - things to know (WE, 2009) and more than a hundred and fifty articles and reviews ni a wide variety of journals worldwide. After many years of teaching philosophy in the USA, including at Washington University in SI. Louis and the School of Visual Arts in New York, he is now the co-founder and director of Wassard Elea, a refugium for artists and scholars in Ascea, Italy, and editor of the journal Wassard Elea Rivista. Erin Bradfield is a lecturer ni philosophy at Santa Clara University where she teaches courses in Aesthetics, Ethics, Film, Logic, and Culture. Her research focuses on the social and political dimensions of Kantian aesthetics. In particular, she works on issues regarding communication, exclusion, and community fOlmatioll. Her most recent work addresses topics in negative aesthetics including ugliness, disgust, and the sublime. In 2018, she coached the Santa Clara University Ethics Bowl team to win the national title in the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl competition. In her spare time, she plays the cello with the Nova Vista Symphony in California. Erni Bradfield earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University. Meng-Shi Chen received his PhD. ni Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture from the State University of New York at Binghamton, and is currently assistant professor in the Department of Motion Pictures at Tung-Fang Design University in Taiwan. His major research fields are in continental philosophy, especially Nietzsche, and in aesthetics, especially the intersection of aesthetics and ethics and cross-cultural issues in aesthetics. He has presented several papers at conferences held in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., "The Significance of the Allegory of Dionysus's Dismemberment in The Birth of Tragedy" at the 23,d International Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, and "Spectacle of Suffering and the Meaning of Life" at the First International Conference on Philosophy and Meannig in Life.

132

Contributors

is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wninipeg, Canada, and the author of The Aesthetics of Design (Oxford University Press, 2013, Korean translation, Misul Munhwa Publ. Co., 2016), and the co-editor of On Taste: Aesthetic Exchanges (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2019). The Possibility of the Sublime (Cambridge Scholars Publishnig, 2017) is a recent collection of critical responses to her work on the sublime. She has published extensively in philosophical aesthetics, including articles on the everyday, still life painting, aesthetic value, negative aesthetics, and the sublime, in journals such as The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Philosophy Today, Symposium, Evental Aesthetics, and Estetika. Jane Forsey

Jonathan Johnson is an artist, philosopher and minister residing in Hong Kong, China. His research interests are in negative aesthetic judgements, the aesthetic practices and philosophies of East Asia, and incorporations of art practice into aesthetic discourse. Having recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation entitled The Anatomy of Ugliness: Locating the Experience of Aesthetic Negativity (Hong Kong Baptist University), he now works as a senior research assistant at HKBU, as well as a teaching assistant at Hong Kong University. His current research projects in aesthetics are on ugliness, the sublime in East Asian art, and the association of aesthetic and ethical value judgements. Bertrand Naivin is Associate Researcher at the laboratory AlAe, and teaches at Paris 8 University, France. He specialises in American photography, American Pop art, and mass and social media. His current research questions what he calls our "tech-sistenz", the growing place of social media and technology in our everyday life. His publications niclude Lichtenstein, de la rete mode me au profile Facebook (2015), Selfie, un nouveau regard photographique (2016), and Monstres 2. 0, I 'autre visage des niseaux sociaux (2018). He is also editor of Selfie(s) (2018), and Sur la laideur(2018).

is Professor Emeritus at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of Leuven University (Belgium), where he taught philosophy of language and philosophical aesthetics. He has been invited frequently to various foreign universities in France and Italy, in various Latin American countries, and in the USA. His publications concern linguistic and philosophical pragmatics, theoretical and visual semiotics, the epistemology of linguistics and semiotics, philosophical aesthetics and art theory; his many books include Language and Discourse (Mouton, 1971), The Herman Parret

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Aesthetics of Communication. Pragmatics and Beyond (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), La main et la matiere. Jalons d'une haptologie de I 'a!uvre d'art (Editions Hermann, 2018). His interest aims at generating a dialogue between disciplines, always in search of a global and foundational reflection. is an artist living in Copenhagen, Denmark. She earned an MPA from the Danish Academy of Fine Arts and an MA in Art Theory and Communication. Working in paint, sculpture, ceramics and mixed media, Petersen has had numerous residencies with the Danish Academy in Rome, the Danish Art Foundation, and the Foundation Idella in Liechtenstein. Selected collections of her work include the Luciano Benetton Collection, Italy, the Danish Academy in Rome, and the Museu do Douro in Portugal. Her most recent solo show is Opus Mixtum, 2019, at the Museum of Ancient Arts, Aarhus, Denmark. The cover image, Entity, (2010), is one in a series of etchings with aquatint, plate 45 x 34.5 cm. Jane Maria Petersen

Rachel Silverbloom, originally from New York, is currently a Ph.D. candidate at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. Her work is grounded in continental and feminist traditions, with particular attention given to the philosophical lineages of existentialism. Her research centres around the question of whether and how art can offer consolation, redemption, or repaIr III expenences of suffering. Rachel is also an avid painter and gardener. Barl Verschaffel is a philosopher and Professor of Theory of Architecture and Architectural Criticism at Ghent University (Belgium). He has published widely in the fields of architectural theory, theory of history, aesthetics and the philosophy of culture. His many publications include Rome/Over theatraliteit ( 1990), FigurenlEssays (1995), Architecture is (as) a Gesture (2001), A propos de Balthus (2004), Nature morte, portrait, paysage. Essais sure les genres en peinture (2007), and Mocking Humanity. Two Essays on James Ensor's Grotesques (2018). Verschaffel is also the scriptwriter of a series of documentary films on Belgian artists, curator of art exhibitions, and the director of the VANDENHOVE Centre for Architecture and Arts at Ghent University.

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor W., 17, 48, 95 aesthetic ideas, 76 aestheticisatioll, 10, 15, 1 10 aestheticism, 2 1 , 1 1 8 empty, 1 16 Allison, Henry, 49, 62 Aristotle, 3, 22, 42 Artaud, Antonin, 1 8 artifact, 98 asceticism, 39 axiology, 23 moral, 25,43, 55 Barthes, Ro1and, 1 14 Bataille, Georges, 9, 26 Baudelaire, Charles, 1 8, 22, 1 17 Baumgarten, Alexander, 1 7 beauty cool, 1 1 2 new, 28 Beech, David, 100 Benjamin, WaIter, 1 1 0, 1 1 2 Berger, David, 50, 56 Bois, Yve-Alain, 9, 26 Bomdieu, Pierre, 1 8, 1 1 6 Bourne, Rando1ph, 104 Brandt, Reinhardt, 52 Breton, Andre, 1 8 Burke, Edrnund, 14, 47, 108 Carroll, Noel, 36 catharsis, 102 Cheetharn, Mark, 48 Clair, Jean, 9 Coate, Matthew, 52, 55 eohen, Alix, 5 1 , 58 Colernan, Francis, 56 collective, 27, 30, 38, 54, 80, 91

colour, 85, 1 14, 1 1 8 common sense, 68 cool, 120 Cousin, Mark, 102 critique, 1 1 2 art critics, 82, 1 17 social, 97 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 1 1 5 Danto, Arthur, 27 de Sade, Marquis, 32 Deleuze, Gilles, 18, 1 14 dialectic, 19, 22, 97 Dickens, Charles, 3 1 disgust, 8, 16, 25, 30, 32, 54, 58, 65, 83, 87 disinterestedness, 20, 43, 7 1 Eco, Umberto, 2 1 , 47 economy, 33 Eliade, Mircea, 9 Enlightenment, 4, 43 entertainment, 3 1 festival, 3 1 fllll, 1 1 1 etymology, 24, 33 Everyday Aesthetics, 85 everyday man, 1 1 7 evolution, 1 9 farce, 1 1 3 Foucault, Michel, 30 Freud, Sigrnlllld, 42 functionalism, 20 genealogy, 101 genius, 76 Ginsborg, Hannah, 55 Gracyk, Theodore, 62 Guemica, 103

136 gustation, 87 Guyer, Paul, 52 Hegel, G.W.F., 4, 17, 23, 108 Hendersoll, Gretchen E., 47, 86 Hudson, Hud, 60 Hmne, David, 82 imago, 1 1 4 mask, 89, 1 14, 1 1 8, 120 JOhnSOll, Jonathan, 86 Joyce, James, 20 Kolnai, Aurel, 9, 40 Korsrneyer, Carolyn, 54 Krauss, Rosalind E., 9, 26 Kristeva, Julia, 26 Kuplen, Mojca, 49, 59, 61 Lacan, Jacques M.E., 25 Land, Edwin H, 1 1 5 Lascault, Gilbert, 8 laughter, 10, 3 1, 40, 1 1 4 LebnUl, Jean-Pierre, 120 Leerning, David, 9 Levinas, Emrnanuel, 120 Levinsoll, Jerrold, 29 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 1 1 1 Lohrnar, Dieter, 52 Longinus, 47 Lucretius, 8 Lyotard, Jean-Fran�ois, 15, 1 8, 25 Lysaker, John, 99 Maturin, Charles Robert, 29 McConnell, Sean, 60, 63 McLuhan, Marshal!, 1 1 0 media, 109, 1 2 1 Medusa strategy, 1 1 Meerbote, Ralf, 56 Melrnan, Charles, 120 Menninghaus, Winfried, 9 modernity, 1 8, 26, 30 Moore, Adrian William, 50 Moore, Ronald, 47 Morin, Edgar, 1 2 1 Morris, Robert, 26 nahrre, 23, 30, 35, 40, 55

Index landscape, 12 talent, 78 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20, 31, 1 17 nostalgia, 27 objectivism, 4, 19, 48, 57, 68, 8 1 , 9 1 , 96, 1 1 2 obscenity, 1 1 Panos, Paris, 49 photography, 1 1 5 paparazzi, 1 1 9 Plato, 17, 40, 109 pleasure, 2 1 , 24, 29 fun, 1 1 1 negative, 74 unpleasant, 85 Plotinus, 21 pop, 1 07, 1 1 9 Pop, Andrei, 48 portrait, 1 17 post-modernity, 1 1 1 power, 35, 105 money, 1 17 press, 109 punishment, 32 Pythagoras, 19 quality, 1 09, 1 14 aesthetic, 86 interesting, 27 Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, 1 04 religion, 10, 1 1 , 107 Renaissance, 19, 107 reproduction, 108 Retort, 1 04 Rimbaud, Arthur, 22 Rind, Miles, 52 Rosenkranz, Karl, 4, 22, 47, 57 Saito, Ymiko, 85 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1 1 4 Scarry, Elaine, 36, 101 Schiller, Friedrich, 2 1 , 95 Shier, David, 53, 60, 70 SolI, Ivan, 35 Staten, Henry, 37

On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges Stieglitz, Alfred, 1 12 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 22 Strand, Paul, 1 12 Strub, Christian, 52 subjectivism, 20, 57, 88 sublime, 1 1, 15, 24, 49, 62, 73 taste, 4, 30, 49, 58, 9 1 , 108 Thomson, Garrett, 54 Titian, 19 Troxell, Mary, 50 unpleasant, 10, 1 1 , 3 1 , 41, 62, 86 Va1ery, Paul, 12, 1 8 value, 6 1 , 80, 1 16, 1 17 aesthetic, 1 7 art, 78 negative, 3 valueless, 1 2 1 war, 104 Warho1, Andy, 107

129 Die in Jet, 108 Electric Chair, 1 1 3 Elvis, 1 1 7 Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), 1 1 0 HeIime Rochas, 1 1 8 Leo Castelli, 1 14 Marilyn, 1 1 7 Marilynx, 100, 1 1 9 MonaLisa, 1 1 0 Senator Burda, 1 1 7 Velvet Jumping Man, 1 1 3 Wenze1, Christian, 50, 60, 69, 86 Widrich, Mechti1d, 48 Wilde, Oscar, 22 Wilson, Robert Rawdon, 3 1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 36 Zarnmito, John, 50 Zuckert, Rachel, 88

137