The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic 9781472530134, 9781472594259, 9781472528834

Citation preview

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Also available from Bloomsbury Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy, edited by Owen Hulatt Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers, edited by Alessandro Giovannelli The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Anna Christina Ribeiro The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture, edited by Nadir Lahiji The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière (translated by Gabriel Rockhill) Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique, Michael Wayne

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic Monique Roelofs

Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Monique Roelofs 2014 Monique Roelofs has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. eISBN: 978-1-4725-2883-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

For Vicky, out of all hooping.

Contents List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Credits

xi

Introduction 1 The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture 2 Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions 3 The Gendered Aesthetic Detail 4 Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor 5 The Aesthetics of Ignorance 6 An Aesthetic Confrontation 7 Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism 8 Aesthetic Promises and Threats Postscript

1 5 29 57 89 107 129 151 177 209

Notes

213

Bibliography

243

Index

257

List of Figures 3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 7.1 7.2 7.3 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

Johannes Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, c. 1665–70 Johannes Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, detail. c. 1665–70 Remedios Varo, Spiral Transit, 1962 Martin Puryear, C.F.A.O., 2006–7 Martin Puryear, C.F.A.O., 2006–7 Fernando Botero, The Beach, 2006 Fernando Botero, Abu Ghraib 53, 2005 Fernando Botero, Abu Ghraib 77, 2005 Gabriel Orozco, La DS, 1993 Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974 Gordon Matta-Clark, Office Baroque, 1977 Damián Ortega, Cosmic Thing, 2002 Constant Nieuwenhuys, Symbolische voorstelling van New Babylon (Symbolic Representation of New Babylon), 1969

Cover image:  Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, The Pink Elephant in the Room, detail. 2011. Vinyl installation on wall, c. 4 x 2.15 m (13 x 7’). Art X Women, AAF 2011, New York City. Commissioned by A.I.R. Gallery and Soho20 Chelsea Gallery.

72 75 113 125 126 168 169 171 190 191 191 192 200

Acknowledgments The vision for this book goes back quite some way. At the tail end of the previous millennium, I was lucky to join that remarkable intellectual space, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. I thank Ellen Rooney and Elizabeth Weed for organizing the yearlong research seminar “Aesthetics, Politics, and Differences.” The seminar’s weekly meetings provoked decades’ worth of questions, and continue to resonate as an extraordinarily vibrant model of interdisciplinary exchange. Ellen’s and Elizabeth’s incisive comments on initial formulations of the book’s key concepts notably influenced the directions the project would take. To the members and invited speakers of the Pembroke seminar on aesthetics as well as to the participants in subsequent seminars on “The Culture of the Market” and “The Question of Emotion,” I am grateful for heated debates and fundamental points of critique. Students and colleagues at Hampshire College bring to our work together a taste for experimentation that fills the air with surprise and a sense of intellectual risk. No single day on the job is predictable. The college has granted support and time for my research. The cross-disciplinary nature of Hampshire’s educational program creates an atmosphere that is distinctly conducive to aesthetic inquiry. I thank students in courses, work/study helpers, coconspirators whose self-designed concentrations and senior projects I advised, and colleagues who collaborate on these ventures, for their energy and curiosity. Countless dialogues make their presence felt in this book. Warm thanks to Linda Martín Alcoff, Suzanne Barnard, Nalini Bhushan, Janet Borgerson, Leslie Bostrom, Peg Brand, Teresa Chandler, David G. Cory, Christoph Cox, Stephen Davies, Denise Davis, Alex DesForges, Fred Evans, Rob van Gerwen, Lewis R. Gordon, Baba Hillman, Katrien Jacobs, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jerrold Levinson, Brian Locke, María Lugones, Kevin Meehan, Mariana Ortega, Carmen Pont, Camiel Roelofs, Jan Roelofs, Karin Roelofs, Lex Roelofs, Sjoerd Roelofs, Loes Roelofs-Vennekens, Mary Russo, Yuriko Saito, Anna Schrade, Daniel Kojo Schrade, Falguni Sheth, Ruth Solie, Mariángeles SotoDíaz, Jutta Sperling, Robert Stecker, Ronald Sundstrom, Gregory Velazco y Trianosky, Peter Vennekens, Bonnie Vigeland, Hent de Vries, Lingzhen Wang, Henk Willems, George Yancy, and Manon van Zuijlen. Your remarks keep reverberating with me. I have benefited from observations by audiences at Binghamton University, Brown University, Duquesne University, KU Leuven, Penn State University, the University of Amsterdam, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the University of Utrecht, and Hampshire College. Discussions at meetings of the American Philosophical Association, the American Society for Aesthetics, the California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, the Dutch Association for Aesthetics, the European Society for Aesthetics, the Roundtable on Latina Feminism, the Society for Literature, Science,

x

Acknowledgments

and the Arts, and the Vanderbilt University Conference on Politics, Criticism, and the Arts have helped to clarify my thinking. I thank Colleen Coalter for her enthusiastic editorial support and encouragement. For rigorous readings of an earlier version of the manuscript, I owe a profound debt to Michael Kelly and anonymous reviewers. Their commentaries have substantially strengthened the book. During the penultimate stretch, the infinitely wise Andy Parker recommended I use scissors, which has left me some things to explore in another forum. The thrill of a next project on aesthetics that is in the making with Norman S. Holland has rubbed off on much of this, as has the delight of our conversations. Throughout, Elizabeth V. Spelman not only generously pored over existing texts, but provided a consistent flow of off-the-cuff insights that lead me to fantasize books within books. The actual one I dedicate to her. Several chapters first appeared in other forms and places, and I thank their editors and publishers for permission to reprint from these sources. A version of Chapter 2 saw the light as “Racialization as an Aesthetic Production: What Does the Aesthetic Do for Whiteness and Blackness and Vice Versa?” in White on White/Black on Black, ed. George Yancy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Chapter 3 is a revised and expanded version of “A Pearl’s Perils and Pleasures: The Detail at the Foundation of Taste.” This essay was initially drafted for a conference in honor of Naomi Schor, and appeared in “The Lure of the Detail: Critical Reading Today,” differences 14.3 (2003), a special issue devoted to Schor’s work. Chapter 4 was first published in a different form as “Beauty’s Relational Labor,” in Beauty Unlimited, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). Under the title “Theorizing the Aesthetic Homeland: Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism in Daily Life and the Art World,” a version of Chapter 6 was included in Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, ed. Mariana Ortega and Linda Martín Alcoff (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009). Finally, a version of Chapter 7 appeared as “Sensation as Civilization: Reading/Riding the Taxi Cab” in “Aesthetics and Race: New Philosophical Perspectives,” Special Volume 2 (2009) of Contemporary Aesthetics (http://contempaesthetics.org/), which I guest edited.

Credits The author and publishers are grateful for permission to quote from the following material: Excerpts from “Ode to the Apple,” “Ode to a Pair of Scissors,” and “Ode to Things” by Pablo Neruda, translated by Ilan Stavans, and from “Ode to the Book I” by Pablo Neruda, translated by Edward Hirsch, from ALL THE ODES: A BILINQUAL EDITION by Pablo Neruda, edited by Ilan Stavans. Translations for “Ode to the Apple,” “Ode to a Pair of Scissors,” and “Ode to Things” copyright © 2003, 2013 by Ilan Stavans. Translation for “Ode to the Book I” copyright © 2003 by Edward Hirsch. Reprinted by permission of Fundación Pablo Neruda; and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from “Ode to a Box of Tea,” “Ode to Bread,” “Ode to the Chair,” “Ode to the Orange,” “Ode to a Pair of Scissors,” “Ode to the Spoon,” “Ode to the Table,” and “Ode to Things,” from ODES TO COMMON THINGS by Pablo Neruda. Translated by Ken Krabbenhoft. Selected and illustrated by Ferris Cook. Odes (Spanish) copyright © 1994 by Pablo Neruda and Fundación Pablo Neruda. Odes (English translation) copyright © 1994 by Ken Krabbenhoft. Illustrations and compilation copyright © 1994 by Ferris Cook. By permission of Fundación Pablo Neruda; and Bulfinch. All rights reserved. Excerpt from “Oda a las cosas,” from NAVEGACIONES Y REGRESOS by Pablo Neruda, and excerpt from “Oda al libro I,” from ODAS ELEMENTALES by Pablo Neruda. Copyright © 2013 by Fundación Pablo Neruda. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “Advertisement” and “Utopia,” from VIEW WITH A GRAIN OF SAND: SELECTED POEMS by Wisława Szymborska. Translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 1976 by Czytelnik, Warszawa. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company; and Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The aesthetic is a pervasive phenomenon. It is found not only in the arts, but also in our endeavors as everyday actors who eat, drink, touch, move, see, hear, read, or not, who address or don’t address one another, occupy some and not other places. From Plato through the Enlightenment to the present, aesthetic theories and practices have realized promises as well as threats coiled within the aesthetic. Such pledges and menaces are among the multimodal, embodied forms of address that we direct at one another, at objects, and toward our environments. They help to shape social and material affiliations and disconnections we inhabit. They suffuse the desirability of aesthetic experience, as well as the turmoil it provokes in the ethical, ecological, epistemic, and political planes. This book locates the aesthetic in sequences of ever-evolving promises and threats we manufacture as participants in webs of relationships and address. Following a period of disrepute, the aesthetic currently enjoys heightened prominence. Artists, theorists, and activists find new use for it as a category of experience, a template for criticism, a dimension of agency, a motor of collectivity, and a marker of value. The rise of the aesthetic animates a wide array of cultural projects, capacities, and agendas. In contemplating directions we might wish this upswing to take, however, we need to engage philosophical conundrums that continue to unsettle the aesthetic’s foundations. Twentieth-century artists and scholars have brought us face-to-face with the rocky past and troubled present of the aesthetic. The notion’s traditional cultural and theoretical supports have appeared to founder. Between the 1960s and 1980s, longstanding critiques of aesthetic paradigms blossomed, precipitating modes of analysis and production that transformed the arts and humanities.1 While these developments persisted, the late 1990s initiated a countervailing current. Aesthetic strategies of creation, schemes of reading, plans of collaboration, and blueprints for action began to spring up with renewed vitality across cultural fields. In the second decade of the third millennium, skeptical stances thus coexist with celebratory embraces of traditional vocabularies,2 alongside more qualified investments in aesthetic matters.3 Institutional forces congeal around these viewpoints, contributing their part to a collectively produced platform in which aesthetic and anti-aesthetic

2

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

operations converge and veer off in separate directions. Conflicting and intermingling assemblies of aesthetic tendencies and anti-aesthetic impulses make their presence felt in academic disciplines, bodily regimes, commemorative projects, archival collections, methods of historical inquiry, transportation systems, urban renewal tactics, and practices surrounding the production, preparation, and eating of food. They show up in exhibition spaces, sites and organs of performance, austerity plans, sexual routines, the pleasures of tourism, media conglomerates, and data-processing designs. These structures embody propensities to endorse as well as reject aesthetic possibilities of various sorts. In the boisterous field of cultural production and uptake, insight flows abundantly from refractory angles. This situation clamors for concept building. Difficulties that have materialized require further excavation, and, when unearthed, point up unexpected lines of defense. Contrasting modes of reading and divergent forms of cultural participation not only acknowledge and implement but also challenge disparate kinds of aesthetic phenomena. Existing controversies linger, surfacing in alternative arenas. Our polemics demand a shift of ground. Major philosophical gaps in the notion of the aesthetic remain. They are yet to be contended with. The following pages explore such lacunae in an effort to reach a tenable understanding of the irresistible awareness to which recuperators rightly turn: a sense of the stubborn attractions and possibilities held out by aesthetic form, experience, and interaction. But how can we affirm the desirability of the aesthetic without downplaying the mayhem it produces within individual lives and the cultural trajectories encompassing them? This quandary necessitates a conceptual change. The present book makes a case for the centrality of the notions of promises and threats, of relationality, and of address. At play in art and theory, shaping everyday practice and other realms of culture, retooled and joined together, these concepts yield a framework for a more expansive opening up of questions that have haunted us now for quite some time. Uniting the following chapters is their inquiry into the fluid link between the aesthetic and the political, a tie that we forge and reforge as we give shape to the everyday. The mutating bond between aesthetics and politics reflects unanticipated ways in which the aesthetic primes our existence and our daily activities mark the aesthetic. Among the detailed stories I will tell, a narrative arises that understands the aesthetic as an assembly of conceptually inflected, socially situated, multimodal, embodied practices. Harboring antagonisms and reorientations, this capacious field admits of no tidy distinctions from endeavors we might wish to call non-, anti-, an-, pre-, or post-aesthetic. Recurrent dips into the history of aesthetic theory will highlight the extensive scope of at once aesthetic and political strategies that undergird differentially inhabitable social orders and embed them at levels of meaning where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination not only go together but also are in conflict. Modes of interpretation come into being in this territory. Examining visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural boundary, the following chapters explore the interpretive web that gives the aesthetic its vast reach.

Introduction

Time Slice Bringing out the intricate presence of aesthetic meanings in our day-today lives calls on a range of methods. Accordingly, my argument develops in conversation with divergent perspectives. Crosscurrents arise among analytical aesthetics, continental philosophy, decolonial thought, and black and Latin American studies. Strategies of cultural analysis take shape alongside approaches in art history and literary theory. Themes in critical race feminism speak to viewpoints in social and political philosophy. Because the investigation proceeds in dialogue with a posse of fields, a good many endnotes along with occasional vignettes called time slices support our discussion. Curious readers are invited to visit these areas of the book if they like to delve into backstories or dwell longer with subjects. These segments provide a sense of salient debates that have taken place in various quarters and suggest topics for further reflection. Since they allude to a broad array of disciplinary histories and interests, I ask the reader to use these sections in a manner that creates an enjoyable readerly rhythm of interruptions and continuities among earlier, present, and future forms and questions.

3

1

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

Eighteenth-century philosophers associate the concept of the aesthetic with that of the public. David Hume and Immanuel Kant are prominent exponents of this interconnection. Their theories of taste lay the groundwork for much contemporary thought about the aesthetic in the Western tradition. Both thinkers invoke operations of common human appreciative capacities. On the assumption that observers share such faculties, and allow them to govern their perceptions of artworks and other objects, the resulting judgments of taste attain intersubjective validity.1 This landmark proposal links the aesthetic with the public: apprehensible to any appropriate observer, artistic value acquires a public dimension. The aesthetic experiences we undergo register generally accessible meanings. The exercise of aesthetic perception comprises a public good in the sense that it is in principle available to everyone, irrespective of anyone’s particular characteristics. The pleasure that aesthetic practice potentially provides us all, and the judgments that it is capable of legitimizing for each and every person anchor us in a common human world. Aesthetic activities instantiate a collective register of subjectivity. The public status of aesthetic experience finds further elaboration in Hume’s view that taste, refinement, and the arts contribute to the advancement of the public sphere.2 Hume’s and Kant’s universalist accounts of aesthetic perception and value have come under critique.3 The notion of the public that emerges from the hypothesis of shared appreciative capacities and the universally valid aesthetic judgments they warrant is thin. The assumption of a common mindset and the universality afforded by our shared propensities tells us little about empirical conditions under which aesthetic experiences and evaluations take shape. It says next to nothing about the influence that institutional matrices of observation, feeling, and desire, of power and language exert over the meanings with which we invest aesthetic forms in actual human communities. Compelling points of criticism have been raised for Hume’s and Kant’s accounts. Nevertheless, their notions of aesthetic publicity hold out the promise of a shared culture, including the pledge that our aesthetic activities connect people, and people

6

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

and objects, in flourishing collective and material bonds.4 This aesthetic project would be one version of the kind of public work the aesthetic undertakes.5 Clearly, it is not what Hume and Kant explicitly said the aesthetic does. However, the prominence their theories enjoy to this date is due in part to the desirability we attribute to what we take to have been promised. We can discern the lineaments of this promise in Pablo Neruda’s elemental odes. Neruda attaches a cultural promise to the aesthetic that illuminates the promise conveyed by Hume and Kant, even if Neruda’s version of the promise of the aesthetic will turn out far to exceed what these philosophers had in mind. Neruda’s odes put into play mechanisms that make possible the promise of the aesthetic and that stand in its way. The poet took the cultural promise of aesthetic publicity to be abundantly available. His odes enable us to see how the aesthetic can be promising in the face of its compromised capacity to carry out cultural projects with which we have charged it.

The aesthetic promise of a harmonious and egalitarian culture Neruda’s three books of odes, Elemental Odes, New Elemental Odes, and Third Book of Odes, which were published between 1954 and 1957, posit the ideal of the harmonious coexistence of people, animals, objects, places, and plants in an egalitarian human and nonhuman community.6 Numerous odes in these collections as well as a great many poems in Voyages and Homecomings (1959), which the poet described as his fourth book of elemental odes, attempt to envelop the reader in a cycle of material interaction, desire, and love that, Neruda intimates, can be actualized with the requisite collective effort.7 The poems articulate the promise of an aesthetically, ethically, and politically thriving society founded on ideals of equality and harmony. The odes embody this promise in everyday objects and events. This is evident in the final stanza of the “Ode to the Chair:” “War is vast like the shadowy jungle. / Peace / begins / in / a single / chair.”8 In the “Ode to the Orange,” similarly, the oneness of the orange announces that of the world: “Nations / are united / within your rind / like segments of a single fruit.” In praise of the abundant possibilities of bread, the “Ode to Bread” attests: “Because we plant its seed / and grow it / not for one man / but for all, / there will be enough: / there will be bread / for all the peoples of the earth.” The “Ode to Things” illuminates the aesthetic structure that throughout the odes exudes the promise of an egalitarian and harmonious community, and clarifies why this promise must be seen as a promise of culture. In this poem, Neruda envisages a pattern of affiliations among subjects, among objects, and among subjects and objects that allows for a common social and material existence. Weaving the reader into relations that connect interpreters, creators, and things, the ode holds out the promise of humans’ intersubjective copresence in a world they share with one another and their surroundings. Acts of creation and reception sustain the ties of conviviality that are to bring together individuals and individuals and things. Such acts forge the bonds that underlie the cohesion of the promised community. The books of odes understand the aesthetic as a connective tissue that can actualize the possibilities inherent in public

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

7

life. The aesthetic promises to fulfill the aspirations that can be associated with the idea of publicity through the institution of a culture of and for the people. The organizing gesture in the “Ode to Things” that gives rise to this image of aesthetic culture is the speaker’s address to the objects: O irrevocable river of things: no one can say that I loved only . . . those things that leap and climb, desire, and survive. It’s not true: many things came together to tell me the whole story. Not only did they touch me, or my hand touched them: they accompanied my existence to such an extent that they lived with me, they were so alive to me that they lived with me half my life and will die with me half my death.9

Addressing the objects through the vocative form (“O river of things”), the narrator fictionally construes them as worthy of being spoken to.10 He lends them qualities of bodily action and lived experience: they acquire the capacity to touch and to be touched. Animated by the speaker, they gain narrative power and subjective agency. A trope of amorous inseparability entwines the narrator’s and the objects’ existence: they share narrativity and experience as matters of life and death. The ode’s apostrophe (“O river”) enacts this symbiosis. Turning directly toward the objects, the narrator instills subjective life into them and engages them in a state of intimacy. This gesture sustains a mutuality of interaction. As the speaker’s voice projects responsiveness into the objects, they answer his address to them with their stories and their touch. Their perceived uptake of the narrator’s address fictionally renders his love reciprocal. The “Ode to a Box of Tea” illustrates this: “Box of tea, / like my / own heart / you arrived bearing / stories, / thrills, / eyes / that had held / fabulous petals in their gaze / and also, yes, / that / lost scent / of tea, of jasmine and of dreams, / that scent of wandering spring.” The speaker’s powers of address and narration find confirmation in the objects’ subjectivity. So does his aptitude for living, his ability to be alive to and with the objects. In the double orientations of the ode’s animation (to and from the objects) Neruda’s “Ode to Things” resembles Shelley’s famous “Ode to the West Wind,” in which the speaker, as Barbara Johnson has noted, calls on the wind to regenerate his waning

8

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

vitality (1987a, 188). However, whereas Shelley foregrounds the animation of the speaker, Neruda’s poem distinguishes itself from the apostrophic lyricism of the earlier work by centering the narrator’s, and, by extension, our—the reader’s and the general public’s—relations with things and other people. Further, in Neruda’s view of aesthetic exchange, relations with people mediate relations with things, and relations with things mediate relations with people. I call the resulting fabric of aesthetically inflected relations “aesthetic relationality.”11 The following verses spell out the cycle of material, intersubjective connections envisioned by Neruda: Oh, how many perfect things man has built! . . . I love all things, not because they are passionate or sweet-smelling, but because, I don’t know, because this ocean is yours, and mine: these buttons, and wheels, and little forgotten treasures, fans upon whose feathers love has scattered its orange blossoms, glasses, knives and scissors— all bear the trace of someone’s fingers, on their handle or surface, the trace of a distant hand lost in the most forgotten of forgottenness.12

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

9

The narrator’s love of the objects is a response to the marks of the bodily presence and absence of other creators and users, signs that he encounters in such objects. The animation of things coincides with the animation of the individuals who made and handled them. The ode suspends the oblivion that had befallen past makers and owners. The love persons have felt is made decipherable—its “orange blossoms” can be discovered on the “feathers” of “fans”—and people’s material activities become evident. Speaker and objects collaboratively defy the distance that separates earlier producers and consumers from the speaker.13 Neruda’s ode imagines a temporally continuous collective that gathers in patterns of address directed at and coming from objects. Through a direct address to the reader (“this ocean is yours, / and mine”) the poem includes its audience in this community. The animated objects join one another in a stream of address that remains indifferent to the boundaries between “your” and “mine.” The narrator places himself in a lineage of mediators of the objects’ stories, which he passes on to his audience. The text positions the reader as a participant in an intersubjective chain of materially and communally supported interpretable and interpretive transactions. Desirous of a close, physically materializing connection with makers and previous users of the objects, and of the reader’s immersion into the unfolding texture of relations, the speaker calls on the persons who might encounter the objects to make the most of a field of relational possibilities, of which these individuals already, however limited, have been made a part. When in the ode’s final passage (qtd. on p. 7), the speaker directly addresses the things, the narrator’s intimacy with them stands in for that of humanity at large, which his apostrophe addresses indirectly. The circuit of reciprocal animation in which the speaker’s relation with things picks up on his relation with people, and his relation with people finds sustenance in his relation with things, spreads from the individual to the universal. Humans, animals, and objects join one another in webs of interconnected modes of address that in principle can encompass everyone, everything. In the poem’s picture of aesthetic relationality, the significance of objects is bound up with the existence of a collective of loving and laboring subjects, who stand in relations of address with these objects and one another. The modes of address subjects undertake toward and receive from one another thereby make responses to the modes of address subjects adopt toward and register from objects, and vice versa. A proliferating reciprocal responsiveness among modes of address, each one inciting and informing other ones, enables people, things, animals, plants, environments, and nations to inhabit connections with one another in a constellation of interlinking strands of address. Modes of address join up to forge larger chains and webs of address that harbor them. The “Ode to Things” implicitly suggests that it is through modes of address we direct at and receive from our surroundings that we can realize our subjectivity interactively, in a potentially shared, spatiotemporally extended material world. This involves the creation of interpretations and conditions of interpretability. For readings and terms of readability, according to the ode’s poetics, enable us to witness in the objects the signs and effects of others’ emotional states and orientations (such as the “orange blossoms”

10

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

of love, mentioned before) and of the bodily actions and labor others have performed in relation to the things (as reflected, for example, by the imprints made by hands). Testifying that “this ocean is yours, / and mine,” Neruda accords the objects a home in a collective scene of address. As he draws subjects close to himself on account of their shared cultural proprietorship of the objects, these individuals’ actions and feelings become legible.14 In interpreting their activities and affects, the poet then brings people closer, enabling them, as it were, to speak through the objects. The vision of aesthetic relationality he projects both presupposes and heralds the presence of a communal forum for address—a structure of publicity, a common culture—that extends into the past and future, and can encompass anyone and anything. The poem articulates the culture-building promise of the collective possibilities for reading, making, and readability that we may associate with the idea of aesthetic publicity. Comprehended as an allegory of the cultural promise of the aesthetic, the “Ode to Things” crafts links between the notions of address, relationality, and the promise of culture.15 This book understands these concepts as structural constituents of the idea of the aesthetic in Western philosophy. The triad of address, relationality, and promising plays a central part in the organization of aesthetic agency and experience. I show how this three-fold assembly lends its powers to vital human capabilities that we bring about by aesthetic means, and, at the same time, has a hand in problems in which the aesthetic is embroiled. Strikingly, the elemental odes not only uncover fundamental components of the notion of the aesthetic, but also expose a lacuna in this concept.16 The poems implicitly notify us of conundrums that signal a hole in aesthetic theorizing. This gap will guide the present study. It arises as follows.

Glitches in the promise Neruda’s view of communal interpretive and interpretable life rests on an idealization. Relatively abstractly described, the objects celebrated in the odes, such as plates and oranges, to many readers, exude the appearance of being ordinary objects. Such ostensibly everyday things readily lend themselves to absorption in a tight, seemingly generalizable nexus of subjects and objects. This may not as assuredly be the case, however, with passports, identity cards, firearms, veils, burkas, electric chairs, abortion pills, immunization policies, political manifestos, cannabis products, euthanasia medication, gluinos, surveillance cameras, or a gulp of drinkable water at a time of emergency and destruction. These entities are harder to incorporate in a vision of aesthetic conviviality. The close, expansive cycle of affiliation envisaged by Neruda would unravel in confrontation with these elements, which have their place in polemics that instantly reveal the speaker’s and the readers’ positionality. It turns out to be a rigorously curtailed scope of subjects and objects that are assimilable by the network of address imagined in the “Ode to Things.” The community of producers and consumers of objects and symbolic forms displays deeper tears and fractures than Neruda’s image of the interpretive collective admits. Does this cause a collapse of the poems’ promise? Do the odes really hold out a promise of culture? If so, can we lend credence to the promise we see there? We may have pinned our hopes on a promise that does not actually exist and/or could not possibly come true.

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

11

Some quite ordinary features of our relation to promises point to other possibilities. Fallible, limited, as we know ourselves to be, grounded in embodied situations, beholden to desire, we do not typically let go of promises that move us or that we have been crafting, just because we run into obstacles, or experience reasons for doubt— legitimate reasons at that. Our belief in promises evinces a certain stretchability. Rather than getting us to give up on the trust we have put into promises that we recognize, impediments and grounds for skepticism often prompt us to surmise that the fulfillment of these promises requires something more complex than we had imagined so far, a different arrangement, another angle, a shift of sorts. Belief retains some resistance to practical hurdles and countervailing evidence. Presumably, this is also the case in situations in which we apprehend artworks that make promises, promises that, in engaging these works, we may already have been helping to fabricate and realize. Thus, the promise, plausibly, goes together with gaps Neruda embodies in his view of aesthetic relationality. These elisions incite questions: what subjects and objects do his poetics render legible and admissible, and which ones do they bar from this standing, or accord a diminished role? How do structures of production, interpretation, and exchange that the writer summons invest a coveted array of aesthetic relationships with normativity, with publicly accessible community-building power? Might certain omissions in the web of aesthetic relationships that the odes weave be inescapable, justified, or even desirable? If so, to whom? On what grounds? What place should we give absences and mechanisms of exclusion that are ethically or politically unacceptable? How should such hiatuses reflect on the nature of aesthetic promising? And what do these phenomena tell us about the notion of the aesthetic? These questions converge at a crucial philosophical juncture that becomes visible in the elemental odes. I have proposed that we consider Neruda’s poems emblematic of the cultural promise of the aesthetic. This reading produces a corollary: besides the promise of culture, the odes epitomize the philosophical quandary of what, in the face of social difference, is to be made of this promise. I will now take a more detailed look at the works’ construal of publicity and community. The odes exemplify a mode of signification that constitutes a fundamental operation of the aesthetic as conceived in the West. The commitments and limits of the poems’ vision of aesthetic meaning production help to bring into view the conceptual terrain that this book will traverse. At first blush, Neruda’s odes may seem to fall short on account of their thematics. Arguably, the poems’ everyday subject matter casts aesthetic relationality in an idealizing perspective. Apples, chairs, flowers, and the other prosaic items the poet describes, one might claim, can hardly be taken to be representative of the interminably antagonistic, and intensely debated world of aesthetic objects. The author’s choice of elements would seem to take for granted commonality where disparity rules. This, however, is not exactly what is happening. A more qualified diagnosis is called for. What appear to be ordinary things are plenty controversial, as the “Ode to a Pair of Scissors” illustrates. Neruda lists many purposes and actions for which we use scissors, including the cutting of “flags / soon / stained and scorched / by fire and blood.”17 More generally, he documents ways in which aesthetic agents mobilize quotidian objects in oppositional acts. The odes place everyday artifacts in circumstances in which people’s deployment of these tools is subject to repression.

12

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

An awareness of the contestatory status of the objects the odes celebrate, that is, of their presence in a space of conflicting interests, persuasions, and powers, pervades Neruda’s poetics. The odes explore how objects may foster the emancipation of workers and peasants. Things function in the poems as elements that are being called upon to fulfill needs of agents employed in marginalized and yet vital sectors of the economy. The odes desist from taking for granted the objects’ availability or enjoyability. Neruda renders things’ capacities to satisfy the needs of workers and peasants contingent on a political struggle that he embraces. As the “Ode to a Pair of Scissors” indicates, he envisions a place in the reader’s life for the poems, just as he does this for the objects: “And here I cut this ode short / with the scissors / of reason, / so that it won’t be too long or too short, / so that it / will / fit in your pocket / smoothed and folded / like / a pair / of scissors.”18 Tailored to occupations they can assume in the life of a laborer, Neruda’s poems participate in the reorganization of social and material existence envisaged by left movements in twentieth-century Chile and abroad, and the international socialist networks with which national communist groups had aligned themselves. His construal of objects as liable to contestation is inseparable from this agenda. Division and disharmony are a presumed ground of signification in the odes. The poems’ prosaic tenor notwithstanding, Neruda’s voice capitalizes on the contentiousness of material life and social being. If humans were able to unquestioningly read the objects’ significance off from them, the odes’ aesthetic project would not take hold. It is because people and things are subject to the structuring force of narrative, symbolic, social, economic, political, personal, public, and intimate practices that the writer’s participation in the shaping of his readers’ relationships with objects acquires aesthetic and political urgency. Such practices are a source of forms of differentiation as well as affiliation. Neruda engages in a project of creating commonalities and differences within already given patterns of commonalities and differences. The odes lay out a field of preexisting dispositions toward conflicting and shared understandings, in which they purport to intervene. Contest and sustenance thereby intermingle, as the “Ode to the Table” attests: “The world / is a table / engulfed in honey and smoke, / smothered by apples and blood.” Clearly, the poems do not merely assume terms of agreement and discord, but, additionally, give rise to such forms.

Creating the promise By considering the odes’ generative functioning, we can take a closer look at the voids in Neruda’s work, and the procedures that give rise to them. The productive aspect of his poems stands out in the opening lines of the “Ode to the Table.” Placed by the narrator within a fabric of cultural relationships, the eponymous object incorporates an existential vision into its form and function: I work out my odes on a four-legged table, laying before me bread and wine and roast meat

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

13

(that black boat of our dreams). Sometimes I set out scissors, cups and nails, hammers and carnations. Tables are trustworthy: titanic quadrupeds, they sustain our hopes and our daily life.

In this passage, the table’s anatomy and its weight-bearing job seamlessly coincide with the object’s bodily and affective significance. Experiencing the artifact in a manner that is receptive to its material capacities, individuals are able to participate in quotidian rituals that establish a sense of community. They find support for “[their] hopes and [their] daily life,” that is, for wishes and activities that they potentially share with others. Engaging readily apprehensible functions of everyday things (such as the table’s chore of propping things up), the narrator identifies alternative roles they may fulfill (highlighting, for instance, the table’s propensities to bolster actual as well as desired forms of individual and communal life). The artifact that presumably holds up the poet’s writing limbs and instruments, also carries the assembly of objects that, we are invited to imagine, inspire his odes and address us through these odes. Further, upon the narrator’s recognition of this supporting function, the table comes to embody collective desires for the future. Initiated by an antecedent capacity for meaning on the part of the objects (their capacity to “touch” the speaker in virtue of their human histories, their sensed physical composition, and their felt functional meanings), the speaker’s orientation toward the objects (which in many odes finds expression in a direct address to them) actualizes a potential for further meaning incipient in the objects (issuing in their new meanings), and thereby gives them their present significance (their parts of “the story,” which encompass contributions they make to the speaker’s and the objects’ intertwined lives). By locking into this meaning-making process of reciprocal animation among subjects and among subjects and objects, Neruda foregrounds a significatory dynamic that lies at the core of the Western idea of the aesthetic and that underwrites the cultural promises associated with this idea. The love Neruda declares in the “Ode to Things” constitutes a structural dimension of the progressive project of meaning production undertaken by the elemental odes. As Stendhal, Freud, and Roland Barthes, among others, have observed, the experienced characteristics of a beloved are not simply enabling grounds for the lover’s love, but must no less prominently be considered consequences of it. Psychic investments in persons and objects help to make possible our appreciation of their qualities.19 Our commitment to the significance of people and things has a certain independence of the warrant their specific attributes appear to provide for this significance. In short, our love sparks lovability, and further love spills forth from the lovability that arises. This is one of the dynamics of seduction. In virtue of this operation, love prompts paths of intersubjective, intercorporeal becoming.

14

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Most widely known for his love poems, Neruda continues his exploits in this genre throughout the books of odes. Aesthetic relationality, as the poems imagine it, thrives on the movements of a generative type of love. Rather than reflecting already given meanings of persons and things, the narrator’s amatory stance brings forth the cherished properties and impressions that people and objects hold out to him. The “Ode to the Tomato,” the “Ode to Soap,” and the “Ode to the Carnation” delight in a plethora of scents, sights, tastes and motions with which eponymous objects regale our bodies. In honoring these “gifts,” as the “Ode to the Tomato” describes them, Neruda also sensitizes us to further wishes that the objects can create and satisfy. Consequently, the objects and our relations with them take on a new significance. The loving acts of animation, that, for Neruda, weave together persons and link people to things, incite altering desires, and forge expanding intersubjective and object-oriented affiliations. Such changes can then transpose our bonds to shifting provinces. Simultaneously drawn in by people and things and drawing them in, we are able to stretch and modify the ties we embody, as we encounter different persons, situations, and things, precipitating evolving cycles of reciprocal connection. Love includes objects in transmuting spirals of connection that, the poems suggest, herald emancipatory social developments. The “Ode to the Spoon” underscores the democratic alignments Neruda embeds in our intercorporeal relations with persons and things. After commending the spoon for its travels through time and across locales, Neruda sets it a task: “the hard part / of your life’s journey / is to plunge / into the poor man’s plate, / and into his mouth.” This challenge posed, the spoon meets with a further ambition: And so the coming of the new life that, fighting and singing, we preach, will be a coming of soup bowls, a perfect panoply of spoons. An ocean of steam rising from pots in a world without hunger, and a total mobilization of spoons, will shed light where once was darkness shining on plates spread all over the table like contented flowers.

Having in earlier verses passed through hands and mouths of eaters who are separated by intervals of space and time (infants, hungry men, occupants of ships, cities, castles, and kitchens) spoons are able to make a promise. Neruda transposes these artifacts’ histories into utopian possibilities that the objects hold out to us—food for all; the stilling of hunger; a radiant sense of satiation encompassing objects, edibles, and body,

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

15

where stomachs previously used to contract, lining empty crypts. The tools become subject to renewed aspirations and attachments, and subtend novel relations among the people who interact with these objects, such as plates, among other things, and, yet again, tables. The foundation for this transformative circuit of relationships is laid by the narrator’s direct address to the things, which simultaneously constitutes an apostrophic address to the reader. This mode of address recurs throughout the elemental poems. It institutes a structure of loving animation that promises to bring about indispensable changes in the roles of people and things. Encouraging readers to join a web of public as well as individualized modes of address that he casts in a utopian shine, Neruda invites his audience to absorb and carry further the mesh of relationships the poems convey. This authorial gesture speaks with the transmissibility and the enticement of love. The reader who allows herself to be seduced by the poems’ solicitations, so the promise proclaims, participates in the realization of an alternative constellation of aesthetic relationships, one that inaugurates an egalitarian and harmonious material culture. The odes’ structure of address gives rise to a generative dynamic of desire and signification that disburses a promise of culture. Emplaced in this frame of address, the promise of culture gains nourishment from a recurring principle of differentiation and generalization. This logic, to which many of the poems’ titles attest, enables Neruda to incorporate particularity into larger wholes. The definite article in the titles of numerous elemental odes postulates a type of thing. Before reaching the opening line, the reader is made aware of a generic object that is representative of all instances of its category: “the onion” stands in for all onions, “the chair” represents all chairs. The odes then often proceed to address different tokens of the type in question, tokens that are characterized in terms of their specific qualities. For example, the “Ode to the Table” juxtaposes “the rich man’s table,” which carries fruit, and “a humble table,” which bears a wreath for a dead miner. This particularizing gesture signals diversity within the subsuming category. The overview of multiple token-objects does not call into question the cogency of the concept of the type, however, or the possibility of an account of the object’s generic meaning. Rather, the odes’ synoptic perspective affirms the presence of the general in the particular, and the particular in the general, as well as the reader’s and speaker’s ability to move between these levels of meaning. Neruda’s thematization of difference opens out onto an inclusive picture of the generic object, one that encompasses all of the object’s specific meanings. The subjective pendant of this logic is an image of humanity that achieves unity in relation to the objects, as Neruda insists in his address to the apple: “I want / a total abundance, / the multiplication / of your family, / I want / a city, / a republic, / a Mississippi River / of apples, / and on its shores / I want to see / the entire / population / of the world / united and reunited / in the simplest act on earth: / biting into an apple.”20 The ideal aggregation of identically situated objects in this ode matches the desired union of all people, which promises to follow from the abundant availability of the objects. Humankind attains integration as everyone, regardless of her or his particular situation, adopts an identical relation to a generically specified object. The parallelism between the generic object and a united humanity can be seen to infuse the promise in the “Ode to the Orange.” Neruda addresses the orange as an

16

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

object in which we can read the whole, and holds it up as a model for the people: “Orange, / the world was made / in your likeness / and image / . . . . / So it was, O earth, / orange planet / .  .  .  . / We are the spokes of a single wheel / fanning out / like tongues of molten gold. / Trains and rivers are the way we achieve / the orange’s unmatched oneness.” Embedding objects in an idealized, unalienated human context, which they reflect, the poet defines them in terms of their role within the community. He thereby delineates a position for the members of this collective, who, assisted by requisite modes of interpreting people and things, are responsive to and productive of the objects’ communal functioning. Eating apples, resting on chairs, and reading poems, subjects realize the potential of these objects while substantiating their own being, and enacting their union with one another and things. Proclaiming the resulting structure of social and material relationships an imminent state of sensuous pleasure, justice, and human flourishing, Neruda extends the promise of this well-being to his readers, and invites them to enter the relational dynamic that, the poems imagine, can bring about these achievements. In short, the problem with Neruda’s odes is not a rounding up of everyday objects in their self-evident, indisputable facticity. Something more complex is at hand, something that reaches more deeply into the structure of aesthetic signification. In light of what we have learned about the odes’ aesthetic anatomy, what, exactly, is Neruda’s predicament?

Is the promise a threat? The matching unities the odes set forth give rise to the question of what authorizes the poet to speak for the whole. In her history of Latin American literature of the Cold War era, Jean Franco situates Neruda’s address within a national and transnational matrix of address that communist parties and labor organizations had established in the twentieth century (2002, 57–85). Referring to his Canto General, she mentions the delight Neruda found in reading his work to publics composed of union and party members, and recognizes ways in which these performances affected the rhetoric of his texts (66–7, 74–6). His attempt to prevail over class hurdles and gaps in literacy, and his endeavor to reach audiences made up of workers and peasants, confronted the orator with a task of address. Franco notes that he answered this challenge, in part, by drawing on entrenched forms of popular poetry and familiar oral models. This move, in her reading, enabled him to create “a counterhegemonic common ground between writer and public” (74). Self-invention was another strategy that shaped his address. The seasoned politician and diplomat devised the persona of “a simple and ingenuous man of the people, a people’s poet.”21 Successful as this fantasy may have been in the writer’s hands, Franco observes that with Neruda, the myth of the poet as a public figure “could be carried no further,” and places him at the endpoint of a “totalizing enlightenment narrative of liberation” in Latin America (84, 72). Citing how “universalizing narratives and representations” have become suspect to contemporary readers, she registers an important proviso: “But the heroic ‘I’ of the romantic tradition that unproblematically represented the voiceless did not seem in any way inappropriate

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

17

in the 1950s. In Neruda’s case, it was an essential aspect of his poetics and his contact with a public in readings, in political campaigns, and strike meetings where barriers of class were overcome” (75). Transposing this analysis into a vocabulary of address, we can infer that the politics and aesthetics of class which Neruda’s work enacts in this period centrally engages audience and poet in a pattern of collaborating norms, forms, and scripts of address that invest the writer, perceived in terms of his publicly adopted artistic persona of the common man, with the authority to speak for persons who lack indispensable capacities for political representation.22 Neruda’s modes of address function as elements of and interventions in structures of address (including strike meetings, communist party gatherings, international socialism, among other constellations of aesthetic relationships) that lend his formal stratagems and authorial posture a distinct efficacy. This scheme of address, however, will appear to backfire at the poet who so ingeniously rallies its productivity. The modes of address subtending the poet’s celebrity status undercut the pose of the writer who formulates his vision of the world on behalf of the people. The very forms that support his connections with his various publics simultaneously limit the range of intersubjective alliances that his address acknowledges. What is more, these forms impose restrictions on the scope of objects that enter into the embodied, symbolic bonds agents entertain with the world. Thus, the structure of Neruda’s address belies his prophecy of a consolidated totality encompassing everyone and everything.23 The “Ode to the Table” bears this out. The poems’ prefiguration of communal flourishing, I have argued, hinges on a synoptic model of difference. But this strategy displays a deceptive transparency. Neruda premises the reciprocal mirroring of the particular in the general that we have identified at the levels of subject and object, on a selective principle of differentiation and integration. This plan recognizes subject positions and objects that affirm the possibility and desirability of the ideal of an international association of laborers. However, it skirts fractious elements. Neruda’s vision of aesthetic relationality expunges particularities that contest the projected harmony of the coming society. This deflects his outlook on the totality of people and things. The “Ode to the Table” illustrates how an erasure of disruption fuels the movement between the particular and the general that ripples through the odes, yet preempts the poet’s desired bond with the universal public. In the final stanza of this ode, the metaphor of the table comes to circumscribe a generally accessible site for the declaration of positionality. The activity of sitting down to it to share a meal signifies a moment of accounting for one’s politics: “The table is already set, / and we know the truth / as soon as we are called: / whether we’re called to war or to dinner / we will have to choose sides, / have to know / how we’ll dress / to sit / at the long table, / whether we’ll wear the pants of hate / or the shirt of love, freshly laundered.” The table symbolizes a platform where political differentiation is to be revealed. It represents a meeting place that we can take particular tables to instantiate. The final verses, “It’s time to decide, / they’re calling: / boys and girls, / let’s eat!,” summon the reader to proclaim her or his affiliation. These lines emphasize the immanence of politicization in an embodied, habitual social form. Invoking intimate

18

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

needs for food in tandem with longings for bodily togetherness with others, these verses heighten the political import of what, to many, comprises a prosaic register of everyday existence. The idea of a forum where everyone assumes and pronounces a partisan stance places individuals in an identical relation to the table. But according to this metaphor, who has set the table, grown, sold, and procured the food, cooked the meal? Who will clear off the breadcrumbs and dispose of the apple cores? Who has washed the shirt and will wash it again? Neruda’s poem takes for granted this work. Because he makes no mention of these tasks or of the people who are responsible for them, and because his representations of work tend to privilege masculinized types of labor,24 it is not obvious that these persons enjoy the requisite standing that permits them to sit down to eat at the table, ready to sound their voice, like everyone else. Gaps crop up when we ask how broadly representative the gathering at the table would be. If we wonder how a communal site for self-representation of the sort the poem invites us to imagine could come about, a differential positioning of subjects that precedes the realization of the forum appears to have been elided.25 Inequalities between those members of domestic and public circles who call and are called, provide and are provided for, who are caught in a repetitive temporality of commodified, partly mechanized activities and who are capable of projecting episodes of subjectivity and intersubjectivity that transcend such occupations, detract from the picture of a diverse humanity joined in equivalent or uniform relations to the table, to the sharing of food, and to the corporeal materialization of voices, opinions, and strategies. Alerting us to social, symbolic, and bodily rifts that we enact as participants in formations of address, these asymmetries invite skeptical questions about the tenability and ethical desirability of Neruda’s vision of the commons. What political status does Neruda lend disparities between those who wash shirts and wear them freshly cleaned? How can the table make room for the former group of laborers? In what ways do gulfs among types of work and classes of workers enter into the formulation of positions? How do these divides impact the demands of partisanship? By which means and in what forms do such chasms bear on the availability of political alternatives and choices for which individuals can stand up? The communal scene of accounting represented by the poem is indebted to individuals whose labor is among its preconditions, but whom the interlocutionary scene itself does not necessarily include in its construction of intentional agency, and to whose interests, needs, and choices it may not be responsive. How to dress to take part at the table? How to address, to be addressed? Or to address to signify love or hate? What if one does not know how to address? Or if the means to get one’s address right are not available, perhaps because one does not qualify as one of the boys or girls?26 Where do the codes come from that we will have to master if we “have to know / how we’ll dress / to sit / at the long table?” What if you don’t command the language that allows you to be heard, if the operative aesthetic registers leave you illegible or repulsive, make the food inedible to you, abstract you as a void, or appoint your seat to someone else? Neruda postulates a general and shared forum for political self-assertion that is open to everyone regardless of people’s particular positions. However, the image he offers of the communal platform suggests that not all subjects bear the same relation

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

19

to this place, and that this setting therefore cannot hold a single, generic meaning to everyone. The idea of a general meaning of the table that subsumes all particular meanings comes apart in the poem. The metaphor of the table alludes to particularities that resist being reflected in a generic conception of the object and escape figuration by the system of address encompassing it. The meaning of the table splits into divergent elements. So does the community surrounding it, which partitions into categories of workers, rents along strata of appropriate address, and reveals the coexistence of disjointed, potentially incommensurable systems of address. What Neruda portrays as a general and shared forum, more plausibly, comprises a locus of exclusions that is asymmetrically occupied by multiple constituencies. To have the particular coincide with the general, “The Ode to the Table” asks the reader to ignore divisive particularities. The poem excises specificities that call into question the possibility and desirability of the ideal of an unfragmented humanity. Neruda effaces elements that belie the vision of an open-ended community that convenes in relation to a generically defined object. The ode omits details that raise doubts about the availability of generally accessible registers of symbolic interaction that would give everyone a voice. This authorial and textual act of differentiation undermines Neruda’s claim to the representation of the whole, and precludes his establishing an equitable, homogeneous fabric of connections with the people. Notwithstanding their aesthetic and political centrality to his work and its reception, the interlocutionary conditions in which Neruda used to recite his poetry fail to authorize his site of enunciation, that is, the position of speaking in the name of the people and the objects. The justificatory gap left by the “Ode to Table” exemplifies a broader philosophical problem that invalidates this authorial stance. Culture is a realm in which shared meanings are contingent on the forever mobile boundaries of collectivities within which these meanings are shared. Cultural meanings of objects and places may be held in common by groups of people whose histories and associations with these objects and places have been streamlined, for example, because they grew up on the same street corner, went to the same school, or were hooked to the same TV shows.27 But this kind of collective training only goes so far. It assembles discontinuous elements from the start—street corners, schools, and TV shows are heterogeneous phenomena to those who interact with them, even to one and the same person. Semantic commonalities run into drastic limits. So do the pedagogies inculcating them. And the poetic schemes designed to foster them. A description of the collective cultural meaning of an object presupposes a delimitation of the community in which the person offering the account presumes the object’s shared meaning to be shared. It requires a reigning in of a vast scope of symbolic considerations and embodied states that potentially enter into the stipulation of this meaning. In short, the common demands a framing. It emerges within a structure of address. Indeed, a narrative postulating shared meanings for things requires a structure of address that features a speaker who delineates the common vis-à-vis an implied audience. In attending to this speaker’s utterances, the audience is expected to draw on culturally specific interpretive capacities—a presumptive public must be in command of a language and a practice of reading to which the speaker gears his or her rhetorical endeavor. As they direct their narratives toward audiences composed of addressees

20

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

who satisfy pertinent interpretive conditions, speakers simultaneously set apart subjects who do not fulfill these requirements. Enunciators also distinguish normative recipients of their speech from auditors who are required to make efforts of translation in order to comprehend what is being conveyed. Neruda’s use of Spanish, which fails to reach speakers of Amerindian languages in the same way as speakers of the dominant tongue, exemplifies this correlation between acts of inclusion and differentiation. The poet’s deployment of a particular, in significant respects hegemonic, even if also subaltern, system of address circumscribes his audience; his participation in this template of address both permits and curtails the connections his poetry establishes with its addressees.28 The cultural meanings of concepts and objects depend on formations of address that simultaneously include and set apart or differentiate subject positions. This militates against the possibility of a single, coherent authorial voice that communicates generic meanings of cultural artifacts and subjectivities to a universal public.29 The idea of a speaker who conveys abstract meanings that encompass the different tokens of each type to a potentially fully inclusive assembly is untenable. This project disregards the enabling constraints inherent in the speaker’s and audience’s positionality, which make cultural meaning production possible. Conditions of address render linguistic contents situationally specific and structurally differential in their operations. My intention is to neither deny that terms like “table” or “orange” have common referents and connotations nor that they allow for communication beyond the limits of narrow social groups, but to note that their cultural meanings are contingent on socially emplaced sites of interpretation that are asymmetrically accessible. Yet Neruda imbues his own locutionary standpoint with the authority of a voice that stems from and directs itself at the people, ratifying its status as a communal organ that represents general meanings to a universal collective. This legitimizing strategy is apparent in the “Ode to the Book I,” which offers an authenticating narrative for the writer’s poetics. Neruda locates the origin of his poems in the streets, which he stations at a remove from literate culture. He attributes the lessons that his art imparts to his audience to his life with the people. As the warrant for his poetic address he advances the convivial relation he enjoys with his fellow human beings, and the common ground that emerges in that relation. Book, . . . go back to the library while I go into the streets. I have learned life from life itself, love I learned from a single kiss and I couldn’t teach anything to anyone except what I myself have lived what I had in common with other men, what I struggled for with them: what I expressed from all of us in my song.30

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

21

Neruda informs his readers here that he has cohabited with the people, and corporeally imbibed existential meanings that he shares with them. Ongoing experiential acquaintance, joint activism, and a claiming of solidarity equip him to transmit to other persons lessons that his companions have given him and will again pass on to him, if he joins them (opening “life” when closing the “book,” as the first lines of the poem assert). Nourished by the common ground he treads along with the people, his voice articulates in poetic form what they express, that is, what they explicitly say, as well as what they otherwise give to be understood about themselves. This apologia has lacunae. Which streets did he enter, who kissed him, and what language did the people speak? What is the peculiar power of a single kiss? How far does the writer’s learning, erotic and otherwise, extend beyond singular moments and habitual practices? We are not told what validates the poet’s comprehension and representation of the people’s alleged pronouncements. In fact, this may not be the kind of evidence to which anyone has incontrovertible access. But that means that Neruda’s poem falls short of vindicating his authorial stance. A gap remains in existence between his song and the voice of the people, even if he commits himself to the participatory project of having them be one. Furthermore, if Neruda’s poetry embodies the people’s words, why should these persons listen to him or read his books rather than make love and stay in the streets, formulating their own insights and extracting life’s lessons unfiltered through his writings? And why should the reader seek out Neruda’s art, in addition to the pedagogy of the streets, which instructed him so effectively? How can the poet discern all the people expressed or pass on everything they implicitly or explicitly transmitted about themselves? A number of responses are open at this point. One move would be for Neruda to sanction his mediation of subaltern voices in the name of the people, their viewpoints, voices, and words. Following this line of thought, he might be particularly adept at conveying these elements in a forum where they receive the resonance and leverage they require. Relaying disenfranchised voices in circles outside the reach of the underclasses, Neruda, arguably, can be said to mobilize discounted powers of expression to the people’s benefit. The poet may be able to lend neglected voices an aesthetic poignancy they would otherwise be felt to lack and thereby intensify people’s self-understanding, foster their general will, or heighten their perceptions. Far more detailed justifications readily suggest themselves. However, legitimizations of this sort give rise to the following dilemma. Self-deputized as a spokesperson for the community, a mouthpiece through which the community addresses itself and others, the poet acquires the capacity to turn around this arrangement to license his use of the community as a medium for his own voice.31 The “Ode to a Box of Tea” illustrates this reversal. When the tea box that Neruda has brought home from “Asia” communicates the “lost scent of dreams” to him, we see the writer in sharp control of the multiple stories the object might convey. The souvenir gives expression to his memories of seas, monsoons, and other natural phenomena: “Exquisite / tin box, / oh / how you remind me of / the swell of other seas, / the roar / of / monsoons over Asia / when countries / rock / like ships / at the hands of the wind.” Even as the box is stuffed with Neruda’s collection of buttons, it remains fundamentally distanced, ostensibly stemming from regions beyond what are known to be humanly

22

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

inhabitable locations. “Box of tea / from / elephant country, / . . . / you brought / into the house / a sacred, / unplaceable scent, / as if you had come from another planet. / With you my weary young heart / arrived from far-off places.” Of remote origin, the tea box is not among the objects Neruda scans for signs of workers and farmers who have produced the container or the tea it used to hold, desirous to forge an intimate connection with these persons.32 The ode lifts the box outside the context of sociality. What protects aesthetic relationality against a repressive, narcissistic narrowing of the community and of the objects’ social functioning? How does the poet’s racialized and ethnocentric outlook impact the promise of specific things and people? What of the gendered, heteronormative presuppositions that pervade his writing? Are people and things able to counter pronouncements Neruda articulates for them, addressing messages or voices to him that he does not wish to hear or is unable to decipher? What of viewpoints to which he has no access because he does not speak the language of the people formulating them or is uninitiated into the relevant significatory matrices?33 The poet lends his voice as a prosthesis to the people but thereby does not and cannot surrender his ability to deploy their words as an extension of himself. His overt strategy of legitimization presents others as ventriloquists whose address is mediated by his poetry.34 Yet this grants him the capacity to switch around this ventriloquism by rallying the supposed voice of the people and the objects on his own behalf. His posture as a poet of the people is compatible with the discursive position that allows him to regulate subjects’ and objects’ presumed capacities of address, and to circumscribe the aesthetic promise that appears to inhere in their address. Neruda’s notion of aesthetic relationality masks divisions of power. The poems overlook differentiating forces that could rupture the fabric of relations they set forth. The conviviality the narrator enjoys with the objects and the people is traversed by asymmetries that his egalitarian social and material vision evades. The poet locates his own aesthetic agency and perceptions at the center of his proposed relational order, while praising a diffusely, multiply rooted significatory system that distributes meaning more evenly across its diverse constituents. The reciprocal flow of animation among speaker, things, and people tilts in the direction of the speaker. Yet the promise stands.

The trustworthy, unreliable, future-oriented, and collaborative nature of promises The odes articulate a promise of culture, notwithstanding the difficulties confronting their vision of aesthetic relationality. Neruda offers no guarantee that the promised order of social and material relations will ensue—interpretive and interpretable, creative and receptive, egalitarian and harmonious. Nonetheless, the poems tell us it will. They beckon us (or, more accurately, some of “us,” a subset of actual and potential readers) to believe this and to put our energies behind it. Inviting us to understand the ideal of reciprocal, equally distributed material and intersubjective connectedness as an affirmation of our everyday bonds with others, things, and the environment,

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

23

the odes depict the world in which people enact this telos as an ordinary, ethically praiseworthy state of affairs. The poems thereby exploit the trustworthiness as well as the inescapable unreliability of promising. Promises can be retracted, broken, rewritten, suspended, empty. They are both like and unlike assurances, contracts, commitments, vows, oaths. On the part of a person who makes a nonmendacious promise, this speech act carries the belief that “it is in my power to make this true” and includes the pledge that “I will indeed do what it takes to make this happen.” Yet promises also leave room for the promised deed or event not to actually occur. The belief may be false and the pledge unfulfilled, despite the promisor’s best intentions, self-knowledge, and understanding. Dependability and fallibility often coincide as parameters of rituals we organize around promises that we make to one another. These dimensions also tend to go together in cases in which promises eventuate in the absence of agents who explicitly or implicitly express them. The match promises light to the person who opens the matchbox. The ray of sun that falls on the windowsill promises a warm day. The chair promises a restful moment. Each of these three promises may fail to substantiate. The sulfur may rub off from the wood, a cold front may set in, the seat may buckle under the body’s weight. This, by itself, does not mean that there was no promise.35 A more plausible view is that promising combines elements of calculability with moments of contingency. Neruda’s poems rely on coexisting threads of predictability and fickleness that characterize ordinary kinds of promises. Another feature of promises Neruda uses is their orientation toward the future. As the poems’ cultural promise asserts, an ethically admirable culture will materialize in the lineaments of a field of creative and receptive, interpretive and interpretable relationships transpiring among subjects and objects. These relationships can be expected to arrive on the wings of a love that permeates already existing human bonds. The future-directed orientation of the promise is crucial to this. It is in virtue of the forward-looking character of promising that the poems are able to proclaim ideals of unity and generality, without having to come to terms with certain antagonisms and differences that will have to find a place in the coming community and the struggle leading up to it. The progressive structure of meaning formation and society building Neruda posits passes over the depth of conflict and disagreement; yet the promise remains to a significant extent unencumbered by this because the act of promising is both reliable and unreliable and because it programmatically gestures toward the future. Lastly, Neruda appeals to the collaborative nature of aesthetic promises. Aesthetic promises engage and depend on the reader’s cooperation for their formation and realization. The odes are able to extend a promise of culture, not because it is in the reader’s or Neruda’s capacity to actualize this promise, but because the works recruit the reader to do so, enlisting her agency along with a vast array of contingent cultural conditions of possibility. If the elemental odes, as I have argued, embody the cultural promise of the aesthetic, this means that behind this promise, as articulated by Neruda, lurks a threat, a pledge to aestheticize a world in which certain differences are precluded from making the difference they ought to make. For the world in which discrepancies between

24

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

supplying and being supplied with, supporting and being supported by, being capable and incapable of addressing or being addressed, do not consistently factor into the politics of self-avowal and public position-taking is a world that obfuscates ethically poignant distinctions. There is another sense in which Neruda’s conception of aesthetic relationality suppresses difference. Modes of address we adopt carry traces of uneven positions that we occupy within existing orders of address. Discontinuities of address, consequently, mark the threads of reciprocal animation that we are able to initiate and carry forth. In eliding such asymmetries, Neruda’s model of aesthetic relationality ignores rifts pervading symbolically mediated bonds among people and among people and other entities. As Barbara Johnson reveals, rounds of animation that apostrophe projects among subject, object, life, and death, display reversible orientations in the male lyric tradition harboring Baudelaire and Shelley, which also includes Neruda. Assuming the metaphorical role of or occupying the unconscious place of a child that calls on a presumptive mother to satisfy its desire for increased aliveness, masculine narrators whom these writers create, in Johnson’s reading, can quite freely engender rhetorical acts of animation and relish the nurturing effects these poetic gestures accomplish. However, the oeuvres of Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, and Adrienne Rich feature poems that evince a different organization of address. Johnson examines work by these female authors on the themes of abortion, the death of infants, and women’s struggle to combine child-rearing responsibilities with the wish to make art. The reciprocal cycles of signification that are a recurrent presence in lyrical poems created by men, unravel when women poets use first- or third-person protagonists to delineate positions of actual mothers who contend with the weight of the (lost) lives of their real, potential, and figurative children. Texts of this latter sort, Johnson argues, tend to exhibit collapsing oppositions between subject and object, life and death, voice and voicelessness. These verses juggle impossible distinctions as they explore connections that mothers sustain with dead children or with children whose needs supersede maternal longings for other types of creative work. Consequently, poems of this kind occasion unstable textures of address. Johnson observes how these writings stage eclipsed, self-distanced, and splitting speakers who become conflated with their addressees or merge with inanimate matter. In women’s poems about abortion, she notes, “‘saying what one means’ can be done only by ellipsis, violence, illogic, transgression, silence” (1987a, 194). Moments of animation, in this body of work, accordingly, mingle with such chasms of address. The program of aesthetic creation and reception that purports to institute mutually cultivating ties among subjects, and subjects and objects, runs amok in confrontation with speakers who were expected to, but have failed to bring to life other human beings, who are impelled to keep alive entities that undermine their own standing as subjects, or who are caught in double binds between their tasks as mothers and artists. When male lyricists seek animation from the external world, and when Aristotle and Quintilian commend that the orator animate lifeless objects to induce liveliness or persuasion, they enact scripts of address and install norms of address that inscribe sexual as well as other, interwoven forms of difference.36

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

25

More generally, modes of address function as elements of structures of address that support stratagems of power and realize typologies of social being. The encounter of modes of address with existing patterns of address that implement schemes of production, consumption, and interpretation comprises a vibrant locus of possibility. Yet, this site also remains beholden to structural constraints undergirding our interactions with persons and things. Neruda’s image of aesthetic collectivity overstates the fluidity with which episodes in the fabrication, transmission, and uptake of objects synchronize with one another to generate intersubjective affiliations. Apostrophic address rallies absences, presences, separations, bonds, twists, losses, and strains that exceed the movements of loving reciprocity sparked by the odes, reflecting the workings of already established matrices of address within which occurrent forms of address take effect.

Promises, threats, relationality, and address Equality, concord, and an egalitarian material culture prove to be more elusive than Neruda’s rhetoric of unity and affiliation attests. In line with the philosophical tradition in aesthetics, presided over by Hume and Kant, the poet idealizes a model of publicity the grounds for which he leaves insufficiently substantiated. Here we arrive at the queries at the center of this book. How can we account for the ties of the aesthetic with injustice and hierarchy, as well as for its importance to desire, sociality, and meaning? What are we to make of the aesthetic’s participation in patterns of social difference and antagonism, of collectivity and agency? What place should we give its connections with power, publicity, and possibility? These dilemmas require an alternative conceptualization of the aesthetic. I turn to the notions of promising, relationality, and address to lay the grounds for this understanding. Promises and threats, as my discussion of Neruda’s elemental odes indicates, emerge in the context of structures of address and relationship in which they also intervene. We organize our aesthetic relationships, in part, around promises and threats that we discern and lend multisensory, intercorporeal forms of articulation. Many are the ways in which we endeavor to put into effect and fulfill such pledges and menaces, or, as the case may be, try to undermine, abandon, and alter them. Undertaking aesthetic activities and projects—as we do in virtually all realms of life—we juggle tensions between promises and threats. Both states may subtract from one another. Threats and promises often render one another less convincing or credible. They can announce a need for supplementary threats or promises. They are able to hedge or qualify one another. They regularly point up gaps of believability and feasibility as well as ethical deficiencies and political shortcomings. All the same, they do not necessarily disband one another. This is not to say that individual aesthetic promises and threats remain fixed and stable. To the contrary, they are in ongoing motion. Promises and threats fizzle out, undergo revision, and vanish. New promises and threats come into existence as we embark on alternative forms of relationality and address. The orbit of promises and threats constitutes a turbulent domain of sensibility and affect. It marks a volatile field of formal and semantic developments. This sphere

26

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

exerts a wide reach: aesthetic agents and subjects of culture, we substantially shape our experiences, judgments, and actions, in engagement with promises and threats that we both embody and encounter in other people and our environments. It is as an integral dimension of this vast realm of meaning that aesthetic life acquires its tumultuousness and runs into limits. The cultural promise of the aesthetic represents one type of aesthetic promises in which many of us are invested. It coexists with aesthetic promises of other sorts. It also admits of a variety of promises of culture that it may subsume under its kind. Different promises (and threats) operate at different levels of address and relationality. In fact, promises (and threats) are modes of address and relationship. The three central notions that this book expounds lie at the core of our functioning as embodied agents and of the collective (asymmetrically inhabitable) forms we assemble under the heading of culture. We often understand promises on a model of individual authorship. This helps to illuminate, for instance, what will likely transpire between us when I (non-jokingly, non-make believe, non-citationally, sans duress, with a certain amount of lucidity—the list goes on) announce to you, “Hereby I promise that I will offer you a fresh apricot this afternoon.” I really wish to give it to you; I utter recognizable signs that not only declare my intent but also commit myself to carrying out the deed I have announced; now you can reasonably expect me to do as I said I would, counting on cooperating circumstances, and barring contravening conditions. Some of these conditions are likely to concern our respective histories and positions in space and time, and the bounds of your credulity and my credibility. This kind of scenario of address and relationship significantly informs our living with a host of aesthetic promises (and threats). Scripts of this sort encode influential plans and protocols of aesthetic exchange. Aesthetic commitments that we make to one another in the form of promises and threats comprise a pivotal part of material culture. For instance, they contribute to our feeding ourselves and other people (or not), to our finding shelter (or failing to do so), and to the creation of spaces for companionship (or our suffering a dearth of sustaining alliances with others). They undergird crucial modes of nourishment and devastating forms of depletion. Yet the vicissitudes of the aesthetic also call for another paradigm of promising. Promises can assume an impersonal character that spreads beyond the contours of individual agency. To see this, it helps to set aside the focus on intention and on terms of success or failure, which tend to gain prominence within person-bound approaches to the promise. Think of the countless things that are promising even in the absence of or at a remove from an agent who makes an explicit promise. Examples of this occur with great frequency: the apricot I am about to hand you promises you a soft touch or a succulent bite. We inform one another of favorable prospects that we anticipate by referring to the promise of spring, of peace, of learning. A storm can offer a promise or pose a threat of lightening. Conflicts can threaten to erupt into violence, or promise a trajectory of development toward enlarged understanding. Instead of promising you a sweet fragrance or a tangy, squashy sensation in your mouth, the apricot I pledge to give you, may, in truth, threaten you with allergic reactions, nausea, an unwanted debt to a self-serving donor, or an unsolicited involvement in a despised sector of the

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

27

food industry. Or it may extend some promises in addition to a catalog of threats. Gulfs often stretch out between promises made by a promisor and those made by a promised object. Rather than locating promises (and threats) for the most part in individuals who offer them, this brief assembly of cases hints at a model that embeds these modes of address and relation in expansive constellations of interacting subjects, objects, and situations. This latter paradigm of promises and threats grounds these states in broadly conceived structures of relationship and address. It is this scheme that turns out to have a peculiar relevance for aesthetics. Aesthetic promises function as elements of and interventions in structures of relationality and address. We have observed this in the case of the elemental odes. The a-personal mold of promising that the poems exemplify translates across numerous contexts, a range of which we will consider in building our understanding of the cultural promise of the aesthetic.37 In investigating the operations of the core triad that I advance in this book, my objective is not to give an exhaustive analysis of each of the leading concepts. Rather, my aim is to establish a working understanding of the three basic notions and their connections with one another. I defend their resourcefulness in light of problems in which the aesthetic is enmeshed, and with respect to queries about subjectivity and culture that these conundrums provoke. I illuminate their pertinence to aesthetic projects and agendas. More will have to be said about our triumvirate than I do in this book. Comprehensiveness out of reach, my more minimal, more urgent goal is to bring into view the prolific productivity our triplet displays when mobilized in response to considerations of social difference. I recruit the three notions in a frame of analysis that clarifies material orders around which we shape evolving forms of agency, at once individual and social. The three principal terms permit us to elucidate trajectories of subjectivation and interaction that we comprehend under the rubric of culture. We will see my key concepts at work in art, everyday life, and an array of aesthetic constellations put forth by influential thinkers in the history of aesthetics. The instances I will investigate in these interrelated domains—art, theory, and quotidian existence—show the aesthetic to be enmeshed in difficulties. By highlighting how aesthetic practices—understood in terms of the promise, address, and relationality— nonetheless prove to be indispensable to our critical engagement with and overcoming of these plights, I make a new case for the importance of the aesthetic. One reason for embarking on this endeavor is to offer a reply to the current aesthetic/anti-aesthetic debate, and to illuminate the present state of aesthetic theorizing and practice, which displays a convergence of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic orientations. Critical analyses of the aesthetic have philosophical implications that are to be explored further and funneled in directions that have remained unexamined. At the same time, the aesthetic sphere has always staged conflicts over the boundaries of cultural practices, clashes that have featured anti-aesthetic tendencies. To the extent that these predilections realize an antithetical momentum, in exercising acts of opposition or negation, they remain inexorably entwined with aesthetic elements.38 The aesthetic has a vast capacity to absorb anti-aesthetic proclivities, to assimilate nonaesthetic phenomena, and to engender movements that direct themselves against, veer away from, and reorient constellations it has precipitated. Accordingly, scholars

28

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

have not yet adequately spelled out the range of philosophical options proliferating in the area of intermingling aesthetic, anti-aesthetic, and nonaesthetic strategies and dimensions. Aesthetic perplexities surrounding questions of difference are often set aside hastily, or all too rapidly granted philosophical resolution. I pick up these threads and steer them elsewhere. At the same time, the controversy over the anti-aesthetic and its putative supersession by newly emerging aesthetic paradigms, or by ventures to move beyond oppositions between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic does not supply the pivot for the current inquiry. My guiding project is to lay out a framework for an alternative account of the aesthetic, which I do by way of the three fundamental notions, those of promising, address, and relationality. I show how this triplet casts the concept of the aesthetic in a novel light. This will allow us to reframe certain queries. Puzzles about the status of the aesthetic, arguably, are among them. Crisp distinctions between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic are out of reach; the non-aesthetic is not readily identifiable. Indeed, both critiques and defenses of aesthetic constellations, in the book’s account of promises and threats, will turn out to be never-ending enterprises. Consequently, challenges as well as vindications of aesthetic formations can be expected to keep springing up. Such polemics are there to stay around. They will inevitably move to different arenas, but are not likely to go away. This should not come as a surprise. Antagonism inheres in the field of cultural production. As philosophers, artists, and builders of everyday life worlds, many of us commit ourselves to devising morally, politically, and aesthetically desirable strata of culture. Even in working to advance these ends, we frequently bolster, leave uncontested, or instigate hurdles that hinder movements along lines we envision, thus stumbling upon blockages of which it is necessary to take note. Indeed, aesthetic practices often prompt ways of brushing against the grain of established cartographies, stirring publics, as Neruda’s poems set out to do, to transfigure plans of action and experience. But while aesthetic undertakings regularly overturn given social delineations, they typically also observe parameters of address and nonaddress, addressability and unaddressability, form and formlessness. They implement registers of seeing and being seen, touchability and untouchability, mobility and stagnation, signal and noise, delight and displeasure.39 They lock into regimes of taste and tastelessness, disgust and delectation, liberation and confinement, culture and archaism. These contrastive modalities systemically align subjects with intersecting social categories. The semantic schemata that inform such organizational procedures channel powerful forces of aesthetic regulation, differentiation, and identification. These disciplinary operations attain a restless dynamism that is yet to fully register its presence in the idea of the aesthetic. But they also reveal a historicity and a stubborn tenacity that clamor for a tenable place in an account of aesthetic agency and meaning. So how do unsettlement and continuity, contestation and common ground, go together in aesthetic territory?

2

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

The web of relationships we inhabit with one another and the material world immerses us in fine-grained enmeshments of aesthetic experience and race. It mobilizes schemata of aestheticization that implement racializing forms. It also activates plans of racialization that realize aestheticizing designs. I call these two pathways crossing the nexus of aesthetics and race, aesthetic racialization (aesthetic stratagems support racial registers), and racialized aestheticization (racial templates support aesthetic modalities). By examining how our relationships unfold along these dual, yet connected, trajectories we spin from intertwining aesthetic and racial threads, it is possible to elucidate patterns of relationality and to probe structures of aesthetic experience. This chapter locates routes of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization in models of aesthetic relationships Hume and Kant envisage among agents, and among agents and objects. Contemporary artists and theorists reiterate as well as contest aesthetic structures in which the two philosophers enlist both itineraries. I will indicate how several twentieth-century cultural productions generate novel frames of relationality and address, put into effect alternative aesthetic promises, and emphasize underexplored aesthetic threats, while also rallying traditional racial configurations. These works of art and theory implicitly attest to possibilities as well as limitations embedded in strategies to reaestheticize given relational systems. Suffusing matrices of promises and threats, of address and relationality, aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization occasion shifting entwinements of aesthetics and race. Participants in webs of address and relationship, we weave promises and threats through our experiences. We occupy strata of aesthetic meaning that take on admirable as well as discreditable orientations. Modalities of race play a prominent systemic role as elements of such constellations. Race and aesthetics saturate one another so thoroughly that aesthetic practices, typically, amount to racial phenomena, and racial molds comprise aesthetic parameters. Comprehending the workings of the aesthetic, consequently, involves clarifying ways in which schemes of aesthetic exchange channel racial passions, perceptions, and values. Correlatively, to account for the nature of race and racism, at macro- and micro-scales of social organization, in the orbits of the

30

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

personal and the impersonal, we must take note of the place the aesthetic assumes in processes of racialization. In forging a framework for analysis that bears out these insights, my focus will be on figurations of whiteness and blackness. By locating lines of racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization in webs of aesthetic relationships, we can begin to recognize how aestheticized and aestheticizing dimensions of whiteness and blackness put into play intersecting categories of subjectivity and sociality, such as class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and coloniality.1 Activating markers of identity and difference, aesthetic constructions of whiteness and blackness implicate not only one another, but also encode fields of agency and experience comprehended as Native American, Asian, Latin American, Arab, Jewish, multiracial, and cosmopolitan. The lists go on. The concept of aesthetic relationality calls attention to the prolific ties connecting modes of aesthetic signification with patterns of social positioning. It is in the plane of aesthetic relationships that we can make visible how stretches of subjectivity, identity, and culture promulgate aesthetic designs, and how aesthetic orders enact blueprints of social agency. At the same time, inquiries into aesthetic relationality alert us to possibilities for alternative alignments of aesthetic and racial subjectivity. They enable us to expose aesthetic formations as technologies that must be retooled, as devices for shaping and reshaping racial constellations that reach into the minutiae as well as the broader outlines of our lives.

Enlightenment orders of whiteness and blackness Under the rubric of taste, Hume and Kant devise systems of publicity that assign disparate positions to whites and blacks, organizing planes of relationality and address, of promise and threat, around paths of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization. Following these trajectories will throw light on the workings of fundamental concepts and principles structuring the aesthetic field. Both philosophers aestheticize whiteness. Hume and Kant propose models of relationality that enlist the aesthetic in the service of white processes of cultivation and construe whiteness as an aesthetic achievement. Mobilizing aesthetic elements toward white cultural goals defined in opposition to blackness, these relational models issue a promise: they yield the prospect of a white culture that is free from blackness. Aesthetic racialization rushes through the conduits of relationality as these theorists conscript aesthetic passions and exchanges in a project of white culture building that distances blackness. Correlatively, racialized aestheticization inundates relational passageways as these philosophers hold up as aesthetic, schemes of creation, perception, and interaction that advance white subjectivity, while pronouncing modes of experience and agency that support black subjectivity to be uncultivated and lacking in taste. Leading the aesthetic away from blackness and ushering it toward white cultural aims, Hume and Kant racialize it as white. Whiteness, for them, presents an aesthetic promise that blackness withholds; blackness constitutes an aesthetic threat.

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

31

Race and taste in Hume’s philosophy of culture Racialized aestheticization, for Hume, initially winds through the differential distribution, structure, and functioning that he attributes to the faculty of taste. Aesthetic racialization emanates from the cultivating effects that taste, subsequently, holds out to individuals and nations. Locking into preliminary social asymmetries embedded in the faculty’s availability, taste’s civilizational functions invest the propensity then with a desirability that spurs further rounds of racialized aestheticization. Hume enlists racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization in close collaboration. Both phenomena inhere in connections between taste and reason and between taste and the appropriate management of the passions. A tasteful disposition recruits adequate combinations of rationality and passion, which it also ignites. By exploring how taste’s ties to reason coil into its links with the passions only to furl back into reason’s compass, securing endless spirals of aestheticization and racialization, we can begin to uncover Hume’s model of aesthetic relationality. Allied with reason, taste stretches extensively across Hume’s philosophical anthropology. He considers the exercise of reason a component of taste’s workings.2 Possession of a high degree of reason, however, is the prerogative of white, middle-class, European men. Black men and women, white women, and working-class or “common” white men count as inferior in rationality.3 Given the prominent part reason plays in taste’s operations, deficient rational capacities translate into a diminished taste. Hume reserves true taste for white, European, middle-class men who go through a requisite process of cultivation, involving practice, the making of comparisons, and a freeing from prejudice (ST, 143–7). Indeed, he labels aesthetic preferences and pleasures that he ascribes to peasants, Indians, workers, and middle-class women, among other things, “course,” “vulgar,” “disagreeable,” “insipid,” “obvious,” “idle,” “harsh,” “uninteresting,” and “trifling” (ST, 144; SR, 43; EW, 1; SH, 97; RA, 174–5). Hume conditions aesthetic relationality yet more embracingly by diversifying the realm of deficient taste. He accords “women of sense and education” a restricted form of taste (EW, 3). In light of his pejorative conceptions of blacks and members of the lower classes, his reservations about aristocrats, and the appreciation he expresses for France and Britain (RA, 174–5; OC, 162–5; NC, 114, 118–21), this designation must be taken to apply to French or British middle-class women.4 Whereas white middle-class men’s taste ranges over all sources of beauty and deformity, including, in particular, artworks and other cultural achievements (“works of genius”), the taste of sensible and educated women confines itself to objects and practices in their immediate surroundings (EW, 1). A distinctive structure differentiates this type of taste from that of white men. Contrary to the latter, white women’s taste is not guided by rules (3). It is sensitive to perversion by women’s “tender and amorous disposition” (4), a disposition that, in Hume’s assessment, can legitimately affect young, white men’s aesthetic judgments without betraying a distorted taste (ST, 150). Notwithstanding female taste’s tendency to slide into degeneracy, white women excel in two limited aesthetic domains. One is the genre labeled “polite writings” (EW, 3), which includes novels; the other resides in

32

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

the conduct of the domestic sphere, which encompasses “the ornaments of life, of dress, equipage, and the ordinary decencies of behaviour” (DTP, 345, textual variant, 1741–70 editions). Hume lends taste an intricate gender composition, organizes it in terms of class, and interweaves it with race. Taste’s gendering and class-inflection informs its specific racialized and racializing constitution; its racial character is determinative of its gender- and class makeup. While white women are able to attain a special, limited sort of taste, black men and women do not seem to be allotted any degree of taste and, furthermore, are denied the possibility of acquiring it. Although an empiricist, Hume notoriously considers blacks “naturally inferior” to whites. Black nations, in his view, have not attained civilization, arts, or sciences. He dismisses the idea that a black man might qualify as “a man of parts and learning” (NC, 306n. 120). The philosopher excludes blacks thus not only from taste but also from the possibility of aesthetic education. He reserves taste for white, middle-class males, and in a diminished variety, for a narrow group of white women. An uneven distribution of reason occasions an inegalitarian allocation of taste. More than that, it effects an implicit coding of taste in terms of social difference. Racialized aestheticization courses through the circuits of relationality. Grounding this force initially in the affiliation between taste and reason, Hume carries it further by corralling the passions into taste’s rein, which occasions an influx of aesthetic racialization, in the following way. In Hume’s analysis, taste prompts civilization through its power over the passions.5 Delicacy of sentiment, the central ingredient of taste, serves as a source of emotional regulation by inhibiting an affective disposition, called delicacy of passion. This latter proclivity consists in a sensitivity to the “good or ill accidents of life,” such as small injuries, favors, mishaps, and good fortune (DTP, 10–11). Rendering us vulnerable to an undue degree of emotionality that hinders “the right enjoyment” of things (10), this sensibility is to be kept in check. Delicacy of sentiment, and, hence, a refined taste, for Hume, comprises our single and most proper way of curtailing delicacy of passion (11). Clearing away emotional obstacles to fitting enjoyment, taste represents a vital motor for the development of honorable, affectively calibrated, white personhood. The pedagogy of taste conscripts an even broader repertoire of strategies of emotional regulation toward the accomplishment of white moral and social agency. Hume identifies five methods by which taste can achieve a suitable organization of the passions, etching the insignia of the aesthetic into a subject’s character and relational comportment: the faculty corrects and refines emotions, renders them liable to the agent’s control, gears them toward a respectable kind of happiness, and toward enhanced sociability. Each of these effects fuels civilization.6 Taste’s differential allocation, consequently, carries over into a lopsided distribution of civilizing stature. The racialization of taste proliferates in the plane of the collective. Taste supports the cultivation of white, middle-class subjects, and at the communal level, bolsters white civil society. Racialized aestheticization (the racial exclusiveness of taste) fosters aesthetic racialization (the racially exclusive civilized standing generated by way of taste). A closer look at taste’s methods of emotional regulation illuminates the farreaching aesthetic powers Hume directs toward the advancement of white civilized

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

33

existence. Taste’s distinct effects on the passions take the following forms: (1) By “cultivating a relish in the liberal arts,” the individual is able to strengthen his judgment. Equipped with “juster notions of life,” the man of taste averts his attention from “many things which please or afflict others” (DTP, 12), and, instead, focuses on what truly matters. Adjusting a person’s sensitivity to his proper insights into life, taste, accordingly, corrects excessive passion. (2) The faculty of taste brings the passions under control by enabling the man of taste to take his happiness in his own hands. Hume believes “we are pretty much masters of what books we shall read, what diversions we shall partake of, and what company we shall keep” (11). The exercise of taste, accordingly, instills a controlled state of happiness that endows the subject with an optimal level of personal autonomy. (3) Taste encourages a virtuous sort of happiness. In Hume’s view, the man of taste “is more happy by what pleases his taste, than by what gratifies his appetites, and receives more enjoyment from a poem, or a piece of reasoning, than the most expensive luxury can afford” (11). This shift in affect and desire produces a morally praiseworthy state of affairs, one that everyone would prefer “when everything is balanced” (10), and to which every wise man aspires (11). Hence, morality and pleasure issue jointly under taste’s salutary influence. (4) Taste refines passion: “[A cultivated taste] . . . improves our sensibility for all the tender and agreeable passions; at the same time that it renders the mind incapable of the rougher and more boisterous emotions.”7 Hume notes that the study of “beauties” (read: aesthetically good works of art and other cultural productions) improves the temper and provokes “a certain elegance of sentiment to which the rest of mankind are strangers. The emotions which they excite are soft and tender” (DTP, 12). Facilitating the cultivation of estimable emotions and reducing reproachable feelings, taste improves the passions. (5) Yet more specifically, taste promotes passions that are productive of proper social bonds. Thereby it refines social life. Hume claims that the apprehension of, for example, poetry, music, and painting, produces “an agreeable melancholy, which, of all dispositions of the mind, is the best suited to love and friendship” (ibid.). A further way in which taste inspires fitting social passions is by enabling the man of taste to arrive at precise and detailed discriminations of other people’s characters (11–13). Under taste’s beneficial influence, the man of taste, consequently, complements his delicate sentiment with an appropriately tempered sensitivity to passion, and an enhanced social sensibility, which we can call delicacy of socialization. Taste deepens love and friendship by “confining our choice to few people, and making us indifferent to the company and conversation of the greater part of men” (12). This, again, results in refinement, burnishing the tasteful person’s affective and social comportment: One that has well digested his knowledge both of books and men, has little enjoyment but in the company of a few select companions. He feels too sensibly, how much all the rest of mankind fall short of the notions which he has entertained. And, his affections being thus confined within a narrow circle, no wonder he carries them further than if they were more general and undistinguished. The gaiety and frolic of a bottle companion improves with him into a solid friendship; and the ardors of a youthful appetite become an elegant passion. (13)

34

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Training the passions, taste instigates appropriate social bonds while eroding less suitable affiliations.8 Guiding individuals toward a properly managed and refined set of passions, as well as a fitting social circle, taste endows them with a high degree of civilization. Cultivation, in this view, constitutes an aesthetic process, differentially realized and apportioned by taste. An aesthetic practice and artifact, culture comprises a racial order and pedagogy. In this scheme of relationality, white, middle-class men seek out one another’s company to encounter, in the ensuing camaraderie, a rapport that fuses moral and personal edification with gratification. Racialized aestheticization (taste’s racialized character) supports aesthetic racialization (white civilization as structured, produced, and enjoyed by way of taste). Both principles permeate the finegrained ligaments of our relational being. Emblems of the aesthetic mushroom across the field of human interaction. At this point, Hume is able to motivate the acquisition of taste as well as the subject’s engagement with artworks by their roles in the civilizing project. Aspirations to white cultivation and impulses to withdraw from blackness provide incentives for the subject’s embrace of art and for his pursuit of taste. A further kind of racialized aestheticization surges here, funneling additional lines of support that racial arrangements contribute to aesthetic structures. Taste derives allure from the white cultural goals it advances. Hume renders the aesthetic desirable on account of its civilizing effects. Racialized aestheticization resides then in the first instance, in the cultural differentiations built into the notion of taste (through the link with reason), and in the second instance, in the significance and attractiveness taste derives from its cultivating labors (its affective and social impact). Reverberating throughout Hume’s social and political philosophy, the faculty of taste casts its whitening influence yet more widely. The civilizing activities this aesthetic proficiency spearheads make their presence felt in the realm of the nation, to whose benefit taste advances knowledge, productivity, pleasure, and the quality of social life. Construing domains of taste such as luxury, refinement, and progress in the arts as integral determinants of the state’s economic and political well-being, Hume invests the faculty of taste with a culture-building propensity that he places at the source of what he calls “humanity.” Aesthetic racialization molds the body of the nation. This program puts into action a copious assortment of developmental mechanisms. The markings of the aesthetic take root in a plethora of human occupations. In Hume’s assessment, the arts of luxury and the liberal arts draw on the presence of refined taste or sentiment.9 The resulting refinement in the arts and in the gratification of the senses is responsible for four humanizing functions. These offices carve out iterative channels of aesthetic racialization, submerging relationality in ever more sweeping swells of aesthetics and race. They take the following forms. One, refined aptitudes in the sphere of art and the senses stimulate human activity and productivity. They not only counteract laziness (an overdose of indolence, idleness, sloth and repose [RA, 168–9, 177]), but also cause us to find greater happiness in our work. Relatedly, they permit us to keep desire and gratification within the bounds of “true” and proper pleasure (168–70). Consequently, they engender a degree of virtue that is exemplary of civilized society. Two, refinements in the arts strengthen our rational capabilities by offering opportunities for the exercise and honing of reason (171). Prompting curiosity,

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

35

they invigorate the mind (168–72). Three, refinement washing through the domain of the arts sparks conversation, sociability, and interaction among men and women, which has the benefit of softening men’s temper.10 Four, refinement incites increasing refinement, propelling itself to unmatched heights. An important factor in this process is the cultivating impact of the “taste, genius, and spirit . . . of a whole people” (RP, 59). Hume postulates a “spirit of the age” in which the arts mutually enhance one another.11 Refinement accelerates, fanning out largely among those subjects who are genuinely capable of it, that is, among white upper/middle-class men, but spreading also, more guardedly, among these men and their white, female, social companions. These four interacting types of refinement accomplish an advance in humanity, which, for Hume, is the mark that distinguishes polished societies from barbarous and rude nations, signaling a decidedly racialized global order (RA, 168–71, 174). A vibrant public sphere emerges within the nation (RA, 168–71). The precinct of “public liberty” expands (174–5). The aesthetic is omnipresent as a sign of potential cultural goodness and deficiency. Taste offers vital impulses to the human excellence Hume institutes at the center of civilization. Aesthetic racialization pervades international rankings, national culture, the sphere of publicity, and the state’s presumed quality of humanity. Its energies suffuse not only constellations of reason and passion, but also arrangements of work, productivity, happiness, virtue, sociability, and sexuality. Flooding cultural life with aesthetic racialization, Hume swamps vast relational territories in projects of micro-aestheticization that also constitute ventures of micro-racialization. Promises abound in the aesthetic arena Hume pictures. Taste shapes laudable and covetable states of affect and pleasure, of activity and passivity. Capacities for reason and social judgment sharpen in its presence. Sophisticated relationships sprout. Members of the white middle class attain befitting forms of socialization and humanization. The nation enjoys mounting levels of productivity, happiness, virtue, and freedom. Appropriate kinds of cultural production, exchange, and interaction come to fruition. Homosocial bonds blossom among tasteful white men, who develop cultivated and cultivating attachments to one another that find sustenance in artworks and quotidian aesthetic activities. Heterosexual bonds thrive on a mutually civilizing companionship these men enjoy with white women, who apply their softening influence to male tempers and rational minds.12 Suitable female conversationalists permit male associates to improve their taste and manners, to connect with the world, and to warm their hearts.13 Exposed to cultivating dispensations proffered by women interlocutors (EW, 1, 5; RA, 169; RP, 74; SH, 97), men return the favor by furnishing their female discussion partners with reason, knowledge, and gallantry.14 Taste engenders cultivation by nurturing appropriate affective and aesthetic affiliations among white men and women.15 A bearer of civilizatory progress, taste holds out lavish promises. Jointly, these promises enact a promise of culture that Hume ascribes to the aesthetic. Aesthetic racialization suffuses taste’s relational undertakings. Hume aestheticizes white agency and collectivity. Steadily widening helixes of racialization branch out from racialized aestheticization (the whitening of taste), while also fuelling such processes (effecting a whitening of culture). Taste’s prolific civilizing labors boost its desirability and commendability. Relaying passions and experiences that are oriented

36

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

toward whiteness and against blackness, this aesthetic aptitude exhibits a racial profile: its acquisition and exercise fulfill desires for whiteness and satisfy impulses to get away from blackness, which is conceived of as antithetical to taste’s telos. Taste promises white culture; whiteness promises taste. Absent the cultivating company of tasteful white men and women, and lacking, also, the requisite degree of reason, which, I have indicated, underwrites taste, blacks stand apart from the civilizing process taste makes available to certain whites. Hume locates black men and women outside the aesthetic dynamic that he takes to be productive of civilization; they have no place in the white, homosocial, and heterosexual arrangement that exemplifies good taste. Their engagement with art and other aesthetic objects fails to kindle this propensity. Moral, epistemic, affective, and aesthetic refinement circulates among white men and women. The cultural project with which Hume entrusts taste demands that blacks keep at a remove from the relevant affective and aesthetic bonds.16 Blackness represents an aesthetic threat, imperiling culture. Sluicing racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization through the relational anatomy he charts, Hume installs the aesthetic promise of whiteness, the threat of blackness, and the cultural promise of the aesthetic at the heart of the cultural order he envisages.

Race and taste in Kant’s philosophy of culture Immanuel Kant’s account of aesthetic relationality in The Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime significantly parallels Hume’s, before taking a further turn in the Critique of Judgment. Making reference to his predecessor, Kant stresses the inferiority of black people’s mental capacities (1960, 110–11, 113). More than that, he pronounces black people incapable of more than trifling feelings (110). Given that taste constitutes a faculty of fine feeling (46), blacks would seem to have to forgo any taste.17 Kant orchestrates a web of relationships around flows of moral, epistemic, affective, and aesthetic goods circulating among certain white, middle-class agents. Suitably disposed men thereby offer women nobility, sublimity, and insight (95, 102n.), which alleviates female rational deficiency (94). Women reciprocate with complaisance and beauty, which enhances male gentleness, politeness, and refinement (95–6, 102n.). Kant closes off such exchanges to blacks. The relevant interactions grant some room to persons identified by other nonnormative racial and ethnic characteristics, who presumably do a bit better in the realm of fine feeling than blacks. Cataloguing a variety of tastes from the standpoint of the ethnographer who unabashedly takes himself to be cognizant of the true and the false in the aesthetic realm, Kant tells us about Spain’s odd taste; the unnatural and distorting effects of the Arab’s “inflamed imagination;” the Chinese fondness for “trifling grotesqueries.” India, in his eyes, likewise, evinces a predilection for the grotesque. The feelings of the Arabs and the Japanese show elements of degeneracy. The prospect of encountering fine feeling in almost any East-Asian country and many American Indian peoples must be considered dim.18 The diminished species of taste Kant attributes to a wide range of non-European and some European populations would seem to allow persons of these races and ethnicities to have some limited presence within the threads of properly aesthetic relationality he embroiders around privileged Europeans. Nonetheless, Kant

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

37

champions an aestheticization of normatively white cultural forms, and propounds a racialized and ethnically delimited paradigm of taste. The aesthetic promises a white species of cultivation; certain kinds of whiteness promise taste. Kant forges routes of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization that are familiar from Hume. Yet he also exceeds the earlier repertoire. This is evident in his equivocal treatment of culture. While he posits ties between taste and cultural propensities that are attendant upon education and class-position,19 he refrains from giving such links an explicit place in his critical view of taste’s conditions of possibility.20 The Critique of Judgment grounds the general validity of true judgments of taste in the postulate of a common sense, that is, in cognitive faculties human beings can be assumed to share (1951, pars 19–22; 40). These faculties comprise natural dispositions for Kant. Contesting this point in readings of cultural dimensions of the relevant propensities, theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu (1995), Richard Shusterman (1993), Sylvia Wynter (1992), and Carolyn Korsmeyer (1998, 150–1), among others, argue that this approach falsely universalizes appreciative conditions and values associated with educated, leisured, white, socially quiescent, masculine, middle-class subject-positions. The Critique’s continued deployment of unfounded cross-cultural comparisons stands out in this light. Upon Kant’s shift to transcendental philosophy, cultural difference has not ceased to inform his hierarchy of variable tastes. For example, declaring aesthetic judgments guided by charm and emotion “barbarous,” he sets them apart from the domain of proper culture (1951, par. 13). Sensation turns out to be a more substantial factor in the aesthetic attractions of Caribs and Iroquois, than in the experiences of observers at higher stages of civilization (par. 41). Figures of American Indians and non-Europeans regularly denote observers whose perceptions fall short of the properly aesthetic, such as the “Iroquois sachem,” who judges in accordance with interest, failing to evince an adequately disinterested form of aesthetic appraisal (par. 2). These comparative evaluations proceed by assertion. Indeed, the postulate of a common sense protects Kant from having to provide a reasoned account of the ways in which culture bears on his version of the natural. Kant’s ambivalent handling of cultural difference effects a narrowing of the field of legitimate aesthetic relationships. Sidelining, through the device of the sensus communis, the differential cultural processes that undergird his operative hierarchies of taste, Kant opens the way for an unmarked, ostensibly neutral rallying of normative forms of aestheticized and aestheticizing whiteness in the relational terrain he valorizes.21 Nonnormative cultural forms he associates with ethnicities and races other than white serve to circumscribe what count as appropriate and inappropriate aesthetic relationships as they help to pinpoint meanings and connotations sustained by relatively open-ended concepts, such as those of charm, emotion, interest, and disinterestedness. Publicity, on this model, does not connote an in principle unbounded set of universally accessible aesthetic experiences or a basically illimitable aggregate of subjects endowed with common appreciative faculties.22 The promise of these ideals, in Kant’s account, implicitly directs us toward a mesh of aesthetic relationships jelling around itineraries of racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization.

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

38

Contemporary collaborations between aesthetics and race Hume and Kant authorize a restricted scope of aesthetic relationships. Countering historical frames of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization, artists and writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Agnès Varda, and Frantz Fanon turn to quotidian aesthetic activities to highlight alternative relational structures. Their works adjust and unseat aesthetic threats and promises, supplanting established slates of pleasure and danger. While transforming conceptions of aesthetic agency, and modifying orders of perception, creation, and exchange, however, these theorists and artists also limit cultural possibilities inherent in the aesthetic, and sidestep complex ties between aesthetics and race in ways that are reminiscent of Hume and Kant.

An aesthetic stand-off Lucy, the narrator of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel by that name, is a young black Caribbean woman who arrives in a North American city to work as an au pair for a white couple with four children. Her story tells us of the friendship she starts with her employer, Mariah, and of shifts that become noticeable in her relationship with her two countries. Lucy’s personhood crystallizes in the vicissitudes of her aesthetic comportment. Her subjectivity unfurls in the form of sensory impressions of food, clothes, sounds, bodies, fields, the sun, and music. These experiences carry her ambitions, her dreams, and her past, as well as her changing sense of her surroundings. In aesthetic consciousness, Lucy finds the principal medium by which she creates meanings. It is in the plane of aesthetic embodiment that she arranges her bonds with persons and things, and makes herself present in a new environment. Antagonism, likewise, announces itself in this field, as when Lucy dissents from the shared longing Mariah attempts to arouse in her for the arrival of spring: She said, “Have you ever seen daffodils pushing their way up out of the ground? And when they’re in bloom and all massed together, a breeze comes along and makes them do a curtsy to the lawn stretching out in front of them. Have you ever seen that? When I see that, I feel so glad to be alive.” And I thought, So Mariah is made to feel alive by some flowers bending in the breeze. How does a person get to be that way? (1991, 17)

Lucy fends off the intimacy of the joint aesthetic anticipation that Mariah craves. Where the employer sees promise, the employee recognizes a threat. Elucidating this rift, Kincaid has the au pair recall from childhood a successful recital of a poem at the Queen Victoria Girls’ School: After I was done, everybody stood up and applauded with an enthusiasm that surprised me, and later they told me how nicely I had pronounced every word, how I had placed just the right amount of special emphasis in places where that was needed, and how proud the poet, now long dead, would have been to hear

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

39

his words ringing out of my mouth. I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; . . . [I]nside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem. The night after I had recited the poem, I dreamt, continuously it seemed, that I was being chased down a narrow cobbled street by bunches and bunches of those same daffodils that I had vowed to forget, and when finally I fell down from exhaustion they all piled on top of me, until I was buried deep underneath them and was never seen again. (17–18)

Once again following the young woman to sabotage her pledge, this time into another country, the daffodils will not hold off their callings, which the neocolonial education system had trained the pupil to answer with graceful exactitude. Kincaid comprehends empire in this passage as an aesthetic matrix. She associates this structure with a projective relation to nature, one that she construes as redolent of British romanticism. Tokens in a colonial aesthetic, curtsying daffodils carry tyrannical undertones for the child mender, in an inversion of the promise they bear in Wordsworth’s famous poem, “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” the work we can assume the student to have declaimed at school.23 On a walk in the country, this poem’s narrator comes upon “A host of dancing Daffodils / . . . / Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.” “[Outdoing] the sparkling waves in glee,” the flowers provide the wanderer “laughing company.” Back at home, in the grip of emptiness and solitude, his heart then often “with pleasure fills / And dances with the Daffodils.”24 Determined to stay true to her oath of forgetfulness, Lucy refuses to display the warm anticipatory feelings her boss solicits from her. The youngster declines to play the part of pliable daffodil. Leaving it to Mariah’s own devices to silence the inner desolation that she, Mariah, is eager to keep at bay, Lucy undoes the spell British romantic projectivism casts over the exchange with her employer. How did things “get to be that way?” Well, in the final decade of the twentieth century, they don’t get to be that way anymore. Kincaid proposes an aesthetic reading of coloniality and decolonial resistance. Mimicking, indeed, Wordsworth’s narrator, Mariah finds in the lands around her summer home what she seeks from her environment, while disclaiming the unwanted. She nostalgically extols natural beauty in the face of ecological damage, without seeing a connection between the devastation she deplores and the conditions that make possible propertied lifestyles, such as her own (71–3). Eager to preempt conflicts of perspective, the mater familias would like her companion to see things the way she herself does (32, 35–6). Mariah’s attempts at aesthetic synchronization repeatedly meet with withdrawal on her friend’s part, who ultimately leaves the family to study photography, in pursuit of her own aesthetic goals.25 The two women terminate their exchange over the daffodils by each taking a step away from the other.26 In a reversal of anticipatory vectors underpinning the aesthetics of empire, Kincaid endows youthful, Afro-Caribbean, immigrant, working-class, geographically mobile blackness with an aesthetic promise of culture; Anglo-European, upper/middle-class whiteness, conversely, issues aesthetic and cultural threats. The novel imagines a stand-off between two aesthetic words. Aesthetic and racial boundaries coincide in shaping the stalemate between the two characters. Kincaid

40

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

impugns aesthetic racialization on a white model; she favors a black version of her protagonist’s own making. While contesting racialized aestheticization in the service of white, Anglo-European, neocolonial social and material arrangements, she celebrates it as a formative dimension of Lucy’s being-in-the-world. Relations among persons and among persons and objects in the book reflect these itineraries of aesthetic and racial development. Racialized aesthetic experience circumscribes the women’s closeness. The love they feel for one another notwithstanding, historical aesthetic structures precipitate a relational deadlock that stymies their friendship. Kincaid offers a picture of aesthetic relationships that disputes versions of racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization. She proposes alternative varieties. The novel amends aesthetic promises and threats undergirding neocolonial formations of power. However, in having aesthetics track racial, cultural, and personal borders outlined in the story, the work offers a restrictive picture of quotidian aesthetic relationships. Whereas Mariah’s and Lucy’s aesthetic perceptions admit of little amalgamation, such experiences would often seem to contain elements that are capable of dislodging tidy racial categorizations.27 Intriguingly, it is exactly daffodils that exude unmasterable flows of cultural displacement and permit syncretic leakages in Edwidge Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, a narrative of mother-daughter relationships that moves between Haiti and the United States. This novel appeared a few years after Lucy. Raised lovingly by her aunt Atie in a small Haitian town, Danticat’s narrator, 12-year-old Sophie Caco, is summoned to join her mother in New York, whom, apart from Tante Atie’s stories, she knows only through mailed audio tapes and a photograph by her bedside. The poem Sophie has written on a Mother’s Day card that she has made for her caretaker idealizes the absent mother in terms of the latter’s favorite flower: “My mother is a daffodil, / limber and strong as one. / My mother is a daffodil, / but in the wind, iron strong” (1994, 29). The gift being intended for Tante Atie, the image of the flower in the inscription folds Sophie’s abstract connection with her mother into the richly embodied bond the child enjoys with her aunt. When Atie tells the girl to save the card for the mother, the daughter squashes the daffodil she had attached to the paper.28 The novel further compounds the flower image when we learn that the mother loves these European imports “because they grew in a place they were not supposed to.” Initially brought over to Haiti by a French woman, current daffodil variants, Atie explains to Sophie, have adjusted to the warm climate, assuming “the color of pumpkins and golden summer squash, as though they had acquired a bronze tinge from the skin of the natives who had adopted them” (21). The flower’s composite, transculturated heritage engenders an affective doubling. Providing solace to Sophie, daffodils also pervade frightening dreams (112, 155, 28). Everything the girl owns is yellow, her aunt comments (21). The color enthralls the young Sophie, who longs to join other children playing exuberantly in piles of yellow leaves. But it also hounds her in a dream in which the mother pursues the daughter through a field of wildflowers in order to press the girl into the frame of the mother’s picture next to the bed the child shares with her aunt (21, 7–9). Danticat’s daffodils commingle love and freedom with feelings of painful

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

41

separation, persecution, and confinement. Hybrid creatures, like Sophie, the flowers exceed oppositions between empire and former colony. Yellow exhibits contrastive codings in Kincaid’s novel, as it does in Danticat’s. The color infuses a fearsome dream of Lucy’s in which Mariah’s husband chases her, egged on by his wife. Its significance reverses in connection with the white family. In Lucy’s eyes, a yellow tint gives the family members a look of bliss and simple purity, and lends their summer home a soothing, welcoming appearance (12–15, 27). The binary connotations Kincaid attaches to recurring yellows fluctuate between polarities of conquest and innocence, splitting between “brutes masquerading as angels and angels portrayed as brutes.”29 While Danticat allows the color’s dual meanings to infect and disturb one another, Kincaid separates yellow’s menace and appeal, marshaling these contrary pulls into oppositions between victor and vanquished, empire and conquered territory. Rewriting promises of civilization as well as threats of barbarism, Kincaid links Lucy with promissory and Mariah with threatening aspects of the aesthetic. The novel rejects Humean and Kantian valuations embedded in contemporary cultural forms and categories. In lining up aesthetic systems with (neo)colonial divides, however, the work parallels the Enlightenment scheme that steers aesthetic agency and race along rigidly regulated paths. Lucy proposes an overly stratified order of daily, aesthetically inspired relationships, one that keeps in check the labyrinthine windings of aesthetic experience and race.

The aesthetic as an aside Filmmaker Agnès Varda, like Kincaid, rounds up everyday aesthetic elements in an overhaul of cultural hierarchies. Her documentaries, The Gleaners and I and The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (France, 2000 and 2002) analyze aesthetic relationality from the perspective of the historical practice of gleaning. Varda’s digital videos situate current manifestations of this ritual against the backdrop of older paradigms, as she finds the tradition spelled out in dictionaries, ratified in early modern edicts, and chronicled in artworks, by, among others, Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton. The first documentary opens by gleaning and having us glean Millet’s painting Les glaneuses (1857) over and through the heads of viewers facing the work in the Musée d’Orsay. From the start, Varda includes spectator and filmmaker alike in a thicket of relations we see unfolding between grapes, figs, fish, cheese-past-its-due-date, clockswithout-hands, lost buttons, discarded TVs, abandoned chairs, oysters, and the people who gather them. This customary collecting takes place at some distance from official circuits of production and consumption, out of need, compulsion, love, or in search of visual pleasure. Emerging aesthetic relationships thereby build on existing ones, and carry them further. The subjects of these relationships crosscut social classes. Varda enters into conversation with propertied whites picking apples at the end of the harvest as well as with poor whites foraging parsley and celery when the market is over. She interviews destitute urban salvagers of African and Asian backgrounds who make a living recovering stoves. A talented and economically savvy young chef collects the herbs that flavor the dishes he serves at his restaurant. It so happens that the filmmaker

42

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

meets the wine-producing psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche whose profession it is to notice unintended turns of language. Expired promises awaken in the hands of Varda’s rummagers and gatherers. Threats posed by trash, haphazard nonfunctional moments, potatoes above or below marketable measurements, and things that have gone out of use, turn into promises, as gleaners find new designs and values in discredited artifacts, draw sustenance from cast-off or neglected produce, and blow life into objects and situations that would otherwise go to waste. Chance promises arise when Varda’s small camera culls images from coincidental events, such as a “dancing” lens cap. Unsuspected promises announce themselves as we observe the cinematographer’s finely crinkled hands and graying hair. Our sense of promising expands as she catches trucks on the highway through the aperture of her curled index finger and thumb, conjuring rhythm and form where, in the anonymity of a car, we might surmise unmitigatedly alien, depersonalized and depersonalizing conditions of consumption and commerce. Aesthetic promises flesh out prior promises, for Varda. Defunct refrigerators harboring demonstrations of playmobil activists elicit the double delight of discovering afresh an aesthetic that has already materialized—the glee of a tidily illuminated, compartmentalized, clean plastic storage system—and of carrying this pleasure into a somewhat unexpected direction: the edible is political, as many children and food activists are keenly aware. Subverting domestic and other quotidian functions of objects, and overturning commodified meanings apportioned to things, Varda also exposes limitations of such playful resignification. Aging and material decay will not be nullified through imaginative redeployment.30 She eschews redeeming institutionalized procedures of consumption and production. Gleaning includes the rescuing of damaged birds after oil spills, the salvaging of foods and goods whose diminished profitability destines them for the dump, as well as interactions with individuals who have been expelled from the work force. Varda paddles through the underside of socially sanctioned economic life. Nevertheless, her study somewhat paradoxically idealizes aesthetic relationality. Gleaning transpires in the peripheries of formal economies. It operates in the margins of standardized cultural life. The gleaner sets forth where an element’s designated functionality has gone astray or has been found wanting. Varda’s investigation shores up residues attendant upon principal, goal-directed states of affairs. Displaying souvenirs collected on a visit to Japan, she observes that “it is what I have gleaned that tells me where I have been.” She grants the accessory paramount status, installing outer edges of various cultural markets at the center of aesthetic relationships. The videos understand gleaning as a mode of comportment in relation to the material world, the passing of time, the body, people, art, animals, and plants. The cinematographer slightly incongruously lends supplementarity the prestige of a major cultural force. The activity of gleaning feeds on received material routines, while inserting also a distance within such procedures, realizing a space where experimental forms and meanings can take off. The videos suggestively extend this effect to the realm of aesthetic action and relationality more broadly. Varda imbues processes of aesthetic perception, discovery, and making with gleaning’s compound pleasures. Aesthetic experiences do indeed often raise the standing of apparently insignificant elements.31 Sidelines tend to move, in aesthetic territory. Yet, this scenario occludes problematic sides of the aesthetic.

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

43

Market formations observe aesthetic norms. Aesthetic needs and desires are integral components of consumption and production processes. The concept of gleaning, apprehended in terms of an elevated aside or centered parergon, minimizes the support aesthetic forms and energies channel toward commodified social existence. For a number of Varda’s interviewees, the custom of garnering leftover elements targets social ills such as overconsumption, pollution, and wastefulness. However, these problems substantially feed on impassioned attachments shaping our relations to aesthetic experiences and objects. Aesthetic preferences help to perpetuate cycles of fabrication and planned obsolescence. Certainly, the gleaner’s strategy of foregrounding the ancillary and the incidental challenges the functioning of aesthetic norms in the service of agro-business interests. Delectable, nourishing potatoes come in a much greater variety than what conforms to the scope of sizes and shapes that pass muster with the food industry, and actually makes it to the shopper in the supermarket, or, for that matter, into any other human eater’s dish. Gleaning potatoes aesthetically opposes aesthetic codes sponsored by corporate practices. But the aesthetic critique with which gleaning confronts capitalist aesthetic operations downplays powerful procedures driving the aesthetic domain that this critique contests. In particular, the strategy underestimates the threats the aesthetic poses as a constituent of the economical, political, and social constellations we keep up. To see the aesthetic as a reservoir of promises that is to be liberated and brought from society’s fringes to the chief business of culture is to sidestep the systemic operations it carries out, and to underestimate the complexity, the risks, and the dangers of aesthetic relationships we occupy.32 By eliding the structural role of the aesthetic in the realization of culture, we obfuscate aesthetic powers bolstering formations of race, and racial forces buttressing aesthetic life. This entails our bracketing of the relational workings of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization. We screen out dimensions of racial and aesthetic domination that historically have enabled the formation of Anglo-European cultures. The image of gleaning takes for granted itineraries of white subject formation. It overlooks the fact that not all peripheries are equal, and that circuits between center and margin are shot through with racial differentiation. The project of aesthetic recuperation, conceived, as Varda suggests, in terms of the mobilization of an afteror side effect attendant on leading moral, political, social, and epistemic practices, renders the aesthetic labor and production of whiteness elusive. Stationed within these trajectories, this outlook whitens itself, disregarding cultural powers that nourish it. Whiteness, in this perspective, constitutes an apparently neutral basis of normativity with respect to race and aesthetics. Varda’s notion of the aesthetic as a self-upgrading aside in this regard corresponds with Kant’s analysis.33 Both approaches implement a normalization of whiteness that leaves this symbolic formation unmarked and loses sight of its aesthetic threats. In challenging Enlightenment configurations of aesthetic relationality, Varda’s and Kincaid’s views reproduce Humean and Kantian ideas that confound our sense of the racial functioning of everyday aesthetic elements and of the aesthetic workings of race. Day-to-day life in the global North is more thoroughly and more problematically drenched in aesthetics than Varda’s digital videos acknowledge.

44

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Racial violence as aesthetic control Postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon accords the aesthetic a prominent role as a dimension of colonial subjugation, of oppositional movements toward national liberation, and of processes by which neocolonial global orders graft themselves onto colonial bedrock. These systems of power and resistance, in Fanon’s analysis, enlist aesthetic elements in shifting relational procedures, and feature a changing cast of aesthetic promises and threats. Fanon appraises these matters in light of desiderata he formulates for a decolonial politics. In examining historical strata of coloniality and anticolonial opposition, he sees oppressive racial and (neo)colonial threats of aestheticized and aestheticizing whiteness go together with emancipatory promises of aestheticized and aestheticizing blackness. His account presents constellations of aesthetic relationality, address, and promising in a new perspective that rejects Kantian and Humean figurations of racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization, while also retaining Enlightenment premises at significant theoretical junctures. In Fanon’s view, popular forms such as newspapers, books, advertisements, film, and radio support processes of white identity formation (1967 [hereafter “BSWM”], 152, 177, 179, 191–2; 1963  [hereafter “WoE”], 209). Cultural productions advance whiteness, among other things, by shaping white worldviews and providing anecdotes and stories that endorse white myths about blacks.34 Mainstream artifacts and media, as a result, succeed at getting both white and black people to identify with white attitudes and perceptions (BSWM, 146–8, 152–3, 191–4). This situation gives rise to a twofold aesthetic agenda: that of countering the effects to which white popular forms expose blacks, and of promoting alternative black voices. These objectives require the creation of magazines, songs, and history texts that foster black modes of socialization (148, 153). Aesthetic promises and promises of culture figure conspicuously in this vision. Concomitant with the growing momentum of national liberation movements in the 1940s and 1950s, Fanon witnesses the advent of an aesthetically innovative form of cultural production, namely a “revolutionary” art, or, an art of “combat,” which he considers capable of bringing about decolonization and national renewal (WoE, 227–32, 240). Fanon offers a reading of coloniality as a form of aesthetic relationality. Aesthetic standards are among the cultural phenomena Western regimes institute in the occupied territories. Discrediting myths and habits of the colonized, and stigmatizing conquered populations as a source of disfiguration of everything and everyone these groups enter into contact with, while validating practices associated with white culture, colonialism installs a dichotomous aesthetic system within the Manichean social rule it secures (WoE, 38–43). Fanon observes a historical dialectic linking phases of black aesthetic production and thought with colonial shifts in Africa, Latin America, the Middle-East, Asia, and the Antilles. Following a period of imposed and partly desired aesthetic assimilation to Europe, he witnesses the emergence of an oppositional perspective that postulates a continuous black culture originating in precolonial eras (WoE, 218, 222, 236–7; BSWM, 191–2). Though an at one point unavoidable defensive move, according to Fanon, this latter outlook, the project of negritude, strands in a mummified, exoticist, folkloristic populism that remains alienated from the people’s

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

45

social reality (WoE, 209–25). Launching a next phase, the stirring of liberatory consciousness is responsible for a reanimation of the aesthetic of the colonized, which issues in a truly dynamical, materially grounded, national culture (233–5). An arid post-independence era then threatens to impose a superfluous temporal interval that Fanon finds exemplified in twentieth-century Latin America. Bound to the metropolis, a European-backed, national bourgeoisie installs a neocolonial regime in the former colonies of this region that perpetuates the people’s exploitation. This class usurps aesthetic means to flaunt its status. Fanon cites ostentatious aesthetic display in the shape of architectural edifices, vehicles, cocktail parties, trips to Europe. A lucrative cult of local products supports this lifestyle (148–77, 184). This regressive turn is to be averted through public policies that benefit the masses. A project of social and political mass education must take off, that allows the people to genuinely materialize as the communal human body they incipiently already are (180–205). An aesthetic task arises, which includes a considerable thrust Fanon directs against specific aesthetic forms. The decadent bourgeois pleasures of gambling, hunting, tourism, and child prostitution are to be discontinued. Frivolous diversions such as detective novels, slotmachines, pornography, and the drinking of alcohol, likewise, are to come to an end. These trifling entertainments were originally invented to brighten up the leisure times of the youth of capitalist nations. Having contaminated the pleasures of young people in the developing countries, such occupations are to be replaced by activities that render “the totality of the nation” real to youngsters of the former colonies, and that “fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things” (153–4, 195–7, 200, 205). Fanon’s account of colonial occupation, anticolonial resistance, the consolidation of neocolonial hierarchies, and the forging of new democracies, accords aesthetic elements substantial weight. He discusses partially aesthetic experiences of embodiment, such as states of bodily freezing and muscular tension (WoE, 45, 54). We learn of the opulence Europe gains through the forced extraction of natural resources from its overseas departments (96, 100–2). Fanon marks the disturbance of indigenous rhythms of life by colonial intervention (36). In exploring colonialism and its undoing, he refers to matters of dress (40), mythology (55–8), and urban geography, such as whites’ spacious, well-lit quarters, and blacks’ cramped, dark sectors or mud huts (39, 128). He takes note of times for dancing, singing, and dreaming. The tones and volumes of people’s voices hold significance. He mentions the symbolic role of statues, bouquets, dinners, parades, and sports, and describes the absence of, for example, tramways.35 Aesthetic registers carry powerful threats and promises in Fanon’s approach. The role he grants aesthetic productions as elements of everyday social, cultural, economic, and political life stands in contrast with another side of his writing, which curtails this influence. Fanon documents how coloniality obliterates the culture of the colonized, destroying their aesthetic rhythms, habits, and artistic creativity.36 From this he infers that “[i]t is around the peoples’ struggles that African-Negro culture takes on substance, and not around songs, poems, or folklore” (WoE, 235). Fanon sees no room for new cultural departures as long as colonial domination persists (WoE, 237, 244; BSWM, 187). Indeed, he considers national liberation a necessary condition for culture (WoE, 233, 244–5). Under colonial oppression, participation in the struggle for liberation represents the one and only, exemplary, form of culture and creativity (93, 244–5,

46

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

247–8). Nothing but an awakening of national consciousness is able to boost a culturebuilding project (36). Aesthetic change can and will indeed arise at an advanced stage of anticolonial opposition, and, we may infer, during the post-independence process of political self-realization (238–46). Aside from the political mobilization of the people, however, the culture of the (formerly) occupied countries remains atrophied under colonialism (and, presumably, neocolonialism).37 Aesthetic relationships, for Fanon, congeal around sources of aesthetic racialization (popular arts are instrumental in the realization of white and black cultural goals; everyday aesthetic elements are productive of white and black subjectivities) and racialized aestheticization (popular arts and everyday aesthetic phenomena reflect whiteness; strategies of anticolonial resistance foster vital forms of postcolonial culture). He exposes powers, limits, and dangers of white aestheticization and aestheticized whiteness by revealing the damage and blindness white art and culture incur on account of their participation in racial, (neo)colonial formations (WoE, 215, 313; BSWM, 202–3). Fanon’s chronicle of historical epochs of black aesthetic production brings out capacities as well as hazards embedded in black aestheticization and aestheticized blackness. He details interlacing strands of promises and threats. Fanon observes that aesthetic idioms undergo demolishment during colonial domination. He indicates how coloniality disrupts and hampers the quotidian workings of aesthetic forms. Yet, his verdict of aesthetic eradication stands in tension with his understanding of anticolonial resistance as a form of culture. The latter view would need to recognize the presence of creative resources that somehow succeed at weathering oppression and that can be mobilized toward oppositional efforts. A picture of comprehensive obliteration rules this out, however. We can resolve this friction in Fanon’s analysis by qualifying his finding of a monolithic course of liquidation. His claim about integral cultural annihilation forecloses the emergence of new aesthetic forms at points at which prior ones have been destroyed. An immediate reason why this view remains unpersuasive is that it precludes an aesthetic of pain, loss, death, and mourning. More generally, it bespeaks a needlessly narrow conception of the aesthetic, one that overlooks aesthetic capacities inherent in basic facets of embodied social and material existence. A view of colonialist repression as a destructive imposition and internalization of aesthetic changes on and by the colonized is compatible with an acknowledgment of the productivity of such violence. Oppression transforms—rather than extinguishes— aesthetic proclivities, which retain the ability to engender novel forms. Although aesthetic practices forcibly shift ground under domination, they in principle remain capable of igniting ethically and politically compelling and humanly sustaining forms of cultural agency and experience. Furthermore, such achievements are neither reducible to advances toward national liberation, nor do they immediately or necessarily issue in such emancipatory developments. The side of Fanon’s argument that interprets colonial subjugation as full-blown aesthetic erasure tailors the aesthetic too orderly to a pure, unequivocally valued national identity.38 This line of thought retains Hume’s match-up between taste and civilization.39 If, instead, we recognize a heterogeneous field of mobile cultural forces, featuring aesthetic vocabularies that are not necessarily continuous or consonant with

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

47

one another, we can make room for the plethora of aesthetic phenomena that populate Fanon’s analyses. Pervading the field of everyday action and experience, these elements are indicative of the presence of aesthetic capacities that inhere in ordinary affective, cognitive, social, and material proclivities. Such propensities are vital resources of political power and agency. They deeply animate aesthetic relationships we enjoy with one another and the material world, supporting both human bonds and disconnections. It is unlikely that anticolonial resistance movements and nation-building projects are able to fulfill the cultural and political charges assigned to them if they pass over the effusive array of aesthetic skills, passions, desires, models of sociality, patterns of commemoration, templates of remembrance, rituals, and paradigms of pleasure that go to materialize in entities like songs, poems, meals, and other popular idioms. A gap opens within the account on which the people’s struggle and their awakened consciousness, defined as culture, but emptied of their aesthetic rhythms, habits, and imagination, bear the task of revitalizing art and culture. There is no straightforward distinction between the culture of political action and that of aesthetic production. Tellingly, Fanon’s own texts evince an intimate engagement with aesthetic registers that he downplays at various points. The performativity, affective lusciousness, humor, shifting points of enunciation, and interweaving voices animating his writing promulgate political powers upheld by aesthetic forms. The virtuosity and arresting verbal appeal of the theorist’s language proclaim the resourcefulness that aesthetic modalities are able to sustain as aesthetic phenomena. Many of Fanon’s formulations and rhetorical constructions betray an elegance and freshness that exceed the declarative import of his insights. Thus his language unleashes aesthetically suffused political energies that surpass what allows itself to be captured under the rubric of aesthetically depleted types of struggle or aesthetically barren modes of consciousness raising.40 A more expansive view of aesthetic life suggests itself than some of Fanon’s skeptical tenets allow. Aesthetic relationality features a more capacious array of cultural promises (and, presumably, threats) than Fanon acknowledges at certain turns in his thought. More plentiful techniques of racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization survive the onslaught coloniality perpetuates. The points of caution he expresses regarding aesthetic stultification attest to considerable stumbling blocks that hamper projects of cultural resistance and renewal. At the same time, this should not blind us to the potential for aesthetic and political inventiveness concentrated in ordinary aesthetic capabilities. Quotidian existence contains ample aesthetic cunning that we can galvanize to hammer away at cultural effacement, and to propel culture along unforeseen paths. Kincaid, Varda, and Fanon uncover webs of aesthetic relationships that are saturated with promises of blackness and threats of whiteness. They transport aesthetic agency beyond the perimeters of legitimately aesthetic creation, reception, and interaction instituted by Hume and Kant. In so doing, however, they also preserve restrictive Enlightenment assumptions, ignore capacities embodied in everyday aesthetic activities, and pass over intricacies of aesthetic relationality. Pervading artforms, protocols of reading, exhibition practices, performance traditions, social customs, and economic policy, Enlightenment plans of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization inhere in orders of relationality and address envisioned by contemporary artists and theorists. Historical relational templates coexist with alternative schemes. Substantial

48

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

powers of aesthetic agency stretch across border regions between divergent matrices of relationality, where our aesthetic dispositions participate in and generate disparate, not typically altogether continuous, relational orientations. Indeed, moving further into such interstitial zones at places in which Kincaid, Varda, and Fanon observe Enlightenment precepts, other artists and writers mark a distance from Humean and Kantian viewpoints.

Toward a quotidian aesthetics of race It is precisely day-to-day aesthetic agency that Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and Angela Davis, writing about women’s blues, see as a font of irrepressible yet  all-too frequently unheeded dimensions of aesthetic relationships. Like Fanon, Kincaid, and Varda, these authors describe sites of aesthetic violence and disregard. In response to continued threats of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization, they bring out cultural promises of ordinary activities such as conversation, sensory perception, narration, adornment, and the fusion of feeling and understanding. Both contravening and drawing on established relational constellations, such everyday pursuits shake up the repertoire of authorized bonds historically linking whiteness and blackness to aesthetics. Without making explicit reference to the Enlightenment legacy, these colloquial endeavors encounter this inheritance with lines of resistance and transformation. Walker, Lorde, Marshall, and Davis firmly anchor the aesthetic resources they ascribe to quotidian social and material practices within connecting fibers that these thinkers, among many others, weld between aesthetics and race. Fostering modes of experience, criticism, and tradition building that are adequate to black cultural productions, these artists and theorists outline avenues of racialized aestheticization. Creating and analyzing objects and actions that address black audiences and advance black cultural projects, they chart paths of aesthetic racialization. Relationality, again, appears to display more finely hewn aesthetic striations than Enlightenment diagrams have historically traced out. Among the designs Walker, Lorde, Marshall, and Davis attribute to a prosaic bedrock of affective, cognitive, social, and material capabilities are cycles of aesthetic exchange occurring among generations of women. For these writers, such circuits of aesthetic creation, reception, and interaction embody fundamental existential and political capacities that counter structures of oppression with strategies of individual and collective meaning making and survival. Alice Walker (1983) contemplates in this light the artistic vision motivating poor black women living in the post-reconstruction South, in the early part of the twentieth century, whose circumstances rigorously curbed opportunities they had to become painters, sculptors, or poets. She asks how these women were able to keep alive their creativity, by which she means, specifically, the impulse to bring into existence objects of art and beauty. Walker ponders what it was that prevented women impelled by a strong drive to create from losing themselves. In piecing together an answer to these questions, she recalls her own mother’s storytelling, and the splendid flowers the mother used to plant wherever the family happened to live. Irrespective of how poor

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

49

or overworked she was, and no matter how run-down the house might be, the mother would decorate the family’s living quarters with gorgeous flowers that she grew, while at the same time maintaining an intense labor schedule, toiling in the fields and sewing clothes, towels, and bedding for the children. A vital part of her daily existence, the mother’s floral and narrative occupations offer the daughter a key to the creativity that sustained the parent (242). Walker takes ordinary aesthetic activities to be exemplary of the work that granted millions of black women resilience in the face of hardship and subjugation. These undertakings helped women pull through (238). Passersby would pause to admire the mother’s garden and receive cuttings. A collaborative loop of address ensued. According to Walker, quotidian aesthetic materials, skills, perceptions, exchanges, and notions of beauty yield abilities to “hold on, even in very simple ways” (242). The captivating joy that women of earlier generations could find in their inventive use of available media, in the writer’s view, carries then a crucial promise for black women artists of Walker’s own time, who have not ceased to countenance social obstacles hindering their ambitions and disparaging their status. This promise is of a piece with an intergenerational cycle of aesthetic relationships. Walker recognizes in her own being the creative inspiration that sustained her mother. As a component of the inheritance her mother transmitted to her, Walker describes the regard in which she holds “all that illuminates and cherishes life,” as well as her respect for and the “will to grasp” the “possibilities” that can be made to germinate (241–2). Indeed, according to Walker, the pressures of racism and misogyny with which contemporary black women artists continue to contend, necessitate identifications on their part with the creative proclivities that historically sustained their foremothers (237). She considers this a crucial dimension of the self-knowledge of “who and of what, we black American women are” (235). Walker traces a mutually supportive circuit of relationships among generations of black female aesthetic agents: “Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength—in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own” (243). A turn to the mother, triggered by her legacy, is imagined to facilitate the daughter’s artistic flourishing. But rather than disclosing an already realized art form, this movement affords the mother’s aesthetic practice a legibility it previously lacked: “our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read” (240). Quotidian aesthetic capacities, for Walker, give rise to aesthetic promises of resilience, resistance, survival, creativity, and well-being, inherent in black women’s evolving aesthetic relationships. Like Walker, Audre Lorde (1984) ascribes to an art form grounded in quotidian faculties, aesthetic promises traversing a broad existential and political ambit. She considers poetry, comprehended as an art of thought, affect, and experience, essential to the survival of feelings that, in its absence, are destined to vanish under conditions of white, male, Anglo-European domination. Poems enable women to achieve a freedom attendant on formulating “the implications of ourselves” (39). Comprehended as “a revelatory distillation of experience,” that is, as a mode of signification culled from daily life, which it also serves to illuminate, poetry, according to Lorde, comprises a necessity rather than a luxury (36–7). By combining thought and feeling, poems allow

50

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

emotions to develop into radical ideas. Articulating affect in a language that permits emotion to be shared and known, poetry can come to harbor differences of which women need to take cognizance in order to conceptualize desirable forms of social change and significant action (37). Indeed, in Lorde’s view, the art of poetry challenges women to bring feeling to a point where it hints at the realization of new existential possibilities (39). Through the image of “the Black mother within each of us—the poet,” with whose inference “I feel, therefore I can be free” she imagines replacing the white fathers’ doctrine “I think therefore I am,” Lorde incorporates into a black feminine genealogy, poetry’s claim on feeling as well as the demand for freedom to which this art form gives shape (38). A revised constellation of aesthetic relationships and modes of address, for Lorde, as for Walker, goes in tandem with the workings of a capacious set of aesthetic promises: “[i]f what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core—the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds” (39). Interconnected promises, ones “toward and through” which we should orient ourselves, in this perspective, serve as devices that funnel expansive epistemic and political resources lodged in everyday aesthetic abilities. The site of quotidian artistry that the poet and novelist Paule Marshall locates at the origin of her writing is her mother’s kitchen. Marshall (1983) affirms her literary debt to artistic lessons and standards conveyed by her mother and her mother’s friends—ordinary, working-class, Barbadian immigrants in New York City, who, after work, used to gather around the table for conversation. Celebrating the women’s transculturated aesthetic, which infused the English they had learned in Barbados with new vocabularies, rhythms, perceptions, and pleasures, Marshall celebrates the artfulness of the language that originated in the “wordshop” of the kitchen. She extols its beauty, inventiveness, irony, exuberance, insight, and wit (4–9, 12). In Marshall’s reading, the women turned their colloquial speech into an oral art form, which, in consort with what she describes as an African fusion of art and life, represented an integral part of their lives.41 Giving a place to their creative energy, affirming their sense of who they were, and broaching a panoramic set of essential themes, the discussions the companions would have after work significantly counteracted the invisibility that was the women’s lot in the labor market and other domains of life. Marshall recognizes in her predecessors’ day-to-day talks a force of invention that would forever animate her own art. Quotidian aesthetic practices, for Walker, Lorde, and Marshall, represent a source of racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization that conveys promises of pleasure, insight, and formal innovation, and realizes orientations among subjects, and between subjects and the material world that are able to reach beyond the overlapping aesthetic and racial partitions documented by Fanon and Kincaid. Mundane proceedings acquire a similar place in Angela Davis’s analysis of Billie Holiday’s music. Like Marshall, Davis (1998) investigates relational conditions fashioning aesthetic experience and meaning at points of convergence among disparate traditions. She observes that twentieth-century record producers on the payroll of the whitedominated music industry would assign Billie Holiday banal popular songs. Subjected to the affective control Lady Day exerts over her material, however, Davis argues,

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

51

these pieces issue in emotionally complex musical works. For instance, Holiday’s renderings can get a woman’s infatuation to evince female independence, sadness to signal happiness, and disappointment in love to speak to black people’s cultural status. Rather than accepting performative terms intimated by preexisting vocals, Holiday works the songs aesthetically, shaping them through tempo, timbre, and phrasing, as well as shifting expressive emphases, into intricate artistic forms that challenge social relationships outlined by the lyrics. Davis documents how Lady Day’s infusion of humor and mockery, her use of assertive, questioning, or frivolous expressive tones, as well as her invocation of accents of playfulness or seriousness, succeed at teasing out critical effects from trivial texts (163–80). The singer’s music, in Davis’s reading, thereby appropriates sentimental white popular love songs within an African American tradition of subverting imposed sound and language. Davis traces this transformative practice from West African idioms, via field hollers and work songs that enabled slaves to communicate with one another and to maintain a sense of community, to the spirituals and blues. Other influences to which she points in this light are the “musicalization” of black vernacular languages, and the oppositional forces with which colloquial black speech often pushes back against hegemonic linguistic conventions (165–8).42 Participating in these historical aesthetic patterns, Holiday’s modes of address absorb a heightened capacity to create tensions between divergent registers of meaning and to upend limits on the speakable. In bringing together African American cultural practices with white popular lyrics, Holiday combines black aesthetic idioms with white musical vocabularies, while altering both in the process.43 This coalescence of forms enabled the singer to address heterogeneous black and white audiences, exposing publics across boundaries of race, class, and sexual orientation, and, in particular, women, to social critiques she incorporated in her music (166, 170–2, 179, 194). Lady Day’s jazz style offers several major promises. In Davis’s view, the music not only furnishes ways of catalyzing critical social consciousness, but, more specifically, permits listeners to expand their insight into emotions such as loneliness and despair, and to deepen their comprehension of the social roots of psychic pain (170, 177, 194). Holiday’s art, in this reading, desists from the rigid aesthetics-culture parallelism postulated by Hume and Kant. The singer steps away from the model of relationality that allots distinct aesthetic systems to discrete ethnicities, a framework articulated by Fanon and Kincaid. According to Davis, Holiday’s songs forge critical and affective affiliations that transgress pervasive cultural barriers.44 Locating the music in processes of racialized aestheticization (Holiday’s jazz incorporates modes of black and white racialization) and aestheticized racialization (the performances summon black and white subjects toward more reflective understandings of social relationships), Davis elucidates relational formations that defy influential Enlightenment assumptions (36, 90, 118–19, 155, 172). Quotidian arrangements play a prominent part in Holiday’s aesthetic politics. Of a piece with a black vernacular fashioning of contrastive meanings, the singer’s music, in Davis’s view, simultaneously stands in close proximity to black women’s daily situations. Indeed, Davis observes that Lady Day gave her life experiences aesthetic form, thereby permitting others to reflexively glimpse their own lives

52

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

through them (179, 186–7, 194). Davis details how Holiday, like Gertrud “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith before her, from whom the singer borrowed and whose art she transformed, addresses themes of emotion, love, sexuality, racial violence, and gender oppression that structured lived realities inhabited by people in working-class black communities. The philosopher underscores how the artist embeds this formal and thematic material in a feminist outlook.45 The critical perspectives that the three blues and jazz women embodied in their music, according to Davis, made their audiences aware of the importance as well as the possibility of changing social relationships. “Ma” Rainey’s, Smith’s, and Holiday’s mobilization of everyday experiences and forms appears to be crucial to the historically neglected and misconstrued politics of their art.46 Davis’s analysis locates Lady Day’s jazz and the promises and threats it rallies in an elaborate texture of aesthetic relationships. Sustaining female genealogies, the fibers of relationality and address the music activates reach from Holiday’s artistic style and its multidimensional contexts to “Ma” Rainey’s and Bessie Smith’s blues and the modes of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization surrounding and activated by their work.47 Analogously to Walker and Marshall, Davis extends these threads also to the contemporary listener, who, in the women’s blues, is able to recognize ideas, forms, and queries at the core of current feminist debates (24, 180). Davis, Walker, Marshall, and Lorde each attribute fundamental existential and political powers to basic aesthetic capacities materializing in the conduct of everyday life. They give the aesthetic a prominent role in enabling survival, sustenance, community, meaning, critique, pleasure and creativity in the face of racial, gender, and economic oppression, while also locating aesthetic forms in racialized cultural histories that help to shape them. Revising models of aesthetic relationality, they posit artistic transmissions and exchanges along black, feminine, and often matrilineal trajectories. They investigate aesthetic relationships among black mothers and daughters; black friends; black woman artists; members of black, working-class communities; and members of black and white publics. Walker, Lorde, Marshall, and Davis identify cultural arrangements, aesthetic forms, and modes of address that the Enlightenment paradigm of aesthetic exchange ignores or undertheorizes. They highlight the cultural promises of a network of enmeshed aesthetic, existential, and political capabilities. In intertwining aesthetic forms with racialized cultural conditions and in rendering the aesthetic vital to the realization of black aspirations, they envision varieties of racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization that establish a distance from the relational plans put into place by Hume and Kant, routines that continue to make their effects felt within the structures of aesthetic theories, productions, and institutions.48 I have selectively examined relational shifts envisaged by Kincaid, Danticat, Varda, Fanon, Walker, Lorde, Marshall, Davis, and Holiday. My aim has been to show how these artists and theorists critically engage historical trajectories of aesthetic promises and threats, repudiating as well as reproducing modes of relationality and address associated with these lineages. The analyses I have plotted remain partial. For instance, my reading has overlooked ways in which Kincaid undercuts fantasies of idealized mother figures. I have sidestepped ways in which she thereby complicates received conceptions of female aesthetic legacies and rethinks the ways in which these understandings lock into established configurations of nation and empire. Through

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

53

this line of critique, Kincaid flouts Humean and Kantian persuasions, and challenges confident notions of matrilineally oriented aesthetic relationships of the sort championed by Walker and Marshall. More detailed interpretations would take note of such factors. Its inevitable spottiness notwithstanding, my account testifies to the importance that aesthetic relationships, promises, threats, and other modes of address have as pillars of aesthetic orders. We have glimpsed the proliferating lines of uptake that these three structural forces are able to provoke, triggering—while simultaneously participating in—ongoing spirals of aesthetic absorption, judgment, modification, and transposition.

Raising the aesthetic stakes Comprehending aesthetic relationality in terms of universality and publicity, Hume and Kant orchestrate a network of cultural relationships in which racialization and aestheticization mutually implicate one another. In these theorists’ views, the aesthetic offers the promise of a white culture that breaks free from blackness. Whiteness thereby offers aesthetic promises; blackness emits aesthetic threats. This dual anticipatory formation exceeds racial binaries since it entails multiple orientations among variably positioned subjects and objects. The two philosophers understand culture as a product of widely reverberating strata of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization. These phenomena pervade a vast range of human activities. Civilization, as Hume understands it, installs racial and aesthetic arrangements of creation and perception; labor and knowledge; passion and control; social affect and conversation; virtue and judgment; friendship, indifference and love; refinement and dispositions that are to be refined. Authorizing a relational edifice that drafts modes of exchange in the service of white civilizational projects, Hume and Kant construe the significance of the aesthetic substantially as the promise of a white cultural order, propped up by racially exclusive forms of cultivation and refinement. They aestheticize a paradigm of whiteness that they organize in terms of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and delineate by way of categories spelling out modes of signification that are to qualify as, among other things, black, Native American, Muslim, and East Asian.49 Their theories render the aesthetic white. Banishing from the field of aesthetic judgment and cultural agency, blackness, as well as plans of experience associated with other racially and ethnically nonnormative subject positions with which blackness intersects, they construe these designs as aesthetic menaces. Hume and Kant restrictively regulate the spectrum of legitimate relationships that they recognize within and across cultures. Jettisoning troubling characteristics of Enlightenment programs of aesthetic relationality, twentieth-century writers such as Fanon and Kincaid record aesthetic threats posed by white cultural forms, and chronicle promises of culture yielded by blackness. Along with Varda, Walker, Lorde, Marshall, Davis, and Holiday, Fanon and Kincaid expound revised templates of relationality. These writers and artists identify aesthetic powers and passions that are supported by and supportive of black cultural goals and that elude Enlightenment procedures of white aestheticization and aesthetic

54

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

whitening. The cultural critics I have discussed propose novel accounts of possibilities and limitations that we encode in schemata of aesthetic relationality and address. Their works present alternative blueprints of relational aesthetic existence. These theorists and makers take steps to modify aesthetic stratagems channeling formations of perception, emotion, experience, understanding, sociality, and publicity. Without identifying Hume and Kant as targets of critical agendas or projects of transformation, these thinkers revise the Enlightenment heritage. They do this in engagement with everyday aesthetic configurations. Aestheticizing blackness, affirming the blackness of established aesthetic constellations by foregrounding disavowed cultural idioms, and outlining an enlarged orbit of black aesthetic agency, they craft new cultural promises for the aesthetic. Institutionalized frameworks of aesthetic relationality and address reveal a broad array of disparate, commingling forms of racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization. Aesthetic elements delimit parameters of whiteness and blackness in tandem with other registers of positionality; these multiplicitous, mutually enmeshed markers of social location, in turn, circumscribe aesthetic schemes. Models of subjectivity and culture comprise aesthetic patterns; aesthetic frameworks absorb and disburse stratifications of social being. Racial structures, accordingly, can neither be understood apart from their aesthetic supports, nor can the aesthetic be separated from its racial underpinnings. This is not to deny that interweaving lines of aestheticization and racialization can and do indeed run counter to one another. Their evolving entanglements instigate points of friction and mutual adjustment. A failure to recognize the tensions, disjunctions, and collaborations that arise in the nexus of aesthetics and race incurs the risk of aligning the aesthetic too tidily with historically stabilized cultural demarcations, or of reinstituting whiteness as a basis of normativity in the domains of art and culture. While Kincaid’s novel Lucy, Fanon’s interpretation of cultural oppression as aesthetic violation, and Varda’s studies of gleaning successfully loosen the hold of Humean and Kantian strictures, they also replicate problematic Enlightenment doctrines. Ongoing consolidations of aestheticized whiteness and whitened aesthetics underscore the continued urgency of the project of creating alternative modes of aesthetic and racial relationality and address. We inhabit dense textures of aestheticized and aestheticizing modalities of whiteness and blackness that persistently surface as facets of intersecting social registers. The entwinements of aesthetics and race extend across sweeping swaths of life, permeating our interactions with one another, and with the material world. Outlining templates of cultural agency, they leave no aspect of existence untouched. Their significance makes it imperative that we look within webs of relationships that they enable and from which they draw sustenance, for means to foster novel matrices of aesthetic and racial address. As aesthetic agents and members of aesthetic communities, we participate in these relational orders. Ethical and political efforts to dislocate existing frames of relationality will at the same time have to be practices of reaestheticization and vice versa. The cultural promise of the aesthetic is at stake in such projects.

Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions

Time Slice Hume’s contemporaneity: Culture as a system of aesthetic relationships This vignette provides further context and disciplinary backstories for some of the claims developed in the present chapter. Hume is an influential precursor of current views of the aesthetic. Summoning what he assumes are generally applicable criteria designed to validate judgments of taste, he circumscribes an area of practice and reflection commonly identified with the aesthetic sphere—a field of activities harboring distinctive kinds of values, experiences, and norms. His theory of taste lies at the core of prominent contemporary understandings of the aesthetic domain. Besides providing a template for aesthetic agency and signification, he offers a model of culture as a system of aesthetic relationality and address. This aspect of his work, which has received little attention, turns out to be utterly salient today. Hume locates the cultural arena in a relational organization featuring nodes and schemes of interaction such as emotional states, bonds of love and friendship, allocations of indifference and care, political states of freedom and oppression, scenarios of pleasure and desire, and commercial conditions exemplifying virtue and productivity, or, for that matter, lethargy and exhaustion. The relational framework Hume posits embodies strands of aesthetic racialization and racialized aestheticization. Contemporary cultures, likewise, display manifold trajectories of these types. Such itineraries emanate from and get condensed around legions of interconnected nuclei of relationality and address. A substantial body of existing work investigates cornerstones of aestheticized whiteness and blackness. Theorists find such driving forces in beauty (West 1982), visual modalities (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 2, 8, 19–21, 36, 38, 131), and schemes of apparent disembodiment and self-abstraction involving parameters of absence, purity, and neutrality (Dyer 1997, 4, 30, 38–93, 75). By recognizing tensions and collaborations into which factors of these kinds enter with one another as elements of relational matrices, we can bring out intricate cultural constellations that converge in the aesthetics-race nexus, such as the figurations of the white imaginary described by Morrison (1992) and the entanglements of white and black corporeal schemata explored by Fanon (BSWM). Aestheticized and aestheticizing whiteness and blackness take myriad historical forms. Whiteness, in its functioning as a master signifier (SeshadriCrooks 2000, 2–4, 25), a melancholic pattern of identity formation (Cheng 2000a, 10–14), a wellspring of imaginative functioning (Morrison 1992; Dyer 1997), an affective structure (Fanon BSWM), a proprietary arrangement (Harris 1995), or a distribution of privilege (McIntosh 1997) activates aesthetic registers that are part and parcel of its social operations. We can acknowledge the immense, incessantly mutating scope of entwinements between aesthetics and race by understanding racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization as trajectories within networks of aesthetic relationality that admit of an in principle boundless field of determinants.

55

56

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Indeed, the twentieth-century artists and theorists considered in this chapter implicitly sketch expansive webs of aesthetic relationships. Their concerns partially overlap with those of others. Modes of relation and address spotlighted by Walker, Lorde, Marshall, and Davis resonate with approaches to racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization explored in debates over black feminist criticism (by, among others, Smith [1998]; McDowell [1995]; Christian [1989]; Washington [1987]; Carby [1987]; and Spillers [1985]). Parallel dimensions of aesthetic racialization in the arts emerge in the context of the Black Arts Movement (see Bullins [1968]), in Cabral’s (1973) account of cultural politics as elements of the decolonization process, and in Gordon’s description of art as “a worldview,” which understands the aesthetic as a dimension of black advancement (1997, 231). Deconstructive moments recognizable in attempts to redirect forms of racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization that we have encountered, furthermore, can also be discerned in West (1990, 29–30) and Taylor (1999), and attain more full-fledged articulation in Gates (1988) as well as DuCille (1996), who pronouncedly embrace a deconstructive dismantling of racialized meanings. The widely reverberating relational modes featured by the twentiethcentury artists and theorists I have discussed also exhibit analogies with the elaborate fabric of connections Hume forges between aesthetic activities and facets of reason and passion, social bonding and character, virtue and judgment, desire, pleasure, and aversion, and the nation’s economic, political, and human advancement. A philosophical stance that situates culture and cultures in structures of aesthetic relationality, address, and promising, thus, not only directs us toward junctures of necessary transformation but also throws light on resources these frameworks comprise that do (or do not) sustain various kinds of human agents, environments, and nonhuman living beings on a daily basis. Hume’s importance for aesthetics lies not primarily in his proposed delimitation of the aesthetic domain but emerges no less pointedly in the capacious field of aesthetic relationality to which he implicitly draws our attention.

3

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

The notion of the aesthetic is bound up with that of the detail. Affiliations between the two categories reverberate widely. Both phenomena are subject to recurrent shifts of standing, their lot wavering between moments of celebration and deprecation. Philosophers, artists, and cultural critics often comprehend the aesthetic—rehearsing a typology of detail—as a randomly proliferating, unpredictable aside. A common figure of excess, the aesthetic, like detail, recurrently appears to wander curiously beyond rules and principles, and, in a final accounting, to blossom once what matters principally in life has taken its course, at moments that preclude further deferral— when the body fails, in jouissance, melancholy, violation, ritualized physical discipline, or mourning.1 The idea of the aesthetic as itself a kind of detail finds a counterpart in the historical endeavor to set the two phenomena off from one another. This latter project locates aesthetic meaning in a suitable mode of addressing detail, that is, in a form of engagement that directs the right kind of attention toward its object, compounded with a befitting sort of inattention. Aesthetic agents, on this line of thought, should correctly orient themselves vis-à-vis detail. They are to muster an appropriate combination of indifference and love for the objects of their perceptions and activities, one that renders the aesthetic itself lovable. In the resulting perspective, the aesthetic avoids taking the place of a detail by absorbing and yet restraining detail. This ambivalent process, which bolsters forces that it simultaneously resists, gnawing away at itself, carries consequential gender implications. Our swerves toward and away from detail take place within time-honored patterns of relationality and address that invest details of various sorts, or the perceived absence thereof, with feminine and masculine meanings. Indeed, details carry promises and threats of femininity and masculinity. What should we make of our presence in aestheticized regimes of detail? What do acts of gendering commonly centered on detail—triggered alike by singular desires and distastes for minutiae and by run-ofthe-mill routines that bring us into contact with tiny shades of meaning—imply for the possibilities of experience and agency the aesthetic holds out? Naomi Schor’s 1987 study of the detail’s aesthetic vicissitudes, Reading in Detail, examines gender quandaries surrounding this figure in Western aesthetics from the

58

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

eighteenth century to the present. Schor documents an obstinate association of detail with pejorative views of femininity. Seen through this lens, the aesthetic constitutes a masculinizing structure of relationality and address that mobilizes its cultivating promises by harnessing the detail’s desirability and powers of attraction. Welded, as Schor’s archeology indicates, to the body, the formless, the quotidian, the ornamental, the partial, and the residue, the detail historically occasioned acute threats imperiling the promise of the aesthetic. Artists and theorists have comprehended this promise in opposition to detail: in prominent sectors of cultural life, theoretical and practical alike, they took value to reside in an artistic wielding of reason, spirit, proper form, and the ideal—exercises deemed to be free from unnecessary encumbrance by detail—and to metastasize into a desirable system of social relationships attendant upon such artful deployment. The advent of poststructuralism in the third quarter of the twentieth century went in tandem with a turnabout in the detail’s fate that it also helped to occasion (Schor 1987, 3). But what did this change imply for the gendering of aesthetics? Schor argues that the transvaluation of detail in Roland Barthes’s aesthetics coincides with its degendering (97). She asks whether the detail’s current critical prominence is also accompanied by defeminization: [D]oes the triumph of the detail signify a triumph of the feminine with which it has so long been linked? Or has the detail achieved its new prestige by being taken over by the masculine, triumphing at the very moment when it ceases to be associated with the feminine, or ceasing to be connoted as feminine at the very moment when it is taken up by the male-dominated cultural establishment? (6)

These questions dig precipitously into the anatomy of loving animation subtending the promises and threats of the aesthetic. The strained, vacillating alliance between aesthetic meaning and detail lies at the heart of the problematic of the aesthetic as a register of subjectivity and a category of criticism and analysis. The following discussion probes this territory by considering Schor’s queries from two angles. In one case, I examine the interaction between two details in Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid (c. 1665–70). The first detail is the mistress’s pearl, which carries feminine traits, dispels several deprecatory feminine attributes and absorbs marks of masculinity. The pearl becomes a better “woman” than the mistress. The second detail is the mistress’s flaccidly spread left hand, which ultimately remains disparagingly feminine, even as it also acquires novel positive feminine qualities in the course of a reading. The other angle from which I set about Schor’s questions explores a moment in the history of aesthetics that enlists an explicitly valorized, feminized aesthetic detail in the institution of a form of attention and creation that is doubly gendered, feminized as well as masculinized. For this, I return to Hume, and in particular to his influential 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” In this text, he authorizes an aesthetic form of desire for sensory detail and makes this desire partially definitive of the entry of the human subject into culture. Hume provides a resounding articulation of the universal subject’s aesthetic address to a general public, a fantasy that has been decisively dismantled, yet

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

59

has not ceased to inform dimensions of aesthetic production, theory, performance, exhibition, and reception. The nebulous situation that results from this dilemma, both practical and theoretical, gives us reason to surmise the ongoing workings of Hume’s multiply gendered detail within contemporary cultural forums. These operations can hardly be expected to be unequivocal in their semantic and expressive orientations. Some clear-cut lines loom, however. In its address to sensory detail, Hume’s inaugurating gesture weaves that detail into a web of relationships connecting the aesthetic, the passions, and the subject-in-process. Along with Schor’s feminized particularities and the singular elements Barthes considers under the heading of the punctum, Hume’s initiatory move is suggestive of ways of critically transforming the detail’s undertakings.

The sensory detail as a ground for taste Hume’s account represents an important juncture in the history of a gendered schema of amatory address that organizes aesthetic meaning, in part, around the proper significance of detail. This tradition prominently includes Plato’s doctrine of the love of beauty, to which Hume’s view bears affiliations. The gendered paradigm of reciprocally animating, loving address, which makes up an influential part of the Western aesthetic heritage, acquires a distinctive spin in Hume’s writings. For Hume, the embrace of a fitting relation to detail by the aesthetic agent constitutes a central dimension of the faculty of taste, that is, of the capacity to perceive beauty and artistic goodness. Hume maintains that beauty is a sentiment felt by a specific observer, called a true judge. This person is a competent critic endowed with five appreciative propensities, namely, delicacy of taste (or imagination), good sense, freedom from prejudice, practice in perceiving artworks, and a history of prior comparative observations of such works. These qualifications allow the appraiser to arrive at correct aesthetic experiences. [A] true judge of the finer arts is observed, even during the most polished ages, to be so rare a character: strong sense, united 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. (ST, 147)

Evaluative judgments grounded in perceptions attained by an assembly of appropriately prepared adjudicators, according to Hume, ultimately are decisive of what is artistically good and bad. Possession of a delicate taste, for Hume, bespeaks an acute sensitivity to detail: “where the organs are so fine as to allow nothing to escape them, and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition, this we call delicacy of taste, whether we employ these terms in the literal or metaphorical sense” (ST, 141).2 By analogizing aesthetic taste (taste “in the metaphorical sense”) to the apprehension of gustatory and olfactory qualities (taste “in the literal sense”) as well as colors,

60

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Hume intimates that a similar observational proclivity is in play across these cases. This perceptual faculty is capable of registering details. And it is capable of taking in all of them (nothing escapes the organs; these experiential functions spot every element). Highlighting the dimension of fineness, not only as a feature of the assessor’s sensory apparatus but also as an aspect of the entities that are being sensed, Hume adds, “When the critic has no delicacy, he judges without any distinction, and is only affected by the grosser and more palpable qualities of the object: the finer touches pass unnoticed and disregarded” (147).3 Delicacy of taste proves to be needed in order to apprehend fine-grained sensory elements. The propensity of taste enables us to grasp these phenomena. And, ideally, it perceives them all. Critical competence, according to Hume, substantially is a matter of discerning details. He stresses that the true judge must record every one of them. Just as the capacity to detect every perceptual detail is a perfection of the senses, the capacity to notice every aesthetic detail is a perfection in the person of the critic. It is acknowledged to be the perfection of every sense or faculty, to perceive with exactness its most minute objects, and allow nothing to escape its notice and observation. . . . [A] quick and acute perception of beauty and deformity must be the perfection of our mental taste; nor can a man be satisfied with himself while he suspects that any excellence or blemish in a discourse has passed him unobserved. In this case, the perfection of the man, and the perfection of the sense of feeling, are found to be united. (ST, 142–3)

Appropriate perceptual functions and suitable powers of aesthetic observation, alike, permit us to experience every element that is open to being sensed, no matter how small or elusive. Hume defines delicacy of imagination, the crucial constituent of taste and a condition for human excellence, in terms of perceptual detail. This schema mobilizes a range of gendered forces. To see this, it is worth keeping in mind the organizational powers Hume attributes to taste, as described in Chapter 2. The intricate lines along which Hume tackles the question of what taste amounts to in “Of the Standard of Taste,” the layered argument through which he seeks to recognize subjective as well as objective facets of aesthetic normativity, and the complexities of the program the essay presents for allocating epistemic authority and credibility in the aesthetic field, can entice us to lose track of the plethora of social, economic, affective, amorous, moral, and political formations in which he locates taste, both as a motor for cultivation and as an effect of civilizational processes. Taste extends well beyond the template for proper or idealized aesthetic apprehension Hume sketches in his explicit reflections on the standard of taste. As argued before, the propensity of taste, for Hume, involves scenarios of passion and desire, schemata of pleasure, consumption, and virtue, developments in production and commerce, formations of knowledge, labor, friendship, public life, and human excellence. While these matters fundamentally draw on and foster taste in its function as a capacity for aesthetic experience, they also surpass this role in ways that are neither obvious nor one-directional, and that remain to be unraveled.

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

61

According to Hume, taste comprises a rich cultural practice. It amounts to a field of agency that includes protocols of creation and experience, habitual interactions, hierarchical rankings among persons, and participation in institutions. In short, it embodies a web of relationality and address that implements promises and threats. Within a perspective that is open to the social forms that Hume incorporates into the practice of taste, we can bring into view the capacity’s gendered workings as these take shape in relation to detail.4 Several feminizing effects come together in the model of aesthetic observation in which Hume recruits detail. He is on the record for mobilizing flagrant gendered conceptions of smallness and greatness in the realm of the imagination. The ideas of the small and the great thereby both conjoin evaluative components with elements that are descriptive of experiences, yielded in the mind of a beholder by objects and persons. Smallness betokens femininity, while greatness heralds masculinity: It is an obvious quality of human nature, that the imagination naturally turns to whatever is important and considerable; and where two objects are presented, a small and a great, it usually leaves the former, and dwells entirely on the latter. This is the reason, why children commonly bear their father’s name, and are esteemed to be of a nobler or meaner birth, according to his family. And though the mother should be possessed of superior qualities to the father, as often happens, the general rule prevails, notwithstanding the exception. . . . (1854, 205)5

The imagination, in a range of cases, as a rule, hastens from small, femininized items to greater, masculinized articles. Hume offers his remark in the context of an analysis of the workings of the imagination in the realm of passion and perception or sensation. Under discussion are regularities governing our reactions to sounds, scents, colors, beauty, houses, landscapes, gardens, countries, food, drink, pictures, wit, eloquence, fine arts, literary compositions, clothes, people’s bodies, animals, our own and others’ achievements, virtues, vices, surprises, poverty, and property—among a host of additional things, states, and qualities. The imagination brings its disposition to bypass feminized excellences to these different domains of persons, environments, occupations, things. Associating femininity with a diminutive scale and a minor status, the passage suggests that small and insignificant phenomena, hence, details, across numerous aesthetic precincts, sustain feminized registers of meaning. This is not to say that, for Hume, the detail is unalloyedly feminine or that every tiny element is feminized, but to draw attention to systemic feminizing tendencies that he brings to bear on it. Widely ranging, recurring philosophical motifs attendant on more specific aspects of detail’s feminization that I will discuss can be found in what Hume takes to be taste’s roots in nature, which, historically, has frequently been understood in feminine terms, and in the faculty’s (partial) distinction from reason, which prominently has been comprehended in masculine terms.6 At poignant moments, Hume conforms to alignments of this sort, even if they undergo shifts in his texts and accrue reversals of orientation.7 In a famous passage of A Treatise on Human Nature, he feminizes nature, construes it as a craved as well as gratifying source of sense impressions,

62

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

and contrasts it to reason (THN, 1.4.7.9, qtd. on p. 77 of this chapter). Elsewhere he invokes a similar gender construction by describing nature “with all her graces and ornaments,” as “la belle nature” (SR, 43). Oriented toward the registration of perceptual minutiae, the propensity of taste, Hume indicates, is anchored in nature. For example, he claims that the capacity operates in conformity with the correspondence that nature establishes between the forms of objects and sentiments (ST, 139). The workings of taste, for Hume, thus, comprise natural operations. They involve a natural (even if substantially acquired) disposition to be affected by details. By invoking the notion of nature, Hume is able to activate an elaborate network of feminine associations. Indeed, Hume’s naturalizing strategy opens up pathways to a feminization of taste. Taste’s (limited) separation from reason plays a part in this as well. Geared toward perceptual detail, the proclivity constitutes a faculty of feeling and sensation. This differentiates it from the masculine-identified aptitude of reason to which it also bears significant affiliations.8 Furthermore, taste’s proximity to nature and the interval that divides it (though incompletely) from reason yoke it to the particular, in contrast to the general. Hume observes that “[w]hen a philosopher contemplates characters and manners in his closet, the general abstract view of the objects leaves the mind so cold and unmoved, that the sentiments of nature have no room to play” (SH, 98–9). While reason’s operations as a source of abstraction and generality can block sentiment, the faculty of taste, as a natural font of sentiment, would ordinarily, in the absence of hindrance by reason, appear to be capable of opening up the intellect to feeling and sensation, funneling particularity and concreteness to the mind. Taste’s bonds to nature and its (qualified) distance from reason both yield grounds for feminizing functions that can be seen at work in Hume’s theory. Hume attaches a prolific array of feminizing menaces to the dimension of taste that consists in a receptivity to detail. He warns of the temptation of excessive refinement. He cautions against the threat of slipping into affectation and conceit. Detail gives rise to dangers posed by overabundant ornamentation. The observer is at risk of getting distracted from the whole, and, in response to that, of suffering fatigue and disgust (SR, 44–7).9 Irrelevance and tedium loom, not to speak of indiscriminate proliferation. Writers of historical chronicles should take care to prevent “minute circumstances”— elements that are “only interesting during the time, or to the persons engaged in the transactions”—from adding up to a “long detail” of “frivolous events” and “uninteresting incidents” (1850, 1–2). Not every situation deserves narrative attention (2). On pain of insignificance, the historiographer should provide a condensed account, one that abridges detail, rather than boring himself and his reader with historical facts that multiply “without end” (1). Indulgence in a surfeit of trivial detail is a shortcoming that is particularly distinctive of feminine literary genres and forms of exchange. It is through an influx of masculinized learning that the so-called realm of “the conversable,” epitomized by women and their at once social, conversational, and aesthetic habits, has been saved from wearying and stunning the intellect with endless chit-chat, and from getting the mind stranded in “a continued series of gossiping stories and idle remarks” (EW, 1). Hume urges women to take up the study of truthful and genuinely instructive, pleasing historical treatises of the sort that renders men of letters erudite (SH, 97). He recommends this as an

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

63

enlightening and entertaining alternative to the false representations that draw women readers to the genres of novels and romance, and to the nonveridical anecdotes that entice them in the genre of “secret history” (95–6). On this proposal, a respectable appreciation of masculinized history writing serves as an antidote to the perverse taste for “trifling pastimes” that Hume finds to be prevalent in his era, and that he associates with feminine aesthetic preferences (96–7; EW). At the same time, as an historian himself and as a commentator on aesthetic forms, Hume arguably capitalizes on trivial occurrences to attain rhetorical and political effects, taking recourse to narrative procedures of a sort that he condemns in the case of feminine styles and genres.10 Aesthetic agents face delicate balancing acts in handling detail. Navigating this treacherous but vital sphere, Hume’s contemporaries frequently overstep the mark: “modern politeness, which is naturally so ornamental, runs often into affectation and foppery, disguise and insincerity” (RP, 72). Schor’s historiography documents how the kinds of hazards that Hume associates with detail-sensitivity traditionally abound with feminine connotations.11 The catalog of threats Hume outlines counsels us to avoid flaws of a sort toward which he takes white, upper/middle-class women to be especially prone, and that, in white men, he takes to betray a diminishment of masculinity. Indeed, the empiricist explicitly links excessive refinement to pejorative forms of feminine embodiment and performance in the remark that “it is with books as with woman, where a certain plainness of manner and of dress is more engaging than that glare of paint, and airs, and apparel, which may dazzle the eye, but reaches not the affections” (SR, 46). Over-refinement signals decadent, duplicitous styles of feminine artifice that threaten taste with perils of degeneracy. The detail presents a vast inventory of feminizing risks. Feminized promises spring up as well. Detail-sensitivity offers an array of influential promises representing further, crucial, instances of gendering in Hume’s account. The perception of fine-grained detail has the effect of rendering white, middle-class men sociable (RA, 169–71), which drastically impacts their life worlds. Thereby receptiveness to detail fulfills a function Hume explicitly attributes to (presumably white) women (RP, 74–5). Susceptibility to detail, in realizing promises of a flourishing social life, would appear to enact a specifically feminine type of social mediation. Hume’s standardized taste represents an aesthetic that valorizes feminine detail. Feminized sensory detail plays additional, more complicated epistemic and foundational roles in Hume’s account of taste. As indicated before, Hume understands delicacy of imagination as a form of detail-sensitivity. To assess whether someone has delicacy of imagination, one has to gauge whether this person is able to experience what Hume calls “fine” as opposed to merely “gross” qualities. But that means one has to differentiate the fine from the gross. “Fine” and “gross” are not aesthetically neutral terms. They are concepts of taste. Accordingly, one must exercise a form of taste in order to adjudicate who possesses this proficiency.12 Observers stand in need of taste to determine whom to defer to in the event of aesthetic disagreement, or whom to turn to as a point of reference for testing or improving their taste. The problem affects not solely the epistemology of taste, but arises in the metaphysical plane as well. Because Hume comprehends delicacy of taste as a sensitivity to “fine” perceptual elements, in short, to sensory detail, his analysis of taste stops short of closure. It displays a conceptual

64

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

gap. He substantially leaves it open what taste exactly amounts to. Hume accounts for criteria for the appropriate observation of art and beauty in terms of conditions of the very sort that he seeks to explicate, to offer grounding, and to defend. His theory traces a circle among aesthetic elements.13 Rather than seeing the circular character of Hume’s theory largely as a problem, as many commentators have done, I will focus on its productive aspect. Recall that “Of the Standard of Taste” goes well beyond proposing a standard of taste. Hume envisions a cultural field in which this standard is valid. In other words, he devises a standardized domain of taste. This province, he is clearly aware, fails to exhaust the realm of taste, which, besides standardized taste(s), encompasses a variety of nonstandardized tastes. Hume thus inscribes an area of standardized taste into a heterogeneous field of tastes that fall short of the standing of fully worthy taste. But standardized taste, the circle in his account allows us to conclude, maintains vital connections with the sphere of unwarranted taste practices. I will venture a hypothesis: Hume’s institution of taste rests on a prestandardized form of taste, that is, on a prior structure of aesthetic engagement, which is presupposed by and continues to inform the paradigm he explicitly articulates. The act of standardization finds support in an anterior mode of taste-inflected address. The assumption that Hume solicits the assistance of a prestandardized type of taste helps to account for two perplexing features of his theory. Why is it important to register all details, that is, every tiny sensible aspect of an object or work? Furthermore, why does he accord fine-grained perceptual distinctions the constitutive and evidentiary role that they acquire in specifying what counts as taste and/or aesthetically good?14 The postulate of a persistently productive prestandardized matrix of taste suggests a reply: Hume does not understand small-scale perceptual discriminations merely as perceptual minutiae. Rather, he thinks of them in terms of aesthetic particularities. He conceives of fine shades of perceptual meaning as elements possessed of an aesthetic character. These diminutive articles owe their aesthetic significance to already established taste systems of which they form a part. To be sure, Hume is in the business of transforming and regulating these systems. But the metamorphosis he sets into motion fundamentally draws on already operative aesthetic practices that have a different organization than the one he seeks to found. Hume, thus, does not valorize just any perceptual detail; he directs our observations to a plane of previously aestheticized particularities, one that he asks us to grasp comprehensively. The sensory ability he singles out derives its aesthetic character from a prior structure of aesthetic desire and affiliation, a fabric of address that already valorizes and embraces perceptual detail, in advance of the experiential complex he wishes to establish.15 In order to institute the standard of taste, Hume must both authorize and displace a prior aesthetic. The standardization of taste rests on the deployment of a precritical pattern of taste that lodges its effects in the critical model of taste he establishes.16 His foundational gesture extols a sensory detail that has its place in an ancillary aesthetic practice. This sensory detail has been made aesthetic in the context of a specifically aesthetic mode of being.17 Hume accords this aesthetic detail a nonderivative, noninstrumental valuation.

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

65

What can we make of the gender of the antecedently aestheticized sensory detail? Hume explicitly acknowledges the presence of a legitimate, though not quite standardized, aesthetic that differs from the aesthetic he launches. He reserves for women a special, limited type of delicacy of taste, one linked with another kind of susceptibility to detail, namely, delicacy of passion, which is a receptivity to the little prosaic events that make up an ordinary day. This limited sort of detail-sensitivity applies to the judgment of certain everyday aesthetic practices, but fails to extend to productions of genius, in other words, to works of fine art and high culture. “[W]e may observe that women, who have more delicate passions than men, have also a more delicate taste of the ornaments of life, of dress, equipage, and the ordinary decencies of behaviour. Any excellency in these hits their taste much sooner than ours; and when you please their taste, you soon engage their affections” (DTP, 345. Textual variant, 1741–70 editions). For Hume, then, white, middle-class European women possess a minimal amount of taste—bad taste, perhaps, but less vulgar than the taste of Indians and peasants (ST, 144) and more refined than that of the tasteless man of letters who does not mingle with women (EW, 2). This species of taste, which stands in a special, immediate connection with the passions and affections of a distinct class of women, falls short of standardized taste in its explicit limitation to quotidian, domestic, and ornamental dimensions of life. Given that feminine taste of this sort is prestandardized and limited in applicability but nonetheless not illegitimate,18 we can assume it to be a source of aesthetic distinctions underwriting what delicacy of imagination conceptually amounts to (the fine/gross distinctions mentioned earlier) and supporting the evidentiary force of this critical attribute (its utility as an indicator of a person’s level of taste and as a touchstone for marking goodness in art). The sensory detail acquires its prior aesthetic standing in the context of prestandardized feminine aesthetic dispositions that are productive of everyday aesthetic life as enjoyed with certain social sectors. These antecedent practices of address make available to the standardized taste Hume postulates, aesthetic passions, needs, and desires that are already centered on detail, which he then adjusts and redirects, nurtures and prunes, to shape official taste, the faculty of distinction that he ultimately takes to promote human character and the state. In feminized quotidian activities as conducted within certain cultural strata, he finds the aesthetically significant detail-sensitivity that he ambivalently enlists to ground authorized taste. He ventures to shape the promises and threats that he takes to be embodied in these mundane aesthetic endeavors into a system of more reliable and desirable promises (and less damaging threats). Traditions of everyday prosaic aesthetic existence, which structure colloquial meanings and perceptions of colors, tastes, smells, sounds, movements, and literary forms in advance of Hume’s foundational project, fill the minutiae he courts with their idealized aesthetic attraction. The sensory detail is gendered feminine. Hume features a cast of perceptual details that carry systemic feminine connotations. The circle into which Hume lassoes delicacy of taste represents not simply a difficulty for his account, but functions as a site of contact among different taste systems. The traffic between standardized and prestandardized feminized aesthetic practices constitutes an instance of this. More generally, the circle Hume traces yields a space in which aesthetic agents are able to negotiate distances and continuities among

66

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

aesthetic practices. Points of mediation of this sort emerge in Hume’s improvisation on a tale in Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Hume composes a parable of taste that implicitly locates detail at a crossroad among multiple gender trajectories. Don Quixote’s assistant, Sancho Panza, in Hume’s version of the narrative, prides himself on his wine-tasting capabilities: “It is with good reason, says Sancho to the squire with the great nose, that I pretend to have a judgment in wine: this is a quality hereditary in our family” (ST, 141). But the attendant does not leave the matter there. He proceeds to give proof. To corroborate his aesthetic authority, Sancho recounts a wine-tasting feat performed by two of his kinsmen. People ask the duo to judge a cask of wine, “which was supposed to be excellent, being old and of good vintage.” And indeed, both samplers find the wine to be good, “were it not for a small taste of leather which [one of them] perceived in it” and “with the reserve of a taste of iron, which [the other] could easily distinguish” (ibid.). General hilarity breaks out among the onlookers. Until the bottom of the vat proffers up a key with a leather thong. Now the delicacy of the kinsmen’s taste stands vindicated, according to Hume. The witnesses, to the contrary, have exhibited their “dull and languid” sensibility. The finding of the key silences the verdicts spouted by these untrustworthy critics and puts an end to their laughter (ST, 141–2). In Hume’s view, the story illustrates the workings of a natural regularity or principle linking objective properties with observers’ feelings: iron and leather cause tastes of iron and leather that subtract from the goodness of sterling wine.19 He quite straightforwardly uses the bystanders’ dearth of perceptual discrimination, as well as their readiness to laugh at things that are not really so very funny to point up these spectators’ flawed aesthetic sensibility. However, in outlining the aesthetic profile of the kinsmen, Hume adduces several further aesthetic factors: one, the two family members of Sancho Panza’s judge the wine to be good, with certain (minor) caveats, thus offering an aesthetic judgment; two, in so doing, the couple lauds a wine that was already deemed “excellent, being old and of good vintage.” Hume clearly gives us to understand that the duo’s apprehensions are aesthetic in nature. But what evidence does he offer to the effect that the contributions made by key and thong do in fact render a supreme wine aesthetically worse than it would be, absent these elements? Why should the unexpected additions give rise to reservations about the wine’s quality (calling for provisos such as “were it not for” and “with the reserve of ”)? In principle, the supplementary ingredients might make an outstanding wine, say, even more magnificently succulent or piquant.20 The correct aesthetic verdict(s) in Hume’s anecdote could have gone a number of different ways than they actually go in the story. Conceivably, the two judges got things aesthetically wrong. But this is not how Hume encourages us to see things. In fact, he steers the reader away from contemplating such possibilities by proclaiming, just before relaying the tasters’ appraisal of the sample to be savored, that the wine presumably was good.21 The match between the testimony the kinsmen offer and the wine’s generally accepted aesthetic excellence lends support to Hume’s finding of the two critics’ first-rate aesthetic sensibilities. It is not only that the wine’s antecedently established goodness helps to make it convincing that the pair got its verdict aesthetically right. Hume’s point about the wine’s

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

67

excellence, oldness, and provenance has a yet more specific function. We are talking about wine of a certain category, a respectable vintage, a mature age, and, hence, an understood body of aesthetic promises. The splendidness that the tasters notice when judging the wine therefore does not consist in just any kind of aesthetic tastiness. It amounts to a delectability of a specific, dependable sort. This helps to make it plausible that iron and leather traces would constitute aesthetic threats—small blemishes marring an otherwise fine wine. Within the taste system in the context of which the experiment occurs, the properties that the wine is “supposed” to have enjoy a distinctive status with respect to the judgment at which a critic should arrive if her or his assessment is to display delicacy of taste. These features carry phenomenal, evaluative, and categorial weight, causing the overall match between expected and registered taste to count in the samplers’ favor.22 Hume’s wine-testing case brings to light a spiral of mediations taking place between different aesthetic schemes. Standardized taste (the system that lends credence to the kinsmen’s verdict), in the story, draws on and absorbs affiliations with not-yet standardized taste (the system on which the wine “was supposed to be excellent,” which encompasses the feelings of the astute duo as well as those of the obtuse bystanders) but also dismisses aspects of this system (upon completion of the testing ritual, Hume valorizes an aesthetic organization that honors the taste of the discerning few, while rejecting a model that favors the perceptions of the blunt many). In Hume’s experiment, objects that appeared to be aesthetically good do not in fact exactly count as such. Judgments that could be expected to be reliable prove to be untrustworthy in minute yet significant respects. Situations that seemed to be amusing, as judged by deficient taste, turn out to be not truly comical. Inappropriate laughter and erroneous judgment are to give way to appropriate laughter and suitable aesthetic judgment.23 Standardized taste both participates in and withdraws from arrangements of nonstandardized taste. Forging a progressively unfolding circuit of connections between presumptively good wine and demonstrably good even if slightly flawed wine, between shaky apprehensions and magnificent sensibilities, and between disreputable and reputable laughter, Hume creates room for aesthetic systems to take shape in encounter with one another, and thereby to fine-tune themselves. This process does not reveal unilateral gender connotations. Although feminization would appear to enter the scene of taste as a register of perceptual detail, Hume’s wine experiment revolves around men. The test takes place in an aesthetic forum where details and more expansive phenomenal gestalts acquire meaning in relation to one another. While Hume insists that a delicate taste allows the critic to experience every detail, this view leaves it open for fine-grained qualities to have greater or lesser aesthetic significance in specific cases. The general tendency of the imagination to pass over the minuscule in favor of the large-scale would seem to affect the comparative weight of these elements, privileging the aesthetic contributions of the macroscopic over those of the microscopic. But taste also functions as a feminizing counterforce that imposes limits on this masculinizing bent. The faculty opens up the imagination to the promise of detail while keeping in check the threats foreshadowed by a mass of tiny phenomena. The channels of aesthetic meaning Hume posits fail to add up to a stable gendered order. Masculinizing and feminizing currents exist side by side. They

68

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

feed into one another and enter into aesthetic competitions. These struggles grant exceptional critics, who, in Hume’s theory, are most likely to be white males of the upper/middle class,24 opportunities to prevail over other perceivers by simultaneously courting detail and putting it in its proper aesthetic place. Hume wraps the readers of “Of the Standard of Taste” into the gendered matrix he propounds in the essay. The aesthetic encounter that the text stages deploys additional machinations besides the ones we have considered so far. The philosopher spins cycles of relationships among Sancho Panza, the onlookers, Cervantes, himself, and the reader of his parable. He relays the tasting scene and Sancho Panza’s description of it for the most part in the present tense and in free indirect speech, sharply reducing his own as well as the reader’s distance from Cervantes’s text. Hume folds us into the story as direct addressees of Sancho’s tale: “You cannot imagine how much [the kinsmen] were both ridiculed for their judgment” (ST, 141). Sancho would appear to be speaking here. But Hume eschews pronouncedly differentiating his own voice from that of the narrator telling the story he adapts. A merging of voices ensues. We are addressed across the centuries, by both Sancho Panza and Hume. Bringing Quixote’s attendant and Cervantes close to us, and bringing us close to them, the philosopher insistently weaves his reader into the historically extending scene of aesthetic education he lays out. In a complementary movement, Hume adopts Sancho’s role of an elucidator of matters of taste. The fable Hume recounts begins with Sancho Panza’s proclamation of the reasonability of his hereditary claim to judgment in wine (“It is with good reason, says Sancho . . . ” [ST, 141, qtd. on p. 66]). Rather than leaving it at this declaration, Sancho proceeds to give warrant for this standing, clarifying what this critical position amounts to. In this, Hume follows him. What is more, he follows him by turning to his very story. “[A]s our intention in this essay is to mingle some light of the understanding with the feelings of sentiment, it will be proper to give a more accurate definition of delicacy than has hitherto been attempted. And not to draw our philosophy from too profound a source, we shall have recourse to a noted story in Don Quixote” (140–1). The plan to have understanding mesh with sentiment in order to improve our comprehension of delicacy sets modest analytical goals. Hume does not present himself as providing a conclusive clarification of the concept for which he ventures to account. He partially places himself in Sancho Panza’s position in that both explainers start a description that goes some but not all of the way. Ironically, Sancho never offers a reason to convince us that he actually did inherit the talent for which he commends his family members.25 Analogously, Hume, at prominent junctures, takes for granted what he hopes to show. The circles of taste I have marked, Hume’s putative recognition of these circles, and the gendered tensions in which he envelops the subject of aesthetic experience and education, including his reader, are compatible with the agenda he formulates for the essay. Hume choreographs a web of address and relationship that invites us to participate in a historically unfolding assembly of promises and threats emanating from now feminized, then masculinized, perceptual detail. While the feminine sensory detail helps to engender the promise of taste and beauty, in Hume’s account, the structure of address he theorizes affords detail a meticulously circumscribed place. He checks his esteem for detail. Sensory detail is only one among

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

69

several kinds of detail. In legitimating this category, Hume refrains from prescribing an overall openness to particularities, a lingering in sensation, or a spirit of heightened phenomenal exuberance. The experience of beauty, for him, centers on getting the sensory detail right, that is, on sensing the correct perceptual differentiations in the object. He concentrates criticism in a moment of judgment that is to be rapid and exact, unhesitating and dexterous (ST, 142–4). In his palette, a clearly and distinctly perceived sensory detail gains precedence over a host of other ones. Although the sensed perceptual detail plausibly constitutes a significant part of the experience of a work of art, it far from exhaustively covers what, in a broader sense, we can call the phenomenal detail, in other words, the minuscule qualitative experiences permitted by artworks and other objects that compose our sense of “what it is like” to see, say, a shiny blue blotch on a canvas. Hume’s discussion of phenomenological qualities foregrounds an abstract kind of pleasurable or unpleasurable affect, yielded by beauty or ugliness. Through the requirement that the observer integrally capture sensory detail he purports to ensure that art appreciation encompasses all phenomenal detail. But Hume’s theory renders it unlikely that this would actually be the case. Complex aesthetic qualities, such as visual, literary, or auditory beauty, a wine’s exquisite flavor, or a beer’s superb fragrance come upon us in intricate phenomenal shades, immersing us in labyrinthine tangles of cognition, imagination, other-directed orientation, desire, longing, anxiety, and fantasy. Beauty and ugliness often provoke states such as excitement and aversion, idealization and vulnerability that invest the pleasures and displeasures of the sensory detail with a profusion of phenomenal tones. Obscurity and distraction pervade this setting, falling short of Hume’s requirements of perceptual accuracy and observational speed, and causing important qualitative experiences to slip by undetected by the observational apparatus of the Humean true critic. The theorist’s appreciation of sensory detail goes together with a neglect of a mass of phenomenal tones. Another class of details, many of which Hume elides, subsumes what I will call the detail of relationships. This consists in fine-grained aspects of the relationships that aesthetic agents (artists, observers, critics, etc.) bear to one another and to the material world as they engage in aesthetic exchanges. Within the realm of intersubjective relationships, Hume validates an ostensibly publicly sharable state of admiration for great artists, alongside a desire to appreciate their achievements, while implicitly scaling back the realm of adequate aesthetic relationality to a limited range of relationships within a select group of men of culture, among those men and certain women, and among a restricted set of subjects and objects. The operative frame of aesthetic relationality sets aside countless details of relationships. A last type of detail Hume systematically downplays is that of culture, which comprises socially embedded values, conceptions, and modes of address that inform aesthetic activity. These considerations receive little attention in his essay. He taps into this field through the requirement that the observer imaginatively identify with the position of a work’s designated audience. While this stipulation could require an elaborate interpretive effort from the observer, Hume’s cryptic treatment of the condition suggests he has something more limited in mind.26 He accords the phenomenal detail, the detail of relationships, and the detail of culture marginal significance. The sensory

70

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

detail occupies an exceptional, rigorously delimited place in his broader canvas of details. Hume in many ways upends the fabric of address we inherit from the Platonic tradition in aesthetics. The relative prominence he grants sensory detail is of a piece with his philosophical skepticism. He suspends belief in God, restricts the capacities attributable to reason, and declares claims about the mind-independent reality of the external world unjustifiable by reason. More pronouncedly than Hegel and Joshua Reynolds, he rejects the Platonic bias against the material and the particular in favor of abstract form and spiritual ideal. Hume invites us to fill the space evacuated by received views of God, reason, and reality with a distinctively aesthetic desire for feminized perceptual detail, the fine shades of color, gustatory taste, and smell. At the same time, the broader web of address and relationships Hume proposes gives ample weight to masculinist operations he partly derails in the sensory domain. Hume’s feminized sensory detail fuels a masculinized process of cultivation. The masculinization of the detail attaches in the first instance, not to the critic’s delicate sensibility, which has several feminizing effects, as I have indicated, but to the four accessory qualifications that allow the critic’s sensibility to operate without distortion, namely, good sense, practice, comparative experience, and freedom from prejudice.27 Good sense, which Hume also calls “strong and masculine sense” (SR, 43) secures the right relation between detail and whole (ST, 146) and forecloses the risk of excessive proliferation of details (SR, 44). Practice, comparative experience, and freedom from prejudice masculinize taste by favoring the judgments of male critics over those of female critics.28 Cases of such masculinization are plentiful. One pertains to Hume’s gendered assessment of the place of emotion in the experience of art. For Hume, it will be recalled, “warm passions” that cause one to be especially “touched with amorous and tender images” constitute an acceptable critical predilection in young men, one that can appropriately inform their judgments of artworks and represents a legitimate source of variation in judgment among true critics (ST, 150). A “tender and amorous disposition,” however, perverts the capacity of women to make critical judgments of “books of gallantry and devotion,” even though, as instances of polite writings, these books exemplify a genre of which Hume takes educated women generally to be more competent judges than men.29 A great many gendered qualifications hem in his valorization of feminine detail. Hume inaugurates a structure of address that is doubly gendered: feminized as well as masculinized. He thereby regulates the subject’s relation to the world of cultural objects and to the community of other subjects. Following paths of appropriate artistic and spectatorial treatment, the sensory detail provides an occasion for aesthetic enjoyment and valuation to aesthetic agents who, in taking their pleasure and reaching their judgment, enact their cultural standing. In Hume’s view, it is both morally imperative and desirable to render one’s taste delicate and to position oneself aright vis-à-vis the sensory detail. This, after all, makes available the best that life has to offer: “[A] delicate taste of wit or beauty must always be a desirable quality, because it is the source of all the finest and most innocent enjoyments of which human nature is susceptible. In this decision the sentiments of all mankind are agreed” (ST, 143). Hume

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

71

grounds taste in feminized sensory detail, which he invests with sociopolitical power as he ushers it through a course of masculinization. Hume holds that a felicitous relation to sensory detail reverberates in suitable relations to certain other kinds of detail. Delicacy of taste, for Hume, as Chapter  2 indicates, relieves the passions from their specific form of detail-sensitivity, “delicacy of passion,” which consists in a regrettable over-susceptibility to details of life, such as favors and small injuries (DTP, 10). Through the acquisition of taste, the critic is able to exercise autonomy in the realm of happiness, taking control of his choice of books, diversion, and company (11). Emotional education, thus, is among taste’s promises: according to Hume, a cultivated taste improves our ability to experience “tender and agreeable passions” while thwarting “the rougher and more boisterous emotions” (12). The interpersonal corollary of this affective discipline equips the critic with the ability to register “insensible differences and gradations which make one man preferable to another,” that is, details of other people’s characters (ibid.). A propitious relation to sensory detail resonates widely in the life worlds men of taste share with others. The faculty of taste ensures that the true observer register every shade of perceptual information, passion, and character that is worth recording, submit it to a correct evaluation, and respond with an appropriate degree of pleasure or displeasure. Sensory detail supports a system of aesthetic address that, while activating feminizing forces, also corrals aesthetic subjectivity and culture within masculinizing delineations. Appointed to its proper place, the detail assists in safeguarding what counts as value. Adequately governed detail materializes as aesthetically suitable experience and conduct. The ability to grant details fitting roles as elements of one’s social, affective, imaginative, and perceptual behavior is part and parcel of the comportment that qualifies as legitimate aesthetic agency.

But is the aesthetic detail a detail? From the aesthetic tradition that extends from Plato (and earlier practices) to the present, we inherit gendered blueprints of aesthetic desire. A source of promises as well as threats, the detail plays a part in these schemata. Alongside the Platonic love of beauty, the Humean passion for sensory detail furnishes a template molding reciprocal moments of animation among subjects, and among subjects and objects. Participants in historical systems of aesthetic relationality and address, we engage countless tiny particularities that fluently take shape in encounter with the aesthetic stratagems we employ. From time to time, however, we stumble upon dissonant details that rattle the amatory frames ensconcing us. Like Hume, whose sensory detail carries both feminine and masculine connotations, Johannes Vermeer, in his painting Mistress and Maid, presents us with a detail that is doubly gendered, namely, the mistress’s earring. Energizing the soft space between her cheek and neck, containing the anxious solace of her self-touching hand, and cordoning off an uncertain split between her fingers, the earring spins the light around in the picture plane.

72

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Figure 3.1  Johannes Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, c. 1665–70. Oil on canvas, 90.2 x 78.7 cm. © The Frick Collection, New York.

Perfect in the luminous wholeness of its shape but subtending so closely to the body that it would seem to have absorbed the body’s warmth; waiting to dangle over and stroke the face upon the slightest turn of the head; and, what is more, reverberating with the rhythms of a pulsating artery, the mistress’s pearl mediates between a sharp visual regimen organized by gazes and bodily gestures and a fluffy, fleshy, and curly tactile modality, figured by curving textiles and exposed skin. The pearl is responsible for a remarkable conjunction of effects: this preciously placed, self-enclosed, rounded ornament initiates an erotic drama; lends a distinctive structure to the viewer’s aesthetic pleasure; distributes class and racial status; and instates two versions of femininity. But is Vermeer’s pearl a detail? Can a pictorial element that fulfills a crucial interpretive role be a detail? Before analyzing the pearl’s gendered operations, it is necessary to consider a paradox that attaches to the notion of aesthetic detail. The concept of the detail is a comparative concept. A detail is something that, on a scale of significance, appears to be of lesser value, gauged in relation to an element that is of greater value. This relativity attaches to any kind of detail as a detail. At issue, for the current inquiry, is of course not any kind of detail, but the aesthetic detail, in particular, and, yet more specifically, the detail as an aesthetic category.30 Aesthetic contexts often take details for a breathtaking swivel around corners of unprecedented meaning. When we apprehend a detail in its aesthetic functioning, its

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

73

characteristic relativity undergoes a subtle shift. As the aesthetic detail performs its aesthetic work in the course of an interpretation, this detail ceases to be the detail it was before it took up its aesthetic labor. In Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid, the mistress’s pearl earring, initially a relatively insignificant pictorial element, comes to organize the painting in the modalities of affect, form, and narrative, constantly renewing and reshaping the work’s dramatic possibilities, inexhaustively steering meaning in novel directions. Paradoxically, the aesthetic “detail” details itself away in the course of a reading. An initially marginal pictorial element dispels its circumstantial status and assumes a central place in a manner that is both initiated and inflected by its initial marginality. This is the paradox of the detail. Interconnected strata of significance and insignificance coexist in the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. The criteria by which we assess the import of aesthetic particularities fluctuate as we engender interpretations. Viewing a painting we put into motion the initial pictorial standing we grant aesthetic detail. Observation of the work yields novel grounds on which we proceed to build our readings, namely, newly emerging, hitherto unknown considerations that reflect meanings that we have been encountering in the piece. These alternative interpretive grounds enable us to fill in the semantic and perceptual field emanating from a detail. Consequently, the detail stands out in the plenitude of its detailed and at times less detailed aesthetic functioning. Taking aesthetic effect, the detail ceases to be the detail it was.

A pearl’s pleasures and perils Approaching Vermeer’s painting, I address it from a vantage point situated within an already existing structure of loving animation that harbors Plato’s and the Neoplatonists’ love of the beautiful and Hume’s desire for sensory detail. I engage the pearl as a participant in a frame of reciprocal amatory address sparked by aesthetic traditions, activating a historically established pattern of relationships, to see where this takes both the detail and us. Ornamental, attached to a female body, and relatively small in size, Vermeer’s pearl constitutes a feminine detail. Yet, it also assumes masculine positions. One such role it takes on is that of governing the relations between the mistress and the maid. The pearl differentiates between their class positions in ways that are unstable and substantially under male control. The letter threatens the mistress’s position. Depending on what the news is, she may have to take her pearl off. But if the pearl goes, who will have to go next? Mistress, maid, and pearl can each be traded depending on changes in the affections of the sender of the letter. Whereas the maid may find another household to serve31 and the pearl can shine on other ears, the mistress is ill prepared for such transformations. Picking up on the light from a window that may be imagined outside the frame of the painting, the pearl occupies several overlapping ovals that connect the women’s bodies. A first oval holds the mistress’s upper body, connecting her head and left arm. (This oval can be traced in several ways, as spanning either the upper or the lower rims of the fur of the mistress’s sleeves, including either the pearl or the eyes. The pearl and

74

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

the mistress’s eyes hold roughly comparable positions in relation to these different, partially overlapping ovals.) A second oval connects the mistress’s eyes, left thumb, right arm, pencil, the letter she writes, the left inkwell, and the arriving letter. This oval can be bigger or smaller, either skipping or including the mistress’s head and bun. A more vaguely circumscribed, third oval is suggested by the links among subtending and red-colored elements in the painting, spanning the folds in the lady’s coat, the red string in her lap, the box on the table (unopened letters? larger pearls? older secrets?), the maid’s red cheeks, the slightly rosy echo at the top of the mistress’s hair, her bun, and the top of her necklace. The pearl’s location left of center in the upper plane of the (smallest) first oval corresponds to the position of the mistress’s eyes in the second (smaller) oval; the pearl’s position in the (larger) first oval corresponds to the position of the eyes in the third oval. The pearl participates both in a sharply differentiated visual and linguistic modality that includes the letter and in a more diffuse and softer tactile register that includes the women. The interchangeability between the mistress’s eyes (one of which is barely visible, the other invisible) and the pearl in several interconnected ovals suggests an easy replaceability of feminine embodied vision by masculinized visual and linguistic signification. Sharing in tactility as well as visuality, the ornament gives the mistress’s body an erotic radiance that her paralyzed body by itself fails to sustain. By visual affiliation with the letter and the gazes as opposed to the sphere of touch and skin, the pearl functions as a stand-in for an absent male letter writer, whose missive invades the women’s domestic sphere. A placeholder for masculine economic and sexual power, the piece of jewelry instates two exclusively defined forms of femininity, which it also denounces: the mistress typifies a decorative femininity that relies on inertia and indecisiveness; the maid epitomizes a domestic femininity that requires her to be supportive and to be in the know about what is going on in the household. The pearl enlists the maid’s material presence and her gentle energy in the service of the mistress’s attractiveness. Another source of the pearl’s masculinization resides in its exemplification of a selfcontained existence that it withholds from the mistress. The mistress does not have the permanent radiance of a fully rounded translucent pearl in the offing, something that is probably not unrelated to the content (and form) of the letter. She falls short of the autonomous perfection of her earring. The pearl outdoes her. Its masculinist connotations notwithstanding, the precious object is a better woman in the register of decorative femininity, which it has helped to articulate. Lastly, the pearl plays out against one another two kinds of femininity. In collaboration with the letters and the fur trim, it whitens the mistress and, by contrast, darkens the maid. At the same time, the mistress fails to match up to the fullness of the inkwells and the maid’s embodied presence. (Placed right in front of the maid’s skirt, the inkwells seem to be the maid’s more generously flowing but more prosaic, shiny “pearls.”)32 While the maid has privileged access to the arrangements surrounding the letter, the mistress is in a state of disorientation. Accordingly, the hierarchical relationship between mistress and maid—established by the pearl, the illumination/darkness and background/foreground contrasts, and, not incidentally, the juxtaposition of detailed, light figuration (the mistress) and rougher, darker modeling (the maid), slips in the epistemic realm, to ironic effect.

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

75

The ornament fulfills an important structuring role in the painting. Nonetheless, it remains a detail. For the aesthetic detail, as noted earlier, is marked in the phenomenological domain by a paradoxical interchange between the significant and the insignificant. Part of the thrill of Vermeer’s painting is the significance that accrues, in the course of a reading, to an element that we simultaneously experience as in some ways inconsequential. In the mistress’s pearl, we find, then, a detail that is both feminized and masculinized and that casts off several disparaging feminine characteristics as an interpretation unfolds. The pearl constitutes a central point of connection between the painting and the viewer. Its address to the observer positions the spectator as a distant bearer of masculine power. The work’s structure of address in this respect substantially parallels Hume’s civilizational fantasy on which the artwork projects an aesthetically authorized white, male, middle-class, heterosexual subject position that draws pleasure from sensory detail and finds the fiction of a self-possessed cultural identity confirmed. Exercising his taste, the Humean man of culture, it will be recalled, sets about actualizing his potential for cultivation, as he seizes on the finest in art, pleasure, feeling, companionship, and people, leaving aside what falls short of this. Another detail contravenes this relational structure. The gesture of the mistress’s left hand, though reactive—it is a response to the letter—counteracts the decorative

Figure 3.2  Johannes Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, detail. c. 1665–70. Oil on canvas, 90.2 x 78.7 cm. © The Frick Collection, New York.

76

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

aspect that her beauty and her graceful attire bestow on her as she holds her posture, transfixed, rooted to the spot. Her bodily presence is measured, even if not subdued or withdrawn. Her demeanor suggests her being paused in the course of a purposive action, checking herself, interrupting her writing. Vermeer substantially fashions the mistress’s corporeal being by means of her coat, her position in the composition, and by contrast with the maid; the lady’s arms and head signal a less than fully vivacious inhabitation of her flesh and posture.33 The hesitant motion of her left hand, which reaches past her chin for her cheek or pearl (or both), is the one moment in which she eroticizes herself and, in the process, also the pearl. Does this gesture reach for a feminized or masculinized detail? (A cheek? The pearl as feminized? Masculinized? Multiply gendered?) In sexualizing herself and the pearl, the mistress also eroticizes the viewer’s subject position and undercuts the distanced, masculinist address in which pearl and viewer are complicit. The mistress’s gesture feminizes the pearl, bringing out its closeness to the female body and its liability to touch. But how does her ambivalent gesture affect the gendering and the aesthetic valorization of the parting fingers? The flaccidly spread hand remains dismissively feminine. Could the hand be a punctual detail, a detail that unpredictably touches the observer? Might it in this respect be analogous to the figure of parting fingers in Roland Barthes’s Lover’s Discourse as read by Naomi Schor?34 I find it hard to warm up to a gesture that is so weak and lifeless. While the mistress’s hand is in transit, it also apprizes us of paralysis. The appearance of immobility stands in contrast with the movement of the intruding letter. The letter absorbs her and, a delay in the maid’s delivery notwithstanding, solicits direct action from her.35 The hand’s fleshiness, its lack of articulation, its blank whiteness, feed its lifeless quality.36 The mistress’s gesture evokes affect for me, but I find it a cold affect (which differs markedly from an absence of feeling). A turning point arises in the cycles of animation encompassing the aesthetic. Inasmuch as it is a modality of love, aesthetic experience comprises a structure of address that brings life to elements that are apprehended as dead or lifeless. A long tradition posits the aesthetic on the side of love and life in opposition to death and immobility.37 Can this scheme coherently recognize a “cold” aesthetic passion? In Barthes’s view, the punctual detail, that is, the detail that unexpectedly touches one and becomes a locus of desire and affect, ruptures coldness: I was looking at everything in the other’s face, the other’s body, coldly: lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, the luster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; I was fascinated—fascination being, after all, only the extreme of detachment—by a kind of colored ceramicized, vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understanding anything about it, the cause of my desire. (LD, 72, my emphasis) Why is it that I desire so-and-so? . . . Is it the whole of so-and-so I desire . . .? And in that case, what is it in this loved body which has the vocation of a fetish for me? What perhaps incredibly tenuous portion—what accident? The way a nail is cut,

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

77

a tooth broken slightly aslant, a lock of hair, a way of spreading the fingers while talking, while smoking? (LD, 20, my emphasis)

The punctum, such as “a brief (but excessive) way of parting the fingers” pierces a cold, detached, and indifferently generalizing consciousness to evoke “a very special desire” for a “particular other (and for no other).”38 This detail makes its appearance in the order of intimacy, attachment, and love, the province of the gift and of grace.39 For Hume, likewise, the pleasure of the desired sensory detail suspends coldness. In the grip of dismay, produced by his own skepticism, an upswing unfailingly looms on the horizon: ’Tis impossible, upon any system, to defend either our understanding or senses. . . . The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning. . . . Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther. (THN, 1.4.2.57; 1.4.7.8–9, my emphasis)

Nature, which Hume understands as feminine, and juxtaposes to reason, supplies him with a font of sensory impressions that drive off his melancholic, delirious state of mind. Given that aesthetic modes of address expounded by Hume and Barthes breach coldness,40 complexities surge when we press their paradigms to recognize a cold aesthetic passion. Even if cold aesthetic affects are not so rare, at this juncture, they engulf us in a paradoxical assemblage of modes of address. The aesthetic passions, as structured on the life-death model of aesthetic address, would seem to have to eradicate coldness, and coldness would seem to have to banish the passions. Our perceptions and feelings have taken us to a border zone among disparate frames of address. Like Hume’s and Barthes’s configurations of address, Vermeer’s painting immerses aesthetic agency in a field of conflicting orientations. A cold affect spilling toward the mistress’s hand bursts forth along with a disruption of our address to the detail, an attenuation of the detail’s aesthetic animation, a modulation in aesthetic love, and a tempering of interpretive energy. The life and love that are at work in the crafting of an interpretation, the development of a meaning, and the elaboration of an experience slow down and threaten to come to a halt. If we see the amatory antinomies in which Hume and Vermeer embroil detail as manifestations of encounters among schemes of address, as I have done, we can illuminate the implications of these paradoxical moments. The puzzles that arise necessitate a shift from the floundering effort to differentiate the aesthetic from the nonaesthetic, proper from improper taste, adequate from inadequate apprehension, to an inquiry into points at which multiple modes of address come together. An

78

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

understanding of the aesthetic as a meeting ground among constellations of address permits us to forgo the historical attempt to found the phenomenon in instituting gestures designed to do away with states of lifelessness. Identifying frictions and confluences between divergent systems and forms of address, the approach I have begun to sketch dispenses with the need to postulate procedures that, evacuating antecedent practices, introduce organization to a previously unstructured, anaesthetic field. Gendered orders of detail, which give rise to the aporias I have recognized in Hume and Vermeer, alert us to the power of aesthetic interpretation as a locus of encounters among modes of address.

Interpretation regenders detail Rather than eliciting continuous moves from femininization to masculinization, two of my details—Hume’s feminine sensory detail, which gains masculine attributes on its way to cultivation, and Vermeer’s pearl, which, as a reading unfolds, discards feminine characteristics while acquiring masculinist ones—exhibit overlaying and interconnecting connotations and valuations that carry multiple genderings. A forum where disjunctive forms of address gather, interpretation yields a basis for a reply to the detail’s gendered history. Interpretive processes imbue detail with genderings, and afford aesthetic agents means of transforming gender orientations at which they provisionally arrive. Readers build upon presumptive genderings they initially assign to detail. They envelop such elements into emerging understandings, sensations, feelings, questions, and hypotheses. Devoting themselves to a work over time, accordingly, observers carve channels of apprehension that allow them to disarticulate putative genderings and forge alternative ones, leaving behind preliminary assessments in favor of untried meanings. Through this process, we can come to ascribe new genderings to detail. Interpretation is capable of regendering the detail. The coincidence of forms of address perceivers bring to works of art and modes of address artworks direct at them holds in stock yet other avenues for transforming the detail’s gendered associations. Encounters among modes of address exist in abundant variety. The resulting proliferation of meeting points affords us copious avenues for critically engaging the detail’s troubled track record. The experiential latitude this gives us is germane in light of the differential and fluctuating ranks details occupy across the aesthetic field. Unevenness permeates the realm of aesthetic particularity. Such inconstancy bars the success of a one-size-fits-all solution to the gender quandaries we are facing. Details hold asymmetrical positions in aesthetic structures of address. For example, Vermeer and Hume create oppositions among different kinds of details, placing in tension disparate forms of address directed toward and by these details. As indicated before, the pearl and the mistress’s left hand function in contrasting scenes of address, in the context of which these details incur shifting, interconnected gendered roles. Hume balances the relative prominence of sensory detail with restrictions on the role of phenomenal detail, the detail of relationships, and that of culture. Details, as Vermeer’s and Hume’s cases reveal, participate in meshes of address featuring multidirectional

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

79

gender orientations and valuations. Accordingly, generic exaltations of details— whether these be of a sensory, phenomenal, descriptive, punctual, structural, or supplementary kind—fail to yield a propitious response to the phenomenon’s vexed history. Such conversions invite the details and the forms of address these turnabouts promote to play out their concomitant genderings against other kinds of particularities and modes of address. Details unpredictably reverberate with one another. The role of the punctum in Barthes’s work illustrates this difficulty. The punctum constitutes a pivot in the web of address Barthes weaves between the detail and the persona of the aesthetic lover he assumes in Camera Lucida. A photo that affects the viewer in the fashion of the punctum “animates” her or him; the viewer, in turn, “animates” the photograph (CL, 20). Barthes’s invocation of the amatory relationship he sustains with contingent detail underscores the ways in which we can irresistibly be given over to aesthetic elements that somehow touch us. The punctum hits the aesthetic observer with a flash (16) provoking tiny jubilations in the subject (53) that rupture the indifferent banality associated with the studium, the culturally sanctioned workings of public, contextual knowledge in aesthetic perception (25–8). It is to the punctum’s force that Barthes attributes the ability of his mother’s picture as a child in the Winter Garden to convey the sense of her presence, the glow of the being she was, the “truth” of the person he adores and mourns (73, 75, 103). Barthes considers the workings of the punctum intractable. On the side of the photo, we countenance the power of the unforeseeable, off-center element. On the side of the viewer, the punctum’s impact manifests a capacity for feeling, an ability to make a connection with the individuals depicted in the photo, and a vulnerability to experiences that elude certain codes of established cultural life. The viewer’s address to the punctum and the punctum’s address to the viewer are responsible for a range of feminizing effects. Inciting a condition of loving animation, the punctum opens up aesthetic experience to pictorial, affective, and individual particularities that have historically been marginalized as feminine. At the same time, Barthes counters the viewer’s and the photo’s feminization with a masculinizing thrust that molds the relation between observer and observed. He describes the punctum’s impact as “immediate and incisive” (CL, 53). The punctum “pierces,” “triggers,” “sets off ” the spectator (26, 49, 19). This model of direct address sets aside the pressure of reigning conscious formations in order to establish a place for the unconscious in the viewer’s relation to detail. Barthes in important ways understands the unconscious positions that forge the lineaments of loving animation as relatively static.41 While he allows the detail to work its way in the perceiver, and to govern and expand the observer’s experience of the photo (53), the sidelining of the studium, as defined in opposition to the punctum, causes an array of phenomenal, cultural, and relational details to fall through the cracks of his analysis, particularities that might be sites of psychic investment and to which an account of the aesthetic unconscious could in principle lend acknowledgment. Hordes of details serve to organize and give meaning to states of love and indifference, yet drop by the wayside in Barthes’s conception of aesthetic address. The circumvention of the studium and its cultural coding in the unconscious positioning of viewer and detail elides fine-grained aspects of the relation between

80

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

the spectator and the photo, and of the experiences and meanings embedded in that relation. Following the punctum that stirs him, Barthes often runs up against the studium in perceptions that carry associations of cultural distance, such as, for example, those of an image of “a rebellion” in Nicaragua, of a photo teaching him “how Russians dress,” of a picture in which “the essence of slavery is . . . laid bare” (CL, 22–4, 28–30, 34–5). Thereby he obscures the workings of details of his persona’s place within a fabric of phenomenal, cultural, and relational conditions, as elements of his vulnerability to being touched and being left indifferent by specific aesthetic particularities. The punctum’s legitimization comes at the price of other details that are liable to aesthetic address and nonaddress. Foregrounding moments in the dyad between observer and photo, Barthes evades the ways in which circumstances exceeding parameters of this reciprocal axis of address enter into aesthetic experience. His reflections elide the forces that the narrator’s whiteness, masculinity, ethnicity, and class position introduce to this persona’s unconscious and unconscious relation to the photo. Leaving these registers in significant ways unchallenged, Barthes’s conception of aesthetic subjectivity not altogether critically aligns the love of the punctum (including besides the detail’s enthralling capabilities also its potential to wound) with structures of domination. While usefully driving a wedge between, on the one hand, presumed, socially legitimized types of interconnectedness and distance among persons and among persons and objects, and, on the other, the bonds and gaps that we actually experience—elements that importantly are capable of upending expected arrangements and of sustaining transformative, critical momentum—Barthes, in making this crucial distinction, simultaneously invites hegemonic vectors of power and experience to reassert themselves in our engagement with detail. The theorist’s transvaluation of pictorial, affective, and individual particularities is accompanied by implicit constraints on the flow of detail that sluice feminizing movements he initiates through gateways of a masculinizing schema of subjectivity. The model of the punctum’s immediate, individualized affective impact posits a spectatorial persona that, while liable to momentary piercings by singular elements, lifts the viewer from the dense fabric of relationships with the world of cultural objects and other aesthetic agents. The elevation of the punctum from the field of discredited particularities to the site of an object of love (in its exhilarating as well as traumatic aspects) thus accompanies a dismissal of an array of aesthetically significant details. Although Barthes resists the gendered demotion of the details of culture, phenomenology, and relationships, his advancement of the punctum also confirms their denigration anew and serves to masculinize the realm of aesthetically enticing particularity. The detail’s multiple and variable positioning in a system of overlaying and interacting gender connotations necessitates a more densely woven response to its history. Correspondences between Hume’s and Barthes’s accounts come into view at this stage. Both theorists invent subjects of aesthetic experience that they situate at the core of a gendered aesthetic order. Hume’s hypostatization of the true critic whose faculties and experiences serve as a telos and touchstone for a cultivating process, parallels Barthes’s presumption of a highly individualized, singular subject who administers

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

81

aesthetic indifference and love. Where Hume renders the joint verdict of ideal judges determinative of what is of value in art, Barthes advances the perceptions of the aesthetic persona presented in Camera Lucida as the measure of the photo’s propensity to touch the narrator. The persona whose affect answers photographic detail by which he is captivated, structurally matches the critic who finds his cultural identity reflected in a world of civilizing aesthetic objects and companions. By containing feminizing effects within the compass of the singular subject of aesthetic experience, Barthes’s masculinizing strategy supports the aesthetic prestige of newly valorized particularities, while simultaneously diminishing—analogously to Hume—the significance accruing to the details of culture and relationships, and to the phenomenal detail. Contra Naomi Schor, Barthes stops short of offering a degendering aesthetic.42 Rather, he envisions a path of feminization, allied to the singular, contingent contours of perceivers’ affects, a trajectory that simultaneously buttresses and undergoes backing by a masculinizing countermovement, which takes effect at the level of the spectator, and the perceiver’s positioning within existing strata of aesthetic meaning. Highlighting the detail’s current triumph, Schor asks what this implies for its feminine and masculine connotations, and for the comparative weight of these dimensions. Three instances we have examined, namely, the sensory detail in Hume’s theory of taste, Barthes’s punctum, and the pearl in Mistress and Maid, invite a concerted response to these queries. My cases exemplify the prominence of feminized and feminizing aesthetic details. Whereas such elements, in Schor’s words, are not “taken over by the masculine” (1987, 6; see p. 58 of this chapter) their prestige lies at most partially in their feminization, is in many ways counteracted by this feminization, and is substantially due to their masculinization. The mistress’s left hand defies this model of recuperation. For all its prominence in the painting, this hand retains its pejorative feminine connotations, fails to incur remedial masculine associations,43 resists aestheticization on the model of animation, and as such constitutes a limit-case of aesthetic and erotic standing, one that verges on paradox. The contrast between my three doubly gendered details and the unequivocally feminized left hand of Vermeer’s mistress bears out a further conjecture: feminine detail enjoys a prominent aesthetic status to the degree that it can initiate masculinizing trajectories of culture formation; its standing becomes tenuous insofar as it escapes being conscripted into such itineraries. Gendered cultural orders harboring aesthetic particularities locate us in patterns of amatory address, which we orient toward as well as away from death. These historical structures differentially mold detail, unevenly energizing and quelling its aesthetic power. Barthes’s examination of photos “in relation to what we romantically call love and death” (CL, 73) eclipses the embracing reach of the mesh of entanglements snarling us up in these moments of relationality. Hence his inquiry falls short in retort to the difficulties accelerating in the detail’s presence. And yet, the singularity of aesthetic attraction exemplified in the figure of the punctum (CL, 8, 20) alerts us to the capacities that the operation Schor names “reading in detail” makes available to endeavors to alter the detail’s fate, and to put into motion gendered structures of aesthetic relationality and address.

82

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Gendering aesthetics anew Aesthetic practices situate us in schemas of address oriented around alignments of life and lifelessness. The detail’s place in such structures of relationality mandates a form of reading that moves between the general and the particular, without settling on either side of this divide. This mobility affords us the suppleness needed to challenge variable historical dispensations of gendered detail. A practice of reading along these lines enables us to deflect plans of address centered on the general and singular subject of aesthetic experience, of the sort proposed by Hume and Barthes, respectively. It yields points of resistance to gender codings governing what counts as culture, cultivation, or cultural form.44 Linking feminized sensory detail and artistic goodness, Hume’s cultural imaginary bears analogies to the seventeenth-century Netherlandish visual logic that took paintings of beautiful women to emblematize cultivation of various sorts.45 Details in Vermeer, Barthes, and Hume, I have argued, function as elements of templates of aesthetic address that enlist feminized perceptual detail within masculinizing tracks of culture formation. This insight makes it likely that the coldness the aesthetic is to overcome, looms at a point at which a female body assumes a desublimatory, lifeless shape that appears to remain antithetical to culture, as in the case of the somewhat formless, stagnant, compositionally awkward fleshiness of the mistress’s left hand. Not coincidentally, Mistress and Maid arises at a moment in Vermeer’s oeuvre and its surrounding discourses (such as courtship and painting manuals, etiquette books, and poems) during which “civility,” Nanette Salomon argues, came to supplant “sexuality” as a defining characteristic of femininity (1998, 319). She identifies a discursive shift from “minne” to “liefde” in the second half of seventeenth-century Holland, in other words, a transition from a sphere of sexual and mercenary love (“the-physical-qua-sexual”) to one of idealized and dignified love (“the-metaphysical-qua-civilized”) (322). This observation throws light on the drama staged by Vermeer: the spectacle entwining his protagonists and their entourage activates tensions between earlier and later amatory designs. These two formulas for desire make conflicting pictorial demands on the aesthetic powers of the sensory detail; a strained figuration of female sexuality and embodiment gives shape to the friction between two schemes of relationality, address, and promising. Vermeer makes this pressure visible in the mistress’s hand. In a plan that opposes sexuality and embodiment to cultivation, the aesthetic, predictably, is unable to animate a detail that Vermeer presents as eluding a painting’s artistic signifying structure. Hence the viewer’s coldness. However, this coldness is not stable, and neither is the supposedly cultivating masculinist address that underwrites it. The mistress’s hand challenges the spectatorial position outlined by the pearl. I find the hand’s passive fleshiness somewhat repulsive. I experience its formlessness as threatening and a bit disgusting. My culturally empowered hold on the painting and on my imagined spectatorial identity slips. Irritation surfaces at Vermeer’s recruitment of the mistress in a signifying economy that he organizes around the letter and the pearl, which offers the lady the dubious options of either engaging in ambivalent selfconsolation or reaching for icons of masculinist presence, one offered up to her eyes,

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

83

the other dangling in her ear. I begin to withdraw from the painting’s structure of desire. Other forms of address announce themselves in the work. The maid’s gentle embodied presence counters the mistress’s hesitant comportment. Denying the lady the company of an adoring, deferential attendant, Vermeer pairs her up with a subject of knowledge who musters a supportive even if ironic awareness of what her employer is about. The maid’s congenial bemusement is suggestive of attitudes that exceed coldness, repulsion, irritation, and threat. Compassion fills me on account of the resourcelessness intimated by the hand’s inert fleshiness. I empathically entertain a moment of corporeal dissolution. Seized by anxiety on the mistress’s behalf, I now fear the cold gaze projected earlier. Class and racial privilege proclaim their material efficacy in her flesh and her gorgeous coat. The pearl draws visual energy from the mistress’s autoerotic gesture. A desire arises to elaborate threads of the intrigue. These experiences contain traces of schemas of address that substantially circumvent the distant, masculinist mode exemplified by the pearl. They bring out details of experience, relationality, and address that dodge the cultivating plan of attention, validated by the paradigm of civility governing Dutch genre paintings of the 1660s. My engagement with the mistress’s hand steps away from the linkages Hume marks between desired detail and the assumption of a culturally authorized interpretive position. Rather than evincing a pronounced break between standardized and prestandardized aesthetic systems, my address to the work, and the work’s address to me, forge a fluctuating web of connections and disconnections among such matrices. The interpretation of the painting I have offered takes place within frames of loving animation we direct both at and away from death. At the same time, it traverses multiple schemas of address. My reading shifts between the general and the particular, eschewing coagulation around either polarity. The resulting critical mobility affords us the limberness we need in order to engage the detail’s differential positioning within and across structures of address. An elastic inhabitation of encounters among modes of address opens up aesthetic experience to passions, strata of relationality, and forms of culture that thwart gendered arrangements of detail that the history of aesthetics has conferred on us. The detail’s predicament in aesthetics speaks to quandaries we invite when consigning aesthetic experience to the role of a detail. The interpretive and regendering capabilities spewing forth from modes of address we direct at detail, and detail at us, preclude the aesthetic’s stable functioning in that place. The versatile strategy of address I have begun to describe, drawing on Schor and Barthes, holds in stock a critical response to projects that relegate aesthetics to a peripheral existence.46 As I have suggested regarding Hume, Barthes, and Vermeer, details function in structures of address linking aesthetic experiences, subjects, passions. They traverse states we comprehend under the rubrics of life and death, intricately and sometimes paradoxically entangling such moments. Details gain their gender connotations as elements of relationships among aesthetic agents, actions, perceptions, objects, forms, and theories. A critical practice of address of necessity takes place within structures of relationality that it contests and exceeds. In short, it inheres in arrangements that it attempts to change.47 The details I have examined point up the complexity of gendered

84

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

constellations enfolding them. Rather than summoning unilateral anti- or anaesthetic viewpoints or generic extolments of particularity, or signaling unresolved, residual preaesthetic impulses, the perplexities that emerge here call for critical perambulations within zones of relationality and address that pilot avenues for working through given locations. Inexorably triggering problematic gender constructions, aesthetic agents are nonetheless able to guide these formations into alternative directions. Playing out the detail against the whole, the abstract, and the ideal, and testing the general as it bumps up against the particular and the singular, we can energize our powers to reaestheticize gender and to regender aesthetic experience.

Time Slice A little more detail about detail This section supplies, for the curious reader, backstories on ideas put forth in the current chapter. My focus will be on interpretation as a mode of addressing and being addressed by detail, and on links between detail, cultivation, and embodiment. Interpretation regenders detail. Yet such regendering often fails to bring about significantly novel genderings; it frequently follows worn paths of masculinization and feminization. As long as the process of reading keeps in motion the work’s field of meaning, details such as the mistress’s hand or pearl enter into unforeseen relations with other pictorial elements and participate in new forms of address between reader and work. For the duration of an interpretation, the detail’s gender position therefore remains in flux. This means that the detail cannot be anchored in a stable gender position, masculine, feminine, or otherwise. When speaking of the doubly gendered details we have explored—Hume’s sensory detail, Vermeer’s pearl, Barthes’s punctum—the language of the “double” serves then as shorthand for a multilayered phenomenon. This is to be expected in the realm of gender and aesthetics. Feminization and masculinization comprise capacious formations that neither circumscribe mutually exclusive alternatives nor exhaustively specify the field of gendered possibilities. Mobilizing context-specific representational frames, perceptual idioms, and corporeal repertoires, they activate interpretive modalities that shift across cultural and historical locales. The scope of factors potentially bearing on the gender connotations a detail acquires within registers of masculine, feminine, queer, trans, or intersexual positioning, in principle, is endless. This illimitability often precludes determinate, conclusive stipulations of a detail’s gender attributes. The stretcheability and internal variability emblematic of gender and sexual designations substantially reside in the plasticity of interpretations, that is, of perceptions and readings in the course of which we ascribe signs of gender and sexuality. The aesthetic supplies crucial frames shaping such interpretations. Accordingly, feminization and masculinization are under production in aesthetic pursuits of the kinds undertaken by Hume, Vermeer, and Barthes, as well as in the inquiry under way in this book—they are far from preestablished delineations.

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

The fundamentally manifold, open-ended orientations of interpretation surface at various junctures of address we have considered. Details regularly bring aesthetic agents together in collaborative strands of address that unfurl in surprising directions. Investigating structures of reciprocal animation in the present chapter, we have participated in ongoing lineages of address that emerge among persons and things. While stretches of these paths flow from and reach into distinctive relational patterns we inhabit as individuals, Barthes’s speculations on the notable character of the punctum nod toward an efficacious node sparking such itineraries, analogous to the workings of the elemental odes as envisioned by Neruda. Barthes makes “notable” the aesthetic modes of address he explores, those of the punctum to the viewer and the viewer to the punctum, in the manner of the punctum, which, in Barthes’s view, is a mode of making elements “notable” (CL, 34). Rendering notable the figure of the punctum and its surrounding modes of address, Barthes places himself a position similar to that of Stendhal, who—Barthes notes—“treats as notable” milk, buttered bread, and oranges, and of Amiel, who—Barthes notes again—records the weather on the shores of Lake Geneva (1975 [hereafter “PT”], 45, 53–4). A chain of animating forms of address to and from detail ensues. Besides Stendhal and his bread and oranges (there is more: sugared strawberries, milk, and counting [45]), and Amiel and his weather, this sequence includes Barthes, who registers noteworthy details in earlier writers, and Schor, who recognizes in the parting fingers in Barthes a punctum (1987, 94–5) and makes notable the resulting V as an “erotic gap, a sort of icon of castration” (96). Other personae we have encountered participate in parallel forms of address. These include Hume, who creates a desire for sensory detail, and the loving person whose love renders lovable a beloved person who has captured the lover’s fascination (Barthes LD). This cast of characters hands us points of connection (and disconnection) with which we can experiment, and that we can modify, even drop, as the case may be, or pass on in altered form. Forging historical bonds and anticipating future ones, these acts of uptake and transmission unfold in existing webs of relationships and address that both support and limit the reach of these gestures. Addressing detail thereby engenders ways of being affected by it; being affected by it engenders ways of addressing it. Developing a reading-in-detail of parts of Mistress and Maid, I have assumed that productive forms of critical engagement with detail can emerge from an address to the mistress’s pearl and hand in which we follow enticements and aversions these elements awaken. This strategy of immanent criticism (underscored by the “in” of “in detail”) simultaneously affirms and unsettles already established structures of relationality and address that we inhabit. A dynamic of this sort characterizes also Hume’s approach, although he in many ways aspires at a more radical rupture of address: Hume aims to break with a prestandardized aesthetic practice from which he fails to extract his position; he applies himself to detail from a perspective inherent in this formation. Nonstandardized aesthetic detail keeps him enthralled, though he tries to leave it behind as he institutes a precinct of sanctioned experience. Enduring influences and attractions of detail that, in Hume’s case, turn out to be hard to cast off, yet that I embrace, epitomize what Schor calls the detail’s

85

86

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

lure (1987, 6–7) and, more specifically, reveal the entwining of our address to detail with the detail’s address to us. While Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid invites participation in a masculinist complex of address revolving around the mistress’s earring, different details support forms of address and enjoyment other than the ones centered on the pearl: the shape of the maid’s collar and the hook of the box on the table support the pleasure of witnessing a grounded, smart, in-the-know femininity; the texture and folds, curls, and yellow hue encourage identifications with an elegant woman dressed in a luscious coat; the maid’s cheek can invite the fantasy of a love intrigue between mistress and maid. Each address holds a promise. The painting prompts a productive imaginary subjection to an absent masculinist gaze but also sustains pleasures flowing from other lines of participation and apprehension, including the delight of visualizing the control one exerts over one’s boss by being smart, or of imagining seducing one’s maid or boss. Vermeer’s painting laces the encounter among amatory schemes that it stages with a rich web of crisscrossing vectors of address. For instance, the maid’s presence for me transfers some warm affect onto the mistress’s body. The maid would appear to make notable the mistress’s body in a way the mistress herself does not. One source of cold affect for the mistress’s hand could be that her disembodied hesitation somehow affects the specific kind of “notability” she lends to her own gesture. This might shortcut a channeling of warm feelings by the viewer toward the mistress’s hand, in contrast to unobstructed projections landing on her elegant yellow coat and its pretty fur linings. At the same time, additional perceptual conduits of warm affect in the painting second the kindness emanating from the maid. Some rubbing off of warm feelings onto the mistress’s left hand emerges in my experience from visual correspondences with other pictorial elements. I see a resonance between the lower part of the mistress’s thumb and the maid’s skirt, which picks up on the V-shape of the mistress’s left arm and the folds in the tablecloth and in the mistress’s jacket. Such correspondences are common in Vermeer. Gowing (1952, 44) links cloths in the paintings with open and opening forms, varying from curtains representing “stillness and seclusion,” to their “antithesis,” “a springing, barely balanced V-shape” (71n. 17). In Mistress and Maid, the mistress’s tensely closed right hand, along with waves in the tablecloth, provide such contrasts to the stolid, open left hand. Indeed, Barthes’s notion of the “amorous, or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world” (CL, 6) speaks to the pictorial position of the mistress’s fleshy hand. Because his remarks on the punctum are spiked with Lacanian vocabulary, it is worth pondering briefly what a Lacanian outlook on the tensions we have traced might reveal. In a perspective consonant with Lacan’s seminar XI, the fleshy repulsiveness of the mistress’s hand announces a traumatic intrusion of the real into the symbolic. Žižek’s (1995, 206–7) discussion of the Pre-Rafaelites explores disturbing, uncanny details in this spirit. An account that, following seminar XX, stresses the impact of the real on the symbolic and on the gap between the real and the symbolic (Barnard 2002, 179–85) hints at a more layered interpretation: the mistress’s hand, conceived along these lines, would mark a moment of vulnerability that is

The Gendered Aesthetic Detail

not inscribable in the symbolic framework organizing the painting, and that, as such, becomes threatening and repulsive. Barthes’s idea that the effect of the punctum fails to “find its sign” registers this kind of impossibility (CL, 51). But this moment of foreclosed representation goes in tandem with the hand’s ability to signify a materiality that persists beyond the painting’s symbolic framework and opens possibilities for a different significatory structure—a divergent form of corporeality, a disparate type of jouissance, and an alternative, nontraumatic relation of the feminine subject to the Other. Perhaps the painting, then, affords us a glimpse of ways in which, in Lacanian terms, the real might attain a signifier (Barnard 179, 184n. 10) or might be on the way to gaining a particular sign. This unfinished process could be visible in the uncertain reach and movement of the mistress’s left hand. Accordingly, both in Hume’s theory, and in an approach to the mistress’s hand that draws on Barthes and Lacan, frictions surfacing in detail appear to intimate traversals among only partially disjunctive, saliently intermingling frames of address, realizing crossings and encounters that activate a dazzling plethora of gender orientations. In Barthes’s view, the punctum can break indifference not by abandoning coldness in an effusion of warmth or adoration, but in the mode of repulsion or the grotesque. He comments on a photograph by Duane Michaels in which Andy Warhol holds his hands in front of his face: “[H]e offers his hands to read, quite openly; and the punctum is not the gesture but the slightly repellent substance of those spatulate nails, at once soft and hard-edged” (CL, 45). Small, faintly repugnant portions of the body touch Barthes with the force and startle of the punctum, deflecting the cultured principles of the studium. Oppositions between cultivation and embodiment pervade the logic of the punctum Barthes sketches, at odds as he takes it to be with the workings of the studium (CL, 18). Recurrent fingernails, at times dirty, perhaps along with a bandaged finger, signal the body’s presence as incongruous with the order of culture (25, 30, 45, 51). Analogous antitheses arise in Hume’s theory and in Vermeer’s painting. Each case exhibits rifts between culture and the body as well as forces interrupting these divides. Such oppositions and bridgings, Chapters 5 and 6 will suggest, are endemic to aesthetic meaning. Configurations of detail of the kind identified in this chapter are by no means unique to the particular theorists and artist we have examined. Stillness, motionlessness, and timelessness markedly appear in other contexts as parameters of devalued, even if in many ways prized detail. Exploring such pervasively neglected qualities of detail, McClary (2000) champions a multilevel critical reassessment of performance practices and analytical premises shaping the seventeenth-century French musical repertory. Music of this era has been judged second-rate for reasons having to do with its savoring of ornamentation and sensual detail, its concomitant lack of teleological development, and outof-time character. McClary’s account indicates that the aesthetic place we grant detail brings together affective, perceptual, performative, conceptual, and imaginary practices. To regender-in-detail is to change our aesthetic relationships in these divergent yet interconnected planes of address, which, activating economic and political registers, come together under the rubric of culture as well as under the heading of embodied, socially situated agency.

87

4

Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor

“I adore Macabéa, my darling Maca. I adore her ugliness and her total anonymity for she belongs to no one. I adore her for her weak lungs and her under-nourished body.” So says the writer Rodrigo S. M., a fictional author invented by the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. He offers his proclamation of love in Lispector’s last novella, The Hour of the Star, which is best known as the script of a successful movie by that name, and—through the work of Hélène Cixous—as a paradigm of écriture feminine.1 Tracing beauty’s collaborations with states of economic disparity and social violence, the novel explores the aesthetic abandonment of its homely, mud-colored protagonist, Macabéa.2 The young woman’s ugliness represents a conspicuous dimension of her expulsion from various sectors of collective life. She amounts to a minor element—a negligible detail. Rodrigo’s attempt to write about the insubstantial being that drives his narrative project saddles him with the paradoxical task of having the insignificant matter. He is to make the existence of a disposable person count. How is this possible without diminishing her irrelevance? Rather than resolving this dilemma, Lispector rejects both alternatives it presents— the supposition that Macabéa’s existence is meaningful as well as the idea that it is largely meaningless. Dramatizing the tension between these two possibilities, the novel uses the impasse the author faces to push the limits of the web of aesthetic relationships surrounding the young woman—bonds and distances that owe their organization, in part, to the workings of beauty. Lispector’s reading-as-detail of Macabéa is also a critical reading-in-detail of a pattern of aesthetic relationships. Following the path Lispector tracks in the novel, this chapter examines the organizational work that beauty contributes to systems of aesthetic relationality put forth by Plato as well as several Enlightenment philosophers. A structural element of aesthetic relationality, beauty displays conflicting moral and political commitments throughout vast sweeps of aesthetic theory. It sides with the ethical and the unethical, with social justice as well as exploitation. Serving in its capacity as a bearer of value and a register of experience, beauty carries out vital kinds of relational labor, and implements aesthetic menaces and promises. These functions are no less robust today than they were historically. They surface in the gendered and racial spell of the beautiful. They play a

90

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

part in the connections beauty entertains with economic mobility and abandonment. They can be recognized in its ties to constructions of cultural citizenship and liminality. The Hour of the Star scrutinizes these themes. Lispector disputes fundamental aspects of the conceptual apparatus that the history of Western philosophy associates with the aesthetic. To bring out the scope of her critique along with the depth of her implicit target of analysis, I will examine theoretical precedents of the aesthetic phenomena she problematizes. Lispector responds to beauty’s predicament by taking to task and unhinging modes of relationality and address that beauty helps to orchestrate. Against the backdrop of historical foundations underlying the operations of the beautiful, the novella’s handling of the concept’s difficulties comes into view and calls attention to broader strategies for addressing not only the plight of beauty but also the ambivalences of the aesthetic.

Beauty and ugliness in The Hour of the Star In the voice of its fictional author, Rodrigo S. M., The Hour of the Star tells the story of Macabéa, a young woman from the northeast of Brazil. Orphaned early in life and raised by her aunt, she moves to Rio de Janeiro where she works as a typist with her boss and her coworker, Glória. Rodrigo, Macabéa’s self-described creator, proclaims the masculinity of his authorship—a woman writer, he declares, would have cried “her heart out” chronicling this tale (Lispector 1986, 14). He professes his love for his character in the passage cited above: “I adore Macabéa, my darling Maca. I adore her ugliness and her total anonymity for she belongs to no one. I adore her for her weak lungs and her under-nourished body” (86). This in-your-face aestheticization of poverty reverses the typical affective implications of ugliness. At the same time, Rodrigo’s unqualified love for the victimized body stands out in its outrageousness, resisting assimilation in a sublimatory narrative that could confer moral legitimacy on his, Lispector’s, and the reader’s attitude toward the young female inhabitant of a third world slum, a woman who appears indistinguishable from countless others. Abject poverty renders Macabéa’s life superfluous. It is her lot to remain an insignificant residue, neglected by everyone but—as he imagines it—the author. This fate is in no small measure due to her sallow complexion, her drooping shoulders, her body odor, the grime underneath nails from which she has chewed away most of their bright scarlet lacquer. In short, it is a matter of her “ugliness.” The only “really beautiful thing in Macabéa’s life,” we learn, is Donizetti’s aria “Una furtiva lacrima,” sung by the tenor Enrico Caruso, to which she listens on the radio (50). She also finds pleasure in the crowing of a cockerel and the signals of cargo ships. Rodrigo tells us that Macabéa loves movie stars and wishes she were like Marilyn Monroe. Since nobody wanted to give her a treat, much less become engaged to her, she would give herself a treat. The treat would consist of buying a new lipstick she didn’t really need: not pink like the one she was using, but this time bright red. In the washroom at the office she painted her lips lavishly beyond their natural outline, in the hope that she might achieve that stunning effect seen on the lips of Marilyn

Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor

91

Monroe. When she had finished, she stood staring at herself in the mirror, at a face which stared back in astonishment. The thick lipstick looked like blood spurting from a nasty gash, as if someone had punched her on the mouth and broken her front teeth (small bang). When she went back to her desk Glória chuckled: —Have you taken leave of your senses, girl? What are you up to, wearing all that war-paint? You could be mistaken for a tart. —I’m a virgin! You won’t find me going out with soldiers or sailors. —Excuse my asking: is it painful being ugly? —I’ve never really thought about it, I suppose it’s a little painful. How do you feel about being ugly yourself? —I am not ugly!—Glória howled at her. Peace was soon restored between them, and Macabéa continued to be happy thinking about nothing. (61–2)

At one level, the text frames female poverty as ugly, putting bodily beauty, including its connotations of social desirability and potential for upward mobility, out of Macabéa’s reach. Her efforts to partake of material tastefulness misfire, as in the lipstick scene, or when, having visited Glória’s parents, she can barely refrain from throwing up the hot chocolate she has drunk, or when, at the sound of her own voice, her singing turns into weeping. Macabéa is granted no more than a grotesque or melancholic repetition of aesthetic achievements others pull off successfully, as a matter of course. The beautiful, the ugly, the malformed, and the grotesque are instrumental in construing her as extraneous to the sphere of ordinary subjectivity and sociality. These aesthetic markers seal her expendability, notwithstanding her love of Coca-Cola and Hollywood film stars such as Greta Garbo, which qualifies her as a competent reader of a transnational stream of cultural products, and constitutes a point of access to modernity (23). When Macabéa asks her short-term boyfriend Olímpico, whose realist sensibilities unfailingly counter her disinterested, semiotic perceptions, “Did you know that Marilyn Monroe was the color of peaches?” he bluntly affirms the intersecting racial, medical, and economic registers of her aesthetic incorrigibility, replying that she, Macabéa, is the color of mud.3 The signs and symbols she likes do not bring her the real things they refer to, their “desiginat[ion],” as Macabéa spells it (15). Indeed, the word “mimetism” (sic) worries her (55). The unavailability of feminized and feminizing beautification is an integral dimension of her disempowerment. Via implicit or explicit notions of the beautiful, the ugly, the grotesque, and the malformed, The Hour of the Star attaches, then, a range of classical connotations to differentially positioned bodies. The experiences, evaluations, and desires that aesthetic categories serve to shape and capture in the novel help to weave a web of relationships among humans and among humans, objects, and places. Beauty and its antitheses circumscribe operations of rank and power, possibility and constraint, admittance and banishment.

92

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Withholding the assurance of a corrective, Lispector suspends the applicability of the language of beauty and ugliness that helps to organize Macabéa’s relationships with others and herself. In relation to the catastrophe the girl exemplifies, the grounds for a tenable ethical or political stance collapse. The Hour of the Star undercuts a normatively aestheticized vocabulary of poverty, wrenching from this lexicon a critical look at terms and conditions of aestheticization. The reader is invited to reconsider beauty’s role in the maintenance, discursive and otherwise, of poverty, global inequality, and social marginalization. Grotesque, sad, or even horrific as they turn out, Macabéa’s attempts at beautification and self-aestheticization cannot be read as mere failures. Provoking cruelty and indifference, they expose the violence of the regime of beauty and ugliness through which wealth and poverty are comprehended and inhabited by her companions and the author. Macabéa’s grotesque performances exercise resistance, even if unconsciously, unemphatically, and neither fully intentionally nor unintentionally, as evinced by Glória’s and Olímpico’s vehement censure. Defying normalized cultural meaning, her lipstick articulates an oppositional physicality. Her solitary urban, consumerist, and environmental perceptions do not exhaust her aesthetic life, as can be witnessed in the “misspellings” she funnels into the documents she types, her voice that sings a love rhyme out of tune, her urge to expel from her body the hot chocolate she is offered—a substance that is comfortably internalized by the well-nourished, middleclass bodies of Glória and her parents. These acts and desires refract the city’s and the cinema’s construction of beauty. They instantiate a beauty of sorts in their own right, necessitating an alternative framing of the beautiful that exceeds the novel’s normative alignments. Enveloping the reader in an aesthetic dynamic that the novel refuses to close, and drenching this dynamic in the urgency of disaster, Lispector articulates the need to subject structures of aesthetic relationality to transformation.

Beauty and moral order: Plato, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson Macabéa is a detail who is in love with detail.4 Lispector’s reading-as-detail of her character is also a reading-in-detail of the aesthetic. The novel plays out singular elements (Macabéa and her perceptions) against large-scale forces (such as principles of economic expediency and global divisions of labor), while also repositioning particularities (Macabéa, Glória, and Olímpico) in response to transmuting overarching social designs (including the author’s narrative schemes and his and the reader’s constructions of poverty—formations that all scramble to accommodate Macabéa’s anomalous being, as the story proceeds). Thus The Hour of the Star brings into disarray the relationships between detail and the orders of significance encompassing it. I will throw into relief Lispector’s sabotaging of the cultural hierarchies that uphold Macabéa’s expendability, and elucidate the challenges that the novel poses for plans of aesthetic differentiation by juxtaposing the work with historical models of relationality, ones that entwine beauty with love, order, and economic productivity. Beauty’s philosophical history presents a quandary. On the one hand, philosophers consider the beautiful of irrevocable significance to ethics, the unfolding of subjectivity,

Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor

93

and the construction of culture. On the other hand, beauty’s power to bring about what qualifies as freedom, goodness, truth, and the public sphere goes in tandem with its contributions to unjust constellations of difference. With the aid of analyses by Bernard Mandeville, Mary Wollstonecraft, and contemporary commentators, the following sections trace this problem to writings by Plato, Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, which locate beauty in a network of relationships it helps to orchestrate. Across these texts, the organizational workings of the beautiful can be seen to give rise to figurations of hierarchically coded social difference. It is arrangements of this sort that Lispector spurs us to unseat in destabilizing Macabéa’s standing as a detail. The Scottish Enlightenment accords beauty great moral and political weight.5 For Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, among others, the beautiful stands in a direct relation with the morally good social order. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson comprehend this order as God’s design. The human sense of beauty is able to register the presence of this design, recognizing in advance of personal benefit or utility and independently of rational comprehension, that is, in a disinterested fashion, those actions, traits of character, and forms that stand in a just proportion with the whole, and that, as such, qualify as good. In Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s views, a person’s sense of beauty intuitively perceives as beautiful those elements that are also moral and rational in the context of the larger whole.6 This idea allows Shaftesbury (and to a lesser extent Hutcheson) to advocate a process of aesthetic education that gives the individual a suitable place in the moral order and makes possible the collective attainment of that order at the level of the nation. Declaring the arts and virtues friends (1964, 1:217) and recommending “morals on the same foot with . . . manners” (2:257), Shaftesbury charges art with the task of rendering individuals morally praiseworthy (1:214, 1:218, 1:228, 1:260–1, 1:279–82). He delineates the ethical and aesthetic trajectory that he envisions, by way of comparisons with examples of inferior forms and tastes, which he counsels the virtuous and aesthetically apt agent to avoid: Grotesque and monstrous figures often please. Cruel spectacles and barbarities are also found to please. . . . But is this pleasure right? And shall I follow it if it presents? not strive with it, or endeavour to prevent its growth or prevalency in my temper? . . . How stands the case in a more soft and flattering kind of pleasure? . . . Effeminacy pleases me. The Indian figures, the Japan work, the enamel strikes my eye. The luscious colours and glossy paint gain upon my fancy. A French or Flemish style is highly liked by me at first sight, and I pursue my liking. But what ensues? . . . Do I not for ever forfeit my good relish? How is it possible I should thus come to taste the beauties of an Italian master, or of a hand happily formed on nature and the ancients? ’Tis not by wantonness and humour that I shall attain my end and arrive at the enjoyment I propose. The art itself is severe, the rules rigid. (1:218–19)

Shaftesbury articulates the meanings of this severe art, these rigid rules,7 and the enjoyment they provide in part by contrast with elements connoted pejoratively in terms of the grotesque, the monstrous, effeminacy, and barbarity. These denominations

94

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

differentiate the ethical and aesthetic path that is to issue in beauty, goodness, and civilized status (“politeness”) from models of subjectivity that are comprehended as feminine, vulgar, of suspect cultural origin, or formless. In Shaftesbury’s fragmentary prose: Politeness in figures helped still to polish grace. . . . [A]s beauteous forms polish (taking politeness with its consequences), so ugly barbarise. . . . But this assert: that neither Jew, Egyptian, nor Chinese polite. This is a judgment of politeness. If polite; show me a picture, a statue, coin, proportion, nature. But arabesque! Japan! Indian! Savage. Monstrous. Even in their portraiture, pleasure-pieces, wanton pieces. Also gods monstrous, frightful according to Egyptian and Syrian models; or Turkish mosques, no architecture, or statuary, or figures: or as bad as none. Frightful, horrid, cruel ideas entertained, advanced by such divine forms; soft gentle, humane ideas, by truly human forms, and divinity represented after the best, sweetest, and perfectest idea of humanity to the vulgar. But without application to divinities, and simply viewed and contemplated in cities, groves, high-ways, places, gardens, forums, etc., emollit mores. “Bad figures: bad minds.” “Crooked designs: crooked fancies.” “No designs: no thought.” So Turks, etc. (1914, 103–5)

Simultaneously empty and full, the above stipulations obscure what precisely is being defined in terms of what, and why. The meanings of aesthetic and racial or ethnic concepts approximate one another closely. An example of this is the staccato sequence, “But arabesque! Japan! Indian! Savage. Monstrous.” Shaftesbury’s list of generic verdicts deploys notions of femininity, vulgarity, formlessness, as well as multiple kinds of cultural difference as stand-ins for morally and aesthetically objectionable meanings.8 Minimally descriptive placeholders for understandings the reader is invited to supply, these concepts solicit the reader’s collaboration in steering the right course toward the beautiful and the good. Absent the reader’s supplementary efforts, the language traces circuitous tautologies. Relationality, in Shaftesbury, draws heavily on the reader’s readiness to furnish missing connections. Shaftesbury’s racial and ethnic preoccupations manifest themselves more concretely in his concern to keep citizens from dwelling pleasurably on “prodigies of Moorish and Pagan countries,” from hearing “monstrous accounts of monstrous men and manners” (1964, 1:222) and from developing a love of “strange narrations” (1:224). Part of this anxiety, which emerges in a remarks on Shakespeare’s Othello, is that white, British women will fall for “a mysterious race of black enchanters, such as of old were said to creep into houses, and lead captive silly women” (ibid.). Shaftesbury worries that readers’ curiosity about the messages they expect unusual objects of sight and hearing to convey, will transfer to the persons of the storytellers, rendering them “sacred and tremendous” (1:225). He foresees the consequence that “[a] thousand Desdemonas are then ready to present themselves, and would frankly resign fathers, relations, countrymen, and country itself, to follow the fortunes of a hero of the black tribe” (ibid.). Appropriate forms of art and artistic reception, for Shaftesbury, accordingly,

Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor

95

outline itineraries of moral and aesthetic development that enable individuals to perform fitting roles in an adequately racialized and gendered national culture. Good art, accompanied by the right kind of interpretation, also helps to achieve an acceptable distribution of power and affect (feelings must be regulated so the right sentiments are felt for the right reasons, to the right degree, for the right persons and objects). Furthermore, art’s pedagogical function enables it to serve as a measure of civilization. For in the above passage on politeness, after identifying the civilizing effects of the beautiful and the barbarizing influence of the ugly, Shaftesbury proceeds to deploy judgments about the arts he attributes to a number of nations (including, implicitly, Britain) as comments on the moral stature of these nations, their level of civilization, and the quality of their imagination and thinking (“No designs: no thought”). Since art is expected to instigate a pedagogical development that issues in the realization of the beautiful and the good, it becomes indicative of a person’s or nation’s level of beauty and goodness. Accordingly, aesthetic designations (“beautiful,” “luscious,” “crooked”) take on racial, gendered, and class-inflected meanings, as when Shaftesbury understands “polite figures” implicitly as figures created by, say, “the ancients” or the British, not the Turkish or the Chinese. Shaftesbury’s reasoning exemplifies a process that, extending the terminology laid out in Chapter 2, I call racialized (gendered, class-inflected) aestheticization.9 This label refers to the inflection of aesthetic concepts and elements by social categories; it signals ways in which constellations of difference leave their marks upon aesthetic arrangements. Additionally, Shaftesbury champions aestheticizations of racial (gendered, class-inflected) forms of subjectivity and culture building. An instance of this occurs when he employs art in the business of creating politeness, and witnesses the hand of “polite figures,” and “beauteous forms” in the polishing of “grace” and the creation of “humane ideas,” while unpacking what counts as politeness, grace, and humanity in racial (gendered and economically hierarchical) terms. Extrapolating again from the earlier chapter, I call this latter policy aesthetic racialization (gendering and class inflection). This concept denotes the aestheticized nature of differential social constellations. Both phenomena collaborate to establish what counts as a good moral order, in Shaftesbury’s theory. The closeness of their mutual cooperation can be spotted, for example, in the idea that “polite figures” (forms occasioned, among others, by the British, but not by the Japanese, and that, so conceived, bear the marks of racialized aestheticization) help to produce “grace” or “humane ideas,” and other achievements exclusively available to a limited group of white Europeans (thereby operating as modes of aesthetic racialization). Critics have observed that Shaftesbury’s ethics legitimizes problematic class and gender hierarchies. Bernard Mandeville contends that the realization of a virtuous society à la Shaftesbury, one that is also rich, flourishing, and civilized ineluctably rests upon the imposition by “law-givers and other wise men” of “violence” on others’ desires.10 Within this social scheme, Mandeville argues, politicians and rulers offer imaginary compensation for the violent self-denial demanded from subordinate subjects, in the form of flattering illusions about civilization and public-spiritedness. Assisted by these illusions, along with a hypocritical denial of their private interest in others’ efforts to promote the public good, well-situated individuals, including leaders,

96

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

are able to appropriate others’ labor for their personal advancement (1924, 48). Contra Shaftesbury, who considers virtue disinterested, these ambitious persons thereby satisfy their own, self-regarding concerns, such as, for example, a love of sensory gratification, a desire for worldly possessions, and the pleasure of “the pomp and luxury [they are] served with” (166, 149). At the same time, such comfortably positioned agents exhibit numerous supposedly vicious qualities, such as selfishness, deception, ignorance, pride, vanity, envy, jealousy, lust, malice, and fraud.11 Mandeville concludes that the field of disinterested, virtuous action is more limited than Shaftesbury would like to (have his readers) believe. He warns against Shaftesbury’s “generous Notions concerning the natural Goodness of Man.” These are “hurtful as they tend to mis-lead, and are meerly Chimerical” (343). Mandeville’s argument breaks the connection Shaftesbury forges between the subject’s tasteful, disinterested perceptions of beauty and his or her contributions to the achievement of the good moral order. His commentary exposes ways in which Shaftesbury’s (and Hutcheson’s) views of disinterested moral and aesthetic perception rest on a partial and reduced picture of the moral psychology and the division of labor underlying social arrangements. This challenge to disinterested beauty, already influential in the Scottish Enlightenment, stands today. Contemporary discussions of beauty have not provided replies to these points, analogous and additional recent objections notwithstanding.12 Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s idealized abstractions bypass beauty’s concrete symbolic functioning, which contradicts its allegedly univocal orientation toward a sensorily, rationally, and ethically commendable order of being. The contributions that the beautiful makes to the good, as conceived by these thinkers, go together with the support it lends oppressive allocations of difference. This difficulty precedes eighteenth-century British and Scottish aesthetics. Broader conceptual grounds of the problem at hand become visible if we consider the Enlightenment debate in light of Platonic formations on which it picks up. Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s theories draw upon Plato’s hierarchical theory of beauty. In Diotima’s speech, which Socrates relays at the banquet in the Symposium, the virtuous soul progressively works its way through several stages of beauty (Plato 1989, 210a–12c). Initially devoted to the beautiful bodies of young boys, the good soul moves on to a passion for beautiful minds. Via the love of beautiful activities and laws and states of affairs, and the beauty of knowledge generally, the soul arrives at a contemplative apprehension of the abstract idea of the beautiful, the form of Beauty itself. Only then is it possible for the soul to “give birth not to images of virtue (because he is in touch with no images), but to true virtue (because he is in touch with the true Beauty)” (212a–b). In the Phaedrus, the soul’s memory of eternal beauty, as this tends to be triggered in independent men by beautiful boys (249e, 251a) initiates a process of moral, philosophical, and amorous development in relation to such beloved boys, empowering the rational part of these men’s souls to supersede physical desire in favor of a more gratifying love for the world of eternally self-identical ideas (253c–54e), which is accessible through dialectical thought. The result is a life of mutual philosophical edification, goodness, wisdom, and happiness (256b, 156d–e). Propelling an aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical process of soul building that finds sustenance in appropriately subjugated forms of bodily attraction and passion, as well

Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor

97

as a suitably dominant love of ideas, hierarchized instances of beauty, in this aesthetic scenario, enable the noble soul to renew its original, pre-embodied access to the idea of the Beautiful, alongside the other forms, including those of the True and the Good (247c–e, 248d–49b). Many theorists have called into question conceptual hierarchies shaping Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology.13 Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray have offered farreaching critiques of gendered presuppositions of Plato’s moral and aesthetic pedagogy. They contend that Plato valorizes a masculinist order of reason that acquires the appearance of being self-authenticating because it abjects, as its unthinkable other, the feminized body, the passions, and the senses, to which it nonetheless has constitutive bonds.14 In their view, the Platonic scheme postulates significatory elisions that render the feminine and the body (which is connoted feminine) constitutively unrepresentable, and gives rise to a limited, exclusionary notion of (inter)subjective becoming. Indeed, making beauty’s pedagogical ties to the true and the good contingent upon a substantial (though neither comprehensive, nor consistent) dismissal of the body and the feminine,15 Plato enlists the beautiful in the production and validation of restrictive paradigms of subjectivity. Like Mandeville’s objections to the notion of disinterested contemplation, this challenge has not yet been answered, although critiques of this sort have been developed along multiple angles.16 The failure of the aesthetic idealizations proposed by Plato, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson, testifies to the impossibility of controlling beauty’s moral orientation at high levels of abstraction. Beauty’s ethical and epistemic capacities appear to reside not in its principled affiliations with the true and the good, but in operations that at the same time recruit the beautiful as a tool of abandonment, gearing it toward public and intimate forms of domination. This problem recurs in subsequent treatments of beauty.

Beauty and the economy: Hume and Smith Novel dimensions of beauty’s relational functioning emerge in writings by David Hume and Adam Smith that explore beauty’s effects within the market, the state, and other institutional forms. Hume updates the eighteenth-century Platonic heritage in aesthetics by modernizing beauty’s relational operations. His secular analogue to Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s divine order is the social, political, and economic structure of the state, which he renders dependent on beauty in ways we have considered. Delicacy of taste, for Hume—that is, the faculty that issues in correct experiences and judgments of beauty and ugliness and that is trained through the perception of “beauties” of various kinds—it will be recalled, comprises a cultural technology that implements a systemically differential, unequally accessible pattern of social affiliations (ST, 141–4; DPT, 10–11). Industry, consumption, and social interaction propel this process. Taste and refinement encourage national productivity by spurring commodity production and allowing it to find a market, utilizing reservoirs of labor that would otherwise go to waste (RA, 168–9; OC 160–3). Rewarding human activity with pleasure, taste motivates rather than coerces the individual to work.17 Sloth and indolence, tendencies Hume

98

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

considers natural, consequently, observe proper bounds; pleasure coincides with virtue (RA, 168–9). Advancing productivity and commerce, taste promotes the rise of a free middle class in the state (174–5). The result is a nation with a high level of knowledge, humanity, and civilization, achievements that percolate through an expanding public sphere.18 By way of his conception of taste, Hume renders beauty instrumental to the social, economic, and political well-being of the nation-state. Adam Smith tightens the connections between the beautiful and the economy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Like Hume, Smith embeds beauty in an encompassing social, political, and economic order, for which it is also, in part, responsible: If we consider the real satisfaction which [wealth and greatness] are capable of affording, by itself and separated from the beauty of that arrangement which is fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confound it in our imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or economy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand, and beautiful, and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow on it. And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life. (Smith 2000, 263–4)

According to these well-known observations, the appreciation of wealth and greatness is contingent on the imaginative experience we have of these conditions as we comprehend them as a result of the beautiful arrangement from which they stem. This regular and harmonious system, which is “fitted to promote” wealth and greatness allows these states to appear beautiful, grand, and noble. This appearance, then, makes us willing to expend “the toil and anxiety” it takes to attain these states. Though in one sense illusory, it is an aesthetic imaginary of wealth and greatness that, for Smith, motivates, and in our eyes, legitimates the cultivation of land and nation. More than that: Smith not merely claims that beauty’s promise drives the economy, leaving it open that the economy may be understood as an aesthetically neutral phenomenon, but advocates the far stronger thesis that this very economy substantially amounts to an aesthetic achievement: the arts and sciences “ennoble and embellish human life.” Ennoblement and embellishment are ethically and aesthetically substantive goods: “[I]t is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner.” Even if Smith expresses skepticism about the true desirability of many a beautiful thing, he allows that other instances of beauty indispensably serve the good, understood in terms of enmeshed aesthetic, economic, moral, and political values.19 The Theory of Moral Sentiments sees the desire for beautiful things and a beautiful life as bringing economic and aesthetic wealth to the nation and the globe.

Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor

99

Several points follow from the crucial passage quoted above. One, while a product of the imagination, the aesthetic dimension of the products of human labor is clearly not reducible to the other dimensions. Two, it represents a good that is nonderivative from other goods, one that emerges as a result of an imaginative surplus. Three, more than that, aesthetic value is a necessary ingredient of other values: economic goods matter to us, at least in part, on account of their aesthetic significance. For Smith, the aesthetic, thus, constitutes an indissociable dimension of the meanings and values we realize through work and through the creation of local as well as (trans)national institutions, and civic as well as political organizations, such as cities and commonwealths. What follows is that the aesthetic and the economic are conceived as fundamentally complicit in one another. This understanding Smith shares with numerous other theorists in the eighteenth century and beyond.20 In light of the widely documented, longstanding, and pervasive imbrications of aesthetics and political economy, the prospects of separating beauty’s economic and political workings from its aesthetic functioning must be considered dim. Entwined aesthetic and economic values inform our imaginaries and desires, and constitute a structural dimension of social existence. They underlie a wide array of existential possibilities that are open to us and that we grant to others. Beauty and its antitheses such as the ugly, the formless, the grotesque, and the malformed enter into a complex affective calculus. A politically neutral conception of beauty can only come at the price of ignoring an intricate system of aesthetically conditioned economic designs and economically embedded aesthetic plans. The complex operations by which beauty makes its polyvalent, often ambiguous effects should be a focus of our attempts to give the beautiful an adequate place within a theory of the aesthetic.

Beauty, love, and the body: Burke and Wollstonecraft If Platonic themes of love and the body in some ways retreat to the background in Hume’s and Smith’s theories of beauty, these elements return with full force in Edmund Burke’s view. The latter understands facets of our amatory, embodied comportment as mainsprings of a system of relationships regulated by way of beauty (1990). Aesthetically encoded hierarchies conspicuously inform Burke’s model of sociality.21 He builds ambiguities into the male passion of love that he places at the heart of an array of asymmetries. On one hand, he defines love as a contemplative state that, contrary to lust, remains free from desire for possession. On the other, he considers love a mixed condition that combines the lust that man presumably feels for all women with a specific (purely contemplative) love that man experiences for the beauty of particular women (1990, 83, 39, 47). Such beauty consists in the social qualities that distinguish women from one another. These characteristics yield a basis for discriminations that guide male social preferences and choices. The relevant attributes displayed by women inspire in men “sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them. . . .” (39). Enticed by beauty to reach out to female social and bodily properties, the mixed

100

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

passion of male sexualized love governs a structurally differential web of aesthetic relationships.22 Burke’s notion of beauty idealizes a pronouncedly eighteenth-century, white, and upper/middle-class type of femininity. The features he lists as beautiful, such as weakness, smoothness, and softness, readily signal bodily states connoting lives that are tended to, rather than the work of tending or other sorts of labor more typically associated with white or nonwhite working classes. The racial specificity of Burke’s gendering of the beautiful gains further articulation from his emphasis on the “terrible” nature of the color black, an idea he applies to the visual appearance of skin in his discussion of a formerly blind, presumably white boy who is “struck with great horror at the sight” of a black woman (131). The boy had already seen a black object, which “gave him great uneasiness.” Note the difference in intensity of experience in the shift from object to person. In accordance with Burke’s definition of the sublime as a condition inspired by horror (36, 47, 53–79), and contra the aestheticized norms of adequate gender performance, the woman would have to qualify as sublime.23 However, Burke does not say it explicitly, which is remarkable given his enthusiasm for reiterated expressions of sublime moments.24 His silence on the matter has a number of effects. One, it suggests that a woman’s body cannot be sublime. Read this way, Burke’s silence preserves the masculine and masculinizing character of the sublime, and its stable contrast with the consistently feminine and feminizing beautiful. Thus his racializing move (white male bodies may be sublime; horrific black female bodies fall short of this) safeguards the operations of gendered aestheticization and aesthetic gendering that he takes to undergird the social order. Two, Burke’s silence honors the animation of the sublime as a great and admirable aesthetic quality by construing it as racially white and masculine. In tandem with this, the image of a horrific (as opposed to beautiful) black female body upholds beauty’s social and aesthetic lovability by implicitly characterizing the beautiful as white. Correlatively, Burke protects the social and aesthetic attractiveness of white femininity (and/or feminine whiteness) by allowing it a potential for beauty that he denies the black woman. The aesthetic promise of sublimity and beauty, for Burke, issues then exclusively from white men and women (of a certain class and sexual preference). Three, construing black femininity (and/or feminine blackness) as an aesthetically irredeemable threat, he locates the woman and the color of her skin, on account of this color, beyond the gendered dichotomy of the beautiful and the sublime. Burke expels her from the order of normatively aestheticized sociality. Having her slip through the divide between the beautiful and the sublime, he implicitly declares her a cultural nonentity. Her circumvention of the aesthetic rules governing human affect and sensibility marks her as a nonbeing within the system of relationality he advances.25 Four, Burke’s racialization of the beautiful and the sublime transfers to the colors white and black. His Enquiry studies what he takes to be natural and universally valid principles that connect qualities of objects and states of affairs with human feelings. These principles he names aesthetic “laws,” or “principles of Taste” (12–17). Whiteness and blackness, accordingly, function as sources of aesthetically produced emotion in his theory, and are subsumed under aesthetic generalizations. Inscribing distinctions

Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor

101

between beauty and sublimity into whiteness, and rendering blackness horrific, Burke racializes these colors’ aesthetic qualities and operations.26 The beautiful, conceived in opposition to the sublime and the horrific, but also as collaborating with these categories toward the realization of a valorized cultural order, serves as a vital source of social differentiation, in Burke’s account. Interlacing schemes of racialized (gendered, and class-based) aestheticization with plans of aesthetic racialization (gendering and class formation), modalities of love and embodiment, for Burke, circumscribe a network of relationships among persons and among persons and objects. Mary Wollstonecraft prominently takes issue with Burke’s notion of beauty. Considering the place of women’s beauty in the context of the pleasures and temptations of property and the aestheticized economy pertaining to women’s social roles, Wollstonecraft judges feminine beauty of a sort that is associated with weakness, passivity, and women’s pleasing of men or that “rests supinely dependent on man for reason” to be morally invidious.27 Burke, as we have seen, valorizes the former kind of beauty; Hume comes close to endorsing the latter. Beauty of these kinds, Wollstonecraft argues, conflicts with women’s virtue because such beauty inhibits their ability to achieve reason and understanding. It is incompatible with the development of strength of character and stands in the way of dignity.28 In Wollstonecraft’s view, the need to please by physical appearance causes women to surrender themselves to men’s affections in order to attain what power is available to them (1992, 152), condemning them to a life of sensibility and immediate pleasure, that is, to an existence that is limited to the present moment (146, 163, 168). In her commentary on Wollstonecraft’s aesthetics, Mary Poovey (1994, 97–8) argues that the latter’s objections to Burke’s theory expose aporias incurred by a regime that denies the mutual imbrication of aesthetics and political economy. According to Poovey, Wollstonecraft unearths contradictions that this model embeds in sexual difference—tensions that cause Burke to assign an impossible position to women. In Poovey’s view, a system of this sort ambivalently locates sex as a matter of providential proportion at the basis of social differentiation and judgment and renders women objects of aesthetic appreciation in an eroticized market economy. This latter construal positions them as commodities that are to be appreciated imaginatively and exchanged rather than as agents of aesthetic discrimination (92, 89–90). Regarding this dual role of women, Poovey observes: “At the heart of this semiotic system of discriminations is the difference upon which Burke anchored aesthetics: women are ‘the sex;’ men discriminate among women and so found civilization” (96). It is this discriminatory authority that Burke’s anecdote of the white boy’s fear of the black woman affirms.29 Burke constrains this power of judgment racially, rendering it a prerogative of white men. Recording racial differentiations, the adjudicative and culture-building capability he posits comprises propensities to discern racial differences that, filtered through the appropriate perceiver’s observations, become formative of what counts as culture and cultural status. Burke’s centering of beauty in a frame of white, upper/middle-class, heterosexual relationships manifests itself in the aesthetic figuration of subjectivities, forms, feelings, and bodies that elude these bonds, and are expelled from the social and natural order that is to be controlled through the opposition between the beautiful and

102

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

the sublime. Regulated by a productive, white, masculinized, middle-class wellspring of perceptual and metaphysical differentiation, love and embodiment institute an uneven, exclusionist pattern of aesthetic relationships. Wollstonecraft’s own conception of beauty lacks the resources to rectify these asymmetries. She proposes an alternative form of beauty, “the beauty of moral loveliness” (1992, 268), which is to supplant aristocratic and upper/middle-class women’s “false notions of beauty and delicacy” (225), correcting their false refinement and manners (144, 153). Such “true beauty” lays claim to virtue, as it arises from the mind (227) and from dignified occupations (259–60), contrary to “mere beauty of features and complexion” (165). True beauty consists in the “harmonious propriety” exemplified by the “well-regulated” mind. As such, Wollstonecraft believes, it gives the subject access to the “privileges of humanity” (268). A difficulty with this view is that it implicitly reinstates the ethical and aesthetic generalizations posited by Plato, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson.30 Like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Wollstonecraft’s proposal affirms the questionable coincidence of (true) beauty, interest, and pleasure with public and private virtue in the larger social whole (1992, 259, 262), and, more specifically, in the fabric of relationships binding white, upper- and middle-class men and women.31 The privilege Wollstonecraft accords beauty of mind over beauty of body replicates Plato’s aesthetic subjugation to reason of bodily desire, many kinds of passion, and the senses. But the mind-body hierarchy, feminists have argued, functions as a marker of social position, translating the valorizations it sustains into normative distinctions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Wollstonecraft’s account is no exception to this. Her alternative fails to free the theory of beauty from the problems identified earlier. More than that, it falls short of engaging the entangled economic, amorous, and social powers beauty carries as a cultural desideratum, demanding normative physiques, skin color, odors, dress codes, and facial expressions. Coming to terms with the force of these disciplinary effects requires a more complex approach than she envisages. Wollstonecraft’s critique of Burke and others contests important aspects of gendered aestheticization and aestheticized gendering. Yet these phenomena cast a wider web of psychic, embodied, and social effects and admit of a broader span of oppositional possibilities than her duality between “mere” physical beauty and “beauty of moral loveliness” recognizes. Beauty’s concrete functioning within strategies of oppression and resistance eludes Wollstonecraft’s dichotomies of mind and body, and of reason and affect or sensibility, as evinced, for example, by Macabéa’s oppositional materiality, such as her typos and her lipstick.32

Reaestheticizing beauty The history of aesthetics recurrently grants beauty opposing moral and political orientations. These directionalities reflect fine-grained relational operations in which the beautiful participates. Scrutinizing poverty as an aesthetic enigma, the Hour of the Star brings out shifting valences that beauty and ugliness acquire across varying

Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor

103

relational contexts (such as, on the one hand, the author’s and on the other, Glória’s and Olímpico’s reactions to Macabéa). Lispector highlights the predicament in which this leaves her protagonist. The novel responds to the moral and political polyvalence of the beautiful, which historically has materialized in constellations of perception, affect, love, desire, embodiment, productivity, sociality, respectability, meaningfulness, and health, by calling for an overhaul of structures of aesthetic relationality. Inventing a male writer, Lispector satirically imbues his poetic comportment and his love for the character he creates with uncertainties riddling a lettered social regimen that animates eroding shreds of patriarchal, God-like authorial control. The tensions this provokes surface in the relation between the detail and the larger narrative frame through which Rodrigo attempts to grasp that detail. These strains unsettle aesthetic structures founded on stabilized relative positions of particulars and overarching whole. Such structures include the order of a tale and the logic of the market, for which Macabéa represents a resource—one that does not permit stable accomodation. Singularity and generality go together in the young woman. The character resembles her author who, after all, constitutes only an insignificant detail himself, superfluous, like her (18, 21, 32). Exchangeable and exploitable, Macabéa obeys the plots of stories others tell for her. The singular detail has a place in larger schemes. Nonetheless, Macabéa’s aesthetic desires escape Rodrigo’s poetics, eluding artistic idealizations and generalizations he broadcasts. As she evades aesthetic scripts in which her creator, among others, tries to enlist her subaltern consciousness (or lack thereof), Macabéa proffers moments of aesthetic resistance to the corporeal and amatory designs enveloping her. Her aesthetic actions and perceptions disrupt the alignment of social and economic standing with aesthetic agency. We witness here, then, a subversion of the relational plans propounded by Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and Burke. The Hour of the Star sets Macabéa apart from paradigms of aesthetic relationality that figure her as disposable detail. The novel imagines its protagonist in part as a resident of an otherworldly temporal and spatial frame, one that entails uncharted orders of love, embodiment, and experience (11–12, 85–6). Thus, Lispector’s readingin-detail of her character uproots the relation between the negligible detail and the aesthetic systems in which that detail is emplaced, rendering this connection elusive, ungraspable. Rather than having the detail that is Macabéa contest the corruption surrounding her as a perfectly singular being or an absolute outsider, the novel brings the polarities of detail and whole into a disequilibrium that gestures toward alternative formations of culture. Steering clear of venturing a solution that would once and for all be capable of rectifying the objectionable aesthetic conditions she critiques, Lispector insists on the need for a complex relational process that recognizes the emergence and re-emergence of aesthetic threats and promises—a point to which I will return in Chapter 8. The aesthetic history I have reviewed is suggestive of a similar response to the frictions contained within the beautiful. Ostensibly lending beauty a one-directional orientation toward the good, Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and other Neoplatonists in fact locate beauty at the heart of an intricate pattern of social differentiation that appears morally praiseworthy only within a radically idealizing vision. Plato, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Burke, and

104

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Wollstonecraft implicitly put the beautiful and its antitheses to work to orchestrate a system of relationships. For these philosophers, beauty functions as a regulative idea that installs acceptable trajectories of subjectivation and regiments the traffic of culture. Its tendencies to bring about goodness, truth, happiness, and freedom go hand in hand with its capacities to inspire unjust differentiation and hierarchy. The pleasures of the beautiful are of a piece with its participation in ethical and political devastation. While the impulse to dredge beauty onto solid moral ground is comprehensible in light of the concept’s momentous social and subjective capacities, the relational history of the beautiful belies its abiding there. In lieu of what traditionally was conceived as an overarching moral order, the actual context for beauty’s cultural operations consists in continually evolving relationships between humans, animals, objects, and environments. Such relationships are mediated by aesthetic elements, which they also help to shape. Unfolding within crisscrossing institutional dynamics, aesthetic relationships are formative of values, ends, and concepts that come to matter in concrete social conditions. This means that the moral and political project of the beautiful is to be a relational endeavor. Beauty’s conceptual structures and its ethical valences cannot be insulated from its participation in formations of aesthetic relationality. Hence, a stable, morally secure notion of beauty that would be protected from the vicissitudes of aesthetic relationships is undesirable and untenable. As Mandeville implies, the persuasive appeal of the ethical and aesthetic idealizations expounded by Plato, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson rests upon forms of discipline and oppression, which they conceal. Like Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s generalizations, the accounts offered by Hume, Smith, Burke, and Wollstonecraft downplay the problematic valence of beauty’s concrete social operations. To attribute an unequivocally good orientation to the beautiful is to write off its participation in conditions of economic disparity, poverty, and social disposability. This response discounts the hold beauty has on our imagination and desire, and sidesteps beauty’s firm rooting in our aesthetic and artistic surroundings.33 More specifically, this approach obfuscates the endemic operations of racialized (class-inflected, gendered) aestheticization and aesthetic racialization (class-inflection, gendering), which are part of the cultural scaffolding against the backdrop of which we shape our identities and differences. Beauty is not ready to be set aright; it never will be. The moral and political polyvalence of the beautiful is inseparably bound up with its relational operations, including its tensions and collusions with market rationality. Our multidirectional ties to beauty and its antitheses acquire their mobility and obduracy as elements of the constellations of aesthetic relationality we occupy. Drawing on the aesthetic affiliations and disaffiliations we bear vis-à-vis others, objects, and our environments, we can devise critical reaestheticizations of such modes of relationality and address. This leaves us with a collective project of working through beauty’s ambivalent history, a challenge that Lispector’s novel takes up.34 Ensconced in the contours of normative sociality, beauty is differentially available to us to arrange our relationships for better and for worse. At the same time, the categories of the beautiful and the ugly surpass the realm of what standardized social existence

Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor

105

valorizes or devalorizes under those rubrics. Unimagined aesthetic possibilities can be recuperated in the margins of normative culture. Expendable and superfluous, Macabéa finds unscripted joy in the sounds of a cockerel, in hugging a tree, and in listening to the pings that make up her favorite radio program, “Radio Clock.”35 Lispector refracts relational forces that bind the beautiful to social and economic flourishing, and the ugly to subalternity. Abundant aesthetic resources envelop us that we can rally to redirect beauty’s moral and political orientations, to tweak the meanings of the beautiful, and to dislodge structures of relationality in which beauty exerts its effects.

5

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

. . . [P]erhaps rather than simply questioning the nature of knowledge, we should today reevaluate the static, inert concept we have always had of ignorance. Ignorance, far more than knowledge, is what can never be taken for granted. Barbara Johnson Placed from its incipient moments in antiquity and modernity under the provenance of a deficient mode of knowing and a je-ne-sais-quoi, the aesthetic might appear an unlikely font of critical approaches to ignorance.1 Planned forgetfulness, structural denial, cognitive dissonance, ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and willful unknowing pervade the experience of aesthetic form and fiction in multiple media, traditions, epochs. If ignorance is what stands to be amended by knowledge, these preoccupations do not carry the promise of a corrective. Rather, they present themselves as dependable means of making things worse. This was Plato’s fear. “But worse is actually better!” philosophers have since exclaimed in so many ways, challenging Plato’s skeptical take on art’s cognitive and moral powers. As a mode of not-knowing, the idea goes, the aesthetic makes up for the not-knowing of knowledge proper.2 Aesthetic judgment—as distinct from ethical and cognitive judgment— addresses blind spots left by practical and theoretical reason: ignorance makes good on ignorance. What can we make of the notion of a kind of ignorance that improves on other kinds of ignorance? A number of strategies suggest themselves for rubbing off the sense of paradox clinging to this formulation. One answer proposes that aesthetic notknowing amounts to a type of ignorance which transcends the limitations of other knowledge practices—in the intractable fashion after which it is named the je-nesais-quoi—generating a kind of meaning that, notwithstanding its significance, falls short of knowledge.3 A second answer contends that we encounter in the aesthetic an unknowing that precipitates a knowing-by-special-means, a species of knowledge that would not otherwise be attainable, or that satisfies distinctive norms and criteria. So conceived, the je-ne-sais-quoi of the aesthetic can be considered an exceptionally knowledgeable state of ignorance.4 If, at any rate, as these two replies attest, the aesthetic

108

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

je-ne-sais-quoi is productive of new epistemic possibilities, then it confounds binary oppositions between knowledge (signifying epistemic success, fruitfulness, positive value, progress) and its failure (connoting deficiency, lack, negative value, stasis). On this third response, the aesthetic je-ne-sais-quoi complicates our understanding of the relation between knowledge and ignorance. Conditions comprised under these epistemic polarities prove to be complicit in one another.5 This point resonates with a fourth one. The irrevocable engagement of philosophical and scientific methods with metaphor, narrative, rhetoric, images, and fiction has led a number of theorists to dissolve long-held distinctions between aesthetic and theoretical artifacts.6 In the resulting perspective, variations on the so-called je-ne-sais-quoi pop up across the realm of symbolic production. Dimensions of ignorance put into play by symbolic forms pervade all epistemic domains, from quotidian aesthetic life to the sciences, philosophy, literature and the arts. Because unknowing and ignoring run in every direction, in this egalitarian line of thought, the capabilities of aesthetically inflected states of relative ignorance to ameliorate seemingly nonaesthetic states of relative ignorance can be expected to be local, contingent, and reciprocal, rather than principled or one-directional. Each of the foregoing replies points in useful directions. Far from a dead end, the aesthetic constitutes an uncannily resonant point of interest for a critical encounter with ignorance. Yet the above possibilities do not emerge in a vacuum. They arise against the backdrop of a distinctive type of ignorance that I wish to consider here. Aesthetic histories, both theoretical and practical, have forged systemic patterns of aestheticized ignorance. As an initial gloss, such ignorance may be understood as an absence of knowledge that is supported or valorized by aesthetic means. But this idea alerts us to something more complex. Elements of structures of relationality, aesthetic forms participate in embodiment, social life, and the sensory. They give rise to states of receptiveness and withdrawal. Through this intercorporeal labor, that is, by establishing bonds and disconnections among people, things, and people and things, aesthetic modes forge patterns of awareness and obliviousness, affectivity and disassociation, openness to and distance from sociality, place, and happenstance.7 The resulting epistemic configurations comprise aestheticized orders of knowledge and ignorance. They amount to states of knowledge and ignorance that materialize in the contours of aesthetic habits, desires, values, institutions, discourses, and forms.8 Structures of relationality, accordingly, conscript the workings of aesthetically encoded constellations of knowledge and ignorance. The present chapter explores ties between aesthetics and ignorance through poems by Wisława Szymborska, a painting by Remedios Varo, a sculpture by Martin Puryear, and the reality TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–7).9 Historically posited aesthetic integrations (between ostensible polarities of mind and body, reason and affect, imagination and sensation, public and private, individual and society) surface as dimensions of contemporary formations of ignorance. These integrations prove to be able to generate as well as contest forms of ignorance. While the aesthetic possesses critical resources, it is steeped in ignorance itself. We will track spirals of agency and experience in which this situation involves us.

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

109

Aestheticizing and reaestheticizing ignorance Strategies of aestheticization in Wisława Szymborska’s poetry frequently highlight the problematic nature of varieties of ignorance, and yet never cease to court other types of not-knowing. Examples of this occur in her poems “Advertisement” and “Utopia,” which invoke opposing strands of aestheticized knowledge and ignorance. In “Advertisement,” a tranquilizer announces the masterful aptitudes it brings within reach: I know how to handle misfortune, how to take bad news. I can minimize injustice, lighten up God’s absence, or pick the widow’s veil that suits your face.10

The pontificating pill proclaims its promises. Medication will dispel anxiety and lots more than that. The capsule coats relief from suffering in feelings of ease and smoothness: “All you have to do is take me, / let me melt beneath your tongue / just gulp me / with a glass of water.” Offering to shelter vision against the world, to shield pain from public inspection, and to remove pangs of terror, moral outrage, or mourning, the tablet conceptualizes reduced agony as the product of a gentle treatment, one that grants a welcome sense of security. At one level, the voice invests the alleviation of misery with a certain attraction in the reader’s eyes—enough to convert this pull, at another level, into rebellion against such enticement. Prosopopeia effects an aestheticization of ignorance. The pill’s address confers a measure of desirability on a diminished awareness of distress.11 A disengagement from failure, the voice attests, facilitates a soft, brightened outlook on things. Who said you have to take it on the chin? Let me have your abyss. I’ll cushion it with sleep. You’ll thank me for giving you four paws to fall on.

Imbuing the removal of consciousness of pain with the appeal of a restful equilibrium, this passage aestheticizes the tranquilizer’s gift of epistemic erasure. But the proposed transaction implements a pact that may already have been sealed: “Sell me your soul. / There are no other takers. // There is no other devil anymore.” Szymborska’s verses answer aesthetization with a reaestheticizing movement. The pill’s tender care doubles as epistemic smothering. The swallowing of the drug portends the taking of the taker, whose moral agency loses its foothold under the obliviousness administered by the tranquilizer.

110

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

What the reader in a sense experiences as a seduction acquires a dimension of repulsiveness; the ad’s saccharine pledges stress the cruelty of its rhetorical mission. The poem accomplishes a transformative undoing of aesthetic connotations it has crafted. “Advertisement” turns aestheticization against itself to critical effect. Szymborska’s lines embark on an aestheticization of ignorance that they counter through a critical reaestheticization. The work’s reaestheticizing momentum ascribes to the medicated unknowing of loss, lack, risk, worry, failure, suffering, and pain a temptation of further unknowing—a lure to cede grounds for epistemic, moral, and affective insight. This moment of reaestheticization undercuts the aesthetic seductiveness that acts of aestheticization, at another rhetorical level, bestow upon such unknowing. “Advertisement” offers an aesthetic critique of ignorance. Yet in a final turnabout, this critique affirms ignorance. For the pill knows all too well, too readily: “I can take exams / or the witness stand. / . . . / I know how to handle misfortune.” Ironically, the poem then invites us to affirm ignorance: the work encourages us to tolerate our inability to come up with answers and solutions that we crave and on which we depend. “Advertisement” passes through several phases of aestheticizing ignorance: An initial mode of aestheticization codes ignorance as desirable. Experienced under the rubric of a caretaker, the pill makes an aesthetic promise. Szymborska imbues the sedation that the remedy pledges to furnish with aesthetic allure—the drug heralds an undisturbed form of unknowing that holds out some appeal. Taking off from and simultaneously interrupting this promissory moment, a critical reaestheticization subsequently marks aestheticized ignorance as undesirable: the trap of forgetfulness beckons with an aesthetic threat. Lastly, a new promise follows this threat. Szymborska offers an affirmative aestheticization of a different kind of ignorance, namely, a state of epistemic unsettlement, which, the poem urges, it is crucial for us to be able to endure. Cultural artifacts are capable of aestheticizing ignorance and of critically countering existing conditions of aestheticized ignorance by providing alternative aestheticizations. A compound perspective on ignorance also characterizes “Utopia.” This poem sketches a view of knowledge that banishes ambiguity, opacity, disorientation, uncertainty. Island where all becomes clear. Solid ground beneath your feet. The only roads are those that offer access. Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs. . . . If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

These lines aestheticize the eradication of ignorance through images of transparency and order. Szymborska aestheticizes knowledge by mapping it along axes of a geometrical grid that permits stable visibility in all directions, up, down, left, right, forward, around. Such knowledge knows no obstacles, distractions, or detours. But it is precisely in its refusal to take cognizance of its boundaries that knowledge, as modeled by the poem, displays the ignorance it has absorbed:

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

111

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista: the Valley of Obviously. . . . Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley. Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

The certitudes “Utopia” posits trumpet the simplifications they impose on an epistemic reality that cannot fully be comprehended. Ironically, the blocking of ignorance by knowledge in the poem demands an ignoring of the possibility of ignorance.12 Among other things, the aversion to ignorance the poem uncovers entails the expulsion of living beings from knowledge’s dominion: For all its charms, the island is uninhabited, and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches turn without exception to the sea. As if all you can do here is leave And plunge, never to return, into the depths. Into unfathomable life.

Casting off the rigid design through which she frames the neat, straightforward matrix of knowledge put forth by the poem, Szymborska envisions the knower’s immersion in vast, fluid reaches of not-knowing. The poem mocks an epistemological model that, determined to expunge its limits, ossifies knowledge production. “Utopia” dismisses this picture in favor of a liberating, invigorating embrace of the unknown that jettisons foundations and encourages epistemic movement. Szymborska wryly supplants the aestheticizing endeavor that understands ignorance as an affliction that is to be eliminated, by an alternative plan of aestheticization. This latter outlook comprehends ignorance as an open-ended, enlivening engagement with ultimately unknowable dimensions of existence. The final verses begin to enact this kind of ignorance. Faint footprints beckon. We glimpse recalcitrant details. Not wholly legible, ephemeral elements arise that elude single-minded grasp and mark incongruities with the tidy vision ruling the island. “Utopia” brings out the slippage between detail and overarching perspective. The work sides in this respect with other poems by Szymborska that register the failure of grand epistemic visions to absorb the significance of fleeting ordinary situations, such as the occurrence of a Thursday, the dropping of letters in the mailbox, a sign prohibiting walking on the grass.13 “Utopia,” surely not alone among artworks, encourages us to tease out hitherto unacknowledged zones of ignorance and to stray from already given configurations of entwined knowledge and ignorance.

Intermingling states of knowledge and ignorance Aestheticized matrices of knowledge and ignorance occur in all areas of existence. What resources does the aesthetic bring to projects of aestheticization that we dedicate

112

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

to the manufacturing of such structures? Szymborska’s poems underscore aesthetic procedures we deploy to this end. “Advertisement” and “Utopia” give shape to cognitive and affective orientations by way of images of softness and order. Within the fictional worlds intimated by poems, these aesthetic forms mold conceptualization, perception, volition, imagination, and feeling in ways that limit awareness. Additionally, Szymborska makes the reader aware of this constructive process. We see the rhetorical production of ignorance take effect. Szymborska represents ignorance as an aesthetic formation, a state that we circumscribe through aesthetically efficacious modalities of experience, imagination, and desire. She gets us to reflect on this practice of aestheticization. Furthermore, “Utopia” and “Advertisement” denounce and commend conditions of aesthetically inflected ignorance. The poems dispute aesthetically marked constrictions of understanding, while also contesting aesthetically qualified refusals of limitations of insight. Freeing knowledge formation from the yoke of overarching frames of comfort (in “Advertisement”) and regulation (in “Utopia”), Szymborska opts for a more demanding, disorderly conception of our epistemic labors and affiliations. Human beings devote significant portions of their aesthetic lives to calibrating and tinkering with aestheticized states of knowledge and ignorance. We direct taxing missions toward what we assume to constitute epistemic success, failure, and possibility. Efforts to aestheticize ignorance, whether impulsively or deliberately, individually or collaboratively, have at their disposal a wide array of resources. For instance, the in some respects feminizing appeal of the biomedical relief the pill promotes in “Advertisement,” and the masculinizing template of vision and access Szymborska satirizes in “Utopia” are suggestive of contributions that technological and affective parameters are able to make to various attempts at aestheticization. These endeavors incorporate modes of seduction. They regularly defy or obey economic motives or political aspirations. They can shrug off or honor normative social scripts. In the operations of the aesthetic we encounter a vast stockpile of formal and symbolic repertoires through which aesthetic artifacts can shroud us in modalities of knowing and unknowingness. More than that, copious aesthetic functions are open to being created and used by us through which we can stir awareness of aesthetic registers of knowledge and ignorance. This means that the realm of the aesthetic also furnishes prolific devices enabling us to adjust aesthetic idioms that we (not typically consciously) deploy to conceptualize and inhabit instances of knowledge and ignorance. The surrealist Spanish/Mexican painter Remedios Varo (1908–63) sheds light on such strategies. Varo brings into view aesthetic capabilities for crafting understanding and for averting it, as well as aesthetic powers that help us apprehend and fashion stakes we have in these epistemic conditions. Her painting Spiral Transit (1962) foregrounds a dramatic entwining of knowledge and ignorance. Water, clouds, and sunshine surround an architectural construction that is reminiscent of a city in the middle of a sea. Voyagers travel back and forth over a spiraling canal that terminates in a central tower. Harboring a perched bird, the tower is suggestive of a state of enlightenment.14 But such enlightenment appears not to be attainable to the travelers or the viewer. Observers and characters alike encounter intermingling strands of knowledge and ignorance. This entanglement is a source of disaffection. Yet the work humorously reimagines aesthetic and conceptual preconditions underlying the resulting epistemic configuration.

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

113

Figure 5.1  Remedios Varo, Spiral Transit, 1962. Oil on Masonite. 100 x 115 cm (39 3/8 x 45 ¼’’). © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.

If Spiral Transit alludes to a quest for enlightenment, the work’s motifs of stasis belie the success of this journey.15 The land is arid, deserted, virtually motionless. The travelers’ boats consist of extended articles of clothing, such as hats or waistcoats, sculpted in the shape of eggs and pods. Closely enfolding the body, and resonating with the frequently recurring ripped fabrics in Varo’s oeuvre that mark moments of transcendence or break-through, these vehicles are suggestive of a truncated process of birth.16 While one passenger may have reached a higher order of enlightenment— the soul who, having abandoned its boat and metamorphosed into a bird, surveys the scene from up above in the tower—those who return from the center appear no more animated than those who approach it. Most figures are clad in somber tones of blue and gray. Their collective search for illumination appears to have failed. Is the endeavor worth undertaking? A reply is not forthcoming from the painting. The work apprehends a state of unachieved enlightenment, or, ignorance, in terms of physical constriction and coloristic restraint. Varo articulates a stagnated potential for life, the halting of a trajectory of teleological development. What shall we make of the viewer’s relation to ignorance and knowledge? The painting disallows a consistent positioning beyond or within these states. The work’s

114

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

figuration (bird, tower, spiral, water, journeys back and forth) is iconic in character.17 Rather than postulating the ideal of a transcendent goal, the painting incites the viewer to explore her orientation vis-à-vis the concept of such an end.18 At the level of the work’s address to the spectator and the address the painting invites from the spectator, Spiral Transit reproduces the ignorance it portrays, while also challenging the observer to become cognizant of her own orientations vis-à-vis ignorance and enlightenment, as she shifts between multiple points of identification outlined by the painting. Combining miniaturization with an aerial perspective, the work has the viewer oscillate between close and remote perceptions of pictorial detail. Identifying with positions in and above advancing and retreating boats, the spectator (imaginatively) confronts the need for knowledge and for the surrender of her quest for knowledge. Feelings of sadness and mortification attach to these attitudes. A hopeful striving for enlightenment on the way to the tower turns into the distress of failed effort on the way back, which, then, infuses other cycles of approach and withdrawal. The viewer ponders the wisdom or lack thereof of giving up on or proceeding along adopted itineraries. The composition takes her through the repetition of these possibilities, which confounds distinctions among them, demonstrating that one feeling, perception, or orientation rests for its renewal upon another, with which it becomes mixed. Dwelling on Varo’s design, we are prodded to contemplate an affective, embodied, existential logic that conjoins a desire for understanding with an ineluctable absence of knowledge. Spiral Transit captures a process in which we labor in ignorance toward knowledge, and in knowledge toward ignorance. The vehicles for transportation in which the voyagers move about are built from coats and hats that are outfitted with mechanical devices such as propellers, steering wheels, sails. This conjunction of domesticity and technology undergirds several layers of aesthetic critique. One, Varo achieves an ironic feminization of conventionally masculinized materials and forms. Recruiting feminized elements in the job of sustaining a quest for enlightenment—articles of clothing, draped around the body in a manner reminiscent of maternal holding, fertility, and birth—she regenders traditionally masculinized visions of transcendence, notably, technology’s function as an instrument of progress, and surrealist fantasies of transformation.19 Technology and surrealism classically explore the female body as a ground for innovation, formulating the promise of the new by way of the transgression of images of this body. Donning this teleological imaginary in a feminized garb, Varo mockingly derails its purchase on novelty. Two, Varo ironically masculinizes standardly feminized materials and forms. Equipping small, protective shapes that carry maternal connotations (choras of sorts) with mechanical contraptions, she regenders femininized spaces that have influentially been located at the basis of masculinizing trajectories of cultivation and comprehended as stable, timeless, unrepresentable.20 Varo’s wheels and propellers playfully reimagine the figure of a passive, stationary, maternal place of origin for subjectivity, that is, of an enduring support for cultural practices that itself remains barred from signification. Muddling influential separations between conventionally masculinized and feminized iconographies, the painting stages enmeshments of knowledge and ignorance by way

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

115

of hybrid, ambiguously gendered images. The work interrupts genderings commonly associated with frameworks of knowledge and ignorance. Notably, it dislodges connotations of masculinity attendant on conceptions of knowledge as active and future-oriented, and connotations of femininity attaching to notions of ignorance as regressive, a distraction, a condition properly belonging to the past. Spiral Transit engages in a working-through of aesthetic vocabularies. The painting overhauls aesthetic idioms underlying a progressivist epistemic model that leads us from ignorance to knowledge (such as travel motifs, myths of enlightenment, and templates of change). Varo’s iconography invites the viewer to envisage an alternative relation between knowledge and ignorance, namely one of mutual interleaving. The critical, transformative impulse of the painting may seem diminutive under the weight of the work’s cyclicality and stagnation. At the level of content as well as address, Spiral Transit finds an antecedent in Encounter (1959). This work confirms Varo’s skepticism about the attainability of a certain kind of knowledge. A swirling blue cloth surrounding the painting’s protagonist binds her to her self-image, which stares back at her, encapsulated in a box. Knowledge of self traces a closed circuit that uncannily replicates the forms by which the self is constructed. Self-reflection mimics entanglements encircling the self. Indeed, Spiral Transit and Encounter both withhold the promise of liberatory epistemic transcendence. If ignorance is to be supplanted by knowledge, knowledge instantly shovels the knower back into such ignorance. But a different perspective emerges if we consider the artist’s own positioning visà-vis ignorance, as scrutinized by another group of works. The theme of aesthetic invention occupies a distinctive place in Varo’s oeuvre, as in surrealism more generally. Spiral Transit’s formal critique bears affinity to the aesthetic pursuits string players, flutists, painters, alchemists, and weavers undertake in her representations of creative acts. Confining forces remain relatively subdued in these paintings. Playing music on rays of sunlight shining through a dense forest, the string player in Solar Music (1955) liberates birds from their cages, enlivening them and herself—both gain color. Dressed in a coat of moss, the musician partly merges with her environment, like her colleagues in The Flutist (1955) and Useless Science or The Alchemist (1955). Each of these creators energizes ambient powers to transcend everyday limitations. With the artists in The Weaver (1956) and Creation of the Birds (1958), these makers share the practice of releasing their productions into the very environments from which such creations derive impulses and forms. On the assumption that Varo investigates similar dimensions of the creative process in Spiral Transit, we can read this painting as locating her own artistic agency within the ignorance the work thematizes. The resulting species of ignorance would not be stagnant but comprises a wellspring of unknown powers that are capable of being energized. Ignorance of this sort suffuses the work’s formal strategies: Varo’s iconography simultaneously emphasizes and counters limitations of surrealist, domestic, and technocratic vocabularies. Satirically obfuscating and revising gender typologies embedded in these cultural repertoires, she spruces up received aesthetic materials to make room for new forms and concepts. Accordingly,

116

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Spiral Transit mobilizes aesthetic idioms immanent in states of ignorance as a part of a strategy that aims at the development of alternative aesthetic possibilities. Clearly, the buckling of a progressivist view of epistemic development, registered by Spiral Transit, is not tantamount to the exhaustion of a model that seeks to contest ignorance from a position within this state. The latter epistemic scheme, which Varo adopts in Spiral Transit, among other works, is suggestive of stratagems of transformation that play out fields of ignorance against areas of knowledge and vice versa, while activating both to bring about a productive difference in the other. This process demands a reckoning with the loss of a hold on knowledge. It prompts unanswered epistemic desire on the part of the subject of knowledge and a lack thereof, and brings on a state of uncertainty and affective disorientation. But it also causes an ironic shifting of grounds. It is not clear where we stand vis-à-vis the axes, spirals, viewpoints, vehicles, and flows by which we can gauge relations between knowledge and ignorance. Varo’s oeuvre shows the aesthetic at work in configuring a broad array of parameters of these states of epistemic dislocation. Placing in tension multiple instances of aestheticized knowledge and ignorance, she implicitly elucidates the vast array of resources and reverberations the aesthetic grants these epistemic stances. Particularly salient are visual figurations of ambivalent positions between captivity and liberation— marked, for instance, by strings binding human figures to one another or in meshings and trappings holding them encased in their environments. Such ties funnel creativity and enlivenment, but also wall in protagonists. Characters free themselves; others remain caught in confining settings. Modeling embodied states of knowledge and ignorance by enfolding these states in a resonant web of existential meanings, Varo renders them intricate cultural conditions. She brings out affective, perceptual, imaginative, and other intercorporeal implications of these conditions. In articulating such divergent dimensions, her work alerts us to the far-reaching scope of the aesthetic and to the expansive, involved presence it has in our epistemic lives. Multifarious means of engendering varieties of knowing and not-knowing commingle in Varo’s paintings and drawings: She recurrently uses technological devices or images of animals to mold conscious as well as unconscious stages of personal transformation. Her characters enact converging activities of science, art, and magic as they set about domestic undertakings, such as knitting or cooking. Her iconography activates the embracing reach and powers of concentration that the aesthetic derives from its propensities to bring together various kinds of processes, dispositions that we will investigate shortly under the heading of aesthetic integrationism. The wide-ranging epistemic preoccupations Varo engages in her oeuvre as a whole surface also in Spiral Transit. Reverberating with manifold layers of aesthetic meaning in which Varo envelops epistemic existence, this work prompts us to address oscillating dimensions of simultaneously aesthetic and epistemic unsettlement. Proclaiming the inexorability of aestheticized ignorance, the painting stations the viewer in the midst of it, inciting her to grapple with this condition.

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

117

Histories of aestheticized ignorance Aesthetically delineated orders of knowledge and ignorance take root in historically established schemata of production and interpretation, codes of publicity and privacy, blueprints of motion, stasis, vision, audition, smell, taste, and touch, along with selective immersions in and retreats from templates of experience and material occupations. Consequently, contemporary aesthetic practices make their effects as elements in institutionalized schemes of aestheticized knowledge and ignorance. Such arrangements reside, for example, in media cultures, medical imaging routines, and spatiotemporal regimes governing body-to-body interactions. Given the historical embeddedness of aestheticized ignorance, one avenue for clarifying the nature of this kind of ignorance that suggests itself, in addition to examining specific cultural modes of the sort just mentioned, is to investigate the role the aesthetic plays as a multisensory, integrative technology. Numerous philosophers have developed integrationists accounts of aesthetic practice—perspectives on which the aesthetic bridges oppositions between spheres that Enlightenment theorists have influentially separated from one another. Friedrich Schiller and John Dewey are among the advocates of such views.21 In a series of letters published toward the end of the eighteenth century, Schiller declares aesthetic practice central to the realization of the moral state (1967, 171, 219). Schiller believes that neither reason nor the moral law is capable of motivating us to act in conformity with duty. The one possible way of achieving a humanly inhabitable form of morality and rationality, he observes, is to bring reason together with feeling and sensation, mind with body.22 The aesthetic is the field of practices that offers us the tools to integrate these faculties. Propelling these capacities into a state of reciprocal interaction, aesthetic creation and perception give rise to a dynamical state of equilibrium in which agents feel moved to put into action precepts of reason and moral law. Schiller looks to the aesthetic not only to bring the field of reason, morality, and mind in accord with that of feeling, sensation, and the body, but also to conjoin individual and society, the personal and the political, the private and the public, the particular and the general. Harmoniously integrated in its diversified functioning, the self, on this approach, brings to fruition its bonds to the larger collective in which it participates, overcoming modern forms of fragmentation, while attaining political freedom, equality, and happiness (7–9, 31–43, 213–19). In the 1930s, John Dewey expanded Schiller’s integrationist conception of aesthetic agency. In Dewey’s view, aesthetic experience integrates mind and body, sensing and thinking, need and action, doing and undergoing, material and ideal, reason and imagination, imagination and practice, self and object, self and environment, subjectivity and objectivity, detail or particularity and whole, individual and nature, individual and community, individual and universal, actuality and possibility.23 Each of these integrations, in his account, is productive of civilization. Like Schiller and Dewey, contemporary feminist critics, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa, highlight the importance of aesthetic creation as a practice that conjoins sensation, feeling, and thought. The aesthetic, for

118

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

these theorists, underwrites processes of articulation and structures of experience that elude models of rationality as a disembodied structure, or constructions of corporeality as an extrasymbolic phenomenon, external to the precinct of culture.24 Integrationism represents a prominent strand of contemporary aesthetic thought. The various integrative projects in which theorists, artists, and quotidian agents enlist the aesthetic and with which it has substantially been identified, engage us in normative work. Feminist and critical race theorists have indicated that the apparent polarities the aesthetic reconciles (such as those of mind and body, reason and affect/ imagination/sensation, public and private, individual and society, personal and political, general and particular) carry normative meanings that translate into hierarchical differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and ability.25 Crafting points of connection among these dualities, the aesthetic fulfills a complex normative task. Unifying functions that have been comprehended as disparate, aesthetic practices interrupt Enlightenment oppositions they straddle. But they also help to secure these dichotomies. Both of these strategies enter into the production of knowledge and ignorance. Aesthetic activities frequently endorse seemingly appropriate relations among ostensibly opposed domains, contributing to the realization of apparently suitable racial, class, and gender configurations in the social field, arrangements that reflect hierarchies encoded in the operative Enlightenment polarities. Aesthetic integrations often implement forms of differentiation that observe these supposed dualities. In bridging realms whose alleged divisions underwrite social distinctions, the aesthetic, thus, does not simply counter established Enlightenment binaries—as proposed by Kristeva, Irigaray, Lorde, and Anzaldúa—but also props up normative effects unleashed by these separations.26 Thus, the normative labor the aesthetic takes on as a social technology is intricately entangled with the functioning of the very Enlightenment oppositions that the aesthetic to some extent displaces. I will examine recuperative procedures of aesthetic integrationism in views of taste and refinement by David Hume as well as in the reality-TV series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. A source of integrations, the aesthetic, it turns out, assumes moral and political responsibilities that include the creation of knowledge and ignorance. Hume understands the aesthetic as an integrative phenomenon, along the following lines. As noted in Chapter 3, the aesthetically appropriate apprehension of art, in his view, rests on the observer’s good sense, freedom from prejudice, delicacy of imagination, and on his possession of antecedent practice, and of a history of comparative assessments of qualities of different artworks (ST, 140–7). A true judge is endowed with these qualifications, which are to inform his experience of the cultural artifact at hand. These capacities combine with the critic’s ability to respond with appropriate emotions to art, which we can consider an additional observational prerequisite.27 Spelled out in terms of these criteria, taste and refinement, in Hume’s theory, are governed by a conjunction of moral, epistemic, affective, imaginative, and volitional requirements. For Hume, aesthetic practice, thus, would appear to put into play the divergent norms that go to control these miscellaneous functions. Indeed,

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

119

Hume implicitly emphasizes several ways in which the disparate functions modulate one another in the sphere of the aesthetic. Under the rubric of taste, Hume imports epistemic and moral norms into the operations of perception, affect, and imagination. Among these epistemic norms are the “clarity” and “distinctness” that, as opposed to “obscurity” and “confusion,” he takes to characterize true experiences of beauty (ST, 143–4). A moral dimension arises when he endorses “proper” or “just” sentiments of art and beauty, while dismissing the “perverted” or “corrupted” feelings with which they are contrasted (140, 146–7, 149). Hume’s opposition between “sound” and “defective” faculties carries both epistemic and moral connotations, as do his notions of “the bad critic,” and a critic’s “faults,” “wants,” and “imperfections.”28 Accordingly, for Hume, aesthetic experience constitutes a field in which perception, affect, and imagination are guided by moral and epistemic norms.29 Conversely, under the auspices of the aesthetic, affective, imaginative, and volitional demands are introduced into the realms of morality, politics, and epistemology. This becomes clear if we briefly recapitulate Hume’s view of taste’s social functioning. With respect to the individual’s character, his personal relationships, and his social, public, and political existence, Hume recognizes a need for taste and refinement. In each of these registers, he finds taste and refinement to be productive of industry, knowledge, humanity, and civilization (RA, 168–71; DTP, 12–13). Via the workings of taste and refinement, dimensions of affect, imagination, desire, and will thereby become formative of the moral, political, and epistemic standing of the individual and the nation. Given the expansive social repercussions taste acquires in Hume’s philosophy, the different functions become even more densely entwined with one another. Recall that Hume postulates a relation of mutual support and parallel development along the planes of the public and private, the individual and the social, the social and the political. Taste bears responsibility for an adequate organization of a man’s passions, perceptions, and level of activity, and thereby, for his hold on achievements such as love, virtue, happiness. It enables the man of culture to sustain connections with significant others, causing him to lead a civilized social life. More than that, taste renders the economy productive, fosters public freedom for white, middle-class men, and strengthens the nation (DTP; RA; RP, 72–5; OC). Social agents, for Hume, exist, then, within a network of aesthetically mediated, civilized, and civilizing relationships. We have investigated the hierarchical, asymmetrical nature of this relational system. Upper- and middle-class women, and black, Indian, and workingclass men and women face exclusions of varying, intersecting sorts from vital social exchanges. The aesthetic is a source of unevenly accessible social, economic, cultural, and political relationships. An orchestrator of relational existence, taste prompts and inhibits modes of address that individuals adopt toward and receive from one another and the world of objects. The normative operation’s taste implements sharply delimit subjects’ place within a differential web of engagements with other human beings and objects. Gaps of connection surround bonds that arise. The resulting fabric of ties and voids in contact, measures of shutting out and exposure, and stretches of togetherness and insulation

120

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

instantiate multiple varieties of aestheticized knowledge and ignorance. These states acquire a broad reach in Hume’s theory. We can gain a sense of the scope of these phenomena by bringing back to mind Hume’s rigorous circumscription of the status of the man of culture. Taste makes the cultivated subject a social creature, provides him with new and ever-renewing material pleasures, yet leaves him substantially independent of others and material circumstances.30 It refines his emotions and affective sensibility, yet preserves his masculinity. It renders him sensitive to the true delights of male companions but nonetheless inspires him to engage in polite conversational, amorous, and sexual exchange with females, who proffer him further edification (DTP, 12–13; RA, 172–4; RP, 72–5). The faculty of taste, as Hume implicitly envisages it, thus helps to encode social difference into multiple registers of human functioning (imaginative, cognitive, affective, sensory, material, moral, epistemic, public, private) that converge in our aesthetic perceptions, values, and habits. The propensity of taste is instrumental in crafting as well as obstructing forms of awareness and embodied connection. Part and parcel of the moral and political labor it performs, in Hume’s analysis, is its job of facilitating and foreclosing zones of knowledge and ignorance. Hume, alongside many other philosophers implicitly theorizes systemic patterns of aestheticized knowledge and ignorance. These structures reside in systems of aesthetic relationality we inhabit. The aesthetic brings its encompassing scope to its social labor. Its field of operation is even broader than Hume’s, Schiller’s, and Dewey’s integrations attest. Aesthetic practice spans all modalities of symbolic interaction we enjoy with our environment (for instance, olfactory, kinetic) and traverses presumed separations between the public and the private, the individual and the social, the social and the political. It pervades a wide spectrum of parameters of embodiment, relationality, and address, which it can set in motion to open up or close off modes of meaning making, creating plenitudes as well as lacunae of signification, knowledge as well as ignorance. This organizational work stands out in the popular, Emmy Award-winning TV series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which ran from 2003 to 2007, and resonates with promises of taste articulated by Hume. Queer Eye, like Hume, subscribes to the view that taste projects a civilizing trajectory. Although later episodes exhibit increased racial and ethnic diversification as compared to earlier ones, the protagonist of the show typically is a white, young, able-bodied, heterosexual, propertied, middle-class man.31 The series runs on the premise that by displaying the right kind of aesthetic comportment, as indicated by five gay experts on the subjects of hair and skin, dress, food, “culture,” and interior design, this person can bring the good life in view. The team of image consultants relays promises and demands of taste to the man in the making. The demands: participation in a script that procures a coolly designed, tidy apartment, a hip outfit and fashionable haircut, a fancy fragrance, a delicious appetizer, something nice to do, an appealing theme to discuss. The promises: social attractiveness, desirability as a friend, colleague, family member, and lover, maturity, beauty, happiness, pleasure in others’ company, enhanced professional status, actualization of life’s possibilities for personal flourishing. Under the presumption of an elementary level of aesthetic educability and literacy, taste initiates a teleological process of becoming for the man of culture. Taking charge

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

121

of his lifestyle, the subject of a typical installment of the show can hope to realize benefits Hume took to surge from taste and refinement: virtue, homosocial intimacy, heterosexual love, happiness, and upward mobility. Fascinatingly, in holding out these promises to the protagonist, the series gestures toward a redistribution of the power of aesthetic discernment. Learning occurs: the student finds out how to start off an evening get-together with a companion who is to be treated to aesthetic enticements that are guaranteed to make the occasion enjoyable. In disbursing knowledge, however, the aesthetic education the lead character receives also doles out ignorance. Taste acquires this cultivating power because the aesthetic judgments, desires, and achievements that the show celebrates emerge from a constellation of relationships in which producers, consumers, marketers, family, friends, colleagues, show designers, and public work in sync. Each plays a part in the creation of taste’s demands and promises. Lovers request a presentable partner and affirm their entitlement to this expected dimension of a committed romance. Friends, colleagues, and family spot stylistic limitations hampering the protagonist and pronounce aesthetic aspirations that it would be commendable for him to satisfy. Furniture stores, upscale food venues, clothing shops, hairdressers and beauty technicians are granted ample screen time to define aesthetic possibilities that will turn out to surpass the character’s imagination. Lavishly dishing out aesthetic commentary, and disciplining their protégé in accordance with the norms of taste, the five image consultants seek to effect an attunement of his self-image to aesthetic demands and supplies they detect in his surroundings. Acting in agreement with desiderata of taste, the subject displays consumptive and productive behaviors that, the show suggests, will permit him to bring to fruition moral and social qualifications he incipiently possesses. Conformity to taste then allows Queer Eye’s protagonist to navigate an extensive network of relations with people and objects in his environment.32 It is in this relational context that taste can be imagined to issue in the good life. The show’s fantasy of happiness finds in aestheticized ignorance protection from destabilizing concerns that a deeper and more expansive awareness would register. The program omits images of the city intimating suffering, violence, and injustice. The project of aestheticization initiated by the “Fabulous Five” averts ecological misgivings. It sidesteps moral concerns about the reserve of human and natural resources that is to support first-world consumption. The aesthetic schooling provided by the five educators neglects worries about the political circumstances shaping (trans)national relationships that allow for lifestyles modeled on market rationality. The instructors’ aesthetic pedagogy by and large neglects the distinctive intricacies of the apprentice’s symbolic stance and his aesthetic vocabulary, which are submerged under the rapid fix that is to issue in a presumably appealing aesthetic persona. The developmental itinerary envisaged for the protagonist eases existential anxieties that might call into doubt the desirability of taste’s offerings. On the terms of the show’s aesthetic script, aestheticization enlists the senses along with many other modalities of embodied engagement with the world and others in the service of the fading of disconcerting bouts of awareness. Aesthetic codes, forms, and standards support the show’s picture of aesthetic education. Conventionally legible construals of aesthetic input—a dessert’s “loving”

122

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

sweetness, a flashy shirt, a dazzling fragrance, a splendid paint job—tailor the available range of sensory, imaginative, cognitive, affective, and volitional options to the ones that provide for taste’s demands and promises. In the scenario enacted by the show, aestheticization is a collaborative project to synchronize modalities of embodied consciousness, social demeanor, and public status toward a structuring of a subject’s life world that is imagined to bring happiness within reach, while averting complications that are likely to hinder this result. This organizational work also creates disjunction and dissonance. The subject of taste is positioned to remain out of touch with multiple facets of the city’s soundscape, its visual rhythms, its disjunctive temporalities, its interdependencies with a broader, global world and ecosystem, the implications of his own and others’ affective investments. Aestheticization creates a pattern of systemic attenuation and intensification of the protagonist’s connections with his surroundings. His newly acquired bodily and psychic habits are imagined to generate a capacity for flourishing that is not available absent the requisite aesthetic supports. The man-in-process undergoes an éducation sentimentale that terminates in a climactic demonstration of his aesthetic skills for the camera, to be witnessed by his teachers and the general public. Ignorance, in the show’s construal of the good life, arises in the course of a dramatic and cinematographic structuring of experience. It is a product of aesthetic intentionality, decision-making, desire, and disavowal, acting in consort with market principles. Aesthetic agency carries the cognitive, moral, and political weight that brings about the resulting epistemic condition. The operative ideology of happiness takes foot in the aesthetic practices of everyday existence. Here lies its force. In Queer Eye, aestheticization lays the groundwork for a construction of happiness. It accomplishes a selective orchestration of the subject’s presence in relation to others, the workplace, the material environment, the institutions of the economy, politics, and culture. It places this organization in the service of a normative, teleological notion of individual becoming. Central ingredients of aestheticization, in the given relational context, are the subject’s ability to accede to the requirements and rewards of taste, his willingness to observe a spectrum of aesthetic codes, readings, and experiences that is made available to him, and his cooperation in the attempt to posit what can be expected to pass as a tolerably attractive, if not enticing aesthetic persona. Additionally there is an all-pervading sense of stylistic choice being liable to aesthetic assessment, of the individual’s task of anticipating, reckoning with, and adequately adjusting to aesthetic evaluations proffered by more or less close others, and of the moral and social justifiability of his companions’ arriving at and vocalization of these judgments. On these conditions, his aesthetic competencies enable him to negotiate a dense web of aesthetically mediated relationships. Though aestheticization along these lines presupposes a relational shaping of an aesthetic voice, it falls short of an improvisational distillation of an aesthetic of existence that could be inspired by more experimental or adventurous aesthetic collaborations. A richly textured relation to the objects of taste is not required of the protagonist, as can be witnessed in the minimally descriptive epithets he is typically shown to deliver, such as “cool,” “fabulous,” “oh my god,” “wow.”

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

123

Taste is set by an economy of consumer products and image makers. The suggestion is that what is tasteful has been established independently of the subject’s judgments, requiring simply to be selected by a loving expert to do its cultivating work. Heterosexuality is safely ensconced in the show’s address to the viewer, its formal premises, and its staging of aesthetic embodiment. Within this framework, aestheticization permits a rudimentary rearticulation of the protagonist’s masculinity, which is expanded to include his new, potentially feminizing domestic and consumerist skills, and represents now his status as what used to be called a metrosexual, that is, a largely heterosexually identified, cis-gendered, middle-class, male city dweller whose self-stylization is enhanced by the latest models of urban life and displays traces of conduct other paradigms of masculinity comprehend as gay or feminine. Neither this reconstruction, nor the tender care the five pedagogues lavish on his physique, his feelings, and his material entourage relax his fundamental heterosexuality, in the spectator’s eye. Stereotypical male homosexuality serves to recharge heterosexuality, updating it as an ingredient of a consumerist urban economy. As the aesthetic mediations dispensed by the five connoisseurs refresh their student’s romantic appeal, his gendered comportment, and his social demeanor, they reaestheticize his minimalist domestic competencies within the limits of normative, able-bodied, heterosexual masculinity, typically white and middle class.33 These categories delineate the confines within which the show’s aestheticizing project standardly attains its desirability and promise. Paradoxically, the aesthetic stance the show designates as its vantage point is a New York-based cosmopolitanism, local, yet worldly and multicultural. Queer Eye’s aesthetic script uses elements of eighteenth-century models of aesthetic relationality, including promises of happiness, developmental trajectories, and exclusionist patterns of address, to circumscribe a morally and politically regimented field of ignorance.34 Ignorance surfaces here as a dimension of an aestheticized and aestheticizing frame of relationships that enables its participants to count on one another’s meaning- and value-producing contributions. Aestheticization, in the series, solidifies existing structures of power on which it depends, even if it warily hints at a democratization of taste and at a suspension of certain sexual mores. In bridging Enlightenment dualities, the aesthetic significantly resists normative effects generated by way of these oppositions. Queer Eye is no exception to this. For instance, the aesthetic enterprises of the Fabulous Five valorize bodily pleasures in ways that surpass a stringent privileging of mind over body. The aesthetic ventures the show celebrates undeniably extol a different array of human activities than, say, Hume or Schiller did, allotting evidential (as opposed to practical) reason, freedom, and public life a far less important place than these philosophers did, and thereby marking certain expanded possibilities for cultural agency. At the same time, the reality show also reinforces cultural arrangements that Enlightenment oppositions historically have bolstered. Queer Eye orients tasteful existence toward normalized social alignments of class, race, gender, and sexuality, in ways that are familiar from Hume and that can be recognized in Schiller. Aesthetic life dwells in the ignorance it has helped to and continues to help to create.

124

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

The ignorance of the aesthetic Implementing and drawing on structures of relationality, address, and promising, aesthetic activities assist in bringing about states of awareness and unawareness, receptivity and disconnection. Aesthetic norms, desires, and values nourish ignorance as they affect which streets we enter or avoid, which people we meet or evade, which songs we love or shun, and which choices we judge unreachable or take for granted. Queer Eye and Hume implicitly point to ways in which quotidian aesthetic routines instantiate profiles of interconnected epistemic elisions and accomplishments that underwrite aspects of social hegemony. Day-to-day aesthetic phenomena carry out this epistemic work as elements of constellations of relationality, address, and promising. Embedded in these frameworks, aesthetic parameters can help to maintain and reduce gaps between acts we commit and beliefs we maintain. Aesthetic forms often embody insights, but can also exert epistemic traction, fostering the deflection of viewpoints or thwarting their adumbration. We build our experiences substantially around aesthetic attractions that draw us to actions, persons, environments, and things, as well as around repulsions that keep us away from elements. Conditions of knowing, unknowing, and nonknowing frequently exert an aesthetic hold over us, as Szymborska’s poems “Advertisement” and “Utopia” indicate. These states involve figurations of aesthetic detail that we use to navigate relations we strike up with particularities and large-scale formations, relations that may permit or hinder awareness of our epistemic locations (as suggested by Szymborska’s dissonant marginalia, and Varo’s miniaturization). Epistemic proximities and distances, developments and points of stasis, thus can attain legibility or illegibility in aesthetic contexts. Contemporary practices of aestheticization emerge against the backdrop of existing orders of aestheticized ignorance. Inhabitants of these paradigms, we participate in selective withdrawals from and enmeshments in patterns of sociality, material plans, and scenarios of experience. Aesthetic norms and forms help to orchestrate such constellations of ignorance. The relational operations of aesthetic elements involve our implementation of routines of differentiation and assimilation, openness and inaccessibility, consciousness and unconsciousness. Zones of and means of bringing about knowledge and ignorance owe their shape substantially to our aesthetic occupations. Thus, the systemic procedures to which aesthetic traditions have given rise make their marks on current cultural arrangements. The phenomena that subjects of twenty-first-century cultures experience as aesthetically meaningful, legible, and desirable bear the imprints of historical scripts of aesthetic relationality. Systems of aesthetic relationality emplace alignments of power in strata of knowledge and ignorance (and vice versa). For instance, whiteness derives considerable power from the normalization of white bodies, behaviors, and desires. Aesthetic productions and modes of reception participate in such normalization.35 As Queer Eye illustrates, cultural artifacts recurrently adopt strategies that invest this racial identity and scheme of power/knowledge with the appearance of universality, elevating it to the normative model for humanity at large, while abstracting it from its situational determinations.36 The ostensible neutrality and invisibility of whiteness find support in institutionally ensconced, knowing and ignorant denials of white specificity,

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

125

dependency, and embodiment. We commit such disavowals in the course of everyday aesthetic practices, incorporating them in the organization of our material and social worlds. An example is the infamous, well-documented tendency to ascribe orderliness and restraint to whites, and formlessness and excess to racial others, a custom that pervades the production, circulation, and interpretation of images (Ortega 2009, sec. 2). This perceptual and interpretive habit to detect racially differential levels of aesthetic control and a lack thereof encodes ignorance as a dimension of our being-inthe-world. Aesthetic norms and codes commonly infuse schemata of knowledge and ignorance with aesthetic appeal. With regularity, cultural artifacts and their attendant modes of reading can be seen to afford whiteness distinctive seductions, depicting white existence as thrillingly awe-inspiring, suspenseful, and profound, while casting black, Asian or Latina/o lives as low key, disposable, prosaic. Alternatively, for that matter, the lives attributed to persons of color frequently are featured as heroic, erotic and dramatic along preformatted templates that constrain ambivalences within frozen, repetitive plots.37 Pervading white cultural formations, aesthetically shaped states of unknowing commonly shore up whiteness. Effecting modes of address and relationality, and investing them with promises and threats, aesthetic dispositions furnish means of sealing up fields of experience and of keeping forms and questions from being elaborated. Aestheticized ignorance resides,

Figure 5.2  Martin Puryear, C.F.A.O., 2006–7. Raw and painted wood. 254 h. x 153 x 193 cm (100 h. x 60 x 76’’). Courtesy of the artist.

126

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

among other things, in directions we prevent sound, vision, touch, or taste from going, interpretive possibilities we leave aside, sites of apprehension we compulsively revisit. It circumscribes lacunae of meaning as well as too definitively espoused understandings, narrowing the scope of what in a given context may be imagined, what can be made visible, audible, felt, intelligible, who can be addressed and how.38 Ingredients of webs of relationships and address, states of aestheticized knowledge and ignorance incorporate morally, politically, and aesthetically dubious promises and threats. These difficulties, however, do not negate the capacity of cultural artifacts to make infringements on ignorance and to energize the impulses ignorance can lend critical inquiry. Martin Puryear’s sculpture C.F.A.O. (2006–7) is a case in point. Its title refers to the Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale, a current multinational corporation founded in the late nineteenth century as a French-owned trading business that operated in numerous African and European countries. The base of the sculpture consists of a wooden wheelbarrow Puryear had found in France. The cart holds up a huge scaffolding of crosshatched pine beams, molded around an enlarged impression of a mask created by the Fang people of Gabon. The mask and the crisscrossed structure both support and shape one another. The concave side of the mask faces out, its eyes at roughly the same height as those of the viewers or workers who would be about to pick up the cart. In the observer this instills the sense of an encounter with a gaze

Figure 5.3  Martin Puryear, C.F.A.O., 2006–7. Raw and painted wood. 254 h. x 153 x 193 cm (100 h. x 60 x 76’’). Courtesy of the artist.

The Aesthetics of Ignorance

127

coming from the mask. The wooden grips of the old wheelbarrow are shiny from the oils of haulers’ hands. The mask’s entanglement in the thickly layered lattice mounted onto the cart registers the momentous constructive labor extracted from Africa by coloniality and signals the ineradicable entwinement of African and European cultures. Complicating this gesture, the double structure alludes to the massive representational edifice sustaining Europe’s construction of Africa. Integrated, stable, and self-sufficient, the composition belies the movement and messiness associated with building projects for which we tend to use wheelbarrows. Crucially, the mask cannot be worn; it is interwoven with the latticework. On its hollow side, which would be occupied by the worker pushing the cart—Gabonese? French? Both?—the mask sculpts negative space. Projecting a vast empty expanse for the viewer, the cart’s load confronts us with the quandary of how postcolonial subjectivity may be shaped and where this leaves the labor involved in the conduct of neocolonial transnational corporations, a question to which neither colonial constructs nor traditional cultural icons appear to offer a reply. The sculpture imprints this conundrum in the viewer’s space, encouraging us to contemplate who and what is molded by the mask, and to what end. We are invited to ask who pushes and carries what, whereto. Infusing signifiers of cultural performance, construction, and labor with these unanswered queries and vice versa, C.F.A.O. traces an epistemic void, a region of nonknowing. The thicket of beams making up the greater part of the wheelbarrow’s monumental cargo obstructs not only the worker’s vision but also blocks the observer’s ethnographic or art-historical scrutiny of the convex side of the mask, and diffuses the viewer’s gaze, which loses itself in the dense pattern of the wooden spikes. The cultural operations invoked by the sculpture delineate a frequently ignored sphere of ignorance. The piece surrounds us in a field of unresolved questions that it is vital to animate in the attempt to think about and counteract neocolonial global arrangements. Reflection, as exemplified in the process of interpreting the work, activates both knowledge and ignorance. Like Puryear, Varo, and many other cultural producers, theorists recognize the fact of and need for dynamical interactions between knowledge and ignorance. Contemplating the nature of critical reading, philosophers and cultural critics see ignorance—in the form of a text’s “blindness,” its supplementary logic, the field of “invisibility” it produces, or the questions it answers but is incapable of formulating on its own terms—as co-constitutive of knowledge formation. Nonknowing, accordingly, is not simply to be overcome on the way to understanding but ineluctably coexists with it.39 Recognizing inevitable lacunae in our knowledge about self and others, theorists caution against violent and oppressive consequences of erasures of ignorance.40 Critics argue that pedagogical agendas require the teaching of ignorance. They call for the discovery of new forms of ignorance, ones that emerge in the surprise of encounters with otherness. Such revelations are seen to mandate a reorganization of “what I think I know” (Johnson 1987c, 16), which is considered indispensable to an ethics and politics of difference.41 Epistemic destabilization, accordingly, occupies a central place in strategies of cultural critique. Because efforts to bring about theoretical and practical change regularly take place within configurations of meaning that remain in

128

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

effect, despite our awareness of their deficiency, epistemic unsettlement constitutes a fundamental dimension of projects of social analysis and transformation.42 Contemporary epistemologies thus reveal a sphere of systemically interconnected forms of knowledge and ignorance. Language, symbolic exchange, and learning incorporate tensions among these states. Nonknowing comprises an inescapable dimension of embodied social existence. Accordingly, knowledge and ignorance do and must activate and put pressure on one another. Summoning unknowns to energize knowns and vice versa, we can resist epistemic stagnation, disassemble discursive barriers structurally inhibiting bodies of knowledge and modes of reading, and rupture systemic zones of unknowingness. The aesthetic, in the manifold orientations of its relational operations, in the impulses and directionalities encoded in its structures of address, and in the promises and threats it precipitates, yields a forum in the context of which we undertake a substantial portion of these epistemic endeavors. Varo’s painting Spiral Transit satirically exposes and suspends limitations of surrealist, domestic, and technological lexicons. Modifying these idioms as she puts them to use, she devises new aesthetic forms. Szymborska’s poems “Advertisement” and “Utopia” critically reaestheticize already aestheticized formations of knowledge and ignorance. Puryear’s C.F.A.O. encourages awareness of a field of ignorance we often ignore to detrimental effect. Cultural productions prove to be capable of creating and critiquing problematic forms of ignorance, of unearthing productive conditions of unknowingness, and of releasing blockages incurred by processes of aestheticization. Aestheticization furnishes threats as well as promises. These offerings, likewise, attach to formations of aestheticized knowledge and ignorance traversing the field of aesthetic relationality. An inexorable component of aesthetic relationality, ignorance is incessantly under production, as is knowledge. Knowledge and ignorance are immersed in ongoing forms of aestheticization. The aesthetic offers promises and threats of unknown strategies that we can put to work to reaestheticize existing symbolic structures and to revise constellations of aesthetic relationality. It is against this background that we can pump various sorts of je-ne-sais-quoi to inspire new kinds of knowledge and ignorance— thereby realizing unforeseen frames of meaningful agency.

6

An Aesthetic Confrontation

Taxi rides carry promises of arrival and threats of nonarrival or delay. They can spark off moments of companionship among strangers or host encounters that instantly go sour. The cab yields rich material for reflection on relationships that arise among persons who spend a sharply bounded span of time together, in close proximity, for reasons that require them to address not solely financial matters, the vehicle, their momentarily joint destination, or their shifting surroundings, but also, inescapably enmeshed with these elements, one another. What part does the aesthetic play in the multidimensional, liminal zone of relationality and address, of promise and threat that is the taxicab?1 The convergence of disparate modalities of bodily engagement in a taxi ride calls to mind the workings of the aesthetic as an integrative phenomenon, postulated by philosophers such as Schiller and Dewey. For them, as noted in Chapter 5, the aesthetic occupies middle ground between dualities of mind and body, reason and emotion, and attendant polarities, conjoining elements allocated to each side of these apparent divides.2 What does the taxicab tell us about the aesthetic functioning of these separations and bridgings? This chapter examines their role in a struggle over address that has fare and cabby compete with one another for control over an aesthetic space, the nature of an aesthetic relationship, and the perimeters of an aesthetic community.

Aesthetic collectivity and the patrolling of racial boundaries The article “Taxi Ride,” published in December 2004 by the white, Dutch author Martin Bril for his daily column in De Volkskrant, a left of center, national newspaper in the Netherlands, is the story of his aesthetic struggle with a presumably allochthonous, possibly Arab, Dutch-speaking taxi driver.3 On a Saturday evening, the writer has to go somewhere and hails a cab in the streets of Amsterdam. An old VW Jetta stops. Bril instantly regrets his decision but nonetheless continues as planned. A hot cloud slams into his body when he enters the vehicle. An odor of toilet cleaner hangs in the air. What he calls “loud Arabic whiny music” is playing on the radio (“Arabische

130

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

jammermuziek”). A plastic sheet covers the back seat to protect it against puking passengers. Everything in the car rattles. The driver speeds and takes a detour. “We arrived at an intersection where we had to go straight, yes, I know my city. But the driver took a left. . . . With lightening speed we approached the next intersection, and I assumed we were going to take a right. We stormed straight-on.” At this point, the passenger protests. When the cabby turns around to answer the columnist’s objection, the car zigzags. In “virtually accentless” Dutch, which the author finds hard to square with the whiny music, the cabby replies, “This is fastest, or do you want to walk?” Bril doesn’t want to. He notes he is being tremendously screwed. “On the other hand,” he admits, “it was also a beautiful feat of free-market policy.” Making one last attempt at verbal communication, the author asks if the heat can be turned down. “‘It feels good here!’ the driver shouts, ‘or do you want to walk?’” Reluctant to proceed on foot, Bril keeps silent for the rest of the ride. The column ends with the musing: “I looked out of the window, and my own city appeared to me strange and uncanny. The music offered no other point of connection than vague memories of other metropolises I had roamed by taxicab at an ungodly hour: Paris, New York, Athens. I felt like a stranger—duped and fucked over.” A Saturday evening-ride through town holds out a promise to Bril. A prolific chronicler of the Dutch everyday, it is his wont to find pleasure in reading the city, among other places, in its characteristically local—invariably prosaic, to legion of readers recognizable—detail. Rather than being intuitable as a delightful throng of minutiae, such aesthetic details, on this trip, conspire with broader developments to mire him in the anguish of estrangement and victimhood. Bril took his cab in the streets of Amsterdam less than two months after the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by Moroccan-Dutch Muslim activist Mohammed Bouyeri, in the streets of that city. It is unlikely that the sting of cultural displacement, in the writer’s eyes, appeared to be an experience that he took himself to be suffering on his own. To the contrary, the bite of dislocation could reasonably be assumed to have typified a feeling that resonated widely throughout the country—a sentiment indicative of recent social, political, and economic developments. By verbally relaying the episode in the cab in detail, Bril then recuperates the lost promise of the taxi ride in an alternative fashion, creating an opportunity for public reflection on the very threats that had supplanted this promise to begin with. Moreover, aesthetic control having slipped away in the cab, the setting of the newspaper furnishes ways of winning it back. Expert at kindling, fashioning, and channeling aesthetic capabilities of prosaic detail, the device from which he typically builds his tales of the Dutch everyday, Bril absorbs quotidian detail into a tangle of rhetorical stratagems. Separating out these procedures will involve our entering into, spiraling away from, and circling back to motifs that the column winds into strands of meaning. Following these threads, we will acquaint ourselves with aesthetic mechanisms shaping the cultural position the taxicab story enacts. This will make visible pivotal functions the aesthetic fulfills as an aspect of our daily lives. Bril’s column implicitly envisions an aesthetic delineation of cultural citizenship. Aesthetic modalities, in his narrative, function as a border patrolling technology. His investment in the aesthetic qualities of a proper taxi trip, and his distaste for the

An Aesthetic Confrontation

131

sensory affronts committed by the cabby differentiate a zone of aesthetically legitimate conduct from a field of aesthetically undesirable actions, events, objects, attitudes, tastes. Aesthetic experience, in the article, distinguishes Amsterdam as it is known and loved from the city it has become (or is at risk of becoming) under the influence of a disagreeable sensibility. Through the pejorative reference to the music, the story marks the latter style negatively, as culturally different from what may be apprehended under the stretcheable yet stringently circumscribed category of the Dutch, and, moreover, codes this style as Arab. Bril’s aesthetic exemplifies a stance I call racialized aesthetic nationalism.4 This position, in short, enlists aesthetic interpretations and experiences in the service of national and racial hierarchies. My analysis of this outlook in this chapter will focus on its operations as a border patrolling technology—specifically, as an assembly of strategies that link matters of taste to conflicts over the character and limits of a local style—a mode of being that then becomes a point of contention in a microscopic, mobile environment which meanders through the city. The agenda of delineating and realizing this style recruits constructions of nationhood, and posits conceptions of a properly national, in this case, white, aesthetic. While the present discussion will recognize the role the category of the nation plays in the Dutch taxicab case, I will investigate that particular register more fully in Chapter 7, which explores it from different social, political, and historical angles.

Taste and the limits of culture The column articulates a variety of racialized aesthetic nationalism that expects to be able to organize the environment in accordance with its own taste. This sensibility and mode of address recognizes “my city” as my city insofar as it is arranged in conformity with my aesthetic norms. I am entitled to feel at home in my own, Dutch way. I thereby acknowledge a single Dutch style of being Dutch, namely my style, which I by and large share with those who I take to have been civilized in accordance with my norms, values, and traditions. I enjoy a fair measure of control in pinpointing the limits of what is to be subsumed under the possessive form. The city should have a distinctive cultural character in that it observes stylistic criteria set by white, autochthonous inhabitants, or, more precisely, a representative, authentic subgroup of them, which mediates a select array of cosmopolitan influences. Such citizens ought to be granted the requisite aesthetic latitude that allows them to experience the urban environment as their cultural property. Within this constellation of address, Amsterdam is expected to exude a phenomenal feel that persons in the right social sector can experience as recognizably “theirs.” The Dutch capital ought to permit persons of this background to forge a joint affiliation with the city. The fabric of connections that this presupposes should give them a sense of being congregated in what counts as their habitat. An aesthetic vision along these lines implicitly posits racial and nationalist norms, which it aspires to bring to fruition in a network of cultural relationships. Within Bril’s white nationalist structure of address, relational effect runs from the cabby and the city to the author and vice versa. In the cab, the city turns strange to the writer in a fashion that, in other cities, can be normally, suitably strange. But Amsterdam does not thereby become strange in some ordinary kind of way. It turns

132

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

strangely strange.5 The strangeness that in other cities can be an object of desire, poses difficulties in Amsterdam. The city acquires a foreign character that dislodges Bril from his customary aesthetic inhabitation of the environment. A void bursts forth in his identificatory feeling of affinity that, to him, makes Amsterdam “my city.” Strangeness infuses the familiar. Because the strange uncannily approximates the ordinary, it gets even stranger: the conjunction of “Arabic whiny” music with a virtually accentless language, ostensibly hard to distinguish from the autochthonously Dutch, presents a conundrum for Bril. Immersed in strange strangeness, the author becomes a stranger to himself, a person who feels “like a foreigner” in his own town. Vectors of relationality reaching from columnist to cabby and cabby to columnist reinforce one another. Indeed, Bril is at risk of being kicked out of the taxi (“do you want to walk?”). The driver mediates the writer’s modes of access to the city. He is in substantially in charge of his passenger’s mobility and makes an impact on his fare’s emotions and sensory impressions. The cabby enjoys a considerable degree of command over the author’s address to the world. The evening’s promise is in his hands. An aesthetic script typical of a taxi ride stipulates that chauffeurs should provide a perspective from which passengers can imagine witnessing a city, a country, a culture. A cabby’s designated role is that of a liaison with the environment, as when he or she supplies materials for informal ethnographic studies to tourists or reporters. In this scenario, the ride serves to enhance the consumer’s grip on his surroundings, expanding his vision and broadening his cultural repertoire. Bril’s cabby violates this aesthetic contract. He refuses to adjust his comportment to the representational demands of the job. Whereas he is to facilitate the writer’s sensed freedom of movement, to support the columnist’s projection of himself into space and place, and to assist in the opening up of the author’s experience, he in fact restricts these matters, through the control he exerts over the aesthetic parameters of the situation. This role could be a source of delight if assisted by the requisite cultural cachet. However, his and his vehicle’s address do not get the style of the matter right, in the author’s perspective. The driver’s aesthetic choices—speed, temperature, route, music, noise, aroma, plastic covering, old car, grumbling—receive a negative racial valence from Bril, and fail to be to the columnist’s liking. These assessments by Bril are of a piece with one another. The racialization helps to give shape to the dislike. The lack of aesthetic appreciation lends substance to the racialization. Consequently, a freedom of the “ethnic” worker in the recently deregulated taxi market is imagined to prevail over a freedom of the white consumer, at the cost of the latter’s racially primed aesthetic pleasure and sense of belonging.6 A racialized aesthetic offense has occurred, which amounts at the same time to an aestheticized racial infraction. The taxi ride, as Bril represents it, signals a limitation of the racial, aesthetic power to align life’s details with white European desires. The cabby’s choices and address imperil a white nationalist aesthetic. The driver presents an additional threat. He appropriates another privilege that the aesthetic of white nationalism counts among the entitlements of the white cultural connoisseur. The authority to adjudicate what qualifies as normal and deviant shifts from columnist to cabby. Judgments of aesthetic appropriateness fall under the driver’s jurisdiction. He wrenches taste-setting power away from Bril. The cabby is in the know about the right way to go and the correct level of climate control: “This is fastest!” “It

An Aesthetic Confrontation

133

feels good here.” In writing the column, Bril reclaims the aesthetic authority that was withheld from him in the taxi. The aesthetic experiences and judgments he describes in the text pronounce a sensory knowledge of cultural identity and difference. Occupied as the author he is, Bril retrieves the customary address to the city of which the cab ride had divested him. Pejorative judgments of taste play a complex part in the columnist’s sense of a loss of aesthetic control as well as in its restoration. Locating the taxi ride in racial territory, the designation “Arabic whiny music” and the reference to the hot temperature rhetorically make plausible Bril’s feelings of strangeness. They appear to warrant his comparison with other cities, and to account for the temporal and spatial shift from an ordinary Saturday evening to a nobody’s land where, in the dead of night, anything can happen. The racialization of the music transfers to the other senses, the imposture, and the urban environment. Taste implements racial boundaries and serves as a racial borderpatrolling technology. As such it offers socially differential sets of promises and threats. For example, while Bril’s taste holds out promises of cultural belonging to certain bodies of citizens, it extends threats of cultural ostracism to other constituencies. Bril casts a racially coded aesthetic confrontation and the broader political themes it reflects in language that speaks to the reader’s affects. Cultural difference becomes tangible as aesthetically inflected foreignness and unseemliness, an ethnically tagged refusal to play by everyday aesthetic rules. More generally, while questions of immigration and community owe their lived reality in part to our inescapable involvement with entities like treaties, rights, laws, work permits, passports, and their attendant modes of recognition and profiling, our persuasions about these matters thereby simultaneously spin through the wheels of aesthetic interpretation and desire. We model our lives in engagement with aesthetic schemata of identification and disidentification in which we, along with innumerable others, are invested. Under modernity, or at least since the eighteenth century, social identity, difference, and conflict, to a significant extent, take shape as aesthetic products and processes. Bril’s expression of alienation points to the degree of aesthetic sustenance that his sense of self and otherness require. The presumptive aesthetic defects of the taxi and its driver undercut the possibility of aesthetic identification or comfort for the columnist. Conversely, his failure to identify with or come to terms with the music and the temperature in the cab can be assumed to contribute to his more general perception of aesthetic impropriety. Absent the “Arab” music and the heat, the fast speed might have appeared exciting to him, perhaps efficient; the detour might have morphed into an expansive, bird’s eye perceptual and choreographic embrace of the town; possibly the plastic and the old, rattling car would have seemed to punctuate Amsterdam’s customary orderliness with a slight, enticing grunginess. Promises might have proliferated; perhaps threats would have appeared to relax standards a little, to give some perspective, to loosen things up a bit. Such threats could in turn have gestured toward promises. But relationality took a different form. As it is, Bril’s aesthetic affiliation with his environment suffers a hiatus. His being duped draws its affective meaning from the interruption of a proprietary cultural sensibility. The rip-off, in turn, loads the aesthetic arrangement to which he was exposed with the weight of moral wrongdoing.

134

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

The estrangement between him and “his city,” the city he knows intimately, signals the effects of an aesthetic and ethical maladjustment. The racial subject demands an adequately racialized organization of his surroundings, and this depends on the right kinds of aesthetic conditions. Racialized and nationalist aesthetic wishes, readings, and habits underlie our sense of who we are and are not. They are responsible for a sense of place. Bril’s article illustrates how a white nationalist aesthetic can organize experience around an aesthetically inflected sense of cultural ownership, violation, and strangeness. In this scheme of relationality and address, aesthetic scripts govern states of racial desire and acts of abjection that engender identificatory positions. Monitoring flows of affiliation and disavowal, taste, in this system, serves to discipline bodies, material conditions, and exchanges in conformity with a racially exclusionist vision of the community. It assist both in the promotion and the foreclosure of forms of relationship and address.

Reclaiming aesthetic territory In its address to the reader, the column reasserts the distinction between proper and improper taste that had been breached in the cab. The article juxtaposes an apparently correct Dutch style, which it understands as being in need of protection, and a foreign mode of conduct that is perceived to threaten European-Dutch accomplishments. Bril proposes a racialized polarity of social and aesthetic virtues and flaws: via the musical signifier and the lost sense of aesthetic ownership, admirable traits such as sensory delightfulness, honesty, reliability, and elegance enter into implicit contrasts with problematic characteristics such as sensory overbearingness, asocial behavior, incompetence if not criminality, incorrigibility, a lack of responsiveness. The honorable attributes thereby announce the precinct of the authentically Dutch, while the disagreeable ones connote culturally different, possibly Arab territory. Aesthetic relationality, on Bril’s model, embodies a distribution of moral and social excellence and dereliction. Negotiating racial power in the arena of the aesthetic, “Taxi Ride” answers promises and threats with other promises and threats. The text posits a desirable, adequately Dutch mode of social comportment that it attributes to a white, autochthonous public intellectual, and a problematic moral and stylistic habitus that it ascribes to a presumably allochthonous, probably Arab worker employed in a relatively low-status service position. On this model, the former predilection holds out aesthetic promise; the latter exerts an aesthetic threat. The column traces how foreign behaviors unjustifiably and inexplicably violate the true Dutch way of being.7 It outlines a position of victimhood with which it invites the reader to identify. The public is solicited to experience indignation and concern about an ethnically embedded aesthetic misdemeanor, and about the threat such transgressions pose for the cultural good. White racial anxieties, seven weeks after the assassination of van Gogh, could unreservedly be expected to recruit unease on the part of a massive segment of the population, and to rally feelings in defense of human accomplishments construed in terms of the city’s authentically Dutch character (social grace, good form) and in opposition to dangers characterized

An Aesthetic Confrontation

135

as alien and Arab (rudeness, deceit, bad form). The designation “Arabic whiny-music” facilitates the projection of fear onto a supposed aesthetic danger, which then legitimates the felt threat.8 Its allusion to the presence of Arabs in the country supplies an object for generalized feelings of cultural disquiet, the sense, on the part of autochthonous citizens, that their own city, style, and culture are under siege. Bril’s column invites the reader to empathize with his victimhood, and to respond with moral and aesthetic disapproval to the lot that befell the author one Saturday evening in Amsterdam, a predicament that the indigenous reader knows could have been hers on any evening, in any town in the Netherlands. Offering the public an object for racial and aesthetic repulsion, the text goes some way toward restoring the demands of taste upon which the driver had infringed. The column itself carries promise—to some, it points to taste as a tool undergirding culturally appropriate experiences of the environment, an available instrument they can use to problematize aesthetic deviancy and to stimulate ways of correcting these irregularities; to others, it extends a threat, forewarning of taste’s powers as a means of white cultural consolidation.

Sound barriers The text’s aesthetic promise stands in contrast to the music’s threat. By unpacking the nomenclature “Arabic whiny music,” an epithet that institutes a complex relational structure, we can bring into view layers of meaning feeding this contrast. The conjunction of an ethnic designation (“Arabic”) with an aesthetic term (“whiny”) creates the impression that Bril is informing us of his engagement with a certain cultural entity, a genre of music. The label is suggestive of a connection between “Arabic music” and “music that whines,” insinuating, for example, that “Arabic music” typically whines and is distasteful in that regard, or that among the varieties of whiny kinds of music there is this type, “Arabic whiny music,” which whines in its own Arabic fashion and is aesthetically objectionable in that sense. Ontologies of this sort, however, are a reflection of the aesthetic resistance of the listener, not of the nature of a category of music playing on the radio. Note the simplification inherent in the label “Arab.” Is it folk music, religious music, court music, classical music, Egyptian, Moroccan, or Lebanese pop-music that is playing in the cab? The denomination “Arabic music” tells us little about the sound that was actually heard. The notion “whiny,” likewise, says more about the perceiver’s undifferentiated experience of the sound, and his dislike for this sound, than about the music itself. There is no category “Arabic whiny music,” apart from the music that a listener for some reason experiences as both Arab and whiny, or as whiny in what sounds like some typically Arab way, presumably on account of its microtonal intervals. Bril’s description of the sound indicates that the specific qualities of the music he hears make no appeal for comprehension to his listening predilections. His vocabulary suggests that the cause of this lies with the sound itself: being “Arabic whiny music,” it just happens to be the sort of unpleasant music you want to avoid if you can. But this linguistic construction effaces the part played by his distaste for the sound, which he projects onto the object of aesthetic aversion. Bril’s musical designation achieves a rhetorical legitimization of his undifferentiated musical experience. The driver’s

136

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

musical choice makes no demand on the columnist’s understanding. By attributing the reason for this to the reprehensible music and the driver’s diminished aesthetic judgment, Bril’s terminology lends him reprieve from a type of work. His language implies that he doesn’t have to perform the labor of comprehension. There is no real need for such labor; the job is easy, obvious: one hears, feels, and knows. Should a more serious expenditure of labor be required, it isn’t worth the effort. Either way, Bril doesn’t have to toil to get his aesthetic desires fulfilled in the cab. It is the driver’s task to satisfy these wishes. He bears the responsibility to supply an adequate aesthetic environment; to the extent that he doesn’t, the fault lies with him and his aesthetic demeanor, perhaps his cultural background. Excusing Bril from a particular kind of aesthetic labor, his auditory experience includes an aesthetic disaffiliation from the sounds he listens to. In hearing the music, he is moved to ward it off. His aural disengagement not only limits his encounter with the sounds, but also keeps at bay meanings and values encoded in these sounds, and blocks out symbolic, material systems comprising the sonic forms to which he is being exposed. These elements fail to lay a claim on his understanding or regard. It is not that Bril declines to work. In the taxi and in writing the column, he undertakes the chore of abjection and boundary patrolling. Aesthetic experience in the cab, as I have indicated, carries out part of this work; the setting aright of taste in the newspaper accomplishes a further part of it. The writer shows a preference for one type of work over another: the disciplinary labor he executes in the form of aesthetic activity justifies his not having to work in another area of aesthetic apprehension. Bril’s musical designation would not be able to aspire to the rhetorical effects I have just described in the case of mainstream European or Anglo-American musics. The negative judgment would reflect on the perceiver rather than the perceived. Were the musical label to denote aesthetic forms that enjoy a high level of social recognition, popularity, or respect, the vacuity of the relevant classification would instantly expose itself. The limitations of Bril’s musical taste would stand out. The probability that the text could get its readership interested in, let  alone worried about the aesthetic breakdown epitomized by the driver would be small. The reader would distance heror himself from the text’s celebration of aesthetic insularity; the wistful affirmation on the part of the reader, “Yes, that’s the way it is, these days,” would be withheld.9 Love or esteem for some form of “Arabic” music is likely to hinder an empathetic pursuit of the affective trajectory traced by the column. The article’s aesthetic success requires that the public can go along in the author’s undifferentiated attitude vis-à-vis the object of his musical dislike. The text presupposes an audience that is ready to be moved by a white, aesthetically nationalist perspective.

Aesthetic distinction as a cultural fix The paths of address the column directs at the reader and onto which it seeks to guide the reader’s address to it bring to light a further dimension of Bril’s treatment of the aesthetic impasse upon which he stumbles in the cab. In a gesture of racial abjection— the racially coded disowning of the driver’s supposedly repulsive comportment—the column distinguishes the aesthetic of the white, national self from an aesthetic connoted

An Aesthetic Confrontation

137

pejoratively as other. Such otherness (the cab’s, the driver’s, and the city’s difference from the norm) takes shape by contrast with the aesthetic codes that characterize the favored, Dutch stylistic habitus. Construing racially marked, aesthetically condemnable behaviors and states of affairs as external to the realm of proper citizenship, and holding them responsible for an abridgment of culture, the text imagines a cultural zone that is to be safeguarded. The article calls on the reader to support his cultural property in defense of his sense of aesthetic belonging and his ability to feel at home in town. The suggestion is that it is worthwhile to stand up for these historical achievements. One might object that the column merely verbalizes Bril’s reactions to the driver’s aesthetic and ethical misbehavior, neutrally presenting them to the public for reflection. However, a minimalist interpretation of this sort misses the participation of antecedent racial constellations in the production of textual form and effect. The column implicitly identifies the city’s failure to mirror a fantasy of monoethnically acculturated subjectivity to the passenger as a source of white upper/middle-class alienation. It takes no steps to contest the aesthetic and racial preconditions for this feeling, or to acknowledge that this kind of racially and ethnically pure form of cultural being does not actually exist. Instead the article chronicles dismay about the supposed evacuation of white indigenous cultural proprietorship, an emotion the piece does not venture to rein in or to prevent from attaining empathetic readerly resonance. In the post-9/11 era of increased white racial fear and deepened cultural surveillance, this feeling, unqualified by attempts to complicate or foreclose the readership’s emotional echoing response, carries expansive cultural meanings. These cannot be bracketed from the text per se, as the minimalist reading would have it. The column actively polices aesthetic ownership over the city, and recruits the audience’s imaginative and affective participation in this project. Mirroring prominent contemporary cultural leanings, and spotting affirmation of such proclivities in the text, the reader may feel encouraged to take up this work of cultural maintenance, or feel strengthened in her resolve to undertake it. Bril’s text illustrates how a racialized, aesthetically nationalist outlook can give rise to an ethnocentric construal of the hometown. Negatively racialized readings of aesthetic elements, represented by the column, may implicitly authorize subjects to close themselves off from objects, forms, individuals, collectivities, and significatory systems that are taken to elude the favored conception of culture. Tyrannized by racial intrusions, aesthetic experience can function as an invitation to seal up the cultural field. The newspaper column produces what may be called a figure of “damaged aesthetic experience,” that is, the trope of a desirable aesthetic experience that could reasonably have been expected to take place but was prevented from occurring due to somebody’s (in this case the driver’s) destructive action, or to a harmful condition that came in the way (in the present case, the racial chaos attributed to the contemporary multicultural city). Because this figure can nurse the wish to replenish the ostensibly banished aesthetic flourishing that it animates and deplores, it can encourage a narrowing of one’s cultural vision—the aesthetic withdrawal already observed, the tendency to seek aesthetic shelter in one’s own stylistic confines. Plausibly, the invocation of aesthetic lack is able to inspire a contraction of the aesthetic community, whether melancholically,

138

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

through imaginary restoration, or in an activist spirit. It can fuel a diminishment of the shared aesthetic life world, within and beyond the limits of the collective.10 My reading so far has shown that Bril’s column puts forth a white aesthetically nationalist position by featuring a racially inflected musical experience, and by staging an episode in which his aesthetic experience and agency are subjected to inhibition and disruption. I have indicated how aesthetic norms can rally feelings, desires, and acts of abjection in support of racial bonds and scissions. The identifications that this involves mandate various kinds of aesthetic work and supposedly virtuous action (the writer’s and the reader’s cultural labor; the driver’s self-regulation in accordance with the city’s presumed standard of taste). The concomitant disidentifications honor nonwork of a certain sort (the writer’s withholding of comprehension), while also denouncing dimensions of aesthetic agency that are embodied in a type of work (the driver’s deviation from communal standards of taste in the process of carrying out his job). Occasioning acts of disavowal and affiliation, transmitting projections of fear, and underlining divisions of labor and virtue, taste enacts a form of discipline that holds out asymmetrical aesthetic threats and promises to differentially racialized and culturally positioned subjects, and serves to choreograph modes of address and relationality, on which it also picks up.

Aesthetic integrationism: Addison, Baumgarten, Schiller, Hegel Aesthetic discipline in Bril’s column and the encounter in the taxi it documents draws on dualities and integrations philosophers have historically connected with the aesthetic. According to theorists such as Joseph Addison, Alexander Baumgarten, Friedrich Schiller, and G. W. F. Hegel, aesthetic experience occupies a middle ground between dichotomies of mind and body and related oppositions.11 These thinkers have defended integrationist views of aesthetic experience. Combining reason and affect, sensation and imagination, public and private, general and particular, and individual and society, the aesthetic, in their accounts, conjoins polarities philosophy has influentially separated from one another. Thereby the aesthetic both observes and resists hierarchical normative codings that theorists have traditionally inscribed in these binaries. To bring out the structural role that these forces play in the taxicab incident and Bril’s account of it, I will briefly describe a selection of the pertinent operations in their historical invocations. Joseph Addison develops a conception of aesthetic experience by tracing parallels and differences that render this phenomenon both analogous and disanalogous to the operations of the senses and understanding. He considers aesthetic contemplation, or, more precisely, the “Pleasures of the Imagination,” “not as gross as those of Sense, nor so refined as those of the Understanding.”12 Furthermore, like our cognitive pleasures and unlike our “more sensual Delights,” the pleasures of the imagination, in his view, don’t give rise to negligence, sloth, and idleness. However, like sensory pleasure, and unlike the pleasures of the understanding, they don’t require labor or

An Aesthetic Confrontation

139

entail difficulty. Being more conducive to work than the senses and less demanding of it than the understanding, the pleasures of the imagination have a favorable influence on mind, body, and the state of our emotions (1945, no.  411, 277–8). Yet Addison considers imagination not as compendious as understanding. This defect, he suggests, may not be due to the soul, which harbors the faculty of taste, but to the association of the imagination with the body (no. 420, 304). Simultaneously valorizing aspects of sensory embodiment, and devalorizing such elements by contrast to understanding, Addison thus holds parallels and differences between the aesthetic and the senses and the understanding responsible for various benefits and disadvantages that he takes to accrue to aesthetic experience, both interrupting and reinstituting polarities among the various functions.13 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten defines aesthetics as the science of sensory cognition, aimed at perfecting it (1983, par. 1, 2–3). Comprehended as a sensory form of cognition, the aesthetic participates in reason as well as in sensation, and would seem to bridge the divide that separates these functions. Nevertheless, Baumgarten’s theory replicates traditional distinctions between mind and body and reason and sensation. Writing in the rationalist tradition of Leibniz and Christian Wolff, he understands sensory cognition as a lower cognitive faculty that is to be governed by the higher faculties of understanding and reason (par. 12, 6–9; par. 38, 22–5). While narrowing, interrupting, and dislodging the split between sensation and cognition, Baumgarten’s account of the proper aesthetic functioning of the lower and higher faculties simultaneously affirms hierarchies between mind and body, and reason and sensation. For Schiller, as indicated in Chapter 5, the aesthetic reconciles mind and body, reason and emotion, imagination and sensation or perception, particular and general, individual and society, personal and political, and private and public. The so-called play drive allows for the development of rationality and morality by integrating reason with sensation and affect (1967, 15, 45, 95–9, 103–5, 117). It thereby overcomes the fragmentation and specialization with which humans have had to pay for the development of learning and  civilization (31–43). In Schiller’s view, the modern individual inhabits the state like “an ingenious clockwork, in which, out of the piecing together of innumerable but lifeless parts, a mechanical kind of collective life ensued” (35). The concrete life of the senses has come apart from the abstract operations of the intellect (37, 39, 43, 215–17). This promises to change with the flourishing of the play drive. Harmonizing the subject’s sensuous and spiritual faculties, taste restores the integrity of the individual as well as that of the larger society (21, 215). Beauty grants human beings a social character, which is conducive to their harmonious coexistence. Under the influence of the aesthetic, which “relates to what is common to all,” Schiller concludes, society becomes “united” and “real” (215). By integrating, over time, a set of interconnected polarities, aesthetic activity, accordingly, is capable of accomplishing a progressive path of social and political emancipation.14 Even if Schiller accords the rational and the sensuous drive each a necessary role in the evolution of the individual and the collective, a development that is to culminate in the realization of our full humanity, he ultimately ranks the sphere of reason above that of imagination, emotion, sensation, and matter. In his view, the “war against Matter”

140

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

is to be played in “the very territory of Matter itself.”15 The sensuous domain, for him, connotes capriciousness and formlessness (41, 49, 77, 209). Rejecting an overemphasis on rationality (which exemplifies “barbarism”) as well as the dominance of sensuousness or “brute Nature” (which epitomizes “savagery” and the “primitive”), he associates the latter with initial strata of development, whereas he links the former with a more advanced stage of civilization (21, 63, 209). Makers and perceivers of artworks and cultural artifacts, and subjects of a developing culture, we are to distance materiality by actualizing a pure, autonomous aesthetic.16 Schiller privileges the domain of reason over that of the sensuous. Metaphysical differences with the aforementioned theorists notwithstanding, Hegel shares with these thinkers a view of aesthetic experience that positions such experience between rationality and sensation. In his account, art constitutes the sensuous appearance of the idea. Charged with the task of displaying the highest reality sensuously, art must bring to expression the deepest and most comprehensive truths of the spirit.17 So conceived, artworks constitute a “reconciling middle term” between pure thought and the sensuous (1975, 1:8, 1:38). Furthermore, according to Hegel, artworks aim to achieve a unity between spirit and the senses and feelings. In other words, the artist is to harmonize spiritual content with sensory form (1:10, 1:70). He believes that classical art, that is, the art of the ancient Greek epoch, had indeed achieved this harmony. Despite the significance Hegel accords the senses, the superiority of rationality is a prominent tenet of his system. Reason’s preeminence is apparent, among other things, in the relatively higher place that art, owing to its participation in spirit, occupies in the metaphysical order, as compared to the mere sensory appearance of things (1:9, 1:29). The preeminence of reason can also be witnessed in the subordination of art’s sensuous shape, that is, its material aspect, which originates in nature, to its spiritual dimension.18 In addition to this, reason’s supremacy surfaces in the restrictions that art’s sensuous commitments impose on the representation of spirituality, which, during the romantic era, in other words, the period in which spirit advances to its most self-conscious stage, cause art’s prominence in expressing the deepest spiritual interests to be supplanted by philosophy.19 Hegel’s account of the artistic reconciliation of rationality with sensation and feeling thus clearly preserves a hierarchical ordering of these elements. Whereas rationality, sensation, embodiment, and affect acquire different definitions in Addison, Baumgarten, Schiller, and Hegel, each philosopher renders normatively coded oppositions and integrations among these functions central to his understanding of aesthetic activity. For these four theorists, aesthetic experience derives distinctive capabilities and limitations from its participation in these polarities. What role do these alignments play in contemporary aesthetic encounters?

Dualities and integrations as forces of discipline Oppositions and integrations of the sort Addison, Baumgarten, Schiller, and Hegel locate at the heart of their conceptions of the aesthetic perform a disciplinary function in both cab and column. These dualities and syntheses are among the factors that lend

An Aesthetic Confrontation

141

the aesthetic an all-embracing scope. They activate numerous registers of meaning that we can mobilize to organize relational constellations. The following vignettes bring out structural procedures that Enlightenment splits and joints, in the sweeping reach they grant the aesthetic, carry out in the Dutch taxi case.

Sensation, affect, and felt bodily being Relational structure, in “Taxi Ride,” takes shape within the contours of multiple kinds of sensory impressions (hearing, smelling, touching, vision, thermoception, proprioception). It materializes in affective forms (irritation, repulsion, fear). These emotional states implicate perceptions, imaginings, reasonings, and desires about the time span of the journey and about the movements of the vehicle through urban space. Such feelings, furthermore, track an array of corporeal conditions such as felt proximity, exposure and vulnerability, and perceived mobility and stasis—elements qualified by the circumstance that driver and passenger are stuck together in a contained volume for the length of the ride. As cabby and columnist ride along, thrown together for the trip that Bril has us envision, sensation, emotion, and the feel of the body gain their distinct profile in collaboration with several additional parameters of relational organization.

Technological tonalities of public and private, generality and particularity, space and time Public setting as well as private enclosure, the taxi puts into effect general norms that govern a meeting between strangers. The liminal site the cab brings into being simultaneously activates individualized scripts by means of which the participants in the encounter realize an exchange that remains in some ways indifferent to propensities of concrete persons. The radio reveals this doubleness. On the one hand, the device is a type, a classical part of the taxi environment and image, a standard thing for the driver and the passenger to contend with, to enjoy or ignore, as the case may be. On the other hand, the radio constitutes an object of intense personal attachment—we often have strong feelings about the music we hear, emotions that are grounded in specific sensibilities and experiences that shape us as singular beings. In virtue of its combination of public and private, and generalized and particularized elements, the taxi thus opens up a space where persons juggle tensions and alliances between these realms. Such convergences and negotiations occur also in the forum of the newspaper feature. Adopting conventions of the autobiographical genre, the column offers up a personal anecdote for reception by the paper’s readership at large. Thereby the text straddles boundaries between public and private, general and particular: it invests its two protagonists with exemplary standing, that is, with a role as types or paradigmatic characters; correlatively, the article designates the field of their encounter as a territory that is of national concern. Traversing fields of publicity as well as the private, generality as well as the particular, Bril rallies a broad, normatively efficacious array of elements to establish,

142

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

maintain, and protect a model of aesthetic relationality that organizes social space and time in the city and the larger nation, and that appoints the individual to a place within this system. Aesthetic protocols orchestrate people’s movements through space, structure the deployment of vehicles, radios, and household materials such as plastic and toilet cleaner, and govern the driver-passenger relation. Racial delineations find implementation in aesthetic procedures. The aesthetic monitoring of temporal and spatial intervals goes in tandem with the institution of relational asymmetries. Relationality, in the cab incident, including Bril’s narrative, materializes in a prolific network of bodily conditions, physical objects, social roles, psychic functions, and phenomenal states. As a technology of culture, the aesthetic has at its disposal copious facets of objects, embodied relationships and encounters to shape our being-in-theworld. The conjunction of what have appeared to be separate orbits of existence endows relational schemes with an abundant repertoire of significatory modalities.

Mind versus body; reason versus emotion; individual versus the social world Enlightenment dualities and their aesthetic integrations furnish intricate stratagems of relational regulation in “Taxi Ride.” They occasion racial effects that reproduce hierarchies traditionally encoded in these oppositions. A pattern of divisions as well as collaborations between reason and the realm of affect, materiality, and embodiment, between the public and the private, and the individual and the social structures the column’s disciplinary operations. The text associates the uncommunicative, apparently allochthonous driver with material and affective sides of existence, and the passenger with a more rational aspect. While the driver answers polite requests by way of dirty looks and threats, Bril remains on top of his feelings. The columnist lays out events calmly. He arrives at interpretations of the sensory dimensions of the encounter, offering inferences, hypotheses, and judgments as to the point of things. He is a source of ethical and aesthetic assessments as to the way a journey ought to go. He engages in deliberation about his own actions, reactions, wishes and feelings, and provides reflections concerning the driver’s behavior. Conclusions are reached. Meanwhile, Bril gets to give the driver a dirty look. As noted before, he recounts how the driver challenges his client’s aesthetic sensibilities on multiple fronts. Bril relates how the cabby takes him along at high speeds in an old, rattling vehicle, seats him on plastic, subjects him to tropical temperatures, barrages him with loud, unpleasant music, and bathes him in the odor of toilet cleaner. In addition to this, we learn that the driver displays a body that, in Bril’s words, “looks bad,” presenting his passenger with a face marked by “thick lines under the eyes, a stubble chin, baggy eyes, a mouth that was grinding chewing gum.”20 Empowered by his command over the stylistic norms of public life, the sensible Dutch man of taste, entrusted with his own platform in the newspaper, publicly airs the dirty look he casts under the cover of an equable, evenhanded, rational frame of mind. In the spirit of the reasonable, furthermore, Bril makes a whiny lament, nostalgically deploring the injury inflicted on his home territory. Yet, his unruly sensibilities neatly fold into a levelheaded exposition. His feelings do not disrupt the composure of his tone.

An Aesthetic Confrontation

143

While the forum of a newspaper column enables the author’s anecdote to transcend the merely personal event and to transpose it to the larger social world, a space occupied by a mass of individuals, the driver, who fails to observe the rules of public life, remains situated in the private sphere of the body and its material trappings. Speaking in a public voice, Bril hears the music as the driver’s music, steeped in ethnic difference, and implicitly witnesses here the racially uncontrolled overflowing of aesthetic alterity onto the urban landscape. In figuring the driver as a threat of overwhelming otherness, the writer acknowledges the cabby’s presence as a member of a larger social field, over and above his nature as an individual actor. However, it is Bril, the author, who controls the terms on which the driver makes his entry in the social world; Bril himself participates on his own terms. Enlightenment rifts and linkages, in his hands, exercise a mode of aesthetic discipline.

The sociality of sound and style The sociality of musical preferences consists partly in the fact that musical affiliations regularly involve a dimension of imagined and desired companionship with a group of, in certain respects, aesthetically like-minded people. The resulting fabric of connections and distances does not imply something as drastic as that if you condemn someone’s music you thereby necessarily insult that individual’s personhood or social being, but it does mean that an ethnically coded musical dislike is not altogether independent of a musically coded racial aversion. I have already described the intertwining of these feelings in Bril’s column. Relatedly, the ethnic classification and aesthetic resistance signaled by the label “Arabic whiny music” along with the alienation voiced by Bril evoke racialized social dimensions of musical life, supporting associations of musical attractions and antipathies with persons’ membership in mutually exclusive racial groups. It is then in virtue of a confluence of individual and social registers of meaning in aesthetic experience and judgment that the column puts forward a contrast between Arab and Dutch aesthetic companionship and bonding, whereby the former comes to signify a racial danger against which the text warns its reader. The sociality of individual aesthetic predilections partly underwrites the column’s racializing force. Individual aesthetic sentiments, in the platform of the newspaper, capture broader racialized social structures. The convergence of facets of individuality and sociality as elements of musical experience functions as a source of aesthetic power and a font of relational discipline.21 The various dimensions of integration and disassociation I have identified work together. In the cracks between rationality and sensuous embodiment, individuality and sociality, the private and the public, and the particular and the general, the column replicates traditional pejorative connotations of materiality as uncivilized, unruly, crude, gross, formless, and restrictive, and reinstitutes honorific connotations of rationality in terms of understanding, knowledge, civilization, morality, and truth. Driver and passenger come to personify these differences. Historical integrations and dualities underwrite disciplinary procedures that span the encounter in the cab and the story in the paper. The conjunction of asymmetrically available registers of publicity

144

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

and privacy, generality and particularity, sociality and individuality, rationality and affect or embodied being underlies the column’s racial workings.

A resonant racial shortcut If the driver makes a detour, the passenger takes a shortcut. The figure of damaged aesthetic experience offers the reader an object for the projection of anxieties and aversions that stem from racializing and nationalist sensibilities. It locks into emotions and desires that are able to call forth a white defensive cultural posture without needing to offer a convincing reason or to elaborate much of a story that would warrant a sense of endangerment. It suffices to show how the sensory malfunctions sustained by a seemingly autochthonous aesthetic reprobate infract upon the achievement of everyday Dutch cultural respectability. The sense impressions described in the column shortcircuit deliberative rationality and narrative detail. Mobilizing rich cultural meanings by addressing a wide spectrum of human functions, Bril’s aesthetic judgments catalyze a web of incipient ideas, reasons, imaginings, and feelings. Taste and distaste perform a racializing function against the backdrop of a racial, nationalist aesthetic that shapes the reader’s experience without having to be spelled out. In virtue of the multidimensional resonance of the aesthetic, the figure of damaged aesthetic experience condenses a great deal of evidential and affective work.22 This effect would be dispersed by further expository detail. Given the encapsulating force of aesthetic experience, the column puts into gear a full-blown racial apparatus while touching the theme of race only fleetingly, so lightly that the column may not even appear to concern race. On the surface, it may just seem to call into question some minor aesthetic annoyance. However, threats of aesthetic degeneracy derive their racial power, in part, from the all-embracing scope of the aesthetic. It is in virtue of its encompassing reach that the aesthetic is able to embed social hierarchies in a widely proliferating, densely knotted web of interlacing cultural functions. The broad, heterogeneous scope of aesthetic agency and experience, in collaboration with proclivities of aesthetic undertakings to replicate categorially entrenched forms of domination, must be counted among the resources the aesthetic makes available for disciplinary projects.

Sensory cognition Aesthetic experience fulfills yet another disciplinary role in Bril’s case. This function draws on Baumgarten’s conception of the aesthetic as a sensory form of knowledge, and Hegel’s notion of the sensory embodiment of ideas. I have shown how the sensory encounter between driver, passenger, and vehicle (involving sound, touch, vision, smell, heat, motion) exemplifies the perceived erosion of autochthonous aesthetic governance over city space under the influence of working-class immigrant labor. The column invites us to examine the bodily interaction in the cab as an instance of the shifting cultural character of the city. This encounter yields knowledge of a racial change, which the text conveys to the reader. Following Baumgarten, we can recognize here the construction of a sensory form of cognition of contemporary race relations.

An Aesthetic Confrontation

145

In Hegelian terms, we can speak of a sensory embodiment of ideas pertaining to racial selves and others. Sensory knowing or ideation is fundamental to the workings of the aesthetic as a principle of racial organization in the cab and the column. The text enables the reader to experience cultural difference as aesthetic inappropriateness. I have argued that this experience contains a disaffiliation from racial otherness in the form of aesthetic distaste. The aesthetically desirable self thereby feels provoked to move away from the aesthetically repulsive other. Via aesthetic aversion, sensory social and environmental knowledge of racial relationships aligns affect against racial otherness. The text’s racial force lies partially in its production of a form of sensory knowledge. Sensory understanding thereby functions not merely as a content of experience, but also as a technology for the creation of experience. Bril implicitly notes that the ordinary production of sensory knowledge has gone awry in the taxicab. He witnesses an unsettling misappropriation of means of knowledge formation. His voice is no match for the racket generated by the loud radio and the rattling car. Whiny noise invades the soundscape, banishing familiar taxi songs and city sounds. The car itself is an old VW Jetta rather than a newish Mercedes. Domestic items such as the smell of toilet cleaner and the look and the feel of plastic on the back seat eradicate what could have been appealing olfactory, visual, and tactile images. Blurring a transparent, audible distinction between self and other, virtually accentless Dutch takes over an auditory space that in the usual course of things would have been filled by an indigenously Dutch inflection, or, for that matter, perhaps by an identifiably and intriguingly foreign-sounding tongue. Aesthetics, communication devices, domestic technology, and language collaboratively shift the space from the familiar settings of legible Dutch identity (“yes, I know my city”) to the anonymity of what might as well have been any Western metropolitan environment. The passenger’s sensory modes of cognition are thrown into disarray. Sensations fail to embody received ideas on which Bril counts (the temperature and smell are the way they should be in a cab; the way this feels is the way my city is; in feeling this, I am sensing what my city is like, and things are well with the city), instead embodying another set of received ideas in which he is invested (the way this feels is a way my city should not make me feel) and that create cognitive dissonance (Why drive around in a rattling car? In hearing what I hear, I am sensing what my city is becoming; I sonically register that things are not well with the city. Why are things not right?). While it may be acceptable that in certain cities anything can happen, that one cannot reliably make out the meanings of the signals one encounters, or finds one’s cultural knowledge to be of diminished applicability, this is a problem if it occurs in one’s own city. In the cab, Bril’s modes of knowledge production do not authoritatively determine how things are or should be done; his stylistic judgment and his special relation to the city lack prescriptive aesthetic power. His ordinary means of making sensory cognition meaningful, and of taking pleasure in the sensory embodiment of ideas lose their reliability. The column cautions against this breakdown of technologies of aesthetic understanding. Sensory and cognitive unsettlement culminates in moral disorder. Bril’s trust has been betrayed: “I protested. To be honest, this is not my forte. I just always want to go by the idea that people have the best intentions for me. I know it’s

146

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

a dumb viewpoint, but occasionally advantages cling to it, though they don’t come to mind readily now.” The driver’s actions have ruffled a framework of social virtue that no longer knows its own innocence. A racialized aesthetic affront has swelled into epistemic and moral destabilization, the origin of which is attributed to the taxi driver. Turmoil has taken over the customary sensory embodiment of ideas. “Our” ordinary modes of sensory knowledge production are in uproar. The column diagnoses this commotion as a racial problem. Addressing both cognition and sensation, it lets us know that the web of aesthetic relationality emplacing us is in trouble.

Regulating aesthetic relationality The disciplinary workings of aesthetic integrations and dualities in the Dutch taxi scenario have several implications for the notion of aesthetic relationality. As many philosophers and cultural theorists have shown, mind-body dichotomies and related oppositions often carry social connotations.23 One pole represents the norm; the other signifies deviancy. Accordingly, the dualities underwriting the aesthetic field have historically imparted hierarchical differentiations to our cultural encounters that embody forms of oppression. Indeed, Naomi Schor links the functioning of mind-body separations in aesthetics with distinctions between genders and classes.24 Frantz Fanon documents the participation of mind-body divisions in an aesthetically simmering dynamic of racialization unfolding between blacks and whites.25 Yet located between polarities that have been understood to be fundamentally separate, the aesthetic would simultaneously seem to be in a unique position to counteract the hierarchical and differentiating functioning of the relevant dualities. This points to a contrary effect, which writers such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde have described in accounts of aesthetic resources for critique and transformation.26 The taxicab scenario testifies to the recuperative workings of aesthetic syntheses and oppositions. Rather than challenging power relationships encapsulated in Enlightenment dualities, the integrations Bril puts into effect assist in the production of traditional racial hierarchies and differentiations, a phenomenon we have also recognized in Queer Eye and Hume. Contemporary aesthetic integrations and dissociations, thus, would neither appear to be generically oppressive nor transformative in their functioning, but to actualize a range of potential effects in collaboration with institutionalized histories of differentially distributed aesthetic oppositions and integrations. Aesthetic acts of resistance to Enlightenment dualities go together with moments of aesthetic reimplementation. Current aesthetic forms emerge within webs of normatively coded dualities and integrations that are already in place in contingent cultural situations. Our aesthetic endeavors participate in concrete constellations of aestheticized and aestheticizing power that, while exemplifying broad, historical aesthetic structures, also enlist singular details. Critical modes of address, accordingly, must take note of systemic and coincidental forms of determination that converge in concrete spaces and times. We need strategies that traverse variable levels of generality and particularity, and play these registers out against one another, along lines sketched earlier in relation to detail and ignorance. By enacting this versatile approach at the

An Aesthetic Confrontation

147

level of the manifold modalities of the aesthetic that have surfaced here, we can hope to dissolve and lend desirable directions to the forceful and broadly grounded impulses driving racialized aesthetic nationalism. The taxicab case calls for a reading-in-detail that markedly involves feeling, sensing, perceiving, making, and exchanging-in-detail, in short, for an address-in-detail. Another aspect of the taxi case bears out this conclusion. The city, the encounter in the cab, the newspaper column, and the reading of the column, instantiate webs of experience. The resulting experiential textures manifest various routes and directions of separation and integration. As the well-documented faltering of the distinctions between Enlightenment poles suggests, there is no one-sided domination of one register of activity by another, and neither are there generic conjunctions or divisions of elements. In fact, it is hard to conceive what these options might amount to, given that the dichotomies ultimately break down and a far more multifarious relational picture is in order. Such a view understands the mind as a corporeal phenomenon. It takes reason to be embodied and sensate; emotion to be inflected by reason; and dimensions of publicity and privacy and individual and sociality to intermesh with one another. Numerous philosophers have insisted on perspectives of this sort, ones that alert us to the workings of a wide variety of relational forces and orientations. What the taxicab case then demonstrates are not the operations of a generalized aesthetic integrationism within a fundamentally binary system, but a pattern of experience in which specific, differentially available connections and disconnections among mutually implicated registers of mind and body, individuality and sociality, generality and particularity, and privacy and publicity give rise to an array of forms of aesthetic positioning and power. Within this experiential web, affect, sensation, and perception enable and constrain what is being imagined and thought, and vice versa. Bril orchestrates modalities of mind, sociality, and publicity to exert control in the realm of embodiment, individuality, and privacy, but disciplinary racial effect also runs in the other direction: he is moved to turn from the bodily impulses undergone within the constricted enclosure of the cab, such as his experience of the music, to the wider reaches of the newspaper publication, which articulates a sense of a racially divided community. In short, aesthetic discipline takes complex, contingent forms that, even if they fail to confirm certain integrationist generalizations, nonetheless draw on dualities and integrations around which aesthetic theorists have historically centered their conceptions of the aesthetic. These historical dimensions of aesthetic agency remain at play in current configurations of aesthetic relationality. We need to encounter them with modes of address that energize and open up frictions between structural determinants and singular instantiations. Taste’s unruliness as well as its orderly routines take effect in the large field of material possibilities in which we participate on a daily basis.

The work and nonwork of aesthetic relationships Taxis are workplaces. They cross borders between public and private. They harbor coincidental meetings among parties who, more often than not, will only ever lay eyes

148

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

on one another during a single ride. One of them, frequently, is a migrant, working a relatively low-access job. Bringing together persons who are unknown to one another, cabs induce scenes of recognition and misrecognition. They provoke imaginings of local situatedness and global citizenship. Perched on the back seat, the passenger commonly traverses lines between belonging and strangeness, normalcy and a lack of familiarity. A ride in the cab brings together noise and sensory signal, consumption and work, stagnation and motion. Driver and passenger navigate an exchange through bodily gestures, language, and sensory experience. The aesthetic proves to be a prominent factor in these negotiations. In the Amsterdam taxicab incident, a contemporary scheme of racial collectivity and aesthetic relationality recruits historical, dualist, and integrationist constructions of the aesthetic. Musical experience traverses a racializing trajectory. Bril’s estrangement reflects a momentary turnabout of prefabricated cultural borderlines, as a result of which an ordinarily excluded, unassimilable strangeness flickers back at him. A slippage in the racial, national aesthetic allows the driver’s alienation momentarily to convert into the passenger’s own strangeness. However, the normative cultural subject knows his whereabouts among the standards of taste, which have consolidated across the field of affect and perception, imagination and reason. He masters circuits of aesthetic abjection. Having disoriented cultural being, aesthetic experience can also redirect lines of becoming. Fanning out between loops of individual judgment and larger vistas made available by public media, and gobbling up group anxieties through the gullet of private sensibility, aesthetic norms may get us to repair damage presumably wreaked by undisciplined otherness, in attempts to quiet racial fear. Unsettled by aesthetic collisions, we can reinstate cultural ownership through ready-made aesthetic scripts that return errant identifications to established frames, which have briefly displayed the tenuousness of their hold. In the melancholic and vulnerable, in some respects demasculinizing, tone that characterizes much of Bril’s writing, openings can be detected toward alternative scenarios of address that, we may imagine, seep through his confrontations with the cabby, yielding tiny strands of interaction that contain seeds of less antagonistic resolutions, not unlike the sadness pervading Mariah’s and Lucy’s aesthetic clashes in Kincaid’s novel. Moments at which Bril’s broader style—even if not explicitly in the current column—intimates hesitation and uncertainty, suggests questions, or hints at an attenuated degree of conviction, remind us that the border patrolling labor of the aesthetic does not install rock-solid frontiers, but imposes tenuous demarcations on a far more unwieldy, elusive fabric of relationships. My discussion of Bril and Addison (and implicitly of Kincaid) indicates that the disciplinary maintenance of aesthetic agency involves work. Such discipline prescribes a division of labor and enforces normative valuations of kinds of work and workers. Recall that the aesthetic observer, for Addison, need not work as hard as those who devote themselves to the toils of the mind but nonetheless avoids the laziness of those who indulge in the life of the senses. Addison’s comments on aesthetic contemplation appeared in his and Richard Steele’s daily periodical, The Spectator. With this journal, he aimed to bring “Philosophy out of the Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables and in Coffee-houses” (1945, no. 10, 32). Hitching onto the pleasures of urban leisure time, almost three centuries after the

An Aesthetic Confrontation

149

publication of Addison’s account of spectatorship, the practice of aesthetic judgment, in itself a kind of labor, performed for and by reading newspapers, and carried out in taxis, cafés, streets, trains, parks, and homes, among other platforms, excuses Bril, the contemporary metropolitan commentator, from the arduous but for that matter not necessarily less rewarding work of critical multiracial literacy, while conveying to the reader the need for cultural regulation and ethnic assimilation in conformity with indigenous cultural norms. Structures of aesthetic relationality draw on the labor that modes of address instantiate, require, and excuse, at the levels of the local, the nation, and the global, and intersecting social modalities. They reside in the ways in which particular types of work and escapes from work aestheticize forms of collectivity.

7

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

Agents of aesthetic desire and form, we play out our relations on aesthetic territory. Structures of collectivity—the institutionalized bonds and distances that connect humans to one another and keep them apart—owe their obduracy, cohesion, promiscuity, and proneness to change, in part, to the workings of the aesthetic. Webs of aesthetic relationships put into play modalities of the local, the national, the regional, and the transnational, dimensions that function hand in hand with other registers of difference, such as class. As Chapter 6 has revealed, existing relational patterns include procedures of what I have called racialized aesthetic nationalism—a position comprising modes of address and embodiment that recruit aesthetic forms, meanings, and experiences in the service of racialized, nationalist conceptions and attitudes, and, in turn, bear the imprint of these understandings. This chapter investigates interpretive elisions and appropriations, schemes of owning and disowning that help to shape stances of this sort, and brings out specifically the role of the national in the resulting relational configurations. Racialized aesthetic nationalism arises in the history of aesthetic theory, and reappears as a strategy of cultural homogenization in the post-9/11 US social landscape. As instances of this at the level of quotidian existence, I consider rhetorical means of cultural surveillance in the aftermath of 9/11, government injunctions to go shopping, and newspaper vignettes commemorating individual victims of the attacks. These forms project ethnocentric, homogeneous notions of what I call the “aesthetic homeland.” Racially and nationally confining delineations of aesthetic agency and meaning are also prevalent in the art world. I will examine art critics Rosalind Krauss’s and Arthur Danto’s remarks on the work of Colombian artist Fernando Botero, and especially Danto’s (2006) review of the series of paintings and drawings with which Botero reacted, from 2004 to 2006, to news reports and photographs exposing the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US military forces in Abu Ghraib. Danto’s conceptual framework imports racialized, aesthetically nationalist elements into his interpretation of Botero’s art, restricting Botero’s critical body politics and shielding US policies against the visual critique that this work levies at the system of justice and punishment instituted by the United States in Iraq at that time, and at the operative regimes of spectacularized

152

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

terrorization. Danto’s flattened reading creates a sanitized sense of artistic and aesthetic culture that guards a racist and nationalist construal of the aesthetic homeland. We face the need to free aesthetic relationships from tendencies toward racialized aesthetic nationalism, not only at the level of the quotidian or the artistic but also in those powerfully charged places where these registers come together.

Culture as property: Racialized aesthetic nationalism in everyday life Racialized aesthetic nationalism has deep roots in the history of aesthetic theory and criticism. It concerns a privileging of the culture that is ascribed to a given nation or ethnic group over cultures that are attributed to other nations or ethnic groups. An example is the disposition to seek out preferred qualities such as purity, order, or formal novelty in artworks by white Europeans and Anglo-Americans, coupled with the tendency to read for devalued or ambivalently valorized features such as embodied rhythms, sexualized passions, and fantastic contents in the works of black diasporic, Latin American, and Latino/a artists.1 Historically, racialized aesthetic nationalism yields judgments as to what kind of art, artistic activities, and artists ought to be included in or excluded from a given national culture. A prominent advocate of an explicitly racialized form of aesthetic nationalism is, again, Hume, who tied the phenomenon of taste closely to the social, economic, and political well-being of the nation-state. Hume enlisted aesthetic elements in support of racialized, nationalist stances by configuring both taste and nation in explicitly ethnocentric terms through cross-cultural comparisons (for instance, between Britain’s and France’s level of civilization and that of other countries) and by contrasting genuine taste with a range of inferior ones (those of Indians, women, and blacks). Hume’s racialized, aesthetically nationalist position is quite common. Shaftesbury preceded him in this regard. Kant’s Observations followed suit.2 The phenomenon, moreover, continues to constitute an influential register of everyday aesthetic experience to this date. Explicit judgment, however, represents only the surface of the phenomenon. At issue are stratagems of interpretation, experience, and address that underlie our everyday aesthetic lives. Racialized aesthetic nationalism is a matter of embodied, relational existence. It resides in our orientations toward others and the material world, and in the ways we read and experience human beings, actions, things, artifacts (and expect to be read and experienced ourselves) against cultural horizons informed by entwined racial, aesthetic, and national forms, norms, and hierarchies. These horizons need not typically be consciously endorsed but produce their effects as constituents of systems of aesthetic relationships. While racialized, aesthetically nationalist modes of address and embodiment rely on habitual and unconscious interpretive and experiential templates,3 they also deploy aesthetic modalities that reside in vigilant discipline, consuming passions, carefully distilled choices, deliberately experimental manipulations of materials and forms, meticulously formulated judgments, cherished

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

153

imaginaries, sharply regimented consumptive palates, aggressively reiterated icons, patterns of exhibition, participation, performance, and creation, and attractions to ever-changing flows of images, sounds, and tastes. The structures of address that harbor these modes make up uneven textures of signification connecting (and disconnecting) subjects, objects, environments, and aesthetic traditions. Interlaced racial, national, and aesthetic formations resist analysis in terms of habitual dispositions because of their material heterogeneity, the ongoing labor of their design and upkeep, their mobilization of mutant, accidental forms of collectivity, and the vitality they derive from frictions and confluences with market structures and daily politics. This multiplicity can congeal into horizons that condition experience. However, as an aesthetic stance, racialized nationalism must also be read in the fragmentary yet systemic inscriptions of culture that not only give this position its contours but that it attempts to organize and control. At the level of everyday existence, a racialized, nationalist aesthetic often engages proprietary registers of experience. Filtering objects of aesthetic perception through intersecting categories of difference that underwrite meanings that social being holds for us, our aesthetic experiences often encode these objects as belonging to “us” or “them,” indexing them through perceptions of suitability and meaningfulness (or a lack thereof) to cultural groups. As shaped through the mediation of identity categories, the aesthetic lifeworld partially derives its organization and substance from suppositions about capacities and entitlements that we ascribe to specific, culturally situated individuals and populations. Such attributions, which encode interlocking aesthetic, racial, and national norms in our aesthetic interactions, are implicit in our ordinary, embodied understandings of social existence. Proprietary registers of experience make up a fundamental part of day-to-day aesthetic practices. We find various degrees of sustenance in the experience of being at home in our streets, city blocks, collectives, institutions, countries, and cultures. Ambivalent as feelings about home may be, they are rarely indifferent. For many, the idea of home represents states of trust and belonging,4 even if it also connotes reliable rhythms of pain, sadness, and, perhaps, agony.5 The experience and aesthetic imagination of what is sensed as “home” significantly feeds our interactions with others, both within and beyond the limits of that home, and is also produced by way of such interactions.6 Racialized aesthetic nationalism is a dimension of, among other things, the feeling that one is among one’s own people, in a territory one can legitimately call one’s own. This sense is coupled with the differentially compelling idea, not ordinarily conscious, that being present in one’s own culture constitutes something desirable, a good one is entitled to and may part with only at inevitable cost—psychic, epistemic, or aesthetic. Racialized aesthetic nationalism represents powerful currents of aesthetic desire and passion at the heart of individuals’ daily aesthetic lifeworlds. As noted earlier, this form of nationalism has a firm grounding in the history of aesthetics. Hume and Kant insistently associate the possession of good taste with asymmetrically accessible forms of participation in a civilized national culture. They profoundly interweave taste with the construction of nation. The connections between taste and nation, in their accounts, run both ways, to mutually enhancing effects. The aesthetic sponsors a nation-building

154

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

project of racialization and class and gender formation. At the same time, processes of racialization and class and gender formation advance a nation-building project of aestheticization. Taste and racialized nationhood reinforce one another. A consideration of racialized aesthetic nationalism at the level of ordinary existence alerts us to its hitherto unrecognized symptoms in the history of aesthetics, a history that must be read for its condensation of logics of race and nation. A case in point is Joseph Addison’s association of the aesthetic with a kind of “property” found in what is seen: “[Aesthetic contemplation] gives [the Man of a Polite Imagination] . . . a kind of Property in every thing he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his Pleasures” (1945, no. 411, 278). Addison’s analogy imports a conception of social, economic, and political relationships into the notion of aesthetic contemplation. If seeing is in some sense analogous to the claiming of property, then this experience would seem to be deserving of protection, and, more generally, to constitute a basis for rights and entitlements. The idea that aesthetic contemplation distills pleasure from “rude uncultivated Parts of Nature” understands aesthetic attention as a form of disciplinary control over its object. If vision implies a form of reciprocity, owing to the spectator’s embodied, spatial presence among objects of perception, as noted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968, 138–9), then Addison’s notion of proprietary seeing locates visual agency primarily in the originator of the gaze and, to a lesser extent, in the perceived environment. In receiving and administering over what arrives at him in a mode of contemplation, Addison’s spectator occupies a position of integrity within the visual field, a centered location, from which he is able to regulate environmental impulses that reach him. This positioning of the spectator has significant consequences for constructions of everyday aesthetic and artistic embodiment, on which aesthetic traditions, both mainstream and avant garde, have capitalized uncritically.7 The spectator’s implied degree of control renders unlikely the possibility that he would be enveloped in an unruly corporeal world, lose his bearings under a barrage of visual influx, or initiate a gently improvised exchange between his own bodily movements and shifting perceptual contents or the motions of other people’s bodies. Underscoring the analogy of property, Addison emphasizes individualized perceptual agency over a more diffuse, collaboratively achieved, interactive communal sharing of what is seen. This approach restricts the orbit of aesthetic relationality, address, and agency. The economic analogy inscribes a disciplinary regimen into the act of aesthetic contemplation, alongside social hierarchies that enable and ensue from individual property ownership. Addison’s account of spectatorship juxtaposes politeness (refinement) with the realm of rude and uncultivated otherness, imbuing aesthetic contemplation with marked class, gender, racial, and colonial connotations. As he finds ownership in what is seen, the spectator selectively abjects what stands in the way of pleasure, disowning the rude and the uncivilized. The achievement of pleasure in seeing thus emphatically demands also a nonseeing, a distancing of those parts of the seen that inhibit the pleasure. Such abjection, for Addison, is the correlative of pleasurable visual sensations. When viewed through contemporary lenses, the notion of a kind of property that the spectator expropriates from everything he sees articulates a proprietary conception of visual culture, and, given the centrality of technologies of the image today, of

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

155

culture and embodied agency generally. This expansive notion of aesthetic ownership necessitates correspondingly far-reaching procedures of disowning. The concept of a proprietary aesthetic confronts the longstanding theoretical controversy on disinterestedness with complications attendant on configurations of racial and national identity. Adopting the terminology of disinterestedness, we can posit that racialized aesthetic nationalism attaches a form of interest to a (supposedly) disinterested form of contemplation, namely, the good that accrues to the sense of being at home in one’s cultural environment. This aesthetic stance affixes a set of racialized and racializing effects to the interests it guards, that is, to the interests it finds in allegedly disinterested perception. Attention to sensory elements for their own sake (as demanded by ideals of disinterestedness8) can effectively be curtailed, made possible, organized, and motivated by an overarching (even if in some respects distanced) proprietary intent, namely, the desire to inhabit an environment that is experienced as “ours,” and differentiated from spaces marked as racially and ethnically other, which are disowned. This proprietary consciousness and its attendant procedures of abjection are then able to lend structure and give meaning to the sensory world experienced by culturally situated subjects. As a mode of comportment and address directed at self, others, and the material environment, a racialized nationalist aesthetic constitutes a rich resource of proprietary experiences of culture. An embodied orientation that takes place across the senses and is discursively mediated, this form of nationalism allows culture to be experienced and produced as property by enlisting the aesthetic in the service of racially and ethnically coded affective, political, and socioeconomic needs and desires. Where these interests are felt to be tampered with, the feeling of proprietariness and the sense of being at home threaten to slip away. An everyday racialized, nationalist construal of the aesthetic, accordingly, safeguards such interests. In this capacity, it endows ordinary aesthetic life with a crucial set of differentially available promises. These promises are contingent upon a productive reigning in of the field of aesthetic relationships. Thus threats crop up as well. In the years following 9/11, influential US institutions embarked on a revitalization of proprietary cultural passions. Intensified strategies of cultural surveillance conjoined with a renewed emphasis on a sharply circumscribed register of cultural and aesthetic citizenship known as “patriotism,” which was cashed out, among other things, in terms of appropriate levels of consumption, and policed, in part, by way of the Patriot Act, which allowed for the monitoring of, for example, library loans. We can recognize in this cultural construal of citizenship a rearticulation of what may be called the aesthetic homeland, that is, the culture we are imagined to own and foster through suitable aesthetic behaviors such as appropriate reading habits and other consumption patterns (or that, correlatively, we threaten to undermine through inappropriate aesthetic conduct, such as, say, wearing an antiwar T-shirt while shopping at a mall).9 Disciplinary measures restricting civil rights attempted to mobilize everyday aesthetic energies in support of a culture that was understood in a racialized, nationalist proprietary sense. Racialized, aesthetically nationalist strategies of culture formation stand in relations of mutual indebtedness to rhetorical figures. The phrase “a terrorist attack on American soil,” for example, which has frequently been used in relation to 9/11 and its commemorations

156

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

in subsequent years, deploys a metaphor that sustains a proprietary conception of national culture.10 The term “American soil” with its sensory, earthy, material overtones is suggestive of US cultural ownership of the land; it contrasts an imagined American-owned culture with a terrorist threat that is connoted as non-American. The juxtaposition of “American soil” and “terrorist attack” masks the fact that “American soil” is itself a product of terrorism that has resided in the destruction of indigenous peoples, the deployment of slave labor, continued practices of racial subordination, and the extrajudicial use of force in political conflicts around the world. This historical terrorism is disavowed under the reconstruction of the American land that is invited by the above juxtaposition. Such violence is rendered invisible; it is extirpated from what counts as the US aesthetic homeland. We encounter here a rhetorical appropriation of the land as a realm of white innocence and entitlement. The image of the fresh soil that is ready to bear its fruits to the American nation lends this construction a distinctive aesthetic attractiveness. The aesthetic turns out to be complicit in a shifting and intensified sense of a white, AngloEuropean—as opposed to Indian, black, Latino/a, or Asian-American—entitlement to ownership and control over “American” cultural property, that is, over the racialized, “American” land or nation, experienced on a model of property. Racialized aesthetic nationalism is grounded in everyday aesthetic patterns of meaning making and experience we enact as we conduct relationships with one another and the environment. It resides in styles of existence we mold through culinary practices, etiquette, gestural vocabulary, bodily expression, physical, prosthetic, and economic mobility, the spatial and temporal organization of work, leisure, and friendship. Nationalist feelings have a broad aesthetic base. Cell phones, iPads, children’s songs, New Year’s Eve, libraries, bicycles, and trains all have aesthetic dimensions that may or may not contribute to a regulative feeling of presence in our own or other environments, whereby that feeling includes a sense of the national. A proprietary aesthetic investment in the nation was actively encouraged by the economic exhortations Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and Rudolph W. Giuliani voiced in the weeks immediately following the 9/11 attacks. Americans were urged to go shopping and conduct business as usual. Cheney, as reported by the Los Angeles Times on September 17, 2001, promoted shopping as a patriotic duty, remarking that “I would hope the American people would, in effect, stick their thumbs in the eye of the terrorists and say that they’ve got great confidence in the country, great confidence in our economy, and not let what’s happened here in any way throw off their normal level of economic activity” (Gosselin and Vieth 2001, A18). Virtually equating the country with its economy, the vice president compressed the distance between buying stocks and consumption goods and supporting the nation in the war on terror. Addressing a joint session of Congress regarding the subject of terrorism on September 20, 2001, Bush solidified the appeal to the population’s vital yet sagging buying and selling instincts: “I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy. Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity. They did not touch its source. America is successful because of the hard work and creativity and enterprise of our people. These were the true strengths of our economy before September 11 and they are our strengths today” (New York Times 2001). Attributing the United States’ success to the strengths of the people, and equating these with the strengths of the economy, the president’s request located the economy, the people, and the country in dazzlingly close proximity

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

157

to one another. In his radio program on September 21, Giuliani, at the time Mayor of New York City, contributed his part to the populace’s economic enactment of good citizenship and nationhood by summoning shoppers into the city’s stores.11 In line with the reductionism characterizing contemporary neoliberalism, ethical and aesthetic consciousness took here the form of market rationality. The injunction that declared economic activity a patriotic calling addressed Americans as individuals, in abstraction from their social and economic position, their race, religion, and ethnicity. The order to shop and do business projected a deceptive unity onto the nation, which was imagined as a collective of entrepreneurial and consuming agents.12 Focusing on individual participation in the market, the strategy shortcut the ethical and aesthetic question of how the community might respond as a social body, an entity made up of constituencies with divergent economic needs and visions. Market rationality inevitably enlists aesthetic values and decision-making in its operations. Aesthetic desires must inform the relevant consumptive and financial choices. The urge to buy in support of the nation presupposes an aesthetic impulse to identify with normative levels, modes, and styles of consumption. The American people en masse—though as individuals—were asked to perform this aesthetic identification, that is, to subject themselves as moral and aesthetic agents to the nation’s markets. A historical scaffold for liberal individualism, the market is profoundly imbricated with consumerist aesthetics, a toolbox for the realization of social distinction.13 Under late capitalism, aesthetic subjectivity substantially consists in economic agency. Consumptive (and productive) aesthetic choices help shape our specific cultural, national, and racial identities. To make a long story short, Bush’s, Cheney’s, and Giuliani’s recommendations, which were echoed by many others, drew on influential interlocking structures of economic and aesthetic subject-formation.14 Because the commercial imperative addressed the American people as individuals—replicating the gesture that passes off institutional and governmental realities as achievements or failures of individual economic and aesthetic agents15—it could be mapped with little friction onto the economic project of the war in Iraq, which sought to mobilize the nation as an undivided collective made up of united individuals. Racialized aesthetic nationalist tactics were thus part and parcel of the neoconservative, neoliberal rewriting of civil life in the initial post-9/11 era, as the country moved to enlist the labor and lives of the United States’ working classes and poor, and of the population of Iraq, in projects that were to advance the interests of a small economic elite.16 A similarly homogenizing vision was achieved through the aesthetic structures of mourning invited by the New York Times’ “Portraits of Grief,” a series of idealized memorials, devoted to the victims left dead in the attacks. Highlighting the specialness of the depicted subjects by citing distinctive anecdotes from their lives and bringing out unique personality traits, this commemorative effort, like the shopping imperative, allowed for a rapid passage from each individual to her or his larger communities, and thereby naturalized the link between individual and nation. Nancy Miller comments on the toothpaste one victim, a broker at Cantor Fitzgerald, we are told, used to leave almost every morning for his wife on her toothbrush, before going off to work: If this is not a “telling” detail in the narrative universe of the Times portraits, what is? For it tells the story of what worked in the marriage, and to the extent that the

158

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

portraits represent something larger than an individual—and they do—they are crafted to serve as the microcosm of family life, of a valiant, and though wounded, above all, happy America. The domestic detail of the toothbrush comes to stand for the intimacy of the home, and the home for the nation’s public life: the home front against the incursions of terrorism. The detail as the index of poignant loss—the toothpaste on the toothbrush, the minute and the familiar—embodies that which we cherish against what is foreign and terrifying, that which protects against the war on terrorism. (2003, 122)

The portraits ask the reader to reimagine the aesthetic homeland on the model of familial bonds, while offering her a way to preserve it as an object and source of love. The personalized miniatures reaestheticize the “home front” in the form of a disrupted domesticity, an intimate enclosure destroyed by terrorism. But in the detail’s invocation of bereavement, as Miller suggests, and its tapping of grief, the reader is also invited to experience the loving intimacy that was lost as a source of affective sustenance, to draw nourishment from a capacity it may have to regenerate individual and public life in the face of terror. Yet, as the portraits have the individual victim stand in for the country as a whole, their narrative structure projects a unified vision of the homeland that evades the question of whose sustaining attachments the aestheticized nation upholds, at the cost of what kinds of terrorization. The intimacy the portraits locate at the heart of American life is the product of an incontrovertible history of constitutive exclusions, the traces of which are blurred in the visual and narrative selections mandated by the operative codes of loving memorialization. Racialized, aesthetically nationalist regimes of address in the post-9/11 landscape were instrumental in foreclosing ethical, political, and aesthetic inquiries that could reach beyond the demands of victimhood and market rationality. Aesthetic structures assisted in abridging deliberative, affective, and symbolic processes that ought to have galvanized a democratic reevaluation of America’s relationships to the global community as well as its own heterogeneous constituencies. Racialized and nationalist aesthetic stratagems helped institutionalize a defensive proprietary stance toward culture, shaping cultural agency on the model of property management and ownership. These forces channeled aesthetic relationships, modes of address, promises, and threats within a tightening ambit of admissible possibilities. The regulative presence of proprietary conceptions of culture in aesthetic theories and everyday practices is mirrored by similar dispositions in the art world.

Disruptive body politics: Racialized aesthetic nationalism in the art world When critical interpretations of works of art deploy racialized, aesthetically nationalist conceptions, the result is an unjustifiably constricted construal of the art world. Interpretations developed in terms of such notions limit the repertoire of reciprocal

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

159

encounters that take place between the world of art and the aesthetic of the everyday, and shelter cultural sensibilities against aesthetic challenges. Such interpretations go in tandem with a diminished, proprietary sense of aesthetic and artistic possibility. They assist in the creation of a pattern of cultural appropriation that restricts the realm of culture to what, in a figurative sense, is “ownable,” that is, to a field of activities and meanings that privileged subjects can properly, safely, own up to. The controversy over Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib series features a reading of this sort. Botero’s paintings and drawings about the torture of Iraqi captives by US military forces in the prison of Abu Ghraib have been exhibited in numerous countries. The Marlborough Gallery in New York displayed a selection of these works in autumn 2006. In a review of the show for The Nation, titled “The Body in Pain” (hereafter “BP”), Arthur Danto situates the series against the backdrop of the artist’s preceding oeuvre. He considers the new works astonishing. From his philosophical lexicon, they call forth the category “masterpieces of disturbatory art” (23). With his representations of torture, Botero elevates his art from what Danto considers bland and repetitive folksy artifice to, for this painter, unprecedented heights of intensity. About the earlier works, and especially the sculptures, Danto reminisces: Colombian artist Fernando Botero is famous for his depictions of blimpy figures that verge on the ludicrous. New Yorkers may recall the outdoor display of Botero’s bronze figures, many of them nude, in the central islands of Park Avenue in 1993. Their bodily proportions insured that their nakedness aroused little in the way of public indignation. They were about as sexy as the Macy’s balloons, and their seemingly inflated blandness lent them the cheerful and benign look one associates with upscale folk art. The sculptures were a shade less ingratiating, a shade more dangerous than one of Walt Disney’s creations, but in no way serious enough to call for critical scrutiny. Though transparently modern, Botero’s style is admired mainly by those outside the art world. Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as “pathetic.” (23)

What in the eyes of Danto and Krauss constitutes Botero’s dubious artistic track record poses a challenge for the viewer of his work.17 If we may believe these critics, to take his paintings seriously is to risk overstepping the boundaries of the art world. According to Danto and Krauss, the viewer who delights in Botero’s works courts contamination by art’s “others.” Beyond the limits of the contemporary art world, these theorists detect the specter of the mass-produced, the commercial, the childlike, the forcibly happy, the popular, the faux-folk, the safely inoffensive, the calculatingly goodnatured, love on command, saccharine and farcical. The suggestion is that Botero’s pieces threaten to diffuse the viewer’s orientation toward vital aesthetic and moral borderlines. Consequently, Danto’s and Krauss’s comments reinaugurate distinctions that were taken to be in danger of unraveling. Echoing Krauss’s verdict of pitiable, somewhat contemptible artistic unworthiness, Danto joins in her judgment, and, in the same gesture, in that of numerous other art world compatriots. Convergence runs deep in remarks by art theorists, critics, and historians. Tropes of cartoonish commodification

160

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

feature prominently in both Krauss’s and Danto’s commentaries on Botero’s art. So does the mantra of the artist’s questionable position in relation to the art world. The context for Krauss’s commentary is a 1998 edition of CBS’s 60 Minutes on Botero’s work. Introduced by Steve Kroft, a reporter for the show, as one of the artist’s many detractors in the international art world who deem his work of “absolutely no consequence to twentieth-century fine art,” Krauss affirms: “In the world from which I come—which is a world of, you know, universities, museums, art magazines, no one talks about Botero. He is simply a non-figure. He’s a dark hole. There’s no reason to talk about Botero.” This language of reasons, it turns out, is closely affiliated with the concept of the art world, as Danto conceives of it. In his view, reasons hold together the art world: “The art world is the discourse of reasons institutionalized, and to be a member of the art world is, accordingly, to have learned what it means to participate in the discourse of reasons for one’s culture” (1992, 46). On Danto’s theory, a lack of reason to talk about Botero, or the failure of his works to participate in the discourse of reasons institutionalized for the international art world, thus certifies Botero’s status as an outsider vis-à-vis the global world of fine art. I have no doubts about Botero’s participation in the relevant kind of art discourse but wish to linger briefly with Krauss’s idea, in order to see what a possible argument against Botero’s membership in the art world based on the apparent absence of reasons can tell us about the structure of this world and the logic of its boundaries, for this argument generates an instructive paradox. Clearly, the charge is unable to seal Botero’s exclusion from the art world, within Danto’s theory, if only for the reason that Krauss did speak about Botero, indeed, was somehow lured to find reason to talk about him. There may have been little art or reason to Krauss’s reason, as measured by the standards of the art world or, for that matter, by the criteria of “universities, museums, art magazines.” But rather than proving there was in fact no good reason, this merely presses certain expansive questions about the nature of the reasons at issue in Krauss’s and Danto’s discussions, such as, What constitute the right kinds of reasons for talking about an artist or oeuvre? What does it mean for a relevant reason to belong to a discourse, and more specifically, an institutionalized discourse? And lastly, what are the conditions for participating in a discourse of reasons? The hypothetical case against Botero’s membership in the art world brings out the instabilities and uncertainties that attach to the project of circumscribing the borders of this world. The argument underscores the malleability that the art world’s boundaries, as conceived by Danto, share with the discourse of reasons. One not necessarily very solid reason, of a rather extrinsic nature, gives rise to another reason, which, prior to the advent of the first reason would not have constituted a reason, and certainly not a compelling or seductive one, until reasons suddenly abound. Krauss’s found reason, perhaps even owing to her initial lack of a reason, now provides ample reason to talk about Botero, and, in fact, Botero has already ventured to make an entry into the art world owing to Krauss’s discussion of him. An especially potent dimension of the art world’s malleability lies then in the liability of the discourse of reasons to enlargement through encounters with materials and events of uncertain art world status. This lends the art world a susceptibility to a

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

161

centrifugal form of inflation, an internally generative voluminousness that prepares it to set off from its bearings, like a Macy’s balloon taking flight during the parade. The art world’s inherently generative potential for expansion when in contact with externalized sources constitutes not only an endlessly fecund power but also a risk, an ineluctable vulnerability to infraction on account of which art’s boundaries are never secure, irrevocably ambiguous, and resistant to patrolling.18 While the spectator of the 60 Minutes broadcast views footage of Krauss, who looks through books about Botero,19 the interviewer’s voice-over explains that to this particular critic, as well as many others, the artist’s distinctive style is a gimmick, designed to pander to wealthy collectors who are ignorant of “serious art.” Krauss’s voice interjects: “The figures in his work have the quality of Pillsbury Dough Boys or Barney, the stuffed dinosaur. This is pathetic.” Notwithstanding the availability of Krauss’s critical vocabulary for the articulation of an interpretation of the Abu Ghraib series, Danto exercises restraint. To develop a reading of the representations of torture, he resorts to a more traditional language of affect and morality, for which he draws on the European Counter-Reformation (BP, 25). Indeed, Danto accounts for the twenty-first-century prison abuse pieces in terms of their rendering of the suffering of the Iraqi captives. In his view, the voluminous fleshiness of the victims’ bodies lends them a specific vulnerability to pain. The viewer internalizes that pain and comes to feel it as her own: “Botero’s Abu Ghraib series immerses us in the experience of suffering. The pain of others has seldom felt so close, or so shaming to its perpetrators” (26). For Danto, accordingly, the visitor of Botero’s exhibit participates in the Iraqi prisoners’ feelings, vicariously experiencing them as if they were hers. In the ontological plane, the category of “disturbatory art” sanctions such imaginative participation.20 Art of this sort, on Danto’s theory, is designed to recreate a magical contact with a disturbing reality. Infracting on the boundaries with life, this kind of art converts the spectator into a participant in a ritual in order to make certain transformative effects (AD, 131; 1987 [hereafter “RS”], 180). In the case of sculptures by Richard Serra, for example, the spectator’s consciousness of her own embodiment in the flesh, a participatory state of mind, enables her to become aware of “latent structures and forces” of the kind that, in Danto’s historical picture of it, art has outgrown (RS, 180). Disturbatory art reaches back to a “primitive” stage of art’s development, one that is underwritten, likewise, by a “primitive” relationship between artist and audience (AD, 126). Like a priest conducting “a primitive ritual,” the disturbational artist initiates a collective process of transformation (129, 133). Mutual change, on this model, is facilitated by the artist’s possession “by something alien” (131). The viewer enters into a shared space with the artist and the work.21 “Melting” the relationship between work and audience, art of the disturbatory type seeks to achieve a connection with “dark impulses” that have come to be repressed in the course of art’s history (AD, 122, 126). As such, this genre of art regresses to what Nietzsche called the Dionysian era, during which art approximated magic in its attempt to make “dark possibilities” real, invoking “alien forces from a space other than the one we occupy” (126). Disturbatory art exercises magic as it purports to render the subject of representation present in the representation itself, hoping to overcome the

162

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

rift between image and reality. Paradoxically working against its own condition as art, the aim is to break the detachment art ordinarily makes possible, in order to expose both artist and viewer to the danger of an unguarded encounter with the real. In this fashion, disturbational art carries the disturbing realities it embodies into the artist’s and spectators’ lives. Transgressing art’s boundaries, this mode of artistic production, in Danto’s words, “colonizes, as it were, the west bank of life by art” (AD, 119).22 At stake in this project is a reactivation of our contact with a “subrational constituent” of our psyches (131). This makes for a special kind of disturbance, to be distinguished from the merely shocking or outrageous: It is the kind of disturbance that comes from the dim subperception that a dimension of our being is being signaled at a level below even the deepest levels of civilization. Greek civilization, if Nietzsche was right, owed itself to putting this all at a distance. We don’t know what we are capable of, what we might do in response to the beckoning of the disturbatory artist: it is that sense of danger she insinuates which one might have felt as one crossed the terrifying boundaries of the precincts of Dionysus. (132)

Disturbatory art, for Danto, addresses opaque and arational strata of subjectivity that elude the influence of civilization. The disturbance inherent in the experience of this art arises as a result of the spectator’s confrontation with these unknown parts of the self. If this is the generic modus operandi of the arts of disturbation, what specific disturbatory dynamics does Botero put to work in his Abu Ghraib series, as read by Danto? “The Body in Pain” postdates by over 20 years the philosopher’s original discussions of disturbation.23 The recent review slightly shifts the definition of disturbatory art to those works “whose point and purpose [it] is to make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts” (BP, 23). So conceived, the category includes works of art earlier formulations had labeled “simply” or “conventionally” disturbing. Art of the latter type, which Danto sees exemplified, for instance, in Leon Golub’s paintings, represents a disturbing subject matter and may or may not do this in disturbing ways (AD, 119–21; RS, 180). Disturbatory art differs from mere artistic disturbance in the challenge it poses for the boundaries that, as indicated before, are assumed to keep real life apart from art. But to attempt to bridge this divide is to pursue an illusion, in Danto’s theory. On that count, he finds disturbatory art “pathetic and futile” (AD, 133). This signals that we have returned full circle to the limitations of Botero’s suspect general style. Stopping short of this, however, the question arises as to what precise borderline(s), among the many distinctions that are considered to separate the realm of art from the sphere of the real, Danto takes Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings to be breaching. The most obvious candidate is the gap between felt and represented suffering, in other words, the distance separating the viewer’s affect from that of the depicted figures. Indeed, Danto suggests that key to an understanding of the paintings’ particular mode of disturbance is their privileging of feeling over and above perception: “The mystery of painting, almost forgotten since the Counter-Reformation, lies in its power to generate a kind

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

163

of illusion that has less to do with pictorial perception than it does with feeling” (BP, 24). At this point, Danto links Botero’s series with depictions of Christ’s martyrdom produced during the epoch of the Latin American Baroque. Within this genre, “graphic, even lurid” depictions of Christ’s damaged body serve to elicit the spectator’s sympathetic identification (ibid.). Accordingly, the empathetic gallery visitor who, by way of Botero’s work, draws the Iraqi subjects of violence close, participates in an affective ritual Danto takes the Abu Ghraib pieces to have been designed to initiate. Merging represented with felt affect, and abandoning distance between self and other, the spectator who takes on the victims’ suffering as if it were hers enables the paintings to realize their transformative disturbatory effects. How does Danto’s interpretation of the Abu Ghraib series reflect on the paintings, drawings, and sculptures produced in the course of the artist’s extended career prior to the 2004 torture scandal? Danto observes a continuity of style between the earlier and the new work: “Although the prisoners are painted in his signature style, his much-maligned mannerism intensifies our engagement with the pictures” (BP, 26). Notwithstanding the alleged ineptness of the artist’s iconography, Botero’s uninterrupted stylistic approach makes a powerful artistic effect in the torture scenes, according to Danto. The finding of this turnabout, if not inconsistency, within Botero’s otherwise supposedly stable aesthetic vocabulary fails to provoke a revision of Danto’s judgment of the preceding oeuvre. Instead, he resorts to a bipartite conception of Botero’s aesthetic repertoire. This construction comes at a price, however. Danto refrains from reading the Abu Ghraib series as the full-fledged political indictment of US military policies it is, in much the same way in which both he and Krauss decline assessing the artist’s prior oeuvre for its visual critique of power, its irony, and sense of humor. Both critics reproduce the worn-out racializing, feminizing, class-inflected, and ethnically othering vocabulary of the childlike and the naïve. The language of Macy’s balloons, Disney cartoons, dough puppets, and dinosaurs voices an absence of individual aesthetic authorship. Conjoined with these figures, Krauss’s comment on Botero’s artistic nonidentity expresses a perceived effacement of artistic consciousness by an overwhelmingly stultified, scripted populist imaginary, which, transpiring outside the realm of artistic significance, can at best attain marketability. Framed through images signifying a popular, childlike, and commercial appeal, Botero’s exuberant preoccupation with pejoratively coded commodified content—prosaic, pedestrian, domestic, mass-produced, material, sensuous, formally unconscious, and aesthetically derivative—arises as a vast abject territory encroaching on the art world. The “dark hole” that, for Krauss, in Botero’s case, threatens to engulf contemporary artistic subjectivity and relationality, conjures up Hegel’s “dark mantle of night” (1956, 91)  and Freud’s “dark continent” (1959, 212)  and their associations with the extrahistorical, the formless, and the unrepresentable. Danto’s implicit explication of Botero’s supposed disturbance effect in terms of the magical, the mysterious, the miraculous, the archaic, the primitive, the extracivilizational, the dark, and the unknown sidesteps the elaborate intertextuality and representational self-consciousness of Botero’s idioms. The aesthetic icons Danto and Krauss draw from the children’s corner, the parade, and the marketplace, in association with Botero’s figures, likewise circumvent the intricacies of the artist’s treatment of the

164

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

body in three-dimensional space and in the picture plane. In a similar vein, by focusing primarily on content, Danto’s descriptions of the Abu Ghraib paintings downplay the works’ formal functioning. Looking rapidly through the level of representation to the depicted pain and violence, he prepares the ground for an interpretation centered on the empathetic feelings of the individual viewer, interpolating the depicted suffering in an affective economy that enables the American public—even if momentarily—to step away from its structural indifference to the victims of US interventions abroad. Affective responses certainly require a place in art criticism and interpretation.24 However, an artistic stress on feeling does not warrant an interpretive downplaying of perception, and neither does the category of the Baroque legitimize a favoring of affect over perception as an evidential ground for a reading. The ambitions of the Abu Ghraib series do not find adequate expression in the idea that they make the suffering of Iraqi captives available to a global gallery public, realizing an aesthetic politics of emotional response. This interpretation performs an appropriative effacement of a more radical artistic gesture. The collection features a specific visual form that, enmeshed with affect as it is—shaping as well as shaped by feelings and emotional dispositions—articulates an aesthetic condemnation of the torture inflicted on the prisoners. Botero gears aesthetic strategies he uses in the series, at once perceptual and affective, toward an interrogation of power structures and visual regimes that deploy and legitimize such violence. A brief look at his vision of corporeality helps to elucidate this. Botero’s human protagonists have their fleshiness in common with one another and with physical objects and spatial settings. This shared fleshiness intimates persons’ collective presence, as at once sensate and material beings, in environments that they occupy along with objects. Fleshy materiality, so construed, signifies as an index of bodily vulnerability, a source of physical need and desire, a point of emotional investment, and a site of intercorporeal embeddedness in a physical and social world. Subjected to physical damage, sexual humiliation, and psychological torture, the large, feminized Iraqi bodies—Botero’s distinctive puffing up of the human figure characteristically demasculinizes the male subject—expose the flip side of values of freedom and democracy, advanced in defense of an economically motivated war, namely structural, militarized cruelty and disregard for human subjects. Corporeality, as Botero fashions it, foregrounds ways in which torture violates basic modes of being-in-the-world. The series’ visual designs document torture as a practice that militates against human flesh—as a routine that harms an animate, vulnerable form of materiality in which we participate along with one another and with physical objects such as boots, bars, clubs, whips, windows, floors. Thus, the collection employs its figuration of embodiment to catalyze the public’s political consciousness about the Abu Ghraib atrocities, to condemn the systemic injustice that made the Iraqi prison abuse possible, and to hold the United States accountable for it. The voluminous Botero body does not simply serve as a trigger of affect by being rendered especially vulnerable to pain—although Danto is certainly right that it functions in this way—but, more than that, visually encodes the commentary as well as the indictment the artist stresses in his remark that the series represents “both a broad statement about cruelty and at the same time an accusation of U.S. policies.”25 Danto disavows the far-reaching polemical, analytical, and contestatory address of the visual critiques that Botero’s work levies in

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

165

its very aesthetic specificity, and averts ethical demands that are part and parcel of this address.26 Indeed, Danto displaces the works’ accusation. Labeling Botero’s style a mannerism, and stressing content and spectatorial affect over the artist’s visual modeling of the body in space, he keeps the art’s aesthetic critique at arm’s length in his own reading of the collection, locating the series’ challenge in the actions and reactions, real and anticipated, by other segments of the public. For the reader of The Nation is told that, when offered the collection by Botero, a number of American museums turned down the gift. This rejection Danto attributes to the same reason for which visitors to the Marlborough Gallery show were asked to have their bags inspected in order to gain entry to the exhibit, a practice, which, he points out, is unusual for commercial galleries (BP, 26). Danto thus acknowledges the political sting of the series indirectly, as evinced in the negative impulses, if not aggression, that the public, including museum donors, is imagined to experience toward the paintings. This implicit recognition by the critic, and if he is right, also by the boards and directors of art galleries and museums, makes the works out to be a threat to a supposed North American mindset. The collection is understood to touch a sensitive nerve in the US public. However, this mutual vulnerability of viewers to paintings and paintings to viewers receives no critical elaboration in terms of the works’ aesthetic functioning. To erase from the site of aesthetic meaning production the reciprocal vulnerability that characterizes the aesthetic encounter is to flatten the exchange and to prepare the ground for a safe yet sanitized passage through the aesthetic homeland. Danto’s reading enacts an appropriative form of political containment. Oppositional visual politics acquire a more central role in the case of the famous Abu Ghraib photographs than in the paintings. The photos Danto considers “essentially snapshots, larky postcards of soldiers enjoying their power, as their implied message—‘Having a wonderful time .  .  . Wish you were here’—attests.” Turning a scene of violence into one of pleasure, these pictures gained the capacity to generate moral responsiveness upon exposure around the globe: “When the photographs were released, the moral indignation of the West was focused on the grinning soldiers, for whom this appalling spectacle was a form of entertainment” (BP, 24). Earlier declared outside the scope of Botero’s sculptures, indignation does not now make a surprise appearance in the Marlborough Gallery.27 Indeed, Danto’s text institutes a sharp division of aesthetic labor. While the paintings offer up the suffering of the victimized body for the spectator’s affective apprehension, the photographic imprints of theatrically staged power and pleasure perform moral work. The review thus centers political effect in the international media circuits in concert with the US social and military system. Featuring Iraqi victimhood, the Colombian artist supplies emotional resources “real-world politics” may or may not take up. The Abu Ghraib paintings are barred from being full-fledged participants in the aesthetic production of social power. It is Danto’s bipartite construction of Botero’s style as generally not worthy of serious scrutiny but forcefully arousing in the case of this particular series that creates room to curtail the work’s significance as a political critique.

166

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Elements of such a critique can be found in the review’s concluding remark, quoted earlier, to the effect that “[t]he pain of others has seldom felt so close, or so shaming to its perpetrators.” Shame is a moral emotion, and like empathetic affect, it can be a political incentive. However, in calling for an end to the torture of prisoners, and in making legible a culture’s political proximity to this violence, the works press beyond their implications for people’s feelings, regardless of whether such people are “merely” viewers, or at the same time torturers, unseen facilitators, cobeneficiaries of imperialist oil policies, or coparticipants in a world system. Botero considered it of particular importance that the American public see the works “because those who did the atrocities were Americans.”28 Hence, presumably, his offer of the series to American museums, just as he had donated his earlier collection on the Colombian drug and guerrilla wars to museums in Colombia. Empathy and shame, however, fall drastically short of an aesthetically discerning uptake of an artistic imperative commanding justice, an appeal, moreover, that is targeted at a highly legible and precisely denoted constellation of violations. The art’s promises and threats take a different shape than those of the contents and orientations of the affect it engenders. Among the features of the works that Danto sidesteps is the challenge they pose for practices of sexual and religious humiliation and torture staged as visual spectacle. His review shields the viewer from this charge by observing tidy divisions between the painterly transmission of suffering and the photographic problematization of power; between a victim’s pain and an abuser’s sexual pulse; between a properly empathizing gallery public and the scenographers in the prison who orchestrated displays of torture for their and their friends’ consumption; between the different audiences for genres such as hard-core pornography, for the violated bodies offered up and fantasized on a daily basis in the news media, and for Disney movies, Macy’s parades, and Botero’s art. Danto’s reading omits recognition of connections that tie together these polarities. Thereby he closes down openings the works craft for examining the viewer’s potential complicity in the sexual settings in which the prisoners are forced to pose, and more broadly, in officially sanctioned, racist patterns of sadism, voyeurism, and sexual humiliation.29 The US viewer’s upright standing finds protection in the failure to investigate how the erotics of spectacularized terrorization reflect on the distinctive nature of racial and ethnic domination exercised historically and to this date on behalf of the American nation.30 Botero’s series creates conditions for a discourse on the subject, of which we do not know precisely where it may take us, or what refused and irrational desires it may bring to the surface. Lending this work an already understood emotional effect, rather than the status of an inquiry or a call for change, Danto’s framework for interpretation shelters both the American neocolonial militaryindustrial-prison complex and the US viewer’s aesthetic homeland from Botero’s artistic critique. Removing aggression, racialized sexuality, and risk from the aesthetic confrontation initiated by the works, Danto lays the basis for a proprietary reading. As in Addison, we witness here a one-sided process of abjection that readies the work for incorporation as a visual commodity within an expandable, yet rigorously guarded territory of aesthetic culture, and narrows the range of its relational implications. But if the category of disturbatory art is applicable to the Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings, and if these works, as this label suggests, pose unknown dangers for

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

167

the viewer, it is surely, in part, because as aesthetic restagings of pornographic modes and motifs, and variations on already aestheticized theatrical and photographic articulations of racialized debasement and oppression, they destabilize the viewer’s position vis-à-vis the ethical and aesthetic distinctions Danto’s reading shores up. The elisions enabling the works’ appropriation within the economy of the US aesthetic homeland stand out starkly on further examination of Botero’s body politics. Botero’s bodies are idealized, yet grotesque. They meet the viewer as deliteralized presences because of their delicious, anachronistic beauty and on account of their hilarious resistance to bodily norms observed by styles of painting across history and geographical zones—bodily norms that support cultural formations of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, producing and reproducing criteria of sensory, rational, affective, aesthetic, and artistic legibility. The bodies of male figures in power (presidents, generals, priests, horse riders, gunmen, drug barons, gang members, murderers, torturers, kidnappers, partners, lovers) deflate this assumed power, mocking the characters’ investment in it. Adorned female or feminized figures (presidents’ wives, prostitutes, women reading books or in front of the mirror, nuns, drag queens, picnickers, partners, lovers) invite us to ask whether their beautiful bodies, social positions, subjective presence, instantaneous gestures, or sexiness will enable them to fulfill their longings or to realize their aspirations. The poses of families and couples raise questions about gendered structures of intimacy, authority, sexuality, and dominance, as they offer multiple, often contradictory, clues about the satisfactoriness of the bonds connecting individuals. Botero models the human figure and pictorial space in dialogue with artists as diverse as Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Da Vinci, Dürer, Caravaggio, Rubens, Velázquez, Goya, Picasso, Orozco, Pollock, and countless others. His iconography draws on Olmec, Mayan, Aztec, and Latin American Baroque forms. Returning to images and themes he associates with the Colombian highlands, which he interleaves with postures and idioms inspired by a brazenly diverse range of art—historical vocabularies, he writes himself as a Colombian artist rigorously into a transcultured Latin American and Anglo-European tradition. His art encounters racialized national stylistic norms and distinctions through a strategy of disruptive mimesis. This resistant technique, which refracts already given aesthetic materials to orient them toward new expressions and ideas, is instantly recognizable in compositions that directly cite canonical images, but equally characterizes his oeuvre as a whole, which, in his words, does not feature one brushstroke “unsanctioned by the history of art” (Escallón 1997, 30). Good art, for Botero, creates a world that “contains a truth that can be accepted as an alternative, and that also exists as a poetic possibility” (32). He considers it the artist’s function to exalt life by communicating sensuality (33). Disruptive mimesis, locating abundant bodily potential in an atmosphere of pictorial calm, makes for an uproarious body politic in Botero. Ironizing varieties of masculinized, feminized, and from time to time explicitly racialized power, through physical comedy, the manipulation of scale, and sardonic inversions, Botero depicts embodiment as a fundamentally pleasurable state of corporeal being. Far from realistic or celebratory evocations of the bulging folds and hanging rolls of the obese, aging human body, his figures come protectively wrapped

168

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

in soft, nourishing, delectable, usually young, elastic fat. Bodily existence, in Botero’s universe, is a potentially joyful state of creaturely being, a readiness for delightful sensations. Distress and pain, melancholy and fear irresistibly interarticulate with a basic modality of happy corporeality, which the figures share with their surroundings. This is also the case in the many variations on the theme of the crying woman, or in Botero’s treatment of mutilated bodies. Botero depicts the skin, the flesh, and the body’s volumes as sensing organs—desiring, needing, touchable. Characters, animals, objects, and environments (interior spaces, the streets of Medellín, the rooftops of hill villages) exude an appearance of essential lovability.31 The material world is animated by the vibrant activity of ordinary details that far surpasses their prosaic functioning much in the way in which the momentous (or sometimes radically diminished) human body transgresses canonical codes of spatiality and normative corporeality. The coincidence of inflation and detail calls into question orders of significance and forecloses dialectical advancement toward a projected stage of development. Under the signs of comical idealization and tranquil beauty, grotesque registers of abjection determine the contours of a gorgeous range of fundamentally adorable human beings, whose lovability is catalyzed by the sensate capacities that disarticulate their positions within established vectors of social power. Botero formulates a critical body politic that challenges normalized regimes of intercorporeal exchange through the expression of the enfleshed pleasures, longings, efforts, and disappointments of minutely particularized bodily postures representing social types rather than individualized psychologies. Inhabiting multiple temporal

Figure 7.1  Fernando Botero, The Beach, 2006. Oil on canvas, 131 x 189 cm. © Fernando Botero. Courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

169

registers that exceed templates of everyday historical progression, and entwining dimensions of plenitude and lack, the body’s possibilities for sensuality and desire suspend certain constraints of normative, contemporary sociality, asking for a tenderness, a love, and a generosity beyond the ordinary rule of things, suggesting this “as a poetic possibility.” When these bodies are then shown as being hurt or shot, stunned or humiliated, in mortal fear or agony over the loss of others’ lives, as in the series on the violence of Colombia and on Abu Ghraib, this belies their generic lovability, challenging the basic, sensory, relational being that constitutes the reality of their embodiment. But this level of bodily being and demand speaks back to the violence. Botero has his desirable and desiring bodies militate against the cruelty inflicted on them, caricaturing such violence, its tools and agents, and the damage it marks in the body as dissonant with the characters’ human life in the flesh. In these paintings, harsh scopophiliac regimes, acts of physical abuse, fences, ropes, dogs, blood, tears, vomit, urine, sticks, explosions, bullets, and the holes left by gunshots in the body take on a schematic, grotesque uncanniness, not altogether unlike the snakes and flies in his earlier paintings. The grotesque Botero body is never simply susceptible to abjection; while courting expulsion and intentionally vulnerable to repudiation, it indissociably invests itself in acts of normalization and participates in beauty. But beauty, happiness, spatiality, order, normalcy, and the ordinary thereby also always assume a grotesque character in

Figure 7.2  Fernando Botero, Abu Ghraib 53, 2005. Oil on canvas, 37 x 35 cm. © Fernando Botero. Courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.

170

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Botero’s work, spilling over in countervailing movements that play out in the registers of the uncanny, the comical, and the carnivalesque.32 Hostility toward the lovable body, thus, is a consistent aspect of the response solicited by Botero’s lexicon.33 His work is no less close to its viewers in the modalities of attraction and approachability than those of disposability and dehumanization. Holding these registers in tension, the artist captures us as actors in longstanding, carnivalesque routines of perpetuating and perceiving aggression. Baroque spats and gushes of blood provoke a sense of our having been in this sphere before, of having seen this sort of thing previously.34 Botero imbues these forms with a dimension of humor and satire in their transposition from Baroque vocabularies, and their allusion to his earlier treatments of cigarette butts, flies, snakes, and water drops. Comedy and irony thereby serve as carriers of cultural memory and as vehicles of aesthetic contextualization. Enacting a critical transcultural specularization of violence, as opposed to, and yet analogous to the torturers’ uncritical use of image technologies inherent in the camera and the internet, blood drops and spurts ask us to view the torture rituals these technologies exhibit against the backdrop of broader historical trajectories of imperial violence and critical resistance, making visible orders of domination and critique often ignored in media representations of the Abu Ghraib episode.35 Like the drops of water in earlier bathroom scenes, the blood preserves a humorous aspect, even as it denotes harm. It meets pain with a politics of laughter. More than that, it encounters vicious jesting (the photographer/soldiers’ notion of a joke) with a critical sense of what is funny. Thus it reorients laughter: Botero converts the sadistic humor that speaks from the grins in the Abu Ghraib photographs into a modality of humor that gives us to read the game of cruel satire put on by the comedians in the prison. In the mode of caricature, the viewer is able to recognize a brutal entertainment, an amusement of which the camera-savy abusers were not the sole inventors but that activated familiar modes of representation, contemporary and historical, to invite outside players to join in the diversion. In aestheticizing the pranking torturers’ violent play, Botero directs the comedic register against their actions. Through caricature, the smile, as it were, shifts from the abusers to the viewer. Yet it becomes a decidedly different smile in the transfer. The viewer’s smile is an element of a mode of responsiveness that resonates with the fundamental human sensibility and mode of sexuate being which the paintings depict as in the process of being damaged. The gentle dimension of humor inherent in Botero’s visual idioms enables the viewer to critically gear the represented sensibility and sexuality in which she participates as an observer of the work against the atrocities that she perceives. It is as an agent grounded in a basic, sensate mode of embodied interconnectedness, a form of relationality that includes humor as an element of a broader pattern of aesthetic engagement, that the viewer apprehends the cruel game set up in the prison. Botero critically reaestheticizes maliciously aestheticized violence. He does this, in part, by absorbing the viewer into a distinctive type of humor. Along with the blood drops, the ropes, boots, bars, and tiles in the series retain the rebellious comedic aspect that inevitably characterizes Botero’s iconography, as do the bodies. The highly theatricalized, pronouncedly staged spatial configurations that

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

171

Figure 7.3  Fernando Botero, Abu Ghraib 77, 2005. Pencil on paper, 39 x 31 cm. © Fernando Botero. Courtesy, Marlborough Gallery, New York.

commonly host Botero’s figures, in the particular case of the Abu Ghraib series, allow him to make visible, in the mode of protest—to wit, in a form of refusal that preserves laughter’s critical, loving power—a lighthearted, banal cruelty the torturers, we can assume, were in the business of conveying to their friends and Facebook companions. Wielding a dialectic of humor, Botero’s works on the violence in Iraq and Colombia inscribe his aesthetic figuration of these brutal episodes into a transculturated European and Latin American tradition, indelibly marking the medium of painting not only with the sensory body’s capacity to alienate and protest these atrocities, but also with this body’s robust ability to feel pleasure, to desire, to love and to laugh, in a critical spirit that denounces cruelty. We encounter here an utterly self-conscious, intertextual artistic tactic of disruptive, comedic mimesis crossing racialized, national art-historical boundaries, forms, and techniques. It is these levels of signification that Danto’s racialized and nationalist conceptual framework ignores. In linking the Botero body to vulnerability, pain, and empathy, he unquestionably recognizes crucial features of the series. Nonetheless, by way of structural interpretive omissions, his reading renders the Abu Ghraib oeuvre a proper item for consumption by a proprietary, racialized, and nationalist cultural sensibility, a commodity in which the benevolent inhabitant of the US aesthetic homeland can safely, even if not altogether comfortably, encounter her own reflection.

172

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Botero’s deliberate anachronisms belie a straightforwardly progressivist understanding of art. Giving rise to a tranquil grotesque, mixing popular and high art, feminizing the masculinized,36 writing Latin American vocabularies into European traditions, and European idioms into Colombian forms, Botero’s oeuvre challenges certain gendered, racialized, class-inflected, and nationalist oppositions at the heart of the art world, conceived on the model of an evolving discourse of reasons. Krauss’s and Danto’s fearful intent to abject Botero’s style from the art world transparently posits as the disavowed origin of the history of art a repertoire of familiar and fundamentally unstable cultural distinctions, which Botero’s art threatens to shake up. These include oppositions we have considered before, such as those between the modern and the archaic, between the civilized and its dark, primitive prehistory. Constitutionally bound to these binaries, the art world is forever at risk of regression, destructuration, and decentering in its encounters with idioms that dislocate the hierarchies encoded in these dualities. Danto’s and Krauss’s implicitly racialized critical language subsumes Botero’s work under already given normative oppositions in which these critics are invested as participants in the art world, oppositions whose racializing force they reproduce without critical distance. The relevant dichotomies establish principled analytical barriers that keep art criticism from registering the force of Botero’s art—its comedy, its mockery of power, its taunting of social respectability and imperial politics. Inhibiting, furthermore, the reciprocal flow between the popular, the vanguard, and the high in art, Danto’s and Krauss’s methodologies hinder the symbolic transmissibility at which Botero aspires, which finds clear expression, for example, in his comment to the effect that he is “delighted by the idea that a poor person in Colombia, with no cultural background, should have reproductions of my work in the house” (Escallón 1997, 22). Danto’s and Krauss’s conceptual frameworks, divergent as they are from one another in language and philosophy, obscure the aesthetic complexity of Botero’s oeuvre. Locking the excessive Botero body into prefabricated aesthetic categories, and their coded assurances of differential social propriety, both critics limit what can be heard by way of aesthetic dissent. This amounts to a diminishment of the art world as well as the aesthetics of the ordinary.37 Notwithstanding the discontinuities between Danto’s and Krauss’s critical approaches, their protocols of reading, in each instance, project an overly homogeneous understanding of aesthetic and artistic vocabularies and meanings. Thereby Danto and Krauss position themselves as contemporary inheritors of the racialized aesthetically nationalist modes of address practiced by Shaftesbury, Addison, Hume, Kant, and others in more overtly racialized terms. Their commentaries dampen the relational reverberations of Botero’s work, trim the scope of its address, and pare down the reach of the artist’s, the art’s, and the viewer’s aesthetic agency as well as that of the artistic and popular histories mobilized in the work. Proprietary constructions of the aesthetic do their work at the level of quotidian existence, in the institutions of the art world, and at their intersection. I have investigated forms of seduction and surveillance that press artworks and everyday aesthetic practices into entrenched matrices of race and nation. We have explored cultural strategies that position the art world and everyday aesthetic collectivity as ethnocentrically defined homeland. Because the art world intermeshes with the

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

173

everyday, racialized aesthetic nationalism in the institutions of art reverberates in the structures of quotidian existence and vice versa. Thus, this stance must be contested at multiple, interlocking levels.38 It is then in the name of a vibrant, unattenuated artistic and aesthetic culture that we should examine how proprietary constructions of the aesthetic and their attendant regimes of racial abjection function, how they may be dismantled, and what alternative forms of relationality can take their place. For the philosophy of art this poses the task of inspecting operative modalities of pleasure, violence, power, interpretation, collectivity, historicity, and judgment, in order to adjust conceptual structures that allow artistic norms and boundaries to import or to reinforce insupportable constellations of race and nation. In the realm of the quotidian, racial and nationalist forms of aesthetic address (such as the shopping command) can help to foreclose political inquiry that pushes beyond the impulses of victimhood and market rationality. As constituents of interpretations of art, such modes are capable of weakening the political bite of an oeuvre that condemns instances of US-perpetrated violence. The cases I have considered are not unique to their particular historical moment or to the individual artists, publics, and critics I have discussed; we here run up against pressures of pervasive, unceasingly morphing relational structures that manifest corresponding effects in many other contexts. Racialized aesthetic nationalism shortcuts political existence and truncates cultural life. By freeing patterns of aesthetic relationality, address, and agency from its burdens, we can cherish the critical potency and vitality of those poignant places where the quotidian and the artistic meet.

Time Slice The Botero controversy: History and future directions This segment gives an idea of the broader penumbra of debates surrounding Botero’s oeuvre and sketches further lines of development that might spin off from these discussions. Allusions to the cartoonish, commodified character of Botero’s art appear in many critiques of his work. Glueck (1996) observes that “when you’ve seen two or three Boteros, you’ve seen them all.” Smith (2006) distinguishes Botero’s “usual pneumatic inflatables” from figures in the Abu Ghraib series, in which she takes him to have modified his “daffy style” for the better. Similar themes of prefabrication, repetitiousness, grandiosity, fantasy, and noncontemporaneity feature in T. J. Clark’s remarks on the series (Clark, Laqueur, and Masiello 2007). He charges that Botero wields clichés, caricatures, and ciphers. In his view, the artist depicts fantasy degenerates and generic victims, failing to reveal the particularity of the Abu Ghraib representations and violations. Clark contends that Botero’s images lack engagement with nonnegotiable, contemporary technical and representational demands provoked by modern formlessness and by the current, hypermodern, excess of banal, small-scale, everyday form-giving acts, elements he takes the torturers’ use of handheld Toshiba cameras to exemplify. In this reading—which he describes as provisional—Botero’s work fails to be

174

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

“true to the sordid meaninglessness” of the Abu Ghraib record, reiterating, instead, a monumentalizing, universalizing narrative that obfuscates the political specificity of the torturers’ actions.   The skeptical line on Botero coexists with approaches that bring out critical powers of his visual idioms. Faris describes the cartoon-like, deindividualizing dimensions of Botero’s hyperbolic style in an account that links his voluminous figures with an ironic deflation of power and sees here a basis for his subversion of an inflated center from the periphery (2001, 342–5, 351). She highlights the conjunction of joyful sensuality with critical satire (346) and interprets the parodic intertextuality of Botero’s oeuvre as a decolonizing strategy (348, 359). Baddeley and Fraser (1989, 64–5), likewise, underline the parodic aspect of Botero’s art. Masiello (2007) reads the Abu Ghraib series against the background of broader Latin American discourses on art and violence, art and politics, and art and the masses. In her view, Botero’s canvases present the body as “a point of entry to our sense of the real” (22), using it to speak for violated and effaced human beings throughout the long cultural history his work cites. Thereby Botero, in her analysis, makes a response “to the urgent and venerable plea: habeas corpus” (ibid.). Laqueur (2007), likewise, emphasizes the ethical demand Botero’s paintings extend through their mobilization of the sensing body. In thinking about the Botero body, it is worth noting that its fleshiness extends beyond the limits of the human frame. Visual parallels between human bodies and objects invoke the animate materiality Merleau-Ponty explores through his notion of the flesh (1968, 135–7, 140–8). This mode of corporeality absorbs and engenders a wide span of bodily relationships. In light of Botero’s broader artistic strategies, we can detect in the Abu Ghraib series a quite direct engagement with facets of historically grounded, quotidian practices of aestheticized violence, that is, of violence as a spectacle for dissemination, a phenomenon to be put into circulation through broadly accessible, everyday modes of production and distribution. Not surprisingly, it is in part the body’s materiality in its art-historical echoes and intertextual reverberations that Botero mobilizes to recontextualize this representational routine. Contrary to Clark’s (2007) view that the paintings and drawings on Abu Ghraib ignore the role of contemporary image technologies in the abuse, the artist critically reconceptualizes such techniques of mediatization through his deployment of Baroque tropes of blood. In the terminology of Chapter 5, the series offers a critical reaestheticization of aestheticized ignorance. In sidestepping the dimensions of Botero’s work that surface here, Clark’s and Danto’s readings would appear to aestheticize a form of ignorance. My reading of Botero suggests points of inquiry that, I hope, will steer the debate over his work into new directions. Botero’s body politics warrants further discussion, among other things, on account of the dynamics at play between tranquil beauty, lovable sensuousness, and comical and uncanny registers of the grotesque. Crucial is also the functioning of transmissibility, spatiality, anachronism, limitless intertextuality, caricature, stereotyping, and

Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism

detail in the service of critical modes of transculturation and as elements of the political import of his art. Much urgent work remains to be done on this artist’s radically underexamined oeuvre. Krauss’s and Danto’s somewhat contradictory readiness to interpret Botero’s work as unworthy of interpretation and their readings-without-reading of the artist (pre-Abu Ghraib) as a formulaic populist who lacks genuine artistic standing, demonstrate a reluctance to rigorously engage with his art. This refusal must be seen as a manifestation of racialized aesthetic nationalism if only because it is highly unlikely that these seasoned critics would have disregarded the self-conscious intertextuality of an oeuvre so rapidly in the case of a white artist of European or Anglo-American descent. Baddeley and Fraser (1989, 61) register the differential ethnic standards underlying critical distinctions between derivativeness and a reworking of predecessors’ ideas. In view of Danto’s and Krauss’s caricaturing and stereotyping of Botero’s figures through signifiers of populist aesthetic types (the Macy’s balloons, and so forth), it is worth noting that their encounters with Botero dramatize the question of who is licensed to stereotype across cultural contexts—the critic or the artist? (see Chow 2002, 52–94, esp. 72, 81). Ethnic bifurcations prop up at an additional juncture in Danto’s discussion. He attributes his own understanding of the European Baroque to Rudolph Wittkower (BP, 24), but traces Botero’s awareness of Baroque modes and images to the artist’s knowledge of the Latin American Baroque (ibid.), despite the artist’s elaborate engagement with the European Baroque. Danto thereby projects national boundary lines onto far more complexly layered, transcultured artistic interactions. He pronounces a racially and nationally partitioned conception of the contemporary art world, one that he denies elsewhere (2004, 206 and [implicitly] 208). Botero’s political intervention clearly draws on a rich array of formal and thematic stratagems. While empathy plausibly plays a part in the series’ political workings, Botero’s visual critique exceeds this affective aspect, and his figuration of the human body ultimately calls into question the power of empathy to remedy human suffering. Melancholy pervades his oeuvre. Botero eschews the psychological—his protagonists often look away from the viewer, two eyes gazing in different directions—and his art does not in the first instance operate through emotional proximity to the viewer, although this does indeed arise. Apprehension of the place of affect in his work must recognize that his figures—even if their postures and faces assume expressive qualities—generally exhibit emotional distance from other characters and the spectator. It must take note of the artist’s Baroque deployment of exaggeration and meta-representational artifice (Faris, 347–9, 359). The complex and sharply delineated role affect acquires in this context, of course, neither means that the work does not engender empathy, nor that such empathy is incapable of politicizing people, nor that such reactions (and Danto’s account of them) are powerless to challenge racialized aesthetic nationalism. At the same time, accounts in terms of empathy risk an ultimately self-contained spreading of the self to a place of otherness that forecloses a recognition of otherness

175

176

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

beyond the terms of the self, or of processes of differentiation beyond already established principles of difference. Many have associated pitfalls of this kind with conceptions of empathy, identification, and felt closeness. Young (1997) underscores the impossibility of assuming others’ standpoints in order to imaginatively identify with them. Crosby (1992) describes limitations and circular dimensions of identification and perceived proximity of self to represented characters as aspects of aesthetic response and critical reading. Botero’s art embodies a more intricate aesthetic politics than many art critics have been able to acknowledge. While the Botero controversy points up multiple avenues for further exploration of his art, it no less forcefully encourages us to reconsider certain conceptual structures marking the philosophy of art. Among the topics that require further study are the racial functioning of the distinctions between art and magic, appearance and reality, reality and representation that inform Danto’s account of art’s historical emergence (1981, 76–83). Another topic is the refractory potential of mimesis. Danto’s Botero commentary echoes the “pathetic frills” he encounters in “the effeminate mimesis of the transvestite,” which, in his view, “has no semantic character whatever” (68). The allegedly “pathetic” and “ludicrous” in Botero, the supposed lack of sexiness, and the failure to demand interpretation resonate with Danto’s denial of meanings of disruptive mimesis when practiced as a dimension of queer or transgender performance. What normative and normalizing conceptions of art follow from the sexually wholesome, masculinized mimesis and gender binarism that Danto posits by contrast with transgender or queer pathos? How do such conceptions impact constructions of race and nation in the aesthetic field? Correlatively, might the notion of the disturbatory be suggestive of resources that we can garner in a decolonial approach to modern constructions of race and nation? The debate clearly has only just begun.

8

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

In Pablo Neruda’s elemental odes, aesthetic activities hold out the promise of a culture for and by the people. The cultural promise of the aesthetic, for Neruda, prefigures a form of communal existence that brings persons together in flourishing reciprocal relationships with one another, with things, and with their environments. Picking up on, originating, and provoking modes of address, the odes activate existing schemes of address to devise altered spaces of relational possibility. Neruda uncovers an important aspect of address: modes of address constitute the muscles and joints of aesthetic relationality. The poems alert us to this. In addressing subjects and objects that have previously been addressed by persons and things, and that themselves can be or currently are engaged in addressing people and things, the odes set into motion patterns of relationships harboring these subjects and objects. Galvanizing potentialities of everyday modes of aesthetic address and signaling ways in which quotidian occupations may reverberate across spheres to change material affiliations and chew away at social hierarchies, the poems invite us to join persons, things, animals, and plants, in frames of relationality that, so the odes promise, can bring about an egalitarian and harmonious culture. Yet, the collective web of productive, receptive, interpretive, and interpretable relationships that Neruda embraces and encourages his reader to build threatens to suppress divisions riddling these relationships, by effacing rifts that stand in need of recognition. What do the flaws we detect—or fail to detect—in constellations of aesthetic relationality imply for the cultural promise of the aesthetic? Promises abound in aesthetic territory. Philosophers, artists, and quotidian agents have infused the aesthetic with promises of cultivation, love, intimacy, friendship, freedom, happiness, virtue, truth, sensory pleasure, understanding, emotional sustenance, perceptual agility, community, empathy, critical consciousness, productive labor, political emancipation, entertainment, humor, human perfection, ineffability, distraction, and survival. Voicing a well-known promise of culture, John Dewey takes aesthetic experience to promote the development of civilization, which it, in his account, records, manifests, celebrates, and on the quality of which it pronounces (1934, 326). Theodor W. Adorno views such promises in a more skeptical light (1997,

178

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

136). Stressing the complicity of civilization in forms of barbarism it purports to overcome, he declares that art offers a broken promise of happiness, a promise that, in the act of opening up an outlook onto a better world, ruptures this prospect. Besides often displaying fissures, losing ground, or never quite coming together, promises share aesthetic quarters with menaces. Legion are the aesthetic threats of injustice, commodification, subordination, self-absorption, abandonment, alienation, violence, ideology, illusion, ignorance, falsehood, distaste, displeasure, frivolity, affectation, wastefulness, and superfluidity. That fact noted, what can we make of the promises inherent in aesthetic practice? Clarice Lispector’s novel The Hour of the Star examines enmeshments of aesthetic promises and threats with schemes of aesthetic relationality. Recall that the novella traces the misfortunes of its impoverished protagonist Macabéa, a young inhabitant of Rio’s slums, through the narrative of Rodrigo S. M., a fictional author who is imagined to have written the story. Macabéa survives on hot dogs, coffee, and soft drinks (66). Her inner life she nourishes by way of a borrowed radio—relishing advertisements, the facts of “culture,” and pings ringing on the minute (50). Though Macabéa’s ugliness inspires the author’s love, and interlaces his position as a writer, impelled to tell her story, with her fate as his character, the entwinement of their destinies will not do her any good. On the part of other characters in the story, her plainness prompts abandonment; contrary to this, her friend Glória’s beauty allows some room for social acceptability and upward mobility. The fiction reveals how aesthetic elements saturate Macabéa’s subaltern status in a neocolonial labor and commodity market, and are instrumental in assigning her to the sidelines of an affective economy. The novel investigates categories of race, class, gender, health, happiness, and the human in their aesthetic functioning, while scrutinizing the workings of the aesthetic as a social technology. Lispector dismantles a promise of culture that the aesthetic conveys. This is the pledge, also made by Neruda, that aesthetic activities connect people, and people and objects, in flourishing collective and material bonds. The Hour of the Star stages a collapse of this and other aesthetic promises. What does this breakdown tell us about the promises of the aesthetic?

The promise of the aesthetic in The Hour of the Star Lispector traverses an array of aesthetic promises that she closely interweaves with one another and with schemata of relationality and address. To elucidate the functioning of these promises (and concomitant threats) I will inspect aggregating layers of promising into which she folds the reader. One stratum of aesthetic significance emerges in the contrast between interested and disinterested attention. Around this precarious ridge, the novel crafts multiplying seams of meaning that invite being peeled off. We will unwrap them in search of the cultural promise of the aesthetic, as The Hour of the Star imagines it. Beauty’s connections with national and class advancement render Macabéa’s colleague Glória marriageable, and get Macabéa’s short-term boyfriend Olímpico to fancy Glória on his intended path to a career in politics. He exchanges the

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

179

prospectless girlfriend for the promising one. The resulting entwinement of aesthetic and socioeconomic factors, which plays out within the global marketplace and under conditions of geopolitical inequality—Macabéa hears cargo ships passing by from the docks—challenges beauty’s claim to disinterestedness. The notion of disinterested attention, according to which aesthetic perception distances the realm of prosaic desire and utility, appears to fall short as a conceptualization of beauty because it neglects the links that bind beauty to progress within social and economic rank orders. But the novel does not condone beauty’s alignment with upward mobility or the parallel association between ugliness and marginality. Lispector offers a moral critique of the entanglements of the beautiful with individual and national success by highlighting the violence this aesthetic formation, which classifies ugliness as disposability, inflicts on Macabéa. Embroiled in a narrative competition between the author and a fortuneteller, two contenders who try to absorb the girl into the stories they tell about her, the young woman comes to her end. The Hour of the Star contrasts Glória’s and Olímpico’s pragmatism with moments of perceptual and contemplative euphoria on Macabéa’s part. Its protagonist recurrently engaged in such pleasures, the novel appears to celebrate the cultural promise of the aesthetic and beauty’s promise of happiness. Condemned to physical ugliness and grotesque performance, in other aesthetic registers Macabéa is fully present to the beautiful as is the beautiful to her. She loves sounds—the crowing of a cockerel, the signals of cargo ships, tooting car horns. Among her favorite activities is her habit of listening to words on the radio, dissociated from their referential meanings, which are often unknown to her. When receiving her wages, she customarily visits the cinema or from time to time buys a rose. Alive to sensory detail, she seeks out the smell of meat where the substance itself is unaffordable. The city docks capture her yearning. The sight of a rainbow makes her happy, though it evokes a longing for fireworks. A tree so large she can’t put her arms around it offers her a moment of ecstasy. Barred from aesthetic production, Macabéa performs abundantly in the modalities of consumption and sensibility. Disinterested contemplation appears to reassert its promise. The many small pleasures Macabéa finds in her environment go some way toward repairing the failures she presumably represents at the level of bodily being and aesthetic self-fashioning. The reader wonders what kind of poverty it is, that amounts to such aesthetic resourcefulness. Eliciting the propensity to aestheticize the condition of the subaltern, Macabéa’s aesthetic bliss inaugurates her as the true even if unacknowledged agent of culture. Aesthetic sensations well up generously from her lack. They confer meaning on her sad existence. In this sense, beauty’s promise of happiness attains fulfillment in Macabéa’s case. So does the cultural promise of the aesthetic. Inseparable as Macabéa’s aesthetic perceptions are from the absence of ownership and the impossibility of satisfying her bodily needs, however, they also parody the state of disinterested observation. Where eighteenth-century philosophers stage the contemplative spectator, Lispector installs her impoverished protagonist, whose circumstances for the most part prevent her from obtaining food, sex, things, or love. This substitution points up what dispossession and disinterest have in common. Both presuppose interest and possession as a base line; the absence of desire and of its gratification constitutes the exception to the rule. Yet Macabéa is free from proprietary

180

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

desire, not because she procures the means of realizing her material wishes elsewhere, which then allows her to leave the matter aside, but because such satisfaction does not enter into the realm of possibility. Absent the normalcy of interest as an element that is negated and abstracted from, disinterest becomes a stance of a different order than the mode of attention the eighteenth century was concerned to distill from the pedestrian flow of the subject’s history. Lispector has us ponder what this other kind of disinterest might be. She blocks the inevitable aestheticizing tendency on the part of the reader to idealize Macabéa’s predicament. The aestheticizing reader threatens to be drawn in too readily by the promise. The comical nature and lovability of Macabéa’s joy notwithstanding, her pleasure remains incontrovertibly melancholic. We are not granted an aesthetic justification of poverty. Instead, Lispector offers us questions: What construction of lack are we subscribing to, that finds amelioration in the aesthetic, but is withheld any prospect of future betterment? How disinterested can a person’s aesthetic experience be if her or his aesthetic life is otherwise saturated with interest? And what if this setting is missing, as it is for Macabéa? Does disinterest in this case merge into the interest of a purified passion for the look, smell, touch, sound of things, that is, into an eagerness for sheer appearance? These questions sweep socially settled aesthetic agency up into their field of inquiry. Lispector has us consider the economic underpinnings at the root of the contentments of culturally comfortable reading, viewing, auditing, and eating. Macabéa’s sensory and consumptive elation ironizes the contemplative pleasures disinterested observation bestows on bourgeois proprietorship. The novel satirically cuts short the idealization to which the protagonist’s perceptual delight inescapably prompts the reader. Lispector threatens to deprive the reader of the promise. The Hour of the Star counters the celebration of the promises of happiness and culture extended by beauty and the aesthetic with a skeptical viewpoint that registers solitude, suffering, and marginality. But the narrative does not straightforwardly testify to the political inadequacies of aestheticized happiness and cultivation. Neither does it unqualifiedly reject the promise thereof. Among the novel’s themes are failures of (inter)subjectivity. Macabéa’s life is given over to emptiness; she spends her days in utter tedium, at a remove from others. Lispector asks us to read such subjective and intersubjective voids as products of aesthetic modes of exclusion. We are urged to see the holes gaping in Macabéa’s existence as having been brought on, in part, by configurations of beauty and ugliness that are instrumental in guarding the boundaries of aestheticized communality. The hollowness pervading her life exposes limits attaching to the promise of the aesthetic. Aesthetic experience falls short of the social, individual, ethical, political, and cultural aspirations to which it gestures. The promise of the aesthetic fails to come true in the fiction. That said, the text neither simply proves this promise false. Taking a distance from Rodrigo’s notions of subjective plenitude and nothingness, the novel turns these concepts back onto him. His declaration that “emptiness, too, has its value and somehow resembles abundance” (14), evokes an aestheticizing vision of deprivation and dispensability. Yet, Lispector mocks the seductiveness of such staid and pompous proclamations.1 She pokes fun at the author’s (and the reader’s) figurations of subjectivity. Lispector’s fiction withholds endorsement of the constructions of

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

181

subjective and intersubjective life the author provides in his narrative. Macabéa’s situation thus does not represent a counterexample to the promise. Neither exactly celebrating nor altogether disproving the promise of Macabéa’s semiotic sensibility, the work, so far, suspends this promise. A further move toward the dissolution of the promise arises as follows. The promise of happy acculturation (or: acculturated happiness) tendered by Macabéa’s aesthetic undergoes a sardonic, even if not unusual inversion. This promise is outlined for her by movies and musicals in which women get murdered—Macabéa is a lover of this plot resolution—and by a fortuneteller’s tale, which predicts Macabéa’s encounter with the man of her dreams. The state of happiness and subjective fulfillment these narratives promise the young girl find their realization in the fulfillment of the prophesy of an aestheticized death, administered by the author, whose story has her killed by the man for whom she longs.2 Ironically, at the moment she dies, hit by her man’s car, Macabéa is granted the self-actualization that the author-alias-Lispector, he or she attests in the book’s dedication, has accomplished under the spell of European classical music—in relation to work by Prokovief, Schoenberg, and other composers who “have touched within me the most alarming and unsuspected regions; . . . who have revealed me to myself and made me explode into: me.”3 Macabéa, the author tells us, becomes transformed into herself, and appears to arrive at her own being at the point at which her life is over. Her death does and does not serve to uphold the promise of her aesthetic. On the one hand, her fall onto the pavement, run over by a Mercedes, a paradigm of modern Western technology, prevents her disinterested sensibility from being surrendered to the fortuneteller’s storyline, which offers Macabéa a conventional form of satisfaction that would undercut her disinterested comportment. On the other hand, the author’s rescue mission annihilates his protagonist. As he imagines it, Macabéa does and does not attain her happiness and her subjectivizing interpellation (81, 84–5). He protects the promise of her semiotic aesthetic by putting an end to this promise. In other words, he endeavors to safeguard the possibility of realizing the promise through means that rule out its fulfillment. With the elimination of Macabéa, the author dissolves the promise that was on the verge of destruction. Retroactively converting it into a promise, or perhaps better, a threat of an aestheticized death, which he indeed brings to fruition, he eradicates his, Macabéa’s, and the reader’s outlook on her happy cultural citizenship. It is not only the promise of Macabéa’s aesthetic that comes apart in the novel. The promises of culture emanating from several other aesthetic systems collapse. Read against the circumstances of Macabéa’s desolate existence, the moral and political promise of other people’s favored aesthetic modes goes awry: with the unraveling of the cultural promise of Olímpico’s and Glória’s upwardly mobile aesthetic, the modernizing aspirations of consumer culture reveal their bankruptcy. Unequipped to improve Macabéa’s lot, the author’s and Lispector’s poetics run up against their limits. Lispector forgoes the option of repairing the cultural promise of the aesthetic and beauty’s promise of happiness by elaborating a new aesthetic foundation. She does not extend a fresh promise that holds out the prospect of correcting the failures of the promises the novel has torn down. Instead, The Hour of the Star superimposes a great many aesthetic modes that call one another into question.

182

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Macabéa’s semiotic aesthetic stands in contrast with the realist routines enforced by Glória and Olímpico. It parallels the author’s concern with signs for themselves but deflects his formalist poetics in its affective orientation toward its immediate surroundings. The global marketplace supplies Macabéa with movies and Coca-Cola but excludes her as a producer of taste. Her socially normalized comportment reaching no further than occasionally successful, often hampering efforts at consumption and reproduction, her subaltern aesthetic remains distinct from that of the market. There is more. A toothache pervades the story. Interspersed into the narrative are the sound of a drum and the tune of a violin player. The fortuneteller’s rap and entourage capture Macabéa’s imagination. Besides summoning these aesthetic registers, the novel cites stylistic effects in works by Robert and Clara Schumann, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, and other, mostly European composers who, according to “The Author’s Dedication,” as indicated before, have propelled the author-alias-Lispector into becoming his or her own self. The novel’s crosscutting aesthetic modalities reveal the contingency of each register. Multiple aesthetic systems coexist but their associated forms and meanings do not occupy a joint public space. There is no base level of aesthetic feeling, perception, and desire that underwrites a shared cultural order in relation to which each character and location can be situated. The normativity of the different aesthetic schemes is disrupted; Lispector challenges the powers we have invested in them. The crumbling of the cultural promise of the aesthetic in The Hour of the Star goes hand in hand with the novel’s contestation of structures of aesthetic relationality and address, its arraignment of the ethical and political aspirations of the aesthetic, and its fraying of the public status of aesthetic forms, which can no longer be imagined to congregate in a single forum. The work explores many of the themes taken on by the theorists of beauty I have discussed in Chapter 4. Eating away at constructions of aesthetic liminality and privilege postulated by philosophers such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Burke, and problematizing interconnections between aesthetic and economic value of the sort endorsed by Hume and Smith, among others, the novella challenges conceptual frames through which we comprehend beauty and shape its promise. Lispector’s fiction also points up limitations attaching to Wollstonecraft’s vision of “the beauty of moral loveliness.” This uplifting form of beauty, which, grounded in the mental and the dignified, purportedly casts off oppressive gender implications attendant on other kinds of beauty, simultaneously obfuscates experiential and evaluative dimensions of beauty that carry interpersonal, moral, and political weight. Macabéa’s love of conventionally feminized, racialized, and class-inflected beauty (as exemplified by her love of Marilyn Monroe’s and Greta Garbo’s looks) and the material acts and pleasures she initiates in the margins of socially normative aesthetic paradigms (adorning, for example, her documents with typos, and auditing the pings on the radio) escape Wollstonecraft’s analytical grid.4 Glória’s, Olímpico’s, and Macabéa’s relations to the beautiful, and their aesthetically mediated relations with one another call for a view of beauty, that, unlike Wollstonecraft’s, acknowledges the ways in which our desires and distastes for material and bodily appearances, as well as the norms embedded in these attitudes, participate in and resist templates of social discipline and consumption.

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

183

The Hour of the Star eviscerates the ethical and political promises delivered by several aesthetic systems. What is the novel’s answer to the disintegration of these promises? Does Lispector announce the triumph of aesthetic amoralism? Do the aesthetic forces of normative sociality as exemplified by Glória, Olímpico, and Rodrigo carry the day? A further look at the novel’s notion of hegemonic culture reveals a different perspective. The narrative destabilizes the social arrangement it describes. This system never securely bans the novel’s impoverished protagonist. Macabéa, Rodrigo tells us, passes through time obscurely, in slow motion (34), even if in the auditory modality she reaches supersonic speeds (62). Denied a future, her life observes aesthetic scales that exceed the measures of normatively aestheticized order. She participates in this order, enjoying the passage of time (62) and imbibing the facts of culture she gathers from the radio (37, 50). But her own heart beats to a different rhythm—she is “ancient” (30); her laughter belongs to the past (32); her dreams seem to be set in a remote age (60). Unable to procure cultural citizenship, Macabéa’s distinctive state of unreality and nonhumanity nonetheless fails to locate her stably outside the quotidian. For normatively aestheticized temporality, the author indicates, knows no beginning (11), and presumably no ending either—the novel “ends” the same way it “begins,” with a “yes” (86). In the temporal register, the work deconstructs the inside-outside opposition dividing normative sociality from subalternity. Any residual sense of normalcy exuded by the characters’ aestheticized social comportment and the author’s literary narration is further destroyed by enigmatically recurring sounds of a drum and a fiddle. Lispector both articulates and rescinds Macabéa’s abandonment from the domain of proper culture and society’s symbolic underpinnings. The novel disputes devices of cultural organization analogous to the stratagems by means of which Burke reigns in normative, aestheticized sociality (see pp. 99–101 of this book). For Burke, the beautiful and the sublime are instrumental in moving white men and women of the upper/middle classes to ground an adequate social order in the heterosexual couple. Burke wraps in silence the banishment of a black woman from his proposed aesthetic framework. It is precisely in view of exclusionist gestures of the sort evinced by Burke that Lispector highlights the tenuousness of aesthetic culture building and expulsion. The Hour of the Star explores discursive and economic strategies that patrol the borders of the aesthetic community. The move to outcast Macabéa fails to mark the boundaries of an aesthetic culture that this act of abandonment purports to delineate. Undercutting aesthetically supported racial, class-inflected, and gendered parameters of Macabéa’s exclusion, Lispector unsettles the foundation of an aesthetic regime that sets a category of human beings apart from the social order. She takes us to a field of cultural practice where our aesthetic bearings become uncertain—thrown off balance as they are in confrontation with an array of divergent aesthetic frames. We encounter here not only the remnants of dissipated promises but also an invitation to formulate new ones. The novel calls on the reader to transform structures of aesthetic relationality. This entreaty garners support from several corners. Our initial encounter with Macabéa in Chapter 4 underscored the novel’s unmooring of a vocabulary of beauty and ugliness, and brought out how the fiction spells a cloud over aesthetically saturated relationships—two moves by means of which the story seeks to divert us

184

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

from established relational arrangements.5 Coming upon Macabéa a second time discloses the part played by Lispector’s withdrawal of aesthetic promises and by her dismantlement of the notion of aesthetic culture. It is through the confluence of these strategies that the novel summons the reader to devise alternative models of aesthetic relationality. Calling forth, interweaving, and distancing diverse meanings that historically have accrued to the beautiful, the novella indicts the modes of address and relationship that beauty has served to orchestrate from a stance located within these formations. Lispector internally dislodges this position.6 She suspends the hold this perspective has on a language of beauty and on a public aesthetic form. She presents this standpoint as a site of paradox for key players whom she grants an ambiguous place in the novel’s structure of aesthetic relationships: for herself, who supposedly did and didn’t write the book; for the author, who is controlled by his character and her narrative as he controls them; for the reader who is left in doubt as to where the fiction, created by whom, starts and ends; and for Macabéa, whose semiotic powers simultaneously operate at superslow and superfast speeds, below and beyond the horizons of culture. Oscillating between these not quite compatible, unstable polarities, the novel calls for alternative configurations of aesthetic subjectivity, embodiment, and address, and challenges us to rethink aesthetic relationships. The Hour of the Star portrays the demise of the promises of culture embodied by a wide range of aesthetic systems. This undoing, however, is not the end of the novel’s involvement with cultural promises. Whereas Lispector avoids furnishing an aesthetic that promises to fix the social affliction explored by the text, she has written a novel, which, presumably, we are intended to read. A literary critique can only leave its mark if a public takes it up, something of which the author-character is fully aware. The fiction does not simply order a reading from a public or command the reader’s politicization, but promises potential audiences that something good can come of the process of engaging the narrative. Absent such a promise, it is unclear how a reader could be moved to peruse the work. As it attracts a public to its pages, the text implicitly promises that our reading it will turn out to be a valuable activity. In exuding this promise, the fiction relies on promises of the aesthetic that are already in effect for its genre—such as the idea that a work of literature traces an arc of suspense, inspires verbal pleasure, makes available unheard-of insights, and offers us fictional personae with whom we can fall in love. Drawing on these kinds of promises, the work creates a space in which we can rewrite the promises emanating from certain kinds of art, incited by our involvement with this particular novel. Lispector eschews placing herself, the author, or the reader in the position of the correct moral agent, who entertains the right perspective on the aesthetic politics of poverty. In its address to and from culpable and fallible subjects, The Hour of the Star delineates an ethical void that opens up a site in which writers and readers can collaboratively shape a cultural promise for the work and for the aesthetic more broadly. The promise that reading the story will amount to a worthwhile occupation arises as an aspect of the modes of address The Hour of the Star directs at its audience in the text’s capacity as a work of literature. This promise yields a starting point for further

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

185

acts of aesthetic promising. In cooperation with already existing literary promises, the fiction initiates a process in the course of which the promise of valuable reading can develop into a promise of culture. The elaboration of this latter promise is not solely the work’s doing but rests fundamentally on the response that the narrative, as an ingredient of an already existing aesthetic culture, mobilizes on the part of a public. The cultural promise of the aesthetic, and, more narrowly, that of the particular aesthetic production that is The Hour of the Star, recruits the agency of the reader to bring about its emergence, alongside a vast set of contingent cultural conditions of possibility. Lispector’s author observes a chasm that constrains the grounds for constructing such a promise. He notes: “The upper classes consider me a strange creature, the middle classes regard me with suspicion, afraid that I might unsettle them, while the lower classes avoid me” (18). In short, he declares his text devoid of power. Social change is beyond his sphere of influence; he deems it unlikely that transformations will ensue from the reader’s side of the story. Without taking this testimony of alienation at face value, in the reservations it expresses about the resonance of his writing we encounter another manifestation of the cultural promise of the aesthetic, even if incipiently and rudimentarily. Rodrigo’s comment prods us to ask: How can we interrupt the social strictures hindering the uptake of the analysis, critique, and appeal articulated by the fiction? What might we make of the text’s promise in the hypothetical situation that we succeed at overcoming these impediments? What does the text’s promise consist of, and to what extent can it be fulfilled, if it so happens that we cannot really break these barriers? In view of the ruination the narrative has brought onto numerous aesthetic promises, the further question arises: What alternative terms might be available for the formulation of cultural promises for the aesthetic? What would it be for Lispector’s fiction, for us, and for the aesthetic to make true on such promises of culture? The novel invites us to consider what these promissory possibilities look like and to take up the moral and political project of endeavoring, one way or another, to realize them. Disassembling the cultural promise of the aesthetic into multiple promises, The Hour of the Star documents its and their failings. At the same time, the text incites us to progressively build upon its nascent promise of a valuable reading process, to shape a new promise for the work, and, more generally, to gather in the remains of discarded aesthetic promises materials for manufacturing novel ones. We encounter here several kinds of more and less trustworthy promises, including the promise that the production and consumption of cultural artifacts of particular genres constitutes a good thing, that beauty gives rise to happiness, that aesthetic practices engage us in flourishing intersubjective and material bonds, that a particular artwork or aesthetic object and the experience thereof make a cultural contribution. In the space between and beyond these promises many other promises can and do take root. Countless aesthetic promises infuse our lives. Many more, and very different ones are open to being generated. What, then, is the significance of aesthetic promises, and in particular that of cultural promises of the aesthetic? Such promises connect an artwork’s ethical, political, social, and aesthetic comportment with that of other artworks and with the agency of the observer. They mediate a work’s cultural import and critique. They are part and parcel of aesthetic meaning making. Promising is able to survive significant failures of the

186

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

relational formations it suffuses. The flaws of aesthetic relationships do not demolish the promise. Paving a way through compromised webs of relationships and nullified promises, we can come across unknown kernels and techniques of promising that incite us to fabricate promises that are yet to be made. How do such promises work? How are we to read their ambivalent attractions? Lispector tightly entwines the fiction’s relational interventions with its treatment of the promise. I next turn to Adorno, who, like Lispector, indicts structures of aesthetic relationality, and looks to the promise to make a reply to the difficulties of such constellations.

Adorno and the promise of art Contesting the putative legitimization of violence in the name of instrumental reason under capitalist modernity, Theodor W. Adorno situates the promise at the heart of an alternative organization of aesthetic relationships. I will first examine the role of the promise in his Aesthetic Theory, and then bring out the place he grants it in the system of aesthetic relationality he envisages. Adorno’s detailed discussion of the promise underscores the significance the device enjoys in organizing aesthetic meaning. My aim, in examining his use of the concept, is not to fully analyze his view of the matter, nor to exhaustively specify what aesthetic promising amounts to, but to bring out certain crucial, fine-grained operations that we can illuminatingly attribute to the phenomenon and to show how these functions can be found at work in several contemporary artistic instances. Thereby I take steps to clarify the promising nature of the promise for aesthetics. Raising the problem of how, in the face of injustice, art can be critical of society, direct us toward a better world, and constitute a source of truth, Adorno forges a middle ground between the Freudian belief that art satisfies a need for wish fulfillment and embodies socially repressed contents and the Kantian tenet that it sets aside desire to make place for disinterested contemplation (1997, 11, 18–19, 131, 133). In Adorno’s theory, art and especially its central element, artistic form, that is, form which bears the imprint of society, is the most crucial, potent, and least cooptable source of social critique, aspiration, and truth we have. This power he locates not in art’s direct “pronouncement of moral theses or the striving after moral effects” but in the dialectic of its forms, which reflect social antinomies that authentic artworks hold in tension (6, 232). Art’s relation to society is one of refraction (4–5). By this he means that art absorbs social elements and simultaneously negates or distances them, refusing the integration that is forced upon such empirical materials by a reified process of progressive instrumental rationalization. For Adorno, it is in virtue of art’s double character—it’s being both a fait social and a practice that is autonomous from society—that art can achieve a field of freedom from ideology, ossified categorization, and administered life that is otherwise unattainable (5). Although all artworks, like everything else, are socially culpable (234), they constitute an indispensable source of hope, our most important hope, according to Adorno. He speaks in this light of the appearance of the “affirmative ineffabile” (233).

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

187

Art promises a better possible world that is not yet real, and thereby keeps it alive, as promised: “[The] claim [of the nonexisting] to existence flickers out in aesthetic semblance; yet what does not exist, by appearing, is promised. The constellation of the existing and nonexisting is the utopic figure of art” (ibid.). What does this utopian promise entail? Adorno distinguishes art’s promissory comportment from the subject’s grasp of themes. The promise brings into view a better future. Yet it does not do this by conceptually specifying the good. Authentic artworks avoid proffering a vision of a moral state of affairs that is liable to identificatory classification. They also eschew conjuring up the not-yet-existing within bodily reach, as registered in the following proviso: “Although the nonexisting emerges suddenly in artworks, they do not lay hold of it bodily as with the pass of a magic wand” (83). Echoing this reservation, Adorno locates art’s utopian comportment, instead, in the artwork’s formal reorganization of empirical contents: “[The abundance inherent in artworks] promises what reality denies, but as an element subordinate to the law of form, not as a treasure that the work holds in its hands ready for the taking” (191). Indeed, for Adorno, the promise resides in what he understands as the work’s objective spiritual, or, in other words, rational character.7 As he describes it by reference to Hegel’s philosophy of art: By its form alone art promises what is not; it registers objectively, however refractedly, the claim that because the nonexistent appears it must indeed be possible. . . . Idealist aesthetics fails by its inability to do justice to art’s promesse du bonheur. It reduces the artwork to what it in theoretical terms symbolizes and thus trespasses against the spirit in that artwork. What spirit promises, not the sensual pleasure of the observers, is the locus of the sensual element in art. (82)

Art offers the subject a formally mediated type of sensation that directs us toward an alternative society, but does not lay out a view of it (14–15, 135). Through the figure of the promise, Adorno recognizes the dynamism of aesthetic desire as well as art’s distance from reality. This balance between Freudian and Kantian perspectives arises as follows. The promise locks into our desires, as acknowledged by Freud: “The unstillable longing in the face of beauty, for which Plato found words fresh with its first experience, is the longing for the fulfillment of what was promised” (82). Beauty’s promise of happiness enflames the desires of the observer, and intensely and abidingly so. Our longing is endless because beauty leaves it unfulfilled. The desires beauty elicits are unsatisfiable. This Platonic postponement of gratification—in the course of our embodied lives, we will never be able to reach the Forms of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—nudges Kant up against Freud: what is promised is deferred. Under the status quo, in Adorno’s view, the promising of happiness mandates an ascetic distancing of happiness, or, as required by Kant, a detachment from immediate desire (10). Adorno’s reason for this is that happiness is unattainable within the system of exchange and labor implemented by late capitalism and Enlightenment rationality in the global North. Accordingly, the artwork must reject celebration and consolation (82). Desire tout court unguardedly reflects reified consciousness. Equally defenseless, desire prohibited, which finds expression in the excitement that gleams through the

188

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

taboo against interest, folds back into the administered system of exchange (10–11), a difficulty unforeseen by Kant: “disinterestedness immanently reproduces—and transforms—interest” (13). Adorno’s reply to this problem is to give interest a place in relation to its renunciation by way of the prolepsis effected by the promise. Genuine art abjures “happy brilliance;” it declines “to play along” (12, 130). Spun around in Adorno’s dialectic, art’s rejection of happiness is precisely what imbues the work with iridescence, and allows it to compose an allegorical image of a happiness that does not exist (130, 233). Art’s negativity then proleptically gestures toward a possible happiness that is yet to be realized. It inaugurates a form of desire that breaks away from the fungibility of commodified existence: “In the false world all ἡδονή is false. For the sake of happiness, happiness is renounced. It is thus that desire survives in art” (13). Art’s dialectic does not only liberate aesthetic desire from the managed social order but also necessitates alterations in the notion of interest handed down by Kant. Interest, as tied to its repudiation, in Adorno’s account, involves a practical refusal to conform to “the rule of brutal self-preservation” and takes as its object a more worthy social praxis (12, 228). Premised on negation, the happiness to which art guides us is otherworldly. As Adorno notes, “Art’s promesse du bonheur means not only that hitherto praxis has blocked happiness but that happiness is beyond praxis” (12). In virtue of its anticipatory orientation, the promise situates utopia and happiness elsewhere, in a coming society.8 Yet the forms and materials of genuine art are grounded in the reality they transcend, as posited by Adorno’s view of art’s double nature, which renders autonomy and heteronomy co-constitutive. Withdrawing from actual society while incorporating reality’s “membra disjecta” in its own organization, art presents a “negative appearance of utopia” (130). We encounter here the affirmative ineffable, mentioned before, “the emergence of the nonexisting as if it did exist” (233). Artworks designate a possible world by negating the actual phenomena they internalize in their own form. The affirmative glow of negativity surrounds also art’s relation to sensation. Adorno contends that it is “by virtue of their spiritualization” that artworks “promise a blocked or denied sensuality” (81). The promise fulfills a prominent role as a component of the artwork, on Adorno’s theory. A condition of possibility for art’s critical and utopian character, it underwrites the ethical and political import of the work. The promise performs this task not merely as an element of art’s metaphysical armature, but also by embodying the work’s ethics and politics in the audience’s aesthetic experience. A striking and neglected aspect of Adorno’s view is that the promise frames aesthetic experience. By comparing the promise to various aesthetic forms and gestures, Adorno suggests that it introduces the work to the observer, and shapes the public’s subsequent reception of the work. By their negativity, even as total negation, artworks make a promise, just as the gesture with which narratives once began or the initial sound struck on a sitar promised what was yet to be heard, yet to be seen, even if it was the most fearsome; and the cover of every book between which the eye loses itself in the text is related to the promise of the camera obscura. The paradox of all modern art is that it

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

189

seeks to achieve this by casting it away just as the opening of Proust’s Recherche ingeniously slips into the book without the whirring of the camera obscura, the peepshow perspective of the omniscient narrator, renouncing the magic of the act and thereby realizing it in the only way possible. (135)

Bringing the observer into and guiding her through the work, art’s promise indirectly reproduces the magic and wonder evoked by so-called archaic forms of cultural production. It does so furtively, aided by the darkness of the via negativa. The examples of the book cover and the three opening moments indicate that the promise encompasses all elements of the artwork, including the work’s beginning (if it has one) which first issues the promise to the reader, listener, or spectator. Adorno renders the promise inherent in the full range of artistic details that comprise a work’s truth content, as implied by the following statement: “There is no artwork that does not promise that its truth content, to the extent that it appears in the artwork as something existing, realizes itself and leaves the artwork behind simply as a husk” (132). This remark makes it plausible that the promise envelops the work in its integrity since the pledge presumably covers the whole truth content (whether ensconced in or divorced from its “husk”).9 Qualities such as the “luster,” “radiance,” and “iridescence,” to which artworks give rise on account of their negativity likewise point to the encircling embrace with which the promise surrounds the work (82, 233). The promise in this regard approximates Benjamin’s notion of the aura.10 It is worth emphasizing at this point that the promise cannot be equated with the lure of beautiful semblance. Its logic is that of a dialectical relationship to beauty, as spelled out above. This dialectic has a further component we have not yet considered: the promise exhibits a fine-grained historical relationality owing to its formal basis, its immanence in the element of artistic form. The form of an artwork, for Adorno, bears the stamp of preceding cultural forms (5–7, 80–2). The ensuing historicity also sustains the promise. Adorno’s example of this is the promise of the book cover, which, he notes, stands in relation to that of the camera obscura (qtd. above). A more recent case is Gabriel Orozco’s sculpture La DS, 1993. This compressed Citroën, laterally cut down to about two thirds its size, and clearly nonoperational, embodies “the promise of speed” of an intact, working Citroën, as stated in the work’s display tag during a recent exhibit.11 The sculpture conveys this impression by invoking familiar designs that render certain rounded, flowing forms legible and liable to experience in terms of velocity. For its current, humorous promise, La DS is indebted to the promise of a wellknown, even if now obsolete—perhaps invitingly retro—image repertoire. Artworks mobilize traditionally established promises as materials from which to build their own. The resulting string of promises that feed into one another secures the intertextual grounding of the promise and institutes a dimension of art’s historicity. Threats are also links in the rapidly multiplying circuits of promises to which Adorno implicitly alerts us. The Déesse Roland Barthes describes in the section of his Mythologies, “The New Citroën,” in his analysis articulates the promise that the magical aesthetic put-togetherness of the industrialized, commercial world amounts to the manifestation of a benign natural order.12 In producing the promise of speed in spite of his D.S.’s decimation, Orozco may be reinforcing this promise, which inexplicably

190

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Figure 8.1  Gabriel Orozco, La DS, 1993. Modified Citroën DS. 140.1 x 482.5 x 115.1 cm (55–3/16” x 15’9–15/16” x 45–5/16”). Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

appears to survive even the vehicle’s disassembly. A more uncanny possibility is that the shrunk Citroën reveals the mythical indestructibility of the promise excavated by Barthes, articulating the threat that the promise of naturalized artifactuality, indifferent to disassembly, cannot ever be destroyed, through no act of elimination. This promise would appear to rule us, rather than permitting our artfulness to manipulate it. With an implicit nod to Barthes, the downsized car may be showing us that the old promise of an artifactual order sanctioned by nature actually hid a threat—the threat of ideology, as exemplified by the moment at which a cultural construction assumes the appearance of a natural given. If Orozco’s D.S. exposes this paradigmatic ideological threat or announces the intractable force of this threat, the object may be attaching new promises to our ability to finally let go of the promise of natural cultivation, and to the prospect of averting the threat of ideology the old promise masked. Other artistic utilizations of cutting machinery offer clarification with respect to the tangle of promises and threats we enter at this point. As I have discussed it so far, Orozco’s surgical procedure is quite unlike the more deflationary incisions Gordon Matta-Clark has administered to various architectural edifices, as in his 1974 Splitting and his 1977 Office Baroque. Contrary to Orozco, Matta-Clark foregrounds the rupturing of existing structures, rather than the attainment of an unfragmented whole. His slits and gashes retain the threat of laceration, even if he never altogether writes off the possibility of a revised unity that is more enthralling than the original one. MattaClark superimposes threats and promises in a capacious, heterogeneous organization that radiates beauty alongside destruction. Threats of cuts extend promises of new forms; further threats can take root in these promises. Orozco’s method also distinguishes itself from Damián Ortega’s monumental array of orderly detached, spaced out, and suspended 1989 Volkswagen Beetle components, Cosmic Thing, 2002. Unlike La DS, Ortega’s installation offers the riveting nostalgic

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

191

Figure 8.2  Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974. Silver dye bleach print (Cibachrome), 75.9 x 101.3 cm (29 7/8 x 39 7/8’’). © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Estate and David Zwirner, New York/London.

Figure 8.3  Gordon Matta-Clark, Office Baroque, 1977. Photo Florent Bex. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp. © The Estate of Gordon MattaClark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp.

192

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Figure 8.4  Damián Ortega, Cosmic Thing, 2002. Stainless steel, wire, 1989 Beetle and plexiglass. Variable dimensions. © Damián Ortega.

promise of a restorative reassembly, more promissory than the intact or mended object ever could have been. The Beetle’s empty spaces call out for our artistry, like a prefabricated children’s drawing that you can expect to materialize in full once you connect the dots. The joyful hope of successful engineering galvanizes the experience of seeing the tidy line-up of each part—nothing missing—perfectly adjusted to one another. Cosmic Thing complicates the promise of orderly design by lining the promise of the repaired object with the risk of our getting lost in or swallowed by the gaps. A profusion of smaller and larger negative spaces threatens to take over the place where we might wish to bring into being an integral object, perforating the work’s prospect of productive mechanical agency. Promises lock into threats. These two slashers and the gaps they mete out go to show that we have yet to reckon with the fact that Orozco effaces the fracture left by the amputated cross-section and undisturbedly solders together the discontinuous, severed parts as if nothing whatsoever has happened. The extraction belies promises of speed and natural puttogetherness; yet these promises stand. This situation gives rise to two threats I have already discussed, that of the promises’ mystical indestructibility and that of ideology. Other threats spring up as well, such as those of our credulousness, of the conversion of trusted promises into untrustworthy ones, and of the cover-up of such conversions. This unearthing of threats, however, can be promising in turn; the disclosure of our

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

193

perilous fallibility may expose the absurdity of the initial promises and may promise us that we will succeed at finding a way to shake off the promise of naturalized artifactuality, which would also imply dodging the threat entailed by that promise. Orozco squarely confronts the observer with threats that sprout from promises and with promises that germinate in threats. Founded in threats, the latter promises then engender further threats, such as the threat of overconfidence in our powers of critical consciousness. Many additional permutations of threats and promises arise in the case of all three artists. To return to Adorno, and putting together the potentially artistically integral character of the promise, its foundation in prior cultural forms, and its role as an enabling medium for artistic critique and utopianism, we can say that the promise, for him, delineates a formal and experiential frame within which an artwork’s ethical and political meanings can unfold for the reader, listener, or viewer. On this proposal, the promise is bound to the countless artistic details of the work from which it emanates, and to which the observer can give herself over in pursuit of her aesthetic longings. Such surrender, however, constitutes an acte gratuit for Adorno. It is not under the artwork’s control to make the promise come true (1997, 133). In his view, “nothing guarantees that [art] will keep its objective promise” (83). Absent the assurance of fulfillment, the artwork remains unyielding in the face of the subject’s calculated investment. This plunges the observer into an irresolvable plight: “Whether the promise is a deception—that is the enigma” (127). Withholding warrant as to the truth of the promise, the artwork shrouds its announced utopia in uncertainty. At the same time, art circumscribes a placeholder for a bond, a site that, left empty and deferred to the not-yet-existing future proclaimed by the promise, extends a form of authorization to the public. In explicitly fiduciary terms, Adorno declares that “[a]rtworks draw credit from a praxis that has yet to begin and no one knows whether anything backs their letters of credit” (83). The subject who puts faith in art’s promise enters a wager, rather than a conventionally endorsed, reliable contract, a socially sanctioned agreement that accords life predictability, as hypothesized by Nietzsche’s and Hannah Arendt’s accounts of promising.13 So far, Adorno places the art public in the hands of a promise that can be broken. Yet, disrupting the subject’s aesthetic habitus perhaps more alarmingly, the promise has always already been broken—it detonates in the very same gesture with which it is made. The reason for this is that the promise cannot come true in the present world order. As Adorno elucidates, “Because all happiness found in the status quo is an ersatz and false, art must break its promise in order to stay true to it” (311). The artwork’s truthfulness to its promise distinguishes art from the culture industry. Contrary to genuine art, popular culture, which “plans for and exploits the need for happiness” it creates in the masses, delivers the promise of happiness “in its immediate, material form” (ibid.). Deceived by this arrangement and oblivious to the negative dialectic of aesthetic utopianism, the general population stocks its cravings in counterfeit promises. But the day-to-day consolations of administered pseudo-happiness are precisely what art shakes off, in Adorno’s analysis. Brushing aside aesthetic practices that might detract from art’s more ambitious aspirations, he reminds us that “Stendhal’s dictum of art as the promesse du bonheur implies that art does its part for existence by accentuating

194

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

what in it prefigures utopia.”14 As he inscribes negativity in the gestural modality and the rhetorical purview of the promise of happiness, which affirms for a possible future what it denies the present, Adorno seals the compromise he has wrought between Kant, Hegel, Plato, and Freud: “Aesthetic experience is that of something that spirit may find neither in the world nor in itself; it is possibility promised by its impossibility. Art is the ever broken promise of happiness” (135–6). Broken as it is, the promise nevertheless transmits a plea and a pledge. Art obliquely testifies to what ails the world. It impresses on the public an ethico-political claim that stems from reality’s ordinarily unacknowledged defective nature and the possibility of a less corrupt world.15 This claim art conveys in the form of an appeal: redrawing “the figure of neediness” imprinted in reality, the artwork announces that “what is in need summons its fulfillment and change” (132).16 The need for which art speaks, Adorno insists, has not been integrated into the social edifice, which, in his account, would render it false. Indeed, it has been repressed by the reigning order (18–19). The artwork, accordingly, petitions us to repair the denied lacks of a flawed world. While art itself is unequipped to fix society’s abominations or to satisfy the delegitimized wants that reified existence feigns to have resolved, it calls on its public to mend the failings it uncovers in the world through the creation of a more adequate social order.17 To this entreaty the promise provides a response. It replies with the enigmatic answer that the better society wanted by art and reality may indeed be possible, as foreshadowed by the as-of-yet-undeciphered constellation in which the work situates displaced empirical elements. The proviso thereby is that this possibility cannot be actualized during our lifetimes, that is, within lives that are intelligible and inhabitable in present-day terms. As the artwork issues this conditional avowal, the promise fuels the hope for a less troubled world with whatever assurance we can derive from a potentially creditworthy option that lacks guarantees. The figure of the broken promise enables Adorno to recognize our, art’s, and the world’s complicity in devastation (234), while simultaneously claiming the ethical stature and the political significance of art. As a dialectical process, artistic practice, in his view, establishes a place for morality amidst the structural violence unleashed by capitalist commodification and Enlightenment thought. He finds this violence epitomized in the mass eradication effected under the National-Socialist regime as well as in repressions and contortions aligning quotidian existence with a Taylorized system of labor and an instrumental calculus of exchange. Cultural productions participate in these troubled institutional arrangements. The spheres of practice that have promised liberation in actuality have become instruments of oppression. Rethinking art’s relations with subjectivity and society, the trope of the broken promise enables Adorno to outline a mode of meaning production and experience that allows art to side with the good, even if—and partly because—an uncompromised break with the bad remains out of reach. Adorno confronts the ambivalence of aesthetic subjectivity and relationality head-on. He challenges the complicity of cultural formations in social violence. He identifies forms of aesthetic practice that outrun the pull of the unethical, leaping for justice. His theory stresses the importance of the subject’s relation to the artwork (13–14), and of art’s relation with society, relations that he expounds in terms of an

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

195

entwinement of negativity and affirmation, distance and desire. Noting that available aesthetic models have disregarded or misconstrued these relations, he makes them a centerpiece of his conception of art’s critical power and of culture’s capacity to extricate itself from the barbarism that, in his assessment, indelibly marks cultural life in the modern era. Adorno gives us a large-scale framework for understanding the place of the aesthetic in culture and its ties to ethics and politics. At the same time, his theory passes over complexities incurred by structures of aesthetic relationality that surround cultural productions in the concrete cultural contexts we are disposed to activate for them. In lieu of the socially positioned, embodied agent, Adorno reinstates the general subject of Enlightenment aesthetics as the vantage point for aesthetically produced social change at the moment at which he articulates a promise of culture for art: art, in his conviction, anticipates “the eruption of the subject’s collective essence” (131). Artistic steps toward social emancipation take place in the name of “a collective subject that has yet to be realized” (231). Adorno’s theory of the ethics and politics of aesthetic relationality leaves a problematic hole owing to the crucial gap it institutes between the deferred utopian reality from which he takes artistic practices to derive their ethical validation, and the systemic cultural forces that circumscribe empirical formations of aesthetic experience and exchange.18 Lispector and Adorno use the promise to negotiate moral and political problems of structures of aesthetic relationality. Both writers turn to this device to describe a movement from impossibility toward possibility. The trajectory they trace is an element of the broader dialectical roamings of the promise, whereby aesthetic promises rely for their content and significance on already existing (and, we can add, future) promises. I have argued that The Hour of the Star invokes an array of institutionalized aesthetic promises, which it denounces. Articulating, in addition to this, a promise of its own— the rudimentary promise that reading the book will be worthwhile—the novel invites us to respond to its razing of given promises with the project of building new promises. On this account, the work is suggestive of an expansive dialectic of promising. This includes acts of absorption, assimilation, rejection, rewriting, substitution. The list of ways in which promises can pick up on one another is endless. The Hour of the Star and Aesthetic Theory designate the promise as a locus of the historicity and the intertextuality of art. Sequences of interlinking promises bind artworks to other cultural productions, forms, and materials. The view that arises here places our engagement with aesthetic promises at the center of processes of aesthetic interpretation. Promises constitute points of contact between artworks and audiences and among multiple audiences and diverse artworks. Directing us to and through artworks and other cultural productions, as my reading of Lispector and Adorno has suggested, the promise serves as an instrument for organizing aesthetic relationality and experience. Aesthetic promises remain under production while they make their effects. We build and change aesthetic promises while we put them to work.19 They are vehicles for shaping aesthetic agency. What does a view of the aesthetic look like that founds aesthetic subjectivity and intersubjectivity on promises? In the practice of promising, Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt locate a central node in which individuality can be seen to take shape as

196

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

a social phenomenon, and the social body emerges in the production of the individual. These philosophers bring out linkages connecting the promise to varieties of subjective and cultural organization as well as to types of improvisatory or chaotic freedom from control. Their accounts of this mode of address enable us to chart certain large-scale cultural procedures subtending more specific instances of aesthetic promising that we have found at work in this book. More specifically, these views can assist us in forging a frame for understanding the operations of lineages of threats and promises that, as aesthetic agents, we assemble in the course of our aesthetic activities. With these aims in mind, I turn to Nietzsche’s and Arendt’s analyses of promising.

Nietzsche on keeping and changing promises Nietzsche famously ties the ritual of promising to the establishment of social order. In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, he notes that promising presupposes humans who have made themselves calculable and regular to themselves and one another (1989, 58). The noble individual who keeps his promise, in that act, displays an exemplary mastery over his circumstances. This person demonstrates the ability to control his will, regardless of what is going to happen during the interval that separates the making from the keeping of the pledge. His determination to follow through on his intention manifests a strong, free, and secure stance at the center of his own world, a world that he inhabits as an autonomous, emancipated, even if disciplined being. According to Nietzsche, the realization of an unshakeable, long-ranging will testifies to a proud self-valorization. A recipient of the privilege to undertake responsibility, the promise keeper inspires trust, fear, and reverence in other people. He imposes a kind of order on himself and the world.20 Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis attributes the origin of the capacity and right to make promises to the enforcement of contractual agreements through a standardized system of punishment. The legislation of obligations and entitlements arose with the need to regulate the relation between creditor and debtor so as to uphold the practice of “buying, selling, barter, trade, and traffic” (63). His mnemonic faculty violently burnt into him as instinct, that is, equipped with a conscience, the promiser is now in a position to “stand security for his own future” (58). Nietzsche’s historical reading considers promising simultaneously a source and a product of a subjective and societal form of order. An altogether different cultural order, however, is anticipated by the prospect of the noble individual himself, the exemplary human being of the future. The noble, we are told, represents a great promise. He embodies this promise not by making himself accountable to others—he is not bound by contracts; responsibility is not his province—but in virtue of his sovereign power, his self-sufficient magnanimity, his freely overflowing life force (87). The logic of the promise he thereby holds out is antithetical to the contractual-commercial arrangement exposed by Nietzsche’s genealogical reading. It accords with the changing nature of social conventions, which the essay describes as follows:

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

197

the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous “meaning” and “purpose” are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. . . . [T]he entire history of a “thing,” an organ, a custom, can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion. (77)

The order hypothesized by this conception of social practices is one in which cultural forms, as Nietzsche puts it, are “fluid” (78), or, in other words, exemplify processes of becoming. In this view, meanings atrophy, degenerate, vanish, multiply, incorporate unexpected elements, and are supplanted by new meanings. Placed in altered contexts, they align themselves with unforeseen functions. Their components arise in shifting constellations. Parts have their prominence redistributed, or get more densely entangled. Propelled by ongoing acts of interpretation and reinterpretation, meaning takes off in unpredictable directions (78–80). Within Nietzsche’s metaphysics of becoming, therefore, the custom of promising encompasses a principle of self-differentiation that renders the forms it engenders dependent on reading and circumstance. The same would then seem to go for the promise instantiated by the figure of the noble, and for the promise this person utters when, projecting his will into the future, he commits to doing what he declares he will do. Rather than issue in awaited results, such resolutions would seem to be liable to redetermination. Nobility of action and will, for Nietzsche, appears to be manifested not solely by the right to make promises and by carrying them out irrespective of what happens, but also by revising a promise once enunciated, in response to a changing situation. Because carrying out an act of will and letting go of it can both represent exemplary forms of power, I understand Nietzsche as formulating two types of noble promising, one tied to changing one’s promises, the other to following up on them. For Nietzsche, the promise is then co-constitutive of two models of cultural order (and their attendant forms of noble subjectivity), the first based on regularization and linked to the kept promise; the second grounded in becoming, and instantiated by the disposable promise. The first kind of order, call it regulatory, constitutes an enabling condition and product of an uninterrupted chain of will stretching between the pronouncement and the realization of a promise. Organization of the regulatory sort is to be found in a communal and economic framework that allows for the initiation of a trajectory of events that at some point leads to an anticipated outcome. The second type of order, which assumes the register of becoming, consists of a mobile system of evolving causes, forces, functions, and aims. Such systems deploy cultural forms that perpetually fuel new interpretations, and keep meaning in a state of transformation. In this scheme, which I will call improvisatory, the promise fails to sustain its purported

198

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

claim on the future, representing just one among countless factors that influence what is going to happen at a later time. Lispector’s use of broken promises and her deployment of promises that are under construction signal that aesthetic promises participate in both of Nietzsche’s models. Along the lines of the regulatory paradigm, aesthetic promises feature in scenario of address that enable artists, audiences, and quotidian aesthetic agents to count on one another’s discursive acts. Beauty, conventionally, attracts its beholder. Ugliness repulses. We reiterate social scripts in which beauty exerts promissory power and ugliness exercises the force of a threat. Macabéa’s imitation of Marilyn Monroe and Olímpico’s rejection of Macabéa in favor of Glória follow a blueprint of this sort. Rodrigo’s love of Macabéa’s unsightliness contravenes this scheme. His love refuses the Platonic pact according to which beauty pledges truth, goodness, and happiness.21 His affect addresses the force and flaws of aesthetic templates that observe this pact. The desirability of ugliness, in this case, brings out untruths, shortages of goodness, and deficiencies of happiness associated with beauty’s promise. In jettisoning a traditional script of aesthetic address, Rodrigo’s passion for Macabéa exemplifies Nietzsche’s model of improvisational fluidity. To complicate matters, uprootings of the Platonic contract have come to function in scripts of their own, giving rise to a broadly established convention of defying beauty’s promise. This artistic strategy highlights beauty’s ethical, political, and aesthetic failures. It has yielded altered scenarios on which we have come to rely. Promises grant artist-audience relationships a basis for continuity as well as discontinuity. They establish fields of expectation in the context of which aesthetic agents, in shaping their aesthetically mediated encounters and nonencounters with one another, and with forms, objects, events, and situations, can negotiate a balance between interest and disinterest, as suggested by Adorno. The promise mediates aesthetic desire and distaste, while also forging spaces for distance from these attitudes. Capturing longings and repulsions, and introducing elements of distance within the operations of these affects and sensibilities, aesthetic promises intimate pathways along which subjects can aesthetically shape and navigate their passions in relation to other subjects and the material world. In this way promises can also bring out unknown or previously nonexisting cultural needs and pleasures. A source of standardization, the promise thus simultaneously constitutes a tool of aesthetic change and innovation. To approach the same point from a different angle, by establishing expectations, the aesthetic promise inadvertently prepares the ground for a thwarting of the prospects it sets forth. The author’s love of Macabéa’s ugliness owes its critical bite to operative promises of beauty, which it rejects. Because Rodrigo’s love of his character’s ugliness dialectically addresses beauty’s received promise, his affect weaves a stretch of historical continuity within a segment of discontinuity generated by the jettisoning of an old promise. Alternatively, focusing on the continued force of the forgone promise, we can take Rodrigo’s feelings to generate fragmentation within a stratum of constancy. From whichever angle we consider it—and we can superimpose angle upon angle— promising gives rise to interconnected forms of stability and instability. Rodrigo’s attitude also illustrates a somewhat different entanglement of continuity and discontinuity. Intriguingly, his love for Macabéa’s ugliness indicates that it can be precisely by ravaging an original promise that the significance of this promise is

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

199

brought home, and that the weight of its claim on us is elucidated and enforced.22 Lispector’s crushing of beauty’s traditional promises notifies us of the importance of the trouble beauty has brewed. In voiding aesthetic promises, she extends an appeal to us. She confronts the reader with the moral task of fixing what has gone wrong, that is, of finding a way to make true what beauty once promised. By giving up on an existing promise, a work can highlight a need that moves an audience to address itself toward ultimately fulfilling that promise. Thereby the work creates lines of continuity within a discontinuous pattern of promising. An alternative way in which patches of continuity and discontinuity, control and improvisation can be interspersed with one another along trajectories of promising is the following. An artwork can fail to deliver what it promises but nonetheless produce effects (whether intended or not) that support the significance of this promise, and assist in animating this promise and keeping it alive. From 1956–74, Constant Nieuwenhuys, a former member of the COBRA group and the Situationist International, designed a set of architectural drawings, lithographs, paintings, maquettes, model photos, altered maps, assemblages, and manifestos for a future city, New Babylon. Left unexecuted, the project imagined a decentralized world city composed of networked sectors that would allow everyone to live as an artist of everyday sensation. For instance, in the 1969 work Symbolische voorstelling van New Babylon (Symbolic Representation of New Babylon), Constant gives shape to itineraries and nodes that come into being among interconnected maps in different languages and from urban settings in various countries. Pathways emerge among empty spaces as well. The multifarious connections that arise exemplify a pattern of heterogeneous, linked zones whose proliferation Constant envisioned in the age before the world-wide web. Automatization, supported by underground machines, was to permit a liberated life of desire, fantasy, and play for all. The project’s utopian promise was never realized. Arguably limited—in its distance from the actual life of the city—by its failure to critically engage the grip of existing cultural arrangements, and vulnerable to capitalist cooptation, New Babylon nonetheless offered a model for alternative imaginaries of the environment.23 Mark Wigley notes that its formal strategies regularly have resurfaced in subsequent interdisciplinary artistic, architectural, and urban experiments (1999, 37). Wigley describes the project as “a carefully constructed openness.” Highlighting its blurring of the distinction between drawing and model, art and architecture, he identifies the work with a “disturbance of design,” a “demolition of the powerful hierarchy between thought and action, a disruptive opening to the physicality of desire” (52). Constant’s aim with the work was not to offer an image of the future global city but to provoke the imagination of those who were to construct and inhabit it, and whose artistic activities would then be determinative of what the city would look like (48–52, 56n. 55). Pointing to the huge volume of drawings the artist produced of New Babylon and the ensuing “flicker between images” summoning the anarchic play that was to come, Wigley observes that the artist “dedicated himself to drawing a mirage. Things momentarily come into focus only to shimmer away. The biggest building ever conceived keeps disappearing into a haze” (52). While even Constant in the end appears to have criticized his own vision in New Babylon itself (de Zegher 1999, 11), experimental potentialities he unleashed under the aegis of the work’s promise survive its brokenness. The significance of the

200

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Figure 8.5  Constant Nieuwenhuys, Symbolische voorstelling van New Babylon (Symbolic Representation of New Babylon), 1969. Collage on paper, 122 x 133 cm (48 1/16 x 52 3/8’’). © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam. Collection of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

promise enacted by the project is affirmed by its reverberations in other promises, past, present, and future, and by its resonance with partially unanticipated aesthetic effects and visions embodied in subsequent cross-disciplinary designs, which help to give shape to and animate the promise Constant’s constructions hold out.24 Retroactive and anticipatory in their effects, scenarios of aesthetic promising have numerous ways of bringing about stability and destabilization. In line with Nietzsche’s improvisatory template of promising we can conclude that aesthetic promises set in motion processes of transformation that allow us to dismiss, replace, and retool already given promises. Interwoven promises link up in unpredictable patterns. This does not mean that promises are at all times prepared for any revision or adaptation to new circumstances. Promises become institutionalized in artistic strategies, forms, and genres. They pop up in modified forms, in unforeseen contexts. Their social and material embeddedness both enables and holds back change. Emplaced in institutional

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

201

configurations, they participate in and are exposed to multiple, contingent modalities of power. In Nietzsche’s genealogical narrative, promising historically took as its condition of possibility the disciplinary requirements of a commercial order. He implicitly recognizes the functioning of an early stage of promising as an element of a structure of address and relationship surrounding the administering of punishment. The spectacle of torture, in his view, brought creditor and debtor together in proximate scenes of address whereby the latter’s pain constituted the former’s pay back in pleasure. Gradually, this arrangement was resolved into an anonymous system of equivalents that separated the defaulter from the claimant and shifted the spectacle to an inner theater of guilt and self-denigration addressed to an imaginary public of Gods. In both cases a person’s subversion of a contractual promise yielded a standardized reward, regulated by an exchange system. Nietzsche’s genealogy thus considers the promise instrumental in a system of aesthetic relationality and address. We conduct our traffic in promises as embodied social agents who are in the business of creating bonds with one another. The view of promising that emerges here remains relatively abstract and leaves unanswered important questions about the precise forms of continuity and discontinuity it posits, as well as about the exact forms of social embeddedness and  proleptic or retroactive outreach it envisions. At the same time, the account forges a useful theoretical framework for comprehending the historically productive, intertextual, socially emplaced, relationally efficacious operations of aesthetic promising. Hannah Arendt further adumbrates the relational dimension of promising in The Human Condition. Like Nietzsche, she understands the promise as a locus for the co-constitutive production of subjectivity and the social. In foregrounding the role the promise plays in structuring individual existence and public life, her proposal sheds light on the nature of the relationships we build by way of aesthetic promising.

Arendt and the order of the promise For Arendt, promises permit us to create stability in an otherwise chaotic reality. One cause of life’s unruliness is that humans pay for their own freedom with existential unreliability: they are incapable of “guarantee[ing] today who they will be tomorrow” (1998, 245). Another source of disorder lies in the plurality of the community. The consequences of a person’s actions depend on the actions of the other agents with whom that person inhabits a world. Hence, these effects are unforeseeable to the person herself. Plurality, according to Arendt, precludes our being “unique masters” of what we do. Unpredictability is inescapable. However, with the ability to make promises, we have available to us a way of reducing the incalculability that is our lot and of diminishing the vast risks of action: “Binding oneself through promises . . . serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men” (237).

202

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

For Arendt, promises confer organization on our relationships with one another. They endow the world with predictability. The relationality of promising is essential to this function. According to Arendt, the presence and agency of other people are indispensible if promising is to be meaningful. In her view, we cannot feel bound by a promise we do not make to someone else. The one who promises thus depends on an addressee. But this addressee is not a passive recipient of the promise; she, in turn, addresses the promiser. It is in virtue of the address by the promiser to other individuals and by these other persons to the promiser that the promise lends its maker and keeper a subjective kind of order, namely, a form of individual identity. Promising actualizes this identity as a segment of a societal order that the promise simultaneously brings about. Arendt writes: Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities—a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. (237)

The promise is one of the anchors of our sociality and individuality. Arising within a public structure of address, it connects us with the people to whom we issue it and who, by witnessing the continuity of our agency, help us to assemble our identities. The practice of promising brings about selves that persist over time and that are fundamentally relational, and more specifically, other-directed in nature. While providing alternative readings of the relationality of promising and agency, Arendt follows Nietzsche in linking the custom of promising to morality, politics, and power. Held together by mutually binding promises, collectives can sustain themselves beyond the moment of actual bodily togetherness in space. Goal-specific coalitions are then able to realize a limited type of sovereignty, that is, a certain degree of independence from the world’s haphazardness, not through the consolidation of a shared will, but by utilizing the validity and binding force of the promise to advance consensually stipulated purposes. This allows a body of people to “dispose of the future as though it were the present,” greatly augmenting “the very dimension in which power can be effective” (245). Like its correlative capacity of forgiving, promising is a source of morality, in Arendt’s account. Along with the spirit of forgiveness, the will to promise, she tells us, constitutes the sole ground of political support for morality, understood as a system that goes beyond what merely happens to be a received ethos. Promising and forgiveness yield a moral code that originates in “the will to live together with others in the mode of acting and speaking” (237–8, 246). The morality and politics enacted by the practice of promising are founded on the plurality of the community, that is, on the copresence of humans in a world. Promises, as I conceive of them, share the relational character of Arendt’s promising and aspects of the grounding of such promising in plurality. They are among the elements that realize our relations to others and the world of objects. What they do

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

203

not engender with the steadfastness posited by Arendt is the predictability that looms so large in her account of the form’s utility. I have suggested that promising combines registers of trustworthiness and unreliability, stability and impermanence, calculability and improvisatory freedom. The capriciousness of this mode of address does not prevent us from theorizing order because additional factors can be advanced to this end. Promises are joined in their organizational occupations by other systemic sources of order that inhibit uncertainty and chaos, even while displacing incalculability to other areas, and thereby generating disorder as well. Among the socially efficacious grounds of order and disorder that fundamentally draw on promises, but do not activate such promises as unshakable entities, are established moral, political, legal, educational, medical, and psychic routines, the organization of the workplace, distributions of class-, racial, gender, national, and sexual standing, fashion systems, commercial arrangements, and the distribution of land, food, and leisure, all of which implement relational constellations featuring forms of address. Promises are modes of address. They play their part in structures of relationality and address. Like other modes of address, they help choreograph webs of relationships among subjects and among subjects and objects. What does this suggest for the specific nature of aesthetic promises? My discussion of Lispector and Adorno has revealed ways in which aesthetic promises function as mechanisms of aesthetic relationality and experience. Nietzsche and Arendt point to a further sense in which aesthetic promises are devices for orchestrating relational aesthetic life. Pertinent in this light are Nietzsche’s conception of promising as a source of noble will and character and Arendt’s view of promising as a basis of agency and selfhood. The promise, for them, inaugurates a frame of being and becoming. A similar logic informs the implementation of strands of aesthetic culture. We enact and give shape to our aesthetic comportment in part by taking up, making, and changing aesthetic promises. This we do as producers, consumers, and exchangers of aesthetic artifacts and events. A person’s aesthetic will, character, agency, and selfhood are supported by aesthetic promises, among other modes of address. Aesthetic promises sustain aesthetic subjectivity and intersubjectivity. They take on this role as elements of webs of relationality and address. Nietzsche and Arendt prefigure the proposal that surfaces here by situating the promise in the enabling social and symbolic demands of, respectively, a commercial order and a pluralistic public world. According to Nietzsche, promising binds individuals to the social body and vice versa. In his genealogical account, the enforcement of promises constituted a dimension of people’s socialization, which involved training them to actually perform the deeds to which they had committed themselves. Having first prepared the subject for submission to the law, the social body then bound itself to rewarding its members with benefits, such as protection from hostility, in exchange for constituents’ pledge to obey communal rules. The kept promise, for Nietzsche, thus was a device that presupposed and encouraged socialization. For Arendt, the promise, likewise, serves as a basis of collectivity, in its capacity to advance the aims of goal-specific political groups, and to expand the duration of coalitions beyond the instant of togetherness. Taking Nietzsche’s and Arendt’s lead, I propose to consider aesthetic promises grounds of aesthetic community formation. Such promises shape aesthetic experience

204

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

in the context of institutionally embedded templates of subjective and collective existence. The cultural promise of the aesthetic represents a structuring principle of the aesthetic field. It lies at the heart of hopes, needs, and aspirations we embody in our various aesthetic practices—endeavors that are both collectively based and productive in shaping community. To speak of the cultural promise in the singular, as has and will at times be illuminating, is to use shorthand for a multitude of promises that aesthetic agents perpetually engineer in the forms of objects, persons, situations, environments, critiques, styles, and encounters. Along the lines of Nietzsche’s improvisatory paradigm of promise making, cultures anchored in aesthetic promises are malleable formations. While Nietzsche, with Arendt, underscores the moral weight and social powers of the binding promise, he alerts us, with Lispector, Adorno, and Constant, among many others, to the ethical and political productivity of breaking, revising, and letting go of promises. Retroactive as well as forward-looking, this improvisatory mode of promising enables us to redirect aesthetic forms and passions as we build webs of relationship among subjects and objects. Sequences of evolving and interconnecting aesthetic promises allow for varying levels of cultural organization. The force, the cohesiveness, and the political comportment enabled by the promise can manifest itself in a rock-solid, unmovable commitment to a style, a genre, an artist, a program, a thematic, a query, an identity, a movement, a group, or it can admit of a loose and open form of collectivity. Rubrics such as a national, postcolonial, queer, black, feminist, green, or working-class aesthetic, a person’s highly individualized style, modernism, surrealism, and global aesthetics each allow for internal degrees of variation along these lines. The preceding list of aesthetic cultures and forms of collectivity demonstrates that, like the promise part, the culture- and the aesthetics part of “the cultural promise of the aesthetic,” stand in need of pluralization. Aesthetic promises, including promises of culture, lie at the heart of an expansive range of aesthetically saturated cultural formations that include certain national and regional cultures envisaged by eighteenth-century philosophers but also reach far beyond this to encompass other types of micro- and macrolevel identifications and differentiations and their mutual repercussions and interconnections. These formations invite a fine-grained picture of modes of aesthetic collectivity that are under formation and that do not admit of exhaustive or defining mappings. The relationality and flexibility of promising lends itself to theorizing a network of mobile, intermeshing systems of aesthetic affiliation and disaffiliation, appropriation and disowning. The ineradicably intersectional entwinement of social categories makes visible that the relations among such systems cannot be stabilized. The notion of shifting promises creates room to acknowledge this. At the same time, the emplacement of promises in institutionalized structures of address and the potential depth of our attachment to them enables us to theorize the persistence and tenacity of cultural segments and powers, which are able to preserve themselves across newly emerging forms, and to remain unmoved in the face of the most concentrated attempts at change. The cultural promise of the aesthetic, among other aesthetic promises, carries out its work as an element in evolving webs of relationality and address. Rooted in such constellations, aesthetic promises are instrumental in shaping forms of aesthetic

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

205

collectivity. As components of formations of relationality and address, they realize incessantly mutating procedures of historically grounded differentiation. The result is a heterogeneous fabric of communal ties and fissures. Leaving behind the Enlightenment model of a public forum comprised of general subjects, we arrive here at a view on which the community constitutes a mobile platform mired in simultaneously aesthetic and political strategies that encounter renewal from unforeseen sources and in unpredictable corners. Within this forum, we dispatch promises of political change on paths of which we do not know where they lead us. This proposal does not project an open-ended field of possibility, however. As a mode of address and a vehicle for collectivity, the promise reproduces the socially disparate procedures analyzed in this book. Aesthetic promises forge asymmetrical bonds and ruptures. They do not achieve an equal distribution of prefigured happiness or anticipated culture, or promise the same thing to everyone, but align themselves with vectors of power regulating the social world. Coca-Cola and the movies, twentiethcentury signs of idealized contemporaneity that supply Macabéa with a springboard into the present, fail to transpose her from her supposedly archaic locale and persona into the global setting of technologically advanced modernity. What is promised to whom, at what price, and with what results reflects imbalances governing symbolic exchange generally.25 This means that aesthetic promises typically also imply threats, as illustrated by the effacement of recalcitrant forms of difference in Neruda’s elemental poems, and by the functioning of beauty, the art of literature, material substances, and consumption goods in The Hour of the Star. Neruda’s elemental odes give expression to a promise of culture that we can associate with Kant’s and Hume’s views of aesthetic publicity, even if the odes’ promise goes well beyond what these philosophers actually had in mind. Offering an allegory of the possibilities of the aesthetic, Neruda envelops the reader into a web of address that instantiates interpretive, material bonds among subjects and among subjects and objects. The poems promise that by participating in this network of relationships and address, we can bring about an egalitarian and harmonious community, a culture by and for the people. The structure of reciprocal loving animation the “Ode to Things” imagines is emblematic of a dynamic of desire and signification that informs an influential Western conception of the aesthetic. On this conception, aesthetic address assumes a public form, and the aesthetic domain constitutes a public forum for such address. The Enlightenment tradition in philosophy grounds the operative notion of publicity in common human appreciative faculties honed by certain conditioning experiences. Aesthetic pleasure, perception, and judgment, on this model, represent a collective good, potentially shareable by all. Neruda’s odes extol the collective possibilities for reading, making, and readability that we can attach to this view of aesthetic publicity, and to the aesthetic, more generally. Like Neruda, John Dewey articulates a promise for the aesthetic that we can ascribe to the Enlightenment model of publicity. Highlighting the culture-building powers to be unleashed by a pedagogy of the aesthetic, that is, by a sustained process of aesthetic education, he exalts the powers that aesthetic experience, in its unified temporal unfolding, its multilayered, dynamical composition, and its integrative workings is able to hold out for culture “in its collective aspect” (1934, 333). The civilizational

206

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

labor of aesthetic experience, as theorized by Dewey, is another version of the public projects we may attribute to the aesthetic. Both authors insist on crucial resources for forging democratic aesthetic cultures. Projects of this sort are legion, across cultural boundaries. It is worth noting that the concept of relationality has been particularly relevant to contemporary undertakings along some of the lines spelled out by Neruda and Dewey. Artists Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Marina Abramović, and Rafael LozanoHemmer, and critic Nicholas Bourriaud, among others, have inaugurated vocabularies of relationality to advance participatory reconfigurations of bodies, things, and places.26 Indeed, the public sphere brims with endeavors to spark changes in relational itineraries, ranging from monumental to microscopic scales of culture. The aesthetic promise of publicity resounds broadly in multiple contexts. Conceptualized in terms of relationality and address, as formulated in this book, however, aesthetic publicity shows another side. Constellations of address delineate patterns of visibility and invisibility, legibility and illegibility, form and formlessness, sound and silence, taste and tastelessness, civilization and archaism that enforce unjustified differentiations and exclusions. Aesthetic collectivity comprises unequally inhabitable, historically unfolding, socially situated orbits of symbolic interaction and noninteraction that germinate within institutionalized parameters of relationality. The cultural promises and threats projected by aesthetic objects and cultural pedagogies acquire their desirability, their credibility, and accessibility within the constraints of constellations of relationality and address. The uneven distributions of good and harm that such promises and threats hold out reflect broader structures of relationship and address, not only with respect to the contents of the relevant kinds of happiness or suffering but also with respect to the operative modes of constructing, implementing, and articulating pleasure and pain. Its social limits and moral flaws notwithstanding, the Enlightenment notion of public aesthetic life envisions a forward-looking orientation that posits as its telos the actualization of the collective, culture-building possibilities inherent in the phenomena of interpretation, making, and interpretability. Amalgamating reliability and untrustworthiness, the promise embodies an anticipatory motion geared toward this end. Because we can overthrow promises, remold them, and replace them by more promising promises, the ritual of aesthetic promising remains promising in the face of the configurations of aesthetic publicity and community, abjection and disaffiliation I have traced in this book. The promise participates in a pattern of need, desire, and love at the core of the aesthetic that also engenders violent annihilation. Promises and the threats they involve depend for their forms and attractions on structures of aesthetic relationality and address they help choreograph. Vulnerable to commitments of publics and producers and to shifting meanings of cultural forms, aesthetic promises remain unequipped to conclusively project a transhistorical global aesthetic. This applies also to the present study, which, absorbing existing cultural promises and threats of the aesthetic, embodies its own.

Aesthetic Promises and Threats

207

A view that locates the aesthetic centrally in evolving constellations of relationality, address, and promising, enables us to understand achievements and failures of the aesthetic as two folds in the same fabric. Aesthetic existence is fundamentally polyvalent. Extinguishing the plethora of threats it poses entails eclipsing its promises. This is not to say that we cannot or should not make things better. That the disorderliness of the aesthetic is not likely to be fixed within an alternative aesthetic, moral, political, social, and economic order that is readily imaginable to us does not belie the importance and the seductiveness of the cultural promise of the aesthetic effort and practice of trying to turn our aesthetic worlds into desirable directions. This cultural promise stands. However, it is simultaneously a promise of new promises and a threat of new threats.27

Postscript

Promises of culture arise in unanticipated places, inviting our cooperation in realizing them. These collaborations also involve our handling aesthetic threats. Thus, cultural promises embroil us in frictions among strands of aesthetic power and meaning. In engaging such tensions, we enact forms of political agency that exceed existing boundaries between art and the everyday. Subjects of aesthetic experience, we participate in modes of address and relationship that substantially owe their organization to historically emplaced aesthetic systems. And that means that we find ourselves positioned within a plethora of cultural forces that pull us in divergent directions. We feel moved to steer a course. Promises entice us; threats often hold us captivated too. Praiseworthy and problematic aspects of aesthetic phenomena come together as we step forward along aesthetic trajectories. Aesthetic details—and the practices of making and reading that engender them, as we conduct our more or less artful daily lives of varying degrees of peripherality and momentum—bring to light unexpected sites and manners in which we can catch sight of the promise of the aesthetic to realize political transformations. Unforeseen aesthetic pleasures and pains spring up at junctures where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination converge and follow separate paths. Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. Our aesthetic activities weave complex meanings into cultural existence. Theorists have extolled the aesthetic as a source of liberation, resistance, and critique. They have decried it for its oppressive, ideological effects. The fine-grained cultural functioning of aesthetic phenomena reveals that the aesthetic cannot be subsumed under unidirectional moral or political orientations. Its social operations testify to a mixed, disorderly picture. Quotidian lives exhibit the aesthetic’s polyvalence—its impulses toward good and evil; its operations of exclusion and inclusion; its dimensions of desire and aversion; its speediness and recalcitrance; its alliance with sustaining types of love as well as with inescapable forms of conflict and antagonism. On a view that considers aesthetic agency and experience immanent in webs of relationships and address, an unquenchable ethical and political unruliness underlies the cultural promises and threats the aesthetic holds out to us.

210

The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Eschewing a language of crisis and celebration, and skirting around the notion of a clear-cut break with a historical framework that, shaken off for a few decades, then makes its return, prepared for renewal and reinvention, the present book recognizes the structural significance that aesthetic configurations, their disarray notwithstanding, have not ceased to and will continue to hold at diverse levels of social organization. To exalt the aesthetic is to embrace a deeply troubled phenomenon. We cannot neatly, straightforwardly, coherently, or univocally call for a renewal of or a turn toward the aesthetic because as embodied participants in various cultures we are profoundly invested in ways we have exercised aesthetic capabilities for a long time. The turns and twists of the aesthetic have been ours: we have gone along with them; our existence has already absorbed their baroque meanderings; we inhabit aesthetic formations at many levels of our corporeal, institutionalized engagements with one another and the material world. We certainly have crafted innumerable reorientations within and beyond established frames of meaning and interpretation, and unquestionably should keep forging such shifts of direction, but what we thereby have not done is send off the aesthetic in an unalloyed flurry of anti-, non-, an-, pre-, or post-aesthetic gestures, and we cannot reasonably expect to do so anytime within our life spans. What has kept us occupied, however, for many centuries now, is the attempt to shape the aesthetic in ways that enable it and us to make true the various promises it holds out to us. Prominent views of the aesthetic as a pillar of moral order, a practice of loving animation, or a disposition to bring integration to a world of division, emphasize commendable sides of aesthetic life over objectionable aspects. The latter dimensions thereby typically gain implicit acknowledgment by negation, as elements that recede in the background: understanding love, integration, and good order as foundational functions, theorists regularly consign the brutality that also characterizes aesthetic existence to an anarchic, primordial territory that, for the most part, they take us to be in the process of leaving behind—as we make headway on trajectories of cultivation, and projects of aesthetic education. The concepts of relationality, address, promises, and threats allow us to affirm the contradictory facets of the aesthetic in their often equivocal, frequently impenetrable enmeshments, and in their dense interminglings that can render the detail by which we are touched so particularly salient. Systems of relationality and address harbor the conflicting moral and political tendencies and ambivalences that characterize many an aesthetic endeavor. Integration and good order pair up with disarray. Episodes of indifference and disconnection accompany negotiations of animating love and destructiveness. Assimilation and expulsion give way to one another. Delight shares a playing field with cruelty and disdain. Repulsiveness lodges attractions; yearnings fuel loathings. This view does not belie the reality of moments of unqualified aesthetic glee or pain, and neither does it write off goodness and failure, or truth and falsehood in the domains of art and culture. Rather, it situates aesthetic agents in a plane of relational possibility that affects and is affected by other aesthetic subjects, their actions and productions to whom and which these agents bear complex, historically unfolding, asymmetrical bonds. Address is a widespread social phenomenon and a carrier of meaning. Adopting modes of address, including those involved in the creation of promises and threats, we enact our ongoing relationships with persons, things, and environments. This is

Postscript

211

the field in which the aesthetic has its home. It is this plane that we activate as a font of critique and an anchor of quotidian life. Aesthetic relationships are always in motion, stirred by mercurial circumvolutions of daily detail as well as by partially enigmatic orbits traversed by grander cultural forms. They materialize in all registers of being we inhabit—political, economic, social, technological, linguistic, bodily, institutional. The openness of structures of relationality and address to change—within limits and possibilities delineated by existing constellations—implies that the question of their moral, political, and aesthetic desirability will always arise anew, and is not liable to closure. The shifting nature of aesthetic relationships shatters the possibility of arriving at a stable conception of the aesthetic that would be insulated from the vicissitudes of aesthetic relationality and address. Crucial components of aesthetic practice and experience resist specification: there is no way of selecting in the abstract a collection of normative modes of aesthetic address, a compilation of acceptable aesthetic promises, a set of conditions for suitable apprehension, an encompassing forum for public exchange, a blueprint for participation or collaboration, a repertoire of aesthetic values, a canon of founding documents and artifacts. These elements are under formation as we engage in evolving aesthetic relationships. That the aesthetic, for all its problems, does not amount to the imposition of a tired sensory repertoire, a reduced scope of artistic ideas, a stifling bodily regime, an attenuated stage of moral personhood, a regressive paradigm of social agency, an ecologically ruinous template for human narcissism, an imperialist global agenda, a grandiose historical fantasy, or a diminished political vision, we owe to the absence of an external end or vantage point that could close off ongoing processes of becoming and address. Impelled by aesthetic forms and passions, these processes are also capable of generating aesthetic impulses anew, irrevocably reshaping the practices and theories that make up the aesthetic.

Notes Introduction 1 Along with other cultural developments, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and the Dadaist movement have inaugurated numerous critical approaches in the arts and theory, challenging everyday aesthetic configurations, theoretical schemata, and artistic frames of meaning. Hal Foster’s (1983) anthology on postmodernist antiaesthetic projects and programs prominently contests influential tenets of the Western aesthetic tradition. Calling into question “the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas” (xv), this locus classicus of the anti-aesthetic employs Marxist, structuralist, psychoanalytical, decolonial, deconstructive, and feminist perspectives, among others, to develop critical methods of cultural analysis and practice. 2 Proponents of the so-called aesthetic turn that accord little theoretical credit to twentieth-century critiques of aesthetic models include Hickey (1993); Scarry (1999). Announcing beauty’s resurgence, a much-cited report on this shift sketches a field of ostensibly transparent contrasts (such as those between politics and pleasure or artistic goodness; cultural analysis and aesthetic evaluation; literary and historical scholarship; cultural specificity and commonality [Heller 1998]). The article’s framing obfuscates conceptual, artistic, and political dimensions connecting as well as dividing stances the text advances as favoring and opposing beauty. 3 Many theorists recognize limitations of historical aesthetic frameworks while simultaneously valorizing conceptual, experiential, practical, and rhetorical elements such outlooks make available. For a drastically abbreviated list of such work that appeared toward the end of the previous century, see: hooks (1990); Benjamin and Osborne (1991); Buck-Morss (1992); Beverley (1993); Yúdice (1993); Bhabha (1994); Lowe (1996, 156–8, 176); Jameson (1998); Johnson (1998).   Perspectives that selectively affirm, dispute, and revise dimensions of aesthetic structures inform also an extensive scope of twenty-first-century accounts. A brief sample includes Rancière (2004); Redfield (2003); Bérubé (2005); Mignolo (2007); Halsall, Jansen and O’Connor (2009); Kelly (2012); Spivak (2012).   Several theorists propose to rethink polarities between the aesthetic and the antiaesthetic. See, among others, Kester (1997); Meyer and Ross (2004). Displacements of this sort pervade also Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing. She brings together Aztec, Nahuatl, and Chicana conceptions, images, metaphors, stories, performance practices, and other artistic forms with critiques of certain Western aesthetic procedures (1987). Thereby she enacts modes of transculturation that realize a condition she describes as mestiza consciousness, or a borderland state of continual transition. Mobilizing established genres (such as the English and Spanish languages, poetry, theory, autobiography) in the process of transforming them, she interweaves aesthetic and anti-aesthetic modes.   In Roelofs (forthcoming), I argue that anti-aesthetic strategies, as represented in Foster (1983), invoked by other theorists, including Arthur Danto and Gayatri Spivak, and enacted in artworks by, for example, El Anatsui and Teresa Margolles, significantly entwine themselves with aesthetic formations they critique.

214

Notes

Chapter 1 1 Hume (1998i [hereafter “ST”], 147); Kant (1951, pars 19–22; 40). I am sidestepping differences between and complexities in their theories. Hume indexes standardized taste to a consensus among ideal critics. Qualifications in his view attach also to the role of two admissible sources of variability, namely (1) personally specific temperaments and dispositions “that are natural to us,” which occasion predilections for particular kinds of artworks and artifacts, and (2) culturally specific manners, opinions, and customs that are morally innocent and avoid bigotry and superstition (ST, 149–54). Kant limits the universal validity of aesthetic judgments to pure judgments of taste, while judgments of art and other cultural objects, contrary to this, involve dependent judgments and apprehension of so-called aesthetic ideas (1951, par. 49). 2 Hume (1998g [hereafter “RA”], 168, 170–1, 174–5; 1998a [hereafter “OC”], 160–3). Hume’s notion of the arts is considerably broader than the contemporary concept of the fine arts. 3 Such critiques include Korsmeyer (1998, 148–52, 158–9); Shusterman (1993). 4 The realm of the public, indebted to factors such as the organization of the ancient Greek polis, underwent formative changes in the eighteenth century and has persistently evolved. This lends vocabularies of publicity a shifting character, which is compounded by variable contrasts separating the public from dimensions of intimacy, the familial, the marketplace, and from other modalities comprised under the no less malleable heading of the private. Hume’s and Kant’s accounts of ties between the aesthetic and the public thus display a marked lexical plasticity. Nonetheless, aesthetic publicity, as theorized by Hume and Kant, furnishes an array of promises. Such promises attach, among other things, to operative conceptions of sharing, of productive, receptive, and collaborative capacities, and of experience, judgment, and value. Promises of culture, such as the pledge of rich and valuable collective and material bonds, embedded in aesthetic activities, are a variety of a broader class of aesthetic promises. 5 Another version can be found in Walter Benjamin’s writings, which envisage a broad repertoire of impersonal, publicly grounded aesthetic promises. On promises of happiness, collectivity, intersubjectivity, and reciprocity in his work, see Hansen (1987, 182, 193, 211, 214, 217). 6 See Neruda (1999a, 1999b, 1999c). 7 Neruda 1999d. As Hernán Loyola’s editorial notes indicate (1999, 1373), Neruda’s description of this volume as his fourth book of elemental odes appears below the copyright listing in the text’s first edition. For translations of all elemental odes see Neruda (2013). 8 Translation revised, drawing on Neruda (1994, 2013). English references in this chapter to “Ode to the Apple,” and to passages from “Ode to a Pair of Scissors” and from “Ode to Things” are to Neruda (2013). Translation copyright © 2005, 2013 by Ilan Stavans. English references to “Ode to the Book I” are also to Neruda (2013). Translation copyright © 2003 by Edward Hirsch. Reprinted by permission of Fundación Pablo Neruda; and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. References to all other translations, including other passages from “Ode to a Pair of Scissors” and from “Ode to Things” are to Neruda (1994). Translation copyright © 1994 by Ken Krabbenhoft. By permission of Fundación Pablo Neruda; and Bulfinch. Excerpts from “Oda al libro I” and “Oda al pan” (from Odas elementales [Neruda 1999a]); from “Oda a la caja de té,” “Oda a la cuchara,” “Oda a la manzana,” “Oda a la naranja,” and “Oda a las tijeras” (from Tercer libro de las odas [1999c]); and from “Oda a las cosas,” “Oda a la mesa,” and “Oda a la silla” (from Navegaciones y regresos [1999d]) copyright © 2013 Fundación Pablo Neruda. By permission.

Notes

215

9 Modified translation, drawing on Neruda (1994, 2013). No single English rendering captures precisely the different degrees and stages of mutual animation and interconnectedness Neruda traverses in the ode’s final verses: “muchas cosas / me lo dijeron todo. / No sólo me tocaron / o las tocó mi mano, / sino que acompañaron / de tal modo / mi existencia / que conmigo existieron / y fueron para mí tan existentes / que vivieron conmigo media vida / y morirán conmigo media muerte.” (“Oda a las cosas”). 10 While Neruda (1999d) writes “Oh” rather than “O” (translated as “O” [Neruda 1994] and as “Oh” [Neruda 2013]), these expressions are regularly used interchangeably, and the phrase as a whole adopts a vocative form, enacting a direct address from speaker to objects. Thus, Neruda’s “Oh” intimates a partial surrender of speaker to things— embodying the interconnectedness the poem celebrates—while also, in the vocative mode, highlighting the speaker’s active reaching out to the things. On connections between apostrophe and animation see Johnson (1987a), to which my reading is indebted. 11 The notions of objects and things, in this book, designate elements that cannot be straightforwardly opposed to subjects, events, and environments, with which they are entwined. 12 Altered translation, drawing on Neruda (1994, 2013). 13 This distance, which impels the desire to overcome it, can of course never be fully annulled, since it is a precondition for the project of diminishing it. 14 Intimacy with the subjects and objects, for the narrator, thus functions as a condition of interpretability. 15 Establishing a precedent for such links in a famous discussion of Baudelaire’s “Spleen II” that connects address to the ode (1985, 61, 70–2), Paul de Man locates a promise of aesthetic sublimation and a dialogical subject-object relationship in an apostrophic address from a speaking subject to a material entity. This object gains consciousness from which it is cut off, which causes the operative aesthetic promise to dissolve into “the unpredictable play of the literary letter” (72). 16 Reflecting on the Spanish “elemental,” Margaret Sayers Peden rejects pejorative connotations of the English “elementary,” and notes that the odes both “are and are not elemental/elementary.” Registering an ironic tension owing to the poems’ avoidance of the ode’s traditionally elevated tone and their “countersimplism,” she observes that they “praise fundamental and essential subjects” (1990, 1). Preserving ambiguities flowing from the “elemental,” I understand promising, address, and relationality as elemental aspects of the aesthetic. 17 Translation in Neruda (2013). 18 Translation in Neruda (1994) adjusted, drawing on Neruda (2013). 19 Stendhal (1927, 5–45, 359–71); Barthes (1978 [hereafter “LD”], 18–21, 31–2, 34–5). For Freud, this view is part and parcel of the theory that prior yet persistently evolving libidinal relationships mold present-day relationships with persons and things (1957). 20 Ode to the Apple. Translation modified. 21 Franco 2002, 79–80; see also 82. 22 Norms of address are standards of adequacy that apply to forms of address, which we adopt as we engage one another and objects in scenes, scripts, and structures of address. Birthday parties and concerts, for example, comprise structures of address that organize our corporeal comportment in accordance with norms of address (such as the rule that people should dance, ought to congratulate one another and give one another a present, or must pay an entrance fee). Such norms govern scenes of address

216

23

24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31

Notes (the instance of jointly moving to music or of kissing, hugging, or speaking to a person, or of handing over money or gifts to someone), scripts of address (scenarios according to which certain gestures are expected to give rise to other gestures), and structures of address (broader constellations of symbolic interaction encompassing scenes and scripts of address along with various modes of address, all of which are liable to norms of address). I further clarify these notions in my book manuscript “Arts of Address.” On structures of address, see Johnson (1987d). For Franco, the elemental odes mark a transition in Neruda’s oeuvre. Detecting a shift of artistic persona in the poems of the 1950s, she observes that these works “celebrate a turn from public poet to the bard of everyday life,” accompanying their author’s retreat into domesticity and the private (2002, 72, 79, 84). “Public poetry” gives way to love poems and texts relishing daily sensory pleasures (72). Admittedly, the odes keep immediate institutional politics at arm’s length. Yet, on a broader notion of the public and the political, one that recognizes crosscurrents traversing the (aesthetic) politics of parties, state organizations and transnational bodies, as well as fields of love, desire, pleasure, and sensation—a type of view Franco adopts elsewhere (1992)—the odes investigate political dimensions of our domestic comportment, and private modalities of our public functioning. In their endeavor to bridge domains that are often separated—a venture that is to be read for the specific politics and figurations of publicity it embeds—Neruda’s odes exemplify a variety of what, in Chapters 5 and 6, I call aesthetic integrationism, an approach that has deep roots in the history of aesthetics. Franco (2002, 78) mentions Neruda’s notion of work as a masculine activity. Notably, in the “Ode to the Clothes,” the narrator finds his clothes for the day lying ready for him on a chair in the morning, seemingly having arrived out of nowhere. Ahmed (2000) describes this dynamic of group formation. On the colonial imposition of binary gender systems in Latin American societies, see Lugones (2007). Using poodle skirts as an example, Lugones mentions the role of a shared daily history in making possible shared meanings and the establishment of interpersonal connections based on such meanings. She emphasizes disconnections that can ensue for outsiders to this history (2003, 90–1). On forms of colonial power sustained by the relations between imperial and Amerindian languages, see Mignolo (2000, 223–9, 247–9). For critiques of the universalizing form of address, see Warner (1993) and Rooney (2002). Translation revised. Neruda writes, “y no pude enseñar a nadie nada / sino lo que he vivido, / cuanto tuve en común con otros hombres, / cuanto luché con ellos: / cuanto expresé de todos en mi canto.” (“Oda al libro I”). The phrase “cuanto expresé de todos” contains a subjective as well as an objective genitive, implying both “said by all,” and “said of all” (i.e. about all). Read in the first sense, the speaker notes that he can teach no more than the very things the people have said; interpreted in the second sense, he indicates that all he can ever teach is what concerns all of them. The Spanish conjoins the two meanings. Negotiating this slippage, the speaker not only declares the content of his speech to be limited to what he has learned from the people and to what he has learned about them by living with them, but also announces how much he takes the people to speak through him, and how much he speaks for them—in solidarity. Or, in the case in which the masses have no voice, to offer his own voice as a way of giving them a voice, or as a way of assuming their voice. On Neruda’s adopting the

Notes

32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39

217

people’s voice in Canto General, see Franco (2002, 73). Citing the ending of “The Heights of Machu Picchu” section of Canto General in which Neruda announces his intent to speak for/through the dead mouths of the people and calls on the dead to speak for/through his own words and blood, John Beverley argues that Neruda’s now defunct “vertical model of representation” presents the poet’s voice as the necessary means of redeeming the dead people’s voices (1993, 16–18). Franco (2002, 82–3) discusses Neruda’s lack of curiosity about the people among whom he lived during his residency as a consul in Yangon, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. Lugones and Spelman (1983) discuss problems of speaking about and on behalf of others, and investigate discursive conditions that can render this desirable. Franco (2002, 73) mentions Neruda’s ventriloquism in his Canto General. Alexander Nehamas productively stresses uncertainties pervading our engagement with the promise of happiness that he attributes to beauty, even if he bypasses threats attendant on this promise (2007, 130–1). For a critical discussion, see Roelofs (2008). According to Aristotle (1984, bk. III, 1411b23–12a35) the orator should use metaphors that give “life to lifeless things,” representing things in a state of activity. Quintilian (1921, bk. IX, 2:375, 2:393, 2:395) exalts the power of figures of speech, such as indirect modes of address that lend a voice to inanimate things (“you, hills and groves;” “[o] . . . laws”). Such figures of speech thereby also animate language itself, offering “life and vigour to oratory; without them it lies torpid like a body lacking the breath to stir its limbs” (277). We encounter here the reciprocal animation at which, as Johnson indicates, Baudelaire and Shelley aspire: in bringing life to the lifeless, speech animates itself. A-personal promises of course do not arise in total absence of humans who recognize them, and partially depend on agents’ reception and recognition. I do not mean to defend a strict difference between the two types of promises but to create adequate room for both kinds. For further discussion and instances of this across various cultural traditions, see Roelofs (forthcoming). Rancière (2004, 2009) illuminates simultaneously aesthetic and political workings of registers of these sorts, which he locates at the basis of aesthetic promises of emancipation. However, in comprehending the aesthetic as a regime for identifying the arts (2004, 10, 45), and postulating an undifferentiated art public (2009, 9–10, 13), he downplays the functioning of historical formations of address in the context of which aesthetic constellations emerge. He underestimates intersectional operations of social categories and modes of differentiation, which systemically and asymmetrically mold abilities of art and other cultural artifacts to effect so-called distributions of the sensible (2004, 12–14, 42–5). These modes and categories shape facets of the production, reception, and theory of cultural artifacts, as well as hierarchical (yet permeable) borders among fields of high art, popular culture, and quotidian existence, and among Western and non-Western traditions—dimensions that in significant respects slip through the web of Rancière’s analysis. He partially disassociates aesthetic epistemes, works, models, and experiences from configurations of address, relationality, and promises undergirding their functions, force, and meanings. Arising in the process of his both implicitly and explicitly shedding light on address, relationality, and promising, this decontextualization points up theoretical gaps. Foregrounding my conceptual triad will then advance our understanding of the ties between aesthetics and politics, as these linkages have evolved and continue to evolve.

218

Notes

Chapter 2 1 These effects run also in the other direction: a broad array of social and subjective categories put into play aestheticized and aestheticizing dimensions of whiteness and blackness. See Spelman (1988) on the analytical connections and interdependent functioning of race, class, gender, and other categories of social identity and interaction. On aestheticized blackness, see Morrison (1992, 90). Essed (1991) and Alcoff (2006, 183–94) emphasize the workings of race and racism at macro- and microlevels of existence. Phenomenological accounts of these aspects include also Fanon (BSWM, 12, 169); Gordon (1997, 5, 85; 2000). Conceptions of race are contextdependent (Alcoff 2006, 181–6). Categories of blackness, whiteness, and other racial and ethnic identities (as well as notions of gender, class, and sexuality with which these classifications intersect) mean different things in Hume and Kant than today. Because their contents and implications vary across contemporary cultural settings, there is no univocal, generally applicable, present-day lexicon into which these denominations can be translated. My objective, thus, will not be to pinpoint the exact import of Hume’s and Kant’s racial terminology, but to investigate the structural functioning of strategies of racial differentiation in their theories, with a focus on aesthetic grounds for and reverberations of these modes. 2 Hume (ST, 146–7; 1998b [hereafter “DTP”], 11–12). Hume names reason, in the specific form in which it is basic to taste, “sense” or “good” or “strong” sense (ST, 146–7). Reason, as an ingredient of taste includes among other things, “capacious thought” and “sound understanding” (ST, 146–7). It is responsible for rational virtues such as clearness of conception, exactness of distinction, and vivacity of apprehension. Hume calls on reason to check the influence of prejudice, to comprehend different parts of a work of art, to compare these parts with one another, and to assess the suitability of a work’s means to its ends. Reason thus is crucial to a critic’s capacity for judgment, and in particular to the ability to “discern the beauties of design and reasoning, which are the highest and most excellent” (147). 3 For Hume’s views on black intellectual inferiority, see 1998f (hereafter “NC”), 360n. 120. For his comments on the debased minds of poor and laboring classes, see NC, 114. On women’s mental inferiority, see 1998e (hereafter “IM”), 327; 1965b (hereafter “SH”), 96; 1998h (hereafter “RP”), 73–4; and 1998d (hereafter “EW”), where a group of individuals labeled “the conversable,” who incline toward “obvious reflections on human affairs” (1) and have a limited “compass of knowledge” (3), are by and large implied to be female. The masculinization of intellect in Hume is also evident in his insistence that a respectable writer’s sense (see previous note) be “strong and masculine” (1965a [hereafter “SR”], 43). 4 Presumably the women in this sharply restricted group have a requisite amount of “strong” sense, which, under specific conditions, allows for taste (ST, 147). 5 Notwithstanding Hume’s views to the effect that reason does and should follow passion (THN, 2.3.3), he holds that passions are to be tutored through taste. His point thereby is not claim that reason ought to control passion. Rather, he insists on the importance of an aesthetic education of the passions. 6 Hume makes this explicit in the case of the second and fifth effects. Because the other three effects contribute to the second and fifth effects, the refinement and “socialization” of the passions, it is clear that these three effects are civilizing factors as well.

Notes

219

7 Hume DTP, 12; see also RP, 72. 8 Taste thereby renders the passions and the individual’s social bonds aesthetically more pleasing, as indicated by the “elegance” of passion in the last sentence of the above quote. 9 Hume RP, 67. The close links among the fine arts, refinement, delicacy, and luxury are also apparent in RA; OC, 157, 161–3. 10 Hume RA, 169. Notwithstanding women’s intellectual shortcomings, the limited scope of their taste, and their taste’s particular liability to corruption, exchanges among certain classes of men and women do turn out to have beneficial civilizational effects, according to Hume. 11 Hume RA, 169. Besides productive interactions among the arts, this spirit also fosters the emergence of individual geniuses (RP, 58–9). 12 Hume RP, 74–5. Thus the aesthetic ties into the propagation of the “white race” through its contributions to heterosexual bonds between white men and women. 13 Conversation with white women allows white men to develop civility and deference (Hume RP, 69, 72–5). It enables white male intellectuals to develop “liberty and facility of thought” and makes available to them experience, which they are able to “consult” in their reasonings. Without white women’s civilizing force, white male intellectuals lack a “taste for life or manners” (EW, 2); their writings remain barbarous; their hearts cold (3). 14 It is white men’s task to rescue women’s talk from triviality (Hume EW, 1, 4–5). Learned men are called upon to correct false female taste (4–5) and to offer women sincere affection, or “the substance,” where others can provide only “complaisance,” in other words, “the shadow” (5). White men should meet white women with gallantry, a passion that refinement promotes in both men and women and that simultaneously affirms white masculine authority (RP, 73–4). Hume links gallantry tightly to taste, observing that it is “refined” by art (72), and, in turn, is indispensable to refinement in the arts (75). 15 Hume postulates a mutually uplifting organization of relationships among white males and females. Men’s and women’s “mutual endeavor to please must insensibly polish the mind” (RP, 74, my emphasis). He considers properly managed, heterosexual love the source of all politeness and refinement (NC, 125). More than that, such love is a natural foundation for the “sweetest and best enjoyment” of both sexes (RP, 74). The cultivation that taste achieves is both masculinized and feminized in distinctive, racialized ways and it is racialized in gendered ways. 16 Furthermore, given colonialism and slavery, blacks are implicitly expected to function, alongside white women and lower-class men, as material supporters of aesthetic bonds among white, middle-class men and among white, middle-class men and women, performing labor (economic, epistemic, and/or affective in nature) needed to protect the leisure and the intellectual productivity of learned, white males (see Hume RP, 67 and EW, 1–3). In addition to this, blackness, as indicated earlier, functions as a limitcategory against which these white bonds are articulated, that is, as a zero-point of reason, and hence of taste, and therefore of humanity and refined society. 17 Since Kant’s dismissals of blacks’ intellectual faculties are global and unspecific, pinpointing precisely how his theory invalidates black people’s aesthetic judgments and tastes requires extrapolation. Blacks’ said intellectual deficiency presumably hinders their ability to make judgments of so-called dependent beauty and to grasp aesthetic ideas, both of which Kant’s theory renders crucial to the aesthetic judgment of what today are considered artworks. Alleged intellectual deficiency most likely

220

18 19

20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

Notes hampers judgments of the beautiful and the sublime in making it difficult to achieve and register the relationships among the cognitive faculties that underwrite these judgments. See also n. 19 on Kant’s views about knowledge and moral feeling as preconditions for taste. Kant 1960, 108–12. The latter suggestion seems to apply in particular to Caribbean and South American Indians. Kant (1960, 114) comments on the variable forms taste historically takes. Kant (1951, par. 60) considers “a culture of the mental powers by means of those elements of knowledge called humaniora,” and “the development of moral ideas and the culture of the moral feeling” preparatory conditions for the emergence of taste. Additional connections between culture and taste surface in his view of genuine taste as a mean between the “large-mindedness,” “refinement,” and “higher culture” of “cultivated” classes and the “natural simplicity and originality” of “uncultivated” classes (ibid.). The presence of cross-cultural, transhistorical, racialized, classed, and gendered variety in the forms and qualities of taste strongly suggests that the phenomenon of taste bears complex relations to cultural conditions, such as the supposedly aesthetically relevant factors that Kant takes to differentiate “the Arab” from “the German.” These relations must be accounted for. However, Kant sidesteps the complexities he has opened up in admitting culturally grounded variety in taste. For a critique of the effects of naturalization of judgments of taste in Kant that links such naturalization with a process of aesthetic racialization (and racialized aestheticization), see Armstrong (1996, 213–15, 221–7, 230). She specifically points to the threat and promise offered by “visions of foreign bodies” in Kant’s Observations (227). A recent approach to aesthetic value judgments in terms of common cognitive faculties that deploys the term “public” in this sense is Railton (1998, see esp. 90). The extensive literature critiquing such notions of publicity includes Fraser (1987); Young (1987); Warner (1993); Yúdice (1993); Fleming (1995); and Landes (1995). For the less joyful side of daffodils that is vivid to Lucy but not to Mariah, see also Kincaid (1991, 29–30). Wordsworth 1983, 207–8, 330–3. Whereas Wordsworth’s narrator welcomes being revisited by images of the daffodils and finds replenishment in their visual “wealth,” Lucy desires erasure. Mariah hopes to share, for example, experiences of the spring sky and weather (Kincaid 1991, 19, 20), real daffodils (29), a ploughed field (33), and a fish she has caught (37). Ibid., 18–19. In reaching out to rub Lucy’s cheek, Mariah creates a rapprochement, but she shifts the terrain of engagement from aesthetic experience to Lucy’s “history.” An exception is Mariah’s love of coffee with hot milk, which she has learned to make in France, a taste Lucy picks up from her. This, however, is an example of Lucy opening up her aesthetic world to Mariah (and, simultaneously, to France?). The converse occurs only during a moment of great, shared pleasure and closeness inspired by the smell of peonies (60). Ibid., 9. See also 31. Ibid., 30. See also 41. Portuges (2001) points to the inexorability and irreversibility of aging in the film. See Chapter 3, 72–3. Kincaid’s novel, likewise, speaks to this phenomenon. Powerful analogies connect conceptions of the aesthetic as an aside and as a detail. Notably, an instance of taste on Lucy’s part (the taste of boiled over fried or baked fish in

Notes

32

33

34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

221

the story of Christ and the fishermen) is figured as a “small detail,” a detail that means a lot to her (1991, 38–9), and that represents a point of aesthetic difference between her and Mariah. Singular, ungeneralizable aesthetic details occasion barriers of communication and understanding that Mariah ignores but Lucy experiences poignantly (131–2). A person who grants (certain) details aesthetic significance, Lucy, in turn, is at times treated like an insignificant detail herself (58). Varda’s use of form and address (to the viewer, to other artworks and, especially in the second video, to aesthetic objects and relationships) complicate her treatment of gleaning and the aesthetic in ways my reading bypasses. The same goes for the correspondences she creates between gleaning and aesthetic disinterestedness, which both stand in tension with forms of utility. This is not to deny that Varda’s cinematic essays at the same time counteract the unmarked role the aesthetic plays as a dimension of relations from subjects to subjects, and among subjects and objects, underwriting everyday existence. However, Varda’s celebration of aesthetic life is limited in a racialized fashion. The racialized restrictions that surface are concomitant with a loving, seductive treatment of aesthetic agents’ collaborative, ostensibly incidental interactions with the world of objects—aspects of mundane aesthetic life the possibilities of which Varda’s videos powerfully underscore. Fanon BSWM, 111–12, 188. Another way in which these forms help to sustain white identities is by offering them outlets for collective aggression (145–6). Fanon WoE, 72, 77, 82–4, 114, 135, 196; see also 142 and 147. Ibid., 40, 93, 236–8. Fanon qualifies this point with respect to the countryside. Apart from their rebellion against exploitation, peasants, in his view, statically preserve their traditions unmodified (111–12, 127). Regarding the independence era, Fanon points out that nationalism is to be deepened as soon as possible by turning into a consciousness of social and political needs (ibid., 204; see also 175). He also binds the aesthetic to an overly restrictive notion of racial identity. Implicitly acknowledging, yet overtly dismissing black women’s sexuality, and guarding against the boundary-threatening force of female miscegenation (Chow 1998), Fanon overestimates the racial homogeneity of black postcolonial communities. Fanon writes that “every culture is first and foremost national” and points to “realistic” developmental trajectories that are to make culture “fruitful, homogeneous, and consistent” (WoE, 216–17; see also 222–4). Of course, aesthetic qualities of Fanon’s writing go in tandem with and partly sustain and instantiate the political thrust of his work. Accordingly, these features do not, strictly speaking, belie the idea that there are no elements external to the decolonial project that are capable of fuelling new cultural starting points. That said, however, the aesthetic potentialities my readings have brought out exceed oppositions that Fanon inscribes in the politics of anticolonial resistance. Along with the many aesthetic elements he discusses, the rhetorical dimensions of his work intimate aesthetic possibilities minimized by some (though not all) of his overt persuasions. Gordon notes the beauty, boldness, irony, and pathos of Fanon’s prose, which he considers “a work of art” (1997, 39 and 230). Comparing these artists’ poetics with that of Flannery O’Connor and Joseph Conrad, Marshall also locates the women’s talks in relation to white literary canons. She cites the friends’ talks as the primary influences on her own work, subsequently followed by the writing of black authors including Paul Laurence Dunbar (1983, 10–12).

222

Notes

42 Davis specifically registers the intertwinement of music and speech in West African histories (1998, 174, 54). 43 Davis mentions that gender oppression went unchallenged in the dominant popular cultural tradition encompassing the lyrics that Holiday transformed through her deployment of African American symbolic strategies (164). She highlights transformations Holiday effected in the black cultural tradition the singer rallied, expanding the idioms of modern jazz (165, 172) and forging avenues for aesthetic politicization in black popular culture (196–7). Furthermore, Davis documents tensions between black and white forms channeled in the singer’s art (175). Like Marshall, Davis recounts aesthetic processes of transculturation. On comparable, more recent syncretic strategies, see West’s (1990) and Mercer’s (1990) accounts of improvisational and critical bricolage. 44 Davis’s view of the translocal affiliations she describes and the boundary-transcending meanings they imply both departs from and bears analogies to Enlightenment notions of the general public. Three crucial points of difference are the following: one, the forces of transculturation Davis identifies are highly specific, eschewing general applicability (see 1998, 183); two, unlike Kant and Hume, Davis recognizes the role of categories of difference, such as race, class, and gender, in enabling and constraining cultural bonds, without also, at another level, denying the role of such elements; three, contrary to her predecessors, Davis refrains from endorsing many of the hierarchies classically encoded in these categories. 45 Ibid., xiii–xx, 24, 65, 142–4, 159, 162–3, 173. Davis also describes Holiday’s engagement with dilemmas confronting growing black middle classes (171). 46 On misreadings of the music, see ibid., 92–101, 142, 163, 184–7. 47 See ibid., 54–5, 164, 168, 171, 173, 175. 48 Departures from Enlightenment paradigms thereby are concomitant with parallels. 49 The whitening of the aesthetic, in their theories, is also characterized by such specificity and intersectionality.

Chapter 3 1 Agnès Varda’s documentaries on gleaning examine this logic of the aside (see Chapter 2, 41–3). 2 Budd (1995, 22–3) points to Hume’s connection between delicacy of taste and detail. 3 Delicacy of taste, according to Hume, allows an artwork to move “the finer emotions of the mind,” which are of a “very tender and delicate nature” (ST, 138–9). The motions of these “small springs” are easily “disturbed” by “the least exterior hindrance” or “the least internal disorder” (139). This highly sensitive material needs to be sensed by a fine and exact faculty, a proclivity that is sensitive to “finer emotions” (140), that is, to detail. Hume supports this view of taste by pointing out that a person with a fever cannot judge flavors authoritatively and that someone affected by jaundice cannot accurately assess colors. A keenly attuned apprehensive capacity is required to truly perceive these “real” qualities (140). 4 Detail-related constellations are my focus in this chapter. Other writers cast a broader analytical net. On gender structures in multiple areas of Hume’s philosophy and their bearings on his notion of the standard of taste, see Korsmeyer (1995).

Notes

223

5 Hume formulates this point about the imagination also in the earlier 2001 (hereafter “THN”), 2.2.2.20–1, where its operations display inflections by class and empire, in addition to (and presumably intersecting with) gender. See also Korsmeyer (1995, 57). 6 According to Irigaray (1985), sexual difference is yet to be formed, in part, through the development of a feminine imaginary, given that Western philosophy has instituted an apparatus of masculine logos, rationality, and symbolic language that construes feminine materiality and embodiment as unrepresentable grounds of signification, positioning nature, marked as feminine, constitutively outside of legible metaphysical and epistemological frameworks. Lloyd (1993b, 1993a, 76, 82) explores structural gendering effects of historical distinctions between reason and its opposites, including nature. 7 While systemic, these associations are neither stable nor univocal. Complications attach, for instance, to Hume’s understanding of reason as a natural capacity. Baier emphasizes his shifting notion of reason and underlines the equivocal nature of his ideas about women’s capabilities (1993, 47; 1989, 50). Lloyd (2000) observes that Hume averts old polarized distinctions between imagination, passion, and reason as he brings these operations together, effecting a naturalization of reason. Whereas Hume regularly feminizes nature, he typically masculinizes human nature. Korsmeyer (1995) identifies gendering effects attendant on Hume’s grounding of taste in human nature, as comprehended on a model of ideal masculinity. Smuts (2000) examines shifting gender metaphors informing Hume’s views of reason and nature. These commentators recognize tensions, shifts, equivocations, and inconsistencies in Hume’s views about reason, nature, and gender. The detail, in his theory, bears out this pattern. 8 Schor sketches a longstanding tradition that feminizes the detail’s ties to nature, feeling, and perception, dissociates detail from culture, and holds detail responsible for threats to aesthetic goodness and taste (1987, 16–17, 19–20). On reason’s significance to taste, see Chapter 2 of this book (31, 218n. 2). 9 Hume’s discussion of the relative benefits and disadvantages of overreaching or falling below adequate levels of detail and detail-sensitivity indicates that the gendered dimensions of detail do not reduce to a generic construction on Hume’s part of a putative mean as masculine, and of anything beyond or short of this as feminine (SR, 46–7). Additional evidence for this resides in the distinctively gendered roles men and women fulfill in the process of refining their taste. 10 Temple (2000, 269–70) argues that Hume relies on trivial feminized detail of the type he denounces (in Hume [SH and 1850]) in order to establish what properly masculine history writing amounts to and to forge an image of the English nation as a paradigm of order. Stressing Hume’s comparison of women with nature, she brings out his alignment of femininity, as exemplified in deprecated detail, with excess, irregularity, superfluidity, multiplicity, and disruption (266–8, 275). Hume’s own (1850) elision of transgressive detail and his evocation of the kinds of details favored by the romance genre, in her account (273–4), collaborate to project onto the figure of a sexually transgressive, diseased, feminine body, forms of disorder disavowed by idealized conceptions of nationhood. 11 See Schor (1987, 4, 15–22, 25, 29, 35, 43–5, 59). 12 Carroll (1984, 190) contends that a Humean critic exhibits the possession of delicacy of taste by describing “fine shadings in tones, colors, and meanings.” He argues that this critical attribute, for Hume, involves a sensitivity to “beauties” and “blemishes,” one that renders Hume’s definition of this appreciative characteristic circular (189–90,

224

Notes

194n. 34); Carroll furthermore persuasively challenges Peter Kivy’s attempt to rescue Hume’s notion of delicacy of taste from charges of circularity and infinite regress (189–91). 13 As Carroll argues, Hume’s notion of delicacy of taste is circular. There are ways of bypassing charges of circularity. Formulating a Humean account, Levinson (2000) defines beauty or artistic goodness as a capacity of objects to give aesthetic pleasure when appropriately apprehended. He proposes to identify ideal critics on the basis of their ability to appreciate a canon of what Hume calls masterworks, that is, a set of exemplary works that have been shown to withstand the test of time, exhibiting wide, broad, appeal across cultural barriers. A work’s passing this test, for Levinson, constitutes prima facie evidence of its aesthetic goodness. This view forestalls certain problems of circularity (230–3, 237n. 20).   However, the delimitation of canons notoriously draws on systemic, historically produced formations of power, knowledge, desire, and pleasure. This foils a plausible reliance on bodies of masterworks as dependable indicators of critical acumen, discernment, and potential to provide aesthetic experience when properly appreciated. The passing of tests of time supplies considerable prima facie evidence that an artwork supports existing formations of power, knowledge, and pleasure, refrains from violating deeply entrenched aesthetic sensibilities, and, perceived in its historical context, is instrumental in sustaining established privilege, rather than of a work’s capacity to supply intrinsically valuable experience to appropriate perceivers. Given that aestheticized and aestheticizing racialization, class formation, and gendering have withstood many a test of time, the tenability of Levinson’s approach, whether definitionally (as an analysis of aesthetic goodness) or epistemically (as a gauge of such goodness), is limited. A critical apparatus is required that challenges these aesthetic forces. 14 Carroll argues that it is impossible to ground a critical sensibility in a mere perceptual sensitivity (1984, 189–90, 194n. 34; see also 186). 15 I speak here of “aesthetic structures” in order to acknowledge the dynamism of aesthetic desires and affiliations, which acquire their force and meanings in the context of webs of aesthetic relationality and address. 16 The newly instituted scheme thereby simultaneously influences this antecedent tradition as the latter carries on. 17 Hume often refers to small and minute elements in the artwork or artifact (ST, 141–2). The labels “small” and “minute,” which, to contemporary ears, have a more objective ring to them than “fine” and “gross,” arguably, function as aesthetic predicates rather than aesthetically neutral notions. This suggests that the notion of detail itself constitutes an aesthetic concept, in Hume, in prestandardized as well as standardized aesthetic systems. 18 Hume endorses a qualified view of epistemic limits that grants room for his ambivalent treatment of prestandardized, feminine taste. Recognizing the inevitability of limited perspectives, he also sees them as impediments that we should resist and valorizes capacities to extrapolate from such restricted viewpoints (1998c, 141–2). 19 Cohen (1994, 150–1) describes a similar yet somewhat different rule that, in his reading, the finding of the key and thong reveals to be applicable in Hume’s winetasting case. 20 Sverdlik (1986, 72) raises the possibility that the tastes detected by the kinsmen are interesting or improvements. 21 Hume contributes this point to the tale in Don Quixote (Cervantes 2003, second pt., ch. XIII, 537–8). Note also that the difference of judgment between the two tasters

Notes

22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34

225

does not cause him to worry about the adequacy of their perceptions. He may grant the true critic leeway in missing some details. This move on Hume’s part substantially mirrors the theoretical role his model of taste arguably lends recognized masterworks (see, for example, Levinson 2002). The supposedly good wine in the experiment functions in ways in which Hume takes canonical works to guide a process of aesthetic education, serving as one of the “excellent models,” or “examples” that the observer can use in sizing up qualities of other works (gaining practice in comparative aesthetic judgment by testing an object against the background of commendable objects), in evaluating characteristics of putative judges, and in assessing the applicability or adequacy of principles of taste, such as regularities correlating iron and leather wine-additives with (unappealing) flavors imparted by these materials, when apprehended as elements of a categorically grounded, overall wine-gestalt (ST, 141–3). My reading of the role of the wine, thus, abides by broader contours of Hume’s theory. Taste, for Hume, applies in the area of wit. Delicacy is called for in this sphere (ST, 143). On the masculinization of the critic, see Korsmeyer (1995). On his class-position, see Shusterman (1993). This is contrary to the situation in Cervantes, where Sancho first demonstrates his ability to identify-by-taste the origin of the wine he is given to drink before discussing the wine-tasting occasion on which Hume improvises (Cervantes 2003, 537). Hume ST, 145–6. This interpretive requirement may even be impossible to fully satisfy. See Young’s (1997) critique of the idea that agents can suspend their positionality so as to imaginatively identify with other’s standpoints. Hume’s sources of critical variability also intimate such limits (ST, 149–53; see Chapter 1 of this book, 214n. 1). These allow delicacy of imagination to operate correctly, that is, in consonance with the relation that nature has established between the object and the perceiver. As Korsmeyer (1995) argues. Shusterman (1993) identifies class exclusions attendant on conditions of practice and comparative experience, which require leisure. Hume EW, 3–4. Among Hume’s reservations about women’s judgments of these books is that women “seem more delighted with the warmth, than with the justness of the passion” (4, emphasis added). With Schor (1987, 15, 23, 34) I share a focus on the detail as an “aesthetic category.” . . . or a man of her own to marry, which was a typical part of a maid’s life path in seventeenth-century Holland. See Nevitt Jr (2001, 102). The maid’s hair and upper body fade into the background and her bright, blue skirt fuses to some extent into the blue tablecloth. This anchors the maid in the domestic setting and intensifies the mistress’s exposed position. Documenting links between tablecloths and women’s skirts in several Vermeer paintings, Gowing (1952, 44–5) reads these tablecloths as characters’ impersonal extensions that function as supports or pedestals to letter writers as well as markers of fertility. For example, this mistress appears much less actively present in her body than the more idealized lady in Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid (ca. 1670–1, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland) or the lady in A Lady Writing (ca. 1665, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art). See Barthes (LD, 20, 72, 191); Schor (1987, 95).

226

Notes

35 The turn of the maid’s right hand suggests a stretching of the time span in which the letter is held out for viewing to the mistress, deferring, in tandem with the mistress’s left hand, the moment at which the letter will be handed over to her. 36 Both the mistress’s and the maid’s right hands, which, as Wheelock (1995, 147) notes, mirror one another, are modeled in sharper detail than the mistress’s raised left hand. 37 Hegel (1975, 2:800–1), for example, describes the spiritual animation by the artist of sensory elements in paintings. Among the large group of theorists who oppose aesthetic meaning formation to death are Barthes (1981 [hereafter “CL”], 73, 110, 117); Fanon (WoE); Deleuze (1989); and Kristeva (1989). On gendered tensions inherent in forms of animating address directed at lifeless entities, see Johnson (1987a). 38 See Barthes (LD, 191; CL, 118–19; LD, 19). 39 See Barthes (CL, 98, 94, 27, 45, 109). 40 Hume’s testimony about his coldness is consonant with his view that delicacy of taste “excites soft and tender emotions” in the critic, produces an “agreeable melancholy . . . suited to love and friendship” and “carries further” the “affections” felt for a select few, while creating indifference toward others (DTP, 12–13; see also Chapter 2 of this book, 33–4). At the same time, in the driving out of a painful state of melancholy and delirium, Hume finds the particularized “sentiments of nature” at work that abstract philosophical reflection can quell (SH, 98–9; qtd. on p. 62). 41 Stasis and motionlessness lie at the center of the melancholic formation he sketches. 42 Schor (1987, 97; 1995, 32–7). This, notwithstanding the role of the neuter in Barthes’s work. 43 Neither the mistress’s autoerotic touch nor her reaching for the pearl, which in some respects confirm masculinist power, have the effect of masculinizing the mistress’s left hand. 44 For Hume, the subject’s relationship to the world of cultural objects and the public is mediated through the construct of “man in general:” “[W]hen any work is addressed to the public . . . I must . . . [consider] myself as a man in general, [and] forget, if possible, my individual being, and my peculiar circumstances” (ST, 145). 45 On links between a logic of cultivation and constructions of femininity in Vermeer’s oeuvre, see Vergara (2001, 235–49). The trajectory Hume takes to lead from feminized sensory detail to culture parallels the seventeenth-century idea that paintings of beautiful women are capable of exemplifying the cultivation that consists in the artist’s artfulness and civil status, the public’s social standing, the quality of cultural life in Holland, and the dignity of painting as an art. See Sluijter (1998, 271–4); Vergara (1998). Vergara argues specifically that by representing femininity as composed, dignified, intimate as well as grand, private as well as public, Vermeer is able to articulate his particular vision of modernity. The plausibility of the relevant cultural logic in Hume and Vermeer, rests on the condition that the paintings of feminine beauty and the constellations of detail that are deemed exemplary of culture observe appropriate class, race, sexual, and gender relations. 46 Varda’s documentaries on gleaning display elements of this mobile interplay between generality and particularity (see Chapter 2, 41–3). 47 Braidotti (1994, 134–5) explores the paradoxical, critical positioning within gender configurations this entails. De Lauretis (1987, 1–30 and 127–48) describes a related dynamic between positivity and negativity.

Notes

227

Chapter 4 1 Lispector (1986 [1977], 68); Amaral (1985); see, among other writings, Cixous (1991). 2 See Franco (1992, 75–6). 3 Lispector 1986, 53. The term “semiotic” refers here to Macabéa’s enjoyment of the materiality of signs at a distance from certain referential meanings (as when she delights in the smell of meat while lacking the means to buy meat itself [ibid.]). See also Kristeva (1984, 21–89). 4 See Lispector (1986, 14, 38, 47, 51, 71, 73, 80). 5 I follow Alexander Broadie, among others, in seeing the Scottish Enlightenment as spanning roughly the eighteenth century (2003, 1, 6). 6 According to Shaftesbury ([Anthony Ashley Cooper] 1964), the mind, which has “an idea or sense of order and proportion” (2:63) perceives and rationally enjoys beauty in itself, which coincides with goodness and truth (1:91, 1:94; 2:126–8, 2:144). Beauty depends on symmetry and order (1:92; 2:177, 2:267–9, 2:276), which we perceive without fully knowing this order (1:214; 2:65). The proportionality that makes for beauty is productive of utility, convenience, and advantage, but beauty does not depend on this. Rather, it depends on the “fountain of all beauty,” which forms the minds that, in turn, form beautiful things (2:126, 2:131–3). Likewise, Shaftesbury argues that self-interest and virtue coincide (2:243–4, 2:274, 2:281–2), though virtue is not based on interest (1:66), but disinterested (1:67, 1:69, 1:77–8).   Hutcheson (2004) echoes Shaftesbury’s idea that the sense of beauty provides a disinterested pleasure in order and the just proportion of elements within the larger whole of which these elements are a part (2004, 8–9, 45, 86, 112). This pleasure is immediate and prior to utility or rational comprehension (9, 25, 35, 100). At the same time, it is compatible with self-interest (186). More than that, self-interest is actually morally required (122). 7 Barrell (1989) analyzes the gendered, sexual, artistic, and spectatorial requirements posed by art’s moral and political task in Shaftesbury. 8 The designation “emollit mores,” denoting a softening of norms, points to the danger of feminization. See the link between softening and “effeminacy” in the previous set of quotations as well as in Shaftesbury (1914, 104). Here the phrase occurs in connection with a concern about the weakening that may follow from polishing and refinement, and that Shaftesbury takes to result in effeminacy. 9 These registers of difference intersect. See Spelman (1988). 10 Mandeville 1924, 42, 323–5, 331. Following Mandeville, Howard Caygill elaborates on the need for violence, forced labor, and political regulation in Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (1989, 43–5, 51–3, 57–62). 11 Mandeville 1924, 331, 68–9, 76–80, 124–65, 231–5. 12 Alongside broader critiques such as Benjamin (2003); West (1982); Wynter (1992), see specifically Caygill (1989, 43–62); Barrell (1989, 102–3). 13 Examples are Spelman (1988, 9–13, 19–36, 126–8); Lloyd (1993b). 14 See Kristeva (1987; 1984, 25–30, 45–51, 68–71); Irigaray (1985, 86–118, 186–9; 1993, 20–33; “The Female Gender,” in 1993b, 109, 113–15). 15 Recall the initially violent subjugation of sexual desire by reason in the Phaedrus, as exemplified by the analogy of the chariot, through which Socrates illustrates the process by which reason gains control over certain kinds of bodily passion in realizing a noble, peaceful, and happy form of love (Plato 1961, 246a–248c, 253c–256e). For a discussion of somatophobia in Plato and the politicization of the distinctions between

228

16 17

18

19

20 21 22 23 24

25

26

Notes the rational and appetitive parts of the soul, see Spelman (1988). On the gendered and racial connotations of figurations of the body and the links between Plato’s views of embodiment and beauty, see especially 23–31, and 127. See, for instance, Buck-Morss (1992). Hume thus avoids the violent self-denial that, Mandeville argues against Shaftesbury, is forced on working classes by politicians and thinkers who perpetuate hypocritical equations of public and private good, and of virtue and self-interest (Mandeville 1924, 42, 323–4, 331). See also n. 22. Hume RA, 169–70. Thus, taste, for Hume, exemplifies what Guillory sees as its role in eighteenth-century moral philosophy generally, namely that of regulating consumption without limiting “the commerce and industry upon which the nation depended” (1993, 307). According to Smith, the poor man’s son, who, eager to reach a felicitous state of repose, devotes his life to the attainment of wealth and greatness, foolishly sacrifices real contentment and tranquility that were available to him, for a figment of his imagination, inspired by the attractions of countless “artificial and elegant contrivances” (2000, 259–62). Smith also notes that the beggar is not lacking in real happiness, as compared to the rich man (265). Thus, on one hand, Smith drastically limits the degree of ennoblement and embellishment beauty promises. On the other, beauty’s promise contributes vitally to the realization of a crucial moral and political good such as justice: in inciting human productivity and investing objects with aesthetic meaning, the imagination of wealth and greatness permits workers to gain a share in the necessities of life that the landlord’s own leanings toward humanity or justice would not have granted them (264). Beauty’s moral and political ambivalence stands out clearly in Smith’s account. See, for instance, Gagnier (2000); Poovey (1994). Mattick (1995) and Armstrong (1996), among others, make this case regarding gender and race in Burke. Burke, like Shaftesbury, keeps subjects in line via regulations without taking recourse to “totally banishing” or “prohibiting” (Shaftesbury 1964, 1:218–19; 1914, 104). This is a possibility that commentators have indeed assumed to be true. See, for example, Armstrong (1996). The assumption is reasonable, given that sublimity is the subject of Burke’s discussion. Moreover, the horrific or terrible is not necessarily sublime. This latter honorific state involves a measure of distance from danger and pain, which, “with certain modifications,” allows for delight (Burke 1990, 36–7; see also 47). Possibly he takes the necessary distance and adjustments to be lacking in the case of the white boy’s perception of the black woman. Burke associates a high degree of sublimity also with astonishment, and recognizes elements of admiration, reverence, and respect as ingredients of experiences of the sublime (53). Assuming that the perception of her as horrific implicitly constitutes an aesthetic judgment, one that deploys the horrific as an aesthetic concept, I suggest that she is not unqualifiedly expelled from the aesthetic realm, although she is banned from the system of normatively aestheticized relationality proposed by Burke. Armstrong argues that Burke casts the black female outside the boundaries he has established for the beautiful and the sublime (1996, 215, 220–1). The specific aesthetic nature and powers of whiteness and blackness depend on the racial coding they carry in Burke’s system; at the same time, their racial meanings find elaboration in their aesthetic effects. The racialization of whiteness and blackness thus

Notes

27

28

29 30 31

32 33 34

35

229

is to be understood, in part, as an aesthetic artifact, and the aestheticization of these concepts (and the experiences they inform) is partly to be seen as a racial construct. In other words, their racialization and aestheticization are entangled. Wollstonecraft 1992, 144–7, 162. The argument may not apply men’s (or other non-female-identified individuals’) aesthetic pleasing of men. For it is not clear that Wollstonecraft perceives a problem with “equivocal beings” that offer men “something more soft than women” (254; see also 161). Wollstonecraft 1992, 156, 170, 150, 144. Wollstonecraft writes “From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind” before insisting on the ways in which “the respect paid to wealth and mere personal charms” is destructive of women’s virtue (257–8). Thus she explicitly discusses the question of women’s beauty (the source of their personal charms) in the context of the market. See Poovey on connections with eighteenth-century debates on the relation between virtue and commerce (1994, 91–8). On this discriminatory authority, see also Armstrong (1996, 217, 220). This is not to deny its distance from Shaftesbury’s grounding of the artistic civilizing process in female beauty (see Barrell [1989]). While Wollstonecraft presents upper- and middle-class women with the virtuous paradigm of working-class women who perform the labor it takes to discharge their responsibilities (174), she ultimately privileges the former. Cole (1991, 125–35) critiques Wollstonecraft’s class-hierarchy. These kinds of bodily acts are infused with Macabéa’s inquisitive disposition and her imagination. See, for instance, Lispector (1986, 26, 32, 49–50). This point applies also to beauty’s associations with able-bodiedness and its conventionally assumed disconnection from aged and physically impaired bodies, and to its complicity in environmental destruction. See Silvers (2000); Saito (2002). Irigaray, among others, alerts us to this task in the context of problematic gender constellations. For an illuminating approach to beauty’s ambivalence and its entwinement with race, gender, and other dynamics of subjectivity, see Cheng (2000). Both Cheng and Johnson (1998, 79–87) recognize such ambivalence in novels by Toni Morrison. In my book manuscript “Arts of Address,” as well as in Chapter 8 of this book, I indicate how pleasures of this kind critically implicate the reader in consequence of the novella’s forms of address. In our joint book manuscript in progress “Anachronism and Aesthetics in Latin America,” Norman S. Holland and I examine the novella’s aesthetic strategies in greater detail.

Chapter 5 1 Prominent instances of a je-ne-sais-quoi can be found in Plato, Boileau, and Hutcheson. 2 Pressing the skeptical line further, one may of course wonder what the epistemic status of this kind of claim is. 3 Leibniz, Baumgarten, Herder, and Schopenhauer, among others, can be considered proponents of this approach. See Barnouw (1993, 1995); Schopenhauer (1958).

230

Notes

4 A perspective along these lines may be associated with a position that takes seriously both the forgetfulness, unknowingness, and irrationality of aesthetic interpretation (see Barthes CL, PT) and its ability to convey knowledge (as suggested by Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, and other theorists who defend art’s cognitive and moral import in the face of prima facie epistemic impediments). 5 For different formulations of this idea see Althusser (1997); de Man (1979, 1983); Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) view of the entwinement of the visible and the invisible; Derrida’s (1998, 1981) writings on deconstruction, supplementarity, and dissemination; Johnson (1987c). 6 Advocates of this approach include Derrida (1998, 1981, 1987); le Doeuff (1989). 7 For the notion of intercorporeality see Merleau-Ponty (1968, 141 and 143); Weiss (1999). 8 These ethically and politically efficacious states participate in the reproduction and transformation of social conditions, demanding a place in the analyses and practices of critical race feminisms and in debates on ignorance currently occurring across disciplines. See, for example, Sullivan and Tuana (2006, 2007); Proctor and Schiebinger (2008). 9 After three seasons the show was renamed Queer Eye. 10 Excerpts from “Advertisement” and “Utopia” in this chapter are from Wisława Szymborska, View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (Szymborska [1995]). Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 1976 by Czytelnik, Warszawa. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; and Faber and Faber Ltd. 11 More accurately, the tranquilizer purports to render its benefits attractive, while at most partially succeeding in this. Yet the poem folds the reader and writer into the desire for ignorance, rather than placing them above it, or leaving them untouched by it. 12 Unlike ignorance, understood as a lack of knowledge, ignoring typically involves awareness of what is ignored. The aesthetic often saves the labor of ignoring by doing the work of enabling nonawareness. 13 See “Warning” and “We’re Extremely Fortunate,” in Szymborska (1995). 14 Kaplan (1988, 169–70) mentions the work’s visual correspondence with a seventeenthcentury alchemical representation of a maze centered around the philosopher’s stone. 15 Commentators who recognize a journey toward enlightenment in the work include Kaplan (1988); Loranzo (2000). On this theme in Varo’s broader oeuvre, see also Chadwick (1985, 195, 215–18). In Kaplan’s reading, the work represents a spiritual voyage (1988, 169). Loranzo describes the painting as depicting a “synthesis of a series of furtive quests” (2000, 45). 16 Kaplan observes that the boats resemble vessels in which alchemists assume transformation to take place (1988, 169). Chadwick, likewise, reads egg-shapes as central to alchemical transformation (1985, 211–12), and recognizes in Varo and other women Surrealists an “alchemical identification of the egg with women’s creative powers” (166). 17 This bird is more emblematic, less individualized than many other birds in Varo’s work, which tend to be free, curious, full of intention, watchful, and actively engaged, as in Immured Figures (1958), The Encounter (1962), and Nocturnal Hunt (1958). 18 Though the bird in the tower represents a state toward which voyagers are striving, its static, symbolic placement suggests that it denotes the concept of a goal, rather than a goal the painting claims humans ought to seek. Plausibly invoking an alchemical print

Notes

19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28 29

30

231

(see n. 14), the bird’s central, elevated position may allude to the philosopher’s stone or the gold signifying the aim of alchemical transformation. This preempts the need to posit an end, besides the indexing of a concept thereof, as Hillman (1993) suggests. I thank Stan Marlan for this reference. Kaplan argues that Varo’s use of Surrealist techniques such as decalcomania, and images of feminized domestic crafts, such as embroidery, cooking, and knitting, subvert Surrealist artistic methods, and outline alternative positions for women under surrealism (1998, 31–40). On the feminized chora, see Kristeva’s reading of Plato’s Timaeus (1984, 25–30, 68–71) and Irigaray (1985, 94, 101–2; 1993a, 34–55, 83–94). Schiller holds a view of this sort, even if he, strictly speaking and not eschewing paradox, resists the language of bridging. See Chapter 6, 234n. 2 and 234n. 11. See Schiller (1967, 5, 13–15, 18, 27–9, 43, 141, 161–71, 179). See Dewey (1934, 20–2, 29, 25, 48–9, 27, 33, 247, 249, 250, 287–8, 54, 333–4, 336, 297). See Kristeva (1996, 167–249); Irigaray (2000, 7, 61, 88); Lorde (1984); and Anzaldúa (2002, 192). Numerous writers document exclusionist effects of such distinctions. The following is a radically abbreviated list. For a reading of hierarchies and differentiations produced by the mind-body dichotomy and its attendant oppositions, see Spelman (1988). On the reason-emotion schism see Jaggar (1992); Spelman (1992). For the bifurcation of the individual and the social, see Lugones (2003). On the public-private divide, see Fraser (1987); Young (1987); Fleming (1995). For the reason-imagination/sensation distinction, see le Doeuff (1989); Braidotti (2002). On the split between particularity and generality, see Schor (1987). Theorists such as Bourdieu (1995); Schor (1987); West (1982); Wynter (1992); Korsmeyer (1998) register the complicity of aesthetic protocols in the institutionalization of gender, class, ethnic, and racial differences. While Hume allows some variability regarding observers’ emotional responses to artworks (ST, 149–51), this confirms that he simultaneously endorses criteria of appropriateness governing them, as becomes apparent, for example, in his discussion of women’s affective reactions to “books of gallantry and devotion” (EW, 4). Hume ST, 140, 149, 142. Hume’s view that “all mankind” agrees that the true critic is a “valuable and estimable” character (148) also confirms the co-presence of moral and epistemic criteria in the realm of taste. Many instances of such guidance surface in Hume’s views. He advocates a balance between simplicity and refinement in order to avoid fatiguing the reader’s mind and filling him with disgust, in order to retain “justness of representation” (SR, 44), and to avoid “degeneracy” of taste (47). Moral and epistemic dimensions converge in this terminology, which purports to regulate the workings of affect, perception, sensation, and imagination. This extensive disciplinary role of taste’s moral and epistemic dimensions emerges also in taste’s refining influence over our affects (DTP), in the cultivating impact refinement in the arts has on our appetites, tempers, pleasure, and wit, and in the quelling of excess by refinement (RA, 167–71). Taste helps him to depend on himself for the happiness he places on external objects, including the company of others (DTP, 11; RA, 174). At the same time, it fosters love, friendship, and sociability (DTP, 12; RA, 169) and provides pleasure in material objects and sensation (RA; OC; RP).

232

Notes

31 Not all installments observe the outline I identify in the following. My focus will be on the basic frame of the show, which has given rise to variations on many points, changes that have clearly have occasioned shifts in this template, but do not in the end undermine the usefulness of a relatively abstract analysis of aesthetic structures postulated across a wide range of episodes. 32 Note that, contrary to Hume’s view, in the show’s aesthetics of equipage (see pp. 32 and 65), there is no need for the subject of the show to act out of taste. 33 While stretching the operative notion of white, propertied, straight masculinity, the show also solidifies it anew by embedding it in the loving care of a gay support network that picks up the slack of dominant construals of heterosexual romance. Thereby the show confirms the traditional homosocial yet heterosexual aesthetic arrangement theorized by Hume and Kant. 34 Hume and Queer Eye share elements of an ethical and aesthetic pedagogy. It is nonetheless worth noting that Hume, one of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment theorists intent on reconciling virtue with an expanded commercial world, fears that commercially attentive men might not be virtuous workers or public-spirited citizens. He then identifies in taste and refinement grounds for securing and enhancing virtue (DP; OA; RP). Such ethical disquietude is not among Queer Eye’s concerns. It is dispelled by the protagonists’ apparently secure economic status. This permits the series to limit its moral compass to the subject’s individual flourishing and his relations with his immediate social and familial environment. 35 Several items on Peggy McIntosh’s well-known list of white privileges involve straightforward aesthetic opportunities, such as the availability of “the staple foods that fit with [one’s] cultural traditions” in the supermarket, the advantage of meeting someone who can cut one’s hair upon entering a hairdresser’s shop; or of finding people of one’s race “widely represented” in the media (1997, 293). 36 On these factors, see, among others (Dyer 1997, 14, 28, 38–40, 70–1, 75–81). 37 On the power of master narratives governing representations of African Americans in Hollywood cinema, see Lubiano (1995). 38 Aestheticized ignorance, accordingly, is part and parcel of practices theorists have theorized under the rubrics of ideology, the culture industry, and, recently, of epistemologies of ignorance, the politics of location, and the ethics of embodiment. Aestheticized ignorance assists in the ideological reproduction of social relations. It comprises an aspect of what Althusser (1971) called ideology and of what Rancière (2004) names the distribution of the sensible. It constitutes a dimension of the embodied, interpretive social horizon feminist epistemologists theorize in terms of positionality and location (see, for instance, Alcoff [2006, 94–102, 144–52]). It pervades forms of ignorance philosophers find at work in domination, such as the comportment Lugones (2003, 18, 23, 132) labels “aggressive ignorance.” It infuses the institutionalized epistemology of ignorance Mills attributes to white privilege (1997, 18, 93, 97). 39 De Man 1979, 1983; Althusser 1997; Derrida 1998, 1981. Althusser speaks of “an oversight” that is “a form of vision” (21). For Merleau-Ponty (1968), the visible is reciprocally entwined with the invisible. De Man (1983, 106, 136) takes blindness to be a correlative of insight. According to Derrida (1998, 1981), who rejects the supposition that we are in control of our terms, knowledge amounts to ignorance, and vice versa; deconstructive language places both positions under erasure. 40 Spivak’s (1988) argument to the effect that the subaltern cannot speak identifies sections of irreversible ignorance crafted historically by colonialism, the effacement

Notes

233

of which uncritically supports white, Eurocentric ideological positions. Butler (2005) argues that ignorance about the self is inevitable as the self is given over to others in relations of address and derives the conditions for its existence from social norms that exceed the subject’s control. Acknowledgment of the self ’s essential opacity, in her view, can support a recognition of our own and others’ unknowability, thereby making possible modes of nonviolence and ethical responsibility (19–22, 40–9, 64–5, 84, 111, 136). 41 Bringing a Socratic awareness of knowledge’s ability to obstruct knowing to the politics of ethnicity, race, gender, and textuality, Irigaray, Johnson (1987b, 15–16), Ofelia Schutte, and Doris Sommer emphasize the centrality of ignorance in navigating symbolic interactions across sexual and cultural difference. Irigaray stresses the importance of acknowledging silence, distance, secrets, gaps, opacity, mystery, and transcendence among subjects (2000, 47, 62–4, 92, 103, 111). She attaches a fundamental form of ignorance to the impossibility of representing femininity within existing linguistic models (1985, 98–102, 106–18, 187–91). Her mimetic strategy purports to engage this unknowingness constructively, construing difference differently. Johnson (1987b, 76) underscores the pedagogical desirability of ignorance. Schutte (1998, 61) argues that communication across cultures involves incommensurabilities of meanings and temporalities among multiple voices. In her view, transnational negotiations of feminist agendas must be responsive to “these elements of cultural difference [which] cannot be fully apprehended in their ‘internal’ intracultural meaning by outsiders.” According to Sommer (1999), readers of minority texts in the Americas that mark cultural differences by erecting barriers to understanding should refrain from overstepping operative limits on comprehensibility. 42 Unhinging oppositions between immanence and transcendence, Irigaray seeks to catalyze possibilities for realizing alternative constellations of subjectivity inherent in current formations of sexual difference (1993a, 27, 32–3, 82, 129). Irigaray’s figures of fluidity, the sensible transcendental, and the angel give expression to material modes of transcendence inherent in embodied relational existence (1993a; “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids” in 1985; “Belief Itself ” in 1993b). Braidotti describes a paradox of gender in which she proposes we linger, engaging contradictions inherent in the workingthrough of traditional figurations of “Woman” (1994, 134–5; 2002, 25–8, 39–42, 59). De Lauretis postulates an unresolved tension between feminism’s positive and negative political programs (1987, 26, 127–8, 145–6; see also 18, 24 on “de-re-construction”). Lugones centers a notion of active subjectivity and attenuated intentionality around meetings and tensions between oppression and resistance. Her view dispenses with the common assumption that critical opposition demands completed intentions on the part of individual agents (2003, 217, 220, 226, 233n. 8).

Chapter 6 1 Besides being liminal spaces, taxis are heterotopias, that is, cultural forms that implement an alternative spatial organization of bodies relative to other spaces that subjects collectively inhabit (Foucault 1986). See Roelofs (2013) on heterotopic aspects of the cab.

234

Notes

2 Schiller observes that the polarities between reason and the senses or feeling cannot be bridged, and that aesthetic experience, as realized by the play drive, retains the oppositions among these functions, but nonetheless uses the language of a middle position (1967, 131, 123, 141, 161). See also n. 11. 3 Bril 2004. Translations are mine. A hugely popular writer, Bril authored over 40 books. His columns typically are narrated in an autobiographical voice. His untimely death in April 2009 was widely regretted in the Netherlands. 4 An initial analysis of racialized aesthetic nationalism in “Taxi Ride” appeared as Roelofs (2006). 5 For the notion of strange strangeness, and the distinction between assimilable and unassimilable strangeness, see Ahmed (2000, 97, 106–7, 113). On conceptions of cultural integrity and assimilation that can be seen to implicitly inform the experience of aesthetic strangeness in the Dutch taxi cab case, see also Alcoff (2006, 272–3). 6 I use quotation marks to indicate that, asymmetries inherent in the term “ethnic” notwithstanding, normatively racialized, autochthonous subjects are no less ethnic than allochthonous subjects. Deregulation of the taxi industry in 2000, which permitted any holder of a driver’s license and a declaration of good conduct to obtain a taxi license, has been widely seen to have precipitated an increase in the supply and price of taxi rides in Amsterdam, a decrease in the quality of drivers and the condition of their vehicles, and unclarity about fare calculations (van der Bij and Brandsen 2003). Since 2004, numerous reregulation efforts have been undertaken to support quality and consumer choice (see OECD 2008, 159–64), culminating in the 2010 taxi law, which several cities are implementing in 2013–14. 7 The culturally foreign behaviors in question here are ones that are accorded lowerclass status. Class is a dimension of racialization in the column. So is gender: Bril engages in a masculinized process of competition with the driver. Each of these social categories qualifies the workings of the other categories. 8 The result is an aesthetic cycle of self-legitimating fear. For an account of the effects of a cycle of projections and legitimizing perceptions of fear, see Butler (1993). 9 I have observed this reaction in the case of several white, autochthonous and allochthonous citizens of Amsterdam. 10 Melancholic and activist dimensions of aesthetic culture-building are not mutually exclusive. Another taxi story that features the trope of damaged aesthetic experience is Alex Gibney’s award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (2007). 11 As noted above (n. 2), this formulation calls for qualification in Schiller’s case. He claims that the polarity of reason and the senses or feeling cannot be bridged, and objects to the notion of a midway or middle state between them. He emphasizes that aesthetic experience, as realized by the play drive, preserves existing oppositions between these binaries (1967, 131, 123). At the same time, he deploys the terminology of a middle position (141, 161). Not eschewing paradox, the question of the ultimate resolvability of which I set aside here, he maintains that reason and sensation, as cultivated through the play drive, coexist independently (181), yet act reciprocally and in unity (95, 111, 125). 12 Addison (1945, no. 411, 277). According to Addison, beauty inspires the pleasures of the imagination in the man of taste, while imperfection elicits dislike (271). 13 Addison’s analogy between the mental faculty of fine taste and the taste of the sense of the palate (ibid., no. 409, 270) and the connections he implicitly or explicitly recognizes between the pleasures of the imagination and the activities of the

Notes

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22

235

understanding (no. 413, 282–3; no. 416, 293; no. 418, 297) also bear out this picture of partial crossings of persisting schisms. Schiller enters the provision that this takes more than a century (1967, 47). Ibid., 169. Likewise, he considers it worthwhile to create form in activities that are ordinarily the purview of physical impulse and desire. He claims that moral law and rational freedom must manifest themselves in the “indifferent sphere of physical life” (167). In virtue of the action of the play drive, the aesthetic state is conducive to the moral state, a more advanced stage of development in which morality and rationality prevail (171). Schiller claims that “aesthetic semblance must be devoid of reality” (199). True semblance is insubstantial and pure (197); it responds to “sheer appearance,” which artworks and human bodies achieve “purely in virtue of their existence as idea” (199). Hegel 1975, 1:7–8. Distinguishing the distinctive domain of philosophy—spirit— from the more primitive functioning of the body, affect, and the senses, his idealist framework observes a binarism of mind and body. See ibid., 1:12–13, 1:38–9, 1:49, 1:71, 1:75–81. Ibid., 1:9–11. According to Hegel, in the Christian period, which gives rise to romantic art, spirit develops to the stage of inwardness, and its artistic unification with sensuous form constrains its expression (1:79). Bril 2004. The Dutch “zag er slecht uit” (“looked bad”) refers to a person’s looking unhealthy or ill but can also hint at a failure to adequately care about one’s appearance. Compare musical sociality in “Taxi Ride” with that in “Hilton” (Bril 2001). In the 2001 column, Bril takes two cabs. During the first trip, on his way to the hotel where Dutch rock singer Herman Brood had committed suicide earlier that day, music is playing from Brood’s band Wild Romance. This not only suits Bril’s taste but also the commemorative end of his trip: he is about to join the singer’s family and friends in a floral tribute to the musician. The questions arise: How loud was the music playing? How fast did the cab drive? In what shape was the vehicle? Did the driver look perky and well rested? Did he take the most direct way? Does this matter to Bril? In the cab on the way back, Bril and the driver talk about Brood and Bril listens again to the singer’s voice on the radio. The atmosphere and the exchange are companionable. The fragility of Bril’s sense of being at home in the city should give us pause. Why does this connoisseur of the city surrender the feeling of belonging so readily? The escalation of emotions about a confrontation in a taxi into emotions directed at the city indicates that the exchange relies for its significance on broader racial anxieties. Yet, the Netherlands affords tremendous recognition to what can be considered autochthonous, white Dutch modes of being. The question remains as to why a prosperous, stable, well-educated, relatively safe country with a public sphere that is founded on centuries-old national laws and traditions fails to generate a more steady sense of aesthetic security in an aesthetically occupied and empowered, artistically employed, indigenous citizen. Given that Dutch wealth has been built on a system of colonial oppression, and the Netherlands continues to benefit from structural global exploitation, a sense of safety attendant on white Dutch privilege may appear to require maintenance in light of omnipresent signs of ongoing inequality and injustice. The emergence of death threats, heightened discourses of increased fundamentalism, and intense international pressures to join a war on terrorism may yield additional sources of apprehension in the post-9/11 years. Yet, it is not as if global power balances underwent large-scale social shifts that were about to bring Dutch culture down. The absence of a more constant sense of aesthetic control is remarkable. How far does a

236

23 24

25 26

Notes disavowal of persistent racialized oppression go toward an explanation? Speculatively, we can recognize the affective and imaginative repercussions of figures of damaged aesthetic experience as elements of a broad mix of factors conducive to a sense of aesthetic precariousness. See, among others, Fanon (BSWM); Irigaray (1985); Spelman (1988); Alcoff (2006, 273–5). See also Chapter 5, 118 and 231n. 25. See Schor (1987, 6–17, 21). Terry Eagleton describes the aesthetic in Baumgarten as a prosthetic, feminized “cognitive underlaborer” to higher reason (1990, 16–17). More broadly, Eagleton links the ascendancy of the aesthetic with the emancipation of the German bourgeoisie (14, 19–28). Fanon “The Facts of Blackness,” ch. 5 in BSWM; see also BSWM, 156–70. See Kristeva (1996, 167–249); Irigaray (2000, 7, 61, 88); Lorde (1984); Anzaldúa (2002, 192).

Chapter 7 1 See, among others, Fanon (BSWM); Dyer (1997); Ramírez (1992). 2 On race, nation, and ethnicity in Shaftesbury, Hume, Kant, and others, see Chapters 2 and 4. The expansiveness of racialized aesthetic nationalism is in part a function of the ways ethnic and cultural identities signify race and vice versa (see Alcoff 2006, 241–3). 3 On perceptual habits conditioning racializing experience, see Alcoff (2006, 187–94). 4 Stressing our intimacy with the house, Bachelard (1964, 14) argues the house is “physically inscribed in us.” 5 Jamaica Kincaid explores such ambivalence throughout her work (see, for instance, 1991, 6–8). Bachelard’s in many ways disembodied, masculinized, white, middle-class, European reading of connections between the house and poetic constructions of intimacy recognizes projections of distress onto the house by the unhappy child (1964, 72), yet downplays the structural aesthetic economy (symbolic, affective, imaginative, sensory, physical) of differentially and hierarchically organized domesticity, even while implicitly gesturing toward it (15). 6 Ahmed (2000) investigates the ties between the formation of home and community and the encounter with others who are understood as more or less strange. On the role of orientations in this, see Ahmed (2006). On the spatiality of communities and processes of community/coalition formation, see also Lugones (2003, 183–237). 7 An example of this tendency is Stolnitz (1961). Challenges to conceptions of aesthetic agency of the sort I am teasing out of Addison’s comment pervade studies of environmental and eighteenth-century aesthetics. See, among others, Foster (1998) on “ambient” dimensions of aesthetic value; Saito’s (2001) view of the framelessness, singularity, and impermanence of bodily experiences central to everyday aesthetics; and Barrell’s (1993) distinction between a panoramic and an occluded view. 8 See Stolnitz (1961). 9 See Hu (2003). 10 To cite an instance of the phrase extending over many years and inviting continued extrapolation, the Washington Post (2013) introduces a set of special reports commemorating anniversaries of 9/11 as “September 11, 2001: Post Coverage of the Worst Terrorist Attack on American Soil.” The headline precedes a photograph of the burning Twin Towers with the Empire State Building centered massively in front.

Notes

11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25

237

Following the photo, the Post offers quotations in the present tense from a September 12, 2001 article describing the attacks, links to series such as “Eight Years Later” and “Five Years Later,” and to numerous other Post features virtually all dated the day after the attacks. Over time, the headline has subsumed different anniversaries (including the first and second). Currently, a particularly vast archive surrounds the tenth anniversary, involving reports and slideshows including “Nine Lives, 10 Years Later” and a section “Sept. 11 Memorials.” See Eaton and Fried (2001). Along the lines of what Wendy Brown calls “a fully realized neoliberal citizenry” (2005, 43). See Bourdieu (1984); Gagnier (2000). Sheldon S. Wolin (2002) argues that Bush’s exhortation to “unite, spend, and fly” confirms the equation of American power with corporate power, and that of citizenship with politically dissociated consumerism and media spectatorship. Both sides of these equations implicate aesthetic registers of identification and desire, including a sense of the aesthetic homeland to which citizens do have political bonds, in which they are complicit and do recognize themselves. On the prominence of narratives of economic individualism in Britain and the US in the 1980s, see Gagnier (2000, 186–96). This is not to dispute that there is an economic rationale for the shopping counsel, given the huge portion of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) represented by consumer purchases. For example, in the second quarter of 2012, “personal consumption expenditures” accounted for 71 percent of the total GDP—24 percent of which involved durable (7.7%) and non-durable (16.3%) goods, and 47 percent services (Swann 2012). The question is, whom do these expenditures serve? The presence of an economic rationale for buying does not entail that shoppers will be beneficiaries of the profits to which their consumption gives rise. In the absence of a fair distribution of gains, following the politicians’ advice backfires. The centering of economic benefits in the group commonly called the 1 percent, has mobilized the recent Occupy Wall Street movement and related protests in the United States. Krauss discusses Botero in CBS Broadcasting (1998). Danto’s notion of reasons, though primarily pertaining to art–historical explanations (1992, 33–53, 42, 47, 48, 52) is not so precisely delineated as to preclude this fundamentally unstoppable yet contingent discursive swelling of the realm of reasons, which undercuts any effort to stabilize the boundaries of the art world, conceived as an atmosphere of reasons or theory (1964, 580). As I reconstruct the scene from the transcript of the show (CBS Broadcasting 1998). Danto uses the terms “disturbational” and “disturbatory” as equivalents (1986 [hereafter “AD”], 131–3). This demonstrates that, for him, Botero’s so-called disturbatory series displays the special logic of the disturbational. As Serra and Vito Acconci suggest in relation to their work. See Danto (RS, 181). I set aside, here, the question of the racial and political implications of this metaphor. Danto (AD; RS [RS was originally published in April 1986]). Danto considers it the task of art criticism, and, indeed, his own task as an art critic, to account for the meanings of or the ideas expressed by artworks and to explain, by identifying reasons, the mode of their embodiment. See, for example, Danto (1994, 14). Ebony (2006, 12, emphasis added). Forero (2005) reports Botero indicating that “he became incensed because he expected better of the American government” and that

238

26 27

28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Notes “his indignation over war and brutality may turn up increasingly in his work.” Botero aligns the Abu Ghraib collection with his earlier series on the guerrilla war and the drug-related violence in Colombia, the mission of which was to show “the absurdity of the violence” (Forero 2004, E1). Connecting the two series in a comment on the Abu Ghraib works, he states, “I rethought my idea of what to paint and that permitted me to do the war in Colombia, and now there’s this” (Forero 2005). A recent treatment of the idea that artworks make demands is Kelly (2012). See also Masiello (2007) and Laqueur (2007). This in spite of the fact that the works, as Botero has said, “are a result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world,” and notwithstanding the fact that Botero takes this indignation to be embodied in the work (Forero 2005; see n. 25). Ebony 2006, 12; see also Forero (2005). Carby (2004) situates the Abu Ghraib photographs in the context of the postcards of lynchings, the Rodney King video, and other spectacles of torture that highlight the central reliance of American fantasies of freedom on the (sexualized) violence and intimidation inflicted on brown and black bodies throughout the history of colonialism, slavery, the deployment of US-trained death squads in Latin America, and US incarceration practices. In Žižek’s (2004, 31) reading, the Abu Ghraib photographs bring out the obscene underside sustaining “US popular culture” and more generally, “the American way of life.” Sontag (2004) recognizes policy and leadership crimes exposed by the photographs, which she also links to pornographic and lynching images, though without recognizing the full implications of the photograph’s continuity with spectacles of racist violence (Carby 2004). Even if mostly as a matter of image management and a general concern about pornography, Danto (2004, 209) does address this question in relation to the photographs, which he lends a paradigmatic status as political artifacts, in relation to which contemporary art’s political efficacy is to be measured. This lovability is of a different order than that of Barney, the dinosaur, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and the paradigmatic Macy’s balloon or Disney character. For a reading of connections of the grotesque with normalization, the abject, the uncanny, the comical, and the carnivalesque, see Russo (1994, esp. 7–14). Clark’s repeated “recoiling” from the Abu Ghraib series and his association of the collection with clichéd sadomasochistic imagery may speak to this dimension (Clark, Laqueur and Masiello 2007). Danto’s remarks on Botero’s baroque vocabulary are suggestive of this aspect, as are Clark’s remarks on universalization (ibid., see the time slice to this chapter, 173–4). Masiello registers this historicizing power of citationality (2007, 21). Danto’s references to the Baroque also allude to such historicization, but cut it short, foregrounding feeling. They possibly also, but to a lesser extent, masculinize the feminized, as in the paintings representing magnified females in the company of miniaturized males. Danto’s and Krauss’s observations on Botero downplay not only the artistic richness of his oeuvre, but also the capaciousness of other works of art and culture. These critics’ racially overdetermined Botero readings, in Danto’s own philosophy of art, deprive other artworks of the new, artistically relevant predicates Botero’s oeuvre introduces into the world of art (which such works either do or do not exemplify). For Danto (1964, 582–4), each artistically relevant predicate initiated by a given work renders all other works in this world “more complex,” and enhances these works’ experiential

Notes

239

possibilities for viewers who are familiar with these predicates. Applying this approach to Botero’s output as a whole, Danto could have revised his view of Botero’s earlier body of work in light of what the subsequent Abu Ghraib series, by his own reasoning, might be able to tell us about this prior work, thus bridging the alleged split in the artist’s oeuvre. 38 It must be challenged on intermeshing moral, political, and aesthetic grounds. This does not entail that a racially and nationally neutral aesthetic is possible or desirable. On the unacceptability of race-neutral, color-blind stances, and the importance to anti-racist agendas of altering sensory practices, see Alcoff (2006, 179–204, and 215). Aesthetic transformations, at numerous levels of aesthetic embodiment and agency, must be included among the changing perceptual dispositions that are to initiate and support new modes of perception.

Chapter 8 1 Rodrigo’s remarks remain distant from Buddhist practices that would place them in a different light. 2 Lispector 1986, 58. Whenever she sees soldiers, Macabéa also excitedly wonders if they will kill her (35). The promise of death is mediated by the fortuneteller’s divination, which resonates with the author’s (ostensibly) not quite knowing foresight of his protagonist’s fate (12–13, 17, 28, 32, 83). The author has Macabéa die, in part, because she surrenders her semiotic aesthetic as she falls for the fortuneteller’s competing storyline (29), but the distinction between his and the soothsayer’s narrative slips. Norman S. Holland and I explore the aesthetic implications of this more fully in our book in progress “Anachronism and Aesthetics in Latin America.” See also Franco (1992, 76). 3 Lispector 1986, 8, 81, 85. The distinction between Lispector and the author is blurred in the dedication. 4 As noted in Chapter 4, Wollstonecraft’s conception of “beauty of moral loveliness” fails to capture the oppositional physicality with which Macabéa resists the aesthetic discipline demanded by her boss, her coworker, and her temporary boyfriend. 5 In my book manuscript “Arts of Address,” I describe the role address plays in coaxing Lispector’s reader away from constellations of aesthetic relationality organized by way of beauty and ugliness. 6 This does not imply that the novel presumes an inside that can definitively be separated from an outside. Rather, my claim is that the work’s outlook is immanent in rather than transcendent with respect to the field of relationality and address it investigates. 7 On Adorno’s notion of spirit, see Paddison (1993, 114–16). 8 Adorno describes this anticipatory aspect also in terms of remembrance and recollection (135). 9 Ibid., 132. I see no reason that the restriction to what appears as existing poses limits on parts of the truth content that (in this context) significantly qualify this point. 10 On the aura in Benjamin, see Hansen (2008). 11 The work was on display as a part of Orozco’s 2009–10 mid-career retrospective at the MoMA in New York City.

240

Notes

12 Barthes writes: “There are in the D.S. the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign nature” (1972, 88–9). 13 Nietzsche 1989, second essay; Arendt 1998. Nietzsche’s essay proposes two views of promising, one of which associates it with predictability. 14 Adorno 1997, 311. Adorno’s move of Stendhal’s view away from the crystallizations surrounding the subjective experience of beauty into the realm of art supports his channeling of art’s promise toward the utopian and away from the status quo. 15 On the claim of the nonexisting, see ibid., 233, qtd. on p. 187. 16 In these passages, Adorno is speaking of reality’s so-called other or second nature. 17 Adorno makes it clear that philosophy and the interpretation of art are indispensible to this project (ibid., 128–31). 18 The place of this lacuna in Adorno’s account stands in need of further investigation in light of his Problems of Moral Philosophy, which calls for our critical engagement with the tension between the particular and the general. Conjoining both accounts (1997 and 2000) we can take Adorno to recognize a moral appeal that asks for an interminable critical engagement with another gap: rifts separating beauty from the fulfillment of its promise. This gap is a site of our more and less “unstillable longings” for all those possible things art can promise us. My view of aesthetic promises affirms this crucial part of Adorno’s theory, while complicating his notion of embodied subjectivity and collectivity by means of the concepts of relationality and address. 19 While an artwork or cultural artifact may not make good on promises it offers, this in itself does not entail that, as Max Horkheimer and Adorno caution those who fall for what these theorists consider the false promises of the culture industry, “the diner must be satisfied with the menu” (1998, 139). Assuming, as the restaurant scene invites us to—and contrary to the decrees of longstanding aesthetic promises, which implore us to push aside our food to leave room for yet better fare—that such promises can indeed get us to expect any edibles at all, they can also direct us toward unannounced substances omitted from the menu. Aesthetic promises of the sort we can attach, for instance, to Hume’s notions of commerce and publicity suggest that there are always more captivating menus to be conceived than the one presently on offer, other desirable prospects to contemplate, perhaps one door over, further longings to take form, if only we follow another lead to which we shall find the promises in question point us. In other words, aesthetic promises have a certain stretch. They give us things to go by, even if this is not what they signaled they were going to provide us. Deferred, revoked, dismissed, they morph into different promises. It is a fundamental premise of the capitalist machinery as well as of the logic of animating love to keep this process of renewal going. The disclaimer thereby, as we shall see, is that promises are constrained and enabled by structures of address, and, as such, project variable conditions of availability and fulfillment for unevenly positioned subjects. Neruda’s, Hume’s, Burke’s, and Lispector’s views of aesthetic relationality implicitly reveal this. For an explicit, recent discussion of asymmetrical conditions imposed by promises of happiness, see Ahmed (2010, 13, 50–8). 20 In this respect he is an artist. See Nietzsche (1989, 86–7). 21 On the dialectic inherent in beauty’s partial violation, partial affirmation by twentiethcentury avant-gardes, and the ongoing, compelling power of beauty’s unfulfilled promise of happiness in art, see Horowitz (2005).

Notes

241

22 As suggested, for instance, by Horowitz’s (2005) discussion of the repetitive, avantgardist resistance against beauty. 23 McDonough (1999, 99–102) describes these limitations in Constant’s vision. De Zegher (1999, 11) mentions the project’s role as an imaginative resource. 24 Discussions by Martha Rosler, Elizabeth Diller, Bernard Tschumi, and Wigley in The Activist Drawing are suggestive of such lineages of promises (de Zegher and Wigley 1999, 122–49). Diller’s and Tschumi’s texts in particular hint at extensions of operative chains of promising into digital forms. Rosler points to their reiteration in airports and other transit zones, located at a remove from the messy everyday (128), and Wigley observes echoes in contemporary critical theory (140). 25 As testified to, for example, by the sharply differential availability of the promise of modernity and modernism in G. W. Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box. See Doane (1991, 162). 26 For example, Lygia Clark’s Nostalgia of the Body includes the work Relational Object (1968). With Hélio Oiticica, she initiated “non-object” and “trans-object” aesthetic relationships among participants in the 1950s and 1960s. Marina Abramović and Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) created numerous Relation Works between 1976 and 1979. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer champions a decolonial “relational architecture” (1999; Adriaansens and Brouwer 2002). Bourriaud (2002) formulates an influential view of relational aesthetics. 27 Which is not yet to speak of the threat of additional promises and the promise of further threats.

Bibliography Addison, Joseph. 1945. The Spectator. Vol. 3 (with Richard Steele and others). Ed. Gregory Smith. London: J. M. Dent. Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hulot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2000. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Ed. Thomas Schröder. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Adriaansens, Alex and Joke Brouwer. 2002. “Alien Relationships with Public Space.” Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. In TransUrbanism, 138–58. Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing/NAI Publishers. Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Routledge. —. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy. New York: Monthly Review Press. —. 1997. “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy.” In Reading Capital. Ed. Althusser and Étienne Balibar. Trans. Ben Brewster, 13–34. London: Verso. Amaral, Suzana, director. 1985. A hora da astrela. São Paulo, Brazil: Raíz Produções Cinematográficas, 1986. Released in the United States as The Hour of the Star, 1987. Antony, Louise M. and Charlotte Witt, eds. 1993. A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Boulder, CO: Westview. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. —. 2002. “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Expanded and rev. 3rd edition. Ed. Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, 183–93. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1984. Rhetoric. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 1. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Armstrong, Meg. 1996. “‘The Effects of Blackness’: Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 3: 213–36. Bachelard, Gaston. 1964. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Baddeley, Oriana and Valerie Fraser. 1989. Drawing the Line: Art and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America. London: Verso.

244

Bibliography

Baier, Annette C. 1989. “Hume on Women’s Complexion.” In The “Science of Man” in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and Their Contemporaries. Ed. Peter Jones, 33–53. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —. 1993. “Hume: The Reflective Women’s Epistemologist.” In Antony and Witt 1993, 39–48. Barnard, Suzanne. 2002. “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance.” In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. Ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink, 171–86. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Barnouw, Jeffrey. 1993. “The Beginnings of ‘Aesthetics’ and the Leibnizian Conception of Sensation.” In Mattick 1993, 52–95. —. 1995. “The Cognitive Value of Confusion and Obscurity in the German Enlightenment: Leibniz, Baumgarten, and Herder.” In Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Vol. 24. Ed. Carla H. Hay and Syndy M. Conger, 29–50. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barrell, John. 1989. “‘The Dangerous Goddess’: Masculinity, Prestige and the Aesthetic in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Cultural Critique 12: 101–32. —. 1993. “The Public Prospect and the Private View.” In Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, 81–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Selected and translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. —. 1975. (PT). The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. —. 1978. (LD). A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. —. 1981. (CL). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. 1983. Theoretische Ästhetik: Die Grundlegenden Abschnitte aus der “Aesthetica” (1750/58). Ed. and trans. Hans Rudolf Schweizer. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Benhabib, Seyla and Drucilla Cornell, eds. 1987. Feminism as Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Andrew and Peter Osborne, eds. 1991. Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics. London: ICA. Benjamin, Walter. 2003. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Third Version. Selected Writings. Vol. 4. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and others. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bérubé, Michael, ed. 2005. The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Beverley, John. 1993. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. van der Bij, J. and T. Brandsen. 2003. “Te Kort door de Bocht? De Deregulering van de Taximarkt.” Bestuurskunde 12, no. 5: 203–11. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1995. “Historical Genesis of the Pure Aesthetic.” In The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanual, 285–312. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les presses du réel.

Bibliography

245

Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. “Of Bugs and Women: Irigaray and Deleuze on the BecomingWoman.” In Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought. Ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford, 111–37. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Brand, Peggy Zeglin and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds. 1995. Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Bravo and NBC. 2003–7. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (Queer Eye). TV-series. Bril, Martin. 2001. “Hilton.” Het Parool, July 12. —. 2004. “Taxirit.” (Taxi Ride) De Volkskrant, December 20, V1. Broadie, Alexander. 2003. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Ed. Alexander Broadie, 1–7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Wendy. 2005. “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” In Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1992. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62 (Autumn): 3–41. Budd, Malcolm. 1995. Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music. London: Penguin. Bullins, Ed, ed. 1968. The Drama Review 12, no. 4, Black Theatre (Summer). Burke, Edmund. 1990. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising. Ed. Robert Gooding-Williams, 15–22. New York: Routledge. —. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Cabral, Amilcar. 1973. “National Liberation and Culture.” In Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. Ed. Africa Information Service. New York: Monthly Review Press. Carby, Hazel V. 1987. “Woman’s Era: Rethinking Black Feminist Theory.” In Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2004. “A Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture.” In openDemocracy, October 10. Accessed September 1, 2013. http://www.opendemocracy.net/mediaabu_ghraib/article_2149.jsp. Carroll, Noël. 1984. “Hume’s Standard of Taste.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 2: 181–94. Caygill, Howard. 1989. Art of Judgement. New York: Basil Blackwell. CBS Broadcasting. 1998. Botero. Episode of 60 Minutes (TV-show). November 8. Cervantes, Miguel de. 2003. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: HarperCollins. Chadwick, Whitney. 1985. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Boston: Little, Brown. Cheng, Anne Anlin. 2000a. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2000b. “Wounded Beauty: An Exploratory Essay on Race, Feminism, and the Aesthetic Question.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 19, no. 2 (Autumn): 191–217. Chow, Rey. 1998. “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon.” In Ethics After Idealism: TheoryCulture-Ethnicity-Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

246

Bibliography

—. 2002. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Christian, Barbara. 1989. “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of a Little Bit of History.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall, 58–74. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1991. “The Author in Truth.” Trans. Deborah Jenson. In “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays. Ed. Deborah Jenson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clark, T. J., Thomas W. Laqueur, and Francine Masiello. 2007. “Art and Violence.” Panel at the Center for Latin American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, January 31. Webcast. Accessed September 1, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OdUa9PRMtCg. Cohen, Ted. 1994. “Partial Enchantments of the Quixote Story in Hume’s Essay on Taste.” In Institutions of Art: Reconsiderations of George Dickie’s Philosophy. Ed. R. Yanal, 146–56. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Cole, Lucinda. 1991. “(Anti) Feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and More.” English Literary History 58: 107–40. Cooper, Anthony Ashley. See Shaftesbury, Earl of. Crosby, Christina. 1992. “Dealing with Differences.” In Feminists Theorize the Political. Ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 130–43. New York: Routledge. Danticat, Edwidge. 1994. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Random House. Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19: 571–84. —. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1986. (AD). “Art and Disturbation.” The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 1987. (RS). “Richard Serra.” The State of the Art. New York: Prentice Hall. Originally published in The Nation, April 19, 1986: 561–5. —. 1992. “The Art World Revisited: Comedies of Similarity.” In Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. —. 1994. Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. —. 2004. “American Self-Consciousness in Politics and Art.” Artforum International 43 (September): 206–9. —. 2006. (BP). “The Body in Pain.” The Nation, November 27: 23–6. Davis, Angela Y. 1998. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billy Holiday. New York: Random House. de Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. —. 1983. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2nd. edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1985. “Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory: Riffaterre and Jauss.” In Lyric Poetry Beyond New Criticism. Ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker, 55–72. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. de Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. de Zegher, Catherine. 1999. Introduction to de Zegher and Wigley 1999, 9–13.

Bibliography

247

de Zegher, Catherine and Mark Wigley, eds. 1999. The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1998. Of Grammatology. Corrected edition. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: G.P. Putnam. Doane, Mary Ann. 1991. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. DuCille, Ann. 1996. “Toy Theory, Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference.” In Skin Trade. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. New York: Routledge. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Eaton, Leslie and Joseph P. Fried. 2001. “Already, Grim Statistics for New York Consumer Sales.” New York Times, September 22, B9. Ebony, David. 2006. “Botero Abu Ghraib.” In Fernando Botero, Botero Abu Ghraib, 5–19. New York: Prestel. Escallón, Ana María. 1997. “From the Inside Out: An Interview with Fernando Botero.” In Fernando Botero, Botero: New Works on Canvas. Trans. Asa Zatz, 7–57. New York: Rizzoli. Essed, Philomena. 1991. Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. (WoE). The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove. —. 1967. (BSWM). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove. Faris, Wendy B. 2001. “Larger than Life: The Hyperbolic Realities of Gabriel García Márquez and Fernando Botero.” Word and Image 17, no. 4: 339–59. Ferguson, Russell, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, eds. 1990. Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. New York and Cambridge, MA: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press. Fleming, Mary. 1995. “Women and the Public Use of Reason.” In Meehan 1995, 117–37. Forero, Juan. 2004. “Turning an Eye from Whimsy to War: The Colombian Artist Fernando Botero Captures the Agony and Absurdity of a Drug-Fueled Conflict.” New York Times, May 3, E1 and E4. —. 2005. “‘Great Crime’ at Abu Ghraib Enrages and Inspires an Artist.” New York Times, May 8, sec. 1, 10. Foster, Cheryl. 1998. “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 2: 127–37. Foster, Hal, ed. 1983. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring): 22–7. Franco, Jean. 1992. “Going Public: Reinhabiting the Private.” On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture. Ed. George Yúdice, Juan Flores, and Jean Franco, 65–83. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

248

Bibliography

—. 2002. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Franits, Wayne E., ed. 2001. The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1987. “What’s Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender.” In Benhabib and Cornell 1987, 31–56. Freud, Sigmund. 1957. “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men” (1910); “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912); “The Taboo of Virginity” (1918), (“Contributions to the Psychology of Love I, II, III”). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 11. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. —. 1959. “The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversation with an Impartial Person” (1926). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 20. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Gagnier, Regenia. 2000. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garry, Ann and Marilyn Pearsall, eds. 1992. Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Gaskell, Ivan and Michiel Jonker, eds. 1998. Vermeer Studies. Studies in the History of Art 55. Washington, DC and New Haven, CT: National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press. Gates, Jr, Henry Louis. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibney, Alex, director. 2007. Taxi to the Dark Side. USA: Thinkfilm. Glueck, Grace. 1996. “Art in Review: Fernando Botero.” New York Times, November 8, C23. Gordon, Lewis R. 1997. Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. —. 2000. “What Does It Mean to Be a Problem? W. E. G. Du Bois on the Study of Black Folk.” In Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge. Gosselin, Peter G. and Warren Vieth. 2001. “As Markets Reopen, U.S. Seeks to Prop Up Economy.” Los Angeles Times, September 17, A1, A18. Gowing, Lawrence. 1952. Vermeer. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Halsall, Francis, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’Connor, eds. 2009. Rediscovering Aesthetics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hansen, Miriam. 1987. “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology.’” New German Critique 40: 179–224. —. 2008. “Benjamin’s Aura: The Resurrection of a Concept.” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (Winter): 336–75. Harris, Cheryl I. 1995. “Whiteness as Property.” In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. Ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, 276–91. New York: New Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1956. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover. —. 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heller, Scott. 1998. “Wearying of Cultural Studies, Some Scholars Rediscover Beauty.” Chronicle of Higher Education 45, no. 15, December 4: A15–A16.

Bibliography

249

Hickey, Dave. 1993. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Los Angeles: Art Issues. Press. Hillman, James. 1993. “Concerning the Stone: Alchemical Images of the Stone.” Sphinx: A Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts 5: 234–65. hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 1998. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum. Horowitz, Gregg M. 2005. “‘I Sat Food on My Knees’: The Promise of Beauty in Arthur C. Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty.” Inquiry 48, no. 2 (April): 155–71. Hu, Winnie. 2003. “A Message of Peace on 2 Shirts Touches Off Hostilities at a Mall.” New York Times, March 6, B1, B6. Hume, David. 1850. The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James the Second, 1688. Vol. 2. New York: Harper. —. 1854. “A Dissertation on the Passions.” In The Philosophical Works of David Hume. Vol. 4. Boston: Little, Brown. —. 1965. Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays. Ed. John W. Lenz. New York: Library of the Liberal Arts. —. 1965a. (SR). “Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing.” In Hume 1965. —. 1965b. (SH). “Of the Study of History.” In Hume 1965. —. 1998. Selected Essays. Ed. S. Copley and A. Edgar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1998a. (OC). “Of Commerce.” In Hume 1998. —. 1998b. (DTP). “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion.” In Hume 1998. —. 1998c. “Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature.” In Hume 1998. —. 1998d. (EW). “Of Essay Writing.” In Hume 1998. —. 1998e. (IM). “On the Immortality of the Soul.” In Hume 1998. —. 1998f. (NC). “Of National Characters.” In Hume 1998. —. 1998g. (RA). “Of Refinement in the Arts.” In Hume 1998. —. 1998h. (RP). “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences.” In Hume 1998. —. 1998i. (ST). “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Hume 1998. —. 2001. (THN). A Treatise of Human Nature. Rpt. with corrections. Ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutcheson, Francis. 2004. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises. Ed. Wolfgang Leidhold. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —. 1993a. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —. 1993b. Sexes and Genealogies. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2000. To Be Two. Trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc. New York: Routledge. Jacobson, Anne Jaap, ed. 2000. Feminist Interpretations of David Hume. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Jaggar, Alison M. 1992. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” In Garry and Pearsall 1992, 129–55. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern. 1983–1998. London: Verso, 1998. Johnson, Barbara. 1987. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —. 1987a. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.” In Johnson 1987.

250

Bibliography

—. 1987b. “Nothing Fails Like Success.” In Johnson 1987. —. 1987c. “Teaching Ignorance: L’École des Femmes.” In Johnson 1987. —. 1987d. “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston.” In Johnson 1987. —. 1998. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1951. Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. New York: Macmillan. —. 1960. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Trans. John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaplan, Janet A. 1988. Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo. New York: Abbeville Press. —. 1998. “Domestic Incantations: Subversion in the Kitchen.” In Remedios Varo: Catálogo razonado. segunda edición, corregida y augmentada. Ed. Ricardo Ovalle, Walter Gruen, Alberto Blanco, Teresa del Conde, Salomon Grimberg, and Janet A. Kaplan, 31–40. Mexico City: Ediciones Era. Kelly, Michael. 2012. A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art. New York: Columbia University Press. Kester, Grant H. 1997. “Learning from Aesthetics: Old Masters and New Lessons.” Art Journal 56, no. 1 (Spring): 20–5. Kincaid, Jamaica. 1991. Lucy. New York: Penguin. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 1995. “Gendered Concepts and Hume’s Standard of Taste.” In Brand and Korsmeyer 1995, 49–65. —. 1998. “Perceptions, Pleasures, Arts: Considering Aesthetics.” In Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions. Ed. Janet A. Kourany, 145–72. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 1987. “Manic Eros, Sublime Eros: On Male Sexuality.” In Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 1996. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. Landes, Joan B. 1995. “The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration.” In Meehan 1995, 91–116. Laqueur, Thomas W. 2007. “Fernando Botero and the Art History of Suffering.” Talk delivered at “Art and Violence” panel (Clark, Laqueur, and Masiello 2007). Also in “Art and Violence,” Working Paper no. 18 (August), 1–10. Accessed September 1, 2013. http://clas.berkeley.edu/research/working-and-policy-papers. le Doeuff, Michèle. 1989. The Philosophical Imaginary. Trans. Colin Gordon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2002. “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 3: 227–38. Lispector, Clarice. 1986. The Hour of the Star [1977]. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1993a. “Maleness, Metaphor, and the ‘Crisis’ of Reason.” In Antony and Witt 1993, 69–83. —. 1993b. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bibliography

251

—. 2000. “Hume on the Passion for Truth.” In Jacobson 2000, 39–59. Loranzo, Luis-Martín. 2000. The Magic of Remedios Varo. Trans. Elizabeth Goldson and Liliana Valenzuela. Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts. Lorde, Audre. 1984. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian-American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael. 1999. “Utterance 4: Relational Architecture.” Performance Research 4, no. 2: 52–8. Lubiano, Wahneema. 1995. “Don’t Talk with Your Eyes Closed: Caught in the Hollywood Gun Sights.” In Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies. Ed. Mae G. Henderson, 185–201. New York: Routledge. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. —. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22.1 (Winter): 186–209. Lugones, María and Elizabeth V. Spelman. 1983. “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice.’” Women’s Studies International Forum 6, no. 6: 573–81. Mandeville, Bernard. 1924. The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Vol. 1. Ed. F. B. Kaye. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marshall, Paule. 1983. “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen.” In Reena and Other Stories. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Masiello, Francine. 2007. “Art and Violence: Notes on Botero.” Talk delivered at “Art and Violence” panel (Clark, Laqueur, and Masiello 2007). Also in “Art and Violence,” Working Paper no. 18 (August), 11–23. Accessed September 1, 2013. http://clas. berkeley.edu/research/working-and-policy-papers. Mattick Jr, Paul, ed. 1993. Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mattick Jr, Paul. 1995. “Beautiful and Sublime: ‘Gender Totemism’ in the Constitution of Art.” In Brand and Korsmeyer 1995, 27–48. McClary, Susan. 2000. “Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in SeventeenthCentury French Music.” Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 2, no. 2 (Fall). Accessed September 1, 2013. http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume2-Issue2/mcclary/mcclary.html. McDonough, Thomas. 1999. “Fluid Spaces: Constant and the Situationist Critique of Architecture.” In de Zegher and Wigley 1999, 93–104. McDowell, Deborah E. 1995. The Changing Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McIntosh, Peggy. 1997. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies.” In Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror. Ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic, 291–9. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Meehan, Johanna, ed. 1995. Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse. New York: Routledge. Mercer, Kobena. 1990. “Black Hair/Style Politics.” In Ferguson et al. 1990, 247–64. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Meyer, James and Toni Ross. 2004. “Aesthetic/Anti-Aesthetic: An Introduction.” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (Summer): 20–3.

252

Bibliography

Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories, Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, Walter D., ed. 2007. With the collaboration of Arturo Escobar, Globalization and De-Colonial Thinking. Special issue of Cultural Studies 21, nos 2–3 (March/May). Miller, Nancy K. 2003. “‘Portraits of Grief ’: Telling Details and the Testimony of Trauma.” differences 14, no. 3: 112–35. Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nehamas, Alexander. 2007. Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Neruda, Pablo. 1994. Odes to Common Things. Selected and illustrated by Ferris Cook. Trans. Ken Krabbenhoft. Boston: Little, Brown. —. 1999. Obras completas. Vol. 2. Ed. Hernán Loyola with the assistance of Saúl Yurkievich. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg and Círculo de Lectores. —. 1999a. Odas elementales. In Neruda 1999. —. 1999b. Nuevas odas elementales. In Neruda 1999. —. 1999c. Tercer libro de las odas. In Neruda 1999. —. 1999d. Navegaciones y regresos. In Neruda 1999. —. 2013. All the Odes: A Bilingual Edition. Ed. Ilan Stavans. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Nevitt Jr, H. Rodney. 2001. “Vermeer on the Question of Love.” In Franits 2001, 89–110. New York Times. 2001. “President Bush’s Address on Terrorism Before a Joint Meeting of Congress,” September 21, B4. —. 2002. Portraits: 9/11/01: The Collected “Portraits of Grief.” New York: New York Times. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. In “On the Genealogy of Morals” and “Ecce Homo.” Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). 2008. “Taxi Services Regulation and Competition.” DAF/COMP (2007) 42. September 11. Ortega, Mariana. 2009. “Othering the Other: The Spectacle of Katrina for Our Racial Entertainment Pleasure.” In Roelofs 2009. Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato. 1961. Phaedrus. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Trans. R. Hackforth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1989. Symposium. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett. Poovey, Mary. 1994. “Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century: The Place of Gender in the Social Constitution of Knowledge.” In Aesthetics and Ideology. Ed. George Levine, 79–105. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Portuges, Catherine. 2001. Review of The Gleaners and I (“Les glaneurs et la glaneuse”) by Agnès Varda. The American History Review 106, no. 1: 305–6. Proctor, Robert N. and Londa Schiebinger, eds. 2008. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Quintilian, Marcus Fabius. 1921. Institutio Oratoria. Vol. 3. Trans. H. E. Butler. New York: Putnam. Railton, Peter. 1998. “Aesthetic Value, Moral Value, and the Ambitions of Naturalism.” Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson, 59–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography

253

Ramírez, Mari Carmen. 1992. “Beyond ‘the Fantastic’: Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art.” Art Journal 51, no. 4: 60–8. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum. —. 2009. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Trans. Steven Corcoran. Malden, MA: Polity. Redfield, Marc. 2003. The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Robbins, Bruce, ed. 1993. The Phantom Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roelofs, Monique. 2006. “Plastic, Toileteend en een Omweg: Esthetisch Nationalisme en het Verlangen naar een Monoculturele Orde.” In Jaarboek voor Esthetica 2005: De Nieuwe Politieke Dimensie van de Kunsten. Ed. S. Leyssen, B. Vandenabeele, K. Vandeputte, and K. Vermeir, 93–109. Budel, The Netherlands: Damon. Also in Esthetica: Tijdschrift voor Kunst en Filosofie. Accessed September 1, 2013. http://www. estheticatijdschrift.nl/2005. —. 2008. Review of Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, by Alexander Nehamas. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 4: 339–401. —. 2013. “Cruising through Race.” In Race, Philosophy, and Film. Ed. Mary BloodsworthLugo and Dan Flory, 84–100. New York: Routledge. —. forthcoming. “Anti-Aesthetic.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. 2nd. rev. edition. Ed. Michael Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roelofs, Monique, ed. 2009. “Aesthetics and Race: New Philosophical Perspectives.” Special Volume 2 of Contemporary Aesthetics. Accessed August 31, 2013. http:// contempaesthetics.org/. Rooney, Ellen F. 2002. “A Semiprivate Room.” differences 13, no. 1: 128–56. Russo, Mary. 1994. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Routledge. Saito, Yuriko. 2001. “Everyday Aesthetics.” Philosophy and Literature 25: 87–95. —. 2002. “Ecological Design: Promises and Challenges.” Environmental Ethics 24, no. 3: 243–61. Salomon, Nanette. 1998. “From Sexuality to Civility: Vermeer’s Women.” In Gaskell and Jonker 1998, 309–25. Sayers Peden, Margaret, 1990. Introduction to Pablo Neruda, Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden, 1–4. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1999. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schiller, Friedrich. 1967. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters. Trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1958. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover. Schor, Naomi. 1987. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen. —. 1995. “Dreaming Dissymmetry: Barthes, Foucault, and Sexual Difference.” Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Schutte, Ofelia. 1998. “Cultural Alterity: Cross-Cultural Communication and Feminist Theory in North-South Contexts.” Hypatia 13, no. 2: 53–72. Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. 2000. Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. New York: Routledge. Shaftesbury, Earl of. 1914. Second Characters or the Language of Forms. Ed. Benjamin Rand. London: Cambridge University Press. —. 1964. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. 2 vols. Ed. John M. Robertson. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.

254

Bibliography

Shusterman, Richard. 1993. “Of the Scandal of Taste: Social Privilege as Nature in the Aesthetic Theories of Hume and Kant.” In Mattick 1993, 96–119. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silvers, Anita. 2000. “From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Can Be Made.” In Beauty Matters. Ed. Peg Zeglin Brand, 197–221. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sluijter, Eric Jan. 1998. “Vermeer, Fame, and Female Beauty: The Art of Painting.” In Gaskell and Jonker 1998, 265–83. Smith, Adam. 2000. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Smith, Barbara. 1998. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” In The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Smith, Roberta. 2006. “Botero Restores the Dignity of Prisoners at Abu Ghraib.” New York Times, November 15, E5. Smuts, Aaron A. 2000. “The Metaphorics of Hume’s Gendered Skepticism.” In Jacobson 2000, 85–106. Sommer, Doris. 1999. Introduction to Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sontag, Susan. 2004. “Regarding the Torture of Others.” New York Times Magazine, May 23, 24–29, 42. Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon. —. 1992. “Anger and Insubordination.” In Garry and Pearsall 1992, 263–73. Spillers, Hortense J. 1985. “Afterword. Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women’s Fiction.” In Conjuring: Black Women Fiction and Literary Tradition. Ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 249–61. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. —. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stendhal. 1927. On Love. Trans. Vyvyan Beresford Holland under the direction of C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. New York: Da Capo Press. Stolnitz, Jerome. 1961. “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness.’” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20, no. 2: 131–43. Sullivan, Shannon and Nancy Tuana, ed. 2006. “Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance.” Special Issue, Hypatia 21, no. 3. —. 2007. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sverdlik, Steven. 1986. “Hume’s Key and Aesthetic Rationality.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45, no. 1: 69–76. Swann, Christopher. 2012. “GDP and the Economy: Second Estimates for the Second Quarter of 2012.” In Survey of Current Business 92, no. 9 (September): 1–10. Szymborska, Wisława. 1995. View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems. Trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace. Taylor, Paul C. 1999. “Malcolm’s Conk and Danto’s Colors; or, Four Logical Petitions Concerning Race, Beauty, and Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 1: 16–20. Temple, Kathryn. 2000. “‘Manly Composition’: Hume and the History of England.” In Jacobson 2000, 263–82.

Bibliography

255

Varda, Agnès, director. 2000. The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse). Paris, France: Ciné-Tamaris. —. 2002. The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse . . . deux ans après). Paris, France: Ciné-Tamaris. Vergara, Lisa. 1998. “Antiek en Modern in Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid.” In Gaskell and Jonker 1998, 235–55. —. 2001. “Perspectives on Women in the Art of Vermeer.” In Franits 2001, 54–72. Walker, Alice. 1983. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Warner, Michael. 1993. “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject.” In Robbins 1993, 234–56. Washington, Mary Helen. 1987. Introduction: “‘The Darkened Eye Restored’: Notes Toward a Literary History of Black Women.” In Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960. Ed. Mary Helen Washington, xv–xxxi. New York: Doubleday. Washington Post. 2013. “September 11, 2001: Post Coverage of the Worst Terrorist Attack on American Soil.” Accessed August 31. http://thedatasphere.blogspot.com/2009/09/ september-11–2001-post-coverage-of.html. Weiss, Gail. 1999. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York: Routledge. West, Cornel. 1982. “A Genealogy of Modern Racism.” In Prophesy Deliverance! Towards an Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. —. 1990. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” In Ferguson et al. 1990, 19–36. Wheelock Jr, Arthur K. 1995. Vermeer and the Art of Painting. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wigley, Mark. 1999. “Paper, Scissors, Blur.” In de Zegher and Wigley 1999, 27–56. Wolin, Sheldon S. 2002. “Brave New World.” Theory and Event 5, no. 4. Accessed August 31, 2013. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_Event/. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1992. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects. Rev. edition. Ed. Miriam Brody. London: Penguin. Wordsworth, William. 1983. Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807. Ed. Jared Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 1992. “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice.” In Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Ed. Mbye Cham, 237–79. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1987. “Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory.” In Benhabib and Cornell 1987, 77–95. —. 1997. “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder and Enlarged Thought.” In Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yúdice, George. 1993. “For a Practical Aesthetics.” In Robbins 1993, 209–33. Žižek, Slavoj. 1995. “The Lamella of David Lynch.” In Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus, 205–22. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. —. 2004. “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib.” In These Times, June 21: back cover and 31.

Index Note: Page numbers followed by f indicate figures. abject, the  238n. 32 abjection  97, 134, 136, 138, 148, 154–5, 163, 166, 168–9, 172–3, 206 Abramović, Marina  206 Relation Works  241n. 26 Abu Ghraib  53 (Botero)  169f Abu Ghraib  77 (Botero)  171f Addison, Joseph  149 dualities and integrations  138–40, 148, 154 racialized aesthetic nationalism  154–5, 167, 172 address  as a constituent of the aesthetic  1–2, 10, 210–11 as muscles and joints of relationality  9, 18–20, 25, 177 Neruda’s odes  7–10, 13–25, 27–8, 85, 177, 205 norms, forms, structures, scenes, and scripts of  17, 25, 215–16n. 22 and positionality  20, 24–5, 147, 209 as a socially ubiquitous carrier of meaning  1–2, 210–11 see also animation; and see also under specific authors, artists, works, and concepts Adorno, Theodor W.  aesthetic promises (and threats)  177–8, 186–9, 193, 198 aesthetic relationality  186, 194–5, 203 “Advertisement” (Szymborska)  109–12, 124, 128 aesthetic, the  as an assembly of conceptually inflected, socially situated, multimodal, corporeal practices  2

as bound to relationality, address, and promising  1, 10, 27, 53, 207, 210–11 concept of  1–2, 5, 25, 28, 55–8, 90, 205, 209–11, 213n. 1 conceptual gaps  2, 10, 27 as distinct from  anaesthetic practices  2, 78, 84, 210 anti-aesthetic projects  1–2, 27–8, 84, 210, 213nn. 1–3 the nonaesthetic  1–2, 27–8, 77, 108, 210, 228n. 25 pre-aesthetic arrangements  2, 84, 210 post-aesthetic formations  2, 210 as implementing dualities and integrations  2, 9–10, 14–19, 23, 31–2, 35, 45, 48–51, 87, 93, 108, 116–20, 123, 129, 138–48, 157, 205, 209–10, 216n. 23 see also integrationism; and see under specific authors, artists, works, concepts, and dualities and integrations importance of  2, 27, 210 as involving antagonism  2, 25, 28, 209 and itineraries of differentiation and identification  11, 25, 27–8, 206, 209–10 moral and political polyvalence of  90, 99, 103–4, 207, 209–10 open-ended nature of  211 scope of  1–2, 46–8, 116, 120, 140–2, 144, 211 status as detail  57, 83, 220–1n. 31, 222n. 1 see also aesthetics; distaste; taste; and see also under animation; desire; experience; interpretation; love; value

258

Index

aesthetics  as central to social, economic, political, and ethical critiques and transformations  27, 207, 209–11 as entwined with economics  1–2, 97–9, 211 see also specific cases of aesthetic relationality, address, promises, and threats as entwined with ethics and politics  1– 2, 209–11 see also specific cases of aesthetic relationality, address, promises, and threats renewal of  1–2, 28, 210 status of  1–2, 42–3, 57, 83, 209–11 turn toward  210 see also the aesthetic; and see specific forms of aesthetics aestheticization  23, 154, 158, 167, 170, 174, 179–81, 183 ignorance (and knowledge)  108–12, 116–17, 119–28, 146, 174 poverty  90–2, 179 racialized aestheticization  20–2, 29–56, 68, 80, 83, 89–91, 93–105, 124–5, 146, 172–3, 178, 182, 224n. 13, 226n. 45 as connected with aesthetic racialization 29, 31, 54, 95, 101, 153–4 intersectional operations of  30, 53–4, 95, 99–101, 104, 219n. 15, 222n. 49, 227n. 9 see also racialized aesthetic nationalism; and see under specific authors, artists, and works reaestheticization  29, 54, 84, 102, 104, 109–10, 123, 128, 158, 170, 174 agency, aesthetic  1, 28, 179 as bound to relationality and address  10, 26–7, 30, 32, 47–8, 151, 195, 202–3, 209–11 and promising  10, 23, 26–7, 185, 195–6, 198, 201–4, 209–10 Ahmed, Sara  216n. 25, 234n. 5, 236n. 6, 240n. 19 Alcoff, Linda Martín  218n. 1, 232n. 38, 234n. 5, 236n. 23, 236n. 2 (ch. 7) links between perceptual practices and racialized experience  236n. 3, 239n. 38 Althusser, Louis  230n. 5, 232nn. 38–9

Amaral, Suzana, director  227n. 1 Amiel, Henri-Frédéric  85 anachronism  115, 167, 172, 174–5, 183 animation  24, 45, 47, 85–6, 100, 103, 113, 127, 137, 164, 168, 174, 199–200, 240n. 19 and apostrophe  7–9, 13, 15, 24–5, 215n. 10, 215n. 15 vocative form  7, 215n. 10 Neruda’s odes  7–9, 13–15, 22, 85, 205, 215nn. 9–10 and the notion of the aesthetic  13, 58–9, 71, 73, 76–83, 85, 205, 210, 226n. 37 reciprocal animation  7, 9, 13–4, 22, 24–5, 59, 71, 79, 85, 205, 217n. 36 Anzaldúa, Gloria  213n. 3 dualities and integrations  117–18, 146 architecture  45, 94, 190, 199, 241n. 26, 241n. 24 Arendt, Hannah  promise  193, 195–6, 201–4 Aristotle  24 Armstrong, Meg  220n. 21, 228n. 21, 228n. 23, 228n. 25, 229n. 29 art  art criticism  1, 158–9, 164 see also interpretation art world boundaries  159–62, 173 art-life boundaries  161–3, 209 art-theory-everyday connections  27, 108, 116, 152, 158–9, 172–3, 209, 211 artistic value  5, 58, 71, 81, 104 see also value see also specific artworks “Art and Violence” (UC Berkeley panel)  173–4, 238n. 26, 238nn. 33–5 autonomy  33, 71, 74, 196 aesthetic  140, 186, 188 Bachelard, Gaston  236n. 4–5 Baddeley, Oriana  174–5 Baier, Annette C.  223n. 7 Barnard, Suzanne  86–7 Barnouw, Jeffrey  229n. 3 Baroque, the  164, 170, 174–5, 238n. 35 baroque, the  210, 238n. 34 Latin American Baroque, the  163, 167, 175

Index Barrell, John  223n. 12, 227n. 7, 229n. 30, 236n. 7 Barthes, Roland  13, 189–90, 226n. 37, 230n. 4 detail  58–9, 76–7, 79–87 love  76–7, 79–81, 85–6 Baudelaire, Charles  24, 217n. 36 aesthetic promises in “Spleen II”  215n. 15 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb  229n. 3 Beach, The (Botero)  168f beauty  2, 39, 48–50, 55, 71, 73, 76, 82, 89–105, 120–1, 130, 139, 167–9, 174, 178–87, 189–90, 198–9, 205, 213n. 2, 217n. 35, 221n. 40, 234n. 12 Hume  31, 33, 59–61, 63–4, 68–9, 93, 97–9, 101, 103–4, 119, 218n. 2 Kant  36, 219–20n. 17 Benjamin, Andrew  213n. 3 Benjamin, Walter  189, 227n. 12 aesthetic promises  214n. 5 Bérubé, Michael  213n. 3 Beverley, John  213n. 3 Bhabha, Homi K.  213n. 3 Bij, J. van der  234n. 6 black aesthetics  38–41, 44–56, 204 blackness  3, 13, 29–56, 74, 94, 100–2, 119, 125, 146, 152, 156, 183, 204, 238n. 29 body  culture-body dualities and integrations  82, 87, 118, 223nn. 6–8, 223n. 10, 226n. 45 mind-body dualities and integrations  70, 96–7, 99–102, 108, 117–125, 129, 138–44, 146–7, 182 see also intercorporeality Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas  229n. 1 Botero (TV-show, episode of 60 Minutes)  159–61, 163, 237n. 17, 237n. 19 Botero, Fernando  Abu Ghraib  53, 169f Abu Ghraib  77, 171f aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  159, 161–76 Beach, The  168f controversy over  151–2, 158–76

259

critical body politics  151–2, 164–76 race, class, gender, empire, transculturation  164, 166–7, 170–2, 174–5 boundaries, cultural  2, 19, 27, 39–41, 46–8, 51–4, 130–8, 143–5, 148, 171–5, 180, 183, 206 Bourdieu, Pierre  37, 231n. 26, 237n. 13 Bourriaud, Nicolas  206 relational aesthetics  241n. 26 Braidotti, Rosi  226n. 47, 231n. 25, 233n. 42 Brandsen, T.  234n. 6 Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat)  40–1, 52 Bril, Martin  130, 234n. 3 see also “Taxi Ride” (Taxirit) Broadie, Alexander  227n. 5 Brooks, Gwendolyn  24 Brown, Wendy  237n. 12 Buck-Morss, Susan  213n. 3 Budd, Malcolm  222n. 2 Bullins, Ed  56 Burke, Edmund  93, 99, 103–4, 182, 240n. 19 racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  100–2, 183 Butler, Judith  232n. 40, 234n. 8 Cabral, Amilcar  56 Carby, Hazel V.  56, 238n. 29 carnivalesque, the  170, 238n. 32 caricature  169–70, 173–5 Carroll, Noël  223–4nn. 12–14 categories, aesthetic  41, 72, 91, 95, 101, 104–5, 135–6, 172, 219n. 16 see also the aesthetic; and see specific aesthetic categories Caygill, Howard  227n. 10, 227n. 12 Cervantes, Miguel de  wine-tasting story in Don Quixote as discussed by Hume  66–8, 224–5n. 21, 225n. 25 C.F.A.O. (Puryear)  108, 125f, 126–8, 126f Chadwick, Whitney  230n. 15–6 Cheng, Anne Anlin  55, 229n. 34 Chow, Rey  175, 221n. 38 Christian, Barbara  56

260

Index

civilization  31–7, 41, 46, 53, 60, 75, 81–2, 94–5, 98, 101, 117, 119–20, 131, 139–40, 143, 152–3, 162–3, 172, 177–8, 205–6, 219n. 13, 229n. 30 and alleged antitheses  30, 154 archaic, the  28, 163, 172, 189, 205–6, 210 barbarism  35, 37, 41, 93–5, 140, 178, 195, 219n. 13 magic  116, 161–3, 176, 187–9 monstrous, the  93–4 mysterious, the  94, 162–3, 233n. 41 primitive, the  140, 161, 163, 172, 235n. 17 rude, the  35, 135, 154 Cixous, Hélène  89 Clark, Lygia  206 non-object and trans-object aesthetic relationships  241n. 26 Relational Object  241n. 26 Clark, T. J.  173–4, 238nn. 33–4 class, as aesthetically produced and productive  class-inflected aestheticization and aestheticized class formation  16–22, 30–42, 45, 48–54, 63, 68, 72–5, 80, 83, 89–105, 118–23, 137, 144, 146, 153–4, 157, 163, 172, 178, 182–3, 185, 223n. 5, 224n. 13, 226n. 45, 227n. 9, 228n. 17, 229n. 31, 234n. 7 Clifton, Lucille  24 Cohen, Ted  224n. 19 coldness  62, 76–7, 82–3, 86–7, 219n. 13 Cole, Lucinda  229n. 31 collectivity, aesthetic  1–2, 5–6, 25, 104, 129, 149 as bound to relationality, address, and promising  6–10, 13, 19, 25–6, 151, 172–3, 177–8, 195, 202–6, 214 individual-collective dualities and integrations  32, 48, 89, 93, 117, 137, 139, 148, 153, 157, 161, 164 see also community; individual, dualities and integrations with society/the social; the public coloniality, as aesthetically produced and productive  30, 39–41, 44–7, 127, 154, 166, 176, 178, 204, 211, 213n. 1, 216n. 26, 216n. 28,

219n. 16, 223n. 5, 232–3n. 40, 235–6n. 22, 238n. 29, 241n. 26 comical, the  66–7, 167–8, 170–2, 174, 180, 238n. 32 commodification  18, 42–3, 159–60, 163, 173, 178, 188, 194 community, aesthetic  129 as bound to relationality, address, and promising  5–26, 52, 54, 133–4, 137–8, 147, 180, 183, 197, 221n. 38, 236n. 6 individual-community dualities and integrations  32, 45, 51, 70, 117, 147, 154, 157–8 see also collectivity; individual, dualities and integrations with society/the social Constant (Constant Nieuwenhuys)  204 Symbolic Representation of New Babylon  199–200, 200f Cooper, Anthony Ashley.  See Shaftesbury, Earl of Cosmic Thing (Ortega)  190, 192, 192f cosmopolitanism  30, 123, 131 Crosby, Christina  176 cross-disciplinarity  3 culture, concept of  26–7, 55–6, 87 culture(s) as anchored in aesthetic promises  204 see also under body, dualities and integrations with culture cultural citizenship  90, 130, 181, 183 cultural promise of the aesthetic, the  26–7, 54, 186, 204–7 Dewey  177, 205–6 Hume  5–6, 35–6, 205 Kant  5–6, 205 Lispector  178–82, 185–6, 205 Neruda  6–7, 10–11, 15, 22–3, 177–8, 205–6 see also culture, promise Danticat, Edwidge  Breath, Eyes, Memory  40–1, 52 Danto, Arthur C.  213n. 3 disturbatory art  159, 161–3, 166, 176 racialized, nationalist conceptual framework  151–2, 158–67, 171–6, 237n. 18, 238nn. 34–5, 238–9n. 37

Index Davis, Angela Y.  aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  48, 50–4, 56 racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  48, 51–4 de Lauretis, Teresa  226n. 47, 233n. 42 de Man, Paul  230n. 5, 232n. 39 aesthetic promise of sublimation and relationality as linked to address in ode  215n. 15 de Zegher, Catherine  199, 241nn. 23–4 death  7, 15, 38, 46, 76–7, 81, 83, 157, 181, 216–7n. 31, 226n. 37, 235n. 22, 238n. 29, 239n. 2 decolonial aesthetics  3, 38–41, 44–8, 126–7, 176, 204 Deleuze, Gilles  226n. 37 Derrida, Jacques  230nn. 5–6, 232n. 39 design  2, 42, 93–5, 99, 103, 111, 120–1, 153, 189, 192, 199–200, 218n. 2 desire, aesthetic  as linked to relationality and address  55, 64, 76–7, 82–3, 85, 91–2, 98–9, 102–3, 121, 134, 151, 153, 155, 157, 224n. 15, 237n. 14 and the notion of the aesthetic  5, 25, 95–6, 179–80, 182, 205, 209 and promises  82, 181–2, 186–8, 194–5, 198–9, 206 detail  2, 19, 33, 111, 114, 117, 124, 130, 132, 144, 146, 157–8, 168, 175, 189, 193, 209–11 the aesthetic as detail  57, 83, 220–1n. 31, 222n. 1 and gender  57–87 degendering  58, 81 double or multiple gendering  58–9, 67–8, 70–1, 75–6, 78–81, 84, 87 feminization  57–9, 61–3, 65, 67–8, 70–82, 84–7 masculinization  57–8, 61–3, 67–8, 70–1, 73–6, 78–84, 86 regendering  78, 82–4, 87 and interpretation  69, 72–3, 75, 77–8, 81–7, 209 paradox of  71–3 and subaltern status  89–90, 92–3, 103, 179, 182 see also particularity; reading-in-detail; and see also under Hume

261

Dewey, John  123 cultural promise of the aesthetic, the  177, 205–6 dualities and integrations  117, 120, 129, 205 promise of culture  177, 205–6 Diller, Elizabeth  241n. 24 discipline, aesthetic  28, 71, 102, 104, 134–8, 140–8, 152–5, 182, 231n. 29, 239n. 4 disgust  28, 62, 82, 231n. 29 repugnance  87 see also repulsion disinterestedness  37, 91, 93, 96–7, 155, 178–81, 186, 188, 198, 221 distaste, aesthetic  57, 130, 132, 135–6, 143–5, 178, 182, 198, 209, 234n. 12 Doane, Mary Ann  differential aesthetic promise of modernity and modernism  241n. 25 domestic, the  18, 31–2, 42, 65, 74, 114–6, 123, 128, 145, 158, 163, 214n. 4, 216n. 23, 225n. 32, 231n. 19, 236n. 5 see also home Don Quixote (Cervantes)  Hume on wine-tasting story in  66–8, 224–5n. 21, 225n. 25 dualities and integrations.  See integrationism; and see also under the aesthetic and under specific dualities and integrations Duchamp, Marcel  213n. 1 DuCille, Ann  56 Dyer, Richard  55, 232n. 36, 236n. 1 Eagleton, Terry  236n. 24 Ebony, David  237n. 25, 238n. 28 economics  as entwined with aesthetics  1–2, 97–9, 211 economic critiques and transformations  centrally involving aesthetics  27, 207, 209–11 see also specific cases of aesthetic relationality, address, promises, and threats education  31, 37, 45, 71, 203, 216n. 30 aesthetic education  20–1, 32, 38–9, 49–50, 68, 93, 120–2, 205, 210, 218n. 5, 225n. 22 see also pedagogy, play drive

262

Index

El Anatsui  213n. 3 elemental odes.  See Neruda emancipation  12, 139, 177, 195, 217n. 39, 236n. 24 emotion.  See reason, dualities and integrations with Enlightenment  1, 16, 41, 43–4, 47–8, 51–4, 89, 187, 194–5, 205–6, 222n. 44, 222n. 48, 232n. 34 Enlightenment dualities and integrations  117–9, 123, 138–48 enlightenment  112–5 Scottish Enlightenment  93, 96, 103 equipage, aesthetics of  32, 65, 114, 120–3, 232n. 32 Escallón, Ana María  167, 172 Essed, Philomena  218n. 1 ethics  as entwined with aesthetics  1–2, 209–11 ethical critiques and transformations  centrally involving aesthetics  27, 207, 209–11 see also specific cases of aesthetic relationality, address, promises, and threats everyday aesthetics  32, 35, 58, 65, 74, 76–7, 90–2, 108, 118, 129–49, 151–9, 172–4, 194 aesthetic democratization  38–54, 120–5, 163, 168, 176–9, 183, 198–9 everyday objects  6, 10–23, 27–8 and the notion of the aesthetic  1–2, 209–11, 213n. 1 experience, aesthetic  as an integrative phenomenon  117–19, 138–40, 143–7 as linked to relationality and address  10, 29–30, 37, 50, 76–7, 79–83, 86, 91, 124, 155, 209 and the notion of the aesthetic  55, 57, 60–1, 85, 89, 205–6, 211 and promises  1–2, 10, 26, 29, 180, 185, 188, 194–5, 203 as public  5, 37, 205–6 Fanon, Frantz  218n. 1, 226n. 37, 236n. 23, 236n. 25, 236n. 1 (ch. 7) aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  38, 44–8, 52–5, 146

racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  38, 44–8, 50–1, 53–5, 146 Faris, Wendy B.  174–5 feminist aesthetics  3, 38–43, 48–58, 63, 81, 89–92, 101–5, 113–18, 127, 178–86, 195, 198–9, 204, 232n. 38 figure of damaged aesthetic experience  137–8, 144 Fleming, Mary  220n. 22, 231n. 25 food  2, 14–5, 18, 26–7, 31–2, 38, 41–3, 45, 47, 50, 61, 65, 85, 116, 120–1, 156, 178–9, 203, 220n. 25, 220–1n. 31, 232n. 35, 240n. 19 drink  24, 45, 66–9, 85, 91–2, 148, 178, 182, 205, 220n. 27 see also specific odes by Neruda Forero, Juan  237–8n. 25, 238nn. 27–8 formless, the  27, 58, 82, 94–5, 99, 125, 140, 143, 163, 173, 206 Foster, Cheryl  236n. 7 Foster, Hal  213n. 1, 213n. 3 Foucault, Michel  233n. 1 Franco, Jean  Hour of the Star, The (Lispector)  227n. 2, 239n. 2 Neruda  16–7, 216nn. 23–4, 216– 7nn. 31–2, 217n. 34 Fraser, Nancy  220n. 22, 231n. 25 Fraser, Valerie  174–5 freedom  24, 30, 35, 40–1, 49–50, 53, 55, 58, 93, 98, 99, 104, 116–7, 119, 123, 130, 132, 164, 177, 186, 196, 201, 203, 230n. 17, 235n. 15, 238n. 29 freedom from prejudice (Hume)  31, 59, 70, 118 Freud, Sigmund  13, 163, 186–7, 194 Gagnier, Regenia  228n. 20, 237n. 13, 237n. 15 Gates, Jr, Henry Louis  56 gender, as aesthetically produced and productive  gendered aestheticization and aestheticized gendering  18–9, 22, 24, 30–41, 48–54, 57–87, 89–97, 99–105, 114–15, 118–23, 146, 153–4, 163, 172, 178, 182–3, 219n. 15, 221n. 38, 224n. 13, 226n. 45, 227n. 9, 234n. 7

Index see also sexual difference; and see also under detail Gibney, Alex, director  Taxi to the Dark Side  234n. 10 Gleaners and I, The.  See Agnès Varda Gleaners and I, The: Two Years Later.  See Agnès Varda global aesthetics  12, 16, 21–2, 42, 44, 91–2, 98, 121–3, 127, 148–9, 158, 160, 164, 179, 182, 199, 204–6 Glueck, Grace  173 Gordon, Lewis R.  56, 218n. 1, 221n. 40 Gowing, Lawrence  86, 225n. 32 green aesthetics  43, 204 grotesque, the  36, 87, 91–3, 167–9, 172, 174, 179, 238n. 32 Guillory, John  228n. 18 Halsall, Francis  213n. 3 Hansen, Miriam  214n. 5, 239n. 10 Harris, Cheryl I.  55 Hegel, G. W. F.  70, 144–5, 163, 187, 194, 226n. 37 dualities and integrations  138, 140 Heller, Scott  213n. 2 Herder, Johann Gottfried  229n. 3 Hickey, Dave  213n. 2 Hillman, James  230–1n. 18 Holiday, Billie  aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  50–4 racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  51, 53–4 Holland, Norman S.  229n. 35, 239n. 2 home  10, 21, 39, 41, 45, 49–50, 131, 137, 142, 149, 153, 155, 158 see also the domestic homeland, aesthetic  151–2, 155–6, 158, 165–7, 171–2, 235n. 22, 237n. 14 hooks, bell  213n. 3 Horkheimer, Max  240n. 19 Horowitz, Gregg M.  240–1nn. 21–2 horrific, the  92, 94, 100–1, 228nn. 24–5 Hour of the Star, The (Lispector)  aesthetic promises (and threats)  89–90, 103, 178–86, 195, 198–9, 203–5 aesthetic relationality and address  89–93, 102–5, 178, 180, 182–4, 186, 195, 203, 240n. 19

263

cultural promise of the aesthetic, the  178–82, 185–6, 205 film by Suzana Amaral (dir.)  89, 227n. 1 love  89–92, 103, 178–82, 198 Hume  41, 93, 99, 101, 182, 232n. 32, 232n. 34 aesthetic promises (and threats)  30, 35–6, 38, 53, 120, 214n. 4 aesthetic relationality  29–36, 38, 46–8, 51–6, 97, 103–4, 119–21, 124, 232n. 33, 240n. 19 cultural promise of the aesthetic, the  5–6, 36, 205 detail  58–71, 73, 75, 77–85 dualities and integrations  31–5, 60, 62, 66, 70, 87, 118–20, 123, 146, 218n. 5 links between taste and nation  31–2, 34–5, 46, 56, 97–8, 119, 152–3, 172, 223n. 5 publicity  5–6, 25, 30, 35, 53, 58, 60, 98, 119–20, 123, 205, 214n. 4, 226n. 44, 232n. 34, 240n. 19 racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  29–38, 43–4, 46–8, 52– 6, 119–20, 123, 222n. 44, 222n. 49 pre- and nonstandardized taste  64, 67, 78, 83, 85 standard of taste  59–60, 64, 70, 81, 118, 214n. 1, 222n. 4 see also under aesthetic taste; beauty; the cultural promise of the aesthetic; love humor  47, 50–1, 70, 112, 163, 167–72, 174, 177, 189 Hutcheson, Francis  93, 96–7, 102–4, 182, 227n. 10, 229n. 1 I wandered lonely as a Cloud (Wordsworth)  39 ignorance  2, 96, 178 see also under aestheticization imagination.  See reason, dualities and integrations with indifference  33, 53, 57, 77, 79–81, 92, 153, 164, 190, 210, 226n. 40, 235n. 15 individual, dualities and integrations with society/the social  32–5, 108, 117–24, 129, 138–44, 146–8 see also collectivity; community

264

Index

integrationism  2, 9–10, 14–19, 23, 31–2, 35, 45, 48–51, 60, 66, 87, 93, 108, 116–20, 123, 129, 138–48, 157, 205, 209–10, 216n. 23, 218n. 5 see also under the aesthetic; and see under specific artists, theorists, works, concepts, and dualities and integrations intercorporeality  13–4, 25, 108, 116, 164, 168, 230n. 7 interdisciplinarity  3 interpretation  117, 164, 166, 173, 175–6, 181, 232n. 38 interpretability  9–11, 18, 22–3, 49, 111, 121, 124, 126, 145, 166–7, 177, 189, 205–6, 223n. 6 and the notion of the aesthetic  1–2, 210 and relationality, address, and promising  6, 9–11, 16, 19–20, 22–3, 25, 47, 95, 125–8, 131, 133–4, 137, 151–2, 155, 158–9, 171, 177, 184–5, 195, 197, 205–6 see also under detail, and see reading-indetail intersexual aesthetics  84, 229n. 27 intimacy  7, 9, 12, 17–8, 22, 38, 47, 77, 97, 121, 134, 158, 167, 177, 214n. 4, 215n. 14, 226n. 45, 236nn. 4–5 Irigaray, Luce  97, 223n. 6, 226n. 37, 229n. 34, 231n. 20, 233nn. 41–2, 236n. 23 dualities and integrations  117–18, 146 irony  50, 68, 74, 83, 110–1, 114, 116, 163, 167, 170, 174, 180–1, 215n. 16, 221n. 40 Jaggar, Alison M.  231n. 25 Jameson, Fredric.  213n. 3 Jansen, Julia  213n. 3 je-ne-sais-quoi  107–8, 128, 227n. 6 Johnson, Barbara  107, 127, 213n. 3, 229n. 34, 230n. 5, 246n. 41 address  7–8, 24, 215n. 10, 216n. 22, 217n. 36, 226n. 37 Kant  41, 152, 186–8, 194 aesthetic promises (and threats)  30, 36–7, 53, 214n. 4 aesthetic relationality  29–30, 36–8, 47–8, 51–4, 232n. 33

cultural promise of the aesthetic, the  5–6, 205 links between taste and nation  36–7, 152–3, 172 publicity  5–6, 25, 30, 37, 53, 205, 214n. 4 racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  29–30, 36–7, 43–4, 47–8, 52–4, 56, 222n. 44, 222n. 49 see also under beauty; taste; the cultural promise of the aesthetic Kaplan, Janet A.  230nn. 14–6, 231n. 19 Kelly, Michael  213n. 3, 238n. 26 Kester, Grant H.  213n. 3 Kincaid, Jamaica  52–3, 236n. 5 see also Lucy Korsmeyer, Carolyn  37, 214n. 3, 231n. 26 on gender in Hume  222n. 4, 223n. 5, 223n. 7, 225n. 24, 225n. 28 Krauss, Rosalind  151, 159–61, 163, 172, 175, 238–9n. 37 Kristeva, Julia  97, 226n. 37, 227n. 3, 231n. 20 dualities and integrations  117–18, 146 La DS (Orozco)  189–90, 190f, 192–3 Lacan, Jacques  86–7 Landes, Joan B.  220n. 22 Laqueur, Thomas W.  174, 238n. 26 le Doeuff, Michèle  230n. 6, 231n. 25 legibility.  See interpretability (under interpretation) Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  139, 229n. 3 Levinson, Jerrold  224n. 13, 225n. 22 life-death model of aesthetic meaning and address  76–83 lifelessness  24, 76, 78, 82, 139, 226n. 37 Lispector, Clarice.  See The Hour of the Star liveliness/having life  7, 24, 74, 77, 82 Lloyd, Genevieve  223nn. 6–7, 227n. 13 Loranzo, Luis-Martín  230n. 15 Lorde, Audre  aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  48–50, 52–4, 56 dualities and integrations  49–50, 117–8, 146 racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  48, 50

Index love  as a dimension of aesthetic relationality, address, and promising  40–1, 49, 51–2, 85–7, 92, 94, 96, 99–103, 120–4, 131, 136, 158–9, 167–71, 174, 177–82, 184, 220n. 27, 221n. 33, 226n. 40, 232n. 33, 240n. 19 and the notion of the aesthetic  57–9, 73, 76–7, 79–81, 82–3, 86, 205–6, 209–10 Barthes  76–7, 79–81, 85–6 Hume  33, 53, 55, 73, 85, 99, 119–20, 219n. 15, 231n. 30 Neruda  6–10, 13–15, 17–18, 20–1, 23, 25, 216n. 23 Lispector  89–92, 103, 178–82, 198 Plato  59, 71, 73, 96–7, 187, 198 Lowe, Lisa  213n. 3 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael  206 relational architecture  241n. 26 Lubiano, Wahneema  232n. 37 Lucy (Kincaid)  148, 220–1n. 31, 236n. 5 aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  38–41, 47–8, 52–4 racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  38, 40, 43, 47–8, 50–4 Lugones, María  216n. 27, 217n. 33, 231n. 25, 232n. 38, 233n. 42, 236n. 6 intersection of coloniality and gender  216n. 27 malformed, the  91, 99 Mandeville, Bernard  93, 95–7, 104, 228n. 17 Margolles, Teresa  213n. 3 marketplace, the  43, 97, 103, 130, 132, 153, 157, 163–4, 178, 214n. 4, 229n. 28 cultural marketplace  42 global marketplace  179, 182 labor market  50, 178 market economy  101 market rationality  104, 121–2, 157–8, 173 marketability  163 Marshall, Paule  aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  48, 50, 52–4, 56

265

racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  48, 50 Masiello, Francine  174, 238n. 26, 238n. 35 Matta-Clark, Gordon  190–2 Office Baroque  190, 191f Splitting  190, 191f Mattick, Paul, Jr.  228n. 21 McClary, Susan  87 McDonough, Thomas  241n. 23 McDowell, Deborah E.  56 McIntosh, Peggy  55, 232n. 35 melancholy  33, 55–7, 77, 91, 137–8, 148, 168, 175, 180, 226nn. 40–1 Mercer, Kobena  222n. 43 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  154, 174, 230n. 5, 230n. 7, 232n. 39 Meyer, James  213n. 3 Mignolo, Walter. D.  213n. 3, 216n. 28 Miller, Nancy K.  157–8 Mills, Charles  232n. 38 mind.  See under body, dualities and integrations with mind Mistress and Maid (Vermeer)  58, 71–9, 72f, 75f, 81–7 Morrison, Toni  55, 218n. 1, 229n. 34 music  33, 38, 50–3, 87, 90, 115, 129–38, 141–3, 147–8, 181–2, 188, 215–6n. 22 nation, as aesthetically produced and productive  2, 6, 9, 16, 44–7, 52, 93–5, 98–9, 118, 121, 178–9, 203, 204, 223n. 10, 239n. 38 see also Hume, Kant, racialized aesthetic nationalism national aesthetic  131, 148, 204 see also racialized aesthetic nationalism Nehamas, Alexander  217n. 35 Neoplatonists  73, 103 Neruda, Pablo  elemental odes  6–25, 27–8, 85, 177–8, 205–6, 240n. 19 aesthetic promises  14–16, 22–3, 25, 27, 205 aesthetic threats  23, 177, 205 cultural promise of the aesthetic, the  6–7, 10–11, 15, 22–3, 177–8, 205 integrations  9–10, 14–19, 23, 216n. 23 see also under address; animation; love; relationality

266

Index

specific elemental odes  “Ode to the Apple”  11, 15–16 “Ode to the Book I” (Oda al libro I)  20–2, 216n. 30 “Ode to a Box of Tea”  7, 21–2 “Ode to Bread”  6 “Ode to the Carnation”  14 “Ode to the Chair”  6, 11, 15–16 “Ode to the Clothes”  216n. 24 “Ode to the Onion”  15 “Ode to the Orange”  6, 10, 15–6, 20 “Ode to a Pair of Scissors”  11–12, 16 “Ode to Soap”  14 “Ode to the Spoon”  14–5 “Ode to the Table”  12–13, 15, 17–20 “Ode to Things” (Oda a las cosas)  6–10, 13–15, 205, 215nn. 9–10 “Ode to the Tomato”  14 Nevitt Jr, H. Rodney  225n. 31 New York Times  Portraits: 9/11/01: The Collected “Portraits of Grief ”  157–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich  promise  193, 195–8, 200–4, 240n. 13 Nieuwenhuys, Constant.  See Constant normativity, aesthetic  11, 37, 43, 53–4, 92, 100, 102, 104–5, 119, 157, 172, 176, 182–3, 211 and dualities and integrations  60, 102, 118, 123, 138, 140–3, 146 O’Connor, Tony  213n. 3 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)  234n. 6 Office Baroque (Matta-Clark)  190, 191f, 192 Oiticica, Hélio  206 non-object and trans-object aesthetic relationships  241n. 26 Orozco, Gabriel  La DS  189–90, 190f, 192–3 Ortega, Damián  Cosmic Thing  190, 192, 192f Ortega, Mariana  125 Osborne, Peter  213n. 3

Paddison, Max  239n. 7 particularity  5, 59, 64, 69–73, 77–84, 87, 99, 149, 165, 168, 173, 184–5 particularity-generality dualities and integrations  15–21, 62, 70, 80–4, 92, 103, 117–8, 138–9, 141–4, 146– 7, 226n. 40, 226n. 46, 240n. 18 particularity-large scale relations  15–21, 62, 64, 70–1, 80–4, 92–3, 103, 111, 117–8, 123–4, 138–9, 141–3, 146–7, 149, 157–8, 211, 232n. 34 singularity  21, 57, 59, 80–2, 84, 92, 103, 141, 146–7, 204, 220–1n. 31, 236n. 7 see also detail pedagogy  19, 21, 34, 127 of the aesthetic  32, 205 aesthetic pedagogy  95, 97, 121, 123, 232n. 34 cultural pedagogy  206 see also education personal-political dualities and integrations  117–9, 139, 143 Plato  70–1, 96–7, 102, 104, 107, 187, 194, 229n. 1 aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  1, 89, 93, 96–7, 103–4 love of beauty  59, 71, 73, 96–7, 187, 198 mind-body and reason-emotion/ sensation dualities  70, 96–7, 99, 102 play drive, the (Schiller)  117, 139–40, 234n. 2, 234n. 11, 235n. 15 pleasure, aesthetic  and aesthetic publicity  5, 205 as bound to address  86 and displeasure  28, 69, 71, 177–8 and integrations  209 and promises  42, 179–80, 184, 198 politics  as entwined with aesthetics  1–2, 209–11 political critiques and transformations  centrally involving aesthetics  27, 207, 209–11 see also specific cases of aesthetic relationality, address, promises, and threats Poovey, Mary  101, 228n. 20, 229n. 28

Index Portraits: 9/11/01: The Collected “Portraits of Grief ” (New York Times)  157–8 Portuges, Catherine  220n. 30 postcolonial aesthetics  3, 38–41, 44–8, 127, 176, 204 poverty  14, 41, 61, 157, 172, 218n. 3, 228n. 19 aesthetic politics of  92, 104, 184 as an aesthetic question  48–50, 92, 102, 179 aestheticization of  90–2, 179 as a question for aesthetics  48–50, 92, 180 private, the  214n. 4 see also the domestic; home; public-private dualities and integrations (under public) Proctor, Robert N.  230n. 8 promise  anticipatory nature of  11, 23, 199–200, 206 and art’s historicity and intertextuality  42, 184–5, 189, 193, 195, 200–1 asymmetrical functioning of  138, 205–6 collaborative character of  11, 23, 185, 202 as a constituent of the aesthetic  1, 10, 204, 210–11 and form, aesthetic, artistic, cultural  181–2, 186–9, 190, 193–5, 197–200, 204 as a mediator of aesthetic critique  185, 188, 193–4 as a mediator of aesthetic desire and distaste  198 as a mode of address  1, 27, 203, 205 models of promising  agent-based promises  26–7 a-personal promises  26–7 improvisatory model  196–8, 200, 203–4 regulatory model  193, 196–8, 203, 240n. 13 and the shaping of aesthetic experience  188–9, 193, 203–4 and the shaping of collectivity  202–6 trustworthiness and unreliability of  10–11, 23, 25, 185, 192, 203, 206 see also aesthetic promises; the cultural promise of the aesthetic; Nietzsche; Arendt; and see also under specific artists, theorists, works, and concepts

267

promises, aesthetic  and aesthetic pleasure  42, 179–80, 184, 198 concept and workings of  1, 25–7, 185–6, 195, 204–5 often implying aesthetic threats  23, 177, 205 specific promises  of culture  5–7, 10–11, 13, 39, 48, 52–4, 177–81, 195, 205, 209, 214n. 4 of happiness  120–3, 177–81, 185, 187–8, 193–4, 198, 205, 214n. 5, 217n. 35, 240n. 19 of publicity  5–7, 10, 37, 205–6, 214n. 4 variety of  177–8, 204 see also promise; the cultural promise of the aesthetic; and see also under specific artists, theorists, works, and concepts public, the  11–2, 15–9, 24, 28, 35, 45, 69, 79, 95, 97, 102, 109, 122, 130, 134– 5, 137, 164–6, 182, 184, 188, 193–4, 202, 205, 211, 214n. 5, 232n. 34 and aesthetic pleasure and experience  5, 205 and common appreciative faculties  5, 37, 205 concept of  214n. 4 as a group of general subjects  5, 8, 10, 17, 20, 37, 58–9, 195, 205, 217n. 39, 220n. 22, 222n. 44, 226n. 44 public life  6–7, 60, 123, 142–3, 158, 201, 206 public-private dualities and integrations  35, 60, 95, 102, 108, 116–23, 129, 138–44, 146–8, 214n. 4, 216n. 23, 226n. 45, 228n. 17 public projects and work of the aesthetic  6, 205–6 public sphere  5, 35, 93, 98, 182, 202–3, 206, 235n. 22 publicity  5–7, 10–11, 25, 30, 35, 37, 53–4, 117, 141, 143–4, 147, 205–6, 214n. 4, 216n. 23, 220n. 22, 240n. 19 aesthetic publicity  5–6, 10, 205–6, 214n. 4

268

Index

specific publics  16–7, 19, 28, 51–2, 121, 134, 136, 159, 164–5, 173, 184–5, 201, 206 see also collectivity; and see also under aesthetic promises; Hume; Kant; universality Puryear, Martin  C.F.A.O.  108, 125f, 126–8, 126f queer aesthetics  84, 120–3, 176, 204, 229n. 27, 232n. 33 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (Queer Eye) (TV-show)  108 aesthetic promises, threats, relationality, and racialization  120–4, 146 dualities and integrations  118, 121–3, 146 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius  24 racialization, as aesthetically produced  aesthetic racialization  22, 29–56, 72–5, 89–91, 93–105, 118–25, 146, 163, 178, 183, 224n. 13 as connected with racialized aestheticization  29, 31, 54, 95, 101, 153–4 intersectional operations of  30, 53–4, 95, 101, 104, 227n. 9 see also racialized aesthetic nationalism; and see also under specific authors, artists, and works racialized aesthetic nationalism  129–76 the aesthetic as a border-patrolling technology  130–1, 133, 136, 142, 148 and neoliberalism  157 and projections of unified collectivity  157–8 and proprietary conceptions of culture  131–4, 137, 145–6, 148, 153–9, 166, 171–3 see also under Addison; Danto; “Taxi Ride” Railton, Peter  220n. 22 Ramírez, Mari Carmen  236n. 1 Rancière, Jacques  213n. 3, 217n. 39, 232n. 38 aesthetic promises of emancipation  217n. 39 reading.  See interpretation

reading-in-detail  81–2, 85, 89, 92, 103, 130, 147 reason, dualities and integrations with emotion/imagination/sensation  31, 33–4, 49–50, 60, 62, 101–2, 108, 117–24, 129, 138–47, 182, 218n. 5 Redfield, Marc  213n. 3 relational aesthetics  206, 241n. 26 relationality  aesthetic relationality  concept of  8 Neruda’s odes  6–25, 27–8, 85, 177–8, 205–6 and the production of meanings, ends, and values  104, 123 and social positioning  24–5, 29–30, 124, 146–7, 209–10 as a constituent of the aesthetic  1, 10, 210–11 see also collectivity; the public; and see also under specific artists, theorists, works, and concepts repulsion  83, 87, 124, 135–6, 141, 198 repulsiveness  18, 82, 86–7, 110, 145, 210 see also disgust Reynolds, Joshua  70 Rich, Adrienne  24 Roelofs, Monique  213n. 3, 215–6n. 22, 217n. 35, 217n. 38, 229n. 35, 233n. 1, 234n. 4, 239n. 2, 239n. 5 Rooney, Ellen F.  216n. 29 Rosler, Martha  241n. 24 Ross, Toni  213n. 3 Russo, Mary  238n. 32 Saito, Yuriko  229n. 33, 236n. 7 Salomon, Nanette  82 satire  51, 103, 111–12, 114–15, 128, 167, 170, 172, 174, 179–81 Sayers Peden, Margaret  215n. 16 Scarry, Elaine  213n. 2 Schiebinger, Londa  230n. 8 Schiller, Friedrich  123 dualities and integrations  117, 120, 129, 138–40, 234n. 2, 234n. 11 Schopenhauer, Arthur  229n. 3 Schor, Naomi  146, 231nn. 25–6, 236n. 24

Index detail  57–9, 63, 76, 81, 83, 85, 223n. 8, 225n. 30 Schutte, Ofelia  233n. 41 sensation.  See reason, dualities and integrations with September 11, 2001, coverage of and response to  137, 151, 155, 172–3 George W. Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s, and Rudolph Giuliani’s shopping order  156–7 “a terrorist attack on American soil”  155–6 see also Portraits: 9/11/01 Washington Post Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana  55 Sexton, Anne  24 sexual difference  24, 223n. 6, 226n. 47, 233nn. 41–2 see also gender sexuality, as aesthetically produced and productive  2, 21–2, 30, 35–6, 51–3, 74–6, 82, 84, 99–102, 118–23, 152, 164–71, 176, 183, 203–4, 221n. 38, 223n. 10, 226n. 45, 227n. 7, 227–8n. 15, 229n. 27 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper)  97, 102–4, 182, 227n. 10, 228n. 17, 228n. 22, 229n. 30 racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  93–6, 102, 152, 172 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  24 “Ode to the West Wind”  7–8, 217n. 36 Shusterman, Richard  37, 214n. 3, 225n. 24, 225n. 28 Silvers, Anita  229n. 33 singularity.  See under particularity Sluijter, Eric Jan  226n. 45 Smith, Adam  93, 97–9, 103–4, 182 Smith, Barbara  56 Smith, Roberta  173 Smuts, Aaron A.  223n. 7 social, the.  See individual, dualities and integrations with society.  See individual, dualities and integrations with Sommer, Doris  233n. 41 Sontag, Susan  238n. 29 sound  38, 51, 61, 65, 90–1, 105, 122, 126, 135–6, 144–5, 153, 179–80, 182–3, 188, 206

269

Spelman, Elizabeth V.  217n. 33, 227n. 13, 227–8n. 15, 231n. 25, 236n. 23 intersectionality  218n. 1, 227n. 9 Spillers, Hortense J.  56 Spiral Transit (Remedios Varo)  108, 112–16, 113f, 124, 127–8 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti  213n. 3 Splitting (Matta-Clark)  190, 191f, 192 Stendhal  13, 85, 193, 240n. 14 Stolnitz, Jerome  236nn. 7–8 subject-object/subjective-objective dualities and integrations  60, 66, 118, 153, 215n. 11 sublime, the  36, 100–2, 183, 220–1n. 17, 228n. 25 Sullivan, Shannon  230n. 8 surrealism  112, 114–5, 128, 204 surveillance, aesthetic  137, 151, 155, 172 Sverdlik, Steven  224n. 20 Swann, Christopher  237n. 16 Symbolic Representation of New Babylon (Constant)  199–200, 200f Szymborska, Wisława  108 “Advertisement”  109–10, 112, 124, 128 “Utopia”  109–12, 124, 128 “Warning”  230n. 13 “We’re Extremely Fortunate”  230n. 13 taste, aesthetic  28, 91, 93, 96, 100, 117, 120–3, 126, 131–6, 138–9, 142–4, 147–8, 153, 182, 206, 234n. 12, 234–5n. 13 gustatory taste  14, 117, 126, 153, 220n. 27, 220–1n. 31, 234–5n. 13 Hume  5, 30–6, 46, 55, 58–71, 75, 77–86, 97–8, 118–21, 123, 152–4, 232n. 32, 232n. 34 Kant  5, 30, 36–7, 154 see also distaste; tastelessness tastelessness  28, 65, 206 Taxi to the Dark Side (Gibney)  234n. 10 “Taxi Ride” (Taxirit) (Bril)  aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  129–49 dualities and integrations  129, 138–49 racialized aesthetic nationalism  130–49 Taylor, Paul C.  56 technology  32, 65, 112, 114–16, 128, 154, 170, 174, 181, 205, 211

270

Index

aesthetic formations as technologies  30, 97, 117–8, 130–1, 133, 141–2, 145, 178 Temple, Kathryn  223n. 10 threat  concept and workings of  1, 25–7 as a constituent of the aesthetic  1, 204, 207, 210–11 see also aesthetic promises; aesthetic threats; promise; and see also under specific authors, artists, works, and concepts threats, aesthetic  often implied by aesthetic promises  23, 177, 205 variety of  178 see also aesthetic promises; threat; and see also under specific authors, artists, works, and concepts time slice  3, 55–6 (ch. 2), 84–7 (ch. 3), 173–6 (ch. 7) explication of  3 transculturation  40, 50, 127, 167, 170–1, 175, 213n. 3, 222nn. 43–4 transgender aesthetics  84, 176, 229n. 27 Tschumi, Bernard  241n. 24 Tuana, Nancy  230n. 8 ugliness  2, 69, 89–92, 95, 97, 99, 102, 104–5, 178–80, 183, 198, 239n. 5 Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen)  Relation Works  241n. 26 uncanny, the  86, 130, 169–70, 174, 190, 238n. 32 universality  100, 124, 195 and common appreciative faculties  5, 37 false universalization  37, 124 individual-universal dualities and integrations  9, 117, 139 and the notion of the public  5, 17, 20, 37, 53, 58–9, 205, 222n. 44 universalization in art  16, 174 see also the public urban space  2, 41, 45, 92, 121–4, 130–8, 141–9, 179, 199 “Utopia” (Szymborska)  109–10, 112, 124, 128 utopian, the  110–12 and promise  14–5, 187–8, 193–5, 199, 240n. 14

value  29, 37, 42, 69, 72, 108, 124, 131, 136, 164, 180 aesthetic value(s)  81, 108, 120, 123, 157, 214n. 4, 220n. 22, 236n. 7 and the notion of the aesthetic  1, 5, 55, 58, 71, 89, 98–9, 104, 182, 211 Varda, Agnès, director  48, 226n. 46 The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse) and The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse … deux ans après)  the aesthetic as an aside  41–3, 222n. 1 aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  38, 41–3, 47–8, 52–4 racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  43, 47–8, 53–4 Varo, Remedios  112, 116 Creation of the Birds  115 The Encounter (1959)  230n. 17 The Flutist  115 Immured Figures  230n. 17 Nocturnal Hunt  230n. 17 Solar Music  115 Spiral Transit  108, 112–16, 113f, 124, 127–8 Useless Science or The Alchemist  115 The Weaver  115 Vergara, Lisa  226n. 45 Vermeer, Johannes  A Lady Writing  225n. 33 Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid  225n. 33 Mistress and Maid  58, 71–9, 72f, 75f, 81–7 virtue  34–5, 53, 55–6, 60–1, 93, 96, 97–8, 101–2, 119–21, 134, 138, 146, 177, 218n. 2, 227n. 6, 228n. 17, 229n. 28, 232n. 34 vulnerability  23, 69, 79–80, 86, 141, 148, 161, 164–5, 169, 171, 199, 206 Walker, Alice  aesthetic promises, threats, and relationality  48–50, 52–4, 56 racialized aestheticization and aesthetic racialization  48, 50 warmth  35, 39, 70, 72, 76, 86–7, 225n. 29 Warner, Michael  216n. 29, 220n. 22

Index Washington, Mary Helen  56 Washington Post  “September 11, 2001: Post Coverage of the Worst Terrorist Attack on American Soil”  236–7n. 10 Weiss, Gail  230n. 7 West, Cornel  55–6, 222n. 43, 227n. 12, 231n. 26 Wheelock Jr, Arthur K  226n. 36 whiteness  29–56, 63, 65, 68, 74–6, 80, 94–5, 100–2, 119–20, 123–5, 129, 131–2, 134–8, 144, 146, 152, 156, 175, 183, 232n. 38, 234n. 9, 235–6n. 22, 236n. 5 (ch. 7)

Wigley, Mark  199, 241nn. 23–4 Wolff, Christian  139 Wolin, Sheldon S.  237n. 14 Wollstonecraft, Mary  93, 101–4, 182 Wordsworth, William  I wandered lonely as a Cloud  39 working-class aesthetics  204 Wynter, Sylvia  37, 227n. 12, 231n. 26 Young, Iris Marion  176, 220n. 22, 225n. 26, 231n. 25 Yúdice, George  213n. 3 Žižek, Slavoj  86, 238n. 29

271