The aesthetic: A peculiar mode of appreciation that wishes to place in brackets or disavow the obvious content of a work and stress instead form and symbolism.
The aesthetic attitude dismisses as vulgar any suggestion that a work might have a ‘palpable design upon us,’ excite our desire, militancy, disgust etc. It commends those disinterested responses which attend only to the formal and figurative aspects of the work, and those works engineered to elicit such a response. A straw target you suggest. So perhaps a few (sketchy) examples are called for.
If I were to write an essay on the ‘alibi of the aesthetic’, my first example might be John Berger’s discussion of the Franz Hals’ Regents and Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House. You perhaps remember Berger’s point: At the time of painting the picture, the old Hals was utterly destitute. The portrait was of the administrators of that charity on which he’d become dependent. As the camera searches the faces in the picture, you sense this relation of dependency, suspicion, distance; and okay, the administrators are dressed in their official symbolic garb, but Hals has revealed in the faces something else, an assumed dignity which is also fragile, vulnerable. So then Berger reads us a passage from a book of art criticism in which all this is forgotten in talk of ‘pictorial unity’ ‘subtle modulations of colour’ ‘coherent design’ etc. Content is bracketed off and/or made subordinate to form.
This content, which is unsettling, which asks questions, which discloses something about the situation of Hals – not just biographically but historically speaking – is sublated; the painting is primarily a thing of beauty, an episode in art history, and its content is swallowed up therein. You don’t have to confront it. So, for Berger, the language of form employed by the art critic is the repression of an uncompromising content.
Exhibit 2 might be Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of ‘taste culture’. I do not have the space here to go into details, save to say that ‘taste’ (ie bourgeois taste) typically privileges form over content. For example, upper class food typically stresses form and mode of presentation, downplaying questions of whether food is “filling” etc (utility based questions). Something similar happens with regard to art. Bourdieu quotes too very revealing theatre/ opera reviews – revealing, that is, as regards taste presuppositions.
“What struck me most is this: nothing could be obscene on the stage of our premier theatre, and the ballerinas of the Opera, even as naked dancers, sylphs, sprites or Bacchae, retain an inviolable purity” [emphasis added]
Ok, the second quote:
“There are obscene postures… in Hair, the nakedness fails to be symbolic”
The ballerinas, thinks the critic, could never be ‘obscene’, because their nakedness is always either figurative or seamlessly integrated into a formal whole – the sexuality of what is before us, and the possibility of a (vulgar) sexual response is dissolved into that peculiar kind of enjoyment termed ‘aesthetic’. The aesthetic performs a strange alchemy whereby the obvious and literal is emptied of its content, leaving behind something numinous and pure (of which it is a mere sign) something that abstains from the world, that proposes nothing – or only the anodyne security of universal human truths.
In Hair, the signal failure, the elementary violation of decorum and taste is that the nakedness is a) not a sign of something else and b) likely to produce a “natural” response. The overt sexual content has not been sublated by form or symbolism. Those who draw attention to the literal/ obvious level (e.g. when someone remarks that a painted mythological female figure is “sexy”) can be dismissed as “vulgar” or – precisely – “tasteless. What this also tells us is this: that the elevation to the “symbolic” is, simultaneously, the suspension of the literal and/or functional, the “vulgar” level of sense. And symbolic readings can be almost something like a “get out clause” wherein the “obvious” or gross significance of an image (or whatever) is bracketed off and “disowned”.
It seems to me that, often, the idea that there might actually be in the content a proposal or question that’s radical and disturbing, that it might directly address your existence, is lost in a certain kind of ‘aesthetic appreciation’. To illustrate (well, suggest really, because I don’t have time to illustrate), just two examples - the radical and hardly consoling proposals of Proust on Friendship and Genet on Betrayal. One confronts always the ‘excuse’ that these are metaphors, or only intelligible within the overarching aesthetic design. They are either signs or architectural units: in both cases they point beyond & deny themselves.
No, Proust really does think that friendship is a vain distraction, that the only worthwhile relations are those with the silent dead (reading); friendship does not enrich or enlarge your thoughts, and the solitary pursuit of writing demands the rejection of such relations. Genet is not using betrayal as a metaphor for something else– betrayal is the definitive act of radical freedom, freedom as caprice and cruelty, capable of renouncing even what is most dear to it; i.e., even if you renounce what seems intimate, most one’s own there will still be an ‘I’ left, triumphant, defiant, stubborn.
In fact, the examples are legion. Whether it is Kafka (Kafka speaks of books that break open the frozen substance inside us) or any other of the authors who really interest me, there is in these writers a content which burns a hole in the given social substance, which is indifferent to the Symbolic Order in which the writer lives, and which, taken seriously, is incompatible with a life lived pragmatically within that order. And the view of literature as no more than a painless supplement to such a life is anathema to such texts.
I have strayed a bit.. the point is to suggest that the ‘aesthetic’ is often a denial of content, a defusing of its radicalism; the content is placed in parentheses. And yet the critics by insisting on the aesthetic (defined as the suspension of content) have turned things on their head. For it is almost always the case that the form of the work – the innovations in form – have resulted from a rigorous effort on the part of the artist to work-through some specific content, to think through the formal consequences of a certain content. And because only through this form could this content have come to expression.
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