Are Aesthetic Models the Best Way to Talk About the Artfulness of Literary Texts?
My strongest response to this book is surprise mixed with considerable admiration. These essays are strikingly inventive in exploring such a variety of possible uses for the aesthetic in relation to concerns shaped by social and political life. I am grateful to the authors for bringing such intelligence and energy to a topic that I had long abandoned as hopelessly vague and abstract. But I am still not convinced that discourses on the “aesthetic” can be very useful for literary work, especially for the novel, which has a long and troubled relation with its own artifactuality. (Cultivating intricate internal relationships seems both to produce and to obfuscate perspicuous relations with the actual world.) In fact these essays intensify my doubts because they seem to show that the only way, or the best way, a language foregrounding “aesthetic” can be effective in dealing with history and politics is to build predicates for social use into the definition of aesthetic from the start. The essays concentrate on how particular aesthetic properties might be appropriated for social use. But to achieve this goal they have to separate these properties from what I will call the more comprehensive aesthetic processes that give a distinctive cast to aesthetic experience as a synthesis of these various properties.1 On one level this could be cause for criticism, because most of the essays talk about the aesthetic rather than demonstrate the power of texts to establish distinctive modes of experience. Yet I think this stems from an honest and intense realization that what matters in literary experience is not how the imagination aestheticizes but how the imaginative labor develops various modes of articulating significance for particulars by treating them as aspects of concrete ways of reflecting on and participating in experience. Were the essays to focus on a distinctively aesthetic cast to that experience, I think they would have to displace literary intensities into misleading analogies with the other arts and ignore what is distinctive for an art based on the medium of language.
These essays are often bold and precise in stating the importance of reconciling aspects of the aesthetic with the historical and political interests still dominating Americanist literary criticism. Bentley, for example, develops possibilities for countering our disenchantment with disenchantment, and Castiglia speaks for many of the essayists in his call for an “aesthetics beyond the actual” that might promise sources of enchantment and empowerment in what is felt to be a dark time for the society at large. But they do not allay my doubts that talk of the aesthetic will cure our sense of malaise, in part because they do so well in directly engaging materials for which the aesthetic is not in fact central. So one almost has to ask why it might matter that most of the essays fail to (or refuse to) honor a crucial distinction between aesthetic properties employed in texts and conditions of aesthetic experience in which a variety of properties function together to establish the kind of event that has traditionally been proclaimed as somehow denying referential functions because the state of attention becomes valuable in itself. In one sense this can be considered a typical problem when a discipline shaped by historicist concerns tries to expand to accommodate “the aesthetic.” But I have become increasingly convinced that there is a significant positive side to the preference for aesthetic properties rather than aesthetic experience. Therefore I will try to show why “aesthetic experience” is not a very good way to talk about the power of literary work because that notion has been developed primarily for arts that do not have the advantages (and problems) of language as their fundamental medium. Then I will suggest as an alternative language for verbal art a simple focus on how we talk about imaginative labor to build worlds out of linguistic resources.
Since I cannot mount any argument at all if I attend carefully to individual essays within my space limit, I will have to trust that my gratitude to them is everywhere apparent. Yet I have to mention a more specific gratitude to two features of their arguments. Bentley’s and Ellison’s essays strike me as doing an especially good job of establishing a sense of the historical urgency informing our need to recuperate what can be accomplished by works of literature in a profession now disenchanted with disenchantment and eager to find new political implications for literary experience not pervaded by rhetorics of resistance and demand. Second, and even more important, there is a shared sense in most of the essays that this is a unique historical moment we would fail were we not to find ways to bring the aesthetic and the political into conjunction: with the election of Obama we can plausibly hope for improvements in social justice and in the U.S. renouncing some of its imperiousness toward the rest of the world. Therefore there can be a renewed sense of the stakes involved in thinking clearly about what roles our profession can play as the Obama years continue to unfold.
Given these stakes, it should not be surprising that most of the essays concentrate on developing possible immediate loosely political uses for specific aesthetic properties. The essays identify the aesthetic with dream states or play or revolution or counterfactuals or various kinds of knowledge as if a critical tradition weakened by aestheticization could recast the power of the “aesthetic.” While this is a reasonable reaction to our disenchantment, it also generates a potential problem that we have to engage. Because of the urgency to find direct uses for these aesthetic properties, it turns out that what might make them distinctively aesthetic comes almost to disappear as any particular essay develops the practical functions. Let me try to illustrate the situation here by drawing an analogy with the philosopher J. L. Austin’s concept of “trouser-words.” Faced with the difficulty of fixing meaning for such a notoriously vague, equivocal expression as real, Austin argues that we should look for the implied concept or term that is actually wearing the trousers and asserting the authority (this is British humor after all).2 Then we see that something is perceived as “real” because it is not fake or not illusory or not a forgery. The negative judgments wear the trousers.
In our essays we find that the aesthetic must be supplemented by positive rather than negative terms. But it remains the case that the supplements wear the trousers. As a test case, imagine how often you can proceed in these essays while simply ignoring or bracketing the language of “aesthetic” so that you can concentrate on the meat of the argument, especially when the author gets down to the particular case. At other times the aesthetic properties idealized prove difficult to reconcile with one another, so authors have a good reason to minimize the case for their distinctiveness. For example, if we stress play and dream, what will we do with apparently justified claims that the aesthetic enhances our sense of the actual and cultivates a critical concreteness that exposes our quotidian imaginings as just fantasies? But if we stress knowledge, what difference in fact does the aesthetic component make in our gathering that knowledge, especially a knowledge that is suspicious of those other aesthetic properties?
The traditional solution to this problem has been to bite the philosophical bullet and insist that the aesthetic properties can have their full force only when they are features of overall aesthetic experiences. If we go this route, we probably have to stress various ways that this experience is different from practical experience. And this obviously complicates immensely any critical position that tries to reconnect this distinctiveness to political and historical projects. For example, if we go the traditional philosophical route we have to correlate two competing claims—that the arts “realize” a density within experience by developing modes of attunement to the world more sensitive than the instruments of empirical understanding, and that the arts have the power to separate themselves from or negate versions of the real produced by those understandings. And the efforts at correlation confront substantial problems. As Loughran shows, claims for aesthetic experience typically foster a contemplative, relatively timeless attitude toward historical materials because the work presents a world for the imagination rather than representing a world for practical judgment. I would add that because of this stress on presentation, aesthetic experience is set against conceptual knowledge of all kinds: the work is singular, and its distinguishing quality is a synthetic or multivalenced expressiveness not reducible to the structures of oppositions on which concepts are based. Aesthetic experience need not be autonomous in the strong sense of claiming separation from life, but its connections to practical life require something like Hale’s concern for alterity in relation to our standard practical discourses. Finally, aesthetic experience makes the medium central to the expressive force of the presentation so that any language of “representation” will seem thin and insensitive.
The medium creates a subtlety of presentation where the aspects of color, line, tone, and movement at once establish their own expressive power and invite metaphorical uses of that power that are not reducible to concepts. So the theory of the arts must cultivate the language of nondiscursive significance (now in the guise of alterity). And such a language will always be hard-pressed to avoid the temptation toward mysticism that emerges in the rhetoric of artists as different as Mondrian, Rothko, Martha Graham, or even classical masters like Beethoven.
I think we best honor the work in these essays if we allow ourselves to explore how literary experience might make use of aesthetic properties without necessarily submitting to the language of post-Kantian aesthetics, which is for most purposes simply to say “without submitting to aesthetics.”3 After all, while literary texts were central to Kant’s and Hegel’s formulation of aesthetics, the picture changed drastically during the course of the nineteenth century (where the popular writers simply refused to write as if they read German and French philosophical aesthetics). Aesthetic theory was primarily derived from and primarily applied to visual art and music, precisely because any “use” value would have to rely on models that challenged the priority of language. Music redirects sound by relying almost exclusively on its capacity to provide structure and suggestiveness to shapes and themes that exist almost purely in a realm where there can be very little talk of “meaning.” And vision does engage the world of conventional meaningfulness, but it populates that world with details and with forces that clearly have no direct conceptual component. Literature has a different mode of mediation. So I propose that the cultural task provoked by this collection of essays is the experiment of seeing how differently we can talk about literary experience, because it is an art made of language and it is usually devoted to challenging not the resources of language so much as limited uses of those resources. The product will probably look a good deal like traditional aesthetics. But it might have at least two differences. It will foreground why language matters and so will grow much closer to rhetoric than traditional aesthetics allows because of its suspicion of language and the practical orientation language traditionally cultivates. Moreover, this experiment will have a more intricate relationship to the power of concepts. It can still emphasize concrete display rather than argument. But it might be able to show the sources of the display in argumentative concerns and take satisfaction in the ways that criticism tries to adapt what is displayed for participating in practical concerns.
Let me conclude by taking up the two differences that make the language of aesthetic experience problematic for literary experience. The traditional modernist in me is still disturbed by the willingness of several of the essayists to deny the basic differences between the rhetorical and the aesthetic on which idealist and romantic traditions of aesthetics were founded. But is traditional aesthetics sufficient grounds for denying how Cahill, Wilson, Castiglia, Bentley, and Ellison treat the aesthetic domain as a generator of properties to be assessed for their utility in public life? Their arguments seem to me fundamentally defensible if we see that at their core they are trying to get back behind Kant, to a time when the sharp split between the rhetorical and a commitment to something like the aesthetic did not exist. So long as the aim of literature was to move and to delight by marshaling the powers of language, literary art was fundamentally an extension of the power of rhetoric to persuade by appealing to concrete emotions. There could simply be different applications of rhetoric—to social agendas and to developing elaborate displays of behavior intended to exemplify the possible consequences of feelings and actions.
Of course we cannot quite go back behind Kant’s disinterested “purposiveness without purpose.” But we can explore different ways of cultivating that concreteness of the aesthetic object without basing our account on how the medium establishes alternatives to the domain of the concepts produced by the understanding. (After all, we have less faith in supplanting the understanding by higher powers of reason than Kant did; and we have stronger resources for concentrating on how language carries exemplary actions that need not produce true representations in order to be intelligible and significant.) So I will try to elaborate a different way of talking about the powers of concrete display that are central in literary experience’s manner of implicating the practical world. This task I think can be handled simply by emphasizing what the imagination can produce when it concentrates on the powers made available by language. Then we need not treat the ontology of literary signs as parallels to the ontology of musical and visual signs. Literature redirects language by relying on its capacity to render worlds. And this capacity is best measured by the range of language games that can be elicited by texts and projected for audiences. Playing with the limitations of concepts is itself a language game fundamental to Wittgenstein’s fascination with the difference between referential and expressive and modeling possibilities of linguistic practice.
On the simplest level, the labor of imagination evokes the various arts of ornament where the imagination becomes central for its ability to play with design and create variety in how we engage the world. As we get more practical, we can easily relate the literary to the rhetorical without identifying them entirely. Rhetoric becomes the imaginative labor of using particulars with persuasive force that supports and directs argument. In contrast, we take texts as primarily literary when imaginative labor is focused on the metaphorical elaboration of particulars so that they have force primarily through the concrete actions they display and elaborate. Then the fullest language for the labor of imagination is elicited by literature’s many ways of using the hypothetical activity of practical speculation, typically constructed as the display of possible worlds. In literary experience it is crucial we admit two different foci of hypothesis, often fused by the richest texts. One is a performative level engaging the question who could I become or how could I act linguistically if certain conditions were presupposed and constructed to make a concrete world. The second focus locates hypothetical interest in how the values emerging in the concrete world displayed might affect the way in which we talk about possibilities in the world we have to live in. Here one could cite as an especially clear example of this kind of attention Beam’s display of how intricacy of tone becomes a vehicle making mutual recognition possible in texts by Woolson and James.
On the microlevel I want to extend the language of the hypothetical to cover the full range of affective experiences created by the text, especially to its capacity to create empathy through the work these affects perform. After all, the primary question enabling empathic response is some version of “what would it be like for this person to have to face this situation and speak these words or have to deal with these persons and demands in the process?” Of course something like an aesthetic attitude has to be invoked if we are to dwell in empathy rather than insist on making up our minds about the best practical way to proceed. But, rather than base the contemplation on aesthetics, why not base it simply on the realization that we can be interested in empathy and a reflective attitude is necessary for its full elaboration? We refuse practical attitudes not because we are dealing with “art” but because we have an interest in testing what our imaginations can make of situations or of authors’ engagements in those situations.
The corresponding macrolevel is a testing of imagination’s capacities to totalize. Agents often hold off practical judgment to explore how various elements in situations might come together to provide the kinds of large pictures that provide contemplative frames in which we assess practical options. Again we have interests that can be activated simply by judgments that this particular textual situation affords reflective capacities that are worth our putting off any rush to practical judgment: the possibility of understanding historical contexts or contemplating possible long-term consequences because of what is implicit in the overt actions might make it worth our while to dwell on how this author develops the interconnections possible in the range of actions he or she brings together. If we attribute this reflective attitude to aesthetic forces, we cannot avoid the intellectual history that tells us how difficult it is to connect what refuses to represent the world to any language of values sustained by that world. So it might be better simply to derive the contemplative mode from a basic account of human interests in avoiding the consequences of shortsighted practical judgment. We could even bring the aesthetic inside our story of interests. For we can argue that because of the influence of the aesthetic in Western culture, writers have learned to provide cues inviting us to dwell in and dwell on their imaginative labors to provide large-scale contexts within which the actions take place. Literature learns from the aesthetic to make it own distinctive uses in accord with the powers of language to suspend practical reference—not for some other world of dream or beauty but for a richer sense of what we might do in the world we are given. Then even the aesthetic must stand before the tribunal of an enlightened pragmatic spirit that literary texts have the linguistic capacity to invoke.
There is no space for an elaborate application of this theoretical position. And I think there is no need for it because I am only trying to describe what we typically do as literary critics in a way that brings out how foreign the discourse of philosophical aesthetics is to that practice. There are similarities in our concerns for the performative and for the tension between display or presentation as opposed to representations that appeal to stable concepts. But there are much simpler and less problematic ways of accounting for these features of literary experience than we can develop once we make the fateful turn to invoking the discourses of aesthetics, especially if we want to talk about the novel. So, in lieu of a fuller argument, I will only point to what I see as exemplary qualities in two of these essays—one devoted to how the aesthetic becomes incorporated in imaginative action rather than being invoked to explain the status of that action and the other offering a way to develop a text’s capacity to set action against the promise of conceptual models.
Castiglia’s essay on The Marble Faun offers a powerful analysis of how an interpreter can use aesthetic categories to flesh out the imaginative action rather than provide the experiential frame for it. In fact, while his emphasis is on criticism rather than performance, he presents the text as the imagining of what the world would be like if certain conditions hold. Fundamental to these conditions is how the two main female characters in the narrative, Miriam and Hilda, are each shaped by competing “perspectives on aesthetics” (124). Each of these perspectives proves a block to developing their full capacity for intimacy. So in this case their aesthetic orientations provide a negative frame setting off how the action stages the major male characters’ “possibilities for inventive intimacies” (122). These possibilities derive from “a new aesthetic theory that combines rather than separates, imagines rather than judges, and acknowledges that relationships” with what remains other to our moral orders “might transform, rather than confirm, our interior conceptions of truth and beauty” (128). He finds this theory in Schiller. But he does not spend time arguing that the shape of the reader’s experience follows Schiller’s model. Rather he shows that the actions of the male characters align with Schiller’s aesthetic in order to achieve this intimacy and provide examples for the audience of dispositional traits that may well produce similar results. By shifting from readers to characters, Castiglia can stress how the narrative action exemplifies opening for social life “a space of negotiable and compensatory intimacy” (130) based on contiguity that avoids the oppositional orientation shaping the women’s interactions with that society. The text is not an illustration of an argument, but does serve concretely to perform the rhetorical purpose of directing the imagination to attitudes worth reflecting on for the values they define as possible states of spirit.
Castiglia’s essay nicely merges rhetorical and literary interests to project through the text the practical possibilities for idealized values. Freedman’s essay on James’s The Golden Bowl explores a contrary linguistic practice by setting James’s constructed action against any concept that might sponsor rhetorical projections. So Freedman restores the fundamental power claimed for aesthetic experience to counter prevailing conceptual practices without any mystification about formal relations or claims to the status of distinctive experience that may require a language of autonomy. First Freedman establishes an admirably clear and subtle account of economic game theory. Then he turns to how the novel stages an action where Maggie wins because she is in an economic position to break the rules and act in a way that opens her to irrational risk. Freedman needs no claims for an additional aesthetic dimension because he can show how James’s imaginative labor stages a complexity of embedded human relations for which almost any conceptual structure will prove inadequate. The conditions of persons triumph over the adequacy of ideas about these persons.
I will quote Freedman at length because I want readers to hear how much he can make of the power of concrete display without gussifying the picture with claims to distinctively “aesthetic knowledge”:
Anticipating the brave new world of game theory that was to prove so important to contemporary economic thought, and anticipating even more acutely the extension of economic analysis into understandings that have followed it of the transactions of everyday life, the novel thus presciently critiques these developments, putting in their place a view of life in which precisely the means that assure victory ensure defeat, those that allow for the accomplishment of gain negate it. And in doing so The Golden Bowl vividly displays the kinds of knowledge that fiction has to offer in a world where the economic has risen to social hegemony.
(256)
Because of James’s intense particularity, he develops the kinds of economic thinking that would ally him now with the school of “behavioral economics” that stresses how often irrationality and “self-balking” behaviors pervade our economic activity. But he does it in a way that also challenges those economist’s staged expectations that rationality is an adequate ideal for practical economic decisions against which we judge that irrationality. Rationality and irrationality are themselves embedded inextricably in Maggie’s trying to find a path of behavior she can live with.
I stress this particularity more than Freedman does because I think his provisionally taking on the economist cap blinds him to one dimension of the action in James’s novel. This dimension matters because it has been a central theme for those who want to emphasize James’s aestheticism—the possibility that the novel refuses to judge Maggie’s action as a failure but instead just characterizes it as necessary for her as an extension of the character the novel has realized for her. I agree with this aspect of the aestheticist position. Even though Freedman persuasively argues that the outcome of Maggie’s decision is not very desirable—exile of the two people with whom she was closest and regaining a husband’s seemingly painfully desexualized and “hypnotized” love (256)—I think the important point is not the desirability of the outcome but its necessity. It seems to me that her decision was the only possible one for Maggie if she were to sustain a sense of herself. There is probably no point in judgment here because no alternative action by which to measure whether she succeeds or fails even becomes thinkable. But I do not think one has to base this argument on aestheticist concerns for singularity. We can attribute our sense of necessity for Maggie simply to how the hypothetical fictive world gets displayed. It is the specificity of our attention to Maggie that makes the action seem of a piece with her life and so resistant to any judgment that imposes conceptual contexts about desirable outcomes. And this particularity is where the Jamesian novel departs from even the work of the most radical behavioral economists: what readers of Maggie come to know is that justice is immanent to action. There is no Maggie outside this action—not simply because of the tautology that she lives a fictional life but also because she lives a life within a sense of necessity, and paradoxically of freedom to express that necessity, that qualifies and complicates what an economic judgment might be. Actions need not generate binary oppositions of success and failure: they are simply there, like our lives.
Notes
1. This tendency to isolate properties helps explain why the essays rely on a very small range of work done in aesthetic theory. The omission of Adorno as an aesthetic theorist (rather than the social theorist Lott invokes) is especially striking. And, while I do not want to be picky, the treatments of topics like Kant’s disinterestedness or Schiller’s sense of imagination seem something less than thorough. For example, Schiller stresses play, but makes play responsible for developing concrete universals where sense joins the domain of ideas. The only philosophers who seem to matter in these essays are Judith Butler and Jacques Rancière, probably because they do exactly what the essays do—promote social uses of the aesthetic without worrying about problematic linkages between how forms of organizing the senses work in particular art works and how they work in social life. And both combine phenomenology’s concerns with intimate self-awareness with a Foucauldian attention to how culture produces categories for sorting experience.
EDITORS’ NOTE: Circumstances prevented Altieri from reviewing some of the essays in this volume or taking into account the final revisions made by the authors.
2. J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, reconstructed from the manuscript notes by G. J. Warnock, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 70. There is an interesting, almost literal, manifestation of this trouser phenomenon in Cavitch’s citing of a late-nineteenth-century Atlantic Monthly statement that “aesthetics is still the vaguest and most fantastic branch of psychology,” then Cavitch’s adding, “It makes a good deal of practical and also political sense if, for ‘most fantastic,’ we hear ‘riskiest,’ and if, for ‘psychology,’ we hear ‘the psychology of freedom’” (87). Notice here the strange affinity with Derrida’s concept of the supplement, the qualifier that in the end determines the meaning, but always in a vulnerable fashion.
3. I think it is difficult to identify literary experience with aesthetic experience without running into the problem of just how other is the world of the aesthetic from the practical and therefore just how other is anything we might be tempted to recuperate as the knowledge deriving from the experience. Hale’s essay seems a case in point because I worry that there is a pervasive ambiguity in her two uses of the term alterity, which stems from how such experiences resist the authority of concepts. One sense is comprised by Nussbaum’s claim that alterity is a productive difference calling attention to the mind’s powers to work beyond the limitations of its conceptual structures and the other is Butler’s poststructuralist sense where the alterity is absolute—one can see only the limits of one’s own perspective and learn to let the other be. Here even a rhetoric of “care” would seem presumptuous because one would have no warrant to trust in one’s own sense of the ethical power of that term.