Where Can Aesthetics Go?

While reading the first two-thirds of this essay I felt as if I wanted to be a cheerleader: “Go, Connor, go! Tell it like it is!” This state is immensely rare for me, because I have internalized all too well an academic training that rewards us for seeking out the vulnerabilities in scholarly arguments. On such weaknesses we build illusions of our own strengths. But with Steven Connor I find myself cheering, because his central argument seems absolutely right: he clearly establishes the impossibility and absurdity of trying to use “the aesthetic” to say anything interesting that can be relevant to all art objects as objects, and he offers a compelling sociological account of how the concept of the “aesthetic” empowers people to identify themselves as artists largely on the basis of their good intentions. It is as if our society permits so much leisure that it has to invent categories whereby those devoted to that leisure can represent themselves in terms of an instantly acknowledged social identity that is worthy of respect but that does not demand much proof of achievement. I might add that, being in the class of the critic, I have a stronger sense of resentment with regard to an easy identification as “artist” than most people—so thank you, Steven Connor, for providing a stage on which I can imaginatively act out that resentment. And thank you for creating an intellectual arena where questions about the psychological motivation for our terminologies, and a potential release from these terminologies, seem an appropriate concern. Finally, thank you, Steven Connor, for resisting the mystifications of the metaphysics of art with such lucidly written challenges as the following sentence: “It is very difficult to imagine any claim for the purposes and powers of art of the kinds that I just enumerated that could really be held to apply to any and all examples even of the type of art in question” (58).

Lest I become too abject, I hasten to add two supplements to Connor’s arguments. For a while now, I have been wondering why it was only in the twentieth century that lyric poems came to be characterized primarily as aesthetic objects, a position that necessarily underplays the verbal in favor of more immediate sensuous properties. The historical source is clear. Modernist poets developed this orientation because they saw the opportunity of absorbing for their own purposes many of the sensuous and structural qualities of the other arts. But almost all of these poets went on to break with the assumptions of early modernism and to incorporate strong rhetorical elements into their work. Why then did criticism not follow suit? Both on the right and the left, those culturally responsible for defining poetry continued to insist on the primacy of aesthetic values, emphasizing qualities of embodiment and sensuous presence rather than those of judgment and scope and sensitivity in relation to the subject matter, despite the obvious decline in the productivity of such a modernist aesthetic. In retrospect, it is difficult to find much difference on this matter between the conservative influence of the New Critics and the “experimental” views of poetry mediated by the Objectivists, in part because both saw discursive language as the basic enemy of poetry. The twenty-first century will have to restore a renewed sense of the importance of poems as rhetorical acts devoted to a variety of technical issues, and Connor is giving us the necessary kick in the butt.

My second point indicates how difficult that will be as aesthetics turns into something close to ontology—that is to say, as concerned less with characterizing specific traits of art objects than with meditation on the work’s singularity and the political force of that singularity for allowing the work to resist the authority of concepts and of disciplines devoted to assessing concepts. This new aesthetics, perhaps best represented in the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Giorgio Agamben, praises singularity and sensuousness and transpersonal states, but it is not concerned with the means by which traditional aesthetics established the claims for judgment. Yet this treatment of judgment was...