Art's Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism

Introduction: “From Which One Turns Away”

1 Introduction: “From Which One Turns Away” Aestheticism and Its Radicality This book is about something I am calling a radical aestheticism, the term that I believe best describes a recurring event in some of the most powerful and resonating texts of the British Romantic literary tradition. A radical aestheticism offers us the best way to reckon with what takes place at certain moments in certain texts by P. B. Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, D. G. Rossetti, and Wilde when aestheticized representations reach their radicalization . I will go on to argue that this aesthetic radicalization, however isolated or rare, has profound consequences, not only for the specific texts in which it occurs, but for our understanding of the ambitious literary project undertaken by each of these writers and, finally, of our conception of the legacy of Romanticism. We associate the term “aestheticism” with those nineteenth-century movements in England and in France that celebrated or promoted what Pater called “the love of art for art’s sake,” or what Cousin called “l’art pour l’art.” The philosophical inspiration for this movement is often attributed to Schil- 2 Introduction ler or to Schelling; but it is invariably if unjustly Kant who offers the philosophical authorization. There is certainly no inherent reason that the critique of a certain form of judgment—one that judges something made available to the senses without the stability or ground of a law or concept—should result in the celebration of the judgment or the sensation. And yet, in Marc Redfield’s elegant formulation, “through a sleight of hand that has always threatened to make aesthetics as suspect as it is seductive, aesthetic judgment claims simultaneously to produce and to discover the essential harmony of the perceiving mind and the perceived world, sensation and idea, phenomenality and cognition.”1 This “sleight of hand,” this surreptitious metalepsis, this “subreption ” is not only constitutive of the aesthetic, but a boundless resource for aestheticism. Moreover, it is certainly impossible to imagine the claims and goals of any aestheticist tradition without the Third Critique’s delineations of the specificities of an aesthetic judgment and its founding claim that “the judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment (either theoretical or practical )” and that the “satisfaction” derived from a judgment of beauty “is alone a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, either of sense or of reason, here forces our assent.”2 And while the Kantian legacy of artistic autonomy has been mobilized for any number of arguments and causes, from the most conservative humanism to the most radical Marxism, it has never been invoked with more extravagance than by nineteenth-century aestheticism. Throughout this book I will have occasion to examine in detail some of the relevant and intricate relationships among eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury philosophical aesthetics, the various strains of nineteenth-century aestheticism, and twentieth-century critical theory. These relationships have been the topic of a rich and contentious critical literature, to which I will turn both as resource and as object of study. But there remains one feature of this relationship that, though obvious enough, tends to pass without commentary . I believe that without any exception of which I am aware, aestheticism is presented by its principal proponents—in the specific tradition I am considering, Pater and Wilde—as something to be espoused. The forms of this espousal are immediately recognizable and, given the considerable rhetorical resources of its purveyors, remarkably limited. “Love art for its own sake,” Wilde declares in his first New York lecture, “and then all things you need will be added to you.”3 Thus is Kant’s painstaking critical analysis of the nature of an aesthetic judgment transformed by way of a claim for the autonomy of art into an extravagant creed, a dandy’s refrain. Indeed, the tone and tenor of Wilde’s lecture makes the extent of aestheticism’s ambitions clear: whether “From Which One Turns Away” 3 as a collective mission or a personal disposition, aestheticism is offered as an ethos, one that can be professed, learned, cultivated, and lived. What I am calling a radical aestheticism is not that which Pater or Wilde espoused . Nor is it the aestheticism that is often—and, I believe, mistakenly— attributed to the chiasmic intertwining of truth and beauty in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Nor is it the politically radical declaration of a poetic...