Aesthetic Matters: Literature and the Politics of Disorientation

Ever since Plato expelled artists from his ideal republic, the question of aesthetics has enjoyed a dubious status within the civic realm as well as among more rarefied circles of academia. Aesthetics in general have not enjoyed the intellectual prestige accorded to, say, linguistic philosophy or political history, which have traditionally been thought to grapple with more serious and substantive issues. Even when not tarnished with the popular notion of aestheticism as betokening a Wildean hedonism, the field has frequently been reductively compartmentalized in relation to a self-indulgent subjectivism, where issues of intellectual rigor simply become moot: de gustibus non est disputandum. The most influential theorist of aesthetics in the modern era was Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgement (1790) aspired heroically to expand the "merely subjective principle" (210) of "empirical intuition" (211) into a wider "faculty of aesthetic ideas" (212), with the German philosopher seeking thereby to remap a subjective principle of the beautiful as "universal, i.e. valid for every man" (225) and to valorize aesthetic taste as a broader foundation for what he called "the development of moral ideas and the culture of moral feeling" (227). Kant argued that "only when sensibility is brought into harmony with moral feeling can genuine taste assume a definite unchangeable form" (227), and he attempted to bring aesthetics and ethics into a symbiotic equation. As David Aram Kaiser has observed, this romantic attempt intellectually to integrate the realm of private aesthetics with the public sphere significantly influenced the nineteenth-century concept of the liberal state, within which "the variously formulated attempts of Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and John Ruskin" sought "to reconcile the opposing models of culture and the nation state through the mediation of the aesthetic sphere" (3). Although Schiller, Coleridge, Arnold and Ruskin all had different conceptions of what Kaiser calls "aesthetic statism" (ibid.), they were all seeking in their various ways to bridge subjectivity with a common culture.

It would be easy enough to dismiss such claims for "aesthetic statism" as akin to John Dryden's nostalgia for the classical unities in drama, a theoretical superstructure hopelessly inadequate to the discursive irregularities of a different time, and indeed one of the occupational hazards of any abstract aesthetic formulation is that it quickly becomes dated, if not redundant. Nevertheless, the idea of literature's representative function, with aesthetics bearing a symbolic function within an institutional framework, became an important aspect of debates about multiculturalism in the United States all through the twentieth century; indeed, William Dean Howells's comparison in 1902 of aesthetic judgement to voting could be seen as a precursor of the culture wars of the 1990s, when pressure to include works by various minority groups on university curricula was charged with a similarly democratic impulse.¹ This in turn led to predictable reactions from cultural conservatives, as for example in Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters's contrast in 2005 between, on the one hand, the attempts of contemporary critical theorists to reduce "literature to ideas" (6) and, on the other, the values of "free aesthetic response" (7) that he equated with "the norms of healthy literary criticism as it has been practiced from Aristotle to Helen Vendler" (6). Such a naive projection of "free" art back from Harvard through two thousand years of cultural history, as though formalist autonomy could ever be construed as a universalist value, testifies to the idealist legacy of New Criticism, which in similar terms fondly imagined itself exempt from ideological conditioning.² We also see inflections of New Criticism in the work of University of Notre Dame professor Mark William Roche, whose book Why Literature Matters in the 21^st Century cites with approbation as "one of the great insights of American New Criticism" Cleanth Brooks's phrase in The Well-Wrought Urn about "the heresy of paraphrase" (97). Roche consequently argues that literature's ultimate value lies in its eschewal of the instrumental condition of contemporary technology and capacity instead to project a world of grace and wholeness, an art that "makes visible those parts of reality that are otherwise veiled...