The "Imaginary" and Its Enemies

I. The Aesthetic and the Illusionary

Throughout our many years as dear friends I have found that Wolfgang Iser and I have been not only close colleagues in a university and a department, but, far more importantly, close colleagues in being dedicated to justifying a continuing major role to be played in culture by the aesthetic, even in a theoretical season that has grown increasingly hostile to it. Iser's and my theories may have emerged from different sources, but they have met in what I hope is a mutual reinforcement in their attempt to support that major role. I am especially grateful for Iser's recent work, which has developed a profound and lasting anthropological justification for the aesthetic. ¹ In what follows I try to add my own minor version of a late defense in the face of an inhospitable environment.

It has become almost routine in recent theoretical fashions to reject the aesthetic as a special category that would justify what we used to call art. My aim is and has been to reassert and then maintain the role and the significance of the aesthetic against these attempts to repudiate it as a deceptive diversion, as a mystification that masks its submissive service to political powers. In this part of my essay and in the second part that follows I will be arguing, first, for the restoration of the aesthetic in its own right as an indispensable and irreducible form of human activity at its best, and second, against the reduction of the aesthetic to the political. ² In what follows, then, I will begin by setting forth my notion of the Western aesthetic construct, its history and the complexities in the ways it functions. With this exposition I hope to have cleared the way for the sequel, which will deal with the politics of struggle between the aesthetic and its enemies in the history of literary theory and commentary, a struggle that leads to the crisis in which literary studies find themselves today because of the widespread dismissal of the aesthetic as a legitimate category.

The aesthetic in literature begins its career in the West with its attachment to doctrines of form, and, as is traditionally argued, we must go back to the Poetics of Aristotle for the earliest and perhaps still the most influential doctrine of form. In the Poetics the doctrine of form arises from the study of drama, and, within drama, of tragedy. I will come later in this essay to look at the history of dramatic theory as that history impinges on more general literary theory. But first I want to review the history of a more general doctrine of poetic form.

As one of his main objectives Aristotle wants to supplant Plato's anti-aesthetic complaints against poetic imitation, based as they were on the representation of individual external objects (persons and things), so that for Plato's attack there was no unified art work, no aesthetic form, but only an assembly of imitations of objects, which are to be compared to their external counterparts, one by one. Plato's splintering of the poem into individually represented objects may account for the strength of Aristotle's commitment to the integral, unified art object, which was to convert all the assembled items being imitated into an indivisible whole. For Aristotle each entity in the work is part of a teleological structure to be realized in the "final cause," the effect of the work's ultimate self-realization. Though I could cite many passages throughout the Poetics, a very few quotations must suffice here. In them Aristotle makes clear his principle of closed structure that would serve a totalizing functionalism, which since the nineteenth century we have called organic theory.

The first of these passages reveals Aristotle charging poetry to convert history's chronological sequence to the logic of poetic form, to convert every before-and-after to cause-and-effect: a poetic whole "is that which has a...