Saving Disinterest: Aesthetics, Contingency, and Mixed Conditions

We are, I hope, a long way from that moment in which the argument that everything is political was taken to be a new and important idea, and even further from the point at which it was taken to be a subversive and "progressive" one. Satya Mohanty's essay valuably participates in what I like to think of as the new sanity, the developing recognition in the world of cultural and literary theory that a lot of babies went out with the bathwater, when along with "universality" and "essentialism" and "reality" itself, both "disinterest" and "objectivity" were being demystified, and virtually every book (almost universally) seemed to begin with an apology, the author expressing awareness that he or she too was trapped in the universalism that was about to be demystified, in the "interests" that were about to be exposed, in the hidden, inescapable, retrograde metaphysics of language that was about to be deconstructed (in language), . . . but what the hell. We were all, I sometimes think, ill with what I once heard Marshall Sahlins call "epistemological hypochondria."

Mohanty's essay is particularly valuable because the most important cultural project for intellectuals at this moment is to recover from the excesses of recent cultural critiques. The problems developed from a frequently sloppy thinking out of a theory of co-optation, which was allied to a passion for constructivist, nominalist, relativist, ideologized thought (all in the name of social justice), so that intellectually indispensable elements for any reasonable debate have been mistakenly understood as inevitably hostile to "progressive" ideals and the result not of serious (dare I say, "disinterested"?) intellectual inquiry but of disguised ideological purposes. I agree entirely with Oscar Kenshur, who rejects this sloppy thinking as "ideological essentialism." ¹ The categories that cultural theory rejected because of their ideologically retrograde implications--I will point for the moment only to those grand old canards become by now almost embarrassing to invoke, like "truth," "reality," "disinterest," "objectivity," "universality"--have no intrinsic political valence, neither progressive nor antiprogressive. Such categories may be problematic, and they may indeed, in any local conflict, be deployed for one ideological purpose or another, but the assumption that their political valence is intrinsic is one of the large mistakes of the dominant critical theory to which Mohanty's essay is a partial response.

Among the victims of ideological essentialism, I believe, is the aesthetic, with the most serious consequences not only for art itself, but for the self-conception of those who work in the humanities, and for the practice of art and literary criticism. Isobel Armstrong, in a recent book, undertakes a rethinking of the "aesthetic," which, she claims, "has been steadily emptied of content." "Such rethinking," she argues, "has become an intellectual necessity because the politics of the anti-aesthetic rely on deconstructive gestures of exposure that fail to address the democratic and radical potential of aesthetic discourse." ² Like Mohanty, then, Armstrong is committed to a political project, recognizes that left criticism has mistaken the aesthetic for a right-wing construction, and attempts to reappropriate the aesthetic for the left. Terry Eagleton, about a decade ago, also affirmed the democratic potential of the aesthetic, only to show that it had become a retrograde category, a tool for affirmation of bourgeois subjectivity and bourgeois ideology. ³ Mohanty, in this tradition, risks the claim, with which I entirely agree, that it is an unfortunate historically contingent fact that the aesthetic "has almost always existed by virtue of oppressive and unjust systems in which only a few can enjoy and practice what we might call aesthetic 'goods.'" Presumably he would agree with Eagleton, who is hard on those who have joined in the obliteration of the "aesthetic" as an important category, and claims--as an avowed Marxist--that "It is left moralism, not historical materialism, which having established the bourgeois provenance of a particular concept, practice or institution, then disowns it in an access of ideological purity" (8).

It...