The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, and: Modernism and Morality: Ethical Devices in European and American Fiction (review)

What are the ethics of aesthetics? This question is at the heart of both Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure and Martin Halliwell's Modernism and Morality. The former presents a moral argument for an aesthetic realm free of moral imperatives, while the latter searches for the ethical experience embedded in the aesthetic.

In The Scandal of Pleasure, Steiner develops an account of artistic experience and social responsibility by using five case studies from the "battleground of contemporary culture" (209): the Mapplethorpe obscenity trial, the antipornography movement associated with Catherine MacKinnon, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the "political correctness" controversy in higher education, and the Paul de Man scandal. The Mapplethorpe trial establishes the ideological conflicts and positions that will reappear throughout the book. A group finds a particular representation or artwork offensive for political, ethical, or religious reasons and seeks to censor it; a party of "experts," responsible for the evaluation and distribution of the offensive artwork, finds itself demoralized, alienated from the public it is intended to serve, and equipped with an enfeebled vocabulary that cannot account for the simple pleasure of aesthetic experience; and a general public watches anxiously, suspicious of the incomprehensible experts and, quite possibly as a result, of the art itself.

In each case, Steiner is unflinchingly critical of those in the role of expert for failing to elaborate an aesthetics "adequate to the times we live in" (8), but she saves her greatest contempt for all those who deny the "differentiation of speech and conduct" (142) by attempting to censor what they believe to be injurious representations. She celebrates, by contrast, what she terms a "liberal" aesthetics that emphasizes freedom of expression, the inevitable subjectivity of all interpretation, and the inherently moral value of noninstrumental aesthetic pleasure. "Experiencing the variety of meanings available in a work of art," she writes with characteristic grace, "helps make us tolerant and mentally lithe. Art is a realm of thought experiments that quicken, sharpen, and sweeten our being in the world" (8).

At the center of The Scandal of Pleasure is an urgent appeal to literary critics and other art professionals to develop a middle ground between what Steiner identifies as the extremes of modern and postmodern aesthetics: that is, between treating art as disconnected from political action and treating art as equivalent to political action, between analyzing art primarily for its elaboration of complex formal principles and analyzing art to uncover how such formal principles, and the pleasures associated with them, reproduce suspect ideologies. Against both fetishization and disenchantment, Steiner calls for a form of criticism that allows us, modestly, to "indulge in a little aesthetic bliss" (211).

Steiner's is a provocative and important book that will be of great interest to virtually anyone curious about the new critical movement coalescing around the study of beauty and the experience of pleasure in reading. Steiner is herself a pleasure to read; I wish more academic books were written with her clarity and vigor. I should note, however, that not all her assertions are equally persuasive. She compels attention with dramatic language and characterizations, but in certain moments this rhetorical force turns trenchant analysis into caricature. Her critical portrayal of thinkers associated with Catherine MacKinnon's work on pornography is a case in point. MacKinnon's important argument that the pervasive distribution and consumption of pornography can promote certain worldviews that can, in turn, have an identifiable causal effect on certain broad patterns of social behavior is hardly equivalent, as Steiner figures it, to the fatuous beliefs that eliminating sexually exploitative representations of women will eradicate all sexual exploitation of women (66), that representations exert irresistible "control&quot...