Inquiries into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics (review)

1 10 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW NOTES 1.In his chapter on the New Criticism, Ohmann does refer to Marxism as a "logical alternative" to the various kinds of formalism available in the post-war period (89), but without elaborating. 2.Ohmann acknowledges the influence of Lauter and Kampf in this book, and his chapter on the New Criticism first appeared in The Politics ofLiterature. AU three writers now serve on the editorial staff of The Radical Teacher, the new journal of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association. Ohmann also edits College English, the journal of The National Council of Teachers of English. 3.For another fuU-scale refutation of this assumption about Uterature, see Gerald R. GraffsPoetic Statement and Critical Dogma (1970). 4.See, for example, in addition to Ohmann, Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (1918); David Horowitz, "Billion Dollar Brains" and "Sinews of Empire," Ramparts (May and Aug., 1969); James Ridgeway, The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis (1970); J. Benet, "California's Regents: Window on the Ruling Class," Change Magazine (Feb., 1972); and David N. Smith, Who Rules the Universities ?, cited above in text. Stefan Morawski. Inquiries into the Fundamentals ofAesthetics. MIT Press, 1974. 408 pp. $25.00. (Also available from Green Mountain Editions.) While never so arcane a field as, say, prosody, aesthetics has usually been among the most insulated and ahistorical areas within the human studies. Like prosody it has had more than its share of cranks and johnny-one-note theorists. Theories of Art, that essentially contested category, pass each other in the dark night of history without ever making logical contact. Recently, though, in journals and books, there is more UveUness in the ancient discipline named after the act ofperceiving what is, perhaps because, correctly, it feels its disciplinary foundations shifting. The challenge of redefinition converges in a pincers-movement from three separate directions: 1)Perception-Theory. Morse Peckham's brilliant Man 's Rage for Chaos (1965), not weU enough known, argues that the gestalt and directive-state psychology developed in the last generation pulls down the whole edifice of observer-reader psychology which has been standing (with many repairs and outbuildings) since Longinus and Aristotle. Reader response theories of Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Stanley Fish, in Uterature, converge on the same recognitions. 2)Historicism. Recent work of Stefan Morawski, Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez, Henri Arvon, and Fredric Jameson (among others) develops a common problematic: a Marxist aesthetic investigation which, as Jameson says, opens itself to the winds of history and does not early foreclose the inquiry with a mere model of the art-work's internal structures. 3)The Understanding ofAvant-Garde Practice. Mentioning the works of John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Peter Weiss, Jean-Luc Godard, and the nouveau roman group, Morawski writes in the book under review (p. 319): the avant-garde of today has definitely eroded the fundamentals of aesthetics which had seemed so firm for many centuries. . . . Given the present situation, the best course to foUow is to accept the chance of being mistaken and, nonetheless , to try to buUd bridges between the artistic tradition, with its relevant REVIEWS 111 artistic categories, and the 'blasphemously' radical avant-garde which, with its 'antiart,' does tend toward something which ultimately will no longer be described as art (a field of specific phenomena), but rather as a mode of creation latent to aU kinds of human activity., This is one of the recurrent themes of Morawski's book, and I shaU return to it below. Enough to say, here, that as a result of such border-disputes aesthetics is re-drawing its discipUnary boundaries. Stefan Morawski held the Chair of Aesthetics at Warsaw untU 1968, when he was ousted and denounced as a revisionist. The essays in this book, most of them written between 1961-1967, lead one to speculate on why he feU from favor: they show wide knowledge of idealist aesthetics of eariier centuries, and of contemporary aesthetic thinking in Western Europe and America; they are not particularly concerned to investigate concepts of class or ideology, though they never, it is true, shy away from these analytical tools; and the chapter on socialist realism, written originally in Polish...