A Pearl's Plesaures and Perils: The Detail at the Foundation of Taste

Naomi Schor argues that the transvaluation of the detail in Roland Barthes's aesthetics coincides with its degendering (Reading 97) and asks whether the detail's current critical prominence is also accompanied by defeminization. Schor writes:

[D]oes the triumph of the detail signify a triumph of the feminine with which it has so long been linked? Or has the detail achieved its new prestige by being taken over by the masculine, triumphing at the very moment when it ceases to be associated with the feminine, or ceasing to be connoted as feminine at the very moment when it is taken up by the male-dominated cultural establishment? (Reading 6)

These are the questions I intend to take up in this paper. I will approach them from two angles. In one case, I will consider the interaction between two details in Vermeer's Mistress and Maid (c. 1665-70). The first detail is the mistress's pearl, which I believe both is connoted feminine and dispels several pejorative feminine connotations. The pearl turns out to be a better "woman" than the mistress in the course of the reading I will perform in this paper. The second detail is the spread of the mistress's left hand, which I believe ultimately remains connoted feminine in a pejorative sense, even as it also acquires novel positive feminine connotations in the course of my own reading.

The second angle from which I will approach Schor's questions considers a moment in the history of aesthetics in which an explicitly valorized, feminized aesthetic detail is enlisted in the institution of a form of attention that is doubly gendered, feminized as well as masculinized. This moment is David Hume's 1757 essay "Of the Standard of Taste." In it, Hume authorizes an aesthetic form of desire for the sensory detail and makes this desire partially definitive of the human subject's entry into culture. On the surface, Hume's text articulates the fiction of the universal subject's aesthetic address to a general public. This fantasy has by now been decisively dismantled ¹, yet it continues to inform modes of aesthetic production and exchange. In its address to the sensory detail, however, Hume's inaugurating gesture weaves that detail into a dynamic that connects the aesthetic, the passions, and the subject-in-process. As such, it is suggestive of ways in which we can reimagine the detail's aesthetic functioning and work both with and against its historical genderings.

It is no accident that Schor's analysis addresses the detail as an aesthetic category. Philosophically, the question of the gendered aesthetic detail lies at the heart of the problematic of the aesthetic as a critical category, a category of analysis and experience that, like the detail, wavers between celebration and deprecation. ² Indeed, philosophers, artists, and cultural critics often figure the aesthetic itself as a somewhat randomly proliferating, unpredictable aside. The aesthetic has been imagined to wander curiously beyond rules and principles and, in the final accounting, to come only after what truly matters in life has been taken care of or when it cannot possibly be deferred any longer—when the body fails, in jouissance, melancholy, bodily discipline, ritual, violation, or mourning. ³ In taking up Schor's questions, I hope to put into motion the conflicted philosophical status of the modern category of the aesthetic, as well as the ambivalent aesthetic status of the detail today. I begin with Hume.

The Sensory Detail as a Ground for Taste

According to Hume, beauty is a sentiment felt by a specific observer, namely, a true judge. A true judge is a competent critic possessing five qualities: delicacy of taste, good sense, freedom from prejudice, antecedent practice in observing artworks, and experience in comparing artworks with one another.

[A] true judge of the...