Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

Remarkable Oversights, or Could We Actually Make Politics Easier to Talk About?

“Art” is the zombie here.1 Not because it keeps moving along as a vestigial automatism long past its relevance, but because it eats the brains of some very smart people. I’m joking, of course. But it seems like this conversation, perhaps by its very nature, ends up less than the sum of its formidable parts. What interests me, mainly, is the evacuation of the political from this conversation—which I take as a diagnostic for much current (academic) discourse on art. The invitation to write this Assessment included the statement that one of the goals of the volume is to make it more difficult to write about aesthetics, politics, and art. Frankly, I don’t want to make it more difficult to write about art and politics; I want to make it easier. I want us to have more vocabulary, more tools. For politics, I might mention occupation, privatization, precarity, extraordinary rendition, anti-globalization movement, Afghanistan, war without end, national security state, carceral democracy, neoliberalism, neoconservatism , racism. These are conditions of our political context. I wonder: did politics emerge in the interstices of the seminar—over drinks at the bar, in knowing looks, in a quick chat between sessions? Foster frequently invoked the situation of the Reagan years as the backdrop to the inflated rhetoric of The Anti-Aesthetic. “The situation,” he says, “was polemical” (seminar 1). Why is the situation not polemical now?2 The stakes of politics are higher than ever; the stakes of art seem impoverished in comparison. Given this situation, might we imagine that art could actually be nourished by politics more than it’s diminished by it? But when politics irrupted into the conversation it kept sliding quickly into something else; it got no traction. Or it produced severe misunderstandings. In a strange moment at the end of the last seminar—the meeting for all the things that hadn’t been discussed in all the others—Stéphanie Benzaquen suggests that the seminar might have discussed the “social and economic conditions of theories of art” (seminar 9). Hal Foster misunderstands Benzaquen’s reference to precarity—she’s not talking about the precarity of art practices “that want to map social and economic conditions.” There might be such practices; but she’s talking about art workers who are precarious—economically precarious. Somehow this is an intervention that simply can’t be heard in the moment. Foster suggests relational aesthetics as remarkable oversights, or could we actually make politics easier to talk about? rebecca zorach 1. On zombies see also Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 779–805. 2. Is it an effect of the evacuation of the political that the Craig Owens essay discussed was not the one actually collected in The AntiAesthetic —“The Discourse of Others”—which redressed some of the political oversights of the otherwise quite brilliant essay “The Allegorical Impulse”? Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 176 3. I was surprised not to see reference to Eve Sedgwick’s work on affect, particularly in the context of structuralism, given, especially, her work on Silvan Tomkins (originator in the early 1960s of the term “affect theory”) coauthored with Adam Frank. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (1995): 496–522. The essay is an effort to move beyond the structuralist and the poststructuralist (thus a prefiguration of this Art Seminar’s problematic) by taking a look back to a moment before structuralism took hold, arguing that “some momentum of modernity (call it monotheism? call it the Reformation? call it capitalist rationalization?) has so evacuated the conceptual space between two and infinity that it may require the inertial friction of a biologism to even suggest the possibility of reinhabiting that space” (512). The word “aesthetic,” of course, comes etymologically from a verb meaning “to feel”; so “affect” in relation to art is hardly a new thing. Emotion has been a key element of the response to art for innumerable writers (one can cite Visscher, Worringer, Dewey, Warburg, and others at the beginnings of modern writing on art). the (apparently superior) obverse: what relational aesthetics actually expresses, by creating privileged spaces for certain kinds of human interaction, is not the authenticity of those interactions but rather how very fragmented our social world is that we should need to find such solace in art. The implication, I think, is...