Preface: A "Hive of Subtlety": Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies

A talking head on the evening news in spring 2004, describing the Democratic primaries underway at the time, claimed that there was so little disagreement between candidates running for president that, at best, their differences were "aesthetic." What the commentator meant by aesthetic is unclear; probably, he simply meant superficial. In the current cultural moment in the United States, aesthetics have come to seem superficial and even suspect; even television, in its distaste for anything that smacks of the scripted (much less crafted), has taken to passing off the implausible and highly artificial as "reality" to avoid the taint of the aesthetic. And in the public and professional cultures of academia, this aversion to aesthetics has been claimed as particularly salutary, allowing criticism and interpretation to concentrate on the real political matters that demand our attention.

But let's assume that the commentator was going a little deeper. Could he have meant, literally, that difference per se is (related to the generation of the) aesthetic? Ian Hunter describes aesthetics as the dreamwork of a fractured subject, a sanctuary of illusion where coherence and symbolic unity can be imagined.¹ In an era in which subjects conceive of themselves increasingly as self-divided (between, just to take Jane Austen's list, sense and sensibility or pride and prejudice), when American citizens in particular are encouraged to fracture their self-conceptions on the hard edges of panic and plentitude, suspicion and sympathy, particularity and universalism (the novels Austen never wrote), the desire for integration, however contingent and fleeting, drives the subject into a space withdrawn from the unsatisfying and incomplete work of intimacy and democracy. There the citizen can construct, through aesthetic contemplation or activity, the psychic scrim onto which are projected fantasies of integrated and enriched personhood. Elsewhere Hunter suggests that literary hermeneutics represents a negative aesthetic activity that allows a different sort of dreamwork, namely, the spiritual exercise of self-examination, which takes the place of politics.² As Hunter cautions, "when it comes to their roles as citizens . . . it is important for literary theorists not to take their work home with them" lest they mistake the delicate operations of introspection, what Michel Foucault in a different context calls "an aesthetics of existence," for truer forms of civil engagement.³ But in an American climate where political difference is reduced to spectacle, can aesthetics be uncoupled from the citizen's withdrawal into a space of contemplation masquerading as agency, a space not of debate but of deliberation? Might not interests in spectacle, fantasy, and form be the only things left in a house that has been repeatedly ransacked by rather strict notions of realpolitik?

The talking head probably didn't mean to invest aesthetics with such power. But if he knew the history of cultural studies and its treatment of aesthetics, he might have. It's become conventional to treat aesthetics as synonymous with formalism, with "high art," and with effete (read: academic) hair-splitting detached from the hair-raisings of the real world. But let's allow a moment of speculation here. Hunter suggests that aesthetics may occasion a "becoming" in which, contemplating the divided world, the subject reinvents the self in previously unconfigured ways. Such aesthetic becomings are often unexpectedly politicized, however. Cultural studies, with its attention to the social conditions and settings that make aesthetic contemplation a privilege available to relatively few, keeps us alert to the dangers of making aesthetics inherently progressive. In a corollary and countervailing gesture, however, cultural studies, with its attention to the unpredictable nature of these social conditions and settings, keeps us alert to the parallel fallacy of discarding aesthetic process as inherently conservative. The title of this special issue captures this schismatic sensibility: at one moment, aesthetics prove resistant to the sociological nature of becoming and thus figure as the transcendent end...