Aesthetics at the Limits of the Nation: Kant, Pound, and the Saturday Review

How powerful is the nation as a taxonomic (rather than jurisdictional) unit? Who gets to classify, who gets to name the phenomena of the world? Do human beings naturally congregate as sovereign states, or can we imagine a different ordering of humanity, something like Bruce Ackerman's "world constitutionalism" or Jürgen Habermas's "postnational constellation"?¹ Habermas thinks that this new associative form will replace the conventional nation-state:

[The] conventional model is less and less appropriate to the current situation. While the state's sovereignty and monopoly on violence remain formally intact, the growing interdependencies of a world society challenge the basic premise that national politics, circumscribed within a determinate national territory, is still adequate to address the actual fates of individual nation-states.²

Habermas made this prediction, of course, before the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003. As Etienne Balibar shows, that war has actually inverted Habermas's model, highlighting not a postnational constellation but state sovereignty globally deployed.³ It is in this context—in the aftermath of a powerful nation unilaterally imposing its terms on the world—that taxonomy becomes not entirely academic. What concepts do we have that might challenge this unilateral naming? What concepts might help strengthen the claims of a "global civil society,"⁴ currently trivialized and in danger of being emptied out?

In what follows, I propose a term that so far has not been examined in conjunction with this global civil society, although historically it has played an important part, namely, the aesthetic.⁵ Terry Eagleton, not exactly a fond champion, pointed out some years ago that while the category of the aesthetic takes its cue from bourgeois hegemony, it nonetheless "provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to . . . dominant ideological forms," for its "contradictory" energies are such as to keep alive a "residually common world."⁶ That residually common world can be reclaimed. It can be recharged, reactivated, and realigned, I argue, to serve as a rallying point against the unilateralism of nations. For the long backward extension of the aesthetic invokes a map that predates the nation-state, one that allows for multilateral ties, more complex and far-flung than those dictated by territorial jurisdictions. The aesthetic, in this way, gestures toward a paradigm of the humanities as a species-wide discipline, planetary in its archives, and planetary in its operating networks.

I am not the first to see the aesthetic in this light. Immanuel Kant, in Critique of Judgment and in his political writings, especially Perpetual Peace, has already done much to lay the groundwork for such a claim. Kant sees the aesthetic as a species-wide category of experience, emanating from the human perceiver rather than the perceived object. What interests him is not the ontological status of the thing we judge to be beautiful but the mental operation that enables us to make that judgment.⁷ This mental operation is the pivot of humanity. According to Kant, it is the clearest evidence we have of a noncontradictory relation between the subjective and the universal. Because beauty is a quality each of us determines, it affirms our freedom as separate judges. This freedom, however, is held in check by one constraint: universal assent. Judgments about beauty must be acceptable to everyone else, a constraint that marks the projected scope as well as the limiting condition for subjective opinion. The aesthetic is both local and global in this sense, both particular in its judgment and generalizable in its ground for judgment. Through this duality, the species is able to individuate each of its members even as it affirms its integrative common ground. A manifold oneness both connects us and makes each of us singular. This is why we count as a species, a taxonomic order encompassing every human being on earth.

Of course, for Kant, this claim on behalf of the aesthetic...