Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture (review)

In a terrific essay entitled "Somatic Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction," Richard Shusterman discusses John Dewey as the figure most responsible for freeing philosophy from its search for foundations. ¹ Such freedom is important, according to Shusterman, as it allows philosophy to be put to other, perhaps more urgent, tasks like resolving social and cultural problems. Because these social and cultural problems are themselves the result of such old-fashioned philosophical views, they have become hardened, in need of loosening up before such an attempt at resolution can even begin. Thus philosophy has the double task of undoing the problems it itself previously created and of recasting them in a different light so that they can then be resolved. In this view, doing philosophy is always doing at least two things at once.

Shusterman's latest work, whose apt title Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture enacts precisely this double work, does philosophy in such a Deweyan fashion. In general terms, the book seeks to understand the problems of appreciating "art's surface meanings and qualities without understanding the cultural contexts and underlying practices that structure their creation and perception" (xi); it also exposes the danger that exploring the depth of those cultural contexts can distract us from those surface qualities that often attract us to artworks in the first place. Does understanding the depth of cultural contexts threaten us away from those sensuous surface qualities that may have attracted us to a work of art in the first place? Does surface pleasure need to be opposed to depth of understanding? Does it even make sense to understand these issues in such opposite terms? Shusterman's provocative last chapter, titled "Art as Dramatization," provides a challenging new definition of art as dramatization that integrates and reconciles the implications of some of these polarities—like the "naturalism" versus "historicism" rift—that have long dominated discussions of aesthetics.

But the book does more than that. While it purports to examine this relationship between "sensuous surface and explanatory depth" (xi) in the field of aesthetics, Surface and Depth also explores in detail a number of issues—as well as a number of thinkers—in continental and analytic philosophy from an experiential-pragmatist angle. Some of these topics include "analytic aesthetics," "interpretation," "the logic of critical reasoning," "the issue of taste," "the relationship between nature and culture," "convention," and "the aesthetic visibility of print"; some of the philosophers include Croce, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Alain Locke, Margolis, Rorty, Adorno, and Danto, to mention but a few. What ties these themes and these theorists together is their contribution to the dialectic of surface and depth, which is itself the unifying theme of the book. But where Shusterman's enterprise departs from business as usual—from discussing topics or theorists from some sort of perspective, no matter how interesting—is primarily in his metadiscourse, in his self-conscious concern to reflect anew on the status of philosophy and on the uses to which it is often unwittingly put. I find this aspect of Shusterman's work to be its greatest strength. His is not the currently fashionable literary view of pragmatism that urges scholars to a new line of action—often before they are even concerned about instrumentalities. In Shusterman's discourse, instrumentalities are always parts of the ends they create. His pragmatism is therefore best described as reconstructive, advancing and refashioning the experiential realm. I will focus here on how such important methodological reflection and reconstruction take place.

The word "reflection" is of course often associated with Kantian philosophy. In critical theory, reflection serves as the philosophical background for various versions of literary formalism. Shusterman, however, goes beyond these narrow views. He is clearly not the disinterested Kantian whose views are unfettered from social and human constraints...