As A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism (review)

Over the last several decades of the twentieth century bitter infighting across a variety of academic disciplines has been a recurrent feature of the discussion surrounding the value of modernist aesthetics versus forms of postmodernist inspired anti-aesthetics. Despite the apparent vanquishing of formalism and of concerns with aesthetic value in recent years, nagging anxieties have remained concerning the role of the aesthetic in contemporary life. In one high profile recent demonstration of these tensions, the co-authors of a new book, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, art since 1900: modernism, antimodernism, postmodernism: Volume 2, 1945 to the present, are engaged in a roundtable exchange between the four authors entitled "The Predicament of Modern Art." Well into the dialogue the discussion abruptly shifts as Krauss bemoans the "dismemberment" of the concept of the medium under the aegis of postmodernism. "Now it's commonplace," argues Krauss, "among artists and critics alike: it's understood as a given. And if I as a critic have any responsibility now, it is to dissociate myself from this attack on the medium, and to speak for its importance, which is to say for a continuation of modernism."¹ Understandably, her colleagues are somewhat taken aback, and despite efforts at qualifying her understanding of the concept of medium, they cannot help but slide into assertions that such an argument runs the risk of resurrecting Clement Greenberg's modernist formalism and his ardent defense of medium specificity. Buchloh raises the specter that to embark on such a path of formalization, even in the case of critical artistic practices embodied by Brice Marden, Gerhard Richter, or Richard Serra, would border on "a conservative position that contradicts their project." Resignedly, Buchloh concludes, "And the question becomes whether preserving modernism is desirable, even if it were possible."² That such an exchange should occur in the first decade of the twenty-first century does indeed point to a predicament of culture that reopens a series of questions regarding medium, form, and the role of the aesthetic that were considered defunct only a short time ago.

The debates over the ongoing legacy of aesthetic autonomy and its implied relationship to political conservatism have tended to congeal into well-defined terms of engagement where the defenders of formalism hunker down behind eighteenth and nineteenth century constructions of the aesthetic under perpetual assault by the New Historicists. The terms "aesthetic" and "formalism" have come under withering scrutiny in the age of the New Historicists because of their implied elitism and indifference to the ethical call to embrace difference in its postmodern guise. As Jonathan Loesberg notes in his new book, the New Historicist and Cultural Studies' refusal to privilege "literature" and their fixed attention to the element of history condense into the following inelastic shape. There arises firstly a questioning of aesthetic values that connects their rise to their increasing economic value and, secondly, a questioning of the very criteria by which aesthetics was used to define the perception of artworks or of any aesthetic experience.

Loesberg is far from advocating a conservative reinstitution of either the "aesthetic" or of "form." What his book offers instead is one of the most sophisticated engagements with the legacy of "aesthetic" yet published that seeks to negotiate a complex reading of both the traditional writings on aesthetics contained in Kant and the legacy of the Enlightenment as well as the more contemporary theoretical writings of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Importantly, while the latter two names are so often associated with the theoretical arguments supporting New Historicism, Loesberg argues that their theoretical principles are not as divorced from the idea of the "aesthetic" as current debates within literary studies would indicate. Whether foregrounded, as in the work of Michel Foucault, or shoved to the background within the work of Bourdieu, the role of aesthetics in postmodern theorizing is, according to Loesberg, an inescapable aspect of the articulation of postmodernism. While...