File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1996/96-11-30.184, message 21


Date: Sat, 09 Nov 1996 12:48:05 -0500
From: John Young <jya-AT-pipeline.com>
Subject: Aesthetic Ideology 1


   The New York Times Book Review, November 10, 1996, p. 18.

   An Artful Theorist: Paul de Man argues for the connections
   between art and politics, art and science.

      AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY
      By Paul de Man.
      Edited by Andrzej Warminski.
      196 pp. Minneapolis:
      University of Minnesota Press.
      Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $19.95.

   By Alan Ryan

      It is no doubt true that a lot of the dislike of recent
      literary criticism and a lot of the abuse hurled at
      university departments of literature is essentially
      political. But the feebleness of the response, and the
      shortage of enthusiastic defenders, owes a good deal to
      a widespread feeling that what we want from critics in
      the arts is the enhancement of our experience, not a
      disquisition on the transcendental conditions of its
      possibility.


   Like other famous -- or moderately famous -- figures whose
   youthful misdeeds come to light only at their death, Paul
   de Man is now almost impossible to see clearly. The lurid
   glow cast by the opportunistic anti-Semitism of the wartime
   years obscures his intellectual interests and achievements.
   For that reason, and only for that reason, the uninitiated
   reader might find a struggle with "Aesthetic Ideology"
   mildly rewarding. There can be no ulterior political
   interest. Although the central argument of this collection,
   which has been compiled by Andrzej Warminski, a professor
   of comparative literature at the University of California,
   Irvine, is precisely that there is the closest possible
   connection between esthetics and politics -- and between
   esthetics and scientific knowledge -- the essays'
   implications for, or entanglement with, everyday politics
   are minimal.

   De Man spends most of his time grappling with Kant and
   Hegel, two central figures in the philosophy of art, and
   two exceedingly ambiguous figures into the bargain. Kant's
   "Critique of Judgment" is the least discussed of his three
   "critiques" -- the analyses of reason, morality and taste
   -- and not least so because it is a work that somehow
   skirts topics in religion, politics and our understanding
   of history without quite focusing on them. Hegel's
   "Aesthetics" is much less read than his "Phenomenology" or
   his "Philosophy of Right" -- the first a wonderfully rich,
   if rambling and unstructured, sketch of a philosophical
   system that is intended to show the inner rationality of
   the entire development of human consciousness, the second
   a rather dour and middle-aged but also an illuminating and
   thought-provoking inquest into the nature of law and
   politics in the modern world.

   The trouble, so to speak, with philosophical esthetics is
   a simple one. It is always in danger of belittling the work
   of art in favor of the philosophical, or semi-
   philosophical, description of what the work of art is
   about. If it avoids that rock, it runs the equal and
   opposite risk -- that of making the work of art deeply
   irrational and mysterious, and so suggesting that esthetic
   experience is just beyond the reach of rational analysis
   altogether. In an interesting essay on Kant and Schiller,
   de Man brings out quite neatly the strain that any attempt
   to theorize about our experience of art is under -- Kant
   has difficulties making sense of the particular pleasure we
   take in art, because it will not fit into the categories of
   science and morality, while Schiller, who was a practicing
   poet and playwright, can show us what he does but cannot
   explain it. Or as de Man puts it, "So there is a total
   lack, an amazing, naive, childish lack of transcendental
   concern in Schiller, an amazing lack of philosophical
   concern."

   The final question, of course, is whether the reader,
   theatergoer, ballet watcher and lay listener to Bach and
   Beethoven, Sondheim and Springsteen is much assisted by any
   of this. On the whole, I think not. The generalizing urge
   of theory is at odds with one of the obvious purposes of
   art, which is to make us listen to this set of sounds, or
   these lines of verse, to make us attend to the particular
   characters and understand their particular fates. In this
   sense, the "resistance to theory" that de Man was concerned
   with has a rather reasonable basis.

   It is no doubt true that a lot of the dislike of recent
   literary criticism and a lot of the abuse hurled at
   university departments of literature is essentially
   political. But the feebleness of the response, and the
   shortage of enthusiastic defenders, owes a good deal to a
   widespread feeling that what we want from critics in the
   arts is the enhancement of our experience, not a
   disquisition on the transcendental conditions of its
   possibility. A modest knowledge of applied chemistry is
   useful for both cooks and consumers; an elaborate
   acquaintance with the history of the philosophy of science
   is not.

   Or to put it somewhat differently, any rational person
   would rather go to the theater with Schiller than with
   Kant.

   -----

   Alan Ryan's most recent book is "John Dewey: And the High
   Tide of American Liberalism."


   [End]



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