From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 11:32:50 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: The Aesthetic



               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 117777

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            20-Sep-1996 11:14am EDT
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu )
 
Subject: The Aesthetic

Isn't the problem of "aesthetic absence" and "autonomy," if
not solved, at least nuanced in such a way that all but the
egregious Roger Scruton (what an odd place to be encountering
his name!) might be satisfied, if one holds to the Althusserian/
Marxist notion of "semi-autonomy"?  Moreover, such a notion
has the sanction of a certain tradition in the history of
aesthetics itself, beginning with Goethe and Schiller, for
whom the aesthetic was a particular modality of representation,
not an autonomous instance in which only the formal structure
of the artifact mattered--as a certain reading of Kant might
suggest.

As for absence, surely there is little difficulty here, at
least in the sense that one regularly understands that works
of art don't always depict directly what, in part, they are
about.  Nowhere, as I recall, does the Wajda film "Danton"
mention that it's about contemporary (c. 1982) Polish
politics, but can any moderately aware viewer not have
understood that Wajda was using the Buechner play, and the
matter of the French Revolution, to talk about the struggle
between Solidarity and the military regime?  In a strict
sense, this subject is absent from the film, and yet it is
so obviously "present" in every scene, in the main characters,
and in the overall structure of the plot, that one can hardly
avoid it.

Or, to take another obvious example, is there anyone who
thinks that Rushdie's novel "Shame" isn't, to use the
Jamesonian phrase, a "national allegory" about Pakistan
in the Bhutto period?  I'd go further:  any reading of the
text that fails to register this dimension simply cannot
adequately comprehend what the novel is about--which is not
to say that working out the relation to contemporary
history and politics exhausts the significance of the novel.

Whether these two examples might be generalized into a 
theory of aesthetic representation is another matter, not
one that I think it's fruitful to attempt to elaborate in
the short compass available here.

Michael Sprinker