Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 13:49:49 +1000
Subject: BHA: aesthetics


Towards an Ontological Aesthetics


If aesthetics wants to rise above empty chatter, it must expose itself,
stepping out into the open where there is no place to hide.
(Adorno)


1. Introduction

This is intended to be the first of three posts on aesthetics.  Post one
takes up primarily the significance of absence for what I call an
ontological aesthetics.  It argues that absence is crucial to a Critical
Realist aesthetics and that moreover absence is not reducible to Bloch's
notion of the not-yet- conscious.

The second post will be a reworking of an earlier attempt to use absence as
a critical tool.  The third posting will address the question of fictional
truth and will specifically attempt to integrate Adorno's notion of truth
content within Bhaskar's concept of alethia. It is of course not Bloch but
Adorno that presents the greatest challenge to a Critical Realist
aesthetics.  Although I cannot hope to cover all the issues involved here,
at this stage I believe that the comparison between 'truth content' and
'alethia' will prove illuminating.


2. Aesthetics on the Bhaskar list

Though the Philistines may jostle
You will rank as an apostle
In the high aesthetic band
If you walk down Piccadilly
With a poppy or a lily
In your medieval hand.
(Gilbert)

For some time on this list we have noted that there is a missing aesthetic
component within Critical Realism.  In an initial foray into the area I
suggested that the concept of absence may be a fruitful one to explore in
the development of a Critical Realist aesthetics.  I then used the concept
of absence to analyse poems by Sylvia Plath and John Clare.  This provoked
a thread which unfortunately ended in something of a personal crisis for a
list member.  We left aesthetic matters alone for a while after and then I
posted a review of The Full Monty.  That with interesting remarks from
Timothy on Ernst Bloch and Howard E on the application of the 1E to 4D
model and an often hilarious thread, sparked off by Tobin, on an Ogden Nash
poem is about where we got to last year.

When the list was going through an anti-Bhaskar spasm there were also
remarks by Hans D. and R. Dumain about the non-treatment of aesthetics
within Critical Realism. I have to say that at the time I was provoked into
thought by a characteristic Ralph Dumain post which was in itself partly a
reply to a query from Tobin about how absence could be applied in cultural
analysis.  Dumain deserves to be quoted in some detail here.  He wrote


"It would seem that the use here of Bhaskar's notion of "absence" is quite
similar to Bloch's notion of the "not-yet",  what perturbs me, however is
not only the seeming lack of originality of Bhaskar's "absence", but the
lack of articulation to aesthetics.  As I stated in my last post, a
free-floating concern with "absence" doesn't say all that much in itself
nor does it lead in and of itself to any profound analysis ... So I ask
again: what else does Bhaskar have to offer aesthetics but a vague notion
of "absence", which hardly seems to be either profound or original in
comparison with others dealing with comparable concepts." (Dumain, Internet
posting, Bhaskar List, 11.16.97)

My first reaction was that Dumain was correct but that he was demolishing a
straw person for at that stage all we had done was to contemplate the
usefulness of employing absence as a critical tool.  However I have had
time to reflect on this over the Xmas break and I think we should be much
less tentative about what we have achieved so far.  

I would like to suggest that our original intuition about absence is indeed
correct and that this is where a Critical Realist aesthetics should in fact
begin.  I offer that primarily because a critical realist aesthetics would
I think be an ontological aesthetics and since the advent of _Dialectic:
The Pulse of Freedom_ absence is at the heart of the CR research program.
(Q.E.D.!)

Of course much more work needs to be done on this but I would like in this
post to discuss some of what I feel may be important elements of an
ontological aesthetics. A further acknowledgment is in order.  A Ralph
Dumain remark about Taoism and absence set me thinking and searching back
through long neglected books in my library and also pointed me in the
direction of non-Western aesthetics.  For that I am grateful.


3. Towards an overview of aesthetics

"It's all a muddle."
(Dickens)

Bohdan Dziemidok provides us with a useful summation of the state of
aesthetics as an intellectual discipline. His conclusions are if anything
very pessimistic about the possibility for the development of aesthetics.
(in Outhwaite & Bottomore (eds), 1993: 4-8) He calls vaguely for change
though he does state that it is premature to talk of the death of
aesthetics.  For him the raison d'etre of aesthetics remains the existence
of "strictly philosophical (axiological, methodological, cognitive,
ontological) problems of art and of aesthetic phenomena".(: 8) 

Dziemidok begins by distinguishing four strands of aesthetics :- 1. a
philosophy of aesthetic phenomena, 2. a philosophy of art, 3. a philosophy
of art criticism or 4. all of the above.  
It is the conflicting and dynamic nature of the relationship between these
different strands that is at least partially responsible for the
difficulties within aesthetics.  Most obviously the question is where to
place the emphasis. Thus for Adorno the history of  aesthetics can be
understood as a shift from aesthetics as the philosophy of beauty (Kant) to
aesthetics as the philosophy of art with the emphasis on "the constitutive
relationship between art and freedom (Schiller, Hegel)" (Jameson, 1990: 219)

Furthermore where is one to place Bhaskar in this schema?  His remarks on
aesthetics take up merely a single paragraph of _Plato Etc_ (:155-6).
Significantly the chapter in which he deals with aesthetics is entitled
"Living Well".  There he distinguishes between (a) ideologies of the
aesthetic, (b) aesthetic experience, and both from (c) the theory of art,
and (d) art criticism. 

It is I think the emphasis on ideologies which gives us a clue how to
proceed.  Moreover although his treatment of the subject is very brief he
does stress that 

	the ideology of the aesthetic, understood as a discourse/normative power2
social intersect and/or that embodying categorial error plays a special
role in the discursive argument of this book. (:155)

For Bhaskar then aesthetic experience is offered to us as "dummy
resolutions" for the problems generated by a society which is marked by
power2 relations of exploitation and domination.  This conflicts with the
genuine element within aesthetic experience which is the moment of desire,
hope, and utopian striving.  The aesthetic keeps alive the notion of a
better world.   However I think it is fair to say that for Critical Realism
aesthetics is only a part of the wider emancipatory project.  This marks it
out from Adorno and the neo-Adornoians, such as Jay Bernstein, for whom 

"he discourse of aesthetics is a proto-political discourse  standing in for
and marking the absence of a truly political domain in modern, enlightened
societies." (Bernstein, 1992: 3

4.  Art Theory and Art Criticism in an Ontological Aesthetics

"Something's missing". 
(Brecht)

About art theory and art criticism Bhaskar has nothing to say other than to
make the distinction between them. However I believe that it would be
consistent with his remarks in Plato Etc to say that he would regard art as
absenting absences, as an ongoing manifestation of that elemental desire
which implies the good society. (:161)  

Similarly in art criticism a consistent criterion would be the extent to
which the art work lives up to the promise of aesthetic experience, in
other words to what extent it *authentically* contributes to our feeling
good and living well.  The stress on authenticity is necessary of course to
distinguish the true from the ideological in art.

Put like this there does not seem to be much about the use of absence in
ontological aesthetics which sets it apart from Bloch's utopian notion of
the 'not-yet conscious'. However if we take the concept of absence in its
*full polysemic* intent we have I think something of an outline of a
distinctly different emphasis in art theory. 

I would like to repeat here that I do not believe that Bhaskar's concept of
absence is reducible to Bloch's "not-yet conscious" or "forward dawning".
Specifically as we will see  Bhaskar's absence is not tied to utopian
notions of aesthetic plenitude. Moreover it seems to me that, unlike
Bloch's "not-yet-conscious", absence is neutral with regard to hope; nor
does it promise anything.  I should add though that Bhaskar himself would
appear to be drawn towards Bloch's vision.

5. The case of Yvonne Rainer

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all
noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I
add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?
(Nietzsche)


At this juncture I would like to use the choreographer Yvonne Rainer's
"manifesto of renunciation" as a possible demonstration of the relevance of
the concept of absence for art theory.   In the 60s and 70s Rainer produced
a number of works which with some discrepancies followed the dictates of
her doctrine of "no to spectacle, no to virtuosity, no to...magic and
make-believe...no to moving or being moved". (in Anne Daly, 1992: 65)  

5 A. This is of course a complicated instance but I would like to
concentrate on three lines of thought suggested by Rainer's work.  Firstly
Rainer's choreography would appear to be marked by absence rather than
presence.  There is in a sense here a positive evaluation of negation or
absence which it seems to me is not based around anything like a Blochian
longing for the "not-yet".  Rather absence here is valued for itself as the
"not at all". This has almost uncanny echoes in non-Western aesthetics
where one can even encounter an outright hostility towards aesthetic
plenitude as in Lao Tzu's condemnation of art :-

The five colours blind the eyes of man;
The five musical notes deafen the ears of man;
The five flavours dull the taste of man... (in Lin Yutang, 1948: 90)

In a way this is hardly surprising coming from a philosophy which preached
the following:-

Thirty spokes unite around the nave;
>From their not-being
Arises the utility of the wheel.
Mold clay into a vessel;
>From its not-being
Arises the utility of the vessel.
Cut out doors and windows in the house
>From their not-being arises the utility of the house.
Therefore by the existence of things we profit.
And by the non-existence of things we are served.
(Lao Tzu in Lin Yutang, 1948: 87)

The Taoist 'Not-being' and also, potentially at least, Bhaskar's 'absence'
have intriguing affinities with the Japanese concept of "mu" or
Nothingness. 'Mu' is the "undetermined whole, the non-articulated Reality
which lies beyond human existential reality". (Toshiko & Toyo, 1981 :31)
Aesthetically Nothingness is given a higher value than being.
Indeed Nothingness is seen as "something pure and immaculate, as the
supreme Beauty in a state 'prior to its being smeared with "being"'. (:32)

What is being suggested by Rainer's manifesto of renunciation is that her
art is functioning not as the moment of desire or of the utopian longing to
absent absences.  Rather it contains traces of art not as consolation but
art as embracing absence for its own sake.  It is as if the artist takes
hold of the "terrible wisdom of Silenus" 

"Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you
force me to say what it would be more fruitful for you not to hear?  The
best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be
born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you - is to
die soon." (Nietzsche, 1993: 22)

There are two very tentative conclusions which I would like to draw from
what is admittedly a brief and inadequate excursus into non-western
aesthetics.  Firstly that Bhaskar's notion of aesthetics as  a "practical"
component of "Living Well" is overly reductive. Secondly absence, and this
is allied to the first conclusion, cannot simply be read in the Blochian
sense of the 'not-yet conscious" nor even in terms of a dialectic of the
actual and the possible.  Absence contains the utopian moment of the
prefiguration of the eudaimonistic society but it also contains simply
absence expressed in the desire for non-existence.  

5 B. The second line of inquiry that I would like to pursue is based on a
realisation that the absenting of spectacle etc in Rainer's work was
specifically inspired by her theories about dance.  I believe that in this
we have another reenactment of the ancient antagonism between philosophy
and art.  One recalls Plato's exclusion of the poets from the republic.

"So we shall be justified in not admitting him (the poet) into a
well-ordered commonwealth, because he stimulates and strengthens an element
which threatens to undermine the reason." (in Cornford, 1971: 137)


It is significant that Rainer herself acknowledges "discrepancies" between
her theoretical ideas and her actual artistic practice. (in Daly, 1992: 64)
In other words there was a tension between Rainer as a philosopher and
Rainer as an artist.  


The case of Plato is perhaps the more famous yet it may be that from the
perspective of DCR the Taoist instance with its emphasis on the "utility of
not-being", i.e. the importance of absence, is the more interesting.   
 
The hostility between art and philosophy has of course not been all one
way. As David Daiches points out Blake in his Song of Los, "fiercely
attacked the whole tradition of Western thought since the seventeenth
century" :-

Thus the terrible race of Los & Enitharmon gave
Laws and Religions to the sons of Har, binding them more
And more to Earth, closing and restraining,
Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete.
Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke.
(in Daiches, 1984: 113) 

A similar hostility to philosophy and science was displayed by Keats:-

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings... (in Daiches, 19884: 114)

This hostility of the aesthetic towards the scientific has not weakened in
contemporary times.  Thus Andrew Bowie in his defence of the relevance of
art in today's world speaks bitterly of the dominance of a 

...scientism and ... (a) resultant metaphysics which now assumes everything
about our access to the world is either ultimately digitally encodeable or
describable in the reductionist terms of contemporary physicalism. (Bowie,
1997: 125)

It should I believe be part of the task of an ontological aesthetics to
bridge this divide between science, philosophy and art. The first step
should be the rejection of the reduction of science to philosophy as in the
speculative illusion or the reduction of philosophy to science as in the
positivist illusion. Philosophy is then set free to underlabour both for
science and for an art theory and an art criticism. 

There also needs to be a recognition of the limits of science.  There is
more than a hint of this in Bhaskar's attacks on cognitive triumphalism and
his ackowledgement that science is not "a supreme or overriding
value".(Bhaskar, 1993: 15)   Consider also the speculation by Bhaskar, in
his note on intuitive realism, of the possible necessity of the dream of
reenchantment, a return to "a world in which man is at home and one with
nature". (Bhaskar, 1986: 97)

Interesting and important as these examples are it is above all the
anti-positivist and depth nature of Critical Realist's ontology which
guarantees that it will not clip the angel's wings. It is also worth noting
here that Bloch in his discussion of the explication stage of the
production of the "not-yet-conscious" argues that 

It is not yet necessary at this point to distinguish between artistic and
scientific genius...Forming of the previously not yet formed, this
criterion for works of genius, is the same in art (the figurative depiction
of a real preappearance) and in science (the conceptual depiction of the
tendency-latency-structure of the real). (Bloch, 1986: 126)

5 C. However Rainer's minimalist manifesto of renunciation has a further
resonance for a theory of art which should be addressed. In her rejection
of spectacle etc we can recognise a reenactment of the tension between the
avant-garde artist and what the Frankfurt School called the Culture
Industry.  In the case of  Rainer the artist is striving to produce
authentic or autonomous art through the ascetic absenting of aesthetic
pleasure or enjoyment.  

This strategy is a typical one of the modernist artist and is surely tied
up with what Adorno terms the "guilt of art" i.e. that art is possible in a
world of suffering. 

By absenting beauty the artist is not only attempting to refuse the status
quo but is also acknowledging that art's promesse de bonheur" is as Adorno
puts it a "broken promise". The problem remains however that, despite the
heroic stance of the artist, that within the totality of capitalist
commodity relations the ascetic gesture can itself become a commodity.
Even the strategy of the absolute absenting of aesthetic beauty can be
marketed, as the 'brilliant career' of Damien Hirst with his sliced cows
and pigs testifies.

Again it barely suffices to say that this is an extremely complex
situation.  It is marked moreover by a number of key dialectical figures
which incidentally I do not believe Adorno's dialectics covers adequately.
The Bhaskarian figure of the duplicitous pairing is much more fruitful than
simple dialectical contradiction. Thus we have the avant-garde artist and
the Philistine, seemingly locked into a life and death struggle but in
reality supplying each other with a raison d'etre.  

Then too there is the philosopher-mandarin who because of the fundamental
absence of a political praxis is driven towards the fetishisation of the
autonomous art object. (Adorno, 1984:)  This is meant to be the site of
truth, but when that too is subsumed within commodity relations the
philosopher is left no option but to theorise the death or decline of art.
(Bowie, 1997: 114)  The corollary to this is that aesthetics then becomes a
"necrologue of art". (Adorno, 1984: 5)

Stress on the necessity of the autonomy of art leads, I believe, to
detotalisation at 3E and ultimately at 4D to a declaration of the
impossibility or near impossibility of agency.  The alternative that an
ontological aesthetics offers is not only a recognition that the aesthetic
is increasingly "commercialised and bourgeoisified in consumer
capitalist/postmodernist society" but also an insistence on both the
necessity and the possibility of the "counter-hegemonic struggle and the
totalising depth praxis that dialectical rationality demands." (Bhaskar,
1994: 156)






References

Adorno, T., Aesthetic Theory,RKP: London, 1984
Bernstein, J. M., The Fate of art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to
Derrida and Adorno, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania Uni Press, 1992
Bhaskar, R., Scientific Realism & Human Emancipation, Verso: London, 1986
___________, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, Verso: London, 1993 
___________, Plato Etc: The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution,
London: Verso, 1994
Bloch, E., The Principle of Hope, Blackwell: Oxford, 1986
Bowie, A., Confessions of a "New Aesthete": A response to the 'New
Philistines', NLR No 225, Sept/Oct 1997: 105-127
Daiches, D., God  and the Poets: The Gifford Lectures, 1983, Clarendon
Press: Oxford, 1984 
Daly,A., Is it Post-Postmodern?, TDR V36, No1. (T133) Spring 1992: 64-67
Dziemidok, B., Aesthetics, in Outhwaite, W. & Bottomore, T. (eds) The
Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-century Thought, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993
Eagleton, T., The Significance of Theory, Blackwell: Oxford, 1990
Jameson, : Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic,
London: Verso, 1990
Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of Laotse, Random House: New York, 1948
Nietzsche, F., The Birth Of Tragedy, Harmondsworth, 1993 
Toshihiko & Toyo Izutsu, The theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics
of Japan, Martinus Nijhoff: Boston, 1981
Zuidervaart, L. Adorno"s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991




     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---