File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1998/bhaskar.9804, message 42


From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gwi.net>
Subject: Re: BHA: Reply to Colin
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1998 12:31:57 +0300


Hi Colin--

>I think Michael is right in his assessement, I am thinking of aesthetic
>questions as evaluative ones. Maybe what you should be trying to do is to
>convince me otherwise.

Yes, I have to agree with you and Michael there.  But it's not precisely
that aesthetic questions are *not* evaluative: at least to speak for myself,
I tend instead to (try to) disentangle them from the analysis of the
aesthetic structure which elicits them (or at least serves as their
pretext), while allowing them to remain present.  Perhaps that's an
occupational issue, since as someone in a form of cultural studies it's
important for me to be able to get a grip on what artworks do and/or mean
and if possible, why other people have liked them, whether or not I do--and
in the case of artworks from the dominant culture, especially when I do not,
otherwise I can't gain any insight into the workings of cultural hegemony.

If tastes were truly random and arbitrary, the issue wouldn't exist; but
since they aren't, one must explain why (and how) certain social categories
tend to accept and/or produce certain cultural products, while
simultaneously others reject them.

>        If, as you seem to want to argue
>(although if I am wrong please correct my apologies), there is an objective
>aesthetic structure to objects/events etc. then you must be prepared at
>some level to say, for example, that seeing/tasting smelling X can/should
>produce aesthetic experience Y.
>
>It simply can't be that you want to argue that the same objective structure
>in X can be allowed to produce differing aesthetic experiences, perhaps Y,
>Z, T, since this simply lets you have it all ways.

Basically, you've got me half right: aesthetic structure X tends to produce
aesthetic experience Y--for social group Z(1).  Group Z(2) may have quite a
different experience.  I don't think that's a case of me having it all ways:
both the artifact and the group are social products.  It's not arbitrary
that, say, men and women often get enthusiastic about different movies, or
like the same movies for completely different reasons.  (*Titanic* might be
a good study.)  So one reason for disentangling evaluation from structure
is: artifact Q is "good"--to whom?  And why?  At the same time, while
evaluations may vary and change, the object may not (or not much), and it
*does* put some limits on possible experiences (so my bizarre interpretation
of *Oedipus* will remain bizarre); consequently one can't exclude its
properties from analysis.  For this reason I think trying to understand
aesthetic experience as either "subjective" or "objective" may lead to
confusion: we're really dealing with a result of a *relationship* here.
That can't be adequately analyzed one-sidedly.

>      On your reading (unless I have totally
>misunderstood) if the objective aesthetic structure tends towards yuk!,
>then presumably those who like red wine and salmon are deficient, or wrong,
>in some way. And all that remains is that we re-educate them correctly.

Not at all.  I don't have to side with one group or another when explaining
their choices.  I can imagine a (sub)culture--something like the early punks
maybe--that might be into yukky food combinations as a strategy of
resistance, protest, or annoyance.  Or a culture that's accustomed to
certain spices may consider the combination of red wine and salmon to be
just the thing.  Or a religion could view it as a sort of Zen reminder that
while two wrongs don't make a right, two rights can make a wrong.  So maybe
your partner, who likes red with salmon, is on a higher spiritual plane than
you, and you should seek her level!  (And as a veggie, I'd find the bad
choice to be the salmon, not the wine.  Besides, I generally prefer reds
over whites.  I am what I drink?)  And the upshot of such understanding may
be to re-educate *me*: I might come to appreciate "strange" food choices, or
at least others' liking for them.  Ditto for anything else in the arts (like
Michael's coming to grasp Jackson Pollack, perhaps).  Of course, that isn't
a necessary result, or even necessarily a goal, but it does sometimes
happen.

None of this forces me to approve all aesthetic choices or see everything as
art.  Snuff films are bad, period; I don't care how "arty" they might get,
and frankly I'd be loath to call them art at all.  That sort of judgment is
possible for me because, as far as I can tell, aesthetics isn't a thing
apart, totally isolated or independent of moral issues (again, that
"relationships" issue).  It only has "relative autonomy," you know?  Still,
on the whole I guess in my view, aesthetics is more about understanding and
explaining than about evaluation.  "More": not "only."

As for telling you the aesthetic structure of *Hamlet*, I think this is a
trick question.  There isn't one.  That is, there isn't *one*.  There are
many.  This is partly because *Hamlet* is a play, and (strictly speaking)
plays only exist in performance; the book you bought when you were 15 (or
whatever) is merely a script, a "score" for a performance.  (Like a music
score; and some people are choosy about whose recording to buy.)  Also there
are several "original" versions of the *Hamlet* script, and editors scratch
their heads for months trying to decide how or even whether to combine them.
(This happens with novels, poems, and music too.)  So we're talking about a
set of family resemblances here.  Still, you can read that old copy in your
library, that'll help.  But if your question is about describing or
interpreting *Hamlet*, then old boy, I'm gonna pack you off to the library.
What, writing to this list is all I have to do with my life?

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-gwi.net *or* tobin.nellhaus-AT-helsinki.fi
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce





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