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The New Aestheticism: an Introduction John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas The new aestheticism: an introduction The very notion of the ‘aesthetic’ could be said to have fallen victim to the success of recent developments within literary theory. Undergraduates now pause before rehearsing complacent aesthetic verities concerning truth, meaning and value, verities that used to pass at one time for literary criticism. The rise of critical theory in disci- plines across the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s has all but swept aesthetics from the map – and, some would argue, rightly so. Critical theory, of whatever variety, presented a fundamental challenge to the image of the old-style academic aesthete sitting in his (and it was always his) ivory tower and handing down judgements about the good and the bad in art and culture with a blissful disregard for the politics of his pronouncements. Notions such as aesthetic independence, artistic genius, the cultu- ral and historical universality of a text or work, and the humanist assumption of art’s intrinsic spiritual value have been successfully challenged by successive investigations into the historical and political bases of art’s material production and transmission. Theories of textuality, subjectivity, ideology, class, race and gender have shown such notions of universal human value to be without foundation, and even to act as repres- sive means of safeguarding the beliefs and values of an elitist culture from challenge or transformation. The upshot of this series of interventions has been the rapid expan- sion of the canon, as well as a profound questioning of the very idea of canonicity. Art’s relations to dominant ideologies have been exposed from a number of perspec- tives, as well as its potential to challenge these ideologies. What has frequently been lost in this process, however, is the sense of art’s specificity as an object of analysis – or, more accurately, its specificity as an aesthetic phenomenon. In the rush to diag- nose art’s contamination by politics and culture, theoretical analysis has tended always to posit a prior order that grounds or determines a work’s aesthetic impact, whether this is history, ideology or theories of subjectivity. The aesthetic is thus explicated in other terms, with other criteria, and its singularity is effaced. Theoretical criticism is in continual danger here of throwing out the aesthetic baby with the humanist bath- water. Yet, on theoretical grounds alone, the recent resistance to aesthetics remains puz- zling, not least insofar as many of the theoretical advances of the last few years – the focus on the reader’s role in the constitution of meaning, the possibility that texts are John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas - 9781526137821 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/01/2021 08:33:29AM via free access 2 The new aestheticism open to a number of interpretations, the way in which literature troubles fixed defini- tions of class, race, gender and sexuality, etc. – might themselves be brought together under the general rubric of ‘the aesthetic function of literature’.Tied to actuality,in ways that cannot be reduced to the empirical, aesthetic experience allows for the creation of ‘possible worlds’ as well as for critical experimentation. In a teaching situation (as Thomas Docherty argues in his contribution to this volume) a reconceptualisation of the aesthetic means making the most of an approach to ‘education’ which relies on an openness to alterity, and developing a pedagogy that refuses to be prescribed by conven- tional or a priori categories. That these concerns are already rehearsed by the unravell- ing of metaphysical ‘givens’ undertaken by contemporary theory could lead one to the conclusion that, if theory has changed the conditions of teaching, then it will also enable us to develop a more rigorous, non-foundationalist approach to aesthetics: one which avoids the pitfalls and reductive unities of an old-style aestheticism. In the process, though, theory will also need to look to its philosophical beginnings in aesthetics. Two years ago, when the original proposal for the current collection was first sent out for review, an early anonymous reader voiced some concerns about the project’s ‘philosophical’ content. The specific cause for disquiet was that, while ‘several of the contributors happen to work in literature departments’, the overall emphasis of the volume was misdirected, and that, if the book was to get a green light at all, the editors would at least ‘have to decide whether it’s about literature or philosophy’. This accu- sation concerning a migration across disciplinary lines is a curious one, not least insofar as some of the best literary criticism of recent years has been penned by phi- losophers, while much of the work currently described as ‘continental philosophy’ now emerges from departments of literature. But the reader’s comments also serve to remind us of the extent to which the dialogue which already exists between these two subjects now needs to be made still more explicit. There are, after all, tensions to be plotted here, as well as affinities. In this respect of course there are other more tangible reasons why the anonymous reader’s distinction between literature and philosophy seems a less than helpful one. Maybe the best response – at least it was the one that we gave at the time – is to say that aesthetics is the theoretical discourse which attempts to comprehend the literary. This of course is an unsatisfactory shorthand, and we will return to problematise the position below, yet, loosely speaking, the relation between literature and philosophy could be said to be symbiotic, in that each would be deficient without consideration by the other. In this respect, as Andrew Bowie has recently reminded us: The rise of ‘literature’ and the rise of philosophical aesthetics – of a new philosophical concern with understanding the nature of art – are inseparable phenomena, which are vitally connected to changes in conceptions of truth in modern thought. The need to integrate the disciplines of literary study and philosophy in new ways is, I propose, vital to the longer-term health of both disciplines. Important work needs to be done . in showing how issues which emerge in relation to literature are, when connected to developments in contemporary philosophy, germane to issues concerning our self- understanding which do potentially play an important role in engaging with virtually any area of modern society.1 John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas - 9781526137821 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/01/2021 08:33:29AM via free access An introduction 3 Bowie’s case, that without ‘an orientation towards understanding the truth-potential in art that is more than ideology, many of the most essential issues concerning the sig- nificance of art cannot even be discussed’,2 is, we would like to argue, compelling. Art is inextricably tied to the politics of contemporary culture, and has been throughout modernity. Aesthetic specificity is not, however, entirely explicable, or graspable, in terms of another conceptual scheme or genre of discourse. The singularity of the work’s ‘art-ness’ escapes and all that often remains is the critical discourse itself, reas- sured of its methodological approach and able to reassert its foundational principles. In other words, perhaps the most basic tenet that we are trying to argue for is the equi- primordiality of the aesthetic – that, although it is without doubt tied up with the political, historical, ideological, etc., thinking it as other than determined by them, and therefore reducible to them, opens a space for an artistic or literary specificity that can radically transform its critical potential and position with regard to contemporary culture. In the light of this, we want to put the case that it might be time for a new aestheticism. This is not to argue that the critiques of aesthetics carried out under the various banners of theory are wrong or misguided. Of course the unmasking of art’s relation to ideology, historical and political context, self-identification, gender and colonialism are immensely important for contemporary thought and politics. It is impossible now to argue that aesthetics is anything other than thoroughly imbricated with politics and culture. And this, without doubt, is an entirely good thing. None of those involved in this book set out to present any sort of rearguard defence of, or case for a return to, the notion of art as a universally and apolitically humanist activity pre- sided over by a benign council of critical patriarchs. Rather it would be more accurate to say that the appearance of The New Aestheticism coincides with a conjuncture that is often termed ‘post-theoretical’ – both historically in the sense that in terms of his- torical sequence it comes after the initial impact of theory, but also conceptually in the sense that as ‘theory’ now enters a more reflective phase, there is an increased will- ingness among cultural theorists and philosophers alike to consider ‘the philosophi- cal origins of literary theory’. Yet, in this respect, new aestheticism remains a troubled term and in current par- lance it already comes loaded with the baggage of the ‘philistine controversy’ which first emerged in an exchange that originally that took place in the New Left Review during the mid-1990s. New aestheticism was identified there as a regressive tendency which in its ‘pursuit of art and judgement’ focused on ‘ethical abstraction’ to the exclu- sion of ‘the pleasures of the body and the problems of contemporary art’ – pleasures and brutalities that philistinism was better placed to explore as the ‘definitional other’ or the spectre of aesthetics.3 Jay Bernstein and Andrew Bowie have by now made their own response as participants in the original debate,4 but on reflection it is increasingly apparent that the two formations share a good deal of common ground: each is cer- tainly opposed to the rootless aesthetic contingencies of cultural studies or lit.
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