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European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy IV - 1 | 2012 Pragmatism and the Social Sciences: A Century of Influences and Interactions, vol. 2 Enjoying the Doubtful On Transformative Suspensions in Pragmatist Aesthetics Heidi Salaverría Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/791 DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.791 ISSN: 2036-4091 Publisher Associazione Pragma Electronic reference Heidi Salaverría, « Enjoying the Doubtful On Transformative Suspensions in Pragmatist Aesthetics », European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], IV - 1 | 2012, Online since 23 July 2012, connection on 19 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/791 ; DOI : 10.4000/ ejpap.791 This text was automatically generated on 19 April 2019. Author retains copyright and grants the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Enjoying the Doubtful On Transformative Suspensions in Pragmatist Aesthetics 1 Enjoying the Doubtful On Transformative Suspensions in Pragmatist Aesthetics Heidi Salaverría 1 Richard Shusterman’s pragmatism is an important voice in the pluralist choir of pragmatist philosophers and has crucially contributed to refine some of the most important pragmatist concerns, particularly those of Dewey. While he, like Dewey, criticizes the compartmentalization of the art-sphere and shows in detail the entanglement of the aesthetic and the ordinary, adopting and further developing his critical insights, Shusterman also detects some flaws in Dewey’s vision. Rather “than pursuing Dewey’s totalizing definitional quest” in dealing with aesthetic experience, he instead aims, “in the spirit of piecemeal pragmatist labor, to make a more specific case for widening art’s borders to forms of popular culture and to the ethical art of fashioning one’s life.”1 2 But Shusterman also radicalized and broadened the pragmatist method or way of thinking, legitimizing a closer interaction of philosophy and the everyday (than Dewey allowed for), of which popular culture forms an integral part. Applying this approach to his own work, Shusterman has been the first philosopher to explore and appreciate philosophically the world of hip hop, not only by familiarizing himself with its culture and making its culture recognizable for an academic audience through his publications, but by arguing for its philosophical and aesthetic significance and legitimacy, and by showing how its culture challenges some flaws of academic philosophy, offering intriguing alternatives.2 3 Although generally benevolent in his discussions of philosophical positions, Shusterman for a long time has been surprisingly critical towards the aesthetic theory of Kant. This is partly understandable, as Kant’s philosophy viewed as a system is in fact incompatible with pragmatism, and there are good reasons to reject some of his premises and limitations.3 Nevertheless there are some aspects in Shusterman’s thinking which come European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, IV - 1 | 2012 Enjoying the Doubtful On Transformative Suspensions in Pragmatist Aesthetics 2 quite close to Kantian ideas (and they already have – in some subcutaneous ways – influenced pragmatist aesthetics via Emerson and Peirce). I believe that a careful connection could be beneficial and enriching both for Kantian and for pragmatist aesthetics. Shusterman himself writes in a recent article that he had “all too readily followed James (and Dewey) in being hypercritical of Kant, though my own pragmatist aesthetics shares with him (much more than with Hegel) an emphasis on pleasure, perception, and the experiential particularity of aesthetic reactions that cannot be reduced to the conceptual.”4 4 So in what follows, my paper explores some of the familiarities and tensions between their reflections on pleasure and on the particularity of aesthetic experience, thereby arguing that the transformatory element in aesthetic pleasure is doubt. 5 Why is it so crucial to underline the positive aesthetic experience of pleasure instead of concentrating on the critical examination of negative experiences (and their opposition and prevention through political philosophy and action) like pain, humiliation, and alienation, which dominate contemporary philosophical debates on feelings, as Shusterman rightly criticizes? Not only do late capitalist societies continue to reproduce the fatal and violent split between mind and body (besides innumerable other dualisms, e.g. subject/object, self/world, male/female, art/life, thought/feeling) and the corresponding depreciation of the somatic in contrast to the mental and linguistic, this split moreover resonates in the hierarchical dualism between popular and high culture, and this hierarchy in turn reverberates in those philosophical discourses which continue to neglect the somatic, and particularly the positive somatic and aesthetic experiences, a problem that “might be termed a radical anaestheticization of aesthetics” (PL: 31). Instead of taking a critical stance towards body-hostile tendencies in society (of which the medially inculcated fanaticism for violently standardized body-images and the equally standardized sensationalism of emotions, which are being confounded with pleasure, represent nothing more than the other Janus-faced side), contemporary philosophy tends to exacerbate the problem. Shusterman’s insistence on pleasure should be understood as a critical response to the tendency to disdain pleasure and hence a part of ourselves (PA: 170). 6 A lot of misunderstanding regarding Shusterman’s philosophical reevaluation of aesthetic pleasure can be attributed to a lack of understanding its essential and indispensable transformatory power (PA: 58, 59, 145). The problem, e.g., of many (post-)structuralist theories is that they tend to describe the subject in terms of an irreducible deficiency. The tendency towards an ever evanescent, and always somehow violently subjected subject not only reflects and partly reproduces the societal violence of the mind-body dualism. It also makes the problem of embodied agency seem increasingly unsolvable, other than to be content (in a very sad way) with the anonymous iterations and ruptures the unpredictability of discourses and the mishaps of speech-acts might offer as only source for renewal and change. Even more so, because these ruptures will always, at least partly, reproduce the implicit or explicit violence of its subjection, whereas unconstrained aesthetic pleasure involves the option of temporarily freeing the self from (at least some) boundaries by getting to know the new. And it is not only the fullness of unconstrained pleasure, but also the surplus of this experience, which Shusterman notes. “That aesthetic experience extends beyond the historically established practice of art should be obvious” (PA: 47). One of the reasons why he advocates popular culture is a consequence of this problem, as the experience of aesthetic pleasure hasn’t been European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, IV - 1 | 2012 Enjoying the Doubtful On Transformative Suspensions in Pragmatist Aesthetics 3 suppressed on such a scale in popular culture as in the so-called high art and its correspondingly expected aesthetic attitude. Furthermore this one-sided aesthetic attitude is inseparable from social hierarchies, in which – as Bourdieu has powerfully demonstrated – distinguished taste is instrumentalized to reinforce social classes, more perfidiously so, as the aesthetic, allegedly authentic and free judgment serves for social positioning. But neither does this entail a determination through social classes nor the nonexistence of valid aesthetic judgments or experiences altogether. The cultivation of rather intellectual aesthetic works, labeled as high art, and their reception is not per se problematic, but it is because of its implications: the exclusions, and the consolidation of those exclusions of social classes and of parts of our own self. 7 It would be trivial to make pleasure a philosophical key concept, if the point was to merely compensate for its negligence in our societies (without touching the societal structures which produced the problem in the first place). The significance of the recognition of aesthetic pleasure lies instead in its transformatory power. And this power can be best activated, in my view, when it is not separated from understanding, as Peirce famously wrote, describing the creative state of musement, as an “open conversation with yourself, […] however, not a conversation in words alone.”5 In this I see a strong connection between Kantian and pragmatist aesthetics, although Kant needs a pragmatist correction of his formalistic and body-hostile tendencies, whereas pragmatism could benefit from a stronger focus on the formation of a critical standpoint through aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic judgment. In his latest book on Somaesthetics, the discipline he has been unfolding in the last decade, Shusterman proposes that we should rely on our feelings and habits “until they prove problematic in experience.”6 But it seems to me, that aesthetic pleasure (which, as I have learned from Shusterman, always is somehow somaesthetic) has more to offer: it not only opens the horizon to a more refined attention toward the somatic processes of our body, but also opens the horizon to a more refined attention on our own problematic
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