Derrida's Frame and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Derrida's concept of the frame, the perergon, which he uncovers in his deconstruction of Kant's 3rd Critique might bring into focus some of the issues regarding Midsummer that I have been struggling to put into words. (Strange, perhaps, that Derrida might bring anything into focus.)

Derrida constructs the frame as the middle ground which Kant gives us as a directional tool, pointing us in the direction of the true aesthetic object. The frame is perergon, it is outside the work, but it is essential in telling us that a work of art, in fact, exists (ostensibly, within the frame). However, Derrida exposes the empirical regression that such a dichotomy--of inside and outside, artwork and pererga--must necessarily introduce. We can never be sure that we have, in fact, set all extraneous details aside in our pursuit of the object, and so must eventually put the object of beauty itself aside in order to finally determine its beauty. Self-defeating, to say the least.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, however, this same concept of liminality is turned inside out. The play itself is structured so as to make the audience successively uncertain as to their position with regards to reality. Kant's aesthetic (for Derrida) suggests a continual movement inward toward the object, while at the same time necessitating a continual 'reframing' of the object in relation to those things external to it. Derrida's hypothetical artwork--a framed painting of a building surrounded by columns shaped like clothed statues--points up this continual reframing. Shakespeare's play also seems to point continually outward to a reality, while continually reframing that reality with regards to the 'art' which is theatrical performance.

One of the most ingenious aspects of the play's structure is that it must necessarily be in play before the play itself actually begins, and it extends itself outward again from the play's ending. In between, it plays all sorts of games with the concepts of interiority and exteriority. Here, very quickly, I'll breakdown how I see this being achieved.

The audience of the play has, upon entering a theater, set aside certain assumptions about 'real life'. There is a tacit understanding that 'entertainment', whatever else it may be, is a diversion from the real. While I am being entertained, there are no jobs to worry about, no familial concerns, no pressing external circumstances (the fact that I have come to the theater suggests that I have made arrangements for my work, my kids, etc.). In this respect, the theater itself acts as the first realm of unreality into which the audience is drawn. While this is true at the play's start, it is made explicit as the play ends, when Puck offers the audience the opportunity to cast the play itself off as nothing more than a dream. By vocalizing the option, however, Puck extends the plays action beyond that played on the stage, in order to incorporate, at the very least, the action of the audience as they leave the theater and return to the 'real.'

Within the action of the play itself, however, this same structure is preeminent. The play opens in Athens, which is at the start to be considered the realm of unreality, when compared with the perceived reality of the actual people in their actual seats in the actual theater. That Athens is being played before them on the stage offers the audience the opportunity to reframe their concept of the real: perhaps they had considered that entering the theater was a diversion from reality, perhaps not, but now they are clearly being asked to draw a frame around the artwork, and to place themselves, externally, in relation to it. I am real, Shakespearean Athens is fake, is fantasy, is artwork. It is key, however, that in this section of the play certain elements of the 'reality' of Athens are also established. Patriarchy is in full effect, gravity works, death is possible, social interactions are fraught with complications; things are not 'ideal.'

The escape from the city again brings into focus the dual nature of the Derridian frame: the lovers move outward from the city, away from civilization and toward nature (and thus, ostensibly, toward some deeper biological reality--for Freud and Lacan, the dreamworld is a little bit more 'real'); however, in doing so they draw the audience, once again, into a deeper sense of unreality. Now, the audience must conceive of Athens as 'real', insofar as it is opposed to the 'dream' of the forest. Thus far, the audience has stacked their frameworks: The world outside the theater is real, I in my seat am real, Athens is real, and it is the dream-forest that is the center of unreality. It is from this point that art springs. And yet, in the Mechanicals rehearsal, a further level of unreality is suggested. That a play could be performed in the dream world itself suggests that the dream world is not so much different than our own. We, after all, are watching a play right now (although the play itself seems intent on obscuring this very simple formulation). As Quince goes about the forest clearing pointing out the stage, the tiring-house, he is surely indicating the actual stage, and in the Elizabethan theater he might as easily indicate the actual tiring-house, which immediately collapses the framework thus far established. Indeed, the entire rehearsal, which takes place at the center of the audience's frame, is built around exposing the inner workings of the illusion of theater. Here, in the 'reality' of the dream-forest, the Mechanicals discuss stage lighting, prop difficulties, the writing of the play, the fact that characters are just actors in costumes. It seems as though, right in the center of its artifice (Act 3, Scene 1 is the center of the play, both by scene, and--more or less--by length), Midsummer performs a sort of deconstruction on itself, pointing out through characters at the center of the artifice that it works to sustain the 'mechanics' by which that artifice is sustained.

Bottom's dream, which we experience as the reality of the dream-forest, is indeed, the bottom of our dream as well. From the moment he goes to bed with Titania, the play moves increasingly back out of the frames which it has constructed. It seems interesting to note here, however, that the devices by which things are 'put right', in the play's interest to get the lovers back to Athens, to move back to reality, all seem to involve a 'putting to sleep' as well. This offers the opportunity for the image of awakening to reality--the lovers awaken to the reality of Athens, bottom awakens to the reality of the forest--but it also suggests that the move to that reality contains within it the same qualities of 'putting to sleep' that are associated with dream.

By ending with "Pyramus and Thisbe," the play repositions its audience to consider the framework in which they experience art and artifice. They have, along with the lovers, been reintegrated into the reality of Athens, but even this movement is one which must certainly recall the original, and more immediate, disintegration into the false world of Athens with which the play began. If this suggestion is missed by anyone the first time around, the play-within-the-play drives it home. The audience now is asked to respond to pure artifice (we saw it under construction in the forest, and we see it fall apart in "Pyramus and Thisbe"), but we are responding to this pure artifice alongside Theseus, Hippolyta, and the lovers, with whom we must both identify (we watch what they watch) while we are immediately distanced from them (we watch them watching). (Does Derrida's regressive frame not suggest itself further: who watches us watching them?)

Of course, as I have already suggested, Puck's final monologue points outward once again. If the implication was not taken up by watching the audience on stage, Puck leaves no doubt that the audience, too, has been complicit in this artifice. "That you have but slumbered here" suggests that you, too, must now wake up. However, as in the play, we may question what it is we are waking up to. No one in the play could quite shake off their dreams, and we might expect to have the same experience. Oberon's final speech, indeed his final existing in and presiding over the manor house at Athens, makes clear the role which fantasy plays in the propagation of reality.

All this very quickly.

Oscar Wilde and "The Critic as Artist"

Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist (Excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition) represents an interesting synthesis of many of the ideas I have heretofore been exploring.

In a strict sense, he seems to be interested in extending and refining the role of the critic put forward by Matthew Arnold in his essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (also, conveniently anthologized in my Norton). Arnold holds that it is the function of criticism "to see the object as in itself it really is" (695), a notion with which Wilde assertively disagrees. As the title of the work suggests, he holds the critic in high regards as an artist in his own right, who uses the works of artists as they in turn have used the material world: as a point from which to jump in the creation of something wholly new. He seems to anticipate reader response criticism when he states that the artwork is not "expressive," but "impressive," and that Criticism is "in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another" (800). Criticism, for Wilde, has no interest in discovering the true intentions of the artist; that is a shallow endeavor. Rather, Criticism must use the artwork as a pallet upon which to read "the record of one's own soul" (799).

Arnold maintain that criticism lays the philosophical groundwork upon which art is built. Wilde suggests, "There have been critical ages that have not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the world, ages in which the spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of his treasure-house" (796). It is, in fact, to this effect that Arnold sets about writing his essay to begin with. He sees a certain deficiency in the age from which he writes, a deficiency which he believes makes the creation of any true art impossible; the absence in Arnold's England of the "national glow of life and thought" which makes epochs of great art possible, leaves contemporary art wanting "materials and a basis" which might allow it "a thorough interpretation of the world" (698). It is the function of Arnold's proposed turn to criticism to create such an era of inquiry. Wilde agrees, stating that "there has never been a creative age that has not also been a critical age" (796).

Arnold still holds the "free creative activity" found in great art to be the "highest function of man," and so seems to position criticism as a somewhat lesser, albeit equally necessary, pursuit (696). Wilde sees no such distinction. Indeed, the very title of his work suggests as much: the critic does not stand in relation to the artist, but rather becomes an artist himself as he experiences and interprets the art of others. For Wilde, Criticism in its highest form is "more creative than [artistic] creation" because it relates not to the world, but to one's soul; in this sense, Criticism becomes a more pure realization of Hegel's self-consciousness, which Wilde holds to be essential to the creation of true art (799). Wilde even goes so far, at times, as to (somewhat humorously) denigrate the artistic function. Of authors, for example, he says, "Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature" (797), and he attributes to the Mona Lisa the possibility that da Vinci was "merely the slave of an archaic smile" (800).

Wilde's concept of Beauty echoes and revises that of Kant. Kant asserts that "the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good" ("From Critique of the Power of Judgment," excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 449). Wilde parallels the sentence of Kant's when he claims that "Beauty is the symbol of symbols" ("The Critic As Artist," p. 802). For Kant, establishing the subjective universality of Beauty was essential, and he went to great lengths to eliminate all interest from the aesthetic judgment of an artwork. In Kant's aesthetic, beauty must have no purpose, and all judgment of beauty lies within the person who is judging. Wilde takes in these concepts and states that "because it expresses nothing," Beauty offers the opportunity to the Critic to "put into it whatever one wishes" (802). Beauty, according to Wilde, "has as many meanings as man has moods," and Criticism of artwork offers the opportunity to bring to fuller light "a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely" (802). That the artwork is somehow incomplete for the artist is an idea first raised by Shelley, who saw in the works of Dante and Milton the possibility of interpretations that the artists themselves could not have anticipated. Wilde echoes this concept when assigns to his Critic the role of "always showing us the work of art in some new relation to our age" (806).

There are aspects of Wilde's work which call to mind Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying" as well; foremost perhaps is Wilde's insistence that it is the primary aim of the writer to lie willfully. What Nietzsche asserts gravely, however--that we are blind to our reality because of our immersion in a lie--Wilde approaches playfully; he seems to register Nietzsche's concerns even as he acknowledges them as the components of the great play-thing that is human existence. In his exploration of the critic, in fact, Wilde builds an argument that echoes Nietzsche's at each step, while at each turn reversing the "tone of grim intensity" that pervades Nietzsche in favor of a certain frivolity (Editor's note, p. 78). Wilde first acknowledges indirectly Nietzsche's skepticism of language when he asserts that language "is the parent, and not the child, of thought" (797). Wilde maintains a certain level of pride in the human animal, who through language can "rise above" "lower" lifeforms (797). Where Nietzsche criticizes language for its roll in constructing a false sense of reality, Wilde praises this linguistic function in human existence:

...it is the function of Literature to create, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvellous [sic], more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon, and through which common natures seek to realize their perfection (798).

One can see that Wilde uses the word true just as Nietzsche would, to describe the constructed reality revealed through the employment of language. Language divides us from the crude rule of mere action, which Wilde points out any animal may achieve, calling action "a blind thing, dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious" (797). Wilde's man of action here begins to sound a bit like Nietzsche's intuitive man.

As Wilde describes the way in which the critic interacts with the artist, he does so in a way that hearkens the role that Nietzsche assigns to Science. For Nietzsche, science "works unceasingly" to fit the world of primary concepts, concepts more or less created as metaphors for reality, into a "columbarium," a great framework which imposes metaphors upon metaphors and thus removes humanity ever farther from the primary experience of reality (771). Similarly, Wilde's critic

occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought (798-99).

As Nietzsche's Science piles metaphor upon metaphor, so Wilde's criticism is "a creation within a creation," and just as Nietzsche condemns Science for this tendency, Wilde praises criticism as "the purest form of personal impression" because "it has least reference to any standard external to itself" (799).

Reading Wilde, I am struck by the way in which he constructs his arguments. As is evident in the above analysis, he is interesting not so much for the originality of his ideas, but for the wild (read, "Wilde") spin he puts on the ideas of others. He uses the dialogue format to highlight the ostensible absurdity of his theses, and then shows them to arise out of a certain point of view taken on past theoretical work. It is, of course, the subjective point of view which arrives as the champion of Wilde's Criticism, and employing just such a point of view serves to demonstrate the very theory he is positing.

Kant and Schiller on "The Pirate Bay"

Kant says of Taste:

Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Second Edition, p. 418).

Schiller insists in On the Aesthetic Education of Man:

Let [the Artist] direct his gaze upwards, to the dignity of his calling and the universal Law, not downwards towards Fortune and the needs of daily life (491).

It'd be nice to have these guys on your side when you got nailed for pirating music. They could help you explain to Ke$ha that to demand remuneration for her work was to deny its appreciation as true art.

Hegelian Dialectic: The Master and the Slave

Hegel's interest in the dialectic lies in his attempt to codify the process by which human's come to self-consciousness, to an understanding of themselves. Thus, he begins his Master-Slave Dialectic with the assertion that "Self-consciousness exists...only in being acknowledged," and the twisting path which leads us all to a recognition of this fact is what comprises the rest of the passage (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 541). My chief goal in this post is to attempt an untangling of the relationship that Hegel describes.

He presents us with a self-consciousness. Hegel's self-consciousness is a negatively defined entity. That is, self-consciousness is "simple being-for self, self-equal through the exclusion from itself of everything else. For it, its essence and absolute object is 'I'...it is an individual. (542). Hegelian self-consciousness defines itself by excluding everything 'other' than itself. This self must be very Kantian in nature, taking no interest in the material world, and existing in a state of pure reason. It is an appeal to the pure "Spirit" of the being. (Because Hegel thus puts it, and because it might help understanding the interaction that must take place, I will henceforth place myself, my 'I' in this role)

Suddenly, I am faced by an other (presumably another human being like me), and because the other is obviously another self-consciousness, I am faced with a host of difficulties. It seems like some of these difficulties arise because, as the editors of the excerpt suggest, "selves do not take their fundamental dependence on others kindly" (538). I am disposed to think of myself as an independent identity, existing eternally, but the confrontation of another self, and the realization through that experience that this other self must feel the same way that I do about its independence and identity, I feel that my independence, and thus my identity (my self-consciousness, at least so far as I have developed it up to this point) is threatened. Hegel suggests that my first reaction, when faced with this threat, is to supersede the other:

[I] must supersede this...other independent being in order thereby to become certain of [myself] as the essential being. (541)

However, by attempting to supersede the other, which I recognize as independent - a veritable mirror of my own self-consciousness - I realize that I myself have also been superseded, both in my attempt to position myself above the other, and in understanding that the other is invariably doing to me just what I have done to him. Hegel addresses the double nature of this interaction, which makes it essentially different than the interaction I might have with other objects:

[I do] not have the object before [me] merely as it exists primarily for desire [as perhaps other objects in the world might exist], but as something that has an independent existence of its own, which, therefore, [I] cannot utilize for [my] own purposes, if that object [the other self-consciousness] does not of its own accord do what the first does to [me] (542).

This back and forth between denial-of-other and denial-of-self goes on until I am faced with a realization: if I am to preserve my self as independent and eternal, I must destroy this other.

(I must say, though I think I sorta' get this, it doesn't come out much clearer from my pen then it did from Hegel's. Ever thus...)

Hegel's "life-and-death struggle" heightens the interplay between the two self-consciousnesses to the highest degree. What began as mere "supersession" becomes destruction. However, the paradoxes inherent in the first situation have not diminished. By seeking the death of the other, I necessarily put my own life on the line, and by recognizing the opportunity to kill the other, I necessarily recognize my own inherent killability. Hegel says, rather cryptically, that "it is only through staking one's life that freedom is won" (543). It is in this moment of staking my life that I realize "that there is nothing present in [me] which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment" (543). Essentially, it seems that by staking my own life on my perceived self-consciousness, I necessarily recognize that my idea of an eternal self independent of external factors is a flawed conception. I begin to realize that my only consciousness is one "entangled in a variety of relationships" (543).

If the battle ends in death, by the same paradox that Hegel has been following, it ends in the death (quite literally) of the other self-consciousness, and the death also (though implicit) of my own. However, Hegel suggests that this battle might end otherwise: in a relationship he considers as Master (Herr, which Norton translates as "lord") and Slave (Knecht, translated here as "bondsman").

A note: I have been using myself as the subject of this interaction, supposing as the 'other' another human being like me, and until the moment that he introduces Lord and Bondsman, it seems as though Hegel, too, considers this an interaction between two separate human beings. However, this does not necessarily hold true hereafter. Look at the way Hegel leads up to the idea:

In the immediate self-consciousness the simple 'I' is the absolute object which, however, for us or in itself is absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment lasting independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience [of the life-and-death struggle?]; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself but for another, i.e. is a merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood. Both moments are essential. Since to begin with they are unequal and opposed, and their reflection into a unity has not yet been achieved, they exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord [Herr], the other is bondsman [Knecht] (544).

Suddenly it seems as though Hegel has moved inside the mind of one of his individuals, in order to discover a split which has occurred within the self-consciousness (within me), rather than between it and another. It's as if the dialectal struggle between self and other (which culminated in a life-or-death struggle) is synthesized in an understanding of self as self and other. Suddenly, the 'I' that at first comprised my entire self-consciousness - built as it was on my understanding of being-for-self, now comprises a single dialectical aspect of my self-consciousness; the other aspect is understood as being-for-another.

So the Master-Slave dialectic, which for Hegel is the ultimate struggle, is perhaps one that takes place within my own mind. I preserve my sense of self-consciousness as being-for-self (that Kantian Ideal of mind free from all interest in the world, negatively defined as only that which is not external to me) by supplicating the second self-consciousness (the being-for-another) to the role of Slave. The former takes the role of Master, and mediates its interaction with the world of things through the latter.

Of course the Master finds his role to be empty, for the reason that he is now necessarily determining his own self-consciousness in relation to a self-consciousness in the Slave that, while he may have dominion over it [the Slave], loses its being-for-self precisely because he has dominion over it: It is now a thing, a being-for-another, and because the Master can only measure himself in relation to the Slave, he finds himself to be lacking as well. Hegel says, "What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He [the Master] is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself" (545). (It strikes me that while the Master sees his complete dissociation from the world of things as an ultimate goal, this dissociation necessarily sends him wheeling into disconnectedness. Either he has nothing to measure his self-consciousness by but itself [which induces a circularity], or he must measure it by something self-consciously inferior).

The Slave, on the other hand, has a golden opportunity. Remember that it, too, faced its death and so understands itself as a vanishing moment:

In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness (546).

The Slave is not conscious of this capacity within itself, but, Hegel maintains, can become conscious of it through the work the Slave does on things:

...work forms and shapes the thing...the formative activity is at the same time individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence (546).

So through the act of creating, of working on the natural world, the Slave becomes conscious of himself as other than the natural world (i.e., he can set himself up once again as a negatively-defined self-consciousness). In what he makes, he sees the permanence that is then reflected back onto himself. Does that make sense? (I'm afraid not.)

Hegel seems to suggest that through their dialectical relationship the Master is naturally diminished and the Slave is naturally empowered. How this comes to a dialectical synthesis, however, in which the opposition itself is superseded, is not clear. (Perhaps because it hasn't?)

Taken this way (as a manifestation of inner conflict), the Master-Slave Dialectic presents us with a self at odds with itself, a consciousness at once dominant and submissive. The delineation of the Slave suggests that our interactions with objects, with the external environment, is at once somehow barbaric and redemptive. It also paints a picture of our higher faculty (what I might characterize as our sense of reason) as both domineering and distant.

There is also the possibility of taking the Master-Slave Dialectic as an external conflict, between two individuals (or even two groups of individuals). It seems, in this case, that the Master's crisis, his recognition of the Slave, and thus himself, as something less than being-for-self, might result in the sort of moral imperative that has ended slavery in the past. There comes a point when the Master "stops fooling himself" and recognizes in the Slave another independent self-consciousness. I'm not sure, however, what necessitates this shift, except to point to historical examples as proof that it happens. It seems like it might be just as easy for the Master, who has reduced the Slave to just another object, might achieve the same level of self-consciousness through his manipulation of the Slave as the Slave receives through his manipulation of other objects.

As Nausheen Eusuf pointed out in our class discussion, one might take the Slave's interaction with the world as analogous to that of the Artist, realizing his self-consciousness in the work he does on the material world:

The bondsman labors to fashion the world of objects and imprint upon it the mark of his own subjectivity, through which he gradually gains self-definition and authority. SImilarly, the young writer labors to fashion language into shapes that are uniquely his, and as he finds language bending to his will, he gains confidence through the permanence of his art. (Eusuf, Nausheen. From lecture notes entitled "Hegel, Consciousness, Creativity." 3 Sept. 2010)

Nausheen positions the Artist Slave in relationship to the Master that is the weight of artistic tradition, but I wonder if the Master couldn't equally well be positioned within a Kantian critical art community. That is, perhaps the Master which the Artist Slave works under is the Ideal of artistic aesthetic, certainly bound to a great degree by ideas of beauty that have been handed down, but ultimately determined by a critical 'disinterest' in Kant's sense.

It is telling that this Masterly critical viewpoint is rather empty. Kant's aesthetic judgment needs necessarily hold no interest in the object, and the effects of this, as I have explored them previously, seem to align with the ultimate self-conscious dissatisfaction that the Master experiences by distancing himself from the world of objects.

One of the beauties of Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic is its ambiguity. Finally, I don't feel like I've fully come to grips with Hegel's concept of self-consciousness, nor with the implications that his Master-Slave dialect suggests, and I don't (wholly) blame Hegel's confusing and difficult language. In a certain sense it feels deliberately left unfinished. What, after all, is the use of a theory that answers all the questions?

Schiller's Aesthetic Education

I recently took issue with Kant for insisting that an aesthetic education was possible, while entirely avoiding any actual explanation of such an education. I have found, in Schiller's Aesthetic Education of Man (excepted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition), an attempt to describe just such a curriculum. It occurs in his Ninth Letter, after an explanation of his conviction that Art is the "instrument not provided by the State" which might "open up living springs" of moral justice even from under the heaviest corruption (490). The fourth paragraph he begins thus:

The artist is indeed the child of his age; but woe to him if he is at the same time its ward or, worse still, its minion! Let some beneficent deity snatch the sucking betimes from his mother's breast, nourish him with the milk of a better age, and suffer him to come to maturity under a distanct Grecian sky. The, when he has become a man, let him return, a stranger, to his own century; not, however, to gladden it by his appearance, but rather, terrible like Agamemnon's son, to cleanse and to purify it. (490)

Here Schiller seems to create the vision of the Artist as Outcast that strikes me as so key to the Romantic poets and the Romantic hero alike. Schiller's Artist takes "his theme" from his own time, so it would follow that the more invested he is in understanding and internalizing the experience of his own time the more clearly he will express his theme. But "his form he will borrow from a nobler time, nay, from beyond time altogether, from the absolute, unchanging unity of his being" (490). The Artist for Schiller is necessarily political, necessarily moral, as he is charged with the task, "Impart to the world you would influence a Direction towards the good" (491).

There is something of DFW in this concept of the Artist. Wallace was so invested in the mainstream ideas of socio-normative behavior, inhabited them so fully and naturally, and yet, was continuously is reminded (and constantly reminding) of his (and our) essential isolation, alienation, disunity.

Finally, Schiller even suggests that the formal aspects of the art object are necessarily and appropriately determined by historical context:

...nothing is more common than for both, science as well as art, to pay homage to the spirit of the age, or for creative minds to accept the critical standards of prevailing taste (490).

This acknowledgment of taste as historically and culturally determined is notably absent in Kant, who is so determined toward universality and eternality that he glosses the issue of the Artist altogether.

Reception in Distraction, or the Habitual Aesthetic

Walter Benjamin is extremely interested in the phenomenon he calls "reception in distraction" (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduciblity and Other Writings on Media, Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 40). He sees this sort of experience as central to our understanding of architecture. While we may stand at a distance and look at a building, admiring it on some visual, contemplative level, the majority of our experiences with architecture are primarily tactile and distracted. There seems, in fact, to be something about the entire sensory apparatus involved in touch that demands a certain distraction. Dr. Rasula made the point by an example: it seems perfectly natural for someone to say, "look at this," or even "listen to that," but it strikes us as odd to be told to "touch" something. Our tactile experience is not attuned to focused attention.

Benjamin sees in film this capacity for reception through distraction, for learning not by way of direct contemplation, but through the development of a sort of habit. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller also seems to place the ideal receptive environment for Art in the realm of distracted attention. When meeting your audience, he advises the Artist:

The seriousness of your principles will frighten them away, but in the play of your semblance they will be prepared to tolerate them; for their taste is purer than their heart, and it is here that you must lay hold of the timorous fugitive. In vain will you assail their precepts, in vain condemn their practice; but on their leisure hours you can try your shaping hand. Banish from their pleasures caprice, frivolity, and coarseness, and imperceptibly you will banish these from their actions and, eventually, from their inclinations too (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 492).

Schiller here is still interested in preserving the concept of high Art, which Benjamin largely rejects in his attempt to reframe the debate around a consideration of all those things which are considered outside the realm of Art and thus are ignored by the critical eye. However, the similarity between their suggestions for ideal audience reception cannot be denied; both have something to do with entertainment.

The passage from Schiller also contains an undercurrent of the propagandistic, as if the artist must be quite sneaky in the insertion of his "principles." Even Schiller's phrasing smacks of the manifesto. He paints the audience as a "timorous fugitive" which the artist must "lay hold of," and the current customs of the audience (his frivolity) the artist must "banish."

Benjamin saw in film's capacity for "reception in distraction" the possibility of a great boon to the proletariat, who might be educated by film of man's relationship to the apparatus. Schiller, too, saw in this receptive mode the capacity for positive social change. History, unfortunately, has played out quite differently. The film medium was hugely successful in spreading the propaganda of the Nazi regime, and continues to be dominated by those interested in personal economic and political gain. So too are many of the media forms that represented Benjamin's great hope for the proletariat's recognition of itself as a class - the television, the radio, the newspaper. And the type of Artist which Schiller was interested in developing remains designated largely to obscurity: in art schools, in English departments, in Music programs, in theaters, Schiller's Artist is still largely studied only in contemplation, rather than in distraction.

Wordsworth seems to recognize (and to some extent embody) this continuing contradiction. He at once recognizes the dilapidated state of the High Arts, which are "driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse" while he at the same time attests to the "indestructible qualities of the human mind" (Norton, p. 564). The eventual triumph of art (which in his mind is not too far off) he places in the hands of "men of great power" who will oppose the "degrading thirst" of popular culture "with far more distinguished success" than he himself can offer (564). How ironic, though, that Wordsworth insists on the employment in high poetry of the language and of the common man while simultaneously turning his nose up at the types of diversion that same common man seems to enjoy best. And he makes no attempt to explain how his "men of great power" might draw the major portion of humanity away from the "gross and violent stimulants" of popular entertainment (563).

It is part of Benjamin's interest to rectify this imbalance. If we are to make this transition toward the Good or True, he seems to say, it will not be by shifting the interests of the larger population to align with our ideas about Art, but rather by realigning our interest in the aesthetic to include those forms that interest the larger population to begin with. This idea in the hands of those who seek power, however, can have some very negative implications. Benjamin closes the Artwork Essay by attributing to the National Socialist movement the motto "fiat ars--pereat mundus" (Artwork, p. 42). And this condemnation of Nazi political aestheticism mirrors perfectly the words with which Schiller closes his Aesthetic Education:

Surround them, wherever you meet them, with the great and noble forms of genius, and encompass them about with the symbols of perfection, until Semblance conquer Reality, and Art triumph over Nature (Norton, p. 492).

This charge, minus the last 5 words which identify the Ideal in the outcome, suggests what all the greatest propagandists in history have realized. Namely, that if you can surround them "wherever you meet them" you can eventually reach the point when your Semblance, whatever it might be, will conquer Reality, will indeed become Reality. The Third Reich surely recognized in this charge a very specific opportunity, that very opportunity which Benjamin identifies as the "aestheticizing of politics" (Artwork, p. 42). By realigning the Ideal that is Art with their own political motivations, they could lay claim to that same Ideal.

These dangers (inevitabilities?) are latent also in Kant. I have already explored the difficulties which I see as arising from Kant's concept of a disinterested aesthetic, but that same disinterest quickly becomes dangerous when taken up as the ideology of a despotic political regime. Kant anticipates as much:

...however much debate there may be about whether it is the statesman or the general who deserves the greater respect in comparison to the other, aesthetic judgment decides in favor of the latter. Even war, if it is conducted with order and reverence for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and at the same time makes the mentality of the people who conduct it in this way all the more sublime, the more dangers it has been exposed to and before which it has been able to assert its courage; whereas a long peace causes the spirit of mere commerce to predominate, along with base selfishness, cowardice and weakness... (Norton, p. 439)

Compare this with Benjamin's assertion that

All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements of the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations (Artwork, p. 41).

Both Benjamin and Schiller have high hopes for the ability of art (variously defined) to move people toward the morally good, but they both fall short of defining the method by which this movement should best be accomplished. They differ from Wordsworth, who still looks forward to a return to more concentrated study of Art. Benjamin and Schiller both hope to locate the work of Art before an audience who is distracted, who is not interested in "learning" or "contemplating", who is entertained and thus can be influenced on an level analogous with Freud's unconscious. However, they (and we) continually run up against a public whose distracted attention seems more naturally attuned to the influence of powerbrokers.

Or, is there something about the mediums of mass that make them more useful to the propagandist than the artist?

Some Conceptions of the Sublime

Kant's description of the Sublime is given short shrift in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (at least so far as it is anthologized in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism). Mostly, his understanding of the Sublime has a great deal to do with size, and I do sort of like the idea of the disconnect between those large things that we can "imagine" and the vast numbers that we can "conceptualize," so to speak. This is the Mathematical Sublime, and Kant says, "Nature is thus sublime in those of its appearances the intuition of which brings with them the idea of its infinity" (435). So, I'd imagine that the contemplation of space or vast oceans might be occasion for an experience of the Sublime.

However, Kant misses an opportunity (once again?) in his insistence that we take no interest in the actual purpose of the object we contemplate. He loves to use the flower as an example of beauty, of a true purposiveness that we can contemplate without reference to any actual purpose. However, it seems by allowing ourselves to follow that idea of purpose into the flower we might easily be exposed to some experiences of Mathematical Sublimity that, for Kant, are strictly off limits.

A closer examination of the function of a flower would expose to us the reproductive function that pollination holds for the plant. By way of the idea of pollination we might come to the complex interplay between flower and bee, and then between bee and beehive. (Say nothing of what connections we might encounter were we to pursue the idea of reproduction.) We'd encounter all of those bees working together in some way (there is some musical quality to it - vibrations and dances) to create something as fantastically complex and beautiful as a honeycomb. A consideration of the uses for the honey-comb might lead us to the bear (and thence no doubt to the storybook, to our childhood) or to the marketplace (and there find either the warmth of the kitchen table or the neon glow of the cereal aisle). Following either of these two lines of thought, in any of the many ways that they could be followed (not to mention the many ways in which they themselves interrelate), leads inevitably to a direct experience of the infinite, to our own interconnectedness in and with the natural world, and thus the Sublime, as represented in something as simple and "merely beautiful" as a flower.

As complex a web as this run at ultimate purpose may seem, it is one that our brains accomplish often and almost instantaneously. It is that sense of the interconnectedness of all things that is familiar to most of us in our moments of deepest clarity, and it seems that it comes, not from a refusal to invest interest in or account for the purpose of an object, but rather as a result of our total and instantaneous investment in the discovery of such a purpose. At its core it seems a Scientific endeavor, this deep inquiry into the nature of reality, but it nevertheless delivers us up to a true sense of the Sublime.

Burke is more willing to allow for the invasion of emotion into his conception of both the beautiful and the sublime, which he identifies as producing "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling" (459). He recognizes as the source of these experiences some level of individual investment, and he seems to set beauty and sublimity on an oppositional axis. Beauty is associated with the experience of pleasure which Burke associates with our relation to "society;" Sublimity he suggests springs from our private fears and pains which he locates in our drive toward "self-preservation" (458).

Burke's conviction that "the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those that enter on the part of pleasure" would be interesting to follow into works like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings which seem to suggest as much in their entire characterization of "darkness" versus "light." And yet, with very few exceptions, it is the powers of light - associated as Burke's beauty with pleasure and the larger society - which prevail.

It is telling that Burke ends with a list of oppositional qualities that he attributes to the beautiful (small, smooth, light, delicate) and the sublime (vast, neglected, gloomy, solid) and then comments on just such an experience as I outlined above:

In the infinite variety of natural combinations we must expect to find the qualities of things the most remote imaginable from each other united in the same object. We must expect also to find combinations of the same kind in the works of art. But when we consider the power of an object upon our passions, we must know that when and thing is intended to affect the mind by the force of some predominant property, the affection produced is like like to be the more uniform and perfect, if all the other properties or qualities of the object be of the same nature... (460).

Because Burke has positioned the two qualities of Beauty and the Sublime as fundamentally opposed to one another, he seems to want to downplay those incidences where we experience a combination. He skirts the issue with his appeal to "the infinite variety of natural combinations" as a source of what he seems to think of as an occasional mistake in the fabric of his dualism. Indeed, even for those occasions he insists, "does it prove, that they are any way allied, does it prove even that they are no opposite and contradictory?" By his lack of interest in pursuing the question, we are given his assumption that it has already been answered.

(An important [and relevant] note about my claims to the way that Burke "ends": I am, of course, still working out of my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, and what I have given as Burke's ending is in fact the ending he is given by Leitch and the other editors of the volume. I find this both troubling and entertaining. Troubling in the knowledge that, in order to speak expertly on the subject I ought to follow all trails before developing my conclusion. Entertained by the knowledge that any attempt to follow those trails would last until eternity and thus preclude my ever finally forming my opinion. Furthermore, I detect even in this minor dilemma an interaction between the social aspects of pleasure and the private concept of pain, a fact which helps me be confident in my reservations regarding Burke's dichotomy).

Kant's Beauty

This post concerns the selections by Kant in the 2nd edition of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. The selection is taken from Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, which I understand to be his '3rd Critique'. I should say from the gate that I know little or nothing of Kant other than what the editors of this massive compendium have either selected for me to read or mentioned in their introduction to the selection. That is, I suspect that Kant's first two critiques (those of Pure Reason and Practical Reason) must bear heavily on his third, but what of the former is not specifically referenced or explained in the latter must necessarily (for the purposes of this post) be assumed not to exist.

That said, I have the distinct impression of several limitations to the understanding of beauty in Kant's Critique. 

The editors suggest that, for Kant and his contemporaries, the aesthetic quality of a natural phenomenon or a work of art "is seen as superior to all others" (406). In his aim to raise beauty to a level of human awareness that he sees as essential to our 'humanness,' it seems like Kant risks making his entire argument idealistic, and thus in no way related to what it means to be human.

It might be easier to begin by an exploration of what, for Kant, is explicitly not beauty.  Kant insists in a strict division between what one considers 'beautiful' and what one might consider 'agreeable' or 'good.' The latter two experiences, as described by Kant, are a great deal more familiar to my own interactions with the world, both natural and artistic, and so are a bit easier to explain.

Things that are 'agreeable' are things that make us want more. That is to say, if I am hanging out at a park, while there I might think about how beautiful the park is and lament the loss of so much greenspace in today's society and wish that there were more places like this one. Likewise, and perhaps while at the same park, I might see a beautiful woman and imagine what it would be like to have a relationship with her. For Kant, I made a mistake in calling both the park and the woman beautiful. Because I invested some interest in the park (by wishing that there were more like it) and in the woman (by wishing that I could have more contact with her), I cannot judge the beauty of either thing. I am too involved, so to speak.

Those things that are 'good,' according to Kant, are things which I invest some moral or ethical interest in. I might see a documentary about missionary work in Africa, which I might take as a beautiful expression of social justice. Contrarily, I might be repelled by the images from the Holocaust or the symbolic imagery of the Nazi regime. Here again, by investing my (this time moral) interest in the scene before me, in both cases I have precluded myself from being eligible to determine their beauty. 

Kant insists:

"If the question is whether something is beautiful, one does not want to know whether there is anything that is or that could be at stake, for us or for someone else, in the existence of the thing, but rather how we judge it in mere contemplation" (415). 

The ability to make this distinction of beauty is called "taste," and Kant insists that there is such a thing as good taste and poor taste, and that taste can even be taught.  He doesn't, however, give any indication of what a curriculum for 'taste-education' might look like, except to suggest that we must learn beauty through "exemplars." It occurs to me that in the idea of exemplars there is a sort of recursive loop of causality.  A begging the question, perhaps,which forever puts the onus of the Decision on a previous generation.  It suggests, I guess, that our current understanding of beauty is determinate solely on some previous historical or personal understanding. 

On a purely psychological level, it is as if to say, that what I find to be beautiful today, and to have that certain--je ne sais quai--is predicated entirely on my own, individual, previous experiences of beauty.  So taste is developed by experiencing a great deal of beauty.  Since Kant seems interested in the education of taste, it would seem a relevant question to ask, who points the way? Who takes on the education of taste to others?  And what effect do the opinions of those teachers have on the opinions of their students?  I suspect, a great deal.

Kant never ventures a guess, though.  He leaves the implication sort of out there, suggesting maybe that the answer is spiritual or religious or, it seems most likely, guisedly political. To deal with the problem, Kant structures a sort of end all, which he calls "subjective universality" (419). Kant wants us to be able to see something that we enjoy, an experience that Kant recognizes is an entirely subjective experience, and to lay claim to that object in a way that can be universal. He does this by creating a space in our mind for "contemplation" which is free from interest.

"Since...the person making the judgment feels himself completely free with regard to the satisfaction that he devotes to the object, he cannot discover as grounds of the satisfaction any private conditions, pertaining to his subject alone, and must therefore regard it as grounded in those that he can also presuppose in everyone else; consequently he must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure for everyone" (418-419).

Kant's explanation of this distanced state relies heavily on what he calls "a free play" of cognition (421).  This seems, for Kant, to end the argument.  This idea of "cognition in general" is the most concrete a definition for the inner workings of our minds that Kant is interested in pursuing.  For someone interested in Pure Reason, this seems like a shallow exploration, and I wonder if perhaps this is what Eagleton means when he calls the Kant's aesthetic an ideology.

To pursue the issue myself, then: I suspect, based on what I know of the current scientific understanding of brain functioning, that Kant's disinterested state of mind doesn't exist.  It seems that on a physical and biological level our minds are in a constant interaction with the world around us.  The act of seeing itself, something that is necessary even for Kant's "free play" to be set in motion, involves a hugely complex electrical interplay between external world and brain. (If, that is, one is even prepared to accept the dichotomy.) Moreover, the existence of the human subconscious as explained by Freud casts immediate doubt on man's ability to actually understand, or reason with, the functions of his own mind. When the way that reality is framed in your mind bears only a tentative relationship to the abstract "real," as Kant's seems to suggest previously in his discussion of "things-as-they-are", all Pure Reason seems resigned to the realm of the post hoc.

In the end, Kant is perhaps primarily concerned with preserving the idea of a universal beauty; that is, he believes deeply (one might say a priori) that a concept of beauty must exist that is not influenced by culture or background or context or emotional state.  Kant himself asserts that to say that everyone has their own taste “would be as much as to say that there is no taste at all, i.e., no aesthetic judgment that could make a rightful claim to the assent of everyone” (419-420). Kant wants to preserve this idea of a "rightful claim," and he goes to great lengths to do so.  

Kant even seems to recognize at times that his theory has severe limitations. These are most notable where Kant seems to allow himself a step outside his a priori assumptions in order to justify them in some way. While Kant insists upon the "universality" of an object's beauty, he admits that, when a claim to the beautiful is made:

"One wants to submit the object to his own eyes, just as if his satisfaction depended on sensation; and yet, if one then calls the object beautiful, one believes oneself to have a universal voice, and lays claim to the consent of everyone" (420).

The entire communicative value of beauty seems lost in this sentence.  What good is a claim to aesthetic which must constantly be double-checked.  Furthermore, what is suggested but notably left unsaid is the question of what happens when, having submitted what you call beautiful to my eye, I decide that it is, in fact, quite ugly? Which of us has poor taste, and what implications does this have if what you have shown me is an exemplar? If you were the one tasked with training me in Taste, you have either utterly failed (either because of the inadequacy of your system, or the inferiority of my mind) or you must demand that it is I who have poor taste.  Either option seems to imply some degree of interest.

Despite his insistence on avoiding rules or standards for art, Kant (accidentally?) includes some clues as to his own conception of the beautiful.  He includes examples of architecture (a home, a palace), animal and plant life (a flower, a Bird of Paradise, "certain sea animals"), visual art (the drawing) and even (in spite of his later insistence on the distinction between art and handicraft) certain textiles ("the garment").  To me, these few examples in themselves suggest a certain political understanding of what qualifies for beauty, perhaps more tellingly by what they leave out than by what they include.  For example, what is it about a Bird of Paradise or a flower that makes them beautiful that would not also qualify the vulture and the thistle? what aura of "purposiveness" exists for the former but not for the latter?  Likewise, the suggesting that "certain sea creatures" would be considered beautiful implies in its very phrasing the idea that other sea creatures exist, and are excluded from qualification.  Even the choice of "home" and "garment" over other forms of architecture and textile-craft suggest a certain quality of what is comforting, what Kant might call "charm." This implication brings with it the entire realm of cultural determinants which Kant seems so eager to do away with.

By his insistence that beauty live up to his high expectations for the Pure human mind, Kant empties the concept of any definitive value whatsoever, leaving the concept of beauty to designate such cliche objects as flowers and palaces.  If those things that are beautiful are simply those things which attain to some veiled trope of what might be called elegance of form, one might ask, who cares about beauty?