The Ethics of Aesthetics

Sarah James on the possibility of a radical aesthetics

Recently I tried to go and see 'Faces in the Crowd', currently on at the Whitechapel, but was prevented from doing so by a fire that looked like it had started in the next-door Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. As the thick smoke coiled up into the East London sky and the third fire engine arrived, I stood with a crowd of redundant displaced gallery-goers, their little Whitechapel stickers differentiating them from the other equally confused members of the public, and considered how long I could be bothered to wait to look at some art. In the January cold, surrounded by the ringing of sirens and looking on to a burnt-out building, my want for some aesthetic pleasure was momentarily made absurd. Oddly, this experience, in which I was denied the pleasure of viewing art, seemed to have a much more profound effect upon my mood than if I had seen the show as anticipated. It brought to mind the question of what it is that we really want from art, what we should expect from it, the politics of inclusion and exclusion, and the ethics of aesthetics. Questions surrounding the aesthetic, and the Left's relationship with the ideologically problematical category, are obviously not new. Yet although debates dealing with the return of aesthetics have been unfolding since the early 90s,the latest restaging of aesthetics has a very specific inflection – as demonstrated by a series of symposiums held recently at the Tate – this time it's all about ethics and aesthetics. The reappearance of the aesthetic question – on the pages of Art Monthly – in JJ Charlesworth's essay on beauty and (AM279)and Mark Wilsher's response to it (AM280)– as well as the current surge in critiques of Nicolas Bourriaud's thesis for its complicity with the dominant political status quo, testify to the fact that the issues at stake in the refiguring of the relationship between aesthetics and political responsibility in contemporary art are far from resolved. More recently, Dave Beech's derision of Julian Stallabrass's political critique of art (AM 283)made clear that the grounds on which the Left should judge art in the present anti-aesthetic yet post-theoretical times are far from established>

There has been much talk of the possibilities of a newly radicalised aesthetics in recent Leftist discourses under the banner of 'new aestheticism', whose writers are united in their objective to challenge the hegemony of anti-aesthetic theoretical writing and recapture the particularities of aesthetic interpretation. Clearly, central to the Left's engagement with, refusal of, or recuperation of the aesthetic is the possibility of construing a dialectical conception of aesthetic autonomy.

Yet, there is a startling failure in the writings of those who advocate a return to aesthetics to begin convincingly to specify what a radical or in Charlesworth's words a 'disruptive affirmative aesthetics' might look like, or even how aesthetic pleasure can be configured as a site of potential cultural and political conflict. If those critiques levelled at the new aesthetes have claimed that most reconfigurations of the aesthetic embrace the notion of 'sensuous particularities' while neglecting parallel social particularities, homogenising the political, it is clear that both sides of the debate are guilty of homogenising the aesthetic. Further, it is possible that the recent debates surrounding a supposed return of the aesthetic have started off on the wrong foot. Just like other universalities that haunt our post-theoretical times, these debates mistakenly neglect the possibility that the aesthetic, although displaced by identity politics and cultural theory, may have never really been killed off in the first place.

There are clearly endless examples of artworks over the last decade whose logic can be understood not in terms of the anti-aesthetic of the readymade, but whereby the possession of aesthetic value is the starting point for radical subversions – such as Gillian Carnegie's beautiful but absurd paintings, or Margaret Barron's miniature site-specific works that complicate spectatorship and commodification. Equally, a growing dissatisfaction with the post-aesthetic in art writing has led to the re-aestheticisation of even the most pointedly anaesthetic practices of the 70s.A prime example being Briony Fer's recent The Infinite Line which aspires to some sort of Rimbaudian poetics of repetition, reframing artists such as Piero Manzoni and Ed Ruscha firmly within the aesthetic terrain (see AM 283).

In the mid 90s Dave Beech and John Roberts offered their theory of the philistine 1 as a response to the Left's tired reclamation of aesthetics. The philistine supposedly stood for both the spectre of and the negation of the aesthetic. Further, they argue that the philistine is a symptom of alienation and that its ontological status is defined by absence. Theirs is a theory of partisanship that seeks to reconnect art to everyday life and bodily pleasures. In their justification of this cultural construction Beech and Roberts rightly maintained that, after 1968,aesthetics came to be understood as ideology – which permanently altered the sphere of aesthetics. Furthermore, in time, the rise of anti-aesthetic critiques of ideology became aesthetic in themselves – and aesthetics left the sphere of art and philosophy to become theory. While new aesthetes and their critics agree that the epistemological adventures of cultural studies have gone too far, Beech and Roberts argue that as a method for the critical questioning of cultural difference, it has not gone far enough. They suggest that we should be thinking of difference not only in terms of the heterogeneous and diverse, but as division and alienation. In Terry Eagleton's writings this politics of separation means the division of culture and politics, for Beech and Roberts it is about the segregation of pleasure and politics from academia.

In his discussion of aesthetics and entropy Charlesworth addresses the dual development in the last few years of both a move to political art and a simultaneous turn to beauty because of the need 'to recuperate the specificity of art's aesthetic potential'. He concludes that if a revival in aesthetics is to be anything more than a disguised acquiescence to political entropy, then it has to reforge the difficult relationship between a disruptive affirmative aesthetics and a new politics of change. Although he draws attention to the growing distance between academicised discourses and artistic practice, he fails to acknowledge the significant difference between emergent trends in artistic production and the changing fashions in curatorial strategies and biennales, or art criticism, all of which he conflates as vague symptoms of significant cultural turns.

This means that the artificiality of the curatorial repackaging of art as reinvested in aesthetics isn't distinguished from practices which genuinely engage in aesthetic concerns and effects, or a reading of an artwork that seeks to recover neglected aesthetic nuances. Charlesworth's observation that any affirmation of the aesthetic must be directly related to the demands of art's increasingly heterogeneous public, is equally reductive. The problem with Charlesworth's approach to the question of aesthetics and beauty is symptomatic of much Marxist art writing, in that it always comes back to the failure of politics, and in so doing, as Wilsher – in his only valid observation – pointed out, splits contemporary art practices into a reductive opposition; either an 'aesthetics of affirmation' or a politics of direct engagement. In this way, Charlesworth's essay is simply restating a summary of events already established by Beech and Roberts, but at the level of recent occurrences in the art world, that the return to aesthetics can only be understood in relation to the exhaustion of the anti-aesthetic.

Like Beech and Roberts, Charlesworth focuses on the de-radicalisation of anti-aesthetic cultural theory, but not actually on the potential of the aesthetic. When he vaguely gestures at Ian Breakwell or David Thorpe's work, it seems more than slightly ridiculous that his 'affirmative aesthetics' are reduced to cheery colours, and social conflict to the literal transcription of complaints on canvas. Confusingly, Charlesworth seems to assume that aesthetic reflection necessarily banishes conflict and contradiction. He derides Adorno's aesthetics as too easily oppositional, suggesting that aesthetic affirmation might be used to confront and upset the real functioning order, a sentiment that could equally be read as following Adorno.

Wilsher's piece, as opposed to engaging in the apparent return to aesthetics, or offering a critique of Charlesworth, read more like an out-of-date manifesto for the institutionalisation of intertextuality. Wilsher argued that both critique and beauty can coexist in an artwork, and awkwardly translated the formalist judgement of aesthetic wholeness to the totality found in a work's cultural packaging,' the aesthetics of the text'. Yet, amazingly, Wilsher concluded by suggesting the reinstatement of elitist qualitative judgements that are made only by stepping outside of the text. Further, he makes the mistake of conflating critique with 'infinite recursive textuality'. While both may perhaps be antiaesthetic, many recent supposedly political or socially interventionist artworks have also betrayed a strong move away from such an investment in intertextuality – or in other words, the institutionalisation of poststructuralism – and have instead often shown a strong commitment to beauty, as in Jeremy Deller's weak but pretty Bats Emerging from a Cave, 2003.Thus,while Wilsher thinks he is observing the aestheticisation of the textual field, his complaint, without recognising it, concurs with Charlesworth's, since it is aimed at both the implicit aestheticism of cultural theory and the exhaustion of the anti-aesthetic.

The problem with the Left's efforts to consider the re-emergence of the aesthetic comes down to the reinstatement of a binary position between aesthetic or political art, whereby the value judgement of art lies with its political substance and the problem of a politically committed sort of criticism which is unable to account for the persistence of art in anything other than reductively prescriptive terms. While Beech criticises Stallabrass's pessimism ultimately derived from Adorno, what he doesn't say is that it is more the failure of social art history, and not of art, that produces Stallabrass's cynical dead-end musings. For Beech, the problem with such readings is that art is negated through the preservation of art; an out-of-date elitist modernist art. Yet in Beech's own philistinism, he makes exactly the same mistake in relation to aesthetics, which is to say that he can only see it as a bourgeois and sanctified discourse, threatened by knowledge.

Andrew Bowie offers perhaps the most interesting alternative position on aesthetics and the most convincing opposition to Beech and Roberts. 2 Bowie asserts the need for the reinstatement of aesthetics and the ontological primacy of the subject (but not the unified subject). Bowie's argument is useful because it rejects the opposition between reason (politics)and aesthetics and, like Adorno, argues instead that any conception of reason or politics which fails to take account of aesthetics is potentially disastrous. For Bowie, aesthetics continues to be valuable because the tension between the modern autonomy of a work of art (as a manifestation of individual human freedom, which tries, at the growing risk of incomprehensibility, to resist wholesale commodification) and the failed desire for accessibility – for a situation in which the major cognitive, ethical, and political issues of modernity would become accessible to the whole population via aesthetic forms – is still with us, and can't be resolved by the concept of the philistine. Bowie stresses the difference between the essential role aesthetic autonomy can play in defending freedom for new articulations and contexts where the defense of aesthetic autonomy may become mere self-indulgent ideology. Another valuable contribution to the debate about a radical aesthetics has been made by Isobel Armstrong , whose argument stems from several observations: firstly, that both in its deconstruction and consecration the model of the aesthetic remains virtually the same, that the aesthetic under attack by anti-aesthetic positions is always the 19th-century idealistic Kantian/Hegelian aesthetic, which is simply an inappropriate object in the contemporary situation.3 Secondly, that aesthetic production continues, even if aesthetics has been derided: halting the construction of theoretical models that deal with the aesthetic leaves one without a valuable resource with which to analyse contemporary culture. And thirdly, that explorations concerning the politics of beauty, the functions of affect, and emotionality, that have been spurned by the Left, are problematically ceded to reactionaries.

Armstrong points to historical moments when a democratic reading of the aesthetic was taken for granted, for example the 19th-century Chartists who claimed Shakespeare as their own. Armstrong suggests that this tradition is lost in the Left's dominant analyses of the category. But at the same time, Armstrong is quick to point out that evolving another poetics means challenging the politics of the anti-aesthetic by remaking its theoretical base and changing the terms of the argument, not by returning to a pre-theoretical innocence. While the relationship between beauty and democracy – Armstrong's two central aesthetic tropes – is never satisfactorily articulated, she claims that the basis from which to develop a democratic aesthetic can be found in the four components of aesthetic life, already embedded in the processes and practices of consciousness, namely: playing and dreaming, thinking and feeling. These processes are common to everyone, common to what the early Marx called species being. Armstrong thus returns to Marx's 1844 Manuscripts ,for the basis of her argument, just like Beech and Roberts, yet not in terms of exclusion and alienation, but commonality.

Surprisingly, in all of these debates surrounding the possibility of a new aesthetics, neither side mentions the theses of Jacques Rancieère. Yet, Rancière offers a way to rethink the politics of aesthetics.4 He claims that the so called modernist narrative misses the point. Whereas it sees aesthetics as the constitution of a sphere of autonomy which has consequently collapsed in the last decades of the 20th Century, in fact, the terms that it opposes have been tied together since the beginning of the aesthetic regime of art. Crucially, Ranciere argues firstly that in this regime the definition of a specific aesthetic sphere does not withdraw artworks from politics. On the contrary their politicality is linked with that separateness. And secondly, that the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere is not the autonomy of artworks. When this representational regime of art collapses, artworks are merely defined by their belonging to a specific sphere. But that sphere has no definite boundaries; the autonomy of art is also its heteronomy. That duality makes for two politics of aesthetics: art is political, in the aesthetical regime of art, inasmuch as its objects belong to a separate sphere, and it is political inasmuch as its objects have no specific difference with the objects of the other spheres. Although the potential problem with Ranciere's anti-philosophy is the permanent suspension of political intervention itself, his philosophical assaults on philosophy offer a way of bridging the gap between ethics and epistemology within aesthetics; a gap into which any real consideration of a radical aesthetics on the Left, up until now, seems to have fallen

1.Dave Beech and John Roberts, The Philistine Controversy, Verso, London, 2002.
2.Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1990.
3.Isobel Armstrong, Radical Aesthetic, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000.
4.Jacques Ranciere, Esthetique et politique, Francais Editeur, La Fabrique, Paris, 2000.

This feature was originally published in March 2005 / No 284, pp7-10.

Sarah James is an art historian.

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