Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code (2006): Middle volume of a trilogy designed to redefine our understanding of the human body and its relationship to the virtual. Digital technologies need not be dehumanizing; they have the potential to furnish rich resources for expanding human embodiment. Human experience embraces a mixed reality, our bodies—beyond existing as representations of an image—are capable of experiencing ontological, preconscious forms of tactile perception within this mixed environment. We can manipulate technological resources to expand our notions of embodiment in order to acquire more agency and connectedness to others—bodily reincoding, if you will.

As a Merleau-Ponty scholar, cultural theorist, and comparative media studies instructor affiliated with the English Department at the University of Chicago, Hansen seems to be addressing an academic audience interested in visual culture, subjectivity, and philosophy. The language is “wonky” and overly dense, often lacking clear definitions.

My question: I might actually like this work, particularly the concept of transindividuation found at the end of Part I, but Hansen makes it really hard to translate this argument into practical, everyday terms. The art examples are helpful, and I know that Hansen is continually troubling the terms “natural” and “artificial.” Nonetheless, I really hate the Wii-Fit machine someone brought into my home. It freaks me out and feels creepy…I much prefer to attend the yoga class at my own gym, where I can hear soft conversations, smell a familiar gym-like scent, and feel really connected to an environment and an experience that is not synthetic in any way. Anyone else struggling with some of these distinctions?

Anna Munster, Materializing New Media (2006): In order to examine contemporary concepts of embodiment and dematerialization, Munster seeks to develop a creative genealogy for the digital and disrupt the idea that there is one history or one set of values embedded in its technologies, its spaces, or its aesthetic. Combining Deleuze’s concept of the fold with Bergson’s work on duration, Munster argues that an enfolding of the digital into a baroque aesthetic can create a new space for understanding connections, differences, and critical disruptions between bodies, digital information culture, and the flows within (and between) each of these systems.

[The baroque, as a differential form of logic, produces a “pulsing field of aesthetic forces” that resists the dominance of precision, order, and clarity of form. The baroque embraces curiosity, wonder, and sensation as it reconfigures relationships to space, temporality, knowledge, history, memory, and technology.]

This is another text written for an audience interested in visual culture, subjectivity, and philosophy. The language is less “wonky” and includes better definitions, but tends to wander. I would like talk more about the distinction between engagement and connection. Munster seems to privilege engagement but her evidence seems slim for this assertion and I think Hansen uses the term connection. Hmm.

Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (2000): In the portions of the text we take up, Shusterman works to disrupt the mind/body split and presents a new form of aesthetic theory as both philosophy and as a practical art of living. Shusterman argues for a return to the body as a critical site for understanding and developing aesthetics (as representation and as experience) as well as reworking existing forms of aesthetic theory in order become more bodily-focused. While Shusterman values pleasure and personal fulfillment, he wants to promote our chances for human survival in a highly fragmented, postmodern world heavily influenced by technology. Some references to a democratic project, but not developed in the chapters we review.

Shusterman works, in part, through Benjamin (reclaiming aura), Adorno, and a number of Anglo-American theorists, including John Dewey, to establish his argument for a somatic turn. His project selects strands from each theorist, and explains why most of their critical work does not go far enough to address contemporary concerns. His audience is Western, but he is trying to undo a number of binaries. With his Anglo-American analysis, Shusterman starts with a more expansive view of Western thought than we have seen from other texts. He also embraces non-Western traditions in his work. He is setting a new agenda for the twenty-first century, and calls for other scholars to engage in particular kinds of somaesthetic analysis.

I would like to address Chapter 8 in class. As someone who found rolfing to be a life-changing experience, I valued Shusterman’s discussion of the Alexander technique, Reichan bioenergetics, and the Feldenkrais Method as important tools for facilitating somaesthetic experiences, and I agree with his assertion that these methods hold promise for increasing care of our bodies in contemporary culture. While he ends the Chapter promoting Feldenkrais over the other two, I still not sure that Chapter 8 fully supported critical connections (practically and theoretically) between these methods and more universal concerns with identity, spirituality, and negotiating new relationships with nature (161-162).

Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, “Lexicon Rhetoricae” (1931, 1968): Our portions of this text reflect Burke’s belief that the social, embodied nature of language calls for a rethinking of classical rhetoric and further reflects his call for a broader form of the aesthetic that embraces more of the body, and turns away from the perceived rationality of science or aesthetic’s purely political functions.

It would seem this text was written, in part, for scholars in newly developing fields of communication and rhetoric. It seems to also be speaking to a number of cultural influences, particularly new image-based mediums (although the first edition was too early for television), and a science-oriented tendency to denigrate imagination.

Burke works with the body, the somatic, in very specific ways. I think it would be helpful to examine these portions of the text in greater detail when we meet later today.

Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001): Steiner argues that Kant’s denigration of mere beauty, and his definition of the sublime as a state of perception or understanding which transcends (or exists outside of) our daily, embodied lives, greatly influenced many avant-garde movements and subsequently produced forms of creative expression in Western cultures (French, English, American) that are oppressive and de-humanizing. The text identifies disruptions or breaks with this aesthetic ideology and unabashedly calls for an expansion of contemporary notions regarding the aesthetic to embrace representations that speak to a fundamental search for pleasure and connection.

The first female voice in our syllabus, Steiner is a professor of comparative literature and arguably interprets art history as an “outsider.” (My current art history professor, who received her PhD in Art History from John Hopkins in 2003, had never heard of Steiner.) Nonetheless, I think interdisciplinary work is critically important and Steiner’s text, as cultural criticism, is designed to reach a large audience at a time when Steiner perceives some kind of momentum building for a significant rethinking of aesthetics and the aesthetic.

Like Sarah, I was confused by the format Steiner chose for this book—its own aesthetic could have been more connected to the visual and I am curious about the absence of color even for the central figures Steiner presents, as well as the decision to not incorporate these images throughout the text.

Rather than raising some specific questions, I would like to throw out a couple of observations as discussion starters:

While I loved most of this book, I found myself wincing on occasion at Steiner’s lack of criticality regarding her own social positioning, and I found her blithe use of some terminology to be quite problematic. For example, what I perceived to be her privileging of “the domestic” seemed too narrow, insensitive, and class-based. For many people, their “domestic” experiences are not about pleasure, empathy, or connection. I respect her search for forms of expression that are life-affirming and her notion of integrating or fusing daily experience with more universal concerns, but I reject the term “domestic” as a valuable place for beginning or undertaking this kind of cultural reconstruction.

I found her readings of particular art works to be quite over-determined. I disagreed strongly with her interpretation of Bonnard’s Nude in Bathtub. Bonnard’s lifeless representation of his (schizophrenic?) wife, Marthe, reminds me more of Jennifer Lynch’s Boxing Helena than a “dreamer in a tub projecting a jewel-like domesticity” (169). Her reading of the intersections between race, class, and art in Basquiat's work seemed shallow as well.

Finally, I found her failure to evaluate connections between the political and artistic expression to be a big flaw. Her discussion of body art and tattoos is one-sided and works through concepts of degeneracy, rather addressing the semiotic potential embedded in this kind of expression. I can’t identify a specific American example, but can draw upon my familiarity with Chilean writer and performance artist, Diamela Eltit, who simultaneously performed, photographed and video-recorded acts of self-mutilation to express how deeply bound she was as a woman existing under Augusto Pinochet’s regime. Her skin became the only “voice” available to her. This kind of art is perhaps, most beautifully, about connection, not alienation or de-humanization. I think Steiner's text does not include a sufficient examination of critical intersections between the political and artistic expression because this discussion would complicate her notions of beauty in very problematic ways.

Relational Aesthetics

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998, 2002). This text presents relational aesthetics as a theory of form based (largely) on Western European artistic production occurring in the 1990s and the theoretical work of Félix Guatarri. Bourriaud argues that art can no longer provide utopian discourses, and that modern art must move beyond melancholy. He values relational art, as a new kind of avant-garde, that provides critical participatory models of human expression, and works to produce “possible universes” or new ways to live by re-figuring human relationships in different social contexts.

In Bourriaud's view, these new works of art represent, produce, or prompt “inter-human” relations and provide social interstices as free spaces that are more democratic and allow for a (brief) restructuring of everyday experiences within the social world (16,45). Art is an encounter, not a representational object or a commodity. Bourriaud wants to get away from the traditional view of the museum as a worthwhile site for interpreting or understanding human experience. He wants to promote artistic practices that work from the “whole of human relations” and their social contexts, rather than from independent, private spaces (29,113).

This collection of essays seems to be designed for a particularly limited, educated audience familiar with the artwork and the theorists Bourriaud references. His textual connections to Marx, Benjamin, Adorno, and Bourdieu lead me to think that Bourriaud is trying to push some of the earlier work on Marxism and aesthetics in new directions in order to confront globalization and rapid technological changes.

Bourriaud briefly addresses some of the criticism that has been focused on relational artistic practices, noting that because they generally occur in galleries and art centres, they contradict the notion of social access that underpins their very meaning (82). I did not find his defense (urging his readers to compare these innovations to the staid landscape of art history), to be very convincing and I am wondering how everyone else reacted this section. I am still wondering how relational art might, indeed, be able to reach the kind of audience that Bourriaud's text seems to be envisioning.

Jacques Rancière, Selections from The Politics of the Aesthetic, (2000, 2004): In this series of interviews, Rancière explains his scholarship which seems to extend or build upon Foucault’s work to challenge existing constructions of history and politics, and to further redefine aesthetics and the aesthetic.

Working through a concept of the distribution of the sensible, Rancière argues that implicit law (as varying degrees of subjectivization?) defines and shapes human perception in the realm of both the political and the aesthetic. He explains that this distribution system has produced three separate artistic periods--an ethical regime of images, the representative regime of art, and the aesthetic regime of art. He believes the aesthetic regime holds great promise for abolishing hierarchical distributions of the sensible, but remains problematic.

I thought this was a very difficult text to decipher. The audience seems to be French intellectuals writing after Bourdieu. I’m guessing that Rancière may be in dialogue with Bourriaud, even though I did not find any mention of Bourriaud or the concept of relational aesthetics. The Forward in this text references an interest in creating new modes of perception as well as inducing novel forms of political subjectivity (9), and seems to be discussing some kind of recuperative effort after the limiting discourses of modernism and post-modernism: art is not dead or emptied of meaning but remains a critical site for understanding visible forms of doing and making, and manifest ways of seeing and thinking.

If I could be with all of you, I would love to talk more about connections between immanence (referenced frequently, but never defined) and the sublime as we have traced it through Kant and some of our earlier texts. I am also wrestling with concepts of freedom (need more Foucault here) and art’s ability to lead only to projects of domination or emancipation (19).

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979, 1984): Our assigned portions of this text represent a full frontal assault on Kant through Marx and Weber. Taste is not some universal to be uncovered, but is defined within particular historical contexts as a socially constructed concept which is driven by systems of class and privilege.

Trained as a sociologist, Bourdieu employs a rigorous (parodist?) form of scientific investigation to examine how taste is determined from an early age by one’s exposure to varying degrees of social, economic, educational, and cultural capital. His analysis continually debunks Kant’s work regarding the definition of true beauty as disinterest, the existence of “pure” forms of perception, and the idea of certain kinds of subjectivity as universal. (Jennifer’s posting on Kant was very helpful to review this week!) I found Bourdieu’s careful examination of the oppositions that work to support the delineation and the perpetuation of high and low forms of culture to be particularly intriguing: beauty as high culture/charm as low culture; pleasure as distanced forms of enjoyment for high culture/enjoyment as immediate gratification for low culture.

I’m not quite sure about Bourdieu’s audience here. His format is fascinating—part reportage, part literature, part researcher’s meta-reflective log, part “objective” gathering of evidence with precise calculations and exact charting. Perhaps, like Williams, he is trying to reach across disciplines in the academy, and he may be concerned about social stratification becoming increasingly more solidified in Western European cultures, if not the world. By presenting multiple forms within the space of this text, Bourdieu seems to be speaking to this stratification and simultaneously undoing it. (He is French, after all).

By the time I reached Bourdieu's chart on page 59 (what would make a beautiful photo), I started to wonder whether strains of the absurd are also working through this text. Is Bourdieu's "science" highlighting how powerful taxonomies and classifications (gone wild) are suppressing human experience in ridiculous, but frighteningly arbitrary and meaningless ways?

Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990): Our readings within this text highlight Eagleton’s interest in linking Marxism to an ideology of the aesthetic that recognizes the value of the aesthetic as a fully embodied experience which can serve as a critical political tool. Eagleton believes this ideology can offer more of a moral vision than the (empty) ideologies associated with Postmodernism.

Eagleton is particularly concerned about a Post-Reagan Western culture where the left has lost relevancy, and the right is continuing to rise. He wants to reinvigorate Marxism to provide more realistic, more unifying (less polarizing) alternatives for society. He argues that the aesthetic can be an emancipatory force which can produce a new kind of subjectivity, a deep inwardness that fosters individual freedom and self-governance within commonality, and provides a space for reconciliation (25). Eagleton notes this power is "double-edged." While it can be liberating, it can also overstimulate bodily pleasures and desires (28). Do we think he addresses this tension adequately? Also, I am wondering who's in for the Trivial Pursuit version of European philosophers versus Irish writers? And might this exercise involve claret or whiskey? Chart that!

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977): This text carefully outlines how Marxism needs to embrace a more comprehensive understanding of culture as a dynamic, integrated process of human development. We are constituted fundamentally as social beings and our articulations (language, art) extend beyond fixed notions of economic determinism or ideology.

Williams engages in a dialogue with Adorno and Marcuse, but his straight-forward tone, the accessible language, and the clear format found within this text all indicate to me that Williams hoped to reach a broader audience. Williams’ design choices (no footnotes, short chapters, larger print, and chapter titles in a “roadmap” format) all seemed to reflect a desire to reach an interdisciplinary academic audience, and perhaps these choices are related to the scope of the project that Williams presents. Williams writes during a time of radical change and great social upheaval. He wants Marxism to become a useful tool for addressing human alienation and despair, but he feels it has been misinterpreted, interpreted too narrowly, or applied in unrealistic ways and consequently, Marxism overlooks or demonizes critically important aspects of human production that occur outside of production for consumption.

I would like to explore Sarah’s question regarding hegemony, as I felt that this discussion was one of the most useful aspects of Williams’ text. As Sarah posits, “How does Williams' discussion of hegemony directly relate to our discussions of aesthetics and the ability to "escape" or "transcend" reality through art?

If hegemony encompasses a dynamic, fluid, non-totalizing interaction between the dominant, the counter-dominant, and the alternative dominant (112-113), Williams believes these complex interactions occur through active, formative, and transformational processes which can be evidenced through art (114). Perhaps art’s power to signify—through ruptures, breaks, openness, reconfigurations—is a kind of generative power that is transcendent or presents an escape from contemporaneous experience. In any event, this language in Williams' text seems to align his work more closely with texts by Adorno and Marcuse which affirm that art can be a critical site of signification that is revolutionary, rather than merely political.

Michael Bérubé, The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (2005): This introductory chapter entitled “Engaging the Aesthetic,” critiques what Bérubé perceives to be a limited understanding of the aesthetic within cultural studies. Working particularly through Mukarovsky and Williams, Bérubé argues that the aesthetic should not be viewed as an abstract "return to beauty" or a transcendent realm of experience. Bérubé wants cultural studies to embrace a more multi-faceted view of the aesthetic as a critical site of human experience (and creative imagination) that is socially constituted in very specific ways. He calls for cultural studies theorists to more closely evaluate and historicize both the production and the reception of a multitude of cultural forms.

T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970): Combining strands from Kant, Hegel, and Marx, this text repeatedly engages in dialectics of form and content to conclude that modern art is philosophically significant. Due to its autonomous nature, modern art provides a space for aesthetic production that incorporates disparate aspects of human experience, challenges existing social conditions, and concomitantly presents utopian notions of freedom.

Adorno writes for an audience concerned with intersections between philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, the death of religion, and the crisis of meaning in modern society. He assumes his audience is familiar with “modern” art produced in the West since 1910, theories of Western philosophy, and the body of work originating more or less with Sigmund Freud.

Deeply concerned that Eurocentric discussions regarding the meaning of human existence are headed in the wrong direction, Adorno disagrees to some extent with ideas advanced by Marx and Benjamin that art should serve primarily as a political tool. Referencing Hegel, Adorno notes that art is never static and is always becoming; it changes over time and through different cultural constructions. The dialectic of art resembles Marx's social/labor dialectic as they both have the same teleology (7), but art is an autonomous entity, as a "momentary standing still," and as a fractured social artifact (9, 10).

Adorno wrestles here with nihilism. He wants to call attention to modern art, primarily visual work and drama, and its inherent ability to authentically engage with a crisis of meaning. He challenges the utility of psychoanalytic theory because he feels that alienation and the desire to bring about a better world are more than a purely subjective language of the unconscious. He also finds Kant's work to be too limiting because it focuses on a concept of disinterestedness, which ignores the central importance of satisfaction and pleasure with respect to aesthetic experience. Modern art can speak directly to domination or repression, and the fact that social conditions deny happiness, but it can simultaneously promise that happiness does indeed lie elsewhere (17). Adorno is calling attention to this phenomenon as a way to redeem the site of art as a space for meaning or signification, to move intellectual thinking away from the view that art only serves as a space of pure negation.


Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1977) : Building upon Adorno’s work, Marcuse affirms that art is revolutionary, but he argues that art’s ability to be autonomous allows art to function as an ideology, rather than as just a political, class-reconfiguring kind of tool. Art can resist social oppression, but then also transcend this same repression (or sublimate it) to re-present new sensibilities of pleasure and freedom.

Marcuse assumes his audience has an intimate familiarity with Adorno’s work and Marxist theory. His analysis works primarily through literature and drama to explore the specific qualities of art that transcend socio-historical contexts of production and still allow this medium to present or enact universal principles. He agrees that art can change political consciousness, but he wants to demonstrate that art can also change more fundamental, more “inward” aspects of human consciousness and he reminds his audience that both kinds of transformation are important steps toward achieving true liberation. Essentially, Marcuse wants Marxism to address basic human needs for beauty (fulfillment, tranquility, freedom) and sensation (including the erotic and pleasure).

I was drawn to Marcuse’s invocation of Proust, the way that Marcuse highlighted art’s motivating ability to preserve a remembrance of things past—its ability to memorialize moments of gratification and happiness or pleasure, as well as moments of human failure. Can this really happen if art (in infinite forms) is not in general circulation? Can this happen if art is only available as a discourse for the privileged, or a privileged leisure class?

I also have questions regarding the specific examples of art each author seems to be valuing. If I am reading Adorno correctly, not all forms of modern art fit within his analysis, and Marcuse does not seem to like Warhol too much. I am trying to identify specific examples of art that can function in form and content as the kind of universal envisioned by Adorno and Marcuse. At the same time, classifications and taxonomies are dangerously limiting and it seems that both authors were very careful to avoid this trap. Thoughts?

Thar She Blows:
The Bayside Middle School Sixth Grade Band Performance

As I entered the stark white gym last Thursday night, I encountered a familiar cacophony: the loud buzz of friendly chatter, the muted whine of over-tired babies, younger siblings squabbling noisily over seats or toys, and the erratic clank of metal chairs as they hit each other or were scraped against the newly waxed gym floor. A few minutes before 7pm, these sounds diminished as the Sixth Grade Band entered the gym in more or less single-file fashion, and ascended the rickety portable stage. During this drawn-out opening, many parents repositioned themselves to get better phone or video shots, and this reshuffling caused some further commotion, but the noisy swell died down as Mrs. White came out from behind a (dusty) purple curtain and waved to the audience.

When the Band Director, also known to the assembled parents as Carol White, assumed the stage, forty-seven members of her Sixth Grade Band fidgeted nervously in their seats. As they lifted their instruments (almost) in unison to begin their concert, looks of unease and uncertainty were shared among a number of the band members. These glances could have been attributed, in part, to the anxiety of performing live and perhaps even the mandatory dress code. Many of the young gentlemen seemed to be chafing almost unconsciously against the obligatory “shirt-and-tie” attire, while many young women pulled at the hems of their skirts, as if to reassure themselves that critical parts of their bodies were indeed, appropriately covered. However, as I noted this fidgeting, I remembered an earlier conversation with my own little timpani player. Apparently Mrs. White had been yelling quite frequently this week. It seems that her most acerbic comments had been aimed at the boys in the trumpet section who had failed to cease their "endless chatter" and needed to pay more attention to matters at hand. Perhaps this lack of musicality remained a lingering concern for the largely female woodwind section as they raised their instruments to start their first number, “Thar She Blows,” which was referenced in my fuzzy, xeroxed concert program as an “Old English Sailing Tune, Composer Unknown.”

Listening to the tune (a term employed carefully throughout this text), I began to think about the middle school concert as a social ritual that necessarily bonded the Bayside community together, but also functioned a cipher. The quality of music these families came to hear mattered much less than the affirmation of culture that this performance and its “dressed-up” players represented. The music seemed to be a secondary consideration, if not completely unimportant, to many members of the audience. Being seen, being in attendance, being part of a community that enjoyed watching a band, all of these considerations seemed to be far more important than any specific aesthetic aspect of this concert experience. Certainly, on an individual level, many parents would be happy to report that they encouraged musical training and that they supported their son or daughter’s need or desire to develop “an ear for music,” but during this more universal moment, as long as Mrs. White kept directing, and the children kept producing something, the audience seemed to be pleased.

As the band moved on to their “Disney Medley,” I think began to think about concepts of beauty, taste, and creative labor. I wondered whether this kind of middle school musicianship is a hybrid form of play and work, some frightening amalgamation of free play and repressive authority. It seemed to me that the trumpet players were leering at each other and racing through their sections, off tempo and happy to be so. The percussion section was counting out loud, trying desperately to stay together, and Mrs. White’s arms were pumping furiously in an effort to catch everyone’s gaze. A few audience members were laughing, but many were simply smiling (not grimacing) and in several rows, a number of people--mostly grandparents--were leaning forward to listen more attentively.

After ending with a strain of music slightly reminiscent of the theme song from “Beauty and the Beast,” several members of the Sixth Grade Band Woodwind Section walked up to the microphone to introduce the Band’s final two numbers (“Theme from Halo 3” and Adapted Selections from “Phantom of the Opera”). As they spoke, I realized that there were some very complicated structures at issue here as well. To engage her students’ interests in the music which they may, or may not strive to play, Mrs. White needed to pander to consumer trends and well-accepted consumptive practices. Few parents seemed to be too concerned about this uncomfortable intersection between the economic and the artistic.

Certainly most Bayside families, if asked, might have considered this concert ritual to be an affirmation of free will and democratic tradition. At the individual level, each family fundamentally believed that their child possessed the potential to become some kind of musician. Each family fundamentally believed that their child contained within them some kind of artistic aptitude that could be brought forth and developed. This ability would not be a question of inheritance, entitlement, or capacity, but more a question of access. Attending a school which provided this kind of opportunity could be seen by many in the audience as affirmation of the right kind of social development a free society should foster for its citizens. And certainly, disturbing questions related to access and equal opportunity would not be raised this evening. Nor would there be any references to pluralism or multiculturalism. During the seven years that I have been attending Bayside Middle School Concerts, I cannot remember hearing even one selection that might be considered a departure from the Western Canon.

I was jolted from these thoughts as the concert concluded, and a sweating Mrs. White thanked the audience for “supporting” the Sixth Grade Band. She clutched the yellow carnations wrapped in green plastic that had been presented to her by the PTO President, and walked off stage. Before I left the building, I could see her solid frame pushing the kettle drum back to the Band Room. And then I began to wonder; perhaps in Carol White's dreams, she is conducting, rather than directing, and the audience can not only see, but hear, if only for a brief and fleeting moment.

Josef Chytry, “The Aesthetic State” (1989): This text examines the aesthetic dimensions of Marx’s theories developed in connection with his vision of a post-capitalist society. Chytry explores Marx’s reworking of Hegel (and Schiller) to arrive at a definition of the aesthetic as a concept of creative labor that has the capacity to unify distinct aspects of human experience: man and nature/reason and spirit/mind and body/individual and community.

Working beyond a perception that particular dimensions of Marx’s work may have limited applicability today, Chytry maintains that the enduring power of Marx lies within his imaginative reworking of the aesthetic. Creative labor, as an aesthetic experience, becomes the foundational aspect of a post-capitalist society. According to Marx as read through Chytry, creative labor operates as a form of “free-life expression,” provides enjoyment, and evidences uniqueness or individuality. It moves from the particular to the universal as its authentic modes of production necessarily cultivate all five human senses, unify individuals with communities, and provide a critical space for personal or social freedom.

Chytry hopes to persuade contemporary scholars to reexamine Marx’s work and identify ways that Marx’s thoughts on the aesthetic might help to shape current debates regarding what it may mean to achieve personal fulfillment and social harmony in an alienated, transnational, globalized world. I think Chytry’s project reads Marx to fully humanize or “concretize” the aesthetic, moving this concept away from it strong connections to mind or spirit, and re-defining the aesthetic as a very particular, and a very universal kind of bodily experience.

I would like to explore aspects of Chytry’s discussion that address techne, technique, and art—how these three terms inform, work against, or complicate Marx’s notions of the aesthetic and creative labor.

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Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production” (1936):
Benjamin is writing to an audience that is growing increasingly concerned about the rise of repressive, totalitarian political regimes, particularly Nazism and Facism. He notes that through photography and film, art can become unmoored from its temporal origin (with its entire cultural heritage, including ritual) and begin to serve as a political instrument in order to reach larger and larger audiences (the masses).

Benjamin discusses the ambiguous nature of these new technologies, for he notes that, unlike lithography or the printing press, these new forms of reproduction cause an absence of original presence which means that the unique “aura” experienced when one encounters any particular object of art is lost. Nonetheless, there is so much at stake at this point in human history that the ability to reach/influence the masses is a critical project; communism must respond by politicizing art, by using the aesthetic as a political weapon to establish new political, social, and economic structures. Film is particularly useful because it is transportable, mutable, addresses individual concerns, and remains universally engaging.

Selections from Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics (1830s)

Hegel explores relationships between art and human experience. For Hegel, art can function as a representation that expresses what it might mean to be fully human. Even though Hegel is trying to work with Kant’s universalities in more concrete ways, Hegel is also making new moves for “art” with respect to form and content in an effort to connect mind and body with some kind of spirit.

Hegel works through familiar structures: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, drama and poetry. According to Hegel, art found in these six realms has the potential to be more than a mere imitation of the physical world. These processes can produce something that is more than an object, or more than an object that produces effects for human viewers (Kant). For Hegel, particular kinds of art can function as objects with meaningful content that manifests or embodies human perfection. This moves away from Kant’s ideas that the “right” kind of people can perceive aesthetics/beauty/Beauty/the sublime through their individual faculties.

Hegel divides art into three foundational categories. Certainly Symbolic Art, with its classification as a less than adequate attempt at representation, and its forced connection with Indian, Persian, or Egyptian models “primitivizes” the Other. Classical Art would seem to be the penultimate, or the Ideal, with respect to form and content because it intimately connected Greeks to their Gods, but Hegel's claim for Romantic Art seems more complicated. It moves inward and can connect man and the divine through some kinds of representation (religious iconography), but it can also function in certain kinds of representations of every day experience (the Dutch masters) that produce momentary freedom or some kind of transcendence. Are some of these principles resonating with earlier views we have seen regarding stages of human development?

I have remaining questions about form and content for Romantic Art, defining beauty/Beauty, sensate/sensuous perception, immortality, and the relationship between reason and spirit, as well as the place of pain, pleasure, and the sublime in Hegel’s text.

Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790): The version we are reading presents Kant's account of beauty and the sublime as two distinct aspects of aesthetic experience. Kant defines the features that he believes can be associated with aesthetic judgment, explores whether such judgment is possible, and examines how it mediates between theoretical and practical aspects of human cognition.

Given the impenetrable nature of this text, I am guessing that Kant's contemporary audience was a very small group of "learned men" found throughout Europe (Germany, France, England). Like his audience, Kant is interested in finding a rational way to harmonize the dualities traditionally associated with human experience. His moves in this text allow him to define aesthetic judgment (read sensation or sensate perception) as a cognitive activity with the same usefulness and validity as pure reason or practical reason.

Once I realized that Kant is continually trying to mediate rather than simply categorize, I felt that I could grasp a little bit more of this text. I also think I now understand why some contemporary art installations feature machines that vibrate: could these objects have been designed to invoke the oscillating nature of the sublime? Hmm...

I have an infinite number of questions, but in this moment I am primarily caught up with the connections between aesthetic judgment and moral culture that Kant advances near the end of this text. It smells like Darwin's theories of evolution: only the most moral cultures are fit enough to develop or foster aesthetic judgment. Would this interpretation work with what we know of Kant? How will this thread play out as we move on?

Aesthetics and Enlightenment

Baumgarten, "Reflections on Poetry" (1760): Essay strives to identify, define, categorize key relationships between philosophy and poetry. Examples from "classical" literature or antiquity are listed as ideals, models, determiners. Sensation is critical and generally combined with notions of clarity, the importance of appropriate/adequate/pleasing/well-received presentation (a "how-to" for embodying, manifesting an aesthetic?). The essay also emphasizes the interconnectedness of many relationships, and expresses a preference for text over image.

Shared knowledge/shared values with audience: Greeks are the still the gold standard for a life well-lived. There is recognized tension between "philosophy" (rationality, reason) and "poetry" (pleasure derived from ancient texts or "poetic cognition").

The shift in knowledge/values Baumgarten may be trying to establish: The mind/body split is keeping us from achieving a full understanding of human experience. Human understanding should embrace perceptions developed through personal sensation in addition to rational (merely cerebral) explorations of experience, whether we are in pursuit of the mortal, or the immortal. These classifications are offered by Baumgarten as a way to balance or harness human sensations or provide an acceptable kind of temperance for "wild" passions, particularly for a skeptical audience that may resist an impulse to let go of "rationality" as a primary tool for evaluating human experience.

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Schiller, "Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man" (1794): Series of letters (to Goethe?) examining how art mediates human experience to help achieve personal and social harmony. Art, as a pursuit of beauty, becomes an aesthetic that unifies (tempers, balances) inherent contradictions or tensions in human nature between sensation/desire/material impulses/feeling and rationality/formal impulses/thought. This reconciliation can produce a state or experience discovered through play (our inherent play drive) which is "outside of time" or extra-temporal (transcendent?) and liberatory.

Shared knowledge/values with audience: Antiquity as an ideal, a time of "glorious humanity." We have "fallen": we are not close to this distant Greek ideal, we lack social harmony and an authentic capacity to enjoy human experience. Questions related to immortality are irrelevant because they don't address the fact that the here and now is pretty awful.

The shift Schiller is trying to produce: life can be better, we can put our differences aside as we work toward this natural balance, this new pursuit will also provide us with more personal Freedom and a brief escape from the contemporary world.

What socio-historical connections can we make to Schiller's "wounds" of modern humanity and the "machinery of the states" on page 7? How are class, gender operating within these two texts?

Aesthetic Theories -- Origins in the West

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Plato’s Symposium (384 BCE?): “Reported” dialogues occurring at an exclusive drinking party for free male aristocrats. Homoerotic setting is complicated by discussion prompts to explore the nature of “love.” Plato, as Socrates, relates through Diotima that the “highest” form of love is not sexual, but intellectual and manifested in a desire to pursue wisdom and divine beauty; text concludes with Alcibiades’ desire for Socrates remaining unfulfilled. Generally interpreted to privilege non-sexual interests and desires (“Platonic” love).

Plato assumes his audience supports existing social hierarchies (white wealthy men/working men, women, slaves) as well as cultural standards of physical beauty (athletic male) and sexual desire (male-oriented). The text seems to reinforce these values, but complicate them by provocatively challenging its audience to recognize virtues like wisdom and a pursuit of the divine, which are less “base,” are not driven by self-pleasure, and could perhaps work more toward communal (reproductive?) stability.

**How is Alcibiades’ “lack” working this text, particularly as the conclusion?

**How does Diotima’s gendered “presence” function at this all-male gathering?

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Aristotle’s Poetics (350 BCE?): Essay addresses a tension between representation versus imitation, and further classifies existing forms of artistic production. Art (poetry) helps us to discover “the good” (in the nature of good men). This principle functions in opposition to the view that art, as imitation, distracts us from discovering universals which are immaterial and exist outside of that which is human. Text emphasizes order and structure through a well-recognized “conception of unity” (each part must share some relationship to the whole). Proportionality and linear progression (as unities in time and place) are also privileged.

Aristotle supports existing social hierarchies and promotes taxonomies, perhaps to standardize artistic production? He values artistic production, arguing that representation produced through human efforts can reflect human experience as it is, as it seems to be, or as it should be, which all allows for greater human understanding than mere imitation (than mere human reproduction?).

**Does pleasure (cerebral or sensual) play a central role in artistic production or reception according to this text?

**Could this essay also be called “Let’s stop waiting around for those damn Gods!” Or “Let’s define what we like, people!”?

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Longinus, On the Sublime (200 AD? Syrian, Greek, Roman?): Addressed to a friend (Terentian), the text attempts to remedy previous efforts to examine the constituents of sublimity as “loftiness in writing.” The author values elevated thought (from a noble mind), strong emotion, figures of thought and speech applied in a particular fashion, noble diction, and attention to composition (i.e., Homer, Plato, Demosthenes). Devalued qualities include turgidity, puerility, false emotion, and frigidity.

Author reinforces idea that human production is valuable. He is trying to promote this kind of production through “vital informing principles” that value unique “natural endowments,” but still share some common characteristics.

** Is he trying to keep artistic production in the hands of the elite? Perhaps something like: “Hey—not just anybody can do this, and watch out for those Bible writers, you guys!”

**How are sensuality and sexuality—bodily pleasures and conception —operating here?

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Horace, Ars Poetica (20 BCE? Roman): A poem in the form of an advice letter to a father and two sons that explores poetic craft and artistic theory. Considerations of audience and reception are more prominent, but Greek production remains the gold standard, and standard aspects of classical style are shored up. Personal choice, individuality can be reflected in art, but efforts to reference a common (Greek) history are preferred. And not just anyone can do this; you need natural talent, plus the right kind of training.

I am less clear about how this text is functioning. It seems to be reminding Romans that they need to look back to forge some kind of common (noble? privileged?) identity.

**Art can re-connect us (not as Romans, per se, but as a special elite) even though we are spread out all around the Empire?

** What prompts this (new?) focus on audience and artistic reception?

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Examining Artistic Production

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, Shoe Shop, 1911.
Oil on canvas, 99.1 x 79.4 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago

I love this painting for its aesthetic qualities and for its complexity. At first blush, this is a simplistic, somewhat romanticized depiction of a seemingly insignificant moment. Stylistically, this scene recalls the work of Mary Cassett and many French Impressionists. Drawing upon established artistic techniques, Sparhawk-Jones uses dramatic tones of yellow, white, black, and red, as well as thick brush work to portray her female subjects in a soft, diffuse fashion. Yet, these technical choices serve to "re-present" the ordinary in an extraordinary fashion. Refigured and illuminated in this new manner, the painting challenges viewers’ routine perceptions and seeks to develop new views of contemporary experience. The title, Shop Girls, and the decision by Sparhawk-Jones to foreground an image of working class women waiting on wealthy customers all work together to challenge class divisions in our “egalitarian” society and to emphasize the social, political, and economic limitations faced by American women at the start of the twentieth century. A viewer could easily fail to read these socially provocative messages, focusing instead on the painting's beautiful use of color and form.

Certainly the composition is structured as a group portrait, similar to the work of John Singer Sargent, whose own portraiture used verticality and a slight distortion of surrounding space to emphasize his subjects. Sparhawk-Jones’ key decision to construct a group portrait with this same kind of emphasis speaks to a desire to expose or challenge social groupings that we fail to view with a critical eye and often participate in unthinkingly.

As we examine the painting more closely, our eyes are drawn to the tall woman found at the far left of the painting who evidences wealth and status with an elaborate hat and expensive clothing. A similar customer is seated nearby. Both women are equally intent on their purchases, simultaneously treating the women waiting on them as fixtures, or figures arranged for their pleasure and satisfaction. Sparhawk-Jones cleverly complicates this traditional scene by having her tallest subject glance admiringly at her shoes. As our attention is drawn downward we subsequently focus on the shop girls attending to their customers. In contrast, the shop employees are plainly dressed in black and white. We can only see the back of one girl, but her posture is one of humility and service. The other young girl is presented with attentiveness, but an air of sadness, despite her humble posture. Their plain figuration, and their lack of individual features or individual markings related to wealth or distinction, all reinforce the message that undergirds this painting: who are we overlooking each day?

Completing our downward gaze we note an array of rejected shoes found at each customer’s feet and we begin to question the consumptive practices depicted in this work. The partial, vague figures observed in the background of the painting (identified by their elaborate hats) wait impatiently for someone to attend to them, further reinforcing the painting’s tension related to consumption, social hierarchies, and commercial exchange.

Sparhawk-Jones' choice of setting further complicates her visual work. Certainly the shoe shop, while not a domestic space, is a “closed” female space. It operates in some respects like a harem, with its draped curtains and its lack of any clearly perceived window or door. This is not a space for male customers. It mirrors the kind of isolated, female-dominated places which prevailed in Western cultures at the turn of the nineteenth century and reminds viewers of the complex restrictions that many disenfranchised, “domesticated” women faced in early twentieth-century American society.

A woman of extraordinary talent, Sparhawk-Jones’ work is often dismissed by art critics as “light-hearted" and she remains largely overlooked today. Born in Philadelphia in 1885, she died in 1968. If she is remembered at all, it is for her earlier paintings completed before 1918, which are situated between the work of Mary Cassett and the startling images of urban realism produced by American artists associated with the Ash Can Movement. Sparhawk-Jones did not have the wealth or family support to continue her studies in Paris like her contemporary, Cassett. Her classical technical training, her limited upbringing, and the constraints imposed upon her as a woman did not provide her with the same kind of artistic vocabulary available to her male counterparts, including noted Ash Can members Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, George Luks, and George Bellows (see examples below). She was not exposed to the experimental painting styles they developed, nor did she have access to the kinds of public spaces (bars, back alleys, boxing rings) these artists employed as their subjects. Does this make her any less of an urban realist?

The current narrative associated with the life of Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones also references substantial periods of “mental illness,” yet this is often the label given to women who found they could not conform to traditional expectations. While I find Shoe Shop to be a complex and intriguing work, it is this last thought that most poignantly reminds me think more profoundly about redefining the "ordinary" and to search more consistently for the many aspects of contemporary and historical experience that have yet to be unveiled.