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.