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Aesthetic Primacy, Cultural Identity, and Human Agency

Michael S. Martin
Temple University
msmartin@temple.edu 

(c) 2004 Michael S. Martin.
All rights reserved.

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Review of:
Emory Elliott, Louis Fretas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne, eds.,
Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP,
2002.

"Let us, for example, credit it to the honor of Kant that he should
expatiate on the peculiar properties of the sense of touch with the
naïveté of a country parson!"

--Nietzsche, 3rd Essay, Section 6, in The Genealogy of Morals

1. If we are to believe the arguments made by the contributors to
Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, aesthetics has been much
maligned in twentieth-century literary theory, film studies, and
art history. As an instance of this critical tendency, Winfried
Fluck, whose essay "Aesthetics and Cultural Studies" foregrounds
many of the central dilemmas inherent to any aesthetic judgment,
invokes the contemporary German critic Urlich Schödlbauer when the
latter writes, "whoever deals with aesthetics nowadays, dissects a
corpse" (80). While the death of aesthetics is perhaps overstated
here, the contributors to this volume all make separate, and
mostly compelling, cases for the revitalization of the aesthetic
in textual and extra-textual cultural productions. The formative
problem in determining aesthetic judgment is perhaps best stated
by Emory Elliott in the introduction when he writes that, because
of multiculturalism and changes in canon formation, "many of the
prior aesthetic criteria need to be re-examined and certainly the
traditional hierarchies of merit need to be challenged" (5).
Instead of being a methodology that discounts the aesthetic, he
argues, multiculturalism makes it possible "to formulate new
terminologies, categories, and processes of assessment" and is
thus firmly grounded in the act of /judgment/ (6).

2. The essays in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age were collected
from a major conference held by the Center for Ideas and Society
at the University of California, Riverside, in 1998. The
conference attracted over 600 attendees, received substantial
coverage in the Los Angeles Times, and was featured in a cover
story for the 6 December 1998 edition of the Chronicle of Higher
Education. In an attempt to add continuity and cohesion to the
sometimes disparately themed essays, the editors have divided the
book into three rubrics: "Challenges to Aesthetics of Diversity,"
"Redefining Categories of Value and Difference," and "Aesthetic
Judgment and the Public Sphere." Coeditor Elliott, an English
professor at Riverside, has assembled a diverse field for this
collection, including scholars in film studies, art history,
African-American literature, and women's studies. By and large,
however, the majority of the theorists in this volume are
well-known names from American Studies, predominantly
nineteenth-century American literary critics, and most of them can
be aligned with a neopragmatist school of thought, borrowing from
the works of John Dewey and William James. Dewey provides a
recurring point of reference for Fluck, Giles Gunn, and Heinz
Ickstadt, all of whom consider Dewey's Art as Experience (1934) as
a model for a contingent, experiential basis for aesthetic
interpretation. The other text most frequently referenced here is,
not surprisingly, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790). But
whereas Dewey is generally enlisted on the side of a new and
reoriented aesthetic project, Kant is usually associated with a
threatened and possibly unworkable paradigm, his notion of
disinterested beauty running counter to the contemporary emphasis
on the political and social investments that must inevitably
inform aesthetic judgment. Still, the best essays in the volume
resist any tendency simply to pronounce aesthetic distinctions
contingent or relative and leave it at that; they undertake to
advance a new aesthetics in which something of Kant's
enlightenment project persists.

3. Under the rubric of "Challenges to an Aesthetics of Diversity,"
the first essay in the volume is perhaps also the finest: Satya P.
Mohanty's "Can Our Values Be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and
Progressive Politics" is an extended criticism of the postmodern
tendency to devalue any form of critical judgment. In response to
the postmodern vantage, which is wary of universal normative
values and claims and lacks grounding in the empirical method,
Mohanty proffers a nuanced, fluid conception of objectivity. For
Mohanty, Michel Foucault represents an ideological holism, or
skepticism, while Noam Chomsky, with his theory of human
betterment, provides an applicable model for a new version of
objectivity that can indeed make a claim for that which is just,
beautiful, and good. Mohanty supports a position that he terms
"post-positivist" realism, though he recognizes that human beings
are inevitably shaped by ideology and thus can never proceed with
"theoretical innocence" (33). Instead, Mohanty posits a new
version of objectivity, one that affirms the role of social and
ideological error in any human inquiry, recognizes the primacy of
empiricism (or referentiality) in any evaluation, and establishes
a cross-cultural conception of knowledge.

4. Giles Gunn, editor of the collection Early American Writing
(1994), is also concerned with heuristic potential and the
importance of culture in shaping human experience, yet his essay
"The Pragmatics of the Aesthetic" argues more overtly for the
virtues of specifically aesthetic texts. Gunn writes of the
primacy of the imagination in such an experience, stating that
"the imagination provides the motive for all those symbolic
stratagems by which a culture's wisdom or ignorance is refracted
and transmitted" (64). The benefit of such an interpretation of
cultural symbols is that both expression and human interaction
have an /ethical/ dimension, and this quality is linked with an
imperative to understand aesthetic tastes and judgments within a
specifically /public sphere./ Gunn's argument centers on a
suppositional structure that guides experience with an original
premise, but aesthetic modes of thinking are central to organizing
the work of the imagination with that of "practical exploration";
therefore, the aesthetic is never really severed from the
pragmatic (73).

5. An equally comprehensive and forceful essay, Fluck's "Aesthetics
and Cultural Studies" has a similar leitmotif: aesthetic practice
is never separate from the referential dimension, and an aesthetic
moment, or "attitude" as Fluck calls it, has a potentially
transformative value. Fluck's approach is a genealogical one, as
he outlines how aesthetics have been categorized because of
normative models of what defines the aesthetic, and this includes
the modernist turn toward New Critical protocols that create a
separate ontological category for understanding the intrinsic
worth of a text. The aesthetic, however, is never merely a
function to be encountered objectively and is instead one of many
functions, including the political and the subjective, that become
manifest when interacting with a work, whether it is of "high"
culture or "low" culture, a distinction cultural studies seeks to
efface. Fluck's example of a subway map is appropriate; that is, a
subway map has its referential dimension always intact--it is used
for finding directions--yet one cannot access its aesthetic
function (perhaps its correlation to Egyptian hieroglyphics),
Fluck conjectures, without first touching upon its direct rapport
with the objective realm. By illustrating how cultural studies
always must work with some movement toward the aesthetic, whether
in matters of beauty or judgment, Fluck articulates the strongest
critique of cultural studies in this volume. Along with Gunn and
Mohanty, he attempts to fulfill the underlying ambition of this
volume, that is, to re-envision aesthetic judgment in a way that
situates praxis within a multicultural framework rather than
simply accepting the death of aesthetics at the hands of
postmodern theory and cultural studies. The force of these
authors' arguments is never quite counterbalanced by essays such
as John Carlos Rowe's, which offers effusive praise for and
defense of cultural studies methodologies.

6. Rowe (editor of Culture and the Problem of the Disciplines,
reviewed in the May 2000 issue of Postmodern Culture) provides the
most systematic argument in the collection in his defense of the
methodologies of cultural studies, "The Resistance to Cultural
Studies," the final essay in the "Challenges to an Aesthetics of
Diversity" section. For Rowe and most of the contributors to this
volume, the promotion of cultural studies to the forefront of
literary criticism does not diminish the role of aesthetics, but
Rowe's argument is almost purely focused on the benefits of
cultural studies, both as a hermeneutic operation and as a
dehierarchizing force vis-à-vis traditional, ahistorical
criticism. For example, one of the several critiques of cultural
studies that Rowe argues against is the notion that the topics
cultural studies critics teach "are easy and superficially
relevant" (109). Instead, cultural studies, with its emphasis on
popular and "low" cultural texts, presents a new hermeneutic
implication for the interpreter: the text in question, whether
films such as Rambo or Titanic, or "indisputable" literary
classics such as Henry James's Portrait of a Lady or Wings of the
Dove, requires a new mode of theoretical and practical inquiry.
Rowe combines the theoretical complexity of de Man and Lyotard
with this form of inquiry, noting the postmodern implications
within cultural studies methodology, and he argues that in the
social relevance, cultural pertinence, and historical grounding of
cultural studies, there is a pragmatic goal: "What will this
interpretation /do/?" (107). What the interpretation does is
contingent because cultural studies, like postmodernism, does not
affirm a "governing narrative" from which the critic can step
outside her particular, historically grounded interpretive situation.

7. The first essay in the "Redefining Categories of Value and
Difference" section is Shelley Fisher Fishkin's study of white and
black American authors being rewritten or forgotten in literary
history because of prescribed ideas on how each should write. In
"Desegregating American Literary Studies," Fishkin uses a variety
of examples of nontraditional racial texts and their subsequent
critical reception to argue that black authors' literary
reputations are diminished by their use of white characters, just
as white authors, such as Sinclair Lewis, are marginalized when
they write about African-American experience. Fishkin ends her
essay with a call to revise current notions of canonicity and
exclusiveness in American literary studies: "American literary
studies will not be segregated until [...] books by both groups of
writers [African American and white authors] are featured in
publishers' African American Studies /and/ American literature
catalogs," as well as taught in both American literature and
African-American literature courses (131). This essay is arguably
one of the more important critical works on American Studies in
recent years, though its narrowly literary-historical emphasis on
reception and canonicity makes it a slightly disconcerting
inclusion in this largely theory-and-praxis-oriented volume.

8. Fishkin's essay, however, is a fitting preamble to the subsequent
piece by Robyn Wiegman, whose "Difference and Disciplinarity"
considers how identity politics are reinscribed within the
academic institution. Wiegman presents perhaps the most complex
argument in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, and her
consideration of national and transnational identities--as well as
her resistance to forcing identities into binary systems--is also
explored in other essays in the volume, including Gunn's
contribution. Wiegman argues that feminist studies has been
co-opted by two positions: the category of "women" is often
equated by African-American and postcolonial critics to some
universalizing white norm, while poststructuralist critics
consider any reference to identity to be essentializing and thus
reductive (137-38). One essay on which she centers her argument is
Susan Gubar's "What Ails Feminist Criticism?," a piece that begins
by recalling the various stages in feminist criticism and outlines
some reasons for the schism between generations of feminist
scholars. Wiegman's answer for how institutions contribute to and
reify identity politics and formations of national identities is a
method that she terms "the metacritics of difference"; this method
can be understood as a genealogical approach to feminist studies
that uncovers how feminism is produced as an object of knowledge,
what Wiegman calls "the problematic of identitarian social forms
and formations" (147). Wiegman calls forcefully for replacing the
aesthetic with a consideration of difference, but her essay would
have contributed more centrally to this volume if she had
attempted to elaborate some definition of an aesthetic judgment of
difference.

9. Americanist Donald E. Pease, in an essay critiquing the
traditional aesthetic criteria that were levied at C.L.R. James,
focuses on individual, rather than social, empowerment and on its
relation to the modern liberal state rather than the academic
institution. "Doing Justice to C.L.R. James's Mariners, Renegades,
and Castaways [1953]," included in the section "Redefining
Categories of Value and Difference," is, on one hand, Pease's
individual argument for the importance to literary scholarship of
James's book of Melville criticism precisely because James
challenges Moby-Dick (1851) in his act of writing an interested
interpretation, reimagining the canonical work with a political
imperative in mind and substituting the narration of the crew over
that of Ahab. On the other hand, Pease is making the case that the
criticism (or deliberate ignoring) of James is rooted in his
book's call for an aesthetic categorization outside of "the norms
and assumptions [...] of which the field was organized" (159). The
aesthetic sphere, here represented by James's book, became a site
of free subjectivity and utopian resistance, as James was writing
his book while he was a prisoner of the state at Ellis Island,
hovering between the rights and dignities afforded to a person of
citizenship and the lack of these rights and dignities of a
subject with noncitizenship. In response, Pease argues, James
"disidentif[ies] with the categories through which he would also
practice U.S. citizenship" and also makes the case for an unstated
metanarrative within Moby-Dick, one that, in the spirit of
equality, moves the locus of power in the novel from Ahab to that
of the crew (170).

10. The next essay in this section is Johnella E. Butler's "Mumbo
Jumbo, Theory, and the Aesthetics of Wholeness," which argues that
Western forms of evaluation, particularly the unifying idea of
/logos/, do not provoke a communitarian standard of judgment.
Butler's piece is one of the most complex, yet rewarding,
contributions to this volume, and though her argument emphasizes
the reconceptualization of African-American theory in order to
"reveal the full significance of the complexities of that
literature's aesthetics," she makes the case for a larger
aesthetic reconstitution (177). In dividing Western consciousness
under the rubric of "Logos/Dialogics," Butler establishes her case
for another form of understanding African-American
double-consciousness (and, presumably, aesthetic consciousness):
through the dialectic of "Nommo/Dianommic." In contrast to the
forced dialectic of Logos, which disaffirms interconnectedness,
the Nommo emphasizes the sacredness of the written word ("the life
force that comes from the divine"), the dominance of multiplicity
over fragmentation, and the confluence of past, present, and
future to inform decisions (183). Butler's argument is compelling
and provocative, but I wonder whether her faith in the sacredness
of the written text, which is understood via the tropes of
ancestral spirituality in texts such as Mumbo Jumbo, does not in
fact reify some of the same metaphysical problems of destructive
fragmentation and isolation that she successfully exposes as
inherent in the Logos/Dialogics tradition.

11. Butler is followed by one of the most prominent voices in
revealing the ideological stakes in the canon formation of
nineteenth-century American literature, Paul Lauter. Lauter
analyzes the aesthetics of tradition, audience, and discourse in
his essay "Aesthetics Again?: The Pleasures and the Dangers," the
first essay in the section "Aesthetic Judgment and the Public
Sphere." To do this aesthetic analysis, Lauter supplements his
essay with photographs of Native American artworks that were
recently displayed in both museum and art exhibits across the
United States. The inherent problem in assimilating these new
artistic forms, he argues, is that Western culture does not have
aesthetic principles from which to understand the discourse of
these art objects. Questions of "audience, function, and
conventions" inform our judgments, and these forms of discourse
are not readily apparent or transferable to an unaccustomed
Western audience (210). The Native American artworks that Lauter
chooses to accompany his essay are stunning and, to his credit, do
indeed implore the reader to embrace the contradictions in
applying Western criteria of art evaluation to works that defy
such application. In comparison to the other theorists' work
represented in this volume, however, Lauter's argument is too
abbreviated to be completely effective, and his central
thesis--that is, we should adjust our aesthetic understanding when
encountering new and unconventional artistic forms--is somewhat
naïve when considered next to the multilayered, expansive theories
of judgment from other theorists (McHugh, Ickstadt) in this section.

12. In a similar vein, Amelia Jones challenges a prominent critical
position, this one proffered by art historian David Hickey, that
emphasizes the exclusivity of art appreciation and the
self-evident beauty of a cultural production. Jones argues in
"Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics" that Hickey, whose
book The Invisible Dragon (1993) won the most distinguished art
criticism prize, invokes Ruskin-esque qualitative, universal
judgments about art and has "occlud[ed] the contingency of meaning
and value and the role of the interpreter" (216). The aesthetic is
then used for purposes of naturalized, institutional normative
values, values that, while unstated, attempt to distance the art
object from identity and cultural politics. Referring once again
to Kant, Jones makes the argument that /interest/, or a "stench of
ideology," is inevitably involved in any judgment of beauty, and
she incorporates such classical and contemporary figures as
Francois Boucher and Robert Mapplethorpe to substantiate her claim
(220). I find Jones's criticism of Hickey's aesthetic values
particularly convincing, but her gendered critique of Denis
Diderot's Kantian aesthetic of disinterestedness is not as
thorough as it needs to be. Her forthright final admission in the
essay, that she wants "to be" Renee Cox--Cox is represented in one
of her own photographs--lends a degree of trust to her preceding
argument, as she acknowledges her own interest in the project she
has just covered.

13. The next essay in the collection is by Kathleen McHugh, and her
argument is a fluid, connective one for understanding aesthetic
criticism through trauma theory. In "The Aesthetics of Wounding:
Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Critical Voice," McHugh
correlates a Kantian understanding of the imagination, which must
reconstitute itself after encountering something beyond its scope
of understanding, with traumatic experiences in the human psyche;
the subject cannot have access to the event itself and is thus
disconnected from history and also from what is "unrepresentable."
McHugh makes her argument more concrete by referring to a 1995
article in the New Yorker by art critic Arlene Croce, who
dismisses an AIDS-themed art exhibit without actually seeing it.
Croce's case, as McHugh describes it, is Neo-Kantian in its
elevation of a particular aesthetic standard to that of a
universal norm, and Croce enacts the psychological trait of
"resistance response" because she self-consciously refers to her
understanding of the artwork as beyond her comprehension (245).
Roland Barthes's autobiographical writings provide McHugh with a
model for an aesthetics of wounding: Barthes disassociates his
interest in specific photographs from any concept of beauty and
instead, McHugh contends, "identifies photography 'as a wound,'
the field in which he considers its meaning and effects is his
affect, not that of the objective meaning of photography" (247).
McHugh's interest in visual culture helps establish a structural
mapping of her central theses throughout this essay, and I
consider her consequent theory of autobiography--a genre that she
argues can "provide a way to apprehend more fully" the "ineffable
and mysteries remainder" outside of the subject during the
aesthetic moment--to be particularly useful for teaching this
literary genre (250).

14. The next essay under "Aesthetic Judgment and the Public Sphere"
comes from the field of film studies, Chan A. Noriega's "Beautiful
Identities: When History Turns State's Evidence." As with Butler's
article, Noriega's piece has far-reaching implications, this time
with the formation of the aesthetic within the realm of the
political. Earlier in the volume, Fluck concludes his essay
"Aesthetics and Cultural Studies" with an acknowledgment of the
reintegration of the aesthetic into political forms, as political
forms naturally invoke an aesthetic attitude (93). Noriega
perceives the two forms, the aesthetic and the political, as
necessarily interwoven functions and specifically refers to the
case of the Federal Trade Commission establishing what Noriega
terms a "beautiful identity" for Chicano literature to prove such
a plurality of genres (257). For Noriega, historiography comes
before history, and the FTC helped establish Chicano cinema in
order to recognize the emerging Chicano cultural identity. The
state thus acted as an intermediary agent between "the mass media
and disenfranchised groups," and the historiographical project was
the state's creation of an identity, or community, of the
disenfranchised before such a group was distinctively formed and
empowered on a social level (257).

15. The final essay in this collection, Heinz Ickstadt's "Toward a
Pluralist Aesthetics," implicitly integrates many of the theories
presented by Noriega, Butler, Fluck, Gunn, and Mohanty. (He does
so, however, without directly referring to them or their
work--sharing, in this respect, the rather too discreet or
isolated character of all the essays in the volume.) This shared
stance favors a contingent, inconclusive, historically grounded
aesthetic model that would recognize "practical, moral, and
aesthetic functions as mutually dependent" (267). Such a model
would be conversant with "changing social and cultural conditions"
(267), Ickstadt argues, and would not eliminate one of the central
questions raised in this volume: do universal standards of
judgment exist, or can there be a plurality of possible answers to
such standards? Ickstadt is careful to distinguish between
/aesthetic value/ and /aesthetic practice/, yet if we are to
incorporate his functional, experiential imperative toward
cultural productions, then the question of what constitutes an
agreed-upon criterion for judgment will still inevitably come into
play.

16. The contemplation of such questions should not be restricted to
individual disciplines and categories of experience, and for this
reason the volume is pertinent to the whole range of literary and
theoretical discussion beyond the field of American Studies, its
most immediate object of study. To take a tentative stance toward
a plurality of aesthetics provides a model to address what Elliott
calls in his introduction "a system [...] aligned with current
theories and cultural conditions," and such a system is necessary
if we are to continue to work outside of disciplinary boundaries
and across cultural identities in our respective fields of study
(18). Even if aesthetics is not quite so seriously imperiled as
this volume suggests, the book remains valuable for detailing its
continued relevance and even necessity for contemporary cultural
study.

English Department
Temple University
msmartin@temple.edu 


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