The beautiful

A better way to make a distinction I made a couple posts ago--a much better way, I think, because it doesn't separate sense from knowledge or oppose them, as I bordered on doing--is to just say that there is a new aestheticism out there that is actually trying to ask a question it is hard to take seriously in the study of literature: namely, what is the place of beauty in our lives?

Or, rather, it is actually defining that place, showing that it is a place where knowledge is not undermined. In other words, aestheticism tries to find the proper consistency of that knowledge: the harangues against aestheticism throughout the history of literary criticism in the last century (which--and not enough people recognize this--is mostly a history defined by modernism), and indeed variants of this harangue throughout the history of the arts (Plato, etc.), would make it out to be precisely a movement that undermines knowledge, but the opposite is the case. Precisely because it doesn't hedge its bets like Aristotle or Sidney (though the latter's elaborations of the statement show it is not as negative as it sounds), and affirm only that poetry does nothing affirmeth, it doesn't give into the thing that this supposes: that truth wholly abstracted from sense is the only form of truth or knowledge, and thus that the sensuous arrangements of art mainly work to undermine or question that knowledge. Aestheticism takes the measure of the sense's knowledge (this is one reason why, as Angela Leighton points out in a book I can't recommend enough, On Form, that the favorite philosopher of aestheticists throughout history is Lucretius).

Close reading, I'm adding, is just really placing the emphasis on this place indeed being a place of positive knowledge. That is, we might define the standpoint that uses it as one that takes the measure of the knowledge delivered by sense: it's a stricter sort of formula, where the emphasis falls more on sense as a form of knowledge, rather than the knowledge that inheres in the senses or sensuous. The downside is it works by analogy, as you can see (it works by supposing the knowledge of the sensuous is like the knowledge we normally deal with in regular propositions), and so lends itself to the undermining of our normal idea of knowledge (it may be the main legacy of deconstruction to have convinced us close reading only does this). But talking about what a poem is about should be a bulwark to this sort of aestheticist enterprise, rather than something the downfall of which the new aestheticism celebrates.

But to get back to my main point, beauty is the name for this sort of this positive, sensuous knowledge. That sounds pretty sappy, I know, and perhaps undignified. But it is the lack of a place of beauty in our lives, perhaps, that makes us assume so immediately that anything dealing with knowledge the senses can give (other than the knowledge from sensuous experience purified of sensuous experience which the sciences give) is going to be undignified, not a real form of knowledge.

That is, I've knocked aestheticism in the past for precisely being sappy, giving too much away to the senses. I wonder now, though, whether this opinion of mine precisely came from those noble and moralistic theorists who, I often found, precisely lapsed into sappiness whenever the issue of something near-beautiful about their austere systems crept to the fore. Of course, its also simply the way of the French to acknowledge the beautiful in the ugly, almost as if it were an imperative (though occasionally the English have this moralistic sense of the beautiful as well, though it is usually surrounding the commonsense rather than the ugly: it probably is a vestige of living in a place with a rich civil society rather than "social networks"). But I've always hated that narrow and perverse sense of beauty one finds in Foucault; it is probably Sartre and Derrida though who remain mostly responsible for this style. Frederic Jameson, who like many Marxists is actually someone who gives an important role to the traditionally aesthetic, indeed notices this exact thing about Derrida in his essay on Specters of Marx; of course, it is what we also notice all the time when we disparage his "literariness." But it's not just the French. I'll ask whether the valorization of the sublime against the beautiful in the 80's was not precisely aestheticism (in the bad sense) by other means for many people. In the 90's, it is trauma and the negative theology: isn't the work of Cathy Caruth so offensive, not because it veers into the most perverse forms of argument, but because it turns trauma into the most traditionally aesthetic (that is, ignoble, sappy) thing, such that we can find something like satisfaction in it? And closer to our own time, the "ugly feelings" we like to hear so much about are perhaps more of the same. Theory in general seems sometimes to be motivated by this sappiness in its avant-gardism, or the enjoyment it takes in its in its politics.

In short, I wonder whether it is those who precisely rail against beauty who lapse into the most traditionally sappy versions of aestheticism--indeed, much more often than the true aestheticists. I hesitate to say people like this (its not all theorists) practicse aestheticism by other means, though, because what's crucial is that the sappiness arises from ignorance and inexperience with it, and indeed the eradication of the place of beauty in our lives this accomplishes, a narrowing of it down to the most horribly sentimental version. If we let the beautiful back in, we might see it contains something to say, or is at least more complex of a thing than we think it is. Alexander Nehamas and Charles Taylor, among others, have been saying this for some time. Familiarity with the thing is what is crucial, since we have none of it as long as we keep encouraging the myth that it only undermines knowledge.