Aesthetics and Anthropology

Cogitations

Tarek Elhaik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350168824
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000213560
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This book focuses on the reconfiguration of aesthetic anthropology into an anthropological problem of cogitation, opening up a fascinating new dialogue between the domains of anthropology, philosophy, and art. Tarek Elhaik embarks on an inquiry composed of a series of cogitations based on fieldwork in an ecology of artistic and scientific practices: from conceptual art exhibitions to architectural environments; from photographic montages to the videotaping of spirit seances; and from artistic interventions in natural history museums to ongoing dialogues between performance artists and marine scientists. The chapters examine the image-work, ethical demands, and aesthetic struggles of interlocutors including artists Mathias Goeritz, Mounir Fatmi, Silvia Gruner, Joan Jonas, and Patricia Lagarde.

1 The art of cogitation

DOI 10.4324/9781003103318-1

Aesthetics and its pretenders

Aesthetic anthropology, Jacques Macquet once rightly observed, “may not be part of mainstream anthropology,”¹ suggesting perhaps that, ultimately and regrettably, observations based on the aesthetic experience of an anthropologist conducting fieldwork among contemporary artists, curators, and art experts continues to be of a lesser value than those emerging from traditional field sites, classical ethnographic motifs, and normative social scientific methods. Observations of an aesthetic nature have nonetheless continued to provide some of us with food for thought and matter for designing research mise-en-scènes that, for better or for worse, are often neglected by most human scientists. This neglect, however, should not mask the fact that there has always been a minor² tradition of human scientists who not only have examined artistic phenomena, but also have taken the works and lives of single artists as concrete points of departure for their inquiries.³

Adopting the point of view of an “anthropologist descending on Earth from outer space,” puzzled by the enigmatic human practice the illustrious structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had situated between magic and science, namely art, a perceptive art historian remarked that “art history always presupposes an anthropology, albeit a deceivingly simple one” (De Duve 1998:3–4). A first consideration by this extraterrestrial inquirer would be to immediately notice that, like the experience of modernist fieldwork, the aesthetic experience of art is no longer what it used to be. Indeed, the contemporary anthropologist who takes as a territory of inquiry a domain of practices where such form of experience and experimentation arises will notice that the said form is no longer underwritten by the Enlightenment debates that gave rise, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the academic field of aesthetic anthropology. A first consequence and second consideration by our extra-terrestrial friend would therefore be to rethink the legacy of both Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's formalist and cognitivist definition of aesthetics as the “science of sensible cognition” and Johann Gottfried Herder's romantic understanding of aesthetics as a “force,” a formless and “obscure mechanism of the soul” that moves humans in ways evocative of primordial and in-human states of being (Menke 2013). In the unsentimental art world, our traveler further notes, it has become a self-evident truth, if not a cliché, to routinely contest judgments based on aesthetic concepts, such as the Beautiful and the Sublime, inherited from key modern and Enlightenment thinkers. Indeed, what happens to the anthropology of contemporary art when our aesthetic judgments and experience of artists’ image and concept work elicits sensations and thoughts anchored less in the question “Is this beautiful?” than in “Is this art?”? It demands from us, as De Duve convincingly proposed, not an abandonment but a reconfiguration of Immanuel Kant's classic Critique of Judgment.

Wrestling with Kant has for a long time been considered a rite of passage for thinking about these matters. Kant's aesthetics—reappropriated in new forms by the likes of Claude Levi-Strauss, Gregory Bateson, and Paul Rabinow—is concerned with the relation between concepts and images and the rapport between the understanding and the imagination. In Kant's critical philosophy and pragmatic anthropology, anthropos or the human is a rational animal and an “empirico-transcendental doublet,” that is to say, at once a Subject and Object of its own knowledge. Rational refers here to the observations and cogitations that take place during the process of inquiry. Reason can therefore be taken up neither as a “faculty of mind nor a quality of the things themselves, but rather a distinctive mode of taking up the practice of inquiry” (Rabinow 2008:10). Consequently, Kant's aesthetic anthropology, the culmination of his “entire critical undertaking” (Kant 2007:7), can be taken up, today, but only if we reconfigure it beyond traditional faculty theory, which posits a play between discreet faculties or powers of the mind (imagination, memory, the sensible, the understanding, and judgment). How? A key motif of Kant's aesthetics is the notion of judgment that he defined as a cognitive faculty and “a medium term between the understanding and reason” (Kant 2007:4). I insist on this point as my own reconfiguration of Averroes’ cartography of the soul or mind—itself a precursor to both Baumgarten's and Kant's meta-aesthetics (Selim 2014)—too does not take up cogitation as a hypostasized faculty or as a middle term between discreet faculties of the understanding and reason. Because something more dynamic is taking place in the work of the contemporary artists I observe, aesthetic judgments are a matter of image-work rather than the effects of a faculty of the Imagination (capital I); simultaneously, these judgments are also a matter of concept-work rather than the effects of a faculty of Understanding (capital U). Work, as I use the term here, is not equivalent to labor which is necessary for attending to the biological needs of homo faber. Instead, work is concerned with creativity, playfulness, and action, with making and thinking beyond utilitarian and instrumental uses of reason. Image work and concept work are therefore types of work and manners of making and thinking about things. It is an ethos that seeks to challenge and reorient the relation of means and ends underwriting the traditional hylomorphic model of making which presupposes a violent action against nature and a subsumption of passive matter (hyle) under active form (morphe).⁴ Anthropos, the rational animal—the cogitative soul—is hereinafter posited as an image-worker and concept-worker. Creation is work.

Kant's critical edifice is built around the relation between “given particulars” and “unknown universals,” which in turn hinges on two types of judgments: determinative judgments or reflective judgments. Determinative judgments are objective and arise when the inquirer's use of reason is an answer to the questions “What can I know?” (logos) and “What can I do?” (praxis), both corresponding to the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, respectively. Reflective judgments are subjective and arise when one is answering the question “What can I hope for” articulated in the third critique, The Critique of Judgment. The third critique is concerned with two manners of making reflective judgments: aesthetic judgments (artistic creations like a painting or a natural phenomenon like the sublime sunset Levi-Strauss famously discusses in Tristes Tropiques) and teleological judgments (the purposiveness of design in biological organisms, e.g., the length of a dolphin's dorsal fin or a finch's beak). In determinative judgments, reason subsumes given particulars under unknown universals; in reflective judgments, either aesthetic or teleological, reason recruits given particulars in a much looser way, opening up a creative motion toward universals. Furthermore, there are four aesthetic reflective judgments: the agreeable (purely sensorial-subjective register, “I love the blue of the Sea of Cortez”); the good (moral-objective register, “this sight could be bad for us”); the other two reflective judgments, those Kant referred to in oxymoronic fashion as “subjective universals,”⁵ are the beautiful and the sublime. He distinguishes between the “remarkable differences” of the beautiful and the sublime, noting that beauty concerns the “form of objects” endowed with “boundaries,” while the sublime arises during encounters with “formless and boundless objects” (Kant 2007). As we shall see in the last chapter, the sublime, of which they are two kinds (the dynamic and the mathematical), has affinities with what Sigmund Freud had skeptically described as “oceanic feelings” characteristic of mystical experiences. Finally, both the sublime and the beautiful can be firmly contested or buttressed once submitted to the judgments and views of others. Cognizant of the political implications of these reflective judgments, Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers hoped—albeit too optimistically— that a sound aesthetic education⁶ could lead to a sensus communis and an experience of humanity guided by a cosmopolitan purpose. Aesthetic judgments, however, are often instrumentalized, if not weaponized and what we find beautiful, agreeable, sublime, and ethical is more often than not underwritten by war rather than cosmopolitical peace.

This form of dissensus, often animated by theoretical realpolitik, is duly noted by our extraterrestrial visitor from the future. Indeed, efforts to go beyond Kant and post-Enlightenment aesthetics abound. They have resulted in a reconfiguration of the human sciences and humanities into two majoritarian territories, each camp convinced that in order to perceive the infinite world of forms and conceptualize the forces that generate them, one ought to practice, often militantly, either a “politics of aesthetics”⁷ or an “anti-aesthetic.”⁸ While the former camp has traditionally been skeptical of the concepts of modernity and the Avant-Garde, seeing political potential in an expanded vision of the sensible beyond art practice proper, the latter, drawing on the legacy of the historical Avant-Gardes (Surrealism and Pop Art, in particular), views contemporary “critical arts”⁹ as always already political, given their complex entanglements with postindustrial visual-popular cultures. It is likely that the former group, led by a philosopher who has become the “caviar of the new left,”¹⁰ and the latter, led by an art historian alarmed by the recent turn toward “postcritical” aesthetics and social art practice, will continue to radically disagree as to what really constitutes not only the political scope of both art practice and criticism, but also what counts as a “scene from the aesthetic regime of art.”¹¹ Unimpressed by what ultimately amounts to territorial and disciplinary rivalries, our extraterrestrial pursues his search and notices another group, of fellow anthropologists this time, keen on going “beyond aesthetics”¹² through a salutary reservation toward the category “non-Western art.” This reluctance remains nonetheless deceptive in its reliance on ethnographic studies of “primitive art [understood] as a feature of an ethnically exclusive prestige economy which they have rational motives for wishing to preserve.”¹³ Alfred Gell, the Elder and chief of their tribe, had nevertheless initially insisted that although “ ‘Non-Western’ has been suggested to [him] as preferable to ‘primitive,’ [.] this substitution can hardly be made, if only because the fine art traditions of Oriental civilizations have precisely the characteristics which ‘primitive’ is here intended to exclude, but cannot possibly be called ‘Western.’”¹⁴ Gell's followers had in fact already signaled an inconsistency and shortcoming in this perplexing formulation. They saw it as being symptomatic of both a cultural malaise around such terms as “civilization” and “cross-cultural aesthetics” (a promising direction) and a desire to “exclude” (less promising), at a high conceptual cost, affinities, and correspondences between the styles of cogitation—the rational imagination—of contemporary artists, tout court, be they primitive, Oriental, Western, or indeed from the planet our extraterrestrial anthropologist is visiting us from. In other words, the call to go “beyond aesthetics”¹⁵ by anthropologists of art inspired by Gell converts the undecidability between West and non-West into a stabilized image of “primitive art,” thereby keeping us from being attuned to the murmurs of other knowledge domains, such as art historical and aesthetic philosophical discourses. In fact, they somehow betray their promise to re-conceptualize a contemporary aesthetics and to reconfigure the parameters of modernist and Enlightenment aesthetics. To begin an inquiry into contemporary aesthetics through an appeal to the “non-Western,” “Western,” and “Primitive,” unduly obligates us to be infinitely indebted to the conceptual costs incurred in the name of aesthetic diversity and the politics of representation, as well as tired concerns with the agency of objects allegedly uncontaminated by either of these civilizational horizons. What often goes unnoticed is Gell's superb analysis of pioneer conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp's oeuvre that he should be praised for having introduced into the anthropology of art. Gell's take on Duchamp opens us to a “fourth dimension” that he defines as the topological horizon and set of transformations out of which our three-dimensional spatial and temporal coordinates are projected. More importantly, the entire work of Duchamp, the conceptual artist, should “not be confined to particular spatio-temporal coordinates” since a person is an “extended mind” composed of a multiplicity of distributed elements (biographical, art historical and cultural forms, images, objects, memories, and sites). Any given work of art can be “considered in the context of its maker's oeuvre, made up of both “protentions” and “retentions,” a “preparation” for later works and a “recapitulation” of previous works” (Gell 1998). While I do not agree “that there is isomorphy of structure between the cognitive processes we know (from inside) as ‘consciousness’ and the spatio-temporal structures of distributed objects in the artefactual realm,” I find Gell's anti-representational analysis quite compelling when he goes on to state that “the structures of art history demonstrate an externalized and collectivized cognitiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Prelude: the Cogitator/anthropology as averroism
• 1 The art of cogitation
• 2 Mathias Goeritz: concrete abstractions
• 3 Silvia Gruner: desperate playfulness
• 4 Mounir Fatmi: cerebral compositions
• 5 Patricia Lagarde: a naturalist's blues
• 6 Marine cogitations
• References
• Index