Why Only Art Can Save Us

Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency

Santiago Zabala

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231544962
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Hermeneutics

The state of emergency, according to thinkers such as Carl Schmidt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, is at the heart of any theory of politics. But today the problem is not the crises that we do confront, which are often used by governments to legitimize themselves, but the ones that political realism stops us from recognizing as emergencies, from widespread surveillance to climate change to the systemic shocks of neoliberalism. We need a way of disrupting the existing order that can energize radical democratic action rather than reinforcing the status quo. In this provocative book, Santiago Zabala declares that in an age where the greatest emergency is the absence of emergency, only contemporary art's capacity to alter reality can save us.

Why Only Art Can Save Us advances a new aesthetics centered on the nature of the emergency that characterizes the twenty-first century. Zabala draws on Martin Heidegger's distinction between works of art that rescue us from emergency and those that are rescuers into emergency. The former are a means of cultural politics, conservers of the status quo that conceal emergencies; the latter are disruptive events that thrust us into emergencies. Building on Arthur Danto, Jacques Rancière, and Gianni Vattimo, who made aesthetics more responsive to contemporary art, Zabala argues that works of art are not simply a means of elevating consumerism or contemplating beauty but are points of departure to change the world. Radical artists create works that disclose and demand active intervention in ongoing crises. Interpreting works of art that aim to propel us into absent emergencies, Zabala shows how art's ability to create new realities is fundamental to the politics of radical democracy in the state of emergency that is the present.

1 THE EMERGENCY OF AESTHETICS

The question of the origin of the work of art is not intent on an eternally valid determination of the essence of the work of art, a determination that could also serve as a guideline for the historiological survey and explanation of the history of art. Instead, the question stands in the most intrinsic connection to the task of overcoming aesthetics, i.e., overcoming a particular conception of beings—as objects of representation. The overcoming of aesthetics again results necessarily from the historical confrontation with metaphysics as such.… Within the horizon of this knowledge, art loses its relation to culture; art manifests itself here only as an event of be-ing.

—Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)

Heidegger reformulated as an ontological question Hegel’s judgments on the end of art by asking: “Is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is this something that art no longer is?”1 In doing so, he was trying to overcome the emergency of aesthetics. This emergency does not lie in the “end of art” proclaimed by Hegel but rather in the reduction of art to representable objects to be felt, contemplated, and reproduced as we please. These objects are not simply forms corresponding to the world but also constitute the completion of the abandonment of Being, where “the only emergency is the lack of a sense of emergency.”2 In this condition, which Heidegger called the “age of the world picture”3 and the “machinational epoch,”4 aesthetics automatically conceals art’s ontological, existential, and historical meaning because it frames them within the parameters of metaphysical oppression. In a lecture course during 1929–1930, that is, after the world suffered its first global economic crisis, Heidegger specified that this “oppression” is not ontic but rather ontological, that is, related to Being’s concealment. What oppresses us

is not this social misery, not that political confusion, not this powerlessness of science, not that erosion of art, not this groundlessness of philosophy, not that impotence of religion—the need in question is not the fact that this or that need oppresses [Bedrängt] in such or such a way. Rather what oppresses us most profoundly and in a concealed manner is the very absence of any essential oppressiveness [Bedrängnis] in our Dasein as a whole.… This absence of oppressiveness is only apparently hidden; it is rather attested by the very activities with which we busy ourselves in our contemporary restlessness.5

This is the “particular conception of beings” that Heidegger’s phrase “objects of representation” refers to in this chapter’s epigraph, a conception that must be overcome in order for art to “lose its relation to culture and manifest itself as an event of be-ing.”6 But why is it so important for art to lose its relation with aesthetics and culture? Isn’t culture supposed to help art and other realms of Being develop their potential?

As we will see, aesthetics is not a heightening of art but rather, as Heidegger said, where art becomes “cultural politics,”7 dangerous in that it is an indifferent measure of beauty. Its concealment of art behind measurements of objective beauty is the emergency of aesthetics, an emergency that will continue to enforce the reification of a lack of emergency until Being is no longer systematically retrieved, appropriated, or disclosed through our cultural contemplation of beauty. This is why Heidegger believes we “must provide a new content for the word ‘art’ and for what it intends to name, on the basis of a fundamental orientation to Being that has been won back in an original way.”8

The goal of this chapter is to confront, weaken, and overcome the metaphysical frame of aesthetics, so that philosophy can stop seeing the problem of art as one of aesthetics.

MEASURABLE CONTEMPLATIONS

Heidegger’s distrust of aesthetics is not that different from his feelings about logic, ethics, and other so-called disciplines of philosophy. All of these became framed within metaphysics and also began to frame their own horizons of thought to the point that “within metaphysics there is nothing to Being as such.”9 But what do the remains of Being have to do with these disciplines?

Heidegger presents these disciplines (in his brief account of the history of aesthetics)10 through knowledge, that is, as “knowledge of logos,” “knowledge of ethos,” and “knowledge of aisthêsis,” not because they aim to know what truth, good, and beauty are but rather because they already know. Logic, ethics, and aesthetics are consequences of the metaphysical structure of modern subjectivism, where an “object” is posited, identified, and applied to a “subject” beforehand, that is, independently of its meaning.11 “The outward evidence of this,” explains Heidegger in Being and Time, “is the determination of the meaning of being as ‘parousia’ or ‘ousia,’ which ontologically and temporally means ‘presence,’ ‘Anwesenheit.’ ”12

The problem with this structure is that the difference between Being (the existence of human beings) and beings (reality) is obscured, and Being as such is exclusively thought in terms of its relation to beings as their only cause. But interpreting essences as the only cause of existence has led philosophy to emphasize exclusively beings and, most of all, to set up Being as a permanent nominal presence, that is, as a presence that speaks of, from, and for the present. When this occurs, priority is given to beings, forcing disciplines to deal with certain areas of Being through regional, secondary, or even applied ontologies. These new areas of Being apply different sets of questions and methods and also submit to these methods, losing sight of Being’s ontological essence, an essence that for both human beings and art is fundamentally different from other objects of the world. In sum, the difference between the “Being of beings” and “beings with respect to Being” does not disclose different areas of beings but rather indicates that we are always speaking, thinking, and creating within this difference, which can also “be interpreted and explained in various ways.”13

Ignoring this difference has not only devalued the thought of Being in favor of the technical use of beings but also transformed truth into a logical, ethical, and aesthetic intuition expressed through a correspondence between propositions and facts and where the real is what fits this correspondence and becomes contemplatable. If, as Heidegger emphasized several times, being and truth are “equiprimordial,”14 it is not because of their capacity to disclose beings but because of their ability to conceal them within our measurements. “Man establishes himself as the measure of all measures with which whatever can count as certain, i.e., true, i.e., in being, is measured off and measured out.”15 This is why, as we will see later, the German thinker does not consider the truth of art an aesthetic measure but rather “an origin, a distinctive way in which truth comes into Being, becomes historical.”16

The fundamental problem of this metaphysical structure is not only that Being, beings, and truth are understood as objective but also how this reduces the world to a predictable “picture.” This picture is not an image we have of the world but rather where “the world becomes picture” or, as Heidegger specified, “the world grasped as picture.”17 In this condition, humanity, as the representative of objective beings, rather than being incorporated into the world is the “predator” of the world, whose experiences are not possibilities for change but rather incidents, deviations, and emergencies that must be avoided. When “beings are not interpreted in this way,” Heidegger explains, “the world, too, cannot come into the picture,” and man cannot establish “himself as the measure of all measures with which whatever can count as certain.”18 Heidegger identifies what counts as certain within the world picture as

the collective image of representing production. Within this, man fights for the position in which he can be that being who gives to every being the measure and draws up the guidelines. Because this position secures, organizes, and articulates itself as world view, the decisive unfolding of the modern relationship to being becomes a confrontation of world views; not, indeed, any old set of world views, but only those which have already taken hold of man’s most fundamental stance with the utmost decisiveness.19

As we can see, within the world picture truth’s function is not simply normative but also political; it requires humanity to fight for objective presence through measurable contemplations of those beings that justify their difference from other beings. This justification takes place logically, ethically, and also aesthetically, that is, through giving priority to those presences already established and secured. Within these world pictures, Being is marginalized, ignored, and abandoned; it becomes a remnant.20 But how can we recognize the remains of Being?

The remains of Being are not something we see or contemplate; they instead constitute everything that is beyond the logical, ethical, and “aesthetic state” that Heidegger defined as “the lucidity through which we constantly see.”21 Wherever such lucidity is lacking, the remains of Being emerge as an alteration, an event, or an emergency of the world picture, that is, an interruption of the reality we’ve become accustomed to. When we are unable to contemplate something, it is not only because our measurements are inadequate but also because of Being’s own “invisibleness,” “unpresentability,” and “ungraspability.” These characteristics of Being’s remnants do not indicate its ineffectiveness but rather its “worn-out” condition.22 The remnants of Being show its condition at the margin of the world picture.

As we can see, the remains of Being do not represent anything objective except its own remnants, which are not objective, escape all forms of lucidity, but are still the condition of such representation. In sum, the remains of Being are not available for contemplation from a logical, ethical, or aesthetic point of view; instead, they allow an acknowledgment of alterations in these same realms. After all, these disciplines are consequences of the metaphysical structure of knowledge, where Being has been abandoned and replaced by beings, that is, by a technological global organization of reality. This is probably why Heidegger emphasized that the “abandonment of Being is the innermost ground of the emergency of the lack of a sense of emergency.”23 But what is the relation between the remains of Being and the lack of a sense of emergency?

The remains of Being allow the possibility of acknowledging and withstanding emergency. “Emergencies” result from our noticing an alteration within the world picture, but the “lack of a sense of emergency” emerges when we realize that everything is lucid and functioning correctly. This is why Heidegger believed that the lack of a sense of emergency is greatest where everything is held to be calculable, justifiable, and predictable, reducing the world to objective measures. But how can someone acknowledge a lack of a sense of emergency that “constantly denies itself as an emergency?”24 According to Heidegger, the “lack of a sense of emergency is the extreme form of this emergency and can be recognized above all as the abandonment of Being by beings.”25

This emergency does not first need help but instead must itself first become the help. Yet this emergency must actually be experienced. What if humans are hardened against it, indeed, as it seems, more obdurately than ever? Then those who awaken must arrive, those who would be the last ones to believe they had discovered the emergency, because they are aware of suffering it.26

For us to experience the lack of a sense of emergency it is not enough to ackn...