The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic

Monique Roelofs

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781474242028
• eBook ISBN: 9781472522245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach.

1

The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture

Eighteenth-century philosophers associate the concept of the aesthetic with that of the public. David Hume and Immanuel Kant are prominent exponents of this interconnection. Their theories of taste lay the groundwork for much contemporary thought about the aesthetic in the Western tradition. Both thinkers invoke operations of common human appreciative capacities. On the assumption that observers share such faculties, and allow them to govern their perceptions of artworks and other objects, the resulting judgments of taste attain intersubjective validity.¹ This landmark proposal links the aesthetic with the public: apprehensible to any appropriate observer, artistic value acquires a public dimension. The aesthetic experiences we undergo register generally accessible meanings. The exercise of aesthetic perception comprises a public good in the sense that it is in principle available to everyone, irrespective of anyone’s particular characteristics. The pleasure that aesthetic practice potentially provides us all, and the judgments that it is capable of legitimizing for each and every person anchor us in a common human world. Aesthetic activities instantiate a collective register of subjectivity. The public status of aesthetic experience finds further elaboration in Hume’s view that taste, refinement, and the arts contribute to the advancement of the public sphere.²

Hume’s and Kant’s universalist accounts of aesthetic perception and value have come under critique.³ The notion of the public that emerges from the hypothesis of shared appreciative capacities and the universally valid aesthetic judgments they warrant is thin. The assumption of a common mindset and the universality afforded by our shared propensities tells us little about empirical conditions under which aesthetic experiences and evaluations take shape. It says next to nothing about the influence that institutional matrices of observation, feeling, and desire, of power and language exert over the meanings with which we invest aesthetic forms in actual human communities.

Compelling points of criticism have been raised for Hume’s and Kant’s accounts. Nevertheless, their notions of aesthetic publicity hold out the promise of a shared culture, including the pledge that our aesthetic activities connect people, and people and objects, in flourishing collective and material bonds.⁴ This aesthetic project would be one version of the kind of public work the aesthetic undertakes.⁵ Clearly, it is not what Hume and Kant explicitly said the aesthetic does. However, the prominence their theories enjoy to this date is due in part to the desirability we attribute to what we take to have been promised.

We can discern the lineaments of this promise in Pablo Neruda’s elemental odes. Neruda attaches a cultural promise to the aesthetic that illuminates the promise conveyed by Hume and Kant, even if Neruda’s version of the promise of the aesthetic will turn out far to exceed what these philosophers had in mind. Neruda’s odes put into play mechanisms that make possible the promise of the aesthetic and that stand in its way. The poet took the cultural promise of aesthetic publicity to be abundantly available. His odes enable us to see how the aesthetic can be promising in the face of its compromised capacity to carry out cultural projects with which we have charged it.

The aesthetic promise of a harmonious and egalitarian culture

Neruda’s three books of odes, Elemental Odes, New Elemental Odes, and Third Book of Odes, which were published between 1954 and 1957, posit the ideal of the harmonious coexistence of people, animals, objects, places, and plants in an egalitarian human and nonhuman community.⁶ Numerous odes in these collections as well as a great many poems in Voyages and Homecomings (1959), which the poet described as his fourth book of elemental odes, attempt to envelop the reader in a cycle of material interaction, desire, and love that, Neruda intimates, can be actualized with the requisite collective effort.⁷ The poems articulate the promise of an aesthetically, ethically, and politically thriving society founded on ideals of equality and harmony.

The odes embody this promise in everyday objects and events. This is evident in the final stanza of the “Ode to the Chair:” “War is vast like the shadowy jungle. / Peace / begins / in / a single / chair.”⁸ In the “Ode to the Orange,” similarly, the oneness of the orange announces that of the world: “Nations / are united / within your rind / like segments of a single fruit.” In praise of the abundant possibilities of bread, the “Ode to Bread” attests: “Because we plant its seed / and grow it / not for one man / but for all, / there will be enough: / there will be bread / for all the peoples of the earth.”

The “Ode to Things” illuminates the aesthetic structure that throughout the odes exudes the promise of an egalitarian and harmonious community, and clarifies why this promise must be seen as a promise of culture. In this poem, Neruda envisages a pattern of affiliations among subjects, among objects, and among subjects and objects that allows for a common social and material existence. Weaving the reader into relations that connect interpreters, creators, and things, the ode holds out the promise of humans’ intersubjective copresence in a world they share with one another and their surroundings. Acts of creation and reception sustain the ties of conviviality that are to bring together individuals and individuals and things. Such acts forge the bonds that underlie the cohesion of the promised community. The books of odes understand the aesthetic as a connective tissue that can actualize the possibilities inherent in public life. The aesthetic promises to fulfill the aspirations that can be associated with the idea of publicity through the institution of a culture of and for the people.

The organizing gesture in the “Ode to Things” that gives rise to this image of aesthetic culture is the speaker’s address to the objects:

O irrevocable

river

of things:

no one can say

that I loved

only

. . .

those things that leap and climb, desire, and survive.

It’s not true:

many things came together

to tell me the whole story.

Not only did they touch me,

or my hand touched them:

they accompanied

my existence

to such an extent

that they lived with me,

they were so alive to me

that they lived with me half my life

and will die with me half my death.⁹

Addressing the objects through the vocative form (“O river of things”), the narrator fictionally construes them as worthy of being spoken to.¹⁰ He lends them qualities of bodily action and lived experience: they acquire the capacity to touch and to be touched. Animated by the speaker, they gain narrative power and subjective agency. A trope of amorous inseparability entwines the narrator’s and the objects’ existence: they share narrativity and experience as matters of life and death. The ode’s apostrophe (“O river”) enacts this symbiosis. Turning directly toward the objects, the narrator instills subjective life into them and engages them in a state of intimacy. This gesture sustains a mutuality of interaction. As the speaker’s voice projects responsiveness into the objects, they answer his address to them with their stories and their touch. Their perceived uptake of the narrator’s address fictionally renders his love reciprocal. The “Ode to a Box of Tea” illustrates this: “Box of tea, / like my / own heart / you arrived bearing / stories, / thrills, / eyes / that had held / fabulous petals in their gaze / and also, yes, / that / lost scent / of tea, of jasmine and of dreams, / that scent of wandering spring.” The speaker’s powers of address and narration find confirmation in the objects’ subjectivity. So does his aptitude for living, his ability to be alive to and with the objects.

In the double orientations of the ode’s animation (to and from the objects) Neruda’s “Ode to Things” resembles Shelley’s famous “Ode to the West Wind,” in which the speaker, as Barbara Johnson has noted, calls on the wind to regenerate his waning vitality (1987a, 188). However, whereas Shelley foregrounds the animation of the speaker, Neruda’s poem distinguishes itself from the apostrophic lyricism of the earlier work by centering the narrator’s, and, by extension, our—the reader’s and the general public’s—relations with things and other people. Further, in Neruda’s view of aesthetic exchange, relations with people mediate relations with things, and relations with things mediate relations with people. I call the resulting fabric of aesthetically inflected relations “aesthetic relationality.”¹¹

The following verses spell out the cycle of material, intersubjective connections envisioned by Neruda:

Oh, how many

perfect

things

man

has built!

. . .

I love

all

things,

not because they are

passionate

or sweet-smelling,

but because,

I don’t know,

because

this ocean is yours,

and mine:

these buttons,

and wheels,

and little

forgotten

treasures,

fans upon

whose feathers

love has scattered

its orange blossoms,

glasses, knives and

scissors—

all bear

the trace

of someone’s fingers,

on their handle or surface,

the trace of a distant hand

lost

in the most forgotten of forgottenness.¹²

The narrator’s love of the objects is a response to the marks of the bodily presence and absence of other creators and users, signs that he encounters in such objects. The animation of things coincides with the animation of the individuals who made and handled them. The ode suspends the oblivion that had befallen past makers and owners. The love persons have felt is made decipherable—its “orange blossoms” can be discovered on the “feathers” of “fans”—and people’s material activities become evident. Speaker and objects collaboratively defy the distance that separates earlier producers and consumers from the speaker.¹³

Neruda’s ode imagines a temporally continuous collective that gathers in patterns of address directed at and coming from objects. Through a direct address to the reader (“this ocean is yours, / and mine”) the poem includes its audience in this community. The animated objects join one another in a stream of address that remains indifferent to the boundaries between “your” and “mine.” The narrator places himself in a lineage of mediators of the objects’ stories, which he passes on to his audience. The text positions the reader as a participant in an intersubjective chain of materially and communally supported interpretable and interpretive transactions. Desirous of a close, physically materializing connection with makers and previous users of the objects, and of the reader’s immersion into the unfolding texture of relations, the speaker calls on the persons who might encounter the objects to make the most of a field of relational possibilities, of which these individuals already, however limited, have been made a part.

When in the ode’s final passage (qtd. on p. 7), the speaker directly addresses the things, the narrator’s intimacy with them stands in for that of humanity at large, which his apostrophe addresses indirectly. The circuit of reciprocal animation in which the speaker’s relation with things picks up on his relation with people, and his relation with people finds sustenance in his relation with things, spreads from the individual to the universal. Humans, animals, and objects join one another in webs of interconnected modes of address that in principle can encompass everyone, everything.

In the poem’s picture of aesthetic relationality, the significance of objects is bound up with the existence of a collective of loving and laboring subjects, who stand in relations of address with these objects and one another. The modes of address subjects undertake toward and receive from one another thereby make responses to the modes of address subjects adopt toward and register from objects, and vice versa. A proliferating reciprocal responsiveness among modes of address, each one inciting and informing other ones, enables people, things, animals, plants, environments, and nations to inhabit connections with one another in a constellation of interlinking strands of address. Modes of address join up to forge larger chains and webs of address that harbor them.

The “Ode to Things” implicitly suggests that it is through modes of address we direct at and receive from our surroundings that we can realize our subjectivity interactively, in a potentially shared, spatiotemporally extended material world. This involves the creation of interpretations and conditions of interpretability. For readings and terms of readability, according to the ode’s poetics, enable us to witness in the objects the signs and effects of others’ emotional states and orientations (such as the “orange blossoms” of love, mentioned before) and of the bodily actions and labor others have performed in relation to the things (as reflected, for example, by the imprints made by hands).

Testifying that “this ocean is yours, / and mine,” Neruda accords the objects a home in a collective scene of address. As he draws subjects close to himself on account of their shared cultural proprietorship of the objects, these individuals’ actions and feelings become legible.¹⁴ In interpreting their activities and affects, the poet then brings people closer, enabling them, as it were, to speak through the objects. The vision of aesthetic relationality he projects both presupposes and heralds the presence of a communal forum for address—a structure of publicity, a common culture—that extends into the past and future, and can encompass anyone and anything. The poem articulates the culture-building promise of the collective possibilities for reading, making, and readability that we may associate with the idea of aesthetic publicity.

Comprehended as an allegory of the cultural promise of the aesthetic, the “Ode to Things” crafts links between the notions of address, relationality, and the promise of culture.¹⁵ This book understands these concepts as structural constituents of the idea of the aesthetic in Western philosophy. The triad of address, relationality, and promising plays a central part in the organization of aesthetic agency and experience. I show how this three-fold assembly lends its powers to vital human capabilities that we bring about by aesthetic means, and, at the same time, has a hand in problems in which the aesthetic is embroiled. Strikingly, the elemental odes not only uncover fundamental components of the notion of the aesthetic, but also expose a lacuna in this concept.¹⁶ The poems implicitly notify us of conundrums that signal a hole in aesthetic theorizing. This gap will guide the present study. It arises as follows.

Glitches in the promise

Neruda’s view of communal interpretive and interpretable life rests on an idealization. Relatively abstractly described, the objects celebrated in the odes, such as plates and oranges, to many readers, exude the appearance of being ordinary objects. Such ostensibly everyday things readily lend themselves to absorption in a tight, seemingly generalizable nexus of subjects and objects. This may not as assuredly be the case, however, with passports, identity cards, firearms, veils, burkas, electric chairs, abortion pills, immunization policies, political manifestos, cannabis products, euthanasia medication, gluinos, surveillance cameras, or a gulp of drinkable water at a time of emergency and destruction. These entities are harder to incorporate in a vision of aesthetic conviviality. The close, expansive cycle of affiliation envisaged by Neruda would unravel in confrontation with these elements, which have their place in polemics that instantly reveal the speaker’s and the readers’ positionality.

It turns out to be a rigorously curtailed scope of subjects and objects that are assimilable by the network of address imagined in the “Ode to Things.” The community of producers and consumers of objects and symbolic forms displays deeper tears and fractures than Neruda’s image of the interpretive collective admits. Does this cause a collapse of the poems’ promise? Do the odes really hold out a promise of culture? If so, can we lend credence to the promise we see there? We may have pinned our hopes on a promise that does not actually exist and/or could not possibly come true.

Some quite ordinary features of our relation to promises point to other possibilities. Fallible, limited, as we know ourselves to be, grounded in embodied situations, beholden to desire, we do not typically let go of promises that move us or that we have been crafting, just because we run into obstacles, or experience reasons for doubt—legitimate reasons at that. Our belief in promises evinces a certain stretchability. Rather than getting us to give up on the trust we have put into promises that we recognize, impediments and grounds for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Introduction
• 1 The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture
• 2 Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions
• 3 The Gendered Aesthetic Detail
• 4 Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor
• 5 The Aesthetics of Ignorance
• 6 An Aesthetic Confrontation
• 7 Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism
• 8 Aesthetic Promises and Threats
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index