1 Aesthetics and the public
This claim right at the beginning of the introduction to Monique Roelofs’ The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic puts front and center one of the main presuppositions of the course: that ”the aesthetic” names a “pervasive phenomenon” of our lives, from the most extravagant instances in the arts to the more quotidian dimensions of everyday life. See p. 1.
Roelofs goes on to claim in this introduction that our historical moment is rich with potential, imagined or real, for exploring new ways in which the aesthetic shapes our communal existence.
Terminologically, ‘aesthetics’ names a sub-discipline of philosophy interested, generally, in judgments of taste. “Taste” is two things. It is one’s preferences, as shaped by one’s past. It is also one’s capacity in general to determine whether something is of artistic or aesthetic value, whether, most broadly, it is worth noticing. Aesthetics studies the nature of taste in this second sense primarily. It isn’t concerned so much with what things or works are beautiful, or even what makes something beautiful. Rather, aesthetics analyzes just the very possibility of taste. In aesthetics we ask questions such as: What does it mean to say something is ‘beautiful’? or ‘ugly’?
Kant and Hume, Roelofs notes, conceived of aesthetics as a way in which community and shared identity are constructed. Although they have very different theories about the nature of taste, both nevertheless believe judgments of taste bring to the surface ways in which we, as human beings, share capacities for making sense. See p. 5.
But the vision of shared community—a “public”—that emerges from Kant, Hume, and other Enlightenment thinkers is “thin.” It lacks substantive engagement with the actual conditions in which concepts of taste emerge. Nevertheless, although there are ways to doubt their particular constructions of it, the possibility of shared community through shared appreciation of the aesthetic remains, for Roelofs, a viable and worthwhile project. See pp. 5–6.
2 On Neruda
Roelefs finds in Pablo Neruda an exemplar of an aesthetics simultaneously invested in the value and meaning of everyday objects and committed to an egalitarian model of community. See the basic claim at the bottom of p. 6.
Consider the poems cited on p. 7 and p. 8, and how they exemplify this double aim: finding value in the everyday, and conceiving of a model of shared community that is broadly inclusive—of the makers of things as well as of the reader. See the two highlighted passages on p. 9.
Note what Roelofs is doing here, incidentally. She is reading Neruda’s poems as answering two questions:
- What is worth noticing?
- How do habits of noticing anticipate conceptions of community?
These two questions will guide us all semester.
Now, it is all fine and well to talk about the everyday and its anticipation of notions of egalitarianism when the objects are things like buttons and socks. Roelofs asks: What about abortion pills? or blue-line flags? Just as objects can be occasions for shared meaning, they can be sites of contest and conflict.
Conflict is, however, fairly prevalent in Neruda, as is the idea of overcoming it. One typical resolution comes in the form of love, for example. Consider the poem (“Ode to the Spoon”) cited on p. 14 and Roelofs’ gloss on p. 15.
But there may be something ultimately coercive, a ”threat,” involved in the promise of the aesthetic—the promise of shared community through shared care for items of sensory awareness. The threat, in short, is that aesthetics tends to eliminate or ignore difference and establish as authoritative just one sort of aesthetics.
Consider for example the table in Neruda’s “Ode to the Table” cited in part on pp. 12–13. Is a table a place you sit down to eat? or is it a place you put food down for others? a place you make a mess of? or a place you clean? The table is a site of community, perhaps, but a site also of difference, of unequal relations of power, too. The occasion of the meal at the table has invisible producers. I’m reminded of a meme in which a (white) family sits down for dinner, saying: “Thank you, Jesus, for this food,” and in a separate image a (Latino) migrant farm worker says: “De nada.” In what sense is the gathering at the table ‘making’ community? See p. 18.
Moreover, perhaps the very structure of artistic production is exclusive. Take movies, for example. Are they ‘for everyone’? or just for the people who can afford to see them? just for the people who are into them? Suppose I have a vision of community and I want to share it with the world. I make a film intended to exemplify it. It’s a buddy comedy, featuring an all-Chinese cast, but they speak alternately in German and Swahili; the movie is about a certain rare strain of spider that lives in Antarctica, and you have to have seen all of the Harry Potter films and be an ardent fan of Beethoven’s late quartets in order to get all the jokes. Who’s going to connect with my ‘vision’? the world? or a highly specific subset of it? See Roelofs’ comment on p. 20.
Neruda’s odes, Roelefs is claiming, “embody the cultural promise of the aesthetic” in its better and worse ways (24). They show how art can be both a forger of community and of difference. Roelefs’ discussion of Neruda also exemplifies the sort of interest characteristic of philosophical attention to art and its relation to community that will continue to be at the heart of our work this semester.