from "Poetry-(|'m)-Possible"
a paper of the Society for the CUm|n’ Linguistics (s’CUm)
Aesthetics as a discipline arose in the late eighteenth century when philosophers like Alexander Gottlieb recognized that the sciences were incomplete, given the absence of a science of beauty [...] Early aesthetic theories were concerned not so much with sensory apprehension of reality as with the theory of poetry, whose topic was thought to be the meaning of beauty, (Turner, 1, emphasis added).
What kind of aesthetics is possible today, and what kind of poetry might be thrown up by considering this question?
Following the Holocaust, and its many successors, some modern thinkers have questioned the relation of art to beauty, Adorno famously announcing that (lyric) poetry is impossible after Auschwitz. This does not mean that art per se has become unacceptable, but that poetry, or any creative endeavor, aimed primarily at the production of beauty makes a “mockery of true values in a world of total violence,” (Turner, 2). By uncoupling the values Truth and Beauty, then deemphasizing the relation between Beauty and Art, the (post)-modern turn* enabled a realm of human activity, known since Kant as ‘the Aesthetic,’ to emancipate itself from representational correctness, moral rectitude, and sensory delight, and become a separate domain with its own autonomous values and aims. The question is: how does this zone relate to other parts of the social body? And, after more than 150 years of ‘experiments’ can Truth, Beauty and Ethics play any part in its function, or are these so-called master values excluded, by definition, from the Aesthetic?
In this paper I approach these questions by drawing on the aesthetics of the philosopher and literary geneologist, Jacques Ranciére, and the work of the social and literary theorist, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, before concluding with some words of my own. The point however is not to prescribe what (post)-modern art should be, nor how it should set about achieving its goals, for like Ranciére, my interest lies with the Aesthetic, not art. My aim is to take the Ranciérean idea of the Aesthetic and, after considering the role Buci-Gucksmann accords gender in this realm, to give an example of the potential the Aesthetic has it in it to become(ing). Whether this example embraces a Truth, a Beauty, or an Ethics, I will leave my readers to judge for themselves.
Footnote:*I use the term (post)-modern to indicate that the general perspective referred to may be seen as either modern or post-modern depending on one’s view of ‘modernity’, i.e., the aesthetico-political-economy/paradigm of ideas, people, things and techniques that frame modern art. Though I make no distinction here between the modern and the post-modern, both of these should be sharply distinguished from the similar terms ‘Modernism” and ‘Post-Modernism’ which refer exclusively to certain movements within the arts.