Aesthetics at Large: Volume 1: Art, Ethics, Politics

Aesthetics at Large

Aesthetics at Large

Volume 1  Art, Ethics, Politics

Thierry de Duve

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54656-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54673-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54687-2 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226546872.001.0001

Chapters 1 and 5 first published as Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us? The Life and Death of Images, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (London: Tate, 2008). © Tate 2008. Text reproduced by permission of the Tate Trustees.

Chapter 6 first published as Aesthetics as the Transcendental Ground of Democracy, Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2015). © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Chapter 7 first published in Art and Aesthetics After Adorno, Anthony J. Cascardi, ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Used by permission of the publisher.

Chapter 9 first published in Rediscovering Aesthetics, Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice, ed. Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, Tony O’Connor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Duve, Thierry de, author.

Title: Aesthetics at large / Thierry de Duve.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018– |

Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Volume 1. Art, ethics, politics.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018030677 | ISBN 9780226546568 (v.1 : cloth : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9780226546735 (v.1 : pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226546872 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Art—Philosophy. | Aesthetics. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804.

Kritik der Urteilskraft.

Classification: LCC N66 .D88 2018 | DDC 700.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030677

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Dear Reader

Part I: The Kant after Duchamp Approach

1   Overture: Why Kant Got It Right

2   From Beaux-Arts to Art-in-General: A Bit of History

3   The Post-Duchamp Condition: Remarks on Four Usages of the Word Art

4   The Idea of Art and the Ethics of the Museum: A Candid Theory

5   Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us?

6   Le sens de la famille: Aesthetics as the Transcendental Ground of Democracy

7   Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant

Part II: Close and Not So Close Readings

8   Conceptual Art in Light of Kant’s Antinomy of Taste

9   Kant’s Free Play in Light of Minimal Art

10   A Transcendental Chicken-and-Egg Dilemma

11   Reflecting on Reflection

Notes

Index of Proper Names

Index of Concepts

Dear Reader,

Behold the campaign button on the cover of this book. It gives away that the author is a militant, eager to share his conviction that Kant got it right. Kant is of course Immanuel Kant, the great eighteenth-century philosopher from Königsberg, whose three Critiques crowned the Enlightenment and inaugurated a new era in philosophy. Now what is it that the author is convinced Kant got right? The title of this book, Aesthetics at Large, offers a succinct answer: whereas other parts of his philosophical system, and the pretension to achieve a complete system, did not withstand the test of time unscathed, Kant’s thoughts on aesthetics are as relevant today as they were in 1790. To this claim the book’s subtitle, Art, Ethics, Politics, adds the suggestion that Kant is a good guide when it comes to exploring the relation of art to ethics and politics.

Or so I was convinced until election night. I thought I had put the final stop to my manuscript and was reading it one last time before sending it to the University of Chicago Press when, four nights ago, on November 8, 2016, we, the American people (I’m a newly minted US citizen who voted for the first time) elected a frighteningly incompetent, racist, misogynous, probably psychotic, and populist demagogue as our forty-fifth president. It is too soon to tell whether, by some miracle of his Dr. Jekyll–Mr. Hyde temperament and opportunistic flair, Donald Trump will rise to the task or, at least, whether the administration he will assemble will restrain his most dangerous impulses. And it is beyond my competence to make predictions or even to analyze why we—and by this we I mean we academics, we liberal intellectuals, writers and artists, we pundits of the serious press—failed to see the earthquake coming. But as I try to recover from the shock, I must ask myself whether the discrepancy between the we I identify with (the educated elite) and the we I belong to by choice (the American people) trivializes—or indeed nullifies—the manuscript I was ready, a week ago, to deliver to the University of Chicago Press. Being a book on aesthetics, it is not directly on politics, but it has the word politics in its title. I cannot see it published simply pretending that nothing happened.

My political convictions are those of a European social democrat: liberal, not radical, progressive, but not leftist. They have not changed, as much as Trump’s election revolts me. Although my gut feeling cried out to President Obama that he should refuse to step down, publicly disavow his successor, or at least warn the country of the dangers to come, I came around, and I am in awe before the gracious way he acknowledged Trump’s victory and started the transition process. That was a great lesson in ethics and politics: respect for the Constitution must prevail, in spite of the very real risk that an unscrupulous autocrat had used democracy to destroy democracy. The thousands and thousands of protesters marching against Trump these days exercise their constitutional right to free expression; I joined them in Washington Square yesterday. The placard stating Not My President that many were carrying is an understandable outcry of disgust, but unfortunately, it is both a delusion and a venial sin against the Constitution. For the truth is that Trump is our president-elect, and we elected him. There can be no individual withdrawal from this we, which is precisely why so many of us feel not only desperate but also betrayed and sullied. Populism turned out to be an insidious poison in this election. The results, so far, indicate that numerous millennials, Latinos, even women, in and out of the Rust Belt, succumbed to its siren song. I am particularly sad for the millennials—the generation of my students—for they and their children will pay the price. I am angry at those of my scholar peers who, draping themselves in the tunic of public intellectuals, were irresponsibly self-indulgent in calling for a third-party vote or holding a lesser-of-two-evils vote in contempt: they typically favored theoretical righteousness over practical efficiency. And I have more than ambivalent feelings toward Bernie Sanders. His relentless campaign against unbridled capitalism and in favor of social justice and economic equality was right, timely, and just. He was the candidate of choice for the majority of the youth, and he would have been mine in the primaries if he hadn’t named the movement he launched a revolution.

In both parties, the primaries opposed a revolutionary to the candidate or candidates of the establishment. Predictably, Sanders, who was calling for a revolution from within the Democratic Party, was disavowed at the party’s convention in favor of the establishment’s champion. He ought to have known that in the United States, revolution is a dirty word—except, of course, for the young people he courted and whom I’d say no one should blame for being susceptible to romantic enthusiasm. It is Sanders who must be blamed for having spurred it; he doesn’t have the excuse of youth. I’m not saying he was defeated in the primaries merely because of a careless choice of words; he had real entrenched forces barring him. All the same, the tragic irony of his campaign is that his revolution was only nominally one and should therefore never have borne that name. He did not exhort his partisans to overthrow the government and burn the Constitution; he only asked them to implement his purported revolution with their votes in due respect for the legality of the electoral process. Not Sanders but rather Trump is the real revolutionary. He was smart enough to never even utter the word, but when, at the end of his third debate with Hillary Clinton, he reserved the right to challenge the results of the election should he lose, he declared his willingness to deny the legitimacy of the electoral process, to trample the Constitution, and to seize quasi-dictatorial power with the mob’s backing. If this is not a revolution—and one, for lack of a better word, of the fascist kind—then what is it? Months before Trump won this indeed rigged election (see Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times of November 7), I was telling my friends, just in case, that the most timely piece of literature these days was Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. In retrospect, I’d say everybody should read or reread it—with ash in their mouth.

As I am writing this, I realize that Kant, whose guidance I sought throughout this book, continues to guide me in my clumsy posttraumatic reflections. There are two things in Kant that I believe can help us think in the present crisis. One is his aversion for revolutions, the other his distrust of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is an emotion, and emotions are likely to be bad counselors of reason. And revolutions are illegitimate because if they were not, they would imply a self-contradictory right to rebel. However, in spite of his stiff legalism, Kant had sympathy for the American and the French Revolutions, both of which he witnessed from afar. In The Contest of Faculties (1798), he wrote the most astounding comment on both enthusiasm and revolutions. Asking himself whether there is a priori ground for believing in the progress and moral improvement of the human race, he looked for an event that would indicate that humanity is the author of its own improvement and therefore not only progresses but has always been progressing. And he found that event in the French Revolution—with two important caveats. The event is not the Revolution itself but enthusiasm for the Revolution; and it is not the enthusiasm of the actors of the Revolution but rather of its spectators. Throughout Europe countless people, many of whom would stand to lose from the Revolution, nevertheless felt a wish to participate in it verging on enthusiasm (eine Theilnehmung dem Wunsche nach, die nahe an Enthusiasm grenzt) and manifested their sympathy publicly and without regard for their own interest. Kant read that fact as the sure sign of a moral disposition in humankind and thus of the reality of its progress. He called this sign historical—the sign that history moves in the right direction. Marxists who, much later, spoke of the sens de l’histoire were right; their only mistake, but a tragic one, was to endow a mere sign with the ineluctability of a physical cause.

Progress is real: this is Kant’s fundamental political lesson, an antidote to both utopia and defeatism. He does not say that progress is constant, though; that would be childish idealism. There are periods of regression in history, and they can be long and dreary. The sense we have these days that civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of our planet have been rolled back at least fifty years is depressing enough. But we should find the energy to fight back in Kant’s dismissal of the thesis according to which periods of progress and periods of regression alternate in a zero sum game and never get to prove that humanity is headed toward moral improvement and political progress. Kant’s proof of the contrary is fragile—it is no more than a sign—and this book does everything to underscore that fragility. One way it does this is by paying attention to negative historical signs (see especially chapter 7, the Adorno chapter), signs attesting negatively that humanity is—or must be—heading for progress. There is no more blatantly negative historical sign than the enthusiasm displayed by Trump’s supporters on election night and since. Please, ignore the obscenity of it all and allow me to play the devil’s advocate for a second.

True enthusiasm, Kant admits (and remember, he doesn’t hold enthusiasm in high esteem, suspicious as he is that enthusiasm is Schwärmerei), "is always directed towards the ideal, particularly towards that which is purely moral (such as the concept of right), and it cannot be coupled with selfish interests."¹ In other terms, enthusiasm is a utopian passion. Trump voters, no doubt, had an ideal in mind, however ill conceived, and their dreamworld is a utopia, however warped. Let’s even grant (some of) them the conviction that they were acting for the common good, morally, and beyond their selfish interests. But they count as actors of the Trump revolution: their enthusiasm doesn’t prove anything. I don’t see public display of enthusiasm in its spectators, nationally and internationally, except in the likes of Stephen Bannon, Viktor Orbán, or Marine Le Pen—who also count as actors of a Trump or Trump-like revolution. For Kant, more than enthusiasm itself it is the publicity of its display that signals a progressive disposition in the spectators of a revolution. The shame that prevented countless Trump voters from announcing their intentions publicly—and which allegedly distorted the polls in the process—is a strong negative historical sign. An even stronger and much more frightening negative sign is, only four days after the elections, the unabashed public display of racist and sexist invectives that Trump’s legitimation has unleashed, normalized, and mainstreamed. The hatred and resentment that fuel them cannot be called enthusiasm. I find no solace but I do find intellectual guidance in those two negative signs. They not only prove that fighting everything Trump represents is fighting for progress (that goes without saying) but they are also the sign that Kant’s remarks on enthusiasm and revolutions are relevant. I have no doubt that he did a bit of introspection when he read the enthusiasm of the French Revolution’s spectators correctly.

Turning to the enthusiasm of the revolutionaries on the other side of the fence in this election—the young Bernie or Bust utopianists—I, too, only need a bit of introspection to recognize in it true passion for equality and justice. But asking myself whether they were actors or spectators, I must come to the sad conclusion that they were actors in the revolution they didn’t want. Rarely has not voting or casting a symbolic ballot for an independent candidate been so irresponsible. As they mature, these young enthusiasts will have to look back on their reckless behavior and ponder whether youth and ignorance of history had been extenuating factors. My heart is broken because, as a teacher—that is, a member not only of the educated but also the educating elite—I find myself since three days ago looking at my students in dismay, wondering, Did s/he or didn’t s/he? Here is a piece of news for them to meditate on: in an op-ed in today’s—yes, today’s—New York Times candidly (I can’t believe cynically) titled Where the Democrats Go from Here, Bernie Sanders offered his services to Donald Trump with these words: I will keep an open mind to see what ideas Mr. Trump offers and when and how we can work together. Not if, but when and how, after which Sanders proceeded, in the most contradictory manner, to promise that he will also provide a series of reforms to reinvigorate the Democratic Party. This should sober up the Feel the Bern enthusiasts who let their emotions overrule their reason and who are now even more discombobulated by the results of the elections. Would that they understood that the rhetoric of revolution Bernie irresponsibly wielded was hijacked by his populist opponent while his own populism got the better of him—and of them. Meanwhile let’s not forget, hope against hope, that in spite of populism left and right, Hillary won the popular vote.

There are several chapters in the first part of this book that the shocking results of the elections made me want to modify—a temptation I must resist. I hope that, in all its horror, the Trump election will alert the reader to the various negative historical signs the book emphasizes. Chapter 7 (the Adorno chapter) is the most explicit in that respect. Chapter 6 (the "sens de la famille chapter") would benefit from reflections on Trump’s own sens de la famille (Melania, Ivanka, Donald Jr., and the others) and the tribalism of it all. Chapter 5, Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us, must now be understood in light of the obscenity of the us having elected as the highest-ranking representative of the American people a man who is blatantly unable to practice what Kant called the maxim of a broad-minded way of thinking. And chapter 3 puts a face—an ugly face—on the confusion between the empirical and the transcendental this book on aesthetics is denouncing throughout. Physical beauty doesn’t always mirror a virtuous soul—if it were the case this book would not exist—but physical ugliness is often enough the sign of moral depravity.

New York, November 12, 2016

Aesthetics at Large is a book on aesthetics, but it is not only on aesthetics, as testified by its subtitle, Art, Ethics, Politics. My vehemently political incipit notwithstanding, it matters that art, ethics, and politics appear in this order, with politics in third position. Where Kant’s guidance is precious is in the notion that the aesthetic is not an isolated and self-contained realm of experience but provides a unique and special passageway to the ethical and thence to the political domains. Foreign to me is the belief that art is autonomous in the sense of being cut off from morality and politics, but equally foreign is the desire that art be subservient to moral injunctions or political agendas. I never ask how works of art can advance a moral or political cause, but I often ask myself why the experience of true works of art opens onto the idea of a better and more just world. Kant has some answers to that question. His political writings offer a few; but the plat de résistance is in the Critique of (the Power of) Judgment (1790), his third and last Critique, after the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

Although the focus of Aesthetics at Large is on art, Kant’s theory of art receives virtually no attention here. Everything important Kant has to say about the beautiful and the sublime pertains to nature. With the exception of his reflections on genius, the sections of the third Critique dealing with art are mainly of historical interest. It is not just that Kant’s artistic culture was rather poor or that he could not have foreseen the development of modern art. It is also that the art world has changed beyond recognition since Kant’s time. Kant knew his way around the schöne Künste, the fine arts. He had no idea that some day the fine arts system would collapse and make way for art in general—indeed, art at large. He would have been absolutely lost before Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square or any of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Speaking of those: readers of my previous book, Kant after Duchamp, know that the method I advocate to update the third Critique is to read it replacing the word beautiful with the word art. I shall argue here again for that replacement. But except for a few elliptical allusions to them, I reserve for the second volume of Aesthetics at Large the theoretical analysis and the historical explanation of the transfer of responsibility, from natural beauty to art as such, that has occurred since Kant’s time and has made this textual replacement mandatory.

The book has two parts. The first, titled The ‘Kant after Duchamp’ Approach, expands on the content of Kant after Duchamp and applies the substitution of art for beauty to a number of issues, all revolving around the idea of sensus communis, its aesthetic origin, and its implications for humanity as an ethical and political community. The second, titled Close and Not So Close Readings, does exactly what the title says: it zeros in on a few crucial and problematic passages of the Critique of Judgment and ventures an interpretation. Wherever I could, I did my best to write with a minimum of philosophical jargon so as to address not just an audience of Kant specialists but also a wider readership interested in aesthetics, art theory, and their relevance to modern and contemporary art practices. It is for the benefit of that wider audience that I wish to preempt a potential misunderstanding right away. It concerns Kant’s technical usage of the term transcendental. I realized how big the risk of that misunderstanding was when I heard a friend speak casually of the transcendental experience she had when visiting an exhibition that had deeply impressed her. To my Kant-attuned ears, this was a contradiction in terms: an experience cannot be transcendental; conversely, what must be called transcendental is not accessible through experience; empirical and transcendental are mutually exclusive denominations. My friend, I soon realized, was in excellent company. Speaking of American abstract painters as performing a metaphysical act whereas, according to him, their European counterparts performed a transcendental act, Barnett Newman wrote, To put it philosophically, the European is concerned with the transcendence of objects while the American is concerned with the reality of the transcendental experience.² Pace Newman, to the transcendental experience, his phrasing adds a level of confusion between transcendental and transcendence—another contradiction in terms to my Kant-attuned ears.

Naturally, I knew of the school of transcendentalism in American philosophy, traced back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. But I was only vaguely aware of how much Emersonian transcendentalism had trickled down into everyday language and threatened to tinge my readers’ understanding of transcendental as I use it. Kant’s and Emerson’s brands of transcendentalism are not just different from each other; they are quasi contraries. Although in his famous essay The Transcendentalist, Emerson claimed an affiliation to Kant, it is as if he had picked the wrong Immanuel. His definition of transcendentalism as the Saturnalia or excess of Faith, his opinion that the Transcendentalist believes in miracles and in ecstasy, and his claim that nature is transcendental owe more to Emanuel Swedenborg than to Kant. Kant would not have hesitated to call such statements Schwärmereien—delusions, most often the illusion that one can access the supersensible through the senses.

In the first Critique, Kant called transcendental all a priori concepts and ideas, meaning concepts and ideas that obtain before, beyond, or independently of sensory experience. This applies to the results of all a priori judgments that yield necessary and universal knowledge but also, as became clearer to Kant with the third Critique, to the outcome of movements of the mind that claim necessity and universal validity yet never yield knowledge: movements such as reflective judgments, which posit things that can be thought and thought about but cannot be known. The gist of Emerson’s philosophy—and its utopian appeal—was that he fantasized that he had arrived at some sound knowledge whereas he had merely wished it into existence, propelled by his irresistible idealism and longing for natural goodness. He may have become an atheist, but he could not stop yearning for a benevolent God. Kant, by contrast, may have remained a sincere believer in God, but the intellectual discipline he imposed on himself forced him to think as if God did not exist.

The Kant whose guidance this book seeks is much more skeptical than the one traditionally presented. As I shall argue in the second volume of Aesthetics at Large, tentatively subtitled Art, Politics, Nature, the Critique of Teleological Judgment (the second part of the Critique of Judgment) all but does away with the idea that the universe needs a creator, benevolent or not. When one allows the Kant after Duchamp approach to update teleological judgment by calling on modern science, all residual need for what Kant called Physicotheology vanishes. (The last chapter of the present volume, Reflecting on Reflection, is a first step toward that update.) This has consequences for the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (the first part of the Critique of Judgment), which are the focus of the present volume. Its main question is, what trust can we have in sensus communis in a radically disenchanted world? Indeed, rethinking sensus communis is the task I felt Kant after Duchamp had failed to address—perhaps didn’t even see properly. That task grew in importance over the years, and its difficulty accounts for the painstaking procrastination this book endured. Books are linear but their content is not. Even run-of-the-mill novels, with their plots and chronological narratives, contain descriptions and character analyses that are, so to speak, perpendicular to the time line. In great novels, in poetry and philosophy, in scientific treatises, these perpendiculars deepen and proliferate to form the multidimensional sedimentation of meaning we take home as we turn the last page. I had an inkling that the meaning I was yearning to discover was complex and multidimensional, but I had no method or strategy to pursue it. I had to rely on problem-raising insights, which I resolved to follow to the (sometimes bitter) end. It’s a trial-and-error process for which I have only a clumsy metaphorical image: I tend to see the object on my workbench as a huge jigsaw puzzle, some pieces of which are theoretical, some historical and art-historical. (The present book contains none of the historical and art-historical pieces, only allusions to them.³)

I don’t know how many pieces the puzzle consists of, what its outer borders are, or what shape the individual pieces have, only that the whole must be coherent and that all pieces need to be chiseled so that their contours fit those of adjacent ones. Indeed, the puzzle was not conceived and fabricated by some company for me to put it back together. I must work the way jigsaw puzzle fans work, but in the dark, at times groping quasi-blindly for the connecting piece, at times looking for the straightedged outer contours, at times gaining distance and trying to grasp a sense of the whole. I will probably never get a completely satisfactory sense of the whole, but I cannot defer publication any longer. It is time to release the pieces of the puzzle that I think are compatible with one another and await the criticism of my peers. A short notice at the beginning of each chapter indicates whether it has been issued before the present publication—sometimes in several versions and in various languages—testaments to the difficulties I experienced.

There are so many people I would like to thank that I will certainly forget several. I beg their pardon in advance. And I must in retrospect, and alas too late, beg the pardon of Jean-François Lyotard, whom I neglected to acknowledge in Kant after Duchamp—an unforgivable slip given that it was he who led me to read Kant seriously. In the 1970s, showing interest in Kant was quasi-taboo in certain circles: Hegel, yes; Marx, yes; Nietzsche, yes; but Kant? One evening, toward the end of the decade, Lyotard and I were having dinner in a Brussels restaurant when he took me completely by surprise telling me that he had a passion for Kant—a passion hinted at by none of his published books at the time. I began to understand what he meant three years later, when Le Différend appeared. His Kant and mine are as different as can be—he focused on the Analytic of the Sublime, I focus on the Analytic and Dialectic of the Beautiful—but without his encouragement, I would probably never have dared plunge into Kant’s arduous writings let alone go public with my interpretive endeavors.

I received over the many years it took to bring this book to fruition more careful critical attention than I deserved from another philosopher, my good friend Herman Parret, professor emeritus from the University of Leuven, who has reviewed the book’s manuscript and offered many invaluable comments. I also received occasional support and friendly criticism from Howard Caygill, the late Jean-Pierre Cometti, Diarmuid Costello, Paul Crowther, James Elkins, Aleš Erjavec, José António Fernandes Dias, Glória Ferreira, Christel Fricke, Véronique Goudinoux, Stian Grøgaard, Gregg Horowitz, John Hyman, Claude Imbert, Geeta Kapur, Robert Kudielka, Bente Larsen, W. J. T. Mitchell, Parul Mukherji, Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Osborne, the late Marie-Claire Ropars, Sônia Salzstein, Kavita Singh, Carole Talon-Hugon, Jeff Wall, Sven-Olov Wallenstein,