TOWARD THE MATERIALITY OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

PETER DE BOLLA

Over the last twenty years or so it has become a commonplace in discussions of aesthetics or of art in the most general sense to note that the term aesthetics was only very recently invented by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, where it appears in his Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus [see Menke 40; Dickie; Eagleton]. But the force of this observation in regard to the relative youth of the concept is rarely, if ever, commented upon. As many philosophers and critics have pointed out, Baumgartens use of the term was not primarily angled at what today might be unproblematically called artworkssay, paintings in the European grand master traditionsince his new kind of investigation was to be a science of sensual recognition, that is, a general inquiry into how we come to know the world from the evidence of our senses. But, as is also frequently remarked, early on in the tradition of speculation now associated with aesthetics as the study of art the mutual attraction (to put it in the most anodyne terms) of art and aesthetics seems to have been extremely strong. As Jonathan Ree remarks, the real begetter of the philosophical doctrine connecting the arts with the empirical senseswhat we might call the aesthetic theory of the artswas Gotthold Ephraim Lessing [58]. From this point on (for heuristic purposes it may be identified with the date of publication of Lessings Laokoon in 1766), artworks, which heretofore had not required a specific branch of inquiry in order for them to make sense or be conceptually grounded as art, are almost universally assumed to require aesthetic contemplation or appreciation.1 It is curious, then, that before 1766 such a mode of experiencing artworks had not been felt to be lacking. One might understand this observation both historically and philosophically, and both approaches, it seems to me, are needed. In the case of the first, a number of material effects conspired across mid-eighteenth-century Europe to produce what was in essence the modern art market. These include the legal establishment of copyright, first in England in 1709 but only by the end of the century in France and Germany; the foundation of various institutions whose primary purpose was the promotion and establishment of the fine arts: academies of painting, sculpture, or letters either with or without royal patronage; the public exhibition of paintings (from 1737 in France and 1761 in England); the opening of royal collections to public view (during the second half of the century in London, Paris, Munich, Vienna and Rome); the development of public concerts of secular music (in small scale from the 1670s in England but only becoming fully integrated in fashionable social life by mid-century); the construction of purposebuilt concert venues (the Gewandthaus in Leipzig, a former cloth merchants hall, was remodeled in 1781 in order to accommodate a resident orchestra, in effect becoming the first dedicated concert hall in Europe); the foundation of literary periodicals and review media; the emergence of social spaces and rituals encompassing polite discussion of

1. The story of how this came about is well told in Larry Shiners The Invention of Art.

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literature (coffeehouses, the construction of dedicated library rooms in domestic settings); and the promotion of architecture to a fine art through various societies, competitions, and the public display of architectural drawings in exhibition contexts (the Royal Academy yearly show included both drawings and models). These and other material conditions helped define the fine arts and construct a market in and for them.2 By the 1770s the category of the fine arts was well established in Britain, Germany, and France: Charles Batteuxs Les beaux arts reduit a un meme principe, first published in France in 1746, was quickly translated into English as The Polite Arts; or, a Dissertation on Poetry,Painting, Musick, Architecture, and Eloquence in 1749 and into German in 1751. By 1771 a four-volume General Theory of the Fine Arts had been published for the German public by J. G. Sulzer. All of this points to the fact that the concept of the artwork is subject to both historical and material pressures. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century (though of course it would be foolish to imagine that a precise date could be given for the invention of such a category), those things we now, under the auspices of the aesthetic theory of the arts, regard as works of art had been, by and large, considered in other lightssay, as craft works, that is, objects produced through the utilization and deployment of particular skills which in themselves may have been highly prized and relatively uncommon but such works were not thought to require a special form of appreciation [see Danto, From Aesthetics to Art Criticism]. It required a conceptual or philosophical revolution (and it was a revolution in the sense that everything changed for the foreseeable future and retrospectively objects that had not been understood under the category art were now reconceptualized) to provide the legislating theory which made art intelligible as art. It is important to note here that this legislating theory was, in effect, a byproduct of the development of inquiry into aesthetics, which throughout the eighteenth century comprised a much broader set of interlocking concerns and interests including, amongst others, the study of rhetoric, ethics, the hierarchy of the fine arts, philosophical criticism, the empirical and theoretical elaboration of the sublime and the beautiful, and the development of what would become psychology. Such an inquiry in any event did not primarily set out to provide a conceptual grounding for what we now consensually take to be works of art. But the proximity and mutual interests of both the historical and philosophical pressures I have just outlined conspired to weld the one the formation of the category artto the otherthe development of aesthetics. And so it often seems, at least according to a predominant strain in recent commentary on the aesthetic realm, that the concept of the aesthetic itself produced a category of objects that were understood to require a particular form of contemplation. According to this account, aesthetics invented art. But if it did so it also, simultaneously, challenged the stability of this new category, destabilizing its architectonic as it first posed the question: what is art? And having done this it unwittingly consigned what has turned out to be the predominant future philosophical discussion of aesthetics to the repetitive posing of this question. Moreover, under the aesthetic theory of the arts, artworks themselves are bound to repetitively inquire of their status as objects seemingly distinct from nonartworks.3 So, under a certain description, all artworks are doomed to endlessly rehearse the question of their

2. A good brief account of the British context can be found in John Brewers Cultural Production, Consumption and the Place of the Artist in Eighteenth Century England; a much expanded version is in Brewers The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. 3. Arthur Danto has expressed the view that such philosophical self-consciousness leads to the end of art. See his Art after the End of Art 121.

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own grounding, or, in its philosophical guise, return again and again to the question of the ontology of art.4 Thus it would appear that since the invention of aesthetics, and certainly since the hegemony of the aesthetic theory of the arts, what is, or should, count as an artwork has consistently proven problematic. Within the mainstream philosophical literature of the last century, there are a number of well-rehearsed positions in respect to the problem of arts definition. These may be grouped into three distinct approaches: functionalist, historicist, and institutional. Here is a good example of a recent attempt at a functionalist definition: An item is a work of art at time t, where t is a time no earlier than the time at which the item is made, if and only if (a) either it is one of the central art forms at t and is made with the intention of fulfilling a function art has at t or (b) it is an artifact that achieves excellence in fulfilling such a function, whether or not it is in a central art form and whether or not it was intended to fulfil such a function. [Stecker 50] The author of this definition readily admits to the necessity of honing and polishing it since, as he remarks, it is a somewhat simplified version of the definition [50]. An example of a historicist definition can be found in the work of Jerrold Levinson, who claims a work of art is a thing intended for regard-as-a-work-of-art, regard in any of the ways works of art existing prior to it have been correctly regarded [Levinson 6]. The institutional definition is strongly associated with the philosophers Arthur Danto and George Dickie, both of whom have vigorously pursued this line of inquiry in a number of books and philosophical papers. Dickie, for example, proposed the following in his book Art and the Aesthetic in 1974: A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld). [34] Another, complementary way of trying to break in upon the definition of art comprises the attempt to discover whether those objects in the world we deem to be artworks are so on account of qualities inherent within them, the so-called intrinsic or essentialist definition, or, alternatively, on account of extrinsic factors. In respect of the former, the best-known exponent is Clive Bell, who wrote in 1914: . . . if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke [the aesthetic emotion]. We shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have discovered the essential quality of a work of art. [Bell 17] His answer was, now famously, the quality he called significant form. The most vigorous proponent of the latter, the so-called aesthetic attitude theory, has been Jerome Stolnitz.5 Although this immensely truncated snapshot of the main lines of argument
4. The most extensive account of this endless return to arts ontological basis can be found in Schaeffer; but also see the brilliant exposition on the force of the name art in de Duve esp. 3 86. 5. [The] disinterested (with no ulterior purpose) and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone [Stolnitz 3435].

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within a long tradition of philosophical speculation is certainly inadequateit represents only at best a part of the analytic tradition, and even that very sketchilyit nevertheless gives the flavor of philosophical approaches to the question of art in the most recent past.6 I believe this long and in many cases philosophically distinguished tradition to be misguided. And, on account of its prestige, it has determined the overdevelopment of one branch of inquiry to the detriment of others which, at least to me, seem to be more fruitful. While the question of ontology as it occurs in artworks is a topic of interest in these other inquiries, the question of art is not. This is to signal a different emphasis, one more concerned with the epistemological claims made by artworks rather than their status as distinct from nonart entities. According to this way of seeing things, art is independent of aesthetics even if the category art only appeared at the moment when aesthetics was born. Art, then, needs to be uncoupled from the aesthetic theory of art.7 While not all the alternative forms of inquiry I have in mind take this as their principal aim, they nevertheless have one thing in common: the avoidance of what I regard as the principal error of the philosophical tradition adverted to above. That error, commented upon below, is to ignore the force of Kants preliminary observation regarding aesthetic judgment, namely its difference with respect to determinant judgment. In what follows I want to return to Kants text not because of the often-implied reason that the Third Critique is the last word on the field of inquiry called aestheticsKant got it rightbut rather because Kants critique opens up a way of understanding artworks that I take to be underdeveloped in the post-Kantian tradition.8 And I want to claim that this slightly different focus leads to the thought that artworks may be considered as ways of knowing. In order to explore what I take to be this underdeveloped avenue of inquiry, I shall first rehearse some of the salient arguments in Kants text before turning to some more recent attempts to address the knowingness of the artwork.9 As is well known, Kants
6. Far more extensive and reliable digests of this large literature can be found in Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics; Stecker; Carroll, Philosophy of Art; Davies; Kivy; and for a good anthology of recent essays Carroll, ed., Theories of Art Today. 7. For this reason I shall use the slightly clumsy phrase art experience in place of aesthetic experience when I mean to refer to encounters with art that are not subsumed within the aesthetic theory of art, even though, as will become clear, under another rubric or way of understanding Kant and the subsequent tradition of aesthetic speculation, such experiences are aesthetic. 8. Even where this alternative has been developed it has often been misunderstood or even derided. The art critic Clement Greenberg, for example, has been widely characterized as misreading Kant as a way of constructing a theory of modernism whichso opponents of Greenberg assertmerely sets out to justify Greenbergs particular taste in visual art. Although Greenberg did not read the Third Critique as a philosopher, he nevertheless took from the Kantian text emphases and observations that have merely been out of fashion rather than incorrect. Some recent work on this important critic of the visual arts has begun to read his essays along these lines [see, for example, Melville]. 9. In recent years a new orthodoxy has begun to emerge under the aegis of an emphasis made by the Paul de Man and his return to Kant in his last essays and lectures. De Man argues that Kants Third Critique has predominantly been misreadhe singles out Schiller as the first culpritand this has resulted in the hegemony of aesthetic ideology. In another way of reading Kant, de Man here approves of Kleist and promotes him as one of the first truly attentive readers and develops an account of aesthetics which brings into alignment some Kantian concepts such as singularity, formalization, and the material in order to compose a very different account of the aesthetic. Writers in this camp include Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Although my essay is clearly connected to this new orthodoxy, the latters concerns are more focused on the aesthetic as a philosophemeand all that entails concerning subjectivity,

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interest in aesthetics derived from earlier work on the relation between the sensible and the rational. In that earlier work, Kant outlined the ways in which determinant judgment is applied to our experience of the world around us. This way of knowing the world proceeds from the concept to the evidence of the senses, and were one to use this form of knowing the world in an account of artworks, it is clear that one would first be required to conceptualize art before any evidence from our senses would become intelligible (and in an important sense knowable). This is sometimes taken by contemporary literary theorists to indicate that a concept of the aesthetic is required before we can experience something called art. But this does not chime with the project of the Third Critique, since Kant makes it clear that it is precisely because determinant judgment does not seem to work in the case of those judgments, called aesthetic, which concern the beautiful and the sublime in nature or in art [CJ 6] that another kind of judgment is proposed. In this unusual case, instead of moving from concepts to the evidence of the senses, this new kind of judgment, reflective judgment, searches for the concept from the data supplied by the experience, thereby beginning with the evidence of the senses before proceeding toward those concepts which are required for the evidence to be known and knowable. It seems important to register that this is a solution to a problem in how we come to know the world, in epistemology, and it has, as yet, very little to do with the class of objects we have come to call artworks. Nevertheless, when carried over into the philosophical discussion of the concept art, the question that has obsessed analytic aesthetics for nearly a centurywhat is art?would be unintelligible under Kants rubric of aesthetic judgment if the concept were deemed to be a necessary a priori category enabling something like affective or aesthetic experience. In other words, the search for a philosophically coherent and consistent concept art under which one might be able to make sense of specific artworks as art would be to consign the feelings of pleasure or displeasure aroused by artworks to determinant judgment. Kant proposed a different kind of judgment as a way of solving a problem that had occurred in his own philosophical project. Essentially reflective judgement acts as a kind of bridge between the theoretical judgments of the faculty of knowing, outlined in the First Critique, and the practical judgments of the faculty of desire, outlined in the Second Critique.10 This kind of judgment is particularly helpful in regard to the formlessness of something like the sublime; as Kant notes in section 24 of the Critique of Judgement, On Dividing an Investigation of the Feeling of the Sublime, while the aesthetic reflective power of judgment may operate upon the beautiful as well as the sublime, in the latter case the feeling of the sublime brings with it a mental agitation connected with our judging of the object, whereas in the former the mind remains in restful contemplation [CJ 101]. The continuation of this paragraph points toward a way of understanding the cognitive component of our experience of artworks, but it remains in the background of the rest of the Third Critique. The Kantian text reads: But (since we like the sublime) this agitation is to be judged subjectively purposive, and so the imagination will refer this agitation either to the cognitive power or to the power of desire, but in both cases the purposiveness of the
ethics, and political freedom. My concern is more narrowly targeted at the epistemological status of artworks. For a good account of the consequences of the revisionary reading of aesthetic ideology and de Mans efforts on its behalf see Plotnitsky. 10. This observation is frequently made, but its consequences in respect to art are often left unexplored. This is not so in Regenia Gagniers, A Critique of Practical Aesthetics, where practical is aligned with the political in a progressive project which aims to reclaim the social, economic, and cultural power of art on behalf of those who produce it.

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given presentation will be judged only with regard to these powers (without any purpose or interest). The first kind of agitation is a mathematical, the second a dynamical, attunement of the mind. And so we attribute both these kinds of agitation to the object, and hence present the object as sublime in these two ways. [CJ 101] I am going to circle around this very important moment in the Third Critique for most of the rest of this essay. But I shall begin by highlighting the last sentence: here Kant makes it clear that although what he calls the agitation of the mind aroused in the judging of the object is clearly a mental phenomenonit happens in the mind of the perceiving subjectthis feeling/agitation (the feeling brings with it an agitation of the mind) is attributed to the object.11 So we extrapolate from an experience qualities which are then deemed to be inherent to the thing we have experiencedit is as if the beautiful or the sublime were a quality of the object itself.12 This transference or translation can be said to be the source of the subsequent traditions endless worry over the source of artness. In the tradition of inquiry into beauty, which certainly predates Kants Third Critique, the formulation goes: does beauty lie in the thing itself or in the eye of the beholder?13 In the philosophical tradition of aesthetic inquiry that follows Kant, it is more like: is the category art an intrinsic property of artworks or a feature of a particular mode of perception? For Kant it is both. What does Kant mean by claiming that the agitation of the mind associated with a feeling of the sublime is referred to either the cognitive power or the power of desire? And, where at first it seems there is but a single agitation of the mind connected to the feeling of the sublime, by the penultimate sentence this has bifurcated into one kind, the mathematical, or another, the dynamical. The distinction Kant makes here concerns the route by which we arrive at knowledge: in the first instance through theoretical judgment and in the second through practical judgement. But in both cases the sublime enables us to think the relation between the sensible and supersensible, that is, it allows us to conceptualize something which otherwise would be impossible without this articulation of relation. Kant does not suggest that this techne of the sublime is itself knowable or representable, which is to note that we do not gain knowledge of the object (and the object here is the concept of the sublime) from the feeling of the sublime. But this is unimportant in regard to the effect of this feeling, which is to prompt an agitation of the mind, a reflective judgment, which does mediate between the faculties of cogni11. John Sallis characterizes this agitation as a tremoring [12631]. 12. Stanley Cavell comments on this as if in Kants description of beauty as if it were a property of things: Only as if because it cannot be an ordinary property of things: its presence or absence cannot be established in the way ordinary properties are; that is, they cannot be established publicly, and we dont know (there arent any) causal conditions, or usable rules, for producing, or altering, or erasing, or increasing this property. Then why not just say it isnt a property of an object? I suppose there would be no reason not to say this, if we could find another way of recording our conviction that it is one, anyway that what we are pointing to is there, in the object; and our knowledge that men make objects that create this response in us, and make them exactly with the idea that they will create it; and the fact that, while we know not everyone will agree with us when we say it is present, we think they are missing something if they dont. [89n] 13. This tradition is very well developed in the period immediately prior to Kants writing his Third Critique, and was of particular interest to writers in the English language such as Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Gerard, Hume, and Kames.

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tion and desire, and that agitation constructs a relation to these two faculties. If one were to conceive of art as an analogy of the sublime, the same would hold true: the object, the concept art, is unknowable in the sense outlined above (its definition cannot be supplied by either theoretical or practical means), but this does not mean that our experience of art is entirely without relation to knowledge. Continuing the analogy: the feeling aroused by our encounter with art (affective experience) sets up an agitation of the mind that constitutes a relation to the ways in which we know the world, be they practical or theoretical. As Kant says, the imagination refers this agitation to the means by which we come to knowledge. Does art, then, hold within itself something like knowledge, or knowing? This formulation must be understood as determined by the transferential impetus noted above whereby a quality of mental activity associated with the process of coming to judgment is attributed to the object perceivedit is as if the artwork has animation.14 Common sense would seem to dictate that art has no agency and therefore could not comprise a way of knowing, yet the power of attribution may create the virtual feeling that the artwork knows. In order to open this out a little further, I want to formulate what I take to be the central problem faced by both pre- and post-Kantian theories of art and aesthetics and to rehearse the Kantian solution to this problem. The inquiry into what after Kant became known as aesthetics (understood as the philosophical interrogation of aesthetic forms, including art) began by asking if it is possible to have knowledge of the world and our relation to it through experiences of objects (be they natural or man-made) arousing feelings of pleasure or displeasure in the registers of the sublime or beautiful, since these experiences are singular and individual. Given this how can one arrive at universal conclusions, that is, valid for all persons, when such experiences are grounded in individual or subjective sense experience, that is, in taste?15 The most efficacious way of addressing this issue was to claim that judgments of taste were disinterested; that is, the self-interest of the agent was not understood to impinge upon the judgment. This claim was made in the early eighteenth century by Francis Hutcheson and became a staple of theories of taste long before Kant wrote his Third Critique [see Caygill, esp. 5362]. Kants spin on the problem was to begin with the notion that judgments of taste are both aesthetic (which is the term he uses to distinguish them from cognitive judgments) and subjective (to distinguish them from objective judgments), but this did not preclude the possibility, according to Kant, that they might also be understood as necessary and unmotivated. In other words, Kant set out to show how aesthetic judgment was not simply something to do with an individual but was also in some way necessitated by the thing that prompted the judgment of taste in the first place. When I state that x is beautiful, Kant notes, I not only speak as if the source of this beauty lies in the thing itself but also assume this quality to be universally perceptible, available to anyone as an object of judgment. This is so even if such judgments are subjective, for in the Kantian description of aesthetic judgment this subjectivity does not preclude the possibility of another agent undergoing precisely the same subjective experience. We might say, then, that Kant proposes a radical subjectivity, since its singularity is capable of being shared in common. The importance of this notion of the subjective in Kants architectonic is signaled by the fact that the text begins here, with the subjectivity of judgments of taste:
14. Gerard Genette claims that the entire groundwork of aesthetic judgment is laid by the occultation of the causal relation between the property seen as if in the object and the judgment itself [see Genette 6768]. 15. A sociological answer is, of course, possible, but it does not attend to the immanent sensation of an aesthetic judgment as described by Kant. The classic account here is Bourdieus Distinction.

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If we wish to decide whether something is beautiful or not, we do not use understanding to refer the presentation to the object so as to give rise to cognition; rather, we use imagination (perhaps in connection with understanding) to refer the representation to the subject and his feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Hence a judgement of taste is not a cognitive judgement and so is not a logical judgement but an aesthetic one, by which we mean a judgement whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective. [CJ 44] These judgments of taste have a number of distinct qualities. In the first place they are grounded in feelings of pleasure or pain. Secondly, they are immediate, which for Kant signifies that they are not based on a process of reasoning. Thirdly, these judgments are particular; they are the result of an individual experiencing subject responding to a specific object. Fourthly, the judgment is nonconceptual, not based upon our cognitive judgments, which in Kants critical philosophy would make reflective judgments equivalent to determinant judgments. For this reason aesthetic judgement is said to be imaginative. Fifthly, aesthetic judgments are subjective, in spite of the fact that they must also have universal validity by which they not only apply to the person making the judgment but to all other persons. This particular emphasis on the subjective is often overlooked or misunderstood it leads to the incorrect view that Kant held judgments of taste to be merely contingent upon the individual experiencing a personal preference and no more. Kant notes that the determining basis for aesthetic judgments can only be subjectivethis is because the feeling of pleasure or displeasure occurs to an individual experiencing agentbut the judgment then made by this individual does not remain in the realm of personal taste or opinion. According to Kant aesthetic judgment is an abstraction from the merely contingent and is therefore universal. For Kant this provides a way of tracking back toward the conceptual basis of determinant judgment, a way of noting the relation between aesthetic judgments, which are not grounded in a priori concepts, and the forms of knowledge that are dependent upon reason. As I have already noted, aesthetic judgments are radically subjective, where the qualifier signals the incoherence or inconsistency of the combinatory subjective-universal. This notion of the radically subjective basis for aesthetic judgement is also immune from considerations of utility or interest. This leads to the thesis of disinterestedness, which claims that the material or use-value of the object is irrelevant. Two further features of aesthetic judgment complete the Kantian architecture: the focus of such judgments is on the formal features of the object, and consequently the most easily identifiable kind of aesthetic judgment attends to the harmony of form in an object of contemplation. It is important to register that all of these observations bear upon the distinctiveness of aesthetic judgment. In the tradition following Kant certain of these features have been taken up independently of the others and have, accordingly, generated warps in the reception of Kants entire architecture. This may or may not be problematic depending on ones assessment of the Kantian argument; one thing, however, is certain: the extraction of the thesis of disinterest has formed the basis for one particularly prevalent view of the distinctiveness of the aesthetic. This holds that aesthetic judgments are absolutely distinct from ethical, social, or political considerations (and it is this supposed pure realm of the aesthetic that has had such bad press in the recent past from those holding to the thesis that art is ideology).16 When this is applied to the concept of art, it leads to
16. For a good account of this trend see Kenshur; and for a misguided attempt to characterize a new aestheticism that offers ethics, truth and freedom as the very embodiment and result

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the notion that the artwork is beyond or indifferent to the realms of politics or ethics.17 This would have been understood as a very unusual turn in the argument by Kant, since the Third Critique, when read in its entirety, proposes ways in which reflective judgments must be seen in terms of teleology, which Kant divides into physical and ethical teleology.18 Indeed the aim of the closing section of the Third Critique, Methodology of the Teleological Judgement, is to unite the physical and ethical in an ultimate end of human freedom that is grounded on natural and moral laws. Reflective judgments are far from being indifferent to the realm of the political or ethical; in fact they help us toward the ultimate route to freedom: end-directed moral judgments.19 It is worth noting that this connection to the ethical does appear earlier in the Critique of Judgment, perhaps most clearly in the imperative that accompanies an aesthetic judgment. Kant writes: A judgement of taste requires everyone to assent; and whoever declares something to be beautiful holds that everyone ought to give his approval to the object at hand and that he too should declare it beautiful. [CJ 86] While the ethical remains distinct from the aesthetic, the latter borrows from the former in the pressure brought to bear upon the universal character of an aesthetic judgment. Here we should recall that Kants project finds its origin in a critique of the theory of taste: Kant, like his British eighteenth-century forebears, is concerned with the problems that are thrown up by evaluative statements about objects (of nature or artworks) deemed to contain aesthetic properties (where aesthetic designates the qualities of objects identified by a theory of beauty). How can these statements be universally applicable, that is, not simply my own opinion? Should everyone arrive at the same statements when faced with the same object? As the above citation makes clear, Kant brings the pressure of the ought to bear upon this issue as a way of finding a solution.20 Kant does not think that everyone will agree with my judgment of taste; he merely notes that they ought to.
of non-partisanship and defends aesthetics as an ethically displaced politics see Beech and Roberts 103; and the reply to this essay by Bowie, Confessions of an Aesthete. 17. Or, if not indifferent, even worse, an accomplice in the mystification of art and culture for political ends [see Bennett]. De Mans version of the aesthetic ideology argues a similar position but for a different reason. According to his thesis the power of the notion of aesthetic autonomy overwhelmed the original Kantian formulation so that what the aesthetic was supposed to enable and indeed serve was supplanted by an aesthetic ideology with disastrous effects in the realm of politics and ethics. This argument is not immediately transparent in de Mans texts, and its fortunes have been enmeshed in the personal and political history of the author. It remains, however, one of the most powerful readings of the legacy of Kants Third Critique [see de Man, Aesthetic Ideology 15455]. 18. On the tendency to read the Third Critique as if it comprised only the first half of the work The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, see Zammito. 19. A different conclusion about the relation of aesthetics to politics, which has also had a fair amount of recent coverage, is the thesis that the inquiry into the distinct realm of aesthetics leads to the aestheticization of politics. For a good brief survey of this argument see Jay. 20. It should be pointed out that this is not universally taken to be a solution. For some it merely reinforces the inevitable bifurcation (or confusion) of the aesthetic, its Janus-like demeanor which allows it to be a force for progressive change and a resistance to progress, both a motor for social and cultural improvement and the brake that aligns it with rebarbative political ends. In Eagletons words, it can either take a left or a right turn. The left turn: smash truth, cognition and morality, which are all just ideology, and live luxuriantly in the free, groundless play of your creative powers. The right turn . . . forget about theoretical analysis, cling to the sensuously particular, view society as a self-grounding organism [36869].

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Now I wish to address what I earlier claimed was an underdeveloped line of argument in Kants text, namely the epistemological claims that might be made by works of art. I shall begin by recalling that aesthetic judgments, according to Kant, are related to cognition. The agitation of the mind that attends a feeling of the sublime precisely establishes a relation between the faculties of cognition and of desire. Kant does not say much more about this relation, or indeed how the agitation of the mind might be understood with reference to the mental activities he distinguished as thinking (Denken), knowing (Wissen), and cognition (Erkenntnis); according to Kant, I can think whatever I please, provided only that I do not contradict myself, so that it is possible to think things in themselves but not to know them, whereas knowing something implies that what is known is capable of being verified by experience. But he does say enough to suggest a way in which a theory of art, as opposed to aesthetics, might begin to explore the cognitive element of artworks.21 Thus, in the preface to the Critique of Judgement, the seeds for such an inquiry are already sown. Kant writes: This perplexity about a principle (whether it is subjective or objective) arises mainly in those judgements, called aesthetic, which concern the beautiful and the sublime in nature or in art. And yet a critical inquiry [in search] of a principle of judgement in them is the most important part of a critique of this power. For though these judgements do not by themselves contribute anything whatever to our cognition of things, they still belong to the cognitive power alone and prove a direct relation of this power to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure according to some a priori principle, without there being any confusion of this principle with the one that can be the basis determining the power of desire, since that power has its a priori principles in concepts of reason. [CJ 6] So although aesthetic judgments do not contribute to our cognition of things they do, nevertheless, belong to the cognitive power alone. This seems to suggest that in the case of a work of art, say, our experience of the object in the form of an aesthetic judgment does not provide us with knowledge of the work, but the judgment belongs, nevertheless, to the cognitive power. Kant leaves hanging what might result from this in terms of knowledge, and it is not until the discussion of fine art, some one hundred and seventy pages later, that a further elaboration is provided. Part of the problem hereand it is a problem no less for Kant than for usis the reach of what should count as knowledge: precisely the terrain opened up by the triangulationconnection, invagination, overlappingof thinking, knowing, and cognition. What needs to be exposed is the connection or nonconnection that reflective judgments have to knowledge. While I take this to be raised within Kants own philosophy, it has remained substantially neglected in the greater part of the ensuing philosophical commentary upon his work.22 Furthermore, within the Kantian argument itself the connec21. De Man, commenting upon the use of denken in section 29, writes: How are we to understand the verb to think . . . in distinction from knowing? [Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant 77]. This extremely dense essay circles around a de Manian crux, the incommensurability of trope and language, in order to sensitize a reading of the Third Critique to its material base in expressionwords, letters, syllables. While the present essay does not attend to this linguistic materiality it is nevertheless sensitive to the materiality of the experience of art. I have written at greater length on this in Art Matters. 22. I do not mean to imply that this focus is unique to me; in their different ways a number of writers both within the continental and analytic traditions have pressed the question of the cogni-

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tion of reflective judgment to knowledge is slightly sidestepped in the observation that aesthetic experiences may be verified in aesthetic terms, thereby suggesting that aesthetic judgments are known or knowable or quanta of knowledge since they are capable of verification under the special rubric of the aesthetic. But how such aesthetic knowing or knowledge might relate to the form of knowledge we gain from determinant judgment is left slightly unclear (we should remember that Kant does begin by saying how these things relate structurallysee the quotation above from page six of the text). However, one way Kant addresses this issue will be helpful in furthering my line of argument: where he makes a distinction between mechanical and aesthetical art, which leads him to propose that there may be more than one mode of knowing. He writes in the context of a discussion of the various kinds of art: If art merely performs the acts that are required to make a possible object actual, adequately to our cognition of that object, then it is mechanical art; but if what it intends directly is [to arouse] the feeling of pleasure, then it is called aesthetic art. The latter is either agreeable or fine art. It is agreeable art if its purpose is that the pleasure should accompany presentations that are mere sensations; it is fine art if its purpose is that the pleasure should accompany presentations that are ways of cognizing. [CJ 172] Here Kant suggests that in the case of fine art the merely sensational is replaced by a purpose whose aim is to connect the feeling of pleasure to the means by which intuitions correspond to concepts (what Kant means by presentation [Darstellung]). While Kant does not go on to develop to any great degree how these ways of cognizing differ from determinant judgment, some writers, including Schiller and Adorno, have gone on to explore some of the implications.23 In the recent literature in this tradition perhaps the most extensive elaboration of this notion is to be found in Hans Georg Gadamers Truth and Method. In the introduction to that work Gadamer sets out his project in these terms: Hence the following investigation starts with a critique of aesthetic consciousness, in order to defend that experience of truth that comes to us through the work of art against the aesthetic theory that lets itself be restricted to a scientific concept of truth. [xiii] Gadamer believes the post-Kantian tradition to have developed in an unhelpful way, essentially constructing a simplistic subjectivization of the aesthetic. This characterization of Kants argument and its effects on the ensuing tradition has detractors as well as supporters, but I do not want to dwell upon the veracity of Gadamers view.24 Rather I want to pick up on his particular approach to the question of the aesthetic. Referring to his own text, Gadamer continues,
tive or knowledge claims made by artworks. Writers following this line of investigation, albeit with different trajectories and aims, include Stanley Cavell, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. Jay Bernstein has called the alternative, predominant strain of aesthetic speculation aesthetic alienationthe thesis that art inhabits an entirely distinct realm, the autonomy of artand argues that Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno challenge this thesis. See his The Fate of Art; see also Cascardi. 23. Adorno reacts against the prevailing subjectivism of the post-Kantian tradition and proposes to reclaim the objectivity of art: aesthetics must try to articulate what its object in its immediacy is driving at [appendix A-1 370]. 24. For a critique of Gadamers reading of Kant, see Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity 31 32.

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But the book does not stop at the justification of the truth of art; instead it tries to develop from this starting point a concept of knowledge and of truth which corresponds to the whole of our hermeneutic experience. Just as in the experience of art we are concerned with truths that go essentially beyond the range of methodical knowledge, so the same thing is true of the whole of the human sciences, in which our historical tradition in all its forms is certainly made the object of investigation, but at the same time in it truth comes to speech. [xiii] For Gadamer, Kants transcendental justification of aesthetic judgment was the first step toward a greater understanding of the aesthetic realm, not the last word. Where Kant ran aground, according to Gadamer, was in his resistance to the notion that there might be theoretical knowledge outside the parameters of natural science. This is to say that while Kants distinction between conceptual knowledge and reflective judgment is helpful in delimiting the object for inquiry in aesthetic theory, he nevertheless remains resistant to the notion that there might be other kinds of knowledge or ways of knowing. This tension between ways of knowing and knowledgeconceptual knowledge and reflective judgmentis present in Kants text, as I pointed out above, but Gadamer wishes to make his point of departure more clear-cut. He writes: The transcendental function that Kant ascribes to the aesthetic judgement is sufficient to distinguish it from conceptual knowledge and hence to determine the phenomena of the beautiful and of art. But is it right to reserve the concept of truth for conceptual knowledge? Must we not also admit that the work of art possesses truth? [39] Gadamers account of the Third Critique continues by pointing out the crucial part played by genius in Kants argument and by noting that in the final analysis Kant is really uninterested in art as such:25 We should not forget that the second part of the Critique of Judgement is concerned only with nature (and with its being judged by concepts of finality) and not at all with art. Thus for the systematic intention of the whole, the application of aesthetic judgement to the beautiful and sublime in nature is more important than the transcendental foundation of art. [50] Gadamer wishes to reverse this priority so that the transcendental foundation of art takes center stage. He insists that art is a kind of knowledge and that the experience of the work of art is a sharing of this knowledge [87]. Indeed aesthetic experience is itself a mode of self-understanding [86]. He goes on to ask:

25. This emphasis on genius has, from Schiller through romanticism to modernism, helped intensify the subsumption of art into the aesthetic theory of art. It is precisely this notion of genius and its drive toward originality and authenticity that has kept discussion of aesthetics in the shadow of a particular misreading of art. Such misreadings continue when Heideggers philosophy is seen as participating in the project of aesthetics rather than, as I see it, in the attempt to disentangle art from a particular version of aesthetics, the aesthetic theory of art. Thus I would want to rephrase the following comment, to be found in a fine essay by Geoffrey Galt Harpham, . . . the aesthetic itself is, through a predisposition to sensory or ideological pollution, responsible for the misreadings that have plagued it, misreadings that both represent and re-present aesthetic over determination [133], so as to emphasize the misreading of art that has resulted from the development of the aesthetic theory of art.

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Is there to be no knowledge in art? Does not the experience of art contain a claim to truth which is certainly different from that of science, but equally certainly is not inferior to it? And is not the task of aesthetics precisely to provide a basis for the fact that artistic experience is a mode of knowledge of a unique kind, certainly different from that sensory knowledge which provides science with the data from which it constructs the knowledge of nature, and certainly different from all moral rational knowledge and indeed from all conceptual knowledge, but still knowledge, i.e. the transmission of truth? [87] It is clear that for Gadamer knowledge has a specific sense and that the force of the term truth will become decisive. In Gadamers project this knowledge is approached via the ontology of the work of art and its basis in what he designates as play. According to him we need to overcome the subjectivization of aesthetics that has dominated the Kantian critique in a move that parallels Heideggers attempt to overcome the subjectivization of metaphysics. In doing so we should ask the question what is the truth of aesthetics? He writes: In the experience of art we see a genuine experience induced by the work, which does not leave him who has it unchanged, and we enquire into the mode of being of that which is experienced in this way. So we hope to understand better what kind of truth it is that encounters us there. [89] In the terms I am attempting to develop, I take this to indicate that we must explore more carefully the proposition that the artwork is a way of knowing. And in order to do that our first line of inquiry must be the affective experience that results from our encounter with the artwork, since this experience is the only material of aesthetic judgment; it is its materiality.26 Gadamer also proposes something similar in his analysis of what he calls play, but I am going to leave this aside in order to stay slightly closer to the Kantian notion of the plurality of ways of cognizing. In both the humanist defense of art and in certain branches of analytic aesthetics, artworks are said to have cognitive value. They may illustrate certain propositions: Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice, for example, illustrates the wisdom of some kinds of behavior and the folly of others. So, it is held, a correct reading of the novel either provides or enhances this knowledge. Works of art, especially paintings, may be illustrative in a more obvious way, such as Monets canvases depicting Rouen Cathedral under different light conditions. These images provide knowledge about both the distinct properties of light and the specific occasions on which the painter observed and then painted the cathedral. A poem may, for example, tell you how to construct a boat. While all of these examples certainly demonstrate how works of art may contain particular forms and quanta of knowledge, they do not do so as works of art. The information component in a Jane Austen novel, for example, is no different from that found in a conduct book, but we do not regard the latter as a work of art. This is to point to a category mistake: artworks may comprise a number of things. They may contain propositional knowledge (not very frequently) or set out to illustrate propositions about the world. They may present political arguments (often works that are manifestly political have short lives as valued works of art, though they may have very long lives as documentary evidence) or seek to persuade us of ethical principles. And we may attend to these distinct aspects in preference to their aesthetic qualities. But in so doing we do
26. The consequence of this implication is far more disturbing to Kants transcendental project than is often assumed. For a good account in relation to de Mans late work see Warminski.

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not advance the thought that artworks understood with reference to their particular quality of artness may be ways of knowing. What I mean to emphasize here is the art component of aesthetic forms, that which is appreciated or experienced as art. Consequently the most efficacious way of furthering the thought that artworks are a way of knowing is to attend to the distinct experiences occasioned by artworks, to what I called above the materiality of aesthetic judgment. And here I depart from Gadamer in his attachment to the concept of truth, for it seems to me that this is the wrong category to reach for in attempting to inquire into the peculiar ways of knowing we attribute to objects of aesthetic judgment. In conclusion I wish to enlist some moments from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes recent Poetry as Experience in order to break in upon the strangeness and beauty of our encounters with art, in the hope that we might begin the task of understanding better the materiality of aesthetic judgment. This short and deeply resonant text is essentially a meditation upon two poems by Paul Celan. Its main line of argument is not explicitly concerned with art but with poetry, as a form and way of being, but for present purposes I shall take them as, in effect, the same thing. In order to get started reading Celans poetry, Lacoue-Labarthe suggests, one must first inquire into its idiom, and this, he suggests, is tantamount to asking if there is such a thing as pure idiom [14]. This is then worried a little further: The question I have called that of idiom is therefore more exactly that of singularity. We must avoid confusing this with another, relatively secondary or derivative question, that of the readable and the unreadable. My question asks not just about the text, but about the singular experience coming into writing: it asks if, being singular, experience can be written, or if from the moment of writing its very singularity is not forever lost and borne away in one way or another, at origin or en route to destination, by the very fact of language. [15] This raises a number of very difficult questions about the nature of experience per se as well as the distinct kind of experienceaffective or art experiencethat may be prompted by our coming into contact with artworks. I have written elsewhere about thishere I want to focus on the issue of singularity [see de Bolla 1116]. LacoueLabarthe asks, a little further on: Is there, can there be a singular experience?, and I take this to be, at base, a question about art experience. Can there be such a thing if it is to be singular? Close to the end of his book Lacoue-Labarthe recalls a passage from Heideggers On the Way to Language where the nature of our sense or perception of having an experience is investigated. Heidegger writes: To undergo an experience with somethingbe it a thing, a person, or a god means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. When we talk of undergoing an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergo here means that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it. [98] Art experiences are singular in the sense that they can only occur to the perceiving subjectthey are subjective in the way Kant describesbut they do not belong to that subject, nor are they made by the subject. As Heidegger notes they come over us, strike or befall us. And as this terminology suggests, they have duration: like the thunderbolt of Burkes sublime we submit to the instant of this experience, and then it is gone. The art historian Kenneth Clark once remarked that an aesthetic experience lasts about the

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length of time one can detect the aroma of a just-peeled orange. This may well be the standard durationone of the aspects of any inquiry into affective experience that needs greater elaboration is precisely this issue of duration. Is it possible to extend such experiences, and if so how?27 But, as Lacoue-Labarthe intimates, the singularity of the experience is immediately compromised in the after-shock: at the moment experience strikes us it has crossed from one thing to another: In the end, if there is no such thing as poetic experience it is simply because experience marks the absence of what is lived. [20] This suggests that the particular quality of an encounter with art is our coming to understand what we cannot live, what is outside the domain of experience. Yet such encounters feel as if they open a terrain, give onto a clearing in which something like experience seems to happen. But not to us, not as part of a continuum of our senses of being, but through us, as if the work itself marks us, touches us. The materiality of this experience is clearly, in some sense, immaterial, since, as Lacoue-Labarthe phrases it, experience marks the absence of what is lived. But at least since Heidegger, and certainly since Derrida, we have come to understand how presence comes wrapped up in nonpresence, how negation is not simply antagonistic to or the inverse of proposition. The materiality of an art response is the virtual sensation of the artwork as a way of knowing. I cannot live that response as an experience, but this does not imply that the experience cannot happen through me. Under one version of the aestheticthat which attempts to construct a philosophically coherent account of the distinct objects we call artartworks must be appreciated according to the theory it presents. And this yokes art to a particular version of aesthetic art. Under a different version of the aesthetic, an alternative that I have argued is sketched out in Kants Critique of Judgment, art is both unknowable and the cause for our experiencing different ways of knowing. This is what prompts the lure or seduction of art, since it holds out the prospect of knowing otherwise. In order to attend to this knowing, we must subject our experiences of arteven when they are not properly speaking experiencedto much greater scrutiny. Art experience, or, in the terms I have argued for from Kant, aesthetic experience, should be examined in respect of its materiality, which would require patient and careful elaborations of specific encounters with art. This might be the only way in which art as a way of knowing will become intelligible to us.

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27. This is to inquire into the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, a project most vigorously pursued by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception, a text that will become increasingly important in the current return to the aesthetic.

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Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Poetry as Experience. Trans. Andrea Tarnowski. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Levinson, Jerrold. Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. Melville, Stephen. Positionality, Objectivity, Judgment. Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context. Ed. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. New York: Routledge, 1996. 6888. Menke, Christoph. Modernity, Subjectivity and Aesthetic Reflection. From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses. Ed. Peter Osborne. London: Serpents Tail, 2000. 3355. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Plotnitsky, Arkady. Algebra and Allegory: Nonclassical Epistemology, Quantum Theory, and the Work of Paul de Man. Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. Ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. 4989. Ree, Jonathan. The Aesthetic Theory of the Arts. From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses. Ed. Peter Osborne. London: Serpents Tail, 2000. 5770. Sallis, John. Spacings of Reason and Imagination in Texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. Trans. Steven Rendell. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Shiner, Larry. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Stecker, Robert. Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. Stolnitz, Jerome. Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Warminski, Andrzej. As the poets do it: On the Material Sublime. Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. Ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. 331. Zammito, John H. The Genesis of Kants Critique of Judgement. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

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