First published in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton and Jeffrey Rhyne. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 79-103. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. Aesthetics and Cultural Studies Winfried Fluck It has become one of the starting moves of recent revisionist scholarship in literary and cultural studies to emphasize the historical relativity of all aesthetic judgments and to stress their function not only as cultural but also as political acts. This argument can be traced back to one of the founding texts, if not the founding text, of cultural studies, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society. In order to defend his own extension of literary studies to cultural studies against the then dominant views in British and American English departments, Williams introduced an astute argument about the historical situatedness of cultural and aesthetic values that had appeared self-evident and universal up to this point: “The organizing principle of this book is the discovery that the idea of culture, and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinking in the period which we commonly describe as that of the Industrial Revolution” (ix). Williams then applies this perspective to the idea of art and describes the emergence of the term aesthetic as a response to an alienating division of labor between artist and artisan. In Marxism and Literature, he goes one step further and characterizes aesthetic theory as a form of evasion, that is, as an instrument of obfuscation: “Art and thinking about art have to separate themselves, by ever more absolute abstraction, from the social processes within which they are still contained. Aesthetic theory is the main instrument of this evasion. (…) Thus we have to reject ‘the aesthetic’ both as a separate abstract dimension and as a separate abstract function” (154-56). The passage shows Williams both at his best and his worst. On the one hand, he illustrates the typical strength of his approach by discussing aesthetics not merely as a philosophical problem but also as a cultural practice. On the other hand, this shift of focus also has its price: seen from a preindustrial, artisanal, and idealized vision of practice, in which different activities and faculties are still united, aesthetics appears to have no other function than that of evasion. A long philosophical tradition and a rich cultural history in which aesthetics has taken on entirely different forms, including the task of philosophically grounding emancipated art, is thus ignored. The reason for Williams’s neglect of this tradition lies in certain unacknowledged premises of his own position. In arguing against the separation of art and life, the case Williams makes is, in the final analysis, not necessarily one against aesthetics per se but against its separation from other forms of social practice. He is not arguing against the theoretical description and justification of art or aesthetic experience (in fact, he is engaging in it himself), but against a conceptualization of the aesthetic as a separate sphere. His position is “anti-aesthetic” only in rejecting a particular historical manifestation of aesthetics, namely one in which, according to his view, the division of labor is uncritically reproduced. Consequently, his argument is made in support of another role of the aesthetic, elaborated more fully in books like The Long Revolution, in which culture and reality are reunited as social practice in order to overcome capitalism’s division of labor - a version and variant of Marxist aesthetics based on a concept of Entfremdung that has its source in philosophical idealism. Thus, Williams’s case against the concept of aesthetics is really a case made in the name of a more meaningful role of art in life. This unacknowledged “conflation of aesthetics in toto with a discredited concept of aesthetic value” (Guillory 271) is one of the recurrent shortcomings of the present-day rejection of the concept of the aesthetic. As I shall argue in the following essay, there are, in fact, three basic reductions that make the current dismissal of the aesthetic possible: (1) the equation of the aesthetic with art or beauty and the reduction of the question of aesthetics to a philosophy of art or a philosophy of beauty; (2) the conflation, sometimes confusion, of aesthetic function and aesthetic value, so that the whole question of aesthetics is reduced to the problem of evaluation; (3) the recurring identification of aesthetics with a particular, discredited historical version of it, so that the question of aesthetics can be “abbreviated as the thesis of the transhistorical or transcendental value of the object, the work of art” (Guillory 275) and the dismissal of aesthetics as a discourse of “universal value” can be justified. However, as Guillory points out: “We should not expect that a critique of aesthetic discourse in its historical forms can proceed by ejecting the category of the aesthetic any more than a critique of political economy would have to deny the reality of specificity of the economic domain” (282). Nevertheless, Williams’s rejection of the term aesthetic as “an instrument of evasion” has become commonplace in the new revisionist literary and cultural studies after the linguistic turn. Since the social 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 214 Winfried Fluck 1 Two recently published handbooks illustrate the matter. The second edition of Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, contains 28 entries on such terms as representation, writing, discourse, unconscious, rhetoric, ideology, diversity, race, class, gender and ethics, but none on aesthetics. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi, contains more than 450 entries but, again, none on aesthetics. In its stead, we find an entry on “Aesthetic Ideology.” In the same line, Donald Pease states categorically: “As Terry Eagleton has observed, the aesthetic should be understood as ideological in the Althusserian sense that it produces a subject for ideology” (144). As Eagleton himself makes clear, however, he only deals with a certain - idealist - tradition within aesthetics, just as he leaves no doubt on the other hand that he is also arguing against the reduction of the aesthetic to nothing but a bourgeois ideology. In this sense, the title of the German translation - Ästhetik: Die Geschichte ihrer Ideologie (Aesthetics: A History of its Ideology) - is more fitting than that of the English original, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Generally, the broadening of Eagleton’s argument to a generalized dismissal of “the aesthetic” must be seen as reductive even in the light of Eagleton’s own argument. and political functions of cultural practices are often obscured in the process of discussing their aesthetic dimension, so the argument goes, the “real” function of the aesthetic is that of an ideology, and the critic who still insists on the importance of the category must be seen as someone who is trying to turn back the clock for whatever sinister purposes. 1 Fittingly, a contemporary German critic starts an essay on the issue of aesthetic experience by saying: “Whoever deals with aesthetics nowadays, dissects a corpse” (Schödlbauer 33). The problematization of the unquestioned authority of the category of the aesthetic stands at the beginning of the new revisionism in literary and cultural studies. Explicitly or implicitly, Williams’s argument became one of the starting premises of revisionist approaches for which the discourse of aesthetics is merely a screen for unacknowledged ideological interests. In the struggle against the dominance of the New Criticism and its insistence that the literary critic should focus on intrinsic, specifically literary values (as against the socalled extraliterary or extrinsic values), it became almost commonplace to point out that the apparently innocent categories of the “literary” or the “aesthetic” are by no means exempt from history or politics. In fact, the New Criticism itself provides a good example, for its theory of literature and its definition of specifically literary values are “historical” in at least three ways. To start with, they do not reflect a superior insight into the true nature of literature that is gained by disciplined close reading; rather, their source is the elevation of the aesthetic premises of a certain historical period or school, for example the aesthetics of modernism, to the level of a general principle. Second, the idea of “intrinsically literary” values itself is historical in the sense that it has 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 215 2 See, for example, Richard Brodhead’s excellent study of the redefinition of American literature through the idea of specifically literary values in the nineteenth century in his The School of Hawthorne. As Brodhead argues convincingly, this redefinition was actively supported by the publisher James T. Fields, who looked for an argument to sell American literature on the basis of new value assumptions. 3 The dissertation, submitted in 1972, has the title Ästhetische Theorie und literaturwis‐ senschaftliche Methode (Aesthetic Premises and Literary Interpretation). In the field of American Studies, it was one of the first books that questioned the seemingly selfemerged in specific historical contexts and reflects particular interests. 2 From this perspective, it is not just a certain canon that has specific historical origins but the idea of canonicity itself. Third, the new critical categories of the literary and the aesthetic were not, as was claimed, “disinterested” categories. They reflected the, in the broad sense of the word, political interests of a certain group by functioning as social and professional strategies of self-empowerment. Recently, Jonathan Arac has provided a fine example of this type of analysis by pointing out how Lionel Trilling’s hypercanonization of Huckleberry Finn as a literary masterpiece and especially his praise of Chapter 31 as a moral struggle for independence served the needs of Trilling’s anti-Stalinist agenda and his search for an independent stand against conformist pressures. Arac’s example confirms my own findings in an analysis of the history of Huck Finn criticism which was written at the height of the dominance of the New Criticism and directed against the seemingly self-evident authority of a strictly formalist approach to literature. At the time, Huckleberry Finn had finally been canonized as one of the masterpieces of American literature and was discussed almost exclusively in terms such as literary craftsmanship or organic unity. However, a critical analysis of the plausibility of these claims for formalist mastery or organic unity led to the result that these claims were mere rhetorical constructs which disregarded contradictory evidence almost at will, despite a claim to base critical assessments on a close reading of the literary text. In fact, it was striking to see how little resistance was offered to the absurd claim of Huck Finn’s organic unity by the methodological criterion of a “close reading”: at a closer look, a “specifically literary analysis” was what the critic wanted a literary analysis to be. Consequently, the assessment of the aesthetic value of the novel was not the result of a close reading but actually its starting premise, which was then to be confirmed in the act of interpretation. In order to justify the study of a book like Huckleberry Finn, it had to be classified as a literary masterpiece. For this, it had to meet criteria that were derived from certain literary models but then applied as norms to all literature indiscriminately, because only in this way could a literary text be described as possessing literary value. 3 Hence my conclusion, then, that in their effort to treat literature as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 216 Winfried Fluck evident authority of New Critical literary and aesthetic norms and drew attention to their historical relativity. 4 This raises the interesting question of the relation of current critical theory and a rich, sustained tradition of Marxist aesthetics. Rightly, John Guillory reminds us: “In the context of critical theory, however, it may be surprising to some that the concept of the aesthetic was never rejected within the Marxist tradition, the very body of theory which cultural conservatives are likely to blame for the current critique of aesthetics” (273). Thus, “the arguments for dismissing the aesthetic do not derive from Marxist theory” (274). However, since Guillory does not have a concept for distinguishing the politics of traditional Marxist theory from that of the current cultural radicalism, he can only register the fact “that the refusal of the aesthetic is an epistemic feature of current critical practice, constituting a consensus powerful enough to enlist in an alliance of ‘left’ critiques even the form of left critique - Marxist theory - historically sympathetic to aesthetics” (274). specifically literary, critics tended to confuse the literary with its definition by the New Critical contextualists. This definition, however, represents an unwarranted generalization of one type of literary structure and results in the interpretation of many texts according to principles by which they patently were not written. Its basic shortcoming is the identification of literary structure with the idea of organic unity or a coherent whole which is usually found in a dualistic pattern or metaphor. The “specifically literary” interpretation practiced by New Critics and those trained in their approach can thus be seen as a form of self-deception, for, given his or her tacit acceptance of New Critical premises, the critic is bound to discover exactly those gualities in the text which the theory has already codified as valuable. Ironically, the moment of the greatest influence of the New Criticism was thus also a moment in which the idea of the aesthetic was strongly discredited by its conventionalized and schematic application. The following problematization of the categories of the “intrinsically literary” and “the aesthetic” in the sense of New Critical formalism has gone through several stages. In the earliest stage, which was Marxist in Europe and vaguely leftist in the United States, it was not aesthetics per se but a special version of it that was attacked in order to replace it with a more relevant or “truthful” form of aesthetics. After all, Marxism had its own elaborate aesthetics influenced by the philosophy of German idealism. 4 The situation changed with the arrival of poststructuralism and its replacement of the idea of the specifically literary with concepts such as writing, rhetoric, textuality, discourse, or representation. The crucial theoretical move of this new cultural radicalism in contrast to older forms of political radicalism lies, as I have argued elsewhere, in a shift in the definition of political power from the repression thesis, in which power is still enacted through agents and institutions of the state, to cultural forms or discursive regimes as the actual source of power, because these cultural forms constitute 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 217 5 A note on terminology: In the following discussion, I shall use the term “new revi‐ sionism” as a broad umbrella term for the description of the movement toward a revision of literary and cultural history, including canon revision, whereas the term “cultural radicalism” refers to a radical analysis of Western societies, shared by various approaches from New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, to race, class, and gender studies and postcolonial studies in which the primary source of power is no longer seen as political institutions but cultural forms. For a more detailed analysis of cultural radicalism, see my essay “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism.” the very ways in which we make sense of the world before we are even aware of it. 5 Inevitably, this redefinition of power must also change the view of the aesthetic: as long as power is located in agents of the state or institutions of society, the realm of the aesthetic can still be conceptualized as a counterrealm, if only for the articulation of a utopian impulse or a negation of systemic closure. Where, on the other hand, power is “everywhere,” including in cultural forms, the claim of aesthetic transcendence or even a negative aesthetics in the manner of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School can no longer be upheld. In his discussion of the work of Henry James, Mark Seltzer has used a neat neohistoricist chiasm to describe this fundamental reorientation by transforming the New Critical trust in the power of art into “the art of power.” Aesthetics thus becomes only another power game, which is, by and large, its theoretical status in the current cultural radicalism. As a consequence, it appears no longer necessary to deal with the dimension of the aesthetic and to employ it as a point of reference in the analysis of cultural material. On the contrary, to do so carries the immediate suspicion of an attempt to distract from the real issues. The current dominance of cultural studies is one result of these developments. The emergence of cultural studies as a new version of the field that used to be called philology and then literary studies can be seen as the logical outcome of the story I have traced. It is, of course, notoriously difficult to define cultural studies, because cultural studies is what you get when some of the more traditional criteria for defining the field are taken away. However, even in its most diffuse form, cultural studies reflects two major changes: (1) If nothing else, cultural studies is a field of programmatic dehierarchization. It breaks down the barriers between high culture and popular or mass culture and says that both - that all cultural practices - are worth studying. What distinguished post- World War II literary studies from philology was that it was based on certain aesthetic norms. Not all works qualified for serious professional consideration, and a crucial, if not the crucial, task of the critic was to determine what works were legitimate objects of study. To be sure, literary studies also dealt with 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 218 Winfried Fluck 6 Thus, for a long time, to deal with film usually meant to compare the literary source and filmic version - a comparison that always led to the same result, namely the claim that the film failed to match the complexity of the literary text. Again, the result confirmed the starting premise. so-called inferior works but only in order to characterize them as such. This definition of the field as constituted by aesthetic norms, and more specifically, by the search for specifically literary values, explains why this form of literary studies had such a hard time extending the discipline to other cultural forms such as film or, even worse, television. There simply wasn’t any way in which the concept of specifically literary values could be convincingly applied to a medium like film. 6 In contrast, there are no real canon wars within cultural studies (although cultural studies is, of course, very much at the center of the canon debates), because there is no longer a canon. In principle, “anything” goes. Cultural hierarchies are rejected as the foundation of the field, though their historical and cultural sources may be studied in investigations such as Raymond Williams’s. (2) If the aesthetic dimension is no longer the explicit or implicit point of reference in cultural studies, then the definition of the object to be studied must change. In postwar literary studies this object was the form or structure of the literary work - although one has to add that these seemingly neutral “technical” terms were already value-laden in characteristic ways. Structure, for example, was not any kind of formal organization but only a gestalt with certain regular patterns. In the formalist approach of the New Criticism, the starting premise is that the literary work distinguishes itself by its artful, organic structure, because only such a type of structure can constitute an object that is ontologically different from other, everyday discourses. In current cultural studies, the starting premise is that the text is part of a discursive network or regime which should become the object of study, because it exerts power by means of classification, representation, and exclusion. Consequently, power resides in rhetoric, or, more broadly, in representation (in the broad semiotic sense of the word). When texts can no longer be distinguished by whether or how they transcend power effects, or whether they are good or bad according to certain aesthetic premises, they must be constituted as objects on the basis of a new premise about their relevance and function. This assumption is now political. What makes the literary text an important object of study is no longer its power of transcendence but the fact that it exerts power. This power is not exerted through a particular form or structure (so that only some texts would exert power) but through the one aspect all objects of cultural studies have in common, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 219 7 Other instances of such a confusion of the aesthetic with a particular historical manifestation of it include the equation of the aesthetic with taste or refinement, its reduction to aestheticism or the superficial equation of aesthetics with elitism - superficial, because, obviously, working-class culture or popular culture also have an aesthetic dimension and, hence, their own aesthetics. namely that they are all representations. Representation is the most neutral, the most “dehierarchized” term one can find to describe the form in which the object (and its ideology) appear, and it has thus become one of the key words of analysis in cultural studies. Yet, the important thing to note here is that, inevitably, the concept of representation has its own normative base and thus, in a way, functions like aesthetic premises did in the New Criticism, that is, as a premise that guides all subsequent interpretive acts. If I have an aesthetic premise, that is, a premise about what constitutes value in the object, then I will search out those qualities and characteristics in my textual description and interpretation. Similarly, if I have a premise about why representation should be studied, namely because it is a manifestation of systemic power effects, then I will pay attention to features of the text in which power manifests itself in exemplary fashion, for only in this way can I describe the text as relevant choice, for example, by arguing, that the text is complicit with the social system or not. This point - that there are premises and normative concepts at work in any interpretation of cultural material - may, in fact, be granted by a revisionist critic, who would then argue, however, that in the new revisionism, the founding premise has undergone a welcome transformation from aesthetic to politics. This seems to confirm the claim that it is no longer useful or necessary to deal with the concept of the aesthetic and to make it a point of reference for critical practice. However, I want to claim that the new revisionism has systematically misunderstood and misrepresented the issue of aesthetics, because it has conflated the New Critical version of aesthetic value with the issue of aesthetics in general. 7 One may suspect that this conflation has two reasons. First, the New Critical aesthetics was the only one the new revisionists ever encountered in their academic socialization (while Marxist aesthetics, for example, was subsumed under the rubric “Critical Theory”). And secondly, they have done so because they could not hope for a better version of aesthetics in order to justify their own project of an historical and political criticism. But in conflating the question of aesthetics with its New Critical version, the new revisionism has disregarded other and different conceptualizations of the aesthetic, much, as I want to show, to its own disad vantage. For it is one of the unfortunate consequences of th is connation that the new revisionists seem to act on the completely mistaken assumption that they have to choose between 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 220 Winfried Fluck 8 Cf. Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s characterization of this tradition: “This special value, often referred to as the text’s ‘essential literary value, or its ‘value as a work of literature,’ is sometimes said to reside in the text’s purely ‘formal’ as opposed to ‘material’ qualities, or in its ‘structure’ as opposed to its ‘meaning,’ or in its ‘underlying meaning’ as opposed to any obvious ‘theme,’ ‘subject,’ or ostensible ‘message’” (“Value/ Evaluation” 179). either aesthetics or politics, while, in reality, I shall claim, the two are inseparable and, in fact, mutually constitutive. One of the striking and puzzling aspects of the revisionist’s rejection of the aesthetic is its ahistorical approach to the issue. Although Fredric Jameson’s dictum “Always historicize! ” ( Jameson 9) has become something like the first commandment of the new revisionism, Jameson’s advice seems to be entirely forgotten as soon as the question of aesthetics is addressed by the new revision‐ ists. Because of a crude opposition between the political and the historical on the one side and the aesthetic on the other, the aesthetic appears to have only one function, namely the evasion of political views and historical explanations. As such, it always remains the same and always functions in the same manner. While everything else is subject to historical change, the meaning of the word aesthetic seems to stay the same. However, the New Critical conceptualization of aesthetic value is still a traditional aesthetics in the sense that the aesthetic is considered a quality of the text or object itself. The aesthetic is identified with a specific formal aspect of the work, so that the analysis of the work’s structure can also determine the nature of aesthetic experience. With this approach, New Criticism gave a scholarly, professionalized version to a long philosophical tradition. 8 The names for the intrinsic qualities change - a change that is in itself an interesting part of cultural history - but the idea that the aesthetic experience resides in intrinsic qualities of the work of art remains the same. This approach is self-defeating, however, for if it can be shown that these aesthetic values are not universally valid but instead are particular historical manifestations of the aesthetic, and that, moreover, they are read into the text rather than residing in it, or, they are created, even “invented” by certain cultural discourses, then the idea of the aesthetic seems to be thoroughly discredited. This happened to New Criticism when its contextualist version of organic unity was questioned in its universal applicability by pointing out that many so-called masterpieces, from Hamlet to Huck Finn, did not meet the criterion of organic unity and had to be submitted to a rather violent reinterpretation in order to save them as so-called literary masterpieces. Clearly, as long as one identifies the aesthetic with the assumption of an intrinsic quality, such reinterpretations are essential, for only if the object possesses an inherent quality described as aesthetic, will it be able to qualify as a legitimate object for literary studies. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 221 9 The pragmatist premises of the concept of aesthetic attitude are clarified by Jerome Stolnitz: “An attitude is a way of directing and controlling our perception. We never see or hear everything in our environment indiscriminately. Rather, we ‘pay attention’ to some things, whereas we apprehend others only dimly or hardly at all. Thus attention is selective - it concentrates on some features of our surroundings and ignores others” (78). But the equation of the aesthetic with an inherent quality, structure, or gestalt is by no means plausible. It is certainly not the only way in which we can speak about the aesthetic dimension of cultural objects. In fact, it presents a profound misunderstanding. In contrast, a number of different approaches such as pragmatism, Czech structuralism, and the reception theory of the Constance School have argued, each in its own way and with different emphases, that the aesthetic is not an inherent property of a text or object, so that an object either possesses aesthetic qualities or does not. Instead, it is argued that the aesthetic is constituted by the attitude we take toward an object and that it is hence not a word for a particular formal quality but for a distinct communicative mode and function. 9 The point is illustrated in John Dewey’s Art as Experience where Dewey evokes the scene of a number of men approaching the Manhattan skyline on a ferry. Toward this object of perception the men on the ferry’s attitudes might range from practical matters of orientation or an assessment of the real estate value of the buildings to an aesthetic appreciation of the skyline: Some men regard it as simply a journey to get them where they want to be a means to be endured. So, perhaps, they read a newspaper. One who is idle may glance at this and that building identifying it as the Metropolitan Tower, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and so on. Another, impatient to arrive, may be on the lookout for landmarks by which to judge progress toward his destination. Still another, who is taking the journey for the first time, looks eagerly but is bewildered by the multiplicity of objects spread out to view. He sees neither the whole nor the parts; he is like a layman who goes into an unfamiliar factory where many machines are plying. Another person, interested in real estate, may see, in looking at the skyline, evidence in the height of buildings, of the value of land. Or he may let his thoughts roam to the congestion of a great industrial and commercial centre. He may go on to think of the planlessness of arrangement as evidence of the chaos of a society organized on the basis of conflict rather than cooperation. Finally the scene formed by the buildings may be looked at as colored and lighted volumes in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river. He is now seeing esthetically, as a painter might see. (140) 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 222 Winfried Fluck 10 It is hard to provide an adequate translation of the philosophical concept of “sinnliche Erkenntnis.” “Sensory” is too empiricist and downplays the aspect of a meaningful, transformative experience in which a synthesis of sense impressions leads to a form of knowledge not to be gained through reason; “sensuous” bears connotations of sensuality which are not intended at all, in fact, are considered a perversion of aesthetic experience. For a succinct summary of the emergence of the concept of the aesthetic see Jürgen Peper: “The history of this concept begins, as is well known, with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s book Aesthetika (1750). The Greek term aisthetike (téchne), which means the study of sensuous perception, designates for Baumgarten a newly planned branch of epistemology. Alongside the traditional cognitio intellectiva, he places a newly defined cognitio sensitiva. While maintaining its previous function of supplying the rational faculties of cognition with sensuous data, it now gains an intrinsic value as the source of a pre-rational grasp of reality, ascribed by Baumgarten especially to art and poetry. This emphasis on art and poetry determined today’s use of the term ‘aesthetic.’ It is important, however, to keep in mind the epistemological core” (294). “Baumgarten’s specification of cognitio sensitiva as aesthetic signals the disintegration of the Platonic ideal unity of the true, the good and the beautiful. In fact, poetry and the fine arts now preclude the intellectual grasp of reason (cognitio intellectiva). Kant’s three Critiques provide us, then, with a systematized expression of this division of classical Reason into the spheres of science, morality, and art” (295). 11 Consequently, it makes no sense to be “against” aesthetics, since the aesthetic attitude is part and parcel of daily life. Implicitly, Dewey’s pragmatist shift from a philosophy of art or beauty to a view of the aesthetic as everyday social practice also undermines the equation of the aesthetic with the idealist project of subjectivation which forms one of the bases of the current radical critique of the ideology of the aesthetic. If the aesthetic is part of everyday life, it is also part of a conflictual, open-ended negotiation and staging of identity-formation that is marked by inherent instability. 12 Raymond Williams therefore praises Mukařovský as “the best representative” (152) of an approach in which the aesthetic is seen as a function of practice. One of the reasons for the evasive nature of bourgeois aesthetics which Williams deplores The aesthetic, here, is not a word for the intrinsic property of an object. Nor is it identical with art. Hence aesthetics, as a philosophical discipline, is not only and not necessarily a philosophy of art. Nor is it restricted to the study of beauty. Experiences of the sublime, the uncanny, the grotesque, even the ugly have produced their own powerful and influential aesthetics. As a branch of philosophy, aesthetics has a much broader range than the beautiful. Historically, it emerged as a “science of sensuous knowledge” (“sinnliche Erkenntnis”). 10 As Dewey implies, such a mode of perception is a part of daily experience and hence, potentially, an everyday occurrence. 11 Similarly, the Czech structuralist Jan Mukařovský argues that any object of the life-world can, in principle, be viewed (and interpreted) from a number of different perspectives. A building or a dress serves a practical function, but we can also, at the same time, look at them as aesthetic objects and we may even reflect upon the possible relations between the two aspects. 12 An 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 223 (“Aesthetic Theory is the main instrument of this evasion”) is that the potential of Mukařovský’s approach has been disregarded: “Mukařovský’s important work is best seen as the penultimate stage of the critical dissolution of the specializing and controlling categories of bourgeois aesthetic theory. Almost all the original advantages of this theory have been quite properly, indeed necessarily, abandoned” (153). Williams calls this process “necessary,” because as a form of social practice, aesthetics is reenacting a growing division of labor. 13 In his essay on functions in architecture, Mukařovský claims that wherever other functions, for whatever reasons, are weakened, dropped, or changed, the aesthetic function may take on an increased importance; he then insists that, in principle, “there is not an object which cannot become its vehicle or, conversely, an object which necessarily has to be its vehicle. If certain objects are produced with the direct intention of aesthetic effectiveness and are adapted formally to this intention, it by no means follows necessarily that they cannot lose this function partially or entirely, for example, because of a change in time, space, or milieu” (“On the Problem of Functions in Architecture” 244). The passage demonstrates that Mukařovsky’s aesthetic theory, in contrast to other forms of aesthetics, has no problem in accounting for changes in the critical assessment and evaluation of an aesthetic object. 14 Cf. the summary of Mukařovský’s position by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature: “Art is not a special kind of object but one in which the aesthetic function, usually mixed with other functions is dominant. Art, with other things (landscapes and dress, most evidently), gives aesthetic pleasure, but this cannot be transliterated as a sense of beauty or a sense of perceived form, since while these are central in the aesthetic function they are historically and socially variable, and in all real instances aesthetic function is, in this view, not the property or inherent quality of a privileged object we can then call a masterpiece. 13 On the contrary, we can, in principle, look at any object of perception or experience as an aesthetic object (cf. Mukařovský, “Aesthetic Function” 18). Take a subway map of Berlin, for example. At one moment, we may regard it as purely referential and rely on its truth-value; at the next moment, we may bracket the referential function for the time being and look at the pattern of subway lines as an aesthetic object that reminds us of an Egyptian hieroglyph; in a third moment, we may reflect on what this strangely irregular pattern can tell us about the historical growth patterns of Berlin’s subway system, including the possibility that it may have been designed by an artist for the purpose of illustrating or dramatizing this fact. In other words: referential and aesthetic dimensions do not occupy ontologically different planes. They interact with and complement one another. In even more radical fashion than Dewey, for whom aesthetic experience marks a culminating moment in which fragmented elements of daily experience are successfully reintegrated, the aesthetic, for Mukařovský, is created by a temporary and, possibly, fleeting shift in a hierarchy of functions that is in constant flux, so that each of the functions remains present and can, at every moment, regain dominance. 14 Consequently, the aesthetic 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 224 Winfried Fluck concrete. At the same time the aesthetic function is ‘not an epiphenomenon of other functions’ but a ‘codeterminant of human reaction to reality’” (153). 15 Cf. Mukařovský’s description: “The limits of the province of aesthetics, therefore, are not provided by reality itself, and are exceedingly changeable. (…) We have all encountered people for whom anything can acquire an aesthetic function and, conversely, people for whom the aesthetic function exists only to a minimal degree. Even from our own personal experience we know that the borderline between the aesthetic and the extraaesthetic (…)-fluctuates for each person according to his age, changes in health, and even momentary moods” (“Aesthetic Function” 3). In his essay on architecture, Mukařovský employs images of extreme plasticity in order to determine the shifting relations between aesthetic function and other functions. He describes the aesthetic function in terms of air and darkness which creep into a room and fill out the spaces that have been vacated by the taking away of an object or the turning off of the light. 16 Or, to draw on Mukařovský’s argument: as an - in comparison with other functions - “empty” function, the aesthetic function depends on other functions in order to manifest itself. 17 The recent exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which created such heated public debates, is only the latest illustration of this project of contemporary art to transform the conspicuously profane into art. However, without a sacred or other reference still implied, this “profanization” would make no sense and would be pointless. 18 Harold Rosenberg was one of the first critics to describe this development. Cf. his description of the movement toward the “de-aestheticization” of art in the 1960s: “Ideally, art povera strives to reach beyond art to the wonder-working object, place cannot be defined as separate sphere. 15 Neither does it present a counterworld, nor does it come into existence by an act of transcendence or a retreat from reality. While looking at the subway map as an aesthetic object, we cannot completely suppress our awareness that it is a subway map. In fact, only on this background does the hieroglyphic pattern take on significance as an aesthetic object. It is not that we find hieroglyphic patterns pleasant or interesting in themselves. On the contrary, without reference to that which has been turned (temporarily) into a hieroglyphic pattern, the transformation would be pointless. 16 In order to be able to bracket a referential function, we first have to have a referential function. Many forms of recent art, such as, for example, pop art, junk art, or abject art, therefore set out by declaring everyday objects or, increasingly, thoroughly “profane” objects to be art objects in order to dramatize the redefining power of shifting attitudes that can transform even the “lowest“ - the most vulgar, junkiest, or most repulsive - materials into aesthetic objects. 17 Similarly, to take another extreme example from literature, in Donald Barthelme’s experimental postmodern story “The Glass Mountain” the dogshit on the streets of Manhattan, in its subtle color shadings, can take on an almost sublime aesthetic quality. 18 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 225 (“environment”), or event. It extends the dada-surrealist quest for the revelatory found object into unlimited categories of strange responses. Redefining art as the process of the artist or his materials, it dissolves all limitations on the kind of substances out of which art can be constructed. Anything - breakfast food, a frozen lake, film footage - is art, either as is or tampered with, through being chosen as fetish” (37). As Rosenberg indicates, de-aestheticization paves the way for reaestheticization. It does not do away with aesthetics, it paves the way for a new aesthetics. 19 In his essay “Die Bedeutung der Ästhetik” (The Importance of Aesthetics), reprinted in the collection Kunst. Poetik, Semiotik, Mukařovský gives the example of gymnastics. As long as our perception of physical exercise is dominated by practical functions (gaining strength, strengthening certain muscles, etc.), we will focus on aspects that help achieve those goals and will judge the single exercise by how well it helps to realize the desired result. Once the aesthetic function becomes dominant, on the other hand, the exercise takes on interest in itself as a performance or spectacle. The various movements, the sequence of movements, and even the “useless” details of the periods between different exercise may now become objects of attention for their own sake. The significatory dimension of reality is foregrounded and the sign is of interest sui generis. Even the “wrong” movements may now be of interest as movements, not just as “wrong” movements. 20 Jürgen Peper therefore describes the aesthetic function as “experimental and experien‐ tial epistemology” (296). Thus, if an aesthetic object has a political function, then on communicative, “experimental” conditions of its own. This is an important point, because it helps to underline the fact that taking an aesthetic attitude toward an object does not mean, or, at least, does not necessarily mean, that we disengage the object or ourselves from reality. By conceding that the object may not be identical with reality, we do not have to assert that it is autonomous or that it has nothing to do with that reality. In changing our attitude toward an object, the aesthetic function may become dominant, but it is not becoming exclusive. What exactly does it mean, then, to take an aesthetic attitude? The concept refers to the capacity of any system of signification to draw attention to itself as a form of expression and to refer to itself as a sign, thus drawing our attention to the organizing and patterning principles by which the object is constituted. 19 For this purpose, the object is temporarily depragmatized and dereferentialized. We no longer insist that reality be truthfully represented by our subway map, because only in this way can we concentrate on the object itself. This temporary bracketing of reference is useful and often gives pleasure, not because it allows us to escape, if only temporarily, from reality but because it opens up the possibility of a new perspective on the object and, by implication, on reality. 20 We discover aspects of the object which we have missed in our exclusive concentration on the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 226 Winfried Fluck 21 In this sense, the aesthetic function becomes dominant when the referential function is bracketed. There are two main reasons why this may occur: (1) the gradual loss of other functions, such as, for example, in the gradual aestheticization of objects of material culture which have lost their practical function, and (2) at the other pole, the possibility that the referential function is still being explored, which can also result in the dominance of the aesthetic function. In his essay on architecture, Mukařovský describes these possible forms of relation with reference to the aesthetic and the practical function. The aesthetic function, he argues, not only becomes dominant where practical functions disappear. It accompanies a process of constant shifts in the hierarchy of practical functions and, thus, can also have the effect of anticipating future practical functions by providing a possibility of articulation before these functions are able to gain any cultural or political acceptance. (In Critical Theory, this would be called the utopian function of art.) In this way, the aesthetic function plays an important role in historical development and can be seen as one important manifestation of it. 22 From this perspective, claims for the autonomy of art are heuristic claims (e.g. for a temporary bracketing of the referential or practical function) in order to allow art to do its cultural work on conditions of its own. Often, discussions of the “autonomy” or “disinterestedness”-premise ignore this heuristic dimension, “mistaking the possibility of a specific experience called ‘aesthetic’ by a temporary bracketing of exoteric purposes for an ontological claim of autonomous existence” (Grabes, “Errant Specialisms” 160). In order to emphasize the heuristic dimension of the temporary bracketing of referential or other functions, Peper redefines autonomy as the “free play” of reason in a specific sense: “Thus, the pre-rational cognitive powers could not obtain free play (autonomy) except through the bracketing of reason (cognitio intellectiva)” (297). This “‘free play’ is an epoché [in the phenomenological sense of a temporary bracketing of cognition and knowledge] for a limited time, prompted by scepticism about the higher, generalizing faculties of cognition, and motivated heuristically” (299). It may be used for purposes of subjectivation and even subjection but, as many examples of contemporary art demonstrate, also to subvert such subjectivation. Cf., for example, Jon Simon’s chapter “Transgression and Aesthetics” in his book on Foucault, in which the aesthetic is discussed as a form that can promote new modes of subjectivity. This refutes the argument, employed by Pease and others, that the aesthetic is per se a mode of subjection or ideological subject formation: “Moreover Foucault’s support for the new social movements of marginal groups such as women, gays and radical ecologists is said to rest on ‘an aesthetic subject’ which highlights those aspects of subjectivity excluded by modernity, i.e. ‘pre-rational embodied otherness,’ as well as ‘spontaneity and expressiveness’” (79). referential function. 21 At the same time, the dominance of the aesthetic function does not mean that the reference is cancelled. On the contrary, the temporary change in perspective only makes sense (and is only meaningful) as long as the reference to reality is not lost. The referential and the aesthetic function always coexist. 22 The new perspective on the object can only be experienced in its various possibilities of revelation, criticism, intensification of experience or pleasure as long as the reference is kept in view, so that we are constantly moving back and forth between the newly created world and the reference that 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 227 23 Peper thus states that “aesthetic effects can only unfold against and into the nonaesthetic. (…) The aesthetic pleasure in the free play of cognitive powers is most intense where - far from empty arbitrariness - it has to be gained within a given conceptual structure, making us aware of this level of cognition as the reflexive play of forces” (314-15). 24 It should be added, however, that “new” interpretation does not necessarily mean politically advanced. It is part of the freedom opened up by art that the disagreement with reality can also come from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Thus, art is neither “progressive” by definition, nor reactionary. As Robert Hellenga points out in his essay “What Is A Literary Experience Like? ”, it merely opens up new possibilities of articulation. The term “aesthetic function” refers to a specific condition of communication (“Wirkungsbedingung”). It does not yet tell us anything about “real” functions art may have had in history (something only a detailed historical analysis can clarify), only about the specific communicative conditions for these functions. 25 When I first presented this paper in the United States, one of the defensive reactions was that Mukařovský has long been known and was now considered an “old hat.” Obviously, however, his significance and potential contribution to current debates has not been fully grasped by this form of “cutting edge” criticism, for otherwise it would not be understandable how the traditional conflation of aesthetic function and aesthetic value can continue. By disregarding the concept of aesthetic function and conflating it with aesthetic value, the current revisionism can claim that aesthetics, by concepts such as “disinterestedness,” denies that the aesthetic has a function. The absurd consequences are pointed out in Guillory’s discussion of Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s counterargument in her Contingencies of Value: “For Smith the refutation of the traditional denial by aesthetics of the utility of the artwork is surprisingly simple: one only has to reassert the artwork’s purpose or ‘use’; but that use turns out be [sic] nothing less than all the uses to which the work may be put as an object not generically different - with respect to use - from any other object. And of course, one cannot predict or limit the uses to which any object has served as a point of departure for this reinterpretation. 23 In this sense, the aesthetic object can be described as repetition with a difference which links the real and the imaginary in a new constellation. The temporary bracketing of the referential and practical function of the object does not mean that the object’s relation to reality is erased. On the contrary, it is put on new grounds, and the clarification of this new relation is one of the major tasks of literary criticism and art criticism. The aesthetic mode opens up the possibility of a new interpretation of the world. 24 It draws attention to aspects that have been overlooked, ignored, or suppressed. We may not approve of this new interpretation and may criticize it, but in order to criticize it meaningfully, we first of all have to acknowledge it in its own right. Dewey’s and Mukařovský’s description of what it means to take an aesthetic attitude has a crucial theoretical advantage over traditional forms of aesthetics: it allows us to distinguish between two aspects that have been continuously conflated and confused in recent attacks on the concept of the aesthetic, namely the aspects of aesthetic function and aesthetic value. 25 Aisthesis means both the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 228 Winfried Fluck may be put” (291). Interestingly enough, Smith has a footnote in her Contingencies of Value in which she acknowledges Mukařovský only to dismiss him: “Monroe Beardsley’s ‘instrumentalist’ theory of aesthetic value in Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York, 1958), pp. 524-576, and Mukařovský’s otherwise quite subtle explorations of these questions in Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (Prague, 1936), trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1970), do not altogether escape the confinements and circularities of formalist conceptions of, respectively, ‘aesthetic experience’ and ‘aesthetic function’” (192n.). It would be interesting indeed to learn more about what aspects of Mukařovský’s argument Smith considers “subtle” and how this is related to Mukařovský’s concept of aesthetic function. 26 This, in fact, may provide a possible explanation for the striking absence of the term aesthetics in Frank Lentricchia’s representative handbook, Critical Terms for Literary Study. Most likely, the editors Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin assumed that the phenomenon of the aesthetic was covered by the entry “Value/ Evaluation.” Similarly, in his introduction to the volume Aesthetics and Ideology, George Levine undermines his own laudable project of - to quote the title of his introduction - “Reclaiming the Aesthetic” and regaining a sense of its “central importance” (17) by equating the aesthetic with “questions of literary value” and fighting contemporary criticism’s “reluctance to engage the question of literary value” (13). 27 To avoid a possible misunderstanding: these two descriptions - skyline as lighted and colored volumes; subway map as hieroglyphic pattern - are, of course, not the only possible ways in which the object can be seen aesthetically. Depending on different aesthetics, different aspects will be emphasized. Dewey’s description, for example, clearly reflects his own latently organicist aesthetics which I have analyzed in more detail in my essay on “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience.” ability to perceive and the power to judge. For most contemporary revisionist critics of the aesthetic, however, aesthetics appears to be synonymous with evaluation and, more specifically, with a suspect hierarchy of values. 26 In contrast, Dewey and Mukařovský claim that the taking of an aesthetic attitude only constitutes a different object by setting the aesthetic function dominant. When, in looking at the Manhattan skyline or the Berlin subway map, we take an aesthetic attitude, it opens up the possibility of perceiving these objects as, in Dewey’s words, a set of “colored and lighted volumes” or, in my example of the subway map, as a hieroglyphic pattern. 27 However, whether we consider these colored and lighted volumes or the hieroglyphic pattern of the subway pleasing or an especially impressive manifestation of its kind, is quite another matter and logically distinct from constituting the object of perception as an aesthetic object. Logically distinct, but not separate. Clearly, the two categories and aspects are interdependent. Inevitably, my consciously or unconsciously held values will influence my constitution of the aesthetic object, just as, on the other hand, my - often tacit - assumptions about the function of literature will shape my aesthetic value judgments. A critic may argue, for example, on the basis of certain premises of what constitutes a work of art, that objects in which 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 229 28 This tacit assumption about the function of the aesthetic will, in turn, be embedded in a specific view of society and interpretation of history. Every aesthetic judgement therefore implies overt or covert assumptions about society, and every aesthetics is at the same time also a philosophy of history in nuce. 29 For a detailed discussion of the logical dependence of every interpretation of an aesthetic object on underlying concepts of reality, society, and the specific role of literature within this concept, see my study of the constitutive role of aesthetic premises in Huck Finn criticism (Ästhetisches Vorverständnis und Methode). For a discussion of the theoretical dilemma produced by the unwillingness of the new revisionism to openly discuss the issues of aesthetic function and aesthetic value, see my review of Jonathan Arac’s otherwise excellent book, ‘Huckleberry Finn’ as Idol and Target, “‘Huckleberry Finn’: Liberating an American Classic from Hypercanonization.” 30 The canon debate which has brought the issue of aesthetics on the agenda again is really a debate about different concepts of what constitutes an aesthetic object. single parts blend harmoniously may be best suited to invite the observer to take an aesthetic attitude, just as, on the other hand, taking an aesthetic attitude may mean for a particular observer to focus on certain characteristic features that constitute aesthetic value for him or her. And yet, it is precisely because of this interdependence that it is necessary to keep the two aspects logically apart. We have to keep them apart in order to be able to grasp the ways in which these assumptions shape and determine our interpretations of literary texts and cultural practices. Before we can assess the aesthetic value of an object, we have to constitute it as an aesthetic object. Taking an aesthetic attitude means constructing an aesthetic object on the basis of a guiding assumption about the function of art or the aesthetic. 28 This founding assumption will in turn influence my judgment of the aesthetic value of the object. The reception history of many artistic works demonstrates that, even when critics agree that a literary text such as, for example, Huckleberry Finn, is a masterpiece, they will still disagree on the specific reasons why, because they hold different notions about the function of art and, consequently, different views about what constitutes aesthetic value. 29 Aesthetic evaluations thus have their often unacknowledged base and justification in their tacit premises about what constitutes an aesthetic function. This also means, however, that they are open to rational dispute at this point. 30 Let us go back for a moment to our subway map. In principle, I said, any object can become an aesthetic object if an aesthetic attitude is taken toward it and its aesthetic function is made dominant. The object itself, however, can also encourage us to take such an attitude. This is especially obvious in the case of fictional texts (in the broadest sense of the word as any form of “invented” representation). Once we classify a representation as fictional, we can no longer regard the object as predominantly referential. Because a fictional text does not merely replicate reality but embodies it in new shape and form, understanding a 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 230 Winfried Fluck 31 Cf. Rachel Brownstein’s description of the doubleness of a novel heroine: “In one sense this doubleness of a novel heroine is perfectly obvious. Every good reader recognizes a heroine as a representation of an actual woman and, at the same time, as an element in a work of art. She does not regard a woman in a novel as if she were one of her acquaintances; she experiences how the context of the fiction limits a character’s freedom and determines her style. (…) The reader identifies with Elizabeth, and as she does so accepts the rules involved in being Elizabeth, and at the same time she sees how the rules determine that Elizabeth be as she is - not merely the rules of the society Jane Austen’s novel represents, but also the rules that govern the representation of it, the novel” (xxiii). 32 In his entry on “representation” in the critical handbook Critical Terms for Literary Study, W.J.T. Mitchell speaks of “the complex interaction between playful fantasy and serious reality in all forms of representation” (12). 33 In summarizing prior work on the psychology of reading, J.A. Appleyard speaks of “the double state of mind we experience by immersing ourselves in a work of literature; we are both ‘participants’ and ‘spectators’” (39) at the same time. fictional text cannot simply be a mimetic act of recognition. Rather, we have to create the object anew. Since we have never met a character named Huckleberry Finn and do, in fact, know that he never existed, we have to come up with our own mental representation of him. Inevitably, we invest our own emotions, draw on our own associations and form our own mental images in imagining characters like Huck Finn or Isabel Archer and make them come alive so that we can become interested in their fate. These imaginary elements can only gain a gestalt, however, if they are based on discourses of the real. 31 Thus, a character like Huck Finn emerges as a combination of a Victorian local-color discourse of a figure of the bad boy on the one hand, and our imaginary complementation of the figure on the other. 32 If it weren’t for the bad-boy discourse, there would be no reference and thus no common object of debate, while, on the other hand, the imaginary elements are the reason for the puzzling and often frustrating phenomenon that we can come up with ever new interpretations of one and the same book. Fictional forms of representation bring an object into our world but they are not identical with this object. They create an object that is never stable and identical with itself. Fictional representation is thus, to use Wolfgang Iser’s words, a performative mode: “Representation can only unfold itself in the recipient’s mind, and it is through his active imaginings alone that the intangible can become an image” (“Representation” 243). Taking an aesthetic attitude thus becomes the source of non-identity, and it is this non-identity, in turn, which can be seen as a source of aesthetic experience, because it allows us, for example, to be inside and outside of a character at the same time. 33 We can look at ourselves from the outside and, in doing so, create another, more expressive version of ourselves. Fiction is an especially potent and heightened means of taking the role of the other and of looking back at oneself from that perspective. As Wolfgang 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 231 34 On the complex and complicated processes of transfer that are set in motion by the perception or reconstitution of an object as aesthetic see my essay “Pragmatism and Aesthetic Experience.” Iser puts it: “In this respect the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform his role must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogue for representing something he is not. In order to produce the determinate form of an unreal character, the actor must allow his own reality to fade out. At the same time, however, he does not know precisely who, say, Hamlet is, for one cannot properly identify with a character who has never existed. Thus role-playing endows a figment with a sense of reality in spite of its impenetrability which defies total determination. (…) Staging oneself as someone else is a source of aesthetic pleasure; it is also the means whereby representation is transferred from text to reader” (244). Non-identity, in other words, is that element of an aesthetic experience which makes it possible to review and reexperience reality. If aesthetic representation is characterized by non-identity, however (which is something entirely different from “autonomy”), then interpretation is also always a transfer and a role-play, the creation of another self, the staging of a new identity, or the articulation of a socially otherwise stigmatized impulse. 34 In Trilling’s case it is clearly the first. Trilling, however, was not the last critic who described a moral struggle on the basis of his own experiences and needs, or, to put it in hermeneutical terms, in terms of his own horizon. To be sure, his interpretation of Huckleberry Finn was a role-play, with Huck cast in the role of nonconformist postwar liberal and the slave-holding South in the role of Stalinism, real or imagined. But if this is true for the past, then it must also be true for the present. The practice continues. There is a tendency in current revisionist criticism to imply that critics may have enacted such critical role-plays in the past for ideological reasons, but that the current historical and political criticism is no longer in need of such “disguises,” because it expresses its own interests and politics openly. In contrast, I have argued that such processes are inescapable because of the radicalized form of non-identity on which aesthetic representation is based. In other words: even political criticism cannot help but create an aesthetic object when it interprets a fictional text. Or, to put it differently, and in a sufficiently polemical manner: politics, if articulated via literary or cultural representations, becomes an aesthetic phenomenon. This appears to be most obvious to me in the current interest in the racially other, e.g. in the massive self-racialization or self-ethnicization which characterizes not only American and European culture at large, as, for example in the movies of Quentin Tarantino, but literary and cultural studies as well. Such role plays are not only at work in cultural crossovers, however. They are also at work in identity politics, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 232 Winfried Fluck 35 Such a history would have to include, especially in view of recent developments, instances of a homogenization, if not essentializing, of imaginary communities not only on the basis of “constructed” identities but, even more so, desired identities. for clearly the racial or ethnic identity a critic affirms through a literary text is also a creation, the construct of an imaginary identity which does not exist in this form in the real world. It is true that the nation is an imaginary community, but it is not the only one. This, in fact, is where cultural studies comes in again and where it can draw on the original insights of Raymond Williams. What I have described so far affects cultural studies in three ways: (1) For a number of reasons, cultural studies are especially tempted to use the concept of representation in a mimetic rather than a performative sense. However, the performative mode of cultural material is not restricted to deliberately self-referential works. It is a characteristic of all fictional texts and aesthetic objects. (2) The processes of transfer and critical role-playing which are inextricably linked to descriptions and interpretations of aesthetic objects do not only occur, of course, in literary studies. They may be even more prominent in cultural studies. In fact, one explanation for the popularity of cultural studies may be that it facilitates such processes, because its objects often invite role-play more easily than, let us say, experimental texts. Responding to popular culture, for example, one can shake off the burdensome role of the complex intellectual and go back to “immediate experience,” to use Robert Warshow’s words, that is, to a relatively direct, immediate expression of strong emotions. What may be even more important in this context is that cultural studies were generated by the crucial insight that critical analyses, including value judgments, are also always cultural acts of self-definition and self-empowerment in which readers, audiences, or critics make use of the non-identity of aesthetic objects in order to articulate their own needs and interests. The history of literary criticism is usually written as that of theoretical and methodological progress. It has yet to be written as a history of changing acts of self-fashioning. 35 I think that the current revisionism is wonderfully perceptive in analyzing critical role-plays of the past, but strangely disinterested in acknowledging the elements of transfer and role-play in its own critical practice. Perhaps, one reason for this omission is the belief that such an analysis would undermine its own politics. In contrast, I believe that it makes for a better politics, because it adds a needed dimension of self-awareness and self-reflexivity. The current rejection of the aesthetic and its displacement with the political is in itself a cultural act, that is, an act of self-definition and self-empowerment which can be seen in a larger historical context. The reason why Raymond Williams characterized the aesthetic as a form of evasion lay in what he saw as 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 233 36 For a theoretical debate of this movement, see Hal Foster’s anthology “The Anti- Aesthetic.” 37 Fittingly, a recent German anthology of cutting-edge comments on aesthetics by leading poststructuralists and postmodern thinkers is called Aisthesis: Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik (Aisthesis: Perception Today, or, Perspectives of a Radically Different Aesthetics), emphasizing the purely physical and sensory dimension against the traditional idea of “sensuous knowledge.” 38 Cf. the introductory justification of his approach in his essay on Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Aesthetic Value: “Modern art, beginning with Naturalism does not ignore an area of reality when choosing its subject matter and, beginning with Cubism and similar movements in other branches of art, no restriction is placed on the choice of materials or technique. All of the foregoing provides sufficient evidence that even those items which, in the traditional aesthetic view, would not have been credited with aesthetic potential, can now become aesthetic facts” (Aesthetic Function 2). Reflecting the fact that Mukařovský’s approach was decisively influenced by the aesthetic revolution ushered in by the art of modernism, Raymond Williams writes, “Mukařovský’s important work is best seen as the penultimate stage of the critical dissolution of the specializing and controlling categories of bourgeois aesthetic theory” and then adds, “Mukařovský, from within this tradition, in effect destroyed it” (153-54). The close, inextricable link between the history of art, modernity, and the history of aesthetics is also the subject of Luc Ferry’s study Homo Aestheticus. its separation from social processes. His critique of the concept had the purpose of overcoming this separation: if, in a particular stage of the division of labor, “art and thinking about art have to separate themselves (…) from the social processes within which they are still contained,” then “we have to reject ‘the aesthetic’ both as a separate abstract dimension and as a separate abstract function” (154-56). This project of overcoming the separation between the aesthetic and the social sphere is by no means new, however. It reenacts the avant-garde’s ongoing attempts, starting with dadaism and surrealism, to erase the separation of art and life by destroying the aura of the work of art. In reaction to idealist aesthetics, the modern avant-garde has authorized and defined itself by ever renewed attacks on the aesthetic as a realm of special, transcendent values. This has resulted in increasingly radical attempts to dissociate the practice of art from aesthetics, and has finally led to a programmatically antiaesthetic stance. 36 The development is analyzed in a number of “post-aesthetic” theories about an ongoing process of “de-aestheticization” (H. Rosenberg), the “delimitation of the aesthetic sphere” (D. Wellershoff), or the “disenfranchisement of art” (A. Danto). 37 In fact, Mukařovský’s revision of aesthetic theory can already be seen as an important stage in this development. 38 The search for a radical delimitation of the aesthetic sphere has had two major consequences. One is a far-reaching cultural dehierarchization; the other, surprising and unforeseen, consequence, is what could be called a 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 234 Winfried Fluck 39 In fact, one might claim that, far from being discarded, the aesthetic, at present, has had something of a comeback in contemporary thought: “From the closeness of deconstruction’s affirmative ‘freeplay’ to the ‘free play of the imagination’ in tra‐ ditional aesthetics, to the aestheticization of the ethical in postmodern philosophy; from the revival of the sublime to the aestheticising of the ‘Lebenswelt’; from the recourse to modernist collage in New Historicism, and to modernist temporality in post-histoire anti-utopian visions, and from the poetic quality of pre-symbolic women’s writing to the recent notion of culture as a self-deconstructive text - postmodernism and anti-foundationalism has, wittingly or unwittingly, come extremely close to the sphere that traditionally bears its foundation within itself: the aesthetic” (Grabes, “New Developments in Literary Aesthetics” 297). 40 This can explain the, at first sight, puzzling and seemingly contradictory fact that a contemporary philosopher of art such as Richard Shusterman can, to quote the titles of two of his essays, speak of the “The End of Aesthetic Experience” and, at the same time, can draw attention to an “aesthetic turn” in contemporary thought in his essay “Postmodernism and the Aesthetic Turn.” 41 For a more detailed analysis of this process see my essay “Radical Aesthetics.” As Shusterman points out in his essay “Postmodernism and the Aesthetic Turn,” in contemporary philosophy aesthetics takes the place of reason. He then goes on to ask “whether aesthetics or politics will inherit the primacy that philosophy has lost” (620). Actually, however, this is not an either-or issue. As a result of the delimitation of the aesthetic, the two are converging in unforeseen ways. pan-aestheticization. 39 Both, seemingly contradictory, developments can be seen as two sides of the same coin. 40 If art and life no longer occupy different planes of cultural hierarchy, then art is no longer a transcendent realm but another social practice. As a result, it has to establish new sources of authority. This leads to an interesting trajectory: (1) because the aesthetic is said to mask power, the authority of the aesthetic has to be unmasked, deconstructed, or subverted; (2) to counter the potential loss of cultural distinction resulting from the radical dehierarchization, art (as well as the institutions of criticism and academic scholarship) need a new marker of significance; (3) this new marker of significance can only come from one of the remaining areas of cultural authority such as the realm of political commitment. 41 Ironically, however, this extension of the sphere of the political cannot leave the political unaffected. It is contaminated, so to speak, by the aesthetic and this, in turn, leads to an aestheticization of politics. Aestheticization of politics means that politics is no longer authorized by a systematic analysis of the political, social, or economic system but by privileged forms of cultural representation. The attempt to overcome the separation between aesthetics and politics thus has a paradoxical effect. Since both aesthetics and politics are delimited, the boundaries between them become permeable. The political extends into the aesthetic dimension 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0013 Aesthetics and Cultural Studies 235 but the delimitation also works the other way round: the aesthetic dimension also extends into the sphere of the political and transforms it into cultural performance, that is, into an aesthetic object. The major reason for the new revisionism’s reluctance to consider questions of aesthetics is not merely a disagreement over aesthetic values. If it were, one only would have to replace one set of values with another. The actual disagreement is one about the function literary texts or other aesthetic objects have (or should have) in society. To accept aesthetics as a central term would mean to accept the premise of non-identity, while the whole point of the revisionist project is to erase the difference between politics and aesthetics, so that literary texts can have a direct political function and the profession of literary criticism can be redefined as political work. In contrast, I have argued (1) that the difference between the two realms cannot be erased and that attempts to do so only lead to exactly the opposite result: not to a politicization of aesthetics but to an aestheticization of politics, a restaging of politics through imaginary roleplays of self-empowerment, and (2) that it is a case of muddled thinking to assume that an object can only have “progressive” political functions, if it is “deaestheticized.” Instead, I would argue that the only meaningful way in which aesthetic objects can have social or political functions is as aesthetic objects that make use of the special communicative possibilities created by the taking of an aesthetic attitude. If the new revisionism is beginning to rediscover and reclaim aesthetics, as some recent developments seem to indicate, then I would therefore strongly support this attempt. 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