“Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited Rita Felski That I feel an affinity with the work of Winfried Fluck - that I think of him as not just a good friend but as an intellectual compatriot and comrade-in-arms - has much to do with our shared concerns and overlapping commitments. We’ve both queried the overreach of a suspicious hermeneutics that bores into texts for evidence of a political guilt that’s been presumed at the outset. We also, however, harbor reservations about an alternative stance that grounds the value of literature in the sole metric of resistance, subversion, and critique. Our discussions of aesthetic experience veer away from the established tenets of Kantian as well as Marxist thought, drawing on a pragmatist tradition running from Dewey to Schusterman. We agree that the question of reception is unavoidable in any reckoning with the social lives of literature, though Fluck has a stronger commitment to the work of Wolfgang Iser than I’ve been able to muster. And we’ve both written about the centrality and complexity of recognition processes as one aspect of such reception. Fluck’s “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,” published in 2002, was an eye-opening essay for me in clearing away various misconceptions of the aesthetic. Its account of how “the aesthetic mode opens up the possibility of a new interpretation of the world” (in this volume 228) remains as essential now as it was two decades ago. Our views of cultural studies are not quite so perfectly aligned. As I reread David Scott’s letters to Stuart Hall in his Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (2017), I am struck by Scott’s case for clarification - rather than critique or even interpretation - as the most fitting register for the give-and-take between intellectual friends. Clarification, notably, is not concerned principally with the truth as such of another’s discourse. And consequently it doesn’t present itself in an adversarial or combative attitude. (…) Clarification is a way of approaching thinking - and learning - that aims to make us more aware of what we are saying or doing. (15-16) In the second half of my essay, I clarify some possible reasons for our differing takes on cultural studies. Even as Fluck’s body of work draws on an eclectic and expansive range of theoretical frameworks, including Gadamer, Honneth, Habermas, Bourdieu, G. H. Mead, Norbert Elias, Martha Nussbaum, and many others, he mainly writes to and about the field of American literature and American studies. A formative part of my own career, meanwhile, was spent in a school of communication working alongside key figures in British cultural studies such as Ien Ang and John Hartley. How might these locations - the places from which we see - affect our differing perspectives on cultural studies? The Aesthetic Function When I came across Fluck’s essay two decades ago, I was especially struck by his quotation of, and commentary on, a passage from Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). Dewey is describing a group of individuals on board a ferry as it approaches the Manhattan skyline; one person is idly identifying the buildings that are slowly filing past; another is searching for landmarks that will guide him toward his final destination; yet another is thinking about the commercial value of the buildings and the challenges of urban planning. “Finally,” writes Dewey, “the scene formed by the buildings may be looked at as colored and lighted volumes in relation to each other.” The person on the ferry who’s appreciating the skyline in this fashion is “seeing aesthetically, as a painter might” (Dewey qtd. in Fluck, “Aesthetics,” 222). Why does Fluck single out this passage? It captures, in a vivid tableau, a key premise of Dewey’s thought; that aesthetics is part of everyday life rather than being a disposition that is restricted to those equipped with education and cultural capital. “An aesthetic function,” Fluck writes in his commentary on this passage, “is, in this view, not the property or inherent quality of a privileged object we can then call a masterpiece. On the contrary, we can, in principle, look at any object of perception or experience as an aesthetic object” (“Aesthetics,” 224). Aesthetic theory, in other words, cannot be divorced from aesthetic experience, which is seen by Dewey as a distillation or condensation of life - characterized by its vividness and coherence - rather than being cut off from life. Taking issue with what he calls the museum conception of art, Dewey underscores the many continuities, as well as differences, between aesthetic and ordinary experience. From such a perspective, the rejection of aesthetics by literary scholars looks like a category mistake. What they are typically objecting to is the much nar‐ rower idea of formalism: the claim that a select group of works possess unique 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 242 Rita Felski formal properties that define an exemplary condition of “literariness.” The New Critics, for example, vetoed any engagement with social and philosophical topics, along with the intentions of authors and the feelings of readers, in favor of a painstaking attention to the words on the page. Interpretation became a matter of demonstrating how equal yet antithetical meanings were being held in delicate suspense within a single poem: of teasing out patterns of irony, ambiguity, and paradox as they came together to compose an organic whole. As Fluck remarks, such values were inspired by the tenets of modernist aesthetics as well as the perceived need to legitimate literary study by separating it sharply from lay reading as well as other disciplines, yet they were presented as universal and omnipresent features of literature. The technique of close reading, held up as a way of doing justice to the qualities of a specific work, had the opposite effect, projecting a narrow definition of literariness onto very different texts, including ones - Fluck cites the example of Huckleberry Finn - for which they were patently unsuited. The arguments of later, politically minded critics, Fluck contends, drew from this same intellectual source, echoing the narrow vision of aesthetics they had absorbed during their academic socialization. Even as they took issue with New Criticism, they retained some of its key premises. If, however, aesthetics is conceived as an experience and an attitude - one that can be taken up in ordinary life as well as the space of the art gallery and the seminar room - it can no longer be decried as inherently elitist. And if the aesthetic function of art does not transcend or negate its referential function, it is no longer possible to see aesthetics and politics as mutually exclusive - an article of faith not only among the New Critics but also among many of their opponents. In elaborating on the latter point, Fluck turns to aesthetic theorist Jan Mukařovský, who, like Dewey, does not see the aesthetic as a separate sphere but as an attitude that is taken up to objects of experience. By way of illustration, Fluck uses the example of a Berlin subway map; instead of looking at the map to work out the quickest route from Onkel Toms Hütte to Kottbusser Tor, we can contemplate it as an aesthetic object; akin, perhaps, to a modernist artwork in its brightly colored grid of geometrical patterns. In doing so, however, “we cannot completely suppress our awareness that it is a subway map” (225). The differing attitudes we take up toward phenomena are not rigidly segregated or mutually exclusive; the aesthetic and referential function co-exist. “The temporary change in perspective only makes sense (and is only meaningful) as long as the reference to reality is not lost” (227). This point remains crucial for any adjudicating of the relation between aesthetics and politics. Moreover, Fluck’s example is wellchosen; by using a subway map rather than, say, a realist novel, to illustrate 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited 243 his point, he wards off the problems of certain theories of mimesis. No claim is being made that texts can mirror or reflect reality; the choice of the subway map underscores that any referential function will involve a degree of stylization. Stressing the defining role of experience in this manner does not require us to deny the part played by the object. Even though anything can in principle be viewed aesthetically, paintings and novels and movies encourage us to take up an aesthetic attitude, whether by drawing attention to their formal features or by advertising their status as fiction. In this way, our relationship to reality is put on new grounds; “the aesthetic mode opens up the possibility of a new interpretation of the world” (228). Here Fluck’s phrasing is reminiscent of Paul Ricoeur’s three-fold account of mimesis. The world appears before us prefigured, Ricoeur writes; our experiences of reality are filtered through a mélange of stories, images, and taken-for-granted forms of knowledge. Yet this welter of experiences can in turn be configured by literary texts that distance them from prior contexts and remake the work of culture, reshaping what is already shaped via narrative and other literary devices. And finally there is refiguration; how the world of the text impacts the world of the reader. Novels and poems and plays only exist in being actualized by audiences, whose beliefs and perceptions can be re-oriented - sometimes dramatically - via the act of reading. As Fluck writes, “fiction is an especially potent and heightened means of taking the role of the other and of looking back at oneself from that perspective” (231). Such a line of thought differs, in crucial respects, from the most influential approaches in Anglosphere literary studies. A literary text cannot be deciphered as just another instance of ideology at work; while shaped by the attitudes, beliefs, and values of its moment, it revises and refracts them to create something new. Yet this newness is not reducible to a single metric of resistance or critique - a second preferred option. By projecting such qualities onto works of art, Kinohi Nishikawa remarks, critics seek to align them with their own political commitments. And yet, he writes, “when art and aesthetic theory are instrumentalized to affirm an ideology of inherent resistance, we sunder the ethics of interpretation, which involves the recognition that the aesthetic object exists outside ourselves” (4). Engaging ethically with texts and images means reckoning with the possibility that they will fail to echo our agendas and being willing to change our minds. Deciphering hidden signs of resistance in novels or films is, moreover, a technique that is designed to showcase academic expertise but tells us nothing about the desires and motives that draw audiences to works of fiction. It is not that social factors do not affect audience response, but they manifest themselves in other ways, including, as Fluck argues, the desire for recognition. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 244 Rita Felski 1 Fluck and I both discuss questions of recognition in reading, though with somewhat different emphases. Fluck looks closely at recognition as a form of social acknowledg‐ ment; I am also interested in the relation between recognition and self-knowledge. Fluck is one of the few critics to connect political theories of recognition to literary criticism; he points to the “amazing centrality” (“Recognition,” in this volume 294) of the motif of recognition to diverse literary genres, ranging from adventure stories and Cinderella plots to the Bildungsroman to depictions of the pain and humiliation of social misrecognition, such as Invisible Man (1952). Yet recognition is not simply a theme in literature, Fluck argues, but is also implicated in the reading process; the political theories of recognition drafted by Honneth and Taylor need to be overhauled to account for the aesthetic aspects of identity formation. Identities, as Fluck points out, are not static entities but are created and revised through narratives. Such narratives are not just coercive scripts dictated by capitalist or heteronormative structures, nor is recognition just a codeword for subjection, as contended by Judith Butler and others. The role of narrative in shaping identity and struggles for recognition involves a complex and variable blend of social norms, personal experiences, and aesthetic models and influences. Moreover, aesthetic response does not hinge on a one-to-one correspondence between the social identities of characters and readers, but brings into play a wide range of formal and thematic elements as they connect to a reader’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and sensations. In this way, writes Fluck, “fictional texts and other aesthetic objects provide material that allow the reader to extend and rewrite the narrative of his own identity” (311). Fluck’s account of the relations between recognition and reading crystallizes how aesthetic and referential functions of literature remain distinct yet inter‐ woven. To read a novel is to enter into a fictional world, albeit one that is linked, via various correspondences, to an existing reality. Entering this world, I temporarily suspend the practical demands of daily life, yet without losing sight of possible analogies to my own experience. This awareness of both sameness and difference underwrites the process of what Fluck calls imaginary transfer; “the recognition gained in the act of reading is nevertheless an encounter with another world that has the potential to change the reader’s world” (313). Such a transfer is dynamic, dialectical, and ongoing; not only may I come to see myself differently, but this altered self-understanding can in turn inspire a different view of the literary text. The experience of readerly recognition, as I’ve argued, “is not repetition: it denotes not just the previously known, but the becoming known” (Uses of Literature 25). 1 Engaging the intricate phenomenology of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited 245 2 See, for example, Johnson, “What is Cultural Studies Anyway? ” the “Introduction” to the influential volume Cultural Studies, ed. Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler; and Nelson, “Two Conferences and a Manifesto.” Twenty of the most widely known definitions of aesthetic experience is thus a precondition for any adequate account of how literature relates to social life. The Vicissitudes of Cultural Studies How might such reflections on aesthetic experience relate to the field of cultural studies? And to what extent do answers to this question hinge on what one takes “cultural studies” to mean? Shortly after taking up a position at the University of Virginia in the 1990s, I wrote an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education expressing my sense of confusion about American uses of the term. I had always taken cultural studies to denote an interdisciplinary field devoted to the semiotics and politics of contemporary popular culture and associated with such figures as Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Dick Hebdige, Angie McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, Ien Ang, John Fiske, Meaghan Morris, Constance Penley, Kobena Mercer, and Jackie Stacey. In both England and Australia, cultural studies had flourished in newer, less prestigious universities that were striving to break down disciplinary silos by creating other ways of organizing knowledge, such as the school of communications in which I’d previously taught. In the United States, however, cultural studies evolved very differently; it was taken up mainly in English departments, where it was grafted onto the text-centered and periodbased frameworks of the field. As a result, its sociological and anthropological strands withered away, while new and (to me) weirdly counter-intuitive terms came into use such as Victorian cultural studies or medieval cultural studies. As I wrote in my Chronicle essay, cultural studies in the United States seemed to have morphed into a synonym for cultural history or political approaches to literature. In his essay, Fluck notes that cultural studies is notoriously difficult to define because of its amorphous nature; “it is what you get when some of the more traditional criteria for defining the field are taken away” (“Aesthetics,” 218). “Field” here is a reference to literary studies, as the antecedent framework to which cultural studies is supposedly reacting. Yet the key figures in cultural studies in the UK and Australia often worked in media studies, sociology, or interdisciplinary programs and had no particular interest or expertise in litera‐ ture. They saw themselves, rather, as the initiators of a new interdisciplinary - or antidisciplinary - field, whose defining features were spelled out in numerous essays, manifestos, and primers. 2 In a polemical essay, for example, Cary Nelson 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 246 Rita Felski the field are collected in What is Cultural Studies? ed. Story. I cite only those texts that appeared during the historical period that Fluck is referencing. bemoaned the 1980s repackaging of U.S. literary studies as cultural studies, deeming it a shallow, opportunistic, and ahistorical exercise and offering, by way of correction, his own sixteen-point definition. The political readings of literary scholars - even if such readings were now being applied to new objects like movies and sitcoms - had little to do, Nelson argued, with the methods of cultural studies. What were these methods? Perhaps the pre-eminent idea of the cultural studies tradition stemming from Birmingham is articulation, a term that rarely crops up in literary studies. Taken over from political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, whose Hegemony and Socialist Strategy had a major impact on Leftist thought in the U.K. and Europe, the idea of articulation sought to define social formations “without falling into the twin traps of reductionism and essentialism” (Slack 112). It offered a way of identifying connections between phenomena without relying on determinist arguments or assuming an essential political logic; the nature of such connections - say between ideologies of gender and TV dramas, or between class and religion - will fluctuate according to context and are unmade and remade over time. While drawing on Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist ideas, the method of articulation thus placed far greater stress on contingency, highlighting “the continual severing, realignment, and recombination of discourses, social groups, political interests, and structures of power in a society” (Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler 8). The consequences of this style of thought for interpretation were farreaching. Articulation pitted itself against the implicit Hegelianism that Fluck identifies, in another major essay called “Shadow Aesthetics,” as a feature of American studies. In this Hegelian framework, a work of art is assumed to stand in for, or represent, a social whole, such that its interpretation by the critic delivers insights into social and historical realities that are unavailable by other means. In the early days of American Studies, Fluck notes, this method was often harnessed to a myth of American exceptionalism; yet it could just as easily be deployed by later critics of such exceptionalism. It became possible to argue that the decoding of a single 1970s buddy movie exposed hidden American cultural anxieties about race, or that a Jonathan Franzen novel, if read correctly, would bring to light the pathologies of neo-liberalism. The cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg was an especially forceful critic of this method of reading, which he described scornfully as “seeing the world in a grain of sand” (107). Cultural studies, by contrast, sought to detotalize the social field 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited 247 3 While I don’t have room to canvass the details here, this populist orientation did not go uncontested in cultural studies. See Morris, “The Banality of Cultural Studies” and Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. and thus rejected the belief that any novel or film or TV show could stand for and represent that field. Texts did not possess hidden political meanings that could be plumbed via ingenious acts of close reading. Rather, such meanings could only be discerned by analyzing how texts hooked up to specific audiences and constellations of interests at a given moment, calling for expertise in the empirical methods of history and sociology as well as textual analysis. The picture of society in the cultural studies tradition thus differs in key respects from American Studies where, Fluck suggests, Foucauldian theses about the ubiquity of power or structural Marxist analyses of an absent cause accentuated the reach and force of a suspicious hermeneutics. While British cultural studies was also concerned with power, it was equally committed to questions of agency. Influenced by sociologists such as Goffman and Garfinkel as well as by cultural historians such as E. P. Thompson, it took strong issue with critical theories that viewed ordinary persons as “cultural dopes,” steered unwittingly by forces beyond their control. It also questioned the dogma of the epistemological break: a sharp separation between the critical knowledge of the intellectual and the inherently benighted or beclouded perspective of everyone else. This populist orientation inspired a commitment to in-depth engagement with the motivations, self-understandings, and interpretations of ordinary persons that produced classic ethnographies of the field, such as Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour and Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas.  3 Ethnography thus emerged as a second cornerstone of cultural studies, in‐ spired by its strong commitment to decentering the perspectives of intellectuals. Soap opera audiences, rather than being interpellated by a dominant ideology, as disciples of Althusser and Lacan had decreed, responded to the shows they were watching in varied and often unpredictable ways. Rejecting the “hypodermic syringe” theory of meaning, in which passive audiences are injected with the messages of the culture industry, cultural studies insisted that consumption is a form of production: meaning is actively co-created by readers and viewers, who do not form a homogeneous and undifferentiated mass. The motives of multinational corporations or advertising agencies, however nefarious, thus could not provide a sufficient explanation of what popular culture is and does. Like the concept of articulation, however, ethnography, as a sociological method, did not survive the move of cultural studies into U.S. English departments. A third aspect of British cultural studies accords more closely with Fluck’s ac‐ count; what he calls the “programmatic dehierarchization” of culture (“Aesthetics,” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 248 Rita Felski 218). In Raymond Williams’ famous phrase, culture is ordinary; cultural studies scholars sought to rescue popular culture from the condescension of both Marxist and conservative intellectuals. This commitment called for aesthetic as well as political arguments. Dutch fans of Dallas were eager to apprise Ien Ang of their tastes, preferences, and emotional reactions, inspiring her to develop a theory of the “melodramatic imagination” to account for the show’s appeal. Jackie Stacey’s interviews with British women who had been avid moviegoers in the 1940s delved into the complexities of identification, the desire for aesthetic escape, and the visual dynamics of spectatorship. And Simon Frith’s analysis of popular music zeroed in on questions of aesthetic experience and value, highlighting music’s imaginative, emotional and sensual power. ‘‘We all hear the music we like as something special,” Frith, writes, “something that defies the mundane, takes us ‘out of ourselves,’ puts us somewhere else’’ (275). For these and many other critics, aesthetics and cultural studies were not opposed, but integrally related. In a 2004 essay I took issue with the one-sided equation of cultural studies with politics and ideology critique that had taken root in the United States, contending that cultural studies “did not seek to destroy aesthetics, but to broaden the definition of what counted as art by taking popular culture seriously. . . it made a much wider variety of objects aesthetically interesting” (“The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies” 32). Looking beyond narrow criteria of aesthetic value that held sway in literature departments - whether New Critical criteria of ambiguity and irony or poststructuralist motifs of dissonance and estrangement - cultural studies highlighted other equally salient aspects of aesthetic response, including escapism, identification, narrative suspense, and strong emotion. Rather than denying the aesthetic, it made a case for multiple aesthetics. Rather than abolishing value - a Sisyphean task - it highlighted the existence of what John Frow called differing “regimes of value.” It is a fundamental tenet of cultural studies, Frow writes, that no text has an intrinsic meaning or value, which can only be produced via specific and changing social relations and mechanisms of signification (145). Taking graffiti as his example, Frow shows how it took on very different meanings when slotted into the regimes of value of street artists, of public officials, and of art gallery curators. Fluck’s later essay “Shadow Aesthetics” (2015) offers an expansive survey of perspectives on aesthetics and politics that reckons more explicitly with the distinctive features of British cultural studies via a contrast between the arguments of Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson. As Fluck notes, there are some notable parallels between pragmatism and cultural studies in their shared rejection of formalism and their commitment to a more democratic vision of aesthetics. “In Cultural Studies,” he observes, “the conceptual separation 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited 249 between the aesthetic and the political is overcome by dissolving the aesthetic into culture, so that it can be reinserted into a whole way of life” (“Shadow Aesthetics” 23). Yet “dissolving” is, to my mind, too strong a word. Like Dewey, cultural studies scholars see aesthetics as connected to the lifeworlds of readers and viewers. Frith, Ang, and Stacey also underscore, however, that the experience of being immersed in a TV show or a movie or a piece of music can serve as an escape from ordinary routines, offering a form of temporary transcendence. Meanwhile, the appeals to a “whole way of life” and a “common culture” that crop up in the writings of Raymond Williams would soon disappear from the rhetoric of cultural studies, thanks to genderand race-based critiques of such organic models of culture. Conclusion To reread “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” two decades later is to realize that the landscape of literary studies has changed dramatically in some ways, yet not in others. What Fluck calls “the present-day rejection of the concept of the aesthetic” (“Aesthetics,” 214) is no longer in force; as Michael Clune remarks, “among the most exciting critical developments of recent years has been the restoration of the aesthetic to a central position in the study of the arts” (9). Alongside Clune’s own defense of aesthetic judgment, some of the most widely discussed works of recent years include Timothy Aubry’s Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures (2018), Joseph North’s defense of aesthetic education in his Literary Criticism: A Political History (2017), and Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories (2012). Twenty years ago, Fluck could argue that the espousal of Foucauldian theories of power left no room for the negative aesthetics of the Frankfurt School or for the attributing of a utopian function to art. In recent years, however, interest in Foucault has ebbed and there’s been a surge of interest in Adorno as well as a revival of the thought of Ernst Bloch; the language of utopia and the utopian, often inspired by José Estaban Muñoz’s later work, now seem to be everywhere. And yet this revival of aesthetics often runs along familiar grooves. It has been harnessed to what’s been called a “New Formalism,” inspiring a renewed focus on the literary work as an object characterized by certain linguistic or stylistic properties. Alternatively, it’s linked to a cultural radicalism that Fluck has incisively analyzed in several essays; critics extol the disruptive or subversive qualities of texts without ever clarifying the channels through which such qualities effect any material social change. By comparison, the thesis that Fluck identifies as central to Iser’s position - and that also defines his own 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 250 Rita Felski - still receives little attention: “the reader (…) is the agent who is needed to realize the potential of literature to provide an aesthetic experience” (Iser qtd. in Fluck, “Distance” 189). How are readers constituted as readers prior to as well as through the experience of reading? How does this experience blend the familiar and the strange, the ordinary and the not yet imagined? How does the act of reading separate the reader from everyday life, yet also spill back into life? The potential of literature to trigger aesthetic experiences arises, as Fluck observes, from a complex set of interactions: the phenomenology of reading, the affordances of texts, and the social conditions and expectations that affect reader response. In their remarkable ability to move with dexterity and ease between these differing vantage points, the writings of Winfried Fluck remain an essential reference point and an ongoing inspiration. Works Cited Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Routledge, 1985. Clune, Michael. A Defense of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Felski Rita. “Those Who Dismiss Cultural Studies Don’t Know What They Are Talking About.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 1999. ---. “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies.” The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Ed. Michael Bérubé. 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Slack, Jennifer Daryl. “The Theory and Method of Articulation.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. Stacey, Jackie. Stargazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Rout‐ ledge, 1993. Storey, John. What is Cultural Studies? A Reader. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0014 252 Rita Felski