J ohannes V oelz Introduction Most of the articles collected in this volume came out of the conference “The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies,” hosted by the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, from November 29 to December 1, 2018� The aim of the conference was to assess, take stock of, and contribute to a recent trend in American Studies of recovering questions relating to the aesthetic� The conference organizers— and most of the speakers—approached the discernible uptick in criticism concerned with the aesthetic from a sympathetic position� Michael Clune’s recent statement that “the restoration of the aesthetic to a central position in the study of the arts has been among the most exciting critical developments of recent years” (910) captures well the organizers’ primary motivation to convene leading and upcoming scholars from the United States and Europe who engage the aesthetic from a wide range of disciplines, including literary studies, film and media studies, political theory, and philosophy, and who are associated with a broad array of critical schools, including queer studies, Marxism, reception aesthetics, Deleuzian media philosophy, posthumanism, popular culture studies, relational sociology, and political aesthetics� “Return,” “recovery,” and “restoration” are, however, risky terms� Do they not ask to be misunderstood as expressing a desire that is nostalgic, conservative, or even reactionary? “Return,” “recovery,” and “restoration” suggest a wish to undo a lapsarian history, to recover a moment of “before�” In light of the fact that over the last four to five decades, the aesthetic has been relegated to the margins of the field precisely for its allegedly conservative and reactionary functions, such an invocation of anteriority may seem all the more hair-raising� However, such uneasiness about the wish for recovering the aesthetic is premised on a particular interpretation of the aesthetic and its relation to the political that should by no means to be taken for granted� That so many scholars in the field do take it for granted only shows how deeply the anti-aesthetic impulse has become ingrained in the field imaginary of American Studies� Despite the fact that today a growing number of scholars are rethinking and redeploying the aesthetic, and that their efforts have an increasing influence in the field, it remains the case that suspicion of the aesthetic constitutes a core element of the regnant doxa regulating American Studies� In the past decade, the field has engaged in vital discussions sparked by a number of manifestos introducing interlinked critical approaches such as postcritical reading (Felski, Anker and Felski), surface reading (Best and Marcus), distant reading (Moretti), new formalism (Wolfson, Armstrong, Levinson), new ethics (Hale), and new aestheticism (Joughin and Malpas)� 2 J ohannes V oelz Not all of these interventions have an explicit stake in the return of the aesthetic, but they all take issue with the kind of critique (widely designated, in a phrase borrowed from Paul Ricoeur, the “hermeneutics of suspicion”) that has dominated the field over the last four or five decades, and that has taken the aesthetic as its main target� While the labels enumerated above have had the greatest visibility and buzz-factor in U�S�-based American Studies, scholars outside the United States—among them two of the editors of this volume—have offered related critical accounts of the premises underlying the American Studies version of revisionist critique and its conceptualization of the aesthetic in particular (Fluck, “The Humanities,” Voelz)� In light of the plentitude of the manifestos and critical accounts mentioned above, the story of how the aesthetic became the target of an openly politicized form of critique does not need to be rehearsed here at great length� It is sufficient to mention that the critique of the aesthetic has relied on a particular understanding of the aesthetic, i�e�, on the idea of aesthetic autonomy� Originally theorized and popularized by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790) and Friedrich Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), the idea of aesthetic autonomy later was picked up and transformed into l’art pour l’art aestheticism, and, starting in the 1930s, became adapted in yet another variant by the transatlantic movement of the New Criticism, from where it grew into the ideological foundation of the U�S� liberal consensus of the Cold War� In the hands of politicized revisionary critics who began to gain wider hearing in the 1970s, the idea of aesthetic autonomy was redefined as the “ideology of the aesthetic” (Eagleton). This redefinition was based on the claim that the alleged universalism of aesthetic value and aesthetic judgment conveniently obscured the way in which that “universalism” actually promoted and enshrined the interests and privileges of those at the top of established hierarchies (of race, class, and gender)� Hence, the aesthetic became seen as a force that actively worked towards the depoliticization of the exploited and subaltern and that helped sustain the status quo. The ideological critique of the aesthetic brought to awareness what had indeed tended to be a blind spot in the self-confident celebrations of aesthetic value and the even more self-assured devaluation of anything that did not reach up to “the states of consciousness embodied in serious art,” as Henry Nash Smith, pioneer of the Myth and Symbol school, put it in “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method? ” (203)� Yet, in supplying aesthetic criticism with its own “political unconscious” (Jameson), the ideological critique of aesthetics also created a truncated account of the aspirations of aesthetic autonomy� Virtually at no point in time was the idea of “aesthetic value” unconcerned with politics. It is not an exaggeration to say that “aesthetic value” was deemed valuable insofar as it was seen as a way out of the alienating effects of an increasingly rationalized modernity� In response to the unfreedom of the modern world, art, or autonomous aesthetics, offered what Stendhal called “promesse du bonheur,” a phrase that Adorno, in his Aesthetic Theory, interpreted as the “implication that art does its part for existence by accentuating that part of it which prefigures utopia” (409). Such interest in Introduction 3 the prefiguration of utopia can be detected even in those moments of the writings of the American New Critics in which they most vehemently insisted on the separation of art and society� According to the standard account (see, e.g., Jancovich), the American New Critics started out with the explicitly political (if reactionary) program of upholding the traditions of the Agrarian South as the counter model to the alienated form of life which Northern industrialism was spreading across the nation� But as a literary paradigm, the story continues, New Criticism only triumphed once its proponents gave up its Agrarian mission and resigned themselves to the professionalization— and depoliticization—of literature� Literature, on that account, had to be relocated to a “world elsewhere” in order for the New Critics to take over English departments and establish a fully depoliticized form of aesthetic formalism as the dominant method of literary studies� Yet, a very brief look at “Criticism, Inc�,” John Crowe Ransom’s 1937 post- Agrarian breakthrough manifesto, shows that even his vision of critical professionalism contained a political shadow program. Ransom exhorted critics to approach poems (here standing in for literature more generally) from a vantage point of poets: The critic should regard the poem as nothing short of a desperate ontological or metaphysical manoeuvre [sic]� The poet himself, in the agony of composition, has something like this sense of his labors� The poet perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling beneath his touch. His poem celebrates the object which is real, individual, and qualitatively infinite. He knows that his practical interests will reduce this living object to a mere utility, and that his sciences will disintegrate it for their convenience into their respective abstracts� (1117) For the New Critic, the poem aesthetically evokes an organic totality that does not stand a chance of surviving in actual life, but that tingles the memory of a dream of organicism once hoped to come true in the Agrarian South� The allegedly de-politicized version of the New Criticism encapsulated by Ransom’s post-Vanderbilt manifesto cannot shake the political utopianism that the New Critics, in their early days at Vanderbilt, had tied to literary criticism in all explicitness. In effect, Ransom conjures a nostalgic version of the promesse du bonheur: having relinquished the South as the concrete figuration of utopia, he downgrades his former expectations by turning to utopia’s aesthetic prefiguration. The utopianism installed by the New Critics as a shadow presence in American literary criticism by no means ended as the method of formalism and the underlying concept of aesthetic autonomy came under attack� Indeed, what has been crucially overlooked in recent accounts of the fall and reemergence of aesthetics in American Studies is the persistence of utopianism organizing the field’s various political aspirations. In American Studies, the critique of the ideology of the aesthetic was hardly ever an end in itself� Indeed, Americanists rarely approached critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion—the reference point of current debates of postcritical reading—as a method designed exclusively for bringing to light the wily ways of power. 4 J ohannes V oelz To be sure, the new historicists of the 1980s turned the search for instances of ideological co-optation in the most unexpected places into a showcase for their own dazzling critical performances (cf� Fluck, “New Historicism”)� But the new historicism in American Studies was rather quickly supplanted by the critical agenda of the New Americanists, which, inspired by Gramsci, aimed to fuse literary criticism with the political activism of marginalized populations� Indeed, American Studies to this day continues to be a virtual think tank of utopianism� Rita Felski and Timothy Aubry have argued that critique is itself an aesthetic endeavor, that critique should be regarded as a genre (Felski) or as having an “aesthetic unconscious” (Aubry)� These observations are astute but incomplete� At least when it comes to American Studies, the scholarship marked by an anti-aesthetic impulse is itself aesthetic to the degree that it remains committed to political utopianism� What changes is the function of the aesthetic. For the proponents of critique, the aesthetic, now redefined as the medium of ideology, can no longer serve as the locus of non-identity unsullied by existing reality. And yet, harnessing the political imagination to the project of utopianism can never fully do without partaking of the aesthetic� In thinking up what doesn’t have any social reality yet, utopianism by definition relies on imaginary anticipations of futures yet to emerge� These anticipations require the aesthetic� Thus, the aesthetic—that which comes to us through the senses and provides the materials of the imagination—has long re-entered, even and especially, the most politicized quarters of American Studies� Even when the commitment to utopian politics remains below the surface, and when the concern more modestly lies with the politics of representation of a given identity, the goal is to establish counter-representations whose path of articulation leads through the aesthetic� This shift of perspective also sheds a different light on Felski’s emphatic call for turning to the “re-” rather than the “de-” variants of literary criticism: “We shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the ‘de’ prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the ‘re’ prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception” (17, emphasis in original)� Siding with a “new regime of interpretation: one that is willing to recognize the potential of literature and art to create new imaginaries rather than just to denounce mystifying illusions” (Felski’s approving summary of Yves Citton, 187), Felski doesn’t so much call for a turn-around than for a continuation, and even amplification, of the field’s longstanding commitment to the utopian� The difference, again, lies in the function of the aesthetic: her project is that of explicitly relocating the utopian in the aesthetic. But now the idea is no longer that the aesthetic can never leave its domain in a world elsewhere— that, to speak with Ransom, “the order existence” of the aesthetic object “constantly crumbl[es] beneath [one’s] touch” as soon as one tries to convert it into actual life� Instead, the aesthetic is now seen as the path to forging new connections in actual life, connections that will potentially bring about new modes of collective being� Introduction 5 Following the lead of Bruno Latour, critics like Felski and Heather Love strive to describe the literary text as an actor that acts upon the reader, creating a network of actors that the literary critic is tasked to trace—in prose that “has to be well written,” for otherwise “the social doesn’t appear through it,” as Latour puts it in Reassembling the Social (124)� The critical language used here may no longer be that of aesthetic analysis, but what could the nodal points of contact between a literary text and a reader be other than aesthetic effects? And how can one judge whether a work of criticism is well-written other than by aesthetic criteria? What surface readers and fellow postcritical readers are striving to undertake is a double transformation, each of which involves the aesthetic� First, the aesthetic is de-idealized and de-autonomized; and second, the aesthetic becomes appropriated as a component of the critical praxis itself (the conceptual blending of affect and aesthetics is particularly conducive to this end)� Which is another way of saying that the postcritical recovery of the aesthetic comes in the form of an aestheticization of literary criticism� Most auto-genealogies of postcritique have so far failed to observe that in the joint maneuver of de-autonomizing the aesthetic and aestheticizing criticism, they are in fact signaling their participation in a social transformation which philosophers and sociologists are describing alternatively as “aesthetic capitalism” (Böhme), the “creative revolution” (Frank), the “new spirit of capitalism” (Chiapello and Boltanski), or “cool knowledge work” (Liu)� In this social constellation—which took shape in the 1960s, just as the critique of aesthetic autonomy gained momentum—labor and consumption, indeed, the very fabric of everyday life, become characterized by aesthetic practices, i�e�, by practices “centered around the production of aesthetic perceptions” (Reckwitz 223, trans� JV)� These processes of “aestheticization of the life world” (Bubner) depend on the integration of the aesthetic into the mundane here and now—they therefore push toward aesthetic heteronomity—so that the aesthetic no longer provides the sacred space removed from the given (or the promise thereof)� Indeed, the aesthetic moves to the innermost core of the operations of society—and of power—and increasingly structures the fields of the economy and politics. To suggest that the return of the aesthetic in American Studies must be regarded self-reflexively as part of this structural process of social aestheticization is not necessarily to fall back on the very hermeneutics of suspicion criticized by various movements in our field. The aim is not to show that postcritical readers are really just the dupes of the latest lure of capitalism, i.e., the aesthetic. By the same token, however, heightening self-reflexivity does require gaining awareness of one’s implicatedness in forces one would rather disavow as the conditions of one’s actions� In that sense, Sianne Ngai offers an important observation when she writes that Latour’s “idiosyncratic use of network as a term of aesthetic praise for texts in which ‘all the actors do something and don’t just sit there’ … points to a general intensification of labor that the ‘new network morality’ of post-Fordist capitalism at once helps mask and sustain” (381)� Yes, we Americanists are part of the creative knowledge industry, our work consists of aesthetic practices, and even our 6 J ohannes V oelz intellectual innovations—such as surface and postcritical reading—reflect our needs arising from these conditions� But this does not mean that in order to remain ideologically untainted, we should reject our connections to the aesthetic or solely approach them in a spirit of self-flagellating demystification. Returning to the aesthetic rather means broadening the scope of perspectives on the aesthetic: assessing how aestheticization subjects, how it subjectivizes, which alternative forms of aestheticization are in competition with one another, how these competing versions are explained, legitimized, and narrativized, and to what degree the aesthetic can still provide occasions for “the great refusal” (Marcuse) after we have entered a historical phase in which “socialization takes the form of aesthetic activation” (Reckwitz 236)� The following essays are contributions to this effort of broadening the scope of work on the aesthetic. They thus explode the parameters of the debates that have stood at the center of this introduction, and yet take these debates as their starting point (sometimes acknowledged, sometimes unacknowledged)� The volume begins by two interventions into the state of the art of contemporary aesthetic theory� By way of a critique of recent attempts to recover the aesthetic in American Studies, Lee Edelman turns the aesthetic against itself, theorizing the “ab-sens” that resists the pedagogies of aesthetic education� Almost as if intended as a response to Edelman, Winfried Fluck details how the commitment to negative freedom among theorists and artists has paradoxically led to a widespread rejection of the aesthetic. In turn, Walter Benn Michaels and Marlon Lieber engage the question of aesthetic autonomy from a broadly anti-capitalist perspective� Michaels offers an appraisal of competing theories of action needed to come to terms with the relation between artwork and intentional structure, whereas Lieber engages the complex of aesthetic autonomy, commodity fetishism, and the Marxian theory of value. The volume’s ensuing section focuses on popular culture: Ruth Mayer takes a journey from 1944 back to 1914 in order to reverse-construct a discourse on mass culture that, as she shows, recognized fewer and fewer possibilities as it moved from Caroline Caffin’s book Vaudeville to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment� Rieke Jordan moves the discussion from the tradition of mass culture to contemporary aesthetic capitalism� In a close analysis of McSweeney’s balloon issue, she considers the role of the creative reader and consumer, who moves between the roles of archivist, conservationist, and curator. Susanne Rohr explores a related form of aesthetic capitalism by examining popular representations of madness in film that reflect disembedding processes Ulrich Beck has theorized under the rubric of individualization� The following section turns to the emerging field of practical aesthetics. Bernd Herzogenrath provides a theoretical foundation that draws primarily on Baumgarten and Deleuze and establishes thinking with (rather than about) art as the core characteristic of practical aesthetics� Eugenie Brinkema exemplifies the approach through a reading of Wes Anderson’s The Budapest Hotel, in which she argues that the aesthetic is an “active and generative and Introduction 7 practical operation of thought�” Julius Greve closes this section by discussing Ezra Pound and Charles Olson as proponents of a practical aesthetics that intertwines lived experience and mythography on the level of form. The final, and largest, section of this volume considers how the aesthetic and the political have come to imbricate each other from the days of the early republic to the election of Donald Trump� Laura Bieger stages a dialogue between Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright in order to reconceptualize the tradition of engaged literature through the lens of relational aesthetics� Linda Hess traces a posthuman network in Richard Powers’s 2018 novel The Overstory whose coordinates are drawn by the contestation of who and what is grievable as much as by a post-romanticist aesthetics of wonder� Jennifer Greiman returns to a classic question in Americanist scholarship: that of Melville’s relation to democracy� Greiman detects a democratic energy that runs through Melville’s writing as a transient, militant, and irreducibly aesthetic creativity� Dustin Breitenwischer considers Frederick Douglass’s lectures on Haiti as acts that creolize the aesthetic: Douglass, Breitenwischer argues, creates a relation between the unforeseeable self-liberation of the formerly enslaved citizens of Haiti and the black American experience of postbellum Jim Crow Society by way of an aesthetic style at once versatile and prophetic� Russ Castronovo creates a self-consciously anachronistic bridge between the contemporary security dispositif and Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novels� What holds these phenomena together is the security dilemma arising from too much information, which, as Castronovo argues, Brown codified through the aesthetic category of the sublime. Johannes Voelz rounds out the volume by offering Part II of his foray into the aesthetics of populism (for Part I, on the populist rally, see REAL 34, 2018)� This time joined by Tom Freischläger, he and his co-author explore the aesthetics and affects of contemporary polarization� This volume is part of a wider effort to provide the conference from which it grew with lasting resonance� It is accompanied by video interviews with the conference speakers that are available on the conference website (http: / / www� returnoftheaesthetic�de) and on the conference’s Youtube Channel (search for “Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies” on https: / / www�youtube�com� Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� Aesthetic Theory� Trans� Robert Hullot-Kentor� London: Bloomsbury, 2013� Anker, Elizabeth S�, Rita Felski, eds� Critique and Postcritique� Durham: Duke UP, 2017� Armstrong, Isobel� “When Is a Victorian Poet Not a Victorian Poet? Poetry and the Politics of Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century�” Victorian Studies 43 (2001): 279-92� Aubry, Timothy� Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2018� Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus� “Surface Reading: An Introduction�” Representations 108�1 (Fall 2009): 1-21� Böhme, Gernot� Ästhetischer Kapitalismus� Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016� 8 J ohannes V oelz Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello� The New Spirit of Capitalism� Trans� Gregory Elliot� London: Verso, 2005� Bubner, Rüdiger: “Ästhetisierung der Lebenswelt�” Ästhetische Erfahrung� Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989� 143-156� Clune, Michael W� “Judgment and Equality�” Critical Inquiry 45 (Summer 2019): 910-934� Eagleton, Terry� The Ideology of the Aesthetic� Malden: Blackwell, 1990� Felski, Rita� The Limits of Critique� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015� Fluck, Winfried� “The Activist and the Actor: The Re-Authorization of Historical Criticism in New Historicism�” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies� Ed� Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz� Winter, 2009� 39-48� Fluck, Winfried. “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism�” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies� Ed� Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz� Winter, 2009� 49-68� Frank, Thomas C� The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997� Hale, Dorothy J� “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty- First Century�” PMLA 124�3 (May 2009): 896-905� Jameson, Fredric� The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act� Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981� Jancovich, Mark� “The Southern New Critics�” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol� 7: Modernism and the New Criticism� Ed� A� Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey� New York: Cambridge UP, 2000� 200-218� Joughin, John J�, and Simon Malpas, eds� The New Aestheticism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004� Kant, Immanuel� Critique of Judgment. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007� Latour, Bruno� “Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern�” Critical Inquiry 30�2 (Winter 2004): 225-48� Latour, Bruno� Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory� Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Levinson, Marjorie� “What Is New Formalism? ” PMLA 122�2 (March 2007): 558-569� Liu, Alan� The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004� Love, Heather� “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn�” New Literary History 41�2 (2010): 371-91� Marcuse, Herbert� One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society� London: Routledge, 2007� Moretti, Franco� Distant Reading� London: Verso, 2013� Ngai, Sianne� “Network Aesthetics: Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social�” American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions� Ed� Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby� New York: Columbia UP, 2012� 367-392� Ransom, John Crowe� “Criticism, Inc�” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism� Ed� Vincent B� Leitch� First Ed� New York: Norton, 2001� 1105-1118� Reckwitz, Andreas� “Ästhetik und Gesellschaft: Ein analytischer Bezugsrahmen�” Kreativität und soziale Praxis: Studien zur Sozial- und Gesellschaftstheorie� Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016� 215-248� Schiller, Friedrich� On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters� Bilingual edition. Ed. E. M. Wilkinson, trans. L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1967. Introduction 9 Smith, Henry Nash� “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method? ” American Quarterly 9�2 Part 2 (Summer 1957): 197-208� Voelz, Johannes� Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge� Hanover: UP of New England, 2010� Wolfson, Susan J� “Reading for Form�” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 1-16�