W infried f luck The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom I. Why do people read long novels although they know that the story is made up? Why do they look at art objects although they know that these have no practical consequences? Traditionally, the answer has been: they do so because they are looking for an aesthetic experience. Literary studies and the history and criticism of art thus focused on the analysis of art’s aesthetic qualities, and, consequently, the aesthetic was the key concept of these fields. Today, however, we witness a sweeping and wide-ranging rejection of the concept of the aesthetic� In literary studies, almost all of the approaches that have replaced formalism as part of a radically revisionist turn after the 1960s, ranging from the ideological criticism of the Bercovitch group, British Cultural Studies and Althusserian Marxism to Poststructuralism and the New Historicism, and including Race and Gender Studies, have as their common ground a critique or rejection of the concept of the aesthetic� Continuing to rely on the concept as a key term of analysis, they argue, perpetuates a separation of the aesthetic and the political that is considered theoretically untenable and must lead to ideological mystification. This problematization of the concept of the aesthetic is not restricted to literary studies� A major topic in aesthetic theory—starting with John Dewey and leading up to Arthur Danto and others—is what has been called the “deaestheticization” (Rosenberg, “De-Aestheticization”), or “delimitation of the aesthetic sphere” (Wellershoff), or the “disenfranchisement of art” (Danto), all of them terms designed to undermine the status of the aesthetic as a separate, autonomous sphere� Similarly, in contemporary artistic practice, such a breakdown of the boundaries between art and life has been one of the major projects in avant-garde art, starting with Dada and leading to contemporary movements like Performance Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Installation Art� II. In literary studies, the rejection of the aesthetic has taken on several forms� Their common starting point is the revisionist turn of the 1960s that has led to a radical transformation of American literary studies� Up to then, the dominant approach—in fact, the institutionally only respectable approach—was 28 W infried f luck formalism which argued that form is the actual source of the meaning and aesthetic value of a literary text. This argument was perfect for the field’s self-legitimation, because it pointed to the need to have the professional expertise to be able to apply a formal analysis� But formalism depended on a particular concept of the aesthetic: form can only become the main source of meaning and value, if it transforms everyday language into a poetic object with a meaning of its own, and, hence, into an aesthetic object� For this, it has to constitute an autonomous sphere of its own� Only if the work possesses aesthetic autonomy, can it be considered art and is worthy of study� Starting with the 1960s, this formalism has been continuously and persistently criticized by revisionist approaches� Despite many differences, they share two basic assumptions� One is a rejection of the category of the aesthetic as a key concept for literary analysis, the other is a shift from aesthetics to the politics of literature as the main criterion of relevance and representativeness� Both aspects are inextricably entangled. For the revisionists, the aesthetic and the political do not constitute two distinctly separate realms; rather, throughout its history literature has also had important political functions, and discussions of literary texts focusing on their aesthetic dimension have helped to hide this fact� For revisionists, literary studies have thus played a major role in obscuring power relations or being in complicity with them� What formalists have praised as the power of art has really been the art of power, to quote Mark Seltzer’s clever bonmot about the politics of the novels of Henry James� To critique the aesthetic and its politics must therefore be a starting point for revisionist literary studies� 1 An important part of the argument is that the relation between the aesthetic and the political is not simply one of a co-existence� The point is that the aesthetic, too, is inherently political� The challenge is therefore to overcome the separation of art and life, or, more specifically, of the aesthetic and the political� A history of literary theories in the last decades could be written on the basis of revisionism’s different attempts to do so� But a brief overview must be sufficient here. In formalism a separation of the aesthetic and the political is crucial to secure the literary text’s autonomy and thereby separate art from ideology� If literature succeeds as art, it transcends ideology� In contrast, Sacvan Bercovitch claims that a work of art … can no more transcend ideology than an artist’s mind can transcend psychology; and it is worth remarking as a possibility that our great writers … may be just as implicated in the dominant culture as other, contextual writers, and in the long run perhaps more useful in perpetrating it� (Bercovitch 99-100) 1 Of course, there have also been attempts in recent years to defend the category of the aesthetic, but these attempts have remained isolated events and have not been able to establish a notable counter-position� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 29 This is not to reduce their achievement to ideology� They may have written great literature, but if there is no longer any ontological difference between art and ideology, the aesthetic may also have an ideological function, perhaps even through its strong aesthetic effects� The goal, then, is not to dismiss the concept of the aesthetic but to question the claim of its autonomy� Raymond Williams goes one step further: 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� (Williams 154-56) However, in contrast to more radical approaches, this artificial separation can still be overcome by redefining the aesthetic as an inherently creative dimension of ordinary everyday life; and, not surprisingly, the best method to reinsert the aesthetic into the context of a whole way of life is Cultural Studies (as practiced by Raymond Williams)� This is no longer possible in the structuralist Marxism inspired, above all, by Louis Althusser� 2 In a radical revision of classical Marxism, ideological analysis is moved from an analysis of content to one of form, from the analysis of a universal spirit that expresses the whole of a nation to the postulation of a structure that constitutes the whole� In bourgeois society, this truth cannot be openly admitted, so that the structure that constitutes social reality as a whole remains an absent cause and can only be traced through its effects� The aesthetic is such an effect� 3 In analogy to Lacan’s description of the mirror-stage in which the mirror provides the child with a mistaken sense 2 Deconstruction has not had a strong presence and formative influence in American studies, but it is, of course, part of the story of a rejection of the concept of the aesthetic which, in deconstructive criticism, is lost in the process of “writing” and its interminable différance� 3 Cf� Terry Eagleton for whom the aesthetic is another one of these cultural power effects through which the sensuous nature of the subject is “reconstructed from the inside”: “For before ‘interpretation’ in its modern hermeneutical sense was brought to birth, a whole apparatus of power in the field of culture was already firmly in place and had been for about a century� This was not an apparatus which determined the power-effects of particular readings but one which determined the political meaning and function of culture as such� Its name was and is aesthetics�” It will “be part of my argument that the ‘aesthetic,’ at least in its original formulations, has little enough to do with art� It denotes instead a whole program of social, psychical and political reconstruction on the part of the early European bourgeoisie” (327)� “The aesthetic, in other words, marks an historic shift from what we might now, in Gramscian terms, call coercion to hegemony, ruling and informing our sensuous life from within while allowing it to thrive in all its relative autonomy” (328)� “It is easier, in other words, for reason to repress sensuous Nature if it has already been busy eroding and subliming it from the inside and this is the task of the aesthetic” (329)� “Structures of power must become structures of feeling and the name for this mediation from property to propriety is the aesthetic� … What matters in aesthetics is not art but this whole project of reconstructing the human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily responses with this law which is not a law” (330)� 30 W infried f luck of wholeness, literary texts can thus be effective in creating a misrecognition of reality—not necessarily because of a particular ideological content, but because literary forms can present coherent images of the world that are illusionary nevertheless� 4 In Cultural Studies, the separation of the aesthetic and the political can still be overcome by reinserting the aesthetic into a whole way of life from which it has been artificially separated. In Althusserian Marxism, the separation is eliminated by reconceptualizing the aesthetic as the deceptive, “symptomatic” surface manifestation of an absent cause that constitutes society as a whole� The assumption of an absent cause that remains hidden and only manifests itself in the form of a symptom on the surface of the text is the core assumption of what has been called the hermeneutics of suspicion� For critics like Fredric Jameson or Terry Eagleton, this absent cause is capitalism, but the influence of this argument has gone way beyond structuralist Marxism and has also become the basis for critics like Eve Sedgwick, Toni Morrison or Edward Said, that is, queer studies, race and gender studies, and postcolonial studies; moreover, it also characterizes some of the work of the New Americanists which has had a major influence on American literary studies in the last decades� 5 Race, queerness, empire, or the nation-state have been the dominant absent causes in revisionist literary studies of the last decades� 6 New Historicism has been another influential approach that works against a conceptualization of the aesthetic as a separate sphere� To overcome this separation, New Historicists have taken a course that is different from other revisionists, however, by moving from a vertical reflection model, in which the aesthetic can be seen as merely a reflection or symptom of the political, to a horizontal model of relations, in which the aesthetic and the political are on the same level� As Walter Benn Michaels has argued in response to Marxist challenges, “the only relation literature as such has to culture as 4 In a stunning reversal, classical realism, in Marxism long considered a privileged literary form to provide at least some degree of critical insight into the “true” nature of capitalist society, is now seen as the ideologically most harmful literary form� 5 See, for example, Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture which is based on the starting premise that imperialism is the absent cause that pervades all parts of American society and also shapes every aspect of the literary (and, in her case, also filmic) text, so that it can be found in most unexpected aspects of a literary text or film. 6 For a concise characterization, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus: “The influence of Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading can be felt in the centrality of two scholarly texts from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991), which crystallized the emergent field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set forth an agenda for studying the structuring role of race in American literature� Both showed that one could read a text’s silences, gaps, style, tone, and imagery as symptoms of the queerness or race absent only apparently from its pages” (Best and Marcus 6)� To this list Edward Said‘s influential postcolonial study Culture and Imperialism (1994) should be added, in which Said argues, among other things, that Jane Austen’s social and literary world is constituted by the absent cause of imperialism� For a comprehensive analysis of the different revisionist approaches in literary studies see my essays “Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings” and “Shadow Aesthetics�” The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 31 such is that it is part of it” (Michaels, The Gold Standard 27)� But if everything is shaped by the same systemic logic, and there is no outside of it and escape from it, then the aesthetic can no longer stand out as having a different quality or function� In Walter Benn Michaels’s book The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, this pervasive, all embracing logic is that of the market; in Mark Seltzer’s study Henry James and the Art of Power, together with Michaels’s book one of the best-known New Historicist studies of American literature, the logic is that of power as defined by Foucault. Such claims have interesting interpretive consequences� If single aspects of the text do not stand for a larger whole, whether metaphorically or metonymically, but must be seen to stand in continuity with other aspects of a system, then every single textual aspect can only exemplify a logic that characterizes all other aspects as well� Interpretation can thus only lead to a potentially unlimited set of equations� Thus, Mark Seltzer can claim that in a novel like Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, “love and power … are two ways of saying the same thing” (66). Love is only another form of exerting power, and so is care, just as benevolence and sympathy, not to forget the novel’s “organic form,” as well as its literary techniques� In effect, the whole point of Seltzer’s interpretation is to dispel the illusion that any of these things could still stand outside of power� But if they all stand in a seamless continuity, then the specific literary form of expression does not really matter; it is only another technology of power, and all that needs to be said about its function is that it “register(s) and secure(s)” (24) manifestations of power� The aesthetic becomes identical with the political to such a degree that it has no longer any signifying power of its own� This is where New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt differ, however� 7 Again, the starting question is how it is possible to overcome the separation of the aesthetic and the political, but Greenblatt takes another route to do so, because, for interesting reasons, he does not want to give up the concept of the aesthetic� Although he agrees that the aesthetic and the political do not constitute ontologically separate spheres, he nevertheless does not want to dispense with any claim of a difference� In fact, he—cautiously—raises the question whether it is “not possible to have a communal sphere of art that is distinct from other communal spheres” (3)� Why is the separation of the aesthetic and the political untenable, then? In Greenblatt’s view, it is untenable, because it is impossible to keep these two spheres apart in any neat fashion� Political spheres always have an aesthetic dimension, and the aesthetic object always and inevitably has a political function� Hence, the relation between these spheres should not be seen in terms of separation but as a continuous circulation and exchange. This is an important paradigm change. Formalist and Marxist models of the relation between the aesthetic and the political are uni-directional, so that one realm determines the other, or has dominance over it� In contrast, the term circulation implies a continuous process of exchange. But if the 7 The following discussion draws on Greenblatt’s essays “The Circulation of Social Energy” and “Towards a Poetics of Culture�” 32 W infried f luck aesthetic and the political are in a process of continuous circulation and exchange, then this also means that there is no stable pattern of relation—which also means that there is no clear-cut causality, no clear-cut hierarchy of influences, no aesthetic form on which we can focus as constitutive of meaning� Instead, the relation is now characterized by often unforeseen, unexpected linkages, subject to change at any given moment, so that Greenblatt can characterize their changing relations as dynamic, if not dizzying, and seemingly inexhaustible. At one point, he even speaks of a “restless oscillation” (8). III. Greenblatt’s position of not rejecting the separation of art and life altogether but blurring their boundaries shows striking affinities to a line of aesthetic theory starting with John Dewey and Jan Mukarovsky, who insist on the continuity of aesthetic experience with everyday experiences without regarding them as identical� A similar development can be observed in modern and especially contemporary artistic practices, starting with Dada and currently continued by artistic movements like Performance art, Minimalism, Conceptual art and Installation art� In fact, in his essay collection Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, Allan Kaprow, the chief theoretician of the Happening, provides a definition of contemporary art that is strikingly similar to Greenblatt’s when he says: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct as possible” (706). 8 Numerous definitions of this kind could be added. They bear a striking affinity to the developments in literary studies that I have traced in the first part of this essay. Just as the challenge to overcome the separation of the aesthetic and the political is the common ground that links revisionist approaches in literary studies, the call for overcoming a separation of art and life can be seen as one of the key projects of contemporary artistic practice� Why has his project become so crucial? When we look at programmatic statements, beginning with Dada, one aspect stands out, the search for an extension of the possibilities of art. As long as it is still tied to aesthetic principles, art cannot do full justice to life� Hence, Richard Huelsenbeck can claim in the “First German Dada Manifesto”: “With Dadaism new reality comes into its own� Life appears as simultaneous muddle of noises, colors, and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified into Dadaist art, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality” (Harrison 25-26)� 8 See also Kaprow’s provocative suggestions to leave the sphere of art altogether and move over to the sphere of life: “The Happening is conceived as an art, certainly, but this is for lack of a better word or one that would not cause endless discussion� I personally would not care if it were called a sport� … A United States Marine Corps manual on jungle fighting tactics, a tour of a laboratory where kidneys are made, the daily traffic jam on the Long Island expressway, are more useful than Beethoven, Racine, or Michelangelo” (706)� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 33 In order to do justice to this experience of life, traditional concepts of the aesthetic have to be discarded, including questions of the proper medium and the proper materials for art� As Archer puts it: “recent art is made not only with oil paint, metal and stone, but with all kinds of things taken from life, including air, light, sound, words, people, food, refuse, multimedia installations and much else besides” (7)� In similar fashion, long-cherished formal principles are dispensed with, as Harold Rosenberg already argued early on in his essay on “The Action Painters“: The new American painting is not ‘pure’ art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic� The apples weren’t brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color� They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting� In this gesturing with materials the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated� Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act� (570)� In Minimalism’s attempt to avoid all overt compositional effects, this tendency is further radicalized, so that its programmatic claim, directed against the idea of symbolic representation, can be “What you see is what you see” (Archer 52)� As Arthur Danto has argued, ever since Warhol’s Brillo boxes of 1964, an art object could be anything at all (or even nothing). For the first time in history artists were free to do whatever they wanted—to slice up dead animals, throw elephant dung on canvases, display their soiled underwear, and mold images of themselves out of their own blood� In this world of total freedom the actual physical attributes of a work counted for less than its philosophical justifications. All art had become conceptual art… (Gewen) Pop Art presents the final rejection of the uniqueness of aesthetic form. Even Duchamp’s ready-made could still draw attention to the unique form a urinal has once we disregard its purpose� But Warhol’s Brillo Boxes have no uniqueness whatsoever. “With it, art had finally become liberated from the representation of form. … For the first time in the history of art everything was possible, everything could be art” (Hauskeller 100, m�t�)� Can everything be art, then? How can we know that an object is an art object and not just a plain vacuum cleaner? One obvious answer is to point to contemporary art’s dependence on the institutional contexts in which it is presented and in which audiences encounter it. If it is exhibited in a gallery or museum, it must be art� But how does it get into these places? One possibility is suggested by Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 used the pseudonym R� Mutt to justify the (unsuccessful) submission of a urinal entitled Fountain to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York: What are the grounds for refusing Mr� Mutt’s fountain: 1� Some contended it was immoral, vulgar� 2� Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing� Now Mr� Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ show windows. 34 W infried f luck Whether Mr� Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance� He CHOSE it� He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object� As for plumbing, that is absurd� The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges� (Duchamp 248) The important point here is Duchamp’s emphatic statement: “Whether Mr� Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance� He CHOSE it�” And by choosing it, he created “a new thought for that object�” In other words: although no artistic work will gain recognition as an art object without any institutional support, it is, in the final analysis, the claim of the artist that what he is presenting is art that is the main criterion left once there is no longer a consensus about the aesthetic� 9 Since the object itself can no longer signal to us how it should be classified, only the artist is left to know what it is supposed to be� Ever since Dadaism, Surrealism, and, even more radically, Pop Art have made it their project to transform profane and banal everyday objects into art, artists have gained the freedom to turn everything into art—including the abject and all kinds of bodily fluids. Thus, Rosenberg can say about art povera: “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 constituted. Anything—breakfast food, a frozen lake, film footage—is art, either as is or tampered with, through being chosen as a fetish” (“De-Aestheticization“ 37)� This new freedom also creates a new challenge, however� Since the appearance of the object itself can no longer tell us whether it is supposed to be art or not, a narrative is needed—in the words of Duchamp—to create “a new thought for that object�” In this sense, all art is Conceptual art today� Conceptual art has carried the development I have described to a logical endpoint, for example, when Sol LeWitt claims that all ideas are art if they are concerned with art: “All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art” (838)� In the same spirit, Joseph Kosuth quotes Donald Judd: “If someone calls it art, it’s art” (843)� And Kosuth himself adds: “All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually” (844)� The aesthetic dimension has become irrelevant at this point� How can we know, then, that something is art? That is easy: “Art is the definition of art” (849)� Until the arrival of Minimalism, a widely accepted criterion for determining what is art could be derived from the modernist story of aesthetic progress in which single elements like paint, light, color, abstract forms, or lines are liberated from their subordination to a larger context of meaning. That story has come to an end with Conceptual art and Installation art� One of the consequences is that the artist has gained a new level of creative freedom, because artists are no longer constrained by aesthetic principles that they have experienced as confining. In its decidedly anti-mimetic 9 In that sense, one can say with Benjamin Buchloh: “Critical practice at the moment resides in aesthetic practice itself” (Foster 86)� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 35 stance, contemporary experimental art is often described as expanding the freedom of interpretation for the viewer, but, more significantly, it also establishes a new freedom of expression for the artist who is now free to declare any object of his choice to be art� When the artist Daniel Knorr was asked in an interview why he had decided to become an artist, he could therefore answer: Because this is where I have the greatest freedom� 10 Instead of being subjected to the constraints of aesthetic principles, the anti-aesthetic attitude empowers the artist to set his own rules� Thus, the sculptor Robert Morris could declare programmatically at one point of his career that he would withdraw all aesthetic quality from his works: Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal The undersigned, Robert Morris, being the maker of the metal construction entitled Litanies, described in the annexed Exhibit A, hereby withdraws from said construction all esthetic quality and content and declares that from the date hereof said construction has no such quality and content� Dated: November 15, 1963� (Rosenberg, “De-Aestheticization” 28) In the same spirit, Donald Judd, in defiance of the idea of aesthetic quality, could claim that a work of art does not have to be good, just interesting: An art that saw itself as new in some way suggested that it should also be judged as good or bad according to new standards� Greenberg had asked that art might demonstrate ‘quality’, and his argument for this derived from Kant’s aesthetic theory. In place of quality, however, and in defiance of the rationalist tradition within which Kant figures prominently, Judd asserted that ‘a work of art need only be interesting’� (Archer 56) Aiming at the demonstration of “quality” narrows the freedom of the artist, although Judd’s rejection of aesthetic quality can also create a new problem: if the art object does no longer distinguish itself by its quality, other means have to be found to make it “interesting�” 11 If we do no longer have any aesthetic principles to determine artistic value, other criteria must take their place. As the example of Duchamp shows, one is the new freedom of the 10 Isabelle Graw puts it succinctly: “Because of the singular character of his product, the artist is in the position of a monopolist� He is the sole producer� What he offers can only be provided by him” (29, m�t�)� Moreover, a work of art holds the promise of a lasting value that a consumer object usually does not do� This makes the work of art a “precious” object—which is only a step away from today’s “priceless asset�” 11 See, for example, the review of an art critic of the New York Times on an exhibition of the artist Kai Althoff at the Museum of Modern Art in the year 2016: “It’s mostly downhill from that initial impression, as Mr� Althoff’s works are haphazardly displayed on walls, shelves and rolling racks amid all kinds of found objects, including antique dolls, vintage clothing, ceramics, personal memorabilia, beat-up furniture and accumulations of rubbish, including an open suitcase full of dirty dishes� It’s like a flea market or estate sale, a kind of anti-exhibition. … In all this there’s a sort of neurotic grandiosity� Finally, when she asks which of his works he would want to be remembered for, he declares, ’I do not want to be remembered’� As disingenuous as this sounds, it may be the secret of Mr� Althoff’s success, for the artist who cares least about his legacy may well be the most free. With this exhibition, however, he’s been given too much freedom” (Johnson)� 36 W infried f luck artist to declare any object of his choice to be art� However, although the artist’s freedom has increased, his own claims are not yet sufficient. A narrative is needed—provided either by the artist himself or his agent or his gallerist and/ or by art critics—to make a convincing case for the public acceptance of the artist’s claim� 12 As we have seen, it is part of the new freedom that this narrative does no longer have to be the modernist narrative, in fact, in the current phase it would not be advisable to use it� This creates a challenge, however, to come up with another, sufficiently “interesting” narrative that can help the artist to stand out in a crowded field. It is one thing to declare a vacuum cleaner to be art, but the actual challenge in the contemporary antiaesthetic climate is to get a range of actors, including institutions and viewers, to buy that claim, figuratively and literally. In her sociological study Die neuen Regeln der Kunst, Nina Zahner has described the complex formation of institutions that can play a crucial role in providing such an acknowledgment: Galleries, art dealers, auction houses, collectors, curators, museums, media and, not to forget, art history and art criticism, which are still needed to come up with narratives about an art object’s value and its cultural significance. Art history and art criticism have lost a good deal of their former authority, however� The anti-aesthetic attitude has shifted the authorization of value and significance to a much wider chorus, leading to a complex interaction process between a range of different actors to determine what is considered “interesting” art at the present time� The new freedom from the aesthetic thus leads to new dependencies, in fact, more freedom also means more dependence, and increasing dependence means that it is not always transparent how reputations are made� 13 More so than ever, then, narrative is crucial in the new anti-aesthetic world, since the object itself does no longer have aesthetic qualities that distinguish it from everyday objects� One of the risks is a growing convergence or even conflation of art and commerce on which Maria Slowinska has written a superb book entitled Art/ Commerce. This brings the art system closer to other cultural systems such as the fashion industry� In her study Der große Preis, Isabelle Graw points to a growing resemblance between art and luxury articles: “It is my thesis that the liberation of art from the concept of 12 Cf� Hauskeller’s discussion of Danto: “But this does not mean that everything was art or can become art, just because somebody has declared it to be art� My desk lamp will not become art, because I claim that it is art, even if I were an established artist� In order to make a convincing case, I would have to be able to explain why it is art and that means to explain what it is about” (Hauskeller 100, m.t.). The Brillo Boxes Warhol painted are about nothing, whereas his painting Brillo Boxes is “about the world in which we live, about ourselves, and our perception of the world” (Hauskeller 100, m�t�)� Thus, “out of three identical squares hanging on the wall one could be a work of art, the second nothing but a square, and the third another work of art, but a different one from the first. Which one is a work of art cannot be determined by my responses to the objects. These responses will only become significant once I know which one is a work of art and why” (101, m�t�)� 13 In his book Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art, Michael Shnayerson focuses on the increasingly important strategic role that gallerists like Larry Gargosian play in this system� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 37 the aesthetic has created ideal preconditions for marketing” (Graw 14, m�t�)� Artists have to learn to sell themselves as cutting-edge (a challenge strongly resembling the situation in literary studies)� It is hardly surprising, then, that contemporary artists and gallerists have developed a repertoire of strategies to draw attention to their works� Branding is one of these strategies, the transgression of boundaries another� In artistic productions, we often encounter a seemingly random assemblage of objects that do not seem to belong together or do not seem to have anything in common, but can produce, because of these disparities, a defamiliarizing and possibly disturbing effect, a strategy characteristic of the assemblages and installations that currently dominate the art world� Still another strategy is the struggle over boundaries� In that respect, an interesting challenge was offered in 2006 by the Italian artist Pierre Pinonchelli who attacked Duchamp’s urinal at an exhibition with the intention of damaging it. His justification was that, if Duchamp’s urinal was considered art, then, damaging it could also claim to be considered art� 14 However, his argument was rejected in court, and he received a sentence for vandalism� 15 The incident provoked Alan Riding, art critic of the New York Times, to point out: “Still, not all vandalism is intended: Another work by Hirst on display in Mayfair Gallery in 2001—half-full coffee cups, dirty ashtrays, beer bottles and the like—was thrown away by the cleaners�” One might be tempted to regard this as a metaphor for the fate of the aesthetic in contemporary artistic practice� IV. What is the reason for these ongoing attempts that I have traced to overcome the separation of art and life, of the aesthetic and the political? Why has this project taken on such an importance? In an essay with the title “The 14 See Alan Riding’s article “If a urinal is art, can hammering it be, too? ”� Pinoncelli “claimed that his action was also a work of art, a tribute to Duchamp and other Dada artists who had made their name by challenging the very definition of art.” 15 Another contemporary work in the urinal-tradition (which also includes Piero Manzoni‘s “Merda d’Artista”), Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture “Maurizio Cattelan: ‘America’” (2016), a toilet seat made of gold, has found a welcoming place at the Guggenheim-Museum� As the New York Times puts it: “… the piece is of modest size and will not be on view in public gallery� It will, instead, be installed in early May just off one of the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, in a small, humble room where visitors often feel the urge to spend some time alone� The room has tiles, a sink, a mirror and a lock on the door� And now, instead of its standard Kohler toilet, it will have a solid 18-karat-gold working replica of one, a preposterously scatological apotheosis of wealth whose form is completed in its function: You could go into the restroom just to bask in its glow, Mr� Cattelan said, but it becomes an artwork only with someone sitting on it or standing over it, answering nature’s call� … Guggenheim official said that they anticipated lines for the Cattelan bathroom and added that a guard or attendant might be placed near the door to ensure orderly waiting—and also to make certain that no one tries to abscond with a piece of the toilet” (New York Times, April 20, 2016)� It seems that Pierre Pinoncelli will not stand much of a chance to launch another of his attacks here� 38 W infried f luck Search for an ‘Artless’ Art,” I have discussed the phenomenon in the context of a democratic aesthetics that drives a process of cultural dehierarchization� In this essay, I want to pursue a different line of argument, not because I consider the other one invalid, but because it seems to me that more can be said on the issue� However, before I pursue this line of argument any further, a possible objection has to be addressed� To be sure, by establishing oppositional terms like aesthetic vs� political or art vs� life, there seems to be a similarity between current literary studies and contemporary artistic practice� But aren’t we really talking about two very different projects? Yes, in both fields the aesthetic is rejected, but in each case, it seems, for different reasons� Revisionist literary studies reject the aesthetic, because in their view it obscures the ideological and political dimensions of literature� But contemporary artistic practice rejects the separation, in most cases not in order to uncover the work’s politics, but because it wants to redefine art by liberating it from the confining category of the aesthetic. In other words: contemporary artistic practice rejects the concept of the aesthetic in the interest of art, whereas contemporary literary studies reject the concept in the interest of politics� This leads us back to the first part of this essay, the role of the aesthetic in revisionist literary studies, where the rejection of the aesthetic seemed to have a function exactly opposite to that in contemporary artistic practice: instead of redefining and extending our notion of art, the goal of revisionist literary studies, I claimed, is to expose art’s politics. However, what exactly does politics mean in this context? The reference is usually not to actual politics, but to theories about the political effects of modernity, and in revisionist literary studies these theories have been inspired, directly or indirectly, by either Althusser or Foucault. For example, in following Foucault, Seltzer’s argument is that a focus on the aesthetic dimension of novels by Henry James obscures the role of power� Yet the term power, here, is not used in the sense of traditional political theory, as a word for the exertion of illegitimate force or dominance, but as something that puts constraints on the singularity of an individual and her freedom of self-determination� Thus, Seltzer can see even the most elementary forms of intersubjective relations, such as love and care, as exertions of power. In other words, at first blush revisionist literary studies may go in a different direction than contemporary art practice, but in doing so their normative base is precisely that which also informs the rejection of the aesthetic in contemporary artistic practice, namely the vision of a freedom unfettered by any confining constraints—constraints that can be imposed by any rule, social or linguistic, any principle (as in aesthetic principles), and, not just by social convention, but by even the most intimate form of social interaction� Freedom in this sense is freedom from any kind of imposition, no matter what the source may be: culture and society, family, intimate relations, but also language, discourse, or the aesthetic are all possible sources of constraint taken out of a long list� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 39 We arrive here at a point that is both paradoxical and ironic. It is ironic, because the very motive that I have identified as a driving force in the rejection of the aesthetic—a search for freedom—has also been the driving force in the development of that which is now rejected, namely formalism and its concept of the aesthetic as an autonomous sphere� We have become used to seeing formalism as a kind of reactionary leftover from less enlightened times that have to be overcome and left behind� But what we may be forgetting here is that formalism emerged in the context of a philosophy of history that dominated the first half of the twentieth century up to the 1960s. This view of history was based on the idea of an increasing incorporation of life forces by the relentless advance of instrumental rationality, driven by capitalism, industrialization, a market economy and their logic of rationalization, leading to a growing self-alienation of the subject� 16 In this context, art and literature could gain a special, utopian function as one of the few, if not the only remaining sphere, that had not yet been pervaded by instrumental rationality; or, to rephrase it in the terminology of this essay, one of the remaining, albeit endangered realms of freedom� This explains, for example, the almost hysterical tone of the chapter on the culture industry in The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, one of the key texts of Critical Theory. By coining the term culture industry, Horkheimer and Adorno wanted to dramatize their fear that in the age of mass culture, the logic of instrumental rationality had begun to invade also the realm of culture, that is, one of the last realms of freedom� This is the reason for the central role the idea of aesthetic autonomy plays in formalism, as well as in Critical Theory: those forms of culture that are not yet shaped by instrumental rationality have to be separated from other cultural forms— hence the strict opposition of high culture and mass culture that was later criticized in cultural studies� From this perspective, an analysis of the not yet compromised forms of high culture will have to focus on the dimension that has so far protected them from being subjected to instrumental rationality� What are these forms? Forms that possess a certain degree of aesthetic autonomy! If they would not possess that autonomy, they would not be able to resist the invasion of instrumental rationality� The only aspect that can justify claims of a separate status of art is the dimension that distinguishes the text or object from other social and cultural forces and thus makes autonomy possible, the aesthetic dimension� Formalism is not focusing on form as art for art’s sake� In formalism, aesthetic autonomy is the precondition for making freedom possible—which paradoxically is also the value revisionists are looking for in their rejection of the aesthetic� The irony, then, in the rejection of the aesthetic is that, at a closer look, it is also a rejection of freedom� But, of course, one immediately has to add: not of freedom per se, but of a particular concept of freedom. In the final analysis, 16 In my essay “Narratives About Self-Alienation,” I am describing the centrality of the premise of self-alienation for critical theories in the twentieth century� For me, it is a founding assumption, not only of Marxism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory, but also of Cultural Studies, poststructuralism and even Constance School reception aesthetics� 40 W infried f luck the revisionist rejection of the aesthetic is driven by a reconceptualization of freedom� Or, to put it differently, discussions about the role of the aesthetic also open up a fascinating chapter of intellectual history in that they are based, in the final analysis, on different and competing visions of freedom. What is the concept of freedom, then, that underlies revisionist literary studies and contemporary artistic practice? In contrast to formalism, freedom is no longer defined as non-instrumentalization, because for revisionists there is no longer any sphere that is not yet commodified. Instead, freedom is now, not non-instrumentalization but non-constraint, the freedom to escape the structures that are the source and medium of constraint, including concepts of the aesthetic� The normative basis of revisionist literary studies and contemporary artistic practice is that of a singularity that should no longer be subjected to any constraints—in contrast, for example, to the philosophies of history I mentioned earlier in which subjects should be protected from certain constraints, such as, for example, capitalism, but not from others, such as the aesthetic through which they may develop their full potential� 17 In formalist approaches, freedom is defined as non-instrumentalization, in contemporary critical and artistic practice as non-constraint� V. As we have seen, the rejection of the aesthetic in literary studies and contemporary artistic practice cannot simply be attributed to a forgetfulness about the field’s core tradition or to an over-eager politicization. It has a philosophical basis as its driving force, the vision of an unconstrained singularity that regards the concept of the aesthetic as merely another imposition� What does that mean for the project of a reanimation of the aesthetic? I think that as long as these attempts remain within the theoretical framework of a freedom from constraint, the aesthetic will not be able to regain a meaningful function of its own� One important point of my discussion is that the question of a return of the aesthetic is not merely a matter of whether it can be redefined more convincingly, because such redefinitions cannot be separated from underlying assumptions about conditions of unfreedom and the role the aesthetic may play in the search for freedom from them� In the past, these assumptions were derived from theories of modernity, as, for example, that 17 In his criticism of poststructuralist film theory, Noel Carroll draws attention to a paradox that can be a result of a radical, in this case poststructuralist, concept of freedom: “As Silverman’s argument exemplifies, there is a presumption among Althusserian- Lacanians that if human actions have certain structural conditions, these constrain human action in a way inimicable to autonomy� Languages have both syntactical rules and semantical rules� But it is strange to think of these as constraints that preclude autonomy� For these very features of language are what enable the speaker to speak—to, for example, denounce capitalism. If the language lacked these structural conditions, nothing could be said, which would in fact be a real blow to the possibility of human autonomy� … The problem with Silverman’s argument, in other words, is that it presumes as a limitation on human autonomy that which is in fact something that facilitates autonomy” (78-79)� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 41 of the Frankfurt School with its combination of Marx, Weber and the idea of aesthetic negation� In one way or another, such theories have shaped the various kinds of formalisms that have emerged in the twentieth-century� Postmodernism and poststructuralism have dismantled these grand narratives� Is a Foucauldian narrative of endless domination, in which the aesthetic is merely another form of domination, the only alternative, then? 18 At this point, it is fairly easy to make sense of current trends in discussions of the aesthetic� There are those who do not want to go all the way in pursuit of a freedom from constraint and think that some constraints, for example that of the autonomy of form, are legitimate, even desirable, because they can carry important political meanings� Walter Benn Michaels’s study The Beauty of a Social Problem provides an example. And there are those, by far in the majority at the present time, who continue to look for freedom from, or resistance to, structural constraints and find them, above all, in bodily or affective resources—strongly, as in the case of Rita Felski, or weakly, as in the case of Sianne Ngai and the little resistance that a weakened, indeterminate emotivity may offer� I cannot discuss these approaches at length here, but in the context of this essay it is of special interest to see what role the question of freedom plays in their argumentation� With her influential study The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski wants to revitalize literary studies by recovering possibilities of aesthetic experience that a skeptical critique has ignored in its routine application of a hermeneutics of suspicion� Instead, literary studies should redirect its attention to the full range and variety of experiences that attract readers to engage in the reading of literary texts. The freedom that can be gained in this way is not a freedom from all-pervasive structural constraints, but from stifling routines that suppress the individual’s singularity� And the way out of these routines is not to reject the aesthetic, but to redefine it as a theory of attachment. What makes the reading process interesting, after all, is the literary “work’s dexterity in soliciting and sustaining attachments” (166) which means that reading can resonate with special force when texts “hook up with passions and predelictions of our affectively soaked histories and memories” (178). Aesthetic experience is created by intense, unexpected and unpredictable attachments to the literary text; these attachments can “surprise or startle us, nudge us into unexpected moods or states of mind, cause us to do things we had not anticipated” (84), so that we can be “aroused, disturbed, surprised, or brought to act in ways that we did not expect and may find it hard to explain” (167). Stifling routines suppress the individual’s singularity, aesthetic experiences can liberate it by a reactivation of life forces that break the hold of routinization� Felski’s philosophical basis is a form of vitalism that sees unfreedom as a constraint on the uniqueness of individual actors, their bodily responses and affects, while aesthetic experience can provide strong, often transformative experiences that may help to transcend these constraints. Inevitably, 18 On the key role this narrative plays in current literary studies see my essay on “The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form: Literary Studies After the Hermeneutics of Suspicion�” 42 W infried f luck one of the consequences is that in her attempt to rescue the aesthetic by reconnecting it with vital life forces, Felski also provides a quasi-vitalist reconceptualization of the aesthetic in which intense emotional and corporeal effects dominate� As a result, the question of quality is phenomenologically reconceptualized: the best aesthetic qualities are those that powerfully affect the reader, “a revitalization of vital life forces that only makes sense within an institutional context whose justification must lie elsewhere. For only in this context can one prevent her argument from becoming also an apology, for example, of a sensationalist, attachment-soliciting mass culture” (Fluck, “The Limits of Critique” 246)� Indeed, that might be too much reanimation! With Walter Benn Michaels we move into a completely different world� The unfreedom on which he focuses is not one of the body or its affects, but the consequence of a rising economic inequality in neoliberalism which is only the latest manifestation of a more fundamental conflict, however—that between capital and labor� What role can or should the aesthetic play in this context? Although Michaels wants art to have political meaning, he is strictly against a conflation of the aesthetic and the political; in fact, one may argue that his book is written to avoid such a fashionable conflation. For Michaels, the refusal of form that I have traced in this essay is the mark of a neoliberal aesthetics. If art is to provide a significant response to inequality, it has to do this on its own terms, that is, as an autonomous form, a form that is self-contained, immune to theatricality and literalism, and not aiming at an effect� This is basically a reconceptualization of Michael Fried’s concept of absorption (Fried is the main inspiration throughout the book), and the medium that is best suited to realize this ideal nowadays is photography, where Fried’s pictorial theme of absorption has become “a condition of the medium” (Michaels, Beauty of a Social Problem 118). An example is provided by the photography of Walker Evans in Let us Now Praise Famous Men. Paradoxically, it is Evans’s aestheticization of poverty that makes his photographs an honest record of capitalism’s class antagonism, because it establishes a structure of superiority that is neither concealed, nor denied, and thus tells the truth about class relations: It’s by seeking to make poverty beautiful in a way that will be invisible to the poor themselves that Agee and Evans produce in their work not just this gap between the rich and the poor but also the conflict between them—the sense that the riches of the rich come at the expense of the poor. (143) Thus, in these photographs “we can experience the society in which those pictures were made and in which they continue to be admired as fundamentally structured by the inequalities of class” (144)� Why does Michaels say ‘experience’ and not ‘comprehend’ at this point? Because the insight into capitalism’s class antagonism is provided indirectly by way of a structural analogy� The structural difference between photographer and his subject is also the social difference of capitalism’s class antagonism� The political meaning of the photographs lies in the structural differences they reproduce in their form� The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 43 Recipients are irrelevant in this argument, since all that matters is the work’s assertion of form which would be distorted by the subjective response of the beholder. The whole point about defining the work of art in terms of Friedian absorption is to free the work from the subjectivity of the beholder (and thereby from the wrong kind of politics which for Michaels is identity politics)� But how can we be sure, then, what the work’s meaning is? Michaels tries to solve the problem by the construct of a self-sufficient form. A photograph is simply there, it is more an object than a representation of an object� No matter whether we try or not, it lies outside of our interpretive grasp, and that is why it can reproduce the structures capitalism has created without being compromised by ill-advised attempts to overcome the separation between art and life� The important point is that the political meaning is preserved and not watered down by the wrong kind of involvement: “My argument about the works described in this book has not been that they place today’s objective conditions at their center, but that, in imagining a form that refuses the politics of personal involvement, they make those objective conditions visible” (172)� An aesthetics of absorption can do this best and it is therefore the best answer art can give to rising inequality� Michaels’s unlikely bedfellows here are Karl Marx and Michael Fried. Taking Fredric Jameson’s characterization of postmodern culture as her point of departure, for Sianne Ngai, too, capitalism, especially in its contemporary, “postmodern” stage, is the main cause of the subject’s unfreedom� But Ngai focuses on other aspects than Michaels and, consequently, the aesthetic also has a different function in her argument� The liberation she looks for is not one from the suppression of vital life forces, or from the wrong kind of politics, but from an advanced stage of commodification that has also absorbed art and disseminated it throughout society, so that there can be no longer any not-yet-commodified realm of aesthetic negation or resistance. What role can the aesthetic still play under these conditions of powerlessness? Despite Ngai’s often overwhelming rhetorical fireworks, there is a pattern of argumentation that repeats itself throughout her work� Its common link is the assumption that a hypercommodified system produces negative feelings that once may have served as a source of political resistance but are now coopted by commodification and transformed into affects of low intensity. No matter whether it is “stuplimity,” a mix of awe and boredom, ugly feelings like animatedness, or weak emotions described as zany, interesting, and cute: in each case what we get are negative and ambivalent feelings that respond to a reality in which agency is blocked� This is precisely what makes them interesting for Ngai, however, who claims, for example, that the categories zany, cute, and interesting, “for all their marginality to aesthetic theory and to genealogies of postmodernism, are the ones in our current repertoire best suited for grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories 1)� 44 W infried f luck How, then, has aesthetic experience been transformed? Ngai’s categories call attention to their own weakness, that is, to their lack of aesthetic impact, and, consequently, to the powerlessness of art under contemporary conditions� Precisely because of their weakness, however, the feelings they describe inadvertently come to resemble sites of non-instrumentalization� Thus, even under the conditions of contemporary hypercommodification, a weak negating potential survives: “Art has the capacity not only to reflect and mystify power but also to reflect and make use of powerlessness” (109). This negating potential is so weak, however, that it comes to reside in the subject’s affect structure� Ngai’s interpretation of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans in her essay “Stuplimity” therefore focuses on the affects produced by the text, among them unpredicted and seemingly accidental ways of linking bits and scraps of language� The result can at least be “a little resistance.” An example for this unexpected strength of weakness is taken from slapstick comedy: “While stuplimity offers no fantasy of transcendence, it does provide small subjects with what Stein calls ‘a little resistance’ in their confrontations with larger systems� … thus we have Chaplin versus the assembly line; Keaton versus military engines such as The Navigator (a supply ship) and The General (a locomotive); Lucille Ball versus domesticity” (Ngai, “Stuplimity”)� In their own way, these comedians do what Stein does: “Yet this preference for the cycle, one of ‘driving’ excitations and fatigues, could easily suggest Stein in Chaplin drag” (“Stuplimity”)� If one starts out from a theory of hypercommodification, the only possible way out are the little resistances of affect� One may call this the slapstick theory of the aesthetic� The three authors discussed in this section do by no means exhaust current discussions of the aesthetic� But for different reasons, they have drawn special attention. They can thus be taken as examples of current attempts to reanimate the aesthetic in literary studies� From this perspective, it is striking to see how different they are� This difference has its origin in very different conceptualizations of freedom: neo-phenomenologically considered, it can be regained by a recovery of vital life forces; from Michaels’s Marxist perspective, it is the utopia of a liberation from the conflict between capital and labor; and, from the point of view of Ngai’s critical postmodernism, it can be temporarily gained by the “little resistance” against hypercommodification that resistant and negating affects can provide. In each case, we have a completely different actor: a reader that wants to reassert her singularity in the case of Felski; an American defined by the Gini factor who is either rich or poor in the case of Michaels; the “small” subject of slapstick resistance in the case of Ngai� Inevitably, these assumptions must also produce very different reconceptualizations of the aesthetic: as a theory of attachment, as an aesthetics of absorption, and as an aesthetics of negative emotions and little resistances� And not surprisingly, these very different conceptualizations of the aesthetic focus also on very different aesthetic objects: fictions that invite intense attachments, a form of photography that rejects personal involvement, and “bits and scraps of linguistic matter” as they can be found in Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. The Rejection of the Aesthetic as a Search for Freedom 45 In literary studies, calls for a return of the aesthetic have their origin in the dissatisfaction with the diminished role of aesthetics in the field. What are the chances for a return of the aesthetic, then? In their stark differences, my three examples reflect the current plurality of options. 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