Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Everyday Aesthetics
by Rita Felski | ns 71-72
I believe art is worldly, not otherworldly: not ineffable, untranslatable, or other. But I find myself increasingly troubled by the functionalism that shadows social theories of art, as critics vault over the disparities between individual works and social structures in their eagerness to nail down political meanings. The model of articulation, well known in cultural if not in literary studies, redeems such trespasses by allowing us to do justice to the contingency, mutability, and many-sidedness of cultural artifacts. And in the thought style of phenomenology, most recently, I have found a newly productive irritant against the trend to over-contextualization, along with welcome intimations of how to reframe questions of aesthetic experience. My current convictions, in other words, draw on a seemingly improbable blend of cultural studies and phenomenology, modes of thought that gaze indifferently past each other even though they are both, in their own way, committed to everyday structures of experience.
The invitation to draft a credo offers a welcome spur to reflection and self-reflection as well as a provocation to business as usual in literary and cultural studies. As a first-person form, a blunt avowal of one's convictions and commitments, it is a rarely glimpsed genre in academic writing, which prescribes the subordination of personal belief to acknowledged authorities and third-person sources. Literary theory prides itself on its antinomian and anti-authoritarian spirit yet often accentuates such deference, as if multiplying citations of Foucault or Zizek will bestow a cast-iron legitimacy on the writer's words. The credo, moreover, serves as an expression of faith rather than a report on knowledge, reminding us of our obligatory enchainment in attachments, prejudices, and non-rational beliefs. We need to acknowledge, in Gadamerian fashion, that such attachments and prejudices are not obstacles to thought, but preconditions for thought, and that even the most abstract and highly flown speculations build on our commitments rather than transcending them.
The method of articulation has driven much of my thinking about literature and culture, even though I stumbled across formal definitions of this method late in the day. A central tenet of articulation theory is the conviction that the social order cannot be conceived of as a seamless totality, that it is not a unitary whole ruled by a single overarching logic and that it cannot be imagined as a quasi-person capable of harboring desires or intentions. (Such personification is often enacted in claims that capitalism "wants" us to do something or that patriarchy "intends" women to behave in certain ways.) There is, in other words, no purposeful and omnipotent Geist driving the course of history in a given direction. Rather, we are thrown into a world that is fractured, multiform, and mutable, composed of myriad and multi-stranded relations of correspondence and non-correspondence, of linkages that are made, unmade, and remade over time. To be sure, connections between social groups and patterns of action, belief, or cultural expression can acquire considerable permanence, cohesiveness, and power, giving the appearance of inevitability or second nature, but even such relatively stable and systemic regularities do not create or control the entirety of the social field. Political identities, in this sense, are not natural kinds, but are forged out of the ceaseless play of correspondence and contradiction; they do not precede, but are constituted by, processes of articulation. The category of woman, for example, does not ground or explain the practice of feminism; rather, feminists seize hold of and redescribe the category of woman in the process of formulating and advancing their goals.
Such a framework dissents from more established ways of linking text to context in literary studies. It casts into doubt, for example, a critical procedure that claims to deduce political meanings and effects from the close scrutiny of texts, a method that I have elsewhere dubbed political formalism. Such readings hinge on an assumed identity or homology of literary and social structure, declaring the novel to be an inherently bourgeois genre or imputing to linear narrative the power to enforce heteronormativity or to sustain masculine privilege. Articulation theory, by contrast, insists that social functions cannot be deduced from aesthetic form, and that past use does not guarantee the unfolding of future meaning. To be sure, texts bear the scars and residues of their histories and cannot magically shrug off their past associations; but by the same token, they also acquire new resonance and purpose in altered milieus. A genre such as the Bildungsroman, for example, is invigorated, refreshed, and modified formally and thematically as it moves into contexts very different from those of nineteenth-century Europe. Literary and social interests do not line up in automatic or predictable alliances, and there are no short cuts to historically informed analysis of the density of context. Hence my reservations, back in the late eighties, about the possibility of defining a feminist aesthetic, defined as any necessary connection between women, politics, and particular styles or forms of writing. A related skepticism inspired me to reassess what was once a theoretical commonplace, that modernity was a quintessentially masculine phenomenon, and to wonder how modern women as well as men had unmade and remade the meanings of gender across a multiplicity of genres, frameworks, and social milieus.
This emphasis on contingency might seem to harmonize with poststructuralist theories of language that have dominated literary studies over the last few decades, yet I harbor extensive misgivings about the impact and effects of such theories. All too often, they shortchange the import and impact of artworks by turning them into meta-commentaries on the indeterminacy of language, the instability of identity, or the ungroundedness of belief. In addition, the vogue for performance metaphors, especially in gender studies and queer theory, has spawned an etiolated view of the self unable to do justice to the thickness of interiority and intersubjectivity, whether in literature or in life. Anti-essentialism is routed into a form of aestheticism that sees language as the sole shaper of human destinies and that wields this insight to trumpet the arbitrariness of beliefs and the artificiality of values. The literary text is hauled in to serve as star witness for the prosecution in this vigorously deflationary exercise.
Literary studies, in other words, remains stuck in a proto-modernist mindset that continues to prize self-reflexivity, dissonance, and estrangement as the most advanced forms of aesthetic consciousness. (Most of what passes as postmodern theory, at least in literature departments, does not seriously contest such a mindset, but kicks it up a notch or tinkers with peripheral details.) The negative, I've argued elsewhere, has become institutionally normative, alongside a paralyzing anxiety that reopening questions of how works of art enrich perception will trigger charges of naive mimeticism or retrograde humanism. Yet there is an easily discernable performative contradiction in theories enthralled with negation, subversion, and the glamour of marginality that sustain their case via entirely conventional and routinized forms of academic argument. Either the medium disqualifies the message, or we need to reassess the relative merits of novelty and familiarity, otherness and sameness, while also crafting more capacious and multidimensional explanations of aesthetic experience.
My fascination with the concept and the experience of everyday life stems from the stubborn resistance it offers to such critical theories of defamiliarization and demystification. On the one hand, the everyday is associated with habit, repetition, convention, the unthinking performance of routine activities—all those qualities frequently excoriated in modern art and criticism as indices of existential alienation or of conservatism and petit bourgeois complacency. On the other hand, an element of sheer necessity adheres to such elements of everyday living that the modern tradition of negative aesthetics seemed ill-equipped to capture or comprehend. My perplexity on this question first drew me to cultural studies, which trumpets its thoroughgoing commitment to the commonplace and the quotidian. Yet much of this work seemed intent on imbuing everyday life with the frisson of transgressive excitement rather than facing up to its mundane and humdrum qualities. It was the phenomenological idea of the life world that yielded the salient framework.
The life world identifies the heterogeneous assemblage of diffuse, distracted, semiconscious perceptions, beliefs, and reactions that make up much of our daily living. The act of seeing something as natural or taken-for-granted—hailed as a cardinal sin in contemporary theory—is here conceptualized not as an error to be rectified but as an inescapable facet of existence. Phenomenology, in this sense, attends to what is already in plain view; it looks at, rather than through, everyday modes of experience; it seeks to describe rather than prescribe, to attend to, rather than escape, the commonplace. What renders phenomenology a still timely framework is not Husserl's attempt at a transcendental reduction—one more expression of a recurring philosophical ambition to escape one's own shadow—but the gaze of wonder it directs at ordinary objects and mundane forms of feeling and thought. Its aim is to really see ordinary structures of experience—not in order to celebrate them or to trumpet their authenticity, but to gain a surer grasp of the ineluctable nature of our first-person relation to the world.
In this sense, the concept of the life world is not just an attempt to capture the textures of everyday consciousness but a gauntlet thrown down to a tradition of modern intellectual thought enamored of displays of skepticism, doubt, and self-reflexivity. Phenomenology does not deny or devalue such skepticism but reveals its necessary limits by noting that any questioning of ideologies, claims, or belief systems depends on tacit meaning structures that allow critique to take place. As certain questions or problems move into the foreground of our awareness, others recede into, or remain firmly within, the background. Moments of rupture or flashes of disorientation explode into consciousness against a horizon of unchallenged and unnoticed assumptions. Critical theory, in this sense, cannot purge itself of ordinary patterns of thought; even the most iconoclastic gestures are rooted in taken-for-granted beliefs and tacit conventions.
While the idea of the life world is often equated with conservatism or quietism, to my mind it signals the exact opposite. There is something exceptionally invigorating in a mode of thought that suspends the usual distinctions between elite and vernacular knowledge, science and ideology, critique and naivete, to elucidate their underlying affinities and connections. Such a framework, in my view, is neither anti-intellectual nor destined to foster complacency. It does not hinder us from scrutinizing the politics of everyday life—challenging, for example, tacit assumptions about the division of labor in the household. Nor does it preclude attention to the contingency and mutability of life worlds, as shaped, for example, by rapidly changing relations to media technologies. (I take for granted, after Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, a "neo-phenomenology" that assumes linguistic mediation and historical difference and sees subjectivity as ineluctably caught up with intersubjectivity.) But one of the gifts of phenomenology, in my view, is its power to puncture intellectual hubris and the Faustian dream that newer, more sophisticated, more self-reflexive theories will somehow absolve us of finitude, ordinariness, and error. (In this respect, as in others, it has patent affinities to pragmatism.) A repertoire of background beliefs, sedimented assumptions, and everyday practices turns out not to be the antagonist of knowledge, but its fundamental precondition.
The promise of phenomenology for literary studies, then, is a more ecumenical and expansive account of aesthetic experience. While a thematics of disorientation and shock plays its part in such an account, other registers of response move into the spotlight and acquire new visibility and salience—responses that were always in plain view but occluded or overshadowed by the preoccupations of contemporary theory. Phenomenology, for example, allows us to do justice to the widespread conviction that works of art can enrich our understanding of the world without lapsing into the misapprehensions of reflection theory, given its orientation toward questions of meaning rather than truth. It is equally primed to investigate the quasi-magical state of absorption that can befall us while reading a novel or watching a film, a state famously described by Barthes as the epitome of plebian plaisir rather than radical self-shattering jouissance. Ideally suited to thick descriptions of the intensities of affective and corporeal response, phenomenology pays notice to subtle and multi-shaded discriminations of pleasure as well as meaning. It authorizes us, in short, to look afresh at the spectrum of aesthetic experience without rushing to judgment about which aspects of such experience qualify as truly aesthetic.
In underscoring the promise of phenomenology I am, to be sure, expressing a hope rather than reporting a fact. I have found only modest inspiration in a past history of phenomenological criticism associated with the Geneva school, Wolfgang Iser, and (early) Hillis Miller. Such criticism suffers, in retrospect, from a tendency to conjure unwarranted universals out of modest particulars. It takes its bearing from a limited practice of academic interpretation—broadly New Critical in orientation—which is subsequently equated with the experience of reading tout court. It imagines a reader whose response is cerebral rather than emotional, who pursues linguistic novelty while disdaining formulae, who hovers fastidiously over nuances of form and style but resolutely overlooks the socio-political resonances or real-world implications of works of art. Such an archetype of mandarin bookishness falls short of capturing the mindset of the Harvard English department circa 1960, let alone telling us anything substantive about the experience of reading across the social field.
Here, cultural studies provides a much-needed readjustment in its attention to occluded forms of reader or viewer response and the multifarious contexts and conditions of interpretation. Rescuing romance novel readers and Star Trek fans from a history of condescension, it accentuates the difference of popular aesthetics while formulating a robust defense of its value. Interpretative frameworks, intertextual references, criteria of judgment, modes of engagement and affective response shift and change from one audience to another. Whether leaning on Bourdieu's statistical correlations between aesthetics and class, or drawing inspiration from de Certeau's utopian vision of the unruliness of ordinary readers, cultural critics insist that academic and popular response cannot be compressed within a single analytical or descriptive rubric. Moreover, their resort to ethnography and social scientific method signals a decisive break with the supposedly more impressionistic and formalist procedures of literary criticism. Cultural studies often prides itself on embracing a radical contextualism that recasts the meaning of a text as the sum or inventory of its various articulations while studiously abstaining from normative interpretation or judgment. In surveys of reception theory within cultural studies, phenomenology often figures as an embryonic, putatively naive model of the reader-text relationship that has been superseded by more theoretically sophisticated and historically conscious frameworks.
I am not persuaded, however, that phenomenology is rendered obsolete by cultural studies, nor, indeed, that practices of academic reading and ordinary reading should be seen as incommensurate. Ethnography, for example, once hailed as a magic bullet that would solve the problem of theorizing reader or viewer experience, has turned out to be less remarkable and revelatory than expected. To be sure, it serves as a useful reality check for wilder flights of academic fancy, anchoring armchair speculations about art's effects in nuggets of empirical information about audience perceptions and practices. But while ethnography ranges wide, it does not go very deep; the responses and self-descriptions of ethnographic subjects are rarely very revealing. The overarching context and framework of social scientific research, with its questionnaires and interviews, its demographic categories and functionalist explanations, is not especially conducive to capturing the experiential density of what is involved in reading a book or watching a film. We are confronted, in other words, with the classic hermeneutic distinction between explanation and understanding, between "seeing that" and "seeing as," between grasping an analytical proposition and "getting" something by having it described a certain way. Novelists, for the most part, have been far more successful than sociologists or cultural historians in crafting descriptions of aesthetic experiences that are not easily captured in words. The promise of phenomenology lies in a similar potential to convey, via metaphorical analogies, imaginative formulations and processes of discernment, something of what it feels like to become absorbed in a film or lost in a book. Its orientation, in this sense, is neither subjective nor objective, but attuned to the co-presence, communion, and interdependence of self and text.
In this context, overlapping modes of engagement and commonalities amongst readers are obscured by a model of social stratification that splices audiences into hermetically-sealed compartments of high, middle, and low brows. I've argued elsewhere that structures of recognition and self-recognition persist across many kinds of readership, even though the modalities of this recognition and the texts that inspire it are far from identical. Similarly, the sense of being utterly absorbed or consumed by a work of art is hardly restricted to a particular subculture or class, even if this state of enchantment has received only token acknowledgement in literary theory. Rancière's objection to rigidly class-based demarcations of aesthetic experience by sociologists and Left intellectuals is on target; a presumption of absolute cultural schisms and incommensurable regimes of interpretation turns out to be no less dogmatic than appeals to a universal model of reader subjectivity.
This question of the general versus the particular bears on my own recent shift toward broad questions of theory and interpretation, a decision driven, for the most part, by a desire to explore methodological issues in more depth than seems feasible within a feminist framework. But it also owes something to a deepening despondency at the limited audience for feminist work—a sense that, while I see my scholarship as in conversation with other traditions, other traditions show little interest in engaging in dialogue with me.
A ready-made explanation for this phenomenon lies at hand, and it is tempting to chalk up any indifference to feminist work to unsavory motives. In some cases, no doubt, such indifference is fuelled by a conviction that women have little to contribute to intellectual thought. And yet it is not just the retrograde or the reactionary who do not keep up to date with feminist theory, but multitudes of other female and male scholars, many of whom would no doubt describe themselves as holding feminist beliefs. Given the intensifying pressure to publish and to achieve scholarly excellence in narrowly defined domains, few scholars have the luxury of keeping abreast of developments in a multiplicity of fields.
In this respect, the common targeting of universality as an oppressive, all-pervasive, proto-patriarchal norm falls notably short of the mark, at least in the context of scholarly work in the humanities. The realm of the universal, for the most part, remains the domain of the amateur generalist, the journalist, and the low-status teacher of introductory surveys and great books courses. The structure of the profession, as evidenced in the hierarchy of the job market, grant applications, and professional honors and awards, remains heavily oriented toward specialization, whether in the eighteenth-century English novel or cutting-edge queer theory. We are rewarded for demonstrating our academic expertise in defined subjects and methods to small audiences. Feminism, in this context, functions as one more area of scholarly specialization, analogous to the history of the book or performance studies. While the latest publications in such fields are eagerly tracked by those who define themselves as members of the same interpretative community, only rarely do such texts travel across disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries to reach broader audiences.
There is, of course, an obvious exception to this drive toward specialization. In the last few decades the idea of theory has come to stand for an interest in debating theoretical, interpretative, and methodological issues that affect all forms of scholarship, not just some. To define one's work as theory is to make the rhetorical claim that it possesses general relevance. While such claims are often scolded for a putative arrogance based in white male privilege, such criticisms strike me as largely misplaced. To argue for the wider import of one's arguments is not to deny the specifics of one's location, merely to deny that such specifics are all-determining. The effect of such objections, moreover, has been to further entrench a system of academic subcultures and subfields in which scholars write for a handful of their colleagues, increasing the stranglehold of specialization. Such professional trends, in my view, need to be vigorously resisted. By engaging general issues in literature and interpretation, while giving them a feminist spin, I hope to reach readers unlikely to ever open a work of feminist criticism
Such, at least, is my present conviction. But secular credos, unlike religious ones, are not divinely inspired, but fallible and changeable, swayed by the force of the better argument or, less happily, by the winds of academic fashion. For the moment, at least, I hold fast to a conviction that attention to particulars can coexist with plausible generalizations, that contextualization need not exclude careful scrutiny of formal devices, and that political interpretations can only persuade if they also do justice to the felt density of aesthetic experience. And, above all, that we need to amplify our repertoire of interpretative styles and theoretical frameworks by venturing beyond the safe haven of skepticism, suspicion, and critique. Amen.
|
