Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and de Man
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Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and de Man
248Paperback
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Originally published in 1991.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691607153 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1208 |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Aestheticism and Deconstruction
Pater, Derrida, and De Man
By Jonathan Loesberg
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06884-8
CHAPTER 1
What Is Art for Art's Sake and How Could It Be Anything Else?
I ask the question in this chapter's title neither idly nor rhetorically. Misreadings of aestheticism in Pater start with misreadings of this phrase. Only by removing it from its context can critics respond to the phrase with the accusations against aestheticism touched on in the Introduction. Thus, T. S. Eliot takes Pater's view of art to be "not wholly irresponsible for some untidy lives" and specifies that while the theory of "art for art's sake," as applied to the artist, has a certain value, "it never was and never can be valid for the spectator, reader or auditor" (Eliot, 392). Pater's view could be responsible for untidy lives, of course, only if it espoused an indulgence in an art that opposed itself to "tidier" or more responsible activities or attitudes. Such an art would oppose reality and therefore encourage relativism by espousing an interest in its own unreality. But an art that actually espoused hedonism, for instance, assuming hedonism to be one of the causes of untidy lives, would actually be art for hedonism's sake. And the claim that no reader, spectator, or auditor ought to experience art for art's sake, though it espouses extra-aesthetic relevance, does so in terms of the content of particular artworks rather than in terms of art's status as a discourse or mode of perception: if artists ought to have no extra-aesthetic interests in creating their art, then an audience's other interests cannot be connected to the art itself as art; those interests will be concerned with the issues, ideas, or feelings that a specific work of art happens to reflect or represent. In fact, Eliot, not Pater, implicitly contends for a prophylactic separation of art from other forms of experience. He connects this separation with the dictum that one should attend to art only for the sake of other forms of knowledge or experience from which it has first been separated. Pater's sin, from Eliot's perspective, does not involve positing a separation that Eliot seems to take as self-evident but originates in his claim that the separation has value for its own sake, thus turning the prophylaxis into an artificial barrier.
In using the phrase "art for art's sake," however, Pater claims the centrality of art to all other forms of experience, not its separation from them. The problems with the phrase have to do with the basis of that connection. If Pater offers the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance as an "ethical point of view," albeit one that led Benjamin Jowett to label him a "demoralizing moralizer," why would he end his advocacy of a certain philosophical position, even a radically skeptical one, with a statement on art?2 Or, to take the issue in reverse: what is a "Conclusion" promoting an ethical philosophy doing at the conclusion of The Renaissance, a work of art criticism? We may start to answer these questions, and see the distance between Pater's aestheticism and the beliefs of which he is accused, by looking at the famous last lines of the "Conclusion," and those answers will bring us to the core problem with the phrase and its importance to understanding Pater's philosophy:
we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.... High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or "the enthusiasm of humanity." Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, tire desire of beauty, die love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. (Renaissance, 190, 274)
The paradox here is that the value of art is instrumental, but only to the extent that it cannot be perceived instrumentally. Like political and religious enthusiasm, it is good to the extent that it gives us "a quickened sense of life." But it has this instrumental value more surely than those other activities because, unlike them, it cannot be experienced instrumentally, but only for its own sake. The connection between the philosophy of the "Conclusion" and the art criticism that comprises the body of The Renaissance is precisely that between aestheticism and philosophy mentioned in my Introduction: the experience of art for its own sake embodies a primary value to which philosophy, either religious or political, can only refer.
This passage indicates two other elements of Pater's aesthetics and his ethics, and their connection leads to the central working of the perceptual and aesthetic theory stated in the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance and enacted in its art criticism. The first element relates to what Pater values about art. The second relates to Pater's attitudes toward the other discourses he finds secondary. Together, they define the real work of Pater's aestheticism as a philosophy. First, then, "art for art's sake" in the above sentences says nothing about die proper way of creating art, perceiving it, or evaluating it. It makes no separations between one kind of art and another or one kind of aesthetic experience and another. It simply describes what all art does, what all aesthetic experience is. "Art for art's sake" does not refer to the content of art but to the way in which art is experienced. And indeed, Pater has markedly catholic tastes in art; he lauds works of literature by such noticeably "unaesthetic" writers as Victor Hugo, William Thackeray, and Robert Browning. He is, in fact, very rarely critical of an artist, except in some minor details. Even on the face of it, the phrase will distinguish one kind of art from another only if there could be an art not for art's sake to which good art might be opposed. In its initial use, the phrase did have such a reference, one that links it to the more traditional views of art that Pater's aestheticism redefined and absorbed. Understanding the difference between Pater's aestheticism and this earlier version will provide a clearer definition of the workings of Pater's philosophically informed theory.
One of the clearest sources of the phrase is Algernon Swinburne's William Blake. Swinburne uses die phrase, though, in the way Eliot does: "Art for art's sake first of all, and afterwards we may suppose all the rest shall be added to her (or if not she need hardly be overmuch concerned); but from the man who falls to artistic work with a moral purpose, shall be taken away even that which he has—whatever of capacity for doing well in either way he may have at starting" (Swinburne, 91). Directing the phrase "art for art's sake" at the artist, rather than the audience, Swinburne argues that art not created merely to do good on its own grounds can do good on no other. Further, Swinburne cannot mean that the content of this art does not refer to extra-aesthetic, moral, or spiritual values. The phrase introduces an explanation of how to evaluate Blake, whose poems clearly endorse certain religious meanings that have to do with more than just art. But art for Swinburne does not refer solely to the object of perception. Just as he directs the phrase "for art's sake" at the artist's motivation, he uses the term "art" to describe a mode of perception on the part of the artist: "No one again need be misled by [Blake's] eager incursions into grounds of faith or principle; his design being merely to readjust all questions of such a kind by the light of art and law of imagination—to reduce all outlying provinces, and bring them under government of his own central empire—the 'fourfold spiritual city' of his vision" (Swinburne, 94). Swinburne essentially predicts the work of modem Blake criticism since Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry in seeing Blake's concern to be the power of the romantic imagination. That imagination, for Swinburne, constituted the aesthetic propriety of Blake's art, its quality of being for its own sake.
Following the Romantics, Swinburne essentially saw art in terms of a radically separated form of perception, one entailing imagination rather than reason. He thus differentiated art, as a discourse, from science or philosophy, in addition to distinguishing it as a mode of perception in tire artist: "Poetry or art based on loyalty to science is exactly as absurd (and no more) as science guided by art or poetry. Neither in effect can coalesce with the other and retain a right to exist. Neither can or (while in its sober senses) need wish to destroy the other; but they must go on their separate ways, and in this life their ways can by no possibility cross" (Swinburne, 98). The reasons for this separation are clear enough. Evaluating art in terms of the religious, philosophic, and political ends it may have puts it in a losing competition with those discourses. At least in die case of philosophy and any claims regarding the state of the physical world, nineteenth-century science seemed to Victorians a much firmer basis for knowledge than did art or poetry. To avoid this competition, Swinburne proposed a special mode of artistic perception—imagination—and then demanded of art, for its own safety, that it stay within that mode. This version of art for art's sake, this form of aestheticism, does imagine a realm of art that is both pure and in an obvious way opposed to physical perception and the reality it registers. And it may well be the form of aestheticism endorsed by figures like Eliot and opposed by critics of Pater and deconstruction who want to delineate art's political and historical involvement. But, since Pater does not in fact distinguish proper from improper art with the phrase, it is not his version.
Later I will address in more detail the relation of art to science in Pater, Ruskin, and Arnold. Here it is enough to note that Swinburne's separation would destroy the claims in the last sentences of the "Conclusion." Pater there talks about all forms of perception and thought, and although he does not refer to science directly in the last sentences, his earlier remark—"the service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation"—would seem to include science and to evaluate its purpose in the same way. For Pater, art is a primary form of perception among all forms of perception. Since art is not merely the romantic imagination in Pater, and since it is placed amid all other forms of seeing and knowing, it can seem to be less easily justified than Swinburne's art for art's sake at the same time that Pater makes far greater claims for it. Thus perhaps the sting of the phrase in Pater. He can look as if he wants a special form of art, but then wants to measure all life by it. Pater means to sting. His view of the relationship between art and living in the world intends to challenge our categorical preconceptions. But the challenge is not in a narrow definition of art nor in some refined or exclusive mode of aesthetic perception. Pater claims that all art exalts perception, and it does so precisely because all art entails self-justifying perception, and thus concentrates on the general act of perception itself. Science, philosophy, political and religious enthusiasms are not different kinds of discourse or perception but simply kinds of perception leading to other ends; art is perception leading to perception itself.
The second element of Pater's aestheticism indicated by the closing lines of the "Conclusion" involves its relationship to the discourses he labels as secondary, particularly philosophy, religion, and politics. If "the love of art for art's sake" is not a love of one kind of art as opposed to another, neither does the goal of "a quickened, multiplied consciousness" oppose itself, as critics usually assume, to religious or political ideals in any direct way. Pater defines art as a central enactment of a perception engaged in for its own sake to respond to die foundational principles of empirical philosophy. In claiming that, stated briefly, our mortal lives are comprised entirely of our sensations, Pater simply restates more pointedly empiricism's founding of knowledge on physical perception, sensation. This founding claim of empiricism does not preclude our reaching conclusions from the evidence of our sensations about values that transcend the mere obtaining of sensation. For reasons we shall see, however, Pater refuses to allow empiricism's grounding in sensation to function as a foundation on which reliable, abstract truths, separable from those sensations, can be constructed. In effect, Pater finds the form of sensation itself too contradictory to be a firm base. Pater's art has its central value because it enacts the problematic and contradictory sensation that founds empiricism. We will see in Chapter 3 how literary language serves this central role in Derrida's analysis of the foundational reflection in Continental philosophy. Pater constructs an art that embodies rather than opposes philosophy and science; by embodying the contradiction within its founding moment, this theory begins Pater's expansive aestheticism.
Central to his philosophical analysis, Pater's aesthetic sensation also works to include within itself, rather than to expel, other forms of knowledge and the discourses to which they lead. Pater's sensation would be describable as "intense self-stimulation through visual perception, for the moment's sake" (DeLaura, 226) only if he were seeking one kind of sensation rather than another. Religious or political enthusiasms, however, are also forms of experience, forms of sensation, and cannot be excluded from the sensations Pater finds valuable. Nor could any other experience or sensation. Moreover, to the extent that religion and politics become passions, we have no reason to want to exclude them, since passions yield a quickened sense of life. Only to the extent that they themselves either exclude or distract would we want to avoid them: "the theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract morality we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us" (Renaissance, 189, 274). In short, having acts of perception, experience, or sensation as a goal does not allow us to exclude some kinds of perceptions, experiences, or sensations in favor of others. No doubt, from a religious or political perspective, the experience of religious or political enthusiasm as its own end is false to die goals of religion or politics. But one cannot discriminate between die kinds of experiences themselves on this basis. Thus, Pater justifies abstract thought, philosophy, politics, or religion on the basis of the sensations they offer. In precisely this way, he intends his values to include all others. He wants to reduce reality to its component parts, base an ethic purely on the result of that reduction, and then claim that everything real in any other ethic must therefore exist within his own.
In short, Pater values art for art's sake as an embodiment, in its own self-sufficiency, of the paradoxical sensation founding empiricism. He does not deny value to other discourses but rather includes their values within his own analysis of the paradox. Thus, far from showing everything to be relative by claiming an unreal art as die only value, Pater's aestheticism builds an analysis of empirical philosophy from an aesthetic perception. To show how this process of building works, this chapter will first analyze Pater's discussion of sensation as the basis of knowledge in the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance and show how that discussion places art at die center of sensation. Then, discussing his absorption of Ruskin and Arnold, I will show how Pater's philosophic aestheticism included the positions it seemingly undercut. In this process, I will introduce a set of categories—the analysis of foundational philosophy, the relevance to that analysis of a reflexive aesthetic perception, and the consequent and contradictory goal of complete indusiveness—that will operate centrally as well in the book's subsequent discussion of deconstruction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Aestheticism and Deconstruction by Jonathan Loesberg. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. ix
- Acknowledgments, pg. xi
- Introduction. The Aestheticism of Deconstruction, pg. 3
- One. What Is Art for Art's Sake and How Could It Be Anything Else?, pg. 11
- Two. Studies in the Histories of The Renaissance, pg. 42
- Three. Deconstruction: Foundations and Literary Language, pg. 75
- Four. Deconstructive Aesthetics: Literary Language, History, Ideology, pg. 122
- Five. Aesthetic Analysis and Political Critique, pg. 160
- Afterword. Aesthetidsm, Journalism, and de Man's Wartime Writings, pg. 190
- Notes, pg. 201
- Works Cited, pg. 223
- Index, pg. 231