[lit-ideas] Re: Denis Dutton RIP
- From: Torgeir Fjeld <torgeir_fjeld@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2011 01:50:37 +0000 (GMT)
Objectivism as a white wedge: Aesthetics and biology
It is true that the categories of aethetics, ethics and the religious are not
entirely subjective phenomena. As sociologists such as P Bourdieu has shown,
class features as a prominent background variable to determine taste (the
effect of standing "back from an attractive object and a feeling for it and
call it 'beautiful')" (Savoury). However, it would also be a mistake to believe
that this non-subjective ("objective") component is reducible to something
nominally objective in the sense used by the natural sciences. To commit this
fallacy is to fall prey to the white wedge strategy: To subsume objectivism in
culture under objectivism in biology.
In the 1919 lithograph "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge", El Lissitzky shows
how an intrusive red wedge can be used to penetrate and defeat the countre
revolutionaries. Analogously, the white wedge strategy entails splitting the
progressive camp. In our case the way this is done is to entice scholars of
culture with symbolic capital from the field of sciences: The wager is that in
order for practitioners of the Liberal Arts to gain access to the capital of
biology they must in return subscribe to a notion of the objective that strips
it of its materialist foundation.
When Dutton tries to subsume aesthteic experience under the biological category
of evolution he is doing exactly this: Against constructivism he claims to have
found an absolute zero-point, an irreducible core of the aesthetic that lies
beyond any subjective construction, and this core is rooted in the hard
sciences: It is biological evolution itself. This defeatist approach to culture
-- the idea that culture can only be explained by reference to the natural
sciences and not by mechanisms that are intrinsic to culture itself -- could
perhaps in the short term lend some symbolic capital to those in the Liberal
Arts that seeks to make themselves pretty to naturalists, but in the long term
it undermines the very ground on which a progressive perspective on the Liberal
Arts rests: the notion that it is not one ("objective"), but many ways in which
culture is perceived and appreciated and that these ways of experiencing
culture is not reducible to a single
parameter outside culture itself. (This doesn't amount to claiming more than
that there is a specificity to culture.)
It si true that language intervenes here: Even if my subjective appreciation of
a cultural artifact will always be tempered by my objective position in the
field of class relations, any aesthetic experience is always articulated in a
non-necessary, i.e. contingent manner. It is such articulations of aesthetic,
ethical and religious experience that should interest us, since it is here that
we unmask the political character of perception.
-tor
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