Savage, Roger - Aesthetics

164

Philosophy and Literature

Philosophy and Literature,

Roger W. H. Savage

CRITICISM, IMAGINATION AND THESUBJECTIVIZATION OF AESTHETICS

T

he growing discontent

with reductivist practices signals a newcurrent in contemporary criticism’s understanding of music, litera-ture and art. George Levine’s unease with critics who are unable orunwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with literary texts they expose as “imperialist, sexist, homophobic and racist” illu-mines the contradiction fueling the reduction of aesthetics to ideology.

1

Cultural studies that deploy literature as evidence of the aesthetics’socio-historical substance mask literature’s capacity to break open newperspectives on reality by assuming that literary works are politically complicit with the aesthetics’ strategic “mystiﬁcation of the status quo”(

A&I

, p. 3). Criticism’s indifference to its philosophical presupposi-tions exacerbates the paradox of denouncing a body of works that constitute criticism’s aesthetic and intellectual heritage. According toMario Valdés, literary studies’ coming of age mandates that criticismtake account of a tradition nurtured by a succession of philosophersincluding Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.

2

For Valdés, thepost-structuralist realization that literary texts are indeterminate andinexhaustible prohibits replacing the work of art with critical commen-taries on it; criticism’s collective and determining role belongs to ashared community of commentary whose history and thought is arecord of the changing interpretations and understandings of literary texts’ meanings.

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Roger W. H. Savage

Valdés’s claim extends to the ﬁeld of contemporary music criticism, where the fashion of denouncing aesthetics as socially pernicious turnsagainst traditional musicology’s institutional authority. By demystifyingabsolute music (instrumental music devoid of programmatic associa-tions), a self-proclaimed critical musicology revolts against traditionalmusicology’s perceived political and ideological agenda. Critical musi-cology militates against the aesthetic conceit that absolute musictranscends its social construction. Yet, by overlooking the philosophicalpresuppositions that set music’s autonomy against practical affairs, newmusicology accedes to the schema it recoils against.The tradition nurtured by Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneuticsand Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology represents a critical cur-rent whose signiﬁcance has been overshadowed by postmodernist investments in decoding music’s social and political content. Gadamer’scritique of the subjectivization of aesthetics and Ricoeur’s meditationson the imagination’s capacity for invention offer an alternative

tocontemporary music criticism’s reaction against the principle of music’saesthetic autonomy. Gadamer and Ricoeur question art’s formal separa-tion from reality, which belongs to the history of Kant’s radicalsubjectivization of aesthetics. Gadamer’s critique of art’s aestheticdifferentiation prepares the ground for revealing how socially informedanalyses conform to the schema Kant initiates by divorcing judgmentsof taste from their surrounding cultural ethos. Gadamer argues that, by discrediting theoretical knowledge that does not rely on the methodol-ogy of the natural sciences, the transcendental function Kant ascribesto aesthetic judgment lays the foundation for differentiating betweenart’s aesthetic constitution and a concept of truth that accommodatesthe standard of the natural sciences. Through reducing the “

sensus communis

to a subjective principle,” Kant legitimates his critique of aesthetic judgments by denying taste any importance

as a mode of knowledge.

3

Ricoeur’s hermeneutical reflections on imagination complement Gadamer’s critique of a differentiating consciousness that abstracts art works from their cultural worlds. For Ricoeur, imagination is productive when the fictions that works create affect our understanding of ourselves and our world by re-describing reality. Aesthetics’ alignment with ideology encounters a limit in the power works evince by unfold-ing different ways of seeing or hearing reality. Ricoeur’s reflections onimagination stand in stark contrast to the idea that individual worksrepresent a form of cultural capital in the struggle for social position

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Philosophy and Literature

and power. Contemporary critical practices’ failure to account for thephilosophical separation of judgments of taste from knowledge of reality precipitates the impasse criticism encounters when it identiﬁesaesthetics with ideology at the expense of a work’s capacity to affect reality in productive ways. The dispersal and potential disappearance of music’s aesthetic character into the recesses of cultural and politicalanalysis keeps step with the conceptual narrowing imposed by arestrictive sociological critique. Demystifying music’s ideological repre-sentations of gender, race and identity purges romantic and formalist ideals through denigrating the aesthetic. By contracting aesthetics andideology, interpretive strategies that intend to free music criticism fromthe pretense of music’s aesthetic autonomy turn against the power of imagination exercised in individual works.The recoil against the idea of music’s transcendent nature concealscriticism’s dependence upon the history that frames art’s and music’sopposition to reality. Critiques of music’s role in advancing the culturalprestige of socially privileged individuals and groups unmask its func-tion as a weapon in the struggle for social position. Yet, by deconstructingthis opposition without interrogating the schema of Kant’s subjectivi-zation of aesthetics, such critiques impede the recovery of an under-standing of the aesthetic beyond the destruction of its romantic andformalist conceptualizations. Gadamer’s critique of the subjectivizationof aesthetics and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of judgment rejoin culturalcriticism’s condemnation of art’s and music’s socially instituted au-tonomy. Music criticism receives a new impetus by engaging thisphilosophical heritage. Through carrying critique beyond the paradoxof condemning as ideologically pernicious works that enlarge our self-understandings, this heritage offers criticism a different vantage-point from which to understand how, by inserting themselves in new culturalsituations, individual works broaden our horizons.

I

Levine’s discontent with the current literary scene and Valdés’sdiscomfort with critique’s indifference to its own philosophical presup-positions motivates the search for the history that informs contempo-rary music criticism’s understanding of its object. By denouncing themodernist myth of the purely musical work of art, postmodern musi-cologists such as Susan McClary and Lawrence Kramer combat tradi-tional musicology’s isolation of works as aesthetically autonomous

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