The Politics of Perception and the Aesthetics of Social Change 9780231554091

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THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION AND THE AESTHETICS OF SOCIAL CHANGE

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS LYDIA GOEHR AND GREGG M. HOROWITZ, EDITORS

Advisory Board Carolyn Abbate J. M. Bernstein Eve Blau T. J. Clark John Hyman Michael Kelly Paul Kottman In memoriam: Arthur C. Danto Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents monographs, essay collections, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance. The possibilities of critical thought embedded in the arts are most fruitfully expressed when addressed to readers across the various fields of social and humanistic inquiry. The idea of philosophy in the series title ought to be understood, therefore, to embrace forms of discussion that begin where mere academic expertise exhausts itself; where the rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and challenged; and where new thinking takes place. The series does not privilege any particular art, nor does it ask for the arts to be mutually isolated. The series encourages writing from the many fields of thoughtful and critical inquiry. For a complete list of titles, see page 273.

THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION AND THE AESTHETICS OF SOCIAL CHANGE

JASON MILLER

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Miller, Jason M. ( Jason Matthew), author. Title: The politics of perception and the aesthetics of social change / by Jason Miller. Description: [New York] : [Columbia University Press], [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053878 (print) | LCCN 2020053879 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231201421 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231201438 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231554091 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Arts and society. | Group identity. | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. | Art and social action. Classification: LCC NX180.S6 M56 2021 (print) | LCC NX180.S6 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03— dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2020053878 LC ebook record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2020053879

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Chang Jae Lee Cover image: How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies), 2006. Courtesy of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; © Yinka Shonibare CBE. All rights reserved, DACS/ ARS, NY 2020.

For Candace

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

1 The Cultural Turn 1 1.1 Do the Right Thing: Aesthetics and the Politics of Perception

1

1.2 The Cultural Turn in Politics

18

1.3 The Cultural Turn in Art 26 1.4 Conclusion: A Return to Hegel 42

2 Rethinking the Claims of Culture: “Offensiveness” in the Rushdie Affair and Beyond 49 2.1 The Satanic Verses: Politics and the Aesthetics of Literature

49

2.2 Contesting Literary Content 2.3 Contesting Literary Form 2.4 Literature as Cultural Claim

53 59 63

2.5 A Question of Cultural Authority 69 2.6 Conclusion: Expanding the Public Sphere

93

3 Imagining Agency: Self-Determination and the Experience of Art 95 3.1 The Liberal Imagination, Reimagined 95

viii Y Contents 3.2 Cultural Narratives 98 3.3 Aesthetic Reflexivity

107

3.4 The “Appearance” of Art: Reflective or Reflexive? 113 3.5 What Is the Purpose of Purposiveness? 124 3.6 Conclusion: The Social Self

4 The Aesthetics of Recognition

141

143

4.1 Recognition and the Politics of Perception 143 4.2 The Problem of Subjectivity (Then) vs. the Problem of Identity (Now)

148

4.3 Imagination and Aesthetic Reflexivity

158

4.4 Affirming Identity: The Paintings of Kehinde Wiley 164 4.5 Conclusion: A Cultural Turn Too Far?

170

5 Imagination and Interpretation After the “End of Art” 173 5.1 The Aesthetics of Indeterminacy

173

5.2 How Indeterminate Is Kantian “Indeterminacy”? 5.3 The End of Art: Or, Art Emancipated

191

5.4 The “Necessary Anachronism” of Art

205

5.5 Conclusion: The Interrelation of Political and Aesthetic Value

Notes 229 Bibliography Index 269

257

216

176

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

hey say it takes a village. This book—the culmination of over a decade of research, writing, revision, and discussion—is, if nothing else, a communal effort. And it could not have been otherwise. Indeed, it is a long, winding, and unconventional path that stretches from my dissertation to the publication of this book, and it has ensnared many accomplices along the way. And so I owe a lot of gratitude to a lot of people who, wittingly or not, have played a role in the conception, evolution, and production of this project. As the core foundation of this project dates back to my doctoral research, I’d like to first thank my dissertation advisors at the University of Notre Dame: Karl Ameriks and Fred Rush. I came in yelling “Kant” and came out yelling “Hegel,” so thanks for supporting (or at least tolerating) this conversion. The many drafts you read and commented on; the many hours of consultation you generously gave; and the many, many forms of support provided along the way—deserve more thanks than I can give here. Also in this context I’d like to thank the late Gary Gutting, whose commitment to making philosophy more interesting and relevant for a broader audience has been a positive influence on this project, and on the discipline in general.

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And thanks also to Vittorio Hösle, whose quirky and energetic brilliance introduced me to an exciting world of German scholarship. As far as mentoring goes, Richard Eldridge gets as close to the Platonic form of mentorship as one can get, and for this deserves very special acknowledgment and thanks. I am incredibly grateful for the intellectual guidance and camaraderie that has evolved since that fortuitous encounter in Freiburg years ago. These have proved invaluable to many projects, most especially this one. Thanks, in particular, for encouraging me to write the book that I wanted to write. Du bist ein richtiger Mensch. A number of other brilliant minds have played a major part in the genesis of this book. Special thanks to John Gibson and Keren Gorodeisky for very insightful comments on early drafts of the final chapter. And thanks to Aaron Meskin and James Shelley for hosting the Southern Aesthetics Workshop at Auburn University that made these exchanges possible. Thanks to Jonathan Neufeld for offering loads of helpful feedback along the way, and also for commandeering the Aesthetics Work Group at the College of Charleston, which has been an excellent venue for discussing aesthetics with colleagues and students. Thanks also to Michael Kelly for the many conversations about art and politics that have given shape to this book. And thanks to the American Society for Aesthetics for the many opportunities to present and exchange ideas relevant to this project in a productive and collaborative environment. Still others have played some part in the making of this book, directly or indirectly, whom I’d like to thank: Raymond Geuss, Paul C. Taylor, Crispin Sartwell, Anne Eaton, Grant Kester, Lambert Zuidervaart, Tom Mulherin, and probably many more. This work has also benefitted immensely from conversations with artists and friends: Mel Chin, Helen Nagge, Thomas

Acknowledgments Z xi

Woltz, Günther Schaeffer, Jefferson Pinder, Jacob Brault, Thom Klepach, Walter Early, Dave Teng Olson, Mike and Jake Simmons, and all the fine folks at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. I have also had the great fortune of having strong institutional support for my research. A research grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for the opportunity to spend a year immersed in research at Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, and to Prof. Christoph Menke for hosting me. In 2018, the Andrew Glasgow Writing Residency afforded me two precious weeks of focused writing among the lovely folks at the Penland School of Craft. My students—more than they probably realize—have been a central part of this process, both in class and beyond. Thanks to Mina Juhn, Shannon Hebert Waldman, Lukas La Rivière, and Wes Tirey for keeping these conversations alive. And a very special thanks to Sam Morkal-Williams for being an awesome and immensely helpful research assistant, and to Jemma Natanson for swiftness and precision in all the eleventh-hour editorial work. Thanks to present and past colleagues at Rice University, Wellesley College, and Warren Wilson College. Thanks to everyone at Columbia University Press who helped bring this book to light. That includes, first of all, series editors, Gregg Horowitz and Lydia Goehr, for including this work in the “Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts” series. A special thanks to Gregg, who more than anyone has put in the labor to see this thing through, from vision to revisions. Thanks to Wendy Lochner for editorial insight and guidance, and to Lowell Frye for running a tight but generously accommodating ship. Thanks also to Partha Chakrabartty, whose contribution to the book at the final stages go well beyond meticulous

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copyediting. And, of course, thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their excellent and valuable comments on the manuscript. Finally, and most importantly, thanks to my family: Candace, Conley, and Lena. I suppose we all learned the hard way that The Time of Two Toddlers is not the best time to write a book. But it could not have happened without your seemingly infinite reserves of patience, support and encouragement. And so, a special “thank you” is in order to my wife, Candace, to whom I dedicate this book.

THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION AND THE AESTHETICS OF SOCIAL CHANGE

1 THE CULTURAL TURN

1.1. DO THE RIGHT THING: AESTHETICS AND THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION A pivotal scene from the celebrated Spike Lee film, Do the Right Thing, begins like this: A young, charismatic Black activist known as “Buggin’ Out” (brilliantly played by Giancarlo Esposito), having just haggled over the cost of a slice of cheese pizza, is settling into a booth in a Brooklyn pizzeria. Suddenly he pauses, mid-bite, struck by the gaze of portraits featured on the wall next to him. The camera cuts to the wall and we see through Buggin’ Out’s eyes as he scans the rows of black-andwhite photographs: Sylvester Stallone, Joe DiMaggio, Al Pacino, Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, and Mario Cuomo, among other Italian-American notables. Above the portrait gallery, in large block lettering, reads: WALL OF FAME. “Yo Mook!” he shouts to Mookie (played by the youthful Lee), the sole Black employee of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, who is seated a few booths over, wholly consumed in flirtations. “How come you got no brothers up on the wall?” More interested in these pursuits than Buggin’ Out’s sudden pursuit of racial justice, Mookie defers to the boss: “Man, ask Sal.” Sal—visibly

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FIGURE 1.1  “Wall

of Fame” scene, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing

irritated when the same question is put to him—fires back: “You want brothers up on the wall? Get your own place. You can do what you wanna do. You can put your brothers and uncles, nieces and nephews, your stepfather, stepmother, whoever you want, you see? But this is my pizzeria. American-Italians on the wall only.” And the thing is, in terms of rights, Sal’s not wrong: it is his place. It is Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, which, we come to learn, Sal has owned and operated in Brooklyn’s Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood for some twenty-five years. And so, in this sense, the “Wall of Fame” is his property to do with as he pleases. But, of course, Sal’s is much more than this. It is a social space, a gathering point for patrons. In his more reflective moments, Sal is happy to take ownership of this as well, even priding himself on making Sal’s a fixture of the neighborhood’s social life. But, as he also recognizes, neighborhood demographics have shifted. And it is precisely because of this shift from a

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predominantly Italian-American neighborhood to a predominantly African American and Puerto Rican one that there’s more to Sal’s Famous Pizzeria than just Sal. It’s not just about rights; it’s about representation. It’s about the perception of racial difference in shared spaces. For, as Buggin’ Out urges Sal to observe, Sal’s clientele is predominantly Black. “Rarely do I see any American-Italians eating in here. All I see is Black folks. So since we spend much money here,” he reasons, “we do have some say.” It is at this point that the specter of violence makes its first appearance in the film: the ominous baseball bat. But Sal is quickly subdued and disarmed. And Mookie calmly escorts Buggin’ Out from the restaurant as he protests and calls for a boycott. This violence, momentarily defused, will appear again and again throughout the film and culminate in full-blown chaos. This conflict over the “Wall of Fame” will continue because it has nothing to do with the rights of individuals in a free society and everything to do with how individuals are reflected in the social environments they inhabit. Which is why, as the scene ends, Buggin’ Out hollers out to Mookie one last impassioned directive: “stay Black!” His campaign for social change is, to a large extent, a battle over social perceptions. At once comical and confrontational, the “Wall of Fame” scene provides a glimpse into a fictional microcosm in which such seemingly pedestrian interactions are freighted with social and political significance. At stake in this brief exchange is something that lies well beyond decorative choices, the expression of individual preferences, or even the assertion of legal rights. At stake here is a question of representation, and of how individuals see themselves represented not only at the political level, but also at the social and cultural ones, in the course of ordinary, everyday interactions. It is not so much a matter of the

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political rights and protections that individuals share, but of the differences among individuals and the varying perceptions of these differences. As with any Spike Lee film, Do the Right Thing is a “political” film in the sense that it engages explicitly in a form of identity politics. Typical of Lee’s directorial style, the “Wall of Fame” scene shows how even the most banal situations are saturated with, and structured by, an awareness of racial difference. Sal’s Pizzeria is both a multicultural hub as well as a pressure cooker of racial tensions. It is both private property and public gathering space, a volatile mix of individual and collective interests. It is a political film about race that leaves unanswered the question motivating the entire plot of the film: What is “the right thing?” In this sense, W. J. T. Mitchell is certainly right to read the politics of Do the Right Thing as a critique of the view that equates common spaces with shared spaces. “The Wall is important to Buggin’ Out,” he writes, “because it signifies exclusion from the public sphere.”1 The film is political in the more nuanced sense that it shows how the space of public discourse has been inscribed by dominant perspectives. In terms of political theory, it exposes a major blind spot of democratic theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and others who put faith in the “public sphere” as the great equalizer of social and cultural difference. It shows that politics has as much to do with the exchange of social perceptions as it does rational deliberation. We might even say that the “Wall of Fame” scene offers liberalism a lesson: that the ideals of individuality, universality, shared norms, and common spaces is, and will remain, in conflict with the realities of racial representation and social perception of racial identity. But there is another, equally-significant-but-often-overlooked sense in which the film is political. This has to do with the way this critique is lodged specifically within the medium of film. It

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is a political film, but it is also film as politics. Do the Right Thing— and, indeed, Lee’s entire cinematic oeuvre—is predicated on the recognition that many of today’s social and political struggles are still deeply rooted in the way racial identity is perceived (or misperceived) in public. As a work of cinema, it is engaged with what we might call the politics of perception. For several decades now, critics of liberal politics have been increasingly attuned to the ways that race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and other markers of supposedly private interests and identities, nevertheless figure centrally in the various social interactions and institutional arrangements that define the public sphere. But such critics consistently overlook the central role that social perceptions of identity play in contemporary politics. Do the Right Thing disrupts not only the notion of a singular, homogenous public sphere, but also the more fundamental supposition that the sole function of the public sphere (or spheres) is to facilitate rational discourse among equal individuals. The sociopolitical significance of Lee’s film, then, is that it responds to the reality that today’s politics involves the public exchange of perceptions as much as the exchange of reasons, ideas, and interests. Indeed, the “Wall of Fame” scene shows exactly the failure of the liberal trust in the public sphere, as Buggin’ Out’s attempt to make the case for diversifying the “Wall of Fame” is met with the flexing of property rights. The argument that images of Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Michael Jordan also deserve a place on the wall is met with the threat of violence. Reasons are met with a baseball bat. And this failure of deliberative politics is made all the more evident by the fact that the fictional violence depicted in the film spilled off the screen and onto the streets not long after the film’s release.2 In such an environment, where politics is forced out of abstract notions of equality and into the complex and

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fraught perceptions of identity, film (and art more generally) turns out to be a far more significant medium for effecting social change than the traditional channels of public discourse. Put in a current vernacular, Do the Right Thing was showing then what a surge of political protests is trying to show us now, namely, that Black lives matter. Art is also political in the further sense, then, that it does what identity-blind politics can’t or won’t do: it engages in the politics of perception. In Do the Right Thing, this notion of art-as-politics can be seen in the character of Radio Raheem. Shouldering an outsized boombox, the stern and towering figure of Radio Raheem commands equal parts fear, respect, and annoyance as he freely navigates the neighborhood blasting Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” on repeat. Notably, the song was conceived at Lee’s request for the film, and released concurrently with the film in the summer of 1989, several months prior to the release of Public Enemy’s third studio album, Fear of a Black Planet. It furnishes the opening and closing theme song of the film, and features in the film as the source of both Black empowerment and reactive violence. Radio Raheem is the devoted messenger of Public Enemy’s lyrical politics, in which “Fight the Power” functions, as Chuck D puts it, as “a work of art to revolutionize.” At a critical juncture in the film, Radio Raheem joins forces with Buggin’ Out, and “Fight the Power” becomes the anthem for the campaign for racial diversity on the “Wall of Fame.” The baseball bat reappears. Only this time, Sal uses it to smash the boombox to pieces. This dramatic show of force represents not only the destruction of property (a rights transgression), but also the silencing of Black voices. For Radio Raheem, rap music is a way of reclaiming space. And his tragic encounter with violence further confirms the need to vocalize Black interests through nonstandard channels of public discourse. Music, like film and art

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more generally, is thus made a primary communicative vehicle for engaging in the politics of perception. To engage in these politics, then, is to proceed from what critical race theorist Charles Mills terms the “nonideal” approach to politics, which trades the traditional liberal conception of how things ought to be for a sober assessment of how things actually are.3 This is crucial since (as we’ll see) even some of the more recent and refined conceptions of the public sphere developed as part of a more recent, critical response to Habermas (such as that of Nancy Fraser), maintain a troubling faith in the sovereignty of rational deliberation in contemporary politics. The reality Lee shows us in film is one in which some of the most important issues that belong to public discourse are precisely those that are least likely to prompt the general public to rational reflection. Do the Right Thing shows us that when it comes to the representation of racial identities, there is often no conclusion to be reached; only an attitude, a perception of the other that is itself culturally constructed and unreflectively adopted. The film engages in the politics of perception by asking its audience to perceive race in a certain way, which speaks volumes about both the weakness of traditional politics as well as the political force of art. Importantly, however, there are different ways that art can engage in the politics of perception. Do the Right Thing is political in the obvious sense that it is a critical, if not bluntly confrontational, response to the prevailing narrative of a “postracial” America that began to take hold in the post-Civil Rights era, and was strengthened in the heyday of Reagan-era economic prosperity. Indeed, Lee’s trademark brand of racial realism has been foundational to both the successes and controversies of his prolific career as a director. Such pointed critique, however, should not eclipse the equally important, though

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perhaps less obvious, affirmative dimension of Lee’s cinematic treatment of racial identity. The representation of race in film should be seen as a form of political engagement that not only deconstructs dominant narratives, but also constructs new ones. To engage in the politics of perception, in other words, is to critique the misperception while furnishing the social imagination with alternatives. The movie screen plays a vital role in this regard, as it often provides the imagery of cultural identity, particularly where it remains invisible or distorted in the public imagination. I take it that this is what W. E. B. DuBois has in mind when, in his famous 1926 speech to the NAACP, he calls on artists to imagine “the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written.” He then invites them to “turn it around,” to then imagine what it would mean “to write a story and put in it the kind of people you know and like and imagine.” 4 And I take it that Lee, like many contemporary Black artists, is taking up DuBois’s call to reclaim Black identity through aesthetic representation. Given the force of appearance in contemporary social and political life, film— and, by extension, the arts in general— furnish precisely the kinds of representation that we’ve come to recognize as the chief deficiency of liberalism’s identity-blind politics. Supposing the critical aim of a Spike Lee film is to reveal how the presumably shared space of the public sphere is segregated along racial lines, conjoined with this is the positive task of creating that very space in which underrepresented or misrepresented identities are made to appear. In this respect, the politics of Do the Right Thing expands the overly narrow parameters of the public sphere to include forms of artistic expression in which perceptions of identity are publicly negotiated. In the context of art, sensory perception and emotional response are deployed not as a threat to rational discourse, but as a necessary

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supplement to, and, at times, a substitute for it. The film brings Black identity into public consciousness through the back door, as it were, in a way that subverts the limited discursive mechanisms of traditional politics. It is not by the exchange of reasoned articulations in the marketplace of ideas that race is thrust into the public sphere, but by Lee’s effective use of cinematic imagery and narrative. It solicits recognition of Black identity, not by pleading with us to take stock of our convictions, to examine their bases, and their internal coherence, but by giving us a story—“an honest, unsentimental story,” as Roger Ebert puts it in his glowing review of the film, “about those who are left behind.”5 Do the Right Thing takes up the politics of appearance at precisely the point where the Enlightenment-era politics of liberalism leaves off: at the limits of discursivity. Beyond its critical agenda, then, the film is political in the broader sense that it takes up the positive task of showing what can’t be articulated in the space of traditional politics, namely, the particular perspective. In this respect, Do the Right Thing is emblematic of the way that art and politics have more generally come to converge on distinctly contemporary notions of cultural identity in recent decades. The familiar legacy of political aesthetics extending from Plato to Schiller to critical theory to poststructuralism is an enduring testament to the ever-evolving dynamic between art and politics. But this tradition of Western philosophical aesthetics has remained stubbornly unresponsive to the kinds of insights DuBois offers on racial aesthetics, not to mention decades of intellectual work in feminist theory, postcolonial studies, queer studies, Latinx and Asian studies, and in other fields, which thematize cultural identity in terms of both political and aesthetic representation. This book aims to address the growing disparity between political and aesthetic theory within

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that tradition by taking up the question of cultural identity in art and politics. Thus, the central concerns of this book emerge from a particular narrative I describe as the “cultural turn” in art and politics that has taken hold in recent decades. I’ll give a more detailed account of what I mean by this term below, but broadly, what I want to say with the analysis of Do the Right Thing is that it is but one example of a much more general and pervasive trend in recent decades in which both politics and art have been marked by a radical transition in priorities, from abstract representation to the particularity of cultural identity. In politics, the cultural turn is marked by a distinctive shift away from traditional liberalism, with its emphasis on universal, identityblind rights and freedoms, to various forms of cultural politics which recognize cultural identity and multicultural difference as key components of democratic inclusiveness. In contemporary art, the cultural turn is marked by a distinctive shift away from the aesthetic language of abstraction and aesthetic autonomy to the proliferation of artistic practices that aim, in sometimes explicit ways, at aesthetic representation of cultural identity, particularly of the socially and politically marginalized. What follows from this quasi-empirical account of the cultural turn in art and politics, I hope to show, is a fairly robust set of normative claims about the role of art in the cultivation and articulation of a modern sense of self. The cultural turn narrative I offer here, as well as the claims that follow from it, are predicated on the ubiquity of cultural identity today. The once-controversial declaration of a Spike Lee Joint now seems quite familiar: cultural identity matters. It matters to who one is and how one navigates the social world. Of course, “cultural identity” remains a contested term, particularly with respect to difficult questions concerning which features define us and the extent to which they define us. In the context

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of the arguments made throughout this book, having an “identity” is something like having a life narrative, a story that lends coherence to our distinctive sense of self and becomes a framework through which the self is related to others. To own one’s sense of self—to be self-determined—is to be in control of one’s narrative. There will of course be more to say about this narrative view of cultural identity. The main thing for now is to distinguish the particularist way of conceiving identity from the generalist, as this distinction is, in the broadest terms, the basis of the cultural turn. It is a deliberate shift away from the abstract concept of personal identity thematized in the philosophical writings of Descartes and Locke. The important thing is to recognize the extent to which modern conceptions of the self are increasingly articulated in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and other (often overlapping) markers of distinctive, sometimes highly particularized, forms of individuality. And we can appreciate this development—this resistance to the Enlightenment impulse to erase particularity for a transcendent cosmopolitanism—without necessarily having to specify whether some of these features count more than others in the process of cultivating a sense of self. It is this profound shift in the way we think about subjectivity that underwrites the values assigned to terms such as “diversity” and “difference,” taken to be essential to well-functioning political, social, educational, and market institutions. It is this prioritization of cultural particularity over abstract, anonymous agency that provides the legal rationale for group rights in recent debates over affirmative action, the limits of free speech, or religious exemptions to schooling, and immunization requirements. It also provides the moral rationale for claims of cultural appropriation, criminal justice reform, and hate crime legislation and (in the U.S.) the removal of Confederate monuments from

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public spaces. It has manifested in Leftist political movements ranging from the Quebec separatists to the Stonewall Rebellion to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and yet has also fueled more regressive forms of so-called “identity politics” in the form of rising nationalism (e.g., white nationalism), cultural purists, anti-immigrant activists, and so on. For better or worse, who one is, individually or collectively, is largely a matter of highly individualized and sometimes fluid, overlapping identities shaped by forces both genetic and environmental. I take it as fairly evident that contemporary consciousness is to a large extent shaped by an awareness of cultural identity. Far more interesting is the extent to which battles over claims of cultural identity have been waged on the cultural front. Contemporary cinema, television, music, literature, performance, dance, not to mention the many and various forms of popular culture, have become a primary site for the communication and contestation of identity. That Kendrick Lamar wins a Pulitzer Prize for a rap album that celebrates “the complexity of modern African-American life” is but one telling indication of this phenomenon.6 The same could be said of any number of rap and hip-hop artists, the films of Jordan Peele or Steve McQueen, the paintings of Kara Walker or Kehinde Wiley, the creative performances of artists such as Adrian Piper, Faith Ringgold, Nick Cave, and so on. It is evident in the distinguished tradition of feminist art extending from Guerrilla Girls to Pussy Riot to the televised adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Handmaid’s Tale. It is evident in the increased visibility of gay, queer, and trans identities in popular films like Brokeback Mountain, Moonlight, Dallas Buyers’ Club, and in TV shows like The Wire and Orange Is the New Black. And it is evident in the significantly expanded range of aesthetic genres and subgenres introduced to capture the corresponding

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diversification of identity-based art: African American painting, feminist art, queer film, Latinx art, Native art, and so on. Well beyond Do the Right Thing, the past several decades have been marked by the broad expansion of artworks that critically examine notions of race, ethnicity, gender, faith, sexual orientation, as well as subcategories or intersectional relations among these and other relevant identity categories. The central aim of this book is to reconsider the relation between art and politics in light of this decisive turn to cultural identity in politics and art. Given, on the one hand, a sociopolitical shift that regards the recognition of identity as integral to the achievement of subjectivity, and, on the other, the artistic shift that regards art as a primary medium for the aesthetic representation of identity, I think we have to take seriously the idea that art plays a constitutive role in defining who we are. Throughout, I develop the rather ambitious claim that engagement with art is a primary form of self-constitution. To the extent that determining one’s identity is a matter of authoring one’s own narrative, it is bound up with aesthetic modes of communicating the forms and images comprising that narrative. Most importantly, I argue, aesthetic engagement with art is bound up with selfdetermination in that it affords a certain kind of reflexive experience through which we confront and contend with a perception of the self. We appear to ourselves in works of art in a way that better orients us to a sense of individual and collective identity. One reason for this is that art is and always has been one of the principal mediums through which we see ourselves reflected in our lived social environments. But the more specific claim I want to advance here is that aesthetic engagement becomes particularly relevant to the achievement of selfdetermination in the context of the cultural turn. The cultural turn makes explicit that the full and free development of one’s

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agency depends on the recognition of one’s particular identity. From this condition emerges the politics of perception, whereby the self is regarded, not as the finished product of individual, rational reflection, but as the site of an ongoing process to define one’s identity in relation to the perceptions and attitudes of others. Insofar as contemporary notions of self-determination demand that we orient ourselves with respect to both shared interests and identities as well as forms of cultural difference, art holds a uniquely significant value for us today. Bound up with this thesis is a unique set of questions around which the chapters of this book are organized. If, as I contend, art bears such a significant relation to modern notions of selfdetermination, we also have to ask: How should we rethink liberal notions of agency in terms of identities that are, at least in part, constructed and contested through aesthetic (that is, not strictly rational) processes? How might we understand and evaluate claims of cultural identity that take the aesthetic form of images, narratives, fictional representations, musical styles, performances, and so on? To what extent is the recognition of cultural identity contingent on the perception of otherness, and to what extent do the arts shape such appearances? For that matter, how should we understand the cultural authority of artists who give aesthetic representation to cultural identity, as well as the civic and aesthetic responsibilities that come with such creative practices? Conversely, how should aesthetic theory understand and evaluate the aesthetic merit of such artistically rendered cultural narratives? What is the relation between the political and aesthetic value of art? To address such questions, I draw on what might seem an unlikely resource: nineteenth century philosophical aesthetics. The account I develop here revives a view of art’s relation to modern subjectivity that can be found in the writings of Friedrich

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Schiller and the tradition of early German romantics, but which is carried to fruition in the aesthetic writings of G. W. F. Hegel. The inquiry of this book is motivated by the Hegelian insight that who we are and how we stand in relation to one another is substantially worked out in the arena of artistic expression and aesthetic experience. Even more precisely, it is the view that aesthetic experience involves a form of reflexive self-awareness that is a source of both meaningful aesthetic engagement as well as meaningful cultivation of socially mediated identity. It is, then, a Hegelian formulation of art’s reflexive character that I think explains both the sociopolitical as well as the aesthetic value of much contemporary art: art shows us both the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity. This, I take it, is the guiding insight of Hegel’s aesthetics and the basis of its renewed relevance to the present discourse around representations of cultural identity in both art and politics. Art engages the imagination in a dialectic between the self and the other, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Works of art reveal both the points of fracture in perceptions of the common and the points of connection among irreducible modes of difference. And this movement between specificity and generality, resonance and discord, gives us a way of rethinking not only how we engage with works of art, but also how we orient our identities within a modern social world increasingly defined by difference. At the same time, harvesting this insight for the present requires a degree of revisionism toward Hegel’s philosophy. This means, among other things, a willingness to sacrifice particular historical and philosophical assumptions for a more general appreciation and application of Hegel’s philosophy of art to the cultural turn in contemporary art and politics. It is worth saying at the outset, then, that while this book both draws on and contributes to the efforts of several recent monographs which

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champion a renaissance of Hegelian aesthetics in the context of modern art,7 it is decidedly not a standard monograph on Hegel’s philosophy. The argument engages deeply with Hegel’s writing on art, particularly in its extensive engagement with the threevolume Lectures on Aesthetics (Vorlesungen über die Äesthetik). But rather than defend the views of Hegel to the letter, my aim is to cultivate the insights of Hegelian aesthetics to get a better handle on the role that art plays in modern life. I am happy to trade textual fidelity for contemporary relevance if that means connecting with a broader discussion of contemporary art and its relation to contemporary politics. In reviving (and substantially revising) a set of claims central to Hegelian aesthetics, this book aims to engage a broad audience for whom these questions are or might be relevant. Thus, beyond the scope of Hegelian studies and German aesthetics more generally, this book is deeply engaged with current scholarship in political theory, particularly as it concerns the critique of classical liberalism and the emergence of a politics of difference, recognition theory, multiculturalist theory, and similar strands of contemporary cultural politics. With respect to aesthetic theory, the conversation easily cuts across the sometimeswide division between the continental and analytic traditions, both historical and contemporary. While drawing on current scholarship in both political and aesthetic theory, this book also aims to initiate a uniquely interdisciplinary discussion within and among these and similar fields by framing such questions as soliciting both individual and collaborative responses.8 Finally, the claims of this book will be illustrated by, and tested against, deep and sustained engagement with a range of contemporary works of art in which modern conceptions of identity enter into public discourse. My hope in formulating a Hegelian response to the questions raised by the cultural turn

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in art and politics is that it allows us to recalibrate art’s relation to contemporary agency and reconceive aesthetic experience. As I illustrated above, for example, a film such as Do the Right Thing can be seen as facilitating both legitimate forms of political participation as well as rich forms of aesthetic experience in how it aims to solicit engagement with representations of cultural identity. The Hegelian idea that we enact subjectivity in works of art, in other words, gives us a more robust and meaningful way of engaging aesthetically with the representation of race in a Spike Lee film, and the increased representation of cultural particularity in art more generally. As the demand for cultural representation has come to underwrite the political and artistic developments of recent decades, the question is: How does this demand for representation influence the evaluative criteria relevant to both politics and art? Just as the long-standing assumption of liberal politics that justice and equality demand an identity-blind allotment of rights, responsibilities, and public goods is being challenged, the notion that the aesthetic can or should operate independently of cultural politics no longer holds sway. We can no longer evaluate artistic productions without considering whether the characters appear as stereotypes, whether dialogue and plot lines are male-dominated, whether the female body is sexually objectified, or whether the artists, writers, and directors have the appropriate cultural standing even to take aesthetic responsibility for these representations. The Broadway production Hamilton is celebrated for director Lin Manuel-Miranda’s efforts to stage a musical biography of a white American statesman using only nonwhite performers. Increasingly, audiences demand that Disney films take greater responsibility with the images and narratives of women, Native Americans, or Muslims, and commend Black Panther for introducing a superhero into the world of Marvel comics that is not

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another white man. Contemporary cultural phenomena such as these imbricate the politics and aesthetics of identity in ways that outstrip the theoretical framework belonging to what Walter Benjamin described as the “politics of aesthetics,”9 and compel us to formulate new ways of articulating the relation between art and politics.

1.2. THE CULTURAL TURN IN POLITICS Instead of simply adding to an already crowded field of turns devised to package complex historical, cultural, and intellectual developments into simple explanatory concepts, my aim in using the phrase cultural turn is to give it a more precise meaning than it has elsewhere been given. There is, in the first place, the technical, academic sense of cultural turn, used to describe the emergence of disciplinary practices (primarily in the social sciences) specifically adapted to treat culture as the proper lens through which to examine human behaviors, values, and practices. It can also have prescriptive meaning. As it occurs in the writings of Frederic Jameson, for example, cultural turn signifies the sense in which “culture,” once a privilege of high society, is now “consumed throughout daily life itself.”10 Yet, there is a more specific sense in which this turn to culture takes hold at the intersection of politics and aesthetics, which I think warrants more focused analysis. Though common to each is a certain anti-positivist skepticism regarding the purity of practices and the clarity of boundaries—between the objective and the subjective, between the public and the private, between the global and the local— the cultural turn in art and politics is distinctive in the way such boundaries are blurred by critically examining the meaning of cultural identity in particular. As we’ll see soon enough, the

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emerging congruency between art and politics with respect to cultural identity is by no means coincidental; it is evidence of their mutually dependent roles in shaping the meaning of modern identity. Political theory, for its part, has in recent decades adopted a decidedly more critical view of liberalism’s appeal to universality. This tendency has its roots in the contractualist tradition that extends from Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Rousseau, and Kant to the more recent writing of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Political theorists are coming to appreciate what marginalized communities have long understood: that behind Locke’s reformist campaign for individual liberty is an opportunistic pitch for the exploits of European colonialists, that Mill’s championing of individuality as “one of the elements of well-being” paradoxically asks us to check our private identities and interests at the door of public discourse; that Rawls’s notion of political deliberation behind a “veil of ignorance” turns out to conceal the very source of social bias that liberalism purports to eliminate. Some question whether it is even possible, as Rawls puts it, “to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations.” 11 Others question the practical wisdom of deliberating in hypotheticals, as if an ideal of justice could be reached in abstraction from existing structural inequalities. To a large extent, then, political theory today has come to terms with the reality that what passes as “fairness” is not the product of political bargaining, and much of it is forged well outside the space of the bargaining table. I join such critiques in acknowledging liberalism’s historical success in prevailing over oppressive aristocracy and the persistent ambitions of authoritative regimes. But this does not mean that liberalism has made good on its promise to level the playing field. In fact, many of these critiques allege that the anonymized

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language of “equality” is precisely the tool with which gender disparity, institutional racism, employment bias, and similarly pervasive forms of oppression have been able to persist. Even stalwart defenders of the liberal tradition have acknowledged the need for more robust conception of social and political agency. Such “reformed liberalists,” as we might call them, insist that, beyond the usual schedule of rights and freedoms, liberalism’s commitment to an ideal of individual autonomy requires the recognition of culturally specific identities. Many reformed liberalists maintain that its appeal to universal human dignity entails the dignity of certain national, cultural, and social groups. Will Kymlicka, for example, argues that the recognition of “societal cultures” is not just consistent with the liberal commitment to individual freedom, but demanded by it, since it is only within the context of a given cultural environment that individuals make choices about the kind of life they want to lead.12 Charles Taylor, however, is more skeptical that the “politics of equal dignity” in classical liberal thought can be reconciled with the “politics of difference,” which rejects the notion that politics must proceed from a place of unity. Instead, he proposes a politics of recognition, according to which self-determination requires more than simply the ascription of equal rights and a general toleration of cultural difference in society; it also requires equal respect for individual and collective forms of identity.13 The point here is not to evaluate the individual merits of these views, but rather to take note of the fairly profound shift in the way subjectivity is conceived of in political philosophy. The cultural turn in politics reflects a shift from the abstract to the particular: from the liberal conception of the individual as the bearer of rights to the reformed liberalist’s conception of the individual as the bearer of a distinctive identity deserving recognition and respect. These critiques of liberalism form part of a

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broader development in political theory which, though it goes by different names (e.g., the politics of difference, the politics of recognition, multiculturalism, identity politics, etc.) can be broadly designated by us as “cultural politics.” What binds these views together is a commitment to liberal ideals—justice, rights, equality, etc.— coupled with the critique of the notion that such ideals can be analyzed or implemented independently of the specific cultural contexts in which they occur. This critique is premised on the ostensible gap between what liberalism promises in theory and what it delivers in practice, particularly for oppressed or underrepresented communities. For example, feminist philosopher Carol Pateman introduces the idea of a “sexual contract” to make explicit how the neutral language of social contract theory implicitly sanctions forms of gender inequality that have persisted for centuries.14 Mirroring this strategy, critical race theorist Charles Mills argues that this philosophical power play reveals itself in racial terms, as a “racial contract.” In doing so, he explains, “whites contract to regard one another as moral equals who are superior to nonwhites and who create, accordingly, governments, legal systems, and economic structures that privilege them at the expense of people of color.”15

1.2.1. Reformed Liberalism (and Its Limits) Radical as many of these critiques may seem, it is significant that none recommends the wholesale rejection of liberalism; only its reform. At the heart of the cultural turn in politics, then, is an effort to revise liberal thought by way of an internal critique that reveals how its commitment to anonymity and abstraction disproportionately benefits the privileged at the expense of the underprivileged. The first step to reform, Mills recommends, is

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to abandon the theoretical orientation toward an “ideal” politics altogether and instead acknowledge the ways that cultural identity actually figures into politics, both explicitly and implicitly. Rectifying the injustices that occur on liberalism’s watch does not mean dispensing with the liberal ideal of individual self-determination altogether. Nor does it mean abandoning the traditional framework of universal rights and freedoms designed to secure that ideal. Instead, it means going beyond the limited institutional frameworks of politics and situating the conditions of self-determination in the social recognition of cultural identity. But, as I intend to show, it also means situating the modern ideal of self-determination where, curiously enough, the liberal tradition of Western political theory has not yet thought to look—in the aesthetic. In shifting attention from abstract individuality to cultural particularity, reformed liberalism takes part—perhaps unwittingly—in the politics of perception. In pushing liberalism beyond the neutral territory of policies, principles, and procedures, and into the undefined and contested space of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc., it shows that representation is as much a matter of public perception as it is of public policies, institutions, and discourse. Contending with the cultural politics of, say, the Muslim headscarf, transgender bathrooms, female genital mutilation, affirmative action, or any other such identity-specific conflicts of individual and group rights means also contending with the dominant perceptions and attitudes that inevitably figure into the formal political response to such issues. Cultural politics must consider the causal relation between identity-specific institutional measures and public perceptions of identity, as well as the function of deliberative processes in facilitating this relation. Are present conflicts over immigration, for example, a contest of reasoned

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principles or a struggle to control a certain narrative about immigrants? Are the sweeping legislative reforms concerning same-sex marriage the product of, or a precursor to, the corresponding shift in social perceptions that normalize same-sex relations? To what extent is public deliberation of, say, legal protections of native and indigenous lands connected with the public perception of such lands as having a certain spiritual and cultural value? It is at exactly these moments, when institutional politics intersect with the politics of perception, that even reformed liberalism reveals its limits. Its narrow emphasis on discursivity overlooks certain informal modes of social communication through which identity claims are transmitted within and beyond cultural groups. So much, then, for the nonideal approach to the revamping of liberal thought. This oversight on the part of cultural politics also undercuts its efforts to register identity claims within the liberal framework of abstract rights. Even more worrisome is that ignoring the ways that identity is negotiated at the level of social perception can seriously distort the way in which we understand, evaluate, and respond to the claims of culture when they appear in the form of art. As I argue in the next chapter, this is precisely what happens with the political handling of the infamous controversy over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. By framing the Rushdie affair as a clash between liberal free speech rights and group-specific demands to be protected from offensive speech, political theorists overlooked the sense in which it involved an even more basic struggle to wrest control over the narrative of modern Muslim identity. Almost never in the course of the controversy is it asked: What is the status of literature as a claim to cultural identity? What bearing might the literary status of The Satanic Verses have on the clash of cultural rights that it is presumed to exemplify, or, for that

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matter, on the question of what constitutes its alleged offensiveness in the first place? Such questions lead us to even more complex considerations concerning the cultural authority of the artist and how this factors into both political and aesthetic judgments about the artistic representation of identity. Comparing the Rushdie controversy with the more recent controversies involving the Danish cartoons of Muhammad and Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, I claim that cultural authority has something to do with having skin in the game— the extent to which the artist’s own identity is substantially informed by the representation of  identity at stake in the artwork. But ultimately what this demonstrates, I go on to show, are the conceptual limits to which this line of inquiry inevitably leads us. To articulate the conditions of cultural authority or to make value judgments about it entails exercising some degree of the very authority in question. The Rushdie controversy is but one illustration of the way that cultural politics confronts its limits at the politics of perception. For there it encounters the vexing metaquestion: Who determines who gets to determine what certain forms of cultural identity look like? This brings us to the broader issue, taken up in chapter 3, of what self-determination looks like in the age of cultural identity, and the role that art plays in advancing it. It is here that the resources of Hegelian aesthetics prove especially valuable. Because the thing that emerges most clearly from the critique of liberalism is that the achievement of modern agency is bound up with the perception of cultural identity, and the idea that works of art embody “the deepest interests” of humans gives us a firm starting point for analyzing the way artworks such as Do the Right Thing and The Satanic Verses function as significant sources of contemporary self-understanding. More specifically,

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the Hegel-inspired account of aesthetic reflexivity I begin to develop in this chapter offers a way of preserving the liberal ideal of self-determination by extending the concept beyond the constraints of rational discourse. Insofar as modern subjectivity increasingly demands reflexive awareness of one’s own particularity in relation to the particularity of others, art becomes increasingly central to the practice of situating oneself socially. In this way, the critique of liberal self-determination gives way to the Hegelian notion that in works of art we enact our identities through culturally expressive forms of images, narratives, and the like. By reviving one of the central insights of nineteenth century aesthetic theory in the context of contemporary political theory, we are able to reclaim what literary critic Lionel Trilling describes as the loss of imagination in liberal politics. Beyond the space of policy and deliberation, art provides a way of imaginatively orienting oneself within and among myriad ways of being human. In chapter 4, I extend this discussion of aesthetic reflexivity to another, more familiar concept in Hegel that assigns to selfdetermination an explicitly reflexive structure: the concept of recognition. I begin by pointing out that the more recent strands of critical theory advancing the discussion of recognition have all but abandoned the pivotal connection between politics and aesthetics that prompted seminal texts of critical theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, György Lukács, and Hebert Marcuse. Focusing specifically on the influential writings of Axel Honneth, I argue that recognitive theory is especially vulnerable to the criticism that its own objectives are significantly undermined by its systematic neglect of the aesthetic dimension of recognition. If, as recognition theorists readily admit, achieved subjectivity demands more than rational reflection, and demands for recognition are met only in achieving a certain kind of

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reflexive relation between the self and the social world, then the real issue confronting the politics of recognition, I argue, is the way that nondiscursive perceptions of individual and collective identity shape and inform these relations. The key here, I think, is to see that aesthetic experience bears a similar reflexive structure to that of recognition. Works of art prompt us to evaluate a normative dimension of the self–other relation otherwise invisible to or inaccessible through rational reflection alone. By reformulating the political aesthetics of early critical theory in terms of the reflexive character of aesthetic experience, recognitive theorists (and cultural politics more generally) will I think be in a better position to address the perennial concern that recognition is often contingent upon social perceptions that reify, distort, or trivialize particular forms of identity.

1.3. THE CULTURAL TURN IN ART Meanwhile, a similar phenomenon is evident in the artistic practices of recent decades. More or less concurrently with the political developments just described, the cultural turn in art likewise undertakes a paradigm shift from abstraction to particularity. For much of the twentieth century, the dominant narrative of modern (and to a certain extent postmodern) art has been characterized in terms of a gradual dissolution of representation. The grand narrative of art that connects Bauhaus to Warhol’s “Factory” is underwritten by a supposed crisis in representation that begins with the loosening of the impressionist’s brushstrokes and ends with the collapse of the term “art” itself. Whether the crisis in representation is manifested in the purification of artistic practice through the expulsion of content or the critique of representation through mass-produced images, its real

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function is to lend a certain logic to the disparate developments of avant-garde art. Yet, as critics, curators, and historians have increasingly pointed out, the narrative of modern art works by way of omission. At some point, the myth of a raceless, genderless modernism has begun to crack and give way to practices deeply embedded within culturally pecific practices and modes of representation. A growing number of contemporary artists actively resist the modernist narrative that separates representation from the aesthetic and the political aims of art through an aggressive reclaiming of art as the space for cultural expression. This is not to say, of course, that the tendency to claim (or reclaim) a sense of identity isn’t present throughout art history. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is a clear example of art’s taking up the politics of identity, but similar precedents can be found in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the poetry of Langston Hughes, or the music of Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, or the Delta blues. Indeed, examples such as these are plentiful, and are vital to the culmination of similar aesthetic practices into a profoundly influential artistic movement. So it is not in terms of any particular set of aesthetic qualities that we can speak of a cultural turn in art, but rather in terms of the sheer quantity of works over the past few decades that take the representation of cultural identity to be central to art. The same year that Do the Right Thing was released (1989), Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was published by Penguin Press, instigating mass protests among many Muslims who perceived the book as an offense to Islam, shortly followed by book burnings, death threats, and, of course, the infamous fatwa issued by the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the assassination of Rushdie and his publishers. That year also witnessed the fever pitch of the “culture wars” in the

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U.S., marked by the state censorship of Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photography and Andres Serrano’s allegedly blasphemous work, Piss Christ, depicting a crucifix submerged in a vitrine full of the artist’s urine. Meanwhile, the feminist artist collective, Guerrilla Girls, began placing its iconic posters throughout New York City, asking the public “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” And finally, the rap group N.W.A was arrested for performing the controversial “Fuck the Police” track off their debut album at a concert in Detroit. Incidentally, it is also the year in which Francis Fukuyama famously asserted (in that neoconservative appropriation of Hegelian dialectics) the “end of history” in the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.”16 The advance of this political trend within the art establishment was made abundantly clear at the notorious 1993 Whitney Biennial, heavily criticized at the time for its curatorial focus on art that, as one reviewer smugly put it, “shrieks about every last inequality.”17 We can certainly develop a retrospective appreciation for the cutting-edge criticality of these works that was largely absent at the time, as Michael Kelly has argued.18 And we can read such works through the interpretive lens of what Hal Foster famously describes as the “return of the real” in postwar avant-garde art, a form of art-mediated investigation into social conflict in which the turn to identity plays a determinative role.19 But there is a more specific and more important sense in which the most controversial works of the 1993 Whitney biennial are “political”: they engage with the politics of identity. The works of Byron Kim, Laura Simpson, Sue Williams, Cindy Sherman, Spike Lee, Kiki Smith, and Fred Wilson were significant then, as they are now, for their explicit treatment of gender, sexual orientation, and race, particularly as they appear against the backdrop of an increasingly urgent AIDS epidemic and the

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released video footage of Rodney King being brutally assaulted by the Los Angeles police. This specification is crucial, since the controversies that emerge in this art historical context involve a question not about the place of politics in art in general, but about the role of art in articulating one’s particular sense of self. The worry, then, is that if we confuse the general question of political art with the specific question of art’s turn to the representation of cultural identity, we grossly misread what is at stake in such cases, both aesthetically and politically. Instead of responding to critics who disparaged Serrano’s work as “trash” with blanket condemnations of censorship, 20 we might consider the ways that such representations function aesthetically as an expression of the same religious identity its critics perceived to be under attack. And insofar as Mapplethorpe’s work prompts questions about the value of public funding for art deemed offensive or controversial, that discussion should specifically address the status of photography as the medium of expression. We need to ask why artists such as Ray Navarro, David Wojnarowicz, and activist artist collectives like Act Up, Gran Fury, and General Idea, looked to art to bring attention to an increasingly urgent AIDS epidemic that especially affected the gay community, or, more generally, to bring public awareness to the existence of a gay subculture no longer content to remain concealed at the social periphery. It is no surprise, then, that when we ask “Why has there been this cultural turn in art?,” we find that art appears where representation on the sociopolitical front is lacking. Art appears when representation is needed in a way that the usual political mechanisms cannot, or perhaps will not, supply. It is no surprise, then, that when art reemerges from the modern/postmodern condition, liberated from overzealous strictures against

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representation, aesthetic representation forms in direct response to the socially and politically underrepresented. Speaking to the emergence of Black aesthetics, Paul Taylor cites its origin in the failures of deliberative politics: “Having been barred, for the most part, from the spaces and settings that their societies of residence set aside for the formal conduct of politics, Black people turned disproportionately to expressive culture.”21 Similarly, Zina Jardaneh, chair of the board of the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, describes the surge of creative output coming from Palestinian artists frustrated with stalled diplomacy around peace talks: “With the continued failure of the political process, many of us now believe that culture is where we should channel our resources, energy and hopes.”22 These and other similarly earnest appeals to art in the name of identity cut a wide swath in what is now a global landscape of creative and curatorial practices.23 Individual artists I associate with the cultural turn in art include Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Robert Gober, Fred Wilson, Jimmie Durham, Edgar Heap of Birds, Coco Fusco, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Felix GonzalesTorres, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and the quirky artist duo Gilbert & George, among many, many others. Each of these artists deploys a distinctive form of art’s representational force in the ongoing battles over contemporary identity: what it means to be “Black” or “Native American,” “Woman” or “Feminist” or “Queer,” and so on. Collectively, such artists have radically altered how we perceive both the production and reception of art. They have demanded we add yet another layer of complexity to aesthetic perception: that we see “art” not as the neutral, disinterested, “autonomous” thing modernism has made it out to be, but as something that always— even if to varying degrees— appears to us under the  phenomenological conditions of race, gender, religion,

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nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, etc. By making explicit the contest of cultural interests deployed in all aspects of art, such works prompt us to see the ways in which we see the work through the lens of cultural particularity, and to make this reflexive awareness part of the experience of art. And, while aesthetic representations of cultural particularity do not necessarily make for good art, I think this added layer of experiential complexity can significantly enliven and enrich how we engage with art, and can open up a range of imaginative and interpretive possibilities. Finally, it is no surprise that the cultural turn in art has contributed much to the overall expansion of the art world into popular culture. It is no surprise at all that the broadly accessible mediums of television, movies, cartoons, comic books, etc., have played an integral part in extending the sociopolitical reach of art into the public sphere. With the spheres of modern existence growing increasingly isolated and insulated, where else might we find a point of convergence among radically different types of folks but in the mass appeal of easily consumable culture? Popular culture brings visibility to identity. Television shows such as The Wire and The Handmaid’s Tale are the stuff of water cooler conversations, bringing issues of race, gender, sexual identity, and the like, into broader view. Rejecting the modernist assumption that art gains politics only by compromising the aesthetic, these and many other popular contemporary works are aesthetically engaging in the way they allow complex social issues to inform their artistic elements. For the millions of viewers drawn to the character of Omar Little, it is worth considering that part of what makes his character so interesting and complex is the unexpected intersection of identity categories at work in the idea of a queer Black hero-villain protagonist. It is hard to say how this kind of aesthetic achievement measures

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against the success of staking out new terrain in the everexpanding geography of avant-garde art. But it does seem that works of art that aim to represent a particular normative view of the world without collapsing into moralism or didacticism carry the additional burden of having to invest more heavily in their aesthetic appeal. Plato was right to worry about the poet’s capacity to lure audiences from the rational into the sensory. But he was wrong in his efforts to expel rather than engage with the politics of perception. Because, from the nonideal standpoint, we are all lovers of sights and sounds, and thus need to be critically attentive to the myriad ways our world, as well as our place in it, is made intelligible to us through appearances. Contrawise, contemporary critics who advocate expelling the political from art in order to protect the purity of the aesthetic should bear in mind that many works of art attain the sociopolitical force that they do precisely because they succeed in attracting and sustaining aesthetic attention.

1.3.1. The Kantian Avant-Garde (and Its Limits) Just as political theory fails to respond to the cultural turn in  politics, aesthetic theory fails to respond to the cultural turn  in art. Whereas political theory fails to account for the aesthetic dimension of contemporary cultural politics, aesthetic theory fails to account for the political dimension of contemporary art. Only, with respect to aesthetic theory, the failure is not simply a matter of oversight; rather, it has to do with the entrenched skepticism of aesthetic theory with respect to the nonaesthetic, particularly regarding heavily freighted normative concepts such as “culture” and “identity.” For many

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aesthetic theorists, the value of art is not that it represents culture aesthetically, but that it represents the unpresentability of culture. Indeed, such theorists seem to revel in art’s impotence, finding ever novel ways of theorizing art exclusively in terms of incompleteness, indeterminacy, and indecipherability. This tendency toward negativity is characteristic of a wider trend in contemporary aesthetic theory I call “Kantian avantgardism.” This includes a wide and somewhat disparate set of views, but broadly shared among them is a tendency to read Kant’s Third Critique as a discourse on the unpresentability of avant-garde art. Implicitly or explicitly, many theorists turn to Kant in search of an aesthetic progressivism solely on the conviction that Hegel uses words like “Truth” and “Absolute.” Now, some are rightly skeptical of the attempt to ascribe grandiose purposes to art, for example, providing a cultural mythology or a tool of human emancipation. Others are dubious of efforts to elevate art to the level of something sacrosanct, thus cutting it off from the world of everyday experience. And yet, many of the same skeptics have no problem drawing a causal connection between a Hegelian aesthetics of cultural expression and the sinister cultural agenda of fascist politics. Whatever the particular motivations among Kantian avant-gardists, the general sense is that all the perceived ills of idealist aesthetics can be warded off with the antidotes available in Kant’s third Critique. The tendency I refer to is not so much even that of the Kantian formalism that has gained such prominence in analytic aesthetics in recent decades (though, of course, the conceptual language of “significant form” and “perceptual qualities” hardly capture what’s going on in a work such as Piss Christ or Do the Right Thing).24 Nor does it have to do with skepticism in general. In the aftermath of National Socialism, for example, the appeal

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to artistic freedom was concomitant with the widespread progressive reforms taking shape across Europe, particularly with the student protests of the late 1960s. The emergence of reception aesthetics (Rezeptionsästhetik) in postwar Germany literary theory is a good example of an aesthetic strategy of skeptical resistance meaningfully informed by Kantian theory. 25 Rather, the problem has to do with skepticism for its own sake; skepticism run amok. It is the entrenched and principled skepticism, which, irrespective of sociopolitical circumstances, insists on situating the sociopolitical force of art strictly in its inability to represent, that is problematic today. It is the kind of skepticism that regards representation as inherently compromised, both politically and aesthetically, irrespective of what is represented or who is representing. My critique of Kantian avant-gardism is in this respect a historicist critique. The problem, more precisely, has to do with the way this radical skepticism extends from the modern to the postmodern and beyond. For it seems that what began as a commendable call for expressive and imaginative freedom has somehow been translated into a narrow set of avant-garde aesthetic norms against which contemporary art continues to be measured. I am not sure that art theory should still be preaching the doctrine of unpresentability in view of the cultural turn in art. I am even less certain about the move to make Kant the unwitting underwriter of avant-gardists making hay about art’s incapacity to do anything at all. I am not convinced by the skepticism which insists the vitality of the text demands the death of the author; which trashes narrative to treasure the fragmentary; which is unreflectively prepared to pounce on any work of art that does not indulge fully in ambiguity and indecipherability as the unwitting tool of conservative ideologues. This is the skepticism I am skeptical of.

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It is a messy genealogy, but we can identify two basic varieties of Kantian avant-gardist skepticism: the modern, which takes shape primarily in the writings of Theodor Adorno, and the postmodern, as articulated by Jean-Francois Lyotard. For Adorno, the form of skepticism begat by the toxic concoction of fascism and capitalism is that which drives virtually every impulse of Frankfurt school critical theory. The most conspicuous expression of this skepticism with respect to aesthetic theory is undoubtedly Adorno’s provocative-but-overanalyzed assertion that “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”26 Whatever else this vexing phrase is supposed to mean, it is clear that it is less a moral indictment than an aesthetic claim about the norms of artistic representation in the face of immeasurable atrocity. For even though, as Adorno goes on to say, “this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today,” the point is that poetry does continue, not as a contingent fact, but as a necessity of modern life. More importantly, it is the recognition that art carries forth, not in blissful oblivion, but with the searing, inescapable consciousness of horror and the equally damning burden that it must, but can’t, bear aesthetic witness to such horror. Art is neither exempted from nor adequate to the Sisyphean task of representation. So it is not the impossibility, but rather the irreconcilable tension between the necessity and impossibility of representation that Adorno insists on as both the condition and the content of modern art. Modern art, according to Adorno, just is this impossibility to reconcile its residual tendency toward mythical transcendence of the everyday world and its ineluctably disenchanted presence within it. Art does this, not by pointing at the social world, but by showcasing its asociality, by making a virtue of its practical impotence. As soon as art says something it is reified and thrust back into the world of instrumental reason

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where it can be tamed and made complacent. Instead, by way of paradoxical dialectic, art becomes political by retreating from politics, by becoming autonomous. “What is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions.”27 By this logic, instead of becoming political in the grip of tragedy and oppression, art is to become “enigmatic” (AT, 27). Between the “committed” politics of Brechtian theater and the enigmatic literature of Kafka or the atonal music of Schoenberg, there is for Adorno an ultimatum on modern art’s strategic response to the persistent threats of fascism and all-consuming capitalism: either render art legible and thus benign as a form of politics, or work subversion from within by exploiting art’s apolitical advancements in “style.” Adorno’s aesthetic program rests wholly on the certainty that it is only by this inward turn, this explicit rebuke of social utility, sustained by radical experimentations in aesthetic form, that art becomes “socially useful,” that it “criticizes society merely by existing” (AT, 225–26, emphasis mine). To be sure, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is equal parts Kant and Hegel, forged on the possibility of reconciling aesthetic autonomy with historical dialectics. But it is precisely because Adorno’s skepticism prioritizes the sensuous particularity of the artwork in relation to a given set of social conditions that we should be skeptical of setting such rigid modernist prescriptions in stone. Let’s admit that artistic inventiveness and ambiguity come off as a clever fuck-you to the artless, jingoistic kitsch promoted by Nazis. And let’s admit that the capitalist machinations of the “culture industry” favor intelligibility in subversive art because it retains marketability. But let’s also admit that by the same token social conditions may call for an aesthetic response that is not forced to choose stylistic innovation over representation. Adorno was smart enough not to speculate

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on art’s future. But it seems not to have occurred to him that conditions would be such that the dialectic between transcendence and disenchantment would not, in fact, be “inherent in art itself ” but a product of historical contingency (AT, 149). It does not seem to occur to Adorno that sociopolitical conditions may be such that the choice between committed and autonomous art is itself a product of social conditions that favor philosophical elitism over expansive artistic practices, or that the taboos of representation fit neatly into an aesthetic and political agenda that favors abstraction over direct confrontation with particularity. But if the dialectical reading of art’s political character is to mean anything at all, it must mean that wallowing in aesthetic impotence must also meet its limits. It must mean that merely existing is not enough. It must mean that the dogma of aesthetic pessimism must at some point turn against itself, become self-critical in a way that restores at least the possibility of artistic representation that is at once critical and affirmative. But the denial of even this possibility is skepticism run amok. It is the principled rejection of aesthetic representation based on the assumption of art’s inherent vulnerability to being easily coopted by political or market forces. This skepticism winces at the slightest whiff of the political in art, since, as Terry Eagleton complains, on Adorno’s view, “for art to refer, even protestingly, is for it to become instantly collusive with what it opposes.”28 Nor is the modernist strand of Kantian avant-gardism peculiar to Adorno; it lives on in various reconstituted forms. Jay Bernstein, for example, ascribes sociopolitical significance to modern art vis-à-vis Kant’s appeal to a sensus communis as the basis of aesthetic judgment, recasting modern aesthetics from Heidegger to Derrida to Adorno as a collective yearning for this lost unity—as a “memorial” aesthetics.29 Though Bernstein is certainly right to

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diagnose this relation in terms of a modern liberal state that has separated the legal from the ethical, and the public from the private, he is wrong to draw the Adornian conclusion that the only answer to a neutralized politics is the neutralization of art. Precisely because modern liberalism “leaves out of consideration any self that might matter in the way of self-determination,”30 art should no longer content itself with the modernist’s assurance that a strict diet of pure aestheticism is the only way to feed the hunger for a progressive counterpolitics. It is precisely because “our ‘We’ has gone underground” that art praxis has come to interrogate the myth of the identityless subject in both politics and aesthetics. And it is because art objects are “saturated” in precisely the way Bernstein describes that we need not mourn the “turn away from art and the aesthetic toward gender and race” but instead see feminist and critical race theory (among others) as guiding inquiry into why such objects have come to be so thoroughly saturated with race and gender, not to mention the range of other identity concepts that now ineluctably shape the experience and appreciation of art.31 Today, this line of thought continues (albeit in far more elusive and elliptical form) in the increasingly popular writings of contemporary French theorist Jacques Rancière. From a fairly loose conceptual affiliation with the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller,32 Rancière identifies the aesthetic as one of the principal “regimes” of community life in which sensible experience frames our modern understanding of the world. In keeping with the post-1968 orientation of Rancière’s politics, however, he frames art’s relation to what he vaguely terms the “distribution of the sensible” in decidedly antagonistic terms, bereft of the affirmative character that Kant and to a greater extent Schiller ascribed to art. Art’s role is not to “produce collective bodies,” but rather to “introduce lines of fracture and disincorporation

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into imaginary collective bodies.”33 With Rancière, we get the extension of the modernist logic from high modernism to radical avant-gardism. It once again confirms the separation of art and politics, both implicitly and explicitly ruling out the possibility of art capable of speaking the representational language of a “We.” In Germany, this anti-representational tendency is being led by Christoph Menke, who takes up the task of resolving Adorno’s “antinomy” of modern art. For Menke, reconciling the autonomy of art with its distinctly critical capacity requires that we assert the sovereignty of art over reason. Aesthetic experience, in other words, is a privileged form of critique to the extent that it subverts rational critique. The theoretical thrust of this view supplements the negative aesthetics of Adorno with the deconstructionist approach of Jacques Derrida. Whereas Adorno touts the “enigmatic” character of artworks, which closes them off from rational discourse, Menke sees the distinctive function of artworks in terms of what he calls “de-automization,” a disruption of the everyday connections between sign and meaning.34 This rupture makes possible the kind of radically indeterminate and ungoverned meaning-making practices that Derrida insists is part of any critical reading of any text. Menke’s thesis, then, reasserts the modernist trope that art registers criticality only at a distance from politics, and pushes it deep into postmodernist territory where criticality means showing the impossibility of ever showing how things might be otherwise. The postmodernist strand of Kantian avant-gardism takes the modernist skepticism of representation and transforms it into all-out cynicism. As Lyotard himself makes clear in The Postmodern Condition, where modernism appeals to aesthetic form to gesture at the unpresentable, postmodernism represents the  unpresentable by evacuating normativity from aesthetic

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representation altogether, abandoning even the idea of art.35 In demonstrating the failure of representation and the necessity of this failure, the romantic genius gets a postmodernist makeover as an aesthetic outlaw whose political agenda consists in flaunting this freewheeling detachment. But this lack of accountability, in art as elsewhere, is won through an abundance of privilege. A critique of representation is one thing; dawdling in indeterminacy with the unreflective certainty that it makes for either good art or good politics is another—it is cynicism. The most fashionable version of this tendency exists in the persistent attempt to make the Kantian category of the “sublime” relevant to contemporary art. This familiar strategy turns up not only in the context of Derrida’s deconstructionism, but in the writings of various postmodernist thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Frederic Jameson, Paul de Man, et al. But it has also been revived in the more recent work of scholars such as Paul Crowther, Rodolphe Gasché, and Kirk Pillow. 36 Common among such efforts is the tendency to measure the political and aesthetic function of avant-garde art not in terms of what it can do, but in terms of what it can undo. Its formula is simple: for any x, art gives us not-x. In this way, modernist skepticism thus slides into a postmodern cynicism which insists (to quote Eagleton again) “Truth is a lie; morality stinks; beauty is shit.” 37 So, again, what draws these different strands together is a deep and enduring suspicion of aesthetic representation forged from a highly abstract conception of the political relevance of avant-garde art and bearing a (sometimes dubious) connection to the aesthetic theory of Kant. This results, first, in a conspicuous disconnect between contemporary aesthetic theory and the  contemporary practices of art. The ideals that have carried this tradition to prominence— aesthetic autonomy,

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indeterminacy, the sublime, etc.— evolved from an era of avant-garde experimentation that no longer hold much explanatory purchase on dominant trends in contemporary art, particularly those that treat “culture” as a primary site of interrogation. More significantly, this disconnect generates a deeply troublesome contradiction for Kantian avant-gardism that so far hasn’t seemed to register within contemporary aesthetic theory. For it turns out that, much like the political, the principle of aesthetic abstraction to which the Kantian avantgardist is committed, rather than safeguarding art from ideological abuse, turns out to be a potential source of it. Peter Bürger elucidates this contradiction by noting that once the autonomy of art came to imply “an element of the noncommittal and an absence of any consequences,” the avant-garde was bound to fail in its efforts to reintegrate art with the reality.38 Rita Felski, lamenting the present condition of literary studies as one consumed by a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” writes that it is not criticism itself that is the issue, but rather “the kudzulike proliferation of a hypercritical style of analysis that has crowded out alternative forms of intellectual life.”39 Similarly, my worry is that an entrenched skepticism has taken over philosophical aesthetics, and foreclosed on the possibility that aesthetic representation can be an affirmative source of self-understanding, an idea which is no longer taken seriously. Even if the anti-representationalist position can be made internally coherent, any formulation of it will be hard to square with the historical development of art. The Kantian demand for generalizability that the various strands of avant-gardism have come to regard as essential to politically subversive art turn out (rather ironically) to be the least subversive. Indeed, there is an air of conservatism in the expectation that high art transcend cultural particularity, as it, in effect, implies that art is not the

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proper place to exercise our identities. Worse still, in the context of the cultural turn in art, the principled denial that art can represent the underrepresented without sacrificing aesthetic integrity reads as an aesthetics of privilege. Of course, one can formulate this critique in direct response to Kant’s aesthetics, as Monique Roelofs does in arguing that Kant “champions an aestheticization of normatively white cultural forms, and propounds a racialized and ethnically delimited paradigm of taste.”40 But the tendency I want to address is the more broadly (and more deeply) manifested tendency to dig in one’s heels on the theoretical commitment to aesthetic abstraction even as contemporary artistic practices have become overwhelming preoccupied with cultural particularity. The once-promising belief that refusing representation is a more refined and indirect way of attaching aesthetics to politics has in the end morphed into to dogma, providing the aesthete with an all-too convenient basis for refusing to engage with the Guerilla Girls poster that says, in effect, “this is what gender bias looks like” or the Kehinde Wiley painting that says, in effect, that “this is what the Black figure looks like.”

1.4. CONCLUSION: A RETURN TO HEGEL Against this tendency toward abstraction in both political and aesthetic theory, this book aims to give an affirmative account of aesthetic representation as one of the primary sources of modern identity. Beyond the critical task of showing the limitations of this tendency, therefore, is the positive task of advancing an account of art that is sufficiently responsive to the developments of contemporary politics and contemporary art. The cultural turn

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in politics signals the need to understand modern subjectivity in terms of cultural identity, and the cultural turn in art signals art’s turn, or rather return, to the cultural significance of art. It is this twofold development that gives renewed relevance to Hegelian aesthetics, particularly in terms of the way it connects the reflexive form of aesthetic experience with the cultivation and communication of one’s identity. With the shift from conceptually abstract notions of agency to the concrete particularity of cultural identity comes the need to recognize and respond to the social and political force of appearances. The idea that one’s sense of self depends in large part on how (or even whether) one’s distinctive identity is perceived in a given social context raises an important set of questions presently neglected in both political and aesthetic theory. It is for this reason, then, that the cultural turn calls for a revisionist approach to Hegel’s philosophy. Indeed, the Hegelian view of art I develop here applies to the present in large part because the Hegelian view of rationality does not. It is hardly the Hegelian vision of an upward dialectical trajectory from Sense to Reason that connects the past to the present. If anything, we are witnessing the retreat of the universal to increasingly localized and diversified centers of discourse. The present is entrenched in the politics of perception. Accordingly, the philosophical problem of subjectivity that preoccupied Hegel has evolved into the sociopolitical problem of cultural identity, a problem in which the tensions between perception and reason resurface in new forms. No longer compelled by the cosmopolitan ideal, the modern subject seems to have returned to, and indeed embraced, the provincial origins in which its distinctive identity is forged. This is not to cast any value judgments on the present state of things, but simply to register its impact on contemporary conceptions of selfhood. For better or worse, the

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reality today is that we navigate a path to self-understanding through a complex maze of imagery, narrative, symbolism, and appearance. Verdicts are cast, policies shaped, lawsuits filed, headlines made, protests ignited, elections won and lost, even political leaders toppled—all on the strength of identity-based allegiances and interests. The social negotiation of one’s distinctive identity takes place within a public sphere that now extends well into spheres of existence once considered “private” (race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, etc.) and thus outside the scope of proper sociopolitical life. Moreover, this happens through new platforms such as the internet, social media, the entertainment industry, etc.—each of which heavily mediate the form and substance of the negotiation process in significant ways. In order to accommodate the emergence of modern forms of identity, we must be willing to rethink not only the scope of the public sphere as comprising multiple “subaltern counterpublics” (to use Nancy Fraser’s term),41 but also its modus operandi, by giving serious consideration to nontraditional, nondiscursive modes of communication and participation. The cultural turn also requires that we rethink the aesthetic dimension of art’s relation to identity. Despite the critique of the Kantian avant-garde tradition in aesthetic theory, it is worth emphasizing that this does not mean the rejection of Kantian aesthetics tout court. The revisionist reading of Hegel that I bring to the discussion of contemporary art explicitly resists the familiar dichotomy between the supposedly pure aestheticism of Kant and the supposedly heavy-handed cognitivism of Hegel upon which the story of modern aesthetics is typically premised. Instead, the arguments throughout the book are grounded in what I call the “continuity thesis,” according to which the key insights of Hegel’s aesthetics are better understood as an extension and development of, rather than an alternative to, the

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aesthetic of Kant. On my reading, Kant is not oblivious to the social, political, and cultural significance of art, nor Hegel to the value of aesthetic experience uncorrupted by instrumental ends. Indeed, I argue it is on fundamentally Kantian premises that Hegel takes the reflexive experience of art to be uniquely bound up with the process of situating oneself in one’s social, historical, and cultural context. Even more precisely, Hegel takes from Kant’s brief and idiosyncratic but fruitful account of fine art in §§45–53 of the Critique of Judgment the recognition that the aesthetic experience of art is sufficiently distinctive to warrant further inquiry. The continuity thesis thus informs the account of aesthetic experience I develop in chapter 3, where I expand on the phenomenological distinction between natural and artistic beauty initially introduced by Kant. But it is particularly relevant to the discussion of aesthetic imagination and interpretation that I take up in detail in the final chapter. There, I begin by addressing two major concerns raised in the context of the discussion of aesthetic reflexivity—one concerning the political, the other concerning the aesthetic. The first—a version of a familiar political critique of cultural politics—is that the aesthetic, so understood, serves only to accelerate the fracturing of the social world into distinct and incommensurable spheres of value and experience—the “balkanization” of identity, as it were. The other concern is that the sociopolitical ends of identity art threaten the imaginative freedom and interpretive richness that rightly belong to the aesthetic experience of art. I’ll address both concerns by developing a more fine-grained articulation of aesthetic reflexivity as an imaginative exchange between the particular and general forms of human experience and perspective. In this way, I’ll aim to show how the account of aesthetic reflexivity connects the political value of art to its aesthetic value: by showing us both the

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particular element in humanity, as well as the human element in particularity. This account begins with a much-needed reevaluation of the well-known “end of art” thesis in Hegel, whereby the significance of modern art, liberated from its religio-mythological function, consists in its representation of the particularity of identity in conjunction with a recognition of shared human experience. The political upshot of this view is that art simultaneously solicits imaginative engagement with radically different cultural perspectives while also revealing the limits of the aesthetic imagination in relation to an individual’s particular experiential context. Race, ethnicity, gender, and the like appear in works of art, not as fixed stable concepts, but as perspectives to be taken up imaginatively. For the same reason, the aesthetic upshot of this view is that engaging with works of art framed around such issues can offer an imaginative and interpretive framework in which meaning is constructed reflexively through various experiential contexts. I take this view to be more consistent with Kant’s discussion of aesthetic ideas than the mandate for radical conceptual indeterminacy fashionable among many Kant-inspired theories of art. Works of art need not eschew conceptual content or sociopolitical motive to yield deeply engaging imaginative and interpretive possibilities. What is aesthetically engaging about the works of Kara Walker, Kiki Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Edgar Heap of Birds, Robert Mapplethorpe, and countless others, is not that they enable infinitely expandable interpretive and imaginative possibilities, but rather that they guide reception to conceptual content and ask the spectator to contend with it as aesthetic representation. Naturally, one has to be skeptical of any absolutist or essentialist notions of identity that figure into either the theory or the practice of contemporary art. But this need not discount the

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possibility of representation altogether, particularly where the aesthetic representation emerges in response to the failures of the political. Indeed, aesthetic representation is often leveraged as a critique of hegemonic notions of culture that thrive on the politics of abstraction. But a principled skepticism, taken too far, precludes this possibility, as well as the possibility of affirming identity through forms of aesthetic representation that point to new and different (and decidedly pluralistic) ways of perceiving cultural particularity not available in discursive practices. For this reason, the critique of Kantian avant-gardism extends well beyond the aesthetic. The insistent prioritization of aesthetic negativity over the aesthetic value of cultural expression is symptomatic of an identity-blind approach to aesthetics, which, much like liberal political theory, threatens to perpetuate in aesthetic theory the kind of misrecognition that the turn to culture in artistic practice aims to address. As politics becomes aesthetic, and aesthetics becomes political, such questions demand a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach. The cultural turn prompts new conversations within and among otherwise disparate and disconnected fields of scholarly inquiry, particularly between contemporary cultural politics and contemporary philosophical aesthetics. The distinct task of this book is to provide a clearer understanding of the reflexive character of aesthetic experience, which in turn can account for both the aesthetic dimensions of contemporary cultural politics, and the political dimensions of contemporary art. Accordingly, each chapter of the book focuses on a specific aspect of the current discussion of cultural identity and shows where the Hegelian notion of art as a form of reflexive self-awareness can be distinctly relevant and valuable: the function of art in achieving the political ideal of self-determination; the recognition of individual and collective forms of identity through various

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artistic media; the importance of aesthetic imagination in shaping a politics of cultural difference; art’s capacity to reconcile the particularity of identity with the possibility of social cohesion; and, finally, the capacity of art to make use of identity concepts while allowing such concepts to remain fluid and contestable.

2 RETHINKING THE CLAIMS OF CULTURE “Offensiveness” in the Rushdie Affair and Beyond

“Stories are a communal currency of humanity.” —Tahir Shah, in Arabian Nights

2.1. THE SATANIC VERSES: POLITICS AND THE AESTHETICS OF LITERATURE The sequence of dramatic events that unfolded in the short aftermath of the 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was read by many political theorists as a moment of reckoning for classical liberalism. The protests, the book burnings, the legal proceedings, the violence (both real and threatened), and, of course, the infamous fatwa issued by the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the assassination of Rushdie and the publishers at Penguin press—all of these televisionready events turned the world’s eye to what seemed to be an irreconcilable clash of rights. On the one side was Rushdie, exercising his right to pen a literary satire of the Prophet Muhammad’s life, as told in the Quran. On the other was a sizable community of Muslims proclaiming a right to be protected from what they felt was an unacceptable offense against the Islamic

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faith. In effect, the Rushdie affair made explicit one of the implicit tensions of modern liberal thought: does everyone’s right to free speech entail a right to offend a few? It exhumed the perennial conundrum— Can liberalism tolerate even illiberal practices?—in a way that seemed to expose the frayed seams of modern liberal thought. More generally, it revealed the limits of the presumption that liberal, identity-blind rights prevail over the demands of particular cultural groups. It is hardly coincidental that the cultural turn in politics that began to question this presumption emerged within the political context of the Rushdie affair. It seemed to provide just the right impetus for a new and more inclusive politics that declared cultural identity integral to modern political agency. And ever since, the Rushdie affair has served as a kind of litmus test for cultural politics, a way to measure the viability of the various theoretical attempts to resolve the dilemma in liberal thought it exposed. Among these theories, one finds considerably different perspectives on the politics of the Rushdie affair. Will Kymlicka, for one, defends Rushdie on more traditionally liberal grounds, arguing that while some cultural groups may be afforded protection from certain external harms and offenses, no group has the right to impose “internal restrictions” that would prevent its members from criticizing or challenging its practices and precepts.1 Jürgen Habermas argues similarly, but more generally, that any open society has not only the right but the responsibility to deny any ideology predicated on fundamentalist notions of exclusiveness and infallibility. 2 Other liberal theorists disagree. Tariq Modood, for example, argues that the debate over The Satanic Verses is not an intracommunity affair among Muslims, but a Western attack on the religious beliefs and values of Islam.3 Considerable disagreement over the Rushdie affair can

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be found in the communitarian camp as well. Echoing Modood’s position, Charles Taylor disparages The Satanic Verses as “a profoundly Western book,” 4 while Michael Walzer defends the stronger view, held by many other committed liberalists, that free speech is an absolute and irrevocable right, regardless of whether the views or the language of the book are considered insulting or offensive to deeply held religious beliefs. 5 Meanwhile, Jeremy Waldron agrees that the social value of free speech overrides other group-specific claims, but for very different (and decidedly noncommunitarian) reasons,6 while Catriona McKinnon upholds the same view from a principle of liberal toleration.7 Yet nowhere in the broad constellation of political views that have formed around the Rushdie controversy over the past several decades is there any serious consideration of the fact that The Satanic Verses—the very source of the controversy—is a work of literary fiction, or that the offensive language in question is the language of literature. Thus, with respect to the alleged offensiveness of the novel, one might reasonably ask: What bearing does the literary status of The Satanic Verses have on the understanding and evaluation of such charges? It may be that such questions are seen as peripheral to the central political problem concerning the limits of free speech. I will argue in this chapter, however, that how one conceives of the political problem presented by the Rushdie affair, and the political conclusions one draws from it, significantly depend on the aesthetic claims entailed. The first concerns the question of what one takes The Satanic Verses to be doing as a work of literature. The further claim concerns the question of what one takes to be the roles and responsibilities of Rushdie as the author of the work in question. More precisely, I’ll develop the following set of claims, and show (in ascending order of significance) how the aesthetic issue at

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stake in each bears on the political question of “offensiveness” at stake in the Rushdie affair: 1.

The language of literary fiction relies on certain aesthetic norms, distinguishable from those of ordinary propositional language, which have a distinct bearing on the interpretation and critical evaluation of literary works.

2.

Apart from other functions a work of literature may have (e.g., critique), it can function meaningfully as a cultural claim, that is, a claim for recognition of cultural identity expressed in literary form.

3.

Artists can exhibit varying degrees of authority in treating different forms of cultural identity as the subject matter of artistic production, whether in critiquing them or affirming them.

In pursuing this line of inquiry, I want to make clear from the outset that my aim is not so much to involve myself in the politics of the Rushdie affair as to develop a kind of metacritique of the way the controversy has been framed by political theorists, both critics and proponents alike. If one takes seriously the novel’s function as a form of cultural claim, I argue, then the conflict is not, as it is typically framed, between Western liberal free speech rights and the cultural rights of an offended religious minority, but rather between fundamentally opposed conceptions of modern Muslim identity: the fundamentalist concept of “Muslim,” and the hybrid, cultural concept of “Muslim.” Framing the debate in this way makes clear the extent to which the controversy is rooted in the politics of perception. Specifically, the political conflict is rooted in the perception of cultural authority as it relates to Islamic identity. This becomes evident in the final section, where I examine the Rushdie affair in relation to more recent high-profile controversies similarly situated

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at the intersection of art and politics: the Danish cartoon controversy and Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till. Although relevant normative differences begin to emerge from this comparative analysis, it more significantly shows the concept of cultural authority to be resistant to the kind of discursive treatment that even a reformed liberalism applies to conflicts over cultural identity. Thus, the key takeaway from this discussion (which sets up the discussion of subsequent chapters) is that the Rushdie affair, by revealing the limits of liberal discursive politics, shows how the liberal ideal of self-determination entails a crucial but often overlooked aesthetic dimension. It shows that, at a certain point, the normative dimension of cultural identity outstrips discursive analysis, and the politics of deliberation extends into the politics of perception.

2.2. CONTESTING LITERARY CONTENT Criticism of The Satanic Verses varies widely in scope and intensity, from the popular to the scholarly, from the reasoned to the reactionary. But at the center of the controversy is a question concerning the offensiveness of the novel. Initial complaints, led by a relatively small group of British Muslims, soon precipitated the infamous book burnings in the heavily Muslim city of Bradford, UK, which in turn attracted the attention of Muslim leaders in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran. Those claiming to be offended by the novel overwhelmingly cited the sacrilegious character of the novel’s contents. Shortly after its publication, the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, UK, picked out the offending passages of The Satanic Verses and distributed them to various Muslim organizations in an effort to coordinate legal action against Rushdie and his

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publishers. Similarly, the Islamic Defence Council appealed directly to Penguin/Viking Press to halt publication of the novel with a petition that catalogued a specific set of passages deemed offensive: The book calls Abraham, the revered Prophet of Jews, Christians, Muslims alike, “the bastard.” The Blessed Prophet Muhammad is given the Middle Ages’ name of “Mahound” (The word means “devil” or a “false Prophet”). —He is a man who “had not time for scruples.” —He was “no angel, you understand . . . !” —The revelations he received were well-timed to suit him when “the faithful were disputing.” —His companions are described as “bum” and “scum.” —The namesakes of his wives are sited in a brothel with all the literary pornography that would go with such a locale. —The Islamic Holy City of Makkah is a city of Jahilia— of ignorance or darkness. —The Muslim “God . . . sounded so much like a businessman” and “the Islamic Shari’ah was about every damn thing.” — Sodomy and the missionary position were approved by the archangel.

Setting aside some of the more overzealous and conspiracyladen responses that tended to draw the attention of Western media, as well as the ostensibly political motivations of many Muslim clerics in ginning up populist indignation against Rushdie, one has to take seriously the protests of an international community of Muslims who claimed to be profoundly offended by these and similarly controversial passages in The Satanic Verses. There are at least two different ways of assessing the allegation of the offensiveness of such passages. One is to proceed

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empirically, from the observation that, in fact, many Muslims claimed to be offended by the work, to some sort of political diagnosis of what should be done about the offense. This strategy is implicit in the way the Rushdie affair was widely framed as an irreconcilable dilemma: Should Muslims be expected to suffer the egregious insults of an author against their deeply and sincerely held religious beliefs, or should Rushdie be expected to tame literary language found offensive by Muslims? Another way to proceed is from the normative question as to whether critics should feel offended by the novel’s contents— that is, whether such judgments are warranted. This approach proceeds from the acknowledgment of a basic distinction between “offensiveness” in the context of literature and “offensiveness” in the context of everyday language. Surely, any judgment about the language of the novel, whether it pertains to the political implications of offensive language or the evaluation of its offensiveness more generally, will depend in part on  the kind of thing we take The Satanic Verses to be and the kind of language in question. And if that is the case, then any political judgments about the Rushdie affair will to some extent be bound up with aesthetic judgments about the literary character of the novel. So, what kind of a thing is The Satanic Verses? It is, of course, a work of literary fiction. More precisely, it is a fictional narrative closely resembling the life of the Prophet Muhammad as told in the holy Quran, but radically altered through historical recontextualization and a heavy dose of magical realism. One seemingly obvious way to delineate the literary language of fiction from ordinary propositional language is to say that the latter is held to standards of truth and falsity whereas the former is not. In this way, one might exempt fiction from the norms of veridicality simply on the basis of the kind of thing literary

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fiction is. And, indeed, the kinds of complaints often lodged against The Satanic Verses seem to conflate this basic distinction between literary and propositional language. A reviewer for the well-regarded Iranian literary journal, Kayhan Farangi, proclaims that “The Satanic Verses contains a number of false interpretations about Islam and gives wrong portrayals of the Koran and the Prophet Mohamed.” 8 Another critic maintains that Rushdie obviously “is not interested in presenting a sincere exploration into reality,” but then goes on to ask, “How could the two characters Gibreel (Gabriel) and Saladin fall from the sky and still be alive?”9 Similarly, many theologians accused Rushdie of engaging in a dangerous form of historical revisionism. The grand sheikh of Cairo’s premiere Al-Azhar institute of Islamic Studies urged British Muslims to take legal action against Rushdie on the grounds that the novel contained “lies and figments of the imagination” about Islam, which were then “passed off as facts.”10 Perhaps there is some basic confusion here to sort out. But claiming that the controversy rests on “one of the biggest category mistakes in literary history” doesn’t seem enough to make the controversy go away.11 It’s not clear that reaffirming the obvious (if not tautological) point that fiction isn’t truth will deflect the criticism that The Satanic Verses misrepresents the truth of Islam. Far more than simply a category error about the kind of thing that literary fiction is, these criticisms are rooted in a deeper acknowledgement about the way that art relates to the values and beliefs present in the real world—an acknowledgment that Rushdie himself of course shares. Critics are in this sense right not to categorize The Satanic Verses as just a work of fiction; its claim to truth is, in effect, comparable to, and thus in competition with, that of religion—it is “true” in the sense that it provides a grounding narrative of Muslim identity. The source

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of the controversy, then, is not an ontological difference between the language of truth and the language of fiction, but a difference in perceptions of Muslim identity. At stake are not competing rights, but competing narratives. As to whether the narrative presented in The Satanic Verses warrants the offense alleged, there are, of course, any number of considerations to be made that are specific to the language of literary fiction. One might consider, first, the range of perspectival differences represented in the novel. One relevant difference is that, unlike ordinary language, where we can typically keep track of where and how to attribute meaning to speakers (for example, by distinguishing use from reference), a trademark of literary language is that it reflects multiple perspectives, not all of which (perhaps even none of which) are attributable to the author. The language found in a literary text may emerge from the author’s imagination, but in a distinctly literary sense it belongs to a certain character, or cast of characters, whom the author introduces to represent the various perspectives comprising the fictional world of the novel. The space of fiction thus functions as an imaginative space wherein, as Rushdie himself explains it, “many world-views jostle and conflict with the writer.”12 Given the kinds of interpretive demands made by the language of literary fiction, one might argue that judgments of offensiveness cannot be made on the basis of the novel’s content alone. Given how the language of the novel is contextualized by the complex interplay of perspectives and the evolution of characters throughout the narrative, one might find reason to question the view that it is obviously offensive. One can doubt, for example, Tariq Modood’s claim that “all the religious zealots had to do was simply quote from SV for anger, shame and hurt to be felt.”13 With respect to the offending passages cited above,

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one could point out, for example, that while it is true that “Mahound” is described in the novel as a “conjurer” and “false prophet,” these turn out to be the drunken utterances of a disgraced nonbeliever. One could likewise argue that, while Muhammad’s companions are characterized as “bum” and “scum” and “riff-raff” and so on, such insults are spoken by Abu Simbel, the idolatrous Grandee who, standing to lose much wealth and status by the growing popularity of the new god Allah, has undertaken an elaborate propaganda campaign against the Prophet and his coterie. (One could even argue in Rushdie’s defense that the insults that emerge from this duplicitous scheme capture the very sense of religious persecution of historical Islam that Rushdie’s critics attribute to him.) Finally, one could argue that Rushdie’s depiction of Gibreel Farishta, the archangel who “was no angel” as a pork-eating philanderer with a crudely entrepreneurial approach to his faith, only makes sense in the context of the literary narrative as a whole, and bears no relation to the archangel in scripture. When one asks about the character Gibreel in the narrative, one finds him paying the price for his profligacy, sliding from sacrilege to depression, torment, and ultimately suicide as he finds himself unable to enact the demands of his faith. And, one could argue, that changes how one gauges the offensiveness of the novel. Indeed, one could argue this way indefinitely, since the purportedly offensive content of these passages is intimately bound up with a variety of distinctly literary features of the text. But this would not address more sophisticated objections premised on the relation of literary content to literary form. As we’ll see in the next section, these objections are more resistant to efforts to mitigate the offending passages of The Satanic Verses by contextualizing them in the narrative, for they turn on the subtle insight that the language of literature, as with everyday

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propositional language, generates meaning not only by what is said but also how it is said.

2.3. CONTESTING LITERARY FORM The extent to which political judgments about the Rushdie affair are contingent upon aesthetic judgments about the The Satanic Verses becomes even clearer with respect to accusations of offensiveness concerning the style or manner of expression in the novel, rather than simply its content. Consider, in the first place, how aesthetic considerations informed the legal rationale behind British Muslims’ attempts to bring legal charges against Rushdie. The strategy was to extend existing blasphemy laws in the UK to include protections against blasphemous speech about Islam. The law stipulates: Every publication is said to be blasphemous which contains any contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous matter relating to God, Jesus Christ, or the Bible, or the formularies of the Church of England as by law established. It is not blasphemous to speak or publish opinions hostile to the Christian religion, or to deny the existence of God, if the publication is couched in decent and temperate language. The test to be applied is as to the manner in which the doctrines are advocated and not as to the substance of the doctrines themselves. Everyone who publishes any blasphemous document is guilty of the (offence) of publishing a blasphemous libel. Everyone who speaks blasphemous words is guilty of the (offence) of blasphemy.14

Two observations are relevant here. First, the UK blasphemy law, a vestige of medieval canon law, still applies only to offenses

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against Christianity (thus a clear indication of the limited legal means of redress). Further, the law clearly locates the offensiveness of blasphemy primarily in the manner rather than the content of speech. That is, the nature of the offense has as much to do with how religion is discussed in public as it does with what is discussed. Indeed, the law even explicitly stipulates that views “hostile” to Christianity do not necessarily count as blasphemous; what counts is whether or not such views are expressed in “decent and temperate” language. By extension, the legal case against Rushdie emphasizes the tone and manner of the novel’s language over its content. Applied to a work of literary fiction, the argument carries certain assumptions about the literary use of language. It raises the aesthetic question: What is it about the language of The Satanic Verses that makes it so offensive? Of the extant literature on the Rushdie affair, Bhikhu Parekh is one of very few to address this question directly. Parekh offers a strongly worded rebuke of Rushdie’s treatment of Islam, but one grounded in a serious analysis of its literary context, giving particular attention to the relation between the form and content of the novel. In Parekh’s view, The Satanic Verses exhibits a mocking, disrespectful manner and tone of expression. This he locates specifically in Rushdie’s use of magical realism—a genre known for its flare for the fantastical and supernatural—to depict actual beliefs, events, and personages central to the Islamic faith. “If the writer is not careful,” he admonishes: he or she might end up treating recognizable men and women as mere objects of fantasies, as manipulable material for the free play of his imagination. He might then become not just disrespectful and irreverent but supercilious and dismissive, a shade crude and even perhaps exhibitionist, scoring cheap points off half-real

Rethinking the Claims of Culture Z 61 characters. If he seeks to explore religion, he runs the further risk of violating its integrity, even vulgarizing it, and outraging conventional norms of good taste.15

Clearly, Parekh’s critique of The Satanic Verses commits no category error. Nor is it couched in reactionary antipathy to religious critique. He readily acknowledges that the novel’s language should be gauged by the standards of literary rather than literal expression. But because the contents of the novel “reflect bad taste and handle a great theme in a somewhat crude, abusive and offensive language,” he ultimately concludes that Muslims were right to protest against the book.16 What is revealing about Parekh’s critique is the way it draws a political conclusion ( justified protest against The Satanic Verses) from aesthetic judgments about the novel (its style being inappropriate to its content). More precisely, the aesthetic claim goes something like this: The characters and events of the novel bear such close resemblance to the characters and events depicted in  the Quran that it is effectively addressed to the sincerely held beliefs of actual Muslims. And in depicting such sincerely held beliefs through the satirical literary lens of magical realism, the novel effectively makes a mockery of the Islamic faith and its followers. The underlying premise of this argument, of course, is that literary form should be appropriate to literary content. It is in violating this aesthetic norm, then, that Parekh claims that The Satanic Verses demonstrates “poor literary judgement” on Rushdie’s part.17 This premise warrants further discussion. Intuitively, it does seem right to say in general that certain kinds of subject matter place certain kinds of constraints on how they are treated aesthetically. Maybe it’s not impossible for a slapstick comedy to address the horrors of genocide, but prima facie there’s good

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reason to think it aesthetically inappropriate. In this respect, Parekh’s criticism of the novel’s stylistic treatment of Islam bears some affinity to the modernist strand of Kantian avant-gardism that eyes aesthetic realism with deep suspicion. Similar to Adorno, Parekh is troubled by the proximity of the literary to the actual world, specifically the novel’s “relatively low level of abstraction” in narrative variation on events found in the Quran.18 After all, he reasons, Rushdie “could have easily handled the theme in a manner that did not bear such a close historical resemblance to historical Islam.”19 The question to ask, then, is this: What degree of abstraction from historical particularity would suffice to blunt its critical sting? Or, more pointedly: Why is any degree of abstraction necessary for art? Quite unlike the Kantian avant-gardist, who sees art’s distance from the real world as an essential critical strategy, Parekh insists on maintaining this distance because he sees religious belief as the kind of identity-affirming value that needs to be spared from the critical sting of art. Insofar as religious faith is a primary source of identity, integral to many individuals’ sense of self, Parekh thinks it ought not be subject to the satirical jabs of literature. On the general point, Parakh is absolutely right: the aesthetic context isn’t wholly immune from nonaesthetic norms. Just as a racist joke is no less racist because it’s “ just a joke,” nor is a work of art exempt from basic norms of decency and morality simply because it’s “ just art.” Parekh is also right to frame judgments of offensiveness around those elements of human life that, like religion, ground individuals’ sense of self and worth. In the next section, I’ll argue that this is precisely the sense in which we can proclaim certain works of art to fail both morally and aesthetically. On the particular point concerning the Rushdie affair, however, I want to say that there is at least some reason to suspend

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judgment about the offensiveness of The Satanic Verses. The reason, as I will argue, is that it is at least possible to think The Satanic Verses (like many works of art) functions not only as a mode of critique but also as a means of grounding oneself within a particular cultural narrative, much the way religion does. The argument that a work of art such as The Satanic Verses is morally and aesthetically obliged to maintain a certain distance from religion holds only on the assumption that there is a fundamental difference between art and religion in terms of their capacity to ground modern identity within a cultural narrative. But it is precisely this assumption that needs to be examined by critics and defenders of Rushdie alike. More precisely, what needs to be examined is the perception of religion as holding a privileged status among identity-making cultural practices. Isn’t it at least possible that works of art such as The Satanic Verses constitute an equal claim to cultural identity? If so, then even Parekh’s more sophisticated critique overlooks the extent to which the Rushdie affair is bound up with the politics of perception. For this reason, the controversy won’t be settled either by political brokering between individual and group rights, nor by a cultural defense of religion’s hallowed grounds. Instead, the complex cultural politics of the Rushdie affair require that we confront and examine what Rushdie’s reactionary critics understood all too well—that literature is indeed a potent expression of cultural identity.

2.4. LITERATURE AS CULTURAL CLAIM We’ve just seen that one response to the Rushdie affair is to criticize The Satanic Verses for its proximity to the real world of sincerely held beliefs and values. Another response is to defend The Satanic Verses as being safely enough removed from the real

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world to cause any real offense. Michael Walzer, for example, argues that The Satanic Verses “represents the softest kind of blasphemy . . . strenuously enlisted in the cause of art.”20 In notable contrast to Parekh’s critique, the phrase “the cause of art” is assumed to carry an obvious, sui generis exculpatory force in Walzer’s defense of Rushdie. It is a particularly selfassured version of the it’s-just-art defense. Yet it is fairly obvious that something’s being enlisted in “the cause of art” does not automatically exempt that thing from moral accountability. Images of animal torture or child molestation do not get a pass simply by virtue of being cast as works of art. Indeed, in most cases, artistic expression matters precisely because it is not wholly detached from the real world, but is an imaginative reworking of the real world in ways that have significant bearing on real situations, real people, real feelings, practices, and beliefs. However distantly art may stand in relation to reality, it is not severed from normativity altogether. Arguably, the accountability of art is proportionate to its audience. In the case of high-profile artists such as Rushdie, whose artistic productions figure widely and prominently in public discourse and social perceptions, artists assume the added burden of answerability for the extraaesthetic implications of their work. So yes, it is important to acknowledge, along with Parekh, the full social impact of The Satanic Verses. But it is equally important to acknowledge that its social impact extends not only to those whose sense of identity is threatened by the novel, but also to those for whom the novel helps ground a sense of identity. That is, it is important to acknowledge the broader point that literature, and art more generally, can function as a way of articulating or orienting oneself within contested forms of identity. To acknowledge this is to acknowledge, along with Parekh, that the it’s-just-art defense won’t cut it when it comes

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to cultural conflicts such as the Rushdie affair. But the primary reason for this is that a work like The Satanic Verses is much more than just art: it is, one could argue, a form of cultural claim. This way of thinking about literature radically shifts the terms of debate in the Rushdie affair. Instead of framing the conflict as a clash of irreconcilable rights claims—individual rights to free speech and rights protecting cultural groups from insult—what is really at stake in the Rushdie affair is a conflict between competing cultural claims about what it means to be a Muslim in the modern world: the traditional, faith-based understanding of Muslim identity on the one hand, and, on the other, the notion of the secular Muslim with cultural roots in Islam. Indeed, the novel itself is about precisely this tension between two seemingly irreconcilable parts of modern Muslim identity. It is, as Rushdie puts it, “the story of two painfully divided selves,” but also “their quest for wholeness.”21 Even the novel’s protagonist is one identity split between two characters—Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha—both actors of Indian Muslim descent whose search for identity proceeds along radically divergent paths. We are introduced to the characters in the opening scene of the novel, casually singing and talking to one another as they tumble earthward through the sky after a hijacked jumbo jet explodes over the English channel. They are distinct, but at the same time there is “a fluidity, an indistinctness, at the edges of them.” We see one “becoming metamorphic” with the other, “hybrid, as if he were growing into the person whose head nestled now between his legs and whose legs were wrapped around his long, patrician neck.”22 Having miraculously emerged as the sole survivors of the downed Flight AI 420, they ask, as if in unison, the question that guides the novel’s central narrative: “Who am I?”23

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Seen this way, one could argue on Rushdie’s behalf that, far more than just a careless bit of iconoclasm, the critical edge of The Satanic Verses is part of a broader strategy to affirm a form of modern, conflicted Muslim identity. Apart from his occasional, defensive tendency to assert the unassailable right of free speech, 24 Rushdie himself is given to speaking about the novel this way. He famously describes The Satanic Verses as “a migrant’s eye view of the world,” written from “the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition.”25 It is clear that Rushdie, an Indian-born Muslim who immigrated to the UK at a young age, approaches the theme of cultural displacement and the loss of cohesive identity in the novel from the first-person perspective of a part-time insider and part-time outsider. In more straightforwardly autobiographical terms, he states that the novel is for him “an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain.”26 Further, one could argue that The Satanic Verses represents not only the individual perspective of its author, but a shared perspective shaped by the common experience of the tension between religious and cultural identity. It is an assumption, of course, that this is a perspective shared by other culturally displaced Muslims—though not an unreasonable one for an author to make. Consider, for example, a published editorial in which a pseudonymous “Karachi” proclaims: “Salman Rushdie speaks for me in The Satanic Verses, and mine is a voice that has not yet found expression in newspaper columns.” This, he goes on to explain, is “the voice of those who are born Muslims but wish to recant in adulthood, yet are not permitted to do so on pain of death.” Further, he explains that those who do not live in an

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Islamic society “cannot imagine the sanctions, both self-imposed and external, that militate against expressing religious disbelief.”27 The Satanic Verses, then, is both a way for others to imagine this, as well as a way for the “Karachis” out there (even, or perhaps especially, if there only are a few) to identify with this perspective, and to find articulation of the conflicted feeling of estrangement within one’s own culture. If laying claim to a certain form of cultural identity is one of the functions of literature, it is perhaps worth taking Rushdie at his word when he claims that his intention in writing The Satanic Verses was not to “conspire against Islam.”28 It could be argued that, whatever else one thinks of the literary merit of the novel, or its critical treatment of Islam, it is worth taking Rushdie at  his word when he says in response to the Bradford bookburning that “The Satanic Verses is not, in my view, an antireligious novel.”29 It could be argued that, while this way of thinking about the broader cultural import of literature does not necessarily blunt the novel’s sharp critique of Islam nor make it any more palatable to critics, it does situate that criticism within the question of Muslim identity as a form of immanent critique directed not at Islam in general, but at a specific strand of Islamic thought which excludes this possibility and which takes religious faith to be the sine qua non of Muslim identity. Here, again, one could argue indefinitely along this line in defense of Rushdie. But, in the end, I suspect that such arguments will have little bearing on existing perceptions of The Satanic Verses, positive or negative. This is because once the novel is framed as a form of cultural claim, and the debate is no longer principally framed by judgments either about the limits of free speech nor the criteria for offensive speech, what one is ultimately left to contend with is a conflict between incompatible

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visions of Muslim identity. Exploring the aesthetic dimensions shows that what is ultimately at stake in the Rushdie controversy is a struggle among competing cultural narratives. Thus, while it is helpful to extend the parameters of the debate in making the case that a work of literature such as The Satanic Verses might be better understood as making an affirmative cultural claim rather than simply dressing down Islam in a clever way, it also shows the limits of this discussion. For the real source of controversy emerges when, in response to the literary expression of the view that, as Rushdie puts it, “Islam is by no means homogeneous,”30 the critic says, “oh yes it is!” It is at this point that discursivity takes a back seat and the perceptual dimension of identity moves to the foreground. Ultimately, the question of the novel’s offensiveness depends on whether one is drawn to the “secular, humanist vision of the birth of a great world religion” put forth in the The Satanic Verses or to the fundamentalist vision of Islam asserted by Rushdie’s critics. If one is inclined to challenge the narrow reading of the Quran, or the unassailable divinity that more fundamentalist strands of Islamic theology ascribe to the Prophet Muhammad, then magical realism, with its trademark blurring of fantasy and reality, will seem a perfectly suitable stylistic choice for the novel; if not, it will seem an inappropriately flippant style for the solemn themes of religion. The choice presented by these two competing visions of Islam is, by and large, a matter of perception. More precisely, the politics of perception in the Rushdie affair comes down to a question of who controls the narrative of Islam, of who gets to say what it means to be Muslim. What the Rushdie affair illustrates, in other words, is the extent to which the politics of perception entails a deeper and far more complex question of cultural authority.

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2.5. A QUESTION OF CULTURAL AUTHORITY As the cultural turn in politics aims to legitimate the role of cultural claims within the universalist framework of liberalism, it confronts the deeply fraught questions of what a culture is and who represents it. Indeed, the more that cultural politics succeeds in showing that society is never the homogeneous composite of abstract, anonymous individuals traditional liberal thinkers take it to be, the more vulnerable it is to the charge of essentializing or reifying the very identity groups it aims to empower through political representation. For the question that always accompanies these reformist efforts is always “Who represents culture?” Given that any notion of identity— women, people of color, people with disabilities, the LGBTQ community, the immigrant community, and so on—is inherently complex, messy, and comprises multiple, sometimes competing, interests among various and overlapping groups, how does one speak of identity-specific needs and interests without overgeneralizing or oversimplifying? Thus, the question is not just who speaks for culture, but who has the authority to voice the claims of culture. With respect to aesthetic representations of cultural identity, the problem concerns specifically the cultural authority of the artist. At issue is whether and to what extent a given artist (or group of artists) has the right to make use of art to criticize, or to speak on behalf of, a particular form of cultural identity. Just as intuition seems to suggest a certain fit between form and content in a work, so too does it suggest a certain fit between artist and artwork. Barring rather extreme views of artistic freedom as absolute and unlimited, the difficulty consists in

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articulating the normative conditions under which certain artists possess a certain degree of cultural authority to treat certain kinds of subject matter artistically. For, in assuming that issues of misrepresentation, cultural appropriation, insensitivity, or offensiveness don’t simply dissolve with the rejoinder that “it’s just art,” the kinds of constraints relevant to aesthetic representations of cultural identity will involve the much thornier question of who determines the standards of representation. In the context of the Rushdie affair, the question might be  posed this way: Who is Rushdie to speak critically of Islam? What standing does he have to question the conception of “Muslim” as an identity concept primarily based on religion? Alternatively, one might ask: What right does Rushdie have to  seek to validate the notion of a secular Muslim, of an identity shaped by competing cultural forces, rather than religious identification? Note that, in putting the question this way, the aesthetic dimension of the controversy shifts from the artwork to  the artist. Specifically, we’re considering the relation between the cultural identity of the artist and the cultural significance of the work. This consideration adds yet another level of complexity to the debate, as the question of the novel’s offensiveness depends not only on what is said, nor even how it is said, but also, it seems, on who says it. One seemingly obvious place to start with the question of cultural authority would be to distinguish between internal and external cultural claims. Intuitively, it makes sense to give members of a certain group autonomy to articulate cultural claims on their own terms, rather than simply imposing or importing them from without. If one thinks of cultural groups as relatively large and homogeneous, it is fairly easy to frame collective rights, as Will Kymlicka does, as entailing both “internal restrictions” on the traditions and practices of that group, as

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well as “external protections” from outside interference.31 Often, however, marking the internal/external divide is not such a simple matter. Seyla Benhabib criticizes the simplistic division between internal and external claims as one of the “four dogmas of multiculturalism,” arguing that “the right to cultural membership entails the right to say ‘no’ to the various cultural offers made to one by one’s upbringing, one’s nation, one’s religious or familial community.”32 Moreover, cultural claims often concern precisely where the line of demarcation between insider and outsider status should be drawn. We see this, for example, in current discussions about what it means to be an “ally” for underrepresented groups of which one is not a part, or, in the recent controversy over the racial identity of Rachel Dolezal, former president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. It is precisely where the distinction between “internal” and “external” is in question that the question of cultural authority comes into play. With respect to cultural claims expressed in works of art, the relation between artist and artwork has only recently come under broad public scrutiny. In many cases, there is little reason to explicitly question the artist’s right to represent any particular way of life or cultural perspective in the form of art. What reason would we have to question Dickens’s authority to speak to the wretched conditions of industrialism in nineteenth century Britain, or Fitzgerald’s right to critique the American decadence of the roaring twenties? In other cases, where perhaps there is good reason to question the artist’s authority on the cultural front (Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book comes to mind), the criticism has extended beyond those immediately impacted by its representation of culture to the broader public reception of the work. Optimistically, this reflects a gradual weakening of the hold that culturally dominant perspectives have had on

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aesthetic attitudes and a strengthening of aesthetic diversity. What I find in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, or Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is a glimpse into a lifeworld I find aesthetically engaging in part because it is not my own. I value their narratives because they conjure in my imagination spaces of lived experience that are not necessarily available or accessible to me. I value them, that is, for showing the particular element in humanity. But such narratives are compelling only to the extent that I can trust in the cultural perspectives and experiences of the authors. To value a work aesthetically for the representation of cultural particularity it offers is, in some sense, to defer to the cultural authority of the artist. Cultural products bear the stamp of their makers. I take it this is why questions of cultural authority typically arise where there appears to be a disjuncture between the identity of the artist and the artistic expression of identity. Where we might not question the cultural standing of Margaret Atwood in presenting a compelling narrative of extreme dystopian patriarchy, we almost certainly would if, say, Ernest Hemingway or Cormack McCarthy had authored The Handmaid’s Tale. Where it might seem inappropriate to question the cultural authority of Toni Morrison in writing The Bluest Eye, it would by the same token seem wildly inappropriate not to challenge, say, Jonathan Franzen’s authority to relay the perspective of a young Black girl in the form of a novel. So where does Rushdie stand with respect to cultural authority in the case of The Satanic Verses? For some theorists, the controversy reflects a conflict between internal and external cultural perspectives. But this is complicated by several factors, not the least of which being the legal and theological framing of the controversy. Apart from the charges of blasphemy examined

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earlier (which are applicable to Muslims and non-Muslims alike), many Muslims sought to accuse Rushdie of apostasy, a far more serious offense (at least within Islamic law) against one’s own religion. Significantly, Islamic law interprets the transgression of apostasy, or riddah, in a way that includes not only explicit renunciation of one’s faith, but also any form of rebuke or challenge to religious norms that threaten to undermine the legal or social order of Islam.33 Charges of apostasy relevant to the publication of The Satanic Verses make clear that from the standpoint of his accusers, Rushdie is presumed to have betrayed his own Muslim faith. Even the theological rationale behind Khomeini’s infamous fatwa (however spurious the declaration itself may be) is grounded in a reasonably well-established interpretation of Islamic law according to which the publication of The Satanic Verses could be seen as equivalent to de facto apostasy, a renunciation of faith through certain kinds of acts. The issue wasn’t just that some writer had spoken ill of Islam, or even that an apostatized, ex-Muslim had assailed the religion. By challenging the religious and cultural essence of Muslim identity, Rushdie had in effect betrayed his identity; he committed the religious equivalent of treason. This idea of “cultural treason” also forms the legal basis of the group libel charges against Rushdie. In contrast to the blasphemy charges, which specify harms to individuals, charges alleging group defamation specify harms to a collective Muslim identity. In this case, British Muslims sought to extend to religious groups protections afforded by the 1976 Race Relations Act by arguing that Satanic Verses had perpetuated a comparable form of oppression against Islam. In either case, it is clear that a determination of the alleged harm done by the novel turns on a more basic supposition about the relation between Rushdie and the collective community of Muslims.

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From the legal and political standpoint, the charges indicate that the novel’s publication amounted to a betrayal of the Muslim community rather than an external provocation. Thus, from the legal and political standpoint, the question of cultural authority relevant to the Rushdie controversy cannot be so easily settled in terms of a simple and clear-cut distinction between internal and external perspectives— especially if Benhabib is right that cultural membership entails the right to say “no” to aspects of one’s culture. Also complicating the internal/external distinction in matters of cultural authority is the above point concerning the role of art in advancing the claims of cultural identity. To the extent that The Satanic Verses can be read as an affirmation of a form of “hybrid” Muslim identity rather than an attack on Muslim identity itself, the critique of Rushdie that puts him squarely on the side of the Western liberal critic won’t do. Of course, in one sense, Rushdie’s critics are right to exclude him; as Rushdie himself proclaims in no uncertain terms: “I am not a Muslim.”34 What he means by this, of course, is that he is not a Muslim in the narrowly religious sense in which it has been construed by conservative critics, and against which the novel protests. And insofar as the cultural claim of the novel aims specifically to cut against such sharply defined criteria for claiming Muslim identity, the legitimacy of the claim shouldn’t be undermined on the basis of Rushdie’s alleged outsider status. Indeed, the literary depiction of the divided, unresolved form of Muslim at the narrative heart of The Satanic Verses is, of course, largely autobiographical. One side of this split identity is told in the story of Gibreel, the celebrated bearer of the faith who finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile his belief with his will, and thus, to distinguish dream from reality. The reader observes how he begins to crack under the pressure of a faith he feels will not

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brook the doubt and uncertainty that begin to surface with the shock of cultural displacement in cosmopolitan London. The Bollywood actor, with a lucrative career of playing the roles of Hindu deities, is suddenly transformed to bear the outward marks of divinity: a glowing halo, the power of levitation, etc. Internally, however, he struggles to live up to the symbols of piety that adorn him in the strange new Western world he now inhabits and has come to embrace. It is not that Gibreel is a flawed character; it is his self-conception that is flawed. His mistake lies in defining his identity strictly in terms of perception. For Gibreel, being Muslim consists in outward conformity with an adopted order of rules, customs, beliefs, and behaviors which, internally, generate torment and schizophrenia, and drive him to suicide. The other side of this split identity is told in the story of Saladin—the modernized, secularized expatriate counterpart to Gibreel, who faces quite the opposite fortune. Having sprouted horns and morphed into a satyr-like figure, the demonically malformed Saladin is made to suffer a string of seemingly endless adversities until, at last, he emerges the unlikely hero of the novel. This coming-of-age transformation rests on his coming to terms with his estranged Muslim-Indian identity and returning to his roots, consummated by the adoption of his cultural surname, Salahuddin Chamchawala. Saladin, we might say, is Rushdie in character form: a deeply fractured self ultimately reconstituted through the cultivation of a Muslim identity in which religious tradition is reconciled with the modern, secular world. It is a reconciliation made possible by a cultural (rather than strictly religious) orientation to Islam, and ultimately achieved by the pursuit of earthly love—the ultimate form of shared human experience—for the progressive Bombay urbanite, Zeeny Vakil, who wisely counsels him in the closing pages

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of the novel: “If you’re serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don’t fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead.”35 If, then, the presumption of a clearly defined distinction between internal or external status turns out to be exactly the thing under dispute in cultural claims, how else might one address the fraught question of cultural authority? One possibility is to cash out the normative force of cultural authority in terms of having skin in the game. Concerning the relation between a particular artist and the particular cultural claim put forth in a work of art, one might ask: To what extent is the artist’s own identity bound up with the cultural claim put forth in the work? To what extent, that is, does the aesthetic representation of cultural identity bear on the artist’s or author’s own sense of self? In this context, “having skin in the game” means having a stake in the form of identity that is given aesthetic representation. It means the artist stands to gain or lose something in the way of self-understanding based on how the work communicates an image of cultural identity to the public imagination. More than simply belonging to a certain cultural group, the notion of cultural authority is linked to the degree to which artists who trade in aesthetic representations of identity are actively and self-reflexively invested in cultivating for themselves the sense of identity represented in the artwork as a constitutive feature of who one is. Where do we go from here? What else can we say about cultural authority as a matter of having skin in the game, so to speak? In the first place, it is worth noting that cultural authority so understood is always by its nature a matter of degree. And, with a fairly wide gulf from one end to the other, cultural authority can still mean very different things. At one end, the

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cultural protectionist can take it to mean that the claims of culture are privileged sites of internal contestation with strict membership policies. At the other end, the cultural cosmopolitan can take it to mean that authority is more widely distributed, since everyone has some stake in the claims of culture. But in order for the concept of cultural authority to be of any practical use in settling such conflicts, one would have to situate it somewhere along this spectrum. And yet, to do that in any meaningful way would require exercising some degree of cultural authority. The only way to answer the question “What grounds the normative force of cultural authority?” is to enact the very notion of cultural authority in question. The point, then, is that, in the context of conflicts such as the Rushdie affair, such questions are at once unavoidable and unanswerable. The fundamental tensions invoked in the controversy over The Satanic Verses’s depiction of Muslim identity ultimately turn on competing sources of cultural authority asserting incompatible versions of Muslim identity. And yet, for precisely this reason, the concept of cultural authority has limited explanatory power in such cases. It resists the kind of analytic parsing into necessary and sufficient conditions that would make it applicable to these kinds of disputes. At best, cultural authority can be understood as a relational quality, a way of identifying relevant differences in normative standing by comparing individual cases. Perhaps this is enough if the question of cultural authority only really comes into play when the identity of the artist is clearly out of joint with the identity of the work. Perhaps the notion of cultural authority has only a kind of negative utility in giving us some sense of what it means to have skin in the game by showing us, by way of contrast, what it definitely does not look like.

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2.5.1. The Satanic Verses vs. The Danish Cartoon Controversy The Rushdie affair was again thrust under the political spotlight when, in September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in various crudely stereotyped caricatures: radical fundamentalist, large-nosed goof, terrorist, etc. It’s not difficult to see why this prompted many political theorists to revisit the Rushdie affair some twenty-five years after the fact, as it seems in many respects to bear strong resemblance to the Danish cartoon controversy. As with the publication of Satanic Verses, the cartoons sparked a national debate about the limits of free speech in Denmark, which rapidly snowballed into an international media frenzy, sparking widespread protests, boycott petitions, and a host of judicial and diplomatic reactions. The Danish controversy also prompted a string of threats and acts of violence, including several assassination attempts against the artists and publishers involved.36 Also, notably, the legal charges accused the Jyllands-Posten of religious-based defamation and blasphemy,37 with the important difference that, unlike British law, Danish blasphemy laws apply to “any legal religious community.”38 Here, too, the courts failed to prosecute. Finally, like in the Rushdie affair, the Danish cartoon controversy elicited a scholarly outpouring eager to adjudicate the proper boundaries between free speech and liberal toleration. So it is not without reason that one finds in the sizable body of literature it produced a strong tendency to draw moral and legal equivalence between the two cases. Both turn on the question of offensiveness. Both are considered offensive to Muslims. Both involve forms of art. But how do the two cases compare with respect to the cultural authority of the artist? To answer this question, it will be

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helpful to focus on what is roundly considered to be the most controversial among the twelve cartoons published in the Jyllands-Posten. Kurt Westergaard’s depiction of the Prophet Muhammad shows him in a large black turban, enshrouded in which is an ignited bomb bearing the Arabic inscription “There is only one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” That any pictorial depiction of Muhammad violates aniconistic laws in Islam is relevant to the case, as is the fact that the Jyllands-Posten is a right-wing publication known for its anti-immigration stance. Putting aside these facts, however, we can focus specifically on the cartoon’s artistic depiction of Muhammad in addressing the question of offensiveness. In particular, how does Westergaard’s controversial representation of Muslim identity compare with that of Rusdhie? To begin with, Rushdie’s representation of Islam, as we’ve seen, is rooted in a semiautobiographical narrative of Muslim identity. Raised in a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Bombay (in the immediate aftermath of the end of British colonial rule), Rushdie was, as an adolescent, uprooted and educated in elite private schools in the UK, where he experienced, among other things, the “wog” taunts of his British peers. It is here, in the context of Western liberal society, that Rushdie reports becoming particularly aware of a hybrid identity—seen as Muslim by the British, and British by Muslims. As Rushdie writes, “I was already a mongrel self, history’s bastard, before London aggravated the  condition.” 39 Whatever else one might say about Rushdie, the experience of cultural migration and hybrid identity from the standpoint of a displaced Muslim that forms the narrative basis of The Satanic Verses belongs to him. Further, despite being geographically and ideologically removed from Muslim culture, one can point to Rushdie’s

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sustained intellectual and literary interest in Islam. He developed an academic interest in Islam as a student at Cambridge while undertaking an independent study on the life of Muhammad—an experience that, incidentally, would later supply the research material for The Satanic Verses. So, while Rushdie’s literary preoccupation with Islam is not, in the strict sense, as a Muslim, neither is it undertaken from the position of the literary voyeur looking inward at a foreign, distant object. The authorial perspective is one of cultural displacement, of a hybrid identity shaped by complex and conflicting cultural forces. The Satanic Verses embraces this complexity and ambiguity of identity, and asks for its validation. According to Rushdie: The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it.40

Finally, it is worth pointing out that Rushdie’s cultural grounding in Islam extends well beyond The Satanic Verses; indeed it underwrites the greater part of his literary oeuvre, which is itself stylistically and thematically indebted to a rich tradition of Islamic literature.41 The coupling of magical realism with a fictional remodeling of actual events, beliefs, and practices specific to the religious and political context of the Indian subcontinent is, in fact, a staple of his literary repertoire. “Anybody who reads any of my books,” writes Rushdie, “knows how powerful the influence of Islam has been. The fact that I would not call myself

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a religious person doesn’t mean that I can reject the importance of Islam in my life. . . . You have to deal with it because it’s the center of the culture.”42 His two preceding novels, Midnight’s Children and Shame, similarly explore the complexities of a subcontinental identity infused with British colonialism. Like The Satanic Verses, both novels—the former winning the Booker Prize, the latter a close runner-up43—are equally critical of various dimensions of this split cultural identity. Critical, but not mocking. Mockery assumes separation from the thing that is mocked. And evident in each of these works is a deep level of engagement with the religious and cultural underpinnings of its author. “Admit it, Salman,” Rushdie reflects to himself, “The Story of Islam has deeper meaning for you than any of the grand narratives.” By comparison, Westergaard is in no position to proffer the cartoon as an internal critique of Islam. Again, this is not to say that the charges of offensiveness made against The Satanic Verses aren’t warranted. But there is an important consideration available in the case of Rushdie that is not available in the case of Westergaard. Rushdie is in a position of cultural standing that at least makes it possible to read the novel as aiming to affirm a certain form— albeit a controversial one— of modern Muslim identity. Westergaard, by contrast, lacks this cultural standing. It is significant that Westergaard makes no claim to have been misunderstood in his intentions. The cartoon seems designed to offend, in part as a way to assert the artist’s right to offend. In this respect, the cartoon exercises a version of the it’s-just-art defense that prioritizes liberal values over culturally specific values. As Sune Lægaard argues, “it is plausible to claim that the offense actually taken [in the cartoon controversy] was not just a reaction to the cartoons and the accompanying article, but to

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what many Muslims perceived to be the underlying intentions, or the broader pattern of which they saw the publications as being a part.”44 The contrast appears to be even starker if, for the sake of argument, one reads Westergaard’s cartoon not as an intentional insult, but as a genuine claim to cultural identity. Imagine Westergaard insisting with all the fervor and literary panache of Rushdie that his real intention was not merely to stoke controversy, but to initiate a broader conversation about the religious or cultural aspects of Islam. It would be difficult to assess such a claim without first assessing Westergaard’s standing to leverage a claim on behalf of Muslim identity in the first place. How might one regard this kind of critical engagement with Islam as anything but external to Islam? In contrast to the Rushdie case, there is very little, either in the image itself, or in the identity of its author, that would support seeing Westergaard’s cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad as any kind of internal critique. Even if the work is comparable to The Satanic Verses in its critical treatment of Islam, the critique of Westergaard’s cartoon is firmly positioned from an us-vs.-them standpoint that forecloses even the possibility of understanding the cartoon as a claim to Muslim identity. While we may neither accuse nor acquit Rushdie on the basis of cultural authority, we do have reason for seeing the cartoons as culturally offensive on the grounds that, comparatively speaking, Westergaard has no skin in the game of cultural identity. Consider the same point from a slightly different angle. How might cultural authority work from the legal standpoint of those offended? Surely part of the reason we take such claims seriously is that they originate from within the Muslim community. Imagine how such claims might look if these controversies emerged primarily among young, white college students who,

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seeking social justice, turned to the courts for legal protections from offenses to Muslim identity. What if they themselves claimed to be offended by the novel? What if they began seeking some kind of punitive course of action, perhaps even monetary compensation, for the alleged offense? Such a claim would be a nonstarter, if for no other reason than that legal systems typically place specific constraints on what constitutes the “group” libeled against. Claiming to be offended is clearly not a sufficient condition for being party to a group libel claim. From a legal standpoint, group litigation requires that one have legal standing within that group—that one have, in other words, skin in the game. Now extend the legal logic to the aesthetic question at hand. Here it becomes clear that there are relevant normative differences among audiences claiming to be offended by works of art. Claiming to be offended by The Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoons presumes a certain standing with respect to Islamic identity. A non-Muslim might, I suppose, claim to be offended by The Satanic Verses in the very general sense of an offense to some being an offense to all. But this is a far cry from the offense felt by British Muslims, and even drawing a comparison threatens to diminish if not trivialize the felt offense among those who feel their own particular identities directly implicated in the work. To return to the fictional scenario above, imagine these same activist college students protesting, not in the courtrooms, but in the streets— staging book burnings of The Satanic Verses, threatening the publishers of the cartoons. One would reasonably ask: But what is it to you? Do you have skin in the game? By the same logic, there are relevant normative differences between artists responsible for the cultural significance of their work. In cases that involve disputes over cultural representation, we can put to the offending artist the same question we would

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put to an offended audience: What skin do you have in the game? As the comparison between Rushdie and Westergaard make clear, there will be varying degrees of cultural standing in relation to a particular form of cultural identity which has (or should have) some bearing on whether or to what extent the work of art in question is offensive. Herein lies the negative utility of cultural authority. Despite similarities in the legal, moral, and aesthetic contours of the Danish cartoon controversy and the  Rushdie affair, the concept of cultural authority captures the crucial sense in which the two cases come apart at precisely the point where the artist’s sense of self is invested in the aesthetic representation of identity. Without specifying any necessary or sufficient conditions of cultural authority, it is nevertheless possible to appreciate the sense in which the Danish cartoons are offensive in a way that doesn’t admit justification along the line of cultural identity. This is owing to clear differences in the otherwise undefined normative relation that exists between artists and artworks where aesthetic representation of cultural identity is at stake. Comparing the two seemingly identical cases illustrates, then, that an artist’s having skin in the game has profound implications for the moral, political, and even aesthetic evaluation of works of art.

2.5.2. Depicting Emmett Till: The Dana Schutz Controversy Consider a more recent example of the way cultural authority figures into public controversies about art. The controversy erupted with the opening of the 2017 Whitney Biennial over the exhibition of Open Casket, a painting of Emmett Till by the  white American artist, Dana Schutz. The painting, a

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medium-large, semiabstract depiction of Till’s disfigured visage facing upward in an open funeral casket, is based on documentary photographs taken after the gruesome 1955 lynching of the 14-year-old boy in rural Mississippi, wrongly accused of flirting with a white woman in a grocery store. As with the other high-profile cases examined so far, the Schutz controversy raises difficult questions about the relation between the identity of the artist and the aesthetic representation of identity in the work of art. Compared with the cases considered above, it shows more clearly the extent to which considerations of cultural identity factor into judgments concerning the normative constraints of such relations. More significantly, the Schutz controversy shows such considerations to be highly resistant to generalization or conceptualization beyond their specific context, thus illustrating in a particularly poignant way how discursive politics gives way to the politics of perception. There are, of course, any number of aesthetic critiques that can be made about the painting. We might say, for example, that the playfulness of its gestural brushstrokes belies the gravity of its subject matter. Likewise, we might question the scale of the work, or ask if abstraction is an appropriate stylistic choice for depicting such a difficult image. In “The Case Against Dana Schutz,” critics Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye argue along these lines, pointing out that, among other things, “the colors are pretty.”45 We might even take a stronger stance and claim that the mere attempt to render the image artistically inevitably results in the aestheticization of suffering. Overwhelmingly, however, criticism of Open Casket has to do not with the artwork itself, nor with how the image of Till is treated artistically, but with the artist, specifically the fact that she is not a person of color. Leading the protest was African American artist Parker Bright, who picketed daily in front of the

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painting at the Whitney wearing a shirt with “Black Death Spectacle” scrawled in permanent marker on the back. Soon after, another artist, Hannah Black, penned a scathing open letter to the curators of the biennial calling for the removal and destruction of the work, which in turn garnered a number of supporting signatures.46 Among several critical points she makes in the letter, the one that most poignantly summarizes the objection to Open Casket is that “the subject matter is not Schutz’s.”47 And so one might ask: What does it mean to say “the subject matter is not Schutz’s?” When and why are certain kinds of subject matter off-limits to certain kinds of artists? What are the normative constraints around representation that make Open Casket problematic for an artist like Schutz? Answering such questions turns out to be more difficult that they at first appear. This is not because the critique isn’t warranted; in fact, as I explain below, the one thing that seems clear about the Dana Schutz case is that it lacks a solid defense. Rather, it is difficult because even if it seems clear that “the subject matter is not Schutz’s,” there are no obvious ways of articulating the moral force behind this claim. In the Schutz case, as in the others, every line of critique involves a more basic question of cultural authority, and it is at precisely this point that the politics of perception is enacted. First, consider what one might say in defense of Schutz’s painting of Open Casket. One could simply say, of course, that nothing is off limits when it comes to artistic expression. Call this the artistic freedom defense. There is a reason, of course, that Romantic appeals to the unfettered freedom of the artistic “genius” no longer hold up: we no longer regard the artist as the bearer of unique and infallible imaginative insight into all things human and divine. Yet, versions of this defense still appear today, typically deployed as a well-intended bulwark against equally

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untenable attempts to censor artists (think of the “culture wars”). One of the more robust defenses of Schutz out there, made by a contemporary artist, Coco Fusco, takes exactly this anticensorship line.48 But almost never does this modern (and more moderate) form of defense imply total freedom from extraaesthetic constraints. We wouldn’t give images of, say, child abuse a moral pass simply by virtue of their artistic status. So unless we’re willing to bite the Nietzschean bullet and say that the aesthetic always trumps all other sorts of value, the Schutz case is not a matter of whether there are limits, but where the limits are. The defense offered in response to the mounting criticism by the Biennial’s curators, Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, doesn’t fare much better. Acknowledging that the exhibition takes on themes which “are painful or difficult to confront,” they defend their decision to include Open Casket on the grounds that the exhibition aims to forge “empathetic connections,” arguing further that the image of Emmett Till “has tremendous emotional resonance” for many African Americans.49 Call this the raising awareness defense. It is a clever formula for acquiring stock in the social capital of art without assuming risk or responsibility for its fallout. It’s no surprise, then, that this rings hollow for Schutz’s critics, as the generalized appeal to the virtue of raising awareness of suffering artfully dodges the relevant question of who gets to be the spokesperson of the specific kind of suffering at stake in the image of Emmett Till’s funeral. And as I explain below, acknowledging this specificity is key. Meanwhile, Schutz’s own defense of Open Casket has been a bit scattershot, and not wholly consistent.50 But by far the defense Schutz has leaned into most heavily in response to the criticism of Open Casket is what we might call the empathetic identification defense: “I don’t know what it is like to be black in America, but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was

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Mamie Till’s only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension.”51 The claim is that in fact there is a substantive point of connection between the image and the artist, and that point is a shared maternal identity. Schutz relates empathetically to the image from a mother’s perspective, through an imaginative identification with Till’s mother, Mamie Till. In contrast to the raising awareness defense from the Whitney curators, which defends the artists as third-party facilitators of “empathetic connections,” the empathetic identification defense positions Schutz as an insider to the pain and suffering conveyed in the image of Emmett Till through the first-person perspective shared by mothers. In making this identification, she is in effect saying to critics that, as a mother, the subject matter is hers. There is, it seems to me, something partly compelling about Schutz’s appeal to maternal identity, if only because it’s hard not to see the mother’s perspective in the image. Much of the significance behind these images is certainly bound up with Mamie Till’s brave decision to hold an open-casket funeral for her son in hopes of making public the ugly image of racial violence in America, and to allow the photographic images to testify to the broader racial injustice that her son’s death represents. 52 We might even say that some of this significance is lost if we somehow fail to read the images through the empathetic lens of a mother’s suffering the loss of her child. Surely part of what makes the image so powerful is that it does solicit a response from its viewers. Assuming that Schutz’s defense is sincere (as I take it to be), she is to this extent not wrong in making an empathetic connection with the photograph of Emmett Till’s coffin on the basis of a mother’s perspective. But that doesn’t mean she’s right in painting the image. Because, of course, the perspective in question isn’t simply a

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mother’s perspective, but a Black mother’s perspective. What Schutz’s defense has in common with other defenses of Open Casket is that it commits the liberalist fallacy in generalizing the particular. It abstracts from the uniqueness and specificity of the thing in order to make something common, shared, and more broadly accessible. The artistic freedom defense is made on behalf of all art, regardless of subject matter. The raising awareness defense looks past the specific issues raised in art and how they are raised in praising art’s role as a catalyst to social progress. Likewise, the empathetic identification defense, despite its appeal, only works in the Dana Schutz case by pushing past the particular characteristics of the thing to claim an affinity with its more general characteristics. In this regard, it’s sort of the artistic equivalent of classical liberalism: it abstracts individuality in the name of equality—and is therefore open to a similar set of objections. But how do we now characterize the liberalist fallacy of generalizing the particular as a moral or even an aesthetic defect? Where does this line of inquiry take us? Let’s start with the obvious candidates. First, there is the moral language of authenticity.We might say, for example, that Schutz lacks an authentic relation to the subject matter of Emmet Till’s death because she’s not sufficiently rooted in the history and shared experiences that give it specific cultural relevance. Which is of course true. But to call this “inauthentic” is at the same time to take on essentialist assumptions about what counts as an “authentic” culture, self, or identity. As Paul Taylor rightly points out, the language of cultural authenticity “often leads to arbitrarily truncated narratives of individual and collective origin, insulating the subject from the messy processes of subject formation and cultural transmission under conditions of historical change.”53 This is, in fact, precisely the concern that contemporary author Zadie Smith

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raises in response to the criticism of Open Casket: as soon as we ask “Who owns Black pain?” we get into problematic questions about who counts as Black.54 But even if we allow for a more nuanced, fluid conception of cultural authenticity of the kind that Taylor recommends— one culled from the context and contingency of actual lives and experiences—it’s not clear it would fully capture what goes wrong in the case of Open Casket. Allowing that Schutz’s connection to the maternal perspective present in the image of Emmett Till is authentic, the charge of cultural authenticity would then concern the authenticity of her connection to African American culture, which, of course, she explicitly disavows (“I don’t know what it is like to be Black in America”). The issue, then, is not the cultural authenticity of the artist, but the artist’s appeal to one form of cultural identification in place of another, and with it, questions of which counts, which doesn’t, or which counts more than the other, and so on. The issue, in other words, is a matter of cultural authority. Another, perhaps more obvious way to frame the objection that “the subject matter is not Schutz’s” is through the language of cultural appropriation. We might say, for example, that Schutz is guilty of cultural appropriation in that she has taken a cultural product from a cultural context that is not her own.55 Of course, there are different ways of formulating this accusation. Perhaps most relevant to this case is James Young’s attempt to define cultural appropriation in terms of what he calls (using a moral category introduced by Joel Feinberg) “profound offense,” a particularly egregious form of offense which “strikes at a person’s core values or sense of self.”56 This gives us a standard by which to distinguish acceptable from illicit forms of cultural appropriation. The worry about framing cultural appropriation this way, though, as Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl have

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recently argued, is that it makes claims of cultural appropriation contingent upon independently grounded reasons, putting the burden of proof for the offense on the offended rather than the offender(s). Not all appropriation claims are backed by a clearly articulated rationale; sometimes they emerge from the mere fact that a cultural group expresses a shared desire not to have elements of their culture appropriated. In such cases, they argue, we might better understand the act of cultural appropriation as violating group intimacy, understood in terms of the intimate bonds formed through cultural practices which “embody or promote a sense of common identity and group connection among participants.”57 In the case of Open Casket, however, the status of “intimacy” is precisely what is at stake. She expressly disavows sharing in the group intimacy of African Americans, but nevertheless appeals to the shared experiences and perspectives of motherhood as a different form of group intimacy that she thinks licenses artistic use of the subject matter in the image of Emmett Till. Rather than breaching the shared intimacy of African Americans, Schutz seeks access to the subject matter by going around it, as it were, approaching it from a different form of intimacy. And the way she does this, as we’ve seen, is by generalizing the particular; that is, by abstracting from the historical and cultural specificity of the image of Emmett Till and foregrounding a far more common and shareable form of intimacy with which she does identify. We can—and I think should—call foul on this strategy. We might gauge the weight and relevance of one form of group intimacy in relation to another. But notice that at this point the critique points to something more basic than cultural appropriation, namely, cultural authority. To speak “as a mother” is—at least in this case—to appeal to a position, perspective, or experience that warrants some degree

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of authority to speak. And if, in response, we appeal to the weightier, more relevant intimacy among African Americans, we do so by appealing to the greater degree of cultural authority that such group intimacy carries with it. Whereas cultural appropriation (in the negative sense) implies some form of unwarranted entry into a cultural group, or illicit displacements of a cultural object from its cultural context, Schutz’s transgression seems to be more a matter of placing herself in false proximity to the cultural object by generalizing its cultural significance. And if the right response is to say that the general does not have standing to speak on behalf of the particular, then again, the critique of Open Casket comes down to a matter of Schutz’s lacking cultural authority to make the subject matter of Emmett Till’s death her own. Much like the language of cultural authenticity, the language of cultural appropriation gets close to capturing what goes wrong in the Schutz case, but leads us to a more basic question about who has cultural authority to claim some ownership in all that the image of Emmett Till entails. In whatever way we articulate the criticism that “the subject matter is not Schutz’s,” it seems inevitably to lead to a question of who does or does not have standing to speak to certain kinds of subject matter. This, however, in turn poses a very different, and far more difficult, question, or rather, metaquestion, namely: What to do with this? What can I say about cultural authority? Call this The Other Question. If all avenues of inquiry in the Schutz case lead here, shouldn’t I attempt to give an account of cultural authority, however tentative or sketchy or suggestive? Suppose I press on. I might try, for example, to link the notion of cultural authority in this case to the wishes of Mamie Till, pointing out that she did not hand over the images of her son’s funeral to just anyone, but entrusted them to Jet Magazine and

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Chicago Defender, both Black publications. I could conclude from this, as cultural scholar Christina Sharpe does, that the images “were meant to speak to and to move a Black audience.”58 It turns out, however, that there are conflicting accounts even of this. Simeon Wright, Till’s cousin who was with him the night of his murder and who attended the funeral, recounts in an interview that Mamie Till “wanted to world to see what those men had done to her son because no one would have believed it if they didn’t the picture or didn’t see the casket.”59 So what then? Should I then attempt to adjudicate? Should I try get to the bottom of things to see whether and to what extent specific intentions bear on the conditions of cultural authority? Or perhaps this is the point at which cultural authority is better understood as a perceptual category rather than a conceptual category. Perhaps it can show me only that Dana Schutz is not in a position to say what the cultural significance of Emmett Till’s image is, but not why in any theoretically robust or principled way. Perhaps cultural authority is a matter of social perception. And perhaps it is precisely for this reason that aesthetic representation has come to function as an extension of political representation that exceeds the reach of reason in public discourse.

2.6. CONCLUSION: EXPANDING THE PUBLIC SPHERE I began this chapter by showing how the political dimensions of the Rushdie affair, framed as a contest of rights, is more deeply rooted in the aesthetic dimensions of cultural identity at stake in literary works such as The Satanic Verses. Reframing works of art as a mode of communicating the claims of culture, I argued,

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allows us to better understand such controversies as involving a contest of perceptions, a struggle for control over the imagery and narrative of cultural identity. And yet, as I further argued, precisely because such disputes are deeply enmeshed in the politics of perception, they lead us well beyond the scope of deliberative politics in confronting us with the question of cultural authority. Each of the three cases considered in this chapter offers a glimpse of the different ways that the question of cultural authority emerges within the cultural turn. Each reflects a distinct way the identity of the artist stands in relation to identity-based works of art. While a comparative analysis of these cases proved helpful for teasing out the relevant normative differences with respect to cultural authority, more importantly it showed the limits of discursivity when it comes to social conflicts concerning cultural identity. Such conflicts are waged within the shifting boundaries of the public imagination, and take the form of images, narratives, and other publicly transmitted forms of aesthetic representation. These cases demonstrate the need for a political discourse that aims at more than simply sorting out the appropriate conceptual relation between liberal rights and cultural rights. Where political notions of recognition and liberal self-determination become inextricably bound up with social perceptions of cultural identity, political theory is obliged to consider the broader set of communicative forms through which competing claims of culture get cashed out within and among various cultural groups. Modern liberalism, in other words, has to embrace an expanded conception of the public sphere as the social and political space of modern self-cultivating practices—which, as we’ll see in the chapter, have increasingly come to include the aesthetic.

3 IMAGINING AGENCY Self-Determination and the Experience of Art

3.1. THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION, REIMAGINED Since its inception in modern political thought, the great promise of liberalism has been to furnish and safeguard the right for individuals to freely develop and pursue their own vision of the good life. It aims to achieve this through the creation of a political order that ensures the greatest variety of what John Stuart Mill calls “experiments in living.”1 Many critics question, however, whether liberalism has delivered on this promise. As the late critic Lionel Trilling argues in The Liberal Imagination, liberalism’s once robustly imaginative vision of a society bustling with individual life pursuits has since devolved into bureaucratic tedium. But, like other critics of liberalism, Trilling holds out hope for reform. And the way to reclaim its once-visionary politics, he argues, is through a reengagement with literature. In terms of retrieving the liberal imagination, he writes: “literature has a unique relevance, not merely because so much of modern literature has explicitly directed itself upon politics, but more importantly because literature is the human activity that takes

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the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”2 Of course, Trilling’s optimism is to some extent a product of the Cold War era in which it emerged. But his plea for political imagination is still relevant today, perhaps even more so in light of the cultural turn in politics. It is indeed telling that Trilling’s call for an intellectual and imaginative revitalization of liberalism is frequently cited among contemporary political theorists.3 Equally telling, however, is that these same theorists remain wholly oblivious to Trilling’s thesis that the ills of modern politics can be remedied through a recultivation of the aesthetic imagination. The reformist spirit of contemporary cultural politics that Trilling helped inspire still neglects the political relevance of artistic engagement. The analysis of the Rushdie affair in the previous chapter revealed several valuable insights concerning the contemporary relation between politics and aesthetics. The first is that overlooking the aesthetic dimension of certain social conflicts can risk distorting the way such conflicts are analyzed and assessed. The further insight is that the aesthetic often functions as an extension of the political, specifically as a form of cultural claim addressing the public perception of identity. But The Satanic Verses is just one example of a much broader cultural phenomenon with important implications for both contemporary cultural politics and philosophical aesthetics. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to develop both insights more fully in order to understand how contemporary art stands in relation to contemporary modes of self-understanding in general. First, I will argue that the liberal ideal of self-determination, if it is to have contemporary relevance, requires a better understanding of its distinctly aesthetic dimension. Individuals’ freedom to pursue their own vision of the good life is partly

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contingent on the extent to which such “experiments in living” are made available to us, and my view is that aesthetic imagination plays a significant but underappreciated role in how these present themselves to us as real and viable life options. This applies in particular to political theories which explicitly tie self-determination to the free and full development of one’s unique identity (i.e., reformed liberalism) since the need to develop one’s identity in the form of coherent and socially communicable cultural narratives becomes paramount. The further task of this chapter is to articulate the role of aesthetic imagination in giving shape to the kinds of narratives that advance the liberal ideal of self-determination. In order to elucidate the distinctive way that art is involved in this revised conception of self-determination, I then introduce the Hegelian notion of aesthetic reflexivity, understood as a mode of self-reflection through which we appear to ourselves in works of art. In the remaining sections, I’ll address several criticisms that arise in the context of Hegel’s aesthetics by showing such criticisms to be predicated on a false dichotomy between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. Finally, I’ll formulate my own criticism of the Kantian avant-gardist tradition in aesthetics for its attempt to link art with human agency in a way that is largely indifferent to, if not dismissive of, the cultural turn in art and its connection to the cultural politics of identity. In sum, I argue in this chapter that the way to reestablish the connection Trilling draws between aesthetic imagination and political progressivism in a contemporary context is to begin, perhaps ironically, with nineteenth century aesthetic theory. It begins by reviving a Hegelian view of art as a primary source of cultural identity and by reframing that view in light of the present cultural turn in art and politics.

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3.2. CULTURAL NARRATIVES In his famously terse definition of the “postmodern” as skepticism toward metanarratives, Lyotard champions the epistemic primacy of the minor narrative, the vessel of localized, customary knowledge and authority set against a seemingly infinite plurality of forms. As a descriptive account of the incommensurability between modernism’s positivist theoretical orientation and actual modes of transmitting knowledge between groups and individuals, he is on to something. The world appears to us in the mediated forms of language, history, culture, institutions, customs, and even aesthetic forms that complicate the attempt to standardize knowledge and discourse. And on the normative point, Lyotard is right to acknowledge the regional legitimation of these embedded narratives, as modes of research, education, and social interaction that outstrip the language of scientific verifiability. But Lyotard never fully escapes the pessimistic conclusion of postmodernism’s embrace of the narrative: to “wage war on totality.” This campaign to redistribute epistemic authority through narrative plurality ultimately boils down to a simple prescription to “be witnesses to the unpresentable,”4 as if progressive politics consists entirely in reminding ourselves that truth dissolves into a multitude of discrete and irreducibly distinct narratives. Notably, the term “narrative” typically carries with it the implication of a literary fabrication, something skillfully crafted to present the world through the eyes of an author. In the United States, recent controversies over the presence of Confederate monuments in public spaces put growing strain on the so-called “Lost Cause” narrative of the Southern Confederacy’s role in the American Civil War. The Lost Cause narrative seeks to displace the ugly specter of chattel slavery with a bucolic image of the

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antebellum South as a charming specimen of gentility and prideful self-reliance, nobly engaged in an underdog’s fight for states’ rights. The potency of the narrative derives in part from the fact that it exists relatively independent of the historically relevant set of facts. Its truth is the strength of the story, and the power of its symbolism (in which Confederate monuments play a crucial role). Contesting the facts does not by itself change the narrative, which is why the activists presently working to dismantle the symbols of white supremacy are not content simply to let a thousand narratives bloom. We can admit that the deconstruction of racial metanarratives demands the full-blooded flexing of postmodernist skepticism. But advancing meaningful correctives to dominant, one-sided perspectives demands a constructive strategy of changing the narrative rather than simply adding another. Within the cultural turn, postmodern skepticism is only the first step to problematizing metanarratives; the further step is to catalyze alternative, competing modes of representation. If anything, the present attempt to reclaim the narrative by toppling Confederate monuments bears witness to the sheer force of presentation, not the unpresentable. It is an iconoclasm that reveals just how deeply the contemporary sense of identity is invested in the politics of perception. It is remarkable, however, that the need to lend coherence to our individual and collective lives seems to cut across differences among them. Harold Rosen coins the phrase “autobiographical impulse” to account for this seemingly fundamental human impulse to give self-understanding a narrative shape.5 The connection between narrativity and agency also has a distinguished legacy in modern philosophy, ranging from the existentialist writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger to the “narrative view” of personal identity in the moral philosophies of Alasdair MacIntyre, Harry Frankfurt, Daniel Dennett, Charles

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Taylor, et al. In response to the broader philosophical question concerning the set of conditions that allows us to attribute moral praise or blame, the narrative view, according to Marya Schechtman, holds that “a person creates his identity by forming an autobiographical narrative—a story of his life.” 6 This view speaks to the important sense in which the self is not a metaphysical abstraction but rather the psychological unity of our values, beliefs, and experiences. Narratives have the practical purpose of giving normative coherence to the self. They allow us to interpret our pasts in ways that clarify the present and give shape to future projects and commitments. And it is through the narrative that we are able to distill meaning from sheer contingency and discern form from the otherwise formless repository of experience. But as Charles Taylor has argued (and as I’ll discuss more in the next chapter), the discourse of moral subjectivity has overwhelmingly assumed a monological rather than a dialogical model of selfhood. What the narrative view gets right is the way that our self-told stories allow us to make sense of ourselves. But, with an emphasis on the practical conception of identity, it is easy to overlook the social value of narratives that make our identities legible to others. Narratives provide a sense of unity to the self, but equally important is the way they communicate that sense of self to others. A narrative addresses some audience (even if implicitly so). And, in crafting narratives for ourselves, we project our inner selves outward—we make them public. And the other-directed, intersubjective structure of narratives bears significantly on how we tell our life stories, and thus, on how we know ourselves. Partly for this reason, the concept of narrativity figures centrally in political philosophies critical of liberalism’s adherence to abstract notions of the individual. For if the problem with

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postmodernist narratives is that there’s nothing beyond particularity and difference, classical liberalism shares with moral philosophy the modernist tendency to speak the reductive language of universals. Efforts to reform liberalism, therefore, look to narrativity to articulate new conceptions of identity and new norms of socially mediated self-determination. For Will Kymlicka, for example, crafting cultural narratives is an integral component of the liberal freedom to forge for oneself an individual identity from myriad life possibilities. “We decide how to lead our lives,” he writes, “by situating ourselves in these cultural narratives, by adopting roles that have struck us as worthwhile ones, as ones worth living.” 7 Such narratives allow me to  communicate my individuality—my concrete, embedded particularity—beyond just my status as an abstract individual bearing certain rights and responsibilities. In the context of reformed liberalism, narratives explain how these particular interests come to be mine in relation to those of others. In telling my story, I situate myself within a certain social world. Indeed, who my audience is can play a fundamental role in determining how I shape my own narrative in particular ways. Finally, and most importantly, cultural politics finds in the concept of narrativity a way of addressing the precariousness of socially mediated identities. “To be and to become a self,” writes Seyla Benhabib, “is to insert oneself into webs of interlocution,” to “become conversation partners in these narratives.” 8 The self, then, is at least partly the result of such communicative exchanges. The stories we tell ourselves get tested against the social world, as it were, read this way and that. Others affirm or deny the self. The self, in turn, affirms or denies others. Identity forms differentiate, overlap, assimilate. They assume simpler and more complex forms. They vie for recognition, sometimes in competition with one another. The self, whatever form it may

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take, is neither a protected trademark of a single individual, nor a colorless putty in the hands of the masses. The self, in short, is never fixed and firm. One’s narrative is to some extent subject to interpretation. It is a messy and evolving assemblage of signs and symbols, forms and meanings, a constant dialectic between author and audience. This means that individuality, as Benhabib puts it, is “the unique and fragile achievement of selves in weaving together the conflicting narratives and allegiances into a unique life history.”9 Thus the concept of the cultural narrative makes clear that, insofar as the meaning of any identity narrative is subject to ongoing negotiation between self and other, the kind of identity relevant to self-determination is necessarily something provisional, dynamic, and open to revision and recalibration. What the concept of cultural narratives should also make clear, however, is that the discourse of identity is not always carried out through political deliberation. This is why Arendt sees it necessary to respond to the “rise of the social” and the decline of the public sphere in modern life by reconceiving political theory as narrative, or “storytelling.”10 One reason for this is that the narrative is, in several meaningful respects, also an aesthetic construction. And to the extent that in constructing these narratives we are constituting a sense of self, this process of selfdetermination is also an aesthetic process. Narratives are aesthetic in the most basic sense that we craft our own stories. We curate an image of ourselves. It is a creative process, guided by vision and principle alike, through which we decide what is relevant and what is not, what fits and what doesn’t, etc. We arrange the parts such that they appear unified and coherent, but also interesting, engaging, compelling, and so forth. In this basic sense, constructing a narrative involves adopting or inventing a certain style— a distinct way of communicating or presenting the

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contents of the self. To craft a narrative is to shape a certain perception of the self. Cultural narratives are also aesthetic in the more specific sense that the perceptions that take shape through cultural narratives are often communicated and negotiated through works of art. Works of art make available different ways of being in the world in the form of aesthetic representation. And by engaging aesthetically with them, we participate in the intersubjective exchange of narratives that in turn gives form and content to our own narratives. Many aesthetic theorists recognize the practical import of aesthetic narratives in precisely these terms. John Gibson, for example, writes that works of art can “ground a way of taking ourselves and our worldly situation to be, offering as they do narratives which organize a purchase on the nature and import of the regions of human culture they address.”11 Similarly, Noël Carroll describes narrative as a “cognitive instrument” that allows us connect the past to the present in a way that makes our lives meaningful, thus functioning as a form of deliberation.12 Works of art provide frames of reference through which we identify ourselves historically, culturally, and otherwise. Homeric poetry and the sculptures of Praxiteles furnish the modern world with a certain image of antiquity. Buddhism appears in the sculpted images of the Buddha. Christianity appears in the vivid depictions of Renaissance paintings, in Ben Hur, the fiction of C. S. Lewis, and even in Piss Christ. An image of queer identity appears in the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. An image of Blackness appears in Do the Right Thing, in the paintings of Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley, in the voice of Ella Fitzgerald and the lyrics of Kendrick Lamar. Works of art can also play the constitutive role of crafting a sense of self. Beyond just providing a preparatory activity for the real work of forming one’s identity narrative, aesthetic

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experience can be fundamental to the process of making sense of who we are in the robustly normative sense. Art exercises the imagination in the self-conscious picturing of possibilities. To engage with art is to make explicit where one stands in relation to the world. Works of art ask us: Do I identity with these characters? Do they attract or repel me? Are these circumstances I would embrace or avoid? What would I do in this situation? Do I reject or endorse these emotions, attitudes, or beliefs? Do I value these projects? Does this look like me? Do I behave this way? Is this my kind of music? Are these my kind of people? Works of art furnish the narratives and images through which we examine, in a not wholly discursive way, how we take ourselves to be situated in the social world; how we separate the trivial from the significant; what we take to be “normal” and not; how we forge and dissolve bonds, and with whom. All of this work of the imagination—clarifying, refining, sometimes revising—is basic to the process of crafting a narrative. By engaging with works of art, we are better positioned to ground our sense of self in the world of social perceptions. Moreover, works of art enable the communication of identity narratives to broader audiences in a way that standard modes of public discourse often can’t, or don’t. In some cases, the aesthetic transmission of narratives is the only way to challenge or change the kinds of narratives that degrade or distort identity and thus  pose a significant obstacle to the liberal ideal of selfdetermination. But if self-determination is to be anything more than an ideal, cultural politics has to contend with the practical challenges that individuals and groups face in submitting identity narratives for public scrutiny. Insofar as our identities are up for negotiation, the public sphere has to be reconceived as a space in which the exchange of narratives is carried out alongside the exchange of reason.

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That the aesthetic has this communicative potential explains the cultural turn in art. When Guerrilla Girls distribute posters and put up billboards asking “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?,” or “How many women had oneperson exhibitions at NYC museums last year?,” they leverage aesthetic representation in order to frame a feminist narrative of female artists to a broader public. When Robert Mapplethorpe publicizes homoerotic imagery, or Catherine Opie photographs mustachioed women, what they in effect offer is a more nuanced story of human sexuality and gender identity. When Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet” became a wake-up call about racial tensions in a post– Civil rights era, or when Kara Walker reclaims the racist imagery of an antebellum South, they deploy aesthetic representation in the service of racial representation. Of course, this strategy extends into the world of pop culture as well, crafting collective identity narratives for broader public consumption through the mediums of film, music, and television. Writing about the popular HBO series about inner city Baltimore, Martin Shuster writes that “through its imaginative vision, and through the interaction of our imaginations with that vision, The Wire ‘enable[s] us to see the world, whether present or absent as significant,’ allowing us potentially to ‘present this vision to others, for them to share or reject [it].’ ”13 Once the political is understood to involve the contestation of rational as well as perceptual aspects of our agency, the political significance of the aesthetic comes more clearly into focus. Works of art engage the imagination in the politics of perception. Nor is this recognition limited to Trilling’s audience of literary theorists; other disciplines have also begun to acknowledge the political significance of the aesthetic. Barbara Johnstone, addressing the need for disciplinary reform in the

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field of discourse analysis, encourages us to examine the political significance of cultural narratives along these lines: As we continue to think about the uses of narrative in human life, we are paying increasing attention to the political effects of narrative, seeing storytelling not only as a way of creating community but as a resource for dominating others, for expressing solidarity, for resistance and conflict; a resource, that is, in the continuing negotiations through which humans create language in society and self as they talk and act.14

Similarly, in Media and Communication Studies, there has been in recent years a focused effort to examine engagement with popular culture as a robust form of political participation.15 But even among reformed liberalists there remains a faith in rational deliberation as the ultimate arbiter of political difference. In contrast to these disciplines, liberal theory seems to have lost its imagination. Even in its most progressive forms it retains its faith in the norms of rational deliberation. Reimagining liberalism along the lines Trilling suggested decades ago requires that political theorists take seriously the ways that contemporary art and other broadly accessible mediums of popular culture actively shape both our conception of the social world and our specific place in it. By prioritizing the space of rational discourse over the aesthetic as a space of meaningful social and political interaction, many theorists have evaded some of the most pressing questions about the role of cultural narratives in the liberal ideal of self-determination. By what means are such narratives brought into public view? Through what expressive forms is identity crafted, communicated, and contested? What happens when the space of public discourse is occupied by a statue of Robert E. Lee or inscribed within a “Wall of Fame” devoted exclusively to white

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folk? Strictly political responses simply won’t hold up for questions that arise from the politics of perception. Where politics concerns not just the recognition but also the social perception of identity, the political significance of identity narratives can only make sense in relation to their aesthetic significance. For, if today self-determination means, at the very least, the ability to craft one’s own narrative and submit it for public review, then the political significance of art is that it affords us the kind of imaginative insight into the vast complex of narratives and subnarratives from which, and in relation to which, we craft and communicate our own distinct narratives. If telling one’s story is part of making oneself, the political conception of the public sphere needs to be expanded to include the range of aesthetic practices through which the perception of self is forged and negotiated in relation to others. This means, as Trilling well understood, reasserting the value of aesthetic imagination in political discourse.

3.3. AESTHETIC REFLEXIVITY But now if, as I’ve argued, cultural politics needs to look to aesthetics, the question then is: Where should it look? Where is the discussion concerning the connection between modern art and modern subjectivity? It may seem ironic to address such questions by looking to the past. But, as I will argue, it is in the context of nineteenth century aesthetic theory, specifically in Hegel’s claim that works of art express “the deepest interests” of humans,16 that we get the most purchase on the cultural turn at present. What Hegelian aesthetics offers is something that aesthetic theory has long shied away from, namely, a way of understanding art as the kind of thing that orients us within a

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social environment. The notion that art affords us a mode of reflexive self-awareness—what I call Hegel’s notion of aesthetic reflexivity—is, I think, key to a more nuanced understanding and appreciation of the way that we shape our identities through narratives. It offers, among other things, a critical account of aesthetic representation at a moment when artistic practices come to be a primary mode of representing identity. It does this because it acknowledges nondiscursive modes of self-awareness, and restores to imagination a central role in the socially mediated constitution of the self. Aesthetic reflexivity a la Hegel gives us a philosophical framework through which the question How do we appear to ourselves? has both political and aesthetic relevance. In the Aesthetics, Hegel offers the enigmatic remark that art  “makes every one of its productions into a thousand-eyed Argus, whereby the inner soul and spirit is seen at every point” (LFA, 153–54). The choice of metaphor here, albeit bizarre, is significant in the way it aims to illuminate the reciprocal character that Hegel ascribes to aesthetic experience. Argus, of course, is the mythic creature with panoptic powers who perceives us perceiving. Per Hegel’s metaphor, works of art engage us in a similarly interactive, reciprocal relation. We don’t just passively and one-sidedly perceive works of art; they return our gaze, as it were, and call on us to engage reflexively with them. For Hegel, the significance of art to self-understanding is bound up with the way that an artwork appears to us, not as an inert object to be admired or investigated, but as “a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind and spirit” (LFA, 71). On the one hand, the work of art is distinct from the mere things of sensible experience in that it is not just there for the perceptual taking; it confronts us as a thing to be reckoned with. We are made in some sense answerable to the sensuous form that appears in the work of art. On the other hand, the work of art is a

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sensuous object, not a conscious subject, and so this reciprocity is ultimately a matter of the self relating to the self; it is a form of reflexive self-awareness. And it is this sense of reflexivity in Hegel’s philosophy of art—aesthetic reflexivity—that is relevant to contemporary conceptions of self-determination. The experience of art is aesthetically reflexive in the sense that it directs sensory experience of the object back to the perceiving subject. It is “aesthetic” in that it is grounded in the sensible reception of aesthetic forms, and “reflexive” in that it solicits the awareness of our exercising agency through that experience. It is, in effect, object-mediated self-awareness. And to engage with works of art in this way is, in effect, to make oneself answerable to the perceptual world. Several scholars have noted an apparent connection between Hegel’s aesthetics and the celebrated final lines of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo:17 denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht/ Du mußt dein Leben ändern18 [For here there is no place that does not see you You must change your life]

In the poetic description, Rilke’s Apollo indeed bears a resemblance to Hegel’s Argus, seeing us at every point, prompting us  to self-scrutiny, and so on. But there are good reasons to question this apparent similarity. For one thing, reading Rilke’s mystical modernism into Hegel’s aesthetics only lends to the distorting caricature of Hegel as peddling religion in the form of art. Dieter Wellershof, for example, complains that Rilke’s poem exemplifies the modernist nostalgia for idealism’s privileging the aesthetic over everyday experience.19 As we’ll see later, it is the celebration of the sheer variety of everyday human

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affairs—the Humanus—that Hegel takes to be modern art’s center of gravity once its religious, mythological significance begins to wane. Further, and more importantly, reflexivity appears as part of the content of Rilke’s poem, whereas Hegel seems to be interested in the reflexive structure of aesthetic experience. This distinction is crucial to resisting the common but equally misguided perception that for Hegel it is the content or meaning of art rather than the experience of art that matters. It is not only about how we appear as the content of artworks, but also, and more importantly, how we appear to ourselves in the experience of art. Hegel would no doubt be appalled by the suggestion that the aesthetic value of Greek sculpture consists in its offering moralizing injunctions aimed at self-reform. “Other ends, like instruction, purification, bettering, financial gain, struggling for fame and honor,” he insists, “have nothing to do with the work of art as such, and do not determine its nature” (LFA, 55). For Hegel, what matters is that the individual, by engaging aesthetically with the Torso of Apollo, reflexively arrives at the kind of normative selfreckoning that says, “You must change your life.” Thus, in developing this notion of aesthetic reflexivity further, we can identify at least two senses in which works of art afford us the kind of reflexive experience that contribute to contemporary notions of self-determination. For even if the work of art is like any other material object, the aesthetic experience of art is qualitatively distinct from other forms of sense perception in that we come to grasp our own agency through that experience. On the one hand, works of aesthetic representation are representations of ourselves in our particularity. They shape into sensuous form the sheer variety of images, narratives, sounds, emotions, attitudes, behaviors, rituals, and practices that mark the points of continuity and discontinuity among our distinctive

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and collective identities. They show us the sheer diversity of ways of being human in which we situate ourselves. They confront us with outward representations of the particular forms that inner cultural consciousness can take—values, beliefs, attitudes, projects, commitments, assumptions, etc.—and in doing so, give our identities external, sensible, and readily communicable forms. On the other hand, works of art don’t just give us these representational forms; they ask us to contend with them, to participate actively in the making, evaluation, and interpretation of aesthetic representations. Thus, the experience of art is reflexive in the further sense that it shows us how we enact our agency through our aesthetic response to art. If the images and narratives and forms of art make claims on us that prompt us to respond, then aesthetic experience is reflexive in the sense that, through it, we are made to contend with our own agency as meaning makers. The concept of aesthetic reflexivity is meant to capture the deeply normative sense in which works of art represent the self both as perception and as perceiver. We see ourselves reflected not only in aesthetic representations, but also in the ways we respond aesthetically to them. More succinctly put, we appear to ourselves both in and through aesthetic representation. Supposing, then, that contemporary notions of selfdetermination demand that we look beyond the classic liberal conception of abstract agency toward something like a narrative view of the self, such that determining the self means forging a coherent and communicable representation of one’s particular identity, the Hegelian notion of aesthetic reflexivity shows how the experience of art connects with agency in a way that is relevant to self-determination. Like many contemporary theorists, Hegel is interested in how our subjectivity appears to us, not as abstract self-awareness, but in the concrete form of historical and

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cultural particularity. But, like many contemporary artists, Hegel also understands art as a primary means of grounding our identities more precisely within a given social world. The reason for this is that, in the modern social world, the task of determining the self lies squarely within the imagination’s capacity to orient the self in relation to otherness. Rather than taking us out of our own subjectivity, the imagination situates us more firmly in self-awareness. As Hannah Arendt observes, this process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon a world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions.20

Arendt’s insight is especially pertinent today, given the extent to which such representations figure into the politics of perception. Today, cultivating a narrative, an image, an identity legible to sense and imagination, is a fundamental part of what it means to develop a sense of self. Now more than ever, the capacity to perceive ourselves reflexively, to imagine ourselves in relation to an ever-expanding complex of possible lifeworlds, belongs to the liberal ideal of self-determination. The sociopolitical significance of art, then, is that it furnishes the kind of reflexive experience through which we become increasingly answerable to our own narratives. Imaginative engagement with works of

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art opens us up a kind of reflexive self-reckoning through which our “deepest interests” appear to us in aesthetic form.

3.4. THE “APPEARANCE” OF ART: REFLECTIVE OR REFLEXIVE? To say that the sociopolitical value of art consists in the aesthetically reflexive experience it affords is, at the same time, to say something about the kind of thing art is. What is it about art such that we appear to ourselves in it? The ontological question this raises concerns, in particular, art’s relation to both the everyday world as well as other objects of aesthetic judgment, such as natural beauty. It is especially important in the case of art’s relation to politics since, as it stands, pretty much any account of that relation faces some form of the following dilemma: Either art is like everyday things (in which case, why bother calling it “art?”) or art is in some way distinct (in which case, art is detached from the everyday world). Modernism, one could say, tends toward the second horn of the dilemma, postmodernism the first. Adorno, anyway, attempts to resolve the dilemma by conceptualizing modern art in terms of a productive tension, claiming that art gets its political clout in the real world by virtue of its distance and autonomy from it. Art is political because of, not in spite of, its distinctiveness. Lyotard, by contrast, attempts to resolve the dilemma by conceptualizing postmodern art as a selfdestructive enterprise, gaining its status as art by virtue of collapsing the distinction between art and the everyday. In either case, the ontological dilemma of art is answered with a paradox. Famously—but also unhelpfully—Hegel defines art as “the sensible appearance of the Idea”21 (LFA, 111). This formulation, freighted with metaphysical implications as it seems to be, does

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not readily present itself as a viable candidate for making sense of contemporary art and its relation to contemporary experience. Indeed, critics have had a field day with it. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, for example, reads it as a kind of theology of art, an expression of what he calls the “sacralization” of art in post-Kantian idealist aesthetics.22 Similarly, though more pointedly, one prominent postmodernist critic describes Hegel’s aesthetics as a “a gigantic war-machine directed against aesthetics in general.”23 What many of these critiques have in common, however, is that they are not directed at any particular claim about art, but rather at the overall philosophical orientation to art in Hegel’s writings. As Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert affirms: “Often it is not just the individual views of philosophical aesthetics [of Hegel] that fall into ill repute, but the very supposition of a methodically oriented analysis of art, and thus of a philosophical grasp of art in general. Every conceptual analysis of art, every systematic representation—so the objection goes—marginalizes the phenomenon and neglects the lively experience of art.”24 The criticism of Hegel’s aesthetics, in other words, extend from a more general criticism concerning what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the “dogmatic schematism” of Hegel’s philosophy.25 In the context of Hegel’s aesthetics, this criticism takes the form of a pointed complaint that the top-down, philosophically systematic approach to art radically diminishes the significance of aesthetic experience. Such critiques also have in common a tendency to treat the purported ills of Hegelian aesthetics by prescribing some version of Kantian aesthetics. It may seem that, in the context of the present discussion, proceeding from Kantian rather than Hegelian aesthetics makes more sense. After all, isn’t Kant the originator of the notion that aesthetic experience is a richly normative source of reflexive self-awareness? More specifically, the

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Kantian avant-gardist is likely to ask skeptically: Why should we invoke the name of Hegel to ground the connection between art and agency when Kant’s account of reflective judgment offers much of the same, but at half the metaphysical price? In order to develop an account of aesthetic reflexivity, I want to address not only the specific concerns about Hegel’s conception of art as “the sensible appearance of the Idea,” but also the standard Kant-vs.-Hegel narrative from which such concerns typically arise. I’ll argue, first, that the Hegelian notion of aesthetic reflexivity in no way runs us into a quagmire of speculative metaphysics. Indeed, with respect to the reflexive character of art, it is not a claim about the ontological distinctness of the artwork (as other human practices are reflexive), but rather a claim about the phenomenology of aesthetic experience—how art appears to us in a way that foregrounds our own agency. This view of aesthetic reflexivity will, in turn, help dislodge much of the accepted narrative that modern aesthetic theory forces a choice between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. What I call the “continuity thesis” will, I hope, show a conceptual affinity between aesthetic reflexivity in Hegel’s philosophy of art and the more familiar notion of aesthetic reflection at the heart of Kant’s theory of taste. Far from neglecting aesthetic experience, Hegel develops key Kantian insights about the appearance of art in order to show that subjectivity appears in aesthetic experience not as abstract agency, but as the concrete, particular self. So—how does art appear to us? Whatever else “the sensible appearance of the Idea” might mean, for Hegel it is intended to capture a basic distinction between artistic and natural beauty. Hegel wastes no time in Aesthetics clarifying that he is not simply pursuing an aesthetic theory but a philosophy of fine art, which for Hegel means first and foremost that “we at once exclude the beauty of nature” (LFA, 2). 26 The claim is not just that art is

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different than nature, but better. This is because the work of art appears to us as a sensible object also invested with human thought, emotion, perspective, insight, meaning, etc.—i.e., with Idea. Artistic beauty is a higher form of beauty because its form is the product of human intention; it is (in Hegel’s unfortunate way of talking) a thing “born of the spirit” (LFA, 2). This certainly does not mean that nature isn’t beautiful in its own right, or even that the beauty of nature is not of rich philosophical importance.27 Instead, for Hegel, it means that the experience of art is a distinct and higher form of sensuous apprehension in that it gives us something more than just the daily dose of sensory stimuli. Art couples the outer world to the inner self. The mere fact that artworks appear to us as a synthesis of sense and intellect enriches and enhances the experience, makes it more than mere sensory pleasure. So much so, in fact, that, for Hegel, “even a useless notion that enters a man’s head is higher than any product of nature, because in such a notion spirituality and freedom are always present” (LFA, 2). Nevertheless, the Idea— and the conceptual orientation of Hegel’s aesthetics more generally—might seem suspect, specifically as a way of rethinking the relation between art and agency in contemporary terms. Here I think we can defend Hegel’s view on its own terms. First, as if in anticipation of this objection, Hegel makes clear that the philosophical approach to the “Concept” of artistic beauty actually requires us to proceed from “particular and existent works” (LFA, 21) so that it doesn’t devolve into “abstract metaphysics” (LFA, 22). Further, wherever one stands with respect to Hegel’s historico-philosophical narrative of art (indeed, I have my own reservations about its aggressively Eurocentric orientation), one has to acknowledge that it is a narrative spun from a deep and rich familiarity with actual works of art (an asset conspicuously absent in Kant). 28

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More to the point, Hegel makes clear that the philosophy of art cannot develop from the top down, but rather must proceed from “what we are acquainted with at the start, as a familiar idea of the work of art,” or what he calls the “common ideas about art.”29 First on this list of “common ideas” is the idea that “the work of art is no natural product” but rather is “brought about by human activity” (LFA, 25). Rather than simply “sacralizing” art as an ontologically privileged type of thing, Hegel’s analysis of art develops from the common and fairly benign notion that, unlike nature, art appears to us as the product of rational intelligence and activity. So it is not some abstraction of speculative metaphysics that motivates Hegel to draw a distinction between a philosophy of art and a theory of taste, but an appreciation for the phenomenological peculiarity that art, unlike nature, appears to us as if it were a partner in dialogue. A philosophy of art is needed, in other words, to account for art’s function as a mode of sensible self-awareness. While critics tend to focus on “the Idea” in Hegel’s definition of art, it is equally important to consider the significance of “sensible appearance.” The epistemic position from which Hegel gauges the philosophical significance of art is summed up in the claim: “Truth would not be truth if it did not show itself and appear” (LFA, 8). Sensible experience is, rather uncontroversially, one of the primary ways we know the world and our relation to it. And for Hegel, art is one of the principal modes of sensible knowing. Hence his repeated insistence that art be understood in terms of its sensible character, that art not be reduced to merely its concept. However the Idea may appear in a work of art, its appearance is necessarily manifested in sensuous material: the bronzen form; the painted image; the word; the notes; the photograph; the film; the performance; and so on.

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Art, then, is like nature in this respect. It is “drawn more or less from the sensuous field for apprehension by the senses” (LFA, 25). And, like nature, we judge art aesthetically according to formal qualities of symmetry, regularity, and harmony (LFA, 134ff.). To say that the work of art “is no natural product” is not to say that it is fundamentally distinct from nature. Rather, it is to say that art is more than nature. The work of art is nature appearing as human artifact. It is human consciousness manifested in material form. As Hegel explains, art is the irreducible hybrid of sense and intellect, as it: “is not yet pure thought, but, despite its sensuousness, is no longer a purely material existent either, like stones, plants, and organic life; on the contrary, the sensuous in the work of art is itself something ideal, but which, not being ideal as thought is ideal, is still at the same time there externally as a thing.” Hegel designates this hybrid ontology of the artwork as the “concrete universal,” an object which stands “in the middle between immediate sensuousness and ideal thought” (LFA, 38). Ultimately, then, Hegel is making a case for aesthetic representation suitable to the politics of perception. What the artwork is and how we respond to it aesthetically are grounded in this indissoluble relation between the sensuous particularity of the work of art and the idea it represents. Art takes us beyond the immediacy of sense perception and offers us an access point to the world that is irreducible to either the perceptual or the conceptual; it is both at once. By engaging with works of art, we transform the simplicity of sense experience into a more complex interplay of form and content. “It is in this way,” Hegel writes “that the work of art is to be significant and not appear exhausted by these lines, curves, surfaces, carvings, hollowings in the stone, these colors, notes, word-sounds, or whatever other material is used; on the contrary, it should disclose an inner life,

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feeling, soul, a content and spirit, which is just what we call the significance of a work of art” (LFA, 20). Looking past the lurid expressions to which Hegel is prone, then, it becomes clear that what is at stake in the Aesthetics is not so much a claim about the essence of art but a phenomenological claim about the appearance of art as the union of sense and intellect. Motivating Hegel’s philosophy of art (particularly in response to Kant’s aesthetics) is the insight that the beauty of art appears to us as something more than just these words, this stone, and so on. To cite Friedrich Schiller, whose Kant-based aesthetics wielded considerable influence over Hegel’s, the work of art appears to us as “significant stone,”30 the object of nature imbued with meaning through artistic activity. A more precise way of distinguishing the aesthetic experience of art from other forms of sense experience, including that of natural beauty, is offered in Hegel’s suggestion that art poses for us a “demand for meaning fulness (Bedeutsamkeit)” (LFA, 20; emphasis mine).31 Presented as objects of interpretation, works of art prompt us beyond the brute particularity of sense experience, enjoining us to exercise our capacity as meaning-makers. Aesthetic experience involves a perceptual shift from sensuous receptivity to active interpretation. “In a work of art,” Hegel explains, “we begin with what is immediately presented to us and only then ask what its meaning or content is” (LFA, 19). Beyond the merely external appearance of the object we “assume behind it something inward, a meaning whereby the external appearance is endowed with spirit” (LFA, 19). This demand for meaningfulness, then, makes the experience of art reflexive, as the work of art appears to us in a way that implicates us in its appearance, making us responsible for our perception of it. One version of this Hegelian insight is brought to light in Arthur Danto’s much-discussed definition of art as “embodied

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meaning.” Of course, Danto—perhaps more than anyone—has succeeded in reviving Hegel’s name in the context of contemporary analytic aesthetics. He shares with Hegel a firm conviction that mimetic theories of art fundamentally fail to capture the essence of art (in a vivid comparison, Hegel likens art’s attempt to imitate nature to “a worm trying to crawl after an elephant” [LFA, 43]) and looks to Hegel to ground contemporary art in a more suitable ontology. In this vein, Danto develops the historicist claim that art today is more than the sum of its sensible properties. Since many works of art—for instance constructivist monochromes; postmodernist found objects; and, of course, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box— are perceptually indiscernible from their real-world counterparts, traditional theories of art (specifically, formalist and semiformalist theories) no longer hold water. Danto’s Hegelian-inspired definition of art as “embodied meaning” is intended to draw the distinction between art and nonart in nonperceptual terms. All sensible objects have manifest sensible properties. And many of those objects bear certain meanings (e.g., a stop sign; a gravestone; a photograph of my kids; etc.). But works of art are distinct, argues Danto, in that their meanings are embodied. For Danto, an object has “embodied meaning” just in case a) it is an intentional object, (i.e., that it be about something); and b) that its meaning is embodied in a physical medium.32 In contrast to ordinary objects of sense experience, works of art represent content artistically, by having a “style,” a mode of expression which partly determines the representation or meaning of the work.33 An object that comes to embody meaning this way becomes something more than a mere object: it becomes, in Danto’s way of putting it, “transfigured” from ordinary object to art object. As in Hegel’s definition, Danto’s concept of “embodied meaning” assigns the work of art something like a dual citizenship: it

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is both object and meaning. Indeed, one could characterize the whole of Danto’s philosophy of art as an attempt to articulate in various ways this peculiar, hybrid ontology of art. The most enduring legacy of this effort is Danto’s notion of an “artworld” that stands in overlapping relation with the world of mere real things. To make sense of art in terms of contemporary art practices, Danto maintained, would require more than aesthetics by itself could afford; it would require “something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”34 Whatever the specific terms by which Danto defines art as the artistic expression of meaningfulness, however, his definition tends to raise more questions than it answers. One worry, voiced by Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn, is that an important distinction is to be drawn between art’s embodiment of meaning as such, and the artistic embodiment of a felt and distinctly human experience of meaning fulness.35 In a similar vein, one might worry that Danto’s account of embodied meaning overlooks the experiential character of aesthetically embodied meaning. Even if it does much to extend the ontology of Hegelian aesthetics, it does little to address the standing objection that Hegel has little to offer in the way of aesthetic experience.36 Nor are these wholly separate issues. For, already implicit in the ontological language of “transfiguration” is a (perhaps more interesting) phenomenological question concerning the appearance of art as embodied meaning. What does it mean to experience Warhol’s Brillo Box as a work of art? When at last we can reliably distinguish art from nonart, what can we say about the experience of art? How does meaningfulness appear to us in works of art? If we take seriously the historicist character of aesthetic theory in Hegel and Danto, the need for contemporary aesthetic theory to adapt to the cultural turn in art becomes even more

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evident. Theory must be responsive to practice. Just as Hegel situates his definition of art within a historical and cultural evolution (from symbolic to classical to modern, or, “romantic” art), Danto locates the need for a revised ontology in the narrative of modern art that extends from postimpressionist painting to pop art. Allowing, then, that postmodern artistic practices that blur the lines between art and the everyday force the paradigm shift from mimetic theories of art to something like “embodied meaning,” the contemporary cultural turn in art advances this dialectic by making explicit that the kinds of meanings that art embodies are deeply embedded in human experience. The cultural turn signifies more than a paradigm shift away from abstraction and a return of aesthetic representation in contemporary art. It signifies the reassertion of art’s sociopolitical meaning. The language of ontology, however, fails to capture this. When artistic practices are no longer principally occupied with avant-garde experimentations aimed at stretching the definitional limits of art, how might an ontology respond to the historical dialectic of an artworld that intervenes directly in the social world? Here, too, I think, the conceptual resources are to be found in Hegel’s aesthetics, as Danto (having long avoided explicit discussion of political aesthetics), comes to appreciate in his later writing.37 Speaking generally, Hegel locates the value of art in neither instrumentalist nor strictly aestheticist terms, but rather in the interrelation of artistic form and artistic content. In this respect, Hegel has more to say about how meaning gets embodied in works of art, and how such meanings take shape among particular individuals within particular historical and cultural contexts. Arendt is actually much closer to Hegel on this point, as she draws out the phenomenological implications of art’s hybrid ontology. “The immediate source of the art work,” she writes,

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echoing Hegel, “is the human capacity for thought.”38 Works of art reify human thought in material form—they become “thought things.”39 That art appears to us this way has tremendous sociopolitical significance insofar as politics, on Arendt’s view, concerns primarily the “space of appearances,” that is, the space in which “I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.”40 The public space of appearance is what constitutes our lived reality, the space in which our projects, values, commitments, and identities become intersubjectively realized and made concrete. This raises the normative stakes of the public sphere considerably since, on her view, “the greatest that man can achieve is his own appearance and actualization,”41 and accordingly, to be deprived of this space “means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance.”42 Notice, then, that it is an expanded and more robust conception of the public sphere that Arendt links with the ideal of self-determination. “Without a space of appearance,” she writes, “neither the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be established beyond doubt.”43 And art, communicating thought in the language of sensory perception, plays a central role in the public appearance of agency. Danto’s definition of art as “embodied meaning,” coupled with Arendt’s understanding of art’s role with respect to the appearance of agency in the public sphere, gives us a clearer sense of the contemporary sociopolitical significance of art in Hegel’s aesthetics. Art appears to us in sensible forms that pose a “demand for meaningfulness,” and, by doing so, engages us in the politics of perception. At the very least, these variations on Hegel’s definition of art as “the sensible appearance of the Idea” cast doubt on the criticism that a Hegelian account of art is far

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too entrenched in speculative metaphysics to yield any meaningful theoretical insights into modern art. The question that remains is how the contemporary sociopolitical relevance of Hegelian aesthetics stands in relation to the aesthetics of Kant, as advanced by Kantian avant-gardists. In other words, with respect to the connection between art and agency, how does the Hegelian notion of aesthetic reflexivity relate to Kant’s theory of aesthetic reflection?

3.5. WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF PURPOSIVENESS? We’ve seen that the prevailing narrative of modern aesthetics is defined by a seemingly fundamental tension between Kant and Hegel. Jason Gaiger’s boilerplate summary of this distinction is fairly typical: “Whilst Kant’s name has principally been associated with the development of a formalist aesthetics, Hegel is seen to represent an alternative, content-based approach which takes into account the social and historical context in which works of art are made and appreciated.”44 Strictly speaking, such characterizations aren’t wrong. There is indeed a difference in philosophical orientation between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. Kant’s is an aesthetic theory concerning the universality of aesthetic judgments of beauty, whereas Hegel’s is a philosophy of art concerning the meaning and value of artworks in relation to culturally particular contexts. And yet, by focusing on surfacelevel differences, we risk overlooking the deeper affinity between the two views as well as more interesting points of contrast between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. There is more to the Kant–Hegel narrative than the partitioning of aesthetic theory into formalist and cognitivist camps. By oversimplifying the

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distinction between them, we risk distorting our understanding of each. Both Kant and Hegel arrive at the question of beauty from the standpoint of systematic philosophy whose principal elements concern the nature and limits of rationality. For Kant, it is linked specifically to the epistemology of judgment that underwrites his critical philosophy as a whole. In the first Critique, the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, he sets out to explain how a certain class of cognitive judgments, namely, synthetic judgments a priori, can be possible.45 How is it that I can reliably calculate the distance between stars, or determine one event to be the cause of another? Because, Kant explains, the mind in effect gives experience both spatiotemporal form (through a priori intuitions) and conceptual form (through a priori categories of the understanding). Similarly, in Kant’s practical philosophy, he aims to show that the same principle applies to moral judgment as well: we ensure the universality and necessity of the moral law because we give it the rational form of a categorical imperative. But, as Kant later comes to realize, the very capacity for judgment (Urteilskraft), defined as “the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal,”46 can proceed in one of two distinct ways. Up to this point, he had been dealing principally with cognitive, or “determining” judgments, according to which a concept is given a priori, thereby giving conceptual shape to empirical experience. But it so happens that judgment can proceed even in the absence of such a concept, or with an incomplete and indeterminate concept. This happens, for example, when the senses are overwhelmed by the richness and magnitude of nature; we perceive it, but we don’t know quite what to make of it. These Kant calls “reflecting” judgments, and they proceed in precisely the reverse order, such that the understanding is “obliged to ascend from the

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particular in nature to the universal” (CJ, 180). And so it turns out that, beyond the scope of cognitive judgments that lay the foundations for mathematics and the empirical sciences in the Critique of Pure Reason, as well as the moral judgments of practical reason set forth in the subsequent Critique of Practical Reason, certain judgments arise from experiences in which no determinate concept is available—hence the need for a Critique of Judgment to complete the trilogy of Kant’s critical philosophy. Readers of the third Critique are sometimes struck by the somewhat awkward juxtaposition of aesthetic theory and causal reasoning that comprise the two-part division of the text. This, too, is a product of Kantian systematicity. As Kant explains, reflecting judgments of nature can take either aesthetic or teleological forms (CJ, 193), as we can judge nature either in terms of its beauty or in terms of final causes. Either way, Kant’s aim is to demonstrate that, even though reflective judgments proceed independent of a determinate concept, they are not entirely unmoored from conceptual understanding. Rather, the guiding principle of reflecting judgments is what Kant calls the principle of the purposiveness of nature. Overwhelmed by nature but nevertheless wanting to make sense of it, the mind is disposed to seek out some kind of rational structure in it. As Kant puts it, we have to regard nature as if it is purposive. He is quick to point out, however, that the principle of purposiveness has merely regulative status (in contrast to the constitutive principles that underwrite determinate cognitive judgments). Even if we can’t know the final purposes of nature, the principle of purposiveness functions as a kind of heuristic device that tells us how we have to think about nature in order to make judgments about it. Thus, the principle of purposiveness is a “special a priori concept” which presents nature “as if an understanding contained

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the basis of the unity of what is diverse in nature’s empirical laws” (CJ, 180–81). It is distinguished from the constitutive principles of cognition (e.g., causality) in that it is a concept not of the understanding, but of the imagination. Kant insists that the principle of purposiveness is at work in all reflective judgments. Whether the starry heavens produce in us a sense of cosmic wonder or the intricate folds of a flower produce in us a feeling of pleasure, we have to see nature as if it were rationally organized. Leaving aside any doubts about teleology in nature, why should we think the principle of purposiveness is necessary for aesthetic judgments? Why should we think that saying “these flowers are beautiful” requires us to “assume that they are based on a causality [that operates] according to purposes, i.e., on a will that would have so arranged them in accordance with the presentation of a certain rule” (CJ, 220)? Kant’s answer is that we need to think this if the judgment “this is beautiful” expresses anything more than a subjective pleasure (more than just “I like these flowers”). For Kant, judgments of taste involve a certain kind of pleasure, namely, a pleasure that, at least in principle, could be had by all. Such is the pleasure felt by what Kant calls the “free play” of the faculties, which occurs when the understanding, when confronted by a certain kind of representation, fails to find the right concept for the experience. In the absence of a determinate concept, the mental faculties are not given over to chaos and lawlessness. Instead, the imagination steps in and gives the experience of beauty the form of purposiveness. According to Kant, the pleasure we take in aesthetic beauty is “the very consciousness of a merely formal purposiveness in the play of the subject’s cognitive powers” (CJ, 222). The rose appears to us as if it were there for the purpose of our taking aesthetic pleasure in it. Herein lies the alluringly paradoxical notion of purposiveness without purpose on which judgments

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of taste are made (CJ, 220–21). Even though this purposiveness can only be assumed as a principle that exists in us, not in nature, the appearance of purposiveness allows us to carry out judgments as if rational purpose were objectively present in nature. Insofar as the blooming rose, or the rolling landscape, or birdsong afford me pleasure in perceiving the object as if it were there for no other purpose than my taking pleasure in its beauty, we have a basis for claiming that judgments of beauty are not merely subjective, but subjectively objective, that is, grounded in a pleasure that is, in principle, universally communicable. For the Kantian avant-gardist, it is not so much the universality of taste, but rather the separation of the aesthetic from the cognitive that makes Kant’s account of reflective judgments attractive. Kant seems to liberate aesthetic experience from the constraints of empirical knowledge, affording the aesthetic the autonomy to exist on its own terms. Commonly referred to as the “subjectivist” aesthetics of Kant, this account seems to prioritize aesthetic receptivity in a way that maximizes the interpretive and imaginative freedom of the aesthetic subject. It is not the object but the experience of beauty in the aesthetic subject that is the focus of Kantian aesthetics. In reflective judgments, the conceptuality of the thing, even the thingness of the thing, recedes into the background. Judgments of taste furnish no knowledge of the thing. They tell us nothing in particular about the world. Sans concept, we are left to contend with only the sensible particularity of the thing, that is, its representation. Indeed, such judgments are “reflective” in the sense that, instead of employing the faculties in determinate cognition, they reflect the operation of the faculties and thus our own capacity for knowledge as such. By staving off determinate conceptualization, the presentation of beauty provides us with a kind of metareflective awareness of the self as a

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knowing subject. And it is this reflective self-awareness that for the Kantian avant-gardist seems to connect aesthetics with a politically progressive conception of self-determining agency. This is seen, for example, in Kant’s description of beauty as a “symbol of morality,” where the contemplation of beauty is thought to furnish a sense of moral agency in which the freedom of the will is reconciled with the determinacy of nature (CJ, §59). It is also seen in Kant’s claim that judgments of taste presuppose a sensus communis, a shared capacity among humans to experience aesthetic pleasure that makes “universal assent” possible (CJ, §40). For late modernists such as Adorno and Bernstein, foregrounding the “common sense” of taste is key to assigning social significance to art in a way that salvages Kantian aesthetics in light of the lost hope of universality.47 It must be emphasized, however, that the notion of subjectivity at work in Kant’s account of aesthetic reflection is a highly abstract notion, having to do with subjectivity in general. What one is really made aware of in reflective judgment is that one satisfies the conditions of agency—a shared and uniform capacity for cognitive, moral, and aesthetic judgment. To put it another way, judgments of taste give us reflective awareness, not of ourselves as subjects, but of subjectivity as such. Just as reflective judgments show me nothing particular about the world, nor do they show me anything particular about myself. The particularity of reflective judgments concerns the representation of the object judged rather than the reflective awareness of the judging subject. And, in fact, it must be so on Kant’s view, since otherwise there could be no basis for claiming the universality of such judgments. So, what progressively minded Kantian avantgardists overlook in extoling the virtues of sociality in Kant’s theory of taste is that it is more or less the aesthetic equivalent of political liberalism. The communicability of reflective

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judgments— aesthetic consensus—is predicated on a general, common notion of subjectivity, necessarily shorn of particularity. Rather than this particular self, it is a generic sense of selfhood, as gleaned from the playful interaction of my faculties, to which judgments of taste direct reflective awareness. This may not be a problem where reflective beauty concerns the experience of beauty in general. Such insights can yield potentially rich and meaningful forms of aesthetic reflection— (“Behold how my faculties are pleasantly uncertain about what to do with the beauty of this sunset!”). But the experience of art is different, and it does present a problem. For, as Kant himself recognizes when he turns his attention from natural beauty to “fine art” (schöne Kunst), the experience of art is qualitatively different from the experience of nature.48 “In dealing with a product of fine art,” he explains, “we must become conscious that it is art rather than nature” (CJ, 306). More precisely, the difference is one of appearance. The work of art, unlike nature, appears to us as “a production through freedom, i.e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason” (CJ, 303). In other words, in contrast to the presumed purposiveness of nature, works of art appear to us as artifacts—that is, as products of human intelligence and intentionality. A problem arises, then, because the appearance of artifactuality in fine art suggests a sense of purpose that seems to cut against the merely regulative function of purposiveness that Kant ascribes to judgments of taste. Rather than perceiving works of art as if they reflect rational, purposeful order, we experience them as actually purposeful, imbued with the artist’s intentions. In which case, the as if structure of reflecting judgment seems to fall away, taking with it the strictly subjective status and regulative use of purposiveness at work in reflective aesthetic judgments of nature. As Kant himself puts it, judgments

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concerning works of fine art are “logically conditioned” in the sense that “we have to look beyond the mere form and toward a concept” (CJ, 312). This realization seems to present Kant with a dilemma: either acknowledge the distinctive character of the appearance of art as objectively rather than subjectively purposive, and thus forfeit the principle of purposiveness as the basis of reflecting judgment, or maintain the qualitative similarity between natural and artistic beauty and assign the purposiveness that appears in art a merely regulative, as if status. Kant’s own solution to the dilemma is to downplay the difference in appearance between fine art and nature. Indeed, the section in which he addresses this tension is titled “Fine Art is Art Insofar as It Appears at the Same Time to be Nature” (Schöne Kunst ist eine Kunst, sofern sie zugleich Natur zu sein scheint) (CJ, 306). Note that, throughout this section, Kant appeals to phenomenological language to draw the comparison, explaining that fine art “looks (aussieht) to us like nature”; that works are to “look (anzusehen) like nature”; that the work of art “appears (erscheint) like nature”; that fine art must “seem (scheinen) intentional”; and so on (CJ, 307). The point Kant is making is that, even though we know it to be a work of art, and thus the product of human purpose, this knowledge does not figure (at least not primarily) into our aesthetic judgment of it insofar as the artifactuality of the work is in a sense hidden from us, made to appear as if it were a work of nature. In this way, Kant preserves the structural uniformity of reflective judgments with respect to both natural and artistic beauty. Whether we are judging the beauty of art or the beauty of nature, the judgment rests on the merely regulative use of the principle of purposiveness. And Kant preserves this structure by attempting to establish a kind of reciprocity between the appearance of art and the appearance of nature: “Nature, we say, is beautiful if it also looks like art; and art can

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be called fine art only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature” (CJ, 306). In sum, Kant’s account of reflective judgment requires that we judge art as if it appeared as nature appearing as if it were art. The symmetry Kant draws between the appearance of art and the appearance of nature is, of course, highly contested, with several critics,49 and as many defenders.50 However we interpret this proposed symmetry, it cannot be taken to mean that aesthetic judgments of fine art are qualitatively identical to aesthetic judgments of natural beauty. At no point does Kant deny the appearance of objective intentionality in fine art. As we’ve seen, Kant actually emphasizes the distinctive appearance of art in reflective judgment. He makes very clear that “if the object is given as a product of art, and as such is to be declared beautiful, then we must first base it on a concept of what the thing is [meant] to be, since art always presupposes a purpose in the cause (and its causality)” (CJ, 311). It is not that the artifactuality of fine art disappears or is transformed into some abstract teleology. It is rather that the artist’s purpose or process in making the work recede from the work’s appearance, thus foregrounding the work itself as the proper object of aesthetic judgment. What does this mean? For one thing, it means that the artist is expected to conceal the “academic form” (CJ, 307) of the work. It must not appear as belabored or overwrought, but rather must “seem (scheinen) as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature” (CJ, 305). But there is a further and deeper sense in which art appears as nature. As Gregg Horowitz observes, this is the purposiveness of the artist—the genius who “gives the rule to art” (CJ, 307)—who makes the work of fine art appear as if it were wholly free and unconstrained. The work of art looks like nature in the sense that it presents the

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sensible world as a product of free labor, absent of any mechanism or extrinsic determination.51 It appears, then, that Kant’s brief account of fine art in §§45– 53, interesting and insightful as it is in its own right, stands in tension with the account of aesthetic reflection Kant develops throughout the third Critique. Alone, Kant’s recognition that “natural beauty is a beautiful thing” whereas “artistic beauty is a beautiful presentation (Vorstellung) of a thing” (CJ, 311), constitutes acknowledgment of a difference in appearance between natural and artistic beauty. The question is what Kant does with this recognition. Either Kant preserves the universal communicability of taste by minimizing the phenomenological difference between artistic beauty and natural beauty that he himself has articulated as centrally relevant to judgments of taste. Or he acknowledges that the principle of purposiveness functions differently, if at all, with respect to aesthetic judgments about art, and is left with qualitatively distinct forms of aesthetic reflection. In other words, Kant never fully resolves the tension between the epistemic uniformity of aesthetic judgment and the phenomenological difference between the appearance of purposiveness in the beauty of nature and the appearance of purpose in the beauty of art. And that has some bearing on how we understand the relation between aesthetic reflection and subjectivity. Enter Hegel. Though it is tempting to read Hegel’s definition of art as the “sensible appearance of the Idea” as an indictment on Kant’s aesthetics, an attempt to pit aesthetic content against aesthetic form, Hegel readily acknowledges that Kant is by no means oblivious to conceptuality in art. Apart from the ample lip service he pays to the Critique of Judgment, 52 Hegel’s philosophy of art is, in effect, an elaborate extension of the Kantian

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insight that works of art appear to us as the aesthetic presentation of human intentionality. And even Hegel’s insistence, contra Kant, on the fundamental distinction between natural and artistic beauty are rooted in an effort to preserve and develop the Kantian insight that aesthetic experience affords us meaningful reflective awareness of our own agency. By focusing on the philosophical significance of art, Hegel sees himself as better positioned to advance this insight, to show that the experience of art is not only reflective, but also reflexive—an experience wherein we get a glimpse of our subjectivity not only through the abstract operation of our cognitive faculties in free play, but also, and more importantly, through the distinct shape of their operation, as a reflection of the particularity of our subjectivity. That we encounter ourselves in the aesthetic experience of art is the torch that Kant passes to Hegel; and Hegel runs with it. We might say, then, that the difference between Kant’s supposedly formalist theory of taste and Hegel’s supposedly content-oriented philosophy of art turns out, then, to be more a matter of degree than of principle. It cannot be a matter of formalist versus cognitivist aesthetics that separates their views. For Kant and Hegel alike, ideas, represented in the aesthetic form of artworks, are neither devoid of nor reducible to conceptual content. So the difference between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics is not simply a difference in the conceptual determinacy of art in aesthetic reflection. The real difference seems to lie instead in the degree of determinacy with respect to the reflexive self-awareness of the aesthetic subject. This is a difference in how subjectivity appears to us in the work of art. For Kant, aesthetic experience gives us reflective awareness of our agency vis-à-vis the free play of the faculties. In place of determinate cognition, judgments of taste afford a meta-level

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glimpse of our capacity for cognition as such; the self that appears is the self as meaning maker. Hegel, too, thinks the experience of art reveals subjectivity, but in concrete and particular form. The experience of art for Hegel is reflexive in the sense that it refers back to the self, not as abstract subjectivity, but as the subject of aesthetic experience, the “I” as situated here and now. Of course, the trade-off is this: universality in judgment for reflexivity in experience. Art can elicit radically different aesthetic responses precisely because it appears to us as a product of human purpose, saturated with cultural and historical value and meaning. Once we abandon demands for universal assent in matters of taste, we find in the beauty of art highly particular modes of aesthetic engagement in which the aesthetic subject confronts their subjectivity in historically and culturally particular forms. And this capacity to invoke reflexive self-awareness of one’s particularity is precisely why Hegel thinks it is necessary to distinguish the appearance of art from the appearance of nature. Art shows us subjectivity in a way that nature cannot. Aesthetic reflection may very well call up subjectivity in bearing witness to the beauty of a rose, a sunset, or a sprawling mountainscape. It may prompt deep and profound moments of inner reflection. But it does not call on us to answer it, to reflexively examine the particular self called upon. This is because the beauty of nature does not demand meaningfulness in the way that art does. Works of art indeed prompt us to reflective awareness of our cognitive faculties at play. But they also ask us to examine why they play this way. The appearance of purpose in the work of art prompts us to ask, “What do you make of this?” It engages me as if it were addressed specifically to me, and in so doing, reflexively points me beyond my cognitive and moral agency to the particular kind of cognitive and moral agent I take

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myself to be. Unlike nature, art makes me reflexively attentive to the particular ways that I enact my particular agency in responding to it. And, for Hegel, the trade-off is well worth it. For advancing this Kantian insight allows us to draw a more robust connection between agency and aesthetic experience. Articulating and emphasizing this self-awareness as a primary and constitutive feature of aesthetic experience shows how art can play a primary and constitutive role in determining our identities. Advancing this Kantian insight depends on seeing subjectivity as more than a background condition for aesthetic reflection. On this view, if the aesthetic is to have substantial bearing on lived experience, it is in terms of a more concrete, more explicit, and more determinate form of self-awareness that emerges from a reflexive engagement with art. Aesthetic reflection doesn’t sufficiently capture the felt sense of subjectivity that develops in response to the ways that works of art call on us to examine our ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and identities. The Hegelian notion of aesthetic reflexivity is intended to address the way that subjectivity appears in its particularity in aesthetic experience— as the self belonging to this culture, as playing these roles, as holding these beliefs, and these attitudes, and so on.

FIGURE 3.1  Cai

Guo-Qiang, Homeland, 2013

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FIGURE 3.2  Cai

Guo-Qiang, Homeland, 2013 (detail)

Understood this way, the concept of aesthetic reflexivity that extends from Kant to Hegel to contemporary art practices offers a way of conjoining aesthetic experience with contemporary conceptions of social agency. If today self-determination implies the realization of agency in the concretely particular form of

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identity, rather than the abstract, anonymous form in which it has traditionally been inscribed in liberal thought, then accordingly one must look to the practical conditions that make self-determination possible. This means, among other things, looking beyond the familiar domain of deliberative politics in order to gain a better sense of how the modern self is constructed and communicated in social contexts. In particular, it means expanding the scope of politics to include the kinds of cultural narratives that give coherence and meaning to individuals’ lives. This would better align political theory with the resurgence of artistic practices that flaunt modernist taboos by engaging aesthetic representation in the politics of perception. It would also align aesthetic theory with contemporary notions of agency as manifested through distinct forms of identity. Reflective awareness of subjectivity as such doesn’t pull much weight when it comes to crafting the kinds of narratives that allow individuals and groups to take ownership of their identities. Furthermore, when agency takes the shape of cultural identities that must remain fluid, contestable, and open to revision in order to meet the conditions of modern self-determination, art affords the kind of reflexive awareness of cultural particularity that allows us to constantly reorient our identities with respect to different social environments. Exploring the connection between art and identity is also an important strategy of contemporary art. It is evident, for example, in the eclectic works of Pakistani-born artist Shahzia Sikander, who combines contemporary minimalist and abstractionist aesthetic practices with Indo-Persian cultural and art-historical traditions such as miniature paintings depicting Hindu deities and Gopi women. Similarly, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s celebrated “gunpowder drawings” form part of a broader artistic repertoire that harnesses a range of traditional Chinese

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FIGURE 3.3  Kara

Walker, Keys to the Coop, 1997; linocut, 40 x 60.5 inches (101.6 x 153.7 cm)

materials, symbols, Eastern philosophy, and cultural practices as a way of exhibiting and reframing contemporary Chinese culture. Such works call on us to respond to the interrelation between the aesthetic qualities of the work and the cultural narrative they seek to project. Other works implicate the spectator more directly in the process of negotiating the representation of identity. In the panoramic visual narratives of Kara Walker, for example, the appropriation and recontextualization of racist antebellum depictions of African Americans serve not only to confront the viewer with an image of a problematic history but also to prompt reflexive awareness of the viewer’s own role as witness to images of violence, bigotry, and defamation. Walker reconstitutes the abstract, silhouetted figures into deeply unsettling pictorial vignettes in a way that makes

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self-conscious spectatorship an essential part of the aesthetic experience of the work. In this way, the imagery—whether it features the exaggerated physique of the “mammy” figure, the unkempt “sambo,” or the prurient interests of slaveholders— functions as a visual critique of degrading and stereotyped representations of Black identity that now call for collective revision. In these confrontations, we see how the cultural turn in art aims, more generally, to integrate art into the ongoing social struggle to reclaim representations of cultural identity and to reconstitute them as meaningful sources of self-affirmation and self-determination. Given the prominent aesthetic dimension of modern selfarticulation, political theories committed to the liberal notion of the public sphere as the site of cultural contestation miss much of what counts as the transmission of the cultural narratives. Particularly among reformed liberalists who recognize cultural identity as a necessary dimension of social and political agency, there is a particular need to look beyond the rationalist moorings of deliberative politics to the more familiar venues of cultural production in order to account for the various ways that modern identity takes shape. At the very least, the aesthetic dimension of culture offers a viable supplement to discursive forms of identity negotiation, and it may well be that forms of aesthetic engagement in many cases substitute rational deliberation, particularly when it involves distorted or damaging social perceptions of identity. Thus, any political theory that regards self-determination as bound up with the construction and communication of cultural narratives needs an account of how such narratives function within the shared cultural spaces of the museum, the movie theater, the radio, the television, and so on.

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3.6. CONCLUSION: THE SOCIAL SELF Hegel’s aesthetics, as I have argued, provides a theoretical grounding for both the political and aesthetic responses to the question of art’s role in creating and contesting cultural narratives. The suggestion so far is that the Hegelian idea of aesthetic reflexivity aids in articulating the connection between aesthetic experience and self-determined agency. In contrast to the tendency to reconfigure Kantian aesthetics in a way that lends sociopolitical currency to aesthetic reflection, I’ve instead sketched an account of aesthetic reflexivity in Hegel that, though deeply indebted to Kant, is better suited to both contemporary politics and contemporary art. The peculiar way that works of art make human ideas and purposes appear in sensible form, originally thematized in Kant’s discussion of fine art in the third Critique, is for Hegel the conceptual basis for connecting the experience of art to the cultivation of the concretely particular self. This notion of aesthetic reflexivity in turn gives theoretical grounding to what I think for most of us is an intuitive (albeit implicit) recognition of the relation between art and cultural identity. If we acknowledge the extent to which many contemporary works of art aim to communicate these identity narratives through aesthetic experience, then the extent to which they achieve such sociopolitical ends should be regarded as centrally relevant to their aesthetic value as well. Conversely, if we acknowledge—as reformed liberalism asks us to—the extent to which self-determination depends on the free and full development of identity, and the extent to which the formation and transmission of cultural narratives is a primary means of realizing this sense of self, then aesthetic practices (broadly construed) should, like other self-defining cultural practices, be

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regarded as a primary source of cultural identity. Crafting one’s narrative is, as we’ve seen, an aesthetic process. Though rightly skeptical of an artistic instrumentalism that shuts down aesthetic receptivity and imaginative free play in the name of political intervention, Kantian avant-gardism has too rigidly steeled itself against an emerging set of artistic practices directly engaged in the politics of perception. Its conceptual vocabulary offers very little in the way of explaining why we are presently witnessing the resurgence of cultural identity in contemporary artistic production, or why the capacity to communicate and give shape to cultural narratives has come to be appreciated as one of the good-making properties of artworks. Largely absent from the discussion of self-determination thus far, however, is the important point that, for Hegel, the self is never determined in social isolation. Indeed, perhaps the most enduring legacy of Hegel’s philosophy is the idea that subjectivity is intersubjectively constituted. As Charles Taylor has observed, this fundamental Hegelian insight marks an important contrast to the “monological” model of self-creation predominant in liberal thought. According to the alternative “dialogical” model he attributes to Hegel, “We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.”53 Accordingly, the Hegelian concept of aesthetic reflexivity I’ve sketched so far has to be more carefully articulated as an inherently social process, through which self-determination is achieved through the reflexive encounter with oneself in the other (sich selbst in dem Anderen); that is, as an aesthetic experience of the “ ‘We’ that is an ‘I,’ and an ‘I’ that is a ‘We.’ ”54 In the next chapter, therefore, I will offer a more developed account of the reflexive structure of aesthetic experience by connecting it with the Hegelian concept of “recognition” that has come to define much of the theoretical framework of contemporary cultural politics.

4 THE AESTHETICS OF RECOGNITION

What we’re positing here is a new vision of the possible, one which is inclusive, one that says yes to people who happen to look like me and one that will increasingly catch fire as we go on to inspire young people to imagine new possibilities. —Kehinde Wiley, on his presidential portrait of Obama

4.1. RECOGNITION AND THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION An unexpected result of the cultural turn in politics has been the sudden resurgence of interest in Hegelian philosophy among political theorists. In particular, the concept of recognition (Anerkennung), discussed at a critical juncture in Hegel’s famously impenetrable treatise, the Phenomenology of Spirit, has become a touchstone for theorists attempting to read modern social movements through a conceptual understanding of socially constituted subjectivity. Frantz Fanon, for example, invokes the Hegelian notion of a “struggle for recognition” in seeking to diagnose the social pathologies experienced by Blacks in French-colonized Algeria.1 In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir

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frames the feminist struggle for gender equality as a Hegelian struggle for recognition.2 Similarly, though more recently, Susan Buck-Morss interprets the historical events of the Haitian Revolution through the famous master/slave dialectic central to the discussion of recognition and argues that it is likely the historical basis of Hegel’s account.3 What has come to be known as the “politics of recognition,” however, entered the discourse of mainstream political philosophy with the eponymous essay by Charles Taylor published in 1992, and subsequently developed through the writings of Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Sybol Cook Anderson, and a number of other contemporary political thinkers. Of course, the concept of recognition has since assumed a variety of different (sometimes conflicting) forms, with varying degrees of proximity to Hegel’s philosophy. But the disparate strands of recognitive theory more or less converge on the view that agency is achieved through reciprocal social relations. And, in this respect, the politics of recognition constitutes one of the earliest and most significant developments of the cultural turn in politics. By focusing on the social conditions under which individuals are able to gain a sense of autonomous agency, recognitive theories articulate a conception of self-determination that extends well beyond the schedule of rights of classical liberalism. Indeed, the Hegelian concept of recognition has played a significant role in the reformist critique of liberal theory precisely because it specifies that the conditions of self-determination extend to the social and psychological needs of individuals to be treated with respect by others. For, on the Hegelian model, recognition entails something more than the political and institutional equality of individuals; it requires equality and reciprocity of social relations, wherein the self perceives itself—as Hegel famously puts it— as “being at home with oneself in another.”4

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Specifying the “something more” of recognition, however, is another thing. And the development of recognitive theories over the last few decades has been marked by the sheer difficulty of specifying the further conditions of recognition that would satisfy this expanded conception of self-determination. There are many reasons for this, most of which are owed to the simple fact that social and psychological conditions are more context-specific and rest on a more subjective set of assumptions. But another reason for this difficulty has to do with the fact that the politics of recognition is necessarily bound up with the politics of perception. That is, whether or not individuals see themselves as “being at home” with themselves in another depends, in part, on the social perceptions that shape the self-other relation. Whether we approach recognition as a theory of justice,5 a theory of social ethics,6 or a theory of subjectivity,7 the conditions of recognition rest on a certain symmetry between how we see ourselves in relation to others and how we see others in relation to ourselves. Whether we regard recognition as primarily a social good, measured in terms of self-confidence and psychological well-being,8 or as a political good, expressed in legal rights and economic or institutional equality,9 this good will to some extent be measured by the extent to which social perceptions are accurate or distorted. And whether we take the claims of recognition as expressions of individualist or collectivist will,10 the conditions under which such claims are met depend on whether the identities in question are fairly represented, misrepresented, or not represented at all. Whatever form the politics of recognition takes, the task of specifying the “something more” of recognition is further complicated by the fact that the relevant social conditions have to do with the range of social perceptions that shape the intersubjective relations between self and other.

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The politics of perception further problematizes the politics of recognition. The difficulty this presents, I argue, makes especially relevant the notion of aesthetic reflexivity developed in the previous chapter. For insofar as recognition depends on the ability to negotiate our identities at the discursive as well as the perceptual level, some account of the ways that perceptions of identity are formed, communicated, and challenged in various social contexts is necessary. The “something more” of selfdetermination that recognition theories aim to articulate is the capacity to imagine the other, and that otherness is the lens through which we imagine ourselves. It requires a way of not only attending to the kinds of social perceptions that affect whether social relations are properly reciprocal or not, but of evaluating them. What theories of recognition need, in other words, is an account of what it means to gauge the reciprocity of prediscursive perceptions. I argue in this chapter that the basis for such an account is found in Hegel’s notion of aesthetic reflexivity. On the assumption that today the claims of recognition are to a large extent formed through, taken from, and contested in the perceptions of identity circulated through TV, movies, music, and the ubiquity of the photographic image, Hegel’s claim that art functions as a primary form of cultural expression stands a chance of making newly relevant the politics of recognition and its relation to the cultural turn in politics more generally. That is to say, contemporary theories of Hegelian recognition stand to benefit much from a contemporary theory of Hegelian aesthetics. It is surprising that recognitive theories overlook the connection between recognition and aesthetics, especially given how much of Hegel’s account of recognition comes through his analysis of Sophocles’s Antigone. But it is also disappointing given that much of the present resurgence of Hegel’s social philosophy

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emerges from a tradition of critical theory once deeply immersed in political aesthetics. As Gabriel Rockhill has observed, “it is remarkable that a significant number of the current representatives of Frankfurt School critical theory have neglected the question of aesthetics.”11 Instead, recognition theorists increasingly situate recognition within a Habermasian framework of discursive politics, which, as Nikolas Kompridis points out, diminishes the relevance of noncognitive forms of receptivity in the claims of recognition.12 Indeed, Axel Honneth, whose work on recognition has been pivotal to this development, has yet to acknowledge any connection between the politics of recognition and aesthetics. As one critic notes, some account of this connection would add an important dimension to Honneth’s account of cultural responses to distorted forms of social intersubjectivity.13 Yet, overlooking the aesthetic dimension of recognition is more than just a missed opportunity; it represents a serious failure to adjust the politics of recognition to the politics of perception. Thus, I’ll begin, in section 4.2, by sketching a brief overview of recognition theory as it develops from Hegel to Honneth, followed in section 4.3 by a critique of Honneth’s account of recognition as ill-equipped to address the perceptual dimension of contemporary cultural identity. In section 4.4, I amend Honneth’s account of recognition by situating it more generally within the account of aesthetic reflexivity developed thus far. It is within this broader context of Hegel’s social thought, I argue, as it extends to and is taken up in the later Lectures on Aesthetics, that the Hegelian account of reflexive imagination gains currency with respect to the present politics of perception. In section 4.5, I’ll address some of the specific challenges that arise at the intersection of Hegelian aesthetics and Hegelian social theory.

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4.2. THE PROBLEM OF SUBJECTIVITY (THEN) VS. THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY (NOW) If the Hegelian concept of recognition is relevant to contemporary cultural politics, it is in part because the problem of subjectivity faced by post-Kantian idealists in the nineteenth century bears some similarity to the problem of cultural identity that we face today. Kant’s resolution to the classic problems of metaphysical, epistemic, and moral philosophy turned on a conception of subjectivity as divided between the real, or noumenal, self, the source of rational moral agency, and the phenomenal self that appears to us in empirical experience. Lingering dissatisfaction with the notion of a fundamentally divided self thus posed a “problem of subjectivity” that helped catalyze the development of German idealist thought in the immediate wake of Kant’s critical philosophy. Following a line of thought already implicit in both the “identity” philosophy of J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling’s philosophy of nature, Hegel seeks to restore the lost unity of the subject through an account of socially constituted agency. This account takes as its starting point the inherent sociality of subjectivity, arguing that self-determination is contingent upon the social conditions in which agency takes shape. Specifically, it is Hegel’s characterization of the “struggle for recognition” as a dialectical process marked by increasingly reciprocal social relations among individuals and social groups that informs a line of political thought extending from Marxism to contemporary cultural politics. A relatively minor theme in Hegel’s own day, the discussion of recognition gains prominence with Alexander Kojève’s famous lectures on the Phenomenology delivered in Paris throughout the 1930s. Here he argues that the “struggle for recognition” at the

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heart of the now famous master/slave dialectic forms the core dialectical concept of the text and, indeed, of Hegel’s social philosophy as a whole. This “existentialist” reading of Hegel would prove enormously influential for the development of poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist thought in France.14 So, too, would it maintain an interpretive hold on Hegelian studies until the mid-1970s, when critics began to question both the place and the function of recognition in Hegel’s thought. Ludwig Siep, for example, argues that recognition must be understood more broadly, as a general principle of Hegel’s practical philosophy directed against Hobbesian liberalism.15 By framing recognition more broadly as a normative account of intersubjective freedom and a response to prevailing liberalist theories, Siep makes Hegel’s social philosophy relevant to a broad cross section of contemporary moral, social, and political theory at a time when some of the central assumptions of classical liberalism were coming under greater scrutiny.

4.2.1. Taylor’s Recognition As noted above, Charles Taylor’s “The Politics of Recognition” brings Hegel’s philosophy to bear directly on the cultural turn in political thought. Sketching a historical trajectory from the collapse of social hierarchies to the emergence of individuality as a political concept in modern liberal democracies, Taylor pitches the politics of recognition as a corrective to the deficiencies of the politics of equal dignity and the excesses of the politics of difference. Central to this critique is the claim that modern identities are formed “dialogically,” through an inherently social and ongoing process of self-definition that occurs between the private and public spheres. The politics of dignity, with its

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identity-blind approach to assigning rights and protections on the basis of the equal moral status of all rational beings, fails to appreciate the “vital human need” of modern individuals to be respected for their particular identities, particularly in the case of marginalized or “subaltern” groups whose identities are significantly threatened by misrepresentation or misrecognition.16 On the other hand is the politics of difference, which responds to the universality of liberal politics with the demand that we acknowledge and respect difference, regardless of actual differences among groups and individuals. With the politics of recognition, Taylor’s aim is to anchor the emergence of cultural politics in a rich account of intersubjectivity that pays attention to the ways that identities take shape in specific social contexts. This, he claims, begins with Hegel’s concept of recognition. Drawing directly (albeit loosely) on the master/slave dialectic of the Phenomenology, Taylor thinks Hegel addresses precisely the sense in which the achievement of modern subjectivity is contingent upon the social recognition of particular identity forms. What Hegel gets right, he thinks, is his account of the extralegal, extrainstitutional conditions of self-determination, whereby identity is achieved through a socially reflexive process, a mutual sense of a “ ‘We’ that is an ‘I,’ and an ‘I’ that is a ‘We.’ ”17 In bringing the Hegelian concept of recognition to bear on contemporary cultural politics, Taylor confronts the politics of perception bound up with questions of cultural identity. His account of recognition makes clear that self-determination rests on political as well as social and psychological conditions. Beyond the recognition of cultural difference as a factor in judicial processes and policy making, the politics of equal recognition poses a “further demand” that “we all recognize the equal value of different cultures; that we not only let them survive, but acknowledge their worth.” Indeed, Taylor maintains that the denial or

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distortion of cultural identity “can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.”18 Recognition, therefore, demands reciprocity with respect to the various attitudes, conceptions, and perspectives of otherness that comprise acknowledgment and respect for difference. Achieving recognition, in other words, depends in part on how we perceive the self in relation to others and others in relation to the self. Articulating the conditions of recognition, then, is quite a tall order. How do we properly cultivate and maintain an attitude of openness to cultural differences and their respective values? As Taylor readily admits, it “involves something like an act of faith.”19 Given that recognition concerns not just the policies and protections that promote respect for difference in general, but the social perceptions that shape identity, the relevant question becomes: What norms of social perception are relevant to recognition? How might we gauge the extent to which social perceptions are adequate or inadequate, or conducive to reciprocal social relations? Such questions concerning the politics of perception, though centrally relevant to the politics of recognition, do not appear to even occur to Taylor.

4.2.2. Honneth’s Recognition A more developed account of recognition is found in the writings of critical theorist Axel Honneth. Like Taylor, Honneth draws on Hegel’s social philosophy to develop a contemporary account of social struggle. In his groundbreaking work, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict, he sets out “to develop, on the basis of Hegel’s model of a ‘struggle for recognition,’ the foundations for a social theory with

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normative content.”20 This first requires extracting the social philosophy of Hegel’s early Jena writings and separating it from the bad metaphysics of his later, better-known works.21 As Honneth’s account proceeds from concrete instances of disrespect, it also requires the supplementing of Hegel’s account of recognition with the empirical edge of modern social psychology. 22 Modernizing Hegel in this way, Honneth claims, provides a conceptual basis for articulating the “moral grammar” of social conflict, and thus the conditions for autonomous self-realization in modern democratic societies. Also, like Taylor, Honneth grounds the normative force of recognition in the claim that humans have a basic need for mutual social acknowledgment. In fact, Honneth goes one step further, characterizing the demand for recognition as a “quasitranscendental interest.”23 He not only preserves, but reinforces, the interrelation between the legal and psychosocial aspects of Hegelian recognition. Individuals count as moral members of social life by virtue of mutually respected legal rights, where such rights are in turn grounded in a more basic conception of equal respect for moral personhood. In positive terms, recognition is, for Honneth, both a legal/political as well as a social/psychological good. In negative terms, misrecognition is accordingly understood as both a legal harm (occasioned by the denial of legal status) as well as a moral or psychological harm (occasioned by the denial of social or cultural status), and thus an obstacle to self-determining autonomy. One advantage of Honneth’s account is that he specifies more precisely than Taylor what the reciprocal social relation between self and other consists in. Specifically, he is concerned with certain forms of self-relation, whereby one’s self-conception is adequately reflected in the other. This, too, is a modernized version of the Hegelian ideal of a “ ‘We’ that is ‘I,’ and an ‘I’ that is ‘We.’ ”

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This ideal takes its clearest expression in the claim that recognition consists in optimally reflexive self-relations in which the value of one’s particular identity is affirmed against a background of shared norms and practices. He describes three such “practical self-relations”—self-confidence, self- respect, and selfesteem. Roughly aligned with the Hegelian division among familial, legal, and communal relations, these correspond, respectively, to the various forms, or “patterns,” of recognition found in modern capitalist society, namely love, rights, and solidarity. Achieving a sense of self-determined subjectivity depends on the individual’s ability to acquire an adequate conception of self within each of these spheres of social activity. A further advantage of Honneth’s account is that it articulates more precisely the nondiscursive dimension of recognition, locating it in the prereflective attitudes toward otherness that figure into social relations. Of course, the most significant criticism of Honneth’s view to date comes from Nancy Fraser, who argues that an overemphasis on emotional and attitudinal responses to identity can overlook or even enable injustice at the political and distributive level. But even for Fraser’s “status model” of recognition, respect for cultural identity by no means drops out.24 And Honneth’s attention to what happens prior to deliberation about the just distribution of rights and resources makes clear that respect for cultural identity entails “something more” than political and institutional measures. What kind of respect is it, after all, if social goods are doled out with disdain? Respect for cultural identity involves what Honneth calls “empathetic engagement,” a prereflective receptivity to the potential contribution of individual identity forms within a set of shared goals and values. But as we will see, this is where troubles begin for Honneth’s view. This is where Honneth’s recognition comes up against the

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politics of perception. For it is exactly in the undefined norms that make for a general attitude of respect that the question concerning the perception of identity becomes particularly meaningful. If indeed recognition is partly contingent on the perception of cultural identity, how do we assess social perceptions of otherness? If the misperception of cultural identity constitutes a failure of recognition, what is the normative basis on which social perceptions constitute misperception? Can mutual recognition be achieved if it rests on a deeply distorted or stereotyped perception of the other? If so, this reveals a serious flaw in Honneth’s theory. If not, then the moral grammar of social conflict, as it stands, is incomplete. Whether or not one adopts a general attitude of respect depends, in part, on the social perception of otherness in question. So Honneth’s recognition is, like Taylor’s, answerable to the question: How do we actually perceive particular identities? How do we gauge whether social perceptions of identity are adequate or inadequate, mutual or one-sided? In short, what Honneth needs is an account of how we evaluate and interpret perceptions of social identity. To see this, it is first necessary to give a little more context to Honneth’s view. Like any species of cultural politics, Honneth’s theory of recognition sets out to reconcile the particularist demands of modern social struggle with the universalist demands of a liberal democratic society. And it does so by looking to the social conditions under which individuals are free to pursue their own version of the good life in an environment of mutual respect. The trick, then, is to balance the particular claims of identity against the need for general and shared norms by which such claims are evaluated. And, as Honneth admits, this depends on how broadly or narrowly we interpret either those claims or norms. They must be general enough to avoid implicitly endorsing any singular vision of “the good life,” yet substantive

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enough to function as a guide for normative evaluation.25 Recognizing difference is the easy part; grounding recognition in  shared norms is the hard part. As Honneth also admits, “everything now depends . . . on the definition of this general value-horizon, which is supposed to be open to various forms of self-realization and yet, at the same time, must also be able to serve as an overarching system of esteem.”26 To strike this balance, Honneth appeals to the concept of Sittlichkeit, or “ethical life,” central to Hegel’s early writings. Hegelian Sittlichkeit represents for Honneth the perfect synthesis of public and private forces that allow individuality to shape against a backdrop of shared norms and conventions. In modern terms, the norms of ethical life consist in “the totality of intersubjective conditions necessary for self-realization.”27 And even as the sources of normativity begin to fracture in modern (or, what Honneth calls “post-conventional”) societies, something like Hegelian Sittlichkeit still exists and forms a common basis for respecting difference. Indeed, according to Honneth one of the virtues of this modern-day notion of ethical life is that it can accommodate even the most radically pluralistic society. All we have to do to is maintain an attitude of openness to difference. We just have to adopt a general attitude of respect for different visions of the good life, however radically different they may be. This, on Honneth’s view, is what it means to recognize and be recognized. Honneth describes the prereflective attitude of recognition more precisely as “a felt concern for what is individual and particular about the other person.” And it is only to the degree that we care about the particularity of others that “our shared goals [can] be realized.”28 But if recognition occurs here, at the general level of respect for difference as such, are we really respecting difference? Does a general attitude of openness alert us to

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gross misrepresentations of those we in principle recognize, or does it allow them to persist? If recognition gets particularity as a consolation prize for securing something common in difference, it’s not clear that it gets us to self-determination. As Raymond Geuss poignantly observes, “I am recognizing you in Honneth’s sense regardless of whether I help you, harm you, or adopt an attitude of indifference to your existence because the recognition in question is prior to adopting any of these specific attitudes.”29 Even if we remain at the prereflective level of social relations, there seems to be more work to do when it comes to recognizing particularity than simply adopting an empathetic openness to others (if, in fact, adopting emotional attitudes is even possible). Indeed, if recognition is achieved even if we don’t give a damn for the other, it doesn’t seem like the “struggle for recognition” is much of a struggle at all. But, of course, there is ample need to go further, as Honneth is also aware. First of all, how would we recognize particularity if we don’t even see it? Call this the visibility condition—the achievement of recognition depends in part on whether and to what extent the claims of culture are seen, and relevant voices heard. Honneth admits: “The more successful social movements are at drawing the public sphere’s attention to the neglected significance of the traits and abilities they collectively represent, the better their chances of raising the social worth or, indeed, the  standing of their members.” 30 So, probably, empathetic engagement is not enough. Otherwise, we can just pride ourselves on  our recognizing others without actually ever seeing the other.  Letting a thousand flowers bloom is in principle a good thing, but not without actually appreciating the flower. So this empathetic engagement is either a disappointingly low bar for recognition, or we have to go further.

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Suppose, then, that a claim for recognition is visible— Affirmative Action. Palestinian statehood. Protection of sacred lands of Native Peoples. Civil Rights. Trans identity and gender nonconformity. Et cetera. Take basically any claim for recognition reasonably visible to the public eye, and it’s clear what is being asked: not that we adopt a generic respect for otherness but that we actually give a damn about what the other is asking. So if an attitudinal adjustment is in order, it is one that should attune us to the particularity of cultural identity. Honneth, after expending the bulk of his effort finding and describing the source of modern-day Sittlichkeit, appears to acknowledge this. “However the societal goals are defined,” he explains. “there is always need for a secondary interpretive practice, before they can operate within the social lifeworld as criteria of esteem.”31 So now we find ourselves engaged in meta-level considerations of the competing interpretive practices by which we understand and evaluate the claims of culture. Add to this the further stipulation that the norms at this meta-level “depend on the dominant interpretations of societal goals” and it soon becomes clear that recognition involves more than empathetic engagement after all.32 At the meta-level of recognition, we find ourselves engaged in interpretive practices that prove to be, as Honneth puts it, a source of “ongoing cultural conflict,” as these are “subject to permanent struggle.”33 But given that the dominant interpretation is exactly what is sought for in claims of recognition, striking a balance between individuality and shared norms will depend in part on how we happen to interpret norms of Sittlichkeit. Recognition depends on which stories are told, which stories are heard, and how we interpret them. And it also depends on the normative baseline against which the claims for recognition are understood and evaluated. This seems to set a much higher

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threshold for recognition than just empathetic regard for otherness. For it seems now that, beyond my respecting you because of our shared interests, I need to perceive you through the lens of particularity. Even where I locate the line between sameness and difference that makes recognition possible will depend on how I perceive you in relation to your perceiving me. And in order to interpret and evaluate these perceptions, it seems I will have to do something more: it seems I will have to use my imagination.

4.3. IMAGINATION AND AESTHETIC REFLEXIVITY In the “master/slave” dialectic of the Phenomenology, the struggle for recognition begins with a distorted perception of the self– other relation. Without rehearsing the familiar movements of the dialectic in detail, we can say that it proceeds from the purely instrumental and one-sided perspective of “Desire” (Begierde) and, through struggle, evolves into increasingly reciprocal forms of regard. What Hegel is describing is a perceptual shift, a shift from “one-sided and unequal” recognition of otherness (PhG, §191) to mutual recognition. And what mutual recognition demands, according to Hegel, is the capacity to perceive ourselves in the other. Getting from Desire to Recognition, from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness, requires a degree of reciprocity among competing perceptions of the relation between “I” and “We.” Beyond an attitude of openness, mutual recognition requires us to examine the social perceptions that give shape to social relations. But how? I’ve argued that the Hegelian notion of aesthetic reflexivity offers us good reasons to think that engaging with art involves

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the kind of reflexive self-awareness that allows us to negotiate our identities. That we see our “deepest interests” reflected in works of art, I’ve said, is relevant to the pursuit of individuality, particularly where the perception of our individuality is at stake. If that is the case, then it seems that another promising way to modernize and develop Hegelian recognition is to connect it with Hegelian aesthetics. Indeed, looking beyond the narrow textual foundation upon which Honneth inscribes Hegelian recognition, namely, to Hegel’s later Lectures on Aesthetics, a different narrative emerges. Rather than abandoning social philosophy in his post-Jena writings, Hegel takes up a broader consideration of the various reflexive processes through which individual claims are publicly expressed, interpreted, and evaluated.34 Hegel’s view of art—particularly modern art— emerges from this consideration. Far from neglecting the early preoccupation with social theory, these later writings, which span over a decade of Hegel’s mature intellectual career, present the culmination of his evolving views on intersubjectivity framed within a more concrete discussion of how cultural identity is communicated through works of art. Thus, the continuity from Hegel’s early writings to the Phenomenology of Spirit to the later Lectures on Aesthetics has to do with the link Hegel draws between selfdetermination and increasingly reflexive social relations. Engaging in art is one of the reflexive practices through which we situate the self within an increasingly complex array of social forms. Following the thread of Hegel’s thought from his early reflections on the normative character of reflexive self-awareness to Hegel’s aesthetics, we find that art emerges as a primary medium for achieving the kind of self-awareness that contemporary theories of recognition seem to require.35 Recall that both Taylor and Honneth claim that the politics of recognition stems from a human “need” to see oneself

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adequately reflected in one’s environment. It is precisely this claim that Hegel takes up in the Aesthetics, where he characterizes art as originating from a natural need to externalize oneself in the world. “The universal and absolute need from which art springs,” Hegel explains, “has its origin in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e., that man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is.” We need to see our agency at work in the sensible world, as Hegel illustrates in the example of a young boy marveling at the ripples he makes in tossing pebbles into a river. In doing so, the boy “gains an intuition of something that is his own doing.” This same impulse, he thinks, manifests itself in both the production and reception of art. On the one hand, there is the “practical activity” by which the individual “brings himself before himself.” The artist satisfies this impulse through creative imagination by “altering external things whereupon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics.” He does this, Hegel continues, “in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself.” On the other hand, the individual does this “theoretically,” since he “must see himself, represent himself to himself, fix himself before himself what thinking finds as his essence, and recognize himself alone alike in what is summoned out of himself and in what is accepted from without.” Both the creative and receptive forms of aesthetic engagement, in other words, are rooted in the human need to recognize ourselves in the sensible world (LFA, 30– 31). It is this need to be seen on one’s own terms that drives the dialectic of social struggle. The struggle between master and servant is a struggle over competing needs for reciprocity and equality, needs which can be frustrated and satisfied in various

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ways and to varying degrees. A key point in the dialectic is the moment of reflexive self-awareness gained through the activity of work. In the Aesthetics, Hegel extends the metaphor to art. Just as the servant “becomes conscious of what he truly is” in the formative activity of labor, so too is the artist able “to produce himself and therein equally to recognize himself ” (LFA, 31). By making our mark on the world, we better understand our agency in it. To perceive the sensible world, not as a thing at our disposal, but as a reflection of ourselves, we are, on Hegel’s wellknown analysis, liberated from the one-sided relation of Desire. Engaging with art provides a source of reflexive self-awareness precisely because it appears to us not as a mere object or instrument, but as an “end in itself ” (LFA, 25). This is crucial if, like Hegel, we think that most of what we experience in the sensible world on a day-to-day basis is obscured or distorted through the lens of consumerism and instrumentalism. For, as Hegel sees it, the “practical interests” of utility that otherwise define sensible experience are precisely what cut off a reflexive relation with our material environment, and works of art resist such interests. It is no accident, then, that Hegel takes up the language of Desire in the Aesthetics, as his characterization of the reflexive experience of art is explicitly contrasted with an “appetitive relation” to the world. From the one-sided perspective of Desire, the individual “relates himself to the objects, individuals themselves, and maintains himself in them by using and consuming them, and by sacrificing them works his own self-satisfaction” (LFA, 25). But this satisfaction works against him since, as Hegel explains, the individual caught up in a “purely sensuous apprehension (sinnliche Auffassung)” of the world “is neither free in himself, since he is not determined by the essential universality and rationality of his will, nor free in respect of the external world, for desire remains essentially determined by

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external things and related to them” (LFA, 36). Confronted with the work of art, however, the individual “leaves it free as an object to exist on its own account; he relates himself to it without desire, as to an object which is for the contemplative side of spirit alone” (LFA, 36– 37). Unlike ordinary material objects, the work of art “liberates the true content of phenomena from the pure appearance and deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality, born of the spirit” (LFA, 9). Art delivers us, as it were, from consumptive to reflexive forms of perception. It extracts us from the immediacy of everyday life and forces us to see ourselves in relation to our environment. For the same reason, the experience of art gives shape to intersubjective experience. Stripped of practical utility, works of art enable us to participate imaginatively in very different perspectives and experiences. They present the great stock of human actions, emotions, interests, and identities in aesthetic form— which is to say, they address our perceptions of these particular things. And if recognizing particularity is essential to achieving a socially mediated sense of self, then it is in art that we actually find this particularity. This is why Hegel maintains that “in works of art, nations have deposited their richest inner intuitions and ideas, and art is often the key, and in many nations the sole key, to understanding their philosophy and religion” (LFA, 7). The case that Hegel is making here is that cultural identity takes shape in and through the kinds of narratives that art makes available. Storytelling, music, murals, dance, drama, and so on— these are the mediums through which humans orient themselves within particular historical and cultural moments. As such, they achieve something for the recognition of cultural identity that we don’t get at the discursive level. They give us  an imaginative representation of how the world is seen or

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experienced through the lens of cultural particularity. For this reason, Hegel claims the “poetic” description of the world is irreducible to the “prosaic.” Beyond merely describing the world, the “poetic” representation of the world “gives us more, because it adds to the understanding of the object a vision of it” (LFA, 1002). As Richard Eldridge aptly puts it in his elaboration of this “poetic conception of the world,” the unique significance of art for Hegel is that “imaginatively, we can enter into a person’s thoughts, moods, and feelings, as well as into the specific look or memory of an object or incident for a subject.”36 The significance of this capacity, in turn, is that such sustained, imaginative engagement presents the relation of the self and others in new and continually evolving configurations. In short, reflexive imagination picks up where rational reflection leaves off in the process of self-determination. Hegel is by no means the first to champion the reflexive character of aesthetic imagination as socially significant; it is a legacy that extends from Sophocles,37 to Schiller, to the Frankfurt School critical theorists. It is echoed in John Dewey’s claim that “works of art are means by which we enter, though imagination and the emotions they evoke, into other forms of relationship and participation than our own.”38 It is implied in the way Cornel West invokes the work of James Baldwin, 39 Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and the musical repertoire of jazz and blues as giving shape to current dialogues of democracy and race in America. Where the politics of recognition intersect with the politics of perception surrounding cultural identity, Hegel’s notion of aesthetic reflexivity responds to the reality that self-determination is largely contingent upon whether and how the claims of culture are seen in a social context. It accounts for the perceptual forms through which cultural identity is communicated and negotiated, and

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offers a normative basis for interpreting and evaluating social perceptions. Aesthetic reflexivity addresses the possibility for the kind of imaginative exchange between self and other that recognition seems to require. For, on this view, aesthetic experience affords reflexive awareness of the self–other relation. Artworks call on the imagination to contend with the kind of perceptions that shape social relations. And so, by taking seriously Hegel’s suggestion that the work of art “is a dialogue with everyone who confronts it” (LFA, 264), the politics of perception can better address the question of how we negotiate between particular identities and shared normativity. For just as there is a qualitative difference between the identity-blind politics of liberalism and the politics of recognition, so too is there a qualitative difference between a general attitude of openness toward otherness and imaginative engagement with the concrete and particular forms of identity. The difference, as we’ve seen, can be cashed out in terms of the social perceptions that form the relation between self and other. And art is one of the principal ways by which the particular forms of identity we are asked to recognize, and for which we seek recognition, come into public view.

4.4. AFFIRMING IDENTITY: THE PAINTINGS OF KEHINDE WILEY Consider how this account of reflexive imagination lines up with the recent work of contemporary African American painter Kehinde Wiley. Like many artists of the cultural turn, Wiley’s artistic work is directly invested in advancing or reframing representations of African American identity. Specifically, Wiley problematizes modern perceptions of race and masculinity in his

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FIGURE 4.1  Kehinde

Wiley, Prince Albert, Prince Consort of Queen Victoria, 2013. © 2020 Kehinde Wiley

large-scale, hyperrealist depictions of young, Black men, outfitted in trendy hip-hop couture, affecting the familiar postures and expressions of traditional European portraiture. The paintings confront us, in the first place, with an anachronistic and incongruous representation of Black youth in the role of aristocratic patron, religious icon, or world-historical hero. The figures themselves are then juxtaposed against an ornate

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background of seventeenth and eighteenth century baroque and rococo decorative patterns. By appropriating the visual language of an earlier, predominantly white, culture of artistic representation, Wiley draws our attention to the frequently overlooked possibility that representation is never a racially neutral enterprise. What are we to make of the rapper Ice-T painted as Napoleon Bonaparte? How do we—and how should we— interpret the aesthetic parallel between the stately aristocratic patron and the street-savvy Black man sporting a hoodie and crooked baseball cap? In contrast to the more familiar, classical counterparts, here we are asked to confront not only the racial character of the imagery itself, but our own internalized responses to the culturally reconstituted imagery. Beyond the mere recognition of this marginalized or misrepresented figure, these paintings are a visual stimulus for recognizing ourselves— for better or worse— as participants in the complex process of identity formation. At the same time, the complex interplay between subject matter and aesthetic convention in these paintings complicates reading this work as a simple critique of the disparity in modes of cultural representation. While the paintings do evoke a consciousness of racial identity through their contrast with the predominantly Eurocentric aesthetic preferences of Western culture, this critical move should be seen as part of a broader aesthetic strategy to reframe contemporary representations of African American identity. For Wiley, this is achieved in part by reframing the ideological implications of portraiture itself. An important aspect of this strategy is Wiley’s process of “street casting” young Black men in urban centers—he hires them as models for his paintings, thus reversing the traditional power dynamic of commissioned portrait painting, a genre of painting particularly well-suited for communicating power, status, and

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wealth. Further, by allowing his subjects to choose their own clothing for the sitting, as well as the pictorial background for the work, Wiley enables his subjects to take control over their own appearance. The subject we engage with, then, is not the artistically conceived image of quintessential Blackness, but an individual—as himself—depicted in the role of cultural other. To quote art historian Robert Hobbs, this process “needs to be taken seriously as a power shift with enormous ramifications, enabling marginalized and ostracized Black males the opportunity to choose how they wish to be inscribed in the grand EuroAmerican tradition and thus produced as one of its newest subjects.”40 Nevertheless, the portraits do more than simply summon the viewer to empathetic awareness of race. The representation of Black identity remains problematic and ambiguous, thereby implicating the viewer in the more difficult task of evaluating (sometimes implicit) social perceptions. This is seen, for example, in Wiley’s uncanny ability to exploit the perceptual ambiguity between confidence and intimidation in the postures and expressions of these figures. Similarly, the paintings are monumental in size, and the typically frontal stare of the imposing figures that meet our upward gaze can seem stern, even confrontational. How are we to perceive this presence? As dignified or threatening? As self-assured or arrogant? At the same time, this edge is softened by the playfully ironic, often humorous,41 character of the portraits. Wiley’s vibrant color pallet—taken from the Martha Stewart Home Collection— 42 lends the paintings a comical, almost childlike, quality. The foregrounded projections of exaggerated masculinity are in constant visual tension with the luminous floral and decorative backgrounds that compete for attention. When Wiley superimposes pop-culture imagery— gold chains, tattoos, puffy jackets, and basketball jerseys— onto

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the iconic vernacular of Titian, Ingres, and David, are we to laugh at this hybrid or to read it as a sober form of cultural synthesis? Does the present awareness of racial identity necessitate satirical mockery of, or reconciliation with, the past? Characteristic of a growing body of contemporary artworks engaged in the politics of perception, Wiley’s paintings confront us squarely with the problem of representing cultural identity, but resist imaginative or interpretive closure. These portraits pose complex visual scenarios that push us beyond the comfortable space of empathetic awareness and into an imaginative engagement with particular representations of Black identity. In doing so, they illustrate the sense in which the recognition of cultural identity is unsettled, and indeed, unsettling, insofar as we bear a degree of responsibility for the match or mismatch between identity and the perception of identity. It is for this reason that we should take seriously the value of aesthetics in recognition theory. Social conflict today demands not only a shift in policy, but also a shift in public perception. It is one thing to address poverty through economic redistribution, and another to challenge negative stereotypes toward underprivileged communities. It is one thing to enact immigration reform, and another to humanize the plight of immigrants. And it is one thing to reform police practices, and quite another to remove racially charged perceptions of threat that motivate excessive or lethal force against Black male suspects. Hegelian social theory points us to a way of understanding, evaluating, and challenging such social perceptions through the aesthetic representation of cultural identity. Beyond concrete legal measures and general empathetic awareness of cultural difference, genuine intersubjectivity requires the human capacity to see through the eyes of the other and to understand oneself in imaginative relation with different perspectives and experiences. Indeed, the harmful stereotypes

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and hostile perceptions that give rise to social tensions are often the product of the apparent foreignness, the otherness, of the other. Where the representation of cultural identity is absent or distorted, art offers an image, a representation, through which an imaginative, reflexive relation between self and other becomes possible. This is not to say that social representation takes precedence over legal recognition or institutional reform. Each informs the other. Just as the images of rural poverty in the US by FSA photographers informed public attitudes that made New Deal policies possible and effective, so too does the The Wire offer an imaginative lens into the lives of one of today’s many underprivileged communities. Nearly sixty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, the American public still struggles to achieve integration at the social level. This is the reality captured early on in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and carried on in the literary work of Maya Angelou and the lyrics of hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy and Jay-Z. As I’ve said elsewhere, it is impossible to know what causal relations exist between the political and aesthetic dimensions of the cultural turn. But the concurrence between, say, the precipitous legal reforms around same-sex marriage and the increased visibility of the LGBTQ community in art, music, film, television, and the like, suggests that such phenomena are not likely to be fully understood within the traditional disciplinary boundaries of either political or aesthetic theory. The cultural turn presents a problem of perception in which both the political and aesthetic representation of cultural identity are conjoined in contemporary art. Insofar as the work of art can shift the framework of perception from the functional or desirable to the imaginative, aesthetic experience, it allows us to engage with objects, language, images, and information in such a way that we become attentive to our presence in the

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representation and interpretation of them. Indeed, how we piece together the meaning of an artwork says as much about our place in this process as it does the work itself. Hence, the aesthetic answers the perceptual question of recognition insofar as empathetic engagement with the other requires us to critically question whether our perception of “the other” accords with the other’s self-perception. It is in the imaginative interplay between self and the cultural other that art achieves this, since the recognition of cultural identity requires us to be discursively attentive to the content of cultural claims put forth, as well as perceptually attentive to the way that we receive and interpret such claims.

4.5. CONCLUSION: A CULTURAL TURN TOO FAR? The challenge that confronts the present consortium of Hegelinspired social and critical theorists is not to replace predominant liberalist theories of justice tout court, but to demonstrate that recognition of identity-blind rights and duties is compatible with the recognition of the needs and wants of culturally specific identity groups, however broadly or narrowly defined. On the one hand, Enlightenment-era liberalism rightly championed the impartiality of legal and social institutions as an urgent corrective to the long legacy of politics shaped by social hierarchies. On the other hand, the cultural turn in politics has rightly identified the limitations of a political discourse that permits systemic denial or exclusion of identity claims in the name of universality. What contemporary theories of recognition get right about self-determined subjectivity is that it depends on social relations being reciprocal, and the extent to which the

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interests and identities of the individual are represented in society. The question that recognitive theories must address, then, concerns the kinds of processes through which the claims of cultural identity are publicly formulated and evaluated. In response to this question, I’ve sketched a Hegelian account of reflexive imagination that frames the intersubjective significance of art in terms of an imaginative engagement with various forms of cultural particularity. The cultural turn in politics represents the need to articulate a broader normative basis for selfdetermined subjectivity, one in which claims of specific identity groups—particularly those that have been historically silenced or oppressed—are made to matter. Recognition is one of the ways we lift the “veil of ignorance” to consider the claims of identity at the institutional as well as the social level. But this, as we’ve seen, rests with the ability of individual members of society to put themselves in the position of the other, to imagine different perspectives and experiences, and to situate their own interests in empathetic relation to a broader and more diverse set of interests. For this reason, the cultural turn is marked by the return of art to public life. What remains to be seen, however, is how the reflexive imagination I’ve outlined in this chapter holds contemporary political relevance while at the same time maintaining a distinctly aesthetic character. The focus thus far has been the contribution that Hegelian aesthetics can make to cultural politics, particularly in terms of the connection it draws between the reflexive character of aesthetic experience and the processes of recognition that many theorists regard as a further condition of selfdetermination. Supposing this to have been shown in the way that contemporary artists have given both visibility and voice to questions of cultural identity and given shape to cultural narratives in ways that engage imaginative over and above rational

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reflection, the question that needs to be addressed in the next chapter concerns the extent to which the kind of civic imagination required of cultural politics is, at the same time, a form of aesthetic imagination. Particularly in the context of Hegelian aesthetics, there remains the concern that this way of conceiving of art as an expression of cultural identity, and thus as an instrument of self-realization, can radically diminish not only the aesthetic character of art, but also the quality and richness of aesthetic experience. Thus, in the next chapter, I will aim to address this objection in two ways: first, by challenging the assumption of Kantian avant-gardists that imaginative richness and interpretive variety are achieved only through radical ambiguity and indeterminacy of content; and second, by showing how these aesthetic qualities are achieved, and in some cases enhanced, through an aesthetically reflexive engagement with works of art that call forth our own particularity in response to the determinate claims they make on us.

5 IMAGINATION AND INTERPRETATION AFTER THE “END OF ART”

5.1. THE AESTHETICS OF INDETERMINACY So far, I have proposed a revisionist approach to Hegelian aesthetics as a promising conceptual resource for responding philosophically to the emergence of contemporary art that traffics directly in the subject matter of cultural identity. I’ve focused primarily on the social and political implications of aesthetic reflexivity, arguing that engaging with art means, at the same time, to engage in socially mediated forms of self-understanding. But what are the aesthetic implications of this view? What does drawing a link between artistic representation and identity formation say about the aesthetic judgment of art? What is the role of aesthetic imagination and interpretation, particularly with respect to works of art that alert us to particular forms of cultural identity? Even if one grants all the social and political goods of identitybased art, it doesn’t follow that it is good art. Indeed, it is often thought that political art is bad art precisely because it is political. This is, in fact, a version of the Kantian avant-gardist dogma that art necessarily compromises its aesthetic character in

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hitching its wagon to any determinate concept or purpose. It is also the subtext of the Kant vs. Hegel narrative of modern aesthetics, according to which the former offers imaginative free play and infinite interpretability whereas the latter makes art the handmaiden of Truth. It is not hard to hear this common critique of identity art in Andrew Bowie’s complaint that “the problem with Hegel’s aesthetics is the assumption that the truth of a work of art emerges completely via its conceptual articulation.” What this means, Bowie goes on to explain, is that “my role as interpreter is just to read what is supposedly latent in the text, not to reveal things about the text via my individual creative initiative.”1 The assumption here, as with Kantian avant-gardism more generally, is that if a work of art foregrounds what it is about—if it is determinate—imagination is lost, interpretation shut down. “The promising content orientation of Hegel’s aesthetics,” writes Kirk Pillow, pursuing a similar line of critique, “is vitiated by his subordination of aesthetic experience to determinate cognition.”2 For Hegel, it would seem, works of art are just puzzles to be solved, messages to be decoded. And by this same logic, it would seem that a Kehinde Wiley painting gives us nothing to play with, no room to interpret, because everything is already determined by the representation of Blackness. But is this assumption right? Is the Kantian avant-gardist justified in thinking that imaginative freedom is incompatible with determinacy of content? Does the proliferation of artworks that explicitly engage with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc., make imagination and interpretation obsolete? Perhaps it is this assumption that explains why Kantian avant-gardists on the whole don’t quite know what to make of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings, or the work of Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, Edgar Heap of Birds, Kiki Smith, Nikki Giovanni, William Pope.L, Faith Ringgold, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lorna

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Simpson, Jenny Holzer, Gilbert & George, and many, many others. Perhaps the problem is not with the art, but with the view that indeterminacy is the sole guarantor of a properly aesthetic experience. Particularly in light of the cultural turn in contemporary art, it is perhaps necessary to challenge the assumption that, if we can say what a work is about, we automatically foreclose on imaginative and interpretive possibilities. In this chapter, I challenge this commonly held assumption on two fronts. First, I question just how indeterminate Kantian indeterminacy really is. Focusing on Kant’s discussion of “aesthetic ideas” in the third Critique, I argue that Kant’s views about the role that aesthetic content plays in our imaginative and interpretive engagement with art anticipate rather than oppose Hegel’s view of art. Then, returning to the account of aesthetic reflexivity developed in previous chapters, I argue that the sociopolitical value of reflexive aesthetic experience also accounts for its aesthetic value. Of course, others have defended the aesthetic integrity of art in Hegel’s content-oriented theory. John McCumber argues, for example, that the thematic content of the work can function as a kind of interpretive “parameter,” a conceptual space in which the particular elements of the work take form and interrelate. 3 William Desmond’s concept of “open wholeness” does much the same in the name of Hegelian aesthetics, offering assurance that any talk of the Absolute in Hegel’s philosophy of art is nevertheless “open to a plurality of possible actualizations.”4 Here, however, I make the stronger claim that Hegel’s development of this Kantian insight helps explain how determinacy of aesthetic content can in fact significantly enhance and enrich imaginative and interpretive engagements with art. To make this stronger defense, in the remaining sections I reinterpret Hegel’s notorious “end of art” thesis as a radically contextualist view of art that explains imaginative richness and

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interpretive variety through the different ways of engaging reflexively with works of art. That art allows us to perceive the “I” in relation to “We” is what lends it contemporary social and political significance, as well as aesthetic value.

5.2. HOW INDETERMINATE IS KANTIAN “INDETERMINACY”? As we’ve seen in previous chapters, the Kant vs. Hegel narrative of modern aesthetics presents a false dichotomy. Even if Kant’s remarks on fine art in the third Critique are brief, and offered as something of an afterthought to the analysis of aesthetic judgment, they bear much fruit. And even if Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment is valued for prioritizing the aesthetic over the cognitive, nowhere does Kant ask us to separate aesthetic content from aesthetic experience. Indeed, as we saw in chapter 3, he articulates at length how art is distinct from nature in appearing to us as an artifact, as a product of human ends and purposes. This awareness of the artwork as bearer of content and meaning figure necessarily into our appreciation of it. And this becomes even clearer when we look to Kant’s account of what he calls aesthetic ideas. For even though his primary aim in this discussion is to show that aesthetic judgments about art retain their status as noncognitive, reflective judgments (i.e., are like aesthetic judgments of nature), the role Kant ends up assigning to imagination and interpretation puts his own view in close proximity to Hegel’s. Kant defines an aesthetic idea as “a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate.”5 “Idea” is thus meant to be taken in the weighty, but

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strictly regulative, sense that Kant assigns it in the Critique of Pure Reason—namely, as a thought that grasps at totality. He explains that aesthetic ideas are in this sense the aesthetic counterpart of “rational ideas,” such as God, freedom, and immortality, which present an unconditioned totality to the understanding even though it cannot be met with in intuition.6 An aesthetic idea, however, reverses this order: it represents an intuition that cannot achieve totality in thought. Strictly speaking, then, “aesthetic idea” is a bit of a misnomer: it’s not an idea, but an intuition with conceptual dressing. It has conceptual content, but this content doesn’t get nailed down by the understanding as it does in ordinary cognition. This is because an aesthetic idea presents, not a single, unified concept, but a “multitude of kindred presentations” (CJ, 315) so plentiful and various that it overwhelms the understanding and escapes its conceptual grasp. Presented in works of art, an aesthetic idea is not one thing but many, an indeterminate stew of associative thinking that eludes the standard operations of cognition and leaves the understanding free to engage the imagination in harmonious free play. Thus, aesthetic ideas “prompt much thought” (CJ, 314) without producing any actual thinking. The desire to articulate them perpetually runs up against the inability to capture their meanings in words. We might say, then, that the value of aesthetic ideas consists in the process rather than the product of cognition. Just as rational ideas exercise reason, ideas presented aesthetically in works of art exercise the imagination. Aesthetic ideas “enliven (beleben) the cognitive powers” and give “momentum” to imagination (CJ, 316). On Kant’s view, all of this ensures that what we attend to in the aesthetic experience of art is not any single, determinate concept, but the associative activity of the faculties as they expand ideas into vast constellations of meaning.

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Such promises of indeterminacy and open-endedness can make Kant’s discussion of aesthetic ideas read like an urtext of the avant-garde. It situates art in imagination rather than cognition. It resists closure and prizes ineffability. It turns the labor of thought into the play of the faculties. In these respects and more, Kantian aesthetics seems to secure the freedom of imaginative and interpretive practices. In developing an account of “sublime indeterminacy,” for example, Kirk Pillow is operating on the assumption that the primary virtue of modern art is the conceptually destabilizing, or “dehabituating” effects and, further, that the primary value of Kantian aesthetics is its articulation of this supposed value. But what is true of Kantian aesthetics is true of Kant’s philosophy more generally: no experience is wholly unstructured or unconstrained. Free play doesn’t mean a free-for-all. The faculties don’t go on holiday when art enters the picture. There are constraints on the range of imaginative and interpretive possibilities in responses to art, as Kant’s own account of how artistic representations come to be “associated with a given concept” shows (CJ, 316). First, it is not the work of art per se, but certain attributes of an artwork which present aesthetic ideas to the imagination. Particular elements of the artwork’s form (a symbol, a metaphor, etc.) direct the imagination to some particular content or theme of the work. The particular kinds of things that get expressed as aesthetic ideas, according to Kant, fall into one of two categories. There are the ideas which aren’t given directly in experience (e.g., “hell,” “eternity,” “creation”) and then there are those which are given in experience but which aim beyond it (e.g., “envy,” “vice,” “love,” “fame”). This taxonomy might seem too simple, and perhaps too closely tethered to the quasi-moral character of aesthetic experience. But as Samantha Matherne has shown, Kant clearly also includes as aesthetic ideas everyday

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empirical concepts, emotions, and thoughts related to ordinary life.7 Whatever the particular theme or content of the work, the primary thing is the way the particular idea gets diffused in the imagination into many representations. To use Kant’s example, Jupiter’s eagle clutching lightning in its claws is an attribute of “the mighty king of heaven” (CJ, 315). Present in a poem, a painting, or a sculpture, etc., the symbol of Jupiter’s eagle directs the imagination to a concept (Kant suggests “sublimity” or “the majesty of creation”) which gives us some sense of what the work is about, however undeveloped or inchoate it may be. The idea of “sublimity,” in this case, gets expanded into a “multitude of kindred presentations” (315). Importantly, however, expanding a concept is not the same thing as exploding it. Kant is admittedly sometimes given to talking about aesthetic ideas in a way that suggests the kind of infinitely inexhaustible imaginative and interpretive possibilities that contemporary avant-gardists are fond of. An aesthetic idea, he says, “aesthetically expands the concept itself in an unlimited way” (CJ, 315). But “unlimited” here cannot be taken literally. Jupiter’s eagle can take the imagination a lot of places, but not anywhere. Elsewhere Kant explains that an aesthetic idea produces, not infinite content, but an “abundance of content” (CJ, 315) which can be imaginatively constituted in a variety of ways. Thus, the aesthetic idea isn’t wholly indeterminate—the imaginative associations are many but not infinite. And if the associations are not in fact “unlimited,” then nor is the freedom of the imagination. This isn’t the anarchy of imagination. Why is the imagination free to make some associations, but not others? There is something that guides the imagination in its freedom to associate and interrelate in this wide-but-not-infinite expanse of ideas. There is some relation between the individual aesthetic attributes of the work. However much we may celebrate

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this “multitude of kindred presentations,” there is something that accounts for this kinship. Kant, of course, discusses this associative process in a general and abstract way, much the way he discusses beauty and the faculties. But perhaps some reflexive attentiveness to the specific ways the imagination forges these family resemblances in response to art might sharpen our understanding of aesthetic ideas, and perhaps even add to the mix another layer of interpretive variety and complexity. To see what guides the imagination to draw the particular associations that it does, it is first necessary to consider what role the work of art plays in this process. Clearly, aesthetic responses are in some senses conditioned by what is given in the work of art. I’ll take up Kant’s example of Jupiter’s eagle to consider this point. The aesthetic representation of Jupiter’s eagle gives me a symbol, a sensible reference to an idea that prompts in me much thought. What thoughts does it prompt? Which interpretive routes are open to me, and which are closed? What about this particular image of a lightning-bolt-wielding bird of prey enables me to bounce between sign and signifier and spin from this (potentially vast) networks of meaning? It is, after all, not just any eagle—it is Jupiter’s eagle that I’m given to unravel. So at the very least in this process of unraveling I am guided by symbolic reference to one of the great fables of antiquity. Associations take shape in relation to the elements of that particular narrative, not to mention its relation to the whole of Greek mythology. And now, pushing further, I have also to consider whether and to what extent the particular medium of artistic representation figures into the process. Does it matter whether Jupiter’s eagle appears to us on a vase or in a poem or as a sculpture? What about Jupiter’s eagle on TV? By the same token, isn’t the object’s history often given in the presentation, and doesn’t even minimal awareness of its history send imagination down certain

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routes and close off others? Whether Jupiter’s eagle is an artifact of antiquity or another art stunt by Jeff Koons seems very much to matter to the kinds of associations I’m able to make. However loosely I draw them, the shape of these associations will depend on whether Jupiter’s eagle appears as a postmodern prank or as a military insignia that extends from the Holy Roman Empire to the Third Reich. Add to all this a representation of the handsome, young nectar taster Ganymede fetched by the bird at Jupiter’s behest, and a whole other dimension of meanings opens up to an imagination already busy with associative free play. For these reasons and more, it is clear that Jupiter’s eagle is not, and arguably cannot be, a symbol in a general and abstract sense—a neutral symbol. Certain constraints operate on the particular way we engage with works of art. And yet, such constraints, rather than shutting down or limiting imaginative and interpretive possibilities, often open up new possibilities or develop and enrich existing ones. Particular aspects of an artwork limit the range of interpretive moves and imaginative associations that can be made, but in doing so, lend interpretive and imaginative processes depth rather than breadth. In some cases it is because of, not in spite of, these constraints that the process continues, and associations abound. For precisely this reason, it’s not enough to talk about aesthetic ideas in a general and abstract way. The multitude of ideas is only half the story; the other is their kinship. Consider Kant’s other example: a poem by “the great king” (presumed to be Frederick the Great). Let us part from life without grumbling or regrets, Leaving the world behind filled with our good deeds. Thus the sun, his daily course completed, Spreads one more soft light over the sky;

182 Y Imagination and Interpretation And the last rays that he sends through the air Are the last sights he gives the world for its well-being.

According to Kant’s interpretation of the poem, the author is “animating his rational idea of a cosmopolitan attitude” (CJ, 316). The poetic symbolism of the sun making its celestial course across the globe refers the reader to the idea of enlightened cosmopolitanism, though not, of course as a single, determinate concept, but rather as an ephemeral complex of partial meanings. We have here the presentation of an otherwise wholly articulable idea which, when conjoined in the imagination with a metaphor (an aesthetic attribute of the poem), bursts into “a multitude of sensations and supplementary presentations for which no expression can be found” (CJ, 316). The imagery of the poem exceeds the bounds of discursivity. Yet, even as the imagination moves freely between the particularity of the poem’s attributes and the universality of an idea in drawing a multitude of associations, it operates within the set of boundaries given by both the nature of the work’s attributes and the nature of the idea represented. Aesthetic reflection outstrips the capacity of language. The sheer abundance of relations formed in the imagination means that the meaning of the poem is never exhausted. The aesthetic idea of cosmopolitanism is to this extent indeterminate. But nor is the poetic meaning of “cosmopolitanism” entirely wide open. Something holds the multitude of representations together in a way that makes the poem about cosmopolitanism, rather than, say, parochialism, fascism, romantic chivalry, and so on. This has something to do with the particular nature of artistic representation (in this case, in poetically crafted words), but also with the particular nature of the aesthetically represented idea. For, no different than “envy,” “vice,” “love,” “fame,” “hell,” “eternity,” “creation,” “sublimity,” and so on, the aesthetic

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idea of “cosmopolitanism” is not a neutral idea. For example, as it is given in the poem (and in Kant’s interpretation of the poem), “cosmopolitanism” is presented with a decidedly affirmative gloss. The idea of cosmopolitanism, though conceptually indeterminate, is nevertheless given a distinctly normative shape— the shape of optimism, redemption, and enlightenment, and so on. So it is not just the aesthetic representation of an idea from which the wealth of imaginative implications is drawn, but the aesthetic representation of an idea in a certain light. Between the life-giving symbol of the sun and the aesthetic idea of cosmopolitanism, imagination is guided to certain kinds of associations and led down certain interpretive paths. Nor is the experience of art itself entirely neutral. How the imagination expands the aesthetic idea of a particular artwork into a multitude of presentations is often constrained by existing conceptions and interpretations of the work. Many works of are given to us secondhand, as it were, passed down through layers and layers of accrued value and meaning. For most, there is no virgin encounter with the Mona Lisa, no unfiltered reading of Romeo and Juliet. This is because, as Georg Bertram eloquently puts it in Art as Human Practice, an artwork “develops itself further through the interpretive activities that are practiced upon it.” 8 Extending Gadamer’s notion of Wirkungsgeschichte (historically affected consciousness) to the question of art’s practical significance in everyday life, Bertram’s point is that interpretation is not a general practice but rather one that takes a particular shape in response to a particular context and tradition of interpretive practices. Let me illustrate this point more concretely in reference to the above example. If I try to articulate my own aesthetic response to the poem, it occurs to me that, in the first place, there is no way to read the poem that isn’t already significantly shaped by

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the awareness of its being the example Kant gives to illustrate his account of aesthetic ideas. Any interpretive activity I bring to the poem will be fundamentally reactive, a secondary interpretation of the poem as it appears as one of the rare (and more peculiar) examples of an actual work of art discussed in the context of Kant’s analysis of fine art in the Critique of Judgment. Indeed, if I consider the way my experience of the poem is constrained by a “historically affected consciousness,” it occurs to me also that the kinds of associations that the aesthetic idea of “cosmopolitanism” produce in my imagination will in fact look quite different from Kant’s. This may be a matter of the sizable historical gap that exists between myself and the poem, but it may also have something to do with a difference in the normative contexts surrounding the idea of “cosmopolitanism.” In a post-Enlightenment context that prizes difference, the notion of transcending one’s particularity to become a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, a Weltbürger, is far less likely to elicit the same level of enthusiasm and esteem that the author of the poem (and by extension Kant) afford it. And yet, the very awareness of the fact that the imagination can proceed from aesthetic ideas along radically divergent paths itself becomes a variable in the range of imaginative and interpretive modes of engaging with works of art. In this case, I ask myself: Where do I stand within this vast tributary of interpretive possibilities? Does it leave me sympathetic to the aspirations of an enlightened monarchy? Or does it strike me as an exercise in vanity? So, too, does it matter whether we take the work to be the poetic musings of the longest-reigning Hohenzollern in Prussia—a figure Kant elsewhere champions as the political arm of the Enlightenment.9 Such considerations, I take it, are basic to the imaginative and interpretive responses to aesthetic ideas.  They contribute to the kind and quality of imaginative

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associations I happen to draw. For all of the ways of getting at meaning in the work of art—through the aesthetic, the historical, the cultural, even who authors the poem—provide the basic parameters within which imagination and interpretation can operate. It is precisely because the generation of meaning prompted by art occurs within a (sometimes implicit) set of parameters that aesthetic reflection yields the kind of interpretive variety that we consider a quality of good art. Kant is able to offer his particular interpretation of the poem, and I mine, because of the particular way such context-specific parameters guide the imagination’s particular response to the poem. Two important conclusions can be drawn from Kant’s examples of how aesthetic ideas operate. First, the conceptual content of art is not wholly indeterminate. Though clearly less determinate than cognition itself, aesthetic reflection is not the freewheeling and unstructured process Kantian avant-gardists often take it to be. Granting even the most liberal set of imaginative and interpretive freedoms, what we are able to do with the conceptual content of an artwork is constrained by what is given both by the nature and mode of presentation of an idea in the work of art, as well as by the context in which aesthetic engagement takes place. The symbolism of a deified eagle prompts much thought that is not bound to determinate concepts, but it is not boundless. Likewise, there are only so many ways to expound the ideas in a poem that equates the beauty of nature’s beneficent regularity to an ideal of Enlightenment politics. Further, and more importantly, Kant’s examples show the extent to which aesthetic reflection is, in the case of art, a fundamentally reflexive process. The aesthetic ideas that appear to us in works of art initiate imaginative and interpretive processes that allow us to draw associations between concepts and

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representations rather than simply subordinating the latter to the former in cognition. But how we draw these particular associations reflects the particular relation between aesthetic object and aesthetic subject. The imagination is constrained by the particularity of the artwork as well as the particularity of the individual imaginatively engaged with the artwork. After all, it is in part because I do not read the poem as Kant does, or as it would appear in today’s New York Times, but as having meaning that is of my own making, that I am able to situate myself in my own particularity. There is, therefore, much more to be said about the way that aesthetic reflection relates to subjectivity in engaging with works of art. For the interpretive process discloses as much about an individual’s use of aesthetic imagination as it does the work of art itself. Herein lies the bridge from Kantian to Hegelian aesthetics— in responding to works of art as meaningful, we appear to ourselves as the particular kind of meaning makers we are. Yes, aesthetic interpretive practices produce reflective awareness of our subjectivity in the general sense that they allow us to appreciate our cognitive faculties in free play. But insofar as the specific course of aesthetic meaning making is partially shaped by the specific context of interpretation, it also produces a distinct kind of reflexive awareness of who we are as historically and culturally embedded agents. How we engage imaginatively with works of art, how we navigate them within their aesthetic parameters in constructing meaning—in short, how we give aesthetic ideas even minimal determinacy— affords us a glimpse of our subjectivity in the more concrete, determinate sense of cultural particularity. In interpreting a work of art, I am, in effect, interpreting who I take myself to be. Taken together, these conclusions suggest that, far from foreclosing on aesthetic experience, conceptual determinacy in

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artworks can significantly enhance and enrich imaginative freedom and interpretive variety. Even more determinate, perhaps, than the idea of “cosmopolitanism,” “envy,” “vice,” “love,” “fame,” “hell,” “eternity,” “creation,” or “sublimity,” the ideas that figure prominently in works of contemporary art whose meanings are bound up with cultural identity—ideas of race, gender, religion, social status, etc.— enable the imagination to form conceptual associations precisely because of their determinacy. As aesthetic ideas, they function as guides to an imaginative and interpretive activity that itself becomes part of aesthetic engagement with works of art. Reflexive awareness of how we respond to such ideas presented in works of art adds a layer of depth and complexity to the imaginative and interpretive activity. Have we lost some freedom, then, if we are compelled to see Do the Right Thing through the idea of race? Do we feel hemmed in by the feminist themes of The Handmaid’s Tale?

FIGURE 5.1  Coco

Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Two Amerindians Visit the West, 1992–1994

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Or is it rather the case that we find such works aesthetically interesting by virtue of their exploration of such ideas? Just as we can say (rather uncontroversially, I think) that the cultural parameters of interpretation are inherent within aesthetic interpretive practices, we can just as readily say that such interpretive practices are partially constrained by the cultural context of the work of art. And if the cultural context of the work should happen to be one inextricably bound up with conceptions of race, gender, etc., there is no reason to think that such determinacy in any way dampens the richness and variety of aesthetic responses to such works. Indeed, because it is this determinacy that implicates the viewer in the meaning of the work, there is good reason to think that it in fact makes this possible. Consider, for example, what kind of aesthetic response a work like Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s traveling performance, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–94) is likely to elicit. As part of an elaborate, carnivalesque exhibition of so-called “specimens” from the fictional island of Guatinau in the Gulf of Mexico, the artist duo display themselves in cages as native “Amerindians” of the primitive island culture as armed guards invite visitors to feed them bananas, take selfies with the captives, watch them dance, or simply observe them as engaged in various “authentic” native activities such as watching TV, working on a laptop, and lifting weights. In an elaborately choreographed work such as this, there is a vast array of aesthetic elements from which any number of interpretive associations could be drawn: the performative, the participatory, the narrative, the element of irony, and so on. But these associations are anchored in, and in many cases catalyzed by, a finite set of fairly determinate concepts such as “racism,” or “colonialism,” or “exploitation.” The same could be said of the thematic palate of Yinka Shonibare’s installations, in which mannequins are clad

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in Victorian costumes retailored with vibrantly colored Africanpatterned textiles. It is through the narrow lens of Europe’s historical and cultural exploitation of Africa that Shonibare explores the notion of cultural identity more generally, deploying particular aesthetic elements of the work to complicate and destabilize any static or uniform conception of its meaning. In these cases, the aesthetic representation of ideas is what creates an opening for imagination and interpretation. That the art is about identity does not limit, but rather furnishes the material, for sustained aesthetic engagement. We don’t need to insist that their meanings be infinitely deferred or sublated to preserve the aesthetic. We don’t need to think of the aesthetic ideas presented in them as vehicles to the radically indeterminate free play of the imagination. They do not revel in radical open-endedness. These works are about something, and it is their determinate aboutness that allows us to engage with them aesthetically. Instead of invoking grand notions of the sublime, or trading on ineffability and the limits of representations, such works represent a renewed faith among contemporary artists that the representation of particularity—the here, the now, the this—is a viable mode of sociopolitical as well as aesthetic engagement. Given the priorities of aesthetic theory in recent decades, it is no surprise that the development of these kinds of artistic practices are met with either silence or resistance, as indeed, they don’t allow us to have our imaginative and interpretive way with them. But, by developing this Kantian insight further, it is possible to see how such works enable a rich form of engagement. It is possible, in other words, that aesthetic freedom is a matter of giving imagination and interpretation depth rather than breadth. Even if this prioritization of conceptual indeterminacy that many theorists are keen to attribute to Kant holds up in the court of avant-gardism, it is hardly tenable in the context of

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increasingly broad swaths of contemporary art. Because, even if we agree that aesthetic experience takes precedence over any metaphysics of art, we need not accept the view that any aesthetic content that poses certain constraints on imagination or interpretation threatens the richness and variety of aesthetic experience. In fact, many of these well-intentioned efforts to safeguard against the cognitive overdetermination of art seem to have lose sight of the aesthetic freedom they claimed to value, as they consign art to a strictly negative function. For the Kantian avant-gardist, preserving the immediacy of aesthetic experience has become an all too simple formula of denying the possibility of representation. On this formula, the exclusive task of art is to dehabituate, deconstruct, destabilize, disorient— in short, to render the determinate perpetually indeterminate. While the Kantian avant-gardist insists on the sociopolitical edginess of this theoretical strategy, it ends up standing starkly at odds with an artistic strategy that pursues sociopolitical agency in aesthetic representation. It is by abstract principle rather than any concrete artistic practice that Kantian avantgardists discount the possibility that works of art can evoke forms of aesthetic experience that are not only constitutive of modern identity but also deeply engaging. Theorists continue to insist that the best art can do in the presence of racism, sexism, nationalism, antisemitism, and the like, is to lean into indeterminacy, to elude the tyrannical grasp of conceptual thought by unshackling the imagination from the very idea that art is about something. But, as always, art outpaces theory. And given where art is now, it is no longer tenable to ignore the possibility that art’s being about something determinate is precisely the impetus for aesthetic engagement, and the means by which rich and meaningful forms of imaginative and interpretive activity are sustained.

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5.3. THE END OF ART: OR, ART EMANCIPATED One way to reconsider the standard Kant–Hegel divide concerning imaginative and interpretive freedom is to question the degree of indeterminacy in Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas. Another way is to question the degree to which Hegel thinks the content of art is conceptually exhausted. This requires examining key assumptions about the historicist orientation of Hegel’s aesthetics, and in particular the so-called “end of art” thesis. The familiar narrative is that Hegel values art only to the extent that it expresses rational content, at which point it is surpassed by philosophy. But here, too, the text tells a different story. If art ever did speak the unifying language of mythology or religion, Hegel’s point in insisting that it no longer does is that art, thus emancipated, speaks to the diversity and particularity of human experience. The story of art Hegel does tell in the Aesthetics is a threepart coming-of-age story on the rise and fall of art, with a touch of Grecophilic nostalgia common among Hegel’s learned contemporaries. Like other aesthetic treatises with which Hegel would have been familiar (most notably, Johann Winckelmann’s writings), it is right in the general view that works of art embody historical and cultural narratives, but wrong in its assessment of what the particular cultural and historical narratives embody. For Hegel, the dialectical history of art goes something like this: Early on, art is limited primarily to its “symbolic” function, giving simple expression to notions of the divine in the form of the sun and stars, etc. Then, with the ancient Greeks, art comes to embody its mythic gods in the form of figurative sculpture, transfiguring the ethical life of antiquity into immediate, sensuous representation, and thus achieving its highest mode of

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expression. With the advent of modern life, however, mythology loses its socially cohesive force to the more spiritual dimension of religion manifested in Christianity, and socially prescribed forms of self-understanding give way to a distinctly modern conception of the individual. Consequently—so the story goes— modern, or “romantic” art,10 is no longer in a position to fulfill its mythological role in giving a normative grounding to modern life; the modern world makes it so that art, as Hegel famously puts it, is “for us a thing of the past.”11 Though grossly simplistic, shamelessly Eurocentric, and unnecessarily burdened by Hegel’s preference for triadic conceptual taxonomies, Hegel’s historicist conception of art as a form of cultural expression has influenced several generations of art history and criticism.12 And, though they are far less sanguine about modern European poetry’s potential for universal emancipation than in his romantic contemporaries, Hegel’s Grecophilic tastes are rooted in a hotbed of culturally biased views of preclassical (predominantly Eastern) art. And yet, generally speaking, it is not any one of the many problematic particulars of Hegel’s narrative, or even the whole of them, that has aroused such controversy. Instead, the scandal of Hegel’s aesthetics— judging by the vastly disproportionate amount of scholarly attention it has received—lies in Hegel’s broader, more general statements concerning the so-called “end of art.” By this, Hegel obviously does not mean that art ceases as a practice— otherwise there would be no modern, or romantic art, to speak of. In fact, Hegel never actually uses the phrase “end of art,” in the Aesthetics or elsewhere in his writings. What he says is that art is “for us a thing of the past.” It is the pastness of art, the notion that postclassical art no longer fulfills the highest function of art, that has for some time now been the source of considerable controversy and confusion. For if the dialectical

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narrative of art has it that art is no longer the mainstay of communal life and collective identity, it raises the question: What, then, is the role of modern art in modern life? For a long time, deeply pessimistic readings of Hegel’s narrative dominated the scholarly field, according to which the classicist-minded Hegel triumphantly pronounces the death of art as a necessary sacrifice for the birth of Reason. As Benedetto Croce has it, Hegel simply “passes in review the successive forms of art, shows the progressive steps of internal consumption and lays the whole in its grave.”13 Such readings take Hegel’s views on art to be a mere by-product of speculative metaphysics, according to which Spirit (Geist) chews through different forms of collective meaning-making—art, religion, philosophy— on its dialectical path to “Absolute” self-knowledge. If Hegel is cast as the bogeyman of modern art, it is easy to dismiss at the outset the contemporary relevance of Hegelian aesthetics. Moreover, this pessimistic reading, which feeds the prevailing views of Kantian avant-gardism, also makes it easy to avoid answering the question that Hegel poses concerning the role of modern art in modern life. More recently, however, more optimistic (and indeed more nuanced) interpretations have gained traction.14 For good reason. First, the caricature of Hegel as the enemy of modern art simply doesn’t square with Hegel’s profound reverence for the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes, or Dutch genre painting, or any other postclassical art presumed to be “dead” on his account. Hegel’s discussion of classical art may harbor an idealized conception of ancient Greek life as one of harmony and simplicity, but his discussions of modern art (which takes up the better part of the Aesthetics) makes clear that the fragmentation of modern life is, at the very least, a source of greater variety and complexity in art. Modern art reflects modern times. And

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insofar as “modern” means simply the set of social and historical conditions under which the idea of the self is no longer primarily derived from the broadly shared norms and institutions of culture, but rather autonomously constituted from a range of possibilities, it should not be the least bit surprising to find that modern art no longer functions as an organizing principle of modern life. Nor should the suggestion that we moderns “no longer bow the knee to works of art” (LFA, 103) strike us moderns as the least bit controversial. Far more controversial, it seems, would be the suggestion that art ever did or ever could serve the mythological, quasi-religious function that Hegel (among others) ascribes to Greek art. As noted above, we have many good reasons to take issue with the particular assumptions that inform Hegel’s grand narrative of art. But insofar as it emerges from the basic conviction that art must be understood in relation to an evolving set of social and historical conditions, Hegel’s “end of art” thesis offers something crucial for our understanding of modern art: it is distinctly attuned to modern subjectivity. Once the “end of art” is taken to mean its liberation from the mythico-religious trappings of its past, the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s contextualist view of art comes more clearly into focus. No longer bearing the burden of forging social cohesion, modern art is the appearance of difference. On the more optimistic reading, Hegel celebrates rather than disparages modern art precisely because it embodies the shift in modern life from divinity to humanity, in all its richness, variety, and complexity. Once “emptied of gods” (LFA, 524), art takes up the task of representing the myriad dimensions of human life. Every aspect of human thought and activity, from the profound to the trivial— the Humanus—is thus taken up in modern art as the “new holy of holies” (LFA, 607). The diversification of content in modern

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art reflects the shift in social conditions under which freedom is expressed in individual and particular forms of human activity. The content of modern art “adapts its shape to ever-altered circumstances and situations in the most multifarious ways” (LFA, 525), and thus reflects this distinctively modern conception of freedom as the freedom of the individual to pursue radically different ways of being human. Stated more explicitly, the continued relevance of modern art consists in the way it allows us to orient ourselves among these various ways of being. Though it no longer grounds us in a shared form of life, art nevertheless situates our particularity within the modern world of difference, plurality, heteronomy. Thus modern art retains its reflexive character, but the nature of this reflexivity has changed dramatically. Works of art no longer furnish the kind of direct and immediate form of self-identification that allegedly made for social cohesion among the ancient Greeks. Instead, we recognize ourselves through otherness in works of art. In modern life, we stand in indirectly reflexive relation to works of art, such that our experience of art is always mediated by the awareness of difference. Today, works of art— even those that presumably once affirmed cultural identity— appear to us through the lens of distance and fragmentation, and whatever we take the work’s aesthetic representation to be will be partly conditioned by the relation between it and our own particularity. We stand in indirectly reflexive relation to modern works of art in the sense that, through our experience of them, we become aware of ourselves in relation to other distinct forms of identity and experience. Rather than forging social and cultural unity, modern art reflects modern fragmentation in the aesthetic representation of human particularity. Much like modern identity, modern art is the appearance of particularity, the expansion of art into a wider field of content

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and practices. Importantly, however, modern art isn’t particularity all the way down. The work of modern art is—also like modern identity—a shifting constellation of particulars loosely bound together by a vision or narrative perpetually open to revision and reinterpretation. However one draws the line between ancient and modern chapters of art’s historical narrative, modern art cannot be taken to represent a clean and decisive break from the past. That works of art are “a thing of the past for us” does not mean, as many commentators allege, that works of art cease altogether to play some form of mythmaking or religious role in the postclassical era.15 What liberates art from its service to social cohesion is not the wholesale rejection of its significance as a form of cultural expression, but rather the realization that broad-based cultural hegemony is not even an option in modern life. Despite its turn to particularity, modern art retains some vestige of its past in its appeal to shared domains of human experience. The foregrounding of particularity distinctive of modern art has to be read against the background of a residual appeal to common sources of meaning and value. It would be more accurate to say, then, that the significance of modern art for Hegel consists in the representation of the tension between an emerging individuality and the latent pull of shared ethical life. As Richard Eldridge explains: Although in modernity, where individuals are freer to choose more specific and differentiated courses of individual life than were available in more traditional cultures, there is considerable scope for an individual artist’s choice of subject matter, materials, and manner of working, and also for variation in individual  audience response, the artwork remains in its essence, or successfully in its central instances, a vehicle of the articulation,

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Absent the broadly shared norms and institutions of a robust ethical life from which we might derive a scripted sense of self, the modern subject must now contend with the freedom to actively cultivate a sense of self by way of constant negotiation between individual and collective forms of identity. So even if, in the modern world, the primary function of art shifts from the representation of cultural wholeness to the representation of cultural difference, modern art is not mere particularity; it remains one of the primary ways that we come to know the “ ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and the ‘We’ that is ‘I.’ ” We can generalize this crucial point in the following way: art shows us both the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity. That is to say, works of art furnish imaginative insight into the vastly different forms of human experience, as well as the points of convergence among them. In the modern world, where self-understanding is a social achievement mediated by an ever-widening presence of worldviews, cultural perspectives, and forms of life, modern art dissolves the false perception of universality by representing unfamiliar, distant, or wholly inaccessible forms of particularity. At the same time, modern art often connects these seemingly intractable differences in representations that humanize the other. Hegel identifies these points of convergence in the “great themes of art,” namely: “family, country, state, church, fame, friendship, class, dignity, honor, and love” (LFA, 220). Whether or not it is right in the details, the general thrust of Hegel’s view of modern art as a form of modern self-understanding is a far cry from the regressive classicism often associated with the so-called “end of

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art” thesis. Precisely because modern art no longer functions as the bonding agent of shared social life, it allows us to orient ourselves among a virtually limitless set of possible lifeworlds. For Hegel, modern art is neither a memento mori symbolizing an irreconcilably fractured modern existence, nor a promissory note for some grand settling of differences. Instead, modern art is a way to register our particularity within the modern world, and a way to gauge the proximity or distance of our own identity in relation to a highly differentiated complex of other socially mediated identities. A final word about the social and political implications of this view of art before turning to the aesthetic. The formulation I’ve just given for expressing the contemporary relevance of art—that is, its representing the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity—is intended to address some of the most serious and persistent criticisms of cultural politics. One worry (already addressed in chapters 2 and 3) is that any attempt to introduce the concept of “cultural identity” into political discourse inevitably runs the risk of overgeneralizing or essentializing the very forms of identity it aims to acknowledge. However the claims of culture are communicated, there is reason to be suspicious of the very notion that cultures produce fundamental claims for the simple reason that, as Chandran Kukathas puts it, “groups are not fixed and unchanging entities in the moral and political universe,” but rather “constantly forming and dissolving in response to political and institutional circumstances.”17 So, the challenge is to elevate the sociopolitical significance of cultural particularity in a way that does not reduce identity categories to static and homogeneous sets of traits, interests, or commitments. The aesthetic representation of identity does this by initiating an ongoing exchange between artwork and audience. Issues of race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, and

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so on, appear in works of art not as fixed identity categories, but as frameworks within which imaginative and interpretive responses are solicited from viewers. And to the extent that these aesthetic responses involve reflexive awareness of how viewers engage in different forms of meaning making, the aesthetic presentation of identity ensures that the perception of identity is and remains only partial and provisional—that is, open to interpretation. Because the aesthetic presentation of identity is partly structured through my aesthetic response to the work, aesthetic experience reveals and reinforces an awareness of identity as a matter of contested perception rather than a fixed and universal category. In this way, the aesthetic representation of identity shows the very limits of grasping it conceptually; aesthetic imagination contends with particularity in terms of the unfamiliar and inaccessible. Another familiar criticism concerns the fetishization of identity in cultural politics. It is the worry that prioritizing identity and particularity threatens to dissolve any sense of social cohesion and give way to regressive factionalism. Of all the objections lobbed at so-called “identity politics,” this has proved the most persistent, and also the most prescient. Indeed, the election of Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in 2016 forced a hard reckoning for leftist politics. It seemed as though the New Left was paying the price for ignoring the warnings of the Old Left, whose warnings about the unsavory endgame of identity politics some thirty years prior suddenly seemed as accurate as they were ominous. Richard Rorty, for his part, admonished the poststructuralist-inspired political theorists for prizing symbolic gestures over concrete political action, warning that “the gains made in the last 40 years by Black and Brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out.”18 The kind of intellectual moralizing around the concept of

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“culture” that took root throughout the 1990s, he argued, had effectively displaced political discourse from the public sphere to the protected space of academia, and in doing so had reduced progressive campaigns of inclusion that brought forth the Civil Rights movement, women’s rights, affirmative action, and other broad-scale social reforms to the self-righteous grandstanding of hyperspecific identity interest groups. Meanwhile, Rorty predicted, its opponents would quietly mount a crude but effective populist comeback. As the Left sacrificed political pragmatism for political posturing, it would fragment and wane, enabling the ascendency of a neoliberal Right and thus paving the way for a populist “strongman” who would feed on “identity” to nourish the darkest insecurities of the American electorate. Todd Gitlin offers an equally damning verdict of the cultural turn in politics. “While the Right was occupying the heights of the political system,” muses Gitlin, “the assemblage of groups identified with the Left were marching on the English Department.”19 Today, as the fragmentation of liberal society into tribal identities is more acute than ever, it is hard not to feel the sting of the Old Left’s prophetic cynicism. What critics describe as the “Balkanization” of politics is happening at a global scale, a pandemic of identity-driven separatism the symptoms of which can be seen in the Brexit referendum, the weakening of the European Union, the tenuousness of NATO and other multinational alliances, the rupture of trade agreements such as NAFTA, and, of course, the unmistakable uptick in ultranationalist and protectionist attitudes at every level of politics. By these and many other measures, liberalism appears to be receding with the emergence of identity politics. Its strategic strongholds are weakening. Its post-Soviet aspirations are in doubt. And unless something is done to address the underlying

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tensions of liberal democracy, it seems more than likely that the retreat to particularity will continue, as will the exploitative means to fill the deep human need for belonging left by the loss of social cohesion. For this reason, forms of civic engagement that transcend the particularity of identity and forge some sense of social cohesion are presently at a premium. Recently, for example, Todd McGowan has mounted a vigorous defense of universality, arguing that the modernist ideal of universal emancipation has been mischaracterized and unfairly demonized by leftist politics. “Emancipation occurs through universality and its ability to lift us out of our immediate situation,” he writes, because our immediate situation, our particularity, is “always unfree because it is given to us,” because “identity is a stumbling block to overcome.”20 It’s not at all clear, however, that a simple return to identityblind politics is the right ointment for this wound. We can admit that the ominous forecasts of the Old Left rightly identified the perils of a hyperfixation on particularity. But does reinvigorating old-fashioned solidarity or Whitmanesque patriotism that once held sway on the Left still offer a meaningful response to the present ills? We can admit that universality is by no means synonymous with totalitarianism, as the New Left is wont to allege. But there is no reason to think that a defense of transcendence necessarily entails the rejection of difference. Indeed, the appeal to universal emancipation seems to require us to recognize that the social struggle for equality is not always and everywhere the same, and that the conditions of emancipation are contingent on particular social conditions. We can admit that these critics are right to proclaim that politics must appeal to something more than mere particularity, that politics must appeal to the human element that holds cultural particularity together.

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But it is equally true that politics can no longer be oblivious to identity. Politics must appeal to the particular element in humanity. The political significance of artistic representations of identity is that it avoids both extremes—intractable tribalism and faceless universalism. Art has become a primary vehicle through which modern, socially mediated subjectivity arrives at a sense of an “I” that is “We” and a “We” that is “I.” Far from peddling reified identity concepts or fomenting political tribalism, many contemporary works that truck explicitly in issues of race, gender, sexuality, etc., engage us aesthetically in a way that both deconstructs and defamiliarizes our conceptual grasp of identity and yet brings into focus the fundamentally human element underlying difference. Perhaps, however, it is not the liberal critic of identity politics who needs to be convinced of the significance of particularity and art’s capacity to represent it. Perhaps it is the champion of difference, the postmodern critic who balks at any mention of a “shared humanity,” who needs convincing. For those who celebrate particularity, any appeal to the common may seem to eclipse the plurality of narratives that allow cultural difference to flourish. From this skeptical position, the concept of “humanity” appears as the sun that threatens to blind us to the value of the particular cultural identities. Under the influence of postwar leftist political theory, one may even reject such talk as the totalizing discourse of positivists and fascists—which, according to skeptics like Adorno and Lyotard, art was supposed to disrupt, not perpetuate. First, then, it must be emphasized that to speak of the human element represented in works of art is not to suppose some baseline universality to which all particularity, however remote, is subservient. There is a distinction to be drawn between the

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assertion of universal, transcendent values and the recognition of things valued independently of identity. From the political standpoint, there is nothing nefarious about a discourse that humanizes otherness, particularly where recognition of particularity means addressing deeply distorted and nonreciprocal social perceptions. Works of art indeed have the power to disabuse us of the presumption of sameness, but what such critics tend to ignore is that they also have the power to short circuit the illusion of incommensurable difference. For insofar as difference is valued not simply for its own sake, but rather for the sake of social justice, it should matter that individuals are seen as more than just identities. To see how works relate representations of identity to something beyond particularity is important because it enables us to see Black, Native, Asian, Latinx, LGBTQ , Muslim, immigrant, gender nonbinary, punk, and other identity categories not just as labels, but as substantive sources of human agency. The politics of perception forces a constant negotiation between the self and the social world. This is why art has come to play an increasingly significant role in modern life. In the modern world, art shows us that human experience is neither a homogeneous unity nor a plurality of incommensurable particulars, that it is neither the Absolute nor the dispersal of windowless monads. And so, when art speaks of “humanity,” it is neither through a single, native tongue nor a surfeit of wholly indecipherable private languages. It is the relation between particular and shared experiences that explains the sociopolitical significance of art. It matters that love, loss, struggle, family, ambition, shame, sexuality, spirituality, and other such sites of human activity and emotion are seen through the differentiating lens of identity. It matters also that differences in identity do not always and everywhere appear as something distant and

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alien, but as different ways of being human. For this reason, it matters that different audiences have different ways of responding to the question that Do the Right Thing poses but never answers: What is “the right thing?” It matters that films like Brokeback Mountain or Carol bring queer identity to mainstream cinema, just as it matters that either film is, at the end of the day, a love story. It matters that the story of Hamilton gets to be retold by an all-BIPOC cast. It matters that the experiences of alienation and cultural displacement described in The Satanic Verses are familiar enough in substance, but radically distinct from one particular form to another. By the same token, it matters that the experience of painful loss etched into the image of Emmet Till in a casket belongs to the Black mother, not to motherhood in general. It matters that the work of Kehinde Wiley or Kara Walker represents Blackness through an explicit appropriation of white conventions and narratives. The contemporary relevance of art, as we’ve seen, is made evident by liberalism’s failure to make good on its promise of equal representation. The cultural turn in both art and politics is predicated on the need to make visible particular experiences and perspectives that otherwise languish at the periphery of the liberal public sphere. But assuming it has been shown that the sociopolitical value of art consists in its capacity to negotiate between general and particular modes of perception, what can we then say about the aesthetic value of art? How do we engage with these kinds of artworks as works of art? The question is important, as the kind of praise and blame that gets assigned to works of art that carry a particular political message or promote some specific social benefit often conflates sociopolitical and aesthetic value. The feminist agenda of Pussy Riot does not, in itself, make for good punk music, any more than Kanye’s bizarre alliance with Trump makes for bad hip-hop. This does not mean,

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however, that the social and political has no bearing on the aesthetic value of the work, nor that the norms of aesthetic judgments must be strictly separated from the nonaesthetic norms of lived experience. As I argue in the next section, this retelling of the familiar end-of-art thesis in Hegel shows how the sociopolitical character of contemporary art is not only connected to imaginative and interpretative engagements with art, but conducive to such engagement. For if works of art furnish insight into various cultural perspectives through which we reflexively orient our own identities, it seems they can also facilitate new imaginative and interpretive connections between the particular and the general. It seems, in other words, that the reflexive experience of art can be both sociopolitically as well as aesthetically valuable.

5.4. THE “NECESSARY ANACHRONISM” OF ART Consider, once more, what it means to say that art is “for us a thing of the past.” Now recast in terms less scandalous than is often presented, we can shift attention from the “thing of the past” to the crucial qualification in the clause—“ for us.” To whom, we might ask, does “us” refer? We moderns? But who, or what, is “modern?” Note that, to take up this line of questioning— who are “we”?—is, at the same time, to ask who we are not. The “modern,” in this context, is defined over and against the ancient. To be “us” is to be not them. Identity signals difference. Part of what it means, then, to say that art is for us a thing of the past is to say that works of art show us something about who we are by showing us who we are not. This “something” that works of art communicate—its aesthetic idea, its truth content— might look

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very different depending on where I stand in historical relation to the work of art. The ancient Athenian looks upon the Torso of Apollo and sees something like a god. But, as I—the modern— look upon the same marbled curvature, the same finely muscled physique, I see a relic of the past, a beautiful but narrow window into a particular time and place. It affords me a partial but meaningful glimpse of how it was for them. From where I stand, the Torso of Apollo does not appear to me as an object of reverence, as divinity embodied. And yet, in the perception of this distance, I see something about myself and where I stand. We needn’t get too hung up here on academic debates about what constitutes the “ancient” or the “modern,” or the relation between them, to appreciate the relevance of this Hegelian view for contemporary aesthetics. Rather than pronouncing the end of art, Hegel’s discussion of modern art actually gives a good starting point for rethinking the relation between politics and aesthetics. The general lesson to be learned from this discussion, after all, is that one’s normative orientation to the world— one’s Weltanschauung—significantly impacts how one engages with a particular work of art. Hegel recognizes (at least at a general level) how profoundly a difference even in historical context can affect the imaginative and interpretive possibilities presented in an artwork. We moderns perceive the same object, we know it to have the same content, and yet “the development of culture makes necessary a metamorphosis in its expression and form” (LFA, 278). Hegel calls this the “necessary anachronism” of art. The work of art is “anachronistic” in the sense that we are bound to read its historical particularity—its here and now— through the lens of our own historically particular context. Given a certain degree of historical distance between artwork and audience, the work of art presents itself as temporally other. The reason for this is that the subject, like the work of art, bears

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the distinct stamp of particularity. Whatever we take to be the meaning or value of a work of art will always be to some degree contingent upon our historical proximity to it. Aesthetic experience takes shape in the exchange between the historical particularity of the object and the historical particularity of the subject. Such anachronism is “necessary” in the sense that the imagination, try as it may, simply cannot close the distance between then and now. However close aesthetic imagination might bring me to some truth about how it was for them, it remains fundamentally inaccessible to me. It’s not just an awareness of historical difference in the Torso of Apollo, but a more profound recognition that there is a way of engaging aesthetically with it that is fundamentally inaccessible to me. This last point is worth emphasizing, as it has direct bearing on how we think about works of art as a form of cultural expression. The idea that at least part of art’s value consists in its representing experiences and perspectives both near and remote from our own follows naturally from the historicist view that sees the beauty of art not as a timeless and placeless ideal but as manifested in concrete, particular forms. It is central to Hegel’s view of artistic value, which is why he claims that in works of art “nations have deposited their richest inner intuitions and ideas,” and (more strongly) that “art is often the key, and in many nations the sole key, to understanding their philosophy and religion” (LFA, 7). But it would be wrong to conclude from this that art’s value lies in transporting us across historical and cultural boundaries. However meaningfully works of art connect us imaginatively to different experiences and perspectives, they do not allow us to inhabit them. We cannot, as it were, resurrect the past in works of art. We cannot, as the youthful poetic genius of Goethe and Schiller once aimed to do, “win back again within

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the circumstances existing in modern times the lost independence of the [heroic] figures” (LFA, 195). Art is no passport to cultural otherness. The necessary anachronism of art shuts us out from certain ways of engaging with art. Whatever course imagination and interpretation happen to take happens within the parameters of distance and difference. This insistence on an ineliminable gap between then and now, between us and them, that figures often into the experience of art in modern life is, in fact, what sets Hegel’s mature view of art apart from many of his romantic contemporaries. In contrast to the young Hegel, who with his intellectual collaborators, Friedrich Hölderlin and F. W. J. Schelling, penned a spirited, manifesto-like tract called The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism, which calls for, among other things, a “new mythology” of art in the modern era,21 the Hegel of the Aesthetics insists this is not possible. He insists that modern art (i.e., modern, romantic poetry) cannot restore to modern life the lost unity of the ancients—as much an indictment of modernity as it is of art. By the time the Phenomenology of Spirit went to press in 1807, some twenty years later, Hegel’s idealism took on a shade of realism concerning art’s prospects for recovering the universal. Modernity had ushered in the era of subjectivity, forever disrupting the unconscious certainty of communal belonging. And with this went the kind of raw and immediate engagement with, say, a Sophoclean tragedy enjoyed by the ancients. We moderns have plenty of reason to read Antigone, but we do so always through the distorting lens of a necessary anachronism. Kantian avant-gardists, even those of a historicist bent, don’t make much hay of how the historical particularity of art acts as a constraint on both productive as well as receptive imagination. “No Dante, Ariosto, or Shakespeare can appear in our day,” Hegel insists, because the work of art is always a product of the

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present, even if it gestures to the past or future. Hence, he goes on to argue that “all material, from whatever time or nature, acquires artistic truth only when imbued with living and contemporary interest” (LFA, 607–8). It is by no fault of the artist, then, that we cannot access past works of art as the spectators of a previous era once did; we have only the evolution of human consciousness over time to blame, one that assumes different shapes throughout history. The artist can, of course, emulate a method. The artist can import or even appropriate style as well as content from elsewhere. Artists do this all the time. But the modern artist does this always conscious of the distance, and cannot make the gap between this and that particularity any less apparent to a modern audience. Indeed, the misperception of necessary anachronism can itself be employed as a convention of modern art, which, as Hegel illustrates in his discussion Cervantes’s Don Quixote, can be very funny. What the novel’s oddball protagonist is ultimately after is an ideal of knightly chivalry so thoroughly vanquished from the modern world that his “quixotic” pursuit cannot but appear to us as a rich source of amusement. That the feudal past in which the young idealist has positioned his worldview rings hollow for us is what makes his actions seem futile and absurd. That we are and must be conscious of the distance between modern sociality and medieval gallantry is what makes futility and absurdity appear to us as entertaining rather than sad. Historically situated consciousness, then, operates as a constraint on imagination and interpretation. Being fixed to the particular sets parameters for aesthetic engagement. And yet, the embedded particularity of experience in many (if not most) instances enables rather than inhibits possibilities for aesthetically engaging with art. Often it is not just the imaginative distance but the sheer inability of the aesthetic imagination to fully

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access historical particularity in the work that initiates or enriches our imaginative and interpretive response to the work. This conscious relation to difference, this recognition of experiential limits and our inability to fully inhabit certain forms of otherness, means that our reading of the work of art is always conditioned by the awareness of our own embedded particularity. Reflexive self-awareness is built into aesthetic experience, ensuring that meaning is never just given through the work of art as something to be discursively unraveled. Meaning has to be worked out through an imaginative, dialogical back-andforth between subject and aesthetic object. And our taking responsibility for the meaning of an artwork is itself a central, inextricable part of the meaning-making process. In response to the familiar complaint that, on the Hegelian scheme of things, imagination and interpretation is locked into a singular, discursively exhaustive articulation of fixed and determinate content, it should be clear that the necessary anachronism of aesthetic experience means that some degree of interpretive variety is not only possible, but necessary. This is, in effect, Hegel’s contribution to Kant’s discussion of aesthetic ideas in art. To extract meaning from artworks is necessarily to consider the particularity of the artwork in reflexive relation to our own embedded particularity. Modern subjects read and interpret the “great themes of art”—love, family, dignity, etc.—in a particular way that is rooted in a particular experiential context. But even, and sometimes especially, where the idea of the work is more determinate than the nebulous cloud of signifiers that Kantian avant-gardists insist is necessary for sustained aesthetic engagement, where the work is predicated on particularity—the Spike Lee film, the Salman Rushdie novel, the Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, Persepolis, Black Panther, The Wire, and

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so on—such representations are rich with aesthetic potential on account of the aesthetically reflexive relations they enable. Rather than showing themselves to be aesthetically deficient, works of art such as these force us to examine standing prejudices about political art with determinate content, and to question prevailing assumptions about the uniformity and universality of aesthetic experience. It is in the relation between the general and the particular that we find possibilities for aesthetic engagement with such works. More significantly, it is in the recognition of the contextual parameters within which I configure a work’s meaning that we find imaginative and interpretive engagement with the work expanded and enriched.

5.4.1. Cultural Contexts of Aesthetic Engagement Historical context, however, is just one way that particularity and generality are interrelated in the work of art. Things get considerably more interesting and complex when we expand this insight into the dimension of cultural difference, because how we construe meaning in a work of art is also partially contingent on where I stand in cultural relation to the object. Of course, this insight is to some extent already implicit in Hegel’s distinction between the ancient and the modern. But here, too, we can develop and refine this insight for the present. This means, in the first place, moving beyond the admittedly overgeneralized notions of “culture” in Hegel’s account and articulating the culturally expressive character of art in more particular terms that are applicable to a broader range of artworks, from Buddhist sculpture to rap music. From the culturally normative

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dimension of Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit, or “ethical life,” we can develop a more nuanced sense of how cultural context figures into both the creation and reception of art. Consider, for example, how cultural orientation shapes various aesthetic responses to a work such as Sophocles’s Antigone. At a very general level, we can say what the tragedy is about: a clash between two irreconcilable normative orientations— fundamental, but conflicting obligations to family (Antigone) and to state (Creon). This, we might say, is the content of the work, more or less fixed and invariable. We might also say that, at this level of generality, the theme of the work is the human element, the thing that is broadly identifiable and accessible across historical and cultural divides. Consensus fractures, however, as soon as we factor historical and cultural particularity into the aesthetic response. How we engage imaginatively with the work, and how we evaluate and interpret its meaning, is to a large extent a function of how we stand in historical and cultural relation to the work. We moderns do not, and indeed cannot, see the tragic narrative unfold through the eyes of a fifth-century Athenian. Aesthetic originalism is not an option for us, even if reading Antigone shortens the distance and reveals surprising continuities between now and then, us and them. Indeed, the art of antiquity can be a profoundly effective antidote to many forms of modern alienation, but it cannot be the great equalizer of difference. We can only reinterpret the tragedy from a position of historical and cultural particularity. What we make of the work, therefore, is made from the retrospective vantage point of hic et nunc. How we interpret and evaluate Antigone’s defiance against King Creon; how and to whom we distribute praise and blame; what we ascribe to fate and where we locate the cause of the family’s tragic demise— each aspect of the interpretive process emerges from and reflects

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our own particularity. Accordingly, representations of “family,” “state,” “the divine,” and so forth, throughout the work, do not appear to us as fixed and eternal essences, like Platonic forms, but as the themes of the work within which imaginative and interpretive activity takes particular shape within different historical and cultural contexts. And reflexive awareness of the historical and cultural specificity that we bring to these activities itself becomes an integral part of our aesthetic engagement with the work. This much is evident in the shifting significance that Antigone has assumed through the different contexts in it has appeared over the last two millennia: as a postwar adaptation by the “committed” Marxist playwright, Bertolt Brecht; as a piece of absurdist theater by Iranian playwright, Homayoun Ghanizadeh; as a production in Arabic featuring a cast of Syrian refugee women;22 as a modern version in which Polynices appears as a terrorist and Antigone a dangerous subversive; 23 and so on. In each case, not only is the aesthetic character of the work inextricably linked to a particular set of extrinsic circumstances, the meaning of the work shifts quite dramatically in relation to the particular intersection of historical, cultural, and political crosscurrents in which aesthetic imagination happens to engage with it. These varying contexts help illustrate the sense in which aesthetic interpretation is not simply a matter of objectively decoding works of art, but of grasping meaning through the reflexive awareness of the kind of subjective encoding we bring to aesthetic experience. In fact, we can push this Hegelian line of thinking one step further. Since there is no reason to think that experience and perspective take shape only around the very broadly defined spheres of historical and cultural particularity, it is possible to conceptualize the experiential contexts that allow for imaginative and interpretive variability in much more nuanced terms.

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Particularly, if modernity implies the fracturing of broadly shared forms of ethical life, there is good reason to think that contemporary life consists of an even more radically diversified array of even more complex and narrowly defined modes of existence. In the context of the cultural turn, in other words, it seems we can, and indeed should, extend the contextualism of Hegelian aesthetics to more particular forms of cultural identity, such as race, gender, economic status, political affiliation, sexual orientation, etc. At any rate, doing so suggests another way of thinking about the imaginative and interpretive possibilities that the seemingly determinate content of identity-based works of art make available. As the cultural turn in politics advances a practical conception of agency as constituted by this level of cultural particularity, the cultural turn in art aims to bring such concretely particular forms of subjectivity into appearance. In both cases, the standing objection is that this level of contextual particularity overdetermines its object. Just as certain notions of cultural identity can threaten to reduce individuals to character types following a “life script” (to use Appiah’s metaphor), 24 works of art that trade explicitly in identity concepts can seem to reduce art to a mode of political messaging. But just as criticism of cultural politics is based on the assumption that identity is a fixed concept that determines the individual rather than a fluid narrative actively constituted by individuals, the worry that identity-based art forecloses on imaginative and interpretative variation is based on the assumption that meaning in an artwork is simply there for the taking rather than actively constituted within, and contingent upon, a particular experiential standpoint. Indeed, if aesthetic imagination and interpretation are reflexive in this sense, originating from an awareness of one’s particularity, we might think just the opposite: the more

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that works of art call on us to engage imaginatively with different perspectives, and the more determinate the content is with respect to those cultural perspectives, the wider the range between the particular and shared forms of experience within which aesthetic imagination can operate reflexively. We might think that in such works there is greater opportunity to relate this or that particular experience, behavior, habit, custom, or decision to a wider set of circumstances and human concerns, to shift imaginatively between the particular and the common, between what is ours and what is not. In The New Television, Martin Shuster offers an excellent example of this reciprocity of the particular and the general in his discussion of the legendary HBO series, The Wire. The show’s success as a work of art, he writes, “is tied exactly to its screening the suffering of Baltimore and, by extension, screening the suffering of any contemporary American city plagued by similar conditions.” He goes on to quote the show’s creator, David Simon, as saying that The Wire “could have happened—not only in Baltimore, but in any major American city contending with the same problems.”25 What makes a show like The Wire great aesthetically, in other words, is not the way it frees the imagination from conceptual determinacy, but the way it lets the imagination move reflexively between particular and general experiential contexts. The long and layered narrative arc of the series consists in this reciprocity between the familiar substance of human emotion and experience—love, loss, heartache, struggle, family, politics, friendship, etc.— and the intimate, day-to-day lives of particular characters. That we respond to and interpret these moments in ways that reflect our own relation to them is, as we’ve seen, an important source of selfunderstanding. But for the same reason, it is also a source of aesthetic engagement.

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5.5. CONCLUSION: THE INTERRELATION OF POLITICAL AND AESTHETIC VALUE Here I want to come back to the Hegelian-inspired formula I offered above, namely, that art shows us both the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity. Given what has just been said about the ways that various experiential contexts can yield radically different aesthetic responses to the content of art, the sense in which aesthetic imagination involves, more generally, a productive tension between both elements— the particular and the general, the familiar and the unfamiliar— comes more clearly into focus. The activity of aesthetic imagination in response to works of art is neither that of fixed analysis nor of freewheeling aesthetic anarchy. Rather, aesthetic imagination is in such cases engaged in the reflexively constituted activity of self-directed meaning making. This activity is constrained, on the one hand, by what is given in the work of art, and the other, by the experiential context of the subject. And yet such constraints enable rather than inhibit these activities. The notion that in works of art there is something which speaks to broad audiences but is heard and understood in radically different and sometimes inaccessible ways depending on different experiential contexts is key to appreciating the aesthetic dimension of the cultural turn. Elucidating this point will allow us to connect the discussion of this chapter with the claims of the previous chapters in order to show that the sociopolitical value of art, understood in terms of this capacity for reflexive imagination, at the same time implies its aesthetic value. As we’ve seen, the charge that the content-oriented aesthetics of Hegel doesn’t admit interpretive variety and imaginative

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open-endedness doesn’t stand up to what has been said concerning the uniquely reflexive and context-specific structure of aesthetic engagement. Even where the content of art is narrowly defined (e.g., in terms of identity concepts), there is no reason to think that imagination cedes ground to exhaustive conceptual articulation. Indeed, it is through the interpretive process that we gain reflexive awareness of the context and the limits of our own imagination, which in turn can inform, reform, and extend the process of interpretation. Engaging with art in this way reveals as much about myself as it does the work of art, and both can be transformed through this engagement. Thus, in the case of artworks that explicitly point to some extrinsic value (such as the political), it is crucial to recognize the sense in which, in doing so, such artworks also point back to the subject and the subject’s role in constituting the meaning of the work. It is crucial to recognize this because being called on in this way, though sociopolitically significant, is also integral to the aesthetic experience of the work. Even the most minimally reflexive consciousness of my role in constituting meaning in the work of art necessarily implies that interpretation remains partial and provisional. As we saw above, engaging imaginatively with art can reveal unexpected affinity as well as incongruity, or even incommensurability, between experiential contexts. The recognition that there are vastly different ways of responding to artistic representations, some wholly inaccessible to me, is indeed a valuable lesson in contemporary sociality. It can also contribute to the value of aesthetic experience. For it implies, first, that the meaning of the work remains fundamentally partial and incomplete, the contingent outcome of my contingent circumstances that warrants further and broader modes of engagement. Further, recognizing oneself in the work of art, seeing one’s particular self emerge through the activity of aesthetic engagement, feeds

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back into this activity in a way that adds to the depth and complexity of imaginative and interpretive processes. The possibility for aesthetic engagement with art exists somewhere between the extremes of determinate meanings and random associations. The work of art is, like us, neither a fixed and immutable essence nor a free-floating bundle of discrete particulars. The sensuous particularity of the artwork and the unifying theme or idea of the work are mutually codependent. Kantian avant-gardists are right to champion the sensuous particularity of art as a mode of disrupting and destabilizing all forms of absoluteness and critically distancing us from the status quo. But with even the most radically avant-garde works of art, there is something that holds these particulars together, something that makes the sensible thus-and-so of every artistic representation appear to us as meaning ful. What aesthetic theory has for some time now failed to take seriously is that this “something” is often something deeply human, and is a meaningful source of human experience and interaction. If what we care about is the richness, complexity, and variability of aesthetic experience, then the response to the cultural turn in art is not to double down on art’s capacity to render the familiar unfamiliar, but to acknowledge the neglected flipside of the formula for  aesthetic engagement: that art also makes familiar the unfamiliar. The Hegelian concept of aesthetic reflexivity is intended to capture this dynamic between the common and the particular that emerges in the space of aesthetic experience. For Hegel, the beauty of modern art consists in the forward-looking celebration of individuality that casts a nostalgic glimpse at the cohesion and simplicity of Sittlichkeit. The significance of this account is that modern art, rather than reinforcing cultural unity and collective belonging, represents humanity in its breadth of

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individual projects and interests. What is beautiful about a Dutch painting depicting the trivialities of daily life—a milkmaid at work, a boy picking fleas off a dog, a mother nursing her sick child, etc.? The particularity of human life as it is lived. Dutch painting has, as Hegel puts it, “an ingredient in any work of art,” namely, “the vision of what man is as man, what the human spirit and character is, what man and this man is” (LFA, 887). The seemingly insignificant is made significant by gesturing beyond what is immediately present in these scenes. The trivial is made meaningful through artistic representations that ask the viewer to ascribe meaning to them. Likewise, Romantic poetry becomes “the teacher of humanity” in that it brings to appearance “the all-encompassing realm of human ideas, deeds, actions, and fates, the bustle of life in this world, and the divine rule of the universe (LFA, 972). In the distinctive and irreducibly sensible language of aesthetic representation, works of art manifest ideas in ways that prompt imagination and interpretation. Finding meaning in art is neither a matter of extracting some discursively exhaustive content nor a matter of improvising free verse on some tabula rasa. However bountiful and unschematic aesthetic representation may be in a work of art, it is nevertheless a representation of something—an idea, emotion, theme, or content. Already in Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas it is clear that freedom of aesthetic imagination means the freedom to move within the set of parameters implicit in both the representational features (its symbols, metaphors, stylistic elements, etc.) as well as the content of the work. The seed of this Kantian idea is carried to fruition in Hegel’s conception of modern art: emancipated from its erstwhile mythmaking function, art prompts reflexive awareness of how we perceive the boundaries between shared and particular forms of experience. For neither does the

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aesthetic imagination operate in unmoored and rudderless fashion. Central to both accounts is a conception of aesthetic content as a kind of organizing principle within a work of art around which the imagination forms various associations with and among various sensible representations. For Kant, this is the function of aesthetic ideas (hell, eternity, creation, envy, vice, love, fame); for Hegel, this is the function of the “great themes of art” (family, country, state, church, fame, friendship, class, dignity, honor, love). What matters is that we take ownership of these imaginative and interpretive processes, that how we negotiate the meaning of art is indicative, and to a certain extent constitutive, of our own subjectivity. How we interpret the relation between particularity and generality, and how we forge associations among aesthetic representations and aesthetic ideas, both informs, and is informed by, our self-perception as socially constituted agents. The reflexive practices of aesthetic imagination and interpretation give shape to our identities, our particular life narratives, just as our particular identities shape the kind and quality of reflexive practices we undertake in engaging with art. In the context of the cultural turn, it has become necessary to reframe the relation between art and politics. Specifically, it is necessary to articulate the connection between the sociopolitical and aesthetic value of contemporary art—without, however, reducing one to the other. As I have argued, this is (at least partly) achieved by drawing out the broader significance of Hegel’s notion of aesthetic reflexivity, with specific focus on the unresolved tension between particularity and generality that initiates and sustains the reflexive experience of art. Works of art give us a way of seeing a world as both shared and private, both familiar and unfamiliar. Through the reflexive awareness of my own imaginative response to the questions that work of art pose,

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I come to appreciate the distinctness of my own perception of the world in relation to that of others. I gauge the degree to which my perceptions are affirmed or denied in the work, the degree to which I am grounded or disoriented in the experience. For both kinds of experience, and the dialectic between them, are as essential to a productive engagement with contemporary politics as they are to a productive engagement with contemporary art. The sociopolitical value of art consists, on the one hand, in upending the sometimes unreflective assumption of commonness: common spaces; shared rationality; public perception; etc. Where contemporary politics makes clear that ascribing rights and protections to citizens requires that we see citizens as “Black,” or “trans,” or “Muslim,” or “immigrant,” and so on, contemporary art disrupts the perception of sameness by representing difference. On the other hand, what is the value of cultural identity if the perception of identity is distorted? How can we work out intelligent immigration policies if we perceive the other as fundamentally other? How can we address the epidemic of police brutality if young Black men are perceived as threatening? What motivation do we have to divert precious resources to their suffering if their suffering appears as something foreign and remote? Thus, the sociopolitical value of art consists not only in presenting difference to a broader audience, but in humanizing difference. To evoke, once again, DuBois’s sentiments in “Criteria for Negro Artists,” it seems it is something like this humanizing potential of art he has in mind when, at the height of the Harlem renaissance, he urges Black artists to make Black art that holds its own with any other kind of art, not through conformity to white standards, but on its own terms: “Just as soon as true art emerges; just as soon as the black artist appears, someone

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touches the race on the shoulder and says, ‘He did that because he was an American, not because he was a Negro; he was born here; he was trained here; he is not a Negro—what is a Negro anyhow? He is just human; it is the kind of thing you ought to expect.’ ”26 DuBois’s recommendation, as I understand it, is predicated on the possibility of a symbiotic relation between authentic artistic expression of the social, political, and ethical substance of Black life in America and the aesthetic integrity of art. This is, I think, a much clearer conception of the relation between art and politics than anything that philosophical aesthetics has subsequently had to offer. Often lost is the subtlety with which DuBois famously proclaims all art to be “propaganda.”27 For it is not the dogged and one-sided pursuit of identity-specific interests prioritized above all else, art included, that is at stake in the production of Black art, but the opportunity to appreciate the unsung experience of Blackness as art. And if, more generally, the point is that the political and aesthetic dimensions of cultural identity are deeply and inextricably intertwined, then so too, as DuBois argues, are the political and aesthetic values of art. We can value art aesthetically for the same reason that we can value art politically: Art shows both the particularity of human life as well as the human element in particularity. A revisionist reading of Hegel’s aesthetics recommends itself as a firm theoretical foundation from which to reconceptualize both political and aesthetic representations of cultural identity. The idea that aesthetic experiences of art generate the kind of reflexive awareness necessary for realizing contemporary forms of social agency offers a new and promising direction for any reformist agenda sympathetic to Trilling’s vision of a liberal politics revitalized by aesthetic imagination. In pressing its demand that liberalism rethink social and political agency in terms of

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cultural difference, cultural politics confronts the limits of discursivity. With the recognition that the public sphere is not constrained by rational deliberation, but rather extends deep into the politics of perception, comes the recognition that the struggle for social change is also being fought on the aesthetic front. Given the extent to which prevailing attitudes and perceptions of cultural identity figure (often implicitly) into the modern, socially mediated quest for autonomously determined forms of agency, it is impossible to separate the aesthetic from the sociopolitical significance of contemporary art. Thus, the idea that the reflexive experience of art can be a source of political and aesthetic value also offers a new and promising direction for any aesthetic theory that does not inscribe strict boundaries between the aesthetic and other forms of human experience. Indeed, finding aesthetic value in art’s capacity to call forth agency, to prompt a sense of responsibility for our perceptions through imaginative and interpretive engagement with representations that destabilize and familiarize, disorient and affirm, is not only a way to advance contemporary philosophical aesthetics; perhaps more importantly, it is a way of engaging more meaningfully with contemporary art. Imagine a work of contemporary art that consists in nothing more than, say, an assortment of colorfully wrapped pieces of candy. What aesthetically meaningful responses might be available to the viewer who encounters it? Does it “prompt much thought,” and if so, how? And what kind of thought? Naturally, the viewer might begin with only what is visually accessible in the work. They might ask, for example: What does it mean to use candy as an artistic medium? What exactly is the artistic product, or even, the artistic process, of the work? Do these reside in the particular configuration of candies—neatly arranged in  a pile, spread upon the floor as a carpet, or stacked in a

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FIGURE 5.2  Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.).

© Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Courtesy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

corner—and if so, how does the variability and adaptability of the work change our reading of it? Should the work—much like candy—be seen as a source of sensory stimulation, or is it symbolic of some deeper meaning? Playful, enticing, and potentially saturated with significance, the candy-as-art motif that is a signature of Felix GonzalezTorres’s artistic work, if nothing else, destabilizes the viewer’s familiar modes of engaging with works of art. Indeed, a key feature of these and other installation works by the artist is what we might describe as their “ambiguously participatory” character: the candies present themselves as available to the viewer, as something to be taken and enjoyed, and yet the viewer is neither explicitly prohibited from nor explicitly invited to help

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themselves to the candy. There is, in other words, another possible way to engage with the work. In fact, the viewer may take from the installation. This might mean that the work of art is not the physical object (the individual pieces of candy), but rather an idea, a process, or mode of participation. Or it might mean that that the work of art is an object dispersed through our participation in it. Either scenario draws into question the significance of the viewer’s role in taking the pieces of candy, as well as that of the institution’s role in replenishing them. Among other things, the ambiguously participatory aspect directs attention from the visual presence of the work to the viewer’s decision-making process in choosing how to respond to the work—whether to take, how much to take, what to do with what is taken, etc. Whatever particular course of aesthetic engagement occurs that takes the viewer from an abundance of candies to an abundance of thought, it is as much a reflection of the viewer’s inner processes as it is the external work of art. Even in the simplest formulas, engaging with the work enacts the viewer’s agency in a way that then becomes an integral part of the viewer’s imaginative and interpretive response to the work. Imagine, then, that the viewer, now more deeply engaged, presses on. How else might this meaning-making process take shape? How else might the viewer be implicated in the interpretive and imaginative response to the work? Imagine that our newly invigorated viewer now consults the title of the work, looking for clues: Untitled: Portrait of Ross in L.A. New possibilities emerge. Perhaps it is a genre challenge: In what sense does a collection of candy pieces constitute a “portrait?” Further, the viewer might ask how the ostensible anonymity of Untitled can be reconciled with the apparent intimacy and specificity of Ross in L.A. And if the viewer presses further still and asks: Who is this Ross?, it may happen that a whole new dimension of

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interpretive possibilities open up. For if the Ross of this work is the same Ross that was the artist’s lover who died of AIDS, almost every aspect of the work previously considered can be reinterpreted through the more particular lens of queer identity. Are we being asked to empathize with the artist’s loss? By participating in the work are we, the viewers, symbolically partaking in Ross? Is taking a piece of candy a kind of secular communion, or is it materialist consumption? So too might the viewer’s perception of the individual piece of candy be transformed: Is it a lasting souvenir or a passing indulgence? Another peculiar but significant detail about the work: the label reads “Ideal weight 175 lb.” How does the weight of the work inform our reading of it? To what does “ideal weight” refer to—Ross’s weight? The average weight of males? Of humans? Again, the viewer is left to consider how broadly or narrowly to construe the meaning of the work. Even the term “ideal,” as Gonzalez-Torres employs it in this and other works, lacks reference to any specific standard of measurement. Typically evocative of consistency and regularity, “ideal” becomes a term of negotiation and fluctuation. And so it is with every aspect of the viewer’s aesthetic response to Ross in L.A. The physical and contextual malleability of the work facilitates a dialectic between the particular and the general through which viewers come to see themselves as giving meaning to the work. The work can, of course, stand on its own and remain broadly relevant and engaging for every viewer. But the introduction of determinacy and particularity can also enhance and enrich this engagement, as the interplay of visual, factual, and conceptual material serves to expand rather than limit the range of imaginative and interpretive responses available to the viewer. It is up to the viewer to constellate meaning from these—to determine, for example, whether the work

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appeals to the shared experience of loss, or to the particular experience of the artist in losing his lover to AIDS. Reducible neither to political agenda nor to pure aesthetic pleasure, Ross in L.A., like any number of contemporary works of art, shows the social and political dimension of art to be coextensive with the aesthetic. This is evident not only in the way the work admits imaginative freedom and interpretive variation, but also, and more importantly, in the way the work calls on us to see our agency enacted in and through these aesthetic practices. This reflexive experience, in which I perceive myself in relation to others, is a vital catalyst to both social change as well as meaningful engagement with art.

NOTES

1. THE CULTURAL TURN 1. W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Violence of Public Art,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 894. 2. See, for example: Joe Klein, “Spiked?,” New York Magazine, June 26, 1989, 14–15. For a similarly harsh review, see Murray Kempton, “The Pizza Is Burning,” New York Review of Books, September  28, 1989, 37– 38. 3. Charles Mills, “Racial Liberalism,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (Oct. 2008). 4. W. E. B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Penguin, 1994), 101– 2. 5. Roger Ebert, “Review: Do the Right Thing,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 30, 1989. 6. “DAMN., by Kendrick Lamar,” 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Music, Pulitzer Prizes, April  16, 2018, https://www.pulitzer.org/winners / kendrick-lamar. 7. Benjamin Rutter, Hegel and the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Ayon Maharaj, The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Robert B. Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 8. In its broader orientation, this project is in conversation with several recent books that seek to restore to art an affirmative social function.

230 Y 1. The Cultur al Turn Michael Kelly’s A Hunger for Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), for example, makes a strong case against the “antiaesthetic” view that figures prominently in current philosophical aesthetics. Similarly, in contemporary German scholarship, Georg Bertram argues in Kunst als menschliche Praxis (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014) that art plays a distinct and pivotal role in how we constitute ourselves as individuals. On the side of political theory, Gabriel Rockhill’s Radical History and the Politics of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) stands out as one of several works closely aligned with the aim of this project, given its attempt to articulate the broader scope of art’s political potential. Examining more popular forms of cultural production, Martin Shuster’s New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers a brilliant defense of contemporary television as the site of meaningful political engagement which resonates deeply with the overarching aims of this book. Also in line with this project, though in a more general vein, is Peter Dahlgren’s study of the relation between popular culture and democratic participation, Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 9. Initially formulated in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin’s well-worn assertion that “all efforts to render politics aesthetic can only culminate in war” is a critical response to the attempt to legitimize fascism through aesthetic appeal. “Politicizing aesthetics,” then, is proposed as a Marxist-oriented counterstrategy to the nefarious “aestheticization of politics.” Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, preface by Leon Wieseltier, and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2013). 10. As Jameson goes on to specify, “culture” is now accessible: “in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the image of culture.” Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1993–1998 (New York: Verso, 1998), 111. 11. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 136.

1. The Cultur al Turn Z 231 12. More precisely, Kymlicka defines a “societal culture” as “a culture which provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both the public and private spheres.” Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 76. 13. This “further demand,” Taylor writes, is that we “all recognize the equal value of different cultures; that we not only let them survive, but acknowledge their worth.” Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 64. 14. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 15. Mills, “Racial Liberalism,” 1386. 16. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18. 17. Deborah Solomon, “The Art World Bust,” New York Times, February 28, 1993. 18. Michael Kelly, “The Political Autonomy of Contemporary Art: The Case of the 1993 Whitney Biennial,” in Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, 221– 56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 19. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 20. When the debate unfolded in the Senate hearings of 1989, Senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato teamed up to publicly denounce Piss Christ as “trash,” as a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity.” “Comments on Andres Serrano by Members of the U.S. Congress,” Congressional Record (May  18, 1989). See also Carole  S. Vance, “The War on Culture,” Art in America (September  1989), reprinted in Richard Bolton, ed., Culture Wars: Documents from Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New Press, 1992), 106. Of course, in this particular case, a level-headed look at Serrano’s own stated motives in making the work would no doubt have diffused much of the heated rhetoric on both sides. It helps to know, for example, that Serrano identifies himself as Catholic, and claims to be coming to terms with his religious beliefs in this and similar works. Moreover,

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21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

Serrano claims to be exploring notions of corporeality that is strongly present in depictions of the crucifixion. See, for example, an interview with the artist in Linda Weintraub, Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society (1970s–1980s), with an introduction by Arthur Danto and conclusion by Thomas McEvilley (Litchfield, CT: Art Insights, 1996), 161. Paul Taylor, Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 85. Nana Asfour, “When All Else Fails, There’s Culture,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 2018. Key exhibitions associated with identity politics are the 1993 Whitney Biennial; Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in American Art (1994), Whitney Museum of American Art; The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990), New Museum; Chicano Art:  Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (1993), Wight Art Gallery; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art (1996), Asia Society Galleries. Clive Bell, Art (New York: Stokes, 1913). Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981). Of course, the philosophical thrust of this tradition can be traced back to the early German romantics (esp. August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Ludwig Tieck), and extends to the linguistic aesthetics of Hamann and Herder. The specific, literary form of “reception aesthetics” I refer to here, however, includes: Rüdiger Bubner, Ästhetische Erfahrung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989); Hans Robert Jauß, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982); Albrecht Wellmer, “Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation: Adorno’s Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity,” in The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, ed. Albrecht Wellmer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 1– 35; Martin Seel, Die Kunst der Entzweiung: Zum Begriff der ästhetischen Rationalität (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985). Dieter Wellershof, Die Auflösung des Kunstbegriffs (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976); Willi Oelmüller, ed., Ästhetische Erfahrung (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1981). Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 188.

1. The Cultur al Turn Z 233 27. Theodor Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 227. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor as Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Henceforth cited in text as (AT) followed by page number. 28. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 350. 29. J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). 30. Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 171. 31. Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 173. Specifically, Bernstein worries that something like Seyla Benhabib’s political feminism will come to inherit the modernist legacy of Adorno, and in doing so, will yield a politics that is at best “speculative and aporetic” (273). It is not, as I understand it, a response to Benhabib’s politics as such, but rather a critique of how the politics of identity plays out in aesthetic practices within a political context based on the extraction of “private” individual identities from the public realm of politics. There is a substantive point to be made here about art’s participating in the very politics it aims to critique (e.g., institutional critique within the institution). But in cases where this critique concerns participation of the private in the public, the more specific question is whether refusal or direct intervention is the better strategy, which Bernstein doesn’t address. 32. See Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2011); Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010). See also Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 33. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 42. 34. Christoph Menke, Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1988), 32– 33. 35. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodernist Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Theory and History of Literature 10, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81. 36. Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form:

234 Y 1. The Cultur al Turn

37. 38. 39. 40.

Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Pillow’s reconstitution of Kantian aesthetics as a theory of “sublime indeterminacy” turns on two key assumptions: first, that Hegel’s aesthetics precludes an account of aesthetic experience; and second, that the conceptually destabilizing, or “dehabituating” effects of art are inherently valuable aesthetic responses. Admittedly, the long-form version of Pillow’s argument draws on Hegel’s earlier and more obscure discussions of Phantasie that, in his view, aligns Hegelian aesthetics more closely with the indeterminacy of Kantian aesthetics. This, coupled with Hegel’s discussion of the non-Ideal forms of art in the Aesthetics (symbolic, romantic), for Pillow shows that there are traces of reflective indeterminacy in Hegel’s aesthetic akin to Kant’s aesthetic ideas. This takes us away from the Aesthetics to passages of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), where Hegel is found to draw a strong connection between the imagination and the “dehabituating” role of madness (139ff.). But, as I’ll show (particularly in the final chapter), Hegel’s discussion of modern, romantic art much more readily allows a reconstructive account of aesthetic experience in which determinacy is an essential feature of modern art’s break from its ideal form, and thus belongs essentially to the aesthetic experience of modern and contemporary art. Kirk Pillow, Sublime Understanding (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2003). Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 372. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant- Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 50. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 10. Monique Roelofs, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 37. Roelofs’s critique of Kantian aesthetics rests on a connection between the implicit Eurocentric biases present in the Critique of Judgment with the explicitly racist views of Kant’s anthropological writings. It seems to me, however, that the more immediate issue concerns the cultural implications of the Kantian-inspired presumption that culturally identifying elements of an artwork are either irrelevant to or incompatible with judgments of taste.

2. Rethinking the Claims of Culture Z 235 41. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no.  25/26 (1990): 67.

2. RETHINKING THE CLAIMS OF CULTURE 1. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 43. 2. Jürgen Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” in Gutmann, Multiculturalism, 132– 33. 3. Tariq Modood, “Kymlicka on British Muslims,” Analyse und Kritik 15, no. 1 (1993): 87– 91. 4. Charles Taylor, “The Rushdie Controversy,” Public Culture 2, no. 1 (1989): 118– 22. 5. Michael Walzer, “The Sins of Salman,” New Republic, April 10, 1989. 6. Jeremy Waldron, “Rushdie and Religion,” in Liberal Rights, ed. Jeremy Waldron (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 134–42. 7. Catriona McKinnon, Toleration: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006). See, in particular, ch. 8, “Artistic Expression,” 119– 36. 8. “Rushdie Has Fallen Into Total Moral Degradation,” Independent, Feb. 21, 1989, in The Rushdie File, ed. Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 18. 9. Syed Ali Ashraf, “Nihilistic, Negative, Satanic,” Impact International, Oct. 28–Nov. 10, 1988, in Appignanesi and Maitland, The Rushdie File, 19– 20. 10. Times, November 22, 1988, in Appignanesi and Maitland, The Rushdie File, section “From South Africa’s Banning Order,” 52. 11. Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, ed. Salman Rushdie (London: Penguin, 1992), 409. 12. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2010), 103. 13. Martin Shuster, New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 109.

236 Y 2. Rethinking the Claims of Culture 14. Tariq Modood, “British Asian Muslims and the Rushdie Affair,” Political Quarterly 6, no. 2 (April 1990): 154. 15. Article 214 of Stephen’s Digest of the Criminal Law, 9th ed., 1950. 16. Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 296– 97. 17. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 320– 21. 18. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 297. 19. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 296. 20. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 320. 21. Michael Walzer, “The Sins of Salman,” 14. 22. Rushdie, In Good Faith, 397. 23. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 7–8. 24. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 10. 25. Rushdie writes, for example, “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist” (Rushdie, In Good Faith, 396). Similarly, in response to the Bradford book burning, Rushdie proclaims that “the giving of offense cannot be a basis for censorship.” Salman Rushdie, “The Book Burning,” New York Review of Books, March 2, 1989, 26. Similarly, in his letter to Rajiv Gandhi, Rushdie asserts that “the right to freedom of expression is at the very foundation of any democratic society,” in Appignanesi and Maitland, The Rushdie File, 35. 26. Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” 394. 27. Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” 394. 28. Karachi [pseud.], “A Dissenting Voice for Whom Rushdie Speaks,” Observer, March 12, 1989, in Appignanesi and Maitland, The Rushdie File, 221. 29. Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” 410. 30. Rushdie, “The Book Burning,” 26. 31. Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” 409. 32. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35–44. 33. Seyla Benhabib, “The Liberal Imagination and the Four Dogmas of Multiculturalism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 408. 34. M. M. Slaughter, “The Salman Rushdie Affair: Apostasy, Honor, and Freedom of Speech,” Virginia Law Review 79, no.  1 (Feb.  1993): 153– 204.

2. Rethinking the Claims of Culture Z 237 35. Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” 405. 36. Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” 541. 37. Similarly, the infamous attack on the Paris office of the left-leaning French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, in January 2015, that left twelve dead and several others seriously injured, was in retaliation for the publication of a similar series of cartoons depicting Muhammad several years earlier. 38. The legal claim attempted to show that Jyllands-Posten had violated §266b of the Danish Penal Code, prohibiting defamatory speech on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexual orientation, as well as §140, prohibiting public expressions of blasphemy. 39. Quoted in Sune Lægaard, “The Cartoon Controversy: Offence, Identity, Oppression?” Political Studies 55 (2007): 485–86. 40. Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” 404. 41. Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” 394. 42. His earliest (largely unsuccessful) novel, Grimus, is inspired by a twelfth-century Sufi poem recast in the style of mythic science fiction. It is further evident in his more recent novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, an imaginative reworking of the classic work of Arabic literature, The Thousand and One Nights, premised on a fictional dialogue between the great Islamic philosophers, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Al-Ghazali. It is worth mentioning that this dialogue resurrects a central theme of The Satanic Verses, namely, that reason prevails over superstition, wherein Rushdie assumes the authorial voice of Ibn Rushd (Rushdie’s namesake, no less), the medieval Islamic scholar who advocates a more tolerant and moderate brand of the faith. Rushdie claims that even the healthy dose of skepticism and scandal that Rushdie injects into these literary retellings have “long been a legitimate part even of Islamic literature” (Rushdie, In Good Faith, 396). 43. Salman Rushdie, The Bandung File, Channel 4, January 27, 1989, broadcast February  14, 1989, in Appignanesi and Maitland, The Rushdie File, 24. 44. Incidentally, the latter gave Rushdie an initial taste of political censorship when many Muslims reacted to the novel’s satirical depiction of Muhammad and the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, sued for libel. 45. Lægaard, “The Cartoon Controversy,” 489.

238 Y 2. Rethinking the Claims of Culture 46. Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye, “The Case Against Dana Schutz,” New Republic, March  22, 2017, https://newrepublic.com /article/141506/case-dana-schutz. 47. Alex Greenberger, “‘The Painting Must Go’: Hannah Black Pens Open Letter to the Whitney About Controversial Biennial Work,” Art News, March  21, 2017, http://www.artnews.com /2017/03 /21 /the-painting -must- go -hannah -black-pens - open -letter-to -the -whitney - about -controversial-biennial-work /. 48. Alex Greenberger, “ ‘The Painting Must Go.’ ” 49. She writes: “I suspect that many of those endorsing the call have either forgotten or are unfamiliar with the ways Republicans, Christian Evangelicals, and black conservatives exploit the argument that audience offense justifies censorship in order to terminate public funding for art altogether and to perpetuate heterosexist values in black communities.” Coco Fusco, “Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till,” Hyperallergic, March 27, 2017, https:// hyperallergic.com /368290/censorship-not-the-painting-must -go-on-dana-schutzs-image-of-emmett-till /. 50. Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, “Dana Schutz Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Sparks Protest,” Artnet News, March  21, 2017, https://news . artnet .com /art-world /dana-schutz -painting- emmett -till-whitney-biennial-protest-897929. 51. In the same breath, she acknowledges norms of artistic content (“You think maybe it’s off limits [Till’s image], and then extra off limits”) and yet invokes the artistic freedom to do it so long as it is done well: “I really feel any subject is O.K., it’s just how it’s done. You never know how something is going to be until it’s done.” At other times, she’s appeals to the currency of the image in the American political landscape: “I was interested because it’s something that keeps on happening. I feel somehow that it’s an American image.” Calvin Tomkins, “Why Dana Schutz Painted Emmett Till,” New Yorker, April 3, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com /magazine /2017/04 /10/why-dana-schutz -painted-emmett-till. 52. Oliver Basciano, “Whitney Biennial: Emmett Till Casket Painting by White Artist Sparks Anger,” Guardian, March 21, 2017, https://www . theguardian . com /artanddesign /2017 /mar /21 / whitney - biennial -emmett-till-painting-dana-schutz.

3. Imagining Agency Z 239 53. As she put it then, “I know that this life can’t be returned but I hope that his death will certainly start a movement in these United States.” Livingstone and Gyarkye, “The Case Against Dana Schutz.” 54. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful, 134. 55. She writes “I turn from the painting to my children. Their beloved father is white, I am biracial, so, by the old racial classifications of America, they are ‘quadroons.’ Could they take black suffering as a subject of their art, should they ever make any? Their grandmother is as black as the ace of spades, as the British used to say; their mother is what the French still call café au lait. They themselves are sort of yellowy. When exactly does black suffering cease to be their concern? Their grandmother—raised on a postcolonial island, in extreme poverty, descended from slaves—knew black suffering intimately. But her grandchildren look white. Are they? If they are, shouldn’t white people like my children concern themselves with the suffering of Emmett Till?” Zadie Smith, “Getting In and Out: Who Owns Black Pain,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2017, 88. 56. There are, of course, many positive forms of cultural appropriation (e.g., music sampling). Schutz’s, however, is the bad kind of appropriation in the sense that she is in some sense the beneficiary of something that does not belong to her. 57. James Young, “Profound Offense and Cultural Appropriation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 135. 58. C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl, “Cultural Appropriation and the Intimacy of Groups,” Philosophical Studies 176, no. 4 (2019): 989. 59. Siddhartha Mitter, “What Does It Mean to Be Black and Look at This? A Scholar Reflects on the Dana Schutz Controversy,” Hyperallergic, March 24, 2017, https:// hyperallergic.com /368012/what-does-it -mean-to-be-black-and-look-at-this-a-scholar-reflects-on-the-dana -schutz-controversy/. 60. Fusco, “Censorship.”

3. IMAGINING AGENCY 1. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (New York: Liberal Arts, 1958), 68. 2. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), xvi.

240 Y 3. Imagining Agency 3. E.g., Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); K. Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Seyla Benhabib, “The Liberal Imagination and the Four Dogmas of Multiculturalism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (Fall 1999). 4. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodernist Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Theory and History of Literature 10, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 82. 5. Harold Rosen, “The Autobiographical Impulse,” in Linguistics in Context: Connecting Observation with Understanding, ed. Deborah Tannen (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1988), 69–88. 6. Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 93. 7. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 165. Elsewhere, Kymlicka makes the stronger claim that understanding these cultural narratives “is a precondition of making intelligent judgments about how to lead our lives.” Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 83. 8. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in a Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15. 9. Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 16. 10. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 181ff. 11. John Gibson, “Narrative and the Literary Imagination,” in Narrative, Philosophy and Life, ed. Allen Speight (New York: Springer, 2014), 148. 12. Noël Carroll, “Narrative and the Ethical Life,” in Art and Ethical Criticism, ed. Garry Hagberg (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), 50. For Carroll, the real upshot is the role of narrativity as a form of moral deliberation. In his view, “narratives are not only an aid to the recognition or perception of virtue (and vice),” they also “increase our understanding of these” (47). In my view, the moral is but one aspect of the normative self-making process to which narratives contribute.

3. Imagining Agency Z 241 13. Barbara Johnstone, “Discourse Analysis and Narrative,” in Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2005), 644. 14. Cf. Peter Dahlgren, Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); John Corner and Dick Pels, eds., Media and the Restyling of Politics (London: Sage, 2003); John Street, Politics and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 1997); Sonia Livingstone, Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere (Bristol: Intellect, 2005). 15. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Bände 13–15 of the Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). Quotations, with minor variations for clarity, refer to the standard translation of the Lectures on Aesthetics is by T. M. Knox: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); hereafter referred to as Aesthetics and abbreviated LFA and cited parenthetically in the text; in this case, LFA, 7. 16. See, for example, Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 97. Similarly, Arthur Danto takes up this line of thought in discussing Hegel in the context of Rilke’s poem in an interview with Fred Rush. In analyzing the category of “attractiveness” in art, he notes that for both Hegel and Rilke there is an appeal to the notion that “to see quality in art is to feel oneself seen by the art in question, as if it were occupied by a soul.” Fred Rush, “The Contemporary Significance of Classical German Aesthetics: A Discussion with Arthur Danto and Dieter Henrich,” in Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism 4, ed. Karl Ameriks (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 37. 17. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaïscher Torso Apollos,” Sämtliche Werke Bd. 1 (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1955–1966). 18. Henrich criticizes the characterization of the work of art as “the appearance of essence, the epitome of an aesthetic reality over and against this one,” and instead recommends a contemporary aesthetic theory that “no longer distinguishes between this hierarchy of art and life, art and reality” (my translation). Dieter Henrich, Die Auflösung des Kunstbegriffs (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 56.

242 Y 3. Imagining Agency 19. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” New Yorker, February 25, 1967, 303. 20. Whereas Knox translates “das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee” (Werke 13: 151) as “the pure appearance of the Idea to sense,” I preserve the literal translation, “the sensible appearance of the Idea,” because it reinforces the sensible character of the appearance. 21. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). It is a peculiar feature of Schaeffer’s account that, in launching a blanket condemnation of speculative aesthetics, he unproblematically situates Hegel alongside his romantic contemporaries, Novalis and Schlegel. For a similar but more historically nuanced critique, see Karl Ameriks, “Hegel’s Aesthetics: New Perspectives on its Response to Kant and Romanticism,” in Kant and the Historical Turn (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 209– 30. 22. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Unpresentable,” in The Subject of Philosophy, ed. Thomas Trezise (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 151. 23. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Einführung in Hegels Ästhetik (Munich: W. Fink, 2005), 9. Translation mine. 24. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd. rev. ed., translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 52. 25. The three-volume Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik represents the fullthroated version of Hegel’s view of art. Compiled and published posthumously by his student, Heinrich Hotho, the series of lectures range from 1818, while Hegel was at Heidelberg, to 1829, during his final years at the University of Berlin, and are considered to be among his most successful and well-attended. See Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 593. 26. Indeed, Hegel offers a fairly exhaustive account of natural beauty in the second chapter of the Aesthetics, called “The Beauty of Nature” (LFA, 116–52; see also 160– 74). His chief motivation in this section, however, is to make the case that, while nature (including the living organism) can be beautiful, it lacks the aspect of universality necessary for it to be considered truly beautiful.

3. Imagining Agency Z 243 27. Hegel was well-versed in the newly emerging art-historical texts of his day (notably, Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764), and also experienced art firsthand in the theaters, opera houses, and extensive art collections of Berlin. For an account of Hegel’s firsthand experiences of art of both the Western and Eastern tradition in Berlin, see Otto Pöggeler, Hegel in Berlin: Preußische Kulturpolitik und idealistische Ästhetik: Zum 150: Todestag des Philosophen (Berlin: Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 1981). See also Beat Wyss, Hegel’s Art History and the Critique of Modernity, trans. Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 28. The other “common ideas” of art Hegel discusses here are as follows: “ii.) It is essentially made for man’s apprehension, and in particular is drawn more or less from the sensuous field for apprehension by the senses; iii.) It has an end and aim in itself.” 29. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Ninth Letter: IV), ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967). 30. Here Hegel cites Alois Hirt’s notion of “characteristic,” which refers to “the degree of appropriateness with which the particular detail of the artistic form sets in relief the content it is meant to present,” as a precursor to his own view that form and content stand in dialectical relation to one another in a work of art (LFA, 17–18). 31. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 195ff. 32. See, esp., ch. 7 of Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 33. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 581. 34. Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn, “The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste,” in Arthur Danto, Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste, ed. Gregg Horowitz, and Tom Huhn (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International), 51. 35. Danto writes, for example: “Nothing more sharply distinguishes the philosophy of art in Kant and in Hegel than the fact that taste is a central concept for Kant whereas it is discussed only to be dismissed by Hegel.” Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), 67.

24 4 Y 3. Imagining Agency 36. Specifically, Danto builds a case against Dave Hickey’s prediction, made in the wake of the highly politicized 1993 Whitney Biennial, that “beauty would be the defining problem of the decade” (The Abuse of Beauty, 103). Hickey’s prediction turned on the assumption that political art that committed itself to representing the ugliness and injustice of the world was for that reason also committed to the incompatibility of political art and beauty. But as Danto argues, political art helped reassert the point Hegel made clear long ago, namely, that aesthetic beauty is not a necessary condition of art: “The great consequence of beauty having been removed from the concept of art was that whether to use beauty or not became an option for artists” (119). 37. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 198– 99. 38. Importantly, Arendt distinguishes thought from both cognition as well as logical reasoning on the grounds that it “has neither an end nor an aim outside itself, and it does not even produce results” (The Human Condition, 168). In this way, Arendt seeks to situate the value of both thinking and art in terms of their “uselessness,” which is to say, outside the utility-oriented practices of science and philosophy. 39. Arendt, The Human Condition,198– 99. 40. Arendt, The Human Condition, 208. 41. Arendt, The Human Condition, 199. 42. Arendt, The Human Condition, 199. 43. Jason Gaiger, “The Aesthetics of Kant and Hegel,” in A Companion to Art Theory, ed. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 127– 38. 44. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from the Critique of Pure Reason refer to the standard A/B pagination from the Akademie edition. All subsequent references will be noted in the text with the abbreviation “CPR.” In this case, CPR, B19. 45. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). This and subsequent references to the Pluhar translation refer to the Akadamie edition, (i.e., Kants gesammelte Schriften [Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften,

3. Imagining Agency Z 245

46.

47.

48.

49.

1900–]); hereafter abbreviated CJ, followed by the page number of the Akadamie edition. In this case, CJ, 179. For Bernstein in particular, Kant’s notion of a sensus communis holds out the promise of social cohesion against an irretrievably fractured modern world. “From the perspective of reflective judgment,” he writes, “the attainment of such a world looks like a loss; a loss of commonness and solidarity” (Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 60. Kantian judgments of taste are thus “memorial” in the sense that they seem to proceed “as if ” from a common sense. That Kant’s treatment of fine art appears as something of a brief and awkwardly situated afterthought to his aesthetic theory, with hardly any mention of actual works of art, is one of many indications that he hadn’t fully resolved all of the tensions between artistic and natural beauty in the third Critique. On the supplementary, or “parergonal” status of art in Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment, see Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 272ff. But, as Eva Schaper argues, this should by no means count against Kant, since “Although no more than roughly and unsystematically sketched in a few sections of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, many of the problems of modern aesthetics are prefigured, and many of its questions are raised here for the first time.” Quoted in “Taste, Sublimity, and Genius” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 392. See Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 271– 301; See also John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Paul Guyer argues, for example, that §§43–54 of the Critique of Judgment represent a significant but welcome departure from the otherwise formalist account of natural beauty suggested in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” because it acknowledges the complexity of the relation between form and content in works of art. Paul Guyer, “Kant’s Conception of Fine Art,” Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism 52 (Summer, 1994).

246 Y 3. Imagining Agency 50. Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 37ff. 51. He calls The Critique of Judgment “the starting point for the true comprehension of the beauty of art” and says that Kant “sees the beauty of art, after all, as a correspondence in which the particular itself accords with the concept” (LFA, 60). 52. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 32. 53. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, Bd. 7 Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993). English translation: G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Henceforth cited in text as (PhG) followed by paragraph number. In this case, PhG, §177.

4. THE AESTHETICS OF RECOGNITION 1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967). 2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 3. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der Philosophische Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 84: “In seinem Anderen bei sich selbst zu sein.” 5. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 6. See, for example: Robert Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Sybol Cook Anderson, Hegel’s Theory of Recognition: From Oppression to Ethical Liberal Modernity (New York: Continuum, 2009). Andreas Wildt, Autonomie und Anerkennung: Hegels Moralitätskritik im Lichte seiner Fichte-Rezeption (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982). 7. This is a recurring thought in Robert Pippin’s writing on Hegel, for example. It is stated explicitly in “What Is the Question for Which Hegel’s Theory of Recognition is the Answer?,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 155– 72.

4. The Aesthetics of Recognition Z 247 8. Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992); English translation: The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 9. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review 3 (2000): 107– 20. Her position is more fully articulated in: Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?: A PoliticalPhilosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003). 10. See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 11. Gabriel Rockhill, Radical History and the Politics of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 93. Rockhill goes on to cite a similar, though more specific, sentiment expressed by Peter Uwe Hohendahl: “In the official transition from Habermas to Axel Honneth, who was recently appointed Habermas’s successor at the University of  Frankfurt, the aesthetic question, which was so prominent in the work of Adorno and Benjamin, has been moved to the background (94– 95). 12. Nikolas Kompridis, “Recognition and Receptivity: Forms of Normative Response in the Lives of the Animals We Are” in The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, ed. Nikolas Kompridis (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). While I am incredibly sympathetic to Kompridis’s proposal to treat literary expression as a meaningful form of empathetic receptivity that outstrips the traditional conceptual limits of recognition discourse, I see no reason to give exclusive, or even privileged, position to literature as a medium of artistic expression. Kompridis himself does not address the relative merits of other artistic media with respect to empathetic receptivity, but I would argue that the thesis needs to be either challenged or extended to include artistic expression more generally. 13. Robert Sinnerbrink, “Power, Recognition and Care: Honneth’s Critique of Poststructuralist Social Philosophy” in Axel Honneth: Critical Essays: With a Reply by Axel Honneth, ed. Danielle Petherbridge (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 177– 205. 14. For a comprehensive overview of Hegel’s influence in French thought, see Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2003).

248 Y 4. The Aesthetics of Recognition 15. Ludwig Siep, Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie: Untersuchung zu Hegels Jenaer Philosophie des Geistes (Munich: Alber, 1979). This work develops the basic insights of an important earlier essay in which the author, taking up the task of Leo Strauss, speculates on how Hegel’s early account of recognition developed in response to Hobbes’s conception of the state of nature. “Der Kampf um Anerkennung: Zu Hegels Auseinandersetzung mit Hobbes in den Jenaer Schriften,” Hegel-Studien 9 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974): 155– 207. 16. According to Taylor, “identity” designates “something like a person’s understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being.” Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 25. 17. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, Bd. 7 Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993). English translation: G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Henceforth cited in text as (PhG) followed by paragraph number. In this case, PhG, §177. 18. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 25. 19. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 66. 20. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 1. 21. That is, roughly the period of 1802– 6, based on Hegel’s lectures at the University of Jena. Of particular interest are the 1803– 04 lectures: G. W. F. Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969). As well as the 1804– 05 lectures: G. W. F. Hegel, System der Sittlichkeit, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1967). On Honneth’s view, by 1807, with the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel had already abandoned a social theory of subjectivity for a metaphysical theory of consciousness. For a robust objection to this view, cf. Michael Hardimon, “Review of The Struggle for Recognition by Axel Honneth,” Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997): 46–54. 22. Specifically, Honneth draws on the psychological theories of Herbert Mead and Donald Winnicot. Of course, it’s an open question as to whether and to what extent such theories actually serve a theory of recognition. Cf., for example, Terry Pinkard, “Is Recognition a Basis for Social or Political Thought?” in Recognition Theory as Social Research: Investigating the Dynamics of Social Conflict, ed. Shane O’Neill and Nicholas H. Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

4. The Aesthetics of Recognition Z 249 23. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 174. 24. Fraser’s aim in developing the “status model” of recognition is not to undermine or replace the “identity model” of Taylor and Honneth, but to question the primacy of cultural identity in recognitive relations, to drive home the point that economic and institutional status are equally important aspects of recognition. As she explains, “the two dimensions [distribution and cultural identity] are interimbricated and interact causally with each other.” Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” 118. 25. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 174. 26. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 126. 27. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 173. 28. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 129. In Honneth’s early writings, the terms “concern” or “integrity” designate the kinds of emotional dispositions necessary for achieving the ideal synthesis of individual objectives and shared values. See, for example: “Integrity and Disrespect: Principles of a Conception of Morality Based on the Theory of Recognition,” Political Theory 20 (1992): 195. More recently, however, recognition has taken on this character of a nondiscursive, phenomenologically basic form of interpersonal emotional relation, structurally akin to Heidegger’s notion of “care” or Lukács’s notion of “empathetic engagement.” Recognition occurs not at the level of explicit, discursive consciousness, but at an implicit, emotional level, prior to the conceptual evaluation of any particular claim or cognitive attitude. For Honneth, recognition is neither derived from rational processes nor the basis from which specific duties and obligations are derived. Hence the paradoxical assertion that “recognition comes before cognition.” Axel Honneth, “Reification and Recognition: A New Look at an Old Idea” in Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 40. 29. Raymond Geuss, “Philosophical Anthropology and Social Criticism,” in Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, 126– 27. 30. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 127. Further, Honneth addresses the same point in response to Nancy Fraser’s critique of recognition. He argues that, on her view, “we are unable to advocatorially thematize and make claims about socially unjust states of affairs that have so far been deprived of public attention.” Honneth and Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition?, 115–16.

250 Y 4. The Aesthetics of Recognition 31. 32. 33. 34.

Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 126. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 126. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 126– 27. Suppose, however, that Honneth is right. The younger, critical Hegel presents a conception of Sittlichkeit as an original condition of intersubjectivity, while the later, idealist Hegel proceeds from the liberalist supposition of a state of nature remedied only through a social contract and state institutions. Even if this description is accurate, there nevertheless remains the consistent view in Hegel that social autonomy is achieved through the gradual stabilization of reflexive social relations. This thought is already present in the System of Ethical Life, where Hegel describes the crucial transition from “natural” to “absolute” ethical life as a transition to socially reflexive self-awareness in which the individual “intuits himself as himself in every other individual.” Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie, 144. It is not so much the nature of the original relation of the self to the other that matters here, but rather the nature of the dialectical movement through which the self comes to stand in the right kind of self-reflexive relation to the other. The same can be said of the concept of honor that forms the focus of this early essay. Honor is described as a self-referential attitude legitimated through social affirmation. This coincides with Honneth’s reading of Hegel, since the struggle for honor only arises because, as he puts it, “the possibility of such an affirmative relation-to-self is dependent, for its part, on the confirmation of others.” Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 22. What is important here, however, is the quality of the reflexive social relation. Because one’s conception of self is intersubjectively mediated, such reflexive self-relations can be positive or negative, accurate or distorted, adequate or inadequate. So, the System of Ethical Life is indeed an early attempt to articulate the normative conditions of intersubjectivity; but more than this, it is one that frames this progressive development in terms of increasingly reflexive social relations. 35. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Bände 13–15 of the Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). Quotations, with minor variations for clarity, refer to the standard translation of the Lectures on Aesthetics is by T. M. Knox: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford

5. Imagination and Interpretation Z 251

36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

University Press, 1988); hereafter referred to as Aesthetics and abbreviated “LFA” and cited parenthetically in the text. Richard Eldridge, “The Work of Literary Imagination: Hegel, Rilke, and What Writers Do,” Journal of Literary Theory 3, no. 1 (2009): 6. As Edith Hall notes in commenting on the problematically democratic character of Athenian tragedy, “in tragic theater individuals whose ethnicity, gender, or status would absolutely debar them from public debate in democratic Athens can address the massed Athenian citizenry.” Edith Hall, “The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy,” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 123. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1980), 333. Baldwin, he writes, “spoke from the position of the oppressed ‘other’ in our culture.” Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin, 2005), 79. Thelma Gordon and Robert Hobbs, Kehinde Wiley (New York: Rizzoli, 2012), 41. Hobbs emphasizes this central element of humor as something frequently overlooked by critics and art historians in Wiley’s works. He quotes the artist confirming this point: “Humor plays a large part in the way that I see my work being seen.” (Gordon and Hobbs, Kehinde Wiley, 41). Blacklight, Kehinde Wiley, accessed October  8, 2020, http:// kehindewiley.com /works/ black-light /.

5. IMAGINATION AND INTERPRETATION AFTER THE “END OF ART” 1. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 131. 2. Kirk Pillow, Sublime Understanding (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 8. 3. John McCumber, Poetic Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 4. William Desmond, Art and the Absolute (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 68.

252 Y 5. Imagination and Interpretation 5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). This and subsequent references to the Pluhar translation refer to the Akadamie edition, (i.e., Kants gesammelte Schriften [Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1900–]); hereafter abbreviated “CJ,” followed by the page number of the Akadamie edition. In this case CJ, 314. 6. See, for example, Critique of Pure Reason (A321/B377–A338/B396); Critique of Practical Reason (Ak. V, 132–42). 7. Samantha Matherne, “The Inclusive Interpretation of Kant’s Aesthetic Ideas,” British Journal of Aesthetics 53, no. 1 (2013): 21–40. 8. Georg Bertram, Art as Human Practice: An Aesthetics, trans. Nathan Ross (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 9. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. L. W. Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 10. The somewhat anachronistic use of the term “romantic” in Hegel designates the whole of postclassical art, both Christian and secular art. This includes, but is not limited to, the art of romanticism, and is centered specifically around painting, literature, and (most importantly) poetry. 11. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Bände 13–15 of the Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). Quotations, with minor variations for clarity, refer to the standard translation of the Lectures on Aesthetics is by T. M. Knox: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); hereafter referred to as Aesthetics and abbreviated “LFA” and cited parenthetically in the text; in this case, LFA, 11. 12. From the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, these include, in chronological order: Karl Schnaase, Alois Riegl, and Erwin Panofsky. See Lionel Gossman’s Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 347–405. Gossman presents a convincing case that even the self-proclaimed Kantian art historian, Jacob Burckhardt, was profoundly influenced by Hegel’s thought. 13. Benedetto Croce, Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistic 2nd. ed., trans. Douglas Ainslie (London: Macmillan, 1970), 302–3.

5. Imagination and Interpretation Z 253

14.

15.

16. 17.

For other pessimistic views, see Erich Heller, The Artist’s Journey Into the Interior (New York: Vintage, 1968), 115; Israel Knox, The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer (New York: Humanities, 1958), 103. In the German-language tradition, see Hermann Glockner, “Die Ästhetik in Hegels System der Philosophie,” 438– 39; Rüdiger Bubner, “Über einige Bedingungen gegenwärtiger Ästhetik,” Neue Hefte für Philosophie 5 (1793): 679. See, for example: Curtis Carter, “A Re-Examination of the ‘Death of Art,’ ” in Art and Logic in Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. Warren Steinkraus and Kenneth Schmitz (New Jersey: Humanities, 1980), 83–102; Stephen Houlgate, Hegel and the Arts (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007); Robert Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” in The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 279– 306; William Desmond, Art and the Absolute (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986); Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Ayon Maharaj, The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor After Hegel, trans. James McFarland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). This is why Nicholas Wolterstorff is right to reject the teleological “grand narrative” of art, according to which art comes into its own by transcending any function extrinsic to itself and allowing for disinterested aesthetic engagement. But he’s wrong to attribute to Hegel the view that art retains no residual trace of its religious or cultural significance. Wolterstorff ’s dismissiveness of this point is quite striking. Taking an apparently literal reading of Hegel’s remarks on romantic art, he poses the rhetorical question: “Was Hegel not aware of the fact that Catholics in his day still bent the knee to images of the Virgin Mary?” Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 72. Richard Eldridge, “Hegel as a Philosopher of Modern Art,” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 2 (2010): 117. Chandran Kukathas, “Are There Any Cultural Rights,” Political Theory 20, no. 1 (1992): 110.

254 Y 5. Imagination and Interpretation 18. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 90. 19. Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of the Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan, 1995), 148. 20. Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 8. 21. Scholars dispute the authorship of this notoriously elusive text, of which only a fragment remains. Alternatively, Hölderlin is believed to be the real author of this essay. Otto Pöggeler presents a fairly convincing set of reasons to doubt that Hegel was in fact the author of this brief fragment of text, which includes the claim that the strong influence that Kant’s philosophy exerted on Hegel would have been sufficient to deter him from claiming that beauty could serve modernity by erecting a “mythology of reason.” See “Hegel, der Verfasser des ältesten Systemprogrammes des deutschen Idealismus,” in Christoph Jamme and Hans Schneider, eds., Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988). 22. Dalia Khamissy, “Syrian Women Displaced by War Make Tragedy of ‘Antigone’ Their Own,” NPR, December 13, 2014, https://www.npr.org /sections /parallels /2014 /12 /12 /370343232 /syrian-women-displaced-by -war-make-tragedy-of-antigone-their-own. 23. Michael Billington, “Antigone—Review,” Guardian, May 31, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com /stage/2012/may/31 /antigone-review. 24. K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Gutmann, Multiculturalism, 166–81. 25. Martin Shuster, New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 103. 26. W. E. B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Penguin, 1994), 104. 27. Alain Locke, for example, criticizes DuBois’s characterization of artas-propaganda on the grounds that propaganda is “one-sided and often pre-judging,” that it perpetuates “partisanship,” and, as such, is an obstacle to “free and purely artistic expression.” Locke’s worries about

5. Imagination and Interpretation Z 255 Black artists catering to “the exotic tastes of a pampered and decadent public” is certainly justified, arguably even more so today in light of the prevalence of institutional and curatorial practices that capitalize on the art of “the other.” “Art or Propaganda,” in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 312–13, first published in November 1928. But the criticism seems misdirected if DuBois’s distinction between the “positive propaganda” of white supremacists and the kind of propaganda that gives representation to the underrepresented holds up. In that case, whatever differences remain, both authors agree on one fundamental point: that artistic freedom for Black artists means independence from predominantly white tastes and interests.

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INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 35– 39, 113 aesthetic reflexivity, 25– 26, 43–45, 97, 134, 141–42; and recognition, 107– 24, 146; in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, 159– 64, 185–87, 195– 205, 209–11, 214, 217, 220 Ameriks, Karl, 241n21 Antigone, Sophocles’, 212–13 Appiah, Anthony, 214 Arendt, Hannah, 102, 112, 122– 23, 244n38 Beauvoir, Simone de, 143–44 Benhabib, Seyla, 71, 74, 101– 2 Benjamin, Walter, 230n9 Bernstein, Jay, 37– 38, 233n31, 245n46 Bertram, Georg, 183, 230n8 Bowie, Andrew, 174 Buck-Morss, Susan, 144 Bürger, Peter, 41 Cai, Guo-Qiang, 138 Carroll, Noël, 103, 240n12

Confederate monuments, 98– 99 Croce, Benedetto, 193 cultural authority, 24, 52, 68– 72, 74, 76– 77, 81–86 cultural claim, 65, 67– 68, 70– 71, 74, 76 cultural identity, 10, 12–14, 22, 24, 63– 67, 69, 74, 76, 82–85, 140, 187, 198, 214, 222 cultural politics. See cultural turn, in politics cultural turn, the, 10, 13–14, 18– 21, 43–44, 169, 220; in art, 26– 32, 42–43, 138,140, 214, 216, 218; in politics, 19– 26, 43, 50, 69, 214; recognition theory, 144, 96 Dahlgren, Peter, 230n8 Danish cartoon controversy, 78–84, 237n37 Danto, Arthur, 119– 22, 241n16, 243n35, 244n36 Desmond, William, 175 Don Quixote, 209

270 Y Index Do the Right Thing, 1–10, 17 Du Bois, W. E. B., 8, 221– 22; and Alain Locke, 255–56n27 Eagleton, Terry, 37, 40 Ebert, Roger, 9 Eldridge, Richard, 163, 196– 97 Fanon, Frantz, 143 Felski, Rita, 41 “Fight the Power,” 6 Foster, Hal, 28 Fraser, Nancy, 153, 249n24 Fukuyama, Francis, 28 Fusco, Coco, Guillermo GómezPeña and, 188 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 114 Gaiger, Jason, 124 Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie, 114 Geuss, Raymond, 156 Gibson, John, 103 Gitlin, Todd, 200 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 223– 27 Guyer, Paul, 245n49 Habermas, Jürgen, 50 Hall, Edith, 251n37 Hegel, G. W. F., 15–17, 33, 43–47; “end of art” thesis, 46, 175, 191– 211; Sittlichkeit (or “ethical life”), in Honneth, 155, 157; 212, 218–19 Henrich, Dieter, 241n18 Honneth, Axel, 147, 151–58, 248n22, 249n28, 249n30, 250n34

Horowitz, Gregg, Tom Huhn, and, 121, 132 Jameson, Frederick, 18, 230n10 Jardaneh, Zina, 30 Johnstone, Barbara, 105– 6 Kant, Immanuel: aesthetic ideas, 176–88, 210, 219– 20; indeterminacy, 176– 90; purposiveness, 124, 126– 33; sublime, the, 40 Kantian avant-gardism, 32–42; modern, 35–40; postmodern, 39–40, 44–47, 62, 115–16, 128– 29, 142, 174, 208, 210, 218 Kelly, Michael, 28, 230n8 Kojève, Alexander, 148–49 Kompridis, Nikolas, 147, 247n12 Kukathas, Chandran, 198 Kymlicka, Will, 20, 50, 70– 71, 101, 231n12, 240n7 Lægaard, Sune, 81–82 Lamar, Kendrick, 12 liberalism, 4, 8–10, 19– 21; reformed, 20– 26, 38, 47, 49–53, 69 Lyotard, Jean-François, 39–40, 98, 113 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 29 Matherne, Samantha, 178– 79 McCumber, John, 175 McGowan, Todd, 201 McKinnon, Catriona, 51 Menke, Christoph, 39

index Z 27 1 Mills, Charles, 7, 21– 22 Mitchell, W. J. T., 4 Modood, Tariq, 50, 57 multiculturalist theory, 16 narrative, 11, 13, 72; cultural, 98–112; view of self, 99–102 Nguyen, Thi, Matthew Strohl and, 90– 91 Parekh, Bhikhu, 60– 63 Pateman, Carol, 21 Pillow, Kirk, 174, 178, 234n36 Pippin, Robert, 246n7 politics of perception, the, 5–8, 14, 22– 23, 32, 43, 52, 63, 68, 85, 123, 138; and recognition, 146, 150, 154, 163, 203 Rancière, Jacques, 38– 39 Rawls, John, 19 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 109 Recognition theory, 16, 20, 25– 26, chapter 4 passim Rockhill, Gabriel, 147, 230n8, 247n11 Roelofs, Monique, 42, 234n40 Rorty, Richard, 199– 200 Rosen, Harold, 99 Rushdie, Salman, 65– 68, 74, 79–81; Satanic Verses, The, 23, 27, 49– 70, 72–84, 236n24, 237n41 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 114, 242n21

Schaper, Eva, 245n47 Schechtman, Marya, 100 Schiller, Friedrich, 119 Schuster, Martin, 105, 215, 230n8 Schutz, Dana, 87–89; Coco Fusco on, 87, 238n48; Open Casket, 84– 94, 238n50; Zadie Smith on, 239n54 Self-determination, 11, 13–14, 96– 97, 101– 2, 112, 123, 138, 140 Serrano, Andres, 28, 231– 32n20 Siep, Ludwig, 149, 248n15 Sikander, Shahzia, 138 Shonibare, Yinka, 188–89 Taylor, Charles, 20, 51, 142, 149–51, 231n13, 248n16 Taylor, Paul C., 30, 89 Torso of Apollo, 206– 7 Trilling, Lionel, 95– 96 Waldron, Jeremy, 51 Walker, Kara, 105, 139–40 Walzer, Michael, 51, 64 Wellershof, Dieter, 109 Westergaard, Kurt. See Danish cartoon controversy Whitney Biennial, 28 Wiley, Kehinde, 164– 68, 251n41 Wire, The, 105, 215 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 253n15 Young, James O., 90

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS LYDIA GOEHR AND GREGG M. HOROWITZ, EDITORS

Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds., The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, edited by Santiago Zabala, translated by Luca D’Isanto John T. Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions Richard Eldridge, Life, Literature, and Modernity Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett, translated by James Phillips György Lukács, Soul and Form, translated by Anna Bostock and edited by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis with an introduction by Judith Butler Joseph Margolis, The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism Herbert Molderings, Art as Experiment: Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, Creativity, and Convention Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media, translated by Carsten Strathausen

Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism Elaine P. Miller, Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of Radical Contemporaneity John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations Hermann Kappelhoff, The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism Cecilia Sjöholm, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things Owen Hulatt, Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth: Texture and Performance James A. Steintrager, The Autonomy of Pleasure: Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution Paolo D’Angelo, Sprezzatura: Concealing the Effort of Art from Aristotle to Duchamp Fred Evans, Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics Maurizio Lazzarato, Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism, translated by Jay Hetrick Monique Roelofs, Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and the World Barbara Carnevali, Social Appearances: A Philosophy of Display and Prestige