The Promise of Common Sense
Monique Roelofs, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic
Bloomsbury, 288pp, £65.00, ISBN 9781472522245
reviewed by Chris Law
The premise of Monique Roelofs’ The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic is that notions of the promise, bound up with ideas of relationality and address, are central to the functioning and failures of the aesthetic. Roelofs proposes that ‘the aesthetic’ is enjoying a renaissance, following a period of disdain and critique. Contemporary invocations of ‘the aesthetic’, Roelofs tells us, span ‘academic disciplines, bodily regimes, commemorative projects, archival collections, methods of historical inquiry, transportation systems, urban renewal tactics, and practices surrounding the production, preparation, and eating of food’. It probably goes without saying that the academy is more than a pawn in such a list. As the precise locus of the very transformations the aesthetic has undergone over a number of decades, the intellectual context in which Roelofs makes her intervention inevitably accords more significance to usage of ‘the aesthetic’ than will any other cultural environment. Whilst there is little doubt that, since the 1960s, art has been at the vanguard of transformations in the meaning and currency of the aesthetic, it ought to be remembered that, during this period, art education was (and continues to be) inseparable from its production. Conceptual and postconceptual art, for example, has been defined from the outset by its (mainly negative) relation to philosophical aesthetics in a way that the emerging disciplines and cultural practices enumerated by Roelofs have not. This is simply to say that, between disciplines, and between the academy and its outside, employments of ‘the aesthetic’ can vary in meaning and consequence.
In a book that devotes whole chapters to phenomena as incongruous as a daily newspaper column, a reality TV show and a journalistic concord between two veteran art theorists, contextual differentiation between the term’s usages would seem all the more necessary, particularly if the book attempts to frame an argument about the aesthetic itself. One hope I had for this book, with its own promise of weaving cultural studies with aesthetics, was that it could suggest how the specificity of the aesthetic’s cultural promise might provide a corrective to the surrogate academic promise ‘the aesthetic’ offers to anyone hoping to lend concrete and material credence to ideas that seem too abstract in their solitude. Roelofs herself suggests that an intellectual and conceptual recalibration of discourse on the aesthetic is necessary, and that a focus on the triad of promise, address and relationality is instructive in attempting to harness — if not dim — the cacophony of voices proclaiming adherence to the idea.
In this endeavour, the author is aware that she inhabits a congested territory. Oddly, however, the book sets aside just two pages by way of an introductory chapter. Whilst a number of texts and traditions — aesthetic, anti-aesthetic and reconciliatory — are addressed in endnotes, this brief gloss of an introduction seems inconsistent with Roelofs’ aim of contending with ‘major philosophical gaps in the notion of the aesthetic’. A book on aesthetics today is a book on the critique of aesthetics, and the possibility and practices of reconciliation. Granted, Roelofs promises her reader a forthcoming intervention on the entwinement of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic formations, yet an articulation of such a complex would be welcome here, given the originality of Roelofs’ thesis.
The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic posits that, when we pay attention to aspects of experience that might be regarded as aesthetic, we recognise patterns of address between and among entities, which may be subjects or objects. Central to these patterns of address is the specific act of promising, which also — inevitably — harbours threat. Roelofs shows us throughout the book how philosophers and theorists have constructed ideas of nation, race, sexuality and gender through such promises and threats, which — each time anew — constitute a specific relationality between people and things. Such matrices can be complicated. Whilst, according to Roelofs, Hume and Kant offer ‘the promise of a white culture that breaks free from blackness’, Frantz Fanon is accused of too hastily propounding a dialectical scepticism that ignores the possibilities for everyday ruptures to the binary categories driving such a dialectic. From this arise Roelofs’ more affirmative and pragmatic engagements with theorists like Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde and Paule Marshall.
As one of the trinity of concepts guiding Roelofs’ project, relationality determines the societal, economic and ecological realm in which aesthetic promises and threats can take effect, as well as the communal constellations that might actually take place. The black feminist theorists mentioned above are read as critics whose attentions to everyday experience play with the limits of what Roelofs terms ‘aesthetic relationality’. In treating the output of these theorists so discretely, however, there are two points on which Roelofs fails to consider how their work might chime with her wider thesis. On the one hand, although detailed readings of certain contemporary artworks form a considerable part of the book, there is no sustained engagement with the critical and reflective frameworks that have come to the fore in contemporary art theory. The mention of relational aesthetics towards the very end of the book seems nominal at best, and its conceptual lines never truly cross those of critical race theory.
On the other hand, the apotheosis of a ‘quotidian aesthetics of race’ ultimately negates black feminist engagements with philosophical aesthetics: Baumgarten’s appearance is as fleeting as Bourriaud’s. Since Roelofs’ discussion focuses discursively on the racism of ‘the Enlightenment’, Kant and Hume are bundled together for the majority of the text. This engenders a dissonant reading experience, structured by the expectation of an engagement with Kant’s philosophy that never quite arrives. At no point, anyway, are the central arguments of the Critique of Judgment made clear, and the famous promise of philosophical aesthetics, that of a sensus communis, goes unheeded. In simple terms, then, and not without knowing it, Roelofs obscures the historical ‘common sense’ whereby the propagation of taste was to the benefit of white, rich males, and the critical idea of a sense or capacity for sensing that is shared by all. The book, notably, is awash with Rancièrian terminology, but the author tackles the philosopher in one endnote that accuses Rancière of eliding the intersectional nature of historically-determined cultural relations. Indeed, Roelofs’ consolidates her catalogue of the racist moments of Kant’s oeuvre (examples cited span the pre- and post-critical writings, as well as the Critique of Judgement) with reference to Bourdieu and others, whose ‘exposure’ of the falsely universalising idea of an aesthetic sensus communis Rancière has careered against for decades.
There is an irony in this book, relating to Roelofs’ suggestion that Fanon’s writing, by virtue of its own rhetorical fluidity, is somehow in aesthetic excess of the racial aesthetic categories that he considers central to the historical, dialectical model governing the transforming consciousness of subjugated peoples. In contrast to a writing that exudes such leakages, Roelofs’ own prose is — though occasionally illuminating and generous — at points so congested, so laden with the task of presenting and connecting its concepts that its very attempt to clarify the multiplicity of forms of intersectional social being falls short. There is some poetry in the book, yet little indication of how the texts to which Roelofs turns (those of Pablo Neruda and Wisława Szymborska, both Nobel Prize winners) might hold a specifically poetic promise. That language can seamlessly convey ideas is taken as read in the author’s own prose, and guides her readings of poetry.
Indeed, at a more general level, Roelofs does not depart from the idea that the ‘readability’ of a poem or cultural text is integral to the contemporary import of the aesthetic. Art is tasked with embodying an interpretability relating to its promises, the actualisations of which can be twisted in any number of directions. Promises can become threats; pleasures, pains. Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno are summoned in the final chapter to provide theorisations for the perpetual incompleteness of promissory operations and the book is invested in the promises that promises make, including the promise of their betrayal. It is invested, in other words, in the social and the historical. As much as artistic form might crystallise social form, however, a book that never mentions the economic exigencies of capitalism, particularly in its current neoliberal configuration, will inevitably struggle to address how the historical transitoriness of art relates to the relationality of social being. A more political book (so goes the lesson of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory) demands a recognition of the unreadable, the uninterpretable, that whose opacity is recalcitrant to its incorporation into a relational framework.
The book needs more ignorance, in other words. Suitably, it is only in the fifth chapter — on the subject of ignorance — that the reader encounters the specificity of the aesthetic in its relation to other kinds of judgment and other kinds of knowledge. This chapter hastily revives John Dewey’s ‘integrationist’ reading of Friedrich Schiller’s letters on Aesthetic Education, into which Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray are strangely drawn. Here, as throughout the book, Roelofs’ argument might benefit from a narrower, if less original, aim: to lay out what a critical, as opposed to empirical, aesthetics can mean at the basest level, to consider the role of the promise in this realm of thinking, and to think about how this stands in relation to sexual difference and the politics of race.
Perhaps this need for regurgitation is symptomatic of any writing on the aesthetic, so closely is thought bound with its presentation in this domain. What it all comes down to, it seems, is the question of philosophy’s role in and out of the aesthetic. Is the aesthetic a critique of philosophy from the outside, to which the vacillating, historically contingent nature of language (epitomised in the promise) can be put to use? Or is it philosophy’s self-critical, self-destructive inside, by which the dumb, repetitive, incommensurable nature of poetic language compels us to think of equality only alongside difference? This question determines a book’s success within academia, its efficacy outside it.
In a book that devotes whole chapters to phenomena as incongruous as a daily newspaper column, a reality TV show and a journalistic concord between two veteran art theorists, contextual differentiation between the term’s usages would seem all the more necessary, particularly if the book attempts to frame an argument about the aesthetic itself. One hope I had for this book, with its own promise of weaving cultural studies with aesthetics, was that it could suggest how the specificity of the aesthetic’s cultural promise might provide a corrective to the surrogate academic promise ‘the aesthetic’ offers to anyone hoping to lend concrete and material credence to ideas that seem too abstract in their solitude. Roelofs herself suggests that an intellectual and conceptual recalibration of discourse on the aesthetic is necessary, and that a focus on the triad of promise, address and relationality is instructive in attempting to harness — if not dim — the cacophony of voices proclaiming adherence to the idea.
In this endeavour, the author is aware that she inhabits a congested territory. Oddly, however, the book sets aside just two pages by way of an introductory chapter. Whilst a number of texts and traditions — aesthetic, anti-aesthetic and reconciliatory — are addressed in endnotes, this brief gloss of an introduction seems inconsistent with Roelofs’ aim of contending with ‘major philosophical gaps in the notion of the aesthetic’. A book on aesthetics today is a book on the critique of aesthetics, and the possibility and practices of reconciliation. Granted, Roelofs promises her reader a forthcoming intervention on the entwinement of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic formations, yet an articulation of such a complex would be welcome here, given the originality of Roelofs’ thesis.
The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic posits that, when we pay attention to aspects of experience that might be regarded as aesthetic, we recognise patterns of address between and among entities, which may be subjects or objects. Central to these patterns of address is the specific act of promising, which also — inevitably — harbours threat. Roelofs shows us throughout the book how philosophers and theorists have constructed ideas of nation, race, sexuality and gender through such promises and threats, which — each time anew — constitute a specific relationality between people and things. Such matrices can be complicated. Whilst, according to Roelofs, Hume and Kant offer ‘the promise of a white culture that breaks free from blackness’, Frantz Fanon is accused of too hastily propounding a dialectical scepticism that ignores the possibilities for everyday ruptures to the binary categories driving such a dialectic. From this arise Roelofs’ more affirmative and pragmatic engagements with theorists like Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde and Paule Marshall.
As one of the trinity of concepts guiding Roelofs’ project, relationality determines the societal, economic and ecological realm in which aesthetic promises and threats can take effect, as well as the communal constellations that might actually take place. The black feminist theorists mentioned above are read as critics whose attentions to everyday experience play with the limits of what Roelofs terms ‘aesthetic relationality’. In treating the output of these theorists so discretely, however, there are two points on which Roelofs fails to consider how their work might chime with her wider thesis. On the one hand, although detailed readings of certain contemporary artworks form a considerable part of the book, there is no sustained engagement with the critical and reflective frameworks that have come to the fore in contemporary art theory. The mention of relational aesthetics towards the very end of the book seems nominal at best, and its conceptual lines never truly cross those of critical race theory.
On the other hand, the apotheosis of a ‘quotidian aesthetics of race’ ultimately negates black feminist engagements with philosophical aesthetics: Baumgarten’s appearance is as fleeting as Bourriaud’s. Since Roelofs’ discussion focuses discursively on the racism of ‘the Enlightenment’, Kant and Hume are bundled together for the majority of the text. This engenders a dissonant reading experience, structured by the expectation of an engagement with Kant’s philosophy that never quite arrives. At no point, anyway, are the central arguments of the Critique of Judgment made clear, and the famous promise of philosophical aesthetics, that of a sensus communis, goes unheeded. In simple terms, then, and not without knowing it, Roelofs obscures the historical ‘common sense’ whereby the propagation of taste was to the benefit of white, rich males, and the critical idea of a sense or capacity for sensing that is shared by all. The book, notably, is awash with Rancièrian terminology, but the author tackles the philosopher in one endnote that accuses Rancière of eliding the intersectional nature of historically-determined cultural relations. Indeed, Roelofs’ consolidates her catalogue of the racist moments of Kant’s oeuvre (examples cited span the pre- and post-critical writings, as well as the Critique of Judgement) with reference to Bourdieu and others, whose ‘exposure’ of the falsely universalising idea of an aesthetic sensus communis Rancière has careered against for decades.
There is an irony in this book, relating to Roelofs’ suggestion that Fanon’s writing, by virtue of its own rhetorical fluidity, is somehow in aesthetic excess of the racial aesthetic categories that he considers central to the historical, dialectical model governing the transforming consciousness of subjugated peoples. In contrast to a writing that exudes such leakages, Roelofs’ own prose is — though occasionally illuminating and generous — at points so congested, so laden with the task of presenting and connecting its concepts that its very attempt to clarify the multiplicity of forms of intersectional social being falls short. There is some poetry in the book, yet little indication of how the texts to which Roelofs turns (those of Pablo Neruda and Wisława Szymborska, both Nobel Prize winners) might hold a specifically poetic promise. That language can seamlessly convey ideas is taken as read in the author’s own prose, and guides her readings of poetry.
Indeed, at a more general level, Roelofs does not depart from the idea that the ‘readability’ of a poem or cultural text is integral to the contemporary import of the aesthetic. Art is tasked with embodying an interpretability relating to its promises, the actualisations of which can be twisted in any number of directions. Promises can become threats; pleasures, pains. Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno are summoned in the final chapter to provide theorisations for the perpetual incompleteness of promissory operations and the book is invested in the promises that promises make, including the promise of their betrayal. It is invested, in other words, in the social and the historical. As much as artistic form might crystallise social form, however, a book that never mentions the economic exigencies of capitalism, particularly in its current neoliberal configuration, will inevitably struggle to address how the historical transitoriness of art relates to the relationality of social being. A more political book (so goes the lesson of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory) demands a recognition of the unreadable, the uninterpretable, that whose opacity is recalcitrant to its incorporation into a relational framework.
The book needs more ignorance, in other words. Suitably, it is only in the fifth chapter — on the subject of ignorance — that the reader encounters the specificity of the aesthetic in its relation to other kinds of judgment and other kinds of knowledge. This chapter hastily revives John Dewey’s ‘integrationist’ reading of Friedrich Schiller’s letters on Aesthetic Education, into which Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray are strangely drawn. Here, as throughout the book, Roelofs’ argument might benefit from a narrower, if less original, aim: to lay out what a critical, as opposed to empirical, aesthetics can mean at the basest level, to consider the role of the promise in this realm of thinking, and to think about how this stands in relation to sexual difference and the politics of race.
Perhaps this need for regurgitation is symptomatic of any writing on the aesthetic, so closely is thought bound with its presentation in this domain. What it all comes down to, it seems, is the question of philosophy’s role in and out of the aesthetic. Is the aesthetic a critique of philosophy from the outside, to which the vacillating, historically contingent nature of language (epitomised in the promise) can be put to use? Or is it philosophy’s self-critical, self-destructive inside, by which the dumb, repetitive, incommensurable nature of poetic language compels us to think of equality only alongside difference? This question determines a book’s success within academia, its efficacy outside it.