Rancière's claim is expanded upon in a book of academic essays entitled Aesthetic Revolutions. Editor Ales Erjavec claims that the arts are moved by tensions between representation and transformation and between an avant-garde of "pure art" and one that is "politicized"in seeking "transformation both of life itself and of the community." This turns a couple of Rancière's concepts into a simplification that misses the subtleties of the history and tensions proposed in his co-ordinated works. Erjavec calls the transformative force the "aesthetic avant-garde, putting the focus of aisthesis on the shifts art may bring to the feeling -perception of life and community. He quotes Rancière on this being a "redistribution of the sensible" (3). All well and good, but one element is missing from these revolutions. We must measure their success in terms of revolt, in and out of the art world; their failure may be in not creating an on-going space for critical thinking. They collapse life and community into the aesthetic.
Erjavec uses Rancière's sense of representational and aesthetic regimes in a way that twists their meaning out of place by bringing them to bear on a difference within the aesthetic regime. Erjavec's use of the long-standing term"aesthetic revolution" is also bent a bit to fit his needs. He makes claims for a general cultural effect of art, and even "cultural revolution," stemming from these so-called "revolutions" that shape "new timelines in the history of art" (5). This effect is seen mostly in the way we frame things and tell their story. However, people in the streets, the offices, and the neighborhoods generally see that as an academic by-way.
How do we measure the cultural effect of art works if not by looking carefully at the intersections of change, the State, and the culture at large? Erjavec included a provocative article by Professor Tyrus Miller of UC Santa Cruz that provides us with an occasion for investigating this idea using the fairly familiar sense we have of The Sixties. Miller's piece is called "Aesthetic Revolution in the United States during the 1960s."
It is easy to say that The Sixties changed our culture indelibly; it is less easy to show it (and how it may have happened) beyond question.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Aesthetic Revolutions: Gathering at the Greimasian Square
Noesis helps create the double-doubled logical framework called a Greimasian Square, where no one element dominates but each helps give the others definition. The most famous examples of this thinking include Molière's joking about the definitions of poetry and prose in The Bourgeois Gentleman. There poetry is what it is by also being what prose is not and vice versa. One side of that square shows each of those alliances (+) while each corner is linked in opposition to the the pair on the other side:
poetry<---------------->prose
+ +
+ +
+ +
not-prose<----------->not-poetry
When I use poetry, I am using it as "not-prose" and also in opposition to "prose" and "not-poetry." The Gentleman's understanding brings out the humor in such logical alliances and differences.
With the four "-esises" as elements of art, we have a more complex set; however, it works on the same principles and even has potential for humor in it that can be used as a logical tool.
making / poiesis<---------->aesthesis / expressing
+ +
(OBJECT) + + (MIND)
+ +
imitating / mimesis<------>noesis / critiquing
On the one side, we have the old alliance of poiesis and mimesis in what Rancière calls the "representative regime." These are the elements of an objective art that presents a world-view of myths and morés. On the other side are the elements of the subjective: aesthesis as the expression of feeling perception, and noesis as the critical thinking of the subject. On the other two sides, there are also linkages within the oppositions: poiesis and aesthesis are the artist's inner elements, chosen form and chosen expression; mimesis and noesis complementarily refer outwardly to the artist's world, imitating or critiquing its ways. Diagonally, we also have linking oppositions: poiesis and noesis as the bonded pair of making and critiquing, and aestheis and mimesis bonded as the extremes of self-expression and world-imitation where they temper each other.
We recognize this last bonded opposition as the dialectic that keeps artists in "the aesthetic regime" from merely returning to the representative or merely fully expressing their own feeling perception. We can recognize in the other bond the call to use shaping or form in conjunction with critical thinking (and humor, as in Molière, to keep the art from settling in its shapes and to keep it reaching beyond mere critique that might be closed down into idées reçues only ever temporarily new. It is the introduction of full focus on this interplay between elements in the form and content of an artwork that allows that work to both deliver on its promise of engagement and to keep its autonomously creative distance by using those doubled tensions.
In Rancière's simple abstract history, we see how societies have created representations of their "known" world by shaping works (poiesis) in conformation to mimesis of one sort or another. The "art" there is in the balance between form and imitation. Aesthetic art arose from that practice through the artist's position in the tension between those two basic elements. It added a third that created a more dynamic interplay between the experience of feeling perception brought to the work by the artist and how the artist used poiesis and mimesis to deliver it. For the audience also, an experience of feeling perception came to be the heart of the work. There would be, in that feeling perception, some critique of the standards of poiesis and mimesis; the field of aesthetics certainly included that kind of education through the work and its reception. However, this element was doomed to be enfolded in feeling-perception and generally identified with an individual or small group. This "matter of taste" then is played right back into the bourgeois world of opinion and other doxa. In that world, heterodoxy only proves orthodoxy's dominance. Aesthetics are anyone's game there, orthodox or not. Everywhere that a seemingly new aesthetics or poetics might arise, it would threaten to change the old and then, at best, the new would shift into being the new old or, as usual, the new would become "alternative" and the old would still sell from another bin in the aesthetical shop. Rancière's claims on behalf of an aesthtics that hovers or oscillates between autonomy and engagement leaves us stuck in this place.
poetry<---------------->prose
+ +
+ +
+ +
not-prose<----------->not-poetry
When I use poetry, I am using it as "not-prose" and also in opposition to "prose" and "not-poetry." The Gentleman's understanding brings out the humor in such logical alliances and differences.
With the four "-esises" as elements of art, we have a more complex set; however, it works on the same principles and even has potential for humor in it that can be used as a logical tool.
making / poiesis<---------->aesthesis / expressing
+ +
(OBJECT) + + (MIND)
+ +
imitating / mimesis<------>noesis / critiquing
On the one side, we have the old alliance of poiesis and mimesis in what Rancière calls the "representative regime." These are the elements of an objective art that presents a world-view of myths and morés. On the other side are the elements of the subjective: aesthesis as the expression of feeling perception, and noesis as the critical thinking of the subject. On the other two sides, there are also linkages within the oppositions: poiesis and aesthesis are the artist's inner elements, chosen form and chosen expression; mimesis and noesis complementarily refer outwardly to the artist's world, imitating or critiquing its ways. Diagonally, we also have linking oppositions: poiesis and noesis as the bonded pair of making and critiquing, and aestheis and mimesis bonded as the extremes of self-expression and world-imitation where they temper each other.
We recognize this last bonded opposition as the dialectic that keeps artists in "the aesthetic regime" from merely returning to the representative or merely fully expressing their own feeling perception. We can recognize in the other bond the call to use shaping or form in conjunction with critical thinking (and humor, as in Molière, to keep the art from settling in its shapes and to keep it reaching beyond mere critique that might be closed down into idées reçues only ever temporarily new. It is the introduction of full focus on this interplay between elements in the form and content of an artwork that allows that work to both deliver on its promise of engagement and to keep its autonomously creative distance by using those doubled tensions.
In Rancière's simple abstract history, we see how societies have created representations of their "known" world by shaping works (poiesis) in conformation to mimesis of one sort or another. The "art" there is in the balance between form and imitation. Aesthetic art arose from that practice through the artist's position in the tension between those two basic elements. It added a third that created a more dynamic interplay between the experience of feeling perception brought to the work by the artist and how the artist used poiesis and mimesis to deliver it. For the audience also, an experience of feeling perception came to be the heart of the work. There would be, in that feeling perception, some critique of the standards of poiesis and mimesis; the field of aesthetics certainly included that kind of education through the work and its reception. However, this element was doomed to be enfolded in feeling-perception and generally identified with an individual or small group. This "matter of taste" then is played right back into the bourgeois world of opinion and other doxa. In that world, heterodoxy only proves orthodoxy's dominance. Aesthetics are anyone's game there, orthodox or not. Everywhere that a seemingly new aesthetics or poetics might arise, it would threaten to change the old and then, at best, the new would shift into being the new old or, as usual, the new would become "alternative" and the old would still sell from another bin in the aesthetical shop. Rancière's claims on behalf of an aesthtics that hovers or oscillates between autonomy and engagement leaves us stuck in this place.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Why Rancière and Beyond
Two threads twist through Jacques Rancière's work so far: a Western political history of public consensus and dissensus with "perception management" and "policing policy" at its heart; and a history of Euro-American aesthetics that looks back to see a pre-history centered in public ethics that unfolds into the regime of classic representative arts which then unfolds further into our modern "aesthetic regime." Our current place in these histories is a kind of concurrence, visible in Rancière's theory and in the major modes and concerns of contemporary life and art. It is this hinge-point of politics and art that Rancière helps to focus for us; it also helps us see through his claims and beyond.
As we puzzle over how to move forward politically and over the function or place of the aesthetic in doing so, we meet a world we are helping to build through our aesthetic sense. This conundrum has its basis in the way that political frameworks employ a vision that Rancière has rightly named as an aesthetic. He stays right there and urges the continued application of artistic visions as agents of revelation and change. However, if we look closely enough, we can see where his framework has begun to unfold into a larger and stronger one right here at the crossroads of those political and aesthetic histories that he has described. We have already begun to create the next regime even while Rancière is defending his theory of a world where dissensus enters through a feeling perception. His argument for this power of the aesthetic is based on showing how the aesthetic regime was built as a freeing framework within the representative regime. That libertatory quality focuses on feeling perception shared through art works and other visions. The strength of this is certainly its democratic approach to individual visions, but we have by now seen that "democracy" can be a word for policing and self-policing both in terms of "perception management" and through public policy. Rancière's vision can allow us to see the next shift already happening among us in defense against policy and policing.
In Aesthetics and its Discontents (2009) / Malaise dans l'esthetique (2004), he made an effort to define our aesthetic history simply in terms of three classical Greek words: poeisis, mimesis, and aesthesis (7). The shaping of a work (poiesis) to reflect elements of a known world (mimesis) was broken open through the inclusion of feeling perception and its transfer through artistic vision (aesthesis). "Aesthetics is not a discipline," he says, but "a specific regime for the identification of art" that he calls "a new historicity" that constitutes an "undifferentiated public to replace the designated addressees of representative works" (i.e. works in the style of the old representative regime) (8-9). This "public" is also the "public" of "public policy." And within this framework a new focus is placed on individual response within that undifferentiated mass. Art is now defined "less according to criteria of 'ways of doing,' and more in terms of 'ways of sensible being'" as it forms a fresh "challenge to thought" (10-11). We now would have a "paradoxical sensorium that henceforth made it possible to define the things of art" through "the opposition between pure voluntary activity and pure passivity" (12). This complex paradox is further complicated by the way "that a 'human' nature is always simultaneously a 'social' nature" and how the new regime suspended the old "rules by which human nature is accorded with social nature" (i.e. social class) (13-14).
These tensions between the individual and the mass, the activities of art-making and consuming, and the concepts of human nature and social class, all are developed in the aesthetic regime to become parts of its focus. As a new "distribution of the sensible," the aesthetic regime allows us to see and "work with" what we "work in" as a world; i.e. it allows critical stances. Art "is political ... because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space" (23). What's at "stake here does not only concern those objects that fall within the sphere of art, but also the ways in which, today, our world is given to perceiving itself and in which the powers that be assert their legitimacy" (15). This comes through the tension between, on the one hand, the autonomies of the arts and individuals and, on the other, the sense of the common(s) through which these autonomies are shaped. (Harney and Moten's "undercommons" concept has a place in the critique being made here, but just staying within Rancière's framework can unfold in that direction.) The paradox of the aesthetic regime lies in its role "in constituting forms of common life" while reserving an autonomy for its own forms, like "the silent space of the museum in which the solitude and the passivity of passers-by encounters the solitude and passivity of artworks" (26). Aesthetics promotes a new "sensorium" (29) in which the ethical and representative aspects of art's work are subsumed under the suspension of work in that relatively idle moment of appreciation (30-31). Rancière claims this as a "suspension of the supremacy of form over matter and of activity over passivity" in "a revolution of sensible existence itself and no longer only of the forms of State" (32). It changes the state of being instead.
There are two measures to be taken here if we would like to see our state of being and that ways that the State itself finds part of its being in art: one would view this claim up against Terry Eagleton's rather larger claims about The Ideology of the Aesthetic and its way of subsuming such suspensions into its mechanisms of policing and policy, and the other would look at some prominent current artistic claims and their place in assisting the work of realpolitik in our time. First, though, a sharper look at Rancière's concepts is necessary as a groundwork. He has placed his theory in a rather tentative position among those already out there.
To make "the autonomy of a form of sensory experience" into "the germ of a new humanity, of a new form of individual and collective life" (32) looks a lot like a reversion to Romanticism and a hovering at a certain point in political and aesthetic history. Rancière claims it instead as a progressive re-reading of Modernism's stalemate by demonstrating "no conflict between purity and politicization" in this aesthetic "metapolitics" (33). It is at this point in his argument, though, that he reveals the fundamental Romantic paradox in the aesthetic regime: the art work is whole in itself but fleeting in its public moment (34). This reveals "a contradiction that is originary and unceasingly at work" in the aesthetic regime. The "promise of emancipation" is suspended as well, at the edge of "the elimination of art as a separate reality, its transformation into a form of life" (36). Rancière wants to leave us hanging between the contraries of "a type of art that makes politics by eliminating itself as art and a type of art that is political on the proviso that it retains its purity, avoiding all forms of political intervention" (40). He puts this tension under the name of "Adorno's aesthetics," describing an effort to see art as resisting " a two-fold threat: from its transformation into a metapolitical act and from its radical separation from the forms of aestheticized commodities and of the administered world" (40). This makes for an art that is looking two ways at once in order to be resistant. For Rancière, "the metapolitics of the resistant form tends to oscillate between two positions." One is "the struggle to preserve the material difference of art from all the worldly affairs that compromise it." The other is "the ethical task of bearing witness," which he sees as "cancelling out ... both art and politics" (43).
For Rancière, the trick is to avoid establishing a "sublime" position in the sense of "a force that exceeds" the heart of the art's effort (19) or stands as "an irreducible gap between the idea and the sensible" (20) or a force meant to "keep the two equally at a distance in "a new modesty" about art's capacity to transform the world" and "its claims about the singularity of its obects" (21). The malaise in our aesthetic sense may be more fundamental than just keeping the concept of the sublime at bay. For Rancière himself, there is a fundamental tension in the aesthetic regime--its regimen of attempting "to construct new forms of life in common" (44) through "a way of redisposing the objects and images that comprise the common world as it is already given" (21), while at the same time offering "the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form of life. This is done by holding aesthetic experience of "art" at a distance from that of any other aistheton. This regimen "threatens the aesthetic regime itself," he admits, even as he claims that it is also "what makes it function" (44). This tension, including that "threat" or risk, helps keep our aesthetic sensibilities moving between promise and compromise. This keeps art both somewhat effective and somewhat sublime.
That combination has given us art as we have it, under what Rancière calls "the aesthetic regime" as he provides a general abstract history of its development. How we got to this regimen of relying on an oscillating aesthetic is figured differently by Terry Eagleton. Eagleton's much more detailed exposition of an ideology built with and into the aesthetic approach is very fully historical. It begins with a historically based discussion of social construction at work in the mutual interplay between the mindsets of art and politics. In it, we see the establishment and development of The Aesthetic as a kind of institution like The Bank, The Stock Exchange, or Parliament (Eagleton 31). The bourgeois revolution that opened the space for all of these institutions created "the public sphere" where a certain kind of "social harmony registers itself on our senses, imprints itself on our sensibilities" (36-37). Eagleton's chapter on this period in Europe, the late 17th into the early 18th century, is called "The Law of the Heart." It explains how bourgeois democracy used this new vision to implant a new social bond. Eagleton explains how "the aesthetic" means "introjection of abstract resason by the life of the senses" (42). Eagleton sharply insists that "in the aesthetic it is as though it is we who freely fashion the laws to which we subject ourselves" (43). This established the ideal that has become reactionary in our time (60). It works both ways, for us and against us, even without coercions from anywhere except our "sympathies." We police ourselves by it.
Eagleton summarizes a very important dialectical concept for us:
The very emergence of the aesthetic marks in this sense a certain crisis of traditional reason, and a potentially liberating or utopian trend of thought. By the end of the eighteenth century, such appeals to feeling will have become identified as dangerously radical. There is in the aesthetic an ideal of compassionate community, of altruism and natural affection, which along with a faith in the self-delighting individual represents an affront to ruling class rationalism. On the other hand, it might be claimed that such a movement comes eventually to represent a devastating loss for the political left. (60)
This loss is written into the structure of a thought that compromises its every promise always already from the start. Karl Marx, in both Eagleton's book and Rancière's book on art's discontents, is seen as a sort of political aesthetician who is trying to help us move into position to break the deadlock of the bourgeois hold on our aesthetics. Rancière sums up Marx's claim for us as the possibility of "aesthetic man: namely, productive man, the one who at once produces the objects and the social relations in which they are produced" (38) in a society that can finally "render ideas sensible" (37). Eagleton goes strangely further, taking Marx all the way back before his time to be a new kind of Shaftesbury, through whom the old emerging bourgeois aesthetic might speak again with some sense of revolution. He sums up that stance from Marx/Shaftesbury as saying: "To live well is to live in the free, many-sided realization of one's capacities, in reciprocal interaction with the similar self-expression of others" (226). This is the bourgeois dream, and it has had a troubling history. "We have seen," Eagleton reminds us, "some of the difficulties of this doctrine; but it remains the single most creative aspect of the aesthetic tradition" (226). In the common life, Marx would have us find "that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom" as he expressed it in Das Kapital. Eagleton uses this quote to turn back toward art: "If art matters, it is as a type of that which has its end entirely in itself, and this is most politically charged in its autonomy" (226).
This sounds very much like Rancière's two extreme for the aesthetic dialectic: autonomous art's forms and art's transformation into common life. Eagleton echoes Rancière's emphasis on the risks of impossibility at either extreme as he adds a caution to his assessment of Marx's aesthetic framework. Eagleton's chapter on "The Marxist Sublime" stops to remind us that Marx did not dive into the full aestheticization that would claim full autonomy or instant transformation. His analysis of "what conditions are necessary" to open the possibility of such happiness requires first the work of thought.
Eagleton wraps it up for us by focusing on "contradictions" and unlocking the closed loop between the impossibilities:
That final aestheticization of human existence which we call communism cannot be prematurely anticipated by a reason which surrenders itself wholly to the ludic and poetic, to image and intuition. Instead, a rigorously analytical rationality is needed, to help unlock the contradictions which prevent us from attaining the condition in which instrumentalism may lose its unwelcome dominance. It may well be that in some future social order theory, instrumental thought, calculative reason will no longer play a central role in human life, but will have been transformed out of recognition. To prefigure such an order now, by (for example) the deconstruction of theory and poetry, may thus be a valuable proleptic gesture. But if an aesthetic experience is to be achieved for all, thought in general must not be prematurely aestheticized. (227)
The process requires critical thinking. This is where the aesthetic regime starts to unfold into something at least slightly "post-aesthetic." It still incorporates the aesthetic; it does not leave behind that double-bind of impossibilities. However, there was "always already" an urge toward critical thinking there in the aesthetic stance. Focus on that element may only seem to make this simply obvious; it could possibly just leave us standing with Rancière, claiming that aesthetics still has this area covered. The difference, though, could come right where Marx suggested it would: in the recognition of a fresh critical element that would "unlock the contradictions which prevent us from attaining the condition in which instrumentalism may lose its unwelcome dominance." Noesis, taken with aestheis, poesis, and mimesis, is the fourth corner that sets up the dialectical tensions between the instrumentalities in each element. As part of a Greimasian Square, it can be looked upon as working with each of the others in cooperations and negations that both emphasize and undercut those instrumentalities. Nothing is left simply doing what it's supposed to; each effort has a delightful duplicity.
As we puzzle over how to move forward politically and over the function or place of the aesthetic in doing so, we meet a world we are helping to build through our aesthetic sense. This conundrum has its basis in the way that political frameworks employ a vision that Rancière has rightly named as an aesthetic. He stays right there and urges the continued application of artistic visions as agents of revelation and change. However, if we look closely enough, we can see where his framework has begun to unfold into a larger and stronger one right here at the crossroads of those political and aesthetic histories that he has described. We have already begun to create the next regime even while Rancière is defending his theory of a world where dissensus enters through a feeling perception. His argument for this power of the aesthetic is based on showing how the aesthetic regime was built as a freeing framework within the representative regime. That libertatory quality focuses on feeling perception shared through art works and other visions. The strength of this is certainly its democratic approach to individual visions, but we have by now seen that "democracy" can be a word for policing and self-policing both in terms of "perception management" and through public policy. Rancière's vision can allow us to see the next shift already happening among us in defense against policy and policing.
In Aesthetics and its Discontents (2009) / Malaise dans l'esthetique (2004), he made an effort to define our aesthetic history simply in terms of three classical Greek words: poeisis, mimesis, and aesthesis (7). The shaping of a work (poiesis) to reflect elements of a known world (mimesis) was broken open through the inclusion of feeling perception and its transfer through artistic vision (aesthesis). "Aesthetics is not a discipline," he says, but "a specific regime for the identification of art" that he calls "a new historicity" that constitutes an "undifferentiated public to replace the designated addressees of representative works" (i.e. works in the style of the old representative regime) (8-9). This "public" is also the "public" of "public policy." And within this framework a new focus is placed on individual response within that undifferentiated mass. Art is now defined "less according to criteria of 'ways of doing,' and more in terms of 'ways of sensible being'" as it forms a fresh "challenge to thought" (10-11). We now would have a "paradoxical sensorium that henceforth made it possible to define the things of art" through "the opposition between pure voluntary activity and pure passivity" (12). This complex paradox is further complicated by the way "that a 'human' nature is always simultaneously a 'social' nature" and how the new regime suspended the old "rules by which human nature is accorded with social nature" (i.e. social class) (13-14).
These tensions between the individual and the mass, the activities of art-making and consuming, and the concepts of human nature and social class, all are developed in the aesthetic regime to become parts of its focus. As a new "distribution of the sensible," the aesthetic regime allows us to see and "work with" what we "work in" as a world; i.e. it allows critical stances. Art "is political ... because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space" (23). What's at "stake here does not only concern those objects that fall within the sphere of art, but also the ways in which, today, our world is given to perceiving itself and in which the powers that be assert their legitimacy" (15). This comes through the tension between, on the one hand, the autonomies of the arts and individuals and, on the other, the sense of the common(s) through which these autonomies are shaped. (Harney and Moten's "undercommons" concept has a place in the critique being made here, but just staying within Rancière's framework can unfold in that direction.) The paradox of the aesthetic regime lies in its role "in constituting forms of common life" while reserving an autonomy for its own forms, like "the silent space of the museum in which the solitude and the passivity of passers-by encounters the solitude and passivity of artworks" (26). Aesthetics promotes a new "sensorium" (29) in which the ethical and representative aspects of art's work are subsumed under the suspension of work in that relatively idle moment of appreciation (30-31). Rancière claims this as a "suspension of the supremacy of form over matter and of activity over passivity" in "a revolution of sensible existence itself and no longer only of the forms of State" (32). It changes the state of being instead.
There are two measures to be taken here if we would like to see our state of being and that ways that the State itself finds part of its being in art: one would view this claim up against Terry Eagleton's rather larger claims about The Ideology of the Aesthetic and its way of subsuming such suspensions into its mechanisms of policing and policy, and the other would look at some prominent current artistic claims and their place in assisting the work of realpolitik in our time. First, though, a sharper look at Rancière's concepts is necessary as a groundwork. He has placed his theory in a rather tentative position among those already out there.
To make "the autonomy of a form of sensory experience" into "the germ of a new humanity, of a new form of individual and collective life" (32) looks a lot like a reversion to Romanticism and a hovering at a certain point in political and aesthetic history. Rancière claims it instead as a progressive re-reading of Modernism's stalemate by demonstrating "no conflict between purity and politicization" in this aesthetic "metapolitics" (33). It is at this point in his argument, though, that he reveals the fundamental Romantic paradox in the aesthetic regime: the art work is whole in itself but fleeting in its public moment (34). This reveals "a contradiction that is originary and unceasingly at work" in the aesthetic regime. The "promise of emancipation" is suspended as well, at the edge of "the elimination of art as a separate reality, its transformation into a form of life" (36). Rancière wants to leave us hanging between the contraries of "a type of art that makes politics by eliminating itself as art and a type of art that is political on the proviso that it retains its purity, avoiding all forms of political intervention" (40). He puts this tension under the name of "Adorno's aesthetics," describing an effort to see art as resisting " a two-fold threat: from its transformation into a metapolitical act and from its radical separation from the forms of aestheticized commodities and of the administered world" (40). This makes for an art that is looking two ways at once in order to be resistant. For Rancière, "the metapolitics of the resistant form tends to oscillate between two positions." One is "the struggle to preserve the material difference of art from all the worldly affairs that compromise it." The other is "the ethical task of bearing witness," which he sees as "cancelling out ... both art and politics" (43).
For Rancière, the trick is to avoid establishing a "sublime" position in the sense of "a force that exceeds" the heart of the art's effort (19) or stands as "an irreducible gap between the idea and the sensible" (20) or a force meant to "keep the two equally at a distance in "a new modesty" about art's capacity to transform the world" and "its claims about the singularity of its obects" (21). The malaise in our aesthetic sense may be more fundamental than just keeping the concept of the sublime at bay. For Rancière himself, there is a fundamental tension in the aesthetic regime--its regimen of attempting "to construct new forms of life in common" (44) through "a way of redisposing the objects and images that comprise the common world as it is already given" (21), while at the same time offering "the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form of life. This is done by holding aesthetic experience of "art" at a distance from that of any other aistheton. This regimen "threatens the aesthetic regime itself," he admits, even as he claims that it is also "what makes it function" (44). This tension, including that "threat" or risk, helps keep our aesthetic sensibilities moving between promise and compromise. This keeps art both somewhat effective and somewhat sublime.
That combination has given us art as we have it, under what Rancière calls "the aesthetic regime" as he provides a general abstract history of its development. How we got to this regimen of relying on an oscillating aesthetic is figured differently by Terry Eagleton. Eagleton's much more detailed exposition of an ideology built with and into the aesthetic approach is very fully historical. It begins with a historically based discussion of social construction at work in the mutual interplay between the mindsets of art and politics. In it, we see the establishment and development of The Aesthetic as a kind of institution like The Bank, The Stock Exchange, or Parliament (Eagleton 31). The bourgeois revolution that opened the space for all of these institutions created "the public sphere" where a certain kind of "social harmony registers itself on our senses, imprints itself on our sensibilities" (36-37). Eagleton's chapter on this period in Europe, the late 17th into the early 18th century, is called "The Law of the Heart." It explains how bourgeois democracy used this new vision to implant a new social bond. Eagleton explains how "the aesthetic" means "introjection of abstract resason by the life of the senses" (42). Eagleton sharply insists that "in the aesthetic it is as though it is we who freely fashion the laws to which we subject ourselves" (43). This established the ideal that has become reactionary in our time (60). It works both ways, for us and against us, even without coercions from anywhere except our "sympathies." We police ourselves by it.
Eagleton summarizes a very important dialectical concept for us:
The very emergence of the aesthetic marks in this sense a certain crisis of traditional reason, and a potentially liberating or utopian trend of thought. By the end of the eighteenth century, such appeals to feeling will have become identified as dangerously radical. There is in the aesthetic an ideal of compassionate community, of altruism and natural affection, which along with a faith in the self-delighting individual represents an affront to ruling class rationalism. On the other hand, it might be claimed that such a movement comes eventually to represent a devastating loss for the political left. (60)
This loss is written into the structure of a thought that compromises its every promise always already from the start. Karl Marx, in both Eagleton's book and Rancière's book on art's discontents, is seen as a sort of political aesthetician who is trying to help us move into position to break the deadlock of the bourgeois hold on our aesthetics. Rancière sums up Marx's claim for us as the possibility of "aesthetic man: namely, productive man, the one who at once produces the objects and the social relations in which they are produced" (38) in a society that can finally "render ideas sensible" (37). Eagleton goes strangely further, taking Marx all the way back before his time to be a new kind of Shaftesbury, through whom the old emerging bourgeois aesthetic might speak again with some sense of revolution. He sums up that stance from Marx/Shaftesbury as saying: "To live well is to live in the free, many-sided realization of one's capacities, in reciprocal interaction with the similar self-expression of others" (226). This is the bourgeois dream, and it has had a troubling history. "We have seen," Eagleton reminds us, "some of the difficulties of this doctrine; but it remains the single most creative aspect of the aesthetic tradition" (226). In the common life, Marx would have us find "that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom" as he expressed it in Das Kapital. Eagleton uses this quote to turn back toward art: "If art matters, it is as a type of that which has its end entirely in itself, and this is most politically charged in its autonomy" (226).
This sounds very much like Rancière's two extreme for the aesthetic dialectic: autonomous art's forms and art's transformation into common life. Eagleton echoes Rancière's emphasis on the risks of impossibility at either extreme as he adds a caution to his assessment of Marx's aesthetic framework. Eagleton's chapter on "The Marxist Sublime" stops to remind us that Marx did not dive into the full aestheticization that would claim full autonomy or instant transformation. His analysis of "what conditions are necessary" to open the possibility of such happiness requires first the work of thought.
Eagleton wraps it up for us by focusing on "contradictions" and unlocking the closed loop between the impossibilities:
That final aestheticization of human existence which we call communism cannot be prematurely anticipated by a reason which surrenders itself wholly to the ludic and poetic, to image and intuition. Instead, a rigorously analytical rationality is needed, to help unlock the contradictions which prevent us from attaining the condition in which instrumentalism may lose its unwelcome dominance. It may well be that in some future social order theory, instrumental thought, calculative reason will no longer play a central role in human life, but will have been transformed out of recognition. To prefigure such an order now, by (for example) the deconstruction of theory and poetry, may thus be a valuable proleptic gesture. But if an aesthetic experience is to be achieved for all, thought in general must not be prematurely aestheticized. (227)
The process requires critical thinking. This is where the aesthetic regime starts to unfold into something at least slightly "post-aesthetic." It still incorporates the aesthetic; it does not leave behind that double-bind of impossibilities. However, there was "always already" an urge toward critical thinking there in the aesthetic stance. Focus on that element may only seem to make this simply obvious; it could possibly just leave us standing with Rancière, claiming that aesthetics still has this area covered. The difference, though, could come right where Marx suggested it would: in the recognition of a fresh critical element that would "unlock the contradictions which prevent us from attaining the condition in which instrumentalism may lose its unwelcome dominance." Noesis, taken with aestheis, poesis, and mimesis, is the fourth corner that sets up the dialectical tensions between the instrumentalities in each element. As part of a Greimasian Square, it can be looked upon as working with each of the others in cooperations and negations that both emphasize and undercut those instrumentalities. Nothing is left simply doing what it's supposed to; each effort has a delightful duplicity.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Je ne suis pas en Place
Vanessa Place's twittering of bits of Gone with the Wind has had many claims made for it, and now of course against it. Her own claims, those re-iterated by her supporters, are noble but trapped within what white French philosopher Jacques Ranciere calls "the aesthetic regime."
The work and the discussion about it provide an occasion for asking ourselves about our aesthetics: what do they bring us, and how can we escape their traps?
If we listen to Place's explanations, we read that she feels she is fighting racism with her work. Rich Smith, at thestranger.com, summarized her Facebook response to the controversy as having "two big thoughts. Thought #1: She believes she is participating in the fight against white supremacy by initiating a copyright dispute between herself, Mitchell's estate, and the state. Thought #2: She believes white people need to write about race because their silence on the matter suggests complicity with racism and also is an exercise of their privileged position in society." He then interviewed her and drew out much the same two thoughts. Her most provocative point was paraphrased as an assertion that "her use of racist imagery is 'vomit' induced by the poison of white supremacy."
The concept, then, in this conceptual poetry is that the legal rights to repeat Mitchell's text are the artistic and practical ground for fighting its "appreciation"--and a place to raise issues about the privilege of silent complicity. For all the ways in which it seems to reach betyond the simply or naively artful, Place's project is still solidly based in a concept of art that uses the aesthetic privilege to sneak into other realms and remain untouched by their realities. The problem of aesthetic distance undercuts her work's effectiveness.
A simple working definition of the world of the arts as we know it these days has been offered in the writings of Jacques Ranciere, a theorist of aesthetics and politics and their inter-relation. Its elegant simplicity helps make it a working basis for any approach to the social construction and political implications of our arts. Ranciere describes them on a historical basis, moving from what he calls "the representative regime" into "the aesthetic regime" and showing the new freedoms and possibilities created in the addition of the aesthetic concept. His concept of "regime" refers to the way that a certain mind-set rules among us. First, for Ranciere, it was the mind-set in a regime of politivcs and the way this framework of thinking supported a kind of mutual quiet policing in a society as to what could be possible in their social contract. After describing this kind of aesthetic of political tastes, he turned his focus around and looked at the politics of aesthetics.
There, he defined the mind-set that rules and polices our sense of the arts by using three classic Greek terms: poesis or making, mimesis or imitating, and aesthesis or feeling experience. It is easy enough to follow him in seeing how these elements show a particular history in our arts. From the kind of "making" that followed a regime of "imitating" models of the traditional world (gods & myths & saints & such--including aristocracy and its supporting castes), we moved through new self-awarenesses into adding the force of the artist's own experience and vision of the possible. This aesthetic (as it now could be called) accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie as it appeared to make rioom for individual achievement and taste. Of course, this quality of individuality was part of the new aesthetic of (bourgeois) politics as much as of the political possibilities of aesthetics in the arts.
Ranciere shows how this opened a social force for the arts that had been latent in "the representative regime," partly in the multiple forms of making and the variety of aesthetics they made possible and partl in this new place for the artist. There could now be seen, in "the aesthetic regime," makings of various sorts that used imitation of life to express a feeling experience and impress it upon the audience. The audience could develop or adopt tastes, and the artists could express themselves toward or within these aesthetic possibilities. Ranciere has provided this rather simple model and defended its libertatory potential; there is a democracy and a productive anarchy within it, and that is what the art world ostensibly celebrates and encourages.
This aesthetic framework for the production/appreciation of the arts and artists creates its own further development and demise. Its contradiction of "the representative regime" remains its avant garde evren as its material contradictions begin to create the conditions for a new necessary advance. What makes this new advance necessary is both the internal dialectic of the forms multiplying in the aesthetic regime and the outer dialectic of the bourgeois social foprms, the "progress" through forms of competitive capital and its -isms. The influence of these social forms is neither simply outside nor inside the arts. Ranciere has described this well by showing that politics has a sort of an aesthetic of its own that is necessary to it. The political world's way of envisioning or policing itself is not a simply re-ifiable "thing." It is part of a conceptual "cloud," a noos-sphere, that also includes the regime of the arts. Ranciere gives us that much, but it is easy enough to see where it goes from there. The arts, having put the artist's sensibility in the driver's seat, are now open to the social awareness of the artist. For Ranciere, this fits roughly inside the aesthetic regime and makes him declare its adequacy. However, what emerges from the aesthetic regime is a set of relations that now includes a noetic dimension that was, of course, there all along.
To add noesis, critical thinking, to the other three clasic Greek terms forms what has come to be called a "Greimasian Square" of logic. The pair of paired opposites here is more complex than the funny one Moliere used in the mock education of his Bourgeois Gentleman, goofing over how poetry is that which is not prose and vice versa. Here we have poesis and mimesis across the top line and aesthesis and noesis as the bottom pair, with tensions between the relatively inner (poesis & aesthesis) and outer (mimesis & noesis) oriented pairs and between other aspects represented by these four. These include making and sensing, sensing and thinking, critiquing and imitating, imitating and creating, critiquing and creating, and sensing and imitating. The work of noesis is awareness of the tensions in each pair and in the work's relations to the world in which it is shaped.
Noesis rises from the awareness of these tensions across the square and how they help shape the work, just as aesthesis arose from the tension between making and imitating out of the fact of there being an artist involved. The making of an imitation of any of the culture's myths or icons (stories or images) required a maker and this artist position puts the spin on things that we recognize as style and appreciate aesthetically. "Aesthetics" is our term for both this reception of the work and for the artist's inner process of turning feeling perception into a work. The artist's vision can be almost immediately seen as a comment on the world in which the work is created. That angle has been included in aesthetics so far, and that is where Ranciere (and most everyone) appears to have left it; however, his schema beginning in the aesthetics of politics and moving into the politics of aesthetics puts an emphasis on that critical commentary. The artist, the critic, the theorist, and the audience participate in the creation and extension or obliteration of this critical element. Ranciere's full contribution to what Terry Eagleton called The Ideology of the Aesthetic in his lengthy detailed study is not completely realized until we pull noesis out to form the fourth corner of the square. In that famous locution of French philosophy, it was "always already" there. We see this best once we have given it a name and a focus that exposes this aspect of what the artist, critic, theorist, and audience do.
The artist who wants to artfully move the art forward must not just participate in the aesthetics of the art but also critique them to some extent, at least by showing an awareness of what has been done and what could be carried further in some direction. This awareness is not parody; it is not mere snarkiness. It is not merely aesthetic; noesis is related to aesthesis as its outward-reaching dimension, and also to poesis and mimesis in this outward way. As mimesis is the dimension of relation to outward "things," noesis is a relation to the social "world" and brings that relation to the other elements in a critical way. The artist that moves the art forward also exposes the art's social function, its politics. This is drawn out from what is "imitated," how thw rok is shaped, and what kind of feeling perception is delivered.
The critic who can lift these aspects from the work may do so in any terms, but the critic guided by the theorist who has brought noesis into focus will offer audiences guidance in recognizing this critical social dimension of the work. Audiences, though, are rarely guided by intelligent critique; theirs is more a position of playing out the effect of the four coordinated elements and demonstrating the social value of the work framed by the theorist and interpreted by the critic. The artist's vision my reach the audience and move them or not. Social resistance to it may manifest itself in any or all of the other three positions, but the concept of noesis will reveal that. Where noesis is given full consideration, even the power of the old regime to blunt the work's effect on the audience is changed. It can now be described critically, and the work can be measured in its own critical power to be not just a vision based in feeling perception or a likely imitation of things or a well-wrought repository. The work the work does in the world can be a focus.
If we apply this to a work that has been bashed and defended a lot lately, like Vanessa Place's GWTW tweets, we may see how the concept works practically. As a long series of tweets repeating the text of Mitchell's famous novel, this work imitates the book in Twitter format. This work takes the shape of tweets, a contemporary social media form of text in brief bursts accompanied by a chosen user avatar image. Place uses a picture of Hattie McDaniel as the "mammy" in the film of GWTW. The perception from which the work stems seems to be the "minstrelsy" that Place has said she sees in GWTW and its racism, a white imitation of black culture within the telling of the "tragedy" of the Old South. The work's attempt to critique this is side-tracked, though, in the odd little project, described elsewhere by Place, of attempting to instigate a lawsuit over "rights" to the text and its iterations. Rights are certainly at issue in the larger picture here, but this is where the work fails both aesthetically and noetically.
To read, bit by bit, the "same" but ostensibly different book, now fragmented and re-framed with that avatar repeatedly appearing, leaves us short of Place's goals. Its mimesis is that re-iteration. Its poesis is that re-framing in the contemporary social media format. Its aesthesis is less clear and simple, though it makes some sense after you hear her explanations given elsewhere. The "minstrelsy" or minstrel show idea is deeply accurate to American history. My own white family participated in minstrel shows in Union County, Ohio, even though earlier generations had run underground railroad stations. That mockery of black culture in the 1930s certainly is present in Mitchell's 1936 text and in Hattie McDaniel's 1939 film role. Place's displacement of the text into a new framework fails to put focus on this perception of minstrelsy. The "black face" of the avatar may suggest it, but her iteration does little to re-frame the text and provide or even suggest critical perspective on its racisms. Place's mimesis and poesis leave that aesthesis dulled.The noetic angle is buried.
Place has elsewhere stated that this whole project has, as one of its goals, the purpose of provoking Mitchell's estate into a lawsuit over the copyright to Mitchell's text. There may be some noetic value in that, but it is not made clear by the work. It also seems a fantasy because the whole thing may be ignored and probably will. That likelihood leaves Place's work in the position of the bad comedian who "not only tells 'em, he explains 'em"--the worst failure of a joke or anecdote with an audience. No one is moved aesthetically or noetically, and the teller is left standing there not quite in touch with anyone's life or head but her own.
So, there are both political and aesthetic failures in Place's work. An expanded framework of four elements, beyond the aesthetic trio, shows us this pretty clearly. We can see that Place's poesis uses a mimesis to underline an aesthesis that places her own perception and experience of Mitchell's book and its "appreciation" (in the linked economic and aesthetic senses) in a suspension (in the linked chemical and artistic senses) where it can be looked at, while the real situation goes on in the streets and the courts and the copshops. A noesis that focuses on the tension between the book and the real is missing from the work. Once it is supplied by critical thinking of our own, or just by a reminder of real hurt or real work, noesis shows where this Twitter work has trapped itself.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The work and the discussion about it provide an occasion for asking ourselves about our aesthetics: what do they bring us, and how can we escape their traps?
If we listen to Place's explanations, we read that she feels she is fighting racism with her work. Rich Smith, at thestranger.com, summarized her Facebook response to the controversy as having "two big thoughts. Thought #1: She believes she is participating in the fight against white supremacy by initiating a copyright dispute between herself, Mitchell's estate, and the state. Thought #2: She believes white people need to write about race because their silence on the matter suggests complicity with racism and also is an exercise of their privileged position in society." He then interviewed her and drew out much the same two thoughts. Her most provocative point was paraphrased as an assertion that "her use of racist imagery is 'vomit' induced by the poison of white supremacy."
The concept, then, in this conceptual poetry is that the legal rights to repeat Mitchell's text are the artistic and practical ground for fighting its "appreciation"--and a place to raise issues about the privilege of silent complicity. For all the ways in which it seems to reach betyond the simply or naively artful, Place's project is still solidly based in a concept of art that uses the aesthetic privilege to sneak into other realms and remain untouched by their realities. The problem of aesthetic distance undercuts her work's effectiveness.
A simple working definition of the world of the arts as we know it these days has been offered in the writings of Jacques Ranciere, a theorist of aesthetics and politics and their inter-relation. Its elegant simplicity helps make it a working basis for any approach to the social construction and political implications of our arts. Ranciere describes them on a historical basis, moving from what he calls "the representative regime" into "the aesthetic regime" and showing the new freedoms and possibilities created in the addition of the aesthetic concept. His concept of "regime" refers to the way that a certain mind-set rules among us. First, for Ranciere, it was the mind-set in a regime of politivcs and the way this framework of thinking supported a kind of mutual quiet policing in a society as to what could be possible in their social contract. After describing this kind of aesthetic of political tastes, he turned his focus around and looked at the politics of aesthetics.
There, he defined the mind-set that rules and polices our sense of the arts by using three classic Greek terms: poesis or making, mimesis or imitating, and aesthesis or feeling experience. It is easy enough to follow him in seeing how these elements show a particular history in our arts. From the kind of "making" that followed a regime of "imitating" models of the traditional world (gods & myths & saints & such--including aristocracy and its supporting castes), we moved through new self-awarenesses into adding the force of the artist's own experience and vision of the possible. This aesthetic (as it now could be called) accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie as it appeared to make rioom for individual achievement and taste. Of course, this quality of individuality was part of the new aesthetic of (bourgeois) politics as much as of the political possibilities of aesthetics in the arts.
Ranciere shows how this opened a social force for the arts that had been latent in "the representative regime," partly in the multiple forms of making and the variety of aesthetics they made possible and partl in this new place for the artist. There could now be seen, in "the aesthetic regime," makings of various sorts that used imitation of life to express a feeling experience and impress it upon the audience. The audience could develop or adopt tastes, and the artists could express themselves toward or within these aesthetic possibilities. Ranciere has provided this rather simple model and defended its libertatory potential; there is a democracy and a productive anarchy within it, and that is what the art world ostensibly celebrates and encourages.
This aesthetic framework for the production/appreciation of the arts and artists creates its own further development and demise. Its contradiction of "the representative regime" remains its avant garde evren as its material contradictions begin to create the conditions for a new necessary advance. What makes this new advance necessary is both the internal dialectic of the forms multiplying in the aesthetic regime and the outer dialectic of the bourgeois social foprms, the "progress" through forms of competitive capital and its -isms. The influence of these social forms is neither simply outside nor inside the arts. Ranciere has described this well by showing that politics has a sort of an aesthetic of its own that is necessary to it. The political world's way of envisioning or policing itself is not a simply re-ifiable "thing." It is part of a conceptual "cloud," a noos-sphere, that also includes the regime of the arts. Ranciere gives us that much, but it is easy enough to see where it goes from there. The arts, having put the artist's sensibility in the driver's seat, are now open to the social awareness of the artist. For Ranciere, this fits roughly inside the aesthetic regime and makes him declare its adequacy. However, what emerges from the aesthetic regime is a set of relations that now includes a noetic dimension that was, of course, there all along.
To add noesis, critical thinking, to the other three clasic Greek terms forms what has come to be called a "Greimasian Square" of logic. The pair of paired opposites here is more complex than the funny one Moliere used in the mock education of his Bourgeois Gentleman, goofing over how poetry is that which is not prose and vice versa. Here we have poesis and mimesis across the top line and aesthesis and noesis as the bottom pair, with tensions between the relatively inner (poesis & aesthesis) and outer (mimesis & noesis) oriented pairs and between other aspects represented by these four. These include making and sensing, sensing and thinking, critiquing and imitating, imitating and creating, critiquing and creating, and sensing and imitating. The work of noesis is awareness of the tensions in each pair and in the work's relations to the world in which it is shaped.
Noesis rises from the awareness of these tensions across the square and how they help shape the work, just as aesthesis arose from the tension between making and imitating out of the fact of there being an artist involved. The making of an imitation of any of the culture's myths or icons (stories or images) required a maker and this artist position puts the spin on things that we recognize as style and appreciate aesthetically. "Aesthetics" is our term for both this reception of the work and for the artist's inner process of turning feeling perception into a work. The artist's vision can be almost immediately seen as a comment on the world in which the work is created. That angle has been included in aesthetics so far, and that is where Ranciere (and most everyone) appears to have left it; however, his schema beginning in the aesthetics of politics and moving into the politics of aesthetics puts an emphasis on that critical commentary. The artist, the critic, the theorist, and the audience participate in the creation and extension or obliteration of this critical element. Ranciere's full contribution to what Terry Eagleton called The Ideology of the Aesthetic in his lengthy detailed study is not completely realized until we pull noesis out to form the fourth corner of the square. In that famous locution of French philosophy, it was "always already" there. We see this best once we have given it a name and a focus that exposes this aspect of what the artist, critic, theorist, and audience do.
The artist who wants to artfully move the art forward must not just participate in the aesthetics of the art but also critique them to some extent, at least by showing an awareness of what has been done and what could be carried further in some direction. This awareness is not parody; it is not mere snarkiness. It is not merely aesthetic; noesis is related to aesthesis as its outward-reaching dimension, and also to poesis and mimesis in this outward way. As mimesis is the dimension of relation to outward "things," noesis is a relation to the social "world" and brings that relation to the other elements in a critical way. The artist that moves the art forward also exposes the art's social function, its politics. This is drawn out from what is "imitated," how thw rok is shaped, and what kind of feeling perception is delivered.
The critic who can lift these aspects from the work may do so in any terms, but the critic guided by the theorist who has brought noesis into focus will offer audiences guidance in recognizing this critical social dimension of the work. Audiences, though, are rarely guided by intelligent critique; theirs is more a position of playing out the effect of the four coordinated elements and demonstrating the social value of the work framed by the theorist and interpreted by the critic. The artist's vision my reach the audience and move them or not. Social resistance to it may manifest itself in any or all of the other three positions, but the concept of noesis will reveal that. Where noesis is given full consideration, even the power of the old regime to blunt the work's effect on the audience is changed. It can now be described critically, and the work can be measured in its own critical power to be not just a vision based in feeling perception or a likely imitation of things or a well-wrought repository. The work the work does in the world can be a focus.
If we apply this to a work that has been bashed and defended a lot lately, like Vanessa Place's GWTW tweets, we may see how the concept works practically. As a long series of tweets repeating the text of Mitchell's famous novel, this work imitates the book in Twitter format. This work takes the shape of tweets, a contemporary social media form of text in brief bursts accompanied by a chosen user avatar image. Place uses a picture of Hattie McDaniel as the "mammy" in the film of GWTW. The perception from which the work stems seems to be the "minstrelsy" that Place has said she sees in GWTW and its racism, a white imitation of black culture within the telling of the "tragedy" of the Old South. The work's attempt to critique this is side-tracked, though, in the odd little project, described elsewhere by Place, of attempting to instigate a lawsuit over "rights" to the text and its iterations. Rights are certainly at issue in the larger picture here, but this is where the work fails both aesthetically and noetically.
To read, bit by bit, the "same" but ostensibly different book, now fragmented and re-framed with that avatar repeatedly appearing, leaves us short of Place's goals. Its mimesis is that re-iteration. Its poesis is that re-framing in the contemporary social media format. Its aesthesis is less clear and simple, though it makes some sense after you hear her explanations given elsewhere. The "minstrelsy" or minstrel show idea is deeply accurate to American history. My own white family participated in minstrel shows in Union County, Ohio, even though earlier generations had run underground railroad stations. That mockery of black culture in the 1930s certainly is present in Mitchell's 1936 text and in Hattie McDaniel's 1939 film role. Place's displacement of the text into a new framework fails to put focus on this perception of minstrelsy. The "black face" of the avatar may suggest it, but her iteration does little to re-frame the text and provide or even suggest critical perspective on its racisms. Place's mimesis and poesis leave that aesthesis dulled.The noetic angle is buried.
Place has elsewhere stated that this whole project has, as one of its goals, the purpose of provoking Mitchell's estate into a lawsuit over the copyright to Mitchell's text. There may be some noetic value in that, but it is not made clear by the work. It also seems a fantasy because the whole thing may be ignored and probably will. That likelihood leaves Place's work in the position of the bad comedian who "not only tells 'em, he explains 'em"--the worst failure of a joke or anecdote with an audience. No one is moved aesthetically or noetically, and the teller is left standing there not quite in touch with anyone's life or head but her own.
So, there are both political and aesthetic failures in Place's work. An expanded framework of four elements, beyond the aesthetic trio, shows us this pretty clearly. We can see that Place's poesis uses a mimesis to underline an aesthesis that places her own perception and experience of Mitchell's book and its "appreciation" (in the linked economic and aesthetic senses) in a suspension (in the linked chemical and artistic senses) where it can be looked at, while the real situation goes on in the streets and the courts and the copshops. A noesis that focuses on the tension between the book and the real is missing from the work. Once it is supplied by critical thinking of our own, or just by a reminder of real hurt or real work, noesis shows where this Twitter work has trapped itself.
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The Wikipedia article on Hattie McDaniel brings out a series of provocative tensions represented in the life and work of this daughter of former slaves; it includes her many achievements, the controversies over some of them, and the 2010 quiet tribute paid to her at the Oscars by Mo'Nique's dress and gardenias. Celebrate if you dare by reading it, and by letting Vanessa go back to her place among those who may have tried but couldn't quite see what living is like for others.
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