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.
