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.