Undermining Aesthetics: Modernist Prose, Play, and the Aesthetic Education
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“Aesthetics,” writes Deleuze, “suffers from a wrenching duality. On the one hand, it designates the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience; on the other hand, it designates the theory of art as the reflection of real experience.” That is, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment uses “aesthetics” in reference to the experience of the beautiful, while in Critique of Pure Reason, the term denotes his theory in which space and time are constitutive of sensory experience. In the difficult, not infrequently repetitive and unpleasant, modernist prose of writers like Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, and even the late Franz Kafka, I contend, this vexed legacy of Kantianism is instantiated and magnified through persistent, almost reflexive disruptions in the aesthetic relation—whether between reader and text, narrative “I” and its other or material world, or the artist and that which is to be represented. The experience offered by such works, rather than harmonizing the mental faculties in disinterested apprehension, provokes discord, generating a sensible violence in the aesthetic encounter, necessitating a new conception of “aesthetic education.” In place of an experience of freedom, Schiller’s ennobling and humanizing play, we find the agitated, and agitating, “free play of every faculty,” which, for Beckett, is synonymous with “suffering.” What remains of the tradition of Western aesthetics, then, are potentially endless variations of dissonant play, which, nevertheless, do bring forth peculiar beauties and sublimities. Such modernist prose, therefore, undermines aesthetics by virtue of its formal brilliance, but also, as Critchley has suggested of laughter, by returning us to our indefinite, finite state.
Abstract
“Aesthetics,” writes Deleuze, “suffers from a wrenching duality. On the one hand, it designates the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience; on the other hand, it designates the theory of art as the reflection of real experience.” That is, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment uses “aesthetics” in reference to the experience of the beautiful, while in Critique of Pure Reason, the term denotes his theory in which space and time are constitutive of sensory experience. In the difficult, not infrequently repetitive and unpleasant, modernist prose of writers like Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, and even the late Franz Kafka, I contend, this vexed legacy of Kantianism is instantiated and magnified through persistent, almost reflexive disruptions in the aesthetic relation—whether between reader and text, narrative “I” and its other or material world, or the artist and that which is to be represented. The experience offered by such works, rather than harmonizing the mental faculties in disinterested apprehension, provokes discord, generating a sensible violence in the aesthetic encounter, necessitating a new conception of “aesthetic education.” In place of an experience of freedom, Schiller’s ennobling and humanizing play, we find the agitated, and agitating, “free play of every faculty,” which, for Beckett, is synonymous with “suffering.” What remains of the tradition of Western aesthetics, then, are potentially endless variations of dissonant play, which, nevertheless, do bring forth peculiar beauties and sublimities. Such modernist prose, therefore, undermines aesthetics by virtue of its formal brilliance, but also, as Critchley has suggested of laughter, by returning us to our indefinite, finite state.
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