T
his scenery includes a significant number of different agencies, some of which are in close mutual dialogue and corporation, others not in contact with each other at all. Besides art itself (with the inhabitants of the art system from artists to mediators, and administrators) this scenery includes a wide range of aesthetic traditions led by the continental “speculative” one, but the analytical tradition with its background in the particular Anglo-Saxon founded philosophy is also important. In addition, we have the art sciences, traditionally focusing on each of their own art form, but many of them steadily working themselves into problems that are more common; from general theory of art, and i.e.comparative arts, to more substantial transversal issues, such as political art, post colonialism, feminism, and many others.16
One might ask, whether considering these agents as inhabitants of the same general landscape of theory actually makes sense at all? Does a basic notion of a Modern space of signification make sense in terms of a shared point of departure?
This is evidently a matter for discussion – and it is indeed being dis-cussed. A philosopher, such as Bruno Latour, resolutely claims that we have actually never been modern, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, is the title of his influential book from 1991.17 To Latour, the notion of the
16 For specific institutionally historical reasons, this centrifugal motion away from the individual art form particularly took place within literary science. See Morten Kyndrup.
2011.
17 Bruno Latour. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Transl. by Catherine Porter
Modern is an illusion, with which we should settle. From his perspective (the notion of) the Modern introduces “a constitution”, with the intent of realizing a purification, a sort of ‘clean-up’, meant to sort out everything as belonging either to the social (the human beings), or to the nature (the things). This illusion is nourished by the claim of being able to understand and to market the Modern project in terms of an ongoing process, through which everything can be assigned, gradually, to these poles of distinction.
Meaning that anything not included, is something that has just not yet been assigned to its pole.
But this constitution, Latour points out, is unable to realize its totalizing pretention, because it leaves large amounts of so called hybrids. The constitution does not want to conceptualize these hybrids as such, but hybrids do in fact make up a substantial part of our lifeworld. The Modern, in Latour’s interpretation, is thus a primitive and tendentially repressive/
reductive framing. Instead, we should see ourselves as non-modern, in a world leaving space for the hybrids in their own right. Towards the conclusion of his book, Latour even proposes a systematic distinction between those values and approaches, which we should, respectively should not, include (in our understanding) from the various modern, postmodern, premodern, and anti-modern positions.18
The space of signification that Latour’s preferences suggest is, however, hard not to interpret as Modern in a broad sense, a fact already documented by his reflexive discussion of that space. The basic notion about a totalizing Modern, with which he intends to settle, is actually rather narrow per se, and to some extent, it appears to have been outlined rather rigidly for the actual purpose of his critical discussion.
But Latour’s point about the hybrids is important. Although the Modern may produce distinctions and differentiations, phenomena in real life are still composite and not necessarily observing the institutionalized differences. If we go back to the problem of separation in the relation between art and the aesthetic, and to the above theoretical scenery, one might ask whether this is not characterized by exactly that kind of hybrids?
Hybrids, which perhaps should not necessarily be purified in order to
18 Latour. 1993, 142.
make themselves assignable to the poles of a claimed distinction?
On the one hand, the hybrid traditions within aesthetical thinking have undoubtedly one by one produced valuable contributions to the understanding of our world too. None of these hybrids have been coincidental. Therefore, history and its achievements could by no means be rolled back. On the other hand, though, the theoretical scenery of today is characterized by almost absurd procrastinations and by an absence of dialogue to such a massive extent that at least some cleaning up seems absolutely appropriate.
Examples are plentiful. One can meet philosophers from various aesthetic traditions who ‘from above’ categorize and evaluate the entity of meaning-engendering components within a single art form, completely without addressing the relevant art scientific discourse, and obviously without any scholarly insight into the art form in question. Shortly after the turn of century, the influential American art historian, James Elkins, found it appropriate to arrange a dialogue between art historians and aestheticians under the title, “Art History versus Aesthetics” (resulting in a book of the same title from 2006).19 This initiative turned out to demonstrate, above all, a considerable absence of insight into the respective disciplinary paradigms on the other side. In the American context, aesthetics was of course primarily represented by the particular analytic approach, which is already, by its view on history, quite far from that of most art historian platforms. However, a real inclusive point of view in Elkin’s roundtable discussion remained almost solely represented by Thierry de Duve, who has a foot in both art history and aesthetics. De Duve is quoted for a point of view, which considering the object identity should be self-evident, “art history without aesthetics is inconceivable to me” – and adding,”…because art history is first of all constituted by the evidential record of previous aesthetic judgments”.20
The absent dialogue between aesthetics and art sciences is partly caused by the unresolved scientific status of that “philosophy”, in which greater parts of the aesthetic traditions today are rooted. Different notions
19 James Elkins, ed. 2006. Art History versus Aesthetics.
20 Thierry de Duve quoted in Elkins. 2006, 60.
exist about the extent to which philosophizing is committed to empirical contextualization and documentation, in the same way as other sciences.
But in itself this should not necessarily hinder dialogue and exchange of results.
Especially within the art sciences, a considerable theoretical armament of direct relevance, also to the aesthetic traditions, has taken place since the latter half of the 20th century. This is of course true, not least of the so called “Rezeptionsästhetik”; theory of reception, which in spite of its pleonastic name in German, is anything but self-evident and self-repeating in its uncovering of genuinely aesthetic function potentials within the singular artworks. Although it developed through literature, it has subsequently spread out to the other art forms too. Semiotics, especially its further development into a pragmatic semantics in Émile Benveniste, among others, constitutes another important contribution.
The analysis of the very act of engendering meaning in an artwork,
“enunciation”, encompasses all the acting communicative instances around the work, including the embedded impressions in the work of both its sender and its receiver. This is of relevance to aesthetics too, and in an overall sense, it is also an important contribution concerning the initial separation of art and the aesthetic, which we are pursuing here. Substantial contributions in theory and analysis and altogether within comparative theory of mediality (as in W. J. T. Mitchell) should be mentioned in this connection, as well.
All this could and should of course be made productive, jointly, and through dialogue between the traditions. There are good reasons for accepting differences in approaches, and this is also true, for instance between the aesthetic traditions. Varying focal lengths in the approach to the “same” phenomena may be extremely profitable.
This, however, presupposes the presence of the will and the ability to establish dialogue. The closure around itself, which many traditions, especially among the aesthetic ones, establish by insistently defining their own private playground, is not fruitful. Immunizing oneself against dialogue and exchange, and establishing even formalistic demands to empirical data, in order for these to be accepted as valid basis for
argumentation, leads to “camp-thinking”. And that, once again, leads to situations, where potentially obsolete and inadequate constructions and approaches to concepts are defended to the last drop of blood on behalf of “one’s camp”.