Jean-Paul RIOPELLE, L'hommage à Rosa Luxemburg, 1992 (détail) [ * ]
Radical Changes in Aesthetics
Joseph MARGOLIS
The changes that are currently taking place principally in the theory of art
and the theory of interpretation and criticism reflect a deeper change in the
arts themselves and, even more broadly, a change in philosophy and science
in general. I should say that they were marked by the following features:
- a preference for ontologies of flux over ontologies of invariance;
- the replacement of assuredly rigorous methodologies by open-ended
critical and explanatory practices opposed to a priori constraints on relevance
and validity;
- the denial that we can legitimate any form of objectivity or epistemic
neutrality suited to the sciences or critical disciplines that is not an artifact of
our habitual practices or that claims cognitive access to an order of reality not
itself constituted in accord with the categories of human understanding;
- the admission that human selves--human agents, human cognizers--are
themselves emergent and similarly constituted by the enabling processes of
history and enculturation;
- the further admission that human thinking is profoundly historicized,
formed under the conditions of changing history and subject, through its own
exercise, to further variable and divergent transformation; and
- the recognition that a bivalent logic is not likely to be best placed to
service the rigor and objectivity of truth-claims in accord with (i) - (v) and
that it must be replaced or supplemented by some accommodation of
relativism.
These are very strenuous changes--in effect, reversals of the
organizing themes of the principal canonical practices in interpretive
criticism, the explanatory work of the sciences, normative moral judgment,
and similarly large forms of inquiry.
The changes I've mentioned are not, of course, simply victorious
replacements for the presuppositions of past canons. It is nevertheless
startling to grasp the extent to which the strong practices of the past--along
the lines of empiricism and the unity of science, Francophone structuralism,
Husserlian phenomenology, romantic hermeneutics, in particular: in effect,
strong forms of objectivism, despite demurrers--have had to yield ground to
the upstart concessions collected under (i) - (v). It is probably true that
conservative convictions will react against the perceived threat of
unrestricted license that that tally seems to promise. But there can be little
doubt that pretensions of neutrality, resistance to historicity, apodictic
certainties, the reliability of modal invariences, confidence in a legible and
independent world are now no longer unquestionably dominant--and can no
longer expect to recover the sense of unchallenged fixity that prevailed
through a good part of the first half of the twentieth century. Small wonder,
therefore, that theories of art, critical interpretation, and cultural history
should, within the usual span of philosophical aesthetics, accord more and
more compliantly with conceptual changes that are now fairly strongly
entrenched in the most admired sciences.
These changes signify an impending transformation in our conceptual
bearings for the beginning of the next millennium. It is too early to tell how
shallow or how radical these will be. They constitute what is probably a
permanent breach in the confident expectations of the dominant philosophies
of the first half of the century, but they also cannot expect to drive out
altogether the theorizing tendencies that have flourished in the name of
epistemic neutrality, the invariance of an independent world, the relatively
constant forms of rationality and methodological rigor. On the one hand,
theorists are attracted to the prospects of an open-ended, relatively informal
sense of rigor and stability that may be possible under the altered conditions
mentioned; on the other hand, many commentators now recommend
scuttling all forms of metaphysics, epistemology, and the like.
If we dub the older canon modernism, meaning by that the
presumption of an accessible form of neutrality and objectivity in one or
another domain or all domains of established inquiry or the convergence
between our historicized inquiries and the regulative requirements of such a
stance, then modernism is well on its way to being replaced and the contest
that now occupies us ( and probably will even more pointedly in the next
century) pits postmodernism and historicism against one another. By
postmodernism (philosophically speaking, not "architecturally" or in similar
ways) is meant the repudiation of second-order inquiries (concerned with the
nature of truth and reality and methodology and the like) and the
presumption that first-order inquiry can proceed successfully without such
encumbrances. By historicism (the new historicism" as it may be called, to
distinguish it from the "new history" of the Annalistes and their successors)
is meant the recovery of second-order inquiry under the general condition of
admitting the historicity of thinking. Postmodernism, usually associated with
the views of Richard Rorty and (more narrowly) the pronouncements of
Jean-François Lyotard (in The Postmodern Condition), is both incoherent
and conceptually irresponsible: its incoherence lies with the fact that
first-order inquiries (say, truth claims in science and interpretation) implicate,
as such, second-order theories about the nature of reality and knowledge.
Postmodernism is correct (but rather belated) in repudiating
transcendentalism, cognitive privilege, certain neutrality; but it arbitrarily
replaces the need for a reflexive critique with one or another labile form of
ethnocentric loyalty. Historicism (in the sense intended) is not a term in
general currency, but its general project is the recovery of the successors of
the classical or canonical philosophical questions under the terms of
historicity. It would not be wrong to see in this the converging benefits of
pragmatism (in the American sense) and poststructuralism (in the French).
In any case, the familiar objectivist views in criticism and interpretation and
history--the forms of modernism --associated with the work of such theorists
as Monroe Beardsley, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Roman Ingarden, Roman Jakobson,
Michael Riffaterre, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Fernand Braudel, Arthur
Danto, Jürgen Habermas, Paul Ricoeur, are pretty well on their way out.
Experiments with the possibilities of rigor under "historicist" or "pragmatist"
or "poststructuralist" inspiration look back to the work of such commentators
as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Harold Bloom, Stanley
Fish, Stephen Greenblatt, Christopher Norris--though not with any assurance
of recovering second-order inquiries.
There you have the agon: the prospects pro and con regarding the
reconstitution of a sense or rigor and objectivity under the conditions of
historicity. One of the most strategic quarrels of this changing scene
concerns the viability of relativism, its reconciliation with a bivalent logic,
the compatibility of relativism and realism, and the reconstituted relationship
between logic and rhetoric. Generally speaking, the new historicism is
opposed to both the Aristotelian and Kantian traditions. It is attracted to the
executive themes in Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Heidegger,
Wittgenstein, the Frankfurt Critical school, Gadamer, except that (as is well
known) nearly all of these theorists yield somewhere in the direction of
invariance, modal necessity, teleologism, totalizing, and the like. Seen in
these terms, the problems for aesthetics, the philosophy of art, the theory of
criticism and interpretation and cultural history center on the prospects of
recovering a sense of objectivity and rigor compatible with the disciplined
informality that appears to be coming into its own.
The forgoing summary regarding the arts corresponds to a fuller
account offered in Joseph Margolis, Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly:
The New Puzzle of the Arts and History (University of California Press,
1995). The general argument for the whole of Western philosophy is offered
in Joseph Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World: Conceptual
Primer at the Turn of the Millennium (University of California Press, 1995).
Joseph Margolis
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
U.S.A.
