A Defense of Judgment

Michael W. Clune

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226770291
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Teachers of literature make judgments about value. They tell their students which works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange,  or insightful—and thus,  which are more worthy of time and attention than others. Yet the field of literary studies has largely disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are inevitably rooted in prejudice or entangled in problems of social status. For several decades now, professors have called their work value-neutral,  simply a means for students to gain cultural, political, or historical knowledge. ?Michael W. Clune's provocative book challenges these objections to judgment and offers a positive account of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic education. It is impossible, Clune argues, to separate judgments about literary value from the practices of interpretation and analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise. Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment,  transcending consumer culture and market preferences. Drawing on psychological and philosophical theories of knowledge and perception,  Clune advocates for the cultivation of what John Keats called "negative capability, " the capacity to place existing criteria in doubt and to discover new concepts and new values in artworks. Moving from theory to practice, Clune takes up works by Keats,  Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Bernhard, showing how close reading—the profession's traditional key skill—harnesses judgment to open new modes of perception.

Part 1

The Theory of Judgment

• 1 •

Judgment and Equality

Among the most exciting critical developments of recent years has been the restoration of the aesthetic to a central position in the study of the arts. Critics have made diverse claims on its behalf, among which we might discern two widely shared themes. First, aesthetic education does not constitute a retreat from politics but rather a means of contesting the neoliberal hegemony of the market. Second, the critics’ emphasis on the aesthetic’s political potential is matched by an unprecedented refusal of aesthetic judgment.

On the surface, these two tendencies appear complementary: the internal refusal of a hierarchy of aesthetic value matches the external refusal of market value. And it is true that for our political imagination, animated by the master value of equality, aesthetic hierarchy has become indefensible.1 I will argue, however, that the elision of judgment—which I understand minimally as the claim that a given work has value not just for me but for everyone—disables aesthetic education’s political potential.2

When Fox News pundits rail against the elitism of artistic hierarchies while implicitly defending grotesque economic inequality, they register a logic that our field has yet to reckon with. Capitalist democracy is founded on the formal equality of individual choice, such that every effort to set up a positive value system counter to that of the market is vulnerable to the charge of elitism. As conservative populists know, the elimination of aesthetic judgment leaves market valuation the undisputed master of the cultural field. Critics’ abdication of aesthetic judgment submits to this logic, making any strong distinction—let alone contest—between the realm of the aesthetic and the realm of the market impossible.3

The first section of this chapter will detail the double bind that paralyzes the advocates of a new aesthetic education. The second section will show how the commitment to equality undermines two strong recent attempts to save aesthetic judgment, by Sianne Ngai and Richard Moran. The following chapter will then suggest a way out of this dilemma. Marx’s image, in “Critique of the Gotha Program,” of a progressive politics freed from the strictures of dogmatic equality provides a framework for rehabilitating judgment. By loosening equality’s hold on our political imagination, we free aesthetic education to erect a new world within the old.

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Jacques Rancière is perhaps the most influential recent champion of “aesthetic education,” and his work illustrates the challenge this project faces.4 Shaped by the attack on the “aesthetic ideology” of the 1980s and 1990s, a generation of critics came to believe that tackling urgent social and political problems through art required bracketing or dismissing purely aesthetic considerations. In the face of this consensus, in Aesthetics and Its Discontents Rancière declares “there is no conflict between the purity of art and its politicization” (32). Art creates a “suspension [of] the ordinary forms of sensory experience” (23). Its political agency derives less from explicit commentary on social injustice than from a capacity to create a space in which the “relations of domination” are “suspended” (36). If our ordinary social world is corroded by many forms of linked domination, the space opened by the artwork is “the site of an unprecedented equality” (13).

Rancière’s vision of a contest between an equal world of art and a dominated social world confronts a problem. Where exactly is the boundary between these two worlds? The problem becomes acute in deciding art’s relation to the market. In capitalist society, art is entangled in the nets of the market—through distribution, advertising, the various forms of attentional manipulation associated with new technologies, and so on. If the market is the space of domination and the aesthetic the space of equality, at what point does one stop and the other begin? Rancière describes the effort to create a boundary as “the struggle to preserve the material difference of art apart from all the worldly affairs that compromise it” (42). But “this denunciation” of worldly affairs, he warns, “can easily be incorporated into political attitudes that demand to reestablish republican-style education to counter the democratic dissolution of forms of knowledge, behaviors, and values” (43). In an echo of his earlier work on education, Rancière here contrasts a “republican” effort to erect aesthetic hierarchies with a “democratic” commitment to equality.5

Rancière also is expressing the paradox on which the effort to rescue the aesthetic for progressive politics founders. Aesthetic judgment is necessary to detach art from a dominated social world, but judgment entails a suspension of democracy. For example, the millions of people who made The Apprentice a massively popular work will want to know why some other work—Madame Bovary, perhaps, to take one of Rancière’s examples—is better, freer, more truly art. To answer this question is to set one community’s judgment—that of professors of literature, say—above the judgment of ordinary people. It is to say that this work, which you may not know or may not presently like, is worth knowing, is worth trying to like, is a more rewarding object of attention than that one. The kind of people who buy Rancière’s books of course do not need to be convinced that Madame Bovary is better than The Apprentice. But if aesthetic education is to reach anyone not already in possession of it, this question must be answered. Yet Rancière refuses.

His awareness of the struggle to distinguish art from the market is trumped by his awareness that any strong distinction must violate the principle of equality. The claim that Madame Bovary is better—more worthy of attention—than The Apprentice must set itself against “the democratic dissolution of forms of knowledge, behaviors, and values.” For most of his book, Rancière can avoid this unpleasant dilemma. If his few examples suggest a vague hierarchy of aesthetic value, one he can safely assume to be implicitly accepted by most of his readers, it is nevertheless the case that at no point is he called on to say that this judgment amounts to anything more than private opinion.

But in the passage I’ve quoted, he’s brought to a halt before the problem. Faced with the struggle between art and the market, Rancière has two options. He can decide that it isn’t important to establish a barrier between the market and the aesthetic. But this would violate his justified belief that in contemporary society, (1) the market is a realm of domination, and (2) aesthetic experience is thoroughly entangled with, and dominated by, market dynamics. His other option is to say that it is important to establish a barrier between the market and the aesthetic. But this would violate his commitment to equality, since it would involve placing aesthetic values in conflict with the empirical preferences registered, and shaped, by the market. This would in effect mean saying to someone: You should devote your attention to these works rather than those. You should attend like this rather than like that.

Rancière registers the necessity of distinguishing aesthetic value from market value. He warns of the danger of an education that would confront people with an aesthetic hierarchy. But he doesn’t choose. The cost to his program is severe. The desire to open an alternative to a neoliberal world ruled by the market is neutralized by a rigorous commitment to equality. If no one can tell people why the works Rancière has in mind for democratic aesthetic education are better than the works they already know and enjoy, the transformation he imagines will simply fail to materialize. His impassioned advocacy of the aesthetic can amount to no more than an empty imperative: keep doing what you do.6

Rancière’s perception of the conflict between the claims of judgment and those of equality distinguishes his work from what otherwise remains the most cogent analysis of art’s effort to define itself with respect to its capitalist context: John Guillory’s Cultural Capital. Revisiting Guillory’s book will remind us of the stakes of aesthetic distinction, even as the distance of twenty-five years reveals the limits of his argument.

Guillory attacks the postmodern tendency to collapse the aesthetic and the economic. He responds in particular to Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s influential argument that aesthetic value is simply a mask for subjective choice, and that aesthetic choices are no different from any other private consumer choice.7 Guillory argues that aesthetic judgment, far from being identical to market value, is historically a “privileged site for reimagining the relation between the cultural and economic in social life” (xiv). Aesthetic value evolves in distinction to economic value. Traditionally, the aesthetic has been fastened to the process of class stratification through the dynamic analyzed by Bourdieu, in which the wealthy pursue cultural distinction through aesthetic education. The fact that aesthetic distinction is not equivalent to wealth is precisely what enables it to serve the interests of wealthy people seeking a noneconomic justification for their social status.

Bourdieu suggests that the progressive response to the traditional ties between class and aesthetic judgment is to forswear the latter. Guillory argues that this would deprive us of a potent means of carving out a space distinct from an increasingly omnipresent market. Aesthetic judgment is imbricated with social stratification, but this doesn’t mean that it’s simply an ideological illusion. Guillory warns us against the temptation to “deny” the “reality” of aesthetic experience due to the “revelation of its impurity” (336). Rather, we should seek to eliminate the barriers restricting those from certain class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds from access to the schools where aesthetic education flourishes. “A total democratization of access to cultural products would disarticulate the formation of cultural capital from the class structure” (337).

Some recent accounts of the aesthetic appear to have forgotten Guillory’s insight, dismissing aesthetic judgment by simply identifying judgment with market value. Kristin Ross, in her study showing the potential of the Paris Commune for our current situation, makes this identification. The body set up by the commune to administer art “exhibited no concern whatsoever . . . over any aesthetic criteria.” “They did not presume to act as judge or evaluator from an artistic point of view. . . . This is particularly important since it shifts value away from any market evaluation.”8 But as Guillory shows, to eliminate aesthetic judgment is in fact to rob art of its most enduring bulwark against total reduction to market value.

Rancière, however, in his reference to the “struggle” of art to free itself from “commerce,” recognizes that aesthetic criteria can function as resistance to market valuation, much along the lines Guillory elaborated.9 But he recognizes something else, something that eluded Guillory in 1994 and has made Cultural Capital, with its stirring and carefully argued defense of aesthetic judgment, among the best-known and least-influential works of modern theory.

Guillory sees the chief source of resistance to the distinctive social role of judgment in arguments, like Herrnstein Smith’s, that collapse the aesthetic into the economic. But he seems also to sense some other source of resistance. “The strangest consequence of the canon debate has surely been the discrediting of judgment, as though human beings could ever refrain from judging the things they make.”10 The resistance to judgment seems to him like a baffling disciplinary failure, a sign of the immaturity of the field. “If literary critics are not yet in a position to recognize the inevitability of the social practice of judgment, that is a measure of how far the critique of the canon still is from developing a sociology of judgment.”11

Rancière acutely perceives that the commitment to equality is the fundamental source of the objection to aesthetic judgment. Because Guillory doesn’t fully grasp the nature of this problem, his book—despite its contribution to our understanding of the social role of aesthetic judgment—has failed to persuade many critics to recognize judgment’s “inevitability” in our educational practice. But if Rancière understands the impasse, he offers no way out. The project of aesthetic education remains paralyzed by the conflict between judgment and equality.

Faced with this conflict, some critics opt to give up on the idea of aesthetic education as a means of transformation. Instead of seeing artistic experience as constituting an alternative to neoliberalism, they bend the aesthetic toward more traditional scholarly ends and see it as a way of generating knowledge about capitalism. This tendency has played a key role in shaping the recent reception of Adorno, the modern thinker who most forcefully conjoins the commitment to judgment with progressive politics. For Robert Kaufman, Adorno’s “key idea is that significant facets of society remain to be discovered and that such discovery is unlikely to occur through use of society’s own extant concepts for understanding itself.”12 The encounter with aesthetic form offers us the opportunity to generate a new, critical understanding of capitalism. “Criticism finally must work to enunciate . . . the contributions toward conceptuality that art, that mimesis, has nondiscursively offered.”13

As Robert Hullot-Kentor observes, Adorno’s commitment to aesthetic hierarchy as such has not been generally influential. Invoking Tocqueville, Hullot-Kentor suggests that the resistance to seeing some artworks as superior to others is “the fate of the mind most exclusively shaped by the pressure of equality.”14 Kaufman, for example, describes the value of a poet like John Keats in terms of the work’s capacity to generate social knowledge. In this he follows not the Adorno who assails popular taste in “The Culture Industry” but the Adorno of Aesthetic Theory, who expresses the superiority of Kafka in terms of the level of critical insight his work offers. “Kafka, in whose work monopoly capitalism appears only distantly, codifies . . . what becomes of people under the total social spell more faithfully and powerfully than do any novels about corrupt industrial trusts.”15

It isn’t difficult to see why contemporary critics might want to convert aesthetic judgment into an epistemological claim. Canon formation has in the past been the scene of the exclusion of women and nonwhites. The correlation is sufficiently robust to suggest a problem with the very structure of judgment. That problem lies in judgment’s incorrigibly subjective nature. Judgment claims a quasi-objective, universal dimension, but this is an illusion. Judgment is opinion. Aesthetic judgment will transmit without friction whatever biases exist in the persons who perform it. Objectivity is a pernicious illusion because any given judge—accused of bias—can simply retreat behind the mask of objectivity and pronounce his judgment—however interested it may appear to us—as purely aesthetic.

The kind of knowledge produced by the academic analysis of artworks, on the other hand, has a genuinely objective quality less prone to distortion by ideology, prejudice, or passing fancy. The opposition between knowledge and opinion is among the most durable of educational values, and it is unsurprising to see this distinction mobilized by judgment’s critics. Thus Sam Rose, in his survey of recent work in aesthetics, describes a consensus among critics and philosophers against the “authoritarian effects” of aesthetic judgment.16 The “elitist” character of judgment motivates a turn from evaluation to a vision of aesthetics as “epistemology.”17

This turn from judgment toward knowledge production has come to define academic criticism. The entry “Evaluation” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics reads: “Evaluation was once considered a central task of criticism but its place in criticism is now contested, having been supplanted to a large degree by interpretation.”18 When and why did this displacement occur? Northrop Frye’s celebrated “Polemical Introduction” to The Anatomy of Criticism is often taken to be a watershed in the transformation of criticism from a dilettantish concern with the ranking of various authors to a serious academic discipline. Before returning to the contemporary opposition between judgment and knowledge, it might be worth examining this foundational text a little more closely.

Evaluation, Frye writes, “cannot be part of any systematic study, for a systematic study can only progress.”19 “In the history of taste . . . there are no facts” (18). Pronouncements like these appear, at a crucial moment in the modern discipline’s consolidation, to consign judgment to an extra-academic, amateur practice. In this narrative, the subjectivity of judgment is what damns it, and later critics’ awareness of judgment’s anti-egalitarian tendencies only heaps more dirt on its coffin.

But if we read Frye carefully, a different picture emerges. Far from marking a retreat from aesthetic judgment, the “Polemical Introduction” is saturated with it. At the outset, in describing his critical “science,” he refers to “its materials, the masterpieces of literature” (15). He contrasts ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1. The Theory of Judgment
• Part 2. The Practice of Judgment
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index