Under Representation

The Racial Regime of Aesthetics

David Lloyd

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823282395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Under Representation shows how the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy ground the racial order of the modern world in our concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity. In taking on the relation of aesthetics to race, Lloyd challenges the absence of sustained thought about race in postcolonial studies, as well as the lack of sustained attention to aesthetics in critical race theory.Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful "racial regime of representation" whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is not just about depiction of diverse humans or inclusion in political or cultural institutions. It is an activity that undergirds the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social.Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory: The racialized remain "under representation, " on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present. Across five chapters, Under Representation investigates the aesthetic foundations of modern political subjectivity; race and the sublime; the logic of assimilation and the stereotype; the subaltern critique of representation; and the place of magic and the primitive in modernist concepts of art, aura and representation.Both a genealogy and an account of our present, Under Representation ultimately helps show how a political reading of aesthetics can help us build a racial politics adequate for the problems we face today, one that stakes claims more radical than multicultural demands for representation.

CHAPTER 1

The Aesthetic Regime of Representation

The Antinomy of Aesthetics

From its inception, the aesthetic has been shadowed by the political sphere from which it sought to declare its independence. Against the conflicting interests and partiality that define political practice, aesthetic thought has traditionally proclaimed its foundation in the disinterested judgment of the spectator. Where the object of judgment is natural, it is an object regarded merely as it appears and gives pleasure, not as one to be conquered, possessed, or fought over, however much appropriation, enclosure, and the displacement of indigenous populations may have furnished historically the material conditions for a terra nullius suitable for the aesthetic contemplation of landscape. Where it is an artwork, it is free of ulterior designs on the subject, whether didactic, dogmatic or ideological. It is an object of pure contemplation or, where it does reflect on social concerns, it reflects on them in their unresolved complexity rather than insisting on the justice of a particular point of view. Aesthetic contemplation reconciles subject and world or it entertains the undecided and undecidable. Such was, at least, the idea of the aesthetic that shaped cultural pedagogy as it came to be institutionalized, from Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man, through Mathew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, down to the New Criticism and beyond.¹ The ego-ideal of the disinterested and ethical subject—an ideal whose genealogy in the aesthetic this book traces—continues to exert a powerful influence over the humanities and over the distaste of the professional scholar for engagement in political activism.

At the same time, aesthetics has also always been the terrain of political contestation: The actual capacity of art to influence and form not only moral and political opinions but also fundamental subjective dispositions has long been valued and activated. The instrumental appropriation of art has its origin in precisely the “cultic” or religious function from which aesthetics, properly speaking, sought to emancipate it and the challenge to art’s ideal disinterest preceded the era of its “politicization.” That politicization has ranged from the nationalist imperative to deploy art in the service of forming popular consciousness to the various and conflicting claims made by radical aesthetics as to art’s function in relation to ideology and to popular mobilization. Over and over again, indeed, radical aesthetics has confronted contradictory but equally plausible prescriptions for effecting social change through art. The contradictory stances that confront materialist thinking in this domain are several, ranging from the antithesis between the political claims of formalist defamiliarization and those, equally cogent, of agitprop or of Lukácsian realism, to the more recent debates on the relative efficacy of postmodernism and modernism that have been complicated in turn by questions as to the relation between postmodernity or poststructuralism and postcolonial or “Third World” aesthetic production.²

The confrontation of materialist aesthetics with a certain kind of antinomy goes back to Karl Marx’s early speculations on Greek art in the “Introduction” to the Grundrisse, in which the question is raised as to how an artwork’s “eternal charm” can persist across history when art, like every other human product, must be determined historically in the mode and means of its production. The question is inseparable from that as to whether art is ideological per se or is a form of cognition inassimilable to or even revelatory of ideological formations.³ In this chapter, I make no attempt to resolve such antinomies, since I argue that they are strictly irresolvable within the terms of aesthetic thought. Rather, I seek to show in the first place that the question is not whether the aesthetic can or should be politicized but how the aesthetic “represents” politics in the sense both of furnishing the conditions under which the modern representative sphere can be thought at all and of displacing or deferring political divisions in the name of reconciliation. This is, strictly speaking, a critical project, in that it proceeds by considering the apparent political impasse of radical aesthetics “in relation to the foundation of the knowledge upon which the question is based.”⁴

It might be more precise to say that one must attend here at once to the form of the knowledge, insofar as that is determined by theoretical exigencies, and to the material conditions that ground it. In reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), generally taken to be the founding text of aesthetic philosophy, I explore the overdetermined conditions both for the emergence of the aesthetic sphere itself and for the formal structures that shaped the discourse on the aesthetic from the start. The argument of this chapter is that the discourse on the aesthetic supplied a theoretical resolution to the contradictions of an emerging liberal politics, resolutions that came to inform not only subsequent ideological discourse but also its material institutions. If that formulation has a certain smack of idealist prioritization of the theoretical, that is not necessarily surprising. In its emergence aesthetics was a theoretical intervention, the historical conditions of late eighteenth-century Germany requiring a theoretical solution to the impasses of liberal politics that could not be resolved in practice given both the political fragmentation and the material “underdevelopment” of the region. The young Marx famously observed: “The Germans have thought in politics what other nations have done. Germany has been their theoretical conscience.”⁵ The observation is no less apposite to German aesthetic philosophy than it is to their political thought. Entailed in both the aesthetic and the political theoretical solutions is the production of a human Subject in the form of an inner disposition toward the ethical that is prefigurative of, because preconditional for, a public sphere and a state that were yet to be. This sense of the aesthetic as furnishing the very condition of possibility for the political is the focus of this chapter; the fundamentally racial organization of those conditions, deeply implicit in if not essential to it from the outset, will be sketched here and elaborated further in those that follow.

Both in view of what I will show to be its narrative mode of production, which derives the formal and universal from the material and singular, and in view of its putative representativeness for man in general, this Subject comes to give the form in which the modern individual is interpellated ideologically. The aesthetic Subject is produced “as if” a unity but in necessary division from the material conditions of the concrete individual: It becomes what I will call in Chapter 3 the “Subject without properties.” Further, this “as if,” which is the principal ideological moment of the aesthetic domain, is held in place by the rhetorically analogical structure and movement of aesthetic thought itself. In the very process of formalization that its analogical structure produces, aesthetics displaces the historical conditions of its emergence on to a universal claim to deduce the “super-sensible substrate” that is the identity of the human.

From this formalization, programmatically forgetful of the conditions that required it, derives the capacity for transhistorical and transnational dissemination that has characterized the discourse of aesthetic culture as an ideological formation. This European usurpation of all other modes of being human that Sylvia Wynter has dubbed “the overrepresentation of Man” underlies the covert raciality of both the aesthetic and the ideal “formal” political and legal subjects that furnish the template for the global juridico-political order of modernity.⁶ For that reason, although I outline here some of its historical conditions, I concentrate on the formal analysis of the aesthetic. In the very formality of liberal ideology, for which aesthetics arguably supplies the indispensable model, lies the secret of its formidable efficiency and its capacity for reproduction and transformation. As I shall propose at the end of this chapter, it is also this formality of the aesthetic, determined by its differentiation as a sphere of human practice analogous to but distinct—by its formality—from the political and the economic, that accounts for its apparently irreducible resistance to appropriation for radical political ends. And that division of spheres of human practice, each one of which is conceived of as the transhistorical end of human development, subtends an ideological system that is never more historical than in its will to deny or put an end to history.

Dividing the Subject

Bourgeois hegemony has always sought to legitimate its universal claims by appeal to common sense. The abstraction that this entails has so often been pointed out, by critics of bourgeois political thought as disparate in their political standpoints as Edmund Burke and Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci, as to need no further analysis here.⁷ That abstraction is part and parcel of its own self-evidence, the figure of universal Man being at once the foundation and the object of common sense, with much the same circularity of origination as a Declaration of Independence that must constitute the people in whose name it claims to speak.⁸ As we shall see, such a circulatory relationship between common sense conceived as permitting the unity or accord of human judgment and its production through judgment itself is fundamental to aesthetic theory. Ultimately, it articulates together the figure of Man as the universal subject of the political and a humanity divided by and subjected to a distribution of particular positions, racialized, gendered, classed. This aporia of common sense in liberal political theory was already manifest in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, a text coeval with the emergence of aesthetic philosophy in the late eighteenth century. Produced out of his attempt to reconcile the practical contradictions that the abstractions of bourgeois ideology at once dissemble and perpetuate, the aporia that Paine so well exemplifies for us generates, in turn, an incessant discourse that seeks to provide universal human grounds for liberal common sense.

In a passage crucial to his refutation of Edmund Burke’s attempt to limit the rights of Man by adducing binding precedents, Paine counters aristocratic or monarchical genealogical claims by the simple strategy of taking them at their word. His deduction of the natural—and universal—rights of man accordingly takes him back through antiquity to “the time when man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man.” Paine’s grammatical isolation of the substantive Man in this passage rhetorically underpins what will be his next claim, that the origins of man, as recorded in all human traditions, likewise indicate the “unity of man.” The unity of man is the guarantee of that absolute equivalence of men in which the conceptual equality of all men is grounded.⁹

At this point, Paine’s argumentation, which is aimed at the legitimation of a new republican form of government, begins an unacknowledged slip from principle into historical deduction. For the necessity of governmental organization, always a negative moment for Paine, cannot be deduced rationally from the unity and equality of man, depending as it does on the historical recognition of conflict and difference between humans as social individuals. Whether because he is engaged in the defense and legitimation of the new society or, more probably, because the universalism of his revolutionary republican principles precludes its acknowledgment, Paine is unable, unlike previous political thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau, to recognize the origins of conflict in the appropriation of property.¹⁰ This lacuna in Paine’s deductions is exemplary for understanding the contradictory developments of liberal individualism and political theory. From Paine’s repression of the origins of conflict in appropriation results an ungrounded assertion of a split in a hitherto putatively unified human subject, a split that takes place in the division between “the intellectual” rights of the individual, on the one hand, and those rights “which relate to security and protection,” on the other.¹¹ This division between the “natural” and “civil” rights of the individual, a memory of whose material origins is betrayed in Paine’s metaphors of “common stock,” “capital,” and “proprietorship,” defines in nuce the fundamental problematic of liberal political theory. For if the security of the individual (that is, of his property) can be guaranteed only by superior force of the collective over each and every individual, what significance, other than merely formal, does the autonomy of the individual in whose name society is legitimated actually have? Alternatively, given that the individual retains the right to dissent, how, without the exercise of a coercive force that would effectively annul that individual freedom, is conflict between the individual and society to be averted? What appears here as a split between the private and the public man, or between what Marx would come to term the “real man” and the abstract man of civil society, originates in a prior division between the human subjected to arbitrary force, the state of necessity that is that of nature, and the universal Subject that is truly representative of humanity and that will find its final expression in the State.¹² As I will argue in what follows, this fundamental splitting of the human between the abstract figure of the Subject of civil society and the human subjected to force or necessity is not only constitutive of liberal political and legal thought in all its contradictions but also determinant for the racial formation of modernity that aesthetic theory grounds and regulates.

The representative institutions that appear as the practical solutions of the liberal democracies to the actuality of the contradiction between universal claims and social differences are thus, at the theoretical level, no solution at all. For in the conflicts of interest assumed in representative bodies there constantly emerge those political differences that belie the universal claims of liberal ideology. One might say, indeed, that representative institutions are the stage on which the return of the repressed of liberal ideology—namely, the multiple forms of inequality that belie formal political equality—is played out in sublimated forms. But, as I shall argue, the insolubility of the contradictions of liberal ideology within either its political institutions or its political theory entails the migration of the discourse on universality and common sense into other spheres that emerge more or less simultaneously in liberal society. The inadequacy of representative institutions within the political sphere is supplemented by an all-the-more universalizing discourse on representation and common sense, that of aesthetics. As the aesthetic comes to represent or take the place of the formerly political sphere of universality, it becomes its function to produce the specific forms of representation that, at every level of human being, are to seem self-evident to common sense. The aesthetic sphere is held to transcend all contingent differences, and, with less paradox than might at first appear, it is in defining this domain as beyond political interest that the formal terms of bourgeois or liberal ideology are constituted.

Analogies of the Aesthetic

At the conclusion of “The Methodology of Taste,” the closing section of the first part of The Critique of Judgement, Kant evokes as an exemplary moment a cultural situation that resembles what a series of critics, notably Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin, would conceive to be the moment of epic:

There was an age and there were nations in which the active impulse towards a social life regulated by laws—what converts a people into a permanent community—grappled with the huge difficulties presented by the trying problem of bringing freedom (and therefore equality also) into union with constraining force (more that of respect and dutiful submission than of fear). And such must have been the age, and such the nation, that first discovered the art of reciprocal communication of ideas between the more cultured and ruder sections of the community, and how to bridge the difference between the amplitude and refinement of the former and the natural simplicity and originality of the latter—in this way hitting upon that mean between higher culture and the modest worth of nature, that forms for taste also, as a sense common to all mankind, that true standard which no rules can supply. Hardly will ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Under Representation
• 1. The Aesthetic Regime of Representation
• 2. The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Racial Regime
• 3. Race under Representation
• 4. Representation’s Coup
• 5. The Aesthetic Taboo: Aura, Magic, and the Primitive
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index