Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Artby Richard Shusterman

Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art by Richard ShustermanReview by: Paul Mattick, Jr.Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 480-488Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320432 .

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480 Book Reviews

don of atomist empiricism, but also to his distaste for technicali- ties in philosophy and for formal logic, to his general repudia- tion of philosophical tradition, to his strong anti- foundationalism, and of course to that priority noted earlier which he gave to practice over theory. On top of all that lie the more extreme uses for the vague in the religious contexts of mystical, or trans-marginal, experience, and in James's una- shamed references to the supranatural. Although Gavin is right to draw our attention to this complexity, it is possible to ap- proach it with a wish to clarify some of the inter-relationships involved rather than merely to stress the undoubted limits to clarification. Such an attitude would demonstrate rather less en- thusiasm for the appeal to the vague than Gavin has, but it is ar- guable whether it is less than James had. If Gavin's account might, for this reason, mislead some readers, there is neverthe- less in the body of the book much that is commendable and useful. It is concise, readable, accurate and stimulating.

University of Manchester Graham H. Bird

Prajfinatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art Richard Shusterman Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992 xii + 324 pp.

As Richard Shusterman says in the preface to his new book, "Pragmatist aesthetics began with John Dewey - and almost end- ed there" (p. ix). Indeed, Shusterman's book is to my knowledge the first explicit attempt, since Dewey, to devise a comprehensive aesthetics following the line of thought developed in Art as Ex-



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perience. (I say "explicit", because Nelson Goodman's work, in this as in other domains, seems to me to be arguably pragmatist in orientation, though Goodman does not describe it as such.) Appearing in the context of the current revival of interest in pragmatism generally, it strikes me as truer to Dewey's spirit than many other contributions to that revival.

Why return to that spirit to "rethink art"> In Part I of Prog- matist Aesthetics Shusterman argues that Deweyan pragmatism provides a "promising middle way" between an analytic tradition whose hegemony over philosophical circles is in the process of breaking down, for good reasons, and what have come to be called "continental" approaches, perhaps insufficiently "down-to- earth" for Anglo-American philosophers (p. 4). It offers an alter- native to the abstract argumentation and distance from the lived reality of art typical of traditional (analytic) aesthetics, and to the mandarin focus on "high" art, with the rejection of "popular forms of cultural expression," central to such theorists as Theo- dor Adorno. "Art, life, and popular culture," says Shusterman, "all suffer from these entrenched divisions." His chief aim is nei- ther analysis of our current conception of art nor the critique of culture on the basis of it, but the reconception of art "so as to enhance its role and appreciation; the ultimate goal is not knowledge but improved experience" (p. viii).

The aim of Art as Experience was, as its author put it, "to re- store continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience."1 The aesthetic aspect of experience is explained as "the clarified and intensified development of traits" - notably that of organic unity - "that belong to every complete experience" (AE 46). Art works are material embodiments of experience produced with the aim of exhibiting this aesthetic character, which in prin- ciple any activity can have.

Dewey contrasts this understanding with what he calls "the museum conception of art" (AE 6). The museum defines as art,



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objects physically removed from any functional context in daily life, setting them "apart from common experience" so that they can "serve as insignia of taste and certificates of special culture" marking the superiority of the dominating classes in capitalist society (AE 9). In the same way, modern aesthetic theory places art in a realm cut off from "association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement" (AE 3). But, according to Dewey, art would be of no importance for people if it really was as disconnected from the rest of life as the museum conception makes out. In other cultures, he holds, art has been an integral part of civic and religious life, as, for instance, in ancient Greece the Parthenon and tragic drama were. In our society, "the arts which today have the most vitality for the average person are things he does not take to be arts; for instance, the movie, jazzed music, the comic strip . . ." (AE 5-6).

That is, theories of art as autonomous, "disconnected from other modes of experiencing, are not inherent in the subject- matter" but have arisen "because of specifiable extraneous conditions." The factors that have both "glorified fine art by setting it upon a far-off pedestal" and by this means made it irrelevant to everyday experience "did not arise within the realm of art" (AE 6) but in the development of capitalism and its particular form of class hierarchy. Thus, according to Dewey, it is the very understanding of art characteristic of modern society that blocks our access to what art really is. To understand this, we must make the effort to look around, or underneath the "extraneous conditions" of social history, to discover the aesthetic "in the raw" (AE 4).

In his able exposition of Dewey's views Shusterman fails to note the way in which Dewey, despite his insistence on understanding the modern conception of art in relation to the development of the society that gave birth to it, follows the chief convention of the aesthetic theorizing he criticizes in construct- ing a theory of art in abstraction from historical specificity. In



Book Reviews 483

fact, the idea of art as a cross-cultural, transhistorical phenome- non, on which Dewey's own account depends, is a product and part of the museum culture he castigates as an obstruction to aesthetic theory. Given his fundamental acceptance of this ahis- torical conception of art, it is not surprising that Dewey follows the tradition of aesthetics in discovering art among the Greeks and "primitive" peoples, embedded in what the moderns have characteristically imagined to be unified cultures, doomed to be rent by capitalist modernity into the fragments of art, science, and morality: a unity which it was the goal of pragmatist aesthetics to help reconstitute. ("In the degree to which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity" [AE 81].)

Shusterman distances himself from Dewey's essentialism about art, but lauds him for the naturalism that discovers the roots of art in biological functions shared even with animals. If somehow natural, art may well be a cultural universal. Thus Shusterman fs critical account of philosophical aesthetics (in his Chapter 2) follows the familiar pattern from Plato to the present, despite his often-stated recognition of the historical specificity of art as a modern social practice. Unlike Dewey, Shusterman does consider the objection that the extension of aesthetic experience beyond the socio-historical confines of the practice of art is far from obvious. Yet, he says, to argue that there could be no aesthetic experience before the concept of the aesthetic developed in the eighteenth century, as a part of the practice of art, would be "like arguing that no one suffered from appendicitis before the malady was so diagnosed and labeled" (p. 48).

To say this, however, is to attempt precisely the naturalization of the aesthetic that the argument Shusterman is replying to wishes to challenge. The "natural" status of appendicitis itself can be questioned; but even from a hyper-Foucauldian point of view art and the aesthetic must be recognized as essentially cultural categories in a way that appendicitis isn't. It is true that in a wide variety of cultures people have (for instance) cared to deco-



484 Book Reviews

rate their bodies and other objects, thus demonstrating an interest in how things look; but to identify this interest with the modern concept of aesthetic experience, defined in terms of the per se perceptual, is unwarranted by what information we have about how other cultures have construed it, and gainsaid by the enormous effort required, in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to produce the new experience alongside the institution of art (in fact, on pp. 48-9 Shusterman continues the passage I've been discussing by admitting as much).

Shusterman is on more interesting as well as more plausible ground when he asserts that, "even granting that aesthetic experience's emergence was historically dependent on the modern ev- olution of the concept and practice of art, this in no way entails that it remains wholly circumscribed by that practice today" (p. 48). Indeed, the main effort of his book, to which its second part is largely devoted, is to suggest the value and plausibility of a transformation of the concept of art. This is looked for, not so much in a transformation of the understanding of fine or "high" art, as in a radical revaluation of the status of the popular or "low" arts.

The distinction drawn between these is criticized by Shuster- man as both expressing and reinforcing "societal and personal fragmentation" (p. 170). Not only is high art (please imagine in- verted commas in all further uses of such expressions) held, as Dewey said, apart from real relevance to actual life. Popular art, "exiled from aesthetic respectability and acceptance in our artistic tradition, ... is deprived of the artistic care and control that could render it more aesthetically satisfying and sensitive." Thus we are left doubly impoverished, "between the stiflingly mori- bund artificiality of the high and the dehumanizing dull primiti- vism [sic] of the popular" (pp. 167-8). Shusterman 's idea is that challenging the distinction, by way of the legitimation of the popular, can provide a cultural base for "art's liberation and rein- tegration into the praxis of everyday life" (p. 145).

Popular art, for instance, violates the anti-somatic bias inherent



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in traditional aesthetics, which conceives of the making and the appreciation of art as fundamentally spiritual, not bodily, experiences. For this reason critics of popular culture like Adorno "are loath to recognize that there are humanly worthy and aesthetically rewarding activities other than intellectual exertion," and as a result mistakenly think of participants in popular culture as pas- sive. But, as typical modes of consumption of rock music make obvious, there are "somatic forms of effort, resistance, and satis- faction" (pp. 183-4). In understanding such practices as dancing and singing along as modes of aesthetic experience, alongside the quiet contemplation demanded by the culture of the museum and conceit hall, the intellectualist bias against bodily knowledge typical of philosophy since Plato is effectively challenged, and art's area of contact with the range of experiences that constitutes daily life is expanded.

Questioning the premise "that art and real life can and should be essentially opposed and separated," Shusterman asks, "why should this view be accepted?" (p. 194). We might as well ask why the view that the state has the right to regulate the affairs of the citizenry should be accepted (or why in an earlier age the king should get to tell everybody what to do). To propose, for example, that political power be exercised by workers' councils or other forms of popular democracy would be not to extend le- gitimacy to these forms but to deligitimate the existing mode of social organization. Similarly, to abandon the idea of art's autonomy would require the construction of an entirely different model of creative production and reception than that embodied in the complex ideological, institutional, and practical matter that goes by the name of "art."

In fact, it seems to me, it is the social-historical force of this category that explains Shusterman 's attempt to "legitimate" popular culture by assimilating it - by reference to such virtues as formal complexity, structural unity, and semantic sophistication - to high art. Symptomatically, in this very effort the repressed critique of popular art returns. Just as Dewey characterized the



486 Book Reviews

mass entertainments in which he found a vitality missing from museum culture as "cheap and vulgar" (AE 6) so Shusterman speaks of the "sensational events and low entertainment that al- ienated modern life typically provides" (p. 159). In his defense of popular culture against the criticism of the Frankfurt School, he insists on its variety and inventiveness. But in a chapter on rap, studied in detail as an example of pop music's aesthetic le- gitimacy, he often enough contrasts hip-hop with "the prepack- aged and wearily familiar" material that constitutes the popular music norm.

What Shusterman in fact defends is not "low art" but certain objects within that domain, objects that can, because of their formal and semantic properties, be described as meeting demands of high aesthetics. A given object from the low domain, that is, can function in the higher sphere; just as, of course, a piece of fine art, like the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh's Sunflowers, can be ab- sorbed into popular culture. This is possible because these domains are not really defined by the objects in them, but by the ideological uses to which the objects are put. Essential to the idea of the "autonomy" of high art is not just the liberation of the arts from their former social functions but their (conceptual) separation from the so-called mundane life under the sway of ec- onomic interest - the "everyday life" vaguely contrasted, in aesthetic theory, with autonomous art - that the bourgeois in reality shares with his and her social inferiors, apart from those mo- ments devoted to the detachment necessary to the aesthetic attitude. That the legitimation of objects within the domain of low culture may, as Shusterman demonstrates, also be used to expand the terms of art theory does not change the basic state of affairs. To take his favorite example, the incorporation of somatic experience into aesthetics as a mode of appreciation, long ago enacted by the avant-garde (for example, in Happenings), is today far from disruptive, given the disappearance of the derogation of physical effort in the age of executive exercise salons.

The social definition of high art depends upon its so-called au-



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tonomy, that is, on its utilization within a special domain marked out by a particular set of institutions and practices. Popular culture, in contrast, typically rests explicitly on the functionality of its objects throughout the range of lived experience - their use as reminders of particular experiences, for instance, or, more generally, as elements of an "image bank" to be raided for whatever bits and pieces may be useful for the construction of modes of sensibility and action. I think, as a matter of fact, that much experience of high art is of this popular type, and does not take the form of the detached aesthetic appreciation demanded by the official institution; but this is not to deny the distinction, a so- cially functional one, between the two categories.

As Shusterman notes, approvingly, the dichotomy of high and low has been reproduced within popular culture, as in the claim to the status of artist made by some of the rappers he discusses, which echoes earlier pop claims to non-commercial "authentici- ty." At the same time a matching trend has been visible in the world of high art, namely the assimilation of art to entertainment and the adoption by artists of the persona of pop-cultural stars. The great pioneer in this development was Andy Warhol (himself one of the first promoters of "art-rock"), but the 1980s saw a generalization of his example, made possible not only by the vast expansion of the public presence of art but in particular by the utilization of art as one more field for speculation in that decade of debt-fuelled boom. While the market has cooled considerably in recent years, it seems evident that the practice of art, as codi- fied by aesthetic institutions and theory in the course of the nineteenth century, is undergoing a great historical mutation. Shusterman's book, I believe, like the 1991 "High-Low" exhibi- tion at New York's Museum of Modern Art, is in part a re- sponse to this situation, as to the development of commercially successful ideologically anti-commercial music. So far, however, this process has not led to a transcendence of the high-low dichotomy, both because of the real differences in production and consumption of products within the two domains, and because



488 Book Reviews

the dassificatory terms remain those of the older practice of art (as, for instance, can be seen in Shusterman's attempt to "legitimate" popular music by demonstrating its formal similarities to high art).

The idea of high art, in fact, needs the contrast with low; the assimilation of elements of twentieth-century commercial culture into the category of art has so far provided a way to deal with the reality of contemporary experience that still maintains the su- perior value of art (even while expanding its domain). The differ- ence between high and low culture cannot be overcome by theory: these name not illusions but real social institutions. In real life the domination and shame that fuel the anger in rap are as repressive as ever. To put it another way, the high/low dichotomy marks not, as Shusterman would have it, a cultural problem, but is essential to the culture of present-day class society. One can only sympathize with the egalitarian intentions of pragmatist aesthetics, as practiced by Dewey and Shusterman. Their realiza- tion, however, requires not the reconstitution of the (imaginary) lost organic community of which art was once supposed to provide a model but, in the first place, open recognition of the real differences in social interest to which such categories as "high art" and "popular culture" give expression.

Adelphi University Paul Mattick, Jr.

NOTE

1. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1980), p. 3; further page references to this book will be given in the text after AE.



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Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Artby Richard Shusterman