The Future of Beauty

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The Future of Beauty


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The Future of Beauty

in Theatre, Literature and the Arts

Edited by

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS


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The Future of Beauty in Theatre, Literature and the Arts, edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe

This book first published 2005 by

Cambridge Scholars Press

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright 2005 Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 1-904303-59-5


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CONTENTS

Chapter One: John Danvers,

In Beauty I Walk: Beauty, Nature and the Visual Arts ........................................1

Chapter Two: Jos Manuel Marrero Henrquez,Poetics of Beauty in a Virtual Millenium............................................................12

Chapter Three: Amy Ione

Is Plato's Philosophy Relevant Today?

Mimesis to Virtual Reality ..................................................................................18

Chapter Four: Maurizio Vito

Does Beauty have a future?.................................................................................32

Chapter Five: Marcus Verhaegh

A Defense of Kants Beauty Centered Account of Art .......................................45

Chapter Six: Steve Mason

On Fractal Logic, and the Fractal Aesthetic ........................................................70

Chapter Seven: Harold Schweizer

The Future of the Aesthetic in the Particular:Reflections on Elizabeth Bishop's Poem..........................................................91

Chapter Eight: Brian Martin

Corporal Affairs: French Military Fiction

and Masculine Beauty, 1870-1918 ....................................................................103

Chapter Nine: Jennifer Walden

Its extraordinary, how beautiful your skin is ...............................................123

Chapter Ten: Yana Meerzon

Hamlet as Beauty ..............................................................................................131

Chapter Eleven: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe,

The Future of Beauty in Theatre .......................................................................146

Chapter Twelve: Sreenath Nair

Saundarya: the Concept of Beauty in Indian Aesthetics....................................154


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Contentsvi

List of Contributors ...........................................................................................164

Index..................................................................................................................167


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection of essays took its origins as a workshop / panel at the 7 th

International Conference of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European

Ideas), held in Bergen, Norway, in August 2000. Ione, Verhaegh, Mason, Nair and

Gritzner wrote their chapters specially for the book. Harold Schweizers essay WithSabbath Eyes: The Particular and the Claims of History in Elizabeth Bishops

Poemwas previously published inJournal of Modern Literature28. 2 (Summer

2005).


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INTRODUCTION

Much of what is going on in the arts and in literature is not what I would call

beautiful. I find the heritage of realism and naturalism of the 19th century

problematic if it inspires yet another delving into the abyss of human

psychopathology. To argue with German theatre director Grndgens: it is

eminently easy to write, direct, and perform in such a way that it is ugly, or that it

causes a scandal. Grndgens words about the theatre are true also for the other arts

and literature. This is a personal, subjective view, and there is a problem here,

which boils down to the catch phrase beauty is in the eyes of the beholder:

beauty is somehow intangible, very subjective, beyond objective (and that means,scientific) means of gaining knowledge which dominate, and are thus favoured by,the current (western) mind-set.

This mind-set, however, shows indications of change: in the booming debate on

human consciousness, for example, an Internet-based seminar, extending over two

weeks, and generating some 500 pages of text in printout, was specifically devoted

to establishing ways of dealing scientifically with the subjective realm of the

emotions, and there is basic research into neurophysiological correlates of beauty

(i.e., changes of neurophysiological parameters when a subject is shown pictures

deemed beautiful or not by the experimenters). Research has also shown thatregarding the beauty of faces, universal patterns seem to exist: statistically

speaking, we tend to agree overall whether a face shown to us at random is

beautiful or not, independent of our own age, gender, race, culture, etc., or that ofthe individuals on the photos.

Common sense would suggest that although beauty is predominantly associated

with things we see, it is not limited to that one sense, or sensual experience

altogether. We may well describe sounds as beautiful (classical music, for

example), or the smell or taste of a favourite meal, or the touch of a specific fabric.

For some of those, most languages have developed more sense-specific terms, sucha delicious for taste, but the ultimate characteristic implied by those terms is the

same. Intellectual stimulation can be called beautiful, or the creative acts, say, of

writing a paper, a poem, or play, or of composing, painting, etc. Beyond all those

manifest objects of beauty, Plato would locate the form of beauty, beauty as such.

It is beauty itself, of itself, with itself, uniform, and of eternal being. All

expressions of beauty have part in this form of beauty, and all expressions of

beauty exist to enable the direct experience of the form of beauty, as the ultimate

goal. Is Platos philosophy relevant for us today, does it have a role in the future?

The majority of chapters in this book are based on papers presented at theseventh international conference of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of

European Ideas), held in Bergen in August 2000. The remit of the panel on The


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Introduction ix

Future of Beauty in the Arts and Literature was to provide a broad basis for a

thorough reassessment of the European traditions of beauty in the arts (fine arts,

performing arts, media arts), and in literature, not as a return to some distant, and

allegedly ideal past, but as a constructive means of realising the potential of the

arts for the 21st century.

John Danvers considers beauty as a mode of engagement, a function of a

particular kind of relationship between subject and object, rather than as a qualityinherent in particular objects or as a transcendent ideal. His paper comprises two

parts: the first consists of notes about beauty grounded in the processes and

structures of experience, perception and nature; the second, employs a more poetic

discourse to explore similar territory. Instead of stepping back from beauty to

define or categorise it, Danvers tries to explore qualities of beauty from a close

vantage point. In a small way he suggests a revisioning of beauty as a mode ofbeing and doing, rather than as an aesthetic category, or mode of passive reception.

This reconfiguring of the meanings of beauty and the beautiful should be seen as

arising from his reflections as an art practitioner rather than as a theoretician.

Jos Manuel Marrero Henriquez provides a brief survey of ideas about

beauty from Plato via the Romantics to G.M. Hopkins, concluding that there

should be a new place for beauty in discussing literature, enabled by approaches

that acknowledge that beauty may never be measurable through scientific

procedures. Amy Ione takes the discussion of Plato further: she first engages with

the question of why, despite his own artistry, Plato questioned the value of artisticcontributions. The discussion then counterpoints Platos view with contemporary

art projects that deal with beauty, emotion, illusory reality and other forms ofdeception. Widening the debate to include not only Plato but also Kant, Maurizio

Vito first of all provides a very short background about beauty in Platonic and

Kantian philosophy; he then draws some extreme consequences of that history as it

developed over the last century, understood from an aesthetical viewpoint. On that

basis Vito examines some changes beauty has assumed according to how three

modern artists (Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage) managed it;

this section deals with the peculiar features Music, Literature, and Paintingacquired in the last century, pointing out their new relationships with beauty, and

asks whether or not it survives. In his defence of the Kantian approach to art ,Marcus Verhaeghargues that good art must be beautiful art, in Kants sense of

the beautiful. His focus is twofold: showing the roominess involved in Kants

account of beauty; and suggesting that art which falls outside this extraordinarily

roomy conception will be tasteless, dull, and awful. This dual project leads him to

criticize readings of Kant that paint him as offering an overly-formalistic

aesthetics, such that a Kantian is left unable to explain the artistic value of works

that violate traditional Western expectation concerning proper sources of aestheticpleasure. He concludes that our positive aesthetic reactions to art-objects can


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Meyer-Dinkgrfex

always be considered to involve judgments of beauty, where this perspective upon

the reaction has a definite explanatory power, in that it places the function of art

within Kants general and quite powerful account of the proper uses of the

theoretical and moral faculties. Steven Mason describes the complexity of

enduring works of art in terms of their inherent fractality. Fractal logic is

epistemologically prior to general rationalization, insofar as it operates beyond

dichotomous semantics. Thus Mason posits fractal logic as a connexion ofnonlinear processes, a methodology, rather than a theoretical structure to which the

complexity of natural phenomena is readily attributed. The future of aesthetics, like

its past, is beset by the problem of presupposition. By exhibiting those

presuppositions inherent in its very discourse, we can at least begin to articulate

modes of aesthetical concepualization beyond dichotomous interpretation -

conceptualization that mirrors the very complexity found in other non/humanrealms. With Harald Schweizers essay, we move from the broad field of the fine

arts to literature. When the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote in one of

his aphorisms in Minima Moralia: The whole is the false (1974, 50), he

expressed his increasing disenchantment with the totalitarian claims of what he

called the moral terrorism of politically motivated art (1990, 98). No gaze

attains beauty, he adds in another aphorism, that is not accompanied by

indifference, indeed, almost by contempt, for all that lies outside the object

contemplated (1974,76). The particular object is dialectically opposed to all that

lies outside. All that lies outside is the whole that is false. Schweizerdemonstrates that Elizabeth Bishops aesthetic exemplifies both Adornos

scepticism about totalitarian claims and his advocacy for the particular object.

Brian Martin writes about the militarization of France between the Franco-

Prussian War in 1870 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, which

produced a new kind of uniform manhood, where every male citizen-soldier

possessed a strong muscular body and a fierce patriotic loyalty to his comrades and

nation. But this new military masculinity could neither protect the bodies of French

soldiers from the ravages of newer and deadlier technologies, nor prevent their

affections from developing into homosocial intimacies with their fellow soldiers.French literary representation from Zolas La Dbcle to Prousts Le Temps

retrouv confirms that militarization ironically brings the simultaneous

development of male beauty and destruction, masculine hatred and love. Attempts

to clothe the male body in the illusion of muscular strength will not prevent it from

mutilation and death. Similarly, many men who are trained to kill an enemy will

displace the horror of such violence onto the desire to love a comrade. Of course,

these lessons are not new; they can be traced in the French literary tradition back to

the twelfth-century Chanson de Roland, and in the Western literary tradition back

to the Iliad. But as the world enters a new period of global violence andmilitarization in this opening decade of the twenty-first century, these lessons and


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Introduction xi

texts demand repeating and rereading. If not, they will soon be echoed by future

texts on the destruction of life, beauty, and human relationships by new military

technologies and even more violent wars.

Jennifer Walden addresses beauty in film, with reference to touch displacing

vision in Alain ResnaisHiroshima mon Amour. Marguerite Duras, who wrote the

screenplay, stated in the scenario to the film, that one of its principal goals is to

have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by theJapanese themselves, but to make this horror rise again from its ashes by

incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and wonderful, one that

will be more credible than if it has occurred anywhere else in the world, a place

that death had notpreserved.

The final three chapters deal with beauty in theatre. Yana Meerzon focuses on two

aspects of the 1911 Moscow Art Theatres staging of Hamletdirected by GordonCraig, with Vasily Kachalov as Hamlet, as they came to be the defining

characteristics of the 1998 Peter SteinsHamlet, presented in Moscow with Evgeny

Mironov as the protagonist. In both productions, one at the beginning and the other

at the end of the 20th century, the directorial treatment of the literary text and

approach to the image of Hamlet reflect thedichotomy of Plato-Aristotelian views

on beauty in its aesthetic function as beauty of form, and in its ethic function as

beauty of good.Accordingly, Meerzon considers the aesthetic function of Hamlet

embodied in the notion of beauty of text, represented by visual effectsin its 1911

staging and by word as actionin the 1998 one, as Aristotelian. She associates theRussian ethic vision of the figure of Hamlet as a tormented, suffering intellectual,

going through a spiritual journey in order to set right the time that is out ofjoint, as Platonian. This Hamlets inner journey is the essence of the spiritual

beauty of each Hamlets stage figure discussed here, from Vasily Kachalov (1911)

to Evgeny Mironov (1998). Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe finally addresses general

issues concerning the future of beauty in the context of theatre, while Sreenath

Nair provides am analysis of the origin, development, understanding and

contemporary practice of the term Saundaryain Indian aesthetics.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. W. 1974. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life.

Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books.

---------. 1990. Commitment. In Literature in the Modern World. Ed. Dennis

Walder. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.


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CHAPTER ONE

JOHN DANVERS

INBEAUTYIWALK:BEAUTY,NATURE AND THE

VISUAL ARTS

INTRODUCTION

In this paper my approach is to consider beauty as a mode of engagement, a

function of a particular kind of relationship between subject and object, rather than

as a quality inherent in particular objects or as a transcendent ideal. The paper

comprises two parts: the first consists of notes about beauty grounded in theprocesses and structures of experience, perception and nature; the second, employs

a more poetic discourse to explore similar territory. Instead of stepping back from

beauty to define or categorise it, Im trying to explore qualities of beauty from a

close vantage point. In a small way Im suggesting a revisioning of beauty as a

mode of being and doing, rather than as an aesthetic category, or mode of passive

reception. This reconfiguring of the meanings of beauty and the beautiful should be

seen as arising from my reflections as an art practitioner rather than as a

theoretician.

PART I

I am very glad, said Aristo laughing, that at last you have come to the proper

conclusion and that you are satisfied to admire what at first you wanted to

understand. Take my advice, he added, and let us stop without saying anythingfurther about a thing which continues to exist only because no one can say what it

is Dominique Bouhours (in Kirwan 1993, 120)

The history of aesthetics is littered with attempts to rationalise and systematise

beauty. Most, if not all, have been either misguided or deeply flawed, usually

because they ignore the ineffable and concrete nature of beauty as an experience.

Likewise attempts to define beauty have ended in blind alleys, false certainty or

futility. Most of these attempts have grown out of a reductive search for a universal

constant or an essence which inevitably tends to reify beauty, freezing a fluid,complex and often fleeting experience.


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Chapter One2

Luc Ferry, inHomo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age

(1993, 40), emphasises the importance of the irrational and ineffable aspects of

beauty. He quotes Philanthe: the heart is more ingenious than the mind and

points to the importance of equivocal metaphors when discussing beauty. The

resistance of beauty to linguistic analysis is a recurring theme of Ferrys writing

and he frequently echoes Bouhours advice that we would do well to be satisfied to

admire what at first we wanted to understand. As Bouhours suggests, the veryexistence of beauty may depend on the fact that no one can say what it is (in

Kirwan, 1993, 120).

Developing these ideas of the indefinable nature of beauty James Kirwan

describes it as a kind of yearning without object, combined with a sense of

ineffable meaningfulness (1999, 47). Kirwan seems to be making a case for

beauty as a psychological state, a condition to which we are all prone. While wemay not agree with the romantic love-torn emphasis on yearning, the idea that

beauty is an ineffable and fleeting experience without a fixed object seems to me to

make sense and to avoid some of the problems associated with other analyses. For,

though it may be difficult and probably impossible to define beauty, there is no

doubt that we can, and do, experience it. And experiences of beauty can be

described, evoked and investigated. We can also acknowledge that the experiences

of what we call beauty are energising and revitalising, making us feel, however

briefly, more alive. These are moments of intense pleasure and vivacity. They have

autonomous value and they can be reclaimed, remembered and invoked in a waythat is enriching and sometimes poignant. Often there is an unpredictability to

experiences of beauty. They can rarely be predetermined let alone dictated. Wecant prescribe conditions or experiences of beauty, for ourselves or for others.

This mix of complexity, unpredictability and life-enhancing power contribute to

the significance of experiences of beauty, and it is not surprising that we celebrate,

attempt to engender and reflect on them through the making of art, philosophy,

literature and performance.

Instead of discussing the epistemological implications of beauty I propose to

explore some of its ontological qualities and related issues.

Beauty and Being

We have already established that whatever doubts surround particular

rationalisations or definitions of beauty most of us recognise certain kinds of

experience signified by the term. The presence of beauty as an experience or mode

of being is distinctive and memorable even if it is hard or even impossible to pindown. Indeed the experience of beauty could be considered as a non-linguistic or


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Danvers 3

pre-linguistic mode of being in the phenomenological sense, a concrete resonant

experience that is ineffable, evanescent and resistant to conceptualisation. As

Scarry puts it: Beauty causes us to gape and suspend all thought (in Nehamas

2000, 24). This resistance to objectification and analysis can lead to a sense of

otherness, and may account for the ideas and metaphors of transcendence often

introduced into discussions of beauty. Experientially beauty is often characterised

by, or associated with, a sense of well-being, coherence, wholeness, integration andvibrant equanimity, and in many cases with a feeling of expanded consciousness

and even liberation from ego or self. Nehamas comments: To find beauty where

one hadnt seen it before is to look at the world with new eyes, and that is an

expansion of the self (2000, 24). Our experience of beauty can involve what

Scarry calls a radical decentring.

It would be wrong to consider experiences of beauty as primarily aesthetic. Theexperience may, or may not, have an important aesthetic dimension, but it usually

comprises a multitude of meanings, sensations and ethical dispositions.

Experiences that are life-denying or detrimental to the quality of living are unlikely

to be constituent strands of the experience of beauty - which is fundamentally life-

enhancing. An aestheticism projected on to suffering or poverty, or that has no

moral dimension, should be distinguished from the view of beauty being explored

here.

Some individuals and cultures place particular emphasis on the path of beauty,

the cultivation of the experience of beauty as a way of healing, establishingwholeness and goodness, and dissolving the linguistic or conceptual boundaries

between self and non-self, observer and observed, subject and object. Many peoplein their experiencing of beauty have a sense of engagement and participation which

dissolves boundaries, a fleeting experience of undifferentiated unity. This quality

may account for the close association between descriptions of mystical

experience and the descriptive vocabularies of beauty and love.

The Way of Beauty

The Navaho place the way of beauty at the centre of their religious life. The

Night Chant(Rothenberg 1969, 81), one of the most important rituals of the year,

includes the following passage: In beauty I walk / With beauty before me I walk /

With beauty behind me I walk / With beauty above me I walk / With beauty above

& about me I walk / It is finished in beauty / It is finished in beauty. This is both a

poetic utterance ascribed to Bitahatini, The Visionary, (who was carried off by the

gods and returned with the rituals and songs that form the Night Chant), and a

statement of spiritual intent to walk the path of beauty and to cultivate theexperience of beauty, whether as a maker (of songs, dances, food or artefacts), as a


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Chapter One4

participant in ritual, or as an experiencing being in everyday life. We can trace a

connection here, in intention if not method or cultural context, with the ideas of

John Cage and Joseph Beuys to establish the sensibility of the artist as a mode of

living for everyone in everyday life. Certainly Cage and Beuys were great

proselytisers for the path of beauty, and both urged us to recognise the importance

of beauty (viewed in the way that Ive tried to describe here) for an enriched and

empowered life. Both artists pursued this egalitarian approach, and both werecritical of the exclusivity often associated with beauty as a special experience

closely linked to the taste of a social/cultural elite. In Cages view beauty can be

thought of in a more inclusive way as the experience of suchness (tathata),

things-in-themselves the beauty of the ordinary, the specialness of the everyday.

Yet always there is the question: are we talking about the experience of beauty

or the beauty of experience? Ultimately experiencing beauty may be synonymouswith experiencing being itself, something Euripides affirms: For only to be alive

and to see the light / Is beautiful. Only to see the light, / To see a blade of young

grass, / Or the grey face of a stone. (in Walker, 1988)

Beauty and Nature

Looked at from a slightly different angle the view of beauty being outlined here

suggests that the ultimate model or template for the beautiful is nature and itsconstituent processes. Cage, paraphrasing Coomaraswamy, suggests that the aim of

art is to approximate to Nature in her manner of operation. Beauty, as aparticular mode of engagement with reality, is probably wired into us in a

biological evolutionary sense. Our notions of what (or who!) is beautiful arise from

the evolutionary reproductive drive to find the best mate with whom to perpetuate

and strengthen our genetic line. It may be that this is a biological reason for the

close association between beauty and goodness or truth. This model of beauty is

rooted in the processes and imperatives of nature. Beauty in this sense is not a

decorative flourish but a fundamental experience upon which particular culturalideas and forms are built. The fact that experiences of beauty can arise in the most

unlikely of circumstances (eg. accounts of prisoners, of victims of war, poverty and

other catastrophes) suggests the centrality of these experiences to our lives. It

might not be an exaggeration to suggest experiences of beauty are important

drivers for living, beacons that light our lives and ensure our survival.


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Danvers 5

Beauty and the Beautiful

Particular attempts to define the beautiful in terms of characteristics or qualities

of objects are as doomed to failure as attempts to rationalise the experience of

beauty. If beauty is a kind of experiencing the function of a particular sort ofrelationship between subject and object, which, in its most intense form, burns

away this duality then it may not be dependent upon particular qualities of

objects. It is the quality of the mode of attention that is crucial, not the quality of

the thing or event in the world. This accounts for how we can develop our sensing

of beauty, how we can cultivate, expand and open out our experience, or,

conversely, how we can narrow it down. Without exercise of the mode of attentionour capacity to experience beauty can shrink and atrophy.

So what is the relationship between beauty and the beautiful, between

experiencing beauty and beauty objectified? First of all Im not sure beauty is, or

can be, objectified. Beautiful objects and events are objects and events

associated with experiences of beauty either because theyre considered as likely

to stimulate such experiences directly, or because theyre likely to evoke, echo or

bring to mind such experiences less directly (for instance by remembering them).

Or maybe the distinction should be between those objects that bring beauty to mind

(directly experienced, remembered or re-presented) and those that remind us ofmoments of beauty lost or no longer experienced. There are also those kinds of

objects/events that stimulate beauty in others, but not in us. Museums, theatres,galleries and concert halls are full of things that embody or stimulate experiences

of beauty for others and/or for ourselves.

Different cultures of beauty arise out of the infinite kinds of experiences of

beauty. Artefacts within these cultures are associated with these experiences and

become codified as objects of beauty, even though beauty as an experience

cannot be objectified. The confusion over this process of encultured objectification

leads to a false debate about competing qualities or characteristics ofobjects/events/artefacts, when a more productive debate would be about the

qualities of experience.

Moments of Beauty

A few examples are given below to illustrate the specificity of moments of

beauty embedded within a continuum of experiences.


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Chapter One6

Agnes Martinmakes work from a position as a classicist and idealist. These

paintings, in my experience, generate the kind of ineffable, vibrant resonance that

is symptomatic of beauty. With extremely reductive formalism, a narrow chromatic

range, and repetitious configurations of lines within a usually square pictorial field,

each painting invites an intense scrutiny that yields a rich array of sensations.

There is a surprising immediacy to the work. Our sensory systems are activated in

ways that belie the simplicity of means employed. I experience a kind of confusionof perception that precludes immediate conceptualisation. There is an excitation of

the senses accompanied by a sense of integration, coherence and fulfilment. It is

probably no coincidence that the paintings are almost unreproduceable. Martin

argues eloquently for an essentialist theory of transcendent beauty far removed

from the case Ive been making. She was very clear about her position: Classicists

are people that look out with their backs to the world.All art work is aboutbeautythe awareness of perfection. (Haskell 1992, 15) Of course there are many

who walk into a Martin show and wonder what all the fuss is about! Surrounded by

low-key variations on a not very interesting theme they are quickly bored,

perplexed and dissatisfied. The experience of beauty is not a function of the object

alone it is a vibrant manifestation of particular kinds of relationship and

interaction.

In Tree of Life (1977) Bill Viola illuminated an oak tree with a powerful

spotlight from late afternoon (when it was still light) until several hours after

sunset. This simple act of drawing attention to one tree out of many, on one day outof many - using a spotlight which has no noticeable effect while the sun is out, but

becomes a sun as it gets darker all around is recorded in a few memorablephotographs. We attend to the tree as if its on fire. Our peripheral awareness of the

abstract generality of trees is briefly replaced by a single entity. And the

illumination makes us aware of the tree as a field of energy and as an organic

processor of light. The image of the spotlighted tree has great beauty, as has the

idea of the event.

Anish Kapoormakes work that arises out of a distinctive fusion of Hinduism,

phenomenology and European modernism. The works have a tendency to induceperceptual disorientation, to challenge our sense of how we experience space and

to raise uneasy feelings of doubt about who we are, and how and what we know.

Kapoor makes use of many sculptural materials in conjunction with chromatically

saturated dry pigment. We approach dense fields of black or blue, unable to tell

whether we are gazing at a flat, concave or convex surface. Often, even close-to,

we cant make out if we are encountering a deep hole or a shallow depression. A

sense of vertigo often arises a powerful engagement with a void. The complex

interaction of sometimes ambivalent qualities and responses provides a rich

generative field within which experiences of beauty can arise.


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Danvers 7

In engaging with the very different works of Cage and Beuys we also

encounter experiential fields in which beauty arises, often unexpectedly. Within the

noisy indeterminacy of Cages Fontana Mix we can experience not only the beauty

of dissonance and diversity but also re-engage with the wider auditory environment

in a revitalised manner. Likewise many of the drawings of Beuys give rise to a

beauty of fragmentation, a scratchy kind of beauty that is in stark contrast to the

experience of a work by Martin or Kapoor. And even in photographic form actionsby Beuys can generate great beauty out of a concatenation of ideas, aspirations,

materials, iconic and symbolic forms, deployed in surprising but convincing ways.

Then again there are those who only experience ugly noise in Cage, and histrionic

melodrama in Beuys. The artists only provide a field of potentiality within which

we may, or may not, experience beauty.

PART II

In Other Words

Empty & Uncertain Dust in the Light

Were not certainties or absolutes

were conditional, improvised,

speculative fields

fluid streams

a dance of

perception, cognition &

representation

appearances in space

inscribed with history

a continuum

of might bes

experience the world

encode that experience

in the world, grounded,

making sense,

making ourselves,

we are smudges

in a shimmering field


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Chapter One8

the object is never, is always

certainty is never always

we are always, never

art inhabits self

weaving & unravelling identity

making, composing

scattering

moments of beauty

the physicist is where

beauty happens

in charged atoms of insight

ideas & regimes

changes in perspective & rationality

small histories of seeing

- all cast shadows

& obscure what light there is

look at experience

experience experience

feel gentle chaos

experience is pure, is dumb wisdom

world is Lila

& we are mirageson the horizon


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Danvers 9

of mind

agents of self

trading words

one minute of stars

- a lifetime of wonder

small dazzle of butterflies

left Neruda dazed

naming, naming is always

too much

drift nets lost

in a sea of verbs

forget names, find beauty

naming maiming

Meng Chaio wrote:

beauty too close

will ruin your

life

Kevin Spacey in American Beauty

showed us how

yet to aspire

to beauty

is to meet the world

on easy terms

Cage realised he couldnt change

the world but he could

change his outlook on theworld


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Chapter One10

practice this alchemy

& know delight

what can we say of being?only that we are, and that it feels

like this

fleeting metaphors of unfolding

there is a necessity to beauty

commonplace moments

ebb & flow of mind

self-contained transparency of passing ecstasy

foggy morning & burning bush

& yet in unknowing

is revelation

& there can be no possession

& no dissection

Hume speaks of being blind but sure

what is beautiful strikes me

I cannot grasp itor predict it

in mind out of thoughtthere is what is before

it is somethingelse


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Danvers 11

we all aspire to the condition of light

beauty is empty-handed being

or being

empty-handed

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ferry, L. 1993.Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Haskell, B. 1992. Agnes Martin. New York: Whitney Museum of AmericanArt/Abrams.

Kirwan, J. 1999.Beauty. Manchester: Manchester University PressNehamas, A. 2000.Not Rocket Science, London Review of Books, Vol. 22 No. 12,

22 June 2000

Rothenberg, J. 1969. Technicians of the Sacred. New York: Anchor Books.

Scarry, E. 1999. On Beauty and Being Just, reviewed in Nehamas, A. 2000. Not

Rocket Science, London Review of Books, Vol. 22 No. 12, 22 June 2000

Walker, R. 1988. Painters in the Australian Landscape. Sydney: Hale and

Iremonger Pty Ltd.


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CHAPTER TWO

JOS MANUEL MARRERO HENRQUEZ

POETICS OF BEAUTY IN A VIRTUAL MILLENIUM

The idea that the true nature of art is intransitive and non instrumental has

dominated in modern criticism and theory. Carried to its extreme, this conceptionof art allowed Valry to relate poetry to dancing and prose to walking, forwalking, like prose, has a definite aim, [...] it is an act directed at something wewish to reach, while dancing is a secondary use of [...] movement [that] admits ofan infinite number of creations and variations of figures (1958, 70).Considerations similar to these are behind the analytical procedures of the Russianformalists and of the American new critics, and they have formed the base to createa science of literature in which the first postulation is always the same: poeticalfunction is the one that calls attention to the message, as Tzvetan Todorov hasalready pointed out (1982).

Lyrical poetry is considered the most literary and artistic of the genres ofliterature as a consequence of the decay of the Aristotelian conception of art thatkept mimesis as a fundamental reason to have tragedy as the best and mostexemplary of the genres until the emergence of Romanticism. Renaissance andBaroque efforts of scholars such as Minturno, Escaligero or Cascales to introduce anon-mimetic genre as lyrical poetry within Aristotles Poetics ended updiminishing the power of mimesis to justify what makes a text artistic. On the wayto consider art as an expression of a subject and as a sublime experience, mimeticcriteria lost its authority. Grard Genette (1982) and, most recently, GustavoGuerrero (1998) have shown with great clarity this process of forcedmisinterpretation of AristotlesPoetics.

During the 18th century a new conception of literariness began to dominate.John Dennis, for example, in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry(1704), classifiedthe most elevated poetry in the epic, the tragic and the great lyrical, and erasedcenturies of Aristotelianism when he affirmed that a poet ought to contrive everything in order to the moving of Passion, that not only the Fable, the Incidents andCharacters, but the very Sentiments and Expressions, ought all to be designed forthat (1999, 338). And a few years later, Joseph Trapp, in his Lectures on Poetry

(1711), affirmed, as to the Nature of the Lyrical Poem, it is, of all kinds of Poetry,


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the most poetical, and is as distinct, both in Style and Thought from the rest, asPoetry in general is from Prose (1711, 303).

By the end of the 18thcentury, and with the complicity of one of the ancients,Longinus On the Sublime(first century A.D.), this new conception of literarinessis so powerful that it will become necessary to justify, not the lyrical poetry, butthe Aristotelian theory, for, as William Jones pointed out in On the ArtsCommonly Called Imitative (1772) the assertion of Aristotle that all poetryconsists in imitation [...] has been so frequently echoed from author to author, thatit would seem a kind of arrogance to controvert it (1777, 191). From King Davidto Petrach, Jones considered that the true poetry had always been an expression of

passions, that the true poetry had always been lyrical, for the finest parts ofpoetry, music and painting are expressiveof thepassionsand operate on our mindsby sympathy [...and] the inferieurs parts of them are descriptiveof natural objectsand affects us chiefly by substitution (1777, 207). Romantic subjectivityexpressing its passions gave way to a new conception of literariness in which theexpression found a reason to be in its own right. By stressing the interplay of wordswithin the page, the subject was left behind, and the text became an autonomousobject of art. Stphane Mallarm, for example, broke with Romantic expressivismand he was also far from considering poetry as imitation. Reality was in the poemitself, it may exist in a piece of paper. Beyond the author, lyrical poetry ledthrough French symbolism to the contemporary idea of the objective nature of the

poem in much of the twentieth-century criticism.Far from the subject, far from reality, literature has ended up forming a reality

apart from reality, a virtual reality, and one more virtuality among the virtualrealities humankind has been surrounding itself with. Jean Baudrillard hascommented on this cultural situation as an emptying process of the referentialcontents of the images, from the image that reflects a basic reality to the image thatbears no relation to any reality whatever: [the image that...] is its own puresimulacrum (1988, 170). Reality is at stake, affirms Baudrillard, and abstractionis no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept [...] it is the

generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal (1988, 166).It is necessary to preserve the abstractions magic to save reality from oblivion.

For it is the difference between the real and the simulation models what forms thepoetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and thecharm of the real (1988, 166-67). In a hyperreal environment, reality and poetryneed each other to exist, and bringing the Platonic idea of Beauty back into literarycriticism clearly contributes to the survival of both.

Perception of Beauty in literature is not a solipsistic act, it depends to a largeextent on the emotive, referential and utilitarian aspects of everyday languages and

lives, and it was no frivolity that Plato in his Hipias Major linked the idea ofBeauty to the idea of Good, and also to the idea of Will. A worthy space to


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transitivity as an aesthetic category should be open. Entering a new millennium,full of virtual realities, the deep values shaping both Classical rhetoric and theHumanist idea that grew from it deserve the intent.

If literature is linked to Beauty, its analysis and interpretations have to take intoaccount not only styles, figures and generic structures, but also moral,

psychological, ideological, historical, political and sentimental factors, all of themdifficult to measure, but without doubt bearers of aesthetic meaning. Theconfluence of agents that take part in the perception of Beauty is so overwhelmingthat Socrates himself failed to define it.

TheHipias Majordialogue enhances the Socratic search of the idea of Beautythat is present in all things that are perceived as beautiful. But after a long andsubtle conversation, no conclusion is reached; rather, the proverb all that is

beautiful is difficult is brought to light. That is the result of the inquisition aboutBeauty.

Located at the end of the Hipias Major, such proverb is not a simpleconsolation, nor is it a frivolous way of hiding an obvious failure, but praise of thewill that any person wishing to reach a certain grade of excellence must have.

Will is also one of the basic topics in The Symposio, where it appears under thename of Love. Love is the impulse toward the perpetual possession of Good, animpulse different from its own finality but, at the same time, and in the light of

Hipias Major, part of it. For in Love there are involved intellectual and spiritual

motives that are far away from the mere physical beauty of things, and close to thebeauty that exists in sublime activities, institutions, feelings and ideas.

Will (or Love) is the impulse, and Beauty (or Good) its final goal. Will is thereflection of Beauty that is in any human being that is seriously engaged in theapprehension of the Ideas. Apprehending and searching are beautiful actions withethical and moral consequences, for they contribute to the healthy development oftheRepublic.

In 1865 G. M. Hopkins wrote a platonic dialogue devoted to the idea of Beauty.Here it is not a proverb that forms the resigned final solution to the enigma. In

contrast to Socrates, the master in Hopkins dialogue succeeds in describing someof the characteristics of the beautiful objects of nature and the arts. Features suchas numerical symmetry of elements, or gradation in colours, define Beauty. Themaster goes on from symmetry to regularity, from regularity to irregularity andtheir combination, to conclude that Beauty results in a relation, and its perceptionimplies the apprehension of a comparison. In brief, Beauty involves the idea ofelements in harmony in the frame of a composition.

However, none of the speakers in the dialogue is satisfied with the abstractionsthat the master uses to expose what the nature of Beauty and the conditions of its

perception are. Criticism, particularly that of poetry, cannot be judicial --degustibus non est disputandum-- nor should it be reduced by logic or common sense.


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Marrero 15

There is a plus, a mystical plus located beyond poetry considered as amathematical thing, measured by compasses, that keeps awaitingcomprehension. Questioned about this plus, the master calls the attention of thespeakers to the tea, and all of them enter to have a cup. That is the end of thedialogue. This plus keeps reverberating as an interrogation. Hopkins called itmystical, but it could have also been called lyrical, transcendent,symbolic; and, if following Socrates moral approach to Beauty, it could havealso been called engaged, social or realist.

If related to the nature and perception of Beauty, Valrys opposition betweendancing and walking, poetry and prose, Jones opposition between thesuperior expression of passions that operates by sympathy and the inferiordescription of natural objects that operates by substitution, Mallarms opposition

between the piece of paper and the world, and the oppositions between thewords mystical, lyrical, transcendent, symbolic, poetical and the wordsmaterialist, comic, determinist, realist, prosaic vanish. Perception ofBeauty in literature is influenced by such a multitude of factors and of such variedand obscure affiliations, that any literary criticism with scientific goals has no otherchoice than to ignore Beauty or dump it in a dark shed with all that offersresistance to be measured.

As a beautiful experience, the experience of literature is an inexplicablephenomenon, far more complex than any intent to reduce it to any mystical,

structural, symbolic, realist or engag approach. Lyrical experience of literatureitself is beyond the so called lyrical genres and the structural and stylistics featuresof lyricism. And social experience of literature is beyond the narrative genres andthe structural and stylistic features of Realism. As much as it is an obstacle to anyscientific enquiry about literature, Beauty is also an obstacle to any theory ofinterpretation that bases the literary prestige of texts exclusively on their higheranagogical interpretations. Reasons enough had Socrates to link the idea of Beautyin the forms of handicrafts, nature, feelings and institutions to the idea of Good,and also to the ideas of Will and Love.

Nothing should be an obstacle in reorienting literary criticism to the possibilityof opening an honourable space to transitivity as an aesthetic category. For in anywriting there is an aesthetic motivation that can be understood as the unavoidabletransitivity by means of which writing refers to itself while referring to the world.It could also be affirmed that in writing there is nothing but transitivity, a directone, the one that by saying of the world says of itself, and an indirect one, the onethat by saying of itself says of the world. It could even be affirmed, taken suchcontradiction to an extreme, that whenever a text says more of itself it is sayingmore of the world, and when it says more of the world, more it is saying of itself.

At orienting the message on the emissary letting the receiver know about him,poetical function cannot avoid being emotive, nor can it avoid being connative


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Chapter Two16

when orienting the message on the receiver implying him in the message, norreferential, when orienting the message on the reality, nor phatic, when orientingthe message on the canal of transmission (purifying it of noises), normetalinguistic, when orienting the message on the code to clarify its peculiar rules.If poetic function is understood this beautiful way, criticism, that can do little morethan concentrating its attention on the text, has no obligation to dissociate languagefrom its human condition to satisfy the necessity of having an object of linguisticresearch, nor has it to assume such a plain consideration of literature that makes ofthe texts not objects of beauty, consolation, pleasure, commitment, evasion ormeditation, but lab entities or bones to apply carbon-14 dating.

Beauty and Will are unstable concepts and both have been ruled out of theworks that intend to determine textual and human behaviours. But if being humanis a linguistic condition more than a biological or zoological one, Beauty and Willmust go hand in hand in an aesthetics of transitivity, since transitivity meanscritically linking literature with its human condition to constantly remind thatlanguage, once emptied of its human content, is merely senseless jangle in a void.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristteles. 1981.El Arte Potica. Mxico: Espasa Calpe.Baudrillard, J. 1988. Selected Writings. Poster, Mark (ed.). California:

Stanford University Press.Dennis, J. 1939. Critical Works. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press.Genette, G. 1982.Figures of Literary Discourse. New York: Columbia University

Press.Guerrero, G. 1998. Teoras de la lrica. Mxico: Fondo de Cultura Econmica.Hopkins, G. M. 1985. On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue.Poems and

Prose. London: Penguin Books, 92-104.Jones, W. 1777. On the Arts Commonly Called Imitative. Poems Consisting

Chiefly of Translations from Asiatick Languages. London: W. Boyer and J.Nichols.

Mallarm, S. 1956. The Book: A Spiritual Instrument.Mallarm: selected Prose,Poems, Essays, and Letters. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press.

Platn. 1986.Dilogos I. Apologa. Critn. Eutifrn. In. Lisis. Crmides. HipiasMenor. Hipias Mayor. Laques. Protgoras.Madrid: Editorial Gredos.

---. 1989.Dilogos III. Fedn, Banquete, Fedro.Madrid: Editorial Gredos.Todorov, T. 1982. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca and London: Cornell University

Press.Trapp, J. 1747.Lectures on Poetry. London: Printed for C. Hitch and C. Davis


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Valry, P. 1958. The Collected Works of Paul Valry. Vol. vii. Princeton:Princeton University Press.


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CHAPTER THREE

AMY IONE

IS PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY RELEVANT TODAY?

MIMESIS TO VIRTUAL REALITY

[i]f one attempted to belittle the arts by saying that, in creating, they imitate nature,the answer should be that . . . the arts create many things by themselves. Where

something is lacking, they supply it, because they own beauty.

Plotinus, The Enneads(Plotinus, 1991, V: 8. 1)

PLATO'S VIEW OF ART

The late dean of art history, E.H. Gombrich began his last book, The Preference

for the Primitive, with the thought:

The well-known dictum by the philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead, that the whole

history of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to the writings of Plato,

applies with special force to the philosophy of the arts . . . [Plato believed that] art

can only flatter and deceive the senses and seduce the mind to feed on phantoms.

(2001, 11)

Gombrich's words are particularly thought provoking when we consider whether

Plato is relevant today. Popular culture abounds with references to Plato's writings,

elevating connections far beyond the philosophy of the arts per se. Paralleling thetwo domains it is worth noting that contemporary testaments to Plato's influence

have a propensity to misrepresent some of his primary philosophical concerns. For

example, in the early 1990s Dan Sandin, Thomas DeFanti, and Carolina Cruz-

Neira introduced an immersive environment technology they termed the CAVE.

Their 1993 article "A Room with a View," explains that the CAVE acronym,which stands for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, is intended as an illusion to

the Allegory of the Cave found in Plato's Republic. According to this article, "the

Greek philosopher explored the ideas of perception, reality, and illusion using the

analogy of a person facing the back of a cave alive with shadows that are his onlybasis for his ideas of what real objects are." (Sandin 2001, 268). Their summation,

Documents

The Future of Beauty