164 Philosophy and Literature

Roger W. H. Savage

CRITICISM, IMAGINATION AND THE

SUBJECTIVIZATION OF AESTHETICS

T he growing discontent with reductivist practices signals a new

current in contemporary criticism’s understanding of music, litera-
ture and art. George Levine’s unease with critics who are unable or
unwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with literary
texts they expose as “imperialist, sexist, homophobic and racist” illu-
mines the contradiction fueling the reduction of aesthetics to ideology.1
Cultural studies that deploy literature as evidence of the aesthetics’
socio-historical substance mask literature’s capacity to break open new
perspectives on reality by assuming that literary works are politically
complicit with the aesthetics’ strategic “mystification of the status quo”
(A&I, p. 3). Criticism’s indifference to its philosophical presupposi-
tions exacerbates the paradox of denouncing a body of works that
constitute criticism’s aesthetic and intellectual heritage. According to
Mario Valdés, literary studies’ coming of age mandates that criticism
take account of a tradition nurtured by a succession of philosophers
including Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.2 For Valdés, the
post-structuralist realization that literary texts are indeterminate and
inexhaustible prohibits replacing the work of art with critical commen-
taries on it; criticism’s collective and determining role belongs to a
shared community of commentary whose history and thought is a
record of the changing interpretations and understandings of literary
texts’ meanings.

Philosophy and Literature, © 2005, 29: 164–179

 Roger W. H. Savage 165

Valdés’s claim extends to the field of contemporary music criticism,

where the fashion of denouncing aesthetics as socially pernicious turns
against traditional musicology’s institutional authority. By demystifying
absolute music (instrumental music devoid of programmatic associa-
tions), a self-proclaimed critical musicology revolts against traditional
musicology’s perceived political and ideological agenda. Critical musi-
cology militates against the aesthetic conceit that absolute music
transcends its social construction. Yet, by overlooking the philosophical
presuppositions that set music’s autonomy against practical affairs, new
musicology accedes to the schema it recoils against.
The tradition nurtured by Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics
and Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology represents a critical cur-
rent whose significance has been overshadowed by postmodernist
investments in decoding music’s social and political content. Gadamer’s
critique of the subjectivization of aesthetics and Ricoeur’s meditations
on the imagination’s capacity for invention offer an alternative to
contemporary music criticism’s reaction against the principle of music’s
aesthetic autonomy. Gadamer and Ricoeur question art’s formal separa-
tion from reality, which belongs to the history of Kant’s radical
subjectivization of aesthetics. Gadamer’s critique of art’s aesthetic
differentiation prepares the ground for revealing how socially informed
analyses conform to the schema Kant initiates by divorcing judgments
of taste from their surrounding cultural ethos. Gadamer argues that, by
discrediting theoretical knowledge that does not rely on the methodol-
ogy of the natural sciences, the transcendental function Kant ascribes
to aesthetic judgment lays the foundation for differentiating between
art’s aesthetic constitution and a concept of truth that accommodates
the standard of the natural sciences. Through reducing the “sensus
communis to a subjective principle,” Kant legitimates his critique of
aesthetic judgments by denying taste any importance as a mode of
knowledge.3
Ricoeur’s hermeneutical reflections on imagination complement
Gadamer’s critique of a differentiating consciousness that abstracts art
works from their cultural worlds. For Ricoeur, imagination is productive
when the fictions that works create affect our understanding of
ourselves and our world by re-describing reality. Aesthetics’ alignment
with ideology encounters a limit in the power works evince by unfold-
ing different ways of seeing or hearing reality. Ricoeur’s reflections on
imagination stand in stark contrast to the idea that individual works
represent a form of cultural capital in the struggle for social position
166 Philosophy and Literature

and power. Contemporary critical practices’ failure to account for the

philosophical separation of judgments of taste from knowledge of
reality precipitates the impasse criticism encounters when it identifies
aesthetics with ideology at the expense of a work’s capacity to affect
reality in productive ways. The dispersal and potential disappearance of
music’s aesthetic character into the recesses of cultural and political
analysis keeps step with the conceptual narrowing imposed by a
restrictive sociological critique. Demystifying music’s ideological repre-
sentations of gender, race and identity purges romantic and formalist
ideals through denigrating the aesthetic. By contracting aesthetics and
ideology, interpretive strategies that intend to free music criticism from
the pretense of music’s aesthetic autonomy turn against the power of
imagination exercised in individual works.
The recoil against the idea of music’s transcendent nature conceals
criticism’s dependence upon the history that frames art’s and music’s
opposition to reality. Critiques of music’s role in advancing the cultural
prestige of socially privileged individuals and groups unmask its func-
tion as a weapon in the struggle for social position. Yet, by deconstructing
this opposition without interrogating the schema of Kant’s subjectivi-
zation of aesthetics, such critiques impede the recovery of an under-
standing of the aesthetic beyond the destruction of its romantic and
formalist conceptualizations. Gadamer’s critique of the subjectivization
of aesthetics and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of judgment rejoin cultural
criticism’s condemnation of art’s and music’s socially instituted au-
tonomy. Music criticism receives a new impetus by engaging this
philosophical heritage. Through carrying critique beyond the paradox
of condemning as ideologically pernicious works that enlarge our self-
understandings, this heritage offers criticism a different vantage-point
from which to understand how, by inserting themselves in new cultural
situations, individual works broaden our horizons.

I
Levine’s discontent with the current literary scene and Valdés’s
discomfort with critique’s indifference to its own philosophical presup-
positions motivates the search for the history that informs contempo-
rary music criticism’s understanding of its object. By denouncing the
modernist myth of the purely musical work of art, postmodern musi-
cologists such as Susan McClary and Lawrence Kramer combat tradi-
tional musicology’s isolation of works as aesthetically autonomous
 Roger W. H. Savage 167

through contextualizing analyses that reveal music’s ideological con-

tent. For these critical musicologists, the illusion of music’s self-
sufficiency masks absolute music’s social and political content. Hence,
they deconstruct the myth of music’s aesthetic autonomy by drawing
correspondences between music’s formal features and these features’
socially constructed meanings.
By locating music’s meaning in the social world that produces it,
McClary’s deconstruction of absolute music’s master narrative identifies
tonality and the sonata form with a patriarchal and imperialist political
program. When, for the sake of preserving his own identity, the
masculine theme that McClary argues is semiotically marked subjugates
the feminine Other, absolute music enacts this political agenda. By
uncovering the master narrative coded within the semblance of pure
music, this deconstructive critique excises the aesthetic by means of a
social semiology of gender.4
Through reducing aesthetics to ideology, criticism recoils against the
principle of autonomy consecrated by the formalist concept of a
musical work, only to lose itself in the detours of socio-political critique.
Deconstructing the myth of music’s aesthetic autonomy shatters the
illusion of pure music’s transcendence to reveal music’s socially con-
structed content within its historical context. Critiques that oppose the
contingency of a work’s socio-historical production to formalist concep-
tions of music’s essential value intend to uncover a work’s social make-
up. Yet, by denouncing as ideologically deleterious works that com-
mand critical attention, critique falls short of interrogating the condition
of a work’s capacity to affect reality.
The suspicion that legitimizes these critical strategies operates at the
expense of the hermeneutical autonomy exercised by singular works.
Distrust of the aesthetic’s ideological complicity aligns critique with the
task of unmasking music’s hegemonic representations of gender,
sexuality, and the exotic Other. Through capitalizing on the concept of
transcendence enshrined in the ideal of music’s formal self-sufficiency,
criticism deconstructs art’s isolation from reality. By opposing music’s
substantive worldly content to this outmoded ideal, criticism paradoxi-
cally preserves and even justifies the schema of music’s aesthetic
autonomy. Consequently, critique consigns itself to the desert of end-
less ideological “unmaskings” through denouncing music’s autonomy
as a function of its social emancipation, thereby inverting the schema of
aesthetic appearances and real material conditions on which both
criticism and instrumental music’s aesthetic autonomy depend.
168 Philosophy and Literature

The blind spot of critical practices that take their bearing from the
opposition they denounce elicits an aporia that indicts criticism for its
failed self-reflexivity. By taking the contrast between music’s aesthetic
appearance and social reality as its point of departure, critique recoils
against the claim of music’s aesthetic autonomy without questioning
Kant’s departure from the humanist tradition, in which judgments of
taste relate to moral or civic interests in the common good. Denounc-
ing art’s separation from reality without interrogating the effects of
Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics severs criticism from the productive
potential it seeks when claiming that individual works contest a given
social order. By accepting the doxy of art’s ideological character,
criticism conceals its philosophical presuppositions and thus blinds
itself to the limitations imposed by the theory of art’s social imitation.
Criticism encounters this blind spot when, through reproaching
music’s and art’s reduction to ideological coordinates, it intends to
rescue the aesthetic from its disappearance into the recesses of cultural
and political analysis by seeking the aesthetic’s positive social value.
Levine pleads for a more imaginative view of the aesthetics as a mode of
conduct and expression that operates differently from other modes of
social practice and “contributes in distinctive ways to the possibilities of
human fulfillment and connection” by creatively engaging moral and
political issues (A&I, p. 3). Terry Eagleton, too, argues for the necessity
of a productive, as well as a critical, view of aesthetics. The mystifying
“escape from or sublimation of unpalatable necessity” that legitimates
the cultural separation of processes of fantasy and pleasure from the
fulfillment of material wants constitutes one of the aesthetic’s func-
tions.5 Through realizing possibilities for creative self-making, the
phenomenon of culture also offers “a prefigurative image of a social
condition in which such pleasurable creativity might become available
in principle to all” (IotA, p. 411). According to Eagleton, the “imagina-
tive reconstruction of our current practices” is indispensable to avoid-
ing the amalgam of disillusionment and sterile utopianisms that afflicts
the Frankfurt school critical theorists, and especially Theodor Adorno’s
relentless negative dialectical strategy (IotA, p. 407). As a critique of
alienation, and an exemplary realization of our creative powers in
proposing an ideal reconciliation beyond the divisions of subject and
object, individual and society, and freedom and necessity, Eagleton
argues that the aesthetic can combat the political’s postmodern
aestheticizations by means of its own inherently contradictory nature.
Hence for him, the aesthetic functions negatively as a means of
 Roger W. H. Savage 169

sublimating social inequities and injustices, and operates positively by

prefiguring alternatives to existing social conditions. The aesthetics’
valorization blocks the aesthetics’ rescue from the confines of social
and political analysis by concealing its dependence upon a conflicted
concept of a work’s autonomy. The paradox that music’s emancipation
from all social functions is itself a function of social conditions that
institute art’s separation from reality only constricts the impasse of the
aesthetics’ ideological and productive character.6 The charge that
music’s autonomy and aesthetic self-sufficiency is socially constructed
solidifies the dilemma on which sociologically oriented criticism
founders. Carl Dahlhaus argues that, with the exception of those few
individuals who adhere to a rigorous aesthetic Platonism, no one would
deny the “relative” autonomy of an art form that also performs social
and socio-psychological functions. Consequently, he regards proceed-
ing from the aesthetics of autonomy as the basis for musical analysis to
be of greater scholarly use than permitting oneself to be misled by the
concept of autonomy’s social origins. Nevertheless, by acknowledging
that the “autonomy principle itself can be interpreted sociologically,”
Dahlhaus concedes that artificial music—instrumental music liberated
from its servitude to both a social function and the principle of
imitation—is a function of socio-historical developments and hence
remains ineluctably conditioned by them.7 Attributing music’s au-
tonomy to its social emancipation indicts the paradox of the aesthetics’
productive derivation. Hence, through reducing aesthetics to ideology,
criticism entrenches the impasse that blocks the true recovery of a
creatively productive understanding of the aesthetic and of the herme-
neutic autonomy of individual works.
The claim that music, literature and art reproduce ideological
meanings and prefigure alternatives sharpens the contradiction be-
tween denouncing a work’s semblance of autonomy and retrieving the
possibility that individual works manifest a creatively productive mo-
ment by transgressing the limits of a given social order. Calls to temper
criticism of the aesthetic with some measure of a work’s autonomy mark
the growing resistance among critics to renounce the aesthetic as a
separate sphere.8 Yet, so long as the concept of a work’s autonomy
remains bound to the structure of art’s separation from reality, attempts
to renew the aesthetic fall short of gaining insight into the power of
imagination exercised within individual works.
170 Philosophy and Literature

II

Contemporary music criticism’s confrontation with traditional musi-

cology deepens the dilemma of a critical riposte that intends to recover
the aesthetics’ productive value by denouncing art’s aesthetic isolation.
Critical strategies that identify a work’s meaning with an ideological
content invert modernist schema of the self-positing subject, founda-
tionalist epistemologies, and aesthetic transcendence. Formalist pre-
cepts justify tearing works from their worlds; critical musicology intends
to rectify this methodological abstraction by reinserting works in the
life-contexts from which formalism forcibly extracts them. By confront-
ing traditional musicology’s methodological violence with the ideologi-
cally constructed character of discursive social practices, critical musi-
cology seeks its justification in the idea that all knowledge is relative to
the disciplinary practices that produce it and in which it circulates. The
destruction of traditional musicology’s idols (Götzendämmerung) cen-
sures traditional musicology’s resistance to “radically anti-foundationalist,
anti-essentialist, and anti-totalizing”9 postmodern strategies. By pro-
claiming a “musicology of the future” where criticism “responsibly seeks
to situate musical experience within the densely compacted, concretely
situated worlds of those who compose, perform and listen,” Lawrence
Kramer positions critique in opposition to formalist insistence on
studying and analyzing individual works apart from their social contexts
(MotF, p. 10). Despite its ethical and political posturing, this “musicol-
ogy of the future” preserves the effects of the subjectivization of
aesthetics’ through reversing music’s separation from reality.
By reducing aesthetics to ideology, music criticism’s complicity with
the schema Kant inaugurates prescinds the imagination’s productive
capacity. Levine’s concern that denouncing the aesthetic brands imagi-
nation as delusive rather than liberating argues against a verdict that
finds “all individual acts of imagination determined by larger constrict-
ing social systems” (A&I, p. 21). For him, “however thoroughly ab-
sorbed into dominant ideological formations the aesthetic has been, it
has always served also as a potentially disruptive force, one that opens
up possibilities of value resistant to any dominant political power”
(A&I, p. 15). Through citing the danger art presents to totalitarian
regimes as evidence of the aesthetics’ liberatory quality, he argues
against aesthetics’ relegation to the byways of cultural studies. As part of
a discourse of value, the aesthetics’ fragile freedom as a utopian
plenipotentiary authorizes “the exploration of possibilities in ways
 Roger W. H. Savage 171

[that] no other modality” of human activity or praxis endorses (A&I, p.

20). Yet, as the closest approximation to a free choice within the field of
options society creates and delimits, the aesthetics’ libratory force
continues to derive its justification from the schema in which, in the
nineteenth century, art and reality part ways.
The idea that absolute music transcends reality consummates an
understanding that derives from a history extending from Kant’s
radical subjectivization of aesthetics to Schiller’s proclamation that “art
is practice of freedom” (TaM, p. 82). Kant’s justification of taste’s
subjective universality augurs the aesthetics’ isolation as a sphere of
freedom divorced from the exigencies of social and political life.
Gadamer argues that, in discrediting theoretical knowledge that did
not rely on the methodology of the natural sciences, the transcendental
function Kant ascribes to aesthetic judgment lays the foundation for
differentiating between art’s aesthetic constitution, and conceptual
knowledge and truth. Gadamer explains that, according to Vico, “what
gives the human will its direction is not the abstract universality of
reason but the concrete universality represented by the community of a
group, a people, a nation, the whole human race” (TaM, p. 21). When,
in obviating the moral and political tradition behind the concept of
sensus communis, Kant discovers the principle of a subjective relation-
ship in the feeling of aesthetic pleasure, he contrasts the universality of
pure aesthetic judgments with taste’s specific contents. Hence Gadamer
concludes that, although Kant retains a connection between taste and
sociability, Kant’s transcendental intention excludes the specific con-
tents of judgments bearing concretely on the existence of particular
historical communities, thereby laying the philosophical cornerstone
for art’s isolation as aesthetically autonomous.
The myth of autonomy that critical musicologists deconstruct be-
longs to the history of Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics. The differ-
ence between aesthetic objects and their sustaining life contexts
conforms to concepts of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience that
methodologically isolate aesthetic culture from a knowledge of reality
dominated by science’s epistemological model. By transforming the
transcendental idea of taste into a moral demand, and by formulating
that demand as an imperative—“Live aesthetically!”—Schiller invests
Kant’s radical subjectivization of aesthetics with a new anthropological
content (TaM, p. 82). In proclaiming art to be the practice of freedom,
and aesthetic education to be the end of the play impulse, Schiller
founds art’s autonomous standpoint in contrast to reality. Gadamer
172 Philosophy and Literature

remarks that the idea of aesthetic cultivation we derive from Schiller

“consists precisely in precluding any criterion of content and in
dissociating the work of art from its world” (TaM, p. 85). By codifying
this distinction between art and reality, the ideal of aesthetic cultivation
and the process of abstraction on which it depends institutes the work
of art and the experience of it as functions of aesthetic consciousness.
Music’s social institution as an aesthetic entity confirms the schema
imposed by the subjectivization of aesthetics’ history. As a function of
the contrast between art as “beautiful appearance” and everyday
practices, the process of abstracting works from their supporting life
contexts justifies the ideal of a cultured society, whose concept of
aesthetic cultivation prepares for an aesthetic education. This educa-
tion to art consummates art’s separation from reality by sanctifying an
aesthetic state of freedom. Gadamer justly identifies art’s transfiguring
sheen, which elevates cultivated individuals into this state of freedom,
with the sovereign exercise of aesthetic consciousness. In seeking its
“own self-consciousness against the prose of alienated reality,” the
poetry of aesthetic reconciliation consecrates the disintegration of the
process whereby one rises above one’s private interests (TaM, p. 83). By
differentiating between the aesthetic sphere and an alien world of
moral interests, political struggles, and economic exigencies, this
sovereign consciousness elevates the artist’s task while placing an
impossible burden on art. In the nineteenth century, the demand for a
new mythology and new symbols that would gather a public and create
particular communities by uniting cultured individuals, charges art
with achieving a measure of redemption “for which an unsaved world
hopes” (TaM, p. 88). Since in cultured society “every artist finds his own
community,” aesthetic culture serves to unite alienated individuals only
in the universal form of the aesthetic (TaM, p. 88). The process of
cultivation (Bildung) responsible for taste’s and the sensus communis’s
moral and political import becomes the handmaiden of aesthetic
consciousness, turning aesthetic culture toward art’s symbolic value as a
form of capital in the struggle for social domination. The fight for
social position and power consumes aesthetic culture by converting art
into a form of symbolic capital. The disintegration and fragmentation
of the social bond evinced by this universal form of the aesthetic
therefore prefigures the struggle to capitalize on the aesthetic and to
impose the legitimate definition of art and music as a means of
positioning and strategically advancing oneself socially.
As a means of marking and enforcing social distinctions, the cult of
 Roger W. H. Savage 173

Bildung and the aestheticism of art for art’s sake ratifies the social
process of disintegration instituted by aesthetic culture’s rise to domi-
nance. Pierre Bourdieu’s diagnosis illuminates how, by reversing the
logic of economics, music’s aesthetic quality disguises its real value as an
instrument of social violence. According to him, music “represents the
most radical and most absolute form of the negation of the world, and
especially the social world, which the bourgeois ethos tends to demand
of all forms of art.”10 An exemplary refuge for the cultivation and
development of self-interest that masquerades as gratuitous, disinter-
ested activity, music and musical practices disguise how self-cultivation
functions as a strategy in accumulating social prestige. The invention of
the “pure” aesthetic gaze devoid of ulterior social interests, the con-
struction of the aesthetic, and the concept of a work’s aesthetic
autonomy conceal how the struggle to impose legitimate definitions of
art and truth constitutes a form of symbolic violence. By removing itself
from the demands of a life of labor by means of this social fiat, the
realm of freedom that distinguishes cultural life from practical necessi-
ties masks the aesthetic’s strategic position within the struggle for social
advancement. Bourdieu argues that the “detachment of the pure gaze
cannot be dissociated from a general disposition towards the world
which is the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economic
necessities—a life of ease—that tends to induce an active distance from
necessity.”11 As a weapon in the struggle for position and power, music,
like art, is therefore the “gentle, hidden form which violence takes
when overt violence is impossible.”12
Bourdieu’s diagnosis of music’s value as a symbolically misrecognized
form of capital explodes the pretense of an aesthetic entity isolated
from the wants and necessities of practical reality. Yet, by identifying a
work’s autonomy with the struggle for position and power, this social
analysis presupposes the schema inaugurated by Kant’s critique of
aesthetic judgment. Bourdieu’s science of art’s social representation
highlights how the “belief in the value of the work . . . is part of the full
reality of the work of art” (FoCP, p. 36). Art’s institution as an object of
contemplation anchors the production of this belief, and the constitu-
tion of a differentiating consciousness “capable of considering the work
of art in and for itself” in the history of the subjectivization of aesthetics
(FoCP, p. 36). The creation of private and public galleries and muse-
ums, and the rise of a corps of professionals appointed to preserve and
maintain art works, is a function of the process of differentiation that
marks the advent of aesthetic consciousness. The economic world’s
174 Philosophy and Literature

reversal therefore preserves the effects of Kant’s transcendental justifi-

cation of the judgment of taste at the root of Bourdieu’s diagnoses of
the field of cultural production.

III
Preserving these effects justifies Valdés’s and Levine’s misgivings with
criticism’s indifference to the history on which it feeds. By framing
criticism’s recoil against formalist dogma, the schema Kant inaugurated
dominates criticism’s combative stance. Through defying the method-
ological violence of analyses that rips work from their cultural contexts,
critical musicology seeks to restore a significance systematically ignored
by formalist approaches.13 Yet, by breaking the methodological shackles
of formalist analysis without breaking this schema’s conceptual hold,
criticism perpetuates the regimen of music’s separation from reality
and thereby ratifies the struggle in which cultural works serve as
weapons in the fight for social position and social advancement.
Through countermanding the pretense of a work’s self-legislating
authority, criticism consequently adopts a political posture that con-
forms to the process of social disintegration that, Gadamer argues,
stems from taste’s abstraction from moral and civic interests. The
justification criticism derives from unseating formalist conceits blinds
criticism to its own position. The escape from reality that Hannah
Arendt argues “gave the physiognomy of the cultural or educated
philistine its most distinctive marks,”14 necessitates analyses of how, in
the “fight for social position, culture began to play an enormous role as
one of the weapons, if not the best-suited one, to advance oneself
socially, and to ‘educate oneself’ out of the lower regions, where
supposedly reality was located, up into the higher, non-real regions,
where beauty and the spirit supposedly were at home” (BP&F, p. 202).
Yet, by ratifying aesthetics’ constriction to ideology through confining a
work’s transcendence of reality to the illusory region of dissembling
ideological representations, criticism abandons itself to the detours of
socio-historical explanations of a work’s genesis and meaning.
Singular works surpass the circumstances that condition their cre-
ation when, through confronting us with the task of understanding
what they say, they address us in new contexts and situations. By
drawing upon Ricoeur’s insight into the reader’s appropriation of the
world that a literary text unfolds, Valdés argues that in the light of the
text’s redescription of reality, it “becomes clear that understanding
 Roger W. H. Savage 175

must be self-understanding, that the truth of the text is in fact the truth
of ourselves” (PH&SoL, p. 68). Our experiences of works therefore
contravene sociologically motivated critiques that combat the pretense
of aesthetic transcendence by subordinating the work’s capacity to
speak anew to socio-historical analyses. By seeking its normativity
through communicating a “fitting” solution to a problem, question, or
perplexity, a work’s exemplarity testifies to the power of thought and
imagination at work in exceeding its circumstances of production.15
Through prefiguring imaginative alternatives, works run ahead of
reality, thereby going beyond a given order from within the histories of
which they are a part. According to Ricoeur, a singular work achieves its
normativity “only in its capacity to communicate itself indefinitely to
others” (C&C, p. 181). This “communicability does not lie in applying
a rule to a case but in the fact that it is the case that summons its rule . . .
in rendering itself communicable” (C&C, p. 183). Consequently, the
work’s capacity to address us within the horizons of our experiences
shatters the convention of socio-historical contextualizations. Ricoeur
argues that if reflective judgment is to be reconciled with the rule of
practical reason, retrospective judgment cannot be allowed to preempt
or prescind reflective judgment’s prophetic dimension. Judgment
receives the full measure of its futurity when, through reconciling its
retrospective and prophetic dimensions with practical reason, it oper-
ates within our ethical or political projects. Expunging judgment’s
prophetic dimension marginalizes critique by abandoning it to the
search for a work’s ideological coordinates.16 Through escaping its
original horizons to broaden our own, a work evinces the point of
futurity that gives the paradox of a work’s singularity and its exemplarity
its depth. By inserting itself in the world, a work distances itself from
reality, thereby transcending reality from within.
The hermeneutical autonomy that works exercise by transgressing
and surpassing their social and historical circumstances attests to the
power of thought and imagination. Gadamer suggests that a work’s
aesthetic quality of formation does not distinguish the work as a mere
object of aesthetic and historical enjoyment, but is instead “only the
condition for the fact that the work bears its meaning within itself and
has something to say to us.”17 The autonomy he identifies with the
world that a work unfolds, and that Ricoeur attributes to a work’s
temporal configuration, distinguishes a work’s vehemence from the
aesthetics’ ideological narrowing.18 Socio-cultural analyses that deny
this vehemence subvert a critical understanding of a work’s power to
176 Philosophy and Literature

open new perspectives on the world. Ricoeur cautions that, by refusing

to confront the problem of the intersection of a work of art with reality,
and by regarding as irrelevant the question of literature’s impact on
life, we paradoxically ratify the positivist prejudice that “the real is the
given, such as it can be empirically observed and scientifically de-
scribed.”19 Through deconstructing the conceit of music’s self-sufficiency,
criticism turns against the culture of aestheticism by condemning the
pretense of a closed world of autonomous musical works. Yet, with the
denigration of the aesthetic, the conceptual constriction that obturates
the hermeneutical insight into a work’s capacity to productively affect
reality imposes on critique the prejudice that it struggles against.
This hermeneutical insight into the power works exercise through
contesting, subverting and refiguring the moral, cultural and social
order, does not preclude critique. On the contrary, critique is indis-
pensable to unmasking dissembling meanings that operate beneath the
sheen of a cultivated world of aesthetically autonomous works. Yet,
when criticism loses itself in its deconstructive detours, critique con-
tracts aesthetics and ideology. That works manifest prejudices, fears and
hatreds that we rightly denounce as unjust and unjustifiable makes
critique vital to any interpretation that discloses a work’s power to affect
our understandings of who we are through modulating and transfigur-
ing our outlooks on the world we inhabit and in which we act. However,
in acknowledging the power at work in reinforcing ideological preju-
dices, criticism is compelled to admit the possibility that a work’s
capacity to affect and refigure reality opens new horizons for experi-
ence and thought. The task of rescuing aesthetics from its critical
denigration, which Levine seeks by identifying the aesthetic with the
imaginative exploration of alternative possibilities, and which Eagleton
presupposes whenever art works creatively prefigure a reconciled
society, lies along the path of the hermeneutical critique of a work’s
aesthetic autonomy. For this hermeneutical critique, the power of
thought and imagination communicated by the singular “fit” that the
work exemplifies is the true measure of a work’s autonomy. This
hermeneutics does not countermand the role of critique. Rather, by
placing the properly historical question: What did the work say? under
the control of the hermeneutical question: What does the work say to us
and how do we respond to the claims it makes? this hermeneutics of
criticism recognizes that the critical detours necessary to uncovering
ideologically distorted representations do not exhaust the work’s capac-
ity to speak anew.
 Roger W. H. Savage 177

IV
The hermeneutical critique of the concept of the aesthetics’ ideo-
logical narrowing opens the way to recovering a productive understand-
ing of the work. Criticism’s indifference to its philosophical presuppo-
sitions, which Valdés argues impedes criticism’s ability to give an
accounting of the tradition that nurtures it, conceals the history of the
principle stemming from Kant’s radical subjectivization of aesthetics. By
acceding to the schema this history institutes, criticism perpetuates and
even deepens the impasse of denouncing aesthetics as ideologically
pernicious. That music and art function as forms of symbolic capital in
the fight for position and power delineates a struggle within the field of
cultural production. However, this diagnosis does not escape the
schema imposed by the subjectivization of aesthetics. Critiques that
denounce aesthetics as the refuge of a hidden social violence do not
extinguish the power of thought and imagination at work in individual
works. A hermeneutical concept of a work’s autonomy re-enervates
criticism’s engagement with individual works by retrieving a work’s
capacity to open new paths for thought and action from the aesthetics’
ideological constriction. The productive recovery of the aesthetic and
of the power works exercise in inventing, or discovering, imaginative
alternatives to the existing social, moral and political order indicates
the path of hermeneutically informed critical practices that recognize
their dependence on the artistic traditions and intellectual heritages in
which they participate. As critics, we can no more escape the effects of
the histories to which we belong than can works, authors and compos-
ers, readers and listeners. Criticism misunderstands the scope of its task
when, in laying bare imperialist, sexist, and racist constructions in
individual works, it reduces a work to an ideological matrix of preju-
dices and hatreds. The stubborn prejudice against aesthetics eclipses
the work’s hermeneutical autonomy. Critics who are either unable or
unwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with works
they censure as ideologically suspect only impede the critical recovery
of a work’s hermeneutic autonomy. New adventures await a criticism
that understands its encounter with cultural works as both a risk and a
wager, where the task of interpreting the work is as much a confronta-
tion with ourselves as it is a challenge to follow the work’s trail.

University of California, Los Angeles

178 Philosophy and Literature
1. George Levine, Aesthetics and Ideology (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p.
13. Hereafter A&I.
2. Mario J. Valdés, Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Literature (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1987), p. 7. Hereafter PH&SoL.
3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revised ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1989), p. 43. Hereafter
TaM.
4. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 53ff.; Susan McClary, “Narrative Agendas in ‘Absolute’
Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms’s Third Symphony,” in Musicology and
Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Musical Scholarship, Ruth Solie, ed. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993).
5. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 411.
Hereafter IotA.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of
Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1989); Peter Bürger, Theory of the
Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984);
see also Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 367ff.
7. Carl Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred
Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 238.
8. See Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 24ff., p. 371; see also Joel Garland, “The
Turn from the Aesthetic,” Current Musicology 58 (1995); Peter Brooks, “Aesthetics and
Ideology: What Happened to Poetics?” Critical Inquiry 20:3 (Spring 1994).
9. Lawrence Kramer, “The Musicology of the Future,” Repercussions 1:1 (1992): 5.
Hereafter MotF.
10. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 19.
11. Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 5; see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 264. Hereafter FoCP.
12. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 196; see p. 192.
13. See Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990); Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing
Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991); Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western
Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Gary Tomlinson, Music in
Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993); McClary, Feminine Endings; see also Susan McClary, “An Exercise in Mediation,”
Enclitic 7:1 (1983).
 Roger W. H. Savage 179
14. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 202.
Hereafter BP&F.
15. Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998), pp. 178ff; see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans.
Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984,
1985, 1988). Hereafter C&C.
16. See Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000), p. 108.
17. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976), p. 97.
18. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 110ff.; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, pp. 52ff.
19. Paul Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader, ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1991), p. 148.