Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Roger W. H. Savage
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
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
II
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
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
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.