Savage, Roger - Aesthetics

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164 Philosophy and Literature

Philosophy and Literature, 2005, 29: 164179

Roger W. H. Savage

CRITICISM, IMAGINATION AND THESUBJECTIVIZATION OF AESTHETICS

T

he growing discontent with reductivist practices signals a newcurrent in contemporary criticisms understanding of music, litera-

ture and art. George Levines unease with critics who are unable orunwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with literarytexts 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 aestheticssocio-historical substance mask literatures capacity to break open newperspectives on reality by assuming that literary works are politicallycomplicit with the aesthetics strategic mystification of the status quo

(A&I, p. 3). Criticisms indifference to its philosophical presupposi-tions exacerbates the paradox of denouncing a body of works thatconstitute criticisms aesthetic and intellectual heritage. According toMario Valds, literary studies coming of age mandates that criticismtake account of a tradition nurtured by a succession of philosophersincluding Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.2 For Valds, thepost-structuralist realization that literary texts are indeterminate andinexhaustible prohibits replacing the work of art with critical commen-

taries on it; criticisms collective and determining role belongs to ashared community of commentary whose history and thought is arecord of the changing interpretations and understandings of literarytexts meanings.


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165Roger W. H. Savage

Valdss claim extends to the field of contemporary music criticism,where the fashion of denouncing aesthetics as socially pernicious turnsagainst traditional musicologys institutional authority. By demystifying

absolute music (instrumental music devoid of programmatic associa-tions), a self-proclaimed critical musicology revolts against traditionalmusicologys perceived political and ideological agenda. Critical musi-cology militates against the aesthetic conceit that absolute musictranscends its social construction. Yet, by overlooking the philosophicalpresuppositions that set musics autonomy against practical affairs, newmusicology accedes to the schema it recoils against.

The tradition nurtured by Gadamers philosophical hermeneuticsand Ricoeurs hermeneutic phenomenology represents a critical cur-rent whose significance has been overshadowed by postmodernistinvestments in decoding musics social and political content. Gadamerscritique of the subjectivization of aesthetics and Ricoeurs meditationson the imaginations capacity for invention offer an alternative tocontemporary music criticisms reaction against the principle of musicsaesthetic autonomy. Gadamer and Ricoeur question arts formal separa-tion from reality, which belongs to the history of Kants radicalsubjectivization of aesthetics. Gadamers critique of arts aesthetic

differentiation prepares the ground for revealing how socially informedanalyses conform to the schema Kant initiates by divorcing judgmentsof taste from their surrounding cultural ethos. Gadamer argues that, bydiscrediting theoretical knowledge that does not rely on the methodol-ogy of the natural sciences, the transcendental function Kant ascribesto aesthetic judgment lays the foundation for differentiating betweenarts aesthetic constitution and a concept of truth that accommodatesthe standard of the natural sciences. Through reducing the sensus

communis to a subjective principle, Kant legitimates his critique ofaesthetic judgments by denying taste any importance as a mode ofknowledge.3

Ricoeurs hermeneutical reflections on imagination complementGadamers 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 ofourselves 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. Ricoeurs reflections onimagination stand in stark contrast to the idea that individual worksrepresent a form of cultural capital in the struggle for social position


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and power. Contemporary critical practices failure to account for thephilosophical separation of judgments of taste from knowledge ofreality precipitates the impasse criticism encounters when it identifies

aesthetics with ideology at the expense of a works capacity to affectreality in productive ways. The dispersal and potential disappearance ofmusics aesthetic character into the recesses of cultural and politicalanalysis keeps step with the conceptual narrowing imposed by arestrictive sociological critique. Demystifying musics ideological repre-sentations of gender, race and identity purges romantic and formalistideals through denigrating the aesthetic. By contracting aesthetics andideology, interpretive strategies that intend to free music criticism fromthe pretense of musics aesthetic autonomy turn against the power ofimagination exercised in individual works.

The recoil against the idea of musics transcendent nature concealscriticisms dependence upon the history that frames arts and musicsopposition to reality. Critiques of musics role in advancing the culturalprestige of socially privileged individuals and groups unmask its func-tion as a weapon in the struggle for social position. Yet, by deconstructingthis opposition without interrogating the schema of Kants subjectivi-zation of aesthetics, such critiques impede the recovery of an under-

standing of the aesthetic beyond the destruction of its romantic andformalist conceptualizations. Gadamers critique of the subjectivizationof aesthetics and Ricoeurs hermeneutics of judgment rejoin culturalcriticisms condemnation of arts and musics socially instituted au-tonomy. Music criticism receives a new impetus by engaging thisphilosophical heritage. Through carrying critique beyond the paradoxof 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 culturalsituations, individual works broaden our horizons.

I

Levines discontent with the current literary scene and Valdssdiscomfort with critiques indifference to its own philosophical presup-positions motivates the search for the history that informs contempo-

rary music criticisms understanding of its object. By denouncing themodernist myth of the purely musical work of art, postmodern musi-cologists such as Susan McClary and Lawrence Kramer combat tradi-tional musicologys isolation of works as aesthetically autonomous


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through contextualizing analyses that reveal musics ideological con-tent. For these critical musicologists, the illusion of musics self-sufficiency masks absolute musics social and political content. Hence,

they deconstruct the myth of musics aesthetic autonomy by drawingcorrespondences between musics formal features and these featuressocially constructed meanings.

By locating musics meaning in the social world that produces it,McClarys deconstruction of absolute musics master narrative identifiestonality and the sonata form with a patriarchal and imperialist politicalprogram. When, for the sake of preserving his own identity, themasculine theme that McClary argues is semiotically marked subjugatesthe feminine Other, absolute music enacts this political agenda. Byuncovering the master narrative coded within the semblance of puremusic, this deconstructive critique excises the aesthetic by means of asocial semiology of gender.4

Through reducing aesthetics to ideology, criticism recoils against theprinciple of autonomy consecrated by the formalist concept of amusical work, only to lose itself in the detours of socio-political critique.Deconstructing the myth of musics aesthetic autonomy shatters theillusion of pure musics transcendence to reveal musics socially con-

structed content within its historical context. Critiques that oppose thecontingency of a works socio-historical production to formalist concep-tions of musics essential value intend to uncover a works social make-up. Yet, by denouncing as ideologically deleterious works that com-mand critical attention, critique falls short of interrogating the conditionof a works capacity to affect reality.

The suspicion that legitimizes these critical strategies operates at theexpense of the hermeneutical autonomy exercised by singular works.

Distrust of the aesthetics ideological complicity aligns critique with thetask of unmasking musics hegemonic representations of gender,sexuality, and the exotic Other. Through capitalizing on the concept oftranscendence enshrined in the ideal of musics formal self-sufficiency,criticism deconstructs arts isolation from reality. By opposing musicssubstantive worldly content to this outmoded ideal, criticism paradoxi-cally preserves and even justifies the schema of musics aestheticautonomy. Consequently, critique consigns itself to the desert of end-

less ideological unmaskings through denouncing musics autonomyas a function of its social emancipation, thereby inverting the schema ofaesthetic appearances and real material conditions on which bothcriticism and instrumental musics aesthetic autonomy depend.


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The blind spot of critical practices that take their bearing from theopposition they denounce elicits an aporia that indicts criticism for itsfailed self-reflexivity. By taking the contrast between musics aesthetic

appearance and social reality as its point of departure, critique recoilsagainst the claim of musics aesthetic autonomy without questioningKants departure from the humanist tradition, in which judgments oftaste relate to moral or civic interests in the common good. Denounc-ing arts separation from reality without interrogating the effects ofKants subjectivization of aesthetics severs criticism from the productivepotential it seeks when claiming that individual works contest a givensocial order. By accepting the doxy of arts ideological character,criticism conceals its philosophical presuppositions and thus blindsitself to the limitations imposed by the theory of arts social imitation.

Criticism encounters this blind spot when, through reproachingmusics and arts reduction to ideological coordinates, it intends torescue the aesthetic from its disappearance into the recesses of culturaland political analysis by seeking the aesthetics positive social value.Levine pleads for a more imaginative view of the aesthetics as a mode ofconduct and expression that operates differently from other modes ofsocial practice and contributes in distinctive ways to the possibilities of

human fulfillment and connection by creatively engaging moral andpolitical issues (A&I, p. 3). Terry Eagleton, too, argues for the necessityof a productive, as well as a critical, view of aesthetics. The mystifyingescape from or sublimation of unpalatable necessity that legitimatesthe cultural separation of processes of fantasy and pleasure from thefulfillment of material wants constitutes one of the aesthetics func-tions.5 Through realizing possibilities for creative self-making, thephenomenon of culture also offers a prefigurative image of a social

condition in which such pleasurable creativity might become availablein 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 afflictsthe Frankfurt school critical theorists, and especially Theodor Adornosrelentless negative dialectical strategy (IotA, p. 407). As a critique ofalienation, and an exemplary realization of our creative powers inproposing an ideal reconciliation beyond the divisions of subject and

object, individual and society, and freedom and necessity, Eagletonargues that the aesthetic can combat the politicals postmodernaestheticizations by means of its own inherently contradictory nature.Hence for him, the aesthetic functions negatively as a means of


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sublimating social inequities and injustices, and operates positively byprefiguring 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 conflictedconcept of a works autonomy. The paradox that musics emancipationfrom all social functions is itself a function of social conditions thatinstitute arts separation from reality only constricts the impasse of theaesthetics ideological and productive character.6 The charge thatmusics autonomy and aesthetic self-sufficiency is socially constructedsolidifies the dilemma on which sociologically oriented criticismfounders. Carl Dahlhaus argues that, with the exception of those fewindividuals who adhere to a rigorous aesthetic Platonism, no one woulddeny the relative autonomy of an art form that also performs socialand socio-psychological functions. Consequently, he regards proceed-ing from the aesthetics of autonomy as the basis for musical analysis tobe of greater scholarly use than permitting oneself to be misled by theconcept of autonomys social origins. Nevertheless, by acknowledgingthat the autonomy principle itself can be interpreted sociologically,Dahlhaus concedes that artificial musicinstrumental music liberatedfrom its servitude to both a social function and the principle of

imitationis a function of socio-historical developments and henceremains ineluctably conditioned by them.7 Attributing musics au-tonomy to its social emancipation indicts the paradox of the aestheticsproductive derivation. Hence, through reducing aesthetics to ideology,criticism entrenches the impasse that blocks the true recovery of acreatively 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 works semblance of autonomy and retrieving thepossibility that individual works manifest a creatively productive mo-ment by transgressing the limits of a given social order. Calls to tempercriticism of the aesthetic with some measure of a works autonomy markthe growing resistance among critics to renounce the aesthetic as aseparate sphere.8 Yet, so long as the concept of a works autonomyremains bound to the structure of arts separation from reality, attempts

to renew the aesthetic fall short of gaining insight into the power ofimagination exercised within individual works.


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II

Contemporary music criticisms confrontation with traditional musi-

cology deepens the dilemma of a critical riposte that intends to recoverthe aesthetics productive value by denouncing arts aesthetic isolation.Critical strategies that identify a works meaning with an ideologicalcontent 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 intendsto rectify this methodological abstraction by reinserting works in thelife-contexts from which formalism forcibly extracts them. By confront-ing traditional musicologys 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 tothe disciplinary practices that produce it and in which it circulates. Thedestruction of traditional musicologys idols (Gtzendmmerung) cen-sures traditional musicologys resistance to radically anti-foundationalist,anti-essentialist, and anti-totalizing9 postmodern strategies. By pro-claiming a musicology of the future where criticism responsibly seeksto situate musical experience within the densely compacted, concretely

situated worlds of those who compose, perform and listen, LawrenceKramer positions critique in opposition to formalist insistence onstudying 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 ofaesthetics through reversing musics separation from reality.

By reducing aesthetics to ideology, music criticisms complicity withthe schema Kant inaugurates prescinds the imaginations productive

capacity. Levines concern that denouncing the aesthetic brands imagi-nation as delusive rather than liberating argues against a verdict thatfinds 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, ithas always served also as a potentially disruptive force, one that opensup 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 arguesagainst aesthetics relegation to the byways of cultural studies. As part ofa discourse of value, the aesthetics fragile freedom as a utopianplenipotentiary authorizes the exploration of possibilities in ways


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[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 ofoptions society creates and delimits, the aesthetics libratory force

continues to derive its justification from the schema in which, in thenineteenth century, art and reality part ways.The idea that absolute music transcends reality consummates an

understanding that derives from a history extending from Kantsradical subjectivization of aesthetics to Schillers proclamation that artis practice of freedom (TaM, p. 82). Kants justification of tastessubjective universality augurs the aesthetics isolation as a sphere offreedom divorced from the exigencies of social and political life.Gadamer argues that, in discrediting theoretical knowledge that didnot rely on the methodology of the natural sciences, the transcendentalfunction Kant ascribes to aesthetic judgment lays the foundation fordifferentiating between arts aesthetic constitution, and conceptualknowledge and truth. Gadamer explains that, according to Vico, whatgives the human will its direction is not the abstract universality ofreason but the concrete universality represented by the community of agroup, a people, a nation, the whole human race (TaM, p. 21). When,in obviating the moral and political tradition behind the concept ofsensus communis, Kant discovers the principle of a subjective relation-ship in the feeling of aesthetic pleasure, he contrasts the universality ofpure aesthetic judgments with tastes specific contents. Hence Gadamerconcludes that, although Kant retains a connection between taste andsociability, Kants transcendental intention excludes the specific con-tents of judgments bearing concretely on the existence of particularhistorical communities, thereby laying the philosophical cornerstonefor arts isolation as aesthetically autonomous.

The myth of autonomy that critical musicologists deconstruct be-longs to the history of Kants subjectivization of aesthetics. The differ-ence between aesthetic objects and their sustaining life contextsconforms to concepts of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience thatmethodologically isolate aesthetic culture from a knowledge of realitydominated by sciences epistemological model. By transforming thetranscendental idea of taste into a moral demand, and by formulatingthat demand as an imperativeLive aesthetically!Schiller invests

Kants radical subjectivization of aesthetics with a new anthropologicalcontent (TaM, p. 82). In proclaiming art to be the practice of freedom,and aesthetic education to be the end of the play impulse, Schillerfounds arts autonomous standpoint in contrast to reality. Gadamer


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remarks that the idea of aesthetic cultivation we derive from Schillerconsists precisely in precluding any criterion of content and indissociating the work of art from its world (TaM, p. 85). By codifying

this distinction between art and reality, the ideal of aesthetic cultivationand the process of abstraction on which it depends institutes the workof art and the experience of it as functions of aesthetic consciousness.

Musics social institution as an aesthetic entity confirms the schemaimposed by the subjectivization of aesthetics history. As a function ofthe contrast between art as beautiful appearance and everydaypractices, the process of abstracting works from their supporting lifecontexts justifies the ideal of a cultured society, whose concept ofaesthetic cultivation prepares for an aesthetic education. This educa-tion to art consummates arts separation from reality by sanctifying anaesthetic state of freedom. Gadamer justly identifies arts transfiguringsheen, which elevates cultivated individuals into this state of freedom,

with the sovereign exercise of aesthetic consciousness. In seeking itsown self-consciousness against the prose of alienated reality, thepoetry of aesthetic reconciliation consecrates the disintegration of theprocess whereby one rises above ones private interests (TaM, p. 83). Bydifferentiating between the aesthetic sphere and an alien world of

moral interests, political struggles, and economic exigencies, thissovereign consciousness elevates the artists task while placing animpossible burden on art. In the nineteenth century, the demand for anew mythology and new symbols that would gather a public and createparticular communities by uniting cultured individuals, charges art

with achieving a measure of redemption for which an unsaved worldhopes (TaM, p. 88). Since in cultured society every artist finds his owncommunity, aesthetic culture serves to unite alienated individuals only

in the universal form of the aesthetic (TaM, p. 88). The process ofcultivation (Bildung) responsible for tastes and the sensus communissmoral and political import becomes the handmaiden of aestheticconsciousness, turning aesthetic culture toward arts symbolic value as aform of capital in the struggle for social domination. The fight forsocial position and power consumes aesthetic culture by converting artinto a form of symbolic capital. The disintegration and fragmentationof the social bond evinced by this universal form of the aesthetic

therefore prefigures the struggle to capitalize on the aesthetic and toimpose the legitimate definition of art and music as a means ofpositioning and strategically advancing oneself socially.

As a means of marking and enforcing social distinctions, the cult of


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Bildung and the aestheticism of art for arts sake ratifies the socialprocess of disintegration instituted by aesthetic cultures rise to domi-nance. Pierre Bourdieus diagnosis illuminates how, by reversing the

logic of economics, musics aesthetic quality disguises its real value as aninstrument of social violence. According to him, music represents themost radical and most absolute form of the negation of the world, andespecially the social world, which the bourgeois ethos tends to demandof all forms of art.10 An exemplary refuge for the cultivation anddevelopment of self-interest that masquerades as gratuitous, disinter-ested activity, music and musical practices disguise how self-cultivationfunctions as a strategy in accumulating social prestige. The invention ofthe pure aesthetic gaze devoid of ulterior social interests, the con-struction of the aesthetic, and the concept of a works aestheticautonomy conceal how the struggle to impose legitimate definitions ofart and truth constitutes a form of symbolic violence. By removing itselffrom the demands of a life of labor by means of this social fiat, therealm of freedom that distinguishes cultural life from practical necessi-ties masks the aesthetics strategic position within the struggle for socialadvancement. Bourdieu argues that the detachment of the pure gazecannot be dissociated from a general disposition towards the world

which is the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economicnecessitiesa life of easethat tends to induce an active distance fromnecessity.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

Bourdieus diagnosis of musics value as a symbolically misrecognizedform of capital explodes the pretense of an aesthetic entity isolatedfrom the wants and necessities of practical reality. Yet, by identifying a

works autonomy with the struggle for position and power, this socialanalysis presupposes the schema inaugurated by Kants critique ofaesthetic judgment. Bourdieus science of arts social representationhighlights how the belief in the value of the work . . . is part of the fullreality of the work of art (FoCP, p. 36). Arts institution as an object ofcontemplation anchors the production of this belief, and the constitu-tion of a differentiating consciousness capable of considering the workof 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 andmaintain art works, is a function of the process of differentiation thatmarks the advent of aesthetic consciousness. The economic worlds


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reversal therefore preserves the effects of Kants transcendental justifi-cation of the judgment of taste at the root of Bourdieus diagnoses ofthe field of cultural production.

III

Preserving these effects justifies Valdss and Levines misgivings withcriticisms indifference to the history on which it feeds. By framingcriticisms recoil against formalist dogma, the schema Kant inaugurateddominates criticisms 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 ignoredby formalist approaches.13 Yet, by breaking the methodological shacklesof formalist analysis without breaking this schemas conceptual hold,criticism perpetuates the regimen of musics separation from realityand 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 works self-legislating

authority, criticism consequently adopts a political posture that con-forms to the process of social disintegration that, Gadamer argues,

stems from tastes abstraction from moral and civic interests. Thejustification criticism derives from unseating formalist conceits blindscriticism to its own position. The escape from reality that Hannah

Arendt argues gave the physiognomy of the cultural or educatedphilistine its most distinctive marks,14 necessitates analyses of how, inthe fight for social position, culture began to play an enormous role asone of the weapons, if not the best-suited one, to advance oneselfsocially, 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 works transcendence of reality to the illusory region of dissemblingideological representations, criticism abandons itself to the detours ofsocio-historical explanations of a works 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. Bydrawing upon Ricoeurs insight into the readers appropriation of the

world that a literary text unfolds, Valds argues that in the light of thetexts redescription of reality, it becomes clear that understanding


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must be self-understanding, that the truth of the text is in fact the truthof ourselves (PH&SoL, p. 68). Our experiences of works thereforecontravene sociologically motivated critiques that combat the pretense

of aesthetic transcendence by subordinating the works capacity tospeak anew to socio-historical analyses. By seeking its normativitythrough communicating a fitting solution to a problem, question, orperplexity, a works exemplarity testifies to the power of thought andimagination at work in exceeding its circumstances of production.15

Through prefiguring imaginative alternatives, works run ahead ofreality, thereby going beyond a given order from within the histories of

which they are a part. According to Ricoeur, a singular work achieves itsnormativity only in its capacity to communicate itself indefinitely toothers (C&C, p. 181). This communicability does not lie in applyinga 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

works capacity to address us within the horizons of our experiencesshatters the convention of socio-historical contextualizations. Ricoeurargues that if reflective judgment is to be reconciled with the rule ofpractical reason, retrospective judgment cannot be allowed to preemptor prescind reflective judgments prophetic dimension. Judgment

receives the full measure of its futurity when, through reconciling itsretrospective and prophetic dimensions with practical reason, it oper-ates within our ethical or political projects. Expunging judgmentsprophetic dimension marginalizes critique by abandoning it to thesearch for a works ideological coordinates.16 Through escaping itsoriginal horizons to broaden our own, a work evinces the point offuturity that gives the paradox of a works singularity and its exemplarityits 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 thepower of thought and imagination. Gadamer suggests that a worksaesthetic quality of formation does not distinguish the work as a mereobject of aesthetic and historical enjoyment, but is instead only thecondition for the fact that the work bears its meaning within itself andhas something to say to us.17 The autonomy he identifies with the

world that a work unfolds, and that Ricoeur attributes to a workstemporal configuration, distinguishes a works vehemence from theaesthetics ideological narrowing.18 Socio-cultural analyses that denythis vehemence subvert a critical understanding of a works power to


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open new perspectives on the world. Ricoeur cautions that, by refusingto confront the problem of the intersection of a work of art with reality,and by regarding as irrelevant the question of literatures impact on

life, we paradoxically ratify the positivist prejudice that the real is thegiven, such as it can be empirically observed and scientifically de-scribed.19 Through deconstructing the conceit of musics self-sufficiency,criticism turns against the culture of aestheticism by condemning thepretense of a closed world of autonomous musical works. Yet, with thedenigration of the aesthetic, the conceptual constriction that obturatesthe hermeneutical insight into a works capacity to productively affectreality imposes on critique the prejudice that it struggles against.

This hermeneutical insight into the power works exercise throughcontesting, subverting and refiguring the moral, cultural and socialorder, does not preclude critique. On the contrary, critique is indis-pensable to unmasking dissembling meanings that operate beneath thesheen 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 andhatreds that we rightly denounce as unjust and unjustifiable makescritique vital to any interpretation that discloses a works 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 workscapacity to affect and refigure reality opens new horizons for experi-ence and thought. The task of rescuing aesthetics from its criticaldenigration, which Levine seeks by identifying the aesthetic with theimaginative exploration of alternative possibilities, and which Eagleton

presupposes whenever art works creatively prefigure a reconciledsociety, lies along the path of the hermeneutical critique of a worksaesthetic autonomy. For this hermeneutical critique, the power ofthought and imagination communicated by the singular fit that the

work exemplifies is the true measure of a works autonomy. Thishermeneutics does not countermand the role of critique. Rather, byplacing the properly historical question: What did the work say? underthe control of the hermeneutical question: What does the work say to us

and how do we respond to the claims it makes? this hermeneutics ofcriticism recognizes that the critical detours necessary to uncoveringideologically distorted representations do not exhaust the works capac-ity to speak anew.


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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. Criticisms indifference to its philosophical presuppo-sitions, which Valds argues impedes criticisms ability to give anaccounting of the tradition that nurtures it, conceals the history of theprinciple stemming from Kants radical subjectivization of aesthetics. Byacceding to the schema this history institutes, criticism perpetuates andeven deepens the impasse of denouncing aesthetics as ideologicallypernicious. That music and art function as forms of symbolic capital inthe fight for position and power delineates a struggle within the field of

cultural production. However, this diagnosis does not escape theschema imposed by the subjectivization of aesthetics. Critiques thatdenounce aesthetics as the refuge of a hidden social violence do notextinguish the power of thought and imagination at work in individual

works. A hermeneutical concept of a works autonomy re-enervatescriticisms engagement with individual works by retrieving a workscapacity to open new paths for thought and action from the aestheticsideological constriction. The productive recovery of the aesthetic and

of the power works exercise in inventing, or discovering, imaginativealternatives to the existing social, moral and political order indicatesthe path of hermeneutically informed critical practices that recognizetheir dependence on the artistic traditions and intellectual heritages in

which they participate. As critics, we can no more escape the effects ofthe 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 eclipsesthe works hermeneutical autonomy. Critics who are either unable orunwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with worksthey censure as ideologically suspect only impede the critical recoveryof a works hermeneutic autonomy. New adventures await a criticismthat 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 works trail.

University of California, Los Angeles


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1. George Levine, Aesthetics and Ideology(New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p.

13. Hereafter A&I.

2. Mario J. Valds, 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 Brahmss 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 Brger, 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 Musicology58 (1995); Peter Brooks, Aesthetics and

Ideology: What Happened to Poetics? Critical Inquiry20:3 (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. HereafterFoCP.

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, 18001900(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 inRenaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1993); McClary,Feminine Endings; see also Susan McClary, An Exercise in Mediation,

Enclitic7:1 (1983).


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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. Valds (Toronto: University of TorontoPress, 1991), p. 148.

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Savage, Roger - Aesthetics