Modernity, Art, and Critique
An interview with
Gregg M. Horowitz
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Scott Zeman: I gather from the classes you have taught here at Vanderbilt that your interests concern two or perhaps three primary themes. First, a social and political theme focusing upon the problematic relationship between the rise of modernity and the possibility of public critique; second, a theme concerning aesthetics; and third, a psychoanalytic theme. Is this characterization of your research and interests a fair one?
Gregg Horowitz: Yes, but the unifying theme is the relationship between modernity and critique. There is a tension within modernity's self-conception as it begins to emerge in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, public and political space are to be constituted out of human freedom, that is, out of the consent of those who live together within that space. Hence, there is a sustained critique of all traditional forms of legitimation. Aristocracy and intellectual governance in the form of priestly power come under assault. All legitimation has to pass through the individual who gives his or her consent to the norms of that space. "Individuality" is constituted as the capacity to consent or not to forms of shared governance. On the other hand, modernity gives rise to a systematic debunking of any putatively natural or objective grounds for even criticism, so that distinctions between public interest and self-interest become problematized. So, in the name of what do you criticize? If you are going to speak in the public space, then you cannot speak merely on the basis of your own private interests. On the other hand, any claim that you are making in terms of an interest broader than your own becomes immediately suspicious.
Zeman: If we treat Kant's essay on enlightenment as marking the advent of philosophical modernity, how would you characterize the relation between critical and consenting individuals and their own self-enlightenment?
Horowitz: If you construe modernity as the institutions and practices of public criticism--as the requirement that in sharing public space one offer for criticism the grounds of one's own position in order to determine the relation between them and the norms of shared life--then public criticism is at the same time self-criticism. That is, one constitutes one's own individuality in critical interaction with one's fellows in a public space.
Zeman: So the advent of the modern subject brings with it the critique of that very subjectivity which is supposedly being constituted?
Horowitz: Exactly. Which is where modern individuality and the debunking tendencies of modernity come into a specific tension. At the same time that modernity requires the informed consent of the individual to governance, it problematizes what counts as the informed consent of the individual.
Zeman: How does this connect to your interests in the history of philosophical aesthetics?
Horowitz: Although we can trace a number of strands in modern aesthetics, it really comes together for the first time in Kant. Much of the Critique of Judgment is a theory of free pedagogy, that is, a theory of education into critical norms that are not merely dominating but are also individuating and pleasure-producing.
Zhman: How are these norms not dominating?
Horowitz: Kant saw clearly that an aesthetic judgment is simultaneously subjective, in that it avows or expresses some subject's pleasure in an experience, but also apparently a report about the object. The grammatical form of the judgment is: "some object is beautiful." While the judgment is an avowal of pleasure, it also seems to be an objective report regarding the object of the experience. Kant was the first to see the importance of the ineliminability of the subjective moment from a judgment which nonetheless formally claims intersubjective validity. When you say that something is beautiful, you are simultaneously saying that you respond a certain way and that that response is or should be warranted for others--which at first seems to be an absurd idea.
Zeman: Given the apparent relativity of judgments?
Horowitz: Exactly. Relativity to merely particular points of view. Thus a traditional philosophical problem emerges in a new form. From Plato through the medievals it was thought that beauty had to have some objective reference. Modern philosophical aesthetics is distinguished by its unwillingness to get rid of the subjective moment of avowal. Kant was the first to make that subjectivism compatible with the claim to intersubjective validity.
Zeman: And this comes out of Hume's discussion of the standard of taste?
Horowitz: Yes, and Burke's, too. Hume locates the standard in those who are well suited or well constituted to be judges of taste.
Zeman: The educated.
Horowitz: Right. But if the proper judge is specified as well educated, then the judgment of taste cannot be merely subjective. It is in this moment of the aesthetic judgment at which some individual's pleasure might be normative for the pleasure of others, and vice versa, that Kant saw the possibility of what you might think of as a non-dominating form of public life. That is, as opposed to public life in the political or moral spheres, public life mediated aesthetically does not require the abandonment of one's own position, "one's own position" understood as that which enables one to feel pleasure. There are moments in Kant where it does seem as if he believes that there is an objective way to determine a proper aesthetic judgment. However, a more careful reading reveals that he did not mean that, precisely because the formation of proper aesthetic judgment is itself always open to criticism. Regarding taste there is perpetual dispute.
Zeman: How do social contractarians differ from Kant here?
Horowitz: If the image we have of the constitution of public space is of actors with merely particular interests coming together, then everyone will have to alienate something in order to share and thus create the space. Social contract theory claims that social actors alienate the capacity to experience freedom in the public space. One renders oneself subject to Leviathan and one's freedom migrates to a private sphere. This suggests an ineliminable conflict between private and common space. The shift that is effected by Kant is that there may be a different model of the construction of the common space which does not require a sacrifice on the part of those who enter it.
Zeman: No sacrifice whatsoever?
Horowitz: Kant voided the traditional problem of sacrifice by seeing the alienation of particular interests not as sacrifice but as a process of self-formation. One ascends to freedom as one submits not to Leviathan but to the process of norm and critique in the public space; one learns to see the world more broadly, more catholically, without, after all, giving up one's own perspective and pleasure. This is what Kant called cosmopolitanism. Aesthetic education opens up a cosmopolitan perspective which is not incompatible with one's local position and one's capacity to shift around to adopt other points of view. Kant did not see this as sacrifice--although he did in fact call it sacrifice!--but he did see this dialectic of socialization and individuation as, let's say, pleasurable abandonment of merely local pleasure.
Zeman: Insofar as we are in a department of philosophy and not of fine arts, we tend to think of these processes of individuation as primarily political in character, yet your interests are centrally located in the realm of the aesthetic. Why?
Horowitz: I have given part of the answer already in terms of aesthetic normativity. But there is another answer as well. Philosophy and art have been at war as long as there has been philosophy. Not as long as there has been art, but as long as there has been philosophy. The argument can be made that philosophy first gains its independence by distinguishing itself from art, that is, from myth and poetry, as in Plato.
Zeman: It follows from this that art not only precedes philosophy but can thus somehow sustain itself, whereas philosophy needs art to exist at all.
Horowitz: A fact that has infuriated philosophers. For insofar as philosophy is committed to abstract thinking--that is, as Hegel so beautifully defined it, to thinking without pictures--philosophy's memory of its birth is at the same time a source of shame. Philosophers may always remember that philosophical reflection was born out of a certain kind of image, but philosophy does not stand on its own feet until it dispenses with the conditions of its birth and thus senses its own capacity for being self-sustaining. Art makes a counterclaim, that relative to philosophy's concern with abstraction, art is the preserve of the singular, which resists subsumption under the universalizing concept. There is something in every artwork that can be grasped philosophically, but something that cannot. If you now ask me what that thing is, naturally the answer would be that I cannot tell you because it cannot be grasped conceptually.
Zeman: And yet, the purpose of philosophy is to continue to seek this excess.
Horowitz: Right--which is to say, to extinguish art's claim to singularity. This relationship between singularity and conceptual universality gets transformed in the late eighteenth century into a political allegory in which the particular is the pre-social individual. Relative to this particularity, the problem of the constitution of the common space becomes an almost unsolvable political problem. For the contractarian, the common space is set up when we have made a legitimating agreement regarding the claims that we have against one another. In return, we each get something. Protection, security. Now once that space has been set up, if I have a claim against either you or that space which cannot be satisfied within the constituting norms, that claim becomes merely private; it has no standing within that common space. Since what constitutes the particular is its particularity, and since the constitution of the common space requires precisely the sacrifice of particularity, any sacrificial constitution of common space looks like domination. I am obliged to give the claim up, to eat it. Hence, an unbreachable gap gets established between what is private to me and the public thing. This possibility does not even arise in the context of the norms of public criticism of the aesthetic because aesthetic discourse cannot be properly constituted by excluding my private judgment. Art's claim to singularity, which is newly relevant in the eighteenth century, allows it to resist sacrificial demands. Further, insofar as art supports critical discourse in which we make claims against one another from the point of view of our own pleasure in singularity, it also provides us with a non-sacrificial alternative for the constitution of common space. In this way, the aesthetic is an allegory of proper politics--but, I must stress, an allegory only and never a substitute.
Zeman: What happens to artistic singularity in Hegel's philosophy?
Horowitz: Claims for the singularity of the experience of beauty and of the work of art are submitted to devastating criticisms throughout the nineteenth century; Hegel is the prime instance. The moment philosophy can give an account of art as the preserve of singularity, art has lost its claim to being the preserve of singularity. Hegel thinks this is the moment art dies, and he has an almost indefeasible argument here: Either there is a philosophy of art and art's claim to singularity is false, or there is no philosophy of art, and art's claim cannot be validated even if true. Of course, it has got to be the first choice, since we are having a philosophical discussion about the singularity of art.
Zeman: Indeed!
Horowitz: My sense, though, is that Hegel's claim to have overcome the resistance of the singular to philosophy is too rapid. It is possible for art to adopt strategies to resist its own sacrifice on the altar of philosophical insight. This is one of the central dialectics of modernism, and it is part of my work to figure out some of the strategies that modernist artists have developed.
Zeman: Artists, surely, but "art theorists" too?
Horowitz: This is an interesting problem. There are theorists of art who want to develop theories that imitate rather than criticize the singularity of the work of art. That art is the preserve of the claims of singularity does not mean that the only claims worth defending are claims of singularity. What is interesting about modern art is the tension within it between the philosophical transcendence of singularity and the singularity that it continues to insist on. Art does not want to give up the claim of singularity, but it does not want to recede into mere privacy. Modernism resides unstably between singularity and universality. Philosophy must track this tension, so the move by some philosophers of art to develop a discourse about art that mimics artistic singularity is, I think, a mistaken form of art envy.
Adorno, on the contrary, developed a philosophical style committed to that which escapes philosophical conceptualization. He developed what he called an "aesthetic theory"--a theory of the aesthetic which itself has aesthetic properties. But he did so in order to better represent the tension in art between universalizing and singularizing tendencies, between the theoretical and the aesthetic. To develop tactics for limning what, in art, has not been brought under the concept, you need a form of philosophical writing that makes vivid what is absent to it. But if you are going to establish a philosophical relationship to that which exceeds the concept, you have to be more philosophically rigorous, more philosophical and less artistic. If you want to make the philosophical claim that there is something that outstrips philosophy as such, you have to be the most rigorous philosopher imaginable. Otherwise you end up mistaking your own incapacities for metaphysical truths. Doing philosophical justice to art's singularity requires a renewed commitment to critical reflection.
Zehman: Can you speak for a moment about your research into modernism?
Horowitz: Sure. Let me start with some historical background. The philosophical claim that art is the preserve of singularity has a common sense version, that for makers and perceivers alike art is an individual, emotional--in short, private--activity. Looked at this way, you can see a moment of protest in the modern relationship of art to society; privatized art is a kind of salvation because the social is so thoroughly wretched, so reified and sacrificial, that there is no way for us to experience our deepest concerns in that domain. Relative to this, art appears as the nonsocial moment of social life, a function it serves by being quarantined in museums, concert halls, and so on. Artistic responses to art's social non-sociality develop in two directions in the nineteenth century, and this is where my answer begins. On the one hand there were various aestheticist movements culminating in "art for art's sake," the view that for art to be a moment of salvation from the social it had to cut all ties to the world. Art became a private garden in which we cultivate ourselves only by turning our backs on everything else. This quarantine generated a practical reification of the artistic.
Zehman: Where was art previously?
Horowitz: In churches, in palaces, even in caves! Art was embedded in other life-activities. It had not been made autonomous from those other activities. Take, as a contrast, easel painting, the exemplary autonomous art of the nineteenth century. You envision the painter standing in isolation in front of an easel expressing himself; you have the image of an artist and a painting separated from the social surroundings. Indeed, to the extent that autonomy has been achieved you do not actually see the autonomizing process but the result, the free painter and the free painting. For this to be possible, of course, painting had to be liberated first and foremost from churches--an easel painting is a liberated fresco. But, for this to be an occasion for the experience, the false experience, of freedom from the social, the process of autonomization has itself to be obscured. If you see this process--see it as a process--then you see autonomization as a form of historical connectedness operating within painting. So for a movement like art for art's sake to get established, there had to be an effacement of that historical connectedness, which is what I mean by reification. You have to regard the easel painting as if it came from nowhere.
In avant-gardism, which emerges alongside aestheticism, the opposition between art and life became both an opportunity and a moment of trauma for the artist. It is for this reason that I first became fascinated with Cezanne--as Merleau-Ponty put it, one of the great traumatic sufferers in the history of painting. Cezanne devoted himself to the rather odd project of the visual representation of the tactile. It was as if the liberation of the painting from its physical or architectural emplacement presented an opportunity for self-expression, but at the same time allowed this self-expression only on the condition of visual distance between oneself and object. Cezanne saw the canvas as an opportunity to probe his connectedness to the world, but he also felt at that same moment the disconnection from the world on which easel painting relied. Painting was both a wound and a healing all at once, and this response to art's autonomy is characteristic of modernism.
Zehman: You have mentioned in an article that simultaneous with the emergence of this new type of representation, and together with the artwork's divestiture from its embeddedness in tradition and social life, there arises for the spectator a new type of aesthetic experience. As you so eloquently put it, the spectator can no longer "view art with the same eyes." Can you describe this transformation in the spectator?
Horowitz: What I had in mind was the creation of an anti-aestheticist spectator. Think of a painting as a doubled artifact that has a physical presence in its own right--a flat canvas with paint on it--but also as a vehicle for seeing something that is otherwise not present. From this point of view, traditional illusionism required the spectator's disavowal of the vehicle, the work's materiality, for the sake of its pictoriality, its making something else visible. Illusionism established a competition between the material and pictorial aspects of the work. In Cezanne, by contrast, you see a contest between two possible fates of paint. The painting invites a disavowal on the spectator's part--"I wish to see that patch as an orange"--but it also blocks it: If you see the patch as an orange, the relation between the orange and the table on which it rests becomes problematic. The paint is forced into perceptibility as a destabilization of the image, and this forcing is the memory of trauma for Cezanne. There is a tension between the moments of disavowal and disillusionment, and that tension is made visible; put differently, what is made visible for the spectator is the desire itself for disavowal. The maintenance of the tension between spectatorial desire and its vehicle gives birth to a new kind of spectator.
Zehman: Does modernism continue to investigate the tension built into this split spectator?
Horowitz: Yes, but I should say one thing here about some changes in my thinking. I used to take the relationship between materiality and pictoriality to be the privileged instance of modernism. I now think that relationship is an exceptionally good example of the dynamics of modernism, but it does not provide us with a definition.
Zehman: Is this because modernism has taken so many different pathways?
Horowitz: Yes. I did not see at the time that one of the reasons why this was a compelling problem for Cezanne was his almost moral concern for the problem of distance between world and art. This is tied to what modernism is about in its broadest terms: the relationship between the social and
I hope to elaborate this relationship between loss of sensuous connectedness and the development of modernism in a book. The unwillingness of so much modern art to offer us aesthetic pleasure is rooted in modernism's ambivalence toward its own distance from life. It needs that distance to criticize social life, but it is just that distance that quarantines it from the life it criticizes. Every gesture toward pleasure is a reminder of the traumatic separation, so the most reflective modern art becomes a site not of compensation but of mourning. The book will be called, I think, Sustaining Loss. It will start with a discussion of Freud's account of psychic loss in "Mourning and Melancholia." But I guess we will have to wait to discuss your description of my third interest another time.
