Digressions&Impressions

On Aesthetics & Elitism

[A]esthetics as a discipline is considered to be marginal in the eyes of other philosophers... One of the reasons for this is exactly the perceived elitism of aestheticians – we go on about extremely highbrow examples like Proust, Bartok and Godard and most of our colleagues find it difficult to relate to this. And our students also find it difficult to relate to this.

But if aesthetics has an elitism problem, what can we do about this? I myself have tried all the strategies I could think of at some point or another in my life, and I’m really unhappy with each of them:

1. Ignore the problem. Just assume that your audience has as much background in atonal music and modernist cinema as you do. If they don’t, it’s their problem, maybe they’ll feel ashamed and go home to educate themselves.  

2. Throw a bone to the crowd sometimes. When I served as a TA in Richard Wollheim’s 200-strong intro to philosophy of art class, one day he came to me enthusiastically, saying he will talk about an artwork the students can surely relate to – and then he talked about the Watts Towers in LA. The idea was that the student from Southern California are bound to love it. To Wollheim’s greatest amazement, the students were not particularly thrilled.

3. Try to educate the audience. I have to confess that I have done this quite a bit. Especially when teaching, which may be excusable. But this can be pretty heavy-handed. Once when I needed to use examples of the representation of dance in film (why? I’m not sure. Maybe something about the relation between the visual and the auditory?), I eased them in with the scene from Pulp Fiction, but then went on to do some Godard, Pasolini  and even Bela Tarr. As I said, heavy-handed.

4. Go completely anti-elitist. Stop talking about high art altogether and focus on artforms and examples the audience can be expected to know and like – sitcoms, comics, punk-rock, street art, porn, horror, late-night talk-shows, whatever.

...

I have been mainly talking about choosing what examples one uses to demonstrate an aesthetic phenomenon. But there is an even more important sense in which we should address the issue of elitism within aesthetics – if we remain too elitist, we may miss out on genuinely important aesthetic phenomena that have become extremely widespread around us, but we failed to notice in our ivory tower.--Bence Nanay [@Aesthetics for Birds]

There was sadly little public comment on Nanay's disarmingly frank blog post; it's also an interesting essay not the least because it contains a very stimulating discussion of shipping. ("You are shipping a couple if you really really want two fictional characters of a serialized narrative fiction, mostly a TV show, to have a romantic relationship.")* Nanay is surely right that the way aesthetics is practiced is, in some respects a cause of its marginalization among its professional peers. I would like to develop his analysis a bit.

 

A. Let's start with the elitism issue. The problem is not so much elitism as class. For as any reader of Timothy Williamson knows, that just a few have a taste for an intellectial project is no argument against its significance and high status. Rather there is a considerable amount of anxiety over class among professional philosophers; many have upper-middle class backgrounds or aspirations in that direction, in a culture in which the rich are getting wealthier at a faster rate. (You don't believe me? Note (a) how many academics blabber on about fine wine and food on facebook; (b) it is verboten to point to the sociological commitments, say, built into Grice's analysis.) Aesthetics is the only field in philosophy that actually is about the objects & experiences that were once a central component of bourgeois life. One's response to aesthetics, thus, generates its own anxiety about how much one reveals of one's class background or desires. Given the fact that so many folk feel uncertain about their professional futures and uneasy over their professional identities, many will instinctively avoid adding a confrontation with one's class status to it.

 

RIP: Ted Cohen

Ted Cohen, a former President of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division), the author of the unexpected hit, Jokes, and the winner (among many other distinctions) of a Pushcart prize for this brilliant piece (and it's not just about baseball), died a few days ago. Within the profession he is probably best known for his work in aesthetics. He was influenced by Wittgenstein and Cavell, although unlike many so influenced not prone to discipleship. At Chicago, this little man was known as the (great) soul of The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate.

I took, I think, my first graduate course at Chicago with Ted. It was not love at first sight. We didn't find each other funny, and I thought he used his class room charisma and humor to avoid investigating the weaknesses of his own certainties. [UPDATED: But, see also Sara Bernstein's take on his teaching: "I also learned the pedagogical art of birdwalking– shifting to a different topic to grab students’ attention, and then pulling them back in after grabbing it.”] As the years went by, I became more fond of him. He was, in fact, a very subtle philosopher and a masterful interpreter of David Hume (and judging by our correspondence, kept correcting my readings well after graduate school). 

In my last year or two in graduate school, we found ourselves hanging out more regularly at Classics cafe and the Bonjour bakery. I found his diatribes against Wagner amusing, especially because I continue to share in the prejudice. Initially, I thought he had grown more fond of me because of my weekly departmental IM basketball reports; he appreciated good sports writing (especially baseball), after all, and in these I made gentle fun of his colleagues. At one point, he confided that, in fact, it was nothing about me; his favorite graduate students had all left Hyde Park.