Under Representation by David Lloyd

Author:David Lloyd [Lloyd, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2018-11-12T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Aesthetic Taboo: Aura, Magic, and the Primitive

If the aesthetic realm originally emerged as an autonomous sphere from the magic taboo which distinguished the sacred from the everyday, seeking to keep the former pure, the profane now takes its revenge on the descendant of magic, on art.

—THEODOR W. ADORNO

Aesthetics as Universal Anthropology

The foregoing chapters of Under Representation have circulated around and elaborated a set of propositions about the structure and function of the aesthetic. First, the inaugural texts of modern aesthetics—those, indeed, that give us the very terms by which we now understand the aesthetic as a distinct discursive formation—oversee a shift from the idea of an aesthetic judgment directed at natural objects and physical sensations to one predicated on artworks. But aesthetic discourse and its effects are by no means confined to the sphere of art. On the contrary, aesthetic philosophy establishes a regime of representation that grounds both the condition of possibility of the public sphere on which the modern conception of the political rests and the developmental trajectory along which distinct modalities of human being are distributed according to their distance from representative or universal subjecthood. If the former regulates the formation of the political subject for the state, the latter governs the conception of the human around which modern racial judgment—or discrimination—is organized. Second, within that regime of representation the formalism of aesthetic judgment describes the movement of the subject’s apprehension of the object from its material qualities to its form, thereby cultivating the moment of the universal in that subject. It also normalizes at the very heart of subject formation itself the decisive distinction between the emancipated human Subject and “pathological” subjects that are still subjected to nature, either through external force or through internal impulses such as desire, fear, or gratification. It is the dubious achievement of the aesthetic to have rendered such distinctions definitive of a scale of development along which whole human groups—races, ethnicities, or what would come to be called “cultures”—are distributed. This deeply implicit racial structure of a narrative of representation is constitutive of aesthetic philosophy rather than a contingent limit determined by the accidental historical biases and perspectives of its inaugural thinkers. The aesthetic regime of representation must therefore be understood as constitutive simultaneously of the terms of the modern political sphere and of a culturally determined racial order of the human. The two domains of representation cannot easily be prized apart.

Accordingly, the aesthetic is a historically situated regulative discourse in two associated domains: the political and the anthropological in the broadest senses. Aesthetics belongs to a constellation or a cluster of discourses—including law, politics, political economy, geography, and philology—that have together determined and differentiated the space of the human. Indeed, in its initial articulation, aesthetics was understood to be a subset of anthropology in precisely this sense: a science devoted to the determination of a universal form of the human. As Kant put it in the lectures published as Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: “A

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