Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network

transcript

CASEY HASKINS

i. our cultural specialists

An advanced alien species has dispatched someanthropologists to Earth to study how educatedearthlings think and talk about art, beauty, rep-resentation, interpretation, and similar subjects.These aliens are hyper-collectivists. They do mostthings together, thanks to a silicon-enhancedadaptation with which they link their minds intoextended networks when sharing significant ex-periences or collaborating on complex analyticaltasks.

As the visitors eavesdrop on our conferencesand graduate seminars and peruse our learnedcultural journals, they are struck by the varietyof arcane methodologies and discourses we havecreated in this area over the last two centuries.They are also appalled at how our scholars con-verse. Their ethnographic report concludes by not-ing that “Although human civilization is enteringa new era of global interconnectivity, their culturalspecialists behave like throwbacks to their age ofmedieval theological disputes. They work in prim-itive clans which quibble endlessly over whetherthe value of Bar at the Folies-Bergere lies in thepatterning of line and colors or in its represen-tation of gender relations, whether La Traviataconsidered qua music, can express thoughts aboutextra-musical life, or whether Casablanca’s narra-tive is a source of apolitical cognitive stimulationor a mimetic mechanism for colonialist hegemony.Many of these cultural specialists still share theireighteenth-century ancestors’ fantasy that theircarbon-based brains will someday allow a singleclan to achieve a complete and unified theory ofwhat those ancestors called aesthetic subjects. Ifthey really wish progress in this area (as in so manyothers), they need a more evolved understanding

of how the full connectedness of their knowledgepresupposes the full connectedness of knowers intheory and in practice.”

Aliens have always been good at tracking ourcivilizational failings. They are, alas, right aboutthe clannishness (I use ‘aesthetics’ here, as el-swhere in its pluralistic, twenty-first-century Ox-ford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics sense.)1 But thisclannishness is not entirely graven in stone. Today,to an unprecedented extent, it is not uncommon tosee philosophers and literary theorists consultingevolutionary psychologists in explaining the ap-peal of narratives, feminist art historians drawingon psychoanalysis in reconstructing the genderedcontexts of images of human beauty, film theo-rists invoking cognitive science in explaining theemotional powers of cinematographic styles, mu-sicologists consulting anthropologists in explain-ing various differences between Western and non-Western forms of musical practice, and so on.

The commonplace nature of such collaborativeprojects underscores how aesthetics, like othercomplex areas of inquiry, including the sciences,has become not only a multidisciplinary but also adisunified field. That is, it possesses some kind ofloose organizational integrity in its complex of dis-ciplines, methodologies, and social communities—an integrity that eludes reduction both to olderhumanistic models of theoretical unification andto earlier postmodernist visions of incommensu-rable conceptual schemes, nonnegotiably politi-cized confrontations of ideology, and the like.

But what sort of integrity, more exactly, mightthat be? This is a conceptual question that,while hardly a traditional “problem of aesthet-ics,” increasingly haunts the margins of recentconversations among the aesthetic disciplines.(One thinks of books like James Elkins, ed.,

298 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Art History versus Aesthetics and Francis Halsall,et al., eds., Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisci-plinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, andArt Practice.)2 The question’s timeliness for di-verse cultural specialists suggests that, even at atime when Adorno’s adage that no claim about artgoes without saying seems truer than ever, thereis an area of common intellectual practice that,whether called “aesthetics” or something else weall-too-human cultural specialists still all somehowshare. This area of practice, while being disunified,is neither entirely clannish (as the aliens worry)nor hopelessly dreary (as John Passmore lamentedyears ago) or dead (as some earlier-generationpostmodernists reputedly believed).

What this unruly field will look like even adecade hence is anyone’s guess. But there is atleast one across-the-aisle conceptual step that wemight do well collectively to take if we would bet-ter grasp the human complexities of our own prac-tice now. This is to think of aesthetics not simplyas a multidisciplinary field, but as an intellectualnetwork.

ii. two images of the aesthetic field

What I mean by an intellectual network in-volves more than just a constellation of dis-ciplines, methodologies, and scholars. It is anhistorically evolving constellation whose constitu-tive items are somehow, in a way that very muchwants fresh clarification now, linked by the dy-namics of collaboration and dependent on oneanother for their mutual intelligibility and exis-tence. This approach to conceptualizing collectiveinquiry is central to a rapidly growing discipline—social network theory—whose findings pose freshchallenges to how all fields understand their aimsand methods. My argument that aesthetics is an in-tellectual network draws equally on themes fromsocial network theory and the history of philo-sophical aesthetics. It involves the further thoughtthat all of the disciplines mentioned above, fromthe traditionally humanistic versions of philosoph-ical aesthetics and art history and criticism throughtheir various posthumanistic counterdisciplines—the nodes of the network—exhibit a kind of looseorganizational coherence. Such coherence in turninvites further reflection on what it is for ideas,methodologies, and their practitioners to dependon one another in a variety of cooperative and

competitive ways. This point also, as we considerlater, turns out to have a more specific sourcewithin early modern aesthetic thought that putsthe lie to the idea that our subject is in some sim-ple sense just a postmodern one.

One need not embrace visions of Kuhnianparadigm shifts in the humanities (if such shiftsoccur in any field) in considering how the con-cept of an intellectual network stands in a cre-ative tension with older conceptions of what dis-ciplines are, in aesthetics or elsewhere, and howthey are connected. In particular, a network ap-proach challenges traditional images of philosoph-ical aesthetics or the historical or critical studiesof the arts as being (like disciplines generally) rel-atively autonomous, atomistic, silo-like entities—things whose integrity depends on their preserv-ing a certain methodological purity and freedomfrom undue intermingling with what lies outside.In contrast, network thinking invites us to picturedisciplines as sieve-like entities, subject to fullerinformational interpenetration and exchange inways that invite a more holistic conception of thefield.

Think of the above tension as projecting two di-alectically competing images of the aesthetic field,each with its own heuristic benefits and, as recentdebates about disciplinarity in the humanities un-derscore, fervent supporters within and withoutthe academy.3 There is, in the nature of the case,no completely neutral ground in this metadisci-plinary debate, and my own remarks favor themore holistic, network-oriented image. But we aredealing with a dialectic, so before we go any fur-ther it will help to review some of the advantagesand liabilities of the network image’s more tradi-tional atomistic alternative.

iii. disciplinary internalism and the myth ofthe autonomy fault line

The more atomistic image of the aesthetic fieldaligns with two themes that enjoy a certain intu-itive appeal both in traditional (humanist, mod-ernist) and progressive (posthumanist, postmod-ernist) quarters. Neither has a standard name, butwe can call the first disciplinary internalism. Thismetadisciplinary stance, rooted in a history of con-ceptualizing the modern academy that goes backto the Enlightenment, is intuitively familiar toacademics of any field.4 Its basic impulse is to

Haskins Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network 299

establish conceptual limits on how inferentially in-sular the conversational life of a discipline needsto be in order for it to retain its distinctive identityand authority, relative to other disciplines, withinour larger culture of knowledge-seeking practices.

A second theme which has historically lentsupport to atomistic characterizations of the aes-thetic disciplines is what I call the myth of theautonomy fault line. This theme remains popu-lar on both sides of the humanist–posthumanistaisle. It says, in effect, that underlying all of ourmodern conversations about the arts is a deeperclash between two irreconcilable stances aboutthat most charged of modern aesthetic proposi-tions, the proposition that art is, in some generalsense, “autonomous.” This proposition has twofurther variants, both ascendant in academic aes-thetic theory since Kant, which continue to hauntthe evolving interdisciplinary conversations men-tioned above in ways that are rarely made veryexplicit. One variant attributes to art a special jus-tificatory autonomy, asserting that art in its centralphilosophical sense is a kind of productive practicewhose instances exhibit a distinctive kind of non-instrumental and nonideological value for all cul-tural populations. The other variant attributes au-tonomy to art in a more causal–explanatory sense,affirming an inferential gap between what makesthings happen in the histories of the fine arts, onthe one hand, and general social history, on theother.5 Since the appearance of the first large (andmainly Marxist) counternarratives of modern aes-thetic life in the nineteenth century, variants of thefault line mythology have projected images of theaesthetic field as an arena for an epic struggle be-tween theories and thinkers who do and do not,respectively, affirm various ideas about art’s conti-nuity or discontinuity with the rest of modern life.This war of self-interpretations, which dramati-cally shapes the ways in which aesthetic scholarsframe their collaborative choices, remains aliveand well today even in supposedly sophisticateddiscussions of interdisciplinarity like those citedearlier (more of this below).

Displinary internalism provides an intuitivelypowerful rationale for weighting some scholarlypronouncements on certain subjects over otherson grounds that the methods of some disciplinesare internally connected to the natures of theirsubjects in ways other disciplines’ methods arenot. This in turn provides a rationale for ignor-ing the pronouncements of disciplinary outsiders

when experts of different fields appear to holdclashing views of common subjects. Of course, thehistory of modern aesthetics is to a profound de-gree a history of just such clashes, and here amore network-oriented approach becomes attrac-tive. Such an approach does not deny the impor-tance of expertise. But it leaves a space for a moreopen-ended and dialectical discussion of just howmany kinds of expertise might be needed, and itmight prove authoritative for understanding cer-tain aesthetic and meta-aesthetic subjects.

Imagine, then, how the internalist and networkapproaches might differently interpret the de-bate, central to Art History versus Aesthetics, overwhether and to what extent the traditionally dis-tinct disciplines of philosophical aesthetics and arthistory share much common intellectual ground.The volume’s operating premise is a view of thatrelationship that assumes a kind of disciplinaryinternalism by default. It says something like this:philosophers are mainly interested in identifyinguniversal, ahistorical defining properties of vi-sual (among other artistic) artifacts and of ourways of knowing them. Art historians, in contrast,are more interested in describing and catalogu-ing visual artifacts with reference to various morespecific contexts of production and reception. Inconsequence of these orientations, the argumentcontinues, philosophers and art historians tend bytraining and temperament to talk past each otherand sometimes have difficulty seeing a point ineach other’s research agendas.

James Elkins offers a provocative parable ofthis disciplinary relationship in his essay “WhyDon’t Art Historians Attend Aesthetics Confer-ences?” He invites us to imagine two societies,“Ah” and “Ae” (corresponding to art history andphilosophical aesthetics, respectively), which in-habit different islands and occasionally try tomake contact:

One day, a trader arriving from Ah carries with him arequest from the people on Ah for a picture of theirown island as it appears from Ae, and he brings withhim a picture that had been made on Ah, purportingto show the island Ae. No one on Ae recognizes theodd shapes in the drawing, but they comply anyway, andafter a time the trader returns with the message thatno one on Ah recognized their island in the strangepicture sent over from Ae. People on the two islandsstudy the two drawings, and conclude that it is probablybest to stay where they are, since the people on the

other island clearly cannot draw, and they may not evenbe able to see straight. For diplomacy’s sake they evensend some letters back and forth, arguing about whoserepresentation is worse, and they end up deciding thatthe members of the opposite tribe have no idea how totalk about pictures to begin with.6

Art history and philosophical aesthetics are analo-gized to islands whose communities struggle tounderstand each other’s “drawings” of their re-spective locales. This is meant to illuminate thereal-world problems of communication result-ing from art historians’ traditional interest inwhat Elkins calls the social and historical “par-ticularity” of visual artifacts, as contrasted withphilosophical aestheticians’ traditional interest in“conceptualization,” that is, in universal aspectsof visual and other artworks and of what it is tomake critical judgments about such things. To thisextent, the parable reinforces a disciplinary inter-nalist perspective, at least by default.

Some art historians and philosophical aestheti-cians (notably philosophical aestheticians wed-ded to certain eighteenth-century traditions intheir discipline) may find the parable to containsome truth. But is an island the best topographi-cal metaphor for what these disciplines (and oth-ers in the aesthetic field) have become today? Asan alternative, consider the image of “hub cities,”which are so nodally interconnected that on somemaps their lines of linkage are more significantthan the cities themselves. The atomistic–holisticvisual logic projected by this contrasting pair ofdisciplinary images is similar to that of the im-ages of the silo and the sieve mentioned earlier.And there are further problems with the logic ofthe island parable. One is its implication that allart historians and philosophical aestheticians, re-spectively, think and collaborate alike. (The con-tributions to Art History versus Aesthetics and Re-discovering Aesthetics quickly put the lie to thispoint.) Another is the parable’s failure to capturefully how the real-world counterparts of the twogroups of islanders—art historians and philosoph-ical aestheticians—have common subjects of studyeven if their methods of studying might sometimesseem incommensurable and even if, as a matter ofcontingent fact, they do not always frequent eachother’s conferences. To this extent, the parable, inimplying that art historians and philosophers ofart are (or may as well be) talking about differ-ent things, replicates a classic difficulty of crudely

relativistic views of meaning, reference, and trans-lation: the problem of how different views of X canbe entirely different if they are still, in the end, allviews of X. Yet another problem is that even is-lands have histories (as do silos), and things withhistories in the real world tend to interact sooneror later with things outside themselves.

To bring out this last point’s further implicationsfor understanding how disciplines can constitutenetworks, consider briefly a more basic ontologi-cal question: What kinds of things are disciplines?They are certainly objectively real, but they arenot natural kinds. That is, they are not entities pos-sessing ahistorically fixed boundaries and equallyfixed internal dynamics that are somehow givenprior to the contingencies of human agency andinterpretation. Better to say that disciplines are,like other areas of cultural practice, including thearts, cultural kinds. We might also say, in the id-iom of Ian Hacking, that disciplines are interactivekinds. That is, they possess, like communities ofhuman individuals, a capacity to define and rede-fine themselves ontologically in accordance withhow, in the course of their history, they get de-scribed and redescribed within their larger cul-ture. And the history of a given discipline’s self-redescription is, among other things, the historyof its various interactions with other disciplines,against the backdrop of changing ideas and be-havior, both within the disciplines and in the largerculture.7 And if this is true, then the internalisti-cally reified image of disciplines as self-standingislands of intellectual life with settled boundariesneeds tempering by the “externalist” intuition thata discipline is something whose nature is alwaysto some degree bound up in its interactions withan intentional world outside itself.

Shift the focus now from ontology to anthropol-ogy. A discipline’s interactive history is a history ofa more general kind of activity in which (althoughour aliens seemed not overly impressed with thisfact) human beings engage at different levels allthe time. We exchange things—all kinds of intel-lectual and nonintellectual things. This sometimeshappens when, and sometimes because, the ex-changers find one another so different from them-selves that the fruits of the process take on newinformation value. Works of art, which can circu-late in complex ways both within a given cultureand across different cultures, are familiar cases inpoint. Thought and conversation, in a similar vein,can be viewed as occurring not in some rarefied

Cartesian space but in complex networks of reasonexchanging social practices.8 Particularly strikingcases of such reason exchanging in academic lifeare suggested by the history of the methodologi-cally disunified field of science. Many of science’smost important advances resulted from the emer-gence of “trading zones,” that is, from pragmaticcoalitions of diverse disciplinarians who pool theirresources to tackle common problems both inspite of and because they lack a larger unifyingmethod or theory. When this happens, hithertoinsoluble theoretical problems can find solutionsfrom creative new syntheses of hitherto isolatedforms of expertise. In the process, disciplines learnfrom one another, sometimes exchanging aspectsof one another’s methodologies and vocabular-ies. These exemplary moments of creative infor-mation exchange are in turn suggestive of whatsystems theory calls a “liquid network”—an infor-mational environment whose state falls betweenextremes of order and chaos and hence can be afertile ground for creative forms of “informationalspillover.”9

And as with the sciences, so too, in this respect,with the aesthetic disciplines. Any two groups ofaesthetic “islanders” who find themselves com-municatively alienated at one point in their his-tory are no more permanently locked into thatrelationship than are any two groups in the net-work of scientific communities—say, populationgeneticists and quantum physicists or psychoan-alysts and cognitive neuroscientists. The pointgeneralizes to innumerable further examples ofcontingent communal isolation in the social his-tories of moral, religious, and political life, whereinformation sooner or later starts flowing in newways, collaboratively or competitively, wheneverdifferent communities encounter one another.

The competitive dynamic, of course, is as com-mon in practice as the cooperative one. As Elkinscomments in a summary assessment of the ArtSeminar series (of which Art History versus Aes-thetics is one installment), sustained critical dialec-tical exchanges of the sort that embody a certainideal of interdisciplinary collaboration are stillrare enough in conversations between art histo-rians and at least certain philosophical aestheti-cians today. More common, Elkins suggests, are“refusals” by interlocutors who are separated bydifferences of vocabulary, method, and, in manycases, historical disciplinary identity to fully ac-knowledge one another’s beliefs and their claims

to rationality and truth. (Pragmatic philosophersof language might today say that such refusals rep-resent a failure to fully reflect on the inferentialcommitments that allow an interlocutor’s utter-ances to be held as true.)10

One common kind of refusal in aestheticsshows itself in a familiar pattern of deep dis-agreement about the relationship between art-works and their surrounding social and historicalcontexts. Although the general orientation of ArtHistory versus Aesthetics (and similar books) istoward new kinds of cross-disciplinary dialogue,the pattern surfaces even here. Consider, for ex-ample, the above-named volume’s contributionsby philosopher Paul Crowther and art historianKeith Moxey. Crowther argues that philosophi-cal aesthetics and art history can authentically in-teract, but only if their constituencies can agreethat image making possesses an intrinsic value andtranshistorical significance for human beings thattranscend the intellectual and political fashionsof specific cultural and historical contexts. Butit is just this point, he thinks, that is fundamen-tally rejected by many art historians and otherswho espouse “anti-foundationalist cultural rela-tivist” approaches to their material, which drawstrength from the environment of modern con-sumerism. The relativist–consumerist collusion isintellectually fueled by “an unquestioning accep-tance of the self-contradictory discourses of Fou-cault, Derrida, and the like,” which have in turnshaped “the dominant contextualist modes of re-cent art history.” For advocates of this approachto art history (Crowther mentions art historiansGriselda Pollock, T. J. Clark, Norman Bryson, andKeith Moxey as examples), “Art per se is takento amount to little more than ideas, theories, andtheir contexts of occurrence.” Such writers’ char-acteristic way of making the character of art as afundamental mode of human making contingentlydependent on historically fashionable modes ofreception and theory is, in Crowther’s view, “tac-itly racist to the profoundest degree.” What suchwriters fail to appreciate, Crowther thinks, is theexplanatory primacy and transhistorically endur-ing nature of “the intrinsic significance of image-making”—a fact of aesthetic life whose seminalanalysis remains Kant’s theory of fine art and aes-thetic ideas.11

Turn now to Moxey, whose work Crowtherlambasts elsewhere as a pernicious specimen ofart-historical relativism.12 Moxey suggests, like

Crowther, that the present methodological gulfbetween the two disciplines could, in principle, betraversed. But this can happen only on a conditionthat is for him the reverse of Crowther’s, namely,that philosophical aesthetics would relinquish itstraditional allegiance to a Kantian-inspired visionof aesthetic judgment as unaffected by historyor social circumstance. Moxey continues by ex-pressing a familiar social art historian’s skepticismabout the “grand narratives” underpinning muchtraditional writing in aesthetics and art history.Claiming that a reliance on such narratives de-nies “the infinite variety of human experience,”Moxey complains that none of the art-historicalor philosophical contributors to Art History ver-sus Aesthetics have fully acknowledged “the waysin which processes of postcolonial developmentor globalization impinge on the debate about therelation of aesthetics to art history.”13 AlthoughMoxey is silent about who among philosophicalaestheticians is remiss in lacking such postcolo-nial awareness, his implication is that this charac-terizes pretty much the entire discipline. A tacitpremise of his discussion is that not only are thearts themselves subject to the shifting contingen-cies of cultural and political history, but so alsoare debates about the arts. Such facts tend to bemarginalized or ignored by more abstractly philo-sophical discussions of what works of art, alongwith their characteristic modes of experience, val-uation, and so on, universally and essentially are.Moxey does, however, go on to identify a morespecific source of the philosophy of art’s historicaldifficulties in adequately acknowledging and an-alyzing cultural difference: the universalizing im-pulse of Kantian aesthetics. And he locates an al-ternative to the Kantian tradition’s relative silenceregarding cultural differences in deconstructionistand Marxist approaches to cultural criticism (thetraditions that Crowther nominated as culprits inthe postmodern-era collusion of consumerism andrelativism).14

Both of these discussions exemplify a larger pat-tern that all of us in the aesthetic disciplines knowby heart and that will likely make our alien an-thropologist friends wince. Not all art historians,philosophical aestheticians, literary critics, musi-cologists, film theorists, and others embrace thispattern in its full form. Some writers in these dis-ciplines make a point of rejecting its key elements,often out of a principled commitment to interdis-ciplinary collaboration.15 But the pattern remains

popular across the larger aesthetic field’s tradi-tional or progressive aisle for reasons that bear onhow the collaborative dynamics of the aestheticnetwork are shaped and limited.

This is the pattern I call the “myth of the auton-omy fault line.” Its mythic power derives in partfrom the appeal, for thinkers of diverse method-ological stripes, of language which projects a clas-sical art–life duality—such as that of the aestheticversus the social—as a basis for modeling the op-tions for belief and argument about one or an-other aspect of the arts. This is then accompaniedby a normative hierarchicalization of the disjuncts.That is, accounts of a subject—say, the nature of apainted image—which do and do not, respectively,favor one’s own favored disjunct in their charac-terizations of more particular themes are deemedacceptable or unacceptable in a broad program-matic way. So, for example, just as Crowther distin-guishes between a Kantian-inspired approach tothe primacy of image making and contextualizingrelativism, favoring the first over the other, Moxeyreverses this order of preference in his distinctionbetween approaches that, respectively, emphasize“universal narratives” and “cultural difference.”A second element of the pattern, exemplified inboth writers again, is an implied premise to theeffect that the possible programmatic stances onemight adopt about the nature of visual artifactsboils down in the end to just two and that theoptions are mutually exclusive: for example, ei-ther (1) underlying the specific perceptual and cul-tural characteristics of works of visual (and otherkinds of) art is a culturally and historically uni-versal artistic essence that manifests itself in thespectatorial experiences of dramatically differentcultural audiences, or (2) there is no such essence;the history of art is, instead, the history of moreparticularized social contexts of production andreception. A third element of the pattern is, ingenetic fallacy-sensitized scholars, usually only in-timated, namely, an association between the the-oretical virtues of an argument and the level ofcivilization of those who embrace it. (Crowtherhints at this in his characterization of contextu-alist relativist consumerism about art as “tacitlyracist,” which mirrors a charge proverbially di-rected by postcolonialist thinkers toward tradi-tional humanists.)

Where does this pattern get its mythic powerfor so many of us? A full answer would keepany anthropologist, human or alien, busy for

some time.16 Suffice it to say that, as with manyother myths, such a stance can impart a sooth-ing sense of dualistic order unto what may other-wise appear as an overwhelmingly complex fieldof argumentation and belief. This stance’s mythicstatus also reflects the deeply aporetic charac-ter, epistemologically speaking, of quarrels aboutautonomy in aesthetics. Myths, in one familiardefinition, are either not literally true or are sogeneral as to be neither determinately true norfalse. Grand, decontextualized assertions aboutthe autonomy or heteronomy of art and relatedaesthetic phenomena are of the latter kind. Butone of the open secrets of modern aesthetic debate(a secret with familiar counterparts in moral, reli-gious, and political life) is that such assertions can-not be proven for a general audience even whilethey are typically uttered with great epistemicconviction.

These assertions are something else too: theyare paradoxical. Quarrels over whether artworksof various kinds possess or lack this or that univer-sal value-making feature have the deeper struc-ture of an antinomy, the sort of deep blockage tosystematic reasoning whose modern philosophi-cal analysis was pioneered by Kant and advancedby the romantics, Hegel, the pragmatists, and oth-ers. Antinomies classically take the form of a pairof propositions about a common subject (a “the-sis” and “antithesis”) that can be neither recon-ciled nor individually rejected. Both propositionshave a rightful place, notwithstanding their infer-ential friction, in the larger system of claims andinferences about the subject in question that door could carry normative weight in our discursivepractices. And insofar as each proposition is fullyintelligible only against the backdrop of that setor system, it is also fully intelligible only in con-junction with the other. This is true even whenany connecting terms that can make that conjunc-tion not show up as a contradiction are eithersimply not known or are otherwise subject to fa-miliar rehearsals of postmodern-era hermeneuticsuspicion. (Adorno made a similar point in not-ing that to think about art from the standpointof autonomy or interiority is also to think aboutit in terms of heteronomy or exteriority, and viceversa.)

It can be tempting to read much of the historyof modern aesthetic debate as a process of endlessdisplacements of this kind of antinomical struc-ture. (This reading particularly suits the dialectics

of autonomist and heteronomist visions of culturalhistory that fueled late twentieth century debatesover aesthetic modernism.) To view that historythis way is to see how there are no final analy-ses of art. All antinomically implicated accountsof artistic subjects are incomplete for reasons thatultimately reach down into deeper modern beliefsabout mind and representation.17

Given how deep the roots of the fault linemythology run in modern aesthetics and in mod-ern thought generally, it would be naive to thinkthat it, along with the disciplinary internaliststances that often sustain it in practice, can justbe reconstructed away. Even so, this mythologyis an empirically learned and not transcenden-tally ordained feature of how we think. It thusbehooves those of us whose meta-aesthetic sen-sibilities were formed by received modernist-eraimages of the aesthetic field as a battlefield ofirrevocably clashing intuitions over autonomy toask ourselves: what would happen if I relaxedmy convictions enough to see a point in at leastconversing more actively with others in the aes-thetic network whose beliefs and inferential com-mitments heretofore seemed prohibitively strangeor wrong?

To do this would involve embracing a moreholistic attitude toward what all of us who strive tounderstand the arts and other aesthetic phenom-ena do. This attitude points in turn to a broadervision of how all inferential practices shapingthe collaborative network within which we think,speak, and critically evaluate one another’s beliefsare more radically dependent on one another fortheir intelligibility than appeared from perspec-tives still beholden to the fault line mythology. (InWittgensteinian terms, compare how one graspsthe point of certain language games only if, whileplaying them, one maintains some sense of theirinterdependencies with a vast array of other lan-guage games within a form of life.)

iv. holism, collaborative networks, and smallworlds

Holism is hardly new as an intuitive approach toexplaining human connections of various kinds.But it takes on fresh meaning in the social contextof collaborative networks. We might think of acollaborative network as a prosthetic extension ofan individual researcher’s inferential powers that

serves in practice to blur certain traditional epis-temological lines between individual and groupknowledge. Imagine a philosophical aestheticianwho, in pursuing her hunches about a particulartopic, draws on research by art historians, culturalanthropologists, social network theorists, her fel-low philosophical aestheticians, and others. She“networks” at conferences and seminars in waysthat may lead her to revise not only her viewsabout the initial topic itself, but also (recallingthe discussion of trading zones) the methods, ev-idence, and vocabulary she finds useful in its in-vestigation. There is a sense in which the locus ofthe thinking is not just this individual but also hercollaborative network, which serves as a kind ofextended mind.

These themes acquire further significance interms of social network theory’s idiom of “smallworlds.” A small world is an arena of reciprocalrelationships of influence among various individ-uals and clusters of individuals who know oneanother either personally—the people to whomone has “strong” links—or through others at vari-ous weaker separational removes. Any given indi-vidual might, in principle, occupy any number ofsmall worlds, as all who engage in online network-ing or belong to multiple academic organizationswell know.18

Small worlds, like disciplines, are cultural, notnatural kinds. Their boundaries are constituted byhuman intentions and can, like the boundaries ofdisciplines, evolve, die out, merge, or mutate overtime. Disciplines are obvious examples of smallworlds, but small worlds in academic life also rou-tinely cut across disciplinary boundaries. Thesefacts, in turn, point to a seeming paradox aboutlearning and innovation familiar to anyone withwide-ranging research interests and that has be-come a staple of social network theory. This isthat the “weak” links in one’s small worlds—thosewhom one does not directly know or conversewith but who know or converse with others oneknows or with someone else who knows them, andso on—often become sources for information thatturns out to be crucial for creative advances in ourinquiries in a way that our more strongly linkedacquaintances do not.19 One’s weakest collabo-rative links can in this sense be one’s strongestones, in that they turn out to play crucial rolesin making one’s small world not only more in-formation rich and capable of growth generally,but also more fit for survival in the informa-

tional ecologies faced by all scholars and artiststoday.20

v. the aesthetics of self-organization

These social-networking themes have little to dowith what most are still trained to regard as dis-ciplinary proper questions about artistic and aes-thetic subjects. Even so, they possess a deep con-nection to the early history of modern aestheticdiscussion. Before I say more about this, considerone last refinement to the holistic idea that thenetwork’s different nodal entities not only workwith, but also need one another to do what theydo.

This is that the aesthetic field is not only an in-tellectual network comprised of interdependentnodal entities. It is also a self-organizing sys-tem. The theme of self-organization has in recentdecades become central in discussions of complex-ity in natural and cultural systems. Its interest de-rives from how it provides a conceptual alternativeto excessively atomistic and holistically reductiveways, respectively, of talking about how phenom-ena that resist traditional forms of unifying expla-nation can both acquire distinctive identities andchange over time. We can define a self-organizingsystem (SOS) as (1) a complex entity (2) whoseactivity as a complex whole cannot be reduced tothe sum of the activities of its constituent partsand (3) whose activity as a whole arises from itselfat least in the sense that this activity cannot bededuced solely from the effects on its operationof outside entities or processes and (4) is so struc-tured that no single part controls the operation ofthe whole.21

How does this definition apply to complex so-cial phenomena such as collaborative networksand disciplinary fields? I have argued that a net-work approach to disciplines views them as partsof a larger whole, with subdisciplinary groups andindividuals comprising smaller subcomponents.These in turn are all redescribable as nodes andhubs of an intellectual network connected via a va-riety of strong and weak links. To this discussion,the SOS theme now adds three further concep-tual refinements to the idea of such a network’sbehavior over time:

(1) The parts’ individual and local movementsaffect each other. (That is, disciplines and

subdisciplinary communities affect oneanother through interactions of variouskinds.)

(2) These changes in turn affect the character ofthe whole (in this case, a larger disciplinaryfield).

(3) The character of the whole changes over time.(That is, the field has a history.)

This schematic description of an intellectualnetwork as an SOS is easily enough instantiatedfor a specific disciplinary field, such as aesthetics,via the kinds of narratives about chains of intellec-tual influence, conflict, and assimilation that arenow staples of the sociology of knowledge litera-ture.22

But what has all this to do with the early historyof aesthetics? In a touch of poetic justice, given theclashing aesthetic metanarratives of writers likeCrowther and Moxey, the most seminal source ofthe basic SOS idea is none other than Kant.23 Associal theorist Niklas Luhmann notes in Art as aSocial System, the idea of self-organization, alongwith the related notion of autopoiesis, is a thematiccousin of the Critique of Judgment’s theme ofthe autonomy of various mental faculties such asproductive imagination and judgment. Complex-ity theorists Stuart Kauffman and Brian Good-win also find significant Kantian echoes in recentdiscussions of self-organization in the sciences.24

These writers are referring to the Third Critique’sdiscussion of teleological judgment, which arguesthat in a living natural object,

the parts of the thing combine of themselves into theunity of a whole by being reciprocally cause and effect oftheir form. For this is the only way in which it is possiblethat the idea of the whole may conversely, or reciprocallydetermine in its turn the form and combination of allthe parts, not as cause—for that would make it an artproduct—but as the epistemological basis upon whichthe systematic unity of the form and combination ofall the manifold contained in the given matter becomescognizable for the person estimating it.25

Kant notes further that we can reflect teleologi-cally on nature as a system wherein

every part is thought as owing its presence to the agencyof all the remaining parts. And also as existing for thesake of the others and of the whole, that is as an instru-ment, or organ. . . . An organized being is therefore, not a

mere machine. . . . [N]ature . . . organizes itself, and doesso in each species of its organized products.26

Here we have Kant’s seminal theme of internalor intrinsic purposiveness. Anticipated by the Cri-tique of Judgment’s early theme of the “purpo-siveness without purpose” (Zweckmassigkeit ohneZweck) of beautiful objects, it is central to thebook’s later account of how a teleological stancetoward nature affords a way of conceptualizingorder in nature without reducing it to older con-ceptions of either efficient or final causality. Kantconsiders such a teleological stance a “regulative”rather than a “constitutive” feature of how rea-son represents the natural world. That is, it plays akey role in guiding our inquiry into the complex-ity of natural order, even while, unlike scientificprinciples and theories, it stops short of deliver-ing full-blooded knowledge of this subject. Kant’sgeneral point is that for at least some explanatorypurposes, we cannot make sense of our naturalworld without interpreting it, along with some ofits parts, as self-organizing systems.

The SOS theme’s subsequent history of inter-pretation and reconstruction by later thinkers isa fascinating study in the multidisciplinary evo-lution of an idea. Goethe and other romanticswould find in Kant’s organism–artwork analogythe key to an organicist theory of artistic cre-ativity and form. Hegel (modern philosophy’sur-network theorist) then took a further recon-structive step that set the stage for more recentdiscussions of networks and complexity in thescientific and humanistic disciplines. This was torecast inner teleology (which Kant, again, con-trasted with externally mechanistic relationshipsbetween objects) now as a “constitutive” ratherthan merely “regulative” feature of thought.Self-organization, reinterpreted by Hegel, nowemerges not merely as a heuristic projection, butas an objective feature of knowable reality.

Now fast-forward to Mark C. Taylor’s updateof these Kantian and Hegelian themes in TheMoment of Complexity: Emerging Network Cul-ture. Kant’s self-organization idea, Taylor sug-gests, contains an early version of a holistic “prin-ciple of constitutive relationality” that “not onlydefines modern and postmodern art but also op-erates in today’s information networks and fi-nancial markets and anticipates current theoriesof biological organisms as well as the natureof life itself.”27 It is then but a short step to

conceptualizing order in complex systems in termsof what Taylor calls “difference without oppo-sition.” This involves redescribing various kindsof conflicts (including intellectual antinomies andtensions between conflicting forms of social iden-tity) as embodying forms of implicit complemen-tarity between their constitutive terms. Such com-plementarity is also, Taylor notes, integral to theformal dynamics of artworks, a point he illustrateswith works by artists such as M. C. Escher, FrankGehry, Chuck Close, and J. S. Bach. Throughoutthe arts, constitutive relationality and differencewithout opposition possess particular heuristic sig-nificance for a twenty-first-century world whosecomplexity outstrips older organizing rubrics likemodernism versus postmodernism and the “twocultures” approach to explaining the differencesbetween scientific and humanistic subjects.

We can now take Taylor’s argument a step fur-ther. For this Kant-to-post-postmodernism tra-dition of holistic reasoning is also illuminatingabout the interdependencies among theories, ar-guments, and disciplinary communities. At onelevel, such things exhibit obvious differences with-out which our modern system of inquiries intonarratives, music, visual, literary, and other arti-facts and their surrounding practices would beunintelligible. These differences are substantialenough to speak of their relationship as disuni-fied in the sense discussed earlier: no grand unify-ing method regulates the theories and arguments,and no single substantive criterion of communica-tive rationality regulates the community. (Thisdoes not mean, though, that our communicativepractices are lacking in normativity.) But that byno means prevents us from conceptualizing suchthings as comprising a kind of self-organizing sys-tem. It is a system all of whose components de-rive their identities from various kinds of log-ical and social dependence upon, and reactionagainst, one another. Thus, for example, the re-search agendas of philosophical aesthetics and arthistory presuppose each other for their intelligi-bility insofar as their respective alleged foci on“conceptualization” and “particularity” have de-veloped historically in reaction to each other withrespect to the supposed opposition between “aes-thetic” and “social” explanations of the visual arts.The same may be said of the relationships be-tween any other pair of humanistic disciplines orcounterdisciplines that differ in focus along thisaxis.

To call a system self-organizing or autopoietic isto say that it has a higher-order life of its own thatincludes, makes possible, and is made possible bythe lives of its parts. To this extent, the networkof aesthetic theorizing itself invites a certain com-parison, in virtue of its autopoietic structure, toa large work of art. Or put differently, the self-organization of aesthetics implies an aesthetics ofself-organization.

vi. the networked future of aesthetics

Historical considerations aside, I have arguedthat

(1) The disciplines of the aesthetic field (and, byextension, those who practice them) broadlyneed one another as different parts of an or-ganism need one another given their individ-ual limitations for purposes of providing thefullest possible understanding of the com-plexities of the arts and other aestheticallyrelevant subjects;

(2) These disciplines are further connected toone another given that, as interactive kinds,their individual identities are bound up in andare being continually transformed by con-versational exchanges between their stronglyor weakly linked communities, as reflectedboth in day-to-day professional contacts andin their professional literatures.

(3) The above interdependencies and interac-tions include disagreements, debates, andother more socially enacted kinds of conflict;

(4) But even so, all of these interdependenciesand interactions in the end exhibit the char-acteristics of a self-organizing system whoseparts’ local movements affect one anotherand the character of the whole in ways thatfacilitate creative change in the character ofthe whole over time.

This still might not satisfy our hyperconnectedalien friends. But they don’t have to deal withour human brains, bodies, and histories, whichmake it our fate to continue wrangling, in vari-ously polite and politicized ways, over the mean-ings of Bar at the Folies-Bergere, La Traviata,Casablanca, and much else. A guiding force formuch of this wrangling, again, remains the mythicquarrel over autonomy described earlier, whichis no more likely to go away tomorrow than

is, say, the mind-body problem (and—althoughthis is a further story—for similar reasons). Sosome might still reasonably wonder, with FrancisSparshott in his erudite and wide-ranging bookThe Future of Aesthetics, how, “in a radicallychanged world, . . . could any phenomenon thenpresent be identifiable as what we now call aes-thetics? Such identification requires that our de-scendants should be able to understand what ourword ‘aesthetics’ meant. But if the changes inthe world are radical enough, how could that bepossible?”28

That’s a fair humanist’s question, circa 1998.But in the present era of Facebook, Wikipediaand renewed debates about the disciplinary fateof the university, that radically changed world isnow here. It is also clear now in a way it was nota generation ago that the aesthetic field is itselfan interactive kind in Hacking’s sense. Withoutpresuming to prophesy too much, it stands to rea-son that the self-interpretive future of aestheticswill be driven in part by dialogues between per-spectives like Sparshott’s and those of similarlyerudite and wide-ranging discussions like Tay-lor’s The Moment of Complexity. This suggestionmay at first equally unsettle old-school humanistswho thought they knew what kind of thing a realdiscipline (and real discipline) is and old-schoolposthumanists who thought they knew that thequest for knowledge in all fields is difference andconflict all the way down. But if the network im-age of aesthetic inquiry turns out to over its moreatomistic alternatives, both groups, historically ha-bituated to viewing each other through the lens ofearlier interpretations of difference and conflict,may find themselves rethinking the more clan-nish forms of such self-interpretation. And whoknows what new informational exchanges mightthen shape a field whose historical currents of col-laboration and competition have always to onedegree or another fueled a further aesthetic dy-namic of creativity? What forms that creativitytakes will depend on how the field continues toreorganize itself.

CASEY HASKINS

Department of PhilosophyPurchase College, State University of New YorkPurchase, New York 10577

internet: casey.haskins@purchase.edu

1. Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 1, ed. Michael Kelly(Oxford University Press, 1998), I, p. ix: “Aesthetics isuniquely situated to serve as a meeting place for numerousacademic disciplines and cultural traditions. . . . [A]estheticsis, in academic terms, both singular and general, and, in cul-tural terms, both local and global. To capture these multipledimensions, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics has been createdusing a definition of aesthetics as ‘critical reflection on art,culture, and nature.’”

2. Art History versus Aesthetics, ed. James Elkins (NewYork: Routledge, 2006); Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdis-ciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Prac-tice, ed. Francis Halsall, Julia Janson, and Tony O’Connor(Stanford University Press, 2009). Similar books that haveappeared over the last decade include The Aesthetics of Cul-tural Studies, ed. Michael Berube (Malden, MA: Blackwell,2005); Aesthetic Subjects, ed. Pamela R. Matthews and DavidMcWhirter (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and ArtHistory Aesthetics Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Hollyand Keith Moxey (Yale University Press, 2002).

3. On these debates’ history, see Julie Thompson Klein,Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Chang-ing American Academy (SUNY Press, 2005). Another ap-proach to conceptualizing the above tension, Ivan Gaskellnotes, is suggested by the Wittgensteinian theme of aspect-perception or “aspecting,” something that perceivers of anobject can individually or collectively do when the ob-ject’s complexity exceeds what any perceiver can take inat any one time. Ivan Gaskell, “Interdisciplinary Aesthet-ics,” American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter 25 (2005):1–3.

4. For more on this history, see Klein, Humanities, Cul-ture, and Interdisciplinarity, chap. 2, pp. 34–54.

5. I further discuss these autonomist themes in “Auton-omy: Historical Overview,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics,pp. 170–175.

6. James Elkins, “Why Don’t Art Historians Attend Aes-thetics Conferences?” in his Art History versus Aesthetics,pp. 39–50, at pp. 42–43.

7. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Har-vard University Press, 1999), pp. 102–106.

8. On art-as-exchange, see Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imag-ination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vin-tage, 1979). On language use as the exchange of reasons, seeRobert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Repre-senting, and Discursive Commitment (Harvard UniversityPress, 1994).

9. On trading zones, see Peter Galison, “Trading Zone:Coordinating Action and Belief,” in The Science StudiesReader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999),pp. 137–160, at pp. 157–158). On liquid networks and in-formation spillover, see Steven Johnson, Where Good IdeasCome From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York:Riverhead, 2010).

10. Re-Enchantment, ed. James Elkins and David Mor-gan (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 309–310. In a book inprogress, I say more about how, in politicized epistemic set-tings like aesthetic and religious debate, the assessment ofan utterance’s justificatory fitness involves a version of thesort of institutionally decentralized normative scorekeepingthat has been described at length by Robert Brandom, whoalso suggestively characterizes the setting within which thisscorekeeping occurs as a “network of inferential relations”

(see Robert B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Intro-duction to Inferentialism [Harvard University Press, 2000],p. 162).

11. Paul Crowther, “Aesthetics in Art History—and Vice-versa,” in Art History versus Aesthetics, pp. 123–128.

12. Paul Crowther, Defining Art, Creating the Canon:Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (Oxford University Press,2007).

13. Keith Moxey, “Aesthetics is Dead—Long Live Aes-thetics,” in Art History versus Aesthetics, pp. 166–172, atp. 167.

14. Moxey, “Aesthetics is Dead—Long Live Aesthetics.”For a fuller version of this argument, see Keith Moxey, ThePractice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History(Cornell University Press, 2001).

15. See in particular such contributions to RediscoveringAesthetics as Wolfgang Welsch, “Aesthetics Beyond Aes-thetics” (pp. 178–192); David Raskin, “The Dogma of Con-viction” (pp. 66–74); and Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn:Collaboration and Its Discontents” (pp. 238–255).

16. The literature on the historical and social-explanatory sources of intellectual conflict is endless. Oneof my favorite recent discussions is Marjorie Garber’s wryaccount of “discipline envy,” whose examples include the de-fensive anxiety sometimes displayed by traditional human-ists toward challenges to their practices posed by postmod-ernist newcomers. Any entrenched discipline is vulnerableto this anxiety, because all disciplines aspire to ideals of com-pleteness, unity, and originality that they can never attain. Tothis extent, discipline envy has no cure. See Marjorie Garber,Academic Instincts (Princeton University Press, 2001).

17. I expand on this discussion in “Paradoxes of Auton-omy: Or, Why Won’t the Problem of Artistic JustificationGo Away?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58(2000): 1–22. What we see repeatedly enacted throughoutthe modern history of quarrels over autonomy in aestheticsis the deep structure of Kant’s Third Antinomy, displacedonto various further modern debates, most conspicuouslyin ethics, about how one or another form of agency can beconsidered “free.”

18. The classic presentation of the small world idea isDuncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, “Collective Dynamicsof ‘Small World Networks,’” Nature 393 (1998): 440–442.For further discussion of its interdisciplinary significance,see Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: The New Science ofNetworks (New York: Perseus Books, 2002).

19. The classic statement of this idea is Mark Granovet-ter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of So-

ciology 78 (1973): 1360–1380, also discussed in Barabasi,Linked.

20. For more on the small world phenomenon and its re-lationship to problem solving and creativity, see the classicarticle by sociologist Brian Uzzi, “Collaboration and Cre-ativity: The Small World Problem,” American Journal ofSociology III (2005): 447–504.

21. This formulation draws on that of Nancy Andreas-son, The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (NewYork: Dana, 2005), p. 62. A related notion is that of the“autopoietic” machine or system, as set out originally byUmberto Maturano and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis andCognition: The Realization of the Living (Boston: D. Reidel,1980).

22. For discussion of these sociological themes, togetherwith a suggestive mapping of diverse currents of influence,collaboration, and conflict in various Western and non-Western traditions of philosophical and religious thought,see Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A GlobalTheory of Intellectual Change (Harvard University Press,1998).

23. I am indebted to Mark C. Taylor’s The Momentof Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (University ofChicago Press, 2001) for its discussion of the general con-tributions of Kant, Hegel, and the scientific thinkers citedabove to the SOS theme’s history.

24. See, respectively, Niklas Luhmann, Art as a SocialSystem (Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 280; also, Stu-art Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for theLaws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1995), p. 274; Brian Goodwin, How the LeopardChanged Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity (New York:Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 197.

25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. C.Meredith (Oxford University Press, 2007) AK 373, Part II,Section 4, pp. 22–23.

26. Kant, Critique of Judgment, AK 374–375, pp. 22–23.27. The principle of constitutive relationality says that

individuals in a variety of explanatory contexts are definedby their relationships to one another, rather than by sup-posedly intrinsic properties, in ways that transcend olderdistinctions between what is internal and external both to athing’s essence and to its concept. See Mark C. Taylor, TheMoment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 84–93. The quoted passagesoccur in After God, p. 110.

28. Francis Sparshott, The Future of Aesthetics (Univer-sity of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 89.

Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network

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