The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy)

The vision for this book goes back quite some way. At the tail end of the previous millennium, I was lucky to join that remarkable intellectual space, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. I thank Ellen Rooney and Elizabeth Weed for organizing the yearlong research seminar "Aesthetics, Politics, and Differences. " The seminar's weekly meetings provoked decades' worth of questions, and continue to resonate as an extraordinarily vibrant model of interdisciplinary exchange. Ellen's and Elizabeth's incisive comments on initial formulations of the book's key concepts notably influenced the directions the project would take. To the members and invited speakers of the Pembroke seminar on aesthetics as well as to the participants in subsequent seminars on "The Culture of the Market" and "The Question of Emotion, " I am grateful for heated debates and fundamental points of critique. Students and colleagues at Hampshire College bring to our work together a taste for experimentation that fills the air with surprise and a sense of intellectual risk. No single day on the job is predictable. The college has granted support and time for my research. The cross-disciplinary nature of Hampshire's educational program creates an atmosphere that is distinctly conducive to aesthetic inquiry. I thank students in courses, work/study helpers, coconspirators whose self-designed concentrations and senior projects I advised, and colleagues who collaborate on these ventures, for their energy and curiosity. Cover HalfTitle Series page Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Credits Introduction 1 The Aesthetic, the Public, and the Promise of Culture The aesthetic promise of a harmonious and egalitarian culture Glitches in the promise Creating the promise Is the promise a threat? The trustworthy, unreliable, future-oriented, and collaborative nature of promises Promises, threats, relationality, and address 2 Whiteness and Blackness as Aesthetic Productions Enlightenment orders of whiteness and blackness Contemporary collaborations between aesthetics and race Toward a quotidian aesthetics of race Raising the aesthetic stakes 3 The Gendered Aesthetic Detail The sensory detail as a ground for taste But is the aesthetic detail a detail? A pearl’s pleasures and perils Interpretation regenders detail Gendering aesthetics anew 4 Beauty’s Moral, Political, and Economic Labor Beauty and ugliness in The Hour of the Star Beauty and moral order: Plato, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson Beauty and the economy: Hume and Smith Beauty, love, and the body: Burke and Wollstonecraft Reaestheticizing beauty 5 The Aesthetics of Ignorance Aestheticizing and reaestheticizing ignorance Intermingling states of knowledge and ignorance Histories of aestheticized ignorance The ignorance of the aesthetic 6 An Aesthetic Confrontation Aesthetic collectivity and the patrolling of racial boundaries Aesthetic integrationism: Addison, Baumgarten, Schiller, Hegel Dualities and integrations as forces of discipline Regulating aesthetic relationality The work and nonwork of aesthetic relationships 7 Racialized Aesthetic Nationalism Culture as property: Racialized aesthetic nationalism in everyday life Disruptive body politics: Racialized aesthetic nationalism in the art world 8 Aesthetic Promises and Threats The promise of the aesthetic in The Hour of the Star Adorno and the promise of art Nietzsche on keeping and changing promises Arendt and the order of the promise Postscript Notes Bibliography Index "Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach."--Bloomsbury Publishing.