Review: Harry Redner's Aesthetic Life: The History and Present of Aesthetic Cultures

Harry Redner’s account of aesthetic life in his book of the same title is one to which the classic dictum of Lichtenberg applies: Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. Replace “good taste” with the more awkward “sense of aesthetic value” and you have Redner’s guiding insight in a nutshell: giving an account of what art is means avoiding all artful pleas for one’s own taste. It means submitting taste to multi-dimensional critical scrutiny on the highest intellectual level. Redner, in short, always has his reasons at his disposal. In Aesthetic Life he is never tempted to evade careful explanation of his whys and wherefores with picturesque rhetorical gestures or baroque theoretical artifice, or by sprinkling the names of the classics across the page.

The book’s subtitle, “the history and present of aesthetic cultures”, gives further clues to his intentions. The key to Redner’s aesthetics is the idea that aesthetic life is historically and socially formed - thus pre-formed, reformed and deformed – in ways that can be generalised about. The present becomes something like a necessary perspective on these socio-historical travails; aesthetic history for Redner cannot but be the history of the present, which for him means a tale told from the point of view of a time, our own, when the coherence and indeed the practical survival of aesthetic life are radically in question. The argument follows the pattern of Ethical Life (2002), which culminated in the claim that contemporary ethics is subject to a number of painful and historically unprecedented paradoxes, in large part because of the way free markets and the activities of modern states have displaced and rationalised (often rationalised away) the multiple ethical ideals of the past.

In each of the major divisions of this new book, Redner deploys a suite of basic aesthetic categories. They provide the machinery of his view of aesthetic life and his method in large part is to explain what he means by them, put paid to associated theoretical misconceptions, then deploy the machinery in his own account of how art works. The latter he does with some flair and considerable intellectual afflatus.

In Book 1 he presents what he calls the elementary aesthetic qualities, as well as a three-fold division between the constitution (composition, construction, fabrication), presentation (performance, exhibition) and reception of art. The aesthetic qualities include, among others, humour, beauty, form, design, expression (musical and dramatic) and verisimilitude. Redner thinks of them as something like the raw material of our experiences of art, anthropological universals which play a part in everyday life but are also aesthetically elaborated in line with the guiding ideas of individual cultures. (Simplifying considerably, jokes are the source of comedy; daily sing-song develops into honed musical art; speech-making and yarn-spinning flow over as epic narratives and novels; proverbs and the metaphorical tidbits of day to day speech take on definite aesthetic form as poetry; and they each do so in ways that fit with the evaluative interpretations that dominate a culture’s view of reality.) A highlight of this part of the work is the swift and effective overhaul Redner performs on the problem whether aesthetic qualities are subjective or objective, roughly – is beauty (or humour or any basic dimension of aesthetic value) in the eye of the beholder or in the beautiful object itself? The answer is neither and both. Beauty is not statically either in the beholder or the object, it comes to inhere in the beholder and the object because of the way social norms and aesthetic standards are absorbed by individuals, then subsequently transformed and sent into social circulation again. Another way of putting it would be to say there is no fundamental subjective (inner, psychological) or objective (outer, material) grounds to which to reduce judgments about whether something is beautiful, funny etc. Aesthetic judgment is intersubjective, taking place within a framework of evaluative interpretations that are supplied but not mechanically determined by a wider culture. So at last that old chestnut has been plucked from the fire of philosophical wrangling. . .

Book 2 makes a categorial distinction between art, high art and great art – forms between which Redner intends to make no invidious comparison. By “art” pure and simple he means the aesthetic life of tribal peoples, as well as the folk and popular arts of historical cultures. “High art” is the product of literate civilisations which do things like create cities, form states and found elaborate social institutions. “Great art” is high art raised to a higher power of self-consciousness and loosened from its traditionalist moorings. The great art traditions, among which Redner includes those of Greece-Rome, China-Japan, India, Islamic Persia and modern Europe, are the traditions which develop a sense of their own historicity and a self-reflexive language of aesthetic criticism, together with a strong sense of the individual artistic personality. (In cultures that support a great art tradition the notion of artistic personality begins to shape what it means to be an individual in the first place.)

Book 2 takes us right up to the threshold of the present, with the aesthetically fateful twentieth century just closed. The main fact of recent aesthetic history for Redner is that the great art tradition of modern Europe has been brought to a (somewhat definitive) end, having been subject in the course of the twentieth century to a severe devaluation of its highest aesthetic values; though multiple threads of the tradition are still there to be grasped, by century’s end no strong sense of art’s purpose or direction remains intact. Here is where Redner sees a role for criticism, which, as the argumentative apparatus of Book 3 tells us, is the concerted artful practice of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Great criticism comes into existence – at least it did so at the height of the European great art tradition - when critics formed the vital point of interconnection between practicising artists and academic scholarship. A re-vitalised criticism is what aesthetic life is crying out for today given the pervasive sense that aesthetic value judgments have nothing but a flimsy subjective basis and the enormous question mark posed by the dominant cultural institution of our times – a homogenised culture industry of elephantine global proportions.

None of which is to deny that artists continue to produce distinguished work in many aesthetic fields or that they will continue to be able to do so in traditional, popular and recondite forms. However the ongoing viability of isolated forms of artistic activity shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the relationship of art to society has changed radically. The boundary-line between art and non-art has been effaced as part of the normal development of economic life: the commercial products we use every day – everything from deodorant to dogfood – are imbued strategically with stylistic qualities to the point where aesthetic style is becoming subordinate to commercial styling. In addition the distinction between art and non-art has lost its meaning because of the (successful) efforts of self-styled artistic radicals intent on confounding any and all conventional expectations of what art is. This two-pronged attack on the notion of the artwork has taken place moreover at a time when the sorts of low-level aesthetic talents and habits that used to be passed quasi-traditionally down the generations are in decline. The upshot? Aesthetic life on the whole is becoming more ephemeral, more marginal. Though it is unlikely to cease entirely, according to Redner it is losing its old function as one complete dimension of human experience.

Redner delivers himself of some grumpy strictures about the post-war art scene, its fashionable excesses and its anything-goes postmodernism. However his encyclopaedic grasp of large swathes of cultural history and the architectonic qualities of his philosophical enterprise constantly create wider contexts into which to place the acerbic commentary. As well as being a cultural critic, Redner is, above all, a systematist. His high regard for rationality is Janus-faced: it looks on one side in the direction of sharp polemical argument, but on the other side in the direction of comprehensiveness, a genuinely integrated view of the whole of the aesthetic domain. The upside of the systematism is that he provides the sorts of cultural panaromas that anyone looking for a way into aesthetics could make good use of getting oriented. The downside is that he occasionally drifts towards schematic rigidity. Thus when he forces himself in Book 2 to summarise the development of each of the great art traditions, the result can start to resemble a history of aesthetic -isms. Likewise in writing the history of twentieth century art and criticism in Book 3, he seems a little too eager to project a world-historical value judgment across the entire scene of post-war culture. His point about the way commercial mass culture puts traditional, popular and high culture through its blender to create tasteless aesthetic spectacles is well-made. But because he isn’t much interested in what art has been up to for the past 30 years, he can sound at times like the ghost of T.W. Adorno, scarifying the entire aesthetic present with the same generalisations about the inanities of the Culture Industry. Film seems to have simply lost its way as an aesthetic medium; tv is a dead loss; pop music declines inevitably into the scatterbrained nastiness of gangsta rap; the unexhausted possibilities of the novel go unmentioned; the undeveloped potentials of computer games seem virtually unmentionable.

That said, Aesthetic Life and its predecessor, Ethical Life, are books that deserve to be read, studied and widely known. This latest volume says something substantial about what art is and how it runs like a red thread through the history of civilisations and societies – about what it is to respond to it in sophisticated terms, and how close we might be coming to dissolving the very bases of sophisticated aesthetic experience. It is not exactly an easy read; its length will put some readers off; this reader for one felt at times that it could’ve been written in sprucer prose. Still, easy reading is not something we ought to demand too loudly, especially if what Redner says about the place of art in the cultural present is even remotely right. Radical simplification is taking place within the world of art as art is becoming indistinguishable from the general impulse to aestheticise everyday life and as aesthetic value-judgment has become subordinate to questions of pragmatic success and commercial viability. So unless we want introductions to aesthetics just to function as aesthetically pleasing Christmas stocking-fillers, we shouldn’t want them to be too simplified either.