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.