About Radical Aesthetics

Central to the concept of art practice in a capitalist economy is the dominant assumption that a successful outcome of the creative process of art making is a tangible object that has a monetary value. In using the capitalist paradigm as one's perceptual coordinates, it could be posited that any form of creative expression, which cannot be bought or sold, has the opportunity to challenge the popular ideology and by it's very orientation is potentially radical. Examples of radical art within capitalistic culture could include specific forms of performance art and conceptual art, which are often ephemeral in their methods of presentation.

In the early twenty-first century, it seems that everything that is tangibly produced is at risk of being commodified. Therefore, this paper suggest that acts of radical aesthetics offer a shift in perspective that is necessary in order to return aesthetics to a more central role in serving the advancement of teaching and learning (pedagogy) of art, as opposed to its current position of serving the dominant ideologies of capitalism.

Admittedly, the popular connotations of the term "radical" make it a difficult term to use in the twenty-first century. It seems that the popular usage of the word is often associated with 1960's protests. The adjective "radical" is sometimes used pejoratively to refer to persons associated with extremist movements and the term has even been used in the 1980's as a slang expression intended to mean "really good", only to have been more recently replaced by the adjective "sick". While the term "radical" is commonly associated with far-left movements, the particular definition of the term "radical aesthetics", as examined here, is related to a historical tradition that is primarily Marxist in its approach and has a particular interest in examining the transmission of knowledge relative to the dominant ideologies within the field(s) of art.

According to Rancière (2004), the politics of aesthetics "suspend the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the network of relationships between spaces and times, subjects and objects, as well as the common and the singular"; he ads that while there is not always politics, there are always forms of power. Therefore, relative to an examination of the dominant ideologies within the field of aesthetics, "radical aesthetics" seeks to define and understand the influence and manipulation power of within art practice, while striving to reveal socio-cultural inequities to ensure social justice and equality of voice among all participants.

Historically, the struggle against the aesthetization of politics is well articulated in Walter Benjamin's essay titled, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1968). In his text, Benjamin suggests, among other ideas, that the path to fascism lies within this aesthetization of politics. However, it should be noted here that similar to the term "radical", the original meaning of the term "fascism", that Benjamin refers to, has evolved over time to become somewhat of a cultural buzzword in politics, which is loosely thrown about. Therefore, in the interest of clarity, it is important to reflect upon what Benjamin is referring to in its original political context which, Paxon (2004, p. 218) describes as:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Parallel to Benjamin ideas, a number of other Marxist theorists have tackled the topic of the radicalization of aesthetics from their own cautionary angles, describing the risks and challenges of the domain of aesthetic theory from their own philosophical perspectives. Herbert Marcuse (1979, p. 1-2.) attempts to articulate the collective theses of an overarching theory for the Marxist aesthetic analysis of literary works through the following statements; this form of aesthetic analysis shares the following characteristics:
1. It attempts to make a connection between art and the material base, meaning that there is a relationship between art and all things that are produced.
2. It attempts to make a connection between art and social class, primarily that truly progressive art expresses the consciousness of the ascending class and correspondingly, that political, aesthetic and revolutionary content tend to coincide with issues of artistic quality. Here the ascending class in the capitalist economy is described as the proletariat.
3. It presents the declining class (bourgeoisie) as producing art work that is often viewed as "decadent".
4. It considers realism the most appropriate art form, as it most clearly describes the social relationships that are at work in the culture.

Correspondingly, in the preface of his text, Marcuse (p. x) identifies art as revolutionary when it either represents a radical change in style or technique or opens "the horizon to change" for groups of persons who have previously been oppressed or are struggling against forms of oppression. Within this set of claims it becomes clear that the Marxist philosophy and hence the proposition of "radical aesthetics" is a perspective in which the philosopher stakes a claim as a realistic purveyor of truth relative to the social landscape.

Badiou outlines the specific role of philosophy, from his perspective, relative to the seeking of truth. According to Badiou (1999, p. 37), the role of philosophy is to:

…propose a unified conceptual space in which naming takes place of events that serve as the point of departure for truth procedures. Philosophy seeks to gather together all the additional names… It does not establish any truth but it sets a locus of truths.

Further, Badiou (2005) has suggested that philosophy and art are dependent upon one another and have been linked throughout history through a series of schemata which each have a different relationship to the notion of truth, which ultimately impacts the perceived role of art in the society. For example, Badiou (2005) suggests that within a didactic philosophic schema, the role of art is to serve education and in this role it is incapable of truth, as all truth is external to art; here art can serve merely as the charm of truth. However, within a romantic philosophic schema, Badiou sees art alone as capable of truth as in its primary role, art places feeling above intellect and hope above knowledge. Conversely, within a philosophic schema of classicism, Badiou sees the role of art as therapeutic and it ultimately provides a public service. While today, thanks to the perspective of pluralism and the evolution of postmodernism, each of the schemata, as defined by Badiou (2005), can happily coexist.

It therefore becomes the role of the cultural critic in a pluralistic society to parry out their own version of truth, through whatever means are possible. However, it is here that Adorno (1967) cautions that the position of the critic is inherently a position of vanity and cultural criticism ultimately places a collection of ideas on display and often fetishizes them. It is this fetishization which often "gravitates towards mythology" and it is here that Marxist aesthetic theory and the notion of "radical aesthetics" has an ability to be most effective as it seeks to deconstruct the mythology that human beings create around creative outcomes. According to Adorno, within any form of cultural criticism, the risk remains that it can use its own cultural ideals to critique itself.

Adorno further cautions that often we are not concerned with "objective substance" within an ideology, as long as it is expedient. In other words, sometimes in the interest of capitalistic efficiency, the truth events, as outlined by Badiou, are often not scrutinized but rather accepted as such, for the sake of speed and consumption, thus merely becoming "self-satisfied contemplation". Adorno adds "today theory hardly exists any longer and the ideology drones… from the gears of an irresistible praxis… today ideology means society as appearance." It is in these moments that acts of "radical aesthetics" are most necessary, because it is here that radical acts hold the potential to "shake us out of our causal comforts", as Rancière has said.

For this very reason, radical aesthetics holds the potential to present us with the mirror of verisimilitude where we can examine in its reflection how the culture is manipulating us. It is within the power of radical acts of aesthetics that we are able to discern what is real, as in the words of Marcuse (1978, p.9), the truth of art lies in its ability to define what is real.


References

Adorno, T. (1967). Prisms. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.


Badiou, A. (1999), Manifesto for Philosophy, Albany: State University of New York

Press


Badiou, A. (2005). Handbook of Inaesthetics, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.


Benjamin, W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In

Illuminations. New York: Harcourt Brace.


Marcuse, H. (1978). The aesthetic dimension. Boston: Beacon.


Paxton, R. (2004), The Anatomy of Fascism, Knopf.


Rancière, J., (2004). The politics of aesthetics. Retrieved December 7th, 2006 from

http://theater.kein.org/node/99