Centre for Art and New Technologies in Prague (CIANT)

A return to aesthetics offers a fresh and interesting approach to the classical concepts of the aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form, disinterest, and symbolic embodiment, as well as to the postmodern critique of aesthetics and of the Enlightenment. This rereading of the history of aesthetics shows how the classical key concepts were misunderstood as symptoms of the Enlightenment ideas of reason and justice and how they still play a very important role in contemporary postmodern philosophy.

The book identifies two main anti-aesthetic tendencies of today. Both of these tendencies try to show that the aesthetic categories are contingent rather than universal and that they are simply a version of the Enlightenment ideas of reason and justice. The first anti-aesthetic tendency criticizing the universalistic tone of the aesthetic categories comes from literary studies field and postmodern philosophy and is represented by thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man or Michel Foucault. The second, “ideological” critique of aesthetics, interprets its categories as a socially based constructions that were simultaneously developed with certain ideas of economic values and with the rise of a certain class. This position is best presented by Bourdieu.

Loesberg paradoxically traces back the conditions of possibility of these two anti-aesthetic positions in the aesthetic concepts and discussions of the 18^th century which gave rise to the idea of “purposiveness without purpose“. The position of “purposiveness without purpose“ offers original solution to aesthetic discussions between epistemology and ontology, and actually presents a mode of writing and critique that is typical of postmodern philosophy. Loesberg shows that the aesthetic criteria of autonomous form (purposiveness without purpose), disinterest (indifference) and embodiment were not necessarily connected to the Enlightenment concepts of reason and objective value but part of the discussion that gave space to such ideas to appear in the first place. Following many examples from discussion in natural theology and later in Kant Loesberg shows how the aesthetic structures were even meant to stand apart form the foundations of reason and value.

The aesthetic theory of the 18^th century actually offers a type of a “sceptical Enlightenment“ that suspends the questions of truth and grounding, and makes them seem not important for the discussion of art and aesthetic experience. The classical aesthetic concepts are in his interpretation almost self deconstructive and they offer as a model how to understand the status of postmodern argument. Aesthetics is to enlightenment what literary language is to postmodern philosophy. When postmodern philosophy says that there is nor universal reason nor justice, it simply performs the aesthetic position. It is not knowledge nor ethical claim but a presentation of a way of apprehending. The status of Foucault's discoursive formations and of power, or habitus in case of Bourdieu, correspond to Kant`s description of apprehending objects as having purposiveness without propose. Neither of them is only a fictions or subjective constructions but a process of arranging details so that we can see a new significance. They are versions of Kant's “intersubjective assent“ which claims that it makes sense to see the world in this way and brake down our normal modes of apprehending things.

For these reasons the return to the classical aesthetic concepts is very challenging and offers a way how to evaluate art on its own terms rather than as a disguised ideology. This is also the basis of how Loesberg’s return to aesthetics differs from some other attempts. Loesberg`s version of the return does not claim that there is a certain form of aesthetic experience that escapes political ideology, that there is a very autonomous and psychological response to certain type of artworks. He does not look for a special experience created by art objects, because this is not really what the critiques are attacking. Bourdieu, a main example of the ideological critique of art, does not say that the taste for autonomous non-utilitarian art does not exist and that it is not valuable, he just states that it is typical of upper classes, it serves ideological ends, and finally it is limited only to certain people. His and similar critiques reject there is a transcendental value attached to it that escapes the historical and political struggle. The version of critique that Loesberg offers within his book is not a try to make aesthetic forms transcendental or unhistorical but rather to render them as a model of inquiry similar to postmodern criticism.