A claim like this blog's title might better be posed as a question. Evidence may be brought to bear and then inquiry made, Has such an age truly passed? But there is not a need to give things a permanent heading of uncertainty. Why refer to the topic as aesthetics? But there is nothing new about calling every kind of art's theory by that term. Now there are several general terms for art that jar equally with concerns for particulars. But only one of them, namely "aesthetics," while it signifies what is indisputable in the sensory basis of art, goes beyond that connotation to invoke a certain doctrine that derives from art rightly understood as satisfaction. This is the underlying hazard or fault, though latent and inadvertent, in the word aesthetics. While art as satisfaction is trivial or axiomatic (for example, in form and in representation), it reinforces the convention that the highest art is a mere fact, since it is in truth dissatisfaction as the tragic. If that condition only exists to speak for itself, it renders "theory" nonexistent. And should one wish to transform that negative into a positive, asserting that therefore art requires no adornment as theory, the reply is that it is not theory that adorns, rather it explains. Whereas, since the reaction to art does not itself explain, and need not even occur at all but only must be seen in art itself, it is in fact adornment. In comparison to much of the appropriate viewers' response to them, the dramatis personae in their own disposition seem almost stoical.
Those who bring to light neglected or poorly understood minds surely recover important evidence and insight. "Then, Brutus, I have much mistook your passion." (Julius Caesar, 1.2.48) To mistake the contents of the fictional souls is a great false step and frequently committed. And those artifactual minds are themselves mental effects, analogous to those of the viewer. But the syndrome that has ruined theory is to mistake our own reaction to the work, more specifically the further effects and especially the negative quality of that reaction in the tragic, for the meaning of the work. There are many things mistaken about this, the most basic being the wedge that is driven between art and us. Art thus becomes adornment by being supplemented and constituted by the audience, and implicitly, no less importantly, the work is thereby trivialized from within as the conceptual isolation of the minds and pathos of characters. On the contrary, the reality of art is that purpose, origin, and reaction are one and operate as a unit. Reaction and pathos are, as Kenneth Burke rightly suspected, no more than expressive intensifications of effort. After all, reactions are not always necessary.
Our reaction, which cannot be better described than as a subtle chastisement, is in the old convention of theory seen as inessential to the work as it appears. But it would thus be essential for the purpose of the work's fulfillment and explanation. In this kind of thinking, our reaction happens to the work and makes it more perfect, since it is seen as ultimate meaning. On the contrary, art's existence conforms with the broader sense that nature is "from the beginning beautiful." On the one hand, that seems axiomatic for art, that there ought to be nothing after it which fulfills it by being a functional effect. But it is also true in fact, that not much exists that we would call effects of that sort.
The response of pathos not only merges with the work, but it is not explanation in the sense of fulfilled purpose. Rather, it is an extenstion of the work or thing to be explained, not as explanation of its quality as happy or sad but as signification of what the whole work expresses. The audience or reader is not privileged in the sense of being an extra component. This is the Copernican Revolution of theory, that pathos is peripheral. It merely builds on the meaning of laughter and comedy.
While it is a truism that art does not have a raison d'etre, its true sense of essential cause is an efficient or generative cause, not consequence-based. Through humanity nature is compelled not merely to imitate itself, or express any profound or superficial virtue. Rather, it expresses truth through an explosion of restrained falsehood and infidelity. This auto-immunization in nature is the cause of, and therefore the main theoretical meaning of art or literature. Art's nature or essence thus consists in this faithfulness of nature to itself. But that does not mean the expression of the particular condition of the writer or artist.
Theory has hitherto always turned art on its head, putting ourselves in the position of the work and its being.
The same strange attitude emerges even in a visual aesthetics of the rebellious sort that, too hastily and bluntly but with good cause, shuns historians and history. That kind of "critical" philosopher whose principle is to view the work as pure, universal or unshackled from contexts, remains in a "theory" that is, at bottom, still one of effects. It is a theory of art as containing an inner message of that inherent negation of interest that plays on the surface in the more rudimentary aspect of the same theory. The radical, the enigmatic or radically darkened is still effect-based even insofar as there is never any actual effect, as it retreats forever.
Aesthetics, especially as it echoes what has been promulgated about literature and narratives, is a theory of effects rather than origins. Such an approach lacks an appropriate sense of necessity or even purpose. And that is ironic, if it is purported by a thinker who invented a philosophy of purpose, or telos.
To define art or literature in terms of its effect is flat and incidental. It is to give the effects undue attention as requiring explanation, but to deny them their appropriate attention for what they signify. It does not break the theoretical plane.
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