Aesthetic Ideology (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Ideology Elizabeth Rottenberg Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology. Edited and with an introduction by Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 196 pp. “What we want from critics in the arts is the enhancement of our experience, not a disquisition on the transcendental conditions of its possibility. . . . Or to put it somewhat differently, any rational person would rather go the theater with Schiller than with Kant”: these words conclude an otherwise unremarkable review of Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology that appeared in the New York Times Book Review on November 10, 1996. There is something unappealing—one might even say, in homage to Andrzej Warminski’s masterful introduction to this volume, “downright ugly”—about de Man’s “disquisition” on the [End Page 974] relation between philosophical aesthetics and epistemology (a relation that is the explicit concern of the essays and lectures in this volume). In fact we might find it advisable to avoid all such disquisitions. Advisable, that is, if we want “to keep at least reasonably happy,” 1 if what we want from our “critics in the arts”—these are de Man’s words—is “a method of literary study . . . that allows for a measure of theoretical rigor and generality . . . while leaving intact, or even enhancing, the aesthetic appreciation . . . that the work provides” (AI, 91–92). It is very legitimate to want this; after all, as this New York Times critic rightly points out, “a modest knowledge of applied chemistry is useful for both cooks and consumers; an elaborate acquaintance with the history of the philosophy of science is not.” A little too much knowledge upsets the balance between rigor and pleasure, and it is certainly bad for the business of literary theory when it does not give us what we want. Both de Man and Warminski point to an (Anglo-American) critical tendency to turn away from (continental) sources of displeasure. “Do not push irony too far,” de Man quotes Wayne Booth as saying, “or you will pass from the joyful laughter of Tristram Shandy into Teutonic gloom. Read Schlegel” (AI, 167). “There are styles of ideological discourse other than the ‘organicist,’” writes Terry Eagleton in a passage cited by Warminski, “the thought of Paul de Man, for example, whose gloomy insistence that mind and world can never harmoniously meet is among other things a coded refusal of the ‘utopianism’ of emancipatory politics.” 2 Clearly gloom is not what we want. We want rather to dispel the gloom, to suffuse it with a “joyful laughter,” with a “cheerful insistence,” as Warminski puts it, on the possibility “that mind and world can harmoniously meet” (Intro, 10). From our “critics in the arts” we want the “enhancement” of our pleasure: gloom (like Coriolanus) must be banished from our critical midst; “boring, monotonous, predictable and unpleasant” like rhetorical readings, 3 gloom must be exiled among the Teutons so we can maintain our good cheer at home. But perhaps we should not be so quick to call this repudiation “rational” along with our New York Times critic; prudence, it would seem, is in order where pleasure is concerned. Indeed there may be much more to gloom than meets the eye, for the very term used here to justify the exorcism of certain critical tendencies also conveys an obscurity, the opacity of which may extend beyond the psychological. Gloom suggests that what is a threat to the psyche may in fact be something far more disturbing, a threat of an epistemological order. In their disavowal of gloom, in other words, our “critics in the arts” have introduced the possibility of a threat that is in no way available to psychological cure or treatment. For all of its gloominess, de Man’s disquisition turns out to be far less gloomy: indeed, as the place where the “convergence of rigor and pleasure is shown to be a delusion” (AI, 50, my emphasis), Aesthetic Ideology dwells not on the darkness of this predicament but precisely on its potential eventfulness. Aesthetic Ideology is a collection of essays and lectures written or delivered [End Page 975] between 1977 and 1983. Of the nine chapters that de Man intended for this volume...