Pleasure: Reflections on Aesthetics and Feminism

Abstract

For much of this century two questions governed formulation of theory in aesthetics: What is aesthetic experience? and What is a work of art? Theories of perception and appreciation were framed in response, along with correlative concepts of objects of appreciation, notably works of fine art. The more specific questions of field-involving topics such as expression, criticism, interpretation, and ontology-were cast as corollaries to these two basic questions. The overall result was a collection of theories that by 1951 John Passmore found dreary in its attempt to generalize about experience and impose unity upon diverse riches available from actual works of art. I Whatever justice of Passmore's original complaint, as century nears its close, one can hardly object that there is too much uniformity in subjects addressed by aesthetics. Only remnants of interest in aesthetic experience remain, and questions about nature of art have been transformed by an interlude of Wittgensteinian skepticism about definability. While some would laud diversity present in aesthetics today, others might decry its cost. Indeed field presently displays such variety that it is hard to discover any obviously central questions defining it at all. Unified theory has given way to an anarchic if fascinating assembly of concerns perhaps only loosely related. One of most obvious signs of breakdown of confident, systematic theorizing is prevalence of suspicion that quest for a common foundation for taste and critical appreciation that had propelled philosophy of art for centuries is in principle not a fruitful endeavor. This doubt has arisen from multiple sources, though surely one of strongest has been feminist scholarship: its challenge to claims about universal human nature, its support for pluralist interpretations of art, and its own brand of skepticism regarding the canon of great works. For some time my own interests in aesthetics and in feminism appeared to run parallel yet mutually exclusive courses, but it seems to me now that philosophical aesthetics and feminist views of culture have begun to dovetail and to share certain concerns and orientations. Philosophical aesthetics is not by and large taking note of this, however, and in first section of this essay I argue that feminist perspectives provide a vantage from which appearance of breakdown in unified theorizing can be seen to have an underlying order and pattern.2 Thus at first I shall emphasize a potential harmony between feminist critiques and recent directions in aesthetics. Then in second section I shall focus on one of subjects that has all but dropped from view in reshuffling of theoretic concerns: aesthetic appreciation or pleasure. I argue that this concept is urgently in need of reexamination, a need that is especially evident when we consider feminist alternatives to traditional idea of aesthetic pleasure.