The Unconscious Grounds of Aesthetic Experience

Abstract

ABSTRACT Aesthetic experience is an emotional response to the spontaneous interpretation of an object/situation as symbolic of either the fulfilment of an impossible but inalienable desire (positive aesthetic experience) or the inescapability of that to which we are ineluctably averse (negative aesthetic experience). In both cases it is an emotional response to situations for which there is no appropriate practical response; hence the perception of the response as “disinterested,” though, since aesthetic experience is a matter of value and emotion, it cannot actually be “disinterested” in the sense of unconnected with desire. Insofar, then, as it is an emotional response—a perception of objects or situations as value-laden—that the subject cannot account for in terms of any conscious desires, we must take aesthetic experience to be the outcome of an unconscious process. We may surmise the form that this unconscious process takes from the nature of aesthetic experience itself. It is precipitated by the spontaneous interpretation of objects/situations in terms of enduring and insatiable desires, which either arise from, or we are convinced arise from, the conditions of our existence. This interpretation invests the object/situation with a meaning that we do not wish to consciously acknowledge. In the case of positive aesthetic experience, this projection of the value arises from a desire to objectify that value by disowning as far as possible one’s own role in creating it. In the case of negative aesthetic experience, it is a matter of containing the perceived value within a specific, avoidable, object.