Aesthetic Sphere Research Articles

Finding Form: Looking at the Field of Organizational Aesthetics

abstract Organizational research has long focused on the instrumental sphere with its questions of efficiency and effectiveness and in recent decades there has been interest in the moral sphere with its questions of ethics. Within the last decade there has also emerged a field that draws on the aesthetic sphere of our existence in organizations. In this review we look at the field of organizational aesthetics in terms of content and method, suggesting four broad categories of organizational aesthetics research: intellectual analysis of instrumental issues, artistic form used to look at instrumental issues, intellectual analysis of aesthetic issues, and artistic form used to look at aesthetic issues. We then suggest how organizational scholars might pursue artistic aesthetic organizational research.

The historical universal: the role of cultural value in the historical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

Best known for his pioneering study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in which the aesthetic attitude of disinterestedness is accounted for as the expression of a class ethos, Bourdieu has become something of an icon of relativism. In thus effecting a Bakhtinian 'discrowning' of official hierarchies of the arts, he is often celebrated for his concern to place all tastes, popular and high, on a similar footing, equally rooted in specific class practices. Only a careless inattention could support such a conclusion. From his early interventions in French cultural policy debates up to and including The Rules of Art and Pascalian Meditations (1996), Bourdieu has consistently repudiated the view that a sociological approach to questions of aesthetic judgment must result in a levelling form of relativism. In exploring why this should be so, this paper considers the issues at stake in the forms of 'historical universalism' that are associated with Bourdieu's account of the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere. It does so with a view to identifying some of the difficulties underlying his understanding of sociology as a historical practice.

Switzerland

Competitiveness of Swiss public forest enterprises is hampered by the fact that there is, by and large, little economic dependence on timber and wood production. Crossfinancing and alternative or other sources of income are more important. Private forest enterprises do well if they are big enough to be economically viable. High level of wages and the low prices in the forest and timber market as compared to other countries is a limiting factor to entrepreneurship. The uncertain development of the forestry sector is not a rewarding perspective for the younger generation to embark on the establishment of forest enterprises. Other sectors of the economy offer better economic alternatives to entrepreneurs. Innovations in the forestry sector bear high uncertainties of success and profit. Externalities of the societal demands in the spheres of recreation, landscape aesthetics and climatic services are taken for granted and are likely not be adequately compensated in future.

Social Change: How Should Technology Education Respond?

Rapid social change creates a powerful challenge to individuals and educational institutions. Technology education is not an exception. To be a useful and authentic learning area, technology education should constantly re-examine its rationale in order to formulate responses to changing contexts to improve the quality of learning for students. The more perspectives used for this process, the better the results should be. This article explores several facets of social change that can influence an understanding of the aims and nature of technology education and that might contribute to its development. Social change is a very complex and dynamic phenomenon that can be considered from a variety of perspectives and is reflected in a number of processes. These processes are different in different types of societies. In relation to the topic, the following processes that are relevant to Western societies (it is acknowledged that for different type of societies, e.g. Islamic, Chinese, social context will be different) will be analyzed: (1) The shift of emphasis from engaging society members primarily as producers to engaging society members primarily as consumers; (2) The colonisation of the cognitive and moral spheres of human life by the aesthetic sphere; (3) The integration of people into the technological world and (4) The shift from the Welfare state to the Competition state. These processes have been identified on the basis of their potential influences on the development of technology education and, as a consequence, the students who study it. These processes are in tension which creates even greater challenges to technology education. Several implications of the above analysis in terms of conceptualizing technology education are discussed. It is suggested that social change can be addressed through technology education if the educational goals of it are ‘to broaden minds and develop all pupils in the creation of a better society’. For technology education classrooms, these specifically mean the involvement of students in democratic debates on the future outlines of technological development; development of their social and ecological sensitivities; avoiding orienting their solutions exclusively to the standard of business efficiency and profitability criteria; helping them to distinguish real needs from desires; discussing the role of designed objects in the life of contemporary society; putting more emphasis on other than the aesthetic aspects of life that can provide existential meaning for people; challenging the way people are manipulated through advertising and cultivation of their desires; developing an active/creative attitude towards problems (not re-active); teaching students to formulate problems (not only being involved in problem solving); challenging consumer-oriented design; looking at design as one source of inspiration, not as a source of economic utility; and developing social responsibility

A Phenomena of Split Consiousness in the Lithuanian Vanguard Poetry of Early XX Century

The aim of the article is to analyze the relation of the vanguard with the social in the poetic texts of lithuanian varguard in the first decades of the twentieth century. The article develops the analysis of the texts on a level of tension between the writter as an artist and a citizen. The article argues that the spheres of aesthetics and social activity were being divided by the vanguard artists. While the artistic imagination was not constrained in the sphere of aesthetics, in the sphere of social activity the artists followed the societal models that defined a citizenship.

Sensibility and its Contexts: Two Recent Books

The first problem faced by any scholar of eighteenth-century sensibility is delimitation. How should it be defined and how will it be understood? In what domains will it be shown to operate, and who will be shown to use it? We could say that it is a matter of choosing the most appropriate context, but that will not get us very far. Sensibility is such a ubiquitous term in the period's writing that there are too many contexts to choose from, though any choice will have important consequences for the direction and scope of our interpretations. So which context should we regard as primary? Does "sensibility" name the humanitarian movement that emerged from a "polite and commercial people" in the early to mid-eighteenth century? Does it refer to an "age of sensibility" in mid-to late-eighteenth century literature? Is it a "culture of sensibility" that overtook and redefined gender norms in the late-eighteenth century? Or is it an awkward compromise in the history of cultural semantics, an unstable fusion of moral, political, and aesthetic judgment that fell apart after the rise of an autonomous aesthetic sphere in the early nineteenth century? Can we simply say "all of the above," [End Page 436] and move on to more specific issues, or should we try to see how the different strands of this seriously polysemous concept relate to one another?

Théâtre et Identité II: Les Modalités de L' échange

This study concludes a two-part enquiry into the possible workings of aesthetics of identity in devising theatre. A preceding analysis of the work accomplished by the Troupe du Haut Pays in Gaspésie and by Brigitte Haentjens with respect to her artistic contribution to Northern Ontario's francophone community highlighted nine structural parallels that articulated, at the metacommunicative level, a dialogical relationship of confirmation of identity between a professional team of artists and an environment virtually devoid of theatre. The theoretical and methodological framework utilized integrates Greimas' theory of modalities and exchange so as to better account for the intertextuality between these two interventions, as narrated by the artists. This complementary focus on the signifying practices identified in the systemic aspects of the narratives analysed goes beyond the aesthetic sphere and suggests the operational value of the exchange paradigm as a model for documenting as well as for stimulating innovation in both the artistic and non-artistic fields.

On the Utility of Art for Politics: Musil's "Armed Truce of Ideas"

A phantom haunts Germany today. It is ghost of intellectual invested with a critical mission. In course of last decade established notions concerning social and political role of intellectuals have increasingly come under scrutiny as space of cultural production has become more than ever politically contested. In a recent analysis of this historical transformation Peter Uwe Hohendahl observed that the critical function once attributed to intellectual seems to have evaporated. 1 Hohendahl is careful to emphasize specificity of German situation in which critical mandate of intellectual is understood as being rooted in sphere of aesthetic. In this context aesthetic sphere is conceived as locus of a distinctive knowledge which is qualitatively different from other cognitive practices, most notably science.2 Hohendahl's diagnosis is complemented by Andreas Huyssen's assessment of disorientation and historical shortsightedness displayed by German intellectuals after Wende.3 What drives Hohendahl's and Huyssen's analyses is recognition of a need to reformulate critical function of intellectuals in light of profound historical transformations. But, as Huyssen has noted, this step demands that assumptions underlying intellectual's claim to authority be reexamined today, particularly as they apply to relation between aesthetics and politics. This essay addresses this question by revisiting modernist origins of paradigms that have currency today and by seeking alternative models among competing discourses that once challenged these categories but have since been obscured. In particular Robert Musil's reflection on art and politics, which seemed so untimely in his own day, is examined as a vision whose time may have finally come. Much of today's vocabulary for conceptualizing relation between art and politics remains indebted, whether knowingly or not, to controversies that drove aesthetic debates of 1930s within German Marxism. In spite of important differences in emphasis and argumentation, opposing sides that emerged from these debates were aligned with respect to two mutually exclusive positions that construed aesthetic as intimately related to or, conversely, as incompatible with politics. While first model, paradigmatically articulated by Georg Lukacs, sought to place art's critical potential in service of a political narrative, opposing paradigm, embodied in its most radical form by Theodor W Adorno, embraced dialectical negativity of an autonomous aesthetic sphere as only critical space available in an administered world.4 Despite these differences both stances share a fundamental premise, namely, assumption that any critical activity presupposes a privileged vantage point for assessing real. In both models it is intersection of aesthetic and political discourses that provides critic with a superior standpoint from which to observe and account for history and society.5 It is this self-understanding of intellectual as endowed with a more encompassing view of whole that increasingly has been called into question by fundamental transformations in fabric of postindustrial societies. Given high degree of complexity of advances in industrial societies, Hohendahl writes, [...] there no longer seems to be an obvious mandate for writer to assume leadership. 116 Hohendahl's argument is indebted to Max Weber's characterization of modern societies as shaped by an unrelenting process of rationalization and proliferation of distinct domains of experience. The intellectual no longer enjoys a self-evident critical mandate because multiplication of perspectives and discourses-not just those underlying different realms of modern life, but within field of cultural production itself-makes any argument concerning intellectual's privileged viewpoint difficult to sustain. …

The Salonnieres and the Philosophies in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment

The Salonnières and the Philosophes in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment* Jolanta T. Pekacz During the eighteenth century a significant shift occurred in the perception of the authority of aesthetic judgment in France, from a group usually referred to as “polite society” and widely considered the exclusive source of taste (goût) to various competing groups arrogating to themselves the right to judge artistic matters. 1 In the present article I discuss the changing recognition of the genders as arbiters of taste, exemplified by Parisian salonnières on the one hand, and the philosophes on the other, during two eighteenth-century quarrels over the French and Italian operas: the Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s and the controversy between Gluckistes and Piccinistes in the 1770s. I argue that by the end of the 1770s, as a result of the collapse of the old paradigm of “polite society” of which salons were a part, Parisian salon women lost the position (however illusory it might have been) which they enjoyed in the seventeenth century as arbiters of taste. While the philosophes attended feminine salons, [End Page 277] they rejected the idea of consulting salonnières on the matters of taste (and on other matters), as was previously the case, and relegated them to formal, if not merely decorative, roles of guardians of good manners and propriety, the roles accepted by salonnières. The ousting of the salonnière from aesthetic arbitration exemplified by the two operatic quarrels may be viewed as a continuation of the process of exclusion of salon women from discursive development that began in the seventeenth century, as discussed by Erica Harth in Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (1992) and, most recently, by Joan DeJean in Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (1997). In the seventeenth century the norms of feminine bienséance (decorum, propriety) allowed a woman to establish a salon but made it impossible for a salonnière to create a space intellectually comparable to that of the French Academy. After having lost a gendered competition for intellectual space with the Academy by the 1680s, the salon, as Erica Harth put it, “proved a discursive dead end for women.” In this essay I carry through this argument into the eighteenth century and demonstrate that salon women lost a competition with the philosophes not only in the intellectual but also in the aesthetic sphere. Salonnières did not choose not to make aesthetic judgments out of respect for the exclusive right of the philosophes to make such judgments 2 but rather were silenced by the philosophes and complied in order not to violate the limits of feminine bienséance in the public sphere, that is, to survive as salonnières. The seventeenth-century ideals of feminine bienséance taken over by eighteenth-century salonnières were no longer perceived as sufficient (or legitimate) to recognize women as arbiters of taste. In fact these ideals proved to be as detrimental as a source of authority for salon women in the siècle des lumières as they were ambiguous in the grand siècle. Ironically, not only were the eighteenth-century Parisian salonnières ousted from aesthetic arbitration, but neither did they succeed in their roles as guardians of propriety and good manners for the philosophes, that is, in keeping the Enlightenment discourse civil. In both operatic quarrels the dominant genre of discourse was a pamphlet, a libelle, not a salon conversation. While during the Querelle des Bouffons the philosophes were unanimously pro-Italian, the Gluck-Piccini quarrel caused a deep split among them, followed by fratricidal fighting, which seriously undermined their authority in public matters. I. The negative connotation associated with the epithets pedant, savant, and their derivatives in seventeenth-century French treatises on honnêteté indicates [End Page 278] that the authority of judgment of “persons of quality” in matters of taste resulted from the code of bienséances in social relations. Blaise Pascal probably best summarized arguments for the superiority of an honnête person (as opposed to a professional) in the realm of aesthetics; being an...

Aesthetic experience, medical practice, and moral judgement. Critical remarks on possibilities to understand a complex relationship.

The aim of the paper is to examine the possible relationships between the different dimensions of aesthetics on the one hand, and medical practice and medical ethics on the other hand. Firstly, I consider whether the aesthetic perception of the human body is relevant for medical practice. Secondly, a possible analogy between the artistic process and medical action is examined. The third section concerns the comparison between medical ethical judgements and aesthetic judgement of taste. It is concluded that the mutual relevance between the aesthetic sphere, moral judgement and medical practice can be understood only if we recognize these spheres as distinct.

Sociality and the Aesthetic Sphere

Sociality and the Aesthetic Sphere

The aesthetic problematic

This article is a consideration of the viability of an aesthetically oriented social theory. After a discussion of some aspects of Michel Maffesoli's writings, the paper goes on to argue for three: 1. that we might take an interest in the aesthetic sphere not from the perspective of a critique of ideology or from that of critical philosophy but throguh a concern for something like Problematics of freedom: 2 that, against the understandable temptations of a sociological reduction of art, we need to treat aesthetic autonomy with a certain benign seriousness, that is to say, as a (moral, ethical, aesthetic) problem; and 3. That, in contrast to the aestheticizing tendencies of much of what goes by the name of cultural sociology, the question of the aestheticization of culture needs to be analysed in terms, above all, of its ascetic properties, aspirations and directions.

Henri Beyle sous influence

Henri Beyle 's literary beginnings illustrate the fluctuations of the notion of influence in the aesthetic sphere at the beginning of the 19th Century. At first turned away at the beginning of the 1800s to the benefit of a strategy of imitation, still impregnated in classical doctrine, influence became an important principal of his literary education. Neglecting the ordinary sense of the term, which supposes the often harmful effect of an ancestry exerting some form of uncontrollable power, Beyle evacuates all idea of submission from the notion of influence, and views it as a relationship of election, a freely consenting character from whom he intends gaining numerous benefits. Contrary to imitations rhetoric, influence's culture, as he put it into practice, is the cult of living sensation; thus supposing a "sympathetic" soul, receptive to and enriched by all aesthetic emotions. But this euphorie make-believe also has a darker side : badly controlled influence becomes a virus, a poison which leads to self-annihilation in another person 's mind. Therefore, without abandoning the idea of his motivating power, Beyle is actually applying himself to another practice of influence, in search of singularity, that which he exerts over himself, though, amongst others, his diary and his letters. Here lie a great many areas of study of influences, in which, through successive filters, appears a precious quintessence : that of originality.

Foucault, politics and the autonomy of the aesthetic1

Abstract How should we read Foucault's claims, in his late work, for the relevance of ‘aesthetic criteria’ to politics? What is Foucault's implicit understanding of the nature of aesthetics and the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere? Would an ethics which gave a place to the aesthetic legitimize a politics of manipulation, brutality and aggression ‐ in short, a ‘fascist’ politics ‐ as some of Foucault's critics argue? In this paper, I examine key accounts of the fascist ‘aestheticization of politics’ ‐ from Walter Benjamin's classic essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), to Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe's work on the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and the fascist theme of politics as the plastic art of the state. Through a discussion of Foucault's late work, the paper demonstrates the connection between Foucault's turn to ancient Greek ethical practices and his call for a contemporary renewal of the idea of ethics as an art of living. The aim of the paper is to show in what ways the ethico‐political position which is presented in Foucault's late work, far from contributing to a fascist politics, in fact provides ways of thinking about the relationship between the aesthetic and the political which avoid both mindless radicalism and totalitarian narcissism. In doing so, the key question is, ‘What's aesthetic about Foucault's “aesthetics of existence"?’

Aesthetics and Orientalism in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters

I confess I am malicious enough to desire that the World shou'd see to how much better purpose the LADYS Travel than their LORDS, and that whilst it is surfeited with Male Travels, all in the same Tone, and stuft with the same Trifles, a Lady has the skill to strike out a New Path, and to embellish a worn-out Subject with variety of fresh and elegant Entertainment. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was well educated for a woman of her day, though largely self-taught. Her incisive intellect was attuned to the nuances of art, literature, and criticism in Augustan England. She was a contemporary of Congreve, Shaftesbury, and Addison, whose tragedy Cato she was asked to critique in manuscript, not to mention her vexed relationship with Pope. The letters she wrote throughout her long, adventurous life persistently thematize aesthetic concerns: the visual allure of sensuous surfaces as well as the hierarchies of power that complicate the relations between spectator and spectacle, aesthetic subject and aesthetic object. We have glimpsed the assumptions held by Montagu's male peers about these matters. Addison reserves the “Polite Imagination” to privileged men, dismisses “the Vulgar” and relegates “Fair ones” to the margins of the aesthetic sphere, while Shaftesbury implicitly aligns aesthetic contemplation with property ownership as masculine prerogatives. Such attitudes are the context for Montagu's innovative approach to both travel and aesthetics. Montagu's husband was appointed British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1716, affording her a rare opportunity for contact with a distant and misunderstood culture.

Lesbianism, History, and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando

At Bow Street Magistrates Court on 16 November 1928, Sir Chartres Biron ordered destruction of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a polemical novel pleading for social tolerance for lesbianism. It is tempting to think that Hall got into trouble simply for raising issue of lesbianism, since female (as it was then known) was not legally recognized in early twentieth-century Britain. A proposal to extend to women 1885 Labouchere Amendment, which outlawed of gross indecency between men, ran aground in House of Commons in 1921 because, Samuel Hynes speculates, men found it [lesbianism] too gross to deal (375). However, at least two other novels published in autumn of 1928, Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women and, more important, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, clearly broached same subject, yet escaped official censure. Hall's case aggravating factor seems to have been not subject but treatment. Whereas Woolf's fictional biography, like Mackenzie's satire, sets out to make readers laugh, The Well of Loneliness pleads cause of sexual inversion by taking up an aggressively polemical stance. A summary of Judge Biron's ruling in The Times (17 November) suggests that Hall provoked British authorities into legal action by preaching an unacceptable sexual doctrine in an earnest tone that sought to deny possibility of either laughter or moral censure. Conceding that Well some literary merit, and that such a book might even have a moral Biron declared: But in present case there was not one word that suggested that anyone with horrible tendencies described was in least degree blameworthy. All characters were presented as attractive people and put forward with admiration. was even more serious was that certain acts were described in most alluring terms. order to advocate sympathy and tolerance for lesbians, Hall had made sure that her lesbian heroine, Stephen Gordon, appeared above reproach. Ironically, as Hall's biographer Michael Baker has noted, it was by making Stephen virtuous that Hall provoked moral censure (220). If those virtues had been nonexistent, or at least laughable, as in Extraordinary Women, The Well of Loneliness would have passed muster as having, if not a strong moral influence, at least not a bad one. The question of relation between obscenity and literature raised by Judge Biron prompted some musings in diary of Virginia Woolf, who attended Bow Street on 9 November, first day of Hall trial: What is obscenity? is literature? is difference between subject and treatment? (Diary 3:207). Like many other literati, including E. M. Forster and Vita Sackville-West, Woolf went to prepared to take witness stand and speak against obscenity charges. She was not quite as committed to cause of Radclyffe Hall as some recent critics have suggested, however.(1) Like many of her Bloomsbury friends, Woolf seriously doubted Hall's qualifications as an artist, finding her work too polemical. Bloomsbury's reservations ran so deep that eight days before Woolf wrote: Most of our friends are trying to evade witness box; for reasons you may guess. But they generally put it down to weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins (Letters 3: 555). Woolf was relieved to be saved task of defending Hall's novel in court by magistrate's decision that only he, and not defense's array of expert witnesses, could rule whether or not Well was obscene: In what cases is evidence allowable? This last, to my relief, was decided against us: we could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art (Diary 3: 207). When, as she put it, the bloody woman's trial went to appeal on 14 December, Woolf did not attend (Letters 3: 563). Woolf's objections to Well were not limited to an ostensibly aesthetic sphere; they also highlight crucial differences among women in questions of sexual politics, questions which are ultimately inextricable from aesthetic ones. …

The Aesthetics of Colonialism: Janet Schaw in the West Indies, 1774-1775

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE AESTHETIC SPHERE, and in particular the history of the shifting boundary separating the aesthetic from other areas of discursive practice, has recently come under intensified scrutiny.2 The eighteenth century was a watershed in this history. Clearly, neither the experience of beauty, nor the idea of art as somehow removed from the everyday, originated in this period; yet eighteenth-century Britain saw an unprecedented flood of discourse on aesthetic topics.3 Writers like Addison and Shaftesbury developed

A Sampler of Modernisms

Given the high authority of modernist art, it is remarkable to realize how recently modernism has been designated a distinctive cultural phenomenon. A good deal of the substance, if not the name, of modernism was occasionally recognized in Anglo-American criticism during the early decades of the century, Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) being perhaps the first sustained analysis. But the category and the term came into extensive use only in the 1950s and 1960s, at the same moment that its objects were being raised to canonical status in universities, museums, and the general culture. By and large the writers who constructed this cultural category, taking the artists at their own word, portrayed modernist art as a heroic enterprise, the only source of transcendence available in the derelict modern world. The resonances of this modernist construction in the 1950s and 1960s are not hard to discern. Modernist art became the repository of subjectivity in an intellectual world that had been divided in two by logical positivism and the scientific aspiration of the human sciences. Amid stalemated Cold War politics, the alienated artist also offered a means to something like freedom. Yet criticisms of modern art were present at the beginning of interpretation-Axel's Castle is one example -and by the late 1960s, hard on the heels of modernism itself, postmodernism entered critical discourse. Conscious of living in a late-capitalist, postimperial world, postmodern writers declared that the alienated stance and autonomous aesthetic sphere of modernism, as well as the phase of modernity to which it had responded, had reached an end. Yet most often they identified their own postmodern program with what was most vital in modernism and proceeded to reinterpret their parent tradition. The result has been a swelling volume of literature on modernism. There is now an excellent book devoted entirely to the differing interpretations of modernism in literature (Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 1990) and another that sorts out the complex permutations of the category (Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence,

The Politics of Postmodernism

• The claims currently being made on behalf of post modernism are nothing if not diverse everything from architecture through formal theoretical developments to the organisation of the economy is now said to be post-modernist. Strange perhaps, then, that outside of the aesthetic sphere we heard so little, relatively speaking, about modernism. Still the very diversity of the arguments in its favour suggest that ‘postmodernism’ denotes something more than a passing fancy. Reactions on the Left to the phenomenon have varied from the openly hostile, dismissing the case as no more consequential than the cultural coke of metropolitan intellectuals, to the enthusiastic embrace, identifying postmodern identities as the bearers of a new decentralised and potentially democratic ‘New Times’. What is involved in these contrary assessments and what, precisely, is the condition of postmodernity or the postmodern condition? At one level, ‘postmodernism’ is a term of cultural analysis, referring to changes in the forms of production, media of distribution and modes of consumption of artistic creation. David Harvey: The Condition of Postmodernity ISBN 0-631-16294-1,

Really Useless 'Knowledge': A Political Critique of Aesthetics

In his Immanuel Kant, Lucien Goldmann cites the early Lukacs’s view that ‘the Critique of Judgement contains the seeds of a reply to every problem of structure in the sphere of aesthetics; aesthetics need thus only clarify and think through to the end that which is implicitly there to hand’ (Goldmann 1971:192) This was precisely what Lukacs did in subsequently historicizing Kant’s conception of the subject and object of aesthetic judgement. The approach adopted here is rather different. The Critique, I shall argue, does provide a clear statement of ‘every problem of structure in the field of aesthetics’, but less by way of resolving those problems, or anticipating their resolution, than by specifying the conditions that would need to be met were they to be resolved. Viewed in this light, Kant’s treatise is most fruitfully read as a commentary on the necessary conditions, properties and requirements of aesthetic discourse.