Aesthetics and Ideology: The State of the Art

            “To set aside or to ignore rather than to reinvigorate India’s past is to deny it any distinctive entry into the future.” --Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes 210.

              The title of my paper harks back quite self-consciously to an essay by Peter Brooks that appeared in Critical Inquiry in Spring 1994.1  In fact, both essays have the same title.  Luckily, my subtitle is different and, so, I hope, is my argument. Notwithstanding the claim to be au currant or the latest, I would not like seriously to press this sense of the phrase “state of the art.” After all, the “state of the art” will keep changing and whatever is the “latest” statement about it will, at least in letter, if not in spirit, allude to it.  My subtitle, instead, points to the state of the art not just as its condition of coming into being or existing, but also to the manner and method of its production and consumption.  To put it a little differently, what concerns me is not only it’s estate or class, but also its relationship to the state, to patterns of sponsorship and circulation, patronage and transmission.  All of these, it seems to me, must be taken into account to determine “the state of the art.”

But more of that later.  Right now, I would like to refer to Brooks’ essay, which may as well serve as my point of departure.  Brooks, then Tripp Professor of Humanities and Chair of Comparative Literature at Yale University, looks back to Northrop Frye and also mentions an exchange that he had with a critic called Clement Greenburg at a Partisan Review conference at Boston University in 1979.  Using these two references, Brooks asks questions about the function and practice of criticism in the early 1980s.  I propose to ask similar questions later, but first, like Brooks, wish to allude to the inaugural meeting held last year of the proposed Delhi Forum on Criticism—I say proposed, because there has been no second meeting so far.  Vikram Chandra, the Indian English novelist and featured speaker, gave a reading and offered some observations on the craft of the novelist.  He said that he wanted to write books that people enjoyed reading, just as he wished to teach and read books that gave him aesthetic pleasure.  I instantly recognized that Chandra was making an important appeal to reinstate the category of the aesthetic into the main agenda of a liberal arts curriculum, to recall it from its banishment into a politically incorrect wilderness to which it had been consigned by various forms of ideologically engaged critical practices.  Chandra seemed to say that what makes literary texts, and hence their study distinctive, is their beauty, which when apprehended, is capable of giving pleasure and solace.  To him, the literariness of literature lay in precisely its aesthetic qualities, which it shared with other fine arts, as opposed to its discursive qualities that it shared with non-literary prose.

              In his argument with Greenburg, Brooks stands, a la Jonathan Culler, for poetics, a formalistic science of reading based on linguistic models.  Greenburg, on the other hand, still considers critics as responsible for aesthetic judgments, for “the discrimination of the beautiful and significant in art” (511).  Brooks makes a case in favour of the structuralist position that always tries to examine specific textual processes in terms of larger, systems of meaning and correspondence.  The real debate in the essay, however, is revealed only later.  It is between what Brooks considers a reductive and arrogant “ideologization of the aesthetic” (513) that through a sort of bad conscience, forces the critic and the reader to assume an oppositional social and political praxis or be damned to the position of a displaced academic.

While Brooks quotes approvingly from engaged Marxist critics such as Eagleton, especially from the latter’s Ideology of the Aesthetic, his sympathies really lie on the side of idealist and conservative thinkers and writers like Friedrich Schiller, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and more recently, Charles Taylor.  Brooks, like Schiller in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), considers the aesthetic a core principle, a part of a program of liberal education.  The aesthetic, according to Schiller, refines the physical while retaining it’s contact with the concrete and sensuous; it is an integrative principle that helps to overcome alienation, and is an effective counter to egotism, fragmentation and mechanization (516).  Quoting Schiller, Brooks says, “It’s core principle” called “the ‘play-drive’ [Spieltrieb] is ‘directed towards annulling time within time, reconciling becoming with absolute being and change with identity’” (516).  As an aside, we may notice how a very similar notion of the centrality of the aesthetic shaped Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophy of education.  Much later, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother considered the aesthetic as the best means not just of refining, sensitizing, and training the senses, but also of purifying the vital.  Brook’s overall argument may be summed up in his own words:  “Constantly trumping the aesthetic by the ideological and political—making the aesthetic simply a mask for the ideological—risks losing a sense of the functional role played by the aesthetic within human existence” (517).  To this extent, he is closer to Greenburg than he thinks or cares to acknowledge, the poetics that he advocates serving more or less the same political needs as the more particularistic, critical judgement of Greenburg. Both positions may be firmly located in a conservative bourgeois ideology that believes that the function of the liberal arts is not to contest regimes of power and knowledge, but to develop certain skills and competences that will help subjects make a useful transition from the academy to the marketplace.

Brooks’ argument anticipates that of other influential critics like Harold Bloom who lined up to oppose the “Balkanization of literary studies” (517) and the overthrow of the Western canon.  In his influential book, The Western Canon, Bloom rues the institutionalization of those whom he calls “resenters.”  Resenters wish to downgrade or dismiss aesthetic value in favour of ideological readings of literature.  Describing the resenters variously as “Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists, or Deconstructors” (20) or as “Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians,” (527), he argues that they are, lemming like, in self-destructive flight from the cardinal aims of the profession.  That is the reason, he believes, why

Students of literature have become amateur political scientists, uniformed sociologists, incompetent anthoropologists, mediocre philosophers, and overdetermined cultural historians….  They resent literature, or are ashamed of it, or are just not fond of reading it. (521)

Bloom sums up his argument by declaring: 

Either there were aesthetic values, or there are only overdeterminations of race, class, and gender.  You must choose, for if you believe that all value ascribed to poems or plays or novels and stories is only a mystification in the service of the ruling class, they why should you read at all rather than go forth to serve the desperate needs of the exploited classes? (522)

              My argument repudiates not just this bipolarity of Bloom’s but also Brooks’ call to empower a depoliticized poetics of reading as key to literary education, but also denies the sort of polarity that is inherent in his, and indeed, in many other accounts of this debate.  Very simply put, I would urge that the phenomenology of art does not deny its specific historicity and vice versa.  Art calls for a complex hermeneutics that has both paradigmatic and syntagmatic, synchronic and diachronic components.  An art criticism bereft of the political dimension will only support the status quo; on the other hand, one that is merely political will rob the richness and pleasure of the art experience.  The four clear, sutra-like, propositions that I outline below may serve as a summary of my position:

1. Art has, or points to, something irreducible, even transcendent in it, even though it may be considered epiphenomenal in the classical Marxist sense.

2. Art is not entirely autonomous, as idealists would like to argue, but definitely contingent and determined by economic and social forces.

3. Yet, these determining factors do not exhaust what art is or has to offer.

4. In present times, simplistic and monocausal ideas of patronage or state sponsorship will not be sufficient to understand the complexity of the economic forces that shape art, let alone account for all its forms and (dis)contents.

What I have tried to propose is that the aesthetic dimension of a work of art is irreducible to its economic, political, or cultural matrix of production.  Significant art, in other words, erupts in the excess that generates an ever-changing surplus value that we may call pleasure, jouissance, rasa, or ananda.  That is what keeps the text alive in an interpretative community.  Even if the language in which the text is written dies, the text persists in a sort of after life, through translations or other means of extension, precisely because of this surplus or excess.  Roland Barthes, in the passing, makes a similar point in Pleasures of the Text:

The brio of the text (without which, after all, there is no text) is its will to bliss:  just where it exceeds demands, transcends prattle, and whereby it attempts to overflow, to break through the constraint of adjectives—which are those doors of language through which the ideological and the imaginary come flowing in.  (12-14).

Barthes is of course struck not so much by the excesses of the text as its very texture of possibilities, which he finds so erotic.

              That is why it becomes equally important, I believe, to remember that a text is not autonomous or self-contained, shut off from or immune to its conditions of production.  Even if it is, as Cleanth Brooks put it, a well-wrought urn, it shows traces of its origins and comes inscribed with the conditions of its creation.  It bears the stamp of history in the Marxian sense, that is, it reflects a certain class consciousness that arises from a specific historical conjuncture.  Every text, then, invites us to place it in various systems of power or discursive orders, be they imaginary or symbolic, spatial or temporal, geographical or historical. 

                              II

              D. D. Kosambi attempted precisely such a reading of one of India’s most enduring literary texts, the Bhagawad Gita.  In an essay called “Social and Economic Aspects of the Bhagawad-Gita,” published as the inaugural essay in Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture (1962), he argues at great length that the Gita is a text of “slippery opportunism” whose utility “derives from its peculiar fundamental defect, namely dexterity in seeming to reconcile the irreconcilable.”  Composed between 150-350 A.D. and inserted into the Mahabharata corpus later, the Gita, according to Kosambi, served a peculiar class function which made so many leading exponents of Indian culture, including Sankara, Ramanuja, Jnanesvar, Gandhi, Tilak, Aurobindo, and others, return to it again and again. Kosambi believes that:

THE GITA FURNISHED THE ONE SCRIPTURAL SOURCE WHICH COULD BE USED WITHOUT VIOLENCE TO ACCEPTED BRAHMIN METHODOLOGY, TO DRAW INSPIRATION AND JUSTIFICATION FOR SOCIAL ACTIONS IN SOME WAY DISAGREEABLE TO A BRANCH OF THE RULING CLASS UPON WHOSE MERCY THE BRAHMINS DEPENDED AT THE MOMENT. (Emphasis in the Original)

In other words, the Gita is a synthetic text that manages to incorporate a wide diversity of complex and, often, contradictory doctrines.  Kosambi believes that such a text could only be written at a certain period during which the competition over the surpluses produced wasn’t so intolerable as to result in class conflict:

FUSION AND TOLERANCE BECOME IMPOSSIBLE WHEN THE CRISIS DEEPENS, WHEN THERE IS NOT ENOUGH OF THE SURPLUS PRODUCT TO GO AROUND, AND THE SYNTHETIC METHOD DOES NOT LEAD TO INCREASED PRODUCTION.  (Emphasis in the Original)

Analyzing the career of Jnanesvar, the author of influential commentary Jnanesvari, Kosambi says:

The conglomerate Gita philosophy might provide a loophole for innovation, but never the analytical tools necessary to make a way out of the social impasse. Jnanesvar's life and tragic career illustrate this in full measure. In other words, though the Gita provided Jnanesvar with some ammunition against the ills of his times, it could not afford him a full-fledged blue print for revolutionary action.  That is why, according to Kosambi, “there was nothing left for him [Jnanesvar] except suicide.”  Kosambi concludes his paper with the following observations:

Modern life is founded upon science and freedom. That is, modern production rests in the final analysis upon accurate cognition of material reality (science), and recognition of necessity (freedom). A myth may grip us by its imagery, and may indeed have portrayed some natural phenomenon or process at a time when mankind had not learned to probe nature's secrets or to discover the endless properties of matter. Religion clothes some myth in dogma. "Science needs religion" is a poor way of saying that the scientists and those who utilize his discoveries must not dispense with social ethics. There is no need to dig into the Gita or the Bible for an ethical system sandwiched with pure superstition. Such books can still be enjoyed for their aesthetic value. Those who claim more usually try to shackle the minds of other people, and to impede man's progress, under the most specious claims.

It is interesting how this conclusion is built upon a whole series of binary oppositions such as science vs. religion, modern vs. traditional, reality vs. myth, progress vs. superstition, and so on.  The cure for all social ills for Kosambi lies not in “theology but in socialism.”  The essay ends with a ringing reaffirmation of the revolutionary doctrine: “the material needs could, certainly be satisfied for all, if the relations of production did not hinder it.”

I have chosen Kosambi’s essay on the Gita not because it is especially “exasperating”—as the title of another collection of his work suggests—but because it is symptomatic of both the benefits and pitfalls of a particular approach to art.  Kosambi’s rigorous materialist and historicist analysis certainly adds something to our understanding of the Gita, but, as I have argued earlier, it does not exhaust the possibilities of that text.  A few years after Kosambi’s death in 1966, Western India, where he himself lived for several years, witnessed a widespread peaceful social upheaval triggered by a movement called Svadhyaya.  It is no surprise to me that this social movement, about which I have written elsewhere, was inspired by the same complex and heterogeneous text that Kosambi considered incapable of guiding any genuine social change.  The slogan of this movement is “Jai Yogeshwar,” one of the many names of Krishna that we find in the Gita, and which is also enshrined in the very last verse of the Gita:

Where there is Krsna, the Lord of yogas, and where there is Partha, the wielder of the bow, there are fortune, victory, prosperity and unfailing prudence. Such is my conviction.

(18.78 Swami Gambhiranda’s translation from the Gita Supersite)

  Also known as the “ekashloki Gita,” or Gita in one shloka, this verse is supposed to bestow the benefits of reading the whole scripture.  The Svadhyayis, with their notion of kriti bhakti or an activist devotion, have fanned out in thousands upon thousands, on bhakti pheris reordering human relationships and social organization on an unprecedented scale.  The idea that God is both within me and beside me in my struggles has become a living reality for several million Svadhyayis who give their time and talent to this cause.  This assurance, contained in the Gita, has been convincingly conveyed to large masses of people by the inspirer of the Svadhyaya movement, Pandurang Shastri Athavale.  I heard him myself in a very large gathering of about 250,000 people at Kurukshetra a few years back.  I had never experienced anyone expound the Gita in that fashion and, for the first time in my life, the text came alive to me in a unique and moving manner. 

I have deliberately chosen a sacred text to illustrate the point that while a materialist reading may be very illuminating, it need not rob the text of its aesthetic, even scriptural, affects.

                                            III

Let me end by asking how our own work has been affected by the material conditions in which it was engendered.  If we think of sponsorship as one of these material conditions, we would have to ask if our sponsors, I don’t of course mean just those who pay our salaries, but also those who fund our research, travel, seminars, even enable publications, dictated what we should say?  Probably not, but as any Marxist would point out, the process of determination is not so simple.  It is a matter of how the discourse is framed.  As Foucault would remind us, what sorts of things are excluded, for instance, or emphasized?  The idea that each of us is free to say whatever he or she wishes is, then, to be questioned rather than accepted.  In other words, our class backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, geographical and cultural location, and so on will have shaped what we have had to say. Paradoxically, while we are programmed to think that we are free, we are actually produced by larger systems and forces. That is to say those who think they are free are not, but those who know that they are not, are—to that extent—free.  Thus it is that in an overall sense our words and worlds are determined, not autonomous.  But as I have argued, a certain kind of limited and contingent space for action, a space that has to be earned through a struggle against precisely those forces that work to preclude it, is possible.  That is why I believe that art—or those who interpret it—usually have the option to earn such a positional effectiveness through an interrogation of its given circumstances of production.

              It has been one of the premises of this paper that to try to annex India’s past, in this case, the history of its arts, to any grand narrative of interpretation would tantamount not only to a denial of India’s difference, but also result in the kind of epistemic violence that one wishes to avoid.  The uniqueness of the object of study demands that we search for unique tools of interpretation.  As critics isn’t it our role to examine these systems and how they influence the discourse that we produce?  There is, at times, a naïve assumption that somehow intellectual activity occupies an autonomous sphere that is free to scrutinize and criticize, even if it is state or industry sponsored.  We need very quickly to move beyond that kind of assumption.  Especially those of us who believe that art is somehow a mask for ideology, or, is ideology concentrated must also acknowledge that academics and intellectual endeavour is subject to the same charge.  Are we, then, as intellectuals in a privileged and impossible Archimedian place, from where we can unmask the hidden ideologies of the arts, but remain safe from such unmasking ourselves?  Or should we at once acknowledge that there are no such places of privilege and that we, like the writers and artists that we study, also function in a realm that is shot through and through with the anxieties of location and moral dilemmas of collusion?  We know and admit that we might in fact be collaborators in the very regimes of capital that we profess to resist.  What does such a knowledge and admission of guilt imply as far as our cultural praxis is concerned?  At the very least, it means that we will argue from contingent locations, from strategic positions, not from fixed and reductively oppositional categories.

Let us look, for a moment, at the world in which we live.  Are we not all subjects of an empire that, to all appearances, has no centre and no circumference, but has conquered the whole world in ever widening circles of penetration and inclusion?  What kind of resistant coalescences might be mounted against such a monotheistic empire of economic paramountcy is hard to conjecture.  Since this empire is elusively transnational, the resistance will also have to be multiform and scattered across the globe.  One of the key weapons in our arsenal will be precisely the sense of difference, cultural and otherwise, with which this regime of capital contends.  A precise articulation of difference, then, will be the petits recits of Lyotard’s that interrupts and even overthrows, howsoever intermittently, the grand narratives of the triumph of capital.  In other words, criticism, at least most of it, is itself compromised.  It’s cry of outrage or its whine of protest are both signs of its complicity and defeat.  We are like chained dogs who can only bark but not bite the thief or the intruder.  The more unreasonable and uncompromising the objection, the more secure the chain that binds the conscientious objector.  Criticism must be read symptomatically just as art or literature are.  Criticism can do very little to alter the world because however much we may shout ourselves hoarse to the contrary, the world is not a text.  Textual practice cannot be equated with changing the power structures in the real world.  In most instances, there is a curious cohabitation and collaboration between the two: they are like parallel and mutually reinforcing hegemonies.  The dominance of criticism is supported by the dominance of the very rule of capital that it professes to overthrow.

              Authority cannot obliterate the subject, but produces a splitting, a doubling, a hybridity, which then creates a site for resistance.  The compelling logic of modernity, and one of its especially powerful subsets, dialectical materialism, may similarly split the colonial subject as might the unrelenting dominance of capital.  Absolutist regimes have produced “great” art and philosophy, the result of which is not at all politically progressive--Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost. Likewise, some art has been classified as imperialistic or fascist, Wagner, for example, but does that make it bad art?  The aesthetic, then, may not be rejected, even if merely as an opiate of the classes.  Even Kosambi grants the Gita such a role: “Such books can still be enjoyed for their aesthetic value,” he concedes.

What, then, of criticism?  At worst, it is entirely self-serving and parasitic; at best, it is merely aesthetic, like art.  Did I say “merely”?  I should take that back.  Because the aesthetic is that specially charmed space that will not yield all its secrets to the economic, wrung dry though it may be.  There will be some degree of slippage and evasion that will not be exhausted by the probing, however relentless.  From this point of view, whatever little autonomy the aesthetic may still retain is also the last resort of criticism.

                                                                                         NOTE

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Performing Arts, State and Society, Carleton University, Ottawa, 23-24 November 2001.  I would like to thank Professor Harsha Dehejia, Dr. Sudha Dehejia, Dr. Vivek Dehejia, and Dr. Rajiv Dehejia for their support.  I would also like to thank Ms. Sharon Pillai for her careful reading of this paper and her comments on it.

Works Cited

Barthes, Ronald.  The Pleasures of the Text.  Trans. Richard Miller.  New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975.

Bloom, Harold.  The Western Canon.  New York:  Hartcourt Brace, 1994.

Eagleton, Terry.  The Ideology of the Aesthetic.  Oxford:  Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Gita Supersite. http://www.gitasupersite.org/

Levine, George, ed.  Aesthetics and Ideology. New Brunswick, N.J:  Rutgers U. P., 1994.

Kosambi, D. D. Myth and Reality:  Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture.  Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1962.

The entire essay, “Social and Economic Aspects of the Bhagawad-Gita” is found on the website:

http://www.crosswinds.net/~bhupi/ddk/mar/mar1.htm.

Rajan, Balachandra.  Under Western Eyes:  India from Milton to Macaulay.  Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1999.

Sprinker, Michael, ed. Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism. London: 

Verso, 1987.

The essay was reprinted in a book by the same title edited by Geroge Levine (New Brunswick, N.J:  Rutgers UP, 1994.  Another book edited by Michale Sprinker, Imaginary Relations, shares the same subtitle: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism (London:  Verso, 1987).