The Future of Beauty

The Future of Beauty in Theatre, Literature and the Arts

Edited by

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS

The Future of Beauty in Theatre, Literature and the Arts, edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe This book first published 2005 by Cambridge Scholars Press 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright 2005 Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-904303-59-5

CONTENTS
Chapter One: John Danvers, In Beauty I Walk: Beauty, Nature and the Visual Arts ........................................1 Chapter Two: Jos Manuel Marrero Henrquez, Poetics of Beauty in a Virtual Millenium............................................................12 Chapter Three: Amy Ione Is Plato's Philosophy Relevant Today? Mimesis to Virtual Reality ..................................................................................18 Chapter Four: Maurizio Vito Does Beauty have a future?.................................................................................32 Chapter Five: Marcus Verhaegh A Defense of Kants Beauty Centered Account of Art .......................................45 Chapter Six: Steve Mason On Fractal Logic, and the Fractal Aesthetic ........................................................70 Chapter Seven: Harold Schweizer The Future of the Aesthetic in the Particular: Reflections on Elizabeth Bishop's Poem..........................................................91 Chapter Eight: Brian Martin Corporal Affairs: French Military Fiction and Masculine Beauty, 1870-1918 ....................................................................103 Chapter Nine: Jennifer Walden Its extraordinary, how beautiful your skin is ...............................................123 Chapter Ten: Yana Meerzon Hamlet as Beauty ..............................................................................................131 Chapter Eleven: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe, The Future of Beauty in Theatre .......................................................................146 Chapter Twelve: Sreenath Nair Saundarya: the Concept of Beauty in Indian Aesthetics....................................154

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Contents

List of Contributors ...........................................................................................164 Index..................................................................................................................167

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This collection of essays took its origins as a workshop / panel at the 7th International Conference of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European Ideas), held in Bergen, Norway, in August 2000. Ione, Verhaegh, Mason, Nair and Gritzner wrote their chapters specially for the book. Harold Schweizers essay With Sabbath Eyes: The Particular and the Claims of History in Elizabeth Bishops Poem was previously published in Journal of Modern Literature 28. 2 (Summer 2005).

INTRODUCTION
Much of what is going on in the arts and in literature is not what I would call beautiful. I find the heritage of realism and naturalism of the 19th century problematic if it inspires yet another delving into the abyss of human psychopathology. To argue with German theatre director Grndgens: it is eminently easy to write, direct, and perform in such a way that it is ugly, or that it causes a scandal. Grndgens words about the theatre are true also for the other arts and literature. This is a personal, subjective view, and there is a problem here, which boils down to the catch phrase beauty is in the eyes of the beholder: beauty is somehow intangible, very subjective, beyond objective (and that means, scientific) means of gaining knowledge which dominate, and are thus favoured by, the current (western) mind-set. This mind-set, however, shows indications of change: in the booming debate on human consciousness, for example, an Internet-based seminar, extending over two weeks, and generating some 500 pages of text in printout, was specifically devoted to establishing ways of dealing scientifically with the subjective realm of the emotions, and there is basic research into neurophysiological correlates of beauty (i.e., changes of neurophysiological parameters when a subject is shown pictures deemed beautiful or not by the experimenters). Research has also shown that regarding the beauty of faces, universal patterns seem to exist: statistically speaking, we tend to agree overall whether a face shown to us at random is beautiful or not, independent of our own age, gender, race, culture, etc., or that of the individuals on the photos. Common sense would suggest that although beauty is predominantly associated with things we see, it is not limited to that one sense, or sensual experience altogether. We may well describe sounds as beautiful (classical music, for example), or the smell or taste of a favourite meal, or the touch of a specific fabric. For some of those, most languages have developed more sense-specific terms, such a delicious for taste, but the ultimate characteristic implied by those terms is the same. Intellectual stimulation can be called beautiful, or the creative acts, say, of writing a paper, a poem, or play, or of composing, painting, etc. Beyond all those manifest objects of beauty, Plato would locate the form of beauty, beauty as such. It is beauty itself, of itself, with itself, uniform, and of eternal being. All expressions of beauty have part in this form of beauty, and all expressions of beauty exist to enable the direct experience of the form of beauty, as the ultimate goal. Is Platos philosophy relevant for us today, does it have a role in the future? The majority of chapters in this book are based on papers presented at the seventh international conference of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European Ideas), held in Bergen in August 2000. The remit of the panel on The

Introduction

ix

Future of Beauty in the Arts and Literature was to provide a broad basis for a thorough reassessment of the European traditions of beauty in the arts (fine arts, performing arts, media arts), and in literature, not as a return to some distant, and allegedly ideal past, but as a constructive means of realising the potential of the arts for the 21st century. John Danvers considers beauty as a mode of engagement, a function of a particular kind of relationship between subject and object, rather than as a quality inherent in particular objects or as a transcendent ideal. His paper comprises two parts: the first consists of notes about beauty grounded in the processes and structures of experience, perception and nature; the second, employs a more poetic discourse to explore similar territory. Instead of stepping back from beauty to define or categorise it, Danvers tries to explore qualities of beauty from a close vantage point. In a small way he suggests a revisioning of beauty as a mode of being and doing, rather than as an aesthetic category, or mode of passive reception. This reconfiguring of the meanings of beauty and the beautiful should be seen as arising from his reflections as an art practitioner rather than as a theoretician. Jos Manuel Marrero Henriquez provides a brief survey of ideas about beauty from Plato via the Romantics to G.M. Hopkins, concluding that there should be a new place for beauty in discussing literature, enabled by approaches that acknowledge that beauty may never be measurable through scientific procedures. Amy Ione takes the discussion of Plato further: she first engages with the question of why, despite his own artistry, Plato questioned the value of artistic contributions. The discussion then counterpoints Platos view with contemporary art projects that deal with beauty, emotion, illusory reality and other forms of deception. Widening the debate to include not only Plato but also Kant, Maurizio Vito first of all provides a very short background about beauty in Platonic and Kantian philosophy; he then draws some extreme consequences of that history as it developed over the last century, understood from an aesthetical viewpoint. On that basis Vito examines some changes beauty has assumed according to how three modern artists (Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage) managed it; this section deals with the peculiar features Music, Literature, and Painting acquired in the last century, pointing out their new relationships with beauty, and asks whether or not it survives. In his defence of the Kantian approach to art, Marcus Verhaegh argues that good art must be beautiful art, in Kants sense of the beautiful. His focus is twofold: showing the roominess involved in Kants account of beauty; and suggesting that art which falls outside this extraordinarily roomy conception will be tasteless, dull, and awful. This dual project leads him to criticize readings of Kant that paint him as offering an overly-formalistic aesthetics, such that a Kantian is left unable to explain the artistic value of works that violate traditional Western expectation concerning proper sources of aesthetic pleasure. He concludes that our positive aesthetic reactions to art-objects can

Meyer-Dinkgrfe

always be considered to involve judgments of beauty, where this perspective upon the reaction has a definite explanatory power, in that it places the function of art within Kants general and quite powerful account of the proper uses of the theoretical and moral faculties. Steven Mason describes the complexity of enduring works of art in terms of their inherent fractality. Fractal logic is epistemologically prior to general rationalization, insofar as it operates beyond dichotomous semantics. Thus Mason posits fractal logic as a connexion of nonlinear processes, a methodology, rather than a theoretical structure to which the complexity of natural phenomena is readily attributed. The future of aesthetics, like its past, is beset by the problem of presupposition. By exhibiting those presuppositions inherent in its very discourse, we can at least begin to articulate modes of aesthetical concepualization beyond dichotomous interpretation conceptualization that mirrors the very complexity found in other non/human realms. With Harald Schweizers essay, we move from the broad field of the fine arts to literature. When the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote in one of his aphorisms in Minima Moralia: The whole is the false (1974, 50), he expressed his increasing disenchantment with the totalitarian claims of what he called the moral terrorism of politically motivated art (1990, 98). No gaze attains beauty, he adds in another aphorism, that is not accompanied by indifference, indeed, almost by contempt, for all that lies outside the object contemplated (1974, 76). The particular object is dialectically opposed to all that lies outside. All that lies outside is the whole that is false. Schweizer demonstrates that Elizabeth Bishops aesthetic exemplifies both Adornos scepticism about totalitarian claims and his advocacy for the particular object. Brian Martin writes about the militarization of France between the FrancoPrussian War in 1870 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, which produced a new kind of uniform manhood, where every male citizen-soldier possessed a strong muscular body and a fierce patriotic loyalty to his comrades and nation. But this new military masculinity could neither protect the bodies of French soldiers from the ravages of newer and deadlier technologies, nor prevent their affections from developing into homosocial intimacies with their fellow soldiers. French literary representation from Zolas La Dbcle to Prousts Le Temps retrouv confirms that militarization ironically brings the simultaneous development of male beauty and destruction, masculine hatred and love. Attempts to clothe the male body in the illusion of muscular strength will not prevent it from mutilation and death. Similarly, many men who are trained to kill an enemy will displace the horror of such violence onto the desire to love a comrade. Of course, these lessons are not new; they can be traced in the French literary tradition back to the twelfth-century Chanson de Roland, and in the Western literary tradition back to the Iliad. But as the world enters a new period of global violence and militarization in this opening decade of the twenty-first century, these lessons and

Introduction

xi

texts demand repeating and rereading. If not, they will soon be echoed by future texts on the destruction of life, beauty, and human relationships by new military technologies and even more violent wars. Jennifer Walden addresses beauty in film, with reference to touch displacing vision in Alain Resnais Hiroshima mon Amour. Marguerite Duras, who wrote the screenplay, stated in the scenario to the film, that one of its principal goals is to have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves, but to make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and wonderful, one that will be more credible than if it has occurred anywhere else in the world, a place that death had not preserved. The final three chapters deal with beauty in theatre. Yana Meerzon focuses on two aspects of the 1911 Moscow Art Theatres staging of Hamlet directed by Gordon Craig, with Vasily Kachalov as Hamlet, as they came to be the defining characteristics of the 1998 Peter Steins Hamlet, presented in Moscow with Evgeny Mironov as the protagonist. In both productions, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the 20th century, the directorial treatment of the literary text and approach to the image of Hamlet reflect the dichotomy of Plato-Aristotelian views on beauty in its aesthetic function as beauty of form, and in its ethic function as beauty of good. Accordingly, Meerzon considers the aesthetic function of Hamlet embodied in the notion of beauty of text, represented by visual effects in its 1911 staging and by word as action in the 1998 one, as Aristotelian. She associates the Russian ethic vision of the figure of Hamlet as a tormented, suffering intellectual, going through a spiritual journey in order to set right the time that is out of joint, as Platonian. This Hamlets inner journey is the essence of the spiritual beauty of each Hamlets stage figure discussed here, from Vasily Kachalov (1911) to Evgeny Mironov (1998). Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe finally addresses general issues concerning the future of beauty in the context of theatre, while Sreenath Nair provides am analysis of the origin, development, understanding and contemporary practice of the term Saundarya in Indian aesthetics.

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. W. 1974. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books. ---------. 1990. Commitment. In Literature in the Modern World. Ed. Dennis Walder. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.

CHAPTER ONE JOHN DANVERS IN BEAUTY I WALK: BEAUTY, NATURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS
INTRODUCTION
In this paper my approach is to consider beauty as a mode of engagement, a function of a particular kind of relationship between subject and object, rather than as a quality inherent in particular objects or as a transcendent ideal. The paper comprises two parts: the first consists of notes about beauty grounded in the processes and structures of experience, perception and nature; the second, employs a more poetic discourse to explore similar territory. Instead of stepping back from beauty to define or categorise it, Im trying to explore qualities of beauty from a close vantage point. In a small way Im suggesting a revisioning of beauty as a mode of being and doing, rather than as an aesthetic category, or mode of passive reception. This reconfiguring of the meanings of beauty and the beautiful should be seen as arising from my reflections as an art practitioner rather than as a theoretician.

PART I
I am very glad, said Aristo laughing, that at last you have come to the proper conclusion and that you are satisfied to admire what at first you wanted to understand. Take my advice, he added, and let us stop without saying anything further about a thing which continues to exist only because no one can say what it is Dominique Bouhours (in Kirwan 1993, 120)

The history of aesthetics is littered with attempts to rationalise and systematise beauty. Most, if not all, have been either misguided or deeply flawed, usually because they ignore the ineffable and concrete nature of beauty as an experience. Likewise attempts to define beauty have ended in blind alleys, false certainty or futility. Most of these attempts have grown out of a reductive search for a universal constant or an essence which inevitably tends to reify beauty, freezing a fluid, complex and often fleeting experience.

Chapter One

Luc Ferry, in Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age (1993, 40), emphasises the importance of the irrational and ineffable aspects of beauty. He quotes Philanthe: the heart is more ingenious than the mind and points to the importance of equivocal metaphors when discussing beauty. The resistance of beauty to linguistic analysis is a recurring theme of Ferrys writing and he frequently echoes Bouhours advice that we would do well to be satisfied to admire what at first we wanted to understand. As Bouhours suggests, the very existence of beauty may depend on the fact that no one can say what it is (in Kirwan, 1993, 120). Developing these ideas of the indefinable nature of beauty James Kirwan describes it as a kind of yearning without object, combined with a sense of ineffable meaningfulness (1999, 47). Kirwan seems to be making a case for beauty as a psychological state, a condition to which we are all prone. While we may not agree with the romantic love-torn emphasis on yearning, the idea that beauty is an ineffable and fleeting experience without a fixed object seems to me to make sense and to avoid some of the problems associated with other analyses. For, though it may be difficult and probably impossible to define beauty, there is no doubt that we can, and do, experience it. And experiences of beauty can be described, evoked and investigated. We can also acknowledge that the experiences of what we call beauty are energising and revitalising, making us feel, however briefly, more alive. These are moments of intense pleasure and vivacity. They have autonomous value and they can be reclaimed, remembered and invoked in a way that is enriching and sometimes poignant. Often there is an unpredictability to experiences of beauty. They can rarely be predetermined let alone dictated. We cant prescribe conditions or experiences of beauty, for ourselves or for others. This mix of complexity, unpredictability and life-enhancing power contribute to the significance of experiences of beauty, and it is not surprising that we celebrate, attempt to engender and reflect on them through the making of art, philosophy, literature and performance. Instead of discussing the epistemological implications of beauty I propose to explore some of its ontological qualities and related issues.

Beauty and Being We have already established that whatever doubts surround particular rationalisations or definitions of beauty most of us recognise certain kinds of experience signified by the term. The presence of beauty as an experience or mode of being is distinctive and memorable even if it is hard or even impossible to pin down. Indeed the experience of beauty could be considered as a non-linguistic or

Danvers

pre-linguistic mode of being in the phenomenological sense, a concrete resonant experience that is ineffable, evanescent and resistant to conceptualisation. As Scarry puts it: Beauty causes us to gape and suspend all thought (in Nehamas 2000, 24). This resistance to objectification and analysis can lead to a sense of otherness, and may account for the ideas and metaphors of transcendence often introduced into discussions of beauty. Experientially beauty is often characterised by, or associated with, a sense of well-being, coherence, wholeness, integration and vibrant equanimity, and in many cases with a feeling of expanded consciousness and even liberation from ego or self. Nehamas comments: To find beauty where one hadnt seen it before is to look at the world with new eyes, and that is an expansion of the self (2000, 24). Our experience of beauty can involve what Scarry calls a radical decentring. It would be wrong to consider experiences of beauty as primarily aesthetic. The experience may, or may not, have an important aesthetic dimension, but it usually comprises a multitude of meanings, sensations and ethical dispositions. Experiences that are life-denying or detrimental to the quality of living are unlikely to be constituent strands of the experience of beauty - which is fundamentally lifeenhancing. An aestheticism projected on to suffering or poverty, or that has no moral dimension, should be distinguished from the view of beauty being explored here. Some individuals and cultures place particular emphasis on the path of beauty, the cultivation of the experience of beauty as a way of healing, establishing wholeness and goodness, and dissolving the linguistic or conceptual boundaries between self and non-self, observer and observed, subject and object. Many people in their experiencing of beauty have a sense of engagement and participation which dissolves boundaries, a fleeting experience of undifferentiated unity. This quality may account for the close association between descriptions of mystical experience and the descriptive vocabularies of beauty and love. The Way of Beauty The Navaho place the way of beauty at the centre of their religious life. The Night Chant (Rothenberg 1969, 81), one of the most important rituals of the year, includes the following passage: In beauty I walk / With beauty before me I walk / With beauty behind me I walk / With beauty above me I walk / With beauty above & about me I walk / It is finished in beauty / It is finished in beauty. This is both a poetic utterance ascribed to Bitahatini, The Visionary, (who was carried off by the gods and returned with the rituals and songs that form the Night Chant), and a statement of spiritual intent to walk the path of beauty and to cultivate the experience of beauty, whether as a maker (of songs, dances, food or artefacts), as a

Chapter One

participant in ritual, or as an experiencing being in everyday life. We can trace a connection here, in intention if not method or cultural context, with the ideas of John Cage and Joseph Beuys to establish the sensibility of the artist as a mode of living for everyone in everyday life. Certainly Cage and Beuys were great proselytisers for the path of beauty, and both urged us to recognise the importance of beauty (viewed in the way that Ive tried to describe here) for an enriched and empowered life. Both artists pursued this egalitarian approach, and both were critical of the exclusivity often associated with beauty as a special experience closely linked to the taste of a social/cultural elite. In Cages view beauty can be thought of in a more inclusive way as the experience of suchness (tathata), things-in-themselves the beauty of the ordinary, the specialness of the everyday. Yet always there is the question: are we talking about the experience of beauty or the beauty of experience? Ultimately experiencing beauty may be synonymous with experiencing being itself, something Euripides affirms: For only to be alive and to see the light / Is beautiful. Only to see the light, / To see a blade of young grass, / Or the grey face of a stone. (in Walker, 1988) Beauty and Nature Looked at from a slightly different angle the view of beauty being outlined here suggests that the ultimate model or template for the beautiful is nature and its constituent processes. Cage, paraphrasing Coomaraswamy, suggests that the aim of art is to approximate to Nature in her manner of operation. Beauty, as a particular mode of engagement with reality, is probably wired into us in a biological evolutionary sense. Our notions of what (or who!) is beautiful arise from the evolutionary reproductive drive to find the best mate with whom to perpetuate and strengthen our genetic line. It may be that this is a biological reason for the close association between beauty and goodness or truth. This model of beauty is rooted in the processes and imperatives of nature. Beauty in this sense is not a decorative flourish but a fundamental experience upon which particular cultural ideas and forms are built. The fact that experiences of beauty can arise in the most unlikely of circumstances (eg. accounts of prisoners, of victims of war, poverty and other catastrophes) suggests the centrality of these experiences to our lives. It might not be an exaggeration to suggest experiences of beauty are important drivers for living, beacons that light our lives and ensure our survival.

Danvers

Beauty and the Beautiful Particular attempts to define the beautiful in terms of characteristics or qualities of objects are as doomed to failure as attempts to rationalise the experience of beauty. If beauty is a kind of experiencing the function of a particular sort of relationship between subject and object, which, in its most intense form, burns away this duality then it may not be dependent upon particular qualities of objects. It is the quality of the mode of attention that is crucial, not the quality of the thing or event in the world. This accounts for how we can develop our sensing of beauty, how we can cultivate, expand and open out our experience, or, conversely, how we can narrow it down. Without exercise of the mode of attention our capacity to experience beauty can shrink and atrophy. So what is the relationship between beauty and the beautiful, between experiencing beauty and beauty objectified? First of all Im not sure beauty is, or can be, objectified. Beautiful objects and events are objects and events associated with experiences of beauty either because theyre considered as likely to stimulate such experiences directly, or because theyre likely to evoke, echo or bring to mind such experiences less directly (for instance by remembering them). Or maybe the distinction should be between those objects that bring beauty to mind (directly experienced, remembered or re-presented) and those that remind us of moments of beauty lost or no longer experienced. There are also those kinds of objects/events that stimulate beauty in others, but not in us. Museums, theatres, galleries and concert halls are full of things that embody or stimulate experiences of beauty for others and/or for ourselves. Different cultures of beauty arise out of the infinite kinds of experiences of beauty. Artefacts within these cultures are associated with these experiences and become codified as objects of beauty, even though beauty as an experience cannot be objectified. The confusion over this process of encultured objectification leads to a false debate about competing qualities or characteristics of objects/events/artefacts, when a more productive debate would be about the qualities of experience. Moments of Beauty A few examples are given below to illustrate the specificity of moments of beauty embedded within a continuum of experiences.

Chapter One

Agnes Martin makes work from a position as a classicist and idealist. These paintings, in my experience, generate the kind of ineffable, vibrant resonance that is symptomatic of beauty. With extremely reductive formalism, a narrow chromatic range, and repetitious configurations of lines within a usually square pictorial field, each painting invites an intense scrutiny that yields a rich array of sensations. There is a surprising immediacy to the work. Our sensory systems are activated in ways that belie the simplicity of means employed. I experience a kind of confusion of perception that precludes immediate conceptualisation. There is an excitation of the senses accompanied by a sense of integration, coherence and fulfilment. It is probably no coincidence that the paintings are almost unreproduceable. Martin argues eloquently for an essentialist theory of transcendent beauty far removed from the case Ive been making. She was very clear about her position: Classicists are people that look out with their backs to the world.All art work is about beautythe awareness of perfection. (Haskell 1992, 15) Of course there are many who walk into a Martin show and wonder what all the fuss is about! Surrounded by low-key variations on a not very interesting theme they are quickly bored, perplexed and dissatisfied. The experience of beauty is not a function of the object alone it is a vibrant manifestation of particular kinds of relationship and interaction. In Tree of Life (1977) Bill Viola illuminated an oak tree with a powerful spotlight from late afternoon (when it was still light) until several hours after sunset. This simple act of drawing attention to one tree out of many, on one day out of many - using a spotlight which has no noticeable effect while the sun is out, but becomes a sun as it gets darker all around is recorded in a few memorable photographs. We attend to the tree as if its on fire. Our peripheral awareness of the abstract generality of trees is briefly replaced by a single entity. And the illumination makes us aware of the tree as a field of energy and as an organic processor of light. The image of the spotlighted tree has great beauty, as has the idea of the event. Anish Kapoor makes work that arises out of a distinctive fusion of Hinduism, phenomenology and European modernism. The works have a tendency to induce perceptual disorientation, to challenge our sense of how we experience space and to raise uneasy feelings of doubt about who we are, and how and what we know. Kapoor makes use of many sculptural materials in conjunction with chromatically saturated dry pigment. We approach dense fields of black or blue, unable to tell whether we are gazing at a flat, concave or convex surface. Often, even close-to, we cant make out if we are encountering a deep hole or a shallow depression. A sense of vertigo often arises a powerful engagement with a void. The complex interaction of sometimes ambivalent qualities and responses provides a rich generative field within which experiences of beauty can arise.

Danvers

In engaging with the very different works of Cage and Beuys we also encounter experiential fields in which beauty arises, often unexpectedly. Within the noisy indeterminacy of Cages Fontana Mix we can experience not only the beauty of dissonance and diversity but also re-engage with the wider auditory environment in a revitalised manner. Likewise many of the drawings of Beuys give rise to a beauty of fragmentation, a scratchy kind of beauty that is in stark contrast to the experience of a work by Martin or Kapoor. And even in photographic form actions by Beuys can generate great beauty out of a concatenation of ideas, aspirations, materials, iconic and symbolic forms, deployed in surprising but convincing ways. Then again there are those who only experience ugly noise in Cage, and histrionic melodrama in Beuys. The artists only provide a field of potentiality within which we may, or may not, experience beauty.

PART II
In Other Words Empty & Uncertain Dust in the Light Were not certainties or absolutes were conditional, improvised, speculative fields fluid streams a dance of perception, cognition & representation appearances in space inscribed with history a continuum of might bes experience the world encode that experience in the world, grounded, making sense, making ourselves, we are smudges in a shimmering field

Chapter One

the object is never, is always certainty is never always we are always, never art inhabits self weaving & unravelling identity making, composing scattering moments of beauty the physicist is where beauty happens in charged atoms of insight ideas & regimes changes in perspective & rationality small histories of seeing - all cast shadows & obscure what light there is look at experience experience experience feel gentle chaos experience is pure, is dumb wisdom world is Lila & we are mirages on the horizon

Danvers

of mind agents of self trading words one minute of stars - a lifetime of wonder small dazzle of butterflies left Neruda dazed naming, naming is always too much drift nets lost in a sea of verbs forget names, find beauty naming maiming Meng Chaio wrote: beauty too close will ruin your life Kevin Spacey in American Beauty showed us how yet to aspire to beauty is to meet the world on easy terms Cage realised he couldnt change the world but he could change his outlook on the world

10

Chapter One

practice this alchemy & know delight what can we say of being? only that we are, and that it feels like this fleeting metaphors of unfolding there is a necessity to beauty commonplace moments ebb & flow of mind self-contained transparency of passing ecstasy foggy morning & burning bush & yet in unknowing is revelation & there can be no possession & no dissection Hume speaks of being blind but sure what is beautiful strikes me I cannot grasp it or predict it in mind out of thought there is what is before it is something else

Danvers

11

we all aspire to the condition of light beauty is empty-handed being or being empty-handed

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ferry, L. 1993. Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haskell, B. 1992. Agnes Martin. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Abrams. Kirwan, J. 1999. Beauty. Manchester: Manchester University Press Nehamas, A. 2000. Not Rocket Science, London Review of Books, Vol. 22 No. 12, 22 June 2000 Rothenberg, J. 1969. Technicians of the Sacred. New York: Anchor Books. Scarry, E. 1999. On Beauty and Being Just, reviewed in Nehamas, A. 2000. Not Rocket Science, London Review of Books, Vol. 22 No. 12, 22 June 2000 Walker, R. 1988. Painters in the Australian Landscape. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger Pty Ltd.

CHAPTER TWO JOS MANUEL MARRERO HENRQUEZ POETICS OF BEAUTY IN A VIRTUAL MILLENIUM
The idea that the true nature of art is intransitive and non instrumental has dominated in modern criticism and theory. Carried to its extreme, this conception of art allowed Valry to relate poetry to dancing and prose to walking, for walking, like prose, has a definite aim, [...] it is an act directed at something we wish to reach, while dancing is a secondary use of [...] movement [that] admits of an infinite number of creations and variations of figures (1958, 70). Considerations similar to these are behind the analytical procedures of the Russian formalists and of the American new critics, and they have formed the base to create a science of literature in which the first postulation is always the same: poetical function is the one that calls attention to the message, as Tzvetan Todorov has already pointed out (1982). Lyrical poetry is considered the most literary and artistic of the genres of literature as a consequence of the decay of the Aristotelian conception of art that kept mimesis as a fundamental reason to have tragedy as the best and most exemplary of the genres until the emergence of Romanticism. Renaissance and Baroque efforts of scholars such as Minturno, Escaligero or Cascales to introduce a non-mimetic genre as lyrical poetry within Aristotles Poetics ended up diminishing the power of mimesis to justify what makes a text artistic. On the way to consider art as an expression of a subject and as a sublime experience, mimetic criteria lost its authority. Grard Genette (1982) and, most recently, Gustavo Guerrero (1998) have shown with great clarity this process of forced misinterpretation of Aristotles Poetics. During the 18th century a new conception of literariness began to dominate. John Dennis, for example, in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), classified the most elevated poetry in the epic, the tragic and the great lyrical, and erased centuries of Aristotelianism when he affirmed that a poet ought to contrive every thing in order to the moving of Passion, that not only the Fable, the Incidents and Characters, but the very Sentiments and Expressions, ought all to be designed for that (1999, 338). And a few years later, Joseph Trapp, in his Lectures on Poetry (1711), affirmed, as to the Nature of the Lyrical Poem, it is, of all kinds of Poetry,

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the most poetical, and is as distinct, both in Style and Thought from the rest, as Poetry in general is from Prose (1711, 303). By the end of the 18th century, and with the complicity of one of the ancients, Longinus On the Sublime (first century A.D.), this new conception of literariness is so powerful that it will become necessary to justify, not the lyrical poetry, but the Aristotelian theory, for, as William Jones pointed out in On the Arts Commonly Called Imitative (1772) the assertion of Aristotle that all poetry consists in imitation [...] has been so frequently echoed from author to author, that it would seem a kind of arrogance to controvert it (1777, 191). From King David to Petrach, Jones considered that the true poetry had always been an expression of passions, that the true poetry had always been lyrical, for the finest parts of poetry, music and painting are expressive of the passions and operate on our minds by sympathy [...and] the inferieurs parts of them are descriptive of natural objects and affects us chiefly by substitution (1777, 207). Romantic subjectivity expressing its passions gave way to a new conception of literariness in which the expression found a reason to be in its own right. By stressing the interplay of words within the page, the subject was left behind, and the text became an autonomous object of art. Stphane Mallarm, for example, broke with Romantic expressivism and he was also far from considering poetry as imitation. Reality was in the poem itself, it may exist in a piece of paper. Beyond the author, lyrical poetry led through French symbolism to the contemporary idea of the objective nature of the poem in much of the twentieth-century criticism. Far from the subject, far from reality, literature has ended up forming a reality apart from reality, a virtual reality, and one more virtuality among the virtual realities humankind has been surrounding itself with. Jean Baudrillard has commented on this cultural situation as an emptying process of the referential contents of the images, from the image that reflects a basic reality to the image that bears no relation to any reality whatever: [the image that...] is its own pure simulacrum (1988, 170). Reality is at stake, affirms Baudrillard, and abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept [...] it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal (1988, 166). It is necessary to preserve the abstractions magic to save reality from oblivion. For it is the difference between the real and the simulation models what forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real (1988, 166-67). In a hyperreal environment, reality and poetry need each other to exist, and bringing the Platonic idea of Beauty back into literary criticism clearly contributes to the survival of both. Perception of Beauty in literature is not a solipsistic act, it depends to a large extent on the emotive, referential and utilitarian aspects of everyday languages and lives, and it was no frivolity that Plato in his Hipias Major linked the idea of Beauty to the idea of Good, and also to the idea of Will. A worthy space to

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transitivity as an aesthetic category should be open. Entering a new millennium, full of virtual realities, the deep values shaping both Classical rhetoric and the Humanist idea that grew from it deserve the intent. If literature is linked to Beauty, its analysis and interpretations have to take into account not only styles, figures and generic structures, but also moral, psychological, ideological, historical, political and sentimental factors, all of them difficult to measure, but without doubt bearers of aesthetic meaning. The confluence of agents that take part in the perception of Beauty is so overwhelming that Socrates himself failed to define it. The Hipias Major dialogue enhances the Socratic search of the idea of Beauty that is present in all things that are perceived as beautiful. But after a long and subtle conversation, no conclusion is reached; rather, the proverb all that is beautiful is difficult is brought to light. That is the result of the inquisition about Beauty. Located at the end of the Hipias Major, such proverb is not a simple consolation, nor is it a frivolous way of hiding an obvious failure, but praise of the will that any person wishing to reach a certain grade of excellence must have. Will is also one of the basic topics in The Symposio, where it appears under the name of Love. Love is the impulse toward the perpetual possession of Good, an impulse different from its own finality but, at the same time, and in the light of Hipias Major, part of it. For in Love there are involved intellectual and spiritual motives that are far away from the mere physical beauty of things, and close to the beauty that exists in sublime activities, institutions, feelings and ideas. Will (or Love) is the impulse, and Beauty (or Good) its final goal. Will is the reflection of Beauty that is in any human being that is seriously engaged in the apprehension of the Ideas. Apprehending and searching are beautiful actions with ethical and moral consequences, for they contribute to the healthy development of the Republic. In 1865 G. M. Hopkins wrote a platonic dialogue devoted to the idea of Beauty. Here it is not a proverb that forms the resigned final solution to the enigma. In contrast to Socrates, the master in Hopkins dialogue succeeds in describing some of the characteristics of the beautiful objects of nature and the arts. Features such as numerical symmetry of elements, or gradation in colours, define Beauty. The master goes on from symmetry to regularity, from regularity to irregularity and their combination, to conclude that Beauty results in a relation, and its perception implies the apprehension of a comparison. In brief, Beauty involves the idea of elements in harmony in the frame of a composition. However, none of the speakers in the dialogue is satisfied with the abstractions that the master uses to expose what the nature of Beauty and the conditions of its perception are. Criticism, particularly that of poetry, cannot be judicial --de gustibus non est disputandum-- nor should it be reduced by logic or common sense.

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There is a plus, a mystical plus located beyond poetry considered as a mathematical thing, measured by compasses, that keeps awaiting comprehension. Questioned about this plus, the master calls the attention of the speakers to the tea, and all of them enter to have a cup. That is the end of the dialogue. This plus keeps reverberating as an interrogation. Hopkins called it mystical, but it could have also been called lyrical, transcendent, symbolic; and, if following Socrates moral approach to Beauty, it could have also been called engaged, social or realist. If related to the nature and perception of Beauty, Valrys opposition between dancing and walking, poetry and prose, Jones opposition between the superior expression of passions that operates by sympathy and the inferior description of natural objects that operates by substitution, Mallarms opposition between the piece of paper and the world, and the oppositions between the words mystical, lyrical, transcendent, symbolic, poetical and the words materialist, comic, determinist, realist, prosaic vanish. Perception of Beauty in literature is influenced by such a multitude of factors and of such varied and obscure affiliations, that any literary criticism with scientific goals has no other choice than to ignore Beauty or dump it in a dark shed with all that offers resistance to be measured. As a beautiful experience, the experience of literature is an inexplicable phenomenon, far more complex than any intent to reduce it to any mystical, structural, symbolic, realist or engag approach. Lyrical experience of literature itself is beyond the so called lyrical genres and the structural and stylistics features of lyricism. And social experience of literature is beyond the narrative genres and the structural and stylistic features of Realism. As much as it is an obstacle to any scientific enquiry about literature, Beauty is also an obstacle to any theory of interpretation that bases the literary prestige of texts exclusively on their higher anagogical interpretations. Reasons enough had Socrates to link the idea of Beauty in the forms of handicrafts, nature, feelings and institutions to the idea of Good, and also to the ideas of Will and Love. Nothing should be an obstacle in reorienting literary criticism to the possibility of opening an honourable space to transitivity as an aesthetic category. For in any writing there is an aesthetic motivation that can be understood as the unavoidable transitivity by means of which writing refers to itself while referring to the world. It could also be affirmed that in writing there is nothing but transitivity, a direct one, the one that by saying of the world says of itself, and an indirect one, the one that by saying of itself says of the world. It could even be affirmed, taken such contradiction to an extreme, that whenever a text says more of itself it is saying more of the world, and when it says more of the world, more it is saying of itself. At orienting the message on the emissary letting the receiver know about him, poetical function cannot avoid being emotive, nor can it avoid being connative

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when orienting the message on the receiver implying him in the message, nor referential, when orienting the message on the reality, nor phatic, when orienting the message on the canal of transmission (purifying it of noises), nor metalinguistic, when orienting the message on the code to clarify its peculiar rules. If poetic function is understood this beautiful way, criticism, that can do little more than concentrating its attention on the text, has no obligation to dissociate language from its human condition to satisfy the necessity of having an object of linguistic research, nor has it to assume such a plain consideration of literature that makes of the texts not objects of beauty, consolation, pleasure, commitment, evasion or meditation, but lab entities or bones to apply carbon-14 dating. Beauty and Will are unstable concepts and both have been ruled out of the works that intend to determine textual and human behaviours. But if being human is a linguistic condition more than a biological or zoological one, Beauty and Will must go hand in hand in an aesthetics of transitivity, since transitivity means critically linking literature with its human condition to constantly remind that language, once emptied of its human content, is merely senseless jangle in a void.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristteles. 1981. El Arte Potica. Mxico: Espasa Calpe. Baudrillard, J. 1988. Selected Writings. Poster, Mark (ed.). California: Stanford University Press. Dennis, J. 1939. Critical Works. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press. Genette, G. 1982. Figures of Literary Discourse. New York: Columbia University Press. Guerrero, G. 1998. Teoras de la lrica. Mxico: Fondo de Cultura Econmica. Hopkins, G. M. 1985. On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue. Poems and Prose. London: Penguin Books, 92-104. Jones, W. 1777. On the Arts Commonly Called Imitative. Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from Asiatick Languages. London: W. Boyer and J. Nichols. Mallarm, S. 1956. The Book: A Spiritual Instrument. Mallarm: selected Prose, Poems, Essays, and Letters. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press. Platn. 1986. Dilogos I. Apologa. Critn. Eutifrn. In. Lisis. Crmides. Hipias Menor. Hipias Mayor. Laques. Protgoras. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. ---. 1989. Dilogos III. Fedn, Banquete, Fedro. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Todorov, T. 1982. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Trapp, J. 1747. Lectures on Poetry. London: Printed for C. Hitch and C. Davis

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Valry, P. 1958. The Collected Works of Paul Valry. Vol. vii. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER THREE AMY IONE IS PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY RELEVANT TODAY? MIMESIS TO VIRTUAL REALITY
[i]f one attempted to belittle the arts by saying that, in creating, they imitate nature, the answer should be that . . . the arts create many things by themselves. Where something is lacking, they supply it, because they own beauty.

Plotinus, The Enneads (Plotinus, 1991, V: 8. 1)

PLATO'S VIEW OF ART

The late dean of art history, E.H. Gombrich began his last book, The Preference for the Primitive, with the thought:
The well-known dictum by the philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead, that the whole history of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to the writings of Plato, applies with special force to the philosophy of the arts . . . [Plato believed that] art can only flatter and deceive the senses and seduce the mind to feed on phantoms. (2001, 11)

Gombrich's words are particularly thought provoking when we consider whether Plato is relevant today. Popular culture abounds with references to Plato's writings, elevating connections far beyond the philosophy of the arts per se. Paralleling the two domains it is worth noting that contemporary testaments to Plato's influence have a propensity to misrepresent some of his primary philosophical concerns. For example, in the early 1990s Dan Sandin, Thomas DeFanti, and Carolina CruzNeira introduced an immersive environment technology they termed the CAVE. Their 1993 article "A Room with a View," explains that the CAVE acronym, which stands for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, is intended as an illusion to the Allegory of the Cave found in Plato's Republic. According to this article, "the Greek philosopher explored the ideas of perception, reality, and illusion using the analogy of a person facing the back of a cave alive with shadows that are his only basis for his ideas of what real objects are." (Sandin 2001, 268). Their summation,