Crista Renouard Aesthetics Prof.

Michael Kelly 5/4/2012 Beauty as Justice In each of their accounts, Elaine Scarry, Adrian Piper, and Anne Eaton examine the relationship between art and the aesthetic and justice and ethics. Scarry proposes a relationship between beauty and justice such that a beauty is conceptually necessary for justice. Piper, on the other hand, places aesthetic considerations secondary in her work; she creates art with the intent of affecting the viewers attitudes on racism. Eaton, meanwhile, frames the question from a feminist perspective whereby art itself carries ethical implications in terms of exclusion and dominance. Through these three accounts, with a little help from Umberto Eco, the case will be made that not only is there a relationship between beauty and justice, but beauty itself is a kind of justice. Through her account of the relationship between beauty and justice, Elaine Scarry makes the case that ones sense of beauty informs ones sense of justice. Her stronger claim, however, is that it is impossible to have a sense of justice without a sense of beauty, as beautiful things create an ideal standard by which all other things ought to be treated. This is because our ideas about justice in terms of fairness and equity not only resemble those of beauty, but in fact, come from beauty, as beauty was present first and is present in the times when justice was absent. (Scarry 66) According to Scarry, it is the very symmetry of beauty that leads us to, or somehow assists us in discovering, the symmetry that eventually comes into place in the realm of justice. (Scarry 66)

The idea of symmetry is central to the concept of beauty on Scarrys account, as symmetry underpins equality. Looking back to the early Medieval Christian philosopher Augustine, Scarry underlines the importance of the feature of equality or symmetry, not only in aesthetic terms, but ethical terms as well. Yet present to his mind is a conviction that equality is the heart of beauty, that equality is pleasure-bearing, and that equality is the morally highest and best feature of the world. (Scarry 67) This is important for Scarrys account because it indicates how beauty was the antecedent concept of equality. All that is claimed is that the aspiration to political, social, and economic equality has already entered the world in the beautyloving treatises of the classical and Christian periods, as has the readiness to recognize it as beautiful if and when it should arrive in the world. (Scarry 68) In addition to the symmetry of the beautiful object as assistive to justice, beauty also inspires a radical decentering in its presence. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. (Scarry 77) In order to bring about justice, or more just circumstances, particularly if those circumstances demand of us a more profound sense of equality, being able to put oneself in a position of being less self-interested would be helpful. What is interesting about the radical decentering process that accompanies the experience of beauty is that it makes the process a pleasurable one. The beautiful object permits us to be adjacent while also permitting us to experience extreme pleasure, thereby creating the sense that it is our own adjacency that is pleasure-bearing. (Scarry 79) By contrast, Adrian Piper approaches the relationship between aesthetics and art and justice from a perspective inverted to that of Scarry. As such, Piper focuses first on the justice aspect of her work and allows the aesthetic component to be secondary or even incidental. By

her own admission, Piper care less about the aesthetic quality of her work than the purpose for which it was created. (Piper 249) Because my creative commitment is inherently political, I am primarily motivated to do the work I do by a desire to effect concrete, positive, internal political change in the viewer, independently of or in spite of -the viewer's abstract aesthetic evaluation of my work. (Piper 248) Rather than the success of the work being evaluated in aesthetic terms, as is usually the case with other art, Piper defines her success in terms of the manner by which it affects people. sometimes people learn something about who they are by viewing my work. For me this is proof of success. (Piper 249) For Piper, it is the use of the indexical present through which she intends to accomplish her explicitly political aim of combating racism. My interest in the particular, personal, immediate transaction between ethnic or cultural others expresses a long-held fascination with the indexical present the concrete, immediate here-and-now. (Piper 247) Piper uses the indexical present as a method of combating racism because racism and xenophobia more generally flourish against a background of socially sanctioned habits of mutual segregation, ignorance, fear, and rejection of the other as a human being that are so instinctive that we may never succeed in fully eradicating their influence on us. (Piper 247) As an effective counterstrategy, the indexical present provides an opportunity to check our theories about them against the particulars of their presence because the, indexical present trades easy classification and hence xenophobia for a direct and immediate experience of the complexity of the other, and of ones own responses to her. (Piper 248) It is taken as implicit for Piper that we all have a problem with race and racism, and that the problem varies only by degree. I want viewers of my work to come away from it with the understanding that racism is not an abstract, distant problem that affects all those poor,

unfortunate other people out there. (Piper 248) As such, Piper approaches the subject of race from one in which the viewer is forced to confront uncomfortable feelings as a result of viewing her work. Such discomfort is, I think, to be expected. My work intentionally holds up for scrutiny deep-seated racist attitudes that no individual socialized into a racist society can escape, no matter how politically correct or seasoned such an individual may be.(Piper 251) It is important to note here that Pipers work doesnt offer a solution in terms of what to do about those uncomfortable feelings as it would relate to a normative ethic. Rather, she leaves the question open for the audience. There is some sense in which, however, Piper seems to implicitly understand the connection that Scarry presents between beauty and justice, and likewise ugliness and injustice. Piper confronts injustice through the use of minimalist art because it focuses attention, on the individual, specific unique object reducing that object to a set of properties that reveal it simply as what it is: as an object in space and time, and not something that is full of external associations, suppositions, and preconceptions. (Piper 257) That most of Pipers work focuses on highlighting injustice rather than upholding justice, it is almost as though the aesthetic properties which are not applied to the work are applied to the reactions to the work. Considering that a significant portion of Pipers work, as a conceptual artist, is the audience reaction, this makes sense. As such, it seems that justice itself takes on the aesthetic qualities normally reserved for art. What Piper and Eaton seem to share is an acknowledgment of how a person is situated affects ones judgment. Whereas, within Pipers work, ethical judgments seem to take on aesthetic properties, from Eatons perspective, aesthetic judgments take on ethical properties.

Eaton begins her account with the notion of situatedness. The basic idea is that both arts producers (the artists) and its audiences (those who appreciate, judge, study, critique, evaluate, buy and sell, and theorize about art) represent, experience, and value the world in ways that reflect their particular social situations. (Eaton) The concept of situatedness becomes problematic when it involves, as it usually does, hierarchical ordering. The problem is that we are all systematically situated in a hierarchically structured world where men have privileges just because they are men and women are disadvantaged in many contexts just because they are women. (Eaton) Though a very strong claim, the warrant underlying that claim becomes apparent when noting womens exclusion from the art world in general. This exclusion takes two forms. The first is in the lack of opportunity for women to produce artwork which conforms to the prevailing notions of art due womens relative economic, material, and social disadvantages throughout history. (Eaton) The second form of exclusion is apparent in viewing the different ways that artifacts which men and women create are classed differently, perhaps based solely on the idea that they were crafted by men and women respectively. As such, work that women create is generally excluded from the domain of art and situated in craft. Women have had almost exclusive access to so-called craft production for centuries and yet this creative output is not accorded the status and respect of mens artifactual production. (Eaton) In addressing this problem, there are three main options. Perspectivism proposes that disinterestedness is impossible and that aesthetic standards are not and cannot be universal. The problem, however, with the perspectivism approach is that it undercuts any notion that there can be bias in the first place. But if all judgments of taste are equally distorted by gender and other aspects of social position, as these feminists hold, then what was the point of exposing these?

(Eaton) By contrast, A revisionist approach would work by, (1) integrating womens artistic efforts into the cannon, and (2) re-evaluating those canonical works marked by antrocentrism and sexism. (Eaton) A gynocentric approach, by contrast, would call for a separate canon that employs uniquely feminine criteria based on a variety of alternative aesthetic concepts and theories of art. (Eaton) In both cases, according to Eaton, risk leaving feminist art undervalued or poorly appreciated. (Eaton) Eaton leaves the question open, pending more work to be done on understanding the aesthetic in terms of sex and gender. I have argued that such questions [about sex gender and aesthetic] need not be framed in essentialist terms, and further, that we need to know the answer to these basic questions in order to adequately address the normative issues of interest to so many feminists. (Eaton) In this, Eaton turns the question over to engagement with the empirical disciplines like psychology and cognitive science whose business it is to answer such questions. (Eaton) As an alternative, I posit that the art world itself can respond in terms of theory which is more inclusive of feminist standards and more friendly to the notion of justice itself. Scarry aligns beauty, and with it the aesthetic more generally, with justice in an interdependent relationship wherein our concept of aesthetic helps to form our concept of justice. Piper, though working a full 20 years earlier, seems to grasp this relationship intuitively in presenting work which is as difficult to see as it is to watch injustice unfold. But it is only through the feminist perspective that what constitutes art is truly called into question, as art itself is has been used as a means of injustice. In this, a theory of art which captures not only what art is but what art could be is necessary for overcoming bias and stereotype present in art itself. For these purposes, I find that Umberto Ecos conception of a work of art as open the most helpful in reframing art that it may overcome biases itself is subject to. In his account, Eco

posits that works are co-created between artistic agent and viewer. A work of art, therefore, is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinges on its unadultaerable specificity. (Eco) While Ecos poetics are looking at work which is coming into creation that is more open in a more specific sense of the word, using the concept of openness can be helpful in terms of art as it relates to justice. Eco says, The notion of possibility is a philosophical canon which reflects a widespread tendency in contemporary science; the discarding of a static, syllogistic view of order and a corresponding devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision, choice, and social context. (Eco) By introducing, personal decision, choice and social context into the framework of aesthetic judgment, the idea of responsibility necessarily accompanies it, because it is only within the context of choice that we can have any responsibility. It is within this acknowledgment of responsibility that the aesthetic manifests itself as a form of justice. Not only, as Scarry says, as an antecedent relation where notions of beauty assist with notions of justice, but also in viewers being responsible for what they consider beautiful in the first place. In closing, I come back to Scarrys account of errors in beauty. In this, she discusses mistakes arising from cultural differences, or as she poses later, problems of composite. (Scarry 13,14) Scarry describes her love for palm trees in terms of an error she made in beauty. Still, it is the case that if I were surrounded everyday by hundreds of palms, one of them would have sooner called upon me to correct my error. (Scarry 13) Scarry acknowledges that when thinking of her disdain for palms, it was a composite palm that I had somehow succeeded in making whereas when thinking about her love of palm trees, it is really individual palms that I have in mind. (Scarry 14) This problem of composite echos Pipers indexical present, and

the notion of cultural error as a product of cultural context foreshadows the feminist agenda. While it is certainly a well made case that Scarry presents in terms of the relationship between justice and beauty, in being aware of this particular type of error, it seems that beauty does a little more than inform justice; in taking responsibility for errors of culture and composite, the experience of beauty itself becomes a kind of justice.

Works Cited Eaton, Anne. Feminist Philosophy of Art. (Web text) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.librarylink.uncc.edu/doi/10.1111/j.17479991.2008.00154.x/pdf. Eco, Umberto. The Poetics of the Open Work. In-class Hand-out. 1962. Piper, Adrian Xenophobia and the Indexical Present I and II. In-class Hand-out. 1990/1992. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. In-class Hand-out. 1998.