academia amnesia

When poetry and poets were deemed dangerous by the Greeks, famously Plato declaimed, "We can admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men." Around the work of art there was awe, or to use Plato's term, "divine terror". (Ahh, how delicious, such ambivalence.)

In The Man Without Content , Giorgio Agamben explores the transformation of art from the ancients' sense of its overwhelming power to the contemporary experience of aesthetic taste and enjoyment. Art was once firmly in the sphere of interest; now it has become "merely interesting". From its deep and ineluctable oneness with the godly, the spiritual, and the immanent, the work of art has become a thing of subjectivity in its creation and a product for disinterested consumption in its reception. Agamben is not a high priest lamenting the destruction of art's place in the temple or its schism from deities. But he does provide a thought-provoking account of the artist's and the spectator's evolving relationships to each other and to the artwork across the ages in the Western cultures.

For instance: the question of aesthetic taste. The experience of art became a matter of demonstrating one's good taste as recent as the middle of the seventeenth century. Building on Agamben's analysis, it strikes me that the analogy of eating can be useful in illustrating the change in art from soul food ("food" that "feeds" the soul's beliefs and values even as it draws on these to sustain itself in the artist and the spectator) to the selectivity (and almost unavoidably, the elitism and egotism) of what is tasty and what is not.

From the man of taste, one could trace the birth of criticism. There is today many forms of criticism but I cannot think of any that does not begin with the assumption of a good faculty of judgment, that is to say, good taste. Movie reviews, restaurant reviews, book reviews, yes, even this one that I am not-so-covertly writing here. I have found so many good things in this book, but I shall single out one that is particularly resonant. In a quiet corner I found a protest that chimes with my personal disillusionment with contemporary practices of literary criticism and appreciation in academia. He writes:

"Whatever criterion the critical judgment employs to measure the reality of the work - its linguistic structure, its historical dimension, the authenticity of the Erlebnis [historical context] from which it has sprung, and so on - it will only have laid out, in place of a living body, an interminable skeleton of dead elements, and the work of art will have actually become for us, as Hegel says, the beautiful fruit picked from the tree that a friendly Fate has placed before us, without, however, giving back to us, together with it, either the branch that has borne it or the soil that has nourished it or the changing seasons that have helped it ripen. What has been negated is reassumed into the judgment as its only real content, and what has been affirmed is covered by this shadow. Our appreciation of art begins necessarily with the forgetting of art."

When critics forget their place in front of a work of art, when critics forget the role of criticism beside the role of art, when critics dissect the work of art as if it were as still and finite as a cadaver, then the critics turn the academy into a world of amnesia - hollow, shallow, and terrifying. But this is no divine terror. (Ahh, how despairing, such emptiness!)