INTRO | kofinatambu

INTRODUCTION

What Is An Aesthetic?: Writings on American Culture, 1980-Present

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming

disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”

--Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."

--C.L.R. James (1901-1989)

“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.”

—Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

"Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research.”

—Malcolm X (1925-1965)

“To think or write or produce [a play] also means: to transform society, to transform the state, to subject ideologies to close scrutiny”

—Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

“Western Civilization is neither."

--Cedric Robinson (1940-2016)

adjective: aesthetic

Concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty.

"the pictures give great aesthetic pleasure”; "the law applies to both functional and aesthetic objects”

noun: aesthetic; plural noun: aesthetics

A set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement. "the Cubist aesthetic”

--Oxford Languages

The philosophical and cultural idea of “the aesthetic”, one of the major historical cornerstones of Western European intellectual thought, is rooted in the discourse informing eighteenth century Enlightenment notions concerning the institutionalization of ideas about “truth”, “beauty”, “science” and “knowledge” as "self-evident and universal categories of human expression." Thus the historical category of “aesthetics” was seen as a self-contained identity that drew its intellectual autonomy and social legitimacy from its privileged status as a “branch of philosophy that examines the nature of art and the character of our experience of art, and of the natural environment...” (italics mine). This highly presumptuous attitude concerning both the definition of ‘art’ and its social-cultural uses in the world has necessarily served as the ideological defense for, and justification of, an imperialist worldview that from its inception promoted and standardized a rigidly vertical hierarchy of cultures, according to which only those of “superior” intelligence, discernment, taste, breeding and knowledge would have access to the aesthetic while “all others” would be seen as lacking this ability. Moreover, ‘others’ could be seen as aspiring to this exalted position of the aesthetic only by embracing its dominant normative codes, methodologies, forms, and “ways of knowing” (epistemology) in their own appropriation of the “artistic” and “creative.”

At the same time the corresponding Western notion that individuals called 'artists' had a virtual monopoly on this rarefied domain of activity ensured that an elite priesthood of representatives of this worldview would spread this doctrine in order to become properly sanctioned (and thus given economic and institutional support) by the bourgeoisie. Thus class, as well as “race”, gender, and ideology became crucial factors in determining who would be considered worthy of being an artist. It is this conception of “worthiness”, with all of its obvious implications, that continues to serve as the major obstacle to a much broader, open, and democratic idea of what “art” is, and could be. However it is crucial to note that such important and disparate social theorists and cultural critics as Antonio Gramsci, C.L.R. James, Stuart Hall, Frederic Jameson, Walter Benjamin, Edward Said, Harold Cruse, Amiri Baraka, Cedric Robinson, Michel Foucault, and Terry Eagleton have all pointed out that “the aesthetic” as defined by this hegemonic ideological tradition need not be the sole criterion of what constitutes a radical and innovative expression of creative ideas, values, and practices in this part of the world. In fact as Eagleton points out in his important study of this dialectic in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell, 1990), we would do well to remember that “the aesthetic, understood in a certain sense, provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to these dominant ideological forms, and is in this sense an eminently contradictory phenomenon.”

It is precisely this contradiction and the concomitant struggle to find and promote “challenges and alternatives” that provides the theoretical and thematic foundation for this book, and serves as a structural framework for ‘understanding’ its content. Thus these essays, reviews, interviews, articles, and polemics represent an ongoing attempt on my part to critically investigate, question, challenge, defend and attack certain specific areas of cultural ideology and expressions that I find of particular interest both intellectually and politically, and to posit--sometimes in opposition, sometimes in support--ideas, theories, values, and empirical observations of my own.

In entering the discourse of cultural and ideological analysis and criticism I am making an intervention that hopes to provocatively engage those ideas, postures, structures and values that I find either problematic and/or useful in my own work (as writer and human being). The reasons that I have specifically chosen to examine cultural representations and conceptions are varied of course, but they all essentially go back to a deeply rooted personal and “aesthetic” dissatisfaction with how conventional or widely accepted discursive formations and ideas in the areas of modernist American literature, music, film, cultural studies and critical theory continue to assert themselves. What I have chosen to focus on is the endless ways in which the multivaried social and historical dynamics of cultural thought and activity/praxis render and express concrete political and ideological effects and consequences that influence and affect how we perceive, and thus deal with, social and ‘aesthetic’ reality.

As a result I am also deeply concerned with how the contextual and theoretical category of hegemony, as understood and expressed by such important thinkers, writers, critics, and activists as Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), C.L.R. James (1901-1989), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Stuart Hall (1932-2014 ), Edward Said (1935-2003), Malcolm X (1925-1965), Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), James Baldwin (1924-1987), Amiri Baraka (1934-2014), Harold Cruse (1916-2005), Toni Morrison (1931-2019), Kimberlé Crenshaw (b. 1959) Angela Davis (b. 1944) Gerald Horne (b. 1949) and Cedric Robinson (1940-2016), have permeated our understanding of contemporary society and culture, and its intellectual traditions over the past two decades. Further, I am particularly interested in, but not limited to, how these ideas and categories influence or impact (or are influenced and impacted by) African American artists, critics, and cultural workers in the United States. My fundamental viewpoint is that there are no poetics, stylistic modes, creative methodologies, formal structures, or expressive practices that are not at one and the same time social and cultural reflections of political economy, state power, ideological history, and class/’ethnic’/gender relations writ large. This is particularly true of the United States.

I am of course very aware of the fact that certain contemporary critics and artists consider, as Eagleton readily points out, “any historical and ideological contextualization of art whatsoever [to be] ipso facto reductionist.” To this ultimately banal charge I can only echo Eagleton in this regard and state that in acknowledging the contradictory dynamics of the concept of the aesthetic (and thus being on guard against being too crude and one dimensional in one’s analysis), that we should also never forget that “certain theoretical concepts are indeed from time to time put to the uses of political power, and sometimes in quite direct ways.” While Eagleton finds a European historical example of this turn to the aesthetic in the Enlightenment and its connection to “certain problems of absolutist political power” in the writing of the 18th century philosopher and theorist Fredrich Schiller, where, as Eagleton asserts, such relations are explicitly formulated, it is clear to me that there are many more concrete, vivid and horrific examples of this “problem” to be found in the United States over the past two centuries. After all, whose reductionism is on trial here anyway?

In this regard the work of African American cultural critic, NYU professor, and film historian Clyde R. Taylor, whose extraordinary book The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract--Film & Literature (Indiana University Press, 1998) is a major, groundbreaking advance in U.S. cultural studies, poetics, and critical theory, and is crucial to a fresh perspective and analysis of this highly complex subject. In his book Taylor aggressively takes on the present crisis of knowledge in the United States by directly engaging in a historically informed critique of the aesthetic from a breathtaking interrogation of its many theoretical, ideological, and political uses in Western literature, film, painting, sculpture, and philosophy since the Renaissance, with a special emphasis on investigating and analyzing these uses and the myriad counter-modalities of radical resistance, opposition, and self-determining alternatives within the context of 20th century America. This necessarily brief survey cannot possibly do justice to the profound contributions that Dr. Taylor makes to our understanding and knowledge of the meaning of the “cultural politics of representation” and the political economy of art, but it does indicate that in the past forty years alongside such original and exciting contemporary African American thinkers, writers, artists and critics as Greg Tate, Nathaniel Mackey, Imani Perry, Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Beatty, Harryette Mullen, Tricia Rose, Erica Hunt, DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller), Brent Hayes Edwards, Will Alexander, Fred Moten, Robin D. G. Kelley, Nelson George, bell hooks, Robert O'Meally, Mark Anthony Neal, Kara Walker, George E. Lewis, Steve Coleman, Frank B. Wilderson III, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Wallace, Jayne Cortez, Ishmael Reed, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Muhal Richard Abrams, Charles Mills, and Kevin Young, among many others a strikingly new sensibility is making itself known. One that simultaneously embraces, critiques, and goes far beyond previous myopic and ultimately reductive white and black modernist notions of the ‘avant-garde.’

Finally, by invoking a question mark after a word (aesthetic) that is far too often taken to be self-evidently clear I hope to problematize, and thus reopen debate on, the complex historicity of the term’s meaning(s) in present critical discourse. In this way it becomes possible to analyze why and how these various meanings are constructed. In this way examining and understanding the history of a term’s evolution becomes far more important than merely assuming that its meaning is fixed, “universal”, and transcendent.

When I began writing the critical essays and conducting the interviews that comprise this book I was nearly thirty years old. After an intense and highly challenging and very rewarding period of some twenty years (1965-1985), which included high school, college, and graduate school, as well as very extensive political and cultural activism and a personally fulfilling immersion in teaching and other independent scholarly pursuits, I felt a great need and desire to intellectually re-evaluate and critically examine my activity, and that of my contemporaries and peers, in light of the pervasively negative changes in American culture and politics that began and rapidly accelerated/expanded with the advent of a new atavistic ideological force called “Reaganism”. The most stunning and deeply disturbing fact about American political and cultural/aesthetic life since the brutal assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy in April and June of 1968 is the chilling realization that for the next twenty out of twenty-four years the virulently rightwing Republican Party led by Nixon, Reagan, and Bush One won five of the following six presidential elections (1968-1992). This quarter century tyranny over both the national political economy and its cultural institutions (like the NEA) has created an ominous ideological and social legacy that remains intact to this day. This postindustrial and high tech period of political, cultural, economic, and ideological hegemony and control has dramatically permeated all general intellectual, political, cultural, and ‘aesthetic’ discourse in the U.S. over the past three decades and unfortunately remains a highly reactionary and oppressive, yet undeniably potent force in American culture and politics in the new millennium. Certainly the moderately conservative, blatantly opportunist, and politically quietist neoliberal policies and programs of Bill Clinton’s administration (1992-2000), followed by the frenzied rightwing hysteria and criminally neoconservative Empire politics (and neolithic cultural attitudes) of George W. Bush’s imperialist junta from 2000-2008 had a markedly demoralizing affect on art and artists (not to mention its censorious and repressive impact on any contemporary notion of a truly humane, democratic, and progressive civic culture).

As a result the so-called ‘Age of Obama’ (2008-2016) that hesitantly and rather cautiously emerged following the unprecedented election of the nation’s first African American president in 2008 did in some obviously heavily compromised, tragically limited and predictably deceptive ways initially helped to buoy the spirits and even openly inspire some members of this society to move (or think about moving) in a far more positive and liberating direction. However, it was unfortunately all too clear throughout Obama’s eight year tenure that the tepid neoliberalism and moderate self serving incremental policies of his administration was always in servile political support and slavish ideological defense of the hegemonic and utterly elitist ruling class mythology of ‘American exceptionalism’ in terms of both domestic and foreign policy. This structural as well as institutional and systemic abdication of progressive principles, ideas, and action on the part of government ultimately provided us all with yet another major cautionary tale about the cynical, manipulative, evasive, and debilitating machinations of the two party dominated American political system drowning in money, corruption, disinformation, and hubris. Finally the raging fascist politics and brazen white supremacy as well as predatory misogyny, pervasive social and cultural repression, rank economic exploitation, reckless advocacy of political violence, and deadly criminality of the clinically maniacal, openly xenophobic, and deeply cultish Trump regime (both in and out of state power since 2016) makes it appallingly clear not only where we’re presently going but more precisely how we got here. Thus our collective experience of these realities and its undeniable impact on our lives demonstrates that it is still very important to remind ourselves always that in our present highly contested and deeply conflicted social, ideological, and cultural context “aesthetics”--like politics!, like art!-- are as prone to institutionalized ossification, manipulation, myopia, distortion, and corruption as anything else. This is precisely why we as citizens, cultural workers, and human beings must always remain vigilant and continue to vigorously assert and exercise our collective will to create viable alternatives of our own that don’t require any ‘official’ validations, sanctions, or controls from the government or anywhere else. This is the genuine definition and meaning of self-determination in both art and politics.

So under these sobering circumstances forgive me if I don’t get too excited over the timeworn and self serving academic debate of “What exactly constitutes ‘art vis-à-vis politics’ in our world today?” My present response to that very tired cliché question (and more importantly its implications and uses) is to be found in the writings and statements that follow. That it took nearly 40 years to get to this point fills me with both mortal dread and a great sense of liberating possibility. How’s that for an ‘aesthetic’ (and political) contradiction?

Kofi Natambu

Berkeley, California

September 9, 2022

(via Detroit, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Oakland, CA: 1980-2022)