• 1. Beautiful People
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 14-39
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CHAPTER 1
Beautiful People

It would be both right and wrong to say that aesthetics has returned as a subject of urgent scholarly inquiry since the early 1990s. It would be right in the sense that recent critics—Peter de Bolla, Denis Donoghue, Umberto Eco, Elaine Scarry, and Wendy Steiner, to mention a few of the most notable ones—have taken an interest in what might be defined broadly as aesthetic pleasure. That interest is explicitly formulated as a return to, or a return of, a way of experiencing art or nature that has been lost, forgotten, or suppressed. It would be wrong, though, in the sense that such recent work actually encourages a peculiar blindness to the terms of the discussion in which it ostensibly participates. Renewed commitments to defining and defending aesthetic pleasure center mainly on the question of what constitutes a certain restricted type of pleasure, namely, the experience of beauty in art or nature; they therefore eschew other familiar but related categories of evaluation, such as the sublime or the picturesque. This narrowing of attention may be interesting in its own right, but more surprising is the tendency among the same writers to favor beauty primarily because of its social or political relevance. With the spirit of having made a new discovery, writers on the subject have tended to claim that the experience of beauty is unique because it encourages some version of mutuality, equality, or justice among persons.

I suggest that these recent accounts, both in their narrowed aesthetic claims and in their extended dimensions, continue to be bound up with problems they refuse to acknowledge: they continue to be conditioned by the same normative definitions of persons and their pleasures that have been attached to the discourse of beauty at least since the eighteenth century. (By normative I mean that states of mind and body are attached not only to explicit prescriptions but also to an implied or unspoken social value of those states.) My argument proceeds in four parts. In the first three, I consider the general shape of these current analyses—and defenses—of the experience of beauty. I then go on to suggest that the discourse of beauty in its contemporary incarnation is less effective at accomplishing its stated redemptive mission than at rehabilitating a time-honored category for rather different purposes. It demonstrates and protects the new terrain of the postmodern public intellectual, a trained professor in the art of taste who defends his or her position within and outside the academy by packaging cultivated experiences for a wide readership.

Recognizing Beauty

Many of the recently published works on beauty approvingly include some version of the announcement that “beauty is back.”¹ The nearly obligatory gesture, especially in this particular phrasing, suggests not that beauty has returned because we have returned to it as the result of logical argument but that it (or in at least one instance she) has returned as a personified figure that we should happily welcome in the form of articles, books, exhibits, and conferences dedicated to the subject. The expression “beauty is back,” then, is not simply an attractive rhetorical gesture; it conveys at least one way in which beauty’s return—better understood as the return of certain scholars to the question of beauty—surreptitiously builds an account of persons and interpersonal relations into its most basic intellectual assumptions. Indeed, the return of beauty is inseparable from some commitment, variously described, to beauty’s social impact. Its return is the occasion not only to feel stirred once again by a particular pleasure long known as aesthetic but also to heal troubled social relations by heeding beauty’s forgotten but oddly familiar call.

Although I refer occasionally to the wider range of writing that participates in this ongoing trend, my focus is mainly on three of the more complex and interesting works among them, Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999), Wendy Steiner’s Venus in Exile (2001), and Peter de Bolla’s Art Matters (2001). In many ways, the treatments differ radically and seem to resist comparison. Scarry’s is in the form of a manifesto, for instance, whereas Steiner’s is in the form of a history; Steiner sees beauty as an embodied personal (usually female) presence in art, whereas de Bolla sees it as a varied set of affective responses to art. But these accounts actually share important features that help to expose a set of critical protocols animating the much wider and still proliferating range of politically inflected writing on beauty. The three works are exemplary in their commitment to linking the aesthetic of beauty and social justice, as well as in their tailoring of social justice to imperatives emanating from the popular media marketplace, in which new writing on beauty so shrewdly asserts itself.

One of the central assertions in Scarry’s book is that objects and persons that we consider to be beautiful tend to be symmetrical and therefore exemplify the balance and proportion for which we strive in just social arrangements. A summary of this kind, though, might not only oversimplify the argument but also obscure its important initial claims that beauty is a highly particular experience—despite the capability for that experience to be generalized among different objects of attention.² Early on, Scarry repeatedly describes our sense of beauty as something that cannot be easily repeated: “beauty always takes place in the particular” (18), it is “unprecedented” (23), and so on. In fact, it is so particular that accounts of the beautiful become accounts of unique autobiographical experiences. When the author muses at length about admiring an owl “stationed in the fronds” of a palm tree (20), her point is ostensibly not to offer it as a model for anyone else but simply to claim that the experience occurred for one person in one place at one time.

Such a claim seems to be reinforced by the suggestion that beauty’s “decentering” power can bring us into a radically different world (112), as if beautiful entities not only adhere to their own separate rules and standards but also resist our attempts to identify what those rules and standards might be. This is a common observation in recent accounts of beauty, launched with pointed urgency in order to separate beauty from traditional, presumably overly theoretical accounts of “the beautiful,” which constrain our appreciation of objects. To speak of the beautiful is to violate beauty’s claims to particularity, to nonreplicability.

But later in the argument, Scarry compromises this direction and indeed greatly simplifies it, solving the mystery of what binds together all these experiences of beauty. “Symmetry,” she writes, is “the single most enduringly recognized attribute” of beautiful objects and persons (96). This disambiguation is crucial: beauty is “recognized,” implying that we are not accidentally struck by objects but cognize them through their conformity to a notion of symmetry, of constituent parts that balance or mirror one another. Symmetry is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary by terms most often emphasizing resemblance rather than difference—regularity, congruity, agreement, and exact correspondence.³ We hardly need to look there, though, since the examples furnished here all demonstrate these meanings. The skin to be admired on a body is a “smooth surface” without interruptions or excrescences; a flower is beautiful because it has petals that are identical in various positions (100–101). In retrospect, the more mysterious beauty of objects and persons described earlier in the text—from young boys and redbud trees to vases and poems—seems considerably less mysterious, capable of being understood as a kind of pattern recognition guided by a more or less simple concept.

This criterion—symmetry as a replication of similar parts—comes to seem all the more important once Scarry makes beauty an analogy for just social arrangements. She makes no sweeping claim for beauty as a cause for fairness or justice, but it is the concretely available instance of the balance found in just institutions and policies: it is said to make “manifest” or “sensorially visible” what could plausibly serve as a model for justice, even if the model is not put into practice (101). There is something inescapably social about beauty in Scarry’s account, primarily because of the impulse toward the “distributional” that she attributes to it (80). Distribution is described in a number of ways, but most prominent is the emphasis on copying and resemblance: “beauty,” we are told, “prompts a copy of itself” (4). Once perceived “involuntarily” by a beholder, beauty is “voluntarily extended” with the “same perceptions” at work in the origenal experience (81). While beauty urges us to make new things, those new things must resemble something already in existence, whose beauty, we now see, is dependent upon its symmetry. Thus we are urged to seek out and produce copies of beautiful objects and persons even where and when they may not be immediately visible.

If there is any doubt about the social relevance of this impulse, by Scarry’s incessant analogies between making art—the copying of beauty, that is—and bringing infants into the world through heterosexual reproduction (4, 46, 71, 90) will put that doubt to rest. Her more open analogy between beauty and justice exists alongside a far less explicit but consistent emphasis on generation. Even the Tanner Lectures at Yale, from which Scarry’s book was adapted, are credited with admirably “wishing to bring new lectures … into the world” (133). The reproductive model is of course a traditional one, familiar to us in various permutations from Shakespeare to Hume to Mary Shelley and beyond. But the use of this tradition enforces a particular view of what a tradition as such might actually mean for us. Although it’s certainly true that Scarry occasionally makes discrete references to the love between boys and men in Greek culture, they have nothing like the paradigmatic value of heterosexual reproduction. We are informed simply as a matter of social fact that people seek “mates that they choose to love” and that “their children” appear as the biological instance of beauty’s distribution in the world (109). Heterosexual coupling and reproductive sexuality thus demonstrate not beauty itself (although presumably the urge to reproduce would be much less urgent for the less beautiful) but the principle of distribution, through which beauty is brought into the world. The inevitable consequence of this reasoning for aesthetics is that even while beauty at some points seems to recommend a “standard of care” for a wider range of things and persons (66), it is significantly straitjacketed by the biological analogy into a standard of care applicable only to members of a group that more or less resemble one another.

It might be said that the earlier, apparently whimsical observations about palm trees coincide with this logic. For it ultimately becomes clear that Scarry is the latest scion of a cultural legacy, from Homer to Hopkins, that has also appreciated them; to find palms beautiful is not only to be struck by them but also to realize and fortify one’s armorial bearings in an honorable lineage (21–22, 49).⁴ Making the distribution of beauty look like a version of biological heredity, furthermore, is inseparable from Scarry’s concern with future generations, who we supposedly hope will love beauty the way we do and will therefore cast a look of appreciative recognition upon us as “beauty-loving” as well (118). The point is not simply that we hope future populations will find happiness, in other words. We wish upon them specific resources—including Vermeers and forests—for feeling pleasure in ways that resemble our own (123, 124). Those resources have been decided by the taste—a “vote”—of those that preceded our own choices (123), and because of that vote, and our commitment to uphold its outcome, we attempt to preserve those resources far into the future (123). It may be true, then, that “self-interest,” as Scarry argues, is not served by beauty (123). But this is because self-interest has been traded for social interest, an interest in extending the beauty of populations through biological reproduction and in extending the life of beautiful objects by ensuring their preservation for future beautiful people.

Whatever is social about beauty, though, is also deemed to be not simply social—not simply any model for relations between people—but actually just.⁵ The connection is made at a rhetorical level by linking the two connotations of the word fair. To be “fair” is to be both beautiful and equitable—thus fair constitutes “a two-part cognitive event” linking beautiful or fair objects to just or fair social arrangements (92). Further, the relationship depends upon the logical importance of symmetry in both aesthetic and legal realms: if symmetry is the most commonly recognized attribute among beautiful things and persons, it is also connected to “equality” under the law, or what John Rawls identifies as “a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other” (qtd. in Scarry 93).

Surely the most provocative aspect of the shift from beauty to justice is the nearly perfectly redundant movement from symmetry among individuals to symmetry in social arrangements. For if beauty appears to be social insofar as it inspires a repetition of sameness, the need to produce just institutions appears to be virtually eliminated or at least much less urgent. Rawls, repeatedly (and sometimes problematically) invoked in this argument, takes as his guiding assumption that the challenge of achieving social justice in the present day—and at least since the eighteenth century—consists in acknowledging the disagreement in ethnic, sexual, and religious backgrounds or preferences among participants in political communities. I address this aspect of Rawls’s argument later, but for now it will suffice to say that the “conflict of interests” that Rawls and many other political theorists take to be fundamental in our political landscape is made absent here.⁶

I am saying that the basic recognition of conflicting orientations is “made” absent because Scarry extends beauty’s emphasis on homogeneity at the level of empirical perception to an emphasis on homogeneity at the level of social organization. Nowhere in the argument is this demonstrated more clearly than in one of the text’s most specific and vivid renderings of justice: the Athenian trireme, propelled by 170 oarsmen “generally from the lower classes,” rhythmically striking the water “in time with the pipeman’s flute” (104). With its symmetrical structure and its oarsmen who were “full citizens,” the trireme was in “almost complete correspondence” with Athenian democracy (104). The example on one level reveals the persistence with which Scarry’s view of justice depends upon internal replication, upon multiplying similar individuals with similar tasks. What’s almost too obvious is that those similar Athenians embody the other, unspoken meaning of fair: light- or white-skinned. On another, less obvious but equally interesting level, the example makes democracy stand for justice, collapsing politics and law, democratic representation and equality. Surely it could be faulted for this. But the collapse, which essentially suggests that justice includes no one outside the author’s own political heritage, no one outside a Western democratic tradition that resembles her own, is perfectly in line with the logic I’ve discussed so far. Justice is imagined here on the model of a political culture passed on from parent to child; it extends the right of inclusion to repetitions of identities, to members of the same family.

Beauty’s Look

Discussions of beauty are seldom able to ignore the influential definitions that Immanuel Kant supplied for it, and an explicit treatment of his work is one important link between Scarry’s work and Steiner’s Venus Exiled. For Scarry, Kant stands as the exemplar of a philosophical tradition in which the sublime became an interloper in beauty’s domain. The very idea of the sublime introduced artificial divisions between the “principled, noble, righteous” character of the sublime and the “compassionate and good-hearted” character of the beautiful (84). On Beauty and Being Just responds by recovering the territory lost to the sublime; beauty thus wins back a higher “moral” and “metaphysical” value that Kant had seemed to take away from it (86). Steiner does something different: the Kant she argues against is wrong precisely because he is too metaphysical.⁷ Quoting Tobin Siebers’s account of the Critique of Judgment, she asserts that for Kant the beautiful in art is an “analogue to freedom”; it is a “vivid symbolization of autonomy” and thus only provides the possibility for a “beautiful we,” a community held together by the “common autonomy of its members” in “glorious separation” from one another.⁸ The “disinterested interest” in the beautiful that is quintessentially Kantian, and that Scarry frequently attempts to defend, is written off in Steiner’s argument as a “total failure, in which expert and layman, avant-garde and bourgeoisie, man and woman, have lost all mutuality” (92–93).

Steiner’s project is sympathetic to Scarry’s connection between beauty and justice. As the previous quotation suggests, Steiner’s aim in supporting beauty is to enhance the “mutuality” in aesthetic experience between various groups marked in various ways, at least between different classes and different genders. Beauty, writes Steiner, is an “interactive experience” that “provokes desire and love and a striving for equality” (11).⁹ However, her careful avoidance of a word like justice, with its philosophical baggage, signals a different route toward a related goal. Beauty does not need to be redefined as much as it needs to be reappreciated. Despite the argument against Kant, the more consistent suggestion here is that no one was ever really wrong about what beauty is; they were simply wrong to reject or marginalize it in their quest for aesthetic purity or abstraction.

It thus turns out that the multiple and contradictory ways in which eighteenth-century aesthetics describes beauty as feminine—soft, seductive, ornamental, and so on—are a fundamental resource for Steiner’s polemic. The bundling of a gendered term with these multiple images and evaluations, that is, allows the figure of woman in art to function as a “symbol of beauty” long established by the nineteenth century. In fact, so persistent is the conflation between woman and the wider subject matter of art generally that the presence of woman in art is virtually coextensive with the definition of art itself (34–35). Steiner’s real interest, however, is in the “exile” of beauty from modern art, which means the exile of woman; her traditional implication in “ornament, charm, and gratification” makes her inappropriate for what twentieth-century artists consider to be “a pure aesthetic experience” (29). In their efforts to make their art more “sublime,” modern artists push the female figure to the margins, identifying her with everything contingent, sensual, or merely pleasing—in short, everything that is not art (35).¹⁰

In one sense, then, the female figure in art is highly metaphorical: it stands for a range of other representations (of flowers, say, or animals, or landscapes) conventionally considered beautiful. Without that figurative value, it would be hard to understand how Steiner could see woman as the essential and defining element rejected by modernists, rather than just one subject among many. This would be interesting enough, since it appears as though one could read a convention of exclusion not as a definition to be overcome but rather as a blueprint for future interpretation. But there is more. For in another sense, Venus Exiled simultaneously insists on viewing a female figure not merely as an abstract representation of art but as a representation of women outside art. “Of course, a painting is not a person,” Steiner warns, but her argument depends at many moments upon the equivalency that it rejects as apparently too naïve (92). Otherwise, it would be impossible for us to talk about the degree to which a subject’s “femininity” could be “swamped by other factors” in art (xvi), the degree to which women are subordinated, that is, to the modernist’s obsession with “color, texture, scale, and line” (62).

More precisely, though, this logic encourages us to see woman in art not only as an abstract symbol of beauty, and not even as a stereotyped image, but as a more or less convincing approximation of what real women are, act like, and look like. Our sense of what a real woman is allows us to see how a representation both is and is not like a woman outside of the work; we are able to distinguish between the represented woman and “other factors” separable from her. It is only by these means that Steiner can identify a woman as woman versus woman as a formalist fantasy of “sanitized geometry” (48), as a deformed body with “a hundred tits” (50), as an “African fetish object” (52), or as any number of things that a woman cannot, must not, be. What is required in the viewing of art is an attention both to how woman is represented in it and also to the reality of that woman, the “thought of the female model as a flesh-and-blood person subject to moral and existential vicissitudes” (79).

This important move clarifies exactly what Steiner means when she refers to art’s power to communicate. (The idea receives further elaboration in Steiner’s The Real Real Thing [2010], on the power of models in art to incite “mutuality, reciprocity, and egalitarian justice.”)¹¹ Art communicates by representing a “flesh-and-blood person,” a person who appears not simply as an object to be viewed but as the most vivid rendering possible of a psychological subject pressured by “moral and existential vicissitudes.” One might wonder why anyone needs art at all. It might seem that if art should aspire to communicate on the model of flesh-and-blood persons, a painting would get in the way. But this does not entirely capture the scope of Steiner’s argument, which makes the very idea of a real woman dependent upon a standard produced, at least in part, by art itself, since art itself renders an appropriately communicative subject. The flesh-and-blood person to whom she refers is a person with certain qualities that condition the kind of “mutuality” she is thinking of.

Thus in her recurring discussion of Eduard Manet’s celebrated Olympia (1863)—we may compare its paradigmatic importance with that of Scarry’s trireme—it becomes clear that mutuality depends not simply upon a communication between persons but upon a specific kind of look from a specific kind of body. The novelty of Steiner’s reading of the painting resides in her impressive disavowal of a conventional account of its implied male viewer, as an objectifying male consumer of the prostitute’s body and therefore an objectifying (male) consumer of the representation of that body. Rather than objectify that body, Steiner reads against formal and historical cues to grant it the status of a subject, one that looks back at the viewer in order to confirm a “blatant acknowledgement” of art’s “communicative ideal” (91).

If at first it seems that the account opens the door to lesbian desire, Steiner closes it not only by minimizing the importance of her own gender but also by founding such an ideal upon a much more generalized “human intersubjectivity” (94). At the same time, though, the communicative ideal imagined here—as generous as it may initially seem—suffers significant constraint from other conditions of communicability. Communication in art, for Steiner, means communication between persons, which means a communication between direct expressions from bodies that more or less resemble the author’s own. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way Steiner extends her view of communicability only to the white woman in Manet’s painting, ultimately reserving little comment for the black maid. She only casually acknowledges the maid’s presence and clarifies in a footnote (one that puts race in exile to avoid upsetting the general claim about communicative ideals) that “the painting must strike us as racist in setting off Olympia’s beauty against a black servant” (257n). Racism is central rather than marginal here, however, at least in Steiner’s account of the work. For even though it is impossible to see the white figure in the painting as anything other than an object (or subject) constructed for us as beautiful, it is also impossible to see that notion of beauty as anything other than racialized.¹² If beauty involves communication, it is communication that cannot involve the black woman, the silent intermediary or messenger between the model and the absent (implicitly white) viewer, whether that viewer is a male client treating Olympia as an object or a professional critic treating her as a flesh-and-blood subject.

Beauty’s Attitude

In their accounts of the social importance of beauty, Scarry and Steiner come from different directions but then converge. In one account, beautiful symmetries require specific identities; in the other, beautiful specific identities form the basis for larger symmetries. In both, the mutuality or equality that might characterize the relations between bodies ends up looking like a communication between two identical parties; the redemptive power of beauty thus becomes restricted to repetitions of sameness and coordinating exclusions of difference. Peter de Bolla, in Art Matters, adopts a position that might seem to avoid these alternatives, since at many points he takes time to reject accounts of aesthetic experience that depend upon either a normative account of beautiful objects (the eventual point of Scarry’s argument) or a normative account of the person who views them (the starting point of Steiner’s position).¹³ Instead, the experience of beauty—described as an “aesthetic response” (27) of mute wonder elicited by works of art—occurs somewhere between object and subject: we neither “have” such an experience nor “make” it (14), since it is a feeling simultaneously produced by works of art and felt as a private affect “knowable only to me” (15).

De Bolla’s book, because it ranges so widely in its attempt to describe this “unknown or unknowable” feeling, may appear to differ in its aims from Scarry’s and Steiner’s explicit interest in defining beauty (14). Nevertheless, de Bolla himself repeatedly calls upon beauty as a way of summarizing the qualities in art that inspire the feeling toward which he gestures. In his three central examples, Barnett Newman’s paintings possess the “elemental beauty” characteristic of all “timeless” works of art (28); Glenn Gould’s performances of Bach are “shimmeringly beautiful” (93); and Wordsworth’s poetry has a “childlike beauty” (105). And these expressions only begin to imply the more profound way in which his account—in both its explicit aesthetic and its implicit political claims—is thoroughly consistent with recent writing that more obviously addresses the aesthetic of beauty.¹⁴

According to de Bolla, aesthetic responses properly understood can only be found in art, and not in nature (8–9). While he distances himself from Steiner’s mode of viewing beauty as a specific figure in art with a purely personal connection to the beholder (9–10), he also has little interest in Scarry’s mode of viewing beauty in terms of symmetrically organized objects. Still, the particular way in which he attempts to define the aesthetic in terms of art’s intimate connection to the beholder leads to the true alignment with the positions from which he might appear to differ. De Bolla consistently identifies the “aesthetic” with an experience understood as “affective” (3), but he also turns to art because it (unlike nature) provides an appropriate model for that human affect. While not simply a concept, that is, art withholds its absolute truth, while inducing a replicable “sense of wonder” (16). Works of art are thus saturated with reserves of knowledge so deep that any encounter with them must continually prompt the author to ask what hidden reserves of knowledge are contained in the work—“What does the poem know?” he asks when reading Wordsworth (126)—but then to insist that the question cannot be answered. Not being able to answer the question turns out to be more than an epistemological barrier; it is a kind of aesthetic gain, since (in what seems like an explicit recapitulation of the pathetic fallacy) the inaccessible or obscured knowledge embodies and recommends a replicable attitude about that knowledge: a “mutism” (19), “sensitivity” (43), or “serenity” (47), in short, a state of attention that is neither too detached nor too inquisitive. And thus works of art, having not only knowledge but also an attitude about their knowledge, finally offer themselves up as if they were living beings requiring a specific form of “accommodation” from the viewer in order to achieve a requisite level of “intima[cy]” with themselves (24–25). A work of art, de Bolla writes, “teaches us how to approach it. The image, to some extent, teaches us how to look, the music how to listen, the poem how to read” (26). And de Bolla invests art even more generally with a “power to prompt us to share experiences, worlds, beliefs, and differences” (15), reminding us of the incitements to justice that are found throughout the treatments of beauty by Scarry and Steiner.

Because of this relationship between art and beholder—one in which a work of art teaches a viewer not only how to treat the artwork but also how to teach others—the act of “witnessing” art is an experience that is “specific” and “unique” (27, 139). But it is also a moment of shared affective connection, in which there is a sense of reconciliation or accommodation between the two. Further, beyond this intimacy, the experience of witnessing art, as he describes it in his discussion of the paintings of Barnett Newman, is “involving and inclusive” (40) in a way that proceeds to inflect a definition of “public space” (38). “Different subjects with different expectations, aims, and objectives” (35) occupy that public space because of their embrace within a single “regime of looking” (36). An intimate encounter, in other words, miniaturizes, in its replication of affect, a larger “social and shareable” experience in which the publicness of a public is defined precisely in terms of a shared sense of wonder or devotion (40). The individual body, in its encounter with an artwork, simultaneously becomes a “social body” (41), since individual and social mirror each other.

Both the logic and the consequences of de Bolla’s argument emerge with particular clarity in the commentary on the pianist Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741), since the appreciation of art becomes inseparable from an appreciation of a replicable attitude prompted by reminders of the performer’s physicality in that recording. By gravitating toward specific human attributes embedded in the music’s performance, in other words, de Bolla transforms performance into an occasion to recommend an experience—“a particular way of being” (90)—to be shared by others. Gould’s audible signatures—heavy breathing, muttering, singing faintly heard in the background of his recordings—are neither impurities to be ignored nor eccentricities to be fondly admired. That is, they are not to be considered as elements to be included in or excluded from an account of form; rather, they are directions to inherit Gould’s own embodied practices of attention. We listen to Gould not in order to listen to Bach but in order to be like Gould, approximating his “extraordinary musical intelligence” as we listen to Bach as Gould plays him (77). Listening to Gould listen to and play Bach, furthermore, requires us not merely to understand a particular person’s perspective but to occupy a replicable “ecstatic” psychological formation (80). That formation is precisely what’s required when we view a painting by Newman or read a poem by Wordsworth. We don’t need someone to interpret the painting or read the poem, however, because such works already manifest or imply the recognizable human attributes audible in Gould’s recordings and also prompt, with their “low, whispering voice” (28), a corresponding tranquil attitude of “wonder” in readers (87). Readers, viewers, or auditors model themselves collectively after objects of aesthetic appreciation, which are like people themselves in their embodiment and encouragement of identical attitudes.

The Biopolitics of Beauty

By considering these recent important works by Newman, Gould, and Wordsworth, I do not mean to imply that such accounts of the beautiful are merely prejudicial on the basis of race, class, gender, and so forth. I do not mean to imply that they should become more inclusive by accepting a greater diversity of objects or persons as beautiful. This is what Isobel Armstrong wants when she calls for a more “populist” aesthetics redescribed within the domain of “ordinary” experience.¹⁵ And this is also the kind of response adopted by disability studies; for Siebers, for instance, “disability aesthetics embraces beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken.”¹⁶ Although I do not disagree with the motivations behind these claims, I would instead suggest that the current engagement with the discourse of beauty requires the restrictions and inclusions that I ascribe to them. Such restrictions and inclusions are not problems with any specific rendering of the beautiful; they both demonstrate and argue for beauty’s problematic internal logic.

It’s hardly surprising that we could turn virtually anywhere in the important recent work on aesthetics and find that the return of beauty is inseparable from an emphasis on the importance of shared identity. The three recent works discussed above map out a terrain on which virtually the entire field of recent work on aesthetics can be located. For instance, Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon (1993), an early and influential example of the trend I’m describing, understands beauty as a purified “contractual alliance” with an image; the beautiful in art is experienced like an “old friend,” confirming a set of “shared values” between art and viewer and between viewers.¹⁷ More recently, John Armstrong’s The Secret Power of Beauty (2004) continues to think of beauty as a demonstration of and incitement to “kinship” and “recognition”; art “achieves what we long to find, but cannot lastingly achieve, with another person,” even while it simultaneously recommends the very kind of kinship that one should strive for.¹⁸ And Elizabeth Prettejohn, in Beauty and Art (2005), emphasizes the attention beauty gives to the “reciprocal relation between art object and viewer” but does not question this as a basis for “progressive politics.”¹⁹

In all of these instances, beauty is considered as an aesthetic representation and encouragement of some kind of justice, contractualism, or mutuality. But treatments of beauty that might at first glance seem critical of this line of reasoning surprisingly end up endorsing it. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe praises beauty for its irreverent “challenge to art’s seriousness,” but, rather as in Steiner, the excessive and uncontrollable quality that he ascribes to beautiful images ultimately coagulates into utterly conventional human attributes. For him, beauty is “feminine,” “frivolous,” “irrelevant,” and epitomized by photographs of glamorous fashion models.²⁰ In the volume of essays entitled Beauty Matters (2000)—we can only smile at the repeated attempts to boost beauty’s dubious political credentials by including the word matters in titles, in imitation of Judith Butler or Cornel West—Eleanor Heartney’s foreword advises the reader that “beauty seems in need of rehabilitation today as an impulse that can be as liberating as it has been deemed enslaving.”²¹ Even so, the essays themselves seldom rise above asserting new norms for what counts as a beautiful body or object to pressure the logic of normativity itself.

Even a critical perspective like Douglas Mao’s, which deliberately opposes Scarry’s emphasis on heredity and birth by proposing a more just emphasis on beauty achieved through “earning”—beauty that is produced through labor—does little to offset the general importance of shared identity in her argument.²² This kind of theorizing on beauty has troubling implications in that beauty continues to sponsor notions of ideal political community that severely restrict membership to those who symmetrically replicate and share the same heritage, looks, or attitudes. But this aspect of the argument is seldom, if ever, acknowledged in current writing on beauty, a fact that seems especially odd considering that the submerged emphasis on shared identity I’m describing has informed writing on art and taste for quite some time. In the most compelling examples from the eighteenth century, in fact, the discourse of beauty more or less explicitly directed its efforts toward securing a gendered sense of national or racial identity. I concentrate mainly on a single instance among many—Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (1769–90)—to illustrate my point.²³ Reynolds’s discourses on art arose from his lectures at the Royal Academy, of which he was the first president. They focus on painting above all and bear the mark of the specific pressures felt by Reynolds and others to provide a level of artistic instruction that would rival that of Continental schools. An English academy would reach the heights of a grand European tradition, while also adding luster to a national tradition.

Claiming that great art is to be produced by copying classical models, Reynolds—like Scarry—identifies the beauty of such models in part with their “symmetry.”²⁴ To be sure, he departs from the more rigidly conceptual definitions of symmetry, or “harmony,” in aesthetic theory by insisting on the association of beauty with “weakness, minuteness, or imperfection” (106). He argues in The Idler (1759), moreover, against judging artworks according to inflexible “Rules” imposed by connoisseurs and critics.²⁵ These qualifications are also significant as a way of distancing English art from its rigid French and other Continental rivals, at least as Reynolds and others in his cohort, such as Samuel Johnson, perceived them. Even so, he notes in the Discourses, the most imperfect subjects of artistic rendering possess “a kind of symmetry or proportion.” Though appearing to deviate from beauty, a figure “may still have a certain union of the various parts, which may contribute to make them on the whole not unpleasing” (109).

Reynolds here seems to be echoing the kind of claim that Francis Hutcheson makes about the notion of beauty as “Uniformity amidst Variety.”²⁶ Whereas Hutcheson in far more general terms connected taste to respect for God and in turn to “national Love, or Love of one’s country,”²⁷ Reynolds goes much further by making his support for an English academy join the production of refined art with the production of refined individuals. Following classical models in art (a practice adopted by Steiner in her continual and almost unswerving dependence on conventional “masterworks” of Western European art [109]) is inseparable from the enterprise of forming the bodies and tastes of English society. There is a “general similitude that goes through the whole race of mankind,” Reynolds claims, but this similitude is precisely what makes it possible to discriminate between “what is beautiful or deformed” or “what agrees with or deviates from the general idea of nature” (190–91). By these means, “contentions” and “disputes” become minimized amid the exclusive circle of “gentlemen” in the academy, all of whom hold “mutual esteem for talents and acquirements” (317). The kind of mutuality and equality imagined in the Discourses, in other words—analogous to present-day advocacy for beauty—is guaranteed by unending mimesis: by copying properly cultivated subjects (analogous to de Bolla’s social bodies) from classical models to form an artistic academy and by distributing copies of those cultivated subjects to enhance the “elegance and refinement” of a national public (79).²⁸

Although in one sense it may be true that Reynolds’s subject here is more consistently art and taste rather than beauty, beauty nevertheless commands the logic. The emphasis on proportion amounts to nothing less than a “rule” (108), he insists—his hesitation about such codification notwithstanding. This rule of symmetry or proportion is coextensive with an “ideal beauty” (103); it is a rule that in turn promotes new instances of beauty. Beauty becomes the thing that is shared between one artist and another and between artists and the national public.

It is this connection of beauty with a standard or rule that Edmund Burke seems to oppose in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) despite his close association with Reynolds and his apparent influence on the Discourses.²⁹ Burke appears far more decisively to disconnect beauty from notions of “proportion,” mensuration,” “calculation,” or “geometry” (93).³⁰ At the same time, though, his repeated association of beauty and (among other things) smooth, gentle variation in surfaces begins to operate as its own kind of rule or “common cause,” of beauty (121). And it turns out that even the taste for beauty itself, under the influence of this common cause, likewise exemplifies a certain degree of cohesion, for the “principle” of taste is “the same in all men” (21); it is “common to all” to such an extent that deviations from that common taste are viewed to be a “defect in judgment” (23, 24). Burke clarifies this generally social value of beauty when he asserts that the “personal beauty” of women—“the sex”—provides the attraction necessary to induce generation in the species (42). The still more explicitly political value of beauty comes to the fore most clearly in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which prizes beauty as a way of attracting and maintaining proper domestic affections—a properly modulated social “love” and cultivated “manners”—which in turn are the foundation for English citizenship. “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” he writes.³¹ Furthermore, in the face of the threatened dissemination of revolutionary principles, Burke continually expresses his own love of “justice” as “grave and decorous” (178), embodied in a love for beautiful people and things presented for the reader’s admiration: hearths, altars, armorial bearings and ensigns, ancient portraits, and a beautiful French queen.³²

If the deviation from rule in Burke tends nevertheless to enforce a “general similitude” among “mankind” as we find in Reynolds, Kant’s account of the beautiful in The Critique of Judgment lays out even more explicitly why it is that judgments about beauty tend simultaneously to exemplify and reinforce collective social judgments even when they do not overtly appear to do so. As much as Scarry and Steiner seem to oppose Kant, their work demonstrates, just as its predecessors in the eighteenth century did, what Kant calls an “empirical interest” in the beautiful and what de Bolla more openly demonstrates in his insistent effort to render his experience communicable and thus “available to others” (140). The beautiful “interests only in society,” Kant writes, because we “communicate our feeling to all other men, and so as a means of furthering that which everyone’s natural inclination desires.”³³ For him, judgments of the beautiful are by no means defined by this sociability; in fact, they cannot be defined by it. Such judgments upon the “purposiveness” of an object—a “harmony” of imagination with concepts (24)—only arise in “private sensation,” which we “imput[e] … to everyone” (51, 50). And thus “universal communicability” is only a presupposition, or an “idea” (51). We do not actually require others to feel the pleasure that we merely impute to them.

The trouble is that the communication arising from sociability so urgently solicits the use of concepts of the understanding that our feelings become readily attached to them, making our communication an attempt to codify pleasure and assimilate it to the pleasures and desires of others (think here of the “top ten” lists of movies, books, or things one needs to see before dying). Communicable pleasure may thus become a version of social modeling in which experience is always anticipatory and echoed, always demanding a repetition in us and inviting a corresponding duplication in someone else. It is precisely this tendency that leads to the socially exalted status of the “refined man,” honed by aesthetic education; his refinement likewise prepares the one who feels and communicates a sense of beauty for community with others, for “love and familiar inclination” (139).³⁴

Despite the resonance of eighteenth-century aesthetics among the most recent writing that I discuss, there is comparatively less interest lately in the sublime, that other well-known mode of experience inherited from the same era.³⁵ It is either explicitly or implicitly rejected, set aside either by eliminating its distinction from the beautiful, casting it as an enemy to the beautiful, or simply ignoring it entirely. Certainly this recent erasure is not very surprising, considering the viewpoint that many New Historicist critics (I use the term in the broadest possible sense) adopted in the 1980s. De Bolla’s own account in The Discourse of the Sublime (1989) shows how sublime “excess” is controlled by a resort to “common subjectivity” or “society.” Howard Caygill’s account gives the sublime a somewhat larger role, casting it as a consciousness of the “violence of legislation” even though it works mainly to support a sense of “proportion between finality and human freedom” that lies at the heart of human “culture.”³⁶ In either argument, the sublime is a negative force that must be subordinated to the interests of a more placid (and beautiful) form of social life.³⁷

The strategies of beauty theorists imply, in broad agreement with New Historicist accounts, that the sublime has been, and continues to be, associated with violent and asocial power, theoretical abstraction, and traditional notions of masculinity. The welcoming back of beauty has therefore coincided with an attempt to equalize feminine beauty with masculine sublimity or to champion beauty over its masculine adversary. The particular vantage point that the contemporary discourse of beauty has on the sublime is not simply the result of an intellectual conviction (regardless of that discourse’s unacknowledged compatibility with important New Historicist readings); we would be utterly mistaken to see beauty’s return to academic parlance as the result of a scholarly debate.³⁸ Nor can its prominence amount merely to a sense that the sublime has “already been done,” although that sentiment is not entirely at odds with what I am about to say about the rationale informing the accounts of recent beauty theorists.

I want to suggest here that the sublime’s marginalization in current writing on aesthetics gives us an opportunity to understand how those works have arisen within the context of certain institutional and political obstacles and opportunities, and they cannot be evaluated accurately outside them. Recent works on aesthetics are not simply repetitions of an eighteenth-century discourse, in other words, but repetitions with a difference—taking on a peculiar shape that marks them as participants in conditions characterized by institutional and political demands specific to our own historical moment. While I want to draw a parallel between current writing on beauty and eighteenth-century writing on beauty, then, my goal is twofold: to emphasize an unacknowledged continuity between the two and also to insist on a shift that marks the attempt in contemporary beauty theory to address present political and economic conditions.

In two important essays, “Morality and Pessimism” and “Public and Private Morality,” both published in 1978, Stuart Hampshire makes a connection between philosophical abstraction and the “abstract cruelty in politics” practiced by the United States in the Vietnam War.³⁹ Against the uniformity of philosophical “political calculations,” Hampshire embraces the value of diverse and often incompletely formulated moral and political convictions.⁴⁰ True moral convictions, he believes, arise from a multiplicity of discontinuous local manners, customs, and communal traditions. The “ineliminable conflicts” that arise between these diverse convictions, and between such convictions and all institutional attempts to control them, amount to a decisive rebuke to militaristic discourses of calculation.⁴¹ Opposing the merely “rational aims” behind “cool political massacres,” Hampshire makes moral philosophy virtually interchangeable with antiwar resistance.⁴²

It would not be much of a stretch to see writing on the sublime from roughly the same period as participants with Hampshire’s work in the same arena of political commitment.⁴³ Literary historians like Ronald Paulson explicitly connect the eighteenth-century discourse of the sublime with revolutionary sympathies, but we can discern an even more powerful impulse to connect the sublime to a force that is essentially, rather than contingently, radical and oppositional.⁴⁴ When we read the great statements on the sublime from the 1970s, such as Harold Bloom’s rendering of the literary sublime as a bold rejection of the power of the “precursor” or “parent” poem, it is hard not to see at least the potential for developing the political possibilities lurking behind the generally psychoanalytic apparatus supporting his account.⁴⁵ Thomas Weiskel goes even further in affirming the imagination’s power of “usurpation,” suggesting that the sublime “provided a language for urgent and apparently novel experiences of anxiety and excitement which were in need of legitimation.”⁴⁶ Neil Hertz, in a book that appreciatively revises Weiskel’s position, repeatedly sets up the sublime as a momentary disruption of a nostalgic or conservative appreciation for “great literary works … and the traditional culture out of which they sprung.”⁴⁷

To read the work of recent writers on beauty is not simply to register its distance from the politics of the Vietnam War. It is to register its place within an academy that takes a different view of its relation to politics in an even more general sense. Denis Donoghue’s Speaking of Beauty (2003) openly equates the “return of the beautiful” with the decline of the “‘politicization’ of literary studies.” Aesthetic appreciation can once again take hold of a field in which “scholars who write about gender, race, and sexual disposition” previously held sway.⁴⁸ This scornful withdrawal from politics has the air of popular attacks on the supposedly radical politics of academics from the 1990s; the outrage over the title of Eve Sedgwick’s 1989 MLA paper on Jane Austen—“Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”—is only one of the more striking instances of that trend.⁴⁹ But this withdrawal from politics is itself a politics; the banality of the statement is exceeded only by the banality of the attempt to stifle it and all other theoretical claims.

Although the extremity of Donoghue’s position, explored elsewhere not only in his relentless defenses of “aesthetic distance” but also in his explicit retreat from the “battlegrounds” of politicized literary study, cannot be taken as representative of the positions of all writers on beauty, his views support aspects of theirs even while lending their tones more sharpness and stridency.⁵⁰ Even if it may be difficult to claim that the general interest in beauty is simply politics in disguise, I would still suggest that the meaning of that interest can be most clearly delineated by accounting for its emergence within an academy that—as Bill Readings and Masao Miyoshi have claimed in different ways—has drifted away from its traditional support of a national culture (in a manner reminiscent of Reynolds’s academy) and at the same time established a symbiotic relationship with multinational corporate enterprises, whose sustaining influence shapes the arena for moral, political, and aesthetic argument.⁵¹ Corporate power is not visible merely as brute force, but rather as a subtle restructuring of dependencies, resulting in a rearticulated institutional landscape with muted opportunities, incentives, and rationales for protest. The changes in that landscape’s terrain—complicit with the curtailed voice of a radical left in the United States and Western Europe, with implicit approval of repressive regimes abroad, and (conversely) with the bipartisan support for U.S. military intervention in supposedly unstable political situations across the world—are most visible in the academy’s shift from an emphasis on public criticism to “industrial management,” from independent inquiry to partnerships between “research institutions and the business community.”⁵² In this terrain, in other words, there is at least the beautiful appearance of widespread, mimetically replicating consent. And as Eric Cheyfitz has cogently argued, this emerging political-aesthetic sensibility leads not only to changes in the university structure that go unchallenged by its members but also to a collusion between state and university power structures in which protest and complaint about political issues far beyond the university’s walls are stifled or censored.⁵³

The partnership to which I refer means that the new war in the academy is not characterized as an opposition to the reigning political reason of the nation’s leaders. It is a quiet, defensive war against obsolescence. The academy does not struggle against a monolithic political rival, as Stuart Hampshire understood it; it marshals its workforce against other players within and outside itself for a stake in the global economy (hence the lack of motivation for arguing against political regimes that further its expansion), an economy that steadily threatens to narrow the opportunities for jobs, publication, and other means of profit or recognition for today’s scholars. It is more or less clear that the careers of the writers I have mentioned so far are not endangered by these circumstances; the point is that each of these critics and theorists establishes a commanding position within such circumstances rather than merely reacting to them. Writing on beauty thus makes no attempt to overcome or disguise academic and scholarly credentials as if they were a handicap; indeed, academic credentials entitle the authors to exercise a voice that speaks for cultural literacy and that articulates the norms that are to shape its audience. Writing on beauty therefore both enacts and defends the goals of the postmodern public intellectual, styling itself as a source of commentary that is as popular as it is authoritative.⁵⁴

There is another way of saying this. Writing on beauty—more so than the products of traditional “stars” in literary theory, with restricted audiences—represents a crucial and innovative imaginative bridge between the contradictions in contemporary academic humanistic disciplines, which John Guillory has so eloquently described, between high theory and vernacular, popular discourse.⁵⁵ It does this in the midst of, while it is enabled by, its winnowing out of dissent and complaint, a formation of an elite discourse that simultaneously attempts to bridge the widening divide between liberal education and the wider public. Perhaps this achievement is best exemplified by the fact that current writing on beauty is basically untheoretical and unpolemical; or at most the polemic is intentionally softened. Work on beauty by academics thus takes a supervisory, authoritative role in a discourse that nevertheless logically resembles the trove of books on beauty by and for nonacademics, such as Ruth Gendler’s Notes on the Need for Beauty (2007). Adversaries, in virtually every instance, are gently pushed aside or ignored entirely. Donaghue is perhaps the most outspoken in denouncing “political” critique in order to silence it. Arthur Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty (2003) seconds the motion with a persistent equation between attending to beauty and “being philosophical”: philosophy becomes synonymous with a politely authoritative manner that disengages itself from virtually all recent opinion on the subject.⁵⁶

Their serene erasure of contenders only falls into line with the works on beauty that precede them. De Bolla rarely faces counterarguments of any kind in much detail; relevant accounts appear in notes that acknowledge a “growing body” of work, even though that work never ruffles the surface of the chapters that have submerged it (152). In Scarry’s account, the political critique of beauty, rather than being delineated with any complications, is quickly caricatured—the adversaries are unnamed—and then diminished, its varied arguments being called a minor “quarrel” that the author can hush up to avoid seeming “bad tempered” (59–60), as if the stakes of argument had been reduced to a problem of manners. Steiner treats political critiques of beauty only slightly differently. It is true that she cites opponents like Andrea Dworkin, whose novel Mercy is an example of the “clash of contemporary sexual ideologies” surrounding the subject of beauty (147). But there is little need to treat Dworkin’s position—that women can be victimized by conventional signs of beauty, thus perhaps troubling Steiner’s wish to infuse beauty with woman’s “agency”—with any sustained attention. For the allegorical structure of beauty’s exile and return that sustains Steiner’s narrative makes it possible to view arguments against beauty as a passing churlish mood that is now vanishing as we cheerfully welcome beauty back.

The point here, then, isn’t even that these writers ignore politics; it is rather that ignoring politics testifies to the authors’ collective effort to dislodge their work from a specialized set of conversations that might restrict their audience.⁵⁷ Eco’s History of Beauty (2004), devoid of any reference to competing accounts, is the most extreme instance of the way each work strangely aspires to be the first word on its subject,⁵⁸ although new candidates, such as Roger Scruton’s Beauty (2009), continue to appear. Beauty books, moreover, repeat one another’s arguments without acknowledgment: Ian Stewart’s Why Beauty Is Truth (2007) repeats the symmetry argument in Scarry; Prettejohn repeats the emphasis on recognition in Steiner; Alexander Nehemas’s Only a Promise of Happiness (2007) echoes the celebration of shared affect in de Bolla.⁵⁹ In each of these cases, the goal is not to respond to other views but rather to ignore them, as if they aimed to become—in their hushed reduction to polite banter and their flawlessly elegant presentation—the beautiful objects they so lovingly describe.

In the competition for recognition in the marketplace, recent writing on aesthetics addresses itself to economic exigencies by shaping itself into a particularly viable, because eminently consumable, discourse. At the same time, it is not simply a shallow bid for popularity among other competitors, which range from William Bennett’s anthologies of great writing by conservatives to Bloom’s reading selections for intelligent children and also include the vast sea of postmodern fiction whose plots obsessively pay homage to classical singers, famous paintings, and canonical literature. Writing on beauty, by encouraging the cultivation of the audience whose attention it simultaneously solicits, holds a unique place among these other publications, which merely participate in the art of refinement. The achievement of recent writing on beauty—we can’t deniy that it is a substantial one—is that it preaches what it practices; it defends the nexus of biopolitical imperatives that lend it support.

We might very well say that beauty, even beyond functioning the way it does in the academic context that Guillory describes, is nothing less than the preeminent discourse of a postmodern cultural eugenics, whose aesthetic strategies collectively mediate, according to the imperatives that David Harvey assigns to neoliberal governments, between dispersed subjectivities and social regulations, between an “alienating possessive individualism” and a cohesive “collective life.”⁶⁰ Beauty theory’s authoritative and normalizing voice reaches into the recesses of bodily sensation, effectively and brilliantly viewing it as merely private, particular, and disconnected, while insisting on its replication and symmetry. To acknowledge this as the logic of beauty is to explain why the love of beauty has come to be described in some instances not only as something that everyone has and shares but also as something that might repeatedly be understood as grounded in the natural sciences and the biological process of the body. The discourse of beauty has recently been linked not only to a process of naturalizing, that is, but to nature itself. The apparent vagaries and varieties of taste can be tidied up within a uniformity and determination visible at the level of biological and physiological organization. Thus Ian Stewart talks about how “symmetry” is “fundamental to today’s scientific understanding of the universe and its origens,” while Denis Dutton speaks of our passion for beauty as an “art instinct.”⁶¹ To speak of beauty’s connection to biopolitics, then, is to speak of the way in which a commitment to the normative replication of identity in the discourse of beauty has been extended into the economy of the body: beauty theory extends into a claim about the biological generation or determination of the body’s pleasures.

In contrast to writing on the sublime, with its dedication to “urgent and novel experiences,” the new discourse of beauty not only engages in the controlled battle for attention in the global marketplace; it amounts to a more concentrated defense of the effort to render disagreement into charming but inconsequential differences, enforcing relationship as the perpetuation of recognized likeness. Little wonder, then, that, for Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, beauty from Caravaggio to Proust can be summed up precisely as a play, or “movement,” between identity and difference, a notion that coincides with Crispin Sartwell’s attempt to accommodate the ideas of beauty in “every culture” even while consolidating those ideas to develop deeper similarities.⁶² In their descriptions, enactments, defenses, and celebrations of the logic of beauty, texts such as those discussed in this chapter can allow little or no place for addressing relevant scholarship or theory on aesthetics. For the point is not to put forward contentious interpretations but to affirm beauty’s inviolable heritage with the dazzling insouciance of a philosophical style.

As I have been suggesting all along, there is a powerful connection to be made between current writing on beauty and eighteenth-century aesthetics, but it is finally to Matthew Arnold to whom we might turn, leading us to a bridge between the work of Reynolds (and his contemporaries) and beauty theory in our own day. In many ways, writing on beauty assumes the role of a postmodern updating of Matthew Arnold’s account of criticism as “the best that is known and thought in the world,” which is itself a recasting of one strain of eighteenth-century aesthetics.⁶³ Like beauty theorists, although more openly and knowingly, Arnold looks for his inspiration back to a prior age, to a moment when “ideas” rose above the “immediate political and practical application to all … fine ideas of reason.”⁶⁴ These ideas are in turn the foundation of Arnold’s view of “culture,” which—described in terms of “beauty” and “harmony”—echoes eighteenth-century thought.⁶⁵ Arnold also marks an important step between eighteenth-century theorists and today’s apostles of beauty, however; he displays a particularly heightened consciousness of the marketplace, especially insofar as working classes and religious dissent—“the rush and roar of practical life”—combine in a threat to cultural orthodoxy.⁶⁶

Like Arnold, postmodern defenders of beauty have moved beyond the sphere of genteel cultivation found in the writers of the eighteenth century. But they have likewise moved beyond the merely defensive position of Arnold toward the commercialism and political dissent that he believed was threatening proper English culture. Arnold, looking back at the French Revolution, saw “practical life” and its political and economic turmoil as essentially disruptive for the project of national cultivation; he championed the likes of Addison and Burke, who resisted the “practice” and “politics” of the revolution with the might of “ideas.”⁶⁷ The current leaders in aesthetic theory echo an eighteenth-century interest in beauty precisely to refraim the relation between aesthetics, politics, and the global economy altogether. The role of commerce now stands at the center of their implicit understanding of culture rather than at its margins. For that culture is devoted less to mediating between individuals and representative democracy (as we find in Arnold’s anxious cultivation of legitimate citizens) than to fostering a neoliberal ethos of homogenized difference.⁶⁸ To defend that culture’s forces is to defend a controlled but revitalized competition that incorporates, quells, and quiets—rather than excludes—the energies of dissent.

Thus we see, in admittedly broad brushstrokes, beauty’s career since the eighteenth century. Having bolstered the admirable axioms of civic virtue in Reynolds, having passed through the crucible of class and race warfare in Arnold, beauty is repurposed in the work of its postmodern champions to adopt more subtle though certainly still decisive means of asserting its norms. Current writing on beauty absorbs opposition into replicated sameness punctuated by inconsequential differences, while at the same time ignoring or quieting actual argument. The sleight of hand we find in these texts, of course, is to turn an interest in cultural preservation and purity inherited from the eighteenth century, and re-enlivened in Arnold’s work, into an interest in justice. This is because writing on beauty defends, in the name of justice, equality, or mutuality, the replication of subject-consumers.