My half of half a dialogue

Reaction to Daniel Albright, Exegete. 

I am more and more convinced of the metaphoricity, the metaphoria of life with art engagement. Particularly if one removes the baggage of Art and accepts – as I am beginning to – that all things, all Things, are in some way noumenal and mutually withdrawn. The only way we have to engage in anything, in other words, is to place ourselves within them; to pseudomorph into the absent tenor of the art (be that the absent Reality of Heidegger’s Van Gogh’s shoes, or Albright’s Duchamp’s urinal, for example) to enable us to connect with it. In a sense, I mean to expand on Albright’s point in saying that there must be a reaching beyond oneself in the aesthetic experience. The ontology of objects – so long denied – must be brought forward. As such, as I think I mentioned long back, the development of a key idea: aesthetics is the ethics of the non-human. It is a means through which we enable our anthropocentrism to be removed from our own view. The ethical is simply anthropomorphised aesthetics, in other words. This is an idea I still do not know how to fully articulate. Perhaps ethics is applied aesthetics, the threshold of which is currently (and should not be) “humanness”.

I think it relies upon something I call Optimistic Criticism: a move toward engaging with art/Art with a flat ontology. I am no smarter/greater/more insightful/more noumenal (!) than that with which I am engaging. An equality of access: the art must interpret me as I interpret it or else comes but pontificating or intellectualising, which helps us little. OC is an openness to one’s own limitations of perspective and insight. As a critic with the most basic medical form (white, straight, male), OC is not merely a theoretical curiosity, but a vital step in acting as an ally.

OC may be understood as a form of intersemiotic translation and is rooted in metaphor, a dynamic process, understanding one experiential domain in terms of another. That is, expression co-occurring within semiotic modes.[1]

I love Albright’s Nietzsche connection about the world as aesthetic experience. For me the same point is made in Nietzsche’s poetry (read: books) when he says that the void stares back – we must stop rejecting that returned stare! The aesthetic experience is the staring back, the acceptance of something beyond us have the ethical/aesthetic possibility. What kind of object is the subject attempting to grasp reality objectively? Who/what gets that authority, when the void stares back? The objects we engage with have their own noumena. The weirdest thing about art – which is saying something – is that humanity has for so long decreed that we are the ones with capacity for it, or for understanding it.