The Ideology of the Aesthetic by Terry Eagleton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mea Maxima Culpa

I have often read Eagleton at the precise moment I needed him most, that is just when I thought I had figured out some important aspect of the way the world works. At that point he has seemed to pop up in order to show me how foolish I have been. And so with The Ideology of the Aesthetic he has done it once again. I am overwhelmed with both gratitude and embarrassment.

Eagleton makes a compelling argument that aesthetics arose as an idea and a discipline in response to the increasingly grating monarchical absolutism of the 18th century. It rapidly became an important intellectual weapon in the army of the emerging bourgeoisie, a sort of personal code for class identity. And eventually it found its way into the liberal economic philosophers of the 19th century, very specifically in its concept of individual ‘utility’, which was both entirely personal and morally un-challengeable.

As Eagleton summarises the situation, the aesthetic is “... at the heart of the middle class’s struggle for political hegemony.” Thus the aesthetic became an ideological category and used as such in the class warfare which continues today under other names - the permanent capitalist underclass for one, otherwise known as poor white Trump voters.* One need not be a Marxist literary critic to appreciate the potentially contradictory character of aesthetics therefore. I had been foolishly unaware.

Having expressed my mea culpa, I then must admit that Eagleton has also confirmed an important part of my thinking about aesthetics, namely that it is a social and therefore political activity. As such, an awareness of its hidden cultural power and processes is essential in social and political life. I had recognised the aesthetic as a particular form of the political not as a variant of liberal economic utility. And I had outlined the process and logic by which aesthetic politics can take place. I therefore feel somewhat vindicated in my thought that the aesthetic is appropriate to problems of the 21st century.**

Today absolutism has again become one of the dominant issues across the globe. It has appeared as both tendency and fact in the United States, Russia, India, China, Burma, and the Philippines to name just a few locations. But it has also appeared in a much more thorough and insidious form, that of the absolutism of corporate life. To note that corporations are the dominant force in world economics and its commercial legal structure is a truism that needs no explanation. But this is the tip of the iceberg of corporate influence.

The overwhelming majority of us are employed by corporate entities, mostly large, and most international. We are subject to and dependent upon, therefore, its mores and judgments for everything from our daily bread to our self-identity. Corporate life therefore is one of a degree of absolutism that exceeds anything dreamed of by a medieval monarch. The rationalisation that we are not enslaved by any corporation and are free to ‘un-participate’ whenever we like is of course fatuous. There is no where else to go in the modern world.

This is the situation in which, I believe, aesthetics can play an important role - in disrupting corporate absolutism. The corporate hierarchy and culture is vulnerable at the point of business measurement. Measurement is the central organ of corporate life. What gets measured gets done. Typically measurement is left to ‘experts’ - accountants, consultants, financial theorists - who impose highly questionable and ultimately indefensible measurement on and within corporate organisations.

Measurements are articulate aesthetics. The more articulate they are, the more powerful effect they have. When they are imposed, they are dangerously powerful because they do not reflect either the interests of the corporation or its participants. The spectacular failure of companies like Enron can be directly traced to the use of measurements (or metrics) which were not aesthetically ‘verified’. Eagleton I think would agree since he does admit that aesthetics "... provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to the dominant ideological forms, and in this sense an eminently contradictory phenomenon."

Therefore I believe that the time for a new political aesthetics is ripe, one that realises the dangers of a middle-class ideological co-optation of aesthetics, particularly in that most middle class group of all, corporate managers. But that aesthetics also is the central, radical key to the reform of the world’s dominant institution. Thank you, Terry, for your corrective guidance.

I do, however, feel obligated to correct Terry in return. Marx anticipated the social consequences of the factory very well. However, he didn’t have a clue about the development of the modern corporation. Its emergence was a surprise to both Marxists and to liberal capitalists. Neither camp has done much to explain or criticise the institution of the corporation except to say that it doesn’t conform to their ideals. And that is another reason I believe Aesthetics is important for dealing with corporate life - it provides a foundation for an alternative theory of the corporate institution that transcends both socialism and capitalism.

* See for example: http://www.newsweek.com/trumps-electi...

**I must also offer a very belated apology to my now deceased teacher, Russell Ackoff, who expressed his appreciation of the aesthetic with the term ‘idealization’. I only now recognise how right he was... and how wrong because he never read Eagleton. See: https://www.amazon.com/Idealized-Desi...

See also: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

View all my reviews