All entries for Thursday 21 April 2005

April 21, 2005

A limited aesthetics: the treatment of space in the Critique of Judgement

I have just decided to try going down a different route: returning to the Critique of Judgement.

Kant allows for an unusually poor range of aesthetic experiences, even by eighteenth century standards. If it isn't containable within a frame, its doesn't count. And by implication, creative activity is limited.

My conjecture is that this is limited by his simplistic understanding of the nature of phenomenal space – an intentional, directed space. In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, striated space. Hence the difficulties that he gets into over purposiveness and autonomy.

A more sophisticated understanding of space would, as in the Logic of Sensation, open up the possibility of a much greater range of aesthetic experiences. And furthermore, it would allow for the recognition of the role of aesthetic experience in all kinds of non-artistic activities, from the everyday to the scientific – in all kinds of spatial operation, all forms of technologies of space. In fact, that all technologies are spatial and hence aesthetic (my real conjecture).

So the task will be to show how notions of smooth space, intensive space and haptic space, the model of the 'creative synthesis of the imagination' that I have built from reading Logic of Sensation and A Thousand Plateaus, can be applied to the Critique of Judgement to disperse some of its problems – for example, the opposition of the beautiful and the sublime. And then how this may be applied to the Critique of Pure Reason.

So, now I go back to reading that again. Is there no escape? This time, maybe.


: 21 Apr 2005 08:25 |  Tags:  |  Comments (9) |  Report a problem