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
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Tags: Philosophy Planning
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[Skip to the latest comment]spyridon
"Is there no escape?" – Remember Christine's word, that dealing with the Kantian sublime is a rather, erm, sublime affair. It's more than the imagination can apprehend…
21 Apr 2005, 11:22
Are you saying that I should not follow the white rabbit?
21 Apr 2005, 13:44
spyridon
What you should and should not do is an ethical question. And the one who'll judge, that is, select 'this' rather than 'that' (quid juris?) is the demon that will steal herself into your loneliest loneliness.
21 Apr 2005, 23:09
From snacking to avoid writing both this Judgement essay and another on the Post-Kantians, Spyridon - I fear I shall become the heaviest weight.
22 Apr 2005, 03:28
spyridon
Oh how enjoyable when people let themselves be bitten by my language which is not mine! My offer is still open, Adrienne, I have so many things to learn myself that it would be a delight to share the heaviest weight with you.
22 Apr 2005, 11:53
spyridon
ew, and what an idiot i truly am! you meant the heaviest weight literally…
robert, did you follow the rabbit after all, or are you still among us finite beings?
22 Apr 2005, 18:18
I was punning. Nietzsche would love that kind of humour.
22 Apr 2005, 18:25
spyridon
I know, I know [embarrassment, blushes]... And if you hear a cheerful laughter emanating from the Claycroft blocks, 'twould be a Greek reading The Case of Wagner.
22 Apr 2005, 21:20
I got diverted down a different burrow – information theory and complex systems that is. But it leads straight back to Kant, via aesthetic DMZs.
26 Apr 2005, 17:01
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