Aesthetics and Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism is a collection of influential French philosophers and theorists who emerged in the wake of structuralism, a movement that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries as a leading methodological approach in human sciences. Structuralism applied some basic tenets of Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics to phenomena other than language, such as the unconscious, myth and ritual, and history. Roland Barthes applied structuralist principles to literary criticism and developed Saussure's suggestion of a'semiology', a study of signs in general, applying this approach to various forms of art and culture.

Poststructuralists argue that meaning is not reducible to static structures and cannot be uncovered using a formal method. They insist upon the necessity of some element of indeterminacy (which accounts for the genesis of the structure) that operates within the structure to generate meaning, and that constitutes an instability which threatens the coherence of the structure and may disrupt it and cause it to change. Poststructuralists have had recourse to highly unorthodox, experimental modes of thinking and writing in theorising and demonstrating those aspects of meaning or effect they believe structuralism misses. Art and aesthetics have been significant topics for all poststructuralists because, as the philosophical tradition attests, aesthetic meaning or effect seems to be a paradigm case of a kind of meaning which is not'scientific'.

Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze are two poststructuralists who have had an enormous influence on literary criticism and some influence as well in the wider arts and aesthetic theory. Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction has had an enormous influence on literary criticism and some influence as well in the wider arts and aesthetic theory. His quasi-transcendental theory of meaning has implications for how meaning is understood to operate in philosophy, literature, and the arts. Derrida's principle of meaning, arche-writing, claims to capture something of these conditions for anything whatsoever being meaningful, rather than writing as such.

Derrida's arguments are extremely complex but can be treated summarily by noting how they draw on the traditions of phenomenology and structural linguistics. In the Husserlean phenomenological tradition, which takes consciousness as the transcendental condition of meaning, Derrida reads Husserl to show that conscious experience requires a synthesis of different temporal moments, such that any 'presence' of something to consciousness is already subject to the passing of time, or temporal difference. From the structural linguistics of de Saussure, Derrida draws the idea that every linguistic meaning only functions because of the possibility of its reiteration, or what Derrida calls its 'iterability'. Every linguistic usage draws from an already-existing store of linguistic meaning, and in that sense is already a reiteration.

Derrida, a philosopher and literary critic, is often seen as collapsing the distinction between philosophy and literature. However, he is drawn to the latter and uses it to complicate the former due to the differences he sees between them. Philosophy traditionally opposes the'merely' literary, claiming truth to be its own exclusive competence and categorizing literature as belonging to the fictional or untrue. Philosophical texts are typically structured according to the metaphysics of presence, deployed in structures of binary oppositions that set up hierarchies of meaning.

Derrida sees all meaning and all texts as to some degree structured by the metaphysics of presence, but he sees the virtue of literature as asserting and developing the ambiguities, contradictions, aporias, and playfulness of meaning that philosophical texts and modes of writing strive to suppress. Deconstruction, for Derrida, is a strategy of reading and writing which aims to identify and subvert the binary oppositions structuring a text, showing how the privileged term is in fact parasitic on the underprivileged one, and opening up the space for a play of meaning beyond simple oppositions by inventing concepts (such as the trace, différance, the hymen) which are 'undecidable' from the point of view of such oppositions.

When Derrida turns his attention to the visual arts, he develops concepts such as the trait, the parergon, and the subjectile which essentially follow the same differential logic as arche-writing. He suspects any supposition of a pure presence of meaning in an image and works in various ways to complicate this, showing that images depend on an ambiguous play between concepts and categories such as the inside and outside of the frame, the visible and the invisible, word and image, single artwork and entire oeuvre, and so on. These playful movements are processes of spatial differing and temporal deferring, working against the metaphysics of presence and underlining a differential form of meaning in the visual which is similar to that which he sees operating in the written text.

Lyotard's Discourse, Figure (1971) stages a significant encounter between phenomenology, structuralism, and psychoanalysis, with the aim of doing justice to the aesthetic event, particularly the visual. He insists that the visual has its own kind of meaning, which differs from and cannot be reduced to linguistic meaning. He compares the kind of meaning proper to perception, as developed in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, with the kind of meaning operative in language according to structuralism.

Lyotard objects to Lacan’s structuralist reading of the unconscious, believing that the latter’s interpretation of art as lodged in the register of the imaginary, acting as a lure for desire, is an affront to the grandeur of art. He develops an alternative view of the unconscious, emphasizing plastic transformations rather than linguistic operations of its contents. He also objects to much of Freud’s explicit aesthetics, arguing that the meaning of an artwork is not to be found in the pathology of the artist.

In his later work, Lyotard reconfigures the traditional aesthetic category of the sublime to account for and defend avant-garde art and the significance of the aesthetic in the contemporary world. He follows Adorno in postulating a crisis of traditional aesthetics, both in relation to the conditions of (post)industrial capitalism and developments in the arts, and tries to update aesthetics in response. For Lyotard, there is a crisis of meaning on the level of perception in the contemporary world, as scientific and technological developments, operating in tandem with capitalism, have mutated the perceptual bearings by which we coordinate ourselves in the world. Sciences and technologies have both extended our sensory capacities (seeing and hearing at a distance, through television and telephones, for example) and revealed a reality beyond our body's capacities for sensory awareness (atoms, microbes, nebulae, etc.). These changes have meant that the basic forms of sensory experience—time and space—have been thrown into uncertainty.

Lyotard sees avant-garde art of the twentieth-century as having pursued an analogous exploration of this crisis of perception. Traditionally, aesthetics has been concerned with the beautiful, understood in the arts as an ideal fit between the form and matter of a work. Lyotard sees avant-garde art, especially minimalism and abstraction, as moving away from a concern with 'good form' and towards an exploration of matter. He characterises the sublime stake of art as 'presenting the unpresentable', because for him the aesthetic event is something which cannot be reduced to a 'presentation', understood in the Kantian sense as a 'good form' given to a sensation. Rather, art-events evoke thoughts and feelings in relation to works which surprise us and leave us feeling moved but lost for words. In his later works, the sublime is the aesthetic which Lyotard thinks best names this feeling.

Gilles Deleuze, both in his writings with Félix Guattari and on his own, made important and influential contributions to the philosophy of film, painting, literature, and music. He sees the level of perception with which phenomenologists are preoccupied as insufficiently deep to provide a full account of reality. Deleuze and Guattari delve deeper to give an account of art and aesthetic experience grounded in a metaphysical description of reality, where'sensation' becomes the key aesthetic issue. They associate Merleau-Ponty's flesh with the lived experience which reveals sensation, but insist on two further, deeper, and necessary conditions for sensation: the 'house' and 'cosmic forces'.

Deleuze and Guattari want to connect the activity of art with things usually considered extraneous to art and the universe as a whole. They claim that animals can be artists through their exploitation of the expressive qualities of materials in marking territory and attracting mates. However, they also insist that art must be considered a form of thinking which thinks with sensations, just as philosophy thinks with concepts and science thinks with functions. This insistence gives art a legitimacy equal to that of philosophy and science, indicating the importance accorded to the aesthetic characteristic of continental philosophy.