Wounded attachments and wounded aesthetics: Wendy Brown, Philip Roth, and a modest theory concerning the interaction of art and politics

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I develop a healthy way for aesthetics to interact with political society. In States of Injury, Wendy Brown argues that left-wing identity politics equates to Nietzschean ressentiment, which uses relative weakness to assume moral or ethical supremacy. Brown uses the expression “wounded attachments” to describe politics that allows suffering to establish an advantaged perspective and group identity. I argue that a comparable phenomenon occurs in aesthetics. Some aesthetics are linked to a notion of a sub-group or political message, and proponents of that message forgive art for mediocrity. Borrowing Brown’s nomenclature, I call this “wounded aesthetics.” I establish the roots of wounded aesthetics in Adorno and its expression in such popular forms as Oprah Winfrey’s book club. I contrast this with Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, asserting that when modern culture examines only art’s explicit message – its content – then art’s value qua art and its relation to politics is problematic. Using Roth, Derrida, and Heidegger, I offer a modest argument in favor of healthy aesthetics.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics
• Wendy Brown
• wounded attachments
• Jacques Derrida
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Theodor Adorno

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge the support offered for this work by the staff at St Johns River State College and the University of Florida Political Science Department, as well as for support and/or thoughts from Shayna Rich, Leslie Thiele, Margaret Kohn, Daniel O'Neill, Jennifer Forshee, Dustin Fridkin, Davide Panagia, Lance Gravlee, and Cameron Buress.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It is important, yet difficult, to define “politics” or “political.” I embrace Hannah Arendt’s notion of the political as a communal creation of meaning and activity. Arendt states:

[T]he political realm rises directly out of acting together, the ‘sharing of words and deed.’ … The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. (1958, 196)

This is in slight contrast to the notion of politics endorsed by Davide Panagia and Jacques Ranciere, which traces the political to a sense of viewing or sense experience. (Politics is seen as the “distribution of the sensible.”) That is too close to defining politics as aesthetics. Arendt’s definition of politics does not exclude the Panagia/Ranciere concept of the political.

2 Affirmative action is used simply as a metaphor and not a comment on the policy of affirmative action. This writer actually supports economic and educational affirmative action in the public goods.

3 This term is from her book States of Injury (Brown).

4 Similar to “political” or “politics,” it is difficult to define “form” and “content” with regard to art. Additionally, “form” has two interlocking, but distinct, meanings. For the artist, form is the material from which art is made: clay, words, paint, etc. To the art receiver, “form” is linked to the visceral experience that the art produces. Both definitions hinge on the creation and experience of art before representation or symbolic meaning is assigned to the art. Of course, form cannot be completely isolated from content. Form and content are partially symbiotic. (Great art often perfectly mixes form and content.) My definition of “form” is influenced by John Dewey. He writes that we “see a painting through the eyes, and hear music through the ears” (123). Art is primarily a visceral and sensuous experience. Dewey continues: “Form may then be described as the operation that carries the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment” (137). Though there is no “bright-line” divider separates “form” from “content,” for my discussion the realm of non-signified experience will generally be considered in the realm of “form,” whereas the attribution of an explicit signified meaning will be considered “content.”

5 My thoughts on Adorno are influenced by J. M. Bernstein (1992).

6 As I will explain, Roth goes beyond the traditional narrative technique of the unreliable narrator.

7 Current statistics about the concentration of wealth in the West lends empirical credence to this data (Piketty 2014, IX–X).

8 This alienation goes beyond that described by Marx. The Swede is not only alienated by his actions, but also from the comforting parts of his own ideology. Louis Althusser would be proud, or baffled.

9 Some people on the Left are trying to reclaim Nietzschean ressentiment like the gay community reclaimed “queer“ (Dolgert 2016). At the very least, they are proud of the solidarity.