The Problem of Value Pluralism in Aesthetic Politics

Studies of aesthetics and politics — whether construed as the aesthetics of politics, or the politics of aesthetics — depend entirely on notions of value, even though aesthetic theorists of the political rarely take questions of value head on. The history of political modernism is nothing if not an assemblage of competing discourses about the social effects of art, about the best — and in that way, most valuable — aesthetic strategy for overcoming a socially repressive pattern of representation. It is at the same time, if not always in the same instance, a way of imagining a path to freedom by aesthetic means; hence the modernist passion for the manifesto. Typically, a notion of value is implied in aesthetic theoretical intervention, if representational change — including the absence of representation itself — is what the theorist/artist intends. It would be better, says the theorist of aesthetic politics, if the work of art did this instead of that, as if correlation itself is calibrated to a singular value. What this implies, in many such cases, is some notion of readerly/spectatorial autonomy with respect to what is shown, written, sounded. Nested in most appeals to autonomy, at least the ones accompanied by a list of problematic aesthetic and representation practices, is the idea of value pluralism; or, the notion that what matters is that we all decide for ourself what matters. And what could possibly go wrong with value pluralism? Plenty, as I hope to show. But not because value is not important, and not because pluralism is unimportant, either. Rather, what concerns me here is the way in which so much work on the relation between aesthetics and politics forestalls the very pluralism it seeks in calls for difference that almost always imply the right kind of difference. If there is a right kind of difference, then there is no difference, really. This has something to do, I want to suggest, with how we regard value, or perhaps, with when we disregard the function of value in our accounts of the relation between aesthetics and politics. It is not that I think value — and in mainly, here, I mean social value, which is itself informed by and linked to moral value — has to be identified in aesthetic experience so as to be eradicated from it. My concern, instead, is to arrive at a conception of value that allows difference to be experienced as difference, in place of difference as something to be corrected, or made to conform; difference as what has to be experienced correctly, or else understood as the beginning of antagonism. None of this will do. The major problem, I will say at the outset, is how we often confuse difference with autonomy, which is why aesthetic theorists tend to privilege what we are accustomed to regarding as resistant, disruptive or intentionally unpleasurable modes of artistic practice. Oddly enough, what I am saying here rhymes in certain respects with what Bertolt Brecht said of the avant-garde in his influential manifesto, “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre.” There, he warns:

The avant-garde don’t think of changing the apparatus. Because they fancy that they have at their disposal an apparatus which will serve up whatever they freely invent, transforming itself spontaneously to match their ideas. But they are not in fact free inventors; the apparatus goes on fulfilling its function with or without them; the theatres play every night; the papers come out so many times a day; and they absorb what they need; and all they need is a given amount of stuff.[1]

The crucial piece that Brecht adds is likely the easiest to ignore for one who thinks it suffices to develop strategies resistant to the “apparatus.” What Brecht indicates is that all the apparatus really requires is more stuff, even if by stuff we mean styles. Hence, differentiation becomes vital to accumulation and thus sameness. And the production of difference as sameness is a value, albeit a capitalist one. And so we might do better to think about how value itself impacts the way we express and understand aesthetic politics, if the goal of aesthetic politics truly is the protection of difference as difference. My sense is that without more direct discussions of value, we will never get very far in imaging an emancipatory role for art.

To get to how this problem might play out, I want first to look again at an important debate, or rather conversation, between Joseph Raz and Robert Pippin about value pluralism. I will do so while arguing that theorists of aesthetic politics might do well to consider the question of value prior to elaborating what one takes to be an emancipatory aesthetic theory/strategy.

i. the problem of value pluralism

In his influential account of value, The Practice of Value, Joseph Raz makes what appears, at least at first blush, to be a claim that most scholars in the humanities would probably accept as uncontroversial: that any value requires valuers and that values are socially dependent. If values are socially dependent, then there “are (or were) social practices sustaining them.”[2] As Raz says, “The whole point of being a valuer is that one can appreciate and respect values, and, to the extent that they are socially dependent, there is no point to being a valuer unless there are sustaining practices making possible the existence of values.”[3] For example, I can understand my desire to dress in Renaissance clothing if there are things like Renaissance fairs, where others gather similarly garbed. If I do so alone at home, I may appreciate the clothes and think I look right in them, even like myself, but I will need to find some others in order to understand, let alone express, my sartorial inclination as a value. If I regard it as a value, then I believe that what I like is good for others, in some measure, to like as well. Moreover, the absence of known others — of ones who do not fear social presentation — might produce in me a sense of shame, a longing for either the end of this embarrassing inclination or else the active discovery of a community in which I can see myself in the eyes and style of others.

Or, to give a slightly more complicated example: Imagine attending a football game, in which someone may wear the apparel of a favorite team and will, once in attendance, find others with shared values. If it is a home game, one is likely to be surrounded by those dressed in similar colors. But there will surely be fans of the other team, ones who have traveled because they value the team, and most importantly, the sport itself. If not for the latter, the positive valuation of the sport, the appearance of two competing forms and colors of apparel would suggest a possible contradiction in valuation, or difference as antagonism, despite the absence of actual political consequence in this example. Though what that absence suggests is perhaps that politics creeps in wherever difference emerges. In this case, conflict itself is what makes the sport work. Fans of both teams know and depend on this as what they value: football, as such. And it is for reasons like this, among others — his examples, as we will see, are more high-minded — that Raz understood himself to be defending value pluralism, or “the view that there are many incompatible and yet decent and worthwhile routes through life, and that they are as available to people in other civilizations, and were as available to people in other generations, as they are to us.”[4]

In Raz’s conception of value pluralism, seemingly opposed values do not compete with other values so much as they coincide, because one value is said to hold among possible others. And if a value depends on a sustaining social practice, as Raz contends that it does — one premised, moreover, on what he calls “local relativism,” or the norms that govern only this or that instance of a social practice — it importantly does not have to be sustained infinitely.[5] Raz maintains that the value introduced by a given social practice can continue to exist in the absence of that practice, so long as it once existed, even if only in a state of local relativism.[6] Hence my example of Renaissance clothing. The conditions in which that particular vernacular, Renaissance styling, was forged and sustained by locally relative norms allow the value, or a particular system of valuation, to exist again if enough people come to fancy it again. And “enough” can include just one, and at some future point, so long as there has been a known moment of social valuation.

Both of the hypothetical examples I have given above concern social practices — one of which is harder to assimilate to politics (Renaissance garb) than the other (partisanship in sports fandom). And yet both can be said to concern politics in two very basic ways: Politics exists to implement change in the social (all will be right in the world if my team wins) or else to protect what exists as the social (it should be acceptable to dress as I please). But neither of these expressions of the political are directly figured in the situations described. At least not usually. I think it is fair to say that both instances can often provoke what feels like politics: my desire to be able to look how I like and be how I want to be; my wish for my team to beat the other team. It’s just that we don’t really know, in feeling those feelings, what exactly we value, save for notions that are themselves too broad to offer much clarity or distinction: freedom, in the case of fashion; the defeat of an enemy, in the case of sport. Both pertain to politics and yet neither promises a statement of value less general than already given. And yet, if a feeling of/for politics persists but remains undefined, what end does that feeling serve, really?

One answer to this question, even though it is still too early to give it, is that this political feeling gives us a desire (even if that desire is nothing more than a habit) for form as the measure of value. But it is a particular notion of form — one that is easy to confuse with genre, for example, and also structure — or else, a universal conception of form. None of which, in my view, is promising, at least — or especially — not in the context of aesthetic politics. That is to say, what one is searching for, in attempting to understand art as a mode of political emancipation, is a notion of form as iterable, and if iterable, then with always minor differences that can sustain each iteration as its own instance, but never in a way that makes an act of formal fidelity hard to discern. This is one way that form gets confused with genre. I otherwise take “form” to describe a coherent whole defined not only by all of the various elements at play within a work of art, but also the logic which binds those parts in a unique and coherent manner. The form of the work is defined not only by the edges of the work but also by the manner in which the elements are combined. By and large, this happens in ways that can only be perceived in the work of art before us and not by reference to other instances of formal relation.[7] But it is not for nothing, I think, that Raz leans on examples from art in his consideration of value, though the examples are at odds with his desire to defend value pluralism, since what he leans on are genre-based forms of art, if not a genre-based conception of form. Take, for instance, Raz’s most general formulation of value, as it relates to art, not to mention the state:

It is difficult to deny that opera (the art form) is a historical product that came into being during an identifiable period of time, and did not exist before that. Its creation and continued existence are made possible by the existence (at one time or another) of fairly complex social practices. The same goes for states, and for intimate friendships (for example, of the kind associated, though not exclusively, with some ideals of marriage), and in general for all art forms, and for all kinds of political structures, and social relations. It is therefore also natural to think that the excellence of operas, or excellence in directing or conducting operas, and so on, or the excellence of the law qua law, say the virtue of the rule of law, or of possessing legitimate authority as the law claims to do, and the excellence of a close friendship, as well as of virtue as a close friend, depend on the very same social practices on which the existence of opera, intimate friendships, or the law depends.[8]

Some things here — opera, friendship, law — are not like the others. And yet what binds the examples, for Raz, is an idea that all three have criteria of excellence and all emerged in social practices at a particular moment in time and have been sustained as values in just the way established by social practices through time. Likewise, all of these practices have in common internal procedures of relation, modes of scene setting, so to speak:

The examples of opera, intimate friendships, and others show that most often the practices will relate to a set of interrelated values. One may not be able to identify separately practices relating to singing, conducting, and so on in operas. The sustaining practices that consist of attending operas, music school, listening to CDs, discussing them, writing and reading about them, and so on relate to various aspects of the art, some of which may be related more directly to one or more practices, but which still derive sustenance from all of them.[9]

Raz’s assertation that the criteria of excellence — which, presumably, includes not only a sense of how to value what we value, but why we do — seems crucial to value pluralism insofar as those criteria, and logics of relation that are determined by value, emerge from social practices. Thus, we might also think that those criteria have something historical at work in them despite the fact that these values, as an ensemble of relations, persist across time. Indeed, the fact that these forms persist in time and do so under criteria formed at a particular moment raises problems for the difference that we take to be the goal of value pluralism. If a notion of “opera” requires that we ignore what Raz calls “the separate practices relating to singing” then value — as an expression and source of stable ways of relating otherwise disparate aesthetic elements — relegates difference to the experience of sameness, insofar as what matters is the way things unite in the act of being related rather than how any one aspect exceeds or resists relation and thus unification. For instance, where aesthetic value is concerned, if we were to follow Raz in understanding value in terms of criteria of formal relations, relations that constitute the form of the work, then we would not be able to say of an extraordinary, if wayward, camera movement in an otherwise sloppy and uninteresting film that there is something here to value. The stakes of such a missed opportunity are admittedly not that high, but if we note that Raz says of the aesthetic what he also says of the social, then we can begin to see the problem. Namely, we are left with a mode of valuation that is expressly articulated against the appearance of works of art that cannot be assimilated to the category they are meant to belong to.

But also, how seriously should we take the social dependence component of value, since what emerges in time does not also change in time? As works continue to exist across time, and do so according to a generic principle of valuation, it would be hard to understand just how pluralistic values really are, since what counts as the sustaining value — today as then — is at best a Renaissance value. This is not necessarily a reason for not valuing opera. It is, at least, a reason why doing so may not be an indicator of pluralism, save for the fact that my passion for Renaissance values (supposing we know what that means, or that it means only one thing), might indicate my difference from contemporary culture sufficiently. More damning, in my view, is the weakness of the social dependence thesis itself. When we give something a name — say, “Renaissance perspective” — we assume that the name holds and historicizes a worldview, a set of related values, that acquired their legibility in a practice and through the repetition of that practice in a time we feel to be sufficiently homogeneous. But more likely, it seems to me, there was already a value in place that informed the social practice of art, which becomes something like the material manifestation of criteria that are themselves adapted from systems of belief that transcend time and are expressly intended to do so. In that case, the question of social emergence, like most matters of origin, becomes much harder to determine. That is to say, there is a question that will not be easy to answer about whether the object or way of being that is valued comes first, or if the concept that articulates the conditions of visibility does.

Complicating the problem of socio-historical emergence rather considerably is the supposed existence of patterns of relation that must correspond to, and be always expressive of, a form of judgement. And if a form of judgement, then a value — one, moreover, that exists at a substantial level of generality. Just as works of art have forms, so too do judgments, and those judgements are just as easily understood in relation to what can and should always be repeated largely as same, or with just enough difference to indicate one more instance of what belongs in a relation of identity (which we too often confuse with coherence). I know an opera is good if it does this, a short story if it does that. When expressed at a general level, value and judgement are tautological formulations of one another. But what happens if “separate practices related to singing” indeed emerge? According to Raz, we read those practices as variations on what we already know how to value, such that the value of the deviation is derived from what it is not. He gives an example — Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood:

Capote’s In Cold Blood, we may say, is neither a novel nor a documentary, but creates a new terrain somewhere in between. We then appreciate it in relation to the standards of excellence both of reportage and of novels, judging whether it deviates arbitrarily or sensibly, whether the deviation contributes to its merit, or detracts from it.[10]

There is nothing terribly unusual about Raz’s proposal — conforming as it does to both genre-based models of criticism and institutional theories of art. Except for the fact that the derivations indicate, at least in his telling, an alignment in procedures of valuation across otherwise incommensurate domains. That is to say, we look for and find agreement between two different forms of excellence and so there is now, in the case of In Cold Blood, one even larger version of excellence, precisely because of what now counts as excellence in journalism and also what counted as excellence then in novel writing. Deviation, in other words, does not create or enshrine difference. At least not for very long; rather, it creates a larger field of what can be valued under a particular heading of value, though it is in no way clear what the heading consists in. What exists in a state of aesthetic pluralism, in other words, does so only for the sake of aligning operations sustained by and that sustain in turn a notion of excellence that is, I think, more than just a little vague, and more than a little bit bound up with accumulation. That should come as no surprise. The more generally we move in our considerations of value, the sooner we arrive at concepts of value that say much less than the works that sustain those concepts: freedom, truth, beauty, and so on.

ii. necessarily insufficient conditions

It would be far too simple to say, well, the problem here is that Raz is not an aesthetic philosopher or a literary critic, but a moral philosopher, and so we — that is, those of us trained in aesthetic analysis — can just ignore Raz’s basic appeals to logics of genre as the simplifications that come from overreaching one’s scholarly domain. That would be mistaken, in my view. Raz’s reliance on the protocols of an institutional theory of art is a way of thinking about art that is easy to see in studies of art by art historians, literary critics and film scholars. But most of all, I want to take the claims Raz makes with and about art seriously because they do expose a problem — even if against Raz’s will — with valuation, including the ambiguity of the most general accounts of value. For this is an ambiguity that does not sustain difference, as we suppose ambiguity to do, so much as it arrogates difference to sameness; or rather, the more difference is assimilated to sameness, the more general, and also the most ambiguous, the conception of value is. The harder this operation becomes to name in a convincing way, the more it occurs. Call it ideology, if you please, and nothing goes differently. The twinned processes of judgment and valuation require the difference that will be rendered impossible, in turn, by that need.

There are a couple of ways of understanding this problem, and I want to outline the ones given by Robert Pippin in “The Conditions of Value,” his response to The Practice of Value, so as to return to my own critique on what I hope will be firmer ground. In his response to Raz, Pippin makes at least two devastating points: first, that there is a problem in Raz’s conception of value pluralism between necessary and sufficient conditions; and second, that value pluralism is guided, as I have already begun to rehearse above, by a singular, if not also monolithic, conception of value. With respect to the latter, Pippin says: “The principle is clear enough: no value pluralism with respect to the value of pluralism.”[11] This is also Brecht’s point about the apparatus. In other words, there is a paradox at work in value pluralism nested in the demand for pluralism itself. If I demand pluralism, then how can I be valuing pluralism? The demand, any demand, implies that what is is insufficient. My resistance to pluralism would have to remain as one way among others in order for actual pluralism to exist. Otherwise, what we have is something more like a curated array of acceptable differences, which means that some other differences have been forcefully excluded and the rest can be unified under a broader heading, as in my love of football as what assimilates the difference between the team I like and the ones they are competing against. This is another way of describing what I mean when I say that valuation depends on difference, or can, in order to arrogate it to sameness. The exclusion of some other differences is not inherently problematic. More likely, it is important to what valuing really requires, which is a choice and a belief that this way of being is better than that way of being. Hence the moral challenge of valuation, or, as we will see, valuation is the most challenging aspect of arriving at a conception of morality.

The other point that Pippin makes that concerns me here relates entirely to this problem and can be told in two parts. First, Pippin raises an objection to the social dependence thesis simply in asking at what point something becomes a value — how many need to value something in order for it be so, since the idea in Raz’s theory is that values become so once someone has made a practice of them at a particular moment in time. Pippin remarks:

I note that we also need from Raz a clearer picture of what counts as a sustaining ‘social practice.’ If two people form a (small) cult and begin to treat all animals as of exactly the same moral status as persons, is that all we need to say to justify the claim that the ‘necessary condition’ for such a value thereby ‘coming into existence’ has been satisfied? If only one person proclaims and begins to live out the value, does that change anything?[12]

In one sense, what Pippin is indicating here is rather straightforward. Perhaps it is enough, in the context of value pluralism, to say that it takes two people to value something in order for it to be understood as a value. The pessimism in Pippin’s example is easy to detect and easy to agree with. After all, if it takes just two people, then we might be closer to something like a private language, an ethos of the couple: what works for two and need not work for others. This certainly moves value in the direction of pluralism, since the limit of the constituent valuers already implies difference as what gives legibility to any one value. But it is equally clear that Pippin is skeptical of the necessary condition for the existence of a value being the fact that someone, or some two, have valued it. Pippin asks, “if only one person proclaims and begins to live out the value, does that change anything?” For Raz, under the social dependence thesis, the answer is clearly yes, even though his own examples of value always indicate a need for larger-scale agreement. Or it can be just one person with an interest in Renaissance wear — who dresses, alone, feels alone (maybe), and looks for others who might also identify with a bygone era. If we have something like criteria for knowing an excellent instance of opera, for instance, then valuation cannot exist without an attempt to produce more valuers. And if two people believe that animals and humans should be evaluated on the same moral plane, and they do not have an impulse to see that value shared by others, this would only be failing the terms of their own value. Sharing a belief between themselves would, presumably, be sufficient to the cause.

But as we know, when we value things, it is very difficult not to want others to value what we value, too. As Pippin puts it, “values function as reasons for action, and so ‘people’ (now considered as social groups) must be able to act on such reasons, acknowledgement of the values must be able to form part of an explanation of actions within a society as well as for an individual.”[13] If value is a reason for action, and I am convinced that it is, then value is bound up with publicity and thus actions that are, at a minimum, intended to influence others on the rightness of the value being expressed. Otherwise, we are confusing value with taste and taste is not something that one always needs or seeks to share with others. Or, at least, the impulse to promote one’s taste is easier to ignore, since matters of taste need not really entail judgement in the same way as does value. To speak of good or bad taste is different, in practice, from speaking of good or bad actions, at least where moral judgement is concerned. A pluralism of taste is much easier to sustain than a pluralism of value.

One of the ways that this difference is indicated in Pippin’s response to Raz is through an example from Keith Richards. What it indicates, more specifically, is the problem in the sufficiency of valuation that follows from granting, however hypothetically, that simple belief — by one or even just two people — might meet the necessary conditions of something being a value. He writes:

(A lapidary example from the rock star Keith Richards at a press conference after yet another arrest on drug charges: ‘Now let’s get this straight. I don’t have a drug problem. I have a police problem.’ I think we would agree that, in this case, both sides are right by their own interpretive lights.) But the ‘apples and oranges’ (both-can-be-right) and the ‘duck/rabbit’ (there-is-no-simply-right-answer) ameliorations only go so far; and really, in important cases, not very far.[14]

Another way of putting this, it seems to me, is that the contingency of signs, which is crucial to aspect-seeing — and thus to perceptual shifts that have the potential to usher in shifts in a social formation — is insufficient, in itself, where the question of value is concerned. We need to know that something can be other than it is, but that is not the same thing as knowing what we want that thing to be. Nevertheless, we need to reckon with signs and being as contingent if we want our values to appeal to others as what they should believe and what they should do. Political examples come quickly to mind, like the Charlottesville riots of 2017. When Donald Trump said of the riots that there are good people on both sides, he was, in fact, relying on a version of value pluralism; he hoped we’d believe him. That this particular invocation of value pluralism would be difficult for most people to stomach is easy to understand. Most people do not find it at all reasonable to describe white supremacists as good people. And no one should. But even more telling was that in saying that there were good people on both sides, we all knew — including Trump supporters, if for opposite reasons — that he did not believe that there were good people on both sides. The only side that matters to Trump is the white supremacists. We know this on the basis of other actions and utterances, so we have every reason to doubt that there is a real valuation of pluralism here. And in putting it this way, I mean to indicate that Trump’s lie — or his inability, in any case, to fully conceal his biases — indicates something that is actually important about valuation. Namely, that the duck/rabbit-ness of things, the contingency of signs, as Pippin makes clear, is often insufficient where valuation is concerned. We need not accept something as a value for others just because someone values it, since values are, as Pippin says, reasons for acting. If Trump were trying to speak to something that is a matter of taste and perspective, as when one engages in a question of whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time, we would not be as likely to become morally alert. For what Trump thinks about the skills of basketball players, should he think of it at all, has no real bearing on social existence and we know that. And so we know, too, that values do have such a bearing.

One thing that can be derived from this distinction, then, is that valuation — when understood as reason for acting, and thus something that happens within a moral context — requires us to say that something is better than something else. And probably saying so will require an explanation that is more complicated and more specific than saying that I value Renaissance clothing because it makes me feel smart, or even that I value football, and so know that the difference I describe as “the enemy” is in fact necessary to the game itself. My passion for the Buffalo Bills cannot be experienced without the league, the array of enemies and others, as such. In this, even the use of innocuous forms of valuation in theorizing value — Renaissance garb, football fandom — can conceal the moral judgments that genuine instances of valuation as a reason for acting demand, if asked as though the question mattered in social affairs. Pluralism of the kind advocated by Raz runs just this risk.

So, to sum up where we have been so far, there are at least three related problems before us: that something cannot be valued by itself — some values require a relation or series of relations to occur in known ways, as when we regard the excellence of an opera in relation to criteria; that in so doing, difference becomes sameness in the process of relation, since relation carries with it criteria of excellence, and thus stable and iterable forms of judgment and creation/action; and finally, that value pluralism dispenses with judgement in favor of taste, and yet judgement either reappears by other means, as when one relies on the alibi of pluralism to avoid judgement, or when — most importantly — we feel we cannot but make a decision between two different ways of understanding the same thing (Pippin’s example of Keith Richards). The outlook might seem bleak, since value pluralism seems incapable of doing anything about difference other than assimilate it so that it can be valued in a general way and yet, somehow, remain free of the judgement that generality supposes. My hope is that recourse to the aesthetic might help us to find a way out of this triple bind, which, it should be said, we also encountered by the aesthetic means that Raz himself supplied. The point, though, is not to remove aesthetics from questions of judgement, but to take up aesthetics from a different perspective.

iii. pluralism or difference?

Ultimately, my concern here is to indicate a problem in the relation of aesthetics and politics, which has everything to do with the coordination of differences in a relation of sameness, or agreement — which is easily confused with sameness. Though the reason to resist putting it this way is that “agreement” need not imply a relation of absolutes. And anyway, if we have to agree on something, we begin to do so because we are not in a relation of sameness or identity. In a recent essay, “A Moral Education,” the novelist Garth Greenwell begins what will be a deeply compelling defense of Phillip Roth. At stake in Greenwell’s essay is a now-familiar question about whether or not one can admire a work of art that is made by an artist who has proven to be ethically problematic, such that we think we can draw an unbroken like between what the work does and who the artist is. What is novel about Greenwell’s response to this issue is his concern with the difference it might make if we read works of art more carefully, and not as an expression of something exterior to the work before us. In this sense, what Greenwell argues for, among other things, is a version of aesthetic autonomy. Though what autonomy amounts to in this case is a precondition for reading closely before all else — taking seriously that what is in a serious work of art is there for reasons that cannot be apprehended by concerns and strategies external to the work. The point, as I take it, is not to leave the work in a state of autonomy, per se; rather, it is a matter of learning to read well as way of arriving at a more complex account of morality and difference — a version of morality that is expressly concerned with discovering and protecting difference. And if so, then what careful reading allows for is a conception of value that is derived from aesthetic experience, in which aesthetic experience is itself unburdened by categorical forms of judgment, and is never something understood as strictly exterior to the work of art, or in which value simply becomes the name of what is sayable or doable at any given moment. To this effect, Greenwell begins by addressing the moralistic response to art today:

Within the small world of people who care about literature and art, the culture is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulnerable. We have a sense that the most important questions we can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra-artistic aims, to what extent it serves a world outside itself.[15]

Another way of putting this is to say that what concerns Greenwell — and me, as well — is the conflation of morality and politics; or, moralism as the basic expression of political values, which are meant to discipline works of art at the moment of production and reception. What Greenwell rightly opposes is the belief that pure political action follows from the identification and silencing of an enemy. Cancel culture depends entirely on general and inflexible values that brook no remainder. One is either all the way correct or all the way wrong. And while Greenwell indicates in this passage a desire for art to be importantly unanswerable to extra-artistic aims, it is equally possible to say that the measure of autonomy he is looking for can also be described as having an important moral and political function. The title of his essay, after all, is “A Moral Education.” In my view, it may never be easy or possible to separate morality and politics, largely because they are bound together by value, especially when we understand value, as Pippin indicates, as a reason for acting. In one sense, value defines a correlative relation between morality and politics. Or can. We need to know why we are advocating what we are advocating. And if the relation is secured by or even as value, then one will be compelled to make a choice to, in some sense, advocate one position or another. This is what remains challenging about Pippin’s assertion. Otherwise, we could just say like the pluralist that all difference matters — save for the fact that we have seen already that value pluralism is often animated by a monolithic conception of what counts as plural: pluralism as the right kind of difference, and so, no difference.

At the core of Greenwell’s precise account of the moral messiness of Roth’s novels is the valuation of messiness itself, which can be understood as a reason for not acting, if and when acting implies the declaration of an enemy. And the decision not to act, to be clear, is both a decision and an action. As Greenwell puts it, “The moral seriousness of those books, it seems to me now, lies in their refusal of an image one might identify with in any frictionless, any merely self-comforting way.”[16] That is, the work refuses to provide an image that can be easily and wholly assimilated to a value that is already known, accepted and doing the work of assimilating difference to sameness. And it also does not mean, as Greenwell is careful to indicate in the essay, that we simply regard Roth’s problematic male characters as equally valuable to more obviously upstanding ones, at least not in ways that we conceive of esteem, or good moral standing, which is in terms that transcend the particular instances the value nevertheless requires. Rather, it has to do with something utterly more humane: an understanding of literature, in this case, as that which helps us recognize the complexity and difference of the other as someone or something necessarily unresponsive to absolute relations of identity. It is an experience of becoming acquainted with the messiness of being, the ethical inconsistencies in being, which is how we might appear to each other if we were read with the nimble confidence of an aesthetically sophisticated reader, or written about by just such a writer. Or as Greenwell puts it, there may be no reasonable alternative representing moral complexity, if that means reducing the specificity of a character’s inconsistencies:

“This posture, of finding another intolerable and at the same time cherishing their existence, is deeply uncomfortable and urgently necessary. Because, at least in part: what’s the alternative? What do we do with people who refuse to act in accordance with our standards, our sense of decency, who have no interest in being reformed? Lock them all up? Exterminate them?”[17]

Opponents of Greenwell’s argument will surely accuse him, if they haven’t already, of exaggerating, as if cancelling literature — they will say — were a precondition for more pernicious forms of social control. But why isn’t it? If works of art are meant to make us less tolerant, then the relation between aesthetics and politics will be horrifyingly clear: The imagination is no longer left to itself, but will now be hitched to ways of sensing and thus describing an enemy, and then finding ways to get rid of the enemy.[18] How much does it really matter if I do such a thing in the name of the left or the right?

But Greenwell’s opponents will be mistaken to say so, if and when they do. For what Greenwell is indicating here is art’s capacity to render the significance of an existence in complex, and necessarily uneven, terms. What Greenwell is refusing to value, in other words, is an idea that art’s value is derived from something external to the object itself — that something can only be art if it is morally and politically coordinated with what passes as good. Wallace Stevens had something like this in mind, a refusal of correlation, in a poem entitled “Table Talk:”

Life, then, is largely a thing

Of happens to like, not should.

And that, too, granted, why

Do I happen to like red bush

Gray grass and green-gray sky?[19]

In asking why he happens to like green-gray sky, the poet presumes, before all else, that what appeals — and what appears uniquely, unexpectedly — is a relation of colour (green-gray) to the form it takes, appears in or with (sky, in this case), that can be identified by the poet but not in relation to stable aesthetic values, as when we assume a sky is blue, or at night, black. And the poet is asking himself the question, and also the reader, but is not seeking an answer from known categories, as if that is what a reader is supposed to do when reading. The work of art seeks only its own criteria, lest aesthetic experience be overdetermined by a value that only ever becomes more general, and thus more inscrutable, the more differences are framed by such a value (or a concept laden with value, like realism, anti-realism, and so on).[20]

If we return briefly to Raz’s The Practice of Value, this problem should now be more evident, especially given an example Raz imagines of a formally excellent work that may be morally repugnant, which is precisely the formula that I take Greenwell to be arguing against. Raz says:

I do not claim that all objects of evaluation are instances of good or bad kinds, not that all objects that are either good or bad are instances of such kinds, nor that those that are instances of kinds of goods or of bads are evaluated exclusively as instances of a kind. Saying this is merely to repeat the obvious. A novel may be a superb novel and yet immoral for advocating wanton violence, and so on.[21]

If we can imagine a novel that is formally good, which is what I imagine Raz is saying — in effect, “it’s a superb novel, but …” — then what, exactly, is form doing here? Clearly, we would need to have a concept in place of what makes a novel a good novel and those criteria clearly need not include what we are left to describe as content, as if content were unrelated to the form that articulates it. But what such a distinction does, rather plainly, is to recognize valuation as formal process of accumulation that nominally requires difference but refuses that difference in the name of valuation and the coherence of the system of valuation. What Raz’s description of a good novel that is also immoral does is to avoid the more pressing problem of value as a reason for acting.

What would acting mean, in such a case? For one, it would mean recognizing that whatever is described as potentially immoral cannot be easily separated from the manner in which that same act comes to sense. And that is not a case for describing the otherwise excellent work as unworthy of regard. It simply asks for a more modest and also a more complete account of what works of art — including the people in them, the people who make them, and people as such — actually ask us to do. It is, I think, something more like Stevens’ question: Why do I happen to like? What the question implies is that, first, I have been affected by this thing that I regard and do not understand; and second, in happening to like, I am not determined by a restrictive value in deciding that this thing, this aesthetic object, has a hold on me. If I happen to like something, I am not obligated to like it. If I happen to like something, then probably I will need to find different words than I have used before to say what I now want to say, and to describe what I now feel. And as Greenwell suggests in his essay, respect for this kind of morally volatile instance of things that nevertheless feel worthy of our regard can only bode well in the work it does to prepare us for life. That is, if morality and politics are related to questions of value, the only general value to uphold, potentially, is a respect for difference as difference where we might otherwise regard difference as the beginning of judgment and antagonism.

This sounds too easy, I’m sure. Or else it sounds like pluralism by other means. But I don’t think it is. In saying that art gives us regard for people who are really not like us, as can be said of Greenwell’s examples from Roth, or not all the way like us, we are not dealing with the kind of value pluralism implied by statements such as “there are good people on both sides.” In part because what art does — literature and film especially, but not exclusively — is to teach us how to slow down in the impress of the unknown, to seek more description, not less. And to give up on the idea of sides. It also asks that we recognize unevenness and difference, unevenness in difference, in more complete ways, which is also why we cannot just say that a work is formally excellent but otherwise immoral. For at that point, we are not paying attention to what the work is actually doing. In this respect, the work of form matters greatly, just not in a way that implies a separability of form and content, which ultimately serves a larger conception of form as process for the assimilation of difference under vague expressions of value like freedom and identity (as opposed to singularity). This is one of the important aspects, for instance, of Eugenie Brinkema’s conception of radical formalism — that works be understood formally, from head to toe, but only with respect to what this or that work does alone, prior to what other ideas and experience it may signal or rub up against. Form is never extended beyond this instance of form; rather, form is how we begin to make sense of everything this particular work does on its own terms.[22] We do not need patterns external to the work, since we will only find those patterns in the work. And as Raz’s example of In Cold Blood indicates, the variations on patterns tend only to produce larger, more unified and unifying patterns. We do not need a generic conception of form as general mode of coherence and excellence in combination. We need to look with our own eyes at all that is there, and in view of how it is there. Form is both the how and the there. It makes judgment a lot harder because it is less predictable, less certain. Why do I happen to like? It is not a vague question. It is a question compelled by a serious aesthetic experience, which begins with the appreciation of a difference that I do not have a name for just yet. I like “happening to like” precisely because it feels luxurious, a moment that art alone makes possible — the space to notice without demand or expectation.

Tending to difference as difference within a work of art — allowing art to teach us how to regard the difference of every other being, animate and inanimate — does have a political bearing, but it is not one that can be decided by favoring or presupposing, in militant terms, a particular mode of representation as the most emancipatory mode. Is this not the problem that Rancière indicates so convincingly in “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” He writes:

In order to assert an unrepresentability in art [the presumed ethical mandate where depictions of the Holocaust are concerned] that is commensurate with an unthinkability of the event, the latter must itself have been rendered entirely thinkable, entirely necessary according to thought. The logic of the unrepresentable can only be sustained by a hyperbole that ends up destroying it.[23]

One way out of this dilemma is to cease regarding art as something that must be politicized and to recognize in turn that art nevertheless has something to offer politics: the making perspicuous of difference in a way that is formally dynamic, and thus appealing, such that we are in a place to act on difference by not acting against difference. As Greenwell has said: What are we to do with the one we cancel? Execute them? The point of putting it this way, I imagine, is not to take it seriously, but to point out how excessive the moralistic-political response to art and the artist has become, how removed it is from the messiness of life, from the messiness of our own lives — from the messiness of good lives, too — which are themselves always at risk of being simplified for the sake of antagonism, or the friend/enemy relation. What Greenwell is asking us to do is to be better at being human, to do better at recognizing the complications even in things we think we oppose; even to learn, in the asocial space of reading, what we oppose or accept. And if value is a reason for acting, then so much of the value of art consists in the clarification of a difference that we know more intimately before opposing it. And thus we probably end up with more articulate, less brutish modes of confrontation. If you want to destroy me, for instance, you will need to do more than cite my Bills fandom as the all and the only of me — as if the thing you don’t like about me should cover every other dimension of me. Or else, art teaches us what general conceptions of value, or values conceived in broad “principled terms” cannot teach us: how to keep regarding and living with difference more peacefully, how to anticipate not knowing where we might otherwise seek certainty, such that the reasons we keep for acting are either significantly less needed or much more greatly specified. And perhaps most importantly, what the kind of careful, aesthetically sensitive reading that Greenwell performs and advocates suggests most is a different way, at least potentially, of conceiving of value in highly specified, aesthetically serious terms.

To return to Pippin’s point about valuation and aspect-seeing, we often do need to arrive at a decision about what might be better or best. But doing so in aesthetic terms implies, however minimally, slowing down and reckoning with something as it is before we decide how things are, really. If we know how things are, really, then perhaps we have not been paying very good attention; perhaps we are aesthetically insensitive and thus beholden to values that can help us police and protect the “right” kind of difference by keeping genuine difference out of view. One may need to decide against something else, and to do so as a value judgment, but it would be better to do so in view of what a work of actually does as a whole and in light of the specificity that only close reading can supply. In other words, it is time, most of all, for aesthetic politics to take on the question of value, so as to understand why or how we fail to see what we nevertheless complain about as something before us. Only then might value pluralism stand a chance, and precisely because the difference identified is identified by aesthetic means — supposing in turn that by “aesthetic” we mean without external forms of judgement that depend on repetition in the act of acknowledgement.

endnotes

1. Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 34–35. ↩

2. Joseph Raz, The Practice of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 19. ↩

3. Ibid., 35. ↩

4. Ibid., 43. ↩

5. Ibid., 17n3. ↩

6. Ibid., 21. ↩

7. This is also why my previous two examples concerning value are not traditional instances of art. Once examples of art are introduced around questions of value and of form, they tend to be understood as exemplary, and if exemplary, the right and repeatable instance. ↩

8. Raz, 30–31. The italics are Raz’s. ↩

9. Ibid., 31. ↩

10. Ibid., 41. ↩

11. Robert Pippin, “The Conditions of Value,” in Raz, The Practice of Value, 100. ↩

12. Ibid., 90. ↩

13. Ibid., 102. ↩

14. Ibid., 101. ↩

15. Garth Greenwell, “A Moral Education,” The Yale Review 11, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 13–14. ↩

16. Ibid., 24. ↩

17. Ibid., 36. ↩

18. To be clear, I am not arguing that we need to be tolerant. Tolerance belongs to a friend/enemy discourse as the moment in which one can accept something an enemy does, even if it still characterizes them as an enemy and not a convert, so long as that act or expression does not erode the value that sustains the absolute terms that define the friend/enemy dynamic. ↩

19. Wallace Stevens, “Table Talk,” in Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 73. ↩

20. In one sense, what I am describing is something like Alexander García Düttmann’s conception of aesthetic seriousness, though García Düttmann is not concerned with the question of value or the political merits of a work of art. See Alexander García Düttmann, Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). ↩

21. Raz, The Practice of Value, 42.  ↩

22. Eugenie Brinkema, Life-Destroying Diagrams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), especially the Postscript, “Ars Formularia: Radical Formalism,” 251–284. ↩

23. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso Books, 2007), 138. ↩