Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network

i. our cultural specialists of how the full connectedness of their knowledge presupposes the full connectedness of knowers in An advanced alien species has dispatched some theory and in practice." anthropologists to Earth to study how educated Aliens have always been good at tracking our earthlings think and talk about art, beauty, repcivilizational failings. They are, alas, right about resentation, interpretation, and similar subjects. the clannishness (I use 'aesthetics' here, as el These aliens are hyper-collectivists. They do most swhere in its pluralistic, twenty-first-century Ox things together, thanks to a silicon-enhanced ford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics sense.)1 But this adaptation with which they link their minds into clannishness is not entirely graven in stone. Today, extended networks when sharing significant exto an unprecedented extent, it is not uncommon to periences or collaborating on complex analytical see philosophers and literary theorists consulting tasks. evolutionary psychologists in explaining the ap As the visitors eavesdrop on our conferences peal of narratives, feminist art historians drawing and graduate seminars and peruse our learned on psychoanalysis in reconstructing the gendered cultural journals, they are struck by the variety contexts of images of human beauty, film theo of arcane methodologies and discourses we have rists invoking cognitive science in explaining the created in this area over the last two centuries. emotional powers of cinematographic styles, mu They are also appalled at how our scholars consicologists consulting anthropologists in explain verse. Their ethnographic report concludes by noting various differences between Western and non ing that "Although human civilization is entering Western forms of musical practice, and so on. a new era of global interconnectivity, their cultural The commonplace nature of such collaborative specialists behave like throwbacks to their age of projects underscores how aesthetics, like other medieval theological disputes. They work in primcomplex areas of inquiry, including the sciences, itive clans which quibble endlessly over whether has become not only a multidisciplinary but also a the value of Bar at the Folies-Bergere lies in the disunified field. That is, it possesses some kind of patterning of line and colors or in its represenloose organizational integrity in its complex of dis tation of gender relations, whether La Traviata ciplines, methodologies, and social communities considered qua music, can express thoughts about an integrity that eludes reduction both to older extra-musical life, or whether Casablanca's narrahumanistic models of theoretical unification and tive is a source of apolitical cognitive stimulation to earlier postmodernist visions of incommensu or a mimetic mechanism for colonialist hegemony. rable conceptual schemes, nonnegotiably politi Many of these cultural specialists still share their cized confrontations of ideology, and the like, eighteenth-century ancestors' fantasy that their But what sort of integrity, more exactly, might carbon-based brains will someday allow a single that be? This is a conceptual question that, clan to achieve a complete and unified theory of while hardly a traditional "problem of aesthet what those ancestors called aesthetic subjects. If ics," increasingly haunts the margins of recent they really wish progress in this area (as in so many conversations among the aesthetic disciplines, others), they need a more evolved understanding (One thinks of books like James Elkins, ed.,