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7 Aesthetics, modernity and postmodernity
Actually the issue of the place of aesthetics is central to the entire modern/post-modernist debate. Let me lay out only a brief overview. There are two radically competing images of modernity at work in the theory. The first is tied to Weber’s description of the modern project as one which divides knowledge in to three spheres: scientific, juridical and artistic. These three are then the fields for three types of expert systems (science, courts, and cultural/artistic). One result of this is the monopoly of aesthetic “taste” in the hands of cultural-knowledge experts, and its removal from popular culture (Habermas 1983, 8-9). In this way, modernity also creates types of knowledge expert (and forms of knowledge) that are artificially limited each to only one sector. It is this description/prescription of modernity that Habermas uses as a foil to revive modernity as a project that can unify all fields of knowledge. But if the future of modernity as a project requires a fundamental revision of its description, is this not a kind of post-modern modernity? Or did Weber get it wrong in the first place?
This brings up the second view of modernity, one in which the “forgotten masses” reemerge, both as consumer targets of the culture industry and as low-rent aesthetes on their own. For, while science and law have been relatively successful in managing their expert cultural production, when it comes to art, everyone is an expert (in their own minds). And aesthetics, the valuation of the images of things, becomes a second life, not of people, but of objects.
The “peopling” of the lifeworld with aesthetically charged objects brings the “cultural dimension” to the fore, and the cultural capital invested into the “games” of distinction becomes a major stake in everyday lifestyle planning. Here the danger is from the institutions of cultural production that find themselves in an avant-garde position not only for their own internal game, but also vying to stay in the forefront of mass cultural commodity production; coupled with a global availability of cultural products. The stakes involved in the aesthetic “wing” of modernity threaten to override the rationality available from within science and law, creating a population obsessed with their relationship to aestheticized objects--including their own bodies. For identity with and through the body is itself colonized in this process (as it is also for the expert aesthete, who at least makes a career of this).
Claiming that aesthetic reason trammels moral and instrumental reason in the individual, Daniel Bell [see (Habermas 1983, 6-7)]--and also David Harvey (Harvey 1989, 18-19)--conclude that modernity has gone beyond its own limits. It has become a type of postmodernity, which, depending upon who is doing the critiquing, is either a dangerous wrong turn or a runway to another mode of modernity. In either case the engine taking us down this tarmac is capitalism. And whether to disengage moral and aesthetic reason from capitalism (say, by reinventing religion or by reinventing marxism), or to invest capitalism (and therefore the individual) with enough (also reinvented) rationality in order to recenter modernity as a project of enlightenment--this is the crux of the modern/postmodern debate.
