Iconoclastic Idolatry: Speculations toward an Image of God, the Meaningful Process-Marks of Labor, & Purposefulness without Purpose
Jeffrey Schultz
Objective beauty, which served as the central category around which aesthetics circled from antiquity up to the nineteenth century, is not now so quickly invoked in discussions of poetry as it once was. Indeed, we are far more likely to hear beauty invoked in discussions of high-end consumer economy commodities–this is a beautiful bag, a beautiful pair of boots; this is a beautiful cheese, a beautiful piece of technology–, than in discussions of contemporary poetry. This is a measure not just of poetry’s or beauty’s conceptual decay, but also of contemporary experience’s alienation from what might truthfully be called beautiful and poetic. When Keats wrote that “beauty is truth [and] truth beauty,” the first waves of industrialization had already forced those qualities out of imagination’s immediate experience and into the frozen fiction of his Grecian urn’s mythic ever-presentness. Beauty’s inability at that early date to withstand any encounter with time itself reveals Romanticism’s not-yet-recognized encounter with modernity. The beauty of the beautiful bag, of the beautiful pair of boots, is nothing other than a masking of the misery and suffering of their material provenance, their manufacture, their conveyance, and, ultimately, their disposability. It is the phenomenon of reification itself that is the beginning of the decay of objective beauty: by concealing the socio-historical and socio-ecological truth of made objects behind their very objectivity, behind the seemingly unquestionable nature of their thing-ness, reification, which is nothing other than a severing of critical, dialectical thought, nothing other than a failure of the mind to find the representations that would be able to truthfully situate the mind’s own limited experience inside of objective reality, collapses utterly the Keatsian ideal: beauty, at least as it is traditionally conceived and popularly understood, is a lie, and we find lies beautiful. Against this degradation of the beautiful and true, this paper will explore the possibilities of a contemporary materialist aesthetics by probing at the materialist metaphysics such an aesthetics would necessarily imply. The conceptualization of the image of God, the productive process of labor, and Kant’s criterion of “purposefulness without purpose” will form the constellation of concepts through which these possibilities will be considered. [...]
Jeffrey Schultz
Objective beauty, which served as the central category around which aesthetics circled from antiquity up to the nineteenth century, is not now so quickly invoked in discussions of poetry as it once was. Indeed, we are far more likely to hear beauty invoked in discussions of high-end consumer economy commodities–this is a beautiful bag, a beautiful pair of boots; this is a beautiful cheese, a beautiful piece of technology–, than in discussions of contemporary poetry. This is a measure not just of poetry’s or beauty’s conceptual decay, but also of contemporary experience’s alienation from what might truthfully be called beautiful and poetic. When Keats wrote that “beauty is truth [and] truth beauty,” the first waves of industrialization had already forced those qualities out of imagination’s immediate experience and into the frozen fiction of his Grecian urn’s mythic ever-presentness. Beauty’s inability at that early date to withstand any encounter with time itself reveals Romanticism’s not-yet-recognized encounter with modernity. The beauty of the beautiful bag, of the beautiful pair of boots, is nothing other than a masking of the misery and suffering of their material provenance, their manufacture, their conveyance, and, ultimately, their disposability. It is the phenomenon of reification itself that is the beginning of the decay of objective beauty: by concealing the socio-historical and socio-ecological truth of made objects behind their very objectivity, behind the seemingly unquestionable nature of their thing-ness, reification, which is nothing other than a severing of critical, dialectical thought, nothing other than a failure of the mind to find the representations that would be able to truthfully situate the mind’s own limited experience inside of objective reality, collapses utterly the Keatsian ideal: beauty, at least as it is traditionally conceived and popularly understood, is a lie, and we find lies beautiful. Against this degradation of the beautiful and true, this paper will explore the possibilities of a contemporary materialist aesthetics by probing at the materialist metaphysics such an aesthetics would necessarily imply. The conceptualization of the image of God, the productive process of labor, and Kant’s criterion of “purposefulness without purpose” will form the constellation of concepts through which these possibilities will be considered. [...]
