Aestheticism and post-humanism

The paper I am asked to respond to reads like a manifesto, which is the greatest compliment I can think of. It conjoins recent strands of theorizing in the phenomenological, actor-network, post- or more-than-human, non-representational, biophilosophical and other newly materialist registers in order to argue/reinvigorate an aesthetic dimension the authors feel has been downplayed. They are right: human geography is, despite its name, of all disciplines the epistemic site par excellence wherein a non-humanist appreciation of the forces, possibilities and perils of ‘nature’ has been most precise and can still be developed most fruitfully. Geography is the science of everything that happens on the surface of the planet. The adjective ‘human’ merely qualifies that earth (and celestial) processes profoundly affect humans. And one way of affecting them is through art.

Following Elizabeth Grosz (2008), it is not that art simply represents environments and organisms. All art is directly, materially, shaped by geology and biology. This is clearly the case in architecture, sculpture and the work of Perdita Phillips and other bio-, found or land art. Even more interesting is to argue the same is the case for poetry, or cinema. To constitute art, geology and biology might pass through many layers or relays (I avoid saying ‘mediations’), each of which measures and ingests the propagating forces of earth and life. The challenge for an earthly aesthetic is to hear the planet echoing through Schoenberg. An aesthetics for post-human worlds has the didactic task of alerting other publics than the geographical to the fact art and discourse do not float in a realm separate from microbes, photosynthesis, toxins, the water cycle and climate change.

Nevertheless, in my estimation, one premise of the paper is wrong. There is too much not too little aesthetics in geography. While perhaps more geographers should employ art as a conceptual vehicle, it is the prevalent approach I take issue with. More precisely, there is an aestheticism, sometimes explicit but mostly not fully admitted, which privileges a sensuous eclectic approach to theorizing over building a more encompassing theoretical edifice in which science, logic, ethics and politics have their rightful place too, and interact with aesthetics. Of these, politics is the most marginalized and badly defined. It has often been pointed out the ascendancy of post-human themes in cultural geography – from nanotechnology to domestic animals, from gene banks to urban assemblages – has, somehow, coincided with a shelving of considerations how these follow from racializing patriarchal capitalism. Instead of worry, shock or solidarity, the affect accompanying a lot of work in cultural geography and cultural studies seems to be that of eating one’s favourite food.

The turn towards materiality and corporeality defines itself as a departure from humanistic geography. It borrows from post-structuralist thought, especially Latour and Deleuze, to overcome the inflated emphasis social constructionism had placed on representation, discourse and meaning. Nevertheless, like humanist geography, the newly materialist non-representational geographies often seem to insist on the primacy of (syn)aesthetic perception, though it could be argued sense of space (the manner in which embodiment’s relationality and dispersion make sense burst forth from inside it) came to replace the older concept of sense of place. Like in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing all attention on sensuous process meant systemic injustices mostly fell out of the picture. When Dixon et al. (2012) conclude by briefly calling for a reassessment of humanist geography, I agree too few in the present generation engage with this legacy, but the debates on the ideological tendencies of humanism should not be forgotten.

What kind of aesthetics can we adopt? Many existing attempts at creating an aesthetic of space fall short of Kantian or Deleuzian rigour. Kant and Deleuze are not aestheticists. They each have a solid philosophical system in which science, ethics, politics, metaphysics and so on are not subordinated to the sensual encounter with an eclectic world. Moreover, many post-structuralist interventions remain stuck in an entanglement of the biases other geographers have so meticulously mapped: national, white, middle class, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, individualist, humanist and so on. The phenomenology or ontology of encounter and landscape is incomplete without explicitly addressing the problems in attaining universal judgement. What would John Wylie’s (2005) deservedly famous walk along the North Devon coast become if he were to spot an item of exotic clothing washed up from a drowned refugee or strain his ankle suddenly remembering his debit card is overdrawn? This is a tiresome criticism. We need not more analyses of presumptions and silences but explanation how the aesthetic is an achievement across adversity requiring the difficult coming-together of affect and reason.

Kantian and Deleuzian aesthetics do not lay bare the ideological limitations of artworks (though this can and should be done) but theorize the always contingent construction of sense and truth. When Kant is reread innovatively through feminism, democratic theory (Benhabib, 2011) and Lacanian psychoanalysis (Zupančič, 2000), his system reappears as open as ever to forging a critical cosmopolitan approach to representations and reality bypassing the vexed biases of identity and taste. Unlike it is for Bourdieu, Kant’s aesthetic sensibility is potentially universal insofar as it is more-than-empirical (transcendental and universalizing). Aesthetics cannot be reduced to its historical–geographical conditions. Left wing Kantianism underscores the emancipatory potential of art instead of the identity-reinforcing pleasures derived from it.

More than any other, it is the aesthetics of Deleuze and Guattari that is attuned to the manners in which life, physico-chemical process and abstract geometries inhabit art (O’Sullivan, 2006). In fact, as Dixon et al. (2012) show, sense of beauty is an instinct humans share with birds and mammals. Darwin had already worked this out in 1871 in The Descent of Man (Darwin, 2004), though I think he would disagree with extending aesthetic sense to organisms such as worms or algae in which sexual selection plays no role. But instinct is not automatism. It is always expressed by bodies in milieus. Just as there are avian cultures and personalities, human affects are complex articulations of sometimes contradictory instincts and learned responses.

It would be good to hear more about the palaeontology of artistry. In all likelihood, symbolic communication including sexuality, story-telling, music, painting and ritual was the key impetus for the evolution of the human brain. Homo neanderthalensis evidently had as much sense of the sublime as our ancestors. What do monkeys do with crayons and video games? Hominids are defined by having actively accrued more brain power over millions of years, especially between 500,000 and 30,000 years ago, through the enjoyment but also conflicts and anxieties that art, religion and other sensual pursuits afforded them. A feedback loop between aesthetics and neuronal density ensued not only through sexual and natural selection, however. Evolutionary psychology conveniently forgets that hominids were already cultural, already making learnt irrational choices of which survival was at best an unintended effect (cf. Miller, 2000).

As for Darwin, beauty is for Deleuze and Guattari intrinsically linked to sex, territory, violence and fear (though this connection is merely implicit in Deleuze’s solo-authored work). Like the left-Kantian framework, then, the Darwinian and Deleuzo-Guattarian aesthetic understands art as always already constitutive of power relations, though the definition of true art is that it also manages to escape its biopolitical functionality. Cathedrals and pyramids are massive condensations of exploitation and hierarchy but usually also contain great artistic merit almost anyone can enjoy.

As much recent art testifies, it is not that aestheticization automatically equals depoliticization. I welcome the call for thinking how art relates to geography. But one does not have to be a ‘vulgar’ Marxist to understand that when inspiration comes from art, science, ontology, therapy, autobiography, spiritual experience, but not politics, there emerges a deficit in the constructive impact the discipline can have. In contrast to many with ‘politics’, I do not mean simply creating or imagining something unexpected and joyful but collective strategic action, occupation, sabotage, street protest possibly including rioting, investigation, continuous debate and critique, all with the aim of immediately dismantling capitalism. Deborah Dixon has elsewhere explored, following Jacques Rancière, how bioart is capable of exposing exclusions and ambiguities (Dixon, 2009), but to me art does not and cannot replace politics as strategic, messy, sometimes violent mass action. Obviously, politics contains its own affectional registers in order to be effective (slogans, drums, posters, YouTube videos) but that is another matter.

It is furthermore important to understand the whole thematic of the non-human and the vital is to a large extent capitalism’s fantastic way of alluring us to muse over the vivid animality, spatiotemporal compressibility, hidden propensities and ultimately consumability of everything around us. Such is the magic Marx called commodity fetishism. Through its machineries of quantification and continuous moulding of instinct, capitalism has always been supremely post-human. The response is indeed to reinvent the aesthetic, to follow capitalism’s alienating dimensions even further, but in a way that jams its destructive and enslaving effects. In a century during which profound ecological and economic crises are bound to tear apart, the global social fabric aestheticization cannot but occur in parallel with the reimagination of a global communist project.

Just as science and rationality inspire art, artistic renderings of landscape and planetary change can instigate affects that can, in the Rancièrian framework, consolidate the rationalities of politics. This does not mean art has to be moralistic, as certainly has been the case in most official communist and socialist art. Art cannot be subordinated to beliefs and programmes if it is to retain its creative edge. On the other hand, there is an unfortunate tendency in cultural geography and the humanities to think politics is exhausted by artistic expression. I am arguing – with the ex-Althusserian to the left of Rancière, Alain Badiou (2008) – that art and politics each have their own essential way of thinking. It is the task of philosophy to ascertain how they converge on a conceptual level. Making them indiscernible as consumer democracy does is to the detriment of both.

I will close with the famous words written in 1819 by John Keats (in Barnard, 1988: 345–346) exercising his exuberant aesthetic sensitiveness on an elaborately decorated urn from ancient Athens:

For the Romantic the ultimate meaning of our brief sojourn on earth lies in being awed by its eternal, entangled (brede = braid), erotic opulence whether depicted through art or not. But humans find and defend truth as much in politics and science as in art and love (these are for Badiou the four ‘truth procedures’ which condition philosophy). There is still much to commend in a commitment to beauty, as long as it does not smother geography’s other commitments.