non sublime traditions-in sample assignment at cheapassiignmenthelp.com

Draft, Tom Lee September, 2015

In this article I point to some common threads in recent critiques of the Kantian sublime offered by prominent literary critics and philosophers, including Sianne Ngai, Bruno Latour and Steven Connor. For my purposes the accuracy and legitimacy of these critiques in their reading of Kant’s work is less important than the interest they generate for speculation. If Kant becomes a straw man for the purpose of new ideas to meet then so be it. In this sense my ambitions are to facilitate a meeting between hitherto disconnected contemporary theory that grows in importance when it’s synthesised. The sublime and its negations function as an organising principle that brings together this important new work which points in many different directions. Furthermore, The sublime warrants scrutiny due to its centrality and persistence in aesthetic theory and philosophical work on the relationship between humans and nature.

For each of these writers the question of the aesthetic has functioned as a lens through which to address broader questions that tend to be answered differently in the arts and humanities, and the sciences and mathematics. In my analysis I look at how activities, perceptual experiences and scenography associated with the sciences and mathematics are often conceived in opposition to aesthetic experiences as theorised in contemporary art criticism and theory. I compare and contrast Ngai’s work on minor aesthetic categories, particularly ‘the interesting’ with Latour’s aestheticisation of scientific practice and Connor’s efforts to look at the way experiences of number characteristic of modernity have been expressed in literature and poetry. I conclude with the proposition that the discipline of design holds a good deal of promise not only as a mediating force between the humanities and the sciences but as discipline that in its very conception necessitates that less emphasis is put on the oppositional relationship between subject and object and the various misleading, though efficacious dichotomies—of quality and quantity, the human and the machine, life and death—which to some extent have limited either purely scientific or artistic understandings of making and action.

A ‘ticklish nature’, Bruno Latour’s antidote to the sublimeIn a number of recent publications Bruno Latour has mounted a somewhat fleeting but nonetheless vehement attack on the aesthetic category of the sublime and the kinds of responses to nature it is likely to engender (2010, 2013). Latour’s contention is that the sublime, in particular the philosophy of the sublime articulated by Kant, is an outmoded model for thinking about the relationship between humans and nature. Sublime nature is non-human, wild, indifferent and amoral. It is unmuddied by scientific knowledge, unmediated by concepts and

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culturally inherited ideas.1 By contrast Latour proposes that it is through the interest generating capacity of scientific knowledge that humans learn to be affected by nature (2004).

The contrast between these two views can be crudely demonstrated in a couple of examples. One can think, for instance, of a tourist travelling to an utterly foreign place and experiencing the full majesty of its newness as sublime. We are familiar with the refrain: ‘like seeing something for the first time.’ In such cases the purity and force of the experience, of the direct encounter, is contingent on directness and instantaneousness. Kant equates this view with that of the poets. In Latour’s view this is either a misleading or limited way to experience a place. In his view it is through our knowledge (knowledge afforded by science and technology) that such a visitor could learn to feel and to recognise the distinctiveness and complexity of what might have been an overwhelming, alien place. Perhaps the visitor in this second example is a forestry scientist with expert knowledge of the grasses in the region. Unlike the tourist, she can distinguish between the different kinds of grass, their relative abundance, the fauna they are likely to habour, their maturity, health and so on.2

In his Gifford Lectures in 2013 and in a copublished paper with Émilie Hache titled “Morality or Moralism: An Exercise in Sensitisation”, Latour we find Latour’s suggestive, to some extent caricatured critique. He opposes Kant’s view that humans “must set aside [their] knowledge in order to experience the sublime” (2010, 9) with that of Michel Serres for whom science teaches us of a “much more complex history” (106) in which humans and things are intimately implicated. Latour performs a reading of a section of Serres’ work which highlights the active and constitutive role non-humans (the rock in the myth of Sisyphus) play in the philosophical narrative. By contrast, Kant allows nature to speak in its tempestuous glory, but does not listen to, or receive well its commands with regard to the question of human morality: “For Kant, people had to be deaf (to nature) in order to respond to the voice of humanity within us” (7). For Serres and for the view articulated in James Lovelock’s notion of Gaia (of which Latour also offers a reading) human morality is an open question that is contingent on the beings it incorporates in its deliberations and the specific role they play. Science is key in making deliberations available.

A similar though less explicit critique of the sublime is offered in 1 “Similarly, as to the prospect of the ocean, we are not to regard it as we, with our minds stored with knowledge on a variety of matters, . . . are wont to represent it in thought . . . Instead of this we must be able to see sublimity in the ocean, regarding it, as poets do, according to what the impression upon the eye reveals.” Critique of Judgement § 29, p. 122.2 Ian Hacking astutely demonstrates how the oft-mentioned, unloved rock that functions as an example in the hands of philosophers can become a highly complex object for a geologist sensitised to the object by technologies and the knowledge of their discipline (1999).

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“Facing Gaia” (2013), Latour’s Gifford Lectures. Here he outlines the philosophical implications of the Anthropocene, with specific reference to Lovelock’s notion of Gaia and Isabelle Stengers’ notion of ‘ticklish nature’:

Nature, the Nature of olden days, might have been indifferent, overpowering, a cruel stepmother, but for sure it was not ticklish! Its complete lack of sensitivity was on the contrary the source of thousands of poems and what allowed Her to trigger by contrast the feeling of the sublime: we, humans, were sensitive, responsible and highly moral: not Her. Gaia, however, seems to be overly sensitive to our action, and It appears to react incredibly fast to what It feels and detects. (2013, 96)

Gaia is what ‘nature’ becomes in the Anthropocene era—and what it always was, implicitly, in modernity. Something at once responsive to human activities and to which humans should feel compelled to respond. Nature is not a given, not part of our environment, but something that arises as a result of human activity. Thus, nature is not a force we can invoke to silence debate, but something determined by making explicit “matters of concern that gather within their many contradictory folds varied groups of folks that are in disagreement and vast amounts of knowledge that are always necessarily in dispute not because they are not objective but because they transform everybody’s world” (116). To talk about and to point to nature in this sense is less a task of deciding what is than deciding what ought to be.

Latour’s ‘ticklish nature’, inherited from Stengers, involves a scenography that is significantly different to the awe-struck but morally smug humans we might imagine in a scene exemplifying the Kantian sublime. Kant’s theory of the sublime leaves us with images of hostile, depopulated landscapes where nature dwarfs, terrifies and inspires awe in the human spectator. The sublime offers a transformative, cathartic experience, where the human is first overpowered by the intensity of a vision induced by the natural world, and then comforted in the notion of a human morality that transcends the otherness of the object (nature) before it.

While the Kantian sublime is characteristically mute and beyond measure, Latour’s ticklish nature is significant and its relationship to scale is diverse and dynamic. The images Latour selects for his account of a field trip to Boa Vista in chapter two of Pandora’s Hope provide a good indication of the kind of human-to-nature relations he has in mind. The images form a series which tells a story about the way a group of soil scientists in the Amazon gather information about the landscape. There are no towering mountains, no lone, trembling humans, no tempestuous storms. A deliberate effort is made to establish common tropes across the various pictures. We read each in relation to the next and a distinctive pictorial grammar emerges. This explicit temporal aspect to the images already distinguishes them from

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examples of the sublime, which are characteristically intense and synchronic. By contrast, each of Latour’s pictures suggests a further episode, an unfolding of latent detail. We read them diachronically, following each indication into the next. In this sense Latour’s description of the “photo-philosophical montage” as a map rather than a picture seems instructive (24). Maps are visual artefacts that work to the extent that they can be followed. Latour’s images are a photographic map that allows us to follow the transformation of nature according to the multiplication and articulation of different perspectives. Whereas the sublime involves a spectacular nature that confronts the human observer with forceful immediacy, ticklish nature is read as trace and interface.

All the images feature humans or technology in addition to the more generically natural aspects of the settings (vegetation, ground and sky). The character of the human presence in the landscape is purposeful. It is abundantly clear that this is a group of humans getting to know a place. Their gestures are directed outwards: pointing, scrupulous stares, digging, arranging, selecting, comparing. The humans and the technology might be the focus of the images, however, the focus of the humans and the technology is obviously their surrounds, and it is not merely a visual focus: hands are often involved in the perceptual activity, bodies adopt certain postures according to the demands of measurement and documentation. Thus, as the title of Latour’s chapter suggests, there is a sense of “circulating reference” from humans and technology, to nature, back to humans and so on, almost to the extent that it makes less sense to distinguish the two than, as Latour would say, to trace the links between various actors. We might ask the question: where is nature in these images? In one sense it might be posited in the surrounds of which the humans take note, though, in another perhaps more compelling sense, we might posit under construction in the notes themselves. Nature is thus not something we can point to as part of an environment, but “the extended consequence of an event” (2013, 71)—to use a Whiteheadian phrase Latour employs in his Gifford lectures that further highlights the diachronic aspect of the images.

Unlike the figures we might imagine in a scene exemplifying the sublime, Latour’s humans work in groups, or, when they are alone, they occupy too much of the frame to induce affects associated with isolation and awe-struck responses to natural magnitude. One portrait-style image features a woman smiling, holding a tuft of grass and a note pad, another features a man digging with a shovel, another a man kneeling on in the grass working some implement with his hands. The affect could not be more contrasting to what we expect from the sublime.

We can gain some insight into Latour’s intent in the selection and arrangement of these images by looking at a comparable account that

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rather than focusing on the question of nature focuses on society. We move from the savannah to Paris. In the photographic essay, “Paris: Invisible City”, Latour and Emilie Hermant attempt to account for the Paris that cannot be captured in a single shot, in a panorama: “No, there are no more panoramas – or rather, the engineers and calculators use only clever dioramas to offer a bird's eye view of some vista. To take it all in at once, to ‘dominate it at a glance’, to calculate the flows, Paris first has to become small” (2006, 4). The ambitions articulated here are clearly inimical to the sublime, which deals with environments that cannot be measured or calculated and in a scale that dwarfs the human. By contrast, Latour’s photographic philosophy seeks to account for the way big, unknownable, impossible to navigate environments are transformed into a small, manageable, suggestive, series of perspectives that can be read alongside each other.

Ngai and the merely interestingThe recent work of Sianne Ngai is central to a growing interest in aesthetic categories. Ngai’s proposition is that analysis of minor categories such as ‘the interesting’, ‘the cute’ and ‘the zany’ have more contemporary relevance than the well-rehearsed discussions of the sublime and the beautiful which primarily derive from the work of late 18th century thinkers like Kant and Edmund Burke among others (2012, 57). Ngai proposes that we need a more diverse range of aesthetic categories that are adequate to the kinds of art objects and commodities that compose postindustrial, late-capitalist societies. She suggests that ‘the zany’, ‘interesting’, and ‘the cute’ are: “best suited for grasping how the concept of ‘aesthetic’ has been transformed by the performance driven, information-saturated and networked, hypercommodified world of late capitalism” (2010, 948).

Ngai’s work is largely focused on things that bear the explicit signs of human making: media and art objects, literature and poetry, and design. The fraught question of representation of ’nature’ and its relationship to the human is not explicitly discussed in her work. Similarly, unlike much of the earlier work on the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque, the discussion of landscapes is largely absent from her analysis. Although Latour’s critique of the sublime is motivated by different imperatives to Ngai’s analysis, her work illuminates the less explicitly articulated aesthetic terrain implicit in his philosophy. In comparing the two we can see how differently a discourse surrounding ‘the interesting’ functions in the arts and the sciences.

In an era where the idea of a nature outside the human was tenable and popular, it perhaps made sense to limit the discussion of minor categories to the domestic, culturally produced items Ngai favours. But this approach seems less appropriate in an era where the world has become a greenhouse (Sloterdijk 2013), where even the

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most pristine wilderness is preserved for its value as a media object, when talking about the “great indoors” makes as much sense as the great outdoors (Smith 2013) and when historians tell us that what were once considered to be unmanaged landscapes where in fact subject to complex land management practices (Gammage 2011). If, as Peter Sloterdijk suggests, the capitalist world interior grows to encompass more of the world, then aesthetic catagories appropriate to the discussion of interior, domesticated things, spaces of pampering and their associated affects presumably share in this increase in scope.

With reference to Silvan Tomkins work on affect, Ngai notes the connectedness of the interesting and the kind of attention required for scientific work. Whereas the sublime is sudden and climactic, the interesting is a slow drip, a capacity which Tomkins suggests is conducive to “sustained immersion—[where one is] able to come back again and again to the same problem until there is a breakthrough” (cited in Ngai, 786). The affective profile of the sublime is characterised by intense emotions that “flare up” and dissipate (786), while the interesting is characterised by recursion and ongoingness (786). Ngai equates this with the narratival or episodic element of the interesting:

In contrast to the once-and-for-allness of our experience of, say, the sublime, the object we find interesting is one we tend to come back to, as if to verify that it is still interesting. To judge something interesting is thus always, potentially, to find it interesting again. In contrast to the “suddenness” Karl Heinz Bohrer celebrates as the essence of the aesthetic relation, here aesthetic experience seems narrativized or to unfold in a succession of episodes (786)

According to Ngai and thinkers like Tomkins, Ralph Barton Perry and William James from whose work she draws, interest is “the minimal condition of our experiential reality” (785), a sense of something being different from something else. This barely detectable difference and the ongoing work required to establish and maintain its significance leads to contrasting attitudes and practices from scientists on the one hand, and conceptual artists on the other. In the examples of conceptual art Ngai describes, the interesting always approaches the banal and the bathetic. The uncertainty associated with whether a distinction or gesture of significance has occurred, “is clearly the source of the association of the interesting with ambivalence, coolness or neutrality” (789). In the art world, this uncertainty surrounding the question of significance, and the concomitant minimisation of affect, stereotypically manifests in an attitude of irony, whereas in the world of science, it is tied to demands for a form of objectivity that is valued to the extent it remains unaffected by subjective sentiments. Ngai

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equates this tendency in the work of late twentieth century novelists and artists with “increase[ing] the proportion of boredom—in the ratio of boredom to interest paradoxically internal to interest” (791). In what is no doubt a too neater comparison, one might argue that in the work of scientists there is a matched though alternative increase in the proportion of interest in the same interest to boredom ratio.

We can see the experience of interest generation in scientific practice at work in Latour’s article “How to Talk About the Body”. Latour describes the process by which ‘noses’ in the perfume industry are trained to become more variously affected by smells through the use of an odour kit. According to Latour, prior to using the kit the untrained noses are “unable to differentiate much more than ‘sweet’ and ‘fetid’” but with the assistance of the expertly arranged odours and with technical training, they “discriminate more and more subtle differences”, “able to tell [each smell] apart from one another, even when they are masked by or mixed with others” (207). These minimal, previously unimportant differences are brought into being for the noses through the help of expertly designed kits. In this account, aesthetic perception is the consequence of a combination of knowledge, training and technology. It paints a contrasting image both to the attitude of irony adopted by the conceptual artist who can no longer distinguish between trivia and novelty, and to the human subject undergoing an experience of the sublime induced by an indifferent, overwhelming nature.

Drawing on the work of Stengers and Vivian Despret, Latour even suggests that interestingness is among the criteria which qualifies something as scientific. He echoes Whitehead (on whom Stengers has extensively written) who offered the typically quotable observation that “it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true” (259).3 In the context of Latour’s work, this informs his interpretation of science not as a discipline isn’t about establishing “incontrovertible and indisputable facts” but “producing through the institutions of many disciplines and the monitoring of many instruments, robust access to a great number of entities with which the polity has to be built” (2013, 131). Science is not primarily about producing truth but making distinctions which facilitate action and distinctions that facilitate action are interesting.

An awareness of the contingency of significance is less surprising subject matter in the art world and provokes a distinctively different attitude in the artists and artworks Ngai analyses. In John Baldessari’s A Person Was Asked to Point, Ngai looks at the way the gesture of pointing draws our attention to the role and the aesthetic of the arbitrary in the selection, display and dissemination of information or 3 In his introduction to the special issue of Configurations devoted to Whitehead’s work, Steven Meyer points out that this is a conception of truth in the pragmatist tradition of William James (2005, 9)

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subject matter. Baldessari’s is a series of photographs with “a male hand point to things that were interesting to him” (803). The gesture itself is as much the focus as the object. Pointing allows the pointer to highlight some aspect of their environment as significant and to disperse themselves through a given context through the act of signification, being located in the body that does the pointing and the location where that body directs interest. In this sense it functions as a rudimentary form of mark making. This artwork then formed the basis of Baldessari’s next piece where he invited amateur artists select one of his images to paint. He then had their name painted prominently at the bottom of the picture by a sign painter. In an account of the work that Ngai quotes, Baldessari describes the idea of the work as being to do with the emergence of art through this series of significance making measures, from the original gesture of pointing, to the photographs, to their selection for painting, to the affixing the artists name at the base—closing the cycle of Peirceian representations (Index: pointing; Icon: painting; Symbol: name).4

Latour’s photographic montage in Pandora’s Hope treats the process of significance making in a different fashion, despite the similar emphasis on the emergence of an entity of value through pointing and other rudimentary gestures of indexation. He describes the transition from field work where the scientists were “immersed in a world in which distinct features could only be discerned if pointed out with a finger” to a meeting in a restaurant where the scientists look at and point to the world as map, which has been filtered through the knowledge of their various disciplines and technologies (29). The distinction making faculties of the scientists are in part outsourced to techniques and technologies that allow for them to be more variously affected by their environment. The process here is one of sensitisation through technology and training. Uncertainty is not mitigated through the self-insulating response of irony but through multiplying the range of techniques that allow one to bear witness to events of significance.

There is at once common ground and divergence in Latour’s aestheticisation of scientific practice and Ngai’s analysis of the late Twentieth century conceptual art. While the artwork Ngai analyses often involves techniques of information display used in the sciences, it does under the pretext of irony. By contrast, Latour is making a non-ironic argument that suggests the aestheticisation of science might lead humans being increasingly sensitised to otherwise imperceptible though important aspects of their environments.

Connor, Ngai, aesthetic-non-aesthetic and the interestingSteven Connor is a literary critic and self-styled ‘cultural 4 Perhaps by chance the forms of representation used by Baldessari’s correspond to the varieties identified by American pragmatist philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce (1982).

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phenomenologist’ who brings poetic writing and academic scruple to bear on a motely, never less than suggestive, range of topics, including: ventriloquism flies, skin, the air and sport. Connor experienced something like a conversion—at least in terms of his publishing output—when he decided to use specific things, objects in the world, to strike sparks of his thinking instead of relying overly on the epistemological trickery that had been the mainstay of cultural theory in the period of his academic adolescence. Connor began to write about the puzzling actuality of objects rather than the questions to do with the freedoms and limitations of subjects, such as those to do with gender, class, sexuality, race and the construction of different identities.5

Like Ngai and Latour, Connor offers an alternative to an aesthetic theory modeled on the sublime. Among Connor’s targets is the seemingly inevitable celebration of the unknowable, the irrational and immeasurable that accompanies the sublime, a tendency he equates with the “suspicion of the allegedly normalising and disciplinary form of moderation, and the consequent inability to conceive value other than in terms of excess or immeasurability”(2012). He has a keen nose for any effort to use the aesthetic as an excuse to advocate the indefinable through theory. Along with Jean-Francois Lyotard, who Connor takes to task in “Doing Without Art” (2009), Roland Barthes is also identified as a culprit who falls back on a crutch common to formulations of aesthetic value modelled on the Kantian sublime:

Barthes, it is well-remembered, proposed that there were two kinds of reading pleasure. The first was the pleasure produced by texts that adapt themselves to readerly expectations – it is the pleasure of recognition, concordance, adequation. The second, provided by the ‘‘text of bliss’, is the pleasure not of recognition, but of discomfiture and dissolution. As opposed to the text which complies with readerly requirements and expectations, the text of bliss provides the ecstatic exhilaration of that which destroys coherence and thwarts expectation. This is a formulation that by now has its own homeliness, since it belongs to such a ploddingly familiar pattern of thought. Underlying it ultimately is Kant’s distinction between the beautiful, which is subject to pre-existing concepts, and the sublime, which escapes all measure, and all concept. (2012).

Barthes’ advocacy of the unknowable is a symptom Connor identifies as common to cultural theorists and critics who place a misguided emphasis on potential emptied of content, without adequate mindfulness of the richness of actuality or the given:

…the one way, the repeated way, the art way, in which things are put to the side of, or minimally substracted from themselves when they are art, is a very

5 Connor outs himself as in part inspired by the shift from epistemology to ontology provoked by Latour and sub disciplines of Science Studies and Actor Network Theory with which he is associated (2010, 3).

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spindly kind of thing compared with the ways in which things are what they are. Artists and their retainers like to say that art adds something to the mere givenness of the world and therefore helps things to be more than mere things, but I can make no sense of the idea of the world as “merely” given. The ways in which things are what they are are much more hugely multifarious and, of course, as modes of perception and interpretation ramify, more capable of almost infinite expansion, than the ways in which art is capable of suspending this givenness. (2009)

We can perhaps register the echoes of a well-worn philosophical debate about theory and experiment here, with Connor on the side of the tinkerer who likes to let things and their manipulation lead the way, with new potential unfolding from actuality, rather than the theorist or rationalist who argues the consequences of getting mixed up in things must be informed by knowledge of some more widely applicable principle (a conviction, about gravity, identity or whatever)—even if, paradoxically in this case, that principle is knowledge of the unknowable that art, if indeed it is genuine art, will inevitably bring. In this sense Connors gripe is with a form of thought that proleptically justifies why art objects should exist and why art making should go on as a mode of activity. He takes issue with the idea that the value of all art is claimed to be this non-specific but in the end homogenous thing (homogenous because the unknowable or indefinable is one kind of unknowable or indefinable) that offers an alternative to the world that is. By contrast, as a kind of purgative measure, Connor argues that we should practice a studious resistance to speaking of what art does, which isn’t to say the energies involved in art-making—“the pleasure in order or pattern,the instinct for play, the narrative impulse, empathy and the imaginingof other minds and experiences, and the projection of other worlds or alternative ways of arranging this one”(56-57)—ought not remain exercised.

Perhaps Connor’s issue with some of the rhetorical claims surrounding what art does can in part be explained by the fact that in late-capitalist modernity, where the place of the arts and humanities in the university grows increasingly tenuous, artists must seek to counter their actual influence with flatulent rhetoric about what what they do does—here echoing the phrasing of Michel Foucault to which Connor appeals in an interview on cultural studies (2003).6 Perhaps artists should seek to avoid the inevitable knots of self-justification and their resulting hollowness by simply owning up to the no less hollow and formulaic but more adequate reason that informs all systems of practicing, that is, that they seek to prolong themselves in the face of improbability. Alternatively, the arts might have to get used to rethinking their essentially insular role as the safe keepers of creative 6 Connor suggests that unlike Foucault he doesn’t find much to despair of in this uncertainty (2003).

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freedom and instead see what comes from being faced with the same imperative that Latour invokes in his characterisation of sciences: to “provide robust access to a great number of entities with which the polity has to be built.”

Connor’s criticisms of the way art and the aesthetics are talked about in the humanities meet with his recent turn towards writing about the ways in which the quantifiable finds its way into phenomenological experience, particularly as evidenced in the work of modernist novelists and poets. In his talk “Blissed Out: On Hedonophobia”, Connor argues that the celebration of the immeasurable, the excessive and the infinite has become a predicable routine that masks the fact that pleasure can equally be understood and experienced according to economic, mechanical, principles and procedures. Connor refers to a scene from Charles Dickens’ Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit to lend substance to his claims:

All the farmers being by this time jogging homewards, there was nobody in the sanded parlour of the tavern where he had left the horse; so he had his little table drawn out close before the fire, and fell to work upon a well-cooked steak and smoking hot potatoes, with a strong appreciation of their excellence, and a very keen sense of enjoyment. Beside him, too, there stood a jug of most stupendous Wiltshire beer; and the effect of the whole was so transcendent, that he was obliged every now and then to lay down his knife and fork, rub his hands, and think about it. (2012, 4)

Here we see an example of the routinisation of pleasure. In contrast to the stereotypically non-domestic examples that characterise conventional accounts of transcendental aesthetic experiences patterned on the sublime, the farmer’s experience of enjoyment is both thoroughly domesticated, and, more importantly in this context, subject to measure, as evidenced in the his pacing out of the satisfaction that ensues from his meal and beverage. As Connor remarks, “pleasure is intimately intermingled with temporal experience” (2012, 4). It is not difficult to think of a substantial set of like instances where part of the pleasure comes down to reflecting on how much of something remains to be had, how far one has got and got to go, how this measures up to that and how it might measure differently in some time to come.

According to this view, pleasure is available as something to which one might regularly return, rather than a sudden, effervescent epiphany. This is strikingly different to experiences of the sublime that are defined by their suddenness. By stopping to pause and reflect the farmer effectively prolongs the pleasure, reassured that its vivacity will not dissipate—at least while his meal still remains. Like Ngai’s characterisation of the seriality associated with interesting phenomena, his pleasure is as an “every now and then” to which he regularly returns. Measurement and rationalistion play an integral role

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in his experience. His experience, like his meal, is broken down into portions, it is rationed out. Like the “reflective art of the 1960s” which Ngai describes as having “the look of capitalist modernity itself, especially in its tendency toward rationalization” (792), in this example we similarly see this rationalising principle at work, only in the absence of any notes of irony.

It could be a happy accident that this example and Latour’s noses involve senses that have occupied a relatively lowly position in the tradition of aesthetics. Both smell and gustatory taste play a relatively peripheral role in the aesthetic theory the foundations of which were set in the late eighteenth century work of Burke and Kant (Korsmeyer 2014). Unlike breathtaking views, food and smells are so pervasively and routinely encountered for most people that they don’t seem to possess the requisite specialness to qualify for aesthetic experiences. Of course, thinkers like Barthes and his apprentices have done their bit to bring food into cultural analysis so to some extent the peripherality has been corrected (1997). Nonetheless, it still doesn’t seem right to describe a smell as sublime, no matter how terrifying or powerful. And while it is imaginable for food experiences to transcend the everyday through impressive feats of preparation, sourcing or setting, most of the sensuous pleasure derived from the experience of eating is to do with things measuring up to expectations. The inapplicability of the sublime to the great variety of pleasures and non-pleasures peculiar to taste and smell further highlights it the limitations of an aesthetic theory where it functions as a paradigm.

Another spin on Connor’s criticism of aesthetics and its entailed ideas is to read it as an argument for the centrality of the aesthetic (or nonaesthetic) category of the interesting. To this extent Connor would be fulfilling Ngai’s imperative that we need different aesthetic philosophies and theories to those of the sublime and the beautiful. This is paradoxical in light of Connor’s aforementioned antipathy to any talk of aesthetics as such. In “Doing Without Art” (2009) he conjectures that calling an experience ‘aesthetic’ is often just an instance of semantic elevation in a similar sense to the way the word ‘real’ functions when politicians talk about ‘real solutions’. To say an experience is ‘aesthetic’ as opposed to ‘an experience’ is a way of invoking a specific audience likely to value whatever non-specific thing the aesthetic is said to do or be (perhaps most obviously, not calculate or measure) but it doesn’t make sense as a way to distinguish the specificity of that experience from other candidates for kinds of experience. In other words, he argues that ‘the aesthetic’ is a category without meaningful content aside from its pragmatic value as vague, belief engendering description.7 However, this ambivalence has the 7 The literary and art critic Charles Altieri offers a compelling analysis of Connors paper in the same journal (New Literary History, Volume 42, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 81-85.)

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paradoxical consequence of bringing his thinking even closer to the interesting, which according to Ngai, is the aesthetic category through which we witness the ambiguity between aesthetic and nonaesthetic judgments (778). Furthermore, the issues that Connor highlights to do with providing a reliable set of criteria to define an aesthetic experience or an art object as such are similarly raised by Ngai in relation to the interesting:

Because the problem posed by the interesting is thus not a dearth of admissible evidence but rather the proliferation of too many kinds, the task of legitimizing this aesthetic judgment becomes unusually difficult to the extent that it also becomes too easy. Anything can presumably count as evidence at one moment or another for the interesting, and so no particular kind of evidence will ever seem especially or finally convincing. (780-781)

Interesting objects, unlike beautiful or sublime objects, lack a distinctive set of commonly held features. As an “aesthetic without content” (781) in this sense, the interesting belongs to the future tradition toward which Connor’s critiques of the sublime and the beautiful gesture.

Aside from these key points evidenced in the Dickensian scene, there are a number of other elements shared by Connor’s characterisation of what he would prefer to call pleasure (which has more modest, earthy ambitions than aesthetics) and Ngai’s account of minor (also modest) aesthetic catagories and their associated affects. Both represent efforts to understand the way sensory and emotional experience have changed in response to certain influential developments said to define the period we give the necessarily crude label modernity: the pervasive influence of number and the associated institutions and styles of reasoning that are endemic to cultures that depend on number for administration and function, and the way that work and leisure have become increasingly diffuse and mixed up realms, both in the sense that entertainment, whether for work or pleasure, seems to increasingly define what citizens of late-captialist modernity do, and in the sense that work has crept increasingly into previously impenetrable spheres of leisure time. If we are to credit the lines of inquiry followed by Ngai and Connor, this new work/life format requires an understanding of pleasure and displeasure.

Design as an antidote (unfinished section)Historically, the sublime, and to a lesser extent the beautiful, have defined our expectations of what it is to see and to be in nature. The Kantian idea persists to a significant degree: that we have only genuinely experienced nature, that great other of humanity, when we have experienced the sublime. The idea of the ‘wilderness’ is tinged by the sublime, an untamed place free from human influence, very different from the nature depicted in Latour’s images. Nature lovers

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seeking the sublime expect a transformative experience and this experience is thereby used as the paradigm against which to measure the value of a journey into nature. Yet despite the undoubted influence the sublime holds in the way nature is conceived and constructed, it often plays a secondary role when compared to the more pervasive but no less important experience of the interesting. This is particularly so in a world where the reach of the human activities, in particular science, increases in scope. Things like the identification and numbering of different species, topographical measurement, any experience of reading, interpreting and documenting a landscape, all involve perceptual experience that is defined by interest rather than the sublime. One can’t bring back the sublime to show others, but one can provoke interest. The easy with which interest is transmitted…

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