Old Masters and New Lessons - Grant Kester

morals of others, but by the aesthetic nature we have made our own.(35)
One can postulate ideal forms of society endlessly, but without also engaging the difficult
questions raised by how these models might be applied, they remain ineffectual abstractions. On
the one hand, the aesthetic provides an autonomous refuge or sanctuary apart from
instrumentality and self-interest. At the same time, the aesthetic serves as a kind of navigational
marker toward the telos of a society that is united in a non-coercive common sense. But the very
disengagement from the object (and by extension, from worldly concerns) that provides the
disinterested outlook with a perspective from which to criticize existing social values (and from
which to imagine something better) also prevents it from engaging in any concrete way with the
forms of political and social power that maintain, and are maintained by, those values. The
principle of an Enlightenment aesthetic is denied any means of practical or empirical application.
Its effects can be produced only in the realm of ideas, and the actual transformation of society
remains a teleological principle rather than a practical goal.
This issue seeks to challenge the disengagement of the aesthetic from political discourse
not by denying the knowledge produced by the body and the senses, but by analyzing the ways
in which this knowledge both resists and collaborates with forms of social, cultural, and political
power. In place of a preoccupation with beauty the following essays might be said to concern
themselves with the political economy of the aesthetic. Dunn and Leeson call for a new
"aesthetics of collaboration" based on "interdisciplinary approaches to change in our
environment, culture, and communications." Susan Buck-Morss discusses the "anesthetizing"
effect of modern culture, which works to suppress our bodily capacity for "critical cognition." She
rejects the idea that sense-based experience can be partitioned from a political consciousness,
arguing instead that "cultural meanings are sensed bodily as being wrong." "How else," argues
Buck-Morss, "are people capable of social protest? . . . I want to say that aesthetics is the body's
form of critical cognition, and that this sensory knowledge can and should be trusted politically."
Greig Crysler and Abidin Kusno suggest that Hickey's "therapeutic institutions" (even those with
no particular interest in "art" per se) are quite capable of deploying aesthetic techniques that
engage the viewer on the level of somatic or bodily experience.(36) Thus, the Holocaust