Art Criticism - The State University of New York

make a distinctive contribution to a critical hermeneutics of modernity. As will
become clear, the bulk of my remarks are philosophical; I strongly believe that
we need to reflect upon the social, political, and ethical stakes of what we do in
the classroom. This essay addresses then not only how we might wake up
students in the art history survey and revitalize the curriculum, but why do so
at all.
Community and Modernity
First I would like to offer a very schematic account of what I mean by
community and how higher education contributes to blocking its formation.
Loosely following Hegel's account in the Phenomenology of Spirit,
we can say that there are three basic modalities of "self-consciousness," three
modes of self-formation that emerge in our everyday practices. All of these
involve the desire for self-integrity: that a prior and internalized sense of self
correspond to or harmonize with the sense of self emergent and embodied in an
ongoing practice. 5
The first mode of striving for self-integrity is consumption. This is
when one appropriates what is other than oneself for oneself; one effaces the
difference between the prior internalized sense of self and the surrounding
otherness. The character of consumption is that the negation or annihilation
of external otherness immediately clears the space for the appearance of more
otherness, setting up another moment of potential· consumption, and so on.
Consumption, in the very broad and embracing sense I am using the term, is a
mode of self-emergence that readily fuels further consuming. Although consumption
is essential for sustaining life, it cannot achieve certainty of self.
A second mode of self-consciousness is work. Like consumption it
negates the otherness outside oneself, but does so by self-externalization. We
come to see a "mirroring" of who we are in the product of our labor. Work is
important in achieving self-integrity, but it has significant limitations. First of
all, much work these days is "alienated"; although we produce something
through our labor, we are often unable to experience the product as self-expressive.
6 Second, even when work is successfully expressive, the reality transformed
by one's efforts is not another human self, hence it is a relatively weak
echo of who one is. And yet work matters for our identities. In our daily lives
we regularly experience varying degrees of satisfaction with our labors, from
dreading tedious bureaucratic paperwork to reveling in expressive acts of writing
conference papers and making art.
A third mode of self-consciousness is recognition. And this requires
another self-consciousness. Recognition is actualized only in interaction
with other human beings qua persons. In the Hegelian scheme, it is the
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