In an exemplary articulation of cultural incommensurability, Borges’s “Averroes’ Search” imagines the difficulty of the Medieval Islamic philosopher Averroes in translating Aristotle’s Poetics. He then reflects on the absurdity of the task he himself had undertaken, to understand or imagine what Averroes meant: “I felt that the work mocked me, foiled me, thwarted me. I felt that Averroes, trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, trying to imagine Averroes.” In a mirror image of this story, “The Argentine Writer And Tradition,” Borges speaks of the absurdity of any attempt to formulate a “national” literature, separate from the foreign influences that Borges himself would go on to creatively assimilate if not downright copy—producing, ironically, the base of modern Argentine literature. The absurdity that Borges discusses extends to any attempt at an anthology of world literature, which would be built on the model of either the addition or inclusion of as many national literatures as possible (or necessary). However, a revaluation of fundamental assumptions about the impositions of Western art upon the putative “Other” might do better to begin with an exploration of the limits of art’s social role within the West and its periphery.
In “The Politics and Limits of Aesthetic Education,”[1] I discuss the consequences of the simultaneous canonization and popularization of European writers in 19th-century Europe. I reveal the strategies that were deployed to mobilize a nationalism based on the Enlightenment conception of art. These very strategies created fault-lines, schisms that were inherent to the constitution of the European 19th-century liberal order. Aesthetic choices were never merely organic, never politically neutral. They replacement of folk culture with a proto-kitsch mass culture discloses these facts (as Peter Burger illustrates). This view of the limits of aesthetic education emerged only after bringing together archival research, on the one hand, and critical theoretical analysis of the social role of art, on the other.
The history and theory of the social role of art is the focus of “Aesthetics and Politics,” a seminar I regularly teach at LS. The course begins with Enlightenment theories on the social role of art (Schiller’s “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”) and ends with Borges’ “Argentine Writer” and Jalal Al-Ahmad’s Westoxication. These last two texts in particular introduce diametrically opposed implications of ‘national’ art in a post-colonial context. Al-e-Ahmad’s revolutionary text originated as a position paper at a congress on national education organized by the Iranian Ministry of Culture in the 1960s. My course traces the textual and historical development of the social role of art after Schiller through the failures of the autonomy of the art project of the 19th century, the subsequent re-politicization of art by the historical avant-garde, the historical logic of the apolitical American Abstract Expressionism, which includes the latter’s exportation to the rest of the world in the Post War period. Borges and Jalal al Ahmad exemplify two different responses from the periphery to Western ideas of both “art for art’s sake” and art that claims a political mission.
[1] In Leerson and Rigney eds., Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth Century Europe: Nation Building and Centenary Fever, (Palgrave, 2014).