CASEY HASKINS

Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network

i. our cultural specialists
An advanced alien species has dispatched some
anthropologists to Earth to study how educated
earthlings think and talk about art, beauty, rep-
resentation, interpretation, and similar subjects.
These aliens are hyper-collectivists. They do most
things together, thanks to a silicon-enhanced
adaptation with which they link their minds into
extended networks when sharing significant ex-
periences or collaborating on complex analytical
tasks.
As the visitors eavesdrop on our conferences
and graduate seminars and peruse our learned
cultural journals, they are struck by the variety
of arcane methodologies and discourses we have
created in this area over the last two centuries.
They are also appalled at how our scholars con-
verse. Their ethnographic report concludes by not-
ing that Although human civilization is entering
a newera of global interconnectivity, their cultural
specialists behave like throwbacks to their age of
medieval theological disputes. They work in prim-
itive clans which quibble endlessly over whether
the value of Bar at the Folies-Berg` ere lies in the
patterning of line and colors or in its represen-
tation of gender relations, whether La Traviata
considered qua music, can express thoughts about
extra-musical life, or whether Casablancas narra-
tive is a source of apolitical cognitive stimulation
or a mimetic mechanismfor colonialist hegemony.
Many of these cultural specialists still share their
eighteenth-century ancestors fantasy that their
carbon-based brains will someday allow a single
clan to achieve a complete and unified theory of
what those ancestors called aesthetic subjects. If
they really wishprogress inthis area (as insomany
others), they need a more evolved understanding
of how the full connectedness of their knowledge
presupposes the full connectedness of knowers in
theory and in practice.
Aliens have always been good at tracking our
civilizational failings. They are, alas, right about
the clannishness (I use aesthetics here, as el-
swhere in its pluralistic, twenty-first-century Ox-
ford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics sense.)
1
But this
clannishness is not entirely graven in stone. Today,
to an unprecedented extent, it is not uncommon to
see philosophers and literary theorists consulting
evolutionary psychologists in explaining the ap-
peal of narratives, feminist art historians drawing
on psychoanalysis in reconstructing the gendered
contexts of images of human beauty, film theo-
rists invoking cognitive science in explaining the
emotional powers of cinematographic styles, mu-
sicologists consulting anthropologists in explain-
ing various differences between Western and non-
Western forms of musical practice, and so on.
The commonplace nature of such collaborative
projects underscores how aesthetics, like other
complex areas of inquiry, including the sciences,
has become not only a multidisciplinary but also a
disunified field. That is, it possesses some kind of
loose organizational integrity in its complex of dis-
ciplines, methodologies, and social communities
an integrity that eludes reduction both to older
humanistic models of theoretical unification and
to earlier postmodernist visions of incommensu-
rable conceptual schemes, nonnegotiably politi-
cized confrontations of ideology, and the like.
But what sort of integrity, more exactly, might
that be? This is a conceptual question that,
while hardly a traditional problem of aesthet-
ics, increasingly haunts the margins of recent
conversations among the aesthetic disciplines.
(One thinks of books like James Elkins, ed.,
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69:3 Summer 2011
c 2011 The American Society for Aesthetics
298 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Art History versus Aesthetics and Francis Halsall,
et al., eds., Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisci-
plinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and
Art Practice.)
2
The questions timeliness for di-
verse cultural specialists suggests that, even at a
time when Adornos adage that no claimabout art
goes without saying seems truer than ever, there
is an area of common intellectual practice that,
whether called aesthetics or something else we
all-too-humancultural specialists still all somehow
share. This area of practice, while being disunified,
is neither entirely clannish (as the aliens worry)
nor hopelessly dreary (as JohnPassmore lamented
years ago) or dead (as some earlier-generation
postmodernists reputedly believed).
What this unruly field will look like even a
decade hence is anyones guess. But there is at
least one across-the-aisle conceptual step that we
might do well collectively to take if we would bet-
ter grasp the human complexities of our own prac-
tice now. This is to think of aesthetics not simply
as a multidisciplinary field, but as an intellectual
network.
ii. two images of the aesthetic eld
What I mean by an intellectual network in-
volves more than just a constellation of dis-
ciplines, methodologies, and scholars. It is an
historically evolving constellation whose constitu-
tive items are somehow, in a way that very much
wants fresh clarification now, linked by the dy-
namics of collaboration and dependent on one
another for their mutual intelligibility and exis-
tence. This approach to conceptualizing collective
inquiry is central to a rapidly growing discipline
social network theorywhose findings pose fresh
challenges to how all fields understand their aims
and methods. My argument that aesthetics is an in-
tellectual network draws equally on themes from
social network theory and the history of philo-
sophical aesthetics. It involves the further thought
that all of the disciplines mentioned above, from
the traditionally humanistic versions of philosoph-
ical aesthetics andart history andcriticismthrough
their various posthumanistic counterdisciplines
the nodes of the networkexhibit a kind of loose
organizational coherence. Such coherence in turn
invites further reflection on what it is for ideas,
methodologies, and their practitioners to depend
on one another in a variety of cooperative and
competitive ways. This point also, as we consider
later, turns out to have a more specific source
within early modern aesthetic thought that puts
the lie to the idea that our subject is in some sim-
ple sense just a postmodern one.
One need not embrace visions of Kuhnian
paradigm shifts in the humanities (if such shifts
occur in any field) in considering how the con-
cept of an intellectual network stands in a cre-
ative tension with older conceptions of what dis-
ciplines are, in aesthetics or elsewhere, and how
they are connected. In particular, a network ap-
proachchallenges traditional images of philosoph-
ical aesthetics or the historical or critical studies
of the arts as being (like disciplines generally) rel-
atively autonomous, atomistic, silo-like entities
things whose integrity depends on their preserv-
ing a certain methodological purity and freedom
from undue intermingling with what lies outside.
In contrast, network thinking invites us to picture
disciplines as sieve-like entities, subject to fuller
informational interpenetration and exchange in
ways that invite a more holistic conception of the
field.
Think of the above tension as projecting two di-
alectically competing images of the aesthetic field,
each with its own heuristic benefits and, as recent
debates about disciplinarity in the humanities un-
derscore, fervent supporters within and without
the academy.
3
There is, in the nature of the case,
no completely neutral ground in this metadisci-
plinary debate, and my own remarks favor the
more holistic, network-oriented image. But we are
dealing with a dialectic, so before we go any fur-
ther it will help to review some of the advantages
and liabilities of the network images more tradi-
tional atomistic alternative.
iii. disciplinary internalism and the myth of
the autonomy fault line
The more atomistic image of the aesthetic field
aligns with two themes that enjoy a certain intu-
itive appeal both in traditional (humanist, mod-
ernist) and progressive (posthumanist, postmod-
ernist) quarters. Neither has a standard name, but
we can call the first disciplinary internalism. This
metadisciplinary stance, rooted in a history of con-
ceptualizing the modern academy that goes back
to the Enlightenment, is intuitively familiar to
academics of any field.
4
Its basic impulse is to
Haskins Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network 299
establish conceptual limits on howinferentially in-
sular the conversational life of a discipline needs
to be in order for it to retain its distinctive identity
and authority, relative to other disciplines, within
our larger culture of knowledge-seeking practices.
A second theme which has historically lent
support to atomistic characterizations of the aes-
thetic disciplines is what I call the myth of the
autonomy fault line. This theme remains popu-
lar on both sides of the humanistposthumanist
aisle. It says, in effect, that underlying all of our
modern conversations about the arts is a deeper
clash between two irreconcilable stances about
that most charged of modern aesthetic proposi-
tions, the proposition that art is, in some general
sense, autonomous. This proposition has two
further variants, both ascendant in academic aes-
thetic theory since Kant, which continue to haunt
the evolving interdisciplinary conversations men-
tioned above in ways that are rarely made very
explicit. One variant attributes to art a special jus-
tificatory autonomy, asserting that art in its central
philosophical sense is a kindof productive practice
whose instances exhibit a distinctive kind of non-
instrumental and nonideological value for all cul-
tural populations. The other variant attributes au-
tonomy to art in a more causalexplanatory sense,
affirming an inferential gap between what makes
things happen in the histories of the fine arts, on
the one hand, and general social history, on the
other.
5
Since the appearance of the first large (and
mainly Marxist) counternarratives of modern aes-
thetic life in the nineteenth century, variants of the
fault line mythology have projected images of the
aesthetic field as an arena for an epic struggle be-
tween theories and thinkers who do and do not,
respectively, affirmvarious ideas about arts conti-
nuity or discontinuity with the rest of modern life.
This war of self-interpretations, which dramati-
cally shapes the ways in which aesthetic scholars
frame their collaborative choices, remains alive
and well today even in supposedly sophisticated
discussions of interdisciplinarity like those cited
earlier (more of this below).
Displinary internalism provides an intuitively
powerful rationale for weighting some scholarly
pronouncements on certain subjects over others
on grounds that the methods of some disciplines
are internally connected to the natures of their
subjects in ways other disciplines methods are
not. This in turn provides a rationale for ignor-
ing the pronouncements of disciplinary outsiders
when experts of different fields appear to hold
clashing views of common subjects. Of course, the
history of modern aesthetics is to a profound de-
gree a history of just such clashes, and here a
more network-oriented approach becomes attrac-
tive. Such an approach does not deny the impor-
tance of expertise. But it leaves a space for a more
open-ended and dialectical discussion of just how
many kinds of expertise might be needed, and it
might prove authoritative for understanding cer-
tain aesthetic and meta-aesthetic subjects.
Imagine, then, how the internalist and network
approaches might differently interpret the de-
bate, central to Art History versus Aesthetics, over
whether and to what extent the traditionally dis-
tinct disciplines of philosophical aesthetics and art
history share much common intellectual ground.
The volumes operating premise is a view of that
relationship that assumes a kind of disciplinary
internalism by default. It says something like this:
philosophers are mainly interested in identifying
universal, ahistorical defining properties of vi-
sual (among other artistic) artifacts and of our
ways of knowing them. Art historians, in contrast,
are more interested in describing and catalogu-
ing visual artifacts with reference to various more
specific contexts of production and reception. In
consequence of these orientations, the argument
continues, philosophers and art historians tend by
training and temperament to talk past each other
and sometimes have difficulty seeing a point in
each others research agendas.
James Elkins offers a provocative parable of
this disciplinary relationship in his essay Why
Dont Art Historians Attend Aesthetics Confer-
ences? He invites us to imagine two societies,
Ah and Ae (corresponding to art history and
philosophical aesthetics, respectively), which in-
habit different islands and occasionally try to
make contact:
One day, a trader arriving from Ah carries with him a
request from the people on Ah for a picture of their
own island as it appears from Ae, and he brings with
him a picture that had been made on Ah, purporting
to show the island Ae. No one on Ae recognizes the
odd shapes in the drawing, but they comply anyway, and
after a time the trader returns with the message that
no one on Ah recognized their island in the strange
picture sent over from Ae. People on the two islands
study the two drawings, and conclude that it is probably
best to stay where they are, since the people on the
300 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
other island clearly cannot draw, and they may not even
be able to see straight. For diplomacys sake they even
send some letters back and forth, arguing about whose
representation is worse, and they end up deciding that
the members of the opposite tribe have no idea how to
talk about pictures to begin with.
6
Art history and philosophical aesthetics are analo-
gized to islands whose communities struggle to
understand each others drawings of their re-
spective locales. This is meant to illuminate the
real-world problems of communication result-
ing from art historians traditional interest in
what Elkins calls the social and historical par-
ticularity of visual artifacts, as contrasted with
philosophical aestheticians traditional interest in
conceptualization, that is, in universal aspects
of visual and other artworks and of what it is to
make critical judgments about such things. To this
extent, the parable reinforces a disciplinary inter-
nalist perspective, at least by default.
Some art historians and philosophical aestheti-
cians (notably philosophical aestheticians wed-
ded to certain eighteenth-century traditions in
their discipline) may find the parable to contain
some truth. But is an island the best topographi-
cal metaphor for what these disciplines (and oth-
ers in the aesthetic field) have become today? As
an alternative, consider the image of hub cities,
which are so nodally interconnected that on some
maps their lines of linkage are more significant
than the cities themselves. The atomisticholistic
visual logic projected by this contrasting pair of
disciplinary images is similar to that of the im-
ages of the silo and the sieve mentioned earlier.
And there are further problems with the logic of
the island parable. One is its implication that all
art historians and philosophical aestheticians, re-
spectively, think and collaborate alike. (The con-
tributions to Art History versus Aesthetics and Re-
discovering Aesthetics quickly put the lie to this
point.) Another is the parables failure to capture
fully how the real-world counterparts of the two
groups of islandersart historians and philosoph-
ical aestheticianshave common subjects of study
even if their methods of studying might sometimes
seem incommensurable and even if, as a matter of
contingent fact, they do not always frequent each
others conferences. To this extent, the parable, in
implying that art historians and philosophers of
art are (or may as well be) talking about differ-
ent things, replicates a classic difficulty of crudely
relativistic views of meaning, reference, and trans-
lation: the problemof howdifferent views of Xcan
be entirely different if they are still, in the end, all
views of X. Yet another problem is that even is-
lands have histories (as do silos), and things with
histories in the real world tend to interact sooner
or later with things outside themselves.
Tobring out this last points further implications
for understanding how disciplines can constitute
networks, consider briefly a more basic ontologi-
cal question: What kinds of things are disciplines?
They are certainly objectively real, but they are
not natural kinds. That is, they are not entities pos-
sessing ahistorically fixed boundaries and equally
fixed internal dynamics that are somehow given
prior to the contingencies of human agency and
interpretation. Better to say that disciplines are,
like other areas of cultural practice, including the
arts, cultural kinds. We might also say, in the id-
iom of Ian Hacking, that disciplines are interactive
kinds. That is, they possess, like communities of
human individuals, a capacity to define and rede-
fine themselves ontologically in accordance with
how, in the course of their history, they get de-
scribed and redescribed within their larger cul-
ture. And the history of a given disciplines self-
redescription is, among other things, the history
of its various interactions with other disciplines,
against the backdrop of changing ideas and be-
havior, bothwithinthe disciplines andinthe larger
culture.
7
And if this is true, then the internalisti-
cally reified image of disciplines as self-standing
islands of intellectual life with settled boundaries
needs tempering by the externalist intuitionthat
a discipline is something whose nature is always
to some degree bound up in its interactions with
an intentional world outside itself.
Shift the focus nowfromontology to anthropol-
ogy. Adisciplines interactive history is a history of
a more general kind of activity in which (although
our aliens seemed not overly impressed with this
fact) human beings engage at different levels all
the time. We exchange thingsall kinds of intel-
lectual and nonintellectual things. This sometimes
happens when, and sometimes because, the ex-
changers find one another so different fromthem-
selves that the fruits of the process take on new
information value. Works of art, which can circu-
late in complex ways both within a given culture
and across different cultures, are familiar cases in
point. Thought and conversation, in a similar vein,
can be viewed as occurring not in some rarefied
Haskins Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network 301
Cartesianspace but incomplex networks of reason
exchanging social practices.
8
Particularly striking
cases of such reason exchanging in academic life
are suggested by the history of the methodologi-
cally disunified field of science. Many of sciences
most important advances resulted from the emer-
gence of trading zones, that is, from pragmatic
coalitions of diverse disciplinarians who pool their
resources to tackle common problems both in
spite of and because they lack a larger unifying
method or theory. When this happens, hitherto
insoluble theoretical problems can find solutions
from creative new syntheses of hitherto isolated
forms of expertise. In the process, disciplines learn
from one another, sometimes exchanging aspects
of one anothers methodologies and vocabular-
ies. These exemplary moments of creative infor-
mation exchange are in turn suggestive of what
systems theory calls a liquid networkan infor-
mational environment whose state falls between
extremes of order and chaos and hence can be a
fertile ground for creative forms of informational
spillover.
9
And as with the sciences, so too, in this respect,
with the aesthetic disciplines. Any two groups of
aesthetic islanders who find themselves com-
municatively alienated at one point in their his-
tory are no more permanently locked into that
relationship than are any two groups in the net-
work of scientific communitiessay, population
geneticists and quantum physicists or psychoan-
alysts and cognitive neuroscientists. The point
generalizes to innumerable further examples of
contingent communal isolation in the social his-
tories of moral, religious, and political life, where
information sooner or later starts flowing in new
ways, collaboratively or competitively, whenever
different communities encounter one another.
The competitive dynamic, of course, is as com-
mon in practice as the cooperative one. As Elkins
comments in a summary assessment of the Art
Seminar series (of which Art History versus Aes-
thetics is one installment), sustained critical dialec-
tical exchanges of the sort that embody a certain
ideal of interdisciplinary collaboration are still
rare enough in conversations between art histo-
rians and at least certain philosophical aestheti-
cians today. More common, Elkins suggests, are
refusals by interlocutors who are separated by
differences of vocabulary, method, and, in many
cases, historical disciplinary identity to fully ac-
knowledge one anothers beliefs and their claims
to rationality and truth. (Pragmatic philosophers
of language might today say that such refusals rep-
resent a failure to fully reflect on the inferential
commitments that allow an interlocutors utter-
ances to be held as true.)
10
One common kind of refusal in aesthetics
shows itself in a familiar pattern of deep dis-
agreement about the relationship between art-
works and their surrounding social and historical
contexts. Although the general orientation of Art
History versus Aesthetics (and similar books) is
toward new kinds of cross-disciplinary dialogue,
the pattern surfaces even here. Consider, for ex-
ample, the above-named volumes contributions
by philosopher Paul Crowther and art historian
Keith Moxey. Crowther argues that philosophi-
cal aesthetics and art history can authentically in-
teract, but only if their constituencies can agree
that image making possesses an intrinsic value and
transhistorical significance for human beings that
transcend the intellectual and political fashions
of specific cultural and historical contexts. But
it is just this point, he thinks, that is fundamen-
tally rejected by many art historians and others
who espouse anti-foundationalist cultural rela-
tivist approaches to their material, which draw
strength from the environment of modern con-
sumerism. The relativistconsumerist collusion is
intellectually fueled by an unquestioning accep-
tance of the self-contradictory discourses of Fou-
cault, Derrida, and the like, which have in turn
shaped the dominant contextualist modes of re-
cent art history. For advocates of this approach
to art history (Crowther mentions art historians
Griselda Pollock, T. J. Clark, Norman Bryson, and
Keith Moxey as examples), Art per se is taken
to amount to little more than ideas, theories, and
their contexts of occurrence. Such writers char-
acteristic way of making the character of art as a
fundamental mode of human making contingently
dependent on historically fashionable modes of
reception and theory is, in Crowthers view, tac-
itly racist to the profoundest degree. What such
writers fail to appreciate, Crowther thinks, is the
explanatory primacy and transhistorically endur-
ing nature of the intrinsic significance of image-
makinga fact of aesthetic life whose seminal
analysis remains Kants theory of fine art and aes-
thetic ideas.
11
Turn now to Moxey, whose work Crowther
lambasts elsewhere as a pernicious specimen of
art-historical relativism.
12
Moxey suggests, like
302 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Crowther, that the present methodological gulf
between the two disciplines could, in principle, be
traversed. But this can happen only on a condition
that is for him the reverse of Crowthers, namely,
that philosophical aesthetics would relinquish its
traditional allegiance to a Kantian-inspired vision
of aesthetic judgment as unaffected by history
or social circumstance. Moxey continues by ex-
pressing a familiar social art historians skepticism
about the grand narratives underpinning much
traditional writing in aesthetics and art history.
Claiming that a reliance on such narratives de-
nies the infinite variety of human experience,
Moxey complains that none of the art-historical
or philosophical contributors to Art History ver-
sus Aesthetics have fully acknowledged the ways
in which processes of postcolonial development
or globalization impinge on the debate about the
relation of aesthetics to art history.
13
Although
Moxey is silent about who among philosophical
aestheticians is remiss in lacking such postcolo-
nial awareness, his implication is that this charac-
terizes pretty much the entire discipline. A tacit
premise of his discussion is that not only are the
arts themselves subject to the shifting contingen-
cies of cultural and political history, but so also
are debates about the arts. Such facts tend to be
marginalized or ignored by more abstractly philo-
sophical discussions of what works of art, along
with their characteristic modes of experience, val-
uation, and so on, universally and essentially are.
Moxey does, however, go on to identify a more
specific source of the philosophy of arts historical
difficulties in adequately acknowledging and an-
alyzing cultural difference: the universalizing im-
pulse of Kantian aesthetics. And he locates an al-
ternative to the Kantian traditions relative silence
regarding cultural differences in deconstructionist
and Marxist approaches to cultural criticism (the
traditions that Crowther nominated as culprits in
the postmodern-era collusion of consumerismand
relativism).
14
Bothof these discussions exemplify a larger pat-
tern that all of us in the aesthetic disciplines know
by heart and that will likely make our alien an-
thropologist friends wince. Not all art historians,
philosophical aestheticians, literary critics, musi-
cologists, film theorists, and others embrace this
pattern in its full form. Some writers in these dis-
ciplines make a point of rejecting its key elements,
often out of a principled commitment to interdis-
ciplinary collaboration.
15
But the pattern remains
popular across the larger aesthetic fields tradi-
tional or progressive aisle for reasons that bear on
how the collaborative dynamics of the aesthetic
network are shaped and limited.
This is the pattern I call the myth of the auton-
omy fault line. Its mythic power derives in part
from the appeal, for thinkers of diverse method-
ological stripes, of language which projects a clas-
sical artlife dualitysuch as that of the aesthetic
versus the socialas a basis for modeling the op-
tions for belief and argument about one or an-
other aspect of the arts. This is then accompanied
by a normative hierarchicalization of the disjuncts.
That is, accounts of a subjectsay, the nature of a
painted imagewhich do and do not, respectively,
favor ones own favored disjunct in their charac-
terizations of more particular themes are deemed
acceptable or unacceptable in a broad program-
matic way. So, for example, just as Crowther distin-
guishes between a Kantian-inspired approach to
the primacy of image making and contextualizing
relativism, favoring the first over the other, Moxey
reverses this order of preference in his distinction
between approaches that, respectively, emphasize
universal narratives and cultural difference.
A second element of the pattern, exemplified in
both writers again, is an implied premise to the
effect that the possible programmatic stances one
might adopt about the nature of visual artifacts
boils down in the end to just two and that the
options are mutually exclusive: for example, ei-
ther (1) underlying the specific perceptual andcul-
tural characteristics of works of visual (and other
kinds of) art is a culturally and historically uni-
versal artistic essence that manifests itself in the
spectatorial experiences of dramatically different
cultural audiences, or (2) there is no such essence;
the history of art is, instead, the history of more
particularized social contexts of production and
reception. A third element of the pattern is, in
genetic fallacy-sensitized scholars, usually only in-
timated, namely, an association between the the-
oretical virtues of an argument and the level of
civilization of those who embrace it. (Crowther
hints at this in his characterization of contextu-
alist relativist consumerism about art as tacitly
racist, which mirrors a charge proverbially di-
rected by postcolonialist thinkers toward tradi-
tional humanists.)
Where does this pattern get its mythic power
for so many of us? A full answer would keep
any anthropologist, human or alien, busy for
Haskins Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network 303
some time.
16
Suffice it to say that, as with many
other myths, such a stance can impart a sooth-
ing sense of dualistic order unto what may other-
wise appear as an overwhelmingly complex field
of argumentation and belief. This stances mythic
status also reflects the deeply aporetic charac-
ter, epistemologically speaking, of quarrels about
autonomy in aesthetics. Myths, in one familiar
definition, are either not literally true or are so
general as to be neither determinately true nor
false. Grand, decontextualized assertions about
the autonomy or heteronomy of art and related
aesthetic phenomena are of the latter kind. But
one of the opensecrets of modernaesthetic debate
(a secret with familiar counterparts in moral, reli-
gious, and political life) is that such assertions can-
not be proven for a general audience even while
they are typically uttered with great epistemic
conviction.
These assertions are something else too: they
are paradoxical. Quarrels over whether artworks
of various kinds possess or lack this or that univer-
sal value-making feature have the deeper struc-
ture of an antinomy, the sort of deep blockage to
systematic reasoning whose modern philosophi-
cal analysis was pioneered by Kant and advanced
by the romantics, Hegel, the pragmatists, and oth-
ers. Antinomies classically take the form of a pair
of propositions about a common subject (a the-
sis and antithesis) that can be neither recon-
ciled nor individually rejected. Both propositions
have a rightful place, notwithstanding their infer-
ential friction, in the larger system of claims and
inferences about the subject in question that do
or could carry normative weight in our discursive
practices. And insofar as each proposition is fully
intelligible only against the backdrop of that set
or system, it is also fully intelligible only in con-
junction with the other. This is true even when
any connecting terms that can make that conjunc-
tion not show up as a contradiction are either
simply not known or are otherwise subject to fa-
miliar rehearsals of postmodern-era hermeneutic
suspicion. (Adorno made a similar point in not-
ing that to think about art from the standpoint
of autonomy or interiority is also to think about
it in terms of heteronomy or exteriority, and vice
versa.)
It can be tempting to read much of the history
of modern aesthetic debate as a process of endless
displacements of this kind of antinomical struc-
ture. (This reading particularly suits the dialectics
of autonomist andheteronomist visions of cultural
history that fueled late twentieth century debates
over aesthetic modernism.) To view that history
this way is to see how there are no final analy-
ses of art. All antinomically implicated accounts
of artistic subjects are incomplete for reasons that
ultimately reach down into deeper modern beliefs
about mind and representation.
17
Given how deep the roots of the fault line
mythology run in modern aesthetics and in mod-
ern thought generally, it would be naive to think
that it, along with the disciplinary internalist
stances that often sustain it in practice, can just
be reconstructed away. Even so, this mythology
is an empirically learned and not transcenden-
tally ordained feature of how we think. It thus
behooves those of us whose meta-aesthetic sen-
sibilities were formed by received modernist-era
images of the aesthetic field as a battlefield of
irrevocably clashing intuitions over autonomy to
ask ourselves: what would happen if I relaxed
my convictions enough to see a point in at least
conversing more actively with others in the aes-
thetic network whose beliefs and inferential com-
mitments heretofore seemedprohibitively strange
or wrong?
To do this would involve embracing a more
holistic attitude toward what all of us who strive to
understand the arts and other aesthetic phenom-
ena do. This attitude points in turn to a broader
vision of how all inferential practices shaping
the collaborative network within which we think,
speak, and critically evaluate one anothers beliefs
are more radically dependent on one another for
their intelligibility than appeared from perspec-
tives still beholden to the fault line mythology. (In
Wittgensteinian terms, compare how one grasps
the point of certain language games only if, while
playing them, one maintains some sense of their
interdependencies with a vast array of other lan-
guage games within a form of life.)
iv. holism, collaborative networks, and small
worlds
Holism is hardly new as an intuitive approach to
explaining human connections of various kinds.
But it takes on fresh meaning in the social context
of collaborative networks. We might think of a
collaborative network as a prosthetic extension of
an individual researchers inferential powers that
304 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
serves in practice to blur certain traditional epis-
temological lines between individual and group
knowledge. Imagine a philosophical aesthetician
who, in pursuing her hunches about a particular
topic, draws on research by art historians, cultural
anthropologists, social network theorists, her fel-
low philosophical aestheticians, and others. She
networks at conferences and seminars in ways
that may lead her to revise not only her views
about the initial topic itself, but also (recalling
the discussion of trading zones) the methods, ev-
idence, and vocabulary she finds useful in its in-
vestigation. There is a sense in which the locus of
the thinking is not just this individual but also her
collaborative network, which serves as a kind of
extended mind.
These themes acquire further significance in
terms of social network theorys idiom of small
worlds. A small world is an arena of reciprocal
relationships of influence among various individ-
uals and clusters of individuals who know one
another either personallythe people to whom
one has strong linksor through others at vari-
ous weaker separational removes. Any given indi-
vidual might, in principle, occupy any number of
small worlds, as all who engage in online network-
ing or belong to multiple academic organizations
well know.
18
Small worlds, like disciplines, are cultural, not
natural kinds. Their boundaries are constituted by
human intentions and can, like the boundaries of
disciplines, evolve, die out, merge, or mutate over
time. Disciplines are obvious examples of small
worlds, but small worlds in academic life also rou-
tinely cut across disciplinary boundaries. These
facts, in turn, point to a seeming paradox about
learning and innovation familiar to anyone with
wide-ranging research interests and that has be-
come a staple of social network theory. This is
that the weak links in ones small worldsthose
whom one does not directly know or converse
with but who know or converse with others one
knows or with someone else who knows them, and
so onoften become sources for information that
turns out to be crucial for creative advances in our
inquiries in a way that our more strongly linked
acquaintances do not.
19
Ones weakest collabo-
rative links can in this sense be ones strongest
ones, in that they turn out to play crucial roles
in making ones small world not only more in-
formation rich and capable of growth generally,
but also more fit for survival in the informa-
tional ecologies faced by all scholars and artists
today.
20
v. the aesthetics of self-organization
These social-networking themes have little to do
with what most are still trained to regard as dis-
ciplinary proper questions about artistic and aes-
thetic subjects. Even so, they possess a deep con-
nection to the early history of modern aesthetic
discussion. Before I say more about this, consider
one last refinement to the holistic idea that the
networks different nodal entities not only work
with, but also need one another to do what they
do.
This is that the aesthetic field is not only an in-
tellectual network comprised of interdependent
nodal entities. It is also a self-organizing sys-
tem. The theme of self-organization has in recent
decades become central indiscussions of complex-
ity in natural and cultural systems. Its interest de-
rives fromhowit provides a conceptual alternative
to excessively atomistic and holistically reductive
ways, respectively, of talking about how phenom-
ena that resist traditional forms of unifying expla-
nation can both acquire distinctive identities and
change over time. We can define a self-organizing
system (SOS) as (1) a complex entity (2) whose
activity as a complex whole cannot be reduced to
the sum of the activities of its constituent parts
and (3) whose activity as a whole arises from itself
at least in the sense that this activity cannot be
deduced solely from the effects on its operation
of outside entities or processes and (4) is so struc-
tured that no single part controls the operation of
the whole.
21
How does this definition apply to complex so-
cial phenomena such as collaborative networks
and disciplinary fields? I have argued that a net-
work approach to disciplines views them as parts
of a larger whole, with subdisciplinary groups and
individuals comprising smaller subcomponents.
These in turn are all redescribable as nodes and
hubs of anintellectual networkconnectedvia a va-
riety of strong and weak links. To this discussion,
the SOS theme now adds three further concep-
tual refinements to the idea of such a networks
behavior over time:
(1) The parts individual and local movements
affect each other. (That is, disciplines and
Haskins Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network 305
subdisciplinary communities affect one
another through interactions of various
kinds.)
(2) These changes in turn affect the character of
the whole (in this case, a larger disciplinary
field).
(3) The character of the whole changes over time.
(That is, the field has a history.)
This schematic description of an intellectual
network as an SOS is easily enough instantiated
for a specific disciplinary field, such as aesthetics,
via the kinds of narratives about chains of intellec-
tual influence, conflict, and assimilation that are
now staples of the sociology of knowledge litera-
ture.
22
But what has all this to do with the early history
of aesthetics? In a touch of poetic justice, given the
clashing aesthetic metanarratives of writers like
Crowther and Moxey, the most seminal source of
the basic SOS idea is none other than Kant.
23
As
social theorist Niklas Luhmann notes in Art as a
Social System, the idea of self-organization, along
withthe relatednotionof autopoiesis, is a thematic
cousin of the Critique of Judgments theme of
the autonomy of various mental faculties such as
productive imagination and judgment. Complex-
ity theorists Stuart Kauffman and Brian Good-
win also find significant Kantian echoes in recent
discussions of self-organization in the sciences.
24
These writers are referring to the Third Critiques
discussion of teleological judgment, which argues
that in a living natural object,
the parts of the thing combine of themselves into the
unity of a whole by being reciprocally cause and effect of
their form. For this is the only way in which it is possible
that the idea of the whole may conversely, or reciprocally
determine in its turn the form and combination of all
the parts, not as causefor that would make it an art
productbut as the epistemological basis upon which
the systematic unity of the form and combination of
all the manifold contained in the given matter becomes
cognizable for the person estimating it.
25
Kant notes further that we can reflect teleologi-
cally on nature as a system wherein
every part is thought as owing its presence to the agency
of all the remaining parts. And also as existing for the
sake of the others and of the whole, that is as an instru-
ment, or organ. . . . An organized being is therefore, not a
mere machine. . . . [N]ature . . . organizes itself, and does
so in each species of its organized products.
26
Here we have Kants seminal theme of internal
or intrinsic purposiveness. Anticipated by the Cri-
tique of Judgments early theme of the purpo-
siveness without purpose (Zweckm assigkeit ohne
Zweck) of beautiful objects, it is central to the
books later account of how a teleological stance
toward nature affords a way of conceptualizing
order in nature without reducing it to older con-
ceptions of either efficient or final causality. Kant
considers such a teleological stance a regulative
rather than a constitutive feature of how rea-
son represents the natural world. That is, it plays a
key role in guiding our inquiry into the complex-
ity of natural order, even while, unlike scientific
principles and theories, it stops short of deliver-
ing full-blooded knowledge of this subject. Kants
general point is that for at least some explanatory
purposes, we cannot make sense of our natural
world without interpreting it, along with some of
its parts, as self-organizing systems.
The SOS themes subsequent history of inter-
pretation and reconstruction by later thinkers is
a fascinating study in the multidisciplinary evo-
lution of an idea. Goethe and other romantics
would find in Kants organismartwork analogy
the key to an organicist theory of artistic cre-
ativity and form. Hegel (modern philosophys
ur-network theorist) then took a further recon-
structive step that set the stage for more recent
discussions of networks and complexity in the
scientific and humanistic disciplines. This was to
recast inner teleology (which Kant, again, con-
trasted with externally mechanistic relationships
between objects) now as a constitutive rather
than merely regulative feature of thought.
Self-organization, reinterpreted by Hegel, now
emerges not merely as a heuristic projection, but
as an objective feature of knowable reality.
Now fast-forward to Mark C. Taylors update
of these Kantian and Hegelian themes in The
Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Cul-
ture. Kants self-organization idea, Taylor sug-
gests, contains an early version of a holistic prin-
ciple of constitutive relationality that not only
defines modern and postmodern art but also op-
erates in todays information networks and fi-
nancial markets and anticipates current theories
of biological organisms as well as the nature
of life itself.
27
It is then but a short step to
306 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
conceptualizing order in complex systems in terms
of what Taylor calls difference without oppo-
sition. This involves redescribing various kinds
of conflicts (including intellectual antinomies and
tensions between conflicting forms of social iden-
tity) as embodying forms of implicit complemen-
tarity between their constitutive terms. Such com-
plementarity is also, Taylor notes, integral to the
formal dynamics of artworks, a point he illustrates
with works by artists such as M. C. Escher, Frank
Gehry, Chuck Close, and J. S. Bach. Throughout
the arts, constitutive relationality and difference
without oppositionpossess particular heuristic sig-
nificance for a twenty-first-century world whose
complexity outstrips older organizing rubrics like
modernism versus postmodernism and the two
cultures approach to explaining the differences
between scientific and humanistic subjects.
We can now take Taylors argument a step fur-
ther. For this Kant-to-post-postmodernism tra-
dition of holistic reasoning is also illuminating
about the interdependencies among theories, ar-
guments, and disciplinary communities. At one
level, such things exhibit obvious differences with-
out which our modern system of inquiries into
narratives, music, visual, literary, and other arti-
facts and their surrounding practices would be
unintelligible. These differences are substantial
enough to speak of their relationship as disuni-
fied in the sense discussed earlier: no grand unify-
ing method regulates the theories and arguments,
and no single substantive criterion of communica-
tive rationality regulates the community. (This
does not mean, though, that our communicative
practices are lacking in normativity.) But that by
no means prevents us from conceptualizing such
things as comprising a kind of self-organizing sys-
tem. It is a system all of whose components de-
rive their identities from various kinds of log-
ical and social dependence upon, and reaction
against, one another. Thus, for example, the re-
search agendas of philosophical aesthetics and art
history presuppose each other for their intelligi-
bility insofar as their respective alleged foci on
conceptualization and particularity have de-
veloped historically in reaction to each other with
respect to the supposed opposition between aes-
thetic and social explanations of the visual arts.
The same may be said of the relationships be-
tween any other pair of humanistic disciplines or
counterdisciplines that differ in focus along this
axis.
To call a systemself-organizing or autopoietic is
to say that it has a higher-order life of its own that
includes, makes possible, and is made possible by
the lives of its parts. To this extent, the network
of aesthetic theorizing itself invites a certain com-
parison, in virtue of its autopoietic structure, to
a large work of art. Or put differently, the self-
organization of aesthetics implies an aesthetics of
self-organization.
vi. the networked future of aesthetics
Historical considerations aside, I have argued
that
(1) The disciplines of the aesthetic field (and, by
extension, those who practice them) broadly
need one another as different parts of an or-
ganism need one another given their individ-
ual limitations for purposes of providing the
fullest possible understanding of the com-
plexities of the arts and other aesthetically
relevant subjects;
(2) These disciplines are further connected to
one another given that, as interactive kinds,
their individual identities are boundupinand
are being continually transformed by con-
versational exchanges between their strongly
or weakly linked communities, as reflected
both in day-to-day professional contacts and
in their professional literatures.
(3) The above interdependencies and interac-
tions include disagreements, debates, and
other more socially enacted kinds of conflict;
(4) But even so, all of these interdependencies
and interactions in the end exhibit the char-
acteristics of a self-organizing system whose
parts local movements affect one another
and the character of the whole in ways that
facilitate creative change in the character of
the whole over time.
This still might not satisfy our hyperconnected
alien friends. But they dont have to deal with
our human brains, bodies, and histories, which
make it our fate to continue wrangling, in vari-
ously polite and politicized ways, over the mean-
ings of Bar at the Folies-Berg` ere, La Traviata,
Casablanca, and much else. A guiding force for
much of this wrangling, again, remains the mythic
quarrel over autonomy described earlier, which
is no more likely to go away tomorrow than
Haskins Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network 307
is, say, the mind-body problem (andalthough
this is a further storyfor similar reasons). So
some might still reasonably wonder, with Francis
Sparshott in his erudite and wide-ranging book
The Future of Aesthetics, how, in a radically
changed world, . . . could any phenomenon then
present be identifiable as what we now call aes-
thetics? Such identification requires that our de-
scendants should be able to understand what our
word aesthetics meant. But if the changes in
the world are radical enough, how could that be
possible?
28
Thats a fair humanists question, circa 1998.
But in the present era of Facebook, Wikipedia
and renewed debates about the disciplinary fate
of the university, that radically changed world is
now here. It is also clear now in a way it was not
a generation ago that the aesthetic field is itself
an interactive kind in Hackings sense. Without
presuming to prophesy too much, it stands to rea-
son that the self-interpretive future of aesthetics
will be driven in part by dialogues between per-
spectives like Sparshotts and those of similarly
erudite and wide-ranging discussions like Tay-
lors The Moment of Complexity. This suggestion
may at first equally unsettle old-school humanists
who thought they knew what kind of thing a real
discipline (and real discipline) is and old-school
posthumanists who thought they knew that the
quest for knowledge in all fields is difference and
conflict all the way down. But if the network im-
age of aesthetic inquiry turns out to over its more
atomistic alternatives, bothgroups, historically ha-
bituated to viewing each other through the lens of
earlier interpretations of difference and conflict,
may find themselves rethinking the more clan-
nish forms of such self-interpretation. And who
knows what new informational exchanges might
then shape a field whose historical currents of col-
laboration and competition have always to one
degree or another fueled a further aesthetic dy-
namic of creativity? What forms that creativity
takes will depend on how the field continues to
reorganize itself.
CASEY HASKINS
Department of Philosophy
Purchase College, State University of New York
Purchase, New York 10577
internet: casey.haskins@purchase.edu
1. Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 1, ed. Michael Kelly
(Oxford University Press, 1998), I, p. ix: Aesthetics is
uniquely situated to serve as a meeting place for numerous
academic disciplines and cultural traditions. . . . [A]esthetics
is, in academic terms, both singular and general, and, in cul-
tural terms, both local and global. To capture these multiple
dimensions, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics has been created
using a definition of aesthetics as critical reflection on art,
culture, and nature.
2. Art History versus Aesthetics, ed. James Elkins (New
York: Routledge, 2006); Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdis-
ciplinary Voices fromArt History, Philosophy, and Art Prac-
tice, ed. Francis Halsall, Julia Janson, and Tony OConnor
(Stanford University Press, 2009). Similar books that have
appeared over the last decade include The Aesthetics of Cul-
tural Studies, ed. Michael Berube (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2005); Aesthetic Subjects, ed. Pamela R. Matthews andDavid
McWhirter (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Art
History Aesthetics Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly
and Keith Moxey (Yale University Press, 2002).
3. On these debates history, see Julie Thompson Klein,
Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Chang-
ing American Academy (SUNY Press, 2005). Another ap-
proach to conceptualizing the above tension, Ivan Gaskell
notes, is suggested by the Wittgensteinian theme of aspect-
perception or aspecting, something that perceivers of an
object can individually or collectively do when the ob-
jects complexity exceeds what any perceiver can take in
at any one time. Ivan Gaskell, Interdisciplinary Aesthet-
ics, American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter 25 (2005):
13.
4. For more on this history, see Klein, Humanities, Cul-
ture, and Interdisciplinarity, chap. 2, pp. 3454.
5. I further discuss these autonomist themes in Auton-
omy: Historical Overview, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics,
pp. 170175.
6. James Elkins, Why Dont Art Historians AttendAes-
thetics Conferences? in his Art History versus Aesthetics,
pp. 3950, at pp. 4243.
7. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Har-
vard University Press, 1999), pp. 102106.
8. On art-as-exchange, see Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imag-
ination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vin-
tage, 1979). On language use as the exchange of reasons, see
Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Repre-
senting, and Discursive Commitment (Harvard University
Press, 1994).
9. On trading zones, see Peter Galison, Trading Zone:
Coordinating Action and Belief, in The Science Studies
Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999),
pp. 137160, at pp. 157158). On liquid networks and in-
formation spillover, see Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas
Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York:
Riverhead, 2010).
10. Re-Enchantment, ed. James Elkins and David Mor-
gan (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 309310. In a book in
progress, I say more about how, in politicized epistemic set-
tings like aesthetic and religious debate, the assessment of
an utterances justificatory fitness involves a version of the
sort of institutionally decentralized normative scorekeeping
that has been described at length by Robert Brandom, who
also suggestively characterizes the setting within which this
scorekeeping occurs as a network of inferential relations
308 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
(see Robert B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Intro-
duction to Inferentialism [Harvard University Press, 2000],
p. 162).
11. Paul Crowther, Aesthetics inArt HistoryandVice-
versa, in Art History versus Aesthetics, pp. 123128.
12. Paul Crowther, Defining Art, Creating the Canon:
Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (Oxford University Press,
2007).
13. Keith Moxey, Aesthetics is DeadLong Live Aes-
thetics, in Art History versus Aesthetics, pp. 166172, at
p. 167.
14. Moxey, Aesthetics is DeadLong Live Aesthetics.
For a fuller version of this argument, see Keith Moxey, The
Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History
(Cornell University Press, 2001).
15. See in particular such contributions to Rediscovering
Aesthetics as Wolfgang Welsch, Aesthetics Beyond Aes-
thetics (pp. 178192); David Raskin, The Dogma of Con-
viction (pp. 6674); and Claire Bishop, The Social Turn:
Collaboration and Its Discontents (pp. 238255).
16. The literature on the historical and social-
explanatory sources of intellectual conflict is endless. One
of my favorite recent discussions is Marjorie Garbers wry
account of discipline envy, whose examples include the de-
fensive anxiety sometimes displayed by traditional human-
ists toward challenges to their practices posed by postmod-
ernist newcomers. Any entrenched discipline is vulnerable
to this anxiety, because all disciplines aspire to ideals of com-
pleteness, unity, and originality that they can never attain. To
this extent, discipline envy has nocure. See Marjorie Garber,
Academic Instincts (Princeton University Press, 2001).
17. I expand on this discussion in Paradoxes of Auton-
omy: Or, Why Wont the Problem of Artistic Justification
Go Away? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58
(2000): 122. What we see repeatedly enacted throughout
the modern history of quarrels over autonomy in aesthetics
is the deep structure of Kants Third Antinomy, displaced
onto various further modern debates, most conspicuously
in ethics, about how one or another form of agency can be
considered free.
18. The classic presentation of the small world idea is
Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, Collective Dynamics
of Small World Networks, Nature 393 (1998): 440442.
For further discussion of its interdisciplinary significance,
see Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: The New Science of
Networks (New York: Perseus Books, 2002).
19. The classic statement of this idea is Mark Granovet-
ter, The Strength of Weak Ties, American Journal of So-
ciology 78 (1973): 13601380, also discussed in Barabasi,
Linked.
20. For more on the small world phenomenon and its re-
lationship to problem solving and creativity, see the classic
article by sociologist Brian Uzzi, Collaboration and Cre-
ativity: The Small World Problem, American Journal of
Sociology III (2005): 447504.
21. This formulation draws on that of Nancy Andreas-
son, The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (New
York: Dana, 2005), p. 62. A related notion is that of the
autopoietic machine or system, as set out originally by
Umberto Maturano and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and
Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Boston: D. Reidel,
1980).
22. For discussion of these sociological themes, together
with a suggestive mapping of diverse currents of influence,
collaboration, and conflict in various Western and non-
Western traditions of philosophical and religious thought,
see Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: AGlobal
Theory of Intellectual Change (Harvard University Press,
1998).
23. I am indebted to Mark C. Taylors The Moment
of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (University of
Chicago Press, 2001) for its discussion of the general con-
tributions of Kant, Hegel, and the scientific thinkers cited
above to the SOS themes history.
24. See, respectively, Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social
System (Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 280; also, Stu-
art Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the
Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1995), p. 274; Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard
Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity (NewYork:
Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 197.
25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. C.
Meredith (Oxford University Press, 2007) AK 373, Part II,
Section 4, pp. 2223.
26. Kant, Critique of Judgment, AK 374375, pp. 2223.
27. The principle of constitutive relationality says that
individuals in a variety of explanatory contexts are defined
by their relationships to one another, rather than by sup-
posedly intrinsic properties, in ways that transcend older
distinctions between what is internal and external both to a
things essence and to its concept. See Mark C. Taylor, The
Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 8493. The quoted passages
occur in After God, p. 110.
28. Francis Sparshott, The Future of Aesthetics (Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 89.