Aesthetics: sound, touch, text

Edited by Sisi Liu and Virginia Rodriguez

The distance between art and the world seems at once never given and yet always fraught with dangers. This ambiguity may be bearable until a moment of crisis compels us to either determine whether the distance exists, or say how we might travel through it. Aesthetics remains one of the critical fracture lines that cracks under the weight of such questions: is ‘aesthetics’ showy garb that art cannot afford when people are confronted with parading militia and falling bombs, or a necessary means of mediation that render such experiences perceptible? Can aesthetics surpass art? Does aesthetic experience bring the world closer to or further away from us? 

Reviews in this section do not pretend that they have a definitive answer to these questions. They do, however, point us to the poignancy of these fracture lines, and force us to think about what is at stake. We first have Samuel Marentes’s comments on Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration or the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life, a genre-defying account of lived experience of artists that lays bare how the fragility of art and precarious status of art practitioners often expose the limitation of all economic systems where they are situated. Marentes reexamines the question that Elizondo asked: “Is art worth it?” and reminds us that the question’s weight presses on the opaque “it”—a lived negotiation with and redefinition of reality could very well be the reward art practitioners gain, rather than the price they pay. In a similar vein, we have Lucy Sternbach examining Carmen Winant’s How We Practice, another work that combines personal experience and its critical dissection. An athlete and an artist, Winant’s exploration of the tensions between practicing bodies and their aesthetic reception cut through cultural, political and philosophical debates. Sternbach stresses the multivalency of Winant’s text, and asks us to reflect on our own academic practice. 

We then have three reviews focusing on the literary aesthetics and the question of the Other. For example, Jeremy S. Boorum’s review of Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance explores the movement and performance of neurodiversity. Boorum investigates how neurodivergence is reimagined as resistance. Through each chapter, he unravels the worldmaking of neurodivergent deviancy. Libby Hayhurst maps Matthieu Chapman’s argument in Shakespeare and Antiblack World-making that a racialized Shakespearean totality must be reckoned with, and brings into focus the question of what we should do with such a totality. Khoa Nguyen teases out several core motifs in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s essay collection To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, and guides us through Nguyen’s reflection on a politicized aesthetic of minority literature in the wake of the palestinian struggle. Last but not least, Sam Parrish unpacks Eliot Borenstein’s The Politics of Fantasy: Magic, Children’s Literature, and Fandom in Putin’s Russia and draws our attention to how fantasy literature constitutes both a cultural contact zone and a battle line. 

All our reviews engage with works that reflect on aesthetic experience as lived, historical, and politically charged. They offer different configurations of aesthetic experience and reach different conclusions as to what aesthetics can offer life. As we traffic through their positions, it is perhaps helpful to recall Jacques Rancière’s comments on the political bearings of aesthetics. Even if you disagree with his judgment that “what it (aesthetics) produces is not rhetorical persuasion about what must be done, nor is it the framing of a collective body,” there are still fruitful conversations to be had over how we should reckon with “a multiplication of connections and disconnections that frame the relations between bodies, the world they live in and the way in which they are ‘equipped’ to adapt to it” and bring out “a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible.” (2011) Our reviews mark efforts to remobilize such cartographies.