SOURCE: Joughin, John J. “Shakespeare, Modernity, and the Aesthetic: Art, Truth, and Judgement in The Winter's Tale.” In Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, edited by Hugh Grady, pp. 61-84. London: Routledge, 2000.

[In the following essay, Joughin argues that a finer understanding of the role of aesthetics in Shakespeare's plays will serve to increase our understanding of his work in general, and The Winter's Tale in particular.]

Any discussion of the literary or artistic merit of Shakespeare's plays is almost bound to arouse suspicion. For most radical critics, aesthetics still tends to be discarded as part of the ‘problem’ rather than part of the ‘solution’, all too reminiscent of a brand of outdated idealism which privileged notions of refined sensibility and the immutability of ‘literary value’. As a consequence, contemporary political and historicist criticism has tended to regard a ‘commitment to the literary’ as ‘one of the major limitations’ of traditionalist approaches to the playwright's work (Hawkes 1996b: 11). Yet more recently, the emergence in a British context of a critical formation, sometimes pejoratively labelled ‘new aestheticist’ in its orientation, has foregrounded the need to give some further consideration to the transformative potential of the aesthetic.

In the course of resituating some of the assumptions of post-structuralist thought in relation to the philosophical analysis of modernity offered by the Frankfurt School tradition of Critical Theory, philosophers like Jay Bernstein (1992), Andrew Bowie (1990; 1997a), Howard Caygill (1989) and Peter Dews (1987; 1995) have enabled a reconsideration of key issues concerning aesthetic validity which were often neglected in the first stage development of literary theory.¹ I want to argue that this work has also indirectly paved the way to the revival of the aesthetic as a politically critical category in English studies. Rather than ceding the question of aesthetic value as the exclusive preserve of the political Right, this chapter aims to demonstrate that the time is now ripe for a re-examination of the idea of the aesthetic in materialist criticism.

Of course the danger of a return to an old-style aestheticism in Shakespeare studies remains a constant threat, as Harold Bloom's (1999) celebration of ‘Shakespeare's universalism’ testifies. Bloom complains that, in relying on ‘ideologically imposed contextualization’, recent critical approaches like cultural materialism and new historicism tend to ‘value theory over the literature itself’. For these critics, Bloom reflects sadly, ‘the aesthetic stance is itself an ideology’ (Bloom 1999: 9). But in some sense, even as he is prone to overstate the case, Bloom is partly right. Cultural materialism usefully draws our attention to the fact that the question of aesthetic value is a politically loaded issue and not a neutral one. Yet while the deployment of Shakespeare is clearly open to ‘ideological misuse’, surely Bloom also has a point when he implies that the endurance of Shakespeare's texts cannot be reduced solely to the question of their ideological function in any given period.

Nor, I might add (and this is where Bloom partly misses the point himself), is this necessarily a position which recent critical approaches would wholly resist: after all, as the bulk of recent work on the cultural production and reception of Shakespeare's plays has demonstrated, historically speaking at least, the striking thing about the playwright's texts is their continued refusal to be exhausted by their continued appropriation and counter-appropriation in an endless variety of contexts (see e.g. G. Taylor 1991; Marsden 1991). This is not to say that the playwright's work is somehow of ‘timeless’ significance, nor is it to deny the value of work which has revealed the playwright's involvement in securing regimes which have deployed Shakespeare for their own oppressive ideological ends. There can be no doubt that the revival of certain plays, at specific moments, in particular contexts, usefully alerts us to the manipulation of Shakespeare as an instrument of social control. Yet the enduring longevity of the dramatist's work is also clearly related to its ability to sustain interpretations which are often contestable or diametrically opposed. Cultural materialism allows for precisely this type of contestation, yet as Andrew Bowie observes:

the failure [of radical criticism] to engage with the most powerful works of bourgeois culture … beyond revealing their indisputable relations to barbarism, means we do not understand why such works are enduringly powerful in ways which cannot finally be grasped by the category of ideology and which cannot be merely a function of their roots in barbarism.

(Bowie 1997a: 7)

Bowie offers us a more nuanced and effective defence of the aesthetic than Bloom can possibly muster, yet his point also implicitly echoes Bloom's complaint, that one of the limitations of ideology critique is that it fails satisfactorily to explain why it is that, in most circumstances, even once they are demythologized or problematized, outside of their immediate ideological function, certain canonical texts like Shakespeare's continue to remain meaningful and authoritative.

For Bloom the ‘ultimate use’ of Shakespeare is in teaching us ‘whatever truth you can sustain without perishing’ (Bloom 1999: 10). Yet paradoxically, as I have already implied, it appears as if Shakespeare's very survival as a literary text is less a product of the type of meaningful repleteness Bloom alludes to than a result of its resistance to ever being clearly understood (cf. Bowie 1997a: 11). Moreover, as I hope to demonstrate, the question of Shakespeare's ireducibility to interpretation actually offers a fruitful resource for critical thought and has a direct bearing on our understanding of the relationship that obtains between literary interpretation and the question of its validity. In these and in other respects, an over-restrictively functionalist account of Shakespeare's involvement in sustaining the reductions and inequities of canon formation falls short of a more reflective acknowledgement that Shakespeare's ‘literary’ distinction is actually entwined with a more complex intellectual legacy: one which raises pressing philosophical as well as political questions. Again, Bowie puts the case still more succinctly, as he reminds us that:

The rise of ‘literature’ and the rise of philosophical aesthetics—of a new philosophical concern with understanding the nature of art—are inseparable phenomena, which are vitally connected to changes in conceptions of truth in modern thought.

(Bowie 1997a: 1)

Clearly, the specificity of literature's cognitive significance and the critical potential these ‘literary’ issues have in relation to canonical texts like Shakespeare is not something we can merely side-step or wish away. By way of developing Bowie's thesis, I want to argue for a reconceived understanding of the aesthetic in relation to Shakespeare's plays. The practical aspect of this argument will be to develop a reading of the closing scene of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (5.3), where I will be particularly concerned with unravelling the significance of the competing truth claims which surround Hermione's unlikely restoration at the end of the play. But the theoretical issues raised by Bowie also merit further consideration in their own right, and I will want to argue that they also have an explicit bearing upon our understanding of Shakespeare in its ‘modern’ context. In many ways, the ‘changing conception of truth in modern thought’ that Bowie alludes to goes to the very root of the formation of ‘Eng. lit.’ as a discipline and continues to sustain the claims to cognitive validity on which it continues to rely. While this ‘modern’ aesthetic distinction arguably post-dates the ‘original’ production of Shakespeare's texts, it nevertheless continues to mediate the tradition of Shakespeare's critical heritage in a powerfully influential fashion. A more critically nuanced and discriminative sense of the role that aesthetics plays in Shakespeare criticism reawakens a series of key issues concerning the broader consensual and regulative criteria which continue to govern our understanding of the plays themselves.

A BRIEF EXCURSUS ON ART AND TRUTH

Traditionalist viewpoints which uncritically endorse the ‘superior validity’ of Shakespeare's plays, to the exclusion of all other considerations, often claim that they are politically neutral. Excepting the qualifications I have outlined above, the major contribution of ideology critique in Shakespeare studies has been in unmasking this stance of polite disinterestedness, and in revealing the extent to which it effectively conceals a series of tendentious presumptions concerning the ‘truth’ of the human condition, the overall tenor of which Terence Hawkes helpfully summarizes in the following fashion:

That, in short, Shakespeare's plays present us with nothing less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the most fundamental matters of human existence: birth, death and the life that comes between.

(Hawkes 1996b: 9)

For all its self-evident transparency this ‘common sense’ view of literature actually secretes its own theoretical agenda, underpinning an approach to interpretation which Catherine Belsey helpfully characterizes as ‘expressive realist’ in its overall connotation:

expressive realism … is the theory that literature reflects the reality of experience as it is perceived by one (especially gifted) individual, who expresses it in a discourse which enables other individuals to recognise it as true.

(Belsey 1980: 7, Belsey's emphasis)

As Belsey argues, this apparently ‘natural way of reading’ actually presupposes a rather fixed understanding of the value of literary texts and their claim to authenticity.

Crucially, ‘expressive realism’ presumes a practice of reading literature which is founded on what philosophers would categorize as a correspondence model of truth. In other words, literature's relationship to the world is conceived in terms of a naive mimeticism which posits the truth of an anterior or predetermined ideal reality, of which literature is correspondingly a ‘true’ re-presentation. Furthermore, as Belsey's statement implies, empirical-idealist variants of lit. crit. locate their premise on the assumption that the origination, reception and knowledge of these ‘truths’ is generally accessible to experience and self-evident—although more so to some than others, and especially to the more refined sensibilities of ‘high and solitary minds’. In effect, literary texts are treated as if they were physical phenomena whose very existence serves to verify clear and testable ideas. In the case of its neo-classical variants, literary criticism reimposes an understanding of art as corresponding with the pre-existent uniformity of nature itself.

As Belsey, Hawkes, and a host of other critics have demonstrated, recent developments in literary theory have revealed just how restrictive these ‘rational’ truth claims actually are. Materialist approaches to the plays demonstrate that the ‘meaning’ of a text is historically determined and is dependent on its cultural context. In turn, a poststructuralist critique of metaphysics has produced a healthy climate of hermeneutic suspicion, both in disclosing the complicity between truth, reason and domination, and in revealing language itself to be ‘perpetually in process’ and productive of a potential plurality of meanings (cf. Belsey 1980: 19-20). Yet, in taking an exclusively linguistic and culturalist turn, recent criticism also runs the risk of excluding from its consideration the distinctively qualitative aspects of literary meaning. In short, as Bowie observes, literary theorists are often effectively in danger of being ‘without a valid way of talking about “literature”’ (Bowie 1997a: 5). While poststructuralism usefully focuses on the reader's role in the constitution of meaning and allows for the possibility that texts are open to a number of interpretations, it tends to neglect the truth-potential of the particular transformation wrought by the aesthetic experience itself. For new aestheticists like Bowie, our understanding of the relationship between art, truth and interpretation is not merely dependent on an openness to the fact that literary texts transform meaning, but is also equally concerned with asking precisely how this revelation is to be construed (Bowie 1997a: 5). Understood in relation to more conventional truth claims, the distinctive articulation of truth in works of art—in being truer than empirical or mimetic ‘truth’—underpins what Bowie terms a ‘disclosive’ literary distinction, which he characterizes in the following terms:

rather than truth being the revelation of a pre-existing reality, it [art's truth status] is in fact a creative process of ‘disclosure’. Artworks, in this view, reveal aspects of the world which would not emerge if there were no such disclosure: truth ‘happens’—it does not imitate or represent.

(Bowie 1992: 33)

Such moments could conceivably be construed purely in formal or ‘linguistic terms’, in relation to overturning conventional expectations or in breaking with existing rules. Yet the revelatory potential of aesthetic disclosure suggests that it also needs to be understood as a more participatory and consensual event, in the course of which, as Bowie puts it, in defamiliarizing habitual perceptions: ‘something comes to be seen as something in a new way’ (Bowie 1997a: 301).

Crucially, the relationship between the ‘happening’ of aesthetic disclosure and the interplay by which we understand it to ‘be’ a distinctively literary happening throws a new light on the question of interpretation and enables us to retain a sense of the creative and evaluative dimension which informs judgement (aesthetic or otherwise), without then merely lapsing back into the restrictions which obtain to the more traditionalist truth claims of essentialism or empiricism. Instead, in developing a Heideggerian sense of the disclosive capacity of the aesthetic (without wanting to restrict ‘disclosure’ to uncovering ‘some kind of already present essence’), Bowie persuasively locates ‘seeing as’ as a constitutive experience which effectively: ‘“discloses” the world in new ways … rather than copying or representing what is known to be already there’ (Bowie 1997a: 5, 301). I shall want to return to these distinctions during my reading of The Winter's Tale.

ART, TRUTH AND JUDGEMENT IN THE WINTER'S TALE

For mainstream criticism much of the attendant moral outrage at the apparent sundering of the link between art and truth in radical criticism has tended to oscillate rather reductively between two extreme polarities. On the one hand, traditionalist critics complain that, if claims to knowledge are not grounded in a fixed or absolute way, but are endlessly contingent and uncertain, the lure of epistemological relativism will ensure that a type of critical nihilism will ensue as a result. In short, meaninglessness rather than meaningfulness will be the order of the day. Somewhat contradictorily, this accusation of critical relativism tends to chime intermittently with the complaint of critical reductionism; so that, for Bloom, recent approaches move in from the outside ‘on the poor play’. Radical critics are ‘gender-and-power freaks’ whose insidious act of cultural imperialism is to ‘shape Shakespeare’ by imposing in advance their own prescriptive brand of cultural politics (Bloom 1999: 9-10).

I have to say that my own experience of teaching Shakespeare is at once more mundane and more revealing. For most students, on first studying Shakespeare at university level, the empirical and essentialist truth claims underpinning traditionalist approaches to the playwright's work are often already residually in place. These assumptions are fairly easily overturned, yet even while students are willing to take a more relativistic view of Shakespeare's plays, they are still drawn back to the assertion that Shakespeare's texts are somehow qualitatively distinctive. There is a resistance to the cultural reductionism which Bloom caricatures as the pedagogical norm, though, as yet, there is often a lack of a developed critical lexicon by which to explore the issue of literary value. As a result, students often ‘cope’ with the singularity of the Shakespeare text in a rather vague and unsituated fashion.²

In practice, the closing scene of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale tends to operate as a type of critical degree zero for locating some of these issues in a more critical context. In its eloquent silence and unfathomable recovery, the puzzle of Hermione's restoration at the end of the play immediately invites idealization, and often does so precisely in terms of those old-style critical unities which would endorse a sense of the literary artefact as the source of some unsullied or immanent value. As she steps down from her pedestal, somewhere between automaton and living being, the ‘resurrection’ of Hermione has tended to double as a tableau vivant for Shakespearicity itself—that impossible thing, ‘a living monument’. Yet, crucially of course, Hermione's unlikely transformation during the scene in question remains ‘meaningful’, only insofar as she is not restored to what she once was. Leontes is quick enough to point this out for himself on first seeing the statue:

                                                                                                    But yet, Paulina,
Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems.

(5.3.27-9)

Almost by default, Leontes' momentary regret here indirectly confirms the essentialist-type error that he had already implicitly committed moments earlier when, indulging in a kind of wishfulfilment, on first seeing his daughter Perdita, he is immediately reminded of his wife—‘I thought of her / Even in these looks I made’ (5.1.226-7)—and against which the shrewd counsellor Paulina anticipates a sharp reproof (cf. 5.1.223-5).

It is precisely because of these and other ‘inconsistencies’ that the statue scene is the one episode in the whole of Shakespeare which in confounding expectations simultaneously throws a ‘common sense’ understanding of the relationship between art and ‘truth’ into sharp relief. In my experience of teaching the play, the provocation presented by the scene's manifest improbability immediately tempts students to restrict matters to the ‘status quo’ of empiricism. On paying closer attention to the text, they insist that it is clear that ‘She didn't really die’—their case often unwittingly hinging on the probability or otherwise of (that old critical chestnut), Hermione's ‘voluntary concealment’ (5.3.126-9). Yet curiously, as the discussion proceeds, it is clear that Hermione's recovery is not explicable in these ‘evidentiary’ terms: after all, the point remains that even if we were to judge matters in terms of the most restrictive truth-only criteria, earlier on, at least, the play is certain enough about the ‘fact’ of Hermione's death (cf. 3.2.201-5, 232-4; 3.3.15-18).³

My point, of course, is that the statue scene remains meaningful while also flouting most of our conventional criteria for understanding. And for this reason, a brief flick through the play's ‘critical heritage’ is enough to confirm the students' intuition that the question of Hermione's restoration constitutes the key interpretative dilemma of the play, as, from Dryden onwards, the critical consensus consistently maintains that The Winter's Tale is, in effect, ‘grounded on impossibilities’ (Vickers 1995, vol. 1: 145). We might say that Hermione's unforeseen recovery unwittingly confirms the unsettling effect of a meaningful temporal dis-continuity. Nor, of course, is this the first instance in the play when the audience is suddenly alerted to the transformative potential of a dramatic recontextualization. Earlier on, at a related moment of incongruity, Time's interpolation (4.1) itself ensures that the action ‘slide(s) / O'er sixteen years’ (4.1.5-6). Each episode produces a conjunctural clash of past and present which, in remaining resistant to interpretation, has remained critically significant ever since.⁴

These improbabilities and temporal dislocations have clearly served to focus issues relating to the validity of past interpretations of the play; yet coming to a more reflective understanding of the particular transformation wrought by Hermione's restoration, depends precisely on how we address the question of its ‘meaning’. As I have already implied, it is pointless to somehow try to ‘fix’ the meaning of the statue scene, either by attempting to pluck out the kernel of its ‘truth’, or by skewing the ‘evidence’ so that it somehow fits with our quest for certain knowledge. Each of these moves produces an over-reductively schematic and distortedly unified account of particular events.

Interestingly of course, it was precisely this type of misjudgement which ensured that Leontes remained such a bad judge during the early stages of the play, where, plagued by certainty, and in his determination to prove truths irrefutably, he quickly emerges as an early prototype of the dogmatic ‘systems thinker’ whom Theodor Adorno has in mind as he outlines ‘Idealism as Rage’ in Negative Dialectics (1990):

The system in which the sovereign mind imagined itself transfigured, has its primal history in the pre-mental, the animal life of the species … The more completely his actions [the ‘rational animal's’] follow the law of self-preservation, the less can he admit the primacy of that law to himself and others … The system is the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism.

(Adorno 1990: 22-3)

The ‘belly turned mind’ would serve as a more than adequate description of the destructive yet ravenous incorporative rage which Leontes exemplifies in the totalitarian state that was the first half of the play. Leontes' behaviour here is typical of the type of ‘identity-thinking’ which, in its ‘progressive’ domination of nature, would reduce all particulars to conceptual generalization and ensures that in a ‘systematized’ post-Enlightenment society, ‘the sublimation of this anthropological schema extends all the way to epistemology’ (Adorno 1990: 22). Jay Bernstein (1991) offers a useful clarification of this aspect of Adorno's critique of ‘enlightened’ reason:

[S]uch a rationality must treat unlike (unequal) things as like (equal), and subsume objects under (the unreflective drives of) subjects. Subsumption, then, is domination in the conceptual realm. The purpose of subsumption is to allow for conceptual and technical mastery. When subsumptive rationality came to be considered the whole of reason … the ends for the sake of which the path of enlightened rationality was undertaken became occluded. Without the possibility of judging particulars and rationally considering ends and goals, the reason which was to be the means to satisfying human ends becomes its own end, and thereby turns against the true aims of Enlightenment: freedom and happiness.

(Bernstein 1991: 4)

For Adorno then, instrumental reason (reason which effectively becomes a means to its own end) excludes the ‘cognition of the particular in its own right’ (cf. Bernstein 1991: 4). Any interpretative paradigm which is governed by these assumptions tends to fix the meaning ‘which already lies behind the question’ (Adorno 1977: 127), so that, as Adorno himself puts it: ‘The things philosophy has yet to judge are postulated before it begins’ (Adorno 1990: 24).⁵

Yet, in contrast, during the statue scene, Leontes' habitual tendency to foreclose on his interpretative options in advance undergoes an abrupt and remarkable transformation. Suddenly his capacity for ‘judgment’ confirms itself as a newly dynamic and creative process, which involves an open-ended awareness of participating in the sensuous particularity of the ‘truths’ that are unfolding before him. The experience of suffering Hermione's restoration opens out on to a series of qualitative distinctions which, fittingly enough (for Leontes at least), proceed to constellate themselves around the metaphor of ingestion itself, the expression of which is now freshly modulated and comparative: ‘this affliction has a taste as sweet / As any cordial comfort’ (5.3.76-7), ‘let it be art / Lawful as eating’ (5.3.110-11, my emphases). In terms of the reflective capacity of judgement we broached earlier on, this productive ability to ‘see more in things than they are’ constitutes what Adorno terms ‘aesthetic behaviour’:

Aesthetic behaviour is the ability to see more in things than they are. It is the gaze that transforms empirical being into imagery. The empirical world has no trouble exposing the inadequacy of aesthetic behaviour, and yet it is aesthetic behaviour alone which is able to experience that world.

(Adorno 1984: 453)

Like the reconciliation scene which precedes it, Hermione's restoration proceeds largely in silence; and as ‘a sight which was to be / seen, cannot be spoken of’ (5.2.38-9), its ‘world-disclosing’ capacity cannot be reduced to paraphrase, as art itself ‘renders reality visible’:⁶

PAULINA:
                                                                                                    That she is living,
Were it but told you, should be hooted at
Like an old tale. But it appears she lives,
Though yet she speak not. Mark a little while.

(5.3.116-19)

Beyond any correspondent sense of a ‘true’ representation, in Bowie's terms ‘something comes to be seen as something in a new way’ during the statue scene. That which ‘appears’ as true cannot be proven to be true: ‘truth “happens”—it does not imitate or represent’ (Bowie 1990: 5; 1992: 33). Indeed, during the process of Hermione's ‘recovery’ disclosure appears as still more complex and overdetermined precisely in ways that place an emphasis on the non-representational rather than the formally coherent, or mimetic aspects of art. Music, silence, and most decisively of all of course, ruination itself, are very much to the fore, as, beyond mere recovery, ‘existing meanings are most decisively transformed … to the point of the destruction of those meanings’ (cf. Bowie on Adorno: Bowie 1997a: 25, Bowie's emphasis)—or as Leontes himself has it: ‘Hermione was not so much wrinkled’.

In short, it is precisely because Hermione's restoration is ‘newly fixed’ (5.3.48) that it undoes attempts to unify meaning. The key to understanding aesthetic judgement in the statue scene then is to see that it proceeds on uncertain grounds, or ‘begins in the middle’ so to speak (cf. Bowie 1997a: 104-6). It is certainly not the unifyingly fulfilling or unreflectively transcendental category of the aesthetic caricatured and maligned by so much early ‘radical’ cultural criticism.

SHAKESPEARE, MODERNITY AND THE AESTHETIC

In order to develop the significance of the distinctions I have raised so far, I want to move on now to consider the relation of Shakespeare to the aesthetic in its ‘modern’ context. As I hope my brief analysis of The Winter's Tale has demonstrated, the statue scene discloses the potential to constitute new meanings which, in their refusal to submit to existing rules, are ‘self-validating’ in their own right. In its modern form, this independent truth potential of art to ‘give the law to itself’ is often discussed in terms of the notion of ‘aesthetic autonomy’ (Bowie 1992: 33-7).

Doubtless, for many, the very idea of aesthetic autonomy risks contamination by the residual idealism of ‘Eng. lit.’, insofar as it tends to evoke ideas concerning the ahistorical fixity and ‘autotelic’ self-sufficiency of the ‘text in itself’—an outmoded approach to the question of aesthetic validity which was favoured by the old New Critics and others, but which was effectively overturned by the first-wave theorization of Shakespeare studies (see e.g. Barker and Hulme 1985: 192). Yet literature's becoming merely self-sufficient or, as poststructuralists might prefer its ‘lack of a referent’, actually serves only to underpin its historical and political significance within modernity. In the course of breaking its ties with tradition, it is precisely because literature is forced back on its ‘own’ resources that, in its autonomous ‘exceeding moment’, it provides new means of expression and accommodates the creative potential for new forms of social cognition, not least around the related question of subjectivity.⁷ This proto-political potential of the aesthetic to unleash ‘unrealized possibilities’ for ‘human emancipation’ is of particular importance to Marxist theorists of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and is linked in complex fashion to their critique of the more dominative aspects of enlightened modernity (cf. Bowie 1997a: 14-15). In its qualitative independence, autonomous art resists subsumption within the instrumentalist logic of capital production and offers an enclave for the articulation of alternative values. In this form, aesthetics is not a rejection of reason; indeed, as Andrew Bowie observes: ‘it becomes the location in which what has been repressed by a limited conception of reason can be articulated’ (Bowie 1990: 4). The appearance of a separate aesthetic domain during the eighteenth century proceeds to provide a compensatory site for the evaluation of our experience of those sensuous particulars, which are now also increasingly denied to us in our newly ‘alienated’ modern condition. And in this respect, the survival of canonical texts like Shakespeare continue to confirm their significance in manifesting the potential to play a crucial role in reconfiguring our understanding of modern society. Tied to actuality, in ways that cannot be reduced to the empirical, the emergence of literature serves as a type of ‘non-empirical record’, which allows for the creation of ‘possible-worlds’ (Bowie 1997a: 16-27) beyond but also within the regulated sphere of its ‘new’ bourgeois confinement.

Coinciding as it does with the emergence of what Habermas (1992) would term the public sphere, the ground-breaking utopian potential of art to ‘move beyond the world of what there is to a world of as yet unrealised possibility’ (Bowie 1997a: 14) has theoretical as well as practical implications. In the context of an enlightened modernity, aesthetic discourse provides new concepts and tools of analysis with which to challenge existing conceptual frameworks. In this respect, just as the modern division between distinct spheres of ‘knowledge’ itself becomes increasingly restrictive and specialized, the ‘intellectual’ pursuits of art and literature also begin to have potentially far reaching effects.⁸

Yet crucially of course, the relegatory shift of art to the relative exclusivity of an autonomous realm (within which the assimilation of Shakespeare is evidently implicated at a very early stage) also, in the same process, proceeds to produce a formative practical dilemma for literary criticism. On the one hand aesthetic autonomy ensures art's significance as a potentially transgressive or ‘critical’ location. On the other hand art's ‘untheorizable excess’ also promotes suspicion, insofar as the distinctiveness of art's newly autonomous ‘self-regulating’ truth claim is perceived to present an alternative to those restrictive notions of empirical truth which continue to govern neo-classical literary criticism itself in its early emergence, and against which contemporary literary theorists have so consistently railed.⁹

As the early antecedents of aesthetic theory and literary criticism become increasingly ‘institutionalized’, the relation of literature to the criticism which attempts to explain or understand it serves to sustain literature's claim to validity. Yet, paradoxically, as I have already suggested, it is only because Shakespeare evades any finite sense of conceptual determination that, in resisting appropriation and in stirring debate, the playwright's work continues to offer us such a valuable resource for critical thought. This distinctive ‘excessive’ quality is clearly at the heart of canon formation itself, so that, as Bowie observes: ‘texts which retain a productive ambiguity in thoroughly different contexts over long periods seem to be those to which the name literature is now often attached’ (Bowie 1997a: 7). Yet the categorical separation of ‘artistic truth’ from other kinds of philosophical truth in modernity has also necessarily proceeded to haunt the convergence of a secularized literature and its criticism ever since. Bernstein formulates the dilemma in the following theoretical terms:

If art is taken as lying outside of truth and reason then if art speaks in its own voice it does not speak truthfully or rationally; while if one defends art from within the confines of the language of truth-only cognition one belies the claim that art is more truthful than that truth-only cognition.

(Bernstein 1992: 2)

In a nutshell then, the problem, as David Wood incisively puts it, is that: ‘poetic discourse may be able to say what philosophy can know it cannot’ (Wood 1990: 2). In this sense of course, the very notion of ‘aesthetic theory’ is something of a contradiction in terms. Indeed, as more than one commentator has suggested, the title of Adorno's last major unfinished work Aesthetic Theory itself implicitly constitutes its own form of ironical epitaph, in that, as Adorno himself observes: ‘What is called philosophy of the art’ (Adorno 1984: 498; also see Zuidervaart 1991: 3). It is in confronting this situation that, as Bernstein argues, more recent ‘post-aestheticist’ philosophies of art like Adorno's actually take art's critical potential seriously by ‘employ[ing] art to challenge truth-only cognition’, while also facing the dilemma that ‘philosophy cannot say what is true without abandoning itself to that which it would criticise’ (Bernstein 1992: 4-9).

It is possible to extend the significance of the implications of Bernstein's thesis on the critical potential of art in terms of its related impact on recent trends within cultural criticism and literary theory. Key paradigm shifts in contemporary variants of Shakespearean criticism are clearly themselves indirectly reliant on the transformative cognitive potential of the aesthetic. Consider, for example, the ‘disclosive’ aspects of new historicism's more general recontextualization of anecdotal material, drawn from a variety of non-literary contexts and freshly deployed in ‘illuminating’ rereadings of canonical texts. These and other interpretative procedures produce precisely the type of unsettling interpretative ambiguities which Russian Formalists, at least, would have still recognized as ‘literary’ (cf. Bowie 1997a: 4-13). Yet while ambiguous faultlines, ruptures, fissures, crises in representation and so on, litter the corpus of cultural criticism, and frequently provide the foci for its activity, there is often an overall lack of any reflective engagement concerning the cognitive implications of such excesses, or, indeed, concerning the relationship between such moments of ‘textual excess’ and the emancipatory politics they implicitly promise as a payload (also see Middleton 1998: 152). The disclosive power of the aesthetic has implicitly enabled cultural critics to open up ‘a world which was hidden by existing forms of articulation’ (Bowie 1992: 36), yet crucially, in its attempt to break with the prescriptive ‘truth-only’ formality of traditional ‘Eng. lit.’, this reconciliatory impulse still necessarily ‘hibernates’ only within the confines of the very metaphysical hierarchy it would seek to overcome (see Bernstein 1992: 9). It follows that literary criticism is necessarily caught in a double bind of its own making, insofar as its relative ‘freedom’ and the autonomous truth potential which sustains its critique are wholly dependent on the rigid categorical distinctions which simultaneously ‘prohibit the fulfilment’ of its goals (cf. Bernstein 1992: 1-7). Viewed in this light, the newer formations of cultural criticism in literary studies could be viewed as ‘post-aestheticist’ in Bernstein's sense of the term: that is to say, not merely in the weaker sense of having broken with a reductive notion of aesthetic value or in ‘being’ postmodern anti-aestheticisms—but also in the potentially stronger sense that cultural criticism continues to deploy the cognitive import of the truth potential of the aesthetic against its own implication in disciplinary division, but has not itself always faced up to the divisive implications of its own interpretative procedures. The particular lure (and simultaneous frustration) of institutionally central or canonical texts like Shakespeare's is that they accommodate a form of critical displacement which is valid and ‘meaningful’ only insofar as they tend to accentuate the very institutional limits that continue to make critique possible, but which then also deny its realization as a meaningful form of political praxis. Indeed, when it is conceived within, as well as against, the oppressive constraints of the instrumental rationality of which it is part, the ‘meaning’ of ‘dissidence’, in its very displacement, might actually serve to symptomatize ‘the absence of a truly political domain’ (see Bernstein 1992: 3). A position which has been inadvertently confirmed and consolidated during the recent past as, since the 1960s or so, the rising stock of non-traditional cultural critique within the academy has actually expanded at an inversely proportional rate to its ability to intervene against, let alone stem or prevent, the ravages of capital's advance in what remains of the public realm.

Here, as elsewhere, it is apparent that the ‘fate’ of art in modernity is that, inasmuch as it remains ‘critical’, then as Bernstein argues, it necessarily continues to ‘suffer’ its alienation, either as a form of betrayal or ‘bereavement’. As a result, even for those who would refute nostalgia, each critical act is inevitably, in some sense, a displaced form of memorial. In short, cultural criticism becomes an act of testimony or remembrance, or as Bernstein puts it:

every conception of the alienation of art from truth is simultaneously a work of remembrance, a work of mourning and grief, even for those philosophers who doubt that such an ‘original’ state of union ever existed. In modernity beauty is not only alienated from truth, but grieves its loss; modernity is the site of beauty bereaved—bereaved of truth.

(Bernstein 1992: 4)

In this sense, as Bernstein's comments serve to suggest, our reliance on the thwarted aesthetic potential of Renaissance or early modern texts might actually be reconstrued as a conventionally ‘modern’ predicament. If there were time to do so here, alongside new historicism's ill-fated desire to speak with the dead, it would be tempting to survey the melancholic fort-da game that cultural materialism has enacted in its continued allegorization of a lost ‘corpus’ or body of truth in Renaissance ‘literature’. From the initial intensity of its disavowal of the organic community of Tillyard onwards, in its encounter with Renaissance texts, cultural materialism enacts a type of ‘memorial aesthetics’ which centres on representations of dead bodies or on images of their dismemberment.¹⁰ Yet it seems to me, that the issue of memorial surfaces as the key conceptual register for Renaissance criticism in recent years only insofar as it begins to function in its very displacement as a ‘sign of modernity’ (see Bernstein 1992: 4). And to this extent, our need to ‘remember’ is also an indirect symptom of a failure to come to terms with what Bernstein rightly identifies as the ‘discordance’ between art and truth in a modern secular society.

SHAKESPEARE AND DE-TRADITIONALIZATION

Modernity, as Adorno reminds us, is ‘a qualitative, not a chronological category’ (Adorno 1978: 218; also cited in Osborne 1995: 9). In this respect, as Peter Osborne suggests, ‘modernity’ situates itself as a temporal determinant of a ‘very specific kind’; indeed the German term for modernity, Neuzeit, locates precisely this sense of its fuller significance, as a new or different ‘kind of time’ (Osborne 1995: 9, 5, 1-29). During the Enlightenment, as Osborne observes, this ‘qualitative claim about the newness of the times’ manifests itself ‘in the sense of their being “completely other … than what has gone before”’ (Osborne 1995: 10, citing Koselleck 1985: 238). As we have seen, the emergence of an independent aesthetic sphere is clearly caught up in this distinctive shift in the temporal matrix: both in the form of the newly distinctive experience of modernity it engenders, but also in relation to its attempt to transform its historical consciousness of this transition into a ‘general model of social experience’ (Osborne 1995: 12).

Yet this sense of the qualitative newness of a ‘modern’ aesthetic distinction or, indeed, of the ‘aestheticization’ of modernity itself, also needs some further qualification. The question of aesthetic autonomy only arises as a question when in the course of its progressive secularization, culture effects its own act of self-legitimation. Which is to say that, in understanding itself to be distinctively ‘modern’, and in the course of dislodging a God-centred universe, culture somewhat contradictorily installs itself as ‘the tradition of the new’—a tradition which in being modern is simultaneously without tradition (see Rose 1992: 3, my emphasis). As such, modernity could be said to inaugurate itself as a tradition of de-traditionalization; indeed as Simon Critchley argues:

[I]t could be claimed that the consciousness of tradition as such only occurs in the process of its destruction, that is to say, with the emergence of a modernity as that which places in question the evidence of tradition.

(Critchley 1995: 20, original italics)¹¹

The overall consequence of de-traditionalization for a modern cultural criticism is double-edged. On the one hand the innovative aspect of de-traditionalization enables a newly critical sense of engagement with the past and could be said to encourage an affirmative stance, engendering a sense of autonomy and freedom: a liberation from the religious constraints which preceded it. On the other hand, the post-theological world can be a solitary place: one which locates the finiteness of the human condition and amplifies our sense of its contingency and inherent ‘meaninglessness’. As Andrew Bowie (1990) observes, either response to modernity—liberatory or nihilistic—inevitably attaches an enormous significance to a secular aesthetic: ‘either as an image of what the world could look like if we were to realise our freedom, or as the only means of creating an illusion which would enable us to face an otherwise meaningless existence’ (Bowie 1990: 3).

It follows that, in confronting secular disenchantment, art's transformative potential is clearly closely linked to an utopian impulse: the felt need to overcome the limitations of the present. Yet in this sense, as we have seen, the encounter of most cultural criticism with modernity could also be said to be exclusively ‘tragic’, as in relativizing the question of authority it then fails to deliver us from the consequence of doing so. In its moment of overturning or undermining its precursors, a critical engagement with tradition often locates a type of ironic discomfort which alerts us to the deleterious consequence of a break with the past. In this sense, as Gerald Bruns observes, an encounter with tradition is potentially:

an event that exposes us to our own blindness or the limits of our historicality and extracts from us an acknowledgement of our belongingness to something different, reversing what we had thought.

(Bruns 1992, cited in Critchley 1995: 21, Critchley's emphasis)

As a result, as I have already implied above, in relativizing tradition, contemporary forms of de-traditionalization can all too easily enshrine a form of melancholic entrapment or memorial: an indeterminate form of ‘self-definition through difference’ (again also see Osborne 1995: 14), which endlessly intensifies a meaningful sense of loss in the present, without offering the possibility of redemption in the future.

Interestingly of course, Leontes is presented with a roughly analogous dilemma mid-way through The Winter's Tale as, in regretting the past, he recognizes his own, non-redemptive future as a form of eternal return:

The causes of their death appear, unto
Our shame perpetual. Once a day I'll visit
The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there
Shall be my recreation.

(3.2.235-8)

Yet significantly, during the statue scene, Leontes moves toward a renewed conceptualization of his former misdemeanours by engaging in a more reflective sense of remembrance. Crucially, this newly evaluative understanding of his historical situation, which manifests itself as an openness to the other, depends on his willingness to concede his continuing involvement in upholding the very process he would now seek to overcome. The moment of transformation effectively pivots on Leontes' critical ability to recognize the fuller extent and deleterious consequence of his own past misrecognition:

                                                                                                    O, thus she stood,
Even with such life of majesty—warm life,
As now it coldly stands—when first I wooed her.
I am ashamed. Does not the stone rebuke me
For being more stone than it? O royal piece!
There's magic in thy majesty, which has
My evils conjured to remembrance

(5.3.34-40)

Intriguingly, of course, when it is viewed in these terms Leontes' admission of guilt and complicity resonates with the key ‘procedural dilemma’ of cultural criticism itself, which we might now shorthand as the perennial problem of ‘how to overcome authority without claiming authority’.¹² In the course of coming to terms with the question of self-implication—‘my evils conjured to remembrance’—Leontes might be said to follow ‘the path of self-reflection’ opened up by critical theory—a process which Bernstein helpfully glosses in the following terms:

Adornoesque critical theory is a continuation of the modern project of self-reflection beyond all transcendental understanding. Self-reflection without transcendental reflection is the ethical act of self-consciousness that brings the subject before and into his or her historical situation … in Adorno's act of self-implication: he is part of the barbarism that he is seeking to understand and overcome. Only through the confession of guilt can immanence be achieved; that guilt is the guilt of self-reflection's totalization of experience: the history it recounts and the explanations it offers. When the totality is reflected and challenged in the same thought, ethical action begins to surmount itself toward the political world whose absence calls it into being.

(Bernstein 1992: 16)

In surmounting self-reflection by conceding ‘reflection from within experience’, Leontes learns to live with the consequence of historical difference as well as remaining open to its potential affinities. In yielding to affinity through distance, and conjuring the possibility of reconciliation into being, the transformative potential of Leontes' moment of acknowledgement is in implication structurally comic rather than tragic.

Yet such ‘traditional’ transactions are not indicative of a mere point of closure nor is the achievement of reconciliation without considerable risk. In this respect the statue scene remains, in every sense, ground-breaking: narrowly treading the line between oppressive reimposition and newly created consensus on the one hand and the accusation of illegitimacy on the other. Indeed it is precisely because the statue scene is law making (canonical even?), just as it is simultaneously indeterminate and law breaking, that in its untheorizable excess it arouses suspicion, mistrust and ‘dread’:

PAULINA:
                                        you'll think—
Which I protest against—I am assisted
By wicked powers.

(5.3.89-91)

… my spell is lawful.

(5.3.105)

Faced with the intractability of tradition, the temptation for cultural criticism will either be to wager away its implication within tradition, or, as I have argued elsewhere, to merely remain melancholically enchanted by its productive failure to conjure tradition (Joughin 1997b: 290). Yet, as I have tried to make clear, it is not merely a matter of reconciling ourselves to the tragic discomforts which accrue to our persistent attempts to de-traditionalize Shakespeare, but also, rather, attempting to overcome them—in the process of doing so, we will need to remain alert to tradition's moment of truth. As Adorno's work serves to remind us, a more reflective engagement with remembrance does not merely collapse the past with the present—either by fetishizing a ‘contemporaneous’ sense of its alienated detachment from the past, or alternatively by endorsing a more reductive sense of a metaphysical continuity between past and present. Rather cultural critics need to achieve what Adorno terms ‘an attitude which raises tradition to consciousness without succumbing to it’. This means remaining open to the ‘past that persists’ in those works which (like Hermione's statue) refuse to ‘be restored to what they once were’ (Adorno 1993/4: 78-80). In this form at least, as The Winter's Tale serves to remind us, the sedimented truths of aesthetic disclosure continue to be historically substantiated, even insofar as they are ‘newly performed’:

So much the more our carver's excellence,
Which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her
As she lived now

(5.3.30-2)

CONCLUSION

Revisiting the question of aesthetic autonomy in Shakespeare studies need not entail a return to the uncritical uniformities which informed the bad aestheticisms of the past. Yet rethinking Shakespeare in aesthetical terms will require an altogether more rigorous form of correspondence with the past: one which resists the lure of nostalgic recuperation in either its radical or conservative forms, in maintaining a more reflective attitude toward tradition. Such a stance would remain attuned to what Adorno terms in his own reflection ‘On tradition’—‘affinity through distance’ (Adorno 1993/4: 79-80): the more substantial risk of which, we, like Leontes, might yet learn to live with.

In the course of becoming aesthetical and in disclosing truths which are ‘truer than truth-only cognition’, Shakespearean texts clearly manifest the transformative potential to sustain a critique of modernity, while also presenting the possibility of producing what Bernstein terms a ‘non-neutral’ defence of rationality. While there are evidently moral, political and aesthetic implications entailed in lifting Shakespeare's plays out of their immediate seventeenth-century milieu, the virtue of reconceptualizing Shakespeare in relation to a later ‘middling’ definition of modernity lies in acknowledging the mediating categories of modern Shakespearean reception as ‘our own’.¹³ Just as Shakespeare seems to anticipate a ‘modern’ secular culture, he does so for us only by continuing to reside within its constraints. In their attempts to challenge the dominant rationality assumptions of disciplinary division, recent advances in cultural and literary criticism have inevitably continued to rely on the transformative power of the aesthetic. As a result, the cognitive and revelatory potential of the aesthetic has already proved crucially informative, not merely in productively accommodating the discontents of ‘Lit. crit.'s’ insular dislocation, but also in tacitly reshaping the direction cultural and literary studies have taken in recent years.¹⁴ A newly conceived reappraisal of the qualitative significance of the aesthetic in Shakespeare criticism is now overdue. A more reflective materialist approach to the Shakespearean aesthetic will enable us to come to a fuller understanding of the determinants which currently govern our own displaced late modern compulsion to engage with the thwarted truth-potential of Renaissance texts, accommodating a fresh understanding of the playwright's significance for critical thought, even as it discloses new opportunities for interpretation.

Notes

1. My indebtedness to these thinkers will be evident throughout, but I am particularly grateful to Bowie, on whom I draw heavily here and below, and whose exploration of the philosophical origins of literary theory has proved especially informative (see esp. Bowie 1997a: 1-27). For more on the emergent debate surrounding ‘new aestheticism’ in its British context see Beech and Roberts (1996), Bernstein (1997) and Bowie (1997b).

2. For more on ‘the haunting singularity of the literary text’ and for an incisive reassessment of the question of literary value in its post-theoretical context and in relation to Bloom on Shakespeare, see Bennett and Royle (1999: 44-53, esp. 50-3).

3. I am grateful to Howard Felperin for illuminating this point for me.

4. I am partially indebted here to Robert Weimann, for his suggestive treatment of the fuller interpretative consequence of conjunctural historicity in relation to a reflective account of his own contribution to Shakespearean criticism in its ‘German’ context (Weimann 1997, see esp. 187).

5. Or as Leontes might put it:—‘Say it be, 'tis true’ (1.2.300); ‘How blest am I / In my just censure, in my true opinion!’ (2.1.38-9); ‘No. If I mistake / In those foundations which I build upon, / The centre is not big enough to bear / A schoolboy's top’ (2.1.102-5). And so on.

6. This last dictum on art belongs, of course, to Paul Klee. Also cited in Bowie (1997a: 5).

7. I am grateful to Terry Eagleton for clarifying these distinctions in the course of a panel discussion on ‘The uses of literature’ at the symposium on ‘The Value of Literature’ held at the Kaetsu Centre, New Hall, Cambridge on 3-4 July 1998. On the emergence of the aesthetic as the site for an alternative conceptualization of the ‘self’ within modernity see also Bowie (1990) and C. Taylor (1989).

8. In short, the institutionalization of literary criticism and the early precursors of aesthetic and literary theory are, from the start, also implicitly caught up in ‘a questioning of the borders between differing disciplines’ (Bowie 1997a: 13-16).

9. From its very beginning then, the rationalization of the Shakespearean corpus, and the attendant editorial apparatus which quickly grows up around his work, is actually snared on the hook of a characteristically ambiguous dilemma. And in their ‘British’ context, the pressure of situating these variant truth claims in relation to Shakespeare's work in some part serves to locate the inherently contradictory formation of an emergent ‘national literary criticism’ itself. Such, as Christopher Norris (1985) reminds us, is the ‘paradoxical consequence’ of Dr Johnson's early editorial project that:

   On the one hand Shakespeare has to be accommodated to the eighteenth-century idea of a proper, self-regulating discourse which would finally create a rational correspondence between words and things, language and reality … On the other hand, allowances have to be made for the luxuriant native wildness of Shakespeare's genius, its refusal to brook the ‘rules’ laid down by more decorous traditions like that of French neo-classicism.

   (Norris 1985: 49)

10. Again I have reappropriated the phrase ‘memorial aesthetics’ from Bernstein's The Fate of Art (1992), where he develops the philosophical and artistic significance of the term in specific relation to a re-reading of the implications of Kant's third Critique.

11. For a provocative interrogation of some of the key procedural features of de-traditionalization which differs from my own reading in its deconstructive emphasis, but which nonetheless provides an extremely persuasive account of the philosophical tradition as a tradition of de-traditionalization, compare Critchley (1995).

12. The formulation is Rorty's (Rorty 1989, cited in Bowie 1997a: 86), though the inference is my own.

13. If it is not already apparent, by a ‘middling’ definition of modernity I mean to imply a shift away from a preoccupation with the ‘early-modern’ with its emphasis on Shakespeare's liminal placement between feudal and modern, in order to hasten the reconceptualization of a modern sense of a Shakespearean aesthetic and its criticism, in more direct relation to the categorical differentiation between value spheres that is itself constitutive of an enlightened modernity (see Bernstein 1992: 2).

14. There is not enough time to unravel the full complexity of this formation here. But, briefly, one could point immediately to the performative dimension of gender studies and queer aestheticism; cultural criticism's persistent allegorization of the body and its concern with the libidinal intensities, affectivities, pulses, flows, rhythms, and becomings which inform any properly ‘materialist’ sense of our understanding of the significance of culture; Black Atlanticism and the aesthetics of alterity and post-colonialism; work on the creativity of counter cultures, the carnivalesque, subcultures of resistance, and so on.

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