Poesis of Objecthood - Part Nine - Fragment

9.5 The abject, or how aesthetics becomes first politics.

Appearance is not what one chooses to look like, but the partial apprehension of an entity by another. It is not an entity’s chosen presentation or an exterior surface concealing an authentic interior. Nor is it entirely produced by the perceiving subject. Rather, appearance arises through the eventful contact of entities whose encounters neither participant can fully determine. Aesthetics concerns the formal arrangement of this confluence, through which certain appearances are favored, stabilized, and perpetuated while others are diminished or excluded. The abject is the residual force of this exclusion, the aesthetic shadow that accompanies the preferred arrangement of objects. It is not the opposite of beauty, nor does it seek redemption through it. The common ground of pulchritude and the abject lies in the irreducibility of what each brings into appearance. Abjection exposes the limitations of a canon that regulates the movement and expression of bodies according to preferred norms, and in doing so, reveals the political character of aesthetic organization and the power to determine not only how things appear, but under what conditions they may participate in a common world. The abject does not petition for admission into beauty to participate in the world, nor must it remain ugly to retain its disruptive capacity. The secret shared by Beauty and the Beast is not that they are identical, but that they both resist reduction to the categories through which they are recognized. Since, as mentioned above, aesthetics organizes the conditions of appearance, it also helps determine what counts as present, legitimate, and worthy of consideration, thus allowing such determinations to precede explicitly political decisions. Before a person is excluded by law, they may already have been rendered socially unrecognizable, threatening, or disposable through certain arrangements of appearance, just as before an object is appropriated, its existence is reduced to a useful image or handy category. When the organization of appearance begins to determine the behavioral patterns of interacting entities, aesthetics reserves the capacity to step forth as a political agent and promote their uncoerced participation.

Kant’s disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment made possible a conception of formal arrangements detached from the conditions in which entities encounter one another. By granting aesthetic judgment independence from any interest in the object's existence, it also furnished aesthetics with an alibi for disregarding the consequences of its own schemes. Even Hannah Arendt's attempt to recover Kantian judgment for political thinking leaves a troubling question unresolved: what is gained by imaginatively considering the standpoint of others when the actual conditions of their participation remain unchanged? Nor is it sufficient to indict the Archimedean standpoint for its supposed neutrality while leaving one's own position of judgment and its exclusions unexamined (regarding Arab and Palestinian indigeneity in her case). Here lies the persistent source of political inertia in contemporary Eurocentric liberalism, where corroborating recognitions have replaced transforming relations. The abject interrupts this complacency, as it neither seeks appreciation nor awaits admission into a more inclusive consensus, exposing the authority exercised through the dominant order of appearances. With its interventions, aesthetics becomes first politics not by extending the privileges of judgment, but by confronting the conditions under which entities are permitted to act, move, and participate in a common world.

Unless it is harnessed into fetishization, the abject resists settling into a permanent iconography. It will not tolerate a representation to legislate the motion of bodies, nor find Parnassian repose among the unsettling friction of contiguous textures and particularities. It may be retrofitted into an instrument of arousal. Still, the abject seeks to undo the aesthetic polarization of beauty and ugliness, which one can then read on a flat scale, like the absorption lines of a spectrum left by specific wavelengths of light. Pivoting around the articulation of form and function, turning them inside out, the abject is the type of intervention that injects Dada back into the commodification of Surrealism, which dissolved a potentially revolutionary movement into mainstream aesthetics for fashion, advertising, and consumer culture. Modernist formal organization, emerging from the clash between religious dogma and rational emancipation, sought to suspend its divergent, mutually antagonistic impulses in the vacuum of the sublime, even as its idols entered their twilight. But at the zenith of etiquette and savoir-faire, Elle Décor magazine's formalism must still negotiate with an incessant metabolic reality that is largely privatized. Meanwhile, the public arena becomes an ontological proscenium, where appearances are legislated according to codes of normative behavior. One might argue that the abject can succumb to the same paradigm that drives the make-up industry. As a safety valve of the dominant order, it might even reinforce its hegemony, since enough adversity can compensate for a system’s homogeneity and contribute to its longevity. However, the abject remains something beauty or the established order cannot entirely expel without compromising themselves.

Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre. On beauty’s dreamtime trajectory, begun in Baudelaire’s mineral reverie, we wave at Julia Kristeva, who shines a flashlight on the organic contingency beauty left behind, then salute Jacques Rancière, who helps us consult his map of the partitioned grounds. The latter recognizes that aesthetic arrangements determine what can be seen, heard, and acknowledged in a common world. Still, within this distribution of visibility, our political question extends to the organization of irreducible entities, the relations that surround them, and their co-produced behavioral pattern. Thus, we have situated abjection not so much in subjective repulsion and threatened identity, as in the preferential order of appearances. We have further located these arrangements within the shared field produced by entities and their relations. Looking back at the Vitruvian code that made aesthetics a foundational pillar, along with function and permanence, Venustas, reflecting the cosmic laws governed by mathematics, found its paradigm in the idealized form of the human body, turning its nonhuman counterpart into abjection as it engages in chthonic and carnal negotiations. To the modern subject, the abject continues to manifest in the surplus of neglect, urban decay, and wall-to-wall graffiti, often seeming like a substantive abomination, but unexpectedly and perhaps unwittingly, it behaves as an agent that draws the entitative condensations of beauty back into the relational encounters from which they have been abstracted, ultimately serving entitative integrity. With the irreverence and impetuousness of Dada, exercising the abject is an intervention that does not demand recognition within an established aesthetic order but challenges it to democratize its conditions of participation.

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