A common critique of the aesthetic involves delineating its social implications. The aesthetic, it is argued, has served within modern capitalism as a means of naturalising aspects of class difference. As the old explicit delineators of social difference within the feudal system broke down new systems of difference were required. Amongst other means of differentiation, the emerging bourgeoisie distinguished themselves from the working class via dimensions of taste – experiential and consumption preferences that demonstrated affective subtlety, refined sensibility, etc. In this sense, the aesthetic – a sensitivity to the aesthetic – is positioned as a pseudo innate capacity, which provides an ideological alibi for social differentiation and economic inequality.
While this argument retains its force, the aesthetic cannot simply be positioned in these terms. Cast as taste, it certainly has an aspect of naturalisation, but there is also the sense that taste must be trained. The breeding of good taste is not simply a biological process, it requires social cultivation. The phenomenon of the European Grand Tour provides an explicit example of efforts to develop and train aesthetic taste. Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) also positions aesthetic sensitivity as something that must be explicitly and deliberately fostered in order to reap socially integrative rewards.
The aesthetic represents a deeply ambivalent and uncertain category/capacity/field. Kant describes aesthetics as a species of judgement that charts a relation between the apriori and the experiential. The aesthetic represents a realm of mediation, negotiation and agreement. Our perception of the beautiful and sublime in the natural world comes to affirm an accord between our inbuilt capacities and the nature of the external world. This can only happen in his view from a disinterested perspective – beyond the corrupting influence of everyday human interests (appetites, instrumental goals). The aesthetic describes a perverse experiential mode – at once engaged and disengaged, at once outward looking, but only in terms of discovering analogues for the apriori. Hence all the of the difficulties involved in recognising the proper field of the aesthetic. Does it lie within some notion of what is proper to the aesthetic – within some sense of autonomy – or within its wider articulation with, in and of the world?