The "new aesthetics"

Cafe --

This recent title from Barbara Johnson is very much in the "theory"
vein many of you on this list deplore, but still, I know a few of you
will be interested:

	Johnson, Barbara.  _Persons and Things_.  Cambridge, MA:
	Harvard University Press, 2008.

Product Description:

	"Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie
	dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and
	Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies psychological
	and social dynamics; she also re-dramatizes the work of
	important tropes -- without ever losing sight of the ethical
	imperative with which she begins: the need to treat persons as
	persons.

	"In _Persons and Things_, Johnson turns deconstruction around
	to make a fundamental contribution to the new aesthetics. She
	begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction
	calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us
	are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing
	that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to
	fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be
	taken seriously, and that although a work of art 'is formed
	around something missing,' this 'void is its vanishing point,
	not its essence.' She shows deftly and delicately that the
	void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s
	jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our
	worlds.

	"The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons
	and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats,
	Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between
	space. The entire process operates via a subtlety that only a
	critic of Johnson’s caliber could reveal to us."

Johnson deals here with themes we've been discussing in other threads
relating to "iconicity" and *prosopopeia* (the Greek rhetorical term
for the personification of a non-human being or idea -- such as
Nestle's use of cuddly bears to sell its Bear brand creamer, the
contradictory effects of which we spoke of earlier).

I know this sort of theory tends to emphasize the verbal over the
visual, but the theoretical insights of "the new aesthetics" and its
critics do translate pretty easily across disciplinary boundaries,
including to information design.

E.g., Patricia Williams applied Johnson's theories to U.S. political
discourses in her 6 Oct. 2008 column for _The Nation_ ("Lipstick
Jungle"), wherein Williams interpreted the Republicans' choice of
Sarah Palin for vice presidential candidate as *prosopopeia* -- Palin
as the salable icon ("self-proclaiming, yet concealed") of an
increasingly unpopular Republican masculinity: "what gun-toting,
warmongering, polar-bear extinguishing, creationist, antiabortionist
man could have gotten away with" Palin's generic acceptance speech,
asks Williams rhetorically.

FWIW, Williams' column, which opens with the provocative claim "Andy
Warhol would have loved Sarah Palin", is available online (for free
;-) in HTML format at:

< http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/williams >.

(Note to Gunnar et al.: where would political cartoons of Palin fit in
Scott McCloud's Big Triangle?)

Deborah
_____

Deborah Taylor-Pearce
[email protected]






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