Aesthetic Ideology
“Aesthetic Ideology” was a term applied by
the deconstructive theorist Paul de Man, in his later
writings, to describe the “seductive” appeal of aesthetic experience,
in which, he claimed, form and meaning, perception and understanding, and
cognition and desire are misleadingly, and sometimes dangerously, conflated. De
Man traces the aesthetic ideology to Friedrich Schiller’s Letters
on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), which describes a process of education
that would eventually produce an “Aesthetic State,” a concept that, de
Man argued, anticipated Joseph Goebbels’s concept of “the plastic art
of the state.” In De Man’s view, the concept of the aesthetic came to stand
for all organicist approaches not only to art but to politics and
culture as well. The experience of literature, he argued, minimizes the
temptation of aesthetic ideology to confuse sensory experience with
understanding, since literature represents the world in such a way that neither
meaning nor sense-experience is directly perceptible. See De Man, Aesthetic
Ideology (1996); and Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations:
Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (1996).
In The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(1990), the Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton provided
both a history and critique of “the aesthetic,” noting the many “ideological”
perversions and distortions in the history of the concept but, in contrast to
de Man, also identifying an “emancipatory” potential in a concept that had,
Eagleton pointed out, originally been articulated in terms of freedom and pleasure.
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