Aesthetic space in society today is in a state of rapid and constant flux. In a world where distances, psychological and geographical, are becoming increasingly irrelevant with the presence of technology and media enabling immediate and easy contact between any two points in the world, it is not surprising to find Ali Akbar Khan sahib teaching the sarod to American students in his school in southern California, nor is it surprising to find Michael Learns to Rock, a Swedish pop band, performing live in Shillong in India’s northeast, thousands of miles away from Scandinavia. Cultural boundaries are becoming increasingly nonexistent in this sometimes-overwhelming discourse of the global village and the new shiny concept of a knowledge-based economy. Necessarily and often ineluctably, this sharing of cultural space is intertwined with the economic and political reality of underdevelopment, and thus the discourse of the global village is still to a major extent the discourse of an industrial, civilised and ‘developed’ elite and is intimately connected to the concepts of globalisation and multinational trade. Although a free market economy is ostensibly meant to create and foster new unforeseen chains of value creation dramatically improving the material conditions of its citizens, actuality is more complicated, and the processes of development are often found to be unwieldy, slow and cumbersome. It needs to be noted that the discourse of the free market often takes a degree of infrastructural development in societies for granted.
In pragmatic terms, this can be ascertained by the massive discrepancy in the quality and accessibility of technological infrastructure in say, the four villages of Madhubani in rural Bihar and southern California. In an ideal situation, connoisseurs of Madhubani art would pay in high value dollars for the artwork produced in rural Bihar, and this high yield trade would show an obvious improvement in the quality of life of the women who create the paintings. This rather simplistic chain of production and distribution fails to incorporate the additional factors of bureaucratic and political interference, middlemen and counterfeiters who eat away a major section of the financial pie in parasitic actuality, often leaving next to nothing for the painter herself. Interestingly, though the painters themselves are often known to point out the irregularities in their distributional network in conversation, the artwork itself never makes an explicit political statement, and the subjective content continues to draw on its traditional symbolic and mythical framework.
The connection between aesthetic experience and its grounding in socio-economic reality is a much argued one, and one risks oversimplication in trying to establish a direct, explicit structure of production, distribution, profit and reproduction. Let us use a book as an example. For instance, when we use the phrase ‘means of production’, we are thinking simultaneously of the author, the publisher, the bookseller, the ink used in the book, the machines and workmen in the press, and of course, the reader who is buying the book. This structure has to necessarily incorporate within it the psychological and political aspects of the system, besides an economic pragmatic analysis of the material means of production. The history of a book is finally shaped by the printed text it contains, and an analysis of the book as a material object serves to make the history more complete, but cannot be sustained as an end in itself. Bibliography helps us understand the temporal and spatial contexts in which the text was produced, but how important are these contexts in the final act of the reader’s response to the text?
What is taken for granted in the argument above is the connection between the text and the processes which culminate in its production. This connection, of course, needs to be questioned and ascertained in detail before the reader accepts it. Does the text exist in an autonomous space beyond its immediate social context, or is meaning indelibly connected to the time and space in which a text was created? Experiments in 20th century drama have continually tried to deal with this conundrum, and the first example which comes to mind is Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Vladimir and Estragon exist in a landscape literally empty of detail, chronology, memory and history, and perhaps significantly, life for them becomes a meaningless limbo of endless repetition with a sense of being irreversibly separated from the identifying contexts of time and space which man uses to try to comprehend the ground reality of his existential condition.
The early and middle years of the twentieth century saw two analytical approaches towards the temporality and autonomy of a text evolve. One of these approaches was that of the so-called French school, primarily articulated in the thought and writings of philosophers like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. This approach draws centrally on the Kantian idea of a transcendent metaphysical space where the ‘meaning’ of the text resides, autonomous and independent of all else. The author performs a generative function in the creation of the text, but once the act of creation is complete, the object, the text exists in a space independent of material reality. The reader can understand and respond to a text detached from authorial identity and the material contexts of production and distribution. In a sense, this way of thought can be called Neo-Platonic, in that it assumes the existence of an independent metaphysical sphere of truth and meaning detached from the mundane appendage of base reality. However, this metaphysical space is also a simultaneous articulation of the discourse of the alienated individual, and the meaninglessness of the disembodied text is a reflection of the perceived incomprehensibility of the processes of perceived reality in the world around.
The second approach to the question of the text was articulated in the thought of intellectuals from the so-called Frankfurt school centred around the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany.
This approach grounds itself in an attempt to understand the functional reason for a work of art to exist, and thus reasons that art can and should be understood as a subjective and interpretive statement of the artistic individual about her psychological and existential realities. Adorno, in his Aesthetic Theory, establishes the distinctions between true and high art and so-called mass produced kitsch on this premise. He rejects the validity of pop art as, according to Adorno, it fails to paint a progressive picture of reality because of its inherent articulation of the mainstream discourse of the lowest common denominator, and thus an implicit failure to subvert and expose the chinks in the armour of the repressive status quo. True art is revolutionary, in the sense that it seeks to subvert and change the injustice of the world around by the very fact of its articulation within the subjective and intellectual framework of the artistic text. The work of art exists in a unique position due to its subjectivity and aesthetic complexity which takes it beyond the reductive scope of mere analytical and discursive reason. In a sense, this is an exaltation of the metaphysical space which an artistic text creates around itself, and simultaneously an articulation of the need to appropriate this exalted metaphysical space towards a culturally and politically functional end.