Attitudes toward aesthetic appearance determine positions on the guilt of art

Evidence

Yet even more crucial matters lie behind these fashionably contemporary ones, in particular the great traditional preoccupation of philosophical aesthetics from Plato to German idealism; namely, the question of the status of Schein, or aesthetic appearance (reduced, in postcontemporary debates, to the somewhat more limited issue called representation). How one stands on the guilt of art and the status of the cultural intellectual (not to speak of the aesthete as such) depends very much, as Adorno never tired of showing us, on one’s attitude toward aesthetic appearance, which can be repudiated for political reasons as a social luxury or privilege, or alternately celebrated or rationalized in any number of different ideological ways (which have themselves been modified since the emergence of mass media culture). DeMan uniquely combined both these positions in an idiosyncratic synthesis, assigning to Schein and sensory appearance the negative status of aesthetic ideology and falsehood or bad faith while retaining art itself (or at least literature) as the privileged realm in which language deconstructs itself and in which, therefore, some very late version of “truth” might still be available. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 559

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Schein as aesthetic appearance, reduced in modern debate to the narrower issue of representation — a key conceptual distinction.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s aesthetics of the guilt of art and the ideological status of the cultural intellectual. — connects to: Art can perform critique for audiences, letting them consume guilt-free. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 29