observations on aesthetic distance

Clement Greenberg

OBSERVATIONS ON AESTHETIC DISTANCE

To repeat: Aesthetic experience is value judgment, is constituted by value judgment. I wrote also that an aesthetic value judgment can be thought of only as a result that swallows its cause or causes, or as an answer that swallows its question or questions; that everything specifiable as aesthetic in aesthetic experience, in being a value judgment, can-nay, has to-be considered a result or answer, and that going from one aspect or part to another of an art work, or an aesthetic experience, means going from results to results of results-or from answers to answers of answers-and so on.

Whatever might be seen at first as a cause, or a question, turns out under scrutiny to be a result or answer; and if there seem to be still further causes or questions behind it, these too, when looked at closely, turn out to be results or answers. This is what happens when the discursive mind probes a work of art or an aesthetic experience in order to account for its specifically aesthetic quality or qualities. It comes up always against the value judgment as a brute fact-"brute" because an act of intuition can't be taken apart by reason.

All this has to do with aesthetic experience as seen from the inside, as it were. Backed away from and seen from the outside, aesthetic experience arranges itself somewhat differently from thought. Now we see it becoming as it were, rather than being. Where before there was nothing but results now everything becomes sheerly means (but still not causes); means to aesthetic results-but to be seen as, thought of, discussed as means only as long as it's not yet aesthetic result, as long as it keeps something of its extra-aesthetic status, its status "outside," and is thus not fully integrated in the aesthetic experience.

Canvas and paint as sheerly material, sounds or the timbre of sounds when considered separately, the dancer's body seen as nothing but body, words and their meanings isolated in their dictionary or cognitive definitions: in the context of the aesthetic, these when thought of this way remain or become means because they exist before art and independently of art, as "ordinary" phenomena, whether physical or mental. But this distinction applies to much, much more than the physical or purely cognitive aspects of the various mediums. It also applies to whatever gets incorporated in or conveyed by the mediums, whatever gets depicted, represented, manipulated, referred to, alluded to, implied, or hinted at by or through them. This distinction applies, moreover, to whatever kind of experience feeds uniformalised art-that is, solipsistic aesthetic experience-where sense impressions alone act as the medium (as in visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, or tactile aesthetic experience of nature).

The distinction between the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic is installed by what has come to be called "aesthetic distance." "Distance" here means detachment from practical reality, the reality we live in ordinarily, reality at large, the reality that's shot through with behaviour and consequences and information. Anything that reaches the stage of being, rather than just becoming a means to an aesthetic result-that is, gets swallowed in the result-does so by being deprived more or less of its "weight," its practical or theoretical specific gravity, in reality at large. (The "more or less" is important here and I shall come back to that later.) It becomes frozen, so to speak, with respect to its impact on that reality. Aesthetic distance lets you watch, behold, experience anything whatsoever without relating it to yourself as a particular human being with your particular hopes and fears, interests and concerns. You detach yourself from yourself (Schopenhauer). Aesthetic distance permits you to experience everything at a remove, even your own feelings, your own joys and your own suffering. Admittedly, experiencing your own suffering aesthetically is unlikely, but the possibility can't be excluded in principle (that there are other ways than aesthetic distance of achieving self-detachment-resignation, etc., etc. -would in truth only bear this out). *

Although aesthetic distance is the prime condition of aesthetic experience, it's not a condition that makes itself known in advance of such experience. It's realized only, it's there only, when aesthetic experience itself is there. An aesthetic occasion has to be there, an occasion that makes itself aesthetic in a circular way by dint of being experienced aesthetically. Aesthetic distance and aesthetic experience arrive together. The distance, as a condition of the possibility of aesthetic experience, "precedes" the latter only in that same at emporal "logical" sense in which Kant said that valuing "precedes" the pleasure or dis-pleasure gotten from art. (Here again, discourse turns in a circle as it tries to come to grips with what actually happens in aesthetic experience.)

But the identification of aesthetic distance with aesthetic experience itself isn't a complete one. You can decide, choose, in advance to have aesthetic distance, put yourself in a frame of mind that's ready to have it. You can prepare yourself to have it as you enter a concert hall, theatre, or art gallery, or when you go out into Nature. The artist chooses in advance to have aesthetic distance when he goes to work-or he should. Yet this doesn't mean that you already have aesthetic distance by mere virtue of your decision; you've only readied yourself to have it. Aesthetic distance, and aesthetic experience along with it, can also come unsummon, without your being at all in readiness for it. Like aesthetic experience itself and the valuing that constitutes it, aesthetic distance-aesthetic attention, focusing-can be involuntary or inadvertent, imposing itself when you're least in mind of anything aesthetic. In this case it's as though the aesthetic occasion, the moment of it, came first, and only then the distance that made it possible. Some appearance, some sound-or some touch, taste, or smell, for that matter-comes into your ken and instantaneously, without your having any say, enjoins the distance, the "aesthetic attitude." This happens all the time. As I've said in another place, the aesthetic lurks everywhere and-contrary to a common notion-you don't have to be particularly attuned in order to have aesthetic experience on some level or another. *

In our culture, if not in others, it's formalized art, and anything resembling it, that elicits aesthetic distance and attitude most noticeably. * Kant pointed in effect to aesthetic distance when he said that the "judgment of taste is . . . indifferent as regards the being of an object"; also when he said, "Taste is the faculty of judging of an object, or a method of representing it, by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction." What could be called the classic essay on aesthetic distance is "Psychical Distance" (1913) by the English psychologist Edward Bullough. The American philosopher John Hospers takes issue with some aspects of Bullough's presentation of his thesis in another important essay, "The Aesthetic Attitude" (1967). Both essays-which I take issue with at some points-are reprinted in A Modern Book of Esthetics , edited by Melvin Rader. See also Chapter 8 in Harold Osborne's The Art of Appreciation. * There's ever so much here that introspection still hasn't noticed in a responsible way. In some directions other cultures may have been ahead of ours in reflecting on aesthetic experience. The trouble is that the Indians, the Chinese, and the Japanese haven't generalized or systematized in quite the logically consistent way that Western philosophy and aesthetics have. So it seems to me, they haven't made their insights as viable as Kant, say, made his. Under the pressure of the same Greek-derived logic that made Western science truly scientific, Western thought has worked at least to develop guidelines for what's sayable in an explicit way about aesthetic experience.