What is Toggling? Disambiguating Brand’s Story about Disinterestedness and Political Art

In an attempt to get clear about Peggy Brand’s defense of disinterestedness I explore her concept of toggling and suggest a way to clear up problems.  It is not simply that looking at the painting or the performance piece would open the feminist up to more experiences of a formalist sort but that there are other layers of meaning that enhance and enrich the experience of any viewer as we work through the different forms of attention, both interested and disinterested.  The enhancement by what Brand, perhaps misleadingly, calls “toggling” is not just additive but transformative in a progressive way.

This is an attempt to get clear about Peggy Brand's defense of disinterestedness in her paper "Disinterestedness and Political Art" which appears in Carolyn Korsmeyer's Aesthetics:  The Big Questions.  The basic claim is that political art in general and feminist art in particular can be appreciated not only in an interested manner but in a disinterested manner, in fact that it should be appreciated in both ways:  both disinterestedness and interestedness afford, taken together, the "fullest and fairest experience of a work of art."  The initial question to answer is why Brand, a feminist, would want to leave room for disinterested perception, which she herself labels as masculinist.  I think that Brand's approach is mostly correct, but sorting out the actual argument for it is difficult, and there are some ambiguities that need to be resolved.  A clue comes in her discussion of the history of the concept of disinterestedness.  She observes that disinterestedness was "both a moral and an aesthetic ideal" opposed to "private interest" and "serving one's own ends." It was contrasted with the desire to possess the object.  Relating this to the beautiful in women, we find that in Burke's writing the female body is only perceived as beautiful "if the sole interest of the perceiver is in perceiving for its own sake and not in the desire for possession." (156) 

Although Brand does not make this clear (and may not be aware of it herself), the original motive of disinterestedness was in the right direction from the standpoint of feminism. Perceiving a woman for her own sake and not as a possession is perceiving her as having her own ends. That is, disinterested attention, directed by men towards women is actually conducive to feminism both on an ethical and on an aesthetic level.  This establishes that disinterested perception has some value, even in the 18th century version, although during that period it was not always practiced with honesty.  In observing the female nude a "natural" reaction for a heterosexual male is sexually interested (I am not sure why Brand puts "natural" in quotes here.)  A much more problematic reaction is desire to possess and exploit the woman under question.  Disinterested perception breaks or at least brackets these predispositions. 

Brand then discusses this issue in relation to Arnheim's discussion of Ingres' La Source.  Arnheim is concerned that the image is so lifelike and sensuous that it makes "the observer almost forget that he is looking at" a work of art. Brand observes that the male observer has an "automatic response to the sexuality depicted" and it is difficult to be disinterested as a result. So, Arnheim's response is initially "unabashedly interested." Nonetheless Arnheim is subsequently able to focus on formal properties of the painting, i.e. the devices that make it "such a complete representation of life." Brand observes that he is able to isolate and interpret these properties because, as he says in another book, he can "peel off the context" to perceive the object "as though it existed in complete isolation" i.e. by way of "an abstraction" blocking associations with, as Brand puts it, "actual nude girls."  

This attempt to achieve mastery over one's own bodily response is, however, seen by most feminists as masculinist and as wrongful psychological censure.[1]  But Brand sees it as useful for the purposes of feminism.  It is not that she thinks that the observer can become totally neutral and unbiased or that one can become an unflawed mirror (as Stolnitz thought):  her view is that one can be disinterested in a relatively weak way, although, as we shall see, this is a weak way of putting the point.

 

Brand's main example is the work of Orlan called The Reincarnation of St. Orlan, a performance work in which Orlan seeks to represent "an ideal formulated by male desire" using the medium of her own body to deconstruct such images of women, and she does this by way of submitting herself to surgery.  The goal is to get women to not engage in reconstructive surgery.  

There are a lot of issues here but I want to keep to the question of the value of disinterestedness for the feminist.  One very effective way to discuss this issue is to focus on one image from Orlan's piece:  a scene from "Seventh Plastic Surgical Operation," Nov. 21, 1993.

The issue Brand raises is whether the empathy we naturally feel towards this woman under surgery should be or even can be blocked in order to perceive her disinterestedly, i.e. in such a way as to be fascinated by the "compositions of lights and darks" and by the "indecipherable" nature of the instruments and body parts.

Brand claims that she is taking a position "between the two extremes:  the traditional endorsement of masculinist disinterestedness ...and its feminist antithesis."  She is arguing for reconfiguring the masculinist approach "along revisionist lines." This can be achieved by "toggling" between the interested and disinterested approaches. (We shall see later that “toggling” is not quite the right metaphor for what Brand proposes.)  Now with respect to the image here: "seeing a still photograph out of its original context - a videotape of the surgical process - a viewer of a single image documenting Orlan's 'Omnipresence' scrambles to clarify the ambiguities of what is seen." 

We need to bear in mind (Brand does not mention this) that single shots like this are often considered part of the artwork, or one way of perceiving the artwork, when it comes to performance pieces.  In other words the performance is the event plus the still shots, often framed in galleries, and so forth.  The artwork is a collection of various related items and events. 

Interested attention (IA) occurs when one empathizes with the artist (or with the woman pictured, if one does not know her identity), but "a quick reminder that the image is a work of art and not just a picture of someone's cosmetic surgery might cause another reversal, this time a disengagement with the rapport one has established - a reversal of personal interest - to an intellectual engagement with the content of the work of art" i.e. recognition of Orlan's goal to "deconstruct mythological images of women" --- this would be Disinterested attention (DA) in the revisionist mode: that is, such attention would "engage intellectually and disengage emotionally" with the work.

Things may be a bit confusing here.  So I will hypothesize what I think Brand is getting at.  Let us posit the movement here as one that begins with the interested attention that goes along with the exploitive male gaze (Orlan is seen as properly enhancing her features through plastic surgery in order to better accommodate male desire) followed by disinterested attention of the classic sort in which the image of Orlan is seen in terms of lines and colors in certain relations and in which the initial male gaze is bracketed, followed by a feminist interested perception, in which Orlan is seen with sympathy, followed finally by a feminist disinterested perception which incorporates feminist theory, a kind of move to greater objectivity. The entire sequence is hardly the same as toggling a light switch:  for. although it goes from IA to DA to IA and back to DA, the IAs and DAs are different.

Going back to La Source, one can attend to the work using both DA and IA.  In DA one can focus on the color, texture and balance of the painting, and from IA (of the feminist sort) one can note that it objectifies the male gaze. 

There is much rather confusing talk in Brand's paper about psychologically ambiguous images such as the famous duck/rabbit, old woman, and pronged figures.  Her idea is that we perceive similarities between our mental sets and what we disambiguate (168).  She notes that in the psychological perceptual experiment using pronged figures when we get disambiguating visual cues we will read the pronged figures one way rather than another, and that "unambiguous sexualized predispositions" similarly explain the tendency for males like Arnheim to see La Source originally in a sexualized way.  (Why Brand believes that male sexualized predispositions are unambiguous is beyond me.) DA then allows them to switch and see it in another way, and presumably opens them up (although this is not explained in this article) to a second form of IA which is feminist.  I think the best way to deal with this material on perceptual ambiguity is to skip through it quickly since there is, after all, no cumulative aesthetic value in switching between the different ways of seeing the ambiguous pictures studied by psychologists.

Brand then tells us that "What is taking place [in the first DA] is a deliberate dis-ing of the gazer's tendency to use, take advantage of, desire, or possess the girl that is pictured [in the Ingres painting];  it is an attempt to be open to receiving all the impressions that the work can provide.  It is a shift toward the eighteenth-century concept of disinterestedness, which is clearly a denial of Arnheim's initial and intrusive interests:  an attraction to the work's sensuality..."  As a heterosexual male I take offense at the idea that my way of looking at women I find sexually desirable is always associated with the desire to exploit and dominate, that I am incapable of a sexualized look that is also caring or respectful, and therefore that in order to appreciate The Nude I have to set aside these naturally exploitative desires.  I do not have to be masculinist to be masculine, although I recognize that we all may have unconscious masculinist prejudices.  But let’s set that aside for more interesting issues. 

I think I can clear up one point here.  Brand sees those habituated to the male gaze as having to "sort through the confusion of interpretations" of the image of the Ingres nude and the image of the bruised Orlan.  The interpretations in question of the nude are simply those of masculinist IA vs. classical DA.  The Orlan case is a bit more complicated as she does not present herself on the operating table as an attractive object for the masculinist IA, or rather, she does only ironically presents herself as such, since for example she is “made up” even though on the operating table, whereas in fact, under the male gaze she can only be seen as sexually unattractive unlike the nude in The Source.   So the confusion here is significantly different in type in each case. 

In her essay Brand sets up Arnheim as a kind of hero, for unlike such disinterestedness theorists as Alison and Stolnitz, he saw that the work does not simply "yield" an impression but rather that a process of abstraction/subtraction is needed to attain DA.  This process, she argues, actually adds to his experience of the painting thus making him "more open to all the impressions that the work might provide." Brand will use this idea to construct a new level of DA for the feminist, one that comes after the feminist IA.  

However, as Brand correctly observes, the initial DA, even that of Arnheim, does not provide a full experience of the work, since it blocks significance that can only be regained by "imaginative exercise of IA" i.e. a switch not only away from conditioned viewing of the image formed by the male gaze but to viewing the girl, in the case of The Source, as "embarrassed by her nakedness." Such a switch, Brand thinks, opens one to "more impressions than ever before."

What I had not realized on my first reading of Brand but which is now apparent, is that the second, feminist, IA is a matter of adding a context, of telling a story, one that may or may not be literally true....it doesn't really matter.  It doesn't matter whether Ingres’ model actually had the feelings of being embarrassed by her nakedness. What matters is that she can easily be seen under this story since this story is true to a common or general experience of women who suffer under the exploitative male gaze.  That is why Brand refers to it as "the imaginative exercise of IA."  So, rather than subtracting context, which Arnheim recommended for IA, this is a matter of adding context, of "building" interest, one that opens the viewer to more impressions. 

So the process Brand envisions is from IA to DA and then to IA (the feminist IA that adds context), and then, but Brand neglects to make this entirely clear, back to DA again by way of a bracketing of the emotional level of response in order to attain the feminist intellectual level.  This comes out, rather vaguely, when she says, "The feminist viewer of Ingre's nude or Orlan's surgeries - whose tendency is to adopt a more physically and bodily based interested stance (IA) like Arnheim's - may also benefit from the lesson of undergoing an intellectualizing and abstracting process" i.e. of moving to the second, feminist DA.  The is confused by the fact that Orlan does not adapt an IA like Arnheim's since she explicitly offers her performance pieces as representing an ideal formulated by male desire and as having the goal of discouraging women from reconstructive surgery.  So, the images from Orlan's performance can now be seen in terms of the feminist theories of Mulvey and the feminist intentions of Orlan herself.  For Brand, the benefit of DA for the feminist observer is the "intellectualizing and abstracting process" not made available through the IA of feminist empathy.  Where Brand goes wrong, and against her own intentions, is to think of the feminist as somehow benefiting from the classical IA in a direct way, saying that "the feminist who looks upon Ingres' nude formalistically is self-consciously and deliberately shedding her feminist lens to view the work as disinterestedly as possible."  The problem here is with the notion of "shedding her feminist lens."

Brand mistakes her own theory when she says that, for the feminist, "[v]iewing La Source in terms of geometry and color adds to the variety of experiences she [the feminist] gains from the piece."  (168)  That is confusing the feminist IA with the original IA.   Brand just thinks her own "revised" DA may be more difficult when it comes to political art since, in the case of Orlan, one needs to "shift toward viewing bloody facial features as combinations of reds and purples, darks and lights..."  This is coupled in Brand's mind with a "shift to reflection on the concept of women and of art exploited by the performance series."  Yet just seeing the facial features in formalist terms is not the goal at all.  The goal is to see them in terms of the feminist IA and DA.  Brand is just confusing the traditional formalist perception advocated by Clive Bell and the intellectualist perception informed by feminist theory.

There is a deep reason for this and it has to do with Brand's misconception of her own idea of toggling.  Briefly, the move from IA to DA to feminist IA and then to feminist DA is not a matter of just switching perspectives.  The previous perceptions are carried into the later ones in a way very unlike the ambiguous figures which had so misled Brand, and very much like what John Dewey refers to when he speaks of the flow of art experience being one that carries the past into the present and projects into the future.  When, in looking at the photograph of Orlan's performance, one is "looking at bloody facial features as combinations of red and purples" this is not a matter of replacing the one form of perception with the other but rather of being very aware that these are bloody facial features as we attend to them formalistically:  you can't stop thinking of the fact that they are bloody facial features. There is no purely formalist way to look at this photograph, nor do I think we should even try.  The reds and purples take on a different look, a different intensity, when we know they are reds and purples of rendered human flesh, just as the initial awareness that this is human flesh is intensified when we focus on the formalist aspect of the work.  These reds and purples take on a different meaning again (and, let me suggest, increase in intensity) when we understand the entire performance under the feminist intentions of Orlan.  The process is not just one of opening up to new experiences, but cumulative.

Brand’s conclusion is not as powerful as it should be.  It is not simply that looking at the painting or the performance piece would open the feminist up to more experiences of a formalist sort but that there are other layers of meaning that enhance and enrich the experience as we work through them.   Further, some aspect of this is even to be found in the original construction of DA in the 18th century as we look at it now under contemporary lenses, insofar as it was directed against seeing things in terms of ego and possession and moved ethically towards treating the object portrayed as a thing in itself. My conclusion is that the "toggling" (perhaps mislabeled because of its association with a mere on/off switch) Brand describes is a way to deepen our understanding of a work and that the enhancement by toggling is not just additive but transformative in a progressive way.  This has implications that go far beyond debates over feminist interpretation since Brand's concept of toggling between DA and IA contributes to resolving the great debate between formalism and contextualism.

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[1] lt seems peculiar that feminists would have a problem with men censoring feelings that have negative implications for women.  I wonder whether Brand has these other feminists right here.  

Fashion and Art

Back in 1990 Karen Hanson wrote a fascinating article titled "Dressing Down Dressing Up," on the philosophical fear of fashion.  It was anthologized in Carolyn Korsmeyer's Aesthetics:  The Big Questions where I am reading it for a class I am teaching.  The article was originally for a feminist journal and so it is not surprising the Hanson begins by discussing the issue of feminist response to fashion.  The big issue is how to deal with the "male gaze" particularly if you value fashion.  Feminists have argued that the male gaze objectifies women and hence is an adjunct to sexist culture and patriarchy.  Eliminate the male gaze and you strike against inequality of men and women.  The problem is, as Hanson sees it, that the feminist attack on fashion can be seen as allied with the traditional philosophical attack on fashion based on rejection of the body.  So there is an interesting problem:  if you don't want the body rejected, and you think this is part of the feminist platform, then there must be some way that understands an appropriate "gaze" for fashion.  

The issue of fashion should be of interest to anyone focusing on everyday aesthetics.  Fashion has an everyday dimension in clothes choice, both in store shopping and in daily dress.  Also, as is well known, popular clothing styles are influenced by things that happen at the level of haute couture.  It is hard to categorize high fashion as a type of everyday aesthetics.  It might be categorized more fruitfully with other forms of high design.  The fashion world itself is remarkably similar to what Danto classically called the artworld.  It seems that fashion designers are very like artists, especially like architects insofar as they design things that are both functional and often decorative.   We speak of fashions and changes in the art world, and it seems as though these days the artworld is becoming more like the fashion world and the fashion world is becoming more like the artworld.   The fashion world is not the artworld but interestingly touches it as several points.  Someone can be called in from the artworld to enhance fashion and fashion people often end up with shows in art museums. Similarly, the various activities surrounding the fashion world often remind one of the movie world.  

This leads us inevitably to the question of whether or not fashion is art, a question much like that of whether or not food is art.  We can argue that both fashion and food are like photography and film. While both were excluded from the domain of art in the early part of the 20th century they gradually gained art status.  What this meant was not that all photographs or films are art but rather that these things can count as media for art.  As I have suggested, it is worthwhile to think of an aesthetic hierarchy where, for example, ordinary clothes choice and ordinary cooking are aesthetic but at a low level  (these things are not art).  At a higher aesthetic level some clothes design, making and arrangement can be seen as a minor art (or minor arts), as also some food-making.  The highest aesthetic level is where a small number of costumes and restaurant productions can be seen as high, serious or fine art.  For some people, this is art in the truest sense of the word.  This would work for a lot of other things.  The high fashion or haute couture level of fashion will be more culturally prominent at some times in history than at others.  

Why not call fashion art?  Of course it is an art, but not the same kind of art as painting, sculpture, video art, all of which seem to have a firmer place in the main halls of the art museum than fashion.  The fashion world is in fact distinct from the artworld.

Grant that it is art.  Is it nonetheless less authentic because inevitably shallow and sentimental?  Can one really compare Michelangelo to Coco Chanel?  As lovely and sophisticated high fashion can be, even as expressive of cultural changes, can it touch on deeper truths?  How do we deal with the view that it is ultimately frivolous.  Maybe we should treat it differently from literature, dance, poetry, and the other so-called fine arts: as expressive but not in the same way.  One of my students, Sadie, writes:  "I think fashion can be art all on its own if it is done the way a great painting is done" i.e. if it is done with great care and if the artist knows what she or he is doing.  Another student suggests it can be if it gives us the kind of awe we get from great works of art. 

There are many things that can be said in criticism of fashion (e.g. the way that it establishes class difference), but as Hanson correctly observes, these do not significantly distinguish the fashion business from many other luxury businesses.  The question she poses is why does philosophy hate fashion.  One reason is that fashion is associated with change and even encourages us to change our desire from season to season.  It is seen as superficial.

Philosophy's rejection of change has its problems however.  As Hanson writes:   "The search for lasting truths and enduring values is a noble activity, but it has sometimes engendered a flight from ordinary, common experience, the experience of growth and decay, coming-to-be and passing away."  The question is whether we philosophers need to identify with the traditional rejection of appearance in preference for underlying unchanging truth.  Must we be Platonists?   Or can there be a wisdom that changes with the Fall issue of Vogue?  

Hanson nicely documents many of the attacks on fashion in Plato's dialogues.  One she doesn't mention is Socrates' ironic comment to Ion that he admires him to be able to present himself in fancy costume before the multitudes.  Socrates the bare-footed philosopher clearly does not admire this.  

I am currently reading a novel called The Rosie Project which is about a geneticist who has Asperger's syndrome but does not know it and who gets into all sorts of socially awkward situations because he does not understand the point behind fashion.  At one point he is expected to put on a sports jacket for a fancy restaurant and refuses because he cannot understand why his much more expensive and much more functional jacket will not do.  Are philosophers who reject the aesthetic relevance of fashion just missing the point in much the same way?  One thinks of Thomas More's utopia in which citizens wear the same style and color and jewels have become children's playthings.

Thoreau famously says "beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."  So perhaps one should beware of being a news reporter since news reporters on TV never seem to wear the same outfit twice.  But is that a problem, really?

Hanson discusses Baudelaire as an advocate of the ephemeral surface,  Baudelaire as supporter of particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance, which gives us pleasure in the quality of being present and of being in the present.  Unfortunately Baudelaire's advocacy is a mixed blessing for fashion as he adheres to a version of Platonist rejection of the body anyway.  

One thing brought up in my class is the issue of the relation between the clothes and the body.  We seldom see clothes without a body to cover.  The fashion experience should be an experience of a clothed body.  The interaction between the body clothed and the clothes themselves is essential to the totality of the experience.  So the study of fashion is inextricably connected with the study of human beauty.   As my student Kristin puts it, "women wear makeup to accentuate the eyes, the lips, or the cheekbones, and people wear different fashions to accentuate the body...it is as colorful and artful display of a human form." It might be possible to observe human beauty with no connection to fashion, but this is in fact rare.  As the same time I am not convinced that fashion is just a way to display or enhance a human form: it is also an artform that uses human form as a ground or base to accomplish other things, to produce amazing visual effects using such materials as cloth, feathers, leather and so forth.

Hanson has a nice quote from Freud that deals with the issue of the transience of fashion:   "Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment....The beauty of the human form and face vanish forever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lands them a fresh charm.  A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely."  from his "On Transience"  Vol. 5 of his collected papers, 1959.  The point seems closely related to the Japanese fascination with transience in natural beauty.

Hanson's own position seems to be something like this:  self-consciousness is a good thing but should include awareness of and interest in one's own appearance [and also with the appearances of others as well as awareness of one's own standard of taste in this regard?]  The problem for philosophers is that they wish to be thinkers not the thought-about, active not passive, not the object of the cognition of others.  Thus philosophy has antipathy to personal passivity.  Feminism in rejecting traditional dichotomies questions the passive/active distinction as well as the masculine/feminine.  It rejects the female as essentially passive, but does not go over to rejecting the value of passivity in human experience.  There are genuine problems with the male gaze, but not necessarily with being the object of contemplative perception, knowing that one does not want to join with traditional philosophy in devaluing the body:  "if philosophy - with the help of feminism - could be brought to terms with our embodiment, could work to find an appropriate stance on the relation between the individual and social norms, could come to admit that each of us is, in part, an object to others, then philosophy might just change its attitude toward fashionable dress [and to its] appropriate if ephemeral satisfactions."

I am not entirely happy with the emphasis on an innocent and valuable passivity in Hanson's article.  Many of my students talk about everyday fashion from the perspective of choices made both in the purchasing of fashion products and in choosing which ones to wear on any particular day or to any particular event.  This is not a matter of pure passivity.  One presents oneself for the viewing of others, but then the first person who sees the product, often in a full-length mirror, is oneself.  One is shaping one's image for the public.  As my student Mikhail puts it, just as "an artist reflects their mood or personality in the medium of a painting, one may reflect the way they feel through fashion."  Several students also observed that the issue is not just one of being the passive object of an objectifying male gaze, which, when it happens, is just rude or sexist, but being the object of a critical/appreciative gaze by both men and women, sometimes women being more concerned about how they are seen by other women, and also more concerned about how other women are seen, as a component of this critical gaze.   The critical/appreciative but non rude/sexist gaze would be in accord with the core feminist value of treating women as equals to men and with the feminist/Nietzschean critique of traditional religion/philosophy in saying "yes" to the body.  

Feminist Philosophy and the Aesthetic Creation of Subjectivity

The title of this post comes from an article (actually a chapter) by Monique Roelofs called "Aesthetification as a Feminist Strategy:  On Art's Relational Politics."  which appears in Art and Essence ed. Stephen Davies and Ananta Ch. Sukla (Westport, Conn:  Praeger, 2003): 193-212.  I am not so much interested here in Roelof's actual thesis or problematic as in her account of the aesthetic creation of subjectivity insofar as it relates to the project of everyday aesthetics.  Roelofs observes that feminist philosophy and aesthetics have many things in common. 

Here goes:  "On Western aesthetic paradigms, the aesthetic has borne the weight of integrating aspects of mental and bodily existence, rationality and feeling, private and public life, and nature and culture.  Aesthetic activity has traditionally combined both poles of these four dichotomies.  Other human domains, such as the spheres of moral action, knowledge acquisition, domestic life, official public existence, and the world of everyday labor have in many ways tended to pry these poles apart.  In reconciling these dualities, the aesthetic performs a task that lies close to the heart of contemporary feminist philosophy in the West, as Western feminism is deeply invested in overcoming precisely those dualities between mind-body, reason-emotion/sensation, public and private life, and nature-culture that aesthetic experience has long served to bridge...It is, then, in virtue of its integrative function that aesthetic activity has been able to support feminist critiques of Western rationality and metaphysics."  195-6.

This passage is both profound and important.  It allies feminism with the anti-dualist version of pragmatism found in the philosophy of John Dewey, who himself is the grandfather of everyday aesthetics.  It also shows that everyday aesthetics is not only at the center of aesthetics but at the center of philosophy itself, at least when viewed from a feminist (or at least, as there are many feminisms, this feminist) perspective.  Moreover, it correctly warns theorists of everyday aesthetics not to assume that solutions to problems of everyday aesthetics are just to be found in looking at domestic life and "the world of everyday labor."  These arenas, as conventionally approached, are arguably caught up in an alienated system in which the dichotomies that both feminism and aesthetic practices (such as those found in the arts) tend to (or are designed to) overcome. 

Roelofs sees this as capturing the heart of aesthetic feminism as presented by Kristeva and Irigaray.  Rather than wandering into interpretation of these difficult philosophers, I'll stick with Roelofs here.  Insofar as Kristeva understands experience as aesthetic she may be a contributor to the aesthetics of everyday life, where the aesthetic is not just limited to art and nature, but is pervasive, the key here being the relationship between self and others, a relationship that is aestheticized.  Roelofs quotes Kristeva: "Experience owes its intensity to signs (music, poetry, painting) that must be manipulated through technique or artifice in order to attain a metamorphosis of all the senses, that is, the simultaneity of Being, with the other, with the beloved." (Time and Sense, 1996). I take this to mean something like what Dewey says when he talks about "an experience" which is intense and which covers the continuity between the arts (and experiences of the arts) and the everyday, in which the senses are educated by the arts, and in which the social dimension (of conversation, for example) is essential, the ideal here being a relationship of love between two individuals.  Kristeva sees this as connected to Proust who integrates the historical with the present self through imaginative acts, causing certain sensations and emotions to be experienced in new ways.  For Kristeva, aesthetic experience allows for authentic subjectivity. 

Roelofs finds that Irigaray adds another dimension.  For Irigaray, perception plays a central role in the intimate relation between self and other, allowing mutual growth to be possible. 
This is like Plato's Phaedrus except that sensuous experience is made prominent over the intellectual.  "Purely intellectual relationships, according to Irigaray, deny corporeality.  They prevent mutual, embodied presence to the other." (198)  Further "An intersubjective encounter is a corporeal engagement, a meeting of concrete, sexuate, sensing bodies, that is always also contemplative or spiritual." (198)  This is taken from her book To Be Two (2000).   Perhaps one can take from this that there is a certain ideal of everyday aesthetics, one that takes Plato's idea of the Phaedrus story of mutual development of lover and beloved through a Nietzschean transformation, where the aestheticized experience of everyday life is also eroticized and a sensuous way. 

Roelofs goes on to criticize Kristeva and Irigaray for being ahistorical, constructing a fantasy world of free artistic agency.  This seems fair enough.  She also thinks that Kristeva and Irigaray do not clearly use the concept of the aesthetic in a feminist way since the relevant creative acts could simply fit into the masculinist system.  Fair enough, again.  What Roelofs likes about these two philosophers is their idea that integration of reason, perception, effect and sensation contributes to more enticing intersubjective relationships.

I want to include a final quote in this post which I think captures the essence of Roelofs' own, more politicized, position.  She calls it "aesthetic feminism" or, more specifically, "aesthetification." 

"There are three immediate reasons why constellations of art and gender get electrified in the spheres of a fully relational, embodied presence to other individuals.  It is under conditions of full relational presence to one another that (a) we can work through traditional gender configurations and bring into being new forms of subjectivity that allow for alternative gender configurations; (b) we exist most wholly as aesthetic agents, as agents who inhabit relationships of aesthetic exchange; and (c) we inhabit our minds and out bodies as the aesthetic entities they are.  The mind-body, I suggest (inspired by Irigaray), constitutes an aesthetic system, distinct from but interconnected with other mind-bodies by way of technologies, forms of communication, and socioaesthetic structures...Under conditions of full relational presence to one another's mind-bodies, individuals and integratedly and integratively open to one another's aesthetic forms and matrixes.  They stand in touch with one another's aesthetic powers in all modalities of sensory, affective, and intellectual awareness.

Aesthetification is the project of making oneself and one another most wholly aesthetic.  It is a mode of acting and experiencing aesthetically in relation to self and other.  It is a mode of inhabiting one's mind and one's body as an aesthetic unit.  It is also a way of encountering others as aesthetic entities."  (208)

Maybe all of this is just an overuse of the term "aesthetic" which is seems to be entering into domains never intended.  This has been a criticism of the everyday aesthetics movement in general.  Still, what I would like to take from it is that idea that in my book on everyday aesthetics I neglected this intersubjective dimension and the gendered issues involves.