This lecture was written for and shared at the publication launch of Blurry Angel by Romy Day Winkel and Benedikt Kuhn at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin on 22 June 2024. Kari kindly agreed to publishing it as an e-log. :-)

This was supposed to be more of a demonstrative lecture but after getting covid this last week, it has taken the form of the unforgivable: a lecture, read from a laptop, without slides. Over the next 15 minutes, I’m going to highlight a few main ideas of a longer project that probes the personal structures of our taste and attempts to make sense of the ways power shapes our most intimate desires and pleasures — Beauty being the central concept I return to in order to explore this interdependent web of category, power, taste, value and ultimately the attachment we have to it. This project has had a few different iterations. First as a theoretical course I facilitated at Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Alexandria under the title Why do I Love You? The Structures of Beauty, then as a Masters Thesis titled and people also search for: Is Chloe Sevigny Pretty? and most recently its manifesto form published 2 years ago: Toward a General Ambivalence About Beauty. First sparked by concerns I had about the ease with which I intuited ideals taught to me through model casting while working in fashion advertising (a 90s body type, aspirational eyebrows, boho face), it became also about understanding why I was left depressed and bored by performance art where every performer is hot, to now questioning how beauty has shaped the performance of a “polite” western politics that ignores the gruesome cruelty it is ontologically linked to. I’ll read some excerpts of the thesis as well as some quotes interspersed with more context of this project and some new thoughts – hopefully all complementing Romy and Bendikt’s reading and discussion to follow.

I had to start thinking of beauty as not merely an aesthetic category, but how it exists in us, through us, in culture, shifts through history, how we feel it, how we are taught what it is, and how it seems to do a lot that we don’t desire for it to do but we also don’t want to give it up; how we won’t entirely relinquish the appeal of hotness, colonial architecture, love at first sight, or the museum, despite their obvious problems, but instead retreat to a defense of the holy aesthetic value that keeps them. There are ways in which these observations relate to more recent surveys of form and aesthetic, such as Anteaesthetic by Rizvanna Bradley and the questions of form and value posited by Anna Kornbluh in her two recent books, but ultimately I am more concerned with understanding the internalized part of beauty — the way and how it is felt — that (possibly) precedes questions of form and instead addresses what to do with our relationship to the affects and resonances that beauty produces, but also how mutable those resonances and affects are and how they seem to represent a stable value we want. 

“There is nothing more alienating than having one’s pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.“ 
Lauren Berlant, Love/Desire

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; beauty lies in the eye; everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it; but studies show that workers of above-average beauty earn more than their less beautiful peers. 

Beauty’s connection to market value, as reflected in the example of the beauty pay gap (that was proven to be as substantial as gender and race pay gaps in the US labor market) was one of my initial concerns about beauty — particularly because while it clearly illustrates how it is connected to a present day material asymmetry, beauty is often only problematized historically and the feelings that produce the category and/or are attached to the idea of beauty, remain considered unquestioningly innocent. I went looking for a model to conceive of how the historical and material engrains itself in our affectual world. Coming from the US, I had gone through a few rounds of psychodynamic therapy based on attachment theory that I found helpful for my own creation of a better life that left behind some crueler attachments. This led me to considering attachment theory and subsequently interpersonal neurobiology as psychological models for how external structures of power become internalized. 

Attachment theory and I had similar aims: demystifying sets of feelings that had been held as unquestionably valuable (attraction/love, finding something beautiful) because something about the feelings, or how/who they relate to, or the systems in which that relation sit, cause subjects more pain then they want to bear. I applied attachment theory to beauty because of our similar aims, which became both supported and complicated by love and beauty’s historical connection, and also because finding something beautiful does comprise a type of attachment. Attachment theory states that we attach to (love) that which sustains us (originary relationships becoming the affectual model of attachment) so I postulated that beauty becomes internalized also because of its socially sustaining force. This application also allowed for individual differences in the composition of good and bad feelings that comprise a relation to the beautiful, while still being conditioned and structuring our desire. Beauty, like the attachments we form in early childhood defined by love, does not require symbolic signaling and deduction, but is synonymous with the immediate affective sense that the object produces and its value trained in our intuition regardless of how cruel the relation is. Similar to how the child of an “avoidant parent,” who has suffered due to these avoidant characteristics, will express a sense of love at first sight with a glimpse or a short interaction with a person who turns out to have similar avoidant characteristics — our affective sense beats us to the masochistic punch, and draws us into a relationship with the beautiful simply because it is known, even if a part of the comfort has to do with its oppressive force. With the addition of interpersonal neurobiology, a neurological model often relied on by US American psychodynamic therapists, I considered implicit memory’s (that is: trained subconscious memory) impact and role in our feelings related to beauty. The sentiment produced by the object that deems it beautiful no longer had mysterious origins but instead, the sentiment could be seen as part of a long series of conditionings. 

While I’ve moved away from attachment theory in recent years due it’s traumatophobia and its commitment to a static world, in this context it does provide a theory that doesn’t stray far from Berlant’s conception of intuition as something taught, or Bourdieu’s concept of an “accumulated history” or from Lacanian desire and the maintenance of symbolic orders, even aligning with one half of Lacan’s conception of beauty that “keeps our desire in check.” Attachment theorists commit themselves to a static “natural” world driven by evolutionary desire that I don’t believe in, but I do believe there is an order that beauty upholds, that is held together through category and capital, and forcibly maintained by those in power; that beauty does not just beget power, but that beauty, or at least some type of beauty, can be thought of as, I would say in most instances, synonymous with power.

“Why rethink aesthetics now, when catastrophe has become the watchword of the day, and when all but the most restrictive pragmatism could easily be construed as little more than bourgeois frivolity? Is this not, after all, the age of Antonio Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms,” in which the many heads of fascism are rearing across the globe? Yet the fascism which liberal modernity and civil society have always required has never abided by this order’s mendacious separation of the political from the aesthetic.” 
Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Four Theses on Aesthetics

Following Max Weber and Jurgen Habermas, J.M. Bernstein claims that aesthetic alienation stemming from the separation of the world into the categories of rationality (philosophy), morality (politics), and aesthetics (beauty/art), is “constitutive of modernity.” This alienation began with Plato’s division of the Republic, his philosophical utopia with the philosopher-king as the ruler of society and the poets expelled; it found a home in “aesthetics” as it was first used in its modern sense by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1750; and culminated with Immanuel Kant’s attempt to theorize the autonomy of aesthetic judgment in The Critique of Judgment (1781), in which aesthetic judgment is defined by its lack of concept, interest, pleasure, and purpose. For Bernstein, this alienation of aesthetics and the autonomy of aesthetic judgment “silenced” beauty. Beauty, for him, is primarily instanced in art and “to consider art as 'merely' aesthetical, where 'aesthetics' has come to mean the understanding of beauty and art in non-cognitive terms, entails alienating art from truth and morality,” therefore from thought and politics. It is important here to also note that Bernstein returns to an ideal of politics as “praxis” — as something enacted — as distinct from the modern conception of electoral politics and moral proclamations which distances itself from getting one’s hands dirty.

I resonate in some ways with Bernstein’s attachment to what he feels like beauty can reveal (the ambivalence arises because I also want to argue that beauty can also disrupt power and desire – or as Ruth Evan’s paraphrase of Lacan “to indicate our most radical jouissance”) but his historical analysis of modernity lacks emphasis on the construction of taste by the state (which has always been primarily concerned with what is beautiful). Tony Bennett, in the Birth of the Museum (1995), claims that the museum’s formation needs to be understood “in the light of a more general set of developments through which culture, in coming to be thought of as useful for governing, was fashioned as a vehicle for the exercise of new forms of power.” Bennett quotes Patrick Calhoun, who said that the modern democratic government of the 18th century saw its citizens as relating to legislature as “a child is to a parent” (note: the imagery). Like a parent, the modern nation-state saw itself as responsible for the moral and inner life of its citizens and where the church encouraged good citizenship through morality, patriotism, and chastity, the museum was designed to encourage good citizenship through the development of taste. The museum, through its displays of beauty and culture, edified its citizens in civility through taste.

We are seeing this shaping of the ideal citizen’s taste play out in real time today. As genocide is ongoing, artists are silenced, doxxed, and censored, leaving art that is entirely void of the anger, desperation, and the felt gruesome reality of ongoing settler colonialism to be enlisted in the canon. The state, or institutions on behalf of the national project, enact this censorship, and it is also internalized by our inner sensors (censors). Our tastes are being shaped – and also, as the early founders of the museum knew, are our political imagination. Politics, in its reduced form of voting, online expression, and fantasy, as opposed to praxis, is reduced to aesthetics and “kept in check” by taste. Reactions in Europe and the US to present day resistance efforts take the tone of disgust – assessed as an art work, without context or history, the repulsion is of the surface. Sympathy can only be inhabited, imagined and expressed through phrases and images sterile enough to maintain one’s “civilized” sense of taste. Politics is reigned in by taste and there is no place in the aesthetic world of the Western citizen for the reality of injustice or the reality of fighting it. This aesthetic domination renders impossible an unbridled praxis with the potential to do anything. 

Bernstein says that “throughout its history philosophy attempted to tame art, to suppress its tendential protest to the reign of theory, but while philosophy had no difficulty in consigning art to the realm of sensory experience, to the world of opinion (doxa) and appearance (the very world of political life), almost, to non-being, nonetheless the beauty of the works shone, and their shining, their claiming spectators through their sensory characteristics, tendentially gave pause to the relegation of art to non being and non truth.” In the manifesto version of the project I argue for beauty to be treated ambivalently, which I think is still my practical (read: political) conclusion. Aesthetics (read: beauty) and the desires attached to its various categories, functionally do lure us away from becoming a type of monster engendered by, what Deleuze and Guitari call a “vigilant and insomniac rationality,” but without making beauty – and our sensorial worlds in general — responsible and responsive, i.e. put into praxis, we are left only with pay gaps, eating disorders, all eyes on Rafah AI generated graphics, performance art by models, and continually chasing after partners that mimic our fathers.