What is a Political Critique?

After hearing so much about Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, I thought picking up her On Beauty and Being Just at The Strand would make good subway reading.  I won’t belabor my disappointment.

However, I find it interesting that Scarry has completely missed her target when discussing critiques of beauty.  Certainly such critiques exist, but they tend to emphasize, for example, beauty’s role in a patriarchal or Foucauldian technology of power.  Scarry, on the other hand, is interested in a kind of eternal beauty, something universal, ultimately cross-cultural, and immanent in beautiful objects.  She dismisses the critiques of beauty as “incoherent,” abstracting them from the sociological and historical conditions that they are more comfortable in (though they are not so much abstracted as misunderstood).

And yet Scarry’s positive appreciation of beauty is more convincing (even as her examples seem trite to me).  Perhaps I am a less rigorous mind, but it does not seem to me like an irresolvable paradox that beauty could be 1) used to distract from the political, 2) erase the history and/or agency of the beautiful object, and simultaneously 3) encourage us towards a more engaged attention to the world.  Scarry makes it seem as if such a thought is impossible to entertain, either by those of “us” who love beauty, or by “they” who criticize it.  However, I have a hard time seeing how one could possibly deny any of the three propositions.  Does someone who reads Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle simply blind their self Oedipus Rex style?  Will a scholar in the tradition of Bernard Berenson deny that there is something less than “disinterested” in the use of the female nude in Western art?  No semi-conscious human being could systematically deny merit from any of the fundamental positions.

Scarry calls these critiques of beauty “political,” by which she means that they accuse beauty of being antipathetic to justice.  However, these critiques are political in a much broader way: a political analysis, if it can be distinguished from a philosophical one, is not primarily interested in the truth of contradictory claims, but rather on how such claims are negotiated, at least since Hobbes’s dictum auctoritas non veritas facit legem.  The Leviathan does not arbitrate between men who are just and unjust, or those who tell lies or tell truths; it just decides.  Scarry might argue that this is thus not justice; but it is equally true that the city-state which Plato erected in the name of justice is not politics.  The modern political field is a struggle between unstable truths, the arbitration of power and justice between such truths, but not a validation of any one truth.

This may seem dogmatic, or perhaps too readily accepting of Liberal politics, which focus on the negotiation between represented interests.  However, even if we were to consult Carl Schmitt, Liberalism’s mid-century adversary, we can see in his radically conservative philosophy the inheritance of Hobbes.  It might seem that Schmitt’s definition of politics, as the distinction between friend and enemy, and the subsequent definition of the enemy as an alien and existential threat, would leave little room for negotiation.  In practical terms, it does not.  Even Schmitt recognized, however, in a comment on a passage of Kierkegaard’s, that the exception and the norm are mutually defining, and that ultimately the norm rests on the exception.  He was speaking of the state of emergency, but it applies equally to the distinction of self and enemy.  The ultimate political moment is when the enemy is identified, because that simultaneously constructs the political self: that there may be no existential difference prior to that moment is irrelevant ( it is hard to imagine what such a difference might be theoretically, but practically examples are legion).  In other words, the truth of the division between self and enemy, the substance of the distinction, is irrelevant.  It is the moment of decision itself which constitutes a social body politically.  Bellum non veritas facit patriam.

This suggests to me that, if the problem of beauty involves balancing paradoxical notions, then, if a decision, some kind of taking sides, is necessary, we are left as arbiters with only two tools: truth on the one hand and politics on the other.  Truth must render all but one narrative illegitimate (hence Scarry’s insistence that critiques of beauty are “incoherent”); politics attempts to find the balance, to understand who benefits from what truth.  It is a less naive, more robust, and ultimately more aesthetic tool than Scarry’s reductive analysis.

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