审美·治理·自由

Aesthetics,Government,Freedom

本文的目的不是要扩大文学的"自由效果",而是要探讨使批评、自由与文学之间的关系变得易于理解的那些历史的以及推论的条件。20世纪对康德提出的自由与文化的关系有两种完全不同的"反应":第一种将文化与工人阶级的自我解放相联系;第二种将文化刻写为治理的一种机制,它通过自我调节手段运作并使之成为可能。这两种反应紧密相连:英国成人教育与文学教育发展之间的关系史表明前者是如何紧密地仿照作为自由表达空间的后者的。要理解这两种情况,就必须考虑构成审美的原初决定性特质的无用性是如何被重新界定的,以便它能够被用作治理的工具。在文化治理中,恰恰是通过与社会隔离开来,审美文化才作为一种能够从治理上作用于它的有益手段而被提出来。审美实践被变成了可以利用的东西。正是以这种方式,审美、治理与自由在自由治理的诸种机制之内刻写了某种特有的张力。

This paper does not aim to augment literature' s 'freedom effects' but to probe the historical and discursive conditions which make intelligible the relations between criticism,freedom and literature that Martin advocated.There might seem to be two quite different 'takes' on the relations between freedom and culture that Kant proposes;the first,con-necting culture to the self-emancipation of the working class;and the second,inscribing culture as a mechanism of government that works through the means of self-regulation it makes possible.But they are closely linked;the history of the relations between adult ed-ucation in Britain and the development of literary education show how closely the former was modelled on the latter as a space of free expression.If we are to understand both of these cases,we need to consider how the attribute of uselessness that constituted the origi-nal defining attribute of the aesthetic was redefined so that it could serve as an instrument of government.Conceptions of aesthetic culture were shaped by,and as a part of,the de-velopment of new material assemblages of cultural governance in which it was precisely by being set apart from the social that aesthetic culture was rendered useful as a means of act-ing on it governmentally.It is in this way that the historical nexus of the relations between aesthetics,government and freedom inscribes a certain endemic tension within the mecha-nisms of liberal government.