``Unfortunately, the healing power of thought seems to be the same faculty that
diminishes the personal sense of experience. A casual reference to a hair on a
nose weighs more than the most important concept, and acts, feelings, and sensations,
when reported in words, can make one feel one has been present at a more or
less notable personal event, however ordinary and impersonal the acts, feelings,
and sensations may be. `It's idiotic', Ulrich thought, `but that's how it is.' It made
him think of that dumb but deep, exciting sensation, touching immediately on the
self, when one sniffs one's own skin. He stood up and pulled the curtains back from
the window. The bark of the trees was still moist from the morning. On the street
outside a violet haze of gasoline fumes hovered. The sun shone through it, and
people were moving along briskly. It was an asphalt spring, a seasonless spring day
in autumn such as only cities can conjure up.''
Robert Musil The Man without Qualities
What is an icon? Icons are symbolic condensations (Freud, 1949, page 51). They root
generic, social meanings in a specific and `material' form. They allow the abstraction
of morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made
iconically visible as something beautiful, sublime, ugly, even as the banal appearance
of mundane `material life'.
Iconic consciousness occurs when an aesthetically shaped materiality signifies
social value. Contact with this aesthetic surface, whether by sight, smell, taste, touch
provides a sensual experience that transmits meaning. The iconic is about experience,
not communication. To be iconically conscious is to understand without knowing,
or at least without knowing that one knows. It is to understand by feeling, by contact,
by the `evidence of the senses' rather than the mind.
Iconicity depends on feeling consciousness. George Herbert Mead once wrote that
the ``content of consciousness is feeling.'' He described this as the ``fund of unexplored
social organization which enables us to act more surely'', pointing to its nondiscursive
quality as allowing subjectivity to mediate impersonal modernity. ``We go to strange
cities and move about unknown men'', he suggested, ``without perhaps presenting to
ourselves the ideas of one of them, and yet'', he continued, we ``successfully recognize
and respond to each attitude and gesture which our passing intercourse involves''
(Mead, 2001, page 67). Mead protests that such a feeling consciousness ``is not sensuous'',
but he protests too much, betraying how deeply resistant modern moralists are
to the aesthetic moment in modern life. For Mead social feelings can only be located
Iconic consciousness: the material feeling of meaningÀ
Jeffrey C Alexander
Department of Sociology, Yale University, PO Box 208265, New Haven, CT 06520-8265, USA;
e-mail: jeffrey.alexander@yale.edu
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2008, volume 26, pages 782 ^ 794
doi:10.1068/d5008
{ This essay was given as a lecture at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geography
in Boston, in April 2008, in a session cosponsored by Society and Space. It was first presented
as a lecture to the Meister Class on the Iconic Turn, Konstanz Universitat, July 2007.
in ``mind'', not in the feelings of the heart or the sensations of the body. These are best
left, not to social theorists and philosophers, but to aesthetes.
The surface, or form, of a material object is a magnet, a vacuum cleaner that sucks
the feeling viewer into meaning. For thinkers who do concern themselves with feeling
consciousness, these surfaces, in their beauty, sublimity, or ugly banality, are themselves
the principal objects of fascination. They resist the interplay between surface and
depth, how aesthetic surfaces allow transitions to social meaning.
With icons, the signifier (an idea) is made material (a thing). The signified is no
longer only in the mind, something thought of, but something experienced, something
felt, in the heart and the body. The idea becomes an object in time and space, a thing.
More precisely, it seems to be a thing. For, as aesthetic shapes, things are the middles
of semiotic process. Insofar as the thing becomes invested with social meaning,
it becomes arch-typical. As some-thing, it is transformed into a signifier, setting off
a semiosis that subsumes every thing into meaning and every meaning into thing.
The status of the material
The theory of iconic consciousness poses itself resolutely against the materialism that
continues to pervade modern thought, in the highest realms and in the everyday.
Materialism reduces materiality to things, ignoring the aesthetic construction of material
surfaces and their experience via feeling consciousness. This reduction is deeply
rooted in the relentless utilitarianism of everyday life, which insists on the concrete,
on the practical, efficient, and useful. The counterpart in theoretical reflection to such
everyday consciousness are concepts such as realism, practice, information, utility, cost
and benefit, cognition and truth. It is not easy to dislodge such deeply misguided yet
socially productive beliefs, but the effort must be made.
Even as we are ruthlessly critical of materialism, however, we should learn to be
energetically enthusiastic about materiality. For the 20th century, understanding
nonmaterial structures of meaning was an extraordinary accomplishment. Resisting
the hegemony of modern practical consciousness, Durkheim initiated the project of
analytically separating meaning from social structure. To give culture its autonomy
is to learn to recognize, with Ricoeur, the yearnings of the soul, and, with Dilthey,
the continuing vitality of the spirit (Durkheim, 1911; Ricoeur, 1976; Dilthey, 1976).
Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, we must try to understand how meaning,
soul, and spirit manifest themselves through materiality.
Saussure rightly insisted that the sound of language, in itself, carries no meaning.
How sound connects with concepts is arbitrary. Pure sound is only a signified;
its meaning is determined by internally organized signifiers, self-regulating relations
of concepts. But this insight should not obscure the significance of sound. Words, after
all, are sounds of meaning. Phonetics matters. It also has autonomy. The science that
Jacobson called poetics concerns the internal sounds and rhythms of speaking and
hearing, and how they affect the construal of meaning. We must be able not only to
think but to hear and feel speechöto make music.(1) Otherwise, we would not have
these rather ugly sense organs sticking out on either side of our head!
There is more than mind. The meanings of the things we see are invisible to the
naked eye, but the visual is not unimportant for that. Can we ignore the sensuousness
of sight, the patterns of line, curve, and symmetry, the shadings of light and dark, the
vividness of color? The textures of touch, the odors of smell, the compulsions of taste?
(1) Thus the first paragraph of Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing (2003): ``In some empty
hall, my brother is still singing. His voice hasn't dampened yet. Not altogether. The rooms where he
sang still hold an impression, their walls dimpled with his sound, awaiting some future phonograph
capable of replacing them.''
Iconic consciousness: the material feeling of meaning 783
The evolution of the humanoid brain's neocortex enabled extended memory and
reflexive thought, the ability to think and interpret that set off the human race. But
the other mid- and hind-brains remain, and so does the autonomic system. We retain
our more primitive capacities, though these five senses may, in some part, be less
developed in human beings. We are human, but, as Nietzsche suggests, we are also
``all too human''.
After inventing the realist philosophy of science, Rom Harre¨ has turned his back
upon it, condemning its materialism as a reduction that overlooks the invisible strands
of meaning that mark not only science but even the supposed materialism of economic
life (Harre¨ , 2002).(2) Harre¨ calls ``stuff'' the objects that occupy space and time,
denying, now, that such merely material things can act in an independent way. Every
piece of stuff belongs to a category, ``an ephemeral attribute of a flow of symbolic
interactions among active people competent in the conventions of a certain cultural
milieu.'' A material object ``is transformed from a piece of stuff into a social object'',
Harre¨ asserts, only ``by its embedment in a narrative.'' It is by such ``narrative binding''
that ``bits of coloured cloth become flags [and] clothes become uniforms.''
All this is deeply true, providing new and powerful ammunition against the obsessively
practical, realist consciousness of modern thought and times. Still, I wonder
whether these materialilties are, in fact, merely what Rom Harre¨ calls ``affordances''
that ``constrain the uses to which such things can be put in the local narratives''? The
sensuous surface of things seems more important than simply a means to the end of
meaning. Is it not the sensuous surface of stuff that allows us to see, hear, and touch
their narrative bindings? For Harre¨ the geography of the Nile valley was merely an
``indirect source'' of Pharonic social order. It could not be the direct source, he insists,
because cultural structures have autonomy. I would suggest, to the contrary, that it
was the overflowing physicality of the Nile that allowed the complex metaphysics of
Pharonic Egypt to be sensuously experienced. Culture gives material things ``magic
powers'', Harre¨ believes, which are ``not an effect of the physical properties of the
thing.'' Yet is not materiality at the center of enchantment? Is it not the `illusion' that
physical things do, in fact, have character and agency that makes their symbolic power
seem magical and extraordinary rather than real and mundane? Stuff matters. What
would Mozart's opera have been without its magic flute? Without seeing it, hearing it,
knowing it was always there?
To recover the material is not to recover the thing-in-itself, but, rather, the texture of
a thing's aesthetic surface, for it is through aesthetic surface that things are experienced.
The philosophical case against idealism has it that there is a something implacable
about a chair. We cannot wish the chair away or walk through it. It exists in time and
space. But it is not this particular chair we see, touch, and feel, and that remains in our
minds as a materiality. The chair is not a chair as such. It is a particularly formed chair.
The status of the aesthetic
The theory of iconic consciousness recovers the aesthetic within everyday life, against the
notion that art either is, or must be, radically separated for rationality or morality is
to be sustained. That it must be separated is famously taken to have been Kant's
argument about the normative structure of modernity: When we are in the world of
the beautiful or the sublime, we can sustain neither the distance nor the disinterest
(2) All the following quotations from Harre¨ are from this article. Harre¨ 's extraordinary about-face
has rarely been remarked upon, despite the gauntlet it throws down to the runaway train of realism
in which the philosophies of both natural and social science are currently misprisioned. For a
critical challenge to realism, and the first cultural ^ sociological approach to an interpretrivist
philosophy of science see Reed (2008).
784 J C Alexander
demanded by objectivity.(3) Universalism, whether in scientific or moral criticism, depends
on the view from nowhere (Nagel, 1986). The empirical possibility for sustaining such
distantiation is undermined if actors `fall' into the objects they observe (because they feel
them), if, when they face putatively separated objects, actors feel as if they are not
separated from them, but that the objects are becoming subjectified themselves.
Weber made Kant historical with his argument for disenchantment. Under the
conditions of moral, religious, and technological rationalization, every value sphere,
including the aesthetic, is sliced and diced, cast out on its own. Magic has forsaken the
modern world. But if there is iconic consciousness, then, while totemism may have
been transformed and radically pluralized, it has hardly been effaced. Bits of stuff still
seem magical, and not only because they are placed inside of stories. The material
surfaces of things are experienced aesthetically. It is materiality that allows feeling
consciousness to be connected to things.
The argument for feeling consciousness, for a cultural materiality, creates middle
ground between Derrida and the romantic early Marx, who wistfully spoke of the
``sensuous object'' overcoming the materialism that marked alienation in capitalist
society. Attacking the philosophy of presence, Derrida pointed to absence, demoting
the visible and material to the status of signifieds linked to invisible signifiers. But if
presence can indeed be known only in relation to absence, how else can absence be
known except by experiencing presence? In Bill Brown's thing philosophy, he protests
Derrida's absence, arguing on behalf of a ``sensuous or metaphysical presence''. Martin
Seel likewise insists on the importance of ``appearing''. If poststructuralism demands
contextualization, Seel writes, then the aesthetic creates decontextualization, an effect
of appearance (Brown, 2001; Seel, 2005).
These briefs for an aesthetics of things are powerful, but they are also one sided.
They develop, not just an argument for aesthetic recovery, but for aesthetic redemption,
not just for the aesthetic but for aestheticism. They demand, not just for the aesthetic
surface to be given full citizenship alongside the moral depth, but for the aesthetic as an
alternative vision. In doing so, they paradoxically reinstate the separate spheres argument
they are so fervently fighting against. Standing firmly on the ground of this
division, Martin Jay (2003) warns against bringing the aesthetic back into everyday
life. Haunted, like every Habermasian exponent of critical theory, by the specters
of Heidegger and Nazism, Jay associates aesthetic consciousness with reaction and
irrationality.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is Jay's perfect foil. Severely rejecting Kant and joyfully
embracing Heidegger, Gumbrecht condemns ``meaning effects'' as ratiocinative and
conceptual. He champions ``presence effects'', not only because they reveal the granular
texture of materiality, but because they provoke a ``crisis'' vis-a© -vis the ugly and routine
banality of the modern world. To experience the aesthetic corporeality of things allows
``intimate'' feelings that are normally ``inaccessible to us''. Reconnected to the ``ground''
of earth, we experience the ``unconcealment of Being'', beyond doing and having. For
Gumbrecht, the aesthetic is a defamiliarization process. It is Proust's hypnotically
arresting Madeline, the awesome gates to Shinto temples, the shockingly ``beautiful
run, pitch, throw, or jump'' that creates the ``moment of intensity'' in the midst of
a game, the ``special feeling' that allows us to step outside a merely instrumental
or ``interested'' position (Gumbrecht, 2006a; 2006b).
These contemporary longings are, contra Jay, not dangerous. Gumbrecht and his
fellow postmodern aesthetes carefully acknowledge the competing worlds of democracy,
law, and the morally abstract. The problem is empirical, not moral. Even as
(3) But see below for a revision of this received opinion.
Iconic consciousness: the material feeling of meaning 785
surface and depth must be analytically separated, they need also to be empirically
intertwined. Presence and absence may inform antagonistic philosophical perspectives,
but they are not antithetical in the empirical sense. The thrills and fears experienced by
feeling consciousness are not the product of aesthetic surface alone; they are informed
by the meaning structures that lie beneath. Gumbrecht asks whether the aesthetic is
``a switch between different actual frames'' or ``a switch towards the awareness of a
pre-existing frame's character.'' We would answer that it is the latter: it is conscious
awareness that changes, not the actual frame. Aesthetic experience is always there, even
when we don't focus upon it. So is the moral experience that it conceals and makes
visible at the same time, even if we are not morally self-conscious in any way.
It is the purpose of art to make the aesthetic dimension explicit, to bring it into our
conscious minds so that we experience it knowingly and reflect upon it. The availability
of such specifically `aesthetic' experience is limited. Not everybody can stand before
Giacometti's Standing Woman and know what they are seeing. It takes an artistic
education. But if the experience of art is limited, the surface experience of aesthetic
things is not. Men, or boys for that matter, don't need an artistic education to skillfully
rank passing women on the proverbial ten-point scale. Nor do modern women have
any problem evaluating the hotness of some guy.
In both everyday aesthetics and high art there is the same interplay of the unique
and the general, the contingent and the a priori. Surfaces are specific and idiosyncratic
in their object reference. We see this fashion model, not some other one. That we see
this `hotty' and that `babe', and not any others, is, of course, the very point of such
designations. At the same time, such aesthetic representations are generic, connecting
us to shared meanings, to culture structures. This model is a specific type of model,
a version, a specification of the more general form; so are the sexy man and woman
particular examples of their species.
An object's aesthetic power inserts the general into the specific, making the
abstract concrete in a compelling and original way. In high culture, this is the challenge
for the artist. In the world of the everyday, it is the challenge for the designer, and
also for the lay person, the bricoleur who assembles his or her objects, laying them out
or putting them on, as in DIY, or `do it yourself'.
Consider the following conversation between two women who encounter each other
on the street outside the salon:
``I love the way you've done your hair.''
``I like this new style, don't you?''
``You've done a great job with it.''
``I found a new product.''
``Where did you find it?''
``In Elle, and there it was, in the front window of the salon.''
``Well, your hair looks good. That product's special. I've never seen that color in
your hair. You look amazing!''
If the artist gets the combination right, his object becomes great art. It can be hung in
any home or museum, anywhere, at any time. It has achieved a ``surplus of meaning'';
uniquely compelling in the here and now, it can also be compelling in the later and
faraway.(4) When the designer and lay person get it right, their surface assemblages
draw us into the discourse of society. It is not just the form that excites, but the
experiences of meaning that forms carry.(5)
(4) For the idea of a `surplus of meaning', see Ricoeur (1977).
(5) For bricoleur, see Le¨ vi-Strauss (1967); for assemblage, see Latour (2005).
786 J C Alexander
The status of the moral
It is difficult to get surface and depth right, to embrace aesthetic sensation without
antagonism to structured meaning, to give culture its autonomy without sloughing off
material form. If aestheticism exhibits the first fallacy, moralism manifests the second.
Emile Durkheim was the founding father, with Marx Weber, of cultural social
science, though, as we have seen, he sharply disagreed with the German thinker's idea
that a radical epistemological break marked the transition from tradition to modernity.
Durkheim devoted his major cultural work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1911)
to examining the symbolic classifications and rituals of ancient totemic religion, but
he avowed this research offered profound insights into the secular symbolic forces of
the present day. Symbols of the sacred-good and profane-evil, he asserted, continue
to structure modern life, providing the moral glue that informs collective rituals and
sustains social solidarity.
As I have mentioned earlier in this lecture, these late-Durkheimian ideas inspired
the outpouring of social semiotic and cultural ^ sociological research that increasingly
marked 20th-century intellectual life. Only rarely, however, has this line of thinking
reached into the realm of material things. The reasons have been, in some part, the
topic of this lecture. They have to do with the empirical and philosophical ambiguities
of materialism and ideality, and, indeed, of the very notion of modernity itself. These
ambiguities and limitations were manifest in Durkheim's own writings. He generally
resisted exploring the relation between `religion' and `material' life. He tended to write
off primitive economic activity as nonsocial and modern as egotistical. Almost always,
he wanted to get beyond what he regarded as the merely visible, material shell of things
to the invisible, the spiritual and moral kernel underneath.
This makes it all the more important to recover a brief moment in Durkheim's later
writing that can be read in a strikingly different way. At one of the axial points in
Elementary Forms, while addressing the origins of manaöthe spiritual force manifested
in sacred totemsöDurkheim becomes remarkably interested in the totem as
material form. He takes notice of how the wooden surfaces of totems are formed
and shaped, observing that ``totemism places figurative representations in the first
rank of the things it considers sacred'' (1911, page 190). When he describes ``what the
totem amounts to'', he emphasizes ``the tangible form in which that intangible substance
[mana] is represented'' (page 201). Throughout this discussion, Durkheim writes of
``material substances'' (page 204) and ``tangible intermediaries'' (page 232). Because
morality is abstract, and can be ``imagined only with difficulty'', we can ``comprehend''
spiritual feelings ``only in connection with a concrete object'' (page 232). Material culture
is particularly marked in totemism. When the Crow people affirm that they ``are crows'',
it is because they believe that mana has the ``outward form of the crow'' (page 201). It is
only this outward form of the totem that ``is available to the senses'' (page 222). They
``attach themselves'' to this ``concrete object'', and display it everywhere, ``engraved on the
cult implements, on the sides of the rocks, on shields'' (page 222).
In these passages on totemism, Durkheim opens the door to culture in its material
form. ``Emblematizing'' is easier, he writes, when symbols are ``inscribed on things that
are durable'' (page 232). The transfer between moral depth and material surface
``is much more complete and more pronounced'', he suggests, ``whenever the symbol is
something simple [and] well-defined'' (page 222). Durable, simple, and well definedö
this is as close as Durkheim gets to exploring the aesthetic construction of surface, the
material texture of feeling that allows deep meaning structures to be experienced in a
sensuous way. While Durkheim is clearly aware of feeling consciousness and aesthetic
surface, it is also clear that he has little understanding of how they actually work.
He has opened the door, but he barely stepped inside.
Iconic consciousness: the material feeling of meaning 787
If Durkheim had stepped inside, he would have discovered that philosophers of
aesthetics had already decorated the room. In 1835, when Alexander Baumgarten
created this new branch of philosophy, he defined it as ``a science of how things are
to be known by the senses'' (cited in Guyer, 2005, page 3). In the preceding decades
there had been increasing excitement about the artistic, as not only the realm of the
beautiful, but the sublime. The notion of the sublime had been around since the Roman
Longinus, and in the 17th century Boileau applied it to the lofty style of rhetoric and
poetry. British thinkers, however, took the idea in a new direction, emphasizing the
wild, the emotive, and the darkly transcendental as an antidote to the suffocating
restrictions of French neoclassicism.(6) This expansion triggered a new interest in the
sensuous pleasures provided by contact with forms. For Shaftesbury, ``the beautiful,
the fair, the comely, were never in the matter but in the art and design, never in the
body itself but in the form of forming power'' (Cooper, 1999, cited in Guyer, 2005,
page 11) For Hutcheson the experience of form is ``justly called a Sense'' because
``pleasure is different from any Knowledge of Principles, Proportions, Causes, or the
Usefulness of the Object'' (1973, cited in Guyer, 2005, page 23).
It was vital for these new aesthetic philosophers to connect sensible form to moral
depth. They argued that aesthetic feeling is binary and that beautiful and sublime
provide sensual homologies with moral ideas. In fact, these aesthetic sensibilities are
often presented as moral expressions themselves. Forms are beautiful when lines,
shapes, colors, and light are pleasing and attractive, the ``qualities in bodies'', as Burke
writes, that ``cause love, or some passion similar to it'' (1990, page 83). The aesthetic
sense of the beautiful, in other words, calls out moral feelings for the sacred-good.
Its moral antithesis, the evil-profane, is animated by the aesthetic sublime, which Burke
describes as ``whatever [is] fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger [or]
is in any sort terrible'' (page 36). The beautiful is about romance and sympathy, the
sublime about tragedy and deceit. The beautiful is small, quiet, soft, round, and proportionate;
the sublime is vast, loud, hard, angular, and unbalanced.(7) Every moral binary
is attached to a pairing in aesthetic life.
With his critical investigations at the end of the 18th century, Kant is supposed to
have straightened all this aesthetic sentimentality out, to have separated sharply, and
once and for all, the sense of form from the substantive commitments of reason
and morality, finally giving to each independent sphere what it is due. What Kant
actually seems to have done, however, is quite different. He defined the aesthetic in
such a distinctive and particular manner that it could be closely rewound with the
rational and moral again.(8)
Kant does, of course, emphasize that what pleases the senses is pure form, that
shapes signify nothing by themselves, that the ``determining ground is the feeling of the
subject and not a concept of an object'' (2000, section 17, page 116). If this were not
the case, if forms were actually dependent on a determinate concept, then the significance
of the aesthetic, its independent function, would be greatly reduced. Then, the
meaning of the artistic object could be known before it was experienced, and the very
point of experiencing would be lost. It is precisely because it is not, in fact, regulated
by a determinate concept that the aesthetic imagination involves free play. But to freely
(6) For this historical and philosophical background, see Goldthwait (1960, especially pages 23 ^ 25)
and Guyer (2005).
(7) Burke (1990, part I: sections XII, XIII, XV; part II: sections II, VII, VIII, XIII, XVII; part III:
sections XIII ^ XVI, XXVII).
(8) Guyer has recently made a strong case for this reading of Kantian aesthetics; see his series of
interpretive works stretching from Kant and the Claims of Taste (1979) and Kant and the Experience
of Freedom (1993) to his 2005 collection, Values of Beauty.
788 J C Alexander
experience forms as pleasurable, Kant is at pains also to suggest, is to recall the
self-determining autonomy that distinguishes judgments of a different, more rational
and moral kind. For this reason, aesthetic judgment actually allows us to experience
core features of these other domains, and in a powerful manner that they could never
have articulated themselves. It is the quality of avoiding determination by rational
thought or moral understanding, not absolute dissociation from them, that makes
an experience aesthetic, the very freedom from a priori determination that, subsequent
to the aesthetic experience, allows greater conceptual and moral development in turn.
In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant puts the connection very simply:
``The entire use of the beautiful arts is that they present moral propositions of reason
in their full glory and powerfully support them'' (cited in Guyer, 2005, page 181).
The aesthetic-cum-moral binary of beautiful and sublime has continued to inform
the philosophy of the aesthetics pretty much up to the present day.(9) True, as Arthur
Danto emphatically suggests, the emergence of such 20th century practices as abstract,
surreal, pop, banal, conceptual, and performative art has demonstrated that beautiful
and sublime do not capture the extraordinary range of possible aesthetic products.(10)
Yet, contra Danto, these binary categories continue to provide the fundamental categories
of sensuous experience, as either homologies or antinomies of moral evaluation,
even as the referents of that experience radically change.(11)
(9) Ever since Aristotle challenged Plato's claim that the aesthetic threatened the moral, these questionsö``what
is the connection between art and knowledge? What is the connection between aesthetics
and morality.'' Indeed,``after several decades in which `analytic' philosophers set these substantive issues
aside in favor of supposedly more respectable as well as more tractable questions about the
structure and logic of aesthetic language and discourse ... precisely these ancient questions have
recently returned to the forefront of debate in Anglo-American aesthetics'' (Guyer, 2005, page x).
(10) Arthur C Danto challenges the continuing relevance of beautiful and sublime for postrepresentational
art in, for example, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art: ``What the
disgusting and the abjectöand for that matter the sillyöhelp us understand is what a heavy
shadow the concept of beauty cast over the philosophy of art. And because beauty became, in
the eighteenth century especially, so bound up with the concept of taste, it obscured how wide and
diverse the range of aesthetic qualities is'' (2003, page 59).
(11) See, for example, the professor of modern literature Patricia Hampl's description of her unintended
encounter with Matisse's late painting Femme et poisons rouges. She first saw it in passing
while hurrying to an appointment at the Art Institute of Chicago. In this recount of her response,
we find an unmistakable intertwining of surface aesthetic and moral depth, of the sacrality of the
beautiful and the profane power of the sublime: ``I didn't halt, didn't stop. I was stopped. Apprehended,
even. That's how it felt. I stood before the painting a long minute. I couldn't move away.
Icouldn't have said why. I was simply fastened there. I wasn't in the habit of being moved by art.
I wasn't much of a museum goer. I'd never taken an art history class, and I thought of myself as
a person almost uniquely ungifted in the visual arts... . [But] maybe only someone so innocent of
art history could be riveted by a picture as I was that day by Matisse's gazing woman ... with her
no-sense post-Great War bob, chin resting on crossed hands, elbows propped on the peachy table
where, slightly to the left, a pedestal fishbowl stands... .The woman's head is about the size of the
fishbowl and is on its level. Her eyes, though dark, are also fish, a sly parallelism Matisse has
imposed ... .What is the nature of her fishy gaze that holds in exquisite balance the paradox
of passion and detachment, of intimacy and distance? ... I absorbed the painting as something
religious, but the fascination was entirely secular. Here was body-and-soul revealed in an undivided
paradise of being ... . A Madonna, but a modern one, `liberated,' as we were saying without irony in
1972. [But] I wasn't thinking in words; I was hammered by the image. I couldn't explain what the
picture expressed, what I intuited from it. But that it spoke, I had no doubt ... . I suppose it was
the first time I saw the elements of a painting, took in, without knowing it, the composition, in
other words, the thought, of a painting. Not simply the thought of some object, but the thinking
of the painter, the galvanizing sense of an act of cognition occurring, unfinished by decisive, right
there on the canvas... .This created, not rendered, world follows (or helps) to establish the tendency
of modern art to be about the mind of the practitioner, about perception and consciousness, and not
about... stuff'' (2006, pages 2 ^ 5, 15, 25, original italics).
Iconic consciousness: the material feeling of meaning 789
What is more challenging to this understanding of high art is the status of the
aesthetic everyday. How can morality and rationality be connected with the aesthetic
amidst the conventions and typifications that mark mundane experience, where
there is neither the free play of sensuous interpretation nor the ascetic autonomy of
self-determination?
I have addressed this question in earlier sections of this essay, and other writings
as well (see Alexander, 2008). The challenge I would like to address here, however, is
whether an answer can be provided in the context of aesthetic philosophy itself. One
might, for example, have recourse to Schopenhauer's anti-Kantian brief for contemplation
over reason, his stoic suggestion that only a ``will-less knowing'' can slough off the
burdens of reason and individuality that distort and alienate the modern world (1966).
Yet, while Schopenhauer is certainly right to suggest that an aesthetic attitude can
permeate modern life, his world-rejecting aestheticism misses how central aesthetic
experience is to everyday moral and cognitive modes. We do not need to give up on
self, reason, morality, or society to gain access to mundane sensuous experience. It is
already there. Everyday experience is iconic, which means that self, reason, morality,
and society are continuously defined in aesthetic, deeply experiential ways.(12)
For a powerful example of just how this trick is turned, we can, in fact, return
to Kant, not to his systematic late treatise but to Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and the Sublime, the precritical work he published twenty-five years before.
Kant here confronts the aesthetic as, in his words, an ``observer'' rather than a
``philosopher''. In a casual and lively style that addresses aesthetic representations
of such everyday matters as sex, gender, nation, civilization, and race, the essay reveals
how conventional morality is enabled by aesthetic experience and legitimated by
the binary discourse of the beautiful and the sublime. Rather than analyzing how the
sensual surface elides moral depth, this early Kantian discourse exemplifies it, and
sometimes in altogether disturbing ways. As in the later work, in this youthful writing
Kant also pays homage to sense experience as independent and significant, asserting
``it does not matter so much what the understanding comprehends, but what the feeling
senses'' (1960, page 72, italics added). Confronting Edmund Burke, whose Philosophical
Enquiry had appeared only a few years before, Kant declares his ambition, in the very
first sentence of Observations, to relate the binaries of aesthetic experience to actors'
subjective ``dispositions to be moved'' rather than to ``the nature of external things''
(page 45). His topic is to be ``the feeling of the sublime and that of the beautiful'' (page 46,
italics added), not the nature of beautiful or sublime objects themselves.
At first, Kant seems faithful to this promise: ``The sight of a mountain whose snowcovered
peak rises about the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or Milton's
portrayal of the infernal kingdom'', he writes,``arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the
other hand, the sight of flower-strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and
covered with grazing flocks, the description of Elysium, or Homer's portrayal of the
girdle of Venus, also occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling''
(page 47, italics added). In this passage, active constructions of everyday sense perception
trigger artistic portrayals of that experience, which make use of the categories
of beautiful and sublime. Immediately after this, however, Kant loses his way, presenting
beautiful and sublime as actual characteristics of objects themselves. He discovers
the structural qualities of the aesthetic and connects them to moral forms, but he does
so in an essentializing way.
(12) Here I am reiterating in a slightly different manner points made earlier in this lecture. It may
have been Schopenhauer, and such of his followers as Nietzsche, whom Weber had in mind in his
attack on the amoral world-rejecting quality of modern aestheticism.
790 J C Alexander
``Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low
hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful
[and] the shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime
moves, the beautiful charms. The mien of a man who is undergoing the full feeling
of the sublime is earnest, sometimes rigid and astonished. On the other hand the
lively sensation of the beautiful proclaims itself through shining cheerfulness
in the eyes, through smiling features, and often through audible mirth'' (page 47,
my italics).
The moral connection is maintained, but the autonomy of its aesthetic construction
has disappeared. Aesthetic form is reduced to a reflection of moral quality.
``Sublime attributes stimulate esteem'', Kant writes, ``but beautiful ones, love''
(page 51). ``Friendship has mainly the character of the sublime'', he maintains, while
``love between the sexes, that of the beautiful'' (page 52). The aesthetic surface now has
the effect simply of naturalizing moral qualities. It allows them to be experienced
sensuously, to be felt as if they were physical, real, and true: ``Dark coloring and black
eyes are more closely related to the sublime, blue eyes and blonde coloring to the
beautiful'' (page 54).
What's so interesting about this reduction of the aesthetic to the moral is that
it provides a classical demonstration of essentalism, of how surface and depth are
intertwined in everyday social life, not only in Kant's times but in our own today.
The ideal-typical representation of this everyday essentialismöand from our contemporary
point of view, its moral and political nadiröis the confident manner in which
Kant employs surface/depth to reproduce the gender and racial stereotypes of his day.
He waxes eloquently about how the moral qualities of women allow them to be
``known by the mark of the beautiful''ö``her figure in general is finer, her features
more delicate and gentler, and her mien more engaging and more expressive'' (page 76,
italics added). The binary qualities of the aesthetic, in other words, are here discovered
as ingrained moral qualities. Women, Kant writes, naturally ``prefer the beautiful to the
useful'', a ``strong inborn feeling for all that is beautiful.'' From ``very early they have a
modest manner about themselves [and] know how to give themselves a fine demeanor
... at an age when our well-bred male youth is still unruly, clumsy, and confused''
(page 77). Affirming that ``the moral composition makes itself discernible in the mien
or facial features'', Kant declares ``she whose features show qualities of beauty is
agreeable'' and ``in her face she portrays a tender feeling and a benevolent heart''
(page 87, original italics). That women are thought beautiful is not due to aesthetic
and moral convention. They are beautiful, because they are, well, women! Kant jokes
that if a woman goes against her nature, trying to appropriate the ``diligent, fundamental,
and deep understanding'' of men, then she ``might as well even have a beard''
(page 78).
But there is something serious at stake. If the physical is a sure sign of the
moral underneath, the not only gender but racial profiling is naturally the order
of the day. Kant makes the extraordinary claim that, outside of Europe, the ability
to identify the beautiful with the feminine does get lost. ``If we examine the relations
of the sexes in [other] parts of the world'', he declares, ``we find that the European
alone has found the secret of decorating with so many flowers the sensual charm.''
In contrast with the European man's ``very decorous'' construction of women,
``the inhabitant of the Orient is of a very false taste.'' Because he has ``no sense of
the morally beautiful'', the Oriental ``thrives on all sorts of amorous grotesqueries.''
Kant asks, ``the land of the black, what better can one expect?'' (pages 112 ^ 113).
Iconic consciousness: the material feeling of meaning 791
This simple question reveals the normative risk in the interpenetration of aesthetic
surface and moral depth. On the one hand, as critical thinkers we must beware of
assuming that a `look' naturally express anything. On the other hand, even if we now
clearly understood that it does not, iconic consciousness inevitably makes it seem that
way.
The status of the real
It has been in order to confront this moral and political ambiguity that modern critical
thinkers have asserted the primacy of the real. One way of combating the moralistic
fallacy, on the one hand, and the aesthetic fallacy, on the other, has been to declare
that icons are neither. It is to say that they are real. This is not Kant's modernity but an
empiricist one, a prototypically modern alternative to moralism and aestheticism that
begins with Locke and reaches its take-off point in the 19th century, with the birth
of photography and the emergence and simultaneous self-critique of capitalism in
its industrial form. The dialectical relationship between surface and depth is here
supplanted not by disbalance but by displacement. Scientific truth can be substituted
for moral and aesthetic claims. Neither is now necessary, for we now have access to the
thing in itself. It is this realist claim that lurks beneath Peirce's theory of iconic as
compared with symbolic meaning and, in the 20th century, the persistent claim for the
denotative rather than connotative status, not only of photography but film, as in
Andre¨ Bazin's argument that the ``ontology'' of cinema is film (Peirce, 1931 ^ 58).(13)
It was in much the same spirit that Marx argued for the fetishistic character of
commodities in capitalist societies. The product is not valued for its use but for the
possessive desire it stimulates, a desire fed by wish-fulfilling fantasy and hope. Fetishism
camouflages the `real' meaning of commodities, Marx insisted, a meaning which is
actually exchange value and, more deeply, the exploitative relations of production.
Only after critical social science discovers this reality can a new economy be established
that will produce goods only according to their use value. In the last two
decades these claims have been empirically confronted by powerful investigations
demonstrating how capitalism actually sustains `decommodification', for example,
Kopytoff's (1986) demonstration of singularization; Miller's (1987; 1998) research on
shopping as gift-giving; Campbell's (1987) historical archeology linking consumerism to
romanticism and hedonism; and the ethnographies of Czikszentmihalyi and RochbergHalton
(1981, pages 55 ^ 89), and Woodward (2003) documenting the noninstrumental
meanings that attaches to things in the home.
The status of the spiritual
This realist critique of surface/depth has the unintended effect of seeming to give
credence to materialism as an anti-aesthetic and antimoral form, whether through
social realism, social engineering, or socialism. A more far-reaching strain of this
critical tradition attacks the very orientation to the material object itself. The repulsion
for `indulgent' materialism, for putting faith in external objects, for `mindless'
consumption or, indeed, for consumption tout court has permeated the Axial Age
civilizations, motivating a demand for world-withdrawal whether in an ascetic or a
mystical form. The claim is that man loses himself when he makes idols, that humans
must seek the divine not in material forms but in the abstract spirit, the only pathway
by which they will find the divine, not outside, but within themselves.
(13) Umberto Eco (1985) makes a parallel critique of Peirce's claims for the icon. For ontological
realism in film, see Bazin (1967).
792 J C Alexander
To make the iconic the enemy of the spirit is to engage, not in iconicism, but in
iconoclasm, the breaking of idols, a practice that extends from the ancient Jews to the
Puritans who made the modern world. William Mitchell has suggested that it was
Charles de Brosse's Du Culte des dieux fetiches that introduced the horror of the fetish
into Western accounts of primitive totem religion. Totemism was ``more ancient than
idolatry properly so called'', de Brosse asserted, because it was the most ``savage and
coarse, worshipping stones, vegetables, and animals.'' Fetish-worshippers were people
in whom ``the memory of Divine Revelations'' had been ``entirely extinguished.' (Mitchell,
1986, pages 190, 193).
How far is this from the anticonsumption movement today?
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794 J C Alexander
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