Having looked at some of the problems the modern market capitalist consumer world creates for beauty and having looked at two popular modern aesthetics of beauty (the aesthetics of the smooth and the of consumption) and having looked at three aesthetics missing in the modern world (the aesthetics of veiling, disaster, and injury), Byung-Chal Han now turns to consider how actually we can save beauty in our world by better identifying it and what brings it to being.
First consider beauty as truth and freedom. Han accepts Hegel’s notion of beauty as an “aesthetic of truth and freedom, which withdraws beauty from any form of consumption….Beauty is an end in itself….For Hegel, no object of daily use, no object of consumption, no commodity would be beautiful. They lack the inner independence and freedom which account for beauty….Beauty does not promote itself. It does not tempt you to enjoy or to possess it. Rather, it invites you to linger in contemplation. It lets desire as well as interest disappear. Thus art does not agree with capitalism which subjects everything to consumption and speculation….Truth reduces entropy, namely the level of noise. Without truth, without concepts, reality disintegrates into a noisy heap [an unconnected side by side]. Beauty as well as truth is something exclusive. Thus they do not occur often….Hegel’s aesthetics of beauty is diametrically opposed to today’s kalocracy. Botox, bulimia and cosmetic surgery reflect its terror. The task of [modern] beauty, first of all, is to produce stimuli and to generate attention. Even art, for Hegel inalienable, is today entirely subjected to the logic of capital. The freedom of art submits itself to the freedom of capital.” One key point is that the beautiful is the free. When you compel the beautiful you destroy it; you force it out of its beauty creating environment and kill it by separating it from its source. Saving beauty means a commitment to freedom and truth.
This leads to the notion of the politics of beauty. Han starts off by pointing out that beauty is a luxury and is playful. “The beauty of flowers is owed to a luxury which is free of any economic aspect. It is the expression of a free play without compulsions and needs. Thus it is opposed to work and business. Where compulsion and need reign, there are no free spaces for the element of play which is constitutive of beauty. Beauty is a phenomenon of luxury. The necessary which only averts needs is not beautiful.” Therefore the life of an MBA, of a business person, or merchant concerned with profit or need, or the market or what is useful is neither free nor beautiful. There are only three free and beautiful lifestyles: 1) one concerned with the enjoyment and appreciation of beauty – a type of hedonist; 2) one concerned with the production of beautiful deeds in the society – a politician or activist, and 3) one concerned with the contemplation of imperishable beauty – the philosopher. And yet the hedonist, the politician/activist and the philosopher are easily corrupted in our world. For example: “As free individuals, politicians must create beautiful deeds beyond what is necessary and useful for pure sustenance. Political action consists in the creation of entirely new beginnings….The ideal politics is a politics of beauty. At present, such a politics of beauty is impossible because all of politics today is subject to systemic pressures. It possesses hardly any free spaces. The politics of beauty is a politics of freedom. The absence of alternatives, which is the yoke under which today’s politics works, makes genuine political action impossible. Politics [today] does not act; it works. Politics would need to offer genuine alternatives, a real choice. A politician who is a stooge of the system is not a free man…but a servant.”
Han then compares the erotic, which is rare and can be beautiful, with the pornographic which is very popular but cannot be beautiful. The erotic works to create a distance; it makes allusions where the pornographic puts things openly on display. The erotic works by suggestion, by delay, by a lack of certainty, and by not being explicit, by being allusive; whereas the pornographic is explicit, certain, and deals with the immediate (as in, not mediated, raw, or right now) moods or emotions. “Pornographic theatre lacks dialogue. It is…an ‘undertaking of private psychopathy’. The capacity for dialogue, the capacity for opening up to the other, even the capacity for listening, is today diminishing on all levels. The contemporary narcissistic subject perceives everything as nothing but shades of itself. It is incapable of seeing the otherness of the other. A dialogue is not a staging of mutual exposure. Neither confessions nor disclosures are erotic.” In other words, a strong desire to learn something about the other person is not dialogue – it is at best mutual interrogation. “Where dialogue disappears from the stage, a theatre of affectivity emerges. Affects are not dialogically structured. A negation of the other is inscribed in them.” Feelings, which are narrative enabling, durable, dialogic are what can have access to the other. Emotions and affects, which are impulsive, volatile and monologic are forms of expression belonging to narcissistic and isolated subjects. “Affective theatre does not narrate. Rather, a mass of affects is loaded directly on to the stage. That is what constitutes its pornographic character.” Today, intimacy in the form of confession, exposure, and disclosure “removes more and more objective forms of play and the room for play in which one could escape oneself, one’s own psychology. Intimacy is opposed to playful distance and theatricality….Strict play or rituals unburden the soul. They do not allow for any space to be given to a pornography of the soul: ‘Eccentricity, egomania, exaltation are not to be found here. Grace and strict play rule out emotional caprice, nudism of the soul, and anything psychopathic.’” A great actor or actress is erotic because they can fill their soul with anyone – they are a nobody freed of all inwardness and free to be any other; free to be seduced by the other. “Erotic theatre is the place where such seduction, the phantasy for the other, is possible.”
“[T]he task of art is the saving of the other. The saving of beauty is the saving of the other. The crisis of beauty today consists precisely in the fact that beauty is reduced to its givenness, to its use or consumer value. Consumption destroys the other.” What do we do in the presence of beauty? We linger. “Beauty itself actually invites us to linger; it is the will which stands in the way of contemplative lingering….The absence of willing and interest brings time to a stand-still, even renders it still. Stillness is what distinguishes aesthetic intuition from mere sensual perception.” The art of the festival is where traditionally high-time stood still and apart from ordinary or work time. The notion of a festival is a religious sacred notion that sets us apart for a time. That time was supposed to be the best way for us to experience eternity by lingering in the present high-time of the festival. “Today the high-time has disappeared altogether in favour of the time for work which has become total. Even breaks are integrated into working hours…. Breaks are not the other of working hours. Thus they do not improve the quality of time.” Sacredness is beauty and works of art lose their sacredness when their value comes from being seen rather than from being kept hidden until festival high-time. “Exhibitions are not festivals, but spectacles….[in museums] things only acquire a value if they are seen, if they meet with attention.” today, for art the situation is even worse: “works of art are primarily traded on the market ….They have neither cult value, nor value as exhibition pieces. Rather, it is purely their value as objects of speculation which subjects them to the logic of capital.”
Lastly, beauty inspires a procreative impulse to truth, to a commitment to durable, long lasting, creative works. However, these commitments are not encouraged in a consumerist world devoted to getting likes. “The saving of beauty is the saving of that which commits us.”