In his 2015 book, “Taste,” Giorgio Agamben seeks to know and enjoy taste. This is no simple matter. From the earliest Greek times taste was relegated to a third class status behind cognition and the privileged senses of sight and hearing that give the substance needed for cognition. Taste was what linked us to the brutish animals – mindlessly pursuing their pleasure. Yet even in ancient “Greek, Latin and other modern languages derived from them, there is also a vocabulary that is etymologically and semantically connected with the sphere of taste which designates the act of knowledge: ‘The word “Sapians” [wise man] is derived from “sapor” [taste] (Sapiens dictus a sapore) for just as the sense of taste is able to discern the flavours [sapore] of different foods, so too is the wise man able to discern objects and their causes since he recognizes each one as distinct and is able to judge them with an instinct for truth,’” Agamben quotes from a 12 century text by Isidoro de Sevilla.
Later in the 17 and 18 centuries, “the term ‘taste’…takes on a metaphorically opposite and additional sense so as to indicate this special form of knowledge that enjoys the beautiful object and the special form of pleasure that judges beauty.” The problem of how it is that knowledge enjoys is different than the problem of how the person who holds the knowledge enjoys that knowledge (what about Calculus is pleasurable?). Likewise, a pleasure that judges seems arbitrary since pleasure does not seem to have objective reason (why should I enjoy the taste of Macintosh apples better than Spartan apples?).
Taste has an empirical component in that it comes from sense data. Science is also based on sense data. Science may be interesting; however, science should not be enjoyed because that adds a corrupting element, a bias. Science should be a knowledge that does not enjoy. Since there is an empirical component to taste it should be scientifically analyzable. But any conclusions from a scientific process of analysis would not be completable because the judgments of taste are immediate and simple – that is they are not the result of a process of analysis. (if you give an explanation of your taste you are merely justifying it after the fact – a mental game in which you are trying to convince yourself of a reason for a knowledge you do not know.) For example, in the process of deciding which of two paintings to buy, one is preferable based on your taste. One then finds reasons to justify the one which fits one’s tastes better. However if the finances make the preferred painting unaffordable and you “choose” the less preferable one then your reasons for your choice will have change but your judgment of taste will not have – you still prefer the more expensive and unaffordable painting better independently of your justifications.
In the modern world, aesthetics has maintained “this fracture—that science knows the truth but cannot enjoy it, and that taste enjoys beauty, without being able to explain it”. Science is supposed to be unbiased: if you bias it with your personal loves and likes then it has been corrupted. Likewise with taste in the popular sense: its judgments are immediate and after thought does not ring true for anyone. The question, ‘why do these fractures need to be maintained?’ has been passed over because analysis requires breaking things up into their smallest easiest components – however this has lead us to a dead end. Agamben does not believe the fractures need to be maintained – they can be sutured. He proposes “in the present study to position taste as the privileged site to illuminate these fractures that essentially characterize Western metaphysics—both the division of the epistemic object into truth and beauty, and the division of human ethical telos…into knowledge and pleasure.” The result of this fracture has been an incomprehensibleness of whole phenomena. There are things (we know not what) that impinge or affect our senses (all we know is the impingement on our senses – this we popularly call phenomena)but the senses that literally make physical sense of phenomena are not the thing in itself. The traditional answer is, as we have just done, to separate any particular phenomenon into the part we know (science) and the part we don’t know (the ‘Idea’ in Plato, ‘the thing in itself’ in Kant). The whole history of western civilization starting from the Greeks to today has sought an ideal integrated beautiful knowledge that both knows and enjoys but we have developed these fractures that analyize, isolate and separate what we seek.
‘Taste’ is the term Agamben uses for this special unified ideal of a knowledge that enjoys and a pleasure that knows. He starts off by defining beauty as the object and ground of taste “of which there can be no science, only love.” “Divination is precisely a form of ‘mania’: knowledge that cannot…explain itself or phenomena but, rather, concerns that which in them is simply sign and appearance.” Divinization “presupposes a knowledge hidden in signs that cannot be known but only recognized”. In the ancient world the divinor placed the content of this knowledge he cannot know but only recognize in an oracle or “daimon” in modern terms we put it in the Other. The Other is the “they” in “they say…” it is where we put knowledge that we don’t really know but recognize: things like fashion, common sense, language – things no one person knows (in a scientific sense) or controls but which we recognize. The excessive signifier is a notion that Agamben borrows from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. “Lévi-Strauss posited a fundamentally inadequate relation between signification [which appears instantaneously] and knowledge [which develops gradually] that translates to an irreducible excess of signifier [signs] over the signified [meaning or idea].” Then quoting Lévi-Strauss “‘…this generates a signifier-surfeit [too many signs] relative to the signifieds [meaning or idea] to which it can be fitted. So, in man’s effort to understand the world, he always disposes of a surplus of signification [meaning]….That distribution of a supplementary ration…is absolutely necessary to ensure that, in total, the available signifier [sign] and the mapped-out signified [meaningful knowledge] may remain in the relationship of complementarity which is the very condition of the exercise of symbolic thinking.” The excessive signifier is the totality of all possible signs and their possible potential meaning that could be attached (but are not) to a specific phenomenon. Now a more formal definition of taste is “an empty or excessive sense, situated at the very limit of knowledge and pleasure…,whose lack or excess essentially defines the stature of both science…and pleasure”.
Consider the complimentary sciences of astronomy and astrology of the ancient world. Astronomy gives and explains the movement and position of the stars in the sky “without offering any explanation as such of those beautiful figures that the stars trace in the sky. The phenomena ‘saved’ by science therefore inevitably leave behind a free residue, a pure signifier that astrology can take as its support and treat as a supplement of signification [meaning] to distribute at its whim.” “In the ancient world, there are thus two species of knowledge: [1] knowledge that is known, which is to say science in the modern sense as founded upon the adequation of signifier [appearance] and signified [thing in itself]; and [2] knowledge that is not known, which is to say divinatory science…that is conversely founded upon the excessive signifier.”
In modern linguistic terms the problem is in the separateness of the semiotic science (related to signs and symbols – knowledge “that does not have a subject and can only be recognized”) and the semantic science (relating to meaning – “knowledge that has a subject and can be explained”). The two sciences are practically linked in purely arbitrary and ever changing links of convention but there is no essential communication between them.
Today, and for about the last 300 years, the ancient divinatory sciences (astrology and alchemy) have not been taken seriously. The hard sciences have negated “the possibility of any knowledge without a subject.” But modern “science can neither fill nor reduce the excessive signifier.” That is, modern science cannot give meaning to the beautiful and is therefore incomplete from a human perspective. We in the modern west have therefore developed several new divinatory sciences. Aesthetics, psychoanalysis and political economy are three modern divinatory sciences that are particularly relevant for taste. They are all based on meaning generated from the excessive signifier; meaning without subject within the signs themselves but which take on or become an object of meaning by virtue of amalgamating the signs and creating a knowledge that is unknown but out there in an indefinite Other. The system generated cannot be proven true or false even if components can be recognized as useful or not useful, fitting or not fitting. With these sciences, like the love for a beloved, one needs to believe in order to see the truth.
“It is perhaps a this point that we are able to grasp the sense of the Greek project for a philo-sophia, for a love of knowledge and a knowledge of love, that would be neither knowledge of the signifier nor knowledge of the signified, neither divination nor science, neither knowledge nor pleasure. So, too, may we no grasp that the concept of taste constitutes an extreme and late incarnation of this very project…. It is this knowledge in which truth and beauty communicate that, at the culmination of Greek philosophy, Plato fixed in the demonic figure of Eros.