The Incarnational Aesthetic

My personal essay in the Spring 2021 issue of The Hedgehog Review is now unpaywalled. You can read the article here. You can read a bit more about it and how I came to write it here.

I’m making my way through the other essays in the issue, which is themed around the question “Who Do We Think We Are”? Please check out the rest of the issue, as the editors did a great job of selecting articles that would speak to one another. I’m particularly struck by the way my piece resonates with the essay by Ashley C. Barnes, “Toward an Incarnational Aesthetic.”

Barnes attempts to bridge the gap between historicist criticism and an aesthetical approach to art (such as that of the New Critics) by arguing instead for what she calls an “incarnational” paradigm. Art can be transcendent, Barnes claims, but in order to achieve that transcendence we do not need to first consider it apart from its situated-ness in time and place. I’ve always been on the fence about this divide in literary criticism. On one hand I am drawn to art because of its universality and its timelessness. We are all after transcendence, and good art can help us approach it. Yet on the other hand I am aware that this approach can be escapist—a way to avoid talking about the particularities from which art arose, or from facing those specific real-world circumstances about which art impels us to care. The right answer lies in the proper balance of the two approaches, I think, one that does not exclude either sphere from coming to bear on how we view art.

Barnes seeks to strike a proper balance also, and to do so she challenges an unhealthily aesthetic approach. Near the end of her argument, she made a point that made me realize that all along she had been critiquing the same kind of aversion to the physical world that I critique in my own article:

 If we do want to resist the cultural secularization of the present moment—if we are to maintain the possibility that art can baffle capitalism’s instrumentalizing of every last minute of our lives—then we need historicism to help us appreciate art as incarnation.

Capitalism’s “instrumentalizing of every last minute of our lives” is very much what “‘Peace’ and the Organization Kid” is about. The Organization Kids are masters at “instrumentalizing” moments, I argue, at mining our quotidian anxieties, the ups and downs of daily life, turning them into occasions for selling a product. Barnes’ piece got me thinking that in order to do this, capitalism first must extract those occasions from the situated-ness of their surroundings. In order for music to become something Spotify can profit from, that music must have no physical properties at all. At least not on the supply side, that is—the product is digital, and when it hits your earbuds it becomes physical again. In order for companies to profit from a sound—a physical vibration—that sound must be removed from its surroundings, and then it can be replicated, bought, sold, etc.

In this way, the aesthetically obsessed New Critic (not all of them are) becomes an unlikely bedfellow with the Organization Kid. Both, in prioritizing the invisible over the visible, the ideal over the real, dislodge art from its surroundings and (perhaps unwittingly in the case of the New Critic) prepare the way for the instrumentalization of art. In the case of the Organization Kid, this enables art—and more broadly, human experience—to serve as an engine for profit.

Barnes’ essay does a great job of laying out some of the dangers of the purely aesthetic approach. I also think—and Barnes hints at this—that Catholics, we to whom the Incarnation is a central doctrine, have even more reason to be wary of any approach to reality that relegates the physical, time-bound word to an inferior status. Our faith, quite frankly, claims the opposite—that the precise way our salvation was achieved should cause us to love the world in all its particularity. Pope Francis has said as much recently about moral theology.

Perhaps we could say that in our day and age, a truly counter-cultural spirit would manifest itself in desiring those things that cannot be recorded, replicated, or be advertised in any fashion. Playing music, sharing a meal, conversing, giving your children a bath, reading to them, making dinner, sweeping the floor, etc. Things that remain firmly lodged in time and space, which we do not choose to extricate for our own gain.

Of course there’s a very human tendency to “capture” even these non-captured experiences, as if we were lifestyle bloggers, and to market “non-marketability” in a way, even if only to ourselves. This temptation causes us to shift our desire from the experience itself to its outcome—it’s the same mistake that Barnes points out, the same mistake the Organization Kids make. This is the mistake religiously minded liberal arts types often make with the concept of leisure, as if, rather than a “letting-go” and entering into the fullness of experience, Josef Pieper was really advocating for a particular outcome: a comfy state of mind, a non-physical pleasure available only to the aristocratic classes.

Religious contemplation I think helps address all of these tendencies, which are all too human. Contemplation trains one to let go of the insistent need to clutch at things, to obtain and hold onto certain feelings or states of mind, even if they (especially if they) arise from good, healthy experiences. Detachment means detachment from our own ideas just as much as it means detachment from worldly pleasures. In fact, attachment to the former often proves more insidious and demonic than the latter.