Dr. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Reading for Seminar: Sylvia Wynter's "Rethinking 'Aesthetics': Notes Toward a Deciphering Practice"
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, PhD (Duke University)
Against Criticism: Technicity in Sylvia Wynter’s Philosophy of Aesthetics
The new question: not who controls reality but what? —Sylvia Wynter[1]
The hypothesis, as one which places our origin in Representation rather than Evolution […] would, of course, call for a new poetics. —Sylvia Wynter[2]
This seminar concerns the intertwinement of science, aesthetics, and cultural criticism via an investigation of the aesthetics of science. Focusing on Wynter’s "Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice,” my paper revisits some long-standing questions like “What is art?” and “What is the relationship between art and politics?”, it does so to problematize their grounding premises rather than provide conclusions or affirm their line of questioning, as something other than eristic. Nevertheless, these questions do not simply cut across scales of being; they could be said to define and delimit received metrics of scale. Thus, they bear directly on the capacity for world-upending change and the dissolution of ordering systems and modes of being. I will proceed by reconstructing Wynter’s contribution to aesthetic philosophy and consider some of its implications for scholarly thinking on art, film, media, and literature as well as philosophy and science studies. Alongside this investigation is another concern: the disavowed metaphysical and aesthetic projects of science and how they rebound on/in our criticism, including that of Wynter’s. In short, for those of us who are taken to be critics, the paper and our discussion will consider how our foundational questions and motivations might necessarily shift or be thrown into crisis or decisively halted by a revisitation that is not an affirmation of the art concept and the aesthetic.
[1] Sylvia Wynter, “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond,” Cultural Critique 7 (Fall 1987): 229.
[2] Sylvia Wynter, “Africa, The West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text After Man,” in Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, ed. June Givanni (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 26.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Research & Study and the Department of Art & Public Policy.
