The "Imaginary" and Its Enemies

Throughout our many years as dear friends I have found that Wolfgang Iser and I have been not only close colleagues in a university and a department, but, far more importantly, close colleagues in being dedicated to justifying a continuing major role to be played in culture by the aesthetic, even in a theoretical season that has grown increasingly hostile to it. Iser's and my theories may have emerged from different sources, but they have met in what I hope is a mutual reinforcement in their attempt to support that major role. I am especially grateful for Iser's recent work, which has developed a pro found and lasting anthropological justification for the aesthetic.1 In what follows I try to add my own minor version of a late defense in the face of an inhospitable environment. It has become almost routine in recent theoretical fashions to reject the aesthetic as a special category that would justify what we used to call art. My aim is and has been to reassert and then maintain the role and the significance of the aesthetic against these attempts to repudiate it as a deceptive diversion, as a mystification that masks its submissive service to political powers. In this part of my essay and in the second part that follows I will be arguing, first, for the restoration of the aesthetic in its own right as an indispensable and irreducible form of human activity at its best, and second, against the reduction of the aesthetic to the political.2 In what follows, then, I will begin by setting forth my notion of the Western aesthetic construct, its history and the complexities in the ways it functions. With this exposition I hope to have cleared the way for the sequel, which will deal with the politics of struggle between the aesthetic and its enemies in the history of literary theory and commen tary, a struggle that leads to the crisis in which literary studies find themselves today because of the widespread dismissal of the aesthetic as a legitimate category. The aesthetic in literature begins its career in the West with its attachment to doctrines of form, and, as is traditionally argued, we must go back to the Poetics of Aristotle for the earliest and perhaps still the most influential doctrine of form. In the Poetics the doctrine of form