An aesthetics of the given in Rei Terada's Looking Away.

Hicks, John

An Aesthetics of the Given in Rei Terada's Looking Away Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Harvard University Press, 2009), Page 240, ISBN 0674032683.

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Philosophers have long determined perception to be the "weaker" faculty. The senses are unreliable, we are told, and require reason to distinguish between appearance and illusion. Reevaluating the status of phenomenality through chapters on Coleridge, Kant, Nietzsche, and Adorno, Rei Terada's Looking Away traces an attitude ("phenomenophilia") and a character ("the phenomenophile") to exemplify a kind of perception that resists or delays the subsumption of sensation under concepts, lingering in pure phenomenality as a "space before the acceptance of any perceived fact" (5). Through figures of lingering, tarrying, and the book's eponymous "looking away," Terada presents the cultivation of object perceptions that resist the transition to fact perception as a mode of dissatisfaction with the given. Expressing dissatisfaction with the given world is often met with charges of skepticism, decadence, or anti-science denialism. Terada frames her explorations of phenomenophilia in terms of the fact/value distinction-is vs. ought-and the slippery way in which fact perception ("is") quickly shades into a social demand to affirm those facts as normative facets of reality ("ought"). The subtle bias by which facts are deemed more valuable than mere appearances pushes observers to confer a positive value on the world "as is." The coercion to affirm the given is the central problem the book seeks to address. Terada suggests that balking at the pressure to accept natural and social facts as givens (and implicitly as norms) is an experience shared among artistic, queer, and utopian sensibilities for whom the world falls short or feels oddly unnatural and inhospitable.

To resist the coercion to accept object perceptions as facts, the phenomenophile turns to ephemeral perceptions too fleeting or subjective to count as facts (e.g., optical illusions). Ephemeral perceptions cannot be shared (and so cannot be aesthetic in Kantian terms), but neither can they be commodified or appropriated for instrumental aims (65); hence ephemera become models for a non-coercive relation to objects. Though Terada carefully identifies these ephemeral sensations as non-aesthetic or "counteraesthetic" (7), she might also have described them as pertaining to Baumgarten's original definition and scope of aesthetics as the science of all sensations, not just those related to beauty and sublimity; or to Hume's brand of value-free empiricism (see p. 10-13).

In the chapters on Coleridge and Nietzsche, Terada examines two figures conflicted about their respective phenomenophilia, and suggests that some of their guilt stems from a common 19th-century misreading of Kant. As a result, the book's central concerns converge upon her reinterpretation of Kant's critical project. For Terada, Kant makes "a major contribution to the literature of world acceptance" by seeking to reduce the scope of facts to which we must assent. In the first Critique, merely acknowledging that we cannot access things-in-themselves is enough: the negative, limiting concept of noumena (things in themselves) carries with it a "minimal, quasi-sujective endorsement" of the limits of our cognitive structures that "completes our obligation to accept the given world" (75). Noting Robert Pippin's objection that deploying noumena as a "merely limiting concept" leads to a circularity-"a needlessly involved way of insisting that we cannot know what we cannot know"-Terada insists on the temporality of the assertion as a way of "work[ing] through the impossibility of knowing something outside phenomena": the "needlessly involved" and "necessarily rhetorical way around" is "exactly what we need therapeutically" (90-91).

This therapeutic angle sheds light on the third Critique as well, suggesting "something of a new way to understand what the implausible 'disinterest' of aesthetic reflective judgments is all about" (98). Rather than simply furnishing a criterion for distinguishing shareable judgments of taste from "interested" corporeal pleasures on the one hand and instrumental moral goods on the other, Kantian disinterest emerges as something newly motivated: "what the subtractive logic of aesthetic reflective judgments seeks to subtract is precisely the coercive effect of fact perception" (98). In this way, the first and third Critiques both seek to lessen the burden of world acceptance by tarrying in the non-, or "paraconceptual" spaces of object perception and aesthetic reflective judgment (100).

The final chapter on Adorno chapter deals primarily with "social facts"-aspects of society so ingrained as to be quasi-natural facts-and our right to resist them. Here the stakes of the phenomenophile's strategies for circumventing the coercive forces of world acceptance become most clear, as do the utopian possibilities of alternate approaches to sensation that disrupt the slippage from fact into value (e.g., art production).

Throughout the book, Terada links phenomenophilia to the contemporaneous developments in romantic lyric poetry and to the later development of absurdist literature and minimalism in the visual arts. It would be a worthwhile project-though another book entirely-to trace phenomenophilia's place in literary and art history with the same care she has taken to uncover its development in the philosophical tradition.

Reviewed by John Hicks, Cornell University