An Aesthetics of the Given in Rei Terada’s Looking Away

Abstract

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. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 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. …