Really Useless 'Knowledge': A Political Critique of Aesthetics

In his Immanuel Kant, Lucien Goldmann cites the early Lukacs’s view that ‘the Critique of Judgement contains the seeds of a reply to every problem of structure in the sphere of aesthetics; aesthetics need thus only clarify and think through to the end that which is implicitly there to hand’ (Goldmann 1971:192) This was precisely what Lukacs did in subsequently historicizing Kant’s conception of the subject and object of aesthetic judgement. The approach adopted here is rather different. The Critique, I shall argue, does provide a clear statement of ‘every problem of structure in the field of aesthetics’, but less by way of resolving those problems, or anticipating their resolution, than by specifying the conditions that would need to be met were they to be resolved. Viewed in this light, Kant’s treatise is most fruitfully read as a commentary on the necessary conditions, properties and requirements of aesthetic discourse.