Do give general information about viktor shklovsky’s        mukarovsky´, jan, aesthetic function, norm and value as social facts [1936],

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Mukařovský’s concern is the function, survival, and development of what he calls the “aesthetic function,” extending his investigation beyond art alone to consider the constantly changing social context in which aesthetic judgments are made. The aesthetic function, he argues, is not fixed, but is modified by situation and by changing subjective responses. For this reason, the division between the realms of the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic can never be firmly drawn. To support this proposition, Mukařovský cites the impact of gesture and body language, and the leveling impact of time on fashion. These considerations lead him to look at the relationship between aesthetic norms and social hierarchies. The final section of the extracts translated here pursues that most difficult and intangible quality: aesthetic value. It concludes with the proposal that aesthetic value is more likely to derive from an artifact’s incongruity and its polymorphous and polysemic qualities, rather than from a simple harmoniousness between the parts and the whole. Mukařovský and the Soviet Formalist also developed the theory of literary evolution. Discourses and texts emerge from an internal need to evolve; they change form in order to ensure the continuation of their function. The linguist Victor Šklovskij used the Russian ostranenie (formal estrangement), which was echoed by Mukařovský’s Czech actualisace (foregrounding or deautomization) to define the constant stimulus by literature to alter and renew its stylistic means to continue binding the reader through originality and innovation. Yet this is not an avant-garde, modernist trope, but an epistemological necessity for the production of texts that combine textual with cognitive aspects. Developing the literary evolution from Marxist, materialist dialectics redefined Saussure’s diachronic linguistics as distinct from linear historical movement and analyzed (recurring) patterns of change between competing elements across time and place. To be sure, this is fundamental to an understanding of fashion’s constant principle of change not as an economic factor alone—prompting new consumption for stylistic trends—but as a generative functional and economic structure. Hence the translation of actualisace must also acknowledge the foregrounding of an expression by making it resolutely contemporary. Mukařovský’s work on the structure of clothing, dress and fashion occurs throughout his book On Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (1935/36)—sometimes described directly, at other times suggested within a principle of change. This focus must be understood as a programmatic extension of his linguistic and literary theories toward general aesthetics. Mukařovský’s essays from these years, for example on “Beauty,” “The Dialectic Contradictions in Modern Art” or “Art as Semiological Fact” (for the VIIIe Congrès international de philosophie) show the direction his research was taking. Consequently, the analysis of fashion’s language is bound up with the discussion of changing norms (“disturbance”) that succeed one another in a constant revival of the aesthetic function. Through his occupation with fashion, a direct link between the “aesthetic value” (perhaps also “social value”) and “market value” entered Mukařovský’s discussion. The political economy of the market emerged in determining the structure for the contemporary production and application of aesthetics. The internal developmental structure of a work, which can be traced, for instance, through the concept of literary evolution, must be embedded for fashion in a concrete commercial framework. Formalism in fashion thus appears as dependent on constant enactment via aesthetic “deautomization” and “estrangement” (the exotic as a consumable ideal) and thus as a materialist manifestation of the movement between aesthetic function, norm and demand. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts Foreword The present study, here offered in book form, has been published previously in part in the journal Sociální problémy (Social Problems; Vol. IV, 1935), where its first two chapters appeared under the title “Aesthetic Function and Aesthetic Norm as Social Facts”. The third and fourth chapters are appearing here for the first time. The different time lapses between the genesis and publication of the various sections does not mean, however, that they are somehow disjointed as to their content. The concepts of aesthetic function, norm and value are connected so closely that they are really just three aspects of the Aesthetic; thus any treatment of any one of them without the other two would inevitably be incomplete. However, each of them has its own particular issues, which accounts for the three-stage arrangement of this study (the fourth is more akin to a résumé). The purpose behind the present work calls for a few words of introduction. It was preceded by a number of studies based on specific material, especially literary material, but tending consistently towards general conclusions; at their core was a constant quest for the fundamental principles behind the structure of a work of art. Naturally, the basic noetic standpoint—while essentially unchanging, staying with immanence, i.e. the internal rules by which the structure of art evolves—did develop over time. While there was an initial leaning towards the theoretical principles of Russian Formalism, which defended a strict conception of art’s autonomy with regard to phenomena in other areas that develop linearly and with which art comes into contact, it became ever clearer that even a consistently sustained assumption of evolutionary immanence permits, nay, demands consideration of the correlation between art and these other areas. One must always remember that it is identity-sustaining internal inertia that resists the encroachments from without that constantly seek to detach a line of development from identity with itself. Only in this way can development be understood as something that happens according to natural laws. As examples of both successive stages I might cite my 1928 Formalist study of Karel Hynek Mácha’s Máj (May; Práce z vědeckých ústavů filosofické fakulty Karlovy university XX) and my 1934 Structuralist essay on Matěj Milota Zdirad Polák’s The Nobility of Nature (Polákova Vznešenost přírody; Sborník filologický III. třídy České akademie, Vol. X). The former takes the approach that poetry is absolutely autonomous, while the latter allows for a correlation between literature and other lines of development, notably that of society. The specific outcomes of the former work are by no means jeopardised by the revision of the noetic base, and both studies work with the core notion of the immanence of development. Once the assumption that literature is hermetically isolated from the phenomena that surround it was cleared out of the way, it proved necessary above all to take account of developments throughout all art, in which context all the arts evolve interactively (making the development of one not fully comprehensible without regard to parallel developments in the others; consider, for example, the recent impact that cinema has had on the theatre and vice versa). However, since the boundaries that separate the entirety of art from non-artistic aesthetic phenomena also change as they evolve, it was also found necessary to look at the relationship between art and such aesthetic phenomena that lie outside art. But then not even the entire range of aesthetic phenomena, whether artistic or non-artistic, is isolated from the vast realm of other phenomena, most notably all the varieties of human activity and its products; thus it became necessary to look also at the standing of the aesthetic function among all the functions that phenomena—especially cultural phenomena in the broadest sense—may take on for man. Only with the noetic background expanded in this way could there be any return to those classical, but for a time overlooked, problems in the philosophy of art: the question of aesthetic norm and value. The obvious starting point had to be analysis of aesthetic function, which both classifies the aestheticas as social phenomenon and emphasises, by its energetic nature, the continuity of the immanent development of the aesthetic sphere. It goes without saying that in his journey towards and work on the present study, the author frequently encountered the views of others, such as the Max Dessoir line in aesthetic theory, taken to its logical conclusion by Emil Utitz, a theory to be credited, after [Jean Marie] Guyau’s intervention, with having finally expanded the horizons of aesthetic enquiry to take in the Aesthetic in the broadest sense of the word. There were also occasions when I could turn to creative artists who, in tackling problems close to their own work, often arrive at findings that apply more generally. Thus, for example, certain major theoretical formulations spring from Oscar Wilde, who, in connection with the Symbolist conception of art, developed a fine sense for its semiotic nature; another example is the interest shown by the Čapek brothers in peripheral art forms, previously ignored, though they have always kept in step with developments in “high” art, from which they have not only borrowed, but which they have influenced in their turn, making it impossible to capture the entire complexity of the history of art without due regard to them. However, there are two figures who merit particular mention in that they were both artists and art theorists: F. X. Šalda and Otakar Zich, whose scholarly accomplishments provided the author with a springboard at the very start of his own scholarly endeavours. Wherever the present study approaches the views of others, the relevant quotations and references are given. However, the author’s prime ambition is to present a systematic outline of his own conception of certain basic issues in aesthetics. Hence there has seemed to be little point in offering any appraisal of the views of others, whether ad hoc or systematic. Ad hoc criticism invariably carries a risk of distorting the other’s views if taken out of context; and systematic overviews of works about and views on the relationships between art and society have already appeared with some frequency. Any attempt at another herein would only blur the main line being followed, which is a quest for solutions to a number of issues in general aesthetics from the point of view of sociology, not a critique of the methods used in the specific sociology of art, given that these carry a distinct lack of clarity, vacillating as they do between causal and structural conceptions of the relationship between art and society. For its author, this work is merely the first stage on the road leading to other issues in the philosophy of art, primarily the question of the part played by the individual in how developments unfold, and the problems attached to the work of art as a sign. Bratislava, June 1936 The aesthetic function occupies an important place in the life of individuals and of society as a whole. The range of people who come into direct contact with art may be quite restricted both by the comparative rarity of an aesthetic predisposition—or at least by its being restricted in some instances to only certain areas in art—and by the barriers that stratify society (certain social classes have only limited access to works of art and limited training in aesthetics). Yet the effects of how art works mean that it also impacts on people who have no direct relationship to it (consider, for example, how poetry affects how a language system develops); moreover, the aesthetic function is effective over a far greater area than art alone. Any object and any activity (whether natural or human) may become a vehicle of the aesthetic function. This assertion does not amount to panaestheticism since: 1. it expresses only a general possibility, but not any necessity of the aesthetic function; 2. it does not claim that the aesthetic function has pride of place among all the functions of given phenomena for the entire area of aesthetics; 3. it neither confuses the aesthetic function with other functions, nor does it conceive of the other functions as mere variants of the aesthetic function. That assertion merely serves to indicate our espousal of the view that there is no solid borderline between the aesthetic and extra-aesthetic spheres; there are no objects or actions which by virtue of their essence or organic structure are, regardless of time, place or the person evaluating them, carriers of an aesthetic function, and others which, again by their particular adaptation, would be necessarily placed outside its range. At first sight this statement might appear exaggerated. It could be countered with examples of objects and actions that appear utterly incapable of any aesthetic function (for example, certain basic physiological actions such as breathing, or certain highly abstract thought processes), or, conversely, with examples of phenomena that are preordained by their entire structure to have an aesthetic effect, such as works of art in particular. From Naturalism onwards, modern art has been totally unselective about the areas of reality from which to draw its subject matter, and since the time of Cubism and its kindred in the other arts, it has set itself no limits as to the materials and techniques it uses. Likewise modern aesthetics lays great emphasis on the breadth of the sphere of the aesthetic (Jean-Marie Guyau, Max Dessoir and his school, and others), all of which provides ample evidence that even such things as traditionally would not have been accorded any aesthetic potential may become aesthetic facts. We may recall what Guyau said: “To breathe deeply and feel one’s blood being cleansed by contact with the air, is this not an intoxicating experience whose aesthetic value would be hard to deny?” (Les problèmes de l'esthétique contemporaine), or again Dessoir: “If we describe a machine, the solution to a problem in mathematics, or the way a particular social group is organised as a beautiful thing, this is more than just a manner of speaking” (Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Stuttgart 1906). One may also cite instances of the opposite, where works of art that are privileged bearers of the aesthetic function may lose it and then be either destroyed as superfluous (as with the obliteration of old frescoes or graffiti by their being painted or plastered over), or they may become used without regard to their aesthetic purpose (as with the conversion of ancient palaces to army barracks etc.). There are, however, within art and beyond it, things that by virtue of their organic structure are meant to have an aesthetic effect; in the case of art that is its core attribute. However, an active capacity for functioning aesthetically is not an inherent property of an object, even if it were deliberately created with that in mind; it only transpires under certain circumstances, specifically in a given social context. The very same item that has been a privileged bearer of the aesthetic function at a certain time or in a certain country may be incapable of having this function in a different time or country; the history of art is not short of instances where the original aesthetic, even artistic validity of a given work has been rediscovered only through scholarly enquiry (see, for example, N. S. Trubetzkoy: “Khozheniye Afanasiya Nikitina kak literaturnyi pamyatnik”, Versty 1, Paris, 1926, or R. Jagodić: “Der Stil der altrussischen Vitae”, Contributions to the Second International Congress of Slavists, Warsaw, 1934). Thus the bounds of the sphere that is aesthetics are not set by reality itself, and they are highly subject to change. This becomes particularly apparent from the standpoint of the subjective evaluation of phenomena. From our own milieu we all know people for whom anything can take on an aesthetic function, and, conversely, people for whom the aesthetic function barely exists at all; and we even know from experience that the boundary between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic spheres, dependent as it is on the measure of aesthetic receptivity, shifts for each and every one of us with a change in age, health or even the mood of the moment. The moment we dispense with the individual’s standpoint, however, and adopt that of social context, it transpires that despite all ephemeral individual variations there is a largely stable distribution of the aesthetic function in the world of objects and events. Even then, the division between the sphere of the aesthetic function and that of non-aesthetic phenomena will not be entirely clear-cut, given that the degree of involvement of the aesthetic function varies immensely and it is seldom possible to determine the total absence of even the slightest aesthetic residue with absolute certainty. But what can be ascertained objectively—from symptomatic evidence—is the extent of the aesthetic function in, for example, dwelling, dress and the like as acts. But as soon as we change our perspective, whether in time or space, or from one social formation to another (e.g. between classes or generations), we invariably find a change also in the distribution of the aesthetic function and the bounds of its domain. So, for example, the aesthetic function of food is evidently more powerful in France than in Czechoslovakia; the aesthetic function of clothing in the Czechoslovak urban environment is stronger with women than with men, though that distinction does not apply to environments in which folk costume is the norm; the aesthetic function of clothing also varies according to the typical situations that apply to a given social context: thus the aesthetic function of clothes worn to work will be much weaker than in the case of those worn to special occasions. As regards shifts over time, we may note that, unlike the situation today, in the seventeenth century (the age of the Rococo), men’s apparel still had the same strong aesthetic function as women’s; and, following the Great War, the aesthetic function of dress and the home took on much wider social dimensions and involved many more types of situation than before the war. As we seek to identify the bounds of the aesthetic sphere that set it apart from the non-aesthetic, we must always bear in mind that the two areas are not totally separate or discontinuous. There is a constant dynamic relationship between them that may be described as a dialectical antinomy. One cannot examine the condition or evolution of the aesthetic function without asking how widely (or not, as the case may be) it has flooded the entire expanse of reality; whether its boundaries are relatively fixed or more fluid; and whether it is spread evenly across all strata of the social context or largely confined to just certain groups and milieus—with due regard, of course, to the particular time and particular social entity. In other words, what will characterise the condition and evolution of the aesthetic function is not just where and how it is found to manifest itself, but also the extent to which it is found to be absent or at least weakened and the circumstances where this applies. […] At this point it is appropriate to recall what was hinted at in the first chapter on the gradual nature of the transition between art and other aesthetic phenomena. Frédéric Paulhan is correct when he says (in Le Mensonge de l'art, Paris, 1907) that “the high arts, such as painting and sculpture, are, by their very nature, also ‘decorative’ arts: the purpose of a picture or statue is to decorate a hall, salon, façade or fountain”. We should add here that for Paulhan the decorative arts are “the kind of production that processes a material to give it useful forms, or confines itself to making it decorative”; as Paulhan, and the French in general, conceive them, the decorative arts are not, therefore, real arts at all, but crafts, that is, non-artistic aesthetic phenomena. Paulhan shows that the decorative element, as also the practical function, may lead to a coalescence of art with the domain of all other aesthetic phenomena to the point that it becomes indistinguishable. Otakar Hostinský puts it even more tellingly: “If we attribute a great portal with decorative doors to architecture, what right entitles us to accord a lower standing to a work, perhaps even by the same person, such as a fine cabinet or other piece of moveable furniture?” (O významu průmyslu uměleckého, Prague, 1887.) This hints at one of the natural bridges between art and the remaining sphere of the aesthetic; there are, of course, very many other routes by which norms migrate straight from the high art that sets them into the non-artistic sphere. To take one more example at least: the influence of gesture in the theatre on the body language that goes with good manners, decorum. Decorum is known as a fact that has a strong aesthetic tone (on which see Max Dessoir: Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft), but its dominant function lies elsewhere: to facilitate and regulate social intercourse among the members of a collectivity. It is, then, a fact that is aesthetic, but non-artistic, and the same goes for gestures in the broadest sense of the word, including mimicry and such phenomena in language as intonation and articulation. The aesthetic function has the important job here of toning down the original spontaneous expressiveness of a gesture and converting a gesture-reaction into a gesture-sign. But we may also observe this interesting phenomenon: body language varies not only from nation to nation (even in the case of nations of roughly the same culture and the same social stratification), but also, and quite radically, from age to age even within one and the same nation. To verify that this is so, suffice it to consider the paintings and drawings, especially engravings, and photographs from as relatively recently as the 1840s and 1850s. The most conventional gestures portrayed, such as simple standing upright, strike us today as almost histrionic: the leg not bearing the body weight is thrust forward, the hands seem to be expressing emotion out of all proportion to the situation, and so forth. Thus body language is prone to evolution, but where does that stem from? Just as sensory perceptions, notably the visual and auditory, evolve under the influence of art (painting and sculpture have always enabled man to experience anew the act of seeing, music likewise with hearing), and just as poetry continually renews man’s sense that speaking is being creative with language, so too gesticulation, body language, has a corresponding art that constantly renews it: acting—since time immemorial in the theatre, in more recent times also in cinema. For the actor, a gesture is a fact of art whose dominant function is aesthetic. This releases it from the context of social relationships and enhances its scope for change. Any new norm arising from such a change then seeps back from the stage into the auditorium. The influence of acting on gesture has long been known to educationalists and has led to the use of amateur acting as a pedagogical device (think of school plays in the age of Humanism). Today this influence on day-to-day living is quite striking, especially as mediated through film: it has unfolded before our very eyes, over quite a short period of time, and especially in women, whose imitative instinct is greater than in men—in their entire system of body language, from their gait to the tiniest of motions, such as opening a powder compact or the play of facial muscles. This is one way in which new aesthetic norms stream out of art right into daily life, whether the location be an artisan’s workshop or the rarified environment of a salon. Outside art they carry much more weight than within the art that engendered them, because outside art they function as true yardsticks of value, not as the mere setting for the violation of norms. This application of norms is not entirely automatic either, because it subjects the norm to the influence of various forces, for example, fashion. In essence, fashion is not a pre-eminently aesthetic phenomenon, but more an economic one; Hubert Gordon Schauer has defined it as “the exclusive domination that a product enjoys for a period of time”, and the German economist Werner Sombart has devoted an entire study (Wirtschaft und Mode) to the economic aspect of fashion. And yet among all the numerous functions of fashion (such as the social, sometimes the political and, in dress, even the erotic) the aesthetic function is one of the most important. Fashion has a levelling effect on the aesthetic norm by eliminating the many forms of competition arising out of the norms that run parallel to it in favour of a single norm. After the Great War, with the huge rise in the part played by fashion, we find—at least in Czechoslovakia—that differences between urban and rural attire and the attire of the older and younger generations disappear. On the other hand, as time progresses this levelling is compensated for by the rapid changes in norms that fashion brings about. Examples are superfluous here—leafing through a few years’ worth of any fashion magazine will reveal plenty. Non-artistic aesthetic phenomena constitute fashion’s territory proper, though it can make incursions into art, in particular some of its fringe branches, such as the low-brow art of the salon or the mass-appeal art of the boulevard, where its main effect is how it influences consumption; consider here the popularity of pictures with particular subjects as a standard element in household furnishing (e.g. still-life paintings of flowers). What may also happen is that specific works begin to appear as the norm, as when, some years back, Gabriel von Max’s Christ on the Cross (the painting properly called Dokonáno jest!—Es ist vollbracht!—It is Finished!, 1882) hung in countless homes. See also H. G. Schauer’s study “Móda v literatuře” (Fashion in Literature, first published in the journal Moravské listy in 1890, reprinted in the collected works edition Spisy H. G. Schauera, Prague, 1917), where, discussing marital infidelity as a theme in poetry, he shows, quite interestingly, that literary fashion, as opposed to fashion proper, is typified by inertia, and that fashion as a factor in poetry may hinder direct contact between themes presented in literarature and drama, and the actual condition of society. […] For all that, it is undeniable that there is a relationship between the aesthetic and social hierarchies. Each stratum of society, but also many environments (e.g. rural–urban), have their own aesthetic canon as one of their most distinctive hallmarks. If, say, an individual from a lower stratum is passing into a higher one, he will generally try to acquire at least the outward signs of the stratum to which he aspires (changes in how he dresses, in his home, or in his behaviour in company etc., where aesthetics is concerned). However, since it is extremely difficult to change one’s true taste, it is actually one of the most hazardous—no matter how well concealed—criteria of one’s original social background. Whenever there is within a certain group a trend towards regrouping the social hierarchy, that tendency will also be reflected in some manner in the hierarchy of tastes. Thus, for example, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the sharp rise in socialist aspirations to wipe out class differences was accompanied systematically by the development of arts and crafts, the founding of folk theatres and schemes to foster art education. In Chapter 1 we discussed the close parallelism between developments in engineering and the revival of arts and crafts, but there was also a connection to the way social evolution was tending, and people were aware of it. The prime mover behind the promotion of a culture of aesthetics, John Ruskin, saw his efforts as a drive towards improving society (raising the level of public morality, etc.), while his successors William Morris and Walter Crane were by conviction socialists. At the Second Congress for Art Education, Stephan Waetzoldt read a paper where he said: “Socially and intellectually the nation is so fragmented and divided that today its various strata barely understand one another.”1 And he anticipated that art education would cement society back together. Others who promoted art education from positions other than the socialist were also of the view that art and a culture of aesthetics in general should act as a social cement: in his Rembrandt als Erzieher Julius Langbehn hopes by this device to turn the German peasantry, burgher class and nobility into “eine Adelspartei im höheren Sinne” [an aristocratic party in the higher sense]. Hand in hand with the aspiration to wipe out or at least weaken the hierarchisation of society, there was, then, an attempt to level taste too, and on the highest possible plane: the youngest, and thus highest, aesthetic norm was to become the norm for all.2 A continuation of what was happening in society, and with it in aesthetics, came at the start of the Russian Revolution, when the artistic avant-garde allied itself with the social avant-garde. However, later on in the social transformation of Russia the aspiration was to find an aesthetic equivalent to the classless society in the reduction of all taste to the median; symptoms of this include Socialist Realism in literature as a return to the barely reinvigorated stereotype of the Realist novel, an older canon already in serious decline, and the compromise with Classicism in architecture. Thus the relationship between how society is organised and aesthetic norms is not rigidly unequivocal, not even in the sense that a particular social trend, such as an attempt to even out differences of class, has to be matched, always and anywhere, by an identical reaction in the realm of aesthetics: first there is an attempt at levelling out the various canons on the highest plane, then at the general adoption of what is average, and finally there is a proposal to generalise the lowest level of aesthetic norm—where lowest means relatively the most archaic. The linkage between how society is organised and how the aesthetic norm evolves is, as we have seen, undeniable and our model of a parallelism existing between the two hierarchies is entirely defensible. It only founders if it is treated as an automatic necessity and not as the mere basis for evolutionary variants. As they age and stagnate, aesthetic norms generally sink down the ladder of social hierarchy as well, though this is a complex process. For none of the strata of a society is—because of divisions on the horizontal plane—an internally homogeneous environment, which explains why there is usually more than one aesthetic canon to be discerned within a single stratum. Even the domain of the ruling stratum in a society does not generally coincide with the domain of the most recent aesthetic norm—not even when a given norm has its wellspring in that stratum. Exponents of the youngest norm (whether as artists or as members of the public) may be of the young generation that is in opposition—often not just as regards aesthetics—to the older generation that actually rules and seeks to set patterns for the strata below it. In other instances the exponents of the avant-garde norm are individuals who have come into contact with the dominant stratum not by birth, but by upbringing, they themselves having come from the lower orders, as in the case of the Czech poet Karel Hynek Mácha (1810–36) and a few decades later Jan Neruda (1834–91) and Vítězslav Hálek (1835–74).3 In both cases—that of rebellious youth and that of members of an alien order—the dominant stratum initially evinces resistance to the new norm and only once that resistance has subsided can the new norm become the norm of the stratum that really is dominant. And in this same manner we could analyse all other strata with respect to how aesthetic canons are distributed. Numerous complications would arise on every front: it would seldom be possible to find an instance where the bond between a certain aesthetic canon and a particular social grouping was so tight that within that grouping it would have the status of exclusivity, or, conversely, that its range would not stretch beyond the bounds of that grouping. An example of where an aesthetic canon does spread out of its home environment into a different one is discussed in the paper by Roman Jakobson and Petr Bogatyrev “Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens” [Folklore as a particular form of creativity] (in the Festschrift Donum natalicium Schrijnen, 1929). In educated Russian circles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, belles lettres and folk literature, whose natural home was the countryside, existed side by side. Despite all these complications, however, the pattern whereby an aging aesthetic norm sinks downwards through the aesthetic and social hierarchies remains valid. However, despite this descent, the norm does not actually and irrevocably depreciate in value, given that it is usually not that a canon is just accepted passively by the lower order, but that it is actively reshaped in some way within the context of the aesthetic tradition of the given milieu and of the whole range of different kinds of norms valid within that milieu. There are also frequent instances where a canon that has sunk to the lowest limit is suddenly raised back into the focal point of aesthetic activity to become again—albeit in an altered form—the new young and up-to-the-minute norm. This progression is particularly commonplace in the art of our own day, as I have exemplified in “Dialektické rozpory v moderním umění” (Listy pro umění a kritiku, 1935). We might well then speak in terms of a merry-go-round of aesthetic norms. […] After aesthetic function and aesthetic norm it is now the turn of aesthetic value. At first glance it might seem that the issues surrounding aesthetic value have been dealt with exhaustively in the discussion of aesthetic function, the force that creates value, and aesthetic norm, the rule by which it is measured. However we have shown in the foregoing that: 1. The domain of the aesthetic function is broader than that of aesthetic value in the strict sense of the word, given that in cases where the aesthetic function is merely an adjunct to some other function, the question of aesthetic value is also only secondary in the appraisal of a given object or action. 2. Satisfying the norm is not a necessary condition of aesthetic value, most notably so where this value outweighs all others, namely in art. From this it follows that art is the true domain of aesthetic value, being the privileged domain of aesthetic phenomena. While outside of art value is subordinate to norm, within art the reverse applies: outside art satisfaction of the norm is synonymous with value, within art the norm is often violated, being met only part of the time, though in such an event meeting it is a means, not an end. If the norm is met, aesthetic pleasure ensues; however, besides pleasure aesthetic value may also entail strong elements of displeasure while remaining an undivided whole. See F. W. J. von Schelling, Schriften zur Philosopie der Kunst, Leipzig 1911, p. 7: “In dem wahren Kunstwerk gibt es keine einzelne Schönheit, nur das Ganze ist schön” (In the true work of art there is no one particular beauty; only the whole is beautiful). By the application of an aesthetic norm an individual case is subjected to a general rule and only one aspect of the case is affected: its aesthetic function, which need not be the dominant one. By contrast, an aesthetic evaluation judges a phenomenon in all its complexity, since all its non-aesthetic functions are only validated as components of the aesthetic value (see my article “Básnické dílo jako soubor hodnot. Jízdní řád literatury a poezie”, in the volume Studie z estetiky [Studies in Aesthetics, Prague, 1966, pp.140–43]). For this same reason aesthetic evaluation treats a work of art as a closed unit and is an act of individualisation: aesthetic value in art is unique and cannot be replicated. The issues surrounding aesthetic value must, therefore, be examined in their own right. The underlying question relates to the validity and range of aesthetic evaluation. Starting out from this question, the way is equally open to us in two directions: towards an examination of the variability of the specific act of evaluation and towards the quest for the noetic premises of the objective (i.e. independent of the perceiver) validity of an aesthetic judgement. Let us take first the variability of aesthetic evaluation at any given time. That immediately places us in the sociology of art. Above all, the work of art itself is far from being a constant: with each shift in time, space or social milieu the artistic tradition applicable at one time—the prism through which a work is perceived—changes, and the effect of these shifts is to alter also the aesthetic object that corresponds, in the mind of a given collectivity, to a material artefact—something created by an artist. So even if a certain work is evaluated equally positively in chronologically separate periods, the object of the evaluation is on each occasion a different aesthetic object, that is, in some sense, a different work. Naturally, such shifts in the aesthetic object are often accompanied by a change in its aesthetic evaluation as well. In the history of art we see all too often that the value of a particular work changes over time from positive to negative, or it might slip from a high, exceptional value to average and vice versa. There is often a pattern of a rapid rise followed by a fall and another rise, though not to the same level of aesthetic value (see my monograph Polákova Vznešenost Přírody [Polák’s Nobility of Nature], Sborník filologický (nákl. Čes. akademie), vol.X, no.1, Prague, 1934, p. 68). By contrast, some works survive at a high level with no dropping off: these are “eternal” values, as in the case, in poetry, of the verse of Homer at least since the Renaissance; in drama, the works of Shakespeare or Molière; in painting, the works of Raphael and Rubens. Although each age sees such works differently, of which there is tangible evidence in how conceptions of the way Shakespeare’s plays should be staged have evolved, they have always, or almost always, been ranked at the top of the scale of aesthetic values. However, it would be a mistake to infer from this that things do not change. For one thing, a closer inspection would, even in such cases, reveal often quite considerable fluctuations, and for another, there is no unequivocal conception even of what constitutes the highest aesthetic value: there is a difference between whether a work is felt to be a “living” value or an “historic” or “representative” or “academic” or “exclusive” or “popular” value etc. Right across all these nuances, the work of art, while gradually swapping one for another, or implementing several of them simultaneously, may persist as an “eternal” value, such persistence being not a state, but—just as with works whose position on the scale does change—a process. So aesthetic value is changeable at all levels; passivity is impossible. “Eternal” values merely change and interchange both more slowly and less appreciably than those lower down the scale. But even the very ideal of the changeless perpetuity of an aesthetic value, independent of exterior influences, has been neither the highest ideal in all ages and in all circumstances, nor the uniquely desirable one. For besides art made to last and to retain its validity for as long as possible, there are instances of art intended by their very creators to be short-lived, as “consumer” art. This includes “occasional” verse or the kind of cryptic verse intended for the poet’s most intimate circle of friends, topical works that depend for their subject matter on circumstances familiar only to a certain period or a certain restricted circle of recipients. In the visual arts, the anticipated duration of a particular artistic value is often evinced through the choice of material: for example, wax sculpture is evidently created with a different anticipated duration than works done in marble or bronze, and mosaic has an expectation of unlimited duration of both the work and its value unlike the case of, say, a water colour. So we have “consumer” art as the constant antithesis of “permanent” art, though there are actually times when an artist may favour the short, sharp impact of a work over a lasting appeal that rises gently over time. A telling example of this is the art of our own time. The kind of value sought after in their day by the Symbolists was meant to be as durable as possible, independent of changing taste and random audiences. His yearning for the “absolute” work was what brought Mallarmé down, and the Czech Otakar Březina (1868–1929) had occasion to express the conviction that it is possible to find “the supreme verse (i.e. metrical) form, so polished that no improvement on it would be at all possible” (see my Preface to Antonín Hartl’s edition of Karel Hlaváček’s Žalmy (Psalms; Prague, 1934, p.12). Compare this with what has been said by an artist of our time, André Breton (Point du Jour, Paris, p.200): Picasso is great in my eyes precisely because he has constantly remained on the defensive against these external things, including those he had drawn from himself, and has never taken them to be anything but moments of intercession between himself and the world. He has sought out the perishable and the ephemeral for themselves, going against the grain of everything that is usually the object of artistic delight and vanity. The twenty years that have washed over them have already yellowed those newspaper clippings, whose fresh ink contributed their fair share to the insolence of his magnificent collages from 1913. The light has faded, and humidity has stealthily lifted the corners of the great cutouts in blue and pink. And that’s the way it should be. The stupefying guitars made of low-grade wood, makeshift bridges cast daily over the song, have not held up against the singer’s headlong rush. But it’s as if Picasso had already counted on this impoverishment, this weakening, even this dismembering. As if in this unequal struggle waged nonetheless by human creations against the elements, where there is no doubt about the outcome, he had wanted in advance to leave his options open, to reconcile everything precious—because it is ultra-real—with the process of its atrophy.4 The propensity for aesthetic value to change is, then, no mere secondary phenomenon arising from an “imperfection” in artistic creativity or perception, that is, from man’s inability to attain to the ideal, but is part of the very essence of aesthetic value, which is a process, not a state, energeia, not ergon. So even without any change in time or space, aesthetic value is a polymorphous, complex activity, as is evinced by, for example, discrepancies in the views of critics on new works, fluctuating consumer demand in the art and book markets, and so forth. The times we live in are again a telling example of this, with its rapidly changing predilections when it comes to works of art; we see it in, for example, the book trade, with its unceremonious price-cutting on poetry, or the rapid rise and fall in values on the visual arts market. However, this is only a fast-motion version of a process that is played out in any age. The causes of this dynamics in value are, as Karel Teige has shown in his Jarmark umění (The Art Fair, Prague, 1936), social in origin: the looser relationship between the artist and the consumer (or client), and between art and society. Even in times past, however, the process of aesthetic value has always been quick to respond to the dynamics of social interrelations, since it is at once predetermined by that dynamics and it acts upon by a backlash effect. In any case it is society that creates the institutions and authoritative bodies through which it exerts its influence on aesthetic value by regulating how works of art are appraised. These institutions include the apparatus of criticism, the role of experts, art classes in schools (to which we can add colleges of art and institutions whose role it is to cultivate passive contemplation), the art market and its promotional machinery, surveys held to determine the most valuable work, art exhibitions, museums, public libraries, competitions, prizes, academies, and often even censorship. Each of these institutions has its own specific objectives, which may well be more than merely to influence the condition and development of aesthetic evaluation (for example, one task for museums is to assemble materials for research purposes), and one of these other objectives may often be their main one (for example, censorship’s is to regulate the non-aesthetic functions of a work in the interest of the state and the ruling social and moral order); and yet all exert some influence on aesthetic value and are exponents of particular social trends. Thus, for example, the critic’s role has often been interpreted as one of seeking out objective aesthetic values, at other times as expressing the critic’s personal response to the work under review, or again as popularising new art works that laymen find hard to comprehend, or yet again as propagandising on behalf of a particular artistic trend. All of these certainly enter into any critique, though with one or other always predominating. But above all, the critic is either a spokesman for, an opponent of or a renegade from a particular social formation (class, milieu, etc.). In a lecture on the history of Czech criticism delivered at the Prague Linguistic Circle (April 1936), Arne Novák demonstrated quite accurately that, for example, [Josef Krasoslav] Chmelenský’s (1800–39) negative appraisal of Karel Hynek Mácha’s Máj (1836) was not merely a sign of the critic’s random personal dislike for the work, but also, and, in the context of Chmelenský’s other critical activity and his ideas on the role of criticism, above all, a sign of the desire by the confined literary milieu of the time to stem the tide of unusual aesthetic values that might gnaw away at the taste and ideology of that milieu; it is striking that at that moment, or shortly thereafter, the reading public began to expand even in terms of its social background, as Arne Novák also showed in the same lecture. The process of aesthetic evaluation is, then, connected with how society itself evolves, and enquiry into that process makes for a chapter in the sociology of art. And let us reminds ourselves of the fact, mentioned in the previous chapter, that within a given society there is no one stratum in the art of poetry or painting, etc., but invariably several (e.g. avant-garde, official, or mass-appeal art or the art of the urban proletariat etc.), and, accordingly, more than one scale of aesthetic value. Each of these lives a life of its own, but they often cross one another’s path and cross-penetrate one another. A value that has become invalid in one may, whether by a rise or a fall, cross into another. Since this stratification corresponds, if not directly or quite accurately, to the stratification of society, the multi-layered nature of art contributes to the complex process of shaping and re-shaping aesthetic values. Finally, it should be added that aesthetic evaluation is both collective and binding and this is reflected in individual aesthetic judgements. The evidence is abundant: for example, as publishers’ questionnaires have revealed, readers most often decide to buy a book not on the basis of the views of professional critics, which strike them as too tinged by the taste of their authors, but on the basis of recommendations from friends, members of the same readership as themselves (see L[evin Ludwig] Schücking, Die Soziologie der literarischen Geschmacksbildung, Leipzig, Berlin, 1931; the authority of annual reader surveys is also well known; art collectors often go for a particular work on the sole grounds that its creator’s name has the cachet of a generally recognised value; hence the effort put by dealers into creating such name-values (Teige: Jarmark umění, p.28ff), and also the importance of experts, whose job it is to attribute works to authors and confirm their authenticity (Max J[acob] Friedländer, Der Kunstkenner, Berlin, 1920). It transpires, then, that aesthetic value is a process whose motion is determined on one hand by the immanent development of the very structure of art (think of the tradition applicable at a given time as the backdrop against which any work is evaluated) and on the other by the motion of and shifts in the structure of social coexistence. The placing of a work of art at a particular point on the scale of aesthetic value and its survival there, or its relocation to another point on the scale, or even its removal from the scale altogether, are dependent on other factors than just the attributes of the material object created by the artist, which alone is what endures as it passes from age to age, place to place or from one social environment to another. It would be wrong to refer here to relativity since for an evaluator rooted at a given point in time and space and wedged in a particular social environment this or that value of a given work is a necessary and constant quantity. Does this fully resolve—or actually eliminate—the question of the objectivity of aesthetic value as adherent to the work as material object? Has this question—to which answers have been sought across the centuries, whether through metaphysical enquiry, by appeal to the anthropological make-up of man, or by treating a work of art as a unique, and therefore once-for-all expression—been rid of all validity and urgency? There are—for all the acknowledged changeability of aesthetic value—certain indications that it has not lost its importance. How, for instance, do we explain the fact that among works of one and the same movement or even by the selfsame artist, that is, works arising out of the same state of the structure of all art and the same conditions of society, some come across with an urgency bordering on self-evidence as more valuable, others as less? It is also evident that between an enthusiastically positive and fiercely negative evaluation there is not nearly so great a gulf as between both these and indifference; and it is far from unheard-of for praise and damnation to occur simultaneously during the appraisal of a single work. Is there not here yet another hint that the focussing of attention—whether approving or disapproving—on a particular work may, at least in some instances, be underpinned by the work’s objectively higher aesthetic value? And how are we to comprehend—if not from an assumption of objective aesthetic value—the fact that a particular work of art may be acknowledged as a positive aesthetic value by even those critics who in other respects dismiss it out of hand, as was the case with the reception of Mácha’s Máj by Czech critics of the time? The history of art, however much its method seeks to reduce evaluation to values that are explainable in historical terms (as I suggest in Polákova Vznešenost přírody [v.s.], p.6), continues to run up against the problem of the value that attaches to a given work without regard to its historical aspects; we might go so far as to say that the existence of this problem is attested precisely by the constantly renewed attempts at curbing its influence on historical research. Finally, it should be recalled that every fight for a new aesthetic value in art, just as any counter-attack against it, is conducted under the assumption that that value is objective and permanent; only under such an assumption is it possible to account for the fact that “a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those that he has selected” (Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist). Thus the problem of the aesthetic value of a work of art that is independent of external influences can simply not be avoided. […] Viewed from this perspective, the autonomy of a work of art, and the supremacy of aesthetic value and function within it, comes to be seen not as necrotising any contact between the work and the natural and social reality, but as constantly revitalising it. Art is a vital agent of extreme importance even at those stages of its evolution and in those forms that stress the principle of art for art’s sake and the dominance of aesthetic value and function; indeed a stage of development when that principle is particularly emphasised may exert considerable influence on man’s attitude to reality (consider the case of Mácha’s Máj, analysed in my “Příspěvek k dnešní problematice básnického zjevu Máchova”, Listy pro umění a kritiku, IV). Now we can return finally to the question with which we began: whether it is in any way possible to demonstrate that an aesthetic value has an objective validity. We have already suggested that the immediate object of an aesthetic evaluation is not a “material” artefact, but the “aesthetic object” that is its reflection and correlate in the observer’s consciousness. Nevertheless any objective (i.e. independent and permanent) aesthetic value, insofar as it exists, has to be sought in the material artefact, which alone endures without change, while an aesthetic object is changeable, being defined not only by its organic structure and the properties of the material artefact, but also by the given stage of development of the non-material structure of art. The independent aesthetic value inherent to a material artistic artefact, assuming that there is one, is, in comparison to the actual value of an aesthetic object, merely potential: a material artistic artefact constructed in such and such a way has the ability—irrespective of the stage of development of the whole structure of art—to evoke in the minds of observers aesthetic objects with a positive hic et nunc aesthetic value. So any question as to the existence of an objective aesthetic value can only be framed in terms of whether such an organic structure of a material artistic artefact is possible. In what way is a material artefact involved in the rise of an aesthetic object? We have seen that its properties, or the meaning arising from how they are arranged (the work’s content), enter into the aesthetic object as vehicles of non-aesthetic values that in turn enter into complex interrelations, both positive and negative (congruities and incongruities), giving rise to a dynamic whole that is sustained as a unit by the congruities and at the same time set in motion by the incongruities. We may therefore infer that the independent value of an artistic artefact will be the greater, the more numerous the bundle of non-aesthetic values that the artefact can attract to itself and the more robustly it is able to dynamise the relationship between them—all that without regard to the transformations in their quality from one time to another. It is of course customary to take as the main measure of aesthetic value the impression of unity that the work evokes. However, unity must not be interpreted as something static—total harmony, but as something dynamic—a task that the work sets the observer. In this connection, let us recall Viktor Shklovsky’s pronouncement: “A living pathway, a pathway along which one’s foot can feel the stones, a pathway that keeps returning—that is the pathway of art.” (Teorie prózy [Czech trans. of Russian original], Prague, 1933, p.27.) If the task is too easy, that is, if the congruities outweigh the incongruities in a given instance, the work’s effect is diminished and it quickly fades from view, because it does not demand that the perceiver stay or come back later. This is why works with poor credentials for dynamism become automatised. But if, by contrast, the discovery of a work’s unity is too difficult for the perceiver, that is, the incongruities far exceed the congruities, the perceiver may be unable to grasp the work as an intentional construct. However, the huge impact of incongruities that create a welter of obstacles will never impair a work’s effectiveness to the same extent as an absence of them: a sense of disorientation, of being unable to uncover the unifying intention behind a work of art, is actually quite common at the first encounter with a conspicuously unusual piece of art. Finally there is a third possibility, where both sides, the congruities and the incongruities, contingent on how a material artistic artefact is structured, are strong, but in equilibrium; this would appear to be the optimum case and to satisfy the postulate of independent aesthetic value to the fullest extent. However, we should not forget that in addition to a work of art’s inner structure, and closely associated with it, there is also the relationship between the work as a corpus of values and the range of values that apply in practice for the collectivity that is receiving the work. Of course, for as long as it endures, a material artefact comes into contact with a variety of collectivities with many disparate value systems. What does this mean for the postulate of its independent aesthetic value? Clearly, here too, the role of incongruities is at least as important as that of congruities. A work calculated to comport freely with recognised life values is perceived as a fact that is not unaesthetic, but unartistic, simply appealing (kitsch). It is the tension between a work’s non-aesthetic values and a community’s system of values that alone enables the work to have an effect on the relationship between man and reality, an effect that is the most fundamental purpose of art. It can therefore be said that any independent aesthetic value of an artistic artefact is of a higher order and the more enduring in inverse proportion to the ease with which the work lends itself to literal interpretation in terms of the generally accepted system of values of a given age or milieu. To return to the internal structure of an artistic artefact: it is surely not difficult to agree on a view that says that works having powerful internal incongruities afford—precisely for their splintered nature and the ambiguities that follow from it—a much less suitable basis for the mechanical application of an entire system of practically applicable values than works lacking in internal incongruities or having them present only to a weak degree. So here again we see that it is a potential aesthetic plus for a material artefact to be internally polymorphous, diverse and polysemic. This then shows that an artistic artefact’s independent aesthetic value resides in all respects in the tension which it is the perceiver’s task to surmount; this, however, is something quite different from the harmoniousness that is often portrayed as the highest form of perfection and the highest perfection of form in art. It is of course impossible to derive from the principles at which we have arrived any kind of detailed rules. The congruities and incongruities among the non-aesthetic values discussed and how they are surmounted by a perceiver may—even with one and the same artistic artefact—be materialised in endless different ways arising out of the infinite diversity of a work’s encounters with developments in the structure of art and developments in society. We were already aware of this at the moment when we raised the question of an independently valid aesthetic value. Yet it was vital to attempt to answer it because only the hypothesis of independent aesthetic value, constantly sought anew and constantly materialised anew in countless permutations, gives some meaning to how art has evolved historically. Only such a hypothesis can explain the pathos of the constantly repeated attempts to create the perfect work, and the incessant way in which evolution returns to values created previously (thus, for example, the modern play has evolved under a constant barrage of effects arising from a handful of permanent values, such as the works of Shakespeare or Molière). Hence any theory of aesthetic values has to come to terms with the issue of independent value, even if the given theory is one that reckons with the irreducible changeability of any hic et nunc evaluation of works of art. The importance of the problem of independent aesthetic value shone out even more brightly as we attempted to resolve it, which brought us to the most fundamental task of art: to guide and constantly renew the relationship between man and reality as the object of human action. Notes 1 This and the following quotation (Langbehn) are taken from J. Richter, Die Entwicklung der Kunsterzieherischen Gedankens (Leipzig, 1909). 2 In this connection let us recall that in What is Art? Tolstoy likewise sought, with a view to social leveling, a unification of the aesthetic canon, but in such a manner that it would be the upper reaches of the aesthetic hierarchy that would be rejected. He promoted universalization of the canons of folk art. 3 On the ties between the poetry of Mácha and his social origins, see my (i.e. Mukařovský's), “Příspěvek k dnešní problematice básnického zjevu Máchova”, in Listy pro umění a kritiku IV. Also, in my essay on Neruda’s collection Hřbitovní kvítí (Flowers of the Graveyard, 1857) there are many passages that deal with the ways in which Neruda’s humble social origins are reflected in his poetry. The shock that greeted its appearance is well known. Interesting details about his subsequent gradual merger into the ruling stratum can be found in his correspondence with Karolína Světlá (1830–99), published by Anežka Čermáková-Sluková (Prague, 1921). Neruda rebuked Světlá, who came from a middle-class Prague family, for behaving towards him like some “hofdáma” (lady-in-waiting). Světlá described herself as his “guvernantka” (governess).