Style

I mentioned Virginia Postrel’s book “The Substance of Style” some time ago, having read a review in The Atlantic. I’ve now had a chance to look at the book, and it is a bracing, forcefully contrarian book in defense of the “aesthetic moment” that we are in in popular culture. But I was unhappy with one of the moves she makes, which seems to make things all too easy for her. She contests the notion that “surface is meaningless” brilliantly, but then weakens her case by separating the realm of aesthetics firmly from the realm of ethics. Surface is not meaningless, it is part of what constitutes personal identity, but it is not a moral category itself. But this is precisely the modernist move that the “aesthetic moment” (at least at its best) would seem to be challenging. We don’t really want ?Edo we? ?Eto say that aesthetics is an autonomous realm. But saying that it is morally charged brings up a whole series of problems in its wake. I’d rather live with the problems, however, than fall back into the dualisms of modernity. I’m more attracted to something like Milbank’s deconstruction of the ethics/aesthetics distinction, and his advocacy of a kind of “art of living” (a theme also being developed by my NSA colleague Doug Jones).