Arendt, Kant, and the Soft-Clubbing Crisis

When searching for local classical shows, I came across a section in a Mozart concert’s description entitled “Your Brain on Art.” The section references studies that argue listening to Mozart enhances “spatial reasoning,” “cognitive performance,” and “brain wave activity associated with relaxation and mental clarity.” The framing of music as a vehicle for self-betterment, a technology for improvement, speaks to the growing instrumentalization of aesthetics. Art no longer seizes us; rather, we seize it.

Nothing better exemplifies this instrumentalization than the rise of “soft-clubbing.” Soft-clubbing moves away from late-night rave scenes, drinking culture, etc., to create a new party scene predicated on “wellness.” Late-night drinking interferes with physical health and work cultures, and alternative events, such as “coffee clubbing,” “morning dance parties,” and “thermal gatherings,” can fulfill the desire for social connections without the exhausting consequences

The instrumentalization of aesthetics does not seem new. Art has been a performative indicator of social capital, with aesthetic knowledge being used to increase one’s standing. In addition, artistic events, including Mozart’s own performances, serve as a means for social gatherings. What renders our period distinct is the emphasis on self-improvement. Aesthetics becomes a potential barrier to our relentless obsession with, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe it, logistics. Everything must be in line with a new hyper efficiency that we conduct our lives around.

Self-improvement’s relentless logic presents a significant political challenge. Hannah Arendt identifies the instrumentalization of reason as a key political problem. Totalitarian logics have equated politics with a means to some ultimate end, engulfing human freedom in the process. For Arendt, politics being an end in itself is the condition of possibility of freedom.

Arendt looks to Kant’s aesthetic philosophy to refute the political as a means to an end. Kant connects a philosophy of history to politics, a connection evident in his fellow Germans, Hegel and Marx. However, by stressing Kant’s aesthetic Critique of Judgment, Arendt argues that Kant fundamentally diverges from the latter two thinkers. In their reflections on the French Revolution, both Hegel and Marx emplot the event within a teleological world history that culminates in an end, subsuming it. The political’s value for both thinkers is in its site within progress, not in itself. For Kant, however, the importance of the beautiful is its ability to denote an end-in-itself belonging to the object itself. The beautiful object’s particularity resists any attempt at subsumption and forces us to judge it independently of a singular, encompassing meaning. The concept of taste maintains a particularity in the work of art, yet it also enables different people, through their particular experiences, to communicate with one another about it. The world historical significance of the French Revolution would not be, as it was for Hegel, its position within a univocal Progress, but in the contingent discourse it engendered for the spectators, and the ability for said spectators to come together and communicate on it.

Kant’s spectators engage in reflective judgments rather than determinant ones. Determinant (i.e., his theoretical philosophy) is when the particular object, ‘this table’, falls under a universal concept, a table. The particularity, that makes this table this table, gets lost in the universal. Reflective judgments instead engender categories through their particularity. When we deploy the word “Trumpism,” we argue that what makes him “him” necessitates creating new categories. It is in this latter, reflective definition of judging that humans can exercise freedom, since it is in their capacity to create that exemplifies their indeterminability.

These reflections on Arendt and Kant all presuppose a certain ability for art itself to disrupt our manner of seeing the world. Listening to Mozart’s Requiem, far from a relaxing experience, enters us into a violent drama of competing notes, brass shrills, and powerful voices all asserting themselves on the listener. The spectator becomes lost when faced with the grandeur of the event, emptied of their interpretive arsenal. Yet they are not alone; after the event, the listener finds their colleagues, and they communicate, piece together language, that is concepts, emerging from the piece. The language attempts but can never fully capture the experience of the work, but it is in this finitude, one that the Requiem best reminds us, that contains the ground of our plurality and freedom.

Raving relies on this aesthetic indwelling. Typically, with substances adding to the disorientation, the rave takes place in a warehouse cobbled together in a random location. Immediately, the blaring thudding lulls one into a trance. Space, time, and the categories, what Schopenhauer refers to as the principium individuatis, collapse. Spatially, the individual becomes the mass, escaping from the rigid bounds of a singular body. Temporally, the capitalist logic of the clock, determining one’s perception of time for the extraction of surplus labor, becomes metronomically displaced for the rhythm of the music. The rave puts forward, beyond capitalist monotony, alternative visions of space and time that we could inhabit. It is through this disruptive potential that people collectively can create new concepts and exercise their freedom.

The rise of wellness culture is directly antithetical to such freedom. Productivity parasitically attacks and attaches to each facet of one’s life, establishing rigid limits of what is possible. Art’s importance is its reminder that, in Arendt’s worlds, human plurality creates the world. The process of aesthetic experiences and reflecting on those experiences with other people is essential for us to recognise that the world we currently inhabit is but one out of many.

Image: Flickr/Christian Kadluba

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