The Return of Beauty: Driving a Wedge Between Objects and Qualities

摘要

Among architects and artists, it remains rare to hear unironic use of the word 'beauty'. Nearly anything else will do -whether it be capitalism or the trauma of the real - just not beauty, that apparently archaic or elitist term. Yet the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has been quick to note that beauty has more weight than ever in the natural sciences.1 For a century and more, scientists have appealed to the innate beauty of any theory as an argument in its favour, as when Einstein expresses joy at the elegance of his final equation for gravity. In the arts, however, it is often treated as naive to speak in aesthetic terms. This is certainly not the first piece of recent writing to come to the defence of beauty: one thinks of Dave Hickey's The Invisible Dragon (first published in 1993) or Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just (1999).2 What we can add to the picture here is a specific philosophical contribution from object-oriented ontology (OOO), the basic strategy of which is to draw a wedge between objects and their own qualities, thereby yielding an important form of cognition without knowledge, with knowledge defined as the effort to paraphrase anything in terms of the formal or functional properties that belong to it.3 One lucid example occurs in the case of metaphor: Homer's 'wine-dark sea' as navigated by Odysseus stipulates something more than a sea that happens to be the same colour as wine.4 Instead, this phrase points to a sea that is connected, but also out of joint with that colour, not to mention numerous other features of wine to which it merely alludes: danger, intoxication, oblivion.5 To defend beauty is not to champion some sort of quaint antique notion, but to mount a vigorous campaign for a loose relation between objects and their qualities.