Literary aesthetics' representation of political violence
- The intrinsic-extrinsic dialogue of the significant form -
- Part 1 -

Dr. P. Milan Khangamcha *

Introduction

This paper deals with some possible theoretical or conceptual frameworks of aesthetics which may underlie any literary and theatrical representations of political violence that may serve as a self-reflexive philosophical endeavour. The expression self-reflexive here means the inevitable mirroring of the endemically concrete politcal violence and its existentially troubling negative social consequences that have been engulfing the general lives of people and society in many art forms like literary and theatrical outputs of the North East India in general and Manipur in particular.

If one considers that, praxis has a fundamental priority over theoria as Heideggerian revisiting of Aristotle who had brought the Platonic heavenly Forms down to Earth is a plausible alternative to the traditional Western philosophical prioritisation of essential theoria over concrete praxis, then being reflexive in any academic exercise would be more pragmatically relevant. This goes hand in hand with the increasing rejection of excessive essentialisation of knowledge in any academic discipline in the traditional insistence on objectivity of truth.

Existentialism as a philosophical movement, continental philosophy especially Heidegger's ontological phenomenology, Gadamar's hermeneutics (the dialogic model of 'play' as alternative to subjectobject dichotomy based dialogue of traditional philosophy where theory is more important than practice) and the entire aesthetic representations in the works of art and literatures agree with this position of giving more emphasis on praxis wherein in the language of Michel Foucault reason becomes practical reason.

This is because, a contextless pure reason that claims to be universal in nature turns out to be a totalitarian, authoritative and overbearing thought essence that stares down at the concrete facts of human existence. This also explains as to why almost the entire well known existentialists take the aesthetic root in their attempts to communicate their forms of concrete truths in lieu of existence sterile cognitive based thought essences being thrown up by the unbridgeable subject-object bipolarism. Therefore, aesthetic representation of political violence may be investigated keeping in view of the aforesaid recontextualisation.

The view that symbolic aesthetic representation in all the works of art and literature has the character of significant form; and according to Susann K. Langer the symbolic character of aesthetic representation is non-discursive in contrast to the discursive orientation of propositions in conventional philosophy. She reiterated that, the symbolic character of the aesthetic representation as a non-discursive language is not deficient in its capability to convey truth when it is compared to the discursive language of propositions. That is, in another word, the truth which art conveys through its significant non-discursive form is not lesser in its value when it is juxtaposed to that of propositional and discursive counterparts.

The next question is what sort of truth of life, society and reality at large is being communicated by works of art and literature in its characteristic way of doing via their symbolic representations. How art and literature have a significant way of suggestively communicating concrete facets of human existence when it is compared with other methods? Say for instance, knowledge or representation of truth in the sciences and social sciences and disciplines of humanities unlike in the non-discursive and symbolic representations of aesthetic works are the results of the ratiocinative or cognitive level investigations of static and abstract concepts rooted in the causal and natural attitude of science.

This method is cognitive in nature while the creations of aesthetic objects are the concerted response of the artists' highly aesthetically impressionable mind, potential for high emotive sensibility and faculty of creative fertile imagination of the artists that are analytically distinguishable but inseparable components of his 'whole being'. That is, art is emotive in nature where as the propositionally evolved empirical knowledge is intellectual or rational where there is hardly any room for emotive subjectivity. As far as subjectivity is concerned it is highly debatable whether human experience including the so called scientific knowledge or truth can ever be had without having any sort of reference to the base human subjectivity.

The phenomenon of quantum consciousness as it is in 'observer-observed relation' according to which a quantum phenomenon is explained either as a wave or mass or energy depending upon the observer's mental framework has indicated this fact. This orientation prepares us with the ground of relating works of art and literature to other forms of human enterprises like sciences and other fields of knowledge. In this respect, one needs to consider that, in as much as, despite the deterministic approach of science and also due to the fact that, no theory or knowledge in any discipline can be any more claimed to be absolute, the traditional for and against debates between the upholders of empiricism and rationalism or realism and idealism may still be treated as open ended issues.

In another words, though, it seems to be bending towards idealistic standpoint, and to that extent, it may sound selfcontradictory, the claim that, there can be no human knowledge claim, especially in the realm of the hard sciences, that has no direct or indirect reference to the observer's or scientist's experience as his or her given framework of subjectivity has a serious bearing on the nature of reality or truth being conveyed by any emotively reconstructed aesthetic object or art work, despite its being fictional character, emotive medium and, representations in symbolic and non-discursive forms, is not devoid of truths or objectivity or universality in as much as scientific objectivity is also believed to be representing its form of truth.

In this context it would be worthwhile to refer to Kant's distinction between objective universality of the sciences and subjective universality of art. If the Kantian account of aesthetics is further interpreted as per Husserl's well known concept of intersubjectivity, Husserl as having developed his particular conception of a rigorous science, the intentional structure of his intersubjectivity as something discovered through his epoché as an a- priori or given psychoontological fact is common to both the sciences and art objects.

Husserl's attempt in his phenomenology to discover the underlying intentionality of all acts of consciousness or experience, which he describes in the Kantian terminology as an effort to reveal the fundamental truth about thingsin-themselves, has its explicit relevance to the holistic nature of art works on the contrary to the subject-object dichotomic nature of propositionally established objective universality of the nonaesthetic academic disciplines. Husserl, despite Heidegger's criticisms, with the reinterpretation of Avicennian form-in-mind intending towards form-in-object and Brentano's intentional inexistent by developing his more fully developed a priori structure of intentionality of all acts did in fact tried to bridge the Descartian subject-object dichotomy.

This is significant for the consideration of as to how the significant forms of the symbolically representational character of aesthetic object (aesthetic account of art works) as artists' response of their whole being equally has such an intentional structure. But, Husserl's intentionality need not be always the a priori structure of only veridical acts; it is also a common feature of even non-veridical acts, mythical acts, hallucination, dreams, judgments, fictional imaginations and what not. These examples were only selected as case studies only to show that, the structure of intentionality of acts of experiences is an invariable ontological feature of all acts of consciousness. It is in this sense, that, his phenomenology has been popularly being described as a presuppositionless method of not only philosophical enquiries, but also other enterprises of knowledge.

That is, it has epistemological significance as the a priori structure of a subject's selftranscendence from his subjectivity to the realm of objectivity of knowledge which in Descartian dualism of subject-object dichotomy, no such a provision of ontologico-epistemic structure was available. Our basic question is in what sense such a structure is relevant for the fictional character of aesthetic consciousness like religious and mythical consciousness if they are not to be treated as wild hallucinatory imaginations like non-veridical or erroneous experiences. This question is important for considering the theoretical justifiability of great values and worth generally are being ascribed to art and literary works despite the fact that, they deal with fictions or some sort of aestheticosymbolic representations of generalised indifferent, negative and positive emotive contents.

This will be discussed while dealing with the nature of art works as having the characters of subjective universality, significant form and nondiscursive language of art as aesthetico-symbolic representation. Within the selfcontained aesthetic-life world of fiction with its sense of completeness, it may be possible to discern the Husserlian intentionality as ontologically intending towards the Twardowski-Meinongnian pure objects as they may be applicable to aesthetico-fictional objects (Husserlian sense, Heidegger did not use the concept of object in his ontological phenomenology).

It is being considered here that, the understanding of these a priori structural issues as the application of Husserlian phenomenology to every aesthetic act of consciousness or pure aesthetic experience is one of the possible ways of looking at the way as to how art especially when it is treated to be of intrinsic value as-an-end-in- itself as a dynamic socio-cultural process is having an indirect or direct overflowing of its self-contained suggestive meanings to society. Just as it is the case in the concept of empty terms of logic, despite its being empty in the sense of being non-existent like a skyflower, nevertheless is still speakable and its meaning communicated to hearers or readers, the fictional characters or aesthetic objects as the well 'formed matter' through its form 'shows something other than itself, that in some way has an intellectual intent or meaning' [Heidegger, 2006: 168].

As stated above, it will be further analysed under a relevant section of this paper. As a preliminary statement, though fictional in character, art's aesthetic power of 'suspending disbelief', and thus having the potentiality of evoking the aesthetically endowed members of audience to experience similar but generalised positive or negative intra-art-work emotive states of characters may be helpful in understanding the main theme of this paper. Considering that, the aesthetico-linguistic structures of art works have textual autonomy; their semantic contents embedded in their symbolic significant forms get played in the inter-subjectivity of these texts and spectators. The said semantic play becomes the aforesaid subjective universal or rather it attains the status of some sort of aesthetico-emotive objectivity as a sharable aesthetic state of unalloyed creative joy.

The modernist belief or rather more or less that which is taken to be a settled idea that, 'truth is discoverable only through objective, reasoned inquiry' [Varner, assessed on 2016/02/13] is what is being infectively communicated as a wholesome aesthetic experience through the symbolic form of aesthetic representation. In the language of Kant aesthetic taste that is subjectively universal may be treated as aesthetic rendering of objective truth of sciences being alleged to be discoverable by only through reasoned enquiry. In the plausible contention of Susanne K. Langer, such an aestheticoemotively presented truth, being embodied in the non-discursive but, symbolic significant form of works of art is not having a lesser than that of scientific truth.

In the above context it may worthwhile to revisit what Tolstoy views about what art does. According to him, what art does is 'To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling this is the activity of art.' This coincides with his definition of what literary art as 'Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.'

The word 'infect' means that, the readers are infected by the writer. 'They feel a similar intensity of feelings and emotion as the writer originally felt.' That is what is generally known as art communication. According to Indian aesthetics, art communication is made possible only when a work of art attains the expected status of aesthetic generalisation (sadharanikrta). The only difference may be that, while the objective universality of the sciences is the product of the of piecemeal, plodding, groping, static, abstract and discursive intellect, that of subjective universality of art is a product of response of the whole being of great artists, and as such, unlike the former it is a significant form which has been defined as being symbolic representations and nondiscursive by Susan K. Langer.

The concept of taste as applicable to art works need not be construed as their being too solipsistic in nature like ordinary subjective experiences are subjective or emotive.

(To be continued) ...