CTI Statement of Purpose - The Problem of Totalization in Art, Literature & Social Theory

While different forms of “organicism,” predicated on the model of a closed, totalizing category, have played a dominant role in the modernist tradition of the arts and social thought, more recent theory has moved in an opposite direction. It has sought to reveal subversive, anti-systematic elements—gaps and contradictions rather than continuities and resolution—in art and thought, in philosophical, aesthetic, historical, and social practices. From “deconstruction” in literature and art to the multiple “discourse practices” in the social domain, what has been called postmodern theory has viewed differentiation, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and dispersion as the fundamental constituent of texts, philosophical systems, and social entities. The “crisis” in humanistic studies today is symptomatic of the difficulty the disciplines face in maintaining an integral and unified conception of their object of study, whether it be the closure of the aesthetic or literary work, the homogeneity of the socio-historical space, or the cohesion of linguistic and philosophical systems. The problem of totalization, then, is as much literary as philosophical, as much historical as aesthetic.

In literature and the fine arts, the historical and social conditions for the production of works have most often been considered as extrinsic to questions of aesthetic value and classification. But in the light of the challenges to any totalized aesthetic system the very grounds for such a division between extrinsic and intrinsic needs to be reconsidered. What is at issue is not the familiar plaint over the “end of art,” but rather an interrogation into what has become of the social and psychic investment (in the sense of the Freudian cathexis) that was once associated with an integral conception of art. This conception is no longer operative, either in social practices or in theoretical pursuits. But in its disintegration it has moved art, and more generally the aesthetic in its many guises, toward altogether new filiations. One goal of our research, then, is to trace the challenge of postmodern theory to the tradition of art as totalizing project, a challenge that has brought to light a complex history and ingrained philosophical presuppositions.