I
Heidegger holds that poetry is the innate nature of Being itself, the manifestation of truth; art is the disclosure of Being's own self. That is to say, poetry and art both take the manifesting of Being as their aim and their nature. In Heidegger's view, although things exist, the human exists, and the world exists, they cannot directly encounter and face one another, because between the individual and the world there exists an intermediary composed of notions, concepts, habits, aims, and desires. By way of this intermediary the individual can, on one hand, commune more conveniently with the world; on the other hand, owing to the refraction and filtering of the intermediary, the real world is thereby concealed, and the clarity of Being thereby vanishes. Especially after notions and concepts have been artificially fastened, in static and congealed fashion, upon things, Being molts into a dead husk. And poetry and art are precisely what disclose the concealment for Being and restore the mirror of clarity. Heidegger once gave a very vivid example. Take a pair of peasant shoes: in the everyday situation they are merely worn by the peasant, not worth any special notice. But once one places them within a painting, they are no longer empty and dull; the viewer has a wholly new feeling of them and is moved to much imagination. From the dark, hollow opening of the worn shoes the laborer's hard tread seems also to come forth. Heidegger uses this to explain: although we face the peasant shoes, we do not in fact directly encounter them—I am separated from the peasant shoes by an invisible screen. The peasant shoes are no more than a useful thing one wears; no one goes out of his way to notice them, still less discovers their other characteristics that have nothing to do with use. But the peasant shoes in van Gogh's painting are otherwise: they “tell everything; in the intimacy of the work we suddenly find ourselves in another world, utterly different from our usual, habituated existence.” [1] Plainly, the peasant shoes taken into the artistic situation have had their concealment removed; they lay themselves bare to us, manifesting themselves without reserve.
How, then, does the magic by which poetry and art lay Being open and make truth manifest come about? Where, after all, does its secret lie? What brings about this change is aesthetic distancing. When the poet or the artist transposes a real object into his own work and reorganizes it “according to the laws of art,” the work has in fact already “distanced” itself from reality. It drifts free of the ceaseless stream of time, severs its complex and tangled relations with the surrounding world, and is created into another existence distinct from reality—a non-real existence. Poetry and art are precisely the non-real existence created through aesthetic distancing. Here an artistic paradox appears: aesthetic distancing distances and transposes the object away from reality's actual situation and reality's relations, yet the result is that the real object is laid open; aesthetic distancing creates a non-real fictional world, yet the result is that truth is made manifest.
Furthermore, behind this surface contradiction and paradox there hides a deep truth: so long as the human cannot leave the real world he inhabits, the habits formed in his real life make it hard for him to break free from a mutual dependence on the real linguistic situation, and he can only commune with the world while bearing everyday opinions, prejudices, and all manner of bonds. For him, the world is always concealed. Aesthetic distancing, by creating a non-real work-world, leads author and appreciator out of reality; when the author and the appreciator create or appreciate the work, they enter the non-real fictional world. In this world constructed according to the free laws of the aesthetic rather than the laws of reality, the notions and concepts founded upon the real background lose their efficacy as the background changes, and come to seem utterly meaningless; aims, too, grow faint with distance, and the human can at last suspend them—at last has it become possible to cast off habit, to cast off all manner of bonds, and to face the world in a wholly new and free way. This is aesthetic reduction. Poetry and art, through aesthetic distancing, first reduce the subject to a free aesthetic subject; once the subject has cast off its bonds and become a free subject, the screen between subject and world melts away, the separation is no longer there, the human once more directly faces the world, and existence is thereby laid open and made clear. Hence the disclosure of the world by poetry and art is chiefly not a matter of borrowing new methods of expression and new norms and forcibly teaching the human a whole set of new ways of facing the world; that would be merely to replace one frame with another, leaving the relation between human and world still confined within frames. Although poetry and art are inseparable from specific methods and norms, fundamentally they do not depend upon any finite method or norm; rather, through aesthetic distancing, they discard every frame, break through every limit, and let the human freely commune with the world—and truth is laid bare within this free communion. Aesthetic distancing is therefore precisely this: by virtualizing reality, it thereafter offers back to humankind reality's own authentic being, reality's poetry. This is also the very root of poetry's being poetry and of art's being art. Philosophy, emotion, and form are indeed what poetry and art pursue, but they are not the ultimate aim; the true aim can only be, through aesthetic distancing, to rebuild the infinitely free, authentic relation between human and world. Within this relation, human and world realize an infinitely free, infinitely rich aesthetic communion, and the world and the human himself likewise manifest infinitely rich and varied modes. Or one may say: this is precisely the poetic, and is beauty.
II
Aesthetic distancing is the ground of the existence of poetry and art. Poetry and art, through aesthetic distancing, open a mouth in the muted world and pour out the unsayable existence. At the same time, aesthetic distancing provides the human with another dimension of existence, provides an ideal mode of existence, and makes the human an aesthetic human, a free and self-governing human.
The human's mode of existence is fundamentally his mode of communion. As a social being, the human—so long as he has not halted his life-activity—is inevitably drawn into communion. It is precisely within communion that the self is formed, that individual life develops, and that, through the richness and changeability of communion, life comes to display its splendid colors. The human's mode of communion is the very embodiment of the human's mode of existence. But once the human enters real communion, he necessarily bears specific roles, and he cannot refuse the constraints of role-norms. He is a father or a son, a husband or a wife, a superior or a subordinate, a friend or a colleague, and so on; each of these names makes its demand upon him with its own particular role-expectation, and he has neither the power nor the possibility to throw off all the bonds that history and society forcibly lay upon him. Seen from this angle, no real social communion is free or full. Although the mode of communion may be incomparably rich, because the individual within communion is not fully autonomous, his life-development can hardly avoid being distorted, and may even fall, beyond escape, into the fate of becoming a “role-set,” a “worldly adept,” a “one-dimensional man”; the individual is distanced and drawn out from the very root of existence, and forfeits his authentic state.
Aesthetic distancing lets the human leave the real world and enter the illusory aesthetic world. In this realm, the creator or appreciator can be a certain role and yet, at the same time, need not be any role at all. Because he stands in an illusory relation with the fictional object, there exists for him no role-expectation whatever, and he need not be constrained by role-norms; he is always “himself,” always, with his own face, autonomously unfolding free communion with the various fictional aesthetic objects. Here the role-masks that forever pursued him in real life are stripped away; the human returns once more to existence and fully unfolds himself; the aesthetic object thereby also fully unfolds itself; and between human and aesthetic object a comprehensive and deep communion is realized.
Aesthetic distancing is the suspension of aim and desire. The human's being human lies in his capacity to engage in purposive activity. Purposive activity sets the human apart from the animal; it has greatly developed human practice and the human himself. The human may continually adjust his own aims, but he cannot be without aim. Only with a clear aim can activity have a determinate orientation and thereby become effective. Whether cognitive activity or practical activity, none can dispense with the guidance of aim. And this effective activity in turn elevates the human's capacity and transforms the human himself. But once activity becomes purposive activity, its direction and mode are limited by the aim. The directedness of the aim is precisely its finitude. It always sets limits upon the infinitely broad, infinitely rich activity of the human, and upon the tangled, crisscrossing relations of human-world communion. More importantly: the activity is directed toward the aim-object and pursues a result, while the activity itself is thereby slighted and forgotten. The human's desire is likewise so: it forces the human to abandon the richness of existence and to fasten and converge his whole life upon the satisfaction of desire, so that the meaning of existence is curtailed. Aesthetic distancing creates a world distinct from reality; within this virtualized, non-real illusory realm, the aim-object and the result, owing to their own illusoriness, no longer have any actual meaning, and become merely a fictional setting that displays the human's activity and the human's process of striving and struggle. Desire too, as its object turns from the real to the fictional, loses its force, so that it is diluted and dissolved. The suspension of aim and desire liberates the human, makes the human's activity unfold all the more freely, makes human-world communion all the more rich and colorful, and makes the human's existence all the more abundant.
Aesthetic distancing is at the same time the suspension of habitual notions. The human's notions are historically formed; they are rooted in historical tradition. Tradition, with its powerful historical force, casts the notions of every human, and these habitual notions, forged by social history, in turn become bonds upon the human's life-activity. Aesthetic distancing transposes the object out of reality, severs it from the ceaseless continuity of history and from reality's tangled relations, and makes the object a self-sufficient aesthetic object. The stripping away of the traditional cultural situation makes it at last possible for habitual notions to be dissolved, even suspended. In the habitual notion of Londoners, for instance, fog is gray—a thing that fundamentally needs no looking-at and no proving. Not until Monet painted it with purple tones were people's astonished eyes first opened. The habitual notion had concealed Londoners' eyes, made them unable to see, made them fundamentally unwilling to look at the color of the fog; but art disclosed this screen. Although people still did not believe it, and were even indignant at Monet on that account, in the end the thing that, in reality, was seen-yet-unseen had been seen in art. This is to say: through aesthetic distancing, habitual notions, having lost their real background, no longer so willfully blind the human's eyes, and the human begins to be able to face the object truthfully—so that the world lays itself open to the human. The habitual notion is a fetter of human existence; it binds his action, even smothers his vitality, makes the human a slave of tradition and an empty vessel of impoverished, pallid notions. Aesthetic distancing's dissolution of habitual notions, on the contrary, restores life's vigor and makes existence return to itself; the human's activity is no longer controlled by traditional notions, but obeys life itself and becomes self-governing activity.
In the fictional world created by aesthetic distancing, the reality-principle no longer holds an authority overriding all else, and indeed, owing to the virtualization of the real background, loses its validity and its necessity of existence. In this non-real realm the only thing that must be followed is the free principle of the aesthetic—that is, the principle of life. This transformation tends to dissolve the surveillance and repression that the unconscious psyche undergoes in everyday life; it forcefully breaks through the norms of concept and of conceptual thinking, fully bares the human's sensuous life, and the human thereupon lives, with a pure sensuousness, within the world that has been laid open.
In Zhuangzi's aesthetic thought, “the fasting of the mind” and “sitting in forgetfulness” are very important concepts. The individual, by way of “letting fall the limbs and members, dismissing the hearing and the sight, departing from form and casting off knowing” (“The Great and Venerable Teacher”), reaches the realm of “emptying and stilling the mind, having no self and forgetting the self.” To forget the self in fact means to be transformed together with things, to be roundly and seamlessly fused with the world—that is, to “roam.” The individual transcends desire and the activity of the mind, transcends the body and the senses; the dissolution of the individual at once dissolves the boundary between individual and world—“that which things the things has no boundary with things” (“Knowledge Roamed North”); thereupon the myriad things of heaven and earth are gathered up within one's own life, the myriad things are I and I am the myriad things—and this is the great harmony of I and things, the roaming in the great freedom of the myriad things. Aesthetic distancing is precisely an important path toward “the fasting of the mind” and “sitting in forgetfulness.” The individual, by way of distancing, dissolves notion, concept, aim, and desire, and enters the carefree realm of self-forgetting, enters the state of merging utterly with the myriad things of the world. The human-world aesthetic communion of which we spoke above is just this realm of free “roaming.” The individual roams free in the world, forgets feeling in the world, and the self disperses; and it is precisely this self-forgetting that returns the human, in turn, to the self's free and authentic nature and to a full existence.
The human is a complete being, and the human's world is a complete world. By “complete” is meant that the human must not only live in reality but at the same time needs to live in dream, to live in the illusory aesthetic realm. Only by possessing these two complementary worlds can the human become a complete human, a true human, and the world become a complete world. A dreamless human is but an unwholesome, withered human—one who has even lost the meaning of “human” and degenerated into something biological or even mechanical. Aesthetic distancing, for its part, offers another world back to the human and thereby nourishes human nature, pouring an abundant vital spirit into the human. Aesthetic distancing is both the boundary-marker that distinguishes the real world from the aesthetic world, and the bridge that joins the two, letting the human go back and forth between reality and the illusory. Seen from this angle, the aesthetic is no mere ornament added to humankind's brocade; it is an indispensable constituent part of human life. Art, too, will forever accompany humankind, and its life will never wither.
III
Aesthetic distancing is a phenomenon of bidirectional co-generation between the aesthetic subject and the object. When the subject distances itself from reality, the object too distances itself from reality at the same time; the two follow each other closely and are mutually conditioning. In the process of distancing, the subject, because the environment severs its direct connections, becomes a self-sufficient free subject, and the object likewise becomes a self-sufficient object; and in mutual generation the two fuse into one. The subject is immersed in the object, steeped in it, overflowing with passion and experiencing the richness of life, and continually constructs itself; the object, too, is enfolded within the subject, illumined by the subject's spirit, given expansive play by the subject's emotion, generated by the subject's imagination, and so appears richer and more dazzling. Aesthetic distancing is the premise of aesthetic construction: only through distancing do subject and object both become self-sufficient, autonomous, independent bodies, and only so can the two possibly realize a seamless fusion and mutually generate and construct one another; and only through distancing does the autonomous aesthetic subject cast off its several fetters and make aesthetic construction a freer and more brilliant creation.
In the domain of art, Brecht advanced the doctrine of the “distancing effect.” In his view, to draw the appreciator into a fictional world distinct from reality is a wrong road for art; for modern people, “he should no longer be lured out of the world of his existence into art and taken in; on the contrary, he should be led, bearing a sober consciousness, into the real world of his life.” [4] Therefore the author or artist must adopt all manner of defamiliarizing devices to prevent any emotional fusion between appreciator and work, to keep him from sinking into illusion, and to make him preserve at all times a sober reality-consciousness and a critical eye. Plainly, the “distancing” of which Brecht speaks is exactly the opposite of the “aesthetic distancing” of which we speak: aesthetic distancing is meant to create a fictional world distinct from reality and to transpose the aesthetic subject out of reality into the fictional world; Brecht's “distancing,” by contrast, is meant to distance the subject from the fictional world once more and bring him back to reality, requiring the subject to take his stand in reality and, with sober reason, to examine and judge the art-object, and further to criticize reality. These two claims, opposed on the surface, are in fact not contradictory. The reason Brecht advocates the “distancing effect” is precisely that he acknowledges one basic premise—the aesthetic-distancing function of art. Art is an alien world; it possesses the force to draw the appreciator into this alien world. It is precisely because of this that, in order to keep the appreciator from sinking into and being lost within it, the author or artist must adopt defamiliarizing devices to distance the appreciator from the work-world once again. Brecht's “distancing,” therefore, ought to be called “the distancing of distancing,” or “counter-distancing.”
Seen from the concrete process of creation and appreciation, Brecht's distancing effect is by no means an unvarying return to reality; it is only that it interrupts, from time to time, the subject's state of aesthetic immersion, letting the subject swing between reality and fiction so as thereby to realize a particular artistic aim. If the author's or artist's creation were always to maintain a sober, critical head and could never enter the experience of self-forgetting, his work would, for want of true feeling, become an inferior thing. The process of appreciation likewise cannot dispense with the experience of being on the scene. Otherwise, appreciation would no longer be appreciation, but would become the hearing of a lecture, the watching of news, the reading of commentary. It may be said that, in the domain of art, aesthetic distancing is the principal and the most fundamental distancing; apart from aesthetic distancing, art is no longer art. The other distancing devices of art only, under the premise of aesthetic distancing, regulate to a certain degree the psychic distance between the subject and the art-object. Brecht's inserting of documentary material into drama, for instance, or fiction's adoption of shifts in narrative person and of the narrator's stepping directly forth to comment, and the like—such distancing devices can only affect the mode of aesthetic communion between the aesthetic subject and the work; they cannot ultimately take the place of aesthetic distancing. (The various other distancing devices of art will be analyzed elsewhere.)
The devices by which the work of art realizes aesthetic distancing are various; broadly speaking, there are two kinds. The first is the use of external conditions—as when Duchamp brought a urinal (Fountain) into the exhibition hall, turning the practical environment into an aesthetic environment and thereby leading people to appreciate the object with an aesthetic eye, so realizing aesthetic distancing. So too the picture-frame of a painting, the theatrical stage, and the genre-markers (“novel,” “poem,” “prose poem,” and the like) inscribed upon a written work all play the distancing role of distinguishing the real world from the fictional world of art. Even a few utterly ordinary everyday notes, if set down line by line in the format of poetry, will produce aesthetic distancing. Or again, primitive rock paintings: against the background of primitive culture and primitive thinking they had no aesthetic but only a shamanic function; with the dissolution of primitive thinking and the change of cultural background, aesthetic distancing occurred, the shamanic import faded away, and the rock paintings became true art. The second kind is the conditions of the work itself. First among these are the formal factors of the work—such as the rhythm and melody of music, the prosody of poetry, the narrative mode of fiction, the two-dimensional treatment and the refinement and combination of light and color in painting, and the conventions of aria, spoken delivery, and stylized performance in traditional opera—all of which play an aesthetic-distancing role. Artistic form is not merely form; it is, first of all, the marker of art. Through formalization, the real phenomenon changes its original state, separates from reality, and becomes a virtualized art-phenomenon, indicating to people that they should regard the art-phenomenon with a non-real aesthetic attitude. At the same time, artistic form is also the marker of a specific art-category or genre, which further draws people to contemplate it in the aesthetic mode peculiar to that art-category or genre. Only under aesthetic contemplation does form become the form within that whole of life which is art, become living form, with the import of form laid utterly bare.
What plays an important role in aesthetic distancing is the emotional force the work of art possesses. It is precisely the emotional force the work possesses that wraps and draws the appreciator, carries him away from reality, and rolls him into the fictional world of the work. The intensity of the emotional force determines the depth of the appreciator's involvement. Here there exists an “aesthetic circle”: artistic form arouses the appreciator's aesthetic attitude; under the appreciator's aesthetic attention, the import contained in the work's form, and the emotion contained in its formalized content, lay themselves open to the appreciator; and the appreciator fully experiences the aesthetic emotion thus obtained and is drawn more deeply into the work-world—this is aesthetic intoxication. On the surface, aesthetic intoxication occurs in an instant; in fact it is a mutually generating, circular, ever-deepening diachronic process.
Although the devices of aesthetic distancing are various, their common fundamental point lies in distinguishing—that is, in seeking the boundary or marker that distinguishes the real world from the fictional world. Whether artistic form, defamiliarizing device, or genre-marker, stage, picture-frame, and so on, all play this distinguishing role. As with Duchamp's Fountain mentioned above, this same distinction exists, only that the distinguishing boundary has been moved to lie between the exhibition hall and its external environment. The viewer steps into the exhibition hall bearing an aesthetic expectation; that is, at the very moment of crossing into the hall, a preliminary aesthetic distancing has already occurred. Duchamp's inscribing of words upon the urinal (Fountain) further makes the viewer treat it as a work of art rather than a practical object, thereby strengthening the appreciator's aesthetic intention and realizing a second-degree distancing, so that the form and the lustrous beauty of the urinal (Fountain) can be fully displayed. In the creation of modern art, on one hand the artist continually breaks the boundary between art and non-art and lets the two interpenetrate; on the other hand, the distinction between the two still exists, and the distancing function still exists—only it may become more hidden and more complex.
Aesthetic distancing distinguishes the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic, distinguishes art from non-art, and at the same time distinguishes the human's aesthetic existence from his real existence, thereby reserving for the human a free heaven and earth. Here, all the human's sensations attain their fullest unfolding, and the most authentic attributes of the self attain a comprehensive realization.