Richard Shusterman's _Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art_.

In a chapter on organic unity--both in terms of its romanticist inception and its new critical appropriations-- Shusterman uses the frame analogy to illustrate poststructuralism's deconstruction of organic unity aesthetics. He describes it brilliantly like this: a work of art is that which is framed. The organic unity concept of aesthetics--that a work of art has essential constitutive qualities--posits that what's inside the frame is what's essential to the work, thus the work possess organic unity. However, deconstructionists such as Derrida and De Mann note that what's outside of the frame makes possible what's inside of the frame. Put another way, literary criticism consists of hermeneutically distinguishing between the essential and the inessential. But this is fundamentally flawed because it presupposes two things: one, that a work has an inside and an outside, and two, that there is an essential constitutive meaning and a margin of meaning--things in the text that one shouldn't pay much attention to. Deconstruction, then, collapses the (false) distinction between inside-outside, inessential-essential by dehierarchicalizing that which has been prioritized.

I'm sure for many of you this is just a review of postructuralist critiques on aesthetics. This is where it gets interesting. Shusterman argues that deconstructionism has a blind spot. Its blind spot is that in its attempt to deconstruct and dereify organicist aesthetic unity, which Shusterman claims to originate from Hegelian idealism, they have in fact only relied on a kind of Hegelian structure of logic.

Here is what Shusterman says: "The essential sameness of difference [Derrida's 'difference'] and the radical concept of organic unity should now appear obvious, especially if we take the notion of whole as representing the (perhaps not fully totalizable) system of structure of linguistic differences" (71-72). In other words, poststructuralism, though critiquing Hegelian totalities, operates on an understanding of mutually constitutive difference based on a kind of radicalized totalization.

The critique against new criticisms still stands intact. New Critical approaches separate inside from outside and deem elements of textuality marginal according to privileged biases--that which didn't support the normative values of literary and academic establishments before the linguistic turn. However, what doesn't remain fully intact in Shusterman's critique of postructuralism is the idea that organicist unity is always already exclusionary. If thought of as a totalizing system it can still be one that is constituted by inescapable difference because in order to to posses unity it must contain difference. 

Shusterman then argues that pragmatism forms an intervention into this debate in the following way. Pragmatism posits that there are valuable uses to seeing a text in terms of organic unity, and, in fact, that which posits itself as a heterogeneous reading is most often, under exegetical inspection, the opposite. In addition, to claim a delineative division between a unified reading of a text and a marginal reading of a text assumes that these fundamental differences can occur on a fully coherent basis (my thought). I wonder: do deconstructionist methods become unitary lens from which to pin down a text? Derrida's aesthetics certainly resist that.

I bring all this up because I find Shusterman's complication of organic unity extremely compelling and totally fresh, even though this book was written over a decade ago.