quickly, yes, the divergence is a Marxist one: “to each his or her desires and abilities,” where in the aesthetic sphere, in the utopian thought experiment of “all needs being met,” the question is whether art has use value, that is, whether Kantian Beauty would turn out to be the aesthetic, and as such, the “useless use” of art. But in this material and ideological situation, needs and desires become confused, and what one sees as ornamental, or what one sees as a desire, that of the re-up of the aesthetic experience, might actually be a particular need, perhaps an essentialist one–like food, or clothing. Or perhaps (yet another Marx inflected value): an instrumental value, where art’s autonomy is its heteronomy, its scale of difference from the everyday. Which is to acknowledge Kantian claims on the judgment while giving pretty much the whole Critique an anterior subjunctive translation–what will have been, or what if as seen thru the future’s eye…

–D

“…[T]he aesthetic experience is intense precisely to the extent that it is devoid of interest. “All interest,” Kant says, whether empircal or rational, “either presupposes a need or gives rise to one”; only aesthetic judgement is detached from need….It’s only when I don’t need something that my liking for it, my being affected by it, can be “disinterested and free” (Kant 1987, 52). The disinterested contemplation of beauty is a utopian conception, in that it requires and presupposes a world in which human needs have already been fulfilled.”

“Aesthetic disinterest may seem cold and detached, but it isn’t neutral. From the indifference of the object to the disinterest of the subject – or from the former’s superfluous self-exhibition to the latter’s ungrounded reception – the experience of beauty is one of distance of separation.”
- Steve Shaviro, Without Criteria, pg 5.

So aesthetics is interest free? I guess that doesn’t put need and want outside of it, but it does exclude the cognition of needs and wants I think – or that they can’t be presupposed seriously (or formally).

One way that Toscano (and perhaps the project that you’re building up through this course) diverges from history of aesthetic thinking that’s seeping out of the book I just finished is that Toscoano/Aesthetic pedagogy is that the disinterest is there without the (beautiful) separation (from one’s needs/wants) so that you can have your subjectivity and aesthetically experience a cake too.

Why would an aesthetics of pedagogy presume or entail no needs or wants? One can imagine a directed aesthetics; Toscano’s aesthetics, if also a pedagogy (not that he would put it this way, particularly) involves participants in CPT who approach with particular desires, if not also needs–? Here I’m supposing by “needs or wants” you mean of the very particular sort, those which look for x or y in the pedagogy-aesthetics yet to take place, not “needs and wants” generally…

D

-w