The Call of Beauty: An Affective Invitation

Abstract

The general attention to affect proposed in Chapter 4 is narrowed in this chapter to a more specific focus on the notion of beauty. The aim here is to raise the concept as one worthy of serious consideration in any performance work that aims to contribute to social justice. The call of beauty makes the case that, rather than being a distraction from radical politics, beauty can be positioned as central. The claim is that asking participants to create something they understand to be beautiful engages them in a quest that has powerful and potentially positive results. Beauty is, of course, a term with a complex and contested genealogy and, while the intricacy of that history will be touched upon, the focus is how certain theories of beauty can be developed to make a case for it as a force for good.¹ The aim is to acknowledge the place of beauty in broader discussions of aesthetics, but also to argue that it is not a mere analogy for them.² The chapter hopes to enhance a number of related arguments from Part I and is, therefore, connected to the playfulness of the term perruque, the focus on multiple cultural forms as an alternative to the singularity of storytelling, and the performance of the difficult return, the ‘burst of beauty’, suggested in Chapter 3. The call of beauty starts by outlining how the term has returned to critical attention, seeking a definition that corresponds to the argument for affect rather than defining it in terms of what are described below as either formalist or cognitivist schools of aesthetic theory (see Graham, 2000, p. 45).

When we come upon beautiful things […] they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space.

(Scarry, 1999, p. 112)

On the one hand, something does not need to have a purpose in order to be beautiful. But on the other hand, whatever we find beautiful looks as if it has a purpose.

(Gumbrecht, 2006, p. 44)

For me it was the beauty of the experience that mattered most.

(Winston, 2006a, p. 293. Italics in original)