Aesthetics, government, freedom

How are we to see now the relations between literature and freedom? This question is unavoidably posed by the theme of the conference – Literature and Liberation – that was organised to celebrate Graham Martin’s life and work. It is posed too by Martin’s own assessment of the close, almost intrinsic connection between the two in his endorsement of Arnold Kettle’s view that ‘Literature had its own special contribution to make to that process of liberation, and the critic’s job was to help literature have that effect’.1 My purpose here, however, is not to augment literature’s ‘freedom effects’ but to probe the historical and discursive conditions which make intelligible the relations between criticism, freedom and literature that Martin advocated. I shall, in doing so, broaden my focus beyond the sphere of the specifically literary to include the relations between aesthetics and freedom more generally. The perspective from which I broach these questions is that provided by post–Foucauldian debates on liberal government and• the role these accord freedom not as the vis–a–vis of government but as a mechanism that is central to its operations. This will involve a consideration of the respects in which the relations between literature, aesthetics, and freedom have operated as parts of a distinctive field of government rather than as an outside of government capable of furnishing the grounds for its transcendental critique in the name of liberation.