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To be entirely free, and at the same time, entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment.
Oscar Wilde in his prison letter De Profundis (Letters 443)

Oscar Wilde's thinking about agency finds its most condensed form in the remark that I take here as an epigraph. Much like Wilde himself, the remark is at once hard to make much out of and hard also to discount. For here, human agency has a paradoxical form--thus a familiarly Wildean form--wherein "we realise" ourselves at once as absolutely free and as absolutely determined. I suggest that something instructive lurks in our widespread willingness to grant him the uneasy position on human positionality that he adumbrated. I maintain that his will to paradox has much to do with the historical irony that Wilde today is the most respectable of Victorian authors. His talents as a person and as an author, coupled with the tragedy of his fall at the hands of a now discredited system of legal and cultural judgment, make him seem wise and true when so much of his period could seem shallow and false. Today Wilde is seldom maligned, and seldom, too, do we see critics at pains to bracket off aspects of his thinking in order to make the best of what remains (as, for example, when people feel concerned to bracket off George Eliot's somewhat conservative attitudes toward women in politics to reclaim her superb intelligence in other matters). Wilde, perhaps uniquely among Victorian authors, figures a critical attitude that seems to us neither dated nor small. "Wilde," as Richard Ellmann notes in the opening segment of his biography, "is one of us."

Ellmann's celebratory remark, to the extent that it seems true, suggests that we find in Wilde a welcome image of ourselves. This is not because Wilde stood for what we now understand to be "the right views." It is because his irreducibility to any concretely identifiable scheme of value or viewpoint leaves him available to a broad range of identifications on our part. His ostentatious aloofness from Victorian marital pieties, in this light, is not simply covert boosterism for alternative domestic relations, nor simply a veiled invitation to others of his mind to join a cause. Instead, as aloofness, his attitude conjures for us a probationary freedom from social determinations of any sort. And therein, in our interest in a radical liberation from constraint, is what I take to be Wilde's principal force of authorial seduction. But as the epigraph here shows, Wilde was not simply holding out a lopsided ideal of radical free agency. He gave much credit to the facts of external influence and insists, in the hardly fathomable logic of the epigraph above, that our freedom and our determination are coexistent and alike absolute.

I suggest three related points: first, that a process of identification on our part with such a paradoxical construct is crucial to contemporary interest in Wilde; second, that such identification has everything to do with our sense of his power or, in the term I privilege here, his agency; and third, that asking about Wilde's agency as a literary creator is closely bound up with our own ideals of agency as critical thinkers. In short, Wilde's greatness and even his general interest as an author lie in his status as an appealing figure of generalized agency or force.
Beyond one more addition to the burgeoning commentary on Wilde, this argument might bring added light to a general crux concerning the critical force of literary or aesthetic practice broadly construed. I hope we can better understand what it means to maintain a chagrined or an optimistic sense of the power or agency at the disposal of literary practitioners. And, taking an inclusive stance that Wilde had much to do with establishing, I include both "creative" and "critical" practices under the rubric of literary practice. This paper is about us, and it argues that our interest in Wilde is also very much about us.

Three Key Terms: Agency, Identification and Interest
I am arguing that our interest in Wilde reflects a form of identification that we bring to a specific ideal of agency generated in the paradoxical character of his works. I think it will be good to specify some of the terms deployed in that claim.

When literary critics speak of agency, they usually mean only a specific aspect of it. For in a fundamental but seldom-invoked sense, anything that does anything--for example, a rock rolling down a hill to strike a tree--is active and therefore describable in terms of its agency. What is more, any living being has agency in the sense of responding to circumstances, as a flower turns to follow the sun, for instance, or a cat chooses to leap onto a countertop. But my account of agency, like most in literary-critical study, concerns action understood to proceed from individual reflection on larger purposes and goals. In this sense, agency is a purposive force, initiated through deliberation and sustainable only by a rational being.

But it is well to note that agency is not only a question of individual conduct. Indeed, discussions of agency generally turn on its role in a larger conception of social practice, and the debate is marked by divergent attitudes toward the credence we should grant to agency in this rational reflective aspect.

The most sanguine accounts propose (or presuppose) that individual action emanates from unproblematic calculations of self-interest. This was a signal assumption of Utilitarianism, with its calculus of pleasures and pains, and it remains a principle for rational-choice analysis in game theory and free-market economics. Some more skeptical thinkers, taking a nearly opposite approach, emphasize the determining force of social norms, so that any sense of personal agency--moral or otherwise--reflects a characteristically modern illusion of interiority, merely the internalization of outlying social structures and material relations. Ideology theorists from Karl Marx to Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu make such points and provoke accusations of determinism from people with more voluntaristic assumptions; pragmatists such as Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty can also be credited with such a view, in so far as they insist that one cannot stand apart from one's own practical commitments and habits to judge them. A third view defines agency through a concept of autonomy, whereby individuals are free to deliberate and choose but only while respecting other rational agents similarly capable. Kant and neo-Kantians make such a case, and they affirm, ultimately, a normative conception of human rationality that many post-Enlightenment theorists have deemed naive or even hegemonic.

Although I cannot adjudicate these views here, nor even pretend that they are exhaustive, I can make plain that I privilege the Kantian view above the others named here. And given the dispositions prevalent in literary study of the last several decades, it would seem that my principal opposition lies in the second of the three views sketched above--the skeptical line of thought handed down from Marx to Bourdieu--as that thinking has many advocates in literary-critical study today. The question for anyone of my view to answer is, then, how one can come to take the idea of agency seriously rather than discount it as an ideological illusion? In particular, how can one cast aesthetic practice, of all things, as a style of agency, given that modern aesthetic practitioners programmatically resist the "reduction" of their efforts to claims, messages, or other forms of assertion?

With interest, in turn, I mean to indicate a force of attraction that we can feel toward something, but I don't mean with the term attraction to indicate something necessarily pleasurable. Where there is interest, in my sense of the term, there is something that compels attention, that insists on regard, and that does so by virtue of a claim registered on our own mental organization. That which interests us speaks to us, and, in knowing our language, it looks like us. An extreme form of my speculation might suggest that, in fact, there can be no interest where there is no identification. But I do not propose to develop that extreme form of the idea here.

With identification, I have in mind the moment of seeing in something outside oneself an image of oneself as an agent. We commonly link identification and interest when we suppose that people will fail to be enjoy a literary work unless they can identify with the characters there represented; likewise, we link identification and agency when we suppose that persons who see others "like" them in certain careers----say, openly gay politicians, or women as military pilots--are consequently empowered to pursue such careers or other careers deemed uncommon or forbidden for the given type of person. The familiar processes of identification gain special interest for my argument in so far as our own sense of agency tends to be a complex construction, divided between a sense of ourselves as radically free and a sense of ourselves as determined by the material routines and cultural protocols that surround us. Where such complexity is part of our self-image, we will tend to identify not with straightforward or simple images of volition or mechanism--to see ourselves either as free radicals or cogs in the machinery, that is--but. instead, we will find our identifications in ambiguous, ambivalent or outright paradoxical images. It is here that Wilde's remark about being "entirely free, and at the same time, entirely dominated by law" becomes interesting, not merely as a declaration with some bearing on the topic of agency, but as a paradoxical account of agency. For this account can seem poised, by virtue of its paradoxical form, to resonate with our own divided sense of the sources of agency. If Wilde's remark seems to ring true--even if also to ring strange--the effect of truth indicates our propensity to see ourselves in a sort of maelstrom of paradoxically related lines of thinking about agency.

Reading Wilde
One might first think of Wildean agency as a matter of social subversion, especially in sexual politics. Wilde is deemed a "sexual dissident," in Jonathan Dollimore's phrase, a guerrilla tactician who baffles heterosexualist conservatism by fashioning "new discursive strategies to express concerns unvoiced within the dominant culture" (Cohen 806). Finding much to sympathize with in such characterizations, I think there is still a need to show how the most compelling dramas of agency in Wilde's writings emerge in the formal character of his works, and that our privileged placement of sexual "content" in reading him bears critical examination. I particularly balk at that sense whereby Wilde's subversiveness is supposed to consist in his effort to encode illicit subtexts into his works to say something forbidden. I cannot be sidetracked here into an engagement with that prevalent view, except to insist that encoding and decoding are alike forms of simple literalism that cannot get us to the substance of Wilde's aesthetic provocations.

Let me try to specify a distinction between literalist reading and a more sheerly formal reading that foregrounds the limiations of the literalist approach. It is one thing to regard Wilde's Dorian Gray as a figure, to literalize him, as it were, and to meditate on how exemption from the effects of time and preternatural beauty might well open certain forbidden doors to anyone like him in the real world. Identifying with Dorian Gray himself would mean, it seems, identifying with a welcome or unwelcome idea of a position from which to act. But most canny readers of Wilde's novel allow that the deeper provocations of that text--its real interest for most of us--concern the triangulated relation of three different figures--Dorian Gray, the insouciant and witty spectator Lord Henry Wotton, and the earnest painter Basil Hallward. Together these figures constitute a sort of exploded view of a single, complex and rather commonplace constitution, defined by the fusion of contending schemes of value and viewpoint. Indeed, the whole point of Dorian Gray as an individual seems to be that his consciousness depends on his contact with two other forces: the image provided by the earmest painter Hallward and the verbal seductions of the ironical Wotton. To see in all these characters a refraction of Wilde's view of character as such is to focus on the work's formal arrangement, and it is, too, to come close to a sense of Wilde's own thinking, implicit in the narrative's form. And to find one's interest not in a specific identification but in a sense of that larger constellation of figures is to posit an alignment of one's own consciousness with the authorial effort on Wilde's part, an effort also marked as a construction of, and meditation on, this triangular relation of characters. In this style of reading, the reading itself is a species of identification--not, however, with a character but with Wilde's account of character.

For a more concretely located instance of this kind of formal reading, let us consider one of the passing amusements in Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. I should say in advance, for those unfamiliar with Wilde's play, that the two characters represented here, Cecily and Gwendolyn, are laboring under a misconception: the absent figure that they call Mr. Ernest Worthing is not one person but two, Jack and Algy, traveling under that one name. Cecily and Gwendolyn will discover soon enough that this Mr. Worthing is not one man at all, but precisely because the two young women do not know just now that their debate is a farce, they proceed directly into an altercation that turns on problems of agency that will inhabit any interpretation of what sort of figure this Mr. Worthing might actually be:

Cecily: [Rather shyly and confidingly.] Dearest Gwendolyn, there is no reason why I should make any secret of it to you. Our little county newspaper is sure to chronicle the fact next week. Mr. Ernest Worthing and I are to be married.
Gwendolyn: [Quite politely.] My darling Cecily, I think there must be some slight error. Mr. Ernest Worthing is engaged to me. The announcement, in spite of my mother's opposition to the match, will appear in the "Morning Post" on Saturday at the latest.
Cecily: [Very politely.] I am afraid you must be under some misconception. Ernest proposed to me exactly ten minutes ago. I had just made note of the fact in my diary, when you were kind enough to call. [Shows diary.]
Gwendolyn: [Examines diary through her lorgnette carefully.] It is very strange, for he asked me to be his wife yesterday afternoon at 5:30. If you would care to verify the incident, pray do so. [Produces diary of her own.] I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. I am so sorry, dear Cecily, if it is any disappointment to you, but I fear I have a prior claim.
Cecily: It would distress me more than I can tell you, dear Gwendolyn, if it caused you any mental or physical anguish, but I feel bound to point out that since Ernest proposed to you he has clearly changed his mind.

Rather than consider the prospect that a confusion is afoot, the two young women instead debate the priority of their claims on Mr. Worthing. In that debate, two figures of Mr. Ernest Worthing are invoked: the one, a figure bound to his initial promise to Gwendolyn; the other, a figure who "has clearly changed his mind." In these competing portraits of Mr. Worthing's bachelor agency, we have two different tales of subjection. The Mr. Worthing that Cecily and Gwendolyn here briefly envision is a creature uncertainly positioned in respect to his monumentalizing promises, on the one hand, and to the ongoing activity of a mind that might "change," on the other.

Insisting on the high stakes of such a distinction is Nietzsche's project in On the Genealogy of Morals. For Nietzsche, the promise is a key moment in that kind of self-enslavement that defines sovereignty. The second essay in Nietzsche's work begins with the question of what it means to breed a man in a position to make promises--a vow to marry and be faithful to another person, for example. Nietzsche's answer is that breeding a man in a position to make promises means breeding a man who is, in effect, not in a position to change his mind, or not, at least, in any position to do so without running afoul of the societal prohibition against doing so. Societal prohibitions have their outward expressions, of course--epitomized in ostracism, excommunication, impeachment--but much contemporary theory turns on a supposition that such prohibition is experienced more crucially in an inward respect, through a conscience that subsists as the internalization of an outlying social norm. Actually, Freud argues this case in Civilization and its Discontents when he describes conscience as the internalization of parental authority, and Judith Butler has more recently voiced these views in The Psychic Life of Power. But the substance of the issue is at hand already in Nietzsche, and we can proceed from there. With the promise, according to Nietzsche, we make free to subject ourselves to a logic extending beyond the present moment; with the promise, our "will" becomes an inflexible and enduring master rather than the ongoing and changing emanation of a presubjected, undomesticated agency. In order for promise-making to take shape as an activity, says Nietzsche, "Man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!" (58; emphasis original).

Wilde's most compelling efforts all reinstate versions of the subject in subjection. With striking frequency, in fact, he does so through the figure of promising. His play Salome is an especially concerted instance. The story is drawn from a biblical episode in which the ruler Herod strikes a bargain with his step-daughter, the princess Salome: if Salome will dance for him, Herod will give her anything she asks, up to half his kingdom. She dances, and then she requests the head of John the Baptist as her prize. Herod grants her request, and such is the Salome legend in its traditional form. Wilde's additions to this traditional narrative clarify his concern to portray Herod's fulfillment of his promise as a moment certifying the ruler's subjection to sociality. Wilde's Herod pleads with Salome to alter her request. She refuses repeatedly, and Herod must finally follow through. Herod notes: "I am a slave to my word, and my word is the word of a king." Wilde goes on to provide a picture of Herod recognizing himself anew-- looking in a mirror, in fact, and realizing himself as a figure in a predicament of power. And Wilde's most singular addition to this massively popular theme at the time--a final moment, where Salome is killed by Herod's order--is a brilliantly condensed image of subjected sovereignty. For here we see not simply that Herod is baffled by an array of determinations and constraints, but Wilde's formal arrangements intimate the ruler's realization of this circumstance--Herod's realization, indeed, that he is caught in a web that stretches beyond his sight for its footings. As Herod resolves to leave this scene at the play's end, he remarks, "I begin to be afraid." He attempts to ascend a staircase to exit, but he turns about, sees Salome taking her pleasures with the head of Iokanaan, and delivers his fatal order that she be killed. The play ends not with Herod exiting this scene but rather frozen midway on the stairs. Again, in a formal specification within the literary work--the ruler Herod fixed midway on the very stairway which he has announced a concern to use as a means of egress--Wilde manages to conjure a richly complex image of a figure's subjection. Herod's power and his defeat are of a piece, and he cannot simply walk away from this scene.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, I might note briefly, is still another story of self-realization and the aftermath to a promise: Dorian recognizes himself in a painting and vows to trade his soul at that moment, provided only that he may remain ageless like the artwork, leaving the portrait to age in his stead. His moment of self-recognition and promising is at once his birth into a sort of empowered self-consciousness and a sort of enslavement to an logic that defines his life from that point onward.

In these two literary cases--that is, in Herod and in Dorian Gray--the "paradox" is that the characters are born into states of sovereign self-awareness even as their states come to exert orders of power and obligation on them that "subject" them fundamentally and wreak on their lives dismaying and tragic finales. In these literary conflations of sovereignty and subjection, Wilde intimates the paradoxical vision of subjective agency that he would condense several years later into the prison declaration that is this paper's epigraph.

But even allowing that such readings of Wilde's literary texts are on target, it remains to be said whether any kind of "critique" that way lies. Can we construe Wilde's literary practice as a scene of critical agency? Indeed, do not his literary images of agency themselves seem to emphasize the constraints and pressures that inform his characters and reign in their freedoms and choices? How can we construe Wilde's practice as a service to any progressive conception of subjectivity?
As I noted earlier, we are now on the point of asking a very general question about what literary practice might be said to do, if anything. In particular, we are landed on the difficult question of literature's status as a tool for or against ideology.

Aesthetic Agency
Questions about aesthetics and agency have been richly pursued by writers in and around the Frankfurt School--for example, Benjamin and Adorno--who sought explicitly the theorize the redemptive or emancipatory potential of aesthetic practices. But the Critical-Theory appropriations of the aesthetic, despite their diverse approaches, deploy an assumption that actually throws us back to Kant. The assumption is that aesthetic experience in some way mediates between scientific knowledge and practical morality--or between fact and value--and, in so doing, disturbs the pretension of either of those spheres to define human life entirely. Indeed, a minor resurgence of aesthetic theory in literary study today proceeds from a renewed sense that the very intractability of aesthetic experience to domains of fact and morality might let it function as a kind of insurance policy for our well being as agents. Things aesthetic, that is, suggest release from an ossification and rigidity that regimes of fact and value seem prey to.

My point about Wilde is that he mirrors this positioning of the aesthetic. In my account, that is, Wilde's appeal as a figure of agency lies in the sense that he inhabits a domain of individual assertion where both factual refutation and rational value formations are unsuited to the judgments he invites. If one asks whether Wilde is right or wrong, either factually or morally, it quickly comes to seem that one has somehow missed his game. But what does it mean for Wilde to occupy such a stance, and in what does the appeal to us of such a stance consist? If Wilde is somehow about elusiveness, then what is it about elusiveness that appeals?

I suggest that Wildean elusiveness appeals to us because we find our sense of ideal agency formally echoed in the paradoxical positionality that we see in him. To test this view, however, we need to ask about what is at stake in a paradoxical positionality. I noted earlier that the principal opposition to my assumptions about agency emerges in a skeptical line of theory from Marx, Althusser, Foucault and Bourdieu. Here I'll consider the most recent of those figures, Bourdieu, in the light of my concerns with Wilde.

Not that Bourdieu has anything to say about Wilde. The Bourdieu work most clearly relevent to my concern with aeathetic agency is The Rules of Art (1992), where he examines France's artistic culture from the middle of the nineteenth century into the twentieth-century avant-gardist movement. He shows how the literary (or artistic) field came during this time to acquire a kind of autonomy in the broader field of cultural production. (In Bourdieu's usage, autonomy is not equivalent to any radical "freedom," but instead names a state of affairs whereby the literary field has acquired a kind internal logic of valuation that allows it to sustain itself in the face of alternative, competing schemes of valuation on display in other fields of cultural production, such as the technological or the bureaucratic fields.) Of special interest for my purposes is Bourdieu's concern to specify and to keep distinct two styles of social critique, a literary critique and a scientific critique. The literary critique is epitomized in Flaubert and his novel Sentimental Education; the scientific critique is epitomized in Bourdieu's own practice of reflexive sociology.

Bourdieu generally upholds the superiority of sociological critique, arguing that only such a critical practice can achieve a consummate "objectification" of its materials and methods. But Bourdieu clearly finds in Flaubert, as well, a seductive critique-monger, with a rich panoply of French social tensions embedded in his works and an exact eye for how those tensions play themselves out, often implicitly rather than in explicit conflict. Bourdieu styles Flaubert as a figure who can, in his literary art, "uncover the most deeply buried structure--the most obscure because it is most directly linked to his primary investments--which is at the foundation of his mental structures and his literary strategies" (25). Bourdieu calls this "an enterprise of objectification of the self, of autoanalysis, of socioanalysis" (25). Flaubert's autoanalysis--which is at the same time, notice, a socioanalysis--expresses a specifically aesthetic or literary species of critique.

Remarking on the "special lucidity" (47) of the social portraiture in Flaubert's novel, Bourdieu notes that a "literary work can sometimes say more, even about the social realm, than many writings with scientific pretensions" (32). "But it says it only in a mode such that it does not truly say it" (32; my emphasis). The literary text says without saying truly, because, for Bourdieu, the literary work can "only unveil by veiling" (32). The figure of the veil here is related to Bourdieu's concept of the illusio that underwrites aesthetic practice. The illusio designates a "belief in a game." I gloss Bourdieu's meaning in this way: belief is a name for the enabling psychic energy of the participants in aesthetic (or other) practice, and game is a figure of speech that Bourdieu chooses in order to insist on the constructedness and the artificiality of the practice.

All this sounds a good deal like high praise of Flaubert's aesthetic agency. But Bourdieu also tries to contrast the aesthetic style of critique at hand in Flaubert with his own scientific, sociological objectification, presenting his practice as an immediate critique with a straightforward declarative content that is lacking or even incompatible with literary critique. Bourdieu's style of critique aims to say and say truly all at once. "Science," says Bourdieu in his work's closing lines, "tries to speak of things as they are, without euphemisms, and asks to be taken seriously, even when it analyses the foundations of this quite singular form of the illusio which is the scientific illusio (336).

A tension, or a prospect, that Bourdieu refuses to put front and center is this: how, in the end, is scientific sociological critique so "singular," so distinct from literary-aesthetic critique? Bourdieu must insist that two distinct styles of critical agency are at issue in these two styles of critique, but he also allows (in what is literally the final word of his argument, in my English edition at least) that the scientific field must also operate through its own illusio, its own belief in its own game. So Bourdieu's sociological critique works in a mirror relation to Flaubert's aesthetic critique: Bourdieu diagnoses in literary critique a self-conscious discourse of the literary illusio--a "saying without saying truly"--and the closing note of Bourdieu's study diagnoses sociological critique as a self-conscious practice with its own illusio. John Guillory has put the resulting crux neatly: "what is at stake in The Rules of Art is really the difference between Bourdieu and Flaubert, or between sociology and art" (390).

In my paper's terms, what's at stake is the difference between aesthetic agency and social-theoretical agency. And it is hard for an answer to this question to take any simple form. To allow that Bourdieu's social science tells us about things "as they are" while insisting that literature proceeds through ellipsis, suggestion, and illusion is merely to return to the idea of formalism that Bourdieu precisely does not wish to attribute to Flaubert, because Bourdieu sees in Flaubert's art not a literature of pure self-reflexiveness but a literature that assimilates and addresses outlying social matters. But to allow that Flaubert's self-conscious literary critique after all does afford some purchase on social critique is to leave unclear what makes Bourdieu's sociological critique so "singular," given that Bourdieu admits in conclusion that his scientific sociology has no privileged access to direct truth-telling but must, in fact, operate within the rules of science. Rules of art and rules of science alike express specific illusios.

My view, however, is not exactly that Bourdieu has failed to make sense finally, nor that he has a coherence problem that we can identify and then use as cause to dismiss him. Instead, I think we are confronted here with a constitutive paradox, an impasse endemic in attempts to account for the nature of critical positionality. In Wilde's prison declaration-"To be entirely free, and at the same time, entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment"--we see such paradoxical positionality insisted on with an unusual baldness.

Can one take such a "position" seriously? Wilde's remark seems to violate some rule of propositional logic--the "law of noncontradiction," perhaps? But I think the remark yields a sort of truth as well--namely, that the individual subject in its sense of free agency is itself only to be understood in terms of a network of determinations that, in the end, have entire purchase on the rules of the game, a game that Wilde here identifies as a game of human life. But there is another crucial concern to keep in mind here: any capacity to comment on such determination holds out the prospect that we relate intelligently to that determination rather than merely play it out. Who is Wilde, after all, that he should "know" such a thing? Who, more generally, is the figure within ideology, who should understand the form and the import of ideology as (a la Althusser) an interpellation, a fundamental organization of the subject as a subject?

Wilde's comment seems to imply a prospect of critical positionality that the declarative logic of the phrase at once affirms and denies. And that tangled circumstance is all that people of a utilitarian mindset need to know to discount Wilde's thinking. If one wishes to say that the agency of a given practice proceeds from the facts there established or the values there installed, Wilde must seem to have failed to render any conclusive effect. His utterance, like his literary efforts generally, does not give us facts to cherish or rules to follow with untroubled consciences. But as I noted in opening this section of the paper, I am out to align Wildean procedure with something other than the regulation proper to factual or moral rule.

At this point, it will be well to clarify that my image of Wildean agency differs from another that brings an affirmative sense to his procedural elusiveness, namely, the idea of a postmodern agency that works by outstripping Enlightenment concerns for logical truth and utilitarian or other values. My disquiet with that diagnosis of Wilde lies in my sense that merely performing contradiction cannot in itself be especially interesting to the extent that one is interested in outcomes. There is no redemptive ideal of agency at work in the mere unsettling of dominant categories of thought unless one also can suppose that mere unsettling will serve a purpose that one supports. (Therein lies for some people, notably Jürgen Habermas, the key problem respecting Foucault's critical ethos: Foucault's apparent concern to reject Enlightenment humanism as a hegemonic ideal seems at odds with his rhetoric, which turns frequently on appeals to freedom, resistance and personal autonomy that are, ironically, Enlightenment legacies.) The challenge in finding aesthetic agency to be a sort of agency worth having an opinion about lies in assessing its place in our more general concerns with action. As I noted earlier, agency is an issue not only of action but of action understood to proceed from reflection on goals and purposes.

The question then takes this shape: can aesthetic practice, understood as something apart from fact and value, be understood as agency in the sense of serving purposes or ends worth having an opinion about?

To pursue this question, I will try to gloss the general division of fact and value, for seeing those terms clearly can expose what is at stake in current recuperations of the aesthetic. Facts, to the extent that they are independent of human aspiration and viewpoint, are objective and unaffected by the vicissitudes of feeling or critical inquiry; and values, to the extent that they proceed from a moral rationalism whereby maxims decide right and wrong and define proper conduct in advance, are prey to the rigidity of a rule or a categorical imperative. Facts are indifferent, and general rules of conduct routinely run counter to individual desires and passions, and to regard either factual thought or moral reason as the final arbiter of value is to impoverish and enslave human experience in its richness and incalculability. (This sober diagnosis was powerfully tendered by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment.)

Aesthetic experience has been thought to hold out another possibility, in so far as it is understood to lie outside the regulative domains of fact and value. In thinkers as various as Schiller, Mill, Nietzsche, Adorno, and (latterly) Charles Altieri, Anthony Cascardi and Martha Nussbaum, aesthetic experience emerges as a staging ground of the cosmopolitan subject's capacity to balance particular and universal concerns. But it is in Kant that we find the most notable exponent of a categorical ethics and also the most potent theorist of aesthetics in relation to knowledge and ethics. I want to conclude by pointing out some recent reclamation of Kant's place in this terrain, tending generally to a more affirmative sense of his usefulness in thinking about the agency of the aesthetic.

The usual critique of Kant insists that his conclusions are dubious on account of his naïve complicity with an Enlightenment ideal of human agency. Thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud laid crucial groundwork for our prevalent critique of that ideal. They condemned the notion, widely identified with Kant's posture on ethics, that we will flourish by trying to stand outside ourselves, regarding ourselves from a distance and placing others on an equal par with ourselves in terms of rights and pleasures. For most critics today, Kant's view seems dubious, I so far as its transhistoricism elides the role of social context in subject formation and its transcendentalism discounts the fundamental place of desire in human life. The effect of Kant's argumentation, such critics say, can only be to perpetuate existing, unequal power structures by taking a specifically bourgeois western viewpoint of positional alienation as the ne plus ultra of human being.

In two works especially--Charles Altieri's Subjective Agency and Anthony Cascardi's Consequences of Enlightenment--we have powerful arguments that this prevalent reading of Kant is not only incomplete but mistaken. The common reading, they argue, focuses only on Kant's practical (ethical) argumentation--with nods to the Critique of Pure Reason and its statements about the transcendental subject--and it forgets the role of Kant's Critique of Judgment, an account of aesthetic experience that Kant himself presented as a necessary and indeed culminating step in his entire critical philosophy. For Altieri, a view to Kantian aesthetics "offers a richer foundation for ethical thinking than does the version of rational powers [Kant] attributes to agents in his moral philosophy" (18). And according to Cascardi, "it may indeed be possible to locate a critical value in a [aesthetic] form of judgment that takes its bearings by the affects and whose procedures are fundamentally reflective" (55).

I cannot sound all the notes of this complicated topic here. Nor can I effectively gloss the dense arguments of Altieri and Cascardi in this space, except to indicate--for those already somewhat familiar with Kant's aesthetics--their two principal points of leverage. First, Kant's claim that aesthetic judgment is a kind of mixed procedure, at once subjective and universalizing, is shown to map onto a larger progressive political interest. Subjective universality, that is, combines personal and universalizing aspects and thereby conjures the ideal of agency that liberal theorists have struggled to conceptualize. For any union of individualism and collectivism that preserves the integrity of each term is an image of a utopian ideal of agency whereby values both of community and individuality are preserved and regarded as crucial. Second, the term disinterest--often maligned by critics of Kant as the key indicator of his naïve or duplicitous denial of passion and power as first principles--comes in for rereading. Cascardi reminds us that the crucial issue in disinterest is the idea that aesthetic judgment proceeds with reference not to a beautiful object and its properties but instead with reference to our processes of reflective judgment as such. For Cascardi, emphatically, Kant's third Critique is not a theory about a domain of aesthetic objects at all but a diagnosis of human intellectual activity as having something left over after facts and values have had their specification. That something-left-over is the mediating aesthetic function. We have here to do not so with much a zone that one at times inhabits--as if one might be in an aesthetic state of mind as opposed to a scientific state of mind. The issue, rather, is how the aesthetic names the fact of our perpetual shuttling between spheres of fact and value, and makes plain that some unaccountable, difficult thing remains outside those domains.

We do well to recall at this point that Kant's gesture is seldom to tell us what something is. Instead, he enjoins reflection on how our processes of thinking already entail conclusions about us. We commonly allow that literary works can solicit critical reflection on social realities. We also commonly allow that modern literature refuses to align itself plainly with values of assertion, argument and evidence that motivate direct forms of critique such as social theory or philosophy. That refusal constitutes the distinctive stance of literary authors--indeed, of artists in general--who avow an interest in social issues even while they disavow any reduction of their work to a declaration, claim or message. In this light, to resist the reduction of literary labor to a "message" is to conceive of literary practice as an alternative form of critique, an aesthetic agency irreducible to description and axiom but nonetheless "critical."

And exactly there, where one at once asserts and disavows assertion, invites thought and defuses thought's aspiration to conclusion, lies a species of agency that Wilde, more thoroughly than any other author of his time, embodied. If we see him that way and see in him, for that reason, a being like us, perhaps it is because of his self-location between determinism and freedom. Perhaps only there can we find the echo of ourselves as ideal agents, performing some unaccountable "aesthetic agency" at once firmly located between poles of freedom and determinism and also definitively beyond those terms.

Selected Secondary References and Works Quoted

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. 1970. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedermann. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 88. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: NLB, 1971.
Altieri, Charles. Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
Cascardi, A. J. Consequences of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Cohen, Ed. "Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation." PMLA 102.5 (1987): 801-13.
Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Random House, 1988.
Fish, Stanley. "Critical Self-Consciousness, or, Can We Know What We're Doing?" Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989. 436-67.
Guillory, John. "Bourdieu's Refusal." MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 58.4 (December 1997): 367-98.
Habermas, Jürgen. Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT, 1987
Marx, Karl. "Introduction." Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin, 1993.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingwood. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. New York: Beacon 1995)
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Wilde, Oscar. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962.

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