Joyful Complexity
a pithy explanation with reference to the Kantian beautiful
Daniel Coffeen

The beautiful is not frivolous. It is complex, surprising, educational, affirmative of itself and experience. It eludes simple reduction: while perhaps transient, it is not disposable. The beautiful slips away from the familiar, speaking a language which seduces the reader into unknown territory. It is uncanny: simultaneously familiar and strange. Unrecognizable because thoroughly itself, the beautiful is glorious, indifferent, self-assured. And discrete: it is bound, enjoying limits. Yet these limits are infinite.

A Calder mobile, for instance: it is never really finished. It shifts this way and that as the surrounding winds nudge and beckon, arranging it just so, and then just so again. These winds do not disrupt the integrity of the mobile. On the contrary, the mobile incorporates the winds into its own production: it is a little machine, endlessly productive of itself. And yet this "itself" is never finally complete; with each gesture, it forges new spaces and possibilities.

Calder's mobiles--or Borges' odd writings, the Beatles' colorful songs, Deleuze's exquisite philosophy, the Coen Brothers' wily filmic wit--are complex machines which are beyond good and evil. They are indifferent to principles, morality, to the familiar run of things. And it is precisely within this amorality that this complexity educates, seduces, and folrics, affording pleasure and pedagogy in its relentless forging of a happy, happy new: a joyful complexity.

©2001