The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics (original) (raw)
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Postmodernist Aesthetic Theoretical Framework
Theoretical Framework Traditionally, from a Western perspective, aesthetics is conceived as a philosophical branch discussing sensory values (White, 2009). Framed in this way, influential theorists such as Kant and Hegel have discursively impacted contemporary understandings and the use of aesthetics in ways that subjected its existence and structured it with political, religious, and classist ideologies. While some of the work of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School managed to expose and discuss these issues, it is my hope to continue the conversation and (re)present aesthetics. Theoretically my position is one of a speculative postmodern, profoundly influenced by the decentered, rhizomatic conceptualizations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/2010) of time, space, and information. A postmodernist theoretical framework epistemologically allows for and understands the plural, and occasionally incommensurable, new sources of knowledge and is inclusive of various modalities of understanding (Pinar et al., 2008). The inclusive design allows for critical examinations of multifaceted contextual issues that could not possibly be qualified against each other elsewhere (Pinar et al., 2008). Moreover, the postmodernist conflation of high and low art and culture discredits the concepts of hierarchy and taste in aesthetics (Pinar et al., 2008). This framework outlines aesthetics in several specific critical moments to better understand present conceptions and uses of this theory with the hopes of contributing to the understanding of the impact of antiaesthetics and advancing the current conversation on aesthetic education. History of Aesthetics Noted philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, and Hume have shaped axiological concerns of aesthetics, which has in turn shaped how the modern understanding of aesthetics has been subjugated by the natural sciences and designated as a lesser branch of philosophical understanding (White, 2009). While Kant and Hegel's work is important to understanding the theoretical lineage of aesthetics, the Greek root aisthetikos meaning " of sense of perception " offers an understanding of aesthetics untainted by the structural interpretation offered by their work (White, 2009). The aesthetic, understood in this archaic way, aligns more closely with a reality or discourse of corporeality in which the senses mediate the meaning-making process and there is a focus maintained on the cognitive aspect (White, 2009). Although, even in Plato's work there is evidence of his beliefs on the untrustworthiness of the senses regarding the truth making process of aesthetics, these earlier aesthetic concepts do not inject the ideas of sublimity, taste, or beauty as integral to an aesthetic experience (White, 2009). Cartesian influences shifted the aesthetic from the rational notions of the Enlightenment toward idealisms elucidated by the work of Hume (White, 2009). Aesthetic concerns began to grapple with the notions of taste and established structures of aesthetic taste, which relied on human judgments based in feeling, essentially creating a counter narrative to empiricism (White, 2009). Hume's work was a critical turn in aesthetic theory as concerns became fully impregnated with certain types of systems or principles structuring the understanding of aesthetics (White, 2009). As discussed by White (2009), Baumgarten's work further indoctrinated these structuring systems by inscribing the notion of judgment in the concept of aesthetics. Baumgarten, similar to the work of his predecessors, narrowly used the term aesthetics for describing and categorizing notions of judgment while his contemporary Kant
'The Elusive "Beyond" of Aesthetic and Anti-Aesthetic'
Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic Eds. James Elkins & Harper Montgomery, 2013
In his introduction to this volume, James Elkins acknowledges an earlier, rather modest effort byJames Meyer and myself to create a forum where the polarized categories of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic might be refigured.' !(/hile I'm pleased that some of the issues we raised are substantially deepened and expanded in the transcribed seminars, I'm less delighted by Elkinst account of our framing of the debate. He asserts that we privileged the anti-aesthetic side of the equation, assigning political significance only to art practices designated as such.' Yet neither the content of our preface nor the theoretically variegated essays we commissioned for Art Journal support this reading. Back in 2oo4 we concluded the following: "Rather than call for a return to classical aesthetic theory unchanged or an anti-aesthetic suppression ofaesthetics, we have sought a structural understanding of these discourses as historically intertwined and a possible cross-pollination of the terms of the debate."r \fith these remarks, we invited a reframing of the aesthetic and antiaesthetic as historically consubstantial, but not necessarily reconciled. \7'e also hint that such a possibility was unlikely to issue from the revivalism of beauty that emerged in the U.S. art scene in the r99os. This largely classically derived "return to beauty'' not only privileged artistic and societal harmonization, but also simply inverted the polarity between aesthetics and politics established in anti-aesthetic frameworks.
Botond Csuka: "Aesthetics and Its Histories", in On What It is: Perspectives on Metaphilosophy, ed. Megyer Gyöngyösi, Zsolt Kapelner, Zsófia Ádám, István Faragó-Szabó, Budapest: Eötvös József Collegium, 2016, 173–202.
The paper examines what kind of historiography enables the histories of aesthetics to contribute to contemporary philosophical aesthetics. Since the historical terrain and subject of these histories evidently depend upon how one defines what " aesthetics " is, I briefly delineate two plausible definitions of the term with two corresponding historical conceptions. According to its exclusive sense, aesthetics is the study of the theoretical domain determined by the concept of the aesthetic, which confines the histories of aesthetics to Western modernity. According to the broader, pluralistic inclusive sense of the term, it is a permanent task of historical research to find the adequate meaning of aesthetics when facing historical materials, thus the concept of the aesthetic and the historical terrain of Western modernity lose their central positions. The paper argues that both the exclusive and the inclusive histories of aesthetics can provide contemporary theories with new orientations, fields of concern, approaches and concepts, and that they can also oppose the policing tendencies, but only if they grasp the alterity and the specificity of the various aesthetic discourses, letting the past challenge our own understanding of the concept of the aesthetic or the field of aesthetics instead of appropriating it. Rejecting both the appropriationist and the strict contextualist view, I argue for a third approach that ensures the exchange between past and contemporary aesthetics by accepting our own historicity, reflecting on our initial interests, concepts and assumptions, and by refining or overwriting them if it becomes necessary.
Aesthetic Space: The Visible and the Invisible in Urban Agency
EPFL Thesis, 2017
Recent turns in social sciences, namely the visual, qualitative, actorial or spatial turns, all indicate a rising interest in individuals. Since the aesthetic dimension always nourishes and informs individuals' spatialities and their decision-making processes, my research explores how the subjective realm of the aesthetic has proved itself able to generate conditions that lead to action, and consequently influence other dimensions of society, especially in the ethical, political or legal realms. My systemic approach is grounded in the relational theory of space, the phenomenological study of the imagination, and the theory of urbanity. Hence, I investigated both urbanity and beauty as some of the most intriguing and interesting emergent (and not resultant!) phenomena of the urban system; where urbanity belongs to its objective realm and beauty to its subjective realm. It is essential to recognize that humans, unlike the components that create the natural systems, are capable of a particular sort of action due to their imaginative capacities that allow them to overpass the actual perceived world. The aesthetic dimension directly involves the human imaginative consciousness, which in turn activates the realm of the virtual, i.e., the realm that which exists only in a latent state, and does not appear visibly (fr. ce qui n'est qu'en puissance). While engaged in aesthetic experience, humans exhibit a particular sort of intentionality through which they bring to mind what is not visible through what is present and perceived. By making use of their lived body, individuals are capable to engage in a particular sort of imaginative play through which memories of the past, anticipations of the future and the actualized perceived present are conjured together, informing one another. Since every human intentional experience is spatialized, I investigated a particular spatial structure through which aesthetic experience occurs as such. I called this structure aesthetic space. In the last chapter, I investigate more precisely the influence of the urban environment on the way in which individuals' aesthetic judgments evolve and mature. By considering the experience of modernity and the city as pivotal in the construction of individuals' aesthetic sensitivities, I explore the spatial component of aesthetic judgments on some particular cases. I also focus on the importance of the urban public space, the lifestyle change, as well as on the period of childhood, which appear to be critical to the (aesthetic) development of individuals.
Aesthetics and Philosophy From Baumgarten to Nietzsche
Aesthetic Theory Across the Disciplines, 2023
This essay offers non-specialists an overview of the field of aesthetics as seen from the discipline of philosophy. Although it emerged somewhat belatedly, aesthetics is today recognized as one of the five main branches of philosophy, where it is often treated as a synonym for the 'philosophy of art'. However, scholars working in these areas are increasingly inclined to distinguish between these two enterprises. The basis for this distinction is the idea that the philosophy of art is concerned primarily with clarifying the concept of art, while aesthetics also considers questions of taste, judgement, and natural beauty as part of its more general inquiry into the nature of aesthetic experience. Throughout, I trace the rise and fall of aesthetics within the context of modern German philosophy. As such, I am not concerned here with contemporary issues and debates in the field of aesthetics; but with showing how classical German aesthetics gave rise to certain ideas regarding the field of experience specific to art. My aim is to show how the idea for a distinctly aesthetic form of experience was born in the writings of Baumgarten and Kant, before then explaining how this type of experience was assigned political, ethical, and existential signicance by Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. My contention is that this history is important not just for understanding philosophical aesthetics today; but for assessing many of the claims that our culture makes about art, particularly since these claims revolve around the idea that art sustains a singular form of experience, one thought to be separable from cognitive and moral considerations and which may well be replete with political, ethical, and existential significance. While aesthetics is not a theory or foundation for art, it nevertheless empowers art by reframing it as an occasion for this type of experience. For this reason, we might say of aesthetics that it is a discourse which sustains art by attributing to it the capacity to engender a wholly unique form of experience. For
Against the Sociology of the Aesthetic
Cultural Values, 2002
I defend traditional aesthetics against sociological criticism. I argue that “historicist” approaches (a) are not supported by arguments and (b) are intrinsically implausible. Hence the traditional ahistorical philosophical approach to the judgment of taste is justified. Many Marxist, feminist and postmodernist writers either eliminate aesthetic value or reduce it to their favourite political value. Others say that they merely want to give a historical explanation of the culturally local phenomenon of thinking in terms of the aesthetic. As a preliminary, I point out that the conception of the aesthetic these theorists operate with is a straw man. In particular, Kant would have rejected it. I then point out that the empirical evidence does not support their historicist views. Most sociological theorists adduce no evidence, thinking their view obviously correct. Where evidence is adduced (e.g. by Bourdieu), the evidence has little connection with their general historicist conclusions. Lastly, I put pressure on the historicist view, first by appealing to the enormity of the error attributed to ordinary people, and second by appealing to the inevitability of pragmatic inconsistency by those who assert the view. I conclude that traditional philosophical aesthetics was right to be ahistorical.