Everyday Aesthetics

Prosaics, the Play of Culture and Social Identities

Katya Mandoki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317138488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Katya Mandoki advances in this book the thesis that it is not only possible but crucial to open up the field of aesthetics (traditionally confined to the study of art and beauty) toward the richness and complexity of everyday life. She argues that in every process of communication, whether face to face or through the media, fashion, and political propaganda, there is always an excess beyond the informative and functional value of a message. This excess is the aesthetic. Following Huizinga's view of play as an ingredient of any social environment, Mandoki explores how various cultural practices are in fact forms of playing since, for the author, aesthetics and play are Siamese twins. One of the unique contributions of this book is the elaboration and application of a semiotic model for the simultaneous analysis of social interactions in the four registers, namely visual, auditory, verbal and body language, to detect the aesthetic strategies deployed in specific situations. She argues that since the presentation of the self is targeted towards participants' sensibilities, aesthetics plays a key role in these modes of exchange. Consequently, the author updates important debates in this field to clear the way for a socio-aesthetic inquiry through contexts such as the family, school, medical, artistic or religious traditions from which social identities emerge.

PART 1
THE LABYRINTHS OF AESTHETICS

It’s super, it’s grand, it’s a beaut, it’s swell, it’s peachy, it’s the real McCoy, it’s nifty, it’s gorgeous, it’s cool … are not just ordinary words; they are everyday aesthetic judgments. In daily life we constantly and unknowingly pass aesthetic judgments on a variety of situations, people, and incidents. Aesthetic theory, however, ignored these commonplace expressions to concentrate only on the pompous judgments of a group of specialists concerning the relatively minute universe of the artworld. Is the theoretical edifice inhabited by aestheticians really solid enough to justify their contempt for everyday aesthetic judgments? Far from it!

I will first acquaint the reader with the main issues in aesthetics being debated today. My approach will be critical without pretending the complete dismantling of its conceptual scaffold. Such an approach would divert us from the goal set here, namely, to explore aesthetics in everyday life. For that purpose, a concise and synthetic review of ideas inherited principally from Baumgarten and Kant is necessary to clear the way towards the construction of a theoretical frame for observing everyday aesthetic phenomena.

Chapter 1
The Problems of Aesthetics

Problems of definition

The term “aesthetic” has been used to designate an experience, the quality of an object, a feeling of pleasure, classicism in art, a judgment of taste, the capacity of perception, a value, an attitude, the theory of art, the doctrine of beauty, a state of the spirit, contemplative receptivity, an emotion, an intention, a way of life, the faculty of sensibility, a branch of philosophy, a type of subjectivity, the merit of certain forms, or an act of expression. What this large heterogeneous list clearly indicates is that aesthetics has not been able to define its object. In some cases it refers to certain characteristics of the subjects or effects on them. In others, it deals with the qualities of the object, the qualities of an act, or the analysis of a social practice such as art, and even of a certain period or style of that practice.

The definition of a concept like “aesthetics” is even more problematic after the questions Wittgenstein (1958 § 66–72) raised concerning the act of defining. In his example of the concept of “game”, he claims there is no common characteristic among the various usages of this word; there are only similarities or family resemblances and blurred boundaries. For Wittgenstein: “The meaning of a word is in its use in language.” (§ 43) From this approach, if the concept of aesthetics were in its use, then we would have to admit that it is related to unisex aesthetics, aesthetic surgery, or dental aesthetics. It is evident in all these usages that aesthetics refers to beauty and similar ideas such as the pretty, the cute, the agreeable, the elegant, the nice. It is not my intention to restrict the terminologies utilized by dentists or dog and hair stylists, but to establish a theoretical starting point, at least a demarcation, for the term “aesthetic”.

Problems of location

There is, on the one hand, the problem set forth by Wittgenstein and applied to aesthetics by Weitz (1989), of whether a definition is at all possible, and on the other hand, whether aesthetics is a discipline. To regard aesthetics as a discipline may be a problem for some, for example Diffey (1984), who considers (but unfortunately does not prove) that aesthetics is not a discipline but a multidisciplinary or an interdisciplinary field. For Diffey there exist disciplines like philosophy, sociology, and psychology that may focus occasionally on aesthetic questions. Aesthetics would then be, for the author, a multidisciplinary problem or object.

Despite Diffey’s very brief argumentation in this regard, he pointed out a real problem that has not received enough attention in aesthetic theory, which simply considers aesthetics as a branch of philosophy. However, there still remains an ambiguity with regard to whether aesthetics is a discipline, the objects of which are art and beauty (or significant form, symbolic expression, sensuous experience), or whether it is an object of various disciplines like psychology, sociology, philosophy, and history of art.

If aesthetics were an object of various disciplines, we would possess a theoretical corpus from psychology, sociology, semiotics or history, focused on aesthetics. This corpus exists in a fragmentary state only. There is no history of aesthetics, but only of aesthetic theories (for example, Bayer 1984). There is no sociology of aesthetics, but sociological views of artistic phenomena (for example, Hauser 1969), or psychological approaches to the perception of form (Arnheim 1985). If we were to define aesthetics exclusively as the study of art (decidedly not the position taken here) we could agree, and very partially so, with a conception of aesthetics as the object of various disciplines, since there is sociology of art, history of art, and theory of art. This definition of aesthetics as the study of art would not, however, be acceptable to a large number of aestheticians who prefer to define it as the study of beauty, whereas art would be the subject of another discipline namely, art theory: Nwodo (1984), for example.

On the other hand, if aesthetics were a discipline, there would be a department of aesthetics at virtually every university (most disciplines exist first and foremost as departments in universities). Since that is not the case, students interested in aesthetics come from departments like philosophy, and in rare cases from art history. Aesthetics has thus been a branch of another discipline, philosophy, and not a discipline in the proper sense, the same as ontology, ethics, or metaphysics. As Berleant has argued (1991, 1): “Nor again can aesthetics claim independence as a discipline, for many of its leading ideas have been transplanted from broader philosophical ground. Moreover, for a variety of reasons the study we call aesthetics is not exclusively philosophical.”

The criticism that Wolff (1983) directs at aesthetics for its lack of a sociological dimension proves that this branch of philosophy is adamant in not converting itself into a multidiscipline. So far, there have been almost no non-philosophical approaches to aesthetics, and these have always been marginal. One such is Bourdieu’s (1987) critique of aesthetics based upon this point. He even accuses aesthetics of plagiarizing categories of social sciences and disguising them as its own. He criticizes the ahistorical character of aesthetic categories and aesthetic experience, which ignores the social conditions that allow the emergence of such categories and experiences.

The traditional approach to the study of aesthetics is related to philosophical tendencies from which various theories arise.1 To the best of my knowledge, none of these theories or tendencies constitutes a discipline; rather, each views art, aesthetics and beauty from its own methodological perspective.

Currently, aesthetics is not multidisciplinary precisely because it rejects any non-philosophical challenge (in some cases, even a challenge from non-analytic aesthetics) be it sociological (as claimed by Wolff), anthropological, biological, psychological, semiotic, economic or political. One cannot blame aesthetics for being so hermetic. Viewed as a branch of philosophy, it cannot do otherwise. Its limitations could be removed by means of another orientation, not as a branch of philosophy, but as the interdiscipline that Diffey apparently had in mind.

Aesthetics is not only a philosophical problem. It is also a social, symbolic, communicative, political, historical, anthropological, even neurological and especially pedagogical one as well. It therefore requires an interdisciplinary, comprehensive orientation. I am proposing an interdisciplinary rather than a transdisciplinary aesthetics since the purpose is to integrate and not to transcend disciplinary approaches, many of which have managed to construct methodological tools that are indispensable for dealing with aesthetic problems. To sum up, aesthetics should not be treated as a branch of philosophy but requires a multidisciplinary approach. As I will contend in Part II, the aesthetic is not only about the ontological status of artworks or beauty but a complex dimension that cuts across social life in a manner similar to the political, economic, technological or semiotic.

Problems of distinction

There have been numerous attempts to define aesthetics and to distinguish it from the philosophy of art. With the provocative title of “Philosophy of art versus aesthetics” Christopher S. Nwodo (1984) made a historical investigation beginning with Plato, passing through Thomas Aquinas, continuing with Kant, and culminating with Heidegger, Kovacs, Maritain, Steinkraus, and Lipman to contend that these are two distinct disciplines. The proposal as such is not new, since more than half a century ago Wilhelm Worringer, Max Dessoir and Emil Utitz proposed the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft or general science of the arts as independent from aesthetics. In fact, art history is becoming increasingly more and more unconnected to aesthetics since philosophical problems are rarely addressed in this field. Proof of this are the publications and clearly differentiated interests of each area: there are very few art historians interested in problems of aesthetic theory, while philosophers of aesthetics rarely consult textbooks by art historians.

For Nwodo, aesthetics would be the theory that studies beauty, leaving art to the theory of art. He eludes the objections regarding the pertinence of the concept of beauty for aesthetic theory and the arguments about its uselessness (like those posed by John Dewey, Richard Hamann, and Mikel Dufrenne). The problem with Nwodo’s proposal is not so much that, in contemporary art, beauty progressively lost the dominant role it played in traditional academic art, although this seems to be one of the reasons for the distinctions pointed out. The problem is that, as a category, beauty lacks sufficient relevance in itself for establishing a whole disciplinary field around it, say “beautology”. If that were to be the case, then there is no reason why other disciplines such as “uglology”, “sublimology”, “tragicology”, “grotesqueology”, “sordidology”, “comicology”, and “triviology” could not be equally established. With this reduction to the absurd it is evident that it is not possible to establish a discipline upon one of the various aesthetic categories. Anyway, in principle we can agree with Nwodo about the importance of differentiating aesthetics (if not as the theory of beauty) from philosophy of art.

Art is a technique for the production of sensitive effects, and, thus, constitutes a part of aesthetics. At this point, the role sensibility has for Baumgarten and orthodox aesthetics is still valid, except that by aesthetics we may not understand the study of beauty and art, but of activities related to our sensibility as live beings.2 Beauty is only one of the many, many categories in the production of sensitive effects. There are almost as many aesthetic categories as there are adjectives in a language, and art is only one of its manifestations. Besides, not only art, but also science involves aesthetic considerations (cf. Osborne 1981, 1982, 1984, 1986; Heisenberg 1974, Engler 1990, Wechsler 1978).

Aesthetics is definitely an elusive phenomenon difficult to define by the traditional philosophical procedure of necessary and sufficient reasons. It is difficult to locate as a specialized discipline or a multidisciplinary object, and hard to distinguish from related fields, such as philosophy of art, art history and art criticism. What remains possible, however, is marking its boundaries despite its blurred edges. I shall attempt to do that in Part II.

1 Analytical philosophy, based upon Russell, Moore, Weitz, and Goodman, is prevalent nowadays mainly among Anglo-American aestheticians. Other approaches are, in very general terms: a) phenomenology inherited from Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, and Dufrenne; b) theories of language and semiotics backed by Cassirer, Shapiro, Wittgenstein, Jakobson, Eco, and Mukarovský; c) Kantian developments taken by Schaper, Guyer, and Crowther; d) Marxist aesthetics imposed by Zhdanov, fathered by Lukacs, and followed by Sánchez Vázquez, Bujarin, Kosik, Della Volpe, Gramsci, Lunacharsky, Benjamin, Adorno, and Eagleton; e) idealism in Croce, Schopenhauer, Collingwood, Schiller, and Fichte; f) intentionalists or expressivists such as Langer, Ayer; g) essentialists such as Kainz; h) deconstructionists like Derrida, Culler, and so on; i) analytic-institutionalists such as Danto and Dickie, j) pragmatists like Dewey followed by Shusterman; k) feminists, namely Korsmeyer, Hine, Brand, and Langer (Cassandra) among others; and l) environmental aesthetics initiated by Berleant and Carlson, as well as Haapala, and von Bonsdorff.

2 Rubert de Ventós (1969) and John Dewey ([1934] 1980) also understood aesthetics as basically related to sensibility, following Baumgarten’s initiative. All three philosophers, however, limited the aesthetic to the artistic.

Chapter 2
The Fetishes of Aesthetics

The fetish of beauty

The notion of beauty has been, and continues to be, the cornerstone of aesthetic theory. As such, it has generated numerous problems. Consequently, Nwodo (among other authors) proposed a distinction between aesthetics and philosophy of art that defines the former centering on beauty as its main disciplinary object, whereas the artistic would pertain exclusively to the latter. It must be emphasized, however, that beauty (as truth, justice or goodness) is an effect of language and not an ontological fact: it results from the conversion of an evaluative adjective (beautiful, true, just, and good) into a noun (beauty, truth, justice, and goodness). It thus appears to have been existing on its own, independently from the subject who, in fact, originally judged something as being good, just, true, and beautiful. This is how beauty becomes a fetish, appearing to have powers of its own and to exist independently of the subject.

All these evaluations are made by persons who depend on certain conventions to decode the meanings that “good”, “beautiful”, and “just” can take and to select the objects these may be attributed to. This explains why the deformation of the lower lip among the people of certain African tribes, the flattening of the forehead among the Mayans, the malformation of Chinese women’s feet, the silicone injection into the breasts and of collagen into the lips among Western women, the eyelid surgery among oriental women, tattoos, laceration, piercing and lifting can be considered by some as beautiful. In similar terms, the hand amputation of those accused of theft among orthodox Moslems, pouring acid over Pakistani women’s faces, the death penalty in several states of the USA, the sale of children and women into prostitution and slavery in many countries are considered justifiable in their respective social contexts. The existence of the phlogiston or of ether in the universe has also been taken as truth during certain periods in the history of science.

I am not trying here to argue for total relativism: on the contrary, whereas beauty is context dependent, justice is definitely not as it involves the absolute principle of life and of individual integrity. Rather, my point is that, whereas justice is absolute concerning human life, since its consequences are irreversible, beauty is relative and does not exist in itself. Beauty is a linguistic effect used by a particular subject to describe personal experiences and social conventions, not things that exist independently of perception. The notion of beauty is a linguistic categorization of a non-linguistic experience, although it can be provoked by language (in the case of literature and poetry), or provoke the production of language (the typical case, art criticism). Beauty subsists only in the subjects who experience it, just as life only exists in live beings.

It is not enough, however, to declare that beauty is a fetish in order to get rid of it in aesthetic theory. Mikel Dufrenne (1973, 1viii), for one, warns us: “we shall avoid invoking the concept of the beautiful, because it is a notion that, depending on the extension we give it, seems either useless for our purposes or dangerous”. But then he ends up declaring: “Basically, it is not we who decide what is beautiful. The object itself decides, and it does so by manifesting itself. The aesthetic judgment is passed from within the object rather than within us. We do not define the beautiful, we ascertain what the object is.” (Dufrenne 1973, lxii)

The author questions the fetishism of beauty, but ends up inventing another even worse: objects that “decide by themselves”, are capable of establishing “an aesthetic judgment from within”, and define themselves as beautiful. In something he is right, namely in the danger of the notion of beauty, that, in his case, laid out this snare for him.

For John Dewey too, the notion of beauty, for theoretical ends, becomes an obstructive term.

Beauty is at the furthest remove from an analytic term, and hence from a conception that can figure in theory as a means of explanation or classification. Unfortunately, it has been hardened into a peculiar object; emotional rapture has been subjected to what philosophy calls hypostatization, and the concept of beauty as an essence of intuition has resulted. For purposes of theory, it then becomes and obstructive term. (Dewey [1934] 1980, 129–30)

Thus we might follow Dewey’s more coherent direction and assert that beauty is not a quality of objects in themselves but an effect of the relation that a subject establishes with a particular object from a particular social context of evaluation and interpretation. It is the subject’s sensibility that discovers its objects and sees in them what it has put into them, not according to a personal whim but depending on its socio-cultural, perceptive, and evaluative conditions. In this sense, we return to the starting point from which philosopher David Hume began to reflect by the eighteenth century on the problems of taste and beauty to settle them respectively as diverse and relative.

The fetish of the artwork

I do not intend to criticize here the exaggerated importance given to artistic production in aesthetic theory. What interests me in this section is analyzing fetishism in its literal sense: the work of art converted into a fetish, possessor of human and superhuman powers and capacities, or even magical attributes. From a Marxist point of view, Terry Eagleton (1990) detects with great perspicuity that the work of art has been for aesthetic theory a sort of subject that embodies all the values the bourgeoisie sought to legitimize since the Enlightenment. Values like autonomy, self-regulation, self-determination, lawless legality, self-management, and the individual as an end-initself (all attributed to the work of art by aesthetic theory) provide the perfect model of subjectivity that the early capitalist society required. This idea became so effective that art acquired greater rights than the very subject it tried to resemble or constitute in what Eagleton denominates as “ideology of the aesthetic”. In other words, the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century imagined a subject whose characteristics were metaphorically projected into the work of art, but all subsequent aesthetic theory took this image literally. Hence, the emergence of views of the artistic artifact as in itself capable of expression, of autonomy, of meaning, of attitudes, and of values. Kant clearly indicated that the harmony we ascribe to the object is, in fact, the projection of our cognitive ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Glossary
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• PART 1 THE LABYRINTHS OF AESTHETICS
• PART 2 ON AESTHESIS
• PART 3 TOWARDS PROSAICS
• PART 4 SEMIO-AESTHETICS
• PART 5 OCTADIC MODEL FOR AESTHETIC ANALYSIS
• PART 6 MATRIXES AND IDENTITIES
• Conclusions Matricial Symbols and Aesthetic Games
• References
• Index