The Aesthetics of Everyday Life

Andrew Light, Jonathan Smith

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231509350
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The aesthetics of everyday life, originally developed by Henri Lefebvre and other modernist theorists, is an extension of traditional aesthetics, usually confined to works of art. It is not limited to the study of humble objects but is rather concerned with all of the undeniably aesthetic experiences that arise when one contemplates objects or performs acts that are outside the traditional realm of aesthetics. It is concerned with the nature of the relationship between subject and object.

One significant aspect of everyday aesthetics is environmental aesthetics, whether constructed, as a building, or manipulated, as a landscape. Others, also discussed in the book, include sport, weather, smell and taste, and food.

PART I

Theorizing the Aesthetics
of the Everyday

CHAPTER 1

The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics

Tom Leddy

WHAT IS EVERYDAY AESTHETICS? It would be a mistake to take the term everyday too literally. A musician who practices and plays every day can justly say that her everyday aesthetic experience is mainly connected with music. A naturalist could similarly say that his everyday aesthetic experience is of nature. Yet when we talk about everyday aesthetic experience, we are thinking of aesthetic issues that are not connected closely with the fine arts or with the natural environment, or with other areas that form well-established aesthetic domains, for example, the aesthetics of mathematics, science, or religion. We are thinking instead of the home, the daily commute, the workplace, the shopping center, and places of amusement.

The issues that generally come up have to do with personal appearance, ordinary housing design, interior decoration, workplace aesthetics, sexual experience, appliance design, cooking, gardening, hobbies, play, appreciation of children’s art projects, and other similar matters.¹ Of course the boundaries are not clearly drawn. Everyday aesthetics is a loose category. For example, the aesthetics of weather seems to fall equally within everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of nature. Children’s art projects fall somewhere between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art. I hope to show in this chapter what the boundaries might be, and give some idea of the scope of inquiry.

Discussion of everyday aesthetics allows us to talk about things that do not generally come up in traditional aesthetics. It opens a whole new domain of inquiry. Yet, this domain is closely related to more traditional fields of aesthetics. For example, terms are often shared between it and the aesthetics of art. Also, much art is based on, or inspired by, everyday aesthetic experience. Vermeer, for example, draws our attention to the aesthetic pleasures of bourgeois Dutch house interiors. We see art, at least in part, in terms of everyday aesthetics, and we see everyday aesthetics, at least partially, in terms of art. Nor should we forget that we see both, at least in part, in terms of the aesthetics of nature.

Of special importance is the relationship between everyday aesthetics and environmental aesthetics. There is considerable overlap. Environmental aesthetics points the way to appreciation of everyday aesthetics by focusing on the entire lived experience, for example, of a walk in the woods. One could certainly approach everyday aesthetics in the holistic manner of environmental aesthetics. My own daily walk to work is an example of a fairly complex experiential whole that may be analyzed along the lines of environmental aesthetics. I may appreciate the nature of the day (sunny and fresh), the seasonal variations of the plant life (spring has arrived!), the flowery smells of plant-clippings (brought out by a recent rain), the cultural richness of our ethnically diverse community (notice that statue of the Virgin!), architectural niceties of ordinary buildings (the California bungalow that looks a bit like a Frank Lloyd Wright), the physical pleasure of my own bodily movement, the quick vision of a white crane in Coyote creek as I walk over the bridge (a fragment of nature appreciation), and the fashion statements of students as I enter the campus. All of the senses are involved.

But notice that the aesthetic delights of my walk may also be relatively isolated and less holistic. I am an amateur photographer, and I often look at scenes of everyday life as potential shots through an imagined frame. For this, and other reasons, I would not make everyday aesthetics just a branch of environmental aesthetics. It will be helpful to turn to a recent work in environmental aesthetics by Arnold Berleant to explore this point.² Berleant recognizes that environmental aesthetics was originally focused on the natural environment, but wishes to expand it to include the aesthetics of everyday life. Thus, he informs us that environmental aesthetics will deal with “how we engage with the prosaic landscapes of home, work, local travel, and recreation” (16). He notes that “we engage the landscape aesthetically as we drive to work or school, go shopping, walk the dog, or picnic in a park” (20). Although Berleant’s contribution is valuable, I believe that taking the aesthetics of the natural environment as paradigmatic places unnecessary limitations on everyday aesthetics. First, contemporary photography, assemblage, and 3D work have taught us to appreciate many landscapes that would be repulsive to most nature lovers (for example, German sculptor Olaf Metzel’s “Outdoors,” 1992, which creates a work of art out of camping tents and netting, and his “112–104,” 1991, which uses debris from a destroyed basketball court; and Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s wonderful film, The Way Things Go, 1985–87, both featured in Art in America, June 1997). Some of my own strongest aesthetic experiences have come from viewing the display of junkyards and storage yards along the train route from San Jose to San Francisco. Berleant implies that such things as telephone poles, power lines, commercial strips, trailer parks, suburban malls, and parking lots necessarily “embody negative aesthetic values” (20). Yet, these are often the subjects of contemporary painting and photography, which provide mediation for our experiencing them in aesthetically positive terms.

Second, an exclusive focus on landscape would draw our attention away from appreciation of relatively isolated objects. Consider a key scene in the 2001 Academy-Award-nominated movie, American Beauty. The boy-next-door is a drug-pusher and a voyeur, and yet he shows his new girlfriend a video he made of a plastic bag shuffling back and forth against a building wall in a gentle swirl of local wind—an image of extraordinary beauty. From a traditional environmentalist perspective, this video simply records the existence of a plastic bag not properly recycled. From a landscape environment perspective, it shows lack of concern for the total environment: there is no landscape present, and only one of the senses is engaged. Yet, this video-within-a-movie makes us aware of possibilities of powerful aesthetic experience that are not particularly environmental or landscape-oriented.

Third, Berleant’s attack on traditional aesthetics goes too far when he says that “the conscious body does not observe the world contemplatively but participates actively in the experiential process” (12). Why should we accept this strict dichotomy? Why cannot we enjoy both? Berleant discourages the detached visual contemplation exemplified by the above-mentioned video, and would disallow my own contemplative appreciation of urban scenes from a train window. Although engagement of all of the senses can contribute to a powerful aesthetic experience, this should not preclude the possibility, and value, of aesthetic experience that focuses on one sense, and is relatively disengaged.

Allen Carlson, another major figure in environmental aesthetics, insists that experiencing nature as a static two-dimensional object unduly limits our appreciation of it, and that we must appreciate natural objects in terms of correct scientific knowledge. Carlson rejects appreciation of nature in pictorial terms, which he believes is to misunderstand it. Whether this is the right approach to appreciating nature I cannot say, but it would seem somewhat bizarre to approach the aesthetics of everyday life in terms of this primacy of scientific cognition, for example, the home in terms of the science of house management, or the aesthetics of sex in terms of sexology. Moreover, we do not need the cognitive approach to help us appreciate the “scenically challenged” (to borrow a term from Yuriko Saito) aspects of everyday life in the way we might need it to help us appreciate something scenically challenged in nature—such as a dead elk filled with crawling maggots.³ We already have the above-mentioned mediation of contemporary visual arts. (I do not intend to exclude the other fine art traditions here. The contemporary aural arts may do something similar with respect to the noises of everyday life. The contemporary novel often engages us descriptively and imaginatively with the same material represented in contemporary visual art.)

Kantian Attempt to Define Everyday Aesthetics

It might be thought that everyday aesthetics could be correlated with Kant’s notion of “the agreeable.” Kant says, “That is agreeable which the senses find pleasing in the sensation.”⁴ He distinguishes two kinds of aesthetic experience: the agreeable and the beautiful. Unlike beauty, the agreeable does not merely please, but gratifies. Thus, whereas beauty is disinterested, the agreeable is not. When we judge an object as agreeable we are expressing an interest in it. This is shown by the fact that it provokes a desire for similar objects. Although the agreeable may be experienced by irrational animals, Kant believes beauty is only available to man.

Kant argues that the agreeable is relative to inclination. Hence, the hungry man will find something agreeable that others may not. Taste, in the sense of “discrimination,” does not enter into the agreeable. The judgment of the agreeable rests, rather, on private feeling. As opposed to the beautiful, when we talk of the agreeable there is no disputing about tastes.

Kant seems to think there are specific kinds of things that are objects of the agreeable, for example, canary wine, violet color, and the smell of a rose. He speaks of “the taste of the tongue, the palate, and the throat,” and also of that which is agreeable to the eye and the ear. When he discusses violet color, he notes that it may be soft and lovely to one, and dull and faded to another. He also refers to the tones of wind and string instruments as examples of the agreeable. However, he insists that pure tones are objects of beauty.

Can the concept of the agreeable be used to define everyday aesthetics? Much of this domain could be included in the agreeable as Kant defines it; for example, all of the pleasures of the senses when they are unmediated by reflection. There are, however, various problems with a strictly Kantian definition of everyday aesthetics.

(1) Recent aestheticians have rightly questioned the idea that aesthetic appreciation can be completely disinterested, and that aesthetic objects can be completely formal. This has undercut Kant’s distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful. For example, Kant’s view of disinterestedness implies that we do not want to hear more of some beautiful music after we have had one pleasurable experience of it. Yet, we often want to hear such pieces again and again, although perhaps not right away. How is this different from our desire to have more pieces of chocolate candy, although not right away?

(2) The concept of beauty should not be excluded from everyday aesthetics. Kant defines beauty in terms of play of the imagination and the understanding. It is true that everyday aesthetic objects do not typically generate such play, even when they generate pleasure. But why should judgments of beauty require such a play? For example, it is not clear that such play exists in the appreciation of the beauty of the tone of a bell or of a minimalist painting. When Kant excludes things like “the smell of a rose” from beauty, he recognizes that he is recommending a revision of language (surely, it is all right to say “that is a beautiful smell!”). Such a revision is not warranted if we no longer accept a radical distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful.

(3) Even if we stuck to Kant’s use of the term beauty, it would still be wrong to exclude it from everyday aesthetics. Kant ties “beauty” with the aesthetic pleasure we get from appreciation of good design and pleasing form. This kind of pleasure is surely not absent from the dinner party, the garden, or the use of tiles in the bathroom. Kant clearly includes such things as costumes and wallpaper under the category of beauty, rather than that of the agreeable. Since we would generally want to include these in the field of everyday aesthetics, Kant’s distinction may not be useful for defining that field.

(4) It is arguable that what Kant calls the agreeable is not exclusively a matter of sense, and that there is an imaginative element in the experience of the agreeable. For example, although the pleasures of sexual intercourse would seem to fall under the agreeable, it would be wrong to ignore the role that imagination typically plays in that realm.

Nonetheless, Kant’s work is still helpful, when modified. I recommend maintaining a rough distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful. The agreeable is primarily a matter of the play of sense and imagination. The beautiful is primarily a matter of the play of imagination and understanding. Yet, the agreeable may contain, in part, some play of imagination and understanding, and sense should not be excluded from the beautiful.

Everyday Aesthetic Properties

Perhaps we can talk about everyday aesthetics in terms of the notion of everyday aesthetic properties. What then are aesthetic properties? Some philosophers tie the concept of them closely to the arts. However, there is another tradition that sees aesthetic properties simply as characteristics of objects and events that give us pleasure in the sensuous or imaginative apprehension of them. I accept the latter view, although I would insist that “property” not be understood in an objectivist way. The properties appreciated in everyday aesthetics are neither wholly objective nor wholly subjective. They are properties of experienced things, not of physical objects abstracted from our experienced world.

My own view is that both sensuous and imaginative apprehension are aspects of aesthetic experience, both at the level of “the agreeable,” and at the level of “the beautiful” (using these terms in the modified Kantian sense suggested above). There is always a sensuous and an imaginative dimension of aesthetic experience. This position has a long tradition. It may be found for example in Bullough’s description of an aesthetic experience of a fog at sea.⁵

We should not forget the other side of aesthetics: the feeling of displeasure that arises in connection with the sensuous/imaginative apprehension of certain things. Whereas the first side comes under ...