This essay discusses Mary Beth Willard's _Why It's OK to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists_ and puts it into dialogue with my book _Drawing the Line._ In particular, I focus on the role of aesthetic projects in thinking about artistic immorality, and develop further thoughts on the public/private and individual/social distinctions with respect to our engagement with the arts.

The notion of “projective aesthetics” is considered in this paper for the first time as a variant of the recourse to praxis that characterizes contemporary aesthetics and its “aesthetic involvement”. Projective aesthetics involves the use of methodologies of a new type: “schizoanalysis”, “conceptivism” and “projectivism”. The emphasis is put on the principle of “rhizome” and on the features of so-called “culturonics”, a way of thinking “through projects” in the cultural sphere. Projective aesthetics implies a way of philosophizing about art (...) and aesthetics which is defined by a functional orientation in terms of a process of aestheticization and artification, and, accordingly, of projectivity. The connection between projective aesthetics and the peculiarities of modern communicative aesthetics is also examined, together with the need for creating a philosophical glossary of artistry and modern art, meant as a relevant project for aesthetics. In the text, a special place is also given to a number of projects implemented in the process of teaching philosophical aesthetics, as related to beauty as well as with the direct participation of students in filling out the contents of the above-mentioned glossary. (shrink)

In this essay, I will examine Henri Maldiney’s phenomenological aesthetics, focusing on his claim that “art is the truth of the sensible.” This claim is presented by Maldiney in the context of a two-fold critique of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective attempts to phenomenologically elucidate the experience of artworks. According to Maldiney, both Husserl and Heidegger fail to recognize what he, following Erwin Straus, terms the “pathic” moment of sense experience, which is also the key moment of the aesthetic reception (...) of art. Drawing on this concept of the pathic and its way of engaging what Maldiney calls the “transpassibility” of receptivity, I argue that his phenomenology of art can be viewed as an attempt to bring together the two senses of the aesthetic in the Kantian sense, namely as an aesthetics of sense experience and as an aesthetics of art, from within the domain of sensibility itself. I develop this idea by turning to Maldiney’s notion of rhythm and examining how he thinks that it can be applied to the visual arts. Ultimately, I suggest that Maldiney’s aesthetics imbues art with ontological significance, since he takes the rhythmic presence of artworks to be a sensuous manifestation of the rhythmic ground of the world’s constitution. The truth of art, in this sense, is a revelation of the ontological functioning of rhythm. (shrink)

We develop the concept of ‘aesthetic practices’ to capture the work needed for population data to be disseminated via government data portals. Specifically, we look at the Census Hub of the European Statistical System and the Danish Ministry of Education’s Data Warehouse. These portals form part of open government data initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required so that data produced at dispersed sites can be brought into (...) relation and projected as populations in forms such as bar charts, heat maps and tables. Two examples of aesthetic practices are analysed based on ethnographic studies we have conducted on the production of data for the Hub and Warehouse: metadata and data cleaning. Metadata enables data to come into relation by containing and accounting for the differences between data. Data cleaning deals with the indeterminacies and absences of data and involves algorithms to determine what values data can obtain so they can be brought into relation. We attend to how both aesthetic practices involve normative decisions that make absent what exceeds them: embodied knowledge that cannot or has not been documented as well as data that cannot meet the forms required of data portals. While these aesthetic practices are necessary to sustain data portals as ‘sites of projection,’ we also bring critical attention to their performative effects for knowing, enacting and governing populations. (shrink)

The article reveals the interdisciplinary potential of empirical aesthetics, including from the perspective of the formation of the concept of a "global art project". The main emphasis in the material is on the conceptualization of empirical aesthetics in comparison with other levels of aesthetic scientific reflection, such as philosophical aesthetics, analytical, receptive and others. It is shown that it is precisely in the aspect of the development of empirical aesthetics that relevant research practices have been developed that make (...) it possible to study art from the point of view not of a form of social consciousness, but as an independent phenomenon of individual and collective human life. The article also provides arguments in favor of the opinion that art grasps reality, revealing its consolidating properties. Thus, the background of empirical aesthetics is revealed, which is necessary for understanding its scientific strategy. The research methodology is based on an interdisciplinary approach, as well as system analysis. These directions allow us to reveal the purpose of the article and solve the tasks set in it, in particular, the use of such a method as event analysis contributes to the formation of the so-called "global art project". The evaluation of this project is carried out at the theoretical and applied levels. A special contribution of the authors to the study of the "global art project" is the chosen perspective of the conceptualization of this research area, as well as the assessment of the heuristic value of the proposed methods and research practices in line with empirical aesthetics, confirming the importance of the "global art project". The main results of the undertaken work include the following provisions: (1) the specificity of empirical aesthetics in the study of the deployment of social reality and the meanings of human individual and collective existence in art is revealed; (2) it is established that the theoretical background of empirical aesthetics arises not only under the influence of the philosophy of art or classical aesthetics, but also in interaction with social knowledge and in particular, with the sociology of art; (3) The experience of using event analysis in the study of art is summarized. (shrink)

Projections of Memory is an exploration of a body of innovative cinematic works that utilize their extraordinary scope to construct monuments to the imagination that promise profound transformations of vision, selfhood, and experience. This form of cinema acts as a nexus through which currents from the other arts can interpenetrate. By examining the strategies of these projects in relation to one another and to the larger historical forces that shape them--tracing the shifts and permutations of their forms and aspirations--Projections of (...) Memory remaps film history around some of its most ambitious achievements and helps to clarify the stakes of cinema as a twentieth-century art form. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate how knowledge and experience influence aesthetic perception. We begin with a discussion of recent evidence from perceptual research in wine tasting that turn out to have significant implications for aesthetic perception. We argue that these results suggest not only that knowledge and experience (what we call “competencies”) are central to determining what is tasted and how, but that this happens because such competencies are an important part of the type of “project” that (...) is undertaken with respect to the object. Our analyses suggest that there must be a distinct aesthetic project for wine tasting, and that this project must include specific competencies. We believe this conclusion holds also for aesthetic experience more generally. (shrink)

Introduction -- Aesthetic judgements, aesthetic principles, and aesthetic properties -- Aesthetic essence -- The acquaintance principle -- The intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgements -- The pure judgement of taste as an aesthetic reflective judgement -- Understanding music -- The characterization of aesthetic qualities by essential metaphors and quasi-metaphors -- Musical movement and aesthetic metaphors -- Aesthetic realism and emotional qualities of music -- On looking at a picture -- The look of (...) a picture -- Wollheim on correspondence, projective properties, and expressive perception -- Wittgenstein on aesthetics. (shrink)

In the course of his collaboration with GAKhN, whose task was to create a systemic ‘scientific’ theory of art, Losev undertook a systematic interpretation of German classical aesthetics as the historical presupposition for his own Christian, Platonist doctrine of art conceived as a dialectical universe comprising totalizing connections at all levels. This interpretation was concealed in a masterful way within the ‘Commentaries’ to Dialektika khudožestvennoj formy. Independently of the significant results achieved by this revival of the classical tradition, Losev’s mythologized (...) theory of art called forth a critical reaction on the part of his GAKhN colleagues and brought to light some of the broader theoretical attitudes present among GAKhN’s collaborators. (shrink)

The review examines different essays from the context set by the idea of 'everyday aesthetics'. Confronted with the notion of "everyday aesthetics," one is immediately faced with some problems of definition. Such problems potentially threaten the viability of the everyday aesthetics project to extend the scope of philosophical aesthetics, so that, as Jonathan Smith suggests in his introduction to this collection of essays, "nothing in the everyday world (or at least very little) can be supposed devoid of the power (...) to excite an aesthetic response." "Everyday" can mean both "daily" and "ordinary," and while the two definitions often coincide in practice, there's no necessary connection: we can conceive the "daily" as remarkable, and the "ordinary" may not be a regular occurrence. If we focus on the aesthetics of the "daily," we might wonder which particular daily occurrences we can be properly said to experience aesthetically and if this means some reassessment of the category of "aesthetic objects" is required, given that "daily" is so often associated with the mundane, the nonaesthetic. Alternatively, if we conceive an aesthetics of the "ordinary" (with agreement on this classification of certain events and objects), then our notion of the "aesthetic" now seems vulnerable on either of two counts: (1) to claims of incoherence, given any agreement that exemplary aesthetic experience, at least, is fundamentally not of the "ordinary" (and never of the "ugly," of the stained, damp, cracked, and so on, in our domestic lives) but of an extraordinary class of events and objects called "art"; (2) to claims of cognitive and moral triviality (to amorality too, perhaps, that it's possible then, after Thomas de Quincy, to appreciate the way a murder is done), so that the aesthetic response is understood as merely a subjective, noncritical "look and feel" response to (almost) everything. It should be evident, then, that the notion of everyday aesthetics needs clarification before it can be of value to those interested in instructing or helping people to live aesthetic lives, and that such work of clarification gets to the very heart of philosophical aesthetics: answers to questions about what constitutes the "aesthetic" in life will inform all aspects of aesthetic inquiry, education, and practice, including the making and appreciating of artworks. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss Baumgarten’s neglected doctrine of taste. In particular I investigate his definition of taste as the judgment of the senses against the backdrop of the philosophical debate of his day, pointing out the biblical and classical sources of the idea of a judging aisthesis. In addition, I analyse the radical change that the definition of taste as the judgment of the senses brings about in the idea of both taste and the judgment of the senses with (...) regard to Wolff. Highlighting the link with the issue of analogon rationis and beauty, I conclude that the concept of taste is at the core of Baumgarten’s new aesthetic project. (shrink)

In stark opposition to this anti-aesthetic project, Isobel Armstrong evolves a new poetics, forging an alternative aesthetic discourse by remaking its ...

Reframes philosophical understanding of, and engagement with, tragedy. In The Tragedy of Philosophy Andrew Cooper challenges the prevailing idea of the death of tragedy, arguing that this assumption reflects a problematic view of both tragedy and philosophy—one that stifles the profound contribution that tragedy could provide to philosophy today. To build this case, Cooper presents a novel reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Although this text is normally understood as the final attempt to seal philosophy from the threat of (...) tragedy, Cooper argues that Kant’s project is rather a creative engagement with a tragedy that is specific to philosophy, namely, the inevitable failure of attempts to master nature through knowledge. Kant’s encounter with the tragedy of philosophy turns philosophy’s gaze from an exclusive focus on knowledge to matters of living well in a world that does not bend itself to our desires. Tracing the impact of Kant’s Critique of Judgment on some of the most famous theories of tragedy, including those of G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Cornelius Castoriadis, Cooper demonstrates how these philosophers extend the project found in both Kant and the Greek tragedies: the attempt to grasp nature as a domain hospitable to human life. (shrink)

How do we perdure when we and everything around us are caught up in incessant change? But the course of this change does not seem to be haphazard and we may seek the modalities of its Logos in the transformations in which it occurs. The classic term "Metamorphosis" focuses upon the proportions between the transformed and the retained, the principles of sameness and otherness. Applied to life and its becoming, metamorphosis pinpoints the proportions between the vital and the aesthetic (...) significance of life. Where could this metaphysical in-between territory come better to light than in the Fine Arts? In this collection are investigated the various proportions between the vital significance of the constructivism of life and a specifically human contribution made by the creative imagination to the transformatory search for beauty and aesthetic values. Papers by: Lawrence Kimmel, Mark L. Brack, Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, William Roberts, Jadwiga Smith, Victor Gerald Rivas, Max Statkiewicz, Matti Itkonen, George R. Tibbetts, Linda Stratford, Jorella Andrews, Ingeborg M. Rocker, Stephen J. Goldberg, Leah Durner, Donnalee Dox, Catherine Schear, Samantha Henriette Krukowski, Gary Maciag, Kelly Dennis, Wanda Strukus, Magda Romanska, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Ellen Burns, Tessa Morrison, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Gary Backhaus, Daniel M. Unger, Howard Pearce. (shrink)

This paper presents an integrated framework applied towards the design and evaluation of a virtual museum of Byzantine art that combines the theorized fields of semiotics, virtual heritage (VH), and Byzantine art. A devised semiotic model, the case study semiosphere, synthesizes important principles from the theoretical background justifying the overall design and evaluation methodology. The approach presented has theoretical extensions to the understanding of the role technology plays in promoting a consummatory aesthetic experience for Byzantine art in virtual environments, (...) complementing the experience received from traditional Byzantine art media. Part A of the work presents the development of the semiotic foundation of the study prior to presenting the applied potential of the approach in design and evaluation of VH for Byzantine art, which appears in Part B. The final task of the proposed approach aims to support a meaningful interpretation, assisting in the promotion of the significance (value) of the virtual museum to potential interpreters/visitors. (shrink)

This volume explores the relationship between Kant's aesthetic theory and his critical epistemology as articulated in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The essays, written specially for this volume, explore core elements of Kant's epistemology, such as his notions of discursive understanding, experience, and objective judgment. They also demonstrate a rich grasp of Kant's critical epistemology that enables a deeper understanding of his aesthetics. Collectively, the essays reveal that Kant's critical project, (...) and the dialectics of aesthetics and cognition within it, is still relevant to contemporary debates in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and the nature of experience and objectivity. The book also yields important lessons about the ineliminable, yet problematic place of imagination, sensibility and aesthetic experience in perception and cognition. (shrink)

Yuriko Saito, the leading figure in the field, explores the nature and significance of the aesthetic dimensions of people's everyday lives. She argues that everyday aesthetics can be an effective instrument for directing humanity's collective and cumulative world-making project.

This paper presents an overview of my work in philosophy from my first book on Friedrich Schiller and the political sublime to my most recent project on listening to traumatic forms of violence. Starting with a reflection on the autobiographical character of philosophy, I propose to take up the question of an aesthetic dimension of philosophical critique, where aesthetics is understood as an always already embodied perspective on the world, on truth, and on philosophical activity, as well as (...) an always already political realm, where the distribution of sense pre-determines our approach and articulation of experience. Departing from aesthetics understood and deployed as critique, the paper moves on to ask about the specific frameworks of sense or grammars that determine in advance the conditions of audibility in the realms of memory-building and history-making—particularly in those contexts where historical, political, and institutional forms of violence produce silencing and erasure. Putting in dialogue the latter with decolonial studies, I (re)interpret “traumatic violence” as a colonizing form of violence, understanding that one of its central aspects is that it is not only an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible as such. In this context, my project on grammars of listening seeks to carefully unpack these complex intersections while also explaining why I believe that a radical form of listening is an essential subversive/imaginative strategy against traumatic/colonial violence. (shrink)

Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language collects together Gadamer's most important untranslated writings on ethics, aesthetics and language. With a substantial introduction by the editors exploring Gadamer's ethical project and providing an overview of his aesthetic work, this book collects Gadamer's writings on ancient ethics, including the moral philosophy of Aristotle, and on practical philosophy. In the final section, Gadamer's writings on art and language are collected, including his examination of poetry, opera and painting among other (...) art forms, and such topics as artistic language and translation. This important collection is a useful resource for scholars in philosophy, studying hermeneutics, continental, 20th-century and German philosophy. (shrink)

The aesthetic domain is a social one. We coordinate our individual acts of creation, appreciation, and performance with those of others in the context of social aesthetic practices. More strongly, many of the richest goods of our aesthetic lives are constitutively social; their value lies in the fact that individuals are engaged in joint aesthetic agency, participating in cooperative and collaborative project that outstrips what can be realized alone. I provide an account of nature and (...) value of two such social aesthetic goods—aesthetic communities and aesthetic traditions—and further argue that such goods are a core constituent of an aesthetically good life. At the same time, I argue that the ideals of the dominant theory of aesthetic value, aesthetic value hedonism, are incompatible with a full commitment to these social aesthetic goods; the hedonist is thereby alienated from the other participants within aesthetic communities and traditions. This sets up a dilemma for the hedonist: either the hedonist must bite the bullet, accepting that the theory leads to a problematic form of aesthetic alienation; or, we must reject aesthetic value hedonism and adopt a different theory of aesthetic value which accommodates the value of social aesthetic goods. I argue that we should take the second horn of the dilemma. (shrink)

“Is something beautiful because we like it, or is it likable because it is beautiful?” This was how (in De vera religione 59: ideo pulchra sint, quia delectant; an ideo delectent, quia pulchra sunt...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce everyday aesthetics in education. First, it presents everyday aesthetics as a subdiscipline within philosophical aesthetics, that revisits sensory perception as the backdrop of all experience, claims ordinary life is a proper venue for aesthetic inquiry, and problematizes the impact aesthetic preferences have on habitual decisions. Second, the paper argues that among the diverse matters students learn in school, they learn—explicitly or implicitly—what and how to perceive, as well as the pedagogical (...) purposes of daily perception. School models the relationships that students will develop between what they perceive, what they think about it, and how they act accordingly. Next, the paper elaborates on the notions of “school aesthetic matrixes” and “space and place in school”. School aesthetic matrixes refer to perceptual patterns that allow characterizing relationships between daily perception and the pedagogical project of a school. They manifest through expressions such as prison school, home school, mall school, etc. Space and place in school allude to concomitant experiences, of corporeal basis, that allow describing how we inhabit the world. What distinguishes them is the approach each one gives to the senses and the body. The paper concludes by calling attention to the comprehension and role of perception in education, urging to mind the aesthetic-pedagogical character that students develop throughout 12 years of schooling. Ultimately, the key relationships we develop with ourselves, others, and the world, entail a basic perceptual dimension that can be educated to become more purposefully and integrally present in life. (shrink)

Aesthetic experience has been relativized and marginalized by recent social and cultural theory. As less attention has been paid to understanding the nature of aesthetic experience than mapping the distributed social correlates of tastes, its transformative potential and capacity to animate actors’ imaginations and actions goes unexplored. In this paper we draw upon a large number of in-depth interviews with performing arts audiences around Australia to investigate the language and discourse used to describe aesthetic experiences. In particular, (...) we begin with theorizations of the subject-object nexus within object-relations theory to consider the transformative potential of aesthetic experience. Using these literatures, and extending them to others within sociology of the arts and materiality, our focus is on the way aesthetic experience can fuse human subjects with aesthetic objects. We examine how viewers take an aesthetic object into themselves and in turn project themselves into the aesthetic object by various visual and imaginative techniques. Our theoretical and empirical analysis bears out the constructive and productive capacity of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory – the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend (...) their own self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement. (shrink)

Resolving to finish reading a novel, staying true to your punk style, or dedicating your life to an artistic project: these are examples of aesthetic commitments. I develop an account of the nature of such commitments, and I argue that they are significant insofar as they help us manage the temporally extended nature of our aesthetic agency and our relationships with aesthetic objects. At the same time, focusing on aesthetic commitments can give us a better (...) grasp on the nature of aesthetic normativity; this is because, in making aesthetic commitments, we are capable of giving aesthetic concerns the weight of obligation. I argue that appealing to aesthetic commitments allows us to account for the existence of aesthetic obligations as well as their grounding. I conclude by arguing that, although the aesthetic domain is a domain of play and freedom of choice, there is nevertheless an important place in it for both aesthetic commitments and the aesthetic obligations they generate. (shrink)

This book represents the first full-length study of the aesthetics of the appreciation of wine. It introduces and argues for the validity and significance of several new concepts: competency, project, and aesthetic practices. Using these concepts -- together with analyses borrowed from cognitive science, sensory science, Husserlian phenomenology and hermeneutics -- the case is made that wine can be a proper and indeed significant object of aesthetic attention. The implications of this are pursued in three ways: First, (...) within the culture of wine, with a sustained treatment of important concepts such as terroir; second, within philosophical aesthetics. The latter results in a position termed 'contextual aesthetics' that sees aesthetic acts as always situated within cultural practices, and given meaning thereby. The third implication is for the cultural and aesthetic value accorded to the various senses, and the kinds of underlying issues that might have led to, and might now lead away from, these values. (shrink)

Introduction. The article is focused on analyzing the aesthetic aspect of A. Kojève’s philosophy, the ability of his philosophy, from an aesthetic point of view, to clarify a number of key problems of the modern political and cultural environment. The purpose of the study is to determine the epistemological attitude of A. Kojève’s philosophy able to clarify the way in which his philosophy problematizes the current cultural and political reality. Methods. Hermeneutics, comparative analysis and deconstruction are used as (...) research methods. Comparative analysis allows us to demarcate A. Kojève’s own line of reasoning, in the context of aesthetic and epistemological theories, as well as Hegelian themes themselves. Hermeneutics is the central method in the work, since the philosophy of A. Kojeve requires interpretation as an aesthetic theory. Deconstruction, formalized to the status of a method according to P. de Man, allows us to detect inconsistencies, the principle of mutual problematization of Kojeve’s philosophy and the current political and epistemological agenda. Scientific novelty of the research. The standard way of interpreting the work of A. Kojève is to evaluate him as an interpreter of G. Hegel. The author analyzes some meaning of A. Kojève’s philosophy, separate from G. Hegel’s explanation of the text. The novelty lies not only in the fact that A. Kojève’s philosophy is defined as theorizing that goes beyond technical hermeneutics (clear presentation), but also as a specific representation of such theorizing as epistemological aesthetic theory. The latter is a rather rare interpretation of the philosophy of A. Kojeve. This allows us to expand the traditional assumption that post-Hegelian epistemesthetics is the property of an extremely limited number of authors (for example, B. Croce). Moreover, such an interpretation of A. Kojève’s theories is a new element in the emerging trend of considering political issues within the framework of epistemological aesthetics. Results. The specific mode of interpreting G. Hegel, which is carried out by A. Kojève, turns the philosophy of the former into a unique aesthetic project. In this project, the category of aesthetic experience comes to the foreground, indicating the empty, formal nature of any discourse. In this regard, any claim to knowledge of reality, to a correct idea of the subject is replaced by the idea of creating the subject of discourse. Consistent treatment of this idea is symptomatic of the philosophy of A. Kojève. This philosophy is a reflection of those historical changes that gave rise to the culture of “aesthetic rationality”: empty and formal. In A. Kojève’s philosophy, one can see how such a culture of the End of History is, contrary to Hegelian ideas, not the era of the struggle decline, but the era of its strange transformation, a symptom of increasing political violence. Conclusions. A. Kojève’s philosophy is considered not as a utopian political project, but as a problematization of the modern cultural and political sphere. The latter is understood as an indication of the inconsistency of ontological discourses of Truth, the discovery in the very essence of discursive practices of an empty, formal principle, and therefore primarily of interest to aesthetics. The modern era of the End of History and the end of the era of persuasive speech gives an idea of the main political paradox (at least for the philosophy of A. Kojève, and at most for the modern political environment). The era of disappointment in discourse should become an era of refusal to fight for discourses, but it becomes an era of maximizing violence, since it is in a situation of disappointment that discourses can only be supported by force. We move from unconvincing speech to convincing violence, but it is possible to understand the origins and specifics of this transition only by considering A. Kojève’s philosophy in the light of such a discipline as aesthetics. (shrink)

Critical accounts of race have drastically changed the landscapes of the social, the political, and the intimate. Philosophical perspectives on racial identity and difference hold out transformative possibilities for aesthetics. Revealing the entanglement of analytical concepts and day-to-day life with racial meaning, such approaches challenge the field of aesthetics to encounter its methodologies with a fresh look. How can aesthetics rethink itself by rethinking race and empire? What shape do aesthetic themes take in light of the historical, spatial, imaginative, (...) affective, sensory, and sexual registers of racial subjectivity and the pervasiveness of racist and neocolonial constellations? How do art and the aesthetic reflect, or critically engage, racialization? What forms and idioms enable us to articulate the racial ethics and politics that shape our various conscious and unconscious aesthetic projects? (shrink)

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Rancière's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a social movement and hunger strike organized for educational justice in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. This serves as a context for understanding how educational provisions are linked to the (...) class='Hi'>aesthetic distribution of perception within the neoliberal city. It also serves as a powerful example of how these orders of perception are resisted and subverted at the local level by aesthetic and affective means. Through the Little Village hunger strike the essay argues that while Rancière allows us to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the political, he falls short in addressing tactical and/or affective considerations. The essay concludes by seeking to extend the critical efficacy of Rancière's dissensus through a rendering of tactical affect within Deleuzian metaphysics. (shrink)

De-extinction technology aims to bring extinct species back into existence, often with the goal of releasing created organisms into natural environments. In this paper, I argue that there are aesthetic reasons to avoid engaging in de-extinction and release projects, even if they pass moral permissibility criteria. The strength of these reasons depends on conclusions regarding species authenticity – a problem that arises at the intersection of de-extinction technology and the ‘species problem’ in the philosophy of biology. Since species authenticity (...) affects the perceived naturalness of ‘natural’ environments, and thus the aesthetic judgments thereof, I contend that there will be negative aesthetic consequences of de-extinction efforts that ought to be further explored before such projects move forward. (shrink)

Continuing from Part A (2016), in which we discuss the semiotic foundation for designing a virtual museum of Byzantine art, Part B presents an applied methodology for the representation of cultural artifacts through virtual technologies and semiotic techniques. We discuss how our semiotic model, case study semiosphere, contributes to design and evaluation research of such unique art-form representation and why the approach contributes as a whole to the field of Virtual Heritage (VH). Theorizing further the design implications integrating the overall (...) approach including the evaluation experiment of three VH applications with the participation of young users and its semiotic analysis, we formulate design guidelines that can be applied also to other types of cultural heritage and art. (shrink)

This paper explores how the virtuous aesthetic cosmopolitan—one actively engaged in cultivating an authoritative appreciation for culturally unfamiliar works or traditions of art, in a manner informed by moral cosmopolitan principles—engages with the ‘exotic’ artwork in a manner that is both morally responsible and aesthetically discerning. After providing an overview of philosophical cosmopolitanism and the aesthetic cosmopolitan’s project, I consider in depth a particular example: the music of Mauritanian singer Noura Mint Seymali as encountered by an unaccustomed (...) listener. I explore potential problematic responses to the work, including both chauvinistic and exoticizing responses. I then consider possible strategies for alternative responses, informed by the aesthetic and hermeneutic theories of Hume, Gadamer, and Charles Taylor. Having revealed deficiencies with these alternatives, I go on to argue that the cosmopolitan’s best strategy is a mode of appreciation that is ‘conversational’ in nature, an open-ended approach modeled on an exchange between the appreciator and an other-cultural interlocutor. In proposing such a model, I draw on the work of Kwame Appiah and Maria Lugones, as well as Anthony Laden’s recent work on conversational norms. (shrink)

On 24 July 2012, the Sansha People’s Government was established on an anthropogenic island in the South China Sea, more than 350 kilometers from the southernmost point of Hainan Province. Sansha is the PRC’s smallest city, occupying roughly ten square kilometers on Woody Island and housing a population of just over a thousand; at the same time, it is also the PRC’s largest city, symbolically laying claim to thousands of kilometers of space in the South China Sea. Alongside the ambitious (...) logistical and military projects to build Sansha into part of China, highlighting an official shift from temporal to territorial nationalism, a corresponding state aesthetic project has consolidated in citizens’ minds a distant island that most will never see. The resulting cultural products portray a new addition of territory as an eternal part of China, while a remote island is constructed as an integral yet also mystical part of the nation-state. Examining artistic portrayals of the island across mediums including film, poetry, and painting, this article critically analyzes newly emerging trends in state and popular nationalism in China today. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of my work in philosophy from my first book on Friedrich Schiller and the political sublime to my most recent project on listening to traumatic forms of violence. Starting with a reflection on the autobiographical character of philosophy, I propose to take up the question of an aesthetic dimension of philosophical critique, where aesthetics is understood as an always already embodied perspective on the world, on truth, and on philosophical activity, as well as (...) an always already political realm, where the distribution of sense pre-determines our approach and articulation of experience. Departing from aesthetics understood and deployed as critique, the paper moves on to ask about the specific frameworks of sense or grammars that determine in advance the conditions of audibility in the realms of memory-building and history-making—particularly in those contexts where historical, political, and institutional forms of violence produce silencing and erasure. Putting in dialogue the latter with decolonial studies, I interpret “traumatic violence” as a colonizing form of violence, understanding that one of its central aspects is that it is not only an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible as such. In this context, my project on grammars of listening seeks to carefully unpack these complex intersections while also explaining why I believe that a radical form of listening is an essential subversive/imaginative strategy against traumatic/colonial violence. (shrink)

Although the first ‘pragmatist aesthetics’ was devised by John Dewey in his Art as Experience, Richard Shusterman has been the only scholar to use the notion of “pragmatist aesthetics” in his Pragmatist Aesthetics. In this paper, I show that Dewey already refuses the gap between the practices of the ‘artworld’ and that of everyday life. In Art as Experience, he criticizes the ‘museum conception’ of art to argue that some aesthetic experiences in our daily life have the same essential (...) structure as the experience of art. While Rorty has revised Dewey’s basic premises, Shusterman has rather restated them. Since the end of the 1980s, he has started developing his own philosophical project, named ‘somaesthetics’. Shusterman’s somaesthetics does not simply incorporate many Deweyan views, but also develops them further. Accepting a Deweyan framework, Shusterman rejects the sharp dualism of the so-called “lower and higher levels of art”. What is more, he considers philosophy as an art of the living, embracing in somaesthetics the ancient Greek and Asian traditions. (shrink)

The whole of Marx's project confronts the narrow concerns of political philosophy by embedding it in social philosophy and a certain understanding of the aesthetic. From those of aesthetic production to the "poetry of the future" (as Marx writes in the Eighteenth Brumaire), from the radical modernism of bourgeois development to the very idea of association (which defined one of the main lines of tradition in the history of aesthetics), steady references to Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, and (...) the idea that bourgeois politics is nothing but a theatrical stage: the aesthetic has a prominent place in the constellation of Marx's thought. This book offers an original and challenging study of both Marx in the aesthetic, and the aesthetic in Marx. It differs from previous discussions of Marxist aesthetic theory as it understands the works of Marx themselves as contributions to thinking the aesthetic. This is an engagement with Marx's aesthetic that takes into account Marx's broader sense of the aesthetic, as identified by Eagleton and Buck-Morss - as a question of sense perception and the body. (shrink)

Aesthetics and Nature offers a clear and accessible introduction to the field of nature aesthetics. Glenn Parsons explores the current debates in the field, providing the reader with a thorough overview of the subject. The book situates nature aesthetics in relation to two principal influences: aesthetics' traditional project of understanding the value of art and current thought on the ethics of our relationship with nature. The book outlines five major approaches to understanding the aesthetic value of nature and (...) explores the aesthetic appreciation of nature as it occurs in wilderness, in gardens, and in the context of appreciating environmental art. The book also includes a study of the idea that conserving nature's beauty provides a compelling reason to preserve wilderness. This highly topical idea has deep implications for the importance of aesthetic value in our relationship to nature, and for the fate of nature itself. Combining a clear and engaging style with a sophisticated treatment of a fascinating subject, Aesthetics and Nature is a valuable contribution to contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to formulate an Ingardenian conception of the literary work’s aesthetic value. Following Mitscherling’s lead, I attempt to place Ingarden’s aesthetics within his overall phenomenological-ontological project. That is, I argue that Ingarden’s aesthetics can only be properly fathomed in the context of his ontological deliberations, since, as he himself often enunciated, all his philosophical investigations constitute a realist rejoinder to Husserl’s turn toward transcendental idealism. To this end, I bring together insights from his aesthetics (...) and ontology to establish a coherent account of values, where artistic and aesthetic values are analyzed as they manifest themselves in the literary work of art. By attending to the ontology of its aesthetic (and artistic) values, I argue, the literary work’s stratified formation becomes more explicit. Keywords: Roman Ingarden, aesthetic value, artistic value, the literary work of art, ontology, aesthetics. (shrink)

This contribution has two motives. In the first place an unorthodox reading of Gadamer's work is provided. This unorthodox reading differs from an orthodox reading that normally places Gadamer's thinking in a certain etimological and historical constellation. It is unorthodox in the sense that Gadamer's hermeneutics is interpreted as a creative contemporary answer to the Kantian project. It is argued that Gadamer interprets Kant's project of the three Critiques from the third to the first (in reverse gear). In (...) this process he starts (in contrast with Kant) with an aesthetical critique of the subjectivist cul de sac of Kant's concept of aesthetical consciousness and then broadens this critique (with the help of the aesthetical concept of play) to the spheres of history and language. In this process Gadamer also addresses ethical and epistemological issues. It is important to notice, though, that Gadamer reads aesthetical, ethical and epistemological issues as interdependent on one an other – with a remarkable emphasis on aesthetics. In the final section (the second motive) it is argued that this reading of Gadamer's aesthetical reconstruction of the Kantian project has interesting implications for other contexts – for instance the possibility for an authentic philosophy in South Africa, and more specifically in the Afrikaans world. (shrink)

This paper debates the new theories of philosophical and aesthetical discourse by applying them to Nietzsche’s thinking on art. The article consists of four general subjects, each of them focusing on an essential part of Nietzsche’s special relationship to art: 1) Art generated by the philosophical text itself, through the form of the fragment; 2) The artistic relationship as an interdisciplinary ground for philosophical knowledge of the world (especially as applied in Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s work); 3) A critical debate on (...) Wolfgang Welsch’s theory about the interdisciplinary aspects of the philosophical and aesthetic discourse; 4) The backgrounds of Nietzsche’s aesthetics project explained in Claus Zittel’s theory on Nietzsche’s “aesthetic turn.” Thus, Nietzsche’s thinking is defined as a relationist project, emphasizing the “self-destruction dy- namic” of his aesthetical perspectivism. (shrink)

There is a rich history in early critical theory of attempting to harness the power of aesthetic imagination for the purposes of political liberation. But this approach has largely faded to the background of contemporary critical theory, eclipsed lately by attempts to reconstruct and apply norms of rationality to processes of democratic will formation à la Habermas. This paper represents a small attempt to return the aesthetic element to its proper place within critical theory, by investigating the (...) class='Hi'>aesthetic aspects of certain forms of resistance to technological domination, forms of resistance that become “embodied” in technologies themselves. The phenomena of customization and personalization of technologies, although already co-opted in a variety of ways, are examples of such resistance. I begin then, by specifying the conventional method of understanding technological domination: the differentiation thesis. I then show how this understanding of technological development fails to grasp the reality of technologies as they are embodied in social contexts. A more accurate understanding of these contexts demonstrates that aesthetic imagination plays an important role in politicizing technologies, and enrolling these technologies themselves in the project of resisting the general phenomenon of technological domination. This helps us begin to understand what it might mean to translate the insights of early critical theory into a contemporary critical praxis. (shrink)

Experimental Philosophy (X-Phi) is now a fully-fledged methodological project with applications in almost all areas of analytic philosophy, including, as of recently, aesthetics. Another methodological project which has been attracting attention in the last few years is conceptual engineering (CE). Its areas of implementation are now diverse, but as was the case initially with experimental philosophy, aesthetics has unfortunately been left out (or perhaps aestheticians have failed to pay attention to CE) until now. In this paper, I argue (...) that if conceptual engineers are interested in expanding their project to the field of aesthetics, which would greatly benefit the field, then they should rely on the existing experimental work of aestheticians. Experimental philosophers have only recently started to join forces with conceptual engineers in various fields, as well as to explore the methodological implications of such an alliance. This paper goes a step further by not only arguing that CE has potential in aesthetics, but that the way to realize this potential is to piggyback, so to speak, on the work of experimental aestheticians. In other words, instead of building a CE project in aesthetics from the ground up, this paper describes the support that CE can and should derive from current experimental aesthetics, thereby making the former’s development more efficiently realizable. Furthermore, I argue that doing so would also be beneficial to experimental aesthetics. Currently, the integration of X-Phi to the wider field of aesthetics is losing ground because certain objections—notably, the objection that X-Phi cannot be of relevance to normative questions—have not been properly refuted. By pairing up with a normative programme like CE, though, experimental aestheticians should finally be able to put these objections to rest. (shrink)

The project of world-making is carried out not only by professional world-makers, such as designers, architects, and manufacturers. We are all participants in this project through various decisions and judgments we make in our everyday life. Aesthetics has a surprisingly significant role to play in this regard, though not sufficiently recognized by ourselves or aestheticians. This paper first illustrates how our seemingly innocuous and trivial everyday aesthetic considerations ha ve serious consequences which determine the quality of life (...) and the state ofthe world, for better or worse. This power ofthe aesthetic should be harnessed to direct our cumulative and collective enterprise toward better world-making. Against objections to introducing a norma ti ve dimension to everyday aesthetics, 1 argue for the necessity of doing so and draw an analogy between everyday aesthetics and art-centered aesthetics which has dominated modern Western aesthetics discourse. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I examine the development of autonomy in the philosophical works of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. After outlining the centrality of this development to what I call, following Robert Pippin, "philosophical modernity," I show that the figure of genius described in Kant's third Critique becomes the model for the "aesthetic" versions of autonomy articulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger under the names of "sovereignty" and "authenticity" respectively. According to these more recent formulations, autonomy is not understood as rational (...) self-legislation, but as a quasi-artistic "self-creation." Moreover, in each of these versions of aesthetic autonomy, I claim that in spite of a disavowal of mimesis understood in a Platonic sense, an implicit reliance is placed upon the operations of a "higher" sense of mimesis, a mimesis of freedom, that enables autonomy to be exemplified and, paradoxically, "imitated." For Kant, this mimesis of freedom accounts for both the continuity and discontinuity of art-historical traditions. In Nietzsche and Heidegger, however, this covert deployment of mimesis has implications for our understanding of historicity more generally, and the relationship between history and modernity in particular. After showing what these implications are, I comment on the problems and limits of "aesthetic autonomy," especially when it is understood politically or collectively, and utterly decoupled from any moral constraints. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of art generally assumes that aesthetic experience is constituted by a certain ontological-phenomenological structure: the apprehension by a subject of an object. This article explores an underexamined critique of this philosophical model found within the black intellectual and artistic tradition. I will specifically focus on the version of this critique proposed by the similarly underexamined black philosophers Adrian Piper and Fred Moten. This critique, which I dub the subjectivizing concern, takes issue with the notion of ontological distance (...) that I argue defines the subject-object model. I define ontological distance as the removal and alienation of the subject’s fundamental sense of self from that of so-called objects. The subjectivizing concern holds that this distance is not value neutral. Rather, the subject-object model is considered to be directly entwined with projects and practices of aesthetic and extraesthetic racism and antiblackness. After offering Piper’s own model of aesthetic experience—which she dubs catalysis—as an alternative, I propose three possible ways in which the subject-object model can be conceived as tied to antiblack racism. (shrink)

The article discusses the technical image, a central concept in Vilém Flusser’s later main work Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985a). After identifying its various dimensions, the analysis frames the concept as an amalgamation of disciplines, theories, and artistic practices the cultural philosopher Flusser explored during the 1960s and especially the 1970s. In particular, the field of information aesthetics developed by Max Bense and Abraham A. Moles, among others, as well as artistic video practices in France and the United (...) States played an important role in both Flusser’s biography and the formation of his technical image concept. At the same time, in Flusser’s cultural philosophy the technical image is the condition and result of a new kind of human imagination, which in this paper is specified as ‘projective imagination’. (shrink)

Abstract:The purpose of this introduction is to set out the scope and content of this special issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education, which takes Aesthetic Education through Narrative Art as its subject. I begin by delineating the “aesthetic” itself and then identifying the denotation of “aesthetic education” with which the issue’s authors are concerned. This is followed by a characterization of “narrative art” that belies my preference for representation rather than art and draws attention to (...) the multiple modes of representation that constitute complex narratives. I next turn to the title of the special issue, an abridged version of Aesthetic Education through Narrative Art and its Relevance for the Humanities, which is an installation research project funded by the Croatian Science Foundation to investigate the relationship between aesthetic and artistic values on the one hand and ethical, political, and social values on the other. The project is multidisciplinary among philosophy, criminology, film studies, and cognitive science, and three of the authors are members of the project team. I conclude by introducing each of the six articles, which employ two approaches, one from philosophical aesthetics and the other from critical criminology. (shrink)