This book deals with the organizational use of aesthetic means. Based on the idea that organizations are systems of communication, it is shown that consciously or not, organizations have always used aesthetic means to reinforce their communication.

After centuries of symbolic and political oppression, Galicia has been recognized by the Spanish constitution as a historic nationality. However, despite a certain degree of political autonomy, Galician identity is threatened by increasing homogenization in the economic, social, cultural and linguistic fields. In the early 1990s the aesthetic movement Bravú constructed an aesthetic community, sustained by an ideological project, and with the aim to, on the one hand, prevent Galician culture from becoming folklore stuck in a time warp (...) and, on the other hand, to validate Galician identity. The Bravú artists refused the historically inherited outsider position and contributed to a reinvention of Galician identity and of a political ideal within a cosmopolitan, internationalist framework and by reversing social stigmas through their works and performances. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉLe goût, en tant que faculté d'appréciation esthétique, implique un individu, et pourtant suppose une communauté. Dans cet article, nous constatons qu'une disposition singulière à l’égard des objets de goût est conditionnée par le consentement d'autrui et par l’être-avec autrui. De cette façon, une communauté esthétique est établie. Cette idée de communauté esthétique remonte au sensus communis de Kant et à la notion de préservation de Heidegger : dans les deux cas, c'est la présence d'une communauté qui conditionne l'expérience esthétique.

This paper argues that community gardens, in addition to being economically practical, offer a promising example of an environment that fosters the new sensibility. After exploring Marcuse’s new sensibility and his critique of aesthetic experience under capitalism, the paper turns to some empirical studies of the benefits of the aesthetic qualities of community gardening. These studies correspond to Marcuse’s proposition that aesthetic environments can play a role in challenging domination. The last section of this paper considers how (...) those involved in the D-Town Farm in Detroit self-consciously assert the community garden as a political project that challenges domination. (shrink)

This article’s main thesis is that aesthetic communication has evolved from animal social play to forms of extraordinary complexity such as traditional arts, helping to preserve and transfer survival oriented information in a preverbal, or embodied form. Following this line of argument, aesthetic communication provides the basis for an adaptive modeling of reality wherein the agents engaged simulate potential exchanges and outcomes with factual or fictive entities, further enhancing – by proxy – their ability to predict (...) and adapt to natural and intentional contingencies. By means of aesthetic communication human cognition has become distributed, i.e. off-loaded in the practices, customs and emotional templates readily available in culture. In this light, the decline of traditional societies and the isolation of art practices that results from it, are to be considered subjects of scientific concern in addressing the societal and ecological crisis we confront today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Role of Glass in Interior Architecture:Aesthetics, Community, and PrivacyMatthew Ziff (bio)Design education seeks to infuse students with knowledge, skills, and attitudes, regarding the design of the built environment. In the areas of knowledge and attitude, sophistication and competence are developed through both practice (largely carried out in the design studio environment), and engagement with critical analysis (largely carried out in seminar classes and traditional lecture format class environments). (...) For design students the world of design is both to be known and understood, and to be created, at their own studio desk. In order to both know and create design, students often behave like nocturnal predators, seeking what is necessary in a mode that is often unobserved, and then returning to digest their catch, to produce responsive and synthetic work. One arena in which design students find rich fields of information is that of material characteristics. Materials used in the design and construction of the built environment form a significant portion of the skeleton of a designer's body of knowledge, skills, and attitudes toward design. A current hotbed of material character and application is that of the world of glass. This essay is an exploration of some of the issues that the architectural uses of glass raise from the point of view of design student exploration.Materials evoke physical and psychological responses. Human beings are complex creatures and an individual's response to specific material applications can be unpredictable. Even so, it is reasonable to expect that there are shared attitudes that form the basis for responses to the physical character of the built environment. From delight, to confusion, materials used in the architecture of things large and small, from buildings to fountain pens, contain literal meaning, or expression of method, as well as possible symbolic and cultural meaning. The contemporary use of glass, particularly in interior architecture, presents a vivid arena for emotional and intellectual stimulation and response. [End Page 10]Glass planes that are sheer, opaque, translucent, colorful, brittle, imposing in mass, irregular in surface texture, flawlessly smooth, deformed through casting or by application of pressure and heat, are being used to create spaces that convey ambiguous relationships between private experience and public display. What is an ambiguous relationship? It is one to which a reasonable response is a high degree of uncertainty regarding the course of action one might take, or in the degree of understanding of the context one can develop. To know that the stair in the train station leads to track 4 is a condition that can be created by the use of unambiguous design; a visual connection from where one has to make a choice of paths to follow to the destination, track 4, creates a clear understanding of where track 4 is to be found. If track 4 can be seen from the position at which a choice is required, then certainty, clarity, is possible, if not probable. Visual connection is exactly what clear glass allows, and provides, yet ambiguity results because of the physical, hard barrier, transparency aside. "I can see track 4, but I cannot get there". The clarity provided by being able to see through glass, or even by being able to see light coming through translucent glass, is not sufficient to offset the uncertainty, or the mixed message, of not being able to get there, to touch what we can see.Glass in interiors offers a tactile and sensory titillation; the excitement of knowing that with a single swing of a hammer, or an umbrella handle, the beautiful sheet of curved frosted lemon ice colored tempered glass can be shattered into fragments.Windows have long been the predominant interior and exterior architectural element in which glass has played a major role. The glass used in Windows on the World, the famous restaurant atop the World Trade Center, destroyed during its collapse, and the glass used in a simple double hung window in a one story ranch house each share architectural duties of providing view from inside to outside, light transmission from outside to inside, heat gain, and acoustical isolation. Human eyes are sometimes described as "windows to the soul," which suggests the ability to... (shrink)

The paper analyses how some types of postmodern art have been used as a means of copying by the aid of humour with the unpleasant restrictions and changes of the way of life during the emergency and alert states in Romania. Artă Reinterpretată is a Facebook page that offers posts on various aspects of life during the pandemics quarantine and lockdown, including isolation or exploiting love, couple and family difficulties; during the relaxation measurement and, finally, during rights restriction for those (...) whom do not have The Green Covid Card. It does so by reinterpreting classical paintings, by adding to them a text or an image or both and thus creating a humourist situation meant to ease upon the hardships of a situation we cannot change. (shrink)

In its comprehensive overview of Alain Locke's pragmatist philosophy this book captures the radical implications of Locke's approach within pragmatism, the critical temper embedded in Locke's works, the central role of power and empowerment of the oppressed and the concept of broad democracy Locke employed.

Philosophers often characterize discourse in general as aiming at some sort of convergence (in beliefs, plans, dispositions, feelings, etc.), and many views about aesthetic discourse in particular affirm this thought. I argue that a convergence norm does not govern aesthetic discourse. The conversational dynamics of aesthetic discourse suggest that typical aesthetic claims have directive force. I distinguish between dynamic and illocutionary force and develop related theories of each for aesthetic discourse. I argue that the illocutionary (...) force of aesthetic utterances is typically invitational because its dynamic force is influenced by a ‘communal’ norm. I draw on dynamic pragmatics to develop a formal account of this dynamic force that explains why invitation has pride of place in aesthetic conversation. It turns out that the end of aesthetic discourse is not convergence but a distinctive form of community, a kind of harmony of individuality, that is compatible with aesthetic disagreement. If this is right, then convergence theories of aesthetic and normative discourse, and of conversation in general, need to be revised. (shrink)

In my general aim to probe a non-reductionist Philosophy of Cognitive Enhancement, considering social self-other relations and the epistemic 2PP in social syn-aesthetic tuning-ins, synchronisations and tuning-outs, this paper amplifies the Aristotelian common sense concept κοινὴ αἲσθησις2 by analysing the concept and metaphor of “resonance”3 in contemporary debates on >resonance< as acoustic and multimodal figure of thought. Resonance as shown in scientific models derived from acoustics will be applied to an aesthetic comunity of sensing and making music together (...) as explored in Alfred Schütz, as well as in social relations in social psychology. Finally, this paper puts resonance to test as well in technical atunements of social relations and closes with the necessary resistance to imposition of social resonance, introduced in this paper as xenoresonance. (shrink)

In its comprehensive overview of Alain Locke's pragmatist philosophy this book captures the radical implications of Locke's approach within pragmatism, the critical temper embedded in Locke's works, the central role of power and empowerment of the oppressed and the concept of broad democracy Locke employed.

Since the publication of Between Facts and Norms, Habermas’s concept of communicative power has been the topic of significant discussion. This article contributes to this conversation by examining Habermas’s account of what makes communication powerful. I argue that Habermas’s conception of communicative power describes a nonviolent and noninstrumental mode of acting and being with others in language. This mode of engagement underwrites a conception of power that is structurally different from willing, one that builds meaningful worlds and (trans-)forms those (...) engaging in communicative procedures. In drawing out this aspect of Habermas’s conception, I show that he is not a rationalist and proceduralist whose account of communicative procedures protects decision-making from irrational aesthetic powers. Rather, he presents communication as a mimetic achievement, a set of aesthetic practices and experiences that affectively alter its participants. With this position, Habermas makes an important contribution to and not just against the analysis of the aesthetic dimensions of political life. In casting communication as a mimetic achievement, Habermas presents an account of how communication opens worlds and forms subjects. Yet since these aspects of communication arrive in linguistic form, he can also examine affective and aesthetic experiences within discursive procedures. We can understand world-opening and aesthetic (trans-)formation as an essential part of democratic politics while also identifying the perspectives and resources by which actors can reflect on and critically evaluate whether an opinion is justified or whether a political project is worth pursuing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 1-18 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Inquiry in Education:Community,Transcendence, and the Meaning of Pedagogy Hanan A. Alexander What does it mean to understand education as an art, to conceive inquiry in education aesthetically, or to assess pedagogy artistically? Answers to these queries are often grounded in Deweyan instrumentalism, neo-Marxist critical theory, or postmodern skepticism that tend to fall prey to (...) the paradoxes of radical relativism and extreme subjectivism. 1 This essay offers an alternative, communitarian account of education as an art and a neo-Kantian approach to aesthetic inquiry in education that avoids these difficulties.I begin by examining the emergence of aesthetic inquiry in education in the context of the larger qualitative revolution in educational research. The struggle to justify the qualitative turn in educational thought was initially framed in terms of two influential doctrines: that cognition and affect on the one hand, and truth, beauty, and goodness on the other, can be clearly distinguished from one another. Qualitative methods were conceived as an alternative research paradigm — a new epistemology — in keeping with Thomas Kuhn's influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2 Qualitative research, on this account, is a cognitive endeavor aimed at discovering a form of knowledge no less valid and reliable than that produced by quantitative methodologies. This way of framing the discussion led to the dichotomizing of positivist and postpositivist epistemologies, one embracing absolutism, objectivism, and rationalism, the other relativism, subjectivism, and romanticism. 3 This approach succeeded in pointing to some serious flaws in the prevailing positivist account of social research, yet it left qualitative inquiry dependent on versions of epistemological relativism and subjectivism that philosophers of knowledge have shown to be self-contradictory and incoherent. 4 [End Page 1]Conceiving of pedagogy in aesthetic terms challenges the prevailing positivist epistemology on a deeper level because it questions the accepted distinctions between thinking and feeling, and between truth, beauty, and goodness. If art can be conceived as a form of cognitive inquiry in addition to affective expression, then the appreciation and assessment of education as art requires not merely a new research paradigm or an alternative epistemology. Rather, it entails a reshuffling of our very conception of the relations between science, art, and ethics.These concepts can be reconceived to avoid the paradoxes of radical relativism and extreme subjectivism if we recognize with Iris Murdoch that sovereignty belongs to communal conceptions of a transcendent good. Educational arts empower people to express, appreciate, and critique collective conceptions of goodness, and artistic criticism of pedagogy celebrates a sacred dimension in educational thought and practice. 5 This approach occasions a fresh look not only at the practice, appreciation, and assessment of pedagogy, but also at the very meaning of the concept of education and the sorts of inquiry that can fruitfully inform its practice. Two Dogmas of Educational Research Two dogmas have dominated educational research for most of this century: the idea that there exists a clear disjunction between the cognitive and affective domains; and the supposed radical independence from one another of truth, beauty, and goodness. 6 According to a popular view rooted in these doctrines, the search for truth is a cognitive affair governed by science, while ethics and the arts are tied to the emotions and the humanities. Inquiry into the former is objective — reliability depends on method not researcher — and into the latter, subjective — results can vary according to interpreter. In this attitude, the cognitive domain dominates the public arena through the influence and prestige of science and measurement. 7Until the middle 1970s, behavioral and social research in education expressed these dichotomies in the distinction made between quantitative and qualitative research. The former was thought to be scientific and objective, the latter, humanistic and subjective. As qualitative inquiry came into its own in the 1980s, its proponents sought justification and legitimization in accord with cognitive dominance. 8 First, they argued that qualitative research methods had checks against error as rigorous as its quantitative counterparts. 9 Later, the cognitive domain... (shrink)

This book is about the philosophy or nature of aesthetic values and beauty.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Communicative Implications of Kant’s Aesthetic TheoryThomas HoveIn recent discussions of aesthetic theory, critics who raise social, cultural, and political concerns have issued important challenges to the Kantian legacy. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) continues to be widely regarded as one of the founding documents of modern aesthetic theory. But the arguments he laid out in that notoriously enigmatic work remain controversial on a (...) variety of fronts. One of those arguments concerns his distinction between pleasures that are beautiful and those that are agreeable. According to Kant’s definition, what makes experiences of the beautiful special is that they have a potentially communicable universal validity. By contrast, pleasures that are merely agreeable are incommunicable and remain confined to private sensation. Philosophers have found this distinction problematic for a variety of reasons. Their detailed commentaries have examined the intricate logical and conceptual difficulties that Kant’s theory raises (see Allison 2001; Guyer 1982, 1997, 2002; Kalar 2000; Wenzel 2005). On another front, sociologists and cultural critics—whom I will broadly refer to as “social critics”—typically raise concerns about the theory’s hidden social implications (Bourdieu 1984; Eagleton 1990; Smith 1988; Shumway 2005). Specifically, they question Kant’s proposal that judgments about the beautiful ought to have universal validity. Taking an external standpoint, they tend to regard aesthetic judgments either as the peculiar habits of [End Page 103] specific social classes, or as badges of hierarchical distinction, or as weapons in symbolic struggles for cultural dominance.To suggest why Kant’s theory is worth revisiting in the wake of such critiques, the following analysis defends his theoretical effort to distinguish the experience of the beautiful from that of the agreeable. This feature of his aesthetic theory highlights an alternative to the cognitive and practical concerns that social critics emphasize. In particular, I indicate how Kant’s aesthetic theory offers directions for the effort to explain how aesthetic experience promotes communicative sociability. By emphasizing this theme, I hope to supplement the rival emphasis that social critics place on the Kantian legacy’s elitist undercurrents. Social critiques characteristically overlook the affective type of sociability to which aesthetic experience gives rise. This oversight occurs because those critiques tend to privilege the theoretical and practical dimensions of communication. In the process, they disregard the special types of validity claims that are unique to aesthetic discourse. Following the lead of his academic precursors Meier and Baumgarten, Kant tried to define a possible third mental “faculty” that differs from cognitive and practical reason (see Henrich 1992, 31–36). But the difficulty of defining this third faculty, much less determining its existence, continues to vex both philosophers and communication theorists.Kant’s Account of Aesthetic Experience and Its CriticsIn the opening sections of the Critique of Judgment, Kant attempts to establish the independence of aesthetic judgment from theoretical and practical cognition. Those faculties are concerned with cognitive and moral concepts. By contrast, the aesthetic properties that concern taste judgments have a unique ontological and epistemological status. Kant’s argument about that status is itself enormously complex, involving as it does an intricate network of idiosyncratically defined concepts (for example, the understanding, the imagination, intuition, representations, objects, etc.). But to avoid getting lost in those intricacies, we can bracket them by simply referring to aesthetic “experience.” Also, we can concentrate on the two properties that distinguish aesthetic experience from other kinds of experience. First, aesthetic properties relate to the feelings of pleasure that are aroused by certain encounters with objects. Second, aesthetic properties are “merely subjective” (Kant 2000, 75). They do not have an objective status because we cannot associate the feelings they arouse with determinate concepts and objects. [End Page 104] As Miles Rind puts it, “in making a cognitive judgment one requires everyone to conceptualize an object in a certain way, while in making a judgment of taste one requires others to share one’s liking for an object” (Rind 2000, 83). In sum, Kant differentiates aesthetic judgment from both theoretical and practical cognition because it is radically subjective and because its unique grounding lies in feelings of pleasure and displeasure.Social critics tend to downplay the idea that there... (shrink)

In hisCritique of the Power of Judgement, Kant explicates the creation of works of fine art (schöne Kunst) in terms of aesthetic ideas. His analysis of aesthetic ideas claims that they are not concepts (Begriffe) and are therefore not definable or describable in determinate language. Nevertheless, Kant claims that aesthetic ideas are communicable via spirit (Geist), a special mental ability he associates with artistic genius. This paper argues that Kant's notion ofGeistis central to his analysis of fine (...) art's expressive power. The notion ofGeistconstitutes a conceptual link between Kant's aesthetic theory and that of G. W. F. Hegel, for whose analysisGeistis the subject. (shrink)

In Mao’s era, China’s policy makers and intellectuals viewed aesthetic experience and thought as handmaidens in the service of the political order. As China opened up and engaged more intensely with modern traditions of the West, aesthetic thinkers such as Li Zehou critiqued the subordinated role of aesthetics and reasserted notions of aesthetic autonomy and liberal humanism, calling for the separation of arts and literature from political, social, and moral concerns. This truncated aesthetic view stems from (...) a modernist version of Western aesthetics that favors sense and sensibility as the sole sources of aesthetic value—a view that considerably diminishes the horizon of concerns inherent in traditional and modern Chinese aesthetic thoughts. This article seeks to recapture a repoliticized aesthetics by considering the ways early twentieth-century Chinese thinkers linked aesthetic thoughts to moral and political considerations in the reconstruction of China as a modern nation-state. Instead of transcendent, pure aesthetics over and above political processes and social experience, prominent aesthetic thinkers like Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, and Lu Xun invoked traditional Chinese aesthetic legacies and reconsidered intimate and necessary ties between aesthetic categories and broader concerns about cultural crises, moral reform, and nation building. (shrink)

Uno de los motivos recurrentes del pensamiento contemporáneo, es la indagación sobre el concepto, la representación y la valoración de la comunidad como una dimensión de la experiencia, en particular en su incidencia política/impolítica. Pero "comunidad" se ha manifestado como un "semantema" elusivo, es decir, una familia de nociones y asociaciones significativas, que abren y complejizan más y más la búsqueda de un concepto preciso, hasta empujarnos hacia las típicas "vías negativas" para la caracterización o definición del mismo. A modo (...) de hipótesis, sin pretender con ello construir un esquema abarcador, sostendré que hay un núcleo estético en ese semantema, aludiendo con "estética" a la presencia, en el punto pivote de la constelación que delimita "lo comunitario", de términos como sonido/silencio, diferencia, doble, forma, identidad, imagen y semejanza. Se trata mayormente, como es evidente, de significaciones construidas sobre los planos auditivo y visual de lo sensorio. Como una especificación de dicha hipótesis, ensayaré la elaboración de una noción de comunidad a partir de la pregunta acerca de cuándo hay comunidad. La respuesta a articular, es que hay comunidad cuando hay imagen, esto es, corporización de una semejanza y de un sentido, capaces de conjurar tanto la amenaza de lo informe como la de la forma sin semejanza. El fundamento último de esta hipótesis, es que nuestro ser-en-común originario toma consistencia en el plano de lo sensible porque se vincula a la insuficiencia de toda representación para subordinarlo a un concepto, pues se presenta aquí, entre comunidad y concepto, la misma distancia infranqueable que hay entre la existencia y su teorización. One of the recurrent motifs of contemporary thought is the inquiry about the concept, representation and valuation of community as a dimension of experience, particularly in its political/impolitic influence. But "community" has proved to be an elusive semanteme, i.e., a family of notions and significant associations that make the search for a precise concept very complex, pushing us to the typical "negative ways" for its characterization or definition. As a hypothesis, and with no intention of building an all-encompassing frame, I will hold that there is an aesthetic nucleus to this semanteme, understanding "aesthetic" as the presence of terms such as sound/silence, difference, double, shape, identity, image and likeness, occurring at the very pivot point of the constellation that defines "the communitarian". It refers mostly to significances related to the hearing and seeing senses. Following this hypothesis, I will try to define a notion of community answering the question of when a community occurs. The answer to this being that there is a community when there is an image; that is, the embodiment of a likeness and a sense that can thwart the threat of what is shapeless or of a shape with no likeness. The ultimate foundation of this hypothesis is that our original being-in-common becomes consistent to the senses because of its inability to subordinate to a concept, as happens with any representation, being the unbridgeable distance between community and its concept the same there is between existence and its theorization. (shrink)

Due to the complexity of aesthetic ideas and the lack of a determinate concept that is adequate to the experience, we search for the words to describe our encounters with art. Sometimes, that search is in vain, and we have difficulty expressing ourselves. In such cases, we are so taken aback by the sheer amount of cognitive activity spurred by our aesthetic experience that we are silenced by art. Instead of viewing what happens in judgments of taste as (...) “discursively mute,” as does Joseph Cannon in his essay, “The Intentionality of Judgments of Taste in Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” I will show how the excess of aesthetic experience has the potential to foster sociability, communication, and ultimately, community. .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 58-83 [Access article in PDF] Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning Marc Redfield Of the many relics of the Romantic era that continue to shape our (post)modernity, the nation-state surely ranks among the most significant. Two decades ago Benedict Anderson commented that "'the end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight" [IC 3], and the intervening years (...) have made it increasingly clear that the developments and processes we summarize as "globalization" operate in mingled synchrony and tension with the political form of the nation-state. 1 That the nation-state should remain the premier vehicle of political and economic legitimation in an era dominated by American imperialism and international capital--forces that, of course, regularly and flagrantly violate the sovereignty of disadvantaged nations--is unsurprising if one accepts the continuing pertinency and power of a Western master-narrative of modernity, according to which the nation represents the emergence of a people into history and prefigures the global achievement of universal human concord. As the proper subject of history, the nation-state can prefigure history's end because, as David Lloyd writes, "the particularism of [nationalism's] contents, potentially in contradiction with the universalism of modernity, is subsumed in the formal congruence between its own narratives of identity, directed at one people, and the narrative of identity that universal history represents for humanity in general" ["Nationalisms" 178]. Lloyd goes on to note that the nation's intermediate status in this narrative--halfway between primitive tribalism and modernity's ever-deferred perpetual peace--accounts for nationalism's irreducibly double association with modernization and atavism. In consequence, the modernist paradigm continues to rule many skeptical or hostile accounts of nationalism, for so long as the nation-state is taken to supersede other political or social formations, the cosmopolitan critique fails to challenge "the fundamental philosophy of universal history that underwrites nationalism's inscription in modernity" ["Nationalisms" 177]. Indeed, both in the corporate media and in mainstream Western political discourse generally, nations and nationalisms are commonly treated as atavistic or progressive depending on the degree to which their behavior harmonizes with globalizing imperatives. That these imperatives emanate quite blatantly from Wall Street in no way seriously troubles the effectiveness of modernity as a narrative paradigm. 2Seeking to discredit universalizing narrative, much cultural criticism in recent years has exchanged cosmopolitanism and the abstract question of "nationalism" for an emphasis [End Page 58] on the contextual construction of national movements or identities. 3 This valuable body of work has sought to recover the particularity of cultural and socioeconomic circumstance, stressed the fundamental role of racism in colonialist contexts, and noted ways in which nationalist movements draw on or unleash forms of resistance that challenge representationalist politics. The pages that follow, however, remain focused on the nationalist fantasy proper to the discourse of modernity. Cultural critique can only profit from knowing as much as possible about the favored turns of the universal-historicist model, particularly since, as Lloyd and others have emphasized, this model is an aesthetic one that grants a world-historical role to "culture." The state, in a tradition that in its main lines runs from Schiller through Hegel and Matthew Arnold and is still very much alive today, represents the community to itself, thereby giving the community form and in a certain sense giving it an ethical imperative and a future: the state represents "our best self" [Arnold 99, passim], "the archetype of a human being" [Schiller 17], because it signifies the formal unification both of the citizen with the community and of the community with universal humanity. Because this unification is ideal rather than actual, it can be projected as the ethical terminus of history (that is, as the ideal of an accomplished modernity). The state's core mission thus becomes pedagogical: its job is to acculturate its subjects into citizens. The production of a docile citizenry thereby obtains an ethical aura and an aesthetic character, insofar as the artwork and the domain of aesthetic or "cultural" experience generally become... (shrink)

Once upon a time, a scholar, ascetic and relig-ious man named Abu Hamid Ibn Muhammad Ibn Muhammad al-Tusi al-Shafi'i al-Ghazali (AI-Ghazali, 1058-11 II) wrote a worl, called The Incoherence qf the Philosophers, 1\ clever philosopher, Abu AI-\Valid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Hushd (Averroes, 112li-1 ID8), responded to this by writing The IlIcolurence (!l the Inroherence. In IVhat is Art;;, Tolstoy refers to the importance of art in order to ridicule itl He notes the attention paid to art, music, theatre, filrn, (...) and books in the press. IIe notes the in\'(~stment of gm'ernments in the support of museums, theatres and the like. He notes the time spent by artists and perlilrmers in learning- their craft. He presents the most sardonic description of an opera rehearsal you will ever read. He describes the eHilrt and money poured into art as "stupefying", "repulsive", "a gigantic absurdity", and "utterly incomprehensible".~ I-Imv can art be so important that a peasant should have to sell his only cow to pay the taxes that maintain the artist-producer in grand luxury~. (shrink)

In this important new study, Pieter Duvenage shows that Habermas’s work on aesthetics, far from being marginal to his core concerns, is central to understanding and evaluating Habermas's entire theoretical enterprise. This important new study shows that Habermas's work on aesthetics is central to understanding and evaluating his entire theoretical enterprise. Duvenage demonstrates that, in the first phase of his intellectual career, Habermas emphasizes the communicative and societal relevance of art; in the second phase, the idea of a communicative aesthetics (...) is worked out in terms of a theory of rationality. Reveals that Habermas’s later work offers a third, albeit undeveloped, alternative that suggests a convergence of the two. Offers a critical perspective on the role of aesthetics in Habermas's work and proposes possible alternatives. (shrink)

We live in an age in which outer space has changed from a theme for flights of science fiction to the actual locus of exploration and travel.1 Space no longer has merely speculative significance for thinking about possible worlds; it has become a real factor in understanding the nature and conditions of the human world that we are constantly refashioning. Our entry into outer space brings with it changes in conditions and experience that require us to rethink the concepts through (...) which we comprehend environment and act environmentally. (shrink)

Cavell’s interest in aesthetic objects can be understood to be motivated by an interest in the nature of meaning and value. The idea is that perceptual objects considered as cultural artefacts under-determine the meaning and value attributed to them. The process involved in determining their meaning and value is essentially a creative one. Through his study of film, literature and music, Cavell could be said to indirectly address the axiomatic, or what is sometimes referred to as the bedrock, of (...) our value judgments. In being embedded within larger cultural commitments, such axioms are impenetrable to the traditional analytical approaches in Anglo-American philosophy. Cavell’s style of philosophy can be understood to have been pioneered to attempt to understand and clarify aspects of experience which elude traditional analytical methods. (shrink)

A general tension in contemporary aesthetics can be described as existing between objective truth claims and historical relativity. The former is generally represented by the Enlightenment approaches and its descendants that ground aesthetic judgment in rationality. The latter characterizes the postmodern appeal to historicity and the exposure of historical prejudice. Following mostly the hermeneutical philosophy of Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Dupré, this paper argues how aesthetic theory, defined by either pole, inadequately accounts for historicity. In response to this (...) critique, this paper attempts to navigate between these two poles in returning to an analysis of the nature of history and its phenomenological and ontological significance. It is in the very depth of the historical experience that aesthetics gains its greatest fecundity by means of its commitment to meaning and communication within history. (shrink)

One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing (...) aesthetic evaluations. And despite the wealth of attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary linguistic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context-sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment might turn out to be different from what they had in mind. (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)

For Bergson, creating a masterpiece and perceiving it amounts to an act of intuitive communication between the artist and the spectator. Both the artist and the viewer intuit the work of art, which is something other than their own personal history, something that belongs to both of them and at the same time exists independently from them. The Bergsonian concept of heterogeneous duration, which primarily refers to consciousness and living processes, is extended in this instance to artistic communication (...) as a process that unites creation and contemplation. Artistic creation and communication constitute an intimate ontological bonding wherein human beings actualize their ability to intuit and where an artist shares with the audience his or her deep emotions without revealing personal data. This process of creation and perception of art could be named artistic duration or artistic communication. This duration is created by a joint participation of more than one individual and represents duration that escapes the boundaries of one mind because it is created by more than one mind. The artist initiates a continuity of emotion, by expressing it in art and making us feel it when we admire the masterpiece. By perceiving it, we do not return to the artist’s time and re-live his or her artistic creation vicariously, but pick up where the artist left this creation and let it live further on in our soul. (shrink)

If a painting or a sculpture needs to be supplemented and explained by words, it means either that it has not fulfilled its function or that the public is deprived of vision. They had manufactured a technology of universal incomprehension. If one is uncomfortable with a commitment one’s theory is saddled with . . . one must reformulate one’s theory. These three citations define the scope and interest of my argument regarding twentieth-century formalist art and visual communication. Formalist art (...) “needs to be supplemented and explained in words” (Gabo) regarding reference and meaning and therefore fails as visual media, because formalists unwittingly “manufactured a technology of .. (shrink)

The Seducer's Diary. By Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) xv + 214 pp. $12.95, £9.95 paper. Christian Discourses: The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress. By Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) xvii + 489 pp. $55.00, £39.50 cloth. Without Authority. By Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (...) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) xix + 317 pp. $42.50, £35.00 cloth. (shrink)