Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds: Reclaiming an Unredeemed Utopian Motif

Abstract

Powerful and influential voices in the early 20th century, mainly from the European and American Left, were criticizing the institutional status of "aesthetic autonomy" as a pathological situation and proposing, as a utopian horizon, a fusion between the everyday and aesthetics. Today, in contrast, we are more impressed by the idea of a profound incompatibility between aesthetic experience, on the one side, and everyday life, on the other. This conviction, according to which a difficult-to-achieve exception brings together aesthetic experience and everyday life, is the starting-point for a threefold distinction that this essay will develop. This distinction enumerates three different types of situations in which aesthetic experience can occur under everyday conditions: there are, in the first place, those cases where aesthetic experience seems to impose itself, interrupting the undramatic flow of the everyday; there are, at the opposite end of a range of possibilities, situations where a longstanding familiarity with an object ends up turning into an aesthetic experience; finally, there are those cases where a change of the situational framework under which we experience the everyday seems to occur "behind our back," thus opening up the possibility of aesthetic experience.