Aestheticization Of Everyday Life Research Articles

Aestheticization of media communication in the context of social reality aestheticization.

Aestheticization of social reality is a multifaceted process that affects various areas of social space and manifests itself as a reconstruction of social relations, social practices and the knowledge. Despite the active use of the term «aestheticization» in the scientific space and in creative activity, the categorical essence of this term remains uncertain, and there is no comprehensive understanding of the essence of the process of aestheticization. In the focus of existing scientific researches in this area are particular manifestations of aestheticization: the aestheticization of politics, science, history, war, violence, death, the aestheticization of everyday life, etc. In our research, we resorted to the historical, epistemological and ontological foundations of aesthetics, which allowed us to suggest a general scientific vision of aestheticization as a macro-process of semantic reconstruction of social reality; develop its three-aspect structure, highlighting the perceptual, axiological and pragmatic aspects. The conceptual foundations of aestheticization thus formed, allowed us to further offer an understanding of the process of aestheticization of media communication that is currently essential. Its essence is to rely on sentient intelligence and smart emotions of the recipient in building the communicative process and in choosing its forms and means. In aestheticized media communication, visual-sensuous and expressively emotive elements dominate over rational ones; imagery, affect and effect are emphasized. By creating new sensually expressive and attractive mass images, media communication not only modifies the forms of sensory perception, but changes the structural archetypes of the modern «media man» and transforms social perception. This reveals the potential of aestheticization in the «fundamental ideological reconstruction» of society (T. Eagleton) through the «aesthetic modulation of the human psyche» (F. Schiller).

Фотография, социальные сети и современные ритуалы

Photography currently forms an integral part of communication on social networking sites and in messengers. Another topic that has become relevant is daily individual rituals, which are also associated with new media. Virtual communication, where messages can be addressed to a whole group of recipients at once, involves the establishment of new rituals or the transformation of the existing ones. In such communication, digital photo images are actively applied. In the present article, the author analyzes some modern practices of publishing photos on social networking sites and reveals their ritual functions. The study shows that photography on social networking sites is connected with the process of transformation of old rituals. The author highlights that photography on the Internet performs several basic ritual functions, namely the functions of socialization and integration, as well as the reproducing and psychotherapeutic functions. It has been found that such an important feature of a ritual as its stable and repeatable form, as applied to photography, is expressed in the development of canons of photographic images created and published for a particular purpose. Thus, the existing genres of visual arts (e.g. still life, Madonna and Child, etc.) are gaining newfound relevance, and so are the well-developed photography forms of mass media and popular science (e.g. personals, architectural and ethnographic photography, etc.). The result of the study is the conclusion that creation and publication of images on social networking sites contribute to the ritualization and aestheticization of everyday life and allow an average user to declare their existence in response to excessive images of media personalities in the visual space.

The mode of theatricality in the work of representatives of “Bu-Ba-Bu” group

The article deals with the phenomenon of theatricalization of the artistic picture of the world in the works of authors-representatives of the group “Bu-Ba-Bu”, (Yuriy Andrukhovych, Viktor Neborak, Oleksandr Irvanets) who carry out a large-scale renewal of Ukrainian literature by dramatizing reality. That is why the mode of theatricality best shows the basic artistic principles of the group (burlesque-balagan-buffoonery). The relevance of the study is due to the need to analyze the work of representatives of Bu-Ba-Bu in the mode of theatricality. The subject of research is the poetic features, the system of characters and the principles of characterization of the group. The purpose of this article is to identify the ideological identity of the literary work of the group “Bu-Ba-Bu” in terms of revealing the theatrical discourse, which provides the research novelty. Research methods: comparative, comparative-historical and descriptive were used. Results of the research. Yu. Andrukhovych’s great prose and O. Irvanets’ drama are considered in the context of the postmodern concept of “theater society”, which treats various forms of social and cultural life as a kind of performance, as well as in connection with the concept of camp, which is characterized by ironic reflection on mass culture and aestheticization of everyday life. Dimensions of theatricality are realized by groups primarily in the form of carnival, which is a means of overcoming postcolonial trauma and a special space of existence (active involvement of the public in theatrical action, blurring the line between “theater” and real life). Addressing the main tenets of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival revealed the peculiarities of the aesthetics of “crisis periods” in prose and drama of modern authors (opposition to official discourses, total freedom and familiarity, accentuation of the bodily “bottom”). Particular attention is paid to corporeality, which reveals carnival features (grotesqueness, fluidity, dynamism) and at the same time becomes a means of rehabilitating human freedom and vitalistic energy, correlating with postcolonial social context. It is proved that the national originality of artists’ creativity is manifested primarily in the constructive nature of the carnival, which, formally correlated with the rhizome, implicitly affirms the value vertical.

Linguistic images of modern parenthood on parenting websites

Contemporary socio-cultural transformations of family life can be observed in the area of non-specialist parental discourse in terms of both modern parenthood and the celebration of childhood. The new quality in the experience and creation of parenthood is noticeable especially in the communication performed with the help of Web 2.0 tools (which are currently among the most important platforms for the exchange of particularly valued “unscientific” – experience, because it is based on empirical knowledge). Internet messages (entries, posts, comments) create an involved parenting and glorify a small child as a subject of parental efforts in the context of post-hierarchical relationships, but they also serve to profile communities gathered around a superior idea or topic (e.g. eco-mum, modern mother, fitmum, dad in the city, dad at work, etc.). They also endorse the principle of the aestheticisation of everyday life, the messages are filled with linguistic humour and expose a non-standard way of thinking, matching perfectly the main trends of postmodern communication.

Логика поздней глобализации: сетевизация и геоэстетика

<p>В статье проводится социально-философское исследование функционирования внутренней логики поздней глобализации. Предметом рассмотрения становится завершающаяся глобализация. Трансформация современности предполагает ряд изменений в функционировании глобализационных процессов. Сетевизация и эстетизация повседневности принадлежат к их числу.</p><p>Обращение именно к этой стадии глобализационного развития позволяет ретроспективно определить некоторые из черт, обеспечивших успех универсалистского проекта в целом. Одним из критериальных отличий глобализованной современности становится сетевизация, имеющая пространственное измерение. Автор предлагает экскурс в историю понятия и его философской интерпретации для того, чтобы прояснить смысл современного концепта «геоэстетика», пришедшего на смену более традиционному представлению о «геофилософии».</p><p>Эстетическое измерение пространства становится последствием функционирования сетевизации. Это позволяет сделать вывод, что для понимания протекания глобализации в современности следует иметь в виду культурную логику сетевизации, для которой категории эстетического становятся ключевыми.</p><p>Статья обращается к концепции космодернизма, дающей философскую интерпретацию эстетизации пространственных измерений планеты. В ходе ее критического анализа делается ряд выводов о внутренней логике глобализации. Вектор на эстетизацию пространства представляется очевидным. Сетевизация при этом функционирует по пространственным, но не темпоральным законам. Слабым местом концепции признается акцентуация на сложности литературного языка, для которого инфраструктура сетей является преимуществом.</p><p>Автор делает вывод, что сетевизация на деле процесс гораздо более односторонний и унифицирующий все под единый стандарт, что необходимо учитывать при анализе национальных ценностных оснований любого общества, в том числе и российского.</p>

Performatywny charakter estetyki

Many lecturers of aesthetics feel that the subject of their lectures is not necessarily aesthetics, but history of aesthetics, the aesthetic views of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Hume and Burke, the British philosophers of taste and German romanticists. Does that mean that aesthetics feeds on its own past, is nurtured by reinterpretations of its classics, defends concepts and categories that inspire no one and do not open new cognitive perspectives? Does it mean that aesthetics is dead today, like Latin or Sanskrit, while its vision of art and beauty is outdated, invalid and totally useless? Aesthetics is a polysemous concept, which has never been sufficiently defined. It can determine a way of perceiving and experiencing the world that is specific for a given community, in other words, taste, yet it can also mean certain countries’ or regions’ contribution to aesthetic thought, to the aesthetic self-knowledge of man. Thus its dimension is practical, cultural and philosophical. Today aesthetics faces new challenges that it has to live up to; its major tasks include the defence of popular art, polishing the concept of aesthetic experience, aestheticization of everyday life and de-aestheticization of art, transcultural aesthetics and its approach to national cultures. In the book “Aesthetics: the Big Questions” (1998) Carolyn Korsmeyer reduces the main issues of contemporary aesthetics to six questions. The first question, old but valid, is a question about the definition of art. What is art? Nowadays everything can be art because art has shed all limitations, even the limitations of its own definition, and has gained absolute freedom. It has become absolute, as Boris Groys says. It has become absolute, because it has made anti-art a full-fledged part of art, and it has not been possible either to question or negate art since, as even the negation of art is art, legitimized by a more than 100 year long tradition, going back to the first ready-made by Marcel Duchamp in 1913. Today making art can be art and not making art can be art, as well, art is art and anti-art is art. The old question: “What is art?” loses its sense, and so does Nelson Goodman’s question: “When art?”. When does something become art? These questions are substituted by new ones: “What is art for you?”, “What do you expect from art?”. There can be a lot of answers, because defining art has a performative character. Louise Bourgeois has expressed the performative character of defining art in an even better way: “Art is whatever we believe to be art”. And for some reasons, which we do not fully realize ourselves, we want to make others share our belief.

Performative nature of aesthetics

Many lecturers of aesthetics feel that the subject of their lectures is not necessarily aesthetics, but history of aesthetics, the aesthetic views of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Hume and Burke, the British philosophers of taste and German romanticists. Does that mean that aesthetics feeds on its own past, is nurtured by reinterpretations of its classics, defends concepts and categories that inspire no one and do not open new cognitive perspectives? Does it mean that aesthetics is dead today, like Latin or Sanskrit, while its vision of art and beauty is outdated, invalid and totally useless? Aesthetics is a polysemous concept, which has never been sufficiently defined. It can determine a way of perceiving and experiencing the world that is specific for a given community, in other words, taste, yet it can also mean certain countries’ or regions’ contribution to aesthetic thought, to the aesthetic self-knowledge of man. Thus its dimension is practical, cultural and philosophical. Today aesthetics faces new challenges that it has to live up to; its major tasks include the defence of popular art, polishing the concept of aesthetic experience, aestheticization of everyday life and de-aestheticization of art, transcultural aesthetics and its approach to national cultures. In the book “Aesthetics: the Big Questions” (1998) Carolyn Korsmeyer reduces the main issues of contemporary aesthetics to six questions. The first question, old but valid, is a question about the definition of art. What is art? Nowadays everything can be art because art has shed all limitations, even the limitations of its own definition, and has gained absolute freedom. It has become absolute, as Boris Groys says. It has become absolute, because it has made anti-art a full-fledged part of art, and it has not been possible either to question or negate art since, as even the negation of art is art, legitimized by a more than 100 year long tradition, going back to the first ready-made by Marcel Duchamp in 1913. Today making art can be art and not making art can be art, as well, art is art and anti-art is art. The old question: “What is art?” loses its sense, and so does Nelson Goodman’s question: “When art?”. When does something become art? These questions are substituted by new ones: “What is art for you?”, “What do you expect from art?”. There can be a lot of answers, because defining art has a performative character. Louise Bourgeois has expressed the performative character of defining art in an even better way: “Art is whatever we believe to be art”. And for some reasons, which we do not fully realize ourselves, we want to make others share our belief.

Moroccan Facebook Visual Narratives and Cultural Production

In this paper, I argue that the creation and circulation of the visual narratives within Facebook groups by Moroccan Facebookers largely entail and substantiate a stronger process of cultural production that has its own logic and praxis. I argue that this process of cultural production has two major facets: an aestheticization of everyday life and promulgation of specific modes of consciousness. Through the aestheticization of everyday life, I posit that Moroccan youth’s acts of cultural production increasingly blur the formal boundaries between the Internet, art, and popular culture; an aspect which fundamentally empowers their creative online input. Through the promulgation of specific modes of consciousness, I argue that the visual narratives attempt to develop and enhance the cultural sensibilities which better champion their perceptions and stances. Taken together, I claim that these major manifestations of the process of cultural production, while being deeply wedded to the Gramscian and Foucauldian perception of power dynamics, set the tone for an underlying struggle over power and meaning-making in the Moroccan society, thus seeking to intervene and exploit the gaps and contradictions in these power dynamics in society.

Hillis Miller on the End of Literature

Abstract In the first decade after 2000, the idea of “the end of literature” proposed by J. Hillis Miller aroused widespread controversy in Chinese academe. This article seeks to reiterate the original meaning of Miller’s statement while tracing the original Chinese context from which this debate arose. The article points out that the real reason for this debate is not that there are different understandings of Miller’s term the end of literature but that Chinese academics have become dissatisfied with and anxious about the increasingly marginal status of literature. This debate has coincided historically with scholarly concerns over visual culture, the aestheticization of everyday life, cultural studies, and globalization. Each of these discussions contains related insights into the future development and transformation of literary theory and its disciplinary boundaries.

Food for Thought: Of Tables, Art and Women in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

AbstractThis article examines art as it is depicted ekphrastically or merely suggested in two scenes from Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, to critique its androcentric assumptions by appeal to art criticism, feminist theories of the gaze, and critique of the en-gendering of discursive practices in the West. The first scene concerns Mrs Ramsay’s artinformed appreciation of her daughter’s dish of fruit for the dinner party. I interpret the fruit composition as akin to Dutch still life paintings; nevertheless, the scene’s aestheticisation of everyday life also betrays visual affinities with the female nude genre. Mrs Ramsay’s critical appraisal of ways of looking at the fruit - her own as an art connoisseur’s, and Augustus Carmichael’s as a voracious plunderer’s - receives a philosophical slant in the other scene I examine, Lily Briscoe’s nonfigurative painting of Mrs Ramsay. The portrait remediates artistically the reductive thrust of traditional philosophy as espoused by Mr Ramsay and, like the nature of reality in philosophical discourse, yields to a “scientific” explication to the uninformed viewer. Notwithstanding its feminist reversal of philosophy’s classic hierarchy (male knower over against female object), coterminous with Lily’s early playful grip on philosophy, the scene ultimately fails to offer a viable non-androcentric outlook on life.

Making Senses of Appetite, Love and Lust in "Io Sono L’Amore" (2009)

"Sensation is fundamental to our experience of the world. Shaped by culture, gender, and class, the senses mediate between mind and body, idea and object, self and environment." (The Senses and the Society Journal) After centuries of what one might call "the religion of reason”, during which the senses, the body and the life of emotions have been mistreated and repressed, we are witnessing a return of subjectivism and its reactions regarding identity. The quotation above points to a theory in Cultural Studies that has recently emerged in academia: Sensory Studies. According to this approach, the senses are essential to the human experience of reality and the understanding of the world: more than employing their senses and being shaped by them, human beings construct them. At the heart of Sensory Studies is the thesis of the mediatory role of senses in the production of experience. Since, as Laplantine claims, cinema is made up of "permanently transforming sensations," films can be the ideal means to think sensually. Inspired by this view and the theory that bodies are not simple objects of thought nor are they fixed into their own boundaries (cf. J. Butler), this paper will focus on the analysis of the Italian film Io Sono L’Amore (2009) by Luca Guadagnino. Although the film seems to depict a common story, it is, in fact, a deeply stylized narrative of the senses – an aestheticization of everyday life and a utopian construal of the body. Applying conceptual tools from both Sensory Studies and Food Studies, we will travel through Emma Recchi's physical and emotional journey of delight, and try to comprehend how fine food can lead to desire, the pleasures of the flesh and a more profound knowledge of oneself.

The Aesthetic Experience of Product Design: A Case Study of the Consumption of Earphones in Hong Kong

Aesthetics is omnipresent in all aspects of our life, and an aesthetic perspective of design concerns the living emotions, feelings, and shared passions among consumers and designers. We empirically investigate how the meanings that consumers infer from earphone designs reveal their personal notion of the ‘aesthetic’ in everyday life and how this notion affects the aesthetic judgement of consumers and their preferences for product designs. This study provides product designers with the implications of comprehensive knowledge behind the design in the form of a story to engage consumers into learning, understanding, and associating their consumption experience with both private and social meanings that constitute the aestheticization of everyday life.

The Aestheticization of Everyday Life and the De-Classicization of Western Working-Classes

This paper explores the relation between contemporary aesthetic features and the formation of cultural dynamics. We examine the role of the symbolic and ideological universe of the aestheticization of everyday life (AEL) in the formation of specific symbolic variables among younger generations of the working-classes, mostly in the service sectors. The analytic lens focuses on the aestheticization of everyday life as a relevant cultural process of de-classicization of collective representations. According to Leroux, Rouanet, Savage and Warde, ‘much of the (mostly qualitative) research on class identity and awareness insists on “dis-identification” (ie, people do not readily identify as class members or consciously adopt “class specific” activities' ( Leroux et al., 2008: 1050 ). 1 In the same article, the authors state that ‘people's stated intentions, desires and practices are marked by their hopes and fantasies, but these dissemble, rather than being the reflex of, their class locations’ (idem). Consequently, they focus on how lifestyles are, to a large extent, connected with specific class locations, not how social agents conceive subjectively their cultural practices. This social discontinuity between class objective processes of social and cultural causality and the individual/collective perceptions of social life is the main theoretical object of our study. In this sense, processes of aestheticization presented in the paper (performativity, narrativization of self, body as practice, fragmentation, the role of image, and prosthetics) contribute decisively to the production of a general set of dispositions around an absence and invisibility of class languages in everyday life practices. The paper covers three interrelated sections. First, how aesthetics had configured relevant dimensions in the structuration of political life in Fascism as Walter Benjamin had envisaged at the time. Then, we will describe pertinent topics of the AEL and, to finish the article, how it induces a set of processes of de-classicization among new strata of Western working-classes. That is, de-classicization is posited as a cultural dynamic capable of displacing class dimensions from everyday life.

The Contradictory Nature of our Relation to Beauty in Contemporary Culture

Our current relation to beauty is contradictory. On the one hand, artists, in the wake of the calamitous upheavals of two world wars, have largely abandoned the concern for beauty on the grounds that it represents an escape from, rather than an engagement with, the horrors and injustices of the modem age. At the same time as art has become de-aestheticised, however, there has been a growing aestheticisation of everyday life as manifested in the increasing emphasis on stylisation from the design of urban spaces to the packaging, advertising and display of commodities and the fashioning of personal appearance. I argue that these two trends, though apparently opposed, are in fact interrelated and are symptomatic of a crisis in the aesthetic. Thus, on the one hand, in their renunciation of beauty, artists risk the reduction of art to a sensually impoverished state. While there is certainly a place for art which disturbs or repels the viewer, at the same time, art which embraces the beautiful is not necessarily affirmative of the status quo but can be seen as keeping alive the image of a better world. Conversely, the vacuousness of much of the visual spectacle prevalent in mass culture, where beauty is largely confined to the role of stimulating sensory pleasure and desire at the expense of any deeper meaning, is just as problematic.

Rise of the Department Store and the Aestheticization of Everyday Life in Early 20th Century Japan

Abstract: This paper focuses on the ways in which the department store has become a key site for the constitution of Japanese modernity through the introduction of images and goods taken from the West, along with the emphasis on “Western design” and “Western taste”. These new consumer spaces have become aestheticized in various ways so that we can speak of an “aestheticization” of everyday life. Yet this was also a modernizing learning process for Japanese consumers, hence a key problem was how these new experiences were to be classified and ordered into a relatively stable habitus. The rise of the department store has had an important mediating function here. Department stores not only provided new goods along with interpretations of how to use them, but also acted as theatres, as rehearsal spaces, with front and back stage areas where one can watch the performance, try out for oneself new roles. This is especially the case for women in the city, who were able to explore a new identity space with a new set of competence experiences and pleasures. In this process, the department store also provided a form of women's public sphere where they could enjoy shopping, entertainment and learning opportunities. Department stores encouraged not only a sense of luxury and theatrical settings, but also help to teach women how to assemble new tastes and styles into their lifestyle. In addition, it should be emphasized that in the Japanese case, department stores also played an important role not just as a new cultural initiative on the part of the businessmen and cultural intermediaries who invented consumer culture, but also as a political initiative on the part of the government who sought to link them to the reform of everyday life and the production of good Japanese citizens.

The aestheticization of consumption: an exploration of ‘brand.new’ and ‘Shopping’

This article explores the aestheticization of consumption through a study of two recent exhibitions in Britain. The collapse of many of the historical boundaries and distinctions between art and life have led to what Featherstone (1991) refers to as the aestheticization of everyday life. It is important for marketing theory to both explore the meaning of this and its implications. The article considers some of the issues to be addressed in examining the nature of aesthetics both in relation to art and consumption, suggesting that processes of de-differentiation (Lash, 1988) and integration (Holt, 1995) have effectively broken down aesthetic barriers. There follows a detailed examination of two exhibitions which it is argued exemplify this breakdown in aesthetic barriers; an exhibition at the V&A in 2000 entitled ‘brand.new’ which was a celebration and critique of the brand in modern society, and ‘Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture’ at the Tate Liverpool in 2003, which brought together numerous artists' interpretations and responses to consumer culture. The article ends by assessing the nature of the convergence of art and consumption and considering some implications for marketing theory.

The mobile phone as media

This article focuses on the mobile phone’s permeation into ‘everyday life’ through products, knowledge and cultural processes. The convergence and blurring of industry boundaries increasingly see entertainment, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and lifestyle products and services combine. The possibilities that digital economies (via products and services) provide in shaping our experiences - and how others experience us - lend support to Featherstone’s comment that the ‘aestheticisation of everyday life’ has arrived. The resulting consumption is an experience economy, where a broad range of mobile phone users, with or without technical savvy, expendable income and aesthetic ambitions, can harvest from the ever-increasing palette of the digital domain. Throughout the 20th century, visions of utopia and dystopia have often run alongside such major developments in technology, especially those that have the capacity or likelihood to transform and disturb conceptions of the everyday. Outlining a number of current states of play and future scenarios for the mobile phone in the everyday, we suggest that mobile phone analytics will shift from the utopian and dystopian towards analyses by more conventional theoretical and methodological tools and approaches found in media, cultural and policy studies, as well as in the social sciences and other disciplines.

The Significance of ‘Craft’ Qualities in Creating Experiential Design Products

The consumer's perception of the significance of an object to them as an individual has become of primary importance to the designer. This paper describes the current consumer trend towards the aestheticization of everday life and the significance of a desire to consume experiences within product design. It aims to address questions that arise through the designer's need to facilitate the consumer's desire to imbue objects with qualities that are meaningful to them within the currency of the contemporary aesthetics of everyday life. The paper goes on to examine the characteristics of craft products, and their ability to take on and embody the personal and individual experiences of the consumer. The author concludes that craft qualities in products appear to provide relevant communicative means for design in the contemporary era of experiential consumption. Craft qualities are discussed in the light of new consumer research that draws on the fields of psychology, sociology and marketing, and presents us with a rationale for the deep meanings of possessions thus attempting to explain our experiential and emotional relationships with products. Ideological and communicative craft qualities used in the discussion of this paper are drawn from the results of a previous sociological research project on the professional production of ‘value’ in Finnish ‘art craft’ objects (Kälviäinen, 1996; Kälviäinen, 1998). Ideologically craft qualities are based on the uniqueness and honesty of craft production, the quality of materials used, the forms or ideas from nature, and on the metamorphosis of the crafted object. These qualities, derived through the tradition of craft practice, seem to emphasize the visual and tactile qualities of a design in a way that enables them to be used as a vehicle for creating meaning within a current consumer trend towards the experiential aestheticization of everyday life.

Sociology and Aesthetics

This review explores the present fashion for aesthetics in contemporary sociology. It evaluates the claims that society is undergoing a deep-seated process of aestheticization, and that sociology is experiencing an aestheticization of its epistemological concerns. The aestheticization literature is divided as follows: (1) the re-reading of classical sociological theory through the aesthetic dimension of modernity; (2) the claim that postmodern society involves an `aestheticization of everyday life'; and (3) those sociological theories which stress that contemporary society is more and more like a work of art in its form. The argument is made that the discovery of aesthetics as a way of problematizing sociological reasoning is to some extent rediscovery, returning to various Kantian precepts: the disinterestedness characteristic of aesthetic experiences; the antinomy between the individual and the social aspects of taste; and the work of art as an organism predicated on an inner teleology.