an aisthesis of their own
by MIchael Templeton
Just up the road from where I live is the town of Greenville, Ohio. If you studied your American history, you know that Greenville is the site of the Treaty of Greenville which brought an end to the Indian Wars in what was then the Northwest Territory. It is also the birthplace of Annie Oakley. Now, Greenville is just a strange little town in the middle of rural Ohio. It has a lot of empty storefronts, a few nice streets that spread out at odd angles as if they were laid out on deer paths, and a big grain silo on the edge of town. I get up there fairly frequently because it is on the way to some nice hiking trails and there is a really nice café in town that is in an old hotel. Out toward the grain silo, you will pass a house that will definitely grab your attention. The front is nearly covered over with cut up pieces of wood. There is a huge stack of what appear to be fragments of old telephone poles all along the front porch nearly obscuring the front door. There are piles of wood in the front yard along with some heavy equipment that is used to move the wood around. The entire vision will make you think of situations in which someone barricades themselves in their home and disappears from all human contact. Locals refer to the man who owns this house as “Wood Man.” As it happens, I met Wood Man one day while walking around Greenville. We were both strolling and taking pictures of things, and he introduced himself. He mentioned his house, and I knew right away who he was. Wood Man told me people frequently complain about his house, and when they do, he said he tells them, “You are ignorant, and you know nothing about aesthetics.” Wood Man’s house, it turns out, is the product of a specific aesthetic intention; it is an artwork meant to adhere to an aesthetic program that the local bumpkins simply do not understand, or so he thinks.
What struck me was the fact that Wood Man used the term “aesthetics.” This is not the kind of thing that comes up in ordinary conversation. A complex philosophical/artistic idea is something one ordinarily encounters in university contexts and situations attached to high art, if such a thing still exists anymore. In any case, while people will freely talk about art in almost any situation, aesthetics is something else entirely. Soon after I met Wood Man, I discovered that young people were using the term aesthetics in their own way. Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I am not criticizing teenagers for misusing words. When I was a teenager, anything we called “bad” was in fact really good. What interests me is the sudden emergence of the term and idea of aesthetics in common conversation. On one hand, we can attribute all of this to the ways the internet blows everything out of proportion and turns nothing into something simply by being the internet. It is a bullshit engine. On the other hand, I think to focus on aesthetics as something like a trend among young people and the obsession of a local oddball in Ohio has to be attached to something worth exploring.
Aesthetics comes from the ancient Greek term aisthesis which designates sensation or perception. This is critically important because one of the chief ways young people are using the term is to describe something that is simply interesting to look at, like something the cool kids do. We may see the appropriation of the term aesthetic here as in some ways analogous to the “high aesthetic line” of Fin de siècle Europe—the world of the dandy embodied by the likes of Oscar Wilde et al. Yet, this makes the current usage even more interesting, and we should bear this relation in mind. For younger people, things described as aesthetic might be beautiful, carefully placed as if curated, or just novel or unique. Aesthetic in current usage is just something that is worth noting. However, in its rigorous philosophical usage, aesthetics means something extremely complex and loaded with history and baggage. It is common to place the emergence of aesthetics as a vast category of investigation at the end of the Eighteenth Century. Edmund Burke led the way in England, and Kant’s Critique of Judgement is the absolute standard for the European inquiry. At the heart of all of this are the two categories of the sublime and the beautiful. Central to what all this might mean is the mere fact that people have been struggling and even fighting over what it really means to perceive and sense our world, ourselves, and ourselves in the world. For a long list of cultural, economic, and historical reasons, people began to investigate how we experience the world around us and how these experiences are transformed into representations of our world. In our current age of staggeringly huge levels of representations, the problem of aesthetics has become something mind-boggling. Romantic-era aesthetics gave rise of what we now call psychology and all that can be put under this umbrella, which would include therapeutic methods to relieve mental and emotional anguish but also psy-op strategies to induce mental and emotional anguish. Again, that people are using or misusing the term is not interesting. That people have once again turned toward this term and its meanings to make sense of what is happening around them and to them is interesting.
I think for many people who are not familiar with aesthetics, the term may lend itself to ideas of a kind of distant and detached experience of art or artistic endeavors. Aesthetics, because it exists as a complex “thing,” is purely intellectual and not about what is going on with our lives and our bodies. This could not be further from the truth. Terry Eagleton began his study, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, with the observation that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body.” When we talk about aesthetics, we are talking about living human bodies in the world. That eggheads turned the discussion into something brainy is only one small part of the picture. Aesthetics is a field of inquiry into perception and sensation, and this means our physical sensations, but also our sense of sensing what we perceive. To this end, the aesthetic is distinctly bodily. I sense the morning sun on my face, the warmth, the brightness, the sensation of coming to awareness of the world at a certain time of day. As a sentient being with memories and ideas, these sensations give rise to a whole universe of feelings and thoughts. Memories of other mornings in late April. My thoughts on the coming of spring, poems about spring, but also the mundane day-to-day: I need to get up and start the day and everything that might come with starting the day. If I stop to reflect on my experience of the morning sun on my face, I begin to reflect on the fact that I am feeling these sensations in a certain way, at a certain time in my life, that my body exists in specific ways at a specific time in my life. You can see how this explodes as a site of inquiry. The point, though, is that this constellation of feelings, reflections, and thoughts begins as a physical sensation of temperature and light. If we bring these same ideas to absolutely every other sensation that makes up a human life, the issues become enormous, and beyond our ability to conceptualize it all. In order to make sense of it all, categories of sensation and experience are formulated to understand how everything comes to be known and understood.
We can take as an example the category of the sublime. This is my personal favorite, and it is the one about which I am most knowledgeable. For Kant, and for most Romantic-era philosophers and poets, any perception or set of perceptions that exceed our ability to rationally conceptualize them will constitute the experience of the sublime. This is the superior category for most aesthetic theorists, although this changes as we come to our own time. For Kant, the beautiful is what conforms to what we know and understand. It is a fine thing to sense and grasp, but does not necessarily elevate the mind or the creative faculties. The sublime, on the other hand, exceeds our ability to grasp the perceptions before us. Kant explains, “(F)or the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does not admit of sensuous perception” (The Critique of Judgement. 92). Notice that the feeling of the sublime comes about via two primary causes: there is the perception which exceeds our understand of forms, and there is our awareness of the failure to properly present this excess to the mind. The sublime is that which is larger than us. It is a night sky in which the visible stars become too many and too intense for us to grasp what we are perceiving. In the Twenty-first Century, that which is larger than us is not pleasing at all. It is a planet that is warming to extinction levels, it is a bomb that can blow up everything you have ever seen, it consists of global powers which will never know or care about your entire world. The sublime as an aesthetic category has ceased to be something we desire. All this said, the sublime was never a pleasing thing for a great many people in Kant’s time. Enormous expressions of power might have been great for the “gentleman” who had always been empowered, but it never worked out well for women, for slaves, for the poor, and for almost everyone other than the privileged few, and thinkers from the period in history like Mary Wollstonecraft made it abundantly clear to men that they do not speak for everyone. Indeed, aesthetic categories have never worked out well. This is part of the problem with aesthetics in general. In any case, it is from these aesthetic systems that artists and philosophers sought to give meaning to perception and representations of perception in art.
To exceed our perceptions in the moment of the sublime necessarily means that anything that is clear cannot be sublime. In Kant’s time, painting could not be sublime. It was not until artists like Turner began to paint obscure and terrifying visions of nature and shipwrecks that painting became sublime. Eventually, as we know, painters, and really all artists—visual and literary—began to produce works that defied representation altogether. We know that artists refuse direct representation and by doing this they have come to foreground not the thing represented but the very process of representing. Our awareness that certain aesthetic categories are filled with political problems such as those that attend the Kantian sublime reveal how aesthetics is directly tied to how representations of sensations and perceptions come to be deeply embedded in politics and political struggles. However, these same pathways for aesthetic processes also feed into the ways representations of perceptions have been captured and directed in the service of capitalism. Advertising is a vast field of representation, and the images at the heart of advertising now dominate all of life. The society of the spectacle, as Guy Debord explains, is the system that dominates perception and therefore dominates all of contemporary life. The society of the spectacle is “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” so that “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (The Society of the Spectacle. 12). We no longer directly experience sensation and perception, or we at least no longer understand or know how to conceptualize sensation or perception except through the mediation of images of sensation of perception. This is why we hear people say of things that are remarkable or powerful that these things are “like a movie.” People no longer know how to experience their world except as it is channeled through images of their world. That people will come onto a local television news show and describe a snow storm as being like a “snow globe,” a trinket meant to resemble a snow storm, is symptomatic of the triumph of the society of the spectacle. We not only grasp our world through the mediation of the image we are now capable of seeing the world through the mediation of the image of an image. This is capitalism and schizophrenia. Accelerate all of this at the speed of light and to everyone everywhere all the time at the same time, and you get a sense of how the aesthetic has now come to dominate life in ways that are staggering. So, when a kid looks at someone else’s Instagram post and comments that this post is aesthetic, or that a weirdo in Greenville, Ohio tells people they are ignorant because they do not understand aesthetics, I think it is worth pausing and considering what is going on.
We should return to the example of Fin de siècle Europe and consider what was happening at that time. The end of the Nineteenth Century was a time of tremendous change. Machines were coming to dominate life. Mass production made it possible for more people to own things than ever before. Smartasses like Darwin and Nietzsche had pushed God to the periphery, and there were (and still are) no end to the fights over this shit. The emergence of something like the department store made for even more problems. The upper classes could no longer tell their own from the middle classes, and even some of the working classes, based solely on how they were dressed. This blurring of the lines of distinction became as problematic as the God issue, maybe more so because class distinction in much of the Western world was far more immediate than the relative security of God. Consequently, class distinctions, and other common distinctions, took on the importance of God and there they have remained ever since. During this time, the dandy emerged as a cultural and social figure—the man about town who is removed from the concerns of the common rabble by virtue of his elevated taste and detached attitude to those petty and trivial concerns of both the upper class twits and the middle class busy bodies. The dandy also took on the role of the flâneur who strolled about the cities and the newly built arcades to show off his style and to observe the same twits and busy bodies. The arcades were, in many ways, the forerunner of the modern shopping mall or retail center we know in our time in the form of the “Towne Centres” that spill all over the suburban sprawl as the non-centered center of all life. In the arcades, Walter Benjamin explains, we observe how “the flâneur sabotages the traffic. Moreover, he is no buyer. He is merchandise” (The Arcades Project. 42). Here, Benjamin hits upon the central issue both for Fin de siècle Europe and for our contemporary teenagers online. Our time is also one of intense and rapid change, and this change is impacting young people who are coming of age amid an onslaught of images. The human being, as it is manifested in commercial culture, is not human at all but the commodity par excellence. In our time, under the weight of the society of the spectacle and the acceleration of the spectacle with the internet, the human commodity has superseded the human altogether. Young people feel this. They intuitively grasp it all, perhaps it is a grasp of a certain type of sublime, but they intuitively grasp that their living bodies are meaningless and only their aesthetic renderings of themselves have any value at all. Where the flâneur purposely adopted his status as merchandise, the contemporary world will not allow humans to be anything but merchandise—abstract commodities to be traded and exchanged like any other commodities. It is not even that we are like livestock. We have more in common with ring tones or downloadable fart noises, and young people are coming of age in this nightmare. As a result, they see the world as aesthetic and from the aesthetic distance made extreme by the digital representations they hold in their hands. They see things in terms of abstract categories of experience that are now devoid of the living body that senses and experiences. And maybe Wood Man is correct. People need to spend a little more time trying experience what Wood Man is doing rather than trying so hard to force Wood Man’s house to look just like everyone else’s house, to force his piles of wood into a uniformity of sensation that is the dull meaningless uniformity of the Town Centre and the rest of suburban sprawl.
Sensation, perception, and the representations thereof can be thought of in terms other than art. The aesthetic is also at the center of all politics insofar as what counts as the political pertains to who gets to speak or represent their experience as legitimate experience, and who does not have the right to speak because whatever constitutes their experience is not public or universal. What counts as legitimate speech is that which concerns everyone. My feelings about certain style choices have nothing to do with anyone other than me. No one gives a shit what I like to wear or do not like to wear. My feelings about how we should educate children concern everyone, and everyone cares deeply about educating children. If I put my thoughts on the topic in a public forum, people will pay attention, and they will make their thoughts known just as loudly as I. These issues start to get cloudy when we begin talking about aspects of life that are not as clearly defined. Many women have made it clear that if men did not need to use toilet paper, we would never see it in any public space. Public bathrooms would not offer free toilet paper. This is why we never see free menstrual products in public bathrooms, because men do not menstruate, the needs of menstruating people are not considered a public concern. Expand this to everything that pertains to women. It was simply not that long ago that the life—the very life of a woman was not worthy of public concern. Consequently, women were beaten and victimized by husbands, locked away in asylums, locked into factories to burn to death or jump to their deaths—this list goes on and on. As a woman’s life was represented by women to the world in rigorous terms that made it clear that their lives and concerns were the stuff of public discourse, things began to change. Nothing was simply given. It took intense political struggle to present and represent in language and in images the lives, sensations, and perceptions of women before their lives and experiences were deemed worthy of political representation. The aisthesis of the lived lives of women required long and hard fought struggle before their lives were considered to be the subject of legitimate discourse. This long historical struggle hinges upon an aisthesis, an aesthetic of experience which renders lives in terms that are articulable and legible and therefore political. Jacques Rancière says that “(p)olitics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable” (Dissensus. 37). The visible is sensation, and the sayable is the representation of sensation.
It seems to me we are some blind old jackasses to diminish things like the aesthetic to just some crap the kids are saying. I do not think this little linguistic fad is purely an expression of immaturity and passing trends. I think the fact that young people are looking at each other online and describing what they see as aesthetic involves something more profound than trendy kid stuff. All of us are now trapped in this world that only exists in the little rectangles we stare at while sitting on the can. If the society of the spectacle trapped all of experience in the mediation of the image, then the digital world is capable trapping experience in images before they ever occur. To come of age in this world is to be denied lived experience, it is to be denied lived sensations and the ability to represent those sensations in one’s own terms, which is to say that people who come of age in this world are denied an aesthetic experience of their own. When they describe each other’s images as aesthetic, they are describing a distant thing they will never know, and this seems deeply troubling. All this unfolds as young people are medicated by professionals and medicate themselves with drugs. Living in a world of pure simulation has made the experience of physical sensation distant and meaningless. Love, passion, desire, loss, grief, heartbreak, joy, ecstasy, maybe even the sublime—all of this is now the stuff of online images and the bodies that were made to experience the sensations that give rise to all these things are distant commodities just waiting to be conscripted into the image generating machines of online exchange or to be completely replaced by an AI version of themselves.
Works Cited:
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, .. .. 1995.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . . 1928.
Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steve Corcoran. New York: . . . . . . . ./ … Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010.