The Appearance of Aesthetics

It is a mere mortal Greek, Aristotle, who in De Anima describes of receiving into oneself, via human senses, the forms that produce our very definition of the world, or rather, our reality. While the term aesthetics was introduced only much later in the eighteenth-century work of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartner and greatly expanded by Immanuel Kant (both German mortals), the idea of a discourse predicated on relationships between humanity and the forms of its reality has appeared in the work of countless thinkers and in a vast array of disciplines over the past two millennia. In this journey—through the hands of not only philosophers A to Z, perhaps Aristotle to Žižek, but also artists, curators, musicians, and critics too many to name—aesthetics has come into contemporary use with a definition that covers an immense intellectual territory.

At least two extreme poles can be identified that define the vast gradient of usage for the term aesthetics as it is understood today. The first exists largely as a theoretical heirloom from the late nineteenth century, gifted by the figureheads of the aesthetic movement: Oxford Don Walter Pater and his protégée Oscar Wilde. Within this movement, aesthetics, interlaced with the beauty and the arts, was separated from commercial life by being positioned as an autonomous human pursuit, a goal to be sought with no concerns for profit, political gain, power, or other polluting aspects of either human greed or commercial exchange. This is generally known as aesthetic hedonism, a label with nefarious connotations but that was actually designed to save the arts from the destructive capacities of capitalism. Wilde’s adage “all art is quite useless” was not intended to demean the value of art culturally but rather to eliminate the value of art commercially, as a thing that is useless can only exist outside of the marketplace of financial consumption. Here aesthetic concerns were positioned to be independent from any form of social or political engagement yet maintained a high degree of cultural significance—precisely due to this capitalistic indigestibility.

Many historic and contemporary critiques of aesthetics and claims of cultural anesthetization emerge from variations of this position—namely that aesthetic qualities only form the “useless” separate or illusory, typically subjective, surfaces of appearance that hover above deeper epistemological or political realities of existence. Holding such beliefs almost requires, intellectually, the revealing of such obscured realities that exist underneath these obfuscations—and can be seen championed in the work of past and current philosophers currently including, notably, Slavoj Žižek, through his work on ideology, and Alain Badiou, through his work on the “inaesthetic” and truth procedures. While the exact trajectories of these aesthetic critiques are beyond the ambitions of this text, they are significant for helping define the current status of aesthetics as something primarily, well, useless and superficial.

Instead of being divorced from commerce and politics entirely, as Wilde proposes, my use of the term aesthetics in this book lies between this restricted definition and a vastly more encompassing position most forcefully articulated today by philosopher Jacques Rancière, who considers the term to be non–art specific and recasts it what he calls the Distribution of the Sensible. In this latter, more encompassing framework, aesthetics defines the relations between the sensible aspects of individual, community, physical, and social life, and accordingly must be a basis for human activity not only in artistic but in political and social registers. In a public dialogue I had with Jacques Rancière at Yale University in 2016, he articulated this contemporary expansion of aesthetics beyond only pertaining to art, as follows:

For me, aesthetics is not the theory of art, and appreciation of art, or so on. My understanding of aesthetics is twofold. First, the ground meaning of the aesthetic is not about art but what constitutes the sensible experience . . . It is about the experience of a common world and who is able to share this experience. For me politics is aesthetic and, in a sense, it was constituted as such before art.

Later in our conversation he elaborated further on the recasting of aesthetics as the “distribution of the sensible”:

What the idea of the distribution of the sensible implies is that an art always does something else than its proper business. At this point it may meet the paths of emancipation, since emancipation means that you stop doing just your “own business.” The aesthetic is not the same as the artistic. The artistic is about the implementation of an idea. It implies some kind of anticipation of the result, which may be put to the extreme in the case of political art. Instead, the aesthetic means that you don’t exactly know what will be the effect of what you are doing.

While it is a burgeoning twenty-first-century cliché to assume all academic endeavors are the proper vehicles for social and political engagement, it is the case that the aesthetic has a particularly strong claim to such relevance through the combination of the above relationships through which political relations are now beginning to be understood. While these concerns are often spoken of as problems of policy in the political sciences and sociology, they are rarely addressed as problems of aesthetic practices. This book is an act of speculation regarding how a reignited discourse of the aesthetic and the extended, but not limitless, spaces of its understood influence can prompt new relations between not only objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the visible structures in which we are all enmeshed—that is to say, the appearance of the world.

Given the vast and explosive interest in aesthetics in multiple fields today, this, I hope, will help prompt what has been elsewhere referred to as one of an ongoing series of philosophical “turns”—an “Aesthetic Turn,” as the case may be, that includes a wide array of vibrant new discourses in multiple disciplines. To adopt such a name is intentionally referential, and perhaps overturns the original developments of the “Linguistic Turn,” the name coined from the collected essays of Richard Rorty in 1967. While the Linguistic Turn referred to the perceived idealism-derived dominance of language in defining reality, such sentiments were far earlier articulated by the prescient Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logicio-Philosophicus as “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (1921), or Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text” (Of Grammatology, 1967). As such, the Aesthetic Turn might revise, perhaps ironically, the languages of the Linguistic Turn in order to propose yet another inversion, where: “The limits of my aesthetic perception are the limits of my world,” or “everything is outside the text.” An Aesthetic Turn would not be a new theory but rather a new intellectual foundation on which new theories for multiple disciplines might be constructed. Here we are concerned with how this expanded but neither useless nor limitless idea of aesthetics might begin to operate in the emerging architectural discourses and professions of the twenty-first century.