[Commlist] Call from Academic Quarter

Call for:

Aestheticization

/Academic Quarter /Volume 19. June 2019.

Guest editors: Peter Allingham, Gorm Larsen and Henriette Thune.

*Aestheticization*

Traditionally, aesthetics is related to high culture and attached to 
certain experientials domains for music, painting, literature, etc., and 
in connection with a judgement of taste characterized by – according to 
Kant - disinterested delight. However, within recent decades a departure 
from the Kantian aesthetic judgement of taste has taken place, in which 
not least the German philosopher Gernot Böhme has aimed at developing a 
new strictly phenomenological aesthetics that addresses sense phenomena 
such as atmosphere and affect. This project is also critical of 
tendencies in ‘aesthetic capitalism’ (Böhme 2016). Today, aesthetics is 
not only related to the world of art but permeates everyday life often 
aimed at creating or promoting special experiences.

Market communication is a field where aesthetics was employed quite 
early, e.g. in advertising and in branding. However, during recent 
decades aesthetics has spread outside market communication as such so 
that today, it increasingly affects both professional and private life. 
A number of researchers have been aware of this for quite some time. 
Among them the philosopher Wolfgang Welch. In 1997, he wrote:

Today, we are living amidst an aestheticization of the real world 
formerly unheard of. Embellishment and styling are to be found 
everywhere. They extend from individuals' appearance to the urban and 
public spheres and from economy through to ecology. (Welsch, 1997).

These observations are currently supported by among others, professor of 
comparative cultural sociology, Andreas Reckwitz, who also points to the 
fact that contemporary capitalism and economy is aesthetic at its core. 
It is not primarily based on technological progress, but on the 
contrary, on permanent innovation and creative production of new signs, 
sense impressions, experiences, and affects (Reckwitz, 2012, p.139).

The aesthetic economy instigates a ‘new enterprise culture’ where the 
employed individuals develop a new entrepreneurial attitude. A 
consequence of this cultural ‘condition’ is a rising demand for 
individual creativity, professionally as well as privately. Working in 
e.g. a value-based organization it is up to the individual employee at 
his or her own initiative to unfold his or her creative skills within 
the framework of the basic values and objectives of the organization, 
and by virtue of an innovative effort to create surplus. Our private 
lives may well support our professional efforts e.g. through acquisition 
of creative forms of expression and compatible orchestrations of tastes 
and lifestyles. This is possible through choice of habitation, 
decoration, leisure activities, travels, etc. With creativity as a 
mediator, work and private life may coalesce.

However, aestheticization is not a new phenomenon. In modern history the 
appearance of the phenomenon and concept of aestheticization is often 
referred to the cultural sociologist Walter Benjamin’s seminal article 
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin 1936). 
Referring to among others to Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti’s futurist 
manifesto from 1909, in which the beauty of war is praised, Benjamin writes:

[Mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can 
experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first 
order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering 
aesthetic. (Benjamin, 1969 [1935], p.20).

Benjamin found the roots of the aestheticization of political life 
during fascism in the missing changes in the ownership of property. 
Instead of rights to changes, the masses were offered possibilities of 
expression within the framework of Fascism.

In the 1990s, the sociologist Mike Featherstone, among others, pointed 
to the fact that communication, management, media, body, and gender, 
etc. had gained increasing attention and been exposed to an intensified 
pressure due to postmodern simulations and the blurring of dividing 
lines between image and reality.

More recent theorists focusing on art and ways of life, among them the 
American art and cultural critic, Hal Foster, pointed at the beginning 
of the new millennium in several articles to an increased tendency 
toward totalizing design of life and the surrounding world on market 
terms and not on conditions of art.

Among recent editions on the subject of aestheticization the Danish the 
book /Aestheticization – connections and differences/ (Eriksson, et al., 
2012) offers a number of thematized analyses, which examine how 
aestheticization influences various aspects of modern life.

With this call to the forthcoming issue of /Academic Quarter/ we ask:

What characterizes aestheticization of the lifeworld at present? We want 
to focus critically on aestheticization in relation to one or several of 
four intersecting themes: identity, nostalgia, politics, and 
consumption. With the division into themes, we want to introduce a 
delimitation of current fields and forms of aestheticization. However, 
historical accounts and arguments are most welcome.

*Identity*

Concurrently with the fact that identity is not given with family, 
religion, and nationality, and that late modernity implies a demand for 
the subject to form and realize itself, aestheticization seems in this 
connection to play an increasing role. On the one hand, the innovative 
and creative artist has become the paradigmatic persona of our time; on 
the other hand, aestheticization has become an essential factor in the 
creation of the self. For this purpose, everything from performance 
measures (on Instagram and social media as well as through cosplay and 
role-playing); over body inscriptions (piercings, tattoos, etc.) to 
special types of consumption may come into play.

*Nostalgia*

A popular assumption is that the present time is characterized by 
“retro”, and that it can be difficult to find out what is concretely 
characteristic of our day and age. Moreover, it is true that nostalgic 
moments or motives often appear in numerous contexts. Not least in 
connection with media where ranges of programmes e.g. on TV are filled 
with reality programmes and programmes like /The Farm /(TV4, since 
2001), /Bargain Hunt/(BBC, since 2000) or e.g. serials like /Heimat/ 
(ARD, 1984, 1993 and 2004), /Downton Abbey/ (ITV, 2010-2015) and more. 
These broadcasts focus on e.g. production methods or tools and 
agricultural machinery of the past, arts and crafts items, or culture 
and lifestyles of the past (see e.g. Niemeyer, 2014; Higson 2014).

*Politics*

Politics can seldom be restricted to being ideological or argumentative, 
but during recent decades, the relevance of aesthetics within the 
political field has become still more obvious, also in connection with 
the simultaneous medialization of politics. It appears from the way in 
which aesthetics enters into the profiling of political parties 
themselves, but also in the activist events of political organizations 
and parties. Furthermore, the fact that today identity politics plays an 
essential role in political life points towards an aestheticization of 
politics, where the rights, cultural artefacts, and expressions of 
certain groups have become the pivotal point in a political struggle for 
acknowledgement quite beyond thoughts of social classes and economic 
exploitation.

*Consumption*

For many years, consumption has been marked extensively by 
aestheticizing staging, which has attempted to suspend the demarcation 
line between company and the surrounding world to a more or less 
totalizing extent. The aim has been – as in connection with corporate 
branding strategies – to bring the surrounding world and consumers 
‘inside’ the company so that both could be managed and controlled. These 
strategies seem, particularly in relation to what the cultural 
sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has named ‘the singularized society’, to be 
seriously challenged. According to Reckwitz, a showdown with uniformity 
and conformity will take place in ‘the singularized society’, and the 
new benchmark will be the singular or the unique, authentic subject with 
original interests and curated biography (Reckwitz 2017). Therefore, 
there seems to be a conflict between, on the hand, a controlling 
tendency and, on the other, a singularizing tendency that both 
implies/involves aestheticization.

**

*References*

Benjamin, W. (1973 [1936]). Kunstværket i den tekniske reproduktions 
tidsalder. In /Kulturindustri. Udvalgte skrifter/. København: Rhodos. 
English edition: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 
In Arendt, H. (ed.) /Illuminations/. New York: Schocken Books (1969 [1935]).

Böhme, G. (2016). /Ästhetischer Kapitalismus/. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.

Eriksson, B. m.fl. (red.) (2012): /Æstetisering. Forbindelser og 
forskelle/. Festskrift til Morten Kyndrup. Aarhus: Klim.

Foster, H. (2002): /Design and Crime (and other Diatribes)/. London & 
New York: Verso.

Featherstone, M. (1997 [1991]). The Aestheticization of Everyday Life. 
In Lash, S. & Friedman, J. (eds.): /Modernity and Identity/. Oxford: 
Blackwell.

Higson, A. (2014). Nostalgia is not what it used to be: heritage films, 
nostalgia websites and contemporary consumers. In Hamilton, K. et al. 
(eds.). /Consumption Markets & Culture/, Volume 17 - Issue 2: Nostalgia 
in the Twenty-First Century.

Niemeyer, K. (ed.) (2014). /Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, 
Present and Future/. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Reckwitz, A. (2012). /Die Erfindung der Kreativität. Zum Process 
gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung/. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.

Reckwitz, A. (2017). /Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten/. Berlin: 
Suhrkamp Verlag.

Taylor, C. (1992). /The Ethics of Authenticity/. Cambridge, Mass. & 
London: Harvard University Press.

Welsch, W. (1997 [1995]): Aesthetics Beyond Aesthetics. In: Honkanen, M. 
(ed.): Proceedings of the XIIIth International Congress of Aesthetics, 
Lahti 1995, Vol. III: /Practical Aesthetics in Practice and Theory/. 
Helsinki. Accessed 15.10 2016 
on:                                                                                                                               
http://www2.uni-jena.de/welsch/papers/W_Welsch_Aesthetics_beyond_Aesthetics.html

*Timetable*

The first step is to submit a brief abstract in English or Danish of 
about 150 words to be mailed to Liza Pank ((pank /at/ cgs.aau.dk)) no later 
than January 20, 2019. The editors will then review the abstracts and 
notify the authors of their decisions soon after. Accepted articles – 
using the Chicago System Style Sheet – should be e-mailed to Liza Pank 
((pank /at/ cgs.aau.dk)) no later than March 15, 2019. Articles will then be 
reviewed anonymously in a double, blind peer review process. The authors 
will receive their review by May 1. The articles should be around 
15,000-25,000 keystrokes (3,000-3,500 words), and they can be written in 
English or in the Danish. Assuming that the articles are accepted by the 
peer review­ers and the editors, they should be revised, and the final 
version sent in by June 30, 2019. The issue is projected to be published 
in August 2019.

/Academic Quarter/is authorized by the Danish bibliometrical system, and 
the journal is subsidized by Danish Council for Independent Research 
Culture and Communication.


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