Ironicwarcriminal posted:

is it just "finding some beauty in the world" like kevin spacey watching some gay plastic bag float around

it's more along the lines of attempting to emulate that plastic bag

Impper posted:

futurewidow posted:

I miss reading fiction but I like how busy I've been lately, even though I'm hanging out with trots

u kkan always make time for good books

ya that's why i'm reading lenin

Impper posted:

futurewidow posted:

I miss reading fiction but I like how busy I've been lately, even though I'm hanging out with trots

u kkan always make time for good books

have you read anything good lately (aside from my thoughts that seem to keep getting plagiarized and added to your tumblr...................)

innumerable aesthetic considerations of and investigations into art and the beautiful have achieved nothing, they have not helped anyone gain access to art, and they have contributed virtually nothing to artistic creativity or to a sound appreciation of art. (N1 79/GA43 92)

Heidegger would thus agree with the sentiment behind Barnet Newman's famous quip: “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.” Still, for Heidegger such complaints, while “certainly right,” are really only symptomatic of a much deeper philosophical problem, a problem which stems from the way modern aesthetics is rooted in the subject/object divide lying at the very heart of the modern worldview.

As Heidegger points out, the term “aesthetics” is a modern creation. It was coined by Alexander Baumgarten in the 1750s and then critically appropriated by Kant in his Critique of Judgment (published in 1790). Baumgarten formed the term “aesthetics” from the Greek word for “sensation” or “feeling,” aisthêsis (N1 83/GA43 98). As this indicates, modern “aesthetics” was originally conceived as the science of aisthêta, matters perceptible by the senses, as opposed to noêma, matters accessible to thought alone, like the truths dealt with in mathematical logic. In fact, modern aesthetics is born of the aspiration to be “in the field of sensuousness what logic is in the domain of thinking” (N1 83/GA43 98). That is, just as logic (conceived as the science of thought) seeks to understand our relation to the true, so aesthetics (conceived as the science of sensation or feeling) seeks to understand our relation to the beautiful.

To recognize that the central focus of modern aesthetics is beauty is not to deny its traditional interest in the sublime or its late-modern preoccupations with the abject, the obscene, kitsch, and so on. Heidegger's point, rather, is that

aesthetics is that kind of meditation on art in which humanity's state of feeling in relation to the beautiful represented in art is the point of departure and the goal that sets the standard for all its definitions and explanations. (N1 78/GA43 91)

In its paradigmatic form (the form “that sets the standard” for all its other “definitions and explanations”), modern “aesthetics is the consideration of humanity's state of feeling in relation to the beautiful” (N1 78/GA43 90).

Heidegger is not denying that there are numerous disagreements within the modern aesthetic tradition (between Kant and Baumgarten, just to begin with). Instead, his thesis is that even the disagreements in the modern aesthetic tradition take place within the framework of a common approach. It is this shared framework that Heidegger designates when he refers to the “aesthetic” approach to art. As we would expect, this basic framework undergirds the paradigmatic inquiry of modern aesthetics, the study of beauty through a “consideration of humanity's state of feeling in relation to the beautiful.” In all the aesthetic investigations which take their cues from this one, Heidegger observes:

The artwork is posited as the “object” for a “subject,” and this subject-object relation, specifically as a relation of feeling, is definitive for aesthetic consideration. (N1 78/GA43 91)

In other words, modern aesthetics frames its understanding of art by presupposing the subject/object dichotomy: Aesthetics presupposes a fundamental divide between the art “object” and the experiencing “subject,” a divide which is subsequently crossed by the commerce of sensation or feeling. Of course, the subject/object dichotomy forms the very basis of the modern worldview, so we would be surprised if modern aesthetics did not presuppose it. So, what specifically does Heidegger object to about the way the aesthetic approach to art presupposes a viewing subject, standing before some art object, enjoying (or not enjoying) his or her sensory experience of this artwork? What is supposed to be the problem with this aesthetic picture of art?

In a provocatively-titled essay delivered in 1938, “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger provides a succinct formulation of what it means to approach art aesthetically that helps us reach the core of his objection to aesthetics. When “art gets pushed into the horizon of aesthetics,” he writes, this

means that the artwork becomes an object of lived experience , and in this way art comes to count as an expression of human life . (QCT 116/GA5 75)

Heidegger is making two connected points here (which are numbered accordingly). The first is that when art is understood and approached “aesthetically,” artworks become objects for human subjects to experience in an especially intense, vital, or meaningful way. We can see this if we unpack his typically dense language: As Heidegger frequently points out, in the modern, post-Cartesian world, an “object,” Gegenstand, is something that “stands opposite” a human subject, something external to subjectivity. In order to experience an object, the modern subject supposedly must first get outside the immanent sphere of its own subjectivity so as to encounter this “external” object, and then return back to its subjective sphere bearing the fruits of this encounter. Given the modern subject/object dichotomy, such an adventure beyond subjectivity and back again is required for the experience of any object. But in the case of the art object, Heidegger is pointing out, the adventure beyond subjectivity and back again is a particularly intense, meaningful, or enlivening one: A “lived experience” is an experience that makes us feel “more alive,” as Heidegger suggests by emphasizing the etymological connection between Erleben and Lebens, “lived experience” and “life.”

The second point Heidegger is trying to make is that when artworks become objects for subjects to have particularly meaningful experiences of, these artworks themselves also get understood thereby as meaningful expressions of an artistic subject's own life experiences. Heidegger does not ever develop any argument for this point; the thought simply seems to be that once aesthetics understands artworks as objects of which we can have meaningful experiences, it is only logical to conceive of these art objects themselves in an isomorphic way, as meaningful expressions of the lives of the artists who created them. Still, this alleged isomorphism of aesthetic “expression and impression” is not immediately obvious. Think, for example, about the seriously playful “found art” tradition in Surrealism, dada, Fluxus, and their heirs, a tradition in which ordinary objects get seditiously appropriated as “art.” (The continuing influence of Marcel Duchamp's “readymade” remains visible in everything from Andy Warhol's meticulously reconstructed “Brillo Boxes” (1964) to Ruben Ochoa's large-scale installations of industrial detritus such as broken concrete, rebar, and chain-link fencing, such as “Ideal Disjuncture” (2008). Vattimo thus suggests that Duchamp's “Fountain” illustrates the way an artwork can disclose a new world, a world in which high art comes to celebrate not only the trivial and ordinary but also the vulgar and even the obscene.) This tradition initially seems like a series of deliberate counter-examples to the aesthetic assumption that artworks are meaningful expressions of an artist's own subjectivity.

Even in this tradition, however, the artists' appropriations are never truly random but invariably require some selection, presentation, and the like, and thus inevitably reopen interpretive questions about the significance these art objects have for the artistic subject who chose them. (Why this particular object? Why present it in just this way?) It is thus not surprising that the founding work of found “anti-art,” Duchamp's “Fountain” (1917)—his deliciously seditious installation of a deliberately inverted, humorously signed (by “R. Mutt”), and brilliantly re-titled urinal in an art gallery—is typically treated in contemporary aesthetics as an extreme expression of Duchamp's own artistic subjectivity, not as its absence. Here one could also point to the failure of Robert Rauschenberg's attempt to deconstruct the found art ideal of unique and spontaneous invention in his incredible “combines,” “Factum I and Factum II,” works which, despite Rauschenberg's painstaking efforts to make them identical, instead work to suggest the stubborn uniqueness of any given artwork. So, even the found art tradition of the readymade and its heirs reinforces Heidegger's point that, in the basic aesthetic approach to art, art objects are implicitly understood as meaningful expressions of artists' lives that are capable of eliciting particularly intense or meaningful experiences in viewing subjects.

In this aesthetic approach, to put it simply, art objects express and intensify human subjects' experiences of life. What Heidegger thus characterizes as the aesthetic approach to art will probably seem so obvious to most people that it can be hard to see what he could possibly find objectionable about it. Art objects express and intensify human subjects' experiences of life; to many people, it might not even be clear what it could mean to understand art in any other way. How should we understand and approach art, if not in terms of the meaningful experiences that a subject might have of some art object, an art object which is itself a meaningful expression of the life of the artist (or artists) who created it? What exactly does Heidegger think is wrong with this “picture” of art?

Despite what one might expect from a phenomenologist like Heidegger, his objection is not that the aesthetic view mischaracterizes the way we late moderns ordinarily experience “art.” On the contrary, Heidegger clearly thinks that what he characterizes as “the increasingly aesthetic fundamental position taken toward art as a whole” (N1 88/GA43 103) does accurately describe the experiences of art that take place—when they do take place—in museums, art galleries, and installations; in performance spaces, theaters, and movie houses; in cathedrals, coliseums, and other ruins; in cityscapes as well as landscapes; in concert halls, music clubs, and comic books; even when we listen to our speakers, headphones, ear-buds; and, sometimes (who could credibly deny it?), when we sit in front of our television screens, computer monitors, iPhones, and so on. The experiences we have of what rises to the level of “art” in all such settings are indeed “aesthetic” experiences, that is, particularly intense or meaningful experiences that make us feel more alive; and, if we think about it, we do tend to approach these art objects as expressions of the life of the artists who created them. The aesthetic view correctly characterizes our typical experience of “art” in the contemporary world—and for Heidegger that is part of the problem.

AmericanNazbro posted:

Impper posted:

futurewidow posted:

I miss reading fiction but I like how busy I've been lately, even though I'm hanging out with trots

u kkan always make time for good books

have you read anything good lately (aside from my thoughts that seem to keep getting plagiarized and added to your tumblr...................)

yeah i've read a lot of great books recently. jakob von gunten, the clown, the loser, the setting sun most recently. they're all "really good"

Impper posted:

AmericanNazbro posted:

Impper posted:

futurewidow posted:

I miss reading fiction but I like how busy I've been lately, even though I'm hanging out with trots

u kkan always make time for good books

have you read anything good lately (aside from my thoughts that seem to keep getting plagiarized and added to your tumblr...................)

yeah i've read a lot of great books recently. jakob von gunten, the clown, the loser, the setting sun most recently. they're all "really good"

what did you think of the setting sun? had you read it before?

AmericanNazbro posted:

Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life.

- the schope

Goethestein posted:

my desire to troll is pathological probably.

yes, it's quite obvious you have strong feelings of self-loathing and an inferiority complex--and with good reason! for you are a loser.

babyfinland posted:

AmericanNazbro posted:

Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life.

in direct opposition to aesthetics, yes

have u guys seen drive. i saw it last night its pretty cool

it sucked. goslins character was a useless wet blanket

futurewidow posted:

Impper posted:

AmericanNazbro posted:

Impper posted:

futurewidow posted:

I miss reading fiction but I like how busy I've been lately, even though I'm hanging out with trots

u kkan always make time for good books

have you read anything good lately (aside from my thoughts that seem to keep getting plagiarized and added to your tumblr...................)

yeah i've read a lot of great books recently. jakob von gunten, the clown, the loser, the setting sun most recently. they're all "really good"

what did you think of the setting sun? had you read it before?

i really loved it. i liked the main character, the narrator, though i wasn't sure what exactly precipitated her change, other than that she might have always been like that and simply had suppressed it for her mother's sake, and possibly out of shame; i loved the brother's notebooks, and his suicide note, which hit very close to home for me in a lot of respects. i loved the quiet desperation, the fascizing influence of family, the beauty of the small movement in the book. it was good. i'd reread it but i have to much to read

Impper posted:

babyfinland posted:

AmericanNazbro posted:

Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life.

in direct opposition to aesthetics, yes

have u guys seen drive. i saw it last night its pretty cool

it sucked. goslins character was a useless wet blanket

drive was great, his character was a classic american protestant good man doing the right thing caught in bad world. its just like all the best movies of the 70s

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

GoldenLionTamarin posted:

living for aesthetics

i still really, really don't know what this means

to ascribe one's life to a higher purpose. to become Pure, Just: Beautiful, Divine. each day is an added brushstroke, a missing piece added to a mosaic--the ultimate destination is death--Yes. but that is not the goal. the goal is to transform the body, the mind--The Soul--into a work of art, that will transcend time, and humanity: to ascend the celestial, alongside God