-
Conclusion
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
❖ W e live in a culture inundated with images, advertisements, fashion statements, a social world promising us fun, pleasure , and fame. Commodities offer us an emotional experience . Celebrities tell us that we can be like them. In our YouTube world, Andy Warhol’s dictum that everyone will have fifteen minutes of fame is believed to be a reality by many young people. For example, many young Americans now think that they will become a celebrity at some point in their lives. Yet the image of the world as a giant mirrored funhouse where people perform for one another is not restricted to adolescents. Even seemingly serious events such as a road race can be a scene of playful activity. For example, in the ING Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco, “60,000 runners make a 12-kilometer journey through downtown San Francisco in Halloween-parade-like-style” amid “a melee of flying tortillas and inflatable beach balls.”1 San Francisco and other cities now regularly host gay and lesbian parades, where participants often dress, or cross-dress, in outlandish costumes. As we have seen, participants in demonstrations and social movements often adopt a self-consciously aesthetic and playful demeanor. Many street protests now seem like a colorful carnival. While such activities are often consumerist, trivial, and politically irresponsible, they are more than this and deserve to be taken seriously. Conclusion 180 ▪ Conclusion As I have argued in this book, the ubiquity of these actions and ideas signifies an aesthetic sensibility about a variety of topics central to modernity : the nature of the self and knowledge and a new way of understanding solidarity. In sum, they represent an aesthetic politics, which appeals to emotions, visual styles, and images when constructing political activities and ideas and calls for a playful social solidarity. Not only have conventional politics and social movements been influenced by this aesthetic turn, but the contemporary portrayals of utopia outlined by Foucault, Maffesoli, and Jameson among others have taken on aesthetic and playful dimensions, different from the depictions outlined by the productivist socialist utopians of the past. I have discussed how French syndicalism, the IWW, fascism, the May 1968 demonstrations, and the contemporary global justice movement have drawn on aesthetic politics to inform many of their ideas and actions. The trajectories of these movements represent a gradual transition from an expressive aesthetic politics, associated with labor movements and ideas of authenticity, to a more transgressive approach to politics, though elements of these different kinds of aesthetic politics were part of all of these social movements. I have situated these movements ’ understanding of aesthetic politics in the context of the crisis of modernity and the differentiation of the value spheres of science, morality , and art, each with its own logic and internal criteria for adjudicating truth claims. In the nineteenth-century aesthetic sphere, art developed its own standards of evaluation. As art became a specialized domain, the slogan “art for art’s sake,” having little connection to politics or the concerns of everyday life, became the dominant creed of this aesthetic sphere. Yet this isolation of art from the concerns of public and personal issues, always tenuous at best, could not last. Many artists and intellectuals were not satisfied with this sundered modernity and looked to create a new, integrated public life with art at its center. By 1900, artists had to confront the hegemony of the capitalist market and commodity culture, which threatened the autonomy of their artistic endeavors. Moreover, the aesthetic sphere had always been an implicit realm of resistance and creativity, for artistic standards were tacitly in opposition to the functional utility and instrumental reason of a capitalist economy. As artists confronted the pervasive commodity culture, many became self-consciously politicized, elaborating a notion of art as an alternative to this instrumental world and the aesthetic sphere as [3.91.245.93] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:25 GMT) Conclusion ▪ 181 a realm of creativity and resistance. Avant-garde artists began to form alliances with left-wing movements opposing capitalism, while others looked to nationalist and even fascist movements as alternatives to a seemingly soulless market and philosophical materialism. Many artists not only influenced European and American cultures in general ways but also became acquainted with militants in labor movements, and they helped these militants to formulate new ideas about expressive authenticity and the particularity of knowledge. The aesthetic sphere was shadowed by popular culture, associated with the democratization of art and culture beginning in...