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The Growing Aestheticization of Society, Culture, and Everyday Life

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Chapter III: The Growing Aestheticization of Society, Culture, and Everyday Life

Part 1: Postmodernity as the Aestheticization of Leisure, Everyday Life, and Society

Since aesthetic pleasure, sensual entertainment, and superficial relationships are


increasingly valued in contemporary society, leisure becomes constitutive of cities
(Sennett 1977). As modern society passes from other-orientation to self-directedness,
individual personality fills the vacuum left by the retreat of the public sphere (Sennett
1977). In cities, where leisure gains in importance, personal emotions, personality
formation, and personal experience transform urban space (Maciocco 2009: 19-20). As
the availability of leisure time increased, the historical and cultural role of leisure
profoundly changed. While during the industrial revolution leisure was used to reduce
social segregation (Henry 1993), from the mid-twentieth century, the paternalistic
welfare-state treated leisure as a common entitlement. Since the end of the last century,
however, economic pragmatism approached leisure as a public investment into urban
development (Maciocco 2009: 20). The changing role of leisure is connected to its
growing professionalization, as the traditional society of exchange of services is replaced
with the modern commercialization of services. Rather than being restorative or spare
time after strictly utilitarian activity, leisure becomes more fundamental to society based
on life-long training (Maciocco 2009: 21-22). As an urban activity, leisure presupposes
participation in local social and cultural life, while contributing to the recovery of urban
spaces for social uses.
Being often associated with work-free locations, distance from reality, and spaces of
desire projections, holiday landscapes become simulacra masking the real conditions of
urban life under dream-like appearances (Maciocco 2009: 22). Places of leisure are
imitative of media representations, fictional places, and reconstructed environments that
fill cities with convincing replicas of the historic past. For Baudrillard (1970, 1981, 1994,
1998), such simulacra indicate the post-industrial transition to the consumer society and
the service economy. Similarly, for Ritzer (1999), the needs-based economy was
overtaken by the production of desires under the influence of economic globalization and
automation technology. Not having a rational definition, defying representation, and

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constantly changing, desires become invested anew in a different object after their
satisfaction (Maciocco 2009: 22-23). Cities respond to this trend by constructing stage-
sets of desire in their transition to postmodernity, in the process of which they take on
dream-like appearance. Postmodern cities put urban landscapes of leisure at a distance
from reality, since, as desired products, these landscapes correspond to kitsch as a
repetitive, foreseeable, and reassuring experience (Kundera 1987, 1988). By satisfying
needs for beauty, gratification, and narcissism (Kundera 1988: 135), kitsch compensates
disappointments of everyday life by the elimination of unacceptable visual experiences
(Espejo 1984). Within the kitsch aesthetics (Kundera 1984), landscape is a product of the
projection of desires (Maciocco 2009: 23, Vos and Meekes 1999).
Oriented to popular taste, offering easy satisfaction, and producing aesthetic pleasure,
kitsch is made for an average person seeking relaxation, rather than the austerity of high
art (Maciocco 2009: 24, Moles 1971). The kitsch aesthetics often characterizes attempts
to commercialize and promote cultural patrimony that combine nostalgic sentimentality,
reassuring familiarity, and popular culture (Atkinson 2007). In landscapes marked by the
kitsch aesthetics, everyday practices and social memory continuously construct and
remodel the identity of everyday spaces (Atkinson 2007). As a reconstruction of the
space of social memory, a landscape closely relates sites of memory to historic heritage
(Maciocco 2009: 24-25). Thus, museums concentrate, society interprets, and everyday
life generates sites of memory in a wide and unplanned geography of memory as a
dynamic phenomenon (Atkinson 2007, Bruno 2003, Terdiman 2003, Thrift 1999). Rather
than resulting from a relationship between memory and space, social memory is a product
of the dynamic production and mobilization of contexts that architects and promoters
produce as routine spaces that are subsequently transformed by a continuous
interpretation of and negotiation with everyday spaces (Maciocco 2009: 25). Inhabitants
and visitors gradually contest, reinterpret, and transform the historic sites of urban
development that change in response to the local sense of place, social memory, and
aesthetics (Atkinson 2007: 537).
Playing a role in the interpretation of everyday spaces and social memory (Atkinson
2007: 537), the kitsch aesthetics appears to derive from the consumer orientation that
development projects cater to by planning pleasant, safe, and attractive places (Atkinson

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2007, Schmid 2006). The kitsch aesthetics often supports efforts to commercialize and
promote cultural heritage as a landscape of leisure (Maciocco 2009: 26, Schmid 2006),
where the experience of place is jettisoned in favor of the projection of consumer desires
in the space between the disintegration of perception and the postmodern landscape (de
Cauter 1993, Vos and Meekes 1999). While the commodification of economy, society,
and everyday life came about in the wake of the transition to modernity (Castells 1998,
McKay 1998, Polanyi 1957, Williams and Windebank 2003), the postmodern landscape
is fostered by rapid technological, media, and economic transformations that favor
commodified landscapes. Nevertheless, the ongoing commodification of cities leaves a
possibility of spaces escaping this process through the particularities of urban geography
(Maciocco 2009: 26, Williams and Windebank 2003). The existence of urban spaces,
where commodification does not reach, is irregular, or advances slowly (Williams and
Windebank 2003), draws on a combination of economic and cultural factors. In
metropolises, edge areas of obsolescence, underdevelopment, and marginality make
possible the emergence of new urban environments, where the lack of institutional
demarcations and clear descriptions encourages creativity, subjectivity, and
communication (Pittaluga 2008).
From this perspective, everyday life seems to be resistant to commodification to a
greater extent than depictions of modern social change suggest. Since the
commodification of space is not an inevitable process, alternative spaces develop
alongside and in cooperation with spaces of leisure (Maciocco 2009: 27). In cities making
transition from industrial economy to recreation as their economic engine, tourism affects
leisure activities by commodifying urban space, which is reflected in the orientation of
the urban policy and planning of post-industrial cities that become conceived of as tourist
destinations, rather than places of work and residence (Meethan 1997). As the post-
industrial transition changes the representation of space (Hall 1994), local circumstances
condition the economic restructuring (Meethan 1997). The conceptual reassessment of
space, its production, and its specificity relates social and economic practices to
representations of space (Harvey 1989, Lefebvre 1981, 1991) that play an important role
in the promotion of cities as places of consumption and recreation emphasizing landscape,
aesthetics, and culture through their architecture and planning (Maciocco 2009: 28).

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These changing urban economic conditions involve institutional negotiations and
everyday life (Meethan 1997). The post-industrial transition makes tourism from a
formerly secondary, seasonal, and low-yield sector into an important economic resource.
Operating in the administrative space of technical solutions to urban problems as
opposed to the space of everyday experience (Lefebvre 1991), urban planning puts
resident and visitor needs at odds with each other in urban space undergoing continuous
economic, institutional, and cultural transformation (Maciocco 2009: 29). To influence
both inhabitants and visitors, promotion policies need to create an image of urban space
inclusive of spatial representations (Meethan 1997) that local communities form in their
personal, social, and geographic environments, where spaces of everyday life are
connected to projections of belonging, aspirations, and anxieties (Pittaluga 2008). As
spatial images, these projections derive from everyday life, culture, and experience that
local perceptions, expectations, and descriptions alter in the process of external and
internal change (Maciocco 2009: 29). Due to the shift from services provision to
economic development, planning mechanisms are significant for urban leisure policies
(Maciocco 2009: 30), since cities have to reconcile pro-active planning and regulation
with environmental protection and investor and visitor attractiveness (Maciocco 2009:
30). These conflicting pressures pit development, preservation, and economy against each
other in urban space (Meethan 1997). Urban aesthetics, history, and architecture have
equal significance for city government, private actors, and local inhabitants. Spaces of
leisure are of service to urban development as mediators between everyday life and urban
visions seeking to obtain novel and unexpected results. Places of leisure make
communication and interaction possible across demarcation lines separating everyday life
and virtual reality.
As an intermediate space, leisure functions as a zone where different identities,
perceptions, and ideas can be recognized, experienced, and defined (Maciocco 2009: 31).
At places of leisure, misunderstandings stimulate gradual familiarity and reciprocal
understanding. As opposed to a border indicating an external or internal limit, a cultural
frontier can be an interface between diversities where cultures encounter each other and
stage their reciprocal difference (Maciocco 2009: 31). As holiday opportunities and
cultural frontiers, urban spaces of leisure ensure plurality among individuals, maintain

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interpersonal relations, and allow social contacts (Abalos 2004: 32, Maciocco 2009).
However, promoting themed leisure and entertainment as part of urban culture
(Gottdiener 2001, Hollands and Chatterton 2003, Landry 2000, Sorkin 1992, Worpole
and Greenhalgh 1998), multinational corporations commercialize public space, gentrify
urban neighborhoods, and marginalize local alternatives (Zukin 1995). Following market
segmentation, business concentration, and brand predominance (Hollands and Chatterton
2003), corporate influence in entertainment and leisure grew in tandem with globalization
(Klein 2000, Monbiot 2000, Sassen 1991, 1994). Through the recovery of defunct
industrial zones for pleasure activities, lofts and offices, and branded entertainment (Hart
1998, Hollands and Chatterton 2003, Maciocco 2009: 32-33, Zukin 1992, 1995),
globalization transformed formerly public spaces into places of entertainment. The
increasing standardization of the spaces of contemporary culture stands in contrast to
post-modern diversity and post-Fordist flexibility (Hollands and Chatterton 2003).
As art and entertainment are used for urban renewal through the merger of fantasy
worlds, brand environments, and everyday life (Evans 2003: 417, Hannigan 1998,
Maciocco 2009: 33), cities become branded environments through events, exhibitions,
and museums as icons of and magnets for postmodern urbanity (Evans 2003, Maciocco
2009: 34, Ryan 2000). For Simmel (1957c, 1971b), cities in the eighteenth century
created their culture, identity, and belonging by what later became the branding of urban
locations. Branding of cities commodifies urban space to produce landscapes of
collective consumption combining product promotion with brand loyalty, such as Nike
Town in London (Evans 2003). Not unlike the modernization of cities in the nineteenth
century, over last decades the architecture and planning of projects for arts and culture
created monuments, museums, and districts in pursuit of both civic pride and urban
branding (Evans 2003). As the overwhelming popularity of the Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao attests (Stern et al. 1995), the form rather than the function of cultural facilities
draws visitors by architectural design. Buildings become self-referential urban icons and
symbols idealizing rather than reflecting their surrounding daily life (Maciocco 2009: 34-
35), even though large-scale architectural projects, such as contemporary art museums,
promise to reconnect culture with urban space (Evans 2001b, Maciocco 2009: 35).

85
Despite their importance for cities, branding projects may fall short of making art
and culture widely accessible as growth factors, due to the postmodern disintegration of
social bonds and public life (Sennett 1977). By bringing coherence to lived spaces,
consumer brands and signature architecture are intended to put cities on the global map of
media campaigns, publicity images, and public identities (Hollands and Chatterton 2003,
Maciocco 2009: 35, Mommaas 2002, Zukin 1995). However, branded cities risk having
their urban brands become obsolete if similar visual, narrative, and spatial elements are
used elsewhere for city promotion (Evans 2003). Intense inter-city competition makes
copying branding campaigns of other cities insufficient to attract visitors (Evans 2001a),
since brands tend to be placeless and universal rather than linking urban space,
architecture, and lifestyle to local practices and fragmented consumption (Maciocco 2009:
35-36). As art museums and historical heritage become redefined as sites of urban
promotion, development, and economy, culture becomes standardized (Evans 2003,
Zolberg 1994). At the same time as architecture links culture and branding to urban
transformation, the commodification of art, the privatization of urban space and unequal
access to culture raise concerns over the erosion of the public sphere (Balibrea 2004,
Maciocco 2009: 36). In emphasizing leisure as consumption, cities are transformed into
fantasy worlds, branded environments, and entertainment landscapes (Jacobs 1998).
In these entertainment environments, spatial experience offers engulfing pleasures,
social mingling, and intoxicating consumption (Costa 1996) in a fusion of urban
development and brand strategies that reduces urban complexity (Augé 2000, Glaeser et
al. 2000, Sorkin 1992, Warren 1994), portrays cities as simulacra, and replaces urban
space with stage-sets (Maciocco 2009: 37). As representations become dissociated from
reality, the simulacra of urban space marginalize lived spaces, branded images replace
urban experience, and local inhabitants lose collective identity. Since relations supporting
social relevance of signs, symbols, and images remain active, leisure can be seen as an
intermediary space forming a frontier between reality and possible worlds bridged by
cultural development, heritage, and projects (Maciocco 2009: 37-38). With reality
remaining thoroughly symbolic, the postmodern detachment from reality precludes the
symbolic construction of public space. The commercialization, privatization, and
Disneyfication of urban space lead to the crisis of cities (Sieverts 2003), where spaces

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lying beyond branded environments are in need of exploration. Individual experiences,
subjectivities, and practices add a public dimension to urban spaces lying outside of
places of leisure (Maciocco 2008, Williamson et al. 2003). Marginal, abandoned, and
residual spaces offer the possibility of emergence of participatory situations, where the
traces of the city of places can be revealed (Derrida 1997, 1999). Social practices outside
places of leisure construct new public spaces through individual subjectivities, practices,
and meanings (Maciocco 2009: 39).
In contemporary society, aestheticization has a growing importance for individual
appearance, urban design, and economic development that become affected by aesthetic
considerations (Welsch 1996: 1). Urban areas, shopping malls, amusement parks, and
product styling are aestheticized in the process of which modernity undergoes a deep-
seated change (Crook et al. 1992: 3-4, de la Fuente 2000: 235-236). In his writings on
fashion, exhibitions, and urban experience (Davis 1973: 328), Simmel (1991a: 63-71)
stresses aesthetics in reliance on Kant’s (1964a) connection between individual taste and
its social constitution. As aestheticization empties social meanings, spatializes social
relations, and intensifies urban experience (Frisby 1991: 76), urban space becomes
aestheticized through architecture, advertisements, and consumption (de la Fuente 2000:
237-238, Featherstone 1992: 280). Regarding metropolitan experience as emotional
intensification under the impact of transitory impulses, Simmel (1971b: 235) predates
discussions of globalization as time-space compression, experience dislocation, and event
simultaneity (Giddens 1990). Simmel (1971b: 235) also conceives of modernity in terms
of discontinuity, intensification, and reflexivity applying as much to society as to art (de
la Fuente 2000: 238-239, Witkin 1995: 31-32). Since postmodernity derives from
aesthetic consumption, reflexivity, and subjectivity as its defining features, from the
postmodern perspective, the aestheticization of everyday life refers to the effacement of
the boundary between art and life, the transformation of life into a work of art, and the
saturation of life with signs, images, and simulations (de la Fuente 2000: 239,
Featherstone 1992: 268-270).
Originating from artistic and literary modernism, aestheticization spread to
everyday life in the late twentieth century as part of the postmodern reorganization of
economy around signs and space that relies on the increasing complexity of information,

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institutions, and reflexivity for its development (Lash and Urry 1994: 10-11, 54). The
postmodern condition of contemporary society replaces cognitive rationality with
aesthetic reflexivity modeled upon Kant’s (1964a: 41) judgment of taste (de la Fuente
2000: 239-240). Lash and Urry (1994: 5) argue that the Enlightenment tradition of
modernity is replaced with the assumptions of artistic modernism of aesthetic reflexivity
that entails interpretation, perception, and experience, rather than cognitive reflexivity,
stable structures, and rational judgment (Beck 1992, de la Fuente 2000: 240, Giddens
1991, Lash and Urry 1994: 5-6). In postmodern society, aesthetics aggregates and
reinforces values, sentiments, and communities (Maffesoli 1988, 1991: 19, 1996) through
the stylization of selves, bodies, and relations as a disinterested form of sociality
conceived of as aesthetic experience (de la Fuente 2000: 240-241). Thus, the aesthetic
consumption of music, sports, and hobbies creates reflexive and taste communities (Lash
1994: 161) through events, communication, and dress as part of everyday life (de la
Fuente 2000: 241, Gronow 1997: 170). Starting with Kant’s (1964a: II: 24-25)
characterization of the work of art by its intrinsic organization, the postmodern
theorization of art as a self-sufficient form defines artworks by their self-constituting
contingency as self-referential constructs (de la Fuente 2000: 241).
In a related manner, Simmel (1968: 69) conceives of modern society as a work of
art composed of forms of association that emphasize the typical by the unique, the normal
by the accidental, and the basic by the fleeting (Gronow 1997: 140), whereby social
forms as aesthetic forms retain their heterogeneity against attempts to provide a coherent
description of them (Gronow 1997: 131-157). For Simmel (1978: 203, 1989), modernity
brings money and art into theoretic proximity, as the value of art and money becomes
uncoupled from their material forms as measures of value and mediators of exchanges. In
expression of their function (Simmel 1978: 203), relations constituent of artworks and of
money become abstracted from their material representation (de la Fuente 2000: 241-
242). According to Luhmann (1992a: 68), modern society is produced by self-referential
systems differentiating themselves from their increasingly complex environments. The
contingency of modern and postmodern art (de la Fuente 1998, Schwanitz 1995: 165)
parallels Luhmann’s (1992c, 1995, 1998, 2000) theory of modernity as a self-referential
form arising from the functional differentiation and autonomous self-regulation of social

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systems (de la Fuente 2000: 242-243). Constituted by a multiplicity of practices, such as
cultural consumption, new media, international tourism, communication technology, and
social networks (Osborne 1997: 127), the aestheticization of everyday life offers a
description of postmodernity (de la Fuente 2000: 243-244). As an historical process, the
aestheticization of everyday life refers to the postmodern fluidity of society allowing for
aesthetic analogies rather than explanatory models (Lyotard 1983, 1988: 130-132). Being
connected to epistemological aestheticization, the aestheticization of society needs to be
aesthetically qualified as part of modern culture constituted by aesthetic and self-
referential foundations (de la Fuente 2000: 244-245, Welsch 1996: 21).

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Part 2: Modern Society, Aesthetic Forms, and Stylization in Simmel’s Sociology

Emphasizing the forms of social interaction, Simmel (1906) reveals an aesthetic


dimension of everyday life that comprises diverse aesthetic interactions, constellations,
and configurations (Frisby 1991: 73-74). Following Kant’s aesthetics, Simmel (1904:
188-189) perceives the value of aesthetic enjoyment in its focus on the forms of things,
since for a disinterested aesthetic judgment the work of art is represented by the forms
relating its elements to one another (Frisby 1991: 74, Simmel 1904: 190). From this
formal perspective, aesthetic judgment relates to the image, appearance, and form of
things (Simmel 1904: 197), since concrete reality differs from its aesthetic dimension that
allows the play of pure forms referring not to material objectivity, but to a subjective
reaction (Simmel 1904: 194). An internal experience of the work of art creates out of its
fragments a comprehensive meaning of its disintegrated existence as a unity (Frisby 1991:
74, Simmel 1904: 194). Relating the fragmentary to the individual, Simmel (1904: 198)
suggests that modern aesthetics refers to the interplay between the objective and the
subjective points of view and between the individual taste and its social roots. While, for
Frisby (1991: 75), aesthetic enjoyment draws on subconscious interrelations releasing
individual elements from the bounds of everyday life, for Simmel (1904: 199), the work
of art rests not on individual associations but on typical forms, relations, and concepts. In
this view, aesthetic forms bear no relation to their content, whereas society specifically
relates to concrete reality (Simmel 1904: 199). Simmel (1968), thus, refers to Kant’s
aesthetic judgment as a subjective response to forms, images, and appearances as
fragments abstracted from their content and losing their individuality in typical relations.
For Simmel (1968), individual fragment in its reliance on aesthetic distinctions
creates the modern distance from individual phenomena (Frisby 1991: 76), since the
aesthetic enjoyment of individual fragment, style, and impression derives from the
experience of distance from the work of art (Simmel 1968). Becoming a central theme in
The Philosophy of Money (Simmel 1989), distance is important for Simmel’s (1968)
sociological aesthetics suggesting that the significance of artistic styles lies in the

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distance between individuals and objects (Lichtblau 1984). According to differences in
subjective response, the aesthetic representation of perceived distance is more
emphasized in popular culture, such as stylized landscapes or historical dramas, and
closer to reality in high art that stresses the attraction of distance rather than proximity
(Frisby 1991: 76-77, Simmel 1968). As a result of the further spread of the monetary
economy, modern culture strengthens contact anxiety as the ease of transportation grows,
heightens interest in temporally and spatially distant occurrences, and sharpens the
sensitivity to disturbances in the immediate proximity (Frisby 1991: 77, Simmel 1968).
Simmel’s (1968) treatment of aesthetics reflects the influence the developed money
economy has on the aesthetics of modernity and everyday life in the intervention of
money in interpersonal relations, relations to commodities, and value judgments. The
immediacy of impressions, the perception of value, and interest in things are lessened due
to their mediated, incomplete, and dependent existence (Simmel 1968), even though
monetary and commodity circulation equalizes exchange values without precluding
qualitative values (Frisby 1991: 78).
The circulation of commodities and monetary transactions appear to create as
much distance as does aesthetic judgment, since, for Simmel (1922a: 74-78), art joining
together unrelated elements is not unlike money serving by its mediating value as the
universal equivalent of use values. The mediation of money equally enables the field of
art and the circulation and exchange of commodities. For Simmel (1922b: 46), the work
of art exists for itself, is autonomous from external reality, and unifies individual
elements. Similarly, in The Philosophy of Money Simmel (1989, 1990) demonstrates that
the monetary economy is an objective world onto itself, creates the culture of things, and
involves individuals into its culture. This establishes a theoretical affinity between the
work of art and the circulation of commodities as represented in Simmel’s analysis of
money (Frisby 1991: 78-79). For Simmel (1990), the transition from the substantive
values of barter economies to the functional values of money economies creates a tension
between the subjective foundations of marginal utility theory as subjective enjoyment and
the objective presuppositions of money exchange as objective measurement (Frisby 1991:
79). Dealing with the consequences of this shift to monetary values, Simmel (1991b)
states that money lacking qualities mediates between individuals and commodities in a

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shift from qualitative to quantitative values. Mediating values, objects, and persons as a
universal equivalent, money unifies diverse phenomena, while serving as a common
denominator for the expression of value (Simmel 1991b).
At the same time, money is the means for “the universalization of exchange
transactions” (Frisby 1991: 80). Monetary means displacing ends are not unlike the styles
and techniques of modern art taking precedence over the applied arts (Frisby 1991: 79-
80). Accounting for the dynamics, the tempo, and the permanence of modernity and
permeating everyday life (Simmel 1991b), money abstracts itself from diverse objects to
unite opposed, unrelated, and distant things. Dynamically unifying modern contradictions,
money replaces stability with the accelerating speed, rhythm, and growth of exchange
transactions. For Simmel (1991b), the abstract properties of money affect the aesthetics
of everyday life in its arrangements, decorations, and forms (Frisby 1991: 79-80).
Effecting reification, alienation, and commodification, the monetary economy does not,
however, preclude aesthetics from existing alongside exchanges, interactions, and
relations of modern society (Frisby 1991: 80-81). Thus, money is a reified expression of
economic relationships between things that are autonomously organized within relations
of exchange marked by objectivity, functionality, and formality (Simmel 1990: 176).
Thus, with increasing social and cultural reification, the aestheticization of everyday life
expands, rather than narrows (Frisby 1991: 81). Similar to the work of art, the circulation
and exchange of commodities and the relations of monetary exchange acquire
autonomous existence, reconcile individual elements, and become abstracted to their
appearances. Associated with the image, appearance, and form of things, aesthetic
judgment in its distance from objects, their use, and their value parallels the circulation of
commodities and monetary exchange (Frisby 1991: 81).
In its phenomenological analysis of the everyday life of modern society, Simmel’s
(1989, 1990) examination of forms of monetary circulation and commodity exchange is
consonant with Marx’s (1963, 1981) analysis of alienation, circulation, and exchange
(Frisby 1991: 81-82). Extending his analysis of circulation and exchange to metropolitan
everyday life and the money economy, Simmel (1989, 1990) addresses the aesthetics of
modernity as the aesthetic illusion of the circulation and exchange of commodities
(Frisby 1991: 82). However, in his interpretation of the corresponding crisis of the work

92
of art, Simmel does not take recourse to the distinction Kant (1964a: 90-91) makes
between the beautiful and the sublime. For Kant (1964a), the beautiful asserts life
through sensuous forms, whereas the sublime as a negative pleasure can both accept and
reject life as a dynamic idea of reason. Simmel’s treatment of the work of art as the
aesthetic form complements, therefore, his analysis of circulation and exchange in the
money economy as a representation of limitlessness, quantitative dynamics, and the
sublime (Frisby 1991: 82-83). The aesthetics of modernity increasingly limits the work of
art to the context of disinterestedness, since, making everything relative and producing
indifference to values, money exchange is at the source of the modern blasé attitude. At
the same time, Simmel (1990: 328) places an emphasis upon the possibilities for aesthetic
liberation, psychological release, and everyday enjoyment under the conditions of
modern experience, money economy, and metropolitan life.
For Simmel (1990: 53), mechanical reproduction does not make art superfluous,
since art was not unrelated to the visual effect of panoramas, applied arts forms, and
ornamentation on metropolitan everyday life (Frisby 1991: 83-84). In metropolises, the
passive appreciation of artworks becomes comparable to the cultural consumption of
other objects. In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel (1990: 74) conceives of aesthetic
pleasure as deriving from the degree of distance, abstraction, and sublimation from
practical utility. For Simmel (1990: 74-75), the transition from the utility of
interchangeable objects to aesthetic uniqueness took place with the increasing remoteness
from original uses of objects later appreciated for their aesthetic appearance (Frisby 1991:
84). Reflecting on adornment and ornament as part of the aesthetics of everyday life,
Simmel (1950a) distinguished between the work of art as a self-referential object and the
applied arts product marked by general accessibility, practical use, and popular style
(Simmel 1950a: 341, 1991a). This consideration of the applied arts can apply both to
architecture in the public sphere and to jewelry in the private sphere (Frisby 1991: 85,
Müller 1987). As artworks become objects of passive consumption characterizing the
money economy, the consumer society and contemporary everyday life, art exhibitions
reflect metropolitan experience (Simmel 1890), since in their juxtaposition artworks
produce a surfeit of visual impressions eliciting the reactions of the blasé attitude and
superficiality (Frisby 1991: 85-86). Overflowing with impressions, everyday life in

93
metropolitan centers fragments the perception of urban landscape (Simmel 1957b, 2007).
Similarly, works of art in the museum add up to disparate fragments only, rather than to a
representable totality.
With regard to the presentation of works of art in the museum, Simmel (1968,
1998) emphasizes that artworks express modernity independently of the everyday
experience of metropolitan everyday life (Frisby 1991: 86). For Simmel (1968, 1998),
modern art represents in its style the affinity between the appearance and the significance
of objects on display. Defining itself against its context, deriving from phenomenological
impressions, and autonomous in its self-referential expression, modern art seeks to escape
generalized stylization (Frisby 1991: 86). While contrasting popular taste with the
autonomous style of modern art (Frisby 1991: 86-87), Simmel (1991c) approaches
Berlin’s trade exhibition as a feature of metropolitan life in a manner not unlike
Benjamin’s (1973) analysis of spaces and objects of consumption. The spatial density of
heterogeneous objects on display for the passive consumption of art, arts products, and
commodities exerts a fascinating hold on its viewers (Frisby 1991: 87). In the context of
exhibitions as amusement (de Cauter 1993), this fragmentation of perception derives
from the differentiation of modern society. Creating desires for amusement by its division
of labor, modern society calls for increasingly heterogeneous impressions, volatile
emotions, and passive diversion during leisure time (Frisby 1991: 87, Simmel 1991c).
The architecture of temporary exhibitions and trade shows bears an imprint of transitory
aesthetics descriptive of consumer goods as well, since such exhibitions offer an aesthetic
surplus characteristic of advertisements becoming artworks as aesthetic representations of
the commodity exchange (Frisby 1991: 87).
For Simmel (1991c), these exhibitions heighten the visual appeal of commodities
by enhancing their consumer desirability through aesthetic appearance (Frisby 1991: 87-
88). As everyday culture disintegrates into a plurality of styles, Simmel (1990: 473)
connects aesthetic appearance to style that expresses various contents through forms
generating aesthetic interest in everyday objects as artworks (Simmel 1990: 474), which
corresponds to art nouveau’s aim to transform public and private spaces into artistic
environments through architecture, design, and art in the 1900s (Frisby 1991: 88).
Following Kant’s distinction between the internal orientation of the work of art and the

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external orientation to utility of the applied arts object, Simmel (1922b: 50) opposes
turning everyday objects into works of art based on his differentiation between the self-
orientation of art and the consumer orientation of commodities. Reconciling subject and
object, the work of art resolves the modern contradictions between the everyday
experiences of restless movement and incessant fragmentation and the impressions of
timelessness and invaluableness (Simmel 1919). For Simmel (1919), only exceptional
works of art reconcile these contradictions of modern life, whereas artworks achieving a
false reconciliation of these contradictions produce a superficial satisfaction only (Frisby
1991: 88-89). In accord with his investigation of the money economy and modern
metropolis through the surface phenomena of everyday life, for Simmel (1916, 2005),
fragmenting objects, disintegrating experience, and dissolving forms define the aesthetics
of modernity.
With its diverse forms, surfaces and appearances, the dynamics of modernity
transforms each moment into its objectified reflection (Frisby 1991: 89, Simmel 1916: 2).
Simmel (1957a: 95, 1997a) discovers the modern aesthetics of circulation and exchange
of commodities in everyday life. Furthermore, Simmel’s phenomenological examination
of artworks, commodities, and consumption is an inquiry into the aesthetics of modernity
through “the transformations of aesthetic experience” (Frisby 1991: 90) taking place in
everyday life. Kracauer (1977: 220) suggests that Simmel shows how everyday
phenomena maintain dynamic connections through their appearances, conceptions, and
interdependencies. Since the aesthetics of everyday life also refers to leisure, travel, and
fashion (Frisby 1989, 1992), Simmel is also relevant to the discussions of postmodernity
(Frisby 1991: 90). Linking the aestheticization and stylization to social arrangements they
support, Simmel (1968: 74) approaches social forms as aesthetic ones. Locating aesthetic
principles in social forms and social ordering in aesthetic forms, Simmel also perceives
sociology and aesthetics as interdependently related (de la Fuente 2008: 344-345).
Drawing analogies between social forms and aesthetic forms (Lichtblau 1991: 55),
Simmel conceives of society through forms, which brings Simmel’s sociology into
proximity with the aesthetics of society as a work of art (Salz 1965: 236). Consequently,
Frisby (1991: 73) formulates the relationship between Simmel’s sociology and aesthetics
by placing an emphasis on aesthetic forms in everyday life (de la Fuente 2008: 345).

95
Postmodern discussions led to a stronger interest in Simmel’s aesthetic sociology,
because of Simmel’s anticipation of the “aestheticization of everyday life” (Featherstone
1991). Focusing on the aestheticization of the urban landscape (Featherstone 1991: 280),
Simmel treats aesthetic form as a social phenomenon and social ordering as internal to art
(de la Fuente 2008: 346, Tanner 2003: 32). His contemporaries qualified Simmel’s
analogical formulations about aesthetics and sociology by pointing out to his drawing on
heterogeneous subjects in an abstract manner (Weber 1972: 160-161) and reaching
conclusions based on overly disparate facts (Durkheim 1965: 48). By contrast, a later
reception of Simmel’s writings appreciated them for their analytically insightful
perspectives on society (Hughes 1965: 117). Similar to Kant’s (1964a: II: 135) preference
for analogy for subjects known only indirectly, Simmel’s (1894, 1971a) treatment of
society as an abstraction justifying an analogical analysis may also account for Simmel’s
predilection for aesthetics (de la Fuente 2008: 346-347). Simmel’s use of aesthetic
analogies involves theoretical propositions betraying more than accidental importance of
aesthetics for his thought (de la Fuente 2008: 347, Scott and Staubmann 2005: xii).
Rather than advancing causal explanations, Simmel infers his analogies from a variety of
perspectives as he draws parallels between social and aesthetic forms (de la Fuente 2008:
348). Simmel (1950b: 41) draws the analogy between social forms and art since they
become autonomous from practical purposes as values in themselves, since art and
sociability supersede their original practical purposes through their interpretation in terms
of pure creativity and association pursued for their own sake (de la Fuente 2008: 348,
Simmel 1950b: 42).
In the process of autonomization, the materiality of objects becomes uniquely
aesthetic, as art self-referentially differentiates itself from everyday life (Simmel 1950b:
42). Simmel (1950b: 48) uses aesthetic analogy to discuss social forms as artificial
interactions free from external considerations (de la Fuente 2008: 348-349). Comparing
the stylization of sociability to the stylization of aesthetic forms, Simmel (1950b: 40)
deploys the aesthetic analogy to propose that style prevents external reality from
disrupting sociable interaction. For Simmel (1950b: 54, 1987: 305), the analogy between
sociability and art rests on the aesthetic devices of suspension of disbelief, distance
between the work of art and its materials, and the symbolic representation of everyday

96
life (de la Fuente 2008: 349). Simmel (1950b: 52) demonstrates that content is entirely
composed of its forms either directly or indirectly representative of reality. Being present
in a conversation through the mediation of its topics, reality is no more present in a
sociable conversation than it is in a Cubist painting not governed by its contents (Simmel
1950b: 52). Becoming self-referential as a value in itself (Simmel 1950b: 55), sociability
can translate into pure or empty forms (Simmel 1950b: 55-56). For Simmel (1950b: 56),
art reflects reality through its distance from it, its symbolic forms, and its realistic devices.
For Simmel (1950b: 57), art and sociability as autonomous forms provide a relief from
reality without being superficial, since aesthetic forms deepen the experience of the
dynamics and patterns of reality through their autonomous, stylized, and enjoyable forms
(de la Fuente 2008: 351-352, Simmel 1950b: 56-57).
Differing from both Bourdieu’s critique of aesthetic autonomy and Baudrillard’s
thesis on the aestheticization of everyday life, Simmel’s analogies between aesthetic and
social forms hearken back to 19th-century aestheticism, 20th-century formalism and
avant-garde movements (Brown 1990: 42, Davis 1973: 324). Avoiding reference to social,
cultural, or biographical context (Scott and Staubmann 2005: xvii), Simmel’s aesthetic
analogies are consonant with Kant’s work on aesthetic judgment (de la Fuente 2008: 352,
Scott and Staubmann 2005: xvii). In a similar vein to Kant’s (1964a: I: 80) conception of
the internal orientation of artworks, the disinterested appreciation of art, and the
separation between art and life, Simmel’s (1950b: 54) sociology approaches sociability,
association, and conversation as purely social forms unrelated to external reality, oriented
to inner dynamics, and autonomous in their development and appeal (Frisby 1991: 74-75).
Separating subject from object and form from purpose (Brown 1990: 43), Simmel’s
emphasis on the predominance of form over content governs his sociology as the
autonomization of form (de la Fuente 2008: 352-353). Simmel placed the study of forms
at the center of his analyses of artistic representation (Langer 1967: 199), aesthetic
symbolization, and artificial environments (Sandelands 1998: 59). This impact of form is
evident in the differentiation of the museum, the concert hall, the theatre, and the stadium
from everyday life. Similar to aestheticization, sociality often requires artificial spaces,
boundaries, and rules (de la Fuente 2008: 353, Sandelands 1998: 59). Thus, Simmel’s

97
sociology of the aestheticization of everyday life mutually implicates social and aesthetic
forms in artworks, stylized objects, and spaces.
For Simmel (1997b), the interrelations between social form and aesthetic form
turn Kant’s aesthetic judgment defined in relation to either subjective or empirical
determination into social tautology (Gronow 1997: 15). Making efforts to avoid an
empirical determinism of aesthetic pleasure, Kant (1964a: I: 155-156) separated society
and aesthetics in an effort to differentiate between aesthetic judgment and moral
judgment. This led Kant (1964a: I: 155) to restrict empirical grounds for aesthetic
experience to society only, rather than to include them into philosophical aesthetics.
Simmel shows, however, that there is no antinomy between the subjectivity and the
communicability of taste (Gronow 1997: 150). Thus, aesthetic experience joins social
form and aesthetic form through aesthetic pleasure (Gronow 1997: 150). In Simmel’s
thought, the relations between sociology and aesthetics cover resemblances between
sociability and art, ties between aesthetic sensation and everyday life, and analogies
between social forms and aesthetic objects (de la Fuente 2008: 360-361). Simmel’s
theory of style contrasts relationships between individuality and generality, such as
Rembrandt’s and Renaissance portraiture, as Simmel approaches the relations between
aesthetic forms and social forms as part of development toward stylization (de la Fuente
2008: 361). Therefore, Simmel relates individual sensation and social communication to
each other as constitutive of aesthetic experience. As opposed to Kant’s theoretical
separation of society and aesthetics, Simmel (1997b: 135) grounds social forms in
aesthetic forms as part of the stylization and aestheticization of everyday life (de la
Fuente 2008: 361).

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Part 3: The Postmodern Centrality of Aesthetic Experience in Contemporary
Culture

As a booming contemporary phenomenon, aestheticization comprises fashion, design,


space, economy, and theory. As reality increasingly becomes an aesthetic construction,
aestheticization processes are of non-trivial significance (Welsch 1996: 1-2). Most
obvious in shopping areas, city centers, and suburban districts, aestheticization refers to
an urban overhaul adding elegance, trendiness, and vibrancy to streets, buildings, and
squares through the aestheticization of urban, industrial, and natural environments
(Welsch 1996: 2). As aesthetic experience becomes more central to consumption,
transportation, production, shopping, and leisure, the transformation of these domains
into experience environments exhibits an aesthetically-driven transformation (Schulze
1992). Given that the continuous consumption of experiences relies on their
disappointing quality, art is equally included into the experience economy exemplified by
Kassel’s Documenta art exhibition regularly attracting record numbers of visitors, closing
without operation losses, and being successful despite negative critical reviews (Welsch
1996: 2). As an addition of aesthetic embellishment to reality, aestheticization responds
to a need for pleasing sensations, agreeable forms, and cultural progress (Welsch 1996: 2-
3). The introduction of aesthetics into everyday life symbolizes the amelioration of reality,
even though through superficial, standardized, and kitsch-like borrowing from art. Rather
than an avant-garde extension and overcoming of the limits and definition of art, as
Joseph Beuys or John Cage advocated, the aestheticization of everyday life does not
recognize non-art objects as artworks or alter the definition of art (Welsch 1996: 3).
Instead, aestheticization borrows from traditional art to saturate aesthetically daily life
with kitsch.
Desire, amusement, and enjoyment driven by hedonist culture dominate the
aestheticization of everyday objects, spaces, and experiences spreading across cultural
landscapes (Welsch 1996: 3). As an economic strategy, aestheticization improves sales
prospects, augments in-built obsolescence, and trumps ethical or health considerations,

99
since consumers primarily acquire aesthetic aura rather than particular products. The
reversal in importance of commodity and appearance belongs to the economic
implications of aestheticization (Welsch 1996: 3-4). Thus, the product becomes an
accessory to the aesthetics of its presentation in advertisements increasingly affecting
consumer behavior through aesthetic images of desired lifestyles. The prioritization of
aesthetic appearance spreads beyond the superficial prominence of aesthetics (Welsch
1996: 4), as the computer simulation of new industrial materials no longer imitates, but
produces reality. The aesthetic manipulation, recombination, and alteration of reality
meets with little resistance to interference with its microstructures that become pliable,
light, and soft (Welsch 1996: 4). Furthermore, aestheticization affects not only surface
appearances, but also core structures of economic strategies, production technologies, and
postmodern entertainment. As an immaterial aestheticization, the virtualization of
material design is applied in microelectronics, engineering, and architecture, where this
virtualization of design involves an aesthetic transformation of everyday reality being
replaced with manipulation, modeling, and artificiality (Welsch 1996: 5).
Being constituted, derealized, and aestheticized trough the mass media, social
reality becomes modifiable, selectable, and avoidable, since information channels
switching, artificial media representations, and scripted television programs derealize
reality increasingly open to media manipulation, virtualization, and aesthetic modeling
(Welsch 1996: 5). Saturating everyday life and being a surface phenomenon,
contemporary aestheticization exerts a growing cultural influence, as expanding
aestheticization corresponds to the increasing determination by virtuality, software, and
models of economy, society, technology, and media (Welsch 1996: 5). These factors of
aestheticization produce a far-reaching dematerialization of experience, reality, and life,
whereby individual experience undergoes a comprehensive aestheticization. Beauty
parlors, fitness centers, and meditation courses ubiquitously offer individual style,
perfected bodies, and spiritual selves as aesthetic products (Welsch 1996: 6). At the same
time, table manners, social etiquette, and dress code persist as forms of aesthetic
competence against the background of moral relativism, while sensitivity, hedonism,
refinement, and taste provide aesthetic anchors to contemporary individuals that,
surrounded by insecurity, are unencumbered by illusions, reflexively distanced, and

100
enjoyment seekers. As lifestyles become aestheticized, individual ethics relativized, and
social standards historicized, the modern availability of contrasting, alternative, and
replaceable conceptions for individual behavior turns forms of conduct into unstable,
aesthetic, and alterable constructs (Welsch 1996: 6).
The aestheticization of everyday life has profound implications. As a general
trend, aestheticization is a novel phenomenon that, going beyond art, demands a
theoretical understanding of its scope, diversity, and importance (Welsch 1996: 6-7).
Beyond shopping malls, urban architecture, and individual appearance, aestheticization
also affects material, social, and subjective reality through technology, media, and style
(Welsch 1996: 7). Different strategies of aestheticization, as a process of imparting
aesthetic appearance or value, include the stylization of cities, the staging of lifestyles,
the mediatization of society, and the virtualization of technology. This leads to the
general aestheticization of experience, as reality acquires the characteristics of art, due to
its becoming produced, changeable, and uncertain (Welsch 1996: 7). Referring to
embellishment, stylization, and virtualization, the concept of aestheticization can relate to
appearances, associations, and processes. Fitting multiple contexts, the concept of the
aesthetic is ambiguous, multi-faceted, and inexact (Welsch 1996: 8), since variously
concerned with epistemology (Baumgarten 1961 [1750]), philosophy (Hegel 2004), and
art (Fiedler 1991a, 1991b), the discipline of aesthetics has multiple definitions. These
definitions alternatively focus on sensuous, emotional, artistic, fictional, virtual, and
playful qualities among others, while multiple theories of aesthetics contribute to its
differing and contradictory definitions (Welsch 1996: 8, Wittgenstein 1967: 77).
For Wittgenstein (1967: 65), the coherent usage of terms having variant uses can
derive not only from common properties, but also from semantic overlaps between them.
Thus, without having anything in common, different meanings of the aesthetic can be
interrelated solely based on their overlaps creating a family resemblance (Welsch 1996: 8,
Wittgenstein 1967: 65). Determined by the family resemblance of aesthetic phenomena,
the term of the aesthetic refers to different interrelationships among them rather than to a
unifying commonality (Welsch 1996: 8-9, Wittgenstein 1967: 65). As part of its related
meanings, the aesthetic has cognitive and affective aspects of sensory perceptions and
emotional responses (Welsch 1996: 9). Since cognition influences sensations, affective

101
responses must be disregarded for the cognitive processing of sensory impressions to take
place. As a cognitive sensation, pure perception leads to the construction of an affective
sphere modified by the aesthetic affect deriving from sensuality (Welsch 1996: 9).
Originating from this sensuality, taste evaluates objects not according to immediate
reactions, but in terms of a reflexive experience of aesthetic pleasure or repulsion. As
cognition eclipses emotions, sensation is reconstituted as aesthetic experience taking the
form of taste based on either senses or reflection (Kant 1987: 214). Consequently,
referring both to cognitive perception and to emotional sensation, the aesthetic joins taste
and sensibility in artworks and aesthetic reflection through differences and interrelations
(Welsch 1996: 9-10).
As refashioning though aesthetic design, aestheticization denotes aesthetic
appearance, virtuality, and fiction, as opposed to substance, reality, and fact (Welsch
1996: 10). Becoming removed from its roots in sensation, aesthetic autonomy signifies an
aesthetic distance from reality that art and aesthetic theory establish, since confrontations
between artistic autonomy and everyday life, such as in material aesthetics and art brut,
indicate the possibility that alternative conceptions of the aesthetic can become present in
its usage (Welsch 1996: 10). Through their diverse intersections and interrelations, the
meanings of the aesthetic form a structure of resemblances where each usage of the term
is positioned. Thus, usages of the aesthetic are interrelated and differentiated (Welsch
1996: 10-11), while the ambiguity of the concept can be counteracted with keeping its
different meanings separate. In including all its usages, a comprehensive aesthetics does
not take recourse to a single concept of the aesthetic based on suitability, declaration, or
reduction (Welsch 1996: 11). More differentiated and complex, this aesthetics considers
semantic variations, groupings, and specificities. Not being solely restricted to art,
aesthetics is hardly divorced from daily life, as aesthetic theory can only do justice to the
concept of the aesthetic by renouncing artistic autonomy foreign to modern art. Though
art is prominent among the referents of the aesthetic, the contemporary immediacy of the
aesthetic exceeds its equation with art (Welsch 1996: 11-12).
Far from being equated with universal improvement, aestheticization is no longer
associated with its original aspirations dating back to the late eighteenth century (Welsch
1996: 12). For Schiller (1967: 105, 107), aesthetics contributes to fuller humanity,

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whereas, for Hegel (1989: 87), beauty unites truth and beauty. By contrast, contemporary
forms of aestheticization put such claims into question. Science, ethics, and aesthetics can
offer criteria for discrimination between positive and negative manifestations of
aestheticization (Welsch 1996: 12), since aesthetics cannot offer an autonomous critique
of aestheticization by definition. Since under neo-Aristotelian and Foucault’s (1992)
influences, ethics became theoretically proximate with aesthetics, science provides the
remaining authority for the criticism of aestheticization (Welsch 1996: 12). As universal
aestheticization is argued to dissolve truth and destroy sciences, rhetoric becomes more
important than justification. Replacing truth, fiction undermines the Enlightenment, as
reason is disregarded in favor of taste. These assertions, however, revive the traditional
opposition between beauty, appearance, and fiction, on one hand, and truth, substance,
and reality, on the other, such as the conflict between romanticism and idealism (Welsch
1996: 12). As a consequence of the development of science, truth became an esthetic
category, since the aestheticization of modernity reaching knowledge, rationality, and
reality increasingly gains ground (Welsch 1996: 12-13).
Starting with Kant’s philosophy, the aestheticization of knowledge began more
than two centuries ago (Welsch 1995: 485-509, 1996: 13). In his Critique of Pure Reason,
Kant (1964b) shows that a priori knowledge reflects aesthetic categories of intuitive
perception, such as time and space. Objects exist for cognition only through these
categories, since, as intuitive forms of perception, these categories are transcendentally
aesthetic, because they define reality for epistemology (Welsch 1996: 13). Knowledge,
thus, has an aesthetic foundation in cognition, given that, for Kant, “aesthetics became a
fundamental discipline in theoretical philosophy” (Welsch 1996: 22). Not following
Baumgarten’s (1961 [1750]) association of aesthetics with art, Kant (1964b) approaches
aesthetics as science. Taking over from Kant, Nietzsche (1979a) further develops the
question of the aesthetic and fictional constitution of knowledge and cognition. Showing
that the representation of reality is fundamentally aesthetic, Nietzsche (1979a)
approaches reality as a fictional construct formed by intuition, projections, and pictures
(Welsch 1996: 13), since for him knowledge is fundamentally metaphorical. Given that
Nietzsche (1979b: 85) writes that concepts are constructs having no other foundation than
metaphors, Nietzsche’s (1979a) aesthetic perspective on knowledge highlights its

103
inherent dynamism, flexibility, and fluidity which are the qualities that bring varied forms
of knowledge into proximity with poetry, fiction, and art (Welsch 1996: 13-14).
In the twentieth century, Nietzsche’s views became increasingly commonplace in
the theory of science that, for analytical philosophy (Quine 1960: vii) and the philosophy
of science (Neurath 1932: 206), is a make-shift, unstable, and modifiable structure.
Belonging to the theoretical features of science (Popper 1969: 103), softness, instability,
and fluidity also apply to the aesthetic constitution of reality (Welsch 1996: 14). In
hermeneutic philosophy, a sea voyage as the modern metaphor of the human condition
can no longer be contrasted with a safe observation point standing on a firm ground
(Welsch 1996: 14). As the metaphor of a sea voyage becomes universalized as a
fluctuating, insecure, and error-prone perspective floating in the wreckage of
disappearing certainties (Blumenberg 1979, 1997), contemporary analytic and post-
analytic philosophy holds the view that science and hermeneutics operate on an unstable
ground (Welsch 1996: 14). Thus, reality only remains meaningful as a description
founded upon problematic premises, lacking an absolute justification, and existing
alongside other versions of reality (Rorty 1979: 378). For Feyerabend (1984), truth’s
aesthetic character equates science with art that truth and reality are similar to, given their
relativity with regard to style, since the form of thought self-referentially supplies a
foundation for truth (Feyerabend 1984: 77, Welsch 1996: 15). For Rorty (1979: 53), a
culture whose foundations are aesthetically constituted, universally artificial, and self-
referentially validated is a poeticized and aestheticized culture that no longer assumes
there is reality or truth accessible behind cultural artifacts (Rorty 1979: 65, 67-69).
In the scientific practice of natural sciences, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg
argued aesthetically in physics (Chandrasekhar 1987, Wechsler 1978), whereas Poincaré
saw aesthetic factors as essential for mathematics (Chandrasekhar 1987, Wechsler 1978).
As aesthetics increasingly impacts knowledge, theories of science connect changes in the
aesthetic and literary canon to scientific revolutions (Hesse 1980, McAllister 1989). The
aesthetic character of knowledge is being recognized across academic disciplines, where
aesthetic constructions replace fundamental assumptions (Welsch 1996: 15). While in
semiotics chains of signifiers self-referentially refer to other chains of signifiers, in
systems theory observations of observations and descriptions of descriptions replace

104
points of ultimate reference (Luhmann 1992b: 717), whereas in microphysics new
complexity emerges at ever deeper elementary levels (Welsch 1996: 15-16). Becoming
generalized, this aestheticization is met with academic anxiety, public defensiveness, and
individual awareness (Welsch 1996: 16), even though the aestheticization of truth,
knowledge, and reality as the aesthetic turn started with Kant’s reflection on the aesthetic
constitution of knowledge and reality over 200 years ago (Welsch 1996: 16). Beginning
with Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, Nietzsche’s conception of cognition and reality as
essentially aesthetic is resonant with today’s natural sciences, where reality is
increasingly recognized to depend on cognition, fluctuate in its parameters, and be
constructed through metaphors (Welsch 1996: 16). Previously considered secondary to
reality, aesthetics directly pertains to knowledge and reality, as aesthetic phenomena
replace traditional objectivity as means for the knowledge of reality.
Art, cognition, and action equally contribute to the production of reality through
categories of appearance, diversity, and instability (Welsch 1996: 16). This recognition
by science of the aestheticization of knowledge, truth, and reality is the legacy of
modernity that leaves no question unaffected (Welsch 1996: 16). As aesthetic constructs,
scientific foundations concomitantly lose their foundational character, since aesthetic
factors and structures come to underpin scientific foundations (Welsch 1992a). With truth
becoming an aesthetic category, modernity succumbs to the aestheticization of science as
arguments against it can no longer be based on truth (Bubner 1989: 139, Welsch 1996:
17). Occurring across everyday life, social reality, individual orientations, and knowledge
production, aestheticization also refers to interrelations between surface embellishments,
media saturation, and practical ethics. Epistemological aestheticization that is behind the
general acceptance of aestheticization lends an informing background to other
aestheticization processes that it contributes to. The aestheticization of everyday life by
technology and media is complemented by the aestheticization of surface appearances as
part of urban landscapes and daily practice (Welsch 1996: 17). For Adorno (1974: 145),
however, individual aesthetic criteria for the critique of aestheticization need to derive
from the self-critique of aesthetic sensibility. Pervasive aesthetic enhancement also
results in the opposite of aestheticization, since ubiquitous embellishment and aesthetic
stimulation lead to indifference to aestheticization.

105
Welsch (1992b) argues in favor of the suspension and limitation of excessive
aestheticization, because aesthetic reflection is antithetical to aestheticization that
produces aesthetic numbness in the wake of its intensification. Given that developed
sensibility combines both attention and disregard, aesthetic reflection has to turn to blind
spots of aesthetic culture, in order to hold hyper-aestheticization at bay (Welsch 1990,
1996: 18). Reaching beyond aesthetics, the trend of aesthetic enhancement has
consequences for cultural sensitivity to differences and exclusion in art forms, product
design, and everyday life. Internally analogous, aesthetic experience and everyday life
mutually sensitize each other to their basic differences, irreducible peculiarity, and
guiding principles (Welsch 1994, 1996: 18-19). Aesthetic culture can make tolerance part
of everyday life through sensitivity to cultural differences (Welsch 1996: 19).
Furthermore, aesthetic sensitization can effectively intervene into social processes, rather
than surface appearances. Though not unqualified, epistemological aestheticization is an
inseparable part of the aestheticization of modern technology, media, and everyday life.
Since aesthetics can supply a critique of these processes of aestheticization, social,
cultural, and political implications of aestheticization include sensitization to aesthetic
differences, overstimulation, and responsibilities (Welsch 1996: 19-20). Thus, the wider
impact of aestheticization can change in response to the justification of its processes, the
criticism of its specific forms, and sensitization to the opportunities of its development.

106
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