Ben Highmore
In his book The Comfort of Things the cultural anthropologist Daniel Miller presents thirty portraits of individuals and their relationship to things that they possess (and that, as he will suggest, possess them). He writes:
There is an overall logic to the pattern of these relationships to both persons and things, for which I use the term “aesthetic.” By choosing this term I don’t mean anything technical or artistic, and certainly nothing pretentious. It simply helps convey something of the overall desire for harmony, order, and balance that may be discerned in certain cases—and also dissonance, contradiction, and irony in others.
(Miller 2008: 5)
Miller uses the term “aesthetic” to describe his informants’ intimate material worlds, but as soon as he does so, he energetically distances himself from the connotations of artiness and connoisseurship that often accompany the term “aesthetic.” The story I tell about aesthetics does its share of distancing too, and although such pedantic positioning may seem overly fussy, it is, I will show, a necessary result of the history of aesthetics in intellectual thought.
But why does Miller want the term “aesthetic”? What is wrong with using a word like “style” or “lifestyle” to describe the pattern of our relations with the world of things? My guess is that, for Miller, “lifestyle” has become too easily associated with a one-dimensional critique of consumer capitalism, where material culture is merely a way of showcasing status and prestige. Aesthetics, on the other hand, suggests a world of sensual contact with things—a world of bodies perceiving themselves and other bodies, a world thick with emotion and sentiment. This gives the term “aesthetic” a lively visceral sense, in contrast to the seeming stifling snobbery of aesthetes. It is this sense of the term as corporeal—addressed to sensual perception and registering emotional intensities—that will make it useful to the sociologically informed study of culture. For social aesthetics, matter matters, and rationality and reason have to play second fiddle to the empirical world of sensation, affect, and perception. But before I offer examples of the productivity of social aesthetics, it is worth addressing the historical roots of the term “aesthetics” and the various paths this term has taken.
From the mid-eighteenth century, the term “aesthetics” wavers between a limited sense as a reflection on beauty, taste, and art, and an extended sense more concerned with the everyday perception of the sensual, phenomenal world. If the former is driven by a desire to judge and appreciate, the latter is oriented to more general descriptive exploration. Writing in 1750, Alexander Baumgarten, who is usually acknowledged as coining the term “aesthetics,” describes it as the “science of sensual cognition” (quoted in Hammermeister 2002: 7). From the start, aesthetics poses a problem: if we use the term “cognition” to primarily describe our dealings in the ideational world of thoughts and concepts, should we talk about “cognition” when we are dealing with the world of emotions and sensations? Baumgarten’s insistence on the word “cognition” here is in keeping with his overall intention. For Baumgarten, our sensual “knowledge” of the world is neither to be trusted nor to be championed: “impressions received from the senses, fantasies, emotional disturbances, etc. are unworthy of philosophers and beneath the scope of their consideration” (Baumgarten 1998 [1750]: 490). In this, he sets the tone for numerous accounts of aesthetic knowledge: he recognizes that the world we live in is experienced sensually and passionately, but that this sensual engagement is often “base” and creaturely. The aesthetic task is not simply to explore the sensual realm but to transform it, to rescue it from its mere sensual form and to set it on a par with the higher purpose of reason. And it is here that poetry, theatre, novels, sculptures, or painting can work their magic—by transcending ordinary life and realizing the beauty of order and sensitive taste.
From the mid- to late eighteenth century onward, the sociological potential of aesthetics—its potential to attend to the full range of sensual experience—was effectively quashed by an overriding concern amongst philosophers and social commentators to concentrate on polite sensitivity and the categories of the beautiful and sublime. Other forms of sensual experience—for instance finding something unnerving, or being confused and anxious, or enjoying the comfort and familiarity of things, or finding something contemptible, and so on—simply got left out of the picture. Although the business of tasteful discrimination continued into the twentieth century, it was by then more obviously in conflict with a social paradox: philosophical attention to taste had sought to establish immutable laws for beauty, whereas the rising commercial culture and commodity exchange were also in the business of producing taste, yet for this production to provide endless cycles of new commodities beauty had to be profoundly mutable. As Jean Epstein wrote, “One talks of the eternal canons of beauty when two successive catalogs of the Bon Marché [a Parisian department store] confound this drivel” (quoted in Marcus 2007: 2).
The understandings of aesthetics as a form of art-theory or as a labyrinthine discussion of the beautiful and the sublime have been challenged by a much more generous understanding of what might count for aesthetic study. In his 1884 essay “What Is an Emotion?” the philosopher and psychologist William James described “the aesthetic sphere of the mind” as the mind’s “longings, pleasures and pains, and its emotions” (James 1884: 188). Such a perspective connects to Baumgarten’s original meaning for the term, but without the desire to rescue this sphere from our creaturely habits and desires. For James, the aesthetic sphere is the arena of our most visceral forms of life, our most insistently human domains: the task is not to transcend it but to explore it as our empirical reality. In this, James reconnects us to a moment, prior to Baumgarten’s coinage, when philosophers talked about “the passions,” and included the whole gamut of sense impressions and emotional reactions that would later be parceled out into discrete enclaves of aesthetics, psychology, ethics, and so on.
The first fully sociological use of the term aesthetics likely appears in the work of Georg Simmel. His 1896 essay “Soziologische Aesthetik” heralds an approach to the social that is attentive to the felt experience of social actors, attuned to the surface phenomena of culture (to be found in clothing and eating etiquette, as much as, if not more than, in elite culture), and expressly concerned with new forms of social life. Simmel’sis an interest in the formal aspects of culture, in the ways that social life is patterned. Simmel doesn’t ignore an interest in beauty; rather, our appreciation of certain formal shapes and arrangements is central to our ability to understand the world. Privileging symmetry and contrast, for instance, would determine (and be detrimental to) our understanding of the web-like complexity of modern life. Part of the task of sociology, in its social aesthetic role, is to appreciate new and more complex patterns: “the more we learn to appreciate composite forms, the more readily we will extend aesthetic categories to forms of society as a whole” (Simmel 1968 [1896]: 74).
In recent years the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has prompted a new understanding of aesthetics that connects the sensual and affective orchestration of material life to the cultural forms we use to apprehend and manage material life. Rancière uses the phrase “the distribution of the sensible” (“le partage du sensible”) to describe the orchestration of material and cultural life: the distribution of the sensible is “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience” (Rancière 2004: 13). Here, Rancière’s aesthetic thought is clearly political (what is and isn’t perceivable matters socially), but it compellingly overcomes the distinction between an experience of sensorial life versus the cultural forms (novels, films, diaries, and so on) that are used to explain and describe such experience. The “distribution of the sensible” would include within its orbit the parceling out of the social world undertaken by, for instance, a realist novel, a school building, or a dietary practice. In this way, novels as much as herbs and spices “flavor” our world, and arrange it in sensorial ways.
The political and sociological orientation of Rancière’s work points to a major accomplishment of social aesthetics: because it purposefully privileges practices, processes, and interconnections, it has the ability to overcome the separation of (human) subjects and (inhuman) objects. For Rancière, the social subject is constituted in a world patterned by arrangements of sensual and sensorial possibilities and impossibilities, and this arrangement is produced by human and non-human actions. Given that our societies, for all their differences, are structured unevenly (in terms of class, for instance, or gender), a radical social aesthetic perspective (Rancière’s, for instance, but also Simmel’s) would see this structuring as a product of aesthetic arrangements rather than seeing aesthetic arrangements as a product of a structuring that might be explained by, for instance, economics. Here, social aesthetics doesn’t attempt to demote the importance of the distribution of wealth, but to insist that economic factors always take sensual, material forms and that these forms are aesthetic.
Such a short sketch of some of the roots and routes that the term “aesthetics” has taken cannot do justice to the many nuanced arguments that have been conducted in its name. One thing, though, seems obvious: social aesthetics simply can’tafford to heed the limitations imposed on aesthetics by those whose main task is to protect the sanctity of the artwork. This is not to say that artworks aren’t important for social aesthetics, far from it, but rather than aesthetics signaling the autonomous value of art, the flag of social aesthetics is raised in order to insist on the deeply embedded connections between artworks and creaturely, material life. Indeed, it could be argued that a social aesthetics places a higher value on the artwork than does an art aesthetics by seeing it as a generative agent in the orchestration of the sensorial. Social aesthetics has a promiscuous interest in all sorts of manifestations—artworks, travel guides, furniture showrooms, plumbing, legal documents, and on and on and on. What keeps it focused is its overriding interest in the “distribution of the sensible,” the profoundly social and material work of patterning culture. But let me move away from these abstract discussions to offer some more concrete examples of the productivity, problems, and potential of social aesthetics.
One way that social aesthetics has been enormously productive for cultural sociology has been in charting what might be called the moods and modes of modernity. Here, the work of German critics such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer during the 1920s and 1930s has been hugely influential in understanding the material transformations of sensorial social life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the cultural moods and modes that such transformations have generated. Both writers were profoundly indebted to the cultural sociology of Georg Simmel, and they followed his cue of finding deep structural changes within the surface phenomena of everyday culture. Both Kracauer and Benjamin paid attention to forms of popular entertainment (cinema, dance-troops, café-concerts, and so on), to the non-places of modern culture (hotel lobbies, moth-eaten shopping arcades, railway stations, etc.), and to the new technologies of communication and movement (trams and cars, cameras and telephones). Theirs was a diagnostic approach, scouring the surfaces of modern life for deep fissures that allowed them to glimpse both signs of sensual and perceptual change as well as the possibilities for new critical approaches to society that lay buried amongst commercial culture.
A central diagnostic argument put forward by both Benjamin and Kracauer was the claim that modern cultural forms solicited and encouraged new forms of attention. Thus in cinema (the new media of their day) they saw not only new cultural techniques but also new relationships between audiences and artwork. For Benjamin, if traditional art had been steeped in cult-value and aura, the art of cinema demanded a distracted spectator. Such new cultural forms reversed the relationship between the cultural object and the perceiving subject: instead of the viewer being absorbed by the artwork, the new cultural forms were absorbed into the viewers’ orbits (their interests and concerns). This development heralds the birth of the modern mass audience. In cinema, audience members are less daunted by the auratic presence of the work and find themselves casually taking issue with the forms of representation that pass before them (the example of armchair sports critics springs readily to mind).
Both Benjamin and Kracauer were subtle, dialectical thinkers, and they would constantly reveal the simultaneous negative and positive possibilities within new cultural forms. So if the cinematic audience could potentially find a critical space in the new entertainment industries, it could also be lulled into a waking dream by the very same material. Distraction, then, has both negative and positive potential, suggesting a sense of overcoming cultural material (refusing its authority) while also being kept in a state of absent-mindedness (partly through the sheer abundance of cultural material). In this, cultural material (including road systems as much as cameras, office furniture as much as radio) is pedagogic—and this is its main aesthetic role. For Benjamin, cinema, funfairs, the click of the camera shutter, the crossing of the road, all serve as training manuals. Whether these phenomena train you for the factory floor or the role of social critic is uncertain; in Benjamin’s understanding it was probably both. As a “training manual,” aesthetic culture prepares the body, it readies our perceptional capacities, and it attempts to establish proclivities.
The focus on attention, on the perceptual capacities of the human subject in relation to changing social and material circumstances, has achieved renewed importance in recent decades. When looking at emerging patterns of feeling and perception, we tend to look backwards from the new to imagine a previous moment when things were different. Often, though, this looking back is itself a product of forces at work in the new. This is a crucial point: when looking at the emergence of modern moods like boredom or social anxieties like agoraphobia or nervous exhaustion, we need to keep in focus the forces at work in producing enthusiastic interest or urban dynamism or nervous stamina. For Jonathan Crary, distraction is a symptom of the attempt to produce concentration: “modern distraction was not a disruption of stable or ‘natural’ kinds of sustained, value-laden perception that had existed for centuries but was an effect, and in many cases a constituent element, of the many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects” (Crary 1999: 49). Although this adds a critical dimension to Benjamin and Kracauer’s work, it does not contradict their positions. Rather it deepens the dialectic of absorptions and distraction that is also a mark of our present moment as we navigate working and domestic routines that demand sustained absorption in computer screens, gadgetry, and internet byways, while all around us leisure is offered to us in the shape of mobile sound technologies and computer graphics. The constant stream of journalism decrying the short attention span of today’s youth (on what evidence?), or the over-prescribing of drugs like Ritalin, must be seen within a social demand for more and more fluid forms of concentration and promiscuous absorption.
Although some social and cultural theorists might see globalization as a recent phenomenon, it is at least as old as Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic in 1492. Although there had been invasions and cultural appropriations prior to 1492, Columbus’s voyage marked a new age of global power, a new age that has done much to constitute our contemporary world. We can get a quick sense of the extent of this longer history of globalization by looking at the spread of languages: The global languages (primarily English, Spanish, and French, but also to a lesser degree Portuguese and Dutch) are the languages of the colonizers. If language is sensual and sensorial consciousness, then the oral and aural texture of the modern world has been indelibly stamped with the aesthetics of colonialism to a very basic degree.
The sensual landscapes of global modernity have been marked by the comings and goings of people and things. In the United Kingdom, for instance, every town, every large village, and every city has a selection of Indian restaurants in its main street. The aesthetic registers of smell and taste within the UK have been shaped by Indian food, to the point where the unofficial English football anthem is named after the Goan dish vindaloo. To follow the sensual journey of this particularly spicy dish is to witness the aesthetic globalizing effects of colonialism and its neo-colonial persistence. Vindaloo is a dish that resulted from combining the Portuguese taste for pork (the Portuguese had colonized this part of India) with the spicing practices of local Goans. Yet what characterizes this dish, and many of the most globally well-known Indian dishes, is its use of chilies. And it was the Portuguese that introduced chilies into India when they transported them from South America (Collingham 2005). Yet, once designed, vindaloo doesn’t remain unchanged as it moves around the globe, but takes on new textures and flavors as it textures and flavors in turn. This is not to privilege the agency of chilies over the practices of cooks or diners, but to claim that the experience of vindaloo eating in specific geographical and historical circumstances will always be a complex amalgam of sensual and symbolic social arrangements. Vindaloo eating cannot be adequately described or explained by recourse to socially symbolic values (for instance its association with male, white “lad” culture in Britain) without also recognizing its intense sensual effects and affects (see Highmore 2008).
If aesthetics is, following Baumgarten, sensual cognition, then the flavors, sounds, smells of everyday life should be social aesthetics’ first port of call. Academic work on food culture usually only explicitly employs aesthetics when it wants to make claims for the culinary excellence of a certain cuisine, or, more often, of a highly select group of chefs. But social aesthetics should insist that elevating the ordinary to the level of art is a pointless game, and could instead respond by treating all sensual material as both worldly and singular. In this, social aesthetics is a form of close attention (to the specificity of things, to their phenomenal form) as well as a way of connecting specific things to lively worlds of other things and bodies. Elspeth Probyn’s book Carnal Appetites (2000) is an exemplary instance of social aesthetics as it moves between localized bodies eating specific foods and patterns of economic and social power. Here, eating is never a solitary act: it materially connects to social and political realms. For social aesthetics, the “food chain” (in all its human, animal, industrial, chemical, and geographical complexity) is a materializing instance of what it means to be embodied. For Probyn, Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of social practices as unnervingly regular even when they seem to be most spontaneous and improvised is a compelling intellectual resource. But in her book the symbolic world of culture is made deeply physical and sensual through analytic descriptions that constantly move from actual bodies savoring flavors or turning up noses to the material actuality of larger patterns of food exchange and production (which also includes the production of ideas about food).
Philosophers and cultural critics, frustrated at the limitations of traditional aesthetics to consider sensual formations that don’t correspond to the concentration on the beautiful and the sublime, have suggested that we focus on more “minor” aesthetic forms. Sianne Ngai, for instance, suggests that privileging emotions like irritation and envy (Ngai 2005a), and cultural forms like the cute and the zany, will provide a better understanding of our present times than maintaining a focus on strong feelings like anger and love and formal values like ugliness and beauty. In this, she follows philosophers like J.L. Austin (whom she acknowledges) who argue that ordinary life provides wonderful opportunities for studying language and that it might also provide a rich field for the study of aesthetics “if only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy” (Austin, cited in Ngai 2005b: 811).
The dainty and the dumpy might need to take a back seat in any assessment of our contemporary world (like “frilly” they seem to have an early twentieth-century ring to them): more pertinent to today might be the shiny, the “buff,” the fit, the cute, the connected, the fast, the mobile, and so on. Globalizing culture is constantly being refashioned and reshaped. In recent decades we have witnessed a globalizing trajectory manifesting from Japan. A key form has been characterized as “globalized cute.” Cultural franchises like Pokémon, Hello Kitty, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh have spread across the globe by the billions—as trading cards, TV cartoons, computer games, brand identifiers, lunch boxes, stickers, toys, internet sites, clothing, bags, and so on. The round-eyed fairytale figures created by these franchises offer an image of smiling lovability and easygoing-ness in a world organized around complex and rigid rules. Their amazing success has created a transnational Japan that both maintains aspects of national cultural forms while also transforming them (there is a distinct lack of ethnic specificity in any of the brands). For social aesthetics, the emergence of “global cute” could be seen as both a softening of the phenomenal world and a hardening of its structuring abilities—for instance the ability to instill forms of compliance. But we would do well to remember Benjamin’s insistence that we treat such materials dialectically, and refuse the easy option of treating them as having necessarily good or bad effects and affects.
In 1928, Mikhail Bakhtin and Pavel Medvedev declared, “it is necessary to overcome once and for all the naïve apprehension that the qualitative uniqueness of, say, art, could suddenly turn out to be something other than sociological” (1985 [1928]: 6). This suggests that socially oriented approaches to cultural objects like artworks need to be inoculated (from the start) against any transcendental understanding of aesthetics. This is the negative cargo of social aesthetics. While sociology has provided anti-transcendental accounts of the art world (for instance Becker 2008 [1982]), the less visible, positive challenge is for social aesthetics to apprehend the “qualitative uniqueness” of not just artworks but also cooking, gardening, media, furniture, business cultures, bureaucracies, and so on, sociologically. This means, I think, treating such cultural forms as agents of social life, rather than mediated reflections thereof; it means always asking how such forms distribute the sensible and what effects and affects such distribution has; it means looking at the feelings, moods, and modes that these forms generate. To give a concrete example, it means not simply recognizing that a plate of Bangladeshi food has a different meaning for a white racist than for a Bangladeshi cook, but acknowledging that the food will actually taste different: it will hit the taste buds differently, settle in the stomach in different ways, and so on. This is to recognize the sociality of our bodies and the way that our racial orientations are simultaneously ideas and bodily orientations. It is at the concrete level of experience that the real potential of social aesthetics lies, and its sociological power will not be guaranteed by treating food, for instance, as another marker of prestige or status, but by constructing sociological accounts of the qualitative uniqueness of food as cultural phenomena that circulate in phenomenologically different ways than furniture or films. At present, much scholarship treats aspects of sensual and sensorial life sociologically (and at the cost of qualitative uniqueness), but few books treat the social distribution of sensual and sensorial culture aesthetically (examples like Probyn’s work are a rarity).
The future of social aesthetics is not merely a matter of academic concern. Indeed, although social aesthetics is dedicated to forms of critical description, it also recognizes the way that aesthetic forms generate social experiences and social assimilation. In this regard, alongside providing analytic description, those practicing social aesthetics might consider their potential as cultural activists in producing new “distributions of the sensible.” If aesthetics has always reflected on beauty, then the work of social aesthetics might require the active transformation of beauty. If beauty can be seen as the materialization of pleasure, then the displeasure invoked by the not-beautiful is of huge social and political significance. In an age when we are edging ever closer to environmental catastrophe, any aesthetic dispensation that automatically favors obsessive cleanliness and the brand-spanking-new over the worn, the crumpled, and the chipped will have serious long-term consequences. The social aesthetic challenges that climate change, for instance, brings us is to find new pleasures in the old, in refuse, and in the reused, and (perhaps more importantly) to find displeasure in the conspicuous waste generated by consumer culture. The trick here is for social aesthetics to sweep aside the language of moral duty to make way for the pleasurable reconfiguration of passionate aesthetic culture.
But this goal is meaningless if it merely reconnects aesthetics to the task of designating beauty (the central task of traditional aesthetics). One of the most compelling aspects of the social movements of the last fifty years is the liberation of certain social groups from mainstream (i.e. straight, white, male) standards of value, beauty, and worth. The ability to distribute new forms of cultural confidence among women, queer communities, and groups marginalized by race or class, is simultaneously political and aesthetic. Social aesthetics has political affectivity precisely because it has been socially aesthetic: this is a deep, grass-roots politics. And the work of social aesthetics is ongoing as long as the materialization of equality is still to be achieved.
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