Abstract
This opening chapter examines the consequences of the aestheticization of everyday life, by historicizing the role taste plays in the social mediation of value. It engages the literature on the social impact of the aesthetic dimension by placing counterpositions from Kantian aesthetics, the sociology of culture, critical theory, postmodern theory, and cultural studies in relation to changes in the political economy. Across this discourse, it focuses on a central line of concern emanating from a dialectic between beauty and alienation, one that raises the importance of aesthetic judgment in the determination of social forms, just as taste is enlisted to resolve an economy in crisis.
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Notes
Karl Marx (1964) describes the cultivation of the senses across history in “Private Property and Communism,” in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In doing so, he conceives of taste as a social faculty. This translation comes from T.B. Bottomore (1964. pp. 161-162).
Kant makes this case in the Second Division of the Critique of Judgment “Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment.” It is a contention that has generated contemporary interest (Ginsborg 2005; Wayne 2014).
Jukka Gronow’s (2011) analysis of Luhmann’s critique of Simmel’s conception of aesthetic sociability provides another entrance into the debate over the efficacy of the aesthetic dimension. While Luhmann argues that Simmel’s application of Kantian aesthetics creates an unrealistic and abstract form of sociability, one that disavows the power relations that police the borders of the aesthetic dimension, Simmel is shown to emphasize the playfulness of the aesthetic element, and its impulse toward sociability. In staging the debate this way, Gronow shows how the aesthetic element is contaminated as it takes form in social interactions. Whereas Simmel, and Gronow (in his book The Sociology of Taste [1997]), works to show how taste is shaped by the impulse toward sociability in this book, I am interested in how the friction between the aesthetic element and its so-called contamination influence our understanding of the political economy.
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© 2015 David Michalski
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Michalski, D. (2015). Introduction: What’s at Stake in Taste. In: The Dialectic of Taste: On the Rise and Fall of Tuscanization and Other Crises in the Aesthetic Economy. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137544285_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137544285_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57485-8
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