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Excerpt from the introduction by Peter McNeil: (pp. xxiv-xxv) The anthology concludes with a provocative essay by Daniel Koch, "Training the Aesthetics". Koch, who has written a masterful PhD analyzing the architectural space of Åhléns department store, Stockholm City, aims to investigate "the matter of consumption choices, and to raise the question of how expert judgement communicates with and within populist quality judgement". He argues that "one of the primary roles of retail architecture is that of performing aesthetic training, or perhaps education in taste". Using wide-ranging theory drawn from art theory, philosophy, spatial theory and literature, Koch argues that a series of profound staging effects are enacted in entering a department store. Fashion is interrogated as akin to representative art, a subject that requires "inherent rarity and value – suggesting taste". His is a useful corrective to the idea that fashion is democratic today. Not at all, suggests Koch. The perusal and acquisition of fashion still operates within a system not dissimilar to entering a gallery space. Although the "bazaar" still exists, much contemporary fashion gains its charge from being displayed in austere spaces in to which untrained consumers can enter but not engage. In an important link back to Ane Lynge-Jorlén's essay on niche magazine readership, Koch resists the cliché of shop as gallery or cathedral space. Rather, he focuses upon the products themselves: "it is figured first as a subject rather than a practice, and it is presented with a disinterest as to how the real clothes look, and especially how they would look in a "normal" situation. Presentation constantly takes forms reminiscent of both popular or high art practices". In a strong statement that brings together the many strands contained in this book, Koch's comment will conclude our anthology: "Meaning is relative to other spaces as well as other systems of meaning, such as the mediation of fashion through magazines, advertising, television and online ...

Surveys the major aesthetic concepts within the writings of Fredric Jameson, especially Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981), & Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (1990). The influence of both Georg Lukacs & Theodor W. Adorno on Jameson's theoretical system is noted. Also examined are key philosophical assumptions as well as the historical context behind Jameson's suggestion that the aesthetic approaches of both Lukacs & Adorno may prove to be "two distinct & equally indispensable moments of the hermeneutic process itself.". 42 References. AA

This paper proposes a radical re-examination of the foundations of modern aesthetics. It urges that we replace the tradition of eighteenth century aesthetics, with its insistence on disinterestedness and the separateness of the aesthetic, and its problematic oppositions, such as the separation of sense from cognition. In their place it appeals to a more process-oriented, pluralistic account, one that takes note of varying cultural traditions in aesthetics, that recognizes the aesthetic as a complex of many forces and factors, and that considers the aesthetic as part of a complexity of values, including moral, practical, social, and political ones. It urges, further, an aesthetic-based criticism, not only of the arts, but of culture and knowledge. Central to this account is the idea of aesthetic engagement, which not only recognizes and extends the many connections of and in aesthetic experience, but invites our total involvement as active participants. ; This paper proposes a radical re-examination of the foundations of modern aesthetics. It urges that we replace the tradition of eighteenth century aesthetics, with its insistence on disinterestedness and the separateness of the aesthetic, and its problematic oppositions, such as the separation of sense from cognition. In their place it appeals to a more process-oriented, pluralistic account, one that takes note of varying cultural traditions in aesthetics, that recognizes the aesthetic as a complex of many forces and factors, and that considers the aesthetic as part of a complexity of values, including moral, practical, social, and political ones. It urges, further, an aesthetic-based criticism, not only of the arts, but of culture and knowledge. Central to this account is the idea of aesthetic engagement, which not only recognizes and extends the many connections of and in aesthetic experience, but invites our total involvement as active participants.

This Element argues that aesthetics broadly conceived plays a significant role in Wittgenstein's philosophy. It traces a continuous line of thought pertaining to a non-conceptual form of encounter with reality and contributes to Wittgenstein's understanding of language and the method of philosophy throughout his career.

In re-igniting a familiar debate about the balance between state security and individual privacy, the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have have stalled on matters of regulation and reform, which treat secrecy, securitisation and surveillance largely in procedural terms. This article seeks to interrupt the containment strategies of communicative capitalism/democracy evident in these debates by configuring secrets as subject to and the subject of radical politics rather than regulation. Its premise is that we might be better able to form a radical political response to the 'Snowden event' by situating the secret within a distributive regime and imagining what collectivities and subjectivities the secret makes available. Through a consideration of artworks by Trevor Paglen and Jill Magid – which help us to stay with the secret as secret, rather than foregrounding the more individualistic notion of privacy or moving too quickly towards revelation and reform – the article turns from a hermeneutics of the secret towards an aesthetics of the secret. Considered as a Rancièrean 'distribution of the sensible', a delimitation of space, time, the visible, the sayable, the audible, and political experience, this aesthetics can help us to imagine a politics of the secret not bound to policy and legalities.

What is the relevance of organizing knowledge in distinct conceptual fields when everything has become cultural with no distinct areas anymore? Is, for example, Western traditional aesthetics as an autonomous cognitive discipline always relevant in the age of multiculturalism? This essay argues, albeit controversially, that the perspective of socalled cultural studies has opened new doors by adopting a more radically pluralistic and inclusive approach – one whereby aesthetic categories are thought in terms of cultural practices. Despite the many defects of such culture-related studies – such as their eclecticism, lack of scientific rigor, or methodological unreliability – the challenges of today's multicultural society demand that we pay more attention at all levels to the roles played by difference and dialogue with otherness. This includes overcoming any form of ethnocentricity in our cognitive cultural disciplines; incorporating new topical horizons, whether economic, political or social; and rethinking the very nature of value, meaning and way of life.

International audience ; The first part of this article outlines a dilemma in cultural studies and sociology of culture regarding the politics of aesthetics. This concerns whether discourse about the evaluation of symbolic forms serves to reinforce power relations and maintain divisions between people and communities, or whether evaluation can serve as a basis for greater commonality. One way of at least beginning to address this issue is to attend to the 'everyday aesthetics' of media audiences, exemplified here in the ordinary evaluative discourse of music users. The second part of the article reports on interview research about musical tastes and values. It analyses these interviews for evidence of the ways in which evaluative statements might involve making connections with others, or alternatively how they may act as barriers to social connectivity or community. How and to what extent might ordinary musical evaluation be thought of as part of potential aesthetic public spheres?

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Politics and the Spatial Imagination -- 2 Politics of Aesthetics -- 3 Politics for Beginners -- 4 Politics in-Common -- 5 Politics for Equals -- 6 The Sublime Element in Politics -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index