Aesthetics of the Familiar (1.1)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making by Yuriko Saito.
In Aesthetics of the Familiar, Yuriko Saito argues for, and describes controversies around, the establishment of aesthetics as a topic of consideration beyond art objects, extending into life itself. The term for this in the related literature is everyday aesthetics, which not coincidentally is the title of Saito’s first book. She also has a later volume, Aesthetics of Care. Saito figures prominently in scholarship on the subject.
Given that most fields specify and subdivide as they develop, it’s one of those things that seems increasingly strange as you further consider it that aesthetic philosophy concerned itself with art objects and only generalized towards everything else in recent decades. Some of the associated baggage could be usefully discarded. To pick something, Western aesthetics distinguishes between distal and proximal senses and favors the former for analysis. Saito says this is fine for aesthetics as it relates to art and music. But much of what we experience doesn’t fall into those categories, and nevertheless has an aesthetic dimension worth considering.
So Aesthetics of the Familiar gets off to what seems like an inauspicious start. First it admits that everyday is not easy to define (page 9: “It turns out that the ‘everyday’ is an elusive, as well as a highly contested, concept”). Then it begins a discussion of the ways that one might bring aesthetic appreciation to the everyday with deliberate defamiliarization, one version of which is termed artification, the “benefits of art-like practice in those areas of life normally not associated with art” (p. 13). Maybe the history of working backward from the specific to the general in this case wasn’t so strange after all.
One might gather from a cursory look that this book is going to bash the supposedly blinkered West like so much other academic literature. But Saito has better intentions (p. 4): “This book challenges the model and assumptions derived from the philosophy of art and beauty that still dominate Anglo-American aesthetics…. I would characterize my challenge, however, to be constructive, rather than destructive, by expanding and enriching the existing discourse.”
Defamiliarization ranges from Sartre’s nausea to Huxley’s acid-opened doors of perception to Dōgen’s setting down of the self. Having established that, Saito pivots—pace Dōgen, no less—to the side of familiarization. Page 24:
My argument is this: paying attention and bringing background to the foreground is simply making something invisible visible and is necessary for any kind of aesthetic experience, whether of the extraordinary or ordinary. Bringing background to the foreground through paying attention contrasts with conducting everyday life on autopilot, which puts the ingredients of everyday life beyond capture by our conscious radar. But putting something on our conscious radar and making something visible does not necessarily render our experience extraordinary….
Being aware and paying attention is simply a prerequisite of any kind of aesthetic experience, whatever the content. To paraphrase Annie Dillard’s observation, with mindful attention, I may experience an unpeached peach or a peach in its very peach-ness.
A few readers protested during our deep consideration of Michael Schreyach’s Totality that intellectualizing the experience of painting to such a degree was of dubious interest and utility. With Saito I have the opportunity to offer them: won’t you be excited when we do the same thing regarding laundry!
Phenomenology calls to me because I’m a couple of years into navigating a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder that I received a full four decades after my high school French teacher once interrupted his lecture to ask me, conspicuously, what was so interesting out the window. I’ll write a future post on that. For now, I’ve been made aware that I experience a different phenomenological orientation than most people. It makes an A in French impossible in my case1 but it enables art-making. Given that ADD is only a disorder in certain contexts and is a massive advantage in others, I’ve become interested in mechanisms of attention and the philosophy of experience, and the problem of whether to unpeach the peach or peach the peach like it has never been peached before. Page 31:
I believe that one of the challenges everyday aesthetics poses is to practice art of living and negotiate daily life by sometimes developing its extraordinary aesthetic potentials, other times savoring the very ordinariness of the familiar, yet some other times sharpening a critical perception of the aesthetically negative aspects of our lives with an eye toward improving them.
If “practice art of living” makes your proofreading eyes twitch, note that I had Saito as a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, and this is true to her manner. I’m glad the editor left it intact, as it evokes how her Japanese expression would overwhelm its English syntax. That class made an impression on me to the present day, which is more than I can say for high school French, regarding which I stand by my youthful preference for the view out the window.
I’ll treat the second section of Part I early next week. Your thoughts are welcome below.
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Our current book for the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making by Yuriko Saito. Obtain your copy and jump in. For more information see the ASBC schedule.
Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.
Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.
Hallowell and Ratey note that difficulty in foreign language acquisition is a common aspect of ADD. See Delivered From Distraction: Getting the Most Out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder (2005).
Being present, mindful and attentive were recurring thoughts while reading part I of Saito’s Aesthetics of The Familiar. As Saito states: “Dewey declares that ‘the enemies of the aesthetic are neither practical nor intellectual. They are the humdrum.’ I would instead hold that the enemies of the aesthetic are inattentiveness and mindlessness.”
She goes on to say “What is common to these diverse modes of aesthetic experience is mindful attention, perceptual engagement, and employment of sensibility toward everyday life.”
She raises and important question when contemplating bodily engagement such as cooking and helping her mother chop vegetables: “Ultimately, therefore, are such experiences simply pleasurable and enjoyable without being specifically aesthetic?” I enjoy mowing the lawn and the resulting trimmed yard. I go about it in a very deliberate, mindful and attentive fasion. Is the finished product aesthetically pleasing? I think so. Was the act of mowing an aesthetic experience? Not really.
She concludes the chapter stating: “…as I discussed previously, attending to and cultivating an aesthetic appreciation for these activities [scratching an itch, drinking tea, hanging laundry, cooking] help us develop a mindful way of living. In particular, it facilitates leading a good life without the usual trappings of requiring material abundance accompanied by various moral, social, and environmental problems.” I think this is a big reach and a far cry from aesthetics.
I like "neo-criticality." There's promise there.
I dislike "progressive," although (long ago) I considered myself one. Ah, those were the days.
And as for erudition, it took less than two decades for "progressives" to make the erudite highly suspect. It's inevitable that we remember Mao and his successes in a similar endeavor. Rather than allow such a winnowing to occur again, let's make erudition honorable again.