Aesthetics of the Familiar (1.2)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making by Yuriko Saito.

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The second section of the first part of Aesthetics of the Familiar is an overview of sorts of the history of aesthetics, by way of potential objections to the author’s notion of everyday aesthetics. She deals with them responsibly if not decisively, which would be too much to ask.

One objection dates to Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable. This commensurates with a distinction between pleasures of the distal and proximal senses, sight and hearing on one hand, taste, smell, and touch on the other. Why smell is categorized as a proximal sense is not clear to me, but that seems to be the case for the long history of aesthetics. To the charge that the agreeable, unlike the beautiful, cannot be profound, Saito counters that any number of proper art objects fall short of profundity, so profundity can’t be the razor.

A second objection, that the experiences of proximal senses are not universal, seems especially weak, but several authors have made it and one of them is Kant, so it has to be dealt with. By entailing what Kant calls “delineation” and elsewhere is described as “credential,” works appealing to the distal senses can be marked with cues as such, the literal frame on a painting being the most obvious example. To counter this Saito appeals to Japanese aesthetics, which does not value this sort of delineation, and tends to deal with contextual effects (e.g., the qualities of the room in which a painting is hung) as inseparable from the object in question.

A third and related objection is “lack of frame.” “Inclusion of bodily sensations as an integral part of an overall aesthetic experience, according to the critics, renders the object of aesthetic experience frameless. One can throw in random ingredients as its constituents, thereby making an objective account of experience impossible” (p. 48). To this she answers that maybe objectivity is the wrong goal. Instead, she proposes a distinction between aesthetics as an exercise of judgment, spectator aesthetics, which requires an objective standpoint, and aesthetics as a category of human experience, activist aesthetics, which does not. Even writing as someone in the judgment business, the latter appeals. Saito (p. 55):

Audre Lorde also recounts her experience of helping her mother grind spices in a mortar, which includes rhythmic body movement punctuated by the muted sound of thump and the tactile sensation of pressing around the carved side of the mortar. All these sensory experiences “transported me into a world of scent and rhythm and movement and sound that grew more and more exciting as the ingredients liquefied.

It seems wrong to disqualify this from aesthetic consideration, and with “activist aesthetics” we don’t have to. (Note that this is activist in the sense that it involves action, not activism.) Page 58:

I do not see any good reasons to follow Kant’s treatment of these bodily experiences as merely adding “charms” to the experience composed of sight and sound, or dismissing the entire experience for lacking aesthetic credentials due to the subjective nature of the experience. The judgment-oriented esthetics that is appropriate for the traditional aesthetics modeled on experience of art is not appropriate for accounting for the aesthetics involved in “doing” things. A phenomenological description rather than a critical discourse is more suited for this dimension of our everyday aesthetic life.

Nevertheless, at the previous post on the book, Peter Joslin made a trenchant comment:

I enjoy mowing the lawn and the resulting trimmed yard. I go about it in a very deliberate, mindful and attentive fashion. Is the finished product aesthetically pleasing? I think so. Was the act of mowing an aesthetic experience? Not really.

To Saito’s claim that “attending to and cultivating an aesthetic appreciation for [mundane] activities help us develop a mindful way of living” and “facilitates leading a good life without the usual trappings of requiring material abundance accompanied by various moral, social, and environmental problems,” Peter replies, “I think this is a big reach and a far cry from aesthetics.”

Her activist aesthetics is continually threatening to bleed over from action into activism. In the later section on wind farms, it does so, and it weakens the thesis. Leaving that aside, I can readily accept Lorde’s spice-grinding as belonging to an aesthetic realm. But it would be grotesque to critique it. Either we accept spectator aesthetics and have to rescue activist aesthetics or the converse.

Peter’s lawn is a different case. I too am a mower of lawns of some ability and have gotten to the point that I can stripe turf. I might have opinions about his lawn that would rise all the way to judgment. This strikes me as a more compelling example of everyday aesthetics. We can discuss how well the job turned out. I’m tempted to propose that spectator and activist aesthetics may not be distinguishable, if critique is a special class of action. I wouldn’t aesthetically analyze Lorde’s experience, but I could imagine her mother glancing into the pestle and saying, “Keep going, not fine enough.” Maybe we need an everyday criticism to accompany everyday aesthetics.

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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.

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