Aesthetics of the Familiar (fin)

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

Tripoli, by Ankara - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 (source)

Reader Peter Joslin dropped a fine summary of this book in the comments a couple of days ago:

While finishing Saito’s Aesthetics of The Familiar, I was reminded of Thomas Dolby’s song “She Blinded Me with Science,” but in this case, she blinded me with aesthetics. Per Saito, everywhere one looks, one can find “everyday aesthetics.” From wind “farms” (“farms” has become acceptable PC), hanging laundry, how we dress, eat, behave, etc. Saito believes everyday aesthetics should be used to justify wind farms and laundry hanging in the name of the environment.

Saito’s book was a worthy read in that it brought to the fore the nuances of how we live day-to-day and how this may or may not intersect with aesthetic value judgements. Her depth of analysis is formidable more extensive than what I can respond to. But I am quite leery of casting “everyday aesthetics” in the same boat as aesthetics in the arts…. This is not to say I don’t see the importance and relevance of aesthetic judgement. Quite the contrary, it is something which occupies me most of the time.

Her conclusions include developing and advancing appropriate aesthetic guidelines for just about everything. I find this dogmatic and authoritarian. Who decides this?

I replied:

The bit about the wind farms was skirting on the use of aesthetics to manufacture consent, in which possibly both the means and the ends were bad. I'm not through it yet but it's already pointing to an inclination to regard sensitive aesthetics as inherently favoring certain political policies, which obliges one to point out that the Nazis agreed. Well, onward.

Now I’m through it. After the point to which I had read at the time, she deals with an interesting Nazi example (p. 144).

…Nazi Germany’s promotion of native plants and its effort to eradicate alien species has a political purpose. According to their agenda, “the area must be given a structure which corresponds to our type of being… so that the Teutonic German person will feel himself to be at home so that he settles there and is ready to love and defend his new home”; hence, it is necessary “to cleanse the German landscape of unharmonious foreign substance.”

Saito is conscientious about the myriad ways her proposals could go badly wrong. Regarding the wind farms, she warns against what she calls “environmental determinism” which would declare something aesthetically good because it was environmentally good. Having been published in 2017, the book doesn’t get into analogous claims of the present on behalf of, say, black figuration. One tends to think that she would also oppose social justice determinism.

Nevertheless, her biases for progressivism circa 2017 are evident. The above example from the Third Reich warns against how aesthetics can support nationalism. At the time of publication, progressives regarded nationalism as an evil because it figured prominently in the Trump campaign. Once Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, progressives who wouldn’t dream of flying an American flag on their property became weirdly enamored of the Ukrainian one, and denigration of nationalism suddenly dropped away. I’m not saying that Saito followed suit, but the book speaks of its time.

A similar remark pertains to her evident environmentalism. Her discussions of the aesthetics of wind farms and clotheslines are largely concerned with how to convert the opinion of people who don’t care for how they look. She connects this effort to her claim that everyday aesthetics are materially consequential, which ultimately is convincing, in itself. But a similar argument could have been made about converting aesthetic opinion about nuclear power plants, which promise far greater environmental benefits than wind farms. The latter would be the more urgent aesthetic case due to the greater impact. But for understandable reasons, however mistaken, many environmentalists disdain nuclear power and always will.

She’s entitled to her political inclinations, but they point back to Peter’s question of who decides what will be the correct desiderata. Saito doesn’t envision a centralized authority, thankfully. But the persuasion campaigns about which she hypothesizes come off as patronizing.

That reaches a crescendo in the last section when it touches on negative aesthetics. She lists among them “deafening and pounding noise from a car stereo.” I don’t care for that either, but it’s inarguable that the driver is having a positive aesthetic experience as he enjoys his music. It’s like Uncle L had Saito in mind:

Strictly for frontin’ when you're ridin' around
Twelve o’clock at night with your windows down
Headlights blinkin’ ‘cause your batteries drain
Armor All on your tires and a big gold chain
Parkin’ outside of all the hip-hop spots
Push the EQ and play connect the dots
Leanin’ to the side, people everywhere
The trunk full of amps, there ain’t no room for a spare
Big beats bumpin’ with the bass in back
All the sophisticated suckers catch a heart attack
’Cause they don't understand why I act this way
Pumpin’ up the funky beat until the break of day
It's because I want attention when I'm ridin’ by
And the girls be on my jock ‘cause my system’s fly

Her everyday is very much that of a Japan-born professor with a long, successful tenure at a New England college, a suburban marriage to an American man, and a couple of kids. It hardly ought to be otherwise. But aside from a handful of references to the rest of the globe, the point of view alternates between Providence’s College Hill and Sapporo with little between. The thesis longs for more, to prove that it can encompass any everyday.

Saito argues throughout the book for aesthetics as a classification rather than an honorific category, and I’m mostly sympathetic. She didn’t accomplish it herself, nor did she set out to, but it seems like it would be fruitful to concoct a stronger theory about how the aesthetic sense operates generally and then specify it to art objects, rather than working the other way, as history obliges her. But aesthetics as classification forces a designation of unpleasant or foul aesthetic experiences as “negative.” For some reason she doesn’t simply call them “aesthetically bad.” For that matter, she mostly avoids “good” as well. In retrospect it seems like a strange avoidance. Does bad connote a coarser quality of judgment that negative avoids?

Aesthetics of The Familiar is hardly the anti-West polemic to which so much academic literature degenerates, but it doesn’t always give the West adequate credit. One pointed example is her citation of Dōgen’s instructions to maintain the same attitude whether one is preparing food with fine or ordinary ingredients, which she says (on p. 173) “may strike one versed in the mainstream Western ethical tradition as falling outside of moral discourse because these objects [such as food] don’t have a ‘good of their own’ which gets damaged by soiling or rough handling.” But a nearly identical sentiment appears in the testament of the Baal Shem Tov, and for the same reason—to encourage the cultivation of equanimity. For that matter, here’s the great Marcus Aurelius:

The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the condition of a diseased eye. And the healthy hearing and smelling ought to be ready to perceive all that can be heard and smelled. And the healthy stomach ought to be with respect to all food just as the mill with respect to all things which it is formed to grind. And accordingly the healthy understanding ought to be prepared for everything which happens; but that which says, Let my dear children live, and let all men praise whatever I may do, is an eye which seeks for green things, or teeth which seek for soft things.

Saito makes a responsible if sometimes strained case for the value of everyday aesthetics. The presentation is superbly organized and admirably plainspoken for a philosophy book. Many of the insights were interesting, and some were surprising. If it seems strange to ruminate so deeply on hanging laundry, two authors recently offered thoughts about why we find modern life so hard:

In order to cope with negative experiences, we need two things: time and mental space. We need idle time, in which our hands might be occupied but our minds are not, in order to let our minds simply process whatever has happened to us. Here's how Dr. Kanojia describes it: “[emotional] processing is actually…a subconscious or relatively automatic activity that…happens over long periods of time.” This is a very powerful process and can help folks to work through brutal experiences.

In ages past, humans had lots of idle time. We fished, sharpened spears, tended fires, repaired nets, and performed other physical activities that kept our hands busy while leaving our minds free to process the events of the day. By contrast, in the modern world, we have little to no idle time. Every spare minute is filled with distractions: we listen to podcasts, read books, text friends, and check social media ten thousand times per day. As a result, we never actually process our emotions and work through them.

Much in the realm of the ordinary merits existential or spiritual reclamation, whether via everyday aesthetics or some other mechanism. Such activity seems profoundly connected to who we are as human beings.

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Thus concludes eleven consecutive Fridays (with one minor hiccup) delivering the goods on the Asynchronous Studio Book Club calendar. We hit four books, Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach, The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin, I Paint What I Want to See by Philip Guston, and Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making by Yuriko Saito. I hope you’ve enjoyed following along as much as I’ve enjoyed leading.

ASBC is taking a week off, and will return with The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield. Titles to follow, as per reader requests, include The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz, Reactionary Modernism by Jonathan Bowden, The Use and Abuse of Art by Jacques Barzun, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice by J.F. Martel, and Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation by Josef Pieper. By then we’ll be in summer, and our summer read will be Calvino’s The Complete Cosmicomics. Exact calendar TBD. Thanks to all who made suggestions; I remain open to more.

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