Trevor, have you noticed that though the aesthetic is dismissed in Australian philosophy as irrelevant for philosophy, it was privileged in Continental philosophy?
I'm sure you have. We've experienced it.
The meaning and value of human life, which was once a part of the religious and/or dogmatic metaphysics, passed to the realm of the aesthetic? Continental philosophy from Schiller and Schelling to Adorno privileged the aesthetic.
Australian philosophy, in contrast, privileged scienceas the bearer of the Enlightenment. Aesthetics was seen as other to philosophy. Though it was acknowledged that professional (academic) philosophers) did aesthetics, aesthetics itself was something else than philosophy. So aesthetics could be ignored by the real philosophers.
And have you noticed how those who do aesthetics privilege literature or the literary at the expense of the visual arts? It is as if there is a denigration of the visual (ie., the image), or vision in aesthetic culture. Or that images are distrusted or regarded with suspicion. Or that looking is to be regarded with suspicion.
Have you come across this?
And yet our consumer culture is predominantly a visual culture. There is also the eye of power of the surveillance cameras in our public spaces and buildings.
And our computer screeens, when we are surfing the net, become an environment of constantly changing visual juxtapositions.
This digital world opens up possibilities of posing stimulating visual analogies, for being critical of those theorists who reduce the flux of visual surfaces to the stasis of linguistic method; and to treat the history of images in a fundamentally different manner than we are accustomed to from the practices of art history.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 26, 2004 06:00 AM | TrackBack