The Ideology of the Aesthetic

Eagleton, Terry

doi:10.2307/1772692

Cited by 189 publications

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“…To avoid an unmediated subjectivism, Kant moves closer to the idea of a universal convention and the possibility of individuals transcending their own particular needs and desires. As Terry Eagleton (1990) outlines it, for Kant, "Aesthetic judgements are thus, as it were, impersonally personal, a kind of subjectivity without a subject or, as Kant has it, a 'universal subjectivity'. To judge aesthetically is implicitly to declare that a wholly subjective response is of the kind that every individual must necessarily experience, one that must elicit spontaneous agreement from all".…”

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confidence: 99%

Living on Thin Abstractions: More Power/Economic Knowledge

Allen

2002

Environ Plan A

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IntroductionOne of Georg Simmel's more contentious claims at the turn of the nineteenth century was that the abstract workings of a mature money economy were mirrored in the very ways that people interacted and made sense of their world. Drained of colour, the abstract character of money was thought by Simmel to bring with it a culture of calculation and a levelling of all things to matters of quantity, not quality.(1) If we extend this image to economic knowledge today, then for some we are in the midst of a similar economic experience whereby the increasingly abstract nature of economic activity rests upon the intangible assets of knowledge and competence, and the broadly insubstantial nature of wealth production. In short, the immateriality of ideas and patented know-how provide a somewhat elusive cultural guide to our economic futures and only lately have we begun to wonder why we were so preoccupied with the bulky side to all things economic and their worn-out physical descriptions.Of course, we might also add is that whilst science, technology and innovation have beaten this path to high value-added abstraction, there has been recognition of the 'softer', more expressive forms of economic knowledge which chart progress in the cultural, arts and entertainments industries for example, and their more informal, performative nature. (2) After all, not all kinds of knowledge and expertize take the congealed form of software or a set of digital signals on line. So even though the kinds of cultural crossover that Simmel envisaged from an abstract economy to a shapeless culture are perhaps a little far fetched, there is nonetheless something about knowledge and its immateriality which chimes with popular cultural experience. In a service-based economy it seems almost churlish to deny the largely insubstantial and abstract nature of economic growth, even to the extent that such descriptive metaphors as the 'weightless economy' or the 'thin air business' beloved by politicians and business journalists alike on both sides of the Atlantic are loosely entertained.But churlish we should be, not because it would be wrong to deny the more ambiguous, replete forms that economic knowledge has taken, but rather, I would argue, Draft Paper for E&P A : ja/sl : 26.2.01 3 because many insightful accounts of the contemporary economy remain locked within a formal, abstract script of knowledge that favours know-how which can be reproduced and replicated in codifiable form. This is certainly the case with the more popular tracts on the 'knowledge economy' such as Diana Coyle's The Weightless World (1999) or Charles Leadbeater's Living on Thin Air: The New Economy (1999), but it is also true of Robert Reich's work on symbolic analysts in the new economy, as it is of the work of more culturally economic writers such as John Urry and Scott Lash. Geographers, too, who work the contrast between local embedded forms of tacit knowledge and its global, ubiquitous counterpart, also lock themselves into a codified script of economic knowledge...

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confidence: 99%

Living on Thin Abstractions: More Power/Economic Knowledge

Allen

2002

Environ Plan A

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“…This has not, however, been merely a fact of art's universality, and social historians of art have pursued this strangeness, the particularity of Western art's own selfconstruction, from within the tradition. The research of Kristeller, Williams, and others (Baxandall 1972;Eagleton 1990) has pointed to the distinctiveness of this 'modern' notion of art, one in which quite distinct kinds of activity have come to be constructed (or recognized) as separated from other cultural activity and having something in common as 'art'. They have attempted to understand the transformations of European social life that led to the condition for our (Western) particular experience of an 'aesthetic dimension'.…”

Section: 'Modern Art'mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Kristeller 1951(Kristeller /1965 In considering what is called 'modernity', historians have explored what is involved in the binary constructions of 'primitive art'. The consideration of 'modernity' stresses the general context of institutional separation of distinct and abstract areas of interest -of kinship, politics, religion, economics, and art -taking place in the rise of capitalism's development, a line pioneered by Max Weber, or in the rise of the nation state (Eagleton 1990). There may not be much agreement about the timing of these developments as well as the definitive characterization of the separation, but most theorists agree that there is an important difference between art and these other domains, in thatas Daniel Miller sums it up, 'art appears to have been given, as its brief, the challenge of confronting the nature of modernity itself, and providing both moral commentary and alternative perspectives on that problem' (Miller 1991: 52, my emphasis).…”

Section: 'Modern Art'mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Primitivism’, Anthropology, and the Category of ‘Primitive Art’

Myers¹

2006

Handbook of Material Culture

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“…The notion of the five senses as epistemically transparent and cultureindependent interfaces to the world established itself in both philosophy and science in the modern period and it was only during the second half of the twentieth century that it came to be variously criticised on the grounds of histor ical, anthropological and scientific results (Howes 2014). In this period, aesthetics also reemerged as a philosophical line of inquiry relevant well beyond art theory, critically revising idealist understandings of aesthetics (Welsch 1987, Eagleton 1990, Böhme 2001. From the 1990s onwards, the under standing of aesthetics has continued to develop from being a normative philosophy of art and beauty into an analytic concept for the study of culture.…”

Section: Introduction: 'Aesthetics'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent research on the aesthetics of knowledge in science and in religion

Borrelli

Grieser

2017

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As an introduction to the case studies collected in the current special issue, this review article provides a brief, and by no means exhaustive, overview of research that proves to be relevant to the development of a concept of an aesthetics of knowledge in the academic study of religion and in science and technology studies. Finally, it briefly discusses recent work explicitly addressing the aesthetic entangle-ment of science and religion.

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The Ideology of the Aesthetic

Cited by 189 publications

References 0 publications

Living on Thin Abstractions: More Power/Economic Knowledge

Living on Thin Abstractions: More Power/Economic Knowledge

‘Primitivism’, Anthropology, and the Category of ‘Primitive Art’

Recent research on the aesthetics of knowledge in science and in religion

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