I am having my aesthetics seminar students read Yuriko Saito's Aesthetics of the Familiar. Although I agree with almost everything Saito says in the second chapter, there are some points of contention in the first. They are not deep, but perhaps interesting. I like the idea that everyday aesthetics ought to be understood primarily in terms not of a list of objects but an attitude. (10) Yet this move to attitude is somewhat surprising since it was precisely the aesthetic attitude which philosophers like Saito have rejected in this arena. I am still fond of the aesthetic attitude. But, Saito thinks, it is another sort of attitude that is required here. What exactly is this attitude? Saito says "We tend to experience 'everyday' objects and activities...mostly with pragmatic considerations. Preoccupation with accomplishing a certain task often eclipses the aesthetic potentials of these..." (10) My first thought is: if it is not aesthetic then it is not aesthetic. There are some things that are just pragmatic (or, as I prefer, "practical"). In these cases one is not noticing or otherwise responding to any aesthetic features. I notice that my tire is flat. There is no time here for contemplation or appreciation. I don't even see the flat tire in negative aesthetic terms, i.e. as ugly. No time for that either. I have to engage in a course of action, must refill the tire with air and then find a place that will fix the leak. To be sure, in the dreary or somewhat depressing time waiting for someone to change the tire I can divert myself by viewing the world about, and even the current situation, in an aesthetic way. Also, after the whole project is over I can review it as a low level example of "an experience" in Dewey's sense. But the practical side of repairing a tire requires nothing aesthetic.
Of course Saito is probably just describing here the point of view of the aesthetic attitude theorists she is referencing and rejecting. But she continues by agreeing with Naukkarinen that "[t]he everyday attitude is colored with routines, familiarity, continuity, normalcy, habits, the slow process of acclimatization, even superficiality and a sort of half-consciousness and not with creative experiments, exceptions, constant questionings and change, analyses, and deep reflections." (10) This quote makes me nervous. Saito had already admitted that one person's everyday is another person's unusual day. What makes what Naukkarinen has described the "everyday attitude"? More likely this is one type of everyday attitude. It is not the everyday attitude of a creative artist, thinker, philosopher, poet, musician, or nature lover. It not the everyday attitude of anyone who has a zest for life and an urge to create, and this includes even businessmen. I doubt that it is the everyday attitude of Naukkarinen himself. It is the everyday attitude of a quiescent sort, somebody who probably wouldn't have any interest in writing and publishing articles and books. So, is Naukkarinen's everyday attitude, which Saito has endorsed in opposition to the aesthetic attitude, the answer to the questions of everyday aesthetics? Perhaps a better question is, is this how we ought to live our lives?
Saito concludes the same paragraph by saying that "[l]ocating the defining characteristics of 'everyday' in the attitude and experience rather than a specific kind of object and activities has the advantage of accounting for how works of art, such as paintings, could be an ingredient of somebody's everyday experience if his job is to wrap, package, and ship them." (10) Yet nothing special is needed to explain how working with paintings can be part of such a person's everyday aesthetic experience. What I think Saito is saying (if I am to make sense of this) is that what is needed is to account for a different aesthetic for the painting wrapper as opposed to the painting maker. I agree that the painting wrapper may be satisfied or not with her wrapping job, and I agree that this is part of everyday aesthetics. But what is forgotten is that experience in the studio working on a painting is also part of someone's everyday life, that is, the artist's, and that this experience requires almost the opposite qualities than those required by Naukkarinen!
The disagreement, however, is not deep. Saito and I agree on an expansionist notion of everyday aesthetic where some aspects of our everyday lives are more art-like and others are less so. Difficulty only arises when we try to interpret what is meant by "less so." Saito speaks of experiences that are less art-like as "primarily experienced without conscious aesthetic attention." (11) She notes that choosing clothes might require aesthetic attention: so the act of choosing what to wear today does not fall in the less art-like category. She then endorses Naukkarinnen's idea that, in addition to the art-like pole, there is another pole of everyday aesthetics which includes "household chores and preparing work-related documents" and we normally take towards these "a non-aesthetic attitude for pragmatic purposes." (11) She refers to this arena is "more physical in nature," and believes that it is these things that form "the core of everyday aesthetics." I object to calling this the core. How can the core of something aesthetic be normally non-aesthetic? (We need to say more about this later since towards the end of Saito's chapter she seems to revise her position.)
The way I see it, when we take a non-aesthetic attitude towards these things for pragmatic purposes then they are not aesthetic and hence not part of everyday aesthetics. I am not sure what "more physical" means but I do think that even daily chores can be approached in a more contemplative way than usual via something like the aesthetic attitude, and when they are then they rise a bit above the merely humdrum and non-aesthetic. In any case, they cannot be part of the core of everyday aesthetics or even part of everyday aesthetics at all if there is nothing aesthetic about them. Again, we need to hold off on this since Saito modifies her conception of the core towards the end of the essay.
Perhaps for Saito and Naukkarinen, the aesthetic nature of these "more physical" activities is unconscious and the important contrast here is between conscious and unconscious aesthetic experience. Maybe the entire issue surrounds what is meant by "unconscious." (But, again, she actually rejects this idea later....so this is just a possibility that emerges at this point in the book.) Surely some low level of consciousness is required for anything to be either aesthetic or experiential: to experience requires consciousness. So let's say that at one extreme there are experiences based on daily activities that, although seemingly at first completely non-aesthetic, actually have an aesthetic charge, albeit one that the actors might not be fully conscious of.
Saito is mainly in opposition to the school of thought that says that everyday aesthetics requires a defamiliarization of the familiar. I, however, think that the idea she rejects is basically right. Yet, again, the disagreement is not as deep as one might think. As I see it there are high level forms of defamiliarization and low-level forms, what I would call "weak defamliarization." Saito, in her objection to the defamiliarization hypothesis seems only to be thinking of the high level forms. If she could accept the low level forms then there would be no disagreement. And I think she does, implicitly. Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of mindfulness in washing dishes. Saito also speaks positively of the Buddhist concept of mindfulness. Washing dishes definitely falls into the category of activity that is "familiar, routine and ordinary," the category which Saito sees as central to everyday aesthetics. For me, what is central to everyday aesthetics is that it involves everyday experience made special (to borrow a term from Dissanayake). But one way this can happen is when we are mindful in the Buddhist way of washing dishes. (I do have one problem however with the Buddhist approach, which I will discuss later.)
Saito describes the position she opposes in this way: "Everyday life is so familiar, so ordinary, and so routine-like that it forms a kind of background. In order for this aspect of our life to be foregrounded as the object of aesthetics, it has to be illuminated in some way to render it out-of-the-ordinary, unfamiliar, or strange: it needs to be defamiliarized." (11) I think this position, which she rejects, is mainly correct, and I think that this is what mindfulness, which she advocates, accomplishes! (The concept of "illumination" probably needs some clarification: if it implies illumination from the outside I would reject it along Deweyan lines since it implies an implicit dualism. My idea of "aura" as developed in my book describes something like illumination that is neither fully subjective nor objective, again, in the spirit of Dewey's pragmatism.) I also fully agree with Saito's other characterization of what she disparagingly calls the "popular narrative." This is how she puts it: "aesthetic experience promotes a radically sensitized acuity of perception that is the antithesis of everyday inattentiveness...the everyday must be rescued from oblivion by being transformed; the all too prosaic must be made to reveal its hidden subversive poetry. The name for this form of aesthetic distancing is of course defamiliarization." I do not want to lose the idea that everyday aesthetics is about revealing hidden subversive poetry.
Saito goes on to discuss some forms of defamiliarization that are deeply unpleasant, for example the one described in Satre's Nausea. Sartre's description reminds of the experience of the manic/depressive in the manic phase of his/her illness in which everything takes on such a strongly defamiliarized look that it is overwhelming and, in the manic phase, very positive, although highly disruptive. Clearly defamiliarization is not always good. Saito describes Roquentin in Sartre's novel who "loses the usual control of existence through conceptualization." He fails to "experience ordinary objects in their benign everyday aspect." Roquentin describes his nausea as arising from failing to reduce things to "their everyday aspect." This is a possible experience, for example in the depressive phase of the life of a manic/depressive.
Now it may be that Saito is saying that this form of extreme defamiliarization negates something, a kind of low-level aesthetically positive thing of which we are seldom if at all conscious, which Roquentin refers to as the "everyday aspect." This sounds good, although I think that it might be better for Roquentin to simply ratchet down from high-level defamiliarization to a form of defamiliarization that is much lighter, rather than entered into the state of a boring, overly literal and mechanical person who simply lives to classify things, To be sure, Roquentin may only be made aware of the second lower level sort of aesthetic experience experience based on modest forms of defamiliarization because of the contrast with the extreme sort that has made him miserable. So, it is the contrast that raises the low level experience.
Roquentin's experience of the tree as having "lost the harmless look of an abstract category" becoming an aspect of a larger material obscene "paste" without individuality describes a very strong negative aesthetic experience which may reveal, by its very absence, something we are not always conscious of, i.e. the comfort attendant on being able to categorize and individualize things. But this comfort is only worth something for us if it goes beyond a life of mere categorization.
A life under stable categories might at first seem like what Nietzsche referred to as the Apollonian. However the Apollinian again is not just at the level of categorization but entails a kind of imaginative seeing. As Nietzsche would put it, the Apollonian lives in a dream world as if under the eye of Helen. Actually both Sartre's and Camus' experience of existentialist absurdity seem much like what Nietzsche described, through quoting Schopenhauer, as the moment when the principium individuationis suffers and exception, a moment in which there is both horror and wonder, i.e. when our normal principles of explanation fail. This, for Nietzsche, can be a moment of Dionysian ecstasy.
Perhaps Nietzsche could make a contribution to this debate in everyday aesthetics insofar as he would hold that the Dionysian experience can be one not of nausea but of ecstasy, and moreover, that great art (ideal aesthetic experience) can only happen when the two modes of experience are in some way synthesized. The question would be, then, where this can also have some application to the level of the everyday (since great art and everyday experience are clearly different). We need to be able to categorize the tree, but we also need to be able to see it beyond categorization, as Stan Godlovitch does when he talks about the need for mystery in appropriate appreciation of nature. The poet sees the tree by categorizing it not literally but through metaphors: a kind of defamiliarization.
As with many other things, I argue here for toggling between the two attitudes, for example, in the case of Godlovitch vs. Allen Carlson (who holds that aesthetic appreciation of nature must be science-based), I would call for toggling between the two positions to get the most appropriate or (better) most adequate aesthetic experience. Similarly, in the realm of the everyday, something defamiliarizing is needed to get us away from the sheer boringness of washing dishes in the practical attitude: we need the aesthetic attitude here. But, we need balance, and if we fail to categorize at all, or leave our capacity to categorize, we can slip into a Dionysian nightmare in which all individuality vanishes.
Saito says that "the most comfortable mode of our interaction with things around us requires an act of intellectual knowing that gives us a power to control them by organizing, categorizing and classifying them." (15) This is Apollonian, but as Nietzsche would observe, the Apollonian by itself is limiting and does not maximize aesthetic experience.
Saito also observes that, for Iris Murdoch and many others, the "contingent overabundance of the world" is not nauseating but glorious. This is the other response to Dionysian experience. What can drive us mad can also drive us to ecstasy. (15) Saito then lists several thinkers who hold like Murdoch to a more positive approach to the Dionysian everyday: Annie Dillard who wants to see "unencumbered by meaning," Neil Evernden, who wants to return to the things themselves away from Nature humanized, Aldous Huxley, who finds drug-induced experience to raise colors to a higher power and drug experience to be like the experience of the artist who is not limited in seeing by what is useful, and the Zen Buddhism of Dogen, who sees this as overcoming of the self and who suggests that we can "see water as jewel necklaces" and jewel necklaces as water, crossing the traditional categories of use. (16) She also mentions my own claim, that, as she puts it "artists are gifted in experiencing and presenting the aesthetic dimensions of everyday life, illuminating a slice of everyday life with an 'aura.'" (17) She admits that such experiences can be refreshing and enlightening. She adds in the next section that our lives can become enriched through being open-minded, as when Sherri Irvin talks about experiencing a cup of coffee as quietly exquisite and even strangely foreign. Interestingly, Irvin, like Saito, stresses the unconscious dimension: those of us who are not Zen masters, she says, respond to sensory information without much conscious awareness.
So Saito basically characterizes the kind of position I and many others, including Paul Ziff, have taken in this way: a "move to turn the mundane, everyday, humdrum into an aesthetic treasure trove is an attempt to extend the time-honored aesthetic attitude theory to everyday life." (19) But she also sees limitations to the aesthetics of defamiliarization. For one thing, it is only one part of everyday aesthetics. She thinks defamiliarization can only happen against the background of (or by way of contrast against) the familiar, ordinary and mundane. Further, to try to make everything special is to make specialness disappear. You want to balance art-like experiences of a paper clip with using it to neaten up the work space. Again, Saito and I are closer than it may at first seem. For example, as I argued in an early paper, neatness is an aesthetic property, although at a very low level of intensity. So we agree that using a paper clip to neaten up a desk can be an example of everyday aesthetics.
Sometimes, however, there is more of a debate surrounding Dewey's concept of "an experience." Many hold that an experience cannot be helpful in defining everyday aesthetics (or even art aesthetics) because it is too committed to being something grand, as in a meal at a fine restaurant that sums up everything a meal could be. But, for Dewey, "an experience" can also be something as simple as being satisfied with repairing one's car. What is really at issue here is how to approach what Dewey called "the humdrum." Before I go on I should note that "humdrum," although usually considered a negative aesthetic property, can sometimes be used as a positive aesthetic property. More on this later.
The main problem Saito has with defamiliarization is that it seems to negate the everydayness of the everyday. Thinkers like Rita Felski and Ben Highmore, as well as Saito herself, worry that treating everyday experience as art-like involves disloyalty to the particularity of such experience, for example arresting its natural "flow" by way of scrutinizing it, and thus losing that which is routine about the everyday. Well, whether not art violates this condition really depends on what poet, painter, sculptor, musician one is thinking of. Still, there is something to the point. Dewey thought that art refines and intensifies everyday experience, and it is true that this involves providing some structure where there was none before. However, providing structure is also part of everyday experience. We provide structure when we recount an experience we had to someone else in the form of a story with a beginning, middle and end. Recounting the events of our lives, including our dreams, is part of what it means to experience everyday life aesthetically. Some of the "flow" is lost, to be sure, but not all of it, since flow is pretty characteristic, as an intensified quality, often referred to as "rhythm," in both artistic and art-like experience.
As I said previously, much of Saito's position involves rejecting the aesthetic attitude. A leading proponent of that position was Edward Bullough. In The Extraordinary in the Ordinary I defended Bullough, particularly in his account of experience a fog at sea from a "distanced" perspective. I still believe that distancing provides us with the possibility to perceive metaphorically, and not just under the standard categories. As I have argued above, I think that the aesthetic attitude can still do the job that Saito thinks it cannot. In particular, I think it is the wrong route to take for everyday aesthetics to abandon the aesthetic attitude for the sort of attitude that Naukkarinen recommends, an attitude that fails to bring out metaphorical qualities and that seems limited to a quiescent non-creative approach to everyday life. So when Saito asks "are the everyday as ordinary and everyday always incompatible with aesthetic?" my answer would be, "almost." As I have said, in a much quoted passage, "any attempt to increase the aesthetic intensity of our ordinary everyday life-experiences will tend to push those experiences in the direction of the extraordinary." To clarify, this this does not mean that they must become extraordinary: the emphasis is on "in the direction of."
So, this is what has been called by Carlson and others "the dilemma of everyday aesthetics" and I will have more to say about that elsewhere. Saito agrees with Carlson that my concept of "aura" as developed in my book does not resolve the dilemma. I do not know whether it was intended to resolve the dilemma. Perhaps the dilemma needs several resources to be resolved. Or perhaps there really is no dilemma at all, or just a dilemma for those who, like Carlson, think we have to choose between formalist and cognitivist appreciation. Saito thinks the dilemma cannot be resolved simply by introducing cognitive understanding since such understanding, say of how a knife works, is needed both to properly experience the extraordinary performance of a knife-swallower as well as the everyday pleasure of watching her mother skillfully cut vegetables. I still think that the idea of "aura" helps here since it indicates how something experienced aesthetically seems to go beyond or rise above the merely humdrum, and it has a positive affective valence which I think essential to the positive outcome of everyday aesthetics. But, of course, basic cognitive understanding plays an important role.
OK, so here is the core of our disagreement. Saito says: "I do believe...that experiencing the ordinary as ordinary is possible and it offers the core of everyday aesthetic experience." By contrast, I think that "making special" offers that core. Making special is what gives aura. Saito goes on: "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 of the ordinary." Further "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." And "putting something on our conscious radar and making something visible does not necessarily render our experience extraordinary." I agree with the last sentence and regret that I previously implied that extraordinariness is necessary. Also, I should note that whereas earlier in the chapter Saito seemed to be talking about something unconscious, here she clarifies that she is not. So my concession plus this modification of her thesis removes two areas of disagreement. Yet another one opens up, and it centers around the idea of "paying attention."
There are different ways to pay attention. One might be called the realist model. On that model, there are properties already out there in the world, including aesthetic properties, and we can either attend to those properties or not. I think that Saito sometimes assumes the realist model. Another model is more Deweyan. It sees properties as neither fully objective nor fully subjective and as emergent on the interaction of the live creature and the surrounding environment. I advocate this pragmatist model of paying attention. One aspect of the pragmatist model is that it does not exclude the affective element of experience since it does not isolate the subjective from the objective. Paying attention on this model always has an affective aspect. And of course this also means that it always has an evaluative aspect. I go perhaps a bit further than Dewey in insisting that paying attention also requires emergence of aura. Let's call this the pragmatist/romantic conception of paying attention since the romantics seemed to always see something transcendent in the mundane, something universal in the particular, and I think this is an important insight that needs incorporation into all aspects of aesthetics, of art, nature and everyday life. I think this conception is also be present in Dewey, although it is more implicit in his many positive references to romantic poet than explicit.
Again, Saito says that "[b]ringing background to the foreground through paying attention contrasts with conducting everyday life on autopilot." I think that when we pay attention in a pragmatist/romantic way to, say, washing dishes, it is not that real background is now foregrounded but rather that a potential is actualized, the potential of real experience comes out where routinized mechanical experience existed before. Both Saito and I (and Dewey and Thich Nhat Hanh) want to get beyond chopping vegetables mindlessly. We favor mindfulness. But how to interpret "mindfulness" is the question. I would not interpret it in a realist fashion since the realist interpretation leaves out affective/evaluative content and provides no basis for the experience of "aura" which is necessary for the whole thing to be aesthetic. How a Buddhist would interpret it depends on the form of Buddhism: there are certain forms that seem more realist whereas others are more like Dewey in deconstructing the objective/subjective split.
Saito puts the contrast she thinks important in this way: "I can attend to the appearance of the vegetables, their feel against my fingers and the knife, the kinetic sensation of using the knife and the staccato sound it makes, all of which are all-to-familiar, or I can experience all of these familiar things as if I am encountering them for the first time." (14) She thinks that both of these require mindfulness as opposed to chopping vegetables on autopilot. I agree. But I think this is a false dichotomy. The first option is incomplete if it does not account for the emergence of these familiar things into aura. The second takes defamiliarization to an extreme, an extreme that is not necessary for aesthetic experience of the everyday. Something in between is needed.
Saito appeals to George Dickie's attack on the notion of the aesthetic attitude to back up her idea, making clear that her notion of "attending to" is realist and not pragmatist/romantic. Dickie thinks all we need to do is attend to the properties of the theatrical production, for example, without being distracted: and that there is no need for a special aesthetic attitude. What Dickie fails to realize is that the conventions of theater have already created the aesthetic attitude for us (it is incorporated into the presence of actors on a stage, for example) and that is why we do not need to take the aesthetic attitude in the theater. Where we need to take the aesthetic attitude is in relation to nature and life, where artistic conventions (and the aesthetic attitude of the artist in her creative process) have not already done the job. When we attend to things in the disinterested fashion advocated by Kant, Bullough, Stolnitz and me we do not just see properties but "see as" as Wittgenstein would put it: we see imaginatively. (Again, in perceiving a play we do not need as much to see imaginatively since the playwright has done that for us. But this does not exclude more creative or imaginative ways of watching a play.) So, contra Saito, Dickie's distinction does not help but rather hinders our understanding of everyday aesthetics.
Dewey thinks, as Saito correctly observes, that the enemy of the aesthetic is the humdrum, whereas Saito believes that the humdrum aspects of everyday life (made up mainly by habitual actions) are the core of everyday aesthetics as long as we are mindful, i.e. as long as they have risen out of the unconscious domain. I think that they must rise a bit further, i.e. into something that we experience as with aura. Saito objects to "[t]he usual narrative" that emphasizes the humdrum as "dreary, drab, tedious, monotonous" for example as Marx saw the life of the worker in a capitalist society. I think that Marx was exactly right, although, again, the actual word "humdrum" is open for positive as well as negative aesthetic usage.
Dewey, similarly, sees the humdrum in terms of slackness, loose ends, and personal drift, where there are no genuine initiations and concludings, and no carrying of the past into the present and projecting into the future. Again, we need to distinguish between "an experience" in the grand manner and relatively low level examples of integral experience that still have the qualities that go beyond the humdrum, i.e. coherence, a pervasive quality, and unity. Saito insists that experiences that do not have these qualities are not, contra Dewey, anesthetic. She calls on Highmore for support. Highmore argues that slackness is suitable for "diffuse consciousness of routine" and "drift" fits with "routine, humdrum life." I agree with the many critics of Dewey that he overemphasized the idea of unity. There are of course aesthetic experiences that can involve disunity, and I think that drifting can be positively aesthetic: the idea reminds me of a lazy summer day for a dreamy teenager. I also agree with Saito that the humdrum as dreary, tedious, etc. is not positively enjoyable but is rather a case of negative aesthetics. I am not sure that this is a background experience since if I am bored or find something dreary or tedious this is pretty much in the foreground, and I do not know what background boredom or tedium might be like.
But when we turn to Saito's distinction of honorific vs. classificatory uses of "aesthetic" I find myself once again raising some questions. Saito chastises those like Dewey and me who hold that the humdrum is not aesthetic since the aesthetic involves perception and enjoyment. Of course there is no denying that there is a negative aesthetics and that there are many negative aesthetic terms, as, for example, ugly. But Dewey and I would hold that the point of everyday aesthetics has to do with what Aristotle, Mill and Marx thought was a point of human existence: happiness. What we want to happen in society is for people to get away from the state of alienation Marx described so well. Negative aesthetic experiences should be attended to so that they be replaced by positive ones or incorporated into larger wholes that are themselves positively aesthetic.
Saito is worried about defining "aesthetic" in an honorific rather than in a classificatory way. She calls on us to return to the root meaning of "aesthetic" which simply referred to sense experience in a neutral way. On this view the aesthetic is any "sensibility mediated response" as Paul Duncum would put it. Saito puts the point strongly: "It is particularly critical in everyday aesthetics that we keep the classificatory sense of 'aesthetic' as its primary meaning ....[r]egarding aesthetics in this value-neutral way is important precisely because the power of the aesthetic can affect us positively or negatively...." (28). For Saito if the humdrum is dreary drudgery this does not mean it is anesthetic but that it is "an aesthetic texture of everyday life, though negatively experienced."
I do not have a big objection to this since I am very much in favor of the negative aesthetics as exemplified in the work of Saito, Berleant and Mandoki. My worry is more with the distinction between the honorific and the classificatory senses of "aesthetic." I have a problem with that if the classificatory is intended to replace or downplay the importance of the honorific. This debate reminds me of the old debate between Morris Weitz and George Dickie. Weitz thought that art could not be defined in a classificatory way, i.e. in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but could be defined, and always had been defined, in an honorific way, i.e. in terms of preferred properties and paradigms. So when Bell says that "art is significant form" he should not be understood as giving a real classificatory definition of art but as recommending that we attend most to those works of art that have significant form and that give us that special aesthetic experience which he referred to as rapture. It is the debates over such disguised honorific definitions that makes aesthetic theory worthwhile. Dickie by contrast thought that there really is a classificatory definition of art, and that the key here is to leave out all honorific definition. I see Dickie's move as a great wrong-turning in the history of 20th century aesthetics. And it was dependent precisely on the property realism which in turn was dependent on the sort of dualism Dewey rejected, whereas Weitz recognized what Dewey recognized, i.e. that values are emergent upon the interaction of the live creature and its environment. Similarly, replacing honorific definition of everyday aesthetics or of "aesthetic" with a classificatory value-neutral definition might denude "aesthetic" of the same dynamic that the move to classificatory neutral definition of "art" after Dickie denuded debates over the nature of art of their real dynamism and richness, i.e. the dynamism that was present in the debates over the essence of art up to Weitz's anti-essentialist intervention.
A final point relates to Saito's final section of this chapter, a section she titles "Positive characterization of the ordinary." This point hearkens back to a complaint I earlier had about Naukkarinen's replacement for the aesthetic attitude: a replacement that seemed to shortchange creative experience in everyday life. Similarly, here Saito seems to advocate Happala's characterization of everyday aesthetics in terms of a set of qualities, which, although I agree are everyday aesthetics qualities, I cannot accept as definitive of the realm of the everyday. As Saito puts it, these are "the qualities such as familiarity, comfort, stability, intimacy, homey, warmth, reassurance, and safety..." (29) One might refer to these in general as "homey" qualities. Saito thinks that "everyday life as familiar can be a source of positive experience" and I agree. But these homey qualities are no more important than the qualities we experience at home and in our own neighborhood when we notice things that are a little off or strange, i.e. things we might consider worthy of a photograph just because they rise above the ordinary qua ordinary. It is not the contrast between the really strange and foreign and the homey everyday that interests me here but that between homey everyday qualities and the qualities of everyday life that add zest and interest to, for example, a daily walk. But, of course, I agree with Saito in her opting for "the wide swath of everyday aesthetics in all its rich variety" (30) and that "the most important issue is...to discriminate between when and in what context it is appropriate and desirable to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and when it is better to recognize negative aesthetic experiences as negative so that we can work on changing them." I am even willing to agree that sometimes we need to savor "the very ordinariness of the familiar" as long as it is understood that this savoring makes the ordinary somewhat less ordinary insofar as it takes on an "aura" it does not ordinarily have.
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 32 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it from Broadview.
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