The Aesthetics of Washing Dishes

I have been reading Yuriko Saito's Aesthetics of the Familiar.  She has a great chapter there on the aesthetics of laundry.  I can relate more to the aesthetics of doing dishes.  So here is my current thinking about this.  My question is:  to what extent is the proper attitude to doing dishes mindfulness?  I want to do a kind of phenomenology of dishwashing.

I go back and forth on mindfulness.  What happens when I try to be mindful (as I do) when cleaning the kitchen.  I am aware of the ugliness of the dirty dishes and do not try to take a Ziff like aesthetic attitude towards them.  I get to work washing.  So my awareness of the dirty dishes is one that has a certain directionality.  As you have taught, it is action oriented.  If I was just mindful of my dirty dishes as dirty dishes I think this would not lead me to action.  But the directionality is towards the positive.  Negative aesthetics is only important if is directed to positive outcomes.  (probably an overgeneralization...but it seems apt here.)  I am also mindful of the process of my action, i.e. of cleaning and neatening.  It would be wrong of me (and less conducive to happiness) just to focus on getting the job done and over with.  I do not want my thoughts of the future (end of this process) to make the task itself less present.  That's the good way to interpret "be in the now."  But I also do not want to be totally in the now, for then I would miss out on the dynamic of the relation between the original situation, the process, and the goal.  Ideally I am aware both of the mess going away and of the orderliness coming in.  (Be in the now does not mean erase past and future.)  The end of the process is what Dewey would call a culmination.  I have had a low level example of "an experience."  The culmination however has no point if does not carry with it the process that led up to it.  Actually, the end moment, as I survey the neatened kitchen, although satisfying, is not actually more intense on the pleasure scale then any of the other moments, for example then the "now let's get to it and get this done" low level enthusiasm at the beginning, or the "let's focus on the natural rhythms of neatening" that gives pleasure to the medium moments. 

Another factor of this is that mindfulness can either be aesthetic or non-aesthetic.  Aesthetic mindfulness is attentive to aesthetic properties.  These emerge between objectivity and subjectivity.  But some may be believe that aesthetic properties are not real, for example because the subject him or herself is not real.  In that case it might be wrong or considered distracting or part of Monkey mind to attend to aesthetic properties:  in mindfulness you erase the thus and thus erase the aesthetic since the aesthetic always requires the self.  This kind of mindfulness is anti-aesthetic.  it might involve being aware of the oily feel of the plate but not of the unpleasantness of the oily feel of the plate.  My thought here is that the mindfulness I want to achieve is not Buddhist mindfulness if Buddhist mindfulness is the non-aesthetic sort I have just described.  

Yuriko Saito on the Familiar

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. 









       

Legitimizing Everyday Aesthetics

I just want to give a shoutout here for Yuriko Saito's Aesthetics of the Familiar:  Everyday Life and World Making.  (Oxford U. Press, 2017).   Saito is already well-known in the world of philosophical aesthetics for her work Everyday Aesthetics. (OUP 2007).  These books together help establish this new sub-discipline of aesthetics.  In this post I am just going to talk about her second chapter.  "Challenges and Responses to Everyday Aesthetics."  There is hardly anything I disagree with in this chapter and so the notes may be a bit scattered, more like musings.   One of the things I always enjoy in reading Saito is the wide range of her reading.  She goes directly from Melchionne's defense of everyday aesthetics to Callicott's views on land aesthetics, and then to Howes and Class,  cultural anthropologists on Ways of Sensing, and then Buffalo Bird Woman on cooking.   I agree that everyday aesthetic phenomena are not limited to objects and can include our experiences of activity:  for example cooking.  I agree that although one can appreciate the baseball game qua baseball game one can also frame the experience somewhat differently, where what is appreciated is a day at the park.  The second kind of appreciation would be focuses as much on the small of hot dogs, for example.   I agree that there are certain values that permeate "our everyday life such as fellowship, reciprocity, care, and love."  (56)  I agree that there are alternative to judgment-oriented aesthetics, and that "a phenomenological description rather than a critical discourse is more suited for this dimension of our everyday aesthetic life."  (58)  

I might be a bit more critical of Juhani Pallasmaa's idea that there is a problem with "increasingly visual primary of experiencing architecture."  (59)  Drawing on Dewey's concept of medium I would hold that one of the ways in which art forms can have power is that they can focus on one sense to the exclusion of our usual incorporation of the other senses.  The senses of small and hearing are absent from our experience of a painting as painting, but they are also in a strange way evoked.  This concentration on one sense produces an experience of the work as having aura.  So, thinking about architecture, although it is not entirely visual in the way that painting is, it is not exactly a lot more tactile, and it seldom involves the sense of smell.  So focusing on architecture as architecture is focusing on the medium of architecture.  So I think it is over the top for Pllasmaa to say "The nihilistic eye deliberately advances sensory and mental detachment and alienation.  Instead of reinforcing one's body-centered and integrated experience of the world, nihilistic architecture disengages and isolates the body..."  nihilistic architecture being architecture that is visual centered.  (59)    Sure, we can go too far in the direction of vision-centeredness in our society, but to throw out all of this is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.  I would agree with Dewey in strongly opposing this quote that Saito gives from Pallasmaa's 2007 book The Eyes of the Skin:  Architecture and the Senses:  "The problems arise from the isolation of the eye outside its natural interaction with other sense modalities, and from the limitations and suppression of other senses, which increasingly reduce and restrict the experience of the world into the sphere of vision."  (64)  Would he similarly have a problem with music qua music excluding the other senses?  The wonder of music is that it creates worlds of its own without the other senses, just as people who are blind are able to get along pretty well (as least sometimes and with some assistance) without the sense of sight:  they do not lose the world.


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. 


      

Saito's Everyday Aesthetics revisited: call for the in-between

So it has been ten years since Yuriko Saito's Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2007) came out, a seminal work in the burgeoning new field of everyday aesthetics.  She will be having a new book on the topic coming out soon.  But perhaps now is a time to revisit some of the issues raised especially in the first chapter of Everyday Aesthetics with the understanding that this is not necessarily her current position.  The chapter is titled "Neglect of Everyday Aesthetics."  It is available here.  Most of what Saito says in this chapter I agree with and it should be understood that the purpose of this post is simply to use her piece as a jumping off point for reflection, as I have in the past.  Saito makes a strong distinction between two kinds of experience in everyday aesthetics. One kind is the "stand out" experience, roughly similar to Dewey's idea of "an experience."  The second is another set of reactions we might, and often do, have to sensuous and/or design qualities of objects.  These would include the reaction of seeing an object as dirty and wishing to clean it up.

I accept Saito's expansion of the concept of the aesthetic to include these kinds of responses.  There is a dialogue going on here since Saito may have been partly inspired in this by an early article of mine on neatness and messiness as aesthetic qualities: “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities:  'Neat,' 'Messy,' 'Clean,' 'Dirty',” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53:3 (1995) 259-268.  This was reprinted in The Aesthetics of Human Environments  ed Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Ontario:  Broadview Press, 2007).  What I currently want to push is an in-between dimension of aesthetic experience, something between the two extremes Saito posits:  a domain that I believe is fundamentally important not only for everyday aesthetics but for aesthetics in general.  In the tradition of Karl Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and John Dewey in Art as Experience, but also of Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, I want to call for expansion of this in-between domain, one that overcomes the alienation (usually based on exploitation as Marx would put it, or inadequate social arrangements as Dewey would put it) that characterizes experience at the low or "practical" end of the aesthetic spectrum.  I also see the three levels of aesthetic experience,  (1) the practical, (3) what I will call, after Buddhist thought, the mindful, and (4) the special/extraordinary, as dynamically inter-related.   So, whereas Saito favors a dichotomy between spectator-like experiences and experiences that "prompt us toward actions, such as cleaning, discarding, purchasing..."  I posit this, the middle "mindfulness," realm.  Following Nhat Hanh in his discussion of washing dishes with mindfulness and Marx in his notion of non-alienated labor, I think that there is a problem at the lowest level of the aesthetic:  a problem if the cleaning or discarding is not mindful, the purchasing is based on false consciousness in a society of consumerism (as critical theorist followers of Marx argued), and so on.  Low level activities of the sort that happen when one cleans for entirely functional purposes or purchases clothes just for comfort, usefulness, or getting ahead, become enhanced when they are mindful of aesthetic qualities. This means that I favor a notion of low-level contemplation, for example contemplative as opposed to mindless shopping. Whereas Saito associates the idea of contemplation only with the high level of fine art experience or contemplation of natural beauty, I think that mindful washing of dishes, for example, is contemplative in its own way.  

One difficulty here is that Saito associates contemplation and disinterestedness and with rejection of the proximal senses of taste, smell, and touch.  This is not my approach:  I see contemplation as applicable to multi-sensory experience.  Contemplative aesthetic experience of sexual intimacy for example is the preferred mode. Thus, on my view, one can take an aesthetic attitude towards everyday phenomena, and this can be a more valuable, actually is generally a more valuable, way to approach such phenomena, as long as it does not interfere with getting the job done.

Actually, then, I disagree with the notion that actions such as cleaning, discarding, and purchasing without any contemplative dimension are "typically the way in which aesthetics functions in everyday life."  They may in fact be typically the way in Western alienated capitalist society.  But they may not be in other societies, for example in Denmark or Bhutan.  Moreover, a better society would be one in which the contemplative or disinterested dimension of aesthetic experience of the everyday would be enhanced.  So, to put the point in another way, when Saito says that she wants to include not only aesthetic experiences of art, however broadly defined, but also "those responses that propel us toward everyday decisions and actions without any accompanying contemplative appreciation" (11) I would count this domain as, yes, aesthetic, but only at the very lowest level, and not something to be encouraged.  It is at the mid-level, where responses such as cleaning and choosing are not "almost automatic" as Saito puts it, but are mindful and at least minimally examples of contemplative appreciation because mindful of aesthetic qualities, that a happy life is constituted.  (I also think that other things that Saito says in her first chapter are actually more in accord with this position.) 

I understand the motive behind Saito's dichotomy: the need to move away from the hierarchy in which everything is seen in terms of Western fine art.  Saito eloquently demolishes that position. What I am offering is hopefully the dialectical next stage.  As with Saito, I also think my approach is more in accord with a multi-cultural, global viewpoint.  But this is because I think that in most traditional or tribal cultures, and in many other non-Western cultures, the middle, mindful, aesthetic domain, plays a more important role in life.  I agree with those people who believe that we should be more like the Navajo or the Bali people in their approaches to aesthetic experience, as much as we can given the Western-based world that surrounds us.  It is the Western mindset that promotes the dichotomy of humdrum practical vs. high art aesthetic.  I think that ultimately both Saito and I wish to undercut this dichotomy.

I also agree with Saito in attacking the tendency to see the aesthetic either as "highly specialized and isolated from our daily concerns, namely art, or else something trivial and frivolous, not essential to our lives, such as beautification and decoration" (12) and I agree that the low-level experiences that we are both interested in are important for practical purposes.  

However, although we both want to "restore aesthetics to its proper place in our everyday" lives (12), and reclaim its status in shaping the world, I wish to do so by encouraging and enhancing mindful and contemplative approaches to the everyday, whereas Saito is concerned that these approaches are too associated with an art-centered approach to aesthetics.  I agree that art-centered aesthetics can "compromise the rich diversity of out aesthetic life" but am not convinced that it always does.  Nor am I convinced that what she calls "experience-oriented aesthetics" (12) is detrimental to a sound everyday aesthetics as long as "experience" is not just understood in such a way as to privilege the distal senses or extreme forms of disinterested approaches to aesthetic objects. 

I also agree with Saito that "art is almost always regarded [in Western aesthetic theory] as the quintessential model for an aesthetic object" (13) and I believe that she is absolutely right to pursue this line.  (This makes me consistent with her quote from my 1995 article in support of her position.)  Saito presents an excellent discussion of the problems of art-centered aesthetics in the section with that name.  

My only caveat would be a response to Korsmeyer's approach to the aesthetics of food. Saito quotes Korsmeyer with approval as saying "the addition of taste and food to the domain of established aesthetic theory presents problems:  both inevitably come off as distinctly second rate, trailing the distance senses and fine art."  I just cannot agree that it is never right to understand food in terms of fine art:  my own view that something like the El Bulli dining experience is at the same level of high art as the best example of Japanese tea ceremony, and for the same reasons.  We must not turn our Western prejudices against the proximal senses into a determination of what makes fine art:  i.e. that fine art must use the distant senses. 

Nor do we have to see all food preparation as fine art in order to concede that some is.  Those who see the highest level Michelin star type dining experiences as somehow second-rate in relation to fine art painting are missing the point.  Saito further quotes Korsmeyer that "the concept of art, dominated as it is today by the idea of fine art, is a poor category to capture the nature of foods and their consumption." (17)  This just seems a category mistake since food as a category is broad like photography as a category.  Most photography is not art, and even less is fine art, and yet this does not mean that photography cannot be fine art. Similarly if we want to broadly capture the nature of foods and their consumption it would be best to focus not on El Bulli but on the vast number of practices involving food.  I would venture to say that virtually any social practice:  dance, food, music, video games, advertising, religious ritual, etc., can have a fine art manifestation (can be a product of genius, in Kant's sense).  But most dance, food, music, etc. is not fine art.  In any case, I would not want to, as Korsmeyer puts it, "divert attention from the interesting ways in which the aesthetic importance of foods diverges from parallel values in art." (18)  Of course one of the things that food as fine art does is focus our attention on such "interesting ways" just as dance as fine art focuses our attention on features of dance that differentiate it from other art forms.       

Saito further quotes Wolfgang Welsh as holding that sport, for example, "cannot substitute for Schonberg, Pollock, or Goddard" which, in my view, is just plain silly, since (1) no one is calling for substitution, and (2) the correct comparison class is master artists. It is not sports against Pollock, but Pollock compared to the El Bulli master chef, Adria. 

Saito is also excellent in his list of various things that are associated with the paradigms of classical Western art and which do not apply to everyday aesthetics.  Putting the point negatively, she says that there are various features that make certain everyday aesthetic phenomena non-art, like "absence of definite and identifiable object-hood and authorship, our literal engagement, transience and impermanence of the object, and the primacy of practical values of the object" (17) although I am somewhat concerned about the notion of "primacy of practical values" which can be interpreted in different ways.  

Saito's discussion of frames as unique to art as opposed to everyday aesthetics is of particular interest.  Ronald Hepburn had once noted that non-art objects are frame-less and that we then become the creator of the aesthetic object:  the frameless character can, as Saito puts it, "be compensated by exercising our imagination and creativity in constituting the aesthetic object as we see fit." (19)  I agree with this, but then I also think that this means that we are then virtually framing the object and thereby treating it as if it were a work of art at least in respect to being something that is now unified and has an imaginative/creative dimension, although this time introduced to some extent by ourselves as viewers.  This is why I say in my book that artists are the greatest experts in the aesthetics of everyday life.  They are constantly seeing landscapes for example as if they were works of art by framing them and exercising their imaginations in the process.  It is interesting in this regard that Saito's examples of such framing (a baseball game, the streets of New York, and drinking tea) read like a poet's appreciation of these things.  She has a fine poetic sensibility.  But poetry is an art form.  Moreover, when she says "in appreciating the smell and taste of green tea, I may incorporate the visual and tactile sensation of the tea bowl, as well as the sound of slurping" I note that this is exactly how one ought to appreciate tea in the setting of the Japanese tea ceremony, which Saito elsewhere recognizes to be an art form. (15)  

Saito admits that "In constructing the object of our aesthetic experience in these cases, we do select and specifically attend to certain ingredients in our perceptual field, just as we do when we appreciate art as art." (19)  The difference in her mind is that, in art, we determine this based on social convention and "institutional agreement" not on the basis of "our personal preference, taste, and inclination."  And she is right at least in that there is some greater degree of institutional agreement in the realm of art, but it strikes me that this is only a matter of degree and that there certainly a lot of relying on "our own imagination, judgment, and aesthetic taste as our guide" in art as much as in everyday life. Moreover, as Saito herself has described, there are some everyday practices that involve a lot of institutional agreement, for example sports and cat beauty contests.

So I agree with Saito when she says "We can appreciate the aesthetic value of a chair, an apple, a landscape, and rain as if the were a sculptural piece...[etc.] by becoming a pure spectator/listener.  However, more often than not, we experience a chair not only by inspecting its shape and color, but also by touching its fabric, sitting in it, learning against it, and moving it, to get the feel for its texture, comfort, and stability." (20) I just think that this just is what aesthetically contemplating what a chair is, what it is to be a "pure spectator" and that seeing it as if it were art must also take into account that in looking at a painting, for example, we, as Dewey observed, are subliminally aware of all of the other senses, and that the intensity of the color is that all of that other information is in some way contained in the color, and then seeing it as it functions in life, is also part of the background information subtly contained in great art.  It is just that, here, that stuff is no longer backgrounded.  One of the most poetical and best said passages in Saito's book is her description of eating an apple, except that she starts wrongly by saying that it is "our typical experience of an apple."  It is not your typical experience in alienated Western perception.   Here is what happens to Saito:  it is perceptual experience of eating an apple that is mindful:  "starts by beholding its perfect round shape and delicate colors ranging from red to green and holding it in our hand to feel its substantial weight and smooth skin.  Then we proceed to engage all of our senses and enjoy the crunching sound when we first bite into it, the contrast between the firmness of its contents and the sweet juice flowing from it, and, of course, its smell and taste."  This is the approach to an apple that a great chef would take, as well as a great poet.  It is an approach consonant with the tea ceremony approach to drinking tea.  It is a deeply contemplative approach to eating an apple very unlike the ordinary way we just consume food.

There is also the issue of conventions.  It is not as though there are no conventions in the experience of non-art.  Saito experiences three ways of appreciating raindrops.  One of them is "we may experience rain by sitting under the hanging roof of a Zen temple, looking out on its attached rock garden, attending to the way in which the surface of each rock glistens with wetness and nothing the elegant movement of raindrops..."  She stresses that, of the three way of appreciating rain, one the "singing in the rain" approach, and the third being that of John Muir in Yosemite, all are legitimate.  I agree, and yet each is a convention, and the one associated with the Zen temple is very immersed in the entire Zen aesthetic and even in a certain architectural aesthetic interestingly similar to what Heidegger speaks of when he describes a Greek temple experienced aesthetically.  So, it is wrong to say that "in all these examples, there is no institutional or conventional agreement" and that the only guide is what is more rewarding:  this sort of business is not as individualistic.  Finally, it is also just plain false that "experiencing a chair or an apple as a piece of sculpture ...is likely to be less interesting and satisfying than more normal ways of experiencing them" since all of the power of an Edward Weston photograph is based on the way in which doing so can be very interesting and satisfying, and, again, largely because he manages to capture, using only visual means, what it is to touch and eat the vegetable he photographs.  Again, although Saito is right that it does not matter when or under what light I observe a painting by Cezanne of Mt. Sainte-Victoire and it does matter when I view the actual Mt. Sainte-Victorie, I know this especially now because i have spent a lot of time looking at Cezanne.  Cezannes's painting of the mountain would not make any sense if it were not the case that he could paint it over and over again because it has different aesthetic qualities at different times.  (25)  Again, it is the dynamic relationship between the aesthetics of the everyday and the aesthetics of art that is most evident here.  

But where our area of disagreement comes up the most is exemplified when Saito says "We clean our kitchen and bathroom for hygiene, cook and eat food for sustenance, and pick our clothes for protection and comfort." (26)  Maybe the word "for" is ambiguous here, but my immediate reaction is that this is just false. I spend a lot of time doing all of these thing and I can only think of hygiene, sustenance, protection and comfort and some of the functions served by these activities...often not the most important ones.  I clean my kitchen mainly for the pleasure of getting it clean, and because I have been influenced by Nhat Hanh, secondarily for the pleasure in the rhythm of the process and the attendant aesthetic qualities, then thirdly because I want my wife to be happy with the results, and maybe fourthly for hygiene -  sure, of course, you want to eliminate the germs that might give you food poisoning....this is in the category of unimportant precisely because so obvious.  

So now to Kant.  I don't want to get deep into Kant interpretation here, and there is a lot of room for disagreement, but it strikes me that Saito's disapproval of his notion of the disinterested attitude in application to everyday aesthetics seems based largely on her understanding of what Kant means by "pure."  She thinks that Kant means that pure or "free beauty" is "more legitimate" than dependent beauty.  And yet Kant does not say so.  We Americans have associations with "pure" that Kant may not have had with the German word it translates.  Saito admits that Kant also has a concept of dependent beauty but thinks that he requires us to "surgically remove" functional value in order to appreciate the everyday.  But this is not how he treats architecture, or any of the arts, all of which he sees as examples of dependent beauty, with the possible exception of music without words.  Although I wholly agree with Saito that "in our everyday, normal interaction with a utilitarian object, the aesthetic and the practical are experienced as fully integrated" I am not convinced that Kant would have held otherwise.  (26)   Going beyond Kant, I think it would be better to say that in approaching the everyday aesthetic object we need to bracket practical considerations to see it as purposeless, to capture the "pure" aspect of the experience in free play, but that we need also to toggle between that and the other, dependent, aspect of the aesthetic object when it is an artifact and not a free beauty of nature. (How we ought to appreciate nature is not under consideration here.)  

Kant however was notoriously disregarding of the near senses, color (which he called mere "charm") and of the pleasures in practical activity.   Dewey, however, with his anti-dualist stance, would not have disregarded these things.  So this is why I join Saito against Kant when she says "the aesthetic value of a knife consists not only of its visual qualities, but also of its feeling in my hand, determined by its texture, weight and balance, but also of its feeling in my hand, determined by its surface texture, weight, and balance, but most importantly by how smoothly and effortlessly I can cut an object because of the material, shape, length, texture, and weight of the blade and handle."  (27)  Saito here stresses not the fact that the knife functions well but "the way in which all the sensuous aspects converge and work together to facilitate his use."  (27)  All of this, and the entire paragraph in which it appears, is, I think, a major contribution.

Everyday Aesthetics as a New Direction in Aesthetics

The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics edited by Anna Christina Ribeiro (2015) (but originally published in 2012 as the Continuum Companion to Aesthetics) features everyday aesthetics its last chapter titled "New Directions in Aesthetics" by Paisley Livingston (255-267).  The article focuses on Livingston's response to my own work on everyday aesthetics from 2005 ("The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics" in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. A. Light and J. M. Smith, New York: Columbia U. Press, 3-22) and to Yuriko Saito's book Everyday Aesthetics from 2007.  Of course I continued to develop my ideas on the nature of everyday aesthetics after that period, particularly in my The Extraordinary in the Ordinary (Broadview Press, 2012) but also in a series of more recent articles. 

Livingston rightly complains that in the 2005 article I proposed that everyday aesthetics covers, as he puts it "all aesthetic experiences that are not already included in 'well-established' domains of aesthetic theorizing" so that not only fine arts and the natural environment are outside everyday aesthetics but also aesthetics of mathematics, science and religion.  His complaint is that, as disciplines get established in everyday aesthetics, for example the aesthetics of food, they then fall outside of it, and "[t]he very success of everyday aesthetics as a branch of aesthetic inquiry would lead to the continuous expulsion of its own topics and results from this subfield." (259)  I agree that this is a problem. 

Livingston, nonetheless, recognizes that the motive of everyday aesthetics has been to deal with material that has been neglected through emphasis on fine arts and nature aesthetics, and so, he defines the field more simply than I did as "the aesthetic experience or aesthetic appreciation of things familiar or everyday, but not the aesthetics of the fine arts and scenic nature." (259)  Interestingly, although controversially, he seems to imply inclusion of non-scenic nature under everyday aesthetics.  It is also not clear whether decorative and popular arts fall within or outside everyday aesthetics on his definition.  At best, his offer constitutes a necessary and not a sufficient condition for everyday aesthetics:  a partial definition that should probably be narrowed further.

I appreciate Livingston's next point which is in favor of my view that, as he puts it, "there have been valuable interactions between the aesthetics of the fine arts, nature, and everyday life."  He rightly observes, via a reference to Bryson, that still-life paintings can make us more aware of the aesthetic properties of everyday phenomena.  He also agrees with me that we should not see everyday aesthetics as a radical break from something negatively called "traditional aesthetics."  

Livingston's article gets interesting when he discusses what I have called a "tension" in everyday aesthetics.  This is a much-discussed issue these days, and Allen Carlson has his own solution, as does Saito.   I will be providing my own solution to what Carlson has called "the dilemma of everyday aesthetics" at the American Society for Aesthetics conference at Asilomar this Spring. 

Livingston, drawing on an article by F. Dretske, puts the issue somewhat differently than I would.  He observes that some experiences "do not cross the threshold into the domain of aesthetic experience...[but] satisfy behavior and motivation conditions on what should be recognized as perceptual uptake in the absence of awareness" (260) and that these often include "what is wholly commonplace and familiar."  So we have non-aware perceptual uptake that is also non-aesthetic.  His example would be a person who makes a daily commute but pays little attention to the "complex flow of sights, sounds and smells along the way."  I am a bit confused about this line of discussion since the commuter is surely aware of her surroundings, including the sights of braking cars and perhaps the smells of burning oil.  I admit that there are some things that are beneath consciousness and yet involve some sort of perceptual uptake, but the question at issue is when something rises to the level of the aesthetic, and I cannot see how unconscious perception is even relevant to that.  Of course, as I have long argued, there can be low-level aesthetic experiences, ones that can be described, for example, by applying aesthetic property terms such as "pretty," or "nice," or "looks good."  It seems that once perceptual uptake reaches the level of awareness it has reached the domain of the low-level aesthetic. 

Still, we may be quibbling about terms here.  Livingston can fairly argue that I am using "aesthetic" in a stretched way, that what he is really talking about is "aesthetic" in the sense of that which is attended to "for its own sake," and that the attention paid to the sounds and smells of brakes and so forth is "practical" (which is the word he uses later in the essay) and not aesthetic.  I suppose the issue for a Deweyan like myself is whether the "practical" can so clearly be delineated from the aesthetic, of which I will have more to say later.  

Livingston further thinks that the everyday aesthetician comes along (not the theorist here, but the person who practices her life in such a way as to focus on everyday aesthetic phenomena) and "reclassifies this part of the world as falling within the sphere of everyday aesthetics."  She does this by attending to the same stretch of road aesthetically.  But, and here is where the tension comes in, the worry is "that although the philosophical operation has been successful, the very 'object' of everyday aesthetics has somehow vanished or been vitiated as a result."  (260)  Well, the answer seems obvious to me since, if the commuter is not aware at all, if she is a kind of automaton, then she is not having either aesthetic or non-aesthetic experience, and thus what happens to her is not a matter of any sort of aesthetics.  But if she is aware and has low level positive or even negative aesthetic experiences, then no re-classification or special philosophical operation is needed to get her experience to the level of aesthetics.  

I can see that there is a difference between the two commuters, but it just seems that the first is attentive to more practical-oriented aesthetic qualities than the second.  I do not know how other people experience driving, but my way tends to alternate between the two modes.  If I smell gasoline or hear knocks in the engine I am going to be more focused in the practical mode, and yet these smells and sounds are ugly, i.e. negatively aesthetic. (As you can see, I do not accept the practical/aesthetic dichotomy that Livingston apparently does.)  On the other hand, usually I am attending mainly to the sights along the road, say on a drive up the 280 Freeway to San Francisco, and this is a less practical-oriented form of aesthetic perception.  Alternatively, I might be attending to the conversation of my companion, or to the music or other entertaining shows I get over the radio, and these experiences have aesthetic qualities too, although, again, at other levels.

Admittedly, because of my strong love of visual arts, I am probably more attentive to what I would consider to be interesting features in the passing visual environment than most.  One point at issue here is whether everyday aestheticians are promoting an approach to the world that is more like mine to the road:  i.e. what is sometimes called an aestheticization of everyday life.   (I want to add that there are differences between kinds of driving that are significant to what one might call the aesthetics of road experience.  For example, it is particularly difficult to have high level aesthetic experiences during commute rush hours.  I find commute driving stressful and quite the opposite of non-commute driving.  Some of my best road experiences have come when driving on 280 when there is no significant traffic.)  

In any case, if the worry is that, by making the ordinary extraordinary, or at least special (as I would currently put it), one harms the ordinary because one takes it out of the ordinary, I think that this is a misleading worry.  The person who is stressed by her daily commute is not helped by learning how to attend to or perhaps even accept the boring, humdrum, or stressful nature of that commute.  She needs to be able to experience things differently.  Her ordinary bad experience is not harmed by transforming it into something better!  Nor are ordinary very low-level aesthetic experiences harmed by being enhanced.  So I am at a loss to how rendering the ordinary extraordinary can be a bad thing, unless it causes moral problems.  I suppose, for example, that if the commuter has achieved a kind of aesthetic enlightenment and can only experience the commute in an aesthetically heightened way she might be less willing to support sensible measures to lessen congestion, and this would be immoral since she would not be considering the suffering of others.  

There is also the problem of neglect of everyday life phenomena, especially the most ordinary ones, by aesthetic theorists.  Such theorists forget that much of our lives operate at a low aesthetic level, both in terms of pleasures and pains.  All everyday aestheticians, I think, agree on this point.  I admit this for example by my talk of aesthetic property attribution that does not rise to the level of aesthetic experience and yet indicates an aesthetic aspect of our everyday lives, talk like "its a nice day."  

There certainly is a normative dimension to everyday aesthetics in that everyday aestheticians are trying to improve things.  I agree with Saito that "there is a pressing need to cultivate aesthetic literacy, so to speak, with respect to everyday objects and environments." (243) The call for change is ameliorative.  It says, “this is can lead us to better lives,”  "pay attention to this stuff at least some of the time," and “an aesthetically more attentive life is a better one:  try it!”  In some ways the claim is like that of the enthusiast for meditation who recommends that we meditate every day.  To that extent, interest in everyday aesthetics could be a movement, one that calls on a new aesthetic literacy in a way much like previous calls for computer literacy or literacy in the fine arts.

Saito makes these calls partly because she sees this literacy as necessary for changes we need to make in our relationship with our environment.  That is probably true (no, it certainly is!).  Yet one could well call for such literacy even if it would not do much to save the whale or stop global warming.  Maybe we just need it to bear living in a world in which global warming just won't be stopped because of human greed or some other intractable problem. In any case, I certainly agree with Saito that everyday aesthetics "has to be a part of the strategies for the project of world-making" where that is a matter of creating a more healthy, humane and environmentally sound world. 

It is after this call that Saito, in the concluding chapter of her book, talks about the "tension" in everyday aesthetics.  (244)  She understands this tension as one between "descriptive function of everyday aesthetics and its normative function."  I will look at her solution and then get back to Livingston.  My basic take on this is that the distinction between these two functions does not hold.

One approach to everyday aesthetics, according to Saito, is to follow "traditional aesthetic theory" with regards to "aesthetic attitude," and this would be to free ourselves from a practical attitude, i.e. from such normal ways of experiencing or reacting as "appreciating a utensil purely for its functionality or deploring a dirty linen that prompts us to clean it."  Traditional aesthetic attitude theory, on her view, would, instead, call on us to closely attend to sensuous surfaces.  In doing so, she admits, we can certainly find "hidden gems," for example in "the way in which the stain on the linen appears."  However we do not notice or appreciate these "because we usually do not engage with them as aesthetic objects."  In order to find these hidden gems we turn to art, for example to poetry and photography, and we appreciate the help they provide.  She concludes that this is "one way everyday aesthetic functions normatively."

I agree that this is one way to appreciate everyday phenomena, and I have emphasized this in my writings.  But, I wonder what exactly is "appreciating a utensil purely for its functionality"? And do we ever actually do this?  I see a spoon and a cereal bowl in front of me that I have just used.  I like the way the spoon is shaped and how it works, and much prefer this spoon to a plastic spoon or one that has less of a soup-spoon look.  The spoon has fine lines, but it also holds cereal nicely.  The cereal bowl is one we purchased at a Frank Lloyd Wright museum and looks vaguely like the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.  I love this bowl which functions perfectly for my morning cereal.  But I cannot separate in my mind my aesthetic appreciation of the bowl from my appreciation of its functionality.  

I am not always contemplating these two utensils as I am now, and yet I choose them for my morning cereal because they look and feel right.  Even now, as I am more conscious of this bowl and spoon, after I have eaten my cereal and am writing this piece, I think of my life as a little better because of these utensils.  

I insist, however, that my taking an aesthetic attitude toward the bowl is not radically discontinuous from when I just choose it from other bowls for my cereal.  That is, I appreciate the bowl for reasons pretty similar to why I choose it.  So, to go back to Livingston, the "below level of awareness" use of this bowl (if we assume now that this level is nonetheless conscious) is pretty strongly related to the appreciative contemplative level.  You might say that the second level involves taking an aesthetic attitude, but it would be wrong to say that I take nothing like an aesthetic attitude when choosing the bowl for my cereal in the first place, even though that choosing is not in itself contemplative.  

Nor is it fair to say, as Saito suggests, that, either in choosing the bowl or in contemplating it as an aesthetic object, I am simply attending to "sensuous surfaces."  Actually, this point is a bit confusing for me.  Of course I am attending to sensuous surfaces: what else could I attend to in the physical object I am looking at and using?  Maybe the problem is with the word "surfaces."  I do not think that in attending to my bowl aesthetically, even in the contemplative mode, I am just attending to its surfaces.  I also attend to how it feels in my hand, to its heft and weight and balance.  Surely these are not surfaces, although they are sensuous. 

I can also attend to things that are not sensuous but are related to the bowl, for example to conceptual matters, such as how it fits the definition of bowl, or how it could be used as an example in a philosophy paper, or how it fits into my overall taste in design, or how it fits into the history of modernism.  I can also to practical matters, such as how my wife would react if I broke it.  I suspect that all of these things are "there" in the background although I am not currently consciously aware of them. A complex phenomenology of meaning hovers around my bowl.  But if I attend to this I am still not attending to "pure functionality."  There is really no such thing.

The case of the stained linen is interestingly different.  It is certainly true that there is a difference between the person who looks at it as if it were a work of art and someone who looks at it simply as something that needs cleaning.  Imagine an abstract painter who is not maintaining the linen in the house but is actually more interested in getting inspiration for her art; and contrast this to the person who sees it as marring the cleanliness in the house and who commences to clean it as soon as she sees it.   I can see a source of house conflict here.  My view is that both of these attitudes towards the stained linen are aesthetic:  they just focus on different properties and consequences.

  

I always have trouble understanding what "normative" means. Webster’s says that it is "of, relating to, or determining norms or standards."  A norm is commonly considered a standard or a type, but is also associated with "normal" or "customary" and with "prescriptive."  So, when Saito says that everyday aesthetics functions "normatively" when we appreciate "hidden gems" with the help of art, I wonder what she means.  She says that this is by way of bracketing our normal response, which is to, e.g., clean up the linen stain.  So the normative is not normal?  But which is more normative in this case:  cleaning up the stain or seeing it as a hidden gem by way of the help of art?  It seems that both are equally normative.  Or, at least, each could be if each advocate prescribed his or her own approach.   The society in which the artist looking for inspiration would be more normal might have a norm in her favor, and the other society might have a norm in favor of the linen leaner.  Alternatively, cleaning up the stain is more normative because this is, after all, the more normal reaction...again, in most societies.

I grant that treating the stained linen as a hidden gem is rendering the ordinary extraordinary.  I now reject the idea of jumping all of the way from the ordinary to the extraordinary without considering all of the possible intermediary steps or the continuum of possibilities between these extremes.  Normativity extends all of the way down.  In my current view, cleaning the stained linen is normative in that the very action of making it look better is intended to enhance a low-level aesthetic quality, i.e. "looks nice" or "is clean."  

Now there is the issue of whether we "lose something of the everyday life's everyday-ness or ordinary-ness" in taking the arts-based attitude, i.e. in seeing the stained linen as if it were an abstract painting.  (245)  I cannot see that anything is lost here except that one ought not to be spending time turning the stained linen into an imagined work of art if one's household job is to make sure that such things look nice.  

Saito calls the "clean it up" approach "descriptive" rather than normative.  In my view, "descriptive" is not quite the right word either.  Sure, something is described, in this case, the attitude of the person who has the household job of making things clean, neat and nice.  But we were also describing when we imagined the artist who came into the kitchen from her studio and was mesmerized by the interesting aesthetic qualities of the stained linen.  So, overall, I do not think that the distinction between normative and descriptive really helps resolve the tension in everyday aesthetics.  

Saito has made us more aware of how action in response to what we see in the world is as important aesthetically as experience that is more detached and contemplative.  I wholly agree when she says that everyday aesthetics "should not be exclusively concerned with discounting ordinary and seemingly pragmatically directed reactions that often result in various actions, such as cleaning, throwing away, purchasing, and preserving..." (245)  (Saito herself begins to doubt her critique of what she calls the normative approach when she recognizes that she herself makes normative claims with regard to aesthetic reactions that have "environmental ramifications."  (245))   

Saito's concern seems to be summed up in the opposition between de-contextualized aestheticization and everyday practical concerns. (245)  I will want to pursue this issue further since I think this is the core concern in the tension of everyday aesthetics.  But it depends on the nature of the practical and also on whether a firm dividing line can be maintained between the two.  It depends on whether, for example, there is no role for de-contextualizing in the practical realm and whether there is nothing practical going on when we de-contextualize.  We might need to de-contextualize something to use it for a new purpose for which it was not intended.

Again, there is a big issue as to when we should make the ordinary extraordinary and when we should focus on achieving the low-level aesthetic results indicated by "neat," "nice," and so forth, i.e. results that are not always associated with the term "aesthetic" (which is why Saito calls them "seemingly non-aesthetic").  The problem, as she sees it, is with "indiscriminate aestheticization."  This returns us to what I once called the LSD problem, although it could also be the problem of Zen Enlightenment.  What happens if everything is experienced as extraordinary, as a hidden gem?  Well, the result could be pretty disastrous!  The dirty linen doesn't get cleaned up if everyone is spaced out on incredible relations of lines and colors. So yes, there is a problem with indiscriminate aestheticization.  Yet, Zen Buddhists seem to get on even after enlightened.  And how bad is it really to promote more art-like experiences of everyday life?  

Livingston interprets Saito's descriptive side as the goal of representing "familiar, everyday life and experience faithfully" (261).  I think that representing everyday life faithfully is not just a matter of representing the need to clean up stained linen but also the experience of seeing the stained linen as if it were art.  These are both sides of everyday life, even though the second relates more to the everyday lives of artists, aesthetics, and aesthetically sensitive people generally.  I suppose the problem is that you have to stop seeing the linen as needing a cleaning to see it as an aesthetic gem.  But there is nothing to keep us from alternating between the two perspectives, or even combining them to some extent, or even allowing some people to focus on one and others on the other.  Combinations are possible too.  Consider that in washing dishes one can enjoy the qualities of cleanliness as they emerge in the cleaning process in an intensified way quite different from the ordinary experience if one practices "mindfulness" in the Buddhist tradition described by Thich Nhat Hanh (which is not to be confused with the earliest Buddhists who were deeply anti-aesthetic insofar as they rejected all sense experience).  

Livingston's own solution to the tension of everyday aesthetics is to move to the level of aesthetic properties.  On this view "everyday aesthetics would then be the subfield that investigates the aesthetic properties of items not falling in the categories of scenic nature or the fine arts."  (261) This is something like the approach I took in my book and in my comments above, although Livingston seems to forget that almost all aesthetic property terms may be applied to both art and everyday life.  Both artworks and flower arrangements can be called "beautiful."  It is more that some terms are used more often in the arts, for example “powerful,” and some more often in everyday life, for example “cute.”

Livingston develops this idea however in terms of the kind of strict distinction between the practical on the one hand and "intrinsic valence" of experience on the other that I have questioned. This, he believes, is the clear dividing line between that which is everyday aesthetics and that which is not.  The intrinsic valence is seen to be positive but always instantaneous, as when the nose of a fine wine "is instantly rewarding," or the immediate sensation of pain has "a negative valence."   I have a lot of trouble understanding how this distinction is going to help solve the problem Saito raised (and that I raised in my 2005 article).   A strict distinction between practical and intrinsic just cannot be maintained.  Also, can’t we talk about a continuum between instantaneous and slowly evolving appreciation, or even of an appreciation that starts off as instantly rewarding and then continues is a slower reflective fashion?

Livingston thinks that "what is wanted in thinking about everyday aesthetics is a broad contrast between two kinds of experiences," where, in the first, "means-end rationality prevails" and the primary object of attention is the agent's goal:  these are "instrumental experiences," and they are "predominantly anticipatory."  They are contrasted to experiences that focus on intrinsic valence which is described as "whatever makes the experience positively or negatively valued intrinsically or for its own sake."  (He is following C.I. Lewis in this).  So aesthetic experience is when the intrinsic value is predominant over the instrumental value.  Value by way of contemplation is "inherent value" of which aesthetic value is one type.  It follows that the relation between aesthetic and non-aesthetic is "a matter of degree."  (262)  Also value/valence need not be reducible to pleasure and it can be a matter either of first-order content of the presentation or of second-order evaluation.  For Livingston, "[c]ontemplation of what is immediately presented" is, finally, crucial to aesthetic experience. (263)  As Lewis puts it, the "pause of contemplative regard...suspends the active interests of further purpose."  (263) This all depends on the kind of radical distinction between the practical and the contemplative that Dewey, my hero, would reject.

Livingston explicates his solution of the dilemma of everyday aesthetics in terms of a story of three fictional characters ironically named Yukiko (I suppose he is thinking vaguely of Saito, who's first name is Yuriko...but that is of no importance for the example.) We need concern ourselves only with Yukiko 1 and 2 since Yukiko 3, who focuses on negative aesthetic qualities, raises no new problems.  Yukiko 1 receives a gift of wa-gashi from a suitor and considers what his choice indicates about his discernment and taste. She then attends to the "practical problem" of undoing the package without damaging the materials, which is "the only proper way to do it."  After that, she sets it aside. Yukiko 2, by contrast, "experiences a mild pleasure as she examines the exquisite packaging" and "relishes the cakes."  Livingston then says "it strikes me as uncontroversial to observe that our second Yukiko has an aesthetic experience, while the first one does not."  (264)

It is not uncontroversial!  Actually it is false.  Again, I may be accused of overextending the term "aesthetic" here, but in the Deweyan tradition I see continuity where others see radical division.  As Yukiko1 looks at the wa-gashi gift she considers issues of taste:  although she may not be focusing on the surface qualities of the item as such, she needs to take these into account as she evaluates the taste of her suitor.  So she is more focused on background considerations than Yukiko2, but these are also aesthetic!  Moreover, she engages in an activity which is done in "the only proper way."  Is not "proper" being used here in an aesthetic way, much like "clean" in the case of the dirty linen?   Livingston is correct that both Yurikos are responding to the same object, but they are responding to different features of that object.  

Livingston, anticipating this objection, writes, "It might be of concern that the first Yukiko's reaction is more typical of everyday life with its emotionally and cognitively entangling web of social and practical concerns, whereas it is only the everyday aesthetician who would have people slow down and appreciate everyday packaging 'for its own sake'....yet the second...Yukiko's experiences are by no means so very extraordinary."  (264)   I agree that they are not extraordinary.  But I also think that both Yukikos' activities involve a heightening of significance, a heightening which I have called in my book "increase of aura."  

Perhaps the second Yukiko attends to this in a different way or in a more intensified way than the first.  Perhaps she is at a "higher level," although I am wary of judging without more information: Yukiko1 may be having a very sophisticated experience in her evaluation of the taste of her suitor by way of evaluation of aesthetic qualities of his gift.  

Livingston says that "in describing such experiences, we do not render the ordinary extraordinary" (265).  Although I am willing to concede that point, I have no idea why that is an issue, since the description of either Yukiko's experience doesn't seem to change it at all!  

Key to this discussion may be the following quote:  "In her concern for social distinction, the first Yukiko misses out on an aesthetic experience, even if she accurately classifies the packaging's place in a hierarchy of goods."  (265)  She would be missing out on one aesthetic experience, in my view, but might be having another.  We miss out on things all of the time.  Is she living a bad life because she is "vain, self-absorbed and sadly obsessed with her relations to other" even though she is "a young woman of leisure with ability to attend to objects around her with discernment..."  I feel like I am reading a novel that is way too short...I need a lot more information to judge Yukiko's life. 

Right now I see no reason, despite her negative character traits, to not grant her aesthetic experience with the gift.   

Livingston stresses that "the key content of this postulated, intrinsically valued experience on the part of the first Yukiko is her own proud sense of her status or identity in relation to the suitor;  in short, her social distinction," and such a self-directed attitude cannot be included in aesthetic experience.  My only question here is, why not?  

Another mark against Yukiko1 seems to be that her pleasure seems not aesthetic but rather "immediate delight in acquiring an expensive object."  (265) By contrast, the second Yukiko is focused correctly on the quality of the packaging, which concern is not "overshadowed" by practical considerations (i.e. how expensive the object is).  The first Yukiko's experience is, according to Livingston, "instrumental," and she "fails to appreciate the inherent aesthetic value of the packaging..."  I cannot help but feel that Livingston has a puritanical judgmental attitude towards Yukiko1 who might rather be linked to the darker, because more ethically challenged, aesthetic world-views.  It is ironic that Livingston ends his essay by stressing that "relational properties can be relevant to the objects' inherent value" and that these relational properties include background knowledge about the item of appreciation. (266) given that Yukiko1, who is not favored, is especially sensitive to relational qualities, for example the relation of the gift to the taste of her suitor.  

So, in general, I do not think that the example and the use of Lewis's theory, or the distinction between immediate and intrinsic, has laid to rest the "fundamental tension" of everyday aesthetics as Livingston believes.  One just can't solve the problem by making a clean break between the merely instrumental and contemplative appreciation of surface qualities, particularly given that background considerations are taken into account anyway.