THE SOCIAL METAPHOR OF THE HUMAN BODY: What Is Aesthetization?
Journal Title: Miscellanea Anthropologica et Sociologica - Year 2015, Vol 16, Issue 1
Abstract
Many scholars connected with so-called postmodernism have taken it for granted thatnowadays reality undergoes the process of aestheticization, so that reality becomes strangely unobligatory. It is reshaped in accordance with the mode of a work of art. In thepaper What is aestheticization? as a point of departure I took the concept of the aestheticizationby Wolfgang Welsh. But finding it unsatisfactory, I refer to that of Jean Baudrillard.He has assumed that aestheticization equals the transformation of reality into hyperreality– a reality that, in essence, is truer than the real itself. So now the question leads us toanother, namely that of reality. How is it possible for hyperreality to become truer thanreality itself? What was reality and what is hyperreality? What did the real existence ofthings consist of? Accordingly to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for a thing to exist inreality means that it has a place in time and space and is subjected to the laws of nature.These in turn are rooted in the unity of transcendental apperception that is introducedinto the world of appearances by the pure concepts of understanding. Today this unity hascollapsed because of modern industry, which produces things on a mass scale. Nothinghas its own place and everything is replaceable. So the Kantian order of nature has becomeimpossible. Nature was absorbed by culture, and then culture itself subordinated to themass production of objects. At the margin of the processes the masses came into existenceand created a proper type of art for themselves – mass art, which became typical for thefunctioning of all social reality. So aestheticization consists in the masses, mass media andmass art swallowing reality. This results in the loss of the obligatory character of reality. Ofcourse, that does not mean that reality does not exist any longer, only that it is includedand reaching its sense and meaning from the aesthetic domain of beautiful semblance,and this semblance is that of mass art.
Authors and Affiliations
Robert Rogoziecki
Keywords
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