In his essay Transformations of the Image in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 Frederic Jameson says that postmodernity has most often been characterized as the end of something and the emergence of a whole new mode of living the quotidian.
The essay sketches the changes to the visual or the image and the role of aesthetics in the culture of the postmodern and its celebratory affirmation of some post McLuhanite vision of culture transmogrified by computers and cyberspace.
In this world the very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the culture of the image.
it only seems appropriate in the present context to recall beauty's subversive role in a society marred by nascent commodification. The fin de siecle, from Morris to Wilde, deployed beauty as a political weapon against a complacent materialist Victorian bourgeois society and dramatized its negative power as what rebukes commerce and money, and what generates a longing for personal and social transformation in the heart of an ugly industrial society. Why then can we not allow for similar genuinely proto-political functions today, and at least leave the door open for an equally subversive deployment of the kinds of beauty and art-religions I have been enumerating?
Jameson continues:
In a previous era, art was a realm beyond commodification, in which a certain freedom was still available; in late modernism, inAdorno and Horkheimer's Culture Industry essay, there were still zones of art exempt from the commodifications of commer cial culture (for them, essentially Hollywood). Surely what characterizes postmodernity in the cultural area is the superses sion of everything outside of commercial culture, its absorption of all forms of art high and low, along with image production itself.
The aesthetic can be found in this statement: "If looking at a picture and attending closely to how it looks is not really to be in the aesthetic attitude, then what on earth is?" It seems to be the case that when we look at a flower in the way that the scientist does, we see the flower in one way, but when we look at the flower in a way as to view it as a thing of beauty, charm, elegance, we see it in a different way; we see it as an aesthetic object.
Viewing the flower in such a way as to see it, or any object, as an aesthetic object, is to be in the aesthetic attitude. The aesthetic attitude has figured prominently in aesthetics from the Enlightenment until the present. Its most important formulations are disinterestedness (Kant, Schopenhauer, Stolnitz), Psychical Distance (Bullough), Aldrich's Impressionistic Viewing, Scruton's Empiricistic Account, and (though these latter views are not attitude theories per se) the naturalistic work of John Dewey and Monroe Beardsley.
The aesthetic-attitude theories grew out of eighteenth and nineteenth century faculty of taste and association of ideas theories and the notion of disinterestedness. Any object (with certain reservations about the obscene and the disgusting) can become an object of aesthetic appreciation. The aesthetic attitude is held to be a special kind of perceptual experience, a specific mode of experience, and is usually premised on either some kind of being distance from everyday practical life or attending to the picture in a certain way termed disinterested.
The concept of disinterestedness is central to modern aesthetic theory and it basically means looking at a picture with no ulterior motive--ie., without economic, moral, or political satisfactions. When we judge an object aesthetically we are unconcerned with whether and how it may further our practical aims. Hence our attitude toward the object as disinterested.
Jerome Stolnitz says that the aesthetic attitude is "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone." "Disinterested" means "no concern for any ulterior purpose," "sympathetic" means "accept the object on its own terms to appreciate it," and "contemplation" means "perception directed toward the object in its own right where the spectator is not concerned to analyze it or ask questions about it." Whereas a practical attitude limits and fragments the object of our experience, allowing us to “see only those of its features which are relevant to our purposes,” the aesthetic attitude, by contrast, ‘isolates’ the object and focuses upon it—the ‘look’ of the rocks, the sound of the ocean, the colors in the painting.”
Is disinterested attention to a picture plausible?
It looks to be part of a formalist aesthetic of modernism, which has fallen on hard times. By this I mean the antiquated notions of the 'autonomy of the work of art' and the 'autonomy of the aesthetic' that persisted through the modernist period, or better still, that served as its philosophical cornerstone. We now live with the end of artistic autonomy, of the work of art and of its frame. Thus is our world and the the only kind with which we can work.
George Dickie in his essay “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” (Dickie 1964) argued that all the purported examples of interested or distanced attention are really just examples of inattention. So consider the case of the spectator at a performance of Othello who becomes increasingly suspicious of his wife as the action proceeds, or the case of the impresario who sits gauging the size of the audience, or the case of the father who sits taking pride in his daughter's performance, or the case of the moralist who sits gauging the moral effects the play is apt to produce in its audience. These and all such cases will be regarded by the attitude theorist as cases of interested or distanced attention to the performance, when they are actually nothing but cases of inattention to the performance: the jealous husband is attending to his wife, the impresario to the till, the father to his daughter, the moralist to the effects of the play. But if none of them is attending to the performance, then none of them is attending to it disinterestedly or with distance
Secondly, we would like to draw knowledge from looking at a picture but this seems to be in conflict with the aesthetic attitude. An attitude which hopes to derive aesthetic pleasure from an object is often thought to be in tension with an attitude which hopes to derive knowledge from it.
So the current return to the aesthetic that argues for an existence of aesthetic experience outside historical time is a conservative project of restoration of the old disinterested aesthetic clothes of the high modernist tradition that seeks to eradicate everything extra-aesthetic in the works they celebrate. It is the properties of sensory Beauty that are a central concern to traditional aesthetics and traditional artistic production. Sensory beauty is the heart of the matter for this tradition.
In The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age at Open Democracy Loïc Wacquant argues that the ramping up of the penal wing of the state (eg., “zero tolerance” policing and Three Strikes and You’re Out) is a response to social insecurity, and not a reaction to crime trends.
Wacquant, who is the author of Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, goes on to argue that under a neo-liberal mode of governance we need to reconnect social and penal policies and treat them as two variants of poverty policy to grasp the new punitive politics of marginality. He says:
we must re-link shifts in penal and social policy, instead of isolating them from one another. The downsizing of public aid, complemented by the shift from the right to welfare to obligation of workfare (that is, forced participation in sub par employment as a condition of support), and the upsizing of the prison are the two sides of the same coin. Together, workfare and prisonfare effect the double regulation of poverty in the age of deepening economic inequality and diffusing social insecurity.
Economists have propounded a conception of neoliberalism that equates it with the rule of the “free market” and the coming of “small government” and, by and large, other social scientists have adopted that conception. The problem is that it captures the ideology of neoliberalism, not its reality. The comparative sociology of actually existing neoliberalism reveals that it involves everywhere the building of a erection of a Centaur-state, liberal at the top and paternalistic at the bottom. Then neoliberal Leviathan practices laissez faire et laissez passer toward corporations and the upper class, at the level of the causes of inequality. But it is fiercely interventionist and authoritarian when it comes to dealing with the destructive consequences of economic deregulation for those at the lower end of the class and status spectrum.The reason for this is that the imposition of market discipline is not a smooth, self-propelling process, it meets with recalcitrance and triggers resistance; and it practically undermines the authority of the state.
The argument is that "neoliberal mode of governance abandons the Keynesian-Fordist legacy of state safety nets and stable wage structures in favour of sweeping deregulation and the precarious, piecemeal work that comes with it. It shrinks its social state, leaving people to fend for themselves. But in order to do so without ruinous social rupture, it multiplies its control functions. Hence the aggrandisement of the penal state: those many misfits exposed in the gap between deregulated labour and the reined-in social state must neither get uppity nor go under completely. Instead, they must go down.
This criminalising of poverty has the objective of frightening people into submissive acceptance of the replacement of reliable wage-work with precarious labour, semi-wages and fractured hours. The increasing dependence on our penal state and the accelerating erosion of our social state are two sides of the same coin.
Chapter 5 of David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism is now online. It is entitled the Enigma of Capital and it highlights the contradictory processes of capitalism.
Harvey says that the saga and history of capitalism is full of paradoxes, even as most forms of social theory –economic theory in particular – abstract entirely from consideration of them. He adds:
On the negative side we have not only the periodic and often localised economic crises that have punctuated capitalism’s evolution, including inter-capitalist and inter- imperialist world wars, problems of environmental degradation, loss of biodiverse habitats, spiralling poverty among burgeoning populations, neocolonialism, serious crises in public health, alienations and social exclusions galore and the anxieties of insecurity, violence and unfulfilled desires.
some of us live in a world where standards of material living and well-being have never been higher, where travel and communications have been revolutionised and physical (though not social) spatial barriers to human interactions have been much reduced, where medical and biomedical understandings offer for many a longer life, where huge, sprawling and in many respects spectacular cities have been built, where knowledge proliferates, hope springs eternal and everything seems possible (from self-cloning to space travel).