The Aesthetics of Existence, the Will to Art, and ERE

[Henry]

If art is pursued within the handrails of goodness and truth, you'll do just fine. That makes room for grandma's shit ass paintings of bowls of fruit as well as Holocaust photographic retrospectives. If art is pursued for ulterior motives, then you'll most likely end up dragging your legs to Crap City Galleries.

[chenda]

It's arguable the state of modern art today is a reflection of a profound and fundamental societal malaise. Such as the Swedish guy who defacates paint from his anus to create konceptuell art.

[7Wannabe5]

Here's a small, mixed collection of 16th century towards 21st century art curated this month for Harper's Magazine. Much of the most recent art is as approachable as that from earlier eras:

https://harpers.org/harpersartdesk/

***

[AxelHeyst]

I accidentally skipped ahead and read the first essay of 'book 2', which is focused on the political economy of art. But the first bit of it seemed relevant to the theme of "why is it so hard to convince people to live simply / do post-consumer praxis / etc?"

First he re-phrases the whole object of the essays for context, which I'll quote because it takes a while to get the knack of wtf he's talking about, but you can skip this bit:

My philosophical analysis of self-creation presented a parallel case for why our natures are not given to us in advance. By engaging Michel Foucault, I set out to explain why the ‘self’ is not a substance but a form, from which it follows that we must each give shape to the content of our lives and subjectivities. That is, we must create ourselves as an aesthetic project through ‘techniques of the self’ and aspire to poeticise our existence, to write our own stories rather than merely act out a pre-written script. By placing this conception of the self in cosmological context, this collection of essays is presenting a narrative about how the creative evolution of human aesthetic sensibility is fundamentally about the search for meaning and beauty. This is the telos of existence, the implicit goal of the cosmos. Through our aesthetic activity and contemplation, the universe is able to experience itself as an aesthetic phenomenon, the manifestation of the Will to Art coming to fruition.3 To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, beauty indicates that human beings have a place in the universe,4 at least potentially.

Then he turns to address the issue of, okay, IF our 'purpose' is to find meaning and create beauty, why is there so much oppression and ugliness in the world? Why do so many people fritter their lives away with shallow and ugly trinketry?

If we are free to create ourselves according to our own conception of the good life, why do so many people anxiously march like lemmings into the machine only to be chewed up and spat out in some homogenised form, the commodified maker and consumer of commodities, one-dimensional man in a one-dimensional market society?5

By this point in the essays he's fleshed out an idea that human nature and culture is very malleable, and that 'art' is both something we create and that creates us, and that the 'self' is more form than being. That's what he refers to in the second sentence about 'our malleable selves'.

My explanation for this grim, uncreative reality is that our aesthetic natures have become deadened by the oppressive logic of economic reason – dying, but not dead.⁠⁠ Too often we choose merely to obey the logic of acquisitive society, as if it were the only way. ⁠⁠Our malleable selves are indeed being shaped, but not by ourselves as sculptors of personal existence, but by global capitalist society that needs obedient producers and consumers, not self-governing people who want to create themselves, as artists of life, forging their own paths into the future.⁠⁠ After all, you cannot sell an infinite array of things to artists and artisans who are content with their aesthetic practices and basic material needs. This is why, throughout history, and in small subcultures today, artists and artisans often live relatively austere, non-consumerist lives of voluntary simplicity, in order to practise their arts and crafts. Capitalism has largely succeeded in beating this creative ethic out of humanity in order to maximise profits.

(If the anti-capitalist rhetoric bothers you, please ignore the urge to engage in a pro/con-capitalist dialogue and just see "consumerism" or "mainstream Culture" when Alexander writes "capitalism"... I think for the purposes of this thread the substitution will suffice.)

Two thoughts come out of this for me:
Creative Ethic. I really *really* like the concept of a 'creative ethic'. It occurs to me that I've struggled to articulate my position around 'productive endeavor' perhaps because I've lacked language to unbury myself from the false dichotomy of work ethic vs. laziness. I feel that there are plenty of people who are allergic to ye old protestant work ethic who would react favorably to the concept of creative ethic.

The Carrot. It seems to me that a lot of the conversation around how to get more people to adopt post-consumer praxis sounds like a bunch of incompetent amateurs trying to come up with an advertising and marketing campaign. Even if we weren't incompetent marketers, we might still be doing the wrong kind of thing.

It isn't any certain aesthetics that is the carrot. It is the notion that post-consumer praxis unlocks freedom to pursue an aesthetic existence, to pursue meaning and beauty, to reject being stamped into a commodified existence.

I mean, that's still a big lift because most people have been so indoctrinated into the consumer mindset that it's hard to even imagine what that previous paragraph even means and why it's preferable to Netflix and Amazon next-hour drone delivery. But to my mind it helps give more language/flesh to the freedom-to discussion, and potentially to communicating with others.

"Why do you want to work less and live off of $10,000/yr? It just doesn't make sense."
"It's because it's the easiest way I can think of to pursue the activities of meaning-discovery and creative endeavor: very little is needed to do these things, and material sufficiency can be had for sub-poverty levels of expenses with a little skill. I want to spend my time pursing artistic creations."

Obviously that wording needs to be wordsmithed a bit, particularly if your form of "artistic creativity" looks nothing at all like what people associate with the word "art/artistic", but it's better than what I've come up with to date. Again, the main thing is that it's a freedom-TO framing, not a freedom-FROM framing ("w*rk sux lol").

[AxelHeyst]

He goes on to discuss the role of 'bad faith' in the insanity of our cultures. Bad faith refers to the disingenuous insistence that one has no real choice in how to act, think, or feel about things. Everyone is "doomed to freedom" but real, full freedom is terrifying (hence doomed). We are all utterly free to choose how we act/react to the world, but it is terrifying to act in accordance with who we really are, so most of us revert to a bad faith stance of fitting into the mold. We choose security over freedom but won't acknowledge the choice we've made.

The final strategy for escaping freedom, and one deserving of special emphasis, is the tendency for individuals to evade their freedom by uncritically adopting the personality offered to them by cultural patterns. Fromm calls this mechanism ‘automaton conformity’:17
...
the truth [is] that modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as through they were our own.
...
So why do we sometimes act in bad faith? In summary, Fromm argued that we fear our freedom. We are sometimes inclined to prefer submission to an authority rather than the agony of choice and responsibility; we sometimes tend toward destruction as a self-defeating strategy for managing our sense of isolation and powerlessness.

Also this bit seems particularly relevant to us:

Without getting into the intricacies of his psychoanalytical theory, Fromm maintained that when a human being gained ‘freedom from’ an oppressive authority in the past (e.g., a state or a church) but failed to find meaningful ‘freedom to’ engage in self-directed creative activity, the individual can try to resolve the burden of their freedom by desperately destroying the world or themselves.

Alexander explores a bit this notion that bad faith contributes to the insanity of culture, and the dynamics of being not totally insane but living within an insane society. He has some real zingers about the insanity of mainstream culture which I'll leave to you to enjoy. "To paraphrase MLK Hr, there are some things in our world to which we should be proud to be maladjusted."

Tying it back to his overarching theme, though, he argues (or is in the process of setting up the argument) that a prescription for the insanity is to "reignite our innate need for freedom and the love of life through aesthetic education and engagement."

My argument is that art and aesthetics may be the best means of shaking us awake. We need to awaken or reawaken a state of 'play', being the condition of aesthetic freedom in which our normal sense of self can be disrupted; when our normal sense of self is liberated from its own self-imposed rules and regulations.

In other words, one reason that it's so hard to get people to 'see the light' when it comes to serious post-consumer praxis in their own lives, or even to fully acknowledge that there are very serious issues with our culture (which is probably prerequisite to agreeing with the proposition that anything could/ought to be done about it, even if only at household scale), is that most people have safely ensconced themselves within the protective folds of their bad faith, the mostly unconscious attitude that keeps them secure from the terrifying reality of freedom in an insane society.

I put this forward as the best antidote to living in bad faith and fear of freedom. It is a promising coincidence that this aesthetic ignition of our need for freedom may also offer a form of ‘art therapy’, a welcome and perhaps necessary existential salve as we find ourselves living in an insane society. My intention, at this stage, is not to argue for the particulars of an alternative form of life, but to find ways for more people to discover that there are different forms of life. As Henry Thoreau insisted, there are ‘as many ways as there are radii from one center.’30 If people can arrive at this conclusion, their freedom will have been expanded.

We'll see what he has to say about the particulars of an alternative form of life, but my immediate thought at this point is "hey look over here, this thing called ERE, a community/praxis that is a widely tested brass tacks practical set of instructions for how to a) deliver people to at least a certain kind of freedom, which can act as a toe-hold towards even further dimensions of freeing the self, and b) start to see the wide range of alternative freedoms available (all the different lifestyles evidenced in the journals, widening everyone's Overton windows, etc)."

The existence of ERE is also a refutation of bad faith. People in bad faith will say "it's not possible" and "the system has us all stuck in this cage and we can't get out, no use trying" but those are hard lines to stick to when there's a whole community of folks calmly going about freeing themselves and living their own unique weird lives. I think this is an explanation for some of the inexplicable heat some of us can get from family and friends who 'don't get it'. It's very important to their sense of selves that they don't get it, that they insist there's some kind of catch to the whole thing that doesn't threaten their bad-faith construct of why they aren't/can't be free.

[7Wannabe5]

Another argument in favor of the sensual/aesthetic might be that human conscious cognitive bandwidth is extremely limited compared to the total input to our sensory systems and brain (around .05%.) Therefore, for example, it could be argued that there is a huge experiential difference between finding yourself lost in a book while gently swaying in a hammock under a tree in your garden vs. finding yourself lost in a book while stuck in a plastic chair at your dentist's office. One can argue art/porn or exploration/escapism endlessly, but there is no escaping the relative strength of your subconscious recognition of reality (not to be confused with the standard narrative.)

The reality is that the alternative narrative of ERE is not likely to make an individual "happier" than the standard narrative, because that is not how "happiness" works. It's also only somewhat likely to provide greater "meaning" towards "fulfillment", because that's not how "meaning towards fulfillment" (the good )works*. So, its advantages are most likely to be found at the level of the aesthetic (the beautiful) and/or psychological richness (the interesting.)

Obviously, there can be as much debate about what constitutes "the beautiful" and "the interesting" as "the good", but having access to all three qualities for consideration will create a wider field with much more Venn diagram overlap across personality types, micro-cultures, etc.

*It may provide "meaning towards fulfillment" (the good) if resource conservation/poly-crisis mitigation is your "baby", but this is not a necessary condition for generalized ERE.

[jacob]

Obviously, there can be as much debate about what constitutes "the beautiful" and "the interesting" as "the good", but having access to all three qualities for consideration will create a wider field with much more Venn diagram overlap across personality types, micro-cultures, etc.

Yeah, so far some variant of this has been mentioned twice, so the expanded concept is definitely in the water. I don't know enough about the history of philosophy to pinpoint how old this distinction is, but IIRC Aristotle made a big deal out of "the good", "the true", and "the beautiful" in Nicomachean Ethics. (This is well worth reading and belongs somewhere on the ERE WL8, 9, or 10 list of reading suggestions.)

If I had to add something he missed, it would be "the great" as in "something greater than oneself". "The great" would easily be something a parochial philosopher would miss due to myopia. We tend to be blind to that which we take for granted.

Anyhoo, ... I'm pretty confident that an overall "solution" to the metacrisis need to take in all three (or four). Modernism's pursuit of "the true" came at both the cost of the "the beautiful" (ugly buildings, etc.) and "the good" (various war crimes and inhumane ideologies). Any postmodernism's pursuit of "the beautiful" while disregarding the other factors risks creating its own monsters.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

That's 5 if you include 'the interesting" which I definitely would Although I suppose it could be argued that some of these are towards the secondary color combinations of the primary colors. Still, I believe "the interesting" stands alone. For example, the time when I was living in gritty urban neighborhood and I happened upon a a very tough looking little person urinating against the wall in an alley. Not "good", "beautiful", or "great", maybe an aspect of "true", but I'm going to stick with "interesting" or "psychologically rich" experience.

[jacob]

I wouldn't. Any of the four can be "interesting" depending on who is looking at them. For example, as a recovering scientist, "the true" is interesting to me whereas "the beautiful" is not. What you're looking for is perhaps closer to "the surprising" or "the novel".

To go off a bit on a tangent, the patent office defines "creative" [invention] as an something that is
1) Surprising/non-obvious
2) Useful
3) New
(see https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu ... ations.pdf )

As such another trifecta concerning creativity alone might be "the surprising" (like a lad pissing in a port), "the novel", and "the useful".

When we talk about a philosophy of life, it's not only necessary to cover all/most bases of most people but also to cover the societies that results from that. This is an incredible difficult problem to solve which is why I've largely given up. (It's a lot easier to solve on an individual basis. For example, I can quickly dismiss "the beautiful" from my personal considerations.)

[7Wannabe5]

What you're looking for is perhaps closer to "the surprising" or "the novel".

Yes, the chaotic edge of the known/experienced by me map. One of the greatest feelings in the world is when a huge glacier falls as a chunk off the edge of my mind and opens up a vast new territory. I also very much enjoy the feeling of anticipation.

like a lad pissing in a port

Not a lad, a little person as in a midget. A midget who was dressed and scowling like a thug. There are some places where you will quite often happen upon novel sights like that and there are other places where you will rarely happen upon novel sights like that.

[daylen]

One conceptualization that retains the compactness of (beauty, goodness, truth) while integrating surprise/novelty and greatness is as follows: surprise/novelty = beauty + truth (coalescence of subjectivity and objectivity)
greatness = goodness + truth (coalescence of intersubjectivity and objectivity)

For niche generalists such as humans especially, but also for cellular cognition in general, (re)cognized patterns are melded with/into novel patterns. Posterior cognition is sensitive to change/derivatives on prior cognition. It is impossible to cognize the entire agent-arena relationship all at once at any given moment in time, so agents must engage in relevance realization which is ultimately a matter of taste/aesthetics/subjectivity fitted to this universe.

Great scientists might have good intentions and top-notch technical/mathematical skills, but if they lack sufficient research or problem taste then they might end up writing 14 books on an obscure and irrelevant topic no one cares about. At least not until another nerd with more fit taste [in that universe] comes along to redress the key points in an engaging article, blog, or youtube video. Although, this may or may not be that big of a deal to the great scientist so long as their effort eventually does some good and archives truth.

[AxelHeyst]

Okay, continuing the theme of the role of art/aesthetics in prefigurative politics,

My overarching argument in this collection of essays is that any hope for deep revision in the established politico-economic order depends on acknowledging, appreciating, and operating within the aesthetic dimension. It is one thing to establish firm scientific, ethical, and philosophical foundations for an alternative form of societal organisation. But if there is no felt need in society for such a political transformation then this can be understood in part as an aesthetic obstacle that demands an aesthetic intervention or series of interventions.

In the essay "Art Against Empire: Marcuse on the Aesthetics of Revolt" Alexander digs into the role of the aesthetic in preparing consciousness for political (/social) change.

The vexed problem that follows is that it is not clear why art should speak the language of the people if that language is not yet the language of liberation.21 For example, little is to be achieved if a culture thinks that the existential malaise caused by consumerism can only be solved by more consumption; or if the ecological problems caused by capitalist growth and extraction can only be solved by more of the same.

(In a previous essay he discussed "capitalist realism", the idea that it's become essentially impossible to imagine any society other than a capitalistic one.)

I think aesthetics + ERE Praxis/the existence of ERE people are/can be an effective 1-2 punch to disassemble Consumer Realism. Art can exist that indicts consumerism and imagines post-consumer society, but it will fall on deaf ears and blind eyes connected to brains unable to imagine non-consumerist modalities of life. But add the dagger of the irrefutable existence of post-consumer people living amongst the consumerist hordes, and it becomes more difficult to retain the illusion.

This is why it's actually important and "great" in the way Jacob meant it to not ride into the sunset after hitting WL6+. The World Needs Your Journal! (and IRL engagement in the world/society...)

I actually think that there's another role aesthetics/art can play here, which is giving us ERE folk tools with which to talk about our lives. So many of us, myself included, resort to little half-truths and avoidant lies to explain our lifestyles in terms that consumers will understand, because it's a pain in the dick to crack their Overton Windows to include post-consumer realities. Perhaps there are artistic works existant or yet-to-exist that can help. "Have you read/seen movie/book/podcast x? I'm doing something like that."

Back to Alexander:

...This is perhaps why Percy Bysshe Shelley was prepared to declare that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’,26 suggesting that aesthetic revolutions often precede revolutions in political economy, sometimes in subtle ways. As quoted in an earlier essay, J.G. Ballard once stated that ‘many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.’

I mean, yeah, the common response you get from normies confronted with ERE praxis is "but why?" Alexander's take is that these are people who have not been confronted with an aesthetic challenge to their known mode of existence - there is no apparent Why at all.

A personal reflection is that my personal aesthetics is a HUGE reason why ERE resonated with me so strongly and immediately. I'd been steeped in aesthetic yearnings for a different mode of being for over a decade: I had the aesthetic (as well as thermodynamic) indictment of consumerism (I saw ugliness and moral corruption everywhere I looked), I had the aesthetic imagined worlds of a post-consumer society (Entropia, Retrotopia, The Ecotechnic Future, etc etc (etc!)), but I lacked the connection to a praxis - a "what to do next Tuesday". Without the aesthetic pressure I doubt I'd have taken to ERE at all - I'd have had no "why". The *intensity* of my "why" can be explained almost entirely in aesthetic, aka inner-world sensuality/subjective-experience, terms.

...art is also the promise of liberation and can point to new forms of prosperity. Art and aesthetic interventions in culture can offer or invent alternative mythologies of existence, expanding the imagination in ways that make new ways of living and being comprehensible, plausible, and attractive.
...
Aesthetically creating new mythopoetic foundations of a society underpins everything else that follows – including politics and economics. This is because myth and narrative are what structure and rework the popular imagination, including the consciousness of the agents of change. Politics and economics always operate in the service of story, so what that story is obviously matters a great deal.

Boom.

However, lest we get too carried away with ourselves, Alexander warns that of course art cannot change the world:

In any case, ‘[a]rt cannot redeem its promise, and reality offers no promises, only chances.’33 As noted earlier, art itself cannot change the world, it can only change the minds and sensibilities of people who must then act in the world to change it. Marcuse claimed that the ‘indictment and the promise preserved in art lose their unreal or utopian character to the degree to which they inform the strategy of oppositional movements…’34 The hope which art represents must not remain ‘ideal’ – again, this is art’s hidden categorical imperative. It must not point to a world of mere fiction or fantasy, but articulate through aesthetic form the concrete possibilities that call for realisation.

Still, a point to the power of art:

Totalitarian governments acknowledge the power of art through the ferocity of their censorship. If art did not threaten the power structures of political society, presumably novelists, poets, and playwrights would be free to write whatever they wanted, no matter how critical.

This next quote is just a great concise summation of The Predicament:

As material wealth expanded over recent centuries, one might have thought that wealth would have become less important and desired; that affluent societies, in particular, would have recognised the diminishing marginal utility of money, and redirected social energies toward non-materialistic pursuits. But somehow, the diminishing returns have been not just disguised but inverted. Growth in consumption seems more important than ever, as if we have been conditioned against the desire for freedom. In the relentless pursuit of ‘more’ – a goal that it was assumed would liberate us – we have bound ourselves to a conception of progress that perpetuates our servitude while at the same time making ecological devastation a way of life.

We have arrived at a stage in history where we cannot transcend the existing system without transcending ourselves. That is, we must liberate ourselves from the exploitative apparatus of this society but first we must free ourselves from what we have been made into.

This, to me, speaks to The Crowbar. A primary motivation for "doing" ERE in a crowbar/speedrun/violent manner is that my goal has always been personal transformation: I'm trying to become a qualitatively different person. It's hard? Of course it's hard! It's like dying! No death, no rebirth!

By liberating ourselves from ourselves, we are freer to rediscover the life- enhancing forces and sensuous aesthetic qualities that are largely absent in a life often wasted in unending competitive performance and materialistic pursuits. Without this transformation of our inner realities, the consumer mentality and its mutilated experience would merely be reproduced in the new society.
...
The ‘needs’ that have been engineered into us have a stabilising, conservative force: the counterrevolution of capitalism has become embedded in the structure of our instincts and ‘second nature’. Marcuse argued that this ‘militates against any change that would disrupt and perhaps even abolish the dependence of man on a market ever more densely filled with merchandise – abolish his existence as a consumer consuming himself in buying and selling.’43
...
What this suggests is that the transition to a radically new type of society will not involve the broader satisfaction of existing needs, but a rupture with the needs and desires that currently define advanced capitalism.

^Paging JnG...


There's a bunch of lines in these essays that are just absolutely savage in a buttoned-down academic sort of way, and I love it. This is the most fun reading I've had in a while.

[The_Bowme]

I have a pretty negative reaction to the writing style. If he wants to communicate, why present everything through the lens of other thinkers' framing? Are the ideas so dependent on their frameworks? When someone says, "Given X's conception of Y, I claim Z, I now need to understand Y and its credibility, which given frequent appeals to authority, also means evaluating the credibility of X. Marcuse and Foucault were both thinkers who made varied, complex claims, often importing additional dependencies from other thinkers (Marx, Freud). All these thinkers also claimed lots of crazy things, were wrong about many things, and have ideas that have been badly misused.

If the point is to persuade or elucidate, why take on this baggage? My view is that the motive is likely careerist, following academic fashion and getting citations, going to conferences, etc., and not particularly related to the demands of the stated problem. I also think that there are basically irreconcilable contradictions in most claims of theory-laden anticapitalist degrowthers (they're socialist libertarians arguing a program that would require ecofascism), so the more obscurantist the better as far as being able to continue publishing.

To be more constructive though, I think the basic idea of trying to drive aesthetics to achieve political ends is flawed. I think politics can create interesting aesthetic ideas, but people will respond to those based entirely on their own passing interest, the zeitgeist, etc. The solar punk aesthetic already exists. Is the problem really that it wasn't compelling enough? Are we hoping to theoretically derive a vision so compelling it gets everyone to abandon consumerism? I mean, a motorcycle is a consumed item -- you can't make it yourself, you can barely make the parts yourself, it requires a highly organized and complex industrial civilization, and the whole history is drenched in engineering and marketing from a capitalist/consumerist system. It's easy to say motorcycles are romantic compared to car commuting, but how do you sell everyone on the idea of just walking instead? I feel like you can't. Some people will prefer to walk but the romance of the motorcycle can't be overcome because it would be ecologically good to do so.

Maybe this points to the moral/spiritual frame being the more compelling one? At least its amendable to argument given shared presuppositions. But I'm afraid our presuppositions are too idiosyncratic for mass persuasion. I would personally settle for a moral/spiritual framing around ERE that would convince just me though. So far I don't have that, just a repugnance for waste and a basic love of nature.

[7Wannabe5]

just a repugnance for waste and a basic love of nature.

These together might form enough of an aesthetic. However, I don't think there is necessarily even an aligned aesthetic related to ERE. For example, Jacob prefers the elegance of science to the basic love of nature. And a free-wheeling eNtP such as me doesn't go as far as "repugnance" when it comes to waste. I'll leave that to the more fastidious "J" crew *

The aesthetic I have related to waste is more in alignment with "lack of knowledge" or maybe more towards "lack of ingenuity", like I wish I could choose any dumpster at random and know how to best integrate the entire contents into a permaculture system and/or lifestyle business. Kind of like a 21st century Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold. I even started writing a collection of essays based on doing kind of the opposite; starting with any random consumer product in sight and tracing its production back to origins. I think doing both of these kind of increases appreciation for small-scale capitalism/production and the wonders of global trade while also increasing appreciation for more intelligent endgame consumption. Like a badger is a miracle and so is a random pair of black tights purchased at the corner drugstore. For example, when I traced the black tights, I discovered they were produced at a small old family held hosiery factory on the east coast that finally went out of business during Covid. So, maybe making it less impersonal is what improves the aesthetic of capitalism for me, and the internet now gives us the ability to make capitalism and global trade less impersonal fairly easily. IOW, it allows us to engage in de-commodification or reversing the process that started when the first large grain elevators negated the need for farmer's to imprint their own brand upon the burlap bags containing the fruits of their production. Unfortunately, something like a stock market index fund does pretty much the opposite in terms of obliterating information.


*Moral codes/rules and repugnance obviously go hand in hand. For example, when Mohammed banned drinking blood from live animals and the eating of pork. The downside is when, for example, the entire primitive tribe that inhabited Iceland died off because they couldn't/wouldn't change their dietary customs.

[Jin+Guice]

Denying aesthetics is denying life. The sharp line between the intellectual and the aesthetic is made up.

Some of the old guard weren't interested unless sharp blades were involved because they realized that eliminating danger changed both the fighting, the fight, and the fighters completely. Similarly, the view from a mountaintop depends on whether you hiked/climbed all the way up or you took the cable car up. To bring it back to ERE a bit: Sitting at a table you made yourself (or acquired through some fancy trade) is different than sitting at a table that was bought in a store. And so on.

This argument is aesthetic. What fighting for your life, climbing a mountain and sitting at a table you made vs their alternatives all have in common is that they feel different.

Few people dare to ask themselves, ‘How much is enough?’ Fewer still dare to meditate on the real question: ‘Enough for what?"

This is the metacrisis, beautiful and ugly, smart and dumb.

[AxelHeyst]

I have a pretty negative reaction to the writing style. If he wants to communicate, why present everything through the lens of other thinkers' framing?

You might like/find tolerable his ‘fiction’ book Entropia as an alternative. Quotes because the story fiction is a light conceit for his ideas that you can’t take too seriously, but it gets the gist of his vision across in a non-academic style.

[ertyu]

If the point is to persuade or elucidate, why take on this baggage?

Because when you use an idea or an empirical result that is not yours, if you're not a shitstain, you give credit where credit is due. This is why citations are a thing that exists.

I also disagree that this is about driving aesthetics to meet political ends. Instead, what it is, is that the aesthetic is also always political. Eg sitting at a table you made being fundamentally different from buying one from the store? That's how Das Kapital starts: the alienation of labor and its product.

[The_Bowme]

These together might form enough of an aesthetic. However, I don't think there is necessarily even an aligned aesthetic related to ERE. For example, Jacob prefers the elegance of science to the basic love of nature. And a free-wheeling eNtP such as me doesn't go as far as "repugnance" when it comes to waste. I'll leave that to the more fastidious "J" crew *

The aesthetic I have related to waste is more in alignment with "lack of knowledge" or maybe more towards "lack of ingenuity", like I wish I could choose any dumpster at random and know how to best integrate the entire contents into a permaculture system and/or lifestyle business. Kind of like a 21st century Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold. I even started writing a collection of essays based on doing kind of the opposite; starting with any random consumer product in sight and tracing its production back to origins. I think doing both of these kind of increases appreciation for small-scale capitalism/production and the wonders of global trade while also increasing appreciation for more intelligent endgame consumption. Like a badger is a miracle and so is a random pair of black tights purchased at the corner drugstore. For example, when I traced the black tights, I discovered they were produced at a small old family held hosiery factory on the east coast that finally went out of business during Covid. So, maybe making it less impersonal is what improves the aesthetic of capitalism for me, and the internet now gives us the ability to make capitalism and global trade less impersonal fairly easily. IOW, it allows us to engage in de-commodification or reversing the process that started when the first large grain elevators negated the need for farmer's to imprint their own brand upon the burlap bags containing the fruits of their production. Unfortunately, something like a stock market index fund does pretty much the opposite in terms of obliterating information.


*Moral codes/rules and repugnance obviously go hand in hand. For example, when Mohammed banned drinking blood from live animals and the eating of pork. The downside is when, for example, the entire primitive tribe that inhabited Iceland died off because they couldn't/wouldn't change their dietary customs.

I like the idea of decommodifying when possible! I guess it seems hard to do with all the trash blown into a field by a highway. But I think probably demoralizing it and having some more abstracted/aesthetic view could be fruitful.

Because when you use an idea or an empirical result that is not yours, if you're not a shitstain, you give credit where credit is due. This is why citations are a thing that exists.

I also disagree that this is about driving aesthetics to meet political ends. Instead, what it is, is that the aesthetic is also always political. Eg sitting at a table you made being fundamentally different from buying one from the store? That's how Das Kapital starts: the alienation of labor and its product.

Citation can be done in a way that's helpful or unobtrusive. I think it's bad rhetoric to write this way, and if he really cared about the ends he claims to, he'd strive for a more persuasive and popular register. I think he's rather engaged in a sort of academic language game. But that might just be my own hang-ups, I'll acknowledge.

You might like/find tolerable his ‘fiction’ book Entropia as an alternative. Quotes because the story fiction is a light conceit for his ideas that you can’t take too seriously, but it gets the gist of his vision across in a non-academic style.

I bought the ebook. Will report back if it inspires something!

[AxelHeyst]

Taste, Enchantment, and The DVP Tetrahedron

In my MMG call this morning we were talking a little about aesthetics, taste, stoke, Ahrens, how to choose/know what to do with your life, etc. I was thinking about how the development of taste is both a push away-from and a pull-towards kind of thing - first you might only be aware of what you *don't* like. You might only know "this is bad" or "this is ugly" or "this is not put together well" at a felt sense, and this is an aesthetic judgement. You might not have a very granular understanding.

As you spend more time with the sense you develop more granular vocabulary etc to think about it, and the dissatisfaction drives you to seek satisfaction - drives you to look for experiences/examples that feel right, good, beautiful, etc in whatever domain you're interested in. (This is a sense I have for the built environment but less so in the sense of traditional 'architectural form' but more like 'whole-environment function with respect to embodied and operational energy consumption, materials toxicity, thermal delight, etc'.) You start to accumulate examples and visions of beauty and you naturally seek to decrease the gap between both what you perceive/experience and what you're capable of creating. Very much this:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

This aesthetic process is a process of taking action, I think, which Alexander gets into a bit when he discusses Bennett's ideas about enchantment.

To be enchanted – if only for a moment – is to see life as worth living and to see the world as a place that has the latent capacity to be transformed in more humane and ecologically sane ways. More importantly, it provides the propulsion to act and engage, functioning as an antidote to apathy, resignation, and perhaps even despair.
...
Transformative action is not set in motion merely by an intellectual appreciation of crisis, immiseration, and exploitation. One can know of these horrors and yet not act... out of disenchantment. For disenchantment’s primary consequence is passive resignation to the status quo, which is capitalism’s greatest achievement and its greatest tragedy.

I read this and think about my own relationship with things I have natural taste towards (the built environment in particular), and the language of enchantment/disenchantment could be well used to describe my ups and downs with it - and directly connected to my patterns of action and inaction, creation and non-creation.

It also made me think of the DVP Tetrahedron of Change from The Book (and blog), the idea that you need sufficient dissatisfaction with current state, a sufficient enough Vision for a future state, and a good-enough Plan that you believe can work, to be able to get to an activation energy sufficient to change behavior. The language of aesthetics speaks both to dissatisfaction and vision, to my mind - they are both essentially subjective felt sensibilities, aka a matter of taste. (fight me).

To be disenchanted is to feel one lives in a world in which meaning and purpose are absent, and in which a better world is unimaginable and so not worth fighting for. Thus disenchantment is a political and ethical problem, even as enchantment remains elusive and its experience temporary.
...
Through art and aesthetic experience, it is still possible to experience enchantment, despite the ugliness and violence of the world. My point in engaging Bennett’s theory is to highlight how this affective state is crucial to motivating the ethical and political sensibilities and behaviours needed to transform the world and its dangerous trajectories.

[7Wannabe5]

the idea that you need sufficient dissatisfaction with current state, a sufficient enough Vision for a future state, and a good-enough Plan that you believe can work, to be able to get to an activation energy sufficient to change behavior.

Two thoughts. (1) It's possible that this also runs in reverse, and those who possess activation energy and/or find themselves in a state of change tend towards summoning up the other three. (2) It is my current experience at age 60 that the length of runway to the future state is also pretty critical. In simplest terms, it is very difficult for me to imagine having a better lifestyle at age 80 than I do now at age 60. However, it is still possible for me to envision having a better lifestyle this summer than I am having this spring.

OTOH, it has been shown that in terms of happiness in the moment or happiness in the day, short term planning is best, and this is why older humans generally are happier on day-to-day basis. Basically, the arc of predicting that you will be happier this evening than you are this afternoon if you take a walk in the woods, cook yourself a nice dinner, and have great sex with your partner is more likely to prove accurate than your 10 year strategy. So, long term planning is really better suited to "fulfillment of purpose", "creating meaningful life", "deepening aesthetic sense, intellectual capabilities, and/or psychological richness" and/or similar.