Aesthetics and Reception Theory

by L. Campos
 Learning Outcomes
To introduce the essay questions for the unit in the context of
the aesthetics and reception theory.
To introduce classical aesthetics debates: Kant
To introduce areas of analytical and continental aesthetic
debates.
To introduce and contextualize areas of hermeneutics in
relation to aesthetics.
To introduce relational aesthetics.
To introduce reception theory.
 Classical Debates: What do we mean
by Aesthetics?
Aesthetics, broadly defined as the philosophy of art,
interrogates this discipline with questions such as:
What is art? What counts as art? What is the value of
art? What are our judgments on art?

From Greek philosophy to philosophers such as Hume,

Kant and Sartre, the establishment of aesthetics as a
clearly identifiable branch of philosophy has been
consolidated.

However, It is Kant who imposes a definite character on

contemporary ideas of Art and Aesthetics
 Kants Critique
Aesthetic Judgment as disinterestedly free

1. Critique of Pure Reason.

2. Critique of Practical Reason.
3. Critique of Judgment.
 The Matrix and Kant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S
z6qunm6q30

Kants Copernican revolution, the idea that the mind

structures the way reality can appear to us. In this
sense, reality has to conform to the laws of the mind,
rather than the mind trying to discover what reality is
out there, which is completely external to us.
 Kant
In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), Kants critical or
transcendental philosophy tried to establish the necessary
conditions for the possibility of our knowledge.

On Kants analysis, our knowledge is construed and essentially

possible by the structure of our own minds.

Loosely explained, human cognition is the result of an application of

concepts to sensations, creating intuitions of things in the world,
not as they are in themselves, but as they appear to our senses.

Concepts bring sense to the wider exposure of the sensorial stimuli

as the mind applies basic concepts or categories of the
understanding.
 Kants Critique
According to Kant in his Transcendental
Idealism, humans experience things as they
appear to us and therefore implying a subject-
based component, a purely subjective
representation in a spatial-temporal framework.
The Kantian subject is not implicated in nature, it
is transcendental to it.
In Kantian terms: transcendental subject is a
condition for the possibilities for knowledge.
 Kants 3rd Critique
Kant addresses aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where aesthetic
beauty can be interpreted as an exercise of rational judgment, but also as an
expression of subjective and personal feeling and sentiment.

Kant places aesthetic judgment between the logically necessary (physics and
mathematic theorems) and the purely subjective (but not determinate), making
clear that the experience of beauty is not purely subjective (but also rational).

An aesthetic judgment is placed between the universally necessary or logical, and

the personal and subjective. In Kants terminology, an aesthetic judgment is
disinterestedly free

Judgments of taste are both subjective and universal. They are subjective, because
they are responses to pleasure, and do not essentially involve any claims about the
properties of the object itself. (What matters is not the picture I see; rather it is the
pleasing effect of the picture on me.)
 Analytical Aesthetic Tradition
The prominent application of logic and
conceptual analysis.
The emphasis on objectivity and truth.
The need to define terms.
Aesthetic philosophical problems as timeless and
universal
Questions such as: What makes a situation
aesthetic? What is an aesthetic concept? How do
meaning, truth and representation arise in the
arts? What is the scope of the aesthetics?
 Continental Aesthetic Tradition
Aesthetic problems as not timeless and
universal, but as constructs of history and
culture.
Questions such as: aesthetics as discourse?
Aesthetics as symbols of modern culture?
 Theatrical Performance:
Ephemeralities, Events, and Feedback Loops
 Theatrical Performance
Performances are read as open-ended engagements
and exchanges between performers and audiences.

Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008) states: the bodily co-

presence of actors and spectators enables and
constitutes performance (2008: 32).

An event that is not fixed or transferable, but ephemeral

and transient (2008: 33).
Phelan (1993) argues that performance becomes itself
through disappearance (1993:146), and defends the idea of
performance as a unique ephemeral ontological event. She
adds to this: Performances only life is on the present.
Performance cannot be saved, recorded, [and/or]
documented (1993:146).

Moreover,

To the degree that performance attempts to enter the

economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise
of its own ontology For only rarely in this culture is the
now to which performance addresses its deepest questions
valued (1993: 146).
 From Static and Complete to Evental.

From classical Aesthetics that consider the

work of art as finished and holder of the
whole truth to a contemporary aesthetics of
the event.

The work of art from complete to becoming

Conceptualizing the Event
Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jacques Derrida

Pierre Boudieu

Michel Foucault
Who is the author?
Jacques Derrida

Roland Barthes

Michel Foucault
Hermeneutics

The word hermeneutics can be traced to

Aristotles treatise On Interpretation, which is
mainly concerned with the proper way to
construct propositions about the world.
However, the roots of the word go back even
further: like most philosophical problems,
hermeneutics finds its first speculation in
Plato.

Hermeneutics: The art of understanding and

the theory of interpretation.
 Hermeneutics 1: Schleiermacher
Schleiermacher described hermeneutics as the art of
understanding. In seeking to lay out a general hermeneutics, his
aim was to discover the interpretive techniques which occurred in
any act of understanding.

Furthermore, Schleiermacher thought that the way we speak and

write had two components: the language common to a culture, and
the individual qualities that the author, as an individual, brings to
his task.

Schleiermachers famous statement of the impossible goal of

hermeneutics: to understand the author better than the author
understands himself.
 Hermeneutics 2: Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamers Truth and Method (1960).

He says that the human sciences (history, literature, etc.) always approach
a text from a position of being remote from itGadamer calls this
distance alienation.

The idea is that our approach to a historical phenomenon (a work of art, a

text, etc.) has already been (to some extent) predetermined by the pre-
understandings of past interpreters; one can never approach a text
innocently.

The hermeneutic circle: has to do with the relation between part and
whole. I can only discover the meaning of the whole from the part, but
the part only gains its meaning by its place in the whole.
Relational Aesthetics

Niclolas Bourriaud attempts to

renew our approach toward
contemporary art by getting as
close as possible to the artists
work, and by revealing the
principles that structure their
thought: an aesthetic of the
inter-human, of the encounter;
of proximity, of resisting social
formation.
Picture: Installation by Tiravininja 1990
 Relational Aesthetics
Bourriaud (2002) coins the term relational aesthetics to explore and
investigate practices that use the realm of human interactions and its
social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private
symbolic space (2004: 14).

The art that Bourriaud classifies as relational is the one in which

meaning is elaborated collectively. The audience of this artistic work is
taken into consideration as a plural entity, rather than a one-to-one
relationship between the work of art and the viewer, the viewer is
addressed collectively.

Bishop (2008) explains that for Bourriaud relational aesthetics is not a

theory of art for interactive practices, but a means of locating
contemporary practices within the culture at large (2008: 116).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj9rWq2uodY
 Reception Theory
Reception theory provides a means of understanding media texts by
understanding how these texts are read by audiences.

Theorists who analyze media through reception studies are concerned with the
experience of viewing for spectators, and how meaning is created through that
experience.

Meaning is created in the interaction between spectator and text; in other words,
meaning is created as the viewer watches and processes the film, performance,
(even paintings).

Reception theory argues that contextual factors, more than textual ones, influence
the way the spectator views the film, television program and/or performance.
Contextual factors include elements of the viewer's identity as well as
circumstances of exhibition, the spectator's preconceived notions, and even social,
historical, and political issues.
 Reception Theory

In short, reception theory places the viewer in context,

taking into account all of the various factors that might
influence how she or he will read and create meaning
from the text.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yr7odFUARg
Birmingham University Centre for Reception Theory :
Stuart Hall
Hall argues that the researchers should direct their attention toward:
Analysis of that social and political context in which content is produced
(encoding).

The consumption of media content. The essence of the reception

approach is to locate the attribution and construction of meaning (derived
from media) with the receiver.

Media messages are always open and polysemic (having multiple

meanings) and are interpreted according to the context and culture of
receivers.

Stuart Hall emphasizes the stages of transformation through which any

media message passes on the way from its origins to its reception and
interpretation.
 Stuart Hall
Hall draws from the basic principles of structuralism and semiology, which
presume that any meaningful message is constructed from signs, and can
have denotative and connotative meanings, depending on the choices
made by an encoder.

He accepts some of the elements of semiology on two grounds:

1. Communicators choose to encode messages. Ideological and institutional

communicators choose to encode messages for ideological and
institutional purposes and manipulate language and media to those ends
(media messages are given a preferred reading, or what might now be
called spin).
2. Receivers (decoders) are not obliged to accept messages as sent but can
and do resist ideological influence by applying variant or oppositional
readings, according to their own experience and outlook