Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Play of Culture and Social Identities

by Mandoki,Katya

• ISBN13: 9780754658894
• ISBN10: 0754658899
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-07-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Katya Mandoki advances in this book the thesis that it is not only possible but crucial to open up the field of aesthetics (traditionally confined to the study of art and beauty) toward the richness and complexity of everyday life. She argues that in every process of communication, whether face to face or through the media, fashion, and political propaganda, there is always an excess beyond the informative and functional value of a message. This excess is the aesthetic. Following Huizinga's view of play as an ingredient of any social environment, Mandoki explores how various cultural practices are in fact forms of playing since, for the author, aesthetics and play are Siamese twins.One of the unique contributions of this book is the elaboration and application of a semiotic model for the simultaneous analysis of social interactions in the four registers, namely visual, auditory, verbal and body language, to detect the aesthetic strategies deployed in specific situations. She argues that since the presentation of the self is targeted towards participants' sensibilities, aesthetics plays a key role in these modes of exchange. Consequently, the author updates important debates in this field to clear the way for a socio-aesthetic inquiry through contexts such as the family, school, medical, artistic or religious traditions from which social identities emerge.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface

The Labyrinths of Aesthetics: The problems of aesthetics

The fetishes of aesthetics

The myths of aesthetics

The fears of aesthetics

On Aesthesis: Demarcating aesthetics

Basic categories for aesthetic analysis

Conditions of possibility of aesthesis: the a priori

The phenomenology of aesthesis: aesthetic latching-on and latched-by

Towards Prosaics: Prosaics and poetics

The tangents of prosaics

The nutrients of prosaics

The play of culture

The horizons of prosaics

Semio-Aesthetics: Thresholds of semiotic perception: sensation, discernment and regard

The axis of the signic

The axis of the symbolic

Comparative view of both axes: the symbolic and the signic

The non axis of the obtuse

Beyond semiosis to aesthesis

Aesthetic enunciation and its dialogical character

Octodic Model for Aesthetics Analysis: Rhetoric and its registers

Dramatics and its modalities

The rhetoric-dramatic coupling

Con-formations of the rhetoric-dramatic coupling

Matrixes and Identities: The matrixes: a general approach

Diachronic and synchronic perspective of cultural matrixes

The family matrix

The religion matrix

The school matrix

The medical matrix

The occultist matrix

The arts matrix

Conclusions

Glossary

References

Index

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