Joanne Lee

Nottingham Trent University, UK

‘Scattered with marvels’: An investigation into the aesthetics of urban life

About the project

My current research project seeks to describe and analyse the aesthetics of everyday urban life, and through this to consider what aesthetics, freed from art, might offer as a form of critical cognition.

The presentation will recognize the body as a cognitive organ, and will argue that were we to recover the original meaning of the term asthitikos – perceptive by feeling – it would allow the development of an investigative method applicable to a broad range of research beyond the traditional remit of aesthetics. I consider this approach to aesthetics to allow a form of bodily knowing that is not pre-critical or naïve. My presentation will consider sense perception to include the visual, but also the haptic, auditory, etc. and will attend to issues of emotional affect such as shame, boredom, etc., in order to develop new approaches to knowledge. This project draws upon an audio/visual/sensory practice as well as the work of theorists such as Susan Buck Morss. It utilizes a range of emerging contemporary approaches to aesthetics and affect including those of Constance Classen, David Howes, Jane Bennett, Philip Fisher, Lars Svendsen, etc. Crucially, however, it is focused through the non-fiction of a creative writer, Georges Perec, whose suggestions as to the methods by which we might attend to the world we inhabit, I find persuasive.

Questions

I am interested to raise questions about what constitutes a properly aesthetic investigation, and whether sensory engagement can actually be critical. I would like to discuss how the habitual limiting of aesthetic consideration to the artistic sphere is preventing us developing useful investigative tools. Further, it seems that binary categories have become established where practice-led research is now commonly opposed to ‘traditional’ research, partly through a concern to establish the research of artists as being somehow of a different order: I am interested to explore alternatives for aesthetic engagement that might better enable us to investigate our world.