Aesthetics both as a discourse describing or evaluating textual features and as a theory of the subject’s relation to aesthetics.
The film text becomes the site of particular aesthetic properties, and the audience become defined by their relationship to the aesthetic in an overly reductive account .
The neglect of aesthetics a political opportunity lost.
Aesthetic as the features of historical periods, genres, or semiotic effects, phenomenological possibilities of film, of ‘affect’, of how film ‘acts’, and its function within diverse film cultures
How is aesthetic ‘affect’ related to diver film cultures ? Do aesthetic traditions accrue to classbased cultures and historical era
What beyond the abandonment of aesthetics to a Kantian reading (or Bourdieu’s reduction of aesthetics to forms of capitao), does aesthetics offer the film spectator?
In neglecting the aesthetic in an analysis of film cultures, do we risk, as Armstrong argues, abandoning the attempt to find a language for, and a comprehension of , the complex yet elusive appeal of film cultures?
Aesthetics: anti, post, or returning ?
A theory of aesthetics predicated on the relations between subjects and objects necessarily meets the overwhelming saturation of aesthetics in everyday life; expanded from its base in the arts, the aesthetic as a ‘furnishment of reality’ permeates our experience of the environment.
“we are’, asserts Wolfgang Welsch, ‘without doubt experiencing an aesthetics boom’ (1997:1)
take the oppositional arguments against continuing to think the aesthetic as a conceptually and politically useful catergory, and the attendant responses.
Welsch’s work: ‘ aesthetics extends from individual styling, urban planning and the economy through to theory’
theory problem.
Ewbar 