Aestheticization of life

Featherstone isolates three aspects of the postmodern aestheticization of daily life:

1) Artistic movements such as Dada and Surrealism attempt to break down the boundary between art and daily life by turning toilets and such into art objects. This is both an attempt to “dissemble [art’s] sacred halo and challenge its respectable location” and also a sense that art could be found anywhere, in the “detritus of mass culture, the debased consumer commodities,” and even in “anti-work.”

2) Bohemian movements attempted to treat life as an artistic project. Oscar Wilde’s ideal man attempts to “realize himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will be curious of new sensations.” Featherstone finds continuities between “Wilde, Moore and the Bloomsbury Group, and the writings of Rorty whose criteria for the good life revolve around the desire to enlarge one’s self, the quest for new tastes and sensations, to explore more and more possibilities.”

3) Through advertising and other industries, the world is saturated with signs and images. Consumer society “confronts people with dream-images which speak to desires, and aestheticize and derealize reality.” Baudrillard defines postmodern culture in this way, as the simulational world, as a world in which reality and image have become indistinguishable. Both art and the real end, absorbed in hyperrealism. As Baudrillard says, “art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image.”

Citing Scott Lash’s work, Featherstone suggests that postmodern culture is marked by a reversal of modern “differentiation” (Weber) and a triumph of the figural, which is found in film, TV, and advertising but also dominates consumer culture as such. Featherstone suggests that this figurality “may have its origins in the growth of consumer culture in the big cities of nineteenth-century capitalist societies, which became the sites for the intoxicating dream-worlds, the constantly changing flow of commodities, images and bodies (the flaneur ). In addition those big cities were the sites of the artistic and intellectual subcultures, the bohemias and artistic avant-gardes, members of whom became fascinated and sought to capture in various media the range of new sensations, and who also acted as intermediaries in stimulating, formulating and disseminating these sensibilities to wider audiences and publics.”

Thus, “many of the features associated with the postmodern aestheticization of everyday life have a basis in modernity. The predominance of images, liminality, the vivid intensities characteristic of the perceptions of churldren, those recovering from illness, schizophrenics and others, and figural regimes of signification can all be said to have parallels in the experiences of modernite as described by Baudelaire, Benjamin and Simmel.” Late twentieth-century “spectacles and simulated environements in malls, shopping centres, department stores, theme parks, ‘Disneyworlds,’ etc . . . ., which have many features in common with the department stores, arcades, world fairs, etc. describe by Benjamin and Simmel and others.” Featherstone mentions the Paris Exhibition of 1900, which included “an exotic Indian landscape with stuffed animals, treasures and merchandise; an exhibit representing Andalucian Spain at the times of the Moors with simulated interiors and courtyards; a Trans-Siberian panorama which placed spectatores in a real railway car which moves along a track, while a canvas was unrolled outside the window to give an impression of Siberia.”

He even suggests that similar experiences were available already in “the carnival of the middle ages,” which was also marked by a “disconnected succession of fleeting images, sensations, de-control of the emotions and de-differentiation which have become associated with postmodernism and the aestheticization of everyday life.”