Everyday Aesthetics and the Practice of Historical Reenactment

Throughout his career, Stanley Cavell’s subject has been the ordinary: what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call ‘the near, the low, the common’. Cavell provides compelling insights into Emerson’s efforts to locate philosophy within the flow of everyday life. He examines how Emerson renews common thinking, citations, and fragments from the works of others by means of his ‘aversive thinking’: his technique of turning writing back upon itself. While taking Cavell’s Emerson readings as its point of departure, this essay switches Cavell’s philosophical angle for a philological one. I suggest that Emerson’s engagement with contemporary debates concerning the historical reading of sacred and secular literature (the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare) formed his own practice of reworking literatures of various origins and recasting aesthetics in major ways.

Everyday Aesthetics, Space, and the Sensory: Fear of Crime and Affect in Inner Sydney

In this paper we explore some pre-conscious aesthetic and sensorial aspects of affect in fear of crime. Drawing on data from focus groups undertaken in inner Sydney, Australia, we link the sensory and aesthetic preconditions of fear of crime to its affective, behavioural and cognitive elements. We argue that fear is grounded in the structural, personal and inter-subjective components of individual’s lives and their interaction with physical and social environments, which then influence how individuals cognitively understand their own risks and react behaviourally to these emotional responses. By bringing alive the importance of environmental cues and the cultural and structural positions of those who are likely to frequently worry about victimisation, we hope to provoke a minor reassessment of, and encourage more focus on, fear’s sensory and aesthetic origins.

Towards an expansive object and a restrictive experience in Everyday Aesthetics: A Chestertonian metaxological approach

This article proposes to resolve an internal ambiguity in the subdiscipline called Everyday Aesthetics (EA), systematized by the researcher Horacio Pérez-Henao, according to whom the extension of aesthetics to the everyday has been done, on the one hand, by means of a consideration of an expansive object and subject according to aesthesis itself, as mainly proposed by Katya Mandoki, and, on the other hand, by means of a restrictive object and subject according to the parameters of an authentic aesthetic experience, a theory headed by John Dewey. Methodology: To resolve this tension, a hermeneutic methodology known as the fourfold sense of being, related to Hegelian dialectic, albeit with important modifications supplied by William Desmond was used. This methodology allows a suitable way to explore and discuss different approaches in everyday aesthetics epitomized by Mandoki and Dewey, and makes possible the proposal of a third way, epitomized by G. K. Chesterton. Results: Bearing in mind the original intention of EA—according to which the everyday must be revitalized from an aesthetic perspective, as explained by Joseph Kupfer, it is argued that the two alternate positions of Mandoki and Dewey are unsatisfactory; an attempt is therefore made to respond to this through the analysis of the aesthetic approach of G. K. Chesterton. From his aesthetic reflections, it can be ascertained that to revitalize daily life, the object must be expansive and the subject, restrictive, from a certain méthodos and according to patterns that qualify an everyday aesthetic experience. All of this seeks to pave the way for subsequent investigations of EA being both expansive and restrictive. Finally, it is argued that this Chestertonian EA converges with and extends the aesthetics of design of Jane Forsey, and thus shows that design itself can be revitalized in keeping with a restrictiveexpansive approach to everyday aesthetics. Conclusion: aesthetics should be expansive every day, in that it should concern itself with any aspect of daily life, and restrictive, in that it should set certain limits on the self and its intentions with regard to the possibilities of aesthetic experience.

Between Adenauer and Coca-Cola

This chapter focuses on the experiences of centre-right women and the cultural practices of centre-right students more generally to determine to what extent they participated in the broader cultural moment that was 1968. It examines different forms of cultural expression and everyday aesthetics to investigate whether centre-right activists viewed these as political. It also examines their attitudes towards the evident modernization of sexuality in West Germany in this period. Finally, it puts women’s experiences centre stage. Analysing changing gender roles and centre-right women’s attitudes towards the emerging women’s movement, it seeks to understand why at least some of them thought that emancipation did not have to equal revolution.