Social Appearances by Barbara Carnevali

Author:Barbara Carnevali
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

The Aesthetic Public Sphere

Now, to arrive at an accurate idea of the properties of the public sphere as it is understood here clearly we cannot turn primarily to the tradition personified by Habermas, which views it as the privileged space for the exchange and construction of rational arguments. The fundamentally aesthetic nature of the sensorium prompts us to pick up instead on an alternative thread in the history of thought, which runs from Vico to Gadamer to Arendt, and which holds that, prior to any common reason, human beings are bound together by a sensus communis (a concept that is nonetheless not free of romantic temptations and that therefore must be understood in terms of aesthetic mediation).34 The Öffentlichkeit is thus conceived as an aesthetic public sphere: as the realm of appearance and mutual sensing in which individuals relate to one another through sensible forms and in which these forms are not only transmitted and perceived but also created, reproduced, transformed, manipulated, interpreted, discussed, and finally criticized. The public sphere is the aesthetic laboratory of the shared world. Also thanks to this rootedness in aisthesis and appearance it is able to become a space for deliberation and conflict, in which one exercises the aesthetic political faculty—the faculty we call “critical.” The fact that perception reveals a shared dimension is a condition of possibility—indeed, a prerequisite—for dissension. To criticize means to formulate judgments, and judging presupposes taste, in the highest and most noble sense of the word, as an estimative faculty. Hannah Arendt, once again, has written some crucial passages on this topic:

In aesthetic no less than in political judgments, a decision is made, and although this decision is always determined by a certain subjectivity, by the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world, it also derives from the fact that the world itself is an objective datum, something common to all its inhabitants. The activity of taste decides how this world, independent of its utility and our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what men will see and what they will hear in it. Taste judges the world in its appearance and in its worldliness; its interest in the world is purely “disinterested,” and that means that neither the life interests of the individual nor the moral interests of the self are involved here. For judgments of taste, the world is the primary thing, not man, neither man’s life nor his self.35

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