10,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Beauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes', resulting in a kind of 'pornography' of beauty. In this book, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han reinvigorates aesthetic theory for our digital age. He interrogates our preoccupation with all things slick and smooth, from Jeff Koon's sculptures and the iPhone to Brazilian waxing. Reaching far deeper than our superficial reactions to viral videos and memes, Han reclaims beauty, showing how it manifests itself as truth, temptation and even disaster. This wide-ranging and profound exploration of beauty, encompassing ethical and political considerations as well as aesthetic, will appeal to all those interested in cultural and aesthetic theory, philosophy and digital media.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 111
Ähnliche
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
1. The Smooth
Notes
2. The Smooth Body
Notes
3. The Aesthetics of the Smooth
Notes
4. Digital Beauty
Notes
5. The Aesthetics of Veiling
Notes
6. The Aesthetics of Injury
Notes
7. The Aesthetics of Disaster
Notes
8. The Ideal of Beauty
Notes
9. Beauty as Truth
Notes
10. The Politics of Beauty
Notes
11. Pornographic Theatre
Notes
12. Lingering on Beauty
Notes
13. Beauty as Reminiscence
Notes
14. Giving Birth in Beauty
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
iii
iv
vi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
Saving Beauty
Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
polity
First published in German as Die Errettung des Schönen © S. Fischer VerlagGmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2015
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station Landing, Suite 300,Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Extracts on pages vi and 77 from Paul Celan: Selected Poems, Author: Paul Celan, translated by: Michael Hamburger, © 1972. Reproduced with the kind permission of Johnson & Alcock Ltd.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1513-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Han, Byung-Chul, author.Title: Saving beauty / Byung-Chul Han.Description: English edition. ⏐ Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, [2017] ⏐ Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017009266 (print) ⏐ LCCN 2017030526 (ebook) ⏐ISBN 9781509515127 (Mobi) ⏐ ISBN 9781509515134 (Epub) ⏐ISBN 9781509515097 ⏐ ISBN 9781509515103 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: AestheticsClassification: LCC BH39 (ebook) ⏐ LCC BH39 .H36 2017 (print) ⏐DDC 111/.85--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc/gov/2017009266
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Once,
I heard him,
he was washing the world unseen, nightlong, real.
One and Infinite, annihilated ied.
Light was. Salvation.
Paul Celan1
Notes
1
Untitled poem from
Atemwende
[
Breathturn
], in Paul Celan,
Selected Poems
, transl. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 279.
1The Smooth
The smooth is the signature of the present time. It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, iPhones and Brazilian waxing. Why do we today find what is smooth beautiful? Beyond its aesthetic effect, it reflects a general social imperative. It embodies today’s society of positivity. What is smooth does not injure. Nor does it offer any resistance. It is looking for Like. The smooth object deletes its Against. Any form of negativity is removed.
The aesthetics of the smooth is also adopted by smartphones. The LG G Flex is even covered with a selfhealing skin which makes any scratch, that is, any trace of an injury, disappear within the shortest of times. It is invulnerable, so to speak. The artificial skin of this smartphone keeps it smooth at all times. It is also flexible and bendable, with a slight curvature so as to perfectly follow the contours of the face and back pocket. This adaptability and absence of resistance are essential characteristics of the aesthetics of the smooth.
Smoothness is not limited to the outside of the digital apparatus. Communication via a digital apparatus also appears smoothed out, as it is mostly polite remarks, even positivities, which are exchanged. ‘Sharing’ and ‘Like’ represent communicative means for smoothening. Negativities are eliminated because they represent obstacles to accelerated communication.
Jeff Koons, arguably the most successful living artist at present, is a master of smooth surfaces. Andy Warhol also professed his commitment to beautiful, smooth surfaces, but his art still had the negativity of death and disaster inscribed into it. His surfaces are not entirely smooth. The series Death and Disaster, for instance, still lives off negativity. In Jeff Koons’s work, by contrast, there exists no disaster, no injury, no ruptures, also no seams. Everything flows in soft and smooth transitions. Everything appears rounded, polished, smoothed out. Jeff Koons’s art is dedicated to smooth surfaces and their immediate effect. It does not ask to be interpreted, to be deciphered or to be reflected upon. It is an art in the age of Like.
Jeff Koons says that an observer of his works should only emit a simple ‘Wow’. It seems that his art does not require any judgement, interpretation or hermeneutics, no reflection or thought. It intentionally remains infantile, banal, imperturbably relaxed, disarming and disburdening. It has been emptied of any depth, any shallows, any profound sense. Thus, his motto is: ‘to take the observer into your arms’. Nothing is meant to shake, injure or shock the observer. Art, according to Jeff Koons, is nothing but ‘beauty’, ‘joy’ and ‘communication’.
His smooth sculptures cause a ‘haptic compulsion’ to touch them, even the desire to suck them. His art lacks a negativity that would demand distance. It is the positivity of smoothness alone that causes the haptic compulsion. It invites the observer to take an attitude without distance, to touch. An aesthetic judgement, however, presupposes a contemplative distance. The art of the smooth abolishes such distance.
Haptic compulsion and the desire to suck can only arise in an art of the smooth that is devoid of meaning. Hegel, who emphatically held on to the arts being meaningful, therefore limited the sensual in the arts to ‘the two theoretical senses of sight and hearing’.1 They alone have access to meaning, while smell and taste are excluded from the enjoyment of art. The latter are only susceptible to the ‘agreeable’ which is not ‘the beauty of art’:2 ‘For smell, taste, and touch have to do with matter as such and its immediately sensible qualities – smell with material volatility in air, taste with the material liquefaction of objects, touch with warmth, cold, smoothness, etc.’3 The smooth only conveys an agreeable feeling, which cannot be connected with any meaning or profound sense. It exhausts itself in a ‘Wow’.
In his Mythologies, Roland Barthes points out the haptic compulsion which is triggered by the new Citroën D.S.:
It is well known that smoothness is always an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals a technical and typically human operation of assembling: Christ’s robe was seamless, just as the airships of science-fiction are made of unbroken metal. The D.S. 19 has no pretensions about being as smooth as cake-icing, although its general shape is very rounded; yet it is the dove-tailing of its sections which interest the public most: one keenly fingers the edges of the windows, one feels along the wide rubber grooves which link the back window to its metal surround. There are in the D.S. the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign Nature.
As for the material itself, it is certain that it promotes a taste for lightness in its magical sense… . Here, the glass surfaces are not windows, openings pierced in a dark shell; they are vast walls of air and space, with the curvature, the spread and the brilliance of soap bubbles, …4
Jeff Koons’s seamless sculptures also look like brilliant, weightless soap bubbles made of air and emptiness. Like the seamless D.S., they confer a feeling of perfection, of lightness in a magical sense. They embody a perfect and optimized surface without depth and shallows.
For Roland Barthes, the sense of touch ‘is the most demystifying of all senses, unlike sight which is the most magical’.5 The sense of sight keeps a distance, while the sense of touch destroys it. Without distance, there can be no mysticism. De-mystification lets everything become available for enjoyment and consumption. The sense of touch destroys the negativity of what is wholly other. It secularizes what it touches. In contrast to the sense of sight, touch is incapable of wonderment. The smooth touchscreen, therefore, is a place of de-mystification and total consumption. It produces what one likes.
Jeff Koons’s sculptures are as smooth as a mirror, so to speak, allowing the observer to see him- or herself mirrored in them. On the occasion of the exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation, he remarked on his Balloon Dog:
The Balloon Dog is really a wonderful object. It wants to confirm the observer in their existence. I often work with reflecting, mirroring materials because they automatically raise the self-confidence of the viewer. Of course, in a dark room that doesn’t work. But if you stand right in front of the object, you are reflected in it and assured of yourself.6
The Balloon Dog is not a Trojan horse, it does not hide anything. There is no inwardness hidden behind its smooth surface.
As in the case of the smartphone, you only encounter yourself, and not the other, when faced with the highly polished sculptures. The motto of Koons’s art: ‘The core is always the same: learn to trust yourself and your own history. That is also what I want to convey to the observer of my work. The observer is meant to feel their own love of life.’7 Art opens up an echo chamber, in which I assure myself of my own existence. The alterity or negativity of the other and the alien is eliminated altogether.
Jeff Koons’s art possesses a soteriological dimension. It promises salvation. The world of smoothness is a culinary world, a world of pure positivity, in which there is no pain, no injury and no guilt. The Balloon Venus sculpture, shaped in birth position, is Jeff Koons’s Holy
Mary. Yet, she does not give birth to a saviour, a homo doloris with a crown of thorns whose body is covered by wounds, but to champagne, a bottle of Dom Pérignon Rosé Vintage 2003, which is inside her belly. Jeff Koons presents himself as a Baptist promising salvation. It is no coincidence that there is a sequence of images from 1987 titled Baptism. Jeff Koons’s art practises a sacralization of the smooth. He stages a religion of the smooth, the banal, even a religion of consumption. In their service, all negativity is to be eliminated.
For Gadamer, negativity is essential to art. It is its wound. It is opposed to the positivity of the smooth. There is something there which shakes me, an inner turmoil, which questions me and appeals to me: You must change your life:
It is the fact that a particular thing such as this exists that constitutes the ‘additional something’. As Rilke says ‘Such a thing stood among men.’ This fact that it exists, its facticity, represents an unsurmountable resistance against any superior presumption that we can make sense of it all. The work of art compels us to recognize this fact. ‘There is no place that fails to see you. You must change your life.’8
A push comes from the work of art. It pushes the observer down. The smooth has an altogether different intentional nature. It adapts to the observer, elicits a Like from him or her. All it wants is to please, and not to knock over.
Today, the beautiful itself is smoothened out by taking any negativity, any form of shock or injury, out of it. The beautiful is exhausted in a Like-it. Aestheticization turns out to be anaestheticization; it sedates our perception.9 Thus, Jeff Koons’s ‘wow’ is also an anaesthetic reaction that is diametrically opposed to the negative experience of shock, of being knocked over. Today, the experience
