Editorial

Editorial

Why a new scholarly ‘Journal of Aesthetics & Culture’? Why the aim to develop inter-disciplinary theoretical models as applied to human science research on aesthetic questions?

Historically, the concept of aesthetics has to a large extent been excluded from the domain of cultural studies, which in turn has appropriated the concept of culture, mostly understood in its anthropological sense. Consequently, within cultural studies, aesthetics has largely been considered a negative concept, associated with formalism. Furthermore, it has often been regarded as something completely cut off from politics; as if on one hand there were the fine arts in a separate sphere, and on the other, popular culture, ideology and the like.

Cultural studies have creatively combined fields as different as political economy, philosophy, and sociology to study cultural phenomena and their relation to ideology, nationality, ethnicity, class or gender. But the concept of culture in its broadest sense would need to reappropriate its aesthetical dimension as it is absolutely central to many of the fields analyzed within cultural studies, such as film and media, art, and literature.

However, in the last decades, the art sphere has become politicized anew. Philosophers such as Jacques Rancière or Giorgio Agamben have brought back politics into the domain of aesthetics. Both have to do with imaging, but also with the realization or implementation of a vision.

Furthermore, in Katharine Wolfe's words, ‘Jacques Rancière argues that what is at stake in politics, just as it is in aesthetics, is the distribution of the sensible, and that politics happens not only through the disruption of a certain aesthetic organization of sense experience but through the eruption of a distinct aesthetics.’1 If aesthetics has thus reappeared on the scene as a concept with bearing on political reality, the radical changes in media technology lately have also to a large extent affected the aesthetic sphere. Experiential space has come closer, surrounding the individual everywhere. The sensorial, the affective, material, and bodily experience have thus also come to replace traditional aesthetics which relied heavily on the split between subject and object, and sought to objectively define the qualities of the latter.

Another limit to aesthetics traditionally has been that, to a large extent, it has been based on national perspectives and contexts, as well as contained within the limits of specific disciplines. However, the changing society has made this focus all too narrow. Due to globalization, media, and territories merge and move in new ways, where regional, national, international, and global perspectives increasingly integrate. New contexts and new aesthetic strategies are also created, and traditional boundaries and hierarchies become transgressed, for example, between high brow and popular culture, or between art and technology.

Aesthetics as well as culture thus need to be discussed and interpreted across the disciplines, through different media, over territorial borders. Finally, this is also a strong argument for Open Access publishing: to constitute a global platform and an interface for interdisciplinary discourse—free for anybody to read.

Astrid Söderbergh Widding
Chief Editor

Lars Gustaf Andersson
Associate Editor

John Sundholm
Associate Editor

Note

1. http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=382

Published: 3 November 2009

Citation: Journal of AESTHETICS & CULTURE, Vol. 1, 2009. DOI: 10.3402/jac.v1i0.2116
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.



Journal of Aesthetics & Culture eISSN 2000-4214

This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Responsible editor: Astrid Söderbergh Widding.