Mediated autonomy. Ideal and Reality of Aesthetic Practice

The question of the relevance of art, design and other aesthetic phenomena is an integral part of philosophical discourse. In this context, there is also a discussion about the extent to which these phenomena are indispensable for ethical claims to a individually successful life and interpersonal togetherness. The research project explores this linkage of aesthetic and ethical questions in three steps: First, it investigates the extent to which aesthetic processes fundamentally formulate normative claims. The hypothesis here is: These processes are driven by human actions and thus are found in the field of tension between ideal conceptions and actual realizations. In order to concretize this thought, artistic and design perspectives are examined in terms of their ideals and claims for creativity, authenticity or intensity. Particular attention is paid to the question of the status accorded to productive and receptive agents in these aesthetic processes. In this way, it is determined to what extent aesthetic practices are accompanied by claims to exceptionality, but also to mediation between ordinary and exceptional aspects. This step is backed up by an analysis of selected examples from two contemporary borderlands of art and design: Digitalization and virtualization on the one hand and activism and participation on the other hand. Second, the integration of these considerations into more general normative contexts is examined. This is done by confronting artistic and everyday perspectives. In this way, it is explored how the ideals and claims of art and design worlds are compatible with late-modern realities of life and their own aesthetic demands. This second step is concretized by an analysis of examples for practiced everydayness and its aesthetic capacities. The focus lies on aesthetic practices in leisure activities. Third, the previous linking of aesthetic and ethical claims is concretized by a reference to practical subjecthood as intersection point of these claims. The orientation here is a model of autonomy that does not focus on control and demarcation, but on relatedness and mediation between ordinariness and exceptionality, the latter polarity being actualized here between being a dependent part of a bigger context and thriving for individuality. This concept of mediated autonomy is combined with the idea of an interplay between inside and outside in order to reach an approach to being a subject that is appropriate to the creative variety of human agency. Based on these three steps, it is finally argued for the position that the ethical relevance of aesthetic practices is shown by the fact that they bring their acting subjects into practical contact with their capacities and limits beyond one-sided ideals of isolated exceptionality.

The aim of this research project was to explore the ethical implications of aesthetic phenomena, with a focus on practical subjectivity. In the first phase, an agency-oriented perspective was developed, which captures aesthetic processes as interplay between compression and externalization. The second phase explored how this interplay is sustained as rhythm. Six examples were analyzed from two borderlands of art: the borderland of digitization and virtualization, and the borderland of assembly. Two driving forces emerged: the indifferent step into the void and the involuntary lending of a hand. Both illustrate how aesthetic rhythm is driven by agents placing themselves at the disposal of the process. The examples have shown how this practice must be wrested from the provisionality, banality, and awkwardness of open-ended agency. However, the art context gives the aesthetic rhythm a lopsided quality determined by reaching for the extraordinary. To capture mediations between the ordinary and the extraordinary, everyday life was examined. The analysis of four everyday practices of digitization and virtualization, as well as of assembly, traced the aesthetic rhythm at the margins and in the gaps of routines. Agency manifests itself here in relations of affective attention, where vulnerability and empowerment can be balanced. Aesthetic practices were characterized as "Gestaltung", a term that describes everyday aesthetic activity as a process of implanting. Thus, the success of aesthetic practice could be identified as maintaining the rhythm. This is achieved through the interplay of affective stability and indifferent destabilization, which is based on a dialectical promotion of the emotional level through stimulating forms and of the formal level through affective support. The rhythm is kept in motion by devoted arbitrariness. The third phase explored ethical implications considering that practical subjects are constituted through a balance between dissolution and differentiation. In the examples, these balances manifested as the subject's contour, shaped by indentations caused by the world's urging and protrusions caused by the subject's thrust into the world. This contour fosters agency: through tangible expansions and surfaces, it enables the subject to shape its "It goes on and on." Aesthetic subjectivity actualizes itself as this contour when the step into the void encounters suitable resistance, so that laboring on the world acquires a material quality. These considerations produced the insight that aesthetic practices convey the autonomy of the subject, while subjects convey the autonomy of aesthetic practice. This reveals a failure, since aesthetic practice does not point to aesthetic autonomy, and vice versa. This failure brings together the irreducibility of the aesthetic and the destructive character of subjective positions in an indifferent reaching out without resolution. Thus, the research project highlights the ethical relevance of aesthetic practices in them bringing subjects into contact with their capacities and limits.