First off, I vastly appreciate that Wysocki goes out of her way to practice what she preaches in the composition of her essay. She speaks of form and content being one and the same and goes out of her way to make visual emphasis on her major points, interacting with her visual elements instead of just placing them on the page for us to see, and speaking outside the margins and alignment to make a point on the limitations of academic text and the idea of a universal composite term for "beauty".
An interesting point that she makes is that the standardization of form in the way of quantifiable design principles (such as contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity) came with the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
- explanations of why such design elements hold such value to the collective consciousness have been attempted
- i.e. roundness = warmth and affection as a result of our memories of our mothers
- flatness = stability and groundedness
- none are all encompassing and explain all the applications of elements with those attributes
"The values of organization and consistency inherent in most modern design are inseparable from ongoing pushes toward rationalization and standardization in industry" (151).
Academic text in particular, she notes, is a prime example of the breakdown of formal design elements where text is organized into neat, repetitive square blocks. It creates the universal idea of beauty through form rather than through subject, as I could literally be talking about total bullshit, as I am often wont to do, for pages on end but a reader's eyes will not be distracted from my
neat
little
boxes
of text, where the form of the assignment is universally assumed and not symbiotic with the content of the assignment.
Why is this? Wysocki says it is because we have been conditioned not to feel emotionally connected to the form. We are not allowed to feel for the object of formulaic beauty because it is not ours. It is built as not belonging to a time or place at all. Our understanding of beauty as a universal concept makes it impersonal and objective. It is not our beautiful thing, it is not beautiful to me. The beauty in it can be quantified and assembled, copied and machine made, duplicated, duplicated, duplicated because it comes from a formula. You can buy it in a box. We do buy it in a box, at the supermarket, on billboards, in magazine ads like the Peek ad mentioned in Wysocki's article.
To that end, Wysocki sort of blames this whole mess on Kant. Kant's philosophy of formal aesthetics breaks down our perception of the world, and in particular of beauty, into a quantifiable science. Through understanding, we morph primal sensation into concepts. Through reason, we create a concept of freedom from our instinctual sense of duty. Beauty is a mathematical equation:
Nature + Law = Beauty
"When we see an object in which nature and law are harmonized, it is beautiful" (162)
By stepping away from the natural world, we shape our emotion and instinct into a universally shared higher thought and act with disinterest towards all objects that fit in this model of beauty and with judgement an all things that do not. In this sense, Wysocki claims that Kant's aesthetics are gendered in his rejection of emotion and instinct, both things that are culturally tied to women to this day. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is used as an excellent example of what Kant's thinking would inevitably produce: a high functioning, very brilliant, sociopath with no emotional or instinctual connection to other people. Wendy Steiner argues in Wysocki's essay that without the human connectivity historically attributed to women and considered inferior, we would all be Frankensteinian monsters.
Wysocki goes further into the harmfulness of this type of gendering that Kent
(intentionally?
unintentionally?)
creates
and modern design principles
have followed through with
to this day.
She claims that due to Kant's aesthetics not valuing "the particular and the messy" (168), our culture is subconsciously taught to judge anything that doesn't formally comply with the pre-determined and purportedly "universally" accepted views of beauty. Wysocki claims that the abstracting of the human form through breaking people down to their design elements is dangerous and dehumanizing because it not only strips away the human elements of empathy, it labels human connectivity as universally unnecessary to realizing the potential of the human psyche.
The solution Wysocki offers is hardly revolutionary in theory, but may prove to be far more difficult in practice. She suggests that instead of using Kant's idea of a "universal beauty," we instead see beauty as a conversation between a person and an Other. Basically, beauty needs to go back to the eye of the beholder and not Big Brother. Beauty should be a conversation between myself and thing that I find beautiful which is subjective and imperfect by Kant's standards, but exists the in physical word I interact with every day.
While I agree that this may indeed be an answer to the disinterested and inhuman breakdown of form and beauty, I feel that our culture is so well indoctrinated with this idea of universal beauty, that I can't even begin to predict what a first step in this direction would be. Even as I type this, I find myself thinking that a return to personal relationships with beauty and an emotional connection to art sounds counterproductive and useless and like such a thing a woman would say
because that is what I have been taught all my life to think.
And that is the very reason this learned idea beauty is dangerous.
Not only because it treats objects and people
like they are objective and quantifiable
when nothing
could be
further
from
the
t
r
u
t
h
But because by it's perpetration over hundreds of years,
no one bothers to challenge the idea
and risk being called
"unintelligent"
(no one panic. this was not the weekly assignment, you did not misunderstand/misread. i did a little out of the syllabus reading because i think anne wysocki is my new favorite person and professor peele said this would be okay. again, no one panic. i'm looking at you, amyre. no panicking.)
Here is a link to my remediated presentation for easy access. Thank you and good night.
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