Judith-Frederike Popp Normative Claims - Aesthetic Practices, Failure and the Question of Evaluation 86070f4982e946f7a807b5e021f556a6

Aesthetic interactions with the world can be located in a status of in-between: between epistemic and teleological orientations or between being embedded in everyday life and being separated from it. The talk inquires into the implications of this status for normative questions. By conceptualizing aesthetic interactions in terms of agency, it becomes possible to relate them to human striving for being at home in the world and creating a meaningful life. This enables evaluating aesthetic practices in dense ethical terms like emancipation or progress. Due to their in-between status, however, these practices resist being reduced to linear steps towards ethical ends: They confront their agents with potentials and limits. Hence, the talk argues that aesthetic practices provide ethical impulses but not through harmonious fusions for example of aesthetic intensity and ethical self-transparency. Instead, they provide an opportunity of getting in touch with oneself without providing security that this will work out as intended. Aesthetic practices irritate teleological organization and thereby are able to confront their agents with frustration and disempowerment. This places them in a space of mentally and bodily experienced reality, where striving can be put into action but is also limited. Through this positioning, aesthetic practices can be evaluated in their potential to confront their agents with the contingency and limitations of their ethical orientations while at the same time opening up a broader experiential approach towards what the latter are. Finally, the talk argues for integrating this normative framework for aesthetic practices to do their situatedness justice.