Feng Zhu: What is the 'aesthetic' in 'aesthetic self-transformation'? a5ec0dead0a645a68fbf661c5ebb5aef

Although the notion of self-transformation as an ‘aesthetic’ endeavour has been of central importance to many thinkers, they have also notably deployed quite different commitments as to what it is that renders such practices ‘aesthetic’. In this talk, I will consider Michel Foucault’s work on the ‘aesthetics of existence’ to ask: to what extent can self-transformative practices, which are a moral and ethical work, also be seen to have an ‘aesthetic’ dimension to them?

I will argue that Foucault was engaged in a ‘problematisation’ of the current usage of ‘aesthetic’. This is an exercise that sought to induce us to explore how to live differently by revealing the narrow confines of how aesthetics has been socially delimited. In doing so, he invoked both a Kantian conception of aesthetics as well as a Greek one (techne, poiesis, kalos), which has led to charges of inconsistency. I argue that this difficulty reveals an incomplete project that sought to thread a line between the autonomy and heteronomy of the aesthetic: it is a perspective that potentially includes all practices into the ‘aesthetic’ domain (living can itself be an art) and yet also requires the ongoing cultivation of a ‘sensibility’ involving particular care and attention. ‘Sensibility’ can be thought to be the character of sensuous experience, one which is culturally encoded and temperamentally delimited, but also mutable through practice. Following Schiller’s writing on aesthetic education, ethics necessarily involves such a sensibility. It is not a matter of the will but the cultivation of the inclination or the ‘character’ – a process involving more than simply effort and discipline. Reading Foucault in such terms, I will touch upon some parallels with the work of Shusterman, Baumgarten, and Dewey.

In the final part of my talk, I will consider the implications of the above for thinking about computer gameplay as a lifelong practice in which players develop a certain sensibility through gameplay dispositions and habits. It is a sensibility that is arguably defined by a computational systematization of gameplay processes via discrete means such as numbers, models, procedures, and formalizations of relations between such things. Drawing on case studies from Magic: the Gathering limited draft, I ask whether playing to increase one’s wins is at odds with the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility.