For an Aesthetic Approach to the Analysis of Event

Beskrivelse

Today's culture could, perhaps, be viewed as an "event-culture" - a characteristic that bear some similarities to the "Society of Spectacles" (Debord). We experience the acceleration of events to an extent where they become either trivial or absorbed in a competition of becoming significant events: news becomes "breaking news" and "pseudo-events" are created to catch attention (Boorstin). The ability to create attention becomes an important parameter for economy and we talk about an "economy of attention" (Franck), or "experience economy". Both are often criticized for contributing to an aestheticization of the world which as an effect has anaesthetics or anaesthesia: in the competition for affecting us through different products and events we finally lose our sensibility and we become indifferent to them. This critical perspective may sound plausible but a different approach may appear more adequate for characterizing our contemporary culture. Rather than losing our sensibility it could be suggested that we experience an increased sensibility. We may, indeed, become indifferent, but in a different sense, namely as an attentiveness towards situations and events without judging them on behalf of different ideologies (Perniola). For a characterization of the contemporary culture we may turn our attention towards aesthetics in the classic sense related to rhetoric. Rhetoric is not to be taken in the sense of persuading by manipulating using affects as means of seduction but of displaying an attention to situations and having faith in them - and faith is exactly related to "péitho", to persuasion (Perniola). Event and affect should not be seen as superfluous and inauthentic means for a noisy culture of empty events, but more adequate be characterized as key words for a sensibility that values the present.

Boorstin, Daniel J The Image. A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, 1961.
Debors, Guy La Société du Spectacle, 1967.
Franck, Georg Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit, 1998.
Perniola, Mario Del sentire cattolico. La forma culturale di una religione universale, 2001.