Aesthetic experience functions as political apprenticeship for future freedom.

Evidence

As a reflection on the processes of valorization, attention ecology comes, therefore, to play a central role in denouncing the illusions and deceptions which, through certain modes of evaluation, seriously and tragically distort the values that we bestow (or that we should bestow) on external things. But what the particular case of the literary attention valorized by Nicholas Carr brings home is the role played by our aesthetic experiences in general as VALORIZATION LABORATORIES: in line with Jacques Rancière’s characterization of a ‘reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible’, the immersion in an aesthetic experience leads to the valorization of previously unexpected sensations and feelings, and/or to the modification of associated valorizations. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 429 (#expands, via linked claim)

This practice presupposes the ability to make a distinction between existence and essence, fact and potentiality, and appearance and reality. Mere existence would be negated in favor of realizing higher potentialities while norms discovered by reason would be used to criticize and overcome lower forms of thought and social organization. Thus grasping potentialities for freedom and happiness would make possible the negation of conditions that inhibited individuals’ full development and realization. In other words, perceiving the possibility of self-determination and constructing one’s own needs and values could enable individuals to break with the existing world of thought and behavior. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 13 (#expands, via linked claim)

But in that case, the seeming aestheticism of the nouveau roman veers dialectically into a form of a very different kind, one capable of fleeing the guilt of the aesthetic generally — Sartre’s suggestion that you could not read a nouveau roman in a Third World country, Lalong with the Bourdieu-type leisure-class “distinction” of reading it in a First World one — at the same time that it proposes new equipment for registering the raw material of everyday life and a new “libidinal apparatus” for coping with those kaleidoscopic shocks Benjamin, following Baudelaire, associated with the modern industrial landscape. At that point, the reproducibility of the new or artificial, invented genre becomes an index of its democratic accessibility; and this was always the reverse side and the progressive implication of the most notorious philistine reproaches to modernist art itself, as, for example to abstract painting, “Anyone could do that!” the answer being, “Of course! but you don’t want to, do you? You would have to want to!” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 349 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Schiller treated aesthetic theory as the necessary path to political freedom; Aesthetic experience acts as a laboratory for reworking values — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 429; Imagination precedes and enables the achievement of political transformation — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3429 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Aesthetic experience acts as a laboratory for reworking values #expands (0.82) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 429
• Perceiving possibilities for freedom enables breaking with existing patterns. #expands (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 13
• The nouveau roman’s stylization functions as democratic equipment for modern lived experience #exemplifies (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 349
• Imagination precedes and enables the achievement of political transformation #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3429
• Aesthetics of immediacy cannot build the political will needed for change #contradicts (0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 377
• Emotionality aids rather than disrupts political reasoning and democratic life. #corroborates (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1660