ABSTRACT
Katya Mandoki advances in this book the thesis that it is not only possible but crucial to open up the field of aesthetics (traditionally confined to the study of art and beauty) toward the richness and complexity of everyday life. She argues that in every process of communication, whether face to face or through the media, fashion, and political propaganda, there is always an excess beyond the informative and functional value of a message. This excess is the aesthetic. Following Huizinga's view of play as an ingredient of any social environment, Mandoki explores how various cultural practices are in fact forms of playing since, for the author, aesthetics and play are Siamese twins. One of the unique contributions of this book is the elaboration and application of a semiotic model for the simultaneous analysis of social interactions in the four registers, namely visual, auditory, verbal and body language, to detect the aesthetic strategies deployed in specific situations. She argues that since the presentation of the self is targeted towards participants' sensibilities, aesthetics plays a key role in these modes of exchange. Consequently, the author updates important debates in this field to clear the way for a socio-aesthetic inquiry through contexts such as the family, school, medical, artistic or religious traditions from which social identities emerge.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |42 pages
The Labyrinths of Aesthetics
chapter |4 pages
The Problems of Aesthetics
chapter |8 pages
The Fetishes of Aesthetics
chapter |22 pages
The Myths of Aesthetics
chapter |6 pages
The Fears of Aesthetics
part |30 pages
On Aesthesis
chapter |8 pages
Demarcating Aesthetics
chapter |8 pages
Basic Categories for Aesthetic Analysis
chapter |6 pages
Conditions of Possibility of Aesthesis: The A Priori
part |28 pages
Towards Prosaics
chapter |6 pages
Prosaics and Poetics
chapter |6 pages
The Tangents of Prosaics
chapter |6 pages
The Nutrients of Prosaics
chapter |4 pages
The Play of Culture
chapter |4 pages
The Horizons of Prosaics
part |34 pages
Semio-Aesthetics
chapter |6 pages
The Axis of the Signic
chapter |4 pages
The Axis of the Symbolic
chapter |6 pages
Comparative View of Both Axes: The Symbolic and the Signic
chapter |2 pages
The Non-Axis of the Obtuse
chapter |4 pages
Beyond Semiosis to Aesthesis
chapter |4 pages
Aesthetic Enunciation and its Dialogical Character
part |42 pages
Octadic Model for Aesthetic Analysis
chapter |10 pages
Rhetoric and its Registers
chapter |6 pages
Dramatics and its Modalities
chapter |14 pages
The Rhetoric-Dramatic Coupling
chapter |8 pages
Con-Formations of the Rhetoric-Dramatic Coupling
part |118 pages
Matrixes and Identities