ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the aesthetic is inseparable from the semiotic, and that the question of aesthetics needs to be explored from certain principles of Social Semiotics, including in its relation to the domain of multimodality. Social Semiotics, with its resources of multimodality, offers a way to read across these phenomena of contemporary communication. Style, as a theoretical category, and the broad principles it rests on, continues to be the semiotic category through which the politics of identity is expressed, even if its repertoires are increasingly fluid and mobile. It makes 'style' always, inevitably social; it also makes style unremarkable, banal, and ‘everyday’. Style is the semiotic toolkit of identity; Aesthetic is the discursive taste regime surrounding it. Aesthetics as the philosophy of the encounter with the beautiful in art has never been the whole story. The aesthetic shaping of their designs, then, are informed by a variety of cultural experiences.
