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In the last years, aesthetics has paid increasing attention to negative sensations (Berleant’s negative aesthetics) and to individual judgements that cannot aspire to universal validity (Saito’s everyday aesthetics). The agreeable or pleasant, and especially its converse the unpleasant, have considerable motivating power for action and creativity (Forsey, 2016), despite the limited consideration it received from Kant (1790) in its Third Critique and from mainstream aesthetics afterwards.
For pragmatic aesthetics (Dewey, 1034; Shusterman, 1992), action and not only judgment are part of the aesthetic experience. In Everyday Aesthetics, Saito (2007) points out that aesthetic responses “prompt us towards actions such as… repairing things like dilapidated buildings…” Within the categories (the ugly, the disgusting…) relevant for negative aesthetics, the unpleasant is unique in that it has not a disinterested note, does not destroy all aesthetical satisfaction, and does not impel us to reject the object. For Forsey (2016, p.19, 21), the unpleasant “provokes an aesthetic response that is uniquely motivating”, requires a response.
In planning, judgments about the quality of public space open a door towards the ethical-aesthetic connection. In everyday aesthetics (Saito, 2007), this applies to issues such as dilapidation or dirt. Such ethical dimension provides a basis to consider such judgments as not purely individual, but open to some kind of “community of others.”
The unpleasant arises discomfort and arouses our will for transformative action. It is strengthened by an ethical dimension in our judgment: whereas the merely aesthetical judgement of the unpleasant- as a personal judgment- does not legitimize our action in the public sphere, the addition of the morally wrong does. The aesthetic judgment of the unpleasant complemented with ethical considerations enables collective action, leading to the attainment of small by rewarding wins providing immediate aesthetic satisfaction together with strong ethical symbolism. Ultimately, the aesthetic-ethical connection serves to realize that the urban or rural landscapes are a medium in which power relations are physically revealed.
Contrary to the stability of the ugly, the merely unpleasant sends a message of provisionality, of waiting for our engagement and action. One example is tactical urbanism, especially in street design: the aesthetic perception of a few people moves them into action by highlighting obvious (ethical) inconsistencies through provisional action with some minor painting and cheap street furniture. This does not create a pleasant perception, but rather the opposite: the clear provisionality of tactical interventions serves to expand and universalize the need for (now aesthetic rather ethical based) action, whereas the new (ethical based) power relations, once that the tactical action has established are consolidated.
This presentation illustrates the aesthetic power and ethical dimension of the unpleasant through three cases studies in Madrid, in which the planning response is ethically charged in different ways. The first case study illustrates the tactical urbanism response provided by a street redesign in the south of Madrid (Vallecas, Arboleda street) in which power relations are revealed and transformed. The second case study (Puerta del Sol) shows the accommodation of the public space to the pressure and colonization of touristification, this time changing power relations on the ethical grounds of fostering economic opportunities. The third case study (Green Southwest Boulevard, A-5) shows the successful strategy of blighting through decades of inaction, turning the unpleasant into the socially unbearable, paving the way to the acceptance of the consolidation of the existing power relations (an ethics of respect to the status quo).
Taken together, these case studies show the relevance of the unpleasant as a key aesthetic and also as an ambivalent category, able to unchain different kinds of action, all of them ethically, and not only aesthetically, charged.
References
BERLEANT, A. (2010) Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World, Imprint Academic.
DEWEY, J. (1934) Art as Experience, Penguin Books.
FORSEY, J. (2016) The Aesthetic Force of the Unpleasant. Evental Aesthetics, 5, 15-24.
SAITO, Y. (2007) Everyday Aesthetics, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
SHUSTERMAN, R. (1992) Pragmatic Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA, Blackwell.
| Keywords | planning; ethics; aesthetics; unpleasant; pragmatism |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
