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System-Oriented versus Object-Oriented AestheticsAuthors Postdigital; Objects Postdigital; Notes; Bibliography; 8. The Aesthetics of Abstraction; Ethics, Epistemology, Aesthetics; Aesthetics as First Philosophy; Abstraction and Allusion; "The Redistribution of the Sensible"; Critical Awareness and Aesthetic Abstraction; Auerbach/Demand/Brethouwer; Abstraction Everywhere; Notes; Bibliography; III. Aesthetics and the Politics of Practice; 9. Cosmogramic Design: A Cultural Model of the Aesthetic Response; Introduction; The Black Cultural Cosmos: Perception and Interpretation Cosmogramma: Survival Value, Resonance, and Conceptual RemixingThe Kongo Cosmogram: Kalunga and Alternate Realities; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; 10. Absolutely Small: Sketch of an Anarchist Aesthetic; Beyond Critique; The Gentle Work of Beauty; The Ridiculous; Sunny Disposition; Notes; Bibliography; 11. Aesthetics as Alienation; Notes; Bibliography; 12. Reorienting Criticism: Against an A Priori Reductionism; Notes; Bibliography; 13. The Unbearable Lightness of Architectural Aesthetic Discourse; Buildings as "Matters of Concern"; The Adventures of Contestation How to Reinvent Aesthetic Discourse?Notes; Bibliography; IV. Aesthetic Alternatives; 14. BigDog, or, The Precarious Aesthetics of Tumbling; BigDog's Legacy: Anthropomorphic Cybernetic Machines; Psychoanalyzing BigDog: Regression, De-erection, and Part-Objects; Notes; Bibliography; 15. Feral Architecture; The Feral; Visibility; Vastness; Intimacy; Inhabited Surfaces; Darkness; Notes; Bibliography; 16. Architecture, Deep and Cryptic; Fissures and Fusions in the Quadruple Object; Connotative Objects; Depth and Crypticity; Notes; Bibliography; 17. Aesthetic Critique/Aesthetic Activism AccelerationismObject-Oriented Ontology; Disobedient Artists; Xenofeminism; Afrofuturism 2.0; Tomorrow's Thoughts Today; Final Thoughts; Notes; Bibliography; 18. The Strangers among Us; A Flicker of Intimacy; Interview with a Cat; Between the Individual and Its Concept; Flashing Teeth; Notes; Bibliography How aesthetics--understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity--might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics--one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the "critical" stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. The contributors--philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancire, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry--build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The book opens with a conversation in which Rancir̈e tells the volume's editor, Mark Foster Gage, that the aesthetic is "about the experience of a common world." The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the "first philosophy"; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; the productive force of alienation; and the unbearable lightness of current creative discourse
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