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Philosophers have long distinguished between appearance and reality, and the opposition between a supposedly deceptive surface and a more profound truth is deeply rooted in Western culture. At a time of obsession with self-representation, when politics is enmeshed with spectacle and social and economic forces are intensely aestheticized, philosophy remains moored in traditional dichotomies: being versus appearing, interiority versus exteriority, authenticity versus alienation. Might there be more to appearance than meets the eye?
In this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon. The ways in which we appear in public and the impressions we make in terms of images, sounds, smells, and sensations are discerned by other people’s senses and assessed according to their taste; this helps shape our ways of being and the world around us. Carnevali shows that an understanding of appearances is necessary to grasp the dynamics of interaction, recognition, and power in which we live—and to avoid being dominated by them. Anchored in philosophy and traversing sociology, art history, literature, and popular culture, Social Appearances develops new theoretical and conceptual tools for today’s most urgent critical tasks.
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part I. Appearing: On the Aesthetic Foundations of Social Life
1. Life as a Spectacle: Self-Display, Reflexivity, and Artifice
2. Masks and Clothes: Medial Surfaces and the Dialectic of Appearing
3. Aesthetic Mediation: A Theory of Representations
4. Figures: Social Images
5. Out of Control: The Alienated Image
Part II. Vanity and Lies: On the Hostility Toward Appearances
6. “Vanity Fair”: The Frivolity of Worldliness
7. Against the Mask: The Rise of Social Romanticism
8. Against the Spectacle: The Crusade of Romantic Anticapitalism
9. Against Aesthetic Values: Aestheticism, Aestheticization, and Staging
10. Two Baptisms and a Divorce: Homo Economicus Versus Homo Aestheticus
Part III. Toward a Social Aesthetics: On the Sensible Logic of Society
11. The Opening: Aesthetic Foundations of the Common World
12. Aisthesis: Senses and Social Sensibility
13. Social Taste and the Will to Please
14. Aesthetic Labor and Social Design: The Value of Appearances
15. Prestige and Other Magic Spells
Conclusion: Social Immaterialism or the Philosophy of Andy Warhol
Afterword
Appendix: Illustrations Mentioned in the Text
Notes
Index
Description
Philosophers have long distinguished between appearance and reality, and the opposition between a supposedly deceptive surface and a more profound truth is deeply rooted in Western culture. At a time of obsession with self-representation, when politics is enmeshed with spectacle and social and economic forces are intensely aestheticized, philosophy remains moored in traditional dichotomies: being versus appearing, interiority versus exteriority, authenticity versus alienation. Might there be more to appearance than meets the eye?
In this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon. The ways in which we appear in public and the impressions we make in terms of images, sounds, smells, and sensations are discerned by other people’s senses and assessed according to their taste; this helps shape our ways of being and the world around us. Carnevali shows that an understanding of appearances is necessary to grasp the dynamics of interaction, recognition, and power in which we live—and to avoid being dominated by them. Anchored in philosophy and traversing sociology, art history, literature, and popular culture, Social Appearances develops new theoretical and conceptual tools for today’s most urgent critical tasks.
