Golden Places, Aesthetic Spaces

Dados Bibliográficos

ID6141545
AutoresJoanne Armitage (0000-0002-5533-197X, autor correspondente)
Ano2018
Volume14
Fascículo1
Páginas51-54
Data de publicação2018-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCultural Politics an International Journal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1743-2197 • E-ISSN: 1751-7435
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/17432197-4312880
OpenAlexW2756473482
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas9

While the term cultural politics of luxury may be employed, generally, to denote all cultural and political features of the study of luxury, and as such may be taken to include the varied cultural and political ways in which luxury is comprehended and examined, for instance, in Continental philosophy, anthropology, phenomenology, and aesthetic criticism, it can also, more accurately, be taken to signify a distinctive and recently defined field of academic investigation. In this second usage, its contemporary origins can be traced to the work of Joanne Roberts and me, and therefore to the establishment of "critical luxury studies" (Armitage and Roberts 2014; 2016a; 2016b). From this initial body of cultural and political work, there is now arising a multidisciplinary critical approach to luxury, drawing not just on the conventional approaches originating in the humanities and business studies but also on more radical approaches suggested by, for example, critical theory, semiotics, and sociology. This assortment of approaches enables the posing of new questions and the reconceptualization of what is indicated by the concept luxury. This special section on the cultural politics of luxury is less about setting itself against the presumptions about luxury found in the traditional disciplines, such as cultural history (Berg 2005; Berry 1994; Dalby 2000; McNeil and Riello 2016; Sekora 1977) and luxury brand management (Kapferer and Bastien 2012), than about setting itself for a different conception of luxury, one that is innovative; culturally, historically, and politically informed; and, above all, critical. While such traditional disciplines discuss luxury products as cultural objects or mere luxury goods and services that can be reasonably studied separately from, for instance, the colonial, place-bound, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts of their production and consumption, advocates of a critical luxury studies seek to position luxury products unequivocally with respect to other cultural practices and, particularly in this special section, regarding political structures and cultural hierarchies, such as precious metals, elites, play, and gender (see also, for instance, Featherstone 2016). A consequence of this approach is that the luxury products studied are not just those designated and praised by the super-rich economic and cultural, political, and leisured elites of contemporary global capitalism (Freeland 2013; Hay 2013; Sombart 1967; Veblen [1967] 2009) but those material and symbolic luxury products encountered in all layers and branches of culture.In "Gold," the American philosopher Alphonso Lingis argues that the study of luxury is inevitably bound up with cultural politics because of the issues of colonialism, ransom, and treasure this study involves. Lingis points out the difference, however, between the luxurious character and influence of gold on the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro (1471–1541)—who led the expedition to South America that conquered the Inca Empire, claimed the lands for Spain, and captured and killed the Incan emperor Atahualpa—and the ritual aims of gold objects such as plates for the Inca. Lingis describes this in terms of the "wonder of gold." The cultural politics of luxury comes into play in his study insofar as it is explicitly devoted to a critique of historical and contemporary cultures of conquest. This puts Lingis in a position both outside and within given luxurious, punitive, and value structures, most immediately those of the economic system and contemporary gold jewelry. Given, also, the different forms of transcendence associated with gold, in South America and Southeast Asia alone—from temples, statues of the Buddha, the domes of pagodas, and so on—its cultural politics of luxury will be differentiated through, for example, Inca Peru's dedication to the sun and frequently varied in purpose and appearance, as in the addition of diamonds to stupas in Southeast Asia.The American anthropologist George E. Marcus's "Luxurious Emplacement: Elite Enclosure, as Far as the Eye Can See . . ." is a theoretically informed cultural politics of luxury that is concerned with questions of location, choice arenas, and visual consumption, along with ideas about the enclosed conditions of elite existence and countless luxurious dreams of self-immersion. In Marcus's contemporary cultural politics of luxury, the theme of exclusive environments that deliberately set boundaries on vistas of experience is examined as personal space, elegant homes, and settings created by and for elites themselves. Primarily centered on privileged dynastic families, Marcus investigates these notables in his study as well as a range of select designs, cultural restrictions, and frontiers within several lavish complexes. Yet Marcus's cultural politics of luxury is not completely defined by his work within elite enclosures. Other areas—advantaged creativity or self-identity, for instance—are drawn on to advance a cultural politics of luxurious ingenuity and individuality. The same is true, though in a less explicitly theoretical form, of those cultural elites, in a more submerged political sense of this term, who practice a sumptuousness specific to their own worlds wherein a kind of seeing in the distance is highly controlled by means of surroundings calculated merely to confirm their own vision of reality.Within Continental philosophy, the German philosopher Lambert Wiesing's "Toward a Phenomenology of Luxury" argues that the cultural politics of luxury must be allied with Friedrich Schiller's famous case in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) concerning the productive cultural role of play. Wiesing's politicized work on luxury thus extends to play, and to play according with our accounts and expectations of luxury under contemporary cultural conditions. Within Wiesing's phenomenological study of luxury, one key argument about the cultural role and political influence of different lifeworlds such as play is that they cause various expectant mental states that amount to an aesthetic encounter with our own self-awareness. This leads Wiesing to ask the question: "Where do anthropologically pregnant moments go when a lifeworld is dominated by a demand for optimization and technocratic means-ends rationality?" Another important facet of Wiesing's analysis is concerned with how the contemporary lifeworld furthers the growing appeal of luxury not as a strategy of marketing and branding but, crucially, as a clear rejection of the unremitting demands of instrumental reason. This analysis Wiesing conducts across a wide front, taking in the philosophical writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, and Immanuel Kant on luxury and aesthetic experience, being, and ways of living otherwise than under the rule of instrumental reason.In one such strategy of living otherwise, the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Against Feminine Luxury," written in 1920, addresses how the dominant culture of male weakness and stupidity has positioned feminine luxury and how it has attempted to further the "disease" of "outfit-itis" and transform women into hidden courtesans. In Marinetti's terms, it is just this kind of "improvement" of women's bodies that not only leads to an overabundance of narcissistic and foolish ensembles but also legitimates, through the culture of luxury, women's bodies as merchandise in the marketplace of male desire. This diminution of the value of women may be exposed and assuaged through men appreciating women as precious yet inexplicable, which will revive men and restore to the cultural politics of luxury men's need for women to be both ambiguous and challenging. Marinetti's radical and, in today's climate, wholly politically incorrect investigation of longing, craving, and men's bid for monopoly possession of women ends this special section with a warning: the death of real love in the present is the unmistakable consequence of our erotic demand for the artifice of endless luxury.In conclusion, any critical cultural politics of luxury must be situated beyond liberal and religious approaches to culture and politics that are overtly opposed to luxury culture, such as those of Emil De Laveleye (2016) and David Cloutier (2015), and beyond approaches that are more positively descended from the humanities, particularly cultural history. In this respect, the term cultural politics of luxury is valuable, distinct, and questioning, and, like critical luxury studies, a unique if not yet fully demarcated subject of academic inquiry

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