Fred Forest. For an Aesthetics of Communication
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What has now led me to set out the basis of a new form of aesthetics, which I term Communication Aesthetics, is the gulf which I have noticed between our awareness as people involved in contemporary society, and this same society's prevailing discourse on art. I believe, in fact that the bulk of artistic production of our age, as produced in response to market forces ant their inherent network, is no longer appropriate to the deeper awareness of people or our time. This production, entirely based on a system of references which take it back to to the past, almost never constitutes a language specific to the age in which we live. This split is serious insofar as it shows to what extent economic pressure is capable of generating artistic production alien to contemporary preoccupations, and generated in an artificial manner by the " art network ".
Communication Aesthetics takes up a clear stance on this ground. Its position lies beyond the market and institutional systems. Communication Aesthetics is neither a philosophical theory of Beauty, nor a phenonology, nor an experimenta psychology of perception, nor still less an academic discourse on the Arts. Its more modest claim is an attempt to apprehend what constitutes for a given society (ours), at a given moment in history, the universe accessible to its perception. In etymological termes, the word " aesthetics " designates the understanding of that which is perceptible. There is no question of holding forth on some abstract category, but rather on attempting to understand how he world of the perceptible directly affects us as people. Even if we are not yet fully conscious of it, contemporary aesthetics is an aesthetics which springs from an awareness of communication. This is something which we must make an effort to discern, for our own universe remains one which we have been conditioned to see through millenia of acculturation... An aesthetics in the uniquely philosophical tradition is no longer sufficient for us to understand that which is perceptible today. The field must be widened. Academic doors must be battered down, the constraints of universities with their over-specialisation anc compartmentalisation must be done away with. Communication Aesthetics, the principles of which are being set out here, strives to integrate experiences drawn from philosophy, but also from the social sciences, the physical sciences, and anything else, science or otherwise, which can throw light upon its subject: the perceptible. Today qe live in a world in which everything is closely interlinked, a world in which biological, psychological, social and environmental phenomena are interdependent. A systemic approach is called for, in order to attain the " sphere " of the perceptible. Yesterday's discursive viewpoint is no longer capable of satisfying us. What is going on at the moment, even if we cannot always see it, is the re-formulation or our concept of Reality. Through the progressive modification of our value systems, our thought systems and our perceptions, we are manifestly passing from a mechanistic view of reality to a holistic conception. The world of communication, the chain-link structure of its networks, the notion of interactivity which are particular to it, all of these lead us into other types of mental schemas. Communication Aesthetics falls in naturally in this tendency. Certain indications of contemporary awareness bear witness to a deeply spiritual dimension. The most advanced research in modern physics is currently reviving the most ancient mystical traditions. The concept of distinct objects is giving way more and more in our conciousness to a global perception. Culture itself, according to Marshall McLuhan's terminology, has become " fragmented ". The rhythm is more important than the object which produces it. The reality surrounding us is experienced as if it were a dance punctuated by regular waves of information. At particularly rich moments of our lives, this synchronism can actually be felt as putting us in harmony with the rest of the universe. It is precisely as if at these moments, all forms of separation or fragmentation or our consciousness have been miraculously done away with. Accorting to Fritjof Capra: " The parallels between science and mysticism are not confined to modern physics but it can now be extended with equal justification to the new systems biology. Two basic themes emerge again and again from the study of living and nonliving matter and are also repeatedly found in the teachings of mystics - the universal interconnectedness and interdependance of all phenomena, and the intrinsically dynamic nature or all reality. (...) The idea of fluctuations as the basis of order, which Prigogine introduced in modern science, is one of the major themes in all Taoist texts. " (1)
By restating the principles of Sociological Art, which at the time I helped to elaborate and illustrate (2), Communication Aesthetics may appear now to be the natural and logical extension of Sociologic Art, since it pushes these principles further. Today Communication Aesthetics not only demonstrates its intention to expand the previously explored fields, but it also seeks to correct certain affirmations which have been contradicted by experience. Without wishing in any way to minimize the importance of sociological factors which at the time constituted the foundation of our theoretical position, it now seems necessary to relativise them and, above all, to vary our analytical tools. The point of view of Communication Aesthetics is situated at a more encompassing level.
We are no longer exclusively concerned with the relationship of man to society, but on a more ambitious level, with his relationship to... the whole world. As for the much vaunted materialist principles of times gone by, modulation has become necessary in an age which scarcely lends itself to definitive assertions while aspiring to " spiritual uplift ". The crisis which is hitting us with full force constitutes a transitory phase more appopriate to prudence, doubt and interrogation. During the last ten years, a different context has been created owing to the evolution of ideas, technological mutations and the resulting social upheavals, the call of religion in the widest sense, a fascination with oriental mysticism and a growing awareness of ecology. After having experienced industrial society and consumer society at their peak, we are now slowly making our way towards the promised Communication Society, a society which is in the process of seeking out new values. The political activity of the young generation is significant in this regard : activism has deserted the campus. But this sign must not be interpreted too hastily as a negative sign of social disintegration and political abdication. On the contrary, it is necessary to go beyond appearances and consider that what is happening now is an intermediate phase marking the emancipation of the individual, who is at last freed from the burden of outdated political machinery and ideologies. The current feeling of emptiness does not merely imply that " something is lacking ". The feeling carries within itself its own dynamic and its own creativity. Society can also be changed by changing oneself. This emptiness constitues a necessary passage towards something as yet unformulated, but which, while unformulated, already bears a number of markers.
There are those who will never balk at showing their reservation and scorn: in their eyes, our goals may indeed seem suspect. Conversions have always brought with them the odour of scandal. Who would have dreamt that so late in the day Sociological Art would founder on junk mysticism ? Despite the emergence or new problematics and new fields of knowledge explicitly referring to subjectivity and metaphysics, our critics are rushing to settle their score with Communication Aesthetics before it has even been born, and this they are doing with scarcely a regard for the crisis which so many disciplines are currently undergoing. Many thinkers are calling into question the traditional use of reason. Concepts of truth, experience, proof and methodology are giving rise to more and more questions. This in no way implies the abandoning of scientific rigour in favour of magical thought. the modern mathematician, René Thom, author of " La théorie des catastrophes ", says of rationalism that it is " a code of ethics for the imaginary " and that " for all fields of science, no matter which, imaginary entities, which are invisible or hidden, must be superimposed on perceived phenomenal reality. (...) These imaginaries entities must be submitted to the most determinant constraints possible. (...) The path along the ridge between the gulf of imbecility on the one hand and the gulf of delirium on the other is certainly neither easy nor without danger, but it is the one along which all future progress of humanity must pass. " (3).
What René Thom calls " imaginary entities, which are invisible or hidden " arise directly out of current perception. These are categories which firmly belong to the field of investigation we are about to explore. It must be repeated again that Communication Aesthetics has as its goal the apprehension of the world which can be perceived by our evolving contemporary society. The way in which we apprehend reality is at once dependent upon our way or perceiving and the manner in which this way of perceiving determines a scale of values. In the age in which we live, established values often appear to us as being devalued and emptied of their content. Most of the time, they belong to a past wich is long gone. We are often unable to idenfy with them. They are in a process of mutation, just like our mental and physical environment. Social changes profoundly affect societal currents. They seem to converge towards the readjustment and quest for the new vision of the world called for by our perception. The first changes bear witness to a reworking of our mental concepts, of a different way of being in the world. Here we have a question of values with which we are capable of identifying. In a context of different values, technology and economics themselves become other instruments if, for example, the ecological way is substituted for the blind rule of competitiveness, of over-consumption, of production and of anarchic waste. The signs which indicate this climate of crisis and questing are intuitively felt by our perception. The world is being transformed at the same time that we are transforming ourselves. Contemporary perception is very profoundly linked to an " intuition " of a systemic nature, of which the principles of dynamic organisation directly affects our aesthetic awareness. Watched by hundreds of milions of viewers on the cathode ray type, Armstrong's first steps on the Moon nourished our modern emotions to a far greater extent than the Mona Lisa's smile or Leonardo's brushwork can ever do today.