# [[Aesthetics of the Familiar]]  ## Metadata - Author: [[Yuriko Saito]] - Full Title: [[Aesthetics of the Familiar]] - Category: - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: [[Yuriko Saito]]'s book challenges [[traditional aesthetics]] by expanding the discussion to include everyday aspects often overlooked. She emphasizes the importance of connecting aesthetics with our lived experiences and social responsibilities. Saito argues for cultivating everyday aesthetic sensibility to enrich life and contribute to the world-making project. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/191161350 ## Highlights - Just as Dewey and Berleant remind us that the typical [[aesthetic experience]] of a spectator is never passively receiving but rather results from both undergoing and doing, or receiving and creating, the activities we undertake, the second of the aforementioned pairs, also involve both operations. When I plant flowers, I think about the most aesthetically pleasing arrangement; when I hang laundry, I try to make the resultant appearance as inoffensive, orderly, and organized as possible. My ‘doing’ things is informed by spectator-like [[aesthetic judgments]]. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1yeeztc0csps2c9wcha8nq1)) - such experience involved in ‘doing’ is not recognized as part of aesthetics because it is difficult to subject one’s experience of engaging in an activity to an evaluative aesthetic judgment. There is no clear ‘object’ of experience which makes it possible to form an aesthetic judgment. For example, Forsey points out that “cleaning, chopping, and repairing are clearly quotidian but not clearly objects ofany kind.”47 We can dispute whether a garden is pretty, but can we dispute whether or not [[the experience]] I am having while gardening qualifies as a Deweyan experience? Is it rather a trivial and purely subjective feeling that lacks “aesthetic credentials”? And is it appropriate to apply the judgment-oriented mode of aesthetic inquiry to such an experience? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1yeh8hd6v42g6132cba0s8x)) - As for the activity of cooking, let us hear from women writing about their everyday home cooking. Consider Luce Giard’s “Doing Cooking” in which the title itself is indicative of her interest in and attention to the activity, separate from the joy of eating. . . . the everyday work in kitchens remains a way of unifying matter and memory, life and tenderness, the present moment and the abolished past, invention and necessity, imagin- ation and tradition—tastes, smells, colors, flavors, shapes, consistencies, actions, gestures, movements, people and things, heat, savoring, spices, and condiments. Good cooks are never sad or idle—[[they work]] at fashioning the world, at giving birth to the joy of the ephemeral; they are never finished celebrating festivals for the adults and the kids, the wise and the foolish, the marvelous reunions of men and women who share room (in the world) and board (around the table). Women’s gesture and women’s voices that make the earth livable.49 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1yemvt0xgzaagfe8mzj79a1)) - Audre Lorde also recounts her experience ofhelping her mother grind spices in a mortar, which includes rhythmic body movement punctuated by the muted sound of thump and the tactile sensation of pressing around the carved side of the mortar. All these sensory experiences “transported me into a world of scent and rhythm and movement and sound that grew more and more exciting as the ingredients liquefied.”50 Verta Mae Smart-Grosvenor’s account of her so-called “vibration cooking” explicitly relates the daily home cooking to aesthetics. “I’m talking about being able to turn the daily ritual of cooking for your family into a beautiful everyday happening.”51 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1yemr7f5jt2bw6nc57vz0gc)) - [[Aesthetic experience]] regarding food also includes the bodily activity of eating. Richard Shusterman’s account of his training at a Zen monastery is instructive here. He characterizes the practice as a challenge of cultivating “graceful, mindful elegance.”52 It requires a careful attention to “the aesthetically proper way to pick up and put down one’s chopsticks and to hold one’s rice bowl and cup” and “how we chewed and swallowed our food, how we passed food to our eating companions.” The reward of such an arduous practice is described as follows: “Not only did my attention to savoring, chewing, and swallowing enhance the sensory pleasures of these activities, but also my focused awareness on the hand and body movements involved in taking and passing the food made these movements more enjoyable and graceful.” He offers this example of eating as “aesthetic transformation of [[everyday life]],” what I called defamiliarization of the familiar, rather than the familiar experienced as familiar, which I consider to be the core of [[everyday aesthetics]]. But the point I want to derive from these examples is that food aesthetics is not limited to making a judgment on the taste of food, the issue that currently dominates the discourse. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1yepbna7nm0jwe7qpgprj53)) - [[What can]] be noted in all of these descriptions of engaging in activities is that [[the experience]] narrated is synaesthetic based upon bodily engagement (body movement, tactile sensation of dealing with soil, handling a mortar, feeling the heat, holding chopsticks, and the like, in addition to sound, smell, taste, as well as vision) and it is imbued with memory and associations. It is also inseparable from other values permeating our [[everyday life]] such as fellowship, reciprocity, care, and love. If one were to follow a typical trajectory of the aesthetics discourse, these features tend to disqualify these experiences from entering into the realm of aesthetics. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1yeqwq8s2bz2596m6k54t56)) - Testimonies of Japanese art practitioners and those who had a proper shitsuke discipline sufficiently demonstrate that, through repeated bodily engagement and practice, the artistic skills and respectful conduct tend to become internalized so that one becomes a certain kind of person who, at the masterful stage, will ‘naturally’ exhibit virtuous qualities. The training of geisha best illustrates this process of internalizing outward bodily training. Literally meaning a person accomplished in the arts, a geisha practices classical music, dance, and the art of entertaining guests. The arduous physical regimen of all of these activities, according to a first-person account, is “as much a discipline of the self as the technical mastery of an art form” and “if art is life for a geisha, then her life must also become art.” Accordingly, “a geisha’s professional ideal is to become so permeated with her art that everything she does is informed by it, down to the way she walks, sits, and speaks.”62 One may not achieve a perfectly virtuous self, but that does not nullify the ideal of cultivating moral virtues through bodily engagement both within and outside of artistic training. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1ydndb153em6jtc9jcm62hy))