Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Barbara Carnevali ,  Zakiya Hanafi
Publisher:   Columbia University Press
Imprint:   Columbia University Press
ISBN:  

9780231187060

ISBN 10:   0231187068
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   04 August 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

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

Reviews

This is a powerful and paradigm-shifting aesthetics of society, by a great philosophical talent. -- Simon Critchley, author of <i>Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us</i> Barbara Carnevali's concept of 'social aesthetics' is tremendously powerful, and explains a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena. Carnevali makes me think that the rise of Orban and Trump and the Brexit movement is better understood as a matter of social 'taste' than in terms of ideology, or economics, or identity. -- Blake Gopnik, author of <i>Warhol</i> Oscar Wilde famously quipped that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. This elegant, profound, and erudite book explores the startling proposition that we may indeed be what we seem. The reader of this book will not fail to be convinced that 'appearances' are constitutive of society. -- Eva Illouz, author of <i>The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations</i> Every sentence in this brilliant book is a unit of thought; it's as epigrammatic as Nietzsche and as seamlessly developed as, say, Hume. And it helps that it's new. Carnevali has restored aesthetics to its central role in philosophy. -- Edmund White, author of <i>The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading</i>

Every sentence in this brilliant book is a unit of thought; it's as epigrammatic as Nietzsche and as seamlessly developed as, say, Hume. And it helps that it's new. Carnevali has restored aesthetics to its central role in philosophy. -- Edmund White, author of <i>The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading</i>

Every sentence in this brilliant book is a unit of thought; it's as epigrammatic as Nietzsche and as seamlessly developed as, say, Hume. And it helps that it's new. Carnevali has restored aesthetics to its central role in philosophy. -- Edmund White, author of <i>The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading</i> Oscar Wilde famously quipped that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. This elegant, profound, and erudite book explores the startling proposition that we may indeed be what we seem. The reader of this book will not fail to be convinced that 'appearances' are constitutive of society. -- Eva Illouz, author of <i>The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations</i> Barbara Carnevali's concept of 'social aesthetics' is tremendously powerful, and explains a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena. Carnevali makes me think that the rise of Orban and Trump and the Brexit movement is better understood as a matter of social 'taste' than in terms of ideology, or economics, or identity. -- Blake Gopnik, author of <i>Warhol</i> This is a powerful and paradigm-shifting aesthetics of society, by a great philosophical talent. -- Simon Critchley, author of <i>Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us</i>

This is a powerful and paradigm-shifting aesthetics of society, by a great philosophical talent. -- Simon Critchley, author of <i>Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us</i> Barbara Carnevali's concept of 'social aesthetics' is tremendously powerful, and explains a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena. Carnevali makes me think that the rise of Orban and Trump and the Brexit movement is better understood as a matter of social 'taste' than in terms of ideology, or economics, or identity. -- Blake Gopnik, author of <i>Warhol</i> Oscar Wilde famously quipped that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. This elegant, profound, and erudite book explores the startling proposition that we may indeed be what we seem. The reader of this book will not fail to be convinced that 'appearances' are constitutive of society. -- Eva Illouz, author of <i>The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations</i> Every sentence in this brilliant book is a unit of thought; it’s as epigrammatic as Nietzsche and as seamlessly developed as, say, Hume. And it helps that it’s new. Carnevali has restored aesthetics to its central role in philosophy. -- Edmund White, author of <i>The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading</i>

Author Information

Barbara Carnevali is professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she holds a chair in social aesthetics. Her books include Romantisme et reconnaissance. Figures de la conscience chez Rousseau (2012). Zakiya Hanafi is the author of The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (2000) and affiliate assistant professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. Social Appearances is her eleventh book of philosophy in translation.

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