A Study On Reification Experience Of Visual Aesthetics

From Martin Heidegger raised the important issue in 1930s that the characteristics of the modern world began to be comprehended as an image,to visual culture studies thrived worldwide in 1990s,visual production based on digital technology in consumption era indicated actual occurrence of cultural turn of visual culture as well as improving the image quality for contemporary media.Visuality increasingly became a dominant force in daily life and artistic production;therefore,the human visual aesthetic experience now changes into reification.The main topic discussed in this dissertation is the manifestation and aesthetic significance of reification experience on visual aesthetic.The reification experience consists of three main meanings in terms of etymology and direct acceptation of the word:meta-symbol sets of the material,replica technique and reification.On the practice of artistic production,uncovering the thinghood is one of inherent properties of contemporary art.And on the changes of the social relationship,mechanical reproduction of image make visual symbol naturalized and socialized into representation of reification.The production of symbols in visual consumption has significant experience properties.On the perspective of cultural creation,the experience of reification generates from inner drive of cross-border motivation on art and culture under social conditions of Objective culture is superior to subjective culture.Through introducing three domains including reification theory,media research and subjective philosophy,this dissertation probes into the causes of reification experience and mechanism of experience change by providing clues to changes in media from photography,movies,television to new media so as to explore the sociology value of reification experience,reveal the turn of culture character and renew aesthetic ideas.On research approach,this dissertation focus on the aesthetic outline and factors affected the changes of visual experience by dialectical analysis of visual cause for reification experience.Moreover,this dissertation begin with real issues about art theory and social theory in order to intensively observe the tangible impact that media and communicative action exert on visual experience.Reification experience is a type of modern experience that move or direct toward postmodern social condition.And its reification characters have distinctive connections with the reflection on postmodern aesthetic.The first chapter,"The reification experience of the visual paradigm",mainly discusses reification history and formation conditions of the modern experience.From the point of view of the asynchronous development of objective culture and subjective culture,Georg Simmel explains that modernized experience historically rooted in the development of mature monetary economy,and its nuclear concentration is metropolis.The urban individual modernized experience and personality traits can be revealed from the relationship between conforming and rebounding/escape.From its"structural theory",Anthony Giddens explains the marginalization of emotion is caused by the modernity with the rational value as its core.With its penetration to the field of the emotional life,the"communicative rationality" gives birth to the proposition of the "emotional democracy".And what caused the emotional democratization is the globalization,the modern daily life and the emergence of post-traditional society.The Post-emotivism no longer pursues the ethics of authenticity,aesthetics,purity of the era of Emotivism,but rather keen on producing the virtual,mechanical,Maneuverable emotion in batches.In the process of modernity established,the symbolic significance of material is replaced by its function and role.Parallel with the fictionalization of material,human beings are functionized into an affiliated object of machine.In such a visual relation age when art and everyday life growing more homogenized,the esthetic experience is materialized as an aesthetic politics more and more.The modern mental temperament can be established only rely on the relentless pursuit of the"future" of modern time.The rush of visual behavior constitutes the norm of modern life,and the more addicted to the rush,the more easily lose their normal perception,thus occurs the experience variation.The symptom of being constantly curious,anxious and constantly discouraged,tired,is torturing the modern human beings alternatively.The reification of Modern experience is relying on the reification of modern media communication/interaction.The new media of expression with the rapid consumption of information as the main content stress the feature of forgetfulness.The reification of the media-mediated interaction changes the subjectivity of the interactive subject:the human body becomes an extension of the media.The consumption society creates excess images,and the material nature and physical image of consumption accelerate the reification of the visual experience.The basic traits of the materialized consuming experience include:conspicuousness and idolization,being landscape and desire,pseudo-personalized new tribalism.Judging from the changes in the media as the main cause of the culture,the dominance of the E-media makes the meaning of "post" in"post-modern" can be explained as material.In "the second media age",the modern subject is replaced into a multiple,discrete and decentralized subject by the modes of information.In the shift of the visual paradigm from Modern to Postmodern,Image aesthetic and its relationship showing several significant changes:from the characterized image from the self-referential simulacrum;from the mean of the form to the procedural of super form;from the shock effect to the experience of addiction;from puzzling by the vision to dwelling near the vision.The second chapter,"From the wane of aura to fashion portrait",discusses the formation of photographic realism,the change of subjectivity and the social aesthetic value of the fashion portrait.With imitation as its initial purpose,the visual replication technology not only leads to the wane of the"aura",but also makes the popularity of photography have the characteristics of extended vision and the social role of democratic politics.As far as the relationship between photography and reality,the experience caused by photography is a kind of space-time experience about the modernity,is a transient visual pleasure differs that caused by painting.Although the authenticity of the materialistic photo derived from the credibility of the empirical significance,but its essence is a representation of object-image;the unconscious exposure of optics by cameras,with the revolutionary significance of socio-spatial transformation and the renewal of the subjective concept,thoroughly overthrows the hierarchy prescribed by the vision.Photographic images strengthen the sense of speed and the fashion trends of modern material life experience.The cover idols realize the fashionability of the photographic images.Old photos provide an unusual historical reproduction.Fashion ads and scenery photos make the life decorative and the nature visualized.The high-speed,huge amount modern creation of photography means the dual innovations of the subject visual concepts and methodologies.The third chapter,"From the full-version Movies to spectacle movies",discusses the experience reduction mechanism of movies,the spiritual traits of the semi-dream fetish subject and the spectacularity of spectacle movies.the continuation of "full-version movies" myth benefits from the movie reduction and control of real-world experience,the sensual shock effect released by the film's technical structure is consistent with the transformation of the tactile qualities of the modern art.The major change brought by the mature computer digital video technology to film special-effect aesthetics is the transcendence of image fidelity.In accordance with the point of view of the second movie semiology,the movie experience is just a daydream.Based on a kind of the visual fetishism which likes the voyeurism,the movie appreciation of the audience constructs a centrifugal subject.The main critique to the culture industry is that modern subjectivity is ordained to be a product of the culture industry standardization and pseudo-personalization since the imagination of consumers is controlled by the mass media.The popular culture studies of the Birmingham School suggest that the mass probably decodes the "dominant discourse" in their own way;resorting to the style,the subcultures initiate challenge or resistance to the dominant culture and hegemony.The rise and prevalence of the spectacle movies indicate that it is the spectacle rather than narration conforms to experience requirements for visual products of the consuming society;and explains the changes of the film texts from the time depth mode to the space plane mode.The traditional images are transforming into simulacra by the extensive application of digital imaging and virtual space.The fourth chapter,"From family experience to mimicry Carnival",discusses the TV's"household" feature,the subjectivity of "Couch Potatoes" and the entertaining nature of TV culture.The "producer-type" characteristics of TV text make the audience deeply embedded self into the TV media mechanism and production process,participating in the generation of program meaning.But the nature of its household media causes the two levels of the individual attention and the group experience both stay in a decentralized state.TV establishes a deep emotional connection with family,and routinizes the daily activities of a family.In a general sense,the modem people are all "Couch Potatoes".The Experiential participation of the TV show represents as a consultation process to seek consensus between the audience and television text.TV culture is an important part of urban culture,the televisionalized prospect in the consuming era is a mimicry carnival.From the angle of relationship between the tech and aesthetics,the technical features of the television broadcasting is now degrading the TV to a superficial,vulgar and downright entertainment,and the sense-pleased entertainment becomes the super-ideology of discourses on television.The fifth chapter,"From the visual abuse to the nomadic style",discusses the animation aesthetics of the new media art and the nomadic subjectivity of smooth space,as well as the visual reproduction during the digital network era.New media art provides transfinite visual experiences,constructs virtual reality with the help of digital technology and forms the animation aesthetics that highlights the subject pleasure as its characteristics.Cyberspace mainly is a smooth space,filling of which is the free,flowing nomadic aesthetic purports.Tuber mode and connection make subject self-build as a functionalized one.The subject's degradation of the cognition and imagination shows the audition relationship between the virtual practice of cyberspace and the real practice of the subject.And during the process of the deconstructive visual reproduction,the "Pseudo-disorder",such as large-scale collective voyeur and network PS parody which characterized by consumption of privacy and image,Highlights the changes of subject boundary and its moral values;while in the sense of the visual disenchantment and reenchantment,the displacement from social McDonaldization to Disneyization put forwards a new question of the transition from the solidified emotional mechanism to self-virtualized mechanism.The sixth chapter,"Aesthetic reconstruction of the reification visual experience",intends to sort out the changing contour of the image and its lodging media from the relationship between visual culture and image development,to Perspective the way back to the nature of reification within the framework of aesthetic modernity during the image era and,the possible trends of the generation and transformation of visual paradigm/experience.Modern visual experience has seen a change from puzzling by the material to loving of material.Shuttling in a highly complex and sophisticated social network of institutions,the modern mass has formed a nomadic subject and a collective confrontational one.Before Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity,Walter Benjamin had connected visual experience with rogues and metropolitans.From changes inside the symbol structure,Fredric Jameson explained the capitalism develops to realism,realism to modernism and then modernism to post-modernism,are two socio-cultural reversal that caused by the continual strengthening of reification power.In essence,the "puzzling" state of a visual subject in consuming culture is a nonessential structure which with subject-object interaction.It has two-way potential for remodeling and subversion,showing the image relationships between power and desire with obvious morphological characteristics.From the aspect of the modern changes of aesthetics,we found daily life had become into the subject of the imitation from the object being imitated,and the images had become into the model of daily life,thus forming emulational world or post-modern culture.But on a real-life situation,art is not ended.The modem aestheticism becomes the representation of the modern positions of anxiety and restlessness when it is struggling in the modem society.When entering into the process of the postmodern condition,aesthetic activity departed from the emancipated functions,the aesthetic thing escaped from the aesthetic relationship and aesthetics adhered with image reality tightly,all these facts are increasingly unable to find out reliable interpretation from the elites' aesthetic systems.However,the image,or the imitation has the aesthetic value to re-discover,to re-expose the reification nature.Of the aesthetic reflection or reconstruction,the starting point should be the aesthetic experience,impure and altered.Such mixed impurity has long made visual aesthetic experience having the characteristics of reification,and also laid down the foundation for the necessity and possibility of the next aesthetic reconstruction.