Thesis: Television is rarely considered aesthetics but music videos are.
Not even postmodern criticism claims to ease the giving distinction between art and non-art, elite and the popular, the high and the low, the profound and profane, the sacred and the superficial considers television as an aesthetic.
For Jakobson, communications functions poetically when expression is excessive, ambiguous , and self-referential or self-focusing(Eco. 1979). Extending Jakobson's arguments, nominates the poetic function communications as the aesthetics dimension, moment, or encounter of communication. The aesthetic dimension of communication implies that any communication can always speak of more than codes and material practices can allow for.
Mickunas (1998) notes that an aesthetic formation, such as a musical composition, a painting, or a music video inscribes a particular space-time style that cannot be exhausted or located. Even the classical arts with their carefully controlled contours and orderly arrangements, do not allow themselves to be reduced to a mere picture of something.
An exploration of the aesthetic encounter of this level of bodily engagement requires and exploration that breaks the limits of the semiotic investigation. Indeed (Eco 1979) has acknowledged this threshold of semiotics and has suggested a way yo move beyond it; "The phenomenological epoch would refer perception back to a stage where referents are no longer confronted as explicit messages but as extremely ambiguous text. This will be another of the semiotics limits worth while to continue research on in relation to the genesis of the perceptual significant. (p.167)
Breathing life into aesthetic formations and capturing the worldly flow is an aesthetic dimension of experience that is rarely discussed, but whose explication would shed light on the superfluity, meaningfulness, and resonance that artistic production has in people's lives.
From Plato, the aesthetic value was delimited along sociopolitical lines. The artwork had value if it was socially beneficial and instilled norms of behavior. Such an aesthetic value is maintained by arguments that are not necessarily aesthetic. (Mickunas 1989)
Aesthetic find a later expression in Hurrerl's (1973) investigation into perception. Perception is indeed interested, but not before passing through aesthetic, simple sensual awareness, to acting, evaluating, and so on,. We apprehend things enjoyable, useful etc..before contemplative interest. Reflection follows, is subsequent; the level of the passive protodoxa, the fundamental stratum which underlies every act of experience is pre-thematic: The interest which is satisfied in contemplating and perceiving is the activation of the fundamental aesthetic. (p. 207)
Husserl (1973) notes that "the stream of phenomenological being has a stuff-stream and a noetic stream" (p. 207).
Within the flow of awareness the body encounters rhythms, textures, colors, shades, and so on, all of which are gathered in the activity of passive and active synthesis and the meaning of which is fleshed-out in experience.
Husserl referes to this domain as the sensuous stuff-stratum, the pre-predicative and the pre-rational basis of rationality. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) called it the plan of consistency.
The prethematic dimension of experience is brought into the realm of aesthetics by Heidegger for whom aesthetics is but "the logic of aisthesis"; that is, aesthetics are "the metaphysics or onto-logic" derived from this more fundamental experience (Smith, 1967, p. 218)
To the extent that an aithesis aims at its own-begins genuinely accessible through it and for it, for example, looking at colors apprehending is always true. This means that looking always discovers colors, hearing always discovers tones. What is in the purest and most original sense "true"...is pure noein.....This noein can never cover up, can never be false. (pp. 79-80)
Synesthesia
To gaze on the musical lines of Kandinsky's paintings to hear the rising gothic cathedrals in Schumann's Third Symphony(Strechow, 1953), and to watch the musical visuality of MTV, is to engage with a painting, a musical composition, and a televisual floe that express an awareness of the overlapping and interpenetration of sense modalities, in which sound is expressed visually and sight is expressed aurally. These works express an awareness of bodily experience that is often neglected or disregarded: That awareness is synesthesia, the crossing or overlapping sense modalities.
Opposing the current interpretation of signification that follows structural semiotics, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, language is not the ground of meaning. More likely, language is an articulation of signification whose basis is the same that continually transgresses and subtends the semantic and semiotic vectorial horizons. In other words, sense is the ground of language and not the other way around. (p. 7)
"My body is the seat or rather the very actually of the phenomenon of expression and there the visual and auditory experiences for example are pregnant on with the other and their expressives value is the ground of the ante-predicative unity of the perceived world, and through it of verbal expression and intellectual significance....My body is the fabric into which the perceived world is the general instrument of my "comprehension."(Merleau-Ponty, 1989, p. 235)
Goodwin 5 sources of visualization of music:
1. personal imagery derived from the individual memories associated with songs
2. images associated purely with the music itself may work through metaphors or metonymy
3. images of musicians or performers
4. visual signifiers deriving from national-popular iconography related to geographical associations promoted by performers
5. deeply anchored popular culture signs associated with rock music linked with a mythologized America
Postmodern criticism claims to ease the giving distinction between art and non-art, elite and the popular, the high and the low, the profound and profane, the sacred and the superficial considers television as an aesthetic.
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