definitions and approaches

aesthetics

sensation, perception > how does it make us feel?

an object with aesthetic properties is an objects that makes something (a sensation? a feeling?) happen

• hume
• • taste
• jakobson
• • innovation -> always seeking the new, a reconfiguration of experiences
• goodman
• • understanding
• • semiotics > metaphors and referral to higher classes of concepts
• dewey
• • action, halfway between sensitivity and activity, that which brings forward
• wittgenstein
• • aesthetics, as a field of conceptual inquiry, should start not from a presumption that the central task is to analyze the determinant properties that are named by aesthetic predicates, but rather with a full-blooded consideration of the activities of aesthetic life.

poetry questions our approach to (natural/machine) language (through what? interactivity? sound? color? typography? …mental structures) literature is the aesthetic usage of written language (tresor de la langue francaise)

adorno - the form of the phonograph record: the artwork only holds “truth-content”, has fragments of true language once life has left it. it is, in a sense a threat to life/a judgment upon life.

• art works to shape our basic sense of what is and what matters in all of life (heidegger)

ranciere: - tissu du sensible

poetics

linguistic -> language vs. poetics -> discourse

is about understanding coherence, about understanding structure, and understanding pre-existing patterns (if poetics are prototypes, aesthetics are instances, maybe interfaces). it “an internal theory of literature”, a conjuction of categories, but also a general direction from an author (not sure how that is different from the aesthetics?)

poetics will be called upon to elaborate a theory of description that will bring to light not only what all descriptions have in common but also what permits them to remain different (todorov) - but it must also provide instruments to identify such occurences of, here, a description

a poetics of beautiful code -> what is beautiful code? an aesthetics of beautiful code -> how is code beautiful?