1/15/2024 0 Comments Life is feudal weather chartIn terms of class conflict, beauty is invidious, demarcating the boundary between those condemned to live out a more or less utilitarian existence and those whose option to idle is sustained by the former’s toil.īy treating beauty as a particular manifestation of conspicuous consumption, Thorstein Veblen laid the foundation for a materialistic theory of esthetics that dispels orthodox bourgeois subjectivism, a materialism that need not imply literalism. In terms of the patriarchy, women find being considered beautiful (or not) a mixed blessing, if not a curse. As a prestige marker, this is its underlying logic. Yet even as a legitimated sign of culture, beauty preserves an uncanny sense of the acquisitive aggression endemic to sexual and economic drives. As such, it approaches the linguistic arbitrariness of the Saussurian signifier. Stripping away beauty’s animal ebullience (which Freud equated with sexual stimulation) 1 may not render it any more or less benign, but it does free it to be ascribed, potentially, to any entity. Although it might suggest the transcendence of everyday life, it assumes its paradigmatic form only by sublimating, even suppressing, the fundamental processes of production and reproduction. As an ideal, beauty has never reflected an ideal world.
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