- 期刊
The Aesthetics of Elsewhere: An Environmentalist Everyday Aesthetics
並列摘要
This paper seeks to confront the environmental destruction associated with a high consumption lifestyle. Environmental philosophers have often argued that knowing about this environmental destruction is sufficient to influence people to choose otherwise. I name this position the ethics of elsewhere. I argue that mere knowledge is usually not sufficient to effect change and that a more effective, although complementary, strategy is to use the resources of aesthetics to influence behavior. To that end I argue that the production of positive aesthetic value in one place generally entails the production of negative aesthetic value somewhere else. This negative aesthetic value is largely overlooked by the ethics of elsewhere. I next argue that many consumption decisions, particularly amongst the world's well-off inhabitants, are driven partially, or even largely, by aesthetic considerations. This being so, it seems as if an aesthetic intervention might serve to influence those decisions in a way that facts and figures do not. In order to make ”elsewhere” present to us while making our decisions about the ”here” we occupy, I argue for a double aesthetic judgment involving an artistic presentation of the destruction elsewhere. This double aesthetic judgment produces an aesthetic melancholia that may serve to influence consumers to consume otherwise or not at all.