Rationalizing My Sense of "Aesthetic Otherness" Experienced In My Photography School Critique Sessions

Assertions About Cultural Origins of Aesthetic Othering

I’ve often felt alienated in Photography class critiques at the Southeast Center for Photographic Studies established at Daytona State College's Daytona Beach, Florida campus. Once the professor identified the presence of the technical, that is taught, characteristics in the image I became aware of just how widely shared the ideas of beauty and appropriateness of an image’s appearance seemed to be shared by other members of the critique class. Often I found myself not agreeing with those shared perceptions.

Having a practical and academic background in Education, Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and Development Communications I was able to move beyond notions of racial isolation as a viable explanation for my alienated feelings and begin to explore answers grounded in reason. Initially this search lead me to Google search for articles that focused on the notion of “Other”, i.e., a characterization of a person or group grounded in their oppressed state. ( Source:6,7) It took a while to identify my conditioned biases that predisposed that choice and I was able to shift my thinking to some of the information in the various academic areas I had studied. (Source: 4)

Part of the product of refocusing my search was to draw on ideas from Cultural Theory, Psychology, and Early Childhood Development and base my central unit of study on the idea that culture is a set of habits developed in a person at a time in their early brain development prior to the development of self-conscious, rational, thinking; the time when the human-animal doesn’t know the difference between itself and a table leg.  This is a period in the life of a human, or any animal, where learning is grounded in the most fundamental principles of pain and pleasure and emotional responses to internal and external stimuli, e.g... hunger, pain, fear, heat, cold, etc. The faculties of reason, rational thinking, have yet to be acquired. This period of brain development lasts roughly from late conception until about six years of age; approximately the first 74 months of life in the human species. (Source: 2)

The salient characteristics of this period of brain development are framed as “synaptic development” in the child. (Source: 1) During this period of human growth the neural links between brain cells are being stimulated by sense signals that come from our sensory receptors, those that are internal, e.g., hunger, bowel pressure, etc., and those that come from the environment, e.g., temperature, sound, light, etc. The theory suggests that these inputs from the sensory systems are received in the brain centers and cause synaptic connections to be fired or exercised as the nervous system is exercised from the sensor to the receptor center in the brain. The operative rule is that as those synaptic pathways are exercised their characteristics change and become fixed and established. The more use of a synaptic pathway the more permanent it becomes. Those pathways that aren’t exercised up to a certain level of use are eventually lost by the process called “synaptic purge” which occurs around 48 to 60 months of life. This purge is a chemical process that removes all synapses that haven’t reached a certain level of maturity.

With this basis for understanding the child’s brain development process, with just a bit of thought, it becomes clear that the vast differences in human brain development are most likely to come from the environment of the child and not from the physiological characteristics of the child. Further, the ground over which a child’s consciousness will be developed is the set of synaptic pathways that remain after the synaptic purge. This base of synapses forms the unconscious basis for the later arriving sense of self-consciousness the child will experience. The fundamental observation here is that the child is “unconscious” of their level of synaptic development until they are taught to interpret and manipulate its content, i.e. until they begin to learn themselves. It is the action characterization of this period of a human’s life, the learning awareness of self, grounded in the first 74 months of unconscious life, and the ritual behaviors used to orient the child’s growing awareness of self and environment, that I call “Culture”. It is the unconscious foundation of psychic existence that allows humans to produce behaviors of which they are unconscious, automatic, and immediate. (Source; 8)

The outstanding and primary characteristic of Culture is that it is realized in the child as unconscious habits, orientations, predispositions, biases, and preconceptions. It consists of behaviors that operate largely outside of conscious control or choice behavior, e.g., bowel movements, human physiological activity, heartbeat, blood flow, brain activity, language usage, etc. Because one’s culture operates unconsciously it is not usually available to rational thought. Behaviors driven by cultural sources tend to “occur”, to be present, without effort or deliberation. They tend to be “automatic”. (Source: 8)

At this point in this paper, I’ve established the central characteristic of my alienated feeling in critique class and a hypothetical explanation for the apparent agreement of perceptions among my classmates and professor. We come from different cultures, histories of synaptic development, and coming to consciousness learning experiences, that have become routinized as automatic behaviors that operate beneath our conscious awareness and ability to control.

Emile Durkheim coined the term, “social fact”, to characterize the notion of mores and norms, i.e., the rules of socio-cultural behavior. (Source: 4,5) One of the most confounding characteristics of a social fact is that one is not aware of its existence until the rule is broken or violated. (Source: 6) It is those unconscious learnings I call culture. So it is that my experiences in most critique classes had consisted of me unconsciously presenting my work, with a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, only to find that the feelings of my classmates and professor, beyond the presence of the taught skills, were not the same as my own. My feelings about the work did not make me a member of the shared feeling set of the “others” in my critique class. I emphasized the word “others” to lead to the conclusion of this paper.

At this point of my conscious awareness, and for the reader of the paper, a destination has been reached, i.e., the definitional basis for my conception of the “aesthetic other”. It is the habituated way of perceiving one’s environment that is learned and the product of one’s cultural background. It is a central element in the socio-cultural grouping rules that operate unconsciously in the human animal. It is a basis for social and cultural affiliation and a sense of belonging to a group; the awareness of sharing a similar, automatic, response set to elemental sensory inputs commonly associated with Art, e.g., color, shape, line, composition, etc.

As a human characteristic, there is no inherent authority or rule that differentiates one set of shared aesthetics from another. It is in the context of social statuses, roles, and ascribed powers that one finds positive and negative rankings of aesthetics. The historical environments of the people imbued with their socio-cultural quantum of aesthetic senses ascribe a valence to the aesthetics held by the members of a society or culture; to a group. All aesthetics are not created equal but are subject to the authority of a higher-order set of power relationships derived from past events and ensconced in the personal and group cultural holdings to which those responsible for acculturating the individual are subject, i.e., their position in the hegemonic power structure of their birth. In essence, one’s aesthetic is a chance of birth not unlike the multitude of innumerable human traits. Over time, like other habits, one’s aesthetic can be modified through the processes of rational learning as occurs when one learns a language different from one’s acculturated language. Yet, at any point in a lifetime, one finds one’s self a member of an aesthetic grouping that is more, or less, a member of the hegemonic power group of one’s time. When you are a member of a marginal hegemonic group, you are characterized as a member of the “Other” grouping along some dimension of measured socio-cultural traits. (Source: 7)

Sources

1. https://www.healthline.com/health/synaptic-pruning ( accessed 11/2/2020 Google search)

2. https://www.reference.com/world-view/aesthetic-development-children-e00f2831e52df369 ( accessed 11/2/2020 Google search)

3.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1383&context=liberalarts_contempaesthetics ( accessed 11/2/2020 Google search)

4. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-sociocultural-theory-2795088 ( accessed 11/2/2020 Google search)

5. https://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html ( accessed 11/2/2020 Google search)

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fact ( accessed 11/2/2020 Google search)

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_(philosophy) ( accessed 11/2/2020 Google search)

8. https://www.wisebrain.org/media/Papers/AutomaticProcessing.pdf (accessed 11/2/2020 Google search)