Aesthetic paradigm and everyday life transformations: methodological aspects

Abstract

Methodological perspectives of an aesthetic paradigm are discussed in studying the transformations of subjectivity and identity in contemporary culture. The aesthetic paradigm is used in psychological research in broad and narrow sense: in the first case, psychology expands its epistemological horizons on the general scientific level of the methodology of science by drawing on the tools of the history of art and art history; in the second, the focus of attention on the specific scientific level of the methodology of science is directed toward the role of art in socialization and the emergence of person's identity. The aesthetic paradigm is seen as the structuring of the thinking space, on the one hand, which connects the methodology of transdisciplinary analysis with the phenomenology of problems relevant to psychology (such as everyday life, modernity, value transformation, identity building in changing and multiple sociocultural contexts, etc.), and on the other – placing this problematics in special research foreshortenings of art and art history. In the context of psychological research the construct "visibility regimes", which appeared at the junction of the history of everyday life and visual anthropologists, is introduced and justified. It is shown that art creates in culture not only new values and life styles but also new optics (ways of seeing) and visual practices. Taken in its historical-genetic foreshortening the aesthetic paradigm makes it possible to single out different types of aesthetics like successive ones in history and coexisting in modern times. The aesthetic paradigm considered from functional positions solves the tasks of building identity in a situation of breaking traditions and disintegrating the everyday life world. Aesthetics creates a space of sublime life where a person discovers resources for building a new identity. The aesthetic paradigm translates cultural values, integrates sensory experience and overcomes linear thinking. It is characterized by latent constructivism, meaningful in the aesthetics of postmodernism, expressed in building life as a work and as a special contextual sensitivity generating new sociocultural movements.