대중문화와 상징생산: 유물론적 미학의 계보

Abstract

Our everyday lives are full of expressions, signs and symbols through which individuals and groups experience and constitute their identity. Materialist aesthetics is the intellectual assumption that the symbolic experiences and practices of ordinary people are more important than the exceptional achievements of artistic genius. The realization of the significance of the symbolic creativity inherent in everyday life constitutes a core theoretical foundation of materialist aesthetics. This article explores and reconstructs the genealogy of materialist aesthetics by examining the aesthetic writings of Karl Marx, William Morris and John Dewey. Marx, especially the young Marx, is the first major thinker who explored the meaning of symbolic production in everyday life. The young Marx defines human beings as “producing beings.” For him, human creativity is synonym for human labor, the productive activity which expands not only the new realm of nature but also human power of self-realization. At least for the young Marx, communism aims at a production of “rich human being with rich human needs” whereas capitalism produces a being only with a “sense of possessing.” The life and thought of William Morris provide a pioneering example of Marx’s aesthetic thinking. Morris‘s main concern was with the ordinary people-- their values, their pleasures in the everyday productive activities. Their strength and vitality were inextricably tied with the material practice of human life. Morris insisted that everyone had the capacity to create art and that art should have an integral place within all our daily activities. For John Dewey, all experience arises from nature and is inextricably bound up with natural processes and, thus, aesthetic experience is continuous with the ordinary activities of everyday lives. Traditional theories of art, however, institutionalize the separation of art and ordinary life. Dewey’s main concern is to restore the continuity of aesthetic experience with those processes of ordinary experience. The aesthetic thinking of these three pioneers of materialist aesthetics provides us new perspective with which we can understand the symbolic significance of our ordinary experience and the meaning of everyday consumption of popular culture.