일상적 삶의 상징적 창조성－윌리암 모리스와 유물론적 미학

Abstract

One of the guiding principles of Cultural Studies comes from its ethical and philosophical understanding of everyday life of the ordinary people. The realization of the cultural significance of the symbolic creativity inherent in everyday life constitutes a core theoretical basis of diverse critical practices and analyses of Cultural Studies. The life and thought of William Morris―a celebrated poet, successful designer and craftsman, and, finally, influential revolutionary socialist―provide a pioneering example of what can be called Cultural Populism. 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. According to Morris, art was the highest expression of human activities. This paper investigates Morris's materialist aesthetics by reading his lectures and writings in terms of the symbolic creativity in everyday life. After joining Democratic League, he delivered lectures that energetically and persuadingly articulated the relationship of art to everyday life of ordinary people, and to the overall quality of living in a certain society. What constitutes the coherence of his materialist aesthetics were the emphasis on everyday life-activity, aesthetic experience in human labour, and the ecological and socialist ideal of human value, each representing the stage of the development of his aesthetic idea. For Morris, capitalist production for profit deprived the ordinary people of the pleasure of producing useful and beautiful things and turned them into mere adjuncts of machines. His ecological and socialist ideal of human living articulates very powerful and rich alternative to the way of living in capitalist society.