Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art

Philosophies of art remain dominated by visions of its end and lamentations of decline. Defining the very notions of art and the aesthetic as special products of Western modernity, they suggest that postmodern challenges to traditional high culture pose a devastating danger to art's future. Richard Shusterman's book aims to cut through the confusions of these views by tracing the roots of aesthetic experience and showing how the flourishing of aesthetic forms outside modernity's sacralized realm of fine art evince the persistent presence of an artistic impulse far deeper and more durable than the modernist movement. The book defends the abiding power of aesthetic experience by exploring its diverse roles, methods and meanings, especially in fields marginal to traditional aesthetics but now most vibrantly alive in modern culture and new media. Ranging from rap, techno and country music to cinema, cyberspace and urban design, Shusterman develops his theory of "somaesthetics", charting the complex network of bodily arts so prominent in contemporary life and self-styling. By blending concrete aesthetic analysis with insightful social critique, Shusterman hopes to provide a rich menu and critical guide for the pursuit of the art of living.

Richard Shusterman is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University and the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. His other works include Pragmatist Aesthetics and Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life.

The essays are lively and engaging in many ways. Not only is Shusterman informative about topics relating to mass-media arts and self-fashioning, his reflections consistently raise important philosophical issues concerning our postmodernist condition and the cultural and sociological factors fostering it. Furthermore, Shusterman's arguments are fecund and provocative, his style vigorous, and his critique of current analytical and continental philosophical approaches adroit.... We cannot but admire the skill and verve of Shusterman's attempts to bring philosophy back to its original goals of teaching us how to live more fully and wisely.

Shusterman's new book is a collection of mutually complementary essays which encompass a decade of writing. It represents his pragmatist aesthetics critically applied to a range of issues, theories, and methods foregrounded by recent work in both analytic and continental philosophy. Interestingly, the contemporary vitality of some of these issues is in part due to the influence of Shusterman's previous writings.... Shusterman's text is enormously sophisticated not only in the range of philosophical and cultural sources which he is able to draw upon, but also in the probing and succinct way in which these are applied.