Aesthetic Society Redux? From Tokugawa Japan to the world-wide web

Lev Manovich, The Aesthetic Society: Instagram as a Life Form, forthcoming in Data Publics, eds. Peter Mörtenboeck and Helge Mooshammer (Routledge, 2020):

We live in aesthetic society (i.e., the society of aesthetically sophisticated consumer goods and services). In such a society, the production of beautiful images, interfaces, objects and experiences, are central to economic and social functioning. Rather than being a property of art, sophisticated aesthetics becomes the key property of commercial goods and services. Aesthetic society values space designers, user-experience designers, architects, photographers, models, stylists, and other design and media professionals, as well as individuals who are able to use social media, including making beautiful and refined images, and work with marketing and analytics tools. “Using” in this context refers to creating successful content, promoting this content, communicating with followers, and achieving desired goals. This article analyses one area of the aesthetic society that became particularly important in 2010s – Instagram. I discuss different types of photos shared on Instagram: casual, professional, and designed. I then cover in detail the strategies used by Instagram authors to create the designed images.

Who are these authors and what does their Instagram aesthetic production tells us about culture in the 21st century? I bring in four relevant terms proposed to describe modern cultures: mainstream, hipsters, subcultures, tribes. I suggest that instagrammers are neither an avant-garde creating something entirely new, nor subcultures that define themselves in opposition to the mainstream, nor the masses consuming commodified versions of aesthetics developed earlier by certain subcultures. They are more similar to Michel Maffesoli’s tribes but exist in the digital global Instagram “city” rather than as “villages” in a physical city. According to Maffesoli, who developed his analysis of the “urban tribe” back in 1980s, the term “refers to a certain ambience, a state of mind, and it is preferably to be expressed through lifestyles that favor appearance and form” (1996). Such ambience and state of mind are the “message” of Instagramism, but now expanded worldwide and crafted through photography.

It would be interesting to compare this with the argument Eiko Ikegami made about the role of aesthetics in Tokugawa Japan, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge UP 2005). I discuss the book briefly in an old post, Art and Civil Society in Tokugawa Japan, April 6, 2011 (reposted from The Valve 2007).