From Frankfurt to Konstanz: from aesthesis as ascesis to the communicational pleasure of catharsis

Abstract

Through aThrough an examination of the aesthetic ideas of the Konstanz School (in particular, in the texts of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss), we intend to make an inflection on the usual links between communication and the aesthetic experience – in the way they were traditionally encoded , as aspects of a critique of extreme mediatization processes, in the late stages of capitalism, illustrated by the philosophical ideas of the Frankfurt School (especially in the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin). We set up as signs of this inflection the proposal for a rehabilitation of phenomena such as the “aesthetic effect” (in Iser) and “catharsis” (in Jauss), as elements that combine affective states of the aesthetic receptivity of works of art with their potential for communicability, proposing from there another type of connection for the appreciation of phenomena, processes and communicational products, in an aesthetic key.n examination of the aesthetic ideas of the Konstanz School (in particular, in the texts of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss), we intend to make an inflection on the usual links between communication and the aesthetic experience – in the way they were traditionally encoded , as aspects of a critique of extreme mediatization processes, in the late stages of capitalism, illustrated by the philosophical ideas of the Frankfurt School (especially in the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin). We set up as signs of this inflection the proposal for a rehabilitation of phenomena such as the “aesthetic effect” (in Iser) and “catharsis” (in Jauss), as elements that combine affective states of the aesthetic receptivity of works of art with their potential for communicability, proposing from there another type of connection for the appreciation of phenomena, processes and communicational products, in an aesthetic key.