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How Could Anybody Ever Feel at Home? Aesthetic Familiarity, Epistemic Comfort, and Displacement*
Ariane Nomikos
Abstract
Places are at once inhabited by various individuals who are themselves members of diverse communities and whose experiences of the same everyday living environment can vastly differ. Everyone lives in some place, but not everyone is fortunate enough to feel as if they belong to that place, as if that place is their home. According to José Medina (2017), those who inhabit a place they are unable to make their home experience a unique form of displacement, that of being displaced within a place. This, he claims, is a problem for everyone—not just for those experiencing displacement within a place but also for those who are able to feel at home in that same place and inhabit it comfortably. So, minimizing this displacement is a key challenge facing pluralistic societies. In this paper, I show why adequately responding to this challenge requires taking the role of (everyday) aesthetics seriously, both when framing the problem and proposing solutions. In doing so, this paper bridges important discussions in everyday aesthetics and social epistemology and establishes a basis for the fruitful exchange of ideas between the two philosophical subdisciplines. It also provides an entry point for critically engaging with the social mission of everyday aesthetics put forward by Yuriko Saito (2017).
Key Words
defamiliarization; displacement; environmental aesthetics; everyday aesthetics; familiarity; home; José Medina; Yuriko Saito; social epistemology
1. Familiarity and home
Familiarity is a characteristic feature of the aesthetics of everyday life. Everyday living environments and the objects in them have a familiar aesthetic character that can give rise to rich, emotionally complex aesthetic experiences. Familiarity also determines expectations and supports the routine activities of daily life. Such activities lend aesthetic texture to the everyday too, and engaging in them can help support subjective well-being.[1] Thus, when experienced positively, familiarity can provide a sense of comfort and stability that is life-affirming and promotes flourishing. It gives rise to a sense of homeliness that can serve as the basis for place attachment and other meaningful people-place relations. It is no surprise that the places with which people are most familiar are the ones they call home.
Home is a special kind of place, one of belonging. And having some place one can call home is an important feature of human experience. It shapes people’s identities, how they perceive the world around them, and how they understand themselves in relation to others. Typically, people’s strongest emotional attachments are to their homely places. Indicative of this is the joy often felt upon returning home after a long trip abroad, or the distress experienced when one’s homely place is transformed in ways they cannot control or endorse, or the mourning that follows the destruction of one’s home. The following excerpt from Yi-Fu Tuan is particularly telling on these points:
A person in the process of time invests bits of his emotional life in his home, and beyond the home in his neighborhood. To be forcibly evicted from one’s home and neighborhood is to be stripped of a sheathing, which in its familiarity protects the human being from the bewilderments of the outside world.[2]
Acting in ways that degrade and threaten to destroy people’s everyday living environments is distressing, in part because it disrupts familiarity, thereby threatening the integrity of such place attachments. So, actually destroying people’s homes is a bad thing—indeed, a form of environmental injustice—partly because of the distress caused by severed place attachments and the loss of comfort, safety, and sense of self that follows.
The experience of familiarity, however, is not always positive. And the mere familiarity of one’s everyday living environment does not suffice to create the conditions for positive aesthetic experience and place attachment. For some people, the experience of familiarity afforded by their everyday living environments serves as a painful reminder of their adverse circumstances and supports a routine that inhibits their flourishing. The life-affirming feelings of comfort, security, and belonging—of homeliness—are rare, if present at all.
In other words, not all are fortunate enough to inhabit a place they can call home to begin with, at least not in any meaningful way. This makes them worse off. So, preventing people from creating positive place attachments and feeling at home in their everyday living environments is a bad thing. It deprives them of an important human good and constitutes another form of environmental injustice. Enabling this deprivation, either by actively working to maintain the systems of power preventing people from securing this good or by doing nothing to oppose them—particularly when doing something would come at little to no personal cost—contributes to the injustice.
Moreover, even when familiarity is experienced positively, it can have negative consequences for oneself and others. For one thing, one’s familiar way of experiencing their everyday living environments is often couched in practical considerations that conceal their aesthetic character and potential.[3] This forecloses a range of rich, potentially transformative, aesthetic experience in everyday life. For another, the intense feeling of belonging to, and identification with, a place that is affirmed and maintained by the familiarity of one’s everyday surroundings can fuel a resistance to change and a preference for one’s own that can result in the (sometimes systematic) exclusion of those who are perceived as different and thus “out of place.” Such exclusionary sentiments can make it hard, if not impossible, for people to experience a sense of comforting familiarity and belonging in their everyday living environments.
Relatedly, the experience of comforting familiarity can deceive people into thinking that they know everything there is to know about their everyday living environments, rendering them in a state of what José Medina calls “epistemic comfort.”[4] Epistemic comfort can obscure the existence of societal ills that do not immediately affect us, but are nevertheless present, fueling a kind of complacency with ignorance that can be especially insidious.
I examine the relationship between aesthetic familiarity and epistemic comfort below. I claim that the experience of familiarity is instrumental to epistemic comfort and to the irresponsible inhabitation Medina says it gives rise to. Thus, ameliorating the problem of irresponsible inhabitation requires paying attention to the aesthetic effects of people’s everyday living environments. I conclude with a recommendation for disrupting familiarity by deliberately seeking out experiences of strangeness in everyday life through defamiliarization. Engaging in the process of defamiliarization can prompt individuals to examine the aesthetic effects of their everyday living environments and the familiar objects in them, which in turn can help counteract some of the undesirable social effects of epistemic comfort. This positions defamiliarization as a vitally important means of everyday aesthetic education, which is a core component of the social mission with which Yuriko Saito (2017) tasks the discipline of everyday aesthetics. Even more, defamiliarization can provide novel aesthetic experiences capable of enriching personal life. This is an independent reason to engage in the process and can provide additional motivation for doing so.
2. Epistemic comfort and displacement (within place)
Among the challenges facing a pluralistic society is figuring out how to best support different ways of being and flourishing in a single place. Places are at once inhabited by various individuals who are themselves members of diverse communities and whose experiences of the same everyday living environment can vastly differ. These diversely situated individuals may engage in a wide range of activities within, and experience different levels of attachment and belonging to, the same place. Everyone lives in some place, but not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to call that place home—to feel as if they belong in that place, as if that place is theirs in some sense.[5]
According to Medina, those who inhabit a place they are unable to make their home constitute a unique form of displacement, that of being “displaced within a place.” This displacement, he argues, is a problem for everyone, not just for those who are displaced within a place but also for those who inhabit that same place comfortably and feel at home in it. This is because of the intimate connection between placing and displacing, or inclusion and exclusion, and thus the inevitability of (at least some) displacement. “Any community—no matter how open and inclusive—will allow some ways of inhabiting places by some people and not some other ways by some others. Every form of inclusion,” Medina states, “is at the same time a form of exclusion.”[6]
Failing to acknowledge this interrelatedness leads to what Medina calls “irresponsible inhabitation,” which could be thought of as a kind of insensitivity toward other ways of living in a place.[7] We inhabit our place irresponsibly, Medina claims, when we inhabit it “comfortably without any regard for the impact of our inhabitation on others…without taking into account whether or not others with whom we share spaces feel at home in them.”[8] Such ignorance, and the irresponsible inhabitation it enables, is held in place by what he calls “epistemic comfort”—a state in which we feel comfortable with respect to what we know and do not know about the particular places we call our homes.[9]
On Medina’s view, such epistemic comfort is unwarranted. This is because knowing one’s place involves knowing it synchronically—that is, “knowing how it is currently related to many other places and how it is constituted by those relations”—as well as diachronically—that is, “knowing how to trace its historical trajectories, how to appreciate its continuities and discontinuities…[so as to be able] to relate its present shape and configuration to other possible ones.”[10] Thus, knowing one’s place in Medina’s sense is an ongoing and endless task that we can work on perfecting, but which we can never complete.[11] It is also largely an imaginative task; conceiving of all the different ways certain places are related to other places across space and time, and envisioning the various possibilities that might unfold in the future, are both mediated by the imagination. Finally, knowing one’s place on Medina’s account also has important cognitive and affective dimensions. Knowing one’s place, he claims, “requires cognitive attitudes and habits that enable you to recognize a particular place as your own,” and such recognition “requires affective attitudes that [enable] us to position ourselves emotionally in relation to that place.”[12]
So, being in a state of epistemic comfort reveals a complacency with ignorance concerning our everyday living environments. For Medina, this constitutes a failure in our ethical and political responsibilities towards others that must be rectified. Countering this ignorance and disrupting this comfort requires cultivating a more responsible epistemic relation toward one’s homely place, one that recognizes the intimate relationship between placement and displacement and is sensitive to the ways in which one’s own comfortable inhabitation in one place might impede someone else’s comfortable inhabitation within that same place. Since knowing one’s place is both a cognitive and affective task, confronting our epistemic comfort and the ignorance it helps sustain requires more than just updating our repertoire of beliefs. It also requires varying the ways we emotionally relate to our homely places.
Thus, Medina urges us to seek out opportunities to experience our homely places anew—to feel perplexed and even uncomfortable in them, to come “to have diversified emotional responses” toward them, and “to feel a wide range of emotions about them.”[13] Such experiences, he claims, can function as starting points for “constructive processes of self-estrangement” that can prompt us to critically interrogate “the presuppositions and implications of our cognitive, affective, and imaginary relations to place.”[14] “We need to cultivate epistemic discomfort through processes of self-estrangement,” he continues, “so as to produce the kind of critical awareness and sensitivity that can lead to being responsive to other possible ways of inhabiting places, to other experiential perspectives that can be part of those places or be affected by them.”[15] This awareness and sensitivity is required for responsible co-inhabitation, and I think the discipline of everyday aesthetics is in a unique position to help us see how we might attain it.
3. Reframing the issue: epistemic comfort and aesthetic familiarity
Far from being a shallow, superfluous afterthought, aesthetic considerations are embedded within the fabric of everyday life in a way that shapes our thoughts and compels us to act or refrain from acting. That is to say, the aesthetic and the practical are intimately connected in everyday life. Failure to pay attention to this can have serious and far-reaching consequences. As Yuriko Saito points out, the “power of the aesthetic can affect us positively or negatively, and in certain contexts, it becomes extremely important that we remain vigilant about the way in which we are affected.”[16] Such contexts include those in which the aesthetic is used to manipulate people for commercial or political ends (e.g., advertising, propaganda), but also those in which seemingly trivial aesthetic tastes and judgments have negative consequences for our interactions with others (e.g., reinforcing racial bias), and even the state of the world (e.g., think of the environmental costs of maintaining a green lawn).
The power and pervasiveness of the aesthetic in everyday life is a key insight of the field of everyday aesthetics. Considering this, Saito presents the field with a task. Everyday aesthetics, she argues, has a social responsibility to expose the power of the aesthetic and to harness it toward better world-making, which she characterizes in terms of “enriching personal life, facilitating respectful and satisfying interpersonal relationships, creating a civil and humane society, and ensuring the sustainable future.”[17] I think the responsible co-inhabitation Medina aims for fits well within this characterization.
So, responsible co-inhabitation is a desideratum of world-making. If Medina is correct, and I assume here that he is, then epistemic comfort and the irresponsible inhabitation it facilitates detract from the world-making project. Everyday aesthetics delivers insights that can help us better understand how epistemic comfort might take hold, which in turn can help us craft more effective strategies for amelioration.[18]
What gives rise to epistemic comfort? It is tempting to think that some combination of pernicious self-interest and willful ignorance causes people to feel satisfied with what they know about their everyday living environments, thus enabling them to dwell in those environments unconcerned with how their comfortable inhabitation might affect others. Though the presence of such flaws in character are relevant to the existence of epistemic comfort and might well factor into the best explanation of the phenomenon, they do not tell the whole story. In particular, they do not speak to the aesthetic effects of people’s everyday living environments and their impact on people’s epistemic relations with those environments. I think that the aesthetic character of people’s everyday living environments plays an important role in creating and sustaining epistemic comfort.
One way to think about the aesthetic character of places is in terms of strangeness and familiarity.[19] Our homely places, we might say, tend to have a familiar aesthetic character—an aesthetic character marked by familiarity. This familiarity, as Arto Haapala points out, may be nothing more than a visual habit and perceived control over things: “things are in their places; they are there where they should be, where I am used to seeing them.”[20] In this way, familiarity determines expectations and supports the routine of daily life while providing the comfort and stability crucial for ontological security and subjective well-being.[21] It also gives rise to a sense of homeliness that can serve as the basis for place attachment. When familiarity is experienced positively, as is the case for most who are lucky enough to feel at home in their everyday living environments, it can deceive us into thinking that we know everything there is to know, or at least everything that we need to know, about these environments. After all, these places are our homes, and who knows more about our homes than us? The feeling of self-assurance is reinforced by the fact that we typically recognize the sights, sounds, and smells that give an aesthetic texture to our everyday living environments almost immediately. How can we be ignorant of our surroundings and at the same time recognize virtually everything around us? Each recurring experience of recognition within our homely places serves to strengthen our confidence in our epistemic relation to those places, not to mention our emotional attachment to them. All of this can function to render us complacent.
Moreover, in their familiarity, the features of our everyday surroundings express to us a sense of permanence, comfort, and security that is life-affirming and allows us to flourish. From our perspective then, challenging a status quo that enables and supports our relatively comfortable inhabitation and flourishing makes little sense. The situation is only further complicated because we are typically unaware that the aesthetic familiarity of our surroundings affects us in this way: once familiarity takes hold, it works below the surface to maintain our complacency with ignorance. This can impede responsible co-inhabitation. Unless familiarity is somehow disrupted, thereby thwarting our expectations and ability to immediately recognize our everyday living environments as ours, chances are we may never come to notice these effects, let alone question what they might conceal.
4. Disrupting familiarity: a case for defamiliarization
Shedding light on the aesthetic character of people’s everyday lives and how it shapes the way they relate to their environments and the things and people in them is a goal of everyday aesthetics discourse.[22] Since our usual way of experiencing our everyday living environments is often tied up with practical considerations that can obscure their aesthetic character and potential, some theorists maintain that paying attention to the aesthetics of everyday life requires engaging in defamiliarization: the imaginative process by which one renders the ordinary and familiar strange, unfamiliar, and extra-ordinary.[23] Such theorists typically go on to emphasize the individual benefits of defamiliarization—namely, how it can result in novel experiences that can enrich personal life. As will soon become clear, I think employing defamiliarization strategies in everyday life can have social benefits too.
It is said that the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky first introduced the concept of defamiliarization in a 1917 essay titled, “Art as Technique,” where he claimed that defamiliarization was “the essential condition of art” and “the effect produced by nearly all artistic techniques.”[24] In Shklovsky’s own words: “the technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”[25]
As an approach to everyday aesthetics, defamiliarization starts from the premise that the familiar and habitual nature of everyday life—of our everyday living environments, the objects in them, and the routine activities and events that unfold there—prevents us from attending to its aesthetic character. In order to capture the aesthetic dimension of everyday life, then, we must disrupt the familiarity and bring the unnoticed background to the foreground. We can do this by making occasional adjustments to routine activities, like walking to the grocery store instead of driving, shifting our attention to typically overlooked dimensions of familiar objects like the quality of the stitchwork in the seams of a sweatshirt, or adopting the perspective of someone sufficiently different from us—“putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes”—when going about our daily life. Defamiliarization can transform the routine, dreary, and mundane into something exciting, remarkable, and refreshing. It can make the comforting seem alienating, and the safe seem threatening. In doing so, it can help put our relationship with our everyday living environments and routines in perspective. And it can help draw attention to the often-neglected aesthetic potential of our everyday lives, while also highlighting the active role of the imagination in everyday aesthetic experience.
A common objection to defamiliarization as an approach to everyday aesthetics concerns the problem of aestheticization, or artification. This also serves as an objection to approaching the everyday more generally through an artistic lens. The worry amounts to something like this: Because these approaches prompt us to find more occasion for aesthetic experience in everyday life, approaching the everyday from an artistic lens can cause us to defamiliarize the ordinary aspects of everyday life in morally dubious ways—for example, in ways that cause us to see the problematic features of some everyday living environments like poverty, ruin, and destruction as beautiful, thereby obscuring the need to combat the societal ills that such features indicate.
There is no denying that this is an undesirable possibility. However, it is by no means a necessary consequence of engaging in defamiliarization in everyday life. The goal of defamiliarization is not, by necessity, a pleasing, enjoyable, overall positive experience; it is an experience of strangeness, unfamiliarity, novelty—all of which can be exciting, refreshing, and gratifying or alienating, unnerving, and anxiety-inducing. Moreover, defamiliarization need not operate in one direction; for instance, by transforming the negative ordinary into the positive extra-ordinary. It can also render the positive dimensions of everyday life, like its comforting familiarity, into something negative (or perhaps just neutral), that can disrupt the comfort that can function to obscure the existence of societal ills that do not immediately affect us. Besides, not all art-experiences are positive, and the critical distance with which we sometimes engage artworks might be useful in everyday life for more than just its ability to facilitate positive aesthetic experience. For instance, a degree of critical distance is likely needed before one can acknowledge the ways one is complacent with and even benefits from structural inequality. Thus, defamiliarization and the resultant aestheticization/artification are only a problem when defamiliarization is done indiscriminately, when maximizing pleasurable aesthetic experience above all is its chief goal.[26]
Figuring out when it is appropriate to defamiliarize the everyday is a challenge facing everyday aesthetics discourse. In fact, Saito considers this task even more pressing than that of determining the precise nature of everyday aesthetic experience—that is, whether the familiar character of everyday life is experienced as dull and boring or safe and comforting.[27] My suggestion here is that it is appropriate, perhaps even required, for one to defamiliarize (aspects of) their everyday living environment, particularly when one finds oneself in a state of epistemic comfort, feeling comfortable and at home in their everyday living environment.
Defamiliarization can help disrupt the aesthetic familiarity that facilitates epistemic comfort and impedes responsible co-inhabitation, and it can do so in a way that creates experiences of tension that set the stage for critically interrogating our epistemic relations to our homely places like Medina suggests. Even more, defamiliarization has the added benefit of being in our control: we choose whether and to what extent we want our familiar places to appear strange. Thus, it can disrupt familiarity in a way that is less threatening and less likely to elicit the defensive and reactionary attitudes that can make respectful interpersonal relationships and responsible co-inhabitation even harder. It is here that the social benefits that come with defamiliarizing our everyday living environments become clear.
Medina’s proposed solution to irresponsible inhabitation involves diversifying the ways we respond to our homely places, so as to become sensitive and open to the different ways one might inhabit them. One way to do this, he notes, is to imagine and reimagine our homely places from different perspectives, to try to see them as strange, foreign, and even incapable of comfortably supporting our current way of life. These shifts in perspective can jumpstart processes of self-estrangement and help us cultivate the epistemic and affective discomfort that Medina deems crucial for sustaining responsible co-inhabitation. In other words, Medina proposes engaging in defamiliarization strategies, though he does not use this language. Making the familiar appear strange and thus capable of being experienced in ways we are unaccustomed to is precisely what defamiliarization aims to do. As such, defamiliarization can help us diversify the ways we relate to our everyday living environments. And it can help us take responsibility for what we know and do not know about those environments.
Recall that the value of defamiliarization, as typically employed in everyday aesthetics discourse, lies in its ability to produce overall positive aesthetic experiences. However, the novel experiences that defamiliarization gives rise to need not always be positive. The ensuing strangeness can be confusing, alienating, and uncomfortable just as well, giving the overall experience a difficult, in some cases negative, aesthetic character. This does not mean these experiences are any less rich, fulfilling, or valuable. On the contrary, difficult aesthetic experiences of this sort can deliver profound moments of insight and serve as starting points for critically engaging with our everyday living environments. Indeed, much of the social value of defamiliarization stems from its ability to uncover and make salient uncomfortable truths that can give rise to epistemic and affective discomfort—a crucial step to cultivating more responsible epistemic relations to our homely places and inhabiting them accordingly. As such, defamiliarization is an invaluable tool for ameliorating the problem of irresponsible co-inhabitation and has an important role to play in the world-making project.
5. The social mission of everyday aesthetics
Linking the experience of aesthetic familiarity with epistemic comfort and introducing defamiliarization as a tool for self-estrangement can help make progress on the problem of displacement within place that Medina delineates. These connections also help further the social mission of everyday aesthetics.
Recall from section 3 that, given the power and pervasiveness of the aesthetic in everyday life, Saito tasks the discipline of everyday aesthetics with a social responsibility: to educate people about the far-reaching consequences of their seemingly trivial everyday aesthetic considerations and help them cultivate an aesthetic sensibility that will positively contribute to the world-making project. She suggests:
Something like ‘aesthetic’ education, distinct from the existing educational programs on visual arts, music, literary arts, theater, and dance, may be worth exploring and developing. Such education may include critically analyzing the aesthetic effects of familiar objects and environments in our lives, as well as creating positive aesthetic effects through designing objects and environments and practicing respectful and caring interactions.[28]
The preceding discussion provides an example of what (a component of) this aesthetic education might look like. It does so by exploring some of the negative aspects of aesthetic familiarity in everyday living environments—namely, how the recurring experience of familiarity can create the conditions for epistemic comfort. Of course, the discussion here only begins to scratch the surface. The aesthetic effects of familiar objects and environments in our lives are numerous; continuing the mission of everyday aesthetics requires delineating them further.
Also recall that a related challenge of everyday aesthetics discourse involves figuring out when it is appropriate to defamiliarize the everyday—something Saito also takes to be of vital importance. So, it is reasonable to assume that cultivating the ability to discern appropriate contexts for defamiliarization count amongst the goals of aesthetic education as envisioned by Saito.
The case for defamiliarization presented in the previous section points to one such context: it is appropriate to defamiliarize our everyday living environments, especially when we feel comfortable and at home in those environments. Again, this is because defamiliarization can help diversify the ways we relate and respond to our homely places and make us privy to other possible ways of inhabiting them, which can counter the epistemic comfort that facilitates irresponsible inhabitation. Even more, defamiliarization in such contexts can further the social mission of everyday aesthetics by prompting us to examine the aesthetic effects of our everyday living environments and the familiar objects in them, which Saito explicitly lists as a potential component of everyday aesthetic education.
But the case for defamiliarization made here is certainly not an exhaustive one. Important questions remain. For example: Even if defamiliarization can work in this way, why think people will engage in it for more than just overall pleasurable everyday aesthetic experience? After all, most people don’t just willingly seek out discomfort in their everyday lives. And besides, didn’t this entire discussion begin by pointing to the significance of comforting familiarity in the first place? If so, can there be such a thing as too much defamiliarization? And if yes, how much is too much? I hope this preliminary discussion motivates others to pick up these questions and further the social mission of everyday aesthetics in new ways.
Ariane Nomikos
ariane.nomikos@mail.wvu.edu
Ariane Nomikos is an assistant professor of philosophy at West Virginia University, where she teaches courses in ethics and aesthetics and advises the (very lively) philosophy club. Her research interests lie at the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, and environmental philosophy.
Published on July 28, 2024.
Cite this article: Ariane Nomikos, “How Could Anybody Ever Feel at Home? Aesthetic Familiarity, Epistemic Comfort, and Displacement,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 22 (2024), accessed date.
Author’s Note
For valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper, I am grateful to Brendan Cline, Zhou Caishu, an anonymous reviewer for this journal, and the audiences at the 2023 ASA Eastern Division Meeting in Philadelphia and the group meeting of the International Society for Environmental Ethics at the 2023 Pacific APA in San Francisco.
Endnotes
* The title of this paper is inspired by the 2017 song (How Could Anybody) Feel at Home, by Open Mike Eagle.
[1] For example, Kevin Melchionne, in “The Point of Everyday Aesthetics,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 11 (2014), defends an account of everyday aesthetics according to which the source of value in everyday aesthetics is subjective well-being. See also, Ariane Nomikos, “Place Matters,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76, 4 (2018), section III.
[2] Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 99.
[3] Noticing, for instance, how much more one enjoys their morning coffee out of a specific mug, or how happy (and at ease) a clean counter makes them, can provide a source of gratification. Becoming aware of how gratifying such seemingly insignificant everyday aesthetic preferences are can then prompt us to attend to them more often, which, as Sherri Irvin points out, can make our lives seem more satisfying to us. This not only promotes subjective well-being but also “holds the promise of more effective moral agency” (43). For example, becoming aware of the subtle ways in which all the so-called “little things” of everyday life bring us pleasure can help us abandon the quest for material fulfillment, allowing us to “[realize our] moral values more fully” by dedicating more time and resources to causes we care about” (43). See Irvin, “The pervasiveness of the aesthetic in ordinary experience,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 48, 1 (2008).
[4] José M. Medina, “Cosmopolitan Ignorance and ‘Not Knowing Your Place,’” in eds. Jessica Wahman, José M. Medina, and John J. Stuhr, Cosmopolitinism and Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 107-122.
[5] For an examination of this experience from the migrant perspective, see Mirjana Lozanovska, Migrant Housing: Architecture, Dwelling, Migration (London: Routledge, 2019). See also, Maram Shaweesh and Kelly Greenop, “Aesthetic Anxieties in the Migrant House: The Case of the Lebanese in Australia,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 30, 2 (2020). Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for pointing me to these works.
[6] Medina, “Cosmopolitan Ignorance,” 108. If Medina is correct here, then the only way to support different ways of being and flourishing in a place is to allow for some displacement—perhaps something like minimal displacement experienced by all. In other words, the best possible (pluralistic) society might just be one in which no one ever feels fully at home in the place one inhabits.
[7] Insensitivity is a central theme of Medina’s work, particularly in The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), where he characterizes insensitivity as “being cognitively and affectively numbed to the lives of others: being inattentive to and unconcerned by their experiences, problems, and aspirations; and being unable to connect with them and to understand their speech and action” (xi).
[8] Medina, “Cosmopolitan Ignorance,” 108.
[9] Ibid., 111-112.
[10] Ibid., 110.
[11] Knowing one’s place in Medina’s sense is quite demanding and must be understood in light of his broader motivation to link the local ignorance that results from inhabiting one’s place irresponsibly to the more global “cosmopolitan ignorance that mis(leads) agents to inhabit the world irresponsibly (that is, without due sensitivity to multiple others),” in order to illustrate the dangers of irresponsible inhabitation (Ibid., 109).
[12] Ibid., 113.
[13] Ibid.,114
[14] Ibid., 115.
[15] Ibid., 116.
[16] Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 28. See also: Yuriko Saito, “The Role of Aesthetics in World-Making,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 9 (2021).
[17] Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar, 196.
[18] Paul C. Taylor expands on Medina’s earlier work on epistemic injustice along similar lines in “An Aesthetics of Resistance,” in Pragmatism and Justice, eds. Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Taylor shows how the problems of epistemic injustice that Medina focuses on have important aesthetic dimensions, and he invokes the tools of aesthetic criticism and practice to aid in their amelioration. See also Medina (2013).
[19] I like to think of aesthetic character as a kind of second-order aesthetic property. So when I say that a particular place has a familiar aesthetic character, I am ascribing a second-order property to the place: the property of familiarity, of being familiar. This can amount to one of two things. First, that the various first-order aesthetic qualities perceived are familiar to the subject such that, when taken together, they give rise to a sense of familiarity that distinguishes, and partly constitutes, the overall aesthetic character of a place. Or second, that familiarity characterizes the aesthetic character of the place. In other words, familiarity is a property ascribed to the particular look or feel of the place—that is, to the place’s aesthetic character, whatever that aesthetic character might be. For example, if the city you are visiting for the first time has a gloomy aesthetic character that matches the aesthetic character of your hometown, you might note that this new city has a familiar feel. In doing so, you are pointing to a feature of the gloominess, one that is perceived in virtue of your unique appreciative situation. Rather than constituting the place’s aesthetic character, in this case, the quality of familiarity is being ascribed to the aesthetic character of the place—that is, to the gloominess—as if it were a kind of third-order, or associative, aesthetic property, with epistemic content and emotional salience. Emily Brady’s discussion of aesthetic character in Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003) has been instructive to my understanding here.
[20] Arto Haapala, “On the Aesthetics of the Everyday: Familiarity, Strangeness, and the Meaning of Place,” in eds. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith, The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 46.
[21] ‘Ontological security’ refers to a psychological state akin to feeling at home with oneself and the world, to a sense of order and continuity felt when things seem to be going smoothly (so to speak) and sustained, in part, by familiar surroundings and routines. See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) and Modernity and Self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
[22] See Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar and Everyday Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also, Sherri Irvin, “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 48, 1 (2008) and Thomas Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Buffalo: Broadview Press, 2012).
[23] For an overview, see Saito Aesthetics of the Familiar, chapter one.
[24] Daniel P. Gunn, “Making Art Strange: A Commentary on Defamiliarization,” The Georgia Review, 38, 1, (1984), 27.
[25] Quoted in Gunn, “Making Art Strange,” 28.
[26] For an argument against indiscriminate and uncritical artification, see Yuriko Saito, “Everyday Aesthetics and Artification, Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 4 (2012). For a detailed examination of the problem of aestheticization and a subsequent response, see Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, chapter six.
[27] For an overview of the conceptual debates regarding the ‘everyday’ and the ‘aesthetics’ in ‘everyday aesthetics,’ see Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar, part I.
[28] Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar, 225.