Kinaesthetic impulses : aesthetic experience, bodily knowledge, and pedagogical practices in Germany, 1871-1918

This dissertation studies a moment of transition in German aesthetics in the late nineteenth century. Starting in the 1870s, groups of artists, architects, historians, critics, connoisseurs, and museum officials in Germany declared that traditional aesthetics, which had operated "from above" with metaphysical concepts such as the beautiful and the sublime, was obsolete. According to these intellectuals, the old aesthetics needed to be replaced by a scientific and empirical "aesthetics from below." The emergence of the new aesthetics was closely related to the rise of mass politics and mass culture in the newly unified Germany. Concerned that an attentive and contemplative perception could not be afforded by the masses, these liberal-minded members of the educated middle classes theorized a new kind of aesthetic experience that was based on corporeal pleasure rather than intellectual judgment. According to this model, an aesthetic encounter with an artwork was primarily kinaesthetic: an artwork elicited an unconscious and immediate effect on the musculature of its beholder. I examine three episodes, in which this idea was employed to pedagogical ends at the turn of the twentieth century. In the work of the artist Hermann Obrist (1862-1927), the kinaesthetic model of experience became the basis of a new pedagogy for the arts, which utilized the unconscious movements of the body to choreograph the production and reception of aesthetic effects. The architect August Endell (1871-1925) theorized these effects further and attempted to invent an exact science of design, which correlated architectural forms to the reaction that they would produce in the human body.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Çelik, Zeynep, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mark M. Jarzombek.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41721

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/41721