Thomas Becker

Die Lust am Unseriösen (The Pleasure of the Unserious)
Zur politischen Unschärfe ästhetischer Erfahrung (On the Political Blurriness of Aesthetic Experience)
VOLUME 202

The Interesting in the Trivial

Taking pleasure in the unserious is one of the fundamental intellectual attitudes of the twentieth century. Prepared by Pop Art, Minimal, Nouvelle Vague, and Situationism, it went on to encompass cultural studies: Foucault turned against academia’s fetish for seriousness; Lacan and Derrida, against the scientification of psychoanalysis and language. Although this desire already shaped the founding acts of modern literature, for example in Baudelaire, the politics of the aesthetic regime since the mid-twentieth century has shifted to the interplay between “high and low”: Duchamp uses a trivial everyday object, the pissoir, and Pop Art recuperated an object of popular culture, the comic, which originally descended from legitimate art. The dissolution of boundaries in art not only encompasses the shift from legitimate to “illegitimate” culture, but also the other way around. While “death of the author” has long been proclaimed in art and DJ sampling cited as a reference, DJs now declare themselves authors in turn. Brecht’s proclamation of technologized authorship surfaces precisely where he’d least have expected it—among virtuoso sound engineers and underground comic artists.

Thomas Becker’s informationally rich and theoretically precise essay shows how the increasing blurring and misrecognition between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” art have become conditions of intermedial differentiation for both areas.

Thomas Becker (b. 1960) is a German cultural studies scholar and philosopher. His research interests include cultural history and cultural theory, media history and media theory, field sociology, aesthetics, and the sociology of science.