a friend asked for my opinion on her newly purchased bag. i looked at it, examined it, and contemplated for a short while. i eventually came to a conclusion. yes, i think it’s good. it’s nice.

sometimes words come out in such a harsh kind of way, not the originally intended way. it happens frequently and i’m working on this particular communicative tendency of mine at the moment. i can be extremely direct and sometimes it hurts others’ feelings without realising. when the relationship gets pretty hostile i wonder what’s going on, and i find out then that what i have said was translated in a completely different way to my original intentions. but this also means that when i compliment you, you can safely assume that i really do mean it.

anyway, i joked about her “nana-like” taste in fashion, and said that the bag would go very well with all her fashion items. i went to teach after that. while the students were doing their exercises, i sensed a quiet osmosis of thought; on what basis did i come to the conclusion on her bag - rather, on the aesthetic qualtity of her bag - and did i communicate it well with her?

apparently the word “aesthetics,” coined by a.g baumgarten, is derived from the greek “aisthetikos,” which means “of sense perception.” there are generally two ways of approaching aesthetics: philosophy of beauty and that of art. initially the subject mainly remained in other “more established” philosophical realms like ethics, but it became a more autonomous philosophical entity largely thanks to Kant (well, in western society anyway). there are countless theories in the milieu of aesthetics, for which i don’t have a lot of knowledge. one of my previous phd plans was actually on the digital aesthetics of mobile media; before delving into the subject, i promptly changed it to something a lot more manageable and equally interesting though :)

anyway, the way i approached the evaluation of her bag was multifold, simply because it was practically impossible to view it in a completely objective manner. there were a lot of negotiations in my head.

1. i looked at the bag. of course naturally, i examined the quality of its beauty from my point of view. she asked for my opinion, so i didn’t really examined it from her aesthetic point of view (yes, i’m often like this. plus, i’m not a mind reader so it’s impossible for me to comprehend someone’s aesthetic point of view without explicit/implicit in-depth communication on the issue). colours. shape. size. texture… i examined them. i thought the level of its beauty was higher than average.
2. my taste in fashion is pretty different from my friend’s. so of course, if i took the bag into my world of fashion, it would remain in the same spot … for a long time; it’d probably stay nice and clean somewhere in my wardrobe. but now i had to look at it in relation to her fashion style. sometimes she dresses in black - a very recent phenomenon - sometimes in grunge style, but she has a lot of vintage romantic style fashion items, which i think suit her really well and find lovely and beautiful. this bag would go really well with most of her clothes and accessories, i thought.
3. then i also somewhat automatically looked at it from the capitalist perspective to evaluate the “practicality” of the bag as a fashion item. i wasn’t sure how much she had paid for it, but it looked quite unlikely that it would fall apart any time too soon, unless you intentionally try to rip it apart or do something similarly violent to it. and as a fashion item, i thought about its APC: audience, purpose, and context.

• audience: in general, all is good. people would like it or at least wouldn’t have any aversion towards it
• purpose: i asked why she bought it, to which she replied “because i could actually fit everything in it, unlike all my other bags” - ok, not her exact words but something along the line
• context: a portable item that would hold things safely, which could be carried around to various places and events within her current (and potential) personal, cultural, social, and philosophical realms.

i noticed that (1) was definitely the first thing that came to my mind. but in a split second (2) and (3) became deeply inter-related with (1), so it became all too difficult to analyse the process of my approach. mostly fortunately, but not in this case, any thought process seems to be non-linear in its nature. so the conclusion of (1) (in bold) was reached through a multi-faceted exploration involving simultaneous contextualisations at both individual and social levels. so really, it appears that what was purchased is not the product itself, but the concepts and images reified in its contextualisation.

well, in the end, i found out that i’d made her doubt - though very slightly - her fashion style, so i guess the communication part wasn’t carried out very well. nevertheless, my conclusion remains unchanged. i think she should be happy with her purchase; good for her for having chosen that bag. now let’s move on :)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 10:41 pm and is filed under personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.