Colloquia
The Mind and Space colloquium
Sally Promey with Kyle Dugdale
Designer’s Mind Session 1: Testimonial Aesthetics
On space, religion, race, politics, law, commerce, and their past and present implications for American aesthetics, design, and display.
Aesthetics, as matters of valuation and categorization, have their own ideologies. They subscribe to dominant affects, train their own reception, teach a correct range of responses, privilege some sorts of engagements over others, manifest in space a particular national “mind-set.” Aesthetics cohere around an ensemble of practices that form a recognizable pattern. In the United States, Christians have taken a biblical instruction to testify as a directive to display. Born of genealogical intersections of Christianity, capital, and law (evangelism, advertising, and speaking under oath) and their common truth-claiming publicities, what I have called testimonial aesthetics offers not a discrete set of coherent styles or a particular theory of beauty. Instead, it frames and infuses a practiced sensory, affective, expressive, material positioning of White self and nation with respect to “others” and the world. Testimonial aesthetics conjoins standardization and variety, inviting choice, to the standard’s advantage. A large share of Christianity’s public sway is an outcome of this national Protestant-commercial-legal aesthetics and its manners of address. American display is an evangelical phenomenon; it proclaims and promotes. It wraps its messages in the aura of sincerity. Showing so as to also tell, bearing witness, endorsing an instrumental technology that seeks to elicit conversion and purchase, testimonial aesthetics mandates display.
The Mind and Space colloquium, organized by Yoko Kawai and taking place across a series of four events throughout the academic year, explores important questions including how our mind perceives space and whether our spaces can influence mental health. The events reflect on contemporary academic conversations on Mind and Space from the conceptual, such as the cultural definition of the self and space, to the scientific, which can be measured. Accordingly, invited speakers join from the fields of philosophy, religion, neuroscience, cognitive science, environmental psychology, and behavioral science.
