Botz-Bornstein Thorsten. The New Aesthetics of Deculturation: Neoliberalism, Fundamentalism and Kitsch

Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. — 248 p. — ISBN: 978-1-3500-8634-0.What are the predominant aesthetics of the twenty-first century? Thorsten Botz-Bornstein argues that deculturation, embodied by the conspicuous vulgarity of kitsch, is the overriding visual language of our times.Drawing on the work of Islam scholar Olivier Roy, who argued that religious fundamentalism arises when religion is separated from the indigenous cultural values, Botz-Bornstein shows that the production of 'absolute' truths through deculturation also exists in contemporary education. The neoliberal environment has separated learning from culture by emphasizing standardization and quantified learning outcomes. In a globalized environment, the idea of culture is no longer available as a referent; instead we are taught to rely on the culturally neutral term 'excellence'. For Botz-Bornstein, this is an absolute value similar to the 'truth' of religious fundamentalists.Similarly, kitsch is what happens when aesthetic values are separated from cultural contexts. Kitsch is aesthetic fundamentalism. Kitsch aesthetics are an aesthetics of excellence. The consumption of kitsch can be understood as an intrinsically narcissistic impulse, reinforced by social media, individuals recycling their own selves without being confronted with the culture of the “other.” The existence of self-centred “alternative truths”, fake news and conspiracy theories and selfies are linked together in the fundamentalism–neoliberalism–kitsch pattern.Including analysis of the intersections of 'cute', 'excellent', 'sublime', and 'interesting' in contemporary aesthetic culture, this is a journey through philosophy, psychology and cultural theory, redefining a new aesthetics of deculturation.Globalization is a fact. Of course, there have been other instances of globalization throughout history, but the phenomenon today is a total and global one. But what actually characterizes this phenomenon? It is the disappearance of the very notion of culture—defined as a horizon implicitly imbued with meaning, a communications system (language), and the shared values of a given society.
Of course, every culture has its history and its conflicts, and every representational system is also a form of symbolic domination; except for the anthropological monads of those societies often believed to be primitive (both primitive and isolated), every culture is subjected to expansion, acculturation, and mutations.
But from colonial and postcolonial history to the class conflict and the feminist protest against a patriarchy that is so universally rooted in cultures that it almost appears as though it springs from nature itself, we have learned not to essentialize the concept of culture. Similarly, art is not simply the product of culture either: it is autonomous and travels, as the Mona Lisa and Bach have, to find an audience far from its original home. Revealed religions, too, butt heads with the cultures from which they emerge, but they subsequently enter into a permanent dialectic of universalization and enculturation/inculturation, of fusion with local cultures