Aestheticization of Poverty

Stub note: created at the Becoming Places ingest; requires fuller treatment as further representation-critique sources are ingested.

Definition

The aestheticization of poverty names the representational regime in which poverty is converted into an aesthetic relation rather than a political one — Ananya Roy's term, engaged at length in Dovey's informal-urbanism chapter. Roy's definition: "the aestheticization of poverty is the establishment of an aesthetic and aestheticized (rather than political) relationship between viewer and viewed, between professional and city, between First and Third Worlds. It is an ideology of space. Such a relationship is expressed primarily in the form of nostalgia … a pastoral nostalgia that craves the rurality of a magical countryside in a rapidly urbanizing world" (quoted in Dovey 2010, pp. 97–98). Dovey's account of the mechanism (via Roy's Berkeley studios): "A transposition has taken place whereby the squatter settlement is not the end of the design process but the means, the symbolic resource for aesthetic production. The use of images of underdevelopment as symbolic capital can also be understood as the aesthetization of poverty" (p. 97) — the battered drum played to generate a site topography; the multilayered model in which the squatters' living fabric is rendered "blank and empty, as frontier."

The concept's qualified defence is Dovey's contribution: "This is a legitimate issue but any separation of aesthetics from politics and commerce is quite untenable. In our view the interests of the residents of informal settlements are best served by entering into the complex intersections of aesthetic and social issues" (p. 98). The proof case is Gondolyu, where Romo Mangun's painted houses "worked as a form of political legitimation that has protected this community from eviction. In other words they have turned visibility from a problem into an asset, wearing a colourful place identity (their difference) as a badge of pride" (p. 99). Aesthetics, on this reading, is not the opposite of politics but one of its instruments — the question is who wields it and to what end.

Key Thinkers

• Ananya Roy (not yet paged — see log) — the concept's author ("Transnational Trespassings," in Roy & Alsayyad, Urban Informality, 2004): the Berkeley studios; the pastoral-nostalgia diagnosis; the warning that aesthetic focus "serves a neoliberal political agenda by turning attention away from transnational struggles over poverty."
• Kim Dovey (with Wiryono Raharjo) — the concept's qualified receiver: the symbolic-capital transposition mechanism; the Gondolyu counter-case; the refusal of the aesthetics/politics separation.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the mechanism's theory: the design studio and the faculty brochure as fields of cultural production converting the settlement's image into symbolic capital ("this image was chosen and used to promote the Faculty and its field trips," p. 98).
• Janice Perlman (not yet paged — see log) — the precedent: Peattie's observation that an image of the Rio favelas in The Myth of Marginality was used "to legitimate squatting" (p. 98) — images shaping politics.

Related Concepts

• informal-urbanism — the object of representation: the settlement as image vs the settlement as place-assemblage.
• symbolic-capital — the conversion mechanism: underdevelopment's images as the "symbolic resource for aesthetic production."
• spectacle — the regime's spectacle-side: the poverty image consumed at First-World distance.
• ideology — the stakes: "It is an ideology of space" — the aesthetic relation as the space-ideology that forecloses political relation.
• postcolonial-identity — the representational frame: the First/Third World viewer-viewed structure as the orientalist relation (Said via Dovey's Bangkok chapter).
• site-of-memory — the display context: the faculty exhibition and the well image as the settlement's musealization.
• spatial-document — the documentary ambivalence: mapping as solidarity (the tenure maps) versus mapping as consumption.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's founding source (pp. 96–99): Roy's definition and the Berkeley studio cases (p. 97–98); the symbolic-capital transposition (p. 97); the faculty-brochure well image (p. 98); the "beauty in abjection and dereliction" register (p. 98); the Gondolyu counter-case and the visibility-as-asset thesis (pp. 98–99); Peattie's image-shapes-politics point (p. 98).

Open Questions

• Dovey accepts Roy's diagnosis and rejects her separation ("any separation of aesthetics from politics and commerce is quite untenable"). Is Gondolyu a refutation of the aestheticization thesis or its most successful instance — and who controls the distinction between self-aestheticization and being aestheticized?
• The concept names a First/Third World relation, but the wiki's own iconic-architecture cluster aestheticizes urban difference domestically (ruin tourism, "poverty porn"). Is aestheticization-of-poverty the global-South name for what spectacle does within the North — and should the two concepts be cross-wired?
• The faculty-brochure anecdote implicates the researcher's own institution (and the book's own images). Can any representation of informal settlement escape the transposition — or is the criterion the settlement's control over its own image (Gondolyu's "badge of pride")?