#UnderstandingSuperficiality

[hollowmaniac]

Understanding Superficiality in Contemporary Culture

Understanding Superficiality in Contemporary Culture - Superficiality is a concept that is pertinent in any explanation of contemporary culture. For the purposes of this study, it is useful to offer a definition that is not too specific or selective, so that the value of considering this study refers to methods of dressing but may include many other lifestyle activities that contribute to the formation of contemporary culture. Superficiality is that aspect of external appearance that, irrespective of the quality it tries to disguise, employs ornament as a substitute for substance. It is a mask for something else or, to be less specific, it is a surface for the sake of existing. It draws attention to the imprisonment of the individual through self-interest, personal ambition, or material possessions.

Given the prevalence of superficiality in contemporary North American society, modern civilization can be understood by making people realize why it exists and what its effects are. Understanding may provide insight into why contemporary culture places such value on signs, symbols, and status as signs, and the results of material wealth as having attributed social equality with substance over thought. Indeed, people emphasize the importance of appearance and presentation in their personal lives. Surfaces are of primary importance in the numerous ways in which North Americans express themselves and succeed. If the reality we experience is superficial and its appearance is the embodiment of that superficiality, attention to external reality can lead to a better understanding of why fabrications and ornamentation often take the place of authenticity and natural dignity. Focusing on the governed reality of our lives, the purpose is to illustrate the shallowness of the superfluous and the useful role the artist may play in highlighting the dilemma of the governed populace.

Definition and Scope

As an all-pervasive phenomenon of modern-day popular culture, superficiality is a highly ambiguous term. General attempts at categorizing the phenomenon flit between various aspects that seem to be characteristic of the use of the term. These include, for example, its being equated with a surface image, thus being suggested to be a purely formal aspect of culture. More commonly, it is deemed to be a part of the broader design milieu, mood, ethos, or zeitgeist. As this list of possible attributes makes clear, the question is whether we should think of superficiality in aesthetic terms and delineate the concept within a similarly aesthetic register, or whether the concept extends to and requires the incorporation of moral deficits of various degrees.

Our purpose here is to argue that superficiality is not best approached as simply an aesthetic category, nor as a primarily or just essentially connected genre, style, or quality. Rather, superficiality would seem to be an essential characteristic of the way in which culture, and by implication people, are currently being constructed: not just the taste or look or feel of popular culture, but the whole array of shifts in lifestyle, physical, psychological, moral, or emotional states, and political-moral attitudes - indeed, the whole of human experience as it has become self-consciously expressed in popular culture.

Historical Context

The eighteenth-century emergence of the phenomenon we now call "culture" transformed human civilization from being primarily the subject of political history to becoming the subject of cultural history. It was the era, beginning late in the seventeenth century, of the first "culture heroes"—certain figures who used their great sensibility, intelligence, or artistry to produce important works of posterity. They laid the foundations of modern connoisseurship and built various elements of the post-Enlightenment age. Together, their writings and activities attested that culture was the chief driver of human affairs.

Culture provided the most important—nay, the only—source of improvement and elevation. From it derived the state of arts, manners, morals, religion, and social institutions. But this emphasis on culture was also balanced by a desire for "civilization," which was understood not only as a process of civilizing the masses but also as an analogy to the "improvement" of agriculture. In these two ways, culture acquired an air of normative and transformative power that only increased as the era of philosophes matured. Consequently, the significance of culture in relation to human beings was understood differently than it is today.