Much of this response has been cobbled together in a moment that felt like synthesis, but I fear it will soon escape and become a tangled mass of thought. Looking through the previous posts by my colleagues, I noticed a few threads that kept repeating as to the nature of a relation between the aesthetic and the vernacular--two terms which I still find myself struggling to articular. Bruce put forth Elizabeth's suggestion (we should all thank her later, by the way) that the vernacular is "the everyday, the unschooled, concerned with function," and I think we rightfully came to the conclusion that this function inherently depends upon context and positioning. Yet, while context may be everything, I look to Helmers, when she states: "it is not that there are no independent facts about the past, but that the researcher is instrument in selecting the area to explicate and illuminate" and that in viewing an image, "the past is a gap that readers must fill with that which they know at the time of viewing" (66).
In reflecting upon a visual artifact, then, we are necessarily drawn into conversation with the past (even if the past consists of earlier that month, day, minute, etc) in our pursuit of surrounding context. But it isn't simply a matter of a temporal past, but of a spatial past, examining the ecology of an artifact. In such a way, categorizing something as vernacular or aesthetic depends upon how we construct that ecology of meaning through past experiences/understandings and sought knowledge. The function of the vernacular is dependent upon the moment and the place in which the vernacular participates, and I think Bitzer's Rhetorical Situation proves itself a useful frame for understanding the factors that go into determining whether something can be considered vernacular or aesthetic. None of us occupy the same space from which we might construe a common vantage point, instead might we simply have the illusions of such commonality?
I'm reminded of the idea of a public expressed by Lucaites in his analysis of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The act of photographing the vernacular, the experiences of the impoverished farmers suddenly brought light to the individual context of a certain population. It drew borders that served to separate that community from others and fragmented the already constructed version of a public even as it constructed a highly arranged interpretation of the population it claimed to study. Molly speaks about the importance of place in defining the vernacular, but doesn't an example like LUNPFM lead us to consider how place is more than a generality and dependent upon the individual spaces occupied, which then are aggregated to create some common meaning? Again, I keep coming back to place and context as defining characteristics of both aesthetics and the vernacular, and while it might seem easy enough to place them at opposite ends of a continuum, they inform one another.
I think it was Christine who mentioned the nature of conscious versus the unconscious, and the vernacular does seem to encompass those aspects which are unconscious--the perceived or agreed condition that is the everyday. But again the everyday is so limited to the everyday of a specific place at a specific time and what may have been considered vernacular depends on an understanding, or a reading of that particular context. And yet I can't get past the idea that looking back, we do not have an unfiltered view of historical events. We don't have a simplified understanding, but rather a constructed understanding of past contexts through the lens of particular historians or scholars. And the same thing can be attributed to aesthetics, that what we consider to be pleasing (and in this case, as Christine suggests, maybe we shouldn't see it purely as pleasing, but pair it with the concept of the sublime) is fluid and changeable and dependent so entirely on a constructed sense of aesthetic value. I wonder, though: now that we are so normalized by our exposure to mass media outlets, have we somewhat flattened the realm of what is considered aesthetic? Instead of being as firmly entrenched in a specific context as the vernacular, is the aesthetic (or definitions of what counts) more universal than they might have been in the past?
Maybe even the notion of interface that Jacob describes could be seen as a way of producing a more widely understood vernacular literacy. That the common ways in which we interact through interfaces might lead to a pairing of the vernacular and the aesthetic, while making that aesthetic frame something that is invisible. Or maybe my understanding of the vernacular needs some revision...
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