After Taste

AFTER TASTE is an exploration of the foundations and limits, structures and histories as well as the actuality and popularity of Taste. Taste has always been a category outreaching aesthetics, which once seemed obsolete, but lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.

AFTER TASTE addresses a number of research desiderata growing alongside the swelling corpus of literature and the public discourse, such as (1) “Taste taboo” in the current theory, (2) the matter of being “like-minded” in the exclusive academic and popular chatrooms, (3) the explosion of literature concerning matters of “personal Taste” and “evaluative domain”, (4) the contemporary structures of humanistic disciplines and (5) the corresponding phenomena faced by “generation Like”.

AFTER TASTE is a comprehensive companion for readers of humanities approaching the concept of Taste for the first time. Moreover, it is intended for anyone who hopes to make a further contribution to the subject.

The first volume covers a systematic perspective serving to explore Taste’s trajectories between thinking, perceiving and judging. It deals with their relationships and questions. Taste as a key factor for understanding of human faculties, value theories and valuating practices. The general question asked here is “why must we give reasons for matters of Taste?”

The second volume explores the instrumentality of the concept of Taste for the production, reception and distribution aspects of knowledge and culture throughout the eighteenth century and until the present time. The question asked here is “how was Taste’s genealogy affected through major (inter-) cultural contexts?”

The third volume covers the sociocultural and political-economical perspective – the “popular” and “commonsensical” aspects of Taste. A central question asked here is “which functions took Taste to inform the central humanistic disciplines and the popular discourse?”