Aestheticising design: Revisiting the concept of commodity aesthetics

This paper is a theoretical contribution to the discourse on design aesthetics. Through revisiting Wolfgang Fritz Haug's (2009) seminal work on the critique of commodity aesthetics, Kritik der Warenästhetik, this paper challenges Haug's notion of aesthetic surfaces of products as means for seducing consumers and confirming capitalism. This paper takes its starting point in Haug's reevaluation of his original 1971 work in a new 2009 book-length addition on the commodity aesthetics in ‘high-tech capitalism’, updating his analysis regarding changing conditions in globalisation and digitisation. This paper points out that Haug has not changed his original Marxist analysis and argues, in opposition to Haug, that the prevailing aestheticisation inaugurates a cultural production of new conditions for experiencing aesthetic meaning properties of design objects. Following the analysis of Wolfgang Welsch (1996), aestheticisation is not only a matter of sugar-coating reality but also produces new possibilities for experiencing it. This paper thus discusses two effects of the aestheticisation for design, reflectivity and de-ontologisation, which create new framings of experience. These framings are, following the proposition of Jacques