Wednesdays 1 - 4 Modern aesthetic discourses implicitly involve a number of categories and relationships. First, to call things beautiful is to establish sets of objects to which beauty is ascribed. However, the property of beauty lies more often not in the ob jects themselves, but rather in an experience of them. In this way, aesthetics is both about a relationship between individuals and objects and an internalized, subjective experience that one has while in the presence of such objects. Shifting focus to the sociological aspects of this discourse, we find that aesthetic discourse also attempts to describe and create a normative relationship between subjects and objects.
Aesthetic discourse legislates a particular sensibility.
Such sensibilities can be generated in different ways but in the end they have to be enforced and recreated by very specific and fairly routine practices. Finally, to talk about aesthetics is also to talk about a relationship that subjects take toward one another. In other words, aesthetics is a discourse through which individuals learn to affil iate with or distinguish themselves from one another on the basis of taste . Som e texts express aesthetics in terms of beautiful objects , others about subjects . As Derrida and others have pointed out, since it is the frame that separates a work of art from what surrounds it, we will use this theme as one returning point and work to situate the transmutations of that frame within a history about the European colonization of Egypt.