Responsables del Sistema de Garantía Interna de Calidad (SGIC) del Plan de Estudios

cultivation of sources of selfhood in a hypermodern moment wrought with dissolving narrative frameworks and goods. The insights that can be gained from an inquiry into Warhol, the artist, through a philosophy of communication ethics, centers upon his battle in a historical moment that evolved from a lineage of philosophical and historical narrative frameworks. The beginning of the Pop Art movement began with artists who, similarly, concerned themselves with

“American consumer culture” as the basis of artistic innovation (Scherman and Dalton xi). Pop Art was a response to cultural events during the period of the 1960s. For the first time, large cultural shifts began to impact American society, culture, and artistic endeavors. Throughout

much of the 1950s and the 1960s, the United States increasingly gave in to new industries, new technologies, and a tireless desire for commodities demonstrated by one of the most influential, and largest, generations in the United States. In every home, media, specifically the television, offered glimpses into the shrinking of the public sphere, and American culture began to pivot and turn around consumer culture. Pop Art, as a movement, shifted the aesthetic focus of attention to the cultural, historical, and social climate that gave rise to Warhol, the Pop Artist. Historicity demonstrates that history, knowledge, and communication ethics questions are not static, but recurrent. The confluence of numerous historical events repeated through a multitude of eras created the conditions that allowed Warhol to combat a hypermodern culture with the tools of modernity (banality, commodification, and artificial light).

Taylor and Arendt, among others, gave voice to the increased search for meaning,

sources of selfhood, and narrative tradition, embracing historicity in the overlapping of questions situated within communication ethics that Warhol would reveal through his artistic endeavors.

His hypermodern combat was the battleground for moral cultivation in his historical moment. A philosophy of communication ethics is attentive to the unification of meaningful practices and theoretical guidelines that act as formative approaches to engaging the communicative landscape.

This opening chapter began Part I of this dissertation project, offering a communication ethics framework that situates Warhol within the field. His hypermodern voice formed a unique

understanding of the dangers of reifying a communication ethic within modern quests for sources of selfhood. Warhol’s contribution exemplifies a hypermodern philosophy of communication ethics that considers interpretative ground. The voices of Taylor, Arendt, Stroud, and Dewey formed the theoretical argument that will structure and guide the explication of Warhol, the unknowing philosopher of communication ethics.

This project commences with the following assertion: Warhol did not exploit hypermodernity. He did not attempt to tame hypermodernity. Warhol did something

considerably different. He called forth reflection with the commodities of a commercial world dominating the public domain to a place of extreme banality. Warhol “lean[ed] into the rapids”

of his historical moment (Arnett, McManus, and McKendree 208). Referring to whitewater rafting, Arnett, McManus, and McKendree remind us that, as an instinct, in the midst of whitewater rafting, one has a tendency to pull backwards from the rapids, allowing water to surge beneath the raft and “push the raft skyward, leading it to capsize and eject the occupants”

(208). One must lean into the rapids, or into the problem, to allow one to stay on top of the problem at hand. Warhol leaned into a historical moment characterized by narrative confusion and lack of moral cultivation. His creative feud centers upon a quest for sources of selfhood surfaced in the midst of a hypermodern moment. Warhol launched counters against artificial light, mass commodification, and the elevation of banality. However, it is both Warhol’s artistic works and his artful life that announce his significance, demonstrating the unification of how and why in the midst of narrative and creative confusion. Warhol argued that Pop Art offered

sameness, a similar read that capitalism offered to American culture. Pop Art placed everyone in the midst of culture, allowing individuals to be culture as long as they had the purchasing power to turn it into a status-fulfilling commodity. Warhol uncovered the need for sources of selfhood, narrative, and moral topography in hypermodernity.

As an exemplar of hypermodernity, he simultaneously combatted the roots of the moment with the tools that his historical moment offered him. Warhol himself addressed a world where moral cultivation and sources of selfhood were shrouded in artificial light, tied to the pursuit of a commodity culture that disrespected both the need for tradition and the commitment to

historicity emergent in a era of virtue and narrative contention (MacIntyre, After Virtue). His life and works exemplify an artful life responding to the collapse of institutionally led narrative frameworks that provided guidelines for the pursuit of a good life. In a moment where a modern inwardness of selfhood called forth an affirmation of ordinary life apart from roots and narrative, Warhol argued for a worldview that was internally cultivating by reflecting upon pure exteriority of inspiration, aspiration, and influence. His philosophy of communication ethics unites a ‘why’

and a ‘how’ that exemplifies a hypermodern communicative framework, inviting us, today, to question the elevation of banality, commodification, and artificial light in our own quest for sources of selfhood.

Chapter 2:

Situating Andy Warhol: Art and Embedded Responsiveness within Hypermodernity Andy Warhol (1928-1987) lived and created during a historical moment comprised of increasing fragmentation, divergent perspectives, and resurgence of past (modern) values. This chapter articulates the rationale for situating Warhol’s work and artistic corpus as a response to and identification of emergent cultural values and norms grounded within hypermodernity. The term hypermodernity emerges from the philosophical work of Gilles Lipovetsky, French philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Grenoble. Lipovetsky

contextualized hypermodernity as a social, cultural, and historical phenomenon marked by the recycling of modern individualism and postmodern fragmentation through a variety of excessive channels. “Situating Andy Warhol: Art and Embedded Responsiveness within Hypermodernity”

responds to hypermodernity by following the philosophy of art conceptualized by Arthur Danto.

Danto suggests that historical conditions give rise to artistic contributions, and hypermodernity made possible the significance of Warhol’s contribution to a philosophy of communication ethics. Danto argues that a work of art acts as an “externalization of the artist’s consciousness, as if we could see his way of seeing and not merely what he saw” (Danto, Transfiguration 164).

Warhol’s art encapsulates values prevalent in hypermodernity through embedded responsiveness.

Through the primary voices of Danto and Lipovetsky, Warhol’s artistic creative feud opens in the space of a philosophy of communication ethics, embedded in a cultural and historical period, responsive to Warhol’s perceived emergent communication ethics and existential questions.

“Situating Andy Warhol: Art and Embedded Responsiveness within Hypermodernity,”

conceptualizes hypermodernity as a defining element to the evolution of Warhol’s project with implications for philosophy of communication ethics, demonstrated through attentiveness to

lived experience, historical moment, and philosophical works. First the role of philosophy of art through the work of Arthur Danto situates the argument for Warhol’s creative feud as an instance of phi embedded responsiveness. Danto’s work articulates the communicative power granted to art to encapsulate and comment upon historical conditions. Next, the philosophical emergence of hypermodernity through the work of Lipovetsky suggests that embedded responsiveness counters a hypermodern commitment to excess and consumption. Warhol then emerges in the context of hypermodernity as one who witnessed his historical moment, recognized change, and sought to communicate that change through ethical considerations emergent in his art, achieved through a summary of the work of Danto and Lipovetsky connected to one another. Through this

philosophical inquiry into the historical dimensions of hypermodernity, art gains definition in the context of emergent social, cultural, and historical conditions. By bridging the voices of Danto and Lipovetsky, a philosophy of communication ethics emerges suggesting that art is

communicative and rhetorical, uniquely creating opportunities for embedded responsiveness.

Sébastien Charles, French philosopher and professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, argued that hypermodernity is a period of “excess,” defined by a market orientation toward an intensification of consumption, coupled with the mandating of radical modern values (such as human rights and democracy) as well as the domination of science over future

possibilities (“For a Humanism” 392). Modern and postmodern values recycled themselves within hypermodernity, ensnaring individual behaviors in excess. One should not conflate this period of excess with modernity or postmodernity; rather, the work of hypermodern scholars dictates the central role of a historical and philosophical understanding of hypermodernity in the context of social and cultural knowledge. For Charles, hypermodernity acts as a reference point for the collapse of postmodern values into a radicalized modernity where the foundations of

social and cultural exchange celebrate the excess of individuality, preoccupation with the present as offering opportunity, and hesitancy in a future characterized by risk and uncertainty. Likewise, for Danto, art communicates an era through rhetorical depictions of the period’s values and beliefs, illustrating the social and cultural norms experienced by those that lived in the age and allowing for consciousness of time from a distance. Danto’s philosophy of art and Lipovetsky’s historical and philosophical account of hypermodernity highlight the excessive nature of

Warhol’s historical conditions, devoid of the traditions that bind, raising new communication ethics questions that demanded embedded responsiveness