Social Aesthetics

The idea that life is art is important (viz. Nietzsche, the Marx quote in the reading). This might typically be read in terms of life as artifice, where we expect to craft, with technique and technicality, a form of life distinct in style, beauty, pleasure.  Highmore's work interests me in exploring an alternative (and, as I read it, complementary) approach to an aesthetics of living - one that is "descriptive," rather than "prescriptive."  That is, I think Highmore's project is to (lead to the project to) explain what constitutes the everyday in terms of aesthetic forms, as opposed to offering an aesthetic way to live.  I suppose my first question is - what's the point?  Does he explain the utility/value in a socio-aesthetic approach to describe everyday life, as opposed to just a sociological account?  I found it difficult to figure out the direction he was trying to take us in if, at the same time, he was trying to stay away from "the need to make categorical judgments as to the worth or otherwise of routine."  Is his point just that aesthetic forms might more accurately capture (by metaphor) what everydayness looks like?

Towards this end, nonetheless, I think the aesthetics of montage (demonstrated in the activity of cooking by Giard) and of rhythmanalysis ("premised on the understanding that everyday life is a polyrhythmic ensemble of competing and overlapping rhythms" (322)) are very interesting and compelling approaches to framing the everyday in aesthetic terms.  Lefebvre's idea that rhythmanalysis might replace psychoanalysis is entirely appealing to me, although - as, mentioned by Highmore, it's a very undeveloped idea - I wonder what rhythmanalysis as a kind of aesthetic therapy would exactly entail?