Aesthetics of post-orientalism vol. 1 Philosophy of Composition

This dissertation examines whether aesthetic practice can still provide genuine philosophical inquiry in our contemporary moment, or whether it has become subsumed by commodification and market-driven meaning. The study proposes aesthetics of post-orientalism as a theoretical stance that critiques Western paradigms while offering analytical instruments sensitive to specific historical relations and present conditions. The research combines Kant’s epistemic limitations with Alain Badiou’s concept of the event and Jacques Rancière’s analysis of the distribution of the sensible to develop a method for producing reproducible aesthetic judgments. Central to this method is a simple thought experiment, the paper-and-line apparatus, which yields concepts of situation, event, frame of reference, invariants, and frame-dependent properties. The project operationalizes these concepts for musical practice through QuarkTonal, a notational and experimental toolkit that establishes a 2-cent unit (the quark) and prescribes rules for intersubjective analysis and repeatable composition. The dissertation outlines conceptual foundations, formal definitions, and an experimental program while reserving empirical tables and data for subsequent chapters. The aim remains modest and procedural: to provide instruments that render aesthetic judgment testable, transparent, and compositionally actionable.