Introduction: Spirituality, Well-Being and the Neoliberal Canopy

Aesthetic Assemblages: Relational Aesthetics of the Israeli Movement Practice Gaga

“…Practicing Gaga evokes specific sensations and interpretations of those sensations, depending on the social and cultural context in which Gaga practices and Gaga practitioners are embedded. Gaga's assemblage of aesthetics responds to, or has developed in relation to, the fundamental neoliberal consumer demands for self-optimization, well-being, aestheticization, extraordinary and meaningful experiences, and processes of individualization, and is thus inextricably linked to them (Aschenbrenner and Koch 2022;Mossière 2022). This is also what makes Gaga-and neo-spiritual practices in general-an object of specific interest to a materialist approach: The social and cultural value and function, the worldview impact of these neo-spiritual practices can only be grasped by focusing on the practice and on its material and embodied dimensions, on its specific "neo-spiritual aesthetics" or even the particular embodied "experience filters" that they produce (Aschenbrenner 2023;Aschenbrenner and Ostrowski 2022).…”