The view of aesthetic experience as a self-reflection that is an enactment, or as an enactment that is self-reflective, can be called a specifically modern conception; ... The claim that this conception is aesthetic is "modern," however, has less a temporal than a structural sense: it is "modern" in that (and in the way in which) it holds fast to the idea of aethetic autonomy. This distinguishes the reflective conception of aesthetic experience from a conception that understands aesthetic experience sees it as nothing more than a variant of those forms of{65} sensuousness - of sensuous perception or representation - that we ordinarily enact. There is accordingly, at best, a difference in degree, not of kind, between the ordinary and the aesthetic forms. The reflective conception of aesthetic experience also does not merely claim a "difference" between aesthetic and ordinary forms of comprehension or representation - even if that be a structural difference or of kind. It claims, rather, that the aesthetic is different from the ordinary by making apparent a difference in the ordinary: the other of the ordinary in the ordinary. In aesthetic experience, we enact the same process of comprehension and representation as we do ordinarily - but we enact them in a different way, that is, so that the forces of our comprehension and representation "playfully" unfold themselves as such, and so that we feel a specific pleasure in the playful unfolding of these forces. ... it is, rather, structurally different from the ordinary enactments because it playfully unfolds the forces in the ordinary against the ordinary.
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Christophe Menke - The Dialectic of Aesthetics