There is an aesthetic undercurrent traversing Deleuze's philosophy along confluent trajectories of Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche, which harbours untapped potentials and far-reaching consequences for contemporary discussions of art and architecture. According to this subterranean stream, aesthetic experience is generated, neither in ready-made mental faculties of a subject, nor in essential qualities of an object, but through affective interactions of a relational field. A cartographic inquiry of affective aesthetics constitutes the subject matter of this paper, beginning (...) with a philosophical elaboration that connects aesthetic theories of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze, evolving via a comparative analysis of aesthetic processes specific to Francis Bacon's artistic assemblages and Vogelkop bowerbirds' architectural constructs, and concluding with the possibility of a non-anthropocentric aesthetics. (shrink)

An unmade bed. A cigarette glued to the wall. A replica of a soup can box. Drippings on a canvas. Can an evolutionary approach help us understand the production and appreciation of, sometimes perplexing, modern and contemporary art? This chapter attempts at this by investigating two hypotheses about the evolution of human aesthetics in the domain of art. The first hypothesis, commonly called evolutionary aesthetics, asserts that aesthetic preferences, such as those for particular faces, body shapes and animals, have (...) evolved in our ancestors because they motivated adaptive behavior. Artworks may exploit these ancestral aesthetic preferences. In contrast, the second hypothesis states that aesthetic preferences continuously coevolve with artworks, and that they are subject to learning from, especially prestigious, other individuals. We called this mechanism prestige-driven coevolutionary aesthetics. Here I report artistic fieldwork and psychological experiments we conducted. We found that while exploitation of ancestral aesthetic preferences prevails among non-experts, prestige-driven coevolutionary aesthetics dominate expert appreciation. I speculate that the latter mechanism can explain modern and contemporary art’s deviations from evolutionary aesthetics as well as the existence and persistence of its elusiveness. I also discuss the potential relevance of our findings to major fields studying aesthetics, that is, empirical aesthetics, and sociological and historical approaches to art. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the interaction between affect and language as articulated in the works of Theodor W. Adorno and Julia Kristeva, sometimes in inchoate and non-explicit ways. Language is always in transit, exile, and dispossession. All language is the language of another, or the other, and precisely because of this, it is the site of dissenting and conflicting affect. In this context, my paper traces a missed but necessary dialogue between Adorno and Kristeva. Adorno’s diagnosis of failed (...) subjective inwardness, first presented in his book on Kierkegaard, was sustained throughout Adorno’s entire oeuvre, to the very end, in his posthumous 1969 Aesthetic Theory. I will explicate Adorno’s forced collapsing of subjective interiority into a negative space that opens up aesthetic emancipatory potential. In what follows I place Adorno’s negativity of subjective inwardness and the aesthetic potential after the fact of its destruction in dialogue with the writings of Kristeva, who has likewise diagnosed a subjective interiority of negativity but framed the latter in terms of the female, abjection and maternity. I conclude by placing Kristeva’s work in conversation with Adorno’s philosophy of the language of music, as one example of their shared framework for aesthetic emancipatory experience. (shrink)

The article suggests a conceptualization of the interrelationship between attention, affect, and aesthetic experience. It supplements classical aesthetic theory by integrating knowledge from neurophysiology, developmental psychology, and psychoanalysis. Furthermore, the article proposes a distinction between a variety of types of affect that are discussed with a view to their potential contribution to elaborating the concept of aesthetic experience in the Kantian tradition and to reflecting different qualities of attention.

This paper explores Moritz Geiger’s work on the role of emotions in aesthetic appreciation and shows its potential for contemporary research. Drawing on the main tenets of Geiger’s phenomenological aesthetics as an aesthetics of value, the paper begins by elaborating his model of aesthetic appreciation. I argue that, placed in the contemporary debate, his model is close to affective models which make affective states responsible for the apprehension of the aesthetic value of an artwork, (...) though Geiger also makes important concessions to the intellectualist. Indeed, like proponents of the affective model, Geiger argues that a work’s aesthetic values are extracted by means of an affective state though the affective state in question is neither an emotion nor a feeling but a “liking”. In fact, like the intellectualist, he considers that a focus on the emotions might on certain occasions interfere in the aesthetic appreciation of the artwork. Next, I reconstruct Geiger’s distinction between surface and depth effects in terms of a distinction between two types of emotional responses to artworks. It is argued that Geiger’s distinction offers a powerful tool to distinguish those emotions that are intrinsically related to aesthetic values from those that are not and that this distinction can be useful to understand how different kinds of emotions contribute to aesthetic appreciation. I proceed to examine the historical sources of Geiger’s distinction between surface and depth effects in Theodor Lipps’s aesthetics and compare Geiger’s account with the works of other early phenomenologists working on values. In the final part, I illustrate the place of Geiger’s model in the contemporary discussion by means of an example. (shrink)

Natural forms, often characterized by irregularity and roughness, have a unique complexity that exhibit self-similarity across different spatial scales or levels of magnification. Our visual system is remarkably efficient in the processing of natural scenes and tuned to the multi-scale, fractal-like properties they possess. The fractal-like scaling characteristics are ubiquitous in many physical and biological domains, with recent research also highlighting their importance in aesthetic perception, particularly in the visual and, to some extent, auditory modalities. Given the multitude of (...) fractal-like scaling manifestations, we explore potential commonalities in the way they might affect aesthetic preference within and across different physical and sensory domains. We use a range of visual and tactile stimuli to explore the equivalence of fractal-scaling effects on aesthetic preferences within and across visual and tactile modalities. Our results suggest that, despite some superficial differences, the underlying dimensional structure mediating the preference across the two domains is remarkably similar. The qualitative nature of this dimensional structure as well as suggestions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Aesthetics is a crucial ecosystem service provided by biodiversity, which is believed to help improve humans’ quality of life and is linked to environmental consciousness and pro-environmental behaviors. However, how aesthetic experience induced by plants/animals influences the belief in the occurrence and significance of biodiversity loss among urban residents remains understudied. Thus, the current study aimed to examine how the diversity of pets and in-house plants affect urban residents’ belief in biodiversity loss in different scenarios of aesthetic experiences (...) (positive and negative aesthetic experiences at home due to plants/animals). Using the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on a dataset of 535 Vietnamese urban residents, we found that the people’s aesthetic feeling about their house induced by plants/animals positively affects their belief in the occurrence and significance of biodiversity loss. The diversity of plants and pets also positively influences the level of biodiversity loss belief, but the effect is conditional on the aesthetic experience of the urban residents. Specifically, the positive impact of species diversity on the belief only exists when urban residents feel that their houses’ aesthetics are negatively affected by plants/animals. Moreover, the effect of pet diversity on biodiversity loss belief is less significant and reliable than that of plant diversity. These findings suggest that raising the houses’ aesthetics through in-house planting or pet ownership can potentially enhance biodiversity loss belief and subsequently build an eco-surplus culture among urban residents. (shrink)

The phenomenology of atmospheres is recently gaining attention in debates on situated affectivity. Atmospheres are defined as holistic affective qualities of situations that integrate disparate affective forces into an identifiable and unitary gestalt. They point to a blurred, pathic, relational, and pre-individual form of experience which has been described in terms of ecological affordances. Despite its relevance in diverse areas of research such as architecture, phenomenological psychiatry and aesthetics, a thorough analysis of the phenomena of affective atmospheres (...) from an enactive-ecological perspective is missing in the literature. This article aims at clarifying how and to what extent affective atmospheres can be accommodated into ecological-enactive understandings of the environment in terms of affordances. To do so, I review four perspectives on ecological affordances – the gibsonian account, the relational account, affective affordances, and the Skill Intentionality Framework (SIF) – and contrast them with the ontological and epistemológical principles that ground the phenomenology of atmospheres. I argue that only the field perspective developed in SIF is compatible with the phenomenology of atmospheres. From this perspective, affective atmospheres can be understood as phenomenological counterparts of context sensitivity, that is, as the holistic and pathic background feelings that make certain affordances more salient than others. As a conclusion, the analysis in this article shows the potential of the phenomenology of atmospheres to enrich the ecological-enactive cognition framework. It also highlights the opportunity to construct a situated understanding of affectivity that is informed by phenomenological perspectives. (shrink)

What is the role of aesthetics, everyday aesthetics in particular, in processes of solving social problems? Many if not most social problems arise from and affect our daily lives. As far as these problems contain aesthetic aspects, these typically are also of an everyday kind. In this paper, I address the relations between social problems and everyday aesthetics in five sections. I will start by briefly describing what I mean by social problems. Second, I will outline what solving such (...) problems means. Then, I will move on to defining aesthetics for the purposes of this article. Fourth, I will focus on the main question, the potential role of everyday aesthetics in solving social problems. Lastly, I will drill down a bit deeper into my own experiences in this matter in order to concretize the general points and give examples stemming from my working life. (shrink)

What is the role of aesthetics, everyday aesthetics in particular, in processes of solving social problems? Many if not most social problems arise from and affect our daily lives. As far as these problems contain aesthetic aspects, these typically are also of an everyday kind. In this paper, I address the relations between social problems and everyday aesthetics in five sections. I will start by briefly describing what I mean by social problems. Second, I will outline what solving such (...) problems means. Then, I will move on to defining aesthetics for the purposes of this article. Fourth, I will focus on the main question, the potential role of everyday aesthetics in solving social problems. Lastly, I will drill down a bit deeper into my own experiences in this matter in order to concretize the general points and give examples stemming from my working life. (shrink)

Black Art and Aesthetics comprises essays, poems, interviews, and over 50 images from artists and writers: GerShun Avilez, Angela Y. Davis, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Theaster Gates, Aracelis Girmay, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Deborah Goffe, James B. Haile III, Vijay Iyer, Isaac Julien, Benjamin Krusling, Daphne Lamothe, George E. Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Fumi Okiji, Nell Painter, Mickaella Perina, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, Claudia Schmuckli, Evie Shockley, Paul C. Taylor, Kara Walker, Simone White, and Mabel O. Wilson. The (...) stellar contributors practice Black aesthetics by engaging intersectionally with class, queer sexuality, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality, Afrodiasporic music, Black post-soul art, Afropessimism, and more. Black aesthetics thus restores aesthetics to its full potential by encompassing all forms of sensation and imagination in art, culture, design, everyday life, and nature and by creating new ways of reckoning with experience, identity, and resistance. Highlighting wide-ranging forms of Black aesthetics across the arts, culture, and theory, Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings provides an unprecedented view of a field enjoying a global resurgence. Black aesthetics materializes in communities of artists, activists, theorists, and others who critique racial inequities, create new forms of interiority and relationality, uncover affective histories, and develop strategies for social justice. (shrink)

This paper explores the aesthetic aspects at play in the preservation efforts in the Bosc de Tosca to gain insight into the role of aesthetics in preservation of natural heritage. The preservation of landscapes entails a complex balancing between aesthetics and sustainability, as preservationist decisions based primarily on appearance may be at odds with pressing environmental concerns. If the area to be preserved is a constantly evolving and lived landscape, the interventions enacted on the place may affect the current (...) appearance and the way in which the area is lived now and in the future. By resorting to the issues discussed in intergenerational aesthetics, this paper aims to show how including the potential aesthetic experience and values of future generations may help in making more aesthetically and environmentally sustainable decisions. The paper begins with a description of the Bosc de Tosca and its surroundings, its metaphysical status, and a description of the preservation approaches at play in the area. It then presents the main stakes of intergenerational aesthetics. It ends by discussing specific aspects of the preservation of the Bosc de Tosca area and aesthetic interventions to show the complex relationship between aesthetics and sustainability and how intergenerational aesthetics can contribute to both theory and practice of preservation taking into account environmental concerns. (shrink)

Advocates of ordinary aesthetics argue that aesthetic experiences found in everyday life can have an impact on our ethical being. This raises the question of how, specifically, action arises from aesthetic experience. Although this matter affects both Aesthetics and Ethics, the current literature provides few details on potential mechanisms. Using neurophysiological evidence, this article proposes specific action profiles and associated mechanisms for aesthetic experiences. To achieve this, it is argued that aesthetic experience originates within the (...) mind and that ordinary aesthetic experiences are logically permissible. Subsequently, a proposed landscape of aesthetic experience is derived. Mechanisms for pathways from experience to action are provided for each category of aesthetic experience. In sum, this provides a tangible bridge between Aesthetics and Ethics, enabling a better understanding of how one’s ethical being is influenced by certain experiences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningPentti MäättänenBethany Henning Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience London: Lexington Books, 2022. 182 pp. incl. indexBethany Henning examines Dewey's conception of aesthetic experience by looking for connections to several trends and traditions. Henning relates pragmatism to Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism, wisdom from esoteric sources, erotic drive, and religion. "In (...) the American thought that we have surveyed thus far, the aesthetic, the religious, and the ethical stand as completions and realizations of one another" (p. 25). This variety of viewpoints is no doubt interesting and potentially fruitful, but there is a danger that the result may remain somewhat sporadic.One of the traditional problems and tasks in philosophy is to explain how the world is experienced as an organized, bounded whole. How are the various sensations and ideas of them related to each other? On what ground can we experience these relations between ideas? Henning refers to William James and says that these relations are directly experienced, we feel them (p. 46). According to Henning there is a unique force responsible for this, and it "can only be a kind of noncognitive, preverbal awareness, and for Dewey, it can only be the qualitative immediacy that is known to us only in aesthetic experience" (p. 25). How can we experience these relations? Here Henning appeals to Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) who provided his own view of habits, which account for "the relations between ideas by relating them through their spatiotemporal contiguity, causality, or through resemblances" (p. 21; italics in the original). This is how the American mind was firmly set on a theoretical path that distinguishes it from "the European conception" (ibid.).This is a surprising claim, indeed. Here is what David Hume has to say about the connexion or association of ideas: "The qualities, from [End Page 369] which this association arises, and by which the mind is after this manner convey'd from one idea to another, are three, viz. RESEMBLANCE, CONTIGUITY in time or place, and CAUSE and EFFECT."1 It is quite inconceivable how this simple relabeling of Hume's principles of association as habits might have any effect on any theoretical path, especially on the emergence of pragmatism. Edwards wrote decades before Charles Peirce entered the scene. Edwards' habit is just a new name for old European ideas. It is obvious that Hume's principles of association, which deal with internal mental processes, have not much to do with Peircean habits of action, which are about overt bodily action in the world where we meet also hard facts involving brute force, muscular effort, and resistance.The starting point of Henning's analysis is immediate qualitative experience, affective sensual awareness, which also prefigures and is the ground of signification (p. 107). Qualitative immediacy is felt, had, and undergone. There is a need to experience the world as meaningful, to move from that world as had and undergone to the world as known. Knowledge about this immediate experience becomes possible with the emergence of mind, when "situations, in their qualitative tone, are also socially significant so that interactions are aided by the mediation of symbols" (p. 88). We can give names to qualitatively different feelings. This knowledge is different from qualitative immediacy in that it is discursive, cognitive, and syntactical (p. 38). But how does this kind of knowledge emerge? What is the origin of names and symbols? What is the notion of meaning applied here? According to Henning, meaning "must be felt, had and undergone, in a way that is primarily qualitative rather than primarily cognitive" (p. 107). There is also "erotic need for meaningful connection" (p. 113). Further, Henning appeals to Julia Kristeva's semiotic theory, but Peirce's semiotics is not mentioned. An explicit definition of meaning would be in place here, especially as Peirce and Dewey have one to offer.According to Peirce, "what a thing means is simply what habits it involves" (CP 5.400).2 Note that there are no restrictions on this. If it is a linguistic expression, then we have Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives ed. by J. Colin McQuillanEmine Hande TunaJ. Colin McQuillan, editor. Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Pp. viii + 364. Hardcover, $130.00.Contemporary philosophers have often overlooked the originality and impact of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's views on aesthetics, and his contribution to the field is often reduced to his introduction of the term 'aesthetics' into the philosophical (...) lexicon. By illuminating the seminal character of Baumgarten's aesthetics and its enduring significance, J. Colin McQuillan's collection of twelve essays endeavors to rectify this neglect, particularly within the anglophone philosophical community. The collection aims to make recent scholarship on Baumgarten's aesthetics more accessible, with translated works from German scholars and their English counterparts presented in a single volume to entice anglophone readers. It stands as the first collection of essays devoted to Baumgarten's aesthetics to be published in English. Through the essays contained in this volume, readers are offered a comprehensive overview of Baumgarten's aesthetic theory and its progression as well as a deeper understanding of his substantial and influential contributions to the field.The collection begins with a comprehensive introduction by McQuillan, which provides insightful analysis of the reasons behind Baumgarten's neglected status and a concise biography of the philosopher. McQuillan lucidly summarizes Baumgarten's goals for his new science of aesthetics, the extent to which he was able to accomplish these goals, and what remained unfinished. McQuillan highlights Baumgarten's view that his aesthetics was not just a theoretical exercise, but rather had practical implications, such as the potential to enhance poetry, rhetoric, and other arts, and more generally all sensible cognition.The opening two essays of the collection offer dual perspectives on Baumgarten's aesthetics, one exploring the connection of his theories to the pursuit of establishing art as the presentation or representation of the absolute and the other presenting his aesthetics as modeled on the "art of invention" (ars inveniendi). Ursula Franke's essay contextualizes [End Page 711] Baumgarten's ideas within the historical framework and demonstrates his impact on the development of German idealist aesthetics, but it also serves as a valuable guide for further research on Baumgarten by providing an overview of contemporary research and avenues for engagement with his work. In the second essay, Stefanie Buchenau offers an insightful examination of the relationship between Baumgarten and Cicero, illuminating how the former crafted aesthetics as a new method of invention.The third and fourth essays of the collection have a narrower focus. In his analysis, Matthew McAndrew, following George Friedrich Meier, posits that Baumgarten, despite seemingly presenting two conflicting definitions of beauty—one attributing beauty to the object of cognition, and the other to the cognition itself—only held the former definition. Departing from previous interpretations that attempted to reconcile both definitions, McAndrew rejects the definition of beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition. Angelica Nuzzo argues that Baumgarten had a pluralistic understanding of truth and distinguished between aesthetic truth and logical truth. She examines Baumgarten's conception of aesthetic truth and contends that it is imperative to comprehend how poetry embodies and incorporates aesthetic truth. According to Nuzzo, Baumgarten believed that aesthetic truth is embodied.In the fifth essay, Simon Grote delves into the theological sources of Baumgarten's aesthetics. Grote claims that Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics was influenced by the definition of aisthēsis put forth by Halle Pietists. Indeed, he claims that seeing this connection between the Pietists and Baumgarten is vital to fully grasp the ethical dimensions of Baumgarten's early aesthetic theory. Like many Halle Pietists, Baumgarten was advancing a conception of moral education as involving the improvement of the human affects through the proper use of the sensible faculties. In the following essay, McQuillan examines the aspects of Baumgarten's aesthetics that set him apart from his rationalist predecessor Christian Wolff. Challenging the orthodox view that portrays Baumgarten as a Wolffian rationalist, McQuillan argues that Baumgarten limited the application of Wolff's mathematical method, circumscribed the scope of logic, and distinguished between sensible and intellectual perfection, separating what Wolff aimed to unite. In his contribution, Alessandro... (shrink)

While many writers have advocated the importance of narrative as a means of engaging with the problem of extinction, this paper considers what the qualities of visual aesthetics bring to this field. In addressing this question, the discussion turns to the problem of the ethical limits of art raised by Adorno and takes a theoretical turn away from posthumanism to consider how visual responses can redirect attention back to human agency. The focus of visual analysis is on five paintings by (...) the contemporary Iranian artist Naeemeh Naeemaei. Neither exclusively Western nor overtly internationalist in their approach, these artworks refer to the effects of both hunting and the erosion of trans-national habitats as causes of extinction, yet they also show how human affective responses to extinction can extend across geo-political borders to a more global imaginary. As such, Naeemaei’s artworks are regarded as a form of immanent critique of anthropogenic forcing. Her works adapt older traditions in Persian humanism and art to show not only how the human dominion of nonhuman animals has led to extinction, but also how this leads to an almost incalculable sense of human loss. I argue that Naeemaei’s affective imagery of loss is not simply yet another example of how the lifeworld of animals can only be understood from an anthropocentric worldview, but instead points to our inability to yet fully register the immeasurable losses of extinction and what this yet unchartered grief might imply for potential human agency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Communicative Implications of Kant’s Aesthetic TheoryThomas HoveIn recent discussions of aesthetic theory, critics who raise social, cultural, and political concerns have issued important challenges to the Kantian legacy. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) continues to be widely regarded as one of the founding documents of modern aesthetic theory. But the arguments he laid out in that notoriously enigmatic work remain controversial on a (...) variety of fronts. One of those arguments concerns his distinction between pleasures that are beautiful and those that are agreeable. According to Kant’s definition, what makes experiences of the beautiful special is that they have a potentially communicable universal validity. By contrast, pleasures that are merely agreeable are incommunicable and remain confined to private sensation. Philosophers have found this distinction problematic for a variety of reasons. Their detailed commentaries have examined the intricate logical and conceptual difficulties that Kant’s theory raises (see Allison 2001; Guyer 1982, 1997, 2002; Kalar 2000; Wenzel 2005). On another front, sociologists and cultural critics—whom I will broadly refer to as “social critics”—typically raise concerns about the theory’s hidden social implications (Bourdieu 1984; Eagleton 1990; Smith 1988; Shumway 2005). Specifically, they question Kant’s proposal that judgments about the beautiful ought to have universal validity. Taking an external standpoint, they tend to regard aesthetic judgments either as the peculiar habits of [End Page 103] specific social classes, or as badges of hierarchical distinction, or as weapons in symbolic struggles for cultural dominance.To suggest why Kant’s theory is worth revisiting in the wake of such critiques, the following analysis defends his theoretical effort to distinguish the experience of the beautiful from that of the agreeable. This feature of his aesthetic theory highlights an alternative to the cognitive and practical concerns that social critics emphasize. In particular, I indicate how Kant’s aesthetic theory offers directions for the effort to explain how aesthetic experience promotes communicative sociability. By emphasizing this theme, I hope to supplement the rival emphasis that social critics place on the Kantian legacy’s elitist undercurrents. Social critiques characteristically overlook the affective type of sociability to which aesthetic experience gives rise. This oversight occurs because those critiques tend to privilege the theoretical and practical dimensions of communication. In the process, they disregard the special types of validity claims that are unique to aesthetic discourse. Following the lead of his academic precursors Meier and Baumgarten, Kant tried to define a possible third mental “faculty” that differs from cognitive and practical reason (see Henrich 1992, 31–36). But the difficulty of defining this third faculty, much less determining its existence, continues to vex both philosophers and communication theorists.Kant’s Account of Aesthetic Experience and Its CriticsIn the opening sections of the Critique of Judgment, Kant attempts to establish the independence of aesthetic judgment from theoretical and practical cognition. Those faculties are concerned with cognitive and moral concepts. By contrast, the aesthetic properties that concern taste judgments have a unique ontological and epistemological status. Kant’s argument about that status is itself enormously complex, involving as it does an intricate network of idiosyncratically defined concepts (for example, the understanding, the imagination, intuition, representations, objects, etc.). But to avoid getting lost in those intricacies, we can bracket them by simply referring to aesthetic “experience.” Also, we can concentrate on the two properties that distinguish aesthetic experience from other kinds of experience. First, aesthetic properties relate to the feelings of pleasure that are aroused by certain encounters with objects. Second, aesthetic properties are “merely subjective” (Kant 2000, 75). They do not have an objective status because we cannot associate the feelings they arouse with determinate concepts and objects. [End Page 104] As Miles Rind puts it, “in making a cognitive judgment one requires everyone to conceptualize an object in a certain way, while in making a judgment of taste one requires others to share one’s liking for an object” (Rind 2000, 83). In sum, Kant differentiates aesthetic judgment from both theoretical and practical cognition because it is radically subjective and because its unique grounding lies in feelings of pleasure and displeasure.Social critics tend to downplay the idea that there... (shrink)

Monique Roelofs’s The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic is groundbreaking in its nuanced account of the potential and limitations of the aesthetic for creating a more just, humane world. Particularly timely are Roelofs’s analyses of the ways in which racial and gender stereotypes are reinforced and the operations of what she calls “racialized aesthetic nationalism,” the tendencies of aesthetic values to shore up schisms along racial, ethnic, and national lines. I raise questions, however, about the (...) appropriateness of aesthetic criticism that stresses sins of omission, the desirability of insisting that the broad nexus of social relations always be kept in view, and the danger that foregrounding minority group membership and gender will reduce individuals in marked categories to mere exemplifications of such status. (shrink)

This article focuses on the affective potential of anticipation, in its ready endorsement of the unknown, as a formative lens for theorising feminist temporalities. I draw from earlier readings of Luce Irigaray’s conceptual paradigm of sexual difference to examine how its articulation of a feminist future that is inherently unknowable might contribute to recent debates on the temporalities of feminist thought. The article presents two broadly intersecting lines of argument. I first emphasise the continued centrality of sexual difference (...) in its anticipatory imperative for thinking feminism but – or perhaps, especially – through a contradictory retrieval of the term that re-narrates its contemporary significance. In other words, it is precisely the retroactive position that sexual difference occupies that exacts a critical reorientation of existing modes of feminist temporalities; it moreover does so as a theoretical construct that altogether circumvents our understanding of feminism as a progress narrative. Secondly, I build upon Drucilla Cornell’s contentions in Beyond Accommodation that the unknown futurity inaugurated by the trajectories of sexual difference demands a dimension of inquiry that is inevitably aesthetic (1991). I identify a possibility of literature’s reinvigoration in emergence narratives of feminist theorising, particularly in a certain ethical capacity precipitated by its affective experience of enchantment, which mirrors the ‘wonder’ that sexual difference incites. If we are to continue to use literature as a conducive space of feminist analysis, then it is the forward-looking perpetuation of feminist narratives that must also be rethought for their investment in the multiple contingencies of anticipation. (shrink)

Drawing from field theory, Gestalt therapy conceives psychological suffering and psychotherapy as two intentional field phenomena, where unprocessed and chaotic experiences seek the opportunity to emerge and be assimilated through the contact between the patient and the therapist (i.e., the intentionality of contacting). This therapeutic approach is based on the therapist’s aesthetic experience of his/her embodied presence in the flow of the healing process because (1) the perception of beauty can provide the therapist with feedback on the assimilation of (...) unprocessed experiences; (2) the therapist’s attentional focus on intrinsic aesthetic diagnostic criteria can facilitate the modification of rigid psychopathological fields by supporting the openness to novel experiences. The aim of the present manuscript is to review recent evidence from psychophysiology, neuroaesthetic research, and neurocomputational models of cognition, such as the free energy principle (FEP), which support the notion of the therapeutic potential of aesthetic sensibility in Gestalt psychotherapy. Drawing from neuroimaging data, psychophysiology and recent neurocognitive accounts of aesthetic perception, we propose a novel interpretation of the sense of beauty as a self-generated reward motivating us to assimilate an ever-greater spectrum of sensory and affective states in our predictive representation of ourselves and the world and supporting the intentionality of contact. Expecting beauty, in the psychotherapeutic encounter, can help therapists tolerate uncertainty avoiding impulsive behaviours and to stay tuned to the process of change. (shrink)

In my dissertation I develop a series of guidelines for responsibly and respectfully navigating varying facets of aesthetic activity involving fat communities. I argue that fat people's engagement with the aesthetic can be used to foster community, resist anti-fat bias, and move towards fat justice. Moreover, I argue that considering representations and treatment of fat people in the production of art must be done carefully in order to avoid perpetuating negative stereotypes and anti-fat bias. My project aims to (...) improve the visibility of fat people, ensuring that fat communities can determine how and when they are seen in ways that affirm their identities and experiences. My project is broken down into four chapters, each of which tackles a different dimension of aesthetic engagement and activity. In the first, I develop a framework called "responsible aesthetic agency" for creators to use when depicting fat people in their work. I intend responsible aesthetic agency to be a way for creators to meet their bare minimum ethical obligations to fat people, and as such this framework is a precursor to Jeremy Fried's aesthetic allyship. I use this framework to argue that artists must attend to the narrative webs in which a work exists when designing their new work's narrative, and that fat people must be active participants in this design and in the realization of said narratives. My second chapter addresses how individuals can use aesthetic agency to advocate for themselves and their communities. I argue that beauty labor can be used to help dismantle anti-fat bias. Using Kathleen LeBesco's framework of agency and identity, coupled with Jeannine Gailey's assessment of the unique perception of fatness as simultaneously hypervisible and hyperinvisible, I argue that participants in the "Fuck Flattering!" movement shape their identities and advocate for fat communities by forcing society to acknowledge their visibility and worth. In my third chapter, I consider representations of fatness in popular media, arguing that we can best achieve fat visibility through centering imperfect representations of fatness. I use Anne Eaton's "Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression" as a starting point. In this paper, Eaton argues that distaste for fat bodies has an affective element of disgust that we must address to mitigate anti-fatness. Eaton argues that we must habitually engage with vivid and engaging representations that encourage us to see fat bodies as likable and attractive. I argue that while this approach has worthwhile aims, it risks leaving behind those fat bodies which we cannot bring ourselves to see as likeable or attractive. To better combat our distaste for fat bodies, I argue that we must show fat people as complexly as we show thin characters onscreen, highlighting the pluralities of ways to exist as a fat person. Lastly, in my fourth chapter I discuss how to appropriately engage with marginalized communities as a member of a dominant group or identity. I examine the co-optation of the body positivity movement, outline the ethical harms that result from said co-optation, and discuss potential avenues for moving forward with the movement given its co-optation. I argue that in order to fully address the myriad levels of goals of the original body positivity movement, none of these three alternatives is sufficient, as each misses a crucial element of the original body positivity movement or asks participants to have too narrow of an attitude towards their own body. Given the shortcomings of these movements, I argue we should move forward from the body positivity movement’s co-optation by employing a modified framework of Aubrey Gordon’s concept of fat justice, one which also makes room to recognize the importance of fat people being able to experiment with beauty and see themselves as beautiful. (shrink)

Iranian national cinema is showing the scars of artistic persecution. The aesthetic landscape of this national cinema has become one of stark confines – both in its thematic allowances and its aesthetic possibilities. However, these confinements, both physical and technological, have not merely been passively affected by ideological constraints but have also been active in affecting ideological discourse, answering back as it does within imposed limitations. What we are seeing in contemporary Iranian cinema, I believe, is a complex (...) movement of aesthetic novelty, provoking some important questions regarding the relationship between politics and aesthetics. The relatively high-profile instance of which I am concerned here is Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film (2011): a work that denies its ontological category and, in turn, furthers its medial possibilities. Panahi’s confinement is an example of enforced asceticism: an asceticism of necessity, groundbreaking in its approach. So much potential arises from this “non-film” – too much to find any answers here. However, this Collision presents the perfect space for briefly outlining some of the questions emanating from a film that is “not a film”. I raise some striking similarities between what occurs with Panahi and the politico-aesthetic ideas of Jacques Rancière in order to contemplate Panahi’s use of asceticism to political effect. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criticism, Imagination, and the Subjectivization of AestheticsRoger W. H. SavageThe growing discontent with reductivist practices signals a new current in contemporary criticism's understanding of music, literature and art. George Levine's unease with critics who are unable or unwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with literary texts they expose as "imperialist, sexist, homophobic and racist" illumines the contradiction fueling the reduction of aesthetics to ideology.1 Cultural studies that deploy (...) literature as evidence of the aesthetics' socio-historical substance mask literature's capacity to break open new perspectives on reality by assuming that literary works are politically complicit with the aesthetics' strategic "mystification of the status quo" (A&I, p. 3). Criticism's indifference to its philosophical presuppositions exacerbates the paradox of denouncing a body of works that constitute criticism's aesthetic and intellectual heritage. According to Mario Valdés, literary studies' coming of age mandates that criticism take account of a tradition nurtured by a succession of philosophers including Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.2 For Valdés, the post-structuralist realization that literary texts are indeterminate and inexhaustible prohibits replacing the work of art with critical commentaries on it; criticism's collective and determining role belongs to a shared community of commentary whose history and thought is a record of the changing interpretations and understandings of literary texts' meanings. [End Page 164]Valdés's claim extends to the field of contemporary music criticism, where the fashion of denouncing aesthetics as socially pernicious turns against traditional musicology's institutional authority. By demystifying absolute music (instrumental music devoid of programmatic associations), a self-proclaimed critical musicology revolts against traditional musicology's perceived political and ideological agenda. Critical musicology militates against the aesthetic conceit that absolute music transcends its social construction. Yet, by overlooking the philosophical presuppositions that set music's autonomy against practical affairs, new musicology accedes to the schema it recoils against.The tradition nurtured by Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology represents a critical current whose significance has been overshadowed by postmodernist investments in decoding music's social and political content. Gadamer's critique of the subjectivization of aesthetics and Ricoeur's meditations on the imagination's capacity for invention offer an alternativeto contemporary music criticism's reaction against the principle of music's aesthetic autonomy. Gadamer and Ricoeur question art's formal separation from reality, which belongs to the history of Kant's radical subjectivization of aesthetics. Gadamer's critique of art's aesthetic differentiation prepares the ground for revealing how socially informed analyses conform to the schema Kant initiates by divorcing judgments of taste from their surrounding cultural ethos. Gadamer argues that, by discrediting theoretical knowledge that does not rely on the methodology of the natural sciences, the transcendental function Kant ascribes to aesthetic judgment lays the foundation for differentiating between art's aesthetic constitution and a concept of truth that accommodates the standard of the natural sciences. Through reducing the "sensus communis to a subjective principle," Kant legitimates his critique of aesthetic judgments by denying taste any importanceas a mode of knowledge.3Ricoeur's hermeneutical reflections on imagination complement Gadamer's critique of a differentiating consciousness that abstracts art works from their cultural worlds. For Ricoeur, imagination is productive when the fictions that works create affect our understanding of ourselves and our world by re-describing reality. Aesthetics' alignment with ideology encounters a limit in the power works evince by unfolding different ways of seeing or hearing reality. Ricoeur's reflections on imagination stand in stark contrast to the idea that individual works represent a form of cultural capital in the struggle for social position [End Page 165] and power. Contemporary critical practices' failure to account for the philosophical separation of judgments of taste from knowledge of reality precipitates the impasse criticism encounters when it identifies aesthetics with ideology at the expense of a work's capacity to affect reality in productive ways. The dispersal and potential disappearance of music's aesthetic character into the recesses of cultural and political analysis keeps step with the conceptual narrowing imposed by a restrictive sociological critique. Demystifying music's ideological representations of gender, race and identity purges romantic... (shrink)

The systematic examination of the visual depiction of nonhuman animals by humans, and the representation of nonhuman animal imagery is an opportunity to observe varying degrees of anthropocentrism in the manner in which the nonhuman animal is represented. The investigation we present ventures beyond the traditional scope of post-modern human alterity and suggests that an Otherness status should be extended to encompass both the human animal and the nonhuman animal. An important motivation for seriously considering nonhuman animal experience is the (...) biological similarities shared by human animals and nonhuman animals. Many perspectives toward the nonhuman animal have ignored such similarities, and this in turn results in the infliction of much trauma and injustice on nonhuman animals. We argue that the visual representation of nonhuman animals has the potential, to a substantial degree, to affect the general human understanding of and interactions with all nonhuman animals, and with positive, neutral, and negative implications for all involved. In other words, it really matters how we represent animals. (shrink)

If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by Boucher and Osgood’s (1969) famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora in several languages (Dodds et al., 2015), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show a Pollyanna effect. Here we tested this prediction applying a vector space model- based sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt (Jacobs, 2019) to two CYL corpora, one in English (372 books) and one in German (500 books). (...) Pitching our analysis at the sentence level, and assessing semantic as well as lexico-grammatical information, bBoth corpora show the Pollyanna effect and thus add further evidence to the universality hypothesis. The results of our multivariate sentiment analyses provide interesting testable predictions for future scientific studies of literature. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest reading the Second Essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as a perfectionist critique of Roman law. Roman Law, I argue, relies on the fabrication of a specific subjectivity that structurally undermines the conditions of a good life and thus prevents us from fully exhausting our ethical-aesthetical potential. Citing an important source for Nietzsche’s legal thought, legal scholar Albrecht Hermann Post, I reconstruct how Nietzsche conceptualizes the disentanglement of the individual from the ‘natural’ community, namely (...) as the fabrication of a subjugated-subjugating legal personality in particular through the Roman civil law. This process fundamentally affects the human psycho-somatic structure in a paradoxical way, both as bad conscience and as sovereign triumphalism. However, while Nietzsche formulates an important critique of one of our dominant forms of social integration, his proposed way of overcoming it remains unconvincing, because it is just as hostile to life as is the law. (shrink)

Background: Individuals with psychopathic traits demonstrate an attenuated emotional response to aversive stimuli. However, recent evidence suggests heterogeneity in emotional reactivity among individuals with psychopathic or callous-unemotional (CU) traits, the emotional detachment dimension of psychopathy. We hypothesize that primary variants of psychopathy will respond with blunted affect to negatively valenced stimuli, whereas individuals marked with histories of childhood trauma/maltreatment exposure, known as secondary variants, will display heightened emotional reactivity. To test this hypothesis, the present study examined fear-potentiated startle between psychopathy (...) variants while viewing aversive, pleasant, and neutral scenes. Method: 238 incarcerated adolescent (M age = 16.8, SD = 1.11 years) boys completed a picture-startle paradigm and self-report questionnaires assessing CU traits, antisocial-aggressive behavior, and maltreatment. Results: Latent profile analyses identified four classes; primary variants (high CU traits, high aggression, low maltreatment; n = 46), secondary variants (high CU traits, high aggression, high maltreatment; n = 42), and two nonpsychopathic groups differentiated on maltreatment experience (n = 148). Findings from an ANOVA comparing identified groups on startle amplitude difference scores (i.e., aversive-neutral) suggested a main effect for group, F(3,196)=8.91, p<.001, η2 = .12. Primary variants of juvenile psychopathy displayed reduced startle potentiation to aversive images (threat and victim scenes), whereas secondary variants distinguished by high levels of childhood maltreatment did not. Conclusions: Findings add to a rapidly growing body of literature supporting the possibility of multiple developmental pathways to psychopathy (i.e., equifinality), and extend it by finding support for divergent potential biomarkers between primary and secondary psychopathy variants. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aesthetic Potential of Global Issues CurriculumWilliam Gaudelli (bio) and Randall Hewitt (bio)IntroductionGlobal issues rarely suggest conversations about aesthetics, as they conjure thinking about massive problems such as global warming, famine, and war rather than beautiful thoughts such as grace, love, and compassion. Students may engage in study of global issues in any number of venues, perhaps through a world geography class, within world literature, or as (...) part of a course in Earth science. They would likely be exposed to readings, Web sites, and videos about the nature and extent of problems. Teachers might engage them in small and large group discussions of problems, and, ideally, there would be some consideration of what they might do as citizens. Such processes, their outcomes, and subsequent civic directions are generally not regarded as aesthetic acts, however. One is likely to consider the aesthetic value of a piece of art, a song or poem, movie or performance, but to speak of activities like teaching global issues being aesthetic seems discordant.Yet, this is not so within John Dewey's notion of aesthetics. He argues that aesthetics can exist outside of museums and beyond theaters, potentially in social discourse. Activities like public talk, while not as inherently pleasing as listening to music, have the potential to be experienced as aesthetic:Hence an experience of thinking has its own esthetic quality. It differs from those experiences that are acknowledged to be esthetic, but only [End Page 83] in its materials … [T]he experience itself has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses integral integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement … In short, esthetic cannot be sharply marked off from intellectual experience since the latter must bear an esthetic stamp to be itself complete.1Dewey's contention that all types of activity, from repairing an automobile to discussing species extinction, can point toward transcendence has not achieved widespread recognition among philosophers, nor has its utility been demonstrated in curriculum.2 Aesthetics and art are still largely confined to the museum, hermetically sealed off from everyday experiences in a Schillerian "ideal kingdom."3 To suggest curriculum, schools, and pedagogy as potential landscapes for artwork far removed from the museum is to render oneself a heretic in many quarters of educational discourse.Yet, there is a despondency and desperation about schools, and thereby curriculum, that too often fail to teach for and about something more than narrow, capitalist-driven, techno-rationalist ends. Constructivist orientations in teaching, for example, have contributed to shifting the manner of teaching but have done relatively little to reframe the ends of learning. Metaphorically, constructivism is a spoon of sugar to help swallow the bitter pill that is learning for and as work. What is lacking in this conceptualization, according to Parker Palmer, Nel Noddings, and Aostre Johnson, is an aesthetic and spiritual rationale for learning that honors the sanctity of students beyond their academic capacities, values the processes of learning as much as its outcomes, and seeks a space for learning that is transcendent.4What we seek in this article with Dewey, then, is an antidote for the malaise that has befallen curriculum, one that is rooted in an aesthetic way of thinking instantiated in a most unlikely candidate: teaching about global issues. We begin by briefly outlining some of Dewey's thinking related to aesthetics, particularly as it germinated in his career and biography. We then turn to the work of contemporary scholars in education who have similarly found value in Dewey's notion of aesthetics. Finally, we draw an illustration from a recent study of student focus groups engaged in reading global media. This student conversation about the potential cataclysm of global warming demonstrates the surprising capacity of such bleak policy discussions to generate aesthetic moments. The significance of this work lies in its potential to contribute to a broadened curriculum discourse that aims toward living an aesthetically resonant life in classrooms and wider social environs while augmenting and enhancing the rationalistic focus of contemporary schools and, indeed, the study of global issues.Deweyan Aesthetics and BiographyWe begin by weaving Dewey's biography with his notion of aesthetics as an internal process of... (shrink)

The long-form television drama series Hannibal thematises the embodied imagination and the elicitation of empathy and ethical understanding at the level of narrative and characterisation as well as through character engagement and screen aesthetics. Using Hannibal as a case study, this research investigates how stylistic choices frame the experiences of screen characters and engender forms of intersubjectivity based on corporeal and cognitive routes to empathy; in particular, it examines the capacity for screen media to facilitate what neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese terms (...) intercorporeality. As a constitutive aspect of intersubjectivity and social understanding that works through embodied simulation, intercorporeality invites a reconceptualisation of empathy and its association with ethical motivation and insight. Hannibal also introduces cannibalism as a dark metaphor for the incorporation of another into oneself, reflecting on empathy's ill-understood potential for negative affect and... (shrink)

Global issues rarely suggest conversations about aesthetics, as they conjure thinking about massive problems such as global warming, famine, and war rather than beautiful thoughts such as grace, love, and compassion. Students may engage in study of global issues in any number of venues, perhaps through a world geography class, within world literature, or as part of a course in Earth science. They would likely be exposed to readings, Web sites, and videos about the nature and extent of problems. Teachers (...) might engage them in small and large group discussions of problems, and, ideally, there would be some consideration of what they might do as citizens. Such processes, their outcomes, and subsequent civic directions .. (shrink)

In this paper, I combine sources from environmental psychology with insights from the everyday aesthetics literature to explore the concept of ‘everyday heritage’, formerly introduced by Saruhan Mosler. Highlighting the potential of heritage in its everyday context shows that symbolic, aesthetic, and broadly conceived affective factors may be as important as architectural, historical, and artistic issues when it comes to conceiving of heritage value. Indeed, there seems to be more to a heritage site than its official inscription (...) on the UNESCO register. A place is included as part of our heritage primarily because it matters to us. People live in, form relationships with, and derive existential and affective meanings from it. Above and beyond its official significance, a heritage site is thus a living dimension that plays a vital role in the everyday life and social practices of people, who transform it into a place of human significance. (shrink)

This study examines the complex relation between spatial experience and aesthetic experience. It is argued that spatial experience specifically in the context of everyday spaces makes it possible to experience them aesthetically as well. A wide selection of research ranging from environmental and philosophical aesthetics to architectural theory, psychology, human geography, and other relevant disciplines is employed in order to achieve a more detailed picture of how spatial experience is formed in the first place. This experience is described mainly (...) in terms of phenomenology but is then related to other ways of understanding experiences and their prerequisites. -/- Different notions of space and spatiality and a more comprehensive articulation of the relation of perception to spatial experience, sensory perception, and how senses contribute to spatial experience are in the focus of attention at the beginning of the study. Different experiential layers that can be distinguished within the space which is closest experienced are explored. Interaction with environment is discussed and the notion of preaesthetic is presented to clarify the relation between the two different types of experiences. Following this, the notion of preaesthetic is studied against eminent notions such as aesthetic attitude and aesthetic engagement that show elements that have traditionally been considered to either lead to or define aesthetic experiences. -/- This study shows that the effect that spatial experience has on revealing aesthetic potentialities in everyday environments is far more complicated than has previously been understood. Due to its contingent qualities, spatial experience sometimes leads to "failed" aesthetic experiences even in situations where there is obvious aesthetic potentiality. Even though there are some overlapping qualities in spatial and aesthetic experiences, they cannot thus be equated, as has more or less been done in different branches studying the topics of art and architectural experiences, for example. In the final part of the study, some possible directions for future research are pointed out and the application possibilities of these new developments in aesthetic theory are presented by short case studies, in which a closer look is taken into a chosen set of urban everyday spaces. (shrink)

Even though there is a general presence of aesthetics in school curricula in most of western countries, both at the level of terminology and at the level of choice and definition of contents, objectives and skills to be developed, the approach to sports and physical education potential for the development of aesthetic education of students still does not seem to be a reality in the agenda of this subject. Moreover, it is not transversal in terms of its different (...) didactic contents. In order to explore its relevance, the aim of this work was to deepen how aesthetics is internal and central to sports experience, and which elements of sports and physical education lived experiences can be relevant in the promotion and development of the aesthetic sensibility of students. We propose the deepening of the subject through an hermeneutical qualitative research approach, confronting the content collected in 19 semi-structured interviews that enabled the thematic analysis of its content, and through it, the discussion of viewpoints of representative subjects among those that are the main players in the consideration of an aesthetic education through sport, namely physical education teachers and researchers in the context of aesthetics and sports sciences. With the information gathered and after its processing, we could conclude that there are aesthetic elements of sport's experience that should be taken into account in an aesthetic educational point of view of physical education, namely: complexity, diversity, playability, tension between drama and accuracy, overcoming experience, risk and vulnerability, unpredictable storylines and uncertainty, technique and effectiveness. (shrink)

In this paper, I combine sources from environmental psychology with insights from the everyday aesthetics literature to explore the concept of ‘everyday heritage’, formerly introduced by Saruhan Mosler. Highlighting the potential of heritage in its everyday context shows that symbolic, aesthetic, and broadly conceived affective factors may be as important as architectural, historical, and artistic issues when it comes to conceiving of heritage value. Indeed, there seems to be more to a heritage site than its official inscription (...) on the UNESCO register. A place is included as part of our heritage primarily because it matters to us. People live in, form relationships with, and derive existential and affective meanings from it. Above and beyond its official significance, a heritage site is thus a living dimension that plays a vital role in the everyday life and social practices of people, who transform it into a place of human significance. (shrink)

The ability to form „images“ of our experiences with the world (imaging effect) and to adjust our drive and determination in accordance with those images (action effect) is what characterises men, as stipulated by Cassirer and subsequently confirmed by Langer and Krois. Special techniques are required to communicate to others the images of life and how we interpret them. The art as a technique does this masterly by presenting us the views of others on their experiences and wishes through (...) class='Hi'>aesthetic experience. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse images not only with respect to their historical aspects based on experiences with the world but to emphasise their power to shape the future by their potential to affect our actions. - / - Die Fähigkeit „Bilder“ unserer Erfahrungen mit der Welt zu formen (Bildkraft) und unser Streben und Wollen (Tatkraft) nach ihnen auszurichten, das ist es, was den Menschen nach Cassirer – und nachfolgend auch nach Langer und Krois – auszeichnet. Voraussetzung dafür die Bilder des Lebens und das, was wir von ihnen halten, zu objektivieren und Anderen zu kommunizieren, bilden Techniken. Die Kunst als Technik ist darin eine Meisterin, indem sie uns über die ästhetische Erfahrung Anschauungen Anderer von ihren Erfahrungen und Wünschen, lebendig vor Augen zu führen vermag. Bei der Analyse von Bildern gilt es insofern nicht nur deren geschichtsträchtigen, auf Erfahrungen mit der Welt beruhenden Aspekte zu untersuchen, sondern vor allem auch deren zukunftsprägendes und damit unsere Tatkraft ansprechendes Potential. (shrink)

“Dance” has been associated with many psychophysiological and medical health effects. However, varying definitions of what constitute “dance” have led to a rather heterogenous body of evidence about such potential effects, leaving the picture piecemeal at best. It remains unclear what exact parameters may be driving positive effects. We believe that this heterogeneity of evidence is partly due to a lack of a clear definition of dance for such empirical purposes. A differentiation is needed between (a) the effects on (...) the individual when the activity of “dancing” is enjoyedas a dancerwithindifferent dance domains(e.g.,professional/”high-art”type of dance,eroticdance,religiousdance,clubdancing,Dance Movement Therapy(DMT), and what is commonly known ashobby, recreationalorsocialdance), and (b) the effects on the individual within these different domains, as a dancer of thedifferent dance styles(solo dance, partnering dance, group dance; and all the different styles within these). Another separate category of dance engagement is, not as a dancer, but as a spectator of all of the above. “Watching dance” as part of an audience has its own set of psychophysiological and neurocognitive effects on the individual, and depends on the context where dance is witnessed. With the help of dance professionals, we first outline some different dance domains and dance styles, and outline aspects that differentiate them, and that may, therefore, cause differential empirical findings when compared regardless (e.g., amount of interpersonal contact, physical exertion, context, cognitive demand, type of movements, complexity of technique and ratio of choreography/improvisation). Then, we outline commonalities between all dance styles. We identify six basic components that are part of any dance practice, as part of a continuum, and review and discuss available research for each of them concerning the possible health and wellbeing effects of each of these components, and how they may relate to the psychophysiological and health effects that are reported for “dancing”: (1) rhythm and music, (2) sociality, (3) technique and fitness, (4) connection and connectedness (self-intimation), (5) flow and mindfulness, (6) aesthetic emotions and imagination. Future research efforts might take into account the important differences between types of dance activities, as well as the six components, for a more targeted assessment of how “dancing” affects the human body. (shrink)

How can the power of wholes be resisted without essentializing their parts? Drawing on different archives and methodologies, including aesthetics, history, biology, affect, race, and queer, the interventions in this volume explore different ways of troubling the consistency and stability of wholes, breaking up their closure and making them more dynamic. Doing so without necessarily presupposing or producing parts, an outside, or a teleological development, they indicate the critical potential of partiality without parts.

We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In _Nature as Event_, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following William (...) James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human? (shrink)

Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in particular their writing on Franz Kafka, this article stakes out the ground for a creative critical writing practice beyond the confines of literature. Exploring the notion of writing in relation to affect constellations, what causes one to write, and expressions without content, how one begins to write, the argument put forth is that in rethinking the distinction Deleuze and Guattari tend to make between artistic practice and philosophical thought, a (...) space is opened up for transversal lines that may cross between these fields in practices that are creative and critical and involve what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as aesthetic figures as well as conceptual personae. These practices, it is argued, provide a potential link between aesthetics, on the one hand, and ethics and politics, on the other. (shrink)

It is widely agreed upon that aesthetic properties, such as grace, balance, and elegance, are perceived. I argue that aesthetic properties are experientially attributed to some non‐perceptible objects. For example, a mathematical proof can be experienced as elegant. In order to give a unified explanation of the experiential attribution of aesthetic properties to both perceptible and non‐perceptible objects, one has to reject the idea that aesthetic properties are perceived. I propose an alternative view: the affective (...) account. I argue that the standard case of experiential aesthetic property attribution is affective experience. (shrink)

The robotics industry is growing rapidly, and to a large extent the development of this market sector is due to the area of social robotics – the production of robots that are designed to enter the space of human social interaction, both physically and semantically. Since social robots present a new type of social agent, they have been aptly classified as a disruptive technology, i.e. the sort of technology which affects the core of our current social practices and might lead (...) to profound cultural and social change. -/- Due to its disruptive and innovative potential, social robotics raises not only questions about utility, ethics, and legal aspects, but calls for “robo-philosophy” – the comprehensive philosophical reflection from the perspectives of all philosophical disciplines. This book presents the proceedings of the first conference in this new area, “Robo-Philosophy 2014 – Sociable Robots and the Future of Social Relations", held in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 2014. The short papers and abstracts collected here address questions of social robotics from the perspectives of philosophy of mind, social ontology, ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, intercultural philosophy, and metaphilosophy. -/- Social robotics is still in its early stages, but it is precisely now that we need to reflect its possible cultural repercussions. This book is accessible to a wide readership and will be of interest to everyone involved in the development and use of social robotics applications, from social roboticists to policy makers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy by Mario TelòSean LambertTelò, Mario. Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy. Ohio State University Press, 2020. 344pp.In Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, Mario Telò takes aim at one of the most canonical (if also one of the most contested) features of Greek tragedy: its potential to deliver catharsis (12).1 Through careful close readings of Greek tragedies informed (...) by psychoanalytic theory and deconstruction, Telò makes a persuasive case that tragedy is anti-cathartic. “The Freudian take on catharsis is complicated, or even undercut,” he writes in the introduction, “by its own anti-cathartic latencies… We can accordingly look at tragedy as a form of dramatic poetry that finds its affective raison d’être… in these anti-cathartic feelings” (34).Telò states that the intent of Archive Feelings is mainly to intervene in the age-old debate, asking: “why do human beings enjoy tragedy?” (14). He suggests that the pleasure of tragedy is, in fact, a masochistic one: a denial of release or pleasure (such as would come from catharsis) that an audience or reader enjoys in its specifically joyless jouissance. At stake is “feeling material,” a “fantasy” of “merging into the impersonal, anorganic, universal matter of elemental life” (44) evoked in tragedy’s death-driven withdrawal from action. With this concept in mind, Telò goes beyond even his own ambitions for his project. More than merely intervening in debates about the pleasures of tragedy, he argues powerfully for the continuing relevance of Greek tragedy for critical theory today, particularly in light of the so-called “affective” and “material” turns in the humanities. Archive Feelings is thus a useful book for classicists conducting interdisciplinary and/or trans-historical research, but even more so for any scholar working within the constellation of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, queer theory, affect theory or critical race theory. Telò makes a persuasive case for tragedy as a lodestar within this firmament–a vital tool for thinking through problems within and across disciplines.In striking contradistinction to previous theorists of Greek tragedy, including Aristotle and Nietzsche, Telò locates the engine of Greek tragedy in the death drive. In so doing, he reads in ancient narratives a number of experiences such as “acceleration, hoarding, vertiginous suspension, [End Page 113] breathless looping, affective bulimia or binge-eating, serial cutting, trying to enter or fold in upon oneself, auto-immune inflammation” (14), and finds in “the orgasm as an unfinished, non-teleological pleasure,” a desire to return to a state of “inert matter” (13).2 Noting that the original meaning of the Greek word archê is “origin,” Telò connects this impulse to once again become “inert” with the desire to create archives. Thus, Telò sees Greek tragedies as both a model for projects of archival reconstruction as well as archival projects themselves: they are “anxious and debilitating” attempts to “re-create the past as it was” (13).3Telò’s study is divided into three parts: Archival Time, Archival Space, and Archival Endings, which attempt to “structurally reproduce the psychological temporalities of the archive” (49). In each of his five chapters, Telò elaborates the diverse narrative masochisms of Greek tragedy, exploring the various stakes and species of tragic anti-catharsis. In Chapter 1, Telò reads the “archive fever” of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus against the “archive fatigue” of Euripides’ Phoenissae, finding in both of these plays—near the end of the epoch of ancient tragedy—an impulse toward “textual hoarding” (76) that both undermines the possibility of catharsis and “exhausts” (106) the possibilities of the genre (107). In both the “synchronic gathering of disparate fragments of experience” into the body of Oedipus before his death and the aesthetics of boredom, fatigue, and inertia that suffuse the Phoenissae, Telò locates a desire to store up, rather than purge, emotions such as pity and fear, in a flouting of the normal formula for catharsis (73).In Chapter 2, Telò looks at the figures of Heracles and Medea in their original myths and tragic incarnations, seeing in both the compulsion to recircle around scenes of their respective “primordial traumas” (145). In Euripides’s Medea, this move manifests in repeated references... (shrink)

An investigation into the historical development of Nike's award-winning advertising campaigns in the US reveals that, over the last decade or so, African-American athletes have become their almost exclusive focus. However, these ads have increasingly centered not on black personalities per se, but on the aesthetic, affective and visceral manifestations of skin, musculature and sweat. Black bodies in advertising are rarely to be seen at rest, unless in a state of exhaustion (from which the requisite product alone can (...) provide relief). Consideration is therefore given to the potential connotations of cultural producers' repeated references to extreme physical exertion. Anson Rabinbach's trope of the `human motor' evokes modern science's concern with matters of energy preservation and entropy; here it is utilized to provide a fresh insight into the chronic contradictions between commercial cultural production on one hand, and the reality of contemporary cultural and social inequalities on the other. (shrink)

To answer those questions we shall have to consider successively to what extent all art is implicitly religious, what makes particular aesthetic expressions explicitly sacred, and how a secular culture affects either one or both of those modes. My overall thesis is that authentic art at all times, including our own, retains a potentially sacred quality. Controversial enough as it stands, this thesis does not imply that a genuinely sacred art must exist or is even possible at all times. (...) Let us then first investigate the more general case. (shrink)

An illustrated exploration of fandom that combines academic essays with artist pages and experimental texts. Fandom as Methodology examines fandom as a set of practices for approaching and writing about art. The collection includes experimental texts, autobiography, fiction, and new academic perspectives on fandom in and as art. Key to the idea of “fandom as methodology” is a focus on the potential for fandom in art to create oppositional spaces, communities, and practices, particularly from queer perspectives, but also through (...) transnational, feminist and artist-of-color fandoms. The book provides a range of examples of artists and writers working in this vein, as well as academic essays that explore the ways in which fandom can be theorized as a methodology for art practice and art history. Fandom as Methodology proposes that many artists and art writers already draw on affective strategies found in fandom. With the current focus in many areas of art history, art writing, and performance studies around affective engagement with artworks and imaginative potentials, fandom is a key methodology that has yet to be explored. Interwoven into the academic essays are lavishly designed artist pages in which artists offer an introduction to their use of fandom as methodology. Contributors Taylor J. Acosta, Catherine Grant, Dominic Johnson, Kate Random Love, Maud Lavin, Owen G. Parry, Alice Butler, SooJin Lee, Jenny Lin, Judy Batalion, Ika Willis. Artists featured in the artist pages Jeremy Deller, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Anna Bunting-Branch, Maria Fusco, Cathy Lomax, Kamau Amu Patton, Holly Pester, Dawn Mellor, Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Women of Colour Index Reading Group, Liv Wynter, Zhiyuan Yang. (shrink)

This article aims to investigate the political and conceptual power of the successful and highly praised film Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2019) by inserting it within general trends of contemporary visual culture surrounding the issue of cinematic precarity. The discussion will find its analytical coordinates around the notions of chronotope and dialogism. These tools are notoriously attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin and are intended to investigate regular patterns in aesthetic experiences and to evaluate the differential and subversive (...) potential to be attributed to every case study. The grounding assumption of the following analysis is to understand cinematic experience as an ecological encounter and an affective and conceptual interaction in which viewers find the opportunity to explore and experience complex ethical systems: a productive interrelation that allows us also to connect the discussion with reflections upon general dynamics of neoliberal governance and with trajectories of resistance and revolt against it. (shrink)

In this study, we ask whether consensus testimony affects children’s judgments of the possibility of improbable and impossible events. Fifty-six U.S. and Chinese 8-year-olds made possibility judgments before and after hearing three speakers affirm or deny the possibility of improbable and impossible events. Results indicated that whereas both U.S. and Chinese children altered their judgments in the direction of the consensus testimony, this effect was stronger for Chinese children. U.S. children were particularly receptive to consensus for improbable events and when (...) the consensus provided correct information, whereas Chinese children were similarly willing to change their judgment regardless of event type and the validity of the testimony. We propose that the extent of the influence of testimony on possibility judgments varies based on cultural setting. Our findings have potential applications for domains that require evaluation of counterintuitive claims, like religious and scientific education. (shrink)

There are various authors who discussed the nature and manner of the existence of aesthetic values and the characterisation of aesthetic experience, among others, Thomas Acquinas, Roman Ingarden, Władyslaw Tatarkiewicz, Stanisław Ossowski, and Mieczysław Wallis. Taking into consideration their positions, the author claims that, potentially, each object as a coincidence of respective qualities is suitable for an aesthetic attitude. It may appear aesthetically somewhat, such that it alone may move (with its contents), i.e. it may draw attention, (...) stir, delight, arouse fancy, affect strongly. All this may be done ..disinterestedly\", therefore without any reference to the practical sphere (to the sphere of usefulness, profit), nor should this object be a source of pleasure (,,cause good composition\"). (shrink)