Aesthetica Preprint

Performance and Performativity – How to Discuss Presence

Erika Fischer-Lichte — 2025-04-11

Today’s aesthetics discourse sees presence as a specific aesthetic quality not just of the human body but of objects from our environment, including products of technical and electronic media (in terms of their “presence effects”). I will apply the term “presence” to the performer’s body and subsequently examine whether, within the frame of the aesthetics of the performative, it can be meaningfully related to objects from our environment.

Kaiseki, Matcha, Wagashi. Taste in the Japanese Tea Ceremony

Maddalena Borsato — 2025-04-11

The aim of this contribution is to explore the performativity of taste in the Japanese tea ceremony. While widely recognized as a non-Western artistic expression, its aesthetic exploration has largely neglected the significant contribution of food and tea prepared and shared – kaiseki (meal), wagashi (sweets), usucha and koicha (thin and thick tea) – while emphasizing what is commonly related to the artworld. I delve into the varied meanings of taste by adopting a non-exceptionalist and everyday aesthetic perspective. In this framework, I investigate some intertwined aspects, such as the intentional conveyance of imperfection and impermanence throughout the ritual, the contradictory harmony and effects of food and tea, and the contribution of taste in crafting a performance as an artistic expression. To do this, a shift from an object-oriented perspective to a relational and operative one is needed. Here, sensory qualities and sharing are neither vehicles nor signs for meaning, but are themselves meaningful as evenemential relationships. Taste acts as a modality, shaping the unique relationship unfolding between host, guest and the environment. By carrying both aesthetic and ethical values, taste not only emphasizes the philosophical meaning of hospitality, but also contributes to understanding the ceremony as an action that is simultaneously routine and extraordinary, capable of redefining the very notion of artistic performance.

Actively restructuring our models through aesthetic experience: revisiting the adverbialist approach through Predictive Processing Theory

Claudia Cano — 2025-04-11

This article aims at describing aesthetic experience based on its cognitive structure. In contrast with the so-called “content-oriented approach”, we defend a “broad” structuralist account of aesthetic experience, particularly drawing on the Adverbialist Model and reframing it within the context of an embodied version of Predictive Processing Theory. We describe here the paradigmatic features of aesthetic experience, that we mainly identify in a particular “cognitive restructuring” mechanism, corresponding to an updating of internal world models, which unfolds under a disinterested motivation profile, correlating with peculiar metacognitive feelings. This approach avoids some relevant objections faced by content-oriented definitions of aesthetic experience and enhances the explanatory power of structuralist views, specifically by accounting for the feeling of learning, the particular attentional profile of our aesthetic experiences, and the pleasure that accompanies ambivalent (both positive and negative-valenced) aesthetic experiences, as in the paradoxical case of the tragic.

Perspective and Metamorphosis from the Renaissance to Amazonia

Emanuele Capozziello — 2025-04-11

In this article, I aim to create a dialogue between “perspectivist” anthropology and the concept of “perspective” in aesthetics and art history. By juxtaposing the two, I will explore the emergence of an anthropological theory of representation that points toward a “reversal” of the Western perspectivist paradigm. The first part will delve into the notion of perspective as a distinctly modern and Western “scopic regime,” while the second part will examine anthropological perspectivism as a form of “reversal” of the first. This reversal will be characterized as pointing toward a “metamorphic” conception of perspective within the ethno-anthropological framework. I will argue that, in anthropological perspectivism, “having a perspective on the other” involves an openness to adopting their form, whether as a risk or an opportunity. Thus, “putting the other into perspective (as an object)” transforms into “assuming the perspective of the other (as a subject).”

Imagination in Practice: The Manipulation of Objects in Mixed Reality through Eidetic Variation

Floriana Ferro — 2025-04-11

This paper explores the application of the phenomenological method of eidetic variation, developed by Edmund Husserl, to mixed reality (MR). Initially, MR is defined within the Reality-Virtuality (RV) continuum developed by Milgram and others (1994) and revisited by Skarbez and others (2021). MR objects, situated within this spectrum, are analyzed phenomenologically as both perceptual and imaginative, constituted by a network of relations. The paper then focuses on Husserl’s method of eidetic variation from Experience and Judgement, which involves arbitrary modification of object characteristics to grasp their essence. This method, though rooted in essentialism, is used by content designers in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to create objects and environments. Lastly, the paper suggests that MR reflects the externalization of imagination through digital technologies, proposing an Analogue-Digital (AD) continuum that integrates human bodily experience and MR technology, facilitating imaginative visualization and creation without searching for the essence of objects.

Il paradosso dell’arte concettuale

Filippo Focosi — 2025-04-11

In the field of visual arts, the category of Conceptual Art has occupied a very prominent place for decades now. Broadly understood, it includes not only the works of ‘strictly’ conceptual authors such as Beuys or LeWitt, but also works belonging to different genres: from the ready-mades of Duchamp and his modern followers, to the installations of Pistoletto and the performances of Marina Abramović. Despite such wide extension and diffusion, Conceptual Art is unable to deliver what its name promises, since – this is what we are going to argue – the ideas it conveys are either trivial or inadequately elaborated. In this essay we will highlight the reasons for this apparent paradox, that have to do with a common tendency toward reductionism in the use of one’s linguistic, visual, and performative media. Subsequently, we will analyse the most common strategies deployed by conceptual artists in order to reaffirm the intellectual weight of their own works, such as de-contextualization, bizarre titling, the display of autobiographical elements, and the reference to critical-theoretical discourses. Such strategies will ultimately prove ineffective in filling the semantic void to which conceptual art seems irremediably destined, and even to some extent dangerous from a more general aesthetic and artistic point of view.

Resemantizing and Aestheticizing Dissonant Heritage: Bunk’Art Museums as Sites of Collective Memory in Albania’s Landscape

Florjer Gjepali — 2025-04-11

The legacies embedded within societies that have experienced profoundly calamitous historical episodes, genocides, mass slaughters, and autocratic regimes, precipitate a complex question for decision-makers: to what degree is the act of remembrance more equitable than the choice of oblivion? Following the collapse of Enver Hoxha’s communist dictatorship (1988-1992), Albania was confronted with the intricate legacy of its dissonant heritage. An initial inclination to repudiate the severe oppression – despite the omnipresent reminders interwoven in the nation’s topography (such as bunkers, military edifices, and modified landscapes) – gave way to the Albanian people resolve to actively engage with their historical shadow. Through the resemantization of sites and landscapes, this contribution discusses the construction of collective memory among Albanian citizens, describing the aesthetic practices adopted to create a novel narration in public spaces. Specifically, it analyzes two underground museums, which are two anti-nuclear bunkers of the communist era: Bunk’Art1 and Bunk’Art2. In conclusion, the paper explores the impact of these interventions, questioning whether excessive aestheticization risks becoming a double-edged sword: that is, a weapon of the utmost importance at first, but harmless, if not penalizing, the moment it is adopted excessively and with a very short time frame on the remainders of the landscape. Particularly highlighted is the concern that such practices may fail to acknowledge the necessity of time in the constitution of collective memory, and that excessive aestheticization might untimely lead to its opposite, i.e. practices of a completely anesthetic character.

Dancing the In-between. The Emergence of Dance from Pathicity, Suspension, and Atmospheric Resonance

Serena Massimo — 2025-04-11

This paper aims to propose a case study of a neo-phenomenological analysis of a contemporary dance work. After presenting the ‘suspended dance’ La Spire, created by Chloe Moglia in 2017, the words used by Moglia herself and the dancers in the choreography will be brought into dialogue with Strausian notions of ‘pathicity’ and ‘tonicity’. They will make it possible to grasp the relevance of the adoption of a ‘pathic’ attitude in the emergence of a dance characterised by multiple constraints. This will be manifested in the analysis of the dancers’ attitude towards gravity, which is far removed from that of everyday life and from that of acrobats. Finally, the neophenomenological notion of the ‘felt body’, the categories linked to it and the concepts of ‘atmospheric affordances’ and ‘atmospheric resonances’ introduced by Tonino Griffero will make it possible to show that the creative dimension of ‘La Spire’ is based on the ability to expose oneself to the affective stimuli present in a way that is not marked by fear of falling but by a spirit of playful complicity.

L’atto estetico secondo Vico: «La Contemplazione del Cielo fatta con gli occhi del corpo»

Leonardo Lenner — 2025-04-11

The aim of this paper is to trace and analyse the notion of “aesthetic act” in Giambattista Vico’s philosophy. Indeed the famous principle of verum ipsum factum, which states that knowledge is related to what we can make, coexists in De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710) with a doctrine of the faculties that assigns primary importance to the capacity of the senses to construct the qualities of objects. These themes are later reworked and transformed in Diritto universale (1720-1721) and in Scienza nuova (1744), works in which the philosophical enquiry focuses on legal-historical questions. Here, the origin of law and human civilisation is traced back to the “contemplation of the sky with the eyes of the body”: the ritual interpretation of the divine will through the observation of the celestial spheres and meteorological phenomena. This early mythopoiesis – a metaphorical thinking that transfers human feelings to the exteriority of nature – is a veritable creative visualisation by which primitives attribute meaning to what they see, drawing constellations and associating deities with planets.

Il teatro della traduzione: una performance estetica?

Elena Nardelli — 2025-04-11

This work aims to exploit the conceptual resources developed by aesthetic theories of the performative for a better understanding of the practice of translation. The argument is threefold. First, it argues that the aesthetics of performance can prompt translation to question the pivotal elements of its own conceptual framework, first and foremost the centrality of the original text, understood as an autonomous work of art in its own right from which a potentially infinite number of translations may emerge (like effects from a cause). Second, performance can illuminate translation’s status as an embodied and situated activity carried out by a flesh-and-blood human being who is constantly confronted with the materiality of word and language and with her own particular experience. Third, the aesthetics of performance can lead translation theory to urgently rethink the notion of meaning, conceived no longer as a pre-constituted element that precedes translation but as an element that is regenerated in the crisis of translation.

L’arte come menzogna e atto perlocutivo in Agostino

Francesco Paparella — 2025-04-11

Uno sguardo multidisciplinare sull’embodied experience nelle pratiche dello yoga

Dana Svorova — 2025-04-11

Recently we witness a cultural debate centered on the concept of embodiment. Indeed, nowadays many fields of study, e. g. cognitive neurosciences, social psychology, PNEI, posturology, somaesthetics, agree that body and mind are a functional unit. This relatively new concept of embodiment manifests the full extension of the cognitive dimension to include the body, mind, emotions and environment in a dynamic process characterized by their reciprocal interaction. Similar view on a complexity of the human being we can find also in an ancient theoretical-experiential system of yoga. This paper highlights a possible link between modern scientific research and ancient oriental philosophy finding some interesting contact points based on so-called embodied experience. This last constitutes a substrate of well-being and personal growth confirming that yoga practice is an affective tool to oppose the negativity brought by everyday routine and its lasting marks on people’s health.

Chemoaesthetics: An Enactive Approach to Collective Aesthetic Experiences

Carlos Vara Sánchez — 2025-04-11

When one reads philosophical work on the emotional dynamics at work during collective aesthetic experiences in particular, and social cognition in general, one is struck by the difficulty of explaining the specific mechanisms by which these events unfold, particularly in situations of minimal interaction such as cinemas or concert halls. Given that in these situations it is likely that we do not speak to or even look at other members of the audience, how do we interact and share emotions with them? This paper offers a new way of approaching this question. I argue that we can further develop the embodied and embedded aspects of enactive accounts of certain collective aesthetic experiences by bringing chemosignals into the discussion. Recent empirical findings strongly suggest that these context-dependent volatile chemicals, which we constantly emit and inhale in the air we breathe convey emotional information from those who produce them and shape cognitive, affective, and behavioural dynamics in those who receive them. Drawing on research in this field, on Dan Zahavi’s phenomenological work on the mechanisms by which we share emotional experiences, and on the philosophical analysis of collective aesthetic experiences, I will offer a discussion of the ways in which chemosignals may be regarded as one of the aspects contributing to what we experience and how we experience it by shaping processes of emotional contagion and emotional sharing in certain collective aesthetic experiences.

Il gesto rivoluzionario dell’infanzia. Avanguardia teatrale e liberazione delle facoltà estetiche nel teatro per bambini di Asja Lacis

Rolando Vitali — 2025-04-11

The paper provides a philosophical analysis of the pedagogical theatre experiment carried out by Asja Lacis in the city of Orel in Soviet Russia in 1918. Lacis’s experimentation is first traced back to the modern German tradition of theatre as a “moral institution” in Friedrich Schiller and Richard Wagner. In light of this tradition, Lacis’s work is then contextualized within the avant-garde movement, showing how it develops in an original way the idea of “leading art back into social life” (Peter Bürger), by overcoming the notion of aesthetic autonomy and radicalizing the pragmatic dimension of the aesthetic field.