Scenari

Introduzione

Chiara Pasqualin — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

L’estetica negli animali non umani

Roberto Marchesini — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Can we talk about a non-human aesthetic? Undoubtedly in our species aesthetics has taken on a particular ontological value and a cultural dimension that cannot be superimposed on that of other animals. However, it would be extremely wrong to believe that the sensorial and emotional orientation of other species can only be referred to mechanisms of behavioral stimulation or environmental monitoring. Ethological research has demonstrated for decades that Charles Darwin’s intuitions relating to aesthetic preferences in other species, at the basis of the evolution of some behaviors, such as sexual choice and courtship, found confirmation. Today we know that aesthetic stimuli induce specific physiological mechanisms, such as the activation of the dopaminergic system, and it is thus possible to study the sensory preference responses present in non-humans. These preferences are also demonstrated by other physiological mechanisms, such as the reduction of salivary cortisol in dogs when they listen to the human voice or the increase in milk production in cows if placed with classical music in the background. As with other aspects, we must therefore conclude that, if it is true that the aesthetic dimension in humans has had a development that goes beyond the mere ethological condition, it is undeniable that the bases of aesthetic behavior are part of the animal repertoire.

Tratti estetici e omologie strutturali: verso un’estetica animale comparata

Lorenzo Bartalesi — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from the observation that the contemporary evolutionary approach fails to exhaust the richness of animal aesthetic phenomena, the article is intended as a first contribution, in the direction of comparative animal aesthetics, to a nascent field of investigation in need of a broader interpretative pluralism. After a brief presentation of the main criticisms of evolutionary aesthetics, the problematic extension of human aesthetics to non-human animals is reformulated in the light of a radical recognition of the variability and plurality of animal aisthesis. A definition of aesthetics as a faculty with multiple components will then open up the possibility of a comparative approach that will be applied in the analysis of a case study.

Sentire animale? Trans-specismo e antropocentrismo fra cinema e tecnologie immersive

Pietro Conte, Andrea Pinotti — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Is it possible to access the experiential worlds of other animal species? From Uexküll’s “soap bubble” theory to Nagel’s inaccessible bats, both biology and philosophy have categorically denied that such a gateway to the Animal is passable. Yet, paradoxically enough, Uexküll himself did nothing but try, imagining the subjective worlds of animals and resorting to drawings and photographs to support this imagination. Cinema and virtual reality have taken up and relaunched this challenge. This article examines some relevant case studies, reflecting on the human, all-too-human desire to transcend the human itself. It aims to distinguish between two different types of first-person shots – anthropomorphic and theriomorphic – used to represent non-human modes of perception.

Apprezzare altre menti

Luca Marchetti — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper addresses the issue of whether other animals’ minds can be legitimate objects of aesthetic appreciation. It argues that (a) we can appreciate other minds; (b) that the object of appreciation in these cases is twofold: on the one hand, we appreciate the fitness, peculiarities, differences, and subtleties of the workings of other minds and, on the other, we appreciate the imaginative activity of trying to put ourselves in the animal’s perspective; and (c) that, as a consequence of (b), the nature of our appreciation is also twofold: on the one hand, it is an experience of the aesthetic qualities that emerge from what we know about the workings of other minds and, on the other, we derive pleasure from the challenging imaginative effort involved in trying to put ourselves in the animal’s perspective, rather than from achieving a definitive result.

L’esperienza estetica di fronte all’animale: una sua possibile definizione in prospettiva ontologico-esistenziale

Chiara Pasqualin — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In contemporary discussion, especially in the fields of aesthetics of nature and evolutionary animal aesthetics, the question about the meaning and definition of a supposed aesthetic appreciation of animals has been posed. In contrast, classical theorists of animal ethics have omitted to consider the role and significance of the aesthetic disposition and approach to animals. The present paper intends to explore this topic from an ontological-existential perspective based on the texts of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. We will outline a broad and non-anthropocentric definition of aesthetic experience that is applicable not only to a special class of objects, i.e. the works of art, but also to animals. We will show, in particular, that an authentic aesthetic experience of animals is characterized by four essential features: disinterestedness, the occurrence of an existential shock, a metaphysical aspect and an ethically binding character.

Without Asking. Language and Animality in Emmanuel Levinas

Giulia Cervato — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The animal question is one of the most significant points of the critical comparison between Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, the latter blames the former for relegating animality to a secondary role. In Derrida’s perspective, Levinas renounces identifying the animal as a wholly Other and thus remains, despite his claims, a carnophallogocentric thinker. The main contention of this paper is that Levinas, as the perfect heir of the Greco-Jewish tradition, is not able to articulate the ethical relationship outside of the linguistic model. Therefore, he cannot grant animals a primary role and, when they enter the ethical discussion, they must always be anthropomorphized. The only exception to this model is represented by Levinas’ analysis of a Biblical passage. As Levinas underlines, in this context, the matriarch Rebekah waters Abraham’s servant’s camels because they cannot ask for it, that is, precisely because they lack linguistic expressivity. Despite not being fully seized by Levinas, these hints of the biblical text could widen the applicational context of Levinasian ethics towards animals and properly pave the way for an ethics of difference. Moreover, in a paradoxical counterpoint, following such hints to the end and amplifying the unexpressed meanings of the Biblical text may lead to adhering to that prophetic dimension indicated by Levinas as the highest characteristic of human language itself.

Amicum animal, sed magis amica veritas. “Estetica / arte animale”: alcune considerazioni critiche in prospettiva ermeneutica

Giovanni Gurisatti — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We adopt a disjunctive approach to the human-animal question, against the ethological conjunctive hypothesis that assimilates animal-human and animal-non-human. With Heidegger, we consider it necessary to distinguish the humanitas of man from both the anthropocentric humanism of the logocentric philosophical tradition and the zoobiocentric antihumanism of the bioevolutionary scientist tradition. We advocate an ontocentric ultrahumanism whereby man exclusively possesses the possibility to exceed his animal-being by virtue of a radical openness to the Other than himself. Only man can grasp the being “as such,” can give it aesthetic form and ethically let it be the being that it is. Only what flows from this free experience, neither functional nor utilitarian, can claim the name “art.” To speak of “art” in the case of animals is therefore simply nonsense. We thought it appropriate to raise some philosophical questions about the nonchalance with which the relationship between aesthetics, art and animality is taken for granted, for the sole purpose of fighting the specist and anthropocentric prejudice. We do not believe that aesthetic sensibility and artistic behavior have a single common animal root, implicit in biological life itself. Our thesis eschews all forms of anthropomorphizing animals and zoomorphizing humans, and for this very reason it is genuinely anti-anthropocentric and anti-speciesist.

Introduzione. Estetica, popular music e sottoculture

Stefano Marino, Giovanni Mugnaini, Anna Scalfaro — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Popular Musical Subcultures: A Contrarian Analysis

Theodore Gracyk — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Although under attack for reasons articulated by David Hesmondhalgh, the concept of subcultures remains useful for understanding some activities surrounding popular music. However, the concept of subculture must be liberated from problematic assumptions that arose when popular music subcultures were reduced to youth subcultures. Subcultures are cultural formations. As such, they involve persistent symbolic distinction. Understood in this way, some popular music subcultures will be found to align with particular ideologies, but many will be fan formations that are not, for the most part, oppositional to the larger culture.

Rock Subcultures versus Pop Music: Italian Pop Music at the Czechoslovak Bratislavská lýra Festival

Yvetta Kajanová — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing on critical reviews in the Czech and Slovak press regarding the Bratislavská lýra [Bratislava Lyre] pop music festival, held annually in Bratislava from 1966 to 1998, the author examines the conformist, ambivalent, and antagonistic relationships between pop music and rock subcultures, while also giving attention to the commentaries about Italian participants, such as Rita Pavone, Drupi, Nino Rota, Toto Cutugno, Aldo Riva, Sabrina, and the Al Bano & Romina Power duo. Besides the substantial influence of rock subcultures – in particular hard rock, New Wave, progressive rock, and heavy metal – which brought changes to instrumentation, image, clothing, and stage presentation, other genres (e.g. reggae and funk) also steered the developmental directions of this festival. Whilst in its first stage (1966–77), the Bratislavská lýra mainly featured a Sanremo-like bel canto style of pop music with orchestral accompaniment, in the subsequent period (1977–98) contestants began incorporating rock show attributes. Cantilena-versus-rhythm and orchestra-versus-rock band polemics accompanied the event until its final year: on the one hand, there were endeavours to transform it from a pop music show into a presentation of rock clubs (in 1990–93) and, on the other, efforts to restore the original cantilena-orchestra model (in 1996–98). Ultimately, the antagonistic competition between rock subcultures and pop music played a decisive role in the demise of the Bratislavská lýra in 1998.

Envisioning the Future: Laibach as a Challenger of the Yugoslav State

Mitja Stefancic — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This contribution aims to assess Laibach’s disruptive social and cultural contribution by analysing the cultural pattern of the early 1980s and discussing the strategies applied by the group to overcome official bans such as the prohibition to publicly use the name “Laibach”. It analyses interviews to contemporary intellectuals who are established experts on the ensemble. The interview questions focused on Laibach’s relation to the Slovenian independent culture, the political pressure experienced by the band during its early years, and the group’s positioning in a setting which became functional for promoting Slovenia’s call for independence. The paper argues that the band’s critique was directed towards the repressive Yugoslav state and its inability to find solutions to economic and social problems rather than towards socialism as such. Laibach’s example shows that governments claiming to support freedom should pay adequate attention to radical art movements and alternative spaces by proactively supporting them.

Hermit Aesthetics in Chinese Metal Music: Subcultural Philosophy between Confucianism and Daoism

Yiren Zhao — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores the “hermit aesthetics” within Chinese music subculture, drawing on the philosophies of Confucianism and Daoism. Using the Chinese metal band Zuriaake as a case study, it examines how the band constructs its aesthetic framework around the notion of the hermit and employs it to articulate the subcultural articulation within the Chinese context. Through discourse analysis of Zuriaake’s music, lyrics, and imagery, the article argues that, in addition to directly integrating the hermit image with metal traditions, the band employs two philosophical strategies: “withdrawing from the world”, rooted in Daoism, and “entering the world”, based on Confucianism. This reveals how Chinese metal artists navigate their subcultural position by maintaining a balance between self, morality, and politics, akin to the hermits depicted in their music.

Aesthetics and Musical Subcultures Today: A Conversation with Simon Reynolds

Stefano Marino, Giovanni Mugnaini — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this interview Stefano Marino and Giovanni Mugnaini posed some questions to a great expert of popular music at an international level, Simon Reynolds, who offered extensive and detailed replies. The result is a dense conversation that summarizes all the main themes animating this issue of “Scenari”: the relationship between philosophy and popular music; the intersection between technology (AI) and popular music; the Adornian legacy in the philosophy of music and in musicology; the heuristic validity of the concept of subculture. Reynolds’ observations allow for a more detailed reconstruction of the relationship between philosophy, understood as cultural production and theory (not merely as an academic discipline) and popular music. Indeed, numerous precedents of “philosophical” interest in the popular are cited, offering a historical perspective on this relationship. This approach helps evaluate the concepts and theories underpinning it.

Algorithms, AI and music composition: When can musical creativity be considered pop?

Serena Allegra — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Traditional musicology has long considered pop music and classical music as two distinct entities, or even as two ontologically opposed categories, each with specific aesthetic, structural and compositional characteristics. The recent development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), in parallel with the use of learning algorithms, has prompted some reflection on the type of creativity associated with their use. In particular, the use of AI in the compositional phase is generally associated with popular music rather than classical music. However, if a convergence could be observed in this very compositional approach, it would mean that both musical domains, albeit with different results, originate from the same creative act: this could lead to a less rigid boundary between them. In fact, if one considers that musical creativity (both classical and pop) is the result of human beings’ ability to extend themselves beyond the boundaries of the skin through the technologies they produce, the presumed hierarchical superiority or inferiority of one of the two musical domains over the other becomes insubstantial. The aim, therefore, is to question the hierarchical dichotomy between popular and classical music, starting with a critical examination of compositional approaches and proceeding to the analysis of illustrative cases identified on a diachronic level. These cases show that the human tendency to delegate certain cognitive processes to more or less complex technologies is not a recent phenomenon, even in the field of music. A reassessment of the phenomenon is therefore proposed that goes beyond its external outcomes.

Sentire il groove: aspetti percettivi e partecipativi

Guglielmo Bottin — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The study of groove is part of a general re-evaluation of rhythm that took place towards the end of the 20th century. The phenomenon of groove is commonly associated with pleasurable involvement and synchronization with musical rhythm, inducing responses that are expressed in body movements and psychological entrainment. In syntactic/structural theories, groove is believed to emerge from a combination of cyclically repeated rhythmic lines, while in processual/performative interpretations, it is considered in terms of a musician’s embodied rhythmic sensibility or as the result of interplay in ensemble performance. Whether groove is considered in terms of ‘text’ or performance, scholars often refer to a unified set of parts, similar to the psychological concept of Gestalt. This essay aims to place groove among the pillars of a more general aesthetic theory of popular music, evaluating both the expressive-performative and deliberately machinic aspects of programmed and electronic popular music. Thus, groove is seen as an aesthetic trait aimed at encouraging direct and immediate participation, which occurs through active and embodied experiences and not through formal intellectual contemplation.

Epistemologia, estetica e pluralismo

Alfonso Di Prospero — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My approach is within an empiricistic and inductivistic framework, where induction is seen as a non-monotonic inference. Thus I interpret the cognitive meaning of art in terms that are – consistently with a non-monotonic epistemology – relative to the field of experience and information that is available to a specific subject. Moving from these premises, Shusterman’s idea that popular music is properly art is defended. Noë’s claim that popular music is not art is criticized also because it is not consistent with the entailments deriving from an embodied mind theory when we accept a non-monotonic epistemology.

Fenomenologia della “situazione musicale”. Note sul “problema dell’ascolto” in Günther Anders e Theodor W. Adorno

Filippo Adussi — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Since his philosophical debut, Günther Anders – at the time known as Günther Stern – developed an original “phenomenology of listening” which criticized the Husserlian approach. In order to work in Frankfurt with Adorno, Anders elaborates a musicology of “situationality” as his research project. Unfortunately, Adorno will consider this perspective “too Heideggerian”, rejecting it. It is the moment that marks a philosophical crossroads: on the one hand the listening interpreted by Anders as a phenomenon situated in space, on the other hand Adorno’s sociological perspective, which criticizes the regressed listener and the “musical fetishism”. If Adorno is certainly one of the most famous detractors of “jazz music” as a commercial “pop” phenomenon, Anders’ diagnosis of “antiquated” (Antiquiertheit) listening leads this question in another direction: what meaning can contemporary music still have in the era of the “obsolescence” of human beings?

Annalisa. Il vortice enciclopedico

Francesco Garbelli — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, firstly I discuss Umberto Eco’s notion of encyclopedia, with particular reference to the definition of a metalanguage: I claim that in an encyclopedic format every sign is to be understood as a token in translational relation with other tokens, and that every interpretation is to be understood as a use of tokens. Secondly, I confront encyclopedia with the Weltanschauung of pop culture, in order to show the mutual dependence between them. Thirdly, I observe that mass medialized tokens are those which offer the possibility to be used as metalanguage to the largest number of encyclopedic users and that they don’t even censor the element of pleasure that is involved in semiosis and is otherwise often silenced by elitist metalinguistic tokens. Fourthly I focus on popular music tokens and I take Annalisa Scarrone’s album E poi siamo finiti nel vortice as a case study in order to test my previous theoretical statements and develop some other remarks about the interplay of backing track and voice creating the idea of vortex, that can be seen as the proxy which listeners can use to frame semiotic activities. As a result, such a proxy displays that semiosis relies on the ‘already said’ which is stocked in encyclopedia and selected by a preliminary cut, to which user’s voice has to arrange itself in order to produce both a ‘classical’ subject (individual vocality, as opposed to backing track) and a ‘synoptic’ subject (the overall voice of the song, the principle of the vortex); and that pleasure is involved as the effect of participation in the making, as it combines personal and impersonal instances resulting in a satisfying appropriation of signs to deliver an expression. In conclusion, I draw attention to the ethical dimension of the notion of encyclopedia, for it allows everyone in the community to appropriate and expand sense.

Debris and sadness. Visual poetry between elegy and irony

Gerhard Glüher — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The reference objects of the following investigation are artistic photographs that the photographer Alberto Petrò took in the past two years at different locations in Europe. The set of images is titled ‘Metamorphoses’ and is published on his homepage. Especially for the second part of this text, it is recommended to consult the images to better understand the analyses, although the imagined images can also be thought of.
In the juxtaposition of this visual research, Marc Augé’s concept of the ‘lost place’ is critically questioned and brought into dialogue with spatial theories by Kracauer, Benjamin, Husserl, Krämer and Canetti. The method of seeing, registering and representing through photography and the perceiving person has the characteristic of the flâneur, who, in a Benjamian sense, seeks out his places and sites and condenses them in open or unclear situations, which are called ‘sites’ in an in-between space. The analysis in the second part of the text focuses on this phenomenon of the fragmentation of space-time. In the sense in which Cassirer uses it, presence and absence are just as intrinsic to the image as the so-called ‘third space’, a term introduced by Homi K. Bhabha. Roland Barthes’s peculiar method of reading the ‘dotted image’ is the basis for the last part of the investigation, which turns to the categories of the provisional, the fragment, the atmosphere, the crack and loneliness. The epilogue refers to Karl Rosenkranz’s writing on the aesthetics of the ugly and attempts to cite the phenomenon of patina as an architectural-aesthetic momentum and argument in order to answer the question of why the vague symbolism of the architectural fragments can only be insufficiently answered. In this sense, the essay is also an attempt to reconstruct what is absent through the intensive study of photographs, and this discourse includes its failure – it is an experiment on the text of what has been seen.

Pensare per immagini nella società connettiva e collettiva

Federica Porcheddu — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explores the transformation of the individual and society in the information age through the work of the anthropologists Pierre Lévy and Derrick De Kerckhove. Lévy highlights the role of images as triggers for interaction and communication, while De Kerckhove extends this view to connectivity, emphasising the importance of digital networks in the dissemination and generation of knowledge. The work aims to reinterpret the innovative ideas of Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg in order to decipher today’s society, with a focus on the influence of images in the social and cultural context. The essay thus aims to investigate these issues of fundamental importance for contemporary society.

Eva e il serpente. Primi appunti su bellezza e conoscenza

Polina Yaryshkina — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The aim of this article is to provide additional and new arguments to the idea of the centrality of the sensible element, according to one of the basic tenets of Western aesthetic theory, within cognitive praxis. To do so, this research uses a figure present, as Jung would have said, within the archetypes of the collective iconographic imagination: the snake. In particular, the choice was made to circumscribe the reswwearch within the Judeo-Christian cultural horizon (beginning with its sacred scriptures), identifying parallels with the Christian and pre-Christian traditions of Slavic culture, with attention also paid to etymological analyses of European and Slavic languages. Thus, a juxtaposition emerges between the figure of the serpent and the feminine, a juxtaposition that, starting from the biblical text, becomes a harbinger of developments that can be followed and deepened within disciplines such as psychoanalysis and archaeological research.