Abstract
Aesthesis, the classical term for sensing and perceiving, is at the heart of innumerable problems that plague global society. The purpose of this article is to open a conversation on aesthesis. We survey the roots and relevance of aesthesis as a direct albeit contested relation and engagement with the world and with Others. From its pre-Socratic origins, aesthesis has been both a pragmatic, somatic concept, prompting a re-evaluation of the distinction between experience and abstraction. We trace its ongoing repression from Plato through ‘western’ theories of formal Aesthetics. Drawing on a relational interpretation of Protagoras’ aesthesis, we argue that modern pragmatists and radical empiricists, as well as more contemporary critics of the ‘colonization’ of aesthesis (Mignolo and Vasquez) by formal Aesthetics recognize and develop the relational and ethical aspects of aesthesis. We consider the role of the body, affect, and of the intangible or virtual qualities of aesthesis. The ethics of obligations (Weil) in the polis (Arendt) shows how aesthesis informs politics despite its repression in favour of moral and legal norms. We argue this is relevant to contemporary crises such as xenophobia and ecocidal climate warming.
Aesthesis, the classical term for sensing and perceiving, is at the heart of innumerable problems that plague global society. Even the recognition of these problems can be taken as an example of aesthesis: an awakening from the ‘anaesthesia’ of consumer society. The purpose of this article is to open a conversation on aesthesis as central to critical cultural theory at this time. We survey the roots and relevance of aesthesis as a direct, albeit contested, relation and engagement with the world and with Others. From its pre-Socratic origins, aesthesis has been both a pragmatic and a radical concept, prompting a re-evaluation of the distinction between experience (senses) and abstraction (reason) for the production of thought.
Starting with an exploration of pre-Socratic and classical debates, we consider the role of the body, affect and of the intangible or ‘virtual’. We trace the codification of aesthesis into western theories of Aesthetics (for background, see, for example, Eagleton, 1991). Drawing on a relational interpretation of Protagoras’ aesthesis, we argue that modern pragmatists such as William James and more contemporary thinkers, recognize and develop the relational and ethical aspects of aesthesis. Given the limitations of space, we will move from a discussion of classical sources to follow social theory on the polis to assay the political potential of aesthesis. We thus only briefly indicate the relevance of a number of 20th-century thinkers – Durkheim, Klossowski, Deleuze, Bataille, not to mention Arendt, Lugones, affect theory or new research on affect on urban cultures of care (Gabauer et al., 2022; Schillmeier, 2020). 1 Our contribution is to provide a refresher on aesthesis in order to reconnect it to collective political action that goes beyond individual interactions that may be guided by situation ethics (i.e. based on the immediate context of an act rather than universal moral codes; see Aristotle, 1984). From this perspective, we will show that the political relevance of aesthesis concerns the social organization of obligation, taken as a situation-ethical and consensual mode. This will be argued to be important to political process, despite the repression of ethics and aesthesis in favour of juridical, codified rights and morals. We further advocate for a role for aesthesis and thus of critical cultural theory in addressing the hate-based, xenophobic and ecocidal crises that plague global society (Shields, 2018a).
Aesthesis (αἴσθησῐς
Aistheta, or sensory phenomena, affect the body through multiple senses – rain is wet but is not just water: it falls with characteristic sounds depending on the ‘type’ of rain and has both its own visual properties and effects on visibility and tactility. Aesthesis is thus often a bundle of apperceptions and experiences that we attend to. In some cases, it is thus associated with forms of synaesthesia, the intersection of senses and sensations, as in when a colour is associated with or sensed as a smell. By contrast, an inability to interact creatively, perceiving and reacting to reality, is anaesthesia, as used in common medical language and also noted by philosophers such as Whitehead. Synaesthesia gives an important hint about aesthesis: it is a template for imagining unconstrained sensoria where the senses mesh and collide showing us that there are ‘other ways to hear, to see’ (Dunlop, 2002: 33).
Especially for an English-language readership, translations of Jacques Rancière’s work have usefully reinvigorated attention to aesthesis but mostly from the standpoint of popular aesthetics and their relation to the theories and codes of formal Aesthetics as a discipline (Rancière, 1989; Hallward and Rancière, 2003). We signal a respectful distinction from works such as the Politics of Aesthetics (Rancière, 2011) in that aesthesis does not maintain his need to disassociate mind from body to engage in emancipatory thought. Rather, it is embedded in practice. What we might call ‘practical aesthesis’ mobilizes the activity of the body within everyday life to stimulate the possibility of emancipatory thought via practices of reality that always exceed regimes of experience ordained by formal aesthetics. These practices are sometimes ludic. We thus consider the potentiality of the surfaces of bodies beyond the question of their alienated condition of obedience to regimes of exploitation. The counter-power of bodies is their capacity to affect everyday situations on the basis of engagement of the local materiality of places (Benasayag et al., 2002; Lugones, 1987, 2003).
Recent interest in modern changes to the regime of aesthetics, whereby an ‘entire hierarchical order of representation is questioned’ has led to the political turn of formal Aesthetics. This bridges the boundaries between the aesthetic sphere and the sphere of life. It seeks to reconfigure an order of representation (Rancière and Engelmann, 2019: 40, 47). The political programme of such a formal aesthetics is to be tasked with forming the constitution of a new collective. However, this is still likely to be a community that excludes its Others. Rancière’s project stands starkly apart from the focus of this article. We neither attempt to define the political programme of Aesthetics as an intellectual field, nor to codify a new regime of experience (that would be a new Aesthetics). ‘Practical aesthesis’ situates itself entirely within the sphere of social life and the environment of society that includes the non-human and contextual milieu. It engages with the complex manifold of local reality. In this article we will argue that this is exemplified in the contemporary polis, the complex urban environment. Theorizing practical aesthesis is thus inseparable from the experience of daily life and its interdependencies (i.e. theory as praxis, living theory).
Classical aesthesis: Protagoras to Plato
For Heraclitus (6th century BCE), stimuli, aiestheta, are qualities rather than substances (2003). They are powers (dynameis) with the capacity of either affecting (poiein) other beings and things or being affected (paschein) by them (Plato, 1973: ss 156a). For pre-Socratic thinkers such as Anaxagoras and Protagoras (5th century BCE) aesthesis designated the physiological processes involved in perceiving objects (contact, mixture, penetration, vision). This remains a critical counterpoint to the better-known Platonic tradition. The pre-Socratic position was critiqued as not giving a reliable access to truth, but according to Sextus Empiricus (1961), embodiment is crucial to knowledge (Guthrie, 1992). Protagoras’ Aisthánesthai (αἰσθάνεσθαι, ‘to perceive’) are said to be a direct mode of apperception (whether sensuous or not), aesthesis being meant to include all immediate convictions (epistatai) (Taylor, 2014). By extension, aesthesis changes depending on age and the conditions of a person’s body.
In Protagoras’ pre-Socratic philosophy, the gamut of the perceptive possibilities of phenomena is immersed in matter itself (encompassing all possible things that can appear to anyone, e.g. sensations of cold or heat). Aesthesis always has a logos in reality, whether a hallucination, the taste of wine, or the intuition of a physis. Aesthesis is a relation, a mutuality of bodies and things: ‘Each thing smiles, has allure, calls forth aesthesis.’ It is affective not cognitive. It is that which demands attention. Hillman (1982, cited in Keller, 1989: 154) argues that this connects aesthesis to the body and to eros in Greek mythology: ‘“Calling forth,” provoking, kaleo: this was…Aphrodite’s main characteristic, kallos, beauty.’
Plato, later in the 4th century BCE, limits aesthesis to only the reception of material reality through the interface of sensory organs. But Protagoras’ aesthesis relates to the importance of attending to all intuition and sensation as part of an experience. This transcends the question of whether a sensation is a true or false perception of a stimulus: Time and space…are not categories of the understanding added to experience after the fact, but the inner and outer modes of intuition given as our immediately felt connection with the body and the world. Of course, our intuitions of space and time are not entirely immediate, since we feel these with the body and so experience them through the mediation of our perceptual organs. But these organs are experienced by us immediately, and the flow of sensation through the nerves of our own body is clear evidence of causation. (Segall, 2011, emphasis as in the original)
For Aristotle (4th century BCE), the senses were incapable of error in relation to their proper objects but judgement between the senses required reason. Koinē Aisthēsis is a ‘common sensible’ that is the object of no specific sense for Aristotle. These include movement and rest, number, shape and size (Aristotle, 1964: ss 418a–425b), as well as perception of sensible things (aisthetón), the distinction between senses, and the perception that we perceive. However, unlike pure Platonic forms, the perception of things leads to opinion (doxa), not true knowledge (ε’πιστήμη, epistēmē). Mid-20th-century opinion on Aristotle’s discussion viewed it as transitional and beset by problems arising from the indistinction of perception and sensation in classical Greek (Hamlyn, 1959: 11) but more recently Welsch (1987) has argued for taking the Aristotelian position more seriously for grounding rationality in the sensual. The commonsensical is by extension a common sensibility of the mutuality of bodies and things, perceivers and objects, propounded by Protagoras.
In contrast, Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, stages the unreliability of sensation as a basis for any true knowledge. The Platonic position is that the sense organs can be too easily tricked (Plato, 1973). Drawing on Parmenides, Plato presented thought as different in kind from perception. This has prevailed in the philosophical canon, as reiterated by David Summers (2014) in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics: The sensible is confused and confounded in the sense that what might be analyzed has not been analyzed. This distinction had many echoes in the tradition down to Baumgarten. Taken altogether, aisthēsis had thus become ‘sense’ with the pejorative meaning the idea has had in Platonic philosophies and their many tributaries and adaptations. At the same time, it is important to stress that the intelligible was there in sense to be analyzed.
Aesthesis is also the reception of a sensible eidos without its matter. For example, for Aristotle, the soul is an eidos of the body (Peters, 1967). However, few have remarked that this means that Aristotle’s Koinē Aisthēsis included the immaterial, or virtual, entangled with the material and was thus polysemic, dynamic and complex. Plato’s reduction is thus drastic and enables a later reduction of aesthesis to a fixed and formalized aesthetics of taste.
Plato’s intention was to rebut previous positions such as Protagoras and Epicurus, who made sensation the only criterion of truth. In Theaetetus, the maxim ‘Epistēmē is nothing but aesthesis’ is attributed to Protagoras: ‘Knowledge is nothing but perception’ (Plato, 1973: ss 151e 1–2). The first and middle parts of Theaetetus are said to refer to Protagoras’ aesthesis, which differs from the later section in which Plato presents his more restricted concept. He attacks Protagoras’ aesthesis by restricting it to the ‘perception of the sensible’ stimuli. This reduction exposes it to critique as a form of solipsism. In the passage of the dialogue where Theaetetus risks defining science as sensation (aesthesis), Socrates concludes that according to Protagoras there is only appearance (and thus no contradiction in perception as there is no fixed object of knowledge, there is only flux and flow). Reality is thus denied a unity of being. This announces a negative philosophy: nothing is fixed, immutable. Nothing is afforded the unity of a being. Perception is the encounter of something active, coming from outside, that causes an impression on the affected subject. More broadly, according to Roja Parma (2015), while there may not be a clear differentiation between the corporeal and incorporeal, we should not take aesthesis as referring to physical ‘sensation’ or ‘sensitive perception’: If aesthesis is an apprehension of sorts, without distinctions between sensible and non-sensible, it also implies the direct, evident and real experience of apprehension as a form of certainty (epistatai). This bears an intimate relation with two arguments [discussed in Aristotle’s Metaphysics], namely the experience as real, evident and reliable constitutes aesthesis (…), and the indistinction, in aesthesis, between the felt and the thought, the experienced and the believed – in Protagoras’ perspective, the felt and the known. (Parma, 2015: 136, emphasis as in the original authors translation)
Aesthesis as the crisis of logos
Such a notion appears to capture well the passionate nature of popular knowledge, even today. But the pre-Socratic position also has a scientific basis. Theaetetus, the mathematician and proponent of aesthesis in Plato’s dialogue was also a founder of the theory of irrational numbers. Following similar discoveries by mathematicians in India, the theory of irrational numbers was presented by the Protagorean, Hippasus of Metapontus (5th century BCE) through a demonstration of the impossibility of √2 (i.e. the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle with sides measuring 1 unit each is also 1, which is thus the root of itself). To grossly simplify: the discovery that the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle is at once sameness (1, logos, unity, equality, measure) and otherness (√1, alogon, oddity, strangeness, disorder) challenges the monological capture of the materially real by geometric logic and logos.
As a critic of positivism and nominalism such as Serres (1980: 190) tells this story, exactitude and static identities crumble, while Platonic reason, logos, is silenced for it has no logical response. Hence, the incommensurable number √1 presents an intolerable situation: how could one have arrived via rational demonstration at an irrational number, both odd and even, impossible to measure and yet easily constructible in a square and geometrically demonstrable? The pre-Socratic notion of aesthesis offered by Protagoras and Theaetetus is a political, mathematical and philosophical crisis for formal reason. Its message is a sort of ‘Rosetta Stone’, written out in the languages of legend, mathematics, history and philosophy.
The theory of irrational numbers establishes conceptual variations on the notions of sameness (even) and otherness (odd); it also makes use of the theorem of Pythagoras (that is to say of measure within a space of similitudes or mimesis). Serres (1982: 129–30) follows Girard (1977) to argue that the crisis is resolved violently as well as rhetorically: as punishment, Hippasus is said to be drowned at sea (the language of legend); Theaetetus dies in combat at Corinth (that of history); Parmenides is sacrificed ‘on the altar of the principle of contradiction’ (that of philosophy), and Plato rewrites his philosophy in the Politics. The dangers of the alogon are tamed by weaving together (collection/division) disordered parts, integrated proportionally thanks to due measure in the Politics (i.e. judgement; notably, ‘measure’ also signifies serenity, peace achieved through the violence just mentioned). The incommensurability of irrationals/otherness is brought into the fold, and control is achieved over the material world. This is to say purity is restored to abstraction and its power used to organize social order – but at the cost of suppressing the affective and dynamically creative qualities of our world.
Aesthesis is transgressive of rationality, returning the operation of thought to the materiality of the world whose order is plural and topological, not monological and geometric. As mode and practice of thought, aesthesis transgresses Rationality’s taboo that experience and the senses must be kept apart from the purity of abstraction and ideas. Aesthesis drags abstraction through the mud of experience and culture, calling for a transformation of the notions of perception and intersubjectivity (see Lury, 2013).
However, we must remember that aesthesis neither is ‘radical’ nor metaphysical. As Welsch (1987) argues, Aristotle admits that, as demonstrated above, mathematics is aesthetic; it is the illumination of sensuality.
Reason rescued by aesthetic judgement
Aesthesis as apprehension is echoed in Kant’s discussion of aesthetic judgement as a kind of cerebral ‘recognition’ of an intangible quality of beauty that is not in the object but is nonetheless a quality of the object that we apprehend in response to it. The aesthetic has both a personal, as well as a shared, intersubjective side. However, in contrast to the Kantian tradition, Whitehead asks about aesthesis as immediate prehension. Kant, followed later by theorists such as Baumgarten, is a key exponent of Aesthetics, in contrast to art as practice. This marks the modern European turn to the questions of judgement and actions that follow in response to judgement, and directs us away from questions of immediate prehension to codified standards of beauty and arbiters of taste. These ordained standards share the collective and constructed features of aesthesis, but substitute a metalogic of Aesthetics that is similar to a moral system. Serres, for example, dubs this a ‘martial episteme’. Like any morality, Aesthetic judgements are self-referential; they are universally applied, valid at all times and places (Maffesoli, 1991). Contrast this with the emergent event of aesthesis as a prehension embedded in the moment of encounter with the world and Others (Parma, 2015). In reaction, Mignolo calls for the decolonization of aesthesis from Enlightenment Aesthetics. This does not mean that aesthetics ceases to be a tool of power in the postcolonies. Mignolo is putting a challenge at the level of the intimate and the everyday to European theorization of aesthetics as universal and their implication in exported norms, forms of sociality, universal styles and rigid judgements: If aesthesis is a phenomenon common to all living organisms with a nervous system, aesthetics is a version or particular theory of such sensations related to beauty. That is, there is no universal law that makes the relationship between aesthesis and beauty necessary. This was an 18th-century European occurrence…The problem is that the singular experience of the heart of Europe translates to a theory that ‘discovered’ the truth of aesthesis for a particular community (for example, the ethnoclass that we now know as the bourgeoisie), which is not universalizable. (Mignolo, 2010: 14)
The Kantian legacy of the relation between the beautiful and the good is reflected in Wittgenstein’s dictum ‘Aesthetics and ethics are one’ (see Wittgenstein, 2014). In the British tradition of Aesthetic Philosophy, this linkage is made central as experiences of beauty are argued to be training for an appreciation of just and equitable socio-political and moral relationships. This approach to informal aesthetics not only recodes the question of aesthesis as a question of beauty. Starr (2002: 362) argues that, ‘The apparent position of aesthetics as a cultural and intellectual in-between – mediating questions of cognition, gender, economics, class, national identity, even ethics – means it seems the perfect, if overdetermined, subject for critical dissection’, with the result that moral and hermeneutic reasoning is often substituted for a theory of aesthetics, repressing further the question of aesthesis.
An example of how aesthesis does not distinguish between tangible and intangible aspects of reality is found in historians’ discussions of the aesthesis of the past in our encounters with ruins or artifacts that bear the scars of time’s passing (Wyschogrod, 2006: 320). Whether a material object such as a stone, or a quality such as a green stone that is valuable or worthless, aesthesis transcends divisions of the material and the immaterial (or intangible or ‘virtual’; see Shields, 2006).
The certainty of aesthesis is not just individual but is a collective certainty founded on trust that is inherently social. This is what makes the concept of such relevance to the social sciences. Epistēmē, for Protagoras, can be taken as an expression based on an experience (evident and certain) that is actually lived and lived socially. The lack of distinction between sensible and the intangible, reason and emotion, sensation and judgement, nous and aisthesis, challenges Plato’s classifications. For Protagoras, sensation presupposes judgement, belief or opinion. Human cognitive judgement is always called forth in sensation, not conducted in a linear fashion as a formal analysis of sensation or perceptions. The relation between aesthesis and epistēmē is intimately related to Protagoras’ conception of reality. For him, humans may not attain absolute truths, as they do not exist. Rather, we are immersed in the constant change of reality and of ourselves, thus living the diversity of aesthesis. The real is perspectival, dynamic without losing its power of being evident, which places epistēmē within life itself. Unsurprisingly, Protagoras’ second maxim positions persons as the ‘measure’ of all things: homo mensura. For Dupréel (1948: 22), Protagoras refers to social or ‘general’ apperception: The word aisthesis should not be translated only as sensation, in this debate it signifies perception, and not only sensory perception, but apperception in general, the fact of grasping, of noting the object, sensible or non-sensible. (Dupréel, 1948: 22, authors’ translation)
In Metaphysics, Aristotle refers to Anaxagoras to argue that Protagoras understands reality as qualitative, that is, as hot, cold, having odours and so on that can be perceived and felt: reality (hyle) is affective by nature (Aristotle, 1989: IV, 1009a 25 ff.). Cornford (1991) adds that, according to Socrates, aesthesis cannot be reduced to sensory perception as it encompasses judgements such as ‘it is true for me’. Aesthesis refers to the power of mathematical evidence, as in the direct apprehension of geometrical proofs when they are demonstrated. The reality that is discovered is within perception, but immediately perceived, such as the power of mathematical demonstration and evidence, notwithstanding individual differences between persons. Thus, Aesthesis is shared and immediate, but neither arbitrary nor idiosyncratic; its condition is that it must always correspond to obvious reality and be subject to consensus.
Individual and social interpretations of Aesthesis
Dupréel distinguishes the two positions by considering two rival interpretations of homo mensura: the ‘individualist’ interpretation (Socrates/Plato), and a ‘general’ interpretation that is social or relational (Protagoras/Theaetetus). The individualist interpretation formulated by Plato in Theaetetus claims that Protagoras meant that every person differs in their perception of reality, and that however perceived, so it must actually be (Plato, 1973: 152a). A general interpretation understands aesthesis differently: the person (in his being opposite to the totality of things (l’ensemble des choses)) cannot reasonably be a specific individual, but only a person in general. In other words, the person is a part of the anonymous collective whole that is the social (see Castoriadis, 1987 [1975]). In this sense, the person is the measure of the existence of things. For Dupréel, to understand Protagoras through any kind of Kantian subjectivism, removes nature from the object and places it in the knowing subject and misunderstands the character of Protagoras’ doctrine.
To caricature Protagoras’ homo mensura through Plato’s critical, second-hand account of a theory of perception as an individual form of knowledge leads to the erroneous yet traditional interpretation of the work of the Sophists as rhetoricians indifferent to truth and morality. Protagoras could not have considered knowledge as a purely individual matter (i.e. knowledge as what one alone feels, impossible to compare with the impression of another). Protagoras is instead the least individualist, and the most social, of the pre-Socratic thinkers. Homo mensura not only expresses a theory of perception of raw (brute) appearance, but also includes a sociological conception of knowledge and of its value (Dupréel, 1948: 19).
Further, Protagoras never reduced all the properties of knowledge to those of sensation. He is not chiefly interested in the psychological corollary to the thesis that sensations are irrefutable. For the Sophist, the criterion to establish a hierarchy of knowledges is their practical value. The inspiration of his doctrine is experimental and utilitarian. His is a philosophy of action, and specifically, a pragmatism. This opens a dialogue with modern thought such as James’s pragmatism (see below). It can also be found in contemporary science and technology literature that continues to work out these dynamics of sensory perception, particularly when they are used in service of collective truth claims (e.g. Knorr Cetina, 2007, among others). Even while classical aesthesis was anchored in the body and its senses, challenges to our senses and collective understanding, such as the need to understand imperceptible changes in our environment and climate do not invalidate aesthesis. They demand a new engagement with it to ask how we can fully ‘grasp’ intangibles but not reduce them to abstractions and mere representations. And, how can this ethical conjunction be translated into collective political action?
Dupréel thus reaches the heart of the Protagorean doctrine of aesthesis by distinguishing between individual knowledge and knowledge of shared value that is socially affirmed (possibly similar to Aristotle’s ‘everyday life’ or koinē aisthēsis). For Dupréel, the homo mensura is not the measure of things as an individual but as a citizen, as part of a collective or polis: ‘c’est la cité elle-même’ – ‘It is the city itself’ (Dupréel, 1948: 23). This places Protagoras’ maxim within the ambit of social life. However, Dupréel then moves away from a spatial perspective on the polis as a social ensemble to focus on law. By contrast, we want to develop this insight. It is worthwhile emphasizing the assembled heteronomy of things that constitutes the urban and ‘things that matter’ for pragmatic and strategic purposes as the basis of its politics. This follows Protagoras’ vocabulary in which he refers to the sources of stimuli, things, as chrēmata (χρήματα) or things of value (resources, money). This might be termed a relational interpretation of Protagoras.
Protagoras’ homo mensura entails a qualitative and dynamic world. Because the world is not neutral, knowledge is neither fixed nor directly assigned to objects and situations. Knowledge requires the sensibility of aesthesis. Qualities (for e.g. heat, cold and everything that can be felt) to be perceived or felt must be in what affects us. Reality is affective because it is encountered as aesthesis. This assumes that truth is plural, multiple, changing, in perpetual flux, without losing its power of being evident.
Social or relational Aesthesis
For Protagoras, aesthesis as sense perception is not only collective but concerns the materiality and immateriality (i.e. the qualities) of an epistēmē that is diverse and spatial in Heraclitus’ and Sextus Empiricus’ sense of physis (which is immanent, in motion, as in dynamis). Aesthesis responds to a world that is a ‘landscape’ rather than ‘bare nature’; or even, a multivalent, social spatialization (Shields, 2013) or cultural topology (Lury et al., 2012). Epistēmē is thus not naively static but dynamic and relativistic, according to Protagoras.
Whitehead echoes Protagoras’ approach to aesthesis. Debaise (2014: 309, emphasis added) claims that, for Whitehead, ‘The aesthetic becomes the site of all ontology.’ Such an approach is reflected in contemporary affect theory and cultural studies where perception is, first of all, a matter of being affected bodily in engagement with patterns of difference oriented towards the future; in short, aesthesis (Hoogland, 2014: 2). In this approach, perception is affective, relational and aesthetic in the classical sense of aesthesis (Shaviro, 2009: 57). Becoming is not continuous because each occasion, each act of becoming, is unique, contra Bergson who subsumes these moments to a general theory of duration (durée) or Heidegger, who subsumes them to a general movement of Being (Dasein). Contra interpretations of Whitehead’s aesthetics, which stress its links to rational knowledge (Sherburne, 1961), contemporary radical empiricism stresses that he understands aesthesis as the body’s physical and non-conscious sense-perceptual prehension or response to the world (Whitehead, 1938). From this event, from the encounter ‘of one actuality in a world of actualities’, Whitehead (1938: 165) defines aesthetics as a form of knowledge that highlights the outstanding and significant. In his lectures at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty (1997: 186) tantalizingly situates it as a ‘thinking of the sensible’ intrinsic to the phenomenon of Being rather than distanced from it.
Serres (2000) follows Lucretius who situates aesthesis within the sciences, specifically physics. Reading De Rerum Natura (Lucretius, 1954, v. 469; see also Lucretius 1992) as a discourse on physics that remains in and of the world, Serres considers Lucretius’ thesis on the relation between the senses and reason. Lucretius’ version of Heraclitus’ thesis is that our notion of reality originates by virtue of the credibility of the senses’ capacity to stitch together a notion of reality. Since reason derives entirely from the senses and is inseparable from them, nothing is more credible than the senses for Lucretius: if the senses were deceitful, how could a reason born of deceitful senses testify against them? If the senses are faulty, then reason too becomes deceitful (Serres, 2000: 44). Consequently, the separation of reason from the senses’ reliable contact with the world leads to bad reasoning (Serres, 2000: 49).
Thanks to the senses and their conjunctive relation to the world, reason’s contact with reality is not representational but coextensive. In light of Lucretius’ thesis on the senses, Serres (2000: 49) defines perception as situated within a space of communication in which things continuously call forth attention: Perception is an encounter, a collision or an obstacle, one of many intersections on the way. The perceptive subject is an object of the world, plunged into the objective fluencies. Receiver, in its place, transmitter from every point of view.
The problem lies not with the unreliability of the senses, but with a system of knowledge that follows the laws of a foedus fati, that is, the inflexible laws of ‘Martial’ power. Such a system is concerned with the ancient idea of law, that is, with determination, absolute mastery, with power and order (Serres, 2000: 67).
As a particular mode of perception, aesthesis exceeds the orbit of the capacities of reason. It is not the extension of the rational thought of a ‘universal’ subject whose perception confirms the latter’s primacy within a global lifeworld. Invalidating this referent, it transposes the person within local places where perception makes bodies vulnerable – where, instead of recognition and mimesis, one encounters otherness. Rather than a form of stasis, this is better understood as a ‘clinamatic’ or dynamic flow. Perceptivity, then, occurs in actu, as a present unfolding whereby one receives sometimes barely perceptible signals and responds to the world. It is a practice that places thought in the experience of reality, even if and quite often it ‘lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet’ (Müsil, 1995: 25) – including over the last few years of COVID-19, wars, forest fires and extreme weather events.
Attending
How does classical aesthesis help us today? Its historicity and situational character imply that our aesthesis cannot be the same as others (see, for example, Winkler, 2017, for an overview of 18th-century preoccupations concerning aisthesis); ours is not the Sophists nor can it be standardized as an aesthetics. But at a minimum, the abstract concept itself opens up a conversation across time and space about forms of aesthesis. For example, Michel Maffesoli has highlighted aesthesis in his diagnosis of a late 20th-century shift away from the modernist stereotype of rational technocratic organization. In the French context, he argued that a shift to a dual reliance on the rational-economic and the affective is manifest in the increasing role of ludic activities in regulating social life at the mass scale (Maffesoli, 1996). Where modernity repressed play, carnival, hobbies, sports and affective passions into the private sphere or as an aspect of the improper everyday life of non-conforming classes, Maffesoli argues for the ‘post-modern’ return of these repressed aspects of everyday life. In these activities, aesthesis is central. Maffesoli’s sociology theorizes emergent, situated and bottom–up challenges to social orthodoxies and univocal law. The ludic demeanour features aesthesis in actu, denoting the extraordinary quality and energetic intensity of lively experiences, along with the capacity to form intimate (intercultural) associations with others, as with David Cooper’s example of an intimate exchange of gazes between strangers (see Cooper, 1974: 150). Aesthesis marks a social form of eros – mundane but fundamental attractions and repulsions – that is felt at the gut level. It is the ‘feeling’ or affect of sociality.
Beyond the scope of the authors we have cited, there is a late 20th-century line of social theory that also includes Deleuze, Bataille and Lingis that is crucial to an examination of aesthesis as a social form of almost autonomic attraction, reaction and interaction. The theatricality of everyday life is placed in the foreground; or better, the game of encounters, in which appearance, ritual linked to a social atmosphere, the ability to adopt a plurality of roles, or moving from one circle or ‘tribe’ to another all generate an infinite dance. From this emerges a ‘pictorial rhetoric’ made of empathic adhesions to community and collective settings that transform sociality into a theatrum mundi, into a general and multidimensional representation. Images, emotions, the polysemy of situations and encounters predominate, creating a play of mutually superimposed interactions, images and words (Maffesoli, 1993, 1996).
Aesthesis foregrounds the sensate body within social space and entails a shift from a concern with formal aesthetics as a question of order and form to questions of relations and thus situational ethics, a move pioneered by Maffesoli in his postmodern approach to the social beginning in the late 1970s. This entails a concern with a subject’s tactile immersion in the local social world. Rancière (1989; Hallward and Rancière 2003; see also Tocqueville, A. de 1983:231) later considers French 19th-century amateur and workers’ attempts to appropriate aesthetics instrumentally as a means to self-advancement but which also opens experiences of aesthesis. If these practices are ludic, it is no surprise that they can be emancipating (Rancière, 1991: 79 ff.). However, our concern is neither with the class political instrumentality of this appropriation of hegemonic Aesthetic codes nor with the moral opprobrium these elicited from the guardians of taste. Play produces serious effects but loses its power of experiment, the counter-power of aesthesis, when it is framed as a means (Rancière, 2011).
Adapting Simone Weil, Matthews (2023: 231–230). argues that attention to aesthesis, to our encounters and relations is the foundation of social and legal obligations in a ‘given configuration of power relations that orders, distributes and enframes our perception of the world’. In Weil’s philosophy, attention is not scrutiny, it is both reflective and affective. It involves attending to a given situation or object that is not determined in advance: Attention, in this sense, entails a particular kind of attunement and sensitivity in which thought is simultaneously opened up and emptied out, allowing an object to penetrate a sensate subject. This entails an enlivening of the senses, a pause in which an actor becomes sensitised to a given set of social relations and the demands that such relations might make. As an ethical orientation, attention wards against premature or ready-made solutions to ethical challenges…Weil’s language of attention suggests that obligations are born out of a particular form of sensitivity or aesthesia. In this way, it is only through a form of aesthetic sensitivity, which takes seriously the immersion of a sensate body within the elemental forces that provide the continued conditions of habitability in a given place, that the nature of obligations in a given context can be discerned. (Matthews, 2023: 242)
Weil (2005) argued that rights were abstracted from obligations that were more rooted in needs, places and social interactions. Obligations arise from comprehending and empathizing with the fragility of Others that can arise out of an aesthetic attending to the encounters and situations in which we find ourselves. For Weil, this gives rise to a situation-ethical response. However, this authentic solidarity can be eroded and lost in the institutional detour of granting rights followed by the calculation and balancing of interests and entitlements, all of which tend to become self-referential rather than reciprocal.
In addition to Mignolo and Vasquez’s call for a decolonization of aesthesis from the rules of Aesthetics, new forms of sensing at the interface of the organic and technological generate new forms of making sense and of sense itself (Lury et al., 2012). These exceed the bounds of established disciplines and doctrines. Munster draws on William James’s and later pragmatists’ interest in the practices of technological networking as the making of experiences, that is, aesthesis. However, contemporary networks are emergent social arrays that combine humans and non-humans in new conjunctions: James does not hold such a homogenous conception of experience as to suggest that everything is simply ‘connected.’ Instead, he develops the notion of a ‘concatenated union,’ which – like his notion of a mosaic unfolding as its components’ edges transit in and between new and differing elements – creates consistency through its very differentiation. Concatenation is ‘a determinately varied hanging together’. (James, 1977: 221, cited in Munster, 2013: 8).
The network experience conjoins machines and humans (Munster, 2013: 7) but does not presuppose that experience is then rooted in or limited to human aesthesis. James’s pluralism is an ongoing challenge, not a fait accompli (Savransky, 2021). Technologically mediated social life is not only conjunctive but divisive and disjunctive. For example, Berardi’s (2015: 12) phenomenology of sensibility distinguishes between conjunctive and connective modes of interaction in light of the mutation in the texture of human experience, and in the fabric of the world, provoked by the shift to a digital technosphere. Whereas connection designates ‘the logical and necessary implication, or inter-functionality, between segments’ (as a product of the logical (technology of the) mind, connection no longer belongs to the realm of nature), conjunction concerns the sphere of sensibility that remains within nature (Berardi, 2015: 15). Aesthesis produces conjunctive concatenations. These are creative acts that create an ‘infinite number of constellations that do not follow the lines of a preconceived pattern or an embedded program’ (Berardi, 2015: 13); they are a source of singularity, an event, not a structure, which happens by chance in space and time.
Berardi’s discussion of conjunction and sensibility foregrounds integral aspects of aesthesis. Contra the codified logical operations of connective mediation, ‘Sensibility is the faculty that makes it possible to find a path that does not yet exist, a link between things that have no intrinsic or logical implication’ (Berardi, 2015: 13). Returning to the body, the sense of touch is of particular import: the skin is the sensible conjunctive interface par excellence (Bateson, 1979). Together the senses acknowledge the immediate experience of reality. In Batesonian terms, one could say that aesthesis refers to the senses’ capacity to perceive the pattern that connects the diverse elements of a situation (Bateson, 1979: 8–11). In contrast, the connective technology of language has the power to negate the sensate ‘canvas of shared perceptions and projections that we call reality’ (Berardi, 2015: 17). The abstractions and reductions of common worlds to a sphere of connective, syntactic, exchanges that have accompanied our technological society aggravate the erosion of empathic understanding, the complicity of relations that conjunctive aesthesis highlights.
Aesthesis gains importance as we shift our anthropocentric outlook towards the recognition of the Other, and even further to interspecies respect. A more mindful acknowledgement of our shared environment challenges the anthropocentrism of Aesthetic traditions and the normative limits imposed on sensoria and attention. To shift the focus back to the roots of the aesthetic project and experience, the history of aesthesis provides a useful baseline. Aesthesis acts as a curative to the ‘lethal mutilation of experience called aesthetics’ (Cooper, 1974: 150). However, the opposite trend is very much in evidence in technological development. On the one hand, people use mobile communication technologies and social media to connect with each other. However, we hardly ask what the novel sensibilities of contemporary technological networking could be. Commercial interests have commodified networking so that they are manipulated experiences of attachment that rapidly fall into standardization, obsolescence and disposability (Baranzoni, 2017: 156).
An objection could be raised that cognition and certainly all use of language employs a certain ‘mutilation of experience’ but this ignores the essential shift being advanced by James, which is from the cognitive realm of philosophy to the lived realm of embodied experience. To escape the tendencies towards technologically enabled anaesthesia, a continuing critique of the continued colonization of aesthesis in new forms and media is essential.
Mignolo and Vasquez project an alternative goal of decolonized aesthesis: the ‘decolonial sublime’. This is apposite, given classical discussions of the sublime are sensorial accounts of overwhelming sensations, such as the vastness of the sea or mountainscape. Sublime experiences transcend the individual and open out human perception (Burke, 2017; Ryan, 2001). The body of the individual is ‘absorbed by the landscape’ (Herzog, nd). They are understood as aesthetic, not rational, framed in terms of intensities, flows and affect.
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Tlostanova (2019: 105) gives an offensive but frank description: Decolonial aesthesis originates, then, in the affective experience of those who have never been given a voice before or have been seen as dangerous or noble savages and native informants. It acts as a mechanism of producing and regulating sensations, and hence is inevitably linked with the body as an instrument of perception that mediates our cognition.
Weil’s outlook could be extended to include the non-human and abiotic as equally fragile in the face of climate warming (Matthews, 2023: 241; see also Tam et al., 2021). However, Munster warns that including the non-human requires us to sort out how to embrace the imperceptible as well as what humans perceive. For example, this is precisely the problem of climate warming: it is imperceptibly gradual. It is difficult to compare today’s weather and climate against personal experience of weather and climate 50 years ago, let alone a century ago. Instead, we rely on abstract numbers and visualizations of these data. This challenge to aesthesis marks it as a core focus for critical cultural theories that have relied on aesthetic philosophy.
For Vasquez, decolonization must retrieve aesthesis from the modern colonial project of aesthetics, including the latter’s role in regulating perception, and controlling the notions of art and beauty. Alternative forms of sensing, embodying and inhabiting the world are a few examples of the possibilities that aesthesis is tasked to activate. Nonetheless, the pre-Socratic trajectory of this idea, and its extension beyond the canon of western epistemology have yet to be articulated by theorists of decolonization. The reference to the sublime retrenches into an individualist sensibility that reinscribes the modernist trope of liberation and escape in the decolonial. It requires the exceptional and extra-ordinary where aesthesis has always been a bright spark within mundane reality. While it is clear from this survey of aesthesis that the concept is a disruptive presence barely contained by the theoretical ‘gasketing’ of aesthetic philosophy, might decolonial theorists speculate about an extraneous, non-European provenance of this notion? Disentangling these epistemological relations seems essential to the coherence of decolonial aesthesis, lest a colonial medium be used as a means to achieve anticolonial ends (and this would be equivocal, since the use of colonialist logic and practices invariably yield colonialist outcomes). Instead, it would appear that aesthesis undermines and bypasses the univocal orthodoxies of formal aesthetic convention.
Formal theories of Aesthetics have aspired to offer global, universal concepts: it pertains to the global system of knowledge of imperial societies that extends over the totality of the world’s singular localities, enclosing, along with these, the cultures and sensibilities that it seeks to homogenize and dominate. Notably, this is achieved by controlling the legitimate representations of reality, and by limiting the ways in which reality may be experienced. Aesthesis, on the other hand, leads one to engage local realities through encounters and conjunctive relations that take place within singular, generative spaces – despite their so-called enclosure within global networks. As such, it is always a personal and intimate experience that entails a situational form of broader socio-political awareness. Stricto sensu, aesthesis follows a relational and generative rather than an accumulative logic. Ergo, its affordances are productive of the new, of another social world.
Ethical aesthetics
In this broad vein, Guattari (1992) called for a new aesthetic paradigm beginning in the fine arts to recast the atomized division and discipline of individuals in contemporary ‘societies of control’. Maffesoli (1991, 1993) joins up aesthesis and ethics in an ‘ethics of aesthetics’ that has been translated as ‘ethical aesthetics’ anchored in places and the ethos of situations. This designates a disposition in a social situation. In everyday life, a balancing of proximity and distance, engagement and withdrawal occurs. What is an ethical aesthetics of humans and non-humans in the world together that recognizes our ecological obligations (Latour, 2018)?
Can aesthesis generate a politics as well as a situation ethics? The global polis can be understood as exactly such a diverse community. The polity is the result of aesthesis, rather than merely a dull, homogenous multitude of similarity that might be produced discursively through demagoguery (Moreault, 1999; Sjöholm, 2015). Amin and Thrift (2017: 61) argue that: ‘in a city there is no simple presence or absence or foreground and background or natural and unnatural or withdrawn and sensual to be found: these concepts have evaporated as infrastructure moves things around and between cities’. This urban register of relations assembles and attaches different groups, indeed humans and non-humans, and the social and ecological. ‘Urban obligations’ constitute the ligatures of the polis as an associative form and require attending to the multiple layers of human–institutional–animal–plant–material relations.
We can read this as a supplement to the growing literature on ‘the right to the city’, which Henri Lefebvre proposed as the ‘right’ to participation of those often excluded from full urban life. Thus, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos argues that urban obligations are a network of bonds expressed in laws, broadly understood. Laws constitute our social and urban reality, making the city into what he terms a ‘lawscape’ (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014). Similar to Spinoza, Maffesoli (1991) locates experience in attunement to the ethos of a situation or place and understands our attention to this ethos as the founding action of an ethics that is always situational and affective. A bottom–up situation ethics contrasts with moral codes that are universally and homogeneously applied to situations and experience as judgements that found abstract political rights. However, this counterposes ethics and aesthesis against morals and politics, a situation ethics grounded in an aesthetic art of engagement that seeks harmony contra an abstract, universal politics based on moral correctness and orthodoxy. As Matthews, Arendt and others argue, there is a route from ethics to politics through the polis, as a socio-political organization of obligation.
One possible approach to the heteroglossia of voices and multiplicity of perspectives, plus the challenges of the imperceptible and the non-human, is to connect aesthesis to new dimensions in which objects are not only perceived as things but recognized as signs (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 176). Semiotically, ‘The sign here is not something known but a problem bearer. It is what makes the sensible perplexing – even shocking – what unfolds as the genuinely novel’ (Munster, 2013: 9). In addition, material bodies and things signal the presence of the intangible but real aspects that supplement the simple materiality of objects and situations (Dejanovic, 2015; Deleuze, 1995: 141; Shields, 2006). That is, the material is entangled with intangibles (i.e. virtualities) and ideological discourses (i.e. abstractions). A brute object is not only symbolic, it is always potentially ‘as if’ something else, or it may bear the traces of past processes. Such virtual aspects also have possible meanings or signal wider classes of objects or situations. In short, it is never just a nominal object (Shields, 2006). Deleuze argues that this is a recursive prehension of the ‘being’ of the sensible; a confrontation with what is ungraspable in the sensible because it is genuinely novel and there are no prior conventions through which to understand it. It is imperceptible – an ‘out of’ the given sensibility’s realm, which is nonetheless in (the) sensible. The imperceptible contributes to the becoming-other of the sensible (Bogue, 2003, p. 178), to a radical aisthesis. Any sensibility gets its ontogenetic consistency from these radically empirical, dynamic processes of intensive differentiation. The ‘being of the sensible’ is always a becoming perceptible, a volatile emergence of sensing from the virtually imperceptible. It is this emergence that is inventive and creative. (Munster, 2013: 9, emphasis added)
William James prefigures both Deleuze and Weil. For the fundamental operation of attending and relating to a context, James conceived of lived relations not just as instants. They have a duration and are experiences of change and of differences, of the edges between objects and their contexts, between this and that, much like the edges of tiles in a mosaic (James, 1997: 198): ‘Relationality is the experience of passage – a vague edging with, against, between, away from – that actualizes the related things. It is experience as conjoining/disjoining’ (Munster, 2013: 35). However, James’s pragmatism also recognizes that attention and time can be colonized and enclosed by normative and predictive structures. These prescribe reactions to situations thus overdetermine any aesthesis or ethical aesthetics. The mesh of interrelated institutions and technologies may foreclose any surprise or shock even in the everyday. Attention is the basis of relation that subtends engagement, conjunction and mutual obligation. Making original relations is always going to be a struggle. Yet we need to draw authentic insights or creative connections, including between local events and a global process such as climate warming. Rather than a dualism of ethical aesthetics versus moral politics; the Venetian versus the Martial; or, the decolonial as a final resolution of the colonial, these are ongoing challenges to connect by acknowledging that the univocality of orthodoxies actually suppresses a diversely equivocal and heterodox world – making ‘patchworks into networks’ (Lazzarato, 2006: 180, cited in Munster, 2013: 133).
Politicizing an ethical Aesthesis
How to escape the reassuring blanket of contemporary anaesthesia? There is an active search for new social and environmental ethico-aesthetic protocols that ask, how can we ‘compose ourselves as collectivities/networks? What novel discoveries can we make about our/the world’s relations of betweenness, with-ness, to-ness, and-ness?’ (Munster, 2013: 193). Relational, ethical aesthesis is a search for ways of generating news spaces and worlds that open out the polis to embrace repressed affects, exploited Others and non-humans. It is a project to assemble new collectivities, not just adherents to enthusiasms of the moment. Ethical aesthesis is not just a matter of civil manners, nor taste, nor a new Aesthetics, but a matter of seeking to sense more profoundly, of sharpening our senses. It seeks nuance to allow for the indiscernible, appreciate the imperceptible and distant, and attend to the radically Other. Because this entails a new sense of the world and a more inclusive practice of living together, this is necessarily collective and thus politicizes aesthesis. In this sense, practical aesthesis is a response to a set of crises produced by the juridical and political ordering of the world (Serres, 2014). 3 Politicizing aesthesis signals the need to consider problems and obligations from the relational perspective of situation ethics (social, tied to places) versus universal moral politics (juridical, abstract). This introduces challenges such as the movement from aesthesis as consensual apperception of social situations to the creation of new forms of organization accountable to the biosphere.
It is perhaps not surprising that a history of aesthesis reveals a long period of western repression of the body, the haptic and the sensory in general in favour of visuality and the codified systems of Aesthetics as a philosophy and as a manner. Thinkers as diverse as Maffesoli, Serres, Mignolo and Vasquez argue for the need to decolonize aesthesis from Aesthetics. Moreover, Heraclitean and Protagorean aesthesis as fundamental relation has persisted and been recovered earlier, for example, as experience in James’s pragmatism. It is integral to perception in Whitehead’s work, and is the founding mutualism of Weil’s obligation. Contemporary thinkers as diverse as Berardi and Serres find aesthesis as a material contact that grounds reason and conjoins thought to reality. Maffesoli anchors aesthesis in the shared exchange of the ethos of a place or event.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos provides the bridge from situation ethics arising from aesthesis to politics not as a matter of codified rights and morals but the social organization of obligation. Aesthesis is the relation between the perceptible or real, and the collective, that is, the polis. On one hand, the polity involves an ethical relation, but it entails a political process. This is an essential area for further investigation and collective action. Munster and others point out that contemporary reality concatenates humans and non-human, demanding new sensoria and creating new forms of attention.
Aesthesis is an open problematic that includes a series of strategic questions for our time. What are the decolonial implications of aesthesis’ link to the crisis of logos? How does aesthesis contribute to a Decolonial Aesthetics? How are understandings of, for example, climate warming or the poor (conspiracy theory driven) grasp of the powers of a pandemic virus part of a contemporary, shared aesthesis on which the tools of logical refutation have little purchase? In theoretical and case study detail, in what ways, when and where does aesthesis inform a politics on the basis of its entanglement with the ligatures of polis? How does a focus on aesthesis and the trans-species skeins of social and ecological obligation change our understanding and lived practice of the polis and even of the political? How is aesthesis productive of creative interactions and effects, and what, in turn, are these productive of? Can engaging aesthesis exceed the injunction of thinking with objects and experiences by contributing to an ethic of apprehending the complex features and qualities of situations in actu (a relational thinking among situations and milieux)? What forms are capable of breaking with the conservative re-modernization of academic thought and its canonical scission with the locally, materially and actually real? Further investigation is needed into the relational aspects and situation ethics of aesthesis with the more-than-human; the challenges of imperceptibility, the intersubjective and inter-object dynamism of affective eros, attention and attraction; and, the relation between aesthesis and creative interactions.
Aesthesis names a connecting thread that allows us to learn from classical theorists while stitching together a dispersed set of discussions concerning our collective sense of reality as well as individual perception. In this, critical cultural theories of the body, affect and relation have an important contribution to make. Our argument is that the conception of practical aesthesis is fundamental to the problematic of the polis as an eco-political totality that now exceeds humans. It has a strategic importance at this time because practical aesthesis names the process by which more complex totalities and imperceptible changes are perceived or mis-perceived – or to put it in the embodied language of everyday aesthesis: the process by which they are ‘grasped’ and by which we ‘relate’ to them. This conception holds promise for application to questions of social totalities and our sense of ‘we’ identities, inclusiveness and exclusion, and to global environmental totalities such as climate warming.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers and the assistance of the journal’s copy editor.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.