The aesthetics of the possible

Abstract

Amid growing concerns that our era may be defined as a ‘crisis of sensibility’, possibility studies have predominantly addressed the possible from a pragmatist stance. While this approach is valuable in explaining how people navigate possibilities, it is limited in its capacity to account for the affective component that precedes and shapes their engagement with the world. How are people affected by the signs emitted through their ongoing engagement with possibilities as events of life? Adopting a vitalist stance, this article introduces the Aesthetics of the Possible. It is defined the degree of bodily affect and emotional experience elicited by the signs one either recognises or encounters, as emitted by people and things, which influences one’s awareness, representations, and engagement with possibilities. Awe, wonder, serendipity, and insights are phenomena embedded within this framework. The article theorises how ongoing engagements with the practice–arrangement tandem of the social complex elicit experiences of what is introduced here as ‘authentic’ possibilities. These refer to an awareness of possibilities arising from the randomness of events, altering one’s worldview.

Introduction

A Vitalist Account of the Possible

Some philosophers have characterised our era as one of a ‘crisis of sensibility’ (Morizot, 2022). According to ecologist thinker Baptiste Morizot, we are becoming increasingly dull in our relations to ourselves and others – both in the living and non-living worlds. The signs that these worlds emit seem barely to affect us, and as we close our sensibility to them, we cleave the link between ourselves and the processes that constitute our lives. For Morizot, the crisis of sensibility is one of the causes of the broader ecological crisis. Perhaps, one may add, it stresses how we have lost touch with a sensitivity to our own experience as humans; lost our connection to the experiences of others; lost our sensitivity to the lives that maintain us (Held, 2005) and are enmeshed with our own (Ingold, 2007). The crisis of sensibility is a relational crisis with the worlds that we populate and that recursively constitute us – it is ‘a crisis in our relations with living beings’ (Morizot, 2022, p. 4, emphasis in original).

The field that addresses senses, sensations, and sensibility – whether externally perceived or self-generated – is aesthetics. In fact, ‘[q]uestions in aesthetics are often about art, but they don’t have to be’ (Nanay, 2018, p. 71). In this piece, I use the term ‘aesthetics’ in a neurobiological sense, referring to an ‘evaluative event whereby biological organisms seek to establish the potential benefit or harm of a sensory object relative to their current physiological, behavioural, and environmental conditions’ (Skov, 2022, p. 32). Aesthetics is the science of sensations (which is why the medical term ‘anaesthetics’ literally means ‘an-aesthetics’ – the absence of sensation). Viewed in this way, the ‘crisis of sensibility’ is a crisis of aesthetic experience. A crisis of sensibility towards the possible sensations within and around us. Thus, in this piece, I invite the reader to conceptualise aesthetics more broadly than the arts.

What, then, do possibility studies have to say about this crisis of sensibility? At first glance, a lot, since the field also recognises these relational and sensibility issues. The Possibility Studies Manifesto, for example, positions possibility studies as a call for work that may help societies to adjust to the ecological crisis, and to health, economic, and democratic insecurities (Glăveanu, 2023b). Likewise, other researchers have focused on the possibility – technology tandem against the backdrop of climate change and increasing political distrust (de Saint Laurent, 2024). Further work, compiled in a special issue on Wisdom and Others, considered attention and responsiveness to others, and how individual differences could contribute to opening up new perspectives on someone’s relation to themself, others, and the world around them (Glăveanu, 2024; Streib, 2023). The second thing which possibility studies may have to say about the crisis of sensibility is that action is necessary to renew the ties that are being cut, and the bonds that are torn. Ross et al. (2023) and Glăveanu (2023a) make possibility studies a science of action. Along with Baumeister’s (2023) matrix of maybe, possibility studies are thus embedded in pragmatism. End-goals and actions guide the actualisation of one possibility over another.

While this pragmatic approach appears valid in seeking to make sense of how people navigate possibilities, it nonetheless leaves a sense of shortcomings. In Morizot (2022), we find that the crisis of sensibility is rooted in the elements that are antecedent to planification and that precede action. As Morizot (2022, p. 6) puts it: ‘[b]y “crisis of sensibility” I mean an impoverishment of what we can feel, perceive, and understand of living beings, and the relations we can weave with them – a reduction in the range of affect, perceptions, concepts and practices connecting us to them’. Certainly, action settles possibilities through human practices and materiality (Schatzki, 2003, 2019), but Morizot stresses something more. The crisis of sensibility is rooted in our lack of emotional response to the signs emitted in and by the living processes in us, around us, and to which we are tied.

I use the word ‘signs’ in a Deleuzian way, to refer to the perceptual features infused with meaning that we attempt to decipher, understand, and integrate (Deleuze, 2004). Signs bear meaningful elements that have a potential to affect us to various degrees. In Sebeok’s (1994) semiotic theory, we find that signs refer to objects themselves, and help people to recognise them through their pattern. While, for Deleuze (2004), signs can certainly be recognised, he was mostly interested in those signs that stop us, that we don’t recognise, and that alter us as they provoke encounters with novel worlds. Here lies the point of departure with semiotics. Such encounters mark qualitative differences in the way we perceive the world (Deleuze, 2004, p. 41). They constitute a qualitative shift in our relation to the processes of life, in which life is understood as a tension between multiple forces and materialities; life as ‘form giving… in which materials of all sorts, with various and variable properties… mix and meld with one another in the generation of things’ (Ingold, 2013, p. 213).

The task of defining life has been the never-ending endeavour of some of the most insightful philosophers, including Bergson (1998), Dewey (1934), Nietzsche and Hollingdale (1974), Deleuze and Guattari (2009), and more recently, Schatzki (2019). Here, I will not pretend to even attempt to settle ‘what life is’, but I nonetheless need to provide some clarifications on how I use this term, as it articulates the conceptual development I present in this paper.

Throughout this text, I refer to ‘life’ and ‘life processes’ following Ingold’s (2007, 2015) conceptualisation. For Ingold (2015, p. 4), life is inherently social, composed of living and non-living elements entangled with one another. He views things as entangled with everything else and forming a meshwork, or in other words, an ensemble of threads, lines, and knots that compose the surface of things (Ingold, 2015, p. 3). From his anthropological work, he defines life as a combination of more or less rigid materials made of various degrees of volume, mass, and density, which are constantly clinging to more or less flexible things characterised by torsion, flexion, and vivacity. In Ingold’s (2015) view, life is made up of ‘devices’ of sociality through how things bind, knot, and entangle with other things, both living and non-living (p. 6). This entanglement between creatures and things nourishes and fertilises them as well as the things they are tied to (Ingold, 2007, p. 104; Ingold & Hallam, 2016). Life is experienced and created along the paths it carves and the traces it leaves (Ingold, 2007); it is growing, flowing, and formed through intertwined movements.

As will be made clearer later, this conceptualisation is useful to understand life as a process of affecting, and being affected by, the elements to which we are tied. Ingold’s framework of life seems to account meaningfully for an ontology that is relational and distributed – something also outlined in the Possibility Studies Manifesto (Glăveanu, 2023b). This Ingoldian perspective on life allows us to theorise that the relations which people and things maintain with the world do engage in constant interactions between their own characteristics and those of the multiple things they are constantly knotted to, which at once affect them, and constitute them. By this account, we are continuously knotted to people and things: our needs and their satisfaction are dependent upon the responsiveness of others, and others are also dependent upon our own ability to attend to them (Held, 2005), which may imply creative adaptation and adjustment (Verger, 2024). Put another way, a person’s life is connected to the lives of others, each of which have their respective paths and histories, past choices, and decisions which (a) have affected them and hothers (people and things), (b) affect us in the present, and (c) will continue to affect us even if we ‘cut’ our relations with them (Ingold, 2007; Schatzki, 2022).

Understood in this vitalist sense, the question then becomes: how are people affected by the signs that are emitted through our ongoing engaging with life, as an ongoing actualisation of the possible?

Approaching the Aesthetic Dimension of the Possible

Dating back to Aristotle’s philosophy of art and beauty, aesthetics is the body of work related to sense experience (Destrée, 2021). For contemporary researchers working on aesthetics, in the form of empirical aesthetics, it is not restricted to the beautiful or the ugly, and not even to art. These scholars view aesthetics in a more general sense, as the domain of inquiry tied to bodily responses and the perceptual processing of sensations (Nadal & Vartanian, 2022; Skov, 2019; Skov & Nadal, 2020).

Ideas and concepts, whether self-kept or publicly shared, encompass possibilities – understood as an ongoing potential becoming (Glăveanu, 2023b, p. 3). They encompass possibilities as the actualisation of events that compose the ongoing processes of life (Schatzki, 2022). For example, when someone sketches a plan for a trip as a surprise for a loved one, the sketching of the idea can take multiple forms, and the person may choose one possibility over another. Pragmatists would say that the end goal of spending a romantic weekend together opens and closes an array of possibilities (Baumeister, 2023). For example, someone may decide to propose a walk along the ocean coast instead of going out to see a movie. Perhaps the former best achieves the ideal of spending a romantic night – a casual discussion accompanied by the sounds of the waves and the colours of the sunset. But what if, in this circumstance, people do not choose possibilities according to an end goal to be met, but to events to be felt? What if people choose one possibility over another by imagining how one particular instance would affect them, and contribute to an ongoing experience of liveliness? Do we settle weekend plans to pragmatically achieve things, or to experience a lively affection and emotional experience from and through these things?

In investigating these questions, the pragmatist approach of possibility studies appeared limited. The affective experiences of possibilities – in terms of wonder, awe, or serendipitous insights, for instance – provide accounts of an aesthetics aspect which is tied to the possible (Chirico & Gaggioli, 2018; Glăveanu, 2020; Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Nam et al., 2021; Ross, 2024). Those experiences, which I discuss in more detail below, suggest an encounter with events enriched with an experience of liveliness. They hint at an Aesthetics of the Possible.

In this article, I develop an initial conceptual approach to what may be regarded as the start of a longer process of development, research, and reflection on the aesthetics of the possible. I define the aesthetics of the possible as:

… the degree of bodily affect and emotional experience elicited by the signs one either recognises or encounters, as emitted by people and things, which influences one’s awareness, representations, and engagement with possibilities.

I will begin this piece by discussing the aesthetics of the possible as a process of person – world affect, showing that our bodily sensations allow us to experience possibilities through the sensitive. I discuss the link between signs and arousal, and argue that congruent possibilities are associated with lower arousal, while incongruent ones provoke greater bodily arousal. Building on Deleuze (2004), and drawing parallels with Piaget’s (1977) theory of accommodation/assimilation, I will argue that we spend most of our time recognising familiar signs in our environment, thereby maintaining psychological equilibrium. Along with Berlyne’s (1971) theory of aesthetics and arousal, and more recent discussions of the role of collative signs in aesthetic experiences (Marin, 2020), I will describe how signs can be congruent or incongruent with a person’s previous schemes and ways of relating to the world. The degrees of congruence/incongruence fall into a continuum, ranging from recognising, on the one hand, to encountering on the other.

I will then shift to the social aspect of the aesthetics of the possible. Building on Schatzki’s work, I will discuss the social aspects inherent to the aesthetics of the possible through signs, practices, and materiality. I will argue that the aesthetics of the possible depends upon people’s engagement with practices and arrangements: as different people engage in practices, they introduce randomness into the signs being emitted and perceived. As people continuously engage with practices, intertwined with material arrangements, inter-individual differences introduce randomness, indeterminacy, and non-regularity in engagement with signs. This process accounts for how signs can either be recognised (thus maintaining stability in one’s relation to the world) or encountered (thus creating a qualitative difference in one’s relation to the world). I will discuss that, while the aesthetics of the possible encompasses the full spectrum of recognising or encountering, it is encountering the liveliness or anti-liveliness of events that creates a sudden new awareness, representation, and engagement with the possible. This experience is only possible, however, if it is complemented by our ability to recognise signs, providing the necessary stability for encounters to take place.

The Aesthetics of the Possible and Person – World Emotional Experiences

A Bodily Affect from the Perceived Signsof One’s Milieu

Our nervous system is the medium through which we are affected by the world. According to Skov’s (2022) synthesis of the neurobiology of sensory evaluation, the human body processes stimuli through the five sensory channels. The olfactory, visual, auditory, somatosensory, and gustatory systems comprise the input decoding system of Skov’s aesthetics system. Skov explains that as a stimulus enters a person’s perception, it is processed so that the organism evaluates how beneficial this stimulus is in a given context. This sensory assessment allows the organism to assign a hedonic value to it, enabling that person to orient his or her behaviour and navigate their milieu.

The body responds to, and is affected by, so-called collative variables. Presented in Berlyne’s (1971) arousal theory (also known as his psychobiological model), collative variables are ‘the comparisons, and thus the response to the degree and nature of similarities or differences between stimulus elements that may be present together or at different times’ (Berlyne, 1971, p. 141). In Berlyne’s account, certain structural and formal properties stimulate the nervous system and elicit aesthetic sensations and responses. When compared, these properties can be experienced as novelty, ambiguity, incongruousness, unexpectedness, or complexity. They form the basis of the human aesthetics experience.

According to Berlyne (1971), collative stimuli elicit bodily arousal, which he defines as ‘the degree to which it can disturb and alert the organism, the ease with which it can take over control of behaviour and overcome the claims of competing stimuli’ (p. 70). In this text, I will use the terms ‘arousal’, ‘affect’ or ‘affection’ interchangeably. For instance, novelty arouses the body as someone perceives a relation of dissimilarity between ‘something that is present now and something that has been encountered in the past’ (Berlyne, 1971, p. 70). In the case of complexity and incongruity, ‘it is a matter of noting, putting together, and summing up characteristics of several elements that are present simultaneously’ (Berlyne, 1971, p. 70).

If I walk in Times Square and imagine where each person has come from and is heading to, with their own reasons, aligned with their own individual life decisions, and dreams and fears, and aspirations, which led them to come to that place at that moment in time, then the crossing of these multiple imagined lines forms a complex image. Ingold (2007, 2015) would describe this image as a meshwork of intertwined lines of life. If I picture that instead of walking forward, people are moonwalking, then this forms an incongruous image. In both cases, to various degrees, the collative characteristics of a stimulus have an arousal potential (Marin, 2020) – a power to excite the nervous system. This arousal activity is distinct from other perceptual systems tied to the intensity, brightness, or colour of the perceived sign, or its association with significant internal biological events, which may, in their own right, contribute to a sense of ‘biological gratifications or discomforts’ (Berlyne, 1971, p. 70).

It is conceptually useful to think of collative variables as poles on their respective continuums. Building on Berlyne, we may identify five continua of collative stimuli: (a) novelty – familiarity; (b) ambiguity – clearness; (c) incongruousness – congruousness; (d) unexpectedness – expectedness; and (e) complexity – simplicity. In the Berlynean view, depending on where the perceived sign is placed on the collative stimuli continuum, its properties can either increase or decrease bodily arousal by a certain degree. These continua of collative stimuli are what I will refer to, hereafter, as regimes of signs– a term I borrow from Deleuze (2005, pp. 117–121) to refer to the intensity of each sign on these collative continua. For example, a sign can be highly novel, moderately ambiguous, highly incongruous, fairly unexpected, and highly simple. Their different intensities yield different degrees of bodily affection. They are indicators of how each person reacts to the possible events that unfold in their lives.

Suppose I enter my office at 8am and see a chair in front of my desk. I respond with low arousal due to (a) high familiarity (low novelty) with the arrangement of the environment; (b) a clear (unambiguous) distinction between the chair and the desk and how it is supposed to be used; (c) a high expectation (low unexpectedness) of where the chair is located as I enter the room in the morning; and (d) two simple signs (low complexity) represented by the chair and the desk. Together, these factors mean that these collative (comparative) elements elicit very little arousal in me. In other words, the possibility of these elements being arranged as they appeared to me as familiar, congruent, unambiguous, and expected in relation to my previous experience of such possibilities. Yes, action involves assessing a range of possibilities and actualising some over others (Ross et al., 2023, p. 400), but in this example, without any difference in the regimes of signs – without variation in how signs affect us – I am likely to be conditioned to engage with a familiar, patterned, learned set of possibilities. I am likely to take the chair and sit on it.

Suppose, now, that instead of being in my office, I walk into a library. I see some tables and chairs, but at one table, there is no chair; instead, there is a man positioned on all fours, and people are using his back as a seat at the desk. This represents the actualisation of a possibility that is (a) novel; (b) ambiguous; (c) incongruent with my past experience; and (d) unexpected. According to arousal theory, these collative elements should elicit in me a greater arousal. This is a different regime of signs compared to the previous example; one that should provoke a stronger arousal; and one which is situated within a higher realm of aesthetic, sensory experience. The variation in the regimes of signs between experiences of possibilities is a fundamental element of what can be described as the aesthetics of the possible – the bodily affection of the signs of perceived liveliness or anti-liveliness that we encounter in the world.

Furthermore, these examples indicate that our arousal may be affected by the extent to which what we perceive as the possibilities of the world affect some elements tied to life processes. In the first example, we find little engagement with a lively relation to oneself, to others, or to one’s milieu. The second example, on the other hand, introduces one’s relation to the social world, along with an incongruent possible engagement with people’s bodies. It seems to depict a possibility that is not entirely in tune with the prolongation of some life processes. This goes back to Skov’s (2019, 2022) point: aesthetics experiences are an indication of how what we perceive from the signs of our milieu contributes to fostering or impeding our body and neurobiological functioning.

Regimes of Signs, Arousal Affection and the Liveliness of Things

I mentioned earlier that signs are the prominent features perceived in our milieu, the meaning of which we try to decipher, understand, and integrate (Deleuze, 2004). Here, the notion of regimes of signs allows us to hone this conceptual view. They add an element of intensity to the signs that are perceived in one’s milieu – regimes of signs form ‘a dynamic that makes the gaze glide’ or stop (Deleuze, 2005, p. 117); they induce ‘variations in the body’ (Deleuze, 2005, p. 121).

I shall provide some examples to clarify what is meant by these regimes of signs, as their conceptualisation allows for a more precise understanding of an aesthetic of the possible. I will start with the view presented by Ross et al. (2023, p. 400) that ‘[a]ction is often a matter of assessing various possibilities and initiating behaviour aimed at realising some possibilities rather than others’. This pragmatist account suggests that signs are there to be perceived and seized, at least insofar as one becomes aware of some different possibilities (Glăveanu, 2023a; Glăveanu et al., 2024) within a matrix of maybes (Baumeister, 2023).

The aesthetics of the possible introduced here can offer a more refined explanation of the relationship between action and the awareness of possibilities. In my view, signs affect bodies through different regimes that elicit varying levels of arousal (Berlyne, 1971; Deleuze, 2004, 2005; Marin, 2020; Skov, 2022). These signs are inherently tied to the aesthetics of the possible as events that inform the liveliness or anti-liveliness of elements of the world to which we are tied. By this, I refer to how these events prolongate, alter, or positively or negatively cut our relations with aspects of the world (Ingold, 2007). According to this account, a person develops awareness of signs, engages with them, or resists to do so, as a function of how these events affect their ties with life processes.

For instance, experimental research has shown that presenting depictions of climate change in association with pictures of droughts or denuded landscapes provokes lower arousal among participants than depictions of phenomena like floods, cyclones, or bushfires, which are highly arousing (Leviston et al., 2014). Research on awe indicates that such elements can contribute to an experience of fearful awe, as they imply low self-agency, low control, and low certainty, and thus tend to increase bodily arousal (Gordon et al., 2017). As an aesthetic experience, awe occurs as people encounter vastness in stimuli that they need to accommodate, forcing them to change their representation of the world (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). Awe is a mixed emotion, and feelings of being absorbed in natural milieus also have the potential to elicit a positive sense of awe (Ballew & Omoto, 2018; Bethelmy & Corraliza, 2019; Collado & Manrique, 2020). In my account, these signs echo events that can foster or threaten a person’s engagement with his or her milieu. They affect people’s arousal because they depict events (i.e. the actualisation of possibilities) that may significantly alter the multiple entanglements between the people, places, animals, artefacts, and things that constitute the meshwork of an individual’s life (Ingold, 2007, 2015). They evoke possibilities of prolonging the threads of the person’s life, or, conversely, threaten them. Awe, in this sense, is a phenomenon that falls into the broader domain of the aesthetics of the possible.

On the other hand, there is evidence about little bodily affection and low arousal even when events are constitutive of life processes. This, again, ties to the collative continua of the regimes of signs, in which the perception of these signs falls into each continuum of novelty – familiarity; ambiguity – clearness; incongruousness – congruousness; unexpectedness – expectedness; complexity – simplicity (Berlyne, 1971; Deleuze, 2004; Marin, 2020). Breathing, for example, is a life process that is usually appraised with high familiarity, clearness, congruousness, expectedness, and simplicity (unless we depict the multiple life processes of breathing). When we breathe without paying much attention to it, or see someone else breathe, we recognise this vital sign as part of the life process, but this rarely seizes us in an awe-like experience. To understand why, we need to discuss the notion of recognition or encounter with the signs we perceive.

The Aesthetics of the Possible and the Recognising – Encountering Continuum

Signs, Affect and Schemes

As illustrated in Art as Experience (Dewey, 1934) and Proust and Signs (Deleuze, 2004), the milieu in which we live sends us signs through the interactions between creatures and things. These signs can be deciphered to various degrees (some more easily than others), to reflect either congruent or incongruent possibilities. I would place the above example of viewing someone sitting on a man’s back at the library further along the congruent – incongruent continuum of possibilities. As an incongruent possibility, it differs from one’s experience and, perhaps, from one’s expectations of the possibilities that a visit to a library might bring. Berlyne’s (1971) theory and research on surprise state that, in this case, the higher the incongruence, the higher the arousal (Breugelmans et al., 2005; Noordewier & Breugelmans, 2013). But, this case also suggests that the perceptions of the people sitting on a man’s back as a chair may challenge their previous mental scripts and representations of the world (Piaget, 1977). Such signs are challenging because, typically, our constructed representations and expectations of the world do not include using someone’s back as a chair in libraries.

Empirical aesthetics documents how learned scripts influence our mental representations. Jacobsen and Klein (2022) explain that as sensorial and perceptual processes construct our mental representations, our pre-existing mental schemes play a feedback effect to modulate these representations. For them, the aesthetic experience is dependent both upon external stimuli (i.e. the signs perceived in the milieu) and internal processing which depends on learned schemes – that is, upon a person’s previous experience, education, and culture.

Skov (2022) tells us that the perception of signs leads to engaging in a particular selection of a behaviour over another: the aesthetic experience depends upon being affected by a stimulus and making decisions based on the valence of this affection. Once an individual perceives the incongruent possibility of someone sitting on a person’s back in a library, and after this has elicited arousal, what are his or her possible actions? Do they ignore this sign, to meet their end goal (searching for the book they wanted) in a pragmatic way? This remains a likely option; as one may simply inquire what this is about to reduce arousal – something called specific exploratory behaviour (Marin, 2020). But, are there other ways in which people may respond to this random scenario?

Dewey (1934, p. 25) provides a tentative answer: ‘[w]hat was mere shock becomes an invitation; resistance becomes something to be used in changing existing arrangements of matter’. Indeed, Dewey (1934, p. 14) believed that ‘life itself consist of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it – either through effort or by some happy chances’. More recently, Glăveanu (2020, p. 80) outlined ‘the pragmatic importance of engaging with randomness’. In his account, chance, luck, and randomness ‘create a rupture in our experience of the everyday’ and ‘invite an active search for an explanation’ due to ‘being wonderstruck and starting to explore the new world opened up by the accidental’ (Glăveanu, 2020, p. 70).

Glăveanu (2020) discusses the value of randomness in his model of wonder, which is composed of a random sign that (a) increases our awareness of possibilities; (b) provokes our excitement; and (c) elicits engagement of exploration with the possible. As in Dewey (1934), the random element can provoke a sense of wonder, understood as ‘a particular type of experience whereby the person becomes (more or less suddenly) aware of an expanded field of possibility for thought and/or action and engages (more or less actively) in exploring this field. This experience is generally accompanied by uplifting emotions (without all of them being necessarily positive)’ (Glăveanu, 2019a, p. 172). As with awe, this affective dimension of wonder falls into the broader domain of an aesthetics of the possible.

However, this account of wonder leaves the question of what could explain the sudden occurrence of this experience in the first place? According to the vitalist outlook of the aesthetics of the possible, the perception of those random, incongruent possibilities is an invitation felt throughout the body caused by the regime of the sign, and the extent to which they arouse us. What may elicit this experience, along with its positive or negative valence and the degree of exploration of the possible, may be how much a person feels that these events contribute to significantly extending, prolonging, reinforcing; or reducing, cutting, or diminishing their ability to do things; their sensation of being connected to, and nourished by, the multiple and dynamic life processes (Deleuze & Guattari, 2009; Ingold, 2015; Nietzsche & Hollingdale, 1974).

Dewey (1934) proposed that as we navigate the complexity of our lives, we are affected by the signs sent by and through the milieu in which we live. Dewey suggests that the aesthetic experience is honed by movements and culminations, followed by breaks and reunions – it is the cultivation (and not the rejection) of moments of resistance and tension (Dewey, 1934, p. 15). In my view, the aesthetic dimensions of possibilities (novelty – familiarity; ambiguity – clearness; incongruity – congruity; unexpectedness – expectedness; complexity – simplicity) are characterised by these elements of resistance (high arousal) and release (low arousal). Events which generate both awe and wonder fall at the higher ends of those continua (highly novel, and/or ambiguous, and/or incongruent; and/or unexpected; and/or complex stimuli).

Yet, it is not enough simply to perceive a sign positioned at those higher ends of the aesthetics continua of the possible. Indeed, if the perception of the signs in our milieu is modulated by learned schemes (Jacobsen & Klein, 2022), then our response should depend upon these schemes. This opens up two more questions: how do these schemes influence our perceptions of the possible, and how do the aesthetic features of the possible modify our learned schemes?

Deleuzean philosophy is fruitful in addressing these questions. Deleuze (2004) discussed two possibilities of engaging with signs: we can either recognise them as tied to the object they refer to, or meet something beyond them that transforms the quality of our experience with the world. I will call the first process recognising, and the second one encountering. Parallels exist between Deleuze’s philosophical discussion of the affection of signs and the Piagetian psychological theory of the equilibration of cognitive functions. Piaget (1977) theorised that our past experiences contribute to the formation of mental schemes. These represent habitual, scripted, quasi-automatic patterns of thought that condition our perceptions of, and engagement with, our milieu. These schemes help us to make sense of the world. When we encounter new information that fits our pre-existing schemes, we integrate this information into them. This process is called assimilation. When we encounter information that does not fit our existing schemes, we are forced to change our representations of the world. This process is called accommodation.

A good example is the history of black swans (Taleb, 2007). For a long time, Westerners thought that all swans were white. Their experiences of viewing only white swans honed they understandings of the world. Every new white swan perceived was thus assimilated into existing schemes. It was only when Dutch mariners travelled to Australia that they met black swans; they then had to accommodate their worldview to update their schemes to the idea that swans can be either white or black.

The parallel between Piaget’s assimilation – accommodation theory and Deleuze’s recognising – encountering requires some nuance, however. From my reading, the process of recognition is definitively on a par with Piaget’s description of assimilation. Both correspond to what Deleuze (2004) described as adding elements to previous elements in a chain of analogies. Yet, Piaget’s accommodation also fits into Deleuze’s recognition process. To say that the Dutch mariners had to adjust their worldview to the idea that swans can be either black or white says nothing about the effects which these accommodated signs had on them. This is why we need to look more thoroughly at the Deleuzean encounter.

For Deleuze (2005), we fuel our world with clichéd, pre-formed representations of the world. We respond to the signs we see without much affect on our being and becoming. Think, for example, of how researchers quickly integrate new articles into their reference lists as mere items that they deem to fit their pre-existing chain of information. Deleuze (2004) might say that by doing so, we are recognising signs. We recognise signs when we add them to a chain of associations of ideas; each sign, a new chain link (Deleuze, 2004, p. 24). On the other hand, encountering is the perception of something we did not look for – an unexpected element that appears where we did not seek it, and which creates an imperative to explore something beyond this sign. As Deleuze (2004, p. 37) puts it: ‘[b]eyond designated objects, beyond intelligible and formulated truths, but also beyond subjective chains of association and resurrections by resemblance or contiguity, are the essences that are alogical or supralogical’. For Deleuze (2004), this so-called ‘essence’ could also be called an ‘Idea’ (p. 39), although not in the sense of a ‘simple association of ideas’ (Deleuze, 2004, p. 12). Rather, the Deleuzean Idea is ‘an [accidental] encounter with something that forces us to think and to seek the truth. […] It is the accident of the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what is thought’ (Deleuze, 2004, p. 16).

Thus, for Deleuze, it is the event’s randomness that makes it authentic and that can force us to adjust our worldview. However (and here is the nuance to Piaget’s theory), these random signs can also be rejected so that they do not constitute any encounters, and are simply assimilated into previous schemes. As I read it, to encounter is (a) to break away from one’s chain of analogical reasoning to be fully affected by a meaning beyond the material surface that the signs express, and (b) to be affected in such a way (or to such an extent) that the sign means something new, different from anything else – something that testifies to a significant ‘before’ and ‘after’ this event; a qualitative difference in one’s relation to life.

Ross (2024) presented a beautiful conceptualisation of this experience – she calls it ‘accidental thinking’. In her model, Ross labels this unforeseen accident recognition as someone has faced a surprising, unexpected event, but discarded it. She also proposed that, alternatively, a person will sometimes notice this random element and, instead of discarding it, enact it. From my reading of Deleuze, such a noticed, random element, that is enacted upon and makes us meet or create an Idea, a concept, a different worldview, and different representations of the world beyond what meets the eye, defines an encounter. As in awe and wonder, serendipitous experiences affect our relation to the world through this encounter with a fortuitous event. In its affective dimension, serendipity could thus form part of the broader domain of the aesthetics of the possible.

This positions the aesthetics of the possible as the affective dimension of what Glăveanu and Beghetto (2021, p. 76) label a creative experience – one which ‘challenges us, interrupts our usual course of action’ and creates ‘novel person – world encounters’. Deleuze (2004, p. 16) posits that any other manners one can use to create ideas and explore things ‘remain gratuitous because they are born of the intelligence that accords them only a possibility and not of a violence or of an encounter that would guarantee their authenticity’. Following Deleuze (2004), the randomness of this affective experience conditions the authentic exploration of possible. The aesthetics of the possible seems to entail that people may authentically explore those elements that affect his or her processes of life; and as they do so, they may gain an awareness, construct new representations, and explore what can be called ‘authentic possibilities’. These refer to an awareness of possibilities that arose from the randomness of the event, altering one’s worldview.

This conceptual development is summarised in Figure 1. It shows that the aesthetics of the possible refers to the bodily, emotional experience of the signs we perceive in our milieu, and how these signs influence our awareness and engagement with possibilities. Signs are thus perceived elements reflecting a state of the possible (either actualised or hinting at a future but non-actualised possible). The signs which Person A perceives in his or her milieu induce a bodily arousal of various intensities (these are the regimes of signs). As they meet a sign that fits their cognitive schemes, they experience low arousal experienced as cognitive equilibrium. When Person A notices a sign which is incongruous with their schemes and attributes a meaning beyond their current representations, they experience high arousal, and cognitive disequilibrium associated with positive or negative affect. The signs can be rejected, meaning that Person A decides to overlook, ignore, and/or discard the perceived incongruent sign. Conversely, it can be integrated into their previous schemes. In both cases, there is no significant cognitive restructuring: this process is recognising. Alternatively, Person A can explore the meaning of random, incongruent signs, thus changing their relations and engagement with their milieu. This exploration can be resolved as Person A becomes Person A’ (a depiction I borrow from Piaget’s [1977] discussion of assimilation and accommodation). This resolution is experienced as low arousal as the result of new schemes. This process is an encounter with an authentic possible. It opens up new awareness, representations, and mode of engaging with the liveliness of the elements of the world.

Figure 1.

Person – world emotional experiences constitute the aesthetics of the possible.

The Aesthetics of the Possible and the Social Complex

Signs, Social Practices and Material Arrangements

According to Depraz et al. (2003, p. 155), ‘[p]ractice is the privileged site for grasping experience’. As they see it, engaging with practices allows one to deploy various degrees of awareness of oneself and one’s relation to others and the world, through full bodily enaction. But, what exactly are practices, and are they entangled with signs? In this section, I will draw mostly on Schatzki’s (2003, 2019) theory of social practices to discuss how the aesthetics of the possible is inherently embedded in a social complex which continuously emits signs. I will re-articulate the elements from the previous sections to shed light on how the emotional experiences and encounters contingent upon signs are crucially embedded in social practices.

According to Schatzki (2006), social practices are a nexus of human activities bounded with material arrangements. For him, human activities are made up of such practices and arrangements. These arrangements include people, bodies, organisms, natural objects, and created artefacts as part of a bundle of things in a spatial configuration. In Schatzki’s account, people’s milieu is comprised of arrangements and practices, and the two go together in tandem. Schatzki (2006) defines practices as an organised, open set of doings and sayings performed from, though, and on bodies (pp. 27–28). He defines arrangements as context-forming, meaningful, configurations of entities (things, artefacts, people, sentient beings, organisms, etc.) that organise social life (Schatzki, 2006, p. 15).

In Figure 2, I draw upon Schatzki’s (2003, p. 210) work to propose that practices use, give meaning to, and affect arrangements. Arrangements prefigure, channel, and facilitate social practices. For example, the practice of research uses knowledge in the form of books, seminars, and discussions with colleagues, gives meaning to what has been conceptually produced in the past (through other practices composed of other sets of doings and sayings drawn from other researchers), in the present and for the future, and ultimately affects the state of knowledge. As arrangements, those books, seminars, and people prefigure possible ways of engaging with research practice in the future. They channel, that is, orientate (to a more or less scripted extent) the sayings and doings of the practice of research. We may, for instance, agree that it is ‘good practice’ to congratulate a colleague for an article and invite them to present their output in a future seminar. Finally, these books, seminars, and discussions with colleagues facilitate the practice of research; they allow the exchanges of ideas, thoughts, technical training, and material sharing.

Figure 2.

The social processes of the aesthetics of the possible.

In their practice, people emit signs and are affected by the signs which others emit. In this example, books, seminars, and discussions constitute material arrangements articulated by people in an attempt to give meaning to and (mis)interpret, and are affected by a multitude of signs: ideas, thoughts, findings, congratulations, criticisms, and so on. Following Deleuze (2004), these signs can be recognised for what they are; for how close they match our schemes in this precise, learned, situation. They can inspire, provoke a drive to do more, and generate a feeling that one is succeeding in one’s ideal of life. These socially prescribed ways of feeling are what Schatzki (2003) calls ‘teleoaffective’ responses.

But signs, according to Deleuze (2004), can also evoke something beyond themselves. If they do not fit the pre-established schemes that fall outside our ability to categorise them, incongruent signs can lead us to change our relations with people, with ourselves, and with our representations of the world. For instance, a researcher moving abroad for a research project may encounter signs that are incongruent with his or her learned scheme in this practice. This variation in context, seeing other people engaging differently in the same practice–arrangement tandem, may generate incongruent experiences that open up new ties with people and things and thus awareness of new possibilities of being and becoming (Deleuze, 2004; Ingold, 2021).

Through each individual’s engagement with the elements that are articulated in them, practices and arrangements both emit signs and are affected by the signs emitted in the milieu. For example, a famous insight from Henri Poincaré, recounted in Science and Methods and more recently discussed in The Creativity Reader (Glăveanu, 2019b, p. 33), accounts for both Poincaré’s ongoing engagement in his practice, and the introduction of variations in his practice–arrangement tandem. Poincaré (1914, pp. 52–53) wrote about this in the third chapter of his autobiographical work on mathematical discovery. I add italics and brackets to Poincaré’s account to stress the elements that lead me to think that the aesthetics of the possible, as a bodily affection and emotional experience of the possible, depends upon an ongoing engagement between (a) practices; (b) arrangements; and the introduction of (c) randomness:

For a fortnight [ongoing engagement] I had been attempting to prove that there could not be any function analogous to what I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was at that time very ignorant. Every day [ongoing engagement] I sat down at my table [arrangement] and spent an hour or two trying a great number of combinations [practice], and I arrived at no result. One night I took some black coffee [arrangement], contrary to my custom [variation], and was unable to sleep; I could almost feel them jostling one another [emotional experience], until two of them coalesced, so to speak, to form a stable combination. When the morning came, I had established the existence of one class of Fuchsian functions. […] At this moment I left Caen, where I was then living, to take part in a geological conference arranged by the School of Mines [practice × arrangement × variation]. The incidents of the journey made me forget my mathematical world. When we arrived at Coutances, we got into a break to go for a drive, and, just as I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me [encounter]… I made no verification, and had no time to do so… but I felt [aesthetics element of the possible] absolutely certainty at once. When I got back to Caen, I verified the result at my leisure to satisfy my conscience [ongoing engagement].

This famous excerpt may be connected to the randomness introduced by Fleming in exploring the sign that led him to discovering penicillin (e.g. Ross, 2024, p. 253), and to the discussion around Wallas’s (1926) model of insight (Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification). But I will leave aside those considerations to focus on the present discussion on the aesthetics of the possible. I think, indeed, psychologists may have tended to restrict insights and serendipity to the psychological level, without much consideration of the emotional, sign-related, experience that occurs in the social complex.

In my account, and perhaps also in Ross’s (2024), there can be no insight or serendipitous event without an engagement with materiality. Following Schatzki (2006, 2019), this materiality is inherently a vector of the social practices that condition the very possibility that people may be affected by such events of sudden illumination. Insights bear an important affective dimension connecting to the practice–arrangement tandem. As Poincaré’s account shows, and recent research supports, insights are characterised by affective events of increased arousal (Nam et al., 2021).

As is depicted in Figure 2, I propose that the condition for the aesthetics of the possible to yield encounters (and not recognition) with the signs of possibilities is a person’s ongoing engagement with practice–arrangement dynamics. The individual differences of people and variations in context introduce randomness, indeterminacy, and non-regularity both in (a) the sign one person generates or responds to, and (b) the signs other people generate or respond to. Different degrees of openness-to-experience, as a pivotal trait in aesthetics experience (Fayn et al., 2015), could condition how people differently perceive and are differently affected by the signs emitted in the practice–arrangement tandem. For Glăveanu and Beghetto (2021, p. 77), this open-endedness orientates the transformative experiences of encounters that, according to the authors, are fostered by the non-linearity of the process itself, along with the multiple perspectives that people have about the world.

Think, for a moment, what these individual, multiple perspectives about the world bring in a non-linear, contingent practice–arrangement tandem. For Schatzki (2003, pp. 30–31), practices depend upon (a) practical and general understandings (how to carry out an activity, and what the ethos of this activity is); (b) rules (directives, instructions); (c) teleology (what higher-order set of actions and goals drives the activity); and (d) teleoaffectivity (the implication of a scripted action and emotional response based on social prescription). This means that for each person interacting with others in a given practice–arrangement tandem, there is an increased diversity of understandings, rules, teleologies, and teleoaffectivities. That is, the multiple intra-personal references to previously learned and integrated signs and schemes (as knowledge and rules), to responses to signs (either genuine or scripted), and to the generation of new signs to be seized by others, all increase.

This complexity highlights that neither a world full of recognitions, nor a world full of encounters, may be possible. Recognition is needed for a person to ensure stability in their relation to the world, and adjustment and continuity in a context that is subject to variations (Glăveanu, 2012). Encounters occur on this backdrop, and contribute to personal and societal growth as the development of life processes themselves (Bergson, 1998 ¹ ; Deleuze & Guattari, 2009). I think that this level explains why it is possible that people sometimes encounter signs that must be accommodated and thus require them to change their worldview. This level accounts for why the aesthetics of the possible can either involve reception with a recognised possible (i.e. the information decoded in the signs of one’s milieu is simply added to a previous logical chain of knowledge), or engagement with an encountered, authentic possible (i.e. the meaning of the sign is interpreted and creates a sudden new awareness and engagement with new authentic possibilities).

Perspectives

I have approached the aesthetic dimension of the possible not as something confined to the arts, but as belonging to the domain of sense, sensations, and sensibility. The aesthetics of the possible is grounded in the way we perceive, are affected, and transformed by signs we either recognise or encounter. This sensibility to signs is, thus, a precursor to action and the enactment of possibilities. It serves as a means of re-establishing connections to the unfolding processes that sustain us.

I defined the aesthetics of the possible as the degree of bodily affect and emotional experience elicited by the signs one either recognises or encounters, as emitted by people and things, which influences one’s awareness, representations, and engagement with possibilities. This framework integrates the affective experiences of phenomena like awe, wonder, and serendipitous insights and considers that we engage with the signs of the world through a recognition – encountering continuum. We integrate most of these signs into our previous cognitive schemes, and encounter those that (positively or negatively) alter our ties to the liveliness of things and processes. This experience is crucially embedded in the social complex of a practice–arrangement tandem that condition the randomness, non-linearity, and pluri-perspectives of signs’ emission and affection.

The problem that motivated the present development of the aesthetics of the possible was the crisis of sensibility discussed by Morizot (2022). In his account, our societies are currently experiencing a crisis of relations with the multiple and subtle signs we emit ourselves, and that others emit in from their own perspectives, and in terms of our engagement with the world. The vitalist account of the aesthetics of the possible, which is developed here, aims to open up the field of possibility studies to theorising the condition of our lack of entanglement with alterity and otherness, including living and non-living beings alike. It aims at opening possibility studies to the emotional experience of the possible.

This conceptual work accounts for the educating people to be sensitive to the multiple perspectives of people’s lives. It calls for an education that fosters sensitivity, sensibility, and more careful attention to the signs emitted in one’s milieu (Held, 2005; Ingold, 2023; Morizot, 2022). This opens further discussions about how the aesthetics of the possible highlights three societal considerations that can be succinctly outlined as follows.

The first is a lack of sensitivity to others, and notably to perspectives that conflict with our own. As we witness a rise in populism, intolerance, and societal cleavage around the world that heightens antagonism, some have called for a cultivation of xenosophia – the knowing of the other (Glăveanu, 2024; Streib, 2023). How to attend to the need of others, sometimes in creative ways, is an important question to address (Held, 2005; Verger, 2024). The aesthetics of the possible may help to highlight that this endeavour requires education on recognising the lively ties that both constitute and affect us (Ingold, 2015). It highlights the need of an education focused on our ability to be opened to letting oneself be affected by the inherent alterity and difference of others’ perspectives. As a concept, the aesthetics of the possible suggests that the crisis of sensibility, and lack of xenosophia, may be partly due to people not letting themselves encounter difference (Deleuze, 2004; Piaget, 1977).

The second consideration is a growing lack of careful attention. Ingold (2000) talks about the art of attention and advocates for the need to cultivate a dialogue between us and the world to attend to the things in life. For Ingold (2021), this education of attention is the cultivation of an art of correspondence. To correspond is to observe, to watch closely, to attend, and to respond to things when the moment to do so opens up, both in terms of temporality and the degree of how and when things affect us. The aesthetics of the possible brings considerations about how our relations to others, and to the subtlety of life processes, depend upon our relations to variations in the regimes of time. As the concept suggests, to recognise is a quicker gesture than to encounter. A culture of speediness thus perhaps increases the likelihood of recognising (i.e. categorising) the world. As the above discussion has shown, however, the encounters experienced in the aesthetics of the possible may greatly depend upon ongoing engagement in practices and arrangements, cultivating a way to remain open to, and affected by, the random signs being emitted (Poincaré, 1914; Ross, 2024; Schatzki, 2019).

The third consideration is in relation to art education. The aesthetics of the possible, as positioned in the above development, encompasses the broader conceptualisation of the emotional experience lived as the result of the signs emitted in one’s milieu. Indeed, aesthetics is not restricted to art (Skov & Nadal, 2020). Still, I do not overlook the fact that Dewey’s (1934) Art as Experience conceptualised what he called the ‘full aliveness’ (Dewey, 1934, p. 19) as being fully present through an active, alert engagement with the world, which art affords. Dewey proposes that the aesthetic experience is constituted of this full aliveness, and that people have an active role to play in cultivating his or her ability to be affected by the world. Consequently, art can be thought to be the expression of this full aliveness, as something that transcends these sensitive affections. Even for Deleuze (2004) and Bergson (1998), art allows us to truly encounter the world, as the only tool humans have to express something of the multiple sensitivities that escape their conscious bodily perceptual engagement.

Modern art pieces position themselves at different points on the recognising – encountering continuum. Some works are purely integrated into what we already know; others bear the potential to transform our relation to others and our milieu. Through the concept of the aesthetics of the possible, art education may develop a vocabulary and framework to aim to create the condition of re-sensitising people to the affection of the signs of the world. This concept is not restricted to the arts and allows for the study of the sensitive (i.e., aesthetic) component of possibilities. It provides a vitalist framework for future research to explore how we are affected by signs that alter our awareness of, and engagement with, the possible. The aesthetics of the possible conceptualises the tension between how practices and materiality contribute to prolonging or hindering the lively relations people establish between who they are and the possibilities of the world.