Dario Cecchi

John Dewey puts aesthetic experience at the center of his reflection on art and beauty, reconsidering it dynamically. Nowadays, this view opened the path to somaesthetics, a term coined by Richard Shusterman, and aesthetic anthropology. Here, it is argued that the contribution of pragmatist aesthetics could be further developed by exploring its analogies with techno-aesthetics, a paradigm proposed by French philosopher Gilbert Simondon in the early 1980s. Art occupies accordingly a special place within the different forms of aesthetic experience, being considered as a way of experimenting the impact of new technologies in the human experience. It is a process by which technologies create ‘devices’ for experimenting perception and reflection: namely, ways of reconstructing the nature of the human mind in-between body and technology, and by means of their interaction. Cinema reconsidered after Dewey’s fellow George H. Mead, offers an exemplary case as both artistic and technological devices.

Catharsis is considered according to the interpretations of two contemporary thinkers: H.G. Gadamer and H.R. Jauss. According to Aristotle, it is the “purification” (katharsis) of “pity” (eleos) and “fear” (phobos). Gadamer is unsatisfied with the translations of the words eleos and phobos: for they describe the real involvement to the tragical representation. The spectator discovers the fragility of the human existential condition through the tragical fate of the hero. Jauss emphasizes how the audience find a standpoint from which events can be judged. Catharsis is a sort of reflective detachment. The interpretation of the story foreshadows the reconfiguration of our ethical values. Recognizing oneself through the identification with the other or exploring the distance between the other and oneself: they are different ways of understanding catharsis, integrable with each other as far as they are elements of an identification concerning all forms of storytelling.

The article considers the nature of series as a narrative, focusing especially on its chronotope, i.e. its spatiotemporal coordinates. The concept of chronotope can be applied at at least two different levels of the interpretation of a narrative: the real world of reception and the expressive form of narration. The impact of series entails both aspects. It is for this reason that series, once on television then on the internet, represented a revolutionary turn in the modern experience of storytelling. Series are therefore bound to the progressive spread of a new form of sociality known as a digital “total mobilisation”. Since the era of TV series up to the emergence of web series, seriality has been able to regulate the increase of interaction in the use of visual devices. Series play the role of a dietetical regulator, which designs the spectators’ attention. An artistic, i.e. experimental, exploitation of this new form of storytelling is possible when one considers the emergence of a new narrative genre, which we propose to call the “short form”.

This article compares two philosophers who have a different theoretical origin: respectively, Arthur C. Danto and Jean-François Lyotard. Both of them are interested in the revolutionary character of Andy Warhol’s art. Danto as well as Lyotard argues that Warhol conceives the work of art as a machine: according to the former, it is a philosophical machine; according to the latter, it is a consumerist machine. Nonetheless, the two hypotheses converge on judging Warhol’s art as a turn in the history of art and its relationship to the world. According to Danto, who follows Hegel here, Warhol at the same time interprets and transcends the 1960s and their Zeitgeist. But paradoxically, Warhol’s historical gesture, epitomized by his work Brillo Box, initiates the age of the “end of art”. According to Lyotard, on the contrary, Warhol represents the end of the critical power of modern art, to which the sublime alone can remediate. The two perspectives converge in the idea that the investigation of repetition is the very center of Warhol’s art. Art has now become the pivot of the Western capitalism and consumerist society. Warhol actually explores the different forms and modes of repetition (commodities, icons, symbols) and, in this way, anticipates the confrontation of contemporary art with the “finite infinite” represented by the media world.

La Critique de la faculté de juger ne relève pas seulement d’une théorie esthétique, pour originelle qu’elle puisse être. Elle met surtout en œuvre un nouveau discours philosophique. La critique de la métaphysique y est reconsidérée d’une manière positive, comme une réflexion sur la donation de sens à la croisée entre principes généraux et expériences contingentes. Le philosophe italien Emilio Garroni a développé ce nouveau point de vue sur le troisième Critique, en soutenant que, dans cette Critique, Kant a formulé une nouvelle forme de « libre schématisme », et en même temps la primauté de ce schématisme par rapport au « schématisme objectif » de la Critique de la raison pure. De manière générale, il partage l’idée que le schématisme représente le lieu théorique où Kant développe implicitement sa théorie sémantique. Lisant, comme Garroni, Kant après Wittgenstein, nous posons alors la question : qu’est-ce qu’une forme de vie après le langage?

The article considers how the narrative of the pandemic has been developed, especially with regard to literature. The case study analyzed is the Italian novel L’assemblea degli animali, written by an anonymous author, whose penname is Filelfo. The article shows that the wide range of classical, literary and artistic references recognizable inside the text corresponds to a precise attitude of the ecologist culture, which is in search for traditional and elevated models to assert their ethical and political objective. The novel brings this directory to the point that it evokes an esoteric dimension of ecology. The article states that this stance is not serious, but ends into a literary game and feeds the needs for entertainment by the cultural industry, rather than giving any real contribution to the ecological question.

The article focuses on the possibility of reconsidering the relationship existing between monstrosity and sublime in the light of Jean-François Lyotard’s interpretation of the Kantian sublime. Sublime and monstrosity unveil a system of analogies and differences, which can depict the aesthetic experience mediated by mass media, rather than by art. The lack of form and the sometimes obscene drift, which are typical of media experience, configure indeed a sensibility that oscillates between the ascension to sublime heights and the emergence of monsters.

The paper reconsiders the possibility of understanding the art of avant-garde in the light of the sublime, as argued by Jean-François Lyotard in his famous critical essay on Barnett Newman’s artwork Vir Heroicus Sublimis. According to the paper, the scope of a ‘sublime art’ of the avant-garde is larger than the reference to a single artist or movement, and entails the possibility of comprehending the reflective stance of modernism as a critique, performed by art, of the conditions of possibility of exposition as a gesture that is relevant not only to the art world but to experience at large. The sublime art brings this critique to its extreme consequences as far as it explores the boundaries of exposition with regard to the world image supplied by the media system. This sublime directory of the avant-garde was inaugurated by Marcel Duchamp as he introduced the practice of the ready-media in the art system. However, it enjoyed a long-lasting success thereafter.

The article aims at showing how far the technologies of audiovisual registration affect not only the ontology of images but also our sense of realism in politics and history. As argue Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, historical events have become “tele-events” after the birth of these technologies. Our handling with images has changed accordingly. As argues Pietro Montani, we no longer consider them as “copies” of real objects but rather as “occasions” for initiating processes of “validation” of history. Hannah Arendt’s opposition between the ancient concept of history being based on praxis and the modern concept of history as “fabrication” (poiesis) of the humankind must be therefore reconsidered. History is rather the negotiation between these two attitudes (praxis and poiesis): cinema might be one of the exemplary sources of this negotiation, as epitomized by the documentary work in the audiovisual archives conducted by Esfir Shub (1927) and Harun Farocki (1992). Representation (Louis Martin) becomes thus a dynamical power of imagination dealing with historical and political reality; consequently, the “ideal spectator”, just as the “ideal reader” for novels (Umberto Eco), is charged with a new task of actualizing the sense of images with regard to their historical and political references.

L’articolo propone un ripensamento della fenomenologia della lettura di Wolfgang Iser, presa qui come risposta non riduzionista alle teorie neuroscientifiche sulla letteratura. Valorizzando il carattere estetico della lettura, grazie anche al contributo di Hans Robert Jauss, emerge l’idea di una ‘immaginazione del lettore’ specifica e irriducibile, che non solo permette l’accesso al mondo narrativo del testo letterario, ma apre anche nuovi spazi alla comprensione e all’esplorazione del mondo reale. Si tratta, in breve, del costituirsi di uno specifico pattern cognitivo-emozionale, che dipende dalla costruzione, nell’interazione con il testo, di quelli che Iser chiama «habitat artificiali» del lettore.

John Dewey puts aesthetic experience at the center of his reflection on art and beauty, reconsidering it dynamically. Nowadays, this view opened the path to somaesthetics, a term coined by Richard Shusterman, and aesthetic anthropology. Here, it is argued that the contribution of pragmatist aesthetics could be further developed by exploring its analogies with techno-aesthetics, a paradigm proposed by French philosopher Gilbert Simondon in the early 1980s. Art occupies accordingly a special place within the different forms of aesthetic experience, being considered as a way of experimenting the impact of new technologies in the human experience. It is a process by which technologies create ‘devices’ for experimenting perception and reflection: namely, ways of reconstructing the nature of the human mind in-between body and technology, and by means of their interaction. Cinema reconsidered after Dewey’s fellow George H. Mead, offers an exemplary case as both artistic and technological devices.

The paper is concerned with arguing the existence of a relationship between the enactive theory of perception and aesthetics. One of the leading figures in the theory of enactment, Alva Noe, pointed out that the works of art constitute one of the keys to understand how perception and cognition realize their enactment onto reality. Art objects are, in fact, a very peculiar case of artefacts since they are considered as being able to quicken the living beings’ organization in their interaction to the world. Do they create a different atmosphere? Do they “furnish” the surrounding habitat with new meanings? The paper argues that these are, of course, fundamental elements in the art’s action onto reality. As far as the subjective enactment of perception is concerned, together with power in designing life organization, art has arguably another original functions, that of building new “environs” where experience can meet reality under a different light and thus prepare the field for other creative contributions, both cultural and technological.

In riferimento alla teoria della rappresentazione visiva di Louis Marin, mi propongo di analizzare alcune immagini filmiche e non filmiche (episodi biblici, quadri, arazzi, film e immagini digitali) in quanto esse mostrano i caratteri di uno schermo. Cercherò quindi di generalizzare tale convergenza tra schermi e rappresentazioni visive, per mostrare che, almeno durante l’epoca moderna, la visione dell’immagine ha spesso funzionato come un’immersione nello spazio di uno schermo in cui lo spettatore era non solamente in grado di riorganizzare la propria esperienza scopica, ma anche, grazie alla relazione che stabiliva con le figure all’interno della rappresentazione, messo nelle condizioni di agire e mostrare la propria capacità d’azione, i propri desideri e diritti. Considerate come schermi, le immagini mostrano così una coincidenza tra esperienza estetica e politica, in cui lo spettatore non è consumatore passivo, bensì attore sulla scena.