Places, Affordances, Atmospheres

A Pathic Aesthetics

Tonino Griffero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429753510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This book offers a diverse understanding and practical approach towards the growing area of atmosphere research, in the context of philosophy, geography and architecture.

It begins by tracing back to the model of experience called the "pathic". Drawing on the phenomenology of theorists Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Böhme, introductory chapters offer a grounding for the beginnings of pathic research. The chapters go on to apply pathic framework to a range of practical cases from theatre studies to education. Atmospheres are often defined as affects one feels in a "lived space" and researchers are becoming more interested in the emotions we feel in natural and artificial environments across day to day life. By providing a critical re-evaluation of phenomenology and aesthetics, the book brings a series of unexplored and controversial subjects to light, opening up a new context for thinking about our everyday life and experiences inscribed within aesthetics, politics, literature, spatial practices and pedagogy and effectively merging abstract philosophy and concrete practice.

This book is particularly poignant in the emerging field of Atmosphere and New Aesthetics research. Practitioners, academics and researchers working within Cultural Geography, Aesthetics, Art and Philosophy will find this book extremely valuable.

Part One

Pathic aesthetics and New Phenomenology

1 Art and atmospheres

The approach of a pathic aesthetics

If aesthetics were really “only” a philosophy of art, it would not be far-fetched to consider it no longer necessary today.¹ Indeed, it would be a form of reflection that – after reaching its apogee in the 19th century on the background of an upper-bourgeois culture inclined to see the art world, considered autonomous by definition, as an authentic surrogate of faith – may have largely lost its raison d’être. Not so much because, as posited (if taken literally) by the famous Hegelian “obituary”, the Christian unrepresentability of the purely spiritual makes art something irreversibly past within the absolute spirit. Rather, because from the standpoint of an interpretation of the felt-bodily presuppositions of the whole historical-cultural evolution, the stylizing creative force might turn out to be weak in the aftermath of the Romantic age, due precisely to a collective disposition of the bodily experience that has become more and more superficial.

But this diagnosis could perhaps apply – it is mandatory to use the conditional – to an aesthetics whose only theme was art, while it certainly does not seem to affect aesthetics in a wider sense. In fact, it does not prejudice at all an aesthetics that re-evaluates its 18th-century genesis (Baumgarten) and is conceived rather as a philosophy of sensible knowledge (or sensibility tout court), or as a thought of the senses (in both the subjective and the objective sense of the genitive). Thus conceived, in fact, aesthetics survives without particular anguish its somewhat megalomaniac phase where it claimed to see art and its unspecified masterpieces as many different things: the revelation of an absolute and an identity that are otherwise only conjectural and interior (Schelling); the sensible manifestation of the Idea (Hegel); the place where the truth of a Being strategically concealed in favor of simple presences that are widely available and thus ontologically disqualified “sets itself to work” (Heidegger); and perhaps the anticipation of utopian social conditions aimed at compensating humans for the wrongs inflicted on them by history (Adorno, Bloch).

Thus released from this view of art as a continuation “with other means” of religion and/or politics, aesthetics seems finally able to (once again) strongly claim its role as the – not gnostic but pathic (see the Preface) – philosophy of felt-bodily feeling,² rehabilitating typical suggestions of 18th-century “effect”-based aesthetics which lost momentum in the 19th century due to idealist top-down aesthetics (cf. Fischer-Lichte, 2005, p. 41). As the pathic philosophy of felt-bodily feeling, aesthetics can even aspire to the role of “first philosophy”, using art – at most – as an emblematic example. On the one hand, this discipline rejects the otherwise irreversible process of “cerebration” (Gottfried Benn) characteristic of Western rationalism, being concretely committed to rebalancing its one-sidedness; on the other hand, it aims to combat the immunization from the problems of the present that was (more or less voluntarily) enacted by the standard aesthetic theory (cf. Böhme, 1995, p. 11). Therefore, the point is to shape the aesthetic reflection no longer on social and communicative models, largely indebted to the implicit Kantian bias of a disinterested distality, but on the pathic – therefore sensible and felt-bodily – dimension which innervates life as a whole, including the most futuristic technoscientific opportunities.

But this contagious and destabilizing involvement, perhaps widely favoured by communicative globalization and basically only emphasized by contemporary “immersive” art,³ must now be framed within the wider paradigm of so-called New Phenomenology.⁴ In full harmony with (if not anticipating) the current rebirth of the multidisciplinary interest in emotions – but without being subject to neuroscientific hypotheses, the superficial mimetic forms of an extrinsic pathos or the “immersive” exaggerations of contemporary media studies – this heterodox phenomenological current sees philosophy as a reflection on how “one feels” or “one finds oneself” in a certain space (obviously not geometric but lived and pre-dimensional) and in the presence of involuntary vital experiences. But above all, it rejects the total psychic introjection of affective states, considering them, qua atmospheres (as we will see), external to the subject and often for this reason refractory to any subjective projection. The relatively predictable aesthetic consequence of this premise will then be first of all to investigate not so much art and the traditional categories of aesthetics (beautiful, sublime, artwork, grace, genius, originality, mimesis, etc.), but rather the implicit pathic structure in any regional ontology (including art, of course). The second goal will be to limit as much as possible the intellectualistic level of critical judgment (especially the one focused, as usual, on art), so as to start reflecting on the general aesthesiologic potentialities of (especially “naive”) perception.

If it really wanted to focus on art, a pathic aesthetics could simply recognize it as one of the most significant ways in which the human being, making the affective more actively real, is invaded by it “without the risk of concrete reality” (Haensel, 1946, pp. 365, 354); art would be the place where we make our emotional turmoil acceptable and therefore manageable. At most, art is therefore the historically specific modality with which the European intellectual, in an era interested in the production of instrumental objects – but also of experiences exempt from pragmatic urgencies, and therefore automatically considered symbols of freedom and even of sacredness – enjoyed a sort of “trial feeling” (Böhme, 1989, p. 153). Art can thus be considered a form of domestication and “cultivation”, within a controlled space, of atmospheres diffused in our “surroundings”, of “daemonic” unmanageable feelings to which the percipient can react, according to their own felt-bodily disposition, either by giving themselves fully to them or by escaping them (even physically).⁵ Such spatialized feelings are situations whose internally diffuse meaningfulness is formed by a chaotic – and therefore atmospheric⁶ – manifoldness that cannot be reduced to discrete (let alone linguistic) elements. These situations grasp us from the outside; therefore, in the experience of art we are able to keep our composure, re-elaborating and objectivating in a relatively stable form the felt-bodily and centripetal aggressions of atmospheric sentiments.

Be they linguistic or not,⁷ works of art only bring to light atmospherically intrusive situations through veritable Pathosformeln (to borrow Warburg’s term). The interior of a church imposes on those who enter it – whether or not they know its meaning – a certain emotional tone and a consequent behavior (of devotion or at least reverence); in the same way, a fugue by Bach, through motor suggestions and synaesthetic characters, radiates penetrating albeit indeterminate and almost numinous atmospheres (in Rudolf Otto’s sense). In both cases, in fact, atmospheric feelings hovering in sufficiently circumscribed spaces grasp the felt body of the percipient, whose feeling, by virtue of a permanent and often infallible felt-bodily communication with the surrounding forms, is thus perfectly matched (attuned) to those feelings. In other words, the sets of expressive – physiologically tertiary but phenomenologically primary – qualities (see Chapter 7) which we legitimately call atmospheres find perfect resonance ⁸ in the perceiver. Indeed, atmospheres are anything but the outcome of associationist processes or subjective projections on the external world, which only appears to be a-qualitative, in reality, because it has been previously reductively emptied of its own immanent qualities.

To oversimplify, artistic forms are here a “bait” through which to capture atmospheres that are otherwise refractory if not openly destructive, and in any case endowed with authority even in this “tame” version. The experience we make of art, therefore, is frankly irreducible to the over-intellectualistic and disciplined psycho-gymnastics of the Kantian free play of the faculties. Let’s take a few examples. In everyday life, the atmosphere of someone’s severe sadness normally arouses respect; a euphoric atmosphere infects and carries away even the most reserved people; the centripetal atmosphere of shame imposes tightness, making the person responsible for it, or even an innocent spectator, occupy, so to speak, less space than what rightfully belongs to their body;⁹ the atmosphere of injustice demands direct (or legal) retaliation from its victims. Well, in the case of the work of art, this authority or authoritativeness instead assumes obviously mitigated and contemplative forms. Perhaps this is the correct interpretation of the all-too-quoted “you must change your life” expressed, according to Rilke, by the archaic Torso of Apollo: perhaps it is indeed an affective and felt-bodily injunction addressed to the observer by a successful (albeit mutilated) art form.

The affordance suggested by a work of art therefore never consists in an entirely irrational turmoil. The rapture that it arouses suggests the regression to primitive presence – to which, according to Schmitz, it is absolutely healthy to regress from time to time, to ensure that one’s identity is not purely formal and self-attributed but on the contrary absolutely subjective (qua affective and felt-bodily). However, the rapture is also an important phase of personal emancipation,¹⁰ realized both by singularizing the initially undetermined situational semantic halo into a “this” (subsumption under the genus and species of art), and through the somewhat devotional “distance” emanating from the aesthetic orientation. Exactly like other privileged affective experiences (above all dwelling: see Chapter 10), art makes the observer be carried away by the influence of atmospheric impressions hovering in the environment but condensed in some pregnant objects, and yet it also makes sure that the observer does not sink into the artwork’s atmosphere until they are completely subjugated by it. The balance thus achieved, resulting from a fortunate felt-bodily alternation between contraction and expansion, immersion and emersion, is nothing but the well-known state of quiet and recollection that characterizes every final cathartic condition: it is the condition of distanced reverence that circumscribes and, in a certain sense, crystallizes in the specific configuration – be it the work or the single aesthetic experience – the daemonic powers that follow each other in the lived space and in which, whether we like it or not, we are called to participate.

At this point, one can find numerous unexpected analogies between the pathic structure of aesthetics and that of law. Let’s leave aside the most obvious analogies, such as the coherence, order and symmetry (“style”) indispensable both in the work of art and in the legal system. Another unquestionable point of contact lies in the idiographic anti-deductivism inherent in the aesthetic judgment as well as in juridical assessments: while demanding an always creative hermeneutical application of the general to the particular, both law and art take the particular case (the crime and the beautiful) as the starting point of a fruitful reconsideration of the “prejudices” (in Gadamer’s sense) that act as their initial parameters. Rather, what interests us here is the analogy between aesthetics and law (suggested by Hermann Schmitz) in terms of domestication of the pathic-daemonic, that is to say of those feelings that, while being unquestionably “the most important things in life, since only they bring force and delicacy, splendour and opacity in the world, and all that in general has true importance for man” (Schmitz, 1969, p. xiii), are often also destructive.

Like art and aesthetics, the law – obviously analyzed here regardless of any disciplinary technicality or any dubious imposition to reject the affective in favour of (anaffective) “facts” – is presented in this perspective as a distanced form of rapture and cultivation of external and aggressive atmospheric feelings. Now, there are of course some prejudices at play here. On the one hand, there is juridical positivism, which, being deprived in its formalism of the “pathos conferred to it [to the law] by the nimbus of legitimacy” ( Schmitz, 2012, p. 42),¹¹ only justifies punishment with formal conscientiousness. On the other hand, there are the theories of eternal values (it makes no difference here whether they refer to God or to nature), whose binding validity remains fatally ideal and in any case always subject to doubt. However, if one looks beyond such prejudices it becomes finally possible to rediscover the affective roots of the very idea of justice, that is, of its indispensable and relatively autonomous nucleus with respect to the accessory and merely organizational components of social life.

In this way, one can acknowledge the powerful way in which the law involuntarily grasps those who are affectively touched by it, persuading them of being in the right not only in a conventional sense, but also because of a feeling of evidence. The validity of this feeling (which is anything but merely contemplative, cf. Schmitz, 2012, p. 28 ff.) is proven by the fact that they cannot avoid it at will and without guilt, or at least, they can hardly put forward arguments against it based on further critical reservations. What enjoys this feeling of evidence, thanks to the felt-bodily resonance it involves – which is far more intense than the ontological evidence leading to define a state of affairs as a “fact”¹² – is mainly the sense of injustice. The latter is indeed an irreducibly subjective “fact”, without which everything would end up appearing indifferent, any arbitrariness would be passed off as legal and, at best, norms would remain ineffective.¹³ So evident and therefore authoritative as to limit the critical freedom that otherwise would exempt one from obedience,¹⁴ the feeling of injustice is present wherever something “feels” like it cannot ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Author’s note
• PART ONE: Pathic aesthetics and New Phenomenology
• PART TWO: Atmospheres, presences, expressive qualities
• PART THREE: Atmospherological exercises
• Bibliography
• Index