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Relational Perception, Ecological Transition, and Artisanal Intelligence: Towards an Aesthetics for the Future
Nicola Perullo
Abstract
In this essay, I address the issue of future generations according to relational aesthetics. Specifically, I propose a way of feeling and thinking about the future based on a particular mode of perception that stems from relational aesthetics: relational perception. Within this broad context, I propose a perspective that challenges assumptions in expressions such as ‘digital innovation’ and ‘ecological transition.’ Since I believe that relational perception needs to focus on the continuity of becoming, I emphasize the importance of the analogical dimension of thinking, which is currently overshadowed by the digital mindset. Finally, I suggest qualifying the potential of such a relational approach in terms of artisanal intelligence, by which I mean a way of feeling and thinking characterized by attention, care, and skillful improvisation. Relational perception and artisanal intelligence offer an opportunity to think about the future differently, not as a goal to be reached but as a path to be retraced each time, creating new possibilities to cultivate the sustainability of life.
Key Words
aesthetics for the future; artisanal intelligence; ecological transition; relational perception
“Let me give one example of the many from which I could choose. Suppose that I am watching the break of the day. I predict that the sun is about to rise. What I see is present, but what I foretell is future. I do not mean that the sun is future, for it already exists, but that its rise is future, because it has not yet happened. But I could not foretell the sunrise unless I had a picture of it in my mind, just as I have at this moment while I am speaking of it. Yet the dawn, which I see in the sky, is not the sunrise, although it precedes it; nor is the picture which I have in my mind the sunrise. But both the dawn and my mental picture are seen in the present, and it is from them that I am able to predict the sunrise, which is future. The future, then, is not yet; it is not at all; and if it is not at all, it cannot possibly be seen. But it can be foretold from things which are present, because they exist now and can therefore be seen. In what way, then, do you, Ruler of all that you have created, reveal the future to the souls of men?”
Saint Augustine, Confessions XI, 18-19
1. Introduction: against the emergentist perception of the future
Despite Augustine’s unparalleled reflections on the unpredictable yet real nature of the elusive future, most reflections on the future adopt an emergency stance stemming from present-day problems. Even worse, these reflections often turn into futurology. Everything appears to be a matter of urgency that requires immediate, quick, and ultimate solutions. In this context, phrases and terms like ‘ecological transition,’ ‘sustainability,’ ‘digital innovation,’ and ‘activism’ are commonly used, and often sequentially as if they were interrelated. The emphasis is on the urgency claimed by a present that seems to perceive the future as a threat and a closure rather than a potential. Moreover, it is usually assumed by the media that the future is “determined” by what has happened and what we have “lived” in the last twenty years. But this is obviously not the case; otherwise we would be able to predict what is to come with ease. On the contrary, the future derives from much further back than a few decades, because the river of life is very long and uninterrupted. While this makes everything less determinable, it concurrently opens up many more possibilities.
Recently, a field in philosophy has emerged focusing on inter- or transgenerationality, aiming at a critical and in-depth discussion of these concepts.[1] In this text, I would like to propose a contribution to such a problematic area by adopting a peculiar perspective on aesthetics. Here, aesthetics is understood neither as a philosophy of art nor as a discipline that deals with specific contents of experience but rather as a general way of relating to the world, and thus as a general way of philosophizing. More specifically, aesthetics is understood not only in its etymological sense—as everything that pertains to the sensible and thus to perception—but as a radically relational and processual philosophy.
My focus is on how relational aesthetics can deal with the future. Indeed, by its very definition a process-oriented aesthetics cannot avoid reflecting on the idea of passage, change, and transition, and this includes the notions of both generation and generations. Although the concepts of generating as begetting and of generations as ages of life are clearly related, they are often not thought of together. In particular, the clear dependence of generations on generation is sometimes overlooked. Inspired by the thesis proposed by the anthropologist Tim Ingold in The Rise and Fall of Generation Now,[2] my relational approach aims to situate the problem of future generations within the broader concept of generation for the purpose of showing that the future should be conceived not from the present but within a line of continuity and interweaving with the past. As will become clear throughout these pages, the link between generation and perception of the future has much to do with the model of perceptual intelligence we will adopt. In this sense, I suggest that the ecological transition and a sustainable future cannot neglect the analogical and artisanal pole of human intelligence that will be considered later. Recovering an analogical way of thinking that today seems to be outclassed and surpassed by the digital one means reconsidering the artisanal value of producing not only artifacts but also ideas, as a response to the computational and industrial models of production that dominate contemporary culture and society.
Artisanal intelligence sounds like a provocation, but I believe it is a useful way not only to rethink some assumptions but also to overcome the current usual distinction between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence and to acknowledge the divergence between two kinds of artificiality, two types of technique (techne) concerning the production of artifacts and concepts/ideas: the artisanal and the industrial. Contrary to what one might assume, my position is far from being against the digital per se, let alone nostalgic. The issue is not the digital, which is coessential to the mind as well as the analogical, but rather the digital-ism, that is the absolute domain of the digital. We need to question whether digitalism is really the only possible solution for a “sustainable” future, as the alleged implication between “digital innovation” and “ecological transition” very often seems to assume.
The paper is structured as follows. After unraveling the idea of relational aesthetics, I will introduce the concept of relational perception as a peculiar way of feeling/thinking. This will lead us to the issue of time and to the notions of continuity and discontinuity, which I will examine by drawing a parallel between them and two different ways of feeling/thinking: the digital pole and the analogical one. Through a series of examples and drawing on diverse argumentations, I connect the idea of sustainability as the carrying on of life with a different understanding of generation(s) and time in order to bridge the gap between “past” and “future.” Lastly, artisanal intelligence is put forth as an alternative aesthetic strategy that allows us to face the challenges of our age with renewed awareness and hope.
2. Relational aesthetics and relational perception
The starting point of relational aesthetics is the overcoming of the dualism between subject and object that determined its eighteenth-century origins as a discipline born within the Newtonian-Galilean science, as is evident in the Kantian philosophical system. Modern aesthetics, being rooted in the subject-object divide, has been codified as a theory of judgment that presupposes the dualism of observer and observed. Following Arnold Berleant’s program,[3] we should rethink aesthetics by starting from a new onto-epistemological framework of a generative, processual genre.
On the one side, there exist evidences and good reasons, in evolutionary biology and quantum physics, in particular, for this paradigm shift. A number of scientists have suggested to move away from the notion of individual: “We have never been individuals,” biologists tell us.[4] After all, not just competition but also cooperation and symbiosis have been key to survival and evolution for living organisms, as described by Lynn Margulis.[5] Indeed, individuality is an ongoing process of individualization, never predetermined in advance but always realized again and again on the basis of motives belonging to different orders. On the other side, there have been many philosophical attempts to move away from individuality as the ontologically original element of humanity: the idea of an original con-, with, from which individualities grow was particularly developed from a social perspective in the twentieth century. Whether concerning mind, unconsciousness or intentionality,[6] the notion of collectivity gained considerable success and is now embraced by many authors.
Now, my perspective focuses mainly on the connection between the con- and the process philosophy, that is, the relational dimension of life and thus of perception, in order to offer a relational aesthetics that proves to be an appropriate key to respond to the global challenges we face.[7] However, in which sense should aesthetics be understood as relational? Many scholars have proposed a relational aesthetics.[8] And from these accounts and many others, a question arises that must be faced directly: are we emphasizing the relational and cooperative nature of aesthetics or instead are we stressing the opportunity for aesthetics to become relational and cooperative? I am inclined to answer both questions in the affirmative. To answer the former, we should describe why the aesthetic is essentially relational and cooperative; to answer the latter, we would have to explain why and with whom/what it should relate and cooperate. A number of evidences that underscores the relational, or cooperative, essence of aesthetics can be inferred; at the same time, there are good rationales to suggest transforming aesthetics according to this cooperative character. In short: while relationality describes the nature of the aesthetic perception, at the same it supports a particular modality of perceiving that calls for a certain disposition.
Relational aesthetics is a peculiar characterization of relational philosophy. Famous process philosophers such as Henri Bergson, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead have all in their own way demonstrated that relations occur as processes and processes manifest as relations. More recently, various examples from a plethora of different perspectives can be found. Through the traditional Chinese idiom of “nourishing life,” François Jullien proposes a shift from the concept of life, typically rooted in individual existence, to the concept of living, in order to stress its collective and holistic potential including its ecological and more-than-human dimension of “with.”[9] Ingold, in his turn, suggests the expression ‘being alive, to convey the same idea.[10] Hence, we can think of relational perception as a kind of collusive[11]—from the Latin cum ludere, “to play together” with the environment—rather than cognitive perception based on the assumption that the real is relational and processual. However, it is not a matter of placing relation in the place of substance but rather to think of relational process as an event.[12]
A key aspect of such a relational interpretation of aesthetics concerns the difference between this relational idea and the notion of interaction. Interaction presupposes individualities that must be related afterward. Interactive operations are dualistic ones: individuals, whether subjects or objects, can meet and interact dynamically through forces, capacities, or affections under certain conditions: the empty space of a galaxy, a demonstration, a parliamentary assembly, or an encounter with a painting in a museum or a symphony in a concert hall. Instead, if we are to think of an original community, an original relation on which individuals depend and descend, we need a different concept. Karen Barad puts forth the term ‘intra-action,’[13] Brian Massumi simply states the difference between the interactionist view and the relational one,[14] and Ingold adopts the term ‘correspondence.’[15] However, whatever the terminology, it is important to understand the conceptual divergence characterizing these two models of cooperation and relationship.
Relational perception stems from the awareness that to live is to live together: the “condominium” essence of life.[16] Relational perception is the experience of a process (in terms of engagement and observation from within), whereas dualistic perception focuses on the experience of an object (in terms of distance and observation from without). Relational perception is engaged and participatory, not necessarily involving physical contact; it is a disposition of attention, a feeling/thinking in presence, a participation along the flow from within, supporting a transition from critical distance to critical intimacy.[17] Elsewhere, I have termed this mode of perceiving ‘haptic,’[18] understood as the intimacy of an entangled relationship with the ongoing processes of the world, which is opposed to the optical insofar as the metaphor of sight is overloaded with prejudices regarding distance, disinterest, and objective knowledge.
The importance of the notion of relation, both epistemologically and aesthetically, marks a profound shift away from the aesthetics of distance and contemplation and is now being addressed by various disciplines, not only in the humanities but also in the sciences.[19] However, the relational approach should not be confused with a praise of immediacy and instantaneous vitalism; rather, it is about immanence, engagement, coexistence, participation, and continuity. This brings us back to the question of time. Again, what science tells us today about time is useful to guide us in how we can rethink the perception of past and future from the perspective of a community and its generations. According to theoretical physics, the only case in which the past differs from the future can be traced to the second law of thermodynamics. In all other cases, past and future are indistinguishable.[20]
3. Continuity and discontinuity, analogical and digital poles
The subject/object model guides and defines an aesthetics of discontinuity. Instead, the relational model requires an aesthetics of continuity. This shift towards continuous perception, however, requires a break with the conventional way in which the modern mind is accustomed to feeling/thinking. We need to break with discontinuity in order to move closer to a different kind of feeling/thinking, one that is more processual, relational, and continuous. Relational aesthetics intends to reanimate a continuous perception that departs from the ordinary and distracted dualistic mindset. Therefore, one must continually create discontinuity in order to enter continuity. This apparent paradox also relates to the contemporary problem of sustainability: in order to sustain—that is, to continue and carry on life—an ecological transition is needed. The transition requires a clear paradigm shift: breaking with the continuity of the productive-economic-social model that has dominated the West (and then most of the world), particularly in the last century. In short, to be sustainable we should not continue, but rather interrupt a certain model in order to recover and resume something that comes from a past less recent than the one just passed. This is the paradox of calls for sustainability!
My hypothesis is that many of our current global challenges ask for a change in the perceptual approach. The modern mindset based on the dualistic paradigm (subjects on one side, objects on the other) has led to a fragmented and compartmentalized conception of existence that has also fostered the dominance of individualism, not only in economic models but also in everyday life. Hence, we can understand why a relational aesthetics, conceived as a recovery of the collusive and communal dimension of perception, is appropriate. And yet, the relational approach is not a passéist appeal, for it aims to contribute to the challenges of rethinking the future—a future in which the humanity’s evolution does not coincide with the mere acquisition of more comfortable interactions but rather with a more radical relational attitude, according to which we resonate and correspond with the world considered as a condominium.
This does not at all deny the importance of technology as the fundamental expression of human intelligence but quite the opposite: intelligence is never natural, as it is always technologically cultivated. The point I stress and to which I will return later concerns rather the quality of technology. Moreover, relational aesthetics does not neglect humanity’s responsibilities in the cohabitation on earth. For the issues of our interest, emphasizing the perception of becoming as a continuous process implies that the future is not an emergency arising out of a presentist urgency. Consequently, one has to shake off the belief that the new is simply better and more suitable than the old. As we know, the future can never be a goal to be achieved, since it always lies ahead of where we are. The future is its continuous realization in the process: ideals of realization are useful indicators, precisely because they cannot meet preformatted criteria and ideas. How can we align the knowledge of such unescapable dimension of unpredictability with everyday perception? I guess we need to sharpen our improvisational ability. Indeed, this capacity is typical of the human mind and is what I label as artisanal intelligence, which draws its resources from the ability to make connections and analogies. Digital technology and artificial intelligence were born from insights and ideas that are not, as such, reproducible; they were born from the artisanal and improvisational intelligence of their inventors. The human mind also has another capacity that responds to a further need: that of cataloguing and distinguishing, moving between separation and objectification.
Following Roberto Calasso, we can describe the human mind as constantly oscillating between two poles: the digital pole and the analogical one. He suggests that the discrete is the substitutive pole, the continuous is the connective pole. The discrete, which he designates as the “digital pole,” is the one in which “a stands for b,” meaning that a can be replaced by b,[21] and that “a annuls b, kills it, sometimes to discover how it works.”[22] The digital pole “takes command, revealing its ability to envelop the other pole, to absorb it—and, naturally, to exploit it.”[23] The discrete manifests itself as scientific reasoning based on classification and taxonomy, rooted in the division between mind and the world. Of course, the pole of substitution and replacement has played a significant emancipatory role in modern history as it relates to rights and freedom, self-determination, and experimentation. However, today this model is struggling and looks weary. This crisis, I believe, is both scientific-ontological and perceptual. In fact, the absolute dominance of this pole is proving to be not only inadequate to respond to the global challenges facing the planet but also dangerous, because it is complicit in many of the problems it claims to solve. Among them, digitalization is the most glaring example, as it is the essence of fragmentation and punctuation and has been globally passed off as a kind of magic wand that will open all doors to a sustainable future.
But the human mind is also characterized by the analogical pole, that of the continuous. Analogical thinking works through connections and relationships, yet without one element crushing and dominating the other. In Calasso’s words, “a stands for b, but in the way that a chip of granite stands for the mountain from which it has been detached.”[24] The part and the whole are entangled, inextricably related. Indeed, it is precisely this analogical thinking that underlies continuity and caring. This is the thinking that promotes not so much innovation for the sake of innovation as the logic of re-pairing. Re-pairing literally means “disposing again, re-arranging,” and also “guarding against, protecting against.” Think, for example, of the issue of waste in this light: wastefulness occurs because we delude ourselves that what has already been produced can be surpassed and forgotten by what we have yet to produce. We forget continuity. To re-pair and maintain, to re-use is a true practice of creative regeneration. To re-pair also means to return to the place from where one started and to begin again. This is the creativity of variation; it is the true re-search, which actually means “to search again”—to retrace a path in order to better see what may have been missed. Re-pairing and re-searching have to do with durability, with a time that is not made up of short, separate segments of replacement but rather is a sturdy and very long rope. In reality, even technology was originally a tool of re-pair. This is why one can also use technology in an artisanal and creative way, because it depends on the kind of relationship one has with it.[25]
Now, the analogical pole is considered a relic of the past, something to be overcome and erased. Here we find a misunderstanding even among those who think of the so-called ecological transition exclusively in digital terms. Let us consider the continuity that some inventions have shown in human history, measuring them against their recent replacements promoted as progress. The wheel, invented in the 4th millennium BCE; the papyrus, in the 3rd millennium BCE, hence our books; the plow, which dates back to the 5th millennium BCE; and also, just to mention some of the countless cases that one might bring, the handwriting, the bicycle, and whole food constitute the longest-lived of the tools seemingly destined to disappear, entirely replaced by very recent devices such as the digital writing, the airplane, and processed food. Those who had the bitter experience of selling all their beloved vinyl records because of the certainty these would have been supplanted in toto by the compact discs will have no difficulty acknowledging the limitations underlying such a paradigm. So, beware of taking the future for granted, as something wholly predictable. That the digital revolution is the only possible future is all to be proven. One must not only ask whether and when it will end but also give serious thought to the problems associated with it, including the extractions of resources for digital devices, that of disposal and of energy, and the dynamics of social inequalities in other parts of the world.
4. Ecological transition and generation(s)
The term ‘transition’ comes from the Latin verb transeo, which means “I pass through.” A transition is a passage from state A to state B. Therefore, transition has to do with movement, that is, with the spatiotemporal issue. In the emergentist model that today looms large, ‘ecological transition’ is mainly understood as the passage from the present urgency to the future state. The past is often neglected, if not overlooked. Indeed, it is believed that the past is behind us and that we must look forward to the future. Now, this is a partial and limiting picture of time and life both on an ethical and a metaphysical level. The real is made by multiple plans and orders. Therefore, we can assume, also from a perceptual level, that the past is ahead and the future behind. As is well known, process philosophy (especially Bergson’s) has given much thought to time as continuity and duration, and more precisely as becoming. In the same way, a relational aesthetics can help to sensitize us to a perception other than the present/future-focused one. And this change has to do precisely with recovering the dimension of the continuous—that analogous property of the human mind that the perceptual supremacy of the discrete, exploded through the digitization of the world, has come to obscure. Let’s see how.
Consider a lifetime. If time runs like a conveyor belt, who is in front? The past or the future? One is inclined to think that the future is ahead and the past is behind. This is certainly true in terms of personal existence: the future is ahead because it is the road I have yet to travel. However, in collective life, in the supra-individual dimension, as Ingold aptly observes,[26] things are upside down: the ancestors have anticipated us and are ahead, not behind. The past is in front of us, it is what we can actually see, while the future is behind us. In other words, those who have to come, the posterity, are behind our shoulders, so we can’t see them.
I would like to illustrate this better with two examples. The first seems trivial. Let’s imagine we are standing in line to buy a ticket or a beer. Who is in front? Those who came before us in time are in front of (before!) us on the timeline. So, when we stand in line, those who came before us are in front of us. We see them and can learn from their movements and mistakes. They can also give us advice. When we turn our backs on them, we no longer see what is going on in front of us and we only look at those who are after us. This is exactly how we usually understand the processual flow by reversing it. Positioning the past behind us means neglecting the convivial perspective of life as a continuous and collective process and seeing only the individual perspective as a separate fragment. To put it differently, it means insisting on the discrete and the digital, forgetting the continuous and the analogical.
The second example concerns memory. As psychology has also demonstrated, our oldest memories are not the deepest, nor are the most recent the shallowest. As we experience, the older we get, the more distant memories surface: the past is not behind, at the bottom, far and deep, archaeological. The opposite is more the case: the present sinks deep down, while the past is here, on the surface. What is farther in the past is closer to the surface and more superficial; it is more fragile and, if care is not taken, can be erased and lost. On the contrary, what is more recent goes deeper. Hence, the more the time passes, the more the past resurfaces. However, we must be careful to catch its traces. On closer inspection, what applies to memory also applies to the land and soils. Imagine furrows in the ground: the most recent go deep, the oldest resurface. This is the logic of palimpsest, which means “scraped again”: the more you scrape, the more what is underneath emerges and comes up.[27] But also, the changing of the seasons, the rotation of the field to make the ground fertile and revitalize it.[28]
Willing to connect the future only to the present, we end up turning the generation of life around, blocking its natural transition. Hence, the sense of confusion, distrust, and hopelessness. Fear, lack of perspective, and mistrust are due specifically to the fact that we have turned our backs on the past in a violent and presumptuous way. In other words, “today” we no longer look to the future with confidence and hope because we have blocked it. Having detached ourselves from the past and turned our backs on it, the future is stuck because we are walled up in the prison of the present. Now, the present has always been perceived as uncertain: as a matter of fact, uncertainty is inherent in the very possibility of carrying on life and generating new life. The generation of life is uncertain because it is precisely the opening up of new possibilities and potentials, while certainty literally is a closure. Today, however, this condition of uncertainty is overdramatized, individually and collectively, creating anxiety and reducing any principle of hope. While there is an understandable tendency of the human mind to seek comfort in certainty and security, what we can change is the mistaken belief that such uncertainty necessarily generates fear and hopelessness. This is where the relational perspective comes in.
An aesthetics for future generations, then, must first and foremost raise awareness of the evolution of perceptual education toward generation, the generation of life as such, as a process of continuity within which generations grow and develop like branches and leaves of a whole tree, or like whirlpools of the river, to borrow an image from Bergson. Instead, we are accustomed to thinking of generations in a discontinuous and separate sense, as if they were overlapping layers rather than buds of a single plant. This fixes attention on the present, which turns toward the future, under the perceptual illusion that the problems to be addressed are exclusively one’s own rather than common and shared worries. However, if we think of historical generations according to the biological generative model of the interwoven rope, the future is not a problem to be solved from the present, but consists of lives to be carried forward, creatively retracing the paths already trodden by those who have gone before us.
These two models—the analogical continuity of the generation of life within which to think about different generations, on the one hand, and the digital discontinuity of autonomous layers that overlap and must then be related, on the other—profoundly mark how the relationships between old and new, tradition and innovation, are felt and thought. The perception of discontinuity makes it easier to be competitive than collaborative, to believe that what we propose today is better than what was proposed yesterday. This is exactly what happens with the ideology of digital innovation: the urgencies of the present demand that everything be replaced and substituted in the name of a future that comes to us. Quite the opposite, by perceiving continuity and relationality one can develop a collaborative sensibility that is not simply the result of a social contract and ethical principles such as solidarity but a more effective and profound attitude. It is not just a way of thinking about ecology, but a way of thinking that is itself ecological.[29]
According to this relational perception, transition is a collective movement that continuously retraces the past going toward the future, because the past is ahead and the future is behind. This way of perceiving will not necessarily see the new as better than the old and replacement as more appropriate than repair. On the contrary, in a world dominated by the separatist and individualist model, which we have called, borrowing Calasso’s terminology, the ‘digital pole,’ it is appropriate to restore a perceptual balance by returning to the “old” analogical model. To recover and retrace the paths and traces of the ancestors in order to show them to the descendants is what is needed today. Of course, this does not mean that all the steps taken by the ancestors should be followed. We must retrace the whole path, not the steps of each ancestor, for some steps were certainly not excellent. But if we have come this far and have been allowed to endure, it means that the path that has been taken and handed down to us cannot be thrown away in one fell swoop. Ecology is not only in the present tense. Transition happens along the same path that has been followed for millennia; it is not a separate path, even if the people who have walked it (the generations) are different. It follows that relational perception does not emphasize individual time, which separates and divides, but common becoming, which unites and connects. We need both, of course, but since we have largely forgotten the analogical model in favor of the digital one, a relational approach today demands to foster repair and remediation, and thus to facilitate the encounter between ancestors and posterity by making the present step backwards.
It is worth stressing again that there is no nostalgia or technophobia in relational aesthetics. Becoming is not a linear process but an intricate tangle of spirals. Consequently, the “past” will never be past; since it is ahead, it will always remain the “future.” And the “future” will never be future; since it is behind, it will never be realized. Seemingly contrary to what I have argued so far, it can be even claimed with good reasons that sometimes fragmentation lies at the analogical pole, while continuity at the digital one. I am thinking of when the great “dataism” of the global web was born at the beginning of the second millennium. Indeed, a great unifying and collective energy was felt because of the total interconnectedness that had become possible.[30] It seemed that the isolation of the individual had finally been overcome. However, it did not take long to realize that this was not quite the case, precisely because the dualistic ontology of individual subjects and objects lurks within interaction and interconnection. This energy, however ambiguous, also produced positive creative impulses, which brings us back to the problem of the future.
5. Sustainability and (dis)continuity
Sustainability—to continue life, to make it last as long as possible—is about the future, and it is obviously about a common life, not an individual one. However, ‘common’ does not refer solely to the human species, for the life of our Homo species largely depends on relationships with other species. As Margulis, Donna Haraway, and so many other scholars have taught us, ecological thinking must necessarily be multi- or trans-species. Therefore, in the sense of the relational perception that arises from awareness of the life generation processes described above, the perception of the future should itself be a composting, convivial, and condominium perception, an alliance between multispecies more-than-human generations. Ecological thinking is a thinking with, a conviviality. This cohabitation should be understood in both a spatial and a temporal sense. As emphasized by Bergson, in duration we see each generation bending over the one that will follow. For this very reason, in Creative Evolution he observes that individual existences are like sprouts born from whirlpools of dust raised by the wind of the great breath of life.[31]
I do believe that the biggest challenge today is to match the achievements of the most advanced theories in biology and physics with those accomplished in anthropology, psychology, and relational philosophy in order to open to the hope principle, as Ernst Bloch defines it. Hope is not combined with security and certainty, but precisely with taking conscious care that nothing is ever taken for granted. We—the generation of today, of the present, accustomed to submerging the past under the present and erecting the future above it—lack any idea of the future and therefore all confidence and hope because we are erasing all the paths trodden by the ancestors, believing that we must proceed without them, heedless of their directions that have brought us this far. To sustain life, that is, the future, relational perception must take a double step, simultaneously forward and backward, through the fissures that open individual feeling to its necessary collective and communal belonging.
Once again, the aporia of continuity in discontinuity, or discontinuity in continuity, should not frighten us. At first glance, sustainability seems to involve temporal continuity; and yet, in the same way we conceive of sustainability as a divergence from current perception. Sustainability requires discontinuity and consequently it literally requires change, that is, unsustainability. As a result, sustainability does not find its place between continuity and discontinuity but rather in-between. By ‘in-between,’ I mean a shift from the interactive view in which relations occur as a connection between two things, to the relational, intra-active, correspondent view, in which relations are orthogonal to the processes themselves. This means that reality is simultaneously continuous and discontinuous, analogous and digital, and that we should orient our perception accordingly. So: should we “change” or not? And how much should we change to be sustainable? Continuity is apparently harmonious; discontinuity is disharmonious—it is the established order of duality that disrupts perfect symmetry. Yet this phenomenon was already vividly portrayed by Empedocles through the contrasting principles of harmony and conflict, love and hate, an idea later revisited by Eugen Fink in his Play as Symbol of the World,[32] where he argues that conflict is an inherent aspect of cosmic play. Relational perception is neither unproblematic nor accommodating: it does not neglect intergenerational conflicts and frictions, but it aims to develop a different sensitivity for collaboration and conviviality. Above all, this sensitivity requires a kind of overall vision and a sort of synthetic intelligence that based on what I have developed so far I propose to call artisanal intelligence.
6. Artisanal intelligence
My overall thesis is that we need to develop the analogical/artisanal pole of intelligence in order to raise awareness of the relational perception of/with the world, of the original con-, which is also about generation and generations, that is, our relationship to the becoming we call time.
The adjective ‘artisanal’ usually refers to the field of making, that is, the creation or production of artifacts, and not to the field of thinking. Here I propose to understand artisanship as a peculiar mode of perception, that is, a modality of feeling/thinking that is the operational and organizational expression of the analogical pole of the human mind and the processual-continuistic conception of the generation of life. For if, as James maintains, thoughts are made of the same stuff as things are, we can think of this “stuff” in terms of a dissimilarity between an artisanal material and a different one. If there is a materiality that is characterized as artisanal, it is because there is another one that can be conceived in an opposite sense: the notion of “industrial” allows us to immediately understand what is at stake here. Of course, this opposition should not be understood as a new hypostatized dualism: perceptual experience consists of continuous mixtures between these polarities. Moreover, according to a relational thinking that brings to an aesthetics of modality, in principle it is possible to adopt a craft-like approach even when working on an assembly line, although the conditions in which one finds oneself certainly do not favor such an approach. However, clarifying their respective characteristics as if they were self-sufficient helps us to redefine a process that is necessarily always nuanced.
In the area of manufacturing, the distinction is quite clear. For example, a cookie can be artisanal or industrial. It is much more likely to have been produced industrially in millions of pieces by machines following standardized procedures whose processes are activated and completed by humans. But this is not necessarily the case. There are still handmade cookies, made by people working in person, baking from scratch and following the process from start to finish, perhaps using techniques that require savoir-faire, hands, and skills acquired over time. This description may be a first approximation of artisanal production. More deeply, the artisanal gesture can be seen as a process or an event that incorporates aspects of the symbolic, the ritual, and the community. It can appear as a simple gesture that conveys complex meanings along a line of continuity. In this sense, to recall again a term proposed by the Italian aesthetician Giovanni Matteucci, the artisanal gesture is collusive (from the Latin cum ludere, “to play together”) with the environment.[33] In other words, it is an approach that implies complicity and intimacy with the environment—the quality of perception is relational in the sense I have already described. Artisanal collusion requires an attentive, continuous engagement with the materials used in the process of creation, and it also often requires nimble improvisation. From this point of view, artisanal work is much more related to the environment in which it is situated and has much to do with community, reparation, and ritual. Artisanal work can be slow and its artifacts can be properly understood in relation to traditions and contexts.
On the contrary, the industrial procedure aims to obtain products or objects according to some universal standards and criteria, realized by operators specialized in individual parts of the processing. From this point of view, the industrial gesture calls for specialization, fragmentation, and discontinuity and does not require the collusive adherence to a specific environment and tradition in order to be successful. It can be done wherever there are suitable machines and tools. Industrial making demands speed and optimization, and its products must often be immediate, purposeful, input-output driven, made for individuals, and without specific symbolic and cultural contexts. Industrial products usually emerge from high-tech processes, very complicated assemblages that, in the mass market, embed simple meanings and immediate consumption.
Let’s consider again the example of food. On one side, industrial and ultra-processed food fulfills immediate needs and individual satisfaction. Indeed, in addition to price, most eating choices are just ascribable to taste and nutrition, two opposite sides of the same attitude. On the other side, artisanal food comes from techniques and skills that are normally much simpler—involving far less high technology or at least using it within a process where machines themselves are handled with great skill and overall vision—but it calls for greater engagement and an appreciation in which meanings related to traditions, symbolism, and community come into play.
In fact, artisans are aware of the entire process to which they are devoted and have relationships with the materials they work from beginning to end. Their time is fully dedicated to a creation that provide them with satisfaction, fulfillment, and a sense of affective connection with one’s life as a whole. In artisanal work, time is not marked or measured by the clock but perceived as a task, colored by the weather or the seasons. Artisans are primarily enthusiasts who are driven by a calling, obsessed with the excellence and quality of their work.[34] The material shapes artisans just as much as artisans shape the material. While artisans certainly start with a set of learned rules, they can adjust, adapt, and even improvise as the relationship with the work develops, based on situational and environmental factors. Artisanality is first and foremost a vocational activity, a total engagement with matter. Here one communicates with matter by listening to it with receptivity and sensitivity, according to the rhythmic flow of doing and undergoing described by John Dewey in Art as Experience.[35] Since the process is always ongoing and does not end in a predefined and automatic adherence to rules but rather in an alignment with the flow of possible variations of experience, artisanality also relies on improvisational skills in order to tune, to calibrate accordingly.[36] Moreover, artisanal does not only refer to the improvised and unplanned. Even more profoundly, it is that which surrounds and overflows the plan, thereby weakening its status as a definitively univocal structure. In short, it deceives and disappoints the plan, frustrating it slightly. There is an artisanal matrix within the highest conceptual systems.
On the contrary, the industry workers have a specialistic skill and a narrow vision of the whole process of making. Being basically occupied with a particular fragment the work is composed of, they do not necessarily feel responsible for its overall realization. By functioning as a part of an assembly line, skilled workers focus just on a portion of the entire work. They are not responsible for the overall process of which they often know little or nothing. Their perceptual commitment towards time is split: they experience chronological time as marked by the clock and are paid accordingly. In other words, there is a work-time on one side and a leisure-time on the other. Blue-collar workers are more often dissatisfied, as their job is felt not as a vocation but as a profession. The instructions they have to follow usually do not allow and envisage any variations or improvisation. Workers embody the discrete perception that is inherent in the objective model of experience, which accounts for its fragmentation and compartmentalization.
Now, insisting on the artisanal approach to perceiving means emphasizing processes rather than objects, and this can raise awareness of a different way of feeling/thinking about becoming, generation, and relationship between generations. A process-oriented aesthetics is thus a relational aesthetics of perceptual engagement, continuity, and collaboration. In the context of craftsmanship, tradition and repair lead, while substitution and innovation follow.
7. Conclusions
If an aesthetics of the future should turn toward a relational model in order to develop a perceptual disposition understood as artisanal intelligence, this also implies questioning the dominance of the object-oriented production systems and also the ideology of commodification that affects both economy and culture. Since digital innovation aligns exclusively with this paradigm, then the future cannot coincide with it. The future is about imagining and retracing over and over again the pathways already walked by the ancestors, trying to remediate them as much as possible and thus giving hope to posterity.
After all, we trace time back and forth with our minds: memory and anticipation, recollection and imagination allow us to travel through time. We have deliberately chosen to limit this ability to our minds, while we believe that time in the “real world” flows in a clear and unidirectional sense. Things are not necessarily like that: the relationship between generations, if understood as a continuous process of generating different features out of a single common path, helps us rethink a different way of experiencing time, without being crushed by the weight of a present that, at the very moment we think it is looking forward, actually turns backward, risking being suffocated by anxiety and despair.
Being critical of the digital and industrial approach does not mean eliminating it but rather attempting to circumscribe it as partial and insufficient in itself. To refer to Karl Marx’s vocabulary, here it is not a question of completely eliminating alienation; this is never possible because the human condition, being characterized by openness, continuous decentralization of the “self,” and transformation, is always also a condition of alienation. And every technical tool necessary for survival and the improvement of living conditions can be seen as a form of alienation. The point, however, is to master the inevitable alienation that accompanies existence with care, artistry, and attention—without being dominated and overwhelmed by it. Thus, relational feeling/thinking purports to enhance the creative, artisanal, and improvisational capacity of perception. As the ongoing creation of reparative and committed gestures, continuity can once again manifest itself as a necessary and inescapable dimension of life. In the end, might an aesthetics of the future need to be attuned not so much to a post-human digitalism as to a new post-digital humanism, as Ingold once suggested?
Nicola Perullo
n.perullo@unisg.it
Nicola Perullo is a full professor of aesthetics at the University of Pollenzo in Italy, where he currently serves as rector. He is the director of the series, Emergenze dell’Estetica (Aesthetica Edizioni), and SAPIO: Cibo, Conoscenza, Filosofia (Edizioni ETS). He is also a member of the scientific committee of Studi di Estetica, Rivista di Estetica, Estetica. Studi e Ricerche, and Aesthetica Preprint. He has written many books and essays on Vico, Derrida, Wittgenstein, in addition to the aesthetics of taste, ecological aesthetics, and the philosophy of food and wine. Among his latest books are Epistenology. Wine as Experience (Columbia University Press, 2020) and Aesthetics Without Objects and Subjects (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Published on November 24, 2025.
Cite this article: Nicola Perullo, “Relational Perception, Ecological Transition, and Artisanal Intelligence: Towards an Aesthetics for the Future,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed on …
Acknowledgment
I am very grateful to Dr. Maddalena Borsato and Dr. Elena Mancioppi, my incredible and talented collaborators, for helping me edit this text.
Endnotes
[1] See: Tiziana Andina, A Philosophy for Future Generations: The Structure and Dynamics of Transgenerationality (Bloomsbury, 2022); Tiziana Andina, Fausto Corvino, eds., “Transgenerationality, Community, and Justice,” The Monist 106, no. 2 (2023).
[2] Tim Ingold, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now (Polity Press, 2023).
[3] Arnold Berleant, Re-Thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts (Routledge, 2016 [2005]).
[4] Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 87, no. 4 (2012): 325-41.
[5] Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (Basic Books, 1998).
[6] Andina, A Philosophy for Future Generations, 9.
[7] Nicola Perullo, Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects: Relational Thinking for Global Challenges (Bloomsbury, 2024).
[8] See: Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Cybereditions, 2001 [1970]); Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, 2022); Nicolas Bourriaud, Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene, trans. Denyse Beaulieu (Sternberg Press, 2022 [2021]); Giovanni Matteucci, “On Some Epistemological Advantages of the Notion of «Intervenient Aesthetic Field»,” Philosophies 7, no. 17 (2022): 1-14.
[9] François Jullien, Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Zone Books, 2007 [2005]), 8-9.
[10] Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Routledge, 2011).
[11] Giovanni Matteucci, Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione (Carocci, 2019).
[12] Roberto Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relation, trans. Tessa Marzotto Caotorta (Springer, 2021 [2020]).
[13] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007).
[14] Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (MIT Press, 2011), 46.
[15] Tim Ingold, Correspondences (Polity Press, 2020).
[16] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).
[17] Adrian Miles, et al., “From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive Documentary and Relational Media,” in Critical Distance in Documentary Media, ed. Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick and Bruno Lessard (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 301-19.
[18] Perullo, Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects.
[19] Adrian Ivakhiv, Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (Punctum Books, 2018).
[20] Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin Books, 2018 [2017]).
[21] Roberto Calasso, The Celestial Hunter, trans. Richard Dixon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020 [2016]).
[22] Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, trans. William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994 [1983]), 213.
[23] Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, 16.
[24] Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, 213.
[25] Steven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot (MIT Press, 2014): 221-39.
[26] Ingold, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now.
[27] Ingold, Correspondences, 88-9.
[28] Not incidentally, evolve, from which ‘evolution’ derives, comes from volvere, “to roll, to unfold, to spin.” The pattern is here that of rotation and, for instance, that of the soil for sowing as well. See: Tim Ingold, “Evolution without Inheritance: Steps to an Ecology of Learning,” Current Anthropology 63, no. 25 (2022): 32-55.
[29] Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010).
[30] Maurizio Ferraris, Mobilitazione totale (Laterza, 2015).
[31] Henri, Bergson, Creative evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (The Modern Library Henri, 1944 [1907]).
[32] Eugen Fink, Play as Symbol of the World: And Other Writings, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner (Indiana University Press, 2016 [2010]).
[33] Matteucci, Estetica e natura umana.
[34] Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Yale University Press, 2008), 243 ff.
[35] John Dewey, Art as Experience (Perigee Books, 1980 [1934]).
[36] Nicola Perullo, “Improvisation in Cooking and Tasting,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts, ed. Alessandro Bertinetto and Marcello Ruta (Routledge, 2021): 671-84.