What is Relational Aesthetics All About?

Keywords
aesthetic field; experience-with; phenomenology; relational aesthetics; resonance

I really appreciated Perullo’s Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects.[1] We both share a fundamental assumption: radical relationalism as a way to overcome the impasse of modern subject-object dualism. However, despite this fundamental convergence there are divergences that merit critical examination in order to clarify the terms of a theoretical project that proves more complex than an initial affinity might suggest. For the sake of argument, my text will attach a rather sharp and somewhat unfairly rigid stance to Perullo. I am aware that actually his view is somewhat more nuanced; however, I believe that it might risk becoming ideological if it pursues some of the directions that I will tackle in my contribution. Therefore, it is this static image of his work that becomes the target of my criticism.

Where the book undertakes what I would call a “path of what” through a sort of para-ontology that investigates the problem of being or what substitutes for that problem, I propose a “path of how” through a phenomenology that focuses on the problem of meaning and its concrete manifestations.[2] This divergence is not merely methodological but reveals fundamental orientations that affect the very conception of the aesthetic and its role in the general economy of human experience.

The divergence manifests already in our common polemic against the dominant ocularity in Western thought. We both recognize the necessity of overcoming this dominance, but the alternatives we propose reveal different theoretical orientations. Perullo opts for a paradigm of the haptic and tactile, privileging the fruitive dimension of experience: “haptic perception (which does not necessarily imply physical contact, but a certain mode of plenary attention and presence)” (3). The paradigm I advocate instead is oriented toward the aural and musical dimension, understood as a creative modality founded on the principle of resonance. This is not simply a terminological difference but a divergent conception of the aesthetic that also emerges in the framework of the pedagogical relevance of the aesthetic. Where Perullo seems to aim at teaching to perceive differently, as when he holds that it is necessary to be “experimenting with a way of perceiving that displaces us from the—supposed absolutist—power of vision” (2), configuring aesthetics as a practice of perceptual transformation, I would rather propose to describe perceiving as it manifests concretely in experience, without presupposing a program for reforming sensibility. The difference is substantial: while Perullo’s approach incorporates a prescriptive dimension that aims to modify existing perceptual modalities, the phenomenological perspective I support is limited to explicating the operative structures that are always already at work in experience, without assuming the burden of any revolutionary transformation of them.

Perullo’s approach shows what I would define as an “emphatic” or “hyper-aesthetic” orientation, characterized by strong theoretical self-consciousness and the employment of terms that evoke the drama of transformation: ‘crisis, ’ ‘urgency,’ ‘upheaval.’ This approach betrays a conception of the aesthetic as a domain of the exceptional and extraordinary, where aesthetic experience assumes the characteristics of a revolutionary event: “perceptual upheaval” that must respond to “global needs and challenges that are before us today” (1). The rhetoric of urgency that characterizes Perullo’s discourse can be seen in a series of linguistic indicators that reveal a conception of the aesthetic as a response to a global emergency situation. “The crisis of reality we are experiencing today” (3) is presented as the triggering motive that justifies a radical rethinking of aesthetics. This argumentative strategy, while understandable in its intention to confer public relevance to aesthetic inquiry, risks inscribing the aesthetic in a logic of exceptionality that is a symptom of the true nature of the strategy itself. When Perullo writes that “these terms—crisis, urgency—refer to a temporal dimension of the present” and presents them as “temporal fictions” (4), he reveals awareness of the problematic character of this approach, without however completely abandoning it.

The perspective I advocate privileges instead the investigation of tacit operative processes that I define as “hypo-aesthetic”—practices that have always been experimented, as they are immanent in human nature and are not revolutionary. It is a matter of recognizing the aesthetic operativity that is always already at work in the ordinary processes of meaning-making, without requiring the exceptionality of the event to prove their efficacy. This difference reflects a deeper divergence in the conception of the relationship between the aesthetic and the everyday. Where Perullo seems to conceive the aesthetic as an ad quem—an objective to be achieved through practices connoted by high energetic cost oriented toward a mediatic outcome—I propose to think the aesthetic as an in quo: constitutive immanent presence in every form of experience. The question is therefore not a political alienation to overcome through revolutionary action but a theoretical alienation to dissolve through the description of constitutive processes. We do not need “perceptual crisis” to access aesthetic experience: this can be seen in the very modality through which present elements are experienced in their concrete manifestation. The distinctive trait of aesthetics can be summarized in the emphasis on the manner in which experience is made of elements somehow present—that is, the manner in which present elements are experienced. Paradigmatic, but perhaps not exhaustive, is sensibility insofar as it is a dimension that is bound to the effective presence of its contents.

2. Temporality, consciousness, and the question of phenomenological “grain”

A fundamental divergence concerns the conceptualization of relational experience and touches decisive questions for understanding temporality and the structuring of the aesthetic. Perullo introduces the notion of “perceiving-with” as “the immanence of the with (in Latin, cum, still present in the co- prefix), the nontemporal becoming of a totality in continuous movement” (5). The notion of “experience-with” that I propose intends to avoid some theoretical problems of this formulation that risk compromising the precision of the analysis. The first question concerns the extension of the concept and its differential applicability. Not every process is “with” and not every perception assumes the relational modality that characterizes aesthetic experience. There are forms of experience that remain anchored to individual structures and forms of perception that do not transcend the objectifying dimension—what I call “experience-of.” The perception of a traffic sign, for example, can remain confined to a functional structure that does not activate the relational dynamics proper to aesthetic experience. The notion of “experience-with” allows for more precise specification of those experiential modalities that effectively realize the relational dimension, avoiding generalizations that risk losing the distinctive character of the aesthetic phenomenon. At the same time, it allows us to carefully account for the ways in which the two modes of experience (“with” and “of”) intertwine in bistable compounds that are effective precisely because of this (such as when using a tool to play a video game), thus protecting us from any possible dualistic drift.

More problematic appears to be the equation that Perullo seems to establish between experience and consciousness when he writes: “Consciousness is co-extensive with experience: Homo is conscious because it experiences, it experiences because it is conscious” (5). This identification overlooks the fundamental difference between the experiential field, characterized by gradations, nuances, and tacit processes, and conscious focalizations, which operate through mechanisms of thematization and objectification. The experiential field is much more nuanced and gradual than conscious focalizations, articulating itself according to levels of intensity and modalities of manifestation that do not allow themselves to be reduced to the conscious/unconscious dichotomy. Aesthetic experience situates itself precisely in that intermediate dimension where meaning-making processes operate that are not yet completely conscious but are not merely unconscious either. It is that region of experience where meaning manifests according to modalities that precede and make possible every successive conscious thematization, but that maintain their own phenomenological specificity irreducible both to mere objectual givens and to pure reflexive subjectivity.

Presence, moreover, does not mean instantaneity of the isolated moment. Presence is a complex temporal phenomenon, at least potentially. On the one hand, the meanings of the past, of acquired experiences, and the prospects of the future, of what one is projected toward, can converge in it. On the other hand, the present is what in mathematics is defined as a “neighborhood” (in a three-dimensional sense) that can intersect simultaneously multiple levels: implicit and explicit, individual and collective, biological and historical, physiological and cultural. While I observe a painting with satisfaction, my present moment includes all these variables, which together connote my perception. This means that the presence that characterizes the dimension of sensibility can be reduced to an unextended point only in an abstract way. In nature, absolute instantaneity is mere fiction. There are insurmountable limits for the minimum transmission of information, so speaking of immediacy makes sense only once the unit of measurement being adopted is established, that is, what is the “grain,” or texture, of experience being considered. Experience has a lower limit that is that of a temporal arc, not of a mathematical point.

The question that Perullo poses in terms of what we can call the ‘quantum structure’ of aesthetic experience reveals a significant theoretical divergence that affects the very conception of the relationship between philosophy and natural sciences. When he affirms that “the real ‘is’ not but happens, as even quantum physics tells us today” (12), Perullo seems to want to found his relational aesthetics on a processual metaphysics inspired by contemporary physics. This theoretical strategy, while understandable in its intention to confer scientific credibility to his philosophical proposal, presents some difficulties that merit thorough discussion. The problem emerges clearly when Perullo writes: “Reality happens as a continuous unfolding of relations; but ‘relation,’ here, has not to be understood as connection between objects or subjects and objects. Rather, it is the con-, the entangled field from which subjects and objects develop” (12). What is described here in terms of quantum structure is actually a question of grain, that is, of experiential density taken into account. The problem is not (para-)ontological but phenomenological: it is not a matter of establishing what reality is “in itself,” but of describing how phenomena relating to meaning prove depending on the level of analysis adopted. The  quantum metaphor risks shifting attention from a level where aesthetically relevant distinctions actually play out, to a level that pretends to describe the ultimate structure of the real.

Quantum physics describes behaviors of physical systems at specific dimensional scales according to mathematical formalizations that have no direct equivalence in the domain of concrete experience. When Perullo appeals to the authority of quantum physics to sustain that “an isolated object, taken in itself, independent of any interaction, has no particular state” (47), he is operating an analogical transfer that risks obscuring precisely those experiential processes that should constitute the specific object of aesthetic inquiry. The phenomenology of experience-with I advocate aims at avoiding this displacement by maintaining attention on the modality in which meaning phenomena concretely manifest in experience. The great divide to be thematized is that taking place between “what there is” (empty relations) and “what sense it has” (full relations) in the phenomenon considered from time to time. We do not need to postulate a processual metaphysics to describe the relational character of aesthetic experience; it is enough to analyze the modalities through which meaning constitutes itself in processes of interaction between organism and environment. The question of grain assumes particular relevance when one considers that every phenomenological description must implicitly specify the temporal and spatial unit of measurement it adopts. The immediate response to a letter I send today may be the one that arrives tomorrow, but this “immediacy” depends on the temporal scale considered. Similarly, the aesthetic experience of a concert can extend from the duration of the performance to the resonance it maintains in memory, but both require specification of the temporal grain through which each is described.

3. Resonance versus correspondence: two paradigms of aesthetic relationality

The most significant divergence concerns the conception of the aesthetic as such and its relationship with ordinary experience. In Perullo’s discourse there seems to be an inclination toward the extraordinary and exceptional nature of the aesthetic that could be the long shadow of an aesthetics conceived reductively as the philosophy of art. Perullo’s approach, despite anti-dualistic intentions, maintains a conception of the aesthetic that distinguishes it clearly from other experiential modalities through exceptional practices characterized by—as noted before—high energetic cost. This conception manifests in Perullo’s tendency to present aesthetic experience as a form of radical transformation that requires totalizing involvement. When he writes that “AWOS [i.e.: Aesthetics Without Subjects and Objects] does not call for ‘immersion.’ On the contrary, it is precisely when deliberate cognition and intention are lost that the participatory, engaged, and interwoven plane of reality presents itself as inescapable” (18), Perullo ends up configuring aesthetic experience as a totalizing event that encompasses the entire experiential reality of the subject. Even his proposal of “a kind of ‘passivism’ that […] takes the form of conscious perceptual participation in the immanent flow of consciousness as experience” (7) betrays a conception of the aesthetic as an exceptional modality of relationship with the world.

The perspective I support instead conceives the aesthetic as immanent operativity that pervades all forms of experience without constituting a separate domain nor requiring exceptional modalities of involvement. The aesthetic is not a property of certain objects or certain subjects, nor a fortiori an exceptional modality of relationship between organism and environment. It is instead that operative dimension through which meaning is constituted in every form of experience—that modality according to which present elements are experienced in their concrete manifestation. Perhaps when we speak of the aesthetic, we are not speaking of an experiential meta-structure but of an institutive component of our experience. What is aesthetic is not that habit that modifies other constituted habits, but that habit that is instituting itself as such. It is more the institutive and not simply transformative capacity of the aesthetic that counts. The institutive modality of the aesthetic is not relative only to so-called works of art but can be recovered generically as it relates to an experiential modality that is widespread in our interaction with the environment. It is not a question of aesthetic supervenience (“from above”) but is something that inter-venes in practice—what I have defined as aesthetic intervenience. A habit is aesthetic insofar as rather than acting on what is constituted, it shows the immanent operativity that is expressed in an instituted habit, that finds one possible configuration in it, but that as immanent operativity could express itself in other ways.

This divergence in the conception of the aesthetic is also reflected in the different articulation of the relational paradigm, revealing two alternative conceptions of what it means to think experience in processual and relational terms. While Perullo develops his theory through the concept of “correspondence” understood as “rapprochement” that “involves introducing something that is no longer mere extension, a closed-off solidity, or the well-defined object—an animated and animating life that neglects being” (3), the concept of resonance I propose operates according to a different logic. The concept of resonance I have developed in my previous works and that I here compare with Perullo’s approach is not simply correspondence between discrete elements but the constitutive modality through which meaning emerges in experience­—a sort of “thick” or “Baudelairean” correspondence, if you will. Resonance indicates that peculiar relational modality in which it is impossible to attribute activity and passivity in a linear and univocal manner to vectors that are distinct per se, as a subject (active) and an object (passive) should be.

Resonance does not presuppose discrete entities to relate to each other, but manifests as the very emerging of meaning in the field of experience. When a string “resonates” tuning itself with the A of a tuning fork, its vibration is not simply provoked by the tuning fork that approaches it; it materially corresponds to the tuning fork within a shared field whose vibrations involve both. The relationship between generation and manifestation of the phenomenon is not synthetic, as if it were between two heterogeneous entities that are a cause and an effect. It is analytic: the vanishing of one coincides with the disappearance of the other. I wonder how sensibly this differs from Perullo’s conception of correspondence. When he writes that “correspondence […] happens thanks to both forces and phases” and that “such encounter is the correspondence that does not necessarily need the force to happen” (52), he seems to still maintain a distinction between elements that encounter each other, even if according to more subtle modalities than that of brute force. In the paradigm of resonance, instead, there are no discrete elements that encounter each other. Resonance is the very modality through which the experiential field constitutes itself as a field of meaning.

For this reason, we say “going into resonance” and not “being resonated.” This is because the action of the tuning fork is not sufficient to produce the phenomenon. The resonant body must correspond to it with a characteristic of its own, which moreover manifests only in relation to the shared field. Both the tuning fork and the body that corresponds to it are resonant. It is not an action of cause or effect proper to one or the other—so much so that it is reversible. A tuning fork resonates in turn when approached with a vibrating string on the right intonation. Resonance, therefore, belongs to the field in which both the cause and the effect take part as vectors. Making a string “sound” by plucking it and making it “resonate” are different phenomena. Between the finger that plucks (an action) and the sound emitted (an acoustic event) there is a difference and therefore a causal passage from a cause to an effect. On the other hand, there is no such difference—indeed, there is intimate conformity—between the field of vibrations that radiates around an acoustic vector and what is immersed in it and therefore corresponds according to its own characteristics.

The concept of resonance allows for a more precise articulation of the question of the temporality of aesthetic experience, avoiding both the punctualism of the instant and the linearity of causal succession. Resonance happens according to its own temporality that coincides neither with the instantaneity of the event nor with the extended duration of the mechanical process. “Resonating” is not a response to a preceding stimulus but the very modality through which the experiential field acquires meaningfulness. It is not a matter of establishing connections between preconstituted elements, but of describing how the experiential field configures itself through expressive dynamics that precede and make possible every distinction between subject and object, internal and external, active and passive.

In the paradigm of resonance, the aesthetic is constitutively productive. It is not a matter of aligning oneself with preexisting opportunities, as Perullo seems to suggest with his metaphor of “alignment according to the emerging opportunities and urgencies” (8), but of generating unprecedented modalities of interaction that simultaneously transform organism and environment through the creation of new configurations of meaning. It is according to how the material goes about articulating itself that our practices assume the Gestaltungen that also characterize in terms of habituality the interactions with our environment. From this point of view, habit is truly the unfolding of an interaction with the environment that simultaneously constitutes our stances toward the environment, and also a cultural niche that has a basic aesthetic component because it is innervated in the saturation between the three dimensions of aisthesis that are perceiving, emotions, and expression.

The divergence between the paradigm of resonance and that of correspondence also appears in the different conception of agency and aesthetic immersion. Perullo devotes considerable attention to criticizing “so-called ‘immersive experiences’” as “exactly the opposite of relational aesthetics without objects and subjects” (18), but his critique risks remaining prisoner of the same logic it aims to overcome. When Perullo writes that “induced immersion achieves its opposite, that is, a distancing with the aim of control” (18), he is still thinking according to the logic of the subject that wants to dominate experience, simply inverting the terms of the relation. His proposal of a “passivism” that “takes the form of conscious perceptual participation in the immanent flow of consciousness as experience” (7) remains partly anchored to a conception of experience that presupposes a subject that “participates” consciously in a flow that transcends it. The paradigm of resonance allows avoiding this difficulty because it does not presuppose a subject that must choose between activity and passivity, control and abandonment. In resonance, the distinction itself between active and passive loses its pertinence because every vector of the field is simultaneously receptive and productive, influenced and influencing.

This difference emerges clearly when Perullo distinguishes between “intentional and individual ‘agency’ on the one side, and attentive and relational ‘agencing’ on the other” (7). Even if the distinction is important, the formulation still betrays an approach that maintains the centrality of a subject (albeit “attentive” and “relational”) that relates to something else. In the paradigm of resonance, there is no need to distinguish between agency and agencing because resonance is constitutively impersonal: it happens in the field, not to a subject. A habit arises insofar as it is a particular way of practicing thick environmental correspondences that makes them highly expressive and lends itself to being practiced so extensively that it becomes automatic. In this maximum practicability there is a progressive decrease of attention to the steps being taken, so that habit becomes a surrogate of instinct, that is, what makes us act automatically in an environment. But this happens according to how the expressive correspondence with the environment has been established aesthetically in an integration of action and reaction so complete that it settles within the environment itself and can be activated by any interaction in which we find ourselves. This could also explain how it is possible that habits are transmitted intergenerationally, which has to do with cultural continuity as such.

The concept of resonance also allows for more precise and nuanced articulation of the question of the “aesthetic field” that Perullo introduces but does not develop systematically. If we think aesthetic experience in terms of a field of resonance, we can distinguish different modalities of field configuration depending on the intensity of energy circulating in it. According to the intensity of energy circulating in it, the aesthetic field assumes different states that I would label as hypo-aesthetic, meso-aesthetic, and hyper-aesthetic. The meso-aesthetic level corresponds to the artistic in the traditional sense: an ordered distribution of activity and passivity that determine the surroundings of a stable center, that is, the work. Hypo and hyper instead represent different forms of entropy between active and passive. The hypo-aesthetic level is characterized not by the work but by praxis and creativity. Its threshold value is style understood as lifestyle and also artistic styles that sediment in daily practices. That which does not have a distinctive way of appearing—and therefore a “style” in this sense, at most borrowed from or inspired by something that is valued in the surrounding world as a work of art—is highly unlikely to be recognized as an “aesthetic phenomenon.” It is the level of perceptualizing, where Klee’s art, for example, draws on tacit operative processes that precede every stabilization in defined works. The meso-aesthetic level is that of the work of art and imagination, of the fictitious understood as works that function as temporary stabilizations of the energetic flow of the field. Its threshold value is design and fashion in their twentieth-century sense as mediation between artistic and everyday: what has “artistic” aesthetic value is, in fact, that which has such an impact on the individual and collective imagination that it modifies certain behaviors, if only by involving moments of consumption or daily practices, as is the case with design and fashion. The hyper-aesthetic level is no longer characterized by the work but by performance understood as event and spectacularity. It is the level in which the energy of the aesthetic field concentrates in punctual manifestations that tend to consume themselves in the intensity of their own manifestation.

4. Language, wisdom, and aesthetic education: open questions

A point of convergence emerges from the conception of language and its relationship with aesthetic experience. Perullo devotes several pages of his book to the linguistic question, introducing Bohm’s notion of “rheomode” as “language of flow” where “nouns and fixed definitions lose their ontological solidity and are transformed by the fluid emergence of their verbal roots” (130). This proposal of an alternative language that better corresponds to the processual nature of reality not only appears theoretically sound but deserves to be radicalized. The phenomenological perspective I advocate suggests that we must turn to adverbiality as the most efficacious expression of the aesthetic component of experience. The aesthetic manifests primarily in the “how” of experience—in the manner in which phenomena present themselves rather than in what they are as substances. The adverbial dimension captures this dimensional priority: we perceive smoothly, we move fluidly, we respond resonantly. The aesthetic is not a property but a modality, and adverbiality provides the linguistic structure most adequate to this modal character. Rather than seeking new words, we need to inhabit more radically the adverbial dimension that ordinary language already offers us, recognizing in it the privileged access to aesthetic operativity.

Therefore, when Perullo cites Wittgenstein to maintain that “aesthetic concepts such as ‘beautiful’ or ‘good’ cannot be ontologized” and that “in each occasion, they express specific actualizations of a broader field of potential” (131), he touches on an important point. However, the conclusion he draws from it—the necessity for a more “artisanal” approach to language—still maintains the idea of a conscious manipulation of verbal expression. The phenomenology of experience-with suggests instead that aesthetic expression happens in language without there being need for specific competence or expressive technique. When Perullo develops his proposal of “Artisanal Intelligence” and suggests that “writing this book was very laborious, sometimes difficult. Perhaps it is the one that has taken me the most effort so far. Probably, this is due to the fact that it is the most artisanal book I have written” (25), he reveals a conception of philosophical work as craft that, while interesting, still maintains the idea of a technique to master. I think instead that authentic philosophical thinking happens in ordinary language when this opens to its own constitutive dimension of meaning. While one can agree with his idea of conceiving “philosophy as an artisanal thinking practice” that “needs amateurship more than professionalism to be fully practiced” (28), in having an anti-specialist spirit it still maintains an intellectualist conception of wisdom as a refined form of knowledge which I think we should get rid of. Wisdom is not so much a form of intelligence alternative to the professional one but rather the very modality through which experience opens to meaning. So the assertion that “wisdom moves on with life regardless of future goals” and that “wisdom is situational but not presentist: it makes decisions based on what is happening but it stands in the flow of life, along continuity” (162), tackles something important, but at the same time remains still too tied to the idea of wisdom as an attitude or disposition that can be cultivated or learned.

More in general, a crucial aspect that Perullo develops extensively is the critique of ocularcentrism and the proposal of “haptic perceiving” as an alternative to the dominant visual paradigm. His proposal of a haptic perception that “does not necessarily imply physical contact but a certain mode of plenary attention and presence” (p3) is certainly interesting, but risks falling into a conception of the relationship between different sensory registers that is still dualistic. The question is not that of replacing the primacy of sight with that of touch but of recognizing that every authentic aesthetic experience is always already multisensory and embodied; and precisely for this reason, it finds its most effective paradigm in the resonance that affects the entire body. Perullo also extensively tackles the question of education, proposing a model of “aesthetic education” that replaces competence with compassion: “The alternative to competence is not ignorance; it is compassion” (161). According to the phenomenology of experience-with, every authentic competence is always already compassionate, in the sense that it arises from the capacity to respond adequately to the demands of the situation. It is not a matter of abandoning competence in favor of compassion, but of recognizing that every authentic competence is rooted in a form of attention and care that transcends it.

5. Toward an aesthetics of constitution: for a constructive dialogue

Critically engaging with Perullo’s work confirms the fruitfulness of a relational approach to aesthetics. Yet it also suggests the need to further clarify the terms of this relationalism, to avoid both the residues of modern dualism and the risks of a new separation of the aesthetic from the ordinary course of experience. The phenomenological approach I advocate through the paradigm of resonance allows thinking the experience-with that characterizes the aesthetic not as an exceptional event that irrupts into everyday life but as the constitutive modality through which everyday life itself unfolds as an experience of meaning. Aesthetic knowledge does not determine contents, except accessorily. It does not aim to produce judgments that define some entity or the characteristics of some entity. Rather it concerns the modality in which an experience takes place. This withdrawal with respect to entities of which experience is made does not confine the aesthetic dimension to subjective interiority. When a circle appears to someone as regular, harmonious, banal, right, wrong, or even beautiful, however much others may dissent, it is not up to the subject to make the circle appear differently.

Beyond specific divergences, I agree with Perullo on the urgent need to rethink aesthetics in relational and processual terms. We both recognize the inadequacy of the subject-object paradigm and the need to elaborate more adequate conceptual tools for thinking aesthetic experience in its concreteness and complexity. The divergences I have highlighted should not be understood as destructive critiques but as indications for a constructive dialogue that can enrich the understanding of aesthetic phenomena. The “path of what” undertaken by Perullo and the “path of how” I support can be seen as two complementary routes of the same common effort to update contemporary aesthetics. In particular, I believe that the phenomenology of experience-with can offer useful tools for clarifying some aspects of Perullo’s proposal, while the richness of concrete analyses present in his work can contribute to enriching a phenomenological understanding of aesthetic processes. The real stakes of this dialogue are not the victory of one paradigm over another but the possibility of elaborating more refined conceptual tools for thinking that dimension of experience that keeps resisting the traditional categories of philosophy. In this sense, even divergences become chances to grow together in this common project to shed new light on aesthetic inquiry.

 

Giovanni Matteucci
giovanni.matteucci@unibo.it

Giovanni Matteucci is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Bologna. Among his publications: Il sapere estetico come prassi antropologica (2010), L’artificio estetico (2012), Il sensibile rimosso (2015), Philosophical Perspectives on Fashion (2016, with Stefano Marino), Estetica della moda (2019), Estetica e natura umana (2019). He edited the Italian translation of classical works of contemporary aesthetics (by Dilthey, Cassirer, Fink, Adorno, Dewey, Langer, Wollheim, Berleant). His research concerns the structures of aisthesis with reference to sense and form. He is Editor in Chief of “Studi di estetica / Aesthetic Studies” and coordinator of “almæsthetics” at the University of Bologna.

 

Published on March 12, 2026.

Cite this article: Giovanni Matteucci, “What is Relational Aesthetics All About?,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 24 (2026), accessed date.

Endnotes

[1] London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2025.

[2] I refer the reader, who might be interested in knowing more about this path, to the following English works of mine: “The Aesthetic as a Matter of Practices: Form of Life in Everydayness and Art,” Comprendre, no. 18 (2016): 2, 9-28; “The (Aesthetic) Extended Mind: Aesthetics from Experience-of to Experience-with,” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, no. 10, 2018: 400-429; “Book Forum on Estetica e natura umana: Questions by Simona Chiodo, Roberta Dreon, Shaun Gallagher, Tonino Griffero, Jerrold Levinson, Claudio Paolucci, Richard Shusterman: Replies by Giovanni Matteucci,” (eds. G. L. Iannilli & S. Marino), Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy, 12 (2020): 2, 593-639 (http://www.metajournal.org/article_details.php?id=438); “Staging Emotions. The Aesthetic Root of the Ecological Niche,” Reti, saperi, linguaggi, 18 (2020): 2, 259-276; “Improvisation as Resonance,” in A. Bertinetto & M. Ruta (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2021): 33-46. In Italian, the reader can find a more extensive argumentation in the book Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione (Roma: Carocci, 2019).