Aesthetics and Affectivity

The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 2021

CALL FOR PAPERS: “Aesthetics and Affectivity” The Polish Journal of Aesthetics No. 60 (1/2021) Editors: Laura La Bella (Independent Scholar, PhD) Stefano Marino (University of Bologna, Associate Professor of Aesthetics) Vittoria Sisca (Independent Scholar) Submission Deadline: October 30, 2020 Emotions, feelings, and, generally, the whole sphere of affectivity make up one of the most fundamental elements of human life, and also play an essential (although sometimes problematic) role in art and aesthetic experience. In this regard, let us simply consider this: on one hand, it is certainly possible to think and talk of something like a “common world” in terms of sensations shared by all human beings; on the other hand, if we focus on each individual’s emotions and feelings, and the way the latter often condition our perception of the real, this same notion becomes somewhat ambiguous. If this is true concerning our experience of the world in general, it is even truer and clearer in the specific case of our experience with art. Reflections on the fundamental role played by affectivity in the whole realm of human experience leads us to recognize, for example, that every experienced object, apart from its purely factual properties, presents some “splits” into which the subject fits, so to speak—specifically, to recognize (following Merleau-Ponty) that our description of reality, even as it appears in perceptual experience, is always full of “anthropological predicates.” This becomes fully apparent if we consider such experiences as fantasizing and dreaming (or, in a more radical and even dramatic way, certain psychological pathologies in which the subject’s “private world,” especially influenced by his/her emotions and feelings, sometimes almost completely eclipses evidence of what we conventionally consider “real”), and also applies to a great extent to art and aesthetic experiences of different kinds. From Plato and Aristotle to modern and contemporary times, philosophers have always assumed a close connection between art and what we may call the realm of affectivity (passions, feelings, emotions), sometimes also developing forms of skepticism and suspiciousness towards them as supposedly non-rational or irrational components of human life. However, throughout the history of philosophy there have always been also other voices, so to speak, that have proposed to think about affectivity, feelings, and emotions in a different way, leading to identification with emotional and even instinctual aspects, such as that of the feeling of horror, no less than with the obscure origin of the brightness of ancient Greek culture and art (Nietzsche), or to acknowledgment of the undeniably powerful and indeed constitutive role of “attunement” and “mood” in human existence (Heidegger), or to the proposal for the rediscovery and rehabilitation of the specific “intelligence of emotions” (Nussbaum). Of course, philosophical reflection on affectivity, with a specific focus on its role in the aesthetic dimension, can also lead to questioning of the validity and appropriateness of categories such as “rational” and “irrational” that we sometimes tend to use in an easy, unproblematic, and somehow dualistic way, both in everyday language and in philosophical discourses. In fact, it is a widely shared and quite common belief that our feelings and emotions (or at least some of them) are irrational, but it is also true that many philosophers and especially artists (poets, novelists, composers, painters, performers, etc.) have shown that it is often very difficult to simply draw a line sharply differentiating between the rational and emotional components of our knowledge, inasmuch as the affective component is not at all marginal in the general economy of our convictions and beliefs. In adopting a broad and open philosophical approach—the only one which can do justice to the multiform and complex character of a question such as that of emotions and feelings—we invite authors to submit articles concerning the role of affectivity in human experience, with a particular focus on aesthetics, as broadly understood. Thus we welcome proposals addressing (but not limited to) the following aspects: – phenomenological analysis of emotions and their intentionality; – the relationship between emotion and perception in normal, pathological, or dreamlike/fantastic experience; – the phenomenon of affectivity as part of the grounds of philosophical thinking and aesthetic experience; – the revealing power of affective dispositions and emotional states understood as primary expression of human embeddedness in the world; – the investigation of the various roles played by moods in the history of aesthetics; – questions concerning the corporeality of emotional states, including somaesthetic investigations; – the relationship between moods, aesthetic enjoyment, and moral sentiments; – the interaction between intellectual and emotional components within the aesthetic experience, including (but not limited to) artistic creation and fruition. We encourage authors to seek original perspectives on aesthetics and affectivity. We are interested in articles that address this topic in innovative ways, including both historical and theoretical approaches. We accept submissions written only in English. *** We kindly ask all authors to familiarize themselves with the journal’s guidelines, available under “For Authors,” and to double-check the completeness of each article (with the inclusion of an abstract, keywords, a bibliography, and a note on the author) prior to submission. Only completed papers should be submitted, using the submissions page, which can be found here. All articles are subjected to double-blind reviews. Articles published in The Polish Journal of Aesthetics are assigned DOI numbers. Please do not hesitate to contact us via email: pjaestheticsuj@gmail.com. Please visit our website at: http://pjaesthetics.uj.edu.pl/

"Aesthetics and Affectivity”, The Polish Journal of Aesthetics N. 60 (1/2021), 2021

This paper investigates the emotional import of literary devices deployed in fiction. Reflecting on the often-favored approach in the analytic tradition that locates fictional characters, events, and narratives as sources of readers' emotions, I attempt to broaden the scope of analysis by accounting for how literary devices trigger non-cognitive emotions. I argue that giving more expansive consideration to literary devices by which authors present content facilitates a better understanding of how fiction engages emotion. In doing so, I also explore the somatic dimension of reading fiction.

Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, New York/Sao Paulo, #issue 4, 2019, 73-87, 2019

How does an audience receive a work of art? Does the experience only affect the viewer or does it have an effect and thus influence his or her actions? It is the cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer and his successors in philosophy and developmental psychology as well as in neuroscience to this day who postulate that perception in general and perception of art in particular are not neutral in their origins but alive and thus meaningful. They assume that both are based on analogous principles: in the perception of moving forms and spatial forms in the world and rhythms of forms, colors, light and shadow in art. In practice, this means that perception and its felt effects have an effect on the feelings of the viewer and thus help him to inform himself directly and intensively about the world through art. In contrast to this general epistemological aesthetic theory, which philosophers in particular accept, it is to be shown that this assumption must redefined not with reference to the world, but with reference to art and design. For the latter, the approach will be extended to a semiotic theory. The background is that in contrast to the world, the designed forms and thus the designed intentions of the artist and designer or his client in relation to the chosen theme have an impact on the viewer and thus on culture and its communicative dynamics.

In this essay, we provide an account of the basic emotions and their expression. On our view, emotions are experiences that indicate and have the function of indicating how our body is faring and how we are faring in our environment. Emotions are also objects of experience: our perceptual systems are more or less sensitive to the expression of emotion in our environment by features that indicate and have the function of indicating emotions. We apply our account to expression in art. What does it mean to say that an artwork expresses sadness? Is perceiving joy in an artwork the same kind of experience as perceiving joy in a friend’s face? How may artworks express emotions without having emotions or any other mental states? In the next section, we provide an overview of unrestricted representationalism about experience. In section three, we offer a representationalist account of the basic emotions that combines exteroception and interoception. On our view, emotions are perceptual experiences that represent properties of our viscera and properties in our extra-bodily environment. Exteroceptive and interoceptive systems combine to constitute a system whose states—emotions—indicate and have the function of indicating how our body is faring and how we are faring in our environment. In the fourth section, we survey aesthetic theories of expression in art including the resemblance, persona and arousal theories, and argue that each faces significant problems. Building on the work of Dominic Lopes (2005) and Mitchell Green (2007), we offer a teleosemantic account of emotional expression in art that is impersonal and continuous with a representationalist account of the basic emotions. Finally, in section five, we apply our view to an example—Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa—in order to illustrate how we experience emotions as represented properties of a painted canvas.

The idea that the aesthetic judgment describes the 'disposition of the affect' (die Stimmung des Gemüts) in relation to how the interaction of the intellectual faculties is felt is a central Kantian contribution to aesthetics. Even though the most recent English translation of the Third Critique hesitates and translates the "Stimmung" sometimes as 'mind' and sometimes as 'disposition', the idea is clear: the aesthetic judgment attributes the representation of the correlate to the felt dynamics of the faculties. 1 The quality of this affective disposition is precisely what the judgment of taste includes, a feeling that varies between the beautiful and the sublime. Towards the end of the 19th century, the affective disposition or -if you will -the mood, becomes a prevalent aesthetic category in the art theory of Heinrich Wölfflin, Hermann Bahr and Aloïs Riegl. However, the disposition no longer refers to the general felt interaction of intellectual faculties but to the affective content of certain images: for Wölfflin it represents the Baroque, for Bahr it refers to the impressionism of his time and Riegl associates it to the 'age value' of monuments. The transposition of an element pertaining to the transcendental analysis of taste to the empirical stylistic analysis of images entails firstly a paradigmatic shift: the discourse moves from the subjective disposition to the description of the image's qualities. Secondly, since the question of the beauty felt by the subject becomes a question of the style embedded in the image, the affective disposition receives a specific sense. It refers to the apperception of certain visual qualities. Yet why and how does an image represent a mood? While stating that the mood is the content of the visual arts, neither Riegl not Bahr explain the epistemological ground of such a homologation. And what is the quality of this affective disposition called the mood that Bahr, Riegl and Wölfflin present as the content of the modern art? In the following, these questions are answered by relating the descriptions of this affect to Moritz Geiger's phenomenological account of the affective empathy.

Classical philosophical aesthetics held several assumptions about the psyche, both in relation to psychic structures and psychic functions. Whereas contemporary psychological aesthetics are dominated by reductive approaches when it comes to the nature of the work of art and the nature of experience, this article identifies some early nonreductive or complex psychological themes in classical aesthetics, namely the nature of sensing and aesthetic form, and locates their importance in contemporary conceptualizations of the functions of art. Sensing and aesthetic form are discussed in relation to other features of subjectivity, such as rationality, emotionality, and sociability. Just as the different senses are never fully interchangeable, neither are the arts, and the existence of a unified aesthetic experience rests on an aesthetic form that is amodal. The article proposes a psychological aesthetics that retains some of the features present in early philosophical aesthetics, while coming to terms with a contemporary experiential subject.

The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English, 2023

Affect theory has revolutionized the way that literary and cultural scholars understand the politics of art. 1 Broadly, affect theory is a philosophy of sensation, which is distinct from the personal " feelings" that are conventionally associated with emotions. Inspired by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, affect theory literally attends to the body's capacity " to affect" and " to be affected." Defined in the most expansive terms, bodies are nothing more or less than their affective capacities and their unlimited potential for change. Indeed, Spinoza scandalously asserts that we do not yet know what a body can do. His point is that the body has agencies of its own, which are not determined by nor fully accessible to the mind. In this way, affect theory challenges rationalist philosophies that center consciousness as the essence of being, perhaps most familiarly exemplified by René Descartes' mantra, " I think, therefore I am" (25). Affect theory contributes to posthumanism, new materialism, e co-c riticism, and other theories that reject anthropocentrism. After all, ticks, rats, and whales have affects that enable them to sensually navigate a material lifeworld. Affect theory's displacement of the human subject also converges with existing theories of embodiment in cultural studies and critical theory, especially feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, and performance studies. They too understand affect as a force that has been repressed within the humanist tradition and, in turn, weaponized against minoritized groups marked as too emotional or too unruly in their embodiments. Affect theory responds by affirming sensation as a pre-subjective current of potential that connects bodies directly to social power and to the unfolding of life itself. Given this ontology, affect theory sees the aesthetic as not fundamentally different from any other assemblage of affects. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contend, " the work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else" (164). Art is thus affective in two senses: it composes a " bloc of sensations" through its own materials, such as words, paint, or rhythm; and these compositions " directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems," stimulating affects in unpredictable ways (Grosz 4). In the tradition inaugurated by philosopher Immanuel Kant, aesthetics are understood as involving a particular power of judgment, which evaluates objects (including the objects conventionally understood as " art," but also naturally occurring objects such as flowers); when certain criteria are met certain sensations are experienced, and those objects may then qualify as " beautiful" or " sublime" (and for theorists after Kant, " good" or " bad" art).

Psychological Review, 2018

This is the pre-print of an article that will soon be published in Psychological Review. It is the first comprehensive theoretical article on aesthetic emotions. Following Kant’s definition, we propose that it is the first and foremost characteristic of aesthetic emotions to make a direct contribution to aesthetic evaluation/appreciation. Each aesthetic emotion is tuned to a special type of perceived aesthetic appeal and is predictive of the subjectively felt pleasure or displeasure and the liking or disliking associated with this type of appeal. Contrary to the negativity bias of classical emotion catalogues, emotion terms used for aesthetic evaluation purposes include far more positive than negative emotions. At the same time, many overall positive aesthetic emotions encompass negative or mixed emotional ingredients. Appraisals of intrinsic pleasantness, familiarity, and novelty are preeminently important for aesthetic emotions. Appraisals of goal relevance/conduciveness and coping potential are largely irrelevant from a pragmatic perspective, but in some cases highly relevant for cognitive and affective coping. Aesthetic emotions are typically sought and savored for their own sake, with subjectively felt intensity and/or emotional arousal being rewards in their own right. The expression component of aesthetic emotions includes laughter, tears, and facial and bodily movements, along with applause or booing and words of praise or blame. Aesthetic emotions entail motivational approach and avoidance tendencies, specifically, tendencies toward prolonged, repeated, or interrupted exposure and wanting to possess aesthetically pleasing objects. They are experienced across a broad range of experiential domains and not coextensive with art-elicited emotions.

The Polish Journal of Aesthetics

This article makes the argument and emphasizes that aesthetic education is central for a discussion and critical awareness of affectivity with our self-perception and world-relation. Our affective relations are a component in our interaction with others with whom we share feelings and emotions, formed and learned through this interaction. Judgments of taste in which social norms are made explicit demonstrate such an education and emphasize the centrality of aesthetic education for a critical awareness of our self-perception and world-relation.

My concern in this paper is with how Silvan Tomkins’ theory of affects might help us to think about the affective response to art. For my purposes, there are two aspects of his account of affects that are particularly useful. First, he does not presume that there is a proper object of affect; hence the love of art is not automatically or necessarily about the diversion of libido or the investment of libidinal energy. The second significant factor in Tomkins' account of affects is the way in which he separates and yet entwines the drives, affects and cognition. It is this model of the embodied, feeling, thinking subject which promises to reach what most people seek or expect from the experience of art.