More-Than-Human Aesthetics. Venturing beyond the Bifurcation of Nature, 2024
This chapter contends that in times of socio-ecological crises all manner of aesthetics are at pl... more This chapter contends that in times of socio-ecological crises all manner of aesthetics are at play in more-than-human processes of becoming. In a world out of joint, the conceptual apparatus inherited from western modernity no longer holds as a way to grasp our current socio-ecological predicaments. This warrants a complete overhaul of ‘modern’ aesthetics. Rather than a supplementary dimension of human values, the beautiful or the sublime, the aesthetic now manifests as a paramount dimension in fashioning, cultivating and sustaining more-than-human worlds. Hence, the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead is introduced as it transcends the modes of valorisation that define our present, providing a reading of our own present and the habits of thought that structure it. More importantly, Whitehead provides a functional more-than-human metaphysics with conceptual tools to reconceptualise the contours of aesthetics beyond the frameworks of modernity. In this ‘generalised aesthetics’, feeling and experience are centre-staged as fundamental to all modes of becoming. This approach is situated in relation to emerging perspectives in sociocultural research, notably STS and feminist technoscience, which eschew social and human-centered aesthetics, to wager that new modes of more-than-human sensitisations are required to exceed western abstractions and attune knowledge practices to experimental possibilities in worlding.
Empirismus und Spekulation, Metaphysik und Geschichtlichkeit gelten in der Philosophie der Modern... more Empirismus und Spekulation, Metaphysik und Geschichtlichkeit gelten in der Philosophie der Moderne als Gegensätze. Für William James und Alfred North Whitehead gehören sie notwendig zusammen. Diese vermeintlichen Gegensätze erfahren jedoch eine grundlegende Rekonstruktion: kein Empirismus ohne Spekulation, keine neue Metaphysik ohne einen radikalisierten Empirismus und Geschichtlichkeit – d.h. nicht ohne eine Reformulierung des Metaphysikverständnisses selbst. Das Buch von Melanie Sehgal führt in das Denken William James’ und Alfred North Whiteheads ein und eröffnet in einer Zusammenschau ihrer heterogenen Schriften neue Perspektiven auf beide Werke. Dabei schlägt es vor, James und Whitehead heute zu lesen. Ihr Denken wird nicht nur philosophie- und wissensgeschichtlich, sondern auch in aktuelle Theoriediskussionen an den Schnittstellen von Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaft eingebettet – insbesondere in Debatten um ein Denken ›nach den Zeichen‹, neue Materialismen und spekulative Denkformen. James und Whitehead heute zu lesen, heißt aber vor allem, nach der Aktualität der Gegenwartslektüre zu fragen, von der ihr Denken seinen Ausgang nimmt: der Diagnose einer Inkohärenz im modernen Naturbegriff. Heute, da die Konsequenzen moderner Lebens- und Denkweisen noch deutlicher als zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts zu Tage treten – während die Inkohärenzen des modernen Naturbegriffs überdauern –, könnte das Projekt einer radikal-empiristischen Metaphysik eine neue Aktualität und Relevanz gewinnen. Denn eine situierte Metaphysik ist keine Rückkehr zu überkommenen, metaphysischen Spekulationen oder eine neue Hinwendung zu den Dingen selbst. Sie ist vielmehr eine spezifisch philosophische Arbeit an den Denkgewohnheiten einer Epoche – und wird damit als eigene Form der Kritik lesbar.
More-Than-Human Aesthetics. Venturing Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature, 2024
This chapter raises the problem of unlearning the habit of organizing reality according to a bifu... more This chapter raises the problem of unlearning the habit of organizing reality according to a bifurcated concept of nature whose destructive consequences have become fully palpable in the present socio-ecological crises. It reconstructs, within Whitehead’s work, a narrative of how this ensemble of habits of thought and feeling operate and persist across time and space; a knowledge regime at the centre of which lies the modern research university. The chapter then raises the question of unlearning the bifurcation of nature for which aesthetic education proves crucial. It develops an understanding of aesthetic education from a Whiteheadian perspective, contrasting it with a Kantian and Schillerian conception, and discusses instances of aesthetic education practices that – although not explicitly formulated in view of Whitehead’s reading of modernity and its present crisis – can be read in light of them and thus, correspondingly, of a new, generalized aesthetic paradigm. Considering educational practices at Black Mountain College, a Native Alaskan Initiative of curriculum reform and the German conception of ‘studium generale’, the chapter uses the ‘school’ as a heuristic to discuss the potentials and pitfalls of a generalized aesthetic paradigm turned educational. Finally, the chapter returns to Whitehead’s own proposition for aesthetic education which he surprisingly locates in the realm of religion and spiritual experience.
Amitav Ghosh states that the «climate crisis is also a crisis of culture»; therefore, it is cruci... more Amitav Ghosh states that the «climate crisis is also a crisis of culture»; therefore, it is crucial to identify the assumptions and practices within the arts and humanities that contribute to the current socio-ecological crises, termed the Anthropocene. In this paper, I respond to this call which I read as a call to critically reflect on the humanities’ enmeshment in the current crisis as well as to inquire in their potential to contribute to transformation. I begin by briefly sketching how a key assumption of modernity according to A.N. Whitehead – a particular way of conceptualizing nature – continues to be operative today, structuring our way of thinking about ‘Nature’, ‘Culture’ or ‘Society’, as well as informing the role the realm of culture and the humanities are accorded (or not) today. Second, I develop the repercussions this wide-spread but implicit assumption has on thinking about experience within a modern cosmology. On this basis, I continue to explore the issue of sensing and experience in the context of today’s ecological disruptions in which, I argue, thinking beyond modern assumptions takes on prime importance. With the help of Jakob Johann von Uexküll and Thom van Dooren I think about the effects of extinction on various modes of experience. By means of ending, I ask whether (so-called) cultural practices such as the arts and humanities could contribute to working for transformation through what I call ‘the arts of the Anthropocene’. Could the humanities help with fostering new techniques of sensing in view of developing other sensibilities than those harbored by the Great Acceleration?
This essay inquires into the role and tasks of the humanities in the Anthropocene – a time and di... more This essay inquires into the role and tasks of the humanities in the Anthropocene – a time and discourse that is marked by knowledge generated predominantly within natural sciences such as earth system science and geology. By thinking through examples of a fruitful transdisciplinary engagement beyond the two cultures (such as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Four Theses or the proposition that the colonization of the Americas marks the beginning of the Anthropocene) I propose storytelling—engaging with the narratives of the Anthropocene in earth system science and geology—situating—reflecting on the material and environmental conditions of the humanities and their implicit holocenic presuppositions—and caring for the concepts and narratives that shape the way we grapple with the current crisis as three of the most important practices with which the humanities could address our present condition.
How to Relate. Wissen der Künste und relationale Praktiken, hg. von Annika Haas, Maximilian Haas, Hanna Magauer und Dennis Pohl, München: Fink Verlag (Reihe „Das Wissen der Künste“), 2021
This text explores techniques as mode of relating between participants with heterogeneous discipl... more This text explores techniques as mode of relating between participants with heterogeneous disciplinary backgrounds and addresses questions such as: What are the theoretical and historical necessities and constraints to re-think our modes of knowledge production today? What are the potentials, the gains and losses of considering these modes, and knowledge in general, as techniques? The text intersects theoretical and historical reflection, f.ex. on the history of specialization of knowledge production or on the notion of technique(s), with experiences of the transversal working group FORMATIONS that Melanie Sehgal co-leads with the artist Alex Martinis Roe. Since 2015 FORMATIONS has been experimenting with practical responses to the insufficiencies of modern categories of thought and their disciplinary and institutional sedimentations in view of creating techniques of transdisciplinary encounter.
More-Than-Human Aesthetics. Venturing beyond the Bifurcation of Nature, 2024
This chapter contends that in times of socio-ecological crises all manner of aesthetics are at pl... more This chapter contends that in times of socio-ecological crises all manner of aesthetics are at play in more-than-human processes of becoming. In a world out of joint, the conceptual apparatus inherited from western modernity no longer holds as a way to grasp our current socio-ecological predicaments. This warrants a complete overhaul of ‘modern’ aesthetics. Rather than a supplementary dimension of human values, the beautiful or the sublime, the aesthetic now manifests as a paramount dimension in fashioning, cultivating and sustaining more-than-human worlds. Hence, the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead is introduced as it transcends the modes of valorisation that define our present, providing a reading of our own present and the habits of thought that structure it. More importantly, Whitehead provides a functional more-than-human metaphysics with conceptual tools to reconceptualise the contours of aesthetics beyond the frameworks of modernity. In this ‘generalised aesthetics’, feeling and experience are centre-staged as fundamental to all modes of becoming. This approach is situated in relation to emerging perspectives in sociocultural research, notably STS and feminist technoscience, which eschew social and human-centered aesthetics, to wager that new modes of more-than-human sensitisations are required to exceed western abstractions and attune knowledge practices to experimental possibilities in worlding.
Empirismus und Spekulation, Metaphysik und Geschichtlichkeit gelten in der Philosophie der Modern... more Empirismus und Spekulation, Metaphysik und Geschichtlichkeit gelten in der Philosophie der Moderne als Gegensätze. Für William James und Alfred North Whitehead gehören sie notwendig zusammen. Diese vermeintlichen Gegensätze erfahren jedoch eine grundlegende Rekonstruktion: kein Empirismus ohne Spekulation, keine neue Metaphysik ohne einen radikalisierten Empirismus und Geschichtlichkeit – d.h. nicht ohne eine Reformulierung des Metaphysikverständnisses selbst. Das Buch von Melanie Sehgal führt in das Denken William James’ und Alfred North Whiteheads ein und eröffnet in einer Zusammenschau ihrer heterogenen Schriften neue Perspektiven auf beide Werke. Dabei schlägt es vor, James und Whitehead heute zu lesen. Ihr Denken wird nicht nur philosophie- und wissensgeschichtlich, sondern auch in aktuelle Theoriediskussionen an den Schnittstellen von Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaft eingebettet – insbesondere in Debatten um ein Denken ›nach den Zeichen‹, neue Materialismen und spekulative Denkformen. James und Whitehead heute zu lesen, heißt aber vor allem, nach der Aktualität der Gegenwartslektüre zu fragen, von der ihr Denken seinen Ausgang nimmt: der Diagnose einer Inkohärenz im modernen Naturbegriff. Heute, da die Konsequenzen moderner Lebens- und Denkweisen noch deutlicher als zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts zu Tage treten – während die Inkohärenzen des modernen Naturbegriffs überdauern –, könnte das Projekt einer radikal-empiristischen Metaphysik eine neue Aktualität und Relevanz gewinnen. Denn eine situierte Metaphysik ist keine Rückkehr zu überkommenen, metaphysischen Spekulationen oder eine neue Hinwendung zu den Dingen selbst. Sie ist vielmehr eine spezifisch philosophische Arbeit an den Denkgewohnheiten einer Epoche – und wird damit als eigene Form der Kritik lesbar.
More-Than-Human Aesthetics. Venturing Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature, 2024
This chapter raises the problem of unlearning the habit of organizing reality according to a bifu... more This chapter raises the problem of unlearning the habit of organizing reality according to a bifurcated concept of nature whose destructive consequences have become fully palpable in the present socio-ecological crises. It reconstructs, within Whitehead’s work, a narrative of how this ensemble of habits of thought and feeling operate and persist across time and space; a knowledge regime at the centre of which lies the modern research university. The chapter then raises the question of unlearning the bifurcation of nature for which aesthetic education proves crucial. It develops an understanding of aesthetic education from a Whiteheadian perspective, contrasting it with a Kantian and Schillerian conception, and discusses instances of aesthetic education practices that – although not explicitly formulated in view of Whitehead’s reading of modernity and its present crisis – can be read in light of them and thus, correspondingly, of a new, generalized aesthetic paradigm. Considering educational practices at Black Mountain College, a Native Alaskan Initiative of curriculum reform and the German conception of ‘studium generale’, the chapter uses the ‘school’ as a heuristic to discuss the potentials and pitfalls of a generalized aesthetic paradigm turned educational. Finally, the chapter returns to Whitehead’s own proposition for aesthetic education which he surprisingly locates in the realm of religion and spiritual experience.
Amitav Ghosh states that the «climate crisis is also a crisis of culture»; therefore, it is cruci... more Amitav Ghosh states that the «climate crisis is also a crisis of culture»; therefore, it is crucial to identify the assumptions and practices within the arts and humanities that contribute to the current socio-ecological crises, termed the Anthropocene. In this paper, I respond to this call which I read as a call to critically reflect on the humanities’ enmeshment in the current crisis as well as to inquire in their potential to contribute to transformation. I begin by briefly sketching how a key assumption of modernity according to A.N. Whitehead – a particular way of conceptualizing nature – continues to be operative today, structuring our way of thinking about ‘Nature’, ‘Culture’ or ‘Society’, as well as informing the role the realm of culture and the humanities are accorded (or not) today. Second, I develop the repercussions this wide-spread but implicit assumption has on thinking about experience within a modern cosmology. On this basis, I continue to explore the issue of sensing and experience in the context of today’s ecological disruptions in which, I argue, thinking beyond modern assumptions takes on prime importance. With the help of Jakob Johann von Uexküll and Thom van Dooren I think about the effects of extinction on various modes of experience. By means of ending, I ask whether (so-called) cultural practices such as the arts and humanities could contribute to working for transformation through what I call ‘the arts of the Anthropocene’. Could the humanities help with fostering new techniques of sensing in view of developing other sensibilities than those harbored by the Great Acceleration?
This essay inquires into the role and tasks of the humanities in the Anthropocene – a time and di... more This essay inquires into the role and tasks of the humanities in the Anthropocene – a time and discourse that is marked by knowledge generated predominantly within natural sciences such as earth system science and geology. By thinking through examples of a fruitful transdisciplinary engagement beyond the two cultures (such as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Four Theses or the proposition that the colonization of the Americas marks the beginning of the Anthropocene) I propose storytelling—engaging with the narratives of the Anthropocene in earth system science and geology—situating—reflecting on the material and environmental conditions of the humanities and their implicit holocenic presuppositions—and caring for the concepts and narratives that shape the way we grapple with the current crisis as three of the most important practices with which the humanities could address our present condition.
How to Relate. Wissen der Künste und relationale Praktiken, hg. von Annika Haas, Maximilian Haas, Hanna Magauer und Dennis Pohl, München: Fink Verlag (Reihe „Das Wissen der Künste“), 2021
This text explores techniques as mode of relating between participants with heterogeneous discipl... more This text explores techniques as mode of relating between participants with heterogeneous disciplinary backgrounds and addresses questions such as: What are the theoretical and historical necessities and constraints to re-think our modes of knowledge production today? What are the potentials, the gains and losses of considering these modes, and knowledge in general, as techniques? The text intersects theoretical and historical reflection, f.ex. on the history of specialization of knowledge production or on the notion of technique(s), with experiences of the transversal working group FORMATIONS that Melanie Sehgal co-leads with the artist Alex Martinis Roe. Since 2015 FORMATIONS has been experimenting with practical responses to the insufficiencies of modern categories of thought and their disciplinary and institutional sedimentations in view of creating techniques of transdisciplinary encounter.
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