Quasi-Things

Tonino Griffero, Sarah De Sanctis

Description

In this book, Tonino Griffero introduces and analyzes an ontological category he terms "quasi-things." These do not exist fully in the traditional sense as substances or events, yet they powerfully act on us and on our states of mind. He offers an original approach to the study of emotions, regarding them not as inner states of the subject, but as atmospheres, that is as powers poured out into the lived space we inhabit. Griffero first outlines the general and atmospheric characters of quasi-things, and then considers examples such as pain, shame, the gaze, and twilight—which he argues is responsible for penetrating and suggestive moods precisely because of its vagueness. With frequent examples from literature and everyday life, Quasi-Things provides an accessible aesthetic and phenomenological account of feelings based on the paradigm of atmospheres.
Preface

1. Quasi-Things Come and Go and We Cannot Wonder Where They’ve Been (Starting from the Wind)

2. Quasi-Things Assault and Resist Us: Feelings as Atmospheres

3. Quasi-Things Are Felt (though Not Localized): The Isles of the Felt-Body

4. Quasi-Things Are Proofs of Existence: Pain as the Genesis of the Subject

5. Quasi-Things Affect Us (Also Indirectly): Vicarious Shame

6. Quasi-Things Communicate with Us: From the Gaze to the Portrait (and Back)

7. Quasi-Things Are the More Effective the Vaguer They Are: Twilightness

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438464077
• Langue: English

Extrait

Quasi-Things
SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
Quasi-Things
The Paradigm of Atmospheres
Tonino Griffero
Translated by Sarah De Sanctis
Original Italian edition: Quasi-cose. La realtà dei sentimenti (Bruno Mondadori, 2013).
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Griffero, Tonino, author
Title: Quasi-things : the paradigm of atmospheres / Sarah De Sanctis, translator.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438464053 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438464077 (e-book)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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Contents Preface ONE Quasi-Things Come and Go and We Cannot Wonder Where They’ve Been (Starting from the Wind) TWO Quasi-Things Assault and Resist Us: Feelings as Atmospheres THREE Quasi-Things Are Felt (though Not Localized): The Isles of the Felt-Body FOUR Quasi-Things Are Proofs of Existence: Pain as the Genesis of the Subject FIVE Quasi-Things Affect Us (Also Indirectly): Vicarious Shame SIX Quasi-Things Communicate with Us: From the Gaze to the Portrait (and Back) SEVEN Quasi-Things Are the More Effective the Vaguer They Are: Twilightness Notes Bibliography Index
Preface
Fortunately, there first exists (apart from the light waves and nerve currents) the coloring and shine of things themselves, the green of the leaf and the yellow of the grain field, the black of the crow and the gray of the sky (Heidegger, 1967, 210).
Where I Started From: A Pathic Aesthetics
M y journey from an aesthetics of atmospheres 1 to an ontology of quasi-things has its frame of reference in the ambitious project of a “pathic aesthetics.” By “pathic” I do not mean pathetic or pathological, but rather the affective involvement that the perceiver feels unable to critically react to or mitigate the intrusiveness of. This very involvement is, for me, the core of the aesthetic sphere (in the etymological sense of aisthesis )—much more so than art and beauty. Philosophically rehabilitating pathicity means valorizing the ability to let oneself go—a skill so rare today that it appears surprisingly (and critically) very relevant nowadays; one could sum it up as the ability to be a means of what happens to us rather than subjects of what we do. This skill was obviously misunderstood by the rationalistic post-Enlightenment dogma of subjective sovereignty and finalistic action; and yet it is the main heuristic instrument of a pathic aesthetics. The practicability of the latter, though, entirely depends on our ability to welcome what “happens to us,” whether we like it or not, resisting the temptation both to transform the “given” into something “done” and to seek shelter from this contingency in (now compromised) late-Romantic nostalgias.
Only if we philosophically valorize what happens (to us) can pathic aesthetics—now emancipated from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century view of art as a continuation of religion and/or politics “with different means”—truly adopt Baumgarten’s idea (1750) that aesthetics is “also” a theory of sensible knowledge. Elsewhere I have defined it as a “thought of the senses” 2 —where the genitive is both subjective and objective—conceiving it as a non-gnostic but, indeed, pathic phenomenology (Straus). For this very reason, it is finally free from what is only one of the many possible conceptions of aesthetics—that of philosophy or even metaphysics of art. In fact, classic aesthetics is (a) idealistic in focusing on the work and its supposed autonomy, (b) metaphysical in considering art and beauty sub specie aeternitatis , (c) bourgeois in its full adherence to the process of civilization (through abstraction) of the European elite, (d) intellectual in focusing on judgment or interpretation rather than “experience” and in misunderstanding the role of felt-bodily sensitivity in the name of the (Kantian) alibi of “disinterested pleasure.” In short, classic aesthetics is governed by the same estrangement from and of nature that we find in the hard sciences and in the Enlightenment apology of the (alleged) autonomy of the subject.
However, as soon as one abandons this aesthetics “from above” and traces artworks back to (at most) exemplary cases of sensible perception, one sees that it is possible to avoid the frustrations caused both by transcendentalism—which is always bound to the analysis of the conditions of possibility—and by interpretationism (hermeneutics and semiotics), which is always bound to a necessarily deferred sense with respect to the “presence.” My pathic aesthetics, instead, intends to remain, against this twofold “bad infinity,” as faithful as possible to the presence—to the way in which “appearances” resound in our lived-body. My itinerary mainly consists in prescinding from special “things” such as artworks and from the traditional categories of aesthetics (beautiful, sublime, genius, etc.) so as to rather investigate atmospheric feelings 3 in the context of today’s aestheticization of the lifeworld and the so-called diffuse design, typical of late capitalist societies. The analysis of situations and atmospheric perceptions, constituting the first step of this wished-for pathic aesthetics, introduces us to the entities that, without being full objects, are present and active on us.
Therefore, I am interested in our ordinary (naïve) sensible experiences, especially when they are involuntary. 4 From the perspective of aesthetics of reception (so to speak), I am serious about the criterion of affectivity—of how “one feels” when experiencing the copresence of oneself (me) and a thing (or quasi-thing). From the perspective of aesthetics of production (so to speak), I wish to underline the competence of the “aesthetic work” that, objectifying or ( à la Baumgarten) perfecting sensible knowledge, has specialized indeed in the generation (or at least, evocation) of atmospheres. However, what changes here is the very meaning of experience. A pathic aesthetics, in fact, does not presuppose an interpretative and constructivist approach—that is, the idea that the world is given only through some reflective “access”—but rather supposes that there is a sense (in both meanings of the word) that is always already sedimented outside of us and can be verified through our felt-bodily and prereflexive communication with the world. Much of this comes from the impressions radiated by spaces, possibly inhabited by things, and, as we see in this book, also by quasi-things—in any case, by entities that fully coincide with their felt-bodily appearance “in act” (active and effective—indeed, wirklich ) and with their generating the affective situation ( Befindlichkeit ) in which we find ourselves. 5
The expressive qualities that, radiating atmospheres, become quasi-things are both particular natural phenomena (twilight, luminosity, darkness, the seasons, the wind, the weather, the hours of the day, the fog, etc.) and relatively artificial phenomena (townscape, music, soundscape, the numinous, dwelling, charisma, the gaze, shame, etc.). These qualities are salient not despite being apparent and ephemeral, but precisely because of that. And yet, for that very reason, Western thought (and sometimes common sense) considers them devoid of reality as opposed to full things, which are endowed with borders, separated from others, perduring in time, and are normally inactive if not touched. The present pathic and atmospherological aesthetics, which is (broadly) realist in rejecting the lazy explanatory hypothesis of associationist and projectivist type, emphasizes instead the cooperative relationship between perception and the more nuanced dimension of quasi-things, which, just like the ecstasy of things, emotionally tune their surroundings. 6 I want to offer an initial aesthetological and philosophical analysis of this pathic area, intermediate (“in between” indeed) but predualistic.
The core of this “in between,” however, is always the felt- or lived-body ( Leib ) ( ch. 2 )—that is, the non-physiological or anatomic dimension that always also presents itself as a task, as something we are daily responsible for—even more so when, like today, it is subject to (and threatened by) countless modifications and technological prostheses. Both the theories of atmospheres and that of quasi-things thus presuppose an adequate investigation of human felt-bodily living. They also seek to rehabilitate the specifically aesthetological paradigm of certainty, thought of as experientia vaga without rules, irreducible to an etiologic and genetic approach. However vague, because it underscores our affective hetero-determination, this experiential and sensible certainty attests our being-in-the-world better than other, traditionally privileged, states (including the cogito ).
In short: we must learn to “experience pathically” (in the right way), no longer regarding teleological efficiency as a phenomenologically privileged path. We must pay attention not to our role as subjects—which has been pathologically overestimated by modernity with well-known negative consequences—but to the pathic “to me” (or the per