The Work of Art in a Pragmatist Perspective, between Somaesthetics and Techno-aesthetics

• Main Author: Dario Cecchi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Firenze University Press 2019-11-01
• Series: Aisthesis
• Subjects: Techno-aesthetics, Somaesthetics, Art, Aesthetic Experience, Philosophical Anthropology
• Online Access: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/10724

John Dewey puts aesthetic experience at the center of his reflection on art and beauty, reconsidering it dynamically. Nowadays, this view opened the path to somaesthetics, a term coined by Richard Shusterman, and aesthetic anthropology. Here, it is argued that the contribution of pragmatist aesthetics could be further developed by exploring its analogies with techno-aesthetics, a paradigm proposed by French philosopher Gilbert Simondon in the early 1980s. Art occupies accordingly a special place within the different forms of aesthetic experience, being considered as a way of experimenting the impact of new technologies in the human experience. It is a process by which technologies create ‘devices’ for experimenting perception and reflection: namely, ways of reconstructing the nature of the human mind in-between body and technology, and by means of their interaction. Cinema reconsidered after Dewey’s fellow George H. Mead, offers an exemplary case as both artistic and technological devices.