Image, Art and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relation 3030677834, 9783030677831

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Roberto Diodato

Image, Art and Virtuality Towards an Aesthetics of Relation

Image, Art and Virtuality

Roberto Diodato

Image, Art and Virtuality Towards an Aesthetics of Relation

Roberto Diodato Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milan, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-67783-1 ISBN 978-3-030-67784-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67784-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Originally published in Italian in 2020 by Editrice Morcelliana srl with the title “Immagine, arte, virtualità: Per un’estetica della relazione”. Translation: Tessa Marzotto Caotorta. The rights for the Italian language version of the text are owned by Morcelliana, Brescia, 2020. The image on the cover is taken by a video installation of STUDIO AZZURRO PRODUZIONI s.r.l., MILANO, [email protected], and used with permission of STUDIO AZZURRO. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Paolo Rosa unforgettable friend

Preface

The title lays emphasis on some key concepts in the essay as well as on its underlying intention, as conveyed by the subheading. In this regard, it is worth anticipating, in the interest of the versed reader, that the expression “towards an aesthetics of relation” is neither meant to point to an aesthetics of “relational properties”—a path, this latter, variedly and efficaciously traced by most of contemporary endeavors in aesthetics—nor to an “aisthetics” of semi-things and atmospheres. It is also not an account of aesthetic experience as experience with—an interesting and recently efficaciously articulated path. The genitive in “aesthetics of relation” is both subjective and objective. It therefore outlines a simultaneously ontological and epistemological field. The aesthetic logos, that is to say, the logos which is aesthetic, hence a body as much as the body is logos, implies the relation as such, which is what makes what we call aesthetics possible, that is to say, to complete the circle, the exercising of aesthetic logos. By way of introduction, I would like to present a few quotations from great twentieth-century works, because it is around the issues they raise that I have articulated my proposal. Here are the fragments in chronological order: Cassirer, Substance, and Function: ‘The category of relation especially is forced into a dependent and subordinate position by this fundamental metaphysical doctrine of Aristotle. Relation is not independent of the concept of real being; it can only add supplementary and external modifications to the latter, such as do not affect its real “nature.”’1 I will not follow Cassirer’s retrieval of Kantian categories within a relational logic. He notably attempted to bring order to chaos by means of order functions within a progressive whole, which are, after all, serial matrixes. Nevertheless, I believe that—although the issue of the relation with Aristotle’s texts is very complex and reaches well beyond the limits of this work—the point made by the quotation is of the highest importance and deserves to be dealt with once more. Wittgenstein, Tractatus: ‘5.621 The world and life are one. 5.63 I am my world (the microcosm). 5.631 The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. If I wrote a book “The world as I found it,” I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then 1 Cassirer,

E. 1923. Substance and Function, Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, p. 8. vii

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would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made.’2 These statements, in my opinion, clarify the sense of our relation with the world not only beyond all kinds of naturalization and empiricist reduction, but also beyond all contrasting understanding of realism and idealism—how come they do not talk about solipsism “revealing itself”? Here we come, I believe, to the point of having said everything that can be said before a metaphysical account. At any rate, Wittgenstein introduces a sense of the word “I” that I share and that I will try to put center stage. Benjamin, Kaiserpanorama: ‘When it rained, there was no pausing out front to survey the list of fifty pictures. I went inside and found in fjords and under coconut palms the same light that illuminated my desk in the evening when I did my schoolwork. It may have been a defect in the lighting system that suddenly caused the landscape to lose its color. But there it lay, quite silent under its ashen sky. It was as though I could have heard even wind and church bells if only I had been more attentive.’3 This is the “Kaiser-Panorama” according to Benjamin’s description in Berlin Childhood; a matter, so to speak, or structure—the one visited by Benjamin was made out of wood, circular and equipped with stereoscopes in which images followed one another. The absence of sound and the absence of movement within the images used to trigger the unusual feeling of contemplative draw-in described by Benjamin; different from the effect of cinema, these images left unprocessed by imagination trigger a peculiar form of participation. Due to its both mimetic and phantasmagoric power, notwithstanding their extreme respective differences, this form of participation seems to me not very different from what is enabled by the virtual body-images. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology: ‘Once there was a time when the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful was called techn¯e. […] What, then, was art—perhaps only for that brief but magnificent time? Why did art bear the modest name techn¯e? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and hither, and therefore belonged within poi¯esis.’4 As is well known, Heidegger prompts us to think of technology as a destiny as well as to internally understand the sense of the machine from the viewpoint of the essence of technology—from the viewpoint of the “bottom,” as Heidegger would say. In the end, all things considered, what emerges as an indication is the belonging together of and essential affinity between techn¯e and poi¯esis as modes of bringing forth. This belonging together is what art somehow historicizes. This very setting-into-work concerns the truth of being; this is what becomes increasingly clear and what this book, certainly just a small attempt, would like to deal with. 2 Wittgenstein,

L. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translation by C.K. Ogden (and F.P. Ramsey), London: Kegan Paul. 3 Benjamin, W. 2006. Berlin Childhood around 1900, translation by H. Eiland, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 44. 4 Heidegger, M. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by W. Lovitt, New York/London: Garland Publishing, p. 26.

Preface

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In short: in the beginning was the relation. Moving from the notion of system, and through the scrutiny of few peculiar entities, such as, for instance, images, persons, works of art, and virtual bodies, I present to the reader an inquiry on relation as constitutive. The ideal, and simultaneously also concrete and historical, model for the said notion of relation is the one, stemming from theological speculation, of “subsistent relation.” This becomes especially clear by means of an inquiry into virtuality and its ontology as resistant to commonly available categories. Existing only thanks to interactivity, virtual bodies are indeed an ontological hybrid; the plexus of body and image, object and event, internal and external, artificial and living; existing only thanks to interactivity, they make an exemplary case for the primary nature of the category of relation, especially when appearing within the context of artistic operations opening new horizons of aesthetic and ethical potential. I am very grateful to Studio Azzurro for allowing me to use an image taken from their Video installation “In principio (e poi)” (transl. At the beginning (and then)) for the cover design. You can find more about this installation at https://www.studioazz urro.com/opere/in-principio-e-poi-2/. Milan, Italy

Roberto Diodato

Note to the Reader

This essay is the second edition of the book Relazione e virtualità. Un esercizio del logos estetico (Relation and Virtuality. Exercising Aesthetic Thinking), published in Italian in 2013. The text has been expanded by a third. I would like to thank the Publisher for welcoming this operation.

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Contents

1 System and Relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 The Idea of System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 From the Object to the System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.3 System and Substance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 1.4 Individuation Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 1.5 Relation and Virtuality: First Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 2 Relational Entities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Personhood-Abyss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Relational Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 The Relation in Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Image Relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27 27 30 35 43

3 Image, Art, Virtuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Aesthetic Experience and Virtuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Art and Virtuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Relational Spatialities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 The Vital Relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53 53 63 78 86

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About the Author

Roberto Diodato is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy, and at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Lugano, Switzerland. Interested in entangling the relationship between aesthetics and ontology, he has been studying the work of modern philosophers as well as some contemporary philosophical currents. His research also covered the relationship between aesthetics and cybertechnology. He is the author of several Italian books such as Sub specie aeternitatis. Luoghi dell’ontologia spinoziana (Mimesis, Milan, 2012), Logos estetico (Morcelliana, Brescia, 2012), and Decostruzionismo (Editrice Bibliografica, Milan, 2016), and co-editor with A. Somani of the Italian book Estetica dei media e della comunicazione (Il Mulino, Bologna, 2011). He is also the author of Aesthetics of the Virtual (State University of New York Press, Albany, 2012), The Sensible Invisible—Itineraries in Aesthetic Ontology (Mimesis International, 2016), and of Vermeer, Góngora, Spinoza: L’esthétique comme science intuitive (Éditions Mimésis, Paris, 2016).

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Chapter 1

System and Relation

1.1 The Idea of System ‘There is the realm of systems philosophy, that is, the reorientation of thought and world view following the introduction of “system” as a new scientific paradigm (in contrast to the analytic, mechanistic, linear-causal paradigm of classical science),’1 writes Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in reference to his General System Theory, a theory this latter that under many respects laid the ground for much of current systems science. The quotation above emphasizes the philosophical core of systems science. In this regard it is worth recalling whom the General System Theory is dedicated to: ‘Manibus Nicolai de Cusa Cardinalis, Gottfriedi Guglielmi Leibnitii, Joannis Wolfgangi de Goethe Aldique Huxleyi, necnon de Bertalanffy Pauli, S.J., antecessoris, cosmographi.’ It is a complex not inconsiderable tradition what leads Ludwig von Bertalanffy to the elaboration of his System Theory. Our starting point, however, is inspired to the last chapter of the General System Theory, the one of greatest theoretical interest, whose title reads: The Relativity of Categories. Here, Bertalanffy famously delves deep into Benjamin Whorf’s position. Originally a cultural anthropologist, Whorf argued that different observers ‘are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe.’2 As is well known, Whorf thus intended to point to the importance of linguistic backgrounds, notably one’s ties to one’s mother tongue as a precondition for the individual cutting up of the world, in other words one’s peculiar segment of experience of what we call nature. What matters here, at any rate, is to place some emphasis on the expression “physical evidence” and what—problematically—connects it to a “picture” of the universe. Bertalanffy sharpens the philosophical outtake of Whorf’s position while assessing to what extent some specific categories—heavily indebted to Aristotle and 1 Ludwig

von Bertalanffy, “The History and Status of General System Theory”, The Academy of Management Journal, vol. 15, n. 4, General System Theory (Dec. 1972), p. 421. 2 B. L. Whorf, Collected Papers on Metalinguistics, Foreign Service Institute, Department of State, Washington 1952, p. 52; quoted in GST, p. 223. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67784-8_1

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highly significant in physics and metaphysics, such as the category ‘of “substance,” “attributes” and “action” to the antithesis of matter and force, mass and energy’3 — rely on Indo-European linguistic patterns, where substantives, adjectives and verbs appear as basic units of grammar. Bertalanffy also wonders whether it is at all possible to translate by means of logical notations those languages which appear to rely on different fundamental patterns, for instance languages whose underlying understanding of time does not foresee the differentiation of tenses and which, thereby, do not insist on accountable experiential reports, not on calendars, clocks, chronologies, not even on historical accounts, archeologies, etc. For someone who ‘has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past,’4 what would be the purpose of the categories of time and space? For such a person the world is “what is manifest,” what is accessible to a dynamically-understood aisthesis, as activity-passivity, active and passive life form, action and reaction, whose many aspects are identified as ‘durative, perfective, usitative, repetitive, iterative, optative, semifactive, momentaneous, progressive, transitional, conative, etc.’5 Whorf would then ask ‘How would a physics constructed along these lines work, with no t (time) in its equations? […] Of course, v (velocity) would have to go, too.’6 Bertalanffy also points to the wide fortune in Indo-European languages of spatial metaphors expressing non-spatial relations, whereas the languages studied by Whorf tend to designate what we call “physical objects” by means of psychological metaphors. In short, while it is fair to claim that our language captures our experience of reality, caution is required when claiming that our language unconditionally captures reality in its truth, or that reality is immediately or even mediately translatable in exhaustive formal terms. Different forms of language grasp indeed equally evident, yet very different, reality experiences. Reality displays then a more complex and more interesting face than what our languages are able to express. It is probably unnecessary to take on Whorf’s theory on the linguistic determination of knowledge, nor should one necessarily subscribe to the claim that ‘Newtonian space, time and matter are no intuitions. They are receipts from culture and language.’7 One could also refrain from joining party with La Barre and infer from Whorf that ‘Aristotelian Substance and Attribute look remarkable like Indo-European nouns and predicate adjectives. […] But we must remember all the time that E = mc2 is also only a grammatical conception of reality in terms of Indo-European morphological categories of speech.’8 This is after all an eminently philosophical and rather complicated matter. Bertalanffy’s leanings in relation to these claims are nevertheless worth our interest, as they establish the very ground on which his system theory develops. The categories organizing 3 GST,

p. 223. L. Whorf, Collected Papers on Metalinguistics, p. 67; cit. in GST, p. 224. 5 GST, p. 224. 6 B. L. Whorf, Collected Papers on Metalinguistics, p. 7; cit. in GST, p. 224. 7 B. L. Whorf, Collected Papers on Metalinguistics, p. 7; cit. in GST, p. 225. 8 W. Labarre, The Human Animal, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1954, p. 301; cit. in GST, p. 225. 4 B.

1.1 The Idea of System

3

our knowledge are biological and cultural and ‘There is no intrinsic justification to consider as “true” representation of the world what we take to be “normal” experience.’9 Our sense perceptions ‘need not mirror the “real” world; they must, however, be isomorphic to it to such degree as to allow orientation and thus survival. […] What traits of reality we grasp in our theoretical system is arbitrary in the epistemological sense, and determined by biological, cultural and probably linguistic factors.’10 A changing relation would then subsist between a relatively permanent biology, invariably affecting our perceptions, and a relatively differentiated culture, such a relation being all the more unstable and dynamic, the more it is connected to the rapid technological transformations of the world and of the human body itself. We will have to come back to this decisive point, but for the time being it is worth focusing on what impact all this has on system models’ specific functions as promoted by the General System Theory, as well as on subsequent researches. Notably, ‘The model of the organism as open system has proved useful in the explanation and mathematical formulation of numerous life phenomena; […] it is not only of scientific but also of “meta-scientific” importance. The mechanistic concept of nature predominant so far emphasized the resolution of happenings into linear causal chains; […] In contrast to this, in the theory of open systems (and its further generalization in general system theory), principles of multivariable interaction (e.g., reaction kinetics, fluxes and forces in irreversible thermodynamics) become apparent, a dynamic organization of processes and a possible expansion of physical laws under consideration of the biological realm.’11 Based on these preliminary remarks, the ever so powerful—especially for scientific and philosophical researches—general notion of system becomes highly interesting. A philosophy of systems is in conclusion ‘the reorientation of thought and world view following the introduction of “system” as a new scientific paradigm (in contrast to the analytic, mechanistic, linear-causal paradigm of classical science).’12 What matters is therefore to acknowledge that we cut experience in a given way, and this is inevitably a conditional cutting, incessantly trying to establish itself as a mimetic model of experience itself. The notion of system is but an interesting cutting tool. More than others, it prevents us from falling into ill-suited simplifications, as it enforces looking for translation models for each theory’s language—be it physical, chemical, biological, etc.—hence the clear display of the linguistic structures on which each model relies and finally the—at least presumptive—awareness of the premises of said structures. Now, according to Bertalanffy, ‘A system can be defined as a complex of interacting elements. Interaction means that elements, p, stand in relations, R, so that 9 GST,

p. 231. pp. 241 and 245. 11 GST, pp. 153–154. 12 L. von Bertalanffy, “The History and Status of General System Theory”, The Academy of Management Journal, vol. 15, n. 4, General System Theory (Dec. 1972), p. 421. This prompting has been taken up, in my opinion, also by theoretically more cautious physicists; cf. Del Giudice, E. (2010). Una viaquantistica alla teoria dei sistemi, in Strutture di mondo. Il pensiero sistemico come specchio di una realtà complessa, ed. L. Urbani Ulivi, 47–70. il Mulino: Bologna. 10 GST,

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the behavior of an element p in R is different from its behavior in another relation, R ’13 ; this definition accounts for the classical principle stating that ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts,’ based on which, on the one hand, the so called parts are not explainable, or better their behavior cannot be explained in terms of their properties, in terms of what they are taken to be in themselves, as if they could be isolated from the whole of which they are parts; on the other hand, the characteristics, properties, behaviors of the whole or “complex” turn out to be “emerging” or “new” compared to those of the parts in themselves. Hence, Bertalanffy’s interesting remark that ‘a system as total of parts with its interrelations has to be conceived of as being composed instantly’14 ; Instantly here means with no mediation. A system is in itself complex, essentially complex. It will then be our task to investigate the nature of the “complex” and of the composition, how this latter can be said to be, chronologically and by nature, prior to the “parts” or “elements” of the complex, in what sense, that is, the interactions are institutive of the parts and the relations constitutive of the elements. In order to better frame these delicate issues we may want to plunge into the most radical consequences of the very idea of system. And to do that we may follow the road traced by Edgar Morin in the first volume of his famous discourse on the method.15

1.2 From the Object to the System Morin’s reference helps us to briefly outline the crucial transition “from the object to the system”16 in the quest for truth. What is at stake here is the dismissal of the “monarchy of the substantial object and of the elementary unity” as brought about by an interpretation of reality easily confirmed by our daily perceptions, based on which ‘we grasp objects which seem to us autonomous in their environment, outside our understanding, endowed with their own reality’17 ; hence classical physics, ‘founded under the banner of objectivity, namely of a universe constituted of isolated objects (in a neutral space) governed by laws objectively universal. In this vision the object exists in a positive fashion […] It is substantial; constituted of matter having ontological fullness, it is self-sufficient in its being. The object is thus a closed and distinct entity,

13 GST,

pp. 55–56. p. 55 (my emphasis). 15 Cf. E. Morin, La Méthode. 1. La Nature de la Nature, Edition du Seuil, Paris 1977; eng. tr. by J.L. Roland Bélanger, Method, Towards a Study of Humankind, vol. 1. The Nature of Nature, Peter Lang, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Paris, Wien, 1992 (Henceforth MT). 16 Part of what is said here was already included in an essay by the author published in Italian, Diodato, R. 2010. Il corpo virtuale come esempio di sistema, in Strutture di mondo. Il pensiero sistemico come specchio di una realtà complessa, ed. L. Urbani Ulivi, 249–269. Bologna: il Mulino. 17 MT, p. 93. 14 GST,

1.2 From the Object to the System

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which is defined by isolation in its existence, its characteristics and properties, independently of its environment.’18 Hence, according to Morin, the analytical approach of scientific research, the experimental isolation, the descriptions of complex things in terms of simple elements and composition rules, the objective being in conclusion elementary units and, ideally, general laws. It is Morin’s opinion that such a world view dissolves, within the realm of physics, at the beginning of the twentieth century, thanks to a new, progressively more complex understanding of the notion of atom—briefly retraced by Morin up to the emerging of the notion of “field” of interactions—19 which not only undergoes a critical review of its order and unity, but also a genuine identity crisis when it comes to its element or ultimate particle status: ‘Thus, no longer being a true object nor a true elementary unit, the particle opens up a double crisis: the crisis of the idea of object and the crisis of the idea of element.’20 The idea weaves then its way in that the prime or ultimate element of the physical universe is actually a “system.” It is unclear, however, whether this “system” may somehow be defined as an “object,” and if so, in what terms. In this regard Morin’s vocabulary swings between a “new object,” a “systemic object” and other similar expressions. What’s clear to him it that we are dealing with something ‘whose explanation can no longer be found solely in the nature of its elementary components, but is found also in its organizational and systemic nature.’21 The effects of these—relatively—recent findings of physics are, according to Morin, exceptionally powerful. Once it is accepted that the basic theoretical object of physics is a “system,” then ‘because this system […] constitutes the true texture of what is the physical universe, […] we see that the universe is founded […] on a complex system! […] All the key objects of physics, biology, sociology, astronomy, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, societies, stars, and galaxies constitute systems. […] All that was object has become system. All that was even an elementary unit, including and especially the atom, has become system.’22 Morin consequently attempts to find or put together a definition of “system.” Now, the definitions he selects and expands entail two main aspects: ‘the first is the interrelation of the elements, the second is the global unity constituted by these elements in interrelation. In fact most of the definitions of the notion of system, from the 17th century up to the systematists of General Systems Theory, recognize these two essential traits, stressing at one time the trait of totality or globality, at another the relational trait.’23 Morin quotes, obviously, von Bertalanffy’s definition (‘a system is a set of unities with relationship among them’), but also Maturana and Varela’s (a system is ‘any definable set of components’), and Rapoport’s (a system is ‘a whole which functions as a whole by virtue of the parts which constitute them’). He then briefly mentions some definitions that do not immediately rely on 18 Ibidem. 19 Cf.

MT, pp. 109–110. p. 95. 21 MT, p. 95. 22 MT, p. 96. 23 MT, p. 99. 20 MT,

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elements or parts, but rather on “sets of states” or “sets of events,” and ends his review with the definition he deems best articulated and most appropriate, the author of which, however, is no theoretician of systems, but one of the founding fathers of twentieth century linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure: a system is ‘an organized totality, made up of interdependent elements holding together and not able to be defined except one by the other in function of their place in this totality.’24 The concept of organization surfaces in this definition and, according to Morin, its task is the compelling integration and connection of the concepts of totality and interrelation, thus allowing the conclusion that ‘Thenceforth, we can conceive system as the global unity organized by interrelations between elements, actions, or individuals.’25 Based on these remarks, Morin establishes a whole framework for epistemological and scientific research that we are nowadays able to assess in its results and limits. This is however not part of our focus, as what interests us is rather the philosophical inquiry ensuing from the definition of systems and its application. Morin’s position has been here taken as paradigmatic for its clear formulation of the whole issue. Two points are indeed well established, (i) that “system” is first of all a way to signify the element of the physical world, and (ii) that any “object” in this world, from the atom to society, can be interpreted as “system.” However, the meaning of “element”—as well as that of other recurring terms in the definitions of system, e.g., unity, component, individual, part and, to a certain extent, also whole, totality, globality, and set—is conflicting with that of “system.” In a footnote, Morin attempts to provide further clarification. While making reference to the “system” as “interrelation of elements,” he writes, ‘The term element, here, does not return to the idea of simple and substantial unity, but is relative to the whole to which it belongs. Thus, the “elements” of systems we are going to speak of (molecules, cells, etc.) are themselves systems (which become thenceforth subsystems), and/or events, and/or individuals (complex beings endowed with a strong organizing autonomy).’26 Given the “system” as “element”—or atom, that is to say indivisible, defying analysis—any “system” is infinitely complex and all unity is denied. However, once unity is essentially denied, the identity of the system can no longer be assessed without difficulty. This is not merely an epistemological problem, pertaining to the recognition or definition of the system, but also an ontological one, as without identity, strictly speaking, also entity is missing. As a result, two scenarios unravel here. The first, philosophically interesting, but probably not a radical position, upholds a complex view of reality. “System” would be a multiplicity of interrelated elements, such that the relations between the elements constitute a whole, an “organized global unity,” whose performances exceed what each part in isolation may offer.27 Hence the methodological approach of systems theory, which can take 24 See

the definitions’ references in MT, p. 99. p. 99 (emphasis in the text). 26 MT, p. 409, Notes to pp. 6, 91–150. 27 Among the most recent definitions of system, I am inclined to accept the one given by Lucia Urbani Ulivi: ‘According to systemic thinking, an object should be described as an organization of parts connected by relations, and having properties that parts do not have; such properties are 25 MT,

1.2 From the Object to the System

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as its object any “system” phenomenon, that is to say whole fields of research (e.g., the “objects of physics” or of biology, or of engineering, theories themselves, or even “knowledge” itself), and pay attention in particular to their internal relations, interactions, and multiple levels. Systems are in this perspective complex organized unities producing emergencies and ties. In them, the organization, the global unity itself (the “whole”), some of the properties emerging from the organization and the global unity are all an exceedance. In the same basket also go the superadditive composition rules mentioned by von Foerster.28 It is worth noting, together with Morin, that within this perspective it is both true that the “whole” is more than “the sum of parts,” and that the “whole” is less than “the sum of parts,” in other words that some ‘properties attached to the parts considered isolatedly disappear inside the system.’29 This is so because a “system” is also a system of ties, based on which its elements take on the limits imposed by the relations and thereby cannot realize, inside the system, all the states available to them. We have then a phenomenology of complexity, which is able, at least in theory, to account for the efficacious action of the relations among elements, such efficacy eluding the borders of any reductionist epistemology and, possibly, of any (reductionist) ontology. The normalization of the idea of system, as operated by the above outlined perspective, amounts however to avoiding to go deeper into the power of the idea of system, that is to say, to keep inhabiting the traditional understanding of “relations” as substitutive or secondary to the idea of element. Reality is thereby still conceived in terms of complex sets of elements, although these latter may clearly be taken as dynamic and not as merely passive materiality. The sovereignty of the “element-of” notion is thus perpetuated and the “system” conceived according to the ontology of the element. Remarkable gains can undoubtedly be recorded nonetheless; the leading notion of “substance,” duly understood in contrast with the idea of substrate, can hold on to its supremacy in a purified form of ontology, without physicalist premises and a generally open attitude toward new integrations. These latter may even stem from explanations based on meta-empirical grounds as necessary framework for states of affairs or physical events. Thus understood, the system as “unity made of interrelated elements” emphasizes the importance of the relation in the emergence of something invisible, which is the condition of possibility for the existence of the system itself. It thereby provides a framework which is able to fully grasp the limits and gaps of analytic ontology, or at least its inherent problems and open questions. It may, however, not be fully enough to grasp the theoretical peculiarity of the idea of system. If one were to claim, as, based on this perspective, you might be inclined to, that ‘it is the system that has a metaphysical and epistemological privilege, in

called “emergent,” or “second level,” or “systemic properties.”’ Urbani Ulivi, L. 2018. Mind and Body. Whose? Philosophy of Mind and the Systemic Approach, in The Systemic Turn in Human and Natural Sciences. A Rock in the Pond, ed. L. Urbani Ulivi, 195. Switzerland/New York: Springer. 28 Cf. H. von Foerster, Communication among Automata, “American Journal of Psychiatry”, 118, 1962, pp. 866–867. 29 MT, p. 127.

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the sense that an entity does not “exist” if not as part of the system,’30 this position, although remarkable, would not per se guarantee any metaphysical privilege to the system, but only a more attentive approach to the knowledge of things. The entity is in fact still existing, precisely as part, that is to say as element of the system. As previously remarked, this is the perspective adopted by the systems theory in the varied fields of its application and it can be taken as prolific in developments thanks to its anti-reductionist core and its proximity to powerful intuitions of common sense, which find an adequate sense of reality in the identification procedures of regular speech acts. The other perspective—non-alternative to the first one—simply claims that “system” is by no means reducible to “element,” since, if each “element” is a system, either “systems” are positively conceived or we have an infinite regress. Moreover, provided that the “element”—both taken simply as element or in its component functions—is what is ontologically equal to the “object,” “system” then does not mean “object,” no matter how we understand this latter—be it the combination of material substratum and properties, substance and accidents, a bundle of properties or a bundle of tropes—even if we were to take it as a unity of elements obviously interrelated. Even in this latter case, in fact, relations are taken as properties of the elements-parts forming the systems, based on which what one may call “system-object” turns out to be endowed of relational properties. Differently, the system can be understood as a relational structure, and the relations can be assessed in themselves, with no need to transform relations in elements. “Relations” are here understood in contrast to “relational property,” as the relation without which there is no identity, therefore no existence. The very notion of “relational property” is certainly not easy to clarify. What it commonly refers to are the “internal” relations, that is to say, those existing between two entities due to their “intrinsic properties.” This implies an ontology: the existence of entities, objects, individuals “endowed” with properties. “Internal” relations differ from “external” relations then, inasmuch as knowledge concerning the latter can proceed aside from the intrinsic properties of the entities. External relations might however not exist. It is hard to understand, in fact, if not through infinite regress, why there should be an external relation among entities if this latter does not depend on intrinsic properties among the considered entities. This implies an outright questioning of the notion of individuation, inasmuch as the external relations in said ontologies work as principle of individuation. Furthermore, the infinite reduction affects also the internal relations and the intrinsic properties which produce them, at least if one wishes to differentiate the entity, object, thing, element, from its properties, and assume that the entity is in a given relation with its properties. One might then conclude that there are no intrinsic properties. Given certain premises, this result seems inevitable, although it means to argue that the existence of any individual is self-contradictory. Another possible path might then be of some interest. What is at stake is an attempt to understand and articulate a sense of relation which 30 M. Dell’Utri, Introduzione in Olismo, M. Dell’Utri (ed.), Quodlibet, Macerata 2002, p. VII (my transl.).

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is able to avoid hypostatization whenever taken in itself, that is to say, a relation which does not turn into res, element-of or part-of. Here starts an investigation that avails itself of the example of some ontological hybrids (hybrids between thing and event, internal and external, body and image) as well as of the contribution of analogy as together—inextricably together—epistemological and ontological access point. Analogy is not in fact a systemic property, but rather what allows us to understand the system as the expression of an ontology of relations. Claiming that the entity—each entity is a system—is not univocal or equivocal but analogous means to understand it as a relational structure. This amounts to stating that the entity is relation. Therefore, the identity of the entity—a deictically designated entity—and its non-abstract definition not only should be analogically understood, that is to say, within a network of similarities and based on degrees of proportion, but also are to be taken as in themselves analogical. This means that the reason why the network of similarities can be grasped is that without it the entity does not exist. Now, analogy means similarity. And the similarity is a primitive; it has no master; it is a primary factor, which brings order and hierarchy in differential relations, starting from itself; it does not decay into a simile, which is serial propagation with no beginning and no end, valid in any direction; it does not belong to the regime of representation, and also not to that of repetition; not to that of models or to that of simulacra. From an epistemological point of view, this is shown by the fact that similarity is the condition of possibility; from an ontological point of view, saying that analogy is the proprium of identity simply translates the idea that the entity is a metaphysical composition of actus and essentia. Such a composition does not imply a relation among elements, but rather an intrinsic and indistinguishable relation between the creative—hence dynamic, transgressive—energy and the limit which defines it while transitioning to something else. Since actuality is the condition of identity, the individual in its thisness can only be expressed in terms of dynamics, that is, as time. This does not necessarily contradict the analogy of attribution concerning what is traditionally said to have being in itself, that is to say, the ousia. This latter should not be understood, at least not primarily, as hypokeimenon (substantia, subjectum, substratum, etc.), but rather as what is signified by the Ancient Greek expression (to ti en einai) that Middle-Age scholars would translate as quod quid erat esse. From a metaphysical point of view, this formula suggests that the entity is a temporal relation; it stands for a difference inhabiting identity, as if the ousia could somehow only be grasped as a past unfolding in its constituting relations, and never as a chronological “now.” In other words: not a hypokeimenon which persists in time—as if time was something different from persisting—but ousia which is time as relation—since persisting is nothing but temporal relation (relative persisting of relations) and what persists is the dynamic plexus, or dynamic organization, of relations. Simondon—who will later be summoned again—would say: the individual is an individuation process, and this is so, I would add, because being is analogical. It may be the case, on an incidental note, that the allegory could qualify as the language of this process, inasmuch as it is the expression of relations, and not of relational properties. What’s more, it is a free, not arbitrary language. Within the context that I have attempted to briefly outline, in fact, the analogy does not clash against the univocity of what is a fact. It does not

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suggest that the entity is essentially unique, or that an expressive power could unveil said unicity via hints (or symbols). The analogy rather supports the plurality inhabiting the entity (or event, inasmuch as an entity is a monotonous event). The entity is one-many not related-to, but essentially open to relations. Now, the analogy is said in the allegory, understood as mode of expression of what is different, unfolding as such, simultaneously plural and singular, in history, through unlimited similarities and always to be tentatively translated, or rather, otherwise said, through true fictions. At any rate, what allows us to do that without hypostatizing the relation, and without immediately taking it simply as causal relation,31 can be better grasped, possibly, in reference to a few entities which make best display of their systemic nature. I hope to be able, thanks to these examples, to show, at least, the possibility of multiple levels of reading of reality. The following types of problematic entities, which can be inspected by means of different strategies featuring the topic of relations, can be mentioned here: the entities studied by quantum field theory—to which systemics understood as philosophy of physics is applied—the entities that we are accustomed to call people, the so-called works of art, and the virtual bodies. To these, an entity totally of its own kind can be added, which works also as an underlying model for the understanding of the world as relational structure, that is the holy Trinity. As far as quantum field theory is concerned, which would obviously deserve an in-depth investigation, reasons of interest are clear under at least two respects: (i) it has revived the philosophical debate on the possibility to establish the identity and ontological status of “elementary particles” in terms of “objects” and in terms of “material” and “natural” objects, thereby allowing the surging of conceptual approaches dissolving the notions of element and elementary particle into the notion of “field,” which is in turn articulated, according to the several interpreters, respectively in events, processes, structures understood as networks of relations, or “factors”32 ; (ii) inherently to the issue of the discernibility of what for convenience 31 It is maybe possible to interpret interactive relations as a unique form of causality, while keeping in mind that also causes are systems. It is also true that the notion of causal relation and, in general, the notion of causality are difficult to define—contemporary physics clearly gives a hard time to any mechanistic or processual understanding of causality—to the point that recent studies, rather than looking for an “objective causal relation,” try to understand the several ways in which entities, states of affairs, events can be interconnected. A pluralist understanding of causality is thus emerging more and more in the scientific literature, which sheds light on the intersections between different approaches (the processual, counterfactual, or manipulative one, etc.). An interesting example of an approach consistent, in my opinion, with the above outlined systemic perspective of the first type is provided by Peter Menzies, who claims that context-sensitivity is inherent to the truth conditions of causal statements (cf. P. Menzies, Difference-Making in Context, in Causation and Counterfactuals, eds. J. Collins, N. Hall, L. A. Paul, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004, pp. 139–180, in particular p. 151). 32 On the several positions on this matter, see M. Kulmann, H. Lyre, A. Wayne (eds.), Ontological Aspects of Quantum Field Theory, World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 2002. Especially on the incompatibility between quantum field theory and the metaphysics of substance, see Peter Simons and Johanna Selbst’s essays; interesting remarks on the topic of relation are provided by Brigitte Falkenburg, especially at pp. 246–250.

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sake we keep calling elementary particles, the debate in physics33 has made clear that we need to understand relations as different from relational properties.34 The difference between the two is, however, rather subtle: ‘relational properties presuppose the existence of the individuals who possess them, while relations can be understood as first of all owned by the whole of interrelated entities.’35 The language expressing this point is, as anyone can see, rather laborious, almost forced to refer back to the whole made of entities. The meaning is nevertheless clear. Granted that relations can identify what we call “objects,” then ‘we must accept the idea that relations can, at least in some cases, not be subordinate to the objects they connect and rather determine the identity itself of those objects. In other words, we must accept the view according to which—at least in some cases—relations are ontologically primary, or at least that monadic and relational properties (plus, possibly, the material substrata), on the one hand, and relations, on the other, are “created” together.’36 In this regard, those studies in the realm of quantum physics that investigate non-perturbative systems prove very interesting from an ontological point of view.37 Notably, the idea of “natural object” ensuing from these studies is particularly noteworthy. These inquiries on matter—developed after the discovery of collective modes and their behaviors in gauge fields, and certainly requiring a revision of the concepts of “matter” and “cause”—emphasize indeed the existence of entities that are non-existent in themselves, non-existent, that is, independently of the structure in which they exist, and yet necessary to the functional existence of the structure, to its typical organization and its typical manifesting as endowed of overall properties when observed.38

33 For a relatively updated introduction (last updated in 2006) and a wide bibliography, see M. Kuhlmann, Quantum Field Theory, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring ed. 2009 (PDF file at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/quantumfield-theory), in particular § 5. 34 Reformulating the idea of elementary particle means first of all dealing with the issue of identity. In this regard, Saunders believes that non-reflexive relations allow to maintain a weak version of the discernibility principle. The applicative example made by Saunders features the subatomic particles called fermions. See S. Saunders, Physics and Leibniz’s Principles, in K. Brading, E. Castellani (eds.), Symmetries in Physics: Philosophical Reflections, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003, pp. 5–6 (the numbering of pages is based on the PDF file available at https://philsci-arc hive.pitt.edu). 35 M. Morganti, Che cos’è un oggetto, Carocci, Roma 2010, pp. 59–60 (my transl.); see also Dorato, M. and Morganti, M., 2013, “Grades of Individuality. A Pluralistic View of Identity in Quantum Mechanics and the Sciences”, Philosophical Studies, 163: 591–610; Morganti, M., 2009, “Inherent Properties and Statistics with Individual Particles in Quantum Mechanics”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 40: 223–231. 36 M. Morganti, Che cos’è un oggetto, p. 61 (my transl.). 37 For theoretical introduction and general bibliography, see G. Vitiello, Oggetto, percezione e astrazione in fisica, in F. Desideri, G. Matteucci (eds.), Dall’oggetto estetico all’oggetto artistico, Firenze University Press, Firenze, 2006, pp. 11–21. 38 Cf. G. Vitiello, Oggetto, percezione e astrazione in fisica, p. 15 e p. 17.

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1.3 System and Substance The linguistic difficulties mentioned above show how difficult it may be to give up entirely on the notion of element as prime and ultimate entity, as support pole; and how tempting it may be instead to try and uphold a systemic perspective intersecting the epistemological and ontological grounds by means of a Neo-Aristotelian strategy. As is well-known, such a strategy39 establishes system and substance as identical, and identifies substance by means of the criteria of support and essence; According to it ‘the criterion of support is fulfilled by all those entities that are not attributes of something else. […] In actual terms, this criterion is precisely employed to distinguish the entities which match the logical definition of an object from those which do not, that is to say accidents in the Aristotelian sense’40 ; while the essence criterion ‘is met by all those entities that are ontologically independent and structured.’41 Clearly, the first criterion is inclusive as much as the second is exclusive. The first criterion can include, for instance, what we call elementary particles (the constituents, for instance, of a cell), cells (as constituents, for instance, of an organ), organs (as constituents, for instance, of an organism) etc.; whereas the second criterion excludes elementary particles precisely because they are the constituents of cells, cells because they are the constituents of organs, etc. The essence criterion would furthermore exclude, at first sight and regardless for a moment of all the matter’s complex details, those “entities” which seem to be designed or constructed, inasmuch as they only have an extrinsic structure—determined not only by its state function but also by the project superimposed to it. It must be added, then, that, given that the support criterion is necessary but not sufficient, the ontological independence of substance, that is to say of any system, must be referring to the dynamism of the support, that is to say, in Aristotelian terms, its final causality. This latter must also be constitutive of its structure or essence, which means it must be at the same time final causality and formal causality; in systemic terms this means that: ‘a structured individual has a dynamism finalized in itself when its behavior is functional to the structure, that is to say when the behavior function is as such that it makes the system’s preservation conditions stable. […] A distinction has to be introduced between system conditions that allow the persisting of the structure and system conditions leading to the destruction of the system itself.’42 However, such a distinction, besides relying, obviously, on the possibility to distinguish system and system conditions, it also relies ‘on the possibility to identify structures that are not part of more comprehensive systems.’43 Hence, in order to identify—or even simply define—the requisites of independent structures, we are not only forced to include in 39 I follow here the line of reasoning of Alessandro Giordani’s well-written essay, which explains this strategy very clearly. See A. Giordani, L’ontologia della sostanza alla luce della teoria dei sistemi, in L. Urbani Ulivi (ed.), Strutture di mondo, cit., pp. 197–229 (Henceforth OS). 40 OS, p. 223 (my transl.). 41 Ibidem. 42 OS, p. 224. 43 Ibidem (emphasis mine).

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our vocabulary terms such as “permanence” and “part,” together with the whole range of issues that go with them—which will be left aside for the time being—but we might even resort to admit that the very concept of “independent structure”—inasmuch as it clearly entails the issues of individuality and the principle of individuation— turns out to be problematic. This is all the more so because ‘as long as a top limit cannot be identified, some systems can always be interpreted as sub-systems of more comprehensive systems.’44 One might here wonder whether a “bottom” limit should also be identified, provided such a terminology made sense, being directions actually relative. One last way out of this embarrassing deadlock for Aristotelian ontology might well exist though. ‘The only available criterion, Giordani says, is to identify independent systems and fundamental systems, that is to say those systems whose functioning is determined by the fundamental laws of the world.’45 Regardless, for the moment, of the reference to “fundamental” laws, one may here spot the introduction of an interesting chiasm between epistemology and ontology, or between model and system. The underlying question is how this twine can be possibly disentangled. What is at stake here is, ultimately, how to ‘separate the identity of a system, that is to say, the ontological side of the system, and its identification, that is to say, its epistemological side relying on the introduction of some model.’46 Now, provided a model can support the identification of a system, this latter could be identified as being ultimately independent only based on a correct model of the world, formulated in terms of fundamental laws describing the elementary substance. However, if such laws are laws of physics, and if these ‘elementary substances are systems that can be identified by the fundamental laws of the world, which are typically described by physics,’47 even overlooking the cumbersome issues ensuing from so challenging a premise—e.g., whether a correct model of the world may exist, whether fundamental laws exist, etc.—we anyway find ourselves back exactly where we started. How to identify elementary substances is still an issue pertaining primarily—but not only— to today’s theory of physics in the light of its contamination by systemics. And given that no univocal answer to the question of “elementary substances” seems to be able to gather consensus in contemporary physics, one can hardly imagine what answers will be made available by future research. The Neo-Aristotelian route allows us at any rate to lay emphasis on a few points. First of all, it establishes the ontological possibility of basic systems which cannot be taken as sub-sets of more complex systems. Hence, an analogy is established between these basic systems and the structure of a system face to the system conditions, thus taking the structure as invariable element which cannot be taken as condition of more complex structures. This is how the notion of system ends up overlapping the notion of substance, understood as ‘structured individual (tode ti) whose structure accounts for its essence (eidos).’48 Since the structure or essence is the unity of its 44 OS,

p. 225. (my emphasis). 46 Ibidem. 47 OS, p. 227. 48 OS, p. 221. 45 Ibidem

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powers, by means of which it is identified, the structure manifests itself through them, and they manifest themselves as causes through their effects. One should remark here that, within the framework of an ontology of substance such as Aristotle’s, these powers, brought forth by causality, are relative, that is to say, intrinsic relative properties, reciprocally dependent as far as their operating goes; however, given that their existence is fully expressed in their operating, it follows that these powers are reciprocally dependent also as far as their existence is concerned. One, therefore, gets to the elementary structure by observing the behavior of the substance. If the substance is a system, its behavior function will be required; and to determine the behavior function its state function will be required. Now, observing the behavior of the substance means primarily to observe formal mutations, that is so say, metamorphoses, for metamorphosis stands for a change in form. Its meaning depends in part then on the meaning of the word form; according to the context of use and the perspective applied to it, form stands for the figure understood either as qualitative identification of quantity or as simple quantitative outlining, the three-dimensional contour of something which is in some sense empirically verifiable. In both cases, the becoming of form coincides with the becoming of what we commonly call matter. This is a preliminary case—inasmuch as it is apparent, phenomenic, aesthetic—and yet it is difficult to grasp. Form can also stand for what makes something else intelligible through a definition; it is then the condition of possibility for the naming of something, when the name conveys an idea as essential reason. It can furthermore also translate, with varied nuancing, the words morphé, eidos, energheia, entelechia, that is to say, the structural principle of an entity, which coordinates and organizes a “matter” to be defined—although in itself this latter has or might have a quantitate signata. Form can even stand directly for the sunolon, the organism as a whole and in all its complexity, and express its very act of existing: substance-form as power and life potential, structured living organism, not an abstractible rational design, but the entity grasped from the viewpoint of its immanent law. These and many more are the meanings of the word form as understood by different philosophies, which in turn establish whether form is the result of a perceptual or abstractive process, or whether it is a normative a priori of perception or of intellection, or whether or not it is a primary aspect of ontology. Regarding these simple considerations, the systemic perspective affords a nonnegligible advantage, inasmuch as it allows to rule out two commonplace assumptions, often included in aspiring philosophical arguments. The first one is the belief that one can legitimately claim, as it sometimes happens in the scholarly literature, that “tradition and common sense” agree that there are “substances,” understood as “entities,” which have a beginning and an end and, in the time between their beginning and their end, they last or persist. It is clearly not only true that the so-called “tradition” designates with the term “substance” many different things, but also that so perfectly distributed common sense would not use a philosophical term to indicate a whatever something. The systemic perspective allows instead to see in the entity a relational complexity, which eludes the simple translation of the notion of substance with that of a naturalistically understood material substrate—based on

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which, there would be some sort of “carrier” of change, and conversely, once eliminated the carrier, there would be only temporal, or space-temporal, “parts,” which is like saying that meta-morphosis does not exist since it does not “change” any form. Furthermore, the systemic perspective leaves behind the understanding of entities as “objects” made of “parts” or “elements” in reciprocal relation, which can be identified based on the structure organizing the relation among the parts, or based on the organization itself as what allows the interaction among the parts. It leaves behind then an obvious understanding of entities, which takes the relation between the parts and the whole both as a relation among elements and as the condition of possibility of the entities’ functions. This condition of possibility is sometimes called organization or schema and it is often hypostatized as the “immaterial part” of the entity, whose task is that of relating the “material parts” to one another so that they can produce emerging abilities, that is, functions that the single parts taken in isolation are unable to perform. The organization is also sometimes taken as immaterial aspect or form of the entity, so that the composition matter (parts)–immaterial form (organization) can be produced; the former aspect would then be the object of the sciences, while the latter that of philosophy. Based on the basic idea that no single “part” can perform the function of the “whole,” not only a distorted, physicalistic use is made of the notions of material and immaterial, but also, under the umbrella of the word organization, an illicit hypostatization is produced of the relation among the “parts.” On this level, what is required is not a contribution from philosophy, but simply the outlining of a field of immanence for the several forms of design brought forth by the technai and the other poietic practices. Differently, systemics does raise a philosophical problem, especially thanks to the results achieved in physics and biology, which shed light and scrutinize the systemic nature of each and every entity. Granted that every entity is a system, it follows that every entity is primarily relation, for what are taken as “parts” or “elements” of the system are also systems. This leads to a transition from scientific to philosophical research and to the investigation of the prerequisites of the physical structure of entities, that is to say, the metaphysical composition of entities. Based on the systemic perspective, it is therefore possible to reconsider the issue of identity, of the principle of individuation, hence of the notion of metamorphosis. Now, for an ontology according to which what exists, the entity, in the realm of what can be intuitively or inductively seen, is the sunolon, it is never the case that what in the compound is called matter—or potential, or indeterminacy principle—can be confused with elements or parts of an entity that can be observed. In other words, matter and form are metaphysical principles, and what one calls form has many names (morphé—the inherent form; eidos—the geared-to form; energeia; entelechia) according to the situations that one needs to describe. Once the entity is understood as sunolon of matter and form, granted that this entity is a system, it cannot be that the form is a principle of organization and the matter is the parts/elements in the system that require to be organized; it can also not be, strangely reverting roles and having matter act like form, that the hypokeimenon is a principle of permanence and the parts a principle of variation. Matter will rather be a principle of potentiality, dynamis, which stands for the positive and real ability of the hyle to acquire and lose eidos, in other words, a tendency to metamorphosis, which is nested within a general

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dynamics where the energheia stands for the form as actualizing process of what the sunolon, in its potential, is deprived. The actualization is continuous. It is the process of individuation which corresponds to the realization of the sunolon’s potential. According to this perspective, matter and form are one and the same thing, the one potentially, the other actually; it is so to speak a matter of theoretical style to talk about the sunolon or entity as the compound of power and act, or as the compound of matter and form, as meta-stable substrate to what is not yet but could be, as progressively variedly organized indeterminacy leading to the realization of possibilities. Anyway, the not yet formed is still form, although undetermined as to what form it could be. The limit of becoming is therefore the entity itself, inasmuch as its metaphysical composition coincides with the constraints measuring its power; in other words, granted that matter is power, privation is non-power and therefore limit of power. There is then no possible which is achieved, but rather constraints/restrictions, perspectives, cuts, powers and non-powers, which define the always provisionally determined indeterminacy which the entity is. The adverb “provisionally” indicates that it is impossible to mark an instant of time t; the term “act” stands for a process, and what disappears is always an absence, that is, the determinate absence of the potentially determined but not actually determined. The metaphysical principles of entities are then an indeterminate unknown—which has different names according to the chosen perspective: hyle, dynamis, hypokeimenon, etc.; its entailed and persisting privation (steresis); and the continuously and variedly determining actualizing (eidos, morphé, entelechia, etc.). What is actually determined is also potentially determined, which implies that it can take a certain form, be deprived of that form, and so on, in that incessant process that one calls metamorphosis; composition and dissolution; a double tendency typical of the undetermined, of the unformed, of power, of dynamis; toward form and toward privation; incessant metamorphosis geared to construction and destruction. In short, the realm of metamorphosis is limited by what defines the dynamic relation between the undetermined and the determining process, or, which is the same thing, between determination and process of indetermination. Dynamis and energheia, energheia and dynamis, this is one and the same process which can be read from a twofold point of view. There are no stable polarities in relation; but relation producing provisory, metastable polarities out of limits and possibilities—these latter as well being just one and the same thing seen from different points of view. One should then conclude that the principle of the metamorphic limit is the relation. One should also remark that the relation defining the sunolon is triadic: power, limit of power, act of power. Left unanswered is however the ultimate problem of the generation of form from the unformed and from privation. This problem implies, among other things, the definition of the meaning of “contingent” and “accidental” (‘nothing can be said without qualification to come from what is not. But nevertheless we maintain that a thing may come to be from what is not in a qualified sense, i.e. accidentally,’ Aristotle, Phys. I 8, 191b, 13–15). Some discernment might nevertheless have been achieved: what is here understood as ousia is the condition of possibility of an analogical reference—compared to which, the idea of a “substrate of inherence and predication” is derivative and potentially misleading, inasmuch as a superficial use of it has been made, translating it into the idea of objectivity as

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propositional attitude. So difficult is to make sense of ousia as relation that possibly the name coming the closest to convey this sense is chora, clearly an untranslatable (“place”; “location”; “area”; “region”; “district” … “mother”; “wet nurse”; “receptacle”; “stamp-bearing”). What is at stake then is not to replace, so to speak, substance with relation in the grid of categories, but rather to understand what one calls substance as relation, and the relation as substance, not as an hypostatized substance though. In other words, what is at stake is the process one calls metamorphosis or relational process: an event, just to use a typical word of current philosophical trends, in which polarities, that is to say what phenomenizes itself as entity, element, sunolon, exist only in the event and thanks to the event; better, they are event. The very sense of identity changes then. Its meaning is more or less conveyed by the word metamorphosis, that is, the transferring of forms which has sometimes, in the interpretations it enables, the shape of the cosmic becoming or of a drama; in both cases, it is nevertheless characterized by incessant interaction. Within the framework of this ontology of the act as event, the expressive and constructive force of the verb pushes itself inside the noun, and a dynamic sense of form comes to the fore. The form includes the act which substantiates it while leaning forward out of it and transforming it, according to a process of coming back to itself and opening beyond itself, as an incessant movement of appropriation and expropriation. Through this process the “body” comes to be and builds up its “figure,” that is, its intimacy, in simultaneous participation and opening, thus determining an impermanence full of meaning. On this level, a not unproblematic retrieval of the notion of analogy can be attempted: the analogy of being “is” transfer and communication. These are not imaginary transformations, but rather genetic mutations, processes rooted in being, but difficult to spot in common notions or stabilizing definitions.

1.4 Individuation Processes In order to fully grasp the previous step, it is useful to investigate how the process of individuation develops conceptually, notably regarding what is irreducible to the element-part or object. This means to understand in what way the system is unitary or distinguishable; what is its principium individuationis; how this latter is intrinsically complex despite supporting the transcendence of the unum. This issue, as is wellknown, has been investigated with extraordinary theoretical creativity by Gilbert Simondon against the background of Merleau-Ponty’s theories. To the memory of Merleau-Ponty, Simondon dedicates in fact his L’individu et sa genèse physicobiologique. Based on a non-objectual understanding of the element, in reference to the pre-Socratic tradition of the elements as pre-individual fabric of the world, the individuation is conceived in terms of its genesis as process. The individualizing formation is thereby understood as what allows us to grasp the hylemorphic structure beyond any dualistic principle. Simondon’s key notion is, as is well-known, that

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of pre-individual. This notion frames a new dimension of what is existent, the ontological dimension of association, which, although concrete and effectual, a properly mundane dimension, eludes (entirely) the language of structured entities which are already individuated by the matter–form relation as well as by their reciprocal relations. Besides intelligible individualities, and ontologically before them, Simondon envisages an associated and generative pre-individuality, which thematizes the origin itself of individuation. In other words, individuation is taken as a process and not as a principle that one can use to explain or account for the individuated. This latter, as what is individuated, is in fact taken as an emergence, something meta-stable, relatively provisional, a transitional phase in the individuation process. This implies a full criticism of the stratification of the individual, of the individuation, and of the principle of individuation. These points can be distinguished and ordered only in the light of an ontological privilege credited to the full-fledged individual, as crystallized by several, sometimes even conflicting, philosophical approaches, i.e. in terms of substances, atoms, monads, etc. The fascination for the clinamen can thus be maintained, provided that it is articulated within a process. It should be clear that this latter, according to Simondon, does not connect ultimate terms. These would indeed be inconceivable also from the point of view of physics, as quantum “particles” are not original, somehow autonomous, infinitesimal substances, and the “individuated atom,” whatever the meaning of this expression, is not the principle of anything. What’s more, according to Simondon’s perspective, not only atomistic theories have little ground, but also hylemorphic dualism should be ruled out, as long as, based on their at least conceptual distinction, it takes matter and form as principles and ranks them among metaphysical causes. As duly remarked, ‘Gilbert Simondon’s novelty lies in proving that the formation of a natural or technical individual under no circumstances implies the connection of one form and one matter.’49 Concerning both natural things and so-called technical things, Simondon points specifically to the complex relationships between the material structure of form and the formal structure of matter as in continuous circulation and reciprocal co-belonging. This resolves into a process of differentiation developed in a field of trans-individual tensions with no pre-established limits and indefinitely in evolution. Structures are then individuated within the realm of the trans-individual based on pre-individual systems in meta-stable balance by means of transduction processes which bring about individuals as provisional phases of the process. Now, Simondon writes, ‘unity – proper of individuated beings – and identity – which in turn allows the application of the law of excluded middle – do not apply to the pre-individual being. This explains why, to the aim of organizing them into a universe, the world and the monads cannot be reconciled retrospectively, not even by adding other principles, such as that of sufficient reason’50 ; In addition the obvious reference to Leibniz—which would imply a complex discussion of the expressive and representative nature of the monads as 49 See Jacques Garelli in the preface to the new French edition of Simondon’s work titled Introduction à la problematique de Gilbert Simondon, in L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Millon, Grenoble, 2005, p. 12 (my transl.; emphasis in the text). 50 L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, p. 25 (Henceforth I).

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totally incompatible with the notion of atom51 —what is interesting here is the notion of pre-individual and what can be inferred about it. Simondon applies to it some notions derived from thermodynamics, notably the notions of potential energy of a system, different orders of magnitude, different degrees within the same system, and entropic increase corresponding to the energetic degradation of the system. In this both systemic and pre-individual realm, ‘every operation and every relation within an operation is an individuation that splits up and throws off the pre-individual being, while establishing at the same time a connection between opposite values, orders of magnitude originally devoid of any mediation.’52 It should be emphasized that, in order to account for the individuation process, Simondon attempts to bestow ‘a dimension of being (dimension d’être) on relations’53 ; the relations between opposite tension fields in a meta-stable system trigger the transition from pre-individual to forming individuations, thus establishing gradually emerging systems as “being.” In Simondon’s words: ‘relations do not originate between terms that are already individuals; they are aspects of the internal resonance of a system of individuation; they are part of a system state. This living thing, that is simultaneously something more and something less than unity, entails an internal set of problems, and it can enter as element another set of problems wider than its own being. For the individual, participation amounts to being element of a wider individuation by means of the preindividual reality charge the individual carries, in other words thanks to the potentials it has.’54 Some forming takes then place in that process of topological in-formation that Simondon calls transduction. This latter is defined as ‘the discovery of the dimensions based on which the system makes those of each term communicate, and as such that the full reality of each term of the domaine can be arranged without loss, without reduction, in the newly discovered structures.’55 In this scenario, information does not mean the transmission of a message based on a shared code between sender and receiver, but rather a progressively individualized acquiring of shape, topologically displayed, which amounts metaphorically to a “theatre of individuations.” This entails, according to Simondon’s language, a “ray of time” which is also a “ray of world” pointing to the pre-individual origin. This latter can be drawn as a tangle of sketches, representing the meta-stable field of tensions, from which some lines progressively emerge and become more and more stable. One could imagine that the genesis of a painting—picking yet another metaphor—implies of course a painting gesture intervening as energy to transform and provisionally stabilize the representation, but that also the good form of the painting could open up the system to different complex levels. This leads to what Simondon call “realism of relations,” where by “relation” one should not understand ‘an accident in relation to a substance, but rather a constitutive, energetic, and structural condition, which extends in the existence of 51 On the notion of world in Leibniz, see R. Diodato, Leibniz: un mondo armonico? in V. Melchiorre

(ed), Forme di mondo, Vita e Pensiero, Milano, 2004, pp. 75–98. p. 26. 53 J. Garelli, Introduction, in I, p. 15. 54 I, p. 29. 55 I, p. 34. 52 I,

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the constituted beings,’56 to the point that in the “individuation” process one could say that it falls on relations to constitute what we call “individuum,” and what is efficaciously defined by Simondon as “theater of relational activity.”57

1.5 Relation and Virtuality: First Remarks In a famous passage of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes: ‘The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual.’ Reference to Proust follows: ‘Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: “Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”; and symbolic without being fictional’ accompanied by the interesting metaphor of plunging: ‘The virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the object—as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension.’58 As is well known, Deleuze attempts to outline a new ontology, which is an ontology of difference relying on “phantastical notions”; “condition of real experience, and not only of possible experience,” phantastical notions ‘are complexes of space and time, no doubt transportable […]: Therefore the objects of an essential encounter rather than of recognition.’59 What is at stake, then, when it comes to the virtual, is not a knowledge-based relation, not the recognition allowed by representation, but rather the encounter with a unique kind of real, not at all immaterial, which corresponds to the experience of effects. It is important to note here that these effects not only transform thinking, but also change the aisthesis. Furthermore, as “phantastical notion,” the virtual stands for a way of “thinking” the difference; Deleuze notably emphasizes (in italics in the original) that ‘The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual,’60 and prompts thereby the reader to think about the reality of the power—the potential which does not precede, so to speak, the form, but rather has its own reality. I will come back to this point in what follows, concerning in particular the notion of meta-morphosis, which is key to the understanding of the virtual, and which already pushes the investigation in the direction of a full reassessment of the idea of dynamis and of the process of individuation. Now, according to Deleuze, as well as according to Bergson, whose ideas Deleuze appropriates, the virtual ‘must be defined as strictly a part of the object.’61 This amounts to saying, as it has been duly noted, that ‘the virtual is immanent to the object, to every object in a loose sense, of which it is a “part” […] which cannot be 56 Simondon G. 2005. L’individuation. À la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Grenoble: Èdition Jérôme Millon, p. 83 (my transl.; emphasis in the text). 57 Simondon (2005), p. 65: ‘théâtre d’une activité relationnelle.’ 58 Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition, translated by P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 208–209. On the topic of the virtual in Deleuze, see Organisti, J. 2014. Gilles Deleuze, Dall’estetica all’etica, Milano: Vita e pensiero, pp. 158–207. 59 Deleuze (1994), p. 285. 60 Deleuze (1994), p. 209. 61 Deleuze (1994), p. 209.

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localized, or perceived, or objectivized’62 ; what is at stake is ‘that “part” of the object in virtue of which the object is actually given and in virtue of which it is animated by an internal dynamism.’63 From this follows a reference to the latin root of virtus in virtuality, based on which ‘the process of the virtual is the process of becoming fact of the fact, which cannot be reduced to the fact and to its connections of conpossibility. It is the coming to be that has not come, to which anything that has come participates inasmuch as it is perpetually becoming.’64 This is a point of extreme interest for the understanding of the virtual body, especially when connecting—as Deleuze hints in the Fifth Chapter of Difference and Repetition, “Asymmetric Synthesis of the Sensible”—the virtual as phantastical idea to Simondon’s concept of individuation. This is where Deleuze puts together a “theory of intensity” where ‘intensity is the determinant in the process of actualization.’65 Intensity is then connected to the virtual by means of a direct reference to Simondon: ‘it remains literally true that intensity creates the qualities and extensities in which it explicates itself,’ Deleuze writes, but ‘How does intensity fulfill this determinant role? In itself, it must be no less independent of the differentiation than of the explication which proceeds from it’; and now the reference: ‘Gilbert Simondon has shown recently that individuation presupposes a prior metastable state.’66 From Simondon, Deleuze appropriates the notions of metastability, pre-individual and transduction, and he applies them to the process of individuation through differential intensities. It is remarkable that Deleuze reads the pre-individual as virtual: ‘The individual thus finds itself attached to a pre-individual half which is not the impersonal within it so much as the reservoir of its singularities. In all these respects, we believe that individuation is essentially intensive, and that the pre-individual field is a virtual–ideal field.’67 Following this “Simondonian” path, one can bring closer together, as it will soon become clear, Deleuze’s idea of the virtual and the ontology of the virtual body-image. It is nevertheless interesting to remark here, although this is not the suggestion I am now going to follow, that also the main “Bergsonian” path pursued by Deleuze yields much understanding. In the Second Chapter of Difference and Repetition, on the topic of “Repetition for itself,” Deleuze writes that ‘The virtual object belongs essentially to the past. […] The virtual object is not a former present […]. Virtual objects are shreds of pure past.’68 And yet they are shreds taking “part” in the present, affecting and “participating” to the present. This way it is maybe possible to lay the ground to a correct temporal ontology pertaining to the virtual body as object-event. So indeed Deleuze: ‘The virtual object is never past in relation to a new present, any more 62 Marchesoni, S. 2019. Ripensare l’ontologia. L’incontro con il virtuale nell’empirismo trascendentale di Deleuze. In S. Mascheroni (Ed.), Il mezzo secolo deleuziano. Leggere oggi Differenza e ripetizione (p. 42) Milano: Mimesis (my transl.). 63 Marchesoni (2019), p. 42 (my transl.). 64 Agostini, F. 2003. Deleuze: evento e immanenza, Milano: Mimesis, p. 101 (my transl.). 65 Deleuze (1994), p. 245. 66 Deleuze (1994), p. 246. 67 Deleuze (1994), p. 246. 68 Deleuze (1994), p. 101.

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that it is past in relation to a present which it was. It is past as the contemporary to the present which it is.’69 This is an ontology—although, as we shall see, the word “ontology” is not right here—that presents itself as essentially hybrid. The importance of the idea of the virtual within Deleuze philosophical trajectory is testified by the title of what is probably his last text, L’actuel et la virtuel. On the backdrop of both Leibniz’ and Bergson’s philosophies, Deleuze sums things up by claiming that: ‘The plane of immanence includes both the virtual and its actualization simultaneously, without there being any assignable limit between the two. […] It is not so much that one cannot assign the terms “actual” and “virtual” to distinct objects, but rather that the two are indistinguishable.’70 Beyond Deleuze’s intentions and running the risk of empiricizing the transcendental—which would be a trivialization of his work—I believe that technology has brought said indistinguishability to experience. As previously mentioned, Simondon invites us to refrain from granting an ontological privilege to the constituted individual, and rather take the individual itself as a process of individuation, as a temporal structure then, but not like a linear causal sequence: ‘The series – Simondon writes – is an abstract vision of meaning by means of which the tropistic unity orients itself,’ therefore, ‘We must begin with individuation, with the being grasped at its center and in relation to its spatiality and its becoming, and not by a realized [substantialisé] individual faced with a world that is external to it’71 I will not go further in following Simondon while he comes to a theory of information as not-given or as a “change of phase in the system,” although I consider it relevant72 ; I limit myself to draw attention to what I believe to be methodologically crucial for the understanding of the nature of virtual, as presented in what follows: ‘The method would encourage, on the one hand, a refusal to construct the essence of a given reality by means of a conceptual relation between two opposed terms, and on the other, a consideration of any veritable relation as something existing in its own right.’73 This is in my view an essential point, which can be developed beyond the methodological plane investing the level of ontology. Simondon himself leads the discourse in this very direction, as he claims: ‘The relation, then, represents one of the modalities of the being, since it is contemporaneous with both of the terms whose existence it underwrites’; therefore ‘A relation must be understood in its role as a relation in the context of the being itself, a relation belonging to the being, that is, a way of being and not a simple connection between two terms that could be adequately comprehended using concepts because they both enjoy what amounts to an independent existence.’74 69 Deleuze

(1994), p. 102. The Actual and the Virtual. Translated by Eliot Ross Albert. In G. Deleuze, C. Parnet, Dialogues II (pp. 148–152). New York: Columbia University Press. 71 Simondon, G. 1992. The Genesis of the Individual. In J. Crary, S. Kwinter (Eds.), Incorporations, New York: Zone Books, p. 310. 72 On this point see what Simondon writes in the supplementary Chapter, “Analyse des critères de l’individualité”, pp. 553–558. 73 Simondon (1992), p. 312. 74 Simondon (1992), p. 312. 70 Deleuze, G. 2007.

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As previously anticipated, Simondon takes the relay from Merleau-Ponty’s late work. On the path leading to The Visible and the Invisible, one could now pick up a note from 1956–1957 in which Merleau-Ponty turns to the concept of nature as elaborated by Whitehead.75 This latter ranks, in my opinion, among the very few philosophers of the last century who fully grasped the front matter of a theory of relation and virtuality. For his part, Merleau-Ponty contrasts Whitehead’s understanding of nature to Laplace’s traditional theory, which, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘tacitly supposed the idea of an unlimited being dominating nature, being able thus to conceive Nature as a staggered Whole, composed of an infinity of temporal and spatial points, individuated and without the least possible ontological confusion.’76 Clearly, a different understanding of nature, superseding the perspective centralization of a totalizing gaze, is supposed to emerge from the thorough investigation of space–time perception. As a result, the investigation would be ultimately able to challenge and unhinge the fundamental ideas of substance, element, and part. Although not fully developed a discourse yet, this is what Merleau-Ponty detects in Whitehead. His interpretation of Whitehead is particularly powerful as it goes beyond Whitehead’s theories themselves. Merleau-Ponty shows above all how Whitehead moves past the basic notion of classical physics, that is to say the notion of point in space and time, understood as some sort of flash and entailing a linear instant-informed understanding of time. Based on such an understanding, ‘the future is what is not yet, the past what is no longer, and there is a flash of the present that represents the only real being. Time is reduced to a punctual moment. Whitehead puts this idea of a spatial “unique emplacement” of each instant in question again, an idea according to which each being occupies its place, without participation in other spatiotemporal existences.’77 His criticism stems from paying attention to the basic properties of so-called matter, which tell us for instance that the electric features of said matter cannot be pinned down to “punctual and objective space–time.” The electric quality of matter should rather be handled as some strange form of trans-spatial and transtemporal something, nevertheless there, which denies uniformity to what we call object, which denies, that is, actual localizability at any given moment in a point of duration. Whitehead, Merleau-Ponty sums up, ‘speaks of “overlapping relations,” of “relations of extension,” to be understood before all spatiotemporal specification as the foundation of time and space as well as their union. The spatiotemporal unities overlap. The task imposed on the philosophy of Nature would be to deepen the relation that exists between these unities. […] Such a conception implies a critique of the notions of matter and substance.’78 The first step in this direction amounts to following Whitehead down the road of a theory of the event, in other words toward an understanding of the object, Merleau-Ponty says, as ‘the abridged way of marking 75 On

the relationship between Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, see Vanzago, L. 2001. Modi del tempo: simultaneità, processualità, relazionalità tra Whitehead e Merleau-Ponty. Milano: Mimesis. 76 Merleau-Ponty, M. 2003. Nature, Course Notes from the Collège de France. Translation by Robert Vallier. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, p. 113. 77 Merleau-Ponty (2003), p. 113. 78 Merleau-Ponty (2003), pp. 115–116.

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that there was an ensemble of relations.’79 Flawlessly expressed by this sentence, the idea of object-event is in my opinion not only an extraordinary interpretation of Whitehead, but also the all-important transition point that allows us to fully understand what I would call, à la Merleau-Ponty, the virtuality of flesh. What we call object is, properly speaking, the indicator of a past, which is in turn a relational fabric. Now, such a deep and strange understanding of things in the world—which clearly dismisses any real difference between primary and secondary qualities—can only be achieved perceptually. However, perception here is not the intentional perceptual gaze of consciousness, but rather the inherent and reversible perception which fuses itself with the object, the synthesis of the two being here called by MerleauPonty—along Whitehead’s lines—Nature. In this respect, he writes, ‘The positing of being in perception is simultaneously the positing of a spatiotemporal matter by our body, and defined such as it appears to us who perceive. Hence: 1. The unity of events, their inherence in each other, appears as the correlate of their insertion in the unity of thinking being. 2. The mind must not be considered as an impartial observer of Nature: “its awareness takes part in the process of Nature.” 3. This process of Nature which assures the interiority of events in relation to one another, our inherence in the Whole, links observers together. It is what joins.’80 Hence, the essential entanglement of space–time in the nature of thinking, of spirit, of observation utterly uproots any spirit-nature and mind–body dualism, thus remodeling each of them as mere sources of possibilities, that is as cradle for the space–time unravelling of events. The subsequent step undertaken by Merleau-Ponty on Whitehead’s path addresses what in nature, based on our tradition, is taken as essentially spiritual. Our philosophical tradition, from Augustin to Bergson and Sartre, ‘defines matter by the instantaneity, by the instantaneous present, and conceives memory and the past only by mind; in the things there is only the present, and correlatively, the “presence” of the past or of the future requires mind or the For-itself.’81 Emphasizing with a certain degree of originality Whitehead’s critique of serial temporality and the corresponding presentbased definition of matter and nature, Merleau-Ponty claims that “the present of past things” as well as “the present of future things” should be acknowledged instead. Nature thus becomes an alive time-place: ‘Nature proceeds, then, by quanta of time, its individuation is that of a Gestalt.’82 Strictly speaking Nature does not exist, only the “becoming of nature” does, since ‘Nature is pure process. It is comparable to the being of a wave, the reality of which is only global and not fragmentary. […] Just as the wave is only an encroachment, so too is Nature an encroachment of serial time and space. […] If we want to understand the process of Nature in itself, we could say that Nature is the memory of the world. […] The quasi-reality of the past of

79 Merleau-Ponty

(2003), p. 116. (2003), p. 117. 81 Merleau-Ponty (2003), pp. 118–119. 82 Merleau-Ponty (2003), p. 119. 80 Merleau-Ponty

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Nature must be understood as the exigency of reality that carried this past when it was present.’83 All these images open up a theoretical door into a vivid understanding of virtuality: Wave, memory, reality need. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Whitehead’s descriptive metaphysics proves particularly interesting inasmuch as some elements of Whitehead’s theory of nature, as grasped by Merleau-Ponty, appear perfectly suitable to the description of an eminently interactive and structurally relational field, such as that promoted by radical systemics and paradigmatically expressed, as it will become increasingly clear, by virtual bodies. According to Whitehead, the event— a crossroads of multiple relations in the making—is neither physical nor psychic, but rather the plexus of perceiver, perceived, and their relationship. Events in turn produce complex intersections intertwining with other events, and integrating events as parts. They can then play the role of subjects and reversibly of objects, whenever “seized” as part of other events. Subject, object, active, passive are then reversible process-functions. The subject is no longer subjectum nor substratum. It is, in Whitehead’s language, superject, provisional place-point, aggregate of events, bundle of a few space–time phases of the process. Such an ontological outtake allows us to rethink, among previously mentioned ones, some entities displaying an eminently relational status, and make headway towards a better articulated and more complex understanding of the relationship between relation and virtuality.

83 Merleau-Ponty

(2003), p. 120.

Chapter 2

Relational Entities

2.1 The Personhood-Abyss ‘“You do not interest me.” No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice. “Your person does not interest me.” These words can be used in an affectionate conversation between close friends, without jarring upon even the tenderest nerve of their friendship. In the same way, one can say without degrading oneself “my person does not count,” but not “I do not count.” This proves that something is amiss with the vocabulary of the modern trend of thought known as Personalism. And in this domain, where there is a grave error of vocabulary it is almost certainly the sign of a grave error of thought. There is something sacred in every man, but it is not his person. Nor yet is it the human personality. It is this man; no more and no less.’1 Simon Weil makes here a good point. However, I will try to handle the term person somehow differently, by providing a background which allows to retrieve “that man” Weil has in mind. Upon first inspection this would coincide with the unrepeatable, the singularity, that which is understood in the little word “I.” In actual terms the reader should be allowed to play with the various possible meanings of “person,” “I,” and “impersonal,” especially when approaching Weil’s remark: ‘So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him. Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else.’2 The Latin word persona, as a translation of the Greek prosopon, is given a specific theological meaning in the disputes concerning the Trinity, notably by Tertullian, at a point in time where Greek and Latin philosophical terminology was being bent to convey something—per speculum et in aenigmate—about the simultaneously mysterious and dazzling abyss of the divine revealed in Christ. “Person” stands here for what in intra-divine life is characterizing and distinguishing; the distinctive appearing 1 Weil, S. 1989. La Personne et le Sacré. Eng. tr. On Human Personality. In: David McLellan, Simon

Weil: Utopian Pessimist, London, p. 273. 2 Weil (1989), p. 317. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Diodato, Image, Art and Virtuality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67784-8_2

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that establishes differences within identities; not what accounts for common nature, but what allows identification; in short, identity as manifestation, representation, and intention. What is at stake, therefore, is not a sub-jectum resulting from the subjectivation of the hypokeimenon, but rather the dramatic expressivity—in this case internal, better yet inner to the divine—which defines personality. “Person” acquires then distinct relational implications pointing to the existence of a prototypal relationship. The reader then understands how extremely questionable is to translate “person” as subject. This latter stands indeed for nothing more than permanence in which incidents take place; it stands for the becoming event of a style. Beyond its etymological origin, the word “persona” lends itself, instead, to signify identity—what each one of us understands when the “I” pronoun is used—in its non-objectival sense, and as such it has been variedly used both in the phenomenological tradition and by Personalism in philosophy. As is well known, this is a complicated issue and I will briefly mention here just what suits my line of argument. Scheler,3 for instance, uses “person” to point to the unitary dynamics by means of which what is spiritual comes to be seen. Unity of spiritual acts, form of spiritual acts, a person is the “center of spirit.” The references to the spiritual realm and to spiritual acts are meant to emphasize the transcendence of the person from the biological realm (i.e. the organic, sense-based, vital and psychic realm) and its opening toward the absolute: ‘By spirit Scheler understands the whole set of intentional, theoretical, emotional, volitional acts that […] go beyond the empirical given of life in order to refer to essences or ideal meanings which are a priori valid in themselves valid as to any of their possible realizations.’4 As spiritual beings, humans are opening functions, stretched toward the world, with the option of breaking free from organic dependency. Human beings can gather their selves not as objects among objects. It is indeed accepted that: ‘Spirit is the only being which cannot be objectified—spirit is pure actuality; it exists only in freely carrying out its acts. Hence, spirit’s center, the “person,” is not objectifiable, nor is the person a thing-like being. The person is a constantly self-executing ordered structure of acts (and essentially a specific structure). The person is only in his acts and exists only through them.’5 It can then be inferred that ‘it belongs to the essence of the person to exist and to live solely in the execution of intentional acts.’6 Such a concept of person is established precisely in reply to the issue of a tangible unity pertaining to intentional acts, notably in order to secure both the being open to the world—‘The human being is that X who can comport himself, in unlimited degrees, as “world-open.”’—and the singularity of those who appear in the world—‘The center of acts […] through which this spirit appears within all finite spheres of being, is 3 On this topic overall, see G. Cusinato (ed.), Max Scheler. Esistenza della persona e radicalizzazione

della fenomenologia, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2007. Ferretti, Max Scheler. Fenomenologia e antropologia personalistica, Vita e Pensiero, Milan 1972, p. 147 (my transl.). 5 M. Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 2009, Eng. tr. by M.S. Frings, p. 34 (emphasis in the text). 6 M. Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Eng. tr. by M.S. Frings and R.L. Funk, Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 390. 4 G.

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what we designate as “person” […].’7 The phenomenological question concerning “intentional consciousness” merges here into “the existential issue of the person,” which includes the investigation of inter-personal relations, that is to say relations between subjectively unique human beings who live in the world and manage it. To the issues of inter-personal relation in the “knowledge of the other” Scheler devotes, as is well-known, the third part of his The Nature of Sympathy. There, the constitutional sociability of humans is depicted as an a priori, based on which ‘not only is the “I” a member of the “We” but also that the “We” is a necessary member of the “I”.’8 Society is here taken as internally present to humans, as constitutive element. And the community, that is the others, cannot be transcended. Only the “Other” and the “You-ness” can be referred to as transcendental, as Scheler himself does in his Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge: ‘“You-ness” (the “Thou”) is the most fundamental category of human thinking.’9 The presence of the Other is thus established as constitutive category of the person. This point, as we will see, will be mentioned again when we will deal with virtuality. These peculiar elements of twentieth century philosophy, on which Scheler draws emphasis, have famously undergone interesting developments. One could mention here Mounier’s work, who maintains that, although the fundamental presence of the other does not imply agreement nor love—which would prove that the other is perceived as person—it is nevertheless true that for sympathy and love the knowledge of the fremde Ich is always a necessary precondition; based on this precondition, Mounier says, the person is ‘the one reality that we know, and we are at the same time fashioning, from within. […] It is the living activity of self-creation, of communication and of attachment, that grasps and knows itself, in the act, as the movement of becoming personal’10 ; ‘it is beyond; beyond consciousness and beyond time; it is a given unity—not a constructed one—wider than the sight I get of it, more internal than the accounting I attempt. It is a presence in me.’11 The thus understood person is fraught in mystery, to the point of becoming a real mystery in itself. This is due to the essential relationality of the person, which is always situated, never given in itself, but always in a position of constitutive relation with others and the world. This non-transcendible metaphysical relation makes it impossible to isolate, distinguish, precisely define the concept of person. On a brighter note, its communitarian qualities are duly emphasized. The person, indeed, ‘only exists thus towards others, it only knows itself in knowing others, only finds itself in being known by them.’12 The lost soul can only be retrieved by means of other people’s intermediation. According to 7 M.

Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, cit., p. 28 e p. 26 (emphasis in the text). Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, Eng. tr. by Peter Heath, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London, 2008, p. 230. 9 M. Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, Eng. tr. by Manfred S. Frings, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston and Henley, 1980. 10 E. Mounier, Personalism, Eng. tr. by Philip Mairet, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1989, p. 24. 11 E. Mounier, Révolution personnaliste et communautaire, Éditions du Seuil, 1961, p. 43 (emphasis in the text; my transl.). 12 E. Mounier, Personalism, cit., p. 62. 8 M.

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Mounier, personalization, as process and as event, develops therefore in opposition to the so-called “individualistic spirit,” which focuses the subject on itself and organizes it in isolating and defensive attitudes: ‘Thus, if the first condition of individualism is the centralization of the individual in himself, the first condition of personalism is his decentralization, in order to set him in the open perspective of personal life. […] The primary action of the person, therefore, is to sustain, together with others, a society of persons, the structure, the customs, the sentiments and the institutions of which are shaped by their nature as persons.’13 No matter what, there is, in Mournier’s opinion, a precise moment in which the irreducible value of the person is expressed as essential sociability: ‘The other starts being element of a community only when they become a second person for someone else […]. I discover a man when he suddenly appears as a you. Tu quoque, fili. Armed men, unknown, foreigners, they approach for an ordinary action, and all of a sudden one of them acquires a face. Tu quoque.’14 It is hardly necessary to mention to what extent the difference between subjectindividual and person is key to—among others—Gabriel Marcel’s and Louis Lavelle’s work. According to Lavelle the subject-individual is some sort of concentrate of external influences, a thing among things, whereas the person is an activity understood as the being’s free communion with itself. In Lavelle’s words: ‘There is a person only when there is an activity which allows the I to be self-made, with elements already found inside the I, but by means of an operation which depends on nothing but the I […] (the person) is the work of freedom which clashes in ourselves against some tendencies, but which, instead of suffering them as fatalities, it transforms them into the very elements of vocation.’15 Similarly, Marcel credits to the person the authenticity of the I participating in the ontological mystery—the “meta-problematic” being, prior to any problem—and open to the you in human communion, whereas the concept of subject-individual is said to belong to the life realm of technique, where other human beings are no longer a You, but a Him, an object, no longer capable of establishing relation, communion, communication. In Marcel’s words: ‘I only use the second person concerning what I consider able to answer me, even if the answer is an “intelligent silence.” When no answer is possible, there is only room for the “him.”’16

2.2 Relational Identity I have briefly recalled the main milestones of a well-discernible tradition and deliberately neglected other possibly equally useful contributions. All these standpoints may well be said to belong exclusively to the past and provide an image of the person that has subsequently crashed against the complexity of the world—from a political 13 E.

Mounier, Personalism, cit., pp. 62–64. Mounier, Révolution personnaliste et communautaire, cit., p. 54 (my transl.). 15 L. Lavelle, Les puissances du moi, Flammarion, Paris 1948, p. 165. 16 G. Marcel, Journal Métaphisique, Gallimard, Paris 1927, p. 138. 14 E.

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and economical point of view—as pure “should be” of a hope principle. Some may point to their having been made redundant by other contemporary theories—from Lévinas to Ricoeur, from Deridda to Nancy—which radically take into account the opacity of the cogito or “wounded cogito.” Some other, from a different viewpoint, may object to their extremism, which appears not to allow the person to rely on the faintest support or foothold.17 Notwithstanding, early Phenomenology and Personalism are, in my opinion, perfectly contemporary and prompt the formulation of an all-important question. By transferring what pertains to the person into the relation, more specifically the I-You relation, a formal investigation of the relation is triggered to the aim of establishing the relational load implicit in the term “person.” In other words, the indexicality of the You and I is scrutinized to account for the fact that you and I are always context-dependent and resisting conceptualization. This allows us to establish some basic ground and possibly make headway in order to relaunch the investigation on a new level. In general terms, the so-called indexicals—here limited only to first and second person pronouns and demonstrative pronouns—stand for an indexing knowledge.18 They do not condense a meaning essence in a formula; they do not cut up space as universal, nor define functional or structural contents. They rather point to a two-way relation. They are dialogical terms, always correlative and symmetrically standing opposite to one another. The indexicals suggest the ability of language to express the existence of something present in itself which, although defying conceptualization, may well be conceptualized at some point and in the time being can be established thanks to the explosive power of its simple, yet complex, truly aesthetic presence. In this regard, Benveniste’s seemingly dissonant position can be mentioned as an example of a radical stance which challenges the relation between deixis and the presence of something other than discourse. According to Benveniste, in fact, pronouns are merely “instances of discourse.”19 Now, Benveniste argues, if ‘The essential thing, then, is the relation between the indicator (of person, time, place, object shown, etc.) and the present instance of discourse’ then ‘it is a fact both original and fundamental that these “pronominal” forms do not refer to “reality” or to “objective” positions in space or time but to the utterance, unique each time, that contains 17 Hence

the well-balanced proposal by Guardini and the more sophisticated one by Spaemann. confirmed by Louis Hjelmslev; cf. La nature du pronom, in Mélanges de linguistique et de philologie offerts à J. Van Ginneken, Klincksieck, Paris, 1937, pp. 51–58. According to Hjelmslev (who follows J. van Ginneken’s Principes de linguistique psychologique), in the use of pronouns, ‘l’adhésion [to representations] cesse d’ être significative et est réduite à être simplement indicative.’ (p. 51) ‘Les particularités du pronom s’expliquent par le fait évident que les mots appartenant à cette catégorie ne présentent aucun contenu significatif, aucun contenu “sémantique” dans le sens traditionnel de ce terme… Le contenu positif du pronom est purement MORPHEMATIQUE.’ (p. 52) Hjelmslev quotes in support of his claims Noreen’s, Jespersen’s, Kinch’s, Brøndal’s, Becker’s, and Hejse’s work. See also: C. Schick, Il linguaggio. Natura, struttura, storicità del fatto linguistico, Einaudi, Torino, 1976, pp. 136–139. 19 E. Benveniste, La nature des pronoms, in Problème de linguistique générale, Gallimard, Paris 1966; Eng. tr. by M.E. Meek, The Nature of Pronouns, in Problems in General Linguistics, University of Miami Press, Miami, 1971, p. 219. 18 As

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them, and thus they reflect their proper use.’20 From an eminently linguistic function—the fundamental conversion function of language into discourse—Benveniste draws some ontological consequences. The personal pronouns I and You ‘are distinguished from all other designations a language articulates in that they do not refer to a concept or to an individual. […] Then, what does I refer to? To something very peculiar which is exclusively linguistic: I refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker. It is a term that cannot be identified except in what we have called elsewhere an instance of discourse and that has only a momentary reference. The reality to which it refers is the reality of the discourse. It is in the instance of discourse in which I designates the speaker that the speaker proclaims himself as the “subject.”’21 Benveniste organizes his words in a way that can hardly be disagreed upon. However their overall sense seems to rely on a misleading superposition of levels. The indexicals do not refer to concepts nor to individuals based on some of their properties. This is so because existence is not a predicate. In other words, from the claim that indexicals’ references can be grasped only in the act of discourse or in enacted discourse does not ensue that the reality of discourse is isolated from the reality that is not discourse. I would instead argue that it is always the case, also in reported speech and even in a virtual scenario type of discourse, that indexicals are a relational structure. They make sense exclusively in their leaning beyond the instance of discourse, even though their reference becomes clear—as an open door onto possible meanings—only within the discourse. This does not imply that those who use them are always in contact with the indexicals’ references, but it does entail that they always express such a contact. I would not argue—given the strict limitations I imposed on the classification of indexicals—that they express “indexical thoughts,” for instance in the case of reported speech, but only that they originally bear testimony to a presence, an aesthetic presence which cannot be said, expressed, signified as such within the concept realm. Assuming, then, that indexicals have their specificities—they have no conceptual content, if not minimal, and their role is eminently referential—and assuming that they are irreducible to other parts of discourse, several interpretative options, as previously anticipated, open up. Among them, a particularly famous one has much of what it takes for the exploration of the I-You couplet based on their deictic properties in the direction of the constitutive relational features of the person. In this regard, a single quotation from Buber might well suffice: ‘Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; […] No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; […] Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.’22 Hence, it is clear that, as Lévinas glosses, each encounter is a unique event, which cannot be narrated, which cannot be placed within a series with other present events as to form a story. The relation is 20 Benveniste

(1971), p. 219. in Language, in Problems in General Linguistics, p. 226. 22 M. Buber, Ich und Du, in Die Schriften über das dialogische Prinzip, Schneider, Heidelberg, 1954; Eng. tr. by Walter Kaufmann, I and Thou, Simon & Schuster, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, 1970, pp. 62–63. 21 Subjectivity

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pure flashing of instants without continuity, eluding an uninterrupted and mastered form of existence.23 Such an approach to the understanding of the I-You relation is notably very successful in breaking loose from any reductive approach which insists on the prominent substantiality or the being subject of the I and You. Along this road, the reader will discover that the I-You relation—despite the asymmetry later pointed out by Lévinas at variance with Buber—stands for something or someone which is not what it is, in other words for what specifically defies being defined by one given appearance, as one phenomenon with one set of primary, secondary or tertiary properties, one possible set of attributes or, especially, one special function or group of functions. What is at stake here is not only what is inexhaustible—inasmuch as the individual is always unfathomable and the science of the unique being impossible—but also what is inexplicable in itself, or even only partially inexplicable, based on predicative judgments. It is not the individual member of one class or the element of one set. It is not the “human” being as member of the definition-ready animal species. It is not a sortal expression. It is not one given expression of human “nature.” It is not, finally, something in the world, occupying a space–time position and preserving its identity in its place. The I-You instead pierces through space–time as soon as it is endowed with gaze. It is its own place, that is to say the opening of an unrepeatable relation. As soon as it is there, space and time unfold, its being there amounting to the experience of itself as possibility of life, that is to say, phenomenologically speaking, as that intertwining between consciousness and time which is responsible for the unity of experience, the very event of experience, in relation to which both consciousness and time are only positive abstractions. This entails that consciousness is temporal, although it does not produce time nor it is produced by it. And it also entails that consciousness is an original experience of time and therefore cannot be disregarded whenever a question about time is asked. Strictly speaking, we learn that time and consciousness, as unity of experience, cannot be separately defined, and only their plexus or unity can provide a starting point for their separate understanding. What’s more, the meeting and overlapping of consciousness and time produces precisely the persistency of personal identity, the identity each one of us expresses with the pronoun “I.” Said persistency is hard to justify and this is so not only for the I but possibly also for anything else in the world. Under what respects am I the same I as that kid of which I have photos taken many years ago when just about to enter for the first time the elementary school building? In more general terms, what does it mean that something is the same despite changing (its parts) in time? On these different and interconnected topics, as is well known, a vast literature exists already. Equally famous issues are those triggered by trying to define consciousness as a complex set of functions, or as mind, thus assuming a distinction between body and mind. In this regard, the number one question—which as such I will not discuss here—has been recently, in my opinion, aptly formulated in the following terms: ‘the thing is that identity cannot be and not be. It is not a matter of degrees. There is truth about identity, a kind of truth which, if underdetermined, can be validated 23 E. Lévinas, “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge”, in P.A. Schilpp, M.S. Friedman, M. Buber, The Philosophy of Martin Buber, Open Court, 1967, pp. 133ff.

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only in reference to a substantial tertium—neither something physical nor something mental in the sense of psychological data or mnemonic data. Chisholm has remarked that the I, unlike an orchestra or a football team, and especially unlike a body, is not a collection of parts or an ens successivum, that is a series of entities which are placed within a rather flimsy stipulated continuity. It is instead something that is strictly speaking always identical. According to a traditional claim, the mind is then a simple entity and thereby especially apt to act as identity principle.’ What is still to be emphasized is to what extent it is impossible to pinpoint an identity criterion, to what extent it is not viable to understand identity as an elementary, irreducible fact, a “simple view”: ‘Upon closer inspection, the “simplicity” of the simple view boils down to this: something complex can always change and can be added by means of further composition; this is not the case with identity, which is supposedly a rigid property. Hence the question “Will I or will I not still be myself (should the event X take place)?” has a clearly univocal answer, despite it may not be, at least sometimes, self-evident—some resemblance can be here drawn with the classical theory of haecceitas.’24 It is certainly odd and hard to think about haecceitas, thisness, and hence about indexicality, this ultimate undefinable in terms of relation, and yet we are compelled to do so. The aim is then to grasp the irreducible relationality—not the substantiality— of the person and effectively account for it. To this aim one may attempt to avoid approaching the unity pertaining to identity as one within a series, or one of many elements in a collection or in a set, hence avoiding to take this individual as determined by a—countable or not-countable—series of causes. The counting approach is able to grasp reality on an abstract level, thus transitioning from personal identity to collective identity and dropping the irreducibility of the person as conceptually unfathomable singularity. Such a extraneous and yet close-by singularity is instead vividly narrated by a famous novel by Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, as recalled some time ago by Deleuze: ‘No one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens, if we take the indefinite article as an index of the transcendental.’25 Dickens tells the story of a “disreputable man, held in contempt by everyone” who is about to die. The more he approaches the moment where the singularity and the impersonality of life meet—where indefinite and definite cross paths—the more ‘everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him.’ The life of an individual, Deleuze comments, ‘gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life […]. It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization.’ This very subtle point is what also Simone Weil brilliantly refers to in her critique of the “person” philosophically dissolved into society: «The human being can only escape from the collective by raising himself 24 A. Allegra, Antinaturalismo e personalismo. Sulle conseguenze ontologiche del dualismo, in Luca

Grion (ed.), Chi dice io? Riflessioni sull’identità personale, La Scuola, Brescia, 2012, p. 151 (my transl.). 25 G. Deleuze, Pure Immanence, Essays on A Life, Eng. tr. by Anne Boyman, Zone Books, New York, 2001, p. 28.

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above the personal and entering into the impersonal. The moment he does this, there is something in him, a small portion of his soul, upon which nothing of the collective can get a hold.’26 When dealing with the issue of art, we will come back to this point. Before that, however, it is worth investigating its ultimate, so to speak, condition of possibility.

2.3 The Relation in Person There is one model which can clearly help us elaborate upon the relational identity established in terms of person, and this is precisely what the notion of “subsistent relation”—as developed by Trinitarian theology in its intricate history—stands for. It may well appear inappropriate to exploit a conceptually very dense outcome—hence always open to further investigation in the steps of its historical interpretations—of the scrutiny of the Scripture to fit the needs of philosophical speculation. The fine line separating theology and philosophy is somehow shifting and fragile, and as such it should be respected. Nevertheless, it is also true that the intellectual exercise applied to Christian faith periodically lands on philosophical concepts especially devised to shed light on one’s faith in the revealed word. Concerning our topic of interest, that is, the understanding of non-accidental but institutive relations of being, I will briefly outline, among the many possible ones, two main options. The first stems from the highest achievements of the theological and philosophical development of the notion of “subsistent relation,” as provided by Thomas Aquinas, especially in the Summa contra Gentiles. Aquinas comes to this notion in analogy with the notion of non-subsistent relation describing what is given in the experience of the created world. The second option accounts instead for what in my opinion is a remarkable contemporary achievement. The reader will already know that the earliest and most significant remarks on the idea of “subsistent relation” are to be found in Augustine’s De Trinitate, where it is clearly stated that, since ‘nihil accidens in Deo, quia nihil mutabile’,27 if one were to assume relations in God, these would not be accidental ones. However, based on the fundamental assumption that relations cannot be reduced to substantia—or better, in Augustine’s terms, to the essential—as they denote to-another being [esse ad aliud]—hence, they cannot be reduced to absolute or to-itself being [esse ad se]—Augustine concludes then that in God there must be absolute perfections— predicable in the singular—and relative perfections, referring, that is, to-another [ad alium] and thus establishing distinctions among the three divine persons. Differently, with Thomas Aquinas, the term ‘person is associated with relation to the point of fusing with it. The Angelic doctor declares without reserve that the person in God is not “relative,” but sic et simpliciter a real and subsistent “relation.” […] 26 On

Human Personality, cit., p. 320.

27 De Trin. V, 4, 5. On the notion of “person,” which in Augustin mainly means substantia individua

and with difficulty applies to the subsistent relation, see in particular De Trin. VII, 4–7, 12.

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According to Aquinas, the term persona, not only “ex usu” but also “ex significatione sua,” denotes in God the relation tout court, although, he subtly adds “non per modum relations, sed per modum substantiae.” Aquinas can achieve this jump forward because for centuries Augustine’s authority, combined with that of Boetius, had made a given understanding of persona familiar in the linguistic and conceptual universe of Christian theology.’28 When it comes to the notion of “subsistent relation,”Aquinas’ argument is exemplarily clear and easy to sum up. Here what he says concerning the generation of the Son29 : Since the Father communicates fully and eternally his nature to the Son, there is no need to distinguish receiver and nature received—as it is instead the case for material generations. What’s more, since the obviously subsistent essence of God cannot be separated from its relations, the generation of the Son must entail the distinction of more than one subsistent entity. Now, because the Word is expressed by God and God expressing himself and the expressed Word are numerically the same essence, the generation of the Son means relations in the unique essence of God. And yet, as nothing in God is other than his own essence—in God esse and essentia coincide—the relation based on which the person of the Father and the person of the Son can be distinguished is nothing but the essence. What’s more, given that the relations of paternity and filiation coincide with the divine essence, as such they are incommunicable, they cannot be transferred to other. Only paternity can establish a distinction. It is the Father who makes the Son other than himself. Inasmuch as the notion of Father implies being Father of the Son, it is the Father who generates alterity. The relation in God has its absolute foundation in God himself and is identical to him. Furthermore, relations in God are real, inasmuch as they stem from God as his own activity, as an expression of his power. In God the action of understanding himself is real inasmuch as it coincides with God himself. God understands himself and expresses himself in the Word. It follows that the relation between the Word and God who expresses it is a real relation. God is being act. Therefore the being of the relation as well is being of the act. No dependency element is then established by the relation in God. The term “God” is predicated substantially of both the Father and the Son. Several persons can then be distinguished in God based on his subsistent relations, who are nevertheless one and only God based on the unity of essence. Since God is, so to speak, synthesis of unity and distinction, it comprises all the contrasts connected to relations, as for instance between begetting and begotten, begotten and unbegotten. And this is where the procession of Spirit is logically implied,30 which can be summed up as follows: the distinction between Son and Spirit must ensue from an opposition, and more precisely an opposition in origin, as divine persons cannot certainly be opposed to one another in terms of quantity or in terms of action and passion. It follows that, if the Spirit distinguishes itself from the Son, it necessarily derives from him, besides deriving from the Father. Between Father and Spirit, 28 A.

Milano, Persona in teologia. Alle origini del significato di persona nel cristianesimo antico, Edizioni Dehoniane, Roma, 1996, pp. 279–280 (my transl.). 29 I mainly rely here on Chs. 11, 12, 13, 14 of Summa contra gentiles, book 4. 30 I mainly rely here on Chs. 19, 24, 26 of Summa contra gentiles, b. 4.

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however, no paternity nor filiation subsist, but relations of spiration and procession. Four relations can then be listed: paternity and filiation according to the origin of the Son from the Father, spiration and procession according to the origin of Spirit. Now, since spiration and paternity belong to the same person, also filiation and procession would belong to the same person if there was no reciprocal opposition between them. Such an opposition can only pertain to their origin, so that the Spirit derives from the Son, or the other way round. Spirit distinguishes itself from the Son, both because it comes from the Son and because of its different origin from the Father. The Son’s and Spirit’s respective origins can be distinguished, that is, based on their different principles. The Son derives from the Father, and the Spirit from the Father and the Son. It is worth remarking that the Father’s and the Son’s procession are not two distinct things, as the Father produces the Son as Word and the Spirit as Love, in other words as intelligence and will, and since in God intelligence and will cannot be distinguished in reality, but only in reasoning (sola ratione), procession and proceeding ones cannot be distinguished either. It follows that also Son and Spirit can be distinguished only in reasoning (sola ratione). What’s more, since about things that can be distinguished only in reasoning reciprocal predication is possible, one could say that the Son is the Spirit and the Spirit is the Son. Three persons are then included in the divine nature, which can be distinguished only in terms of reciprocal relations. Only three can be distinguished since the immanent procession inherent to the principle of procession belongs only to intellect and will. And, being God’s intellection unique and simple, also its procession must be unique. God understands everything by understanding himself. Needless to say, also God’s volition is unique and simple. Gods loves everything by loving himself. Hence, only two proceeding persons and one non-proceeding person are possible in the Godhead. The same conclusion could be reached if one was to remark that the person can only relate to procession in three possible ways: either it does not proceed, or it proceeds from what does not proceed, or it proceeds from what proceeds. Finally, it should be excluded that Son and Spirit, being God, could respectively produce one more Word and communicate the divine nature to one more person, since the subsistent relation person/Son owns intellectual power in its capacity as what has been begotten, and the person/Spirit owns infinite volition in its capacity as what receives. If active generation was not the Father’s exclusive incommunicable property, if, that is, active generation could be credited to the Son and to the Spirit, every distinction would indeed be cancelled. The most interesting element of Aquinas’ argument lies in its use of the concept of subsistent relation. As previously mentioned this concept is extrapolated by Aquinas in analogy with that of non-subsistent relation, which generally describes our experience of the world. As is well-known, according to this theory of Aristotelian derivation, in the created world relations are understood as accidents. Even better, one could say that relations entertain with the absolute the same relation accidents entertain with the subject. Their being is different from that of substances inasmuch as it is fundamentally dependent. Accidents are, according to this perspective, added forms which depend on the substance. In other words, real relations in the created world are credited with lowest level and very imperfect forms of being, inasmuch as they presuppose other accidents as well and they establish relations of dependency

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not only to the substance but also to another reality. In created things, therefore, the relation cannot be subject. Differently, the person, that is to say an individual or singular thing, can well be subject. Conversely if this definition was to be predicated univocally—and not analogically—about God, more than one God would follow at variance with the one unique God doctrine. The notion of subsistent relation for divine persons then comes about by means of analogy and stands for the incommunicable subsistence in the divine essence’s unity. The subsistence of the relation entails real distinction, distinction among persons, in the divine essence. The well-oiled Thomistic machine relies finally on a philosophical conceptualization of non-subsistent relations in the experience of the world only to project this notion in the idea of the divine, which, comprising distinctive qualities, notably the identity of esse and essentia, hence immutability, eternity, etc., requires necessarily the elaboration of a subsistent relation, in other words, a non-relative relation. This very strategy suits our purposes particularly well, especially if we play it in reverse mode. Our argument is here based on a theological hypothesis we invite the reader to take with due seriousness. We have been created in the image of God. Life in God is relation. We are relation. The ultimate meaning of created things lies in the ontological relation establishing them as singularities. This is roughly speaking the path we seek to investigate. In alternative to the Thomistic approach—which is still a crystal clear model— many other strategies have been applied to intra-divine relations, as to shed light on relations as such and on personal relations in particular, and many of them have been or are currently investigated by recent scholarship in theology. As suggested by some authors,31 a convenient classical reference can be found in Richard of Saint Victor,32 who explained the core meaning of that very peculiar kind of unity expressed, not without difficulty, by the substantia terminology, by pointing to the fundamental dynamics of trinitarian love. In particular, Richard of Saint Victor delves into the “condilection” feature of love, that is to say the encounter between the greatest kindness and the highest harmony, which takes place ‘when a third person is loved by two persons harmoniously and in community…[and when] the affection of the two is fused into one affection by the flame of love for the third.’33 The unfathomable unity of love articulates then the multi-dimensionality of the person organizing the aspects of individuality and sociality in an eminently relational perspective. The radical, sense-building relationality of the person is thus slightly further clarified: ‘Autonomy and relation, “being-for-oneself” and “being-from-the-other” are in the concept of person two moments not only parallel to one another, but also with unambiguous priorities referring to one another.’34 Among the numerous and remarkable 31 Cf. B.J. Hilberath, Der Personbegriff der Trinitätstheologie in Rückfrage von der Karl Rahner zu Tertullians “Adversus Praxean”, Tyrolia, Innsbruck-Wien, 1986, in particular pp. 322–325. 32 See Richard of Saint Victor, On the Trinity, Eng. tr. by Ruben Angelici, Cascade Books, Eugene, 2011. 33 On the Trinity 3:19. 34 B.J. Hilberath, cit., p. 321 (my transl.) [original text: ‘Selbstand und Relation, Für-sich-Sein und Vom-anderen-her-Sein sind also nicht nur zwei parallele Momente im Begriff der Person, sondern mit eindeutigen Prioritäten aufeinander bezogen.’].

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proposals of contemporary theological research on this topic, I would like to mention, as alternative path, one distinctive step in Klaus Hemmerle’s concisely elaborated approach to his well-known Theses for a Trinitarian Ontology,35 inasmuch as it seems to me that this is what could bring about a contemporary accomplishment— the reader will excuse this somehow extravagant idea—to the not immediately clear sense of Aquinas’ position. In order to understand the constitutive relations of beings, Hemmerle shifts focus from the noun to the verb, thus, in my view, correctly interpreting the Thomistic priority of the being act, as dynamic and creative singularity as well as infinity power. What’s more, Hemmerle locates the meaning of the verb in the dynamics of life, hence allowing the philosophical exploration, in the realms of ontology and anthropology, of trinitarian theology. Such a shift in perspective turns traditional questions upside-down. We no longer wonder ‘how can the subject come out of itself and then come back to itself? Or, according to another version, how can substance manage to differentiate itself, define itself, produce effects, without belittling its superior position, its being-in-itself?’36 The relation defies our understanding as long as we rely on the substantive model; it cracks open instead if we think about it as a verb, as a process, happening, event: “what” is signified by the relation is process. Hemmerle quotes the example of the German word Leben, which is simultaneously a noun and a verb: ‘The “thing” signified by the noun Leben is the process, what happens, Leben in its verbal meaning (…). This process finds its identity in its own developing, in the way it develops. Living means coming out of oneself (…). The complex relation that life is (…) is a relation between life and life. The intimate dimension of single life, to which egress, participation, assimilation, reproduction already belong, also owns, indivisibly, an external dimension, that of living together, where one lives for another life and out of another life.’37 Although more will need to be said on the internal–external relation, and philosophical eyes might well be ruthlessly sharp, it is worth remarking that Hemmerle extends the dynamics of life to being itself: ‘The connections observed in the life phenomenon are true as well, differently in each case, not only of all processes, but also of all beings. Any given being, any subject or existent can only be understood and interpreted in its own act. And this act is establishing, communicating, delimiting and placing oneself in global correlation.’38 In the light of the trinitarian dynamics, Hemmerle reads therefore any being as relational process, while simultaneously attempting to understand, based on the specific dimension of that dynamics, any being as relational pole, and relations as establishing polarity. His language turns difficult and lingers on the paradox while attempting to express, in widely embraceable terms, what the ontological status of the things in the world is: ‘The process requires then two poles, and, while uniting and distinguishing them, it does not uniform them. The poles however have no distinct place outside of the event; they are in the event. Even more 35 K. Hemmerle, Thesen zu einer trinitarische Ontologie, Einsiedeln, 1976, Kriterien 40 (Henceforth TTO). 36 TOT, p. 40 (my transl.). 37 TOT, p. 41. 38 TOT, pp. 41–42.

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they are event. They are: communicating, relating, entering the process and from it receiving, making the process be and being themselves made by it. In each pole lies the whole process, and in the whole process lies each pole’s being.’39 The sense of identity is thus transformed and roughly conveyed by the word metamorphosis, a transfer of forms that sometimes takes on—in the many readings it supports—the features of drama, nevertheless being characterized by incessant interaction: ‘All processes, realms, and relations can be thoroughly understood if interpreted based on the interaction structuring them. Based on it, unity is explained in the multiplicity of the origins, the process as simultaneously process, reaction and correlation, the identity as growth. The structure of interaction is the structure of the process.’40 According to this structure, it is based on the verb that the noun—the subsisting of things and their differentiating—is established and understood, inasmuch as such subsisting is always a point of provisional equilibrium, an almost-punctual limit, that can be read as relatively stable only according to a partisan space–time point of view. Remarkably, Hemmerle claims, ‘in such limit the strength of the origin is revealed: it can touch. In such limit its weakness is also revealed: it can be touched.’41 The “touching” here presented will be later further investigated, as it will be key to the understanding of artistic operations as place for the appearance of alterity. In the meanwhile, it will suffice to remark that, thanks to the trinitarian ontology of the act as event, thanks to the internalization of the expressive-constitutive power of the verb into the noun, a processual manifold origin replaces what one might still want to call subjectivity. As Hemmerle puts it: ‘Interpreting the noun as verb, beings as processes, processes as manifold origin, this is what suitably pertains to phenomena. It is nevertheless a change and enhancement of usual ways of seeing and saying.’42 His approach shares therefore the role traditionally played by philosophy as well as by art: it opens up new possibilities for thinking and perception and it allows the superseding of the perceptual clichés which organize our visions of the world according to stereotyped standards.43 A dynamic sense of form is made here explicit, as including so to speak its substantiating act while leaning out and transforming it, in a process of going back to itself and opening beyond itself, an incessant movement of appropriation and expropriation. This is how the “body” is established and its “shape,” its intimacy, is put together in simultaneous participation and opening. Its provisionality is moreover particularly rich in consequences and, as we will see in some detail later on, it transforms space in place, the place of our inhabiting: ‘These are the places where this intimate is protected as inviolable mystery, and at the same 39 TOT,

p. 42. p. 45. 41 TOT, p. 47. 42 TOT, p. 44. 43 Relevant to this point, F. Desideri investigates the function of perception in relation to the aesthetic as dense perception synthesis, which goes beyond both internalist, subjective and externalist, objective definitions of the aesthetic as emotion-based fact or as fact based on the so-called “aesthetic properties”; see Desideri, F. 2011. La percezione riflessa. Estetica e filosofia della mente. Milano: Cortina; and more recently Desideri, F. 2018. L’origine dell’estetico. Dall’emozione al giudizio, Roma: Carocci. 40 TOT,

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time is opened, even offered as prey to what is outside.’44 Here, also the problematic notion of analogy is retrieved. The analogy of being is transfer and communication: ‘Analogia entis means being one in the other and one out of the other, and the sense of this condition of being is revealed in the being one for the other.’45 These are no imaginary transformations, but rather genetic mutations, deep-rooted processes of being, hard to grasp by means of common notions or stabilizing definitions: ‘To the univocity of form in itself corresponds its referring beyond itself to the manifold of its meanings.’46 In short, this is—in my opinion—the very interesting effect on ontology of the extremely delicate clash between revelation and reason. One last remark from Hemmerle will prove very useful, especially, as we will see, while introducing another singular case of relational entities, that is to say: artworks. Hemmerle diligently wonders: ‘Isn’t there something that is left out by trinitarian ontology? That which can soak up all guilt, all solitude, all the sadness of this fleeting world (…)?’47 Hemmerle hints, in my view, to the right path without venturing much into it though: ‘from the theological point of view, the deepest point of a trinitarian ontology is that in the kenosis of the Son all limitations and all contradictions are included in the event of divine giving-oneself.’48 The exact ontological rebound of kenosis is not entirely clear, except its pointing generically to the opening of immanent Trinity, and the consequent ‘destination of all Creation to be included in trinitarian life.’49 Nevertheless the theological side of the matter has been investigated, as is well known, by Hans Urs von Balthasar in a passage of the Theo-Drama50 : ‘A way must be found to see the immanent Trinity as the ground of the world process (including the crucifixion) in such a way that it is neither a formal process of self-communication in God, as in Rahner, nor entangled in the world process, as in Moltmann. The immanent Trinity must be understood to be that eternal, absolute, self-surrender whereby God is seen to be, in himself, absolute love; this in turn explains his free self-giving to the world as love, without suggesting that God “needed” the world process and the Cross in order to become himself (to “mediate himself”).’51 From a speculative point of view, one could sum up Balthasar’s achievement as follows: what the Father bestows on the Son returns to the Father in the Spirit, and as the generation is comprehensive, that is the Father expresses himself fully in the Son, likewise the return is comprehensive. The return or fulfillment of the trinitarian cycle is however also an opening, since the Father is infinite generation power in himself not abstractedly but as incommunicable 44 TOT,

p. 48. p. 49. 46 Ibidem. 47 TOT, p. 55. 48 TOT, p. 56. 49 TOT, p. 57. 50 See H.U. Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 4, Eng. tr. by Graham Harrison, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, pp. 319–332, section a. On “The Immanent and the Economic Trinity.” On the topic, see also my Logos estetico, cit., pp. 156–168. 51 TD IV, pp. 322–323. 45 TOT,

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person of the Trinity, and the return to the Father takes place in the Spirit. The return however originates from the Son, due to his decision: freedom for freedom, giving for giving.52 With no reciprocal elision nor synthetic reconciliation, freedom and the kenotic feature of creation are thus connected. Granted that freedom amounts to the connection/identity of beginning and choice, human freedom is alternative to mundane necessity53 and necessity qualifies as the negation of freedom, whenever it takes the historical or theoretical form of what is negative, what destroys and annihilates, what makes human beings simply victims. This is the ontological structure of freedom and its relation to the plexus nothing-evil-necessity: freedom emerges as choice in opposition to the negative, in opposition to crushing and attractive necessity, to the pervasive dominion of the positive–negative of evil, which is in itself deprived of any sense. Therefore, freedom is available to God “nevertheless,” which means notwithstanding the surfacing of non-sense, notwithstanding the withdrawing of the Father. However, the Father’s withdrawal is full of sense, for it is heavy with pain for the Son’s death, for the Father is pain, for the Son’s death is nothing but the mundane self-giving of divine kenosis in the economy of salvation.54 The original gift fundamentally accounts for the trinitarian God structure, the self-originating of the divine, the dynamism of what the divine is. When the Son, in his turn, suffers for the withdrawing of the Father, he stands for properly human freedom: A decision “notwithstanding” the tragic element of the drama for a possible sense.

52 On the topic of “giving” and the relation “giving-forgiving” in Balthasar, see R. Carelli, La libertà

colpevole, Glossa, Milan, 1999, pp. 118–136. In general on the relation between “freedom” and “giving,” interesting remarks have been provided by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Experience of Freedom, Stanford University Press, 1993, see in particular pp. 72–75. 53 Hans Jonas, very aptly, writes about ‘the concept of freedom in relation to the human realm. Far from beginning where necessity ends, freedom consists of and lives in self-determination with necessity itself. To separate it from the realm of necessity means to take away from freedom its object; as a force which meets no resistance, freedom without necessity is void. [original text: (…) wie im menschlichen Bereich mit der Freiheit. Weit entfernt, daß diese beginnt, wo die Notwendigkeit endet, besteht und lebt sie im Sichmessen mit der Notwendigkeit. Die Abscheidung vom Reiche der Notwendigkeit entzieht der Freiheit ihren Gegenstand, sie wird ohne ihn ebenso nichtig wie Kraft ohne Widerstand.]’ in Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz, Eine jüdische Stimme, Suhrkamp, Berlin, 1987, p. 34 (my transl.). 54 The interpretation of “kenosis” clearly opens significant problems concerning the issue of the relationship between immanent Trinity and economic Trinity as well as concerning the issue of the Father’s suffering. Two accurate, although partially divergent interpretations are provided by P. Martinelli, La morte di Cristo come rivelazione dell’amore trinitario nella teologia di Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jaca Book, Milano, 1996, pp. 339–366; and by M. Paradiso, Nell’intimo di Dio. La teologia trinitaria di Hans Urs von Balthasar, Città Nuova, Roma, 2009, pp. 271–290 (for an interesting parallel with Hegel see pp. 291–306).

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2.4 Image Relation Earlier on I have briefly mentioned the issue of images. Needless to say, unlike in other monotheistic religions, images are for Christianity of the greatest importance, especially with respect to its distinctive features, that is to say Trinity and Incarnation. Christ is the image of the Father; humans are, or should become, image of Christ; more generally what has been created is image of the creator. Now, images are strange entities, distinctively relational ones. Image is indeed said-of, of this or that, of something other than itself. It appears to be something existing as relation. What’s more, from images one gets imagination, and conversely imagination produces images; and from imagination one gets what is imaginary and vice versa; and that human production that mankind calls art is an expression of collective imagination and in it finds its roots. However, it is also true that image is predicated in several ways: There is (is there?) a remarkable difference between a mental image and a picture-image, such as a painting or a photo. It seems in fact that the “internal” or “mental” image—provided these terms are suitable—is potentially rich in indefinite features and possible determinations, evoking representations, virtual sources of better determined schemes. There is (is there?) a fundamental difference between an image and a perception, or even between and image and an idea. One might even ask whether it is at all possible to “think without images.” In short, the issue of images is as complex as unavoidable, at least within the scope of our inquiry. The specific reasons why images are particularly relevant for us has something to do with the nature of mimesis and with the relationship between Christianity, images, and mimesis. We shall then rapidly delve into such a relationship before being able to come to that other relational entity that the work of art is. The term mimesis55 stems from the rituals and mysteries of the Dionysian cult, where it would denote the ritual actions of dancing, playing music, and singing. Only later, around the V c. BC, mimesis starts indicating the reproduction of reality, hence applying also to painting and sculpture. However, the reproduction of reality is also differently understood by different authors. For many scholars “mimesis” does not refer to the relation between a model, the “archetype,” and the copy. It does not stand, that is, for imitation as impoverishment or reduction of reality, but on the contrary it means primarily a mirroring process of reality, in which this latter can shine in its essence, that is to say in its beauty. According to Pindar, for instance, mimesis means reality that represents and reveals itself through art; life becoming “festive” event; an event full of sense in which the “poietic” features of mankind—that is their transforming the realm of nature—and the practical features of mankind (“praxis”)— their building up communities with other human beings—are reconciled. Within 55 On the here considered meanings of mimesis, cf. G. Carchia, L’estetica antica, Laterza, RomaBari, 1999, pp. 28–47. For a full survey of the theoretical history of the concept see A. Melberg, Theories of Mimesis, Cambridge University Press, 1995; As a reference on mimesis as aesthetic category, see S. Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, Princeton University Press, 2002; Finally, an accurate survey of today’s meaning constellations associated with the concept of mimesis is provided by Andrea Borsari (ed.), Politiche della mimesis. Antropologia, rappresentazione, performatività, Mimesis, Milan, 2003.

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such an event the distinction between art understood as techn¯e and art understood as mousikè grows dim and the techn¯e turns into a form of wisdom inherent to poems, as matter of fact undistinguishable from the Muses’ ascendancy. Not only according to Pindar but also in the Pythagorean tradition and according to Empedocles, mimesis thereby does not mean reproducing reality but rather joining in all the way as to render it almost intensified. Along this line of thinking, it might be useful to retrieve Odo Casel’s much discussed idea, recently commented upon by Giorgio Agamben.56 According to Casel, Christians would have revived the Greek mystery doctrines, which then had a remarkable influence not only on philosophy and theology but also on the sacred rituals. Casel mainly seeks ‘to demonstrate the connection of Christian sacramental liturgy with the pagan mysteries and to show that Christian worship is by nature essentially a “mystery.”’57 Mystery means then cultic action and the Church itself, according to this reading, ‘is defined […] through participation in the mystery of the cultic action.’58 Such participation is established by means of mimesis and is expressed as effective image. Hence the image-presence turns into an effective threshold between the visible and the invisible, expressing both the invisible reference and the visible representation; two in one, all difference preserved, the image is a peculiar participatory location, where, as Casel writes, ‘all that was […] represented symbolically becomes a reality, but a reality of an invisible and pneumatic type, which can thus also become productive of the effects of grace.’59 Agamben then links the notion of image as presence of the mystery to the investigations on image as living image or effective Pathosformel, which, with different approaches and goals, Klages and Warburg were conducting in the same years. However, although a suggestive link, we are here committed to stay on the topic of the relation between human and divine. Properly divine being is deployed by means of its mimetic representation in the realm of praxis, and makes itself available in the effectiveness of its image. In this regard, Agamben recalls a passage from St. Ambrose (Exameron, I, 5, 17) concerning the divine creation of the world, supreme analog of the deployment of being in the realm of praxis through artistic operativity, and he shows that Ambrose is moving in an ontological dimension that has nothing to do with that, for instance, of Aristotle, inasmuch as ‘what is in question is not the mode of being and the permanence of a form and a substance (that is, of a being that, in Aristotelian terms, “is what it was”) but a dislocation of being into the sphere of praxis, in which being is what it does, is its operativity itself,’60 that is to say, creating power, salvation power. ‘The end here is not an external work (as in poi¯esis), but nor does it coincide, as it might seem at first glance, with the action 56 See G. Agamben, Opus Dei, An Archeology of Duty, Eng. tr. by Adam Kotsko, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2013 (Henceforth OD). Agamben relies mainly on Odo Casel’s text of 1932, The Mystery of Christian Worship, published in English by Herder & Herder in 1999. 57 OD, p. 33. 58 OD, p. 34. 59 Cit. in OD, p. 40. 60 OD, p. 44.

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itself (as in praxis),’61 but it is rather act as effectuation, based on a model that we would today call performative. Agamben finally remarks that the operative, effective sense of the work of art as result of the action is already established in theology in the III c. CE, when the Fathers start using the terms efficacia and efficientia, closely linked to effectus, in order to translate the Greek energeia. He quotes among others Rufinus, Calcidium, Marius Vittorinus, and then, besides Ambrose, also Augustine and Boetius, up to Thomas Aquinas. From these references he draws an overall rather appealing strategy: ‘While in the vocabulary of classical ontology being and substance are considered independently of the effects that they can produce, in effectiveness being is inseparable from its effects; it names being insofar as it is effective, produces certain effects, and at the same time is determined by them.’62 A shift in the ontological paradigm takes place here: ‘being coincides without remainders with effectiveness in the sense that it does not simply exist but must be effectuated and actualized. What is decisive is no longer the work as a stable dwelling in presence but operativity, understood as threshold in which being and acting, potential and act, working and work, efficacity and effect, Wirkung and Wirklichkeit enter into a reciprocal tension and tend to become undecidable.’63 What is interesting within this framework is its emphasis on the effective power of the mimetic, of the image as image-of, and more precisely as image-of-truth. Here, being and effect coincide, and the effectus is a mode of being pertaining to the mimetic image. In other words, the image is esse in effectus, not only being in action but an operation realizing a power while holding on in itself to the realized power. What is at stake here is what has been called virtuality in other contexts. Agamben himself employs this term: ‘energeia no longer designates being-at-work as full dwelling of presence but an “operativity” in which the very distinction between potential and act, operation and work are indeterminate and lose their sense. The opus is the operatio itself and the divine potency, which in its very virtuality is brought into work and actualized, is operative (operatoria virtus Dei). Operativity is, in this sense, a real virtuality or a virtual reality.’64 Agamben aptly clarifies that the transformation of energeia in actualitas, understood as effectuality, is a key passage in Heidegger’s 1941 lecture on Metaphysics as History of Being.65 Heidegger sees, Agamben explains, the creationist paradigm as key to the history of being, and understands being-at-work as producing, in the sense of causing. Paradigmatically, artistic operations bring being into work, they effectuate it. Regardless of Heidegger’s specific argument and Agamben’s criticism of it, I would like to draw attention to Heidegger’s reference to the so-called creationist paradigm and the consequent shift in focus it notably allows. It is indeed true that the creationist paradigm requires the acknowledgement of some eminently theological, hence philosophical, factors 61 OD,

p. 72. p. 67. 63 OD, p. 75. 64 OD, p. 96. 65 Published in The End of Philosophy, Eng. tr. by Joan Stambaugh, New York, Harper and Row, 1973. 62 OD,

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contributing to yield different, although not necessarily contrasting, results than those obtained by Agamben. The specifically Christian and more generally biblical theological meaning of creation qualifies as a breakthrough, inasmuch as creation is said to happen out of nothing.66 Emphasis should be placed on this point, widely debated among Christian apologists and Greek and Latin Church Fathers (e.g., Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus, Tertuallian, Origen, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Hippolytus, Lactantius, Ambrose, Augustin), and the radical difference between the work of the Greek Demiurgos, who orders a pre-existing matter on the model of Ideas, and that of the Creator in Judaic and Christian Revelation. The expression “out of nothing,” which is hardly compatible with efficient or material causality theories, points to the idea that the cause of the world lies in God’s freedom, the freedom, that is, pertaining to the divine personality, as made of three persons. What pertains to such freedom is the ability of making the other than itself be, while relying only on itself. Accordingly, nothing in the world is necessary, inasmuch as contingency, that is to say the power, virtue or ability of beings stems from a free act of creation. Leading to the notion of creation, a strictly philosophical line of reasoning could also be followed. One might here want to rely on what can be called aesthetic logos, which bears testimony to the fact that our common experience, the experience, that is, that pertains to each and all of us, the experience which ultimately allows us to communicate, is nothing but the perception and elaboration of a self-annihilating being. What we experience is being becoming (being) nothing, hence establishing that it is not absolute, that it is not outright thinking of nothing, not perception of nothing, not experience of nothing. It inclusively establishes itself as elaboration of the creation, of the fundamental originating from nothing of being, made possible by a non-commensurably positioned power.67 Nevertheless, creation seems to be an absent notion in Greek philosophy, when not explicitly rejected as inconsistent. Creation stems from Christian and more generally biblical Revelation. As a result it seems to defy classical philosophical notions to the point that its translation tends to miss its meaning, thus hindering the understanding, nevertheless always partial, of the Absolute that other approaches allow. This is an all important threshold between metaphysics and theology turning into some sort of territorial border, on which exchanges and relations take place alongside potential openings, feeling-based experiences as well as knowledge-based experiences. These latter clearly develop beyond philosophy and shape notably the hermeneutics of religious experiences and what is sacred. In the case of creation, such an approach qualifies as hermeneutics of biblical revelation and its aim is to introduce the reader to the theological meaning of creation,68 as pointing on the whole to the fundamental quality of reality as stemming from the act of an original and non-controllable alterity. Furthermore, alterity here 66 Cf.

John 1,4; 8,58; 17,5; 17,24; Apoc. 4,11; Rom. 4,17; Hebr. 11,3. The creatio ex nihilo was included among the Church’s key dogmatic teachings in the occasion of the III Lateran Council in 1179. 67 I have discussed this point in L’invisibile sensibile. Itinerari di ontologia estetica, Mimesis, Milan, 2012, pp. 105–118. 68 Cf. B. Casper, Il senso del discorso sulla creazione, “Filosofia e teologia”, XI, 1, 1997, pp. 27–37.

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offers, unexpectedly and defying belief, an alliance with each one of us, in other words, the withdrawing of any dominion in the form of being creature, which is also a form of sense giving. This leads to another groundbreaking feature of Christianity. Creatures, and human beings at the highest degree, are image (and resemblance) of the Creator, notably by means of the mediation of the image of the Father, that is to say Christ.69 I will refrain from accounting for the whole debate, already developed by the first Church Fathers, on this topic, and I will only remark that around the notion of Image of God, also due to its ambivalence—Christ as image of the Father (imago qua deus) and human beings as image of God (imago qua homo)—a consistent Christology as well as a theory of the relation between Christology and Anthropology have been historically developed by the Patristics. What is particularly relevant to our purposes is that from the complex disquisitions on the image of God a pressing question emerges: how can a visible entity be the faithful image of an invisible entity? In its being faithful lies indeed the whole power of the image, its effectiveness, its virtuality, which is to be understood mainly according to two perspectives: within the framework of the theology of incarnation—notably in the steps of Irenaeus and Tertullian—inasmuch as it encompasses the anthropological meaning of the idea of humans as image of the logos made human; and according to the trinitarian standpoint—along the lines of the Alexandrian tradition from Origen to the First Council of Nicaea—inasmuch as it articulates the issues concerning institutive and subsistent relations, concerning kenosis, and the trinitarian economy. To the above outlined scenario, one more key element to the understanding of the Christian standpoint should be added. Fundamental theological and philosophical novelty is indeed introduced by the idea—as established in 325 CE in Nicaea— that the Son is God as much as the Father. Thus, the being-of accounting for the demiurgic sense of the image—connected to a certain extent to the understanding of mimetic power in terms of copy and imitation of a model, rather than in terms of living participation—is decisively questioned. The Son is understood as the “perfect image,” “exact image,” “with no difference”—aparàllaktos eikòn, according to Alexander I of Alexandria’s formula—of the Father. This creates a paradoxical situation, as the image is both the other and the same. The image encompasses both historicity and visibility. It conveys the Son’s role of representative and agent of the Father in the world together with the Word’s transcendence, universality, cosmic and creator’s role. The image holds all this together, more precisely it opens up a space where the polarities of visible and invisible, divine and human, finite and infinite, time and eternity are kept in unity and tension. Interestingly enough, this very tension is what accounts for the relational essence of the image, its ontological properties, and as such is worth investigating. For the time being, it will suffice to say that the term “image” as a whole is thus questioned by Christian authors and provided with a new 69 On the historically widely discussed link between Gen., 1, 27 and Col., 1, 15, and its influence on

philosophy and contemporary art, see Salvatore Natoli’s essay, L’immagine del Dio invisibile, and Pierangelo Sequeri’s, Icona della discordia, in Non ti farai idolo né immagine, il Mulino, Bologna, 2011.

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meaning, which cannot be equated to the demiurgic paradigm or to the demiurgic protocol of artifacts’ manufacturing, which necessarily entail a preliminary design or project as well as a more or less chaotic, nonetheless pre-existing matter to be shaped. As a result, the word “image,” as pointed out by Jean-Jacques Wunenburger,70 is now conceived of according to the filiation model as faithful image, despite being other than the original, as internal resemblance, inherited, exemplary, ultimately expressive faithfulness. Such an idea stems from a thorough re-elaboration of the idea of natural and theological genesis: ‘As in the Christian economy, God, initially creator of the world, incarnates himself in his son and engenders thereby a new living image of himself. The divine incarnation forces then to better distinguish the modes of production of an image. Between the Creation of the world and the divine Incarnation, the Church Fathers carefully establish at once similitude—confirming a link between the two events—and difference in nature, in order to account for the presence of God in his image, whereas Creation is but the external image of its author.’71 Glossing on a passage from Origenes (De principiis, I, 2–6), Wunenburger writes: ‘Christ, historically manifested in this world, Son of God, is understood as an Image engendered by the Father God based on a relation of internal resemblance and not of external reproduction. Filiation replaces, then, duplication, genealogy, artifact creation. Thus, for its incarnationist theory of God, Christianity distinguishes itself on the one hand from Judaism, for which no visible image participates to the divine nature, and on the other hand from Platonism, for which every image remains an external artifact. Thus at least one Image exists, that of God visible in the person of his Son, which is endowed with an ontological plenitude that is equal to that of its principle and which simultaneously ensures an unprecedented theophanous function of manifestation without alteration of the absolute Being.’72 A true image is such not based on exterior faithfulness, but due to its ability to convey the meaningful power of its origin. The image-being thus holds an extraordinary truth potential. To sum up, based on this specifically early-Christian theoretical model of the image, which is the product of the conceptual intersection of creation from nothing, trinity and incarnation, to be image means: I. II.

III. IV.

that created things, under the category of image, can be taken as a whole as intermediate entities, simultaneously inhabited by distance and by the origin; that the images making up for our world—the world of visibility and of the Word—constantly deal with an always crossable margin of nothing, this nothing seeping through the backbones of being while also bouncing back into life, acting as both effectiveness and effectuality, as being which is life; being an entity (the image) which is constitutively relation, and which can somehow also be taken as constitutive relation; being an entity, inasmuch as it is an image, which is intrinsically effectual, or better, virtual, that is to say, ontologically hybrid: object-event, space–time connection or knot of an incommensurably dense network.

70 Cf.

J.-J. Wunenburger, Philosophie des images, PUF, Paris, 1997, pp. 101–146. des images, p. 112 (my transl.). 72 Philosophie des images, p. 113. 71 Philosophie

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All things considered, the theoretical framework provided by the theological and anthropological investigation of images within the realm of creation and genesis establishes in the first place that simply created entities are signifiable as images; in the second place it also establishes that images themselves have an ontologically expressive power. As to the first point, one might even say that the world is the “whole set of images,” and that no relationship is established with the so-called world if not via images, that is to say, via a virtual, problematic, undetermined, and almost unlimited source of determinations which is dynamically open to relevant selections. In this regard, concerning our perceptual, participatory, creative relation to the world, we could describe ourselves as essentially “image faculties” or “image powers.” Hence the images produced by us, by the artistic operativity of creatures which are themselves images, once more emphasize an essential being-of, which is to be articulated not in mimetic and descriptive modules, but as a dynamic and precariously vital reference to that invisible that only can produce salvation.73 The poietic image clearly displays then its specific existence as in-between and limited participation to the act, its being potentiality and virtuality; it becomes the symbol74 of a transition, of an anxious and unsteady passage between nothing and being, death and life, damnation and salvation. By way of digression, I should say that cinema is formally a peculiar exemplification of this sense of the poietic image, inasmuch as it concretizes time in the space of a constant and instantaneous fleeing, to the point of making visible that precarious and insistent contact with nothingness, which is the meaning of the being-image of entities—secondary, although relevant, is that cinema is both concept and percept, intelligence and emotion, and also that it brings forth a different gaze and a different feeling. In poietic images, in general, the visible sinks in the incident, that is to say, a sinking in time takes place as memory of the past, which, regardless whether lived or not lived, even when only dreamt or hoped, is hurting for some inexplicable reason. This might certainly happen also in cinema images, but it does not define their specificity, this latter having to do with the relation between movement and time, as understood since the early days of cinema as its unique property, and such as to produce a powerful primary illusion. Cinema images show becoming in terms of space pushing itself inside time, or as temporality becoming explicit in space. But what is the coming-to-be if not the self-annihilation of that entity which the appearing of something is? It should be clear that the achievement of said annihilation is a logical/phenomenological plexus; an experience which cannot be achieved otherwise is given: the experience of the disappearing of something amounts to the annihilation of its appearing, inasmuch as, while what appears can be separated from its appearing, the appearing (this given appearing) cannot be separated from

73 For

the implications of this kind of reference in contemporary art, see G. Larcher, Estetica della fede. Un abbozzo teologico-fondamentale, Glossa, Milano, 2011, pp. 55–104. 74 For more on this point, see Franzini, E. 2008. I simboli e l’invisibile. Figure e forme del pensiero simbolico. Milano: il Saggiatore, in particular pp. 199–209; Lingua, G. 2006. L’icona, l’idolo e la guerra delle immagini, Milano: Medusa.

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itself. The experience records the coming-to-be as annihilation, that is, as the presence of nothingness in life, ‘not-being seeping through the bones of being.’75 This is a common experience, which sometimes, as to its determination, turns out to be severely irreparable. Now, in cinema, this experience is precisely formalized, to the point of making cinema the mirror of life. What is given in cinema is precisely the irreparable disappearing of the image, and in the sinking of the singularity of the image into nothingness the meaning of becoming itself is given. What appears is not nothingness, but the annihilation, that is, the margin that keeps being and nothingness bound to the contingent historicity of the narration. The cinema image is perpetually passing away; it always belongs to the past; it never stays; and cinema makes perfectly visible the ontological meaning of this never staying. However, its being of the past is also productive: in some movies, being constantly on the brink of nothingness widens up to the point of destructuring the reality effect and appearing without a goal; in other movies it produces a consistency with no residue, or it explicitly opens the way to the ontological meaning of the image: it shows the strength and form of becoming, the fluidity of being and that incessant metamorphosis that the real is. From the exorcising of the destructive power of time emerges the theory of cinema as time-image, which Deleuze extracts precisely from the depths of Bergson’s idea of time. The cinema image is then seen as crystal-image: ‘What constitutes the crystalimage is the most fundamental operation of time: since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past […]. Time has to split at the same time as it sets itself out, or unroll itself: it splits in two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past. Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is time, that we see in the crystal.’76 In cinema, the image always shows itself while falling; it shows itself as and because it falls into nothingness; however, on the bounce, it somehow brings order to chaos, provided it is true that the editing is cosubstantial to the very being of cinema. And yet, precisely due to the absolute value of editing, in the transition from analog to digital, the depth of time in cinema dissolves or tends to dissolve: ‘as constituted through digital capture or synthesis, the image is always “montage,” in the sense of a singular combination of discrete elements […]. Because the spatial unity of the image in time can no longer be assured or attested to by the digital image, and because the powers of indexicality are weakened or decentered by the process of digital conversion, the expression of duration is transformed […]. We no longer seek to overcome our temporal alienation from the past in digital cinema, first because the causal chain of analogy is broken, and second because the electronic screen expresses another ontology.’77 This “other” ontology

75 Bontadini, G. 1995. L’attualità della metafisica classica. In: Conversazioni di metafisica. Milano:

Vita e Pensiero, t. I, p. 92 (my transl.). G. 1989. Cinema 2, The Time-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 81. 77 Rodowick, D.N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 166. 76 Deleuze,

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is for the great part still to be formulated.78 This should be done by elaborating on the idea of virtual which underwrites it. According to the basic point of view developed here, cinema takes place as aesthetic logos, that is, as primary structure of knowledge, as an experience which is the synthesis of logic immediacy and phenomenological immediacy, as sensible logos bearing testimony to the presence of a form of negativity which is fully other in relation to the realms not only of concept-based understanding but also of representation and reason. The aesthetic common sense, which precedes any determined knowledge—inasmuch as transcendental—testifies that our primary experience is essentially twofold: experience of being and of its annihilation, of the entity’s rising from nothingness and of its disappearing into nothingness. It is the experience that something is in image, experience of the appearing and thereby experience of the rise: genesis, physis; this experience can sometimes be terrible, but sometimes it is also experience of beauty, of the sublime, of grace; as such it inaugurates the horizon of sense; while simultaneously being experience of going into nothingness, that is, of the self-annihilation of the very appearing.

78 This ontology might well be also “cinematographic.” I agree with what Cristiano Dal Pozzo writes in this regard: ‘It is true that VR is not cinema, if by cinema we insist to understand the (mainly) narrative, bidimensional and collective (if not even analogical) of the screening hall; but if we accept the idea of an also attractional (besides narrative) cinema, constructed on a constantly changing device, on an organism-device in constant mutation, […] a gas-like body which is able to take different forms according to the spaces it occupies, then we would not be surprised to hear people talking about VR as of a (post)cinematographic medium,’ Dalpozzo, C. 2018. Cinema e realtà virtuale, ovvero “The early virtual (post)cinema of attractions. In: C. Dalpozzo, F. Negri, A. Novaga (Eds.), La realtà virtuale, Dispositivi, estetiche, immagini. Milano: Mimesis, p. 104 (my transl.). Interesting remarks in the direction of experimenting new conceptual relations can be found also in F. Zucconi’s article, Preposterous media: applicazioni umanitarie del VR cinema e pittura a lume di notte, “Arte Cristiana”, 912, 2019, pp. 174–185; more on this topic can be found in Zucconi, F. 2018. Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 3

Image, Art, Virtuality

3.1 Aesthetic Experience and Virtuality We do not know what art is,1 but art makes full display of the relational being of the image, of the personal power of imagination, of the impersonal, irresistible, power of collective imagination. Any philosophical attempt to define art mostly turns into a historical non-achievable endeavor, and yet one could easily claim that art is some sort of accomplishment or perfecting of experience, and in particular of so-called aesthetic experience, meaning by aesthetic nothing less than the highest degree of complexity conveyed by the word experience. Hence art provides a paradigmatic opportunity for an inquiry of experience in general and of aisthesis in particular. Simply put, in its original and outward simplicity, aisthesis is constitutively relation. Any perception entails intention, a synthesis of past and future (protentions and retentions), attentional aiming, passivity and activity, and so on; in equally simple terms, being the perfect synthesis of a work of art (opera, in Italian) and its operating (operare), any artistic operation is also relation. It is the relation between the artists and their project—although superseded by the impersonality of inspiration; it is the relation with materials, techniques, the culture of one’s time, with the commissioner; it is the relation between the work of art and who achieves it, who enjoys it, with the bystanders, with its interpretations and the history of its impact. As there is radically no aisthesis which is not relation, similarly there is no art which is not relation—as loudly spoken by performative art and, notably, by relational art today. That’s not all. Today also those who take aesthetics as the general doctrine of perception and as environmental aesthetics, that is, as aesthetics of “feeling the environment,” while turning the attention to atmospheres, delve into a theory of the 1 “What

is art?”: ‘When a philosopher repeats this question without transforming it, without destroying in its form, its question-form, its onto-interrogative structure, he has already subjected the whole of space to the discoursive arts, to voice and the logos.’ Derrida, J. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Translated by G. Bennington and I. MacLeod. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, p. 22.

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relation. This latter has even become clearly prominent in authors such as Gernot Böhme. ‘Atmospheres – Böhme writes – are something between subject and object. They are not something relational, but rather the relation itself. […] The dominant ontology in the European cultural context since Aristoteles is a thing-ontology or, to say it better, a substance-ontology […] and what is a something between substances only is as long as the substances are. […] Our phenomenological access to perceptual experiences frees us however from the dogma according to which all beings, also beings of a relational and medial nature, must be based on substances. For us, the atmosphere is the first reality of perception.’2 This is a key remark that can be fully shared. However, from an ontological point of view, it relies on the differentiation of effectual reality (Wirklichkeit) and physical reality (Realität): ‘in this sense effectively real (wirklich) is only what is given in actual perception, real (real), what can stand behind it like a thing.’3 This distinction deprives or tends to deprive relations of virtuality, and likens them to pure phenomena existing, so to speak, only in the “existential” more of actuality. This is certainly an interesting direction of research,4 however not the one pursued here. It is not my intention to investigate the phenomenon-event, but rather to explore, although briefly, the coinciding of object and event.5 In this regard, what is preliminarily of interest here is the coincidence between experience and art as relational dynamics with ontological value. John Dewey, I believe, has been the first, in Art as Experience, to point in this direction.6 The title of Dewey’s work should indeed be taken in its strongest possible sense. Art as experience7 means that the work of art is an accomplished aesthetic experience and vice versa. This entails that the work of art should be taken not only or not primarily as object, but rather as an event, even better as an object-event. Thus a close and specific convergence between aesthetics and ontology is achieved, based on which art as this work of art and art as this experience merge in unity. This is so both on the level of the particular and on a more general level, inasmuch as the peculiar intertwining of work of art and aesthetic experience is understood by Dewey as exemplary case study shedding light on the sense of experience in general. In the third chapter of Art as Experience, Dewey thoroughly examines the matter and claims that: ‘the 2 Böhme, G. 2001. Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, pp. 54–56 (my transl.; emphasis in the original). 3 Böhme (2001), p. 57. 4 Developed for instance by Tonino Griffero. See Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, Ashgate Publishing, 2014. 5 On this point I also refer the reader to my Diodato, R. 2012. Aesthetics of the Virtual. Translation by J.L. Harmon. New York: SUNY Press. 6 I have dealt with this topic also in Esperienza estetica e interattività, in L. Russo (ed.), Esperienza estetica a partire da John Dewey, “Aesthetica Preprint: Supplementa”, 2007, pp. 137–149. 7 J. Dewey, Art as Experience (1934). See the Perigee Books edition, New York, 1980. In my opinion “As” means here “in the same way that,” as suggested, in overall, by Matteucci’s introduction to the remarkable Italian edition of Art as experience (Arte come esperienza, a cura di G. Matteucci, Aesthetica Edizioni, Palermo, 2007, pp. 7–26). See also, Matteucci, G. 2015. Il sensibile rimosso. Itinerari di estetica sulla scena americana. Milano: Mimesis, pp. 31–50.

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[a]esthetic […] is clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience. This fact I take to be the only secure basis upon which [a]esthetic theory can build.’ Precisely ensuing from this claim, Dewey also points to a problem: ‘We have no word in the English language that unambiguously includes what is signified by the two words “artistic” and “[a]esthetic.” Since “artistic” refers primarily to the act of production and “[a]esthetic” to that of perception and enjoyment, the absence of a term designating the two processes taken together is unfortunate.’8 In his never-ending fight against all forms of dualism, Dewey finds in art the place where the polarities of passivity and activity, production and enjoyment, are exemplarily intersecting and generate the existential concreteness of the work of art, such concreteness leaving behind all differences between mind and body, senses and intellect, spirit and matter. In this respect, the work of art is a rich dynamic structure, which can be read as reality only within the realm—production and enjoyment wise—of its genetic layers of experience. It is an object-event which can be understood only in its complex anthropological and ontological structure. It is from this viewpoint that we can also discuss Dewey’s ideas on aesthetic/artistic experience as full achievement or perfecting of experience. What is at stake here is not pleasure or enjoyment, however complex they may be, experienced by the subject of aesthetic experience as signs of the accomplishment of experience itself; not some sort of echo or translation—in the streams of existential interests—of some Kant-reminiscent unselfish pleasure. What is at stake here is rather aesthetic/artistic experience as perfecting, hence as lived understanding, based on both intellect and senses, of the sense of experience. The idea that what is peculiarly revealed by art as aesthetic experience also applies to the sense of experience in general—hence to the very being of the world—is clearly presented by Dewey’s investigation on the function of copulas in the formulation of predicative judgements, as published in Logic—The Theory of Inquiry. There, the reader discovers that: ‘Etymologically, the word is derives from a root meaning to stand or to stay. To remain and endure is a mode of action. At least, it indicates a temporal equilibrium of interactions. Now a spatio-temporal change is existential. Consequently the copula in judgement, whether as a transitive or intransitive verb, or in the ambiguous from “is,” has inherent existential reference.’9 Although, on a merely reflexive or explicative level, copulas can also stand for purely logical relations, ‘The situation to which the sentence refers determines unambiguously whether “is” has an active force, expressing a change going on actually or potentially, or whether it stands for a relation between meanings or ideas. […] The copula in judgement, in distinction from the term of formal relation, expresses, accordingly, the actual transformation of the subject-matter of an indeterminate situation into a determinate one. So far is the copula from being an isolable constituent that it might be regarded as what sets the subject-and-predicate contents at work executing their functions in relation to one another.’10 Dewey finally detects already in predicative 8 Art

as experience, cit., p. 46. Dewey, Logic—The Theory of Inquiry, 1938, p. 35. 10 Ibidem. 9 J.

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judgements the explosive power of the being-experience plexus, its dynamicity, prior to isolatable objectualities and constituting them as relational networks, in terms of distribution of active factors, of regulated cooperations, as work projects only later expressed by propositions. These latter, in turn, can even be read on this level as cartographies defined by their functions.11 This is what emerges with increasing clarity in Dewey’s lexical transition, in Knowing and the Know, from the concept of interaction to that of transaction: ‘If inter-action assumes the organism and its environmental objects to be present as substantially separate existences or forms of existence, prior to their entry into joint investigation, then transaction assumes no pre-knowledge of either organism or environment alone as adequate, […] but requires their primacy acceptance in common system […].’12 Here, perfectly in line, in my opinion, with what Dewey already wrote in Experience and Nature concerning James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism, experience ‘is “double-barrelled in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality.’13 In other words, the matter of experience is made of adapting processes including actions, habits, functions ranging from doing to being done; that is to say, matter of experience are not primarily the objects of which a subject makes experience. Hence the immediate de-structuring of the merely naturalistic relation between object and subject, between internal and external. Experience is instead the synthesis of matter and act, and such synthesis is inter-action. Moreover, granted that the word interaction entails an action “among” polarities, one might want to claim that experience is fully accomplished not when said polarities relate as self-constituted poles, but rather when they reciprocally coordinate within a unity of sense, as it happens, precisely, in aesthetic/artistic experience. This latter is neither an emotional experience, nor a practical one, nor an intellectual one, but it achieves in unity all these factors: ‘Art thus represents the culminating event of nature as well as the climax of experience.’14 I now intend to get some mileage out of Dewey’s results. As is well known, Dewey understands experience mainly as ‘the interaction of organism and environment, resulting in some adaptation which secures utilization of the latter […].’15 But what happens, one may ask, when the notion of environment is no longer what Dewey’s could make reference to, that is something exclusively or mainly connected to biological and vital processes as original drives for social relations and institutions? In such an unprecedented scenario Dewey’s ideas on the relation between art

11 As clearly suggested by Enzo Paci: ‘The acknowledgement of all events’ interdependency and relation is the distinctive feature of Dewey’s philosophy. Everything is experience, everything in experience is reciprocal relation; the universe itself may present itself to us as a big society of facts and events.’ See Dewey e l’interrelazione universale, in Tempo e relazione, Taylor, Torino, 1954, p. 155 (my transl.). 12 J. Dewey, A.F. Bentley, Knowledge and the Known, 1949, p. 137. 13 J. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 2nd ed., George Allen and Unwin Ltd., London, 1929, p. 8. 14 Experience and Nature, cit., p. ix. 15 J. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1920, p. 87.

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and experience as exemplifying the sense of experience in general acquire an even more radical meaning.16 Our current, common “environment,” in which we constantly seek adaptation and newly achieved balance, displays today the features of media-induced collective imagination and the footprints of its corresponding desire-machine defining the era of emotional marketing. We live in an environment of widespread aestheticization—from fashion to design, to advertising and videoclips, to packagings and environmental design, etc.—where tastes, feelings, emotions and likings determine seeming immediacy thanks to complex processes of mediation. In order to fully emphasize Dewey’s potential topicality, many elements of our complex current environment should be taken into account, possibly too many. Nevertheless there is one element in particular that, in my opinion, fully supports the retrieval of this model. To a certain extent, what we call environment today can be defined, broadly, as “virtual,” made possible, that is, by technological devices which interact—not always but very often—with prothesis-endowed organism, organisms that are no longer only biological, but biotechnological. One might then wonder what happens, in such environments, to the aesthetic/artistic experience. New digital technologies allow the interpreter to evade the two-fold paradigm that has long engulfed the theories on technique. Technique has been traditionally understood as a means to supplement typically human adaptive deficiencies—as explained by Gehlen17 and many others—or as humans’ “natural” prosthesis, as something, that is, originally connected to “human evolution,” this latter understood as intermeshing of tools and gestures—as notoriously claimed by Leroi-Gourhan.18 New technologies stand instead beyond adaptation experiences aimed at increasing control, balance, expansion, since the new experiences they allow are no longer made simply by means of technologies, but are rather made in them, as new changing and plural gravitational centers. Relying on the well-established imagery of deterritorialization, this idea is also radically articulated by Baudrillard, as he writes that: ‘instead of concentrically gravitating around them, all parts of human beings, including their brain, have become eccentric satellites, have launched themselves in orbit and, suddenly, due to this extroversion of their own technologies, to this orbital multiplication of their functions, it is human beings who become exorbited, it is human beings who become eccentric. In relation to the satellites they have created and launched in orbit, it is human 16 In his Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione, Carocci,

Roma, 2019, Giovanni Matteucci has outlined an interesting development of Dewey’s contribution on experience, which amounts to a theory of experience which does not entail pre-constituted subjectivity and objectivity, but rather supports the notion of experiencing-with: ‘according to this understanding, experience is primarily an environmental interaction between organism and surroundings endowed with its own structures and modes of sense already on the level of the sensible, concerning, that is, how said interaction develops in the whole of sensibility’ (p. 12, my transl.). 17 Cf. A: Gehlen, Man in the Age of Technology, Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. 3–4. Gehlen makes reference to Sombart, Alsberg and Ortega y Gasset in support to his position. 18 Cf. A. Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachuetts & London, 1993, pp. 242ff.

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beings who today with their bodies, their thinking, their territory, have become exorbitant.’19 In this regard, Baudrillard develops the concept of “videosphere” as overall label for new digital, hypermedia and telematic technologies. All things considered a reductive and potentially misleading concept, Baudrillard’s “videosphere” misses the fact that new IT technologies are not exclusively nor fundamentally TV-style processes of analysis and synthesis of external appearance. Nevertheless, besides its lexicon, the message is clear: more than tools and explication of the so-called “human nature,” new technologies are autonomous streams, which express a previously possibly hidden feature of physis. They clearly imply what is human, its modes of perception, emotions, desires, social exchanges, more generally the mesh bodymind. Hence they increasingly structure and de-structure what is human within their processes, the increasing autonomy of which makes what is human ex-centric, no longer able to hold them tightly within the grip of will and projectuality. This encourages a reformulation of the combination of physis and techn¯e as the source of ethos, that is of human inhabiting. Whereas until now the polis has been the most articulated expression of the above mentioned combination, currently the realm of politics appears no longer sufficient. In order to understand the relation between art and new technologies, in my opinion, the “telematic” perspective, that is the idea that new technologies mean new media, is insufficient and misses on an important point. What is necessary is in fact an investigation of the notions of virtual and virtual body. In general terms, these are key elements not only in new digital technologies, but also in artistic activities which are not necessarily media-related or explicitly targeting communication, if not in the sense of the communication elements pertaining to any artistic production.20 By “virtual body,” here, we can understand in the first place and in a broad sense, an interactive digital image, the becoming phenomenon of the binary representation of an algorithm in interaction with a user. This is something precise, on which since several years international aesthetic experimentations have been working. What I am talking about are all those digital objects/environments with which users can interact through the devices we can connect to computers, these sometimes even being biorobotic prostheses which allow for high levels of immersiveness. Sometimes users interact with such digital environments—mainly put together not by one individual author/(possibly) artist, but by a collective mind—by means of avatars,21 virtual alter-egos who appear to perform actions within said environments and to produce transformations within them; some other times the users’ spectator function coincides with their being actors in the situation. Now, all “aesthetic” transformation or 19 Baudrillard, J. 1989. Videosfera e soggetto frattale. In Videoculture di fine secolo, ed. L. Anceschi,

30. Napoli: Liguori (my transl.). For further development of this topic in the direction of the virtual, see Baudrillard, J. 1996. Il delitto perfetto, Afterword by G. Piana. Milano: Cortina. 20 For an overall discussion of digital art from a historical and critical perspective, see Paul. C. 2016. A Companion to Digital Art. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Useful insights are also included in Catricalà, V. 2016. Media Art. Prospettive delle arti verso il XXI secolo. Storie, teorie, preservazione. Milano: Mimesis, in particular pp. 75–104. 21 On the communication functions and psychic functions of avatars, see Tisseron, S. 2012. Rêver, fantasmer, virtualiser. Du virtuel psychique au virtuel numérique. Paris: Dunod, pp. 113–127.

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modification produced by users in digital or virtual environments are possible inasmuch as the sense-based images (involving sight, hearing, touch, etc.) they perceive or produce are but the several phenomenon versions of an algorithmic matrix, nothing but the several possible aesthetic actualizations the program allows. However, it is interesting to remark that the degree of interactivity22 of digital objects varies based on whether the interaction relies on “stiff” algorithms—which pre-order all interaction—or “flexible” ones—which “learn” as they go and change according to the interaction itself. When the point is reached that the interaction implies aesthetic experience in Dewey’s sense, that is to say, a perfecting of experience that displays some distinctive features—which I will describe later—and is as such that it produces the sense of the object-event, of the image-body or virtual environment, qualifying it as work of art, then the interaction becomes outright interactivity. A full survey of this field, a full phenomenology of the virtual bodies of interest here that could introduce some distinction based on different degrees of immersiveness and interactivity would be necessary. However, this is clearly beyond the scope of this essay. I will content myself with saying that currently a note-worthy distinction is introduced between screen-linked virtual environments—digital screens, not TV screens! hence also but not only on the web, which becomes phenomenon on screen—and what I call properly speaking virtual environments. This is a key difference which supports the production of artistic experimentations and poetics that are very, almost entirely, different from one another. The web aesthetics, hence the aesthetics of hypertexts and hypermedia as a network, implies a full revision of the notion of body scheme, of the relation Körper-Leib and of the relation between perception and imagination,23 that is to say of all the strategic dimensions of the relation between human beings and the world which have been absorbed, and taken for granted, from the phenomenological tradition. The almost insuperable challenge facing programmers, which is to give life to avatars on screens and make them surf the net as if endowed with a living body, as to thereby convey real time aesthetic and noetic processes of presence24 to the inhabitants of the avatars (avatars’ users/avatars’ 22 An introductory account on the several types of interactivity is provided by Sommerer C. and Mignonneau, L. 2011. Cultural Interfaces: Interaction Revisited. In Imagery in the 21st Century, eds. O. Grau, T. Veigl, 210–218. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. On the historical development of interactivity, see Weibel, P. 2006. It is Forbidden Not to Touch: Some Remarks on the (Forgotten Parts of the) history of Interactivity and Virtuality. In MediaArtHistories, ed. O. Grau, 21–41. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. 23 For an investigation of this relation, see Richir, M. 2004. Phantasia, imagination, affectivité. Phénomenologie et anthropologie phénoménologique. Genoble: Millon. Richir develops the logic of perception first outlined by Merleau-Ponty in the terms of a logic of affection. He notably reassesses the relations between phantasy, imagination and affectivity, and presents the non-synthetic results of the impact between dynamis and aisthesis. Attention has been duly given to this logic by Pierangelo Sequeri in Sequeri, P. 2016. Il sensibile e l’inatteso. Lezioni di estetica teologica. Brescia: Queriniana, pp. 187–206. 24 On the perception of “presence” in virtual environments, see Riva, G. and Gaggioli, A. 2019. Realtà virtuali. Firenze: Giunti, pp. 83–106; Micalizzi, A. and Gaggioli, A. Il senso di realtà del virtuale e i “principi di presenza”, in La realtà virtuale. Dispositivi, estetiche, immagini, cit., pp. 55, 66.

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counterparts), is also a challenge for the interpreters, who are called to come up with new categories in order to account for the relative inapplicability of experience to the web.25 Besides this generically hypertextual feature of electronic writing, there is also, as is well known, a full line of research whose explorations range from immaterial sculptures to sense-based environments with natural interfaces, from prosthesisendowed bodies in telematic environments, up to the early experiments with outright virtual environments. Separate reference should also be made of the artistic experimentations of telematic bio-art26 and of those attempting to establish a connection or co-inhabiting of prosthesis-endowed bodies and telematic networks.27 When it comes to the strictly speaking virtual body, this latter can be understood as a structurally relational and essentially interactive environment. A brief survey of the ontology of the virtual body/environment ensues. Its main characteristics are the closely interconnected features of intermediacy and virtuality.28 Virtual bodies are intermediary29 entities, in my opinion, for two main reasons: since it becomes a phenomenon in interactivity, the body which is a virtual environment evades the dichotomy between “external” and “internal”; it is not a cognitive product of consciousness, and it is not an image of the mind—the user is well aware of experiencing an other reality also in the sense of a paradoxical reduplication of perceptual synthesis—nor it is something “external” to it—the user knows it depends on their actions. The virtual body-environment is therefore simultaneously external and internal. On this point further discussion might ensue. I invite nevertheless the reader not to take the terms “internal” and “external” naively or “naturalistically,” as if they were not “phenomenologically” very significant. All this means that virtual bodies 25 An interesting debate on web aesthetics has been launched by Vincenzo Cuomo in the book Al di là della casa dell’essere. Una cartografia della vita estetica a venire, Aracne, Rome, 2007. I tend to agree with Cuomo, when he writes that “it is a phenomenological – and ontological – mistake to confuse the environment-digital body with the data-space or with the tele-present stream of data – of the software-data – in the web. The interactive space of the web cannot be unproblematically reduced to the virtual environment.” p. 76 (my transl.); this is also true the other way round. The two environments are indeed structurally different. 26 For instance, Edoardo Kac’s now very famous work; For a discussion of the ethical responsibility of Bioart, see the conversation between Maurizio Bolognini and Edoardo Kac in https://www.ekac. org/luxflux2005.html. 27 Reference can here be made to MOVATAR by Stelarc, which features a partially other-directed virtual exoskeleton powered by Internet users’ bodies: ‘Consider […] a virtual body or an avatar that can access a physical body, actuating its performance in the real world. If the avatar is imbued with an artificial intelligence, becoming increasingly autonomous and unpredictable, then it would become more an AL (Artificial Life) entity performing with a human body in physical space’; ‘MOVATAR is an inverse motion capture system – an intelligent avatar that will be able to perform in the real world by accessing and actuating a body, whereas in previous performances the artist has attached prosthetic devices to augment the body. Now the body itself becomes a prosthesis – possessed by an avatar to perform in the physical world.’ STELARC, Zombies & Cyborgs, The Cadaver, the Comatose & the Chimera: https://stelarc.org/documents/zombiesandcyborgs.pdf. 28 On the notion of “virtuality” and for the several definitions of “virtual,” see the first part (The Foundation of Virtuality) of The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, ed. M. Grimshaw, 17–125. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 29 Cf. Ph. Queau, Metaxu. Théorie de l’art intermédiaire, Seyssel, Champ Vallon/INA, 1989.

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should not be taken, strictly speaking, as representations of reality, but rather as entities that come about in a way that is totally different from how other entities come about in the two-way participation of the lived body to the world, which thanks to vision and perception passes through the body to become gesture, body movement, and—when mediated by analogical reproduction tools—also image. Differently, virtual bodies-environments are “artificial windows opening onto an intermediary world.”30 In this intermediary world space itself is the result of interactivity; the world does not take place in the distancing of oneself, but rather in the sense-feeling of immersion; and the body, perceived as other, takes upon itself the sense of its reality, of its effectiveness, as imaginary and pathic incision, as production of desire and emotion, to the point that the reality feeling conveyed by a virtual environment relies significantly on how effectively it produces emotions in the users.31 From this point of view, ‘virtual reality can provide its own, self-authenticating experience.’32 This is so precisely because it qualifies as reality, as alterity in relation to the users, as an environment in which they can act, as bodies they can manipulate. The virtual body-environment is, therefore, intermediary not only as it mediates between a digital model and a sensible image, but primarily as it is intermediary between interior and exterior as two sides of the same phenomenon. In this strange place the border turns into a territory. It can be concluded that virtual bodies-environments are neither simple images nor simple bodies, but bodies-images eluding the ontological distinction between “objects” and “events,” since, like “objects,” they have relative stability and stay the same through time, and, like “events,” they exist in the happening of interactivity. The ensuing individual is indeed solid, for it is the subject-object of actions and perceptions, but it is also “distinctively flimsy,” precisely because of its being interactive. As a hybrid, its ontological status is uncertain; one might even call it a flimsy body in a non-continuous world, made of points-data coming across in terms of fluidity and density to saturate perception. Digitalization makes this body light and interactivity the condition of its appearing. Such a body finally belongs to the world of both natural and artificial things, perfectly in line with both theoretical possibilities famously outlined by Aristotle’s very powerful and paradigmatic definition of existing things in the Physics: ‘Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes. “By nature” the animals and their parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water) – for we say that these and the like exist “by nature.” All the things mentioned present a feature in which they differ from things which are not constituted by nature. Each of them has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration). On the other hand, a bed and a coat and anything else of that sort, qua receiving these designations i.e. in so far as they are products of art, have no innate impulse to change. But in so far as they happen to be composed of stone 30 Ph.

Queau, Metaxu, cit., p. 18. I tend not to accept Queau’s theory of intermediary beings and prefer to develop the matter independently. 31 Cf. Riva, Gaggioli (2019), in particular pp. 115–130. 32 J. D. Bolter, R. Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999, p. 165.

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or of earth or of a mixture of the two, they do have such an impulse, and just to that extent which seems to indicate that nature is a source or cause of being moved and of being at rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not in virtue of a concomitant attribute.’33 Now, although Aristoteles probably does not wish to support the existence of pure self-movement in things that are “by nature”,34 virtual bodies, as digital appearances existing only in interaction, are “certainly”35 artificial, a product of art, however they also have an “innate” impulse to change, which does not depend on their “natural” components but rather on their own “nature” of event. Hybrid then means artificial-natural, in some respects almost a “living” system,36 or, in the current jargon of physics, a dissipative system.37 Not only object-events, then, but also subject-objects, virtual bodies only exist—as previously remarked—as the encounter between digital writing and bodies that are sensitive to it, hence as constitutive interactivity. This allows to conceive of the relation (i.e. the encounter) as in itself capable of constituting entities—independently of specific relational properties—hence to develop an—until now mostly uncharted—ontology of relations, as acknowledging an addition to the world’s furnishings.

33 Aristotle,

Physics, II, 1, 192 b.

34 As argued, for instance, by Wieland in his now standard work (see W. Wieland, Die aristotelische

Physik. Untersuchungen über die Grundlegung der Naturwissenschaft und die sprachlichen Bedingungen der Prinzipienforschung bei Aristoteles, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962, pp. 231–243). At any rate, there seems to be no univocal bond between poi¯esis and techn¯e. Also “natural” genesis is somehow poi¯esis, and, inasmuch as both are aimed to an end, techn¯e can be said to imitate poi¯esis; on this topic, see C.A. De Bravo Delorme, Physis y Techne. Una investigación acerca del cáracter poiético de la relación entre naturaleza y saber, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 2009, pp. 278–290. 35 I am well aware of how problematic this adverb is. On this matter, see Soavi, M. 2009. Antirealismo e artefatti. Sui limiti della natura. Milano: Franco Angeli. It is my opinion, for that matter, that if by artifact one is to understand the “intentioned product of an intentional action,” the works of art and virtual bodies are not artifacts. 36 Once more, this is the actualization of one of Benjamin’s ideas. In reference to the circular relation between the reproducibility principle defining mimetic experience and the reproducibility principle intrinsic to technical devices, Fabrizio Desideri writes: ‘Techné is here not the other than psyche […] but a quasi-living organ which is able to reflect it and extend it.’ See F. Desideri, I Modern Times di Benjamin, in W. Benjamin, L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica. Tre versioni (1936–1939), Donzelli, Roma, 2012, p. XXXIX (my transl.). 37 For an approach to the study of biological systems in terms of quantum theory of fields, see E. Del Giudice, The psyco-emotional-physical unity of living organism as an outcome of quantum physics, in G. Globus, K. Pribram, G. Vitiello (eds.), Brain and Being. At the boundary between science, philosophy, language and arts, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2004, pp. 71–88; G. Vitiello, The dissipative brain, in G. Globus, K. Pribram, G. Vitiello (eds.), Brain and Being, cit., pp. 315–334. Del Giudice’s and Vitiello’s works pave the way to an integrated research project on physics and aesthetics, which is clearly in my opinion worth pursuing.

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3.2 Art and Virtuality It is possibly still useful today to remember Husserl’s invitation, in the Crisis, to think about the “world of life,” the renown Lebenswelt, which is the world produced by ‘all activity of life […] presupposed by all human praxis and all prescientific and scientific life. […] the life which, in all its accomplishments, is in them and strives upward from them, shaping from within.’38 This extraordinary and trivial world cannot be left to its “anonymity.”39 According to Husserl, this is primarily the world of “pure experience,” which far from amounting to the experience of “sensible data,” it rather qualifies as doxa,40 a stormy ocean in constant mutation, and yet one determining habits, styles and ultimately also the content of what we call scientific knowledges. The doxa is clearly a form of experience which is knowledge; this knowledge shapes the space–time of everyday experience; it takes an orientation and specializes to some purposes; it determines the framework within which the games of life take place, that is to say, the “field” of praxis; this experience is as manifold and varied as the often overlapping and interrelated fields of our capitals and of our processes of symbolizing. As always, the doxa is connected to interacting devices,41 today in the form of complex technologies, which deserve close examination in their structure and effects. In the light of the effects of today’s devices, a revision of phenomenology is due, namely of the relation between empirical and transcendental, and their origin in a “generic ego.” Eideitic variation derives in fact, according to Husserl, from ‘generically an ego, who already has (in conscious fashion) a world – a world of our universally familiar ontological type’42 ; however, if one is to accept a strong definition of virtuality, today the “ontological type” of the world is no longer “universally familiar,” neither is, correspondingly, “the generic ego.” Wider examination deserve indeed the properties of today’s space–time43 as inextricably natural and cultural, mainly connected to neotechnological devices with medial features, which are so pervasive that they produce a blurring effect. As a result, it is increasingly difficult to understand what finds itself in a medial situation and what does not.44 In this regard, one can turn to Stiegler’s words, as he writes that: ‘individual connections do not stop multiplying. An individual connected to global networks, who is already geolocalized without knowing it on a web of variable links, emits and receives messages 38 E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated by D. Carr, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1989, pp. 113–114. 39 E. Husserl (1989), p. 112. 40 On this point, see C. Sini, Inizio, Jaca Book, Milano, 2016, p. 12. 41 On the highly relevant notion of device, see A. Pinotti, A. Somaini, Cultura visuale, Immagini sguardi media dispositivi, Einaudi, Torino, 2016, pp. 136–192. 42 E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by D. Cairns, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers: The Hague/Boston/London, 1960, p. 76. 43 On this point, see Fulvio Carmagnola’s contributions, notably Carmagnola F. 2016. L’anima e il campo. La produzione del sentire. Milano/Udine: Mimesis. 44 On this topic, see R. Eugeni, La condizione postmediale, La Scuola, Brescia, 2015.

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to and from the network of servers, where the memory of collective behaviour is recorded – just like an ant which, secreting its pheromones, inscribes its behaviour on the territory of the anthill […]. And, to the extent that the integrated cardinocalendaric system brings people to live increasingly in real-time and in the present, to dis-individuate themselves as they lose their memories – that of the I just as much as that of the we to which it belongs – everything happens as though the “cognitive” agents that we still are tend to become “reactive” agents, which is to say, purely adaptive. No longer inventive, singular and capable of exceptional behaviour which in this sense would be unexpected or “unlikely” – radically diachronic in other words – in short: active.’45 What is at stake then is to put cultural memory back together by working within the devices. The result would be a time-memory that is also a project able to free itself from the passivity of pre-mediation techniques; as duly emphasized by Grusin, digital media are indeed not only remediating but also premediating: ‘ [T]he future is always remediated at the very moment that it emerges into the present, because the world is already so thoroughly hypermediated that it becomes impossible for anything to happen outside of its premediation. […] Premediation operates in the current security regime to ensure that there will always be enough data (enough dots) in any particular, potential, or imagined future to be able to know in advance, before something happened, that it was about to happen.’46 Not only the past, then, but also the future is put under control. To this it should be added that technologies nowadays are not only tools, but rather our environment—the natural and social environment of our life47 ; that the power of communication technology is essential, because human beings are essentially a communicative relation; that the word medium—as perfectly understood by Benjamin—describes how human perception is organized. In short, as McLuhan wrote more than half a century ago: ‘Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environment.’48 Therefore, the production of a communicative, participatory, active and creative spacetime is the simple task awaiting arts that are willing to get their hands dirty with digital technologies. In order to do so, however, art must “get out of itself”49 ; this happens as soon as art is the elaboration of utopias, or better, of symbolic antibodies against social pathologies; in other words, art “gets out of itself” if it is a movement of opposition to the contemporary anesthetizing processes. This idea of art, as technique, is seen as an incubator for a social habitat, which includes a political dimension not in its direct contents, but in its formal potential of restructuring of the aisthesis on the dimension of freedom, on turning a lucid 45 Stiegler, B. (2014) Symbolic Misery, Volume 1, The Hyper-industrial Epoch. Translated by B. Norman, Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press, pp. 76–77 (emphasis in the text). 46 R. Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010, pp. 48 and 124. 47 For an introduction to this topic, see Dennis D. Cali, Mapping Media Ecology. Introduction to the Field, Peter Lang, New York etc., 2017. 48 M. McLuhan, Q. Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Bantam Books, New York, 1967, p. 26. 49 See A. Balzola, P. Rosa, L’arte fuori di sé. Un manifesto per l’età post-tecnologica, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2011.

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eye to lack of freedom, on suffering and on contradiction. Key stable element of these techno-artistic processes is the quest for the participatory dimension, for, that is, the respectful interactivity of the agents-viewers, as accounting for the very sense of the artistic action; from the interaction emerges in fact the possibility of an ancient and new memory, together individual and collective, a memory, that is, which is a perspective on the possible inhabiting together of this earth. The artistic potential of virtual works—as it is always the case for art, yet clearly exemplified by experiences in technological production which are able to produce precise simulation, where by “simulation” one should understand a generally perfect imitation50 —is in the first place linked to their successful demarcation from the definition of reproduction as simulation of a “real” or “reality-based” experience. This is always true about art, but it is even more so when it comes to experiencing technological productions aiming at precise simulations. Virtual simulations may concern game-related or commercial aspects, whereas artistic actions entail an accomplishment of imagination that is always something unreal, the opening of a breach in the existent. What’s more, concerning the reproducibility of the work of art and the relation between work of art and experience, an unprecedented scenario unravels in virtual reality. Virtual works of art are intrinsically non-reproducible, inasmuch as, being interactive, they unprecedentedly incorporate the action of the user, inasmuch as, that is to say, the action of the user is the essence of the work of art, its ontological structure, precisely in relation to its virtual essence. Interactivity here does not only mean interaction, or action-between, but also intervention and modification of the matrix ensuring the existence itself of the work of art, in addition, of course, to the impact on the aesthetic and noetic transformation of the technologically hybrid body of the user.51 This difference has been recently indexed under the notion of “emergence,”52 but, in order for the systemic novelty to make sense from an ontological point of view, it is necessary to ascertain the contingent nature of the interactive relation between bodies and virtual environments. For the time being, one could simply 50 Slavoj Žižek contrasts imitation and simulation: ‘Virtual Reality does not imitate reality, it simulates it generating its semblance. In other words, imitation imitates a pre-existing model of real life, while simulation generates the semblance of a non-existing reality […]. The “ontological bet” of the simulation is that no fundamental difference should be there between nature and its artificial reproduction.’ Lacrimae rerum. Saggi sul cinema e il cyberspazio, Scheiwiller, Milano, 2011, pp. 280–281 (my transl.). Furthermore, the word simulation has also one more specific meaning in the realm of robotics and philosophy of engineering, see Datteri, E. 2012. Filosofia delle scienze cognitive: spiegazione, previsione, simulazione. Roma: Carocci, Roma. 51 The discussion of the logical and physical issues ensuing from this notion of interactivity, although an interesting and challenging research topic, exceeds the limits of this essay. 52 See Jennifer Seevink’s book, Seevink, J. 2017. Emergence in Interactive Art, Cham: Springer, which includes a rich analysis of case studies. Seevink writes that: ‘The classifications fit an overarching, broad understanding of emergence as occurring when a new form or concept appears that was not directly implied by the context from which it arose; and where this emergent whole’ is more than a simple sum of the parts. Emergence also has some core qualities and characteristics. As implied by the definition, something new is created that is a whole with parts, which exists across levels and has the potential for feedback between those levels, namely from the whole to the parts. Unpredictability, creativity and open-endedness and the subjective interpretation of emergence are other key concerns that have come out of emergence literature’ p. 13.

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assume that the “key” element of interactivity introduces—at least potentially—both in the work of art and in its enjoyment—separable only rationis, in reasoning—an element of imponderability, such that the digital, that is numeric and “programmatic,” essence of the work of art can be said to introduce a component of indeterminism. It is my belief that, on top of emphasizing the unrepeatability and unicity features of works of art—no longer “objects” but “objects-events”—and besides introducing a higher degree of complexity to the topic of authenticity, this notion of interactivity may prove relevant in the definition of the—broadly speaking—ethical potential of virtual art. The specific virtuality of the virtual body lays emphasis on the fact— implicit in the preliminary definition of virtual body—that the digital interactive body-image never fully actualizes the virtuality of the algorithmic matrix.53 Clearly, in order to be able to talk about the unrepeatability of the virtual artistic action, that action as virtual must be contingent. It should also be remarked that the issue of contingency, of whether entities are necessary or contingent, pertains to metaphysics; in our seemingly peculiar and circumscribed case study, this question is well visible, maybe even better than in other realms. In order to pin it down, one can start from discussing one of the two main parameters of the virtual environment-body, that is to say, interactivity: ‘The interactivity which is to replace interpretative cooperation is as such only as long as it is allowed (or it allows itself) to modify, by expansion or alteration, the (audiovisual or other) starting text. In this way, the text loses the prerequisites of the work and receives those of an open evolutionary process—of a “technical form of life, as previously said—which assimilates it to more complex and indeterminate forms of individuation and auto-nomy, with the ensuing difficulty of defining appropriate evolutionary protocols in a way that can be generalized.’54 From an ontological point of view, remarkable consequences ensue from the possible realization of an interactive relation. One may assume to face a new mode of existence, pertaining to neo-technological digital objects, which possibly import or implement one of the typical qualities of technical objects: ‘One of the distinctive features of technical objects is their opening to forms of (expert, but not only) interactivity, which may get to the point of modifying their form and performance so that the object is placed at the beginning of an evolutionary line with margins of indeterminability and of sensitivity to contingency that are analogous to those defining the individuation process of human life […]. The issue surfacing at this point is determining under what conditions these principles of expansion and these rules of intervention can assert themselves in the realm of interactive processes.’55 Although current experimentations do not allow it, prospectively one can foresee a mode of intervention by users that can be ‘somehow recognized by the installation as to be subsequently integrated in a hypertext, which is not only larger but also essentially unpredictable

53 Cf. P. Lévy, Il virtuale, Cortina, Milan, 1997, pp. 130–131; see also M. Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Oxford University Press, New York-Oxford, 1993, p. 132. 54 P. Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità. Estetica e immaginazione interattiva, Cortina, Milano, 2014, p. 79 (my transl.). 55 Tecnologie della sensibilità, cit., p. 78 (emphasis mine).

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as to its future development and its overall configuration.’56 What is needed is then an investigation of the conditions of possibility of such an outcome. These can be organized—in abstract and for propaedeutic purposes—in conditions concerning the apparatus or technical device and conditions concerning the projectual dimension or “interactive imagination” of the user: ‘To what principles and rules should the participation of the user-viewer conform in order for it to be accepted or rejected by an interactive installation?’57 This issue requires mainly a full clarification concerning the conditions of an essential unpredictability in the configuration and development of the installation, that is to say, of the environment that can be said “virtual”—an environment produced by a particular technology in the peculiar relation (what we call interactivity) with its users. Now, the philosophical word referring to said unpredictability is contingency: interactivity is given if the environment is contingent, and conversely the environment is contingent if interactivity is actually given. As always, in ontology conditions of possibility are intertwined. One should be aware that if these conditions could be satisfied, we would probably face a new type of being (body, image, system…), a hybrid with an uncertain ontological status, something from the natural-artificial world. I have already tried to imagine the life conditions in such a strange world as well as the questions which from said experience could emerge. Since the virtual environment with the whole of its perceivable properties is nothing but the actualization of a digital memory, the staging, that is, of an algorithm based on a binary system, an unprecedented articulation of the relation between aisthesis and noesis can be envisaged here. It becomes indeed possible to reduce the aisthesis in computational terms. This does not entail however the reduction of secondary qualities to primary ones, or, in all likelihood, the possible reduction of the world to a number. It rather points to the primary and reversible solidarity between the aesthetic and the noetic expressed by an operational trajectory, at one end of which one finds a digital description in computational memory, and at the other end a body endowed with technological prosthesis, non-organic extensions, that is, of our senses, inasmuch as the user body in a virtual environment is a complex structure, a subject-object resulting from a technological project. The issue of the conditions of possibility develops then along two—separable only in reasoning—lines: the life of the machine and the power, or virtue of humans. In what sense is the machine alive? It is alive inasmuch as it allows contingency, that is to say, inasmuch as it allows the production of something that is similar to what seems to define the conditions of life. Contingent is an entity or event which in the very moment in which it is could also not be. I am adopting here Scoto Eriugena’s notion of contingency—also discussed, not by chance, in other theoretical accounts concerning the virtual58 —rather than Aristoteles’. 56 Tecnologie

della sensibilità, cit., p. 77 (emphasis mine).

57 Tecnologie della sensibilità, cit., pp. 78–79. For an account on recent forms of interactive art, see

K. Kwastek, Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013. Heim, M. 1993. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 132; Alliez, É. 1996. Pour une phénoménologie réelle des images virtuelles. Chimeres, hiver: p. 132. The issue is complex and mainly revolves around Scoto Eriugena’s notion of power.

58 Cf.

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Now, can we credit that peculiar machine that is called computer with having such an organization that can simulate the living organism and its peculiar power? From the viewpoint of its forming power, a computer is a system. It is hardware, software, and the electronic implementation of programming languages which allows a reality effect, that is, an emergence—that effectual reality that we call virtual. Can this system, made of an intelligence meeting electronic matter via the medium of numbers, go beyond the mechanism? Based on a viewpoint that I would define as narrow, the one, that is, of the intrinsic possibilities of the machine, I would say no, not even when it comes to the random number generator models based on Bayes’ theory of decisions—after all, if also what we call mind could be reduced to a biological calculating machine, even human action would not be a condition of contingency. The machines here under consideration can in fact learn something inasmuch as they are able to process such a sheer amount of data that cannot be reviewed by nevertheless finite resources; current paradigms of the intelligence we call artificial implement in fact algorithmic probability models based on statistic analysis of observed samples; this is how the machine is able to make, so to speak, autonomous decisions concerning how to respond to the input of the environment, when all state and effects conditions cannot be fully predicted. It is clear however that all of this, even the case of the elaboration of not-computable functions, lies within the realm of determinism. For each effect follows nevertheless the application of rules determining how the highest probability should be calculated at the time of a given state; and it is not ultimately relevant that said probability depends only on the statistic distribution of the events or even together and adaptively on the change of state of the machine—which, by analogy, we could see as lived experience.59 I cannot say whether this will be different with quantum computers, but for the time being everything hinges upon a given idea of temporality, which implies the possibility to define a temporal point t; and well known are the great difficulties to physically and metaphysically define what is indicated by the space–time deictic terms “here” and “now.” The topic of the instant of time clearly entails the topic of the numerability of the continuum, hence—key to our inquiry—that of the relation between number and reality, or, in other words, that between programming languages—strange languages, probably not comparable to natural and historical languages—and electronic matter. Concerning this latter, one may ask whether electronic matter is or is not simply matter. In this regard, David Deutsch writes that: ‘What might not be so obvious is that our “direct” experience of the world through our senses is virtual reality too. For our external experience is never direct; nor do we even experience the signals in our nerves directly – we would not know what to make of the streams of electrical crackles that they carry. What we experience directly is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them.’60 Among the most renown founding fathers of quantum computation, Deutsch supports nothing more than a form of 59 As

convincingly argued by Trentin, E. 2014. Libero arbitrio e macchine intelligenti. In Libero arbitrio. Teorie e prassi della libertà, ed. C. Tugnoli, 489–502. Napoli: Liguori. 60 Deutsch, D. 1997. The Fabric of Reality, London: Penguin Books, p. 120.

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transcendentalization of the empirical: what we are psychophysically determines our experience of reality, that is, the constitution of a sensical environment. And yet the virtual body seems to have at least one property that is different from the other bodies we are used to call real: the virtual body eludes more clearly than the so-called real bodies the dichotomy external–internal. Given its digital origin and its interactive nature, the virtual body coincides with its history; it is a process; and yet it is not the mere sum of numerically different phases. For the fabric of the virtual body depends on interactivity, it develops as an action for a subject, and from that activity acquires a relative, fluctuating—inasmuch as it is dependent—identity. Clearly, any body as soon as it is perceived by my body is in a situation of interaction; as an object, and as external, it seems however to be resistant to mutation; differently, the virtual body typically exists as interaction. These matters certainly deserve further investigation and clarification; but it should not be forgotten that this is only part of the overall problem of that strange, almost-living, artificial form that qualifies the virtual environment-body including the experience of the user. In it, the power of the user to manipulate their perspective and turn it into a place of experience is combined with the possibility to learn something through immersion, to the point of allowing, in different degrees, the appropriation of the viewpoints of other users. This entails, from a radical and general point of view, questioning the stability of the abilities of one’s own body, and their redefinition through the potential of the interactive relations. Perspectively, the embodiment of the self is thus conceptualized as changing; the self is seen as performative, not structured as a given set of faculties, but rather sensitive to the evolution of technology and of programming languages. The self is reassessed as the trace of its transits, that is, as the trace of its residual integrity as medium of transformation, as the line of its possible borders in the action stages that identify on the whole the virtual environment. Within such a scenario, I suggest to consider for a moment what happens when by aesthetic experience we understand the relation with what a given set of behaviors and values labels as works of art, within a varied yet recognizable tradition. In the case of virtual works of art, one should first of all strip aesthetic experiences of distance—what has long been a significant form of artistic value—and rather place them in the realm of attraction, where the user enters the body of the work of art and the work of art enters one’s own or one’s imaginary body. This entails the intensification of the pathic and panic dimensions of relations, in other words, the becoming one body with the work of art, which is affected by my presence, and which, through the changes produced by my being affected, modifies my own way of feeling. From this viewpoint the aesthetic experience is a unique empathic relation, as it fully reveals the fundamental ambiguity of empathy’s typical internalizing and unifying. The projective movement neutralizing the alterity does not simply assume a polar duality to be overcome, but it is in itself the condition of possibility for a minimal threshold of polarization that allows the projection to take place. Therefore, from what once we would have called a subjective point of view, the same process of self-transferring in the other is also a process of constitution of the other; on the other hand, such a constituting process is also foreseen by the virtual essence of the environment, and is limited by its hidden schematism, by its digital nature, which is

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empathically processed only when it turns into a phenomenon. This always entails some other-directed procedure, some modeling strategy, however flexible and fluid it may be. On a side note, this also entails an unprecedented experience, where the virtual body-environment gets so to speak attracted in the horizon of perception, thus effectively triggering what is otherwise impossible in non-virtual environments, the reduplication, that is, of perception itself. Concerning at least primary processes on which complex modes of action-enjoyment are grafted,61 in a highly immersive virtual environment users generally “perceive” that they are perceiving. After acknowledging that the invisible inhabits space, that it is available for works of art and that its experience is aesthetic, a new form of experience is possible today, where the work of art qualifies as relational place, space of human inhabiting, no longer just a container space, but a proper work-of-art-space, the space of artistic dehiscence. New technologies and the consequent virtualization processes they achieve as works of art now allow the artwork and the place of interactive relational aesthetic experience to become one. A virtual work of art is indeed the complex and problematic intersection of tendencies developing according to an unpredictable process of actualization. Since the interactive features of the work allow the unprecedented incorporation of the users’ action, the work of art turns into an irreproducible experience happening as event in the environment it itself constitutes. All these elements push toward an interpretation of the virtual structure body-environment as essentially relational or as a place that only exist in the encounter. And, if what we can, want, decide to call work of art in the time of virtual devices is, due to its interactive nature, the shaping of a contingent and unrepeatable, hence unpredictable, experience, then today, as always, although also never quite like now, it is legit to claim that, strictly speaking, art is experience. This experience has a collective nature, as the work of art turns into a dwelling and a place, and it includes in its matrix all the sensible, emotional and cognitive traces left by its audience members/actors, thus metamorphically turning into a participatory project. The work of art becomes then a medium space, actualizing the original meaning of “medium” as “public space,” space in the middle because that is where people meet. Such a space, however, is not produced by the kind of digital processes we have grown accustomed to, where media presence means lack of physical contact, tele-vision; it is rather a work-ofart-space which qualifies as sensible environment, both bodily to the highest degree and inextricably mind-related. Clearly, this entails, as to its conditions of possibility, a twofold difficulty: first, ontologically, in relation to the question of contingency; second, practically, in relation to artistic operativity and its objectives. As to this second level, concerning interactivity,62 ‘one may wonder whether it is sought after precisely to enhance the feeling of an immemorial immersivity, or maybe to make up for the powerlessness felt in the current interactions with our real world; or whether it offers modes of interaction, which are able to uncover, let perceive, potentiate, 61 On the modes of aesthetic experience in virtual environments, see my Diodato, R. 2012. Aesthetics

of the Virtual. Translation by J.L. Harmon. New York: SUNY Press. N. Stern, Interactive Art: Interventions in/to Process, in A Companion to Digital Art, cit., pp. 310–329. 62 Cf.

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bring to light properties of our doing that without this aesthetic intensification would remain opaque and ignored.’63 It goes without saying that an underlying question, especially when it comes to immersivity, can still be clearly heard: ‘Is it a matter of maximizing that being possessed by the work of art that non-immersive works no longer manage to trigger or of offering a spectacular surrogate to our current inability to stay in the experience in which we are “always-already” immersed?’64 Moreover, one could also ask how important in immersive experiences is ‘the awareness, no matter what, of being inside a fictional environment, inside, that is, a type of framework which although different from traditional frameworks, is nevertheless different from reality and requires a reflective consciousness? And how important is instead the quest for a passive and regressive illusion, such as that of living in a re-enchanted world?’65 And yet, the underlying problem to these important questions concerns the ontological difference between real and virtual, or, say, between fiction and reality. A difference between fiction and reality—although strained by virtuality—is indeed implied by the idea of “framework,” which survives as the need for preserving a reflective space or critical thinking. It might well be that works of art fully complying to the above outlined description of virtual bodies-environments have not made their appearance yet, if not in the form of projects and experimentations. It is nevertheless worth keeping attentive track of those research approaches exploiting the interactive qualities of aesthetic enjoyment as supported by digitization processes. Since at least 25 years ago, in particular since Char. Davies’ installation Osmose in 1995,66 there have been numerous proposals—with different goals and different technological implementations—in the field of immersivity.67 Among relatively recent ones, one could mention “Best VR Experience” at Venice Festival in 2017, Chalkroom by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s68 and Carne y Arena by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, also from 2017. The first is a refined journey in a sound-word environment, which is an unprecedented world, featuring a peculiar injection of space and time—‘a different kind of space,’ says Laurie Anderson—and the ejection of perceptual connections based on which we are projected into the autonomous creative activity of “words,” which appear to be almost developing Jeffrey Shaw’s project intentions69 ; as to the second, even more interestingly, its intention and invention 63 Velotti, S. 2019. Tecnica, in Estetica dell’arte contemporanea, ed. G. Ferrario. Milano: Meltemi, p. 169 (my transl.). 64 Velotti (2019), p. 168. 65 Velotti (2019), p. 168. 66 On this and other installations by Char. Davies, see Thwaites, H. 2005. The immersant experience of Osmose and Ephémère, Christchurch (New Zealand): ICAT, University of Canterbury; see also Grau, O. 2003. Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion, Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, pp. 193–211. 67 For an account on the notion of immersity in art, see Arts immersifs. Dispositifs & expériences, B. Andrieu (ed.), Presses de l’Université de Pau et des Pays de L’Adour, Pau, 2014. 68 https://laurieanderson.com/?portfolio=chalkroom. 69 On which, see Hansen, M.B.N. 2003. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, pp. 47–92.

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are simpler and more direct, for they openly request political responsibility. Carne y Arena places the user among a group of migrants trying to cross the border between Mexico and the United States. Particularly interesting is here the relation produced by this environment-work between immersivity, hence activity, and the simultaneous spectator-function, hence passivity: ‘visitors take little time to realize that, while the “passivity” (in the wider sense of “undergoing”) of their participation is intensified by the specific aisthesis championed by the installation, […] no real initiative can be taken in that environment, in which nevertheless they move freely and to which no doubt they participate’; what’s more, visitors equally quickly realize that ‘that passivity is a structural element of the whole spectacular machine.’70 As it is primarily an environment, Iñárritu’s installation produces a prototype of hybrid body-image experience, which comes very close to virtuality at least under one respect, inasmuch as ‘the effort in multi-senses implementation goes hand in hand with the commitment to create images that are increasingly less easy to distinguish from reality. That is to say, images negating themselves as “images-of” something which in turn is not an image; paradoxically an-iconic images; images, then, which become environments.’71 And yet, although leaning toward simulative mimesis, thanks precisely to its technological limitations, Carne y Arena produces the experience of a relative awareness of the difference, still within a process aiming at simulation; in other words, it allows relatively new conditions of enjoyment, which can be summed up as follows: ‘First of all, it is a hyperbodily yet disembodied experience: although it literally involves the bodily nature of the spectator, it eclipses it in its very device, generating conflict between tactile stimuli and visual perception; Second, it is intersubjective yet selfsubjective experience […]; Carne y Arena is an experience extending bodily nature, alterity and space-perceptual borders, while remaining without Body, without Other, without Display.’72 Unlike Osmose, Carne y arena does not attempt to explicitly disrupt the perceptual structure of the human “sensorium”; that is a radical, archeological quest: ‘through the reference to the biological process of osmosis, Osmose makes explicit the idea of a dissolution of the borders between “internal” and “external” concerning the own-body, of the borders, that is to say, between the internal perception of one’s own bodily states and the experience of the environmentworld’73 ; this is made possible mainly by trying to transfer the perceptual organization based on the vision-touch axis on the vision-breath axis. In this way, users ‘were led to acquire awareness of the “contingency” even of their neuron-anthropologic structuring.’74 Nevertheless, from the risky interpretative viewpoint of the potential of an aesthetic experience, Carne y Arena relevantly produces—at least tends to 70 Montani,

P. 2017. Tre forme di creatività: tecnica, arte, politica. Napoli: Cronopio, p. 135. A. 2018. Immagini che negano se stesse. Verso un’an-iconologia. In Ambienti Mediali, eds. P. Montani, D. Cecchi, M. Feyles, 232–233. Milano: Meltemi. 72 D’Aloia, A. 2018. Virtualmente presente, fisicamente invisibile. Immersività ed emersività nella realtà virtale a partire da “Carne y Arena”. In La realtà virtuale. Dispositivi, estetiche, immagini, eds. Cristiano Dalpozzo, Federica Negri, Arianna Novaga. Milano: Mimesis, p. 133. 73 Cuomo, V. 2017. Una cartografia della tecno-arte. Il campo del non simbolico. Napoli: Cronopio, p. 100. 74 Cuomo (2017), p. 101. 71 Pinotti,

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produce—a change in the logic of sensation, namely, in the empathy of shock; this is a feature of trauma, pertaining to the condition of those who find themselves in danger without being prepared to it, in this case, due to a peculiar mimetic mediation. This is a distinctive trait of many artistic operations, and as such it has been placed under the umbrella of the classical image of the shipwreck with spectator. However, in the case of Carne y Arena something is modified. It is true that, unlike Lucretius’ metaphor, as usual, danger is apparently only staged, it belongs, that is, to the realm of fiction, to an artificial situation; effectual reality has been removed, to the advantage of, if you wish, the ideal: ‘Through the move from seashore to theater – Blumenberg writes – Lucretius’s spectator is withdrawn from the moral dimension; he has become “aesthetic.”’75 It is nevertheless possible to briefly account for the structure of the metaphor and its changes in meanings in the history of its interpretations by relying on a set of couplets of opposites which outlines a range of preferences: spectator—actor; theory—praxis; safety—risk; detachment—involvement; immobility—movement; These opposites outline ‘a logical and metaphorical space symmetrically divided in two parts, separated by variable safety distance’; the first sequence ‘defines a condition of isolation, externality and abstraction in relation to the situation of danger. The second a random and changing condition, in which one is already immersed and from which one cannot or does not want to flee.’76 Now, to the classical standpoint favoring the first term in the oppositions—i.e. the sequence spectator–theory–safety–detachment–immobility—and binding together theoretical comprehension and anesthetic will, modernity has progressively contrasted the acknowledgment of uncertainty and the inevitable involvement in the shipwreck. Based on this perspective, shipwreck can also occur on land and the spectator is forced to accept risk and become actor, to plunge, that is, in the flow of effectual reality where performance and spectator tend to coincide. Defined by the line actor–praxis–risk–involvement–movement, said plunging can even occur as joyful identification with the vital élan. What is important, here, is that such a radical reinterpretation of the metaphor—leading to complex issues and a full upturning of its meanings—does not compromise its underlying grammar, which is made of a series of opposites, that is to say, of meaningful dichotomous polarities, which influence the philosophical lexicon as well as the aesthetic stance. After all, in fact, also the pinnacle of the metaphoric inversion—as marked by the primacy of praxis and emphasized by a pervasive part of contemporary culture, through expressions such as rhizome, fluid mechanics, and mille plateaux—presents itself as an account of the level of “immanence,” hence as based on a typical oppositional structure. What I instead believe to be worthy of note is that, for instance in Carne y Arena, the shipwreck with spectator stages the possibility of an in-between, the opening, that is, of a space between the oppositions, which is the typical space—or topica—of spectatorial gaze; this latter being such inasmuch as it turns, while remaining such, into an actorial gaze. One finds 75 Blumenberg, H. 1997. Shipwreck with Spectator, Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. Translated by S. Rendall, Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, p. 40. 76 Bodei, R. 1985. Distanza di sicurezza, in H. Blumenberg, Naufragio con spettatore. Bologna: Il Mulino, 10–11 (my transl.).

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here, then, a relational and primarily emotion-based pre-categorial structure, which is the edging of a transcendental moment of emotion-based experience. This is the almost-transcendental dimension of emotionality—that is to say the edging of an essential passion—which is not rational but notwithstanding determining the gaze on the world’s spectacle. In this respect, to be noted is art’s strategy in the mimetic construction of an artifice in which gaze and spectacle are inextricably connected. The spectator’s gaze is positioned and identified in a constantly shifting space. The variable position of its thresholds allows a relative unstable minimum distance, which is nevertheless able to ensure a minimum of resistance to the unavoidable emotional involvement. This triggers the rather compelling mechanics of empathy. In Carne y Arena, the process of secondary identification does not hinge upon the fascination for the negative as such; it rather moves toward and opens the emotional space of apprehension and compassion; it moves toward a form of participation which give rise, in the wake of disorientation, to a relation, and possibly to a responsible answer with political meaning. From these brief remarks a wider range of problems ensue concerning the mutations and the status of the so-called “spectatorial gaze”.77 What is the difference between gaze as such and spectator’s gaze? What theoretically defines the spectator? Is it the “spectacle”? And what is the interest that transforms the event in spectacle? On these topics, many valuable contributions have come from contemporary visual studies, as they have shown the differences among several types of spectators, how these differences ensue from the historicity of the forms of representation, from the devices, from perception attitudes and beliefs, from, in short, what Martin Jay78 has defined as the “scopic regimes” of the representation,79 which are always contextbound. However, the issue left unsolved by contemporary studies is that of the relation between cultural data—which identify the scopic regimes of representation—and, rather than the physiological principles of vision, the structure of the consciousness of image, in its several layers and in relation to the schematic processes activating the spectator’s gaze as such. Between gaze and spectator’s gaze there is then a thin gap that deserves investigation. In relation to this gap, the fact that a percept cannot be amended is less of a pressing issue compared, for instance, to that of the defining schema which is intertwined with the emotional and cognitive system. This dense nucleus could be indicated with the eighteenth-century philosophical term “sentiment,” including its reference to the complex field of the analogon rationis. To put it otherwise, as what is primarily at stake is not an understanding of the conditions of possibility of gaze as such, but rather of the spectator’s gaze, the focus of the inquiry shifts form the transcendental realm to the slightly paradoxical one of the 77 On this complex issue, see Somaini, A. (ed.). 2005. Il luogo dello spettatore. Forme dello sguardo nella cultura delle immagini. Milano: Vita e Pensiero; this collection includes a great Introduction (pp. 7–26) by Antonio Somaini, which presents visual culture in connection with the figure of the spectator with great clarity and competence. 78 See Scopic Regimes of Modernity, in Vision and Visuality, ed. H. Foster, 3–23. New York: The New Press, New York, 1988. 79 The expression “scopic regimes” first appeared in “Le signifiant imaginaire” (see The Imaginary Signifier, Indiana University Press, 1982) by Christian Metz in 1975.

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almost-transcendental. This is precisely the mainly relational conceptual space that some artistic inquiries are trying to outline. Interesting input comes in this regard from Sonia Cillari’s work, in particular from Se mi sei vicino and Sensitive to Pleasure, in relation to the attention devoted to the idea of “interface-body”80 defining the performer—who, in the case of Sensitive to Pleasure is the artist herself—as what allows a specific user–environment interactivity. An investigation of interactivity in connection with the degrees of unpredictability allowed by the system (apparatus or device) is particularly prominent in the work of the studio fuse*, notably in the 2017 live media performance Dökk—darkness, in Icelandic. A narrative sequence of ten “rooms” (stanze, in Italian) inhabited by a performer develops a circular path, in which each “room” is a mental space in which reality is seen or created through an interactive relation between the viewer and the performer mediated via a device; this makes it possible for the viewers to express their emotions through the body of the performer and the immersive environment—along similar lines, in some respects, as Motovar by Stelarc: ‘a system has been developed – fuse* writes – capable of elaborating the result of close interaction between various data generated in real time on the stage: the analysis of sound, the movement of the performer, his/her heartbeat and the sentimental analysis of contents shared on social networks. The combination of these data thus ensures that every performance takes on ever different and unique connotations as a result of the random, unforeseeable nature of the information analysed’.81 The device is complex and clearly betrays, in its operational components, the shifting from a simulative perspective to the attempt to go beyond it by opening to not pre-calculated interventions. Although Dökk’s poetics does not take a clear position on the issue of contingency and unpredictability—they do include a precise reference, though, to the theory of synchronicity—their work achieves highly suggestive results, as widely recognized by the critics.82 A different type of aesthetic-artistic experience based in part on the synthesis of network functions and sensible environments will presumably be allowed by wearable technologies in the field of so-called “augmented reality”83 —which however requires a different, if not opposite, conceptual approach, compared to that of the virtual body. Mention can be made, in this regard, of, for instance, the Rider Spoke project by the group Blast Theory. In these operative spaces, according to very different practices, not only one can find good examples of productions placing emphasis on the exquisitely technical and simultaneously also participatory and collective aspects that define art, but also theoretical contributions that can help some 80 On

this notion, see Hansen, M.B.N. 2007. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. London/New York: Routledge. 81 https://www.fuseworks.it/en/works/dokk/. 82 Dökk was awarded the German Design Award Special in 2019. Relevant input comes also from the current developments of fuse*’s work on interactivity in the artistic elaboration of eco-system processes, as shown by Mimesis in 2020, https://www.fuseworks.it/en/works/mimesis/. 83 On this topic, see Augmented Reality Art. From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium, 2014, ed. V. Geroimenko. Cham: Spinger.

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contemporary philosophical proposals dig deeper.84 For instance, Studio Azzurro’s “sensible environments,” designed as a “journey of feelings,”85 provide remarkable insights on the pathic substance of interactive art, here emphasized by the use of natural interfaces—hence with non-technological prosthesis attached to the user’s body—as well as by the relatively higher degree of experience immediacy. Based on its, now historical,86 practices, Studio Azzurro has long developed an investigation on the meaning of interactivity within artistic actions. It has also recently launched a very promising space of artistic experimenting with potentially relevant ethical impact. Concerning the issue of interactivity, Paolo Rosa writes: ‘interactivity means the “intercepted” relation in the form of information data, that sharply separates it from the simple definition of interaction, as it turns out to be a direct, somehow more intimate relation. That is to say that, thanks to new technologies, it is possible to interfere in relational processes, gathering through interfaces the most varied sensible data, and then transfer them in one of the many available databases. If instead of using them, as it happens, for marketing or surveillance purposes, we could virtuously make them into living and participatory traces, we would get an extraordinary tool to enhance a feeling of commonality, of constant elaboration, which are ultimately valid instruments for the constitution of identities, unicity, cobelonging.’87 Although this definition of interactivity does not fully exploit the above outlined techno-ontological makings, it clearly moves in the—in my opinion wellfounded and promising—direction of an aesthetics of relations, emphasizing the collective and socializing aspects of works of art’s creation in terms of participatory public space creation. In this regard, Studio Azzurro’s current practices engage in the elaboration of territorial museums designed revolving around one main topic and designed as interactive spaces of identity and memory: ‘We do not think any longer in terms of strictly museum-based approach, but in terms of “condensation” places, where the memory of the past meets the participation in the present […]. We start with distinctive historical or productive elements […]. We gather images and testimonies and we immerse them in our interactive systems. Thus, what is presented – besides telling something of the past, of a story – also tells something of the language used to bring it on stage.’88 What is at stake here is the reformulation of personal 84 By way of example, see Žižek, S. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London/New York: Verso, p. 134: ‘today, with VR and technobiology, we are dealing with the loss of the surface which separates inside from outside. This loss jeoparsdizes our most elementary perception of “our own body” as it relates to its environs.’ 85 As presented on their website: www.studioazzurro.com. 86 Cf. Valentini, V. (ed.). 2017. Studio Azzurro. L’esperienza delle immagini. Milano: Mimesis (in particular, S. Borutti, L’arte relazionale di Studio Azzurro: alcune questioni filosofiche, pp. 97–108). A good summary is provided by Marcolini, L. 2019. Studio Azzurro: un percorso. Arte Cristiana 912: 192–205. 87 Oltre i confini delle immagini: l’estetica delle relazioni. Conversation with Paolo Rosa, B. Di Martino (ed.), in Studio Azzurro, Tracce, sguardi e altri pensieri, B. Di Martino (ed.), Feltrinelli, Milan, 2007, p. 49 (my transl.). More on these topics in A. Balzola, P. Rosa, L’arte fuori di sé. Un manifesto per l’età post-tecnologica, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2011. 88 Oltre i confini delle immagini, cit., pp. 48–49. Early experiments in this direction are the Audiovisual Museum of the Resistance in Fosdinovo and the museum “The Wheel Factory” in the area of

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and collective past in the mode of the future, in order for it to become project, as exemplified by the Portatori di storie (Story-carriers) installations, which display ‘a procedurally generated and interactive actualization of the individual stories in the unwritten archive of single communities. In the series of installations under the name Story-carriers, a piece of urban territory, for instance the outside wall of a building, is transformed into a giant sensible screen – a “touch wall,” one might say – which displays images of people in transit. Just touching them, people can be stopped and thereby invited to tell a story or share their thoughts on a place or topic. Still in its project phase, this work in progress envisages the audience as free to interlace or contrast other stories and remarks to the ones they have just heard within an overall promiscuous dynamics of re-organization of the archive: a never-ending “conversation” on the past and the present, as allowed by the specific resources of digital images.’89 It is my belief that such a technological and artistic projectuality—far from being alternative to the “ethics of form,” but acting instead as complementary to it, in a minor key version if you like—points to the same direction of what Benjamin—in the same years of Art as Experience—would have called “politicization of art.” It also complies to Dewey’s entrusted duty to ‘restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.’90 Virtual art is indeed able to graft the soul of places, the memory of people and the culture expressed by inhabited spaces onto cutting-edge technologies, as to make their voice echo again in productive and unprecedented ways. The memory and narration of traditions come then in contact with forms of interactivity which by means of contamination produce an abundance of experience. It can be concluded that the more artistic experimentations will be able to interact with a new museum culture—which treats art as the occasion for a collective and participatory experience looking at the future, and includes non-standardized forms and languages advocating the superseding of perceptual and cognitive clichés—and the more it will be able to mingle with those trends in urban and land design91 which today attempt to openmindedly overcome the abstract approach of “land-use planning,” by integrating the dimensions of temporality and invisibility which cartographic logic had forced to let go, the more it will be possible to progress in the direction of an aesthetic ethos of some utility. This point deserves a quick in-depth analysis.

Biella, this latter devoted to the textile traditions of the region. Remarkable is also the Laboratory Museum of Mind of the Local Health Authority of Rome, devoted to the experience of madness. 89 P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. Perlustrare, rifigurare, testimoniare il mondo visibile, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2010, p. 69 (my transl.). 90 Art as experience, cit., p. 3. 91 In the field of land design, a remarkable theoretical contribution in this direction has been offered by Lidia Decandia, notably in her books, Dell’identità. Saggio sui luoghi. Per una critica della razionalità urbanistica, Rubettino, Soveria Mannelli, 2000; and Anime di luoghi, Franco Angeli, Milan, 2004.

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3.3 Relational Spatialities92 The issue is clearly formulated by Nicolas Bourriaud, as he says that: ‘Art is the place that produces a specific sociability. It remains to be seen what the status of this is in the set of “states of encounter” proposed by the City. How is an art focused on the production of such forms of conviviality capable of re-launching the modern emancipation plan, by complementing it? How does it permit the development of new political and cultural designs?’93 Now, in order to understand the “status of this space” of artistically produced social participation, “in the set of states of encounter proposed by the City,” a new idea of city is needed. If we are notably to understand “city” as a form of collective social production of sense, and in particular of the aesthetically perceptible space–time, then the answer of poeisis has been the transformation of the environment-space in a landscape-space, or aesthetic space, and the “city” can be provisorily, ideally conceived as a form of “landscape.” What is here called “landscape”—urban and not—is clearly not in itself reducible to the physical reality of an environment, nor to an ecosystem. As Paolo D’Angelo claims, ‘the landscape is the aesthetic wholeness of nature […]. Its character is therefore eminently perceptual, and not physical.’94 First of all, the landscape—and the city as its most extreme form—cannot be taken as a “piece of nature” for which “delimitation” is essential, inasmuch as in the idea of landscape the limit does not stand for an objective delimitation, but rather for a projection beyond what is accessibly visible, as the index of an elsewhere and as a beyond-referring function.95 Landscape ‘is not a closed circle, but a spreading. It is genuinely geographic for its extensions, for the real or imaginary background that space opens beyond the gaze. […] is an open door toward the whole of Earth, a window open on unlimited possibilities: an horizon. Not a stable line but a movement, an élan.’96 Landscape can then be seen as ‘place without places’97 aesthetically configured as ‘a self-contained perception intuited as a self-sufficient unity, which is nevertheless intermeshed with an infinite expansiveness and a continual flux.’98 It is not a delimited portion of space, made of 92 I would like to thank my son, the architect Federico Diodato, for our enjoyable discussions and his precious hints on this topic. 93 Bourriaud, N. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by S. Pleasance and F. Woods. Paris: Les presses du reel, p. 16. 94 D’Angelo, P. 2001. Estetica della natura. Roma/Bari: Laterza, p. 141 (my transl.); echoing Martin Seel’s aesthetics of nature (see Eine Äesthetik der Natur, Suhrkamp, 1991). 95 On this point it would be useful to read once more Enzo Paci’s essays published in the ’50s, in particular “The Heart of the City” from 1954; “The Problematic of Contemporary Architecture” from 1956; and “Architecture and the Lifeworld”, all published in Italian on the journal Casabellacontinuità. 96 Dardel, E. 1952. L’Homme et la Terre. Paris: PUF, p. 42 (my transl.). 97 Straus, E. 1989. Du sens des sens, Contribution à l’etude des fondaments de la psychologie. Grenoble: Jerome Millon, p. 515, translated by H. Maldiney in L’ Arrière-Pays, Skira, Genève 1972, p. 21. 98 Simmel G. 2007. The Philosophy of Landscape. Translated by J. Bleicher, Theory, Culture & Society 24 (7–8) pp. 20–29, quotation p. 22.

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the sum of elements that are able to exist in the form of an homogenous, statically identity-based totality; it is rather a complex system constantly becoming and able to accompany and implement a cultural identity by preserving and transforming its memory, as to allow human inhabiting, which is together standing and going beyond. The landscape is, in short, an open finitude and a limited infinity.99 The same applies to the city from the viewpoint of thinking: a deployment of imaginary potential; condition of possibility of relations; place of encounters; constitution of identitydefining processes. Emphasis should be placed here on the systemic perspective, which shows how the city is a whole which is more than the sum of its elements; an open set which through relations—ensuing from the whole and also defining its nature—produces a constantly varying emergence of sense. As in an open system, by inter-vening in the city, the elements produce exceedance, that is, supervenience, which should not be taken as one more element in the system, but rather as the sense of the system itself, which is progressively individualized and articulated. As to its value, this ontological structure is neutral; one should therefore take into account the mode of existence of the elements and the modes of their intervenience. Just to give an example, let’s consider elements such as the museum and the district. How can they interact with one another and with other modes of being of and in the city? With institutions, with citizens, with artistic actions, with productive, commercial, and housing structures, and so on? Now, defining the idea of system is its possible projection on the elements; in other words, museums, other institutions, any person inhabiting the system, living in it and imagining its existence, hence making it possible, each of these elements considered in itself is a complex system. An institutive and constitutive relation therefore exists, which can be understood as a priori priority, and which should be intercepted in order to grasp what is the status of its happening. A condition of possibility is simultaneously generating and generated; it always happens in situation; it inter-venes in an unpredictable complexity, which looks like Harlequin’s coat,100 caught in the wind, its colors constantly changing, their reciprocal borders being constantly modified. In this respect, one should not underestimate the electronic nature of today’s urban space: ‘The electronic city is problematic for its inhabitants because it reintroduces the invisible, re-enchanting the world in functional form, which, at least in western urban terms, has already been disenchanted. […] The instruments of human interaction, production and consumption are miniaturized, dematerialized and unhooked from any fixed location. […] In this sense, cartographic logic in which only proper names exist is totally overthrown. Together with it, the decisive presupposition of any possibility of knowledge seems to disappear, the faith that there exists a relationship between what we see and the functioning of the world.’101 On this topic, 99 Cf.

Assunto, R. 1994. Il paesaggio e l’estetica. Palermo: Novecento, p. 28. is the image suggested by Michel Serres in order to account for the complexity of contemporary culture. See Serres, M. 1997. The Troubadour of Knowledge. Translated by S.F. Glaser and W. Paulson, The University of Michigan Press. 101 Farinelli, F. 2018. Blinding Polyphemus, Geography and the Models of the World. London/New York/Calcutta: Seagull Books, p. 205. 100 This

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Franco Farinelli makes reference to Melvin Webber, who already in the ’70s, in his essay The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm, described a “nonplace urban realm,” as without a center, and threatening sense-based orientation, hence the very idea of space, to the point of resembling by analogy—as Farinelli adds—the idea of labyrinth—‘the labyrinth corresponds by definition to the absence of centrality.’102 As is well known, this will define the space of the post-modern city—as Fredric Jameson understands it—as the space corresponding to the loss of the ability to put together a coherent cognitive cartography. What ensues is also and mainly a paradoxically communicative space, or wrongheaded communication, inasmuch as it does not produce the common on which a community is based and from which it originates, but rather functions of isolation culminating in “solitary crowds.” In this regard, Bourriaud reminds us that: ‘These days, communications are plunging human contacts into monitored areas that divide the social bond into (quite) different products. Artistic activity, for its part, strives to achieve modest connections, open up (One or two) obstructed passages, and connect levels of reality kept apart from one another. […] We feel meagre and helpless when faced with the electronic media, theme parks, user-friendly places, and the spread of compatible forms of sociability […]. The ideal subject of the society of extras is thus reduced to the condition of a consumer of time and space. […] The space of current relations is thus the space most severely affected by general reification. The relationship between people, as symbolized by goods or replaced by them, and signposted by logos, has to take on extreme and clandestine forms, if it is to dodge the empire of predictability.’103 Now, the space of relations is simultaneously that of the time of relations, that is to say, the time establishing us as identity, an urban time which is “city” inasmuch as it is ‘capable of producing a material, public, and thus shared, image of the form and functioning of the world or a part of it.’104 Today’s temporality entails however a basic question: what form in these conditions is life forced to take on as operation to the future which finds its direction in the faith in the past? As horizon, future is mainly structured on the stability of the past, on experiences and habits. But what happens if traditions, that is the symbolic worlds of reference, are no longer given as education and acquired consciousness of values? What happens is that the past is no longer the repository of tools for the future, and, from the point of view of internalization, it increasingly emerges as free energy, subconscious power, or mere repetition. Furthermore, one should add one more feature, which is in my opinion essential, to the form of our current experience of time, that is to say, its spatialization. As pointed out by Jameson: ‘the crisis in historicity now dictates a return, in a new way, to the question of temporal organization in general in the postmodern force field, and indeed, to the problem of the form that time, temporality, and the syntagmatic will be able to take in a culture increasingly dominated by space and

102 Farinelli

F. (2018), p. 207. (2002), pp. 8–9. 104 Farinelli F. (2018), p. 161. 103 Bourriaud

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spatial logic.105 If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its protensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but “heaps of fragments” and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory.’106 On the whole, a superficialization of the experience of time takes place in the direction of a distinguishing abstraction; the space–time plexus is explained not as an actually inextricable complex, but as a confounding regime where time is bent on space producing an indefinite polarization of desire. As a result, typical of the contemporary feeling of time, at least in the hypertechnological West/East, seems to be an excess of precariousness. Bewilderment ensues from the absence of memory and the fragility of the project on which a powerful formatting of the experience of the world is established through agents and agencies that provide an ephemeral stability. Influenced by how the devices identify and structure personal and collective habits, by how they allow forms of sociality and ultimately build up epochal backdrops, our psychological and social identity depends on a set of collective practices of steering and control which are continuously and rapidly changing. Granted that personal and collective identity is created at least in part as stability of the temporal relation with the world, in our time identity is then possible only as fluctuating. Languages trying to make it stable are consequently even more pervasive and persuasive, although ephemeral, trying to establish at least provisionally a relational structure between the social self and the world. In the time of temporal disarticulation of existence, the advertising access to the system of goods and the language of consumption acquire a remarkable importance in the constitution of identity, inasmuch as they create micronarratives of the self, lay out fragmentation at a sufficiently harmonic pace to be enjoyed, and develop the novelty of events according to short and interesting steadfastness. TV shows, facebook and instagram personal profiles, the practice of selfies… all these procedures of constitution of fluctuating identities become discourses, that is, intersubjective possibilities of narration. They are however born to be in trend and fall out of trend. From a speculative point of view, trends are, in short, the form of contemporary time, that is, a way to shape identity through time. Now, it is in this inescapable space–time that we need to think relational valueforms: landscapes, atmospheres, systemic complexities, medial excesses. And this is maybe possible thanks to a double movement of deconstruction and construction, which implodes and explodes in the spirit of the narration.107 Deconstruction 105 Interesting

input on this point is provided by Ruggero Eugeni, in particular concerning the ‘feeling to partecipate to two co-present temporal systems in the same space’ (my transl.) which immersive media allow. See Eugeni, R. 2018. Temporalità sovrapposte. Articolazione del tempo e costruzione della presenza nei media immersivi. In La cultura visuale del ventunesimo secolo, ed. A. Rabbito, 33–51. Milano: Meltemi. 106 Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism. Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 25. 107 More on the notion of “spirit of the narration” in Diodato, R. 2017. Lo spirito della narrazione. Nota su Studio Azzurro. In Studio Azzurro. L’esperienza delle immagini, ed. V. Valentini, 87–96. Milano: Mimesis.

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is “thinking at work,” that is, an event. It places itself then within a sphere of ambiguity, for deconstruction work is simultaneously construction work. At any rate, the sphere of meanings of the word construction is close and unavoidable. Proximity can be here easily detected to the notion of architecture. And yet deconstructive architecture is clearly, at least in part, a contradiction in terms. Architecture— or better, western architecture—is indeed another word for metaphysics. This is what Derrida108 claims in the famous essay from 1985, Point de folie. Maintenant l’architecture. Architectural thinking is organized around the topos of the oikonomia (oikos: home; hearth), that is to say, the law of the house, of the hearth, based on which the other essential “places” of social and private life, the temple, the public square, the tombstone, acquire their meaning. The law of the hearth is the architrave supporting all places of life; it is their foundation. The notion of foundation is common both in metaphysics and in architecture: foundation as origin (arché), that is to say, as basic element, but also as supporting and balancing center, and as its end (telos). Architecture then, like metaphysics, is a teleology of human inhabiting on this earth. In its being useful, in other words, while programmatically fulfilling also a service function, architecture presents itself as the sense of inhabiting, and, like metaphysics, it lays out rule-based structures that take up the form of values. The deconstruction of metaphysical thinking entails then also the deconstruction of architectural thinking. That means that, based on its distinctive double movement, deconstruction will amount to the practice of a form of writing, or project, that simultaneously accepts and rejects traditional rules. In this regard, the debate concerning architecture and deconstruction can still be useful for us today. This is not primarily due to the results achieved on the projectual level, which have explored the limits between stability and instability, between functionality and lack thereof, between urban or natural environmental coherence and environmental nuisance, and between hospitability and inhospitability. What is particularly relevant here is that the debate has shown the ability to achieve functions of public interest and has launched relevant lines of discussion toward an “architecture de l’événement,” which takes into account the evental nature of being, as possible place of encounter, acknowledgement and collaboration among beings. In this regard, it is my opinion that what has been imported here is the meaning of the word chora. This is the issue of a practice with a narrative social function, which stages the potentiality of drama by opening the space to the production of stories, which take form within it, form being here dynamic and bound to transformation. This is, in my opinion, the sense of the debate ensuing from the connection between deconstruction and spatiality: by guarding incompleteness, openness is practiced, which enables collective, creative and undeterminable practices. This place, borrowing Alberto Pérez-Gómez’ words, ‘is simultaneously the work and the space, its ground and lighting. It is both a space 108 On

Derrida and architecture, see the collection of materials in Adesso l’architettura, ed. F. Vitale. Milano: Scheiwiller, 2008. Interesting input is provided also by Francesco Vitale’s essays; see Politiche della casa. Note su Jacques Derrida, architettura e decostruzione, in Costruire, Abitare, Pensare, F. Filipuzzi, L. Taddio (eds.), Mimesis, Milano, 2010, pp. 343–357; La casa in decostruzione. Derrida e la legge dell’oikos, aut aut, 368, 2015, pp. 88–104.

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for contemplation and a space of participation – a space of recognition.’109 PérezGómez compares this resistant experiential space to the definition of dimensionality that qualifies Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, which is the embodiment of the idea actuating dehiscences, participatory intertwinings which respect singular and collective memories, dynamisms that are not only functional but also poietic. Two aspects in Pérez-Gómez’s position are particularly worth mentioning: the anti-Deridda rescue of the ‘dramatic and narrative form of architecture’ and, thanks to the inquiry on the meaning of chora, the ‘announcement of freedom and of the possibility to design spaces that are not necessarily defined by their purpose or by rigorously determined aesthetic canons.’110 The term chora is thus spread and amplified in its scale, while contaminating the geographic space and exhibiting it as human milieux. This is the natural space of the somebody, which is a concrete and generative space, singular and collective, that can be narrated through metaphors, a space that is always of-, pertaining to predicates. This is the space of stories, of a physical dimension incorporating memories, a layered corporeality of existences and made of, literally, time and differences. What is material here is also and simultaneously the human quality of space. This is what Augustin Berque111 has named Ècoumène, the space of médiance, of trajectivité and of mouvance. Such a space of both belonging and mobility; since it is historical-physical, it generates dynamisms mediating between the collective and the singular, and tying nature and culture together. Generative space, matrixlandscape, chiasm between ontology and geography, such a space does not produce a dialectical overcoming of polarities (nature—culture; singular—collective; physical—historical; etc.) but rather a constant tension and a dynamic relation between works and behaviors. A good example of work of art hinting in this direction is the intervention of the Belgian studio Rotor at Manifesta 12112 on the landscape of Pizzo Sella—a particularly difficult context, brutally marked by illegal development— where Rotor puts together a guided tour, which, through great attention to natural and artificial details, restores forms of respect for relations, with the environment and among people, to their rightful place. In this spatiality there is no static identity, but rather an always in progress one, that is to say, a symbolic, relational and generative identity, which ideally, that is, from the point of view of theory or vision, can be expressed, it seems to me, by the category of landscape presented by Kenneth Olwig. It is the chorography which pinpoints the distinctive features of this spatiality, identified ex negativo as ‘a nothing

109 Perez-Gómez, A. 1994. Chora: the Space of Architectural Representation. In Chora 1, eds. A. Pérez-Gómez, S. Parcell, 15. Montreal: McGill. 110 Ciucci, A. 2019. Il fascino di chora. Fortuna contemporanea di una intuizione platonica. Milano: Mimesis, p. 226 (my transl.). A full account on the debate on “chora” in architecture and geography is provided by Andrea Ciucci at pp. 215–244 of his useful book. See also Mangani, G. 2007. Intercettare la Chora. Luogo e spazio nel dibattito geografico contemporaneo. In Cartografia e progettazione: dalle carte coloniali alle carte di piano, ed. E. Casti, 31–41. Torino: Utet. 111 Berque, A. 2000. Ècoumène, introduction à l’étude des milieux humains. Paris: Belin. 112 Rotor, Da quassù è tutta un’altra cosa, Manifesta 12 Palermo, 2018. https://www.domusweb.it/ it/speciali/manifesta/2018/rotor-a-palermo-da-quass--tutta-unaltra-cosa.html.

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that is something, […] a nothing holding a place for something.’113 Spatiality here is then grasped as an unrepresentable-fleeting which comes before and originates the representable space, by determining an inescapable opening function; but also, based on a double movement, as possibility of sense, in the direction of an attention given to physical and historical bodies inhabiting space, this latter being concrete, potentially dialogical, essentially political, and intimately not conformable. Reference goes here to the agora, an ancient-new spatiality, “after” deconstruction, in other words landscape as human event: ‘It is the gathering of people at the agora, not a bounded topographical space within which it meets, that defines the choros of its polity.’114 Chora is in sum the word safeguarding, in the contemporary, the possibility of an identity which is also collective, resisting, that is, the “trap of identity,” as exposed by Rem Koolhaas, in his famous essay on the urban space, there significantly named “junkspace”: ‘Identity is like a mousetrap in which more and more mice have to share the original bait, and which, on closer inspection, may have been empty for centuries. The stronger identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction. Identity becomes like a lighthouse – fixed, overdetermined: it can change its position or the pattern it emits only at the cost of destabilizing navigation.’115 But, is it even possible to think about a form of spatiality which does not build identity in the inflexible form of a bond? What is at stake is to keep on investigating the relation between spatiality and artisticity, as well as the always tense and problematic conjunction of the two in the urban form, that is to say, their concrete declination in given contexts. In order to sum up within a project the topics outlined above, I believe it is helpful to connect the inquiry on the sense of locality—the meaningful spatiality—with the inquiry on the mutations of aisthesis in the neo-technological era and, finally, with the artistic experimentations which, by involving territories, make the potential of aisthesis explicit and thus open new perspectives of innovative expression of imagination based on collective relational imaginary. As to the first point, it is useful to relaunch the investigation based on the definition of locality provided by Arjun Appadurai: ‘I view locality as primarily relational and contextual rather than as scalar or spatial. I see it as a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of contexts.’116 Appadurai draws attention to ‘the role of mass media, especially in its electronic forms, in creating new sorts of disjuncture between spatial and virtual neighborhoods. […] It is impossible to sort through this bewildering plethora of changes in the media environments that surround the production of neighborhoods. 113 Olwig, K. 2006. Global. Ground Zero. In Landscapes of a New Cultural Economy of Space, eds.

D.S Terkenil, A. d’Hauteserre, 185. New York: Springer. K. 2012. Choros, Chora and the Questions of Landscape.In Envisioning Landscapes. Making Worlds: Geography and Humanities, eds. S. Daniels, D. Delyser, J. Nicholas, 50. London: Routledge. 115 Koolhaas, R. 1995. The Generic City. In R. Koolhaas, B. Mau, S, M, L, XL. New York: Monacelli Press, p. 1248. 116 Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity At Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 178. 114 Olwig,

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But there are numerous new forms of community and communication that currently affect the capability of neighborhoods to be context-producing rather than largely context-driven. […] These new forms of electronically mediated communication are beginning to create virtual neighborhoods.’117 Forcing one’s way in these disjunctures, then, in order to produce active forms of relation, is not only possible but also necessary, as to avoid that the aesthetic dimension is reduced to the repetition of the same—to increasingly refined and pervasive simulation processes. The city can become a laboratory for creative writing and improvisation, where singular cultural memory turns into a project. This point has been lucidly grasped by Jean-Cristhope Bailly, as he claims that: ‘the city, then, would be precisely the complex and secret combination of flow and immobility; it would be, through an infinity of tempi, the always singular knotting of writing and improvisation; it would be the memories of intentions which had to come to terms with the run of the mill – signs with which the run of the mill comes to terms all the time. […] What is this singularity made of? What does the city say of itself in it? And what does this point – this particular point of its space – tell the city? One can immediately guess that answering these questions is never easy, because everything there is inscribed and everything is sensible; because they are maybe imperceptible and undefinable variables that make the air of time tremble: for instance that shadow of a tree at noon, and the way it makes a facade tremble; […] They city – the phrasing of the city – would then be this infinite phrase that each passer-by simultaneously encounters and recites; it would be the discordant whole of all these fragments of city and/or of phrase, and the harmony of all these gaps, the mystery of a tonality, despite all, a local tonality, precise like the sum of the inflections which form the accents. The answer here is that of joy, which is to say, that of identity without withdrawal, of opening: mass of signs and ball of sense, where no sign, no thread, is insignificant.’118 Now, the virtual artistic action can broaden this phrasing, while respecting its discordant and fragmentary nature, and produce an infinite, always variable, phrase.119

117 Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity At Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 194–195. 118 Bailly, J.-Ch. 2003. La phrase urbaine. Paris: Seuil, pp. 175; 176; 177 (my transl.). 119 We approach here the place Sébastien Marot calls hyperpaysage: ‘Cet approfondissement des territoires réclame évidemment que les projeteurs pénètrent dans le “parlement des choses”, bien au-delà de sa façade urbaine: cycles de l’eau et de l’énergie, restauration des sols, phytosociologie, dynamique des éco-systèmes, etc. Mais il appelle aussi des projets qui s’épanouissent à la fois en art de la mémoire et en art d’espérer, de façon à amplifier l’étoffe spatio-temporelle des sites et des situations. […] Donner du temps à l’espace (et de l’espace au temps) est sans doute la mission la plus sérieuse et la plus intime de nos disciplines. Apprécier la valeur d’un projet d’architecture, de paysage ou d’urbanisme, c’est se demander dans quelle mesure il soutient, amplifie ou exprime la matrice temporelle du site en question.’ S. Marot, Envisager les hyperpaysages, in ‘Les cahiers de l’Ecole de Blois’, 12, juin 2014, p. 60. See also Sébastien Marot’s important contribution, L’art de la memoire, le territoire et l’architecture, La Villette Eds., Paris, 2010.

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3.4 The Vital Relation Not much has been said so far on the essential core of relation. We already know that the aesthetic-artistic relation is structurally relational, and thereby that the category of relation is prior to the category of substance. Relations tell us more thoroughly what the world is and what we are. They are then highly significant, sense-unveiling, possibility-opening. Nonetheless, relations are mainly made of space and time. As human beings, we are mainly forms of time, although in our normal dealings with the world we are mostly jagged forms of time, torn between a gaze to the past, the nostalgia for what we have lost, and a gaze to the future, the anxiety for an uncertain fate. The aesthetic experience gathers past and future to the unity of a significant present. It implies indeed the knowledge-related joy resulting from mind and body interconnecting in an inextricable mesh, something that has nothing to do with superficial satisfaction, but rather carries the pathos marks of intense experiences, to the point of being, sometimes, experience of the uncanny. Thanks to aesthetic experience, then, an enigmatic and risky temporality, in the form of research and with the power of imagination, is thrust open. Experience is here like a journey,120 a temporal dimension of place, first of all the place we are, but also the place-time—the memory-engraved nature—in which we are. From such a journey we might sail back with some expertise concerning unexpected dimensions of being, unknown to the regular totalizing and sedating/narcotic gaze, which insists on translating experience in fixed and final formulas. According to classical metaphors aesthetic experience is like a shipwreck or a “pilgrimage.” Typical examples are Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Góngora’s The Solitudes, where the shipwrecked person and the “peregrinus” (Latin for pilgrim)—which in Spanish 17th-century lexicons means not only those who embark on a sense-seeking journey, but also “something rare and precious”— as they “see” new worlds, also change their perceptual experience of the world. In addition to modifying our ideas of the world, aesthetic experience (ship)wrecks, then, our perceptual clichés, even though perceptual clichés are much harder to alter than ideas, as they are deeply-rooted in the body and appear as entirely natural. As education to the form of time and education to perception, the aesthetic and artistic experience is thereby place-constituting, it opens up a place, it makes the place be. No place exists without the body—even better, the body-mind—which inhabits it, to the point that inhabiting makes the place exist, not as measurable space, but as a set of tensions, entanglements, as expressivity. My gaze makes the place, my gestures make the place with the result that what is spatially far away can be meaning-wise close, and vice versa. The place is no container, nor perceptual a priori, but rather an always reversible event—in Merleau-Ponty’s language—the chiasm of seer and seeable, the concrete intersecting of visible and invisible. The invisible is what makes a place into a dwelling, what makes it world-for-us; the invisible cannot, clearly, be 120 On the relation between traveling and experience, see what has been beautifully written by Fabris

A. 2002. Paradossi del senso. Questioni di filosofia. Brescia: Morcelliana, pp. 65–77. A relevant contribution on the relation between ethics and new technology has been recently offered by Fabris in Fabris A. 2018. Ethics of Information and Communication Technologies. Cham: Springer.

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made visible, and yet it cannot be grasped as invisible without the body, the gesture, the voice, the gaze. This is the sense of the event that really takes place, has its own concreteness, despite never giving in to full grasping or full translation into one determinate meaning. The invisible is always, so to speak, slightly off, just a little off target when it comes to what my gaze sees, and yet it guides my gaze and my desire’s direction. One might wonder whether the lexicon of imposition would be better suited here than that of guidance. In aisthesis indeed the complexity of human beings—their genius, creativity, taste, as well as their imagination, feelings, intuitions—are fully displayed with no possible reduction. Aisthesis is, then, not the place of freedom, but rather the typically human intersecting point. It is the place where the inextricable and rather mysterious mesh of body and mind, that we are, meets the several forms of necessity, as what conforms, standardizes, what pertains to the natural and artificial passivity of the subject, the forms, that is, of physio-psychic and social systems—today especially studied in relation to aesthesis—which range from biology to neurology, from economics to technology. More than anything, however, aisthesis has something to do, it would seem, with the experience of necessity itself. Necessity is experienced in the form of what we like or dislike independently of our own will, in the form of what has an emotional impact on us and cannot be forgotten, of what strikes us as important despite not fully understanding it. These kinds of things are arguably connected with the deep down layers of our simultaneously very personal and very impersonal subconscious, without which it is difficult to explain why this aisthesis affects and hurts us. On these grounds one can claim that aesthetic experience is dangerous. It can act as an antidote to the clearly poisonous contemporary processes of aestheticization, which are actually powerfully lethal processes of anaestheticization, but it can also be the source of servitude and frenzy. Nevertheless, if we are in any way free, it is only by venturing into the abyss of necessity that we can exert our freedom. Such a freedom is, I remind the reader, not only mine or yours, it is ours. In this respect art is exemplary, since the sense of a work of art is established only in a relation which— unlike the relation between subjectivity and objectivity—cannot be conceived of as relation between previously-constituted polarities, but it is rather a relation among modes of being sharing a common original solidarity, in which sense is brought into effect. Besides the synergy producing affective and intellectual modes, and besides the inclusion of affections within a sense-producing sequence, in aisthesis a new meaning of causality is made sensible, one that is properly immanent and connected to non-anthropomorphic freedom. As it is clear concerning works of art, or better, thanks to works of art exemplarily displaying a common situation, it is widely agreed that even when all causes of an oeuvre’s genesis are accurately reconstructed, the most essential core of its regulating laws is still missing. An infinite gap brushes off any totalizing gaze here. Thanks to works of art, in the inspection of their genesis, we find the action of infinite freedom. Mankind grasps the sense of such freedom only by means of what Spinoza called “intuitive science,” an oxymoron pointing to that achievement of aesthetic experience which carves the space of human freedom. This is a distinctive intellectual and producing exercise in which humans feel (percipit) the identity of necessity and freedom, without being forced to subordinate one—it

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does not matter which one—to the conceptual realm of the other. In order to further clarify this matter, with the highest degree of seriousness available to me, I will now refer, by way of conclusion, to a few examples. Poetry provides here inspiration: Lad of Athens, faithful be. To thyself, And Mystery All the rest is Perjury Emily Dickinson’s121 words aptly convey, in my opinion, the meaning of poetry, more generally of art, and philosophy. They convey these domains’ fundamental shared features, inasmuch as faithfulness to mystery is also faithfulness to things, that is to say, respect of aisthesis or, if you may, of alterity. A personal memory comes here in handy. I was at the Corrente Foundation in Milan. Franco Fortini was there to speak about Vittorio Sereni; among Fortini’s personal memories one in particular stuck with me. Fortini told the audience he had read a manuscript verse by Sereni which sounded: “Milan, anchored in wind.” But, in the published version of that text, Fortini found “Milan, inside all that wind”; he immediately picked up the phone, called Sereni and asked him whether by any chance he had gone mad to ruin such a “beautiful” verse. Sereni replied: “I had to do it because it was not that.” I here quote Fortini literally. He then argued that the story exemplifies the honesty or ethicality of the poet. But I still wonder: what was that that? “That” is a deictic word. Deixis—personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns— or in contemporary linguistic terms, shifters or indicators have, as is well known, distinctive characteristics: they convey presential knowledge, which means that they say the existence of something present; however they convey no conceptual knowledge about what is present or what defines it. The reader might already know that deixis indicates two-way relations that can be dialogical, correlative or symmetrical. The relation to the present is without mediation; it does not require the presence of a third party; it is immediate. The common and unavoidable use of deixis proves that the knowledge of things—or events, given that things are just relatively monotonous events—more specifically the knowledge of their explosive power or pure existence, is not conceptual. So interpreted, the “that” in Sereni’s reply does not mean “I had to do it, because it was not what I wanted to say, support, express, communicate, etc.,” but rather means “because it was not the that that was present back then.” Presence as such does not belong neither to the past nor to the future, and in its radical precariousness is beyond time and duration, beyond the anguish of nostalgia and the anxiety of wait(ing); it is simply eternal. “Eternity” here means a fleeing point, shiftness, mobility, oscillation, intrinsic dynamism, an essence which becomes concrete and passes away, escapes, stings, shines through in a thousand colors and shapes…, where the power coincides with the contraction of the act. The wound where singular things, finite modes, stay as such, as modes and as finite, is eternal and poetry is its 121 See

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. By Thomas H. Johnson, faber and faber, London, 1982, p. 714.

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exquisite engraving in the body: ‘language actualized […], according to its essence, presentness and presence’ (P. Celan, Der Meridian122 ). What comes into play is the pursuit, in writing, of the already mentioned form of knowledge Spinoza called “intuitive science,” the knowledge of the eternal side of being, which circularly implies the acknowledgment of the gaze and by the gaze of eternity. Eternity is here simultaneously the means and the end of intuitive science. It defines both the essence of the conceiving mind—as this latter is but what allows understanding—and the object of understanding. It is knowledge sub specie aeternitatis, then. In this regard, reference can be made to one of the most paradoxical, and at first sight unintelligible, sentences of Spinoza’s Ethics: ‘eternity isn’t a matter of long-lastingness; it doesn’t have any relation to measurable time. But still we feel and know by experience that we are eternal (sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse)’ (Note on 23 of the V part). This sentence is very close to what can be read in the corollary to 13 of the II part: ‘the human body exists as we are aware of it (corpus humanum, prout ipsum sentimus, existere)’ Spinoza, it would seem, claims that one has experience, feeling, of eternity, the same way one feels the body. On this level of understanding, or of intuitive science, the bond or common feature of singular things, as denoted by the term species, finds its expression. The expression of such bond has a clear ground in the substance, nature, God, that the intellect perceives (percipit)—bodiless perception being a non-sense—in the attributes accounting for the things’ essence. Needless to say, intuitive science is not, as is well-known, firstgenre or primarily sensible knowledge, nor is it second-genre or rational, scientific knowledge; it is third-genre knowledge not because it is both rational and sensible, nor because it mediates between sensibility and rationality, but rather because it is experience, knowledge, that is, of individual-singularities, respected in their being finite events, respected as “modes,” in other words “certain and determinate” expressions of the substance. As such, it provides an horizon of sense, “internal” to nature, obviously, which allows the coming about of countless determinate meanings. This is why intuitive science qualifies as knowledge of aesthetic nature, that is to say simultaneously bodily and mental knowledge of single things and God together, which stands as knowledge of nature inasmuch as it is the non-transcendible and inextricable horizon of singularities and knowledge of singularities. It is also, in this regard, full-fledged poietic knowledge, expressive, productive knowledge. As Spinoza powerfully states in proposition 24 of the V part of the Ethics: ‘The more we understand particular things the more we understand God.’ While rejecting any interpretation of substance as undifferentiated and indeterminate power, Spinoza claims that intuitive science, far from being something static, is activity and expression; it is knowledge of nature in its expression. Intuitive science both produces and is produced by a specific affect, which is joy or amor Dei intellectualis. From intuitive science stems in fact ‘mind’s greatest fulfillment, that is joy’; it is “happy knowledge” and it is closely connected to the body’s endowment: ‘Someone whose body is capable of a great many things (ad plurima aptum) has a mind whose greatest part is eternal,’ writes Spinoza in proposition 39 of the V part. Reference is here made 122 Eng.

tr. by Pierre Joris.

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to a dimension of bodily existence (aptitudo corporis) which has nothing to do with enduring, but is all operating, expressing, constructing, a power of the body, that is, which is also a power of the mind. Concerning joy, some misunderstandings are possible. Intuitive science is triggered by the blow produced by a presence the body has to withstand. Such a blow is produced by what without any explanation is given to the gaze, in other words, what makes itself visible and as such demands a reaction/reply. The something that turns up to intuitive science and in its turning up triggers it in reply can even be something commonly seen, familiar, which suddenly appears, so to speak, in its being exactly that something. It carries the sign of deixis as some sort of luminosity which does not exclude the shadow. In the blow of intuitive gaze the distinctively being that something of something is made clear, and yet such clarity is simultaneously also non-clarity. It reveals indeed unicity as something felt as a punctum, something that affects, hurts. Hence the issue of the unicity of the something itself. Unicity comes about essentially either in the puncturing of loss, fading out, vanishing, or in the perception of birth, of the generation of a shining life bound to self-loss, or, finally, in the intertwining of these two transcendentals of experience. When the two transcendental states of aesthetic experience intertwine, out of breath and with no residue, then, intuitive science or aesthetic logos is the coincidence of action and passion, joy and pain, event of being in its speechless elocution. So understood, writing has nothing to say. It is just “shaking hands” beyond any opposition between being and becoming, necessity and contingency, yes and no. In Paul Celan’s words, it is shade: Speak, you also, speak as the last, have your say. Speak But keep yes and no unsplit. And give your say this meaning: give it the shade. Give it shade enough, give it as much. as you know as been dealt out between. midnight and midday and midnight.123 In this case poetry simply is, and bears testimony. It is the infinite in the very moment of its withdrawing, of its plummeting, of its contracting, of its not; it is the tragic, in the precise and not-crossable sense given to it by Hölderlin: ‘For, […], no original appears as actual in its original strength; rather, it genuinely appears in its weakness, so that quite properly the light of life and the appearance of the weakness pertains to every whole. Now, in the tragic the sign in itself is meaningless, ineffective; yet the original comes to the fore. For the original can appear in a genuine way only 123 Speak, You Also, in Paul Celan, Selected Poems, Eng. tr. by Michael Hamburger, Harmondsworth,

Penguin Books, 1996, p. 101.

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in its weakness. Yet insofar as the sign is meaningless and thus = 0, the original too, the concealed ground of every nature, can present itself. When nature presents itself in its strongest talent, the sign = 0’ (Die Beteutung der Tragödien124 ). No salvation is here offered, the original annihilates the sign attempting to signify it, and the very sacrifice of what makes itself sign (Zeichen, as showing and indicating: an-zeigen), in its self-deleting, brings out in the open the “concealed ground of every nature.” Nevertheless, the manifestation of what cannot rise as true sign does happen, does become event, and paradoxically communicates (the “light of life”: Lebenslicht) in full respect. This is no-remainder joy stemming from the “poems of the tower,” the poems of madness, of the totally annihilated and definitively faithful I: […]. That nature completes the image of seasons, That she lingers, quickly gliding over them, Is out of perfection – The height of the sky gleams. Upon men, then, just like leaves wreathe the trees. With submission, Scardanelli. May 24th , 1748.125 Thus the artistic action finds its otherwise unavailable freedom in the faithfulness to aisthesis, that is to say in being faithful to the appearing of the world as irreducible alterity. All things considered, this is the constitutive relation of our being in the world. The same has been clearly grasped, and this is my last reference, by Rainer Maria Rilke, when he found himself shocked by Cézanne’s paintings. There and then, Rilke accepted that he might never write again. The poet discovered Cézanne at the exposition of the Salon d’Automne, in the October of 1907, one year after the painter’s death. In that moment Rilke, after having recently submitted to his publisher the first book of the Neue Gedichte and having already written most of the second, is an extremely commanding poet; he can so royally deal with language that he can manipulate, almost swallow in poetry, any object. Even when he seems to respect the object in its alterity, he is actually absorbing and transforming it. He had thus finally achieved his greatest ambition in poetry, as expressed few years earlier in his poetic program: ‘Art is the dark desire of all things,’ he had written in 1898, adding that: ‘They all want to be images of our secrets. With pleasure they let their wilted meaning go to carry any of our heavy longings. They force their way in our shaking meanings and thirst for becoming the pretexts of our feelings. They flee convention. They want to be what we think they are. With gratitude and submission they want to carry the new names the artists gift them with. […] This way things want to stand in front of the artists’ confessions, when they choose them as pretext for their work. 124 Partial

Eng. tr. in J. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic, Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy, Princeton University Press, pp. 189–190; see also a full translation of the fragment in D. Farrell Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 54–55. 125 Sight, Eng. tr. by Aleksi Barrière.

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Silent and revealing at the same time. Dark, but lined with their spirit, like many singing faces of their soul. That is the call the artists hear: the desire of things to be their language.’126 On all this, seeing Cézanne’s paintings is the greatest shock of Rilke’s life. He then starts on a strenuous path, as his letters to his wife tell us. There he states, in all its massive seriousness, the issue of respecting the other than oneself, of the unaccessible and yet self-evident presence of things, in their inexplicable autonomy. In chronological disorder, we can follow his line of thinking127 : October 12, 1907: ‘It also struck me very much yesterday how unaffectedly different they [i.e. Cezanne’s paintings] are, how little concerned with originality, sure, in every approach to thousand-sided Nature, of not losing themselves, rather of discovering earnestly and conscientiously her inexhaustibility through the manifoldness without.’ October 18: ‘This work, which had no preferences any more, no inclinations, no fastidious indulgences; […] which with such integrity reduced the existent to its color content, that it began, beyond color, a new existence, without earlier memories. It is this unlimited objectivity, which declines to interfere in any other sphere, that makes Cezanne’s portraits so outrageous and absurd to people.’ October 13: ‘One also notices better each time how necessary it was to go even beyond love; it is of course natural for one to love each of these things, when one makes it: but if one shows that, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying it. […] This consuming of love in anonymous work, out of which such pure things arise, no one perhaps has so fully achieved as this old man;’ While tackling alterity, what is discussed is not only an issue pertaining to the theory of knowledge, but also one of ontology, since any “respectful saying” – be it poetic, pictorial, musical, philosophical, etc. – which is yet a human – but not too human – expression, all the more comprehensive as it is respectful of the thing, is nevertheless a diction of being. In other words, it is sense-constituting, world-constructing, expressing the sense of the world: ‘The convincing quality, the becoming a thing, the reality heightened into the indestructible through his own experience of the object, it was that which seemed to him the aim of his innermost work’ (Letter of October 9, 1907). How is then possible to say the objectivity without absorbing it in the subjectivity, in too human language and affectivity? How then to respect it and yet say the mysterious autonomy of the thing? Hence, the extraordinary reference to the animal gaze: ‘As a dog – writes Rilke – Cézanne sat there in front of it [the thing to be painted] and simply looked.’ In such a gaze, it should be clear, there is no idolatry of a [mythic] time before consciousness when humans and nature were one. Nor is the world questioned concerning its noumenic condition. Cézanne rather goes to the root of the human 126 R.M. Rilke, Aufzeichnungen über Kunst – Zweite Fassung, in R.M. Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Rilke-Archiv, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt a.M., 1966, vol. VI, pp. 1161–1162 (my transl.). 127 Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892 -1910, Eng. tr. by J. Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton, W.W. Norton & Company Inc., New York, 1945, pp. 303–314.

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knowledge of the world, to the source of culture, and speaks—as Merleau-Ponty teaches us—as the first human spoke, and he paints as if it was never done before. ‘Cézanne did not think he had to choose between feeling and thought, between order and chaos. He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization. He makes a basic distinction not between “the senses” and “the understanding” but rather between the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive and the human organization of ideas and sciences. […] We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use. We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakeably. Cezanne’s painting suspends those habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself.’128 This is the turning point. In Cézanne, always from the beginning, the primal act by which human nature is grafted on “the non-human” is revealed in terms of irreducibly extraneous Other. Merleau-Ponty remarks how people in Cézanne’s paintings look like being of another species, and also nature is ‘stripped of the attributes which make it ready for animistic communions: there is no wind in the landscape, no movement on the Lac d’Annecy; the frozen objects hesitate as at the beginning of the world. It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness.’129 For Cézanne—Merleau-Ponty concludes—only one emotion is possible, the feeling of extraneousness, and only one lyricism, the one of an existence which is always about to start. A radical effort is therefore required in order to see the object as something that is given for the first time, as chaos of pure visibility that has to be organized, in reply to the blow, the astonishment, the wound, as a formal system under an immanent law. Such law, though, does not gather the chaos of the visible around a main center; hence the dismissal of any hierarchical organization, such as the perspective-based disposition of the elements on the canvas. One might even be under the impression that Cézanne totally rejects the idea that sense unravels according to laws or linear development, whose main framework is that of cause and effect. What we see is then a composition, clearly, but a composition where every part is the center, as important as the others and as much as the whole. Painting here resembles thinking, which is scattered center, non-linearly developed. On a higher level, what is at stake here is establishing a relation which respects the singularity of the element, the dignity of “this.” In order to signify this relation Merleau-Ponty makes reference to Spinoza. It is some sort of “intuitive science,” he writes; while, few years earlier, in the introduction essay for the catalogue of his exhibition at the Warren Gallery in London (June

128 M.

Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Eng. tr. by H.L. Dreyfus, P. Allen Dreyfus, Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 13 and 16. 129 Ibidem.

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1929),130 D.H. Lawrence would talk about “the appleness of apples,” in reference to Cézanne, and thus pinpoint the idea of something that is properly that something of something. Our circle can then close on the intersection of two cardinal points: “intuitive science” and “being properly that something of something.” Between these two poles the astonishment comes about, the blow which de-structures and deforms all cliché, perceptual habit, and thus triggers a constructive action of sense. It elicits a novelty. It claims that art does not repeat the visible, but rather makes the appleness of apples visible, the being properly that something of something. Appleness is not the essence. Art does not force the thing to show its own secret and intimate sense. The word Lawrence uses to talk about the shape of apples in Cézanne is “shiftness,” that is to say, as we know, mobility, oscillation, dynamism, virtuality. Cézanne retrieves the form, but a powerful, moving, dynamic form. It is the opening of the possible abiding in the necessary. It is the intention of an act, and act of being, an act of existing, in relation to which the essence is only a contraction, a limit. It is properly speaking the intention of the fleetingness of an act, which is nevertheless the condition of possibility of presence, a seal, so to speak, of alterity. These ideas are well understood by Yves Bonnefoy: ‘There is a reminder of Cézanne, reverberating through Giacometti, in contemporary poetry. A mountain surfacing there, not certainly represented, the line of a peak people like to see cut off, not only by clouds in the physical sky, but also by the held-against-it, condensed on this side of what is, cloud of non-knowledge. Line without reason nor contribution but being the threshold of a light which abides alone. Deeply nourishing a line nevertheless: as it is through this at first negative approach that will flow the power of life which makes us love terrestrial things and find for them no longer meaning but sense. This stripping bare of Being is necessary for existing to reach plenitude.’131 Finally, the specific temporality of deixis gets engraved on the space of the canvas, as an essential time, the time of genesis and loss inter-connecting in vortex, the time of freedom and of necessity as emergence of life: ‘Sensitive only to modulation, to transition, to the quivering of balance, to the presence established in its bursting already everywhere, it looks for the freshness of invading death, it triumphs easily over eternity without youth and perfection without burn marks. // Around this stone time boils up. For having touched this stone, the lamps of the world are turning, the secret lighting is going around.’132

130 See

D.H. Lawrence, “Introduction to These Paintings” (1929), in Selected Critical Writings, World’s Classics, Oxford, 1998, p. 261. 131 Y. Bonnefoy, Devant la Sainte-Victoire, in Remarques sur le dessin, Mercure de France, Paris, 1993, pp. 38–39 (my transl.). 132 Y. Bonnefoy, L’Anti-Platon, in Poèmes, Gallimard, Paris, 1982, p. 41 (my transl.).