More-Than-Human Aesthetics
Book Launch and Discussion with Melanie Sehgal, Alexander Damianos, Maximilian Haas, Maxime Le Calvé
Climate crises demands that we develop new ways of knowing, new kinds of action, but also, and equally important, new ways of experiencing and feeling. Inspired by A.N. Whitehead and Felix Guattari, More-Than-Human Aesthetics traces the contours of a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’: a generalised aesthetics acknowledging the primacy of aesthetic experience across all entities, phenomena and processes in order to sensitise contemporary knowledge practices to the nature and import of the aesthetic dimensions of present crises. Departing from the dominant understanding of aesthetics as a realm of human privilege, the book follows the transformation of our understanding of cultural and knowledge practices when predicated on aesthetic experience and feeling. This involves two profound and interrelated assertions that upturn the prevailing understanding of aesthetics. First, aesthetics precedes and thus cannot be separated from knowledge: feeling and knowing are indivisible. Second, the ‘social’, typically seen as the source and cause of aesthetics is, itself, the upshot of aesthetic processes. Taking up the proposition of generalised aesthetics, the contributors to the book, from diverse disciplines including Cultural Studies, Design, English, Law, Geography, Performance, Philosophy and Sociology, address how such an understanding of aesthetics plays out when confronted with environmental, technoscientific and ‘social’ matters of concern and care.
Celebrating the publication of More-Than-Human Aesthetics in paperback by Bristol University Press, this event brings together contributors to the book and one commentator to discuss what it means to open up the field of aesthetics, as a generalised form of experience and affect, to the more-than-human world. The event presents a general discussion on themes raised in the book and how they fit into ongoing critical discussion of aesthetics today.
Participants: Melanie Sehgal (University of Wuppertal and book co-editor), Alexander Damianos (University of Kent), Maximilian Haas (HAW Hamburg), Maxime Le Calvé (Humboldt University).
