The other forms of knowledge that I want to strengthen throughout this text are embodied, intuitive forms of knowledge—a knowledge of experience that is enabled through attention towards how we experience and not towards the what, the object of experience. Intuitive knowledge can, thinking along with Whitehead, be understood as something between physical and con-scious purposes. Whitehead re-thought Henry Bergson’s notion of pure and instinctive intuition as intuitive or propositional feelings, as “lures for feelings,”
that “give to feelings a definiteness of enjoyment and purpose which is absent in the blank evaluation of physical feeling into physical purpose” ([1929] 1985, 280). Intuitive feelings can be understood, then, as an orienting principle, something that directs my attentions towards the world. It is in this phase of experience that I intuitively direct myself towards certain aspects in the world, and that creativity has its roots as the possibility for novelty, which lies in the fact that a subject integrates a new aspect into the process of its becoming.
The key argument I develop throughout this text is that we can gain a new per-spective on the human-environment relations if we become familiar with the metabolic processes that embed us in the environment. Such a perspective would account for processes not fully comprehensible to our conscious reference to the world and can, in principle, emerge anytime. Therefore, while aesthetic milieus intensify experiences of metabolic processes, a sensitivity towards the effects of metabolic interrelations on our feelings, moods, thoughts, and actions can, in principle, happen at any point in time. This everydayness of aesthetic experience of metabolic processes can be exem-plified with breathing.
Breathing is a vital example of an engagement with the world that can come to conscious experience anytime. As philosopher Emanuele Coccia points out, in breathing, our being as being immersed in a world becomes apparent, as “[w]
e are in something with the same intensity and same force as that something is in us. It is the reciprocity of inherence that makes breath an inescapable condition: it is impossible to liberate oneself from the environment in which
42 Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes
one is immersed, and it is impossible to purify this environment of our pres-ence” (2019, 143). Breathing traverses different levels, from the bio-chemical to the cognitive. In breathing, we are related to our surroundings in many ways:
Oxygen provides energy, while possible pollutants can harm us; the chemical mix also primes how energetic we feel, how much energy can be provided for our muscle activity. Breathing exercises are used to reduce stress and calm the mind. If we learn to consciously breathe, to focus on our breathing in challenging moments or meditation, we shift our perspective to something that happens continuously. Exercising this shift is usually a temporary matter.
We focus on breathing for a few minutes or an hour and then completely forget about our breathing, letting it phase back again into the background of our experience.
While we can become more sensitive towards the way we breathe and the effects our breathing has on our wellbeing, it seems more difficult to abstract knowledge from breathing about what it is that we are actually breathing in and out. The air we are breathing remains invisible, opaque. We grow used to certain chemical compounds in the air. Living day-in, day-out in a polluted city, for example, makes one unaware of the impact it has on the whole of one’s being. This impact, as studies on one of the world’s most polluted cities, Beijing, China, have shown, comes with severe physical and mental health problems (Liu, Xu, and Yang 2018).
Are the alarming effects that reports on these issues have on citizens and politicians around the world enough to create a change in perspective and habits, and they can lead to new ways of dealing with the fact that the bios-pheric metabolism traverses different scales of time and space, ignoring national boundaries? I argue that the shift in perspective that pays attention to the minimal-affective qualities of our atmospheric surroundings has to be exercised, and the mode of attending to one’s environment must change, in order to give way to new ways of relating to the environment in a caring and less “ego-centric” manner. With an aesthetics of metabolism, I propose an aesthetics that foregrounds the intensities that come with transitions and phase-changes rather than discrete objects and that assigns new meaning to relational processes that embed us in our environment. Developing a sense of our bodily withness in the world beyond what is consciously graspable might ultimately extend our sensitivity beyond a human-centered point of view. This is because sensations that are not linked to an intention or representational system, and that must be placed beyond the position of the self-identical sub-ject, start to matter.Furthermore, an aesthetics of metabolism creates a new context for everyday experiences. The metabolic interrelations that have been expressed through different modes of perception in the pieces explored here are always present in certain ways and not specific to the artistic works. An aesthetics of metabolism thus provides a certain orientation to the world, a
Terms of an Aesthetics of Metabolism 43
new perspective that is open to affective processes that transgress bodily and temporal boundaries. I propose understanding this orientation as a practice of re-imagining our relation to the world based on a foundational interrelated-ness through shared metabolic pathways.
As a practical aesthetics of everyday experiences, an aesthetics of metabolism is informed by and derived in this way from real-world encounters (Bennett 2012, 2). As philosopher Jane Bennett puts it,
practical aesthetics is the study of art as a) means of apprehending the world via sense-based and affective processes—processes that touch bodies intimately and directly but that also underpin the emotions, sentiments and passions of public life. It is, then, the study of aesthetic perception at work in a social field. (2012, 43)
The interoceptive awareness for breathing, the emergence and unfolding of emotional processes and one’s physical condition, a sensitivity to infrastruc-tural processes of inscription of individual and collective actions, and the simultaneity and comprehensiveness of not necessarily visible environmental dependencies allow us to rethink the role that subjective, lived experience can play today. Not as an alternative to representations and abstract thought, but as an additional point of view, able to fill in the space between subjective experience and the effects of imperceptible phenomena in order to create a basis for reflection and communication of what tends to escape our conscious awareness. An aesthetic experience of metabolic processes can blur the object-subject distinction, and yet allow for the emergence of forms, feelings, patterns, and, ultimately, new concepts. Aesthetic experience, thus, is not radically opposed to reflective experience. Rather, both forms are only two modes of how we access the world—two of many dimensions of experience that prime each other and traverse each other.