Over the course of my study, I have explored different areas in which the metabolic interrelatedness of humans and their environment could become sensual. First, I showed how the interoceptive sense allows us to attune to the bio-chemical dimension of our body and how feelings, possibilities for acting, and also a sense of self emerges from there. Then I looked at the ways environments externalize metabolic interrelations between organisms, how the being-in an environment leaves traces that bare meaning for those who become attuned to them. I have proposed speculatively that an aesthetic experience in which meaning is assigned to these newly perceived metabolic correspondences comes with an acknowledgment of something shared that lies outside the conscious grasp of the human subject.
In the previous chapters, I described aesthetic experience of metabolic correspondences by expanding Seel’s definition of aesthetic perception towards the sensing of metabolic interrelations, which concerns processes internal to our bodies and between our bodies and the environment that can only become sensuously perceivable in their effects. Using Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience, I highlighted the operative dimension of the experience of our bio-chemical dimension, which consists of continuously re-establishing a meaningful relationship through engagement with our environ-ment. Meaning is thereby understood as a relation (Langer 1951, 44) and not something reserved for “higher” cognitive capacities. Becoming sensitive to the meaningful relationships that are established, lost, and re-established in the bio-chemical dimension of our being means to acknowledge our ability to be affected and to affect metabolically, and, to say it with Despret, to acknowledge what our bodies and bodies of others make. An aesthetics of metabolism gives the potential to sensuously perceive these correlations in
130 Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes
different layers of engagement with environments, internal as well as external to our bodies, whereby these layers in my examples intermingle.
The capability to be affected by the environment is not only particular to humans but also includes other living and nonliving entities. Because this affectability of, for example, vegetal life or minerals usually happens on a scale outside of human perception, the affectability of nonhuman entities needs to be mediated so that a human can intersubjectively attune to those others. In my previous examples, this attunement became possible because of the sharing of metabolic pathways, which allows processes of one’s own body to be brought into relation with processes of other forms of life. I have argued that it is through this attunement towards our biochemical dimension that the subject becomes open to their own processuality, to the way feelings, thoughts and actions are affected by continuous intake and conversion of matter into energy, as well by their extraction of wastes. Now I will investigate how it is that these experiences not only are meaningful on a pre-reflective, embodied level, but become subject to conscious thought as well. How does the body, or more precisely, the feelings and sensations that come with metabolic processes, become a signal that can be contextualized, be reflected upon, and enrich further the engagement with the surrounding world?
In order to describe how abstract thought and new intentional action develop from the aesthetic experience of metabolic processes, I will consider characteristics of the aesthetic mode of perception that I have identified so far in relation to theories, which place consciousness as evolving from pre-reflective experience. One of these theories is that of prehension by White-head. I will put forward the idea that attunement emerges from prehension in enabling the experience of a relation, which might include sense perception, feelings, or moods. Attunement then allows us to form some kind of knowledge that re-contextualizes not only what the subject-in-attunement attends to, but the formation of the subject itself.
What I call knowledge here is not equal to abstract knowledge of something in its being-so. Not falling for the “God’s eye view”(Haraway 1988, 589) that Haraway identified as fostering binaries and thereby producing harmful inequalities, my exploration of the passage from intuitive, bodily knowledge of attunement to abstract thought is meant to add to the practices of situ-ated knowledges. Situsitu-ated knowledge pervades the epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political planes and thus excludes the ideology of expertism. In resonance with this account, I will describe the process from bodily engagement with the world to abstract thinking by further expanding my own phenomenological observations with concepts from philosophy and media theory, which, in part, were presented earlier in this research.
Newly introduced will be the term mimesis. Mimesis, generally described as a tendency to synchronize the affective expressions, vocalizations, postures,
Atmospheres of Dwelling 131
and movements of another person (Chartrand and Bargh 1999), will play a role here in its relevance for an expansion of the dynamic of intersubjective awareness towards non-human matters.
The suggestiveness of the concept of the metabolic for a thinking-with philosophies of process, embodiment, and aesthetic theory brings into focus the unfolding relationships not only between bodies or matters and their environments but between ways of creating knowledge as well. The process of mimetic synchronization between bodies is therefore explored here as part of the phase of meaning-making, a form of corporeal imagination that allows one to gather percepts from different senses and to transfer them into abstract thought. It follows that I understand affect, attunement, and mimesis as processes that not only relate different entities but that also modify them at the same time. My thinking proceeds here from understandings of the relation of affect and mimetic faculty that follow William James, a philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries whose work greatly influenced both phenomenology and pragmatism. James saw affect as embodied and yet related to cognition (1884). In James’s view, affect followed perception but led only at a later stage to an emotion that could be recognized by a conscious-ness. This understanding of affect and attunement differs in focus from more recent research in psychology, such as that of Daniel Stern. Stern researched affect attunement based on mimetic behavior as it develops between a child and their caretaker (1987). The difference between Stern’s and James’s approach, and mine, for that matter, is that Stern only regarded one phase of attunement between a subject and an other. From my perspective, this phase emerges only at a later stage in the process of relating, in which an inter-action between child and caretaker leads to a shared understanding of reality through new forms of nonverbal engagement and a shared emotional stage.
A processual perspective, which I want to bring forward here, considers the phases before this materialization of emotional subjects, without disregarding conscious reflection.
The questions that remain in my study are, for one, how is it that we create new meaning by attuning to an other that may not even be human? And, following from that, how can we create an emotional relationship and con-sciously reflect on what follows an attunement to shared metabolic pathways?
The following chapter will provide perspectives on these questions rather than answers. In the sense of a situated knowledge practice, I will further expand my analytical-speculative perspective, and include my own experience—both in the form of first-person experience of a processual aesthetic and from the perspective of being a creator of and observer in an aesthetic environment.
My perspective in what follows is thus multiple from the start; it is a multi-plicity that is productive for a speculative thinking-with others—with concepts, atmospheres, subjects, and organic and inorganic matters. My starting point
132 Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes
will be an encounter with scholars, designers, and artists, brought together by a shared fascination for the materiality of atmospheres.