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From Saul Steinberg, The Inspector, 1965.
Head
Research Associates
Dr. Daniel Martin Feige / Dr. Frank Ruda
Student Assistant
Objective
In the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, aesthetic experiences are consistently attributed with reflexive moments. This project inquires into the ways in which these moments are intimately related to reflexive structures established within the - sensorily and symbolically constituted - media conveying these experiences. Our aim is to explore the internal and external borders and border-dissolving forms of art in a specific manner: as basically determined by media-specific and praxis-specific reflexive modes. This involves understanding the generation of reflexive forms of these media - approached in terms of both their sensory and symbolic aspects - within aesthetic practice.
Comprising the processes and structures of self-relation and of distancing in the aesthetic focus on objects, aesthetic reflexivity has traditionally been tied to the subjects of aesthetic experience: hence the general orientation of philosophical aesthetics to subjectivity. Nevertheless it is questionable whether aesthetic reflexivity can actually be suitably understood without observing the structure of the objects and symbolic media upon and in which aesthetic experiences unfold. We thus see that in many literary and poetic texts, language itself experiences a complex, new structuring; works of graphic art vary individual motifs in an intricate manner; musical compositions likewise present tones and tonal structures in new ways, in this process rendering themselves estranged. Such examples quickly make clear that aesthetic reflexivity is not, in fact, settled in the subject alone - that forms of self-reference and distancing are also characteristic for the objects of aesthetic praxis themselves. They are thus always ascribed to works in the process of concrete interpretation. This project thus centers on an explication of basic reflexive forms in the objects of aesthetic experience that correspond with the reflexivity of these experiences.
Work tied to the project will be limited to the symbolic media of image, music, and language and will be oriented around two hypotheses: (1) aesthetic experiences are essentially tied to characteristic reflexive forms of media constituted in the course of specific practice; (2) it is here possible to distinguish between mainly sensory-material and mainly symbolic forms of reflexivity. Aesthetic experiences are constituted in the interplay of these two forms, while at the same time themselves possibly being constitutive of them. The project’s intention is to conceptually illuminate these connections, while placing the particular qualities of both, the realm of aesthetic experience and the realm of art itself, into the broader context of a theory of medially based reflexive praxis. This will involve rendering such phenomena newly comprehensible and theoretically adaptable in relation to the study of the individual arts on the one hand, philosophy itself on the other hand. In addition, the results of our research are meant to offer an approach for explicating processes of differentiation and border-dissolution both within the arts and between art and non-art. With the distinction between mainly sensorily and mainly symbolically oriented forms of aesthetic reflexivity, a division suggests itself between cognitive and symbolic areas of research that can themselves be assigned to two separate subprojects. Through close consideration of relevant positions in philosophy and art theory, the particularities of the separately reflexive forms will be examined, as well as an irreducible interplay explored, in a last step, by means of cooperative work between the two sub-projects.
Subproject 1: Sensory Reflexivity in Aesthetic Experience
(Dr. Frank Ruda)
The goal of subproject 1 is to render comprehensible the forms of sensory reflexivity present in aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience is characterized by intensified attention to sensorily ascertainable material - such as the sound of words, the special texture and color-dramaturgy of pictures, the relation to space of corporeal movement. This intensified attention within aesthetic forms of experience can be explained in terms of their reflexive use of sensory material: a process involving, among other things, the thematic incorporation by specific artistic procedures - for instance structural fractures and dissonances - of their own material production, leading to a foregrounding of their own material constitution. In order to make such reflexive forms understandable, we will take a cognitive-theoretical approach emerging from three thematic fields. First, we will consider the extent to which sensory-material moments (e.g. colors, sounds, and phonemes) appear to emerge in reflexive acts of perception; second, on that basis we will inquire into whether such acts and moments take specifically aesthetic form and, if so, what defines this specificity. Third, these considerations must be brought together with those at work in subproject 2: to what extent are reflexive forms of sensory moments in aesthetic experience tied to one phenomenon in particular:the unfolding of such experiences in association with symbolic media that for their part are used in a self-referential way within the aesthetic realm.
Subproject 2: Symbolic Reflexivity in Aesthetic Experience
(Prof. Dr. Georg Bertram and Dr. Daniel Martin Feige)
The goal of subproject 2 is twofold: to examine the ways aesthetic praxis is grounded in reflexive forms of the use of symbols, and inversely, what renders both the structures of symbolic reflexivity and its forms of enactment specifically aesthetic. Special emphasis will here be placed on the question of whether, and if so how precisely, such reflexive forms differ significantly in the media under consideration - images, music, and language. What is the locus of the structural-logical differences and commonalities between the forms of symbolization used in each case, and in what manner does the process of their semantic constitution and genesis become the center of aesthetic reflection? The extent to which significant distinctions between reflexive forms emerge on the basis of such medial differences will be considered in two steps. The first of these involves the comparison between the reflexive forms tied to each of the media in question; the second is an examination of the forms identified in this way: are these forms specific for aesthetic praxis, or do they simply receive a special shape or character through it? Finally, in conjunction with the results of subproject 1, we will consider both what separates and what structurally joins symbolic and sensory reflexivity within the concrete aesthetic praxis and its symbolic media.
