How Else Can We Think About Art? Aesthetics, Technosphere, and the Post-Metaphysical Image

Žarko Paić

doi:10.25038/am.v0i28.624

Authors

Žarko Paić Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i28.624

Keywords:

technosphere; figurality; aisthesis; visualization; art; aesthetics; posthumanism; digital aesthetics.

Abstract

In this article, the author asserts that the technosphere denotes the last frontier of metaphysical thought within which both aesthetics, as a philosophical discipline, and the aesthetic replaced by the concepts of aisthesis, figurality and visualization, after the end of all conceptual-categorical systems of thought about the essence of art from Immanuel Kant to Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schelling to Theodor Adorno, still appear as relics of language and its ontological structure of telling “about” the world. Aesthetics emerged in the era of the rise of rationalism and modern technology. Aisthesis, figurality and visualization are conceptual tools for what connects the thought of the technosphere and its world-forming “aesthetic objects”. The central problem of this article is to articulate post-aesthetic thinking. The conceptual tools are figurality, aisthesis, visualization, and the main thesis attempts to demonstrate that art in the technosphere, as autopoietic semiosis, becomes an assemblage of new categories and concepts that transcend all metaphysical matrices.

Author Biography

Žarko Paić, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb

Žarko Paić is a retired Professor at the University of Zagreb, where he taught courses in Aesthetics and Visual Studies. His research interests encompass aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of science, political philosophy, and visual/media studies. He is a member of the Croatian Society of Writers, the Croatian PEN Center, the Croatian Philosophical Society, the Forum for Humanities, the International Center of Studies on Contemporary Nihilism, and the Sören Kierkegaard Institute. He is a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the field of humanities, and he serves as the editor of the Sociology and Transhumanism Series, published by Trivent Publishing in Budapest. His publications include Theorizing Images (edited with Krešimir Purgar, 2016), Technosphere Vols. 1–5 (2018–2019), White Holes and the Visualization of the Body (2019), The Return of Totalitarianism – Ideology, Terror, and Total Control (2022), and The Superfluity of the Human – Reflections on the Posthuman Condition (2023).

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How Else Can We Think About Art? Aesthetics, Technosphere, and the Post-Metaphysical Image

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Author Biography

Žarko Paić, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb

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