Le qualit espressive

Stato dellarte e prospettive di ricerca sui caratteri espressivi dellesperienza

Expressive qualities
State of the art and research perspectives on the expressive characters of experience
25 26 27 settembre 2014
Palazzo Feltrinelli, Gargnano del Garda

Il convegno si propone di fornire un quadro degli studi fino ad oggi piuttosto frammentari a
proposito delle qualit espressive degli oggetti dal punto di vista della filosofia della mente,
dellarte e della musica, della fenomenologia. Lappuntamento vorrebbe offrire loccasione di
affrontare i nodi pi significativi del problema filosofico sollevato dallesperienza di qualit
espressive, quali la relazione con le percezioni, le emozioni e limmaginazione, limpatto sulle
teorie dellesperienza artistica, le radici storiche del dibattito e le sue possibili declinazioni.
The conference aims to provide a picture of the studies about expressive qualities of objects from
the viewpoint of the philosophy of mind, of art and of music, and of phenomenology. The date would
offer the chance to face the most significant aspects of the philosophical problem raised by the
experience of expressive qualities, as the relationships with perceptions, emotions, imagination, its
impact on the artistic experience, the historical origins of the debate and its possible variations.

Abstracts

Expressive qualities and perceptual dynamics

Alberto Argenton
Professor of Psychology of Art, University of Padua
In the first part, my contribution will focus on the explanatory aspects of the perception of expression related
with the dynamics of perception. I will dedicate particular attention to the artistic phenomenon, taking for
granted the theoretical and methodological framework of the psychologist Rudolf Arnheim. Then I will
present, in their basic form, some studies that are both concluded and in progress, so as to describe the
themes previously introduced.
***
The role of emotions in the experience of expressiveness: feeling, recognising, perceiving
Marta Benenti
Graduate Student in Philosophy, University of Milan
Emotions can be considered one of the key ingredients that shape the experience of expressiveness. Most
descriptions of inanimate objects, both natural and artificial, make use of adjectives typically belonging to
the semantic field of emotions. It can legitimately be asked why we use the same attributes i.e. happy,
joyful, melancholy, sad, quiet to describe both animate and inanimate beings; in other words, how can we
sensibly attribute emotional character to objects that are by definition incapable of feeling emotions? We
could maintain that the emotions ascribed to inanimate objects are those emotions actually felt by the subject
experiencing the object. According to this claim, in describing a landscape as quiet we are actually
describing the feeling that that landscape arouses in us. On the other hand one could take the emotional
character expressed by objects to be part of the way in which they manifest themselves to a subject capable
of recognising emotions without being emotionally involved. My aim is to show why and where these two
accounts dont obtain and to suggest an alternative perspective on this aspect of expressive experience.
***
Emotional Physiognomics. Affordances, Ecstasies, Atmospheres
Tonino Griffero
Professor of Aesthetics, University of Rome Tor Vergata
Through an atmospherological approach, primarily inspired by the Aisthetik (Gernot Bhme) and the New
Phenomenology (Hermann Schmitz), the paper defines the atmospheric perception as first pathemic
impression and investigates the relationship between this kind of perception and the expressive qualities of
the surrounding spaces. Our aim is to understand atmospheres as (amodal, transmodal, sinaesthetic)
affordances that permeate the lived space, that is as ecological and affective invites or meanings that are
ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things.
***

What is the how? Notes for an ontology of expression

Giovanni Gurisatti
Professor of Aesthetics, University of Padua
Starting from a physiognomic and characterological that is phenomenological and hermeneutical
definition of expression, and making explicit reference to the work of Ludwig Klages, this paper aims to
analyse the possibility of applying the paradigm of expression (ontologically based on the distinction
between the what of the action and its how) not only to bodily manifestations (gesture, gesticulation, action,
behaviour) but also to those kinds of expression that tend to move away from the body, like speech, writing,
art and finally the urban form. The analysis will make it possible to observe that, consciously or not, this
paradigm works in a structural and structuring way in some of the major representatives of the twentiethcentury aesthetics, historiography and history of arts. Eventually, taking account of two typically postmodern objects, say the fin de sicle metropolis-spectacle, and the digital photography, it will be worth to
ask whether in the world of simulation and virtualization, the phenomenological and hermeneutic paradigm
of expression still preserves its validity and topicality, or is instead doomed to fade, within a deconstruction
of the aesthetic of expression in which the how puts on the look of the absolute simulacrum, that is
ontologically inexpressive.
***
Explaining the Presence of Expressive Content
Paul Noordhof
Professor of Philosophy, University of York
The perception of expressive properties and, indeed, of any mental states behind them is a particular case of
attribution of rich (or liberal) perceptual content. Part of the defence of such attributions depend upon
undermining the case put forward by austere (or conservative) theorists who, often, appeal to claims about
our powers of sensory discrimination to secure their position. One part of my paper focuses on this.
However, the more important part concerns the need to accommodate certain facts about the nature of the
presence of such properties in our perceptual experience. They dont show up in the way that properties like
colour and shape do and they are, to an extent, subject to our will. I argue that this favours a particular way
of understanding the nature of our perception of expressive properties, relate this to the perception of other
peoples mental states, compare such an approach with others offered recently and consider the
epistemological implications and implications for the simulation/theory-theory approach to the
understanding of others.
***
The comic appeal of incongruent causality
Giulia Parovel
Researcher in Psychology, University of Siena
According to incongruity theories (Koestler, 1964; Bergson, 1900/2003), the cognitive capacity to note an
incongruous event is a necessary condition to experience laughter. More precisely, one of the most comic
incongruities, suggests Bergson, is the perception of an animate or psychological behaviour embodied in a
mechanical structure. The aim of this research was to investigate with psychophysical methods the role of
incongruity in low-level processed visual events like causality and animacy (Scholl &Tremoulet, 2000; Sholl
& Gao, 2013), by considering the comic appreciation as a qualitative dependent variable. General findings
showed that the paradoxical juxtaposition of a living behaviour, depending on animacy cues, in the

perceptual causal paradigm is a powerful factor in eliciting comic appreciations, coherently with the
Bergsonian perspective in particular, and with incongruity theories in general. Moreover, these experiments
show that expressive events hold the same compelling evidence and surprising character of many perceptual
illusions, and can be systematically explored and measured with psychophysical methods.
***
Gestalt and Pathos: expressive qualities and form in the morphological tradition between Rothacker and
Weizscker
Salvatore Tedesco
Professor of Aesthetics, University of Palermo
In the tradition of twentieth-century morphological thinking, the concept of form constitutes the profound
unity from which it is possible to articulate the relationship between subject and object and the expressive
qualities of experience and reality. Erich Rothacker, in his last book published posthumously in 1966 and
titled Zur Genealogie des Menschlichen Bewusstseins, outlines a genesis of human consciousness in which
the relationship with reality is structured expressively starting from sensory-motor images up to the
conscience of the world (Weltbewusstsein) on the basis of a criterion of organic-expressive significance,
while, even more markedly, Viktor von Weizsacker concludes his theory of Gestaltkreis reformulating the
circularity of form as a circularity of life (Lebenskreis), to be grasped on the basis of pathic-expressive
categories that belong to the experience of form.
***
Mnemosyne's Gesture: Aby Warburg & the science of expression in 1920s Germany
Matthew Vollgraff
Ph.D. candidate in German, Princeton University
During the first decades of the 20th century, the once-marginal subject of human expression became a
common concern for diverse thinkers throughout Germany. Aby Warburgs proposed historical psychology
of human expression, Helmuth Plessner & Frederik Buytendijks phenomenological investigations in the
interpretation of mimic expression and Ludwig Klagess psychodiagnostic Seminar fr Ausdruckskunde
all form part of the grand science inachev known as Ausdruckskunde. In parallel with the quests of the
avant-garde for originary typologies of movement, this science of expression represented an effort to break
away from the physiognomic tradition and develop a dynamic understanding of the relationship between
motion and emotion. But Ausdruckskunde also produced radical new models of subjectivity, historicity and
aesthetic experience that went beyond its empirical basis in individual physiology: what Warburg called the
pathos formula has little to do with a hermeneutics of affect, but rather constitutes a critical point where
embodiment and memory, stylization and spontaneity converge. My paper explores Warburgs fragmentary
treatment of expressive movement as a mnemonic trace, and situates this work within the context of
contemporaneous research into expression. How did the revaluation of gesture in the 1920s reflect divergent
currents of philosophical and aesthetic thought? Does the biology of human expression lead the way to a
general cultural morphology?
***