Writing in English

in Somaesthetics and Design Culture, ed. Richard Shusterman and Balint Veres, Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2023, 23-49.

This paper returns to a foundational text in the history of Western philosophy, Plato's Timaeus, and explores the ways in which this text establishes our thinking about design and creation - going as far as recent examples such as Dieter Rams' famous design principles. The paper shows how Platonic thoughts on the essence of design and creation fit into the general ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions of philosophy, thus possessing a much wider scope than one might suspect. If we can talk about Platonic 'design theory', however, we can only reveal it as a latent theory whose latency stems from two factors: one is the chorology (a media theory avant la lettre) explicated in Timaeus, and the other is Eros, which involves aspects of desire, fertility, and corporeality. The paper shows that in a less mentalistic context a different design thinking could have emerged from the Platonic heritage, for which craft knowledge and fertility are not isolated from each other but necessarily closely related entities. The chapter concludes with the insight that by rethinking the concepts (and practices) of khôra, fertility, childbirth, and care with a Meliorist purpose, Platonic-based Western design theory could become a proponent of a more satisfying design culture.

in DISEGNO 2024/1, 4-9.

https://doi.org/10.21096/disegno_2024_1vb

in The Journal of Somaesthetics Vol. 8, no. 2, (2022), 78-87.

Aural architecture might seem at the first sight as some oddity, a deliberately unique niche genre, and an out-of-the-ordinary hue on the wide spectrum of built environments. In contrast, the essay overviews some of the most important aspects that foster a broader conceptualization of architecture conceived as substantially interlinked with the sonic realm. In comparison with the established discourse on soundscape, this writing does not start from fieldworks and empirical-based terms with the goals of a general theorization but works the other way around: it arrives at the notion of soundscape in its conclusion by pointing out the unsatisfying nature of any conception of architecture that misses the aural aspects of architectural space, hence excluding a crucial somaesthetic dimension both from theoretical discourse and designer practice.

in Pragmatism Today 2019/2, 100-109.

There is a long tradition to see museums and similar cultural displays as sites of knowing and self-education; and also as tools of political and ideological tuition, indoctrination indeed. The critical approach of new museology in the late 20th century launched a systematic revision of the social and epistemological role museums play in contemporary culture. New museology highly increased, or at least required, the self-reflexivity of cultural displays, however, an increase in reflexivity does not involve, in a self-evident way, an increase of intensified experience, which became crucial to our contemporary life, especially in the perspective of somaesthetics. Thus, more recent museological and curatorial approaches, oriented according to the corporeal turn in philosophy and social sciences, emphasize the effects and consequences of the sensorial range in use within cultural displays. The historically developed and therefore questionable social consctructions, political status quos and epistemological presuppositions underlying museum displays are encoded already at the level of the sensorial modalities. Hence, a new critique of the cultural displays and representations will consider the sensorial spectrum available and targeted. The museum was once considered a church, later a school, then a stage. Today, in accordance with somaesthetics, cultural displays can be conceived as physical sites of intersubjectivity and models of human environment relationship, in other words: social and ecological agoras. Mentalistic and educational tactics (like identity politics, national heritage issues, intercultural relations, etc.) are not passé at all, but the somatic dimensions of human existence need to be revealed through tactile tactics in the most important cultural institutions.

in Aesthetic Experience and Somaesthetics, edited by Richard Shusterman, Boston: Brill, 2018, 87-100.

Linked to the current discourse on rethinking aesthetics, this chapter argues that the revision of the traditional “modern system of the arts” (Kristeller) is inevitable for at least two reasons. First, because that system has to face the increasing dynamics of its enlargement through new phenomena that are considered to have artistic value; and secondly, because of the eruptions of old anomalies and disproportions that characterize the traditional conception of the arts. It is particularly important to record the performative and somatic deficits present in the modern arts through attempted adaptation to the ideal model of literature. My thesis is that the interpretation of the experiential dimensions of architecture (including its multisensory nature) plays a crucial role in repositioning and interrelating the heritage of the five major art forms and recent artistic practices. What’s more, it makes graspable those aesthetic experiences as well that are not classified under the heading of art. All this could be done without parting with systematic thinking in aesthetics. My proposal is that traditional aesthetic thinking founded on specific ideas about literature and then expanded to all the other arts, has to be replaced with another possible aesthetics inspired by the experience of architecture. Thereby the rights of the somatic dimension, which is a decisive factor of the aesthetic experience in its fullness, could become reinstated. I believe the art of architecture provides a more appropriate paradigm for the other arts and for the aesthetic phenomena in general. We can thus offer a relevant alternative to our Hegelian legacy.