Image, Art and Virtuality

Roberto Diodato

Image, Art and Virtuality

Towards an Aesthetics of Relation
Roberto Diodato
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Milan, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-67783-1 ISBN 978-3-030-67784-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67784-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
Originally published in Italian in 2020 by Editrice Morcelliana srl with the title “Immagine, arte, virtualità:
Per un’estetica della relazione”. Translation: Tessa Marzotto Caotorta. The rights for the Italian language
version of the text are owned by Morcelliana, Brescia, 2020. The image on the cover is taken by a video
installation of STUDIO AZZURRO PRODUZIONI s.r.l., MILANO, info@studioazzurro.com, and used
with permission of STUDIO AZZURRO.
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To Paolo Rosa
unforgettable friend
Preface

The title lays emphasis on some key concepts in the essay as well as on its underlying
intention, as conveyed by the subheading. In this regard, it is worth anticipating, in
the interest of the versed reader, that the expression “towards an aesthetics of rela-
tion” is neither meant to point to an aesthetics of “relational properties”—a path,
this latter, variedly and efficaciously traced by most of contemporary endeavors in
aesthetics—nor to an “aisthetics” of semi-things and atmospheres. It is also not an
account of aesthetic experience as experience with—an interesting and recently effi-
caciously articulated path. The genitive in “aesthetics of relation” is both subjective
and objective. It therefore outlines a simultaneously ontological and epistemological
field. The aesthetic logos, that is to say, the logos which is aesthetic, hence a body as
much as the body is logos, implies the relation as such, which is what makes what
we call aesthetics possible, that is to say, to complete the circle, the exercising of
aesthetic logos.
By way of introduction, I would like to present a few quotations from great
twentieth-century works, because it is around the issues they raise that I have
articulated my proposal. Here are the fragments in chronological order:
Cassirer, Substance, and Function: ‘The category of relation especially is forced
into a dependent and subordinate position by this fundamental metaphysical doctrine
of Aristotle. Relation is not independent of the concept of real being; it can only
add supplementary and external modifications to the latter, such as do not affect its
real “nature.”’1 I will not follow Cassirer’s retrieval of Kantian categories within
a relational logic. He notably attempted to bring order to chaos by means of order
functions within a progressive whole, which are, after all, serial matrixes. Neverthe-
less, I believe that—although the issue of the relation with Aristotle’s texts is very
complex and reaches well beyond the limits of this work—the point made by the
quotation is of the highest importance and deserves to be dealt with once more.
Wittgenstein, Tractatus: ‘5.621 The world and life are one. 5.63 I am my world
(the microcosm). 5.631 The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. If
I wrote a book “The world as I found it,” I should also have therein to report on
my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then

1 Cassirer, E. 1923. Substance and Function, Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, p. 8.
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would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important

sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be
made.’2 These statements, in my opinion, clarify the sense of our relation with the
world not only beyond all kinds of naturalization and empiricist reduction, but also
beyond all contrasting understanding of realism and idealism—how come they do
not talk about solipsism “revealing itself”? Here we come, I believe, to the point of
having said everything that can be said before a metaphysical account. At any rate,
Wittgenstein introduces a sense of the word “I” that I share and that I will try to put
center stage.
Benjamin, Kaiserpanorama: ‘When it rained, there was no pausing out front to
survey the list of fifty pictures. I went inside and found in fjords and under coconut
palms the same light that illuminated my desk in the evening when I did my school-
work. It may have been a defect in the lighting system that suddenly caused the
landscape to lose its color. But there it lay, quite silent under its ashen sky. It was
as though I could have heard even wind and church bells if only I had been more
attentive.’3 This is the “Kaiser-Panorama” according to Benjamin’s description in
Berlin Childhood; a matter, so to speak, or structure—the one visited by Benjamin
was made out of wood, circular and equipped with stereoscopes in which images
followed one another. The absence of sound and the absence of movement within
the images used to trigger the unusual feeling of contemplative draw-in described
by Benjamin; different from the effect of cinema, these images left unprocessed by
imagination trigger a peculiar form of participation. Due to its both mimetic and
phantasmagoric power, notwithstanding their extreme respective differences, this
form of participation seems to me not very different from what is enabled by the
virtual body-images.
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology: ‘Once there was a time when
the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful was called technē. […] What, then,
was art—perhaps only for that brief but magnificent time? Why did art bear the
modest name technē? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and hither, and
therefore belonged within poiēsis.’4 As is well known, Heidegger prompts us to
think of technology as a destiny as well as to internally understand the sense of the
machine from the viewpoint of the essence of technology—from the viewpoint of the
“bottom,” as Heidegger would say. In the end, all things considered, what emerges
as an indication is the belonging together of and essential affinity between technē
and poiēsis as modes of bringing forth. This belonging together is what art somehow
historicizes. This very setting-into-work concerns the truth of being; this is what
becomes increasingly clear and what this book, certainly just a small attempt, would
like to deal with.

2 Wittgenstein,L. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translation by C.K. Ogden (and F.P.

Ramsey), London: Kegan Paul.
3 Benjamin, W. 2006. Berlin Childhood around 1900, translation by H. Eiland, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, p. 44.

4 Heidegger, M. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by W.

Lovitt, New York/London: Garland Publishing, p. 26.

Preface ix

In short: in the beginning was the relation. Moving from the notion of system, and
through the scrutiny of few peculiar entities, such as, for instance, images, persons,
works of art, and virtual bodies, I present to the reader an inquiry on relation as
constitutive. The ideal, and simultaneously also concrete and historical, model for
the said notion of relation is the one, stemming from theological speculation, of
“subsistent relation.” This becomes especially clear by means of an inquiry into
virtuality and its ontology as resistant to commonly available categories. Existing
only thanks to interactivity, virtual bodies are indeed an ontological hybrid; the plexus
of body and image, object and event, internal and external, artificial and living;
existing only thanks to interactivity, they make an exemplary case for the primary
nature of the category of relation, especially when appearing within the context of
artistic operations opening new horizons of aesthetic and ethical potential.
I am very grateful to Studio Azzurro for allowing me to use an image taken from
their Video installation “In principio (e poi)” (transl. At the beginning (and then)) for
the cover design. You can find more about this installation at https://www.studioazz
urro.com/opere/in-principio-e-poi-2/.

Milan, Italy Roberto Diodato

Note to the Reader

This essay is the second edition of the book Relazione e virtualità. Un esercizio del
logos estetico (Relation and Virtuality. Exercising Aesthetic Thinking), published
in Italian in 2013. The text has been expanded by a third. I would like to thank the
Publisher for welcoming this operation.

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Contents

1 System and Relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 The Idea of System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 From the Object to the System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.3 System and Substance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.4 Individuation Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.5 Relation and Virtuality: First Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2 Relational Entities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.1 The Personhood-Abyss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.2 Relational Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.3 The Relation in Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.4 Image Relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3 Image, Art, Virtuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.1 Aesthetic Experience and Virtuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.2 Art and Virtuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.3 Relational Spatialities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.4 The Vital Relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

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About the Author

Roberto Diodato is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the Università Cattolica del

Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy, and at the Faculty of Theology of the University of
Lugano, Switzerland. Interested in entangling the relationship between aesthetics
and ontology, he has been studying the work of modern philosophers as well as
some contemporary philosophical currents. His research also covered the relationship
between aesthetics and cybertechnology. He is the author of several Italian books
such as Sub specie aeternitatis. Luoghi dell’ontologia spinoziana (Mimesis, Milan,
2012), Logos estetico (Morcelliana, Brescia, 2012), and Decostruzionismo (Editrice
Bibliografica, Milan, 2016), and co-editor with A. Somani of the Italian book Estetica
dei media e della comunicazione (Il Mulino, Bologna, 2011). He is also the author
of Aesthetics of the Virtual (State University of New York Press, Albany, 2012), The
Sensible Invisible—Itineraries in Aesthetic Ontology (Mimesis International, 2016),
and of Vermeer, Góngora, Spinoza: L’esthétique comme science intuitive (Éditions
Mimésis, Paris, 2016).

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