Anticipatory aesthetics

new identities and future senses

Marcus Bussey

pp. 49-70

in: John Clammer, Ananta K. Giri (eds), The aesthetics of development, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstrakt

Anticipatory aesthetics is offered as a critical process of engagement, via a range of futures senses, with conditions that constrain neohumanist possibilities of the human and non-human actors resident to our planet. Its approach offers us an adventure into possibility via a reflection on aspects of the human "everyday" we take for granted. We navigate the world sensorially both as physical and cultural beings. Our physical five senses are well-known to us even though their operation is still in many ways a mystery; our cultural senses orient us in time and space and are even less understood. In this chapter, these cultural senses are described as offering us a futures orientation with an anticipatory edge. The case is made that the aesthetic arranges perception around relationship with the past, the present and the future, and that these can be harnessed to understand and enact richer identities for the future.