Aesthetics After Finitude

Project and problem

Aesthetics After Finitude is an anthology and research project edited by Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson and Amy Ireland, developed from a University of New South Wales network and its February 2015 conference. Its governing problem is whether there can be “an aesthetics without the subject” that historically theorized, practised and legitimated it (Aesthetics After Finitude, p. 7). The editors present the question as a problem to be made more difficult, not a solved doctrine.

The title refigures Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude. Meillassoux's attack on correlationism supplies the immediate philosophical provocation: if thought is not confined to the relation between human experience and world, aesthetics can no longer take phenomenal response as its unquestioned ground (Aesthetics After Finitude, pp. 10–12). The anthology transfers that pressure into artistic production while resisting philosophy's tendency to colonize art by treating it as secondary evidence.

Problems of scale and perception

The introduction joins three apparently separate domains—neuroscience, climate change and algorithmic finance—through a mismatch of scale. Neural imaging unsettles the self that aesthetic experience presupposes; climatic processes evade local experience; financial systems operate too quickly and complexly for perceptual traction (Aesthetics After Finitude, pp. 8–9). An aesthetics after finitude must produce new perceptual and conceptual means of grappling with realities that do not become less real when no subject can experience them as a whole.

The editors describe art as an open-ended “labour of abstraction” in which thought and matter reciprocally destabilize one another. Neither subjective intention nor objective resistance alone explains the trajectory of a work; the practice is synthetic, exploratory and continuous with political, scientific and cultural transformation (Aesthetics After Finitude, p. 16). This places the anthology beside abstract culture while withholding a single formal prescription.

CCRU inheritance

The anthology explicitly routes its investment in science fiction, horror, pulp and non-academic writing through the CCRU. It names Sadie Plant's nonlinear cyberfeminism and Nick Land's experimental philosophy as precedents for collapsing theory into practice and for attempting contact with the outside by means other than legitimate philosophical expression (Aesthetics After Finitude, pp. 16–18).

This inheritance is plural rather than doctrinal. Ireland's chapter constructs a receiver for signals from outside; other contributions address generic literature, Mallarmé, Tiamat, hyperstition, nuclear listening, accelerationism and mythotechnesis (Aesthetics After Finitude, pp. 19–20). The volume ends by stating that it has “no such allegiance” to any one camp of new realism or new materialism (Aesthetics After Finitude, p. 20). Its unity lies in the pressure it applies to the human-centered aesthetic apparatus, not in a shared metaphysics.

Relation to xenoaesthetics

Ireland's xenoaesthetics is one answer internal to the larger project. Where the anthology holds open many ways of thinking art beyond finitude, xenoaesthetics recodes the human perceiver as a noisy receiver and asks how representation looks from the side of the nonhuman signal. The distinction matters: Aesthetics After Finitude is the heterogeneous platform; xenoaesthetics is one construction made upon it.