Under the Weather: Atmospherics, Aesthetics, and Thermic Subjects

In episode two, Susan Mathews speaks to Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024) who works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception. 

Re-defining aesthetics to mean not just beauty but perception, Mădălina spoke of weather not just as a frontal experience, but our immersion in the atmosphere, the very medium of our life and existence as it permeates our porous bodies and sensitivities. We experience it not as thinking subjects, but as living beings. While it is, in principle, a commons that is available to all, its perception and access is socially, culturally, politically conditioned. Aesthetic perception converges with scientific knowledge within the ethical consideration—we simply cannot enjoy a natural catastrophe. There is a communication of vessels between our moral and our aesthetic being.

She spoke of how imagination throws us into the past, but we can also project ourselves into the future. And this is what at least some environmentally committed artists do, as they imagine the earth after the collapse of civilization, a paradoxical posthumous imagination. 

Mădălina shared her long fascination with what were philosophically known as the ‘lower senses’, including olfaction, and the need to go beyond Western philosophical frameworks. Smells are extremely evocative. The sense of temperature, usually subsumed in tactility which is a vast spectrum of perception in itself, deserves a separate theory. While sight has just two sensory organs, with temperature, we have the whole body, its surface and its depths. And the thermic ‘aura’ of every living being extends beyond the boundary of the thermic subject. We then spoke of Herman Schmitz’s concept of the body’s tendencies to narrow and to expand, the epicritic and the protopathic, in breathing, in response to pain. 

Mădălina brought to focus the tendency to subordinate the richness of perception of our everyday life and of art to a merely ocular experience. But in reality, we experience, say architecture, not merely as visual but also thermic, clothing also as tactile, perfumes not merely as olfactory but evoking a feeling, say of refreshment. And this goes deeper with performing arts such as dance where, as spectators, the tendency to focus on the visuals, leads to a deficit of empathy and a disregard for other aspects of the dancer’s experience such as heat and pain. In visual arts and fine arts, thermic considerations could destroy the art itself, or be used by the artist to form or deform materials. As Mădălina said, we need to expand our traditional aesthetic concepts to account for this richness of experience. 

Join us with your thermic body and enjoy the fleecy, cloudy edges of our conversation. This is part one of the conversation. Listen to part two in episode three to hear our conversation about tornadoes, traces and landscapes. 

This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance. 

More about the guest:

Mădălina Diaconu studied Philosophy (PhD, PhD) and Theology (MA) in Bucharest and Vienna. She teaches as Dozentin at the Department of Philosophy and as lecturer at the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Vienna. She is member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Aesthetics, Studia Phaenomenologica and polylog, a magazine about intercultural philosophy. She authored eleven monographs and (co)edited several books on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, the ontology of art, the phenomenology of the senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, urban sensescapes, environmental ethics, animality, atmosphere, and eco-phenomenology. Her latest book is Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury 2024). You can read more about her work here.