Bioaesthetics

"If you’ve ever wondered how we’ve gotten to the point where virtually every cultural theory field now boasts a ‘bio-’  or ‘neuro-’ subfield, Carsten Strathausen’s Bioaesthetics is an excellent guide. Setting the stage with scrupulous readings of historical controversies, Strathausen then incisively critiques the reductionist ‘biologism’ he finds in ‘literary Darwinism,’ ‘biopoetics,’ ‘neuroaestethics,’ and so on, before judiciously tackling Deleuze and affect theory. A powerful and insightful study, Bioaesthetics rewards the reader with clarifying and careful mappings of important contemporary concepts."—John Protevi, author of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences

In recent years, bioaesthetics has used the latest discoveries in evolutionary studies and neuroscience to provide new ways of looking at art and aesthetics. Carsten Strathausen’s remarkable exploration of this emerging field is the first comprehensive account of its ideas, as well as a timely critique of its limitations. 

Strathausen familiarizes readers with the basics of bioaesthetics, grounding them in its philosophical underpinnings while articulating its key components. Importantly, he delves into the longstanding problem of the “two cultures” that separate the arts and the sciences. Seeking to make bioaesthetics a more robust way of thinking, Strathausen then critiques it for failing to account for science’s historical and cultural assumptions. At its worst, he says, biologism reduces artworks to mere automatons that rubber-stamp pre-established scientific truths. 

Written with a sensitive understanding of science’s strengths, and willing to refute its best arguments, Bioaesthetics helps readers separate the sensible from the specious. At a time when humanities departments are shrinking—and when STEM education is on the rise—Bioaesthetics makes vital points about the limitations of science, while lodging a robust defense of the importance of the humanities.

Carsten Strathausen is professor of German and English and Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in Humanities at the University of Missouri. He is editor of A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics (Minnesota, 2009) and author of The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900, as well as translator of Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media by Boris Groys. 

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Biological Nature of What?

Against Consilience 

What Is Bioaesthetics?

Structure and Chapters

1. Human Nature after Kant

Kant and Biology

Preformation and Epigenesis before 1800

Emergent Life (Autopoiesis and Cognition)

Sensus Communis Aestheticus

2. Marxism and Biology

Marx and Darwin

Chance and Necessity, or, Kant Revisited

Science and Politics

A Biologistic Theory of History

On Norm-Circularity and Aleatory Materialism

3. Cultural Evolution

Sociobiology

Evolutionary Psychology (EP)

Social Learning and Sociogenesis

Of Memes and Culturgens 

Technogenesis

4. Evolutionary Aesthetics

Art and Nature

A Survey of the Field

Literary Darwinism Revisited

Cognitive Studies

5. Neuroaesthetics

How to “Read” a Brain Scan

The Cerebral Subject

Consciousness

Neuronal Aesthetics: The Historical View

Neuroaesthetics: The Scientific View

“The Pre-existing Idea within Us”: Zeki’s Platonism

Coda

Deleuze and Affect

A Posthuman Aesthetics?

Notes

Index