Public defence of doctoral thesis with Cecilia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Aesthetics

Cecilia Sá Cavalcante Schuback defends her thesis ”Emerging Forms: Studies in Kant, Palatnik and Ligeti”.

Subject: Aesthetics
Research area: Critical and Cultural Theory
External reviewer: Howard Caygill, Professor of Philosophy, Aesthetics and Visual Culture at the Institute for Doctoral Research in the Visual Arts
Language: English

This thesis investigates how form emerges from movement in aesthetic expressions. It examines the uncertainty and dynamism of movement creating form in different aesthetic expressions by considering the phenomenon of form while it is happening, that is, as a forming. In order to approach form in its movement, the dissertation engages with the problem of how we apprehend form in its own emergence. For this, the present study looks at different aesthetic expressions of such movement in the spheres of reflection, the plastic and the sonorous. It is about the question of how one can apprehend a dynamic of formation in its very movement.

The first chapter engages with dimensions of reflection, analyzing how formative movement challenges conventional notions of causality and teleology in Kant’s aesthetics. By revisiting the second part of the ”Critique of Judgment”, it argues that Kant’s treatment of teleological judgment can be read as a theory of formation that extends beyond the biological and organic, encompassing reflexive and conceptual processes. This chapter also aims to show that Kant puts in play a type of thinking that surprisingly is not properly teleological, but a thought-process structured in terms of analogy. The second chapter turns to the plastic expression of the forming movement, focusing on non-object-oriented forms found in kinetic art, where the artwork itself seeks to embody the process of formation. Special attention is given to the work of Brazilian artist Abraham Palatnik, whose practice was shaped by Gestalt theory and phenomenology. In the third chapter, the movement of form is discussed in light of the musical and theoretical works by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti on the sonorous apprehension of the movement of form in terms of transformation. Here, the focus is on sound as a medium of transformation, exploring how Ligeti’s work renders audible the very movement of form and attempts to make listening sound.

Key words: form – forming – movement – emergence - aesthetic expression - reflective, plastic and sonorous expressions – Immanuel Kant – reflection – analogy - teleological judgment - Gestalt theory – phenomenology - kinetic art - Abraham Palatnik - György Ligeti – sound – listening – transformation.