Defining spatial experience as preaesthetic implies that not all of the previously presented usages are taken into account. By definition, preaesthetic is understood here as a collection of factors that precede the aesthetic as its prerequisite. This is most clearly shown in the way aesthetic potentialities actualise in aesthetic experiences. The immediate lived experience of space is one of these preaesthetic factors, but there are others as well. This immediacy is part of the nature of spatial experience. Its character is most often unclear or still in an un-organised state. Spatial and aesthetic experiences necessarily overlap to some extent. I have gathered here the main aspects that help to assess why it is useful to ascribe spatial experiences to the realm of the preaesthetic.
1) Spatial features that affect our stance in a given situation necessarily also affect where the attention is drawn. Perception is affected by position, location and navigation in space but also by inter-subjective relations and their changing physical formations in space.
2) The presence of other people is of great influence, depending on many other variables in the situation. Being alone or together with someone or part of a bigger group also affects the experience. Physical distance, closeness, or even intimacy to others creates different kinds of conditions
for aesthetic experiences. This goes both for specific art environments such as galleries or any kind of everyday situation in both public and private spheres of life.
3) These preaesthetic effects are not merely explainable with the traditional notion of a specific aesthetic attitude. It is relevant to take into consid- eration the aesthetic attitude though, since it also assumes something significant taking place before or otherwise affecting the possibility of an aesthetic experience. This temporal precedence of the actual aesthetic experience has been noted in psychological research as well.
The preaesthetic then describes both the very conditions and the initial experience of them needed in order for the aesthetic experience to be even possible. The traditional notion of the sublime is central here, since it already acknowledges the existence of a set of prerequisites for the sublime experience. The sublime is also described in spatial terms, as “great beyond measure”. The variation between the sense of danger and safety, even physical hindrances to perception, among other things, are the kind of experiences that would require further pondering together with the spatial features that go with them.
Pauline von Bonsdorff describes the web-like nature of aesthetic experience in an enlightening way for this specific context:
Perceptual experience is temporal, but it can be analyzed as consisting of different components. Sensation, praxis, imagi- nation or understanding pick out aspects of the whole which are not isolated, but mix in experience. Aesthetic experience, whatever else it is, is a similar mix. In its relation to other experiences and to the world, it might be approached in terms of a rhizome or a complex that is related to other complexes, of which some but not all may be subaltern to it. This kind of thinking can better accommodate relations between the aes- thetic and the nonaesthetic and consider aesthetic phenomena through traits or qualities.350
With this kind of rhizome351 or net model of experience, one can better under- stand the relation between spatial and aesthetic experiences. Instead of just adding another layer to aesthetic experience, spatial experience constitutes the prerequisites for this experience. It regulates to some extent, as one of the factors, the limits of aesthetic experience. The network of qualities, their variations, and the oscillations between them constitute the actual experience. This does not mitigate an emphasis on the aesthetic. On the contrary, it underlines its value by pointing out how it is either suppressed or supported by the changing and changeable conditions of the environment.
Wolfgang Welsch divides the aesthetic understood as sensuous experience into two parts, consisting of the aisthetic and the elevatory element. The elevatory element implies the presence of “a cultivated attitude”, even though Welsch acknowledges that recently, the importance of this kind of attitude has been diminishing concerning the aesthetic understood as sensuous. From the aisthetic part Welsch discerns both the elements of sensation and perception, the former which he names more subjective and evaluative and the latter more objective and cognitive. Sensation is tied to pleasure, whereas perception deals with information, the output of the environment, so to speak. Welsch mentions that depending on the emphasis, either one of these elements, sensation or perception, can become more prominent.352 I would assume, however, that in any situation either of the two elements is already initially more dominant. I disagree with the point that Welsch makes about “objective ascertainment” being within the scope of perception.353 When it comes to the perception of space by different senses, for example, one might have an illusion of being objective about it. Instead, multiple personal and subjective factors affect how this perception eventually turns out.
“A sort of distancing always belongs to the aesthetic,” Welsch emphasises.354 This distance, cognitive or attitude-based, is a recurrent and persistent theme
351 See Deleuze & Guattari 1980. 352 Welsch 1997, 10–11. 353 Welsch 1997, 10. 354 Welsch 1997, 11.
in aesthetic theory. It is as interesting to parallel the “move” from the aisthetic to the elevatory element in experience as the move from the preaesthetic to the level of the aesthetic. Following Welsch’s thought, the question would be, can the preaesthetic be understood as the interplay between the complementary parts of sensation and perception that form the aisthetic semantic level of the aesthetic? The notion of “preaesthetic” describes here the level of experience that precedes and participates in the aesthetic experience. It could also be used to describe qualities and circumstances in our environment which promote aesthetic experiences. For my research, spatial circumstances constitute the most relevant areas of attention. The reaction to these qualities of surroundings and situation could thus be described as the preaesthetic antecedent of an aesthetic experience. By this I refer to emotions such as pleasure, awe, astonishment, hesitation, fear, and even to some extent pain, just to mention a few.
Evolutionary aesthetics reminds us that the ability of a human being to define and interpret space on the sensory level is most probably innate. For other species this might be different but our understanding of their a priori categories is necessarily limited. Preceding this line of thought, Kant among others treats aesthetics as a fundamental epistemological discipline in his transcendental aesthetics. Space and time are understood as an a priori framework for all knowledge. This does not determine how the perception functions in actual situation but emphasises the absolute necessity of space and time as “forms of intuition”.355 I only mention this somewhat superficially here in order to point out the fundamentality of space and time for all knowledge and in that sense, for being in the world and interpreting it. In this sense, perception of space epistemologically precedes the fundamentally aesthetic way of making sense of the world. The Kantian a priori categories are pre-epistemological in this wider sense. Or, as Welsch puts it in his interpretation, they provide us with “a principal protoaesthetic of cognition”. This prevalence of the aesthetic for cognition and for “our representations of reality” is eventually fixed by Nietzsche and points towards the solidifying of “the aesthetic constitution of reality”.356
355 Welsch 1997, 20. 356 Welsch 1997, 20–21.