Towards Aesthetic Mindfulness

The Language, Poesis, and Buddhist Experiments with the Possible Seminar concerned what is made possible in language variously used. Based on our conversations, I offer a constructive account of aesthetic experience. Engagements with works of art, I argue, are best understood as giving rise to aesthetic events: structured experiential episodes that occur under conditions of sustained aesthetic attention. Such aesthetic events are not reducible to interpretations of artworks or to semantic relations between texts and readers, being instead concrete experiential occurrences whose content, affective valence, and intelligibility are partly scaffolded by works of art and by broader aesthetic practices and institutions. We discussed how aesthetic events may be fruitfully compared to virtual experiential episodes, akin to events occurring in dreamscapes—which may call for a variety of aesthetic mindfulness on our part: a micro-phenomenology of aesthetic events through which artworks help us to contour and experiment with the possible.