Susanne K. Langer

How did the philosophy of Henri Bergson look before Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism? This article provides a situated answer to that question by performing a close reading of Susanne K. Langer’s early engagement with Bergson in her monograph Feeling and Form from 1953. Both Bergson and Langer argue against polemical philosophizing. Such polemical modes of doing philosophy distort insight into the thought of the philosophers in question and in philosophical questions per se (such as questions about artistic creation). My reading of Langer’s Bergson is therefore infused with what is nowadays called a new materialist impetus of non-linearity, a non-oppositional philosophizing, and the reading follows the methodology of diffractive reading, a thinking outside fixed and fixating schools of thought. I argue that in spite of Langer’s explicit, i.e., polemical objection to Bergson’s work and to its use by artists, it is a Bergsonism with which Langer’s work is infused.

This essay aims to analyze the conception of a work of art in the thought of Susanne K. Langer. The author offers us a definition of art, grounded on the idea that art is the "creation of symbolic forms of human feeling". This thesis is, in turn, constructed from a robust theory of the symbolic function of the human mind.

A philosophical exploration of engagement in art, elaborating on the work of Susanne K. Langer. Five interconnected essays address the role of art and the artist in society, conceptual and performance art, beauty and the gaze, aestheticism, and the cultural politics of the art-world. It contains extensive discussions of the work of, among others, Andy Warhol, Derek Jarman, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anthony Goicolea, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and draws upon the work of Arthur Danto, Roland Barthes, and Elaine Scarry.

Susanne K Langer deserves a renaissance as she was among the first to combine philosophy of mind, aesthetics and philosophy of life. It is especially her intuition of rhythm and the dynamics of acts that are highly interesting for ongoing debates between philosophy and neurosciences.

In this chapter I work with Volume One of the interdisciplinary trilogy Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling written by the American philosopher Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985). The three Mind volumes – first published in 1967, 1972, and 1982 respectively – use ‘human feeling’ as the common ground from which to integrate knowledge and insights from a great many disciplines and fields of study covering the full academic spectrum. According to the logic of integrative interdisciplinarity, the three hefty volumes, when taken together, form a more comprehensive understanding of ‘mind.’ In this chapter, I zoom in on Langer’s work on the virus as a ‘borderline case,’ in her language, or as a ‘boundary object,’ in the language of American feminist theorist and historian of science and technology Donna Haraway, as a launch pad to expose how, as per the project of this 21st-century post-pandemic book, art has a prefigurative capacity for exposing and understanding forms of sociability and of life. In the chapter, I do not argue that Langer’s philosophy is posthumanist. I do, however, hint at how her unique and innovative work, the starting point of which are the expressions of human feeling as living forms, can only be fully appreciated with the benefit of hindsight. I unpack the ‘politics’ of the virus as well as dynamic patterning per se in a series of close readings of relevant sections from Langer’s Mind I as well as of auxiliary material that gives insight into the development of the trilogy and its philosophical propositions. About viruses and all other borderline cases, Langer ends up saying that they are characterized by an interplay of ‘individuation’ and ‘involvement.’

This pdf contains Chapter 1 'Introducing' from this book, which posits feeling as the basis of an embodied psychology. The book sets out a concept of feeling, describes its responsivity to social and material influences, briefly considers its implications for notions of experience and subjectivity, and for research, then presents three examples from health and clinical psychology to demonstrate its relevance. The book finishes with a discussion of feeling in relation to the wider 'affective turn' in the humanities, social science and psychology.

This paper is a historically informed reflection on the constitutive power of aesthetic experience from the Neo-Kantian perspective of the philosophy of symbolic forms. Arguably, the experience of art expands our view of the world and of ourselves by offering us a new perspective on the world. Such an experience is subjective, in that it focuses on the inner engagement of the subject with an artwork, and, in an even stronger sense, in that it shows subjective experience itself—a virtual event—to be the point of establishment for aesthetic value. This aesthetic experience, however, is not simply self-referential,  but is shared among the beholders. How is this possible, given that aesthetic experience is supposedly subjective? In this paper, I argue that this connection is forged through the aesthetic object. As I also argue, the aesthetic object is an object of a peculiar kind. With the help of Ernst Cassirer’s and Susanne Langer’s accounts of art as a “symbolic formation,” I will show how such an object forms a virtual bond between two subjective poles: the artist and the audience. According to both thinkers (with an explicit reference to Clive Bell’s and Roger Fry’s rather nebulous concept of “significant form”  ), this connection is formed through the dynamic and expressive function of artistic signification. This particular symbolic formation is neither subjective nor objective, but a mediation between the two. I will call this modus, in lieu of a better term, intersubjective.

Do we communicate with pictures? If so, the text asks, what about their complex, dynamic appearances? Are they part of the communication process? By analysing a cover image of the journal Jugend from 1896 and by consulting the research on the logic of pictures (“Eigenlogik”) in Bildwissenschaft, Iconology and Cultural Anthropology these questions shall be persued. The analysis suggests, that instead of consenting the results of epistemological aesthetic research a new understanding of pictures shall be implemented: They can be considered as parts of cultural semiotic processes. That means, it is not the view of something (epistemology) but the view of someone (culture) that is shown by the pictures. - I-

Kommunizieren wir über Bilder? Falls das zutrifft, stellt sich die Frage, ob daran auch deren komplexe dynamische Erscheinungsweise Anteil hat? Über die Analyse eines Titelblatts der Zeitschrift Jugend von 1896 und die Betrachtung der Forschungen zur Eigenlogik von Bildern in Bildwissenschaft, Ikonologie und Kultureller Anthropologie soll diesen Fragen nachgegangen werden. Die Auswertung veranlasst, sich von der klassischen, erkenntnisorientierten, ästhetischen Theorie zu distanzieren und sie als kulturtheoretische, semiotische Theorie neu zu fassen. Die Neuausrichtung wird im Verständnis des Gehalts der Bilder im medialen Transfer greifbar: Statt in einer Ansicht von etwas (Erkenntniswert), so eröffnet sich, liegt er in einer Ansicht über etwas (Meinung/Kulturwert).

Performing politics, practising transdisciplinarity, translating cultures:
The scholarly embodiment of knowledge as a network of living ecosystems

If the scholarly persona like other species “brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems” (Varela, Rosch and Thompson 1991), the practice of transdisciplinarity is an act of performing politics. The increasing “fragmentation of the disciplinary universe” (Nicolescu 2002) demands that we further develop the transdisciplinary organisation of knowledge (Brier 2008+2018). Situated at the interface of cognition and culture, translation (Sonesson 2014) is more than a unilateral act of encoding ready-made knowledge. In order to foster interparadigmatic understanding between languages, cultures and “performative conventions” (Steiner 1989), this paper investigates scholarly organism-environment relations as a dynamic network of cyber-ecosemiotic relations. The “’objective’ embodiment” of meaning in an “operative paradigm” (Kuhn) (Rosa 2012) can be supplemented by Arendt’s theory of (political) personhood (Švec 2020) for discussing analogies with the “performative disclosure” of scholars. Drawing inspiration from Buddhist phenomenology (Lusthaus 2002) I propose to understand the transdisciplinary scholar as the embodiment of a “willingness to understand” (echoing Arendt). The sensorial textures and intertexts of scholarly embodiment imply an “inventory of traces” (Braidotti 1994), a flow of action (Czikszentmihaly 1975) and an “ecology of mind” (Bateson) that reveal “patterns of interaction” rather than isolated entities (Waldron 2002). In keeping with the “interconnectivity of knowledge” (Kaviraj 2005) and the Buddhist “dharma of natural systems” (Macy 1991), let us embrace the cooperative principle of forming open systems (Hayward 1987) and conceptualise knowledge as a “living form” (Langer 1953), including such “interrelated, interdependent centers of activity” (Langer 1957) as the “living ecosystems” of education (Laszlo 2018).

Do have pictures an impact on future? Yes, say theories of embodiment by making perceptual foundations in place of representational arrangements responsible for it. - / - Wirken sich Bildern auf die Zukunft aus? Ja sagen Verkörperungstheorien und machen dafür weniger Repräsentationsmodelle als Wahrnehmungsweisen verantwortlich.

The ability to form „images“ of our experiences with the world (imaging effect) and to adjust our drive and determination in accordance with those images (action effect) is what characterises men, as stipulated by Cassirer and subsequently confirmed by Langer and Krois. Special techniques are required to communicate to others the images of life and how we interpret them. The art as a technique does this masterly by presenting us the views of others on their experiences and wishes through aesthetic experience. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse images not only with respect to their historical aspects based on experiences with the world but to emphasise their power to shape the future by their potential to affect our actions. - / -
Die Fähigkeit „Bilder“ unserer Erfahrungen mit der Welt zu formen (Bildkraft) und unser Streben und Wollen (Tatkraft) nach ihnen auszurichten, das ist es, was den Menschen nach Cassirer – und nachfolgend auch nach Langer und Krois – auszeichnet. Voraussetzung dafür die Bilder des Lebens und das, was wir von ihnen halten, zu objektivieren und Anderen zu kommunizieren, bilden Techniken. Die Kunst als Technik ist darin eine Meisterin, indem sie uns über die ästhetische Erfahrung Anschauungen Anderer von ihren Erfahrungen und Wünschen, lebendig vor Augen zu führen vermag. Bei der Analyse von Bildern gilt es insofern nicht nur deren geschichtsträchtigen, auf Erfahrungen mit der Welt beruhenden Aspekte zu untersuchen, sondern vor allem auch deren zukunftsprägendes und damit unsere Tatkraft ansprechendes Potential.

Despite of the underlying cognitivism in her aesthetics, Susanne Langer never claims that exposure to music makes us more knowledgeable about our emotional life. What she advocates, rather, is that acquaintance with music offers the cognitive benefit of an intuitive grasp of the “form of feeling”. This intuitive grasp, as it were, is not readily translatable into concepts (hence our intellectual disappointment), but stays firmly within the limits of genuinely aesthetic experience.  This is due to an implicit, but fundamental notion of Langer’s aesthetics: immediacy, stressing both the unity of form and content, as well as of experience and meaning in a work of art. In this paper, I attempt to disentangle this complex issue by clarifying the function of “transformation” and “contemplation”, which together form the effect of immediacy in art.
First, the work of art brings formal features and content close together. Thus, the symbol as it is – the material existence of it – is as important as what it gives rise to in the beholder (may this be an “emotion” or some other impression). The artwork does not become superfluous after it effected an aesthetic emotion in us, but remains at the center of consideration. It is rather that we permanently return to it, and constantly find something ‘new’, something previously unfelt ‘in’ it. Artistic symbols reach this effect through a transformation of formal elements into meaning. Second, such a work only has significance if it is taken up in a particular way. Simply speaking, it is fairly easy to miss the point of music by just not listening. It is only through a complete, but lucid immersion into the art symbol – which Langer calls contemplation – that can bring about an aesthetic experience.

Performing politics, practising transdisciplinarity, translating cultures:
The scholarly embodiment of knowledge as a network of living ecosystems

If the scholarly persona like other species “brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems” (Varela, Rosch and Thompson 1991), the practice of transdisciplinarity is an act of performing politics. The increasing “fragmentation of the disciplinary universe” (Nicolescu 2002) demands that we further develop the transdisciplinary organisation of knowledge (Brier 2008+2018). Situated at the interface of cognition and culture, translation (Sonesson 2014) is more than a unilateral act of encoding ready-made knowledge. In order to foster interparadigmatic understanding between languages, cultures and “performative conventions” (Steiner 1989), this paper investigates scholarly organism-environment relations as a dynamic network of cyber-ecosemiotic relations. The “’objective’ embodiment” of meaning in an “operative paradigm” (Kuhn) (Rosa 2012) can be supplemented by Arendt’s theory of (political) personhood (Švec 2020) for discussing analogies with the “performative disclosure” of scholars. Drawing inspiration from Buddhist phenomenology (Lusthaus 2002) I propose to understand the transdisciplinary scholar as the embodiment of a “willingness to understand” (echoing Arendt). The sensorial textures and intertexts of scholarly embodiment imply an “inventory of traces” (Braidotti 1994), a flow of action (Czikszentmihaly 1975) and an “ecology of mind” (Bateson) that reveal “patterns of interaction” rather than isolated entities (Waldron 2002). In keeping with the “interconnectivity of knowledge” (Kaviraj 2005) and the Buddhist “dharma of natural systems” (Macy 1991), let us embrace the cooperative principle of forming open systems (Hayward 1987) and conceptualise knowledge as a “living form” (Langer 1953), including such “interrelated, interdependent centers of activity” (Langer 1957) as the “living ecosystems” of education (Laszlo 2018).

Conclusion
Drawing inspiration from Buddhist phenomenology, in particular the model of the senses (sensory fields, āyatana, cf. e.g. Lettner 2021, “Semiotic roots and Buddhist routes”) as the embodiment of an intentionality to see, hear, smell etc. (cf. Lusthaus 2002), I propose to understand the transdisciplinary scholar as the embodiment of a “willingness to understand” (echoing Arendt). This also ties in nicely with George Steiner’s understanding of responsibility and the enactment of meaning through the immediacy of translation as it manifests itself through understanding in action. In keeping with Jan Mukařovský’s notion of the artefact, which may involve a person’s own body as the artefact offered for interpretation (cf. Sonesson), the transdisciplinary scholar as a human artefact thus seems to become the embodiment of a willingness to enact responsibility and freedom by means of (and transgressing the performative conventions of) speech and action. Just as in Buddhism sensorial qualities are not viewed as properties of material entities (cf. Lusthaus), the material entities of scholarly productions – Arendt’s “things of thought” (as objects of the human world) can be understood as concrete instantiations of the experiential traces and sensorial textures embodied by scholarly organism-environment relations.

Lettner, Alina Therese 2021. “Performing politics, practising transdisciplinarity, translating cultures: The scholarly embodiment of knowledge as a network of living ecosystems.” Slides for a talk held at the International online conference on Performing Politics, Translating Cultures org. by Prof. Mangesh Kulkarni (Dep. of Political Science, Savitribai Phule Pune Univ., India) on 20-21 December 2021, day 1: 20 December 2021, 09:30-10:30 CET/ 14:00-15:00 IST. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/67691046/_Performing_politics_practising_transdisciplinarity_translating_cultures_The_scholarly_embodiment_of_knowledge_as_a_network_of_living_ecosystems_Pune_online_2021_SLIDES_. Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wSdBOgjscc&t=1s (Department of Political Science SPPU, 29 Dec 2021).

My contribution discusses diffractive reading and asks questions about the spatiotemporality of diffractive reading: where and when does diffraction happen in reading processes? Furthering Donna Haraway’s 1992/1997 formulations, Karen Barad practices the reading through one another of texts and/or oeuvres in her 2003 article “Posthumanist Performativity.” Furthermore, Barad is very clear about the distinction between classical and quantum ways of conceptualizing diffraction in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). In my contribution I unravel these two ways of reading diffractive reading by discussing my own diffractive readings, published from 2011 onwards. I attempt to come up with a very precise answer to the spatiotemporality of diffractive reading, which is explored at length in the work I have done on Susanne K. Langer’s 1953 Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. I also discuss how this work is in and of itself diffractive.

This essay places the collage work of Herb Greene in the broader context of the art and architecture of his time, more specifically, in reference to phenomenological theories and their application to architecture. The collages of Greene are in part informed by the interest and faith in the ontological validity of photographs that the field of architecture was applying in its didactic environments, in the early 1960s.

Contrary to the standard Objectivist view of post-Kantian philosophy's two principal lines of development, Linguistic Analysis and Existentialism, there are deep and striking commonalities between Ayn Rand's aesthetic views and those of two prominent writers in the latter traditions: Susanne Langer and Albert Camus. In particular, Langer holds the equivalent of Rand's microcosm view of art (as elaborated upon in Roger Bissell, "Art as Microcosm," Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 5, no. 2), and Camus holds a view indistinguishable in all essential respects from Rand's definition of art as "selective re-creation of reality."

An aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature(s) with culture(s) is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal relationship of sounding. What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current interspecies practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer's theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her "new key" in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art.

XX. yüzyılda ortaya çıkan bilimsel ve teknolojik gelişmelerle birlikte zaman ve uzam algımızda büyük değişimler olmuştur. Gerçek ve sanal ortamlarda teknolojinin neden olduğu hızlanma sıkışmış, klostrofobik bir uzam-zaman deneyimine yol açar ve bu (fiziksel, eleştirel vb.) mesafe algımızı zayıflatarak yetersiz hale getirir. Uzam-zamanın yerini hız-uzam aldığında doğaları gereği statik olan plastik sanatların sorunla karşılaşması kaçınılmazdır. Bunun yanında sanatta hazır-nesne kullanımı da sanat kavramını sonu gelmez bir yeniden tanımlama arayışına neden olur. Nitekim sanat eserinin biçimsel (duyusal/estetik) niteliklerinin büyük öneme sahip olduğu geleneksel temsil kavramı terk edilirken, felsefede geleneksel metafizik ve epistemolojik temalardan ayrılarak dilin yapısına ve insanın söz konusu bu temaları kavrayışındaki rolüne odaklanan post-modern dönüşüm, duygulardan bağımsız, zihin temelli bir sanat kavrayışına ayrıca katkıda bulunur.
Oysa yaratım sürecinde duyguyla bütünleşik olarak gerçekleşen bedensel eylem sayesinde duyumsanabilirlik kazanan biçim, üslup ve anlam, resmin aurasını/atmosferini meydana getirir. Resmin aurasının duyumsamaya açılmasını sağlayan resimsel uzam, söylemsel bir uzam değildir, dolayısıyla söyleme dönüştürülemez. Nitekim yaşamsal deneyiminin, söylemsel formun yetersizliğinden ötürü sanatsal formun yaratımıyla duyusal hâle gelişi bu durumu anlaşılır kılar. Kısacası, resmin gücünü söylemsellikten değil, biçim-üslup-anlamın yaratılış biçiminden aldığını söylemek yerinde olur.
Dil temelli semiyolojinin büyük önem kazandığı postmodern dönemde geleneksel sanattan esinlenen Yeni-Eski Ustalar ise resimsel uzamın oluşturuluş biçiminden kaynaklanan resmin bu gerçek gücünü duygu ve malzemeyi bütünleştiren sanatsal formlar yaratarak ortaya koyarlar. Nitekim Rego’nun resimlerinin başarısı da üslubunun anlatımcı olması ya da resimlerinin arkasındaki hikayelerden ziyade resimsel ögeleri düzenleyiş biçiminden ileri gelir.
With the technological and scientific developments occurring in the 20th century, our perception of time and space has gone through a process of drastic transformation. Acceleration in real and virtual environments brought about by technology causes a compressed, claustrophobic experience of space-time which diminishes our sense of distance (physical, critical and so on.) rendering its perception insufficient. When space-time is replaced by speed-time, it is inevitable for plastic arts, which are static by nature, to run into problems. In addition, the use of the ready-made in art leads to an incessant quest to re-define the concept of art. Thus, the traditional notion of representation where the formal (sensuous/aesthetic) qualities of the work of art are of great importance, is abandoned while the postmodern linguistic turn in philosophy further contributes to a conception of art that is intellect based, independent of feeling and emotion.
However; form, content and style, all becoming sensuous through the activity of the body imbued with feeling, create the aura/atmosphere of the painting. The pictorial space which presents the aura of the painting to the sense is not a discursive one, and thus cannot be translated into the discursive form. Thus, that vital experience becomes sensuous through the creation of artistic form because the discursive form is insufficient makes this clear. In short, it can well be said that the painting acquires its power through not discourse but the way form-content-style is created.
In postmodern period in which language based semiotics acquired paramount importance, the New-Old Masters influenced by traditional art clearly demonstrate this power of painting which comes from the way the pictorial space is constituted by creating artistic forms that unify feeling and the material. Thus, the success of Rego’s paintings has to do with the way she organizes the pictorial elements in her paintings rather than with her narrative style or the stories behind the paintings.

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RESUMO Este artigo tem como objetivo entender em que termos a música, para Susanne Langer, é inter-pretada à luz de uma Filosofia das Formas Simbólicas. Esta expressão, por sua vez, é a que de-signa o programa teórico de seu mestre, Ernst Cassirer. A teoria da arte que Langer propõe, em Filosofia em nova chave e em Sentimento e Forma, se pretende uma continuidade da crítica da cultura empreendida por Cassirer, a qual se fundamenta na ideia de que, uma vez demonstrada a necessidade do simbolismo (função psicológica sem a qual não há cultura), cabe à filosofia compreender e acompanhar o desenvolvimento histórico dos modos de manifestação do Espírito. A música, enquanto a mais abstrata das artes, é um modo particular de simbolismo cujo amadurecimento de sua forma interna desemboca no que chamamos hoje de música tonal. O tonalismo é o estágio em que a música atinge sua maior idade justamente por ter se mostrado capaz de operar a partir de leis próprias, sendo assim, o resultado de um longo pro-cesso de constituição da forma musical. Palavras-chave: Susanne Langer. Música. Simbolismo. Forma. ABSTRACT This article aims to understand in terms of music, for Susanne Langer, interpreted in the light of a Symbolic Forms Philosophy. This expression, in turn, is a project or theoretical program of its master, Ernst Cassirer. A theory of art that Langer proposes in Philosophy in the New Key and in Feeling and Form is thought to be a continuity of Cassirer's critique of culture, an idea based on the conception that once the need for symbolism has been demonstrated (function without

RESUMO: O presente artigo tem o objetivo de aprofundar o debate sobre a noção de experiência musical, explicitando os aspectos epistemológicos de uma interpretação filosófica a qual chamamos de simbólico-transcendental. Trata-se do projeto teórico iniciado por Ernst Cassirer, e retomado por Susanne Langer, o qual defende que as manifestações da Cultura são formas simbólicas particulares, quais sejam: conhecimento, linguagem, mito, religião e arte, sendo a partir destas que é possível ao espírito humano significar o real de modo objetivo. A capacidade de simbolizar, por sua vez, constitui-se como resultado de uma função operativa, transcendental e válida a priori, a qual é o aspecto fundante que marca a diferença entre o homens e animais, por exemplo. Para que a experiência musical possa ser entendida nos termos da interpretação simbólico-transcendental que construiremos aqui, realizaremos um percurso argumentativo cujo três momentos centrais são: i) a compreensão da arte como uma forma simbólica particular, ii) a distinção entre arte e linguagem enquanto formas simbólicas e como condição necessária para a teoria da arte de Susanne Langer e iii) os aspectos constitutivos da experiência musical (significação, produção e recepção). ABSTRACT: The present article has the objective of deepening the debate about the notion of musical experience, explaining the epistemological aspects of a philosophical interpretation that we call symbolic-transcendental. It is the theoretical project initiated by Ernst Cassirer, and taken up by Susanne Langer, who argues that the manifestations of Culture are particular symbolic forms, namely: knowledge, language, myth, religion and art, from which it is possible to the human spirit to mean the real in an objective way. The capacity to symbolize, in turn, is constituted as a result of an operative function, transcendental and valid a priori, which is the foundational aspect that marks the difference between men and animals, for example. In order for the musical experience to be understood in terms of the symbolic-transcendental interpretation that we will construct here, we will undertake an argumentative course whose three central moments are: i) the understanding of art as a particular symbolic form, ii) the distinction between art and language as symbolic forms and as a necessary condition for the theory of art of Susanne Langer and iii) the constitutive aspects of musical experience (signification, production and reception).

Moro, N. (2007). Il «cerchio labirintico dell’intelligibile»: Sentimento e forma nella teoria del simbolo di Susanne K. Langer [The “Labirintic Circle of the Intelligible”: Feeling and Form in Susanne K. Langer’s Symbol Theory]. ACME, 60(1), 141–167.
URL http://www.ledonline.it/acme/allegati/Acme-07-I-05-Moro.pdf.
ISSN 0001–494X.

In this paper, I highlight several aspects and changes in Langer’s understanding of ‘symbol’: first of all, the development from a logico-linguistic matrix―which emphasises the semantic reference and isolates the abstract structure of syntax―towards an aesthetical interpretation where semantics, syntax and the perceptual dimension are inseparable. Semantics, syntax and perception thus acquire anthropological relevance as non-linguistic and non-conventionalist ways of reworking experience. Secondly, I discuss theoretical reasons and some difficulties of the aforementioned widened understanding of symbols: I argue that it is not always fruitful to combine “discursive” and “presentational” symbolism, theories of expression and perception, language and feeling, perception and emotion. As a final result, the incomplete and virtual character of symbols in art works comes to be identified as the inexhaustible form of feeling and human experience as a whole.