Nonhuman Aesthetics: Register, Mode, and Criterion

Abstract

Nonhuman aesthetics is often pursued either by extending human aesthetic parameters to more-than-human domains or by dissolving the aesthetic into generalized relationality. This article proposes an account that keeps “aesthetic” discriminable without grounding it in taste, judgment, or human legibility. It first reframes the aesthetic register as aesthesis: an impersonal field in which encounters become articulate through differential responsiveness. It then distinguishes stabilized and adaptive operativity as modes of causal conduct: whether registered differences are absorbed into an established conduit or modify how the encounter continues. Openness and closure are introduced as criteria of the encounter’s formal-consequential horizon: whether consequences remain confined to an available repertoire or reconfigure what can follow. Nonhuman aesthetic performance occurs independently of human involvement, and arises when adaptive mode and open criterion coincide. This conjunction allows the same discrete encounter to shift between aesthetic and non-aesthetic performances without being classified once and for all. Finally, the article elaborates the implications of nonhuman aesthetics for cultural studies. It argues for a posthumanist cultural studies oriented not toward human access to nonhuman events, but toward the larger situated objects in which occurrence and access, human and nonhuman registrations, and aesthetic and non-aesthetic performances are internally articulated.