Abstract
Speculative realism explores the substance of objects existing outside of humans’ subjective frame of thought. Under its radiation, Western aesthetics in the last five years has developed a new trend of speculative aesthetics composed of various branches, stimulating a shift in existing art paradigms. However, inside this trend, two camps of aesthetic discussions, with speculative materialism and object-oriented ontology as their respective starting points, are in great division. This article attempts to work through and clarify the tension as well as interaction among the various branches of speculative aesthetics, by mainly focusing on how speculative aesthetics talks about art outside of humans’ subjective frame of thought—that is, how it solves the subject-object relationship of art in a brand-new way. This article finds its foothold in N. Katherine Hayles’s object-oriented inquiry, which complements and shows advantage against the existing speculative aesthetic modes, and takes the artistic creation of Michelangelo Antonioni and Samuel Beckett as examples. By mapping out the landscape of speculative aesthetics and by interpreting Hayles’s aesthetic paradigm, this paper intends to demonstrate that speculative aesthetics, unlike speculative realism, does not remove or expel humans’ mediating roles; rather, it tries to transcend anthropocentrism and truly display the equal and symbiotic subject-object relationship among artists, artwork, and the viewers.
First Page
68
Last Page
78
Recommended Citation
Chen, Chang. 2021. "Speculative Aesthetics and Subject-Object Relation: Michelangelo Antonioni and Samuel Beckett as Examples." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 41, (5): pp.68-78. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol41/iss5/21
