Intentional Suns

A return to the basics, to the core principles of aesthetic experience: what is art (the artwork) and how can it be distinguished from other phenomena; what is beauty when considered in relation to the world, its essence; and while we’re at it, let’s keep it local, just as the site of Živa Božičnik Rebec’s fictioning, the Black Widow building (built between 1963 and 1982 as the office building for the Slovenian newspaper Delo, known for its dark steel façade and amber reflective windows).^[1] To approach Pleroma (2025), one must build from the ground up: start at the bottom and work their way up, one floor at a time, layer by layer of perception, meaning, and eventually impact.

Aesthetics in the Slovene context have had their share of hurdles, points of development and arrest. To this day, the work by the philosopher France Veber entitled Aesthetics: The Psychological and Normative Foundations of Aesthetic Reason,^[2] first published in 1925, is still considered and routinely cited by scholars as the major and the most ambitious, systemic philosophical undertaking of aesthetics in Slovenia—a full, programmatic aesthetics treating psychological, descriptive, normative, and teleological aspects of aesthetic experience and art. When it comes to blasting one’s retinas, Veber writes:

“When staring into the glaring sun, one can experience, simultaneously, the hedonic and the aesthetic feeling, in which the former tends to be negative and the latter positive: the experience of gazing into glaring rays themselves is unpleasant, while the majestic sunlight is beautiful.”^[3]

For Veber and the phenomenologist aesthetes coming after him drawing from his work, the aesthetic experience is bundled in a multilayered intentionality—i.e. the relations that constitute the core dynamics of perception. Every distinct phenomenal act has its corresponding object, “every thought is in essence a thought about something”, so to say. The more complex the intentional act, the more multilayered. The experience of art, therefore, according to Veber, does not include only an aesthetic feeling along with its corresponding object but is accompanied by other more or less conditional intentionalities. The most apparent or intuitive is the sensorial or imaginary representation, whose object, the object that we see or imagine, serves as the base for aesthetic experience.^[4] It can also include a noetic act (the experience thought), an act of striving (the experience of intent),^[5] or a parallel act of feeling—for instance, the aesthetic feeling (the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the represented object) being accompanied by a hedonic feeling (the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the representation itself, of the mere sight or picturing of the object^[6] (one referring to the work of art, the other solely to the inner experience)), and so on.

Veber also distinguishes between what he calls “authentic” and “inauthentic” experience (between what is experienced first-hand—as in immediate, sensory perception—and what is experienced through the act of recollection or fantasy)^[7] and furthermore between authentic experience that is “correct” or “incorrect” (between what he considers to be autonomous or self-generating experience and heteronomous experience, which is authentic experience defined by an outside determining factor or a particularity of the experiencing subject, depicting or relating to something that does not in fact exist, and is in that regard, hallucinatory).^[8] As noted by Dušan Pirjevec in his book The Aesthetic Thought of France Veber,^[9] one would think that such a distinction might suggest that the criterion for validity or accuracy of any aesthetic experience is then placed solely within the experiencing subject.^[10] That the limits or weaknesses of the experiencing subject’s perceptual or cognitive capacities are the sole determining factor whether the aesthetic experience could be considered one way or the other. And that the possibility of a correct, authentic aesthetic experience is therefore conditioned by the feasibility of a pure subject (a subject unburdened by these vulnerabilities). Yet such is not the case. Instead of arguing for a transcendental interiority of a pure subject, Veber (as noted by Pirjevec) considers the subject irrecoverably tied to its “particularities“ and places the source of “correct” authentic experiences solely within the object, in its inherent “factuality”.^[11]

This begs the question of what is the object when considering the validity of aesthetic experiences. As mentioned before, these experiences are multilayered intentionalities, meaning that they are based on parallel intentional relations or acts of varying degree of subordination, which means that their objects are multifaceted. Is the object then the artwork, its every gesture, texture, and other physical details? Or is it the idea of the artwork, its very own representation? (Wouldn’t this bring us back into the domain of the subject tainted by its “particularities”?) Is it the 3D-printed objects? Its placement in the Black Widow along with a tightly knit web of references (its referentiality)? Or is it in the speculative wager on the object’s inscribed efficacy within the immediate and broader environments it populates? For Veber, the answer is clear: both the physical object as well as its ideated representation can serve as the psychological foundation for aesthetic experience, but since the validity of the latter lies in its object (its factuality, which representation by its nature does not guarantee), one must seek the object in question somewhere else.

Where this somewhere could be is not clear. As Pirjevec notes, Veber does not offer a detailed account of the necessary facticity and the nature of the object that could possess it.^[12] Since the psychological foundation of aesthetic experience can be non-factual yet still serve as the basis for the object of valid aesthetic experience, the necessary factuality lies in a certain distancing from the object (reaching a certain aesthetic disposition or attunement) in the form of a necessary omission. Pirjevec explains this gesture by turning to the work of Roman Ingarden, more precisely to his essay on aesthetic experience,^[13] where Ingarden explains the latter as a necessary breaking with the normal course of experiencing (along with its practical attunement or disposition), incorporating it only as a weakened echo of past experiences that shape the fundamental disposition of the experiencing subject.^[14] However, while such a description accounts for the necessary aesthetic attunement, it does not deliver the transcendental solution needed for Veber’s turn towards the object and its facticity. Moreover, it ties Veber to the same realm of the subject he deems to be unreliable (irrecoverably tied to its “particularities”).

Pirjevec recognises that this seeming duality of factuality of the object—one transcendent, tied to the outside, the other strictly positioned within the experiencing subject as its aesthetic reduction (i.e. quasi-factuality)—is present throughout Veber’s project.^[15] One would seemingly have to capture the beauty of sunshine through the blindness caused by its glaring rays (“Sun Times Review: Today will be bright[!]”), through its blinding discovery, a poetic contradiction that more than a simple philosophical inconsistency presents, more broadly, the crux of local aesthetic development: stumbling on the necessity to go beyond the subject yet finding no philosophically viable way to carry it through.

To reiterate, the lack of a clear transcendental solution presents a systemic inconsistency that hinders Veber’s aesthetic project and bars further development of aesthetics in a systematic, philosophical manner. The multilayered intentionalities—the addition of layers, states, and the introduction of quasi-factuality—in the end serve a simple reduction to the limiting scope of a transcendental subject. Such regressive accumulation (of layers and states) can be understood as compensation for anxieties surrounding the lack posed by modernity’s chaotic ungrounding (the Copernican, Darwinian, and Freudian reckoning with humanity’s primacy, along with the vectors posed by ecological devastation and technological acceleration, escaping human capacity for control): reaffirming interiority as a way of humanity’s retreat—its final haven. It does so by trading off access to the outside for the sake of existential reassurance, committing itself, committing humanity, to relativism and nihilism.

Could there be another way? Is there a possibility for aesthetics to develop beyond the stale interiority it has found itself in? If humanity can’t avoid erupting a transcendental model to approach and deal with reality, if transcendence is, indeed, elusive—pushing humanity down a slippery path of relativism and nihilism—perhaps one could still approach it through the productive lens of pluralism, or even dust off the old bid for the absolute. Perhaps in that case, a transcendental modality is not erupted as a path of escape, committing itself to a singular transcendental modality, but could offer a spectrum of options that a subject could mediate between. This would allow its first steps towards the outside that would not elude it by way of transcendent withdrawal.

When art implores to consider the world in another light, to imagine an alternative world, alternative futures, it does not call for the creative within. Pleroma does not depict nor shatter existing visions, it is neither an art object placed in appropriated, existing surroundings, neither an art environment, constructing the space along with the objects that populate it around the artist’s gesture, perspective, or expression. Instead, its efficacy is placed in the bipolarity of its object and environment alike. Both are as much artworks as real-world actors: artworks as far as they are real-world actors, and real-world actors as far as there is an impersonal artifice that intrinsically defines them.^[16] They erupt and are erupted within a reality that verges on fiction—in a reality as pragmatic, functional fiction. The four core blocks made out of honeycomb composite and resin, installed in relation to the Sun and its movement, the Black Widow building with its anecdotal history and material presence (giving the blocks their place under the sun along with access to sun radiation—mediated by the building’s ember windows and dark metal plates), as well as the sun, the movement of the Earth, the density of atmosphere, or lack thereof, and henceforth; all these elements are as much symbolic references, imaginary visions as real-world actors with their correspondent factuality, all present core components to what makes the artwork tick—what ties it to reality and instills a seed of counter, parallel reality within.

The tile of the artwork, Pleroma, refers to Gabriel Catren’s Pleromatica, or Elsinore’s Trance,^[17] in which the author proposes to merge transcendental relativism and speculative absolutism. Catren describes pleroma as a “pleromatic outside”,^[18] a “phenoumenodelic givenness”^[19] that cannot be described as actual experiences of an empirical subject nor as a transcendental horizon of possible experiences;^[20] instead, Catren defines it as a form of infinite insubstance—“[t]he fullness, the exuberance, the prodigality, the ubiquity, the exorbitance of revelation”.^[21] He refers to philosophy’s giants—Spinoza, Kant, Husserl, etc.—and throws them in a phenoumenodelic blender out of which images of the world, transcendental modalities along with their models of elusive transcendence, are mediated as mere operational fictions, all situated within a hypothesised absolute immanence—the infinite insubstance (Pleroma).

Catren argues that while the phenomenal world might be in the subject (as one particular model reality among others), the subject itself is still in “life”.^[22] This allows him to treat every transcendental constitution of a form of experience, be it a Husserlian epoché or a necessary (aesthetic) omission, described above, along with its transcendental consequences, as an act of limiting and trimming the pleromatic infinitude;^[23] in other words, as a snapshot or a finite vision, extracted from the “constantly metamorphosing infinite ultra-vision of life”.^[24] Instead of falling for the illusion of a single, idealist production of phenomenality, he thus calls for a state of suspension, within which one can perceive, feel, and think in line with “different subject-dependent transcendental capacities that can be speculatively mediated”.^[25]

Such functionalism of transcendental modalities absolves us of our reliance on a single phenomenological structuring of perception—and with that, our relation to the world—along with the multilayered intentionalities that shape our aesthetic experience. It also allows art to not only implore a reimagining of the world but to actively take on the mediation between various transcendental capacities necessary to do so. In this way, its fictions and critical interventions are, again, not a product of mere imagination or common-sense attentiveness to the phenomenal outside but of speculative mediation between modes of approaching the outside. Such is the case of Rebec’s Pleroma: the artwork is neither the object, nor the setting/environment, nor the idea behind putting the object in the described setting/environment, but a phenoumenological complication of their intrinsic relations—the relations that seem hypothesised, observed, and documented, and at the same time completely imagined or even hallucinated, but nonetheless actualised or made real. It is the warping of reality as reality’s own facticity that at the end makes up its inherent “dreamlike materialism”.^[26]

All this inscribes in art a new (positive, productive) directive, ridding it of relativism (of “anything goes”)^[27] along with nihilism and melancholia (nestled behind modernity’s vast ungrounding). In the words of William Burroughs: “Happiness is [in the end but] a by-product of function.”^[28] It also paves the way for aesthetics as a discipline to overcome the impasses it has reached in its local, Slovene, development. Instead of chasing the elusive transcendence behind the art object and its facticity, aesthetic though might very well challenge the narrow transcendental frame it has found itself accustomed to and regain ambition in the wilderness beyond.^[29]

Pleroma (as the artwork and as the concept itself) points towards an intrinsic immanence of conceptions and visions of the world. It acknowledges that our finite capacities are nonetheless incorporated in and tap into a becoming both distinct from and resonant with them—traversing neither the ontotheological path of absolute separation nor the mystical path of absolute fusion,^[30] but a path unique to them (drawing, at most, from the productive tension between the two). In doing so, it allows for a new relation to the world, to our environment, and most importantly to our unforeseen futures, breaking the long-lasting siege of modern despair.