>> Aesthetic Materialism, as a research ontology, perceives the human as a contradictory creature of two realms: society and nature. The way that these two sense one another is by means of a third thing: human practical activity. For Aesthetic Materialism, we make sense of the world, and the world makes sense of us, by acting together. The human sensorium, both the physical and mental senses and capacities, is the unfinished result of our dialectic interaction with an unfinished world. Aesthetic Materialism therefore complements and transcends the one-sidedness of idealist philosophy, and its conceptual categories that appear absolute and eternal.

>> At the same time, Aesthetic Materialism is other than empiricism, where the idea is subordinated to the form of things. Aesthetic Materialism engages with reality in a material way, that is, both empirically and speculatively. It engages with both the sensuous and the supra-sensuous: the things that lie below, above, and beyond what is directly here.

>> Aesthetic Materialism therefore engages with our current reality, Capitalist Realism (Fisher 2022), in a twofold manner. It engages with capital’s own aesthetics, moving within and against the sense of anaesthetization postulated by the real abstraction of commodity exchange. And it engages with human activity and human objects that bring forth glimpses of another reality and another future.

>> Aesthetic Materialism guides a praxis that mirrors and inverts the praxis of commodity exchange. Instead of being objectified and reified, human subjectivity is objectively expressed into objects created on the basis of real individual and social need, including the need for creation as an end in itself. Instead of being lost in the private object, the subject creates social objects, mediating the relation between the individual and society towards the creation of the social individual. It is the inversion of the inverted mode of existence in a gesture that is not rewinding, but its positive sublation and transcendence.

>> As we engage in the metabolic intercourse with others, our senses are developed and enriched. For the development of the senses, their objectification is required, both practical and theoretical (Marx 1975 pp.353-354). Gradually, what appears as a means, becomes an end:

“When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means has become an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them” (Marx 1975 p.365).

>> A human activity that is tasked with the cultivation of aesthetic skill and judgment is the arts. The object of art constitutes a bridge between the subject and the object, where the subject, the object, and the human praxis in-between, remain incomplete and unfinished: “Art as a middle term and dialectical movement demonstrates the material actuality of spirit” (Khatib 2022 p.92). When art is conceived as a process and relation, the results of creative activity remain open and not closed to further material and symbolic transformation. It is art as a social and metabolic process, not as discrete objects disconnected from their history, not commodities.

>> Art, and every practical activity performed as art, is therefore a mediator, and thus constitutive of the sensuous relation between matter and meaning, form and fiction, nature and society, the one person and the other. It is a form of human correspondence without telos (Ingold 2017). By producing and consuming objects of art, we weave the social bond, and connect through the object with one another. Our need is no longer a passive need, but a human, social need, passive and active, consuming and productive. It begets activity as real movement, life-begetting life, and life as the means of life (Santilli 1973). Aesthetic Materialism is the mediation of this movement, not a goal.

>> Through aesthetic materialist praxis, the human senses are both satisfied and enriched. They become human senses. The eye becomes the human eye, and society and nature are seen humanly – not crudely, not as utilities. The enrichment of the senses is the wealth of the species. Individually conceived, wealth is the developed senses of the human body: “the rich man who is profoundly and abundantly endowed with all the senses” (Marx 1975 p.354). Transindividually conceived, for a man the greatest wealth is the other man (Marx 1975 p.356). Socially conceived, wealth is the development of sensory relations where praxis springs “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Marx no date p.615 in Hägglund 2020 p.307).

>> Speculatively conceived, Aesthetic Materialism alludes to an alternative mode of production, and thus cultivates the sense of a utopian reality. In this, poiêsis or labour, the cyclical action guided by thought persists, but it has become accountable to aesthetic praxis as the union of action and thought and, therefore, as the way of thought thinking itself in practice. In doing so, the social abstractions, scientific, artistic, and spiritual, that organise production are not rigid and separate, standing above and against their producers. They themselves exist objectively in a reciprocal and metabolic relation with the totality of society and nature, subjected to material wear and tear and change.

>> Aesthetic Materialism traverses dialectically the realism of capitalism by means of a utopian reality. This movement, like life itself, is a contradiction.