volume 5

no. 2 (2021)

DOI:10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0020 Richard Shusterman

Aesthetic Experience at the Borders of Art and Life:

I
Since its modern eighteenth-century origins, Western aesthetics has essentially defined itself in terms of playing
with boundaries and transgressing or surpassing limits. Alexander Baumgarten introduced aesthetics precisely
to extend philosophy beyond the limits of conceptual knowledge and into the sphere of sensory perceptions and
what he called “the lower cognitive faculties.” As he insists in paragraph 3 of Aesthetica’s “Prolegomena,” one of
aesthetics’ goals is “improving knowledge also beyond the borders of the distinctly knowable” (“Die Verbesserung
der Erkenntnis auch über die Grenzen des deutlich Erkennbaren hinaus vorantreibt.”) There is a basic logic at
work here: To justify a new philosophical discipline or science like aesthetics, Baumgarten must argue that
the new field is needed to go beyond the limits of the studies we already have, that it occupies a place beyond
the boundaries defined by other fields. Hence, Baumgarten further defends the need for aesthetics by saying
it also goes beyond the limits of Rhetorik and Poetik by comprehending a larger field by including also objects
of other arts. Nor can we equate aesthetics simply with the general field of criticism or with art, Baumgarten
argues, because criticism includes critique of logic while aesthetics is said to deal specifically with matters of
sensibility, and because aesthetics is claimed to be a science (Wissenschaft) rather than just an art.

1) My citations from Baumgarten are from the bilingual (Latin-German) abridged edition of this work, Alexander Baumgarten,
Theoretische Ästhetik: Die grundlengenden Abschnitte aus der “Aesthetica” (1750/58), trans. H. R. Schweizer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner,
1988), 3–5.

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Beyond Baumgarten, the modern field of aesthetics can be seen as an attempt to go beyond the limits
of older philosophies of beauty, sublimity, and taste in order to engage a much wider domain of qualities and
judgments relating to our pleasurable and meaningful experiences of art and nature. The defining strategy
of Hegelian aesthetics (and other aesthetic idealisms) is to take the essence of aesthetics beyond the limits of
nonconceptual sensuous experience and to celebrate instead the idea of art as purveying the very highest spiri-
tual truths, albeit in a somewhat sensuous form. The progressive revolutions of artistic forms and styles that
define twentieth-century art similarly reflect the same play of dynamic movement in which art and aesthetics
advance by challenging and overcoming the determination of established boundaries posited by prior aesthetic
theory and practice. The limit-defying trend in aesthetics is evident in the continuing unsuccessful attempts by
analytic philosophy to provide a satisfactory definition of art that will perfectly define its extensional limits by
either providing its core essence or some formula that will select (for now and for all times) all and only those
objects that are genuine works of art.
Like other Wittgensteinian and pragmatist-inspired philosophers, I have criticized such compartmental-
izing definitions of art (which I call “wrapper theories”), not simply for their failures to provide perfect exten-
sional coverage of all the diverse works of art, but also for these theories’ explanatory poverty in explaining art’s
meanings, purposes, functions, and values. One of the problems with traditional definitions of art is that they
attempt to define something that is not a natural kind but a historically constructed field composed of rather
diverse practices (with their own independent, prior history). These diverse practices employ a variety of different
media and issue in a variety of different works of art that appear to belong to different ontological categories.
A marble sculpture enjoys a robust, particular spatial physical existence that a musical work does not, which
instead exists in its diverse temporal performances and also (some would argue) in its score. A key problem for
defining art’s distinctive common essence was that it seemed to have no substantive essence to define, a mean-
ingful essence that was both shared by all artworks and shared only by them, and thus not to be found in other
works or practices. Early analytic philosophers of art, reacting against the essentialism of Croce-Collingwood
theories of art as expression and the Bell-Fry theories of Significant Form, repeatedly raised this problem and
cautioned against hasty generalizations about art as whole while advocating instead an aesthetic theory that
respected the clear differences between the arts. Famously complaining of “the dreariness of aesthetics” John
Passmore, for example, argued “that the dullness of aesthetics arises from the attempt to construct a subject
where there isn’t one.” His point was “that there is no aesthetics and yet there are principles of literary criti-
cism, musical criticism, etc.,” and that general aesthetics should be abandoned “for an intensive special study
of the separate arts,” whose specific differences should be respected.
Although there are obvious benefits in focusing our theoretical efforts on analyzing separately the
distinct arts and appreciating their distinctiveness, the problem of blurry boundaries and limit-transgression
has become increasingly evident among the arts themselves. T.W. Adorno was quick to realize this, maintaining
already in 1967: “in recent times the boundaries between the different arts have become fluid, or, more accu-
rately, their demarcation lines have been eroded.” As “music inclines toward the graphic arts in its notation,”
so “painting no longer wishes to confine itself to mere surfaces.” If sculpture through its use of mobiles (e.g.,
Calder) defies its traditionally defining limit as “motionless” and not “temporal,” then “sculptors [also] have

2) Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), ch. 2. In French, L’art à
l’état vif : La pensée pragmatiste et l’esthétique populaire (Paris: Minuit 1992).
3) John Passmore, “The Dreariness of Aesthetics,” in Aesthetics and Language, ed. W. Elton (Oxford, 1954), 45–50 and 55.
4) Theodor W. Adorno, “Art and the Arts,” in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader (Stanford University Press,
2003), 368.

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ceased to respect the boundaries between sculpture and architecture,” by defying the distinction between func-
tional and nonfunctional art.” Noting how “the artistic genres appear to revel in a kind of promiscuity that
violates some of the taboos of civilization,” Adorno worries how this “blurring of the clean divisions between
different genres of art produces anxieties about civilization” by presenting threats “to the rationality and civili-
zation that art has always been involved in.” Still more frightening for Adorno is contemporary art’s phenom-
enon of the happening which seems to brashly mix various arts together (notably visual and performance arts)
and thrust them into a defiant merger with practices and life-contexts outside those of the artworld in order to
create a Gesamtkunstwerk that he critically regards as achieving “only total anti-art.”
The sixties’ art of happenings, we should remember, was introduced by Alan Kaprow, inspired by John
Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics that challenged the established dichotomy between art and life. The underlying
pragmatist aim was to advance the democratic social project of making contemporary art more relevant to
more people but also to make the social world more aesthetically satisfying for more people by creating more
harmonious relations between individuals and social groups that would also be reciprocally enriching. My own
philosophical work on art was similarly inspired by this pragmatist vision of integrating art and life. When
I first came to Paris in 1990, invited by Pierre Bourdieu because of my earlier analytic work on Wittgenstein,
my goal was to convince either him or other powerful people in publishing to arrange a translation of Dewey’s
aesthetic masterpiece Art as Experience. After repeated failures to interest influential French thinkers in the
Dewey translation, I decided to try to arrange the French publication of my own book on pragmatist aesthetics
that I was writing at the time. The book’s title – Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (in French
L’art à l’état vif : La pensée pragmatiste et l’esthétique populaire) – highlights its aim of blurring the established
modernist boundaries between art and life, but also the Kantian opposition between the aesthetic and the
practical. The book likewise challenged the oppositional divide between aesthetics and popular culture by
refuting the arguments of both Adorno and Bourdieu. The book’s good fortune in France helped paved the way
for pragmatist aesthetics’ reception in Europe and the eventual publication of a French translation of Dewey’s
aesthetics, thirteen years later in 2005 for which I was privileged to write the preface.10
The book exemplified the pragmatist idea of blurring entrenched aesthetic boundaries by applying it to
two major issues or aims: The first was challenging the apparent dichotomy or aesthetic gap between popular
music and genuine art. Here my example was the then new genre of hip hop which blended the artistic genres of
music and poetry with graffiti art, breakdancing, and ghetto-styled fashion to provide an integrated lifestyle or
art of living. The second project of blurring boundaries worked at a more general philosophical level. It aimed

5) Ibid., 368–69.
6) Ibid., 371.
7) Ibid., 369.
8) Alan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (University of California Press, 2003).
9) The French translation of Pragmatist Aesthetics was published in Paris in 1992 by Minuit and is reprinted in a second, enlarged
edition by L’éclat (2018).
10) John Dewey, L’art comme expérience, trans. Jean-Pierre Cometti et al, Editions Farrago/Universite de Pau, 2005; reprinted in
Paris by Gallimard, 2010. For discussion of the reception of pragmatist aesthetics through my book of that title, see the symposium
of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, “A Symposium on R. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics 20 years
later” (with contributions by Paolo D’Angelo, Roberta Dreon, Heidi Salaverria, and Krystyna Wilkoszewska, and a response by Richard
Shusterman), EJPAP (2012), 4, no. 1, (https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/758). For more recent discussion of the relation of my
Pragmatist Aesthetics to Dewey’s classic Art as Experience, see “Pragmatist Aesthetics: Histories, Questions, and Consequences : An
Interview with Richard Shusterman,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 13, no. 1 (2021), https://journals.
openedition.org/ejpap/2261.

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to challenge the traditional opposition between ethics and aesthetics by presenting the idea of a contempo-
rary ethics of taste where ethical judgments depend on the kind of complex reflective judgment that Kant and
others identify with aesthetic thinking because it is not strictly reducible to moral rules but requires sensitivity
and imagination. This notion of an aesthetical ethics found further expression in reviving the ancient idea of
a philosophy as an embodied art of living, thus challenging modernity’s dominant distinction between philos-
ophy as a theoretical genre of writing and the actual ethical lives of the philosophers beyond their writings.
Pragmatism realizes that making distinctions is a very necessary and productive part of thinking. For
example, it recognizes that modernity’s sharp distinction of aesthetics from ethics was extremely useful in
promoting the idea of art’s autonomy and thus freeing modern art from art’s traditional role of serving the
ideology of Church, state, and aristocracy. But pragmatism warns against erecting useful, contextual distinc-
tions into absolute, unhelpful dichotomies that result in unnecessary and oppressive hierarchical divisions that
painfully fragment not only the social world but the experience of individuals, dividing us against ourselves. In
this spirit, pragmatist aesthetics insists on the validity and value of “the mix” in the creation of art. Hip-hop art,
with its appropriation and mixing of recorded sounds and its mix of African diasporic cultures and contem-
porary urban life in the big cities of America and Europe, strikingly thematizes the importance of blurring or
defying boundaries through mixing.
Adorno claims that contemporary art’s increased fraying of its defining genre boundaries “produces anxi-
eties about civilization” and threats “to the rationality” that sustains civilization along with art.11 However, this
desire to defy boundaries through mixing is a reaction against the contemporary hypertrophy of rationality in our
culture, or more specifically what Adorno identifies and critiques as “instrumental reason” or “identity” thinking
that insists on clear borders for classifying and thus subjugating individual entities (including people) under
clearly distinct and determinate concepts. If Adorno’s dialectical thinking aims to combat such thinking, then so
does a pragmatist approach of mixing that brings diverse things together while still recognizing their difference
and even highlighting those differences through the play of bringing or blurring them together. The fraying of
boundaries can be seen as a positive and necessary response to an increasingly compartmentalized, bureaucra-
tized, administered social, and cultural world whose categories and classifications are increasingly oppressive and
detrimental to new ways of thought, action, and creation that do not fit those established categories. Conversely,
because so much of our lives is powerfully structured by conventional practices and institutions defined by explicit
and implicit limits (including those dimensions of life that should be most freely creative, such as philosophy and
art), it becomes ever more difficult to create something new that does not fit those categorial limits.

II
The above remarks on aesthetics’ essential play of boundaries and their transgression, a history that extends
from Baumgarten through Hegel to Adorno and pragmatist aesthetics, will serve as the theoretical background
to consider a puzzling contemporary case of aesthetic border crossing in which I am essentially involved.
Sometimes it is most useful to work from examples one knows best through insider’s knowledge even if this
means abandoning the impersonal academic style that pretends to give an objective, God’s-eye point of view.
The case I discuss here concerns not only the fraying of boundaries within the realm of art but also the blur-
ring of the boundaries between art and philosophy and those between art and life, challenging moreover
also the conventional limits of personal self-identity. It concerns my work in photography and performance
art with the Parisian artist Yann Toma. Before analyzing the theoretical aspects of its complex and puzzling

11) Adorno, “Art and the Arts,” 371.

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fraying of boundaries, I should briefly explain the origin and nature of this work that began in the Abbey of
Royaumont in June 2010.
Toma asked me to pose for his photographic project he calls Radiant Flux in which he tries to capture and
visually represent the invisible aura of the posing subject, an aura he conceives and perceives as a temporally
changing energetic force emanating from the person’s body. The photographic shot must be done in a totally dark
setting, typically indoors for better control, and its technique ultimately derives from Man Ray’s light drawing
method called “Space Writing.” After positioning his camera on a tripod, adjusting it to a special setting for the
long exposure, and aiming it at the photographic subject who takes a pose and then must remain motionless,
Toma – who is dressed in dark clothes so as to make himself less visible and holds a small hand-lamp or two
– releases the shutter and approaches the posing person, seeking to sense that person’s aura and trace it with the
lamps’ light. To do so he hovers very close to the subject’s body, moving very quickly around it, not only to catch
the changing flow of the person’s auratic energy but also to ensure that only the stationary posing subject and the
tracing of the lights (but not his own body or the lamps tracing them) will be captured on film. After a short burst
of such energetic swirling, Toma returns to the tripod and closes the shot. The photograph that emerges portrays
the posing subject surrounded by the lines of light created by the trajectory of Toma’s hand-held lamps.
I had expected to be photographed in my ordinary clothes but when we reached the darkened room in
the Abbey to do the photo shoot, Toma instead asked me to wear skin-tight gold bodystocking that he had
inherited from his parents (former dancers at the Paris Opera Ballet). I reluctantly put it on and posed in it,
working for a day and a half, silent and motionless in the mystery of the dark Abbey room. My poses were some-
times erect, but sometimes seated or reclining (especially as I grew tired), and sometimes with my eyes closed
(either intentionally to magnify the mystery or unintentionally because of fatigue). By the early afternoon of
the second day, I could not tolerate the immobility and darkness anymore so I suddenly ran outside into the
Abbey courtyard and gardens. Although surprised, Yann Toma grabbed his movie camera and chased after
me, filming my capering ramble through the Abbey grounds. The picturesque gardens and ruins prompted
me to improvise scenarios of dance and gesture that fit my playful, exultant mood that was inspired not only
by the blossoming, sunny outdoor energies of the June flora but also by the excitement I felt in Yann and by
the puzzled glances of the tourists visiting the Abbey grounds. This al fresco romp introduced a new artistic
genre to our collaboration – my costumed and improvised movement performance in a public space that Yann
then captured in video. Because my unexpected outdoor ramble had made us already very late for our lunch
with the family who hosted us at the Abbey, there was no time to return to the darkened shooting room to
change back into my ordinary clothes. Stunned but amused by my strange attire, they dubbed the apparition
I embodied as “L’homme en or.”
The naming of this persona was as aleatory and uncalculated as the urge to leave the dark room of still
photography for energetic movement in the sunny outdoors. But this name became increasingly meaningful
as it helped give the persona an identity that nourished my collaboration with Yann and thus fueled the future
appearances of L’homme en or. Each performative sortie added more content to his evolving identity and his
repertoire of silent gestural expression so that he developed a personality and movement signature of his own,
quite different from those of the philosopher Richard Shusterman. As the Man in Gold never speaks but expresses
himself only through movement and gestures, he has come to be known as “the philosopher without words”
(“le philosophe sans la parole”), embodying the silent wisdom of Chinese sages.12 Since June 2010 the Man in

12) I treat some of the epistemological issues of the idea of wordless thinking and speechless philosophy in “The Philosopher without
Words: Philosophy as Performative Art with L’homme en or,” in Unsettled Boundaries: Philosophy, Art, Ethics, East/West, ed. Curtis
Carter (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2017), 36–50.

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Gold has appeared in fifteen public sorties in Paris, South America, South Florida, Northern Denmark, and
the Polish cities of Łódź and Wrocław. His image has been exhibited in art galleries and posters throughout the
world and he himself has appeared in two Paris art galleries for very brief, improvised performances. But, all
the other performances were spontaneously launched in open public spaces without any announcement that
they would take place and without any script or prearranged scenario. The event depended entirely on the occa-
sional proximities and convergent energies of Yann (who keeps the golden costume) and me (who provides the
body for the Man in Gold to inhabit). In December 2016 a bilingual book was published in Paris that describes
his performance experiences largely from his point of view but in my language, presenting those adventures in
the narrative structure of a philosophical tale that is illustrated with stills from his videoed performances and
photographic poses as captured by Yann’s photographic art.13
Why have I have pursued this project of performance art despite its problematic fit with my long-established
identity as a professional philosopher? I came to appreciate the Nietzschean critique that philosophical aesthetics
is mostly written by philosophers whose perspective on art is only that of observers or interpreters rather than
that of creators, and that their aesthetic theory suffers because of that one-sided perspective. I thought I would
have a better understanding of art and its aesthetic experience if I could understand and experience it from
the creator’s or artist’s perspective. My quite accidental initiation into performance art through my encounter
with Yann Toma provided me that instructive perspective, no matter the artistic quality of those performances.
Moreover, there was the pure pleasure of playful performance and the thrill of spontaneity that involved risk-taking
and emancipation from my conventional sense of self as an aging professor of philosophy.

III
This brief description of my collaboration with Yann Toma (a collaborative project we call Somaflux to
distinguish it from Yann’s photography with other subjects) should provide enough material to tease out
some of the project’s key limit-blurring aspects. This dimension of the project became clear to us only as
the project evolved since the project was never planned from the beginning but only emerged organically
from the essentially contingent and spontaneous evolution of the Man in Gold through the experiences of
his performances.
Perhaps the most fundamental boundary question that this work raises is whether the Somaflux project
and its performances qualify as genuine art? Or are we dealing here instead with philosophical research in
aesthetic experience that does not merit the title of art? One angry critic (from the field of theatre history)
vehemently complained (after I presented the Man in Gold and his book at an invited lecture in Berlin) that
this performance work has nothing to do with true art. Instead, the critic claimed, it is merely an irreverent,
provocative exercise in narcissistic role-playing that insults the very idea of art, because its alleged perfor-
mance art is done by someone who is not a legitimate artist. As several witnesses to his angry response quickly
remarked, the fire of resentment derived from his feeling that a sacred boundary that separates (and protects)
art from non-art had been violated, and that this boundary should be decided and safeguarded by conventional
academic standards of professional credentials.

13) The Adventures of the Man in Gold: Paths Between Art and Life: A Philosophical Tale/Les Aventures de l’homme en or: Passages
entre l’art et la vie: Conte philosophique (Paris: Hermann, 2016). A second, “pocket” exclusively French edition of the book, enlarged
with two new essays was published as Les Aventures de l’homme en or: Passages entre l’art et la vie, Suivi de “Le philosophe sans la
parole” et “Expérience esthétique et effrangement de frontiers,” trans. Thomas Mondemé, Simon Gissinger, et Wilfried Laforge, (Paris:
Hermann, 2020).

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I make no claims here for the artistic value of the Somaflux works or for my own contestable status as artist.
But the project clearly suggests the fraying of the boundaries between art and philosophical research, along with
the boundaries between artists and non-artists. Photographs and videos of the Man in Gold have been presented in
art galleries and museums in Paris, Bogota, Helsinki, Stockholm, Denver, Seoul, Kraków, Wrocław, and Shanghai;
although my artistic credentials may be questionable, the Somaflux works are equally the creation of Yann Toma,
whose status as artist cannot be questioned. Our collaboration likewise blurs the boundary between represented
object and the creating artist because while my embodiment of the Man in Gold is the object represented, this
embodied object is also the somatic subject who is creating the performative poses and actions that are then
represented in photographic stills or videos produced by Yann. This fraying of boundaries finds expression in an
ontological complexity of the works of the Somaflux project that is reflected in the captions these works carry. On
the one hand, the works are temporal performances in which I am the principal artist performing as the Man in
Gold. But, on the other hand, these works qua photographic visual images – either in the form of photographic
stills (in print or digital format) or video film – are the creations of Yann Toma. Hence, a typical example of our
standard caption formulation for photographic artworks of the Somaflux project goes as follows: Yann Toma,
Somaflux with Richard Shusterman performing as the Man in Gold: Currents of the Seine, 2012.
If Somaflux’s fraying of the borders between art and philosophy has faced condemnations of artistic
fraud, it also risks the charge of trivializing (or even abandoning) philosophy by its forsaking the proper means
of philosophical expression. Instead of writing abstract theoretical texts according to the currently dominant
academic standards and style, the Somaflux project plunges into experiments of deeply embodied aesthetic
experience through improvised gestural expression and movement inspired by somaesthetic sensitivity to the
energies of the subject and his environment (including of course the interactive energies I share with Yann). To
refute such charges of trivializing or abandoning philosophy we should recognize that genuine philosophical
thinking is not confined to the contemporary genre of academic philosophical writing by university professors
but historically includes many other forms of expression. The culture of philosophy has included many literary
genres other than the standard essay: dialogues, poems, meditations, confessions, memoirs, letters, sermons,
aphorisms, and now also blogs. One of these genres is the philosophical tale (perhaps most influentially prac-
ticed by Voltaire and Diderot). The Adventures of the Man in Gold (which is subtitled “A Philosophical Tale”)
is an attempt to reclaim this genre for contemporary philosophy.
Moreover, the culture of philosophy (as Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault have shown us) is historically
much broader than the practice of reading and writing texts but includes a reflective, critical, disciplined way of
life that involves ameliorative self-stylization and self-transformation. In that sense, the approach to philosophy
embodied by the Man in Gold represents a fraying of the conventional boundary between philosophy and life,
between reality as critically studied through books and reality as personally lived through experimentation. My
particular path in philosophy is nourished by this blurring or convergence of borders. My most important philo-
sophical convictions and most fruitful ideas have come not from reading logical arguments but from powerful
personal experiences. The experiences I gained through the Man in Gold’s performances have been philosophically
instructive in different ways. First, in terms of theory, these performances revealed to me that both analytic and
continental theorists are wrong to reduce the art of photography to the photographic image. Instead, photography
also involves a somaesthetic art of performative process that involves postural and gestural skill both in the human
subject who is posing for the photography and in the photographer’s manipulating the camera. It further involves
skills of silent somatic communication between photographer and subject as well as skills of mise en scène.14

14) For a detailed discussion of these points, see Richard Shusterman, “Photography as Performative Process,” in Thinking through
the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch.11.

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However, I should insist again that philosophy, as I understand and seek to practice it, is much more than
discursive theory, but rather the comprehensive practice of a distinctive way of life, characterized by a quest for
self-knowledge and self-improvement (which should, of course, include an ethical regard for others) that neces-
sarily involves critically exploring the limits of one’s self. So beyond the theoretical discoveries it afforded for my
aesthetic theory, the experience of embodying another character, my work with the Man in Gold (who does not
speak and whose strikingly unconventional shining appearance and somatic behavior are very different from
my own) has provided me with precious personal insights. It has taught me about the limits of my conventional
philosophical self and about what mysterious freedoms and possibilities (but also what risks) lie beyond it. Those
risks (which include social rejection, insulting abuse, and physical injury) are described in The Adventures of
the Man in Gold, along with the joys of emancipatory poetic visions.
The book itself is a complex hybrid that exemplifies the problematic fraying of established textual bound-
aries. Its strange hybridity is partly the result of it not being planned in terms of conventional genre categories
but instead emerging, like the Man in Gold himself, through the contingency of spontaneous impulse. The
book began (toward the end of 2014) as a chronological list of the dates and places of all my Somaflux perfor-
mances with Yann, a list composed to accompany a planned exhibition of this work in an art gallery. While
I was imaginatively recalling those performances, the spirit of the Man in Gold seemed to possess me. So the
text’s narrative, while respecting the factual details of dates, places, and persons, became shaped by his distinc-
tively different and exotically fanciful view of these performance experiences and their meaning. The book is
thus a blending of fact and fantasy, philosophy and fictional literature, philosophy and art – all pursued through
both text and image (with forty color illustrations).
In a culture, pervasively shaped by compartmentalizing institutions that reinforce the conventional cate-
gories and boundaries on which those institutions themselves rely, a product’s imaginative mixing of modes
will tend to hinder its reception. I encountered some of these difficulties with The Adventures of the Man in
Gold. When its Parisian publisher first announced that I was bringing out a new book, there were some prom-
ising inquiries from the radio (France Culture) about inviting me to talk about the new book, as I had done
for earlier books. Once the radio hosts realized, however, that the book was a philosophical tale rather than
a conventional work of philosophy, they refused to pursue the interview, explaining that they would not know
how to conduct a thirty-minute or hour long philosophical discussion about an illustrated tale rather than
a genuine treatise involving standard forms of philosophical argument. Similar problems arose in the French
bookstores about where to place the book so that people could easily find it: in the philosophy section, the art
and aesthetics section, or even the section on literature? Even the publisher could not properly place it in one
of his book series, neither of philosophy nor of art.
The book’s bilingual status (English/French) further intensifies its hybrid character, while highlighting
a category boundary that seems extremely strong and central to defining culture and thus is very challenging
to dissolve or blur: the boundary between different languages. Although languages are always in the process of
change and constantly assimilate words and expressions from other languages, they strive, at least in modern
times, to sustain their distinctive identity, employing a variety of methods to codify their proper particular
forms in rules of grammar, spelling, and diction. Linguistic identity, as I learned from The Adventures of the
Man in Gold, is also essential to the commercial marketing of books and is reciprocally reinforced by the mech-
anisms of global marketing. I wrote the book in English but included a French translation (because the Man
in Gold was born in France), and placed it facing parallel to the book’s English text. The book bore a French
ISBN number because of its Parisian publisher. The result was that although English was the book’s primary
language, it appeared throughout Amazon’s European and American websites as a simply a French book with
no mention of its English text. Because this misinformation would certainly diminish the book’s sales (as the

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English-language reading public is much larger than that of French), the publisher tried to change the book’s
linguistic designation and description on those problematic websites. But this proved too difficult, because (so
we were told) the relevant software and robotic search mechanisms would not permit the French ISBN number
to be classified as an English book. It was thus necessary to acquire a new American ISBN number and print
another set of books bearing that number.
This example of the automated rigid policing of linguistic or literary boundaries through computer
programming suggests how our cultural world is increasingly controlled by mechanisms based on digital
thinking’s insistence on clear boundaries and discrete units. In this context, one is tempted to look to the arts
to provide some resistance to the increasing fragmentation and compartmentalization of cultural expression
and aesthetic experience that is part of our increasingly pigeonholed, stereotyped ways of thinking and living.
Art’s fraying of boundaries can perhaps serve as an expression of such resistance. One would like to hope that
future technological advances will introduce increasingly more subtle mechanisms that encourage critical and
creative thinking that, while recognizing the utility of boundaries and distinctions, can also appreciate and
exemplify the value of blurring or fraying them. The dominant thrust of technological progress, however, seems
to encourage greater surveillance of boundaries and control of borders.15

15) However, I should mention some promising new currents of somaesthetic design that aim at appreciating the ambiguities and
informulable dimensions of subjective body experience in the field of human-computer interactive design technologies. See, for
example, the cover story of Kristina Höök et al., “Somaesthetic Design” in Interactions 22, 2015. http://interactions.acm.org/archive/
view/july-august-2015/somaesthetic-design and her book, Designing with the Body: Somaesthetic Interaction Design (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2018).

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