The Aesthetic Dimension of Reading: An Embodied-Ecological Approach

Abstract

This paper aims at integrating insights from ecological psychology, pragmatism, and embodied cognitive science to shed light on the aesthetic dimension underlying daily activities. For this purpose, we discuss conceptions of the aesthetic developed by authors from diverse traditions, including Dewey’s pragmatism, Carroll’s cognitivism, and Saito’s everyday aesthetics. We focus on the activity of reading, which has traditionally been conceived as involving the establishment of letter-sound correspondences and the rule-based deduction of information. However, an embodied framework opens up a more ecological understanding of this activity encompassing dynamic, multimodal perceptual engagement which is dependent on: (i) who the reader is (ii) the task or purpose, and (iii) what the person-environment-system affords. This form of engagement, even in mundane everyday-reading, we argue, brings forth an aesthetic dimension to it. Specifically, we explore how bodily engagement such as olfactory, tactile, and prosodic processes, saturate even logical judgements and reasoning. This integration of embodied and aesthetic processes in a particular context, we claim, can effectively emphasise and cultivate an aesthetic attitude. This, in turn, will provide insight into how the aesthetic dimension of reading can be cultivated intelligently, enriching the overall experience and will also illuminate why we read at all.

Introduction

Currently, the dominant conception of reading regards it primarily as a cognitivist act of symbol decoding and information processing (see Dehaene, 2009; Jack, 2019; LaBerge, 2002). This conception limits from the beginning a focus on the aesthetic processes involved in the act of reading, such as the reader’s appreciation of a forceful description of an original plot, the quality of the paper a text is printed on, or the font and colours used in an advertisement sign on the street. When considering the aesthetic dimension of (everyday) reading, scant attention has been devoted to this aspect due to the prevailing emphasis on commonalities in perception often analysed through analytical, semantic, or syntactical models. Moreover, the primary focus has centred on the cognitive processes performed by the brain, leveraging statistical knowledge and mechanical information manipulation. The exploration of the sensing body in reading studies has only recently gained prominence (see Mangen et al., 2019) but there has not been a systematic and consistent focus on how the embodied engagement relates to aesthetic judgements. Further, the disembodied brain-bound focus on reading tends to converge with intellectualist approaches in aesthetics, like that of Carroll’s (2012), according to which aesthetic experiences emerge in a strictly cognitive relation between a person and a work of art. These two positions do not converge accidentally, but out of conceptual coherence: they both conceive the person as disembodied and only cognitively linked to the literary text or the work of art (see Beardsley 1981).

A disembodied approach has significant limitations for a theory of human perception, as it mainly includes neural processes, and overlooks the function of temporality, individuality, spatiality and materiality. Consider instead human perception as enabled by the person (brain-body)-environment system (see Järvilehto, 2009). This ecological starting point allows multiple sensory processes to constitute the perception and experience of an action. As such it opens the possibility for treating an activity as reading as more than just information processing. By considering the embodied aspects in reading, focus falls on how the reader understands information through experiential engagements including sensations, memory and what the situation affords. A disembodied approach has no language for explaining the situated and embodied engagement underlying the reader’s aesthetic appreciation of the texts. Our aim in this paper is thus to develop an account of the aesthetic elements underlying everyday activities such as reading within an ecological, embodied and pragmatist framework. Further, we want to show how the aesthetic aspects are essential to understand reading beyond linguistic decoding and semantic meaning-making. While we argue that aesthetic dimensions are ever-present in all human activities, we do not claim that they are equally salient or significant in all activities, nor in all cases of reading. Further, we argue that the aesthetic role and significance of processes like creativity or imagination depend on how they are acknowledged and conceived. Our embodied and situated conception of reading allows us to characterise the aesthetic dimension involved in reading. This, we argue, will help enhancing the reading practices by offering cues about how to understand and cultivate an aesthetic attitude in reading.

To do so, in section 1 we discuss a cognitivist account of the aesthetic and aesthetic experiences and oppose to it an ecological and embodied one, based on ideas from everyday aesthetics and John Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experiences. In section 2 we show the relation between an embodied conception of reading and the aesthetic dimensions involved in this activity. In section 3, we develop a gradual account of aesthetic experiences and address their significance in reading, before we present our final remarks in section 4.

The field of the aesthetic

According to an influential conception in philosophy of aesthetics, ‘[…] an aesthetic experience of a work of art is a matter of attending with understanding to the formal and/or the aesthetic and/or the expressive properties of a work of art’ (Carroll 2012, p. 173). Unpacking entirely this claim would lead us astray, however, let us stress two important elements in this quote: i) aesthetic experiences are primarily those we have when engaged with the aesthetic aspects of a work of art,¹ and ii) the expression ‘attending with understanding’ emphasises the cognitive dimension of aesthetic experiences: the experiencer brings to the encounter with the artwork their knowledge of the artistic tradition, the context of creation, the techniques used, the artist’s intention, etcetera. In this view, aesthetic experiences are reserved for those with proper knowledge and education, who can enact the apt attitude and appreciate ‘the right products’ for their ‘exceptional expression’.

Carroll’s influential conception of aesthetics allows us to address, by contrast, the ecological and embodied processes involved in the aesthetic aspects of reading we aim at exploring. Further, we follow Saito in the claim that the field of aesthetics extends beyond exceptional experiences confined to specific perceptual affordances of a product. If we are interested, not in how art is acknowledged, but in the function and mechanisms underlying aesthetic experiences more generally, then we should also consider daily experiences where we judge a place as being messy, an animal being cute, a conversation being boring, etcetera.² As Saito also claims, ‘… such seemingly trivial, innocuous, ordinary, mundane, or even frivolous aspects of our aesthetic life do have surprisingly serious, pragmatic consequences: environmental, moral, social, political, and existential’ (2007, p. 52). The important distinctions to make here are (i) that aesthetic judgements happen on a continuum spanning extreme sensations of pleasure or disgust and flickers of fleeting and fragile sensations and impressions. Thus, at one end of the spectrum, we have visceral reactions that evoke strong emotional responses, while at the other end, we encounter more subtle and nuanced forms of aesthetic engagement that may vanish before they become tangible or unfold gradually over time, and (ii) that social and innate and evolutionary aspects of (non)appreciation are intertwined. This integration requires that the analyst considers how personal preferences and general biological or strongly developmental based preferences are difficult to discern. Aesthetic judgements emerge from a mix of bio-social processes.

We are after an understanding of aesthetic processes inherent in general experience. Our focus lies in recognising aesthetic judgments present in engagements that involve sensory perception. Ultimately, we categorise all human activities as more or less saturated with aesthetic experiences. Our embodied-ecological perspective allows us to characterise engagement with artworks as highly aesthetic because the perceiver is predisposed to pay attention and recognise such situations as creative, exceptional and significant. When visiting a gallery or museum, for instance, attention is easily directed towards specific aspects in the environment, and the setting itself might afford deep concentration. Imagine a visitor who has the time to sustain attention and let details emerge. Consider then the design of the museum which encourages controlled, unhurried behaviour: the pace could be coordinated with calm music, few obstacles or the slow pace of other visitors. The interior is spartan and the objects that draw attention are carefully selected and positioned in relation to one another to provide the best experience for the observer. In contrast, in messy everyday situations, multiple points of attention intertwine, necessitating individuals to move in and out of situations and balance task-oriented focus with awareness of perception. In everyday life, it is often convenient to ignore bodily sensations and view the body as a means of transportation rather than a resourceful experiential organ. The aesthetic experience is easier to foreground and appreciate when it emerges in a context designed for a particular focused attitude and when it is made the main task occupying the person’s attention.

We suggest that there are essential aesthetic processes involved in all human activities, including reading non-literary texts. However, they might be shorter, more fragile, precarious and intertwined with other kinds of experiences. Nevertheless, think, for example, of the experience of reading an insightful scientific article, a powerful yet simple mathematical proof, or a traditional cooking recipe handwritten by your grandmother.³ In some cases, engaging with these non-artistic texts can derive in powerful aesthetic experiences. Conversely, for individuals who do not assign significance to art, the aesthetic experience derived from visiting a museum may largely be overlooked. Some people claim that they feel simply ignorant towards an artwork at a museum, for instance. Therefore, our aim is to explore the roles and functions of (i) an individual’s experiential body, (ii) the surrounding situation, and (iii) the artefacts involved in the emergence of aesthetics. Additionally, we seek to understand the factors that limit aesthetic experiences across diverse individuals, cultures, and contexts. Regarding aesthetic experiences, there also seems to be an incompatibility between our claim that they emerge in all sorts of practical engagements, and Carroll’s claim that aesthetic experiences derive from ‘attending with understanding’. Even though the latter idea depicts an active observer, it remains an overly intellectualistic and disembodied form of engagement of the person with the aesthetic object. The focus, in this view, is based on the observer’s propositional knowledge like the artist’s intentions, the context of creation, the artistic techniques, etcetera. It is true, however, that understanding enables the perceiver to have a particular kind of aesthetic experience, that might be judged as valuable in a given cultural practice. Yet, while the aesthetic experience itself emerges regardless of cultural values, we do suggest that a developed aesthetic attitude that involves an awareness of bodily sensations might improve the experience of the aesthetic dimension in a given activity. The attitude is partly a skill, where one can learn to attend to what the body senses—or alternatively learn to ignore its signals (we will address in detail what the aesthetic attitude amounts to in section 2.3).

Alternative conceptions of the aesthetic and of aesthetic experience to that of Carroll can be found in the works of authors like Dewey (1980), Saito (2007, 2022), and Berleant (2023), who, despite of their diverse approaches, aim at widening the field of aesthetics and emphasise the continuity and complementarity of everyday life, aesthetics, and aesthetic experiences. This continuity also implies that an aesthetic experience is not characterised by a cognitive appreciation of the sublime—such as a distinguished artwork - but is instead considered a direct embodied appreciation emergent from the person’s engagement with a practical activity involving any kind of material affordances. This alternative understanding of an embodied aesthetics will allow us to enquire into the domain of reading from a radically different starting point than the cognitivist and information-based approach. We can instead investigate how reading is a bodily process of material engagement that also involves continuous aesthetic judgements.

Embodied reading and everyday aesthetics

The conception of cognition as brain-bounded information processing, in which the body acts primarily as a receiver of stimuli, is still strong in cognitive science, and has profoundly influenced how we understand reading processes (see Dehaene, 2009; Jack, 2019). The orthodox conception of reading foregrounds two attentional processes: attention to perceive letters and words as units (which is automatised with practice), and attention to associate words with meanings (see LaBerge, 2002). These two processes which, in the cognitivist view, constitute reading, can be described in terms of information processing that takes place in the brain. Let us propose in the rest of this section an alternative conception of reading.

Reading as a bodily engagement with symbolic material

An embodied approach to reading -in line with pragmatist, ecological and enactive approaches- argues that reading is a bodily activity, where a reader uses multiple senses to engage with the text. This view proposes that reading is an activity constituted by the reader’s engagement with interrelated and multisensory affordances that, besides the visual perception of the text, calls for olfactory engagement, tactile exploration of text materials, a modulation of temporality and rhythm, and many other embodied processes that constitute sense-making. Gibson coined the term affordances, as ‘what the environment offers the animal for good and for ill’ (1979, p. 119). In the reading environment a book affords reading when a person is literate, the lighting conditions are good enough, etc. As such it is a relational integration of person-environment conditions that allow affordances to emerge. However, affordances link not brains but embodied agents with objects in the environment to engage with what is available. In the cognitivist framework, only affordances that relate to brain-structures have been emphasised. In the embodied view, however, reading involves a richer layout of affordances. When reading involves the sensing body, aesthetic judgements and reasoning go hand in hand and are in essence impossible to separate empirically. Think of the act of reading a music score. For a trained musician, a passage of a piece in adagio tempo, combined with a gradual decrease in intensity and a harmonic progression in a minor key conveys a tense or melancholic atmosphere. When the musician is playing the piece, the embodied, emotional, and aesthetic aspects of the activity constitute an indissoluble unity. While reading is indeed a heterogeneous activity, all instances of reading are to varying degrees embodied, emotional and aesthetic. An embodied-ecological approach further suggests that operations that traditionally have been considered secondary, tangential, or even detrimental are actually essential for sense-making processes involved in reading (see Trasmundi & Kukkonen, 2024; Trasmundi & Toro, 2023).

Routine human engagement with non-artistic affordances in the environment has been neglected by the field of aesthetics, which has traditionally focused on the perceptual experience of artworks (see Dickie, 1965). Nevertheless, inspired by the seminal work of John Dewey Art as Experience, an alternative movement in aesthetics called ‘everyday aesthetics’ re-evaluates what counts as aesthetic aspects, seeking to describe also ordinary products’ significant influence on our aesthetic judgements and our lives more generally. Everyday aesthetics focuses thus not so much on socially valued objects, but rather on the aesthetic attitude that we adopt when interacting with, potentially, any kind of aspect of the world. Focus is relocated from art-crafted objects to people. Or rather, focus is moving away from the object, to the relation between people and things in the world. The interest, then, lies in how, when people engage with artefacts, features that constrain our attention (nature, sounds of the ocean, taste of foods etc.) emerge. According to Ziff (1997), our routine engagement with the world around us, is motivated by practical considerations, which afford a shifting, rapid, and fragile form of attention that usually causes the aesthetic experience to decline in significance and impact. Nevertheless, even if we do not fully realise it, we are continuously making aesthetic judgements while we engage in our daily activities: perceiving things directly as pretty, boring, messy, or interesting are common aesthetic assessments (See Saito, 2007). Our objective is to bring this awareness to the forefront of people’s consciousness, highlighting the aesthetic dimensions inherent in everyday experiences both in practice and in theory.

Reading non-literary texts is one of those activities many people enjoy, and often innumerable times throughout the day. It is performed in an eminently practical attitude, and in reading research the aesthetic judgements involved are often downplayed or even overlooked. Moreover, an everyday aesthetics unfolds within a patchwork lifeworld, where aesthetic judgments intertwine with various cognitive processes in task settings. For instance, in cooking, functionality must align with olfactory and visual assessments - such as perceiving the beautiful colour combination of the vegetables at use - while maintaining accountability for the culinary outcome. Similarly, in reading, the reader navigates between task-oriented focus and aesthetic judgments of linguistic nuances, for instance. Conversely, an aesthetics of the sublime prioritises the sole task of appreciating an object, requiring an elevated perception of its intricacies. Here, aesthetic appreciation is regarded as a distinct task, complete with guidelines for appreciation and skilled judgement.

Following everyday aesthetics, aesthetic judgements are often intertwined with other tasks, and reading as our case is best understood as a multilayered activity emerging in a taskscape (Ingold, 1993). We thus tend to develop the idea that the context in which we read, the sensory modalities activated, the atmosphere or ambient in which we read, and the social norms we follow (or not follow) are all deeply interdependent with aesthetic processes. We claim that an ecological framework pivots on embodied and situated experiences, which includes cognitive-aesthetic forms of engagement, including sense-making processes in reading.

Reading as a multi-modal engagement with a situated text

In reading, we do not engage with an abstract text; we engage with a concrete materiality, which by its very nature makes multimodal engagement possible: When we read a book, we touch its pages and assess their quality more or less explicitly: is it a pleasurable feeling to touch? Is it an offset paper, a recycled paper, or a coated paper? Does it seem like a high-quality publication? We can look at the letters and their design: a sans-serif font is often used to give the text a modern and uncluttered appearance. Does it look ostentatious? We can also smell the pages and the glue that binds them. Does it smell like an old book? When we start to read it, we can make judgements about whether the story is realistic and so on and so forth (see Blau & Capetta, 2020). We can keep exploring the book’s features and allow its emergent affordances to affect our bodily engagement and continuous experiences. We are rapidly and inadvertently judging the book, its author, the topic, the editorial, etc. The particular combination of these judgements constitutes different ways of reading, enabled by a combined aesthetic-logical form of embodied engagement. Some readers are highly affected by an authentic, old book cover, some are paying less attention to the material and are more immersed in the story world, whereas others are struggling with following the flow on a digital device. The appreciation of the reading experience is the result of continuous judgments; something the reader can be trained to pay attention to with the purpose of foregrounding the aesthetic dimensions of reading and perhaps cultivate the reading experience.

By doing so, we emphasise the importance of the reading setting and readers’ lived experiences. Reading takes place in a specific setting defined by a particular socio-material environment with an underlying normativity that constrains how a reader engages with a text. While affordances do not exist a priori for the reader, their emergence depends on the interaction between the reader’s identity and the design of the environment. Certain affordances are more predisposed to emerge than others based on factors such as reading experience, environmental design, and the layout of reading material. For instance, reading a book at a library is an act that calls for concentration, silence, stillness, and so on, while reading a newspaper in a café might call for a comment about the latest news with a friend or with a stranger sitting by. We might experience the atmosphere as cozy, or as busy and messy, or as loud and festive, which are all aesthetic judgements. And in each case the experience and the process of reading are different, even if the text is the same. An ecological-embodied framework enables a focus on how multiple timescales and actual contexts impact agency and perception. This knowledge is useful, because we have the power to design and structure the environment in ways that most likely cultivates the kind of reading we aim at. For instance, a window offers the opportunity for gazing, allowing a reader to connect with a world beyond the confines of the room. While this can foster a rich imagination in relation to the text and one’s personal world, it may also lead to disruptions and mind-wandering that another reader might not find appealing. They may opt to close the door and draw the curtains instead (see Trasmundi & Toro, 2023). The ecological-embodied framework underlines the importance of how activities are dependent on structures that constrain personal and bodily engagement. However, it is not in the power of an individual to entirely control the environment. Social norms, physical constraints and other people also impact how we can navigate our environment. It all impacts how free a reader might feel to gesture, vocalise, change postures, point with a finger, take notes, look away for a while, and other embodied strategies that are essential to make sense of the text (see Trasmundi et al., 2022).

Everyday aesthetics, as we briefly presented it here, can be interpreted also as an invitation to develop an aesthetic attitude that makes us more aware of the aesthetic processes that pervade our everyday lives, and that deeply influence our behaviour and our worldview (Saito, 2007). This same invitation can be applied to the case of reading. Even though reading is an activity that we often perform as a means towards something else -reading the instructions of how to build an Ikea furniture, the map in a metro station, etc.- it is important to notice that underlying that practical engagement there is always a dimension of aesthetic judgements colouring the activity. Developing an aesthetic attitude that allows us to notice and appreciate those aesthetic dynamics is a skill that can be developed, and by doing so we can enrich our daily lives and daily reading activities, without giving up on the practical or engaged attitude that characterises our being-in-the-world.

The aesthetic attitude

The notion of ‘aesthetic attitude’ is based on the idea that every object that is being perceived, thought, sensed, or imagined inherently engages a person’s aesthetic attention (see Stolnitz, 1969). This implies that an object or idea is always apprehended through the lens of our embodied experience in the world. No perception can be devoid of an emotional and evaluative stance; thus, perception is inherently (inter)subjective, never purely objective. Though some aesthetic attitude theories still conceive the person as mainly a contemplator, everyday aesthetics proposes a notion of aesthetic attitude in which the person experiences the aesthetic aspects of the objects in the environment by actively engaging with them.

The very notion of aesthetic attitude is paradoxical within the everyday aesthetics movement: how to heighten the aesthetic aspects in our perception of the environment without it losing its ‘everydayness’? (see Leddy, 1995) The aesthetic attitude is not about turning our everyday life into a highly aesthetic experience -which is impossible-, but about enriching our everyday life through an educated attention that discovers in routinary acts and objects an intrinsic appreciation that goes hand in hand with their practicality. It is, in Saito’s terms, about ‘(…) nurturing this awareness of the neglected, but familiar, aesthetic gems of everyday life (…)’ (2007, p. 50).

If the aesthetic attitude is an education of attention, it is gradually achieved through the practice of a specific openness to the otherwise hidden details of ordinary activities and objects. This training could involve the effort of slowing down, focusing on the details we usually overlook, playing and exploring, and sometimes consciously trying to find the unfamiliar in the familiar.

Therefore, when it comes to reading, developing an aesthetic attitude contributes to generating the conditions for the reader to enjoy aesthetic experiences more explicitly. How do aesthetic experiences occur in reading and what are their significance for our understanding and practicing of reading?

A gradual conception of aesthetic experiences

The common ground that links Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experiences and the everyday aesthetics movement consists of a strong defense of the idea that the field of the aesthetic is not limited to our experience of exceptional artworks. Rather, our routine engagement with daily activities is already aesthetically loaded. However, a tension emerges between Dewey and everyday aesthetics when it comes to defining the object of study. While everyday aesthetics foregrounds the aesthetic judgements and processes that permeate all embodied engagements, Dewey focuses on the most heightened forms of experience that corresponds to rounded unitary experiences with very specific formal features. Inspired by both theories, in the following we propose conceptualising aesthetic experiences as gradual processes in which the experience oscillates back and forth in complexity and open-endedness, and the focus shifts between the aesthetic character and the practical goal shaping the engagement with the object that enables the emergence of a landscape of affordances. Consequently, at times, we encounter the cohesive unity of an intensified experience, while at other moments, the process is experienced as more formal and neutral. We end this section by addressing the significance of emphasising the potential of aesthetic experiences for reading.

Ecological affordances: humans live in a cognitive-aesthetic world

According to Dewey, experience emerges in the adaptation of the living being to the conditions of its surroundings to reach a temporary equilibrium: ‘The nature of experience is determined by the essential conditions of life. (…) Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it -either through effort or by some happy chance’ (AE, 12). In enactive terms, the agent is naturally capable of evaluating its own situation and act accordingly: if it is going well, to preserve it, and if it is deteriorating, to look for ways to counteract the forces that are leading it away from equilibrium.⁴

Affordances emerge in the interaction between a person with a particular history, skillset and desires and her environment (see Chemero, 2009; Gibson, 1979). Thus, the person’s need for equilibrium with the environment guides the field of affordances to emerge as an uneven distribution of salient solicitations and uninviting affordances for the agent (see Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014). In line with Dewey’s ideas, we claim that this natural capacity of all living beings to regain or preserve an equilibrium with the environment by engaging with the world at hand constitutes the seed of our -human- aesthetic experiences and explains the aesthetic component of the affordances we enact on a daily basis. We might perceive a room as cozy, which means that the enacted affordances are those related to pleasant activities, like an armchair to sit on, a book to read, a cup of tea to drink, etcetera. Or we might perceive a room as hostile, cold, and messy, and the enacted affordances that constitute our perception of the room are entirely different. We feel compelled to tidy it up, or to adjust the heating. In other words, aesthetic judgements like a room being cozy or hostile are associated to specific affordances and these affordances are, therefore, aesthetically loaded. Following Saito (2022), we claim that affordances are aesthetic affordances insofar as they are associated to our everyday aesthetic judgements of our situation and our umwelt.⁵

A routine activity may be initially experienced by the person as slightly aesthetic, in the sense just described: it is associated with prereflective aesthetic judgements about the situation. The person’s engagement with the affordances can be sustained in time with a practical goal in mind, either through the person’s effort or because the situation calls for it. The affordances guiding the activity can grow in intensity, and their aesthetic character may become more evident or relevant. If the aesthetic aspect of the affordances is salient enough, the person might take the time to engage with them just for the sake of it. The practical goal of the activity might recede to the background while the person explores the affordances, plays with them, and engages with them in alternative ways. The activity then becomes more open-ended, more playful and exploratory. This exploration might allow related aspects of the environment to emerge as affordances for joyful reading, and the person finds herself engaging with several affordances at the same time. There’s rhythm in such an activity, because the person is actively responding to and enacting affordances and letting the situation unfold. The aesthetic aspect of the affordances can at times be at the forefront of the situation and take over the dynamic, and it may then recede to the background to give space for the practical goal, in a dialectic that enriches the whole activity.

Each person engages with her environment in a way that is both constrained by social and personal dynamics, allowing a particular layout of affordances to emerge. In real life, multiple affordances emerge simultaneously, forcing the person to make continuous judgements and foreground and background affordances on the fly. This engagement is crucial for understanding how, in our case, some readers experience the activity as rich and open-ended whereas others feel trapped and struggle with even managing the reading. We suggest focusing on how readers are (un)able to navigate the landscape of affordances and modulate the tensions when affordances clash. In the previous paragraph we described how a person engages with the aesthetic aspect of foregrounded affordances. However, it might also be the case, that the reader can learn to enact an aesthetic attitude by attending differently to the environment. If nothing prompts the reader’s attention, she can modulate the pace of reading or start reading aloud to make the voice a real empirical phenomenon that affords a different kind of experience than silent reading, for instance. In that sense, the landscape of affordances is an interactive, dynamical phenomenon that both constrains action-perception and can be sculpted from the person’s action-perception.

How do students read an excerpt of Goethe’s Faust?

To give an empirical example we refer to an ethnographic study where university students read Goethe’s Faust (Trasmundi & Kukkonen, 2024). Different embodied strategies were employed to modulate the landscape of affordances. In one case a student switched between silent reading and reading aloud. When she was interviewed after the reading, she reported that: |

I do it because it is another language. […] the fact that I hear it – the case that it is not just a voice inside my head, but I actually also hear it, allows me to focus my attention; that my thoughts so to speak are moved in the background […] but I could also do it in Danish, because I like to use multiple senses in some way to…, well then that is the only thing I need to focus on, and I am not going to remember what I will be doing tomorrow […] which I often do when I read inside my head (Trasmundi & Kukkonen, 2024).

What we conclude from this report, is that the aesthetic and functional are inseparable aspects of reading experience. Her multimodal reading strategy allows her to keep enjoying reading even when it is difficult in terms of understanding.

In another case we observe how the aesthetic sensibility develops and changes over time. A student reads in an old book, that she has read years before. In the book, there are traces of her previous and current markings, made by different writing tools. When we asked about the different marking techniques used the student replied: ‘I used this book in high school too, and I just realise I wrote with a ballpoint. I would never do that anymore. It looks really terrible—to see the marks in the book, but I was probably not thinking about that back then’. (Trasmundi & Kukkonen, 2024). This statement further highlights how aesthetic judgements are both related to individual experience and conventionalised practice of judging the aestheticisation of marks, and as the person gains experience her aesthetic awareness develops.

The significance of engaging with aesthetic affordances in reading

By developing and practicing an aesthetic attitude, based on the education of attention (see Gibson, 1979, Saito, 2007), we get better at identifying the aesthetic potentials of the affordances we enact and engage with. This idea is the main contribution of everyday aesthetics. It is not about turning every practical engagement into a heightened aesthetic experience, but about recognising that even the most routine or basic activity is aesthetically permeated and that we can wilfully bring the aesthetic dimension of it to the fore alongside the practical goal that motivated the activity in the first place. The practical consequence of refining and putting into practice this aesthetic attitude is an enriched experience of the affordances of the environment and a more open and explorative way of engaging, modulating, and shaping them.

A given task might initially seem to consist of engaging with a reduced set of affordances with a rather clear normativity: say, this is how it is done according to custom or previous instructions. However, if the person sustains the activity long enough, and has developed an aesthetic attitude, the situation can become more complex and richer. This is what we tried to describe through the case of reading. However, it requires that the person is willing to slow down and investigate their own attentional processes. For instance, with reference to the previous case example, a group of students were assigned to read an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust for class. Indeed, the task outlined by the lecturer required the students to recount the narrative and provide a literary analysis based on their comprehension of the text (here, in terms of linguistic information processing). Notice that little attention is given to the act of reading itself. Instead, focus is on what we should do with a text after the reading, providing no guidance on how students should interact with the text or how factors like bodily posture and the materiality of the text influence their reading experience. We argue that there is a need to shift the focus towards the act of reading itself, rather than solely on post-reading activities, which tend to be more analytical in nature.

Engaging with the aesthetic aspects of the affordances involved in reading and allowing them to become the focus of the reading activity, at least for a while, opens up the space for the reader to explore the unlimited possibilities in reading. And, by engaging with them, exploring them and even by struggling with them, the reader refines her aesthetic attitude and enriches her repertoire of embodied strategies that can be enacted when faced with other texts. The field of relevant affordances associated with reading activities has expanded, and the reader becomes skilled at trying different ways to make sense of the text. As Trasmundi et al. (2024) show, expert readers develop multiple sorts of embodied strategies to deal with challenges that might appear when reading a difficult text. The readers structure the environment to make it easier for them to engage with the right affordances and to make the transitions smoother between the activities involved in reading (e.g. scanning, writing, highlighting, etcetera). Readers also sometimes focus on one sentence or one word for a longer period, intrigued or attracted by its aesthetic character, disregarding the rest of the text. A non-linear reading is also a strategy developed by expert readers, leafing through pages, or going back and forth. Lastly, in cases where comprehension is especially difficult, readers can make use of other sense modalities to help, by reading out loud and feeling the words in the mouth, listening to the rhythm of the text, which can constrain the attention and allow them to focus temporarily on the aesthetic aspects of the text even beyond its literal meaning.

Conclusion

The dialogue among pragmatism, ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science around aesthetic experiences is very recent, despite the conceptual foundations that they share. In this paper, we have aimed at integrating insights from these three fields to foreground the aesthetic elements involved in our daily engagements with affordances in the environment, and specifically in reading.

By foregrounding the aesthetic layer underlying sense-making processes in reading, we aimed at accomplishing two interrelated goals: strengthening the theoretical basis for an embodied, ecological, and situated conception of reading, and fostering an aesthetic attitude towards reading that allows the reader to approach it as a more open-ended and rich activity, to explore for alternative affordances in reading, and in that way enhance the overall experience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

JT and SBT are funded by the Danish Research Council, project 1130-00008A ‘The imagining power of reading’.

Notes

1 See Carroll 2010, pp 105–106 for a discussion about aesthetic experiences derived from non-artistic objects, for example, nature.

2 For a discussion on the seemingly subjective relativism underlying everyday aesthetics, see Soucek 2009.

3 In the background of this discussion is the demarcation problem: how to distinguish art from non-art. Although we will not contribute to this discussion here, we can say that for the purpose of this article, and in line with Carroll’s own position, when we talk about artworks, we refer to paradigmatic cases: a poem, a painting, a novel, etc. There is also the question about whether the experience of the recipe can be considered aesthetically loaded or only affectively loaded (see Vara Sánchez 2022).

4 These ideas constitute the conceptual basis of enactive conceptions of life and agency. See Rietveld 2008, Di Paolo 2005, Thompson 2007.

5 Vara Sanchez’s conceives aesthetic affordances as those that lead the person that engages with them to reflect on their own life and self-narrative. Aesthetic affordances are, according to him, “a particular type of affective affordance, for every aesthetic experience is also an affective one, but not vice versa” (2022, p. 77. See also Vara Sánchez 2023). However, since we derive inspiration from everyday aesthetics, in which the conception of the aesthetic includes more basic, and less cognitively demanding processes, our conception of aesthetic affordance is less cognitively complex. We agree with Vara Sánchez that in complex forms of aesthetic experiences the aesthetic affordances leading the activity make the person reflect on their own self-narrative, habits, memories, etc., but we don’t restrict our notion of aesthetic affordances to only those scenarios.