Co-operative Aesthetics. A Quasi-Manifesto for the 21st Century

The idea of co-operativity underlying this book runs on a spectrum spanning the dynamics typically found in elementary – but complex, institutive – structures of experience, and those informing current practices of organization of reality that are also oriented by a humanistic, ecological and socially engaged impulse. This kind of co-operativity both recognizes an anti-isolationist foundation to experience and implements this same principle in situations where it seems to be lacking or not sufficiently perspicuous. This book gathers some of the most relevant contemporary voices, both of “theorists” and of “operators” of a co-operativity that, in a very broad sense, can be characterized as an aesthetic dimension of experience or that, in turn, somehow co-operates with it. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this quasi-manifesto simply lays out the beginning of a path that, hopefully, will involve more and more fields. Co-operativity is, by its very nature, polyphonic. And polyphony typically preserves the specificity of individual voices, which converge but do not necessarily coincide. Co-operativity, therefore, will be addressed from various perspectives and with different approaches, within this field community, by professionals involved in the drafting of this “quasi-manifesto.