Where boundaries are dissolved, and the immediacy of a reciprocal relation is experienced

The interaction between organism and environment has been, since the 20th century, central to modern theoretical biology, exploring how organisms, through action-perception circuits, establish a relation of balance with the environment (Uexküll 1933). In extreme situations, though, the relation becomes anti-logical and it is necessary to continuously search for new balances, starting from the experience of the pathic dimension of one’s existence, in which acting and enduring are inextricably bound (Weizsäcker 1947). In such cases, in particular, the boundary between oneself and the other vanishes and one finds oneself in a sort of a presentational immediacy, that is the vivid enjoyment of an immediate sense of experience in which the reciprocal relation comes to the foreground as opposed to the gathering of subjective and objective polarities. Attention is no more paid to the perceptive salience of external objects, but is entertained in the relationality of the field, dances with-in-towards-around the environment in its own blooming (Manning, Massumi 2014), while perception becomes aptic, primarily grasping the relation of correspondence that establishes and precedes any distinction between subject and object (Perullo 2022). This is particularly evident in people with ASD, capable of lingering in the texture of the world, establishing a relation of inter-affective resonance with the environment (Entertainment). In such a perspective aesthetics, as the science of sensitive knowledge, cannot be indifferent to those who, more than anybody else, can perceive and let themselves become involved in the atmospheres radiating and who, in the coming together of subject and object, release their expressive potential (Böhme 2016, Griffero 2017), suggesting different ways of navigating the environment. The experience of such a resonance with the environment makes it possible to go beyond the anthropocentric vision in order to develop a greater environmental awareness that can cope with a Body-World making the difference a resource. There is therefore an urgency to become responsible for one’s being-nature and being-body in that they have never been given permanently once and for all, but whose full deployment can be approached devising good practices for the design of living environments that take into account the different ways of perceiving and moving into space (Arakawa, Gins 2002). They aim to establish how the qualities of living environments are perceived by the body, in order to appreciate slowness, diversity, create the conditions for the expression of everybody’s talents, not only in spite of but also thanks to one’s own vulnerabilities.