Abstract

This paper develops a cross-cultural framework for materialist aesthetics by arguing that aesthetic experience is not a private judgment of a detached subject, challenging the Kantian legacy that has long dominated Western aesthetics, but an emergent property of spatial, social, and material entanglements. The paper brings Western phenomenology (Ponty's embodied perception), New Materialism (Jane Bennett's ‘vibrant matter’, Karen Barad's ‘agential realism’), and Critical Spatial Theory (Henri Lefebvre's production of space) into dialogical conversation with classical Indian aesthetic traditions as interpreted by contemporary scholars- particularly the rasa theory (Abhinavagupta's aesthetic emotion, as elaborated by V.K. Chari), dhvani theory (Anandavardhana's suggestion, analyzed by Arindam Chakrabarti), and anukarana (Parul Dave Mukherji's re-reading of mimesis as material practice). The analysis proceeds through a series of philosophical interventions. First, drawing on James Gibson's affordances, Bennett's thing-power, and Mukherji's anukarana, it prioritizes the material qualities of objects over purely symbolic interpretations, revealing how matter possesses agency that constrains and enables aesthetic experience. Second, it examines how these object-agents function within spatial and social networks (through Lefebvre's spatial triad, Pierre Bourdieu's field theory, and the rasa theory components of vibhava [determinants] and anubhava [consequents] as analyzed by Kapila Vatsyayan) to either stabilize or destabilize shared meanings and social arrangements. Third, the paper addresses cultural power through the orienting concepts of figure and ground, (drawing on Gestalt psychology and Jacques Rancière's ‘distribution of the sensible’), while questioning the universalizing assumptions of rasa theory's sadharanikarana through Mukherji's postcolonial critique. The argument is grounded throughout in the contemporary artistic practice of Vivan Sundaram and Abir Karmakar, whose work exemplifies how spatial, social, and material entanglements produce and circulate aesthetic experience. Ultimately, this paper contends that a materialist aesthetics, enriched by cross-cultural dialogue and focused on relationality and distributed agency, offers a more robust and politically salient model for understanding the pervasive role of aesthetic experience in shaping contemporary life than approaches centered on subjective judgment or symbolic interpretation alone.