Symbiotechnical Taste: A Festival of Finkian Phenomena in the Post-Anthropocene
Symbiotechnical Taste: A Festival of Finkian Phenomena in the Post-Anthropocene

Summary/Abstract: This article proposes a reconceptualization of gustatory aesthetics beyond the anthropocentric paradigm that has historically marginalized taste as a ‘minor sense’. Drawing on Eugen Fink’s phenomenology of fundamental human phenomena – death, labor, domination, love, and play – we argue that taste attains its full aesthetic and ontological significance only when these phenomena are gathered together in the event of a festival. Contemporary discourses on the post-anthropocene, flat ontologies, and symbiotechnical alliances provide the framework for extending Fink’s analysis beyond the human. By integrating Fichte’s concept of mutual recognition (Aufforderung) and recent debates in new materialism and posthumanist aesthetics, we develop a model of ‘symbiotechnical taste’ in which human agents enter into cybernetic alliances with non-human actors – artificial intelligence, sensor technologies, microbial cultures, ecological systems – to overcome the limitations of individual gustatory judgment. This model transforms taste from a subjective aesthetic judgment into a relational, co-constitutive practice of world-making, wherein the Finkian festival re-emerges as the event of gathering distributed agencies into a shared gustatory experience.

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