Aesthesis and Perceptronium: On the Entanglement of Sensation, Cognition, and Matter by Alexander Wilson (review)

In Aesthesis and Perceptronium, Alexander Wilson seeks to articulate a contemporary philosophy of science consistent with a speculative metaphysics inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. A radical aesthetics, social psychology, and politics may emerge, Wilson insists, if we extend the grounding insight of eighteenth-century aesthetics, that sensation and knowledge could not be strictly separated, by "[r]eimagining aesthetics beyond the human" in ways that "com[e] to terms with the inherently entangled nature of sensation, cognition, and matter" (5). Because "[a]s living beings, we are irreducibly perspectival, asymmetrical, and oriented within the broader structures and processes of reality," experience and cognition are "always conditioned by a deep structure of nested transcendental constraints" which "evolve in time" and thus have histories. Starting from these premises, Wilson hopes, in emulation of Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism," to describe "the conditions of real experience, rather than [in the manner of Kant] merely possible experience" (5, emphasis Wilson's). Delineating the evolutionary history of constraints, Wilson insists, will dispel illusions about their fixity, for interpretative procedures associated with poststructuralist critique, "explaining biases and perspectives through … accounts of their genesis," will disclose the scientific-metaphysical primacy of change, flux, instability, which will then enable us to "expand our degree of freedom within these very constraints" (6).

Wilson summarizes the results of this project, in which "aesthesis" is considered as "a process inseparable from the production of material subjectivities in the wild, beyond the human" (207), in his book's conclusion: "belief that the stabilities we observe offer some kind of purchase on reality, a hope that they are more than just random flukes," is "rigorously unfounded," so that "all practical reasoning depends" on "superstitious constraint," for evolution "favors the creature that believes in the stability and invariance of the necessities regimenting the real" (210–11). Art, however, "does not merely show us the indistinct; by enframing the act of enframing, by revealing the contingency of this act, the artwork can also be said to challenge the closure of the correlation between subject and object. It inserts itself into the flow, causing a disturbance, diffracting subjectivity into its contingent variations, and collapsing, if only for a moment, the objectivity aesthesis inevitably instantiates" (211).

The first thing one might say is that this account of art privileges or totalizes an aspect of art, its lifting of the veil of familiarity through making us aware of how the eye half-creates what it half-perceives. This of course has been much noted since the Romantic era. "[E]nframing the act of enframing" is precisely what Romantic irony, as formulated by Goethe, Schiller, and Friedrich Schlegel, seeks to do. Moreover, questioning the regimenting of the real by excessive stability and repressive invariance is something all critical, iconoclastic art does—whether it is Blake's "prophetic" poetry, or that of the Hebrew poets he saw as his models. The stultification that needs unsettling may reflect naturalized bourgeois conventionality, as in Flaubert or Sinclair Lewis, or the imposition of Stalinist ideology, as in Akhmatova and Bulgakov.

Wilson's book is not notable for its recognition and valorization of "enframing the act of enframing." This is a staple of Romantic and avant-garde aesthetics, though recognition of paradox and celebration of the liberating, rejuvenating effects of subversion figure in oral literatures around the globe. Rather, what is notable in Wilson's work is the way his totalizing, exclusionary version of this aesthetics is itself enframed by an account of the human condition embedded within a no less totalizing, exclusionary metaphysics (in which what is disjunctive and fracturing is always more important and "real" than what is affiliative and relationally cohesive, though on a basic atomic and molecular level, it is hard to see how there could be one set of these pairs without the other). Immediately after the passage cited above, Wilson writes, "In the realm of human affairs, art echoes the same principle of variation...