A Return to the Senses: Introduction

The essays collected in this Symposium are a selection of some of the various research projects presented at the first international Theory & Event conference held on May 7-9, 2009 at Trent University (Peterborough, Canada) entitled "A Return to the Senses: Political Theory and the Sensorium." Though distinct and diverse, each of these papers – and, indeed, the conversations they spurred – explicitly attempt a reworking of sense; a reworking, that is, of the relationship between the complexity of the human sensorium and the life of politics, variously conceived.

"A reworking of sense" is a phrase that Kam Shapiro introduces in his contribution to this Symposium. It is an apt phrase, we believe, that helps characterize the provocations put forth by each of our contributors. Such re-workings are undoubtedly ambitious, though the reader of these essays will acknowledge that there is no singularly ambitious agenda to which each of the writers might prescribe. Rather, what we affront in reading these essays are diverse interventions on how we might re-imagine and reorient our attentions towards the human sensorium and its adventures in political life. The re-working of sense that the authors put on display might, in this respect, be read as a displacement of our habits of indexicality; a displacement, that is, of the linearity that confirms concrete correspondences between our perceptions of the world and the meanings we give to those perceptions.

The symposium leads with Roger Cook's "Democratic Dandyism: Aesthetics and the Political Cultivation of Sens" which offers us a genealogy of dandyism in the modern period. From its eighteenth century inheritance of the "macaroni" – the name given to those aristocrats who would return from the Italian Grand Tour adorning themselves with the fashions and the culinary tastes of the culture they had encountered – to Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol, Cook develops the idea of democratic dandyism by reworking the polysemy of the term "sens" itself. "How can a politics of sens inspire a democratic desire for distinction?" asks Cook. His answer is neither specific nor programmatic. Rather, it is exploratory from historical, aesthetic, and theoretical points of view; and through his explorations, we are invited to refigure how our indexical assumptions regarding the dialectical tensions between distinction and equality can be reworked through the cultural practices of democratic dandyism.

Mark Coté's "Technics and the Human Sensorium: Rethinking Media Theory through the Body" explores an equally provocative indexical displacement: Rather than sustaining the conventional assertion that media and technology are supplements to the human, Coté affirms that "sensory perception is only ever calibrated in relation to technics" and that human life has always been indistinct from technological and mediatic modes of existence. The fundamental assumption that governs much political thought – that there is a distinctly human body and that that body is distinct because of its capacity to use technics – is put under pressure by Coté through his insistence that the internal/external binary implicit in this view of technics is unsustainable. Rather, he concludes, humans are always-already transductively related to technics; this is the lesson of technogenesis that makes us face up to the fact that despite the ambitions of our most enthusiastic political imaginings, we have never been simply human, but have always been human somethings.

In her essay entitled, "Harriet Jacobs's "Excrescences": Aesthetics and Politics in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," Theo Davis approaches the issue of the human sensorium and its object world from a different perspective: the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs. Marking the insufficiency of reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as testimony, Davis argues that Jacobs's text evinces a multi-generic style of writing characteristic of the sphere of black-American writing during Jacobs's time. But more importantly, Davis gives weight to the ornamental in Jacobs's text as something other than instances of authorial self-expression – as if to be free is equivalent to being able to express one's self. Here Davis offers us an indexical displacement of the relation between freedom and selfhood: Harriet Jacobs's ornamental "excrescences," we are shown, challenge the image we have of literature as expressive of intention and, instead, work to call attention to the author's presence. The entirety of Davis's argument is given sustenance via her turn – at a critical moment in her essay – to Michel Foucault's treatments of the ornamental; a turn that Davis admits is somewhat perverse. The contemporaniety of Jacobs to Foucault, Davis shows, betrays a shared inheritance of reading both authors as committed to meaning as embodied in form. Here the hermeneutic project of indexing objects that are meaningful in order to unpack their signification so that the asseveration of meaning is equivalent to a political act is displaced by Davis's explorations of an aesthetics of excrescences. In the end, her ambition is to acknowledge a domain of value in the aesthetics of politics not reducible to instrumental interest but nonetheless "articulated without being precisely locatable or identifiable in a consciousness, the form, or even the historical and social era."

Dean Mathiowetz's contribution entitled, "Feeling Luxury: Invidious Political Pleasures and the Sense of Touch," is explicitly concerned with the tactility of indexicality. More specifically, Mathiowetz asks us to shift our perceptual horizons and to think the history of luxury in the modern period as complicit with haptic sensations. He begins with the wonderful example of the "I am Rich" iPhone app as an initial way of grappling with luxury's hapticity; Mathiowetz uses this discussion to open up his own luxurious engagement with Adam Smith's theory of value so as to retrieve the place of luxury at the site of political economy's historical emergence. Like Davis's explorations of Harriot Jacobs's excrescences, Mathiowetz's ambition here is to think of luxury in non-instrumental terms and to consider political economy as a discipline not entirely reducible to the utilitarian demands that have been accredited to it. That is, what Mathiowetz asks of his readers is to think with our senses in order to imagine the possibility of a mode of value not reducible to use. Mathiowetz's concern regarding luxury's hapticity might therefore be read as displacing the history of liberalism's possessive individuals. Here concerns over the clutch of possessiveness are replaced by an engagement with the organoleptic assignments and structures that are the matters of course for our understandings of the disjunctures between person and world, between sensation and reference.

Kam Shapiro's essay, "Critical Feelings and Pleasurable Associations," is explicitly concerned with one of the most formidable challenges of our contemporary political condition: the possibility of forging "gratifying associations with diverse populations under conditions of rapid social change." In this respect, Shapiro announces that his intent is to read the poetry of William Wordsworth as instructive example to those seeking to formulate "a philosophy of the virtual to a democratic politics." Implicitly, Shapiro is concerned with the sentiment of sympathy as a critical feeling, and he turns to scenes of instruction in Wordsworth's poetry as a way of approaching what a critical sympathy might feel like. Shapiro's engagement with Wordsworth is at once layered with complexity and punctured with intensity – and for this reason, it resists any impetus to summary. But one theme does stand out in his discussion: what Wordsworth's poetry affords isn't so much a sentimental education as a way of combining critique and pleasure such that sympathy is not reducible to common attachments and critical feelings are equally not reducible to vitriolic detachment. Rather, Wordsworth's poetry affords techniques for combining the waves of attachment and detachment at once vital and complicit to modern political life.

After reading Christina Tarnopolsky's essay, "Plato's Politics of Distributing and Disrupting the Sensible," it becomes difficult to retain our inherited picture of Plato as a critic and disparager of democratic life. Tarnopolsky's indexical displacement, in other words, begins from the beginning; and in the beginning is the always elusive Platonic logos. On her reading, though, "far from inaugurating the rule of logos, [the Republic] actually contests the Socratic privileging of logos over both affect and sensation." In these pages, and in her careful and erudite analysis, Tarnopolsky guides us through the ways in which the Republic enacts a democratic aesthetico-political activity of a reconfiguration of sensation. At stake, here, is the willingness on Tarnopolsky's part to read the Republic not just as making an argument for an aesthetics of politics; but as an instance of an aesthetics of politics. That is, the Republic for Tarnopolsky is not to be read as a continuous distribution of epistemological arguments about the just political order according to Plato, but as acts of aesthetic stagings through which Plato can put on display a series of characters (Socrates, Adeimantus, and Glaucon) all of whom are responsible for articulating (in diverse ways) "a perfectly incontestable distribution of the sensible that evacuates the space of politics by rigidly defining the positions and roles from which a person can even count as making sense or partaking in meaningful communication." Tarnopolsky's indexical displacement is that this view of politics – i.e., politics as an incontestable distribution of the sensible – is what Plato diagnoses and disrupts in the Republic.

None of the essays in this symposium point to an answer regarding the nature of political theory's sensorium; their gestures of indexical displacement resist such a confident stance. Rather, through each of their own interventions, and in their unique turnings, the relationship between the human sense world and the political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions of life are brought together in an unprecedented manner. This collection of essays thus amounts to a rich and diverse field of political and cultural theory research that combines philosophical analysis with cultural sensibilities, imagistic attentions with sonorous apprehensions, and an account of modern political life that engages the complexities of multiple media – digital, analogical, textual, filmic, and so forth – all of which makes one thing certain: to overlook the sensorial dimensions of political life is to refuse to imagine the possibility of multiple forms of political engagement and thus to refuse the plurivalence of political resistance that the political life of sensation affords.