Political Theory and the Sensorium

Political theory has for the past ten years or so witnessed a growing interest in the relationship between the sensorium and politics. ¹ Spurred by a variety of reasons, including insights from other fields such as neuroscience and new media studies, the interest expands on a number of previous developments in political theory. As a first approximation, one could thus say that the “sensorial turn” represents a continuation of feminist and phenomenological approaches, which criticized liberalism and other classical paradigms of politics for disavowing the role of embodied experience in political life. Like the feminist-phenomenological approaches on which it builds, the sensorial turn sees such a disavowal as inhibiting, in particular when it comes to pressing issues regarding justice, ideology, and power. Unlike its predecessors, however, the sensorial turn does not replace the disavowal with an emphasis on either social discourse or bodily integrity, but instead seeks to highlight the netherworld of affect and perception that both underpin and undermine the appearance of all sentient existence. The result is a new set of questions for the study of political life. No longer are we asked to determine which entities are most likely to secure and manage the desire for sovereignty; instead, we are encouraged to consider the processes of becoming that both precede and exceed this desire. How do sensorial forces change over time? What kinds of practices make political agents more perceptible to such change? Are some modes of the sensorium more conducive to democratic politics than others?

The aim of this special issue is to track how the sensorial turn’s engagement with these and other questions has emerged over the course of the more than forty years that Political Theory has been published. Showcasing five articles from the journal’s rich online archive, the issue hopes to achieve three things concomitantly: (1) to clarify how the sensorial turn has emerged from within the broader field of political theory, including the history of political thought; (2) to identify lines of continuity and discontinuity across older and newer engagements with the sensorium, in particular with regard to divergent accounts of how to study the relationship between politics and the sensorium; and (3) to identify new areas of research that might inspire future discussions about political theory and the sensorium.

To orient the discussion of these three points, the following may be a useful working definition of the relationship between politics and the sensorium. Aiming to foreground the sum of sensory environments underpinning any lived experience of the world, the sensorial turn encourages us to approach the sensorium as a multilayered phenomenon that spans all aspects of sentient existence, including the way in which touch and other sensory inputs elicit affects, emotions, and perceptions. According to most studies, this elicitation is not reducible to a physiological law but rather hinges on the interplay between a body’s biological makeup and the surrounding institutions, practices, and traditions. ² Proponents of the sensorial turn thus suggest that the most important thing to note about the relationship between politics and the sensorium is how it depicts sentient existence as a multiplicity of forces that work with and against each other. Some times this collaboration makes the relationship between politics and the sensorium akin to a smooth space in which bodies fuse and come together in a flow of shared experiences; at other times, the forces are more divisive, creating a situation of conflict and disagreement. In both cases, however, the sensorial turn can be seen as a rejection of the culture–nature divide that has characterized political theory and the rest of the humanities for the last seventy-five years or so. From the perspective of the sensorial turn, the most important thing is not whether sentient existence is either “naturally given” or “socially constructed,” but rather how we might come to appreciate the imbrications and resonances that cut across all layers of embodied experience. To achieve this, the sensorial turn proposes a dual perspective, one in which appeals to nature and appeals to culture are equally prominent.

As an elaboration of this dual perspective, we might say that the sensorial turn entails at least two models of analysis, both of which explicate how and why the sensorium matters to political theory. One model—the “flow” model—draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of micropolitics in order to show how sentient existence emerges from below the threshold of consciousness, enabling a range of connections and intensities that do not fit into our existing categories of identity and difference. ³ On the flow model, the emphasis is thus on sentient existence as a multiplicity that embodies the potential to pluralize the ways in which bodies and discourses express themselves in this or that context. This emphasis on pluralization is countered by the second model—the “partition” model—which draws on Rancière’s concept of the “partition of the sensible” in order to clarify how the State and other political formations work to divide and frame the sensorium in ways that make society recognize some but not other modes of sentient existence as legitimate. ⁴ Rather than focusing on the flows of pluralization, the second model thus emphasizes bodies and discourses as internally divided phenomena that not only interrupt but also reestablish perceptions of belonging in any given context. The debate between these two models of analysis continues to be an important focal point for any one interested in the relationship between politics and the sensorium. Still, we should be careful not to miss a fundamental agreement between them, in particular when it comes to why the sensorial turn matters to political theory. For both models, the answer to this question follows from how the sensorium links the discussion of politics to the embodied nature of lived experience, including how we perceive and engage with issues concerning justice, ideology, and power. Without recognizing this linkage, the two models agree, political theory will never become as relevant and poignant as it could and indeed should be.

Whether or not this wager bears fruit is a recurrent theme in the five articles included in this special issue. ⁵ The first article by Judith Shklar, published in 1973 in the first volume of Political Theory, draws on Hegel’s critique of subjectivism in order to explicate the normative challenges related to the study of politics and the sensorium. As Shklar reads him, Hegel’s critique centers on subjectivism’s reliance on pleasure and how this feeling produces an unsubstantiated mode of selfhood in which the pleasure-seeker negates her own existence by relying on whatever satisfaction the pleasure-giver can provide. This, Shklar notes, is not unlike Goethe’s Faust who found pleasure but had to give up his own existence: “In finding his pleasure, he lost himself” (261). ⁶ Shklar’s concern in the article included here is not to adjudicate the validity of this claim, but rather to trace its possible implications for later developments in the history of Western thought. Thus, going along with Hegel, moving from Greek hedonism to Christianity’s “law of the heart” to Roman virtue and German romanticism, Shklar clarifies why the relationship between politics and the sensorium may pose a normative problem. If we see the sensorium as constitutive of subjectivity, and if this leads to a negation of existence, then we may not have the normative resources needed to create a viable political community. Shklar is clear about the impasse that this challenge produces, in particular given Hegel’s own conceptualization of politics and the sensorium. As she puts it in conclusion, “Hegel was in no position to suggest alternatives. . . . He accepted the circumstances that produced subjectivity and he cursed it as an aberration” (283).

Shklar’s later writings suggest that this way of posing the challenge may not be the only one. ⁷ Still, the way she explicates Hegel’s critique helps to explain why much of political theory in the 1970s and 1980s turned away from the sensorium. Quite simply, it did not seem feasible to generate knowledge about the sensorium that would substantiate its relevance with regard to many of the most important issues in political theory. With a few exceptions, this seems to have been the predominant view until the early 1990s, when two alternative strategies begin to emerge. ⁸ The first strategy, represented here by Michael Shapiro’s 1993 article “Eighteenth Century Intimations of Modernity,” disputes the rejection of the sensorium by showing how attention to sentient existence interrupts the assumption of a “stable meaning structure for things” (290), something that in turn reveals two “radically different ethico-political legacies for modernity” (274). The second strategy, represented by Patchen Markell’s 2000 article “Making Affect Safe for Democracy?” does not so much juxtapose one legacy to another as it tries to show how mainstream theory “rests on a misleading picture of the dynamics of political affect” (39). ⁹ Thus, whereas the first strategy aims to counter the turn away from the sensorium by sending political theory down a different path altogether, the second strategy insists on connecting the sensorium with those accounts of politics that have tried to relegate it to the unexamined background. The crisscrossing of these two strategies adds to the two models of analysis discussed above, and it thus represents an important feature of the sensorial turn in political theory. Given how the sensorial turn works with and against mainstream theory, we might even say that it not only represents yet another twist in the long history of political thought, but in addition, and more importantly, it aims to reexamine the basic categories of politics by interrupting how we have come to understand political theory. It is, if you will, the supplement that simultaneously sustains and undermines our image of what political theory can teach us about the very study of politics.

The final two articles included in this issue help to substantiate this view of the sensorial turn. For Romand Coles in his 2004 article “Moving Democracy,” the sensorial turn shifts the analytical orientation of political theory. Based on his own involvement with the grassroots network Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), Coles criticizes the literature on social movements for limiting the discussion to two options: “voice” or “exit.” ¹⁰ According to Coles, these two options do not suffice, not only because they assume that citizens have fixed preferences, but also because they overlook a range of alternative practices crucial to the quality of public discourse. Coles is especially interested in sensorial practices of receptivity based on “listening” and “travelling”: “receptivity . . . evokes a broader notion of responsiveness and helps attune us to a broader range of practices . . . receptivity . . . [juxtaposes] listening to voice and . . . corporeal world-travelling to exit” (684). A similar shift in orientation informs Sharon Krause’s 2011 article “Bodies in Action.” Appealing to one of the sensorial turn’s conceptual cousins—the new materialism ¹¹ —Krause criticizes a deontological account of politics and instead suggests a corporeal conception of agency susceptible to issues of “selfhood” (303) and “the non-human material world” (308). According to Krause, such a conception is needed if we wish to secure a truly multifaceted account of politics that reaches across the old culture–nature divide. As she puts it, “our ability to achieve freedom for all depends on how well we grasp the subtle, corporeal dynamics of human agency, and how wisely we engage them to open up new avenues for political transformation. Exploring the politics of bodies in action is one step in that direction” (318).

As this overview suggests, it is not an exaggeration to say that the relationship between politics and the sensorium is a longstanding issue, which has become a particularly fecund area of research in the past ten years. As the five articles demonstrate, the sensorial turn is not only a turn away from a philosophical intellectualism that was particularly prominent in the 1980s and early 1990s; in addition, the turn is also a turn back to a long tradition in history of political thought that intersects with many of Hegel’s concerns, and that includes thinkers such as Spinoza, Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, and Merleau-Ponty. This combination of the future and the past—the creative and the historical—is an intrinsic part of the sensorial turn, which we may summarize as both a mode of theorizing about issues in political theory and an intervention into the perennial discussion concerning politics itself. With regard to the latter, we might say that the recent contributions to the sensorial turn provide fresh insight into a largely overlooked conception of politics, one that supplements or replaces the usual emphasis on order and stability with an interest in fluidity and reversibility. This shift in the conception of politics is further augmented by how the sensorial turn engages moments of instability in order to disclose new opportunities for political engagement. Rather than assuming that such opportunities emerge ex nihilo, the sensorial turn looks to the past in order to excavate and explicate remainders embedded in our habitual ways of making sense of self, other, and world. This approach imbues the sensorial turn with an agonistic outlook—that is, an outlook that sees disagreement as something positive, and that engages its own internal divisions as a source of renewal rather than as a sign of failure.

What might follow next from this way of theorizing the embodiment of political life? One answer to this question would take us back to Hegel’s challenge discussed by Shklar in her 1973 article, namely, whether the relationship between politics and the sensorium entails a subjectivism void of normative content. Although Shklar’s later work complicates this challenge—and although the articles by Shapiro, Markell, Coles, and Krause point in the opposite direction—the suspicion that the sensorial turn in fact does amount to nothing but a normative void is one that lingers on. As evidence for this, one could point to an emerging consensus in contemporary political theory, which stipulates that future discussions should be organized around a division of labor between, on the one hand, the study of the sensorium and, on the other hand, the discussion of what an ideal society could or should look like. ¹² Whether temporary or not, such a division of labor must be resisted for two reasons. First, it reintroduces one of the key assumptions that the turn to the sensorium sought to undermine, namely, that the cultural and the natural represent two spheres that never intersect with each other. And second, it encloses the sensorial turn in such a way that it no longer can interact in a meaningful manner with other strands and traditions in contemporary political theory. Both aspects run counter to the basic intuitions animating the sensorial turn; moreover, they emasculate the mode of the theorizing that not only underpins the sensorial turn but also has allowed us to approach the relationship between the sensorium and politics as a particularly promising way to engage pressing issues in political theory.

Given this, it may be imperative for future studies of the relationship between politics and the sensorium to address Hegel’s concern regarding the normative dimension of this relationship. Informed by Shklar’s own insights—and further augmented by the archive on which thinkers such as Deleuze and Rancière draw—the idea would be not to reduce the normative to the sensorial (or vice versa), but instead to see both as entangled with each other in ways that make it meaningless to address one without the other. ¹³ The main advantage of approaching the issue in this manner is that it displaces the premise of Hegel’s concern—that the sensorium amounts to nothing but the pursuit of self-interest—and instead encourages us to approach sensory input as imbued a wide range of normative expectations. Not all of these expectations will be equally desirable; and yet by both acknowledging and pluralizing the link between the normative and the sensorial we may take a first important step toward uncovering how some flows of affect and perception are better than others at underpinning the pursuit of a just and fair society. This intuition is strengthened by the agonistic nature of the sensorial turn, which encourages us to conceptualize political norms as open-ended structures that exceed fixed definition because they regulate two levels at the same time—the sensorial and the deliberative—both of which are dynamic in their own right. If political norms are to make a viable claim on society as a whole, they must embody (and even encourage) this dynamism, something that in turn will make them part of the creative processes that empower the flow of sensory input in this or that context. Without limiting political norms to a specific set of claims or obligations, it thus appears that the most powerful way of ensuring a just and fair society is to base the relationship between politics and the sensorium on a norm of creativity. This norm may not satisfy the desire for order and stability, but it will generate the kind of relationships that allow politics to develop in a manner that is agonistic and open-ended rather than antagonistic and closed.

By way of conclusion, let us note that elaborating on this argument will expose the sensorial turn to a range of other recent developments in political theory, including psychoanalysis, history of medicine, new materialism, visual studies, and aesthetics. Such an exposure should be welcomed as part of the study of politics and the sensorium. Not only will the exposure tell us more about the flows of affect and perception, it may also deepen our appreciation of the sensorium as longstanding concern in political theory.

Articles included in the special issue:

Judith Shklar, “Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Moral Failures of Asocial Man,” Political Theory 1, no. 3 (1973): 259–86.

Michael Shapiro, “Eighteen Century Intimations of Modernity: Adam Smith and Marquis de Sade,” Political Theory 21, no. 2 (1993): 273–93.

Patchen Markell, “Making Affect Safe for Democracy? On ‘Constitutional Patriotism,’” Political Theory 28, no. 1 (2000): 38–63.

Romand Coles, “Moving Democracy: Industrial Areas Foundation Social Movements and the Political Arts of Listening, Travelling, and Tabling,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 678–705.

Sharon Krause, “Bodies in Action: Corporeal Agency and Democratic Politics,” Political Theory, 39, no. 3 (2011): 299–324.