Brandon LaBelle
“Against the backdrop of critiques of Cartesian Dualism formulated by sensory studies scholars and (feminist) phenomenologists, this lecture addresses the persistent myth of a divide between the inner and outer worlds, the private and public, and sensus and logos.
These bifurcations have fostered an ideal of deliberative and representational democratic interaction within institutions as disembodied. By pivoting radical democratic theories toward knowledge production in Soma Studies (Wuttig 2016; 2022) and Sensory Studies, and by focusing on critical ontological politics, this lecture invites us to reconceptualize democratic encounters in institutions as zones of affective, sensorial, energetic, and embodied transmissions (see also Seyfert 2011).
Thinking democratic interactions as multisensorial and embodied fosters more- than-human articulations and representations that have been excluded from logos-centric and anthropocentric democratic discourse. This lecture aims to locate the intelligible within the senses and the body: How do multisensorial and embodied approaches help identify the hierarchical (pre-)structuring of political fields? More specifically: How is the sensorial experience of (dis-)comfort articulated in non-semantic ways? Since (dis-)comfort points to hegemonic structures privileging certain groups over others (see Ranciere 2008), rendering these somatic expressions intelligible is crucial.
The rendering intelligible of somatic and affective expressions—such as smiling, holding one’s breath, synchronization of movement, scratching, fleeing, trembling, or hee-hawing—which are sensed rather than cognized, may reveal the intertwining of the inner and outer worlds of democracy, reaching beyond the individual to the more-than-public.”
