Political Theory and the Sensorium

Abstract

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