Writing Assignment Exam 3 – Due 4/11/2019

Rancière, Nancy, Massumi

6-8 pages double-spaced with the usual formatting and uploading guidelines.

After studying the Structuralist and Poststructuralist discourses on the nature of signification in language, subjectivity, and social apparatuses/ideologies, our more recent string of texts have spiraled us back to three interlaced issues: (a) How does ‘sense’ (meaning) happen? (b) How are ‘we’ involved in the making or finding of sense? (c) How does the ‘aesthetic’ relation to sense focus these very issues and promise a better ‘making sense’ of ‘sense’? The questions amount to matters of ‘meaning’ on both the Ontological and Practical levels – how sense ‘is’ and how it ‘works.’

Rancière considers society in terms of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ and the unique modes of aesthetic-political ‘dissensus’ that, through the function of art in the ‘aesthetic regime,’ can reconfigure the situation on behalf of human equality. Nancy burrows beneath all of this to account for the broader phenomenon of ‘sense’ itself, and for the way we are (and art is) positioned on the threshold between (a) the old ‘transcendent’ guarantors of ‘sense’ and (b) a more primordial and affirming return to the ways in which the immanence of the world holds a life of dynamic and non-subjectivist sense. Massumi’s case for an ‘activist philosophy’ of the ‘occurrent arts’ focuses on the relational nature of perceptual/artistic ‘events’ and human experience overall, and on how the process-nature of such events consists in their being at once virtual, potentializing, abstract, sensible and nonsensuous, political, and even ‘immediate’ in their meditational qualities.

Perhaps we could say that where Rancière explores the aesthetic regime’s role in dissensus, Nancy explores the role of art’s ‘fractality’ in relation to awakening the second kind of ‘sense,’ and Massumi explores how pre-cognitive events are figured as perceptible semblances across a process that reminds us of how ‘technologies of existence’ are at once creative and political. It would be misleading to say the three projects are perfectly linked. But it is true that each project speaks to the issue of ‘sense’ by way of speaking to the nature of ‘art,’ and vice versa.

Question:

What are the most important ways in which each of the three projects unpack the issue of ‘sense’ (broadly including the ‘sensible’, the ‘event’, etc.) and also call for an ‘activism’ (activating, etc.) on its behalf. What are some ways they overlap or differ in this regard? In view of these comparisons, what do you think are the projects’ best insights, problematic claims, and what further insights would ‘you’ as artist-philosophers add to this question of activism and sense?

Note:

-I mean ‘activism’ in the spirit of activating – animating something central to the life of sense.

-Feel free to include an artist/artwork in the discussion to help address either part of the question.