TOWARDS AN ANALYSIS OF THE COMMON SENSORIUM. NOTES FOR AN AESTHETIC-POLITICAL MORPHOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL DIMENSION

Abstract

Both, be it the advance of electronic media and teletransmissions in the 20th century and the cyber digitalization of the 21st century, the various epistemic fields have been responsible for problematizing the relationship between the perceptive, the aesthetic (space-time) and the technological changes that impose new intersubjective practices, behaviors and modes of subjectivation. A specific concept arises in many authors: the sensorium. Whether a cultural approach or a specifically epistemological perspective is proposed, a reference to that category is often repeated in relation to changes in the speed and acceleration of images, texts and communications; first in the era of analog electronics and then in the digital age. The objective of this paper is to expose a brief systematization of the sensorium towards a possible definition as an aesthetic-political unit of analysis. This category let us think, on the one hand, about the Aesthetic discipline as political thought, and on the other, about politics in aesthetic terms. For this, this paper reviews various senses that the category of sensorium has had throughout history, according to its emergence in different epistemes. The first part identifies certain discourses locating authors in which specific uses can be found (Newton, Simmel, Benjamin, McLuhan, Kittler, etc.), thus it is possible to delineate a series of senses related to time and space from an aesthetic point of view, from the perception, social realm and the technique. Henceforth, the second part presents the idea of a “sensory turn” in contemporary social and political studies, where the idea of sensorium takes a new importance. Finally, the text focuses on the conceptual relationships that derive from Rancière's use of the category. Based on this lines, this paper seeks to delineate a series of elements to open the possibility of defining the Aesthetic as the thought of the common sensorium; as a unit of aesthetic-political analysis that works as a theoretical framework for a morphology of the social dimension, as analytical of the sensible order.