senses and/of meanings

by Michael Templeton

“... language is the house of power, the refuge of its police violence.” The Situationist International. “Captive Words, Preface to a Situationist Dictionary.”

Language is the capacity that separates humanity from all other life. I am aware that in our time there are any number of theories on the capacities of other animals to communicate, but in the final analysis, only humans are able to render their experiences in vocal enunciations that can capture experience in a reasonably meaningful way and communicate that experience to others. This capacity is at the heart of philosophy going back to the Greeks. It is experience that sets language in motion. That we have experienced or sense something that we need to convey to another is the most elemental feature of what we have come to call, the rhetorical situation, the situation which calls for the need to respond with and in language.[1] An elemental rhetorical situation is the presence of danger. I detect danger, I see something or hear something, and I know I need to let others know of the presence of this danger. I use language to say something like “Fire!” to let others know they need to get out of the building or flee the area. What has now emerged in the course of these introductory remarks is the idea of the senses. The rhetorical situation depends in some part on the ability to sense something, smell it, hear it, taste it, feel it. If one of the primary conditions of language is the experience that gives rise to the rhetorical situation, the condition for the experience is the ability to sense something specific to the situation and relate the sensation to other features of existence. The sound of a siren only means something if we have learned to link that sound to other conditions—other conditions which are themselves rooted in language. The siren takes the place of the smell of smoke and the heat of fire to warn us before we are caught in smoke and fire. In any case, words and the senses defined experience, and this is what is at stake in the uses and abuses of words and language.

Heidegger explains that language “brings something to appear, lets what appears be apprehended” (“The Way to Language.” 401). This is to say that language reveals things in the use thereof, and by making statements, it is thought, language reveals (Heidegger will use the Greek term alētheia for this revealing), and “inasmuch as language is... it pertains to what comes to presence” (402). Language reveals the presence of what it designates by the bringing to presence of that which is to be shown. Language shows, it reveals, and what it reveals and shows is the presence of a thing in the form of that which represents it in language. To this end, statements are made to bring to presence the subject of statements. Still more, speakers are also subjects who make statements to interlocutors who form, in the moment and under the circumstances of making statements, objects in the sense of a sentence structure of subject/object. All of this falls into Heidegger’s discourse on language as the process whereby spirit—the spirit within one who senses and has experiences then speaks and uses language—can and does deploy language to seize hold of objects for the purpose of conveyance in and through language: “Because spirit is grasped as subject and thus represented in the subject-object schema, positing (thesis) must be the synthesis between the subject and its objects” (404). This can be simplified by explaining that one who occupies the position of subject makes a statement (verb) to a listener (object). In any event, one of the most crucial elements to bear in mind at this stage is that language brings to presence what is to be the matter of language. Heidegger explains that language works to bring presencing to bear in the forming of statements, and he deploys the term “presence” in the form of a gerund in order to emphasize the active nature of what happens in and through language.

This is all fairly straightforward and not terribly complicated, and it would all remain simple except that in the course of human societies, some forms of language take on more importance than others. In fact, it can be said that there are certain types of language that are considered important to everyone, and there are other types of language that are deemed unimportant except to a narrow group of people whose interests have no bearing on how a society functions or on the greater good of that society. These kinds of questions and issues as they pertain to language become the beginnings of politics as individuals vie to have their language, and by extension, their concerns, which is to say their experiences, emerge as the language, concerns, and experiences that matter most. To this end, what is at stake is the claim to have one’s experiences brought to presencing above and beyond the presencing of the experiences of others. What is more, in vying for these claims, individuals and groups will necessarily work to render some experiences denied the right to be brought to presencing, and one of the ways this is done is by having the language which brings these experiences to presencing deemed illegitimate language altogether. What we are doing when we bring things to presencing, and when we are engaged in debates over which experiences are to be brought to presencing is taking sides over what things are to be made visible and sayable. Rancière explains that “Politics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable” (Dissensus. 37). I began with the simplest of premises on language because at the heart of politics is language, and what so often feels like the most obvious and simple set of issues is revealed to be, through baby steps, the mine field of contemporary politics. 

The deceptively simple nature of language also leads us to something else that would appear obvious but absolutely is not. We would tend to assume that if there are experiences of one group of people in the world, and that these experiences are amenable to language, that the experiences of this group of people is, by definition, visible and sayable, then these experiences will be visible and sayable, and this emphatically is not the case. In fact, there are powerful mechanisms at work in the world to keep certain experiences from becoming visible, and by keeping them invisible, ensure that they are absolutely not sayable. I am old enough to remember when AIDS first emerged in the world. The shame of America at that time was that the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, never spoke of AIDS. He never spoke of the people who were impacted by the disease, the horrifying ravages of the disease; he never spoke of the lives that ended, most often tragically young lives. Reagan ignored AIDS because at the time, at least in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, people thought it was a disease of gay men, and no one in power wanted to speak of gay men, their lives, their concerns and experiences, their experiences and the sensations of being alive that were ultimately the same experiences and sensations common to all, and their deaths from a disease that was ignored. The Reagan Administration appeared to assume that if things were left unsaid, then they would remain invisible, and if unsaid and invisible, these things, these experiences and sensations did not exist. We saw similar bullshit when Trump wanted to just pretend that Covid-19 didn’t exist, but Covid-19 hit everyone and anyone. It did not hit a specific segment of society, a segment that was largely kept in the shadows in the early 1980s. It was not until groups like ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) began shoving the issue into the faces of middle-class America, and after a few cis hetero people started getting the disease, that it all started to become visible and sayable, and therefore actionable in language and in deeds. Activists insisted on using language which had hitherto been private and unheard in order to bring to presencing experiences that dominant powers wanted to keep hidden, and by doing this, they made an otherwise mute issue into a political issue for all of the world. Groups like ACT-UP placed the experiences of the bodily sensations of people with AIDS into language which was made visible and sayable in contexts where it was no longer possible to ignore them.

The Reagan Administration was successful for a long time in rendering the experiences and language of a large portion of the American population as illegitimate. The language of gay men, the language of anyone who contracted AIDS, was held to not be the language and experience of what constituted the political world of American society. Activists changed that, but it is clear that one way to delegitimize experiences and language is to simply ignore it to death. You can do that until the people you are ignoring are on your doorstep making your life really fucking uncomfortable. At the heart of politics, then, is what Rancière calls dissensus: “The essence of politics is dissensus. Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the demonstration of a gap in the sensible itself. Political demonstration makes visible that which had no reason to be seen” (Rancière. 38). ACT UP took steps to make visible what had until then had no reason to be seen. They unleashed power by bringing experiences to presencing through language. Rancière draws our attention to another key aspect of all this, and that is the issue of the sensible. What constitutes experience, as we saw above, is the sensible, what is detected by the senses. Rancière speaks of aisthesis, the Greek term for what comes to sensation, and from which we get the word aesthetics. Another way to marginalize or delegitimize experiences and a population is to render the experiences of a certain population as either non-existent, they are not really having these experiences, or of no concern to the wider population. This was how women were treated for centuries. Either their experiences were simply not real, they were “hysterical,” or their experiences were of a private domestic nature and had no bearing on public matters. It was only after women made it clear that A) hysteria was a fictional category created by men for their own advantage, B) living without those private domestic aspects of life were shown to be absolute essential to life itself, and C) women were in the larger world of public life whether anyone wanted to admit it or not, and they were not going to go away. The aesthetic, then, the dimensions of life that pertains to the sensible and the ways these dimensions are represented, is a powerful force in the political more generally.

Poetry and all the arts have always constituted powerful interventions into the political. Poetry is obviously a compelling form of language that can bring to presencing the sensible whereas direct prosody can frequently only describe the sensible. What we gain from poetry is some sense of what is sensed. Indeed, it was the contention of the Situationist International that “every revolution has been born in poetry, has first of all been made with the force of poetry” (S.I. Anthology. 151-152). And since power is always deeply invested in crushing revolution before it starts, and in suppressing the voices of those who would present meaningful challenges to power, “power lives off stolen goods. It creates nothing; it coopts” (150). This is to say that power steals languages which bolster power, and coopts language which challenges it so as to divert, if not pervert outright, that language. In doing this, power seeks to delegitimize challenges and suppress forms of presencing experiences (the sensible dimension of life) of those who challenge power. While prose is capable of conveying the facts of experience and the sensible, it is poetry which is capable of infusing language with a sense of action, immediacy, force—a sense of sense in words. We can speak of things like the situation in Gaza and the genocide of Palestinians, but so many people have had recourse to the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish because as a Palestinian poet he is able to speak as one who is a part of these horrific events, and his poetry brings something to our understanding that cannot be reached by more direct expository language. Darwish evokes something about Gaza, and the Palestinian people, that taps into their experience when he writes about Gaza itself that “It will continue to explode./ It is neither death, nor suicide. It is Gaza’s way of declaring that it deserves to live” (Darwish. “Silence for Gaza”). Gaza will explode in every way conceivable, in anger, in grief, in rebirth, and literally in the explosions of Israeli and American bombs, and this explosion involves real loss, but it defies death by never becoming extinguished no matter the violence and killing of the genocide. Darwish situates a loaded word into a linguistic/poetic context so that the word sends out, carries to presencing, more information that strict denotation allows. The point is that Israel and the United States would deny the voices of Palestinians altogether, but Darwish brings both the voices and the very real experiences to visibility in poetic language that expresses things that exceed the obvious content of the words themselves. This speaks to Rancière’s theory of dissensus insofar as Darwish’s poetry renders visible and sayable the experiences of Palestinians against the official reality of those powerful forces that seek to silence them. Dissensus “places one world in another” by layering the otherwise silenced voice over top the official voice so that both voices must now be heard and recognized (Dissensus. 38). Prose can do this, but poetry brings to presencing the sensations and experiences to language that prose cannot.

Since poetry has been so long a feature of resistance, if not revolutionary action and activism, modes of power who find these kinds of language actions threatening have worked hard to develop new ways of neutralizing them. Digital modes of language transmission have primarily worked to neutralize all language, including poetry. While we were all sold the bill of goods that the digital world would bring us all together via electronic connections, the polar opposite has occurred, and those who championed digital communication did this quite deliberately. Cybernetics, the foundation of the digital systems of the internet, was never meant to unify “the people.” It was designed from the outset to serve power and function primarily as a war machine, if we want to use the language of Deleuze and Guattari. Cybernetics, the theoretical system that laid the foundation for what would become the internet, was developed as a system to gain superiority in military conflict. It was and remains a strategic apparatus designed to enable certain types of warfare so that “cybernetics is an art of war whose objective is to save the head of the social body in the case of catastrophe” (The Cybernetic Hypothesis. 37). In other words, in the event that the generals get taken out, the strategic machines of battle and military advance are retained because they are never in a single place. They are everywhere and nowhere just as the internet is today. The other distinct advantage to cybernetics, and the internet that came from it, is to overcome the chief disadvantage of war which is the unknown. The enemy art of surprise is the unknown, and there is no unknown if the cybernetic system creates a future and supplants the unknown with an outcome that is already known. This is exactly what the internet does now. It turns out that capitalism benefits from this machinic supplanting of the unknown with a known outcome, and all that was needed was to convince the world that they wanted all of this in their daily lives. That was easy enough with the insinuation of consumer capital into the system. Once we were all convinced that we were “users” of the system instead of objects used by the system, it was all over. In the final analysis, the internet now functions as a system of total security that has captured all of us in a vast web of securitization from which we are no longer able to extricate ourselves. The internet transforms “the event into information,” and all sensible experience is now recirculated instantly as a reproduction of events that effectively transforms real feeling, and even intense emotions, into content to be consumed even as we experience it ourselves. We are no longer living beings in the world with sensations and experiences; we are the sources of content and the consumers of the same content. In this way, the sensible, words, language, the bringing to presencing of language can no longer achieve anything at all other than to become online commodities of exchange for Meta, Google, Amazon, etc.

We need to wonder if there is any way to return to something like dissensus in which our immediate struggles—the battles against ICE for our very lives, for example—can be made visible and sayable such that what we are experiencing in our sensible worlds cannot be written off and transformed into mere noise and the ramblings of so-called domestic terrorists and criminals. I do not have a definitive answer to this question, but there are examples to draw on. Poets such as Nanni Balestrini splice the language of experience into the kinds of language that would otherwise devalue experiences. In his long poem Blackout, Balestrini places the language of common moments alongside images of individual lives, and this is the layered onto images of the contest between a deeply repressive and violent power and the forms of resistance that engage this power. We find the speaker in the poem in a prison cell: “I was afraid when the snow came into the cell/ like at the cinema when the film ends/ white threads stirred at the window’s double bars and drifted through the openings” (Blackout. 62). This is a discreet moment that conveys the feeling of being lost, put way and desperate, of having one’s physical life shunted away from presencing. Yet, these same few lines also suggest the feelings of remembering and longing for some other sensations, some other place. The unresolvable quality to these lines are part and parcel to the feeling, the sensibility of this moment. Yet, the poem continues to compound such discreet moments until it reaches a crescendo in which “a new concept is emerging it is the concept of direct counterpower” (34). The lack of punctuation emphasizes the urgency of the coming crisis of a direct counterpower, a direct challenge to the violence of the state and the forms of repression that the state simply cannot contain. That feeling, sensation, and experience unfold in a non-linear fashion further render it as fugitive and evasive. Language, specifically poetic language, can break through the digital enchantment if we allow it. This requires an active engagement on the part of readers. These kinds of poetic moments can be and frequently are swallowed by the machines of digital commerce and fascist power. To sustain the life of those forms of language that bring to presencing the validity, force, and meaning of the sensible, of our very real lived lives, demands an active engagement with language and words. None of it happens through a passive consumption of words as if words are of no more value than any other commodity exchanged and discarded among the landfills of everything else that never mattered. To achieve anything at all requires what Raoul Vaneigem called a “revolution of everyday life” in which he predicts that “the work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life” (Vaniegem. 177). This is entirely up to us.

Works Cited:

Balestrini, Nanni. Blackout. Translated by Peter Valente. Oakland: Commune Editions, 2017.

Darwish, Mahmoud. “Silence for Gaza.” This is from the Substack of Khaled A. Beydoun. Pen>

Sword. https://khaledbeydoun.substack.com/p/silence-for-gaza-by-mahmoud-darwish.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. London: Harper Perennial, 2008.  

Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steve Corcoran. New

York: Continuum, 2010.

The Situationist International Anthology. Revised and Expanded Edition. Translated by Ken

Knabb. Berkely: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.

Tiqqun. The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Translated by Robert Hurley. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e)

Intervention Series 28, 2020.

Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

Oakland: PM Press, 2012. 

[1] The “rhetorical situation” is the invention of Lloyd F. Bitzer in his foundational essay “The Rhetorical Situation.” It is not a terribly complicated thesis, but it does constitute a lengthy digression at this point. If you would like to understand it more completely, the essay can be found at Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 1, no. 1, 1968, pp. 1–14.

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