Energetic Sensations and the Material of Politics

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

This panel takes an experimental approach to examining how energetic sensations catalyze expansive political experiences beyond what is conventionally perceived to be the political. The panelists interrogate sensorial experience from a variety of perspectives: touch, taste, smell, and even imperceptible media. Each uses sensations to ask what counts as the material of politics – or what forms of immateriality produce felt experiences that challenge familiar narratives of political action.

Jane Bennett’s contribution, “People With ‘Sensitive Cuticles’: On the ‘Politics’ of Affective Sensitivity in Emma Goldman, Walt Whitman, and Roger Caillois”, examines 'sensitive cuticles' to suggest that affective sensations multiply models of what counts as the political, to add to the dominant agon-centered models in contemporary political theory. Kyla Wazana Tompkin’s work, “Sourness and Power” revisits Sidney Mintz's great food book Sweetness and Power to create an argument about the work of aesthetics in thinking through labor energy as capacity. She first makes her argument in relation to sugar energy and the industrial revolution to ask what does thinking about a sugar high tell us about everyday affect. She then turns to the changing aesthetics of energy (and relatedly, palate) in a period organized around immaterial labor.  Davide Panagia’s contribution, “The Political Theory of the Algorithm Dispositif” asks: how are algorithms political? And how can theorists think critically about a non-experiential medium? People never experience an algorithm, even though they do experience the input and the output.  In recent years, a rich and compelling body of research has attempted to articulate the power dynamics of algorithms in contemporary political life by showing how they are coercive tools of domination. This paper proposes a different answer; one that engages the specificity of the algorithm medium, and doesn’t assume that there is only one mode of critical thinking for addressing the function of media in political life, nor does it assume that political power is reducible to the causal instrumentalism of ideological distortion. By looking to what algorithms do, how they operate as sites of conviction, their histories, and the ontologies of the medium, Panagia sketches a political theory of the algorithm dispositive to show how algorithms are "sentimental media," and he explains the political stakes of that characterization. Elisabeth Anker’s paper, “The Sweet Taste of Freedom”, argues that sugar’s sweetness offers a material and gustatory archive of freedom's violent practices across the globe. Through examinations of sugar plantation practices alongside both John Locke’s theories of freedom (so deeply entangled in the sugar slave trade), and Kara Walker’s artwork made of sugar titled “A Subtlety: Or, The Marvelous Sugar Baby”, this paper uses sugar to ask: How does the value of freedom shift when it becomes not merely a political ideal of the individual protected from and by state power, but an entangled global project of colonialism and capitalism with a tactile material presence that can be touched, tasted, and smelled?

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Elisabeth Robin Anker George Washington University

Presenters

• Davide Panagia UCLA

• Kyla Wazana Tompkins Pomona College

• Jane Bennett

• Elisabeth Robin Anker George Washington University