Starting from the premise that the body is a site of both instinctual and cultural knowledge, and a site where subjectivity is formed between the personal and the political, countersense considers:
How do embodied sense and sense-making inform one another?
How can bodily experience inform a critical consciousness of material conditions—using sense to make sense?
How can such sense-making become a transformative, creative practice, a countersense, to contest oppressive frameworks and define our own?
How do embodied sense and sense-making inform one another?
How can bodily experience inform a critical consciousness of material conditions—using sense to make sense?
How can such sense-making become a transformative, creative practice, a countersense, to contest oppressive frameworks and define our own?
Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
“Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world.”
Karen Barad
Karen Barad
Starting from the self, with embodied experience, I work outward.
Our bodily senses open up the world to us; they are the foundation of all experience and consciousness. While foundational, sense goes beyond embodiment. I see sense as a duality, as embodied perception and meaning-making together in how we cognize the world. To revise Berger’s claim, “the relation between what we [sense] and what we know is never settled.” Sense, straddling both the embodied and cognitive, is dynamic, alive, and shifting because the world is, too.
Our bodily senses open up the world to us; they are the foundation of all experience and consciousness. While foundational, sense goes beyond embodiment. I see sense as a duality, as embodied perception and meaning-making together in how we cognize the world. To revise Berger’s claim, “the relation between what we [sense] and what we know is never settled.” Sense, straddling both the embodied and cognitive, is dynamic, alive, and shifting because the world is, too.
Making sense of material conditions,
I work inward.
The sense we make of our material conditions makes up our ideological outlook, it is our “imaginary relationship…[to] real conditions of existence.” Our ideologies either sustain current material conditions or counter them. This is where we have agency: ideology is always present, but it is malleable. How we view the world matters, “not because culture in itself has the power to change the given, but because [it] affects decisively the collective, political will for change. It is its only nourishment.” Cultural producers can nourish a collective political will by crafting alternative understandings and histories rooted in our own experiences, not just as an individual practice but a collective one. These narratives and histories, or usable pasts, as Lizzie O’Shea calls them, are “not simply to be a record...[but] a method for creating the world we want to see.”
I work inward.
The sense we make of our material conditions makes up our ideological outlook, it is our “imaginary relationship…[to] real conditions of existence.” Our ideologies either sustain current material conditions or counter them. This is where we have agency: ideology is always present, but it is malleable. How we view the world matters, “not because culture in itself has the power to change the given, but because [it] affects decisively the collective, political will for change. It is its only nourishment.” Cultural producers can nourish a collective political will by crafting alternative understandings and histories rooted in our own experiences, not just as an individual practice but a collective one. These narratives and histories, or usable pasts, as Lizzie O’Shea calls them, are “not simply to be a record...[but] a method for creating the world we want to see.”
“Against is bound to trying.”
Lola Olufemi
Lola Olufemi
“Dismantling, after all, is also a
world-building project.”
Eden Kinkaid, Disorienting Phenomenology: Queer Space and Trans Life
world-building project.”
Eden Kinkaid, Disorienting Phenomenology: Queer Space and Trans Life
Sense and ideology overlap in sense-making.
countersense embodies a counterhegemonic practice of sense-making; it is a practice of opening up our present conditions for critical reflection and remaking. countersense is not just a negative critique. I define counter as the positive embrace of feminist, queer, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial standpoints and practices; and sense as embodied and cognitive meaning-making, a process where both recursively inform each other. I regard countersense in the same way scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines abolition, as a lived, constructive practice:
“[It] is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.”
countersense is performed between experience and ideology, self and material conditions—and is always foregrounding “what politics are chosen as a result of the personal.”
- Subjectivity refers to an individual's worldview, encompassing their perception and beliefs. Linda Martín-Alcoff writes that “complex social structures construct subjectivities as sets of habitual practices that create dispositions toward certain affects and interpretations of experience.” [1]
- Material conditions are the political and economic structures that shape our daily lives, such as education, labor, and the resources one has access to. [2]
- Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus [3]
- Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing [4]
- Lizzie O'Shea, Future Histories [5]
- Cultural hegemony is a concept developed by the Italian Marxist intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned under Mussolini’s fascist government. It asserts that ruling classes culturally legitimize and reproduce their existence through the popularization of their ideas within culture. Here, I am referring to counter-cultural hegemony, though it is important to note that counterhegemony is not necessarily emancipatory. For example, fascism is also a counterhegemonic force today. [6]
- Gen Doy, Materializing Art History [7]