Aesthetic Experience and Feedback Loops: Re-orienting Connolly's Politics of Becoming in the Direction of an Ethico-Aesthetics

Abstract

The core tenet of William Connolly’s theorisation of a politics of becoming is the cultivation of a broad-based ethos of pluralisation, one manifested in terms of democratic sensibilities of agonistic respect and critical responsiveness. Grounded in such an ethical attunement, Connolly argues for a politics that is sensitive and responsive to a world of multi-layered agency composed of overlapping and interinvolved agential force-fields and processes of becoming—a world of becoming. Yet, how are we to grasp the experience of such a world? Not as a worldto-come, but as an orientation to and responsiveness towards processes of becoming already underway. And what is the role of such experience in democratic processes of subjectification (or agential becoming)—particularly, in activating the possibilities for what Connolly calls a politics of becoming? This paper argues, supplementing Connolly’s account, that a world of becoming opens itself to us in moments of aesthetic experience—active-passive moments of radical self-difference that enable the autopoietic emergence of that which is concealed or hidden. It suggests that Connolly’s ethical theorisation fails to account for the seminal and yet, subterranean role played by aesthetic experience in enabling a politics of becoming. By uncovering this aesthetic operation, the paper argues for an ethico-aesthetic knot as the ground (a novel ontology) of a politics of becoming. The paper, therefore, supplements Connolly’s politics of becoming by bringing to light a particular mode of experience that, while not considered in his account, is nonetheless ontologically central.

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ORCID for Tanay Gandhi: orcid.org/0000-0002-1159-054X

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