Rituals of perception: political constructions of sensitivity

Dr. Hernán Ulm1

To what event or to what law do these mutations obey that

suddenly things are no longer perceived , described, stated,
characterized, classified and fatigued in the same way, and
that in the interstice of words or under their transparency, they
are no longer more the riches, the living beings, the discourse
that open to knowledge, but radically different beings?
Foucault, Michel; Les mots et les choses. An archeology of
human sciences; Paris: Galimard; 1966; p.229 (my emphasis)

Of perception as a ritual

All of these are but approximations to the topic. While in the

hospital I had a kind of revelation. I was sick in New York and I
wondered where it was that I had seen women walking around
like my nurses. I finally realized it was at the movies. When I
returned to France I realized, especially in Paris, how common
this way of walking was; The girls were French but they walked
the same way. The American walking fashion was reaching us
through cinema. I was, therefore, faced with an idea that could
be generalized. The position of the arms and hands while
walking constitutes a social idiosyncrasy and is not only the
result of I don't know what purely individual, almost entirely
physical movements and mechanisms.
Mauss, Marcel; Techniques and body movements , in Sociology
and anthropology ; Madrid: Tecnos; 1979; p 339. (or text,
published in 1936, refers to a lecture given in 1934)

According to a commonplace of contemporary thought, it is not possible to

confront political issues without thinking, at the same time, about the aesthetic
problems that they presuppose. For this reason, some time ago, I tried to think
about the territory of the sensible – in the Deleuzian sense: a territory made of
vectors of closure as well as lines of flight and a sensible compound of affects
and percepts – analyzing, through the formula “ rituals of perception”, the
processes by which the perceptual unit is constructed within different social
agencies. I intend to highlight, in this way, that an assemblage is expressed
through a play of forces that disputes what we consider perceptible.

In this sense, perception, far from being “natural”, “innocent”, “transcendental” is

the result of submission (conscious or unconscious) to a set of collective rules
that define what, for each assemblage, can or cannot be perceived (there are,
thus, no “private” perceptions). These sets of rules (discursive and non-
discursive, of a practical nature and whose purpose is the production of an

1 Text presented at the International Congress Rituals of perception: body, technology, materiality, held
at the Fluminine Federal University in July 2017. In publication process
intersubjectively shared system of beliefs) constitute what, according to the
thought of Marcel Mauss, can be called “ritual”. The concept of ritual, initially
restricted to the analysis of the sacred and the religious, was reread in
contemporary anthropology under the complementary perspectives of the
performative and performance, expanding its limits to reach all types of
behaviors governed by a system of rules that produce effects immanent to
themselves: in this sense, a ritual process is not true or false in relation to
something external to it (in relation to objects that it would have to capture or
configure) but would be effective or ineffective (more or less successful) in
relation to the emergence of those objects and the behaviors that the rules
themselves conceive in relation to them. It is in this immanence that a common
horizon of meaning is produced. Thus, according to this model, I want to
propose that perception can be considered as an effect of a ritual process that
produces a common sensitivity: only when the performative nature of the rules
that organize the sensible is accepted, something “appears” to perception and ,
only to the extent that something “appears”, the ritual process is effective in the
production of perception.

Only to the extent that we believe in the performative force of the rules do we
belong to the sensitive community that the process itself produces. Thus, our
own body (as a sensitive unit of ourselves) is a performative effect of the rules:
only as a successful performance can the body be recognized as such, as
forming part of a community (that is, the most decisive performative effect and
performance of the rituals of perception are those by which, at the same time
that a community is created, models of subjectivity are offered for the agents
who participate in it). In other words, our bodies (and the world in which there
are bodies), being “without organs” or “disorganized”, have to be constructed
each time by some agency in accordance with a ritual that corresponds to it. To
that extent, an assemblage can be analytically decomposed based on the rules
of the rituals of perception that make up sensitivity. If, to paraphrase Foucault,
rules organize the conflicting tensions that produce modes of subjectivity, a ritual
allows us to study the set of forces in dispute in the constitution of the sensible
body (paying attention to all the metaphors that define the political and social).
Thus, to the extent that it defines what can appear, a ritual also delimits the
border of what cannot appear in the order of the social body: abject bodies, as
Judith Butler said, and not those that are part of what is considered worthy of
being perceived. In the ways of appearing, the dignities of what appears and
what does not appear are concerned: what does not follow the rules, what does
not observe the prescriptions of the ritual, will be unworthy of appearing and will
remain outside of the perceived (it will not even have the subtle appearance of
shadows and ghosts). For its part, a change in the order of the rules will cause
perception (and the belief in the sensitive world that was organized in it) to enter
into crisis, prescribe, demanding an effort to restore the conditions of the
perceptible, either through a greater demand in the observance of the rules of
the ritual, either by the invention of new rules (new prescriptions) and thus, by
the elaboration of a new ritual of perception. The crisis may be referred to the
dissatisfaction of the agents regarding the beliefs that the ritual institutes or in
the face of the inability of the rules to resolve some incongruity of the perceptible
derived from a conflict in the order of appearance. Or, in short, it can be felt as
an exhaustion of the beliefs that were constructed by the ritual: reaching the
ways in which something appears on the horizon of the perceptible and the
models of subjectivity that were accepted in the ritual. In short, these changes
result in a mutation in the order of the sensible, of affects and percepts and,
therefore, of the ways in which we legitimately constitute ourselves as
subjectivities. That is why there is always an incommensurability, a discontinuity
between assemblages, according to the ritual of perception in question. In this
sense, we can make a genealogy of the present by analyzing our own
perceptual rituals. Is there such a thing as a digital ritual of perception? What is it
to perceive within the technical processes of image production? What type of
subjectivities appear as an effect of these rituals of digital perception? Would our
present be analysable in terms of rituals of disjunct perception, in which the
senses, far from converging in a sensitive unity, far from constructing the body
as a sensory-motor unit – remain in indefinite distance from that which has no
point? of convergence, a regime of the heterogeneity of the senses and of what
is felt by the senses, a regime in which what we see, what we say, what we hear
and what we touch are subject to non-transferable rules? A ritual that perhaps
was already diagnosed by Baudelaire's Correspondences, by Huysman's
dilettantism? A ritual that exasperates the dissimilarities of the senses? Rituals
that distribute the disjunctions between images?
And, if the rituals of perception organize the tensions and conflicts that go
through an assemblage, if it were possible to deviate from the rules, could we
achieve an “imperceptible becoming”, in the sense in which Deleuze and
Guattari proposed it? Or, like Michel Foucault, could we fold the forces of
subjectivation that cross the assemblages? A becoming of the body in the face
of forms of subjection that could be achieved through self-aesthetics, or through
the arts as a work of affections and pure percepts against the normalizing effects
of common sense? Wouldn't it be that, if rituals define the recognized modes of
subjectivities, these, in turn, have a future beyond those rituals? And from what
element can we analyze these rituals and, without abdicating immanence,
escape from their subjections?

The rituals of perception: between art and technique

There are aesthetic effects of social and ritual practices that

may be more consistent than many contemporary art
productions.
Fair Shepherd Jagged em
http://justopastorvalparaiso.blogspot.com.ar/

In Anthropology of Performance Víctor Turner states that the insufficiency of

structuralism, revealed in the second half of the 20th century, was derived from
the obscuration of the Renaissance model according to which what is
perceptible as spatialization appears inside the frame of the picture-window
( space, empty and homogeneous, ensures the appearance and
interchangeability of what appears – a condition that is repeated every time we
are required to present “the conceptual framework of our research”). In this way,
the structure (as a grid of Renaissance representation) guarantees the order of
all the differential relationships that constitute the social space, determining the
here and now of any phenomenon. Outside the grid, the imperceptible, the
unrepresentable. Such an epistemology of space would have prevented us from
thinking about social relations as processes composed in time (or would have
barely conceived time under the general model of spatialization): Turner's
proposal, based on the notion of dramatization (and the phases that constitute
drama), attempts to make phenomena perceived as processes that are
incessantly reconstructed in time (or, better yet, the very notion of drama is
presented as a way of thinking about time that no longer owes anything to the
form of space).

As several thinkers have shown (among which Benjamin undoubtedly occupies

a prominent place), the perceptual model of the Renaissance enters into crisis to
the extent that, from the end of the 18th century, the spatio-temporal unity of
perception explodes, disaggregating and fragmenting what sensitive in splinters
whose unity cannot be reconstructed (the fragmentary, before being a
philosophical-literary option, is the condition of contemporary perception). The
suspense of the narrative (indicated by the French philosopher in a
complementary way to the decline of the aura) was derived from the fracture of
the here and now typical of traditional experience. In this way, the emergence of
a new perception that would be marked by its disjunctions was diagnosed.
Jonathan Crary, in a central book for this presentation, shows the changes that
occurred in the field of perception at the end of the 18th century and that had the
effect of mutating the spectator into the observer, highlighting the limits of the
camera obscura as a general model. of classical perception. Roger Chartier has
analyzed the transformations derived from the changes in the book object as a
communication technology over time, as well as from the reading practices that
modified the general meaning of what was read; Flusser, for his part, shows the
incommensurability of spatio-temporal forms of perception taking as his axis of
analysis the mutations that have occurred between analog images, writing,
photography and digital media in the production of subjectivity.

Starting from these examples, I would like to propose that it is possible to

consider these objects (and, in general, any technical object) as the result of
rituals of perception. What is, after all, a Renaissance painting (or a book, or a
photographic camera) if not the result of practical rules (discursive and non-
discursive) that ritualize sensitivity and produce (in the case of the Renaissance)
a perception individualized? It is enough to confront a painting (beyond what it
wants to represent) or to read the texts of Alberti or Leonardo, or the classes of
Piero dela Francesca, among others, to notice that perspective representation is
the result of a ritualization. that produces an internalized subjectivity. It is enough
to confront ourselves with a book to have a perception of time configured in it as
linear continuity. These technical objects do not determine, but express the
ritualized conditions of perception within an assemblage: and, in this way, the
rituals of perception become analysable by the technical objects that express
them.

In this way, assemblages can be diagnosed in two complementary ways: 1) by

the study of technical objects that allow us to account for a perception
normalized by a ritual from which a community recognizes itself and offers
models of the “ appear". These objects could be considered “quasi-ritual”
objects, to the extent that they provide a model of collective belief and
subjectivity and assume quasi-sacred functions within the community (or, at
least in a community of users); 2) by the emergence of new objects and new
technicalities that, placing a preceding ritual in crisis, “dramatize” the sensitive
incongruities within an assemblage, and that throughout this “dramatization”
deepen the “gap” between what that may or may not already be perceived: in
this way, a conflict between old and new objects could also be thought of as a
conflict in the order of the perceptible and as an attempt to “restore” behaviors
and orders of belief (which can be read, for example, in the presentation text of
the daguerreotype by François Arago)2 .

These two modalities (normalized perception and crises of perception) can be

analyzed by the way in which certain objects express modifications in the way of
perceiving space and time (from the photographic machine to the cinema and
the computer screen) and by the metaphors from which these objects are
appropriated in the symbolic order (or, on the contrary, cease to have meaning
as metaphors and are presented as simple metals, as worthless coins): for
example, the metaphors according to which Objects have memory, they are
alive or dead depending on the amount of memory they are capable of updating,
the metaphors according to which we are interconnected “online”, in “real time”,
and those according to which we could erase our memory, reset our life, delete
lost loves, etc.

A third option allows us to think about the lines of flight within these rituals:
defining the arts as the work of thought that interrupts the daily flows of
sensitivity (those flows that each assemblage normalizes, ritualizing them), we
can analyze the historically variable modes of perception by the various ways in
which the sensible is interrupted (beyond the academic tradition of considering
“works of art” as bearers of qualities or characteristics subjected to some type of

2 The terms in quotes in this paragraph refer to central concepts in Victor Turner's thought.
more or less idealized valuation, any object or action, as that produces such an
interruption of the sensible can be considered art: they themselves propitiate a
crisis or allow the conditions of what is considered a normal perception in a
given arrangement to be analyzed abysmally). In this sense, we would have an
artistic development of technical objects as a game of inversion of the rules or as
a going to the limits of what the technical object can do, or as the invention of
new games within the rules by the that these objects are defined.

Rituals of our present

I tried to introduce montage into literature through cut up. I think

it is much closer to reflecting the concrete facts of human
perception than mere linearity. For example, if you go out into
the street, what do you see? He sees cars, pieces of people, he
sees his own thoughts and everything mixed without any
linearity. This montage mode of writing leaves the narrative
intact. I precisely believe that it is even more faithful to it (…)
Look, the experience itself is a cut-up, and this is clearly seen in
the experience of writing. You cannot write without being
interrupted by everything that comes to mind and everything you
see. Your experience as an adult is not linear, it is interrupted by
all kinds of arbitrary juxtapositions. But these 'remains' are not
known how to put them when writing linearly. The montage, on
the other hand, integrates them .

BURROUGHS, Williams; The electronic revolution ; Buenos

Aires: Black Box, 2009, p. 102-103.

Since the beginning of the 19th century, the dissolution of Renaissance

spatio-temporal links is expressed by the emergence of a diverse set of technical
objects for image production that offer rules and allow us to analyze the new
conditions of perception. Photography and the phonograph, extracting their
images (visual and sound) out of any context, proceed to a systematic
fragmentation of bodies and produce a perceptual unconscious (both optical and
sound) that reorganizes the limits of sensitivity. Automation reveals that every
image is a splinter without totality: to the extent that time and space are
disaggregated there is no unity to which the experience can be reintegrated (but
as the nostalgic dream of a community that will never come). Outside the frames
of the painting, the unity of the sensible is fragmented. No less than the world,
one's own body (the body as property) will have to be produced according to the
new rules expressed in these new objects. We are, as Benjamin stated, under
the pressure of states of shock in the face of which we have to rework the
conditions of the “common” experience (for this, I refer to the text by François
Arago) – we can remember, in passing, that by the end of the 19th century
Bergson, taking photography as an epistemological model, stated that all
perception is a selective action in the midst of the flowing evolution of images:
from among that accumulation of images, we barely cut out those that are of
interest to life, the rest do not affect us or We affect them. Among the many
consequences of this initial position, Bergson will establish his famous
differentiation between space and time, conceived as duration.

However, perhaps even more important for the understanding of our

rituals, as Flusser has shown, is the fact that these automated images sever any
fundamental relationship with an Outside. Automated images are no longer the
copy or index of an external world, nor the projection of man's inner life. They
appear as the very substance of what we consider real: the technical evolution of
images cancels the old Platonic distinction between copy and simulacrum. And
as Nietzsche would say, once the true world is abolished, the world of
appearances is also abolished: neither truth nor falsehood: barely, simply, the
power of the affects, the pathos of the images. To put it in a way that suits my
exposition, they do not represent the world: they have the performative force
through which the perceptible arises as an effect of a performance: the
performance through which the world appears as an image. In this sense, as
Belting states:

The change in the experience of the image also expresses a change in the
experience of the body, so the cultural history of the image is also reflected in an
analogous cultural history of the body (...) Today's digital media have modified our
perception , just as the technical means that preceded them did; However, this
perception remains linked to the body BELTING, Hans; Anthropology of the image ;
p. 30-31

Perception as montage

I confess without false modesty that this glory, if there is glory, is

the one that makes me happiest. Do you want to know how I
first got the idea to apply the trick to cinematography? It was
very simple. A part of the apparatus I used at the beginning (a
rudimentary apparatus in which the film frequently tore or caught
and refused to advance), produced an unexpected effect one
day when I was prosaically photographing the Place de l'Opera:
it took a minute to unblock it. the film and start the device.
During that minute the pedestrians, buses, cars, had, of course,
changed places. Projecting the film together at the point where
the breakup occurred, I suddenly saw a Madelaine-Bastille bus
changed into a hearse and men changed into women. The
substitution trick, called the stopping trick, had been found and
two days later I performed the first metamorphoses of men into
 women and the first sudden disappearances, which were at first
very successful. It is thanks to this very simple trick that I
performed the first magic: the Manoir du Diable, le Diable au
couvente, Cendrillon, etc, etc.
MELIES, Georges; Les vues cinématographiques , at
http://collections.cinematheque.qc.ca/articles/les-vues-
cinematographiques

If cinema was one of the most successful technical objects of the 20th century, it
is because it expresses the rules of ritual necessary for our perception to be
constructed. For the German theorist Hugo Münsterberg, in a founding text of
cinematographic theory from 1916 (equivalent, perhaps, to that already
mentioned by Arago), the production procedures of cinema (point of view,
moving images, close-up, etc.) ) express the logic of thinking. In this sense, the
key to perception is found in montage. To the extent that the senses have been
fragmented (to the extent that space and time have been fragmented),
perception is itself a performative effect of montage (of cutting and pasting) that
never ceases to reconfigure itself: a modification in the montage will have as
consequences a modification of the perceptual spectrum of what appears (each
model of montage - from Griffith to Gance, from Murnau to Einstein - produces,
as Deleuze has shown, a well-differentiated type of community). The
permeability of the editing procedure, beyond the cinematographic object, seems
sufficiently demonstrated by the references to the Fordist type of production, to
psychoanalysis and the modes of elaboration of the unconscious, to the
Duchampian procedures of the ready-made , to Joyce's writing, etc. . Williams
Burroughs expressed it in a poignant way. Human perception is a montage, a
cut-up , a paste effect. Thus, the body, no less than the world, results from a
performative effect of that performance called montage. Going out onto the
street we see pieces of people. Of Meliés's tricks, (which play with the
unexpected and immediate approximation between life and death, between the
feminine and the masculine, diabolical tricks that show that all identities were put
on hold: cutting off heads and making them disappear were the tricks favorites of
the French filmmaker) to the problematizations of Lucrecia Martel's cinema (The
Headless Woman), from the Bataillean acephalus to the Warburg atlas, a body
without organs always appears to us that is constructed through the gluing of the
parts: the unity is the effect of this relationship

Thus, some final final considerations arise: would performance art be a

great ritual of fragmented bodies produced in the immanence of the
heterogeneity of the senses? Can these bodies without unity, or whose unity is
produced as an effect of a montage, be, in turn, dismantled and assembled in
new performances, in new gluings, making other corporeities appear beyond
what was normalized in them? And, if cinema is an exploration of the fragmented
body as an image, would performance art be a political exploration of montage
beyond cinema?
We could think about another question that is barely indicated in this
place: with the montage and beyond the visual empire, the unity of the sensible
is not only a question of the gaze (we are surprised, in retrospect, by the fact
that the ancients had a body and that it had a memory). Performance studies
have given rise to a reevaluation of meaning throughout the history of Western
thought (in brief I refer to the work of David Le Breton). In this sense, the
performance arts would be ways of thinking about the image (the performative
effects of images) from the perspective of a body that exceeds all
ocularocentrism (perhaps some of this was in Benjamin's diagnosis: in the fall of
the aura, defined as what we see in what looks at us, would the disparity of the
body emerge?

One last consideration arises: assembly is part of our past. The new
technical, electronic and digital objects express another type of sensitive agency.
They don't cut or paste. Montage gradually disappears from the scene (neither in
work, nor in production, nor in the arts does it seem to occupy the same place
for the general understanding of perception). The nature of images on television
and computer screens is no longer spatial and their relationships are not defined
by contiguity. The images appear to be just temporary modulations of intensity.
To the extent that the intensity ends, the image is erased without leaving traces
behind it. The new images do not archive anything and therefore do not promise
to reveal anything (perhaps they are part of a biopolitics that neither Foucault nor
Derrida could have imagined): they cut all relations with the past and with the
future in which they gave something to see. But that does not affect the images
without also affecting the body itself, as Belting stated. In the simultaneity
between what we see on the screens and what is outside of them, there is a
digital equivalence: the body is perceived as sets of bits of information
expressing an absolute assemblage of exchanges: bodies are not exchanged
except to the extent that have become informative. It is the eroticism of thinder
that resolves possible contacts through a scanning procedure in which the
finger, touching the screen, accepts the image and rejects the encounters. Our
rituals today express this becoming information of the bodies. In this
arrangement, the assembly matters less than the relative trajectory of the
movements in a territory and the intensity of their appearance and
disappearance, guaranteeing the online interconnectivity of life. But all of these
are only approximations to think about the post-montage rituals in which Mauss's
nurses gave the convalescent the model of the body of the women of Paris:
those bodies and the gaze that constructed them have vanished, together, in the
grains of celluloid where they feigned eternity.

Concluding, I tried to develop and define a research in which

assemblages can be studied as fields of tensions made of closure and leaks in
the territory of the sensible. But the interest is not theoretical without being at the
same time practical. Considering perception as the effect of a ritual, would it be
possible, appropriating its rules (as Foucault says, perverting them, inverting
them; or, as Flusser proposes, inventing new moves from them; or, as I propose,
interrupting the everyday flows of sensitivity that they produce) create new
processes of subjectivation that are beyond the subjections of normalized
bodies? Perhaps it was possible, within the rituals, and despite them, to create
other sensibilities, made of pure affects and percepts – as Deleuze and Guattari
said. Perhaps, in this way, in their imperceptible character, other bodies oppose
the unworthy modes of exposure that force us to appear within the commons of
our community.