What do the knotted feeling in the gut, the constriction in the throat, vomit, and feces have to do with the orderly syntax of knowledge and truth? What do such visceral phenomena have
to do with the flows of social power that are regimented by this syntax? How are we to think about those decisive moments of physical and affective communication that precede and exceed interpretation, the sensation that comes before and goes beyond logic but is somehow logic’s operative basis, its sine qua non? Sensation, which provides myriad points of intrusion and
extrusion for the nervous system, has, constitutively, a fractured syntax that calls for a commensurate kind of reflection, a reflection that in some circles goes under the rubric of “the aesthetic” (or its currently more fashionable counterpart “the antiaesthetic”); though “poetics” happens to be Michael Taussig’s favored designation for this reflection, a reflection whose object and context are ones in which the “observer melts into the observed in
confusing ways, subject and object keep changing places in unpredictable rhythms, language becomes manifestly treacherous, both sharpening and disarming the critical faculty through hazy ambiguities”