Attuned Otherwise: Curating Aesthetic Experience to Encounter Perceptual Difference

Abstract

This paper argues that carefully curated aesthetic experience can bring us into proximity with perceptual modes we cannot live ourselves. When speaking of differently abled bodies and sensory worlds, empathy often falls short or worse, becomes a kind of violence. The desire to understand another can flatten, appropriate, or misrepresent. But if we give up the idea of total comprehension, we might find something more durable: proximity, contact, and a shared vulnerability. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, I argue that carefully curated aesthetic experience addresses the body directly, posing perceptual questions to what Merleau-Ponty calls the tacit cogito rather than to reflective thought. Because perceptual structure cannot be changed through conceptual argument—only through embodied encounter—curated aesthetic experience offers a privileged site for approaching another’s mode of perceiving. I demonstrate this thesis through an experimental engagement with works by Julia Wolfe and Jackson Pollock, guiding readers toward something that approximates my own non-normative vision: a figureless ground.

1. Introduction: The Problem of Perceptual Difference

The problem that motivates this work is not new. One of the most enduring philosophical challenges is the problem of other minds: how can we ever truly know what another person perceives, feels, or lives through? The difficulty is not merely empirical—about whether we can gather enough evidence—but ontological. Another’s perceptual world is not available to us in the same way our own is, nor can it be delivered through a series of propositional statements. Their body, their orientation, and their sensory rhythms are not ours. Yet we live among others, depend on others, respond to them, and seem to understand them. Empathy appears not only possible but common. Despite its daily occurrence, however, we must resist overextending empathy’s power: how can we ever truly know that we have earnestly encountered the other?

Phenomenology, particularly in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, offers an approach to this problem. Rather than seeking access to the other’s experience through detached observation or cognitive inference, phenomenology focuses on embodiment, on the structures of perception that always already involve a world shared with others. But this sharing is not given in advance; it must be made, and it often fails. As Merleau-Ponty insists in Phenomenology of Perception, our bodies are not merely instruments we use to perceive a world that exists independently of us; our bodies are the very medium through which any world appears at all. “The body,” he writes, “is our general means of having a world” [1] (p. 147). This means that differences in embodiment are not merely differences in perspective on a common world, but potentially differences in the structure of worldly givenness itself.

This paper enters that problem from within the tradition of critical phenomenology, which does not simply accept the body’s sedimented habits as given; it asks how those habits were formed, whose interests they serve, and what it costs to live outside them. As Lisa Guenther has argued, critical phenomenology insists that the very structures Merleau-Ponty describes as fundamental to embodied perception—the body’s implicit projects, its perceptual faith, its tacit orientation toward the world—are never neutral. They are shaped by histories of race, gender, ability, and class, which organize which modes of being-in-the-world are normalized and which are rendered marginal, deficient, or invisible [2].

To speak of “perceptual difference,” as I do throughout this paper, is already to invoke a framework that is not merely descriptive. It marks a deviation from a norm that is itself socially constituted—a norm whose authority is secured not through philosophical argument but through the unreflective confirmation of bodies that fit. The eye that sees without a focal point is not merely unusual; it is already marked, already legible as deficient, within a world built for, and by, eyes that focus. The perceptual habits Merleau-Ponty takes as universal—figure-ground organization, directed gaze, the body’s coherent intentional arc—are, from the vantage point of critical phenomenology, also the perceptual habits of the normatively embodied. This does not make them philosophically worthless; it makes them partial. This paper does not abandon Merleau-Ponty’s insights but bends them toward that recognition: asking what becomes visible, phenomenologically and ethically, when inquiry begins from the non-normative.

My concern here resonates closely with Helen Fielding’s recent and significant argument in Cultivating Perception through Artworks: Phenomenological Enactments of Ethics, Politics and Culture, which makes a compelling case that engaging with artworks can cultivate our perceptual capacities toward ethical and political responsiveness—opening us, through aesthetic encounter, to forms of experience that habitual perception would otherwise foreclose [3]. Fielding’s argument, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of expression and the flesh, establishes a crucial link between aesthetic practice and the expansion of perceptual possibility; my argument shares this foundational premise. What I add, or specify, is a direction and a method: I am concerned not with the cultivation of perceptual-ethical responsiveness in general, but with the particular problem of approaching perceptual modes structured by non-normative embodiment. The aesthetic experiment I develop below does not simply widen the perceiver’s general capacity for openness; it is designed to bring a body into proximal encounter with a specific mode of seeing—one that does not merely differ from the norm but resists the very structures through which the norm organizes itself. And crucially, this mode of seeing is also my own—a starting point, not merely an illustration—a methodological choice to which I return in Section 5.

This paper argues that carefully curated aesthetic experience can bring us into proximity with perceptual modes we cannot live ourselves. Perceptual structure cannot be changed through conceptual argument; I cannot convince you to see differently, nor can you argue me into a new mode of perception. The tacit cogito—the anonymous body that structures our world before reflective thought arrives—is deaf to logic. It responds to encounters. And aesthetic experience, when properly curated, offers precisely such encounters: it poses questions not to the mind but to the body itself. Such embodied, nonconceptual questions, as we will see, open new horizons of perceptual possibility.

When speaking of differently abled bodies and sensory worlds, empathy often falls short—or worse, becomes a kind of violence. The desire to understand another can flatten, appropriate, or misrepresent. But if we give up the idea of total comprehension, we might find something more durable: proximity, contact, and a shared vulnerability. I argue that aesthetic experience can cultivate this kind of proximity, not by offering access to another’s lifeworld, but by unsettling our own—through a style of disorientation attuned to the perceptual structures of the other.

This need not be a perfect mimicry, nor a literal replication, but an aesthetic mode that resonates structurally—kinesthetically, affectively, rhythmically, spatially—with at least something akin to the organizational logic of the other’s world. That resemblance is what opens the door to proximity: not sameness, but relational attunement through perceptual resonance. It is not the sheer fact of disruption that creates proximity, but the manner of the disruption—one that echoes or resonates with the structure of the perceptual world we are approaching.

To demonstrate this thesis, I will offer an aesthetic experiment drawn from my own non-normative experience of vision. My left eye, structured by a figureless ground, offers an example of a perceptual mode that resists the figure-ground logic Merleau-Ponty takes as universal. Through carefully curated engagement with works by Julia Wolfe and Jackson Pollock, I will guide readers toward something that approximates this unusual perceptual structure—not to make them understand my vision conceptually, but to let their bodies encounter a resonant disorientation. This encounter with a figureless ground is an example of my broader argument that curated aesthetic experience, in addressing the body rather than the mind, can open us to perceptual modes we cannot otherwise access.

2. The Phenomenological Ground: Sense, Existence, and the Logic of Expression

To understand how aesthetic experience might open us to perceptual difference, we must first attend to the phenomenological foundations of perception itself. Merleau-Ponty posits that all phenomenal things are present as sense and material existence—two dimensions that are mutually reciprocal in their simultaneous expression of the experienced thing. The sense of a phenomenal thing is not some fixed, linguistic meaning that a thing-as-concept holds for me but is what Merleau-Ponty calls a thing’s horizonal style of presence—its inherent feeling, manner of solicitation, or atmosphere [1] (pp. 330–333).

This notion of sense derives from Gestalt psychology, which finds the sense of the whole as irreducible to constitutive parts. Therefore, any explicitly thematized sense I may arrive at is only one reflectively isolated part of the inexhaustible present sense that a thing offers for me. I do not constitute a thing’s sense, just as it does not dictate to me only one possible response. I encounter this sense through a material presence: my body meets up with the thing, perceiving sense in and through this other material presence. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “The thing and the world are given with the parts of my body… in a living connection comparable, or rather identical, to the living connection that exists among the parts of my body itself” [1] (p. 211).

The general sense of something and its material existence are mutually reciprocal in their simultaneous expression of the experienced thing. The anger of my friend is read as the tightening of their fist. The ceramic cove of the coffee cup, at once solicitation and matter, calls for a refill. The ink on a page presents itself as its meaning, at once mark and word. A thing is materially present within my phenomenal field and carries with it more than simple sense-data: these things always already deliver to me some feeling or call to action. A thing is not reducible to its atomic matter just as a thing’s sense is inexhaustible and holistic.

This is the logic of expression: sense simply present as experienced material. The anger and the gesture, the ink and the meaning—these are not isolated elements tied together by a surveying rationality or unconscious psychological process, but, in living phenomenal experience, they are simply present as the thing itself. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “In a painting or in a piece of music, the idea cannot be communicated other than through the arrangement of color or sounds… A novel, a poem, a painting, and a piece of music are individuals, that is, beings in which the expression cannot be distinguished from the expressed” [1] (pp. 152–153). However, I can take more or less notice of this expressive process, aware of only one side by turning a blind eye to the other—thus the importance of the context of encounter.

The prereflective attitude, for instance, primarily finds things as they are meaningful for current, deliberate projects. In this case, I take the material existence of things for granted while consciously attending to primarily one region of their sense, the world soliciting me according to my mood and current projects. I do not consider the fact that my friend is making a fist, but I try to alleviate their anger. I could not care less about the materiality of my mug when I hear its desperate call for more coffee.

The analytic encounter, by contrast, misses the experiential depth of this prereflective world by covering over the living reciprocity between sense and material. Rather than seeking to understand prereflective engagements on their own senseful-material terms, analytical thinking does violence by dividing experience into subject/object dichotomies. The empiricist misses the sense inherent in the world as she reduces meaning to an imposition upon actually existing material existences. The intellectualist strips away the independent existence of things, reducing them to elements of subjective constitution. Both analytic modes render sense secondary and imposed after the fact. As Merleau-Ponty argues, “Empiricism does not see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not go looking for it; intellectualism does not see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or again we would not go looking for it” [1] (p. 30).

Understanding this logic of expression—and the difference between prereflective and analytic modes of encounter—is essential for what follows. If sense were merely conceptual, imposed upon neutral matter by a thinking subject, then changing someone’s perception would be a matter of changing their concepts: argue differently, and they will see differently. But because sense is lived through the body’s engagement with the world, because it is encountered rather than constructed, perceptual structure cannot be altered through argument alone. The analytic attitude, which dissects and categorizes, cannot reach the level at which perception is organized. We need a different kind of intervention—one that addresses the body where it lives, in that prereflective thickness where world and flesh meet. To understand what kind of intervention this might be, we must go deeper still, to what Merleau-Ponty calls the tacit cogito: the anonymous bodily understanding that structures our world before we ever come to think about it.

3. The Tacit Cogito1 and the Body’s Silent Understanding

To understand how aesthetic experience might disrupt our habitual perceptual patterns and open us to difference, we must attend to what Merleau-Ponty calls the tacit cogito: the living body beneath Descartes’ “second-hand Cogito” [1] (p. 422). In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty corrects Descartes’ error of locating apodictic certainty in the self-consciousness of thought, positing instead a primordial bodily understanding that precedes reflective awareness. This tacit cogito is crucial for understanding why perceptual structure cannot be changed through argument—and why aesthetic experience offers a privileged alternative.

Descartes is wrong to find certainty in the self-held subject of explicit ideas because, as Merleau-Ponty argues, to have ideas at all, one must be already implicated within a deep field of intentions and sedimentations, predicated upon ongoing, embodied being-in-the-world. This field precedes reflective thought. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “Beyond the spoken cogito, the one that is converted into utterances and into essential truth, there is clearly a tacit cogito, an experience [épreuve] of myself by myself… The tacit Cogito, the presence of self to self, being existence itself, is prior to every philosophy…” [1] (p. 426). This primordial self is not a thinking thing but a perceiving body.

Eschewing the objective causal universe of positivism and the psychic grounding of rationality, Merleau-Ponty shows that my perceptual life is rooted in an anonymous body that precedes self-aware thought. The Cartesian move is to sever worldly perception from abstract thinking in an effort to grant immutable status to such clear thinking by virtue of its immunity from the contingencies of the world. Merleau-Ponty argues that such pure self-consciousness forgets that the ground of all thinking—and all experience—is perception. “The world,” he insists, “is not what I think, but what I live” [1] (p. lxxx).

Throughout the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty describes a dichotomy between that which is explicitly conscious, self-aware, personal, egoistic, conceptual—that which is found within a Cartesian cogito—and the anonymous, prepersonal, unthematized, primordial thickness underpinning these explicit, personal activities. Importantly, it is not the Cartesian “I” that perceives. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “one perceives in me” [1] (p. 223). Perception is not at the level of self-held thoughts and ideas, but is in and of the world’s meeting of my body, in a layer of anonymity that outstrips my self-conscious ego.

This tacit cogito is where the implicit structuring of our worlds takes place—at the ground of one’s being-in-the-world beneath their conscious, self-held life of ideas and personal projects. The tacit cogito is the prereflective structuring of one’s world in a coherent and meaningful whole, imbued with an ambiguous and irreducible style or timbre. My world is always already shaped before I come to it, complete with the affective investments that are lived in the fabric of my anonymous body’s offered solicitations and inflections. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “My body is the common texture of all objects” [1] (p. 244).

This matters crucially for our inquiry into perceptual difference. The tacit cogito is precisely what shapes our habitual engagement with the world—the taken-for-granted structures that organize perception before we become aware of it. And here is the key point: the tacit cogito does not respond to arguments. It does not hear reasons. It cannot be convinced or persuaded to perceive differently through conceptual intervention. The tacit cogito responds only to encounters—to situations that shake loose its sedimented structures through embodied confrontation rather than intellectual persuasion.

To encounter another’s perceptual world, we must somehow loosen the grip of our own tacit understanding, making space for unfamiliar modes of organization. This is no easy task, for the tacit cogito operates silently, weaving the world into coherence without our conscious participation. We cannot help but get in our own way, our conceptual categories and personal projects always already overdetermining what we will take from the tacit cogito’s offerings. The question becomes: what might shake loose these sedimented structures? How can we get out of our own way, allowing for glimpses of new perceptual possibilities offered by the tacit cogito, letting ourselves perceive something not already worked over by category or personal investment? We cannot get there through argument, explanation, or representation—these are elements of the Cartesian cogito’s commerce with a worked-over world. We can only glimpse these possibilities through encounter—embodied, felt, lived through the body that we are.

4. Why Aesthetic Experience: Questions for the Body

The tacit cogito cannot be reached through conceptual argument. Here I argue that art, when properly engaged, does not pose conceptual puzzles to be solved but perceptual invitations to be felt. Aesthetic experience, with the right curatorial context, addresses the body directly, bypassing the sedimented habits of interpretation that govern everyday perception. As Merleau-Ponty argues in “Eye and Mind,” the painter “takes his body with him” into the work, and the work in turn addresses the body of the viewer [5] (p. 162).

In my earlier work [6], I have developed the concept of attentive receptivity as the experiential mode wherein one is perceptually present to indeterminate experience, exploring perception through deliberate improvisation. This mode contrasts with both prereflective engagement—which takes the world for granted according to familiar projects—and analytic detachment—which dissects experience according to predetermined categories. Attentive receptivity is the mode in which the tacit cogito can be stirred without being overridden by conceptual thought.

Husserl’s basic insight, I argue, was that at the heart of experience there lies a mutual activity-in-passivity: my body actively structures my experience into a coherent whole, while, at the same time, I passively receive this coherent totality offered to my conscious life [7]. My insight is that under certain conditions of attention, this active-passivity can surface into awareness, making conscious what ordinarily operates in silence—and it is precisely this surfacing that allows a perceiver to deliberately engage with what is typically taken for granted, thereby expanding their perceptual horizons of possibility. This is what I call attentive receptivity: a mode of conscious awareness wherein the active-passivity at the heart of my structuring of experience is brought to the fore of my waking life.

When perception is disrupted—by an artwork, by another’s embodied difference, by being wonderstruck beholding the sublime—it is not merely thought that is challenged but this deep, bodily familiarity. The tacit cogito must renegotiate its position in the perceptual field. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, perception involves a living cohesion of the body, and when this cohesion is disturbed, we find ourselves in what he calls the “motor grasping of a motor signification” [1] (p. 144). It is in this shaking loose of the sedimented “I can” that proximity to another becomes possible.

When a perceptual question arises—when we are confronted by the unfamiliar, or by an artwork that resists familiar legibility—it is this tacit cogito that is stirred, if we are able to sit in the initial discomfort and let the unfamiliar bloom. The question is not “What is this?” but rather “How do I live this?” The engagement is not with a what, but a how of perceptual openness. Consider motivated synesthesia as a prime example: if I ask you to attend to the color of a sound, concepts fall flat [6]. Your mental categories are confused by such nonsense, but most listeners who open themselves to this question will stumble upon a kind of intersensory weighing, surprised to find that some colors fit the sound better than others. This is a bodily, pre-conceptual upheaval. The force of the perceptual question compels us to renegotiate the world beneath conscious intention—sound takes on a new colorful dimension, color resonates audibly, and perception sparkles in a new synesthetic interplay. Presenting such a question stirs the tacit cogito, bringing its perceptual world front and center for conscious awareness, enabling a firsthand engagement with our taken-for-granted perceptual lives much more effectively than any academic argument about the inherent synthesis of our senses ever could. Show, don’t tell. The arena where we engage perceptual questions is the site where encounter truly happens: not where we comprehend the other, but where we are moved, reorganized, and made perceptually vulnerable in our orientation to them.

But not just any aesthetic experience will do. The artwork alone is not sufficient. What matters is how the encounter is framed—how the aesthetic experience is curated to direct the body’s attention toward particular structures of perception. This is why curation becomes central to my argument: the curator who understands another mode of perceiving can select and frame works that resonate with that mode, guiding the viewer’s body toward an approximation of unfamiliar perceptual structures—otherwise, the overwhelming gravity of our concepts and personal projects will hold the tacit cogito under the surface, where it habitually operates.

5. An Example: The Figureless Ground

To demonstrate this thesis concretely, I draw on my own non-normative experience of vision—not as a mere case study, but as an aesthetic provocation, a material invitation to perceive otherwise. (Again: Show, don’t tell.) My left eye, diagnosed at birth with Morning Glory Syndrome, does not participate in the world the way my right eye does. It does not resolve the world into discrete objects. It does not anchor my gaze. It meanders. It blurs. It attends to everything all at once, and nothing in particular. It sees, but not how most would call seeing: it is receptive to light and color, but there is literally no focal point, a pure ground of melting form.

A word on method: I am aware that beginning from my own non-normative visual experience is not merely an illustrative choice but a methodological one—one that warrants acknowledgment in the context of critical phenomenology. The first-person, socially situated perspective of the philosopher is not a contamination to be neutralized but a resource to be interrogated. Havi Carel, writing on illness and phenomenology, has argued that the disruption of normative embodiment can illuminate dimensions of experience that remain invisible from the vantage point of normative health: the breach in what she calls “embodied certainty” reveals the sedimented assumptions that ordinary embodiment takes for granted without ever having to justify them [8] (p. 13). My non-normative vision does something philosophically analogous. It exposes, from within, the assumption that figure-ground organization is the natural and inevitable structure of vision—not by arguing against that assumption, but by simply not sharing it. The phenomenologist who sees without a focal point does not need to argue that focal clarity is contingent; his eye demonstrates it.

This is not, then, merely an auto-ethnographic maneuver—a personal anecdote pressed into philosophical service. It is a methodologically principled use of situated embodiment. Feminist phenomenologists have long insisted that the particular, socially situated body of the phenomenologist is itself philosophically productive—that the specificity of one’s embodied standpoint opens questions that a supposedly neutral vantage point would never raise [9]. My figureless ground is such a standpoint. It is, at once, where the philosophical question begins, where the curatorial compass is calibrated, and where the ethical stakes of the inquiry become most legible. To begin from the non-normative is not to generalize from a quirky exception; it is to use the exception to illuminate what the norm conceals about itself.

In other work, I have explored this as a phenomenological problem in its own right—an invitation to rethink Merleau-Ponty’s commitment to figure-ground structure as the universal form of perception, for my left eye’s field is structured according to a figureless ground [6]. That inquiry was a genuine critique: Merleau-Ponty, in his insistence that figure-ground organization is constitutive of perception as such, presupposes a normatively organized visual body. His phenomenology of perception is, in this respect, also a phenomenology of normative perception—one that quietly excludes the perceptual worlds of bodies that do not organize their fields in this way. The universal claims he makes about the figure’s emergence from an indeterminate ground, about the body’s intentional arc toward determinate objects—these are not false, but they are partial. They describe a norm, not a phenomenological necessity, as is lived in the perceptual field of my left eye.

And yet to say this is not to abandon Merleau-Ponty as a resource, nor to deploy him merely as a foil. My relationship to his work in this paper is more genuinely dialectical: I appropriate his phenomenological tools—the tacit cogito, the logic of expression, the body’s anonymous structuring of world—precisely because they are powerful enough to illuminate the experience they were not designed to accommodate. The figureless ground does not refute the tacit cogito; it gives the tacit cogito a different perceptual grammar. In this sense, I carry Merleau-Ponty’s argument forward by extending it into the non-normative—not dismantling the architecture but discovering that some of its walls are less load-bearing than they appeared. This paper is, in that spirit, both a use of Merleau-Ponty and a quiet critique: drawing on his framework while insisting, firmly and with affection, that the body of Phenomenology of Perception can also be a body with a “dream eye” [6], as we will see.

Here, I do not want you to understand how my left eye sees. I do not want you to know my vision conceptually. I want you, instead, to let me guide you into the affects of a figureless ground—let my experience resonate into your perceptual field so you might glimpse something previously foreclosed. Whether you are sighted or not, hearing or otherwise, whatever abilities you carry, you can explore the general style of the experience I want to offer: the existential texture, affective mapping, sensory consistencies.

I am not changing your body, just as you are not reaching your perception into mine. Rather, we will resonate perceptually, a mutual orientation that neither merges nor divides. Let your tacit cogito float to the fore, as I present provocations that do not make sense but tease sensations. You will not see what I see, but you may feel your own experience shift, loosen, become porous. And in that trembling proximity, difference is not dissolved but sustained—held open, like a question, pulsing quietly between us.

This is not a question of empathy in the traditional sense. We will never fully inhabit another’s perceptual world. The lifeworld of my left eye is not simply a unique vantage point; it is a different structure of perception altogether. Those without a similarly structured visual field will, literally, never see as my left eye does. It resists figure-ground logic, defies focal clarity, and floats in an atmospheric haze that cannot be pierced. You cannot live there. You will not inherit its challenges—the social awkwardness of cross-eyedness, the difficulties of driving and 3D movies with monocular vision, etc. But you might visit its world. You might approximate a figureless ground. And that visit might matter.

6. The Aesthetic Experiment: Entering the Figureless Ground

Let us now turn to the aesthetic experiment itself. I have selected two works that, when experienced together in a particular way, may approximate something of the perceptual structure I have been describing. This is not a question of representation; these works do not depict my visual experience. There is no one-to-one correlation, no direct indication, no illustration. Rather, they create conditions for a perceptual encounter that shares structural features with the experience of a figureless ground: diffuseness, simultaneity, ambiguity that does not resolve. They present an opportunity for invitation, when coupled with the right context of encounter.

Before turning to the experiment, a brief reflection on why these particular works—and whether others might have served equally well. The question is not indifferent; it is, in fact, philosophically consequential. Not every disorienting artwork is suited to this kind of curatorial work. The disorientation must be of the right kind—structurally resonant with the specific perceptual mode we are approaching, not merely surprising or challenging in a generic sense. What I am looking for is a particular species of perceptual difficulty: the difficulty of a field without a center, of experience that spreads rather than focuses, that cannot be held in a single gaze or resolved into a dominant figure. Many artworks are difficult; far fewer are difficult in this way.

Both Julia Wolfe’s Stronghold and Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) are exemplary for this purpose in ways that are substantive, not incidental. Wolfe’s scoring for eight double basses is specifically composed around the dissolution of individual voice into collective resonance—she describes it as creating “one mega bass” [10], where the ensemble boundary blurs and melodic figure yields to textural field. This is not merely unusual sonic texture; it is a compositional logic that formally mirrors the figureless ground’s resistance to focal organization. Pollock’s all-over compositions, for their part, were developed as a principled rejection of conventional figure-ground painting—a sustained dismantling of focal hierarchy that has been extensively theorized in terms of its phenomenological and perceptual radicality [11]. These are not random examples of difficulty; they are works whose formal structure enacts, at the level of their making, the perceptual organization I am inviting the reader to inhabit.

Could other works have served? Perhaps. One can imagine approaching a similar curatorial experiment through certain compositions by Morton Feldman, or through the work of Agnes Martin or Mark Tobey—artists who, in their different ways, also resist the prioritization of focal figure. The experiment does not claim uniqueness for Wolfe and Pollock, but fidelity: fidelity to the specific perceptual structure under inquiry, and to the requirement that the work’s formal logic and the perceptual mode being approached be in genuine structural resonance with one another. The curatorial choice is motivated, not arbitrary—and that motivation is itself part of my argument. But any artwork could do, if curated in a way that frames a specific sort of bodily engagement.

To begin, access Julia Wolfe’s Stronghold (2008; Figure 1), a work for eight double basses. Listen to the first 30 seconds with eyes closed, letting it fill your headspace. Do not think, just listen. After 30 seconds, let the work continue to play as you continue to read below.

Figure 1. Listen to Stronghold: https://juliawolfemusic.com/music/stronghold/ (accessed on 6 August 2025).

Wolfe writes in the work’s program notes: “Stronghold starts with webs of rolling harmonics, very high overtones that take advantage of the long length of the strings, and ends with thick resonant sounds created when the bow is heavily pressed into the low open E string. With 8 basses going at once, the ensemble turns into one mega bass, and it’s hard to tell where one player ends and another begins” [10]. This work is about slippage, blurring, blending: you cannot tell where one player ends and another begins, nor can you find where one musical phrase ends or another begins.

Stronghold does not offer melody, the typical musical figure. It does not guide you along a line. Rather than the clarity our Cartesian cogito craves, where each instrument proudly melodizes or harmonizes through its own discrete voice, Stronghold’s web of resonances swells, roils, and vibrates in place. Rhythmic pulses emerge and dissolve without warning, layering density upon density in a sonic architecture that resists containment.

Listening to Stronghold is not unlike trying to stare with my left eye—familiar habit failing to hold something. No clarity, no things. It is slippery, an ocean of affect, a churning. It is raw texture, no object, only field. No path, only presence, an overwhelming. The sound does not move forward so much as expand laterally, threatening to engulf in a sea of indeterminate motion. One does not follow this music; one is suspended within it.

When listening, do not try to follow a melodic line, but let yourself be dragged under the waves, thrown in an interwebbing of resonance and timbre. There is no relief—no relief of a figure against a ground nor a relief of stillness or sense—but instead a network of all-at-once. No localization, no point where you are. There is no shore from which to watch these surging swells; let them wash over you, multiple inter-resonances. Let them echo, without attempting to resolve or clarify. Churning, turbulent churning.

Try to hear the colors of the timbre, the tensions between pulses; let them blur—do not listen for sounds, but feel for movement and follow where it wants to guide you. It is exhausting, but hold on, ride the upsurge, crash in the clashing. Let go of the need to localize, do not try to sing a melody, do not follow a line. Spread yourself, smear your ear and dissolve that little focal center in your head that is trying to follow something, anything—accept this cacophony, become a thousand ears all at once. Inhabit the uncertainty, let yourself be everywhere, pulled apart into the quavering trebles and guttural thrum-thrum-thrums. You are everywhere; it is inside you; you are empty; you are a resonance chamber; it is everything.

This is what it means to hear otherwise: not to find new clarity, but to be immersed in ambiguity that does not resolve—what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” [12] (p. 488). That immersion is the invitation to encounter a ground without figure.

Now, find Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30); look it up online as large as possible, or, if you are lucky, visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is one of Pollock’s most expansive and immersive all-over compositions; it becomes similarly difficult to locate a focal point. The lines do not direct the eye. They scatter, swarm, and fold into themselves. You are not looking at a figure on a background. Get caught in this field where every part competes for attention and yet offers no stable resting place.

Do not try to rest; let the lines carry you. The canvas stretches more than seventeen feet wide, a tidal surge of interlacing lines that coil, crackle, and stretch without resolution. Once again, spread. Let vision smear. You are a thousand eyes, one massive eye, no eye at all; this is not vision but a gravity, a net, a coil of coils. The paint does not depict, but moves—propels the eye without anchoring it. A storm, a cascade, a raging boil. The canvas is not a window into a world; it is a field of activity, a spider’s web, a splatter-splash-tangle, a resonance chamber. The gestures layer over one another until depth collapses: no perspective, or perhaps only perspective. There is no figure, no ground. No center to return to. Evaporation. Mist.

Now, play Stronghold once more, from the beginning or where you left off—it does not matter. Allow the music and the painting to blend. Give yourself over to their intertwining. Let Wolfe’s inter-resonances continue to pour through you as you drift along Pollock’s flecks and strings. An ocean of oceans—a whirlpool. Feel the textures and vibrations of each work bleed into one another: paint, wood, strings, spread, echo, splash, vibrato, specks. Let the basses boom in the back of your head while the lines ripple outward from your sternum. Resist the urge to name or locate; do not rest; do not stop. Just follow motion, color, tremor. Let your thoughts go slack. Spread, spread, spread.

This is not about identifying meaning. It is about being caught—suspended in a cross-sensory drift. Stay there. Listen with your eyes. Watch with your body. Let time fall away. Notice when you begin to search for something familiar, and gently let that search dissolve. That feeling of weightlessness, of detachment from focal clarity—that is the beginning of attunement, of touching my perceptual encounter.

And as you feel that disorientation build, do not retreat. Lean in. Let it undo you. It should feel frustrating; it should feel peripheral. Lose yourself. Frustrate, glide, fall. You are not in control; perception slips through your fingers. This is the point: not understanding, but concentrated surrender. Not resolution, but resonance.

Stop the music, rest your eyes. Silent dark.

7. The Curatorial Imperative: Why Guidance Matters

What you just endured—if you gave yourself over to it—was your own tacit cogito brushing against a figureless ground. Not my figureless ground, but a resonant approximation: your body’s habitual structuring momentarily loosened, its figure-seeking mechanisms thrown into productive disarray. Had I simply argued propositionally about how my left eye sees—described its lack of focal point, its atmospheric blur, its resistance to figure-ground logic—you might have developed an intellectual appreciation for its strangeness. But you would not have felt what it means to perceive without a figure. That feeling, however fleeting, is what makes proximity possible. Importantly, you were not only brought into proximal awareness of my left eye’s figureless ground, but also drew your own tacit cogito to the surface of conscious awareness—what I earlier called attentive receptivity. This mode of engagement has a simultaneous double effect: it opens you to others’ perceptual worlds while at the same time revealing your own, loosening the grip of conceptual categories and personal projects that otherwise hold a near-monopoly on our daily commerce with the world. In attentive receptivity, we become porous in both directions—outward toward difference, inward toward the silent structures we had mistaken for necessity.

These aesthetic experiences are not analogies for my vision nor mimicries; they are invitations. They allow the normally sighted or normatively perceptive to momentarily attune themselves to a perceptual mode structured by ambiguity, diffuseness, and simultaneity. You still do not see what I see. But you are closer. We have a shared affective texture to refer to. Is it the same as mine? Who knows. It does not matter. But it gestures toward the affective texture, it approximates, it starts a conversation. And such proximity matters.

This is what I mean by attuned otherwise. Through careful aesthetic design—whether sonic, visual, or performative—we can guide perception away from its habitual structures. In this example, we de-familiarize the figure-ground logic that usually organizes our world through aesthetic objects in a carefully curated format, mixing multi-sensory presentation with a guided experience. And in doing so, we open space for a mode of receptivity that is not aimed at clarity or mastery, but at encounter.

And this is why the curatorial context is key: it is not enough to be exposed to artworks that might urge us to perceive otherwise. The curation must direct us where and how to perceive the work. I selected works that felt akin to the perceptual structure of my left eye in its figureless ground. Then, I crafted a curatorial context that highlights the salient qualities of the works. Without such curatorial guidance, you may have strived for melody, sought figures in Pollock’s splatters, or, as so many do, written off the works as noise and mess.

The selection of aesthetic objects is itself a form of philosophical argument. By pairing these particular works—Wolfe’s sonic density with Pollock’s visual field—I am not merely illustrating a point but constructing conditions for perceptual transformation. The synesthetic blending of auditory and visual experience is deliberate: it overwhelms the organizing capacities of habitual perception. When sound and sight interpenetrate, neither modality can take precedence, and the figure-seeking mechanisms of ordinary perception are thrown off their habitual axis.

Many people shudder at the sound of Wolfe and scoff at the sight of Pollock, for their perceptual apparatus is allergic to such confusing and disorienting sensations. Their typical worlds of neat figures upon unobtrusive grounds are thrown for a loop, and they dismiss the experience as “something a three-year-old could do” and move on to something more predictable and comfortable. But if one is open to the possibility of difference and listens to the questions I pose, attempting to comport themselves in the ways I invite, they can open themselves to these sensations without overdetermination, engaging the aesthetic object with their tacit cogito—a body immersed in a fresh possibility.

The curatorial work I have just performed—selecting, framing, guiding—is not incidental to the encounter but essential to it. Such a body immersed in fresh possibility is a body that might, even momentarily, perceive otherwise. But this is not empathy as we usually understand it. It is something stranger, potentially richer—and, I will argue, more honest about the limits and possibilities of encounter.

8. Beyond Empathy: Proximity Without Comprehension

Aesthetic experience becomes a privileged site for this type of encounter precisely because it calls upon us not to analyze, but to sense. As we have established, perception is often overdetermined by concept, by habit, by the sedimented paths of expectation and utility—the Cartesian cogito, our everyday dictator. We see what we expect to see, perceive what we are accustomed to perceiving. This overdetermination is not merely epistemic, but existential. Our perceptual fields are structured by what Merleau-Ponty calls our “sedimented” style of the world, a habitual orientation that reflects our history of engagement with things [1] (p. 131). This sedimentation forms a kind of ontological scaffolding, a world that always shows up as already familiar, actionable, meaningful.

When we perceive, we do not primarily operate through conceptual judgment or rational synthesis. Perception silently, perpetually calls upon the tacit cogito—the prereflective structure of the lived body—which acts as the locus of orientation, responsiveness, and sense-making. It is the body, not the ego, that sees, and it sees by virtue of its history of co-inhabiting the world. The world is not first given as a set of things, but as a field of potential orientations. The tacit cogito is not the Cartesian subject, but what Merleau-Ponty calls the “I can” that precedes reflective judgment [1] (p. 139). “Consciousness,” he writes, “is being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body” [1] (p. 140).

This is precisely why empathy, as traditionally conceived, falls short. Empathy typically operates at the level of the Cartesian cogito: I observe your situation, infer your mental states, and imaginatively project myself into your position.2 But this projection remains conceptual—it is an act of the mind representing another mind. The problem is not that such projection is insincere, but that it cannot reach the level at which perceptual difference is constituted, and therefore where lives are richly and meaningfully lived. I can imagine what it might be like to lack a focal point in my visual field, but imagination is not perception. The imagined scenario passes through my own perceptual structures, which remain intact and unchallenged. I think about your difference without ever feeling my own perceptual habits tremble.

Worse, empathy’s imaginative projection can become a subtle form of colonization. In attempting to occupy another’s position, I risk assimilating their difference to my own categories—understanding them as if they were a variation of me, rather than encountering them as genuinely other. Empathic imagination says, “I can picture what that would be like.” But this picturing domesticates the foreign, translates the untranslatable, and ultimately returns me to myself, now believing I have understood what in fact I have only represented. Empathy, for all its good intentions, can flatten the very difference it seeks to honor.

Art cuts through the overdetermination of habitual perception because it is the site where perceptual questions can be posed—questions that address the body rather than the mind. Art does not pose a conceptual puzzle to be solved, but a perceptual invitation to be felt. It disorients, it slows, it refuses instrumentalization. It calls upon the body and the senses—those registers beneath the conceptual and the habitual—to attend again. This is not just a disruption of expectation; it is a reactivation of the body’s capacity to be surprised, for the tacit cogito to be stirred.

What aesthetic experience offers is not a better form of empathy but something structurally different: an encounter that does not require you to represent my experience, but instead disrupts your perceptual habits in ways that resonate with the structure of my visual world. You do not imagine my figureless ground; you undergo a loosening of your own figure-ground organization by virtue of mine. The difference is crucial. In empathic imagination, your perceptual structures remain the stable ground from which you project outward—a Cartesian cogito mistaking its own variations for the other. In aesthetic encounter, those very structures become unstable—shaken, softened, made porous. You are not reaching toward me from a fixed position; you are losing your footing in a way that brings you closer to the ground on which I stand. You silence your Cartesian cogito in an effort to see past mine.

And in doing so, it creates a rare possibility: a moment where your perceptual horizon might be loosened just enough to let in the other. Because what is made possible is not the comprehension of another’s world, but the opening of your own. Not the conceptualization of difference, but the felt proximity to it—through the body, through the senses, and through the silent depth of the perceptual field itself.

This is why I speak of proximity rather than comprehension. Comprehension implies a cognitive grasp, an exhaustive knowing that risks reducing the other to what I can conceptualize. Proximity names something more modest and honest: a drawing-near that does not overcome distance but inhabits it. In proximity, I do not claim to know your world; I acknowledge that your world exceeds my grasp while still insisting that we can meet somewhere in the fragile, porous space between us. Proximity is relational without being appropriative. It holds difference open rather than resolving it.

Crucially, such aesthetic engagement is not a separate act from encountering another; it is not a sequence where the artistic encounter is a stepping-stone to deeper personal engagement. To broaden my perceptual world is also to make room for the other, in one and the same movement. These are not two distinct movements—first expanding myself, then turning toward the other. They are the same gesture, the same disruption of familiarity that makes space for meaning and contact. To encounter another’s perceptual logic is to become vulnerable in my own. That loosening is not a precondition for encounter; it is the encounter itself.

9. Conclusions: Toward a Politics of Perceptual Vulnerability

This is why aesthetic experience matters so deeply in this context: it addresses the body directly, bypassing the sedimented habits of interpretation, and in doing so, it reorganizes the perceptual field. When we are confronted with unfamiliar sensory logics, we are thrown into contingency. That trembling in our attention is not a breakdown of understanding, but rather a bypassing of the nets of concept that would halt our encounter with novelty, by appealing to the body prereflectively, where the tacit cogito first encounters its world without the mediations of concept or judgment.

It is when we find ourselves stripped of interpretive scaffolding and confronted with sensation that meaning begins—not as recognition, but as response. Aesthetic experience returns us to this originary scene, where to understand is not to know, but to be moved, to be reorganized in the act of sensing otherwise. We are not simply becoming aware of another’s difference; we are reencountering our own contingency, our own openness, our own capacity to be otherwise.

To encounter another is not to grasp them. It is to be disrupted by them. It is to feel the contingency of your own mode of perceiving—to realize that what felt necessary was merely familiar. Aesthetic experience makes this possible not because it represents the other, but because it interrupts us. It offers a training ground for receptivity, for attunement, for being shaken loose.

When someone encounters Stronghold, or a Pollock—not as spectacle but as a practice—they are not simply learning about my perception. They are undoing their own. That undoing is not loss, but rich possibility. To attune otherwise is not to lose ourselves, but to find a shared interval—where perception slips, softens, and stretches toward the unknown. In that interval, we do not comprehend the other, but we touch something real together: the fragile underside of meaning, where contact happens not through explanation but through reverberation.

This is the ethical work of aesthetic experience: not to master what is different, but to be mastered by it, to tremble beside it, and to let it change the contours of our attention. If we take that trembling seriously, then perhaps we can build a world where difference is not a threat to understanding, but the very condition for it.

The argument I have made is this: perceptual structure cannot be changed through conceptual argument. The tacit cogito does not respond to reasons. But it does respond to encounters—to aesthetic experiences that pose questions to the body rather than the mind. Curated aesthetic experience, by addressing the body directly, can bring us into proximity with perceptual modes we cannot otherwise access. Empathic imagination remains locked in the Cartesian cogito’s projecting categories; to come into proximity with the other, we must engage the body and not the mind. What I am describing is not empathy as comprehension, but empathy as contact—not understanding, but resonance.

Art opens proximity rather than projects. Art reconfigures perception. It makes space for difference not through representation but by introducing difference through a particular, directed disorientation. And in that disorientation, we become reoriented and thereby newly available to others—and to ourselves.

Such aesthetic engagement shows that we are not destined to remain cut off from one another, foreign worlds bouncing about in a solipsistic universe. Rather, through carefully curated perceptual engagement, we might come into enriching contact with how others see, how others hear, how others are embodied, and therefore, may also glimpse how they think, how they feel, how they live. At the same time, it lets us better appreciate the contingencies of our own perceptual modes, loosening the tight grip our concepts, habits, and expectations have on our everyday modes of being, necessary foundations melting into contingencies.

Perceptual difference, in this light, ought not be a threat to my own lifeworld or a puzzle to be solved, but a different mode of worldly engagement that has something to teach us—something that cannot be learned through concepts alone, but must be felt, approximated, approached through the body’s own willingness to be undone.

And that, I think, is the beginning of something special.