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.