Massimiliano L. Cappuccio
UAE University, Abu Dhabi
Merleau-Ponty making sense of nonsense. A dilemma for participatory sense making
Enactive theory claims that cognition is sense-making, and – in line with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception – that sense-making is founded on the embodied experience of the “perceived world”. Social beings make sense of their shared worlds by adjusting their joint possibilities of perception and action in a participatory way. Event though fundamentally correct, this approach seems to overlook a question that was crucial in Merleau-Ponty’s reflection (e.g., Sense and Nonsense; The Perceptual World): the role of genuinely nonsensical experience seems constitutive for sense-making, not just residual (it plays a key role in communication. E.g., humor, interrogation, negation, etc.). But, if sense-making is just the possibility to adjust to contextual circumstances, what adjustment can possibly make sense of the circumstances characterized by a lack of possible adjustments?
The question, in the first place, is how nonsense is possible as such: as a situation that doesn’t have a sense and that, nonetheless, is sensed and recognized exactly for this lack. When enactive theory tries to answer it, it faces a dilemma: if nonsense is just one of the possibilities of sense-making, than how can we recognize nonsense as such? But, if nonsense is entirely heterogeneous to sense making, then how can we experience nonsense at all? Claiming either the continuity or the irreducibility between sense and nonsense lead to an equivalent impossibility to understand how the very process of making sense of nonsense occurs in participatory scenarios. I will try to solve this dilemma arguing that nonsense does not emerge as a second-order sense-making capability, but as a moment of ekstatic self-alienation within a fundamental dialectics between the familiar and the unfamiliar. I will briefly examine some typologies of participatory experience (artistic, delusional, non-declarative…) that, according to Merleau-Ponty, border with and circumscribe the more ordinary forms of interaction.