Postponing Identities: Slowed Perception, Layered Embodiment, and Lateral Politics

Abstract

This article examines how non-divisive identities are enacted through perceptual slowness, understood as a multilayered, embodied structural trait that counters the immediacy and frontality characteristic of contemporary perceptual and communicative regimes. It explores how different instances of slowed perception reshape processes of identification by foregrounding affectability, layered embodiment, and lateral relations that both precede and exceed symbolic or intentional mediation. Drawing on critical phenomenology, contemporary accounts of material and visual inflection, enactivist aesthetics, and recent theories of socially engaged perception and ambient rhetoric, I argue that hesitation, inflection, and viscosity exemplify perceptual attitudes that suspend reactive and potentially destructive behaviors – including certain forms of socio-political critique – and instead open indirect, compositional modes of relation. These attitudes postpone identification, expanding the experiential field and thereby resisting racializing perceptual forms and normative recognition while cultivating spaces of non-frontal engagement. I conceptualize these modes as a form of lateral aesthetics and politics: indirect, embodied, and purposefully affective strategies of counter-discrimination that unfold through delay, dwelling, and practices of apparent passivity, creating more plural and breathable spaces of identification.