Empire of the Senses

The Sensual Culture Reader

David Howes, David Howes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000515435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino and Alain Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain - and they are subject to dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.

Part I

The Prescience of the Senses

‘Culture Tunes Our Neurons’

The lead chapter in this volume, by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, takes as its object the paradox of describing ‘what the blind see.’ In this chapter, Sacks does for blindness and visual thinking what he had earlier done for deafness (Sacks 1989), and a wide range of neurological disorders, from autism to Tourette’s Syndrome (Sacks 1985, 1995). Unlike the dry ‘case histories reported in conventional medical textbooks, the ‘clinical tales’ Sacks recounts teem with anecdotes and personal reflections. He describes the symptomatic worlds his patients inhabit in vivid, palpable detail, such that his ‘case histories’ read more like ethnographies (and he, in fact, characterizes his unique genre of medical writing as ‘neuroanthropology’). In addition to exemplifying the skills of a ‘sensuous ethnographer’ (Stoller 1997) in his feelingful and profoundly reflexive accounts of the far borderlands of the mind where his neurological patients dwell, Sacks has been responsible for advancing a highly cultured critique of the cognitive sciences. He has been particularly concerned to expose the flaws in the two most basic tenets of classical (computational) neuropsychology – namely, the notion of the mind as a computer, and the notion of the specialization and localization of brain functions.

Consider the case of ‘Dr. P.,’ ‘the man who mistook his wife for a hat.’ Dr. P., who suffered from profound visual agnosia, was unable to recognize persons or everyday objects. He could not grasp particulars, only abstractions. Sacks’ interactions with Dr. P. led him to conclude that ‘our mental processes … involve not just classifying and categorising,’ of which Dr. P. was still capable, ‘but continual judging and feeling also’ (Sacks 1985: 20), two capacities he lacked. In Sacks’ estimation, the cognitive sciences are also lacking in attention to matters of feeling and judging, and he goes on to hold up Dr. P.’s case as ‘a warning and parable – of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational’ (Sacks 1985: 20). We are not just calculators. ‘We need the concrete and real,’ Sacks insists.

According to the cognitive sciences, the mind makes the object. This proposition needs to be balanced by the recognition that the object makes the mind, and that both such makings are always mediated by the ‘ways of sensing’ or ‘techniques of the senses’ unique to a given culture and, within each culture, to each individual. This is what is meant by the phrase ‘the prescience of the senses’ as used here.

Sacks draws another, equally profound, conclusion from his study of Dr. P. He noticed that Dr. P. compensated for his inability to organize the world visually by, among other things, ‘fac[ing] me with his ears’ and ‘do[ing] everything singing to himself’ (Sacks 1985: 9, 17). In other words, Dr. P. cultivated a series of sensory techniques that enabled him to cope with the ‘disaster’ that had befallen his brain. This finding points to the extraordinary plasticity of our neural wiring, in addition to standing as a tribute to Dr. P.’s indomitable spirit.

In the piece included here, Sacks delves into the intricacies of the visual sensorium in both sighted and non-sighted individuals. It is literally fascinating to follow him as he draws out the implications of each of the seven cases he discusses, and goes on revising his conclusions concerning the multiple forms of human visuality to the very end of his essay.

Culture has a marginal place at best in conventional neuropsychology. But in Sacks’ view, culture completes physiology, as appears from the following exchange with an interviewer from Psychology Today:

OS:	Our culture beats on us constantly, and we see this most clearly in the occasional wild child, the wolf boy, who has been lost in the woods. Our nervous systems need culture as much as they need chemicals. Without language and culture, we are like headless monsters.
PT:	The culture tunes our neurons …
OS:	Right, and so the biological and the cultural are woven in us together from the very start, from the first days of life. This is why a pure view of physiology is not sufficient. It has to take in the whole world. (Anon 1995: 32)

The suggestion that ‘culture tunes our neurons’ provides an apt segue from Sacks’ neurological investigations to the work of the man who took electronic communications technologies to be extensions of our nervous systems: Marshall McLuhan. It bears noting, as well, that McLuhan was no less fascinated than Sacks by the possibilities of perception and cognition opened up by the privation of vision. (For example, both Sacks and McLuhan’s views on visual perception were shaped by reading Jacques Lusseyran’s memoir of blindness.)

McLuhan started out in literature but graduated to cultural studies – avant la lettre, of course.¹ Even this capacious disciplinary label cannot do justice to the multiple strands of his thinking, particularly as regards the senses. For McLuhan both brought a multidisciplinary perspective to bear upon the study of the senses, and pursued the implications of his model of the ‘kaleidoscopic sensorium’ for the reconstruction of knowledges across a wide array of fields. ‘Inside the Five Sense Sensorium,’ the essay selected for this volume, weaves together architecture and urban planning, communications and psychology, history and anthropology, sociology and cultural studies (in both its high and popular varieties). In short, this essay is a ‘knot’ – in Michel Serres’ sense – and untying as well as retying the diverse strands of McLuhan’s argument constitutes one of the unifying threads of this volume.

It was McLuhan who gave us the notion of the ‘ratio of the senses.’ Following Harold Innis’ lead in The Bias of Communication, he traced the (allegedly) distorting impact of successive technologies of communication (oral, chirographic, typographic, and electronic – or, return of the oral) on the ‘sense-ratio.’ The term ‘sense-ratio’ as used by McLuhan means sensuous reason; that is, it refers to the proportional elaboration of the senses within a particular cultural logic. According to McLuhan (1962), it is only in consequence of the invention of writing and later print, which involved ‘an exchange of an ear for an eye,’ that ‘reason’ was reduced to classification, lineal (cause-effect) thinking and quantification – in short, calculation. But we are not simply calculators, as the electronic revolution in communication has brought home with a vengeance, plunging us, in McLuhan’s words, into a dynamic universe of ‘simultaneous relations’ akin to the ‘oral world’ of ‘tribal’ societies.

Appreciating the impact and insight of McLuhan’s theories does not mean overlooking their shortcomings. There are problems with the technological determinism and implicit evolutionism of McLuhan’s theoretical position, and aspects of these will be addressed by the essays in this volume. These problems, however, do not detract from the fundamental soundness of his claim that our senses – and our sensibilities – are fashioned by culture and technology and not just given by biology.

1. See, for example, Culture Is Our Business (McLuhan 1970). McLuhan’s media image – as the 1960s guru – backfired on him: he became a victim of his own soundbites. Only recently have we begun to appreciate in any depth just how prescient were his takes (or ‘probes,’ as he called them) on virtually every topic of discussion in today’s human sciences. See Cavell (2002) and Feld (this volume), as well as Mitchell (1992).

Bibliography

• Anon. (1995), ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a What?’, Psychology Today, 28(3): 28–33.
• Cavell, R. (2002), McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Innis, H.A. (1951), The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• McLuhan, M. (1962), The Gutenberg Galaxy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• _______. (1970), Culture Is Our Business, New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Mitchell, W.J.T. (1992), ‘The Pictorial Turn,’ Artforum (March): 89–94.
• Sacks. O. (1985), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, New York: Harper and Row.
• _______. (1989), Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, Berkeley: University of California Press.
• _______. (1995), An Anthropologist on Mars, Toronto: Knopf.
• Stoller, P. (1997), Sensuos Scholarship, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

1

The Mind's Eye

What the Blind See

Oliver Sacks

In his last letter, Goethe wrote, ‘The Ancients said that the animals are taught through their organs; let me add to this, so are men, but they have the advantage of teaching their organs in return.’ He wrote this in 1832, a time when phrenology was at its height, and the brain was seen as a mosaic of ‘little organs’ subserving everything from language to drawing ability to shyness. Each individual, it was believed, was given a fixed measure of this faculty or that, according to the luck of his birth. Though we no longer pay attention, as the phrenologists did, to the ‘bumps’ on the head (each of which, supposedly, indicated a brain-mind organ beneath), neurology and neuroscience have stayed close to the idea of brain fixity and localization – the notion, in particular, that the highest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, is effectively programed from birth: this part to vision and visual processing, that part to hearing, that to touch, and so on.

This would seem to allow individuals little power of choice, of self-determination, let alone of adaptation, in the event of a neurological or perceptual mishap.

But to what extent are we – our experiences, our reactions – shaped, predetermined, by our brains, and to what extent do we shape our own brains? Does the mind run the brain or the brain the mind – or, rather, to what extent does one run the other? To what extent are we the authors, the creators, of our own experiences? The effects of a profound perceptual deprivation such as blindness can cast an unexpected light on this. To become blind, especially later in life, presents one with a huge, potentially overwhelming challenge: to find a new way of living, of ordering one’s world, when the old way has been destroyed.

In 1991, I was sent an extraordinary book called Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness. The author, John Hull, was a professor of religious education who had grown up in Australia and then moved to England. Hull had developed cataracts at the age of thirteen, and became completely blind in his left eye four years later. Vision in his right eye remained reasonable until he was thirty-five or so, and then started to deteriorate. There followed a decade of steadily failing vision, in which Hull needed stronger and stronger magnifying glasses, and had to write with thicker and thicker pens, until, in 1983, at the age of forty-eight, he became completely blind.

Touching the Rock is the journal he dictated in the three years that followed. It is full of piercing insights relating to Hull’s life as a blind person, but most striking for me is Hull’s description of how, in the years after his loss of sight, he experienced a gradual attenuation of visual imagery and memory, and finally a virtual extinction of them (except in dreams) – a state that he calls ‘deep blindness.’

By this, Hull meant not only the loss of visual images and memories but a loss of the very idea of seeing, so that concepts like ‘here,’ ‘there,’ and ‘facing’ seemed to lose meaning for him, and even the sense of objects having ‘appearances,’ visible characteristics, vanished. At this point, for example, he could no longer imagine how the numeral ‘3’ looked, unless he traced it in the air with his hand. He could construct a ‘motor’ image of a ‘3,’ but not a visual one.

Hull, though at first greatly distressed about the fading of visual memories and images – the fact that he could no longer conjure up the faces of his wife or children, or of familiar and loved landscapes and places – then came to accept it with remarkable equanimity; indeed, to regard it as a natural response to a non-visual world. He seemed to regard this loss of visual imagery as a prerequisite for the full development, the heightening, of his other senses.

Two years after becoming completely blind, Hull had apparently become so non-visual as to resemble someone who had been blind from birth. Hull’s loss of visuality also reminded me of the sort of ‘cortical blindness’ that can happen if the primary visual cortex is damaged, through a stroke or traumatic brain damage – although in Hull’s case there was no direct damage to the visual cortex but, rather, a cutting off from any visual stimulation or input.

In a profoundly religious way, and in language sometimes reminiscent of that of St. John of the Cross, Hull enters into this state, surrenders himself, with a sort of acquiescence and joy. And such ‘deep’ blindness he conceives as ‘an authentic and autonomous world, a place of its own … Being a whole-body seer is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions.’

Being a ‘whole-body seer,’ for Hull, means shifting his attention, his center of gravity, to the other senses, and he writes again and again of how these have assumed a new richness and power. Thus he speaks of how the sound of rain, never before accorded much attention, can now delineate a whole landscape for him, for its sound on the garden path is different from its sound as it drums on the lawn, or on the bushes in his garden, or on the fence dividing it from the road. ‘Rain,’ he writes, ‘has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience … presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once … gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world to another.’

With his new intensity of auditory experience (or attention), along with the sharpening of his other senses, Hull comes to feel a sense of intimacy with nature, an intensity of being-in-the-world, beyond anything he knew when he was sighted. Blindness now becomes for him ‘a dark, paradoxical gift.’ This is not just ‘compensation,’ he emphasizes, but a whole new order, a new mode of human being. With this he extricates himself from visual nostalgia, from the strain, or falsity, of trying to pass as ‘normal,’ and finds a new focus, a new freedom. His teaching at the university expands, becomes more fluent, his writing becomes stronger and deeper; he becomes intellectually and spiritually bolder, more confident. He feels he is on solid ground at last.

What Hull described seemed to me an astounding example of how an individual deprived of one form of perception could totally reshape himself to a new center, a new identity.

It is said that those who see normally as infants but then become blind within the first two years of life retain no memories of seeing, have no visual imagery and no visual elements in their dreams (and, in this way, are comparable to those born blind). It is similar with those who lose hearing before the age of two: they have no sense of having ‘lost’ the world of sound, nor any sense of ‘silence,’ as hearing people sometimes imagine. For those who lose sight so early, the very concepts of ‘sight’ or ‘blindness’ soon cease to have meaning, and there is no sense of losing the world of vision, only of living fully in a world constructed by the other senses.

But it seemed extraordinary to me that such an annihilation of visual memory as Hull describes could happen equally to an adult, with decades, an entire lifetime, of rich and richly categorized visual experience to call upon. And yet I could not doubt the authenticity of Hull’s account, which he relates with the most scrupulous care and lucidity.

Important studies of adaptation in the brain were begun in the 1970s by, among others, Helen Neville, a cognitive neuroscientist now working in Oregon. She showed that in prelingually deaf people (that is, those who had been born deaf or become deaf before the age of two or so) the auditory parts of the brain had not degenerated or atrophied. These had remained active and functional, but with an activity and a function that were new: they had been transformed, ‘reallocated,’ in Neville’s term, for processing visual language. Comparable studies in those born blind, or early blinded, show that the visual areas of the cortex, similarly, may be reallocated in function, and used to process sound and touch.

With the reallocation of the visual cortex to touch and other senses, these can take on a hyperacuity that perhaps no sighted person can imagine. Bernard Morin, the blind mathemati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Empires of the Senses
• Part I: The Prescience of the Senses
• Part II: The Shifting Sensorium
• Part III: Sensescapes
• Part IV: The Aestheticization of Everyday Life
• Part V: The Derangement of the Senses
• Sensory Bibliography
• Index