Thinking Multisensory Culture

Abstract

The scholarly turn toward visual culture has left in place the sensory hierarchy that subtends Western philosophy. Yet given the commodification of sense experience, an inversion of the sensory hierarchy with the proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell at the top is not necessarily any more conducive to knowledge or justice. I argue that proximal sense experience may be a vehicle of knowledge, beauty and even ethics. Operating at a membrane between the sensible and the thinkable, the proximal senses have an affective dimension that permits an immanent epistemology. My examples and olfactory 'illustrations' emphasize the sense of smell, which, I posit, given its intimacy with emotion and memory, gives rise to an 'olfactory unconscious'.

Formats, fabrics, and fashions: muslim headscarves revisited

“…In a similar vein, in Hoofdboek ten pages are dedicated to detailed, enlarged pictures of a section of the headscarf, which not only shows the vivid colors and patterns, but also the nature of the fabric 318 ( Figure 9). These formats help viewers to "get a sense" of the multisensorial experience of dress (Howes 2006;Marks 2008)." Draped on the body, rather than cut to fit the body, headscarves differ among themselves in terms of size, shape, fiber, fabric, texture, color, patterns, and decorations.…”

“The Chinatown Foray” as Sensational Pedagogy

“…Smells can be challenging to isolate, as the place and time in which we encounter a smell affects the ways that we register the sensation. Likewise, when we are familiar with the object of the smell, the smell is stronger, demonstrating that “cultivated odors operate across a membrane from the material to the symbolic, the asocial to the communal” (Marks, 2008, p. 126). The smells of daily life—sewage, rot, corruption, body odor —in short the smells associated with the body—have been censored over time and replaced with sweet, clean, and sanitized smells.…”

“…In art and educational research we continue to privilege the distance senses—vision and hearing—as vehicles of knowledge, dismissing and neglecting the proximinal epistemologies of touch, smell, and taste. Because of their association with the body, the close senses are often repressed and sanitized or marketed “not as means of knowledge but of pleasure” (Marks, 2008, p. 130). Laura Marks (2008) argues that consumer capitalism has conquered the bodily senses for hedonic not epistemological reasons.…”

“…Because of their association with the body, the close senses are often repressed and sanitized or marketed “not as means of knowledge but of pleasure” (Marks, 2008, p. 130). Laura Marks (2008) argues that consumer capitalism has conquered the bodily senses for hedonic not epistemological reasons. Think of aromatherapeutic promises of hand soap, and the connoisseurship of wine, coffee, and other luxury goods that are sold to enhance sensuous pleasure and secure class status.…”

Performing AppsTouch and Gesture as Aesthetic Experience

“…Accurately critiquing earlier theories of aesthetics for relying on distance (seeing or hearing) when determining beauty in objects, Marks foregrounds instead the proximal senses --touch, taste and smell --in her analyses. She argues that these senses are not only hedonic, serving pleasures, but can also be senses of knowledge, vehicles of beauty and ethics (Marks: 2008). Aesthetics as aesthesia: the perception of the world of objects without an a priori judgment regarding the validity or quality of the sense through which the perception comes.…”