Durkheim and realism

This article examines Durkheim's relationship to realism. I argue that there is enough prima facie evidence of realist commitments in his work that our task should be to consider what kind of realist Durkheim was. I discuss, first of all, Durkheim's epistemics and follow that analysis with a discussion of metaphysical realism in his texts. The first part of the paper covers a wide range of his work; the second part focuses primarily on The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In a final concluding section, I go on to consider how his epistemic arguments and his philosophical realism might work together to support important parts of his general sociology. Realism is not often brought to bear on Durkheim's work. When it has been, Durkheim has been identified as a naïve realist. These interpretations of Durkheim do not recognize the sophistication of contemporary realism, which does not reduce to naïve representationalism. This paper will sort out Durkheim's realist commitments in his texts, and in light of the variety of realisms consistent with “sophisticated” (that is, non-naïve) realism.     

Radical Interactionism: Going Beyond Mead*

George Herbert Mead argues that human society is comprised of six basic institutions—language, family, economics, religion, polity, and science. I do not believe that he can be criticized for making institutions the cornerstones of a society, but he can definitely be criticized for his explanation of how our basic institutions originate, how these institutions operate in society after their inception, and how they later change, modifying society in the process. The problem with Mead's explanation of these three critical matters is that he based them on his principle of “sociality” rather than on the principle of “domination.” If Mead's principle of sociality is replaced by the principle of domination and his notion of the “generalized other” is replaced by the notion of the “phantom community,” then most of these problems can be largely solved. Thus, in this paper, I will not only point out the key problems in Mead's theory of society, but I will also offer solutions to them based on the notions of domination and the “phantom community.” The end product is a “radical interactionism” that surpasses Mead's original interactionism in identifying the part that both domination and the composite “other” play in every known human society—big and small, and past and present.     

The Social as Heaven and Hell: Pierre Bourdieu's Philosophical Anthropology

Many authors have argued that all studies of socially specific modalities of human action and experience depend on some form of “philosophical anthropology”, i.e. on a set of general assumptions about what human beings are like, assumptions without which the very diagnoses of the cultural and historical variability of concrete agents' practices would become impossible. Bourdieu was sensitive to that argument and, especially in the later phase of his career, attempted to make explicit how his historical‐sociological investigations presupposed and, at the same time, contributed to the elaboration of an “idea of the human being”. The article reconstructs Bourdieu's philosophical anthropology, starting with his genetic sociology of symbolic power, conceived as a form of critical theory (latu sensu), and concluding with an account of the conditio humana in which recognition (“symbolic capital”) appears as both the fundamental existential goal through which human agents strive to confer meaning on their lives and the source of the endless symbolic competition that keeps society moving. The agonistic vision of the social universe that grounds his sociological studies returns in his philosophical anthropology under the guise of a singular synthesis between Durkheim's thesis that “Society is God” and Sartre's idea that “hell is other people”.     

Rethinking the Soundscape

ABSTRACT

This article takes critical issue with the well-circulated but often misapplied term “soundscape.” Coined by Canadian composer Murray Schafer in his book “The Soundscape,” the term has become one of the keywords of sound studies, but in its wide circulation it has become disconnected from its original scholarly concept and used broadly to apply to nearly any sonic phenomenon. Scholars either misapply it or redefine it to suit their needs. This article is an attempt to trace an intellectual history or genealogy of the term, and to open a conversation about the term's use, application, and utility for scholars of sound. This article draws on Schafer's work in an attempt to ground the term in its own intellectual history, and then traces the use of the term in a variety of sound studies works. The term “soundscape” emerges as at once indispensable and elusive, provocative and limited. By calling attention to background sound, Schafer shaped the field in ways that exceeded his own contribution.     

The Flesh and the World: Intercorporeal Body-selves,Ageing and Dancing

ABSTRACT

In this paper I address the role that embodiment, embodied consciousness and what can be termed “extradiscursive” experiences such as body memory and ekstasis as a form of ecstatic experience assume in understanding the body-self of mature dancers. I argue that the body-self of the dancer becomes increasingly intersubjective in maturity through her/his bodily practice, and that this can be understood in terms of the notions of intercorporeity, and of the “flesh” derived from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. I argue that ways of manifestation of intercorporeity in bodily experience are discursively elusive, drawing on two forms of bodily experience—body memory and ekstasis—and examining experiences narrated by mature dancers who were interviewed in my Ph. D. study on ageing, gender and dancers' bodies. I contend that the experience of ekstasis is the “glue” of a corporeal subjectivity that transforms itself through momentary identification with the world, that calls on the invisible as well as the visible. Body memory also challenges Western dualist conceptions of consciousness and bodily experience, and is more easily aligned with Eastern understandings of consciousness as embodied. Finally, I suggest that the concept of body memory is useful for imbuing the body-subject with a cohesion and authenticity through the body's capacity for nonconscious remembrance of movement through a proprioceptively stored “body history,” which enables the constitution of a coherent body-self in older age.     

Embracing Sculptural Ceramics: A Lived Experience of Touch in Art

ABSTRACT

Sculptural ceramic objects created by and for the body were made within the context of art-based research, in which theoretical explorations and studio practice were integrally interwoven. Studio explorations developed from theoretical knowledge gained from human physiology, and from the development of an understanding of the “lived experience” as expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, through the experiences of the artist in making, and comments from visitors at exhibitions. The artworks challenge the visual hegemony of the art gallery by more fully engaging the body's sense of touch through the embrace. The sculptures, which were made by “casting hugs,” instinctively invite interaction, with soft curves that echo the human body, textures to visually entice individuals to touch, and a pleasurable weight that slows down responses. In public exhibition the artworks are enthusiastically embraced and held, broadening and articulating a tactile aesthetic for sculpture, and shifting focus from the sculptural objects themselves to one's physical and emotional experience of those objects.     

Fantasy Lands and Kinesthetic Thrills

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that Coney Island's enclosed amusement parks aided in the transformation of spectacle as total-body experience. By studying the ways that Coney Island's unique beachside resort produced entertainment that appealed to all of the senses, we seek to “make sense” of the amusement area in its historical and geographic specificity. Even in its early years of development the beachside resort was touted (and critiqued) in the popular press as a carnivalesque atmosphere that escalated the senses. With the opening of Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland Coney Island's enclosed amusement parks provided dream worlds of technological and architectural wonder that invited kinesthetic. Coney Island reconfigured the dizzying effects of urbanism, modernity and the capitalist machine as entertainment, inviting pleasure seekers to experience the shock of modernity as fun. Mechanical amusements celebrated and fostered thrill seekers as sensuous beings who experienced leisure not just through their eyes but with and through their entire bodies. Though the impossibilities of recreating the sensorial experiences of pleasure seekers at Coney Island remains a methodological limitation, this article contributes to literature that understands the senses as lived, embodied phenomena that are products of culture.     

The Menagerie of the Senses

ABSTRACT

The term “menagerie” convenes two claims: firstly that our relation to our senses is one of active and constructive management (the old sense of the word “menagerie”), and that animal senses, or our idea of them, play an indispensable part in that management of the senses. While our senses mediate the world to us, animals mediate our senses to us; animals are thus the mediators of the mediation. A review of the use of animals as emblems of the five senses in medieval and early modern illustrations shows that while, on the one hand, animals were used to enforce the idea of the lowliness of the senses, on the other hand, the awareness of the superiority of certain animal senses encouraged the imaginative recruitment of animals to augment or transform human powers. This is brought to a focus in representations of the fly. Finally, this essay considers the part played by simulations of animal perception in the development of new technologies for augmenting and extending human senses. The new organs, perceptions and forms of awareness of our world continue to implicate and improvise upon the animals, which helps us to take leave of our senses.     

Surprising the Senses

ABSTRACT

We perceive the world around us and the objects in it with all our senses. Designers can therefore influence the way we experience everyday products by paying attention to the multiple sensory aspects of products.

When sensory information from two or more senses conflicts, people can be surprised. Currently, more and more product designers are experimenting with designing products that provide incongruent sensory information. Creating such products enables these designers to evoke interest for their products and let people experience something new.

In several studies, we have investigated people's reactions to and opinions about products with sensory incongruities. The results of our studies suggest that evoking surprise by incorporating sensory incongruities in products can be seen as a means to create more pleasurable product experiences.     

Groping in the Dark

ABSTRACT

Government mandated blackouts precipitated a crisis in the optical consciousness of the American public in the first years of the Second World War. In an effort to foil potential aerial bombardment, citizens were asked to turn off their lights and so break an otherwise unqualified promise of modernization: ubiquitous illumination. After decades of constantly increasing levels of artificial light, blackouts challenged not only nighttime visibility, but spatial perception more generally. Americans discussed ways to adjust to dimmer surroundings, to infer spatial information from non-visual senses and familiarize themselves with nightscapes based on specular rather than geometric properties of surfaces. Although the blackouts lasted only a few years in the USA, they reveal the profile, albeit in negative terms, of how the nation's visual environment was imagined around 1940.     

Touching Consumers,engaging the Senses in Consumption

ABSTRACT

For years, the Campbell's Soup Company advertised their brand of soup through a message of “Mmm, Mmm, Good.” This slogan reached mass audiences primarily through visual and auditory media messages of television and print. Campbell's recently switched to a new form of advertising to consumers through an IAd application. The format works through Apple iPhones by first showing an interactive ad teaser, “You're getting warmer,” then when clicked through asks consumers to download cooking applications individually to their iPhones. This shift represents a change in appealing to consumers' senses and social sensibilities. The former media approach appealed to a rational social sensibility and mass audiences of eating soup at home as an enjoyment shared with others. The latter iAd slogan and iPhones media approach appeals to a more tactile sense and individualistic sensibility. This article explores the particular confluence of social, sensory, and media factors that intersect with a marketed food brand, and discusses its implications for the way manufacturers mix and blend new sensory messages and mobile media channels to appeal to a new sensibility in people's changing eating habits.     

Sonic Envelopes

ABSTRACT

This article examines ways in which an individual's experiences of spatial environments are informed by physical and psychic perceptions of sound. It explores how sonic images, memories, voices, spaces and events constitute “sonic envelopes.” These aesthetic figures are developed out of the late-nineteenth-century writings by the philosopher Henri Bergson and from contemporary audio-walks by the artist, Janet Cardiff. Each shows that sound, space and time are embodied in the individual's powers of sensory perception. Bergson and Cardiff's sonic envelopes may therefore enable reevaluations of the relationships between sound, space and time that connect the individual to his or her environment.     

Odorous childhoods and scented worlds of learning: a sensory history of health and outdoor education initiatives in Western Europe (1900s-1960s)

ABSTRACT

This paper develops a sensory history of health and outdoor education initiatives which featured (non-)formal schooling, analyzing these as belonging to (a) scented and more generally sensed world(s) of learning. Working with photographs as sensory objects of affect, and using as examples Belgian and Luxembourg open-air schools and associated sanitary and social welfare provisions, the paper explores issues that have gone under-researched in sensory scholarship internationally: those of precise educational purposes, methods, processes and effects of sensory engagement, particularly pertaining to “smell”. Sensory practices and experiences and uses of senses generally are thereby traced in/as “situated, embodied” movements inextricably “enmeshed” with symbolism. The paper argues that while the educational goals underpinning the initiatives investigated and the approaches and practices characterizing these have changed, some (un)intended effects still have an impact today, for instance through Forest School as given shape in the United Kingdom. The concept of “odorous”, or rather “sensuous childhoods”, is proposed to denote ways that particular target groups have come to be imagined as in need of explicitly sensorial health and outdoor education.     

Teenagers' Multisensory Routes for Learning in the Museum

ABSTRACT

In this article I draw on a study of sensory aspects of teenagers' use of digital media, how these sensory aspects are incorporated in emerging learning strategies, and the implications of this for the same teenagers' engagement in museums. My focus is on how an ethnographic approach that attends to the senses may enable a critical review of prevailing pedagogical ideas in museums. Recent developments in museum education have led to large investments in state-of-the-art technology to produce interactive, multisensory exhibits. However, the question of how teenagers respond to these campaigns remains rather under-researched. This article shows how habitual use of digital media in teenage everyday practice incorporates learning to appropriate other people's experiences and ideas through a configuration of vision, touch, motion, and imagination, thereby enhancing non-representational learning qualities such as affect and sensation. The implications of this sensory approach open up routes to differentiate pedagogical settings in museums that on a superficial level apply the same educational technologies, but since they are based in different sensorial belief systems, different conditions for learning unfold in their use. In developing this analysis I argue that through ethnographic attention to the senses we might advance theories of learning within museum education.     

The awakening of the body: “Film as Sensation” in the first French avant-garde

ABSTRACT

This article examines the notion of “Film as Sensation” in the first French avant-garde. It begins by exploring the meaning of this notion in a series of key films and aesthetic statements by Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Pierre Porte, Henri Chomette, Jean Tedesco, and Réne Clair. Contrary to Gilles Deleuze’s account of the work of this school as Cartesian in spirit, this article seeks to demonstrate that it operates a fusion between the senses, disruption, and criticism: the three elements coming together to produce a new, integral art form. Walter Benjamin’s views on the tactile and the absent minded public of film, and Henri Bergson’s critique of time and movement in cinema are also discussed, with the latter being shown to be a key philosophical influence. The essay ends with an analysis of some films by Abel Gance, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Léger. It is concluded that the idea of “Film as Sensation” entrained a significant development in thinking about the mediation of perception that, once recovered from the oblivion to which it has been consigned, can help bring film theory to a reconsideration of the senses and a new attention to the aesthetics of filmic sensation.     

Sensing Cittàslow: Slow Living and the Constitution of the Sensory City

ABSTRACT

In 2004 Aylsham, Norfolk, became Britain's second Cittàslow Town (Slow City). Embedded within the slow living ideology of Cittàslow is the assumption that the “better” life it advocates involves heightened sensory experience and concomitant pleasure. In contrast to contemporary fast life, it wishes that “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment [may] preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency” (The Slow Food Companion 2005: 6). In the first part of the paper I analyze how the sensory elements of slow living are represented in the Cittàslow and related Slow Food movement's literature. Then, based on my ethnographic fieldwork centered on Aylsham's Cittàslow events and projects, I examine how the routine and creative sensory practices of the individuals who produce and participate in Cittàslow policies and activities are constitutive of a “sensory city.”     

Kinesthesia,Synesthesia and Le Sacre du Printemps: Responses to Dance Modernism

ABSTRACT

“Kinesthesia, Synesthesia and Le Sacre du Printemps: Responses to Dance Modernism” discusses the reception of Vaslav Nijinsky's controversial choreography to Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) in the light of kinesthesia, or movement sense, and synesthesia or the merging of the senses. Dr. Järvinen argues that the invention of kinesthetic sense and particularly the theory of expression linked with this notion, kinesthetic sympathy, were historically and culturally specific responses to increasing abstraction as a goal in the arts, also seen in Le Sacre du Printemps, a work aiming to produce synesthetic experiences in the spectators.     

Researching the Senses as Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Research in the growing field of sensory studies has begun to identify the sensory aspects of experience, particularly in our engagement with material culture. What is yet to receive much attention is how the senses are acquired and used by individuals and communities, and how they inform action. Adopting barth's argument that cultural phenomena are most productively examined as different kinds of knowledge, this article argues that the senses can be examined as any other knowledge source. This article demonstrates the value of examining the senses as knowledge through an account of learning to hear medically. This example is taken from a broader ethnographic study of the aural practices and experiences of ninety-two musicians, doctors, adventurers, and Morse code operators. It argues that hearing is learned, specialized, and specific to the places we go, the people that surround us, and the things that we do. To seek out the sources and value of this taken-for-granted aspect of our experience, it argues that the senses can be analyzed in terms of their foundations, their acquisition, and practice.     

A body passes by: the flâneur and the senses in nineteenth-century London and Paris

Abstract

The flâneur is well-known for being the most emblematic nineteenth-century observer of urban life. Critics have often compared the flâneur to a camera eye which records everything and insisted on the predominance of sight over other senses in the cognitive process. This article emphasises the embodiedness of the flâneur’s vision, which is an experience of all the senses. Urban public space can be envisaged as a ‘metabolic space,’ in which “the links between background and figures are very unstable” (Augoyard 1991). The moving body of the flâneur, which can adapt to this changing space, seems to be in an ideal position to apprehend the metabolic body of the city. The flâneur is not only a “transparent eye-ball” (Emerson 2003), he is “a living eye” which communicates with all the other senses and captures the whole experience of moving through the city. By looking at texts by Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, the article shows that flânerie is a sensory activity that shapes our perception of the city as much as the city shapes our own flâneries by transforming our bodies into scribes who write the “thicks and thins of the urban text” (de Certeau, 1984).     

Animated Spaces

ABSTRACT

Recent exhibitions of interaction design have sought, and often struggled, to capture within the space of a traditional gallery the multisensorial, often performative nature of the user experience and the richness of the contexts within which that experience takes place. Similarly, many architecture exhibitions have attempted to reinvent the place of architecture in the modern museum—to portray architecture as a multimodal, multisensory shaper of the material landscape that impacts people's everyday lives. Yet, again, the “white cube” complicates curators' and exhibition designers' efforts to go beyond traditional materials—blueprints, renderings, models, and photographs—to convey the dimensionality and material richness of built space. This article will examine how interaction design and architecture, both experiential fields, present unique challenges to the exhibition designer. It will also consider how these fields, by virtue of the distinctive qualities of their designed objects, offer unique opportunities for us to rethink the relationships between the contexts and contents of exhibition. It will conclude with specific recommendations for ascertaining the limitations and affordances of—and critically negotiating between—the exhibition space, the exhibition's publics, and exhibition modes and media.