Senses and Cognition in Early Chinese Thought*

In the early history of Chinese thought, a cognitive tradition emerged under the Shang and Zhou dynasties that saw the ear and the mouth as the main means of connecting the inner and the outer world. In the pre-Qin period, particular prominence was given to the cognitive function of the ear and eye, with the latter receiving greater attention; however, in the contest between the two, the ear eventually prevailed over the eye. In the Qin-Han period, the tongue came out ahead in the contest between ear and tongue. At first the ear and the mouth were seen as cooperating, but later in the competition between ear and eye, the ear prevailed, in what can be seen as a restoration of the ancient Shang and Zhou tradition. The same is true of the tongue’s victory in the ear-tongue disputes of the Qin-Han period. The mouth was originally latent in this process, but reappeared as the tongue. The successive victories of the ear and the tongue represented conscious progress in cognition. In the contest of the senses, the eye and the ear were lost out, being supplanted by the sense of taste. This moved Chinese thinking on cognition ever further from the primacy of sight and hearing, with the sense of taste eventually taking pride of place. This led to the creation of a culture in which core concepts such as the Way (dao 道) were dominated by the sense of taste, giving rise to China’s unique taste-based mental universe.     

Learning (to) taste: food,aesthetics, and education in early modern France

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the intersection between taste and education in the early modern period. The first part investigates the close connection between the sense of taste and the sin of gluttony, highlighting taste’s close association with food disorders in the late Middle Ages and early modernity. Silencing taste was by then a key aspect of the education of the body, which needed to be learned from the earliest age, at home as well as at school. The second part charts the rise of a moderate and honest gourmandise from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, accompanied by the invention of the polite bon goût and later the aesthetic taste of beauty, which contributed to a new social valorization of taste, while also complicating contemporary practices of learning (to) taste. Using a wide variety of early modern printed sources, including conduct books, religious and moral treatises, books of emblems, and treatises on the senses and on taste in particular, as well as aesthetic works, this paper sheds light on the multiple ways in which taste – of the body as much as of the mind – was used, learned, and displayed, hence revealing a transformation of the experience and understanding of taste throughout the early modern period, as well as its impact on educational practices.     

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.     

Seeing touch and touching sight: a reflection on the tactility of vision

ABSTRACT

The article explores the reciprocal relationship between images and viewers by considering the relationship between the senses of sight and touch. I argue that images touch viewers at the same time that viewers touch images. Taking Casilda Sánchez video work, As Inside as the Eye can See as a point of departure, this article explores the ways in which a viewer’s encounter with the work can be understood as tactile rather than merely visual. Precisely because the work is visibly obsessed with the sense of sight it provides an intriguing entry point into discussions around the tactility of visual experience. Even though a person does not physically interact with this video by means of actual touch, our relationship with it is fundamentally tactile. In order to make this argument, I draw on theoretical positions that deal with the embodiment of perception, phenomenology and haptic visuality. Finally, with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s theories on vision as touch, I show how a viewer’s embodied response to the video contributes to its critical potential which unfolds from this rich experiential and tactile encounter.     

Body of knowledge: Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery and the blind imagination

ABSTRACT

This article examines the cultural and philosophical intersection between visual and tactile knowledge and the emergent aesthetics of modernism. In the September 1913 edition of The Museums Journal, J. A. Charlton Deas published a paper entitled “The Showing of Museums and Art Galleries to the Blind.” The text, exceptional in its historical context, complicated prevailing assumptions about acts of “visual” art and blindness. Deas details a series of experiments undertaken at Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery from 1906 to 1913 that consisted of making accessible exhibits, specimens and paintings for blind children to touch. Unprecedented at the time, these experiments recast the persistent Western belief that the eye has privileged access to knowledge, instead asserting that knowledge is embedded within material corporeality. The physical, creative and intellectual inclusion of blind people into the formerly inaccessible space of the museum was unique in its reach and offers a refreshing new perspective of what those (authoritatively visual) spaces could be. Sunderland, a region which tends to be discursively separated from the ambitions and experiments of modernism, was at the center of modernist discussions about knowledge, sight and touch; and, disrupts modernism’s silence with respect to acknowledging unprecedented regional developments such as those detailed in “Showing.”     

视觉化传播对当代审美文化的影响

当代视觉化传播对当代审美文化的影响是深刻而复杂的,既有积极的一面,又有消极的一面。一方面,视觉化传播整体上把日常生活纳入审美的范围之内,有利于培育当代大众的新型审美文化形态;另一方面,视觉化传播泛审美的结果也导致审美活动停留在感官-形象消费的水平上,使大众的审美趣味庸俗化、审美感官钝化,消解了美学的传统精神。     

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).     

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.     

Feeling the unseen: imagined touch perceptions in paranormal reality television

ABSTRACT

In paranormal reality television, the medial evidence of senses adding to the visual and auditory may produce the most compelling intermedial experience. When little can be seen or heard, the lasting impact of a ghost hunting show may rely on what it makes the audience feel through the sense of touch. Even if the touch perceptions were imagined – or precisely because they were imagined – the experience can be all the more powerful. Intermediality research supplies the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis and hypotyposis as tools for a study of the television show Ghost Adventures. A definition of senses as media is advanced in conjunction with a three-tier model of mediality to lay open the intermedial experience involved in imagined touch perceptions as medium-specific instances of rhetorical figuration.     

消费时代的审美正义——审美的伦理学视角

消费主义思潮深刻地影响着当代中国社会的日常生活,重新塑造着我们这个时代的审美文化品格与表征,同时也给学术界提出了新的审视和思考。面对当代审美文化呈现出平面化、世俗化、快感化和商业化的特点,学术界在调整自己学术理念的同时,更要坚守传统美学精神和审美正义,发挥审美特别是文学艺术的超越性和批判性潜能,揭穿日常生活审美化光环遮掩下的消费欲望横行的现实,从而完善主体的审美趣味和心性良知,挽救人的理性与感性的双重＂异化＂。     

康区的历史与可能性——基于阿来四部长篇小说的历史人类学分析

本文以历史人类学的视角讨论了阿来的四部长篇小说《格萨尔王》、《瞻对》、《尘埃落定》及《空山》（系列）。文章认为,康区历史上的空间感发生过重要转型,即从古代的四方四国模式收缩为晚期帝国及近现代时期的汉藏二元模式,再到当代的一元模式。与此相伴随,康区的时间也经历了不断规训的过程,即从循环的宗教时间转变为中原王朝的政治时间,再到现代线性时间。在上述转型之外,这些作品也分别暗含了空间里的中介与时间上的超越等另类时空发展模式。这一过程及结果既是康区的经验事实,也是历史叙事的功效。阿来的情感体验和文学追求是自下而上的,而其史观却相反。本文也考察了阿来这样的少数民族精英在建构关于本族群的文学化历史叙事中的复杂性。     

Social Representations: The Beautiful Invention

Psychoanalysis: Its Image and Its Public is a perfect illustration of Tarde's claim that ‘beautiful’ should be reserved for ideas that lead to a discovery of more ideas and to an invention that we can judge as fruitful for the future. The article examines the influence of the book in geographical, historical and scientific contexts and traces the development and diffusion of the theory of social representations throughout four periods. The article highlights the difference between the first edition in 1961, and the second one in 1976, and it examines the development of Moscovici's ideas over time. The first edition of Psychoanalysis, based on the criticism of sociology of knowledge, underlines common sense as a new object of study, attempting to capture complex social phenomena. It shows common sense as a legitimate object of study that interweaves social, cultural and individual dimensions in the constitution of social reality. The 1976 edition emphasises that language and communication and its role in the theory of social knowledge. The book has had manifold impact on new areas of study. An overview of international research in social representations shows how this work has inspired scholars all over the world, has lead to creating Schools of research and to innovative proposals not only in terms of domains that have been studied but also in terms of theoretical models and methodological concerns.     

Sensuous (Re)Collections: The Sight and Taste of Socialism at Grūtas Statue Park,Lithuania

ABSTRACT

The present paper is about Grūtas, a Lithuanian park—museum featuring recuperated Soviet-era artifacts. This museum is examined as a locus of public memory where the nation's socialist history is invoked through visual representations (recovered statuary) and by implicating the sense of taste (“Soviet” drinks and dishes served at the museum's café). The paper suggests that seeing the Socialist past at Grūtas activates memories of trauma and loss, while tasting that past summons up more nostalgic reminiscences. It is further argued that this museum constitutes a visual and gustatory critique of Lithuania's increasingly commodified and “modernized” present. It is also proposed that collective memory in today's Eastern Europe affords a productive ethnographic site in which to investigate the ongoing systemic transformations in the aftermath of communist rule.     

李白的诗美学思想及其盛唐特征

从陈子昂提倡"风骨"论到李白再次提出"风骨"论,形成了初唐到盛唐的一股美学思潮.李白以美学史家的巨深眼光,充分认识到美学史的发展状况,善于进行思想的融合.他推崇建安时代的"风骨"美学,成为他的理想目标.天然、清新是李白的又一重要的美学思想.它要求审美形态回归本体.它宣告了六朝美学的终结,同时宣告了另一个美学新时代的到来.因而,它具有盛唐时代特征.     

民国时期北平高校教师的休闲文化

民国时期,作为新式知识分子重要组成部分的现代高校教师群体,其休闲文化展现出诸多特点:休闲生活悠然自得,休闲方式中西交融;休闲品味高雅,休闲时间自由;休闲活动中展现出强烈的社会责任感和精英意识;休闲过程实现了人际关系网络的巩固或重新建构。这些休闲文化特征具有深深的时代烙印,其形成原因,有民国社会各种制度的影响,也有文化资本和职业惯习的共同作用。     

The Rehabilitation of Common Sense: Social Representations,Science and Cognitive Polyphasia

In Psychoanalysis, its image and its public (PIP) Moscovici introduced the theory of social representations and took further the project of rehabilitating common sense. In this paper I examine this project through a consideration of the problem of cognitive polyphasia, and the continuity and discontinuity between different systems of knowing. Focusing on the relations between science and common sense. I ask why, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, the scientific imagination tends to deny its relation to common sense and believe that can displace it. I argue that the psychosocial dynamic between common sense and science is revealing of how heavily they are entangled in, and indeed indebted to each other. Even more, this dynamic allows for a full appreciation of what the theory of social representations calls states of cognitive polyphasia. Different systems of thinking and knowing do not displace each other but live side by side, co‐existing in a variety of ways, fulfilling different functions and answering different needs in social life.     

Immersed in sfumato: Correggio’s sensory palette and the immersive Renaissance

ABSTRACT

This brief essay examines the multisensory aspects of the painterly technique of sfumato, first through an analysis of Corregio’s interpretation of the myth of Jupiter and Io, then in the broader context of Renaissance approaches to the representation of space. While scholarship has emphasized the optical character of sfumato, aerial and linear perspective, the last part of this essay replaces these approaches in the context of the immersive character of Renaissance arts and suggests parallels with the dissolution of boundaries between art and audience characteristic of modern and contemporary art.     

Sensuous Pageantry

ABSTRACT

This article proposes an exploration of taste through the lens of certain events organized by the Slow Food movement. It aims, first, to situate Slow Food discourses in the practices carried out in particular sites, and second, to account for sensuous relations established between people and food in events such as fairs, festivals, and markets. In redirecting attention to the specificity of sensory practices of the organization, the article contributes to a little-explored field in Slow Food studies. It shows how micro-practices enrich and continuously shape the Slow Food principle of sensory education. Research from fairs, festivals, and markets in England and Italy provides insight into the interactions and strategies of producers, organizers, and visitors, and evaluates modalities of taste-making and taste formation. The article introduces the concept of sensuous pageantry in order to explore multiple ways of engaging with various sensory orders pertaining to the what, who, and how of tasting. It is argued that sensuous pageantry, an often overwhelming and dominant sense of taste and sensing at fairs, brings multiple sensory orders together and creates tensions which alternately undermine or reinforce those sensory orders. As such, fairs offer distinctive conceptual insights for a sociology of taste and the senses, which aims to assess emerging sensory constitutions as potential catalysts and drivers of change.     

现代非理性主义的本质及其主要形态

非理性主义源于对近代理性主义文化的反叛 ,它是西方现代文化的重要标志之一。现代非理性主义首先将人看做非理性的实体 ,同时强调非理性方法的重要性 ,贬低、限制理性的作用 ;在真理观等问题上也坚持非理性的标准。非理性包括感觉、直觉、本能、情绪、情感、信仰、审美、生存和发展需要等内容。非理性主义几乎在现代文化的主要流派中都有所表现     

浅论大学教育理念重构与校园文化建设

教育可概分为两大类:一是“大学”之学,作用于人性的完善和社会文明的进步,一是“小学”之学,作用于获取现实利益和促进社会的富有,二者有机贯通与整合,构成完整的教育理念。中国高等教育思维中有重实用、技能、职业的导向,忽视了“使人成为人的教育”的本质。大学教育理念的重构和人文素质教育的提高,责无旁贷地落到校园文化建设上来。