Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 36, October 2002
Laura U. Marks
Emergent Senses
A Response to Swalwell
Melanie Swalwell 'The Senses and Memory in
Intercultural Cinema' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6
no. 32, October 2002 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n32swalwell I am delighted that Melanie
Swalwell takes up _The Skin of the Film_ [1] so
thoroughly and thoughtfully, and further chuffed that I can
respond in _Film-Philosophy_'s speedy electronic salon.
Swalwell's focus on my arguments about the sensuous and
multisensory character of cinema is most welcome, especially
given her own provocative research into the new
configurations of sense experience that emerge in
interactive media. Swalwell takes up my invitation to pull
the book in the direction of her own interests, and so I
will build in turn on her points about the accessibility and
flexibility of sense experience. Swalwell observes 'popular
representations frequently portray sensory affects as the
automatic outcome of purchasing experiences', in contrast to
the difficulty with which sense experience is accessed in
the works I discuss. This point is welcome, for certainly
the exploration and exploitation of sense experience is
'hot' both commercially and creatively now, but it was in
the works of emigrant, exile, indigenous, and other
ethnically marginal artists that I found the most radical
experimentation with representing sense experience. They
appeal to sense memories and forgettings as a crucial
repository of cultural meaning, not a sensuous sauce on top
of the plenitude of meaning that's accessible to people
living more or less squarely in the middle of a dominant
culture. Swalwell acknowledges all this acutely; I emphasize
it again simply to distinguish between the hapticness of,
say, Rea Tajiri's _History and Memory_ and a Burger King ad.
Both are sensuous, but the stakes are different. Swalwell's recognition that
'it is encouraging to see someone questioning the stability
of the nexus between instrumentality and sentience' is much
appreciated. The senses themselves are precious exponents of
our being in the world, including the pleasure of perceptual
discrimination, skill, and even mastery. [2] My
faith in sentience comes from a phenomenological confidence
in intersubjectivity; that looking-being seen,
smelling-being smelled, etc., are mutual acts (and the
subjects need not be human). It is only in particular
historical circumstances that any sense perception may be
bent to the ends of human power over others. Swalwell's faith in the
individual's ability to decolonize his or her own sense
experience is even greater than mine. She points out, in a
just critique, that an instrumental *image* (which, in my
usage, may be a sound, smell, etc., as well as a visual
image) need not be *perceived* instrumentally. The thinness
of perceptual experience I refer to isn't a result of
technology per se, but technologies that reduce sensation
and perception to the recognition of signs. Yet to some
degree it's up to the perceiver whether to recognize them as
such. In Swalwell's nice phrase, 'a chance city symphony of
noise', the instrumental urban sounds of sirens, car alarms,
etc., lose their symbolic quality. As noise, they arrive to
us less as signs with specific meanings than as an audible
texture. Noise, one might say, is haptic sound. To some
degree it is up to the individual hearer whether to
experience them as a texture or to distinguish and perceive
them, as in the difference between haptic and optical
visuality. Thinking this way, which
Swalwell does well, allows us to understand mass-encoded
images (visible, aural, tactile, olfactory and gustatory) as
accumulating in layers on the world of experience. Any of
these layers may be experienced as primary. In Peircean
terms, they are Thirds (symbolic images, in this case) that
return as Firsts, the stuff of new perceptions. For example,
in the book I quote food critic Jeff Weinstein reminiscing
about the packaged apple pie of his, and millions of other
North Americans', youth. Same pie, different mouths,
different pie-perception and pie-memory. (I can see and hear
the crinkly waxed paper wrapper in my mind now, I can taste
those cinnamon-sludgy former apples, but darned if I can
remember the brand name.) For each generation growing up in
increasingly and differently technologized societies, it is
(and will be) interesting to see how they navigate the
thickening texture of the perceptible and cognizable world
-- what they choose to distinguish, what remains indistinct,
what is the rhythm of this 'haptic-optical' shift. Also it
is interesting to consider how various groups of people
create their own 'texture maps' of technologized society.
Immigrants continue to be my favorite agent of this process,
because they have to creatively negotiate a differently
technologized culture. But also think, for example, of the
ways deaf people, elderly people, teenagers who don't have
the money to jack in, and other groups with quite specific
interests decide what to focus on, what to block out, what
to reweave and reinvent. So Swalwell is right that
technology need not be linked with sensory impoverishment.
The question of instrumentality lies somewhere between the
object and the perceiver. Nevertheless, I do find that sense
experience is increasingly instrumentalized in the current
state of global capitalism (if you'll excuse the condensed
term). I don't want to bracket the enormous power of the
corporations that attempt to encode our sense experience for
us. I still think it's important to distinguish between
perceptions that arrive pre-symbolized, and perceptions that
require a detailed sensory engagement with the world because
their meaning is not already given. Thus my research has turned
to objects that are increasingly hard to pin down: from
haptic images to fugitive odors to wily electrons, and
beyond. This trajectory is evident in my brand-new book,
_Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media_. [3]
Where in _The Skin of the Film_ I 'looked' to intimate
sensory experiences as a kind of refuge from the
colonization of sense experience, now I see such a refuge
(or Temporary Autonomous Zone, in Hakim Bey's term) in that
which is utterly imperceptible, enfolded, or
immanent. My current research returns
to the origin of the notion of haptics in the writing of
early art historian Alois Riegl, who controversially
distinguished optical and haptic images as proto-European
and Oriental respectively. Riegl argued that Roman
figurative, illusionistic art, clearly distinguishing figure
from ground, was inherited by European painting. In a
parallel historical development, a non-representational,
falsely termed decorative mode in which figure and ground
were inextricable became the province of Islamic art. This
privileging of haptic imagery took place within Islamic art,
I would argue, for both theological and geopolitical
reasons. I am curious whether the haptic spectatorship of
these works invites a similar dissolution of self as does
the haptic spectatorship of the films and videos I discussed
in _The Skin of the Film_. What is the mimetic relationship
with this particular kind of abstract image? Also, in the
history of Islamic art, images do not *represent* but
actually *embody* and *perform* religious and philosophical
statements. As such Islamic art, particularly mosque
architecture and calligraphy, is algorithmic. Currently I am
turning to this work as a fruitful prototype for
computer-based art. Computer art is similarly
algorithm-driven, often displays a lack of concern for the
visual image, and is an exercise in making manifest the
invisible, if not the transcendental as in Islamic art. This
research may seem a great departure from the work on
embodiment and sensory experience in _The Skin of the Film_.
The common element is that both projects seek non-Western
alternatives to the Western privileging of optical
visuality, in order to turn these rich bodies of knowledge
to the understanding of contemporary culture. Carleton
University, Ottawa,
Canada Footnotes 1. Laura U. Marks, _The Skin
of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses_ (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press,
2000). 2. See Grahame Weinbren,
'Mastery (Sonic C'est Moi)', in Martin Reiser and Andrea
Zapp, eds, _The New Screen Media_ (London: British Film
Institute, 2002). 3. Laura U. Marks, _Touch:
Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media_ (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002). See
<http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/M/marks_touch.html>. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Laura U. Marks, 'Emergent
Senses: A Response to Swalwell', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6
no. 36, October 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n36marks>.
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