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LIBIDINAL AND
POLITICAL ECONOMIES OF THE SENSES An
intense new focus on the social life of the senses is sweeping the humanities
and social sciences. This "sensory turn" or rather, "revolution"
-- has resulted in a profound disruption to the hegemony which the discipline
of psychology formerly exercised over the study of sense perception
(Howes 2007). Now, alongside sensory psychology, there is sensory anthropology
(Classen 1993, 1997; Geurts 2003; Howes 2003, 2004), sensory history
(Classen 1998, 2001; Jutte 2005; Smith 2007, Howes 2008), and sensory
geography (Rodaway 1994; Paterson 2007). The sociology of the senses,
first suggested by Simmel (1924), has also come of age (Synnott 1993). As
these emergent fields of study take on increasing definition, it is
instructive to look back and consider the work of certain earlier theorists
of the social nature of the senses, most notably Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud. While neither of these scholars is primarily known for their
contribution to sensory studies, both made substantial contributions
to our understanding of the social determinants of perception. Marx,
for example, may be regarded as the author of a political economy of
the senses, centring on the alienation of the senses under the regime
of industrial capitalism, while Freud invented a libidinal economy of
the senses, focusing on the erotogenic zones of the body and the competing
pleasures of looking and touching. The
objective of the two chapters which follow is to relate the works of
Freud and Marx to current research in the history and anthropology of
the senses, and thereby bring their theories up to date. At the same
time, we shall be concerned to identify how their ways of understanding
the senses were both a product of their respective times, and influenced
by their respective sensory biographies. The
idea of "sensory biography" comes from the work of Sander Gilman,
most notably his fascinating little study called Goethe’s Touch
(Gilman 1988) In that essay, Gilman argues that, while the idea of
a social history of the senses has come of age, much of that work
has operated from the assumption that the history of all
of the senses could be written as part of the history of the mentalité,
the historically created consciousness of any given culture. Why
not, asks Gilman, also try to understand how central individual variations
are in shaping the generalized response of a culture? Whence his
study of Goethe’s touch. While
we embrace Gilman’s idea of sensory biography, we are also conscious
of its dangers. These are well brought out in the following quotation
from Mark M. Smith’s Sensing the Past: Depending
on the subject under consideration, a sensory biography might quickly
become an interior intellectual history project that does not deal with
the senses in a fully textured and articulated way. The second danger
is that a foray into sensory biography might wrongly posit the social
and cultural history of the senses and sensory biography as somehow
in tension when, in fact, the tools and insights of social history could
be used when detailing how any given individual understood the senses
and the context in which he or she lived. Gilman comes perilously near
to endorsing such a position when he says that it is not the general
setting but the specific individual response, with all its personal
idiosyncrasies, that is of real interest in writing a history of the
senses. This distinction is both unhelpful and false not least because
one cannot measure idiosyncratic sensory understanding without having
an understanding of the general sensescape of a society and culture. With these
caveats in mind, I invite you to read the following two chapters: Freud’s
Nose: Toward a Libidinal Economy of the Senses Marx’s
Skin: For a Political Economy of the Senses References Classen, C. (1993), Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures, London and New York: Routledge. -----, (1997), Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses, International Social Science Journal, 153: 401-412. -----, (1998), The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination, London and New York: Routledge. -----, (2001), "The Social
History of the Senses, in Encyclopedia of European Social History,
vol. IV, P. Stearns, ed., New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 355-63 Geurts, K.L. (2003),
Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community,
Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilman, Sander (1988), Goethe’s
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Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society. London: Routledge |