SENSE and SENSATION
websites, blogs and forums
research networks, centres, laboratories
publications
calls for papers, conferences, seminars
CONTENTS:
I. HISTORY of the SENSES
AHR Forum pp.1-2
II. HISTORY, ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY of the SENSES
1° Centre for Sensory Studies (includes links to Research Directory and Related Interest)
2° Publications related to the Sensory Studies Centre
A) Constance Classen
B) Sensory Formations Series
C) Senses and Society Journal
III. PHILOSOPHY and PSYCHOLOGY of the SENSES
The Network for Sensory Research.
1° The Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience (CSPE)
2° The Network Centre for Sensory Research (NetCenSR)
3° The Centre for the Study of the Senses (CenSes)
IV. SITES and PROJECTS more specifically relevant to EARLY MODERN STUDIES
1° Sense Shaper
2° Early Modern Conversions/ “The Sense of Hearing”
3° SENSES, EMOTIONS and URBAN HISTORY
A) Amsterdam Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Emotion and Sensory Studies (ACCESS)
B) The Sound of Amsterdam (Museum of Amsterdam)
C) Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
(Europe 1100 – 1800)
V. CFPS, CONFERENCES and SEMINARS
1° CFP “Decadence and the Senses” (Dec 2013)
2° CFP “JOINED SENSES – synaesthesia in texts and images” (June 2014)
3° “Qualia : Thinking the Senses” (March 2008)
4° VISUAL ARTS/ VISUAL CULTURE
A) “How to See Light. Perception in Early Modern Optics” (Oct. 2013)
B) “Early Modern Colour Practices, 1450-1650” (Sept. 2013)
C) “Sense as a Ratio: Early Modern Proportional Analogies in Visual Art” (April 2014)
5° HEARING
CFP “Noise in EM England” (March 2014)
6° TASTE / DISTASTE
« Le dégoût. Histoire, langage, politique et esthétique d’une émotion plurielle » (mai 2013)
7° MEDIEVAL STUDIES
A) « Penser les cinq sens au Moyen Age : poétique, esthétique, éthique » (mai 2013)
B) « Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge (II) » (mai 2013)
C) “The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures” (June 2013)
D) « Le débat des cinq sens au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance » (mars 2012)
E) « L'expérience de la ville. Les cinq sens du citadin, du Moyen Age à l’époque contemporaine.
Contribution à une anthropologie historique urbaine » (mai 2011)
VII. PUBLICATIONS – AUTRES/ FRANCE
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I. HISTORY of the SENSES
The April 2011 issue of the American Historical Review includes an AHR Forum on "The Senses in
History."
http://blog.historians.org/2011/04/american-historical-review-april-2011/
AHR Forum
The six articles in "The Senses in History" treat the five canonical human senses, even though
they are not so easily separable, as rightly noted by one of the contributors, Mark S.R. Jenner.
While the senses are now often studied individually, this forum juxtaposes current research in
each of the traditional senses to put such work in greater dialogue and to bring new work in
"sensory history" to the attention of historians generally. The essays themselves vary in strategy:
some are more historiographical and others more empirical.
In his introductory essay, "In the Realm of the Senses," Martin Jay places the study of the
senses at the unstable crossroads between corporeality and meaning, nature and culture. He
argues that the discipline of history is better positioned than neuroscience and cognitive
psychology to study the discursive differentiation and ranking of the senses, their impairment,
and their enhancement, and to investigate the relationship between hegemonic cultural
assumptions about the senses and actual material and corporeal practices of a place and time in
history.
In "On Being Heard: A Case for Paying Attention to the Historical Ear," Sophia
Rosenfeld focuses on the history of sound and audition in Europe and its colonies since the
early 17th century, an area in which historical research has achieved sufficient density to be able
to generate a synthetic narrative. The centerpiece of her essay is a consideration of the effects of
the French Revolution, when the newly regained right to free speech led to a reciprocal need to
be heard—which could itself, she argues, be a battlefield. She thereby connects the history of
hearing to central issues of modern European political history.
In "Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories," Mark S.R. Jenner rejects the
teleology and stereotyping embedded in an association of modernity with deodorization. A
narrative that lodges smells in a primitive past or in contemporary poverty does not help us
appreciate either the modern generation of smells (fair and foul) or the complexity of smellscapes
deserving careful historical analysis. Jenner also demands conceptual care in avoiding
culture/nature and human/environment dichotomies. The sense of smell in particular suggests
the permeability of these domains, as well as the interconnectivity of the senses themselves, if we
are to investigate the totality of bodily techniques in various historical moments.
Facing the impossible task of encapsulating the overwhelming amount of historical research on
visuality and visual culture, Jessica Riskin delves instead into an intellectual history of the eye
itself. Significantly, the eye was rendered distinct from vision by English, British, and European
intellectuals spanning from the 17th to the 19th centuries. This distinction was purposeful,
making it possible to characterize the eye’s mechanistic properties to suit theological agendas.
"The Divine Optician" demonstrates how mechanistic principles were associated not only with
science but with theology in Britain and Europe well into the 19th century.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson considers "The Senses of Taste," which she says were primarily
corporeal until scientific and aesthetic determinations of "taste" emerged in Europe in the 18th
century. Once decorporealized, taste was turned into a means of judging individuals and groups,
and signifying the contested terms of personal status, collective identity, and social order. Not
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only social foodways but cookbooks and other representations of food changed over time, and
thus can contribute to our understanding of self and society in history.
Elizabeth D. Harvey meditates on "The Portal of Touch" mainly through a single and singular
example, the collaboratively produced painting The Allegory of Touch (1617) by Peter Paul Rubens
and Jan Brueghel the Elder. She begins with Plato and moves into Renaissance print and visual
culture before engaging in a close analysis of an emblematic artwork. Among the intellectual elite
in Renaissance Europe, human skin and the sense of touch involved both boundedness and
permeability at the same time, according to Harvey.
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II. HISTORY, ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY of the SENSES
1° Centre for Sensory Studies
The nucleus of the Centre for Sensory Studies was formed in 1988. In that year, sociologist
Anthony Synnott and anthropologist David Howes were awarded a grant by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to pursue a research program centred on
charting “The Varieties of Sensory Experience.” The “Varieties” project aimed to take the study
of the senses and sensation out of the psychology laboratory and into everyday life, as well as
back in history and across cultures. In addition to collaborating with faculty members from
Religion and Psychology, Synnott and Howes were joined by Constance Classen, then a doctoral
student at McGill University. In this way, CONSERT (for Concordia Sensoria Research Team)
was formed. Classen has since acquired an international reputation for her pioneering work in the
cultural history of the senses, while Howes and Synnott have played formative roles in the
development of the anthropology and sociology of the senses respectively. The CONSERT
approach to the study of the senses and perception may be said to be characterized by the
following features:
• a focus on the social and cultural life of the senses as distinct from the physiology and
psychology of perception;
• attending to the lower senses in an effort to offset the privileging of vision (and audition) in the
conventional Western hierarchy of the senses;
• emphasizing the relations between the senses (or “intersensoriality”) along with studying the
senses individually;
• giving new meaning to – and recovering the original meaning of – the term “aesthetic,” which
comes from the Greek aesthesis meaning “sense perception” (not just beauty, and not just visual
perfection);
• a concern with the commercialization and technologization of the sensorium; and,
• a robustly interdisciplinary approach to sensory analysis.
In late 2010, CONSERT found itself at a crossroads. The team could either continue to develop
its profile project by project or take steps to become recognized as a research centre. The
decision to apply to the Faculty of Arts and Science for recognition as a research centre was
motivated by a variety of considerations, including above all the explosion of interest in the
Sensory Studies website:
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www.sensorystudies.org
The latter site, a joint initiative of CONSERT and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen,
was launched in March 2010. It sparked tremendous interest right from its inception, and further
galvanized an already dynamic interdisciplinary field of inquiry, in addition to giving it a name:
“sensory studies”.
The Centre for Sensory Studies is an interdisciplinary collaboration platform for research in the
social life and history of the senses, perceptual practice, multisensory aesthetics, and the
development of technologies for expanding the sensorium in innovative ways.
Keywords: Anthropology of the Senses, Sociology of the Senses, History of the Senses, Sensory
Marketing, Sensory Engineering, Sensory Design, Sensory Aesthetics, Immersive
Environments/New Media, Visual Culture, Taste Culture, Sound Studies, Disability Studies,
Sensors and Sensing
Synopsis: The Centre for Sensory Studies was founded in 2011. It provides a framework for the
integration and furtherance of the research activities and interests of twelve individual faculty
members, three research labs and one research team. The team is the Concordia Sensoria
Research Team (CONSERT) co-founded by David Howes and Anthony Synnott in 1988. The
labs include: LabXmodal founded in 2006 by Chris Salter, the Laboratory for Sensory Research
founded in 2010 by Bianca Grohmann, and the Concordia Vision Laboratories co-directed by
Aaron Johnson since 2006.
The Centre for Sensory Studies is a Concordia University Faculty of Arts and Science Research
Centre [Concordia University, Montréal]. We wish to acknowledge the generous support of the
Dean of Arts and Science, Brian Lewis, the former Vice-President Research and Graduate
Studies, Louise Dandurand, and the Acting Vice-President, Graham Carr.
The “Research Directory” which can be accessed at http://www.sensorystudies.org/about/ is
a compendium of the names of scholars who are actively engaged in social scientific or
humanities-based research on the senses and perception. Each entry gives the person’s name,
institutional affiliation, and up to seven keywords describing their research interests, as well as a
link to their home page. Use this directory to explore the riches of “sensuous scholarship”
(Stoller). Listing in this Directory has been by invitation in the first instance. If your research has
a strong sensate dimension and you would like to be included in the list, please submit a request
and documentation to senses@alcor.concordia.ca. Your submission will be reviewed and if your
work falls within the mandate of this site, one of the convenors will contact you about creating
an entry.
The section entitled “Related Interest” directs to teams and research groups and laboratories
currently working on the history, theory and representation of the senses:
http://www.centreforsensorystudies.org/related-interest/
2° PUBLICATIONS related to the SENSORY STUDIES CENTRE
A) numerous publications by Constance Classen and David Howes
http://www.sensorystudies.org/about/constance-classen/
Constance Classen is a writer and researcher based in Montreal. She has a Ph.D. from McGill
University and has held fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, and the
Canadian Centre for Architecture. She is the author of numerous essays and books on the
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cultural history of the senses, including The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (University of
Illinois Press, 2012) The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination (Routledge,
1998), Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (Routledge, 1993), and Aroma:
The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994, co-authored with David Howes and Anthony
Synnott). Classen is also the editor of The Book of Touch (Berg, 2005), one of seven books in
the Sensory Formations series from Berg Publishers of Oxford, and a founding member of the
interdisciplinary Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, which is dedicated to
promoting research on the social and aesthetic life of the senses. She is currently editing a sixvolume series on the history of the senses for Bloomsbury Publishing and is the principal
investigator of a research project on art, museums, and the senses.
B) Sensory Formations Series
Berg Publishers
Oxford and New York
Series Editor: David Howes
http://www.centreforsensorystudies.org/sensory-formations-series/

What is the world like to cultures that privilege touch or smell over sight or hearing?

Do men’s and women’s sensory experiences differ?

What lies beyond the aesthetic gaze?

How has the proliferation of ‘taste cultures’ resulted in new forms of social
discrimination?

How is the sixth sense to be defined?

What is the future of the senses in cyberspace?
‘There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses,’ wrote Aristotle. From the
Ancient Greeks to medieval mystics, and from Karl Marx to Marshall McLuhan, the senses have
been the subject of dramatic proclamations. The senses are sources of pleasure and pain,
knowledge and power. Sites of intense personal experience, they are also fields of extensive
cultural elaboration. Yet, surprisingly, it is only recently that scholars in the humanities and social
sciences have turned their full attention to sensory experience and expression as an object of
study.
This path-breaking series will show how the ‘sensual revolution’ has supplanted both the
linguistic and the pictorial turns in the human sciences to generate a new field – sensual culture,
where all manner of disciplines converge (e.g. history, sociology and anthropology, literary,
cultural and communications studies, philosophy and psychiatry). The extraordinary richness and
diversity of the social and material worlds as constituted through touch, taste, smell, hearing,
sight and, provocatively, the sixth sense will be addressed in the following volumes:
The Auditory Culture Reader
Edited by Michael Bull & Les Back
[Publication date: November 2003]
This volume articulates a strategy of ‘deep listening’ – a powerful new methodology
for making sense of the social.
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http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-auditory-culture-reader-9781859736180/
Sight and sound are equally crucial to our understanding of the world, yet the visual has
dominated discussions of cultural experience. The very way we relate to, and think about, our
everyday world has been influenced by this emphasis on sight over sound. Providing a definitive
overview of an emerging field, this pioneering reader is the first to redress a glaring imbalance by
investigating how auditory culture subtly and profoundly impacts on our everyday lives.
From the evocative tolling of village bells to the grating rattle of exhaust pipes, what we hear
influences how we feel and what we do. As technology advances, the world has become an
increasingly noisy, confusing and disturbing place. The recent addition of mobile phones alone
has irrevocably changed our auditory experiences. In order to retreat from jarring sounds, we
seek new sounds sounds that calm, block, soothe. Beginning with the role of sound in historical
and social thought, The Auditory Culture Reader moves on to consider city noise, music, voices,
and new technologies and medias of sound. It explores, for example, the sectarian sounds of
North Belfast, sounds of the powwow amongst Native Americans, football chants, recorded
sermons, and the power and influence of the DJs voice.
Filling a significant gap, this groundbreaking and multidisciplinary reader combines classic texts,
interviews and original contributions by leading social and cultural theorists. It represents a
landmark statement on a surprisingly overlooked aspect of our everyday experience.
☼☼☼
Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader
Edited by David Howes
[Publication date: December 2004]
With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Susan Stewart and Alain
Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation
and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of
knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain – and they are subject to
dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts
the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the
sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a
Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies
sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.
☼☼☼
The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink
Edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer
[Publication date: August 2005]
From Eve’s apple to Proust’s madeleine to today’s culinary tourism, food looms large in culture.
Sociologists and anthropologists study cooking and eating practices across the globe. Debates
about health and nutrition are common in news reports. Yet despite its fundamental relationship
to food, taste is mysteriously absent from most of these discussions.
The flavors of foods permeate social relations, religious and other occasions. Charged with
memory, emotion, desire and aversion, taste is arguably the most evocative of the senses. The
Taste Culture Reader explores the sensuous dimensions of eating and drinking, from the
physiology of the tongue to the embodiment of social identities and enactment of ceremonial
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meanings. A cornucopia of historical, cross-cultural and theoretical views is offered, drawing
from anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, science – and more. This book will interest
anyone seeking to understand more fully the importance of food and flavor in human experience.
☼☼☼
The Book of Touch
Edited by Constance Classen
[Publication date: September 2005]
This book puts a finger on the nerve of culture by delving into the social life of touch, our most
elusive yet most vital sense. From the tortures of the Inquisition to the corporeal comforts of
modernity and from the tactile therapies of Asian medicine to the virtual tactility of cyberspace,
The Book of Touch offers excursions into a sensory territory both foreign and familiar. How are
masculine and feminine identities shaped by touch? What are the tactile experiences of the blind,
or the autistic? How is touch developed differently across cultures? What are the boundaries of
pain and pleasure? Is there a politics of touch? Bringing together classic writings and new work,
this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the body, the senses and the experiential world.
☼☼☼
The Smell Culture Reader
Edited by Jim Drobnick
[Publication date: February 2006]
The sense of smell is mired in paradox. There is general ambivalence regarding its potential for
knowledge, yet it provides the foundation of a multi-billion dollar perfume and synthetic
fragrance industry. Stigmatized as animalistic and vestigial, scents have nevertheless served as a
long-standing component in spiritual and religious practices. Considered ephemeral and ethereal,
smells still elicit intense, visceral, emotional affects. While lacking a well-defined or extensive
vocabulary, aromas catalyze the evocation of memories, people and places. Dismissed as
inconsequential in an era dominated by information technologies, olfaction harbors subtle but
essential significance to sexuality, social status, personal identity and cultural affiliation. The Smell
Cultures Reader explores all these themes in redolent detail.
☼☼☼
Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader
Edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Kaushik Baumik
[Publication date: January 2008]
This volume interrogates the multiplicity of scopic regimes within and without the Western
tradition.
☼☼☼
The Sixth Sense Reader
Edited by David Howes
[Publication date: March 2009]
This volume asks: What lies beyond the bounds of sense? Is the sixth sense ESP,
electromagnetic sensitivity, intuition, revelation, gut instinct, or simply unfathomable?
☼☼☼
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C) Senses and Society Journal
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/1745-8927
Peer-reviewed and international, The Senses & Society explores all aspects of the intersection
between culture and the senses. It brings together groundbreaking work in the humanities and
social sciences and incorporates cutting-edge developments in art, design, and architecture.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Journals (formerly Berg Journals)
24 issues are available electronically
series started in 2006, 8 volumes with three numbers each, that is three issues of the journal per
year.

Volume 8/ Number 3, November 2013
Engaging the Senses in Ethnographic Practice will include Developing a Sociology of the
Senses: The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture: A Sociology of the Senses
pp. 362-364(3) Author: Rhys-Taylor, Alex
Volume 8 / Number 1, March 2013 Special Issue: Jean-Luc Nancy: Sense, the Senses, and the
World

Volume 7 / Number 2, July 2012 Special Issue: Sensory Aesthetics
etc…..
The Senses and Society is a journal founded in 2006 by Michael Bull and David Howes, together
with Doug Kahn and Paul Gilroy. It is published three times a year. The journal carries fulllength articles and a range of reviews (sensory design, book, conference and exhibition). The
inaugural issue is available free on-line. To view the inaugural issue, or to consult the table of
contents of each issue published to date, please visit Berg Journals
Aims and Scope of the Journal
A heightened interest in the role of the senses in culture and society is sweeping the human
sciences, supplanting older paradigms and challenging conventional theories of representation.
This pioneering journal provides a crucial forum for the exploration of this vital new area of
inquiry. It brings together groundbreaking work in the humanities and social sciences and
incorporates cutting-edge developments in art, design and architecture. Every volume contains
something for and about each of the senses, both singly and in all sorts of novel configurations.
Sensation is fundamental to our experience of the world. Shaped by culture, gender and class, the
senses mediate between mind and body, idea and object, self and environment. The senses are
increasingly extended beyond the body through technology, and catered to by designers and
marketers, yet persistently elude all efforts to capture and control them. Artists now experiment
with the senses in bold new ways, disrupting conventional canons of aesthetics.

How many senses are there?

What are the uses of the senses – all of them?

How is perception shaped by cultures and technologies?

In what ways are the senses hierarchized by gender, class, or race?
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
What are the social implications of the growing emphasis on the management of
sensation (or, commercialization of the sensorium)?

How might a focus on the cultural life of the senses yield new insights into processes of
cognition and emotion?
The Senses & Society aims to:

Explore the intersection between culture and the senses

Promote research on the politics of perception and the aesthetics of everyday life

Address architectural, marketing and design initiatives in relation to the senses

Publish reviews of books and multi-sensory exhibitions throughout the world

Publish special issues concentrating on particular themes relating to the senses
There is a new journal on the sensory studies scene. Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in
Critical Media Practice is “an online, media-based journal for the creation, presentation, and
critique of innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences.” It is based in the Sensory
Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. Also noteworthy in this regard is Interference: A Journal
of Audio Culture, which is put out by the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media
(GRADCAM), Trinity College, Dublin
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III. PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY of the SENSES
The Network for Sensory Research.
http://networksensoryresearch.utoronto.ca/Network_for_Sensory_Research.html
The network links five major interdisciplinary research centres in philosophy of perception: the
Network Centre for Sensory Research at the University of Toronto, Mississauga (NetCenSR); the
Centre for the Study of the Senses (CenSes) at the Institute of Philosophy in the University of
London; the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience (CSPE) at the University of Glasgow;
the Department of Philosophy and the Mind, Brain, and Behavior program (MBB) at Harvard
University; the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
1° University of Glasgow.The Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience
(CSPE) facilitates analytical philosophical and empirical research into the nature of perceptual
experience. Our researchers often work in an interdisciplinary manner drawing on philosophy,
psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and human computer interaction. Our personnel conduct
and publish research, often based on the conferences, workshops, reading groups that we
organise. We have research links to many research groups in the UK, Europe and North America
working on the nature of perception and we frequently host academic visitors from around the
world.
Fiona Macpherson. Professor of Philosophy (Philosophy)
“My research concerns the nature of consciousness, perception, introspection, imagination and
the metaphysics of mind. Topics that I have worked on include: cognitive penetration, the nature
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and individuation of the senses, cross-modal intersensory phenomena, sensory substitution and
augmentation, hallucination, illusion, delusion, novel colours, inverted spectra, ambiguous and
impossible figures, synaesthesia, the admissible contents of experience, disjunctivism and
representational theories of phenomenal character.
Director of the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience, University of Glasgow.
Co-Director of CenSes: Centre for the Study of the Senses at the Institute of Philosophy, School
of Advanced Study, University of London
Co-investigator on the Network for Sensory Research at the University of Toronto
Member of New York Institute of Philosophy's Project on the Nature of Taste
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) have awarded a grant of 1.9 million pounds
to the project Re-Thinking the Senses on which I am co-investigator. …..
awarded AHRC Fellowship for 2012-13 for a project entitled Perception, Imagination, and the
Structure of Consciousness ….
Derek Brown and I will be editing the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour….
Oxford University Press have agreed to publish a volume on Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual
Memory, to be edited by Fabian Dorsch and me. Many of the papers which will feature in it were
given at the conference on Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory that we organised….”
See Fiona Macpherson’s suggested bibliography (includes different sections such as The
Individuation of the Senses, The Nature of the Senses, Relationships between the Senses,
Synaesthesia, Blindsight, Sensory Deprivation)
http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/fionamacpherson/thesensesbibliography/
2° The Network Centre for Sensory Research at the University of Toronto, Mississauga
(NetCenSR) is responsible for The Senses: An International Research Project
http://individual.utoronto.ca/sensesproject/The_Senses.html
We are an international group of researchers investigating the nature of sense perception from a
variety of disciplines: philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, biology, and physiology. We are
especially interested in the interface between cognition and perception, and in the theoretical
significance of the traditional distinctions between the sense modalities.
Research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Is there a theoretically important division among the sense modalities? Or are the distinctions
that we make, based on receptors or on qualitative feel, theoretically unimportant and in need of
adjustment or de-emphasis? And in what ways are the differences between the outputs of the
various sensory modalities important with respect to consciousness and epistemic employment?
A bit more precisely, this cluster of questions might be understood in either or both of the
following ways:
Perception and rational cognition: The materials for epistemic assessment are either modal or
multi-modal. If this interface--between perception and cognition--is such that the perceptual
contribution to cognition is always multi-modal, then are distinctions between modalities
theoretically important vis-à-vis cognition? Or, weaker, are these distinctions at least of less
importance?
Sensory maps: If information from distinct modalities is organized into a single informational
array and distinct modalities involve distinct mappings (either in terms of their content/objects
or in terms of the organizational character of the respective maps of receptoral data, or both (for
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example, spatial data/maps vs. tonal data/maps), then are distinctions in modality less
theoretically important than usually supposed? And what would the answers to these questions
imply about the formation of beliefs, concepts, and other cognitive states from sensory
experience?
From here, a number of sub-questions and issues follow:
Evolutionary history of the senses: What do the senses share by way of common cellular and
network organizational principles? How and when did they diverge?
Bodily feelings and cognitive feelings: Bodily feelings include thirst, hunger, air-hunger, and
pain. Cognitive feelings include the feelings of presence and familiarity, pastness and episodic
memory, the feeling of control, and directivity as a component of sensory content. These
phenomena, especially as they occur in non-visual perceptual experience, are worthy of
theoretical exploration.
Substitution and prosthetics. With the development of strategies used by individuals with
sensory deficits and sensory substitution technologies like Cochlear implants and Trans Visual
Substitution Systems (TVSS), comes rich opportunity to ask questions about and test theories of
the phenomenology, ontology, and epistemology of sense perception.
Time and the Senses: Sensory perception takes place over time. Sensory exploration leads to
information about environmental objects that is not available at-a-moment. And time itself can
be represented by the sensory system. What do these facts tell us about the sense modalities and
their relation to cognition?
Sensory subordination/domination: Do phenomena like the the McGurk and rubber hand
effects suggest that all the other senses are subordinate to vision? What does this tell us about
the above questions concerning rational cognition and sensory maps?
Dual systems: Important work in vision science over the last few decades has revealed two
visual systems, associated with the ventral stream and dorsal stream in the visual cortex. Are
there neuro-anatomical or pscyho-functional analogs to these structures for other sense
modalities?
The bibliography made available by the researchers involved in the project follows the sections
listed above: Sensation and cognition; Distinguishing the senses; Sensory integration; Sensory
maps and information; Evolution of the senses; Bodily feelings and cognitive feelings; Sensory
substitution and prosthetics; Time and the senses; Sensory subordination and domination; Dual
systems
http://individual.utoronto.ca/sensesproject/Bibliography.html
S. Biggs, M. Matthen, and D. Stokes are editing a collection of papers on the senses, to include
contributions from the a number of philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.
3° The Centre for the Study of the Senses, or CenSes, is hosted by the Institute of
Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
http://philosophy.sas.ac.uk/centres/censes
The CenSes pioneers collaborative sensory research across disciplines, drawing on the work of
philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists, connecting groups of
researchers from different fields and sectors who can benefit from one another’s results. The
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overall aim is to achieve a coherent framework to accommodate the welter of recent findings that
have revised our understanding of how the different senses contribute to our perception of the
environment, and awareness of ourselves. New discoveries have shown us how the senses as
traditionally conceived are not so independent of one another as was once thought, and much
work is being carried out on cross-modal effects and multisensory integration. However, as yet,
there is no underlying theory or conceptual framework in which to house the numerous findings.
Such a foundational approach to sensory perception can only be carried out by well-informed
researchers working in a wide-scale and interdisciplinary way.
We fund workshops in these areas to encourage networks for further interactions and once a year
we hold a major conference to bring together the results form each group to ensure crossfertilization.
The outcome is a comprehensive account of the nature of our sensory systems and the role of
particular senses in perception. The Centre for the Study of the Senses has an international
Scientific Board comprising philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists. The aim of the
centre is to foster interdisciplinary research on the senses by identifying research groupings to
pursue specialised topics of benefit to the participating disciplines.
*************************
IV. SITES and EVENTS more specifically relevant to EARLY MODERN STUDIES
1° Sense Shaper
http://senseshaper.com/ site signalé par Line Cottegnies
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2° Early Modern Conversions / site signalé par Guillaume Coatalen
The Conversions project will develop an historical understanding that will enlighten modern
debates about corporeal, sexual, psychological, political and spiritual kinds of transformation. The
project will study how early modern Europeans changed their confessional, social, political, and
even sexual identities. These subjective changes were of a piece with transformations in their
world—the geopolitical reorientation of Europe in light of emerging relations with Islam and the
Americas; the rethinking and the translation of the knowledge of Greek and Latin Antiquity,
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; changes in and changing uses of the built environment; the
reimagining of God.
Indeed, early modern people changed the world and themselves in ways that have been lost to
view on account of the discipline-boundedness of much recent study of the past. By examining
forms of conversion across disciplinary boundaries as a network of movements and
transformations, we will develop an understanding of religious, cultural, and cognitive change
that will provide a new account of early modernity and a foundation for a renewed understanding
of the present age. The project will make use of new ideas about extended mind and cognitive
ecologies. Cognitive ecologies are, according to team members John Sutton and Evelyn Tribble,
“the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine,
and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments.”
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Led by McGill’s Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI), the project is partnering
with eighteen research centres in Canada, USA, England, and Australia. The partners will work
together toward a rethinking of early modern Europe as an “age of conversion.” The project will
involve younger scholars, other scholars, artists, and members of the public. The four artistic
partners will develop creative programs in collaboration with the project and take part in
workshops that will inspire audiences to think creatively and historically about the possibility that
we might be entering a new great age of conversion. The project’s ability to engage with multiple
public audiences will depend first of all on the coherence of the story it has to tell about
conversion as an agent of historical change. The artistic partners will be crucial to the coherence
and appeal of that story, especially since the performing arts are themselves forms of historical
research, experiential ways of understanding the lines of connection between the past and the
world of modernity.
“The Sense of Hearing” is one of the five discussion forums of « Early Modern Conversions »
http://earlymodernconversions.com/research-groups/the-sense-of-hearing/
Description of research
In the coming months we will investigate the sense of hearing and its relation to conversion in
the early modern period. Of the senses, hearing has a special relationship to conversion and to
devotional practices. It is harder to withhold hearing than sight; we have no earlids to block out
sound. Sound and music are tightly linked to emotion, and hearing is a sense that leads readily to
both conviction and deception. Hence, many devotions are sonic in nature: singing, preaching,
reading aloud, chanting, reciting, murmuring, chiming.
While hearing is a sensory phenomenon, listening is a skill. One of the goals of our work will be
to investigate the nature of skilled listening within the cognitive ecologies of early modern
England and Europe.
Our initial work will be organized around the following broad topics:
Religious music, particularly the sometimes-fraught relationship between words and music in
worship/ Spiritual poetry, including the role of ornamentation and aural patterns: what kinds of
religious captivation might patterns and rotations in phonemes elicit in spiritual poetry?/ Sound
and sight: what tensions come into play when the visual medium, in striving to capture sound,
confronts its incapacity to achieve that?/ Performance: what is the role of the lively word in the
space of the church and the theatre?/ Social coordination: how do sound and music organize
human activity in space and time?/ Cross-cultural experiences of music in the early modern
period, especially music and sound in travel narratives: were travelers transformed by their
listening experiences, and if so, in what ways?/ Hearing and memory: what is the distinctive role
of sound and music in acts of individual and joint remembering?
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3° SENSES, EMOTIONS and URBAN HISTORY
A) ACCESS Amsterdam Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Emotion and Sensory Studies
http://access-emotionsandsenses.nl/
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The Amsterdam Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Emotion and Sensory Studies provides a platform for
cooperation between scholars from the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences.
Recently the scholarly interest in the emotions and the senses has gained momentum through the
‘affective turn’ informing many new studies in different disciplines. ACCESS aims to enhance
this momentum, creating an interdisciplinary platform between historians, cultural
anthropologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers and other scholars interested in the
cultural production and expression of the emotions and the operations of the senses. Our
research rests on the presumption that both the experience and expression of the emotions and
the senses are culturally informed.
*****
B) The Sound of Amsterdam
http://amsterdammuseum.nl/en/sound-amsterdam
The Amsterdam Museum presents an installation called The Sound of Amsterdam. Here visitors can
experience how the largest square of the city, the Dam, sounded around 1895, 1935 and 2012.
This installation of soundscapes is interactive: different sounds, for instance of carts, street
vendors, clocks and cars, can be added or removed. The sounds comprising the soundscapes
were recorded in 2012, but they were produced by authentic objects of days gone by, such as
historical carts, cars and carriages.
International co-operation
The concept for this project was developed by the Soundscapes of the Urban Past group of the
University of Maastricht. It is based on research by Annelies Jacobs as part of her PhD
dissertation under Prof. Karin Bijsterveld. The sounds of the soundscapes were recorded by
Arnoud Traa. Jessica Swinkels is the sound designer of the audio story lines. The installation was
developed by the American company Harris, Miller, Miller & Hanson in cooperation with the
Amsterdam Museum. Soundscapes of the Urban Past is one of the projects within the Cultural
Dynamics programme of the Netherlands Association for Scientific Research (NWO).
Talk prompted by the installation:
Dr Alex Rhys-Taylor (Lecturer at Goldsmith University), Sonic Boom, 100 Years of Urban
Sound, ACCESS, Museum of Amsterdam, May 2013.
http://www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/rhys-taylor/
[cf Alex Rhys Taylor’s forthcoming article in the Senses and Society Journal, Volume 8, Number
3, November 2013: Developing a Sociology of the Senses: The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture:
A Sociology of the Senses pp. 362-364(3) ]
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C) Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
(Europe 1100 – 1800)
http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/
Research at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100 - 1800)
takes place within the following four programs:
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MEANINGS Program Leader: Bob White
This program carries out fundamental research into understanding what emotions were thought
to be, and how they were understood, expressed, and enacted in Europe 1100-1800.
CHANGE Program Leader: David Lemmings
This program deals with mass or communal emotions, in particular mass and communal events
which were emotionally driven, but had lasting political and social implications and
consequences.
PERFORMANCE Program Leader: Professor Jane Davidson
This program carries out research into how emotions were understood, expressed, displayed,
transferred, and constructed through performing and visual arts. -music, opera, drama and art.
SHAPING THE MODERN Program Leader: Professor Stephanie Trigg
This program draws connections between the emotions history of Europe 1100 - 1800, and what
is happening in Australia today, both in terms of European-Australian continuities and the
survival of our European heritage, and in terms of the emotional investment of modern
Australians in their European past.
V. CFPS, CONFERENCES and SEMINARS
(liste en partie établie à partir de la bibliographie commune et des suggestions de Sandrine
Parageau, Line Cottegnies et Guillaume Coatalen)
1° CFP Decadence and the Senses: An Interdisciplinary Conference (10-11 April,
Goldsmiths, University of London) 31 December 2013
This interdisciplinary conference explores the relationship of Decadence and the senses, and the
ways in which Decadent writers attempt to capture fleeting sensations. It is an opportunity to
trace common visual, aural and ‘perfumed’ motifs in Decadent works, and to reflect on the extent
to which the senses are important to our understanding of the tradition. We welcome proposals
on any aspect of Decadence and the senses. Papers should be about 20 mins in length. Abstracts
of 500 words plus brief biography should be sent to: decadence2014@gold.ac.uk by 31
December 2013.
2° CFP International bilingual conference (English/French) INTERFACES DIJON
JUNE 25-27 2014 - JOINED SENSES – synaesthesia in texts and images
Synaesthesia is a recognized neurological phenomenon in which the sensory impressions
associated with one sense are produced by the stimulation of another. Those who have this
faculty might, as a consequence, experience odours as sounds, graphemes as colours and so on.
Certain artists, musicians and writers, Kandinsky and Scriabin for example, were acknowledged
synaesthesists. Our intention is not to examine the scientific basis of synaesthesia, but rather to
ask how such linked sensory experiences are translated into images and writing, how successful
synaethesists are in describing their experiences, and whether non-synaesthesists can share these
perceptions indirectly through their representations in images and texts. In other words, the aim
of the conference will be to examine the representation of perceptions that fall outside the
established categories of distinct sense impressions. Pursuing the issues raised by Hervé-Pierre
Lambert in his article "La synesthésie. Vues de l’intérieur" (ISSN 1913-536X
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ÉPISTÉMOCRITIQUE - Volume VIII - Printemps 2011), we would like to concentrate on the
communication of synaesthetic experiences to non-synaesthesists and so examine how far texts
and images are able to convey non-visual sensations. Ultimately, this conference aims to revisit
the interaction between words and images and invites papers that go beyond mere analogy and
unified systems of equivalence. We are calling for papers linked to one of the following three
themes:
- synaesthesia and the brain: our aim here is not to retrace the historical discovery of synaesthesia
(early examples of synaesthesia, neurological approaches, etc) nor to describe and assess recent
advances (eg those due to medical imaging) in understanding the phenomenon. Rather papers
relating to historical or contemporary accounts of synaesthesia will be expected to describe the
different attempts, in the past and the present, to represent this fusion of the senses in images
and texts.
- synaesthesia and the arts: this theme will cover those artists, musicians, writers, etc –
synaesthesists and non-synaesthesists – who have tried or are trying to transmit multiple sense
impressions through texts and animated and non-animated images. The focus will be as much on
contemporary experimentation as on the “synaesthetic” heritage, and the influence which the
different artistic disciplines have had on each other. Papers which focus on synaesthetic artists,
obscure as well as famous, and on artists who attempt to go beyond the categorisations
conventionally associated with the senses, should try to show how their texts and images
transcend the usual categories of perceptions attributed to the five senses, in particular how
figures of speech and traditional visual devices are adapted and what innovations have been
introduced.
- synaesthesia and the world: synaesthesia is often perceived as opening up a richer, truer and
occasionally more esoteric world. The analogies, correspondences, echoes and reflections
between the senses seem to be not only the means of transcending the ordinary limits of our five
senses, but of actually gaining entry to a different world. Papers focusing on experiences which
involve the senses in new and unconventional ways – through experiments with drugs or occult
practices for example – should take as their theme the way in which text and image represent the
synaesthetic experience as it is lived or imagined.
In each of these three areas we invite a thorough and detailed study of the interaction between
images and texts in the representation of synaesthesia is expected, in keeping with the aims of the
TIL Research Centre of the University of Burgundy, and the review INTERFACES, jointly
edited by Holy Cross, Paris-Diderot and Dijon. Please send summaries (in English or French) of
approximately 200 words before the end of December 2013 to Fiona McMahon and Christelle
Serée-Chaussinand at the following addresses: Fiona.McMahon@u-bourgogne.fr and
christelle.chaussinand@u-bourgogne.fr.
The finalized programme will be announced in March 2014.
Organising committee : Fiona McMahon (Fiona.McMahon@u-bourgogne.fr), Christelle SeréeChaussinand (christelle.chaussinand@u-bourgogne.fr), Sophie Aymes
(sophieaymes@hotmail.com), Véronique Liard (veronique.liard@neuf.fr), Sylvie Crinquand
(s.crinquand@orange.fr) Marie-Odile Bernez (marie-odile.bernez@u-bourgogne.fr).
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3° Qualia : Thinking the Senses. Conference & Research Project, Institute of Advanced Study.
University of Durham, 28th, 29th and 30th March 2008. Advisory committee: Professor
Emerita Claude Imbert (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Department of Philosophy, Member of the
European Academy of Sciences); Professor Ivo Strecker (University of Mainz and University of
Addis Ababa, Department of Anthropology); Mr Jean Khalfa (Trinity College, Cambridge). The
aim of this interdisciplinary conference, and the research project associated with it, is to explore
the ways in which different disciplines theorise the qualitative dimension of experience and
integrate the sensual into their working-models of a range of phenomena. It will explore sensory
perception in different times and places, in its multiple relations to the literary and the artistic as
well as to the political and social. It will create a forum for an exchange of points of view between
researchers in the fields of literary theory, history, art history, philosophy, anthropology,
psychoanalysis, geography, cognitive science and other areas still. It will also involve practising
artists and writers.
4° VISUAL ARTS/ VISUAL CULTURE
A) (seminar) How to See Light. Perception in Early Modern Optics
Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis (University of Twente) 17th October 2013.
Goethe’s Farbenlehre is generally considered – not in the last place by himself – to have
constituted a break with the Newtonian optics dominating the previous decades. As contrasted to
the projected colors of Opticks, Goethe built his theory from perceptions of light viewed
through a prism. In a way that later scientists were not always comfortable with it anticipated the
physiological optics that developed in the 19th century. Despite Goethe’s rhetoric and historian’s
accounts, the Farbenlehre did not start from scratch: there was a long line of 17th- and 18th-century
inquirers that took into account the way we perceive light and colors in their optical theories.
This implies that the break with medieval optics that Kepler brought about was not as complete
as is generally believed. Many students of optics did ask what the retina and the cognitive faculties
do with light and colors. These were not easy questions, in particular not for early modern eyes.
Paradoxes like a blind spot at the center of vision and the painter’s primaries in the full spectrum,
puzzled enlightened minds. The perception of light and colors raised considerable challenges to
early modern scientific as well as epistemic convictions. Leaving aside the historiographical
questions why these have been left out of histories of optics and how Goethe appropriated this
legacy, in this presentation I would like to focus on the conceptual issues challenging early
modern inquirers into the perception of light and colors.
This Department of Philosophy Weekly Research Seminar will commence at 11:30am in Room
005, 48/49 Old Elvet, Durham. Refreshments will be served from 11:00am in Room 010, 48/49
Old Elvet, Durham.
Dr Matthew D Eddy
Durham University, Department of Philosophy, 50/51 Old Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HN, United
Kingdom. http://www.dur.ac.uk/m.d.eddy/
B) (conference) “Early Modern Colour Practices, 1450-1650”, September 20/21 2013, Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (Organisers: Sven Dupré Max Planck Research
Group Director, Karin Leonhard, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
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C) (conference) “Sense as a Ratio: Early Modern Proportional Analogies in Visual Art”,
Annual AAH Conference, Royal College of Art, London, 10 - 12 April 2014
5° HEARING
- CFP Noise in EM England Posted by Laura F. Brown
RSA meeting March 27-29, 2014 in New York
Scholarship on the senses has discussed the importance of hearing in early modern England,
especially the significance to early modern Protestants of hearing the Word preached. So that the
faithful could better hear the Word, canon law addressed ways to improve the acoustic
environment, including by restricting activities that could make noise. At the same time, in the
theaters, characters on stage defined some sounds as acceptable and others as noise. One thinks,
for example, of Cloten in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline2.3, who declares that the singer’s music will be
"better” if Imogen responds to it, but "a vice in her ears” if she ignores it. In the legal realm, the
1595 Lawes of the Market defined certain sounds as off-limits in London after nine at night. How
do early modern English writers define noise? What is acceptable sound, what is unacceptable,
and who gets to decide? At what point does a sound that citizens generally tolerate in a given
soundscape become transgressive noise, and why? In addition, how does the genre of a text
affect the depiction of sound? I welcome papers on hearing and sound that explore noise and the
edges and boundaries of acceptable sound in early modern England. By June 6, please send paper
proposals that address these or similar issues to Laura Feitzinger Brown, Converse College
(laura.brown@converse.edu). Your proposal should include a paper title, an abstract (150-word
maximum), keywords, and a brief curriculum vitae (300-word maximum). You do not need to be
a member of Renaissance Society of America to propose a paper, but you must become one to
present. For more information, see the following: http://www.rsa.org/?page=2014NewYork
6° TASTE / DISTASTE
Le dégoût. Histoire, langage, politique et esthétique d’une émotion plurielle, Université de Liège,
23-24 Mai 2013. Responsables : Michel Delville, Viktoria von Hoffmann, Andrew Norris
http://www.fabula.org/actualites/le-degouthistoire-langage-politique-et-esthetique-d-uneemotion-plurielle_52385.php
7° MOYEN-AGE
A) Toulouse 2 : « Penser les cinq sens au Moyen Age : poétique, esthétique, éthique » du 13
mai 2013 au 15 mai 2013 (Colloque National du laboratoire PLH ELH)
Au Moyen Age, l’homme est pensé comme un microcosme entrant en relation, par
l’intermédiaire de ses sens, avec le monde macrocosme, ce liber naturæ qu’il convient de
comprendre pour accéder à la connaissance du Créateur divin. Le système hiérarchisé des cinq
sens externes (hérité de l’Antiquité via Aristote) interagit avec le paradigme (élaboré à partir
d’Avicenne) des cinq sens internes de l’âme, qui assurent la réception et un premier traitement
des données de l’expérience sensible, avant d’être relayés par les facultés intellectuelles
supérieures capables de mener à une connaissance rationnelle. Les cinq sens jouent ainsi un rôle
fondamental dans le couple corps / âme (chair / esprit) qui structure l’anthropologie médiévale.
18
Tout au long du Moyen Âge, ils ont généré abondance d’écrits à visée scientifique, spirituelle,
morale aussi bien que littéraire et de productions artistiques, musicales comme figuratives. Tous
manifestent comment l’homme peut jouir d’une présence sensible au monde ou comment il doit
s’exercer à contrôler et dépasser ses sens. Le colloque s’attachera à explorer toutes les dimensions
des cinq sens en tant que système organisé offrant une entrée multipolaire dans les modes de
penser et d’agir au Moyen Âge. L’approche pluridisciplinaire (littérature, histoire de l’art,
musicologie, philosophie et théologie, histoire des sciences) permettra de comprendre en quoi les
cinq sens engagent tout à la fois une poétique, une esthétique et une éthique.
B) Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale (UMR 7302), « Les cinq sens au
Moyen Âge (II) ». 29, 30 et 31 mai 2013. Poitiers Médiathèque François- Mitterrand & UFR
SHA
La place des cinq sens dans la culture du Moyen Âge occidental est centrale pour certains aspects
essentiels de la définition de la liturgie et de la théologie chrétiennes. Dans l’Antiquité et durant
tout le Moyen Âge, l’Eglise et sa théologie ont accordé un rôle de premier plan aux cinq sens
dont témoignent des domaines tels que la liturgie, l’histoire de l’art, la littérature, la philosophie, la
musique et, de façon plus générale, l’histoire politique et sociale du Moyen Âge. Pour les auteurs
chrétiens, s’appuyant sur la tradition biblique ainsi que sur la philosophie antique issue de Platon
et d’Aristote, les cinq sens sont plus particulièrement mis en action dans le déroulement des
rituels de la liturgie afin de permettre la réalisation des principaux effets sacramentels de la
théologie de la liturgie. Les cinq sens sont également au coeur d’une vaste réflexion sur la notion
d’harmonie dans le christianisme ainsi que sur la relation entre l’homme-microcosme et le
macrocosme. Dans le cadre de la liturgie, les productions artistiques peuvent être ainsi
considérées comme des « objets » destinés à servir de support pour l’activation sensorielle afin de
créer et de rendre possible les effets sacramentels du rite. La table ronde organisée au CESCM
propose une première approche résolument interdisciplinaire de l’étude des cinq sens dans la
culture chrétienne médiévale. Elle réunit des spécialistes internationalement reconnus dans leur
domaine respectif et pour la connaissance des cinq sens. Des domaines aussi variés que l’art, la
liturgie, la théologie, la littérature, l’héraldique, la poésie, entre autres, seront traités pour une
approche diversifiée des cinq sens. Le cadre chronologique et géographique sera aussi large que
possible avec des conférences sur l’Occident, la monde byzantin et le monde musulman.
C) “The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: Literature and Language”,
University of Bern, English Department, 7-8 June 2013
http://www.ens.unibe.ch/content/research/conferences/2013___senses/index_eng.html
D) Bordeaux 3, CLARE (Cultures Littératures Arts Représentations Esthétiques) : « Le débat
des cinq sens au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance », LAPRIL Laboratoire sur l’Imaginaire,
mars 2012
http://clare.u-bordeaux3.fr/spip.php?article791
E) « L'expérience de la ville. Les cinq sens du citadin, du Moyen Age à l’époque
contemporaine. Contribution à une anthropologie historique urbaine », Organisateurs : Robert
Beck et Ulrike Krampl, Université François-Rabelais de Tours/CeRMAHVA (France), 19-20 mai
2011
La session « L’expérience de la ville » se propose d’explorer le paysage sensoriel urbain (Alain
Corbin) en partant de l’expérience individuelle et collective des citadins, entendue ici comme
instance de jugement (Arlette Farge). Il s’agira, en effet, d’historiciser le lien entre l’espace et les
sens en tant que ressort essentiel de la construction de la ville comme ensemble signifiant
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(sociologie urbaine, Jean-François Augoyard). La réalité urbaine est fabriquée à travers des
« pratiques d’espace » (Michel de Certeau), au nombre desquelles on peut compter l’expérience
sensorielle : la figure du citadin comme acteur sensible sera ainsi placée au centre de la
réflexion. L’expérience sensorielle du citadin est forgée par une série de filtres de perception,
propres au contexte historique donné et à la matérialité spécifique de la ville : la forme urbaine,
mais aussi le sexe du citadin, son âge, son appartenance sociale, sa situation économique et son
activité professionnelle, ses origines géographiques, culturelles, politiques et ethniques, etc.
façonnent les sens. Cette expérience se dit avec des mots, des gestes, des regards, l’expression du
visage et des mouvements du corps. Incorporée, elle forge un imaginaire individuel et collectif qui
oriente l’action des hommes et des femmes dans la ville, que ce soit le choix d’un itinéraire ou les
politiques urbaines menées par les autorités publiques. En effet, nos expériences sensorielles ont
elles-mêmes une histoire. Elles sont modelées par les discours et les représentations que
véhiculent les sciences, la religion, la politique, l’art et la littérature : pourquoi, par exemple, la ville
du XIXe siècle est-elle représentée dans un cadre bucolique ? Il faudrait aussi analyser la
rencontre entre morale, médecine et perceptions sensorielles qui, s’inscrivant dans un même
discours, permet d’opérer des distinctions socio-politiques : la perception de quartiers pauvres
depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècles, celle d’une ville lointaine par les voyageurs, amateurs ou
scientifiques, les « cités » ou « quartiers » de notre époque, etc. Pour les périodes modernes et prémodernes, d’autres critères devront être pris en compte. Quelles significations un citadin peut-il
attribuer à un phénomène sensible, les bruits des rues de Paris évoquent-t-ils en lui les mêmes
sensations, affects, images, que ceux de Calcutta, London ou Belgrade, Berlin ou du Caire ? Le
mouvement même des corps, itinérant ou sédentaire, affecte-t-il le dispositif sensoriel ? Que veut
dire, finalement, « se sentir » chez soi ? Comment saisir l’expérience sensible de l’altérité urbaine ?
Il existe, on le sait, une hiérarchie des sens, la tradition occidentale privilégiant la vue. L’ambition
de cette session sera ainsi double : interroger d’une part l’importance, certes inégale, de tous les
cinq sens dans la perception et le façonnement de l’espace urbain et d’autre part, croiser les
expériences de citadins d’horizons sociaux et culturels différents. Il doit s’agir, autrement dit,
d’une analyse des filtres de perception qui régissent nos sens. S’inscrivant dans une histoire
anthropologique de nos sensibilités, cette démarche que l’on pourrait qualifier d’anthropologie
urbaine, permettrait de faire apparaître une fonction ‘naturelle’ du corps humain comme un
produit historique de paramètres à chaque fois spécifiques et qu’il s’agira d’analyser.
L’interrogation sur l’expérience sensorielle de la ville cherche ainsi à contribuer à une
compréhension de l’altérité et de ses enjeux, expérience qui, inscrite dans les corps mêmes, anime
de manière ‘évidente’ l’action des hommes et des femmes qui, à un moment ou un autre, entrent
en contact avec la ville. Des communications de toutes les disciplines sont les bienvenues tant
qu’elles comportent une réflexion à la fois historique et anthropologique, à partir d’analyses
d’exemples concrets.
VII. PUBLICATIONS – AUTRES/ FRANCE
- Ronan de Calan. Généalogie de la sensation. Physique, physiologie et psychologie en Europe, de Fernel à
Locke, Paris : Honoré Champion, coll. "Travaux de philosophie", 2012. 496 pages
Contrairement à ce que laisse accroire une maxime pour nous sans âge – Nihil est in intellectu quod
prius non fuerit in sensu, rien n’est dans l’intellect qui n’ait été auparavant dans les sens – le concept
comme le lexique de la « sensation » (sensatio en latin) sont entrés très tardivement sur la scène
philosophique, dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle. Leur apparition nécessitait en effet un
double processus d’unification, de l’instance psychique et de la causalité physique. Ce processus
s’est amorcé certes tardivement, mais les catégories scolaires n’en ont malheureusement retenu
qu’une version, celle de Descartes, dans laquelle pourtant ni le lexique ni le concept de sensation
n’ont leur place. On peut alors fixer la tâche d’une généalogie : remonter aux sources multiples de
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cette double unification, à ses diverses formulations, ainsi qu’aux divergentes théories du sensible
auxquelles elles ont donné lieu. La sensation se révèle alors être moins l’expression d’un « climat
idéologique » que la résultante de choix théoriques précis, tant dans le domaine de la physique
que dans celui de la physiologie ou encore de la psychologie. Ces choix permettent en outre
d’établir plus précisément les coordonnées de l’empirisme moderne.
http://www.honorechampion.com/cgi/run?wwfrset+3+0+1+2+cccdegtv1+08532285+1
- D.Heller-Roazen, Une archéologie du toucher, Traduit par Paul Chemla, Paris : Seuil, 2011.
- Réfléchir [sur] la sensation, sous la direction de Marina Poisson, avec la collaboration de Maxime
Chapuis, Florence Daupias d'Alcochète, Anne-Laure de Meyer, Lucie Lagardère, Edouard
Marsoin. Paris : Editions des archives contemporaines, coll. "n/a", 2010.
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