009 ON SENSUALITY – towards fully lived, thus fully human realities

from "Subjectivities in Investigations of the Urban" (segment 5)

As outlined in the previous post, what has been spaced out from (urban) research and action was precisely, as in Lavoisier laboratory, all that was judged impure, potentially dangerous, sensual, all that is lurking under the surface of Spectacle.

Hierarchies of senses have been sought at least since Ancient Greece. During the Renaissance, the privileging of the eye evolved into a fully developed “ocularcentric paradigm and strong, dominant, anthropocentric worldview has emerged. In terms of production of space, ocular-centrism reached its dystopian pinnacle in the 19^th century, with Panopticon, a perfect prison with the building itself an ultimate control tool. Since Jeremy Bentham’s times, we have seen only exponential rise and perpetual fostering of that logic.

But, despite the aggressive globalisation of the logic of Panopticon, the mainstream has not managed to suppress the heresy. Not yet. The rebellion starts with an irrepressible sensuality, with hand – “or, perhaps, more exactly with the finger of the hand” (Derrida, 2005). Subjectivity can never be dislocated from the body, from each and every concrete, sensing body. That is especially the case when subjectivity is understood in Nancian terms, as singular plural, as being-with – which is critical for comprehension of the essence of the urban. There is an urgent need to reconquer that complexity in order to deal with many manifestations of urban life, such as alienation (one of many terms that are, as uneasy and difficult to address, not popular in the dictionary of the happy Spectacle).

Being in the business of place-making, urbanists and architects need to know that “bodies are places of existence … (that) the body makes room for existence …” (Nancy, 2008). “The body of sense” is polysemous (as Nancy’s term itself is full of meanings, ranging from an understanding of the body as locus of sensation, seat of sensibility, to our [impoverished] common sense). “The body is being-exposed of the being” (ibid.). Its existence is spatial. “Bodies don’t ‘know’, nor they are in ‘ignorance’. They’re elsewhere, they’re from elsewhere, from another side (of places, regions, frontiers, limits, but also of household plots, boulevards with promenades, trips through estranging lands: in fact, they can come from anywhere, from the spot, even here, but never from the nonplace of knowledge)” (ibid.). Immersed in that, being one with that, the questions arise: “Why is there this thing, sight, rather than sight blended with hearing? And would it make any sense to discuss such a blend? In what sense? Why this sight, which doesn’t see infrared? This hearing, which doesn’t hear ultrasound? Why should every sense have a threshold, and why are senses walled of from each other? Further still, aren’t senses separate universes?”(Howes, 2005).

Addressing such questions, Michel Serres (2008) speaks about knots of our sensual experiences, complex entanglements which we have walled off in our desire towards clarity, commensurability, deciphering. Coverley finds something similar in De Quincey, who wrote how in his urban wonderings he “came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London” (Coverley, 2006).

That makes perfect sense. While seeking complex ways of thinking and making cities, we have discovered the ultimate complexity of the object of our research. Appropriate, complex knowledges can not be made simple, unless we decide to accept the simplistic thought. Layering of the textual - simplifies; textuality of the messy palimpsest does a bit better; and knots elevate the discourse yet another notch up. All those combined reach towards vécu, fully human, fully lived realities of everyday life. Although not necessarily open to ratio, representing those realities helps open them to alternative ways of comprehension, which can be usefully translated into inspiration. As Hélène Cixous wrote in Savoir, “what is given to see is given to touch, though henceforth, from the outset, it is given to read” (Derrida, 2005).

But, what is given to touch is given to an open reading, to various sensual and subjective appropriations. That is what systems of control do not like, and that is why they prefer standardization and accuracy, if possible, a scrutiny of the panoptically positioned eye. “Lower senses” get appropriately excluded, as “non-measurable” rendered inferior, at best only referential. Our proposal here is to seek fully multisensorial practices of urban research and action. They demand multiple entry points, various planes and plateaus (a la Deleuze and Guattari’s, 1987), rhizomes which are “against method” (Law, 2004), and thus – resielient. The key questions asked indeed move us from “What does it mean?” to an inclusion of “How does it mean?” (I never understood why in Deleuze there is an excluding move from “What does it mean?” to “How does it mean?” (West-Pavlov, 2009), and not an inclusive both-and.) That is where we (can) understand (urban) qualities as (diverse) intensities.

For Merleau-Ponty, “every sensation is spatial” (Derrida, 2005). I add: every spatiality is, equally, sensual. Spaces are knots of sensual stimuli, sensations are knots or perceived spatial realities, in which “the senses communicate with each other” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). They reduce us to creating the self-gratifying, simple and easily understandable constructs – which, alas, usually do not have much to do with realities they are meant to represent.

In summary - explorations of space need to include sensual, which is, by definition, subjective. Presenting those dimensions and opening them to thinking, including analytical thought, needs to move from (de)layering and (re)layering of realities, and include (un)tying and (re)tying (and tightening) of the knots of sensations of the urban. That, of course, is an utterly impossible task, which makes it worthy of investigation, and its application promising!

[segment of Mn’M book "Subjectivities in Investigations of the Urban" dérive, or - how to seek, find and capture subtle urban qualities is not included here)