The House of the Senses: Experiencing Buildings with Peter Zumthor and Pliny the Younger

Contemporary communicative platforms welcome and accelerate a socio-anthropological mutation in which public opinion (Habermas, 1995) based on rational individuals and alphabetic culture gives way to a public emotion whose emotion, empathy and sociality are the bases, where it is no longer the reason that directs the senses but the senses that begin to think. The public spheres that are elaborated in this way can only be disjunctive (Appadurai, 2001), since they are motivated by the desire to transgress the identity, political and social boundaries where they have been elevated and restricted. The more the daily life, in its local intension and its global extension, rests on itself and frees itself from projections or infatuations towards transcendent and distant orders, the more the modern territory is shaken by the forces that cross it and pierce it. non-stop. The widespread disobedience characterizing a significant part of the cultural events that take place in cyberspace - dark web, web porn, copyright infringement, trolls, even irreverent ... - reveals the anomic nature of the societal subjectivity that emerges from the point of intersection between technology and naked life. Behind each of these offenses is the affirmation of the obsolescence of the principles on which much of the modern nation-states and their rights have been based. Each situation in which a tribe, cloud, group or network blends in a state of ecstasy or communion around shared communications, symbols and imaginations, all that surrounds it, in material, social or ideological terms, fades away. in the air, being isolated by the power of a bubble that in itself generates culture, rooting, identification: transpolitic to inhabit

Download Full-text

Touching Blind Bodies: A Critical Inquiry into Pedagogical and Cultural Constructions of Visual Disability in the Nineteenth Century

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0014 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Heather Tilley ◽

Jan Eric Olsén

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Visually Impaired ◽

Blind People ◽

Embodied Experience ◽

Visual Disability ◽

Visually Impaired People ◽

Educational Challenges ◽

Impaired People ◽

The Senses ◽

Cultural Constructions

Changing ideas on the nature of and relationship between the senses in nineteenth-century Europe constructed blindness as a disability in often complex ways. The loss or absence of sight was disabling in this period, given vision’s celebrated status, and visually impaired people faced particular social and educational challenges as well as cultural stereotyping as poor, pitiable and intellectually impaired. However, the experience of blind people also came to challenge received ideas that the visual was the privileged mode of accessing information about the world, and contributed to an increasingly complex understanding of the tactile sense. In this chapter, we consider how changing theories of the senses helped shape competing narratives of identity for visually impaired people in the nineteenth century, opening up new possibilities for the embodied experience of blind people by impressing their sensory ability, rather than lack thereof. We focus on a theme that held particular social and cultural interest in nineteenth-century accounts of blindness: travel and geography.

Download Full-text

Think with the Senses--Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense

Landscape Journal ◽

10.3368/lj.27.2.319-a ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 319-323

Keyword(s):

The Senses ◽

Present Tense ◽

The Mind

Download Full-text

Touching, crafting, knowing

Body and Religion ◽

10.1558/bar.36491 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

pp. 224-244

Author(s):

Amy Whitehead

Keyword(s):

Raw Materials ◽

Ethnographic Study ◽

The Senses ◽

Religious Objects

Based on a small ethnographic study at the shrine of the Virgin of Alcala in Andalusia, Spain, this article asserts that 'touch' is not only an intrinsic part of religion, but the principal facilitating medium through which the performances, expressions and relationships with the Virgin, take place. The article uses the relational discourses of animism and the fetish to critically explore the dynamics of touch, focusing primarily on the ways in which powerful religious statues such as the Virgin are creatively forged from raw materials, the gendered ways in which her statue-body is ritually touched, cared for and maintained, and the potentiality of her personhood. Personhood, it is argued, emerges co-creatively between 'persons' (artefact persons and human persons) during moments of active relating that involve touch. It is concluded that 'to fetish' is both to apprehend beloved religious statues with the senses and to be invited into creative religious, relational engagements with so called religious objects. 'To touch' is 'to fetish'.

Download Full-text