Our social & symbolic senses
Knowledgeable sight vs emotive hearing
As we perceive and understand our world through our senses they have taken on more intangible or metaphorical associations beyond their physical abilities. Our senses determine not just how we perceive reality functionally but also how we understand and interact with it socially and symbolically. Here we look at the differences between what are considered (in the West) as the 2 most dominant senses — sight and hearing.
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
We have established sight as our paradigm of belief, which we can ‘see’ in the terminology and phrases that proliferate our language — ‘seeing is believing’, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ — and therefore we equate it with knowledge. If I can see it it must be true, and if I can’t then there is no concrete proof of its existence beyond ‘blind faith’.
Famously, for Foucault (1979) seeing is control: ‘our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance…we are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine’. Surveillance is a means for controlling unwanted behaviours, shaming people into compliance and holding people accountable for their actions — whether right or wrong. Nosey neighbours replace God as a guarantor of social morality, people fear the watching eye and the hidden camera. With the rise in social media and camera ready phones this has never been more true.
It is generally accepted that ‘the eye is all seeing, both literally and metaphorically. It sees all and is all. A fit metaphor for God, society and the I’ (Synnott, 1993).
Less menacingly, for others the eye is the window to the soul. Our eyes are the most dominant means of non-verbal communication, they portray compassion and sorrow, tell truths and give away lies. Currently, visual culture relies predominantly on our almost universal dependence on visual information (although thankfully there is great work being done in making information accessible across all senses). Books, television, media, the internet etc. all communicate information primarily via visual stimuli (and secondary sound ofcourse). But don’t believe everything that you read. Sight is deceptive and can lie, we see this with optical illusions which trick your brain into believing it is seeing something that is not there — therefore knowledge cannot be equated with sight. Our world is multisensory, we create knowledge by coupling past experience with information from our all five senses, not just sight.
LISTEN
Sound on the other hand is much less associated with knowledge, and more with emotion. Across cultures sound is connected to more visceral and instinctual practices. For example, our body is tuned to recognise and react to a baby crying — a high pitched shriek causes a palpable physical reaction as well as an emotional one. Researchers have identified that the interaction between the region of the brain that processes sound (the auditory cortex) and the amygdala, which actively participates in the transformation of negative emotions, is the main cause that certain noises are extremely unpleasant for the human ear. The noise caused by the friction of nails on a chalkboard or that of a fork against a glass (just the thought of these makes me shudder) — essentially causes your brain to send a distress signal causing our negative emotional reaction.
Movies use soundtracks to impose a particular mood onto the audience: fear, empathy, suspense — think of the two-beat soundtrack in Jaws signalling impending attack. Throughout life we learn to react to particular auditory cues: a school bell, an alarm clock, a loud bang. And we associate emotive states to sounds that we have experienced in past situations: the serenity of the rustle of trees in summer, the fear of a ruler making swift contact with a table top. Sound is visceral. Sound is intuitive.
This is not to say that sight evokes no emotive responses whatsoever — looking at old photos or works of art can also trigger strong emotions.
ALTERNATIVE MODES OF BEING
Many cultures (outside of the West) use the senses in traditional rituals, such as the Shipibo-Conibo Indians of Peru. For their healing ritual they use visual, auditory and olfactory senses ‘synesthetically combined to form a therapy of beauty, cultural reverence and sophistication.’ (Gebhart-Sayer, 1985). While the dominance of sight and hearing is pretty well ingrained in Western culture this shows that our less dominant (or animal) senses can be utilised in ways beyond our current understanding.
Humans are capable of learning new forms of sensing to create their own perception of the world, either through necessity (losing a sense) or through new technologies (Sensory Augmentation). For example, when John Hull lost his sight he experienced a gradual loss of visual imagery and memory. In ‘The Dark Paradoxical Gift’ (Sacks, 1991) he explains how he lost the very idea of ‘seeing’. Concepts like ‘here’ and ‘there’ lost their meaning, as did the importance of appearance. Instead he became a ‘whole body seer’ — shifting his sensorium away from sight to other senses. The sound of rain could delineate a whole landscape, delicate nuances in speech would denote subtle emotive states, and he began to recognise people by their smell. For him this was not ‘compensation’ for visual loss, it was a whole new mode of being.
To learn more about new ways of sensing see our blog on Sensory Augmentation technologies here ->
For more see: cyborgnest.net | lesleyanndaly.com
Reading recommendations:
‘The Body Social: Symbolism, Self & Society’ by Anthony Synnott, 1993
‘Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader’ by David Howes, 2005
