UNCOMMON SENSES:
Richard Schechner New York University
"Rasaesthetics"
In this paper I will discuss the Western privileging of the eye over the other senses, and the differences between eye-based and ear-based aesthetics. I will then concentrate on rasa performance theory, central to Indian aesthetics. My main subject will be Indian classical performance, which is based on rasa-theory to a large degree, and on the ancient Natyasastra text, which is a delight for the ear and eye; but "behind" or under that, is something more "belly-based," connected to yoga and "internalized." The rasa system bears a closeness to the interiority of the body that is much in contrast to Western systems. Even the use of the hands to form meaningful movements is significant, given that in traditional Indian cuisines, one eats directly with the hands, introducing the hands into the mouth. The "system" connecting mouth, interior of the body (the belly especially, which is full of nerve bundles much like the brain), and the excretory organs -- which are also sexual or closely connected to birthing -- give a whole different "basis" to aesthetics than the "head-oriented," eye-based systems prominent in the West.

Robert Desjarlais Sarah Lawrence College
"Movement, Stillness: On the Sensory World of a Shelter for the 'Homeless Mentally Ill'"
In attempting to "redescribe" certain aspects of homelessness from a non-medical, sensory-centered perspective, this paper explores the sensorial contours of a Boston shelter for people considered homeless and mentally ill. While conducting ethnographic research in the shelter in the early 1990s, I found that life there typically entailed themes of distraction and routine, sensation and numbness, movement and stillness, timeliness and timelessness. Shelter dwelling was double-edged for many, for while it involved strenuous efforts against opposition, of hitting up against a world filled with noises, pains, and displacements, it also entailed efforts to do away with hassles and constraints ­ to the point, at times, of trying to block out everything in moments of stillness outside the flow of time. While shelter staff often found that such efforts were self-defeating because they negated opportunities for active engagements in life, certain self-styled "routines" promised many the best chance for a relatively sane existence outside of hospitals.

Brian Massumi State University of New York
"The Parable of the Cave (Blind Version)"
C.S. Peirce set himself a thought experiment. He wanted to imagine what it would be like to live in a non-Euclidean space. Since the space of vision is predominately Euclidean, he had to begin by closing his eyes. He imagined himself afloat in a cave whose regions were differentiated only by smell and temperature. As the thought experiment continued, it took on an unexpected intensity, turning distinctly hallucinogenic. As it continued, the movements he initially imagined as exploring a readymade space gradually take on the ability to alter the shape of the space. In the end, the relation between movement and space is inverted, the latter arising from the former rather than taking place in it as a preexisting frame. This talk will tease out the implications of Peirce's experiment, taken as an occasion to reexamine the connections between vision and nonvisual senses (in particular smell, tactility and proprioception) and the relation between movement and space. Albert Michotte's experimental work on the phenomenology of movement and causality will be drawn upon to suggest that Peirce's non-Euclidean space is not as far removed from our everyday, sighted experience as he believed.

Constance Classen Lonergan College
"The Futurist Sensorium and the Cultural Politics of the Senses"
Sensory perception is profoundly affected by cultural practices and ideologies. Just as social norms influence how we dress and what we eat, so do they influence how and what we see or touch or smell. This cultural construction of the senses works to support social divisions and hierarchies by associating high-status groups with highly valued sensory domains and low-status groups with devalued sensory domains. Hence the traditional association in Western culture of the "lower classes," "the lower races" and the "lower sex" with the "lower senses" of taste, touch and smell. Given this link between sensory hierarchies and social hierarchies it might seem that the contemporary interest in elaborating the role of the "suppressed" "lower" senses within art and culture would also have the effect of opening up a greater cultural space for the groups traditionally associated with those senses. That this is not necessarily the case can be evidenced by going back in time to Futurism and examining this controversial movement's unique blend of multi-sensory aesthetics and cultural politics.

Joanna Frueh University of Nevada, Reno
"Vaginal Aesthetics"
The primary thesis of this performance is: the vagina is rich and sweet. Smell, taste, and touch play predominant roles as I use scholarly analysis and my own autobiographical narratives and poems and poetic language in order to redress the vagina's culturally inherited ugliness. Based on the premise that ugliness, marked by specificities of disease, discomfort, and complaint, looms large in both cultural and women's consciousness of vaginas, and that a woman is likely to have a more medicalized and pathologized than aesthetic consciousness about her own vagina -- unless awareness of ugliness can be called aesthetic consciousness -- I create a representation of the vagina that is as sophisticated, smart, and blatant, as full of ridiculous beauty, as the phallus. I do this in the belief that women need such representations for mind-inseparable-from-body confidence and in order to counter the unitary power and pleasure ruled by the phallus. Chocolate, as an image and reality of pleasure that is available to women, is a recurrent motif. I speak about chocolate, eat a chocolate cake, and wear a brown dress and shoes.

Jim Drobnick Concordia University
"Corrupting the Purity of the White Cube"
In the discourse on the problematics of the "white cube" -- the paradigmatic exhibition venue for contemporary art -- critics often address the ocularcentrist presumptions implicit in the architectural elements of blank walls, geometric forms and uncluttered lines of view. While the white cube may be the product of a diversity of forces -- modern architects' antipathy for ornamentation, aesthetic formalists' intensification of visual pleasure, museums' search for a pure, neutral, autonomous space for art -- the end result remains an environment in which visual specialization is premised upon the deprivation of the other senses. This paper explores one aspect of the ignored sensory field -- smell -- and its utilization by contemporary artists to intervene into the architectural and corporeal dynamics of the white cube. Creating room-sized chambers to engage with ambient sensations, collaborating with professional perfumers to simulate the aroma of particular buildings, strategically placing "inappropriate" odours to contravene spatial ideologies, engaging with the symbolic and cultural aspects of fragrance and its relationship to specific sites, are but a few of the strategies mobilized by artists to work with scent despite is presumed lack of status as an "aesthetic sense.." These connections between scent and architecture not only critique the predominance of the visual, but suggest alternative possibilities for experiencing and relating to the built environment.

UNCOMMON SENSES:SELECTED PRESENTATIONS
Jennifer Fisher Concordia University
"Performing Touch"
This presentation examines emblematic representations and actual enactments of touch in the context of the visual arts. I am interested in how the haptic sense -- the sense of touch, kinaesthetics and proproprioception -- engages sensorial apprehension in ways which interrupt and put into question hegemonic notions of a purely visualist aesthetic experience. Where cultural studies has evolved as a critique of aesthetics, it conventionally deploys the category of the aesthetic in terms of its closures of meaning -- as a term of evaluation -- whether a question of attitude, style or criteria of judgement. Redressing this preoccupation with meaning as a visual/textual blind spot which betrays a sociolinguistic bias, I argue instead for the implications of a haptic aesthetic to enactments of more sensorially nuanced "politics of feeling," on the one hand, and to precritical morphologies of connection, on the other. In particular, I will investigate the haptic as a form of "distal touch" involving the energies, volitions, presences, temperatures, intensities, pressures, resonances and affective climates of specific exhibition contexts. An overview of art historical allegories of touch will set the ground for an analysis of haptically nuanced performative installations, including works in the Vital Signs exhibition accompanying this conference.

Sabine Gross University of Wisconsin
"The Sensory Subversion of Reading"
The dominant ideology of reading instructs us that reading is a visual-cerebral process, and mastering the discipline of reading is to engage in techniques of exclusion: to direct one's focus to the signs presented in order to transform them into meaning. For this reading-as-comprehension to proceed smoothly, contributions by all other senses, in particular the "lower" or "proximate" senses, have to be censored, as do all forms of visual attention that are not directed towards the sign as unit of meaning. but to other qualities of the textual object.. But the process of reading is not reducible to the purely intellectual: it always entails the physical engagement of an embodied reader with a textual artifact, one that, furthermore, has throughout the history of reading been designed to lure the reader into a multi-sensory relationship. The decoding of signs can never be completely separated from the sensory entanglement that accompanies it. A closer look at the activity of reading reveals its suppressed sensory dimension. Texts appeal not only to reader's eyes, but to their sense of touch, smell, and hearing, to their hands, mouths, and bodies. Offering detailed examples (both historical and contemporary), I propose an approach to reading that acknowledges its physical-sensory substratum.

Eran Guter Boston University
"Through the Glass Brightly: Synaesthesia and the Arts"
Science demystifies the romantic conception of synaesthesia as a form of primordial perception. Deprived of transcendence, the highly idiosyncratic inter-sensory correspondences associated with either spontaneous or induced synaesthesia are left outside of the aesthetic discourse, being epistemologically inaccessible to others, and, hence, akin to a private language. In this paper, I attempt to trace the construction of meaning in hybrid artworks that incorporate "synaesthetic" effects or are founded on a synaesthetic code. I argue that the only access we have into the world of such an artwork is essentially metaphorical, and hence, creative. The perceptual similarity that underlies hybrid art forms is made rather than discovered. However, what we are trying to recover in the process of making sense of a "synaesthetic" artwork is not the artist's particular synaesthetic catalogue, whether genuine or fake, but rather a sense of necessity -- something which another synesthete is likely to be incapable of. Alexander Scriabin's Prometheus proves to be a particularly fruitful locus classicus for my discussion.

Roger Haden University of Technology, Sydney
"Taste and Technology: Count Rumford's 'Red Hot Monsters' and 'Metaphysical Soup'"
This paper draws on philosophers Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, historian Piero Camporesi, and the discourse of culinary history and technology. It addresses the degree to which the sense of taste is affected by, and is the product of, cultural and instrumental technologies. Tracing this reconfiguring of taste hinges on the central consideration of Count Rumford's invention and introduction of coal-burning iron ranges in the latter years of the eighteenth century. In the context of what Bachelard calls "the complex hearth", the advent of the "Rumford Roaster" (circa 1800) marks an end of the peasant age, and is mapped in terms of changes to the conditions under which taste takes place. This contextualizing of taste as a discrete cultural product in both peasant and modern economies involves establishing criteria for a fresh appraisal of taste as a "faculty" (from facere: to make) and as a potential epistemological resource; in other words, as an active rather than the historically familiar passive construction of taste. I thus emphasize the importance of tracing the historical "shape" of taste, in order to formulate ways of incorporating taste anew -metaphorically, figuratively and literally- into discursive and culinary practices. The sense of taste thus undergoes, within the terms of the paper, something of a rehabilitation: historical, philosophical and discursive.

David Howes Concordia University
"Sensual Relations, or the Life of the Senses in Society: Melanesian Case Studies"
Societies vary in the way they value and make use of the five senses; they also differ in the meaning and importance they ascribe to different sensations within the same sensory modality. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the sensory orders of two ethnographic areas of Papua New Guinea. In societies of the Washkuk Hills region of East Sepik Province, vision is considered to be the noblest sense and touch is demonized and suppressed; in the Massim region of Milne Bay Province, the polarity is between hearing and taste. In terms of specific modalities, such as touch, smooth sensations are privileged in Massim societies whereas hard sensations tend to be most prized in those of the Washkuk Hills. The paper concludes by exploring certain links between the contrasting sensory orders and the contrasting social and symbolic orders of cultures in the two regions as condensed in two shell artifacts.
Sharon Kivland School of Cultural Studies, Sheffield Hallam University
"Le bonheur de femmes (the scent of a woman)"
A recent work of mine, Le bonheur de femmes (the scent of a woman), consists of photographs hung at genital height. They are of women's feet, taken in the perfume departments of Parisian grands magasins. Texts mounted at eye-level -- such as "envy," "obsession," "allure," "escape" and so on -- might be identified as the names of scents. While the work alludes to nineteenth-century Paris, consumerism and the urban experience, my paper begins with an encounter between Freud and Marx at the site of the fetish. While Marx borrows the term to demonstrate how social relations take on the illusory form of relationships between things, Freud applies it to sexual behaviour, when excitement depends on the presence of an object. All this is standard stuff, but what if the object disappears, like faint waft of scented air? Or, furthermore, if it disappears into words, transforming a shine on the nose to a glance at the nose perhaps (sniffing all the time), then there is an indication that fetishism is more than a vague analogy in the visual field, it is something subject to linguistic transformation. One might say that the very words are perfumed, as mine will be ...

For more information, please contact: Uncommon Senses c/o Lonergan College Concordia University 1455 de Maisonneuve West Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8 email: senses@alcor.concordia.ca tel: (514) 848-2282