A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age

David Howes

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781350078017
• eBook ISBN: 9781474233170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

In the 20th century, many aspects of life became 'a matter of perception' in the wake of the multiplication of media, stylistic experimentation, and the rise of multiculturalism. Life sped up as a result of new modes of transportation – automobiles and airplanes – and communication – telephones and personal computers – which emphasized the rapid movement of people and ideas. The proliferation of synthetic products and simulated experiences, from artificial flavors to video games, in turn, created heady virtual worlds of sensation. This progressive mediation and acceleration of sensation, along with the sensory and environmental pollution it often spawned, also sparked various countertrends, such as the 'back to nature' movement, the craft movement, slow food and alternative medicine. This volume shows how attending to the sensory dynamics of the modern age yields many fresh insights into the intertwined processes which gave the 20th century its particular feel of technological prowess and gaudy artificiality.

A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.

CHAPTER ONE

_____________________________________

The Social Life of the
Senses: Ordering and
Disordering the Modern
Sensorium

TIM EDENSOR

In “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” published at the dawn of the twentieth century, the German sociologist Georg Simmel provided an influential account of the ways in which modern cities were settings for powerful new sensory experiences. He drew attention to how urban dwellers were exposed to a radically different sensory world from that of the villages in which they dwelt before they migrated to the city. The urban denizen was subjected to an “intensification of nervous stimulation” in the context of an “accelerated city life” typified by the “rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli” (Simmel 1995: 31). According to Simmel, the urban habitué was induced to adopt a blasé attitude in the face of this hyperstimulation—a rational, distancing measure that formed a shield against overwhelming and rapid sensory impressions, but also inculcated the incapacity to respond to them. This defense accompanied the social reserve and instrumental attitude towards work and interaction with other people that was required by operating within a money economy.

Simmel’s value-laden assertions about sensation in the city chime with the sociological contentions of Ferdinand Tonnies, who construed the dualistic terms Gemeinschaft and Geselleschaft to underscore what he regarded as the contrasting sorts of social relations that obtained in urban and rural spheres respectively. Tonnies conceived of the rural as embodying “the lasting and genuine form of living together” (1955: 37). In a similarly dichotomous fashion, for Simmel, the rural was typified by a “slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm” (1995: 31). It was an environment in which sensations could be absorbed and in which social contact was warm and friendly, in contradistinction to the cold, reserved disposition of the urbanite. Such dualistic understanding of contrasting sensations in urban and rural spheres persisted throughout the twentieth century, though subtly changing as I discuss later.

There is no question that advancing urbanization, which could be considered the defining feature of the modern age, has produced an almost complete transformation in sense experience. I thus acknowledge that, as Simmel suggests, the conditions of modern life may well have called for distancing strategies to insulate personhood by blocking out powerful noises and smells, and onrushing sights. I shortly discuss how the dynamism of modernity simultaneously continued to provoke an uneven but often overpowering range of sensations as all that is (or was) solid seemed to melt into air (Berman 1982). This “baroque” modernity (Lash 1999) echoed Simmel’s depiction of the turn of the century urban environment, which was variously sensed as fleeting, multiple, dazzling, and confusing. However, this very dynamism, and the perceived sensory disorder it produced, also incited a range of increasingly intensive attempts to regulate the environment and facilitate a more disciplined, orderly social and sensory experience of the city. Accordingly, I shall consider how a plethora of technological developments and a range of values and imperatives came to inform the sensescapes of the twentieth century. I further discuss how these regulatory strategies became so powerful and pervasive that they had the unanticipated effect of instigating the active pursuit of unfamiliar kinetic, aromatic, sonic, and visual sensations by those who grew dissatisfied with the sterile “blandscapes” that had eventuated across the urban West.

These contradictory modern processes—regulation and the desire for sensory order versus volatility (destructive dynamism) and the quest for sensory alterity—might usefully be thought of in terms of the “Apollonian” characteristics of modernity which affirm “structure, order and self-discipline,” and the contrasting “Dionysian” qualities of modernity, productive of “sensuality, abandon and intoxication” (Rojek 1995: 80). These tensions have been highlighted by the proclivities of modern subjects to demand and impose epistemological, social, and spatial order on the one hand, and to long for disorder and transgression on the other. Whilst the dominant urge has been to seek refuge in reconstituted regimes of order in the face of continual change, the desire to transcend regulated minds, bodies, and environments has constantly bubbled just below the disciplined surface of twentieth-century everyday life and found various outlets (Cohen and Taylor 1992), often in spaces and events saturated with unfamiliar sensations.

To explore the tensions between these modern desires for sensory order and sensory alterity, the contrasting values and identities with which they were associated, and the complex ways in which they intertwined and clashed, I investigate four modern spatial processes. Firstly, I look at various strategies to order spaces and bodies, and the overarching regulatory measures that have come to pervade most aspects of social and sensory life in the modern age. While doing so, I also treat some examples that bring out the compulsion to seek out sensory alterity that this sensory ordering provoked. Secondly, I instantiate these processes by examining the project to illuminate space as an ongoing ordering process, but also look at how illumination simultaneously produced an uncanny sensory realm, and how extensive illumination provoked a search for darker spaces as well. Thirdly, I investigate how twentieth-century tourism was a practice through which comfort and familiarity were pursued, but also inculcated the desire to seek out sensual difference and surprise, and thus transcend the normative apprehension of space. Finally, I circle back to consider how these processes played out in the sensory experience of the rural.

SENSORY REGULATION AND THE QUEST FOR SENSORY ALTERITY

The bourgeois moral imperatives and scientific rationality that were first applied to the regulation of the sensorium of the city in the nineteenth century gained more and more momentum over the course of the twentieth century. These included the containment of smell through the construction of sewers and efficient waste disposal, measures to limit smoke, and the creation of urban and national parks to provide compensatory greenery and clean air. This desire for rigorous sensory control was particularly evident in the emergence of the “International” or “Modernist” style in architecture from the 1930s and concomitant drive to sweep away all traces of the past: buildings which predated the twentieth century were conceived as vestiges, outmoded relics of limited use that could justifiably be erased from the landscape. Doyen of the movement, Le Corbusier, contended that the provision of plentiful light, clean air, and space would encourage the rational development of the healthy individual, whose eyes, nose, and ears would be uncluttered by sensory rubbish. The slogans that underlined the rise of the Modernist style in architecture and urban planning resonated with these regulatory desires. Ornament was “a crime” (Loos 2006), living quarters were to be devised to accommodate bodies “efficiently,” and the house was to become “a machine for living in.” One of the foremost imperatives, as articulated by Le Corbusier (1933), was to “kill the street,” thereby ridding urban space of unnecessary distractions and producing linear spaces of transportation that would optimize the movement of people and goods. The street was to become “a machine for traffic,” purified of pedestrians and cafés that “eat up the pavement.” In short, the ideal modern street was the freeway, conceived as a uniform space of, and for, mobility without obstruction, in virulent contrast to the multifunctionality of the “traditional” or “old modern” street—i.e. the nineteenth-century avenue with its “volatile mixture of people and traffic, businesses and homes” (Berman 1982: 168).

Le Corbusier’s machinic episteme was further concerned with the functional and spatial division of the city into discrete parts where people might reside, work, shop, and carry out leisure pursuits, thus preventing “friction” between practices that might otherwise compete in the same space. In Le Corbusier’s view, the truly modern city would be “a fully integrated world of high-rise towers surrounded by vast expanses of grass and open space—‘the tower in the park’—linked by aerial superhighways, serviced by subterranean garages and shopping arcades” (Berman 1982: 167)

While Le Corbusier’s designs were only realized in a few cases, the influence they had on the modern discipline of urban planning was enormous, as Berman (1982) points out. For example, in many Western cities, the delimitation of single-purpose spaces or “zones” produced exactly the segmented city that modernists like Le Corbusier so desired, drastically reducing social and sensual diversity. Such zones have been described by David Sibley (1988) as “purified” spaces, strongly circumscribed and framed to banish ambiguity of function and character. In a similar vein, Richard Sennett (1994: 15) argues that in the latter half of the twentieth century, urban space was reduced to “a mere function of motion,” engendering a “tactile sterility” where the city environment “pacifies the body,” with car drivers, for instance, using only “micro-movements” to negotiate space. The body was coerced into passive acquiescence and subordinated to the sterile spaces through which it passed as the desire for smooth transit “triumphed over the sensory claims of the space through which the body moves” (1994: 15). Similarly, Trevor Boddy (1992) draws attention to a “new urban prosthetics” that coerced pedestrian bodies into a passive engagement with their surroundings via a system of smooth and sealed walkways, escalators, bridges, people-conveyors, and tunnels. Constituting a comprehensive movement system to link work, recreational, and commercial spaces, these cocoon-like passages produced an aesthetic and material form typified by “incessant whirring,” “mechanical breezes,” “vaguely reassuring icons,” “trickling fountains,” and anesthetic qualities like low murmurings and insensate movements. While not entirely devoid of sensual features, these movement systems, with their mild stimulations, were not designed to excite the body either, but rather to simulate urbanity, and also filter out that which might disturb the pedestrian, the glaring sights, disruptive textures, and “troubling smells and winds” (1992: 123–4) associated with the “chaotic” city of the past.

FIGURE 1.1: Smooth passage: escalator at Canary Wharf, London. Public domain.

These spatial functions were intensively managed to secure illusions of orderly permanence and minimize that which might render them the least ambiguous. Smells, noises, textures, and tactility were closely monitored by often invisible maintenance procedures that ensured that waste would be swiftly removed and that the sensory impact of those people who failed to adhere to the prevailing spatial norms would be sharply curtailed. For instance, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was an intensification of injunctions against sleeping or resting on benches and floors, which imposed severe restrictions on the movements of the homeless. In the highly ordered single-purpose spaces that became increasingly normative, “loitering” and “hanging out” were strictly proscribed. Graffiti-writing and bill-posting were also intensively monitored to ensure that anything considered to be an “eyesore” or that interfered with the visual order imposed by sanctioned advertisements and signage was speedily removed. Similarly, noise abatement policies attempted to ensure that loud music and “out of place” activities were minimized in residential and commercial zones.

This aesthetic and sensory control over space would appear to have reached its apogee in the increased production of themed spaces from the 1980s. Gottdiener (1997: 73) coined the term “scenography” to refer to the sort of “themed milieu” exemplified by the theme park, shopping mall, festival marketplace, regenerated waterfront, and so-called cultural quarter. Scenographies create the illusion of vibrant living but are actually highly restrictive in what practices they allow, with activities largely confined to browsing, shopping, and dining. It is not that there are no sensations to be had in such spaces, but that the sensations on offer are all carefully managed to produce particular “atmospheres.” Carefully selected smells, such as the aroma of coffee or fresh-baked bread, would be released to stimulate “linger time” amongst consumers. Likewise, particular soundscapes of popular music or muzak were deployed to produce an ambience of mild relaxation. Sensory management also extended to the smoothing of floor and wall surfaces to engender a tactile seamlessness so that progress through such spaces was never jarring, always smooth.

Other areas of social life were also subjected to increasingly intensive regulation from the 1920s on. For instance, in 1930s Sweden, the sensory control of space was complemented by attempts to manage the feelings and performance of the body through an educational regime that promoted only “good habits.” As Frykman (1994: 68) observes, “Sweden pioneered the teaching of sex education and sexual hygiene in schools … an example of the desire to rationalize the body and its drives—to make sensible use of them.” The state did not have to lecture the citizenry about the importance of physical fitness, though, for “Modern” Swedish men and women enthusiastically embraced gymnastics (in particular), and found its regimens liberating. Many voluntary gymnastics associations sprang up in the interwar years. There was talk in the popular press of “the body’s revolution” and its role alongside political organizing in the coming to be of a truly “Modern” society. Frykmam quotes an excerpt from a 1934 issue of the journal Morgonbris (1994: 72):

the world must be remade, people’s lives must assume other forms … in order to endure one must have physical strength, a trained, well-formed body, flexible, well oiled—a machine to live with. This applies to the men. But it also applies to the women, who are violently wrenched out of an indolent existence in a fat corset and tight shoes. Make the body strong and shape it to be living, glad, and harmonious, and the soul will willingly follow in its tracks.

The connection between somatic regulation and modern reflexive projects of self-fashioning can also be seen in the proliferation of sites for the management of the body, including not only gyms and swimming pools, but also massage parlors, nail parlors, and hairdressers. All of these sites were dedicated to the development of selective bodily capacities.

This sensory management extended into private space as well—that is, into the home. From the 1960s, a minimalist aesthetic became fashionable which emphasized purifying domestic space of clutter. This was accompanied by an intensification of habitual procedures and techniques for maintenance, temperature control, and spatial management which were supposed to foster cleanliness, comfort, and convenience (Shove 2004). And finally there was the car which, from the 1980s became perhaps the most sensually controlled environment of all, as “standard” features or amenities came to include first power steering, then power windows, power seats, and so on, with “auditory cocooning” topping the list (Bijsterveld 2010). Valorizing only certain forms of sensual experience, while obviating others, these processes of regulation co-produced a body that could open itself out to certain sensory experiences but would automatically withdraw from others.

However, despite all the ordering processes that transformed many spaces into homogeneous, diluted sensory “blandscapes,” the social and cultural dynamism of modernity continued to produce a baroque kaleidoscope of stimulation and diversity. While many of the more powerful stimuli which characterized early twentieth-century life would gradually be managed out of existence, strong sensory experiences could not be entirely eradicated, and continued to co-exist with regulated spaces in an uneven distribution across space and time. As Appadurai (1996) insists, the evolution of modernity is discontinuous and far from homogeneous. Thus, despite the forces of globalization, very different forms of social and sensual ordering often persist outside the West, in Indian market areas or bazaars, for example, which have enduringly provided an exemplary modern space, just not one that has ever been successfully subordinated to Western regulatory schemes.

The Bazaar

As explored in greater detail elsewhere (Edensor 2000a), the bazaar typically constitutes an unenclosed realm that provides a meeting point for a variety of people and multiple activities, mixing together small businesses, shops, street vendors, public and private institutions, and domestic housing. The street is also a site for diverse social a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “Make it New!”—Reforming the Sensory World
• 1 The Social Life of the Senses: Ordering and Disordering the Modern Sensorium
• 2 Urban Sensations: A Retrospective of Multisensory Drift
• 3 The Senses in the Marketplace: Commercial Aesthetics for a Suburban Age
• 4 The Senses in Religion: Pluralism, Technology, and Change
• 5 The Senses in Philosophy and Science: From Sensation to Computation
• 6 Medicine and the Senses: Bodies, Technologies, and the Empowerment of the Patient
• 7 The Senses in Literature: From the Modernist Shock of Sensation to Postcolonial and Virtual Voices
• 8 Art and the Senses: The Avant-Garde Challenge to the Visual Arts
• 9 Sensory Media: Virtual Worlds and the Training of Perception
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright