A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace

Abstract

Robert Jütte's subject is a fashionable one, drawn on a broad canvas, and dissecting its apparent familiarity across the longue durée produces intriguing results. The current surge of interest in the senses he believes is a social phenomenon, and its wide appeal is charted from advertisers to museum curators, keen to engage their displays with senses beyond the visual. His book is divided into four sections. The first, on the senses and historicity, covers explorations since the late eighteenth century, of how human perception has changed over time. Historians of science first looked to physiology and biology to explain the operation of the senses, and there was naturally a close relationship to the history of the body and medicine. It was seen early, however, that there were other questions, about the place of the senses within cultural systems and the social history of sense perception. Jütte argues that the ‘economy of the senses’ is ‘a mirror image of the society in question, meaning that in any given hierarchy or classification of the senses it is possible to discern mental outlines and reproductions of the social hierarchy and value system to which it is attached’ (p. 14). He therefore draws a link between a rigidly structured, feudal society, unchallenged until the French Revolution, and the schema of the five senses which the middle ages inherited from classical antiquity; and his interpretation makes nuanced inflections to match later changes in society. The second part of the work, the first of three chronologically arranged divisions, examines the traditional order of the senses from antiquity to the early modern period. Starting with the sensoriums of ancient India and China, the relationship between sense perception and intellectual knowledge is considered, along with its development in terms of Graeco-Roman natural philosophy, medieval theories of optics, and of sensory operation from Aquinas to the early modern period. Unlike other, medieval analyses of knowledge, the senses were seldom represented pictorially, a position that altered with the Renaissance. Also examined here is the medical context: the senses and their ailments. The book is strong on theoretical conceptions of the senses, their classification and hierarchies, and this pays greater dividends when Jütte turns from the late medieval and early modern world, ‘the world of the senses’, to the world of reason of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rise of the bourgeoisie coincided with new interests in sensibilities: there was a shift towards sensualism, away from the sense organs to the stimuli, or impressions made on the nervous system, and to the ‘over-sensitivity’ of nineteenth-century art and literature. Here Jütte considers the relationship between the senses and the aesthetic, training the senses and the transformation of the senses by industrialisation and technology. Experimental physiology effectively isolated the functions of the senses, laying the foundation for modern, scientific comprehension of their operation. The final quarter of the book focuses on the ‘rediscovery’ of the senses, that is, of their sensual characteristics. While some of this renewal is connected to commercial pressures, a link is drawn to the effects of overstimulation in a post-industrial, leisured society, and to a new concern for the pleasures of the body, from fast food and nouvelle cuisine, sex, the management of odour, the art and power of noises, a diversity of ways of seeing, to an interest in extra-sensory perception. A further form of the last comes with the developments of cyberspace, with machines that mimic human sensory analysis or present new vistas for perception, displacing them from the body into virtual space. Jütte's work is a broad survey and much is drawn from what might be termed the high culture of cognition. Its results are surprisingly uniform. Studies in comparative anthropology have shown that different societies have a good deal of variety in their understanding of sensory perception, in terms of numbers of senses, their operation and the relative ranking of the faculties, as well as the location of the boundaries of animate, sensory life. Further, they have shown that we should not necessarily expect a single model of perception to be prevalent in a society. An exploration of these complexities will not be found in this book, yet these textures are essential for our knowledge of the fundamentals of daily life in the past.

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