Sound as a Metaphor for Being-In-Nature

I still need to get my hands back on R. Murray Schaffer's The Tuning of the World, which I had to return to the library before getting to read, but I feel like the connection between Merleau-Ponty's being-in-the-world and the pursuit of sound ecology are linked.  

I just finished Virginia Madsen's little article entitled "Notes Toward Sound Ecology in the Garden of Listening," and was struck, as I usually am in writings on soundscapes, by the sense that the city is "a homogenising, polluted, and 'disturbed' environment where noise (equated with poorly designed acoustic technology)  is the parasite that consumes its host."  This consuming power of sound though, suggests to me that listening is a powerful agent of our being-in-the-world. 

I'd like to suggest that museums think more carefully about the use of sound and silence in order to soothe the effects of the city.  I'll mention Hildegaard Westerkamp's critique of the Museum of Anthropology's soundscape as an example of the wrong that large institutions are doing us with the use of "silence."

Essay Schema

I have started the writing process, and though it's very slow going, it really helps me to organize my thoughts.  As I write I am keeping track of the main ideas in each paragraph.  I'll keep updating this schema as I continue to write, and add other posts as I read new articles.  We'll see how the process of researching and writing co-exist here... (I've never written an essay before while continuing to research. )

The Body as the Seat of All Understanding (establish the significance of the body)

-The world is murky and uncertain; we rely on the body for information.

-Merleau-Ponty's third position between Empiricism and Intellectualism.

-David Rokeby, and being implicated in the world. Very Nervous System

-Limitations of the body: the situated perspective and horizons.

-Sense experiences cannot be abstracted, b/c they are all interconnected within the body.

-Merleau-Ponty's Doubly constituted body.

-Atau Tanaka: Global string: The body as sensed by others and an instrument for sensing

-Museums should take account of the body using Merleau-Ponty and Multi-media art.

Merleau-Ponty pg 258

I'm still working my way through Phenomenology of Perception (at a very slow pase), but it does get my brain working.  

On page 257 he gets into the spatial aspects of sense experience, and it creates a very visual metaphor for me, of a human walking through the world with senses that extend out to varying limits, all mutually informing one another about the environment.  He says,

"It is neither contradictory nor impossible that each sense should constitute a small world within the larger one, and it is even in virtue of its peculiarity that it is necessary to the whole and opens upon the whole."

I like the idea that each sense has a sort of spatial realm, that helps to inform us about the greater picture.  He uses the example of the spatial sense of hearing that gives a more vast understanding of space than does sight:

"When, in the concert hall, I open my eyes, visible space seems to me cramped compared to that other space through which, a moment ago, the music was being unfolded, and even if I keep my eyes open while the piece is being played, I have the impression that the music is not really contained within this circumscribed and unimpressive space."

Though the sense of hearing seems to extend the environment beyond the walls of the concert hall, sight traps the experience in a container.  Though the sound may not actually permeate out into the night, the sense of sight and sound toghether inform us about the environment both inside and outside I think. I'm rambling now, so I'll finish with:

"It brings a new dimension stealing through visible space, and in this it surges forward...Like the perspective of other people making its impact on the world for me, the spatial realm of each sense is an unknowable absolute for the others, and to that extent limits their spatiality....the unity of space can be discovered only in the interplay of the sensory realms."

I'm hoping to make a case for this wholeness of sensual experience in the art museum context.

Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Music Hall courtesy of Daily Dose of Imagery

Mind and Body Connection

As I continue to think about my writings and readings, I am still struck by the phenomenological notion that the mind and sensual body are intimately connected and thrust together out into the world.  Right now I'm looking at a piece by Maria Coleman called "Reappraising the Disappearing Body and the Disembodied Eye Through Multi-Sensory Art."  It comes from the e-journal Crossings. She very eloquently addresses the union of thought and the senses, and I particularly like her urgent use of language such as when she states that, 

"...our haste to disassociate ourselves from mortality removed our sense of wholeness. By distrusting bodily truths and intuition, we divided ourselves internally and splintered our wider relationship with nature."

She calls for a reunion of the mind and body and the destruction of the disembodied eye. 

For my research I still very much want to continue looking at the cultural shift that is a reaction to ocularcentric society... our more interactive and multi-sensory world that comes along with electronic technology. I'd like to look more closely at the sensual body and its place in art and also in art institutions.  I think a participatory mode is upon us, and I'd like to reflect on some new and interesting ideas that are coming out of the museum world.  

I'm going to look into the tactics of the Musee de la Civilization in Quebec city, because they seem to be doing some very interesting things with theatrical lighting and bodily involvement etc. engaging the senses.  I came across this one at the conference "From Jurassic Part to Rothco's Chapel" in a talk by Francois Tremblay about the museum as performance.  I'll definitely have to visit someday. 

Foucault and Embodiment

In the book Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art  Foucault has a great little article dealing with the corporeal body and he plays around with the idea of the body as a utopia, which I interpret as being like a fantasy.  He really helped me to understand the way in which we are our bodies, and also to think about the strange way in which we are both visible and invisible, beings in the world, fleshy, flawed, but perceiving. Of the body he says, 

"It is in relation to it - and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign- that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world."

This idea is very closely aligned with the phenomenological perspective, but I find his notion that the body is also nowhere, very curious.  All in all, I really enjoyed the language of this article, and it has my mind moving about what my body means.  I also like this small quote that puts the body squarely in the centre of any consideration:

"My body is like the City of the Sun.  It has no place, but it is from it that all possible places, real or Utopian, emerge and radiate."

Ihde's Approach

I've been reading Don Ihde's beautiful book "Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound," and am feeling a real connection to it based on my personal interest in sound design, soundscape ecology and music.  His introduction to the book has been extremely helpful to me, because he works through phenomenology as a methodology and begins the book by justifying his focus on sound.  Some very helpful points that I'd like to keep in mind while looking at technological art are:

1) What is Phenomenology?: "... a style of thinking which concentrates an intense examination on experience in its multifaceted, complex and essential forms."

2) Hermeneutical Exestential Phenomenology: "It understands that experience cannot be questioned alone or in isolation but must be understood ultimately in relation to its historical and cultural embeddedness." 

3) Wholistic Character: "...the first gain of phenomenology in regard to sensory experience is a recovery and reappreciation of the fullness and richness and of the global character of experience" ... "The object "primitively" stands before us in all its diversity and richness and unity."

4) Description: "Describe the appearances or phenomena..." and carefully take notes on what goes on in the "flow of experience." Concentrate on the "eidetic" or "structural components of experience," and "make use of the full range of possibilities."  "...philosophy has always used fantasy as its tool."

Phenomenology Fundamentals

After reading David Cerbone's chapter on Merleau-Ponty and his rather interesting introduction to the study of Phenomenology, I thought it would make sense to jot down a few fundamentals that will be helpful for me to keep in mind.  Also, while reading the introduction I noticed some interesting intersections with McLuhan's little publication, "The Medium is the Massage."

A Few Important Phenomenological Points (as I understand it):

1) Holistic structure of experience: Also a tenet of Gestalt Psychology which Merleau-Ponty admired.  As Cerbone suggests, "In experience, the whole is prior to the parts and so is more than their sum," and "bodily self-experience is a dimension of my "being-in-the-world", which resists decomposition into physiological and psychological components." Merleau-Ponty calls this unity of consciousness the Intentional Arc.  He says it is a "...unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility."

2) Return to the Phenomena: As the quote in the last point suggests, we need to get back to something that is prior to objective (and scientific) understandings of experience. Phenomenology is highly descriptive, and that has to do with understanding pre-objective experience. As Merleau-Ponty says, we need to "reveal a 'primary layer' of sense experience." 

3) Embodiment: Borrowing from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty championed the idea that the body is central to all experience. Husserl said in Ideas II that "the Body is, in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in all perception." The body is also not just an object in the world, it is "categorically distinct" and one way of describing this is with the phenomenon of "double-touch" (where a hand can both touch and be touched).  The lived body has both of these aspects. 

4) Seeing as Prejudicitave: We see and then we judge.  Merleau-Ponty suggests that "nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see." This concept is very new to me, but as I understand it, there is a passive reception of objects through the senses, and this reception can be fooled, such as with an illusion, but we still have a sense of judgement that understands the greater meaning (an objective sense of truth?). What I have to be careful not to do here, is to turn the senses in to mere channels of perception (b/c that's what the empiricist does), and not to suggest that judgement comes before sense perception (as an intellectualist would). 

Intersections with McLuhan:

After looking at Walter Ong a little bit and thinking about the switch to literacy and the effect this had on sight gaining primacy over the other senses, I began wondering what this would mean for the unity of consciousness that is a part of phenomenology.  In what I have been reading, discussions of ranking the senses have mostly been left out.  Phenomenologists sort of combine sense perception, and talk about them as equal. To zero in on sight seems against the project of phenomenology, and looking at it as a causal result is pretty well out of the question. Husserl says that a "subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing Body" (a body that is not just a corporeal thing, but involved in the experience).  I don't think Ong is suggesting that with literacy, society became uni-sensual with nothing but a sense of sight, but I am curious about what this switch in the hierarchy means for Phenomologists.  Does anything really change if some senses are more important than others, or would the phenomologist feel that the balance was disrupted?

What I found really interesting about Cerbone's introduction to Phenomenology is that it felt a lot like what McLuhan was trying to do in his 1967 publication "The Medium is the Message." This little book is filled with pictures that draw attention to the process of reading and how we take part in literate activities without realizing the perceptual faculties involved.  When Cerbone was describing the visual sensations of the words and the tactile experience of the book, it brought me right back to a section in The Medium is the Message that is simply an image with two thumbs holding the pages of the book open.  There seem to be some fundamental differences between the aims of these two works, but I'm noticing some overlap too.  I'm going to keep the aims of these two camps in mind, and hopefully either reconcile them or identify their major differences.  

*And lets not forget multi-media art works... I'm still looking for some perfect examples that fit into what I'm thinking about, but like a phenomenologist, I'd like to look at the experience of these works of art, rather than at their particular content or message.