The Senses and Society

ISSN: 1745-8927 (Print) 1745-8935 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfss20

Introducing Sensory Studies

Michael Bull, Paul Gilroy, David Howes & Douglas Kahn

To cite this article: Michael Bull, Paul Gilroy, David Howes & Douglas Kahn (2006) Introducing
Sensory Studies, The Senses and Society, 1:1, 5-7, DOI: 10.2752/174589206778055655

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2752/174589206778055655

Published online: 16 Apr 2015.

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Introducing Sensory
Studies

+ The appearance of The Senses and Society is a

sign of the sensual revolution in the humanities,
social sciences and the arts. This “revolution” has
disclosed the startling multiplicity of different formations of
the senses in history and across (as well as within) cultures.
The sensorium (meaning: “the entire perceptual apparatus
as an operational complex”) is an ever-shifting social and
historical construct.1 The perceptual is cultural and political,
and not simply (as psychologists and neurobiologists would
have it) a matter of cognitive processes or neurological
mechanisms located in the individual subject.
In addition to loosening psychology’s grip on the study
of perception, the emergent focus on the social life of the
senses is rapidly supplanting older paradigms of cultural
interpretation (e.g. cultures as “texts” or “discourses”, as
“worldviews” or “pictures”), and challenging conventional
theories of representation. The senses mediate the relation-
ship between self and society, mind and body, idea and
Senses & Society

object. The senses are everywhere. Thus, sensation (as op-

posed to but inclusive of representations in different media)
is fundamental to our experience of reality, and the sociality
of sensation cries out for more concerted attention from
cultural studies scholars.
While providing an antidote to the logocentrism and
ocularcentrism of conventional historical and social scientific
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accounts of “meaning,” The Senses and Society will also

 Introducing Sensory Studies

help to problematize the increasingly homogenized notion of “the

body” in contemporary scholarship by advocating a modal and inter-
modal or relational approach to the study of our corporeal faculties.
This relational focus will disrupt the presumption of the unity of the
body (which has simply taken over from the modernist presumption
of the unity of the subject) by highlighting the differential elaboration of
the senses in diverse times and places, and underscoring the multiple
forms of human sensuousness.
A further objective of The Senses and Society is to recuperate the
original meaning of the term “aesthetic” not as a form of judgment
but as the disposition to sense acutely.2 The role of artists in Western
society, and shamans in many other societies, has ever been to stretch
the bounds of experience through cultivating and experimenting with
novel ways of using and combining the senses and to radically re-
embody prevailing notions of the sensorium. In addition to sampling
sensory awakenings and machinations by attending to exhibitions,
performances and media events, this journal will be centrally con-
cerned with analyzing the increasingly widespread phenomena of the
“aestheticization of everyday life” and “technologization of perception”
among the design and media arts.3
The Senses and Society is a peer-reviewed journal which is inter-
national, interdisciplinary and intersensory in scope. It will draw in and
upon a wide range of fields (e.g. aesthetics, anthropology, archaeology,
architecture, communication and media studies, geography, history,
literary and cultural studies, philosophy – and above all, sociology)
each of which has much to say about thinking through the senses.
By so doing, the journal will act to promote and develop research
on the cultural and political dimensions of sensory expression and
communication, and create a unique theoretical and methodological
forum for exploring the varieties of sensuous experience that exists
in contemporary society. Readers may expect to find something for
and about each of their senses in virtually every issue.
The journal is divided into four sections: groundbreaking articles
on the role of the senses in culture and society; reviews of recent and
classic experiments in sensory design; reviews of leading books in
the emergent field of sensory studies; and, reviews of contemporary
exhibitions and conferences which foreground the sensuous dimen-
sions of human experience.

Notes
Senses & Society

1. See “The Shifting Sensorium” (Ong 1991). The young Marx (1987)
put it well when he wrote: “The forming of the five senses is a labour
of the entire history of the world down to the present,” only he
postponed the moment when the senses would become “in their
practice theoreticians” to the end of capitalism (i.e. the overthrow
of private property relations), whereas we hold – following Classen
(1998), Gilroy (2001), Geurts (2002), Stewart (2002) and Finnegan
(2002) – that the time for theorizing the senses is now.
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 Introducing Sensory Studies

2. This construction follows Alexander von Baumgarten’s original

definition of the term aesthetic as occupying the space between
raw sensation and abstract cognition, and as involving the
perfection of perception (in place of the perception of perfection or
beauty). See Gregor (1983) and also Jütte (2005: ch. 7). However,
while Baumgarten identified the aesthetic with the perception
of the unity in multiplicity of sensible qualities, this journal – in
keeping with recent trends in the field of sensory studies – will
focus as much on the ambivalence, sublimation, transmutation,
technologization, ideology or politics, and contestation of the
senses, etc., as on the “unity” of aesthetic perception.
3. Leading works on the aestheticization of everyday life include
Featherstone (1991) and Malnar and Vodvarka (2004). On the
technologization of perception see, for example, Ihde (1990) and
Geary (2002).

References
Classen, Constance. 1998. The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender
and the Aesthetic Imagination. London and New York: Routledge.
Featherstone, Mike. 1991. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism.
London: Sage.
Finnegan, R. 2002. Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human
Interconnection. London: Routledge.
Geary, James. 2002. The Body Electric: An Anatomy of the New
Bionic Senses. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Geurts, Kathryn Linn. 2002. Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways
of Knowing in an African Community. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 2001. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond
the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gregor, M.J. 1983. Baumgarten’s Aesthetica. Review of Metaphysics
37: 357–85.
Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Jütte, Robert. 2005. A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to
Cyberspace, trans. James Lynn. Cambridge: Polity.
Malnar, Joy Monice, and Vodvarka, Frank. 2004. Sensory Design.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Marx, Karl. 1987. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
trans. M. Milligan, Buffalo: Prometheus Books.
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Ong, Walter J.. 1991.“The Shifting Sensorium” in The Varieties of

Sensory Experience, ed. D. Howes, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Stewart, S. 2002. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
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