See, Hear ...

I spent last weekend with my friend and academic mentor, Dian Hosking. Di is one of the most profound and scholarly thinkers I've met (if you want a seriously demanding but worthwhile reads head over to her website, here). In the last few years Di's thinking has be significantly affected by what she calls a secular Buddhism and some of this is starting to show in her work. Her latest work is to do with the senses.

Now, I haven't read the resultant paper yet but we did have a lengthy conversation about it and one point has intrigued me over the last few days.  For various reasons we have come in the west to be incredibly reliant on our sight: "Seeing is believing".  This has consequences. Amongst them, for academics, is our constant reduction of our research and scholarship into text (that we can read/see).  So, for example, Discourse Analysis or Conversation Analysis seek to take what we call "naturally occurring talk" and represent it as text on a page.  Other forms of social scholarship seek to capture actions, attitudes, behaviours in questionnaires, experiments, interviews etc.  Underling all these methods is an assumption; that there is 'something' that is lasting that affects or creates these actions etc.  I.E. there is an assumption of stability, that something I capture in a text today will continue to affect what will happen tomorrow.

But is the world, are we that stable?  is it our experience that there is coherence?  Don't you find that your actions owe much to odd things that happen in an instant?  I suspect that our answer to those questions is "yes" and "no" (not very helpful :-)

But if we follow Di's idea and start to give greater importance to senses other than our seeing, our sense of smell, hearing, touch, even intuition (?) something crucial happens.  We can not adequately record it (ok sound, but tell me that a recording ever captures the fullness of being at a concert!  Why do I find jazz so boring on CD but so exhilarating in live performance?).  We can never capture a moment, and our emphasis on what we can record for sight directs us to attend to that which is stable and lasting and blinds us to the ephemeral or transitory. 

"But does our value of the test of time
blind us to moments in life's onward rush?
the smile that lifts, or affirming touch:
the human are of living in the now.

We value what will stand the test of time:
structures, strictures, standards
and in so doing; give no worth
to the transitory art of becoming"

We tend, as a result of our emphasis on what we can see, to give less importance to that.  But what would a scholarship - so strongly based on the written word - look like if we took our other senses more seriously?  What would Christianity - a religion of the Word - look like?  And then we arrive at the exciting realisation; that Jesus was the "Living Word" .. as Christians we have this resource that can shape us, our beliefs our theology into a living .... 

But there are problems because of that transitoryness, because of that livingness. Considerable amounts of our practised, intellectual tools (for example truth, reason, evidence) will have to change.  As we move our scholarship away from the study of what is towards the moment by moment relations where touch, smell, hearing and sight combine to create and re-create people and worlds we will have to learn to rely on different ways of making sense, appreciating and justifying our actions.

And where will that leave those of us who follow and worship the living Word.

Umm, I don't know! But I suspect that it'll be exciting to find out and I'm looking forward to reading Di's paper, 'cos I think that it'll help.

Comments

[graham]

Fascinating stuff, Caroline!

I think that this certainly goes some way towards explaining the difficulties that arise from seeing Christianity as a religion of the text rather than a religion of the (Living) Word in action.

[Jason Clark]

Sounds fascinating. Reminds me of a couple of things from my limited reading. Exisitential Phenomonology, people like Michael Henry, arguing that we access reality and any continuation that way, rather than rational discourse based philosophical constructs. Also George Lakhoff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_philosophy) and his theories of non congnition, metaphorical constructions of reality (as I understand him, it means we all think in metaphors, and communicate at every level metaphorically even when trying to be literal).

On the music side reminds me that after hearing Nigel Kennedy live, a recording sounds more than it is as my brain recollects and fills in the gaps from the CD :-)

Thanks for the post. Jason.

[Jason Clark]

Also Rob Waller might have come across the development of 'clean language' used in therapy with metaphorcal models to talk about reality.

Rob?

jason

[ConradGempf]

(Warning. Lengthy reply!)

Thanks for this Caroline. I think there are all kinds of questionable assumptions here, myself. For instance, I would strongly challenge the idea that the other senses aren't already involved in scholarly activity. There are several very active academics in my field, New Testament Studies, the most obvious characteristic of whose work is that it stinks.

No, but seriously... The (pardon the expression) focus on sight over the other senses is not 'western', or rather not exclusively western. You might say that one of Jesus' favourite expressions was auditory rather than visual: "He who has ears to hear, let him hear!" However, the fact is that this was literal language insofar as the stimulus he was presenting was his vocalized teaching. When Jesus uses metaphors for 'getting it' he more often uses visual phenomena, the most obvious example being the two-step healing of the blind man (who saw men like trees walking) meant to (pardon the expression) reflect the two-step confession of Peter (who knew he was Messiah, but thought it had to do with triumph rather than death).

The other metaphor is light and dark. Interesting that 'silent' has good connotations, while 'dark' has negative ones, isn't it? Is there any culture in which that's not the case? Conversely, very interesting 'a riot of sounds' seems unpleasant while 'a riot of colours' is good. Probably this is because our eyes are the most highly developed sense organ and the results process the most quickly and richly. Still to examine something closely is as likely to be chewing it over as focussing on it...

The other major questionable thing has to do with scholarship and text being visual. We've been critiqued before (wrong-headedly, methinks, but still) precisely for not being visual enough -- that this is (supposedly) a generation that will reject text in favour of icons; reject poetry in favour of powerpoint! I think you could argue that the pictographic writing of the Far East and Egyptian heiroglyphics are visually orientated... but our texts are not, at their heart, truly visual phenomena, but rather one of the earliest methods of sound recording: our letters and syllables represent units of sound not units of sight. Scholarship and teaching is primarily, still, about speaking; writing is an extension of that.

Fact is, we get a lot more information from sight than any other sense. Hearing probably comes the closest. Everyone knows the words 'blind' and 'deaf'... ever hear of the word 'anosmic'?

By the way, one of the reasons jazz on a cd isn't as good as live jazz is that you're lacking the visual clues about how the sounds are being produced and by whom and with how much sweat and strained faces.

Another reason, though, is surprise. Live you don't know what'll happen next, know this will never happen again. CD or even DVD you know it will be just like this next time and you can rewind or fastforward.

But, and here I think you're on to something, still another is our human desire for 'event' and 'the moment'. Would you like hearing jazz live if you were the only person in the audience, or if you knew it was being played by perfect robotic simulations of the original players or would that too become dull?

So I think you might well be barking up the wrong rainbow with the 'which senses' business. The real interesting contrast in your blog entry is this difference between captured and living. Writing is certain captured; whereas speech is living. But even Jesus seems fairly comfortable with captured ideas: 'Not a jot or a tittle will pass away...' 'When you pray, say this...' 'Do this as oft as you drink it, in remembrance of me...' 'Wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told...' (Though, of course, not exclusively -- the living surprising testimony is still crucial and the domain of the Spirit: 'Don't give thought to what you'll say, the Holy Spirit will give you the words...')

Recording or not, you will LOVE the Laura Veirs song 'Rapture'. She, or her record company, allow us to listen to it here without buying it (click for type of connection, then click on the word 'Rapture'):
www.nonesuch.com/Hi_Band/lauraveirs/

"With photographs and magnetic tape:
We capture
Pretty animals in cages
Pretty flowers in vases
Enrapture....
Love of colours, sound and words,
Is it a blessing or a curse?"

She's mad as a hatter, but an absolute genius.

[Caroline]

Conrad

I really love your contrast between the 'captured' and the 'living'. That is really helpful use of words.

Thanks, I shall see where I can go with that