Locales of Art: Synaesthesia and the Interruptions of Orientational Aesthetics

This paper argues that the significance of questions of synaesthesia in relation to modern philosophies of experience and art lies in its challenge to rethink accounts of the localisation of experience in general, and of the locales of experience provided by art in particular. To do this, the paper reviews the history of psychological research into synaesthesia, including recent neurological accounts, pointing to contentions in biological and techno-socio-cultural informed versions of these. It draws parallels between these contentions and the history of aesthetic thinking, of music and painting in particular, and with recent accounts of synaesthesia as a model of the technical possibilities of digital media. Borrowing from Levinas’ account of the experience of art, the paper then argues that transmodal sensing and the complexity of corporeal experience it implies upsets Kantian divisions of aesthetic experience. Further, synaesthesia accompanies the Lockean account of the formation of ideas, exposing in particular the exclusionary normativities of this empiricist account of senses of space. The paper then reviews the return of this question in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and, with reference to work by Massumi and Stiegler, argues that acknowledgement of synaesthesia and trans-modal experience requires both the transcendental and the immanent in accounts of experience, and their implication in questions of memorization. The paper concludes by showing this to be at stake in Sartre’s attempt to acknowledge synaesthesia in The Psychology of the Imagination in ways that confirm questions of the significance of the localisation of the experience of art, allowing for a reformulation of Levinas’ account of the apprehension of art

Keywords:

Synaesthesia, Aesthetics, Art, Experience, Neurology, Empiricism, Idealism, Phenomenology, Memorization Localisation.,

PDF

___

ARSCOTT, Roy. ‘What Shape Does a Chicken Taste?’ In n01se: Universal Language, Pattern Recognition, Data Synaesthetics, ed. Alfred Birnbaum, n.p., Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2000.
BARTHES, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.
BENNINGTON, Geoffrey. ‘Emergencies.’ In Interrupting Derrida, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 162-79.
BHABHA, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
BRACCI, Francesca Bracci. Art and the Senses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
CRAIGHERO, Laila and RIZZOLATTI, Giacomo. ‘The Mirror-Neuron System.’ Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, (2004) : 169-92.
CROSS, Lowell. ‘Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus The Poem of Fire 1909-1910.’ Last modified 2005, accessed March, 2016, http://www.lowellcross.com/articles/prometheus/.
CYTOWIC, Richard E. Synesthesia: The Union of the Senses. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989.
CYTOWIC, Richard E. and EAGLETON, David M. Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. Boston: MIT Press, 2009.
DERRIDA, Jacques. ‘Economimesis.’ Translated by Richard Klein. Diacritics 11, no. 2 (1981): 3-25.
DERRIDA, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987.
HEYES, Cecilia. ‘Where do mirror neurons come from?’ Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 34, no. 4 (2010): 575-83.
LEVINAS, Emmanuel. ‘Reality and its shadow.’ In Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alfonso Lingis, (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 1-13.
LOCKE, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited Alexander Campbell Fraser. New York: Dover, 1959.
LYOTARD, Jean-François Lyotard. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1994.
MASSUMI, Brian. ‘Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biogram, and the Body Topologic.’ In Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002, 177-207.
MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
PEEL, James. ‘The Scale and the Spectrum.’ Cabinet, no. 22, Winter 2006, accessed March 2016, http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/22/peel.php.
RAMACHANDRAN, Vilayanur S. ‘Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution.’ Edge, last modified June 1st, 2000, accessed March, 2016, http:// www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_index.html.
SARTRE, Jean-Paul. The Psychology of the Imagination. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. London: Methuen, 1972.
SHAW-MILLER, Simon. Eye hEar the visual in music, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013.
‘Synesthesia and the Synesthetic Experience,’ last modified October 7th, 1997, accessed March, 2016, http://web.mit.edu/synaesthesia/www/synaesthesia.html.
SCRIABIN, Alexander. Prometheus: Poem of Fire. Video, 28:54, September 14th, 2010, accessed March, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3B7uQ5K0IU.
STEIGLER, Bernard. ‘Derrida and Technology: fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prosthesis of faith.’ In Jacques Derrida and the humanities: a critical reader, edited by Tom Cohen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 256-69.
VAN CAMPEN, Crétien. ‘Synaesthesia and Artistic Experimentation.’ Psyche 3, no. 6 (1997), accessed March, 2016, http://www.theassc.org/files/assc/2290.pdf.
WARD, Jamie. The Frog Who Croaked Blue: Synesthesia and the Mixing of the Senses. Hove and New York: Routledge, 2008.
Kant Estetiğinde Güzellik Yargılarının Evrensel Geçerliliği Cansu YÜKSEL
ALLISON, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A reading of the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’, Birinci Basım. ABD: Cambridge University Press. 2001.
CASSIRER, Heinz, W. A commentary on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Birinci Basım. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd. 1974.
CRAWFORD, Donald, W. Kant’s Aesthetic Theory, The University of Wisconsin Press. Birinci Basım, İngiltere. 1974.
GINSBORG, Hannah. 10.12.2016. “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 72, 1991, https://philosophy.berkeley.edu/file/830/ginsborg1991_On_the_Key.pdf.
GINSBORG, Hannah. “Thinking the Particular as contained under the Universal”. Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (R. Kukla). Birinci Basım, ABD: Cambridge University Press. 2006.
GUYER, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Birinci Basım, ABD: Harvard University Press. 1979.
KANT, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Birinci Basım. ABD: Cambridge University Press. 2000.
KANT, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Birinci Basım. ABD: Cambridge University Press. 2000.
KANT, Immanuel. Yargı Yetisinin Eleştirisi. İkinci Basım. Türkiye: İdea Yayınevi: 2011.
WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Yedinci Basım. İstanbul: Metis Yayınevi. 2013.