Locales of Art: Synaesthesia and the Interruptions of Orientational Aesthetics

Authors : Lewis JOHNSON

Pages : 25-48

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Publication Date : 2016-09-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :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