on the color, so to speak" (quasi coloran) of books he reads. Later, another speaker remarks upon the "bearing and, so to speak, color'' of a speech: it is "smooth and slim/plain (teres et tenuis), but not without muscles and strength
Color as conditioned result
Hahn presents readers with a series of ‘orientation’ exercises. In the first of these she asks readers to ‘Imagine taking a drink of water from a glass as performance’ (original italics), then to reflect on elements of this experience and describe it
The Judson Dance Theater in the 60s was known for these sort of experimental pieces - Steve Paxton once did a dance where he sat and ate a sandwich. It often gets mentioned now as a sort of oddity, but it was constructed as a means of questioning the adaptation dancers undergo in moving only (often) on a proscenium stage. Perhaps this is a way to think through sensorial rhetoric - what adaptations do we as rhetors go through in order to perform as rhetoricians, and what avenues do those adaptations hold for inversion or reworking?
The recipes are not direct representations of tastes but offer routes to experience
So what routes to sensorial experience can rhetoric offer? What modes/forms/expressions might those take? Or, how does the metaphor of a 'route' free us from responsibilities that might constrain sensory and sensual expression?
generally thrown into violent action
This idea of sudden, borderline spastic response is intriguing, but I'm tagging to consider how else muscles might respond to sensory input - wary of view of the body as something at the mercy of external forces.
they compel us to relinquish our at- tachments and acknowledge that our subjectivities are inconsistent and open to repetitions of articulation
Or, to use genre theory terminology, they enable us to investigate our patterns of uptake.
Starers gawk with abandon at the prosthetic hook, the empty sleeve, the scarred flesh, the unfocused eye, the twitching limb,
I think this quote skims across what I was trying to get at earlier - yes people might stare at all of these, but all stares are not equal. Someone in a flashy wheelchair w/no other apparent 'defects' will be subject to a different gaze than someone with a rare skin condition. How does this complicate Garland's categories/points about otherness?
A visible signifier of disability-that is, the physical impairment-is always apparent in photographic images. In representing disability, the visu- alization of impairment, never the functional experience of it, defines the category of disability. In this sense, disability exists for the viewer to recog- nize and contemplate, not to express the effect it has on the person with a disability.
I would agree that this split b/n the visualization and lived experience of disability is an all too unfortunate reality. It seems these different disability categories are supported by two assumptions - one is that a person only ever has one disability/associated symptoms at a time, and the moral warrants attached to different types of disabilities support readings of being more/less wondrous, exotic, etc... than others, hence why a skin condition is 'exotic' instead of 'realistic'.
e stories cross generational, regional, class and gender lines to convey the larger meaning of racism so that the interviewer would get some sense of how it fe
As opposed to a generic historical overview? Or as opposed to a supposedly 'pure' cognitive understanding? An emotional centering?
pleasure and pain
Why is this? Is it merely b/c of the state of 'otherness'? Or, what in particular about pain/pleasure invites this sort of attention?
Aesthetics is the domain in which the sensation of otherness is felt at its most powerful, strange, and frightening.
The sublime?
Good human understanding, by this definition, fol- lows from ordered mental retention, from clear and rational recording and mental preservation of ideas.
Memory as object in the intellectual marketplace/scientific catalogue?
nd therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day
Emphasis on ritual/practice as a memory tool
it is necessary to take account of the habitus that determines the frontier between the perceived and the unperceived, and, even more, of the norms which decree what is spoken and what left unspoken. We need, in fact, to be careful not to confuse what is not said with what is not experienced
So how to read b/n the sensory lines then?
a disadvantage compared with the anthropologist, the historian, let us repeat, has access to hardly any other sources than those that involve language
Material sources: how might an individual have gripped the handle of this jug/balanced it on her head while walking a winding path, a rocky path, a forested path back to the village? What patterns would doing so have set up?
‘ skilled visions [which] are embedded in multi-sensory practices, where look is coordinated with skilled movement, with rapidly changing points of view, or with other senses such as touch’
Or, how do you know what to look for, and do you know what to do when you see it?
in motion
How do moving bodies sense things differently than those that are paused?
I would urge contemporary ethnographers of the senses to be more explicit about the ways of experiencing and knowing that become central to their ethnographies, to share with others the senses of place they felt as they sought to occupy similar places to those of their research participants, and to acknowledge the processes through which their sensory knowing has become academic knowledge
Yes, a detangling of the cognitive AND embodied processes that go into ethnographic knowledge making.
sensation is never simple. It is always doubled by the feeling of having a fe eling. It is self-refere ntial. This is not necessarily the same as "sc1f-reAexive.
possible endpoints. The Rigln of the arrow is not immobilized as Zeno would have it. We stop it in thought when we construe its movement lO be divisible into positions
Love this part.
movement as qualitative transformation
The question of how to critically loop in issues of time with this qualitative transformation/movement seems key.
grid
I would like to develop some examples of grid formations and plot a few bodies for a concrete example of what Massumi is pushing against/toward. e.g. Is gender a grid? heternormative gender relations a grid?
expression
It seems like the middle ground between 'sensing' and 'expression', whether in terms of time or something else, is important to parse out.
expression involving music, sound, speech, and moving images, cinema is among the most figural and thus sensual of the arts
Hmm, more so than theater?
auditory knowledge be represented to an audience unfamiliar with such ways of experiencing and knowing
And how to present these without falling prey to the sort of tunnel vision Pink describes earlier in relation to vision?
mimetic
muscle memory and sense memory