Disciplining the Senses in the History of Art and Design

by David Howes

This text is excerpted from The Sensory Studies Manifesto: Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts and Human Sciences - Chapter 6: “‘A New Age of Aesthetics’: Sensory Art and Design,” pp. 173-76 (University of Toronto Press, 2022).

In Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (1991) sociologist Mike Featherstone reflects on the derivation of the phrase “the aestheticization of everyday life.” “If we examine definitions of postmodernism”, he writes, “we find an emphasis upon the effacement of the boundary between art and everyday life, the collapse of the distinction between high art and mass/popular culture, a general stylistic promiscuity and mixing of codes” (1991: 65). Featherstone proceeds to disclose “the genealogy of postmodernité” (or what Virginia Postrel (2003) would call “the aesthetic age”) and bring out its linkages with modernity. In one of its senses “the aestheticization of everyday life can refer to the project of turning life into a work of art” (Featherstone 1991: 66). Featherstone cites the example of the artistic countercultures that sprang up in mid- to late-nineteenth century European urban centres, such as Berlin and Paris -- the preserve of Baudelaire and company. In its most salient sense for us now, however, ‘the aestheticization of everyday life refers to the rapid flow of signs and images which saturates the fabric of everyday life in contemporary society’ (1991: 67). As Postrel (2003: 4) suggests, “Aesthetics has become too important to be left in the hands of the aesthetes,’ whence the growth of the so-called culture industries, ‘with painting moving into advertising, architecture into technical engineering, [and] handicrafts and sculpture into the industrial arts, to produce a mass culture’ (Featherstone 1991: 73). The burgeoning importance and salience of “design” spells both an extension of art into the everyday, and the end of art’s autonomy, or perhaps even “the end of art” and “the end of reality” at once (following Baudrillard 1983), as images and reproductions proliferate endlessly, and ‘culture’ is everywhere.

In All-Consuming Images (1988), communications and sociology professor Stuart Ewen documents how, in the early decades of the twentieth century (that is, rather earlier than Featherstone would allow) giant industrial corporations, such as AEG, began to develop multi-purpose styling divisions. An industrial aesthetic was born, with a view to bringing coherence to the perceived “disorder” of the marketplace and consolidating corporate identities by creating a certain corporate look. This development tipped the scales of capitalism, as consumption came to drive production and attractiveness came to override considerations of functionality or efficiency in the manufacture and marketing of products (see Howes 2005b). Advertising companies sprang up and brought a new level of artistry to everyday life. A premium was attached to “eye-appeal,” but the so-called creatives of the day also turned their attention on the “lower” senses, most notably touch, which were seen as having been repressed by civilization, and sought to capitalize on their appeal as well. (This was the beginning of the “checklist” approach to sensory marketing, though it would not come to full fruition until the turn of the twenty-first century.) If “art for art’s sake” was the banner cry of the artists, “art for control’s sake” was the goal of the thoroughly modern designers and advertisers, or “consumer engineers” (Sheldon and Arens 1932).

By way of example of the recuperation of touch by design professionals, consider the following words of advice from Sheldon and Arens in Consumer Engineering:

Almost anything that is bought is handled. After the eye, the hand is the first censor to pass upon acceptance, and if the hand’s judgment is unfavourable, the most attractive object will not gain the popularity it deserves. On the other hand, merchandise designed to be pleasing to the hand wins an approval that may never register in the mind, but which will determine additional purchases. …Manufacturing an object that delights this sense is something you do but don’t talk about (Sheldon and Arens 1932: 98-102)

Already in 1932 these brave new consumer engineers had imagined “subliminal seduction” – not as involving the projection of images (“Eat popcorn!” or “Drink Coke!”) on a movie screen that go by too fast for the conscious mind to register (that technique was only invented later [see Key 1974] – but by making commodities “snuggle in the palm,” and so tap into the haptic subconscious.

Standard histories of art and music since the beginning of the twentieth century are keyed to the succession of styles: from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, for example, or from the atonal compositions of Schoenberg and Webern to the polyrhythms of jazz and the experimental work of John Cage. They do not deign to treat non-Western art, nor the industrial arts discussed above.  In his overview of the artistic trends of the twentieth century in the introduction to Sensory Arts and Design (2017), sociologist Ian Heywood disturbs these unilinear, monosensory narratives by bringing out the extent to which multisensory experimentation also figured in this history, animating the artistic work of such avant garde movements as Dadaism and Fluxus, and the design work and education program of the Bauhaus School. Heywood also surveys the contributions of critical philosophers, like Theodor Adorno on the “commodification of listening,” Martin Jay on “ocularcentrism,” and Gilles Deleuze on the “logic of sense.” In doing so, he resituates the recent history of art, music and design within the larger context of transformations in the meaning and uses of the senses over the course of the twentieth century.

In “Disciplining the Senses: Beethoven as Synaesthetic Paradigm” (2010), art historian Simon Shaw-Miller (who is also the author of Eye hEar: The Visual in Music) begins by reflecting on the disciplinary and institutional divisions that gave rise to art and music as distinct fields of knowledge and endeavour (for example, music as to be performed in the concert hall, not the drawing room or pub), and the division between the faculties of seeing and hearing that are supposed to hold art and music apart. His overarching argument is that these divisions are “historically contingent,” and that much can be learned from focussing on the “interconnections” and referrals that the disciplining of the arts and the disciplining of the senses both occluded and stimulated. Shaw-Miller’s starting point is the moment around 1800 when music was reconstituted as “absolute.” Shorn of words and no longer bound to depicting scenes, instrumental music, as exemplified by Beethoven’s symphonies, became “pure” and “dematerialized” (i.e. unearthly, otherworldly) and, in short order by that same token, “the condition to which all arts [including painting] aspire,” in the nineteenth-century English essayist and art critic Walter Pater’s famous phrase. On Shaw-Miller’s account, absolute music and synaesthesia (the unison of the arts and senses) are different sides of the same coin and must be studied conjointly. He illustrates his thesis through a close reading of the Prussian Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana papers (1810-1813). In Kreisleriana, Hoffman reviewed the work of a variety of Romantic composers (Haydn, Mozart) but gave special treatment to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In his review of the Fifth, Hoffmann alternates between formal analysis of the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic structure of the symphony, on the one hand, and intensely imagistic and polysensory or “synaesthetic” language on the other. Shaw-Miller observes that Hoffmann celebrated Beethoven’s Fifth both for its “high level of rational control,” and for it being:

the true music of the night, that romantically sublime site where it is hard to see, but easy to imagine. This condition corresponds to that of absolute music itself, which, in attempting to sever its connections to other arts and senses, to close its eyes to all but sound, provided instead a rich site for all types of imagery and the liberation of the inner eye (2010: xxii).

We can see here a prime example of what Fiona Candlin calls “sensory demarcation” in her chapter on “Sensory Separation and the Founding of Art History” in Art, Museums and Touch.  (2010). In Hoffman we can also see the prototype of the contemporary sensory studies scholar, like Shaw-Miller himself. Shaw-Miller is a historian of art who takes music as his object, and thus focusses on the interface, the crossing of sensory boundaries in the arts, instead of treating them severally (see further Shaw-Miller 2013; Halliday 2013).

Hendrik N. J. Schifferstein is a professor of design at the Delft University of Technology. In collaboration with Charles Spence (e.g. Schifferstein and Spence 2008) and others, such as Lisa Wastiels, the co-author of “Sensing Materials” (2014), he has excavated the psychological foundations of multisensory product experience and theorized the emergent field of multisensory design. There are two broad trends that drive contemporary research in multisensory design. One is the sensory checklist or additive approach. This is supposed (ideally) to yield products with the right look, the right sound, the right scent, etc. following extensive laboratory testing of the sort reported on in the articles in the Journal of Sensory Studies. Incidentally, the title of this journal has nothing to do with the academic field of sensory studies as presented here. It is addressed to chemists and other so-called sensory professionals with their one-sense, one-sensation-at-a-time approach to the evaluation and development of consumer products, most notably food and beverages. The sensory professional toils away in the secretive sensory evaluation laboratories of the flavour companies that, for instance, line the New Jersey Turnpike, a.k.a. the Flavor Corridor. (For a peek inside these laboratories see “Accounting for Taste” (Lahne and Spackman 2018); and for a critique see Howes 2005b and 2015b)

The other is the superadditive approach, Schifferstein’s specialty, which focusses on the interaction of product attributes or “how the senses work together in creating experiences.” The latter approach pays careful attention to, for example, correspondences between stimulation in different modalities, the congruence of sensory messages but also the advantages of introducing discrepancies (i.e. an element of surprise), the sequencing of sensations, and patterns of sensory dominance in material perception. Throughout, the emphasis is on interaction – interaction between the senses, and interaction between user and product. As will be recalled from our discussion in chapter 1, the geographer Paul Rodaway presented a broadly similar range of intersensory relations as crucial to the practice of sensuous geographies.

For all its emphasis on interaction and sensory diversity (i.e. product differentiation through the selection and incorporation of multiple sensory attributes) and on “enriching” the experience of the consumer, there are some potentially troubling consequences of multisensory design. One of these has to do with the usurpation of the role formerly played by craftspeople in the production of material culture (Sennett 2009; Classen 2014c). Another has to do with privatization, or the trademarking of sensations. Whereas formerly companies were only permitted to trademark names and logos, now they compete to register the colour, shape, sound, scent and feel of their goods. To take the case of smell, British Airways has used “a signature scent of ‘Meadow Grass’ in their executive airport lounges … UK consumers can now buy darts arrows that have been impregnated with the smell of beer, while consumers in the Netherlands can buy tennis balls impregnated with the smell of green grass as part of a registered brand” (Schifferstein and Spence 2008: 156). Some commentators see this as an encroachment on the sensory commons as the range of scents, the divisions of the colour spectrum, and the array of sounds, etc. fall under private control (Elliott 2012, 2019; Howes and Classen 2014: 114-118). This development gives new meaning to the phrase “monopoly capitalism” – the monopolization of the senses in the interests of moving merchandise.