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DR E M R Critchley 'Synaesthesia'

Sensory experience and the occurrence of inter-sensory crossovers are examined by DR E M R Critchley in the Chapter ‘Synaesthesia’ from ‘Hallucinations and their Impact on Art’. He discusses the varying notions of synaesthesia as ranging from its consideration as a special talent, to looking at it as a physiological mechanism, and further to a psychological occurance.

Critchley describes synaesthesia as being the ability to receive one sensory impression and ‘translate it into another sensory percept within the same sensory modality’ and in the process of extracting sensation from it invoking ‘other sensory percepts’ that draw upon apparently unrelated ‘modalities of sensation’. The most common example, he suggests, would be the instance of colour-hearing.

Critchely covers different perceptions from several authors about the origin and function of synaesthesia. The five key examples include; base cognitive mechanism, a facility for linking the different realms of sensation only present in some adults. A second theory is that it could be considered a mental disease, the overshadowing of one sensation upon another resulting from childhood experiences and repressed associations. Another proposition is synaesthesia as a confusion of sensations at a conceptual level – that the experience or perception of intersensory distinctions are learned, but some encounters may contradict usual patterns as conceptually understood. In the fourth example Critchely presents the theory of looking at synaesthesia as creative cultural metaphors, As evident in the aims of the blue rider(check) painters who sought to evoke the sensation of sound through use of colour. And lastly is the idea that some individuals develop schematised patterns, and generate sensory associations (often visual associations) to assist in ordering abstract concepts, particularly into sequences.

I was interested to read about Fredric Jameson’s perceptual experience of treatments of architectural space at the Bonaventura hotel in ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. Jameson here presents a description of a destabilising inter-sensory experience that seems to be tie closely to Critchley’s explanation of conceptual synesthesia – that is, an encounter that confounds prior conceptual understanding of sensorial data.

As opposed to a modernist insertion of utopian structure disconnected from its context, (in the style of who) Jameson describes how the Bonaventura engages a post modern eclecticism by assimilating the language of its surrounding city and the existing structural signifiers belonging to it. An example Jameson uses is the mirror exterior shell of the building which functions to reflect the shape of the surrounding landscape rather than the shape of the building itself. The most interesting description in relation to the perceptual experience of the space itself would be Jameson’s account of the lobby of the building whereby a central column surrounded by a miniature lake is situated between four residential towers each with exterior elevators and rising balconies, topped with a greenhouse roof - a complex interrelation of forms further suffused by hanging streamers. Jameson describes how ‘emptiness here is absolutely packed, …. it is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume.’ Jameson goes on to note how the spectator is in a hyperspace that extends right up to the body and eyes. The layered and discontinuous space generates a suppression of depth. Textural saturation produces what Jameson terms as a ‘bewildering immersion’, a sensorial experience that confounds cognition.

So what kind of perceptual experience is this? Jamesons description links with what phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty in ‘Eye and Mind’ has similarly described in the body’s attempt to absorb the ‘voluminosity’ of the world through vision. Merleau Ponty states how
‘This voracious vision, reaching beyond the visual givens opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house’ pg 166.
There seems to be in this statement a view of sensations that are parts of a larger experiential whole, and a condensing of the physical world as it is experienced and the visual world as it is seen. How do you separate one from the other? For Merleau Ponty this is not possible. The physical world being ‘out there’ and the visual world being ‘in here’ become the singular, they become an integrated encounter of the body.

From this I would say that what we normally experience as a stable and continuous relationship between sight and physicality, in Jameson’s account however becomes unhinged by a confusion not only of the physical space but of the representational space. The eye cannot sort, based on prior conceptual knowledge, the perceptual experience of space as it presents itself in the Bonaventura hotel. My suggestion is that Jameson’s encounter is an example of the conceptual synesthesia that Critchley touches upon. To return to the lobby once more, Jameson recounts the sensation experienced in the dramatic descent in one of the glass elevators, where one is ‘plummeting back down through the roof to splash down in the lake’. Up-down, inside-outside, wet-dry. A dizzying mish-mash of structures, signifiers and sensations indeed.

REFERENCES TO COME