Senses of the ordinary

In this, the last substantive chapter, I want to bring together some of the major themes of this book around the varied meanings and associations of ‘sense’: the senses (touch, taste and so on), sensuality, sensibility, sense (good sense, common sense, etc.) and sensitivity. I want to use this orientation to continue to explore ordinary aesthetics and its relation to the habitual and the becoming-habitual. As many of those who write on the senses quickly point out, the categories we have for distinguishing the ‘five senses’ quickly break down when we start to think about specific phenomena. Or rather: we begin to see how imbricated the various senses are when we apprehend something as ordinary as eating. Clearly, if we are in possession of all our senses (or they are in possession of us), there is a good deal of sensual overlap occurring when we eat. The visual aspect of food adds or takes away from its allure (we ‘eat with our eyes’ as the saying goes); the sound of crunch adds to our sense of the freshness of a vegetable or a crisp; the textures of food are part of what we enjoy or detest. Do we taste or smell herbs? I remember school biology lessons where we were taught the flavour-map of the tongue: this bit of the tongue tasted salt, this area was good for sourness, go here for sweetness. We dropped saline solution and lemon juice on our tongues to show this happening. Although it turns out that this tongue-mapping was a myth, it was always the case that eating

could never be reduced to such flavour maps. Food, common sense might tell us, is about smell and taste, yet whatever else we do when we eat we always touch food with our mouth and particularly our tongue, and the softness or abrasiveness of food is part of its pleasure (indeed for spicy food the abrasiveness of the chilli is part of what produces the experience of ‘hotness’). But the imbrications of sense are not limited to the overlapping of the

five senses. The intermingling of emotions and sensual experience, for instance, is evident in the blurring of meanings associated with words such as bitter, sweet, sour, bile, acrid, acid, rough and so on. It wouldn’t be hard to see this as simply a metaphorical use of a world of sensations: clearly the taste of bitterness is different from the emotional feeling of bitterness.1 Yet we live our metaphorical worlds in intimate and material ways to the point where metaphorical meanings flavour material experience (a sour taste, endlessly pleasurable, will never have the comforting ease of sweetness for a society that equates sweetness with kindness and gentleness). We live a synaesthesia that hitches the metaphorical to the material (and vice versa) and makes it impossible to purify our experience into scientifically exact biological activity or, alternatively, into pure discursiveness. Emotions and memories, sense and sensitivity, energy and affect, con-

gregate and congeal in complexly singular ways. A tired parent washes a small baby. The baby is teething: his red face is crunched up in displeasure. The parent struggles with the sympathy he knows he should be feeling, but sympathy is too mixed-in with last night’s broken sleep and the vague animosity that he knows he shouldn’t be feeling. Yet somehow the mixture of cutaneous contact, mediated by water and soap, and the baby’s buoyancy, which requires the merest touch of support, allows animosity to dissipate, allows a bond to be remade. A teenager returns home after the long walk from school. Fractious and cold, and mulling over the various exchanges that have knitted and unknitted the day, she takes a shower. The full-blast of almost scorching hot water drills into the shoulders and neck, marshalling the muscles and nerves, galvanising the body for the tasks ahead. The masochism of the drilling heat, prickling shoulders and back, assembles the muscles and nerves against the emotional toxins of the day. Tired limbs relax. Can we simply see these complexes of sensual and emotional relations as an intermingling of metaphor and materiality? Are adverts for bath salts that will ‘wash away anxiety’ simply analogies? Or are there partial truths in those soapy solutions? Recent cultural inquiry has witnessed a marked increase in studies that

focus on what might loosely be called immaterial material: affect, emotion and the senses.2 Such an orientation might seem unsurprising given cultural studies’ privileging of experience as a central locus for inquiry.3 This orientation has often resulted in a partial abandonment of the stalwarts of critical inquiry so central to cultural studies (ideology critique and

discourse analysis, predominantly), as investigation moves towards arenas less obviously ripe for critical purchase: the body, everyday life and the sensorial. This arena (mundane, bodily and sensorial life) seems less amenable to critical assessment because inquiry often starts out by querying the very object of study. Sensual, bodily, mundane life throws standard epistemologies into disarray, revealing the mentalist foundations of dominant forms of attention in the human sciences: forms of attention, then, that would remainder a world characterised by its non-ideational aspects. What often characterises the best recent work in this area is the way that inquiry favours description over prescription, exploration rather than assessment. Alongside this what should also be noted is the way that such an orientation towards ‘immaterial’ objects has often been undertaken in the name of a renewed materialism; a materialism that seeks to recognise the phenomenal materiality and collectivity of those aspects of culture that have been seen as ineffable, or irredeemably subjective. This chapter began life many years ago when I first tasted fresh coriander

(the herb) in cooking. To begin with I found it to have a soapy taste that I couldn’t stand. Now I can’t get enough of coriander. What happened? Obviously I got the hang of it, learnt to love it, just as children learn to love (or at least not detest) the taste of bitter things as they get older. But if I had managed to reorientate myself toward coriander, to move from loathing to loving, then what had achieved this pedagogic function; what had made the reorientation possible? I forget the circumstances of how I was introduced to coriander and I’m sure that there wasn’t a ‘eureka’ moment when it went from being something I didn’t like, to being something that I did. It crept up on me. As far as I can see the coriander itself was an agent in all this, a pedagogic guide that trained my taste buds, reorchestrated my sensorium to a new taste and aroma. But it did so not as a solitary and timeless material ingredient; it did it as part of a much larger cultural and sensual shift that could be called (somewhat blithely, I have to admit) multiculturalism. Indian food in Britain has become part of the ordinary landscape of

everyday food. The history of Indian cooking in Britain goes back at least to the end of the eighteenth century and while it has had a large presence throughout the twentieth century it was in the 1970s and 1980s that it really took off in the British high street.4 An aesthetic approach sensitive to the migrations and diasporic communities that produce the multicultural foodscape of somewhere like Britain, would want in the end to look at a whole range of culinary negotiations: the changing landscape of restaurants; the domestic food culture of diasporic communities; the food practices of British ‘natives’ and so on. There isn’t the space to do all this here so I want to concentrate on a very specific, but also culturally dominant, example of ordinary Indian-food eating in Britain. In a recent essay on Indian food in Britain, Elizabeth Buettner relays one of many accounts:

I started to go out for curries. It was a bit of fun in that you’d try the hottest curry, even if it was so fiery it blew the roof of your mouth off … You’d always try to have the hottest curry, you’d have a Madras, or a vindaloo or a tindaloo. … Going for an Indian was very much a boy’s thing, a boy’s night out.