ABSTRACT
Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 172 pp., £11.99 (paperback)
The ecology of the senses has not been a popular subject in theory since Marshall McLuhan; it was discredited partly for the political positions he stood for, partly for the way he made it possible for a scholarly tradition to be exploited as a fad; Walter J.Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982), published in the ‘New Accents’ series, was not able to change this. It has not been helpful either that the oral has been associated with Presence, and as such has been rejected in deconstructivist thinking (e.g. in Derrida’s Of Grammatology). The visual has continued to reign supreme. But even where the ecology of the senses has been taken seriously, its study has usually been restricted to the ear and the eye, the senses addressed by the modern media; these so-called new or distance senses also allow us to place ourselves in perspective to the world surrounding us. Other senses recognized as such by Western culture, like smell and taste (the old, chemical ones) have largely been neglected, or their gradual loss has been lamented.1 Moreover, because we tend to view (language is revealing) the senses in terms of biology, they have not been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that, in other areas, has shown (caught again) things seeming perfectly natural to be socially constructed.
