ABSTRACT
Just a few years ago, the Spanish sociologist Monica Monserat Degen (2008) published a book titled Sensing Cities that investigated in detail a central phenomenon of urban restructuring in two cities: Barcelona and Manchester. The phenomenon in question is the social management of the senses, of the sensory perception of the users of urban spaces. According to Degen’s ethnographic approach, the demands of many everyday users of West European cities, especially those of the middle classes, as well as trends in current urban planning that are responses to these demands, have raised the question: How can buildings, streets, residential and shopping areas be designed or redesigned to generate an atmosphere of comfort and safety for visitors? Concealed behind the facade of gentrification, sensory perceptions (visual, auditory and kinetic) and the feeling of the urban are being reorganised. The British sociologist Nigel Thrift (2006) observes a related phenomenon in his article ‘Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification’. According to Thrift, in the domains of both post-Fordian labour and of consumption, a comprehensive mobilising of the senses and affects has emerged as a fundamental phenomenon of contemporary societies. Thrift speaks of affective labour and a transformation of objects of consumption into sensory resonance surfaces. Lastly, in his book Suspensions of Perception, analytically influenced by Foucault, Jonathan Crary (1999) takes a step back in time to the media technologies that existed around 1900. He sees so-called ‘panoramas’ as causing an immense transformation of the structures of sensory, especially visual, attention, that involved an antagonism between disciplined and aesthetic attention. While Degen, Thrift and Crary each observe very different processes, their work and that of some others suggests the same conclusion: a central task for a sociology seeking a comprehensive understanding of the social in general, and of modern and late-modern culture in particular, is an analysis of the structure of sensibility. But what can sociology tell us about the senses? What status should the analysis of sense perception have in social theory? What do aesthetic practices mean within the framework? My basic assumption is that to date social theory has been poorly equipped to deal with sense perception; it should renew its heuristic
terminology for this purpose. I therefore first explore the systematic grounds for this forgetting of sense in social theory, as well as opposing tendencies which have advocated a rehabilitation of sense throughout the twentieth century. Following on from this, I address the status assignable to sense perceptions in a sociological research programme. I assume that a praxeological perspective is particularly appropriate in this regard. My aim is thus to show how practice theory is in principle very well equipped to provide the analytical background for a consideration of the constitutive role of sense perceptions for the social. But that also means that future practice theory must approach sense perceptions more systematically and more seriously. Practice theory should carry out a turn to the senses.
