Since everyday life is the cultural domain of different politics embedded within the process of globalization, I am further intrigued by questions about from what aspects we can understand the cultural dynamics of everyday life or what the most critical mediation between everyday life and global flows is. Given the interconnectedness of daily practices and aesthetical representations such as architecture, music or arts, I regard the sensory experience as the material mediation that combines everyday life and cultural expressions through sensuous practices. As a result, I would like to examine the cultural dynamics of globalization with a particular emphasis on the sensory experience in discussion of everyday life; that is, I try to bring the senses back to the domain of everyday life. We should not treat “everyday life” as a “given,” which is pre-determined by global capitalism;
rather, it is important to find out how global flows insinuate into our everyday practices and our cultural expressions through our senses of seeing, hearing, touching or tasting.
To further explain how the sensory experience reflects or witnesses the effects of globalization on our everyday life, it should firstly outline the historical sketch of senses and sensations from the seventeenth century onward to illustrate how the sensory experience is socially constructed and interpreted in different historical contexts. The
historical review will help explain why we need to re-examine the sensory experience in the age of globalization. Secondly, I will draw on John Tomlinson’s theories on
“deterritorialization” and other theorists like Arjun Appadurai and David Howes to illustrate how the geographical re-scaling brought about by global flows of people, culture and capital contributes to the globalizing mundane experiences and now it affects sensory experience.
Senses have been regarded as one of the important ways to know the outer world since the seventeenth century. Susan Stewart mentions that the notion of “five senses” firstly is attributed to Aristotle, associating eye with water, hearing with air, smell with fire, and touch with earth. The set of associations also imply hierarchical distinctions that the
“notions of sensibility and sensitivity are associated with refining of the higher philosophical senses of seeing and hearing” (61). Following this tradition, the senses have been ranked according to the degree of immediacy: “taste and touch, in direct contact with the world, are lowest, followed by smell, which forms a kind of mean distance to sight and hearing, which operate across distance and yet can be remembered at will (Langer 1972; I;
see also Janson 1952). Hearing and sight, because of their link with philosophical contemplation and abstraction, hold the leading place” (Stuart 61-62). From then on, the senses have often been interpreted as a philosophical concept of inquiring our mind in relation to the outer world. Empiricist philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Rene Descartes basically regard sensation as
philosophical relations between the external world and the mind. For example, Locke describes that our “sensible qualities” are interdependent with the mind and Hume argues that the formations of ideas result from our empirical experiences.
During the early and mid-nineteenth century with the development of science, the study of sensation and perception focuses not only on philosophical investigation but technological effects on the sensory experience. Classical sociology doesn’t deal adequately with the social relations implicated by human bodies and experiences. However, Marx and Simmel endeavor to investigate how the bodies are influenced by capitalist technologies and its formations of modern experience. Continued with his persistent concern about social class, Marx cares about the alienating effects on bodies on account of capitalist technology exemplified by industrial revolution and mass productions by machinery. Simmel has similar concern about how the money economy changed our emotional relationships with one another, the way we interact with others of modern life. He indicates “all intimate emotional relations between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations man is reckoned with like a number, like an element which is itself indifferent”
(411). Because of the domination of money economy, as Simmel argues, “modern mind has become more and more calculating” (412).
The theoretical discussions above indicate that our sensory experience has played distinct social roles in the structure of human relations and social activities at different
historical periods. What particularly concerns me is what the role of the senses signifies in the age of globalization or why we should return to the realm of the sensory experience to understand cultural globalization. As I contend, the senses, apart from being as our contacting front to the outer world, are also the material medium that these global flows require for circulation. Globalization drastically precipitates the encountering of different cultures and promotes cultural flows of “ethnoscapes,” “mediascapes,” “technoscapes,” “financescapes,”
and “ideoscapes” as Arjun Appadurai notes (33). Frequently associating such global flows as capital, technology and ideology with floating, rootlessness and transnational mobilities, we tend to overlook the material dimensions of globalization. However floating and mobile global flows can be, they still require concrete or material space for production, reproduction or circulation (Sassen 207-09). In other words, these global flows need mediation interacting with the localities of our everyday life. One most direct and immanent medium would be our bodily senses to interact and negotiate with these flows such as sensual pleasures and stimuli engendered by transnationalization of global commodities and cultures. Explicitly speaking, it is through our senses that the flows of people, culture and capital are enacting on our everyday life and underlie our globalizing sensory experience.
It is the domain of the sensory experience from which we can see what global impacts and changes are reflected in our everyday life. Furthermore, returning to the sensory experience will also help us understand how these global effects enact on localities since the
sensory experience refers to the sensory practices, which is spatially grounded in our daily life. According to John Tomlinson, mundane experience, including sensory experience, of deterritorialization makes it difficult to maintain a stable sense of “local” cultural identity:
“as our daily lives become more and more interwoven with, and penetrated by, influences and experiences that have their origins far away” (113). The cause to the globalizing mundane experience is related to the transnational flows of cultures that exactly result from the geographical rescaling of “deterritorialization,” including the blurring of national boundaries, the broadening world market and the growing global media. For Tomlinson, the process of globalization sometimes is identified with the broad sense of “deterritorialization” since he thinks the term can grasp different aspects of globalizing process:
This category grasps a number of aspects of a globalized (as distinct from a global) culture as it is lived in daily experience, but it relates these to one key assumption, namely that globalization fundamentally transforms the relationship between the places (emphasis original) we inhabit and our cultural practices, experiences and
identities… In employing the concept of ‘deterritorialization’ we will try to understand why this might be so (106).
Tomlinson’s discussions from “deterritorialization” to “mundane experience of deterritorialization” point out that our mundane experience is one of the most crucial aspects that have encountered the most dramatic changes elicited by various global flows in
the process of “deterritorialization,” the transformations of geographical and social territories (106-07).8 Tomlinson’s theories allow the commonly overlooked complex of mundane experience come into focus again in the era of globalization and help justify why we should go back to the domain of sensory experience as I suggest. Inspired by Tomlinson, I attempt to narrow down the mundane experience to the sensory experience, for these global flows are immediately and immanently mediated through our bodily senses and thus attribute to multiplying sensory experiences of eating, drinking, listening and seeing due to various cultural encounterings. In other words, I regard the sensory experience as the cultural domain of combining our everyday life with our senses. It is through our senses that we interact with these cultural flows that have formulated our sensory experience, which have influenced the ways of cultural expressions.
Consequently, to examine the cultural complexity of new conflicts, hybridization or glocalization brought about by these global flows implicated within our cultural expressions, it is essential to return to the sensory experience as the analytical regime. As previously argued, our sensory experience contributes to cultural expressions of localities when bodily senses function as lived space interacting with these various global flows. Sensory experience based on human sensorium is permeated with social values and cultural significance to such an extent that it even is replicating hierarchical social orders. As David
8 The specific example of mundane experience of deterritorialization provided by John Tomlison is the globalization of food. For more details, please see his book of Globalization and Culture.
Howes informs us, our sensory experience may be “collectively patterned by cultural ideology and practice” (XI). The sensory order will be linked up with the global powers that diffuse new ideology of global capitalism to our local life worlds.