Is Sight Sovereign Of The Senses?

In his Ways of Seeing, John Berger states that `the faculty of touch is like a static, limited form of sight` as if it were a given. This implied ocularcentrism dates back to Aristotle`s classical hierarchy of the senses, which places visus at the top and tactus at the bottom. This ranking of sight above touch is also evident in the historical tendency to consider painting (an art closely associated with sight) as a higher art form than at of sculpture (usually considered a haptic art). Comte de Caylus, for instance, claims that sculpture `not only shortens and restricts, but clouds an artistic career.` As James Hall notes, metaphors for the mind - such as the camera obscura and the tabula rasa - have reflected and reinforced these prejudices. As a result, a great deal of sculptors have strived to create sculpture that is as pictorial as possible. For example, the sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini are extremely focussed on the visual effect that they produce. Bernini explains `in order to represent the dark which some people have around their eyes, one must hollow out the marble, in this way obtaining the effect of colour and supplementing`. The powerful effect of this hollowing technique is apparent in his large, marble The Rape of Proserpina. In this extremely evocative sculpture Bernini has created intense shadows through his deep carving, which contribute to the realistic look of the sculpture. They add to the naturalistic texture of the flying hair, the tears of Persephone and the fabric, as well as capturing the vulnerability of both of the figures` flesh (such as the top left of Plato`s face, which is stretched, wrinkled and distorted by the force of Persephone`s defensive push). This effect would be ruined, however, if the viewer were to touch the sculpture, as his carving only looks like that which it represents, it does not correspond haptically to the external world. As Bernini himself professed, `naturalism is not the same as imitation.` On one level, this claimed superiority of vision appears to now be supported by science: the optic nerve has eight-hundred-thousand fibres (eighteen times more nerve endings than the cochlear nerve of the ear, its nearest competitor), which can transfer a vast amount of information to the brain at a rate of assimilation far greater than that of any other sense organ. Moreover, as Edward Hall notes in The Hidden Dimension, the unaided eye `sweeps up an extraordinary amount of information within a hundred-yard radius and is still quite efficient for human interaction at a mile`, whereas the ear, for example, is only `very efficient` for `up to twenty feet`. That said, sight is not without its limitations: Martin Jay points out in Downcast Eyes that the human eye has a blind spot (where the optic nerve connects with the retina), a `metaphoric "hole" in vision`, that the `eye`s superiority at sensing objects from afar is balanced by its inferiority at seeing those very close` and that `we are often fooled by visual experience that turns out to be illusory, an inclination generated perhaps by our overwhelming, habitual belief in its apparent reliability`. In such instances of visual deception, physical contact is usually sought as confirmation, touch consequently replacing sight as the most trustworthy sense. Indeed, somewhat ironically, such an idea has been the subject of a number of paintings. For instance, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio`s painting Doubting Thomas depicts the moment when St Thomas - not believing that Christ has come back to life - parts the thick, labial skin of Jesus`s wound and plunges his finger inside. Although on the one hand, the painting presents sight as an inadequate sense (which needs the confirmation of touch), Caravaggio also implies through the gruesome, vivid nature of his painting that to doubt sight is an admission of ignorance and faithlessness. Jesus must undergo the pain caused by St Thomas`s prodding digit as a result of the apostle`s disbelief. The painting nevertheless reveals that biologically at least, vision is not necessarily the `sovereign` of the senses, which can always be relied upon without doubt. The emphasis that our culture places on the ocular is socially and historically conditioned. This is illustrated particularly clearly by the vastly differing attitudes towards touch that have occurred throughout history. Leonardo da Vinci may have claimed that `the sense of sight is the Lord and Commander of the others`, but in Michael Drayton`s sonnet XXIX `To the Senses` in Idea, touch is declared the `King of Senses, greater than the rest`, exemplifying the privileged position that touch often held in the Renaissance hierarchy of the senses. The speaker of Drayton`s poem declares that touch `yields Love up the keys unto my heart` (whilst sight is `corrupted` by beauty, ` hearing bribed with her tongue`s harmony`, `taste by her sweet lips drawn with delight` and `smelling won with her breath`s spicery`). Touch is the sense that the speaker has the most active control over and is also the one that ultimately yields the most pleasure. This motif of setting the senses up against each other was popular in literature from the Medieval period through to the post-Restoration era. Another example may be found in an early eighteenth century poem by Jacques Le Pansif, in which `the senses got into a fight` in order to `get it firmly agreed/ which of them Venus didn`t need`. It is touch, the last sense to take its turn in the competition of winning the goddess` favour, that has the decisive word:

Feeling laughed out loud and asked: what use is a bride to lie with day after day, if we don`t feel the urge for this kind of play.

Thus Le Pansif highlights how closely the sense of touch is bound up with ideas of the erotic. This association of the tactile with the sexual is also very clearly portrayed in many paintings of the Early Modern period: pictorial catalogues of the Five Senses often emphasised the sensual and the titillating. For example, in Crispyn van de Passe the Elder`s The Seasons and the Senses (a late sixteenth century engraving), Touch is personified as a woman with bare breasts, her hand resting on a turtle shell (often employed as an erotic symbol because of the believed paradoxical sensitivity of its shell) and a scorpion (the zodiacal sign that rules the genitalia) lying at her feet. Such an association has also been employed as an argument for and against sculpture. Whilst the link between touch and the carnal has been celebrated by many - in On the Nature of Things, for instance, Lucretius praises touch as `the bodily sense` that `gives pleasure in issuing forth by the creative acts of Venus` - it is also the association that has partly resulted in the sense`s controversy. Whilst sight, hearing and smell extend the body beyond its own boundaries to something beyond the corporeal, tactility insists on the fleshy and relies on close proximity for its operations. Thus as attitudes towards sexual activity change, so do attitudes towards touch. This ties in with Norbert Elias` descri ption in his The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization of the transition from `warrior to courtly societies`, which involved an increasing control of `animalistic instincts` and the `raw material of drives`, a rationalizing and curbing process that was enacted both within the individual and as a social moulding. This instilling of social and bodily decorum - ranging from the restraining of sexual behaviour, etiquettes of burping and nose-blowing, to the introduction of eating utensils - affects popular attitudes towards the senses and their hierarchy. Senses that involve a close bodily proximity (namely touch and smell) became subordinated to those that could provide a further distance between individuals (hearing and sight). In De civilitate morum puerilium, for example, Erasmus lists recommendations and admonitions concerning eating etiquette, many of which directly relate to touch, including the advice that individuals not to put their hands into the dishes immediately after being seated, as `wolves do that`. This demonstrates a clear desire to elevate human beings above animals, and fundamentally serves to severe men from their own appetites, instincts and bodily functions. As Ed Cray writes in his anthology of erotic poetry, during the Restoration period `"Shit" carried no social opprobrium, and that word, both as a noun and verb, apparently was used in polite conversation. Similarly, "fart" and "piss" were acceptable`. However, by the Victorian age such words describing basic corporeal operations were considered obscene. Elias traces the progressive integration of forks and spoons into civilised society: eating utensils that ultimately act as replacements or extensions of the hands, and so serve to distance touch. These manners and codes aim - as explicitly stated by Erasmus - to separate people from animal behaviours. Sexual conduct also became increasingly restrained, as it too - in the words of Rachel Herz (That`s Disgusting; Unravelling the Mysteries of Repulsion) - `puts our animality on full, glorious display [.] reminders of our creatureliness stir a storm of disquiet and bring fears of our fleeting and fragile mortality to the surface`. Alternatively, seeing and hearing remind us of an existence that extends beyond our mortal flesh. Indeed light - an electromagnetic radiation that is necessarily for the sense of sight to operate - often has religious or spiritual significance: from sun-worship to astral light surrounding the godhead to sacred fire and holy candles. Thus touch is identified with beasts that are baser than humans, and vision with divinities that are higher. Jesus may heal those deemed `untouchable` with his hands, but this is a deliberate subversion of social norms and as the son of god he is able to invert contamination (he cleans them, rather than them sullying him). Other references to touch in the Bible are mainly prohibitive: Eve must not touch the apple (Genesis) and the clean must not touch the menstruating (Leviticus). However, according to Elias, it is the restrictions that civilisation have placed upon human beings` natural instincts - many of which incorporate touch - that have in turn led to psychoanalysis. He claims that the distinctions between the Freudian conscious and unconscious or the ego and the id are the result of a historical profession: the split between `rationalization` and the drive impulses and affective fantasies become wider until the `wall of forgetfulness` separating the two becomes increasingly impermeable. Elizabeth D. Harvey thus hypothesises in Sensible Flesh that `the physical properties of tactility - which evoke in the early modern period eroticism, pain, and the appetitive in general - are subordinated during the process of instilling social restraint` and so `migrate into the affective realm [.] the civilizing process is one that interiorizes emotion`. She argues that emotion is directed internally, producing a split in the subject between drive and affect impulses and their expression, so that the subject `conceals his passion`, `disavows his heart` and `acts against his feelings`. Physical desires are made progressively emotional and the libidinal progressively secret. Thus sight may be treated as the sovereign of the senses by the dominant culture in our current society. However, far from being objectively superior to the other senses, vision has gained its pre-eminence through evolving value judgements and its position as king may have had a considerable impact on the evolution of our psychology. Harvey insists that tactility is `linked to a forgotten world - of childhood, of a less completely `civilized` time, of a more realised embodiment`. Berger may begin his book with the statement that `seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak`, but before even seeing comes feeling. Unlike the other senses, touch is not restricted to one location in the body - the eyes or the ears or the tongue or the nose - but is dispersed throughout the body. Touch provides a world of sensation. Even Aristotle admits in his De Anima, that `all animals whatsover are observed to have the sense of touch` and therefore it must be the `primary form of sense`. Yet it is this very fact - the basic, essential, animalistic nature of touch - that has resulted in a civilising process eager to distance itself from its own body. Touch may have been the sovereign once, and it would have been more akin with Charles II as a monarch, than with Elizabeth I. To feel is to live, but to live is to die, and it is this ultimate fear of morality that has given vision the crown.