“Touch appears to be the most versatile and various of the senses, partly because it threads through all the other modes of sensory apprehension, and also because it seems itself to be formed differently depending upon the particular kind of apprehension it delivers, whether of shape, texture, volume, space, tightness, heat, or weight. “
I find all senses to be interconnected. Connor’s emphasis on touch, especially in relation to sound, seems contrived. Touch can be invoked through sight in a haptic response or we can hear the results of our fingers dragging across wires, but this is a co-dependent response and I would argue against a higher level of versatility.
“…..ventriloquism seems to need the confirming circuit of touch, which acts both to intensify and to protect against the disembodiment of the voice.”
Ventriloquism is an act of connection, but I would not describe it as touch in sensory terms. Technically you are touching the dummy but I doubt the ventriloquist is focusing on what the inside of this puppet feel like.
“Hearing has the reputation of being more passive than seeing. The association of hearing with feeling rather than cognition probably comes from our modern sense that feelings happen to us rather than being willed or subject to conscious direction. This has sometimes impelled claims that a culture based more around sound and hearing than around sight might be a gentler, more participative, less dominative culture (Fiumara 1990).”
Why would hearing be associated with feeling rather than cognition? In a classroom, students are more likely to be described as listening to the teacher rather than seeing the teacher.
“We will mistake if we try to use the history of the senses as a way of softening the rigor mortis of a social body that we imagine has gone deaf and dumb, blind and numb. If there seems to be plentiful evidence of a demand to “feel the noise,” for sonoro-tactile pathos, this need not be taken as evidence of a deficit to be made good in the social body. “
Until this last sentence, I had no idea this article was discussing the “social body” and so I am confused by this statement and missed the evidence presented to tell me why I should imagine that we have “gone deaf, dumb and blind.”