The Sensual Culture Reader - Essay Example

Today we see so many changes around us that during our childhood, maturity, and old age we essentially live in different worlds. The changes take place not only in social and technological realms, but even our basic notions about the world may undergo transformation. This may even be the case with such an apparently unchangeable phenomenon as our senses, which may be generally defined as our methods of perception of reality, and therefore may be thought of as cultural systems (Howes 2005, pp.128-142).

Let us see how such transformations may happen.The rise of consumer capitalism initiated several great changes within Western societies. One such transformation was the shifted emphasis from production to distribution, as the distributor got a higher role than the manufacturer and the consumer, because the growing production requires adequate sales. Therefore, it has become necessary to spur consumption by products replacement, when the notion of obsolescence artificially shortens economic cycles in different markets.

As a side effect, to the material concerns of people a new factor of mass concern had been added - the visual confirmation of the social status. Another development was the subordination of visual art to the capitalistic institutions. In part, this has been done through sacralization of the art and isolation it in museums, where works of art serve as modern icons, but lose their intersensoriality, which is an active connection between senses needed for the wholeness of experience (Howes 2005, pp.318-334). Such trends influenced our senses as a cultural frame of our perception because we almost never perceive the world immediately but rather sense it stereotypically.

Thus, design arts that exploit our cultural stereotypes began to be employed for the promotion of sales, which turned the figure of the designer, a modern visual artist at the conjunction of cultural and material spheres of our reality, into the driving force behind consumer capitalism due to her ability to satisfy the mentioned concern about status among consumers. Indeed, the designer creates the magic visual appeal of products that makes them a prestigious and seductive constant advertising.

However, the motive of the designer is not to make better products, but to make products sell better, which are not synonyms because to promote sales the designer contrives fictitious qualities which he himself will negate when introducing newer products. This leads to the victory of the distributor over the artistic nature of the designer who abandons truly artistic ideals in favor of commercial profits.On ground of this, I believe that the next stage in the process of the aestheticization of our everyday life will ensue from the dissatisfaction with the mentioned cultural trends when products of consumer capitalism are advertised as artistic, but which in the end turn out to be quasi-artistic.

Therefore, I optimistically hope that for the challenges of the industrial revolution, which initiated the shift from our reliance on the senses to precise measurements (Howes 2005, pp.106-127) and therefore engendered the production of identical utensils and raised the difficulties regarding the proper industrial design, alternative solutions will be found which will overcome flaws and sensual limitations of the mentioned distributive design. Such a solution should lie in finding the balance between usefulness and aesthetics, and in refusal from the paradox between our secularization of traditional art isolated in museums, which requires that useful cannot be sensed as beautiful, and existing attempts of consumer capitalism to turn beauty into a function of sales promotion.

This solution may be embodied, for example, by the return to the traditional values of craftsmanship, which, without the direct market pressure, allow craftsmen to define their own approach to design and production, and, by "coming to our senses", to create things which transcend merely visual appeal and combine utility and beauty as an integral whole on many sensual levels. I realize that it is easier to say about this task then to fulfil it, but as far as we talk about such a fundamental factor as human senses, if we view them not only as a passive tool of our perception of the world, but also as an active force in the process of formation of our cultural environment, then such a "sensual revolution" may indeed open for us new horizons.

SourcesHowes, David. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Berg Publishers, 2005.