[In
case you didn't get the press release, postmedieval has just won the award for Best New Journal by the ALPSP
(Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) - a distinction it
earned by beating out three science journal finalists. Of course,
postmedieval is certainly in dialogue with the sciences and if anything is working with them, not against them: check out exciting new issue on "neuromedievalism"
(HERE) and note the forthcoming issue on the "The Intimate Senses" (HERE)
edited by Holly Dugan and Lara Farina. In this posting, I would like to offer a
preview of my talk at the
"Synaesthetics" session (organized by these same wonderful collaborators).
Please ignore the unwieldy title in the official BABEL program (HERE), as I
have now arbitrarily decided to give it a new title: "Synaesthesia Is Not A Metaphor."]
[Above: Various Google Image search results for "Synaesthesia," 16 September 2012].
Most
people don't know this about me (it doesn't come up often in normal
conversation), but in my everyday life I experience something
called synaesthesia, a type of perception often defined in cognitive science orbits along the lines of "a condition in which stimulation in one
modality also gives rise to a perceptual experience in a second modality"
(Sagiv & Ward 259). [1] There are many types of documented cases of
synaesthesia (for some, music evokes colors; for others, smell might evoke
three-dimentional shapes -- Richard Cytowic describes the experiences of synaesthetes in an engaging way, and synaesthetes are even sensationalized as if extraordinary superheroes with mutant powers in this Discovery documentary). [2] As for me, I happen to experience a comparatively mundane type of cross-modal perception of the sort that is the most well-documented in scientific literature so far: color-grapheme grapheme-color synaesthesia.* This means that for me all letters and words each have their own
distinct colors (as do all numerals, numbers, and units of time [days,
months, years], but individual experiences vary from person to person).
Speaking from my own experience, it's not so much that I "see" the
letter E as bright lime green in "my mind's eye," but rather that
"lime-green-ness" is inextricably tied to "E-ness" in my
perception (in a similar way, five is inherently bright cherry red, no matter
whether or not it's transcribed as five, 5, or in any other language I happen
to know: 五, fünf, cinq, etc.).
Whenever my synaesthesia happens to come up in conversation, I get a range of reactions:
some people look at me like I'm crazy and others have a more bemused reaction,
as if to suggest I'm just being highly imaginative. But for me synaesthesia is
an involuntary and entirely real experience. Whenever I see 5 on a
page or screen -- or even when I just think of the number five --
it is always bright cherry red. (If you don't experience
synaesthesia, there are some ways to approximate it: synaesthete Cassidy Curtis offers a nice Q&A and "color coding" of letters and words; and this interactive Flash applet lets you type words and approximate what synaesthetes experience while typing or reading). But as much as I can tell another
person that Mondays are bright yellow or that the year 1381 is purply-green,
such explanations will never quite "click" for a non-synaesthete.
Human language alone can never properly encode the fullness of embodied sensory
experience. Indeed when I talk with other people who happen to have this kind
of synaesthesia we'll discover that our individual perceptions
don't even match up: it can strike me as entirely "wrong" and
"unnatural" when another synaesthete says that her 5 is blue,
or that her letter R has a distinct texture (or even gender!).
[Images associated with a research experiment involving synaesthetes. On left, the the image of a number matrix as the non-synaesthete sees it; on right, a color-coded representation of how a synaesthete might see it. Ramachandran & Hubbard, "Window" (full citation below). FYI, I immediately see the triangle of 2's when I glance at the image on the left - except for me the colors are reversed: 5 is red, 2 is green.]
Cognitive scientists like V.S. Ramachandran et al. have been conducting research on synaesthesia for some time
now, using a number of methods to confirm that synaesthetes are actually
experiencing the cross-modal effects they say they experience in
response to external stimuli. I'm currently trying to find an online video might do a good job explaining
Ramachandran's research methods and include some interviews with
synaesthetes, but haven't tracked one down just yet - stay tuned [oh, and a side note: check out how Lara Farina puts medieval texts in conversation with Ramachandran on phantom limbs and tactility]. When it comes to synaesthetes, Ramachandran & Hubbard assert that cross-modal perception is “a genuine
perceptual phenomenon” (R&H, "Window"
3) that can be externally verified by behavioral and neuroimaging data,
perhaps even suggesting a neurological basis (R&H, "Neural Basis"). [3]
What I find so interesting about the discourse of Ramachnadran and others is this insistence that synaesthesia is not "just a metaphor." We all use phrases like "loud shirt," "bitter cold," or "sharp cheese" and automatically understand such phrases are instances of cross-modal metaphor, a mere trick of language. [4] That is, we all know a loud shirt is not actually making any sound, for instance, and we are metaphorically employing one sense (sound) in order to discuss another (sight). But what if one's sense experience is effectively already cross-modal? What happens to metaphor then? Ramachandran & Hubbard have their speculations: if "[s]ynaesthesia is a concrete sensory phenomenon [with] neural basis" (R&H, "Window" 4), then the (possibly) "more cross-wired" brains of synaesthetes might suggest "the neural basis of metaphor" itself (R&H, "Window" 28). Metaphor, R&H might suggest, is at its core a type of cross-modal thinking; one must always think in one modality while activating another.
What I find so interesting about the discourse of Ramachnadran and others is this insistence that synaesthesia is not "just a metaphor." We all use phrases like "loud shirt," "bitter cold," or "sharp cheese" and automatically understand such phrases are instances of cross-modal metaphor, a mere trick of language. [4] That is, we all know a loud shirt is not actually making any sound, for instance, and we are metaphorically employing one sense (sound) in order to discuss another (sight). But what if one's sense experience is effectively already cross-modal? What happens to metaphor then? Ramachandran & Hubbard have their speculations: if "[s]ynaesthesia is a concrete sensory phenomenon [with] neural basis" (R&H, "Window" 4), then the (possibly) "more cross-wired" brains of synaesthetes might suggest "the neural basis of metaphor" itself (R&H, "Window" 28). Metaphor, R&H might suggest, is at its core a type of cross-modal thinking; one must always think in one modality while activating another.
[St. Cecilia refuses to kneel before a statue of Jupiter. Domenichino, "St. Cecilia before the Judge." Fresco, San Luigi dei Francesi (1612-1615).]
I am NOT claiming to be an
expert on neuroscience in any way here (and indeed I'm cherry-picking from Ramachandran at the moment, so if I'm somehow misconstruing
or misrepresenting anything above I stand ready to be corrected!). What
intrigues me here as a literary scholar is the discursive deployment (or
disavowal) of metaphor itself as a means to understand those who are perceived
to have nonstandard modes of sensory perception. This semester I'm teaching a
course on medieval disability, and I'm particularly interested in how often
metaphor gets deployed as a means to inhabit any mode of
sensory experience that is alien to one's own. In literary texts, blindness is
often explicitly employed as a metaphor -- and texts representing blind or
visually impaired people are not necessarily concerned with understanding any
"authentic" lived experience of blindness but instead mobilize the various cultural
meanings of disability for their own ends. St. Cecilia in Chaucer's "Second
Nun's Tale" deploys blindness and sight for rich metaphorical resonance.
She has privileged insight (she can see an angel the non-Christians cannot),
and she employs a metaphorical discourse of blindness in order to
express her pagan adversary's lack of faith (calls him out on his spiritual
"blindness"). In this case, the unconverted pagan can physically
see i.e. process external stimuli -- "There lakketh no thyng to thyne outter
yen" (498) -- but in in a spiritual (metaphorical) sense he cannot
"see" (recognize, believe) that the pagan idol in front of him is
actually a mere stone object.
There's a lot to be said about
sight/blindness here, but what I find most interesting is the attempt to make an intersubjective bridge between two worldviews via cross-modal metaphor. We start off with
incompatible perspectives: the pagan man recognizes the "ymage" as a
god, while the Christian woman knows it is stone. In an attempt to bridge two
fundamentally different modes of perception, St. Cecilia deploys a complex
cross-modal metaphor: "I rede thee, lat thyn hand upon it
falle,/And taste it wel, and stoon thou shalt it fynde,/Syn that thou
seest nat with thyne even blynde" (502-504) [emphasis added]. If the
pagan were only to bracket the (distracting) sense of sight, he might touch --
and thereby "taste" (in Middle English, this is a pun meaning to
taste and/or to perceive) -- that the stone is stone. What makes this passage
so difficult to unpack is precisely its use of mixed metaphor, a rhetorical
strategy that conveys the effect of cross-modal perception. In this
case, one can never bridge the gap between the pagan's mode of
perception and the Christian one (this pagan does NOT convert), so the
privileged (Christian) discourse can only end up employing a seemingly
haphazard mix of sensory modes to denote other ones.
In this discussion of the
subjective experience of synaesthetes as well as "blind" people
(scare quotes are deliberate in this case!), we find that metaphor can only take
us so far in describing any sensory orientation toward the world that is alien
to our own (as much as we may try to inhabit different modes of embodiment and lived
experience). Nonstandard or extraordinary sense experience not only reconfigures our very choice of metaphors but also invites us to more carefully consider the material and corporeal underpinnings of metaphor itself.
