This is the approved final manuscript of the series editor’s preface to David Le Breton,
Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses, translated by Carmen Ruschiensky
(Sensory Studies Series) published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/sensing-the-world-9781474244176/

Preface:
David Le Breton and the Sociality of Sensation

David Howes

 

This is a book to be savoured. The author recounts how it was written over a period of sixteen years (1990-2006), whenever he could take time out from his busy schedule – giving a course of lectures here, holding a workshop there, researching other books – to sit down, usually at a café, and reflect on the material he had read on the train, heard about in the media, or observed in his daily life.¹ Having, in 1990, just published Anthropologie du corps et modernité – an academic blockbuster (now in its seventh edition) – David Le Breton was very much in demand as a speaker and animator. This book has some of the flavour of all those cafés in which it was written, and the hectic pace of Le Breton’s itinerant existence at the time, though he had by that point acquired a permanent post. The writing is upbeat, wide-ranging, probing, and engaged or “passionné” (passionate). Le Breton is a very passionate intellectual as well as public – and prolific – one. Indeed, this is the 19th of the 31 books he has written to date. Many of these books were published by Éditions Métailié, whose founder and director, Anne-Marie Métailié, is renowned for her cosmopolitan flair and discerning eye. It was specially commisioned by Métailié, and one can see how it is in many ways a paean to her complex vision for the human sciences – a vision with our humanity at its core.

La saveur du monde is the first of Le Breton’s books to be translated into English, though there have been numerous translations of his works into other European languages. It is a privilege for us to introduce this work to the English-speaking world as the sixth volume in the Sensory Studies series – and, together with the author, we wish to thank the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study (USIAS), and in particular its director, Thomas Ebbesen, for the generous financial contribution that made this translation possible.

 

Sensology

For Le Breton, as for others of us, the anthropology of the senses emerged out of a prior engagement with the anthropology of the body. He began reflecting on the question of “the body” towards the end of the 1970s while writing his doctoral thesis in sociology under the direction of the illustrious Jean Duvignaud. The topic of the body was very much in vogue thanks to the work of Michel Foucault on the micropolitics of corporeal practices, as in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. But Le Breton resisted the tendency to treat the body as object that was so rampant – both in the literature (e.g. Foucault) and in popular culture (e.g. liberation of the body, body therapies) – at the time, since this appeared to him to smuggle a certain dualism back into the discussion. “For me, there is no world apart from the body and hence of the senses” (in Andrieu 2007: 5) This formulation, with its cosmic solipsism (almost), owes more to the subjectivism of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and perception – and in particular Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “the flesh of the world” – than, for example, the instrumentalism of Marcel Mauss’ theory in “Techniques of the Body” (i.e. the body as “man’s first tool”), much less the “docile body” of Foucault’s carcereal modern subjects. For Le Breton, the body is the existential ground of perception and being – or, better, life – itself. But it is important not to think we are simply talking about the “lived body” of phenemenology here.That construct, too, in Le Breton’s estimation, perpetuates the old dualism. Le Breton’s overriding interest is rather in “the life of the subject” – the subject as embodied individual, the subject as social actor, and the subject as seeker after meaning (sens in French).

For his understanding of meaning (sens), Le Breton found that he had to step out of phenomenology and into anthropology. Phenomenology lacked an adequate purchase on the encompassing inevitability of society and culture – and above all, the symbolic.

What interests me in my work as an anthropologist are the resources of meaning [ressources de sens] that individuals project onto the world. … Perception, for example, is a dialogue between the postulate of a world that is ultimately unknowable in any absolute sense and the interpretation that an individual, belonging to a community of meaning [communauté de sens] and of values, and with his or her own style, brings to it (in Andrieu 2007: 6)

The emphasis on each individual having his or her own style, while at the same time belonging to a community that provides them with the resources (the language, the habitus, the lenses) to interpret the world symbolically, and the allowance that there is also a world out there (if only as a postulate) that is impervious to the sense people try to make of it – these are the key elements that make up Le Breton’s anthropology of the body, the senses and the world.

While Le Breton often cites Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and there is a school of phenomenological anthropology (see Throop and Desjarlais 2011), his anthropology is ultimately much closer to Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. According to Cassirer: “Symbolic forms are not imitations, but organs of reality, since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual apprehension, and as such is made visible to us” (quoted in Becker 1979: 2). In The Imagination of Reality, Alton Becker says of this passage that it packs a “powerful metaphor[:] conceiving of symbolic systems as ‘organs’ of perception; not what we know and believe, but the means of knowing and believing” (ibid). Casirer’s pronouncement agrees with Le Breton’s convictions regarding how human beings project meaning onto the world, or make sense of things in the act of sensing. Le Breton’s sensorial anthropology could otherwise be compared to Symbolic Interactionism, with its emphasis on interpretation, social interaction, the definition of the situation, “minding” and human agency. It is no coincidence that Le Breton wrote a treatise on this school of American sociology (Le Breton 2004).²

If one were to try and sum up Le Breton’s approach in a single word, the most apt term would be “sensology”, as proposed by the distinguished medieval historian and prominent sensory studies scholar, Richard Newhauser (2014). This neologism nicely captures the back and forth between sensing and sense-making (or symbolization) , between sensation and signification, feeling and meaning, that is given in the French word sens and is also implicit in the English word “sense” (Rodaway 1994)

 

Sensus in extremis

Throughout Le Breton’s work, there is a strong emphasis on relationality. As he points out in an interview with Bernard Andrieu:

Meaning is not in things. It emerges in the relation between social actors and things, as well as in the intertwined debates with others about their definition [i.e. “the definition of the situation”]. The projection of meaning is a social and individual activity that sometimes meets resistance from the world or from other members of the society. (2007: 6)

Thus, Le Breton’s individual is a social subject but not necessarily a (fully) socialized one. This écart is partly a reflection of his own double formation – in sociology and prior to that clinical psychology, and partly his own condition as a subject, his existential self. Le Breton freely admits that his own life has been a troubled one, that he is a “survivor,” who often feels guilty about going on living when so many close acquaintances of his have died. (see Lévy 2010: 13, 143) This is perhaps what draws him to the study of other individuals on the margins of society – those who engage in risky or “extreme behavior”, such as the anorexic, the cutter, the suicidal. But he strongly resists the all-too-easy pathologization of such behavior.

It is precisely because we live in a safe society [société sécuritaire] that the fact of putting one’s life in danger takes on the meaning of a quest and a transgression. It adds to the symbolic effectiveness. And in any transgression, there is power. Anyone who takes it upon themselves to confront a prohibition is going to reap the power that comes with having dared look death in the face and risk dying. There is also a power of metamorphosis in the fact of confronting limits when society prohibits us from doing so and seeks to prevent this. This is the paradox of risk-taking: there are an enormous number of social workers, doctors, psychologists, associations and hotlines in place to prevent young people from putting themselves in dangerous situations. And the more this network of prevention grows, the more the transgressions and danger-seeking grow, and are constantly renewed: new scarifications, choking games, etc. … (in Chavaroche and Chobeaux 2008)

In place of advocating prevention, Le Breton advocates “l’accompagnement” or “being with the other,” – that is, empathizing with them in their quest for meaning through starvation, self-harm and other forms of extreme sensation.³ This has put him at odds with the community of health professionals in many a notorious debate on television or at conferences. His method of sensing along with the other is manifest in a wide array of empirical studies (e.g. Le Breton 2002, 2003, 2007)⁴ These books all bear testimony to Le Breton’s profound humanity (the quality that Métailié so admires in his work), to his openness to grappling, both sociologically and sensationally, with what some call “bare life.” Sartrean existentialism pales in comparison with Le Breton’s sensationism.

 

Savouring the World

“So, you’ve written a cookbook!” one colleague quipped when hearing the title of the present work, La saveur du monde in the original (Le Breton, personal communication). Not quite, but this book does attest to the enlargement of Le Breton’s concentration, from a focus on exploring the voir-savoir (or seeing-knowing) nexus in a seminal chapter of Anthropologie du corps et modernité (the chapter dealt with the rupture in humanity’s relation to the body instigated by Vesalius’ visualization/objectification of the dissected corpse) to grappling with the saveur-savoir (or tasting-knowing) nexus, the entendre-entendement (hearing-understanding) nexus, the sentir-sentir (smelling-sensing) nexus, and so forth in this book. In other words, Le Breton grew out of the “anti-occularcentrism” of conventional French Theory (Jay 1993) and into his other senses, but without turning his back on sight, as his investigations progressed and his thinking matured. Michel Serres traces a similar trajectory in The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies.

In closing, let me highlight some of the points about this work the reader will want to savour as they digest it. Le Breton is sensitive to the sensory underpinnings of language and constantly teases out the sensology of everyday speech;⁵ he plumbs the depths of light and sound (as well as noise) but also turns his attention on their antithesis, darkness and silence; he inquires into what blindness and deafness mean to the individual living with either or both of these conditions and what they can teach us about “normal” vision and audition; he is not afraid to venture beyond the ordinary bounds of sense and treat such extrasensory perceptions as clairvoyance or the odour of sanctity anthropologically; he is attuned both to the individuation and interrelations of the senses (e.g. “The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress,” to quote Goethe); he ruminates on the pleasures of the senses (especially those of the table and of sex) but devotes the final chapter of this book to pondering the cultural conditions of disgust; he is particularly entertaining (and scathing) in his analysis of the racist sensorium; and, he occasionally leavens his social analysis of the sensory self (including the sense of self) with psychoanalysis.⁶ In short, Le Breton leaves no sense unturned or any sensation out. This evenness of attention to what each of the senses has to contribute to our social and personal existence is what makes this book such an excellent introduction to the anthropology and sociology of the body and senses.

Le Breton is fortunate to have Carmen Ruschiensky as his translator. Ruschiensky is a graduate of the renowned translation studies program at Montreal’s Concordia University. She is currently enrolled in the Humanities doctoral program and a member of the Concordia Centre for Sensory Studies. Her translation is faithful both to the sometimes rambling and driving power of Le Breton’s writing. It should be noted that Le Breton, in conversation with the present editor, has also revised his original text, trimming some sections and expanding on others to ensure that the reader can enjoy a taste of and for the world in all its multisensory richness.

 

Notes

1 The late Umberto Eco had a phrase for this reading and witing on the fly (on the plane, in a train, at a café): “writing in the interstices” See Lévy (2010: 16-18, 56-57) regarding Le Breton’s writing practice
2 “As we sense we also make sense” and “the senses are interaction” write the authors of The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture: A Sociology of the Senses (Vannini et al 2016), a work deeply informed by the theory and methodology of Symbolic Interactionism. See further Synnott 1993.

3 Thus, for example, he treats self-scarification or “cutting” as a way of caring for the self, attempted suicide as “attempted life” (on account of the egosyntonic reaction such an act elicits from others), and extreme sports as a form of sensation-seeking in an overly secure, commoditized, sense-less world.

4 There are numerous echoes of these other books in the present work, since many of them were being written as Le Breton labored (lovingly) on this one. Since Le Breton’s book are written in tandem, they should also be read in tandem. One pairing I would particularly recommend is L’adieu au corps with Marcher: éloges des chemins et de la lenteur, which deal with the technologization of the body and reappropriation of the body and senses through walking, respectively.

5 Le Breton’s sensual linguistics is akin to Constance Classen’s insightful archeology of the senses in language in “Words of Sense.” See also Levinson and Majid 2011.

6 But not just any psychoanalysis. As the reader will find, Le Breton is particularly attracted to the work of Didier Anzieu on the “skin-ego,” or multisensory envelope of the self, and Donald Winnicott’s “transitional object” or doudou. For an excellent introduction to Anzieu’s work, from a cultural theory perspective, see Lafrance 2013.

 

References

Andrieu, Bernard. 2007. Entretien avec David Le Breton. Corps 1/2007(2) : 5-8
Levinson and Majid, s

Becker, A. 1979. Communicating Across Diversity, in A. Becker and A Yengoyan (eds.), The Imagination of Reality. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Casirer, E. 1955. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols. trans. R. Manheim. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Chavaroche, B and Chobeaux, F. 2008. Entretien avec David Le Breton. Vie Sociale et Traitements 99 : 46-52.

Classen, C. (1993) Words of Sense, in Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures, London: Routledge.

Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Random House.

Jay, M. (1993) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Contemporary French Thought, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Lafrance, Marc. 2013. From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope: An Introduction to the Worlk of Didier Anzieu, in S. Cavanagh, A. Failler and R. Hurst (eds.), Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Le Breton, D. 2002. Conduites à risque. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France

2003. La Peau et la Trace. Sur les blessures de soi, Paris : Éditions Métailié,

2004. L’interactionisme symbolique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

2007. En souffrance. Adolescence et entrée dans la vie, Paris : Éditions Métailié

2012a. L’adieu au corps. Paris : Éditions Métailié

2012b Marcher: éloges des chemins et de la lenteur. Paris : Éditions Métailié

Levinson, S. and Majid, A. 2011. The Senses in Language and Culture. The Senses and Society 6(1) : 5-18.

Lévy, J. J. 2010. Entretiens avec David Le Breton. Paris: Téraèdre.

Mauss, M. 1979. Techniques of the Body, in Sociology and Psychology Essays, trans. B. Brewster. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Newhauser, R. (ed.). 2014. The Sensual Middle Ages, in A Culture History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, 500-1450. London: Bloomsbury.

Rodaway, P. (1994) Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place, London: Routledge.

Serres, M. 2008. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. M. Sanky and P. Cowley. London: Continuum.

Synnott, A. 1993. The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society. London: Routledge.

Throop, J. and Desjarlais, R. 2011. Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 40: 87-102

Vannini, D. , Waskul, D. and Gottschalk, S. (2012) The Senses in Self, Society and Culture: A Sociology of the Senses, London: Routledge.