This is the approved final manuscript of the series editor’s preface to François Laplantine
The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology, translated by Jamie Furniss (Sensory Studies Series) published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2016, acquired by Routledge in 2020.
The Extended Sensorium: Introduction to the Sensory and Social Thought of François Laplantine
David Howes
François Laplantine is the paragon of a hybrid thinker. He studied philosophy under Paul Ricoeur in the Paris of the late 1960s, but an encounter with the great psychoanalytic anthropologist, George Devereux, drew him out of philosophy and into both psychoanalysis, which exposed him to the underside of conscious or “rational” thinking, and into anthropology, which immersed him in the study of modes of living and thinking undreamt of in Western philosophy, such as the Afro-Brazilian religion known as Candomblé.1 Another important influence during his student days was the cinema, particularly the New Wave cinema of Goddard and Truffaut. As Laplantine notes in conversation with Joseph J. Lévy, his training was philosophical by day and cinematographical by night, when he would go with his friends to see films (Lévy 2002: 14). Cinema-going became a life-long passion, and he continuously references filmmakers and film scenes in his writing the way other scholars cite academic texts.
Laplantine defines cinema as made up of “permanently transforming sensations” (p. 116). He does not treat film as an object but rather as a “way of knowing.” It is a way of knowing that exceeds language (the standard medium of philosophy) on account of the way it traffics in auditory and visual sensations – that is, in “sounds and images in motion” (in Lévy 2002: 132).2 The ostensible aporia between words and images is not a barrier for Laplantine, as it was for the young Wittgenstein, who famously wrote: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” (2004: 34). Rather, it is an invitation, an opportunity to think otherwise, which is to say to think sensually. Cinema does not seek to state “what is the case”; it shows. Cinema is the art of showing things in ways that words cannot, whence its appeal to Laplantine, and a growing number of English-speaking anthropologists attuned to the senses, such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor (1994), Anna Grimshaw (2001), David MacDougall (2005) and Sarah Pink (2006).3
Attending to the Sensible
Attending to “the sensible” (le sensible) is a key theme of Laplantine’s approach to the social.4 For him, “modes of living in society cannot be reduced to systems of signs” (contrary to Lévi-Strauss), and “the social does not exist except by way of the sensible” (contrary to Durkheim) (in Bragard 2007: 20). He criticizes Durkheim for saddling anthropology with the idea of “the social fact” as a purely objective construct, stripped of any temporality, subjectivity, emotionality or sense-ability. While this move may have been necessary to the establishment of sociology and anthropology as “social sciences” distinct from the “natural sciences” of psychology and biology, the fact remains that “social phenomena are sonorous, visual, tactile, gustatory and olfactory phenomena” (in Bragard 2007: 15). This leads directly into Laplantine’s definition of anthropological fieldwork as a form of participant sensation in a given culture’s mode of living:
The experience of fieldwork is an experience of sharing in the sensible [partage du sensible]. We observe, we listen, we speak with others, we partake of their cuisine, we try to feel along with them what they experience (p. 2)
There is no finer definition of the methodology of sensory ethnography than this, and Laplantine is one its most consummate practitioners.
Laplantine’s career as an ethnographer spans four different terrains (and continents): Ivory Coast, France, Brazil, and most recently the cities of Tokyo and Beijing.5 His scholarly output is equally far-ranging. It consists of over two dozen books: in ethnopsychiatry, medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, political anthropology, urban anthropology, ethnographic description, cinema, and other works that defy classification on account of their hybridity, such as Métissages (with Alexis Nouss), Transatlantique, and Le social et le sensible. The last book, which is translated here under the title The Life of the Senses, will be the first of Laplantine’s books to appear in English. This moment has been far too long in coming, as it was for Michel Serres’ The Five Senses: A philosophy of mingled bodies ([1985]2008), another French text of relevance to the expanding field of sensory studies.6
Before delving into the argument of this book, I would like to draw attention to a particularly formative experience which Laplantine underwent in the early 1980s, that he has not discussed much in his writing, but which Lévy managed to draw out of him in the interview . In 1983, Laplantine went to Brazil at the invitation of some former students. There he continued his exploration of alternative forms of consciousness and healing that had begun in France (e.g. Laplantine 1985) through studying Kardecian Spiritism, Umbanda and Candomblé. He was initiated into the first grade of Candomblé, which he came to regard as a form of “sacred theatre.” In his interview with Lévy, he relates how Candomblé initiation begins with the identification of one’s orixa, the “master of the head” who then orients one’s personality. This identification is achieved through a divinatory technique which involves throwing cowry shells (originally from Africa) on the ground; the disposition of the shells is then interpreted by one’s master. In Laplantine’s experience, Candomble apprenticeship is
absolutely not by the book [livresque], not intellectual, but tactile, olfactory, musical, chromatic and above all alimentary. It is based on a system of precise correspondences between the personality of each [apprentice] and the cosmos, in its various components: food, colours, perfumes and musical sounds. Living in ignorance of this harmony is to falsify one’s life and to risk falling sick, according to the adepts of Candomblé. An accord is therefore sought between the singular personality of each one and the cosmos in community [with others] (in Lévy 2002: 76)
A complete initiation takes many years, and involves periods of complete isolation in a tereiro, which cannot but provoke meditation. At other times, the apprenticeship is of “an extreme sensoriality.” As Laplantine relates,
It is an experience of sensory awakening [l’éveil des cinq sens] and also of symbolic filiation in a relation of dependence to the one who initiates you and guides you simultaneously to a heightened personalization and a heightened socialization (in Lévy 2002: 77)
Three things stand out about these observations: the emphasis on the communal, the emphasis on the sensual, and their interconnection. Laplantine was already attuned to the social due to his anthropological training, and attuned to the sensate due to his love of cinema. The experience of initiation sensitized him to the intricacy of their interrelationship. This nexus would constitute the fulcrum of his thinking going forward and issue, finally, in the extraordinary treatise you have before you.
Modal Thinking
The Life of the Senses is part philosophy, part anthropology, part film theory and part philology (both in the conventional sense of the “science of language” and the archaic sense of the “love of learning and literature”).7 A good place to pick up the multiple threads of Laplantine’s argument is chapter 5, where he takes aim at “categorial thought.”8 Categorial thought, which Western culture inherits from the Greeks, attributes properties to those things it isolates from the flux of existence and cleaves to the logic of the excluded middle. As such, it is inimical to life and living (la vie et le vivant), which are processes of continuous transformation. Life itself is rhythmical, and to model or categorize it (which is to say, to fix it) is false, for the model eliminates the temporal and processual in the name of the essential. For instance, is dawn night, or is it day? Categorial thought balks at this question because of its will to impose a (binary) logic of identity – the logic of this or that with no remainder.
Categorial thought is exemplified by a long string of Western thinkers, from Plato to Descartes, and from Kant to Durkheim. But there is also a countertradition, comprised of the presocratics, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Bergson, among others, who encourage us to focus on duration, modulation, and rhythm instead of essence and identity. Laplantine rescues this counter-tradition from obscurity, and extolls its virtues. “Sensible thnking” (la pensée sensible), or “modal thinking” as he also calls it, is continuous with the world, sensitive to the slightest gradations and movements and affects. Laplantine holds that cinema affords an illuminating experience in this regard. Cinema is inherently temporal (compared to painting, for example, which is spatial); it traffics in images rather than ideas, and in emotions rather than reason. Cinema can thus serve as a lens for integrating life into thought by attuning us to the continuous flow and modulations of experience. In short, cinema is good to think with, and not only with but through.
It might be wondered whether Laplantine’s love of cinema (or cinephilism) has perhaps blinded him to the fact that the movie camera does not treat the senses equally since it magnifies vision and augments listening while screening out all the other senses. In other words, cinema gives only limited access to the sensible. While this concern is real (Howes 2003: 57-58, 2008), it is mitigated in Laplantine’s case first by the multi-sensory memories that his Candomblé initiation instilled in him, and second by the fact that he takes Marcel Mauss’s classic 1936 essay on the body as the starting point for his approach to anthropology. Laplantine credits Mauss (the nephew and inconstant disciple of Durkheim) with being the first to theorize social existence as modal existence. In “Techniques of the Body,” Mauss relates how he was surprised to see young French people evincing the same “American ways of walking” in Paris that he had seen displayed by the nurses of New York during a hospital stay in that city. (He deduced that it was cinema that propagated the new kinaesthetic style across the Atlantic. ) Inspired by this observation, Mauss proposed that “it is necessary to study all of the modes of disciplining bodily movements [dressage], imitation, and especially those fundamental ways that can be called lifestyle, modus, tonus, ‘matter,’ ‘manners, ‘way’” (Mauss 1966: 375).
Taking his cue from Mauss, Laplantine dedicates the first chapter of this book to an analysis of ginga. Ginga refers to a swaying, sinuous way of walking, which is characteristically Brazilian on account of its sensuality. (Think of the swinging hips of the girl from Ipanema.) This kinaesthetic style also forms the basis of a number of dance styles including samba and the erotically-charged umbigada (“navel-to-navel”). It is above all manifest in the comportment of the malandros, who is a loiterer, a good-for-nothing, but at the same time one who is always on the make, and occasionally strikes it rich. Carnaval is the element of the malandros. Ginga is also fundamental to the martial art/dance style known as capoeira, in which all parts of the body must be alert, responsive to the slightest feint or attack by one’s opponent. Ginga then is an energized, rhythmic, swaying or curving/curvaceous style of movement.
“The undulating rhythmicity of ginga is a pulsation, a vibration of the body,” writes Laplantine, which also informs a style of music – namely, bossa nova, which is a cross between samba and jazz. Bossa nova “caresses the ear with its words and its notes.” It is the perfect medium for expressing that peculiarly Brazilian sentiment, saudade. Saudade has to do with reviving the past in the present and taking pleasure in the pain of loss.
In 2007, Laplantine went to Japan to take up an appointment as a visiting professor at Tokyo’s Chuo University. He prepared for this trip by immersing himself in Japanese film, and then translated his lived impressions of Japanese culture generally and the city of Tokyo in particular into Tokyo, ville flottante. The latter book is another fine example of Laplantine’s modal approach to the study of the social, or what he calls the “anthropology of the sensible.” According to Laplantine, the Japanese privilege form (not idea), percept (not concept), concrete (not abstract), and transformation (not essence). The culture oscillates between high tech and tradition, the pragmatic and the frivolous, extravagance and asceticism, extreme flexibility and standing on ceremony, a strong sense of duty and a craving for distraction (e.g. karaoke, pinchoko bars), self-effacement and national pride. Japan is a highly disciplined, hypercivilized society with an overwhelming emphasis on security, serenity, harmony and integration which is nevertheless pervaded by a profound consciousness of impermanence (e.g. the seasonal cycle, seismic activity, Tokyo itself is built on a marsh). In what other society do you find aesthetic appreciation of a few unpretentious objects, as in the tea ceremony, and expertise in seasonal representation, as in the art of flower arranging, so bound up with social distinction? Social distinction is normally about permanence, not fugacity (see further Daniels 2010: 108-112).
Laplantine evokes a lively sense of the apparent antinomies (or rather, alternate modes) of Japanese culture and how they nevertheless hang together. He is particularly astute in his observations regarding the discontinuance of tradition by contemporary Japanese youth, and the insights into this phenomenon which various Japanese filmmakers provide. Laplantine kindly accepted my invitation to write a synopsis of his experience of urban Japan as a supplement to this book, and it is included here under the title “Sensing Tokyo.” His exposition of how the surfaces, rhythms and intensities of daily life in Tokyo contrast with the textures of urban experience in European cities such as Paris is a model of the application of the comparative method in sensory studies.
The Extended Sensorium
“Life” or “life itself” is a hot topic in contemporary anthropological theory (e.g. Ingold 2011), but nowhere is it treated with as much finesse or in as much philosophical depth as it is in this book (Lévy 2013). “The body” is another major focus of contemporary anthropology (Lock and Farquhar 2007) but few have taken the further, radical step that Laplantine does when he affirms that “all anthropology is anthropology of the body” (in Braggard 2007: 14; see further Saillant 2013). What is more, Laplantine does not merely seek to overcome the split between mind and body (endemic to Western culture since the time of Descartes) the way other thinkers do when they postulate such synthetic notions as the “mindful body” or “embodied cognition.” In place of positing some hypostatizing, totalizing “unity of body and mind,” he digs deeper to uncover and highlight the multiplicity of the body’s organs of perception — the senses. In Laplantine’s oeuvre, the accent is always on mixity (métissage) rather than unity or totality (see e.g. Laplantine and Nouss 1997).
To put this another way, Western culture has long been saddled with the opposition between “the life of the mind” and “the life of the senses.” (Think of the opposition between the cerebral character of Narcissus, who becomes an abbot, and the lusty character of Goldmund the wanderer in the novel by Hermann Hesse [1968]). “The life of the mind” is, furthermore, identified with “the examined life,” which is the only life worth living, according to conventional Western notions. On further examination, however, the life of the mind — which is to say categorial thinking — misses the whole point of life and is (actually) hopelessly imprecise when confronted with the oscillations and infinitesimal gradations of life and living (la vie et le vivant). Moreover, categorial thinking kills by a thousand cuts, beginning with the separation between the intelligible and the sensible. But life can never be so cut and dried as categorial thought presents it to be, as Laplantine shows by bringing out the primacy and pervasiveness of sensation, and the ultimate indomitability of the life of the senses. Whence the title of this book. Contemplating its arguments will prove a life-changing experience for those who heed Laplantine’s call for an awakening of the senses.
What Laplantine here proposes by way of an “anthropology of the sensible” or “modal anthropology” is known in the English-speaking world as the “anthropology of the senses” or “sensory anthropology” (Classen 1997; Howes and Pink 2010).9 The anthropology of the senses is one of numerous approaches that emerged out of the sensory turn in the humanities and social sciences beginning in the 1990s. Other such approaches include the history of the senses (Classen 1993, 2000; Smith 2007), sociology of the senses (Synnott 1993; Vannini et al 2012), philosophy of the senses (Rée 1999; Macpherson 2010), and sensuous geography (Rodaway 1994; Paterson 2009), all of which feed in to the emergent, interdisciplinary field now known as “sensory studies” (Bull et al 2006). The sensory turn also gave rise to the domains of inquiry currently known as visual culture (Evans and Hall 1999; Heywood and Sandywell 2012), auditory culture or sound studies (Bull and Back 2003; Pinch and Bijsterveld 2013), taste culture (Korsmeyer 2005), smell culture (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994; Drobnick 2006), and the culture of touch (Classen 2005, 2012). These various domains may likewise be seen as subdivisions of the burgeoning field of sensory studies.
This quickening of the senses (and attention to the senses) within and across the various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences has broken up the hegemony which psychology formerly exercised over the study of the senses and perception by underscoring the sociality of sensation and the extent to which the perceptual is political — not private and subjective the way psychology would have it. As Laplantine observes, “there exists a political and a historical dimension to sensory experience, which exceeds what individuals can consciously experience” (p. 83). The growing recognition that the sensorium is a social formation has led to increasingly widespread questioning of the adequacy of the account of perception that comes out of psychology and the brain sciences generally. Laurence Kirmayer captures the gist of this critique in his description of the “hierarchical systems view of neural organization” — also known as the theory of the “extended mind” (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008) — that has emerged within cognitive neuroscience:
Contemporary cognitive neuroscience understands mind and experience as phenomena that emerge from neural networks at a certain level of complexity and organization. There is increasing recognition that this organization is not confined to the brain but also includes loops through the body and the environment, most crucially, through a social world that is culturally constructed. On this view, ‘mind’ is located not in the brain but in the relationship of brain and body to the world (Kirmayer quoted in Howes 2011: 165-6)
Kirmayer goes on to state that, ideally, “we want to be able to trace the causal links up and down the hierarchy in a seamless way.” Such an objective will remain out of reach, however, for as long as cognitrive neuroscientists continue to privilege the brain and cognition over the mediatory role of the senses in the production of experience (see Howes 2011; Howes and Classen 2014: ch. 6). By shifting the focus of inquiry from the intelligible to the sensible, Laplantine opens the way for reconceptualizing extended mind theory as a theory of the extended sensorium. The senses, which are always-already socially conditioned, mediate the relationship between mind and body, idea and object, self and environment (Bull et al 2006). The senses are the “loops through the environment” of which Kirmayer speaks, at once bearers and shapers of culture. By attending to the “ways of sensing” through which the members of a given culture make sense of the world, it becomes possible to arrive at full-bodied, multimodal understanding of the richness and diversity of being alive.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the author, François Laplantine, for graciously allowing this book to be translated into English and published as the first volume in the Sensory Studies series. I also wish to thank Jean Ferreux, whose publishing house, Téraèdre, has done so much to promote the sensory turn in French academia, for his authorization. We are all indebted to Jamie Furness for producing a translation which is sensitive to the nuances of Laplantine’s mode of thinking and writing. Furniss brings the same philological sensibility — that is, the same “love of language, literature and learning” — to the translation of this book as Laplantine brought to writing it. Finally, I am indebted to the editorial staff at Bloomsbury for their encouragement and support of this endeavour
Notes to the Introduction
1. Laplantine went on to obtain a second doctorate, in anthropology, also from the Sorbonne, in 1982, making him a philosopher anthropologist, as it were.
2. All translations of passages from works other than the main text are my own.
3. Castaing-Taylor is the Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, which is dedicated to experimental ethnographic sound and film production. Grimshaw, Pink and McDougall are all prominent theorists and practitioners of visual anthropology. Visual anthropology and sensory anthropology are both offshoots of the sensory turn in the humanities and social sciences (on which more below).
4. The word “sensible” has only a limited semantic range in English, as in the expression “sensible shoes” or the command “Be sensible!” In French, by contrast, it connotes “everything pertaining to the senses” (Sankey and Cowley 2008: x), or in Laplantine’s terms, it is a “word for designating the body in all its states and multiple metamorphoses” (ch. 7 p. 3). The sensible thus stands for whatever affects the body; this would include silence as well as sound, and the invisible alongside the visible (see further the Translator’s Preface). The incorporation of this extended definition of the sensible into the lexicon of sensory studies going forward will be a spur to further elaboration of this nascent field of inquiry, which is still searching for its own language.
5. For Laplantine, a terrain is not a site, “not a space, but a human relation” (in Lévy 2002: 39), and it engages all of the anthropologist’s faculties — “Anthropology is a mode of knowledge which implicates the totality of the senses and the intellect” (in Braggard 2007: 14) –, and not only the intellect and the senses but the emotions too, for Laplantine “never accepted the idea that, to arrive at objectivity, it is necessary to neutralize affectivity” (in Lévy 2002: 24).
6. Laplantine’s work also invites comparison with that of two other key figures of contemporary continental philosophy, Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze. Rancière is another proponent of a “politics of the sensible” (see Panagia 2009) while Deleuze is another advocate for the epistemology of cinema and image-based thinking.
7. Laplantine’s love of language is apparent in the way he revels in drawing out the hidden meanings and implications of a range of keywords, such as “multiple” and “sensible” in chapter 2 and … of this book. As for literature, he treats it as a “way of knowing” (the same way he treats cinema) but not, as one might expect, as a “reflection” of society. Rather, literature “attacks, contradicts, transforms the social” (in Lévy 2002: 53), according to Laplantine, which is precisely what makes it such a powerful and valuable source of insights. Laplantine also speaks of “the liveliness of literature” and, above all, of its “solidarity with the body.” This definition effectively recasts literature as an extension of perception (see further Hertel 2014). Even writing, which we ordinarily think of as having to do with representation (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986), is a physical activity for Laplantine — and a source of pleasure:
I like to write by hand. There is something carnal about the contact between pen and paper … It is an experience of tactile pleasure that I hold dear. The creation – or the putting in crisis – of meaning [through the activity of writing] unfolds for me in a rhythmic movement which unites the eyes, the hand, cigarettes, pens – never ballpoint pens –and sheets of differently colored paper. (in Lévy 2002: 12)
8. Other targets at which Laplantine takes aim include: the discontinuity of the sign, the ideology of the present and presence, representation, identity, the stabilized subject and totality – all of which constitute so many manifestations of categorial thinking (i.e. mainstream Western thought). Modal thinking, by contrast, proceeds “little by little,” foregrounding the past and future in the present, modulation, alterity, the multiple subject, and tonality, energy (in place of structure). Commenting on the opposition between these two modes of knowledge in chapter 9, Laplantine writes (refreshingly):
I believe that in the construction of an anthropology of the sensible what is necessary is more to revitalize the antitheses than to find syntheses, or, worse still, to accept compromises that would do away with the question of the ethical and the political, as well as the negativity that befits the act of thinking (p. 107).
9. One of the objectives of the Sensory Studies series is to expand the forum of sensory studies internationally through translations, such as this one, that multiply the voices in circulation by overcoming language barriers (here that of French). It is instructive to compare the genealogy of the different branches of sensory studies – here that of anthropology — in different national traditions. For example, in chapter 6 of this book, Laplantine distinguishes modal anthropology from structural anthropology (which he regards as tainted with “logicism”) and hails Roger Bastide and George Bataille as precursors (while sidelining Lévi-Strauss). The English counterpart of modal anthropology, sensory anthropology, took shape in part as a reaction to the excesses of textual anthropology (while embracing structural anthropology, if somewhat ambivalently) and counts a different array of anthropologists among its precursors, such as Rhoda Métraux and Edmund Carpenter (for a fuller genealogy see Howes 2003: chs. 1, 2).
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Bibliography of the Works of François Laplantine
L’Ethnopsychiatrie, Paris. Éditions Universitaires, 1973
Les Trois Voix de l’imaginaire : le messianisme, la possession et l’utopie, étude ethnopsychiatrique, Paris : Éditions Universitaires, 1974
Les 50 mots-clés de l’anthropologie, Toulouse: Privat, 1974
La Culture du psy ou l’Effondrement des mythes, Toulouse : Privat, 1975
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