This weeks reading brought about a couple of reactions centering on sensory experience. The first reaction, sight, has to do with my object: the 18th century wasitcoat. The second shifts toward another sense, touch, and how we can (or can't) make use of this when thinking about our exhibit.
To begin, while reading
Mark M. Smith's
Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History, I was immediately reminded of
a reaction I posted a few weeks ago. Before moving further, it's important to note Smith's critique of Marshall McLuhan (and Walter Ong). The author (and others referenced in the introductory pages of the book) has an issue with McLuhan's
implicit suggestion non-visual senses are lower, or inferior senses. To me, although Smith offers significant evidence of a sensory evolution in alternate histories rooted in various regions, I don't quite buy into critiquing
implicit suggestions. I understand the importance of Smith's expansion into the other senses, but I didn't really find it helpful to critique sight in our visual culture. Then again, maybe I'm just being sensitive to another McLuhan critique. This all said, I want to get back to my post about structure and power from a few weeks ago. Smith's chapter on sight uses Foucault is wrestle with the panoptic gaze's power. In sum: feeling surveilled by another, a person can internalize a "managerial gaze" (p. 25). I attempted to apply this to fashion because it was a visual confirmation of one's social status. Smith seems to agree with this assessment, noting a person's "accept[ance of] social norms" as a microcosm of Foucault's musings. I've been interesting in thinking about power and surveillance in society because the more information I receive about Capt. Brown, the more it appears surveillance plays a role in his social performance. As
I mentioned last week, sitting near more powerful community figures informed Capt. Brown's social status. A document I reviewed this week listed Capt. Brown's children. One child, George Washington Brown seems, to me, be a result of such surveillance--indicating Capt. Brown's awareness of his status in 18th century Philadelphia because of his affiliation with America's first president. Uncovering bits of information like this further suggest that his waistcoat embodied power within Philadelphia's culture and society.
Roughly transitioning, now, to touch in the limited (...more likely exhausted...) space I have remaining, I want to explore Smith's use of "seeing is believeing, but feeling's the truth" (p. 93). A few weeks ago, during our class discussion, a few of my peers discussed the benefit of having tangible supplementary material at the exhibit for the public to interact with. I think this is something worth exploring as it seems, according to Smith, the paradigm may be shifting in this direction. According to the author, some museums even encourage active participation via touch (p. 115). I guess I'm not sure if Smith views this as a good or bad thing. His mention of museum touch as a road to museum profit via increased attendance wreaks of skepticism. But, again, maybe I'm reading a bit too into things. My interest in talking more about this has more to do with a potential paradigm shift within museum exhibits than anything else. I'd be interested to hear if my Material Culture peers felt the same way.
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