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Tim Edensor Sensing the Ruin
Tim Edensor Sensing the Ruin
Tim Edensor Sensing the Ruin
Tim Edensor
To cite this article: Tim Edensor (2007) Sensing the Ruin, The Senses and Society, 2:2, 217-232,
DOI: 10.2752/174589307X203100
DOI 10.2752/174589307X203100
mobility, materiality
and industrial ruins.
moving through an industrial ruin. In derelict
T.Edensor@mmu.ac.uk spaces the body is generally liberated
from the usual self-conscious performative
constraints of the city and may move in a
non-linear, improvisatory fashion across
a variety of textures, comport and weave
the body in expressive ways, confront
powerfully unpleasant but also pleasurable
and surprising smells and sounds, and
behold sights which disrupt normative
urban aesthetic conventions. Acquaintance
Senses & Society
through vision are effaced and visitors are visually able to “take
possession of objects and environments, often at a distance” (Urry,
2002: 147), while other sensory effects are minimized. It remains the
case that Western modernity continues to valorize the use of scopic
approaches and techniques to understanding and representing the
world (Jay 1992).
Olfactory regulation will only allow “ambient fragrancing” through
which “scents are diffused through ventilation systems in order to
optimize employee performance, subliminally influence consumers’
buying behavior, or effect a kind of mass medication in subways,
schools and prisons” (Drobnick 2005: 274). Incense, coffee smells,
the aroma of fresh bread may waft through shopping areas, but
the everyday smells of sewage, food and industry are minimized,
generating “blandscapes,” those “aseptic places, created by the
modernist drive towards deodorization, that are so empty that they
lead to an alienating sense of placelessness” (Drobnick 2002: 34).
Strong aromas remain associated with poverty, disease, decadence
and decay, the antitheses of high modernity (Bauman 1994), and
continue to transgress “social conventions in regard to enjoyment,
discipline, functionalism, corporeal deportment” (Drobnick 2002:
35), and so they are rigorously policed.
Sound is similarly controlled, so that loud sounds are rarely
permitted to disrupt soundscapes suffused with piped music.
Auditory techniques and technologies serve to “marshal and
discipline sound” and otherwise mediate urban space, “carving
out acoustic order” (Tonkiss 2003: 304). As Tonkiss further notes
(ibid.), responses to urban sounds are typified more by distraction
Senses & Society
and its fears” (1993: 136), its social relations, its cultural practices
and its forms of practical living. The senses are thus “cumulative and
accomplished, rather than given” (Stewart 1999: 18), they do not
provide an unmediated access to the world as purely “natural” tools,
for as Classen underlines, “we not only think about our senses, we
think through them” (1993: 9).
The sensing of the city is strongly influenced by modes and styles
220
and in pop music festivals, which combine auditory and haptic stimuli.
For instance, Saldanha (2002) shows how Goan beach raves are a
complex amalgam of music; smells of sweat, kerosene and hashish;
the sight of the moon and coconut trees; the tactilities of moving
bodies, sand and humidity. A similar sensory immersion might be
attributed to raves, in which, according to Reynolds, “the listener is
hurled into a vortex of heightened sensation, abstract emotions and
artificial energies” (1998: xix). In addition to occasional experiences,
sensual order may be confounded in the course of everyday life. An
intensive maintenance must be persistently mobilized to minimize
the impact of strong sensations, but this is insufficient, for the smell
of drains and body odor, car screeches and alarms, lurid clothing
and outmoded artifacts, crumbling pavements and spilling rubbish
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can cause us to stop in our tracks. And so, despite the sensory
regulation of Western urban space, as I will show, unbidden sights,
sounds, textures and smells lurk in marginal spaces, waiting to burst
out and infect regulated space and sensory experience as the “old,
earthy environment persistently breaks through the cracks in the
pavement” (Howes 2005: 37).
Figure 1
space, but is the venue for a host of social activities and colonized
Sensing the Ruin
Figure 2
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223
Tim Edensor
The rhythms of home, work and leisure, a sense of place are constit-
uted by soundscapes (Smith 1994) in which church bells or muezzins
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Figure 3
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225
Tim Edensor
Figure 4
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226
Sensing the Ruin
Figure 6
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228
Sensing the Ruin
light fitment in the wind may cause a sharp fright, and fingers may
gather splinters from a shattered beam. The body recoils or opens
itself out to these sensual stimuli, to the abundant textures, to both
abject and pleasurable matter disposed of in more regulated space.
Acting contingently in these unfamiliar surroundings, the body is
not merely reactive to the effusion of sensory affordances but also
actively engages with the things it beholds. In turn, the ruin is a
space in which things can be engaged with, destroyed and strewn
around expressively in contradistinction to interaction with things
in regulated realms where, typically, vision predominates, objects
are beheld at a distance, and a disposition is required whereby
commodities and other forms of material property are sacrosanct
and may not be meddled with. In the ruin, there is no price to pay for
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Figure 7
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229
Tim Edensor
Conclusion
A sensuous engagement is part of the way in which people make
and inhabit space, but while an apprehension of the environment
continuously emerges in response to its qualities it is constrained
by environmental conditions and performative conventions, for, as
Susan Stewart argues, the senses are “shaped and modified by
experience and the body bears a somatic memory of its encounters
with what is outside it” (1999: 19). Similarly, place thus imprints itself
on the body and is carried by it through time and space (Casey
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