In ordinary language, we use the word “sense” in three different ways: sense as in sensation; sense as in making sense and finally, sense as in being sensitive. The first use of sense is about perception, the second use of sense is about thought and the third use of sense is related to emotion. These three senses of “sense” are closely interrelated; part of how our minds work. in fact they arise from principles that cut across cognition, emotion and perception. The Sensome is a tool that helps us tie these three aspects of ‘sense’ in interwoven threads.
The Sensome is a place where the kind of abstraction that comes from concepts is combined with the vividness that comes from sensory experience. It becomes all the more important when you're talking about futures or imaginations that are not actually in front of you, right?
It's not an experience you could just go out and have with your eyes and ears. So, how to make realities that are different from ours, as available as the current reality is, right? We are going to share an alternate urban experience that we call Shaktiville, that we have written about in our newsletter.
This is when Alok and Srini share their visual representations of the sensome:
Alok: How can we collectively flourish? And this also I would like to use as a motif that we can keep coming back to the, idea of commons, the idea of shared ownership. Still, that would be a better one and and this sense that we're not existing in competition to each other, but coexisting and sharing these resources.
Srini: One of the characters is an anthropologist and photographer who documented a strange event. Rivers were flowing into this lake and a petrol steamer came and overturned and polluted the whole lake and a lot of birds died and all that. So she had documented that thing and she had won a first prize. So now when she's looking back at it, she's feeling "is she different from those tiger hunters posing with a dead tiger"? What has she done? So she's thinking about her past when she comes back to visit Shaktiville.
You can watch Srini and Alok talk about their images in the video below:
And then we had an extended conversation about nostalgia and the emotional tone of experience.
Rajesh: this slight nostalgia of the two friends who go back and see the place, and of course, places often have that nostalgia component. Instead of the sensory experience coming through vision and through sound and sight and touch. Maybe we can also talk a little bit of on the emotional side of the sensory experience. What does it feel like? What does it mean for a human and an elephant going back to some place that they have experienced as younger people? Is that something we can even imagine?
Srini: Yeah, I think it's a very important little piece. Sometimes even little matchbox that you've seen when your childhood you can transport you back into some completely special time and space kind of zone. Anything can take you down the trip down that nostalgia right to people.
Alok: There are three things that are happening simultaneously, that the sense of time we humans perceive is very different from what would be the case for another species.So there is two different senses of time coming together and they also see each other. And so there is besides nostalgia, there's also a friendship which has also changed and evolved over a period of time and they see each other in a new light. In the new backdrop of this city. We can only speculate what they could be feeling about.
Rajesh: It will be good for us to map those out carefully. What would a Emotional map of a city actually look like? How would you represent the feelings in Mumbai? On way is scrape Twitter data from all the people tweeting across Mumbai and then do sentiment analysis and figure out where people are happy and where they are sad. That's one way to carry out nontraditional mappings of urban spaces.
You can watch that conversation in this video:
Starting with the work of Foucault, social science scholarship has focused on the intimate relationship between knowledge and power in the modern world - an important milestone in that genre is Ian Hacking’s Taming of Chance. Their argument was that modern societies gain legitimacy by exercising control over the processes of life (what Foucault calls biopower) through the collection of a certain kind of knowledge and the creation of new categories such as “population.”
That’s why birth and death statistics are collected so that policies targeting population averages (public health policies for example) can be used to legitimize state power. The breathless reporting about the Corona virus is a classic example of biopower. In other words the exercise of power demands certain knowledge regimes.
What’s happened in the last three decades is both an evolutionary growth of knowledge as power and a dramatic transition in its exercise. It’s no longer knowledge that’s being collected and categorized - it’s emotion as well. The technologies of surveillance can now directly access our limbic brain and don’t need to stop with rational categories such as population averages and GDP. Knowledge is often replaced by emotion because the technologies of control, surveillance etc have become more fine grained.
In short: emotion is more important than knowledge and populations are no longer the unit of control.