Multicorporality against ocular-centrism: from the visual/individual city to the sensory/participative city

Abstract

Certain authors, such as Jay (1988, 2003, 2007, 2008), Levin (1988, 1993) and Jenks (1995), have investigated the influence of ocular-centrism in Western culture. Others such as Pallasmaa (2006) have specifically considered this influence in the architectural and planning context. Finally and since the 1980s, sensory anthropology has questioned the visualism of Western thought and culture, emphasising a need to transcend this bias in order to connect with the cultural experience of non-Western subjects. However, and taking into account the advances of the latter field, cultural taxonomies of the senses follow a cultural and social order that is determined by the assignment of greater or lesser value to our senses. But we may use the experience of bodies that resist this hierarchical process to question the ocularcentric taxonomy present in our own Western culture.
This article analyses how ocular-centrism was managed in modernity and how it remains the main paradigm in the construction of the cities. The paper then presents a multisensorial project for inhabiting cities based on the dismantling of said taxonomies through sensory anthropology, making use of the range of contemporary technologies that permit synaesthesia and the interdependence of our senses. The aim of this project is to enable participants to inhabit urban spaces in diverse ways that differ from the normalised forms of interaction.