31 A Multisensory Approach to Visual Methods

Introduction

While I was still contemplating this chapter, my partner arrived home with a copy of New Scientist. He handed it to me folded open at the review of a new book, See What I'm Saying by the perceptual psychologist Lawrence D. Rosenblum (2010). The very sight of and subsequent tactile encounter with New Scientist gave me the sense that I was about to read a popular magazine, with its glossy but floppy pages and color images. New Scientist produces both a magazine and a web site, where its readership is described as ‘business decision-makers and consumers from diverse backgrounds’(http://www.newscientist.com/data/html/ns/mediacenter/uk/intro_audience.jsp, accessed 30th March 2011) and its mission in that it ‘reports, explores and interprets the results of human endeavour set in the context of society and culture’ (http://www.newscientist.com/data/html/ns/mediacenter/uk/intro.jsp, accessed 30th March 2011). I was initially drawn to the photograph that centered the one-page review, I imagined, taken from the book and featuring a visually impaired cyclist who, the caption says, ‘relies on hearing where most others use sight’ (2010: 46). New Scientist also smells like a magazine, now it has been read and used for a while; this particular issue has a weaker scent, but still reminds me of the olfactory experience of getting too close up to a Sunday newspaper supplement in the days when I used to read real newspapers rather than reading the news online. The reviewer of See What I'm Saying, Richard E. Cytowic, himself a professor of neurology, describes this as an accessible book that uses examples of first-hand experiences to demonstrate how ‘the five senses do not travel along separate channels, but interact to a degree few scientists would have believed only a decade ago’ (Cytowic, 2010: 46). Interestingly, the idea that the senses are so interwoven and interdependent is now not only the domain of the biological and neurological sciences, philosophers of perception [Page 602]and social scientists who seek out these fields but also is now seeping out in to the popular intellectual imagination of science magazine readers. It is likewise time for anyone who is interested in using visual methods and media as part of social research to account for the idea that neither the vision nor images can be practiced or understood without a theory, methodological appreciation, and practical awareness of multisensoriality.

How could Cytowic's review be relevant to a visual researcher? Quite apart from the points it makes about the ways that the senses are interconnected, it is a material and sensorial object in itself. Considering it in this way we might think of its visuality on two levels. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold has pointed out, the notions of the image and vision have tended to be conflated in existing literatures in visual culture studies and visual anthropology. Thus, in such works, ‘it seems, vision has nothing to do with eyesight and everything to do with the perusal of images. Thus, no image, no vision’ (Ingold, 2010: 15). Ingold argues that we need to recognize that visual practices go beyond looking at images. Therefore in the case of the New Scientist article, we might distinguish between, on the one hand, the practice of seeing the magazine as an object and evaluating and defining it based on past knowledge and experiences, which might initially be thought of as a visual practice, and, on the other hand, the practice of interpreting the visual representations that constitute the article described above—the photograph and the writing.

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