“Every work of art reveals itself to us as a person harmoniously feeling himself into a kindred object.”
– Robert Vischer, On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics.
“This is an experience, not a theory, and it is not intended to uphold any theories I have heard, even the ones that sound similar to it.”
– Mel Baggs, Cultural Commentary: Up in the Clouds and Down in the Valley: My Richness and Yours
The world is too loud.
The world is too loud.
The world is too loud.
The world is too loud.
And I can’t hold it.
Sometimes this noise is sound. Sometimes light. Sometimes smell. Sometimes touch. Sometimes something more intangible. The sun at midday in August is loud. The static of electricity running through my switched off speakers across the room. The texture of fish scales (seeing or touching) or microfibre cloths (touching). The Zoom call’s grid of expectant, staring eyes. Someone matching my rhythm on the sidewalk behind me. Being jostled on a crowded bus, or pulled along by an overly excited dog, or shuffled into the center of a packed elevator with all those faces at eye level. My racing, circling, restless thoughts. All of this and so much more is too loud, most of the time. I only realize the extent to which I have been confusing this noise with sound when one day in desperation, I buy ear plugs to carry with me to drown it all out, only to be surprised by how little they help. It is not my ears that are the problem.
It was in the study of relocalization – the transformation of perceptions from one sensory experience to another – that Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach first used his famous inkblot test. As an artist (and the son of an artist), Rorschach understood from personal experience that “sensations could be detached from their original location and felt somewhere else.” For example, when trying to remember a given image he had once drawn, his body could activate his vision: “If I try to call up in my mind a given image,” he wrote, “my visual memory is often unable to do it, but if I have ever drawn the object and I remember one single stroke of the pen from the drawing, even the tiniest line, the memory image I am looking for appears at once.”[1] In art and in life, this technique seems self evident to me (and also obviously to Rorschach) and I start to wonder if maybe this isn’t the case for everyone, and what that might mean.
I wonder how often I have missed this slippage from one sense to another entirely, or taken it for granted as the way everyone experiences the world. Like early one Sunday morning, when I am jolted awake by the overwhelming smell of wood smoke, immediately convinced there is an approaching forest fire. But as the world creeps slowly back in, the scent dissipates entirely and I am just in my bed, on the ground floor of my inner city apartment with Saturday night party goers loudly returning home outside my window. Like how I can only call up my internal visual map of the route to a friend’s flat by remembering/feeling how my body braces over my bike tries with the discomfort of the cobblestone streets I have to take to get there.
Once I start to notice it, I begin to see the pattern everywhere. I start to recognize the rising tension every time I pick up my keys to walk out the door as that same embodied bracing for the discomfort of impending noise – a feeling so taken for granted that I had stopped experiencing it as a feeling at all. I realize with a kind of detached horror that I fundamentally do not feel my body because if I were to let go and fully register the volume of all of this noise I am blocking out, all of the time, I would be carried away by it. There would be no I left to differentiate from anything else. But is this really disorder, or a connection I have been trained to view as disorder?
In their short film A Communications Primer, which follows the Shannon-Weaver model of communication, Charles and Ray Eames define noise not necessarily as sound, but as “any outside force which acts on the transmitted signal to vary it from the original”. They make a seamless leap from Shannon’s theory based in the binary code of early computer science to how a conversation or a book conveys information, but I can’t follow them. What is this ‘original signal’ that can so clearly and confidently be separated out from the noise? The Eames’ film gives several examples of the ‘outside forces’ that create distortions, from the deteriorating quality of successive photocopies to inconsistent light and motion while reading on a train. They add that, “besides noise, there are other factors that can keep information from reaching its destination intact. The background and conditioning of the receiving apparatus may so differ from that of the transmitter that it may be impossible for the receiver to pick up the signal without distortion.”
But we are not computers. What if there is only an overlapping, complex web of sensory information that cannot possibly be separated, but is constantly slipping from one form to another? I guess then it might be hard to differentiate these signals from one another at all. I guess then the whole world would be noise. This sounds more like my experience, and also more like da Silva’s thinking. Does that make miscommunication a problem of the signal, or the noise, or the receiving apparatus – or maybe, the problem of a model that cannot account for such entanglement, except to see it as defect and inefficiency?
The concept of Relocalization that so interested Rorschach was an idea heavily influenced by the work of German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Robert Vischer, who coined the term Einfühlung (to feel-into) – a category he marked as distinct from verstehen (to understand) – to describe how we reflect and are reflected by the world. As Damion Searls explains, Vischer’s work greatly influenced both Western aesthetic theory and psychology, and when these texts began to be translated into English in the early 20th century, Einfühlung became empathy:
“What the word empathy described was not new, of course, and the ideas of “sympathy” and “sensibility” had long and closely related histories, but “empathy” recast the relationship between self and world in a new way. It also comes as a surprise that the term was invented not to talk about altruism or acts of kindness, but to explain how we can enjoy a sonata or a sunset. Empathy, for Vischer, was creative seeing, reshaping the world so as to find ourselves reflected in it:… “We can often observe in ourselves the curious fact that a visual stimulus is experienced not so much with our eyes as with a different sense in another part of our body. When I cross a hot street in the glaring sun and put on a pair of dark blue glasses, I have the momentary impression that my skin is being cooled off.”
An ‘atypical expression of empathy’ (defined through neurotypical eyes as a deficit of it) is frequently labelled an autistic trait. But I wonder if empathy/Einfühlung might be thought of as just another way of describing noise – a particular attunement to how everything insists on its constant connection to everything else. A connection that seems to be understood, from a neurotypical perspective, as no connection at all. As Mel Baggs says in their short film, In My Language:
“Ironically, the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as being in a world of my own, whereas if I interact with a much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings, people say that I am opening up to interaction with the world. They judge my existence, awareness and personhood on which of a tiny and limited part of the world I appear to be reacting to.”
What Mel understands as deep connection to their world is perceived by neurotypical society as total disconnection.
This sensory sensitivity/connection certainly makes existing in the world inefficient, slower; anethma to a theory of communication (or any theory, really) that prioritizes clarity, efficiency and speed, and classifies anything that stands in the way of those goals primarily as defects or distortions[2]. But it is closer to an excess of Einfühlung, rather than a deficit of it.
Einfühlung/empathy is not Understanding, but if we stopped mistakenly conflating the two, we might begin to see our mutual misunderstandings as intimacy and entanglement, rather than estrangement. Maybe, we could begin to see connection, rather than disorder in all of this noise.
Sources:
Searls, Damion. The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing. (New York: Crown Publishing, 2017).
[1] Searls 2017
[2] The concept of noise is also prevalent in economics, for example, where economist Fischer Scheffy Black understands it not only as interference with the accurate transmission of information but as “hype, inaccurate ideas and inaccurate data” – information’s opposite from which it is difficult to differentiate, and an indicator of market inefficiencies.
This post is part of a month long series supported by the Canada Council for the Arts exploring the topic of mis/understanding and translation of neurodivergent knowledge, asking: what embodied neurodivergent knowledge is not (or perhaps should not be) translatable? What kind of relationships might we build if we begin from the assumption that we will not be able to understand one another? What might happen to our patterns of communication, if understanding of the other is not our ultimate goal?
Some of the thinking of this blog series has been translated to the short film, Lost in the Reeds.