We need a revolution of the senses beyond sight

Get outside of your eyeballs. All these crises are crises of resonance.

Hilma af Klint knew

What have our eyeballs got to do with climate breakdown, violence, the loneliness epidemic, political polarization, income inequality, prejudice, and Elon sodding Musk?

Well.

According to my own gut instinct and also, if you want an authority higher than that, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, the breakdowns we’re currently living through on multiple fronts are all—every last one of them—crises of resonance.

Meaning:

Life is good not (or at least not necessarily) when we are rich in resources and opportunities, but rather, however banal and tautological this may at first sound, when we love it. When we have almost a libidinal connection to it—it here meaning the people, places, tasks, ideas, objects, and implements that we encounter and with which we interact.

When we love these things, there emerges something like a vibrating wire between us and the world.

—Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of our Relationship to the World

Rosa argues that modernity is characterized by acceleration, rather than resonance. That “modern capitalist society, in order to culturally and structurally reproduce itself, to maintain its formative status quo, must forever be expanding, growing, and innovating”—and when you’re constantly feeding off your own energy, your own hunger for expansion, it’s impossible to come into resonance with the world around you. To feel anything like a vibrating wire between yourself and the people, places, tasks, ideas, objects, and implements that you encounter.

In other words, when you’re dead-set on acceleration, you’re in an energetic vacuum, and that is a very dangerous place to be, severing you from enjoyment and connection and, as a result, from the possibility of true care.

What I love about this idea is that it takes all my heady objections to the way we live today, and it brings them into the body, where I can actually feel them and do something about them.

But still: what about eyeballs?

Last week I wrote to you about caves. About how our earliest ancestors went down into the belly of the earth, into caves, and there, chanted and drummed and incanted their way into altered states of consciousness; into the imaginal otherworld; into the world on the other side of those rock walls, a whole-making, healing realm from which this material world is born. I argued that by accessing that other place, that whole-making imaginal, they were able to step into a felt sense of cosmology; an embodied belonging to and in this world. A bodily knowing that everything material is cradled in an order, a consciousness.

Everything including us.

Those rituals created a felt sense that we ourselves are cradled in an order, a cosmology. That we have a rightful place here. That we belong.

When did this felt sense of belonging rupture? When did we lose this ability to access that whole-making otherworldly realm?

That’s a big question—the question that drives the novel I’m currently working on. It’s too big to answer in full here.

But it’s got a lot to do with eyeballs. With the shift to a visual culture.

Our earliest ancestors didn’t go into caves and look at the walls. They didn’t try to transcend by analyzing the stone in minute detail. They didn’t invent microscopes. They didn’t draw pictures of the caves or write stories about them—capture them in written words and images that they could carry around with them.

No: they used echo to come into resonance with the cave and the energies moving through it. They used their whole bodies, and all their senses.

We know this way of doing things didn’t last. Caves fell into disuse. Practices of worship migrated above ground, increasingly focusing on the sun, whose kindness was ever more critical once human societies began to adopt agriculture.

And as agriculture and acquisition took hold, humans needed new ways to store information. The body can hold a story or a felt sense of cosmology, but it cannot hold a detailed list of accounts.

Enter writing. Did you know that the earliest form of writing, cuneiform, was developed to balance the books? That writing itself was originally just a form of accounting?

As literate cultures spread, stories and meaning began to be held not in bodies or in caves or in sensory experiences, but in documents that had to be deciphered by the eyeballs and the brain.

Here’s what Walter Ong has to say about the way such a visual fixation changes a culture:

Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every directions at once; I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence... You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight.

Sight isolates.

Sight severs the vibrating wire between us and the world.

Over-emphasis on sight, then, allows, makes space for the energetic acceleration that characterises modernity.

And in literate cultures—which is to say the cultures that wield power on Earth today—sight reigns.

***

So what’s the solution? Hartmut Rosa is careful to point out that even if the problem of modernity is acceleration, he’s not prescribing simply slowing down.

Rather, the solution is to come back into resonance. To step back into a way of being where you can feel that vibrating wire between yourself and the world around you.

Naturally, this does involve a slowing down. But it’s about more than speed alone. It also requires us, once we’ve slowed down, to step into a different way of knowing and experiencing. It requires us to reclaim the senses beyond sight, which for most of us at this stage of late capitalism are profoundly underdeveloped.

Because you cannot be in resonance until you can feel.

My personal journey to reclaim my full sensory experience has been life-changing. Increasingly, I believe it’s the reason I was born. It’s a long story, catalysed by a divorce and an epiphany, a blowing open, on a Malibu beach. You can read a version of it here, if you like.

But this journey is different for everyone, and right now I’m more interested in what it looks like for you—because I believe to my core that this revolution of the senses is already underway. Have you had a bodily awakening? Are you having one right now? Which senses are coming to life? Where does your resonance live, in your body? Where does that vibrating wire anchor itself in you? How is it changing you, your relationships, the world you move through? And does it feel to you, like it does to me, like a rebirth—like the very reason you were ever born?