Sentio ergo sum: House paint as politics of the radically mundane

Abstract

According to one view, the rise of ocular-centrism in the West has reduced the faculty of vision to the cognitive, eliding the sensory aspect of seeing. But there is an important way in which visual experience feels a particular way and exerts, in a sense, a material force upon us. In other words, there is a particular character to the experience of seeing that can interact with us in an abstract, but extremely significant way. This helps to explain why the coercive cultural phenomenon of policy often targets visual expression or experience. The same would hold true, I argue, for other aspects of the sensorium. As a case study in Savannah, GA, this paper explores municipal and civic responses color in the context of urban streetscapes as sites of negotiating, promoting and reproducing “appropriate” sensibilities. I examine how the policing of something as seemingly mundane as house paint is undergrid by notions of restraint, vulgarity, and conformity and reflect hegemonic paradigms of normative citizenry, political interests, and property value. In examining the exertion of the political through the lens of the sensorial, and vice versa, we can explicate the phenomenological aspect of policy, tracking its operations on both cognitive and somatic registers.