Synaesthesia

Helen Palmer

doi:10.1344/jnmr.v2i2.35896

Abstract

The following entry includes firstly a list of synaesthetic portals, and secondly an initial table of scaled sensory modalities following Felicity Colman’s ‘Fragment of a Modalities Map’ (Colman, 2019, p. 985-987). James Joyce famously begins his ‘Proteus’ chapter of Ulysses with Stephen Dedalus describing the ‘ineluctable modality of the visible’ (Joyce, 1922, p. 37). Synaesthesia presents a phenomenon whereby the modality is not merely ineluctible but is also a portal that can potentially link one sensory realm to another, suggesting an infrastructural connectivity that links ostensibly individuated or hermetically differentiated perceptual fields. To describe this process as merely the condition of synaptic short-circuitry affecting a small percentage of human animals does not account for the ways in which synaesthesia is always already at play in all the regular sensory categories, in its experience as and between what analytic philosophers call ‘qualia’, neither does it account for also the ways it can be played as if it were an instrument itself. Perception in general can be perceived as an organ within itself: a desiring organ, as Vicki Kirby says in Quantum Anthropologies (2011, p. 120).

Highlights

The following entry includes firstly a list of synaesthetic portals, and secondly an initial table of scaled sensory modalities following Felicity Colman’s ‘Fragment of a Modalities Map’ (Colman, 2019, p. 985-987)
If we continue to think of perception as a desiring organ, how would it desire? Let me count the ways
Optical-auditory the sound of dust falling in the light

Summary

Introduction

The following entry includes firstly a list of synaesthetic portals, and secondly an initial table of scaled sensory modalities following Felicity Colman’s ‘Fragment of a Modalities Map’ (Colman, 2019, p. 985-987). Optical-auditory the sound of dust falling in the light. It falls in streams as if a prism is resting there and all along the banks a hymn is sounding. The honeyed yellow haze, afternoon of the faun, the slumber and the dream of prancing legs and love amongst grass and flower. The crunch of boots in whiteness and the swirl of purple and red.

Results

Conclusion