The papers here show an incredible diversity of ethnographic realia and rich theoretical analysis that unsurprisingly is difficult to contain within a simple programmatic generalization. Undaunted, I will create a kind of hopefully useful kind of skein to throw over and capture the charms of these articles, starting from a close reading of the potentialities of the title: the phrase “synaesthetic encounters,” which I tendentiously read as containing the word “affective” (because all encounters are part of the domain of Spinozan affect, e.g., “Spinoza’s conative, encounter-prone body” [Bennet 2010, 21]). I do not think that synaesthesia or affect are somehow “asemiotic” (see Newell Reference Newell2018 for a discussion); indeed, I do not think anything that exists is. So, with a certain lugubrious inevitability, I will assume some basic Peircean semiotic terms to work with. I will introduce them here (for full explication, see Manning Reference Manning2016): Firstness, a quality of feeling (Peirce’s favourite example: “a feeling of red”); secondness, an embodied quality of experience (another favourite Peircean example: a second feeling—“the peircing the shriek of a steam whistle”—which destroys the first “feeling of red,” producing a secondness, an experience); and of course thirdness (a thought). “Both are qualities of feeling, but the steam whistle’s negotiating position, its vividness, intensity, is such that it has some qualities that belong not to firstness but to secondness, its ability to compel attention, its irrational insistency” (Manning Reference Manning2016).
In exploring “synaesthetic encounters,” I am most interested in connecting Peircean secondness to Spinozan affect, a body’s capacity to affect, and be affected by other bodies (Bennet Reference Bennett2010):
This sense of acting and of being acted upon, which is our sense of the reality of things,—both of outward things and of ourselves,—may be called the sense of Reaction. It does not reside in any one Feeling; it comes upon the breaking of one feeling by another feeling. It essentially involves two things acting upon one another. (Peirce Reference Peirce1894, §1)
So, the phrase “synaesthetic encounters” recalls Peircean secondness, alterity, which I identify with Spinozan affect (Manning Reference Manning2018): These do not reside in feelings but in experiences. I think all the papers in this volume in one way or another attend to this affective secondness of qualities, but more importantly, I feel (drawing from many observations made throughout by the authors) that they point to an analysis of synaesthesia which is not merely grounded in firstness, the free unconstrained play of fancy, cross-modal iconism, and metaphoric slippage of adjectives randomly from one body to another, but to the way synaesthesia is transitive, grounded in affective encounters between bodies (secondness), leaping from one body to another related body, involving indexicality, metonyms, hence “synaesthetic encounters.” My observation may ultimately prove to be trivially true, or just completely wrong, but I hope to show that it is a useful lens to foreground at least a few similarities between these papers, which, naturally, overflow the limits of my characterization.
In the papers here, synaesthesia occurs as part and parcel of situated referential practice, that is, using adjectives cross-modally, either metaphorically (iconism) or metonymically (indexicality), to pick out similarities between different sensations across a range of different embodiments. Juliet Glazer’s paper deals with the embodied experience (secondness) arising in the synaesthetic encounter of the violin player, a luthier, and the violin itself and its manifold parts; in Xiao Schutte Ke’s paper, the synaesthesia resides in the encounter of scat analysts and various scats, and the animals they point to; in Zhuoli Gao’s paper, the encounter of the dancer and the music; in Jay Ke-Schutte’s paper, the encounters of multiple bodies in martial arts practice and their characterizations; in A.M.B.D. Dewar’s paper, reader’s cross-modal coordination of varied text-artefacts, physical and digital, which embody “the same” text; and in Shaheed Tayob’s paper, the way halal practices in contemporary Hindu Nationalist and Neoliberal Mumbai can be found in alternatingly embodied and disembodied forms, in the body of Muslim butchers who produce halal meat but are rendered abject in Hindu nationalist discourse, versus the disembodied neoliberal certificates of halal, halal food without the abject, polluting Muslim butcher, the site of disgust for the Hindu nationalist imaginary of Mumbai.
Some of these papers trade more heavily on cross-modal synaesthesia embodied explicitly in referential practices, especially adjectives, though the deployment of these adjectives is mostly emergent from contextual referential practice rather than codified in some sort of enregistered lexicon of qualia like oinoglossia, and others are much more implicitly registered in linguistic discussions. Obviously, these linguistic practices are potentially different from synaesthesia proper, which belongs to the underlying sensations rather than the linguistic practice (“Synesthesia is defined as ‘the union of the senses,’ or the way that sensory experiences cannot be compartmentalized, but seem, rather, to feed off each other” [Sutton Reference Sutton and Korsmeyer2005, 305]).
Qualities. First of all, synaesthesia implies that we are in the presence of sensations, which are obviously often lexicalized as adjectives, and for Pierce, adjectives form a convenient metalanguage of sensation, but in more technical Peircean terms, sensations occur under a daunting array of distinct terms: qualities (abstract, uninstantiated firstnesses, Peirce’s favourite expression is “a feeling of red,” whatever that is), qualia (singular quale; secondneses, that is, qualities instantiated or embodied in entities or events, experiences), and qualisigns (thirdnesses, which belong to the legisign level, and hence exist as culturally construed, conventionalized types within systems of cultural value (as used famously by Nancy Munn [Reference Munn1986, see also Keane, Manning, Meneley, and many others]) (Chumley and Harkness Reference Chumley and Harkness2013, 4–5).) Affects are often conceptualized as being prior to linguistic, cultural, or cognitive formulation, closer to secondnesses (as opposed to sensations or emotions captured and constrained by adjectives, or enregistered and codified thirdnesses), as being “sheer preindividual ‘intensity’ or ‘potential’” (Newell Reference Newell2018, 2note6), they seem fairly far away from cultural legisigns. For example, the affects produced by the material-semiotic assemblage of the picturesque or gothic ruin can be elaborated into many specific emotions, “sentimental associations,” from horror to pleasing melancholy (Manning Reference Manning2023, 191), including the cross-modal synaesthesia Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy,” the animating projection of human emotions onto nonhuman landscapes (“brooding ruins” and “babbling brooks” [Manning Reference Manning2017, 78]), which produces a sense of animate haunting presences like ghosts.
Synaesthesia, cross-modal iconism, and qualic transitivity
A classic example of synaesthesia is offered by Harkness, which is cited by many of the papers here, the way the lowered alcohol content of contemporary Korean soju is experienced synaesthetically as a form of cross-modal “softness”:
The lowered alcohol content is understood to produce a softer taste, a softer sensation on the throat, softer sonic reactions to consumption, a softer feeling of inebriation, a softer mood among friends and colleagues, and softer embodiments of both masculine and feminine personhood. (Harkness Reference Harkness2013, 13)
Harkness calls this synaesthesia “cross-modal iconism,” implying a mere set of metaphors (firstness). But he also calls it “qualic transitivity,” which implies metonymic transfer between affecting and affected bodies (secondness). For comparison, Harkness discusses Munn’s discussion of “qualisigns” in her ethnography of Gawa, where
culturally meaningful quality such as “buoyancy” or “lightness” (gagaabala) could be experienced via any number of objects of sensory experience, e.g. the wetness and expansiveness of the sea, the slipperiness of fish, the fluttering motion of birds, the lightness of the heated and driedwood of a canoe, or the quickness of a brilliantly-adorned dancing body. (Harkness Reference Harkness2013, 14)
I see cross-modal iconism as being slightly less specific than “qualic transitivity.” The former can be a matter of metaphor or metonym, firstness or secondness; the latter strongly implies iconism inflected by indexical connection: indexical icons. While synaesthesia can be entirely metaphoric, a series of iconic firstnesses, the free play of fantasy entirely within the mind of the beholder, I think Munn’s example must be understood as qualia that are not merely metaphoric play, but metonymic, secondnesses, quasi-indexical parallels drawn between bodies that are already connected indexically: the body, the canoe, and the sea are all connected indexically by the transfer of qualia from human to nonhuman in canoe production and the experience of sailing a canoe on the sea (Munn Reference Munn1977, Reference Munn1986). All of the examples identified from Munn Harkness are not merely metaphorically related, but are metonymically connected to the synaesthetic encounter with the sea. Similarly, the vocal effects that register softness of soju directly index the drinking of soju and its effect on the throat, and the qualities of the soju are refracted through all the other social and embodied synaesthetic reflexes of “softness”: they are all affective synaesthetic encounters. The synaesthetic encounters found in these papers are based on secondness, affective encounters between bodies. Thus, synaesthetic encounters are founded on metonymy, qualic transitivity of affective encounters between bodies, rather than merely metaphoric glimpses of random similarities of cross-modal iconism. All of the papers in the volume, I propose, can be understood as exploring such synaesthetic encounters as affective relations between bodies.
The papers
As a dutiful host, I will now see if I can fit my six guests into a single programmatic Peircean procrustean bed. I will begin with a provocative challenge issued by Xiao in her remarkable contrast of Silversteinian “oinoglossia” and her own discussion of “scatoglossia”:
What if linguistic anthropological scholarship examining language use and sensory evaluation did not start with wine connoisseurship… but with scat identification? (Xiao, this volume)
It is probably a testament to the sheer charisma of Silverstein’s classic discussion of “oinoglossia” that makes it a point of departure here, inasmuch as it is a very extreme example of ritualized, highly enregistered, eucharistic reference rather than what I would call a more practical “craft of reference” (Manning Reference Manning2001). Two of the papers (Xiao and Glazier) take up this challenge directly. Both are centrally concerned with synaesthesia embodied in actual adjectives deployed in actual referential practices, and it is interesting that these two papers locate the referential practices they are talking about with respect to Michael Silverstein’s influential work on oinoglossia. The stakes in reference to wine are personal rather than practical: tasting notes are ritualized, indeed eucharistic, in what they say about the person, but almost completely inconsequential in relation to the wine itself, compared to how consequential correct and proper (or at least intelligible) formulation of an order for a coffee in a coffee house is immediately a matter of practical concern (Manning Reference Manning2012), regardless of what it says about the connoiseurship of the orderer. I say this because while it is obvious that the adjectival “lingo” of coffee (and olive oil [Meneley Reference Meneley2007, Reference Meneley2008] and tea [Besky Reference Besky2020, Reference Besky2021]) has undergone “vinification” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003, Reference Silverstein, Carr and Lempert2019) under the influence of the prestige commodity par excellence, wine, connoisseurship in coffee is mostly displayed as part of ordering a cup of it from a barista, using, of course, a highly branded lexicon, but the order is itself an essential description, and indexical icon of the production process of the cup one desires, and not an indexical icon of consumption, the order in which the sensations of the coffee interact with the palate in the manner of the organoleptic test found with wine, olive oil, and tea. As I pointed out elsewhere, comparing the two different commodity registers:
However, much as Starbucks coffee lingo self-consciously resembles prestige registers of winespeak, there are enormous practical (and pragmatic) differences. At Starbucks one must control a relatively standardized and branded lexicon of distinction in reference to order the commodity from a server, while in winespeak the lexicon of distinction is deployed in a peer community of tasters to evaluate the commodity in consumption. (Manning Reference Manning2012, 40)
In that sense, these two papers are doing fascinating studies of kinds of reference very distant from this exemplary analysis, but very close to rather ordinary kinds of referential practices that are consequential for practice; practical reference that is more about things than persons, part of a “craft of reference” (Manning Reference Manning2001).
As noted, Xiao’s article takes its discussion of referential practice primarily from Silverstein’s discussion of wine-tasting, and while there are similarities, the struggle here is that they are maximally different in many ways. One way, obviously, one hopes, is that scatoglossia, unlike oinoglossia, is not a major register of foodie connoisseurship. There appears to be almost nothing in common between oinoglossia and scatoglossia except that they involve Putnamian expert forms of authorized referential practices. Indeed, whereas oinoglossa is an almost completely subjective person-centred accounting of an affective encounter, subjective organoleptic trials for other commodities (e.g., olive oil [Meneley], modelled quite explicitly on wine-tasting notes) are usually paired with laboratory trials that deal less with synaesthetic impressions and more/less evaluatives but with concrete either/or identifications: extra virgin olive oil is, for example, a measurable condition, whatever the organoleptic tasting notes are. In scatoglossia, the objective of the description is also ontological; the question is not whether this is tasty scat and, if so, what synaesthetic tasting notes it has, but rather how to identify the animal that put it there. It thus has more in common with Putnamian expert reference to “natural kind” terms. Xiao shows that there is in scatoglossia “dialectical mutuality and shared affinities between aesthetic practices and scientific acts. By examining the forms of talk that both describe the perception of scat (‘sensation’) and judge its species of origin (‘ontology’).” In this way, we move from a frankly person-centred form of reference in sensation talk in winespeak to a rather more thing-centred one: “In other words, analysts often over-emphasize the human-centric group-making threshold of sensation talk, while neglecting the ‘thing’-centric process of how in-group members enact expertise and coordinate material configurations through sensation talk.” While wine-tasting is really about indexing the characterological attributes of the person and not the wine, much of the practical contextual work of reference in scat identification is about picking out a referential object (successful reference, even if not correct reference), establishing mutual attention to a referential object. “Their expertise does not lie in a repertoire of pellet descriptors; rather, a more important skill is at play: helping addressees calibrate their perspectives and align with the speaker’s ‘vision’ and tactility.” This is simply not present in person-centred wine-tasting, but is to my mind a central issue of referential practice in general.
Similarly, in Glazier’s paper, two “experts” with different practical takes on the same object, the player of the violin and the luthier who will fix it, engage in a kind of “craft of reference,” where the non-standardized synaesthetic terminology is improvised ad hoc as part of an emergent interactional attempt to create an intersubjective mutual recognition, joint attention, to the qualia in question. This is important because the qualia, once mutually recognized, become the basis of a practical intervention by the luthier: the player tests the violin, they talk about what they heard, and the luthier makes the adjustments. A synaesthetic term like “metallic” here can be crucially understood either as a metaphor (“sounds metallic”) or as an indexical, metonymic (“actually,” there was really something metallic that was causing the sound); the difference here leads to different actions by the luthier. If the former, which apparently it was, subsequent reformulations of the elusive qualia at stake led to other non-standardized emergent, contextual cross-modal metaphors: “sounds like gravel, AM radio …” until one “clicked” and intersubjective joint attention is established, but we are nowhere near some standardized enregistered system like wine-tasting notes or coffee orders. Rather than being a fully standardized enregistered vocabulary, here it is exploratory, emergent, and contextual, since it is about locating the cause of a specific elusive qualia, which is also something specific. Thus, “metallic” can be just a matter of metaphoric impression (firstness), or metonymic, directly indexical of a cause, which can be corrected, an “indexical adjective” which “points” to an underlying cause. While displaying craft skills in reference is important for the luthier, since it is part of their craft expertise, which allows them employment, within the situation, this referential craft is deployed to diagnose specific problems that need to be fixed.
The next two papers, by Ke-Schutte and Gao, move from referential practices (talking about experiences related to things)—scat and timbre—to the affective world of kinesic experiences grounded in bodies in motion: martial arts and dance.
In the case of Berimbolo martial arts discussed by Ke-Schitte, if I understand it correctly, we have what appears to be the transnational transformation, a “kinesic enregisterment,” of Berimbolo from what was originally in Brazil a rather more chaotic “scramble” to a transnational “‘style’ of play as well as an emblem of personal attributes.” This transformation of an emergent “scramble” into an enregistered choreography, a style of play, also to some extent echoes Silversteinian oinoglossia; the result is a kinesic register that says as much about the characterological attributes of the person (indexing emblematic identities, persons, teams, and nationalities) as it does about the effectiveness of the style of play itself. This enregisterment occurs through a series of multichannel and multi-modal intertexts “acquired through accessing illegal VPNs, transmitted via fractured translations, and maintained through a interpersonal curations, refinement, and continuous kinesic enregisterment.” Interestingly, the metalanguage of Berimbolo characterology involves a kind of synaesthesia in which Berimbolo styles of play slide metaphorically into emblematic characterological sexual role positions. Since Berimbolo emphasizes “guard” rather than “passing,” and these are metaphorically associated respectively with “bottom” and “top” sexual positions, an apparent non-sequitur like “I don’t pull guard, because I’m a heterosexual male” makes an enregistered (somewhat synaesthetic) and disputed rhetorical move from playing style to characterological attribute: the argument made by some “that ‘pulling guard’ symbolizes a questionable masculine ethics … certainly finds its counter in an irreverent, and playfully antagonistic queering of this position” by other practitioners.
Gao’s paper on freestyle dance is also located, much more explicitly than the other papers, in the Spinozan category of affect (indeed, it was reading this paper that helped me formulate my point of departure). Gao seeks to create an understanding of improvisation in freestyle that is not grounded in pure introspection but in an affective space “where senses are passed along through events—an intersubjective space where ‘forces’ meet.” I will focus just on one part of this rich discussion. The affective dimension of freestyle dance is conveyed in local metalanguage by the instructor Mike’s interesting use of indeterminate “qualic-deictic” terms like That and Relation which seem to me to point to a kind of metalanguage of affect or secondness (note the interplay between true deictics this and that and the elusive qualic deictic that): “When you are dancing to house music, it’s your time to relate. That was what the culture was about …. That don’t happen because you know how to do like this ≪arms waving and flapping in the air≫ That happen because you really feel that moment …. Your house has to be that <index finger pointing to the floor> first.” Gao’s formulation of this sliding, indeterminate metalanguage of affective secondness as “qualic deictics” (the that in “making that happen”) points to the way terms “such as ‘That’ and ‘Relation,’ index immaterial and sensorial qualities … [that] need to be approached through their co-occurrence with other signs: speech, co-speech gestures, as well as non-speech modalities, including visual demonstrations of dance movements through which feeling and senses are communicated.” An important part of the “relation” here, of course, is displaying in one’s dance style the indexical relation to music: “dance is an emergent bodily technique continuously calibrated with musical indexicals. ‘Yourself’ emerges through this ‘relation.’”
The last two papers I have grouped together as being about the variousness of embodiments: the variousness of embodiments of a single text in text-artefacts (Dewar) and the alternating embodiment and disembodiment of the category of halal in contemporary Mumbai (Tayob).
Dewar attends to reading groups in Taipei, and the processes by which readers in a reading group “get on the same page,” reading the same text together as a collective while individually making “use of distinct text modalities.” Each text-artefact a single reader uses represents an equally valid iteration of the “same” text, but the different qualia of each modality present different affordances for the individual reader, while presenting problems in a collecting reading group for “being on the same page.” A single example gives some idea of the importance of attending to text-artefacts as different embodiments, with different affordances, of the same text:
Cindy’s engagement with each iteration of this text—what might be called her reading of it—makes use of the specificities of its material form. The audio format is useful to her because she can listen to it while she does other activities that require her vision and her tactile engagement (cooking, cleaning). As with the digital format, the aesthetic qualities of the delivery are subsumed to the exigencies of daily life. The audiobook itself is rendered through an automated text-to-speech software included in the reading app.
Each text-artefact contains its own affordances as an “embodied, sensory engagement,” even as the variousness of the affordances of these text artefacts is ideologically backgrounded “to enable the ideological sameness of each interaction. But the dimensions of that sensory engagement are consequential for how the reader encounters the text—precisely because they have no impact on the content conveyed therein.”
Lastly, Tayob also attends to the variousness of the relation of a single term related to food consumption, Halal, in relation to multiple bodies, some human, some not. Whether something is or is not halal, for most consumers, is not something one can verify without some sort of chain of authentication, since halal is not experienceable as a quality. Traditionally, the category of halal meat is guaranteed by the fact that the butcher is Muslim, that is, by the presence of the body of the Muslim butcher (“We are Muslim, we slaughter halal”). But, apparently, this is not sufficient for some consumers, who demand to hear the recitation of the tasmiya (ritual invocation) audibly while witnessing the slaughter, much to the irritation of the butchers, for whom such a vocal display is not necessary for halal. The butcher’s predicament does not end with nosey customers who demand exact performance of rituals; for others, notably Hindu nationalists, the problem is the opposite, the body of the Muslim butcher, once the guarantor of halal is now rendered abject, polluting, an object of disgust and disdain: “the very sights, smells, and sounds of butchering are a sign of Muslim abjection, a source of disgust to be eradicated from the ‘world-class’ Hindu city.” Accordingly, from such a perspective, the chain of authentication of halal is not guaranteed by the body of the Muslim butcher, or even the recitation of the Tasmiya, but by relaying the chain of authentication through nonhuman certificates, rendering the now abject labour, and body, of the Muslim butcher invisible: “Indeed the Subway fast food outlet serves halal certified meat without the visible presence of Muslim bodies. Here, the Hindu Nationalist imagination of a cleansed city scape without Muslim bodies (Appadurai 2000), and butchers, is achieved through the halal certificate.”
This is a fascinating group of papers whose insights I have only briefly skimmed over, on such a diversity of different forms of “synaesthetic encounter,” which I can only hope that I have provided a large enough procrustean bed for them all.
Open access
