Sensual Significance

     We live in the age of information. Theories, hypothesis, discussions, opinions, logic, and reason, these things are the ruling factors of our education. In this well ordered colaberation of thought, there seems to be little room (or importance for that matter) of what we feel. In her article “Big Time Sensuality” Jenny Edbaur begs to differ. She argues that our “affect”, or what we feel when reading, watching, or even writing something can be just as importance as the ideology of the thing. She doesn't discount the importance of the ideology, or the “meaning” of what we read or see, but she states that the emotional connection (the affect) that people have with something gives it a meaning that cannot be expressed solely by the ideology. As an example she uses rock music. She relates the account of professor by the name of Grossberg, who tried to show the ideological meaning of rock music to his students. The students, however, were unimpressed, as Edbaur states, “the music mattered to students in spite of (or beyond) any ideological meaning either given to them or from them.”

      We don't appreciate the importance of affect. We are embarrassed of pleasure, of sensations. Often when we read or watch something solely because of the way it makes us feel we call it a “guilty pleasure”. If it's not intellectual or productive it is inherently “bad”. But that is what we crave, and why not? We are meant to experience this life, not just think our way through it; and just as we can't go through life based on passions and emotions alone, we cannot go through life being only a logical being. Some things can only be understood through the way it affects us, and in fact, almost all of the most memorable experiences of our lives are remembered, not because of what we thought during the experience, but of how we felt during the experience, the sensations we had. The most powerful movies or books we read are powerful for the same reasons. This can be seen as well in Edbaur's article. She described a student she had named Paul, who wrote papers and blog posts in a very sensual way, (not sexual, sensual, they are different things even if we don't always think of them as different). He put feeling into his writing and it made all the difference. Everyone loved what he wrote and wanted to write more like him.

     As Edbaur stated, if we really want our compositions an writing to make an impact, we get away from the “tyranny of ideological meaning alone” and focus more on how we feel.