The Historical Epistemology of Sensory Failure

One point of consensus within media studies is that sense is always technologically mediated and thus never 'natural.' Because of this, it is possible to give a history of the senses. Seeing, for example, means different things in different historical periods which depends at least in part on the dominant technological frame of reference accompanying that period.

This course explores the following provocation: is it likewise possible to give a history of sensory failure? Intuitively, we often associate terms such as “invisibility,” “opacity,” and “nonsensuousness” with an experience of nothing, which is their predicate. “I could not see anything” à “I saw nothing.” Because of this, sensory failure is often a site of non-thought within media studies — the limit of theory. Throughout this course, we will pursue the following question: what if sensory failure was always specific? What if “invisibility,” “opacity,” and “nonsensuousness” actually meant different things in different periods, just like their positive counterparts? The course engages a wide variety of literature from media studies, the history of science, and cinema studies in order to pursue an answer to these questions.