THE ROLE OF SENSES AND SIGNS IN THE ECONOMY

Abstract

Since some years back a number of scholars have argued that the analysis in social science, including the analysis of economic life, needs to take materiality into account. In this article, the author suggests that one way to do push the debate about materiality one step further would be to look at the role of the senses in mediating between outside materiality and the inside reality of the actor. Drawing on Georg Simmel's essay The Sociology of the Senses the author suggests how we may look at the senses from a sociological perspective; this article also discusses what an economic sociology of the senses might look like. In order to show the mechanism by which the senses operate when they mediate between outside materiality and inside reality, the author draws on the sign theory of philosopher Charles Peirce. The signs, and what they refer to, come together in the mind of the subject, Peirce argues. They also impact the subject, rather than the other way around.

Keywords:

• materiality
• senses
• signs
• semiotics

Notes

1. The idea that human beings have five senses has its origin in Greek thought and can most importantly be found in Aristotle (2006). Some Greek thinkers, including Socrates and Aristotle, felt that there also exists an additional sense that is hard to pin down and name. They referred to this as aesthēsis or a sense that is common to the other senses or/and the sense of feeling alive (e.g. Heller-Roazen 2009). It is today often argued that the number as well as the definitions of the senses is arbitrary. People's experience of pain and their capacity to navigate in space are among the candidates for additional senses. One could perhaps also talk of human beings being as endowed with a social sense; and one example of this would be Noelle-Neumann's famous argument about ‘the social skin’ (Noelle-Neumann 1993). For the senses in general, see e.g. Ackerman (1990), Jütte (2005), Smith (2007).

2. The section on the sociology of the senses in Soziologie (1908) is a few pages longer than the original 1907 version (Simmel 1992, 1997). Most of the new material, however, is devoted to a discussion of the relationship of sensuality to physical closeness.

3. There exists a debate in the secondary literature on Peirce on how to interpret what Peirce means by the term ‘determine’ in his theory of signs (see e.g. Short 2007, pp. 164–168). While my own view sharply differs from that of the consensus, in that I believe Peirce meant that ‘determine’ means ‘to cause’, his argument that the object is the actor (which is at issue here) is not challenged. Most discussions of Peirce's doctrine of signs seem to be more interested in presenting Peirce's ideas than to determine if these are useful for analytical purposes – and show why this is the case.

4. There exists a so-called signaling theory in modern economics, which originates with the work of Michael Spence. The focus in this type of analysis is on intentional signaling and asymmetric information, not on the broad type of signs that exist independently of the individual as in Peirce's work. For an overview of signaling theory, see Gambetta (2009).