Grosz states “ It will my claim here that it is not exactly true that art is a consequence of the excesses that sexuality or the sexual drive posses, for it may be that sexuality itself needs to function artistically to be adequately sexual.” (p 64)This reversal in thinking, that sex needs artistic intensity in order to function at all, helped me to draw a stronger delineation between sexual evolution and natural selection. It is much easier for me to come to terms with the idea that sexuality needs art or excess, rather than the idea that art derives from the excess of sexuality. In this way art can “resonate just for itself” and sexual selection can utilize the intensified sensation.
I found it interesting that Grosz’s interpretation of sensation echoed some of Lingus’s writings on emotion. That although sensation is sensed in the perceiver, it does not live within us. Grosz discusses Straus’s distinction between perception and sensation, “Geography is the space of the map, that which is regulated by measurable abstract coordinates…Landscape by contrast is that space revealed by sensation, which has no fixed coordinates but transforms and moves as a body passes through it.” (p 72) It strikes me that this distinction is merely the difference between types of thinking, the later being based on emotional processing. It is my stance that emotion does not come from external sources. We turn to emotions or sensations in thinking that they provide a form of absolute truth, but how often are our emotions misleading, misguided by our perspective. By believing that sensations come from external sources, we again give power to this idea that there is a universal or “true” sensation that exists outside of our interpretation of it.
Grosz states that “Sensation is that which is transmitted from the force of an event to the nervous system of a living being and from the actions of this being back onto events.” (p 72) While I believe that this happens everyday and everywhere around us, I don’t feel enough emphasis is put the interpretation of that event. “That which is transmitted” can take any number of forms at the moment it is percieved. Grosz states “Just as space and time are not in us…so sensation is not in us either. We are in it whenever we sense, and it brings us to where sensation occurs, in the artwork itself.” While Grosz doesn’t make the claim that sensation is universal, if sensations are derived from ways of perceiving, aren’t they in us?