From Synaesthetic to Synthetic

Many years ago, almost forgotten, the art education department I currently chair used to be called the Department of Synaesthetic Education. Synaethesia is a physiological term, referring to the production of one kind of sensory or bodily response by stimulation of another sense or part of the body, that is, “the interassociation of sense impressions.” In the context of art education, synaesthesia was a romantic, patriarchic, and thoroughly modernist conception of children occupying a prized developmental stage shared in common with mature primitives and uninhibited (wild) or illiterate species of adults. Synaesthetic education was intended as the nurturing of a “dormant subconscious capacity to perceive simultaneously…the total sensory import of experience…through a more complete individual involvement” with the world. Not surprisingly, the faculty of the Department of Synaesthetic Education did not believe synaesthesia could be taught. They believed it to be a native capacity in children that could only be cultivated and preserved from atrophy, hopefully saving the child from the terrible sensory disassociation of adulthood.

I, on the other hand, do NOT see myself as a guide to the wild and untamed, controlling human destinies as if they were inert raw materials, civilizing the savage beast, shaping the wet clay of formless boys and girls with my own two bare-knuckled hands. The modernist narrative just doesn't work anymore. Enter the postmodern. I am interested in how we each, young or old, construct a shape for ourselves out of the bits and pieces at hand. I am interested in how we coalesce into aggregate bodies of social knowledge, constituted of physical bodies that embody and re-member experience as the basis of knowledge--and in how these bodies of social knowledge become the cultures that sustain us. And I am interested in our shape-shifting capacity, the meaning-making impulse to detach ourselves from expected patterns of behavior so that we may rush into the gaps in our own understandings.

In one of the final meetings of my third year faculty review this past academic year, I was asked if I thought my penchant for drawing upon the oft-competing bodies of knowledge comprising and surrounding arts education practice was synthetic. I thought about it a moment and said yes. And if I have helped move Syracuse University art education practices even further from the synaesthetic to the synthetic, I would say we are headed in the right direction.

~JHRolling