Caroline A. Jones’s essay “The Mediated Sensorium” historicizes discourse and common beliefs about the senses and their role in society. In the essay she establishes a hierarchy of the senses: odor is at the bottom, vision at the top, and the other senses range between. Jones gives an account of why this is, but what stood out out to me was her assessment of the visual/optical in society today. According to Jones’s essay the modernist privileging of the visual--which disembodies human minds--is still present in society, and still requires consideration even as we move forward into a world that is less wary of the other senses.

I’ve chosen this video because it has several moments where Daniela and Luis are beautifully connected with each other both in a tactile and auditory way, but the larger their dance gets the more that tactile connection is lost (it’s visible if you look for it)

“We still have to struggle to relinquish the visual ordination of intellectual knowledge” Jones states, and this reminded me of my experience with tango. As someone who spent most of her life reading--language being one of the optical forms--and quite a bit of it sitting in the classroom watching a teacher a. lecture or b. attempt to lead discussion with the aid of a whiteboard/chalk board and language. So when I was told I was going to need to close my eyes as a tango follow... well, I kept them open for at least a year of that advice. It wasn’t that I was stubborn, but I couldn’t handle being cut off from the visual world. To relinquish my sight would be to relinquish control, in my mind, and if I was going to be led around a floor I wanted to at least know where I was being led. Beyond fear for bodily harm, however, like Jones’s modern subject vision was my primary way of learning, of taking in information, and of interacting with the world. Without my vision I was severely handicapped. For a while I could hardly think with my eyes closed, and because closing my eyes caused me to be so disoriented I was a much better dancer with my eyes opened. No one seemed to take it too poorly, other than the occasional advice to close my eyes, but I remembered there was advice I wasn’t taking.

I would say there are a variety of ways that this primacy of vision manifests in tango, but also a variety of ways in which it is undermined, or at least brought into perspective.


One of the truisms of tango is that it should never be danced for an audience, the dance is between yourself, your partner, the floor, the other dancers on the floor, and the music, all of these are your partners and none of them are the people on the sidelines. There is a lot to be learned from watching, but the dance itself is more tactile and auditory than visual. This is particularly apparent in Hsueh-tze Lee’s dancing and workshops and private instruction, where she primarily teaches musicality and connection, and the bond between the two. Communication is done through physical contact at the chest, arms, and heads, although the dance itself comes from the feet and how they channel from the floor up through a body held as erect as possible while still being relaxed.Here the eyes only come into consideration for the lead, he must keep an eye on the flow of the dance floor and move with it. Ideally the flow of the dance floor has little to do with vision, however, mostly it should have to do with the music, moving to it and how both dancers interpret and physically interact.

For a lot of people how their dance looks takes precedence over how it feels, or even how it sounds. These are the people who move quickly across the dance floor, who take control of their partner--this can come from either the lead or the follow, if they have expectations that the dance will go a certain way, those expectations come through. Sometimes these dances are beautiful, but often they’re rushed, busy, and disconnected. To connect the idea that their mind is in the audience with Jones’s essay, this is because their minds cease to be with their bodies, and are somewhere on the periphery, watching, only that periphery isn’t their periphery anymore. Physically they are on the dance floor but intellectually they are somewhere else, consequently their mind ceases to be connected, and they forget that they are embodied. It’s also worth noting that the more performative the dance becomes the more dangerous it is for other dancers on the floor, another symptom of disembodiment. Ganchos (where the follow kicks back between the lead’s legs) aren’t allowed on social dance floors in Buenos Aires because there’s too much risk of kicking someone else, a traditional milonguera often denies even knowing ganchos, and it seems to offend their sensibilities to be asked about them. To be consumed by the visual side of the dance means the tactile aspect is ranked lower, and on a crowded dance floor forgetting the Narcissus syndrome Jones describes could lead to injury.