addressed in this book, it also includes the confluence of interior and
exterior spaces, discourses of generosity and nourishment, and engage-
ments with touch, taste, and scent.^72
The study of perceptual culture emphasizes reception over production,
replacing historicism with an accretion of experience best modeled
through duration. Henri Bergson (1859–1941) describes duration:
Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes
when our ego lets itselflive, when it refrains from separating its present state from
its former states...[it] forms both the past and the present states into an organic
whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one
another...[comparable] to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate
one another just because they are so closely connected.^73
Focusing on sensory concepts over individual works, the study of percep-
tual culture resists Hegelian historicism, and its recognition of art objects
as points at the intersection of temporal and spatial vectors. Valorizing
artistic context and intention, this practice paradoxically dehistoricizes the
historical mutability of meaning as objects traverse time and space.
Everything–texts as well as the books in which they are written; bowls
and decanters; mihrabs and mosques–transcend the moment of their
production. They may start with one meaning, become irrelevant, and
reemerge in an entirely new context. Objects are not, in themselves,
historical, yet histories accrue to them. It is the discipline of art history,
and its enactment in the museum, that historicizes objects, viewing linear
time as the primary mode through which to access culture frozen in the
past.
Emerging through discursive conditioning, perceptual culture reflects
reception rather than production. By immersing ourselves in discourse,
this analytical practice enables a sort of time travel: we can step into
a discursive framework through which to perceive the world other-wise,
while also not letting go of the attitudes and analyses that seem natural to
us as moderns. This expanded framework complicates the seemingly stable
premises of Western art history. Constructing a dialogue between regio-
nalizedfields, it undermines the structure of center and periphery inherent
to the additive globalization of art historical analysis. Along with other art
histories, Islamic art history should not constitute a ghetto, but enable
a critical engagement with ideas interacting across space and time.
(^72) Shortle, 2018 engages extensively with poetry, scent, and touch.
(^73) Pearson and Maoilearca, 2014 : 72.
Islam, Poetry, and Perceptual Culture 27