This article deploys Peircean approach to bodily skills, foregrounding motricity as a semiotically mediated and a “suprasubjective” process. By examining two contrasting skills – javelin and martial arts – I draw out the relevance of dynamic movement to the semiotics of sport and embodiment. These contrasting movements expose different epistemological assumptions since they emerge in distinct cultural traditions. To attend to the cultural dimension of movement practices – including the mediation of signs making certain movement forms seem reasonable or desirable (...) in the first place – I highlight ecological dimensions of each somatic tradition. This ecological focus aligns with Peirce’s project of tracking how semiotic signs are positioned and mediated. To make ecological factors of motricity more recognizable, I contrast somatic engagements that take place on synthetic, predictable substrates and somatic engagements that take place on variable, unpredictable ground. In a similar way to the classic gestalt figure-ground relations, where perception of a figure depends on the particulars of the ground, I suggest that the ground upon which somatic action occurs shapes the way we make sense of it epistemologically. These different grounds – both literally and figuratively – operate representationally via thirdness: they lead us to conceptualize movement in culturally and historically particular ways. (shrink)

Examining movement learning though Piercean semiotics, this article affirms the basic embodied notion that to utilize one’s body constitutes a form of thought. Through a case study that focuses on theorization of skilled movement in a Japanese martial art that has been transported into North America, I examine processes involved in somatic learning, including both ontological as well as epistemological aspects. I suggest that embodied skills are passed on through story telling, rather than through more conventional models of “passing down (...) information.” Learning somatic skills, or learning more generally, can thereby be conceptualized as a process of attuning judgment, in contrast to acquiring a set of internalized representations about the world. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The nature and the role of sensation sit at the heart of classic enlightenment debates about the nature of knowledge. While these debates, in their modern form, came into being several hundred years ago, many key words from them remain with us today. As a result, a number of culturally particular assumptions also remain as part of the semantic composition of these words. In the following, we examine such assumptions, particularly in (...) relation to sensoriality. We contrast the classic empiricist and rationalist views on sensation, including their broader epistemological stakes, and bring forth a third account through Peircean semiotics. We suggest that the classic debate between rationalists and empiricists can be re-examined by asking how repetition exists in the world. By thinking about the ontology of repetition, and by highlighting some of the basic semiotic principles of this, we suggest that sensoriality needs to be recognized as a dynamical system rather than a system that exists for the documenting of "what there is". In this account, neither sensoriality nor the nature of existence, including the physical world, are anchored toward absolutes on any level. This point, however, does not lead us toward rationalist claims about the non-importance of senses or the body, but toward recognition that while patterns and stability play a significant role in living systems, there is always room for plasticity and open-endedness. It is in this space between stability and change, where meaning is brought into being. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE. (shrink)