Living corporeity is the intermediate element between nature and culture, which must be thought of as a reciprocal interconnection, since as corporeal beings we always move on a threshold. In the reflection of the bodily self, a doubling between the living body as a functioning subject and as a material object is revealed; after all, even one's own body sometimes takes on the features of a foreign body, as is the case in the experience of illness. In (...) the technical instrument, the body is prolonged and this highlights the connection between the technique of the thing and the technique of the self; however, despite the gradual autonomisation of the technical element from the living corporeity, there remains what escapes calculation and looms large in the subtraction of the alien. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Merleau Ponty understanding that the body is the medium of the field of awareness.

This paper 1) examines Husserl’s critique of presuppositions, a critique that realizes a desideratum of the Western philosophical tradition precisely by clarifying and grounding the latter’s own tacit presuppositions; 2) surveys Husserl’s descriptions of the apperceptions whose operative efficacy make tradition itself effective, holding good at both the individual and the generative levels; 3) identifies the need for a further critique of the psychophysical apperception in particular; and 4) offers a phenomenologically grounded alternative to the latter way of understanding and (...) experiencing embodiment. (shrink)

In thePeristephanon, a collection of hymns in praise of the Christian martyrs, the Spanish poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens refers back to a time more than a hundred years before he was writing, when Christianity was not the predominant influence in the Roman world but the religion of a beleaguered minority. In the course of Prudentius' lifetime, the trials that were suffered by that minority under emperors such as Decius and Diocletian became an important point of reference for increasing numbers of (...) Roman converts seeking to identify with Christianity and its sectarian past. At the time, however, those trials were recorded in only meagre written accounts. Prudentius, whose successful administrative career might have culminated in elevation to a senior position in the imperialscrinia, displays particular interest in the extent of the official archival material in thePeristephanon. In a number of passages in this work, he comments on the fragility of historical documents, which are easily destroyed by acts of malice or the effects of time. The following discussion will examine the ways in which he reflects on the permanence, or otherwise, of his own written texts. Analysis of his imitation of elegiac verse inscriptions will demonstrate how he draws attention to the inadequacy of even the most monumental types of human writing. But I will argue that, by identifying his poems with the martyrs' perishable bodies, Prudentius claims that they too can be a medium for a divine presence not confined to any perishable physical form. (shrink)

This paper explores the body-schematic and body-imaginative processes that underlie individuals’ participation in the public sphere via religious media ecologies. Utilising embodied cognition and social critique, the authors outline how subaltern counterpublics make use of the body to enact micro-oppositions to mainstream discourses. The paper also discloses the origins of higher objectivities (identity, sense of togetherness, justice, plausibility, opposition and openness) in embodiment. Discussing counterpublics through the prism of embodied cognition, as found in Latin religious media ecologies, (...) constitutes a valuable alternative to the logocentric understanding of public consent. While the dominant discourse privileges abstract formal cognition, Latino subalterns use bodily, affective and enactive affordances given by religious media ecologies. The latter offer affordances and alternative strategies for enacting social imagination, bridging the personal and the public in physically choreographed joint intentions. Embodied participation suggests a constitutive process of public meaning that makes use of the body as the most fundamental medium of communication. (shrink)

The subject matter of the article is focused on the senses in contemporary art. The author tries to find universal (or all-embracing) theory of senses aesthetics, which is totally new experience in contemporary art. Very important place in this article takes also body, which is undestand, especially by the artist, as a storage medium. Because body is as phenomenological presence.

Cellular and sub-cellular material become creative medium across a range of disciplines that engage with biotechnology, from medicine to art practice. Historically, these practices complicated the boundaries of the body through patriarchal and colonial narratives of abstraction and extraction. In contrast to the ethical requirements of anonymity in medical research, this article suggests that material culture has a duty to know the body it works with. Three brief histories of bodily donation are recounted and aspects of these (...) are contrasted with contemporary approaches to the use of bodily material within art practice. The developing project, Offering the Body, is offered as an example of performative practice that reintroduces a proximity to the body in biotechnological practices and begins to question whether through art practice, the biological body can move from commodity to be considered as a more-than-human resource. (shrink)

Félix Guattari spent his entire working life at La Borde psychiatric clinic where a radicalised form of psychoanalysis, ‘schizoanalysis’, was applied, based on the theory that emerged in Anti-Oedipus and was elaborated in A Thousand Plateaus. In the medium of this non-Oedipalised therapeutic plane lies the ‘body without organs, a body not fully organised but open to every form of expression and metamorphosis. The ideas and practice involved in schizoanalysis, which have now been in effect for fifty (...) years in every social and cultural field, have produced a new hybrid of Lacanian analysis and schizoanalysis, with the recent queering psychoanalysis expanding further the revolutionary character of the latter. The general logic and the determinate ideas of A Thousand Plateaus were applied as a reciprocal presupposition between content and form: free expression, interconnectedness, becoming-woman and -imperceptible, a deterritorialisation of models, roles and relations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation by Rachel DaviesRobin LandrithRachel Davies, Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. Xii + 187. $105.00. ISBN: 9781108485371. Rachel Davies's Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation finds in Bonaventure a resource for contemporary theological efforts to read embodied experience as a primary text. She argues that Bonaventure (...) supports these efforts by affirming the body as an aid to the soul in the whole self's sanctification. In her effort to read Bonaventure's account of the body in aesthetic terms, Davies argues that Bonaventure sees the suffering body as the site of the revelation of God's beauty. Distinguishing her reading from that of Hans Urs von Balthasar, however, Davies avoids suggesting that bodily suffering is beautiful per se (19–21), emphasizing instead the need to seek the beauty unique to bodily suffering "through" that suffering, looking toward its redemption (25). The beauty of suffering is beauty in potency—beautiful only insofar as it is grafted onto Christ's suffering, and, like Christ's suffering, only revealed as beautiful when it appears in the resurrected body. For Davies, the "deep logic" (32) by which Christ's suffering and resurrection transform human suffering permits hope that suffering can be made meaningful, but that same logic also refuses premature attempts to say how it will be made meaningful. Davies's argument is most persuasive when read as a mystical meditation on the beauty unique to human suffering—that is, as a theo-logical text in the formal sense. There is a pastoral sensitivity motivating her scholarly contribution. The book attempts to address "a common human struggle: the experience of bodily diminishment, which threatens to turn corporeality into a noetic obstacle rather than the communicative medium it was intended to be" (170). In some ways, Davies shows Bonaventure to be a useful resource in pursuit of this aim. At the same time, Bonaventure's works and milieu create conditions within which Davies's scholarly and pastoral theses occasionally work against each other. Davies first intends to highlight Bonaventure's (occasionally) favorable view [End Page 245] of the body—a view which stands apart from less-favorable assessments frequent in medieval theology (32). In doing so, Davies recovers an important, surprisingly tender, instance of medieval sensitivity to the soul's abandonment of the body in sin alongside medieval references to the body's rebellion against the soul. As a scholarly contribution, Davies's work draws attention to these existing, if at times undeveloped, intuitions within Bonaventure's account of the role of the body in the process of sanctification. Still, it is difficult to see an obvious pastoral application for the claim that the soul abandons the body when we consider cases of involuntary chronic or terminal suffering. Davies does not try to offer one, but neither does she address the fact that shifting the accent to the guilt of the soul in abandoning the body risks shifting the blame for suffering—even chronic suffering—to the sufferer herself. Davies by no means thinks the blame lies here. She is attentive to the challenges that such suffering presents to the sufferer. Indeed, it is to alleviate some of these challenges that Davies emphasizes the mystical, rather than imitative, aspect of Bonaventure's account of the effect of Christ's suffering on other instances of human suffering (109). She observes that Christ's "victory is a victory for the entire Church," which means that "those who cannot begin to imagine the transfiguration of their own sufferings, or direct their feelings toward any sort of fruitfulness, can at least consent to be carried along passively in Christ's return to the Father" (108). This "requires nothing but blind trust, and does not ask people to find meaning in their own suffering, or even to be at peace with it" (108). I am convinced by the pastoral merit of this point, and of the capacity of Bonaventure's mystical soteriology to sustain it. But the notion of an unconscious or unintentional transfiguration of suffering raises two further questions regarding attempts to apply Davies's... (shrink)

Through the medium of a brass candlestick made in a sixteenth-century German foundry, I discuss the Christian European household’s sensory engagement and spatial control of the Muslim body. I argue that the Europeans’ sensory experience of the turbaned candlestick reflects and reinforces their conceptualization of Islamic culture, which is a blend of fear and fascination. The turbaned candlestick allows us to explore issues rarely discussed in the study of metalwork and the European imagery of ‘the East’. The shape (...) and scale of the candlestick suggest that it could have been treated both as a statuette and as a piece of furniture. The inanimate candlestick would have felt livelier when the user touched its body and felt heat, flame, light and smoke from the candlestick. My analysis of the candlestick suggests that it might have been experienced through a comprehensive play of senses. (shrink)

In a context of pervasive digitalization of the social world, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the field of education has undergone major changes with the development of digital practices and settings. However, the physical presence of the subjects and the body remain something primordial and irreplaceable in traditional educational processes. Thus, it is often assumed that virtuality is opposed to the corporeal reality of the subjects involved in teaching, learning and studying. In this paper we aim to (...) critically challenge this assumption by addressing the phenomenon of virtuality in a more original sense: as a fundamental dimension of corporeality itself. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights, we argue that the experience of the virtual is inherently embodied and fully real. We understand corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena. At the same time, this leads us to rethink the digital as only one possible medium in which virtuality can appear as inherent to embodied experience. We develop our phenomenological approach in three instances. First, we question and bracket two common assumptions about corporeality. From our critical perspective, assumptions about a disembodied digitality and a devirtualized corporeality represent extremes within which educational discourses currently move. Second, we address the inherent virtuality of embodied experience. We outline the heuristic concept of the virtual body to describe corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena that encompass extension, intercorporeality and intermediality. Finally, we make some remarks on the relationships of corporeality and virtuality considering the challenges of digital education. (shrink)

This article considers the use of flag telegraphy by the US Signal Corps during the Civil War as it functioned as a proto-technical medium that preceded wire telegraphy as a military communications technology. Not only was flag telegraphy a historical step towards contemporary technical media, it was also an early iteration of the digitization of communication. Our treatment ties together three main theoretical threads as a way of seeing ‘the digital’ in material communication practices: (1) Friedrich Kittler’s concept of (...) technical media as a remediation between the 19th and 20th centuries, (2) Foucault’s docile bodies as means of reproducing culture, and (3) James Carey’s argument that the telegraph reconfigured communication. The Signal Corps is a rich historical moment in terms of media history and history of technology because it illustrates the convergence of historical exigencies at work in the war machine: mobility, secrecy, precision, and speed. Each contributes, we argue, to a digital telos that privileges digital ways of knowing and being. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the transformations in anatomical representation introduced by the Visible Human Project, the first complete virtual anatomy object. By comparing the process of production of book based classical anatomy with that of the Visible Human Project, the paper identifies the medium specificity of anatomical knowledge, the extent to which its powers of demonstration and analysis are conditioned by the medium in which they take place. The paper argues that anatomy can be productively thought of as a (...) kind of writing practice, in which material flesh is written into different media as traces. Because the production of such traces always involves the destruction of the body involved the paper also interrogates the biopolitical hierarchies involved in anatomical knowledge. (shrink)

In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty tells us of how the phenomenon unfolds and its unfolding is never complete: there is no total view of being to be had. Being as phenomenon is, because of this, non-objective: it is disclosed, as Heidegger would put it, in proportion to its being concealed. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty suggest, in their different ways, that this obscure counterpart to the disclosed world, forgotten in objective thought and instrumental rationality, is nonetheless shown, made visible, in art. (...) That is to say, paraphrasing Heidegger, that art shows the concealed as concealed. Conceptual art and its 'dematerialisation of the art object' that the art critic Lucy Lippard described during its early days, have not been readily associated with phenomenology, in part because conceptual art practices tended to be, as Lippard noted, 'non-visual'. Nonetheless, if one overlooks the apparent visual bias of Merleau-Ponty's treatment of art, then it becomes clear, as this paper set out to show, that Conceptual art's 'immaterial' or non-objective ontology is peculiarly congruent with the late Merleau-Ponty's account of the intertwining of the visible and the invisible. In particular this paper argued that the relevance to ecophenomonology of conceptual practices such as Richard Long's that consist in walking as medium and method, is not primarily in their thematising of nature or the body, but rather in their own ontological structure as open-ended and non-objective projects as opposed to their being directly perceptible objects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AQUINAS ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY MONTAGUE BROWN Saint Anselm College Manchester, New Hampshire THERE HAS BEEN much discussion in recent years bout whether or not the Christian doctrine of the resurection of the body can be rationally defended. The question "What happens after we die?" seems to have been raised by philosophers in every tradition. Materialists have answered that the corruption of the body (...) is the annihilation of the individual. Idealists or spiritualists have answered that the soul lives on without the body. Christians have traditionally held that the body is to be resurrected. Do Christians have any evidence, outside of the faith, for holding that there will be a resurrection? If the answer is no, then the doctrine of the resurrection of the body might rightly be ignored by anyone who is not a Christian. If the answer is yes, what is the evidence? There seem to be three basic ways of applying reason to questions about life after death and hence to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. One way is parapsychology. Through recording information from mediums and from those who have had experiences of being dead and reviving, statistical evidence is gathered to support the theory that there is life after death, and a description of what that life might be like is drawn up. Here the attempt is made to apply the scientific method of hypothesis and verification to the issue. A second way of applying reason to the issue is to assume through faith that the resurrection of the body is true and then try to show that such a position is not incoherent. 165 166 MONTAGUE BROWN This position attempts to show that it is not impossible to conceive of God resurrecting the body, that is, the concept does not involve a contradiction. A third way is to try to show, not only that the resurrection of the body is a coherent concept, but that it is true, that there is evidence upon which to base an argument which leads to the conclusion that the resurrection of the body is the best answer to what happens to us after death. This third position is that of St. Thomas Aquinas and will be the position defended in this paper. Let me just briefly sketch Thomas's position at this point. Thomas arrives at his position on the resurrection of the body by considering evidences which are discovered in reflecting on what it is to be human. On the one hand, we exercise an immaterial activity, thinking, which means that we have a faculty whose operation transcends the body and therefore is not corrupted when the body is. Thus, the rational soul is an incorruptible substance. On the other hand, this incorruptible substance is the form of the body, naturally requiring the body for its perfection. It is I who thinks and senses, not my soul in one case and my body in the other. Instead of reading this pair of evidences as mutually exclusive options requiring a choice (which choice would entail absurdly denying one or the other of these fundamental aspects of human nature), Aquinas acknowledges both evidences and finds in them reason to affirm the resurrection of the body. The structure of the paper will be as follows. In the first section of this essay I shall examine the current literature on the reasonableness of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In the second part I shall look at the philosophical arguments which establish the apparently contrary evidences indicating that the human being has an incorruptible soul and yet is a unity of body and soul. Part three will involve an examination of Aquinas's reasons for affirming the resurrection of the body. And in the fourth and final section, some fundamental objections will be entertained concerning difficulties in holding that the body is AQUINAS ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY 167 to be resurrected, particularly the problems of the continuity of the individual and the possible encroachment of philosophy into the realms of theology and grace. I As has been said, there appear to be three ways to apply reason to what happens after we die... (shrink)

Embodiment as a compelling way to rethink the nature of teaching and learning asks participants to see fundamentally what is at stake within teaching/learning situations, encountering ourselves and our relations to others/otherness. Drawing predominantly on the thinking of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty the body's role within teaching and learning is enfleshed through the concrete experiences of one middle-school science teacher attempting to teach for greater student inquiry. Personal, embodied understandings of the lived terms of inquiry enable the science (...) teacher to seek out the lived terms of inquiry in her classroom alongside students. Theories are taken up as working notions for the teacher to examine as philosophical/theoretical/pragmatic processes to be worked with, and concomitantly, working as dynamic practice at the core of the teacher's thinking and experiences. The theory/practice conjuncture of inquiry is thus enfleshed, gaining embodied understandings. Embodiment as the medium enhancing comprehension is evidenced as holding worthy implications for teacher education. Teacher education must fall into trust with the body's role in teaching and learning. (shrink)

Embodiment as a compelling way to rethink the nature of teaching and learning asks participants to see fundamentally what is at stake within teaching/learning situations, encountering ourselves and our relations to others/otherness. Drawing predominantly on the thinking of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty the body's role within teaching and learning is enfleshed through the concrete experiences of one middle‐school science teacher attempting to teach for greater student inquiry. Personal, embodied understandings of the lived terms of inquiry enable the science (...) teacher to seek out the lived terms of inquiry in her classroom alongside students. Theories are taken up as working notions for the teacher to examine as philosophical/theoretical/pragmatic processes to be worked with, and concomitantly, working as dynamic practice at the core of the teacher's thinking and experiences. The theory/practice conjuncture of inquiry is thus enfleshed, gaining embodied understandings. Embodiment as the medium enhancing comprehension is evidenced as holding worthy implications for teacher education. Teacher education must fall into trust with the body's role in teaching and learning. (shrink)

e medium and the revolution exclude each other, insofar as two kinds of violence, restlessly ghting for domination, collide. e ght is a ght for the ght itself. e violence of the medium can namely suppress the ght the revolution needs. e violence of this suppression of violence, the violence of nonviolence produces the psycho-somatic state of depression. In this depression the body is drawn together, onto itself. It does not experience anything anymore. e violence of »the (...) ancient« directs itself therefore only towards itself alone. us the immediate and its origin are veiled. e medium excludes them. e origin cannot return, it remains in absence. e violence of the revolution cannot awaken anymore. e absence of the revolution is the absent origin itself. (shrink)

In the 1950s and 60s, Martin Heidegger turned to sculpture to rethink the relationship between bodies and space and the role of art in our lives. In his texts on the subject—a catalog contribution for an Ernst Barlach exhibition, a speech at a gallery opening for Bernhard Heiliger, a lecture on bas-relief depictions of Athena, and a collaboration with Eduardo Chillida—he formulates his later aesthetic theory, a thinking of relationality. Against a traditional view of space as an empty container for (...) discrete bodies, these writings understand the body as already beyond itself in a world of relations and conceive of space as a material medium of relational contact. Sculpture shows us how we belong to the world, a world in the midst of a technological process of uprooting and homelessness. Heidegger suggests how we can still find room to dwell therein. Filled with illustrations of works that Heidegger encountered or considered, _Heidegger Among the Sculptors_ makes a singular contribution to the philosophy of sculpture. (shrink)

Recalling a public lecture that Georg Simmel gave in Berlin in 1910, Paul Fechter described him as `philosophizing with his whole body'. This article focuses on the role of the communicative body in the production, reproduction and reception of sociological ideas by investigating the dissemination of Simmel's sociological thought through the medium of the lecture. It utilizes contemporary reports of Simmel's lecturing style as observational data, and his own writings on the `Sociology of the Senses' and the (...) `Aesthetic Importance of the Face' as a theoretical framework. This examination of Simmel's lectures, focusing on both physiognomic expression and perception, reveals that the lecture as a complex communicative event is structured on a dialectic of closeness and distance. (shrink)

The Visible Medium. Opaque Interface and Non-Mimetic Immersivity -/- The relation of reciprocal co-implication that Merleau-Ponty formulates—and on which he insists throughout his work—between sense and the sensible, perception and expression, and then visible and invisible, transforms the way in which one conceives of the medium. Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics reveals an idea of the medium as a support that erases itself in the act of conveying the signifi cation and also shakes the direct correlation between transparency and mimetic (...) simulation. Understood as the sensible thickness of the body opening onto the world, then as depth and écart that catalyzes vision, the medium, then, furnishes one of the defi nitions of fl esh, as the element of auto-mediation: connective tissue or fabric of communication that is at once écart and internal difference. Merleau-Ponty conceives of the medium as both that which renders and that which is rendered visible. It is therefore no longer an intermediary; it ceases to be an invisible mediator and becomes the opaque element that reveals in fi ligree the movement of gestaltic difference. It is from such a Merleau-Pontian conception of medium that one can begin to elaborate the complex issues posed by mediality in the post-medial age. The idea of a “visible medium” permits us to break with the confl ation of the simulation’s immersive effect and performance, which often informs the rhetoric concerning medias and new technologies, in order rather to think of an “opaque interface” or an “non-mimetic immersivity.” From such a conception of mediality we can equally understand the phenomenon of numerical convergence, not as the accomplishment of the suppression or dematerialization of the medium, as is the case with traditional theories, but as the point of departure for a return to the body as the condition of possibility for every aesthetic experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Like no other medium, virtual reality (VR) offers new possibilities to alter the perception of reality. These possibilities are mainly related to the feeling of presence in a virtual environment. With the VR performance ‘The Machine to be Another’ (TMTBA), we find an innovative embodiment system that enables a virtual body swap between two users. Hence, we conceptualise the performance as some kind of breaching experiment in order to alter self- and body perception. With the use (...) of TMTBA and a qualitative research approach, we hope to gain a closer insight into the formation, alteration and persistence of body images. This challenges the phenomenological idea that our sense of bodily presence is essentially anchored in our physical or ‘objective’ body as we know it and seems to potentially expand our notion of what bodily presence can mean. (shrink)

This paper will discuss how the theological turn within phenomenology has contributed to the further development of discussions concerning Husserl’s distinction between the lived body of the “flesh” and the extrinsically manifest “seen” body by re-appropriating Christianity’s emphasis upon incarnation, as exemplified in the work of Michel Henry and Emmanuel Falque. For Henry, an additional “reduction to the flesh” must be enacted in order to overcome the dualistic opposition between “phenomenal body” on the one hand, and the (...) living medium of flesh on the other, for the sake of returning to the original givenness of life. Yet, Falque criticizes Henry’s position as a kind of monism, just as problematic as the very dichotomy which it aims to criticize. Falque argues instead that the flesh must always be incorporated, “given back” to the body as a unity, possessing not only affect and life, but also solidity and visibility. (shrink)

Science at the Club explores the architecture of the nightclub space as a nucleus for queer testimony, relating it to a judiciary courtroom. This performance challenges legal doctrines of forensic identification and the binary of life and death, by transforming biological and forensic material into ephemeral essences within the performance of the dance floor. Divided into a case study surrounding my performances at nightclubs, research courses taken in human remains recovery and visits to various burial sites of South Texas, I (...) pull from a variety of interdisciplinary studies relating to queer death theory, building on José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of ‘disidentification’ in relation to the human corpse, racial politics in science and the biological arts in a nightclub context. Science at the Club creates a catalyst platform challenging racial and scientific histories of the body and land within the current US political climate, while exploring questions of resurrection and disintegration with a focus on the language of forensics and identity. (shrink)

Using touch as a medium for exploring the ways in which it is constructed by nurses, the body is here characterized by a plethora of competing and co‐existing terms: disobedient, obedient, mirroring, stigmatized, sinful, post‐mortem, sanitized, angelic, desexualized, dangerous, dominant, dominating, deceitful, submissive, disciplined, postmodern and communicative. We have tried to be provocative by juxtaposing contradictory messages and evoking conflicting emotions, and we hope that the reader will not assume that we believe everything we write, or that everything (...) may be taken only at face value. There are as many messages and meanings in the paper as each reader thinks there are. (shrink)

The main goal of this article consists in addressing two fundamental issues of consciousness research and cognitive science, namely, the question of why declarative memory functions are inextricably linked with phenomenal awareness and the question of the physical basis of memory traces. The presented approach proposes that high-level cognitive processes involving consciousness employ a universal mechanism by means of which they access and modulate an omnipresent background field that is identified with the zero-point field (ZPF) specified by stochastic electrodynamics, a (...) branch of physics that deals with the universal principles underlying quantum systems. In addition to its known physical properties and memory capacities, the ZPF is hypothesized to be an immanently sentient medium. It is propounded that linking up to a particular field mode of the ZPF activates a particular phenomenal nuance, implying that the phase-locked coupling of a set of field modes, i.e., the formation of a so-called ZPF information state, constitutes an appropriate mechanism for the amalgamation of elementary shades of consciousness into a complex state of consciousness. Since quantum systems rest exactly on this mechanism, conscious memory processes in the brain are expected to differ from unconscious processes by the presence of the typical features of many-body quantum systems, particularly long-range coherence and attractor formation, which is supported by a huge body of empirical evidence. On this basis, the conceptual framework set out in this article paves the way for a new understanding of the brain as a write-read head interacting with the ZPF, leading to self-consistent interpretations of the neural correlates of memory formation and memory retrieval and explaining why these memory processes are closely intertwined with phenomenal awareness. In particular, the neural correlates suggest that the brain produces consciously perceived memory traces by writing sequences of information states into the ZPF and retrieves consciously experienced memory traces by reading sequences of information states from the ZPF. Using these theoretical foundations, altered states of consciousness and memory disorders can be traced back to impairments of the ZPF write-read mechanism. The mechanism should reveal itself through characteristic photon emissions, resulting in testable predictions. (shrink)

This article examines Artaud's 1920s cinema texts, arguing that like other theorists writing at the time, Artaud envisaged the medium of cinema as capable of forging new types of corporeal experience, both through the types of bodies that were portrayed onscreen, and their relationship to the body of the audience, conceived as collective force rather than an individual spectator. It pays particular attention to Artaud's theories of corporeal materiality, and argues that these are relevant to more recent approaches (...) to embodiment and identification in film studies. Whilst Artaud never successfully put his own cinematic theories into practice, these are discussed in relation to Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc ( La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc , 1928), a film which puts distinctions between bodies into question in an unprecedented manner. Finally, through an analysis of the various different critical interpretations of Dreyer's film, the article considers the difficulties inherent in the notion of a universally intelligible affective body, arguing that there is a distinction to be made between a fascist appropriation of collective affect, and a type of body that overcomes the boundaries between self and other. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

Like the human mind, the human body is the medium by which we represent ourselves, whether we are patients or healthcare providers. This paper concerns the significance of understanding the existential phenomenological side of a patient’s body within healthcare. To care for a patient’s body, one needs to be aware of how the body appears to itself, to others, and in a lager environmental reality. We think and feel and observe the world with our (...) class='Hi'>body, especially with the brain and nervous system, but also with other dimensions of the body manifesting itself as a somatic tonus. The healthcare providers’ body does not only represent a profession, but also who they are as a person and what kind of environment they are affected by. The same applies to the patients' body. As a tool for experiencing, a tool inseparable from our very being, our physical body functions as a surface open to and in contact with the healthcare environment that surrounds it. In the modern healthcare regime, the human body is nearly always visible and under constant surveillance. In the environment of control and visibility bodies become psychologized and normalized to fit into sociocultural demands of economic adaption, social participation, and communication, which in certain situations seem hostile to the ideology of care, freedom, and humanity. We should realize that all our ethical concepts and norms, even the very notion of humanity that underwrites them, depend on social forms of life involving the ways we experience our bodies in different medical and sociocultural situations. (shrink)

In this chapter what I call the “backside” of habit is explored. I am interested in the philosophical implications of the physical and physiological processes that mediate, and which allow for what comes to appear as almost magic; namely the various sensorimotor associations and integrations that allows us to replay our past experiences, and to in a certain sense perceive potential futures, and to act and bring about anticipated outcomes – without quite knowing how. Thus, the term “backside” is meant (...) to refer both the actual mediation and the epistemic opacity of these backstage intermediaries that allow for the front stage magic. The question is if the epistemic complexities around sensorimotor mediation gives us valuable insights into the nature of human agency and further how it might begin to show us new ways to think of the mind as truly embodied yet not reducible to any finite body-as-object. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Image of the Performing BodyEric C. Mullis (bio)Elsewhere I have discussed the principles of embodied expression that are developed in the practice of the performance arts—dance and theatre.1 These principles, it was argued, disclose the work that must be done in order to transform the human body into an aesthetically expressive medium. That is, precarious balance, the interplay of oppositional energies, and the compression of energy (...) must be mastered if a performance artist is to overcome the artifice of the stage and develop scenic presence. However, in that essay I said little regarding the manner in which the body acquires these skills and little about the effects that the transformation has on the artist's experience of embodiment. I would like to continue here by discussing how the body is modified in the process of developing the skill sets necessary for performance as well as how this developmental process affects the performer's corporeal experience. More specifically, I will draw on the notions of the body schema and the body image in order to clarify how the body can be transformed into an aesthetically expressive medium. In the first section I discuss the functions of the body image and body schema as well as the nature of their interaction. In the second section I discuss what relevance these concepts have for our understanding of the skill acquisition process. Finally, since the points made in the first two sections can be applied to non-peformative practices (such as sport, yoga, and martial arts) the last section focuses on the performance arts by discussing how the body schema and body image are developed in order to create a space of effective gesture.Body Image and Body SchemaShaun Gallagher argues that "The body image consists of a complex set of intentional states and dispositions—perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes—in [End Page 62] which the intentional object is one's own body."2 That is, there are three kinds of intentional content that constitute the body image—the body percept, the body concept, and the body affect. The image of my body is rooted in sensorimotor and kinesthetic perceptions, specific beliefs about my body, as well as emotions that often arise in response to such beliefs. Perception gives me a sense of the condition of my body at any point in time, while conceptions build upon perceptual content and allow one to understand the nature of one's embodiment. For example, the belief that the body is akin to a machine that can run well, break down, be diagnosed, and repaired is widespread since it is based in a widely accepted philosophy of medicine. That is, the body is often conceived as a thing that must be fixed by those who have the expertise that allows them to understand its intricate systems and processes. This example not only gives us insight into the perceptual and conceptual content of the body image but also demonstrates that beliefs about the body are conditioned by culture. This latter point is also supported by observations regarding the manner in which the body is invested with emotion. For example, some may feel frustrated with their bodies since they do not meet social standards of beauty, while others experience the joys of physical competition and accomplishment that are brought about by participating in widely practiced games. This brief discussion illustrates that the image that one has of one's body is a synthesis of perceptual experience, beliefs about the nature of one's body, and emotional responses.In 1911 Head and Holmes defined the body schema as the postural model of the body.3 In this account, the body schema functions by continually comparing the body's present posture to those held in the immediate past. That is, at the preconscious level, the schema provides a standard against which changes in posture can be judged. It must be stressed that the body schema functions below the surface of consciousness and, unlike the body image, does not include perceptions, attitudes, or beliefs about the body and is consequently not subject to cultural influence. Gallagher notes that the body schema "is a system of sensory-motor... (shrink)

In this incisive study of the biological and cultural origins of the human self, the author challenges readers to re-think ideas about the self and consciousness as being exclusive to humans. In their place, he expounds a metatheoretical approach to the self as a purposeful system of extended cognition common to animal life: the invisible medium maintaining mind, body and environment as an integrated 'field of being'. Supported by recent research in evolutionary and developmental studies together with related (...) discoveries in animal behavior and the neurosciences, the author examines the factors that have shaped the evolution of the animal self across widely different species and times, through to the modern, technologically enmeshed human self; the differences between which are presented as relations of degree rather than absolute differences. Much like our primitive ancestors, he contends, routine human behaviour is governed more by unconscious instinct than self-conscious rationality, and is generally resistant to any major changes in customary habits of life, until compelled in time to do so. However, in extreme and rapidly evolving circumstances, as with climate change, tardy responses may become so detached from reality as to constitute an actual threat to survival. (shrink)

Dance anthropologists and ethnomusicologists are trained to treat the labels ‘dance’ and ‘music’ with caution, because the terms carry preconceptions that may mask significant aspects of the structured movement/sound systems they study. Yet many talk about ‘the body’ – the medium through which these systems come into being – as something given and ‘true’, without investigating its emic conceptualizations or looking into the implications these may have in terms of how music and dance are experienced. The article investigates (...) the dancing bodies of western ballet dancers and of Tiwi dancers of northern Australia. The latter have an extensive vocabulary for body parts, but no word for ‘body’ as a bounded entity, comparable to the ‘body’ conceptualized by ballet dancers. The article argues that for the Tiwi landscape and human bodies are unavoidably tied together and that the dancers incarnate both land and cosmology. While specific parts have a concrete practical existence, the whole body expands into the landscape so that the landscape becomes flesh. Through the aesthetic transformation of dancing, dancers and land become one, and life is sustained and the land revitalized. (shrink)

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body (...) Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life. (shrink)

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic (...) models. Renewing and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

This paper is prompted by the charge that the prevailing Western paradigm of medical knowledge is essentially Cartesian. Hence, illness, disease, disability, etc. are said to be conceived of in Cartesian terms. The paper attempts to make use of the critique of Cartesianism in medicine developed by certain commentators, notably Leder (1992), in order to expose Cartesian commitments in conceptions of disability. The paper also attempts to sketch an alternative conception of disability — one partly inspired by the work of (...) Merleau-Ponty. In particular, three key Cartesian claims are identified and subjected to criticism. These are as follows: (a) The claim that the body is an object, (b) what is termed here ‘the modularity thesis’, and (c) the claim that the body cannot be constitutive of the self (i.e. since the soul/mind/brain is). In opposition to these claims, it is argued that the body is properly viewed as a subject; that there are neither purely mental, nor purely physical disabilities; and that selves are constituted, at least in part, by their bodies. (shrink)

It is known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics—as usually understood at the present time—when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor. The observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor and the magnet, whereas the customary view draws a sharp distinction between the two cases in which either the one or the other of these bodies (...) is in motion. For if the magnet is in motion and the conductor at rest, there arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet an electric field with a certain definite energy, producing a current at the places where parts of the conductor are situated. But if the magnet is stationary and the conductor in motion, no electric field arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet. In the conductor, however, we find an electromotive force, to which in itself there is no corresponding energy, but which gives rise—assuming equality of relative motion in the two cases discussed—to electric currents of the same path and intensity as those produced by the electric forces in the former case. Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good.1 We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.. (shrink)

Body experience can be seen as the basis for the formation of the self-concept. The relation between body experience and self-concept is fundamental for human existence and is especially in focus in the fields of psychotherapy and movement activities . But body experience is a "data source" which is difficult to handle scientifically. Body experiences are based on "internal physical sensations" - which Gendlin also describes as the felt meaning or the felt sense, and is not (...) in opposition to phenomenology. To bridge the gap between internal sensations - which are the foundation of the creation of meaning - and language as the medium in both everyday and scientific communication, a form of visualisation technique is introduced to help to evoke descriptions and metaphors that are able to transform body experiences as the pre-reflective mode of information into language as the digital mode of information. Metaphors are the source domain for the target domain body experience . Through the presentation of an empirical project in the field of movement and sport, the theoretical reflections on the process of transforming body experience into language will be exemplified. (shrink)

Three metaphors appear to guide contemporary thinking about organ transplantation. Although the gift is the sanctioned metaphor for donating organs, the underlying perspective from the side of the state, authorities and the medical establishment often seems to be that the body shall rather be understood as a resource . The acute scarcity of organs, which generates a desperate demand in relation to a group of potential suppliers who are desperate to an equal extent, leads easily to the gift’s becoming, (...) in reality, not only a resource, but also a commodity . In this paper, the claim is made that a successful explication of the gift metaphor in the case of organ transplantation and a complementary defence of the ethical primacy of the giving of organs need to be grounded in a philosophical anthropology which considers the implications of embodiment in a different and more substantial way than is generally the case in contemporary bioethics. I show that Heidegger’s phenomenology offers such an alternative, with the help of which we can understand why body parts could and, indeed, under certain circumstances, should be given to others in need, but yet are neither resources nor properties to be sold. The phenomenological exploration in question is tied to fundamental questions about what kind of relationship we have to our own bodies, as well as about what kind of relationship we have to each other as human beings sharing the same being-in-the-world as embodied creatures. (shrink)

This article explores the rhythmic body with the example of the embodiment of the ‘bashment gal’ and the role she plays in the dancehall sound system session. It considers rhythm as an energetic patterning process operating both within and between media. Rhythm provides a means of communication and making sense that does not rely on representation or code. There are three elements to performance techniques of the rhythmic body – amplification, inflection and transduction. Amplification for the bashment gal’s (...) performance techniques involves increasing the size or effort of her dance movements, dancing in a chorus line accelerating her tempo. In what is considered as a hyper-sexualized arena of the dancehall session, it is argued that the bashment gal has to be understood in terms of African traditions where sexual pleasure and fertility are not separate. With rhythmic inflection the bashment gal gives distinctiveness to her performance, as is much prized in the style and fashion of the dancehall scene. The transduction of patterning from one medium to another, via tympanic surfaces, helps to forge the sound system session and the bashment gal as a rhythmic whole and fosters her sense of identity as a rhythmic body. (shrink)

Husserl's phenomenology of the body constantly faces issues of demarcation: between phenomenology and ontology, soul and spirit, consciousness and brain, conditionality and causality. It also shows that Husserl was eager to cross the borders of transcendental phenomenology when the phenomena under investigation made it necessary. Considering the details of his description of bodily sensations and bodily behaviour from a Merleau-Pontian perspective allows one also to realise how Husserl (unlike Heidegger) fruitfully explores a phenomenological field located between a science of (...) pure consciousness and the natural sciences. A phenomenological discussion of naturalism thus cannot limit itself to the task of discrimination, it must attempt to integrate what an eidetic analysis has separated: inside and outside, here and there, first-person and third-person perspective, motivation and causality. Husserl's phenomenology of the body thus shows that dualism is at best a methodological but never an ontological option for the mind-body problem. (shrink)

In his paper, Jakob Hohwy outlines a theory of the brain as an organ for prediction-error minimization, which he claims has the potential to profoundly alter our understanding of mind and cognition. One manner in which our understanding of the mind is altered, according to PEM, stems from the neurocentric conception of the mind that falls out of the framework, which portrays the mind as “inferentially-secluded” from its environment. This in turn leads Hohwy to reject certain theses of embodied cognition. (...) Focusing on this aspect of Hohwy’s argument, we first outline the key components of the PEM framework such as the “evidentiary boundary,” before looking at why this leads Hohwy to reject certain theses of embodied cognition. We will argue that although Hohwy may be correct to reject specific theses of embodied cognition, others are in fact implied by the PEM framework and may contribute to its development. We present the metaphor of the “body as a laboratory” in order to highlight wha... (shrink)

Based on Merleau-Pontys’s philosophy of flesh, this paper outlines possibilities for organisational practices towards sustainability development. In order to elucidate these en-fleshed practices, the paper begins by presenting Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and perception as well as his ontology of ‘flesh’. In particular, flesh is interpreted as elemental ‘carnality’ and formative medium. As such, it is processed through sensual and reflexive doubling as a reversibility and chiasm of the sentient and the sensible. This understanding opens for the (...) path to a post-dualistic, transformative approach towards processes of post-dualistic ‘wild being and ‘inter-be(com)ing’ in organisations. These concepts of Flesh are related to affect and imagination as well as organization and sustainability. The paper then offers some practical and political as well as research implications and concludes with some final perspectives on possible enfleshed inter-practices of sustainability. (shrink)

This paper is prompted by the charge that the prevailing Western paradigm of medical knowledge is essentially Cartesian. Hence, illness, disease, disability, etc. are said to be conceived of in Cartesian terms. The paper attempts to make use of the critique of Cartesianism in medicine developed by certain commentators, notably Leder (1992), in order to expose Cartesian commitments in conceptions of disability. The paper also attempts to sketch an alternative conception of disability — one partly inspired by the work of (...) Merleau-Ponty. In particular, three key Cartesian claims are identified and subjected to criticism. These are as follows: (a) The claim that the body is an object, (b) what is termed here ‘the modularity thesis’, and (c) the claim that the body cannot be constitutive of the self (i.e. since the soul/mind/brain is). In opposition to these claims, it is argued that the body is properly viewed as a subject; that there are neither purely mental, nor purely physical disabilities; and that selves are constituted, at least in part, by their bodies. (shrink)

Of all the German idealists, Sartre refers the least to Fichte-so little in fact that there have been long-standing suspicions that he was not even familiar with Fichte's writings. It is perhaps ironic, then, that Fichte's writings are as helpful as they are for clarifying Sartre's views, especially his views on subjectivity and inter-subjectivity. Here I want to look closely at a key concept in Fichte's mature writings: the concept of the Anstoss, a concept which Dan Breazeale has called "Fichte's (...) original insight." Fichte introduces the Anstoss, or "check," to explain why the I posits the world as it does. In effect, the Anstoss is the occasion of the facticity of the I. I will show that his concept can be uniquely helpful in understanding the role the body plays in Sartre's theory of inter-subjectivity. The importance of Sartre's account of the body for his theory of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity has been chronically underappreciated by his interpreters; this comparison is the beginning of an attempt to rectify that. In turn the concept of the Anstoss provides a means for analyzing the necessary differences between any Sartrean and Fichtean ethics based on their respective accounts of inter-subjectivity. (shrink)

A partir de la consideración de la utopía como un ejercicio crítico de la realidad instituida, nos preguntamos por una posible relación entre el cuerpo y la utopía. Para llevar a cabo esta reflexión, hacemos uso de los trabajos de Arturo Andrés Roig en torno a la utopía y a sus funciones, lo que nos permitirá ver el rendimiento político que esta categoría tiene en Latinoamérica. Así, desde el análisis del discurso utópico que desarrolla Roig, buscamos mostrar el papel de (...) la dimensión corporal como portavoz de las demandas y de las reivindicaciones en un acontecimiento particular: las protestas Mapuche que tuvieron lugar en el territorio chileno en el año 2011. From the consideration of utopia as a critical exercise on instituted reality, we wonder about the possible relationship between the body and utopia. To carry out this analysis, we make use of Arturo Andrés Roig's works concerning to utopia and its functions, allowing us to see the political performance that this category has in Latin America. Thereby, from the analysis of the utopical discourse that Roig develops, we seek to show the role of the corporal dimension as an expression of the claims and demands in a particular event: the Mapuche's protest in Chile in 2011. (shrink)

This volume focuses on the development of empiricism as an interest in the body - as both the object of research and the subject of experience.

In this paper I re-evaluate Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term “measurant.” I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s “body as measurant” (VI 249/297) describes embodied perception as a tuning into and a dis-covering of a world that is never completely in its grasp. I dis-cover in the world objects and other persons, which sweep me away from the centre of the world and which offer me new perceptual dimensions. This relation does not necessarily imply agreement and harmony, but it suggests that all (...) our interactions, even those that are disharmonious and ambiguous, take place in a back-and-forth of response and transformation. (shrink)

Can paradoxical or ambiguous sexual identities and practices change, or even go beyond, the meanings of masculinity and femininity? In other words: can the body be a source of social change? To answer this question I turn to the work of two theorists: Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. After an account of their ideas, various sexual practices and identities will be described. The question is whether these practices and identities affect the meanings of masculinity and femininity. It will be (...) concluded that, even in our postmodern world with its technological opportunities the division into the two sexes is extraordinarily persistent. However, we can expect some change from the extension of the categories of masculinity and femininity, rather than from attempts to break free from them altogether. (shrink)