Embodied knowledge

Maison Française d'Oxford, March 2019

This paper is concerned with an alternative social history of the photobook; one that is audience-driven, focussing upon the viewer/reader’s embodied and intellectual photobook encounter. Although numerous historiographic accounts are constructing a photobook canon, the study of the photobook’s physical and perceptual encounter is central to these developing histories, since the photobook is intended as materially interactive in a far greater sense than the majority of photographic artworks.

The photobook occupies a unique position in the nexus between everyday book object and rarefied cultural product. The forums for its engagement vary significantly, from high street bookshops (or even charity shops), to rarefied spaces such as photobook awards and museum art libraries. Each environment attracts different motives for engagement aligned with the expectations and coded behaviours of that place, whether they be to purchase, to study, to not be touched or otherwise.

Howard Becker emphasises the contexts in which our interactions with art occur as mediating the structure of the artworld. This paper deciphers the complex experiential and situated phenomenon of a photobook encounter, through profiling a series of empirical pilot studies in which responses and behaviours towards contemporary photobooks in different contexts are considered. These contexts include individual and group encounters in the university, the specialist gallery bookshop, the photography fair and the National Art Library.

Informed by varied phenomenological and sociological literature, the resulting observations are organised into a series of theoretical statements that address progressively complex actors involved in the photobook encounter. These statements range from the necessity of a temporal and spatial situation, through the apprehension of narrative and the role of the haptic, to the plurality (à la Law, Mol, Barad) of an encounter with a photobook published in multiple; overall demonstrating the diversity of the photobook’s material experience.

Neste capítulo, apresento e sustento uma articulação da noção de habilidade corporal ou sensoriomotora a partir da psicologia ecológica e mostro como ela é relevante para o debate entre Dreyfus e McDowell sobre a lida habilidosa e também para o debate sobre se saber-fazer se reduz ou não a conhecimento proposicional. A metáfora correta para compreender habilidades corporais não é a do computador, mas a do rádio. Essas habilidades resultam de um processo de sintonização do organismo com o seu ambiente.

The coppersmith artisan Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas of Santa Clara del Cobre with whom I apprenticed insisted on the ‘un-finishable.’ In many ways, essentially, he instructed me in the un- finishing of things. He taught me that perfecting is infinite, and infinitely an unraveling. An un- finishing.

In this paper, we draw on our personal experiences with the perpetuating gender bias in (early-career) academia, more specifically within geography. We develop two main arguments. First, we argue that everyday academic practices stand in sharp contrast with the critical content geography, as a discipline, aims to study and teach - including its feminist, anti-colonial, and queer understandings. Strikingly, geography as a field does not seem able to apply its academic insights into its internal organisation. Indeed, everyday academic practices within geography reproduce structural gendered inequalities. Consequently, geography reproduces the historical ‘maleness’ of the discipline, both in terms of who embodies it and through the methods and topics it focuses on. Second, we reflect on the strategies we develop to denounce and alter the unjust practices we are confronted with. Yet, these strategies reveal the double bind early career women face, as these very strategies may risk to undermine one’s own precarious position, or to give the skewed impression of reproducing the male, disembodied ideal we are fighting.

This essay defends a qualified version of Quine’s thesis of universal revisability against David Chalmers’s recent conditionalization-based criticisms of it. It is argued that an embodied view of cognitive processing undermines Chalmers’s account of nonrevisable a priori justification, which presupposes that concepts prefigure the confirmation-relations into which they enter so as to make such relations rationally accessible to anyone who possesses those concepts. On the view developed here, bodily interaction with the world and the accompanying subconscious processing can change subjects’ dispositions to apply their concepts in ways that are not rationally accessible to them, even given a complete description of that interaction, and do not constitute a change in the content of the concepts involved. Thus a subject who treats a proposition as indefeasibly justified a priori might nevertheless significantly lower her credence in that proposition, in ways that are not accessible to the subject on the basis of her grasp of the content of the relevant concepts. This discussion has further implications concerning the role of the a priori in the philosophical enterprise.

Call for Papers für eine Session der ÖGS-Sektion Körper- und Emotionssoziologie auf dem Kongress der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Soziologie 2019 „Alles im Wandel? Dynamiken und Kontinuitäten moderner Gesellschaften“, 26.–28.09.2019, Salzburg

What does it mean to be an embodied thinker of abstract concepts?  Does embodiment shape the character and quality of our understanding of universals such as 'dog' and 'beauty', and would a non-embodied mind understand such concepts differently?  I examine these questions through the lens of Thomas Aquinas’s remarks on the differences between embodied (human) intellects and non-embodied (angelic) intellects. In Aquinas, I argue, the difference between embodied and non-embodied intellection of extramental realities is rooted in the fact that embodied and non-embodied intellects grasp different kinds of universals by means of different kinds of intelligible species (intellectual likenesses), which elicit in them different “modes” of understanding. By spelling out what exactly it means to be an embodied knower, on Aquinas’s account, I argue, we can also shed new light on his mysterious claim that the embodied intellect “turns to phantasms”—the imagination’s likenesses of individuals—in its acts of understanding.

Spontaneity is the result of autonomously learned (acquired) ‘knowledge’ and rationality is the result of taught knowledge. In rational behavior, the mind plans and the body executes whereas in spontaneous action the body and the mind function together. The idea of ‘method’ comes from the notion that the mind can be taught first and then applied. So spontaneity is a result of body and mind together engaging with the world- learning while doing and rational act is when the mind learns first and the body is taught later. So in spontaneous action, there is no conscious reasoning but the reason is inherent and integral to the act.
In order to ‘understand’ spontaneous behavior, the rational people need to break it down to its parts and isolate the tangible and drop the intangible. Dealing with the spontaneous and the organic is an impossible task for the 'rational' people. It is for this reason that all the experiments that are being done to ‘understand’ nature is dealt with very planned activities. Take any experiment devised to understand any animal, not just the wild but even the domesticated or even children for that matter, are all devised in a preplanned manner for an either-or answer. The questions and activities are devised within the format of the ‘known, leaving hardly any space for encountering the unknown.
In a way, spontaneous is the seamless integration of the unplanned and the planned (or the integration of the rationality and the irrationality) which is the way life functions. Or maybe the ‘planning’ is so spontaneous that it becomes invisible. In this case, the rational is inbuilt and inherent. The body and mind function together.

Once, I happened to watch two people swimming and noticed that one's actions were totally spontaneous whereas the other person seemed to think and act, kind of mechanical. Sure enough, when I enquired I found out that the first one was self-taught and the second person was taught by a coach. Self-taught is a way of expression that we have started using after we 'invented' teaching-both the word and the act. Actually ' self-taught' in this case really means that it is the water that taught the person to swim. The person began to respond to the water as a whole (mind and body together), each moment attentively learning from water what to do next. The mind is totally present with the body and here thought doesn't seem to have any role. Whereas the one taught by the coach had to break down the learning, giving priority to the mind because the coach first taught the mind with the help of language and then the student taught the body how to act. Seeing (sometimes even without seeing) and doing (learning) is different from instructing/ thinking/ understanding and then doing. In the first case, language does not come in as the primary source of knowledge whereas in the second case the teaching and instruction are happening in language. So here the mind learns first and then the body executes the action. In autonomous learning, the feedback is internal and experiential whereas in teaching the feedback is external and in language. With the mind and body thus fragmented and distanced, time entered our being. From timelessness, we got trapped in time. I remember reading an anthropologists description of how these two cultures cross a river. In the case of the rational cultures first thing is to study various factors like the direction of the wind, the strength of the flow, variations in this at particular time etc etc and after a thorough study the total plan is made. Start at so and so time in this direction and at another point change the direction etc and several mental rehearsals and then they set out to do the act. So the mind does the act first and the body obeys the mind. In case of spontaneous cultures learning happens while in the act. Of course, they are indeed familiar with the river. They have been living there and 'knowing' the river without any conscious learning. Two other situations worth exploring are one the football game and the traffic. In the case of football, the Brazilians are extremely spontaneous whereas the Germans and England etc are very rational in their moves. Even within Europe, one can see the difference between Spain, Italy-more spontaneous-on one side and North Europeans on the other. 'Rational' football looks like chess being played. When you watch..........

In cognitive and educational sciences, the writing process is an incessantly debated area, particularly when it comes to the newer methods of writing on keyboards and touchscreen devices. Despite controversies, learning through writing with digital devices remains an overlooked area of cognition. To address this gap, in this study, an embodied knowledge construction model that merges Hayes’ framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing with Wilson’s six aspects of embodied cognition was tested among six 16-year-old adolescents. The data comprised memory tests written with a pencil, laptop keyboard, mobile phone touch screen keyboard and a questionnaire. The purpose was to not only examine the adolescents’ recollection after one week of writing stories with these three modalities but also reflect and examine issues affecting the results, which would help develop and validate the embodied knowledge construction model. The results indicate that valuable information was added to the quantitative recollection scores. We have proposed further development of the model.

Keywords: Writing, Embodied Cognition, Cognition, Embodied Knowledge Construction Model

I have just started a new series on how embodiment affects the ways in which we think about and interact with the world. If you have a text that would fit in with this description, let me know. If you would agree to serve as a reviewer for such a series, please contact me. I can be reached at james.mensch@gmail.com.  Ibidem press distributes in the US through Colombia Press. Its offerings are reasonably priced and it does not require any subsidies from contributing authors. It pays royalties, and provides author copies to contributing authors.  For more information, see https://www.ibidem.eu/de/blog/BaC/

Despite the growing interest in performance artworks, museums worldwide still show some reservations when it comes to incorporating such works into their collections. This paper aims to explore the conservation challenges that these works present for museums.
Through the analysis of the relevant literature, the practices and theories surrounding the conservation of performance-based artworks are contextualized and examined. Notions of the conservation of performance artworks are reassessed in the light of ideas relating to archives and repertoires (Taylor 2008), which can be considered essential to the study of these works. By combining reflections about performance art acquisition and performance art conservation, a new conceptual framework based on an expanded view of conservation, which regards preservation as a process that includes presentation strategies, is proposed. In order to illustrate this examination, two case studies are presented as examples: sexyMF (2006) by Ana Borralho and João Galante (f. 2002, Lisbon) and Ad Verbum (2010), by Vasco Araújo (b. 1975, Lisbon).

RESUMO
Apesar do interesse recente na aquisição de obras de arte
da performance, a incorporação destas obras em coleções museológicas ainda é uma prática relativamente rara. Este artigo procura refletir sobre os desafios que estas obras apresentam à sua preservação, nomeadamente em coleções museológicas. Neste sentido, através da análise de bibliografia relevante, práticas e teorias da conservação de obras de arte de natureza performativa são contextualizadas e examinadas. A conservação destas obras é reconsiderada de forma a espelhar a dicotomia entre arquivoe repertório (Taylor 2008), que é considerada essencial para aarte da performance. Desta forma, repensa-se a conservação e incorporação destas obras a partir uma visão expandida da conservação, considerando que estratégias de apresentação podem promover a conservação efetiva destas obras. Para ilustrar esta reflexão, apresentam-se exemplos de dois casos de estudo: sexyMF (2006), de Ana Borralho and João Galante (f. 2002, Lisboa) e Ad Verbum (2010), de Vasco Araújo (n. 1975, Lisboa).

Although embodied knowing is fundamental to our experience, no previous study has detailed its role in a specific spiritual group. This thesis offers a new model of embodied situated cognition, and develops an embodied hermeneutics which uses Focusing (Gendlin, 1981) in phenomenological research. I apply these tools to the first detailed ethnography of Eco-Paganism to reveal powerful processes of connection which have considerable significance for religious studies and ecopsychology.

Chapters 2 and 3 survey the literature on Eco-Paganism and embodied cognition. Chapter 4 uses the latter to synthesise a model of embodied situated cognition which I call the 'enactive process model', because it draws primarily on enactivism (inter alia, Varela et al., 1991), and Gendlin's process philosophy (Gendlin, 1997a). Current research shows that key aspects of cognition are situated and embodied (inter alia, Varela et al., 1991), such that we often think with place (inter alia, Preston, 2003). This raises epistemological questions which I address in a discussion of embodied philosophy in Chapter 5. I then explain my embodied hermeneutics methodology, and the practical application of the Focusing Interview technique, in Chapter 6. My fieldwork autoethnography, Chapter 7, provides an intuitive, felt understanding of life on a road protest site, and is followed by ethnographies of urban and protest site Eco-Paganism in Chapters 8 and 9. Chapter 10 discusses six processes which create a sense of connection to the organic environment, which include the felt sense (Gendlin, 1981) and the wilderness effect (Greenway, 1995).

I conclude that a type of wilderness effect can catalyze the emergence of a complex 'nature based' spirituality amongst site Eco-Pagans, while a less intense form affects urban Eco-Pagans. Eco-Pagans sometimes use these processes of connection to think with a place. The processes of connection and thinking with place are fundamental to embodied situated knowing in Eco-Paganism, and help explain many of its distinctive aspects. By demonstrating the importance of embodied situated knowing in Eco-Paganism, I highlight the potential for further research into processes of connection and the impact of different physical spaces on religious practice in general.