'Our bodies are not mere vessels for the containment of our personalities, our agencies or our disembodied souls. Our embodiment is the very manner of our co-activity with, emplacement in and experience of the world. ... We are entangled, we are processes of becoming, we are products of resistance to the conditions in which we find ourselves.' (Noë, 2023, p.139)
In his book 'The Entanglement', philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy. The book has helped me to see how I can move between one mode of visualising things and another. For instance I might spend time trying to visualise a pain, either my own or someone else's, this interoceptual or somatic experience can appear to be totally unrelated to a creature that seems to emerge from my subconscious, or an image I might have made of a cornfield on a sunny day; but they are all part of my experience of the world. At one moment I might be in conversation with someone about their state of mind, an hour later I might be walking through a rain storm and be wondering if the Gods of nature are all against me and then as I take shelter in a local museum, might find myself gazing at Egyptian artefacts from 5,000 years ago.
Whether I am experienced by others as a soaked escapee from the storm, or a serious historical researcher, as an artist or as an old man, will also effect how I feel about my experiences. But the architecture of the museum, the layout of the streets I walk through and the geological features of the land I walk over will also be shaping and influencing both my body and the thoughts it contains.
I am inseparable from my body and my body is inseparable from the world. As Jacob Von Uexküll pointed out in his text, 'A Stroll through the worlds of animals and men', each creature has its own 'unwelten' or phenomenal world. Living beings therefore perceive their worlds in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, "self-in-world" subjective reference frames. He called these framings, the 'umwelt'. The structure of the world view of each creature is therefore determined by the nature of each individual species; by its physiology, its behaviour, and its interactions with its environment. For myself as an artist, I thought the most important thing was the fact that Von Uexküll when pointing these things out, also stated that he firmly believed that these world views could only be disclosed through individual subjectivity.
This is how Jacob Von Uexküll introduced his idea;
'The place, a flower-strewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with butterflies. Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colourful features disappear, others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being. Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the butterfly, or of the field mouse; the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal.'
The body folds into its environment, at the same time the body's internal events are folding into and are the body's interior, which itself is contiguous with its exterior.
References:
Deleuze, G. (1992) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Univ Of Minnesota Press
Noë, A. (2023) The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press
Ruyer, R., (2019) The Genesis of Living Forms. Rowman & Littlefield
Von Uexküll, J. (1992) A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. Semiotica, Vol. 89 (Issue 4), pp. 319-391. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1992.89.4.319
See also:
Interoceptual textures and surface flow
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