What is embodiment?

 '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.'

However the physiology of the individuals of each species, is a product of a particular type of memory. Raymond Ruyer who developed the concept of embryogenesis stated, 'Memory is not the property of bodies. Bodies, or what appear as "bodies", are the property of memory'. He also wrote that consciousness begins with a material idea. A forming principle being at work, right from the beginning that directs the actions of bodies. Every cell forms itself out of the 'memory' of the principles adhered to by the sub-atomic forces that control the behaviour of materials. Therefore both the form of each creature and even what we think of as consciousness, are the products of the movement of relationships between atomic forces. How they can move and in what possible variations being dependent on the structural principles inherited from all the previous embodied generations of electrons and protons, neutrons and / or electromagnetic or other forces that underpin everything. These rules then determine the possibilities of events coming together in different arrangements, such as a finger in a human ending up being something that can be used to help hold a pencil, but in a bat being something to help tauten a membrane so that it can fly. 

Ruyler uses diagrams to illustrate his ideas.

In 'The Genesis of Living Forms', the folding of the earth to form the Alps is compared with the folding of a flat sheet to form a tube, which is in turn compared to the folding of cells during the process of embryogenesis, in particular during cell division and differentiation. 

I'm sure Gilles Deleuze must have been reading Ruyler or had come across his ideas when he wrote 'The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque'. Leibniz had developed a concept of the monad, which was that the universe is made up of an infinite number of basic, immaterial, and indestructible substances, that in his Fold text, Deleuze interpreted as folds of space, time and movement, going on to describe the world itself as a body of infinite folds that twist and weave through space and time.

So 'embodiment' when considering this framework, could be a sort of enfolding of things. 

From a series of images trying to visualise a moment/event in the life of a fish

A fragment of a body/emotional landscape

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.  

The body as a landscape with inhabitants (fragment of an animation)

As you make an animation it is as if you 'fold' something into life. Beginning with just a few marks, gradually you add more and more material until you have enough to create movement. For the animator the background and the figures that act upon it are equally important, as the one defines the other.

Two birds attempt to blow life into the landscape (detail from far left, above)

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: 

Invisible worlds

Connecting the singularity

Interoceptual textures and surface flow

Drawing and quantum theory