Embodiment

Darkness, Depth, Dirtiness: Metaphors and the Body

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson drew attention to the significant and often unnoticed work metaphors perform in our everyday use of language.  Once you start paying attention you realize that metaphors (and figurative language in general) are not merely the ornaments of speech employed by poets and other creative types; they are an indispensable element of our most basic attempts to represent our experience of the world with words.  Lakoff and Johnson also suggested that many of our most basic metaphors (up is good/down is bad; heavy is serious, light is not) are grounded in our embodied experience of reality.  Did we not stand erect, for example, we’d have a very different set of metaphors.

It’s been thirty years since Metaphors We Live By was published, but it has been in the last few that studies have been confirming the link between embodied experience in the world and our metaphorical language.  Many of these studies were helpfully summarized in the January 2010 issue of the Observer, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science.  In a short article titled  “The Body of Knowledge:  Understanding Embodied Cognition,” Barbara Isanski and Catherine West describe a series of experimental studies that establish links between our bodily experience and our metaphorical language.  Here’s a sampling of some of those links:

  • Temperature and social relationships — think “cold shoulder”
  • Cleanness and moral purity — think Lady MacBeth or Pontius Pilate
  • Color and morality — think black is bad
  • Weight and judgment/seriousness — think “a heavy topic” or “deep issue”
  • Movement and progress/achievement — think “forward looking,” “taking a step back”

Most interesting perhaps are the elaborate set ups of the experiments that attempted to get at these connections and the article does nice job of succinctly describing each. For example:

In a recent study by Nils B. Jostmann (University of Amsterdam), Daniël Lakens (Utrecht University), and Thomas W. Schubert (Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa, Lisbon), volunteers holding a heavy clipboard assigned more importance to opinions and greater value to foreign currencies than volunteers holding lighter-weight clipboards did. A lot of physical strength is required to move heavy objects around; these results suggest that in a similar way, important issues may require a lot of cognitive effort to be dealt with.

As always bear in mind the nature of “recent studies,” but it is not too surprising to learn that our embodied experience is at the root of our way of talking and thinking about the world.

“Monastic Reading” — Reading with the Body

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

“Monastic Reading,” the third chapter in Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text, gives us a window into a form of reading that involved the body along with the mind.  Illich is attentive to the physicality of reading and modes of remembering that (figuratively) engrave the text onto the body so that the body and mind work in tandem to remember and recall what has been read and learned.  Very interesting material given my recent fascination with embodied knowledge.

The easiest way to recognize instances of embodied knowledge is to take note of athletes and dancers who “know” how to do a great deal of things that they may have a very hard time putting into words.  Or, if you can type, ask yourself, where is the letter “L” on the keyboard?  How did you think of the answer?  If you are like most people in that situation you moved your fingers around to remember.

I’m most interested in how embodied knowledge — which is also picked up through the habits and rituals, religious and otherwise, that make up our cultural milieu — plays a significant role in shaping our dispositions, attention, inclinations.

Illich, who is drawing on the work of anthropologist Marcel Jousse, gives us some more instances of embodied knowledge, this time in the service of recalling articulated speech.

Previous posts:  Introduction, chapter one, chapter two.

  • Quoting Hugh of Saint Victor:  “Meditation is sustained thought along planned lines . . . . Meditation takes its start from reading, but is bound by none of the rules or precepts of reading.  Meditation delights to range along open ground, where it fixes its free gaze upon the contemplation of truth, drawing together now these, now those causes of things, or now penetrating into profundities, leaving nothing doubtful, nothing obscure.  The beginning of learning thus lies in reading but its consummation lies in meditation.” (52)
  • “Meditative reading can sometimes be difficult, a chore which must be faced with courage, fortitudo.  But the reader, sustained by the ‘zeal to inquire,’ will derive joy from his application.  Eagerness comes with practice.  To foster his zeal, the student needs encouraging example rather than instruction.”  (53)
  • “Hugh’s meditation is an intensive reading activity and not some passive quietist plunge into feelings.  This activity is described by analogy to body movements:  striding from line to line, or flapping one’s wings while surveying the already well-known page.  Reading is experienced by Hugh as a bodily motor activity.
  • In a tradition of one and a half millennia, the sounding pages are echoed by the resonance  of the moving lips and tongue.  The reader’s ears pay attention, and strain to catch what the reader’s mouth gives forth.  In this manner the sequence of letters translates directly into body movements and patterns nerve impulses.  the lines are a sound track picked up by the mouth and voiced by the reader for his own ear.  By reading, the page is literally embodied, incorporated.
  • The modern reader conceives of the page as a plate that inks the mind, and of the mind as a screen onto which the page is projected and from which, at a flip, it can fade.  For the monastic reader, whom Hugh addresses, reading is a much less phantasmagoric and much more carnal activity:  the reader understands the lines by moving to their beat, remembers them by recapturing their rhythm, and thinks of them in terms of putting them into his mouth and chewing.  No wonder that pre-university monasteries are described to us in various sources as the dwelling places of mumblers and munchers.” (54)
  • “For Hugh, who uses Latin, the act of reading with the eyes implies an activity not unlike a search for firewood:  his eyes must pick up the letters of the alphabet and bundle these into syllables.  The eyes are at the service of the lungs, the throat, the tongue, and the lips that do not usually utter single letters but words.”  (58)
  • “. . . for the monk, reading is not one activity but a way of life . . . . Reading impregnates his days and nights.”  (58-59)
  • “The process by which the written text of Scripture becomes part of each monk’s biography is typically Jewish rather than Greek.  Antiquity had no one book that could be swallowed.  Neither Greeks nor Romans were people of a book.  No one book was — or could be — at the center of the classical way of life, as it is for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  For the first Christian millennium, memorization of this one book was performed by a process which stands in stark contrast to the building of memory palaces.  The book was swallowed and digested through the careful attention paid to the psychomotor nerve impulses which accompany the sentences being learned. Even today, pupils in Koranic and Jewish schools sit on the floor with the book open on their knees.  Each one chants his lines in a singsong, often a dozen pupils simultaneously, each a different line.  While they read, their bodies sway from the hips up or their trunks gently rock back and forth.  The swinging and the recitation continue as if the student is in a trance, even when he closes his eyes or looks down the aisle of the mosque.  The body movements re-evoke those of the speech organs that have been associated with them.  In a ritual manner these students use their whole bodies to embody the lines.
  • Marcel Jousse has studied these psychomotor techniques of fixing a spoken sequence in the flesh.  He has shown that for many people, remembrance means the triggering of a well-established sequence of muscular patterns to which the utterances are tied.  When the child is rocked during a cradle song, when the reapers bow to the rhythm of a harvest song, when the rabbi shakes his head while he prays or searches for the right answer, or when the proverb comes to mind only upon tapping for a while — according to Jousse, these are just a few examples of a widespread linkage of utterance and gesture.  Each culture has given its own form to this bilateral, dissymmetric complementarity by which sayings are graven right and left, forward and backward into trunk and limbs, rather than just into the ear and the eye.  Monastic existence can be viewed as a carefully patterned framework for the practice of such techniques.”  (pages 60-61)
  • “It is, however, not a social technique incorporated in the rule which makes the monk, but rather the attitude with which he approaches the book as the center of his life.  In the short chapter on meditation, Hugh refers to the spirit in which this life of reading ought to be lived.  He uses the word vacare, which says all but just cannot be translated into English . . . . Vacare means ‘to have been set or become free.’  When Christian authors use the term the stress is not on the release a person gets, but on the freedom he takes of his own volition.  The term stresses ‘the desire to be engaged ‘ in a new way of life rather than a release or flight from one’s old habits of bondage and lifestyle.  The verb is also used in classical Latin . . . . With generosity, [Seneca] urges, one should choose what to be free for.  True leisure can be found only by those who give themselves to wisdom (sapientiae vacant).”  (61-62)
  • “Lectio is forever a beginning, meditatio a consummatio, and both integral to studium . . . For Hugh, there is only one kind of reading that is worthwhile, lectio divina.  This place him at the end of one thousand years during which lectio and otio vacare had defined each other.”  (63-64)
  • “The new way of reading the newly laid-out page calls for a new setting within the city:  colleges that engender the university, with its academic rather than monastic rituals.  The studium legendi ceases to be a way of life for the great majority of disciplined readers, and is viewed as one particular ascetical practice now called ‘spiritual reading.’  On the other hand, ‘study’ increasingly refers to the acquisition of knowledge.  Lectio divides into prayer and study.”  (64-65)

Breaking the Spell

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

In the not too distant past there were a series of Visa Check Card commercials which presented some fantastical and whimsical shopping environment in which transactions were processed efficiently, uninterruptedly, and happily thanks to the quick, simple swipe of the check card.  Inevitably some one would pull out cash or attempt to use a check and the whole smooth and cheerful operation would grind to a halt and displeasure would darken the faces of all involved.  For example:

Cynic that I tend to be, I read the whole campaign as a rather transparent allegory of our absorption into inhuman patterns of mindless, mechanized, and commodified existence.  But let’s lay aside that gloominess for the moment, it is near Christmas time after all and why draw unnecessary attention to the banality of our crass … okay, no, I’m done really.

But one other, less snarky observation: These commercials did a nice job of illustrating the circuit of mind, body, machine, and world that we are all enmeshed in.  This circuit typically runs so smoothly that we hardly notice it at all. In fact, we often tend to lose sight of how deeply integrated into our experience of reality our tools have become and how these tools mediate reality for us.  The emergence of ubiquitous wireless access to the Internet promises (or threatens, depending on your perspective) to extend and amplify this mediation exponentially.  To put it in a slightly different way, our tools become the interface through which we access reality.  Putting it that way also illustrates how our tools even begin to provide the metaphors by which we interpret reality.

Katherine Hayles drew attention to this circuit when, discussing the significance of embodiment, she writes,

When changes in [embodied] practices take place, they are often linked with new technologies that affect how people use their bodies and experience space and time.  Formed by technology at the same time that it creates technology, embodiment mediates between technology and discourse by creating new experiential frameworks that serve as boundary markers for the creation of corresponding discursive systems.

Translation:  New technologies produce new ways of using and experiencing our bodies in the world.  With our bodies we make technology and this technology then shapes how we understand our bodies and this interaction generates new ways of talking and thinking about the world.

But as in the commercial, this often unnoticed circuit through which we experience the world is sometimes disrupted by some error in the code or glitch in the system.  We often experience such disruptions as annoyances of varying degrees.  But because our tools are an often unnoticed link in the circuit encompassing world, body, and mind, disruptions emanating from our tools can also elicit flashes of illumination by disrupting habituated patterns of thought and action.  Hayles again, this time writing about one of the properties of electronic literature:

. . . unpredictable breaks occur that disrupt the smooth functioning of thought, action, and result, making us abruptly aware that our agency is increasingly enmeshed within complex networks extending beyond our ken and operating through codes that are, for the most part, invisible and inaccessible.

Thinking again about Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” we might say that disruptions and errors break the spell.  And depending upon your estimation of the enchantment, this may be a very good thing indeed, at least from time to time.

What Our Bodies Want

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Well all sorts of things, naturally: air, water, food, and other items that readily come to mind.  But our body’s desires are not only of the ready made, basically biological variety.  We could also speak of learned desires which, while having an embodied platform, are also culturally or socially conditioned.  These are desires which may emerge when patterns or circuits of action and reward become habitual leading to the formation of desire for the action.  And mostly, I’m intrigued by how our tools and technologies participate in these sorts of desire forming practices.

Here’s a possible illustration.  A few years ago people started noticing what came to be called phantom vibration syndrome.  If you’ve had a cell phone for any amount of time, you’ve probably experienced what you thought was your phone vibrating only to pick it up and realize that, in fact, no call or message had come in.  The vibration was a phantom.  There are a number of explanations for this phenomenon all stemming from how our bodies become attentive to certain stimuli.  Our bodies in a sense are waiting to receive this particular stimuli and sometimes they misinterpret data as a result.  The body/brain jumps the sensory gun as it were.

I want to take this a little bit further and ask about what I’m going to guess is another familiar phenomenon for cell phone users — frequently reaching for the phone for no particular reason, preemptively putting your hand in your pocket to feel your phone, constantly looking over at your phone after you’ve set it prominently before you.  These are not just a matter of feeling a phantom vibration and reaching because you thought you had a message coming in. In other words, these are not reactive or responsive actions.  My suggestion is that these are actions of a body desiring, wanting, hoping for a certain stimuli.

We are embodied creatures, living in a diverse and complex bio-cultural environment throughout which our tools and technologies are intertwined.  Understanding our desires involves exploring our conscious wants; it also means exploring the patterns of our habituated technologically mediated actions and interactions.  My guess is that we’ll find all sorts of habituated desires that float just below the level of our conscious awareness and yet impact our actions and thoughts in countless, barely discernible ways.

Our tools don’t only help us satisfy our wants and desires, they are also implicated in the formation and development of those wants.

Apple School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Here is one more reason to bookmark Big Questions Online (despite the somewhat silly name), Alan Jacobs will be contributing a monthly column.  His first piece, “Steve Jobs:  Shaman and Sorcerer,” posted yesterday includes this observation:

To turn back the cultural clock, as it were, to take a set of technologies that Apple had already deployed in the iPhone and improve them, repackage and repurpose them in a way that functions with near-absolute smoothness: this is the goal of the iPad. It’s a device meant to mediate the web flawlessly, and to do so — and this is perhaps the most important thing — not primarily by altering what you see or hear but rather by giving you manual control. On the iPad you make things happen by moving your hands around, like a wizard, except you don’t need either a mouse or a wand. You don’t even need those funky gloves that Tom Cruise wore in Minority Report. You touch the Internet: you stroke it, swipe it, pinch it. And it responds precisely to your will. And only Apple can give you that.

I’m not exactly vested in the whole PC/Apple thing, but I thought this was an insightful and elegant observation by Jacobs.  Read the whole piece to get the full context for the analogy.

Given my current interest in embodiment, I found Jacobs’ emphasis on “manual control” and “touch” particularly intriguing.  Forgive the pun, but I think he has put his finger on an important source of the iPad’s appeal.  The iPad exercises its uncanny appeal despite the fact that many believe it is not much more than a glorified iTouch with little that is new or otherwise groundbreaking.  I suspect the uncanny appeal lies precisely in the way it engages the sense of touch to give the user seemingly immediate (without the mediation of keyboard, mouse, etc.) interaction with the Internet.  Or to look at it another way, it moves us closer to experiencing the Internet as a kind prosthesis which blurs the boundary between body and  information.