Sound Research WIKINDX
Sound Research WIKINDX |
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Abram, D. (2017). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1997). Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (8/13/23, 11:49 AM) Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (8/9/24, 11:28 AM) |
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| Resource type: Book Language: en: English Peer reviewed ID no. (ISBN etc.): 0-679-43819-X BibTeX citation key: Abram1997 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: Ecology, Perception, Phenomenology, Presence, Self Creators: Abram Publisher: Vintage Books (New York) |
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p.50
Following Merleau-Ponty, Abram acknowledges the primacy of the body in fashioning a self by engaging with other selves and with space. Yes, perhaps there is something genetically dictated in our behaviours but, like the spider spinning a web, these genetic 'programs' must also interact with the present through its bodily sensing of the terrain, and its specific features and dimensions, in which the web must be spun. "[T]he genome could not explicitly have commanded the order of every flexion and extension of her various limbs as she weaves this web into its place. However complex are the inherited "programs," patterns, or predispositions, they must still be adapted to the immediate situation in which the spider finds itself. However determinate one's genetic inheritance, it must still, as it were, be woven into the present, an activity that necessarily involves both a receptivity to the specific shapes and textures of that present and a spontaneous creativity in adjusting oneself (and one's inheritance) to those contours. It is this open activity, this dynamic blend of receptivity and creativity by which every animate organism necessarily orients itself to the world (and orients the world around itself), that we speak of by the term "perception"."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Ecology Perception Phenomenology Presence Self |
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p.57
Discussing the participatory nature of perception through the analogy of a magician using sleight of hand on a coin: "he uses his sleights to enhance the animation of the object, generating ambiguous gaps and lacunae in the visible trajectory of the coin. The spectators' eyes, already drawn by the coin's fluid dance across the magician's fingers, spontaneously fill in those gaps with impossible events, and it is this spontaneous involvement of the spectators' own senses that enables the coin to vanish and reappear, or to pass through the magician's hand [...] The perceiving body does not calculate logical possibilities; it gregariously participates in the activity of the world, lending its imagination to things in order to see them more fully."
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Keywords: Ecology Illusion Perception Phenomenology Presence Self |