Alva Noë: Action In Perception: Representation and Mind (2004)

“Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us,” writes Alva Noë. “It is something we do.” In Action in Perception, Noë argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought—that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience.

To perceive, according to this enactive approach to perception, is not merely to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand. In Action in Perception, Noë investigates the forms this understanding can take. He begins by arguing, on both phenomenological and empirical grounds, that the content of perception is not like the content of a picture; the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration. Noë then argues that perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession and exercise of practical bodily knowledge, and examines, among other topics, the problems posed by spatial content and the experience of color. He considers the perspectival aspect of the representational content of experience and assesses the place of thought and understanding in experience. Finally, he explores the implications of the enactive approach for our understanding of the neuroscience of perception.

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262140888, 9780262140881
277 pages

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PDF (updated on 2013-6-2)

Brian Massumi: Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011)

Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question.

It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented–variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention–which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Massumi argues that traditional art practices, including perspective painting, conventionally considered to be object-oriented freeze frames, also organize events of perception, and must be considered occurrent arts in their own way. Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance.

The artwork’s relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension. Massumi investigates occurrent art practices in order to examine, on the broadest level, how the aesthetic and the political are always intertwined in any creative activity.

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
Technologies of Lived Abstraction series
ISBN 0262134918, 9780262134910
220 pages

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google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Vivian Carol Sobchack: Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004)

“In these essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today’s image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we’ve all ‘had our eyes done’; why we are ‘moved’ by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of ‘making sense’ requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2004
ISBN 0520241290, 9780520241299
328 pages

Keywords and phrases
phenomenological, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, metonymy, irreal, Elaine Scarry, rience, catachresis, Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, Decalogue, cyborg, Aimee Mullins, Walter Benjamin, synecdoche, Street of Crocodiles, Million Man March, prosthetic leg, transform fictional, semiotic, Medium Cool

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2014-12-7)