Ninth Week Journal

Embodiment - Before we get into the essays, I just want to throw down my definition of embodiment thus far that follows Hansen's definition based in neuroscience "as inseparable from the cognitive activity of the brain." The mind must have body to think. I agree with this statement.

I think the definition sends us down roads in multi-dimensions. We can discuss the term from a psychological state, cognitive neuroscience and anthropology to semiotics. Which perspective you want to take?

JeanFrancoisLyotard, “Can Thought Go On Without a Body?” in The Inhuman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 8-23.

For Lyotard, it is the force of desire that drives the embodiment issue. Artificial Intelligence (that which can live on after the demise of our sun, minds downloaded on to computers sent out past our however we have to get to not be destroyed) need to use "the body as the model". How else would we get intuition, hypothetical configurations and the glory of gender?

He makes me question and want to seek out the answer: What's negentropy? Funnily enough because of my construction background with risk management the term defined in this context was the easiest for me to understand: "negentropy is the force that seeks to achieve effective organizational behavior and lead to a steady predictable state." It took the class discussion for me to understand that negentropy is the opposite of entropy or balanced stability to forces of instability.

What's meta-level of operation and meta-function of philosophical thought?

In our class, we discussed an interesting aspect of his ideas that I had not thought of the need for him to use the dualistic dialectic to get his points across even though he clearly does not want dualistic. The first part of the paper is subtitled "HE" and the second "SHE". Simplistically, he's speaking in the first part as the liberal humanists that are on the side of spectrum that believe being human is essentially a pattern of information that can be downloaded into a computer and thus cheat death. The "HE" is fear of extinction. The "SHE" is the typical embodied femaleness that evokes males’ lust and thus forces embodiment.

Mark B N. Hansen, “Introduction” and “The Affective Topology of New Media Art” in New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004), 1-11, 197-232.

Is a young Assistant English Professor where he teaches courses on cultural theory and media studies at Princeton University? He's supposed to be at Princeton but, when I go to Princeton he's not there. It's a mystery. I can't find where he is now.

He talks about embodiment in the sense from neuroscience that inseparable from the cognitive activity of the brain.

HenriBergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (NY: Zone Books, 1991). Translated from the 5th Edition published in French in 1908. Excerpt of 3 pgs.

What is matter and how does embodiment relate to matter?

For Bergson, he needs the aggregate of images and the perception. The aggregate can be the body and the afferent (the nerve carrying the electrical impulse). So, it is the body's physiological experience of the perception. In class, Soraya explained that it is the space between the "image" and the body's interpretation. She also wanted to make sure we understood that Bergson is not speaking of the image as visual but an object.

You have to body to think because of perceptions and centripetal and centrifugal nerves. The centripetal goes from the outside to the center in all direction and so the center interpreted as knowledge of oneself. The centrifugal is the self going out in all directions and that is where the self is standing on a turn table exclaiming all that you know would splatter against the wall.

It all goes back to the mind body division. I don't believe embodiment can happen if the mind is in another body. The mind and body are together as one. Change out one of them and the whole thing is different. Is embodiment another way to say thought happening? Is this where semiotics comes into play?

I dreamed about embodiment last night which is kind of ironic in the formal sense (not my sense) because sleep could be thought of as a form of disembodiment or out of body experience.

I did not originally write about the skulls that Hansen uses as an example for his ideas because I did not believe his description. I truly thought that this was somehow his experience and not possible without some rational theoretical agenda. But, when Soraya shared her experiences and said that Hansen's descriptions were correct, I believed him. I needed him validated which is interesting. It reminds that I do have skepticism of purely theoretical writers falling into the realm of mental masturbation without any bearing to reality or at least my personal epistemology.

Robert Lazzini’s works is perfect for the embodiment discussion. By the affects of his work on a person, he demands that the body be recognized in the artistic experience.