Mauss & Merleau-Ponty

Body Technique and Phenomenology

Mauss and Body Technique

•  Learning How To Swim
• How does the process of acquisition of a skill (swimming for example) takes place BELOW the level of consciousness, reflection and expressive distance. The body believes in what it PLAYS at. It ENACTS the past. 
• body (muscle) memory is what learning a physical skill is all about
• learning to move is an embodied, not intellectual (memory) activity
• MIMESIS: overall relation or identification and reproduction (as opposed to an IMITATION or conscious effort to reproduce)
• Practical mastery, transmitted through PRACTICE, without rising to the level of discourse
• mechanical learning through trial and error.

• The world of objects is learned through the whole body and through the movements and displacements which define the space of these objects. In other words, we learn about the world as children but how we relate to it physically. We later attempt to intellectualize this if we are asked to.
• Feelings and sensations (body felt sense) are not easily expressed in world by are easily KNOWN
• Each culture has its own techniques of the body (habits) We can see this in everyday activities like walking, swimming and digging.

Phenomenology

• Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and his insight that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call “indirect ontology” or the ontology of “the flesh of the world” (la chair du monde).

• Consciousness

  • the body-subject as an alternative to the Cartesian "cogito." This distinction is especially important in that Merleau-Ponty perceives the essences of the world existentially. Consciousness, the world, and the human body as a perceiving thing are intricately intertwined and mutually "engaged." 
  • The phenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of the natural sciences, but a correlate of our body and its sensory-motor functions. Taking up and "communing with" (Merleau-Ponty's phrase) the sensible qualities it encounters, the body as incarnated subjectivity intentionally elaborates things within an ever-present world frame, through use of its pre-conscious, prepredicative understanding of the world's makeup. 
  •   The world and the sense of self are emergent phenomena in an ongoing "becoming."
  •  The object of perception is immanently tied to its background—to the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world. Because the object is inextricably within the world of meaningful relations, each object reflects the other.
  • Through involvement in the world – being-in-the-world – the perceiver tacitly experiences all the perspectives upon that object coming from all the surrounding things of its environment, as well as the potential perspectives that that object has upon the beings around it. 
  • Each object is a "mirror of all others." Our perception of the object through all perspectives is not that of a propositional, or clearly delineated, perception. Rather, it is an ambiguous perception founded upon the body's primordial involvement and understanding of the world and of the meanings that constitute the landscape's perceptual gestalt.
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• Rehabituation: how experience is changed when one learns new ways of making sense of and using their bodies
   
• Kinestesia: (Maxine Sheets Johnstone) not an object of consciousness or perception, but more accurately a “felt unfolding dynamic” Knowing where you body is in space all at once. Something that athletes possess. Movement and attention to movement can produce a heightened sense of awareness and less stressed sense of identity---a less rigid sense of self. What does lack of movement do therefore? Changing one’s way of moving our bodies also has an impact on how we feel about ourselves and the environment.
                  “…Depression is often experienced in the body as a passive giving in to weight.. The slightest movement can diminish this. What is important is the indication of participation, rather than passivity”
  
  
  Embodiement (Philip Zarelli). Relational modes of experience. When we engage with our bodies we are able to have more heightened levels of experience  in which we see ourselves as full human beings…the body connected to the mind in a dialectic