on Dewey: experienced and the experiential - helen park

I felt that Dewey could be placed in conversation with Brian Massumi, particularly in regards to concepts dealing with the experience as felt, sensated, embodied affect. Dewey spoke to the experience of art and the aesthetic in regards to more ‘traditional’ media, whereas Massumi’s writings on the body and the experiential could be an updated response to this, addressing new forms of embodiment and aesthetic experience in the digital age.

Dewey writes of a necessary unity for an experience to be whole or constituted as experience in itself: “An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship…This unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it” (38). I felt that throughout this essay, Dewey kept pointing to a certain kind of knowing through experience that is not “emotional, practical, nor intellectual” and that this is what Massumi refers to as proprioception, a bodily sense. Experience is sensated and perceived through the body’s movement through space. There is also a sensory feedback as the body experiences, senses, produces its own affect. There is a sensory recursiveness, beyond only emotion or intellect into something other, the proprioceptive. 

Dewey writes, “Physical things from far ends of the earth are physicially transported and physically caused to act and react upon one another in the construction of a new object. The miracle of mind is that something similar takes place in experience without physical transport and assembling. Emotion is the moving and cementing force” (44) — Also here I found a conceptual parallel to Peirce’s firstness (emotion), secondness (physical force), and thirdness (relationships created). Dewey writes about ‘mind’ and ‘emotion’ but where is the body? Placed within a historical discourse, there is an interesting conversation happening here in regards to understanding our experience in art as it has changed over time and invention; from painting, sculpture, architecture, to pixels on a screen, the design of responsive environments, and virtual spaces through game design or internet based interfaces. In the latter, still we need pattern and structure - chaos is mapped, scanned, coded, or interlaced - in order for experience to be comprehended. Mind, emotion, and ‘purely’ cognitive sensation give way to bodily sensation, proprioception, the embodied experience. In this paradigm, what kinds of new experineces are we having? What new affordances appear? What do these new experiences do for proprioceptive experience and sensation, while still affecting the mind and heart?  

Comments

[Ben Carson]

You raise an interesting question..."where is the body" in Dewey's arguments about art experience. I know his writing is substantially in the lineage of William James, and in James' discussion of "Pure Experience," the body is really the only consistent location, or grounding, of consciousness. Consciousness, prior to any mystical or speculative discussions of the soul, is a succession of mental states; we know that we have a succession of mental states, and we know that they inhabit the same body. (I do not experience a succession of mental states that sometimes inhabit my body and then later inhabit others'.^1) James is the ultimate skeptic, in no case does he assume a mind-body split.

And that may be the liability of "embodiment" studies through the 1980s and 1990s in literary criticism and cultural studies: the intention in many cases is to challenge mind-centric or highly abstracted conceptions of thinking, knowing, and expressing...or to imagine that some cultures (puritan, modern) are estranged from their bodies. However, the consequences are enormous: when "embodied" knowledge is distinguished from some sort of alternative, it's very difficult not to reify the Cartesian mind-body split, and re-inscribe some sort of mystical "special" place for the mind, the spirit, the soul. I like the approaches of pragmatists like Peirce and James, who, we may have forgotten, never believed in even one sliver of mindfulness that was disembodied. For 19th-century thinkers, the only disembodied reality was a spiritual one: people of faith and spirit Romanticized disembodiment as something to strive for. Pragmatists and other scientific thinkers (especially atheists, which were more outspoken in the 1890s, probably, than in the 1940s) would have dismissed any "disembodied way of knowing" as pure superstition.

^1. Although: see Paul Bowles' story "You Are Not I," for a fictional rumination on alternatives in an institutionalized schizophrenic who attempts to migrate her consciousness into the life and body of her sister.