Embodiment, Identiy, and Space
1. Indeed one toils with the incommensurability of relying on the predictable yet powerful refrain: “but you don’t know how it feels to be black.” This statement points to that essence, that Thing, that makes the Black experience a unique one. But the refrain also points to this notion of embodied practices and how we identify through our bodily engagement with the environment. Often, my bodily engagement with the environment has the weight of racism, and bigotry upon it as I enter a space I often assess how many people of color are in the space. The higher the number of people, the more I’ am inclined to think of and therefore interact in that space as safe. The higher the number also assumes that the space has seen black people before and therefore knows how to accommodate them. It is the case in most instances that spaces don’t accommodate the other so this is really good news. This is all to say we can’t underestimate the extent to which social relations founded on the logics of race might counter how we conceive of a social interaction or embodied digital practice to perform. For example, does cocooning always happen? Is there something to a Black sociality that sees the structuring and regulatory nature of cocooning (for that it most out rightly distinguishes between the public and private) as oppressive and not applicable to their embodied experience with public transportation? Mostly I’m thinking of those bodies who rather than invisabalize themselves through canoeing on public transportation make themselves hyper visible in the public space through the sharing (one would assume social to be at its base definition about sharing) their conversations, or as I have experienced music through phones.
2. So that “if embodiment depends on the cognitive unconscious” and embodiment is culturally contingent then would it follow that he unconscious also shares a symbiotic relationship with cultural context? Does ones cultural identity (made through social interaction) shape what one doesn’t notice as well as notices in a space? Can we see differently based on our embodied experiences? And if so can we say there is a collective unconscious? A way of seeing that is mediated through cultural conventions of how certain bodies are to act, and react in social spaces given that enough bodies share the same ‘vision’ from a certain social location (although the way their social interactions are performed is infinitely varied) can those bodies be said to share a collective unconscious?
3. What are the differences in operation between Thrift’s bare life and Farman’s sensory-inscribed? Does bar life mark the elements of a space that the sensory inscribed body practices being? Is bare life a domain of space that we move in and out of through sensory experience?
Embodiment: how we describe how our bodies feel in relationship to how others perceive our bodies to feel, act, and be.
Space: a term that helps us govern the ungovernable of experience.
I think Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight has much to say about your second question. All throughout the Thrift I was thinking about Keeling’s concept of the cinematic, especially on page 62 where Thrift talks about implicit knowledge.