Weekly Posts: Farman and Thrift
1) Last week several of us commented on the connections being made in the readings about the relationship between movement and space, and from that assumptions about people with physical disabilities’ relation to space. This week’s reading about embodiment and the idea of the cognitive unconscious had me thinking about neuro-diversity, and autism, and the fact that the ability to block out particular sensory input and to move through the world is one that is not uniform for everyone and everybody. As Grosz points out, (as quoted in Farman on page 18) the concept of “the body” is based on generalizations, and “always misses someone’s particular body.” How might our idea of embodiment change when thinking about those bodies that get left out? And how might the idea of embodiment and perception change for someone for whom it is incredibly difficult to block out sensory input? Farman writes, “Embodiment depends on the cognitive unconscious” and I know that we all have cognitive unconsciousness to some degree, or the world would be unlivable, but still I wonder how we might think about embodiment in terms of people with autism or spectrum sensory disorders, how do we talk about their experience of the world/senses/space?
2) While writing the first part of this prompt, I was playing pandora radio, and an advertisement for google maps came up, showing the viewer all the different tourist sites and natural landscapes. Thinking about the two Thrift pieces about nature and driving, I wonder what happens when “nature” becomes what is inside the computer screen? How does the act of “walking” down a google street differ or not from the experience of actually walking down the street? It is marketed by google as being the same as visiting those sites, and in many ways it is–you have the streets full of people and cars (or in the case of my hometown, empty of both, as is the norm). In my intro to geology course in undergrad, we used google maps to visit volcanoes, and were able to explore them in ways that we never could in “real life.” However, it is also obviously different, while connected to our own experiences of place. What about the difference between the experience of visiting familiar places on google maps–and how we can immediately place ourselves there, full of memories of being in that actual space, compared to the experience of being on a street which we haven’t actually visited before, except on google maps, yet it still feels familiar because we have seen it, and moved on it through the computer screen? How is this linked to the idea of proprioception and embodiment?
3) I don’t know that I have a question attached to this observation, but I liked Thrift’s point about the development of understanding social interaction as body practices, as I think this is linked to, and contributes to the discussion we have had in class about the idea of social space and social communication/interaction between humans and possibly machines/molecules. It also furthers our understanding of what bodies do, and to think about the act of perception as also being one about communication.
Definitions:
Space: relationship between bodies and objects; understood in relation to our embodied experience of the world, the meaning that we attach to the areas that we move through–be they virtual or physical
Experience: linked to an idea of embodiment, and our perceptions of the world around us
The body: is located in space, and produced by space, and produces space. it is based on generalizations of certain groups of bodies and “always misses someone’s particular body.” (Grosz)