Brain Body Movement

Lecture Series 2009

Sam Gill
Sam Gill delivered a series of fourteen lectures in a graduate course Brain Body Movement at the University of Colorado Boulder during spring term 2009. The lectures discuss implications of human embodiment from a variety of perspectives including philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, critical theory, and medicine. He discusses the implications in terms of the academic study of religion, the academy in general, and the way we understand dancing.

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Contents
Introduction to Lecture Series Lecture 1: Introduction Lecture 2: The Meaning of the Body Lecture 3: Tradition and Change: Memory and Neuroplasty Lecture 4: Imagination, Theory, Story Lecture 5: Color and Reality Lecture 6: Phantom and Reality Lecture 7: Making, Agency, Action, Artifice Lecture 8: Self and Other: Proprioception and Exteroception Lecture 9: Consciousness and Emotion Lecture 10: Touch, Flesh, and Vision Lecture 11: Emotion, Depth, and FleshPart I: Dancing as Pure Depth Lecture 12: Metaphor, Gesture, Language Lecture 13: Thought and Cognition Lecture 14: The Backside of God 3 4 8 12 19 25 31 37 45 53 58 65 72 80 87

Brain Body Movement

Introduction to Lecture Series

In the spring semester of 2009 at the University of Colorado at Boulder I taught a course titled Brain Body Movement. It was offered in the Department of Religious Studies where I have been teaching since 1983. Topics covered include: The Meaning of the Body Tradition and Change: Memory and Neuroplasty Imagination, Theory, Story Color and Reality Phantom and Reality Making, Agency, Action, Artifice Self and Other: Proprioception and Exteroception Consciousness and Emotion Touch, Flesh, and Vision Emotion, Depth, and FleshPart I: Dancing as Pure Depth Metaphor, Gesture, Language Thought and Cognition The Backside of God

While the course was taught primarily to senior majors and graduate students of religion, the bulk of the discussion focused on the current research outside the academic study of religion on the many topics covered. Psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, neuroscience, medicine, and critical theory are some of the fields represented. My lectures present important aspects of these topics, including critical reviews of the readings that support each topic. The primary intent of the lectures was to creatively contribute to our understanding of the bodied nature of being human and to extend how we may best take advantage of the many and diverse areas of research on brain, body, and movement. My primary academic and personal interest is in dancing. For many years I have been a dancer, a dance teacher, and academically I have studied dance traditions all over the world. My continuing work is to construct a theory of dancing that allows us to use dancing as a comparative category for the study of cultures throughout the world. In these lectures I occasionally turn to dancing to provide a concrete example of how a particular topic may be effectively applied. As a result aspects of a new dance theory are presented. I was excited to offer innovative extensions and alternative understandings to many of these important topics. Because I believe that I am making a significant contribution to the discussion of these topics I want to make these lectures immediately available. A podcast is available presenting each lecture. The full series of fourteen lectures is available as an e-document. For details see www.SamGill.com.

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Lecture 1: Introduction1
The role of the body in the academic study of religion
As it well known, the academic study of religion developed from a heritage of Christian studies and the comparative study of religion, the study of religions beyond Christianity has been deeply modeled on Biblical studies. Christianity has a deep ambivalence regarding the body, however strange given that Christianity is based on the bodied incarnation of the deity and on the killing and bodily resurrection of this god. The principal rite, the sacrament of the Eucharist, is the grizzly affair of eating body and drinking blood. Still, spirit is understood as the enduring, as the dependable, and the body is considered corruptible by sin and the inevitable aging and death. At best the body is the temple for the soul, mere housing and transport. Furthermore, since Platos interest in ideal types the invisible has been understood as more real than any manifestation. Descartes furthered this thing by valuing the mind as that which distinguishes us, sets us apart as human beings: I think therefore I am. The body again is residual or a mere housing, or a fearful distraction, to the mind. Modern western universities, indeed, most of western education, embodies (physically, actually, and the irony is intended) these valuations of mind over body. We instruct our children to sit down and be quiet so that they may learn. Educational spaces are containers isolated from the actions of cultures where people go to look into books, read words, learn theories, exercise minds. Academic furniture disables bodies and focuses eyes and ears on the source of wisdom, the only one permitted to stand and walk about. Our minds match our mountains. Our minds are the products of the university. Graduation exercises for learning institutions are the largest of our public rites (save occasional presidential inaugurations) and the academic garb renders the body below the neck inarticulate and the effect is an appropriate sea of floating heads. Stereotypical images of the intellectual, the scholar, are consistent: bespectacled, slight or stout pearshaped bodied, unkempt, scruffy facial hair, and exuding an air of distance, vagueness, contemplation, befuddlement. Bodied activities in the educational system are isolated to either extreme: athletics as some remnant of the full and rounded human being, now exaggerated through commercial attachments to an almost separate entity uncomfortably tolerated by the academic mission, and theater and dance, a remnant of high culture where participants are politely excused for the most part from intellectual matters. Athletics has become a performance of spectacle, an advertising gimmick, dealing with huge budgets, television, and arenas. Theater and dancing have become shrinking programs increasingly marginalized and isolated and underfunded. To survive they must take on some aspects of the male productive world by putting on productions and making works. Universities have yet to formalize their actors and dancers into companies, although this perhaps shows their naivet.

Delivered January 19, 2009

Brain Body Movement As educational environments have slipped in cultural value displaced by business, production, and economic competition, the tolerated bodied activities have been progressively reduced. Even the residual Physical Education programs in pre-university education are being left behind and sports continues to exist only to the extent it is successful and productive. The academic study of religion created in this heritage remains largely a study of texts. Indeed, the very thing that makes legal the teaching of religion in state supported institutions is the word about. Typically the method that assures the distance required to attain about is the reading of texts. Texts are about, are distant, are accessible in lieu of the actual, the bodied. Often the closest students of religion get to bodies through the metaphorical terminology associated with texts that have physical parts identified by terms such as headings, footnotes, and bodies.

Alternative
While the devaluing of the body distinguishes what we do and how we do it, and indeed this same valuation distinguishes our deep cultural and religious heritage, increasingly and building strength and energy over the past century are many who have re-evaluated the relationship of mind and body, spirit and body, soul and body. This too is part of our heritage corresponding with the rise of modernity, the reshaping of the place of religion in modern and western life, and the rise of secularism, even science. Despite this movement which has occurred in philosophy, biology, neurology, anthropology, and other fields, the study of religion has remained largely ignorant of these developments, doubtless because of its tacit theological underpinnings, tacit as much as any reason because overtness would be illegal. Perhaps the principal opening to these ideas has been in the slow recognition of the importance of field study. Such studies continue to be largely serving textual studies, yet, it has opened an inroad. Given the work that is being accomplished and the discourse that is broadening, it seems high time for the academic study of religion to begin to open itself to the perhaps frightful, even revolutionary, possibility that the body is more than a meaty vehicle for the mind. Stemming from mid-twentieth century we may have retained some residue of that old notion that religion is sui generus, that is, a distinction (or some say incorrectly a uniqueness) of being human, and, as such, must not be reduced in any way by our study of it. While it has long been accepted that all academic study is reductive, this reluctance to include body, with its meaty alliance with biology, neurology, and physicality, nonetheless persists. This course ventures into this dangerous territory. The motivation is not to somehow reduce religion to mere biology, mere neurology, mere genetics; to even think this possible is a misunderstanding of biology, neurology, and genetics as well as religion. Rather, this course endeavors to complement and enlarge the study of religion by including additional perspectives and understandings of religion by beginning to appreciate how body, brain, and movement contribute importantly to what it means to be human, including being religiously human. We will address many of the issues that commonly concern the study of religion and culture such as issues of meaning, value, action, imagination, story, agency, art, self, consciousness, emotion, language,

Brain Body Movement and so on, but we will do so from perspectives developed from research that foregrounds body, brain, movement. This is a new arena for most of us and it will require that we gain our introduction through intermediaries rather than the hard scientific and philosophical researchers themselves, that is, by reading non-technical scientific and philosophical writings. Fortunately, this literature is abundant. This is not a religion and science course. Such framing suggests an unresolved tension between the two. I suppose that such a tension might be felt in our very reluctance to go this route; that it seems somehow threatening and that wed like quickly, too quickly, to dismiss it as simply irrelevant or reductive. However, matters of the modern university are thoroughly scientific in their mythology and ontology and the fact that we are still doing our best to hide our theological leanings may provide this tension. All I care to accomplish in this course is to draw to our work a full arsenal of ideas and tools to do the very best we might in the exploration and appreciation of our subject. There is another arena in which I hope this course may contribute to university education: the expansion and stimulation of our academic imaginations. This should come from a greater appreciation through these studies of what we are as human beings. My hope is that in doing so it will stimulate our creativity, hone our imaginations, expand our power as both humans and scholars. To know more about how we work in ways that include the very mechanics of thinking and moving; to appreciate how we human beings are actually integrations of mind, brain, and moving bodiesshould we allow ourselves to be considered any less!will help us, will motivate us, to be more deeply feeling, more imaginatively and creatively thinking, and more humane beings.

Personal Background and Interest

I think it accurate that education is holistic, that, in some sense, we never get on to anything really new; that we continue exploring facets of the same issues again and again throughout ones life. I started out studying mathematics, then moved to business, then religion. In religion I elected to study Native Americans because, for as much as any reason, I could feel connected to them by sharing a common landscape. Native Americans have few, if any, texts; therefore, studying these cultures had, necessarily, to be a study of bodies in action. Among the first things I wrote about were prayer acts, dolls and dances. I had physical experience with these things; they were bodied and physical. In the broader terms of the academy, wanting texts, I needed to align myself with ritual studies; only to find this an absurdly undeveloped area of study, particularly given that almost every religious action might be referred to as ritual. I also found that the study of prayer was shamefully poorly developed given that this action might be the most ubiquitous action of religious peoples. Later, I found myself interested much more broadly in these issues and began to study masking and dancing in cultures the world over. Once again I found the same patterning: no one has or is studying dancing as a religious action despite the commonly known fact that, in most religious cultures (Christianity is the rather conspicuous exception), dancing and religion are considered to be nearly synonymous. Prayer acts, ritual, dancing all central to most religious traditions the world overyet practically ignored, I might say religiously ignored by students of religion. The reason is perhaps obvious: these phenomena are not textual; they are bodied and involve movement.

Brain Body Movement The concerns of this course are not to make esoteric the study of religion by reducing it to biology; our concerns are to engage materials insights knowledge that might allow us to include what are undeniably important and centrally religiousprayer acts, dancing, ritual, masking. It is also to allow the study of story, text, language, history in enriched ways that significantly enhance and deepen our understandings, our appreciations. Yet, there is a more pressing urgency for my interests in what we are going to do in this course. Over the past decade I have become increasingly involved in creating ways in which I can engage in my culture in innovative and ways; an interest in creative service that engages the disparate aspects of my personal historyat once thoroughly academic and deeply bodily active.

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Lecture 2: The Meaning of the Body2

In his discussion of meaning-making in art, Mark Johnson,3 noted The idea that only words have meanings ignores vast stretches on the landscape of human meaning-making.4 Students of religion need take this seriously. Surely compared to religion there is no subject of study more richly textured by images and actions that are not based in words or that can be adequately captured by wordsart, music, architecture, ritual, pilgrimage, landscapes, colors, mountains, trees, dancing, dramatic performances, praying, gesturing, clothing and vestments, hair styles, even underwear, eating, drinking, animals, fasting, killing, birthing, initiating, dying, marrying, nurturing, loving, laying on of hands, circumcision, tooth extraction, menstruation, sub-incision, singing. Is there an end to this list? Yet, surely there is no academic endeavor more word-bound, headier, than the academic study of religion. It seems incomprehensible that the study of religion has been so unchallenged in the tacit insistence that embodied meaning has little to do with religions or the study of religions. I suppose it has much to do with the historical influence of Christianity and its less than eagerness to have much to do with bodies and also with Western intellectual history whose attitude towards body is classically articulated by Rene Descartes. It seems that the academic study of religion has looked at meaning in the same terms as does analytic philosophy, that is, that meaning is limited to objective, propositional, conceptual matters all of which can be fully captured, and necessarily so, by words. Yet, as Johnson shows, for at least the last thirty years, scientists and scholars in a variety of fields have powerfully established what was adumbrated early in the twentieth century by William James and John Dewey. They were American pragmatists, a field now rather poorly understood and also easily misunderstood and misrepresented. We ought, I think, to trace this pragmatism back to C. S Pierce, the father of pragmatism and the preeminent American philosopher. And I think we might even look back to Frederick Schiller, whose On the Aesthetic Education of Man, published in 1793, powerfully influenced Pierce as a teen, creating the intellectual foundation that would carry him through a very long life and an enormous body of work. The modern academic study of religions is based historically in the tradition of Biblical studies, and the comparative study of religions emerges from the proselytizing efforts of Christian mission interests. While such influences have become tacit, perhaps as much as for any reason so that we might continue to be legal, the pungent flavor of colonialism is always present in the study of the religions and cultures. As students of religion we study words, texts, written descriptions and what we produce is almost exclusively written and spoken words. Our task is to find or make meaning in our subjects, but, to be clear, our subjects are not the people, nor their experiences, nor their relationships with their gods, nor their rituals, nor their dances and musics and actions and joys and feelings. No, our subjects are the words that, I suppose, we somehow believe to represent or describe what we have termed the religions of these peoples. Jonathan Smith made this abundantly clear in his discussion of map and
2 3

Delivered January 26, 2009 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 4 Ibid., p. 9.

Brain Body Movement territory. He said that we suppose there are territories of real people and their religions, yet, in the study of religion, maps are all we have.5 The meanings we find or make are intended to be objective, conceptual, propositional, theoretical, and directed to the establishment of truths and knowledge. Such meanings are produced by the mind, by the powers of great minds. We recognize as legitimate only the most disembodied meanings. The privileging of the mind/soul/transcendent spirit, while ignoring that the body and experience, shape, without our conscious awareness, what comes into the field of vision, the scope of our studies. Such a philosophy of meaning truncates our subject to words, and even more limiting, to particular types of words and to specific types of relationship with these words. With the rarest of exceptions virtually every religious human being who has ever lived did not traffic in written words of any kind (including scriptures) in her or his understanding of religion and most certainly did not engage in any level of intellectual religious discourse. For all of them, the meaning of their religions has been felt, experienced, enacted, practiced, and grounded in their bodies. That religions are embodied is not the condition of some prior era that we have now, in our expanding literacy, surpassed. I certainly recall my parents shock and disbelief when I attempted to talk to them about the great concepts, theories, ideas, writers, thinkers I was so excited about while I was in graduate school studying religion. My father-in-law, a church-going man, told me frankly that he noticed that I lost my religiousness when I began my study of religions. He was right. Thus, the object of study we call religions scarcely corresponds at all with the religious lives of almost all religious peoples. My academic colleagues would likely find my remarks outrageous. They could promptly offer numerous examples of the more embodied study of religions such as the recent increase in field research, so-called site visits required of students, and the recent interest in lived religions and religions on the ground. There is also the interest in religion and politics and ritual. These are indeed important developments. The test is whether or not these studies actually give any attention to materials other than written words and if these studies recognize the value of any type of meaning beyond the propositional, objectivist, conceptual, word-centered. I dont think at this point we have much of a clue how to take that giant step beyond our limited understanding meaning. But I also believe that now is the time to accept the challenge to be open to what we might do. The potential is surely great and the promise is exciting. Mark Johnson shows us how the human body tends, by its own structure and methods, to hide from our awareness of it. We live as bodied minds, since our bodies arent normally the object of our attention we relate to the world beyond our bodies as body-minds. We dont see our seeing, hear our hearing, taste our tasting. Yet, it is clear that we have no access to the world or ourselves as anything but bodyminds. Johnsons focus is on meaning and meaning-making. The heart of his proposal is that while we are conditioned to understand meaning rather exclusively in terms of concepts and propositions expressed and enacted as words, there is another whole level of meaning-making that occurs more or less outside
5

Jonathan Z. Smith, Map is Not Territory, in Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Brain Body Movement of our consciousness. Interestingly, he understands this type of meaning-making as lower6 than that of the higher meaning-making we are more accustomed to. The low-high metaphor seems to reflect a number of associations. One is the association of the head with conceptual meaning while the grosser below-the-neck body, the traditional location of the so-called lower or animal senses, seems to operate on sensorimotor body schemas with little sense of meaning at all. This suggests that the conceptual, language based meaning is more important, more advanced than body meaning. Yet, Johnson clearly also sees lower in the positive terms of foundational for and prior to conceptual meaning. Many might accept and grant value to body schemas as being meaning-like, yet, they are usually set apart as of another order, thus paralleling the divide between mind and body. Johnson repairs this disjunction by invoking John Deweys principle of continuity7 that holds that these two levels or domains of meaning cannot be separate and unrelated; rather they are built on one another and are fundamentally alike or congruous. Johnson insists that, indeed, the higher forms of meaning-making depend on, in a fundamental way, the lower body-meanings. Much of his book is devoted to demonstrating this from a number of perspectives each reflecting a different area of research. The weight of the argument builds throughout the book. Granting the existence of body-meaning, it is essential for us to ask, given that such meanings are subconscious, how might we discover and uncover these meanings and, if words fail to adequately express or describe them, how can we articulate whatever we might uncover? Johnson describes these body-meanings as qualities, images (but not necessarily visual or conscious mental images), patterns, sensorimotor processes, and emotions. One can describe the environment for the generative formation of these types of meanings. One can describe the qualities and values that are associated with these types of meanings. Such attention cannot be understood as constituting a statement of conceptual or propositional meaning nor any kind of conclusive truth. Yet, accounting for the factors in the formation and presence of these deep-lying body-meanings adds much to our appreciation and understanding of religion as it is practiced, inseparable from emotion, feeling, value, qualities, expectations, associations even if they cannot be articulated in the higher sense of conceptual meaning. Further, this complementation to our restricting focus on higher meaning enriches our appreciation of the quality, power, passion, engagement, emotion, affect, of all the articulated meanings we endeavor to analyze and construct. Perhaps our first example should be self-analysis. The question really is, what body-mind schemas unconsciously underlie and shape the way we have come to study religion, that is, with such a truncated view focusing on words and propositional knowledge, theoretical constructions, and objective truth? What in our body-mind meanings allows us students of religion to restrict our subject matter so as to exclude nearly everything that has ever been experienced as religious, and to do so without seemingly noticing that we have done so?

6 7

Note that George Lakoff does as well. See Lecture 13. Johnson, p. 10.

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Brain Body Movement Inspired by Johnson we should consider the formation of patterns, images, schema, and sensorimotor processes for contemporary academia and for students of religion in particular. Johnsons first chapter shows how we come to an understanding of ourselves and our world through our bodily movements. Sheets-Johnstone is quoted by Johnson, We literally discover ourselves in movement. We make sense of ourselves in the course of movement.8 Can we apply these principles to our academic selves? From our earliest associations with learning, what bodily movement, what sensorimotor patterns are constructed in relation to the cultivation of making and discovering meaning? This is easy. From our earliest days of formal learning we are told to sit down and be quiet. We are told to use our heads. We identify bodily activity with recess or sport, not learning. Learning is reading and writing. Speaking, which is bodily involved, is interestingly limited. Learning is not only word centered; it is almost exclusively word. As we progress in learning to higher education, the frame narrows and the disembodying patterns are more strongly enforced. The patterns, qualities, values of learning are built through the limited movement of eyes on words and, now, index fingers on mice. It is not that we do not discover ourselves through movement; it is that we have discovered ourselves as learning and meaning-making creatures through the explicit limitation of movement. It would be quite easy to continue this exercise, yet surely you get the point is clear. I believe, consistent with Johnsons proposition, we would say that the practices of bodily movement identified with learning have created body-meanings in the form of sensorimotor behaviors, qualities, patterns, images, schemas. Thus, our very idea of what constitutes meaning and meaning-making are founded on these body-meanings. Because they ultimately reside here, in this deep body locale, they are more powerful even than the propositional meanings that we believe are our stock in trade. We remain unaware of how they are conditioned by body-meanings. We may also understand now why even the idea of body-meaning seems threatening to us; it rubs the deepest conditioning of our bodymind meanings. So there are two essential general notions that we must engage in Johnsons work and all the works that he represents. The first has to do with the scope of our domain of study. Surely it is time to seriously consider the expansion of what we do. The second has to do with how we understand meaning. Here too we have, it seems to me, overly narrowed our field to allow as worthy only propositional and descriptive meanings with an objectivist stance, even though we well know that in this post-modern world such a stance has been completely discredited. There are then new and daunting challenges that are possible for the academic study of religion and culture.

Quoted in Johnson, p. 20.

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Brain Body Movement

Lecture 3: Tradition and Change: Memory and Neuroplasty9

Certainly one of the most fascinating developments in the brain sciences during the last quarter century has been the shift in understandings about brain plasticity. It is also notable that the emerging ideas on plasticity were anticipated by Freud and others more than a century ago. The traditional view, still widely held, is that the brain is highly plastic only during the first few years of human life. In these first years a child is capable of uttering perfectly any phoneme, becoming fluent in any one or several languages, learning to read, to speak, to walk, to play piano, to perform complicated bodily and mental tasks. Yet, once this critical period passes the brain becomes fixed and mental capacities are then set. During the rest of ones life change certainly occurs through learning, yet the basic equipment and capabilities to learn are considered pretty much set. Thus, human development throughout the early critical years is understood as of a different order and type than change throughout the balance of life. At the end of the critical developmental period where brains are plastic the door is closed, the equipment and tools are fixed, and from then on one is rather stuck, for better or worse, with the mental equipment one has at that point. While the influence of genetics and environment, nature and nurture, is hotly debated, most believe that environment plays a significant role in child development, consequently there is much attention given to what parents and schools may do, and most acknowledging that genetics also has a powerfully deterministic effect. Interestingly my examination of the literature on youth brain development reflects a marked difference in tone and attitude between the critical period of child development and the post-critical period of child development. The literature on critical-period child development has an urgent positivity about it. It hums with the concern that everything possible be done to support brain development during these critical years. The adult brain is being formed so schools and parents are prodded and pushed into providing every opportunity and encouragement to these adult-brains-in-the-making, that they develop as fully as possible. Notably the Bush administrations no child left behind legislation is considered by many to be significant. A shift in attitude takes place as youth reach their teens. Suddenly the lions share of the literature addresses human development in terms of teens being seen as problems. There are endless articles and programs devoted to curtailing the brain-damaging effects of drugs, alcohol, television, risky behavior, careless sexual behavior, and so on. Surely it is not incidental that this shift from potentiality to problem, from positive to negative, correlates almost perfectly with the belief that brain development ceases at the end of the pre-teen critical developmental period. Recent scientific studies, conducted in both clinic and laboratory, have markedly shifted these beliefs about brain development and, though it remains controversial, the impact has yet to be widely felt in the general population. In her book The Primal Teen,10 Barbara Strauch outlines the research findings of Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Health. Giedds research findings, based on the studies of 150 living teen brains

Delivered February 2, 2009

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Brain Body Movement beginning in 1997, convinced him that teenage brains undergo periods when the cerebellum keeps getting bigger and better throughout the teen years. Teen brains experience periods of exuberance followed by a rapid reduction to their final set adult brain level. Periods of exuberance likely continue into the early twenties. What this discovery means is not all that clear. Interestingly Strauch, a mother of teens, finds it important as a way of understanding the erratic behavior of her teens, that is, it explains why they are problems. But it certainly raises the question, which seems to follow on the attitude about critical period brain and human development, of what environmental elements influence what happens to the teen brain during these periods of exuberance and refinement. It is commonly held that some parts of the brain are more plastic, less genetically fixed, during these periods than others. The issue of what to do to assure full and healthy teen brain and human development seems to be only informally discussed. There are a few ideas here worth noting. There is a general pervasive attitude that is effectively expressed as use it or lose it. There is a general belief that since the teen brain is more malleable than formerly believed the potential for damage from environmental causes drugs, video games, etcis greater. But it isnt yet that clear what sorts of experiences teenagers might have that would be most beneficial to this seeming gift of extensions to the critical period. Giedd simply says, If that teenage brain is still changing so much, we have to think about what kinds of experiences we want that growing brain to have. 11 Chuck Nelson at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota wrote, The thing is, we know experience matters, but we just dont know what nature of experience matters, whats best for the brain. 12 Curious to me in light of my having for a long time studied the importance of play, Giedd wrote, What if we find out that, in the end, what the brain wants is play, thats certainly possible. What if the brain grows best when it is allowed to play?13 Im not really sure what he means here by play; Im thinking he has something like lacrosse in mind. Provocative in any case. Paralleling in time this idea that the critical period of brain plasticity may be extended through the teenage years are the numerous studies of neuroplasty of adult brains, most notably those conducted by Paul Bach-y-Rita and Michael Merzenich. Their research findings and those of a number of others are presented in a bestselling book The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.14 Notably the science of brain plasticity seems invariably to arise from dramatic individual cases of severe trauma or malfunctions that have, seemingly miraculously, been overcome in clinical settings. Doidge engages us in this book by focusing initially on important cases which opened doors to the expanding evidence that brains remain plastic throughout life. While there isnt enough space here for an adequate reflection, it is essential to remind of Paul Bach-yRitas invention and development of amazing devices that map sensory data of one sense through the experience of another in the brain to allow, for example, the congenitally blind to see through stimulation on the skin and generally to enrich the localizationist perspectives on the brain.
10

Barbara Strauch, The Primal Teen:What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell us About our Kids (New York: Anchor Books, 2003). 11 Strauch, p. 21. 12 Quoted in Strauch, p. 42. 13 Quoted in Strauch, p. 44. 14 Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).

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Brain Body Movement We must carefully study Merzenichs extensive works which have provided much evidence that brains remain plastic, in some senses, throughout life. Merzenich recognized the profound implications of his findings on many developmental and disabling situations. He developed Fast ForWord, a computer software program directed to children with learning disorders, even disorders as acute as autism. The results from extensive trials and use have shown phenomenal results. He has also developed a business called Posit Science directed toward creating computer based tools to keep malleable the brains of aging people. Michael Gazzaniga has long been a prominent brain researcher. In his book Natures Mind,15 Gazzaniga posits a position that explains apparent brain plasticity in terms of genetic programming and the processes of selectivity that are consistent with long term evolution. He argues that all cells, as genetically determined, have a wide range of potential roles when confronted by differing demands. He argues for biological determinism. And he explicitly argues that brain malleability claims made for aging adults, such as Merzenich has made, are wrong. I have read his discussion fairly carefully, yet, clearly based in my limited knowledge and obviously shaped by the deep patterned schemas that bias me toward brain plasticity. As I see it, Gazzaniga can certainly be correct,16 while we may still continue to accept the results that demonstrate brain plasticity. For example, should a brain cell have the genetic possibility of being mapped to many different body parts, a remapping may certainly be based in this selection of genetic coding rather than some fundamental change in the cell or the creation of some completely new cell. While I dont pretend to fully understand Gazzaniga, and his work is well worth much fuller study, I continue to be totally convinced by the work of Bach-y-Rita and Merzenich, and frankly, even if I was intellectually convinced that their work was without grounding in brain physiology and neurology, their demonstrated practical results are so extensive that I would still follow the implications of their work. Given that these brain studies can be read by those of us without technical knowledge in the various scientific fields is relieving. However, I think that as we begin to direct some of our attention to studies based on the implications of these works we need to invest ourselves at least to a degree in the descriptive aspects of these technical studies. It would be irresponsible and perhaps reckless to shirk this task. What is the significance of all of this new information on brain plasticity to us as human beings and to us as students of religion and culture? Perhaps there is an analogy that may be of value drawn from our experience with computers. We are familiar with the difference between hardware, software, and application. In the realm of science fiction we can imagine a merging and intelligent interaction of hardware and software and the field of artificial intelligence is directed to progressively bridging the gap between them. Our science fiction and fantasy are built on the overlap of hardware and software. Certainly the dancing humorous emotional wisdom of WALL-E is a recent and one of the most successful
15

Michael S. Gazzaniga, Natures Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 16 Gazzanigas argument is that each cell is multiply capable of many tasks, thus under different demands a different capability is selected rather than the brain actually changing. To some this can still be evidence of endless plasticity.

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Brain Body Movement examples. We may think of the brain as the hardware we use to learn and drive our bodies, essential for us to live and interact with the world. Yet, we also acknowledge that not only is the brain physically growing and developing, but it is being trained and shaped. This second function is similar to the installation of more or less permanently resident software. We believe in the magic of the influence of the development of brain hardware and resident software during the critical period, but after that we resolve ourselves to the fact that the brain is now hardwired with relatively fixed resident software and closed to physical extension. From this point forward the brain works like our quotidian computer. Most intriguing to me is how this belief correlates with a wide range of attitudes and practices related to post critical period human life. We accept without question, and therefore act decisively in accordance, that teen brains are hardwired and thus anything having to do with teen brains is restricted to how to protect them against damage. Stroke victims are commonly relegated to the permanently disabled, because it is assumed that since a brain is not plastic, brain damage is permanent. However, Paul Bachy-Ritas fathers remarkable recovery from a disabling stroke was the very motivation that led Paul to embark on his remarkable studies of brain plasticity. Two important things for us to remember in this case is how difficult, how highly repetitive, how physically based was his fathers recovery. And we must be amazed that he recovered to near normalcy despite nearly 97% loss, through stroke damage, of the nerves that run from the cerebral cortex to the spine. Aging brains are considered to be like computer mother-boards, certain to become outdated, increasingly slow, and progressively useless. Declining memory, forgetfulness, dementia, Alzheimers disease, slowing, malfunction, are expected of aging adults. It is remarkable to me how our understanding of the life history of brains corresponds with our understanding of the human life cycle. Perhaps it is actually the cause of a wide range of social practices that pervade our culture, from no-child-left-behind to the very ideas of retirement and assisted living. The radical message that is presented to us by neuroplasty studies is that the critical period of early childhood where the formation of brain hardware, semi-hardwired resident patterns, is not completely closed at the end of the first critical period of development. There is abundant and increasing evidence that aspects of the malleability, adaptability, growth, change in brain hardware and resident software can and does take place throughout the entire life cycle, or it has the potential to do so. Further, while it is not altogether clear specifically what environmental factors have the most impact, it seems clear that changes to semi-hardwired brain are interconnected with experience. I believe another quite radical idea presented in this research is the emerging sense that while brain functions are localized to specific parts of the brain, the brain nonetheless is so aware of itself and its vast complexity that changes in any parts of the brain tend to be experienced in some respects throughout the brain. Again use it or lose it applies as does neurons that fire together wire together, and neurons that fire apart wire apart or neurons out of sync fail to link.i17 New ideas on brain plasticity are nice, but what do they have to do with what we are about? First of all, it seems to me that there are clear links between Mark Johnsons discussion18 of various types of bodymind meanings and research results focused on brain plasticity. Clearly a major portion of the brain hardware developed and designed through experience in the critical periods contributes to what
17 18

Doidge, p. 64. Mark Johnson, pp. 11-14.

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Brain Body Movement Johnson referred to as that foundational body-based type of meaning that is pre-cognitive, nonlinguistic, comprised of images (though not visual or even mentally visual), schemas and so forth. These, he argues, underlie and inform the so-called higher forms of meaning that we recognize as meaning more properly, that is, propositional, descriptive, and conceptual, all based in language. Indeed, what seems to be fixed through critical periods of brain development are just these foundational patterns and schemas and images which provide the ground patterns and processing routines that we use to learn, to perceive, to adapt to the world, to comprehend ourselves as selves and bodies. They seem to be established in the hard wired circuitry of our brains and the semi-hardwired resident programs. To consider these kinds of ideas allows us to begin to see that brain plasticity may also be powerfully connected with the kinds of experiences we may describe as cultural and religious. Should this be correct then the critical periods are imprinting periods for culture. We know that the brain becomes deeply patterned through enormous repetition of sensorimotor activities. The brain is the seat of our kinesthetic selves. The ways of a culture and a religion insinuate themselves onto human beings through the high repetition of patterned movements and practices and value/meaning/feeling associations. Once enculturated, change is as difficult as breaking a bad habit because culture does not occur at the propositional level, but at the subconscious body-based level of meaning. Change of these patterns requires high repetition. And change can scarcely be separated from kinesthetic activities. If we want to change the way we think, we cannot simply think our way from where we are to this new place. Such change requires a lengthy, repetitious, kinesthetic process. It is at once humorous and frightening to think of academics engaging this process. Were we to follow up these ideas, we would likely understand that religions and cultures might be better understood in terms of the repetitious sensorimotor activities that occur during critical periods of brain development, when cultures and religions become inseparable from brain hardware; it remains malleable, yet with reticence. To continue to maintain a distinction between the hardware and semihardwired resident programs and the later use of the hardware of the brain is of further value. It helps us understand why cultures and religions are so difficult to change. Change in culture or religion that is propositional is of the type we may call history. History is parallel to the level of learning in non-critical brain developmental periods. It is propositional, conscious, a matter of application. Yet this change is firmly grounded in the hardwired patterns, schemas, special processors of the brain. We may draw a useful parallel between tradition and the hardwiring of the brain and change/history as parallel to the use of the brain to learn and live, in other words, application. Like the new understandings of the brain that recognize that the brain may remain plastic throughout life, so too is tradition. There can be changes made in fundamental values, patterns, sensorimotor values, and so on. Yet, for both, these are slow processes often inseparable from serious trauma, crisis, or threat. Significant change in tradition is similar to a shift in paradigm. To draw this analogy, and to suppose that it may be more than analogy, is to give us important insights into the nature of tradition and change, into how something can remain unchanged yet ever changing, how tradition can be formed and have distinct identity, how tradition itself has the potential to change. Ill mention the implications for the study of religion and culture below.

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Brain Body Movement I think it quite remarkable, when seen from a relatively nave perspective that cultural, religious, personal, and political identities are so powerful and seem to persist outside of any influence by propositional, objectivist, and conceptual knowledge. There is an irony here I think since we so strongly tout the importance of objectivist knowledge and reason, yet our actions are almost wholly determined by our cultural, religious, political, and economic identities imprinted on the hardwiring and semihardwiring of our brains. Evidence of this is everywhere in the world today. We are often confounded by, but shouldnt be, the seeming impossibility of even talk occurring between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The same seems to apply to the so-called liberals and conservatives in the US government, who cannot seem to compromise or see any gray areas on anything. The pattern is that we despise our rivals and actually cannot see in our foes anything of value. I think we can actually understand ourselves, our religions and cultures, more interestingly by placing ourselves in the context of neuroplasty and we may be more insightful about how to change ourselves, relate to others, and to understand human processes. A quick agenda for the development of the study of religion and culture that proceeds from these ideas can be quickly drawn. The role and treatment of children in the establishment of tradition is critical. Children are the subjects of education and psychology, but rarely of interest to the study of religion and culture. Adult converts to religions are of special interest here in understanding how a tradition is embodied, that is, how body-minded meanings based in sensorimotor activities are insinuated onto an adult. Likely the experience for the adult is markedly different than for children. Also we may now understand why adult converts to a religion often act quite differently than those born into it. Agency, which is currently so often our concern, must now be understood as based in these brain patterned schemas. Action and inaction rest in these bodied meanings perhaps much more than being produced as the result of conscious considerations and choices. We have a significant challenge in developing methods for the appropriate articulation of schemas and sensorimotor patternings. We may begin to understand that stories and myths and rites and ritual dance dramas may be ways in which religions and cultures articulate these schemas. With an appreciation that it requires highly repetitious experience of sensorimotor actions to establish or change our semi-hardwired body-mind meaning schemas, we should have a much different kind of interest in ritual and repetitive quotidian cultural patterns. Presently we study ritual primarily through texts and have no patience or interest at all in the repetitiveness that is a distinctive mark of ritual. Repetition in music and dance, the partners to ritual, would also begin to be appreciated differently. Even our incessant interest in thought and theology and philosophy may enjoy an expansion when we begin to account for how these word-based phenomena are themselves grounded in semi-hardwired brain patterns. Issues of tradition and change pervade the study of religions and cultures. We are confounded by how traditions remain the same, yet operate in the processes of the sequence of changes we document as histories. The strong analogies, if not the actually causal bases, between brains becoming semi-

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Brain Body Movement hardwired, yet capable of applications and learnings, should provide us with extensive insights in how we think of and study issues of tradition and change. We may be able to understand the phenomena of change in new and interesting terms, seeing learning and applications as quite different orders of change from those sensorimotor based schemas that have come to be nearly hardwired. From these perspectives we may even reflect on our own academic processes to see that they participate in the same patterns. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,19 described the developmental process of science as progressing within paradigms (correlating to the application of a given set of theories) and as the result of a paradigm shift, where the basic operative and established theories are replaced by new ones. The difficulty of changing the hardwired patterns is so great that he noted that paradigm shifts usually do not take place except between generations. We may appreciate why this is the case recognizing that the presumptions on which a whole view of the world do not operate at the propositional, objective, cognitive, conscious level, but below that in the emotional, feeling, deeply body-based meanings. These few suggestions arise from just a few minutes of reflection. They are indeed cursory, superficial, and general. Still, I do not think even this quick list is superficial nor trivial nor insignificant in the potential for the study of religions and cultures. I think that any of these ideas might be effectively developed into a forum for the comparative studies of religions and cultures. Nor are these explorations limited to some completely new phenomena to be studied, but may well enrich the kinds of materials we have traditionally been interested in.

19

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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Brain Body Movement

Lecture 4: Imagination, Theory, Story20

Hmm. Separate the visual fields so the right eye cannot see what the left eye sees. Show a picture of a snow scene to the left eye, show a picture of a chicken foot to the right eye. The left eye connects with the right brain hemisphere; the right with the left. A special condition pertains to this little scenario: the person looking at these pictures has had his corpus collosum, the neurological super highway that connects brain hemispheres, severed so his brain hemispheres work independently. Now show the person groups of pictures from which he is to select an object that is related to the picture he sees. He correctly chooses, among a series of objects, a shovel to match the snow scene and he also correctly matches, among a group of objects, a chicken to correlate with the chicken foot. The left hemisphere has the special capacities for quantitative concerns and language and speech. Michael Gazzaniga refers to it as the interpreter.21 The right brain, which Diane Ackerman calls the strong silent one,22 is concerned more with emotion and intuition (a feeling kind of knowing). When this person is asked why he selected the shovel (chosen by the silent right hemisphere) his left brain must speak for the right brain, yet it cannot communicate directly with it. Rather than being befuddled about the shovel, he immediately responds Oh, thats simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.23 Herein lays a most fascinating revelation about being human. Our brains come equipped to make up stories. They have the mission to do so in order to explain and justify the world we live in and the actions we take. Note that what the left brain does automatically, instantly, naturally, and seemingly without conflict, is to examine the factors at handchicken, chicken foot, and shovelconstruct an hypothesis about how these objects may relate. Then to use a logical argument chicken is to chicken foot so the inference is that the shovel must have something to do with chickens which very logically would be to clean out the chicken shed. One small problem is that there is no chicken shed and the silent right brain hemisphere accurately selected and thus knows, but cant tell the left brain that the shovel matches the snow scene, quite distant from a chicken shed. Such behavior may be disturbing on the one hand. If we acknowledge this behavior, we must conclude that our left brains are habitual prevaricators and perhaps we should thank god for the moral control exerted by the right brain. But surely the creative intuitive right brain is otherwise occupied. To contemplate that this brain hemispherethe one most closely associated with rational thought and languageis built to make up stories raises complicated and frightening questions about those rational, logical, objective processes we so strongly rely on in our studies, our research, and our lives. However, we might find the presence of chicken shit in this story a source of wonderful humor and delight at our hardwired human brainy being. Human beings are story-makers and storytellers. I have on more than one occasion written about what I think is so engaging about the word story. I accepted
20 21

Delivered February 9, 2009 Gazziniga, pp. 124-29. 22 Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain (New York: Scribner, 2004) 23 Gazziniga, p. 124.

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Brain Body Movement the invitation to revise my book Native American Religions for the sole reason that I wanted to tell several stories. In the epilogue of that book I wrote, I particularly like the ambiguity of the word story. It is commonly used to refer to myth, folktale, anecdote, history, as well as an out-and-out lie. Often we never know.24 It is the never knowing that I most love. Wheres the fun in finding out? In the epilogue of that book I recounted in personal terms a number of stories related to my studies of Native American religions and my own life history. They were stories about stories, both told and untold. One of those stories was about my fathers family. I recount my childhood when I had a wonderful relationship with my grandmother and my adventures as a farm kid. Then I told about my interest in tracing genealogy and that, after my grandmother died, I was given a bible of hers. Consulting the pages in the bible that recorded births, marriages, and deaths I discovered something of interest. Recounting what I found in the bible, I wrote, Mattie Delphine Fulton *my grandmother+ was born in the year 1870 in Zenia, Ohio, to Isaac B. Fulton and Ruth Ellen McGoogen. And in tiny fine script beside her name was written born Saskwehana. My dad always told me that Elizabeth was a descendant of the president Adams family and that Isaac Fulton was a descendent of Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat. These are his stories, now also mine and it seems there were other stories left untold. Of course, I was referring to the untold story about the inclusion, using a fine pen, which indicated that my great grandmother was born with an Indian name. I think it is funny that no one has ever asked me about this. I focused on my mothers family in another story I wrote for this epilogue. In this story I recounted the family history that placed my mothers aunts, when they were children, with their family at the land rush that took place to open the Oklahoma Strip in 1889. After I recalled some of the stories they had told me about their encounters with some outlaws known as the Dalton Gang, I turned to a ribbon tied bundle of letters I found putting things in order after my mothers death. These were letters written among the sisters, siblings of my mothers grandmother. The cursive in these letters was written first in one direction on the paper and then the paper was turned ninety degrees and written the other direction overlaying the first, a method used when paper was scarce. I tell of reading these letters and I give some detail of one in particular. Heres what I wrote, One letter dated March 1881 was to Susan Maria Bales (b.1853) wife of Joseph Avey, from her sister, Sarah. A line from that letter reads, Joy be to God that Ocy Lenore *my mothers mother+ was born healthy and sound into the wilderness you call home. The secret of your Cherokee paramour is safe with me, though Ocys features may one day betray you. The hint of a story swallowed by the territory and time. No one has ever asked me about this either. N Scott Momaday once wrote that people can endure anything if it is rendered into a story. There is a conjunction between story and science and between story and belief. The structure of story proceeds from a condition of incongruity or incredulity, to the creation of an hypothesis that can render this condition congruous, then on to recount the evidence to support the conclusion. This is the scientific method: motivating problem, hypothesis, data, argument, conclusion. Belief works pretty much the same way. And curiously, given our distancing of science and religious and other belief
24 nd

Sam Gill, Native American Religions: An Introduction (Wadsworth, 2 ed. 2004), p. 129.

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Brain Body Movement systems, as Gazzaniga shows,25 both tend to focus on supportive information while quickly dismissing conflicting information. Seems as humans we want to understand the world and are happier with a good story than with being completely objective, disinterested, and technically correct. Wheres the fun in that? While I respect the immense knowledge and experience of Michael Gazzanigas long career in brain science, there could scarcely be a greater divide between his beliefs and mine regarding what distinguishes human greatness. The conclusion to his chapter called Selecting for Mind, reads this way, When the interpreter goes to work on more complex events, the resulting hypotheses and beliefs about the world also seem resistant to change. Even though the similarities are striking [I think he means the similarity between hypotheses and beliefs], the quintessential human property of mind rational processescan occasionally override our more primitive beliefs. It isnt easy, but when it occurs, it represents our finest achievement.26 Frankly Ill put my destiny with the invention of chicken shit. Ill try out my own rational faculties here. It seems to me that rational processes are not engaged until an hypothesis is present. So where do hypotheses come from? Certainly not rational thought.27 The issue is, how do we think a new thought. Or, put differently, how do we make up a new story? Gazzaniga was interested in showing that, from infancy, our brains are designed to interpret. He recounted the research done on infants to discern what knowledge and types of awareness are built in to being human and those that are not. Since infants cannot answer questions, an infants knowledge is measured by its reactions as reflected in its facial expression and bodily comportment. Infants have little or no change in expression or body comportment for things they expect or know, while they show an expression of surprise for things they do not know. Gazzaniga and others are focused on documenting that infants are pre-set with some knowledge. What they ignore, but take for granted, is, to me, the more interesting thing. And this is that babies have obvious bodily responses to surprises. Yes, surprise is the word Gazzinaga uses to describe it. Also in a figure28 the infants surprise is graphically shown by a thought bubble with an exclamation mark and a question mark in it (!?). Charles Sanders Pierce studied hypothetic inference throughout his entire life and I dont believe that his work has been surpassed or even adequately integrated into how we understand ourselves.29 We are all taught in science classes about the two standard inferential methods: induction and deduction. These are rational processes, those wonderful high minded processes Gazzaniga so loves. Pierce, however, noted that neither of these methods increases our knowledge by one whit (his term). Why? Well, he argued that since they are rational processes they simply move around in different ways what is

25 26

Gazzaniga, Natures Mind, p. 135-37. Ibid., p. 137. 27 C. S. Peirce argued that this process has a rational base simply because hypotheses are so often supportable while a random hypothesis would not be; however, clearly for him this was not a conscious rational process. 28 Ibid., Figure 6.2. 29 See Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vols. 1-6, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, vol 7-8, ed. A. W. Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-58), 5.196 and K. T. Fann, Peirces Theory of Abduction (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).

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Brain Body Movement already known. The real issue for Pierce was how we think something new and throughout his entire life he wrote on this topic again and again, usually using the term abduction; sometimes alternately hypothetic inference. The term is, to me, quite fascinating. Technically abduction refers to the movement away from the center. But it also means to be caught or captured by something; kidnapped as it were. Pierce argued that abduction differs in kind from induction and deduction in that it is not strictly a consciously used rational process. Rather, the process that gives rise to a hypothesis is initiated by the element of surprise and the subconscious iterative process that is initiated by the visceral experience of being surprised. Hypotheses arise for the purpose of dissipating the emotion of surprise. Abduction, Pierce said, is a feeling kind of knowing. 30 It is the rise of belief, of hypothesis, of a kind of knowing that isnt yet established by conscious rational process of inductive or deductive reasoning, by the objective application of data; but it is the kind of knowledge that is most fully felt.31 Pierce referred to it as a best guess; Ackerman wrote, Were devotees of the hunch, estimate, and best guess.32 It is why we constantly ask why? It is the kind of knowing that can, using other inferential methods, be extended in useful ways to the world around us. It is the knowing that grounds us, drives us, impassions us, and that, because it is felt, experienced in our bodies, is inseparable from emotion, motion, and life. We see on infant faces the birth of this distinctive human trait. So while Gazzaniga is more interested in documenting that infants come prepackaged with certain kinds of knowledge expectation, I am much more impressed that they come prepackaged with abductive capacities which even in infancy show that the body is inseparable from the mind, that even infants are capable of feeling surprised, of inventing a little chicken shit where needed. Surprise and the accompanying feeling kind of knowing ground our creativity, our stories, our art, our ritual, our myths, our sciencesall these lies that feel like truths. Gazzanigas longing for that rare human moment when a primitive belief may be bludgeoned to death by that quintessential human property of mind reminds me of those who commonly identify religion with those mountain top experiences of enlightenment or transcendence. They can await their pinnacle moments for all I care. For my tasteokay, maybe its one of my many primitive beliefsgive me a good surprise any old day, a nice crisis, a nasty blow, a crappy response to a lecture from my students. Our innate capacity to invent some chicken shit is our finest achievement. ********** Okay, I have some issues with the implications made by Norman Doidge, in his book The Brain That Changes Itself, regarding the work of Alvaro Pascual-Leone and others.33 Certainly I need to caution myself about dismissing information that contrasts with my own beliefs. So be it. At least Im going to talk about it. These are the studies that show that we can acquire bodily skills, such as playing piano, and that we can build body strength, by simply imagining our bodies performing these tasks.
30 31

Ibid. Peirce here anticipates the discussion of blending in Faucconier and Turner. See Lecture 13 32 Ackerman, p. 15. 33 Doidge, pp. 196-202.

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Brain Body Movement Let me fast forward to those Winter Olympic personal moments where we see an ice skater with earphones on, eyes closed, sitting behind stage awaiting her performance. We are told that she is imagining her performance, seeing herself with her minds eye (why is this always singular? Shouldnt it be minds eyes?). I get that and realize that it really works. I practice this technique myself in dancing. When also told that doing this imagination exercise also fires the same neurons as actually doing the skating, Im okay with that, too. After all they can document this with an fMRI. My embodied beliefs get in the way, however, since I dont think this imagination process can work for very long or can on its own make but the smallest progress toward building bodily skill and strength. By the fifth day of piano finger exercises, we are told, there was some small discrepancy beginning to appear, but this was made up for by two hours of physical practice. I dont have a problem with the implication that imagination and action are truly integrated; that sounds obvious. I just have a problem with moving to the conclusion that Doidge makes that the brain is so easily altered.34 Two comments here. First, were the brain so easily altered I believe we would be in a perpetual state of chaos. I know a woman who spent ten days on a rough sea in Indonesia. Her brain responded too quickly to remap itself to these challenging conditions. Now off the sea, for many months her brain has stubbornly retained this mapping and she can scarcely walk, she is dizzy, she has short-term memory problems. If our brains are always this plastic any brief conditioning would rewire them to the new condition and we would be in a constant turmoil to have brain mappings that we could simply rely on to allow us to live our lives. Second, were this imagination method of acquiring bodily skill and strength capable of extending beyond preliminary beginning stages or refining and fine tuning, we could start schools where we simply had students imagine playing piano every day without ever touching a piano with some expectation that they might be capable at their first bodily encounter with an actual piano of playing Bach after a couple hours practice. We might expect that a weight-lifter might imagine himself lifting weights without ever going to the gym and he could watch his muscles physically grow. Might we expect that he gain the benefits of nutritional supplements by imagining taking them? Maybe I am going a bit too far; being driven by my primitive beliefs. I am all for brain plasticity, but were these effects of imagination actually possible, Id still prefer to hear my wrong notes on a physical piano and drip with sweat in the gym. *********** So what does this have to do with our studies of religion and culture? The old notion of homo religiousus is interesting. This term man the religious suggests that humans are religious by nature; we are designed as religious beings. This belief has been used and misused by students of religion for some time. The studies of how our brains are wired and what they are designed to do, gives us some insight into what it means to be human. It appears clear that human brains are designed to be surprised by what they dont know and that this condition of surprise is instantly physically reflected throughout our bodies; that the brain/body has sensorimotor and emotional/feeling components. Accompanying this capacity, it seems that the human brain/body is then built to create stories which may take the form
34

Doidge, p. 209.

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Brain Body Movement of fictions, hypotheses, beliefs, guesses, hunches. It appears that we are designed so that our best guesses are more readily confirmed rather than challenged; that we actually feel, that is, have emotions, related to those things that threaten or challenge or confirm our theories and beliefs . Our propensities to create stories that diminish our surprises, our confoundments, our incredulities are surely as much at the heart of religion as they are of science. Religion creates and abides by story, myth, beliefs; science by hypotheses, inferential rational processes, and theories. I cant see how we can possibly understand these as separate in any way other than the contexts and contents. If you stand with Gazzaniga, youll understand religion as limited to those rare and rarified moments of transcendence, enlightenment, balance, harmony, heaven, order, being centered, goodness, and what comes next sweetness? If you are with me, youll see religion as conflict, wonder, struggle, repetitive acts of ritual dancing singing walking praying crying fighting arguing storytelling mythmaking searching ... what comes next suffering and sacrificing and pain and dying. I also believe that as students of religion we havent known much what to do with story, folklore, myth, and ritual. What our scientific colleagues are showing us is that our brains are designed to make stories, myths, tales, and many of those arts are understood as lies that tell the truth. Surely we should be comforted, on the one hand, by this information and energized and inspired, on the other, to return with new appreciation and interest to these aspects we know are essential to religions and cultures.

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Lecture 5: Color and Reality35

Some years ago now I realized that I had a difficult time making choices regarding some personal preferences. I could make decisions about many things, many of them having gravity and consequences, yet I found I couldnt say what color I most liked for a shirt or a car or the walls of a room. I had become increasingly aware of this lack. The tipping point came in two phases. In a moment of weakness I watched the popular film Runaway Bride. There was that scene where Julia Roberts says that she ran away from the altar and numerous betrothed because she didnt even know what kind of eggs she liked. She had always fallen for guys and just taken on, chameleon like, whatever they liked. Thus when she would get to the altar, shed realize that she was losing herself without ever knowing herself. As silly as was the movie, I resonated with her problem. I recalled the scene in my mind now and then. The final call to action, the tipping point came when I flew to some city or other to do a lecture. Dont now recall where it was. I was picked up at the airport and taken to dinner then to my hotel for the night. Bored but not tired, I flipped on the TV to see what was on. Amazingly as the TV came on, it was playing the very scene in Runaway Bride where Julia Roberts is explaining to Richard Geer that she needed to determine what kind of eggs she liked. I took this extreme coincidence as a sign from the universe and decided I needed to follow Julias lead. At that time I was living in a large home in Niwot, Colorado, with a 400 square foot room that I wanted to redecorate as a dance studio, I decided it was time to address this issue and that color was as good a way as any to start. It didnt seem enough to simply go to Sherwin Williams, look at paint chips, and make a decision, so I began to do research on color. I looked at color charts to try to see the relationship between primary, secondary, tertiary color combinations and how colors go together. I wanted to understand why colors can be placed on a wheel and why so many people have such strong opinions about what colors go, or more strongly, dont go with other colors. Then I bought a bunch of color design books and looked at hundreds of photos of rooms and design ideas and various perspectives on how to use colors and how to put colors together for different affects. I began to see that color schemes are most often identified with valuescool or warm, invigorating or soothingor with erasthe fifties for exampleor with culturesMoroccan or Chinese or Ghanaian. Then, one day I was talking to someone about my burgeoning interest in color and my new-found knowledge of the association between culture and color. She replied, Oh yes, thats why red is so often a royal color. Only royalty could afford red dyes. Well, this statement hit me like a brick and I have to say that it took me a few days to admit, even to myself, the implications. You see, for some odd reason, I had stupidly not thought that chemically based colors have only been available in rather recent times. It had not dawned on me that not everyone in human history could simply run to a Home Depot and pick any color at all paying the same price for any choice. Once I had swallowed my own embarrassment I had newfound passion about learning more about color.
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Delivered February 16, 2009

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Brain Body Movement Historically every color has a story and Victoria Finlays book Color: A Natural History of the Palette36does a fascinating job of discovering and telling these stories. Color is of the earth or, perhaps more accurately, color is an amazing aspect of our relationship with the earth. Color is of people and their specific historical, geographical, geological, relationship with the earth and one another. Color has often been a factor in world politics and economics and war. Color is also of the imagination and can be appropriated to apply to surfaces to color things. Color has a psychological dimension in that we feel emotional responses to color in our bodies much more powerfully than we have responses to color from the interpreter language-generating part of our brains. The use of color as pigment or dye, in some fashion or other, is fundamental to art. And then color has major philosophical and physiological and neurological and anthropological and psychological dimensions as well. Indeed, it is fascinating that studies of color have become watershed examples in a number of fields of study. Modern studies of color spanning several fields have revealed a great deal, in quite concrete ways, about what we are as human beings. To me the immediately most important findings in color studies are: Those that convince us that color does not exist independent of our perception of it. While this aspect of color is a philosophical position at some point, it is a physiological and neurological finding at another. Those that convince us that while color tastes and color terms are culturally determined, certain aspects of color perception are universal among humans because of our common neurophysiology. Those that convince us that the physiology of the color receptors in the eye, conjoined with the neurological processing of this information, determines our identification of primary colors despite the continuum of the color spectrum of light. This is why we see color bands in the rainbow rather than a smudge or blur. Those that convince us that the categories we construct and by which we live are, like color, constructs that emerge from a complex combination of physiological, neurological, biological, cultural, and personal sensorimotor involvements. Here color is an exemplar of our human distinctiveness.

Knowledge of these studies of color, in my experience, actually make living as a human being in the world pop with vitality like a Kandinsky painting. The idea that color does not exist independent of our perception of it, is astounding, particularly when we extend this to all human experience of the world. It addresses an issue I have long struggled with. Ive thought of it primarily in terms of what is sometimes called the anthropic principle. I have been unable to let it go. Strangely Ive always connected the idea with dinosaurs. You see, I cannot bring myself to believe that dinosaurs existed in some distant past. In fact, I have trouble accepting that anything can exist totally free of any awareness, conscious or subconscious, at all that it exists. This would be a world empty of meaning in any possible sense. I certainly recognize that this is a
36

Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (New York: Random House, 2002).

26

Brain Body Movement homocentric view, but I cant let it go. I hear folks when they say, you know existence may just not be about us. Still, there is no about, no existence, no distinction, no categories, apart from some meaningmaking perspective, apart from some awareness, apart from some confoundable being of some sort asking questions. It is arrogant to hold that the world exists only so that we may perceive it. But then I think that is precisely what these studies of color are telling us. We create color in the world as we interact with it. Thus, apart from us, there is no color, in any sense we can imagine color to be. If a dinosaur can have no color, apart from us, can be there be dinosaurs? Varela, Thompson, and Rosh, in The Embodied Mind,37 refer to this interdependence as enaction. They put it quite well when they write Color categorization in its entirety depends upon a tangled hierarchy of perceptual and cognitive processes, some species specific and others culture specific. They also serve to illustrate the point that color categories are not to be found in some pregiven world that is independent of our perceptual and cognitive capacities. The categories red, green, yellow, blue, purple, orangeas well as light/warm, dark/cool, yellow-with-green, etc.are experiential, consensual, and embodied; they depend upon our biological and cultural history of structural coupling.38 It is really amazing that these color studies are able to demonstrate so convincingly this tangle of processes. I am about to tell you something you will not ever forget because the image is so distinctive as is the revelation it makes. Kittens were raised in the dark and exposed to light only under controlled conditions. The kittens were divided into two groups. Kittens in one group were free to move around as they pleased; however, the kittens in the other group were confined to a little cart attached to the freely mobile kittens. Thus they moved about the world together in pairs, yet one actively engaged the environment through movement, while the other passively, that is, without motivating movement or actively interacting with the environment. Only the actively moving kittens developed sight. The passive kittens were functionally blind.39 The image of those kittens being pulled about by their siblings leaves us with another remarkable insight.40 Perception, indeed our world, depends on our willful and experiential action; we must explore our world through directed bodily movement in order to even see it. Non-directed movement, even the experience of differing perspectives through non-directed movement, is not enough to wire up our brains for meaningful sight. We must explore the world with our moving experiential touch-based bodies to see the world. This example shows us that even sight is actually based in the sense of touch, the sense that is itself grounded in movement. Like my fixation on dinosaurs, I cant help but be concerned that as academics we explore the world almost exclusively with eyes peering out of long immobilized bodies. I cannot help but be concerned about our whole educational system that discourages touch and movement. Our understanding of
37

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosh, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993). 38 Ibid., p. 171. 39 Ibid., pp. 174-75. 40 Ibid., p. 175.

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Brain Body Movement learning is captured by the phrases we so often use to beseech our kids to learn, such as, Sit down, shut up, and keep your hands to yourselves. Of course, I understand that sight is enabled early in life, however, believing that neuroplasty is possible throughout life, I cant help but think that the sensorimotor patterning of bodily inaction, of restricting movement to the stuttering index finger and the movement of mouths and eyes, has a major effect on what we value, on the values born in those subconscious schemas that Mark Johnson revealed as being foundational to all of our higher conscious rational cognitive processes. Surely the impact on us is enormous and yet, as it is based in long engrained and embodied patternings and schemas, we are not, we cannot, even be aware of the deep effect these have on us. Valera, Thompson, and Roschs work on category, as also Lakoffs, is quite remarkable I think. Clearly we do have a fairly embedded sense that categories work as they are envisioned in classical category theory, that is, that categories reflect the world as it is separate from us and that members of a common category all share the same distinctive trait. Yet, it doesnt take all that much to disenchant us with this theory when we consider our own practices related to category. Get ready for application to our area of study. Lets be ambitious and begin with the term that labels the category that gives all of us a common identity, religion. It is rather standard fare for students of religion, at one time or another, to think a bit about this term. In my graduate school days, it was common to attempt definitions of religion. This invariably led to collections of definitions that have been offered among religion scholars. It also led to trying to understand what we mean by definition and making distinctions between lexical definitions and phenomenological definitions. This discussion would arise because it used to be fairly widely held that religion is the ineffable and how on earth can you define the ineffable? Such discussions about definition and even definitional strategies always become tedious to the max and eventually just plain boring. Most such discussions simply provide a bit of lip service to the matter and go on. Still, this isnt completely satisfying or even acceptably academic. Jonathan Smith has made a strong case that we invent religion. Only some scholars are even open to this idea. The discussions of category provide some insight to the matter of defining religion. Rosch and Lakoff make much of the prototype theory of category.41 Rather than members of a category sharing one or more distinctive traits, these traits being definitional criteria, the prototype theory holds that categories are based on best examples joined by others that can be related to them in various ways and degrees. Implications of the prototype theory also hold that categories, like colors, are not distinctions in the world independent of us. Rather categories are the product of human interactions with the world and clearly, like color, they are the product of a tangle of perceptual and cognitive processes all ultimately grounded in body, in sight, in purposive movement, in brain, in touch. Biology, neurology, culture, history, and individual experience all play a part. Certainly then the term religion refers to a category constructed in the same fashion.

41

George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

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Brain Body Movement The academic study of religion emerged largely from Christian studies. All one need do to be overwhelmed by the impact of this heritage is to read Walter Cappss book, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline.42 In this thick book the first non-white, non-Christian, non-male scholar doesnt show up until near the end of the book. The sensorimotor patternings that have created the schemas that we unconsciously draw on when we think of religion in any way are those experienced by thousands of dead white Christian men. Quite the groove! And it doesnt take a Lilly funded study to identify Christianity as the operative prototype we continue to use, though now rather unconsciously, as our best case for our deeply embodied understanding of religion. As students of religion, virtually every question we ask, every sub-category we engage, every phenomenon we identify is rooted in an understanding of Christianity held, not by the broad spectrum of practicing Christians throughout Christian history, but by that elite group of white male intellectuals that spent their entire lives sitting immobile thinking and writing about Christianity. I am not sure we can grasp the depth and pervasiveness of the impact on us of these deeply engrained sensorimotor schemas. I suggest that they establish the reality of the academic study of religion, a level of subconscious and tacit agreement borne in the body, the inactive body, to a highly restricted ontology. Notably when understood in this highly restricted frame, we can appreciate that all the debated differences that have shaped the history of this academic study are but minor adjustments in an overly and narrowly determined world. Academics are kittens riding in carts pulled by others. In my first lecture in this series I talked about the peculiar ways in which the academic study of religion seems to be limited. It has pretty much ignored such obviously religious phenomena as prayer acts, ritual, dancing, drama, music, art. We can now perhaps begin to appreciate why such odd exclusions occur. They simply are not features that have been connected with aspects of the prototype of religion that our forefathers (and I mean this literally) constructed and passes along to us. Valera, Thompson, and Roschs extensive discussion of Buddhism as a traditional philosophical source to assist us in our understanding of enaction and its implications raise an interesting idea. Let us suppose that the academic study of religion had been based on an understanding of religion where the prototype for a religion was Buddhism. It would be interesting to take some time to start with this idea and play it out. My guess is that we wouldnt even end up with anything recognizable from our current practice. Clearly how could an understanding with an operative prototype inseparable from enaction ever led to even the bodily comportment and practice of contemporary Western academics. Even the furniture of learning (should it exist) would be completely different. It seems that the implications of these insights are strong support for Smiths idea that we invent religion, but it also is strong support for the absence of our awareness that we do so. We simply dont know that we see red, blue, and yellow because of a complex entangled set of subconscious processes. Surely the cause is the same with religion. That such effects occur at a subconscious and bodily level to actually determine what we see and how we value what we see means that we are not aware of it. Yet we can know that these processes are at work and even specifically how they impact us.
42

Walter Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2000).

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Brain Body Movement Yet I believe, always faithful to plasticity, that knowing something of the background of conditioning and determining processes, we may purposefully go about our work anew. Coming to know that the operative prototype for our study of religion is Christianity we can do personal archaeology to learn how this shapes our world. Discovering the deeply determining nature of sensorimotor patternings and their interconnection with cognition, we may finally recognize the potentially determining impact of sedentary immobile bodies, the icon of our educational system, and get up and start moving about. We can begin to exercise our body/minds to create new sensorimotor patterns that may embody new schemas which will change who we are and the world we experience. These are but a few ideas I have on the implications of color on our understanding of who we are as human beings and as students of religion. I will return to this topic for fuller discussion in a later lecture. Oh, and I did eventually paint that dance studiored with yellow ceilings, gold yellow trim with a light berry purple accent in it. And I went on to design many of the features of my current house which the neighbors call the colorful house. In this regard there is perhaps one more relevant experience. To assure that I created and discovered my own taste in color I knew that I simply couldnt consult with anyone. I knew that were I to ask even my dog what he thought about the color scheme I was planning to use on the walls of this room, Id read his every bark and drool as a critical statement and Id quickly change my mind. Week after week I considered various combinations and gradually began to narrow my choice. Finally, I bought the paint and when nobody was home, I spread out the drop cloth and started one large wall. Remember this wall was red. I painted a pretty large area and walked across the room to give it a look. My stomach churned, my head spun, and I nearly threw up. When you first see a large area of red on a wall that has been quite bland, it is a huge emotional shock. I sat down, I had to, and began to consider rushing back to the paint store to get a nice beige to over paint the red. At that moment a young woman who was renting a room from me walked in. Yikes! Caught in the act. Her immediate response was, I love it! It is so you! This was the immediate response of virtually everyone who ever saw it. We had many dance parties in that room while I lived there, some even with live salsa bands. The room came to be known as Sams Club. The lesson here may be that we might undergo the same emotionally wrenching process in trying to repaint our field of study, but I have faith that we would enjoy what comes of it.

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Brain Body Movement

Lecture 6: Phantom and Reality43

Touch and feeling are our most reliable and perhaps our most primitive measures of reality; yet we all know that they arent necessarily reliable. If I put my finger in a flame, I feel the heat of it, the risk to my flesh, and I have not a single doubt in the world of the reality of the flame. When someone asks us a question, even in the most intellectually controlled situation, the initiation of our response comes from our feelings about the question. Feeling, emotion, and touch are complexly interrelated in ways we will continue to explore. As Charles Sanders Peirce showed, hypothetic inference is fueled by a feeling kind of knowing. Yet, a single word may trigger us to feel insulted or abandoned. Common experience reveals that these feelings are often not connected to external reality. Feeling bridges physical and emotional sensation, yet both are powerfully resident in our bodies. We know that we often feel emotionally in ways not supported by the world around us. Still, the depth of these feelings and their power to impact us is undeniable. V.S. Ramachandran studied many cases of feelings not supported by reality in the fascinating cases of phantom limbs.44 There is a high incidence among amputees of continuing to feel the limb or body part that has been removed. Sometimes this is the bazaar situation of an amputee feeling that he or she can extend the arm and operate fingers to do such tasks as pick up a coffee cup. Other times it manifests in intense pain in the non-existent limb. Sometimes the feeling is of a limb, but one completely immobile. Physicians and researchers have been mostly mystified by this phenomenon. Ramachandran has made significant progress in both understanding and treating phantom limb syndrome and in doing so he has also revealed much about the workings of the brain in relation to the larger body. There are a number of provocative issues associated with phantom limb studies that are valuable for us to consider with respect to our seemingly distant interests in the study of religions and cultures. First, how do we grasp the complexity of the brain? While we have faced this before, I feel it is essential to try yet again, in hopes that, with each iteration, well grasp the matter a bit fuller. Ramachandran put it this way A piece of your brain the size of a grain of sand would contain one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses, all talking to each other. Given these figures, its been calculated that the number of possible brain statesthe number of permutations and

43 44

Delivered February 23, 2009 V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: Quill, 1998). Ive been encountering numerous references to phantom limbs of late. Stephen Kings novel Duma Key focuses on the phantom limb of his protagonist that seems to have a life of its own. In Jonah Lehrers wonderful book Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007) discusses Walt Whitmans discussion of the syndrome based on his experience nursing many amputees in the context of the Civil War. Lehrer also notes that Hermann Melville referred to the syndrome even before Whitman related to Ahabs loss of a limb to Moby Dick.

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Brain Body Movement combinations of activity that are theoretically possibleexceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. 45 In 1913 Henry Poincare tried to mathematically model the relationship between three interacting objects in gravitational orbits only to determine that this is entirely incalculable. This was the introduction of chaos theory. There is an easy mathematical solution to two interacting objects, but three become impossible. Imagine a much greater number. It is not that synapses are bodies moving relative to one another in a gravitational field, but I think the analogy is significant. How can one grasp such utter complexity presented by the brain? Brain scientists are not kidding when they tell us that they know next to nothing about the brain. A couple weeks ago I was visiting with Pat Guyton, a master Pilates teacher. She told me that standing at rest simply raising one arm to the side engages an astounding number of required responses from proprioceptors and muscles distributed across our body to simply keep us from falling over from the levered weight of the extended arm. Add this kind of complexity to that of the brain since the brain and body are inseparable and the results are just overwhelming. I suppose the down side of grasping all this complexity is that we have no hope whatsoever of actually understanding a significant amount of the physical bodied aspect of being human beings. When we appreciate that we are bodies even as we are minds and spirits, the sheer order of complexity may seem so great as to shut us down. However, should we want to hold out any hope for retaining awe, mystery, wonder, what could possibly rival the appreciation of the complexity of brain/body/mind/spirit? Clearly our fears should be relieved that to consider religion and culture from the perspective of the body is somehow reducing them to the merely mechanical, physical, or chemical. Indeed, it is to the very order of complexity that we find the basis for our freedom, for our individuality. Ill want to take this topic up in greater depth. I am interested in the mapping aspect of Ramachandrans phantom limb studies. He, as have many before him, shows that the human body is mapped on the brain. He says that the entire body surface is mapped on the brain46 and that there are many maps in the brain corresponding to body and bodily functions.47 Thirty maps are known to be associated with vision alone.48 Since mapping is one of the principal metaphors that the study of religions and cultures use to help us understand what we are doing,49 I want to reflect on what neuroscientists mean by maps. By maps they indicate that there is a physical representation in the brain of the terrain of the body. Yet, in this instance of mapping the relationship between the brain map and the body part is an actual neurological connection. Here stimulating an area of the brain map will result in a felt sensation or physical action in
45 46

Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 27. 47 Ibid., p. 29. 48 Ibid., pp. 39 and 72. 49 See for example Jonathan Z. Smiths Map is not Territory in Map is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also Sam Gill, Territory In Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Edited by Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 298-313.

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Brain Body Movement the corresponding body part and vice versa. We can certainly appreciate why the brain areas corresponding to body areas are called maps. There is a one-to-one relationship between the two and the physical area taken in the brain is a tiny fraction of the physical area of the body surface, thus there is a scale in the relationship between map and territory. However, unlike conventional maps, these brain areas corresponding with body features are neurologically connected. I think, in this instance, it would be better to adjust our understanding of the body and the brain to understand them as inseparable. The body surface is surely nothing but meat without the interconnection to the brain and the brain area is useless without connection to the body. The skin is the outer surface of the brain. The body is the extension of the brain. This mapping is, at least in one sense (but only one sense), hardwired, genetic, generic to being human, or generic to having a brain. Should we use this type of mapping as metaphorically reflecting some aspects of the study of religions and cultures, we would understand more fully the relationship between scholar and subject. As scholars, particularly seeing ourselves as generally removed from society, the distance symbolized by the idyllic campuses on which we dwell, we seem to care not about our relationship to our subject. Only rarely would we think of ourselves as actually interconnected with them. We may occasionally encounter them in the field; we may occasionally invite one of them to come into our space; yet, we do not consider our mapping as anything beyond marks on pieces of paper. A large amount of the research I have done on the study of religions and cultures has documented the actual and physical impact scholars have on their subjects. My book Storytracking50 included a consideration of two of our most important and influential religion scholarsMircea Eliade and Jonathan Smithto show how both of them construct the subjects they use to document their understandings of religion and in doing so their subjects, actual people and cultures, have undergone significant change. The cases I have worked on are not isolated and unusual examples. Timothy Mitchells book Colonizing Egypt51 shows how nineteenth century European exhibits representing the city Cairo resulted eventually in physical changes in the city so that it would conform to European expectations. I could provide many examples. Certainly the academy is a colonial enterprise and we surely must know that we have changed the world as we have studied it. We insist that the world we observe conform to the expectations we have of it. Our study of something invariably transforms it, in itself, to correspond with our expectations projected on it. The point here is that we need to think of ourselves as connected to our subjects in the same way as our bodies are connected to our brain maps, that is, they are connected and interdependent. Such a perspective demands that we be more sensitive and responsible scholars. And more powerful as well. Another mapping that Ramachandran discusses is the sort involved in human perception. Ramachandran discusses this mapping in the context of his phantom limb studies. While the limb is physically absent, the brain creates and holds a map of the missing limb, often interwoven with other body areas reflecting powerful sensations like pain attributed to the missing limb. The absence of the interconnection between brain map area and corresponding body area is not known to the
50 51

Sam Gill, Storytracking: Texts, Stories, Histories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)

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Brain Body Movement corresponding area of the brain. Ramachandran uses a mirror illusion to give visual feedback to the brain. 52 Ill consider the relationship between vision and touch shortly and in later sections of the course. The most important principle underlying all perception, according the Ramachandrans research, is that the mechanisms of perception are mainly involved in extracting statistical correlations from the world to create a model that is temporarily useful.53 The sort of mapping that is involved with perception is more like our traditional understanding of mapping in that the map and territory are related, but separate. The brain has a symbolic representation of the external world. Perception is fundamentally an interpretive and representative enterprise, not one that objectively records the external reality. Nor is it a one-way process, that is, from external to internal, but rather an interactive oscillatory process, a comparative process, if you will. Perception is a process of creating symbolic images and patterns that our brains use to operate all the functions of the body, the body-mind. The process is creative in that it, like the interpreter functions of the left brain, seeks whole pictures, meaningful relationships, congruency, and sensibility.54 Ramachandran includes a number of visual exercises with diagrams he includes to demonstrate how vision fills in (the blind spot, for example) and alters patterns.55 His parlor games, as he calls them, demonstrate how our visual blind spot is filled in, in effect assuring gapless coherence of reality. Filling in, providing the missing pieces, is the way perception works. We have images of our bodies and the world that guide our perception and help fill in gaps in the raw data that we collect to conform to these images. Yet, our perceptions also serve to reinforce as well as modify and even radically change these images. In this understanding Ramachandran believes that nature is not opposed to nurture, but rather, as was demonstrated in the many studies of color, there is a complex interaction between them.56 These ideas are powerfully captured in his statement Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience.57 To apply this information to our work, the stream of readings we are doing is hammering home the position that human beings are story-makers and storytellers. Our bodies, including our brains, are designed to fill in gaps, to make up stories, to reshape raw perceptual information to confirm resident images and schemas, to use held images and schemas to shape our perceptions, to engage in imaginative playful oscillatory creative processes. Gazzaniga showed this human quality in terms of brain hemispheric actions. Johnson demonstrated this with the sensorimotor patterns and schemas that inform basic level categories and the very idea of categorization. Ramachandran shows that in some senses our bodies are phantoms, fabrications of our brains. Our perceptual processes fill in gaps, shift lines, construct images based on unconscious best guesses. We must surely be impacted by this overwhelming realization that we are prone to creating fiction and we do not even know we are doing it.

52 53

Ramachandran, pp. 46-48. Ibid., p. 59. 54 In Lecture 13 Ill take up fit and coherence. 55 Ramachandran, pp. 90-97. 56 Ibid., p. 56. 57 Ibid., p. 58.

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Brain Body Movement We may choose to be horrified by this information or to celebrate it, but we most certainly should not ignore it. As students of religion and culture we must not only recognize these processes in ourselves, but also in our subjects. We create ourselves and one another as we discover one another and ourselves. Another aspect of Ramachandrans work that fascinates me is its implications for touch. Im a big fan of touch as a foundational sense. Touch is a remarkably complex sense that involves sensation on the skin, the surface or outside, while at the same time touch or feeling occurs on the inside from the flesh below the skin. And there is also proprioceptive touch58 which is how the body knows where it is in space, that is, the internal touch of the body by the body itself. How appropriate it is that touch is inseparable from feeling and emotion. Touch and feeling are, as I noted at the outset, a ground of our bodily being and the unquestioned measure of reality. Touch and vision are interconnected. Well study this later as we consider Maurice Merleau-Ponty.59 Ramachandran demonstrates the connection by his mirror trickery used with amputees, where vision provides a feedback loop to help revise brain mappings (the neurological type) of body parts, in this case, missing body parts. Touch is also the sense most associated with sensorimotor actions, that is, with self-directed and experienced bodily movement. Touch invariably invokes a sense of movement. Were we to carefully contemplate the importance of touch to being human, we would surely revise in significant ways our approach to the study of religion and culture. The sensorimotor patterns, the basic level categories, set by repetition throughout the long history of our academic studies of religion exclude, almost totally, any of the implications of touch even its interdependence on vision. Ramachandran shows, through a fascinating exercise that we may appear to feel in our own bodies someone touching a table.60 The ease with which we are capable of incorporating, in a feeling way, in an experiential way, non-fleshy things into our bodies is quite remarkable. Ramachandrans demonstrations that we can feel stimulation to a plastic hand or even a table top, obviously and visually confirmed as inanimate and artificial, is most amazing. It is matter of course to embrace the idea that we may transcend the boundaries of our skin by touch. But we dont generally think that we can have feeling sensations from external and artificial objects in the same sense we feel with our bodied sense of touch. Again this ability to appropriate objects into our bodies is possible primarily through the sense of touch conditioned by even a remarkably brief period of sensorimotor patterning. Such insights take us back to the classic theories of magic presented by E. B. Tylor in the late nineteenth century. It opens many interesting possibilities for expanding our studies. It increases the sense of importance of repetitive patterned movement forms such as ritual and dancing. It increases the sense of importance of our relationship to objects and material culture. The objects and structures we surround ourselves with are extensions of ourselves and we come to actually feel the external world through the incorporation of these objects into our bodies. Think of our clothing, our transportation vehicles, our

58 59

Ill deal with this topic more fully in a later lecture. See Lecture 10 60 Ramachandran, pp. 60-61

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Brain Body Movement houses, our cities, our countries. Through routinized sensorimotor conditioning we feel in our bodies through these inanimate, non-sentient, and completely constructed things.

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Lecture 7: Making, Agency, Action, Artifice61

Human life, from Genesis to the Gross National Product, is about making and agency and action that lead us to having stuff. Human beings are concerned about making themselves, making others, making stuff, making others make stuff, make stuff that makes more stuff. The measure of the man is how many toys he has, how much money he makes, how much agency he commands, how much power he has to make others make stuff for him, that is, ones stuff is what it is all about. Money is both a measure and an exchange of our making, our agency, our power, our wealth, our self-worth. The question, how much does she make? is to invoke a medium that embraces all these related terms. The current world crisis is a crisis of food and health care and education and global warming and international relations and terrorism and security and opportunity? How does the new president address all these issues? By infusing money and in terms of budgets. In the words of that great song in Cabaret, money makes the world go round, the world go round, the world go round. To attend to these things is nothing new, yet, every time I read Elaine Scarrys book, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World,62 I am surprised at how deeply making and unmaking are related to the human body and how long this relationship has existed. It is fascinating to think about how all making is, in some important sense, motivated by some lack of the body, by some projection of the body into the world beyond the body.63 And thus the motivation, the agency, for making rests in part on pain, on a desire to alleviate pain and discomfort. It is a crazy insight to recognize that all made things are, in some sense, patterned on the body or at least our idea of what a body should be. It is important that we realize that in making stuff, we are remaking ourselves. I find insightful Scarrys discussion of the hinge effect of made things. We make things as projections from our bodies or our image of what our bodies should be. These made things, standing seemingly independent of us in the world outside our bodies, then return the favor, exercising an agency projected on them to remake us. We must spend some quality time reflecting on the multiplier and exchange effect of made things. The energy and effort required to make a thing is multiplied by its impact on us and those around us as it hinges back to show us what we did. Scarrys analysis of the potential impact of the small effort and movement required to pull the trigger of a gun is far out of proportion to the impact the fired gun has on the world. Of course, to make a gun from the inception of the idea of such a device through a history of development and design and manufacture and distribution is a long and complex one, yet we can see that in making there is often a powerful multiplication of the hinged return. In the evolution of human beings, the development of the thumb is, as Friedrich Engles noted,64 of critical importance. Without a thumb, we cannot easily hold tools to make things to hold and exchange. The thumb is surely also the inspiration for all our interest in holding, grasping, clasping, handedness, specialization (even of our brain hemispheres), weapons, handshakes, and masturbation (although the
61 62

Delivered March 1, 2009 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 63 Ibid., pp. 284-88. 64 The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man (an unfinished essay)

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Brain Body Movement thumb is here important to males not females). In turn, the thumb is the culprit in loss and loosing. We measure value in terms of the direction of the thumbthumb up is winner, down is looser. Ethologists and evolutionists have long known the opposing thumb a distinctive mark of humans. Ill return to the thumb later. Scarrys location of making in Jewish and Christian biblical literature is fascinating and actually jarring, I think. The biblical passages of god making the world and human beings; the passages of human beings making images of god and his response; all seem rather shocking in the degree to which the making and unmaking of the body is involved. I find it rather surprising to think about how extensively involved is the body of god and humans in this formative exchange. In a religious tradition seemingly so opposed to the body, it shocks us to find that important exchanges between god and humans, as depicted by the biblical literature, were about bodies. Yet, even here I feel slightly embarrassed that these ideas surprise me. After all, god is traditionally thought of in male gendered terms. God from the get go is a speaker and speech is physically a bodied action, and language, as we have learned, makes sense only in bodied terms. Gods initial statement let there be light is clearly a projection into a made world of bodily attributes, specifically that there are bodied eyes to see.65 Our images of Adam and Eve are images of naked and gendered bodies. Among the first acts of these ancient parents were making garments to cover their genitalia. As we reflect on these first makings, we begin to realize that this action is exemplary of all that has followed. At this very point in human religious evolution (from a Judeao-Christian perspective) we might utter that stock phrase, And the rest is history. God too created human beings in his own image, as scripture tells us. Thus, gods creation of the world must surely be motivated in the same way as is human making, that is, out of pain and desire according to ones own nature. The Christian innovation was to take the embodiment of god all the way to incarnation; to giving god a human bodya male one, of courseso that this drama could be played out in deeper, more profound, and more bizarre ways. Artifact artifice, I like these words. Artifact refers to a human made object, especially an object that is made with a view to subsequent use. Thus the term artifact reflects Scarrys hinge effect of human making. We also think of artifact as the remains of such an object, a shard of pottery, for example, that reveals the makings of others. Artifact often implies made by hand, but can include mass produced objects. And, of course, artifact is human-made, not natural. Now the term artifice is even more fascinating to me. The word has two primary meanings. The first suggests ingenuity and an artful stratagem. Artifice is cleverness and artful skill. However, the second use of the term suggests something more on the order of a trick; false or insincere behavior. Thus artifice is a term that catches some interesting shades of value associated with making: the extension of our bodies, the manifestation of our body images, through ingenuous artful creative extensions and projections, but also the falseness, the emptiness, the made-upness of objects and makings. In terms of art, the term artifice catches that interplay between the object made to cleverly reflect back on the world and the obvious, yet unacknowledged, fact that art is made up, a trick, a lie.

65

Perhaps primordial darkness corresponds with dark space and pure depth. See Lecture 11.

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Brain Body Movement Scarry boldly describes god as the Original Artifact, suggesting a projection of the human body on the prime Agent, who may then return the favor. Another energy I find in the word artifice is that it suggests in its mixture of values an indeterminacy that accompanies making, that is, the relationship between maker and thing made. Thing made is a projection of the body. Thing made hinges back to remake the maker. In neurology I think this would be considered a feedback loop. The indeterminacy is in the understanding of where lies the agency; who indeed is in control? Negatively, we may feel overwhelm; positively, we may enjoy the creative play. From a theological point of view these concerns may suggest the endless question of the presence of free will.66 In the terms of the human sciences we may think of the issue primarily in terms of agency. And, we may be surprised to learn, as considered by Shaun Gallagher,67 that this has also been an issue of neuroscience. I actually think that the discussion here is a bit silly. Neuroscientists, such as Benjamin Libet, have shown that our actions are often initiated by neurological processes that occur well before the actor has an awareness of even the intention of such actions. On the basis of this demonstration, some have argued for a pure determinism. I suppose this means that we are but mechanistic programmed beings whose every action is a reaction to the world around us based on neurological determined patterns set through human evolution, that nothing we do is a result of our willful determination. Gallagher reframes the matter into larger than microsecond intervals to argue for agency and willfulness. What is clear is that human beings are remarkably complex and invariably distinctive as comprised of a number of complex interacting systems, some totally hardwired, yet many malleable by cultural and individual agency and action. We must thank godwho we now know had a body and needed to think about all these thingsthat we dont have to consciously direct our every motor function. Had we to live this way, we would spend most of the morning just grasping a coffee cup, getting the coffee into our bodies, and processing the liquid to extract the caffeine. Swimming happily around in the lake of making and artifice we encounter splashing around making far too many waves for our comfort, a rather odd Frenchman, obscure, bold, almost downright nasty spewing about pornography and gendered values and production and, frankly, god knows what. Surely, were he to let us, wed simply swim on by. Yet, if we tread water nearby we may experience something on the scale of a tsunami. Ive read Jean Baudrillard many times, not only this book, Seduction,68 but many of his others. Each reading has a different effect on me. This time through this section of his book I was pretty constantly irritated by him. Not yet sure why. Still, I cannot help but feel a powerful impact from some of what I think he may be saying. In terms of our present topic of making and agency and power and production, I am caught (abducted) by his introduction of a contrast between production and seduction. It is an amazingly rich and provocative, yet difficult and opaque, idea. Let me just note a few things Baudrillard seductively writes about seduction and production:
66

Freewill needs to also be addressed in terms of neuroplasty. I will do this later in terms of the insights I am gleaning from Jonah Lehrers discussion of George Eliot and relevant recent neruo -scientific findings.. 67 Shawn Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 68 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (New York: St. Martins Press, 1979)

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Brain Body Movement All masculine power is a power to produce . . . . The only, and irresistible, power of femininity is the inverse power of seduction. In itself it is nul (sic), seduction has no power of its own, only that of annulling the power of production. But it always annuls the later.69 It is femininity that incarnates reversibility, the possibility of play and symbolic involvement.70 seduction as an ironic, alternative form, one that breaks the referentiality of sex and provides a space, not of desire, but of play and defiance.71 Seduction is stronger than power because it is reversible and mortal, while power, like value, seeks to be irreversible, cumulative and immortal. Power partakes of all the illusions of production, and of the real; it wants to be real, and so tends to become its own imaginary, its own superstition (with the help of theories that analyze it, be they to contest it). Seduction, on the other hand, is not of the order of the realand is never of the order of force, nor relations of force. But precisely for this reason, it enmeshes all powers real actions, as well as the entire reality of production, in this unremitting reversibility and disaccumulationwithout which there would be neither power nor accumulation.72 Seduction is stronger than production. . . . It is a circular, reversible process of challenges, oneupmanship and death.73

Perhaps it is not easy to clearly understand Baudrillard on seduction, yet, as he shows us, the grasping for clarity and finalityfor the end of play, as Derrida74 put itis masculine and this drives production. Still, exerting our masculinity a bit, this is in some sense the problem of Archimedes who declared, Give me a place to stand on and Ill move the world.75 Power, the power to make, cannot simply exist sufficiently of itself. Power can be only if there is something other than, outside of, power. This alternative to power must, itself, not be power or powerful. Yet, as Baudrillard writes without this alternative there would be neither power nor accumulation. We desperately want to grasp (using our thumbs) this alternative, yet Baudrillard makes it difficult for us. He calls it seduction. It can be neither thing, nor force. He describes it, insofar as he does so, as reversibility,76 as circular (we might say oscillatory), as play, as defiance, as outside reason and desire and force. Seduction is stronger than production. Seduction is feminine; production masculine. Trying to understand seduction reminds me a bit of that story of the Iroquois woman who, after listening to a lecture on relativity and cosmology, told the scientist that the Iroquois world was created on the back of a tortoise. The scientist, amused by her remark, asked, But what does the turtle rest on? She quickly and confidently answered, Its turtles all the way down. Does it matter at all that
69 70

Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 21. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., p. 46. 73 Ibid., p. 47. 74 Jacque Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, pp 278-294. 75 Cited in Smith, The Influence of Symbols upon Social Change, in Map is Not Territory (Leiden: Brill, 1978), p. 129. 76 Reversibility will become clearer in Lecture 11 where we consider Merleau-Ponty as discussed by Sue Cataldi.

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Brain Body Movement production, power, agency are of value only in there also existing an alternative? Baudrillard understands our world as production run amuck; that making and the hinged effects of the made on the maker have become so accelerated, so rampant, that there has finally come to be no grounding at all. All is feedback. Humans are as much artifice (artificial, clever, and false) as what they have made. Humans are as much or more products of what the world has produced as they are producers of things in the world. In his view, all has become hyperreal, more than real, real to such an extent that all of the distinctions have collapsed between real and unreal, maker and made. And in such a world no wonder pornography is rampant, with male makers seeking some final evidence, through an ultra-closeup view, that sex is real. As Baudrillard writes, Pornography says: there must be good sex somewhere, for I am its caricature. In its grotesque obscenity, it attempts to save sexs truth and provide the faltering sexual model with some credibility.77 For Baudrillard the counterpart of pornography that exemplifies production is transvestitism which he believes exemplifies seduction. Transvestitism is, in his view, not about gender and sexuality, but about the pure play of signs. It is about an endless interplay of appearances. Applied to the academic world, I think it is fairly clear that what we do is aligned with production, with the masculine. We interpret, we examine, we analyze, we provide answers, we create minds, we accumulate knowledge, we win football games. Though physically subtle, our makings are projections into the world of our ideal understanding of our minds. When we then see these productions especially in the form of writingthey reveal much to us. They express what we desire to be the character of our minds. Academic writing conventions and practices produced by the mind are a hinge that helps create the mind. The desired distinctions are: clarity, objectivity, finality, orderliness, sensibility, authority, power, concreteness, innovation, and enduring in plain black and white. Given the recent studies of the brain and its propensity to clever artifice, our brains, our body/minds, are anything but distinguished by the qualities of our writings. Academic work may then be seen as the masculine attempt to produce a mind quite different from what we actually possess, a process motivated perhaps as much as anything by the unmet desire to have such a mind. A desire that we have endeavored for centuries to produce, all the while dismissing the body as of any but vehicular value. We still hope that the academic works we make will hinge back on us to give us the kind of minds we desire. Or perhaps academic products serve to veil gut understanding of the actual workings of the mind. To finish what can never be finished, I want to take the discussion of making, action, artifice, production as background for thinking through things with which I am personally concerned. As you all know, I am fascinated with dancing. I think that we can understand some interesting things about dancing when seen in light of this discussion of making and production. Clearly our culture devalues dancing. It is not a topic commonly taught in schools. It would be difficult to find anyone who would insist that we should spend money and time teaching dancing on a par with science and math, or even social studies and literature, or even art and music. Where does dance fit in a world directed by
7777

Baudrillard, p. 35.

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Brain Body Movement masculine powerful production? The answer is simple: dance is valued to the degree it is seen as masculine powerful production. Yet, what does dancing produce? In the most immediate sense, dancing produces nothing beyond the body of the dancers dancing. One certainly could argue that there is some existence of a dance beyond the dancing, say the classical ballet Sleeping Beauty. This may be true of choreographed art performance dancing, but it isnt for all the rest of the worlds dancing. There is no parallel artifact like a play script for theatre; no score as with music. Dance notation is not viable since it cannot be read and produces no kinesthetic images. Dancing is distinctive for its relationship to making. It is a making where what is made is bodily identical with the maker. The dancer is the dance, in some important respects. Where is the hinge? Where is the multiplier effect, especially for non-art non-performance dancing? But what of dancing as art, as performance, as done for an audience, as a product of culture, of high culture? Interestingly, such forms of dancing are usually uncomfortable products of masculine makings (even if not done by male dancers). Notice the terminology that has come to be associated with these accepted forms of dance. They are done by companies of dancers. The company puts on productions. Choreographers typically refer these days to their creative process as making work. The results of choreography are themselves referred to as works. The economic side of this type of dancing is prominent. Audiences pay to watch. Programs tell audiences the meanings and stories of the dances. Advertising and promotion are extensive. And so on. Even with all these terminological adjustments and masculinizations to fit a world driven by productivity, dancing remains an uncomfortable fit. Few dance companies really make it; few dancers actually earn a living. And, notably, dancing, even of this type, is only rarely associated with masculinity and masculine sexuality. Baryshnikov is a rare exception. All this would seem depressing and hopeless, yet Baudrillards work seems to offer some insight. Might we rethink dancing in terms of seduction? Could we comprehend dancing in these terms? Were dancing to be aligned with seduction as Baudrillard presents it, it would not be productive, nor would it necessarily have fixed meanings. It would not project something onto made objects to meet the desire caused by a lack. Dancing would be reversible and circular and mortal and powerless and without meaning. What could be more exemplary of reversibility than dancing where the same object, the body, is maker and thing made, is dance and dancer.78 Yet, dancing would also be stronger than production, stronger for not having meaning, for not making anything, for not producing artifact. Dancing would be foundational in important ways to production. Dancing would be understood as perhaps the last surviving experience of the idea of reality in a world of hyperreality. My work in developing dance theory moves in this direction. It takes stock of such cultural examples as the Hindu figure of Nataraja, whose dancing encompasses, but is not the producer of, creation, destruction, preservation, and materiality; Nataraja, whose dancing is understood as play (lila), as for nothing, as without meaning, yet stronger than all of these. My personal dance interest is not in performance, art, high-cultural forms, but rather in social dancing. I want here to return to the thumb. Salsa, as most social dancing, is done by male-female partnering
78

Ill explore these ideas more fully in later lectures.

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Brain Body Movement couples. The dance is based on a simple basic rhythm patterned combination of steps. On this foundation, the improvisational dance is built (notice the language of making) up from just a few conventional elements of movement. Traditionally teaching the dance involves establishing the rhythm pattered basic steps and then teaching combinations of the movement elements. In my teaching, the males who are invariably the leads, are obsessed with learning moves. This is very consistent with the values of our society. The best dancers are those with the most moves, or so it seems most believe. Moves are seen as external productions. Actions intended to impress ones dance partner; and, of course, make other males envious. In my experience, women, the follows, are mostly taught to anticipate the lead, often through rather obvious external signs, including even some guys tendency to actually verbally tell the woman what he is about to do. Teaching in this way, which I did for many years, I was always shocked to see the results of my work. Good dancers I was rarely making. I was disturbed to see the jerky, conflicted, awkward, almost violent and hurtful appearance of these dancers. I would see guys wrestle and drag their partners through some complex moves, awkwardly executed and almost always lacking any connection with the rhythm in the music. Were I to consider this process in the terms we have been discussing here, Id have to say that this is masculine dancing oriented toward production. It is directed to males making something to fulfill a felt lack, to meet an unmet desire. This kind of dancing as social dancing displaces social connection with demonstration; partnering with controlling and overpowering manipulation. It is male centered, despite the unnoticed fact that it is only the skill and intuition of the women that make it anything other than painful disaster. I shifted the way I teach a couple years ago. While I still teach complex move patternsIm a North American male after allI have begun to place a large amount of attention on partner connection. What I am interested in teaching is the skill of two people physically connecting through touch (and many other connectivities). This is the sort of touching that is subtle, requiring only the lightest of physical contact, but where the two bodies are focused on the interconnection. The connection is one of equality of force and opposition: push against push, pull against pull. It is a skill that clearly works at the subconscious level and requires response times of nanoseconds. It is a connection that might be described as like a bungee cord, because of the progressive increasing and decreasing forces that are exactly met by the two dancers. Here is where the thumb comes in. In the male dominating move making style of dancing, men often connect with their partners by firmly holding their hands using the thumb to assure the connection. Men dancing this way grasp their partners with their thumbs powerfully engaged so as to better control and use the woman as a tool of their exhibition. The use of thumbs in this context says it all. The innovations of technique I apply to teaching dancing is to neverwell, almost neverallow the use of thumbs. Rather the guys middle finger tips are placed on the womans palm where her middle finger meets her palm. Male middle finger or two to the middle of the females inner hand, without thumbs, the dancers must focus carefully on connection, maintaining a connection, on connective interaction and movement. Leading and following must become interdependent, co-equal, interactive, subtle, sensitive. Leading and following require constant feedback looping or play. Touch and touching are the foundation of the connection. The resulting dancing is very different. The dance is focused primarily on the physical connection. Moves, or movement combinations, arise out of this connection rather than

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Brain Body Movement out of male productiveness. Sensitivity to the connection demands that the dancing is compatible with the experience both dancers have in connecting and maintaining the connection. Dancers trained in this way find the experience of dancing very different: smooth, social, interactive, sensuous, playful, and, yes, seductive. Such an approach is also interesting from the perspective of making. While I have said that making dance, particularly in the non-art non-performance sense of dancing, is when the thing made is the same as the maker. This reversibility is equivalent to an experience of what Baudrillard is referring to as seduction. Now, in the social dance setting dance and dancer are two persons, not one. So what of the reversibility here? What is involved in the dance and dancer being one body? Well, when the dance is done with thumbs, with the masculine intent to produce, there is no reversibility; there is only the male thrusting forward controlling the female bent on showing, making, impressing. However, without thumbs, the two move as one, with fluidity, with grace, with ease. There are two, yet in their connection, they experience a oneness; they experience a reversibility; they play with one another, without meaning or goal or product.

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Brain Body Movement

Lecture 8: Self and Other: Proprioception and Exteroception79

It wasnt all that long ago that I first learned about proprioception. How wonderful it is that life keeps serving me up with discoveries of this magnitude. It impacted me so powerfully due to inquiries I had been making during my studies of the senses. Certainly most human experiences and actions can be considered in terms of one or more of the senses being dominant. Reading involves primarily the visual sense. Writing adds something of the tactile. Eating engages taste predominantly, but also smell and even vision. And so on. My inquiry that led to no satisfactory results was to understand dancing in terms of the senses. As is obvious, dancing is of the body and is sensual and engages feeling, yet, what are the senses that dancing engages? Dancers perhaps see themselves, but only from a rather odd angle and even mirror images are strangely distorted. Dancers smell their often sweaty selves, but how can this be the dance sense. Hearing is important since dancers often dance to music, to rhythms. Yet, postmodern dance demonstrated that dancing can be done in silence without anyone questioning that it is still dancing. Touch is important in some waysthe contact of the foot, and sometimes other body parts, with the floor and perhaps other bodies or objects. Yet, clearly this isnt distinctive of dancing. Lets see oh, yes, taste is the last of the five senses. Hmm. Cant see that taste has that much to do with dancing. Very weird. Then along came proprioception. It is sometimes identified as the kinesthetic sense, another sense or one that significantly extends the sense of touch. Technically proprioception is a neurological phenomenon. Proprioception is based in sensory receptors associated with joints and muscles that sense and provide feedback to the demands placed on joints and muscles both from without and within. Here is how one person described it to me: should we reach out to catch a falling object and not know how heavy that object is, proprioceptors in the joints and muscles react almost instantaneously to assess the demand made by the weight and force of the falling object to adjust the actions of the muscles. If the object is extremely heavy and our muscles dont have the strength to catch and hold that object, proprioceptors release all the muscle tension so that we simply drop the object rather than have it rip loose our muscles. And should the object be extremely and visually deceptively light, the proprioceptors react so that we dont throw the object unnecessarily in the air by overreacting. The larger implications of proprioception are far more remarkable and interesting than this little illustration would suggest. Proprioception is the neurological system at work to inform us about the location of our body parts. In a practical sense it allows us to walk without visually seeing our bodies; or touch body parts with rough accuracy that we cannot see.80 But even this seems all potentially dreary and practical. Yet, proprioception suggests something of a response to my concern. Surely dancing is heavily dependent on knowing where ones body parts are and on being able to move ones body in intended ways. Proprioception clearly is inseparable from movement. At last, I had something to go on.
79 80

Delivered March 8, 2009. I say rough accuracy because that is the case. Try this. Stand barefoot but upright. Close you r eyes. Bend forward at the waist and twist so that you point your right index finger at your middle left toe without making contact with it. Now open your eyes to check your proprioceptive accuracy.

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Brain Body Movement Yet, the implications of proprioception are immense for understanding our sense of self, our sense of ownership of our bodies, our relationship with objects and others. Time and again we have come upon the idea that self, cognition, awareness, vision, depth perception, and vitality are based in self-directed body movement. Given that academics are scarcely moving entitiesbumps on logs, desk chair potatoeswe are perhaps challenged enough by such ideas. We study texts, histories, thought. Movement is of the body and realizing that we are part of a religious/cultural heritage that has had distrust, even disdain, for the body, we are all the more challenged by the knowledge that self, cognition, vision, depth, and so on are formed, nurtured, and even made possible by self-directed bodily movement. Should we be able to withstand the threat of such a position to proceed, then to actually understand proprioceptionthat which negotiates movement in every environmenttakes on not only greater, but vital, importance to our intellectual endeavors of understanding religion and culturefor proprioception is at the heart of self and other and our ongoing efforts to understand ourselves as human beings; it is key to consciousness. Lets begin with the work of Shaun Gallagher.81 In his book How the Body Shapes the Mind, he has taken the trouble to sort out the differences between body image and body schema. Body schema is the system of sensorimotor processes that constantly regulates posture and movement and it does so without reflective awareness. Body schema is essential to our living without having to reflectively direct our quotidian and routine movements. There are many sensorimotor programs that comprise the body schema, each directing practical tasks such as reaching for and grasping a glass or habitual motor patterns such as the systematic routine of combing our hair or even the less pleasant habitual motor patterns of getting ones keys from ones pocket two minutes before reaching a locked door or annoyingly scrunching your nose every fifteen seconds. Sensorimotor patterns that comprise body schema are operative in skills such as driving a car or playing a musical instrument or dancing. Body schema is dependent upon proprioception. Body image is the system of perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and dispositions pertaining to ones own body. Body image points to the personal level of experience of the body that involves a sense of ownership. Body image is our sense of body as it appears in our consciousness. That the term includes the word image suggests a primary dependence on the visual sense. Body image is basically how we see ourselves in our minds eyes. Proprioceptively body image provides information about joint position, limb extension, posture, gesture; that is, proprioception is how we know our body position and posture. Body image is an awareness, a visual structure, but also a feeling kind of knowing. We can know or sense our body image because of proprioceptive information. Now, two examples are very important in understanding aspects of proprioception. The first has to do with the loss of proprioception (or nearly so) and the second has to do with invisible imitation and when this ability arises in the human developmental process.

81

Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).

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Brain Body Movement Studies of rare cases where humans have lost certain aspects of their proprioceptive sense show that there is a cross modality between vision and touch and prioprioception. Gallagher depends heavily in his research on the single case of Ian Waterman who is described as a remarkably rare case for losing proprioception throughout his body below the neck. Gallagher uses Waterman for many experiments to help him understand proprioception more fully. First, I think some clarity is needed. I didnt find this in Gallagher; remember he indicates that Waterman has lost his proprioception below the neck. I think that what has been lost in these cases is not the proprioceptors in the joints and muscles themselves, but a disruption in the route to the brain by which the information collected by these sensors is disrupted. Most certainly the feed forward route must remain so that the proprioceptors in joints and muscles can still direct movement. What is learned from these studies is that vision and proprioception are intermodally linked. In time, one suffering this situation can use vision, rather than the interoceptor information, the proprioceptive information fed back to the brain, to monitor and control movement. One way to think of this is that body image can be developed to do the work of body schema. Another is that visual feedback from the location of body parts can be fed forward cross-modally to the proprioceptive system that controls the muscles in movement. While this substitution is possible it is never the same. Visual monitoring, translated into motor stimulation and control via the operative proprioceptive system is awkward and slow simply because it requires so much more neurological processing some of which is temporally inefficient compared with a wholly proprioceptive process. This helps us appreciate the difference between body schema and body image and also that, while they are distinct and different, they can overlap in some respects. It also shows us that visual information can be translated cross-modally to proprioception and movement. Perhaps less surprising there is a similar relationship between touch as exteroception and proprioception. The second body of relevant materials Gallagher presents has to do with invisible imitation that has been demonstrated to be a faculty even of newborns. Babies from one to 72 hours old are shown to be able to imitate facial gestures of persons in their environment. It had been long held that such imitation is not possible until some months into life at the time when the infant begins to gain some sense of self and sense of self-awareness or some distinction of self and other. These new studies show that we are born into an innate intermodal visual-proprioceptual sensorimotor linkage, a natural intermodal connection between self and other.82 Put powerfully, we are born into a world of others. This also suggests that infants, long before they have any primary or fully conscious notion of self, nonetheless have a rudimentary proprioceptive self, that is, a sense that involves ones own sensorimotor possibilities, body postures, and body powers. Gallagher holds that neonate invisible imitation evidences a rudimentary differentiation between self and non-self. Further, since proprioceptive awareness (complementary to simply proprioceptive information) is an awareness of a body (even as it operates as body schema that is pre-reflective) that can only be of ones own body. This Gallagher feels is consciousness. I want now to turn to Brian Massumis book Parables of the Virtual.83 Although he is much more opaque and seductive than Gallagher, there is much here to engage us. Massumi is concerned with the body
82 83

Ibid., p. 81. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual ( Durham: Duke University Press, 2002),

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Brain Body Movement and change. He notes that it has been our approach to always see the body in position rather than in motion and this has skewed and truncated our understanding of not only the body, but of the many aspects of ourselves (our cultures and religions, as well) that are connected with body movement. Much of his work teases out how we might catch something of movement without simply converting it to position or to a point in space; how we might avoid the reduction of movement to non-movement.84 Im delighted by his introduction of ideas such as paradox, vagueness, and play. What I understand to be his strategy in providing a peek into movement-in-itself is what I think Derrida was referring to by his term structurality. Derrida also used the term play. One approach suggests that movement as structurality is the verb or action or processes engaged and involved, rather than structure, principles, places, meanings. Further, structurality also suggests the uncapturable, the illusive, the oscillatory, the irresolvable. Massumi directs us toward change as the ongoing movement of the body that any capturing of it is to lose the designated concern, that is, the moving aspect of movement. He speaks of movement in terms of an incorporeal dimension of the body, an incorporeal materialism. Massumi seems a bit obsession with Ronald Reagan, as bad actor yet as an actor who eventually got one line right. In this context, he discusses mirror-vision and movement-vision. Mirror-vision is, as the word mirror suggests, reflective; that vision of seeing oneself as others see us. Massumi describes this as the ongoing reciprocal determination of I-me/I-you. Movement-vision is not quite so easy to grasp. It is discontinuous with mirror-vision and the relationship between them cannot be mediated. Movement vision is a grasp of the movement and only the movement; it is absolute and self-distancing. In a valuable passage in which he describes how he understood Ronald Reagan to finally grasp movement-vision, Massumi writes: When Reagan enters the space of movement-vision, he is leaving behind the empirical world as he knew it. He is coinciding with a perspective that is neither that of his plain old self vis--vis the others and objects populating neither his everyday world, nor that of the others in that world vis--vis him as an object in their sight. He leaves the intersubjective world of the otherin-the-self, self and other identity-bound in mutual missed-recognition, for a space of dislocation, the space of movement-as-such, sheer transformation.85 Massumi puts this another way: The elementary unit of the space of movement-vision is a multiply partial other-perspective included in a fractured movement-in-itself: change. Change: that which includes rupture but is nevertheless continuous (but only with itself, without complement).86 Echoing phrases of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Massumi suggests that movement-vision is the body without an image. Image, of course, suggests a snapshot marking a moment in process rather

84 85

This is, of course, a core issue in the study of dancing. Massumi, p. 51. 86 Ibid.

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Brain Body Movement than the process itself. Massumi must invoke such shocking phrases to wrest us from the habits of understanding body as image reducing body to points in space, to mere object. Massumi recognizes that both strategies, that is, movement-vision and body without an image rest on vision and that it is the nature of vision to arrest movement to image or as a spatial trajectory of movement. Vision, while connected with movement, is not the best way to get at what he wants. Here enters proprioception. Massumi writes that the spatiality of the body without an image can be understood even more immediately as an effect of proprioception, defined as the sensibility proper to the muscles and ligaments as opposed to tactile sensibility and visceral sensibility .87 In what is to me a brilliant discussion of proprioception, Massumi gives us much to appreciate and contemplate. He differentiates layers of the gross bodied senses. Touch, the tactile sense, in the limited sense of exteroceptors in the skin perceive subject and object in that they mediate between feeling outside and inside. Visceral sense, that feeling in the gutthat feeling response of fright, for exampleis the deepest layer of perception. Interestingly, as Massumi points out, visceral perception precedes the exteroceptive sense perception surely because it involves different areas of the brain and anticipates the translation into explanation of sight or sound or touch perception. Visceral perception registers intensity. Viscerality is a rupture in the stimulus response path; it is the perception of suspense; it is the space of passion.88 Turning to proprioception, Massumi writes: Proprioception folds tactility into the body, enveloping the skins contact with the external world in a dimension of medium depth: between epidermis and viscera. The muscles and ligaments register as conditions of movement what the skin internalizes as qualities: Proprioception translates the exertions and ease of the bodys encounters with objects into a muscular memory of relationality. This is the cumulative memory of skill, habit, posture. At the same time as proprioception folds tactility in, it draws out the subjects reactions to the qualities of the objects it perceives through all five senses, bringing them into the motor realm of externalizable response. Proprioception effects a double translation of the subject and the object into the body, at a medium depth where the body is only body, having nothing of the putative profundity of the self nor of the superficiality of external encounter. This subjective and nonobjective medium depth is one of the strata proper to the corporeal; it is a dimension of the flesh. Proprioceptive memory is where the infolded limits of the body meet the minds externalized responses and where both rejoin the quasi corporeal and the event. As infolding, the faculty of proprioception operates as a corporeal transformer of tactility into quasi corporeality. It is to the skin what movement-vision is to the eyes.89

87 88

Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 61. 89 Ibid., p. 59.

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Brain Body Movement Joining visceral perception and proprioception Massumi calls this conjunction mesoperception, which he describes as The synthetic sensibility: it is the medium where inputs from all five senses meet, across subsensate excitations, and become flesh together, tense and quivering. Mesoperceptive flesh functions as a corporeal transformer where one sense shades into another over the failure of each, their input translated into movement and affect. Mesoperception can be called sensation, for short.90 This discussion of proprioception is a complex of ideas with far-reaching implications. To summarize and digest a bit, some things can, I believe, he said. Proprioception translates sensations on the skin, conditions of movement, as qualities Inversely proprioception translates qualities held in memory into patterns of movement Proprioception translates the way the body encounters objects, including others, through movement into relationships Relationalities are proprioceptively recorded as posture, habit, skill, body schemas, sensorimotor patterns Proprioception translates qualities both incoming and as responses between memory and sensorimotor responses or expressions

Proprioception, movement-vision, change, flesh, 91 seduction, reversibility, play, structurality are all importantly interrelated and enjoy a loose synonymy. Massumi was fascinated by Reagans effort, as an actor, to extend his awareness beyond himself. How was he to comprehend the condition of losing the lower half of his body, as did the character he was to play? His supposed experience of movement-vision produced the delivery of the required line in the most convincing way. He wasnt acting at this point; he had, momentarily, become other. The issue of self and other underlies all in this discussion. While the self-other distinction is self-evident, given that we live and ask these questions having achieved something of this distinction, when we trace back the origin of this distinction it isnt so readily grasped. Further, it is a rather profound philosophical concern to understand how we comprehend anything beyond our selves. What keeps us from being profoundly isolated from others and alone? An important insight is that mesoperceptionwhich is experienced as sensation, that is, as a feeling kind of knowing, awareness, consciousnesstranslates between self and other and does so in both directions. External stimulations are connected with relationalities, qualities, and values. Internal values engender sensorimotor patterns, movement. I hope that it is abundantly clear that a discussion of proprioception based in scientific studies does not explain away all that is unknown about being human and thus reduce us to comprehendible
90 91

Ibid., p. 62. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 155.

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Brain Body Movement mechanisms, that it is, somehow a debunking of the human spirit. In the midst of his discussion of movement and change Massumi engages in a discussion of what we as academics are doing. This is a statement we should all print and post on the wall above our computers: The balance has to shift to affirmative methods: techniques which embrace their own inventiveness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add (if so meagerly) to reality. There is a certain hubris to the notion that a mere academic writer is actually inventing. But the hubris is more than tempered by the self-evident modesty of the returns. So why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-seriousness, set aside the intemperate arrogance of debunkingand enjoy. If you dont enjoy concepts and writing and dont feel that when you write you are adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending its growth, in however small a way, however really abstractlywell, just hang it up.92 Certainly what we should be doing in our studies, and this has nothing to do with any tension between religion and science, is what Massumi term miraculation. This is a wonderful word. Our studies should, through deep consideration from every possible perspective, grasp the ungraspable complexities and depths of being human. What I hope you see in this discussion is that proprioception can be limited easily enough to body mechanics, neurology, and body work. Proprioceptors, like eyes, are neurophysiological objects that perform certain necessary bodily functions. We need proprioception to be able to accurately grab our asses which we cannot see, with both hands, and, of course, a few other valuable things. Yet, proprioception, when miraculated by the likes of Massumi and Gallagher, comes to be connected with our sense of self, with fundamental relationality, with subjective-objective interplay, with consciousness, with body ownership. As students of religion and culture are these studies of proprioception, movement, change simply curiosities, mere incidentals in our ongoing studies of texts? Certainly they can be. That is your choice. However, should you choose, the possibilities are manifold. Anything in our study of religion and culture that has to do with self (or concepts of self or distinctions of self or denials of self), with movement (pilgrimage, dancing, ritual, etc), with other (theology, theological concepts, gods, other humans, other cultures, objects, etc), with consciousness (concepts thereof, actions related to, etc), action and agency, power and absence of power . . . all these things . . . can be understood more richly, more appreciatively, more profoundly by having an awareness of this deeper discussion of proprioception. To put more in Massumis terms, studying cultures and religions and any of the myriad aspects that comprise them, from a perspective of this rich understanding of proprioception will be enjoyed as reversible miraculation. You will see your subject as richer, more profound, more enjoyable, more remarkable and what you understand of your subject will feedback to help you become a richer, more profound, more joyous human being. I agree with Massumi, if we cant do this, then we should just hang it up.

92

Massumi, p. 13.

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Brain Body Movement Throughout the semester I have tried to dial down my interest in dancing and my understanding and appreciation of it. Last lecture I failed and played it with maximum volume. I simply cannot resist adding what I hope is a potentially interesting postscript. It offers a slightly more specific example and a reason why I am not about to just hang it up. Besides it returns us to the issues that motivated my interest in proprioception as described at the outset of this lecture. Thats good style, aint it? Proprioception, as I discovered, is the prominent sense involved with dancing in that most simple and direct sense that proprioception is the sense that provides us an awareness of the position and location of the parts of our bodies and further is the basis on which directed and controlled movement is possible. However, having considered proprioception through the works of Gallagher and Massumi, we have found proprioception, when considered in terms both grounded in and transcending corporeality, to be fundamental to all of the senses and all of our actions. Proprioception is body and movement, but it is movement in process, movement-as-such, flesh in its reversibility, perception in its play, self in its otherness. Proprioception is seduction, play, structurality as incorporeal materialism . Dancing is, in the most basic sense, movement, yet not any movement is dancing. Might we not suggest that what distinguishes dancing is that it enacts just these qualities of mesoperception; it enacts movement-vision; it plays out change. It is not about anything; it does not mean anything; it is a display in corporeal moving terms, of that which cannot be captured as a point in space or a trajectory through space. Dancing is an exercise in and celebration of self-othering or other-selfing that enacts without production or application our proprioceptive awareness, our becoming in being, our interplay with the world through movement.93

93

At some point I must expand this to consider the function of mirror neurons in dancing, which surely has something to do with audience experience.

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Brain Body Movement

Lecture 9: Consciousness and Emotion94

Self-actuated human movement is foundational to appreciating the whole complex of issues related to brain, mind, body. Mark Johnson shows that self-actuated movement creates our fundamental sensorimotor schemas that underlay even the highest levels of cognition. Brian Massumis widely ranging discussion of proprioception is stunningly powerful. We know, certainly it is most obvious, that life seems synonymous with self-actuated movement; yet, I dont think that we necessarily fully appreciate the complexity and profundity of such obviousness. Raymond Gibbs, in presenting the findings of cognitive science on embodiment, points again and again to the essential role of action, human movement. On the topic of perception he writes that there is no perception without action.95 Gibbs later discusses the relationship between action and perception and concludes that perception and action share a common representational code.96 In other words perception and action influence one another; they are interactive and interdependent. And the moving body is also always engaged with the environment. So the conclusion is that perception depends on the dynamics of how certain movements are created from larger patterns of brain, body, and environmental interactions.97 There are two important observations I want to make at this point. Again and again when confronted with two-option problematics we have found that old objective of attempting to eliminate one and champion the other is being consistently replaced by dynamic and interactive and interdependent systems. Both/and has replaced either/or. No longer need we choose between nature and nurture, mind and body, action and perception; yet, now our task is to describe the energetics, the dynamics, the structuralities, the reversibilities. And once we have aspired to this task, we are faced with the inadequacies of the arresting impact that such descriptions and explorations produce. And, it seems to me we are inspired to another voyage in order to come home again, to place self-actuated movement as foundational, by trying to trick ourselves into a glimpse of movement-in-self, action-in-itself, play, seduction. This is clearly the era of dynamics, of reversibility, of flesh, to anticipate Merleau-Ponty. Should we learn no other thing here, it must be this shift. There are no settling conclusions, no final choices, no firm places on which to stand. As Jonathan Smith has long shown us,98 we have only the choice between inaction and plunging into the chaos; yet, an interesting and amazing chaos it is. This insight must impact every aspect of our studies and lives. We are not free to simply take any position we like without thought or reflection or investigation. No, it means that we must discover the greater contexts and the deeper interdependencies and reversibilities of anything we consider. Furthermore, as we are learning, this dynamic is built into our deepest neurological, cellular, physical, and chemical beings.
94 95

Delivered March 16, 2009 Raymond Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 51. 96 Ibid., p. 63. 97 Ibid., p. 53. 98 Jonathan Smith, Map is Not Territory.

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Brain Body Movement The second important point follows directly. The brain and body are inseparable. As Candice Pert puts it in her book Molecules of Emotion, the mind doesnt dominate the body, it becomes bodybody and mind are one the flow of information throughout the whole organism, as evidence that the body is the actual outward manifestation, to physical space, of the mind.99 The mind and body are reversible. Body and mind are mobiatic; two-sided and one-sided at the same time, that is, at once separable and inseparable. In terms of action and perception, or self-actuated movement and emotion, the process goes both ways at the same time. Action influences perception as the perceptible influences the action of the perceiver. If we take this relationality seriously, then, should we allow ourselves to have any choice, any opportunity for conscious decision, we have to consider an issue that is of growing urgency to me. Life-style impacts what and how we perceive, feel, think, imagine, experience, know, understand. And, of course, the inverse is also the case. This is fairly obvious and widely accepted outside the confines of academia. Any browsing in the self-help section of a bookstore provides endless suggestions on life-style changes to impact emotions, relationships, self-esteem, wealth, happiness. There are then two sub-issues. First, in the academic literature I dont know of a single paragraph or even a sentence that would suggest that a scholars personal life-style impacts what she or he thinks, or sees, or understands, or knows. I suppose there are relevant implications in the insider-outsider discussion.100 I suppose the closest foray into this is presented by academic feminists. There was that wonderful French feminist writing the body movement101 which, I think, amounted to the same. It argued that womens experience as womens bodies constitute a shaping of perspective, an alternative understanding, indeed, perhaps something entirely different from the traditional male views, shaped by academic male bodily experience. Writing the body was an effort to practice the quotidian obvious that life-style is reversible with emotion, insight, perception, action, awareness. Recalling Jean Baudrillards gender associations with seduction and production102 we can appreciate the entrenched nature of this issue. Yet, we can no longer avoid the likelihood that there is a widespread occurrence of what Gibbs referred to as change blindness, the condition in which people fail to notice changes in the environment that are quite large and in full view. Change blindness occurs because our sensorimotor experiences dispose us to experience only certain aspects of the world. We attend to the world through these predispositions. It is even more likely that academics suffer also from inattentional blindness, which occurs, according to Gibbs, when we are engaged in attention-intensive tasks and fail to notice when extraneous stimuli are presented.103 The very scientific process that we operate under is an intentionally attention-intensive process. We construct a hypothesis and then limit all our observations to the process of supporting the desired conclusion and this method blinds us to what might be rather
99

Candice Pert, Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-body Medicine (New York: Touchstone, 1998), p. 157. 100 See Russell McCutcheon, ed. The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: a Reader (New York: Cassell, 1999. 101 Ann Rosalind Jones, Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'criture feminine in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Robyn Warhol and Diane Herndl, eds., (Rutgers University Press, rev ed. 1997). See also Katie Convoy, et. al. eds., Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 102 See Baudrillard, Seduction, pp. 6-7. 103 Gibbs, p. 66.

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Brain Body Movement obvious alternatives. Can we continue along this darkening alley? The challenge is really for young scholars to incite a revolution and it will need to be on a scale larger than was feminism, because female scholars themselves have largely given themselves to production. The second sub-issue is this. In reversibility, in a mobiatic structure, how can change be introduced? If action shapes perception which, in turn, shapes action, where does change enter? If the feed forward is as influential as the feedback, the result would be to be trapped. This surely is what drives discussions of free will and choice and agency and power and even meaning. What prevents this reversibility from being an infinite closed loop as might be depicted by the coiled shape of the infinity sign that is taken by a mobius strip when left to itself? Alicia Juarrero (1999), as reported by Gibbs, criticizes philosophers for failing to provide coherent answers to the question of what causes intentional behavior. And her response is to characterize intentional behavior as a fluid, dynamic process taking shape through the interactions between brains, bodies, and their environments.104 Surely environment is a key player which we might grasp in such terms as time and space, community and society and history and experience. This suggests that reversibility is not consistent or bidirectionally equal.105 Should greater explanation be needed, we need only remind ourselves how utterly complex are the brain, the proprioceptive system, the chemistry of emotion based in neurotransmitters and receptors, and almost every other aspect of the brain, body, movement triad to appreciate that the interactions among all the determinative elements is so utterly complex as to be far beyond determination or even comprehension. This is yet a further dimension of the dynamics of dynamic systems. It is a daunting, yet exciting, task of grasping reversibility and structurality. For many years I have believed that traditional academic life-styles are severely limiting to the field of vision (taking this phrase metaphorically) and to the cognitive processes academics use. If our selfactuated movement is an influential factor in our perceptions, our emotions, our cognitive processes, then what must be the impact of a severely sedentary male life-style that excludes most experiences beyond reading and writing and talking all directed towards producing knowledge, publications, student clones? In the study of religion I feel that, due to change and inattention blindness, much of the world of religious action and behavior and life is virtually invisible to religion scholars . Religion understood as what happens every day in the lives of religious people, is simply imperceptible. The study of religion must then be progressively self-referential where most interest is in what other scholars write in reference to what yet other scholars have written, and so on. And the overwhelming majority of sources for the study of religion are textual. The sciences, both social and natural, seem to make advances by directing attention primarily to aberrancies. Bring us your sick and deformed and we will discover the nature of the healthy and normal. For the study of religion to maintain some place of value in the world accelerating in change in the twenty-first century, it too must change and the order of change must be quantum. There are many clues and inspirations offered by these brain, body and movement studies.

104 105

As quoted in Gibbs., p. 74. The topic of bi- or uni-directionality of reversibility will be discussed in greater detail in Lecture ???? as incomplete reversibility.

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Brain Body Movement Emotion, feeling, sensation, pleasure, pain, conviction, passion, ownership, consciousness these are all interrelated terms. These are the invisibles of the body, the other side of the body, the body inside. The studies we are reading show abundantly that they are body-inseparable. More than that, they are fundamental to perception, to cognition, to self, to body image, and thus surely these invisibles are fundamental to meaning and value. Traditionally emotions, feeling, pain, and passion have not only received short shrift by academics, they have been maligned. We look down on the emotional. We consider weak those who admit to feelings. The media gave about a weeks attention and analysis when they observed Hillary Clinton shed a tear. Those in pain are quickly dismissed or simply not comprehended. Those convicted with passion are shunned as being too strong, one-sided, unbalanced. These attitudes are found in the public arena. In academia, these invisibles are carefully avoided, hidden behind more acceptable invisibles such as thought, ideas, concepts; all of which are traditionally more associated with the head, with the male head at that, and they are believed to be controlled by means of reason and objective distance. If we allow ourselves the surgery to remove the cataracts that have prevented us from seeing emotion, we have much to consider. The interplay of emotion and touch is powerful. The interplay between vision and emotion is as well. Indeed, emotion is synaesthetic in integrating and responding to all sensual information. Emotion seems to differ from feeling. Feeling is simply an awareness of general bodily arousal. Such arousals become emotions when we provide cognitive attributions to the cause and nature of these arousals.106 Indeed, isnt it a rather common experience to have some persisting emotional arousal? When we give attention to these arousals we are often able to identify, through a process I call personal archaeology, vague feelings as emotions and to discover the experiences that give rise to them. Oh, this feeling is anger and I am feeling it because so-in-so made an unfair and rude judgmental statement to my friend about me. Yet, what initiates emotion? There is the longtime discussion centering on views held by William James and Walter Cannon. James held that emotion begins in bodily sensation; Cannon believed that emotions initiate in the head and trickle down to the body.107 Yet, Gibbs and Pert report that both are correct and one position does not exclude the other. It is fascinating that when Pert came on this idea she found it quite a revelation.108 This is yet another example of reversible structurality. It is important to incorporate in our discussion Candice Perts identification of molecules of emotion and how they work. Explanations of emotion parallel the other neurophysiologial discussions we have had regarding perception and consciousness. I believe this biochemical grounding of emotion and the complex relationship this biochemistry has with other body systems provides a powerful basis on which to argue that emotions, feelings, sensations are not ephemeral, are not subjectivities that need to be factored out. Rather emotions are at the heart of our convictions, our passions, our guesses, our stories, our beliefs, our imagesall of which underlie meaning, value, hypothetic inference, and authority. Pert describes the molecules of emotion as ligands, a term designating any of a variety of
106 107

It seems to me that mood is a sort of halfway point where feelings begin to lean toward identifiable emotions. Gibbs, p. 253 and Pert, pp. 35-37. 108 Pert, p. 137.

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Brain Body Movement small molecules that specifically bind to a cellular receptor and in so doing convey an informational message to the cell.109 Students of religion may take special interest in ligands for the term is from the Latin ligare which is also the root for the word religion. It means that which binds. I am interested in the relationship between posture and emotion. Here again is a dynamic system. Emotions are expressed in postural affects. We slump down when we feel sad and depressed. Even the word depressed corresponds with a postural attitude. Yet, we also know that intentional postural conditioning has emotional consequences. To forcibly take on a postural affect is often accompanied by the initiation of corresponding emotions. It might be valuable to ask about human postural values. I think that technically good posture would be defined as the body with all of the musculature balanced and closest to being at rest. Our musculature is designed so that the articulation of our movement is even possible because it is controlled by sets of opposing muscles. In every movement one set of muscles is tightened and shortened and the corresponding ones are relaxed and lengthened. Indeed, most movement engages triangulated musculature. Posture is rooted in movement and movement mechanics. So-called good posture occurs when the muscles throughout the body are equally taught and engaged. So-called bad posture is when muscles in opposing sets are not equally involved. Bad posture then corresponds with added effort, even at rest, a sense of imbalance, and often pain. When we feel bad, we often describe it in such terms as I feel weighed down. Of course, we feel this way because one is actually weighed down by ones own body. To mechanically correct posture corresponds with lightness of being, balance, relief from pain. I think that the kyphotic head-forward posture so common to todays computer users surely has significant emotional affect. This posture, the posture of academic practices, closely resembles the posture associated with depression.

109

See Pert, pp. 23-24 for a nice description of this process.

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Lecture 10: Touch, Flesh, and Vision110

Hand touching hand, really finger touching finger, extended to the good old handshake, all male in a curious sort of way. Lip touching lip, or lips touching lips, to include all possible lips, extended to hand holding palm to palm, decidedly female. Flesh or mucous, vision or touch, these are our choices. All are, of course, images, metaphors, by which we might glimpse something that has no materiality whatsoever, no names, and, most of the time, feels to us frankly ungraspable. They are levers to hoist us or lower us into ourselves; pry bars to wedge what is seemingly of our nature into our self-understanding. Yet, we all know what has the greatest power over us. It is that which we can only feel, and feel in that intimation sort of way, by some magic done on us by words like flesh and mucous. So what are we trying to understand, grasp, feel? In banal terms simply human perception. In the classic view, this was, as we look back, rather simple. The sense organs serve us as receptors to record what is out there, as instruments seemingly do. The result is a record inside us that closely matches what is outside of us. The model for this understanding is vision and the camera obscura, which means darkened chamber. Our insides are dark chambers and our sense organs are pin holes. Information from the external world enters the dark chamber through the pinhole sense organs and casts a likeness on a recording surface, presumably our brains, inside the dark chamber. Notably this model resembles rather well our nave experience of our own perceptual processes. We open our eye to allow the world to enter and we feel that we have in our brains an objective unadulterated picture of what is outside us. In the last half of the twentieth century a shift has taken place in the way we understand perception. Shift is not a strong enough word really, because it would imply an adjustment, a modification, a focusing. What occurred was something much greater, a jolt. Studies of perception encompass a broad range of perspectives and methods. Certainly there is scientific medically based research associated with every one of the sense organs: eyes, ears, nose, skin, tongue. There is psychological research focused on each of the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. There are neuroscientific studies that are concerned with the brain and the greater nervous system related to perception. Philosophers, particularly phenomenologists, are interested in perception. More recently cognitive science has entered the area. So also has critical theory, that weirdly postmodern philosophical multi-disciplinary discourse. Why so much attention? Once the camera obscura model of perception is surpassed, we are quickly driven to struggle with the deepest, most complex, most profound, most elusive, most fascinating questions and ideas related to what it means to be human. The visible and the invisible, mind and body, self and other, nature and nurture, masculine and feminine, production and seduction, agency and free will, movement and cognition, consciousness and self, affect and effect, and just about every dual choice we can imagine are now brought into new discourse. No longer are we struggling to settle the score and announce the final results, the side of the duality that wins. We are now projected into complicated dynamic systems, structuralities, play, body without organs, body without images, flesh and mucous, chiasmimages that project us beyond the simple substances and patterns into a contemplation of dimensions that transcend the easily graspable yet
110

Delivered March 30, 2009

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Brain Body Movement fuel and motor the concretions of our existence. Every scientific advance has philosophical implications. Every philosophical idea suggests a new scientific inquiry. We must look anew at the complex interactivity of sense organs and brain processing. Synaesthesia, the intertwining of the senses, is now more important and interesting than is the study of senses isolated from one another. And forgotten or overlooked or unknown senses such as proprioceptors and visceral perception are suddenly playing central roles. Movement, once identified by Aristotle as inseparable with life itself yet playing no part at all in the camera obscura approach to the senses, has returned as central to every arena. Movement is synonymous with the dynamic character of the present interests. While these various perspectives, various research approaches, remain separable, containable, they overlap profoundly. Here too we experience a jolt. No longer is it responsible to maintain isolation in the pursuit of ones interests; it is incumbent on us all to benefit from the overlap. Philosophers must understand neuroscience; humanists must appreciate cognitive science; psychologists must know physiology; students of religion and culture should be familiar with them all. Indeed, it seems to me that it is precisely here that we, especially our younger colleagues, will find our own creative future. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was among the first to shift radically, although it is certainly clear he had many forerunners. As a lifelong student of perception, late in his life Merleau-Ponty came to a new stage in his understanding. I really love a passage in his writing that is near the beginning of his acclaimed essay The Intertwiningthe Chiasm. The visible about us seems to rest in itself. It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand. And yet it is not possible that we blend into it, nor that it passes into us, for then the vision would vanish at the moment of formation, by disappearance of the seer or of the visible. What there is then are not things first identical with themselves, which would then offer themselves to the seer, nor is there a seer who is first empty and who, afterward, would open himself to thembut something to which we could not be closer than by palpating it with our look, things we could not dream of seeing all naked because the gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own flesh. Whence does it happen that in so doing it leaves them in their place, that the vision we acquire of them seems to us to come from them, and that to be seen is for them but a degradation of their eminent being? What is this talisman of color, this singular virtue of the visible that makes it, held at the end of the gaze, nonetheless much more than a correlative of my vision, such that it imposes my vision upon me as a continuation of its own sovereign existence? How does it happen that my look, enveloping them, does not hide them, and, finally, that, veiling them, it unveils them?111 I regret, among many things, that we dont have time to settle in for a long leisurely discussion of such passages. Seems we must rush along; our responsibility is our irresponsibility; our efficiency is our inefficiency; our breadth our shallowness. Enantiodromia.
111

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 131.

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Brain Body Movement Still, let me tarry a bit. Merleau-Ponty feels that our vision is formed in the heart of the visible. The visible is that which is subject to being seen. In the heart of that world is vision formed and certainly necessary to it. Now Merleau-Ponty seems to identify us, that is human beings, with our vision when he writes that there is an intimacy between it *that is visibility+ and us as close as between the sea and the strand. Strand is that strip of land along the edge of the sea and we understand how intimate this relationship is. Using the word strand which can also mean to leave someone in a difficult or helpless position, Merleau-Ponty anticipates his discussion of chiasm, folding one meaning of the word onto another, of almost opposing value, as he continues by saying that it is not possible that vision, i.e., humans, blend into visibility or visibility into vision, being human. We must remain stranded, estranged, otherwise, as he writes vision would vanish at the moment of formation, by disappearance of the seer or of the visible. Vision and visibility, our senses, our being human, and our environment, are born of one another, enjoy an intimacy, are interdependent, yet are separate, cannot be blended.112 Merleau-Ponty goes on to tell us about vision/perception/humanity, as he understands it. There are not things in our environment all separate and identical in themselves, that is, having an identity and a being in isolation from being seen. Nor are we seers at first empty opening to these externals. What there is is something, as Merleau-Ponty says, to which we could not be closer than by palpating it with our look. Here he conjoins touch with vision in this wonderful phrase touching it with our look. That is, we are connected with our world as by touching it. And in touching it, as Merleau-Ponty shows, we do not see it, we do not dream of seeing it, all naked. Rather our touching look envelops clothes *the things of the world+ with its own flesh. Our gaze, as Merleau-Ponty imagines it, has its own flesh. To see something is to touch it in such a way as to make it our own, make it of our own flesh. Yet, as MerleauPonty reveals in a series of questions, both actual and rhetorical, such a touching gaze does not hide the things in the world, does not destroy their own sovereign existence, but rather, in veiling them, clothing them, actually unveils, reveals them. We could read the entire article this closely and benefit more than we might imagine from doing so. This passage presages much of what Merleau-Ponty says in this essay. Let me quote a couple more passages to open further his views. The first: Between the alleged colors and visible, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.113 Notable is Merleau-Pontys use of the words tissue and flesh. Flesh refers literally to the soft tissue, that is muscle and fat that cover the bones; that flesh is subcutaneous. However, the word also means the outer surface of the human body. Thus flesh refers to the outside of the body, the skin surface. We have in flesh then the same intimacy as between sea and strand, yet embraced in a single term. Merleau-Ponty jolts us by insisting that this nourishing sustaining tissue is not a thing at all, but a possibility and a latency, which he then terms flesh. But now the chiasmatic flesh is understood as a

112 113

Or, in terms that will be developed later, they are incomplete reversibilities. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, pp. 132-33.

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Brain Body Movement possibility, a latency. That most meaty sweaty bloody term refers to nothing at all, but rather a condition. And another passage: We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box. Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh? Where in the body are we to put the seer, since evidently there is in the body only shadows stuffed with organs, that is, more of the visible? The world seen is not in my body, and my body is not in the visible world ultimately: as flesh applied to flesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is surrounded by it. there is a reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other.114 As flesh literally indicates the interdependence and intimacy of inside and outsidein former discussions, between exteroceptors and interoceptors; subjectivity and objectivity; touch and feeling or emotion; and so onMerleau-Ponty projects, by analogy, the same relationship between the body and the world is one of flesh and thus there must be the flesh of the world. Flesh is then, as MerleauPonty goes on to say, an element of Being,115 an ultimate notion,116 the ultimate truth.117 Flesh is further fleshed out by Merleau-Ponty in terms of hinge, fold, reversibility, turned inside out, as well as dehiscence, intertwining, and chiasm. While vision dominates as the exemplar, touch actually underlies all vision examples. One would think that touch insinuates itself more and more as Merleau-Ponty moves progressively from the camera obscura model of the senses while exploring of the idea of flesh. Touch progressively replaces vision as exemplary. I am intrigued by Luce Irigarays discussion and extension of Merleau-Ponty. 118 Merleau-Ponty spent a great deal of time meditating and ruminating on one hand touching the other and, as I picture it, the hand is too meaty, too fleshy. I think Merleau-Ponty has in mind something more like the fingers, the penetrating fingers. Irigaray offers another analogy: The hands joined, palms together, fingers outstretched, constitute a very particular touching. A gesture often reserved for women (at least in the West) and which evokes, doubles, the touching of the lips silently applied upon one another. A touching more intimate than that of one hand taking hold of another. A phenomenology of the passage between interior and exterior. A phenomenon that remains in the interior, does not appear in the light of day, speaks of itself only in gestures, remains always on the edge of speech, gathering the edges without sealing them.119
114 115

Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 139. 116 Ibid., p. 140. 117 Ibid., p. 155. 118 See Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (New York: Routledge, 1998). 119 Quoted in Vasseleu, p. 66.

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Brain Body Movement Irigarays alternative imagery helps us see how male-object-production oriented is Merleau-Pontys crown example, although I dont understand why she didnt depict the fingers of her example as intertwining, interdigitating, rather than outstretched. As Cathryn Vasseleu writes in Textures of Light, Merleau-Ponty is shown by Irigaray to have had a preoccupation with an agent for whom perception is a holding on to things as objectives and thus a means of maintaining oneself in the world.120 Irigarays contiguous touching refers to a mode of sensibility which, in maintaining itself as sensible, parts company with things.121 This shift is referred to by Vasseleu as a tangible invisible which she describes as the body as a positive reserve, a vitally constituted dimension, an adherence to indetermination rather than the surfacing of an unpresentable interior.122 Tactility then is the primordial sense in which the bodys interiority is constituted. Recalling Brian Massumi, I think that the proprioceptive dimension of tactility would be yet a more accurate reference. Irigarays lips present an alternative, a predecessor actually, to Merleau-Pontys hands. Vasseleu puts it this way: Before the intentionality of the double touch (which divides touch between sentient being and the touched object), the indeterminacy of the hands that touch without taking holdlike the lips (Irigaray, 1993a: 170) constitutes the body as threshold or passage, neither an interior nor an exterior world.123 And, fittingly, Irigaray calls this intimate and impreceivable join of flesh, mucous, or as she puts it that most intimate interior of my flesh, neither the touch of the outside of the skin on my fingers nor the perception of the inside of these same fingers, but another threshold of the passage . . . between.124 Mucous is a touching without seeing, a tangible invisible. Irigarays tangible invisible is a non-reflexive indetermination of flesh in/between flesh, a body reserve which is not subject or object and not active or passive. Vasseleu says, it is an attentiveness devoid of anticipation or resistance. 125 Proprioception is the body knowing itself in space and movement and I believe that, for me, it serves better the idea of tangible invisible than does mucous. After all, the most basic quality of mucous is lubrication invoking the anticipation or presence of movement, passage, penetration. Lips, mucous, inevitably anticipate an opening, an entering, a merging, a frictional relationship, a tight squeeze, a susceptibility to deterioration due to exposure, an otherness, a joining. Mucous occurs at body openings suggesting a relationship with objects that is not as distinct as sea and strand, that does blend the object and subject. As one hand touching is extended into the world by Merleau-Ponty with the example of the handshake, touching lips might well be extended into the world, for example with the kiss, the deep kiss, and sexual intercourse, to suggest the extension for Irigiray. These too are invisible tangibles, but involving our internal invisible tangibles with those created and enacted through certain intimate relationships with the world. While Irigaray attempts to reverse Merleau-Pontys reversibilities, there remains something of this structurality when extending Irigarays example beyond the body into
120 121

Ibid., p. 66. Ibid. 122 Ibid., p. 67. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid., p. 72.

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Brain Body Movement the world, an extension that seems inevitable. Still, there are important differences. It seems that Irigarays lips example bears a distinctly feminine relational character as opposed to Merleau-Pontys object based example that is decidedly masculine. It would be worth our effort to pursue the differences in much greater detail. In either case we must still ask what difference does any of this make to the study of religion and culture, to the quality of our own lives. But first, a few comments on Raymond Gibbss discussion of the insights of cognitive science on our understanding of perception. After Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray and even Vasseleu, Gibbs seems prosaic, far too clear. Still, the work is important even in the outline of the findings. Perception involves the entire body. Perception is what we do. Perception is inseparable from action. Perception-action involves interactions of brain, body, and environment. Movement is essential to perception. Okay, got it Ray, thank you very much. For the moment, let me pretend that I am you all, that is, young students of religion and culture, eager to accept the challenge and recreate re-imagine these studies for the nascent generation, for the postglobally warmed world. Can I pull this off, even to catch a glimpse, opps, rather cop a feel, of the direction we (you) might take ourselves? Certainly, the first thing would be to recognize that the current approach is bound to the perceptual model based on camera obscura, on vision, to the almost complete exclusion of touch, either of the hands, the lips, or the interoceptors. We continue to frame our studies in terms of our attention outwardly directed to objects that, through acts of vision, we bring to focus on our internal screen so that, held there, we might pass them through various filtering devices to offer what we understand to be insights, the word means to see clearly. To study others is, in our present modus operandi, to see them clearly. Our most persistent goal is to interpret, that is to explain in terms of meaning and significance. That is what I am doing at the moment. The assumption is that the interest we have in things is satisfied only by seeing the thing as not sufficient in the terms in which it appears. Our subjects are valuable only to the degree that we may render them in terms they would not recognize. We usually do not think that perception is even a factor in what we do; yet, perhaps we should. How we, as humans, perceive is fundamental to how we perceive our subjects. How we perceive is fundamental to the inner-dynamics of our subjects, that is, how they perceive and act in the world. What changes might occur were we to rethink what we do in terms of an understanding of perception based on touch, on lips, on proprioception? Minimally, we will need to reinvent ourselves, rather our image of ourselves, to include body, movement, interaction. We will have to acknowledge that there is no objective other, perhaps not even an object of our study at all distinguishable from ourselves, our acts of perception. We will need to look at our every insight to revision ourselves without relying on vision as the principal exemplar of perception and relationship. We will need to come to a totally different understanding of ourselves as human beings and as scholars. As color is a persistent exemplar for so many studiesengaged frequently by Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, and Gibbsperhaps color should be the model for our reinvention of ourselves. Religion might compare quite effectively with color, since religion doesnt exist in itself any more than does color. Religion, culture for that matter, exists only in our perception of it and our perception is interestingly based on interactive processes of body, movement, and environment. Religion then is based, on the one hand (perhaps I

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Brain Body Movement should say lip), on our biophysiology and on our neurology and on our psychology, and on our history, and on our experience, and on our sensorimotor patternings and body images and experiences, and the very structure and character of our bodies. It exists, on the other hand, because it is an invented mode through which we interact, perceive, and encounter others and ourselves. Religion then must be reshaped by applying the exemplars of touching hands or slippery lips.

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Lecture 11: Emotion, Depth, and FleshPart I: Dancing as Pure Depth126

The concept pure depth is discussed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others and it greatly fascinates me. Im going to give something of an overview of these discussions and how pure depth contributes to our understanding of not only Merleau-Pontys Flesh, but also to our understanding of ourselves as percipient-perceptibles. In the context of this discussion I am going to consider dancing as a candidate for being a powerful exemplar of pure depth. Turning that around, I will then consider, in cursory terms, the implications for dancing when considered as pure depth. To avoid the implications of a split dual structure to reality Merleau-Ponty must introduce unity and continuity among the parts. Yet, inseparability among its constituents would simply collapse reality. Somehow there must be distinctive constituents of reality yet they must not be separated from one another. Merleau-Pontys consideration of this thorny matter focuses on the arena of human perception. This makes sense given that it is through perception that we come to know the world beyond our own bodies. Perception is the fabric of our connection, the hedge against isolation. He creates a unified ontology by showing that embodiment unifies subject and object, thus overcoming the common subject-object dualism. However, to avoid the collapse of all distinction he had also to somehow accommodate distance and this led to his ontology of perception, to flesh. Distance is key, however distance must be understood relationally and this suggests depth. The concern with how we perceive depth is an old one, usually understood as a line endwise to the eye,127 and was thought as derivatively perceived, added to an otherwise flat and static image produced by a two-dimensional array of radiant energy on the retinal surface. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson (among others) have rejected the classical explanation. Notably, Merleau-Pontys ways of resolving the issue of distance and depth then become fundamental parts of his flesh ontology. Depth comes to be understood as that which both allows difference and distinctness while creating a bond or connection or identity between perceiver and perceived. The exploration of depth is complex and profound. James Gibsons approach128 is identified as environmental. For Gibson distance is an intrinsically dynamic concept that implies movement. We dont actually see depth but rather we see one thing behind another. Movement reveals the occluding edges of objects that are separated and connected along the dimension of depth. Gibson formulates depth in terms of paradox, a unity through disparity. The environmental aspect of his approach is articulated in affordance, as he termed it. Affordance is understood as the value and meaning of things in the environment and value and meaning are always understood in terms of the relationship to the perceiver. Thus depth is the dimension that points both

126 127

Delivered April 6, 2009 From Berkeleys New Theory of Vision cited in Sue L. Cataldi, Emotion, Depth, and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space (State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 30. 128 James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986).

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Brain Body Movement to the object and to the perceiving subject. Depth is the significance of surfaces in relation to the body.129 Merleau-Ponty held that an essential aspect of every meaningful perception is a spatial orientation. It is always already there because it must be presupposed in the body holding some place in the world as the locale for perception. This is then a primordial spatial orientation. Ill develop this later. Perhaps we might enhance our understanding of Merleau-Pontys idea here in terms of proprioception, the ability already active at birth (and surely before)130 of the body to locate itself and its parts in space through movement. From birth the body simply exists and orients itself in space already existing. MerleauPonty holds that we come into the world as perceptible bodily beings, or, to anticipate his terms, we belong to the flesh of the world. The body is already oriented by being a body. The body however has in its structure and behavior examples of distance and separation that are also unities. The hand touching the other hand (finger on one hand touching the other hand) is a favored example often contemplated by Merleau-Ponty. Another is the stereopsis in vision based on seeing with two eyes. We, in fact, see the world clearly, under normal circumstances, through two separate eyes that see separate images. We can test this easily by closing first one eye then the other in a variety of situations. Difference, separation, is easily confirmed. Yet, so also is the unity of vision. Even vision situations in which there is a distinct disparity between the images separately seen by our two eyes get reconciled and they snap into place as a unified image that is nearly impossible to then willfully separate. This separation yet unity is fundamental to Merleau-Pontys consideration of depth. Depth at this nave level then is understood as that dimension by which we see something from here that is at its place there. The here and there are contemporary in our experience. Here and there are joined in time through their visibility and this is depth, a space of copresent implication. When movement is factored in, as necessary to such perception, then, very much in the same terms as Gibsons affordances, Merleau-Ponty appreciates depth as a sensitive space, as living movement, as lived distance.131 Depth, in this progressive consideration, becomes increasingly profound. It is that dimension that contemporaneously unites and separates. It is a thick view of time. Depth is the most existential dimension.132 Depth, we might here call it more properly pure depth, then is a dimension that is primordial, allowing the perception of distance and the value of the distant. Primordial depth, in itself, does not yet operate between objects, between perceiver and percipient. Pure depth is depth without distance from here.133 In its thickness, depth preceding perception is perhaps difficult to grasp. Merleau-Ponty offers an analogy that both depends upon vision and also foils vision to the point of its replacement by touch, by feeling. This wedge is dark space, the experience of night or darkness. In
129 130

See Cataldi, pp. 31-34. See Shaun Gallaghers presentation of neonate imitation, pp. 69-73. 131 Erwin Straus clarifies, Distance is a primal phenomenon there is no distance without a sensing and mobile subject; there is no sentience without distance. Quoted from his The Primary World of Senses in Cataldi, p. 45. 132 Cataldi, p. 45. 133 Ibid., p. 48.

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Brain Body Movement darkness seeing is thwarted, yet seeing into the darkness elicits a feeling of thickness, a density, a materiality, a tangibility, an intimacy. In dark space everything is obscure and mysterious. Eugene Minkowski, an early twentieth century psychiatrist, who offered the idea of dark space, held that the essence of dark space is mystery.134 The experience of dark space provides a means of trying to grasp pure depth. Pure depth is depth without foreground or background, without surfaces and without any distances separating it from me. Menkowski understood dark space, which Merleau-Ponty identifies with pure depth, as the depth of our being, as the true source of our life.135 Pure depth is key to understanding flesh which, like pure depth, as pure depth, is always already there as the formative medium of the subject and object, (precessive) as the inauguration of the where and when (progenitive).136 The moving body is fundamental to flesh, because through movement flesh begins to understand itself or become aware of itself.137 Flesh, without moving body, is only possibility, never actuality, percipience never perception. The moving body is then, as Merleau-Ponty termed it, a percipient-perceptible, that is, an entity possessing the power to perceive while also being capable of being perceived. The body is an intertwining of two sides, the adherence of a self-sentient side to a sensible side. The body as an intertwining blurs the boundary between the flesh of the world (depth) and our own bodily flesh. The body exists then in an ambience, a primordial given, of depth, the hidden dimension behind everything.138 This doubling is for Merleau-Ponty a reversibility. Reversibility is a way to express the interconnection among distinctions. A subject requires an object and vice versa; they are reversible; they move back and forth among themselves. Movement is essential for reversibility to be realized, for occlusion to be recognizable, for perception to take place. Yet, this reversibility is never complete. This is a fascinating phase in this argument, I think. Complete reversibility would result in identity among the distinctions and a collapse of perception. Were the touching of one hand with another to be completely reversible it would not be possible to distinguish one hand from the other. The images provided by each eye would be the same and there would be no negotiation and reconciliation between the two, no vision. The term chiasm here identifies this gap or cross-over space. There must remain this undetectable, in itself, space or gap or hiddenness for reversibility to be incomplete. Incomplete reversibility is not some flaw to be overcome in perception, it is rather the very motor that drives the movement of reversibility that allows for simultaneous interdependence and distance. Since the chiasm is hidden, since chiasm precedes and makes possible reversibility, it can be thought of as depth or better as pure depth as presented through the analogy of dark space. Chiasm, pure depth, this incompleteness is the source or condition of percipience and at the same time unifies flesh ontology. I am well aware that these ideas are difficult to grasp and tend to slip from our grasp even after we have a few moments of lightly touching them, yet these ideas, and I believe even our way of trying to think

134 135

Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time, (1933), p. 429, cited in Cataldi, p. 49. Cataldi quoting Minkowski, p. 50. 136 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 140, quoted in Cataldi, p. 60. 137 Cataldi, p. 61. 138 Ibid., p. 67.

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Brain Body Movement about them, are fundamental to our understanding of ourselves as sentient beings and to the way we study other sentient beings in the context of religion and culture. These ideas can also raise fascinating and provocative possibilities for understanding other aspects of our humanity. I want to turn now to dancing, considering it in these terms to both understand another reversibility, that is, how dancing may help us understand flesh ontology and also how flesh ontology may help us understand dancing in new terms. I want to begin with the simple observation that dancing may be seen as a distinctive kind of making. It is distinguished by the relationship between the maker and the thing made. The dancer, in dancing, makes the dance. The dance is inseparable, physically inseparable from the body of the dancer, from the body of the maker of the dance. Even in the situations where choreographers make up a dance that is set on the bodies of others, there is no manifest dance or work other than when bodied. The existence of any dance is in it being danced and a dance cannot be danced apart from a dancing body. The distinction between the dancer and the dance is not difficult to discern, it is not ambiguous, and it is an aspect of the very designation of dancing. So the dance is other than the dancer, while being identical with the dancer. Having just worked through Merleau-Pontys discussion of perception and the body in terms of his flesh ontology, this description of dancing surely sounds familiar. It has similarities with the examples of two hands touching or of two eyes seeing, yet the dancing body presents a fascinating new wrinkle: there is no physical separation between the two parts, dance and dancer, these are identical bodies. It is in the movement act called dancing that the body is at once separated into dance and dancer, self and other in some respects, a distance that allows reversibility, while at once holding self and other, dance and dancer, as unified, indeed as bodies identical. Yet, how is this possible? Here is where pure depth becomes important. There is an important distinction between the quotidian moving body and the dancing body. Following Merleau-Ponty we would expect that pure depth exists in the perceptual space in which the body locates itself. However, in the dancing body pure depth must be otherwise located. The reversibility in dancing, unlike that of perception, does not take place between the perceiver and percipient, joined in the flesh of the world. Rather reversibility in dancing takes place in the body of the dancer, in the action of dancing, since in dancing self and other have identical bodies, the dancing body. The question then is where is the primal depth that precedes and makes possible the reversibility that occurs in dancing? We must look for an alternative to dark space, that vision initiated experience of trying to see in the dark only to be foiled and thus forced into that thickness that is felt rather than seen. We can look immediately into that perceptive depth within the body that we have come to understand we are born with, perhaps even conceived with since it surely is functioning neonatally, and that is interoception, or proprioception. These are the receptors by which we understand ourselves as bodies moving in space. These are the receptors that provide a sense of self, that provide the ground for movement itself that thus must precede all exteroception. Proprioception can be described in terms identical with those that describe dark space, that is, as primordial depth that constitutes a medium of thickness with a tangible diffuse materiality that is not held at a distance.

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Brain Body Movement While proprioception139 provides the birth of pure depth in the sense that self necessitates a distinction, a distance from, other; proprioception alone is vague about the other, requiring the other to be nothing more than ambient space in which the body moves, in which the body is located. Dancing, however, is a making of an other and a concrete other, which is not yet set apart from the proprioceptively aware body. The dancing body is at once self and other, both proprioceptively, rather than exteroceptively, experienced. As the essence of dark space is mystery, so surely must we so identify the essence of dancing. Dancing is the primordial depth that allows one to experience other and otherness proprioceptively and emotionally as ones own body. Dancing creates depth without surfaces and without any distance separating other from me. Dancing is depth without foreground or background. The distance between self and other as experienced in the dancing body is pure depth, primordial depth, yet made manifest, made visible to others. Compared with dark space that foils vision and recoils to touch and feeling, dancing begins with that most intimate of feeling, with the thickness of feeling itself, in interoception and yet shows it in the observable act of dancing. Dancing is distinguished in the realm of movement in its identity with depth, with the mysterious thickness that allows the distance of self and other while holding them together in one body. Dancing is movement that is pure depth and thus precedes the movement upon which perception, or better exteroception, depends. Dancing is a reversibility between dancer and dance, between self and other, yet it clearly is not a complete reversibility. While dancer cannot be without dancing without making a dance, there is the constant awareness that the dancing may stop at any moment and then the reversibility terminates. It is also clear that it is the dancer who will remain rather than the dance. The dance is ephemeral even as it is fully bodied. This hidden incompleteness is not the weakness of dancing, but rather the factor that energizes it, that gives it value albeit a mysterious one. In dancing there is always that hidden emptiness or space or chiasm that only movement may maintain. We experience the collapse of pure depth when a dance ends, so it is the sustaining of the chiasm or open place in the bodied moving action of dancing that is the ground for the possibilities for affordance, for bearing meanings, but much more significantly, for evoking feeling and emotion. These are topics I will eventually consider in Part II. Dancing is that reversibility that is necessary and must precede Merleau-Pontys favorite example of one hand touching another. While he can see and feel that the hands are separate hands, he holds that they are united in being of one body. Yet, it appears that he holds this only because he can see that the hands are connected to arms connected to a common trunk or because in the past he has made this connection and now knows this connection due to personal history. He does not acknowledge that we already know without seeing that our two hands are of one body because we propriocieve them before seeing them as two and distinct, yet of one body. We simply know proprioceptively that they are my hands. While Merleau-Ponty understands the body as percipient-perceptible, it appears that this connection of the body to the world through flesh depends on the body being, more fundamentally, propriocepient-proprioceptable, for this is the primal and pure depth that is the embodied chiasm

139

We need recall the discussion related to proprioception initiated by Massumis work.

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Brain Body Movement across which reversibility plays. We must know, in the sense of feeling in our bodies, the distance of pure depth, before we can even place ourselves in the space of perception.140 Dancing is the most fundamental dehesence or breaking open that creates the hinge, or perhaps better termed the bootstrap, by which we come to play in that mobiatic wonderland of perception, signs, metaphor, art, language, religion, and certainly everything else we might consider human. Dancing is the exercise and showing of pure depth, if it is not the actual action in which our existence is constituted. There are plenty of examples that may help us see that, while Western cultures tend to diminish the significance of dancing or to value it only to the degree it is commodifiable, others have a different perspective. The Hindu figure Nataraja, the lord of dancing, a form of Shiva, is significant. As depicted in the popular bronze images fashioned in the thirteenth century, Nataraja is a dancer while holding in his hands symbols representing the five cosmic processes creation, preservation, destruction, embodiment, and release. His dancing is not a part of these cosmic processes, but the primordial grounding upon which all these cosmic processes become possible. His dancing is understood as lila or play and, as such, it is not done for any reason, but simply because it is his own nature to do so, to dance. Without the fuller exploration that should be provided here, I would suggest that dancing is selected as the play actions of Nataraja because the ancient Hindus comprehended that it shows and exemplifies the pure depth which in Merleau-Pontys terms is what necessarily precedes and is the ground for perception, for his flesh ontology. Dancing precedes and grounds ontology. It is of interest, well worth spending ones career exploring, that dancing is nearly inseparable from ritual drama in cultures throughout the world, save perhaps the West. Dancing in many cultures is a loose synonym for religion. Dancing as pure depth is the platform or primal condition on which are built the many dance forms that do have intention that take a specific form. Ballet and Javanese court dancing are highly codified dance forms that hold and show the most fundamental values of a culture, in both these cases, the culture of the court. On the platform of pure depth these dances create something like pure ideals for behavior, demeanor, comportment, presence, value, and so on. The other presented as the dance is no real other, but an ideal other, yet, in its dancing it is realized in real bodies in real movement in real presence. The ideal body of the dance is reversible with the quotidian body of the dancer, yet the reversibility is incomplete. The incompleteness is the depth that makes it possible for the dancer and those witnessing the dancing to experience the ideal. It is of interest that children the world over dance before they speak. Kids respond to the rhythms of their environment not with quotidian or purposive or meaningful actions, but rather with that form of action that people everywhere identify as dancing. Surely this is the response in this critical stage of development of the dehiscence that exercises proprioceptively experienced pure depth, that exercises
140

This is what those newborn infants are doing in facial imitation.

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Brain Body Movement the pure joy of being human. And I believe, were we to study this carefully, children begin dancing at the stage in human development when the sense of self and the other is understood in the ways necessary to make possible the acquisition of language, metaphor, artifice, and art. With these sorts of analyses we can appreciate why dancing is so commonly inseparable from religious and ritual acts. The embodiment of the other in dancing is an act of human transcendence or theological immanence. It bridges the distance between human and other-than-human while allowing that distance to remain. I think there is much potential for pursuing the study of religion in the terms of distance and the bridging of distance. Prayer, for example, is an act of communication bridging realms of reality. Pilgrimage is an act of movement across a landscape of particular types of affordances. Almost all religious ideas and actions are based on distance, types of distance, bridging distance, creating distance. Of course then all these distance-based religious elements rest on pure depth. I decided to call this Part I of two lectures because the second half of Sue Cataldis book explores the interconnection between depth and emotion. Since religion and dancing are so commonly associated with emotion, with feelingsindeed, in our rationally based world (however untenable) they are both denigrated for this associationI think it important to continue this exploration of depth in terms of its connection to emotion. Now, to find the time to do Part II.

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Lecture 12: Metaphor, Gesture, Language141

I feel rather guilty directing you to read Zoltn Kvecsess book Metaphor 142rather than the books of my personal favorites, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Ive taught their Metaphors We Live By143 a good many times. I have included metaphor as one of our topics because I think it is important that we understand how intertwined are language and metaphor. We must shift our attention away from the folk understanding of metaphor as a poetic trope that perhaps muddies meaning or prettifies it rather than clarifies it. Yet, I also wanted the excuse to think more extensively about the structurality of metaphor especially in the context of the various perspectives we have been considering, such as Baudrillards seduction, Batesons play, and Merleau-Pontys flesh and depth. Gesture is good to think and I want to reflect on hands particularly in light of the importance of body in language and communication. While strung together, my thoughts today span several topics. Kvecses defines metaphor, or specifically conceptual metaphor, as understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another conceptual domain.144 He explains that metaphor is a process of mapping entailments from the more concrete to the more abstract and that the process is unidirectional, that is, the mappings go only in one direction.145 In his example, a very common one indeed, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, he holds that journey is the more concrete concept and that its entailments are mapped onto the more abstract, love. The travelers are mapped as the lovers; the vehicle is the love relationship itself; the distance covered is the progress made; and so on. The importance of showing these characteristics of metaphor is that we soon begin to appreciate that our lives and our language are shot through with metaphors. We can scarcely come up with a simple statement that isnt based in some key metaphor and we cannot find any concept or experience that we would hope to talk or think about free of metaphor. Minimally an appreciation of metaphor at even a general level is an awakening. We recognize that concepts are based extensively in embodied experience and that there is a major fluidity in the grasping and expression of concepts. The structurality of metaphor is what interests me most and I dont find that the extant discussions of metaphor have the same sophistication as do discussions of seduction, flesh, and depth. Let me explore metaphor structurality. First, I am rather fond of the simple definition that metaphor is to understand something in terms of something else which it is not.146 The convention for stating a metaphor is to use capital letters and the word is, for example, LOVE IS A JOURNEY. In Kovecses example, love is the target and journey is the source, which means that he understands that journey is concrete and love is abstract. When I read his list of entailments and mappings, I think that a revision to his presentation is necessary. The word love names an emotion or a feeling and I believe that all the
141 142

Delivered April 13, 2009 Zoltn Kvecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 143 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 144 Kvecses, p. 4. 145 Ibid.,, p. 6. 146 Kvecses, nor other students of metaphor, does not place any concern with this aspect of metaphor, although Lakoff and Johnson do talk about metaphors hiding as well as revealing.

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Brain Body Movement attributes of love that Kvecses names refer to something other than love. Rather they refer to a relationship and, indeed, all of the features that he assigns to love have little, if anything so far as I can discern, to do with any emotion: the lovers, the relationship, the events of the relationship, the progress made, continuing on to the goals of the relationship. So first of all, it seems to me that there is a hidden element in this structurality and it is actually love itself. And perhaps the hidden love in this metaphor represents something rather larger in the structurality of metaphor and that is feeling or emotion. We know that love or feelings or emotions drive a relationship, but we are distracted from this hidden, yet most important, element in the double structure of metaphor. The unidirectional principle of metaphor is worth thinking about in this respect. LOVE IS A JOURNEY, yet A JOURNEY IS NOT LOVE. The target is abstract, that is, love not journey, while the source is concrete, that is, journey not love. I want to contest this, but first, were we to consider unidirectionality in terms of the metaphor RELATIONSHIP IS A JOURNEY it would be less clear, because the inverse JOURNEY IS A RELATIONSHIP isnt actually all that implausible. We might think of a journey as a relationship of the traveler through space relating to the road, to the landscape, to the map, to fellow travelers, and so on. Im far from convinced that metaphorical mappings are simply unidirectional. I believe that they must be reversible to some extent, yet simply incomplete in the reversibility. This is an important development in the understanding of metaphor. In metaphor an essential condition is ONE THING IS ANOTHER THING. The word is is a marker of reversibility. Were it truly unidirectional the conventional presentation would be ONE THINGANOTHER THING, using a left pointing arrow to indicate the mapping of the source domain named second onto the target domain named first. Is means they are equal, yet different, and thus, in some respects, reversible. Mappings of entailments cannot occur without some oscillatory negotiative reversal. However, another essential condition of metaphor is that the one thing is also not the other thing. Were this not so, then the metaphor would be LOVE IS LOVE and, who could learn anything from that one. We should be familiar with the structurality I am suggesting; we have seen it before in our consideration of play, seduction, flesh and we have been building richer understandings of the profundity of this structurality in our discussions of depth, chiasm, proprioception, dark space, and movement. Perhaps a more interesting way of thinking about the relation of the two parts of the metaphor is in Merleau-Pontys terms of the visible and the invisible rather than the concrete and the abstract. Reviewing Kovecsess lists of common categories for source and target domains in metaphor there is a general correlation with the visible and invisible. Body, health and illness, animals, plants, buildings and constructions, machines and tools, games and sports, money and economic terms, etc. are the categories common to the source domain, while emotion, desire, morality, thought, society/nation, politics, economy, human relationships, communication, time, religion, and so on are categories common to the target domain. I think there needs to be more extensive consideration than I have time to do here, but my guess is that even those target domains that are not invisible, such as human relationships, as I have shown above, have a hidden invisible such as feelings or emotions. The common argument is that body, and bodily experience, is involved in the source domain. This body involvement is the basis for the source domain to be understood as concrete. However, when we

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Brain Body Movement consider the target domain, while it is invisible, can it be any less bodily involved? Experience itself suggests the persisting internal bodily connection with the history of the body. Experience is not simply the mechanical and physical movement of the body; it is the impression such posture and movement has and has over time. Experience is a store of the effects and affects of mechanical and physical movement; more than a store it is a deepening well of evolving and changing implications that are essential to affordance and perception. Surely it is a limited or nave understanding of body, perhaps overly shaped by vision (which sees only the body visible), that truncates this standard argument. Emotion, feeling, proprioception, visceral perception are all deeply bodied and, frankly, anything but abstract. What is abstract about felt pain or the felt knowledge that we sometimes term belief? What we know in our bodily feelings are the hidden certainties that drive everything that we do. If we accept then that metaphor structuality is comprised of the visible and the invisible or, in bodily terms, the external and the internal, we must then recognize that metaphor structurality is necessarily grounded on depth. The identity of inside and outside, of visible and invisible, has copresent implications, a thickness, a depth. Metaphor structurality can be restated as AN INSIDE THING IS AN OUTSIDE THING. Metaphor then is reversible in turning one outside in. Metaphor is the complement to and in continuity with perception which is grounded in the flesh of the world. Metaphor, as perception, is trafficked in the depth between the inside and outside, the invisible and the visible, concept and form, idea and action. Metaphor, as a trope,147 is of a different order than perception. Metaphor is a language act or a conceptual act, yet, like perception it still functions, in nave terms, to bring the outside inside, or, in more sophisticated terms, to engage the interdependence of outside and inside in the human enterprise of being in the world. And, like perception, metaphor is thoroughly embodied. Metaphor is not unidirectional so much as it is an incomplete reversibility. The incompleteness of the reversibility of the metaphor is the not to the is. And the not typically remains hidden. The metaphor is stated LOVE IS A JOURNEY emphasizing the is. However, of actually greater importance is the hidden certainty that LOVE IS NOT A JOURNEY. The reversibility implied by the is is known to be incomplete, but only by the hidden and unstated not. In Merleau-Pontys terms this hidden not, this incompleteness in the reversibility, is the chiasm, the crossing place between the two terms of the metaphor, the crossing place where comparison, negotiation, revelation, expansion, construction, creation, thought, and action occur. Metaphor then succeeds perception in a logical sense and depends on it, yet metaphor is in continuity with flesh. The thickness or depth of metaphor is dependent on an awareness of a primordial pure depth which I discussed in some detail in the last lecture. This is but a prolegomenon toward a shift in the way we understand metaphor. I think it complements and extends the understanding of metaphor presented by Kvecses and also by Lakoff and Johnson. Clearly a fuller exploration of the metaphor structurality in light of play, seduction, flesh and so forth will

147

Trope is a word or phrase, expression, or image that is used in a figurative way, usually for rhetorical effect. However, interestingly, in medieval religious texts a trope was a phrase or text interpolated into the service of the Mass, suggesting that it was a kind of intrusion of the outside to the inside in order to expand or provide affordance.

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Brain Body Movement be important as will considering the implications of this perspective on the many metaphor related topics. So there should be a part two to this lecture followed by a dozen or so more. Now I want to turn to the topic of gesture. This is a complex topic, yet Im interested in think ing about it, I suppose, in more of a reactive than a directly constructive way. Ill focus on Shaun Gallaghers chapter The Body in Gesture in his book How the Body Shapes the Mind, knowing full well that there is a large literature on gesture that I have not yet carefully read. First, I must say that Im tired of Gallaghers use of Ian Waterman. This poor guys loss of proprioception is Gallaghers career gain it seems to me. I understand that the single exceptional case is often the ground for breakthrough knowledge, yet I am often not very persuaded by the Waterman case. I also have loads of questions about Gallaghers claim that Waterman has no proprioceptive feedback from the neck down. While I do not doubt that Waterman has no awareness of proprioceptive feedback, I think that, even under visual control, something as muscularly complicated as walking is not possible without proprioceptive feedback to the brain of some sort. I need to do more research on how muscles work in conjunction with proprioceptors of various kinds, but what I have discovered so far is that basically every muscle movement is necessarily meshed with proprioception. Gallagher is considering gesture in terms of two explanations of gesture. The motor theory holds that gesture is a matter of movement, falling within the domain of sensory-motor behavior.148 The other, a communications based theory, holds that gesture is a form of expressive action a communicative act. tied to linguistic and communicative processes.149 Gallagher argues for the communication theory and further distinguishes two aspects of gesture: its inter-subjective (communicative) and intrasubjective (cognitive) functions.150 In other words, gestures are good to talk and good to think. As I think about this, it seems clear to me that the rather routinized patterning of gesturing that accompanies common discourse points strongly to the motor theory. There simply isnt enough variation, as there clearly is in American Sign Language, for example, to achieve anything like the level of speech communication. On the other hand, clearly there is an expressive aspect to gesture that is undeniable. The discussion of gesture is all too commonly limited to hands. Elocution was a form of rhetoric popular in the eighteenth century that recognized the importance to the art of oratory of gesture, stance, and dress. Elocution prescribed specific hand gestures to accomplish specific effects. But even in elocution, while prescribed, gesture was not a matter of simply the isolated hand. It was a movement of the arm and hand connected with the posture and stance of the body. In Gallaghers discussion of gesture, as in the few other studies I have read, gesture is almost constantly referred to as limited to the hand or hands. For example, Gallagher writes, one requirement for gesture is that there be some knowledge in the system concerning the location of the hands relative to each other and relative to the rest of the body.151 He even consults Ramachandrans studies of amputees to see if phantom limbs have evidence
148 149

Gallagher, p. 117. Ibid., pp. 117-18. 150 Ibid., p. 122. 151 Ibid., p. 123.

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Brain Body Movement of gesture, or phantom gesture. He understands the flapping of stumped upper arms as evidence of gesture, were the hands to be there, rather than the moving stumps themselves being gestures. My point is this, while Gallagher argues for an embodied theory of gesture, he appears not to understand the fundamentals of movement. Hands are the extremities connected to the trunk of the body by arms. Movement of the hands, particularly any hand movement that we would call gesture, also involves the arms. Movement of the arms and hands is initiated from the core of the body and is inseparable from the posture and placement of the entire body. When the analysis of gesture is limited to attending only to hands and the intricacies of digital movement, focus on articulation and communication is predictable. However, if gesture is understood as being initiated in the core of the body and, in sequence, extended into the arms and finally the hands, a different understanding should arise. The arm and hand movements are then the articulation of the bodys core which is strongly associated with feelings, emotions, depth rather than cognition, articulate communication, speech, or thought. Rather than being cognitive-linguistic, gesture may be emotive and affective. Based on his experiments with Waterman, Gallagher holds that gesture is not under the control of either body image or body schema, nor is gesture under either visual or proprioceptive control.152 He holds that gesture is essentially language and functions primarily in communicative contexts.153 Again, I think that the shortcoming here is the same as that for metaphor in the discussion above. Gallagher has a body concept that separates hands from bodies, that separates emotion and feeling from cognition and language. Were we to re-couple hands to arms to bodies and feelings and emotions to cognition and language, gesture would be complementary to language in communicating the emotional counterpart to the simple conduit understanding of language expression and the embodied metaphorical understanding of conception and cognition. When concepts are thoroughly entwined with body via metaphor, when metaphor has by its structurality depth that is inseparable from emotion and feeling, then speech needs multiple channels by which to express and affect its full richness and nuance.154 Gesture is not the only means of doing this; so too are facial expression and the nuances of speech articulation, that is, the vocal qualities, timing, and emphasis of speech. There is a welldeveloped speech act theory, initiated by J. L. Austins book How to Do Things with Words155 that explores the amazing complexities of articulation. The pragmatic and locutionary aspects of speech are well considered. So gesture may clearly have a communication function, however, I think it impossible to understand it as Gallagher contends that gesture is essentially language.156 On another point Gallagher argues that gestures are products, as well as active producers, of brain organization. Reviewing his neonate imitation data he proposes that gesture helps to accomplish thought.157 This idea is more fully developed by Raymond Gibbs in his consideration of gesture and language. Gibbs writes,

152 153

Ibid., pp. 118 & 120. Ibid., p. 118. 154 Later Gallagher does acknowledge that the body generates gestural expression, Ibid., p. 129. 155 nd J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2 ed., 1975) 156 Gallagher, p. 118. 157 Ibid., p. 128.

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Brain Body Movement Iverson and Thelen (1999) claim that speech and gesture momentarily activate and entrain one another as a coupled oscillator. At first, an infants manual activity takes precedence, but through rhythmical activity, and later through gesture, manual behavior gradually entrains the speech production system. The initial basis to move hand and mouth together cascade with a single coupled connected system where the mental thought is manifested as movement. Eventually, every communicative act, either by speech or gesture, is remembered as an ensemble, including the proprioceptive consequence of that movement. This linkage of speech and gesture provides another example of the sensorimotor origins of thought and of the continual importance of embodied action in mental life.158 So, we might say that speech and gesture are good to think. Gibbs chapter Language and Communication offers insights and extensive evidence on how language and communication are based in body. For example, he concludes that, Human bodies provide the conceptual basis for defining the range of meanings associated with each verb for hand motion in any language.159 Importantly he shows that people create meaningful construals by simulating how the objects and actions depicted in language relate to embodied possibilities. Thus, people use their embodied experiences to soft-assemble meaning, rather than merely activate pre-existing abstract, conceptual representations.160 There are many things of merit in Gibbs chapter, but Ill take time here to respond to but one of them. In a number of the experiments reported by Gibbs, the response time of subjects was often considered a measure of meaning; the more immediate the comprehension the greater the meaning. For example, near the end of the chapter Gibbs discusses affordance. In terms of the affordance related to the word chair, he provides two sentences: Art used the chair to defend himself against the snarling lion and Art used the chair to propel himself across the room. He notes that people judged the first sentence more meaningful which he argues is associated with the greater affordance of using a chair to defend against a lion than to propel oneself across the floor. Interestingly, my experience which I think representative of most, would actually produce the opposite. I have often sat in a desk chair with rollers and propelled myself around the room, but I have yet to face a lion or any other animal with a chair. Who on earth would carry a chair along for such purposes. However, the issue I want to address has to do with the correlation of speed of comprehension with meaning. Gibbs writes, that the nonafforded sentences took significantly longer to comprehend than the afforded ones. It seems to me that there is a general understanding that speed of comprehension correlates with meaningfulness. Something incomprehensible such as John scratched his back with thread is deemed incomprehensible and thus without meaning, because it registers long response times. I am not so sure Gibbs would actually believe that comprehension speed always correlates with meaning, but it is a point I want to consider further. Jonathan Smith, citing Paul Ricoeur, argues that incongruity gives rise to thought; so too does poetry, complexity, profundity, incredulity, seductivity, and many of
158 159

Gibbs, p. 169. Ibid., p. 197. 160 Ibid., pp. 200-201.

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Brain Body Movement the topics we have considered. Comprehension speed may indicate superficial or customary comprehensiveness, but it does not correlate with meaning. I often make a distinction between the words meaning and meaningful. The meaningful is full of meaning, suggesting there is much to comprehend, that there is much to think about, that thinking actually creates more and more meaning. I can in a microsecond dismiss as quotidian the statement John scratched his back with a floppy disk finding little about it remarkable beyond the increasing rarity of floppy disks. It is mere information, useful or not, but certainly not provocative or interesting. Not so with the statement, John scratched his back with thread. This is of interest and it is so for the very structurality it shares with metaphor. It contains a hidden depth, and it does so precisely because that depth is a gap, an incredulity, an incomprehensibility, a chiasm. And these provocations rise precisely because the statement confounds affordance programs. What sort of thing is John that he could scratch his back with thread? What sort of thread might work for such a task? Why does he scratch with thread rather than a thread? Perhaps this is symbolic in some sense or needs to be placed in context. Who would make such a statement? I think it is unfortunate that our culture and era confuses meaning with information and with rapid comprehension speed. It consigns us to a fast-paced information-crowded world with little depth or thickness. I could go on to preach a bit about the ill consequences of living in a world where production supplants seduction, where hyperreality is our reality, where our energies are directed to end play, to deny depth, and to celebrate being simple. Ill pass on that one and end with an exercise of my duty to you as students of religion and culture. So how do these topics and insights, be there any you find significant, relate to or might be of value to the study of religion and culture? This is the information you are paying the big bucks to receive. Here you go. Metaphor is foundational, I believe, to any comparative study, to any study of any other. Metaphor is foundational to who we are as human beings, how we build conceptions, how we understand ourselves, how we create ourselves. Metaphor, as I argue above, is fundamental to being human. As many studies of metaphor show, because many structural and ontological metaphors are based on the distinctiveness of the human body, metaphor offers a base, a ground, for comparison, and also translation, to be even possible. Were there not some ground common to all human beings then we would have no place to stand to consider the more interesting differences. A careful study of these body-based metaphors shared among human beings is then important for this fundamental stance. However, metaphor is also powerfully shaped by culture, by history, by any accumulation of experience. Since all experience is body based and since all bodies are, also cultural and historical, then to explore the operative metaphors of other peoples is a powerful method providing a way to hopefully surpass our studies being simply projections of our expectations onto others. Much more could be said on this. I also believe that to understand metaphor structurality, as I have begun to develop it, is important for our self understanding and appreciation. To embrace the hidden chiasm of metaphor is to open ourselves to profundity and richness, to depth and beauty.

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Brain Body Movement To understand gesture, especially in terms of the perspective of gesture being connected with emotion and feeling and with the communication of affect, is to significantly broaden our understanding of embodiment, of communication, of cognition, of being human. We need embrace the whole body perspective that acknowledges that emotion and feeling are the often hidden motors that drive communication, action, thought, and behavior. As emotion is inseparable from body and body is inseparable from thought and communication, we must embrace it in our studies. To do so, especially for studies of religion and culture, would affect a striking shift from our present practices.

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Lecture 13: Thought and Cognition161

The task is to understand and appreciate how we think. I am sure none of us thinks this is an easy task and I appreciate how in their book The Way We Think, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner162 are almost worshipful of the largely invisible and unknown processes they attempt to glimpse for us. And Lakoff and Johnson have written tomes on related topics. In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things163 George Lakoff argues for an experientialist base for thought grounded in the givenness of our embodiment. Simply because we are human bodies we come equipped with at least two kinds of structures to preconceptual experiences, that is, experiences not driven by concepts. These are basic-level structure and kinesthetic image-schematic structure. Both structure our experience in ways based on the distinctiveness of the human body. We could then say that these are natural, of our bodied nature. Lakoff continues by indicating that there are two ways in which abstract conceptual structure arises from these two structures. One is by metaphoric projection from the domain of the physical to that of the abstract; the other is by projection from basic-level categories to superordinate and subordinate categories. In the last lecture, my consideration of the structurality of metaphor led me to question that metaphor is a unidirectional projection from the concrete to the abstract. I proposed that metaphor structurality is better characterized as an incomplete reversibility. The is of the metaphor demands a comparative and negotiative process of entailment mapping. The hidden not of the structurality provided the incompleteness of the reversibility which gives rise to the chiasm in which creativity and knowledge and meaning may be generated. I also questioned the characterization of the two elements in terms of concrete and abstract and the implications of the concrete being embodied and the abstract being disembodied or of the mind. I proposed to alternately designate the elements of metaphor in terms of the visible and the invisible. Furthermore since the invisible is bound to feelings and to emotions , the invisible is also inseparable from the body. Lakoff uses the verb arises to indicate the temporal and value interrelationship between basic-level and kinesthetic image-schematic structures and abstract concepts. Using his own style of analysis, the word arise is based on the up-down kinesthetic image schema and invokes the metaphor BETTER IS UP. It designates a temporal relationship which would indicate that abstract concepts come after embodied natural structures, but that the abstract concepts are better or higher. The temporal ordering is, I believe, in service to arguing that body is more basic, more natural, than mind and that the mind cannot function without the body. However, there is in the word arise a bit of a residual of the old body-mind separation and hierarchy. I find it difficult to even grasp this temporal and unidirectional projection. If metaphor mapping is unidirectional, then what can be the object on which the
161 162

Delivered April 20, 2009 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities (Basic Books, 2002). 163 George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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Brain Body Movement entailments of the source are projected? Doesnt there need to be something there, something that has some independently discernible characteristics to be able to receive these unidirectional projections? How do these so-called abstract concepts gain these pre-projection characteristics if not by bodily experience? I dont think these questions can have adequate answers under Lakoffs projection scenario. Therefore I dont think it is possible to maintain that there can be mappings from a physical to an abstract domain. These problems raise for me questions about the basic term abstract conceptual structure. The word abstract, as it might apply in this situation, would mean something like a general concept without a specific example or a category apart from case, or it might mean an existant only of the mind and thus separate from embodiment, or it might mean ideal or general rather than specific, or something that does not represent external/experiential reality. The word concept is then in some senses redundant with abstract in indicating an abstract or general idea inferred or derived from specific instances. It seems that the principal distinction of abstract concept must be its independence from body. When I think through all the implications of this term, it seems to me that if there is no concept existing prior to the metaphoric projection of entailments, then there can be no reversibility, no sense of the fit of metaphoric mapping, no choices made among which entailments of the source term are appropriate. The projection cannot be on to any target at all; it can only be a transformation into another form. The result would be that the so-called abstract concept can then only be a reorganization of the source term. What are the implications of this proposed alternative that metaphor structurality is incomplete reversible and that both terms of the metaphor are necessarily inseparable from body? Surely we would need to posit that bodily experience is in the shape or structure of metaphor which has, at once, both a visible and an invisible, an internal and an external, presence. Abstract concepts do not arise from metaphorical projections they are copresent as constitutive of the structurality of metaphor. Metaphor is not a device to get from one place to another, one level to another, from body to mind; it is rather a resident type of structure readily available to digest interpret and expand knowledge and experience. It is an incomplete reversibility that supports oscillatory playful processes that make meaning and create newness. Metaphor is then a type of perception. But what of the second way Lakoff describes how abstract concepts arise? This is the projection from basic-level categories to superordinate and subordinate categories. This is the process by which we move from the basic-level category, chair for example, to the superordinate category, furniture for example, or to the subordinate category, say rocker. Basic-level categories, Lakoff argues, are the first level to be acquired by children and they are directly meaningful. So too with kinesthetic imageschemas which are those structuring schemas that come directly from our human bodies such as containers, paths, links, forces, and orientations such as front-back, part-whole, center-periphery. The question is, in part, is the superordinate category furniture based any less on body and experience than the basic-level category chair? Does the category rocker come from a projection of the bodily experience of chair in some way that suggests an abstraction to any degree greater than chair? Again

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Brain Body Movement the term projection suggests a unidirectional process and I simply cant comprehend how this is possible and, were it to occur, how the result can be somehow free of bodily experience.164 Where I once found great insight in Lakoffs and Johnsons understanding of metaphor as preconceptual and that the source term of metaphor was based in bodily experience, I now find myself questioning if we can actually defend the existence of anything we might refer to as an abstract conceptual structure. Im wondering how any of the attributes of the terms abstract or concept can be maintained. Yet, our folk understanding of how the mind works is supported by our quotidian language and certainly by academic and philosophical beliefs. What would an alternative look like? As I suggested above, bodied experience creates constantly shifting patternings, such as metaphor and sensorimotor programs, that are the means by which we live in the world. These patternings share a structurality of incomplete reversibility; they are all negotiative and oscillatory; they have components that are visible and invisible, external and internal; and therefore are all based on a primitive that we have come to think of as pure depth. Metaphor is of flesh. Following this discussion it is necessarily a matter of meaning and understanding; it is to place metaphor as a form of perception tipped toward meaning and understanding. Terms that may be more interesting are meaningfulness and knowledge. Based on our folk perspectives, interestingly perpetuated in academia, we expect meaning to correlate with reason and logical resolution and knowledge to correlate with information and content. However, when we give up objectivism and transcendent reason, as I think we have no choice but to do, and embrace an experiential reality, meaning and knowledge correlate with fit and coherence. Interestingly there is yet to my knowledge a careful discussion of what constitutes fit and coherence, yet clearly both measures require a comparative and oscillatory process resolved in a sense of happiness or comfort, both notably are feelings or emotions. I find it interesting that Lakoffs discussion165 of knowledge is broadly dependent on vision metaphors and sight experiences. What we find is that the ground of knowledge, the measure of fit and coherence, is belief, feeling, and emotion all inseparable from the body in a visceral way and based on body in other important ways. What is missing from the articulation of these measures of meaning and knowledge is the hidden side of the structurality, that is, the absence of fit, the incoherence, the incongruity, the incredulity. While meaning may be measured by the satisfying feeling that accompanies fit and coherence, both of which release one from the oscillatory comparative process driven by the absence of this happy feeling, I suggest as I have before, that the meaningful is the capacity of something to tease with the promise of coherence and fit, yet perpetually to confound by revealing previously hidden elements that resist fit and coherence. Meaning and knowledge are dynamic processes, perpetuating structures, thorny problems. Meaning is constantly absorbed in these structures increasingly filling them up, yet only occasionally, after long histories, if even then, do they
164

Lakoff describes the various operations of what he terms the conceptualizing capacity ( Women, pp. 280-1). Were I to have the time, I would critique these three abilities in similar terms. For all these the issue is that mapping onto something requires a pre-existent target with some structures and qualities and then the question is how do they get such qualities since their origination seems necessarily to succeed the precognitive experiences and structures arising from them. The other issue is invariably the unidirectionality of the projection process involved in all these processes of conceptualization. 165 Lakoff, Women, pp. 297-99.

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Brain Body Movement become completely full. When something can no longer absorb meaning, it will be abandoned, no longer of interest. When, for example, do we completely fill the works of Shakespeare so that there remains nothing incoherent, nothing out of place, nothing more to ponder? As such structures are constantly interrelated with ongoing experience, they perpetually become fuller with meaning. I must now turn to Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turners book The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexities. They argue the important point that double-scope conceptual integration *what they commonly term conceptual blending+ is crucial to the activities that make us what we are.166 Conceptual blending is the way we think, from quotidian to high level cognition, engaged by all people of all mental capacities throughout life. Conceptual blending is done at lightning speed and we have evolved in such a way that we are not conscious of the process and further that we even find it difficult to tease into some presence. Conceptual blending is a double-scope conceptual integration, that is, the mental integration at amazing speed of two extraordinarily different inputs to create new emergent structures. Fauconnier and Turner state their major claims: Nearly all important thinking takes place outside of consciousness and is not available on introspection; the mental feats we think of as the most impressive are trivial compared to everyday capacities; the imagination is always at work in ways that consciousness does not apprehend; consciousness can glimpse only a few vestiges of what the mind is doing; the scientist, the engineer, the mathematician, and the economist, impressive as their knowledge and techniques may be, are also unaware of how they are thinking and, even though they are experts, will not find out just by asking themselves. Evolution seems to have built us to be constrained from looking directly into the nature of our cognition, which puts cognitive science in a difficult position of trying to use mental abilities to reveal what those very abilities are built to hide.167 When the authors consider blending as compared with identity and analogy theory they write, Identity and analogy theory typically focus on compatibilities between mental spaces simultaneously connected, but blending is not to obscure incompatibilities but, in a fashion, to have at once something and its opposite.168 We can see that what Fauconnier and Turner understand as blending is similar in important ways to the structurality we have been developing. The way we think is characterized by a structurality that blends impossibilities and improbabilities to create new relationalities, new meanings, new knowledge, new patterns, all the while recognizing, however unconsciously and in hidden ways, that this process is, in some senses, based on sleight of hand and smoke and mirrors . The hidden incompatibilities drive the oscillation. As students of religion I want us to focus on one of the examples that Fauconnier and Turner give much attention, the Buddhist Monk Riddle. Let me repeat it here.

166 167

Fauconnier and Turner, p. 389. Ibid., pp. 33-4. 168 Ibid., p. 29.

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Brain Body Movement A Buddhist Monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top for several days until one dawn when he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset. Make no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his pace during the trip. Riddle: Is there a place on the path that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two separate journeys?169 Fauconnier and Turner use this as an important example to illustrate in some detail the blending processes that are engaged by the riddle. Using diagrams they chart the initial input mental spaces, the journey up the mountain and the return journey. Using other diagrams, they show cross-space mapping, that is, the correlations between the input mental spaces. Yet, to resolve the riddle they hold that we create a generic space in which the separate input mental spaces may be related. This is basically that the upward and downward journeys may be played simultaneously even though this is physically impossible. Once this is created then another space is created in which the factors of the question of the monks riddle can be placed to provide an answer. Basically one creates a space in which the monk goes both up and down the mountain on the same day rather than separated by several days. Although there is the not that it is impossible for the monk to go both directions simultaneously, it is yet part of the way we use blending to think. When it is realized that the monk going up must meet himself coming down, it suddenly becomes clear that there is indeed a place on the path that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day and that such a place must exist without regard to pace or pauses. Riddle solved well at least in Fauconnier and Turners reckoning. While I dont contest Fauconnier and Turners use of this little ditty to illustrate the blending process and its apparent results, I want to show that Fauconnier and Turners approach to the riddle might be more creative. They only scratch the surface of blending hmmm there must be a better metaphor rather, they only blended tomatoes and onion when they could have made salsa. First, lets look at the other example of the same situation as presented in the Spanish short story Pginas inglesas.170 Here a man must prove that he was twice on the same spot at the same hour. He has just run down the hill in twenty minutes. The day before, he had climbed the hill in five hours. But the twenty minutes are contained in the period of the day spanned by the five hours.171 Now there are important differences between the Monks Riddle and this Spanish characters need for proof. To begin, Fauconnier and Turner refer to the monks situation as a riddle, but they do not identify the event in the Spanish story using this term.172 A riddle is a statement or question having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles purposefully misdirect and that is why we are fascinated by them. They make us think that we have the answer when our direct pursuit of the obvious misdirects us from the information crucial to the riddle being a riddle. A problem has no misdirection. Fauconnier and Turner consider what they persist in referring to as the Monks Riddle, without ever
169 170

Ibid., p. 39. This riddles is from Arthur Koestlers book The Act of Creation. This story is by Spanish writer Pedro Zarraluki. 171 Faucconier and Turner, p. 52 172 I have yet to learn enough about this story to say much, but I did find that the story invites us to solve a riddle in Paginas inglesas, which cleverly synthesizes metaphysics, arithmetic, and fine irony. Thus it seems that Fauconnier and Turner may not have actually considered this story in as much depth as they might have.

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Brain Body Movement acknowledging the distinctive structure of the riddle. In streamlining the riddle as a problem they also ignore that the traveler is a Buddhist monk, that the monk spent days on the mountain top meditating, and that the journey was to a mountain top. They gave more attention to the copresence of car and hiker in the Spanish story, which cannot be literal without the demise of the hiker, than they gave to these details in the other example. They miss the seduction of the riddle by their eagerness to produce a resolution to the problem that, I believe, serves to hide the actual center of the riddle. Here is where we, as students of religion, may be better able to understand the Monks Riddle as indeed a riddle. What are some of the blendings we might engage? Well, I am not a student of Buddhism, but I can give a start. As a student of Mircea Eliade, I can say that mountain tops are understood as axes mundi, world axes. A mountaintop is often the point where the creator and created separated as the world came into existence.173 The mountain top is where humans go to meet god. Mountain tops are where heaven and earth meet. Mountain tops are where enlightenment occurs, where Moses is spoken to by god, as is Mohammed. Pilgrimages are destined to mountain tops, and so on. Buddhism is often described in elemental terms as an eight-fold path, that is, as a journey, and meditation is designated as the following of one of those paths. These paths are often depicted as spokes in a wheel and certainly the hub is homologous with the mountain top, with the world center as an enlightenment place. After enlightenment one is a bodhisattva, an enlightened one, yet still living a structurality where the becoming of physical existence is nullified by the being of the enlightened condition. Well, you all can continue this exploration which is certainly replete with blendings. Taking this path, the solution to the riddle would then be something like the monk occupies every place on the path at the same hour because, for an enlightened one, all paths as all times are copresent. 174 The riddle then returns to the problem of the copresence, yet now with a blend that required an excursion into Buddhism. This solution to the riddle pleases in far different terms than does the solution to the problem. And the resulting feelings of happiness arise in the awareness of the blending and co-presence of the wisdom of Buddhism being somehow reflected in a novel understanding of this much simpler matter of temporal copresence on a quotidian path. Where Fauconnier and Turner observe the aha moment in resolving the problem of temporal copresence, surely this is nothing compared to the quiet smile that bemuses the face of the one who blends this copresence with a copresence of an entirely different order. I cant resist carrying this just one step further. Enlightenment then, in this example, corresponds to the experience of pure depth, thickness, flesh on which existence succeeds and depends. Enlightenment is a living in the chiasm, that gap where the is and is not, where being and becoming, co-exist in eternal play or lila. Okay, Ill stop with that. Perhaps Fauconnier and Turner were well aware of this richness and felt it better to ignore it so they could make their blending example in the simplest terms. However, I believe that it is clear that the example as I considered it is far richer and more interesting. It also enriches their basic insights regarding the way we think.
173

Interestingly this setting apart of the creation from the creator is in some ways homologous with the structurality of perception and metaphor, yet the reverse. In creation the direction is from the invisible to the visible, while in perception and metaphor is runs the other way. 174 I havent yet looked up Arthur Koestlers use of this riddle in his book The Act of Creation, yet I will do so.

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Brain Body Movement Finally, I want to turn to the topic of creativity. The question is something like How do we think a new thought? or How do we come up with anything new? In Peircian terms this is a matter of hypothetic inference. In Faucconier and Turners terms it is a matter of certain novel blendings. Keeping Baudrillard well in mind, by creativity I do not intend anything like production or productivity. One of the things I am most concerned about as a teacher is the paucity among students of the sort of creativity to which I point. C. S. Peirce, I think, understood it well. Creativity, as hypothetic inference, is motivated by the experience of surprise, an emotional state that seeks stability and dissipation of unrest. A hypothesis is created to alleviate the conditions that give rise to surprise. Jonathan Smith, following Paul Ricoeur, as we have repeatedly mentioned, holds that incongruity gives rise to thought. Mid-life, illness, and other passages may do the same. Crisis of almost any kind is a common stimulant for creativity. Unfortunately it appears that we must be bludgeoned and whackered into our creative moments. There is perhaps an alternative and that is to understand the structurality of creativity and to cultivate an appreciation for incongruity or the hidden or seduction or provocation or pure depth or gaps or play. Creativity demands a manipulation of blending or double-scope conceptual integration. What drives creativity? Since creativity often seems a nuisance and has the potential to get one into trouble, why seek it? Creativity may be thought of as consciously and purposely engaging in blending, in doublescope integration. Creativity may be thought of as attempting to become aware of these blendings despite our seemingly being blocked from looking directly into the nature of our cognition. We nonetheless may open ourselves to the occasional flashes that are emitted from these blendings, flashes in which we may see anew. Creativity is to participate, even if from the sidelines, in this amazing, indeed awesome, process that, as Faucconier and Turner appreciate it, is crucial to the activities that make us what we are. To be creative then is to exercise that which distinguishes us as human beings.

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Lecture 14: The Backside of God175

Near the end of Werner Herzogs wonderful documentary film on Antarctica Encounters at the End of the World (2007) he interviews Peter Gorham, a physicist at the University of Hawaii, who is preparing a balloon experiment designed to detect, for the first time, physical evidence of neutrinos. Gorham describes neutrinos as The most ridiculous particle you can imagine they pass through all of the matter around us continuously in a huge blast of particles that does nothing at all. They almost exist in a separate universe, but we can measure them, we can make precision measurements and predictions. They exist, but we cant get our hands on them because they seem to exist in another place and yet without neutrinos the beginning of the universe would not have worked. We would not have the matter that we have today because you couldnt create the elements without the neutrinos. They actually determined much of the kinetics of the production of the elements we know so the universe cant exist without the neutrinos, but they seem to be in their own separate reality and we are trying to make contact with that universe of neutrinos. It hits me in the gut that there is something here around me, surrounding me, almost like some kind of spirit or god that I cant touch.176 Neutrinos are primitive particles that underlie and make possible all elements and thus all the matter and energy in the universe. They are paired and oscillate and move at the speed of light. They lack an electric charge; they pass through ordinary matter. Fifty trillion pass through the human body every second. They have nonzero mass, and each is paired with an antineutrino made of antimatter. Gorham describes his project as like measuring the spirit world. Neutrinos seem a great candidate as the poster particle for what we have done in this course. They remind me of pure depth, of flesh, of seduction and the many other homologous primitives that we know and can experience, yet are not actually graspable by our efforts. The human body, we have learned, is the locus for a great many systems that operate at lightning speed based on physical processes so complicated and so remarkable that we can only share Professor Gorhams analogy of being humbled by the task of trying to measure or comprehend them. Recall the descriptions of the complexity of the brain. The brain is composed of neurons or nerve cells, which are the nervous systems basic functional units. We are born with over one hundred billion neurons. Each neuron has a cell body and tens of thousands of branches called dendrites which receive information from other neurons. Each neuron also has a primary axon that can travel long distances in the brain that sends data out of the cell to communicate with other cells. When neurons communicate with other neurons the points of contact are called synapses. Each neuron makes up to ten thousand synapses with other neurons. Ramachandran wrote, A piece of your brain the size of a grain of sand would contain one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses, all talking to each
175 176

Delivered April 27, 2009 Transcribed from the film.

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Brain Body Movement other.177 Try to comprehend the billions of synapses that are constantly fired just to keep our bodies in quotidian operation. Now consider how many more are involved in the simplest thought or memory or feeling. Remember the proprioceptive system where measurable interoceptors in the muscles and joints communicate and translate in feedback and feed-forward loops impossible amounts of information all essential to accomplish basic human movement. Recall Candice Perts discussion of the chemistry of emotion and how our simplest feelings are based on vast chemical processes where ligands, a variety of small molecules, bind to cellular receptors conveying information to the cell that results in our feeling emotion. These ligands travel and connect over great distances at blinding speeds. Higher operations like the way we think through blending processes, metaphor construction and use, hypothetic inference, and the intricacies of language use all require systems of trillions of elements operating and functioning at blinding speeds. The entire system of perception we have learned is not a simple unidirectional data collection operation, as impressive as even that would be. Rather we understand perception as an amazingly interactive process created through sensorimotor patterns, basic body neurobiology, and proprioceptive dispositions that we arrive within the world. And, were this catalog of processes not enough to awe us, we must recognize that these are not parallel systems each operating independently. Rather they are all in communication and coordination with one another to support us as human beings in a remarkably smooth way. All of these processes are known to us, measurable, detectable. We have read so many studies to support this. Yet, we seem to be built so that we cannot be aware of all these processes in ourselves. To account for what we know, yet cannot grasp, we have invented images and schemas that capture traces that inspire us to imagine; beyond that we share Gorhams acknowledgement that what we are about is like measuring the spirit world. I have been frankly surprised that movement has emerged as fundamental in our every consideration. I cant get out of my mind the image of the kitties pulling other kitties around in carts. Without the experience of self-actuated movement experiences, the riding kittens were functionally blind. So too with us across the full range of what distinguishes us as human beings. We are moving creatures and our sense of self and other, of perception and depth, and feeling and form all arise through the bumbling explorations of our self-actuated moving bodies. The implications of this awareness and appreciation have, for me, come to two primary focal concerns: academic lifestyles and the role of dancing in human development and culture. While I have long reflected on what I have believed to be the deleterious impact of a sedentary occupational lifestyle on academic work, and particularly the habituation of our primarily Christian forefathers, I still avoided saying anything about it. However, with increased appreciation of the enormous role movement plays in every aspect of our thinking, imagining, acting, and knowing, I am finally finding it necessary to explore the likely limitations of the profession and field we represent. It no longer can sound silly to beseech you, the oncoming generation, to reinvent the academy in terms of movement. I am not at all sure what that will look like, but I firmly believe that the impact of this revolution will be the complete reinvention of what we study and how we go about it; that the resulting
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V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Quill, 1999), p. 6.

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Brain Body Movement studies will be more engaging and relevant and connected with the full spectrum of religious life. And I firmly believe that without this revolution our studies, and perhaps the academy itself, will not survive. Then too I have been a long-time student of dancing. Since dancing plays such a minor, even negative, role in our society, I have been hesitant to actually tout dancing despite all that I have come to appreciate about it. Again, my time of silence has come to an end. Dancing, as I am coming to understand it, holds an exemplary place in our many discussions. Dancing, as a quotidian and near universal human experience, holds immense potential for enhancing and exploring many topics: flesh, metaphor, seduction, aura, body/brain. Dancing in most cultures is nearly synonymous with religion and culture. I now feel a responsibility to realize and articulate this potential as fully as I can. One of the most powerful moments for me during our studies is a fuller grasping of the notion of pure depth and this increase in insight supported a better understanding of flesh, reversibility, chiasm, seduction and so on. Recall that depth involves that dimension by which we see something from here that is at its place there. The here and there are contemporary in our experience. They are joined in time through their visibility and this is depth, a space of copresent implication. Depth is that dimension that contemporaneously unites and separates. It is a thick view of time, the most existential dimension.178 We came to understand the dimension depth itself in terms of pure depth, a depth without distance from here, a primordial that does not yet operate between objects. MerleauPonty used Eugene Minkowskis dark space to give some sense of the experience of pure depth. Pure depth is without foreground or background, without surfaces and without any distances separating it from me. Pure depth is always already there as the formative medium of the subject and object, as the inauguration of the where and when. The moving body is fundamental to flesh, because through movement flesh begins to understand itself or become aware of itself. When I experienced Peter Gorhams efforts to even describe neutrinos, I caught reflections of pure depth. Neutrinos were already there in the beginning, necessary for the kinetic construction of the elements. Thus they are pre-elemental. They continue to persist, virtually undetectable by us, as ambient to the universe. They oscillate, they are paired. Seductively, they do nothing, yet they make everything possible. They may well share the same descriptors given pure depth: the depth of our being and the true source of our life, yet framed at once by subatomic and cosmic processes. While Merleau-Ponty understood flesh as the ultimate truth, this statement gains depth for me in grasping the homology with a subatomic counterpart, neutrinos, which we might see as comprising the flesh of the cosmos. The universe within echoes the universe without. Many years ago I wrote a paper titled Go Up Into the Gaps: The Play of Native American Religions. I dont think I ever got round to publishing it.179 I do recall giving it as a lecture in Canada at my friend Thom Parkhills invitation. It was about my experiences studying Native American religions. I used
178 179

Depth, although a development of Merleau-Ponty, was insightfully presented by Cataldi. Although I do have a note that indicates otherwise that Ill need to check. Published as "Religion in America in 1492," The Newberry Library, D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian. Occasional Papers in Curriculum Series, Number 15, American in 1492, Selected Lectures from the Quincentenary Program (1992), pp. 28-62.

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Brain Body Movement Frederich Schillers understanding of play as presented in his book On the Aesthetic Education of Man published in 1793, to develop our understanding of masking and ritual in Zuni and Navajo examples. Schiller understood play as arising from the reciprocal interaction between two interdependent, yet separate, drives. He argued that when these two drives interact in concert in an oscillating manner, a third drive arises. He called this third drive play and identified it with beauty. Surely this is an early articulation of the structurality that we have been exploring in so many arenas this semester. Play occurs in the gaps between structural elements. I considered Native American examples, particularly masking, the interplay between mask and masker, in terms of Schillers understanding of play. A quick aside: Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of pragmatism, had a common structure to the many explorations throughout his lifes work. This too focused on the identification of a third thing when we consider the effect of two interacting, interdependent, paired things. The third thing was invariably the energetic driving fueling force behind the other two, the structurality that precedes and is essential for the existence of the other two, the two more readily recognized by us than the hidden third thing. For example, we all know the pairing of induction and deduction as the principal inferential methods of science. But Peirce proposed a third hidden thing he termed abduction. Abduction is that oscillatory iterative process initiated by the feelings of surprise that is based in reason (he argues) that leads to an almost instant best guess which we then identify as a hypothesis. Familiarly we all experience this process, yet the actual awareness of the process in action is hidden from us. Peirce spent several months as a teenager carefully studying Schillers On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Peirce celebrated the gaps, as did Schiller. Throughout this course Ive been thinking of the gaps that are fundamental to our existence. There is the synaptic gap between neurons. The entire operation of our brains takes place in these gaps. How remarkable that we speak so casually of synaptic firings, of brain wiring, of brain functioning when it all takes place, rather mysteriously, in the synaptic gaps, in the spaces between. While we have attempted to grasp Merleau-Pontys flesh ontology, perhaps the most important points for me in catching a glimpse of this ontology are the notions of chiasm and incomplete reversibility. Chiasm is a crossing place, that hidden dark space where reversibility occurs, a space free of structures, a space without objects, a gap. Reversibility is the interconnection between things, yet complete reversibility would indicate the identity between paired elements. In such an interrelationship, there is no life, no movement, no action, no meaning, because there is no difference to fuel the oscillation. The life of reversibility, its potential to create meaning is then the not in the interrelationship, that condition that wedges space between the pairing. This not is what creates the gap of play. It is in the gap, the chiasm, that reversibility becomes vitality. Then there is metaphor. Because I have become a believer in the powers of gaps, I cant accept the established understanding of metaphor as comprised of unidirectional mapping from the concrete to the abstract. There is no play, no seduction, in this structure. I proposed that we must see metaphor as an incomplete reversibility, as knowing something in terms of something else which it is not. Following this proposal, we find metaphor as other than a process terminating in moving from one known thing to an unknown, but rather as a resident oscillating structurality, much like perception, that functions to give us a program to embrace and comprehend our thoroughly bodied experience.

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Brain Body Movement In the paper Go Up Into the Gaps I quoted a passage from Annie Dillards book Tinker at Pilgrim Creek. It had been the inspiration for my title. Im pleasantly surprised these many years later that I am still contemplating the gaps. Here is what Dillard wrote: Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the gaps." The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlockmore than a maplea universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.180 Were I a theologian, my theology would surely be shaped in the beautiful and provocative poetic terms of Dillard and Gorham. God is to be found when we go up into the gaps, the gaps of synapse, of play, of hidden nots and nos,of chiasm, of seduction, of metaphor, of blending, and flesh, and dancing. God is to be found herding neutrinos. And in these gaps, awestruck by the prospect of what we imagine, we cower there waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting for god to flash us her backside. To be mooned by god, this is enlightenment worth our wait.

180

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), pp. 268-9.

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