Enactive becoming Di Paolo, Ezequiel A.
Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences,
12/2021, Letnik:
20, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial ...desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on human becoming as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film
Blade Runner
. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming.
Humans, more than any other species, have been altering their paths of development by creating new material forms and by opening up to new possibilities of material engagement. That is, we become ...constituted through making and using technologies that shape our minds and extend our bodies. We make things which in turn make us. This ongoing dialectic has long been recognised from a deep-time perspective. It also seems natural in the present in view of the ways new materialities and digital ecologies increasingly envelop our everyday life and thinking. Still the basic idea that humans and things are co-constituted continues to challenge us, raising important questions about the place and meaning of materiality and technical change in human life and evolution. This paper bridging perspectives from postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory (MET) is trying to attain better understanding about these matters. Our emphasis falls specifically on the human predisposition for technological embodiment and creativity. We re-approach the notion Homo faber in a way that, on the one hand, retains the power and value of this notion to signify the primacy of making or creative material engagement in human life and evolution and, on the other hand, reclaims the notion from any misleading connotations of human exceptionalism (other animals make and use tools). In particular, our use of the term
Homo faber
refers to the special place that this ability has in the evolution and development of our species. The difference that makes the difference is not just the fact that we make things. The difference that makes the difference is the recursive effect that the things that we make and our skills of making seem to have on human becoming. We argue that we are
Homo faber
not just because we make things but also because we are made by them.
Process archaeology (P-Arch) Gosden, Chris; Malafouris, Lambros
World archaeology,
10/2015, Letnik:
47, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We advocate a Process Archaeology (P-Arch) which explores modes of becoming rather than being. We advance three theoretical postulates we feel will be useful in understanding the process of becoming. ...And then six temporal propositions, with the latter arranged from the briefest to the longest timescale. We lay down the basic conceptual foundation of our approach using the example of pottery making and we follow the process of creativity in between the hand of the potter and the affordances of clay. This specific creative entanglement of flow and form on a fast bodily timescale provides our grounding metaphor for an archaeology of becoming over the long term. Subsequent propositions provide the basis for exploring issues of longer-term material engagement and change.
Mark Making and Human Becoming Malafouris, Lambros
Journal of archaeological method and theory,
03/2021, Letnik:
28, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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This is a paper about mark making and human becoming. I will be asking what do marks do? How do they signify? What role do marks play in human becoming and the evolution of human intelligence? These ...questions cannot be pursued effectively from the perspective of any single discipline or ontology. Nonetheless, they are questions that archaeology has a great deal to contribute. They are also important questions, if not the least because evidence of early mark making constitutes the favoured archaeological mark of the ‘cognitive’ (in the ‘modern’ representational sense of the word). In this paper I want to argue that the archaeological predilection to see mark making as a potential index of symbolic representation often blind us to other, more basic dimensions of the cognitive life and agency of those marks as material signs. Drawing on enactive cognitive science and Material Engagement Theory I will show that early markings, such as the famous engravings from Blombos cave, are above all the products of kinesthetic dynamics of a non-representational sort that allow humans to engage and discover the semiotic affordances of mark making opening up new possibilities of enactive material signification. I will also indicate some common pitfalls in the way archaeology thinks about the ‘cognitive’ that needs overcome.
We can only understand what is it to be human by understanding the modes of human becoming. This paper looks at the creative aspect of human becoming taking hands and tools as the focus of reference. ...I advocate a process archaeology of mind where thinking is thinging. Human cognitive becoming is cast in terms of metaplasticity and creative material engagement. Humans are plastic creatures indeterminate and incomplete, or else, always about to become. Humans are also inextricably intertwined with the plasticity of forms that we make. I argue that hands and tools trans-act in the mindful handling of matter and that the mindful handling of matter is a condition for human becoming. Tools are made and used by the hands as much as hands are made and used by tools. Human intelligence is largely handmade.
In China, humanism, especially within the framework of Confucian ethics, developed quite differently from humanist discourses in Europe. Therefore, it is important to understand the origins and ...development of Confucian ideas that place human beings at the center of culture and the cosmos. Through the lens of the cultural particularities of humanism, this knowledge can help us gain a more complex and multi-layered insight into the universal factors that make up human nature. This paper critically examines the foundations, development, and distinctive features of traditional Chinese humanism, which emerged within the framework of classical Confucian teachings. Beginning with an analysis of the Confucian view of the relationship between the individual and society, the author explains the conceptual origin and historical development of various models of humanism in the Chinese tradition. The paper then sheds light on the reasons for the transition from religions to humanities that took place in China during the Axial Age, and highlights various implications of this transition manifested in Confucian ethics and its search for a better social order.
A caring science study of creative writing and human becoming Sandbäck Forsell, Johanna; Nyholm, Linda; Koskinen, Camilla
Scandinavian journal of caring sciences,
March 2021, 2021-Mar, 2021-03-00, 20210301, Letnik:
35, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The previous research describes creative writing to have a potential for self‐care and healing in relation to illness and mental health conditions. The aim of this article was to deepen the ...understanding of creative writing and human becoming, from a caring science perspective. A data material consisting of answers from an e‐form and diaries was analysed with a thematic analysis. The result depicts two main themes and seven subthemes. The first main theme, Creative writing – an act of emotional reactions and release, shows that creative writing is an act where fears and emotional reactions are unveiled; it is a relieving valve for the writer and includes moments of liberating wordplay. The second main theme, Creative writing – a key to self‐understanding and personal growth, shows that creative writing is a genuine conveying of oneself to others, to experience mercifulness within oneself, to keep up faith in oneself and hope for the future and to find a new order of values. Creative writing enhances human becoming and gives possibilities for human beings to find inner peace and balance in life.
The aim of this study is to explore how material things might become involved in the recovery process of people with mental health difficulties.
Empirical material from three different studies on ...various aspects concerning mental health issues that each of the authors had conducted was reanalysed through a phenomenological item analysis.
We discovered that mundane objects such as a mobile phone, a bench, a door and a key have agency to contribute to peoples' recovery and wellbeing. Things became agents that created contexts that initiated physical, social and emotional movements.
By giving attention to materiality we might become aware of the importance of things as agents in living in general and in recovery processes for people with mental health difficulties in particular.
This paper attempts to draw a cartography of becoming Angry Indian Goddesses as transnational nomadism towards an embodied and material rethinking of women’s friendships from outside the constraints ...of systemic binaries. The friends are all professional women who are globally wired, whose thinking minds and non-docile bodies detach themselves from any normative modes of belonging in their respective personal and professional realms. They map a post-humanist spatiality of rhizomic linkages with other animate and non-animate entities, throwing up a new ethics of nomadic affect and responsibility. The film begins with a panoramic gaze of the Goan landscape, overlapped with flash images of Hindu goddesses and their animal escorts framed within a power packed song “Kattey”, which intersects Bhanwari Devi’s powerful folk composition of Meera Bai’s 15th century mystic tradition with Haard Kaur’s rap. The crossing of the song and the violent events of rejection that the women face, unbridle a becoming angry goddesses through a pastiche of the anxious goddesses and women sited on an axis of re/de-valorised difference. Goa becomes a potential third space entangled with all of the above, as it dwells on the contemplative scope of this cartography as redemptive and suggests a re-humanization of schizophrenic splintered objects through love and affect.
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