Losing Oneself

embodiment isn’t a match with experience

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by

Simon Ellis
in

Here’s a quote from Tim Ingold’s Making that describes how Maxine Sheets-Johnstone questions the synergies between embodiment and experience:

Comparison of the two pieces vividly demonstrates how animacy and embodiment pull in opposite directions: where the former is a movement of opening, the latter is bent on closure. For the living, animate beings we are, argues dance philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the term ‘embodiment’ is simply not experientially apposite. We do not, she insists, experience ourselves and one another as ‘packaged’ but as moving and moved, in ongoing response – that is in correspondence – with the things around us (Sheets-Johnstone 1998: 359; Ingold 2011b: 10).

Comments

One response to “embodiment isn’t a match with experience”

  1. Isaac Araujo avatar
    Isaac Araujo

    Hello Simon,

    I agree with her last statement – “in correspondence with the things around us”, but I think the term ‘packaged’ is not well used as a reference to embodiment.

    A package means there is something, which is surrounded by something – in which case I believe there is an emphasis on that which surrounds.

    I suppose embodiment refers to the awareness of that existing correspondence and also to the fact that there is something in the first place to be corresponded to.

    Moreover, I think that animacy and embodiment do not necessarily move in opposite directions – if I consider that embodiment can be a movement of opening (the awareness) towards somewhere else other than outside or ahead or to a place physically detached from oneself.

    Best regards from Berlin,
    Isaac

    Reply

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