Losing Oneself

Author: serverteam

  • low fidelity documentation

    I’ve written and presented in another context about documenting complex, rich, high fidelity human experiences with low fidelity (or resolution) forms of documentation. When we point any kind of camera at a human being improvising there is vast difference between the internal experience of the improviser and what is visible.

    In Losing Oneself Katye Coe and I are doing a version of authentic movement for four cameras which more or less cover the space. Three cameras are shooting time-lapses (every 3, 4 and 7 seconds respectively) and one camera is a locked off 4K video camera. The stills are RAW files so each photograph is about 25MB, and each improvisation produces hundreds of these per camera. After 9 studio days we have nearly 3TB of data. These data are unquestionably high resolution but still they capture nothing of the complex, rich and wide open experiences that Katye and I are having.

    So why bother?

    The truth is I don’t know. I think I might make a film out of the timelapses/stills but I don’t for a second imagine that film will somehow register anything of what is going on in the studio.

    Katye Coe, 4 cameras and a lot of light.

  • non dual awareness can co-occur with any content

    Zoran Josipovic is a cognitive and affective neuroscientist who founded the Nonduality Institute with Judith Blackstone. Here’s Josipovic with Vladimir Miskovic:

    NDA [non dual awareness] can co-occur with any content, whether perceptual, affective, or cognitive, which appears in it, so to speak, like an image in a mirror.

    – Josipovic, Z. and Miskovic, V. (2020) ‘Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience’. Frontiers in Psychology 11, 2087, p.6

    This was an important idea in my initial curiosity about the potential to work through and with nonduality as a lens to understand experiences in dance improvisation. Nonduality does not presuppose particular types of content and therefore it seemed to make sense (as a matter of direct experience) that a busy, emotionally rich (even difficult) experience during a movement improvisation could be non dual in much the same way that more contemplative, slow and still meditation or sitting practices could be.

    I’ll return to nonduality as a framework for thinking through improvisation in future posts including whether the phenomenological method is capable of ‘getting at’ nonduality, and how nonduality is distinct from typical flow experiences.

  • me doing into it doing itself

    One of the things that Katye Coe and I have been focused on in the studio is the remarkably subtle shift that happens between a very expansive and open awareness that is the consequence of attention, and the feeling that a similarly open awareness is happening of its own accord. Katye beautifully captures this distinction as “me doing into it doing itself”.

    I’ll get more into this another time as it seems to be at the phenomenological heart of these movement improvisations Katye and I are practicing. My initial hunch is that these oscillatory experiences (between me doing and it doing itself) are different by degree, and not by kind.

  • self vs person

    One of the key themes in Jay Garfield’s book Losing Ourselves is the distinction he makes between a self and a person (built on the thinking of Candrakīrti and Hume). Garfield describes how the idea of a transcendent self:

    should convince us that we are talking about the self because it perfectly captures that idea of the subject that stands behind mind and body as their possessor, that to which we seem to be so atavistically attached. That is the self, not the person. It should convince us that something has gone terribly wrong because, when we reflect carefully, it does not seem at all plausible that we really exist outside of space and time and distinct from our psychophysical embodiment.

    – Garfield, Losing Ourselves, Chapter 4

    It is not that this self isn’t useful to we humans, but more that it is an illusion (or “apparent integration” — also in Garfield) that reifies agency and control.

  • interpretations of sensory signals

    Anil Seth is a cognitive neuroscientist who thinks and writes about consciousness. He is known for describing perception as a form of controlled hallucination.

    The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience – in this case the subjective experience of ‘seeing a coffee cup’ – is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them.

    – Anil Seth (2021) Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber (Loc 1391)

    What I like about this idea is how strongly it contradicts the phenomenal experience of sensing the body in motion. This is particularly intriguing in a movement practice (or indeed any activity) that is not goal-oriented. There is no ‘best outcome’ here, or some other measure of success – just sensing, moving (or not) and being in a wide-open field of awareness.

    The question then might be, why interpret these sensory signals in this way and not that? I doubt this is a question that is answerable.

  • experience and consciousness

    Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is consciousness.

    – Anil Seth (2021) Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber

  • the body and related signals

    Because mindfulness interventions are concerned with the idea of being present in the moment, focusing on the body and related signals in a non-judgmental way, such methods are of high interest in research on interoception.

    – Fischer, D., Messner, M., and Pollatos, O. (2017) ‘Improvement of Interoceptive Processes after an 8-Week Body Scan Intervention’. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 11, 452

  • the body tends to efface itself

    Normally, the body tends to efface itself in our world-directed activity. However, it appears as an object of conscious attention, particularly when it is inadequate for a task to be performed, be it by a lack of capacity, fatigue, illness or numbness, and whenever it becomes an object for others to whom I feel exposed. In these cases, the body’s performance is made explicit and may often be disturbed. Thus, the body has a double or ambiguous experiential status: both as a ‘lived body’, implicit in one’s ongoing experience, and as an explicit, physical or objective body. An ongoing oscillation between these two bodily modes constitutes a fluid and hardly noticed foundation of all experiencing.

    –Thomas Fuchs and Jann E. Schlimme (2009) ‘Embodiment and Psychopathology: A Phenomenological Perspective’: Current Opinion in Psychiatry 22 (6), 570–575.

    I find the language of the body effacing itself to be fascinating. How it is that the body can do this to itself? Is the body in this case both subject and object?

    The work in the practice component of this research is to foreground the body in consciousness such that it tends not to efface itself, if at all — to patiently allow, enable or afford the body to resonate through consciousness. What are the strategies for such affordance? What does this feel like?

  • selfing your experience

    This is from Sam Harris’s app called Waking Up and is a brief commentary about ego and illusion:

    … your mental experience of the world is a process. It is not a static something. So the experience of being a self, an ego, in the middle of all of these changing neurophysiological states, it too must be a process. It’s a verb, it’s not a noun. You are selfing your experience. You are not a self standing in the middle of experience. Self is a kind of action. It’s the act of identifying. It’s the act of grasping.

    – Sam Harris (no date) Ego and Illusion. [online] available from https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/CE2E59 [30 January 2024], from 01:29min.

    Makes me think that it takes a lot of effort to maintain this process of selfing.

  • embodiment is not apposite

    Here’s Tim Ingold from his 2013 book Making citing Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (who has long been critical of how we in dance use the term embodiment):

    … 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).

    – Tim Ingold Making (2013: 94).

    In the detailed, messy and complex conversations between Katye Coe and me after each improvisation we both seem to share a similar experience of slippage or “correspondence” between the interior and exterior. As if that which is contained in a “bag of skin” (from Alan Watts) is not functionally discreet from that which is out.

    The Sheets-Johnstone reference is from The Primacy of Movement (1998) Amsterdam: John Benjamins.