awareness as modulation of organism and environment

Here’s Jay Garfield (again) writing about the embedded, embodied, enactive and extended 4E) approach to cognition:

we can think of awareness as a mode of embedding of the organism in its world, instead of as the relation between an interior subject and an exterior object, even if that is how it appears to us in introspection. To think of awareness in this way is to take seriously the idea that we don’t stand against the world as subjects that detect its properties or agents that act on it, but instead are part of the world, and that awareness is more an attunement to our environment than a recording in our minds of what is going on outside.

– Jay Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

Garfield’s explanation is more complicated when we think about our bodies; that the body easily becomes another object (but this time an interior object) looked at by some other interior subject. This is the linguistic trope (at least in English) that we have a body. But who is the ‘we’ in that phrase that is other to the body?

In this project, in the movement practice conceived as non dual awareness there is no ‘we’ or ‘I’ as subject. Rather, perhaps we can re-think the nature of the environment as described by Garfield. That is, the environment does not start at the boundary of the skin and that the separation between human as (dancing) organism and the environment is more or less arbitrary. Certainly, the extended part of 4E cognition aligns with such a conceptualisation.

Perhaps though I’ve missed a vital part of Garfield’s thinking here; that “awareness is more an attunement to our environment”. But attunement by what or who? In the English language (and certainly in the romantic langauges) it’s nigh impossible to avoid subject-object splits.