Lectures - Sam Gill and the Senses... · Web viewLectures. 48. Religion and the Senses Lectures. Spring 2012. Introduction; Central Issues; Naturalist Approach. One chapter in my

Religion and the Senses LecturesSpring 2012

Introduction; Central Issues; Naturalist ApproachOne chapter in my personal history in this course goes back to a large room in a home I had in Niwot a few years ago. I wanted it to be a dance studio and in the process of transforming it to that space I discovered that I knew very little about color. What colors did I like? What colors go together? As kids we are often asked our favorite color. But I realized that not only did I not know my favorite color, I didn’t know anything about color. So I went to work collecting materials about color wheels and color schemes and color in decoration. Soon I discovered the depth of my ignorance. Somehow it had never dawned on me that our simple venture to Home Depot to scan and select paint colors from among thousands available is a remarkable luxury enjoyed by few people and only in very modern times. How stupid of me not to know this. Then I began to realize that throughout history many colors were impossibly difficult to acquire and then only at great expense. Then I began to realize that colors correlate with historical and cultural fashion. Then I began to realize (I should have known this since I’d studied it many times) that color has been one of the most fascinating topics of study for philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and other heavily theoretical fields because color exists in part because of the nature of objects in the world but also highly dependent on neurobiology and even personal experience and psychology. The vastness of color simply kept expanding for me. I did paint the room, but I also offered a course called “Color Culture and Religion” to continue my interests in this topic as well as to share the riches with others.

It was a short leap but a great deal of work reading and thinking from considering color to the entire sensorium and then to perception itself. At first this just transformed the “Color” course into a “Religion and the Senses” course that covered each of the five human senses surveying the rich literature on these senses and our human experience. But then my interest in dance and movement began to impinge on this topic as I became increasingly interested in perception especially through the writing of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty that extensively transformed the way we think about perception. Rather than perception being organ-based and passive, it is whole-bodied, active which means it is based in movement, in the interaction of perceiver with perceptible. So movement must be seen as essential to perception, to our being sensual beings, to being human. However, movement, while often mentioned or implied, has played a rather peripheral part in the discussion of perception. Only recently have scholars begun to ask “what is movement?” “how is movement possible?” “how do we account for, articulate, grasp movement, since movement is moving and resists being captured?”

A few years ago I first learned of proprioception. It is sometimes referred to as the kinesthetic sense. It is often described as that internal sensory system that responds to our self-movement so that we will know where our bodies are in space even if we can’t see them. I knew instantly that this understanding was only the barest hint of the potential of the profundity connected with proprioception; and indeed

“Religion and the Senses”Lectures

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this is most certainly the case. Now to try to bridge to the distinction of the present iteration of all this … while I knew that proprioceptors were sensors found in muscles and joints, I did not know much about what they actualy were and I pictured them as distributed here and there like little instruments keeping an eye out on what was going on. Much of the material on proprioception describes them largely in terms of “feedback” to the brain’s work of directing the body’s movements. When I actually took the time to look up the neurobiological descriptions and discussions of proprioceptors I was astounded at not only how complex they are, at not only how pervasive they are (billions and billions), but more so that the way they work (in my understanding) was according to principles that seemed to me to be highly valuable to the macro-behavior that constitutes the living stuff of culture and religion. Further, I found that I couldn’t simply comprehend much about proprioceptors without placing them in the context of the whole nervous system, the muscle and skeletal system, the exterocensors on the skin, or even the viscera in its deep role in perception. Now I don’t pretend to understand these systems in the technical detail of specialists, yet what I found is that everywhere in these systems I came to understand some of the principles that operate, they suggested application to macro-behavior. And the suggestions are innovative and exciting.

In the process of this expanding inquiry I found that philosophers (particularly phenomenologists) and neurobiologists (of various specialized fields) as well as the emerging cross fields of cognitive science and neuro-philosophy were all studying and writing about similar things, yet with little general awareness of the work in parallel fields. And furthermore they all tended toward becoming highly technical and specialized in their work to the point that it is rather limited in its access. Now as a student of religion, I’ve found that it is unfortunately remarkably rare for a religion scholar to show the least interest in or tolerance of work in the natural sciences, even cognitive science.

Against this background them my interests have developed along two intersecting paths. First, as I began to comprehend how essential movement (understood in a somewhat more sophisticated way than we inherit) is to all perception and that movement can be located in proprioception which is as neurobiologically based as any of the five senses we are accustomed to, I realized that we need to rebuild the sensorium (the hierarchical accounting of the senses) so that it is based on movement/proprioception. Second, I began to realize that so many of the issues and concerns that need to be resolved to broadly expand and enrich the study of religions and cultures are revisioned if based on the neurobiology of movement. The breakthrough on this for me came when I learned that whether one classes proprioceptors as neurological sensors or muscle fibers is arbitrary. One can see them as part of either system. The principle here suggests a very different approach to understanding humans where a longtime confounding issue is the so-called “mind-body problem,” that is, how the mind and body relate and coexist. Typically they are separated and isolated and subject to judgment. From the perspective of proprioception, there is no problem to solve. We cannot move without both involved, yet in movement they are in an important way indistinguishable in their assignment to separate systems. I find this so remarkable, that I believe we can develop an approach based on the consideration of neurobiology for insights, principles, images, and metaphors that are as powerful and important in the study of the macro-behaviors of culture and religion. I am calling this a “naturalist” approach because the principles are founded in the neurobiological nature of our animate organism. It


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seems to me that this kind of grounding is appropriate for phenomenology and for cognitive science as well in they both are finally grounded on what we consider the “nature” of our being. I want to immediately caution that I don’t see this approach as opposing any other approach, or isolated to but certain domains of concern such as a “materialist” concern or a “body” concern. Rather I propose that is offers an explanatory model that is pervasive even though it certainly is one possible among many approaches. For me at this point it offers the most exciting approach I know about and it avoids many unfortunate aspects I know to exist in many other possible approaches.

Overview course and syllabus.

Sensorium; Anthropology of SensesWhen one thinks of cultures and religions it is nearly impossible not to think of gorgeous tapestries of sensuous lushness—coffee table books and Technicolor films. Yet, the academic studies of these subjects are often droning colorless descriptions typically focused on the thinking of intellectuals and the shifts in doctrine institutional history, bereft of the tastes, smells, sounds, feelings, emotions, images, colors, textures, temperatures, and patterns swirling in constant movement in the lived moments of these religions and cultures. It seems that academic studies have become somehow equipped of negative genius in becoming so skilled at scrubbing the sensuous from the sentient.

Jesuit scholar Walter Ong has discussed how this skill has been not only acquired but valued in his ???? book Orality and Literacy and in the essay “The Shifting Sensorium.” He plots the shift as intertwined with the shift from orality that depends on speech and gesture and face-to-face personal communication to literacy that depends on sight and private distanced communication even over great periods of time and space. This shift occurs in multiple stages beginning with the rise of the alphabet and writing done by skilled technicians hand-copying manuscripts to Guttenberg (1450) and the printing press with the subsequent rapidly accelerating consequences that take us to the present with widespread literacy and the development of technology that allows the worldwide distribution of print, but also images and videos, by the nonspecialist on a near immediate basis with large percentages of people around the world having personal handheld devices allowing access and interaction.

Ong shows that a shift in medium is a shift in sensory hierarchy and sensory value and even the extent of sensory experience. These changes are also associated with shifts in worldview and the image schemas on which all meaning, even reason, are based. We are not only mentally but physically, at the level of tissue, the means of our communication.

Ong’s work helps us appreciate why the academic study of religions and cultures has resisted the inclusion of anything beyond writing and the consideration of things written (i.e., texts). We are born of this sensorium and our lives are devoted to the perpetuation of it. It is our reality and thus seems natural to our experience to the point of being unquestioned.

Ong however has a broader vision. His experience and knowledge of other cultures informs him that not all cultures are formed and operate with the same understanding as we have of senses, sensory


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experience, and the value associated with the hierarchy of the senses. He offers a number of contrasting examples to begin to establish a most important point: we are not alone, but the others are not like us in this most fundamental way!

Despite many scholars dating especially from the late nineteenth century with Charles Sanders Peirce and his successors, William James and John Dewey; despite the contributions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and many others in the mid-twentieth century; ethnography and anthropology (I’ll get to the academic study of religion in a bit) continued to focus on text-based approaches to the recording and interpretation of their subjects. They asked elders to share their wisdom which became documents of beliefs. The material aspects of cultures were described and then became of interest to studies of morphology and evolution and development and dispersion. The entire field of folklore was focused on the identification of motifs and tale-types both of which could be identified by an alphanumeric designation rather than the performance of the stories.

By the 1980s contributions by anthropologists such as Michael Jackson and folklorists such as Del Hymes, began to show that the media were as important as the message, indeed, often the medium was the message as Marshall McLuhan later demonstrated. As a result anthropologists (well a few of them anyway) not only began pay much more attention to the sensory composition, experience, and values, but also began to consider a new approach for anthropology (or at least a subfield) called “Sensory Anthropology.” David Howes and Constance Classen have been the most tireless and persistent advocates of sensory anthropology since the 1980s themselves contributing many studies often based on field research and also editing and encouraging others to advance this approach.

Arising in anthropology this approach linked to persistent and classic anthropological issues. Acknowledging that the scholar’s sensory experience and sensorium may be decidedly different from her/his subject culture presented a new chapter in the issue of the participant observer and the objective perspective. These scholars recognized that their own sensory reality makes it impossible for them to be without expectations born in their very senses regarding their subject cultures. Howes discusses this issue in “Coming to Our Senses,” yet he seems to consider the resolution is to honor the sensorium of the subject. What I don’t find satisfactory in his solution is just how one can set aside one’s own senses (and the entire reality that correlates with them) in order to even come to know the others as they know themselves. This is a thorny issue that I’ll attempt to resolve in this course based on the “naturalist” view that begins at the level of neurobiology whose mechanisms may be shaped by cultural, historical, and personal experience, but that have a common base in the human body.

The second issue that arises is that since anthropologists tend to study small scale cultures that are often (indeed almost invariably) associated with a primitivism (positively or negatively valued) and since the expansion of sensory data in the study of these cultures often focuses on smell, taste, and touch (all long identified with the animal senses or the lower senses), then there is a tendency in sensory anthropology to correlate the value of sensory experience to be most relevant to primitive or exotic cultures (often cultures without writing anyway). The unintended result reinforces a primitivism as well as reinforcing the lofty position of text-based studies. Howes even contributes to this in his criticism of text-based studies when he writes, the “model of the text would result in the meaning coming unhinged


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from the body, the message divorced from the medium.” I think we must get past this text versus body approach and it simply can’t be done by solving it like a problem, but rather by establishing a paradigm in which the opposition does not arise. I’ll endeavor to do this.

As for the academic study of religion, there is no doubt that in recent decades there have been efforts to incorporate a broader sensory landscape than has been the forte of the academy. I have taught “Religion and body” courses many times, I have taught “Religion and Dancing” courses for 15 years, I have taught “Brain, Body, Movement” as a course a couple times and certainly numerous versions of “Religion and the Senses.” These are not common courses. Most of them, like this one, take place in a classroom based on reading, writing, lecturing. My dance classes have often involved dancing yet never integrated with the balance of the course (lecture/writing/reading). I plan eventually to add a “lab” component to “Religion and the Senses.” Other scholars have included aspects of “body” (the usual rubric) in some of their research and teaching. Yet, commonly the body is understood as a “text.” Lawrence Sullivan’s article “Body Works” is a good example in seeing things like canoes as texts. His article also presents an extensive history of the inclusion of such “body” things. Students of religion still want to find the meaning in everything they consider and the principal way of understanding how one discerns meaning is based in the language paradigm. Most recently Manuel Vasquez has written a book Beyond Belief: Toward a Materialist Theory of Religion (2011). This book surveys the possibilities for a non-text based study of religion. The academic study of religion is far behind anthropology in its work to expand beyond gradually recognized limitations. Both still tend, by the very way they approach the concern, to support a divide and opposition between text-focus and body-focus and all the correlate oppositions that have pretty much determined the shape of modern Western history: body/mind, primitive/civilized, senses/intellect, subjective/objective, experience/truth, and so on. I contend that even if we begin by attempting to resolve these dualities by “integration” or “hyphenation” or “conjunction” is to lose the entire war before the first battle. We cannot simply move forward by engaging terms like Michael Jackson’s “body-mind-habitus” even though his inclusion of habitus suggests something interesting. We can’t be satisfied with Merleau-Ponty’s “minded-body” or “lived-body” constructions. All of these begin and are based on invoking the long history of opposing and hierarchically valued dualisms and I believe that in that frame of mind, no amount of hyphenglue will put Humpty back together again.

Let me adumbrate an alternative and then we’ll fill it out throughout the course. Beginning with the image of proprioceptors being both/and nerves and muscles identical in the moving itself, but subject to being backfilled into an analysis of how they operate in the context of various systems (nervous and muscular) we have an important image. Moving has forever and everywhere been identified as life, as vitality. In Husserl’s term “animate organism” it is the moving that constitutes the wholeness and the nature of the organism as a life form. In the nervous system, neurotransmission is the movement of information from one place to another and is foundational to the ontology of the whole system. It all collapses absent the movement we call neurotransmission. In the muscular system, it is the exercise of the muscles, contracting and releasing, conjoined with the skeletal system that is the function. A nonmoving muscle is simply not a living muscle it is meat. Since movement is associated with proprioceptors, but in turn with the entire animate organism, it can be considered as a sense (often


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termed the kinesthetic sense) but it is much more, as we would expect, in that no other sense can function without movement and no movement is possible without engaging other senses. So movement is a sensory mode that is also amodal. Surely we can immediately appreciate that beginning with movement holds much promise for a very different approach. Not movement as one more, previously ignored and forgotten, sense, but rather movement as a very different way of comprehending the complexity of sensing, perceiving, living.

So now it is time to look much more carefully at moving from a number of complementing and overlapping perspectives. Something as common and natural as movement will become something almost infinitely complex and elusive. I’ll begin with a general description of neurotransmission and we’ll begin to enrich from there.

Nervous System: Neurotransmission and Action PotentialsLockhart, Hamilton, and Frye wrote in their Anatomy of the Human Body, “the nervous system is merely a [part of a] mechanism by which a muscular movement can be initiated by some change in the peripheral sensation, say an object touching the skin” (p. 267). It may be surprising for us to learn that the purpose of the nervous system is movement. But then it is all the more fascinating that the initiation of this purpose the nervous system serves is itself inseparable from movement, that is, “change in the peripheral sensation, say an object touching the skin.” Thus the moving of the body is in response to the moving in the world that impinges on the body. Yet, of course, the moving of the body participates in, we will come to see necessarily so, in the encounter of the body with the environment that constitutes this motivating change. However we look at it, movement is the purpose and the mechanism of the nervous system is directed and movement is the condition initiating the need for this movement.

In this context when we look at the nervous system itself at its core component, the neuron, the cellular architecture can be appreciated as a mechanism for movement. So movement initiates or creates the motivating conditions for the nervous system; its purpose is to move muscles in response to movement-based sensation. Movement is fundamental and ubiquitous. Movement is the vehicle and the fuel. Movement is so inseparable from neurology and sensation that it is simply taken for granted. Yet, it is important to ask, “What is movement?” “Is it possible to consider this movement itself, as it is movement, rather than the effects or affects resulting from movement?” I suggest that while there is an obvious impossibility of grasping, nailing down, catching on to movement, for these surely will remove the most distinctive attribute, that is, the moving, from movement, to make the effort is to foreground some principles that are important and insightful. I want to attempt to do this by focusing in a general way on the nervous system, neurotransmission, and action potential.

The nervous system is commonly understood as comprised of two major divisions. The central nervous system is that portion encases in bone, the brain and the spinal cord. It is remarkably complex and fragile. The peripheral nervous system is everything in the system outside the areas protected by bone. This part is found in every part of the body’s interior and skin. It is common to draw a strong distinction between the central and peripheral portions of the system. This division is evident in the current


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remarkable popularity of the brain, subject to endless popular books, perhaps because of its association with memory and with the memory disorders and diseases that are so widespread today. However, it is important to understand that neurons have the same structure and work the same way no matter where they are located in the system. The divisions in the nervous system are more a matter of physical location than of function.

Information is transmitted around the nervous system to accomplish the needs of the animate organism, but the cell, the neuron, is the locus for understanding how this movement occurs. We might say that it is here in the neuron and between neurons that purposeful movement occurs at the most elemental level. We might look here to attempt to catch a glimpse of movement itself.

All nerve cells are of the same design. The cell has a cell body containing a nucleus, dendrites (receiving connectors awaiting connections with other neurons), and axons (tread-like protuberances that reach out to connect with other neurons). The cell is protected by a membrane that has amazing properties to protect the nucleus, to allow transmission of chemicals from the inside or from the outside into or out of the cell and to carry an electric charge based on the mix of charged ions in the cell at any time. Surrounding the neuron are fluids of a great many kinds, some toxic and some essential.

Where an axon of one nerve finds a dendrite of another cell there is not a solid contact or physical connection, but rather a close encounter characterized by a tiny space or distance, a synapse. Because of the balance of chemicals in the nucleus of a neuron at rest there are slightly more negatively charged ions than positive ones giving the neuron a slight negative charge. When the nerve is stimulated (another issue to be considered) the neuron is excited and the membrane allows the inflow of chemicals carrying a balance of positive ions resulting in changing very briefly (1/1000th of a second) the charge of the neuron to positive and then back to negative.

The rapid reversal of the electrical polarity of the cell is called an action potential which is a moving electric charge. Where there are more positive than negative ions briefly in the neuron there is a movement of charge differential across the cell. The change in polarity in the neuron initiates a chain of events with the charge being carried through the tube-like structures of the cell to their ends where the axons meet the dendrites of other cells. The action potential flowing through the axon causes a quick release (a spurt) of a neurotransmitter at the point of the synapse. This chemical crosses the distance between the axon and dendrite and effects the membrane of the receiving cell which quickly opens to the inflow of chemicals with positively charged ions thus reversing the polarity of that cell and transmitting the charge from the first cell to the second one and so on until the termination (in a simplified model) at a muscle cell (this too is another matter). The neurotransmitter is quickly reabsorbed into the transmitting cell to be used again. Neurotransmission speeds, which I’ll consider much more at another time, are obviously rapid given how quickly we can act and react and remarkably amazing given their complexity. While variable, neurotransmission speeds are often stated as being 250 miles per hour. I’ll return to the system shortly to add other elements, but first I want to focus on the principles that seem to be operating here related to moving itself at this most elemental neurological level.


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There are entities involved that have clear boundaries, cells that are bounded by cell membranes. Yet, while these are barriers protecting the nucleus from toxins and harm, they capture and invite into the cell nutrients and other chemicals for cell metabolism. There is movement here across the cell membrane which is itself a movement in response to the overall purpose of neurotransmission. There is also movement for the maintenance of the life of the cell, also to purpose (autopoesis). The design of the cell reflects its purpose which is to communicate with other cells and all neurons both reach out to touch someone and reach out to be touched by someone. We see a similarity between cell membrane and cell design. Neurons are designed to be integral, whole, separate, and even distant from other neurons. Yet, neurons are selectively porous in both directions spurting out chemicals and sucking in chemicals; reaching out to connect with another neuron that it will never actually be able to touch while patiently awaiting that virtual touch from a neighbor via the shower of neurotransmitters. Movement within the cell is initiated by the change of electric polarity that flows across the cell shifting the balance of ions which quickly flip back. Movement from neuron to neuron occurs across a distance, a separation, a gap, via a mechanism by which one cell tells the receiving cell to open its membrane to ambient chemicals with positively charged ions. And the sequence continues on through the chain. The operative principles/conditions associated with moving are distance and a vectored (i.e., directionally intended) condition characterized by a need or desire. [distance is as much a connection as it is a separation: a synapse is an actual distance, but no more than is a key in a lock … ] Information (the flip of polarity, that is the action potential) moves so long as there is a space or distance that must be crossed before the action has fulfilled its purpose or need. The movement from neuron to neuron also is characterized by the setting of a space to cross and a purpose.

On a larger scale the transmission of a message to the muscle has the same contextual structure that correlates with the presence of moving itself or we might term this living movement to distinguish it from the chaotic flow of chemicals in the interstitial spaces surrounding the neurons. Action potentials are carried as movement. It is not so much bits of information that are passed along some conduit; it is a flow of electrical polarity shifts, oscillations since they flip and then flip right back, that have the appearance of movement from one location to another. We might ask what is actually moving? Is there anything at all going from one point to another? An interesting analogy are marque signs composed of arrays of small light bulbs. It is the timing of the on/off condition of the lights that give the appearance of the flow or movement of words or pictures across the sign. The same principle holds as well for almost all electronic displays where pixels are on or off or have a fixed number of conditions that can be selected offering the appearance of movement. The difference is that in the sign or the electronic display there is not “awareness” or actual connection from one pixel or bulb to the next wherein this connection is the heart and nature of the nervous system. But no thing is actually being carried along; movement is virtual.

This is a stripped down version of neuron structure to give us a few terms that are key in the context of movement: distance or space connected with purpose or need or desire. Further, there are givens in the system; mechanistic aspects like cell design, nature of membrane functions, the electronic charge of certain chemicals, the function of neurotransmitters. All of these exist as of the nature of animate


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organisms. Movement is characterizeable in its moving or in itself as oscillatory (flipping from positive to negative) and as virtual (no thing crosses from one place to another like a car driving down a road).

I want to pan out a bit from the neuron to include other aspects of neurotransmission to enrich our understanding and to discover other terms that reveal principles important to our larger endeavor.

Excitation/inhibition (interactive, responsive)

It is common to speak of neurotransmission and the nervous system in terms of an analogy to electric wiring. There are a number of things that suggest this is a good analogy and the common perception of the workings of the nervous system tend to enforce these. We speak of being “hard-wired,” of synapses “firing,” and think of a hard connection between locations in the brain and specific locations of muscles. However the analogy does more harm than good, even though it is by now almost impossible to move beyond it. One of the important differences is that at the synapse there is no “spark” that “fires” across the gap like we are familiar with the gap in a sparkplug. [FN on Spark People] It is a chemical spurt that is then quickly reabsorbed. Further the effect of the neurotransmitter on the dendrite is quite variable. It may be excitatory or inhibitory; that is, it may pass along the action potential or it may actually inhibit it. If it passes it along it may increase the excitation or not. This means that other factors are involved in an extraordinarily complex system of active responses to stimuli. It is interactive and variable and organic rather than simple and direct. We need think of interactive self-adjusting variable systems and networks rather than point to point connections. At the cellular level where the nervous system connects with muscles the same interrelationship pertains. This interactivity between cells constitutes what is commonly understood as tone, that active push/pull vitality of muscles incipient to movement. As Lockhart and colleagues describe this,

Muscular activity must … be viewed against a general background of neuronal activity, a balance of facilitation and inhibition resulting in musculature tone, upon which intermittent or phasic excitatory stimuli produce actual movements, the pathways concerned being at times facilitatory and at times excitatory (366).

Many-to-one, one-to-many (self-adjusting network)

Another major difference between the nervous system and electric wiring is that neurons have many axons and dendrites and these do not even necessarily all act the same way within the same cell in terms of their excitation/inhibition behavior. The relationship between neurons is not a one-to-one relationship but rather a many-to-one and a one-to-many relationship. Many neurons can connect to the same neuron or muscle cell. It is estimated that up to 15,000 neurons can synapse to a single muscle cell. And, of course, there can be many axons for any neuron which synapse with many different neurons. The complexity of these relationship and the cross-connections constitute an interactive, self-adjusting network of almost unimaginable complexity given the permutations and combinations of the connections and reactions that occur even between a point-to-point connection, area of brain with area of body.

Afferent/efferent (looping) somatic senses/afferent


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Now imagine all of the neurons that comprise the nervous system. Half of these neurons have on balance more dendrites that oriented outward toward the surface of the organism and more axons reaching toward the core (the spinal cord). These neurons propagate their action potentials inwards, a centripetal direction. These neurons originate with sensory endings of the body—exteroceptors in the skin, proprioceptors in the middle depth of the connective tissue in the muscles and ligaments, and interoceptors deep in the body’s internal organs or viscera—and terminate in the sensorimotor cortex, the highest part of the brain. These neurons collect in pathways that transmit sensory information and are called sensory pathways. They deal with feeling and affect and are referred to as afferent. In terms of our accounting of the various human senses, there are 4 distinct afferent pathways, one each corresponding to sight, hearing, taste, and smell. The afferent pathways for touch however are not distinct coming from every part of the body. More on these later.

Now the other half of the neurons have the complementary design. They have axons oriented outward, dendrites inward, a centrifugal direction. These pathways carry information from the sensorimotor cortex outward to the muscle cells where they are translated into movement, behavior. Since these pathways effect behavior via muscles moving they are termed efferent.

A few more things need be said about afferent/efferent pathways for action potentials. There is no correlation between these two neuron orientations and the central and peripheral architecture. Both occur everywhere throughout the entire system. Thus we must resist the tendency to think of the afferent pathways in the periphery and the efferent in the brain.

More importantly, afferent and efferent neurons interact with one another throughout the system. It is not a simple one way process for each indicating that they are interacting with one another in a looping networking constantly adjusting manner. As Deane Juhan puts it,

Sensation evokes movement, movement produces new sensations, these sensations then evoke and modify further movements, and so on around the track. Each side of the circle has many synaptic connections with the other side, connections which weld them into a single unit, like a spoke of a bicycle wheel. Sensory and motor activities are everywhere and at all times interpenetrating one another to create the homogeneity of conscious experience (162).

It is like, Juhan says, a stream flowing in 2 directions at the same time. It is a looping circular iterative repetitive interactive process of unbelievable complexity, based on movement and touch, that is our behavior and our sensation.

What I hope to accomplish in this exercise that I’m calling “naturalist” is that when we consider the mechanical natural neurobiological systems of animate organisms we find operative principles and relationships that will correspond with philosophical (phenomenological) understandings and that will be of importance in the way we approach the study of, the understanding and appreciation of, religion and culture and simply being humans.

Recap


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Movement is foundational to the purpose and function of the nervous system and the musculature system. Movement is the initiator, the action, and the result. Movement on the model of neurotransmission is occurs in the structurality where distance, space, gap is characterized by need, purpose, desire. Movement is virtual as well as actual. I have got to adequately explore the movement on the model of muscles, but to this point it is inseparable from the oscillating interacting excitatory and inhibitory aliveness (usually called tone or tonus) of muscle tissues. Tonus is movement in process or progress, the virtual dimension of movement at the point of incipience, moving yet not yet having gone anywhere.

Further, we have found the animate organism to be a complex interactive looping networking system that we attempt to comprehend by means of somewhat arbitrary and often potentially misleading distinctions such as central/peripheral and afferent/efferent as well as analogies such as “the nervous system as electric wiring” that are not only incorrect, but insidiously misleading.

Movement/Self-MovementI want to begin this essay with some comments on some terminological distinctions that are important to help us keep a focus that is fuzzy enough but not lost in a fog. Even to discuss different types of movement or different aspects of movement is to already take away the moving in the movement and it is our prime objective to glimpse or feel this moving rather than to be ignorant that writing about and analyzing movement, however, distinguished is post-movement, although involving moving. Watch the fog! But surely something can be said. The moving of stars and planetary bodies, the moving of fluids in the intercellular spaces in the body are movements that follow wholly natural laws and as such are highly predictable given the variables of any situation. This movement may be called objective or mechanical movement. The natural sciences are based on determining and applying these laws. Perhaps one reason that philosophers and humanists avoid the “naturalist” approach (which I am attempting to adopt here) is that this would seem to reduce to natural law the behavior of human beings eventuating in the explanation of culture and religion, art and ritual, human behavior and feeling is directly predictable. While I suppose one like ???? Crick would consider this determinism possible, even with the most modest knowledge of the complexity of not only the human animate organism but also the variability of the environment would quickly realize that the principles involved are far beyond the human capacity to ever begin to grasp. As Brian Massumi argues in his exploration of the implications of Bergson on movement, the status of natural law is theoretically important, but we must overcome the one-sidedness of attending to only this half of what constitutes us as being. Even our formulations attributed to “nature” are based on our human, cultural, and historical constitution. Massumi says that nature and culture are mutual movements “into and through each other” (p. 11) and that “things that we are used to placing on one side or another of the nature-culture divide must be redistributed along the whole length of the continuum and we can’t sustain the distinction between artifact and thing, body and object—even thought and matter. They are allies in process—tinged with event.” (11 … check quote). What Massumi does not do to any extent even though he argues for it is to go to the level of the “natural” that I am here attempting. The avoidance of “reduction” to natural law is immediately avoided when we consider the necessary (by law) interactivity of the afferent/efferent


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tendencies that are present as distinctive of the nervous system as a whole, but also of the architecture of the neuron. The nervous system is a movement mechanism to respond to the movement encounters with the environment; as well as extensive adjustments of affect and effect within the nervous system itself.

To talk a bit about movement and self-movement . . . the necessities of simply writing without drudgery encourage less than precision in the use of language. The awareness that precise definition of movement is to assure the removal of the movement from the thing being defined is the reason we are engaged in this process knowing full well that we may need to turn to different constructions than definitions and laws to accomplish our purposes; that is, paradoxical situations, explorations of analogies, metaphors, vague pointings, and odd neologisms are more the fare than are definitions. The advantage is a more interesting and perhaps even poetic narrative. And, of course, the advantage in not only how we appreciate ourselves as animate beings but even the way we are, in this endeavor, forced to change the strategies of our efforts are also something to look forward to. It is not precision about worlding and living, that is only possible if we remove the moving the processing the exploring the creating to describe a fixed and precise world and life less its vitality.

I tend to use terms like “movement itself” when I’m referring to the aspect of this word that is its coming to be, its moving, its processing in process, its about to be but yet to become, and so forth. I tend to use “self-movement” as referring to the animate movement that is involved in the afferent/efferent looping processes. Self-movement is akin to “groping” in that it is movement that is involved with encounter that gives rise to response that gives rise to adjustment of movement and so on and on. Self-movement need not be conscious, indeed, it is more often not conscious. Even conscious movement engages enormous chains of self-movement at micro-levels that are not conscious. Movement that can be parsed and analyzed as a path or a course is perhaps the most common use of the term, but, as I will show over and over, this is mere trace or artifact of movement completed and no longer involves any moving itself.

Now with this bit of clarification of both terminology and approach, I want to consider Sheets-Johnstone’s understanding of the “primacy of movement.” She holds what is more or less obvious that we come into the world moving. I’ll return to this pre- and early post-natal movement in greater detail later, but here it is surely adequate to describe what happens in terms surely uncontestable. As is our nature, and it is a nature we share with all animate organisms though clearly in wide variations, we come to life with built in sensorimotor programs. These are no more mysterious than that we have hearts that beat and lungs that breathe. These autonomic functions are essential to life from the very first moment and are necessary to the very last exhalation. Sensorimotor programs for neonatals function so that sucking can occur as well as movement (not as totally random as might appear) of limbs in what we might describe as “groping.” Infants reach out with limbs and take in with their sucking mouths and through the touch/proprioceptive responses to the groping encounters with the ambient world: objects, mommies, whatever and everything. Sheets-Johnstone refers to these innate movement abilities as “I dos” in that the body is simply neurobiologically structured to move in this way without being consciously directed or even directed in terms of acquired patterns. However, fascinatingly the


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infant’s sensory experience (the affect) alters the sensorimotor programming and doubtless the whole afferent/efferent neurological network. Repetition results in structuring patterned responses, feelings and movements, that result in awareness of the world and one’s skilled encounter with the world. This is a process Manning and Massumi call “worlding.” The use of acquired skills, even if unconscious, then become “I can dos” in Sheets-Johnstone’s terminology. Movement, these groping gestures with which we are born, are the bootstrap to the acquisition of reality and a sense of self. Husserl said that it is “through movement that life acquires reality.” (in S-j). And, importantly, this process while perhaps becoming increasingly sophisticated and eventually with a conscious component is the process of “worlding” that continues throughout life. Also importantly the process is designed into the architecture of the neuron, with axons and dendrites reaching out to touch and reaching out to be touched so that they may undergo change, as well as the whole nervous system, with the afferent/efferent looping networking neuro-pathways, as well as the whole animate organism whose limbs reach out to touch but to also be touched and whose muscles are toned to for both affect (to respond to the world) and well as effect (to have agency on the world). Moving is the means and end, the fuel and the motivation that is at the heart of the whole system.

The way I have described this process has been from a point of view of describing the architecture that is common at these various levels, yet I have yet to attempt the more daunting task of seeking some vague sense of movement itself or the moving within this structurality. I suppose we might want to first ask, who cares? What difference does it make? When we can comprehend that there is a system that works, why do we need to try to catch it in the act? Maybe what happens behind closed doors is better left alone? Or, maybe the better metaphor is, what happens behind closed doors is better left to our imagination, because the lurid details of moving will require considerable imagination.

In the introduction to his 2002 book Parables for the Virtual: Movement ??? , Massumi not only critiques the shortcomings of the results of the analyses based on backfilling, but, developing from an inspiration from Henri Bergson (which I’ll develop a bit later) explores a considerable list (15 items) of advantages that come from using our imaginations to catch a peek at moving. A careful consideration is worth the effort, but here they may be summarized as shifting our attention to process, to interdependencies, to the vagueness of our customary distinctions, and to the sorts of paradoxes and vagueness that, while giving us a headache, may initiate us into a richer more exciting more alive sense of ourselves as biological, cultural, historical beings and our shared heritage with animals as well as the sense of something that encourages us to want some distinction from them.

Efforts to begin to feel even mildly at ease with imagining movement itself require, not surprisingly, something on the order of the same groping methods I have just described as innate to infants. I think we must reach out and pronounce some words and reflect on the effect and affect these words have when we do so. In the process these interactions will force us to understand our own terms in new and perhaps confounding ways. In this interaction and the resulting changes that occur, we’ll then need to try different terms becoming more acceptable to the paradoxicallity and comprehension through vagueness and confoundment that we will most certainly experience. As we do this, I want to return again and again to our “naturalist” base, the description of the simple neurobiological architecture to


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give us some grounding. Patience and persistence are necessary because, like infants, we need, through a highly repetitious process of groping experience gradually build sets of terms slowly connecting with developing ideas. As we embrace the process we will embrace the insights.

There are lineages of gropers that can be traced. Brian Massumi and Erin Manning are colleagues both of whom have written powerfully, sometimes poetically, sometimes extremely vaguely or confoundingly about movement. They trace their lineage most immediately to Deleuze and Gutarri (correct this and identify them) and more remotely but powerfully to Henri Bergson (identify), but also to the American pragmatist tradition beginning with Charles Sanders Peirce, but they are more directly influenced by William James. I will consider some of their writings in our groping efforts. I will also consider the recent work of Renaud Barbaras, who is the most knowledgeable expert on Maurice Merleau-Ponty whose work he critiques and advances. While Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception shows an increasing awareness of the primacy of movement, it is Barbaras who finally fully develops a discussion based on Merleau-Ponty’s perspectives.

I’ll begin with Erin Manning’s 2/?? book, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. To approach “relational movement” Manning invokes a partner dance (she’s a tango dancer) without actually identifying that she is doing so, “There are always at least two bodies. These two stand close, facing one another, reaching-toward an embrace that will signal an acceleration of the movement that has always already begun. The movement within becomes a movement without, not internal-external, but folding and bridging in an intensity of preacceleration.” (15) Focused on two people dancing we can feel the sense of them reaching to the embrace one another with their bodies preparing to move. We can perhaps feel something akin to what Manning calls “preacceleration” pointing to the incipient pre-movement anticipation of the dancers. This is perhaps the intended affect of Manning’s writing, but she is referring not only to dancers, but to movement itself, a point that becomes clear at the end of this same paragraph when she writes, “Preacceleration: a movement of the not-yet that composes the more-than-one that is my body. Call it incipient action.” (15)

Although Manning actually labels these two bodies: “actual, virtual, organic, prosthetic,” we may not be able to make the transition from the dancer analogy to the two bodies that are the one body by means of this list. The paradoxical image—the one that is two—is and will be fundamental to most of our efforts to imagine moving. I want to flex the “naturalist” muscles to offer some imagery based on my description of the nervous system (we’ll see it again in many “natural” contexts).

[include salsa connection as image similar to axon/dendrite synapse]

In my description of the neuron, movement occurs at the cell membrane and within the nucleus and at the synapse. The cell has bounded integrity at the membrane, yet the membrane while protecting the integrity of the cell is also open to the ambient chemicals for life and as essential to its function, that is, generating action potential. At this point the cell is always one and distinct, yet always facing and opening to, reaching out to, the ambient environment. It is this other, beyond its integral self, that is the dual structurality that is describable in Manning’s term as “incipient action.” Then if we consider the function, the seeming purpose, of the neuron as a cell, we can quickly see that its dendrites and axons,


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like tango dancers, reach out to one another in the anticipation of movement. The flow of the action potential across one neuron is a way of understanding Manning’s “preacceleration” that not-yet movement across synapse that composes the more than one, that is the two cells interacting as moving. And again at the systemic level, the efferent tendency is partnered with the afferent tendency aimed to move information that is virtual because it is no thing, yet living movement, to accomplish movement actual, which is the effect on the muscle cell. And at the level of the animate organism, the same structurality occurs to effect the tango dance with all of its affects to the self-adjusting skill-developing emotionally moving process. There must, as Manning says, always be at least two bodies as the structurality that is moving, movement in process of moving. Action potential is virtual, movement between neurons is both actual (chemical spurts) and virtual, and a network of interactive self-adjusting virtual and actual movements between the sensorimotor cortex and muscle, and the eventual organic movement that interconnects with prosthetic objects in the environment which is not separable from the movement itself. Groping, groping, groping.

Likely we have all spent a few idle minutes reflecting on Zeno’s paradox before saying “to hell with it.” The arrow shot toward a target. The target at finite distance that can be divided an infinite number of times. No matter how small the increment of the half distance remaining on each iteration of dividing the distance, it still takes time for the arrow to cross. Thus the arrow logically will never reach the target.

Massumi takes up Bergson’s discussion of Zeno’s problem leading us to another way of imagining movement as moving. Bergson held that a path is not composed of positions, but rather that it is non-decomposable. Movement is a dynamic unit. The continuity of movement is an order of reality other than the measurable, divisible space it can be confirmed as having crossed. He wrote,

We attribute to motion the divisibility of space which it traversed, forgetting that it is quite possible to divide an object, but not an act: and on the other hand we accustom ourselves to projecting this act itself into space, to apply it to the whole of the line which the moving body traverses, in a word to solidify.” (quoted in Manning, p. 18, check quotation)

We are confounded by Zeno when we fail to distinguish between the event of the arrow in movement which is non-divisible so long as it is the moving that is the concern and the post-movement analysis of the movement territorialized, that is, plotted in space and time. These are two different orders of reality.

The imagery allows us some additional potential to our repetitive groping. Space, seen as a grid or as something fixed is, in Bergson’s perspective, itself a retrospective construct. Measurable space is as Massumi puts it, “a stopping the world in thought, thinking away the dynamic unity, the continuity of its movement.” His introduction is titled “concrete is as concrete doesn’t” playing cleverly on the distinction between cement and concrete. Or put differently he writes, “a thing is when it isn’t doing.” This reminds me of Navajo language which is constructed almost totally of verbs bestowing motion to everything all the time. Reference to things is a complex construction for Navajos since they have to say something like, “that which usually is doing this or that but is not now doing it.” The verb-heavy


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composition of Navajo language makes it difficult to take the movement, the vitality, out of the world of experience. No wonder that for Navajos the border between the biological and the prosthetic (or what we’d call the material) is not really clear or perhaps even viable. No wonder Navajos find life force and movement in what we typically understand as the physical objects of the world.

Academics traditionally have as their jobs the fixing and analysis of measurable space or time. Manning calls this territorialization. It is a fixing of the world, or some aspect of it, as an object for consideration. Manning notes that “territorialization is always to stop movement, to begin the analysis from a stopping and then to make a body move” (23). From the academic perspective then, movement is something, if of interest at all, is to be added in as a secondary consideration of the territory. It is important to note here that one of the most powerful metaphors that has driven the academic study of religion over the last 50 years has been the concern with “place.” I have written much about this perspective as it has been presented by both Mircea Eliade and Jonathan Smith. What I am considering here will, I believe, have profound impact on this metaphor and have deep implications for how such territorializing metaphors need to be set aside as we begin to learn how to put the movement and life back into the religions and cultures we study as well as our ways of studying them.

While we all are in motion as the condition of life, to give movement its primacy in our studies of the world seems perhaps at this point confounding. Yet, this is precisely what Massumi takes as his objective: “to put matter immediately back into cultural materialism, corporeal body back in body” and “to part company with linguistic model as basis …” (p. 4 fix quote)

Such a task is indeed demanding as evident in Massumi’s observation that “when a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation.” (4) And, “in motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary, that is, ‘real but abstract.’” (4)

Massumi offers terms related to “territorialization,” to our habitual approach, that offer other images helpful to our efforts here. They relate to our objectification, to our customary methods (academic and quotidian), our perspective being built as retrospective. I find insightful his use of terms such as “back-form” and “back-fill” in that they remind us that what we consider as the object of our study already has the life, the movement, wrung out of it; that we study, like anatomists, cadavers. Clearly much can be discerned from such objects (these are a particular dimension of the real), but the most important and distinctive aspect is missing or a later add-on, the living movement. Massumi takes the time to outline what he believes are 15 advantages of replacing or complementing territorialization with what Bergson called “fluidification.” (6) A careful consideration of these is important, but they may be characterized with a few phrases:

Emphasis on process before signification or coding Position no longer comes first with movement a problematic second Positionality is an emergent quality of movement There is a coincidence of a thing’s immediacy to its own variation Process concepts are ontogenetic not ontological


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Indeterminancy is primary to social determination, i.e., gender and race are emergent and back-form their reality

Possibility is back-formed from potentials unfolding The “natural” and “cultural” feedback feed forward and back into each other; nature and culture

are mutual movement into and through each other Focus on movement requires culture studies to embrace their own inventiveness

The consequences of these shifts are profound for both academic and quotidian Western views of the world. But how do we go forward. Massumi turns to a focus on “sensation.”

Sensation is, he writes, “a directly disjunctive self-coinciding. Sensation is never simple—always doubled by the feeling of having a feeling. Self-referential. A resonation, an interference pattern.” (pp. 13-14, check quotation). This returns us directly to my concern with neurobiology as presented in the description of nerve cells, neurotransmission, action potential, and the efferent/afferent design of the nervous system. From the most basic understanding, the nervous system responds to the connection with the world beyond the skin; that is to sensation to experience. And the purpose of the nervous system is to adjudicate the sensation in terms of a context of experience to produce bodily movement that effects the world, that is, agency. In the effort to solidify and territorialize, sensation has been ignored, overlooked, discounted as largely irrelevant if not branded more negatively as a subjective pollution. Sensation has been understood as vaguifying the territory with its movement, with its dynamic processual complexity impossible to back-fill on a stable grid. So the very conditions that give rise to the purpose of the nervous system are denied it as we have satisfied ourselves with examining cadavers. My analysis of the most elemental building block, the neuron, demonstrates that its architecture is based on the primacy of movement and this structurality is retained all the way to the contribution of the nervous system to the animate organism.

I want to talk a bit about Massumi’s discussion of sensation being always doubled by the feeling of having a feeling. Perhaps our experience is adequate support for this statement. Most of us are used to having a general awareness of feeling as part of our being sensory as well as emotional beings. Further we are able to identify various types of sensation in the general terms of feeling. We are aware that we are seeing for example without needing to use our eyes, or any other sense organs, to determine that we are seeing. Here again we are finding this necessary doubling that is distinctive of our integrity or our unity. I believe this two (or more) that is one is a crucial imagery for our endeavor.

But let me place this feeling of feeling in the context of the description I have made of the complex afferent/efferent neurological network. First I remind that we must realize that between sensation at the skin and proprioceptors and the sensorimotor cortex in the brain there is a looping characterizable by feedback and feed-forward, that is, an interdependency of sensation and the resident neurological programming. And further we must realize that this is not a simple loop but a remarkably complex network of complex one-to-many and many-to-one interactions between neurons and neurons and muscle cells. Because of the neuroprocessing time, rapid yet nothing like the speed of electricity, then the process of simple neurotransmission has a duration. It is not instant. In this duration the process itself becomes a reference to the process or, as Massumi indicates, “sensation is self-referential. An


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interference pattern.” The result is that while processing information along a neuropathway there is a complex network of interactive engagement of the movement with itself leading to the sensation of sensation. A product of the gaps and rhythms and loopings and redundancies of the process. I’ll later consider more fully the feeling of feeling or what might also be called the “common sense” or, my favorite, coenaesthesis, which has been a persistent issue throughout the history of philosophy. And in the next essay I will suggest that the rise of the self as well as awareness and even sensation is possible only because of the sluggishness (am I joking?) of neurotransmission.

Massumi offers as an analogy the extensive discussion of “echo” that is well worth careful consideration as another groping. (see p. 14)

The key point here is that movement and sensation are inseparable and that sensation (perception) must become a fundamental concern for us to put the movement back in movement, the process and dynamics and vitality back in our subject.

Movement: Action PotentialRenaud Barbaras’s several publications1 on movement and movement’s connection with, indeed identity with, perception are, I believe among the most important works on the topic. Barbaras holds that “bodies that perceive are living bodies and that they are distinguished from other corporeal beings … by their capacity for movement.” 86 But he does not consider this correlation sufficient explanation. Since movement/perception are at the heart of humanity (and animate organisms) and vitality and the reimagining of them revolutionizes (in the literal sense of turning things around completely) then his work deserves our most careful consideration. Here I want to consider only a couple topics out of the richness he offers.

The first one excites me because it correlates with my recognition that neurotransmission speeds are fortunately slow even though we think of them as fast. Further, neurotransmission times are variable because of many factors such as the existence of many possible routes (the Thieves’ Forest or the Internuncial Net) through the neurological afferent/efferent network, the various responses that occur at the synapse (from excitatory to inhibitory), the variable effectiveness of neurotransmitters, the myelination of the axons (is this correct? Explain), and the hydro-electrical-dynamics of transmission, and many other factors. The slowness and distinctiveness of neurotransmission can be clarified by considering the inappropriateness of analogizing neurotransmission with electrical wiring. Electric wiring is one-to-one initial to terminal points (any break is a “short” and causes total failure) while neurotransmission is one-to-many and many-to-one and complexly interactive between these points. But the difference I want to focus on here is speed. Electricity moves through wiring at something like the speed of light or 186,000 miles per second; neurotransmission speeds are 250 miles per hour but variable. The difference is a factor of from 2 to 20 million times slower. The point I want to make is that this is not only a good thing, but that perception, subjectivity, awareness, thought, memory, and about

1 List the pubs


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everything else we consider human (or even animate organism) arises in the time delay due to the relative slowness of transmission speeds.

Let me start with a couple of quotidian experiences that allow us to both recognize the time-lapse the speed and the network create as well as that it is where perception occurs. First, let’s think of that game where one person holds out a hand and another person taps their palm. The objective is that the person being tapped must try to capture the finger of the tapper. Maybe this is more fun if it is a $100 bill. The point of this game is that even if we have great reaction time (that’s what we call it), the time for the neurotransmission to go from the exteroceptors in the skin to the spinal column and back to the fingers is never fast enough to be able to capture the finger or the money. This would not be the case if neurotransmission speeds were the same as electricity. Many other examples can be made. In driving a car, we know to keep distance between our car and the one in front of us because reaction time (due to less than instant neurotransmission speeds) is required before we can effect braking after the affect of seeing the brake lights of the car in front of us. Okay, we have that one.

The next one has to do with perception and this reaction time. Barbaras says that if the reaction time were instant we would perceive nothing, “the immediacy of reaction goes hand-in-hand with the absence of perception.” (D & D, p. 99). We have experience to confirm this. The reflex response is appropriate here. Consider those occasions when your reflexes are being tested and the physician taps reflex points and your leg flies up. We are often surprised by this reflex reaction because it seems to occur without perception. Proper perception or awareness occurs after the event based on visual and proprioceived movement, but the movement seems to occur without perception or awareness. This, of course is due to the immediacy of the neurotransmission occurring from point of contact to the spinal column and back in the most direct pathway. This experience offers us some appreciation of the correlation that Barbaras describes.

With this grounding in our experience we can go on. Barbaras, who in this respect is developing on Bergson’s work, holds that “it can be inferred that perception originates in the reaction’s delay.” (99) Perception then is action potential, the moving charges that provide virtual movement in the nervous system. Perception originates, as Barbaras writes, “in the distance that separates the external impulse from the reaction.” This means that perception takes place in transit through the Thieves’ Forest, where the external stimulating impulse encounters the patterns, memories, feelings, and much more that comprise our life experiences and present tonus resulting in, not knowledge, but a reaction, that is, a responding movement. Perception is not knowledge it is movement. Barbaras: “Contrary to what traditional philosophy affirms, perception has in no way a speculative interest; it is not knowledge but action.” (99) Talk about revolution! And Barbaras continues, “the perceived is only that which the living subject reacts to.” (101) This also directs us to the dark denseness of the Thieves’ Forest where aspects of the external impulse may be filtered out altogether, slain by the creatures of nonrecognition and the gremlins of avoid-the-threatening, while wandering about looking for a way back out. The implications are significant, as Barbaras writes, “the object is not born of a disinterested relation to the world; it is on the contrary constituted by vital activity and, more generally, by action that needs to circumscribe stable entities within a flowing totality.” (99-100) Thus, what we perceive is not the result of some passive


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recording of the world “out there” and it does not arise in some objective measurement given by the world “out there.” Rather the object is born of the process of movement that is conditioned by experience and by interest both of which are encountered and developed as movement (action potential) through the adventurous journey through the Thieves’ Forest of neurotransmission.

Let me try another analogy to help us understand why the action potential speeds are essential to perception. Were we electronically wired we would function something more like an internet search engine. So let’s consider how that might work. The external stimulus (in our analogy the search request) would produce, in the tiniest fraction of a second, an enormous number of possible reactions. The choice of which among these to effect would need to be based on an algorithm to determine hierarchy, say the first item to appear on the results. And the reaction would then occur almost instantaneously. Everything would be “instant” reaction; the fastest knee-jerk one can imagine. Actually our muscular system would quickly self-destruct because it simply couldn’t handle the demand of volume of stimuli. Now, of course, we might then suggest that we could build into the algorithm time delays so that we didn’t zip around at the speed of light, but then this is adding living movement, self-movement, back into the system to renormalize the system to how it works now. The living animate organism is what it is as the result of this essential “delay” even though these may seem rather instantaneous in our experience. Were these times instant we would not be humans (or animate beings) whose life, whose definitive character, is the primacy of movement; we would be machines that are designed to move.

Barbaras makes another point that I want to take up briefly here related to delay. He writes, “A more complex organism perceives to the exact degree to which the reaction does not immediately follow the stimulus.” (p. 99) This statement suggests that with the evolution of animate organisms the development of the nervous system thickens and complicates the Thieves’ Forest, the Internuncial Net, inhabiting it with many more creatures and obstacles that need be encountered by any passage, slowing the time, increasing the delay, complexifying the interactive network resulting in the greater role and importance of perception. This is an interesting and insightful way that we may distinguish our human selves among the other animate organisms.

Okay, I love this transmission speed analogy and this aspect of our discussion of movement and perception. I’ll certainly return to it frequently. But now I want to return to another analogy and to the primacy of movement we have considered related to “groping.” This consideration complements what I have just been discussing because it focused on the world outside the perceiver/mover whereas I have been focused on the speeds of action potential and the neuro-networks that process external stimuli.

Let me begin with a complex of ideas from Barbaras regarding such things as body, transcendence, negativity, and grasping which will take us into a range of topics that I’ll try to keep reigned in.

Start here: “To move is not to be what one is (or was); it is to be always beyond and therefore within one’s self, to exist on the basis of noncoincidence. Within the ‘there is’ there is negativity only as mobility …” (86) This complex statement makes sense for me by remembering the architecture of the neuron: axons reach out to touch while dendrites reach out to be touched. This is their design. This


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reaching out shows their existence is based on noncoincidence, that is, they are not self-contained, self-sufficient, an entity complete in themselves, but rather exist to reach out, to transcend their boundaries. Barbaras describes this design, this “there is” as a negativity, meaning that by its design the neuron exists as the need to be connected with something beyond itself. Barbaras sees this negativity as its mobility, its ability to move; for the neuron its action potential. There is a need and a goal associated with the design of the neuron that is the movement of the action potential both across the body of the neuron and the reaching across the synapse to transcend the neuron. And so with the design of the animate body, with arms and legs reaching out to touch and to be touched and skin receptors and sense organs and proprioceptors awaiting being touched. “Perception is essentially linked to movement. Beings capable of moving are the very ones that are capable of feeling; feeling and moving are the two aspects of the same mode of living, because movement assumes the desire for a goal, which itself requires the capacity for perceiving it.” (87) This discussion then takes us to the relationship between the perceiver and the external world being perceived. In light of the current interest in shifting away from “text” based studies to “body” based studies, it is provocative to consider Barbaras’s statement, “instead of approaching life on the basis of the body, as the possibility characteristic of a body, we have to determine the body’s sense of being based on life.” In other words, as I read this, a body based on life is a self-moving body, not an inanimate material object.2 Thus, even in our consideration of the neuron (material, body) we have considered the architecture in terms of the life of the cell as well as the cell’s existence being for the life of the body. This is the core principle for the revolution of our studies. Texts and bodies backfilled into grids for study and analysis are both lifeless. Self-movement, living movement is the perceiving body that lives.

Sheets-Johnstone placed her understanding of the primacy of movement on the observation that we are born into the world moving, that we are not taught or need we learn to move, and that movement is at the core of our discovery and construction of the world and ourselves. From Barbaras’s perspective this movement arises from an inherent interior negativity or put positively on the need/desire to reach out to connect or touch. I referred to his infant movement by the term “groping” which I got from Carrie Noland’s discussion of Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas of gesture. This term is a good one because it shows the propensity of movement, insatiable movement, that in reaching out to touch and even in touching expresses and pursues needs and goals, yet the momentary seeming satisfaction of those goals, as in encountering some part of the world, only increases and expands the needs and goals. This is the characteristic of Barbaras’s interpretation of the terms “distance” and “desire” which are conjoined in the title of his book. Movement arises because of distance, or space or gap or synapse, and the desire to transit the distance, to close the gap, the activate the synapse, yet it is the nature of movement that desire and distance are not accomplishable, but rather only fold back on movement as its fuel.

Let me shift terminology a little here. I’ve often said that “to grasp” movement is “to not grasp” movement because it would take the movement out of movement. To grasp is to accomplish a backfill, a territorialization. However, grasping, like groping, can be seen as consistent with our discussion of living movement, self-movement. Grasping is like synapse. The word synapse, from Greek syn-

2 Interesting to reflect on Vasquez’s “materialist theory of religion” in this regard.


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(together) and haptein (to clasp or to touch), understood as process is neuronal grasping. Grasping3 conjoins movement and touching in perception4 and such pertains to all perception; how this works will have to be dealt with later.

A remarkable issue arises at this juncture of our discussion. If grasping, reaching out to touch with intention even if unconsciously done, is perceiving then there appears to be some “grasp” the precedes the grasping. Barbaras puts it this way “there is no perception without a movement that, so to speak, goes to meet the object, draws its contours, or adopts the angle that allows the clearest view of it. The mystery here is that, although preceding the perception of the object strictly speaking, movement is already adapted to it and ‘knows’ the object before it is perceived.” 91 This may be the difference between “groping” and “grasping” although Barbaras doesn’t discuss it in these terms. Groping has something of a random undirectedness to it. We think of infant groping, we think of “groping about in the dark,” we think of crude imprecise touch that does not open to sensation. Groping has a tenuous relationship to object touched and is characterized by random or crude movement. Grasping, I might suggest, is directed and sensitive. Yet, as Barbaras notes, how can this be that we have preceding knowledge of the object that to which we direct our grasping? I’d suggest that the problem arises only if we conflate a back-filled territorialization of the process with the living movement/touching event. Leaving the movement/touching as central to the concern then groping and grasping are continuous with the self-adjusting network of the neurological system where vagueness, paradox, partiality are impossible to eliminate. The Thieves’ Forest is ever-growing and ever-changing as it encounters the complex afferent/efferent menagerie of visitors. The mystery is in the iterative movement. Or as Barbaras states, “In truth, it is movement itself that perceives in the sense that the object exists for it, in which movement has its meaning, as its oriented nature attests, inspired and clairvoyant with regard to the living movement that often demonstrates an intimacy with its objective, an intimacy that runs deeper than that which knowledge exhibits. In and by movement the object appears, though without its manifestation being separated from its brute presence, according to the indistinctness between its essence and its existence. Here the grasp of the object is not distinguished from the gesture made toward it; perception takes place in the world and not in me, and the object is therefore perceived where it is.” 91-2

It is movement itself that perceives! The movement transcends the perceiver, moving beyond, to grasp (that is, perceive) the object where it is in the world. And this movement, this perceiving, is living movement, the self-movement that is living, because, as Barbaras puts it “it is its own source, because it nourishes itself, and because the impulse is not exhausted but restored by its realization.” 93 This characterizes the autonomy of living movement.

There are many other issues that I should cover here, but will save. Based on Bergson’s notion of image, Barbaras discusses that in grasping we grasp objects among the totality. His analysis takes him to the conclusion that “it is in its negation that the totality as such is posited, as if the part were to give rise to the whole of which it is a part.” 106 with the consequence being that it is “in movement itself that the

3 Other terminology enter here “attention” and “stopping there” as discussed by Barbaras, pp. 90-91.4 Discussed by Barbaras as “tonic” phenomenon D&D p. 88 based on Goldstein.


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world must be constituted, a world that movement considers as the field agaist the background of which its negating power unfolds.” 106 very interesting.

Also need to discuss “principle of equivalence” what I call self-othering in Barbaras, p. 89

Missing Half Second Found!Since the 1980s scholars including neuroscientists and philosophers have taken up the issue of “free will” based implications associated with a mysterious missing half second. I would think theologians might be interested, but I haven’t found any of them participating in this fascinating discussion although I haven’t really looked. For my discussion I depend on Brain Massumi’s consideration of this in his Parables for the Virtual and Shaun Gallagher’s discussion in How the Body Shapes the Mind (????). Essential to my consideration is my discussion, in the last several sections, of the primacy of movement, the philosophy of movement, the movement-removing process of territorialization, and the evolution of animate organisms that resulted in the distinctiveness of human beings.

There are a number of scientific procedures that document a half second time lapse between awareness of the decision to act and the action itself. There is evidence that the stimulation of an action occurs in the brain prior to the actor’s awareness of a choice to perform the action. Massumi’s bases it on this example, “Mild electric pulses were administered to the [cortical implanted] electrode and also to points on the skin. In either case, the stimulation was felt only if it lasted more than half a second.” 28 Massumi looks at Benjamin Libet’s experiments to attempt to understand what is occurring. In Libet’s procedure subjects were monitored by an electroencephalography (EEG) machine. They were asked to flex a finger at the moment of their choosing and to recall the time (on a large clock they could see) of their decision. The results: the flex came 0.2 seconds after they indicated that they decided to move, but the EEG registered brain activity associated with the movement 0.3 seconds before the time designated for the decision. The brain activity started half second before the finger moved and more than quarter second before the decision to move became conscious to the subject; thus the missing half second. Gallagher’s discussion is based on these same procedures conducted by Libet.

Libet himself raised the question of free will and human agency, “The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act. Is there, then, any role for conscious will in the performance of a voluntary act?” (Libet 1999: 51, Quoted in G , p. 238) The brain starts moving our finger and then we decide to move the finger, thus, according to Libet and others, the decision is an illusion of agency which rightfully belongs to the brain. Even put this way I’m frankly a little embarrassed to even take up the issue, because on the face of it, stated in these terms, it is pure silliness. Still, that this missing half second has been understood as a “problem” that needs resolving and the way that various authors have attempted to solve the “problem” raises issues that are worth discussing.

Massumi’s response follows from Libet’s explanation of what is occurring. Libet wrote, “we may exert free will not by initiating intentions but by vetoing, acceding or otherwise responding to them after they arise.” (in Massumi, p. 29) Massumi then concludes that “the half second is missed not because it is


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empty, but because it is overfull, in excess of the actually-performed action and of its ascribed meaning. Will and consciousness are subtractive. They are limitative, derived functions that reduce a complexity too rich to be functionally expressed. It should be noted in particular that during the mysterious half second, what we think of as ‘free,’ ‘higher,’ functions, such as volition, are apparently being performed by autonomic, bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness, and between brain and finger but prior to action and expression.” 29 I’m fine with Massumi’s understanding that a great deal is occurring during this half second, but I think his understandings of will and consciousness being subtractive are dependent on limiting them to a retrospective, analytic, stage or phase of the process which cannot occur without territorialization and backfilling the movement that is occurring during this half second in order to describe some attributes, like agency and choice, to the movementless duration. This to me is precisely the issue that has confunded us regarding Zeno’s puzzle and I feel that Massumi has forgotten what he learned from Bergson’s analysis. Backfilling is a human movement neurobiological function with conscious as well as unconscious dimensions. In some ways it can be understood as self-movement that is distinctive to being human. Yet, I think there are other ways of considering this over-full half second that leave the movement as foremost. Actually the duration of time surely cannot be comprehended apart from movement.

Gallagher lays out the issues and presents the neuroscience interpretation regarding “free will” much more fully than Massumi yet comes to the point of arguing the unacceptability of the scientific support of a brain-based determinism. Gallagher begins his refuting discussion with two propositions: first, that “free will cannot be squeezed into 150-350 msec” and, second, “that free will doesn’t apply to abstract motor processes that make up intentional actions—rather it applies to intentional actions themselves.” (p. 238, check quote) Gallagher’s analysis then opens to the role of body (as demanded, of course, by the title of his book) which he sees connected with the brain in a looping fashion, similar to the way I have described the neurobiological network, yet I de-emphasize the significance of the distinction between brain and body. Indeed, this division is, I believe, at the root of Gallagher and Massumi (and Libet, although I think he is in another universe in some respects) seeing this as a problem in the first place particularly attached to such issues that are labeled “free will.” Within this loop, Gallagher acknowledges, actions can be intentional even if “significant aspects of this production took place non-consciously.” 239 For Gallagher it is important to restrict the consideration of free will or conscious volition to a subset of motor processes, those as he said that are “intentional actions themselves.” He then continues, “voluntary actions are not about neurons, muscles, body parts, or even movement—all of which play some part non-consciously—but all such processes are carried along by my decision, that is, by my intentional action.” 239? This is an interesting way of solving the problem by simply declaring that only those actions are intentional that are intentional actions. Yup!

But I think Gallagher has this backwards with his approach only shifting the question to the nature of “intentions” which, now it seems, must come from a magical place outside of bodily processes. This is just another way of saying that something in my head (if not my brain) is the master in control by the exercise of intention. Who’s intention? If they are “my” intentions then where do “I” reside? Gallagher’s response simply shifts the concern to another ontological issue. Also, he sees movement


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(action) as only responsive to intention, returned or even introduced (outside of autonomic functions) as the product of intention.

In the discussion of movement I presented in earlier sections, self-movement living movement is always movement with intention, with direction, conscious or not. Self-movement is need and desire even as it characterizes the vitality of neurons and certainly the entire neurobiological system. Animate beings, movers, are designed (through the evolutionary process) for intentions manifest as living movement. The issue then becomes, wherein do our movements get associated with some notion of being “free,” and what might we understand as “free.” The issue can be addressed in terms of this “missing half second.” For it is in this gap that we find the insights.

During evolution some creatures, humans, evolved to have increasingly complex neurobiological processes that are constantly (as life function) functioning (as many faces of self-movement) to interact with the environment and in remarkably self-referential and folding interactions. As Barbaras showed the greater the distance (and thus the longer the time) between stimulus and reaction the more complex the organism. Thus with the increase in the complexity of the gap (space and time) arise the possibilities, distinctively human, of backfilling in increasingly sophisticated ways, that allows a conscious awareness of an "I" as a “me who is not a you,” a self and other. The very idea of freedom of choice is a qualifier of our neurobiological evolution—the way we distinguish ourselves as we distinguish ourselves via a backfilled grid of articulatable qualities like free will, self, other, and so forth. What is interesting to me is that we cannot even ask the question of free will without having the neurobiological history (phylogenetically and ontogenetically) that we have. The question of free will is the human backfilled capacity to abstract from movement reflective principles, that require the subtraction of movement. Gallagher, as Massumi I think, is confined to this reflective and territorialized arena when he writes, “this isn’t about movement.” Yet, in this perspective, as is obvious from the endless argument about free will, this is about movement because movement seeking resolution is always re-energized by the reaching, the grasping. I have discussed these aspects of movement in an earlier section.

There is another major issue in distinguishing “I.” What is the difference between “I choose” and “I am consciously aware of choosing?” As I have shown, the “I” in the “I can dos” resides in the gestural/postural being more fundamentally than in an intellectual or a conscious being. Our distinctive identity is inseparable from the body concepts (Sheets-Johnstone) and basic level categories (Lakoff) that exist not as concepts and conscious awarenesses but as sensorimotor programs and as engrams where they also have feeling/affect aspects. Based on a variety of studies, I have shown that the “I” exists as this complex neurobiological network. That distinctions between stimulus and reaction, are analytical backfilled efforts to comprehend ourselves in some respects, but the “I” does not reside anywhere, but is rather processual, moving, that is, as a self-moving being that is understood as living because it is moving. To locate the “I” apart from movement is the exercise of capacities that evolved distinctive to human beings to territorialize and analyze absent the movement. “I,” self as process, is always already there as the gap, in the half second, yet, this isn’t a gap that can be crossed, or a half second that simply lapses. These terms are ways of grasping (in the sense of always seeking and being only energized by the process of seeking) ourselves, our nature.


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Now there is another issue related to the word “free” in free will. If we mean free in the radical sense of being without contingencies or influences or contexts, then I believe this understanding of freedom disallows choice to have any significance whatsoever. This freedom can be nothing other than random action. Choice or volition or will has no interest to us apart from possibilities, options, contexts, and most certainly consequences. Free will or volition necessitates the processing of contingencies in the context of possibilities weighing consequences. Even in the most elementary understanding of the neurobiological processes that are required for this processing, for contemplating and making choices, would show that this requires time. The time would be instant if we were actually electronic mechanical beings. It is because of the slow neurotransmission speeds and the remarkably complex neurological network that there is a delay between being presented with making a choice and the action based on that choice. Where it seems Libet allows a “reaction time” between the conscious decision and the physical movement, it seems that he dismisses what occurs in the time lapse between knowing that one needs to make a choice and the awareness of a choice having been made as part of the process of making a choice. The subjects in Libet’s study are told to move a finger when they decide to. He allows that post decision to physical action takes time, but he doesn’t allow that there is a complex process required for making a decision. We all constantly experience an awareness of the conditions of making a choice that actively involve us where there eventually comes a moment well into this process that we acknowledge that we’ve made the choice as we are already acting to effect it.

Massumi refers to this aspect of the process, I think, as intensity, the quality of incipience of movement. Manning I believe would call this the preacceleration aspect of moving. We could also identify it in terms of tonus, a resonating aspect that is an aspect of making choices.

Continuing on the analysis of the notion of “conscious choice,” the understanding of choice that it seems most discussants of this issue have in mind is choice being a singular fixed moment, a precise instant of stimulus to action. Intentional action then for Gallagher is action that proceeds from a moment of intention. Yet, we simply don’t work this way. Let’s say someone asks us a complicated question. We pause and begin our response with the time-buying meaningless, in this context, word “well” and then initiate a string of words that proceed not in some highly confined logical singular pathway from the “choice” or “intention.” Rather we proceed on a feeling, or as C. S. Peirce called it a feeling kind of knowing, on a sense that we need to start talking in a certain way. I’m certainly doing this as I’m writing these words. I have not made a choice to arrive at a particular conclusion, but I have a sense, a feeling, that as I reflect on it has rather less to do with conscious thought than with visceral gestural hunch and guess. However, as I reflect on it, the only thing that keeps me stringing these words together is a willfulness that in doing so I’ll make myself clear to myself and perhaps others, though the latter is less important. I believe that these words, as all our actions, are constantly spewing from this half second gap, this synapse that is stimulating and living only in that the movement is self-renewing. And the relatively slow speed of neurotransmission is the mechanism that allows the freedom, the volition, the intentionality, as well as the ownership of the choice, the stamp that it is my choice.

We exist so far as this is a living vital existence in the Thieves’ Forest in the Internuncial Net in the self-movement that is “our” perception, that is “me.” I believe that we could not be, were it not for the


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mysterious half second. From the discussion I am presenting, this half second is not missing, but rather this half second is all we have … ever. In this half second gap is where all our personal history, our cultural values and qualities, and so on exist and constantly shape our lives. The gap is where it’s at! The gap doesn’t close, the half second isn’t concluded; it is characterized in its flowing (always flowing) like neurotransmission; process not grid, not clock; and as living movement cannot be divided or reckoned. The processes are not comprehendible as cause to effect, but as a remarkably complex afferent/efferent self-adjusting complex of movement. Movement is the only way that this time gap can make sense; movement which always arises from a negativity yet is continuously renewed in being unfulfilled.

We invoke time (think about it) only to backfill or territorialize movement and in doing so we remove the movement. When we put the movement back, then free will is not a decision point directing some consequent movement (action)—didn’t we learn anything from Bergson’s view of Zeno?—free will is the movement always called forth in the distinctively complex neurobiological system that gives rise to backfilled images of “I,” “free,” “will,” “cause-effect,” “time,” “agency,” and on. Movement, living or self-movement, is ontogenetic to even the issue.

The very question/doubt/indeterminacy/affect connected to outcome of the term “free will” is on the one hand only possible because of the development through evolution that give human beings sufficient neurobiological complexity of this network we vaguely grasp as gap that demands the extra time, that we have identified as the missing half second, for memory, sense of self, notions of recognition, grasping, art, religion, and on as well as awareness of choice and agency. Cows could care less about free will and intention!

Primacy of Moving-Touching in Proprioception“The brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less.”

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

My objective here is to establish that movement, and now also touching, are primary to all perception, all sensation, and thus the core of human vitality. Once self-movement and touching are established as primary we can revision, rebuild a number of things. First, we will rebuild the sensorium so that movement isn’t left out altogether, but is foundational to all the senses and touching is not relegated to one of the lesser or animal senses, but is, with respect to sensation, inseparable from movement. Second, there are accompanying insights in terms of what it means to be human both as we share life with all animate organisms, but also in providing us clues about how to comprehend and articulate what has, through evolution, given certain distinctions among the animals to us humans. And, finally, thus equipped we should be able to engage in the study and appreciation of cultures and religions without wringing the life (movement, touch, sensation, behavior, action) and vitality out of them in order to study them.

The approach I am forging here is to ground insights in a “naturalist” base which is to describe aspects of our neurobiology and appreciate them not only in terms of the way they function to effect movement


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and touching and thus life, but also to identify inspiring, provocative, and powerful principles and images that pertain at macro-behavioral levels as well as at the micro-cellular levels.

To this point in this process I have focused the consideration of movement largely to the self-movement that occurs in and among neurons and how this movement corresponds with the insights of movement philosophy. While I have suggested that these principles and images apply to the entire human being I have discussed this primarily in terms of groping and grasping, the movement processes by which human bodies reach out and touch the environment in the creation and discovery of self and other and how these also constitute interrogative as well as agentive aspects of our behavior. Where I have considered the synaptic connection between glial cells, via axons and dendrites, I have yet to consider how it is that we are able to connect with the world around us. Movement and touch are clearly implicated, but we now must ask how this connection process works from a “naturalist” base and then discern the principles we discover in the process of this description.

It would seem that physical contact of the body with the world would center on the touch contact with the skin and the exteroceptors that are located in the skin. While these are, of course, important, I want here to focus on a medium depth aspect of touch because it is here that movement and touching are inseparable. It is here that we first begin to transcend ourselves. Consider our earliest groping behavior as infants. While certainly the texture and character of contact on skin offers a continuum of sensation from pleasure to pain with a variety of qualities along the way, it is the connection that is felt as response to muscular action and the neuromuscular response that builds sensorimotor experiences that shape the discovery of self and world. This contact experience involves movement conjoined with inner touch that is broadly constituitive; a neuromuscular moving-touching process that we may call proprioception. Proprius is “one’s own,” thus proprioception is perception of one’s own self and usually refers to the sense of relative position of body parts. But the implications are much greater in that proprioceptors are where neuron and muscle cells are inseparable yet separate, where integral skin-encased bodies and the environment are inseparable yet separate, where self and other are inseparable yet separate, where excitatory and inhibitory energies are inseparable as tonus and posture yet separate, where interrogative and inquiry are inseparable from agentive action yet separate; where thought and action are inseparable yet separate; where touching and being touched, percipient and preceptor, proprioception and proprioceived are inseparable yet separate. Proprioceptors offer powerful imagery of the two-that-is-one structurality that is a core principle to our vitality and our living behavior colored and shaped by culture, history, psychology.

The muscles are full of sense receptors; the muscle spindles (intrafusal fibers) are the most elaborate sensory structures in the body outside of the eyes and ears. Muscle Spindles are at the heart of all fine motor skills. A muscle spindle is comprised of from 3 to 10 specialized muscle fibers surrounded by a protective sheath forming a spindle shape, that is, thicker in the center and tapering to the ends. These muscle spindles, also called intrafusal fibers, are much smaller than the large skeletal muscles that surround them making up the belly of the muscle and that do the major work. Efferent nerve motor fibers from the cord or brain enter the muscle spindle with the motor endings spread through the fiber. Anulospiral receptors (afferent nerve endings) enter the muscle spindle and wrap in spirals around the


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muscle fibers. The gaps between the coils are sensed by these receptors measuring the degree and speed of expansion and contraction of the fiber they hug as a whole. It is here in the muscle spindles that the efferent and afferent sides of the nervous system have their closest physiological association. Their association is where movement and sensation are joined together. Importantly the anulospiral receptors feel the movement itself; that is, as the muscle moves the anulospiral receptors feel how far and fast the muscle moves. Muscle spindles are then motor units that can feel themselves and this is a feature unique to them. The anulospiral receptors do not feel the effect of the movement of the skeletal muscles, but rather they feel the moving muscle fibers. This is a key distinction because the anulospiral receptors then sense movement itself, living movement, not the measurant of backfilled territorialized movement effects.

The muscle spindles are connected to the spine and to the skeletal muscles most immediately in the spindle reflex arc. The afferent nerve ending as an anulospiral receptor is at the end of an axon stretching out to the spinal column. In the spinal cord this neuron synapses with nerves that carry the information about the muscles to the brain, but it also synapses with the efferent skeletal motor neurons for the very same muscle being sensed. This allows a reflex arc that goes from muscle spindle (infrafusal) to cord and back to skeletal muscle without going to the brain. There are of course synapses that connect these signals to the brain, but that obviously takes more time and has a different function. So the spindle reflex arc is rather like a miniature nervous system.

Thus there are interwoven in the muscles the skeletal muscles and the intrafusal fibers or muscle spindles. The motor neurons that stimulate these two muscle systems are separate. The skeletal motor neurons (alpha motor neurons) have their own paths through the spinal column ending near the summit of the brain, the motor cortex. The intrafusal motor neurons (gamma motor neurons) take their own discrete pathways up the spinal cord and end in collections of cell bodies (ganglia) deep in the brain, in the brain stem. Thus there are two separate motor systems within us. The alpha originates (or is associated with) in the cortex and is associated with conscious sensations in the sensory cortex, operates the skeletal muscles, and is responsive to conscious motor commands. The gamma originates in (is associated with) the older part of the brain, has no conscious sensations and functions primarily beneath the levels of conscious awareness.

However, these two separate systems are joined at their peripheries by the anulospisral receptors which wrap the fibers of intrafusal spindles and synapse in the spinal column with their alpha partner motor nerve for the associated skeletal muscles. Thus any impulse and movement initiated by one system necessarily triggers an immediate reciprocal impulse and movement in the other, since the anulospiral receptor is stretched or compressed in either case. The alpha muscle system seems to dominate, do the work of moving body parts, with the gamma systems, tiny and hidden amongst the skeletal muscles, seems at best to offer a monitoring or feedback role. However, closer consideration reveals differently. The importance of the gamma system is hinted at by the fact that fully 1/3 rd of the motor neurons in the human body are gamma. I’ll come back to this, but now to introduce the other major proprioceptor, the Golgi Tendon Organ (GTO).


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The Golgi Tendon Organ is another sensory device occurring in large numbers among the collagen bundles of the tendons and they serve as minute gauges of the efforts of the alpha muscle fibers. The collagen fibers are zigzag shaped offering a small degree of elasticity in the tendon as the muscle is stretched. The GTOs are multi-branched endings of sensory axons woven among the zigzagging collagen fibers. The GTOs are highly specific and reflect the activity of only 10 to 15 fibers in the skeletal muscles. The GTOs carry information to the ganglia of the brain stem, with a few direct connections to the conscious cortical areas. Most of the information from the GTOs is processed unconsciously in the brain stem.

The anulospiral receptors and the GTOs are closely paired but measure different aspects of movement. Where the anulospsiral receptors measure the length of the muscle fiber and the speed with which the length changes, the GTOs measure the tensions that are developing as a result of the changing lengths. The degree of distortion in the parallel zigzags of the collagen bundles is a precise gauge of the force with which the muscle is pulling on the bone to which it is associated. If these seem redundant these differences allow the same degree of movement of my arm lifting either a book or a feather the same distance and at the same speed. The GTOs assess the exact amount of resistance which is overcome in order to contract a given distance in a given time.

GTOs and anulospirals together measure the pure mass of an object, that is, the measure of the object’s resistance to movement. Importantly we can have no idea of the value of mass until we are actively engaged in moving the object or connecting with it through movement. And we can begin to see that we cannot even know ourselves as moving bodies apart from the combined experience gained through the proprioceptors as we physically encounter our bodies in connection with the world through movement.

Like the anulospiral receptors axons that synapse with the motor neurons of the skeletal muscles in the spinal cord, so too do the GTO axons. However, they perform complementary functions. The anulospiral receptors have an excitatory effect on the alpha motor nerves, while the GTOs have an inhibitory effect on the alpha motor nerves. The anulospirals initiate movement and the GTOs inhibit movement in part to prevent the tear of muscle fibers or ligaments but certainly to adjust movement to the precise demands of the task at hand.

[discuss the integration of alpha and gamma … to create skilled and smooth movement … associated with tonus, posture, gesture, skill, etc.]

So what observations might we make about this barest of introductions to proprioception? Certainly we must be amazed at the nearly overwhelming complexity of a system that is fundamental to our existence as animate organisms. Proprioception is the conjunction of the nervous system and the musculature and has no other interest than movement. Yet, by proprioceptors being the interconnection between the afferent and efferent, nervous and musculature system, they are also at the heart of the connection between a person and environment, self and other, person and condition. Proprioception is the inner touch that allows us to transcend the skin-encased physical boundaries of


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our bodies. Through the conjunction of movement and touch, proprioception connects us with ourselves and our worlds.

With regard to movement proprioception does many things: it refines the physical movements during the movement based on environmental connections. It provides sensation of movement to both the old parts of the brain and to the sensorimotor cortex so that the experience of movement registers on sensorimotor patterns that create gesture, posture, skillsets, engrams … all of which are inseparable from our personal identity because it embodies/embrains our movement experience. Proprioception is at once the monitor for the nervous system regarding the behavior of muscles as well as an active force in the refinement and control of skeletal muscle movement. Without proprioception we would lurch and rip about, if we could move at all. Proprioception engages the borderland of the conscious and unconscious dimensions of our lives. While we may consciously direct our movement and action, the actual effecting of what is consciously directed would be impossible without the unconscious proprioceptive functions. Proprioception is what turns mere biomechanical movement into living movement. And as living movement it is inseparable from feeling; feelings enter into the internuncial network that impacts the values in the proprioceptors; the ease and efficiency of the movement monitored and effected by proprioceptors is experienced as feeling. Proprioceptors are conditioned by the development of sensorimotor patterns in the development of skill, gesture, habit, engram, posture, and tonus [all to be considered in fuller detail later] functioning as the foundation for that general sense of being, a sense of normalcy, a sense of the rightness. Proprioception is connected to the pleasure of skilled movement, to the flow when movement activities are identified with the proprioceptive immediacy of the performance of movement. Proprioception is that feeling kind of knowing that is not backfilled or territorialized which is why it cannot easily be described even on reflection in terms other than the vague references to “rightness” or “pleasure” or “flow.” Proprioception is sensation and movement, monitor and initiator, exciter and inhibiter, muscle and nerve, conscious and unconscious, inside and outside, self and other, reflexive and directed, creative and traditional, inquiry and skill, habit and innovator, …

Neonatal Movement; Phylogenesis, Evolution, OntogenesisFebruary 3, 2012 Lecture Outline

1. Cognitive Science:a. Minimal criteria: resolve mind/body problemb. Enaction

2. Project Possibilities:a. Any sensory rich topic with cultural and historical specificity; a cultural practice, a ritual,

an event, a place, a work of art, music, etc. even writing or a textb. Essential will be to attend especially to how to reverse the movement/vitality destroying

effects of territorialization (backfilling)


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c. Essential to understand the processual, moving, worlding, gesturing, posturing aspects of your topic; how it creates self and world, how is retains tradition while being agentive, and so forth.

d. Essential to see that identity (self), environment or world (other), cognition, connection, transcendence (of self and thus the basic model for religious transcendence), reason, reality, sensuality, pleasure, pain, and so on are all discovered and created and given valuation in the experiential perceptual neurobiological life where there is a primacy of self-movement.

e. Essential to apply principles and ideas being developed in the course. i. Eg. Distance. Religion and aspects of religion related to the defining movement

generated by the desire to overcome a gap/distance that cannot be overcome. Prayer, pilgrimage, ritual, etc. This is a huge one since synapse/gap distance desire are all ways of comprehending self-moving, living moving.

ii. Eg. Paradox. The fundamental paradox of the Christ event … vertical (transcendence) and horizontal (immanence) … god is both spirit and in heaven and embodied and on earth. This is a fundamental Christian paradox that might well drive the movement of Christian history. It is not to be solved! It is to fuel the movement that is everlasting life. Notice the active character of such things as blood … how it evokes strong emotion, how it is ambiguous (blood of life of murder of sin of sacrifice), blood cannot be passive even if dried. All sensory-rich materials have this active quality, drawing out action and reaction, engaging emotion, and so forth and these effects/affects are their vitality and to understand the dynamics of their movement is more insightful than dismissing them with a backfilled description or a dry statement of what they mean.

iii. Eg. Network or self-adjusting network. We often understand history as point to point, cause and effect, as one cause and an effect. Yet, clearly any event that is marked by history is simply a backfilled point in the circulation of endless circulating influences. We can emphasize the dynamics of these movements, how their interactions excite or inhibit further movement, etc.

f. As we continue in the course we will find that all thought, all the common senses, have their base in movement/touching and thus share the qualities I’ve just suggested. We’ll certainly see that even sight (the sense we feel most objective) is deeply entwined with movement and touching … and so with the other senses.

3. Neonatal Movementa. Setting for concern with neonatal movement … why it is important. Groping to grasping. b. Neonatal imitation capabilities: Body schema vs body image. Primitive proprioceptive

system. Primitive sense of self. Issues of cognition.4. Correlation of ontogenetics and phylogenetics

a. Evolution of humans … upright posture, use of hands, focus on face (eyes and speech) … all centered on changing form of motility

b. Human development … quadrapedal movement to bipedal movement, …


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c. Longer developmental time than other animals … leads to the creation of distance (and longer time required for neurotransmission) that Barbaras identifies with the more advanced animate organisms. Our distinction as animals comes from the slow speed of our human development and the slow speed of our neurotransmission.

Touching and Moving1. Camera Obscura Analogy of Perception

a. Characteristics: objectivist, separation of observer and observed, hierarchy of sensorium (sight/hearing superior to “animal senses”), distrust of feeling, movement is primarily a concern of grids.

b. Intro to shifts initiated by Merleau-Ponty“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.” M-P Visible and Invisible, p. 138. Reverses all of the valences associated with camera obscura.

2. Implications, restrictions, alternativea. Manning’s approach in Politics of Touch (she doesn’t explicitly reference M-P, yet is in

the lineage of his work)i. Against mind/body, reason/senses distinctions

ii. Against stable body as point of departure, i.e., pre-given in time and spaceiii. For relational body

1. Process is foregrounded2. Thinking the processual body is a way we articulate and live the political

b. Implications from my point of viewi. Impact on our understanding and appreciation of culture, religion, life

ii. Impact on the way we live our lives in the world and relate to othersiii. Emphasize process, becoming, moving, vitality … not static, grid, being, deadiv. Meaning is understood in terms of generative/ energizing force of structuralities

like play, paradox, gap, distance, desire, grasping, etc rather than meaning that fixes, that terminates

3. Touching and Movementa. Manning’s insights

i. Early life is linked to touch (groping)ii. Touch is the way to locate body-in-movement

iii. Touch is not simply the laying on of hands, but an act of touching, that is, reaching toward something (grasping) that is not reached or reachable, like axons-dendrites

iv. Touching is creating space through worlding (Manning’s and Massumi’s term)1. Proprioceptors measure speed, length, and tension as characteristics of

movement and register these on sensorimotor programs in the neuromuscular system or where they hone and refine and revise existing sensorimotor programs


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v. Touching and the other1. The political (in Manning’s account; I think of it more in Mauss’ terms of

cultural, historical, psychological) context of touching/movement makes movement/touch into gesture.

2. There is an interdependence of the touch and the touched, the subject and object. This is what we will soon see that Merleau-Ponty referred to as reversibility, as chiasm, as flesh

b. Examples of touching and movement becoming gesture with political, cultural, religious value

i. Schools: restriction and prohibition of movement and touching. Explicit way of politicizing bodies, making fixed bodies (students). Serves the purpose of controlling the body politic in order to insinuate values and in much deeper ways than the content. Shapes the behavior and the values associated with behavior. Interesting that the restriction of movement and touching in schools is not unlike that for prisons. It is only in terms of degree and the content that distinguishes them. Michel Foucault did extensive studies of the political significance of imprisoned bodies.

ii. Cultural Identity: practices associated with movement and touching and body proximity correlate closely with cultural identity. E. T. Hall The Hidden Dimension outlined a study of this aspect of culture he called proxemics.

c. Manning and touch continued:i. Incorporeal/corporeal

“The incorporeal is like a smudge that emanates from your body’s potential movement. The smudge exfoliates in all directions, leaving traces of the potential of the animated body as it moves from here to there, from the now to the not-yet, from the after to the before to the will-have-come. The incorporeal is not the opposite of the corporeal. It is a stage of corporeality that reminds us that the corporeal is only ever vitually concrete. The body is always what it has not yet become. The body is in metamorphosis.” Manning Politics of Touch, pp. xviii-xix

ii. Body without Organs (BwO)1. Image is from Antonin Artaud developed by Giles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari. Their point is to use this shocking construction BwO to kick us into remembering that the corporeal is always the becoming-body, the body that will-have-come. BwO means you “have to divest yourself of your biology” … “Bodies interrelate, extending form into matter, matter into form. BwO not only create relational networks with the world and with each other, these relations themselves become embodied. Bodies incorporate by becoming more than them-selves.” Manning Politics of Touch, pp. xix-xx


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2. There is a possibility that, while this idea is important, there is a lack of understanding and appreciation of the “organs.” My description of neurons (with their axons, dendrites, and various mechanisms of movement that transcend the limitations of the body of the cell) and the proprioceptors (which are of value only in terms of the touching and moving body in an environment that extends beyond the body) demonstrate that these “organics” surpass their bodies by design. The architecture of the organic body is an architecture of movement, touching, and transcendence.

d. Manning, Tango, and important issues: Manning’s consideration of the touch/movement aspects of Tango lead her to discuss topics of enormous importance:

i. Gesture: She depends largely on Italian Giorgio Agamben particularly since he places gesture in the context of the political, yet this view is articulated largely in terms of the relationship of gesture to language (this strategy is twd poor gesture). Manning could have developed a richer understanding of gesture that would have been totally consistent with her general intent. Gesture is not simply expression (agentive), but also interrogative (grasping). Gesture occurs in a looping complex auto-adjusting interactive network.

ii. Double-touching: that to touch is to be touched is a core issue that was at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s development of his “ontology of flesh” and in his efforts to develop language to fly in the direction of this complex image such as reversibility, chiasm, and many others. The topic is taken up further in important works by Jean Luc Nancy and Jacque Derrida’s discussion of Nancy’s work. Here are some things that Manning says on this topic: “Touch functions through a double genitive. I touch you twice, once in my gesture toward you and once in the experience of feeling your body, my skin against yours. You con-tact me. I cannot approach you tactilely without feeling that approach. I touch (you). From your body, I elicit a response, a response not necessarily felt or acknowledged through words, but through a return of the touching I initiate.” Manning Politics of Touch, p. 11. And, “Touching is directionally toward a body which has-not-yet-become, not a body in stasis, but a body moved and moving. I touch what I cannot quite reach, I am touched by an other I cannot quite comprehend, I abstain from touching what I touch with an abstinence that holds within itself the desire to touch, to feel, to sense you.” Ibid., p. 12.

Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Flesh; Touch & Pure DepthFeb 8 & 10, 2012

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French existential phenomenologist whose understanding of human perception reshaped traditional philosophical positions. He denied the body-mind split that has for centuries shaped the way we understand not only perception and body, but also what


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it means to be human. His conjunctive constructions of the lived-body and the minded-body seek acknowledgment of the traditional distinction without the radical separation.5 He defined the mind as “the other side of the body” holding that

we have no idea of a mind that would not be doubled with a body. . . . The ‘other side’ means that the body, inasmuch as it has this other side, is not describable in objective terms, in terms of the in itself–that this other side is really the other side of the body, overflows into it (Ueberschreiten), encroaches upon it, is hidden in it–and at the same time needs it, terminates in it, is anchored in it.6

There can be no mind without body. At the time of Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961 he was working on a manuscript that was to broadly expand his earlier ideas, specifically through his development of what has come to be termed “ontology of flesh.” The manuscript was edited and posthumously published as The Visible and the Invisible and the ontology of flesh is developed most fully in the complex often opaque essay “The Intertwining–The Chiasm.”7

Merleau-Ponty does not limit his understanding of flesh to skin and meat, nor are these its primary reference, yet his most enduring and inspiring analogy and example of what he termed flesh8 is developed in his reflections on our experience of touching one hand with our other hand.

If my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part. Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it; the two systems are applied upon one another, as the two halves of an orange.9

There are at least two things here: a hand touching an object and a sentient object being touched,

5In very general ways these ideas are explored in terms of dancing by Sandra Fraleigh in her book Dance and the Lived Body (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987).6Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 259. “In itself” or “being-in-itself” is a Sartrian term referring to nonconscious being. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), especially the glossary by translator Hazel E. Barnes.7Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 130 - 155. The predecessors to this theory are found in “The Philosopher and his Shadow,” trans. Richard C. McCleary, in Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964).8I believe this example provides the “flesh” terminology Merleau-Ponty adopted. The difficulty with this terminology lies in its inevitable identity with substantive banal flesh, an identity we have constantly to deny even though it is the basic bodied experience we must always depend on as the basis for our understanding. There is a certain irony in the need to disembody, even dematerialize Flesh, in order that it help us more fully understand our being lived-bodies. Some more philosophically focused discussion of this, at least more than what I want to do anyway, would be interesting.9Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible., 133.


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but in this case the object touched is the other hand of the person, the subject, doing the touching. There is a complexity here, as Merleau-Ponty shows, that denies the simple division between object and subject, between the perceived and perceiver. What is doing the touching is also being touched and vice versa. Merleau-Ponty points out the crisscrossing in which the touching and the tangible are but two sides of the same thing as are the two halves of an orange. The unifying structure of two hands touching is the inarguable singularity due to both being of the same human body. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “My two hands touch the same things because they are the hands of one same body.”10 “The body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis, by welding to one another the two outlines of which it is made, its two laps: the sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible within it is born by segregation and upon which, as seer, it remains open.”11 “Our body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees them and touches them; we say, because it is evident, that it unites these two properties within itself, and its double belongingness to the order of the ‘object’ and to the order of the ‘subject’ reveals to us quite unexpected relations between the two orders.”12

This image of the body that is two yet one is clarified with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of chiasm (a cross piece, crossing place, or to mark with the letter chi), that is, a crisscrossing, intertwining, folding that he calls “flesh.” Flesh is not stagnant or inanimate matter, but rather it is on the order of an element (in the same sense as fire, air, earth and water) in the sense of being constitutive of reality.13 I might prefer the term “structurality” to indicate a dynamic relationality. It is a texture, he says, (a woven fabric) that expresses the fundamental unity and continuity, yet allowing diversity, division, and opposition, that permeates all interrelated and interwoven pairings. It is no thing, but the formative medium of the subject and object. As a skin or fabric, flesh is two-sided–the sensitive and the sensed–yet where the two are not entirely separable from one another. The hand being touched is also capable of touching. The sides are reversible as are the insides and outsides of a jacket or glove or, to suggest a metaphor Merleau-Ponty did not use, the windings of a möbius strip. A möbius strip is a single-sided geometrical structure. It can be modeled by taking a thin strip of paper, twisting it a half turn, and joining the ends together. At any point on the strip one can turn it over to confirm that is has a second side. By holding the paper between one’s finger and thumb it is clear that the finger is on one side, the thumb on the other. Yet, when one traces the extent of one side, say by marking a line along the

10Ibid., 141.11Ibid., 136.12Ibid., 137. The leaves metaphor is interesting. Leaves, as of a tree, are all different yet all connected to the same species (we know a tree by the shape of its leaves) and even of one entity. Leaves of a book carry on the structurality and include a sense of the two sides, as in turning over a new leaf, meaning I suppose in the behavioral analogy that one side of a leaf differs from the other while still being the same.13The shift of flesh from the gross matter of the inspiring analogy, that is, two hands, to the elemental is a difficult one largely because of the gross physicality, the bloodiness, that is almost inseparable from the word “flesh.” Dancing, I’ll suggest, is an important alternative.


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length of the strip, it is continuous and single, the line meets itself without any break to move from one side to the other. The endless conjunction and continuity of inside and outside is also captured by the infinity sign this form takes as a three dimensional object.14

For Merleau-Ponty, the essential feature of flesh is its reversibility (a description of a structurality), the exchange between the inside and outside, the subjective and objective, the touching and the touched, the seeing and the seen, and so on. Which hand is touching; which is being touched? Which side of the möbius strip is the outside? The structurality that Merleau-Ponty calls flesh is characterized by reversibility, a capacity to fold in on itself, a reflexivity, a fundamental gap or dehiscence that is also continuity and connection of being that Merleau-Ponty shows is the operative relationality that makes possible perception, language, and thought. Merleau-Ponty did not explicitly give primacy to movement in his discussion, but there are plenty of signs he recognized it. And, of course, Renaud Barbaras, the leading authority on Merleau-Ponty, has written much on movement clearly developed from Merleau-Ponty. It is in the separation and division that perception, language, and thought occur; but were there not also a unity or interdependence among the parts, there would be no connection, no passage, no access from one part of a structure to the other. It is the reversibility of flesh–“a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself,”15—that offers the separation that is also continuity and therefore motivates movement and makes life possible.

As perception is the intertwining of the percipient and the perceptibles, Merleau-Ponty extends his notion beyond the boundaries of the human body in his understanding of what he called the “flesh of the world.” Merleau-Ponty attacks the self-other distinction that usually survives even those philosophies that interrelate or identify mind and body. He sees that to allow this radical separation, this dichotomy, would be to stop too soon. “Is my body a thing, is it an idea? It is neither, being the measurant of the things. We will therefore have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions.”16 Merleau-Ponty expands the understanding of body to extend beyond that space displaced by the physical body. The flesh of the world extends perception beyond the physical body, but, as importantly, it re-conceptualizes the body as extending into the world. As the inner and outer are continuous (separable, but unified), as the body and mind, subject and object fit the same pattern, so too do the physical body and the world beyond it. 14Merleau-Ponty did not refer to the möbius as a model. Elizabeth Grosz did apply it to his work. See Volitile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 36. Merleau-Ponty used an analogy that was quite close, “If one wants mataphors, it would be better to say that the body sensed and the body sentient are as the obverse and the reverse, or again, as two segments of one sole circular course which goes above from left to right and below from right to left, but which is but one sole movement in its two phases. And everything is said about the sensed body pertains to the whole of the sensible of which it is a part, and to the world.” Visible and Invisible, p. 138. His reference to one sole circular course is but a half twist from being a mobius and clearly the mobius would have served him as a better metaphor.15Visible and Invisible, p. 146.16Ibid., 152.


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This development is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception. Perception, as usually understood, bifurcates the perceiver and world perceived, yet, for Merleau-Ponty, they are of the same fabric, they are both of the flesh of the world. He writes,

If the body is one sole body in its two phases, it incorporates into itself the whole of the sensible and with the same movement incorporates itself into a “Sensible in itself.” 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?17

Otherwise, Merleau-Ponty argues, we would be in a world he finds impossible, a world divided into discontinuous paired members isolated from one another. The flesh of the world is the fabric that at once divides us from and unites us with the world in which we live, the world beyond the bounds of our physical bodies, the world that we perceive and experience. Here our sentient bodies are understood by Merleau-Ponty as belonging to the same flesh as non-self-sentient sensibility, as those things outside the body that we perceive as objects sensed. Merleau-Ponty argues that we are able to perceive that which is beyond us because our bodies share the same fabric, a fabric he calls the flesh of the world.18

Merleau-Ponty investigates the bond that he calls flesh between the physical and the idea or internal image, the issue addressed by the title given his book, the bond between the visible and the invisible. He writes, ideas

could not be given to us as ideas except in the carnal experience. It is not only that we would find in that carnal experience the occasion to think them; it is that they owe their authority, their fascinating, indestructible power, precisely to the fact that they are in transparency behind the sensible, or in its heart.19

He says further,

The idea is this level, this dimension. It is therefore not a de facto invisible, like an object hidden behind another, and not an absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits the world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being.20

17Ibid., 138.18This understanding of the body as extending beyond the skin into the world is not unknown beyond Merleau-Ponty. One thinks of Edward T. Hall’s work The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1966) with proxemics, which explores how our physical bodies are surrounded by domains (bubbles) that can be characterized differently that extend us into the world seemingly outside of ourselves. However, Merleau-Ponty’s work is far more radical. Rather than our bodies extending into the world beyond our physical boundaries, Merleau-Ponty argues that we are continuous with the world, of the same fabric, yet still distinct from it.19Visible and Invisible, p. 150.20Ibid., p. 151.


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Merleau-Ponty’s flesh ontology addresses the current most engaging cultural and intellectual problem: is there intrinsic order in the world. Merleau-Ponty articulates his understanding of this intrinsic order in the terms of this doubling structurality, this intertwining, this reversibility, this reciprocity, this flesh that makes possible, that grounds, that both distinguishes and unifies self and other. For Merleau-Ponty the reversibility of flesh constitutes “the ultimate truth.”21

Merleau-Ponty begins with a semi-naturalist position, one common to phenomenology, which is to consider the experience of touch/touching, particularly one hand touching the other. He describes the experience of this. While M-P has a naturalist base, he does not include a discussion of proprioception as fundamental to understanding touch. I believe that doing so would have greatly developed his work, especially in comprehending the interdependence of movement and touch. Tactility for Merleau-Ponty is the primordial sense in which the body’s interiority is constituted. There is, for M-P a distinctive structurality to touch/touching which conveys the relation between self and other as dual elements of a singular incorporeality. That means that the corporeal arises in this relationship in this incorporeality. Consciousness is not possible without touch. We have had this fleshed out for us by Manning, though of course she is dependent on M-P who developed it.

Then, as we have seen, Merleau-Ponty fleshed out this relationship under the broad rubric of “flesh” which of course was inspired by his fundamental image/exemplar touching. Flesh has to do with subjective/objective relationships which he understands in terms of the structurality of touching. It is incorporeal, no thing, nothing named in philosophy, a structurality (structuration is the word he uses), or as Manning and Massumi would have it, a virtuality. M-P then knowing that this virutality cannot be nailed down, grasped, set out to offer a variety of images, relationalities, metaphors that would engage us further in the grasping process, the movement that draws us toward what cannot be reached. I’ll quickly summarize these terms:

Reversibility: this points us toward the body’s simultaneous status as perceiving subject and object of perception. It is the two that is one. There is an incompleteness to this reversibility which M-P referred to as a “fecund negative.” This reminds us Barbaras’s discussion of movement which occurs because of a negative that leads to the motivation he called “desire.” It is this incompleteness that gives movement and the potential for significance to reversibility. It is an oscillation, a movement across a gap or distance that exists because the one is divided or split into two (M-P uses the botanical term dehiscence for this), yet the oneness is the movement, the desire (translating a bit here) that is the oneness.

Chiasm: based on the appearance of the Greek letter Chi, chiasm is a crossing place, a crossover of two separate things. It is where two things are one thing. It is the Christian cross; the unity of horizontal and vertical, transcendent and immanent. M-P sees chiasm as a folding back, like

21Ibid., p. 155.


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cloth or flesh, on itself. But the important point is not that the crossing place of chiasm closes the gap and settles the twoness with a unity; rather, it is that the structurality of chiasm is that the twoness is always there even as it is also one. The chiasm is more a gap that is a distance without dimension that it allows us to move in the grasping direction.

Mobiatic: M-P did not use this mathematical image but others have suggested it might be useful. It is a two-sided figure that is also a one-sided figure.

Depth: Turning to vision, M-P discussed the depth perception which is obviously related to flesh. He discussed the neurobiology of stereopsis where the nerves from one eye cross over to the opposite side brain hemisphere; a chiasm of vision. The interesting thing is that we literally see two different images because our two eyes are physically separate, but we perceive one image. This is again an image to help us comprehend the two that are one, but never quite. Further it is in stereopsis that we gain the best capacity to perceive depth, that is, distance. The world takes on dimension through the two that are one.

Pure Depth: Turning from the visual understanding of depth, or distance, M-P contemplated the idea of “pure depth.” Depth at a naïve 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 Merleau-Ponty appreciates depth as a “sensitive space,” as “living movement,” as “lived distance.”22 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.”23

Depth, or more properly “pure depth,” when taken in this most profound sense, 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.24 In its thickness, depth preceding perception is perhaps difficult to grasp. Merleau-Ponty offers an analogy that both depends on vision and also foils vision to the point of replacing it with touch, with feeling. This lever is “dark space,” the experience of night or darkness. In 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.”25 The experience of dark space provides a means of trying to grasp pure depth. Pure

22 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. 45.23 Cataldi, p. 45.24 Ibid., p. 48.25 Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time, (1933), p. 429, cited in Cataldi, p. 49.


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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.”26

Pure depth is key to understanding flesh which, like pure depth, as pure depth, is always already there as precessive, that is, “the formative medium of the subject and object” and as progenitive, the “inauguration of the where and when.”27 The moving body is fundamental to flesh, because through movement flesh begins to understand itself or become aware of itself.28 Flesh, without the 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.29

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 oscillate 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 the other 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.

Corporeality or Body: The implications for body are perhaps obvious by this point and they follow on Manning’s discussion of incorporeality/corporeality in a prior lecture. For M-P the body is not understood as the origin of perception, but rather the origin of the body is in the relationality of perception. The living body, as M-P calls it, is not the physical body (which M-P

26 Cataldi quoting Minkowski, p. 50.27 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 140, quoted in Cataldi, p. 60. 28 Cataldi, p. 61.29 Ibid., p. 67.


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sees as the object of biology). The living body is a contingent/relational body. It is the body that cannot be properly conceived, adequately thematized or reproduced because it is “flesh.” Barbaras focused on living movement to characterize the same structurality. Living movement is always moving and therefore cannot be conceived or reproduced because it is moving, living. I think there is perhaps less distance between the living body and the physical body than M-P and others are allowing. Thus my interest in an approach that might be characterized as a bit more of a “radical naturalism.” I see in the consideration of the architecture of neurons and proprioception the same structuralities; the flesh that is, acdg to M-P, the “ultimate reality.” Why should not these structuralities of ultimate reality pertain even more fundamentally to the most basic level constituencies of our existence?

Tonus and Sense of EffortFeb 13 & 15

1. Orchestration of Muscle Responsea. Substantia Nigra: ganglia (old brain) responsible for the interpretation and coordination

of overall sensory information coming from muscle spindles and tendon organs. Not “felt” but essential to smooth integrated movement

b. Globus Pallidus: ganglia (old brain) that sift and select sensory information to brace parts of our bodies in order to support the desired movement of other parts. Phenomenon of fixation. This is essential in order to do much of what we do from writing with a pen to most all movement. “habitual repetition of these preferred fixations which creates the individualized tension patterns in our musculatures, and eventually even alters the thickness of our fascia and the shape of our bones in order to more efficiently accommodate a limited number of positions. As we select postural fixations and become more and more attached to them, their increasing familiarity begins to give us a comforting sensory and psychological stability, a constant norm to which we return as to a favorite jacket or an old friend. … my favorite fixed positions eventually cease to be something I am doing and become to a large degree what I am. The fixation becomes dominant, and the release more difficult; person, posture, and point of view become firmly welded together, unfortunately limiting all three. … I need a large repertoire of fixations, so that I am not trapped in the discomforts inherent in any single position.” Juhan, p. 220

c. Striate Body: ganglia (old brain) that initiate and monitor stereotyped movements, i.e., movements that are distinct to our species and our situation, and also the stereotyped manner in which all movement is done (i.e., style). These are the habitual preferences built up by compulsions, training, job requirements, dispositions, and culture, etc. Juhan, p. 221.

2. Tone: a. Salsa Connection analogy … based in tone


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b. Proprioceptors (spindle and Golgi) are at base of complex task of maintaining tone throughout the body. Between the two they produce a summation of excitation and inhibition on the alpha (skeletal) neurons which keeps the active muscle fibers within a narrow range of tensional forces—just the right amount to stand, to lift a book, to hold a glass. It is tone, just as much as it is connective tissues or bone, that is responsible for my basic structural shape and integrity. Tone must superimpose on its own stability of steady rhythmical expansion and contraction of respiration. It must support overall structure in position (whatever that is … standing, sitting, etc). It must be able to brace and release any part of the body in relation to the whole, and to do so with spontaneity and split-second timing so that graceful action may be added to stability, posture and rhythmic respiration. Juhan pp. 222-23

c. Tone and feeling: The proprioceptive system (gamma) is constantly assessing (getting the feel, even if not a conscious feeling) length and tension to maintain tone. Something as simple as lifting an arm out to the side “changes either the length or the tension values in most of the body’s muscle cells.” Juhan, p. 224 The entire musculature must learn to participate in the motion of any of its parts. … the entire musculature must feel its own activity, fully and in rich detail. [feeling here refers to the overall sensation (not necessarily consciously felt) of the coordination of all of this stuff]

d. Tone as basis for maintaining posture and stability, but also for acquiring new skills, gestures, behaviors. Everything is built on tone.

e. Repetition (see Juhan, p. 227): the most repeated actions most resemble the feel of the more primitive reflexes (swallowing) in their automaticity and their regularity. Thus they come to appear “natural,” to be us not something we do. Question is how does repetition work? One possibility is the neurological principle of “neurons that fire together wire together,” even though this principle stated here is based on a “wiring” analogy that I don’t like. Engrams will help on this. Repetition is so important to rehabilitate for the study of religion and culture because it is essential to the feeling of cultural/religious identity (rather obviously), yet it is disdained by the academic study of religion where it is relegated to a pre-religious sphere like magic. Idiocy.

f. Postural/gestural/habitual/skill comes to play an enormous role in who we are and how we see and act in the world. Since these have become stereotypical reflex patterns they are largely active beneath the level of our conscious control and awareness. Gestures become postures that become structures that then become mental state. Tone operates throughout as baseline and as the medium for the “feeling” of this process. We should be able to see that the accounting of tone via posture/gesture is fundamental to the study of religion and culture.

3. Sense of Effort (proprioception): “Our most sacred convictions, the unchanging elements of our supreme values, are judgments of our muscles.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power (Juhan, p. 245) Sensory and motor nervous systems must be fully blended in order for us to have smooth controlled movement.


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a. Proprioception as sense of effort. While we often consider proprioception as the kinesthetic sense, how is it that the muscle spindles (anulospirals) and Golgi tendons account for movement? They do so in a way that we might understand in terms of effort. Movement is inseparable from a sense of effort as it is the grounding for action and awareness. “no sense contributes more to our conception of material reality.” The “organ” of this sense of effort (being our entire musculature system) comprises 70 to 85% of the body.

b. Time, gravity, movement, mass, even our psychological/philosophical feelings are linked to the sense of effort. “I’m having a hard time these days.”

c. Sitting (often even a slouching which doesn’t even depend on a sitting tonus) disengages most of our sense of effort (like closing our eyes related to seeing). Consider the impact on our sensory being as the result of being without the most pervasive and foundational of our senses. Consider the implications of the academic posture, the business posture, a slouching sitting kyphotic relatively toneless motionless posture.

d. Feeling effort. Effort is something one feels rather than something one does. Related to feeling of vitality

e. Aesthetics of effort: The relative ease and difficulty experienced (felt) related to effort become associated with value: difficult, challenging, enjoyable, etc. Daniel Stern discussed “vitality effects.” We associate movement with aesthetics and pleasure—sports, dancing, exercising, etc. We associate achievement of skill and efficiency of movement also with aesthetics and pleasure. What we recognize as skill is “effortlessness” as much as results. In teaching dancing I always say that “technique is inseparable from style” and that “the simplest most efficient way to do something is the most beautiful, stylish, pleasing way.” Sprezzatura refers to doing the difficult with apparent effortlessness.

4. Implications: I am making an effort to ground our study of the senses and following that our study of culture and religion in the nature of our neurobiological human being. Tone (or tonus) is the ever-present, ever-active, self-adjusting neurobiological network in which the muscle spindles (anulospiral receptors) and Golgi tendon organs are in constant excitatory and inhibitory dialogue with the ganglia (the old brain) and to a lesser extent to the cerebellum (the new brain) to maintain the body as a vital living moving constantly changing system that both acts on the world and engages the world interrogatively. Tone is the readiness, the incipience, of our movement potential. We are born with basic tone, yet our every action and movement and experience in life builds on tonal patterns expressed as posture and gesture. Tone bears culture and religion as certainly as does doctrine and belief. Indeed, tone being so integral to what feels natural to our identity isn’t a matter of question or choice so it functions as even more foundational than belief and doctrine that can be questioned and even changed (though tone will resist). Tone is inseparable from sense of effort, for they are in some sense the same thing. Tone is the proprioceptive base for the measurance of effort that assesses movement (the body’s own backfilling) and environment (the body’s own objectification system of knowledge and action). Sense of effort is present in stereotypical skills and patterns that define


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our humanity, our culture, our individuality; that are the basis of our style as well as the negatively inhibiting patterns we often refer to as habits. The general principles that exist in tone and sense of effort that are important to the spiraling consideration of personal (psychological), social, cultural, and religious domains is that a tensional oscillating self-adjusting system of inhibitory/excitatory forces is essential. In the frame of culture and religion it seems we might call this tonus system by the name tradition. Interestingly we tend to think of “tradition” and “traditional” more in the terms of the static, the changeless; whereas, tonus is constantly in motion. We must also see that repetition is essential to the establishment of the tonal levels that are necessary for action—movement agency. As I have said, we tend to dismiss repetition as redundant or mindless or habitual or automatic or autonomic or animal or magical; thus not only do we ignore the essential importance of repetition, we actually denigrate it. Aesthetics of effort are key to the appreciation and valuation of skill and gesture and posture. In the study of culture and religion we rarely consider grace a quality of consideration relative to our subjects and we also rarely consider that grace should be an essential quality of our own efforts, resulting in simply being unaware of the most beautiful and pleasing aspects of both our subjects as well as our own profession/occupation.

EngramsFeb 15 and 17

Despite the dismissal of “feeling” as of any value at all to human personal, cultural, and religious meaning and behavior, what C. S. Peirce called a “feeling kind of knowing” is at the very heart and core of not only our every action and expression (including speaking and writing and thinking) but also our inferential processes. Throughout his life Peirce, realizing that not one whit of knowledge is gained from inductive and deductive inference, attempted to articulate an abductive inferential process to explain how we think something new, how we discover; he understood abduction as a “feeling kind of knowing.” As we approach a problem or even make the effort to select a problem, we do not robotically tick through options or steps mechanically selecting and rejecting options without the influence of feelings/interests; we somehow grasp an idea or an image that evokes or is associated with a feeling that we somehow know to be connected with a process which we then simply unleash and allow ourselves to “feel” our way along toward a conclusion. The unleashing is rather like starting a process that will continue on its own. Swallowing is an example. We can voluntarily initiate a swallow, but the complex sequence of sensorimotor/muscular actions taking up to 5 seconds cannot be stopped mid-swallow. It is little different than when, in speaking, we begin to talk. There is usually only a feeling of releasing the sequence of words that will lead to the conclusion we desire, but certainly we do not have in mind all the words, implications, grammar, style, enunciation, and so on that are required of every utterance. We have only the feeling that allows us to release or initiate the process by uttering the first word (and we often hedge this by a filler word like “well”). It is a wonder we do not misspeak more than we get it like it feels right. It is as much a matter of faith based on past experience of feeling than anything. It constitutes our style as well as our acumen. Perhaps later we backfill to disguise and hide this feeling process by presenting reasoning and argumentation, but it is always always backfilling.


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So how does this feeling process work? One way to gain some inroads is to consider sensory engrams or simply engrams. Consider the following: the word signature can refer to our quotidian signing of our name on documents (checks, leases, papers, etc) and it can also refer to that set of style features that distinguish our overall movement and even way of thinking or acting. We all have a signature to our gestures, posture, habits, movements, actions, speech, etc. that is constructed through the history of our personal experience. There are also species, gender, cultural, occupational signatures. A simple example is the movement of animal characters in the Lion King. Even though the animals are animated by human actors, because the signature movements/postures of the animals are understood so well and repeated in their essential features, the animals have a greater presence than their human animators.

Let’s consider this signature element further to attempt to understand its “naturalist” neurobiological base, the engram. Consider our signature as it applies to a document. This is the use of tiny finger muscles against a postural tonus that supports the body to allow this fine motor movement. The signature is not identical in every replication, but it is distinct and recognizable in each manifestation as a specific signature. Its distinctiveness is not the arrangement of distinct letters, but the style of the flow of marking. Now consider this signature applied to the side of a building using a can of spray paint. It will be recognizable as a the same signature. One does not need to learn to sign one’s signature in different sizes to be able to do so, nor does a person have different signatures based on the size. This means then that signature is not simply a muscle memory event. And since we know that specific parts of the brain are associated with the movement of specific muscles and body parts, it is not simply a specific sensorimotor program. Further, we know that this is not a consciously directed action. As I discussed above, we simply initiate the movement of signing our names, or making our signature, and it just happens. The same feeling kind of initiation engages us whether our signature is a half inch high on a dotted line or four feet tall on the side of a wall.

Only proprioceptors (anulospirals and Golgi tendons) give us a feel of movement as it is happening. As we repeat movement we build memory of the feel of certain movements or movement sequences. Skill, gesture, habit constructs a sensory engram which is a memory of the feeling of doing a sequence of movements. Neurobiology isn’t all that sure where engrams are actually located or how they are able to do what they do, but it is clear what they do.

I like to think of sensory engrams as stretchable fluid templates. They are templates in that they designate recognizable patterns of movement such as a signature, but they are stretchable in that they can engage the proprioceptive neurobiological systems across different muscle groups. They also can adjust or are fluid in accounting for an infinity of variables such as surface, pen or marking device, effects of clothing or gloves, and on and on. We can stand on our heads wearing a parka and mittens and use a cotton swab dipped in mud and still sign our names. Not only that, but engrams obviously string together dozens of smaller sensorimotor programs and even stereotypical responses and primitive reflexes (both of which are innate) to create complex skillsets and gestures. These engrams then are stretchable and fluid in transferring from one skill to another related skill. So if we learn to dance ballet, then we can learn to dance many other dances more quickly and at a higher skill level.


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Sensory engrams also have style signatures. Not only do we write our names with a certain signature style, but we walk and talk and do many things in our lives in ways that are distinctive to our personal, occupational, gendered, age, cultural, species style. As new skills, gestures, postures are acquired extant engrams are applied to them to mark them with the signature style.

Since engrams are feeling based, then they are the mechanism involved in our sense of the “rightness” of movement. We have this sense of rightness when we learn a skill, when we perform an action, when we practice behavior. The feeling of doing it feeds back to the memory of the feeling of doing the action, that is the engram is a looping self-refining system. We simply know by the feel how we have done a movement. This is easy to confirm. We usually know when we mistype a letter because of the feel we have before we see that the wrong letter has appeared. We feel the accuracy of a throw before it arrives at its intended destination. Another interesting aspect of this memory of feeling is in attempting to remember a movement that doesn’t come readily to mind. I often experience this in complex dance moves. If I can remember how it starts I simply do the move feeling the rightness of the movement that is coming forth without my conscious direction. Typically to repeat it concentrating on where in the sequence it doesn’t feel “right” will eventually lead to that feeling of “rightness” that is the satisfactory and accurate recall of the move.

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Lectures - Sam Gill and the Senses... · Web viewLectures. 48. Religion and the Senses Lectures. Spring 2012. Introduction; Central Issues; Naturalist Approach. One chapter in my