dourish - Where the Action Is

Chapter 4 in Paul Dourish's (2001) book is titled "Being-in-the-World" and it outlines the ideas of embodiment by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Schutz, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He first gives what he calls a "naive" definition of embodiment:

Embodiment means possessing and acting through a physical manifestation in the world (p. 100)

and then offers a "more elaborated" definition:

Embodied phenomena are those that by their very nature occur in real time and real space (p. 101)

Obviously, I was "naive" when I approached the concept, but that's okay, Husserl had a similar problem in 1936, complaining about how math privileged a world of idealities over "the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable -- our everyday life world" (Husserl 1936:48-49). So he suggests that two things happen in parallel: we see a rabbit, and we realize that we actually *see* a rabbit (as opposed to just imagining or remembering it) (p. 105). Hence arises phenomenology.

Heidegger develops it, looking at Husserl's intentionality. He says that we need to be before we can think (opposite Descartes dualistic "cogito ergos um"), and he "transformed the problem of phenomenolgy form an epistemological question, a question about knowledge, to an ontological question, a question about forms and categories of existence. Instead of asking, 'How can we know about the world,' Heidegger asked, 'How deos the world reveal itself to us through out encounters with it?'" (p. 107). Interesting here, how the onus of action/revelation is on the world, and not on us [onus not on us -- heh!]. In some ways, this suggests that just as the dualism of mind/body is a false on, so too is the dualism of body/world (see Mar.01.05a entry). Dourish pipes in here, explaining that Heidegger's talking about Dasein, or "being-in-the-world" (chapter title), "emphasizing the way in which being is inseparabvle from world in which it occurs" (p. 108). He then suggests that the dualism is Dasien/World. Heidegger's distinction here is zuhanden (ready-to-hand) and vorhanden (present-at-hand), which strikes me as formalism or structuralism (as I naively understand them to revlove around being presently conscious of, or focused on, the structure of things). Dourish uses an example of a computer mouse as an "invisible" extension of the hand until it moves off the mouse pad, then he has to think of it, and reposition it. I would use the Mac vs. PC example here, where for me, the Mac "gets out of my way" and lets me write, but on a PC I have to work consciously *through* its structure. Ditto for html, or any other unfamiliar Discourse). Heidegger says the mouse would not exist for us if we didn't have to deal with it (this reminiscent of Maturana's frog not seeing dead flies).

Schutz takes it to the next level, looking at the intersubjectivity of our individual experiences, as they are mediated by others. We assume others are rational actors like ourselves: an assumption based on our own experiences (p. 113) -- ala von Foerster's "Man in the Bowler Hat"). Consequently, we tend to trust them -- more-so even than ourselves. Who's sane in an asylum?

Merleau-Ponty adds layers of complexity, by turning the body into "neither subject nor object, but an ambiguous third party" (p. 114). Dreyfus (1996) explains Merleau-Ponty's three versions of embodiement: "the physical embodiment of a human subject, with legs and arms, and of a certain size and shape; the second is the set of bodily skills and situational responses that we have developed; ans the third is the cultural 'skills' abilities, and understandings that we responsively gain from the cultural world in which we are embedded. Each of these aspects, simultaneously contributes to and conditions the actions of the individual, both in terms of how they understand their own embodiment (the 'phenomenolgoical body') and how it is understood by others (the 'objective body')" (p. 115). In other words: Mar.01.05b. Clearly, there's a disconnect between my ideas and Merleau-Ponty's, even though the words suggest a parallelism. For example, I feel that perception is located in the mind, of which the body is an important part -- not an ambiguous third party. When MP says "A theory of the body is already a theory of perception" (1945:203), I interpret it to be a matter of self-perception/awareness.

Having explored the phenomenologists, Dourish looks at embodiment in his field, Human Computer Interface (HCI) by examining the work of J.J. Gibson who gives this cool quote: "One sees the environment not just with the eyes but with the eyes in the head on the shoulders of a body that gets about" (Gibson 1979:222). He came up with the concept of "affordances" -- how chairs are designed to be particularly suited for *our* sitting, not for rabbits or horses. Donald Norman (1988, 1993) builds on affordances, as does William Gaver (1991, 1992). Then Dourish introduces Michael Polanyi (The Tacit Dimension (1966), suggesting that embodied skills fit under this heading (see Feb.16.05). Polanyi suggests the terms proximal to describe sensory impressions, and distal to describe our interpretations of the impressions -- these are the "first and second terms of tacit knowing" (1966:13). Dourish then refers to the work of Clancy (1997), Lave (1988), and Suchman (1987) (Mar.01.05 was big day of thinking for me). Dourish ends the chapter's summary moving to (my uderstanding of) a Jim Geeian perspective of embodiment. Wittgenstein started with a focus on the interactions between the individual and the world. In his second phase of writing, in Philosophical Investigations, he shifts his understanding and places meaning more Gee-ward towards the social practice elements of language, looking less at a statement's inherent (or even personal) "truth" and more at its social appropriateness.