Re: [-empyre-] introduction here -



hi all,

somewhat predictably, i'm going to carry on banging the same drum i was
banging last month....

on 2/11/03 7:31 PM, Alan Sondheim at sondheim@panix.com wrote:


> 
> In this manner, I worked with both structure and its experience -
> something that has been with me constantly, and is at the heart of
> codework. I consider codework _not_ to be programming art, but to be the
> problematic of the interstices of structure and experience - both the
> experience of the bones and the bones of the experience.

> Part of my work deals with bodies in relation to this, the extrusion of
> bodies into and throughout code, and vice versa. The body is always
> already a culture object of course, but the opposite is also true, that
> symbolization/code is always already embodied.

the fold or chiasm between structure and experience of structure - cool.
this was the idea that kept me lurking and thinking for a lot of last
month's discussion.

i'm not so sure, however, that i'd be in a hurry to describe the body as
'always already a cultural object'.  .... can we make this assumption of the
body in toto? for sure it has its cultural 'skin' - it wouldn't otherwise be
visible as a body - but beneath/beside this skin we also occasionally
glimpse the trace of a prereflective body - the body before the code... or
maybe it's better to describe it as those aspects of embodiment and embodied
perception that are unresponsive to coding, uncodable.
> 
> Embodiment and desire are interrelated; embodiment, as Husserl and others
> have pointed out, is intentional (at least consciousness is);

there's a big difference between describing consciousness as intentional,
and embodiment as intentional. husserl was still sunk in the cartesian swamp
to an extent - he was only able to think the individual material body by
circumscribing it in what he called a 'second order reduction' - i.e. by
taking the distanced view of the cartesian observer, and abstracting
himself-as-self from that body. this is husserl's achilles heel - the
'failure' of the phenomenological reduction, which, as it happens, is
merleau-ponty's point of departure in 'the phenomenology of perception'...


e





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