A Snippet on Affordance Theory

If you’re anything like me you get excited by new theories and philosophies. It takes me a good day or two to settle down afterwards and think straight. Eventually, I can get down to the nitty-gritty of conceptual work and can think this new theory through. So, if anything, this post should be seen as a reminder not to get excited to the point of glossing over the important bits when reading new material – something of an extended memo written to myself. And so, don’t get alarmed if the chucky-cheese material isn’t really representative of any particular writer or thinker, I’m just thinking out loud.

Now, what I’m interested in here is affordance theory. But affordance theory is not a complete theory. There. I’ve said it. Sure, you can get excited, and give it an exalted role in the overthrow of the metaphor of our glassy essence. But it just ain’t the whole kit and caboodle.

Philosophy of Dance

It might be my unashamedly bodily bias, but I’ve always been struck and drawn towards the physical arts, rather than those on masonite or marble.  Fresh off an art-high from seeing Martin Creed’s ‘Ballet Work No. 1020’ I’ve been thinking about the great works of choreography and dance in history.

Has dance, like other forms of art, gathered up and opened us up to new ways of thinking and experiencing?  Did Ninjinsky’s choreography draw out those primal emotions stoked by Stravinsky at the premiere of Le sacre du printemps?  Did Elvis’ shaking hips shake common conception about male sexuality?  What about b-boys, breakdancers, and other modern dancers and dances – what do they show or tell us?

Dance is, I’m convinced, a large and interesting problematic I’ve barely just begun to consider.

In a bit of personal reflection, I can narrow down the rekindling of my interest in dance to this video from Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite.  I was shocked the first time I saw it.  I’d never seen anything like it before.  I’ve since been drawn to Crystal’s works, their narrative structure, their organicism, and their Butoh inflections.  They have definitely made me pay more attention to how I move and think about movement.

Heidegger and Naturalism

I’ve been reflecting on the link between phenomenology and naturalism more and more often in these past few weeks.  And the more I read and consider this issue, the more convinced I am that the two, while not clashing, do seem for the most part to be discussing two completely different domains of inquiry.  Here’s a quote from Heidegger’s “The Thing”, discussing the much debated jug, that has my little gray cells a-workin:

The statements of physics are correct.  By means of them, science represents something real, by which it is objectively controlled.  But – is this reality the jug? No.  Science always encounters only what its kind of representation has admitted beforehand as an object possible for science. … Science makes the jug-thing into a nonentity in not permitting things to be the standard for what is real.

More to come later…

Hegel and Enactivism pt. II

As always, I should’ve kept reading.  From Beiser’s ‘Hegel’:

If the absolute were to be conceived as life, then it must include finitude and difference within itself for the simple reason that organic development consists in self-differentiation.  Life is a process by which an inchoate unity becomes more determinate, complex and organized; it is the movement from unity to difference, and from difference to unity within difference. (94)

Hegel and Enactivism

Like most philosophers (or so I imagine), I can never learn or reflect enough.  One day we’ll know the truth, or know enough about everything, so that everything else makes sense.  Like Pinky & The Brain we do the same thing every night with the hopes of one day taking over and understanding the world – only with (slightly) smaller egos and much less humour (sadly). My most recent world-dominating auto-didactic project then, is to gain something of an understanding of Hegel.

For better or worse, I’m following my usual strategy of reading a few secondary sources before diving in to the source material.  One of the better things about this strategy is that interpreters since Hegel have had time to collate and discuss his work, yielding a much more understandable presentation of his views. On the other hand, many of these modern philosophers present Hegel in our modern language of philosophy and discuss him in view of modern issues.  While this makes Hegel much more tractable, it leads me at least to see connections and juxtapositions between Hegel and modern philosophy that the man couldn’t have even anticipated, let alone commented on.

That being said, I am flabbergasted that I have not seen Hegel raised in connection with Enactivism, particularly to Varela and Maturana’s autopoiesis – a quick Google search doesn’t really yield anything, nor does a search in Phil-Papers.  But the connections leap off the page and smack me in the mouth with every turn.