Heads, hands, and consciousness arose in ever more rapid succession

“Like a sixty-year-old person on actuarial charts, the habitable Earth is three-quarters of the way through its calculated life expectancy. Earth is about 4.57 billion years old, and the laws of stellar physics tell of another billion years before the sun expands to the point that it bakes the possibility for life off the planet. Looking back, life got going quickly after Earth’s formation – within a paltry few hundred million years. Bodies took roughly 2.5 billion years to come about. Then, one after another, heads, hands, and consciousness arose in ever more rapid succession. As in Moore’s law, which famously describes the doubling power of silicon chips every twenty-four months, the biological world has witnessed exponential rates of change: it took most of the expected life span of our planet for the origin of a big-brained species using stone tools; then merely thousands for the origin of the Internet, gene cloning, and schemes of geo-engineering the atmosphere of the planet itself. Planetary and biological change have brought about a transformative moment – one in which ideas and inventions shape our bodies, the planet, and the interactions between them. Before our species hit the scene, trillions of algae took billions of years to transform the planet; now change is driven by single ideas traveling at the speed of light.”

(page 157)

Neil Shubin. The Universe Within: The Deep History of the Human Body. New York: Vintage, 2013. Ebook.

Borrowed in digital format from the Vancouver Public Library.

What we see when we read the world

“Writers reduce when they write, and readers reduce when they read. The brain itself is built to reduce, replace, emblemize… Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce. And it is not without reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world. This is what humans do.

Picturing stories is making reductions. Through reduction, we create meaning.

These reductions are the world as we see it – they are what we see when we read, and they are what we see when we read the world.

They are what reading looks like (if it looks like anything at all).”

(pages 415–416)

From Fred Mendelsund, What We See When We Read. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Searched for and borrowed on ILL via les Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal.

Reading mirrors the procedure by which we acquaint ourselves with the world

“When we apprehend the world (the parts of it that are legible to us), we do so one piece at a time. These single pieces of the world are our conscious perceptions. What these conscious perceptions consist of, we don’t know, though we assume that our experience of the world is an admixture of that which is already present, and that which we ourselves contribute (our selves – our memories, opinions, proclivities, and so on).

Authors are curators of experience. They filter the world’s noise, and out of that noise they make the purest signal they can – out of disorder they create narrative. They administer this narrative in the form of a book, and preside, in some ineffable way, over the reading experience. Yet no matter how pure the data set that authors provide to readers – no matter how diligently prefiltered and tightly reconstructed – readers’ brains will continue in their prescribed assignment: to analyze, screen, and sort. Our brains will treat a book as if it were any other of the world’s many unfiltered, encrypted signals. That is, the author’s book, for readers, reverts to a species of noise. We take in as much of the author’s world as we can, and mix this material with our own in the alembic of our reading minds, combining them to alchemize something unique. I would propose that this is why reading “works”: reading mirrors the procedure by which we acquaint ourselves with the world. It is not that our narratives necessarily tell us something true about the world (though they might), but rather that the practice of reading feels like, and is like, consciousness itself: imperfect; partial; hazy; co-creative.”

(pages 402–403)

From Fred Mendelsund, What We See When We Read. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Searched for and borrowed on ILL via les Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal.

Having a body entails a sense of this relationship

“Metonymy, like metaphor, is thought by some to be a part of our innate language faculty – and an even greater foundational aspect of a human being’s natural cognitive abilities. (Our understanding of the part-for-whole relationship is an important tool by which we understand our world and communicate that understanding to others.) As embodied creatures, we consist of corporeal forms, physiques, which are in turn composed of parts. Being born with a body entails being born with some natural abstract sense of this relationship – of synecdoche.”

(page 390)

From Fred Mendelsund, What We See When We Read. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Searched for and borrowed on ILL via les Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal.

Experience, spectral and mutating

“The smell of “salt and weeds”:

I am not smelling them as such. I am performing a synaesthetic transformation. From the words “smell of salt and weeds” I am calling up an idea of a summer house by the sea, where I’ve stayed. The experience does not contain any true recall of an odor. It is a flash, which leaves a slight afterimage. It is spectral and mutating. An aurora.

A nebula of illusory material.”

(page 342)

From Fred Mendelsund, What We See When We Read. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Searched for and borrowed on ILL via les Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal.

Theory creates new, necessary situations and emotions

“When theory happens outside of academia, it means something different. It’s more mobile, edgy, responsive to experienced conditions. When theory happens at home, right where life is most concentrated and messy, it’s bound to disrupt the banal and gendered dualism of public and private language. Its space is symbolic, not institutional. So theory is also transformational: “Theory, a story I tell so that the world changes in my favor, so that it swerves towards my own eyes” says Louise Cotnoir, who goes on to discuss how theory changes “the registers and forms of the real. To invent the language of a knowledge based on decategorized emotion.” So the work of theory is a work of and upon the imaginary, which is to say that it creates new, necessary situations and emotions. In this sense, theory is not a second order language; it doesn’t only speak about something else, it generates knowledge on its own terms. Theory is an agent, and it is a resistance.”

Lisa Robertson. Theory, A City: Introduction.

Shared by a friend on social media.

One does not use oneself

“[Dancing] tends to draw its significance from the fact that in it the dancer’s self is transformed: to say that a dancer’s body is either the medium or the instrument of dance, though not actually false, is misleading. One does not use oneself, and if one truly used one’s body one would do so not as a wholly embodied being but as a spiritual or cerebral entity to whom the body was extraneous.”

(page 5)

Francis Sparshott, A Measured Pace: Towards a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance.

Found via an online community for performance philosophy studies.

The voice fills the space between two subjects

“The moment in which voice and language thus detach seems to be the final culmination or reversal of the tension between the two. The tension disappears as the voice itself becomes language. The voice no longer transmits language; it is language, in which a bodily being-in-the-world expresses him/herself and addresses the audience purely. The materiality of the voice reveals the performance’s materiality in its entirety. The voice captures tonality as it resounds in space; it emphasizes corporeality because it leaves the body through respiration; it marks spatiality because its sound flows out into the space and enters the ears of spectators and articulating subjects alike. Through its materiality the voice already is language without having to first become a signifier.

In many ways, the voice represents a remarkable if strange material that contradicts all semiotic principles. It comes into existence only when it sounds out. It cannot survive the breath that created it but must be brought forth again with every new breath; it is a material that exists only in “ecstasy.” Not only does the voice unite tonality, corporeality, and spatiality so that the performance’s materiality constantly regenerates itself within it. Through it, the bodily being-in-the-world of the articulating subject expresses him/herself and addresses those who hear him/her in their own bodily being-in-the-world. The voice builds a bridge and establishes a relationship between two subjects. It fills the space between them. By making their voices audible, people reach out to touch those who hear it.”

(page 129-130)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

At its most sensual and simultaneously its most transfigured

“Through their singing, especially in the higher pitches, the singers exude what I have called presence. They radiate a tremendous energy which the voice spreads through the space and that physically takes hold of the listeners. Detached from language, the voice emerges as the opposite of logos. Having escaped the power of rationality, the voice becomes dangerous and seductive. To succumb to it does not necessarily lead to downfall and death as the story of the sirens forewarns. It rather promises the equally lustful and terrifying emotional experience of one’s own corporeality at its most sensual and simultaneously its most transfigured.”

(page 127)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

The voice leaps from the body and vibrates through space

“Tonality always creates spatiality and, as we have seen, not only an atmospheric space. Vocality, however, always also brings forth corporeality. A voice creates all three types of materiality: corporeality, spatiality, tonality. The voice leaps from the body and vibrates through space so that it is heard by both the speaker/singer and others. The intimate relationship between body and voice becomes particularly evident in screams, sighs, moans, sobs, and laughter. Unmistakably, these sounds engage in a process that involves the entire body: it bends over, is contorted, or tenses up. Simultaneously, these speechless assertions of the voice might deeply move those who hear them. To hear somebody scream, sigh, moan, sob, or laugh is to perceive these sounds as a specific process of embodiment. The listener perceives the concerned person in their bodily being-in-the-world, which immediately affects the listener’s own being-in-the-world as the scream penetrates, resonates in, and is absorbed by the listener’s body (Plessner 1970). When a performer lets out a scream, they create a moment in which the voice brings itself forth in its own sensual materiality (Risi 2003).”

(page 125)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.