Being in the World Documentary

maciasterence. (2012) Being in the World [online]. [Accessed 4th October 2012]. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_18LfSA2Qs

Quotes:

"We're thoroughly conditioned by the world we are in, and that world is a world of customs, traditions, practices that we are so immersed in that we no longer see a way out of it. So the only way to do anything skillfully, with innovation, insight, sensitivity, and authentically is to be appropriating traditions, practices, customs that are all around us in the world that we just absorbed."

Taylor Carmen, Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College, Colombia University (37:10)

A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person… Fundamental Reason

LEONARD, V.W. (1994) A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective on the Concept of Person. In: P. BENNER (Ed.), Interpretive Phenomenology: Embodiment, Caring, and Ethics in Heath and Illness. Sage Publications, Inc. pp43-64

“Thus to understand a person’s behaviour or expressions one has to study the person in context. For it is only in context that what a person values and finds significant shows up.” (p51)

Annotation:
The fundamental reason for choosing to develop a phenomenological methodology is expressed by Leonard, “to understand a person’s behaviour or expressions one has to study the person in context. For it is only in context that what a person values and finds significant shows up” (p51). The context of an experience gives the parameters of how the experience can be understood and interpreted to visualise the studied experience. 

The Aims of Interpretation… Preunderstanding Parallels

HIRSCH, E.D. (1976) The Aims of Interpretation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

“Hence, I think Heidegger was right to extend the range of hermeneutics beyond the limited domain of man-made representations, since the fundamental character of interpretation is the same in all our cognitive processes. What Heidegger called the priority of pre-understanding is described by developmental psychologists as the primacy of the genre; by cognitive theorists (particularly those concerned with scientific knowledge) as the primacy of the hypothesis. On this theory, all cognition is analogous to interpretation in being based upon corrigible schemata, a useful phrase I take from Piaget. The model of a corrigible schemata, which was exemplified in the description of Piaget’s experiments, is, I think, a more useful and accurate model than that of the so-called hermeneutic circle. Unlike one’s unalterable and inescapable pre-understanding in Heidegger’s account of the hermeneutic circle, a schema can be radically altered and corrected.” (p32)

 

Annotation:
Heidegger’s pre-understanding that comes with a person to any experience has parallels in both psychology and cognitive theory. Psychologists refer to the primacy of the genre, while cognitive theorists refer to the primacy of the hypothesis. Hirsch suggest that these are analogous, and that “cognition is analogous to interpretation” (p32). But unlike a hermeneutic circle, (s)he prefers a schemata than a circle. The argument and preference is that a schema is easier to be “radically altered and corrected” (ibid.). It needs to be remembered here that Hirsch is concerned not with interpreting the interaction of experience but only speech between more than one person (which is a specific subset within an interaction experience). 

Guerilla Metaphysics… Criticism of Hermeneutics

HARMAN, G. (2007) Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court Publishing Company.

“hermeneutics still ascribes to humans (and perhaps even to animals) an apparently miraculous power: the ability to convert the sheer impact of the world into pictures of simulacra of such impact. Humans still transcend the world and contemplate it, even if only partially, and this makes humans different in kind from mere paper, sand, or gold. It is still humans alone can perceive the world, and the philosophical gap between sentient and inanimate or object and appearance is still taken as a given.” (p#)

Annotation:
The criticism of hermeneutics here is that as it reveals the structure and personal interpretation of a human’s experience, it is only revealing a state of being that has always existed in humans. This is a pointless criticism as hermeneutic phenomenology seeks to reveal the meaning behind that said experience, and until the phenomenologists began this inquiry that state had never been addressed. Despite this Harman does ascribe to hermeneutics that its power is “the ability to convert the sheer impact of the world into pictures of simulacra” (p#) of the studied experience. This demonstrates the contribution that this methodology makes to understanding human experience within the world – to reveal the unrevealed.

Guerilla Metaphysics… Heidegger

HARMAN, G. (2007) Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court Publishing Company.

“What must be rejected from the start is the prevailing model of humans as transcending or negating the world, as critics who break loose from animal bondage and stand in a windy, starry space of freedom. We should be equally suspicious of those hermeneutic versions of critique that merely add the caveat that perfect transcendence is impossible.” (p#)

Annotation:
The Heideggerian phenomenological revealing of an experience is situated within a context and the world. It is not some permanent state of transcendence outside of that context or the world*. This is a reason why Husserlian transcendental phenomenology is not being followed in the thesis.

* may return and expand this point. 

Guerilla Metaphysics… Critical of Phenomenology

HARMAN, G. (2007) Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court Publishing Company.

“When we speak of the relation within the heart of things as perceived, let’s refer to sensual relations, in keeping with the discoveries of the carnal phenomenologists. (…) Phenomenologists know that the intentional object can never become present in the flesh, but they also know that there is no purely given sense data free from the spectre of intentional objects. (…) The phenomenology of perception plays out only on this sensual level, making no claim to drive into physical reality itself – indeed, in its abhorrence of all naturalism it even tends to deny the very existence of a physical realm, and certainly holds it at arm’s length from philosophy.” (p#)

Annotation:
Harman is critical of phenomenology as the associated perception is never located in the physical external tangible world, but in a cognitively sensual internal personal world of interpretation and experiences. 

Guerilla Metaphysics… Experience of Being

HARMAN, G. (2007) Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court Publishing Company.

“The endless rejuvenating force of phenomenology lies in the philosophical dignity that it grants to such experiences. Never are they treated as some sort of frivolous anteroom to an ominous rumble of being. For phenomenology, the drama of the world plays itself out within specific appearances, not behind or beneath them.” (p21)

Annotation:
Phenomenology as a research method focuses on the experience of being, whereas ethnography and other methodologies look at the contexts of being – the states behind or beneath the experience. 

Perceptual Selectivity

This post is part of a draft for a new academic paper aimed at a graphic design journal and represents an idea-in-progress. Feel free to comment but questions on how or what next will be answered in future posts as I construct my paper.
Within an anaesthetic experience the very nature of it means that the very perception of the undergoing and doing falls below our conscious perception. We act and react to the causality as rhythmically as breathing but without a consummation of fulfilment. We may recognise we feel emotion as we experience or we may not. But to recognise and to perceive are not the same. In experience the relationship between action and the consequence of that action is given meaning through the perceiving of it. This is a cognitive action and one that selectively places the self into the experience. In recognition a signifier is enough to satisfy. A sign, a label, a familiarity that ‘this’ is what is needed to be done or undergone to move onto the ‘next’ thing is anaesthetic. Any resistance between an old or new experience is minimal. There is no call on the person to perceptually engage in an act of reconstructive doing, selecting meaning of the new experience from past experiences. It is within the placing of the self consciously within the experience that it becomes autotelic and it is this action that Visual Communication relies on within a communicational situation.

It is not a passive relationship between the graphic outcome and the viewer. The ‘aesthetics of surface’ certainly is meant to attract attention (Frascara, 2004, p85) but it is in the ‘aesthetics of use’ that the communicational power exists. It is within the perception of the graphic outcome that that object of attention’s meaning can be interpreted within the correct socio-cultural context. The perception and object are part of the same cognitive operation, they are built up together in the mind of the viewer and completed as a whole understanding. The past experiences and references to pre-understanding of the viewer are perceptually remade into a new pattern of understanding. This new experience is a meeting of the viewer with the designer in an experiential journey to meaning, and then to action. The experience of the past cannot be dismissed from this new pattern of understanding, but neither can it be dwelt upon, as the communicational situation is cognitively kinetic moving the viewer to action from perception. Perception is an act that is not reactive or unreflective. It calls for a personal act of engagement and responsively take in data from the situation to begin to understand what is unfolding. To perceive is to be immersed in the situation, to plunge (even for a fraction) into the context to see what is unfolding.

From perception comes awareness, and from perceptual selectivity comes understanding through interpretation leading to thoughtful action. This action leads to a behavioural change which is where Visual Communication has its strengths. The perception within a socio-cultural experience of undergoing and doing is causally limited. It is partly reconstructed from past experience but this become coefficient in creating new understanding and meaning to the current experience. This pre-understanding is not a bridge from one experience to another experience, but a partial expectation of outcomes that can be challenged and questioned, re-ordered and subverted. This leads to an individualisation of the current situation. Pre-understanding is a contribution that is neither a simple recollection or in its entirety subordinated to understand a new experience. This is a beginning of understanding, and perception advances like waves up a beach towards an action. The experience’s meaning is grown from the situational context, from pre-understood knowledge selectively framed by a personal socio-cultural context, toward an interpretative meaning that is pervaded emotionally throughout. This assimilation of waves toward a meaning elevates the experience beyond mere anaesthetic because the self is responsive within the unfolding experience that has eventually a culmination that is felt consciously, subconsciously and emotionally. This accumulation leads toward an objective autotelic fulfilment, that within Visual Communication is a behavioural change in the viewer. In discussing pre-understanding this segues back into a phenomenological discussion of hermeneutics, and how phenomenological interpretation can be synthesised with Visual Communication to aid the design of better interactions through a visualising valuation of the properties of an experience, long since “dismissed as unmeasurable” (McCullough, 2005, p44).

References

FRASCARA, J. (2004) Communication Design: Principles, Methods and Practice. New York: Allworth Press.
McCULLOUGH, M. (2005). Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Visual Communication and Exprience

This post is part of a draft for a new academic paper aimed at a graphic design journal and represents an idea-in-progress. Feel free to comment but questions on how or what next will be answered in future posts as I construct my paper.

The mere understanding of a Visual Communication graphic outcome in itself does not induce action. It is through the active interpretation of the outcome that shapes perceptual selectivity within the viewer (McCullough, 2005, p34). Through this cognitive processing, behavioural change is enacted through the viewer taking from the outcome a personal interpretation of varying strengths, dependent upon their own intellectual and socio-cultural ability. This intellectual appropriation of an action, suggested through the communicational situation created by the graphic outcome’s internal structure, happens within the communicational situation as a consummation of that very experience. When defining such an experience it is an essentially an autotelic experience that is being discussed. Psychologist Csikszentimihalyi (1990) frames two forms of experience - autotelic and exotelic (p67). These terms are derived from the Greek: telos meaning goal, auto meaning self and exo meaning outside. Csikszentimihalyi defines an autotelic experience as a self-contained experience where the reward is intrinsic to the experience itself, whilst exotelic is an experience where activities are performed for external reasons to the self. Experiences are a combination of both an internal and external elements, but it is within an autotelic experience that the optimal element is an end in itself that is intrinsically rewarding. Most experiences we have in our conscious day can be described as anaesthetic. For Dewey (1980) the description of an anaesthetic experience is one that does not begin or cease at any particular place, it is slack and discursive with no initiations or conclusions, where connections between incidental components within the experiences are unconcerning (p41). These everyday experiences are as Csikszentimihalyi names exotelic. They are external to our own existential self-determined purpose, and feature events we mechanically do as a norm of our existence.

Alternatively, an autotelic experience is an experience that in itself is self-purposeful which is analogous to a pragmatist philosophical aesthetic experience. From a pragmatist perspective an aesthetic experience is shaped not only through visuals, touch, smell, and hearing, but also from the past experiences of the individual experiencing it. But past experiences can at times be contradictory, ambiguous or complex. An aesthetic experience emerges from a lived experience, where the self can be lost in the moment but can return, feeling nourished and contented, the “irreducible totality of people acting, sensing, thinking, feeling, and making meaning in a setting, including the perception and sensation of their own actions” (McCarthy and Wright, 2004, p85). Dourish suggests from a pragmatist perspective that the world is “already filled with meaning. Its meaning is to be found in the way in which it reveals itself to us as being available for our actions” (2004, p116). The sharpness in contrast between a self-purposeful experience and everyday exotelic is immediately noticeable, even if consciously at the time it is not realised. In this sharp contrast it is impossible to combine the special qualities of the experience within the usual exotelic structure, so that the special qualities are given a status outside the everyday (p42).

So far this appears to be an intellectual process, but it is also an emotional, practical and mechanical process that together constitute integral components within experience. The complexity of these various components are interlinked and not ordered in succession during an interaction with events, people, objects and ideas. They do not assume ascendency over each other, but through the linkage move toward a culmination rather than a cessation. What is crucial here is that the culmination is not dependent upon the mechanistic component of the experience to finish, as the consummation is not wholly a conscious state. Within an aesthetic experience Dewey states that the experience is “anticipated throughout and is recurrently savored with special intensity” (p57). This type of experience is separated from the everyday anaesthetic experiences, and it is framed within this form of experiencing that a communicational situation is created by Visual Communication. As Frascara explains the act of communication is not the designer’s objective but designing the impact of that communication is (p13). The interaction between meaning and the viewer is paramount, and the interaction between visual elements within the graphic outcomes aids the reception, leading to the necessary change in behaviour. This interaction becomes a self-experience within the viewer once they take notice of the graphic outcome. How they engage making it a self-experience can be framed within a phenomenological flow proposed by Csikszentimihalyi. Dourish is aware that a phenomenological perspective framed using pragmatist aesthetics is only one perspective amongst others that has embodiment as a central focus. But he argues that phenomenology looks at “the pretheoretical, prerational world of everyday experience” (p106) making phenomenology a relevant starting point to account for the relationality between meaning and action.

References

CSIKSZENTIMIHALYI, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper
DOURISH, P. (2004). Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press.
FRASCARA, J. (2004) Communication Design: Principles, Methods and Practice. New York: Allworth Press.
McCULLOUGH, M. (2005). Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing. Cambridge: MIT Press.

…all experience is experience of meaning | Derrida

Jacques Derrida's Deconstructionism looked to subvert binary oppositions that shape our dominant ways of thinking, and through textual interpretation lead to alternative meanings. The philosophical aspect to Deconstructionism leads him towards a "metaphysics of presence”. It is within this framework that the quote that Barnard makes in his book Graphic Design as Communication needs to be understood. Barnard says,

“There is a sense in which no images are at all meaningful without words. This is the sense in which words are necessary even to see or experience an image: without using language, one could not even identify what a picture contained, let alone describe that content or experience to someone else. To this extent, all experience is experience of meaning, as Derrida says. Without language, the image would not be experienced in any meaningful or communicable way at all and could, therefore, hardly be described as a experience at all.”

(Barnard, 2005, p45)

The core of Visual Communication rests in the relationship between text/image, and as Frsacara argues, in the performance of that relationship to incite a change of behaviour of the viewer. Barnard explains the rhetorical and semiotic structure underlying this relationship. Although my argument isn't purely a Deconstructive one (as I am interested more in a phenomenological position, with pragmatism as a philosophical framework through which to view the aesthetic experience), Derrida is useful to unpick the semiology of how the ralationship works. To understand Barnard's statement I have followed his citing of Derrida back to the original source. Here are two paragraphs from Julia Kristeva's interview with him in the 1981 book Positions, that puts Barnard into a philosophical context.

"Subjectivity - like objectivity - is an effect of différance*, an effect inscribed in a system of différance. This is why a of différance also recalls that spacing is temporization, the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, perception, consummation - in a word, the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being - are always deferred."

(Derrida, 1981, pp28-29)

"Kristeva: It is said that the concept of 'meaning' in semiotics is markedly different from the phenomenological concept of 'meaning.' In what ways, however, are they complicit, and to what extent does the semiological project remain intrametaphysical?
Derrida: It is true that at first the phenemonological extension of the concept of 'meaning' appears much wider, much less determined. All experience is experience of meaning (Sinn**). Everything that appears to consciousness, everything that is for consciousness in general, is meaning. Meaning is the phenomenality of the phenomenon."

(Derrida, 1981, pp29-30)

* différance A new concept of writing, examining the internal and external semiological oppositions
** Sense, generally synonymous with meaning at a conceptual level [Bedeutung]

References used:

BARNARD, M. (2005) Graphic Design as Communication. Abingdon: Routledge.

DERRIDA, J. (1981) Semiology and Grammatology: Interview With Julia Kristeva. In: J. DERRIDA. Positions. London: The Athlone Press, pp 15-36.

FRASCARA, J. (2004) Communication Design: Principles, Methods and Practice. New York: Allworth Press.

An Experience of an Experience

When we experience something (a phenomenon) our self-perception that this is familiar or new is typical. If familiar this is because we have experienced similar processual units of activity in the past, from which we try to make sense of the current phenomena. If it is new then that means our recognition of the phenomena is not causing a replaying of previous experiences from which we can understand what to do now. These processual units of past experiences can be articulated from our own prior experiences, or from the experiences of others expressed to us through narratives. We are not only having an experience of an experience but also performing a new meaning based on re-construction.

References used:
BRUNER, E.M. (1986) Experience and Its Expressions. In: V.W. TURNER & E.M. BRUNER, ed(s). The Anthropology of Experience. Chicago: University of Illinois, pp3-30.
ABRAHAMS, R.D. (1986) Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience. In: V.W. TURNER & E.M. BRUNER, ed(s). The Anthropology of Experience. Chicago: University of Illinois, pp45-72.

I::MY::YOU

I Experience MY Experience of YOU

We can empathise but we cannot experience directly what another experiences. It is our own. We can reflect on our experience and make it 'storyable' to communicate the essence to another. Within that recounted narrative on another person's experience, I experience through my embodied situation observing and listening to that person, what I experience. I make that person's experience MY own, but it is constructed based upon MY past experiences of similar processual actions and emotions. This construction is a socio-cultural construction, and happens within a familiar and shared socio-cultural context.

References used:
KAPFERRER, B. (1986) Performance and the Structuring of Meaning and Experience. In: V.W. TURNER & E.M. BRUNER, ed(s). The Anthropology of Experience. Chicago: University of Illinois, pp188-203.

An Aesthetic Experience

CREATE 10 SLIDE: Moving Across the Boundaries
Image Source: © iMarc http://creattica.com/posters/discovery/25486

Experience :: An Experience

What is the distinction between mere ‘experience’ and ‘an experience’?

Wilhelm Dilthey (a German historian, psychologist, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher) made a distinction. He saw 'experience' as a temporal flow that is received by individual consciousness. 'An experience' has a beginning and an ending. It is an intersubjective articulation, transformed into an expression* of that experienceª.

* how individual experience is framed and articulated
ª how reality presents itself to consciousness

References used:
BRUNER, E.M. (1986) Experience and Its Expressions. In: V.W. TURNER & E.M. BRUNER, ed(s). The Anthropology of Experience. Chicago: University of Illinois, pp3-30.