Bodily Presence Research Articles

‘In the mix’: Relational leadership explored through an analysis of techno DJs and dancers

Relational leadership theory views leadership as a process of social construction in which participants engage through their bodily presence. The ‘in-between’ space connecting leaders and followers, however, is under-researched and has not been analysed with a focus on movement. With a phenomenological approach and dance theory, this study explores movement by considering techno DJs and their live performances to an audience in clubs. It analyses DJs’ insights into relationships between themselves and followers. DJs actively seek physical proximity and use bodily movement and kinaesthetic empathy to relate to the participants, engage in mutual challenge, and embrace the co-creation that emerges. These insights are transferable to many leadership situations that include embodied interaction. The study illustrates that leaders not only ‘have’ bodies, but ‘are’ (moving) bodies who achieve a profound appreciation of the situation. This changes how we conceive of leadership when agency in embodied interaction is conditioned and reciprocated by leaders and followers in the ‘in-between’ space and does not pertain to one or the other.

John Donne, the Instant of Change, and the Time of the Body

John Donne, the Instant of Change, and the Time of the Body Timothy M. Harrison In "The Sun Rising," John Donne pits the time of the living body against the "motions" of the sun that direct worldly time.1 Why, the speaker asks the sun, should it think its "beames so reverend and strong?" (D, 166.11). After all, "I coulde ecclipse and cloude them with a wincke, / But that I would not lose her sight so Long" (D, 166.13–14). By asserting that he "coulde" eclipse the sun with a "wincke" were it not for a desire to keep his beloved in view, Donne attempts to create a lyric moment in which love evades the temporal regimes of both sun and body, a moment in which "Love, all alike, noe Season knowes, nor Clyme, / Nor houres, Dayes, Months, which are the raggs of Time" (D, 166.9–10). Acknowledging but passing up on the opportunity to "wincke" the sun away, Donne jokingly seeks to replace the temporal power of the sun's "motions" with the voluntary "motions" of his own body. The impossibility of this exercise is most obvious in the egotistical and comic confusion between the first-person perspective and a state of affairs pertaining in the world itself. Yet this impossibility is also manifest in the word "wincke," a term that could refer either to the voluntary closing of one's eyes or to the involuntary, constantly repeated act of nictitation.2 Donne considers winking and then decides against it. But his beloved will nevertheless disappear, however briefly, behind eyelids that cannot help but close. Donne suggests that the time of the world—structured around the "motions" of the sun according to which "Schooleboyes" (D, 166.6), "Prentises" (D, 166.6), "Court huntsmen" (D, 166.7), and even the "King" (D, 166.7) organize their lives—is subtended by the unavoidable temporality of the body. The present moment is grounded in bodily presence. Donne's obsession with the present moment is well known, but his habit of linking time to the living, sentient body has gone all but unexplored.3 Scholars such as Robert Ellrodt have argued that although Donne's focus "on the here and now" has some precedents in Roman elegy, in Francesco Petrarca, and in Philip Sidney, "Donne's arresting of the present tenuous instant is peculiar," something deeper than "a mere characteristic of his art."4 Indeed, Donne experiments repeatedly [End Page 909] with representations of the present moment.5 He attempts to pause, slow down, or accelerate temporal passage. He works to discover eternity or aeviternity—an angelic state of being between time and timelessness—in the fleeting, ephemeral now. He strives to inhabit the eschatological moment when time itself will cease. In this essay, I argue that Donne grounds such temporal experiments in what I am calling the felt time of the body—in blinking eyes, beating hearts, and all of the myriad, nearly insensible events that take place within the recesses of the living body and generate a temporality peculiar to the body. For Donne, the embodied self changes just as quickly as the mutable world, a fact highlighted in The Second Anniversary, where lovers become rivers: "she" and "thou," who did begin to love, are neither now.You are both fluid, chang'd since yesterday […]So flowes her face, and thine eies[.]6 Heraclitus is here dressed in Petrarchan garb; you never kiss the same lover twice. Subject to the laws of motion that govern all physical entities, sentient bodies flow, changing in time. Yet as the image of the winking eye in "The Sun Rising" suggests, although the time of the body must intersect with the time of physics in general, it is nevertheless distinct—precisely because it is felt. Throughout his career, Donne sought to invent a rhetorical decorum adequate to the lived time of bodily change. In this essay, I reconstruct how Donne thought his way inside changes too swift for human beings to perceive.7 I take as my guiding thread Donne's exploration of a puzzle from the ancient Greek physics of time known as the "instant of change."8 The crux of...

Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku: diffractive and divergent multiplicities and their cosmopolitical orientations

ABSTRACT More than one and less than many, has become a refrain to depict the notion of multiplicity. Borrowed from Mariyln Strathern, Annemarie Mol mobilized the refrain to succinctly capture the complex result of a series of operations that make a variety of practices hold together as a singular thing. In this article, I seek to explore some consequences of the proposition that multiplicity can be figured in, at least, two different ways: as diffraction, where the operations of singularization explored by Mol are more easily carried out, and as divergence, where singularization is not necessarily an option. The exploration is part of a larger project to rework the notion of cosmopolitics first proposed by Isabelle Stengers and later taken by Bruno Latour. Elsewhere I have argued that their conception of cosmopolitics as a project oriented towards the composition of a common world is predominantly informed by the figuration of multiplicity as diffraction, and thus it very much resembles a process of singularization writ large. In this context, foregrounding multiplicity as divergence opens a path to probe the limits of this conception of cosmopolitics, inquire into the different ways in which multiplicity holds together, and envision alternative forms of cosmopolitics. I organize my exploration around two entities caribou and atîku that, so to speak, occupy the same space at the same time in terms of bodily presence, albeit dominant common sense would have it that atîku and caribou are two words for the same entity.

Is Schizophrenia a Disorder of Consciousness? Experimental and Phenomenological Support for Anomalous Unconscious Processing.

Decades ago, several authors have proposed that disorders in automatic processing lead to intrusive symptoms or abnormal contents in the consciousness of people with schizophrenia. However, since then, studies have mainly highlighted difficulties in patients’ conscious experiencing and processing but rarely explored how unconscious and conscious mechanisms may interact in producing this experience. We report three lines of research, focusing on the processing of spatial frequencies, unpleasant information, and time-event structure that suggest that impairments occur at both the unconscious and conscious level. We argue that focusing on unconscious, physiological and automatic processing of information in patients, while contrasting that processing with conscious processing, is a first required step before understanding how distortions or other impairments emerge at the conscious level. We then indicate that the phenomenological tradition of psychiatry supports a similar claim and provides a theoretical framework helping to understand the relationship between the impairments and clinical symptoms. We base our argument on the presence of disorders in the minimal self in patients with schizophrenia. The minimal self is tacit and non-verbal and refers to the sense of bodily presence. We argue this sense is shaped by unconscious processes, whose alteration may thus affect the feeling of being a unique individual. This justifies a focus on unconscious mechanisms and a distinction from those associated with consciousness.

Телесное присутствие в геолокационных играх. Часть 2

Телесное присутствие в геолокационных играх. Часть 2

Телесное присутствие в геолокационных играх. Часть 1

Телесное присутствие в геолокационных играх. Часть 1

Dancing compassion: Cultivating a body of love in the Tantric Buddhist dance of Nepal

Abstract This article examines Charya Nritya, the contemplative and yogic dance practice of the Tantric Buddhist priests of Nepal. Taking as my focus a dance devoted to a divinity who embodies universal compassion, I elucidate how the ways of moving and somatic sensitivities nurtured by the dance can serve in the Buddhist quest to cultivate a compassionate bodily presence on earth.

Home Visits in Social Work: From Disembodiment to Embodied Presence

This paper explores the bodily aspects of home visits, based on an institutional ethnography of home visits conducted by social workers of an Israeli municipal social services department. The analysis of fifteen in-depth, semi-structured interviews with social workers in various capacities revealed their heightened and unique corporeal experiences during home visits, in contrast with their work at the department. Four key aspects are discussed: the journey from the office to the client’s home as a transition from a disembodied position to an embodied one; the social worker’s tentative bodily presence during the visit; the home visit as a ‘dirty work’; and the social worker’s bodily experience in relation to the institutional and professional discourse. The discussion centres on the drawbacks and benefits of the workers’ increased embodied presence during home visits.

Post-mortem privacy and informational self-determination

Post-mortem privacy is becoming a vital topic of public and scholarly legal concern. Post-mortem privacy is understood as the right of a person to preserve and control what becomes of his reputation and dignity after death. The assumption that the deceased does not qualify for privacy rights, because his bodily presence has been terminated, no longer holds in our networked society. In the digital age, the phenomenon of the digital legacy that an Internet user leaves behind after his demise, has led to new challenges for the legal system. The deceased is no longer in a position to exercise human autonomy as an active agent. The article reconsiders the notion of human autonomy with regard to these digital representations. Taking the point of view that the control over personal information (also known as informational self-determination) is essential in protecting one’s privacy in the antemortem life, the article explores whether this principle may have validity in the postmortem context. Legal philosophical arguments are advanced in a discourse about the quandary if digital personae of deceased persons can be bestowed with a legal basis of personality rights and concomitantly privacy rights. Therefore much attention is given to the problem of the subject, which does not seem to be functioning in the case of the absence of a living subject. Briefly referring to novel personae, it is argued that fundamental human rights need not be limited to the rights of living human beings.

Women's experiences of labour and birth when having a termination of pregnancy for fetal abnormality in the second trimester of pregnancy: A qualitative meta-synthesis

Objectiveto explore women's experiences of labour and birth in the context of a termination of pregnancy for fetal abnormality in the second trimester of pregnancy. Designmeta-synthesis of 10 qualitative studies which included the experiences of 581 women. Data analysis was informed by van Manen's four lifeworld existentials (lived body, lived space, lived time and lived human relationships) and focused only on women's experiences of their labour and birth when terminating a pregnancy in the second trimester for fetal abnormality. Key findingseight themes were generated by the analysis. In my head: a storm of emotion reflected the lived or felt space. In this space women make meaning of the experience. Too late to turn back time and Living and escaping the moment considered lived time; it is lived time that enables a woman to reinterpret who they once were and who they are becoming. The existential concept of lived body represented the women's physical or bodily presence and was reflected in the themes; The language of labour: un-describable torture, The meaning of pain; punishment and protection and Being a mother in the space where birth meets death. Relational or the lived human relationship is reflected in See me… talk to me…hear me… be with me and Sorry baby. These themes describe the women's lived sense of others in the interpersonal space that they share with them. Key conclusionsthe findings of this meta-synthesis provide insight into how emotionally and physically traumatic a woman's labour and birth experiences can be in this context. Women wanted to spend time with their baby constructing lasting memories that they could hold onto and share. They needed acknowledgment that their baby existed and their loss was tangible and real. What happened within the space of the relationship women shared with care providers was seen as vital, especially when respectful and dignified interaction was experienced. The women's need for human contact and support through their experience was also seen as critical. Implications for practicethe need for greater understanding and acknowledgement of the woman's experience by all caregivers is required. Woman-centred and situation sensitive care provision should be prioritised. Further research that acknowledges and prioritises the feminine voice and the lived experience of women is required.

Luke 24 Reconsidered

One of the climactic passages of the third Gospel is that in which Jesus probes by his resurrection and bodily presence that his message has been confirmed. Consequently, Luke 24 has been of interest to many researchers, but it seems there remain still some exegetical puzzles such as the literary model of the pericope 24:36-49. This article will deal with some questions regarding the meaning of this issue and will try to formulate a response to some open questions by considering the passage in the context of the stories of apparitions of the Imperial Greek and Roman literatures.

Manipulating Bodily Presence Affects Cross-Modal Spatial Attention: A Virtual-Reality-Based ERP Study.

Earlier studies have revealed cross-modal visuo-tactile interactions in endogenous spatial attention. The current research used event-related potentials (ERPs) and virtual reality (VR) to identify how the visual cues of the perceiver’s body affect visuo-tactile interaction in endogenous spatial attention and at what point in time the effect takes place. A bimodal oddball task with lateralized tactile and visual stimuli was presented in two VR conditions, one with and one without visible hands, and one VR-free control with hands in view. Participants were required to silently count one type of stimulus and ignore all other stimuli presented in irrelevant modality or location. The presence of hands was found to modulate early and late components of somatosensory and visual evoked potentials. For sensory-perceptual stages, the presence of virtual or real hands was found to amplify attention-related negativity on the somatosensory N140 and cross-modal interaction in somatosensory and visual P200. For postperceptual stages, an amplified N200 component was obtained in somatosensory and visual evoked potentials, indicating increased response inhibition in response to non-target stimuli. The effect of somatosensory, but not visual, N200 enhanced when the virtual hands were present. The findings suggest that bodily presence affects sustained cross-modal spatial attention between vision and touch and that this effect is specifically present in ERPs related to early- and late-sensory processing, as well as response inhibition, but do not affect later attention and memory-related P3 activity. Finally, the experiments provide commeasurable scenarios for the estimation of the signal and noise ratio to quantify effects related to the use of a head mounted display (HMD). However, despite valid a-priori reasons for fearing signal interference due to a HMD, we observed no significant drop in the robustness of our ERP measurements.

Body as Temple: Jamaican Catholic Women and the Liturgy of the Eucharist

ABSTRACTWithin the historical formation of Jamaica, Christian rhetoric and rhetorical practices ritually exiled African Diaspora/Black Atlantic women and their bodies from essential human and feminine value systems. However, there were other scripts brought to the island in the bodies of African peoples who arrived as captives in a pernicious Christian project. These scripts promote, value and affirm the bodies of African peoples as sacred and divine. This article presents an ethnographic exploration of Jamaican Catholic women’s bodily presence and performance at the Liturgy of the Eucharist, highlighting critical spiritual practices around the notion of body as temple. In the enlivened space of contemporary Jamaican Catholic Christianity, Jamaican women participate in ongoing rituals of body reverence, the claiming, re-claiming and repossessing of body-selves, in order to become dynamic crossroads spaces where human and divine regularly encounter and intermingle.

Coordination, negotiation, and social attention

Living with others is a key factor shaping our urban life. Their bodily presence scaffolds our social world and is involved in the way the built environment appears to us. In this article we highlight the influence of the embodied presence of other human beings on the constitution of a special type of urban architecture — the extraordinary architectural space. Our analysis, which lies at the intersection between architecture, phenomenology and cognitive science, suggests that being in the direct presence of others constitutes this extraordinary architectural space in the sense that it transforms the built setting into a negotiated place and reveals for the subject some of its extraordinary properties. The architectural examples we discuss show that these intersubjective advantages are often embedded in and encouraged by the design of such built objects.

Antiracism apps: framing understandings and approaches to antiracism education and intervention

ABSTRACTMobile apps for antiracism have become valuable pedagogical and activist tools for their real-time and mapping capabilities, their portability and intimate bodily presence, which enables a reaction exactly when an act of racism occurs. In this article, five mobile apps aimed at producing antiracism education or intervention outcomes from the United Kingdom, Australia and France are the focus of an interrogation of the ways in which racism and antiracism are framed and the strengths and weaknesses of these initiatives for countering dominant forms of everyday racism. We identify a number of different approaches to racism and antiracism in our inquiry, which lead to particular sets of aims, features and uses: the app as a tool for capturing, reporting and responding to racist acts; as a way of reinforcing a wider sense of community identity and solidarity; to demonstrate racism, especially Islamophobia, and make its forms visible, and as a means for challenging racism through raising awareness and encouraging bystanders to oppose it. We argue that while these apps are well disposed to exposing and manifesting isolated incidents of racism in everyday life, we question their potential for transformative societal outcomes beyond the level of unilateral action in the context of events experienced as unique incidents.

Memory, body, and the online researcher: Following Russian street demonstrations via social media

ABSTRACTThe Moscow street demonstrations of 2011–12 were the largest public gatherings in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were also the largest‐ever gathering of Russians on social media. While using the Internet to follow such large‐scale social movements remotely, researchers experience social media as a context in which anthropology happens. They may think about “being there” in new ways that shift their focus to their own processes of memory making and sense of bodily presence. Experiencing and remembering social media in the body challenges the distinctions we might otherwise make between virtual and physical encounters. [body memory, protest, social media, digital anthropology, online research, Moscow, Russia]Московские уличные демонстрации 2011–12 стали наиболее многочисленными в России со времен распада Советского Союза. Они также объединили наибольшее число россиян в социальных сетях. Используя Интернет для изучения крупномасштабных социальных движений в удаленном доступе, исследователи одновременно рассматривают онлайн пространство социальных сетей как новое поле антропологии. Новые способы «присутствия» побуждают исследователей обратиться к своему собственному процессу производства памяти и собственному чувству телесности. Особые опыт и память телесности в социальных средствах коммуникации заставляют нас пересмотреть границы виртуального и физического опыта. [память тела, протест, социальные медиа, цифровая антропология, онлайн исследования, Москва, Россия;]

Atmospheres, inside and out

Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, Tonino Griffero. Farnham: Ashgate (2014). 174 pages. Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (Space, Materiality and the Normative), Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. London: Routledge (2014). 277 pages. Elements of Architecture Assembling archaeology, atmosphere and the performance of building spaces, Mikkel Bille, Tim Flohr Sorensen (Eds.) London: Routledge (2016). 444 pages. The theme of atmospheres within philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory has developed steadily over the last two decades. Inspired part by the philosophies of Gernot Bohme and Hermann Schmitz, the area of research has become a focal point for studies on the intersection between materiality and affectivity, embodiment and culture, and perception and sense. We are now at a point this atmospheric turn where networks devoted to the topic are appearing alongside a prolific emergence of publications concerned with the manifold dimensions of atmospheres. Yet despite--or because--of its prevalence, the idea of atmosphere remains decidedly elusive. An atmosphere, as philosopher Tonino Griffero, tells us his systematic study of the concept, is both everywhere and nowhere. Moreover, an atmosphere has a peculiar quality of being that which is often overpoweringly in the air (to use a phrase that will return time and again what Griffero calls atmospherology) whilst at the same time resisting rigid analysis. Prima facie, a strong part of the appeal of the concept of atmosphere is its very fuzziness. Atmosphere is a liminal concept; it belongs neither to the subject nor the object, it is neither fully present nor entirely absent, rather it sifts between these divisions, undercutting any attempt at fixing polarities place. This much we already know from everyday discourse. An atmosphere can refer to anything ranging from a room to a political climate, from a person's presence to the feel of a city. In aesthetic and affective terms, our language extends from the mood of a film to the affective resonance of a monumental event. Furthermore, atmosphere has a peculiarly excessive quality to it; a word, it cannot be constrained, at least not easily. To speak of the atmosphere of a room is to speak of a dialogue that takes place between the inhabitant of the room and the spatiality itself, while at the same time registering how an atmosphere exceeds that liaison between subject and object. Gernot Bohme offers a compelling summary: [A]tmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and yet they are something thinglike, belonging to the thing that things articulate their presence through qualities--conceived as ecstasies. Nor are atmospheres something subjective, for example determinations of a psychic state. And yet they are subjectlike, belong to subjects that they are sense bodily presence by human beings and this sensing is at the same time a bodily state of being of subjects space (Bohme, 1993: 122). These three volumes under review, each important their own right, offer a series of illuminating perspectives on the paradoxical aspects of atmosphere and its broader conceptual landscape. Together, each text assumes a distinct perspective on atmosphere, with a joint sense of divergence and convergence between them. Griffero's book is emblematically phenomenological approach; his aim is to undertake nothing less than a thematic and ontological study of atmosphere, outlining its salient and invariant structures. In sharp contrast, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos's book is mindful of phenomenology's contribution to the topic of atmosphere, but ultimately he is opposed to such a stance. Indeed, his project differs radically from Griffero's seeking to burst the bubble of atmospheres, accenting its seductive propensity to draw us inwards. Bille and Sorensen's collection adopts a different perspective altogether. …

The bodily other and everyday experience of the lived urban world

This article explores the relationship between the bodily presence of other humans in the lived urban world and the experience of everyday architecture. We suggest, from the perspectives of phenomenology and architecture, that being in the company of others changes the way the built environment appears to subjects, and that this enables us to perform simple daily tasks while still attending to the built environment (to a certain, relatively minimal degree). Our analysis shows that in mundane urban settings attending to the environment involves a unique attentional mode, which does not rely on concentrating on, or appreciating the architectural objects, but rather on social attention and on the subject’s kinesthesis in relation to the built environment.

Whose Voice Is It Anyway? A Rereading of Wang Changling's “Autumn in the Palace of Everlasting Faith: Five Poems”

The Tang dynasty poet Wang Changling 王昌齡 (ca. 690–ca. 756), renowned for his mastery of the jueju 絕句 (quatrain) form, has been praised specifically for having brought a lyric sensibility to the heptasyllabic quatrain: a poetic genre most closely associated with yuefu themes and technical complexity. To the extent that such praise is responding to something specific in Wang’s poems, they present a fine opportunity to investigate precisely how a lyric subjectivity is constructed on the basis of the limited poetic vocabulary afforded by stock themes, archetypal characters, and stylized surroundings. Noting that Wang is especially adept at using visual (and occasionally auditory) cues to convey the inner state of the personae that inhabit his quatrains, and taking into account the importance he apparently places on establishing a bodily presence within a given poem (as expressed in his attributive essay “Lun wenyi” 論文意 [On Writing]), this article performs a close reading of the perceptual cues featured in the five heptasyllabic quatrains, “Autumn in the Palace of Everlasting Faith” 長信秋詞. Borrowing the term focalization from recent theories of visual narrativity (most notably as applied by Mieke Bal), and applying it to these poems over the course of this close reading exercise, the essay demonstrates that the lyric power of these poems stems not from the communication of the poet’s inner state on the specific occasion that inspired his writing but from his use of the senses to construct a fluid, shifting, and permeable subjectivity—one that can, at moments, encompass the reader and the poet.

Interference of the Visual and the Kinestetic in the Postnonclassical Art

The Double-Post culture, which is based on the digital “Grand Style”, is noted for its special kine(sthe)tic format, characterized by the virtualization of the spatial, the tactile, and the corporal. Dominance of the visual part generates the person’s desire for a physical experience of the world’s tangibility and own corporality. Overcoming of the lack of tactile in culture comes either through the actualization of direct kinesthetic experience or by means of the indirect visual kinesthetic. The postnonclassical art (the media art, labyrinth-installations, mirrored rooms) offers some previously impossible ways of perception, construction and physical exploration of the multi-dimensional visual reality. The tactile and kinesthetic sensations begin to play the role of an “augmented” virtuality in the viewer-participant’s communication with the intangible, visual spaces and images. Therewith, the kinesthetic and the visual create the counter “flows” of sensory perception, which intersect, overlap and interfere, forming some fundamentally new spatiality and imagery. Due to the interference of the visual and the kinesthetic, the postnonclassical artworks obtain some sophisticatedly dissected fractal spaces that give to a person the fullness of the bodily presence through the simultaneous co-existence of the person’s physical body and an infinite set of mutually exclusive physical reflections to be experienced in the format of indirect visual kinesthetic. The article examines the history of labyrinths and mirrored rooms from the viewpoint of cultural studies and analyzes the media performances by Ph. Decouflé, Ch. Sandison, the Cloud Gate theatre and others, the movies with the plot or composition connected with a labyrinth (“The Cube”, “The Maze Runner”, etc.), and the art installations with mirrored rooms by L. Samaras, Y. Kusama, T. Frank, S. Salat and others.