Religion and the Senses Lectures
Spring 2012
Introduction; Central Issues; Naturalist Approach
One chapter in my personal history in this course goes back to a large room in a home I had in Niwot a
few years ago. I wanted it to be a dance studio and in the process of transforming it to that space I
discovered that I knew very little about color. What colors did I like? What colors go together? As kids
we are often asked our favorite color. But I realized that not only did I not know my favorite color, I
didn’t know anything about color. So I went to work collecting materials about color wheels and color
schemes and color in decoration. Soon I discovered the depth of my ignorance. Somehow it had never
dawned on me that our simple venture to Home Depot to scan and select paint colors from among
thousands available is a remarkable luxury enjoyed by few people and only in very modern times. How
stupid of me not to know this. Then I began to realize that throughout history many colors were
impossibly difficult to acquire and then only at great expense. Then I began to realize that colors
correlate with historical and cultural fashion. Then I began to realize (I should have known this since I’d
studied it many times) that color has been one of the most fascinating topics of study for philosophy,
cognitive science, linguistics, and other heavily theoretical fields because color exists in part because of
the nature of objects in the world but also highly dependent on neurobiology and even personal
experience and psychology. The vastness of color simply kept expanding for me. I did paint the room,
but I also offered a course called “Color Culture and Religion” to continue my interests in this topic as
well as to share the riches with others.
It was a short leap but a great deal of work reading and thinking from considering color to the entire
sensorium and then to perception itself. At first this just transformed the “Color” course into a “Religion
and the Senses” course that covered each of the five human senses surveying the rich literature on
these senses and our human experience. But then my interest in dance and movement began to
impinge on this topic as I became increasingly interested in perception especially through the writing of
French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty that extensively transformed the way we think about
perception. Rather than perception being organ-based and passive, it is whole-bodied, active which
means it is based in movement, in the interaction of perceiver with perceptible. So movement must be
seen as essential to perception, to our being sensual beings, to being human. However, movement,
while often mentioned or implied, has played a rather peripheral part in the discussion of perception.
Only recently have scholars begun to ask “what is movement?” “how is movement possible?” “how do
we account for, articulate, grasp movement, since movement is moving and resists being captured?”
A few years ago I first learned of proprioception. It is sometimes referred to as the kinesthetic sense. It
is often described as that internal sensory system that responds to our self-movement so that we will
know where our bodies are in space even if we can’t see them. I knew instantly that this understanding
was only the barest hint of the potential of the profundity connected with proprioception; and indeed
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this is most certainly the case. Now to try to bridge to the distinction of the present iteration of all this
… while I knew that proprioceptors were sensors found in muscles and joints, I did not know much about
what they actualy were and I pictured them as distributed here and there like little instruments keeping
an eye out on what was going on. Much of the material on proprioception describes them largely in
terms of “feedback” to the brain’s work of directing the body’s movements. When I actually took the
time to look up the neurobiological descriptions and discussions of proprioceptors I was astounded at
not only how complex they are, at not only how pervasive they are (billions and billions), but more so
that the way they work (in my understanding) was according to principles that seemed to me to be
highly valuable to the macro-behavior that constitutes the living stuff of culture and religion. Further, I
found that I couldn’t simply comprehend much about proprioceptors without placing them in the
context of the whole nervous system, the muscle and skeletal system, the exterocensors on the skin, or
even the viscera in its deep role in perception. Now I don’t pretend to understand these systems in the
technical detail of specialists, yet what I found is that everywhere in these systems I came to understand
some of the principles that operate, they suggested application to macro-behavior. And the suggestions
are innovative and exciting.
In the process of this expanding inquiry I found that philosophers (particularly phenomenologists) and
neurobiologists (of various specialized fields) as well as the emerging cross fields of cognitive science
and neuro-philosophy were all studying and writing about similar things, yet with little general
awareness of the work in parallel fields. And furthermore they all tended toward becoming highly
technical and specialized in their work to the point that it is rather limited in its access. Now as a
student of religion, I’ve found that it is unfortunately remarkably rare for a religion scholar to show the
least interest in or tolerance of work in the natural sciences, even cognitive science.
Against this background them my interests have developed along two intersecting paths. First, as I
began to comprehend how essential movement (understood in a somewhat more sophisticated way
than we inherit) is to all perception and that movement can be located in proprioception which is as
neurobiologically based as any of the five senses we are accustomed to, I realized that we need to
rebuild the sensorium (the hierarchical accounting of the senses) so that it is based on
movement/proprioception. Second, I began to realize that so many of the issues and concerns that
need to be resolved to broadly expand and enrich the study of religions and cultures are revisioned if
based on the neurobiology of movement. The breakthrough on this for me came when I learned that
whether one classes proprioceptors as neurological sensors or muscle fibers is arbitrary. One can see
them as part of either system. The principle here suggests a very different approach to understanding
humans where a longtime confounding issue is the so-called “mind-body problem,” that is, how the
mind and body relate and coexist. Typically they are separated and isolated and subject to judgment.
From the perspective of proprioception, there is no problem to solve. We cannot move without both
involved, yet in movement they are in an important way indistinguishable in their assignment to
separate systems. I find this so remarkable, that I believe we can develop an approach based on the
consideration of neurobiology for insights, principles, images, and metaphors that are as powerful and
important in the study of the macro-behaviors of culture and religion. I am calling this a “naturalist”
approach because the principles are founded in the neurobiological nature of our animate organism. It
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seems to me that this kind of grounding is appropriate for phenomenology and for cognitive science as
well in they both are finally grounded on what we consider the “nature” of our being. I want to
immediately caution that I don’t see this approach as opposing any other approach, or isolated to but
certain domains of concern such as a “materialist” concern or a “body” concern. Rather I propose that is
offers an explanatory model that is pervasive even though it certainly is one possible among many
approaches. For me at this point it offers the most exciting approach I know about and it avoids many
unfortunate aspects I know to exist in many other possible approaches.
Overview course and syllabus.
Sensorium; Anthropology of Senses
When one thinks of cultures and religions it is nearly impossible not to think of gorgeous tapestries of
sensuous lushness—coffee table books and Technicolor films. Yet, the academic studies of these
subjects are often droning colorless descriptions typically focused on the thinking of intellectuals and
the shifts in doctrine institutional history, bereft of the tastes, smells, sounds, feelings, emotions,
images, colors, textures, temperatures, and patterns swirling in constant movement in the lived
moments of these religions and cultures. It seems that academic studies have become somehow
equipped of negative genius in becoming so skilled at scrubbing the sensuous from the sentient.
Jesuit scholar Walter Ong has discussed how this skill has been not only acquired but valued in his ????
book Orality and Literacy and in the essay “The Shifting Sensorium.” He plots the shift as intertwined
with the shift from orality that depends on speech and gesture and face-to-face personal
communication to literacy that depends on sight and private distanced communication even over great
periods of time and space. This shift occurs in multiple stages beginning with the rise of the alphabet
and writing done by skilled technicians hand-copying manuscripts to Guttenberg (1450) and the printing
press with the subsequent rapidly accelerating consequences that take us to the present with
widespread literacy and the development of technology that allows the worldwide distribution of print,
but also images and videos, by the nonspecialist on a near immediate basis with large percentages of
people around the world having personal handheld devices allowing access and interaction.
Ong shows that a shift in medium is a shift in sensory hierarchy and sensory value and even the extent
of sensory experience. These changes are also associated with shifts in worldview and the image
schemas on which all meaning, even reason, are based. We are not only mentally but physically, at the
level of tissue, the means of our communication.
Ong’s work helps us appreciate why the academic study of religions and cultures has resisted the
inclusion of anything beyond writing and the consideration of things written (i.e., texts). We are born of
this sensorium and our lives are devoted to the perpetuation of it. It is our reality and thus seems
natural to our experience to the point of being unquestioned.
Ong however has a broader vision. His experience and knowledge of other cultures informs him that
not all cultures are formed and operate with the same understanding as we have of senses, sensory
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experience, and the value associated with the hierarchy of the senses. He offers a number of
contrasting examples to begin to establish a most important point: we are not alone, but the others are
not like us in this most fundamental way!
Despite many scholars dating especially from the late nineteenth century with Charles Sanders Peirce
and his successors, William James and John Dewey; despite the contributions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
and many others in the mid-twentieth century; ethnography and anthropology (I’ll get to the academic
study of religion in a bit) continued to focus on text-based approaches to the recording and
interpretation of their subjects. They asked elders to share their wisdom which became documents of
beliefs. The material aspects of cultures were described and then became of interest to studies of
morphology and evolution and development and dispersion. The entire field of folklore was focused on
the identification of motifs and tale-types both of which could be identified by an alphanumeric
designation rather than the performance of the stories.
By the 1980s contributions by anthropologists such as Michael Jackson and folklorists such as Del
Hymes, began to show that the media were as important as the message, indeed, often the medium was
the message as Marshall McLuhan later demonstrated. As a result anthropologists (well a few of them
anyway) not only began pay much more attention to the sensory composition, experience, and values,
but also began to consider a new approach for anthropology (or at least a subfield) called “Sensory
Anthropology.” David Howes and Constance Classen have been the most tireless and persistent
advocates of sensory anthropology since the 1980s themselves contributing many studies often based
on field research and also editing and encouraging others to advance this approach.
Arising in anthropology this approach linked to persistent and classic anthropological issues.
Acknowledging that the scholar’s sensory experience and sensorium may be decidedly different from
her/his subject culture presented a new chapter in the issue of the participant observer and the
objective perspective. These scholars recognized that their own sensory reality makes it impossible for
them to be without expectations born in their very senses regarding their subject cultures. Howes
discusses this issue in “Coming to Our Senses,” yet he seems to consider the resolution is to honor the
sensorium of the subject. What I don’t find satisfactory in his solution is just how one can set aside
one’s own senses (and the entire reality that correlates with them) in order to even come to know the
others as they know themselves. This is a thorny issue that I’ll attempt to resolve in this course based
on the “naturalist” view that begins at the level of neurobiology whose mechanisms may be shaped by
cultural, historical, and personal experience, but that have a common base in the human body.
The second issue that arises is that since anthropologists tend to study small scale cultures that are
often (indeed almost invariably) associated with a primitivism (positively or negatively valued) and since
the expansion of sensory data in the study of these cultures often focuses on smell, taste, and touch (all
long identified with the animal senses or the lower senses), then there is a tendency in sensory
anthropology to correlate the value of sensory experience to be most relevant to primitive or exotic
cultures (often cultures without writing anyway). The unintended result reinforces a primitivism as well
as reinforcing the lofty position of text-based studies. Howes even contributes to this in his criticism of
text-based studies when he writes, the “model of the text would result in the meaning coming unhinged
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from the body, the message divorced from the medium.” I think we must get past this text versus body
approach and it simply can’t be done by solving it like a problem, but rather by establishing a paradigm
in which the opposition does not arise. I’ll endeavor to do this.
As for the academic study of religion, there is no doubt that in recent decades there have been efforts to
incorporate a broader sensory landscape than has been the forte of the academy. I have taught
“Religion and body” courses many times, I have taught “Religion and Dancing” courses for 15 years, I
have taught “Brain, Body, Movement” as a course a couple times and certainly numerous versions of
“Religion and the Senses.” These are not common courses. Most of them, like this one, take place in a
classroom based on reading, writing, lecturing. My dance classes have often involved dancing yet never
integrated with the balance of the course (lecture/writing/reading). I plan eventually to add a “lab”
component to “Religion and the Senses.” Other scholars have included aspects of “body” (the usual
rubric) in some of their research and teaching. Yet, commonly the body is understood as a “text.”
Lawrence Sullivan’s article “Body Works” is a good example in seeing things like canoes as texts. His
article also presents an extensive history of the inclusion of such “body” things. Students of religion still
want to find the meaning in everything they consider and the principal way of understanding how one
discerns meaning is based in the language paradigm. Most recently Manuel Vasquez has written a book
Beyond Belief: Toward a Materialist Theory of Religion (2011). This book surveys the possibilities for a
non-text based study of religion. The academic study of religion is far behind anthropology in its work to
expand beyond gradually recognized limitations. Both still tend, by the very way they approach the
concern, to support a divide and opposition between text-focus and body-focus and all the correlate
oppositions that have pretty much determined the shape of modern Western history: body/mind,
primitive/civilized, senses/intellect, subjective/objective, experience/truth, and so on. I contend that
even if we begin by attempting to resolve these dualities by “integration” or “hyphenation” or
“conjunction” is to lose the entire war before the first battle. We cannot simply move forward by
engaging terms like Michael Jackson’s “body-mind-habitus” even though his inclusion of habitus
suggests something interesting. We can’t be satisfied with Merleau-Ponty’s “minded-body” or “livedbody” constructions. All of these begin and are based on invoking the long history of opposing and
hierarchically valued dualisms and I believe that in that frame of mind, no amount of hyphenglue will
put Humpty back together again.
Let me adumbrate an alternative and then we’ll fill it out throughout the course. Beginning with the
image of proprioceptors being both/and nerves and muscles identical in the moving itself, but subject to
being backfilled into an analysis of how they operate in the context of various systems (nervous and
muscular) we have an important image. Moving has forever and everywhere been identified as life, as
vitality. In Husserl’s term “animate organism” it is the moving that constitutes the wholeness and the
nature of the organism as a life form. In the nervous system, neurotransmission is the movement of
information from one place to another and is foundational to the ontology of the whole system. It all
collapses absent the movement we call neurotransmission. In the muscular system, it is the exercise of
the muscles, contracting and releasing, conjoined with the skeletal system that is the function. A
nonmoving muscle is simply not a living muscle it is meat. Since movement is associated with
proprioceptors, but in turn with the entire animate organism, it can be considered as a sense (often
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termed the kinesthetic sense) but it is much more, as we would expect, in that no other sense can
function without movement and no movement is possible without engaging other senses. So
movement is a sensory mode that is also amodal. Surely we can immediately appreciate that beginning
with movement holds much promise for a very different approach. Not movement as one more,
previously ignored and forgotten, sense, but rather movement as a very different way of
comprehending the complexity of sensing, perceiving, living.
So now it is time to look much more carefully at moving from a number of complementing and
overlapping perspectives. Something as common and natural as movement will become something
almost infinitely complex and elusive. I’ll begin with a general description of neurotransmission and
we’ll begin to enrich from there.
Nervous System: Neurotransmission and Action Potentials
Lockhart, Hamilton, and Frye wrote in their Anatomy of the Human Body, “the nervous system is merely
a [part of a] mechanism by which a muscular movement can be initiated by some change in the
peripheral sensation, say an object touching the skin” (p. 267). It may be surprising for us to learn that
the purpose of the nervous system is movement. But then it is all the more fascinating that the
initiation of this purpose the nervous system serves is itself inseparable from movement, that is,
“change in the peripheral sensation, say an object touching the skin.” Thus the moving of the body is in
response to the moving in the world that impinges on the body. Yet, of course, the moving of the body
participates in, we will come to see necessarily so, in the encounter of the body with the environment
that constitutes this motivating change. However we look at it, movement is the purpose and the
mechanism of the nervous system is directed and movement is the condition initiating the need for this
movement.
In this context when we look at the nervous system itself at its core component, the neuron, the cellular
architecture can be appreciated as a mechanism for movement. So movement initiates or creates the
motivating conditions for the nervous system; its purpose is to move muscles in response to movementbased sensation. Movement is fundamental and ubiquitous. Movement is the vehicle and the fuel.
Movement is so inseparable from neurology and sensation that it is simply taken for granted. Yet, it is
important to ask, “What is movement?” “Is it possible to consider this movement itself, as it is
movement, rather than the effects or affects resulting from movement?” I suggest that while there is an
obvious impossibility of grasping, nailing down, catching on to movement, for these surely will remove
the most distinctive attribute, that is, the moving, from movement, to make the effort is to foreground
some principles that are important and insightful. I want to attempt to do this by focusing in a general
way on the nervous system, neurotransmission, and action potential.
The nervous system is commonly understood as comprised of two major divisions. The central nervous
system is that portion encases in bone, the brain and the spinal cord. It is remarkably complex and
fragile. The peripheral nervous system is everything in the system outside the areas protected by bone.
This part is found in every part of the body’s interior and skin. It is common to draw a strong distinction
between the central and peripheral portions of the system. This division is evident in the current
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remarkable popularity of the brain, subject to endless popular books, perhaps because of its association
with memory and with the memory disorders and diseases that are so widespread today. However, it is
important to understand that neurons have the same structure and work the same way no matter
where they are located in the system. The divisions in the nervous system are more a matter of physical
location than of function.
Information is transmitted around the nervous system to accomplish the needs of the animate
organism, but the cell, the neuron, is the locus for understanding how this movement occurs. We might
say that it is here in the neuron and between neurons that purposeful movement occurs at the most
elemental level. We might look here to attempt to catch a glimpse of movement itself.
All nerve cells are of the same design. The cell has a cell body containing a nucleus, dendrites (receiving
connectors awaiting connections with other neurons), and axons (tread-like protuberances that reach
out to connect with other neurons). The cell is protected by a membrane that has amazing properties to
protect the nucleus, to allow transmission of chemicals from the inside or from the outside into or out of
the cell and to carry an electric charge based on the mix of charged ions in the cell at any time.
Surrounding the neuron are fluids of a great many kinds, some toxic and some essential.
Where an axon of one nerve finds a dendrite of another cell there is not a solid contact or physical
connection, but rather a close encounter characterized by a tiny space or distance, a synapse. Because
of the balance of chemicals in the nucleus of a neuron at rest there are slightly more negatively charged
ions than positive ones giving the neuron a slight negative charge. When the nerve is stimulated
(another issue to be considered) the neuron is excited and the membrane allows the inflow of chemicals
carrying a balance of positive ions resulting in changing very briefly (1/1000th of a second) the charge of
the neuron to positive and then back to negative.
The rapid reversal of the electrical polarity of the cell is called an action potential which is a moving
electric charge. Where there are more positive than negative ions briefly in the neuron there is a
movement of charge differential across the cell. The change in polarity in the neuron initiates a chain of
events with the charge being carried through the tube-like structures of the cell to their ends where the
axons meet the dendrites of other cells. The action potential flowing through the axon causes a quick
release (a spurt) of a neurotransmitter at the point of the synapse. This chemical crosses the distance
between the axon and dendrite and effects the membrane of the receiving cell which quickly opens to
the inflow of chemicals with positively charged ions thus reversing the polarity of that cell and
transmitting the charge from the first cell to the second one and so on until the termination (in a
simplified model) at a muscle cell (this too is another matter). The neurotransmitter is quickly
reabsorbed into the transmitting cell to be used again. Neurotransmission speeds, which I’ll consider
much more at another time, are obviously rapid given how quickly we can act and react and remarkably
amazing given their complexity. While variable, neurotransmission speeds are often stated as being 250
miles per hour. I’ll return to the system shortly to add other elements, but first I want to focus on the
principles that seem to be operating here related to moving itself at this most elemental neurological
level.
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There are entities involved that have clear boundaries, cells that are bounded by cell membranes. Yet,
while these are barriers protecting the nucleus from toxins and harm, they capture and invite into the
cell nutrients and other chemicals for cell metabolism. There is movement here across the cell
membrane which is itself a movement in response to the overall purpose of neurotransmission. There is
also movement for the maintenance of the life of the cell, also to purpose (autopoesis). The design of
the cell reflects its purpose which is to communicate with other cells and all neurons both reach out to
touch someone and reach out to be touched by someone. We see a similarity between cell membrane
and cell design. Neurons are designed to be integral, whole, separate, and even distant from other
neurons. Yet, neurons are selectively porous in both directions spurting out chemicals and sucking in
chemicals; reaching out to connect with another neuron that it will never actually be able to touch while
patiently awaiting that virtual touch from a neighbor via the shower of neurotransmitters. Movement
within the cell is initiated by the change of electric polarity that flows across the cell shifting the balance
of ions which quickly flip back. Movement from neuron to neuron occurs across a distance, a
separation, a gap, via a mechanism by which one cell tells the receiving cell to open its membrane to
ambient chemicals with positively charged ions. And the sequence continues on through the chain. The
operative principles/conditions associated with moving are distance and a vectored (i.e., directionally
intended) condition characterized by a need or desire. [distance is as much a connection as it is a
separation: a synapse is an actual distance, but no more than is a key in a lock … ] Information (the flip
of polarity, that is the action potential) moves so long as there is a space or distance that must be
crossed before the action has fulfilled its purpose or need. The movement from neuron to neuron also
is characterized by the setting of a space to cross and a purpose.
On a larger scale the transmission of a message to the muscle has the same contextual structure that
correlates with the presence of moving itself or we might term this living movement to distinguish it
from the chaotic flow of chemicals in the interstitial spaces surrounding the neurons. Action potentials
are carried as movement. It is not so much bits of information that are passed along some conduit; it is
a flow of electrical polarity shifts, oscillations since they flip and then flip right back, that have the
appearance of movement from one location to another. We might ask what is actually moving? Is there
anything at all going from one point to another? An interesting analogy are marque signs composed of
arrays of small light bulbs. It is the timing of the on/off condition of the lights that give the appearance
of the flow or movement of words or pictures across the sign. The same principle holds as well for
almost all electronic displays where pixels are on or off or have a fixed number of conditions that can be
selected offering the appearance of movement. The difference is that in the sign or the electronic
display there is not “awareness” or actual connection from one pixel or bulb to the next wherein this
connection is the heart and nature of the nervous system. But no thing is actually being carried along;
movement is virtual.
This is a stripped down version of neuron structure to give us a few terms that are key in the context of
movement: distance or space connected with purpose or need or desire. Further, there are givens in
the system; mechanistic aspects like cell design, nature of membrane functions, the electronic charge of
certain chemicals, the function of neurotransmitters. All of these exist as of the nature of animate
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organisms. Movement is characterizeable in its moving or in itself as oscillatory (flipping from positive
to negative) and as virtual (no thing crosses from one place to another like a car driving down a road).
I want to pan out a bit from the neuron to include other aspects of neurotransmission to enrich our
understanding and to discover other terms that reveal principles important to our larger endeavor.
Excitation/inhibition (interactive, responsive)
It is common to speak of neurotransmission and the nervous system in terms of an analogy to electric
wiring. There are a number of things that suggest this is a good analogy and the common perception of
the workings of the nervous system tend to enforce these. We speak of being “hard-wired,” of synapses
“firing,” and think of a hard connection between locations in the brain and specific locations of muscles.
However the analogy does more harm than good, even though it is by now almost impossible to move
beyond it. One of the important differences is that at the synapse there is no “spark” that “fires” across
the gap like we are familiar with the gap in a sparkplug. [FN on Spark People] It is a chemical spurt that
is then quickly reabsorbed. Further the effect of the neurotransmitter on the dendrite is quite variable.
It may be excitatory or inhibitory; that is, it may pass along the action potential or it may actually inhibit
it. If it passes it along it may increase the excitation or not. This means that other factors are involved in
an extraordinarily complex system of active responses to stimuli. It is interactive and variable and
organic rather than simple and direct. We need think of interactive self-adjusting variable systems and
networks rather than point to point connections. At the cellular level where the nervous system
connects with muscles the same interrelationship pertains. This interactivity between cells constitutes
what is commonly understood as tone, that active push/pull vitality of muscles incipient to movement.
As Lockhart and colleagues describe this,
Muscular activity must … be viewed against a general background of neuronal activity, a balance
of facilitation and inhibition resulting in musculature tone, upon which intermittent or phasic
excitatory stimuli produce actual movements, the pathways concerned being at times
facilitatory and at times excitatory (366).
Many-to-one, one-to-many (self-adjusting network)
Another major difference between the nervous system and electric wiring is that neurons have many
axons and dendrites and these do not even necessarily all act the same way within the same cell in
terms of their excitation/inhibition behavior. The relationship between neurons is not a one-to-one
relationship but rather a many-to-one and a one-to-many relationship. Many neurons can connect to
the same neuron or muscle cell. It is estimated that up to 15,000 neurons can synapse to a single
muscle cell. And, of course, there can be many axons for any neuron which synapse with many different
neurons. The complexity of these relationship and the cross-connections constitute an interactive, selfadjusting network of almost unimaginable complexity given the permutations and combinations of the
connections and reactions that occur even between a point-to-point connection, area of brain with area
of body.
Afferent/efferent (looping) somatic senses/afferent
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Now imagine all of the neurons that comprise the nervous system. Half of these neurons have on
balance more dendrites that oriented outward toward the surface of the organism and more axons
reaching toward the core (the spinal cord). These neurons propagate their action potentials inwards, a
centripetal direction. These neurons originate with sensory endings of the body—exteroceptors in the
skin, proprioceptors in the middle depth of the connective tissue in the muscles and ligaments, and
interoceptors deep in the body’s internal organs or viscera—and terminate in the sensorimotor cortex,
the highest part of the brain. These neurons collect in pathways that transmit sensory information and
are called sensory pathways. They deal with feeling and affect and are referred to as afferent. In terms
of our accounting of the various human senses, there are 4 distinct afferent pathways, one each
corresponding to sight, hearing, taste, and smell. The afferent pathways for touch however are not
distinct coming from every part of the body. More on these later.
Now the other half of the neurons have the complementary design. They have axons oriented outward,
dendrites inward, a centrifugal direction. These pathways carry information from the sensorimotor
cortex outward to the muscle cells where they are translated into movement, behavior. Since these
pathways effect behavior via muscles moving they are termed efferent.
A few more things need be said about afferent/efferent pathways for action potentials. There is no
correlation between these two neuron orientations and the central and peripheral architecture. Both
occur everywhere throughout the entire system. Thus we must resist the tendency to think of the
afferent pathways in the periphery and the efferent in the brain.
More importantly, afferent and efferent neurons interact with one another throughout the system. It is
not a simple one way process for each indicating that they are interacting with one another in a looping
networking constantly adjusting manner. As Deane Juhan puts it,
Sensation evokes movement, movement produces new sensations, these sensations then evoke
and modify further movements, and so on around the track. Each side of the circle has many
synaptic connections with the other side, connections which weld them into a single unit, like a
spoke of a bicycle wheel. Sensory and motor activities are everywhere and at all times
interpenetrating one another to create the homogeneity of conscious experience (162).
It is like, Juhan says, a stream flowing in 2 directions at the same time. It is a looping circular iterative
repetitive interactive process of unbelievable complexity, based on movement and touch, that is our
behavior and our sensation.
What I hope to accomplish in this exercise that I’m calling “naturalist” is that when we consider the
mechanical natural neurobiological systems of animate organisms we find operative principles and
relationships that will correspond with philosophical (phenomenological) understandings and that will
be of importance in the way we approach the study of, the understanding and appreciation of, religion
and culture and simply being humans.
Recap
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Movement is foundational to the purpose and function of the nervous system and the musculature
system. Movement is the initiator, the action, and the result. Movement on the model of
neurotransmission is occurs in the structurality where distance, space, gap is characterized by need,
purpose, desire. Movement is virtual as well as actual. I have got to adequately explore the movement
on the model of muscles, but to this point it is inseparable from the oscillating interacting excitatory and
inhibitory aliveness (usually called tone or tonus) of muscle tissues. Tonus is movement in process or
progress, the virtual dimension of movement at the point of incipience, moving yet not yet having gone
anywhere.
Further, we have found the animate organism to be a complex interactive looping networking system
that we attempt to comprehend by means of somewhat arbitrary and often potentially misleading
distinctions such as central/peripheral and afferent/efferent as well as analogies such as “the nervous
system as electric wiring” that are not only incorrect, but insidiously misleading.
Movement/Self-Movement
I want to begin this essay with some comments on some terminological distinctions that are important
to help us keep a focus that is fuzzy enough but not lost in a fog. Even to discuss different types of
movement or different aspects of movement is to already take away the moving in the movement and it
is our prime objective to glimpse or feel this moving rather than to be ignorant that writing about and
analyzing movement, however, distinguished is post-movement, although involving moving. Watch the
fog! But surely something can be said. The moving of stars and planetary bodies, the moving of fluids in
the intercellular spaces in the body are movements that follow wholly natural laws and as such are
highly predictable given the variables of any situation. This movement may be called objective or
mechanical movement. The natural sciences are based on determining and applying these laws.
Perhaps one reason that philosophers and humanists avoid the “naturalist” approach (which I am
attempting to adopt here) is that this would seem to reduce to natural law the behavior of human
beings eventuating in the explanation of culture and religion, art and ritual, human behavior and feeling
is directly predictable. While I suppose one like ???? Crick would consider this determinism possible,
even with the most modest knowledge of the complexity of not only the human animate organism but
also the variability of the environment would quickly realize that the principles involved are far beyond
the human capacity to ever begin to grasp. As Brian Massumi argues in his exploration of the
implications of Bergson on movement, the status of natural law is theoretically important, but we must
overcome the one-sidedness of attending to only this half of what constitutes us as being. Even our
formulations attributed to “nature” are based on our human, cultural, and historical constitution.
Massumi says that nature and culture are mutual movements “into and through each other” (p. 11) and
that “things that we are used to placing on one side or another of the nature-culture divide must be
redistributed along the whole length of the continuum and we can’t sustain the distinction between
artifact and thing, body and object—even thought and matter. They are allies in process—tinged with
event.” (11 … check quote). What Massumi does not do to any extent even though he argues for it is to
go to the level of the “natural” that I am here attempting. The avoidance of “reduction” to natural law is
immediately avoided when we consider the necessary (by law) interactivity of the afferent/efferent
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tendencies that are present as distinctive of the nervous system as a whole, but also of the architecture
of the neuron. The nervous system is a movement mechanism to respond to the movement encounters
with the environment; as well as extensive adjustments of affect and effect within the nervous system
itself.
To talk a bit about movement and self-movement . . . the necessities of simply writing without drudgery
encourage less than precision in the use of language. The awareness that precise definition of
movement is to assure the removal of the movement from the thing being defined is the reason we are
engaged in this process knowing full well that we may need to turn to different constructions than
definitions and laws to accomplish our purposes; that is, paradoxical situations, explorations of
analogies, metaphors, vague pointings, and odd neologisms are more the fare than are definitions. The
advantage is a more interesting and perhaps even poetic narrative. And, of course, the advantage in not
only how we appreciate ourselves as animate beings but even the way we are, in this endeavor, forced
to change the strategies of our efforts are also something to look forward to. It is not precision about
worlding and living, that is only possible if we remove the moving the processing the exploring the
creating to describe a fixed and precise world and life less its vitality.
I tend to use terms like “movement itself” when I’m referring to the aspect of this word that is its
coming to be, its moving, its processing in process, its about to be but yet to become, and so forth. I
tend to use “self-movement” as referring to the animate movement that is involved in the
afferent/efferent looping processes. Self-movement is akin to “groping” in that it is movement that is
involved with encounter that gives rise to response that gives rise to adjustment of movement and so on
and on. Self-movement need not be conscious, indeed, it is more often not conscious. Even conscious
movement engages enormous chains of self-movement at micro-levels that are not conscious.
Movement that can be parsed and analyzed as a path or a course is perhaps the most common use of
the term, but, as I will show over and over, this is mere trace or artifact of movement completed and no
longer involves any moving itself.
Now with this bit of clarification of both terminology and approach, I want to consider SheetsJohnstone’s understanding of the “primacy of movement.” She holds what is more or less obvious that
we come into the world moving. I’ll return to this pre- and early post-natal movement in greater detail
later, but here it is surely adequate to describe what happens in terms surely uncontestable. As is our
nature, and it is a nature we share with all animate organisms though clearly in wide variations, we
come to life with built in sensorimotor programs. These are no more mysterious than that we have
hearts that beat and lungs that breathe. These autonomic functions are essential to life from the very
first moment and are necessary to the very last exhalation. Sensorimotor programs for neonatals
function so that sucking can occur as well as movement (not as totally random as might appear) of limbs
in what we might describe as “groping.” Infants reach out with limbs and take in with their sucking
mouths and through the touch/proprioceptive responses to the groping encounters with the ambient
world: objects, mommies, whatever and everything. Sheets-Johnstone refers to these innate movement
abilities as “I dos” in that the body is simply neurobiologically structured to move in this way without
being consciously directed or even directed in terms of acquired patterns. However, fascinatingly the
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infant’s sensory experience (the affect) alters the sensorimotor programming and doubtless the whole
afferent/efferent neurological network. Repetition results in structuring patterned responses, feelings
and movements, that result in awareness of the world and one’s skilled encounter with the world. This
is a process Manning and Massumi call “worlding.” The use of acquired skills, even if unconscious, then
become “I can dos” in Sheets-Johnstone’s terminology. Movement, these groping gestures with which
we are born, are the bootstrap to the acquisition of reality and a sense of self. Husserl said that it is
“through movement that life acquires reality.” (in S-j). And, importantly, this process while perhaps
becoming increasingly sophisticated and eventually with a conscious component is the process of
“worlding” that continues throughout life. Also importantly the process is designed into the
architecture of the neuron, with axons and dendrites reaching out to touch and reaching out to be
touched so that they may undergo change, as well as the whole nervous system, with the
afferent/efferent looping networking neuro-pathways, as well as the whole animate organism whose
limbs reach out to touch but to also be touched and whose muscles are toned to for both affect (to
respond to the world) and well as effect (to have agency on the world). Moving is the means and end,
the fuel and the motivation that is at the heart of the whole system.
The way I have described this process has been from a point of view of describing the architecture that
is common at these various levels, yet I have yet to attempt the more daunting task of seeking some
vague sense of movement itself or the moving within this structurality. I suppose we might want to first
ask, who cares? What difference does it make? When we can comprehend that there is a system that
works, why do we need to try to catch it in the act? Maybe what happens behind closed doors is better
left alone? Or, maybe the better metaphor is, what happens behind closed doors is better left to our
imagination, because the lurid details of moving will require considerable imagination.
In the introduction to his 2002 book Parables for the Virtual: Movement ??? , Massumi not only
critiques the shortcomings of the results of the analyses based on backfilling, but, developing from an
inspiration from Henri Bergson (which I’ll develop a bit later) explores a considerable list (15 items) of
advantages that come from using our imaginations to catch a peek at moving. A careful consideration is
worth the effort, but here they may be summarized as shifting our attention to process, to
interdependencies, to the vagueness of our customary distinctions, and to the sorts of paradoxes and
vagueness that, while giving us a headache, may initiate us into a richer more exciting more alive sense
of ourselves as biological, cultural, historical beings and our shared heritage with animals as well as the
sense of something that encourages us to want some distinction from them.
Efforts to begin to feel even mildly at ease with imagining movement itself require, not surprisingly,
something on the order of the same groping methods I have just described as innate to infants. I think
we must reach out and pronounce some words and reflect on the effect and affect these words have
when we do so. In the process these interactions will force us to understand our own terms in new and
perhaps confounding ways. In this interaction and the resulting changes that occur, we’ll then need to
try different terms becoming more acceptable to the paradoxicallity and comprehension through
vagueness and confoundment that we will most certainly experience. As we do this, I want to return
again and again to our “naturalist” base, the description of the simple neurobiological architecture to
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give us some grounding. Patience and persistence are necessary because, like infants, we need, through
a highly repetitious process of groping experience gradually build sets of terms slowly connecting with
developing ideas. As we embrace the process we will embrace the insights.
There are lineages of gropers that can be traced. Brian Massumi and Erin Manning are colleagues both
of whom have written powerfully, sometimes poetically, sometimes extremely vaguely or confoundingly
about movement. They trace their lineage most immediately to Deleuze and Gutarri (correct this and
identify them) and more remotely but powerfully to Henri Bergson (identify), but also to the American
pragmatist tradition beginning with Charles Sanders Peirce, but they are more directly influenced by
William James. I will consider some of their writings in our groping efforts. I will also consider the
recent work of Renaud Barbaras, who is the most knowledgeable expert on Maurice Merleau-Ponty
whose work he critiques and advances. While Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception shows an increasing
awareness of the primacy of movement, it is Barbaras who finally fully develops a discussion based on
Merleau-Ponty’s perspectives.
I’ll begin with Erin Manning’s 2/?? book, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. To approach
“relational movement” Manning invokes a partner dance (she’s a tango dancer) without actually
identifying that she is doing so, “There are always at least two bodies. These two stand close, facing one
another, reaching-toward an embrace that will signal an acceleration of the movement that has always
already begun. The movement within becomes a movement without, not internal-external, but folding
and bridging in an intensity of preacceleration.” (15) Focused on two people dancing we can feel the
sense of them reaching to the embrace one another with their bodies preparing to move. We can
perhaps feel something akin to what Manning calls “preacceleration” pointing to the incipient premovement anticipation of the dancers. This is perhaps the intended affect of Manning’s writing, but she
is referring not only to dancers, but to movement itself, a point that becomes clear at the end of this
same paragraph when she writes, “Preacceleration: a movement of the not-yet that composes the
more-than-one that is my body. Call it incipient action.” (15)
Although Manning actually labels these two bodies: “actual, virtual, organic, prosthetic,” we may not be
able to make the transition from the dancer analogy to the two bodies that are the one body by means
of this list. The paradoxical image—the one that is two—is and will be fundamental to most of our
efforts to imagine moving. I want to flex the “naturalist” muscles to offer some imagery based on my
description of the nervous system (we’ll see it again in many “natural” contexts).
[include salsa connection as image similar to axon/dendrite synapse]
In my description of the neuron, movement occurs at the cell membrane and within the nucleus and at
the synapse. The cell has bounded integrity at the membrane, yet the membrane while protecting the
integrity of the cell is also open to the ambient chemicals for life and as essential to its function, that is,
generating action potential. At this point the cell is always one and distinct, yet always facing and
opening to, reaching out to, the ambient environment. It is this other, beyond its integral self, that is
the dual structurality that is describable in Manning’s term as “incipient action.” Then if we consider the
function, the seeming purpose, of the neuron as a cell, we can quickly see that its dendrites and axons,
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like tango dancers, reach out to one another in the anticipation of movement. The flow of the action
potential across one neuron is a way of understanding Manning’s “preacceleration” that not-yet
movement across synapse that composes the more than one, that is the two cells interacting as moving.
And again at the systemic level, the efferent tendency is partnered with the afferent tendency aimed to
move information that is virtual because it is no thing, yet living movement, to accomplish movement
actual, which is the effect on the muscle cell. And at the level of the animate organism, the same
structurality occurs to effect the tango dance with all of its affects to the self-adjusting skill-developing
emotionally moving process. There must, as Manning says, always be at least two bodies as the
structurality that is moving, movement in process of moving. Action potential is virtual, movement
between neurons is both actual (chemical spurts) and virtual, and a network of interactive self-adjusting
virtual and actual movements between the sensorimotor cortex and muscle, and the eventual organic
movement that interconnects with prosthetic objects in the environment which is not separable from
the movement itself. Groping, groping, groping.
Likely we have all spent a few idle minutes reflecting on Zeno’s paradox before saying “to hell with it.”
The arrow shot toward a target. The target at finite distance that can be divided an infinite number of
times. No matter how small the increment of the half distance remaining on each iteration of dividing
the distance, it still takes time for the arrow to cross. Thus the arrow logically will never reach the
target.
Massumi takes up Bergson’s discussion of Zeno’s problem leading us to another way of imagining
movement as moving. Bergson held that a path is not composed of positions, but rather that it is nondecomposable. Movement is a dynamic unit. The continuity of movement is an order of reality other
than the measurable, divisible space it can be confirmed as having crossed. He wrote,
We attribute to motion the divisibility of space which it traversed, forgetting that it is quite
possible to divide an object, but not an act: and on the other hand we accustom ourselves to
projecting this act itself into space, to apply it to the whole of the line which the moving body
traverses, in a word to solidify.” (quoted in Manning, p. 18, check quotation)
We are confounded by Zeno when we fail to distinguish between the event of the arrow in movement
which is non-divisible so long as it is the moving that is the concern and the post-movement analysis of
the movement territorialized, that is, plotted in space and time. These are two different orders of
reality.
The imagery allows us some additional potential to our repetitive groping. Space, seen as a grid or as
something fixed is, in Bergson’s perspective, itself a retrospective construct. Measurable space is as
Massumi puts it, “a stopping the world in thought, thinking away the dynamic unity, the continuity of its
movement.” His introduction is titled “concrete is as concrete doesn’t” playing cleverly on the
distinction between cement and concrete. Or put differently he writes, “a thing is when it isn’t doing.”
This reminds me of Navajo language which is constructed almost totally of verbs bestowing motion to
everything all the time. Reference to things is a complex construction for Navajos since they have to say
something like, “that which usually is doing this or that but is not now doing it.” The verb-heavy
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composition of Navajo language makes it difficult to take the movement, the vitality, out of the world of
experience. No wonder that for Navajos the border between the biological and the prosthetic (or what
we’d call the material) is not really clear or perhaps even viable. No wonder Navajos find life force and
movement in what we typically understand as the physical objects of the world.
Academics traditionally have as their jobs the fixing and analysis of measurable space or time. Manning
calls this territorialization. It is a fixing of the world, or some aspect of it, as an object for consideration.
Manning notes that “territorialization is always to stop movement, to begin the analysis from a stopping
and then to make a body move” (23). From the academic perspective then, movement is something, if
of interest at all, is to be added in as a secondary consideration of the territory. It is important to note
here that one of the most powerful metaphors that has driven the academic study of religion over the
last 50 years has been the concern with “place.” I have written much about this perspective as it has
been presented by both Mircea Eliade and Jonathan Smith. What I am considering here will, I believe,
have profound impact on this metaphor and have deep implications for how such territorializing
metaphors need to be set aside as we begin to learn how to put the movement and life back into the
religions and cultures we study as well as our ways of studying them.
While we all are in motion as the condition of life, to give movement its primacy in our studies of the
world seems perhaps at this point confounding. Yet, this is precisely what Massumi takes as his
objective: “to put matter immediately back into cultural materialism, corporeal body back in body” and
“to part company with linguistic model as basis …” (p. 4 fix quote)
Such a task is indeed demanding as evident in Massumi’s observation that “when a body is in motion, it
does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation.” (4) And, “in motion,
a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary, that is, ‘real but
abstract.’” (4)
Massumi offers terms related to “territorialization,” to our habitual approach, that offer other images
helpful to our efforts here. They relate to our objectification, to our customary methods (academic and
quotidian), our perspective being built as retrospective. I find insightful his use of terms such as “backform” and “back-fill” in that they remind us that what we consider as the object of our study already has
the life, the movement, wrung out of it; that we study, like anatomists, cadavers. Clearly much can be
discerned from such objects (these are a particular dimension of the real), but the most important and
distinctive aspect is missing or a later add-on, the living movement. Massumi takes the time to outline
what he believes are 15 advantages of replacing or complementing territorialization with what Bergson
called “fluidification.” (6) A careful consideration of these is important, but they may be characterized
with a few phrases:





Emphasis on process before signification or coding
Position no longer comes first with movement a problematic second
Positionality is an emergent quality of movement
There is a coincidence of a thing’s immediacy to its own variation
Process concepts are ontogenetic not ontological
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 Indeterminancy is primary to social determination, i.e., gender and race are emergent and backform their reality
 Possibility is back-formed from potentials unfolding
 The “natural” and “cultural” feedback feed forward and back into each other; nature and culture
are mutual movement into and through each other
 Focus on movement requires culture studies to embrace their own inventiveness
The consequences of these shifts are profound for both academic and quotidian Western views of the
world. But how do we go forward. Massumi turns to a focus on “sensation.”
Sensation is, he writes, “a directly disjunctive self-coinciding. Sensation is never simple—always
doubled by the feeling of having a feeling. Self-referential. A resonation, an interference pattern.” (pp.
13-14, check quotation). This returns us directly to my concern with neurobiology as presented in the
description of nerve cells, neurotransmission, action potential, and the efferent/afferent design of the
nervous system. From the most basic understanding, the nervous system responds to the connection
with the world beyond the skin; that is to sensation to experience. And the purpose of the nervous
system is to adjudicate the sensation in terms of a context of experience to produce bodily movement
that effects the world, that is, agency. In the effort to solidify and territorialize, sensation has been
ignored, overlooked, discounted as largely irrelevant if not branded more negatively as a subjective
pollution. Sensation has been understood as vaguifying the territory with its movement, with its
dynamic processual complexity impossible to back-fill on a stable grid. So the very conditions that give
rise to the purpose of the nervous system are denied it as we have satisfied ourselves with examining
cadavers. My analysis of the most elemental building block, the neuron, demonstrates that its
architecture is based on the primacy of movement and this structurality is retained all the way to the
contribution of the nervous system to the animate organism.
I want to talk a bit about Massumi’s discussion of sensation being always doubled by the feeling of
having a feeling. Perhaps our experience is adequate support for this statement. Most of us are used to
having a general awareness of feeling as part of our being sensory as well as emotional beings. Further
we are able to identify various types of sensation in the general terms of feeling. We are aware that we
are seeing for example without needing to use our eyes, or any other sense organs, to determine that
we are seeing. Here again we are finding this necessary doubling that is distinctive of our integrity or
our unity. I believe this two (or more) that is one is a crucial imagery for our endeavor.
But let me place this feeling of feeling in the context of the description I have made of the complex
afferent/efferent neurological network. First I remind that we must realize that between sensation at
the skin and proprioceptors and the sensorimotor cortex in the brain there is a looping characterizable
by feedback and feed-forward, that is, an interdependency of sensation and the resident neurological
programming. And further we must realize that this is not a simple loop but a remarkably complex
network of complex one-to-many and many-to-one interactions between neurons and neurons and
muscle cells. Because of the neuroprocessing time, rapid yet nothing like the speed of electricity, then
the process of simple neurotransmission has a duration. It is not instant. In this duration the process
itself becomes a reference to the process or, as Massumi indicates, “sensation is self-referential. An
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interference pattern.” The result is that while processing information along a neuropathway there is a
complex network of interactive engagement of the movement with itself leading to the sensation of
sensation. A product of the gaps and rhythms and loopings and redundancies of the process. I’ll later
consider more fully the feeling of feeling or what might also be called the “common sense” or, my
favorite, coenaesthesis, which has been a persistent issue throughout the history of philosophy. And in
the next essay I will suggest that the rise of the self as well as awareness and even sensation is possible
only because of the sluggishness (am I joking?) of neurotransmission.
Massumi offers as an analogy the extensive discussion of “echo” that is well worth careful consideration
as another groping. (see p. 14)
The key point here is that movement and sensation are inseparable and that sensation (perception)
must become a fundamental concern for us to put the movement back in movement, the process and
dynamics and vitality back in our subject.
Movement: Action Potential
Renaud Barbaras’s several publications1 on movement and movement’s connection with, indeed
identity with, perception are, I believe among the most important works on the topic. Barbaras holds
that “bodies that perceive are living bodies and that they are distinguished from other corporeal beings
… by their capacity for movement.” 86 But he does not consider this correlation sufficient explanation.
Since movement/perception are at the heart of humanity (and animate organisms) and vitality and the
reimagining of them revolutionizes (in the literal sense of turning things around completely) then his
work deserves our most careful consideration. Here I want to consider only a couple topics out of the
richness he offers.
The first one excites me because it correlates with my recognition that neurotransmission speeds are
fortunately slow even though we think of them as fast. Further, neurotransmission times are variable
because of many factors such as the existence of many possible routes (the Thieves’ Forest or the
Internuncial Net) through the neurological afferent/efferent network, the various responses that occur
at the synapse (from excitatory to inhibitory), the variable effectiveness of neurotransmitters, the
myelination of the axons (is this correct? Explain), and the hydro-electrical-dynamics of transmission,
and many other factors. The slowness and distinctiveness of neurotransmission can be clarified by
considering the inappropriateness of analogizing neurotransmission with electrical wiring. Electric
wiring is one-to-one initial to terminal points (any break is a “short” and causes total failure) while
neurotransmission is one-to-many and many-to-one and complexly interactive between these points.
But the difference I want to focus on here is speed. Electricity moves through wiring at something like
the speed of light or 186,000 miles per second; neurotransmission speeds are 250 miles per hour but
variable. The difference is a factor of from 2 to 20 million times slower. The point I want to make is that
this is not only a good thing, but that perception, subjectivity, awareness, thought, memory, and about
1
List the pubs
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everything else we consider human (or even animate organism) arises in the time delay due to the
relative slowness of transmission speeds.
Let me start with a couple of quotidian experiences that allow us to both recognize the time-lapse the
speed and the network create as well as that it is where perception occurs. First, let’s think of that
game where one person holds out a hand and another person taps their palm. The objective is that the
person being tapped must try to capture the finger of the tapper. Maybe this is more fun if it is a $100
bill. The point of this game is that even if we have great reaction time (that’s what we call it), the time
for the neurotransmission to go from the exteroceptors in the skin to the spinal column and back to the
fingers is never fast enough to be able to capture the finger or the money. This would not be the case if
neurotransmission speeds were the same as electricity. Many other examples can be made. In driving a
car, we know to keep distance between our car and the one in front of us because reaction time (due to
less than instant neurotransmission speeds) is required before we can effect braking after the affect of
seeing the brake lights of the car in front of us. Okay, we have that one.
The next one has to do with perception and this reaction time. Barbaras says that if the reaction time
were instant we would perceive nothing, “the immediacy of reaction goes hand-in-hand with the
absence of perception.” (D & D, p. 99). We have experience to confirm this. The reflex response is
appropriate here. Consider those occasions when your reflexes are being tested and the physician taps
reflex points and your leg flies up. We are often surprised by this reflex reaction because it seems to
occur without perception. Proper perception or awareness occurs after the event based on visual and
proprioceived movement, but the movement seems to occur without perception or awareness. This, of
course is due to the immediacy of the neurotransmission occurring from point of contact to the spinal
column and back in the most direct pathway. This experience offers us some appreciation of the
correlation that Barbaras describes.
With this grounding in our experience we can go on. Barbaras, who in this respect is developing on
Bergson’s work, holds that “it can be inferred that perception originates in the reaction’s delay.” (99)
Perception then is action potential, the moving charges that provide virtual movement in the nervous
system. Perception originates, as Barbaras writes, “in the distance that separates the external impulse
from the reaction.” This means that perception takes place in transit through the Thieves’ Forest, where
the external stimulating impulse encounters the patterns, memories, feelings, and much more that
comprise our life experiences and present tonus resulting in, not knowledge, but a reaction, that is, a
responding movement. Perception is not knowledge it is movement. Barbaras: “Contrary to what
traditional philosophy affirms, perception has in no way a speculative interest; it is not knowledge but
action.” (99) Talk about revolution! And Barbaras continues, “the perceived is only that which the living
subject reacts to.” (101) This also directs us to the dark denseness of the Thieves’ Forest where aspects
of the external impulse may be filtered out altogether, slain by the creatures of nonrecognition and the
gremlins of avoid-the-threatening, while wandering about looking for a way back out. The implications
are significant, as Barbaras writes, “the object is not born of a disinterested relation to the world; it is on
the contrary constituted by vital activity and, more generally, by action that needs to circumscribe stable
entities within a flowing totality.” (99-100) Thus, what we perceive is not the result of some passive
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recording of the world “out there” and it does not arise in some objective measurement given by the
world “out there.” Rather the object is born of the process of movement that is conditioned by
experience and by interest both of which are encountered and developed as movement (action
potential) through the adventurous journey through the Thieves’ Forest of neurotransmission.
Let me try another analogy to help us understand why the action potential speeds are essential to
perception. Were we electronically wired we would function something more like an internet search
engine. So let’s consider how that might work. The external stimulus (in our analogy the search
request) would produce, in the tiniest fraction of a second, an enormous number of possible reactions.
The choice of which among these to effect would need to be based on an algorithm to determine
hierarchy, say the first item to appear on the results. And the reaction would then occur almost
instantaneously. Everything would be “instant” reaction; the fastest knee-jerk one can imagine.
Actually our muscular system would quickly self-destruct because it simply couldn’t handle the demand
of volume of stimuli. Now, of course, we might then suggest that we could build into the algorithm time
delays so that we didn’t zip around at the speed of light, but then this is adding living movement, selfmovement, back into the system to renormalize the system to how it works now. The living animate
organism is what it is as the result of this essential “delay” even though these may seem rather
instantaneous in our experience. Were these times instant we would not be humans (or animate
beings) whose life, whose definitive character, is the primacy of movement; we would be machines that
are designed to move.
Barbaras makes another point that I want to take up briefly here related to delay. He writes, “A more
complex organism perceives to the exact degree to which the reaction does not immediately follow the
stimulus.” (p. 99) This statement suggests that with the evolution of animate organisms the
development of the nervous system thickens and complicates the Thieves’ Forest, the Internuncial Net,
inhabiting it with many more creatures and obstacles that need be encountered by any passage, slowing
the time, increasing the delay, complexifying the interactive network resulting in the greater role and
importance of perception. This is an interesting and insightful way that we may distinguish our human
selves among the other animate organisms.
Okay, I love this transmission speed analogy and this aspect of our discussion of movement and
perception. I’ll certainly return to it frequently. But now I want to return to another analogy and to the
primacy of movement we have considered related to “groping.” This consideration complements what I
have just been discussing because it focused on the world outside the perceiver/mover whereas I have
been focused on the speeds of action potential and the neuro-networks that process external stimuli.
Let me begin with a complex of ideas from Barbaras regarding such things as body, transcendence,
negativity, and grasping which will take us into a range of topics that I’ll try to keep reigned in.
Start here: “To move is not to be what one is (or was); it is to be always beyond and therefore within
one’s self, to exist on the basis of noncoincidence. Within the ‘there is’ there is negativity only as
mobility …” (86) This complex statement makes sense for me by remembering the architecture of the
neuron: axons reach out to touch while dendrites reach out to be touched. This is their design. This
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reaching out shows their existence is based on noncoincidence, that is, they are not self-contained, selfsufficient, an entity complete in themselves, but rather exist to reach out, to transcend their boundaries.
Barbaras describes this design, this “there is” as a negativity, meaning that by its design the neuron
exists as the need to be connected with something beyond itself. Barbaras sees this negativity as its
mobility, its ability to move; for the neuron its action potential. There is a need and a goal associated
with the design of the neuron that is the movement of the action potential both across the body of the
neuron and the reaching across the synapse to transcend the neuron. And so with the design of the
animate body, with arms and legs reaching out to touch and to be touched and skin receptors and sense
organs and proprioceptors awaiting being touched. “Perception is essentially linked to movement.
Beings capable of moving are the very ones that are capable of feeling; feeling and moving are the two
aspects of the same mode of living, because movement assumes the desire for a goal, which itself
requires the capacity for perceiving it.” (87) This discussion then takes us to the relationship between
the perceiver and the external world being perceived. In light of the current interest in shifting away
from “text” based studies to “body” based studies, it is provocative to consider Barbaras’s statement,
“instead of approaching life on the basis of the body, as the possibility characteristic of a body, we have
to determine the body’s sense of being based on life.” In other words, as I read this, a body based on
life is a self-moving body, not an inanimate material object.2 Thus, even in our consideration of the
neuron (material, body) we have considered the architecture in terms of the life of the cell as well as the
cell’s existence being for the life of the body. This is the core principle for the revolution of our studies.
Texts and bodies backfilled into grids for study and analysis are both lifeless. Self-movement, living
movement is the perceiving body that lives.
Sheets-Johnstone placed her understanding of the primacy of movement on the observation that we are
born into the world moving, that we are not taught or need we learn to move, and that movement is at
the core of our discovery and construction of the world and ourselves. From Barbaras’s perspective this
movement arises from an inherent interior negativity or put positively on the need/desire to reach out
to connect or touch. I referred to his infant movement by the term “groping” which I got from Carrie
Noland’s discussion of Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas of gesture. This term is a good one because it shows the
propensity of movement, insatiable movement, that in reaching out to touch and even in touching
expresses and pursues needs and goals, yet the momentary seeming satisfaction of those goals, as in
encountering some part of the world, only increases and expands the needs and goals. This is the
characteristic of Barbaras’s interpretation of the terms “distance” and “desire” which are conjoined in
the title of his book. Movement arises because of distance, or space or gap or synapse, and the desire
to transit the distance, to close the gap, the activate the synapse, yet it is the nature of movement that
desire and distance are not accomplishable, but rather only fold back on movement as its fuel.
Let me shift terminology a little here. I’ve often said that “to grasp” movement is “to not grasp”
movement because it would take the movement out of movement. To grasp is to accomplish a backfill,
a territorialization. However, grasping, like groping, can be seen as consistent with our discussion of
living movement, self-movement. Grasping is like synapse. The word synapse, from Greek syn-
2
Interesting to reflect on Vasquez’s “materialist theory of religion” in this regard.
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(together) and haptein (to clasp or to touch), understood as process is neuronal grasping. Grasping3
conjoins movement and touching in perception4 and such pertains to all perception; how this works will
have to be dealt with later.
A remarkable issue arises at this juncture of our discussion. If grasping, reaching out to touch with
intention even if unconsciously done, is perceiving then there appears to be some “grasp” the precedes
the grasping. Barbaras puts it this way “there is no perception without a movement that, so to speak,
goes to meet the object, draws its contours, or adopts the angle that allows the clearest view of it. The
mystery here is that, although preceding the perception of the object strictly speaking, movement is
already adapted to it and ‘knows’ the object before it is perceived.” 91 This may be the difference
between “groping” and “grasping” although Barbaras doesn’t discuss it in these terms. Groping has
something of a random undirectedness to it. We think of infant groping, we think of “groping about in
the dark,” we think of crude imprecise touch that does not open to sensation. Groping has a tenuous
relationship to object touched and is characterized by random or crude movement. Grasping, I might
suggest, is directed and sensitive. Yet, as Barbaras notes, how can this be that we have preceding
knowledge of the object that to which we direct our grasping? I’d suggest that the problem arises only if
we conflate a back-filled territorialization of the process with the living movement/touching event.
Leaving the movement/touching as central to the concern then groping and grasping are continuous
with the self-adjusting network of the neurological system where vagueness, paradox, partiality are
impossible to eliminate. The Thieves’ Forest is ever-growing and ever-changing as it encounters the
complex afferent/efferent menagerie of visitors. The mystery is in the iterative movement. Or as
Barbaras states, “In truth, it is movement itself that perceives in the sense that the object exists for it, in
which movement has its meaning, as its oriented nature attests, inspired and clairvoyant with regard to
the living movement that often demonstrates an intimacy with its objective, an intimacy that runs
deeper than that which knowledge exhibits. In and by movement the object appears, though without its
manifestation being separated from its brute presence, according to the indistinctness between its
essence and its existence. Here the grasp of the object is not distinguished from the gesture made
toward it; perception takes place in the world and not in me, and the object is therefore perceived
where it is.” 91-2
It is movement itself that perceives! The movement transcends the perceiver, moving beyond, to grasp
(that is, perceive) the object where it is in the world. And this movement, this perceiving, is living
movement, the self-movement that is living, because, as Barbaras puts it “it is its own source, because it
nourishes itself, and because the impulse is not exhausted but restored by its realization.” 93 This
characterizes the autonomy of living movement.
There are many other issues that I should cover here, but will save. Based on Bergson’s notion of image,
Barbaras discusses that in grasping we grasp objects among the totality. His analysis takes him to the
conclusion that “it is in its negation that the totality as such is posited, as if the part were to give rise to
the whole of which it is a part.” 106 with the consequence being that it is “in movement itself that the
3
4
Other terminology enter here “attention” and “stopping there” as discussed by Barbaras, pp. 90-91.
Discussed by Barbaras as “tonic” phenomenon D&D p. 88 based on Goldstein.
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world must be constituted, a world that movement considers as the field agaist the background of which
its negating power unfolds.” 106 very interesting.
Also need to discuss “principle of equivalence” what I call self-othering in Barbaras, p. 89
Missing Half Second Found!
Since the 1980s scholars including neuroscientists and philosophers have taken up the issue of “free
will” based implications associated with a mysterious missing half second. I would think theologians
might be interested, but I haven’t found any of them participating in this fascinating discussion although
I haven’t really looked. For my discussion I depend on Brain Massumi’s consideration of this in his
Parables for the Virtual and Shaun Gallagher’s discussion in How the Body Shapes the Mind (????).
Essential to my consideration is my discussion, in the last several sections, of the primacy of movement,
the philosophy of movement, the movement-removing process of territorialization, and the evolution of
animate organisms that resulted in the distinctiveness of human beings.
There are a number of scientific procedures that document a half second time lapse between awareness
of the decision to act and the action itself. There is evidence that the stimulation of an action occurs in
the brain prior to the actor’s awareness of a choice to perform the action. Massumi’s bases it on this
example, “Mild electric pulses were administered to the [cortical implanted] electrode and also to points
on the skin. In either case, the stimulation was felt only if it lasted more than half a second.” 28
Massumi looks at Benjamin Libet’s experiments to attempt to understand what is occurring. In Libet’s
procedure subjects were monitored by an electroencephalography (EEG) machine. They were asked to
flex a finger at the moment of their choosing and to recall the time (on a large clock they could see) of
their decision. The results: the flex came 0.2 seconds after they indicated that they decided to move,
but the EEG registered brain activity associated with the movement 0.3 seconds before the time
designated for the decision. The brain activity started half second before the finger moved and more
than quarter second before the decision to move became conscious to the subject; thus the missing half
second. Gallagher’s discussion is based on these same procedures conducted by Libet.
Libet himself raised the question of free will and human agency, “The initiation of the freely voluntary
act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to
act. Is there, then, any role for conscious will in the performance of a voluntary act?” (Libet 1999: 51,
Quoted in G , p. 238) The brain starts moving our finger and then we decide to move the finger, thus,
according to Libet and others, the decision is an illusion of agency which rightfully belongs to the brain.
Even put this way I’m frankly a little embarrassed to even take up the issue, because on the face of it,
stated in these terms, it is pure silliness. Still, that this missing half second has been understood as a
“problem” that needs resolving and the way that various authors have attempted to solve the
“problem” raises issues that are worth discussing.
Massumi’s response follows from Libet’s explanation of what is occurring. Libet wrote, “we may exert
free will not by initiating intentions but by vetoing, acceding or otherwise responding to them after they
arise.” (in Massumi, p. 29) Massumi then concludes that “the half second is missed not because it is
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empty, but because it is overfull, in excess of the actually-performed action and of its ascribed meaning.
Will and consciousness are subtractive. They are limitative, derived functions that reduce a complexity
too rich to be functionally expressed. It should be noted in particular that during the mysterious half
second, what we think of as ‘free,’ ‘higher,’ functions, such as volition, are apparently being performed
by autonomic, bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness, and between brain and
finger but prior to action and expression.” 29 I’m fine with Massumi’s understanding that a great deal is
occurring during this half second, but I think his understandings of will and consciousness being
subtractive are dependent on limiting them to a retrospective, analytic, stage or phase of the process
which cannot occur without territorialization and backfilling the movement that is occurring during this
half second in order to describe some attributes, like agency and choice, to the movementless duration.
This to me is precisely the issue that has confunded us regarding Zeno’s puzzle and I feel that Massumi
has forgotten what he learned from Bergson’s analysis. Backfilling is a human movement
neurobiological function with conscious as well as unconscious dimensions. In some ways it can be
understood as self-movement that is distinctive to being human. Yet, I think there are other ways of
considering this over-full half second that leave the movement as foremost. Actually the duration of
time surely cannot be comprehended apart from movement.
Gallagher lays out the issues and presents the neuroscience interpretation regarding “free will” much
more fully than Massumi yet comes to the point of arguing the unacceptability of the scientific support
of a brain-based determinism. Gallagher begins his refuting discussion with two propositions: first, that
“free will cannot be squeezed into 150-350 msec” and, second, “that free will doesn’t apply to abstract
motor processes that make up intentional actions—rather it applies to intentional actions themselves.”
(p. 238, check quote) Gallagher’s analysis then opens to the role of body (as demanded, of course, by
the title of his book) which he sees connected with the brain in a looping fashion, similar to the way I
have described the neurobiological network, yet I de-emphasize the significance of the distinction
between brain and body. Indeed, this division is, I believe, at the root of Gallagher and Massumi (and
Libet, although I think he is in another universe in some respects) seeing this as a problem in the first
place particularly attached to such issues that are labeled “free will.” Within this loop, Gallagher
acknowledges, actions can be intentional even if “significant aspects of this production took place nonconsciously.” 239 For Gallagher it is important to restrict the consideration of free will or conscious
volition to a subset of motor processes, those as he said that are “intentional actions themselves.” He
then continues, “voluntary actions are not about neurons, muscles, body parts, or even movement—all
of which play some part non-consciously—but all such processes are carried along by my decision, that
is, by my intentional action.” 239? This is an interesting way of solving the problem by simply declaring
that only those actions are intentional that are intentional actions. Yup!
But I think Gallagher has this backwards with his approach only shifting the question to the nature of
“intentions” which, now it seems, must come from a magical place outside of bodily processes. This is
just another way of saying that something in my head (if not my brain) is the master in control by the
exercise of intention. Who’s intention? If they are “my” intentions then where do “I” reside?
Gallagher’s response simply shifts the concern to another ontological issue. Also, he sees movement
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(action) as only responsive to intention, returned or even introduced (outside of autonomic functions) as
the product of intention.
In the discussion of movement I presented in earlier sections, self-movement living movement is always
movement with intention, with direction, conscious or not. Self-movement is need and desire even as it
characterizes the vitality of neurons and certainly the entire neurobiological system. Animate beings,
movers, are designed (through the evolutionary process) for intentions manifest as living movement.
The issue then becomes, wherein do our movements get associated with some notion of being “free,”
and what might we understand as “free.” The issue can be addressed in terms of this “missing half
second.” For it is in this gap that we find the insights.
During evolution some creatures, humans, evolved to have increasingly complex neurobiological
processes that are constantly (as life function) functioning (as many faces of self-movement) to interact
with the environment and in remarkably self-referential and folding interactions. As Barbaras showed
the greater the distance (and thus the longer the time) between stimulus and reaction the more
complex the organism. Thus with the increase in the complexity of the gap (space and time) arise the
possibilities, distinctively human, of backfilling in increasingly sophisticated ways, that allows a conscious
awareness of an "I" as a “me who is not a you,” a self and other. The very idea of freedom of choice is a
qualifier of our neurobiological evolution—the way we distinguish ourselves as we distinguish ourselves
via a backfilled grid of articulatable qualities like free will, self, other, and so forth. What is interesting to
me is that we cannot even ask the question of free will without having the neurobiological history
(phylogenetically and ontogenetically) that we have. The question of free will is the human backfilled
capacity to abstract from movement reflective principles, that require the subtraction of movement.
Gallagher, as Massumi I think, is confined to this reflective and territorialized arena when he writes,
“this isn’t about movement.” Yet, in this perspective, as is obvious from the endless argument about
free will, this is about movement because movement seeking resolution is always re-energized by the
reaching, the grasping. I have discussed these aspects of movement in an earlier section.
There is another major issue in distinguishing “I.” What is the difference between “I choose” and “I am
consciously aware of choosing?” As I have shown, the “I” in the “I can dos” resides in the
gestural/postural being more fundamentally than in an intellectual or a conscious being. Our distinctive
identity is inseparable from the body concepts (Sheets-Johnstone) and basic level categories (Lakoff)
that exist not as concepts and conscious awarenesses but as sensorimotor programs and as engrams
where they also have feeling/affect aspects. Based on a variety of studies, I have shown that the “I”
exists as this complex neurobiological network. That distinctions between stimulus and reaction, are
analytical backfilled efforts to comprehend ourselves in some respects, but the “I” does not reside
anywhere, but is rather processual, moving, that is, as a self-moving being that is understood as living
because it is moving. To locate the “I” apart from movement is the exercise of capacities that evolved
distinctive to human beings to territorialize and analyze absent the movement. “I,” self as process, is
always already there as the gap, in the half second, yet, this isn’t a gap that can be crossed, or a half
second that simply lapses. These terms are ways of grasping (in the sense of always seeking and being
only energized by the process of seeking) ourselves, our nature.
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Now there is another issue related to the word “free” in free will. If we mean free in the radical sense of
being without contingencies or influences or contexts, then I believe this understanding of freedom
disallows choice to have any significance whatsoever. This freedom can be nothing other than random
action. Choice or volition or will has no interest to us apart from possibilities, options, contexts, and
most certainly consequences. Free will or volition necessitates the processing of contingencies in the
context of possibilities weighing consequences. Even in the most elementary understanding of the
neurobiological processes that are required for this processing, for contemplating and making choices,
would show that this requires time. The time would be instant if we were actually electronic mechanical
beings. It is because of the slow neurotransmission speeds and the remarkably complex neurological
network that there is a delay between being presented with making a choice and the action based on
that choice. Where it seems Libet allows a “reaction time” between the conscious decision and the
physical movement, it seems that he dismisses what occurs in the time lapse between knowing that one
needs to make a choice and the awareness of a choice having been made as part of the process of
making a choice. The subjects in Libet’s study are told to move a finger when they decide to. He allows
that post decision to physical action takes time, but he doesn’t allow that there is a complex process
required for making a decision. We all constantly experience an awareness of the conditions of making
a choice that actively involve us where there eventually comes a moment well into this process that we
acknowledge that we’ve made the choice as we are already acting to effect it.
Massumi refers to this aspect of the process, I think, as intensity, the quality of incipience of movement.
Manning I believe would call this the preacceleration aspect of moving. We could also identify it in
terms of tonus, a resonating aspect that is an aspect of making choices.
Continuing on the analysis of the notion of “conscious choice,” the understanding of choice that it seems
most discussants of this issue have in mind is choice being a singular fixed moment, a precise instant of
stimulus to action. Intentional action then for Gallagher is action that proceeds from a moment of
intention. Yet, we simply don’t work this way. Let’s say someone asks us a complicated question. We
pause and begin our response with the time-buying meaningless, in this context, word “well” and then
initiate a string of words that proceed not in some highly confined logical singular pathway from the
“choice” or “intention.” Rather we proceed on a feeling, or as C. S. Peirce called it a feeling kind of
knowing, on a sense that we need to start talking in a certain way. I’m certainly doing this as I’m writing
these words. I have not made a choice to arrive at a particular conclusion, but I have a sense, a feeling,
that as I reflect on it has rather less to do with conscious thought than with visceral gestural hunch and
guess. However, as I reflect on it, the only thing that keeps me stringing these words together is a
willfulness that in doing so I’ll make myself clear to myself and perhaps others, though the latter is less
important. I believe that these words, as all our actions, are constantly spewing from this half second
gap, this synapse that is stimulating and living only in that the movement is self-renewing. And the
relatively slow speed of neurotransmission is the mechanism that allows the freedom, the volition, the
intentionality, as well as the ownership of the choice, the stamp that it is my choice.
We exist so far as this is a living vital existence in the Thieves’ Forest in the Internuncial Net in the selfmovement that is “our” perception, that is “me.” I believe that we could not be, were it not for the
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mysterious half second. From the discussion I am presenting, this half second is not missing, but rather
this half second is all we have … ever. In this half second gap is where all our personal history, our
cultural values and qualities, and so on exist and constantly shape our lives. The gap is where it’s at! The
gap doesn’t close, the half second isn’t concluded; it is characterized in its flowing (always flowing) like
neurotransmission; process not grid, not clock; and as living movement cannot be divided or reckoned.
The processes are not comprehendible as cause to effect, but as a remarkably complex afferent/efferent
self-adjusting complex of movement. Movement is the only way that this time gap can make sense;
movement which always arises from a negativity yet is continuously renewed in being unfulfilled.
We invoke time (think about it) only to backfill or territorialize movement and in doing so we remove
the movement. When we put the movement back, then free will is not a decision point directing some
consequent movement (action)—didn’t we learn anything from Bergson’s view of Zeno?—free will is the
movement always called forth in the distinctively complex neurobiological system that gives rise to
backfilled images of “I,” “free,” “will,” “cause-effect,” “time,” “agency,” and on. Movement, living or
self-movement, is ontogenetic to even the issue.
The very question/doubt/indeterminacy/affect connected to outcome of the term “free will” is on the
one hand only possible because of the development through evolution that give human beings sufficient
neurobiological complexity of this network we vaguely grasp as gap that demands the extra time, that
we have identified as the missing half second, for memory, sense of self, notions of recognition,
grasping, art, religion, and on as well as awareness of choice and agency. Cows could care less about
free will and intention!
Primacy of Moving-Touching in Proprioception
“The brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less.”
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
My objective here is to establish that movement, and now also touching, are primary to all perception,
all sensation, and thus the core of human vitality. Once self-movement and touching are established as
primary we can revision, rebuild a number of things. First, we will rebuild the sensorium so that
movement isn’t left out altogether, but is foundational to all the senses and touching is not relegated to
one of the lesser or animal senses, but is, with respect to sensation, inseparable from movement.
Second, there are accompanying insights in terms of what it means to be human both as we share life
with all animate organisms, but also in providing us clues about how to comprehend and articulate what
has, through evolution, given certain distinctions among the animals to us humans. And, finally, thus
equipped we should be able to engage in the study and appreciation of cultures and religions without
wringing the life (movement, touch, sensation, behavior, action) and vitality out of them in order to
study them.
The approach I am forging here is to ground insights in a “naturalist” base which is to describe aspects of
our neurobiology and appreciate them not only in terms of the way they function to effect movement
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and touching and thus life, but also to identify inspiring, provocative, and powerful principles and
images that pertain at macro-behavioral levels as well as at the micro-cellular levels.
To this point in this process I have focused the consideration of movement largely to the self-movement
that occurs in and among neurons and how this movement corresponds with the insights of movement
philosophy. While I have suggested that these principles and images apply to the entire human being I
have discussed this primarily in terms of groping and grasping, the movement processes by which
human bodies reach out and touch the environment in the creation and discovery of self and other and
how these also constitute interrogative as well as agentive aspects of our behavior. Where I have
considered the synaptic connection between glial cells, via axons and dendrites, I have yet to consider
how it is that we are able to connect with the world around us. Movement and touch are clearly
implicated, but we now must ask how this connection process works from a “naturalist” base and then
discern the principles we discover in the process of this description.
It would seem that physical contact of the body with the world would center on the touch contact with
the skin and the exteroceptors that are located in the skin. While these are, of course, important, I want
here to focus on a medium depth aspect of touch because it is here that movement and touching are
inseparable. It is here that we first begin to transcend ourselves. Consider our earliest groping behavior
as infants. While certainly the texture and character of contact on skin offers a continuum of sensation
from pleasure to pain with a variety of qualities along the way, it is the connection that is felt as
response to muscular action and the neuromuscular response that builds sensorimotor experiences that
shape the discovery of self and world. This contact experience involves movement conjoined with inner
touch that is broadly constituitive; a neuromuscular moving-touching process that we may call
proprioception. Proprius is “one’s own,” thus proprioception is perception of one’s own self and usually
refers to the sense of relative position of body parts. But the implications are much greater in that
proprioceptors are where neuron and muscle cells are inseparable yet separate, where integral skinencased bodies and the environment are inseparable yet separate, where self and other are inseparable
yet separate, where excitatory and inhibitory energies are inseparable as tonus and posture yet
separate, where interrogative and inquiry are inseparable from agentive action yet separate; where
thought and action are inseparable yet separate; where touching and being touched, percipient and
preceptor, proprioception and proprioceived are inseparable yet separate. Proprioceptors offer
powerful imagery of the two-that-is-one structurality that is a core principle to our vitality and our living
behavior colored and shaped by culture, history, psychology.
The muscles are full of sense receptors; the muscle spindles (intrafusal fibers) are the most elaborate
sensory structures in the body outside of the eyes and ears. Muscle Spindles are at the heart of all fine
motor skills. A muscle spindle is comprised of from 3 to 10 specialized muscle fibers surrounded by a
protective sheath forming a spindle shape, that is, thicker in the center and tapering to the ends. These
muscle spindles, also called intrafusal fibers, are much smaller than the large skeletal muscles that
surround them making up the belly of the muscle and that do the major work. Efferent nerve motor
fibers from the cord or brain enter the muscle spindle with the motor endings spread through the fiber.
Anulospiral receptors (afferent nerve endings) enter the muscle spindle and wrap in spirals around the
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muscle fibers. The gaps between the coils are sensed by these receptors measuring the degree and
speed of expansion and contraction of the fiber they hug as a whole. It is here in the muscle spindles
that the efferent and afferent sides of the nervous system have their closest physiological association.
Their association is where movement and sensation are joined together. Importantly the anulospiral
receptors feel the movement itself; that is, as the muscle moves the anulospiral receptors feel how far
and fast the muscle moves. Muscle spindles are then motor units that can feel themselves and this is a
feature unique to them. The anulospiral receptors do not feel the effect of the movement of the
skeletal muscles, but rather they feel the moving muscle fibers. This is a key distinction because the
anulospiral receptors then sense movement itself, living movement, not the measurant of backfilled
territorialized movement effects.
The muscle spindles are connected to the spine and to the skeletal muscles most immediately in the
spindle reflex arc. The afferent nerve ending as an anulospiral receptor is at the end of an axon
stretching out to the spinal column. In the spinal cord this neuron synapses with nerves that carry the
information about the muscles to the brain, but it also synapses with the efferent skeletal motor
neurons for the very same muscle being sensed. This allows a reflex arc that goes from muscle spindle
(infrafusal) to cord and back to skeletal muscle without going to the brain. There are of course synapses
that connect these signals to the brain, but that obviously takes more time and has a different function.
So the spindle reflex arc is rather like a miniature nervous system.
Thus there are interwoven in the muscles the skeletal muscles and the intrafusal fibers or muscle
spindles. The motor neurons that stimulate these two muscle systems are separate. The skeletal motor
neurons (alpha motor neurons) have their own paths through the spinal column ending near the summit
of the brain, the motor cortex. The intrafusal motor neurons (gamma motor neurons) take their own
discrete pathways up the spinal cord and end in collections of cell bodies (ganglia) deep in the brain, in
the brain stem. Thus there are two separate motor systems within us. The alpha originates (or is
associated with) in the cortex and is associated with conscious sensations in the sensory cortex,
operates the skeletal muscles, and is responsive to conscious motor commands. The gamma originates
in (is associated with) the older part of the brain, has no conscious sensations and functions primarily
beneath the levels of conscious awareness.
However, these two separate systems are joined at their peripheries by the anulospisral receptors which
wrap the fibers of intrafusal spindles and synapse in the spinal column with their alpha partner motor
nerve for the associated skeletal muscles. Thus any impulse and movement initiated by one system
necessarily triggers an immediate reciprocal impulse and movement in the other, since the anulospiral
receptor is stretched or compressed in either case. The alpha muscle system seems to dominate, do the
work of moving body parts, with the gamma systems, tiny and hidden amongst the skeletal muscles,
seems at best to offer a monitoring or feedback role. However, closer consideration reveals differently.
The importance of the gamma system is hinted at by the fact that fully 1/3rd of the motor neurons in the
human body are gamma. I’ll come back to this, but now to introduce the other major proprioceptor, the
Golgi Tendon Organ (GTO).
“Religion and the Senses” 30
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The Golgi Tendon Organ is another sensory device occurring in large numbers among the collagen
bundles of the tendons and they serve as minute gauges of the efforts of the alpha muscle fibers. The
collagen fibers are zigzag shaped offering a small degree of elasticity in the tendon as the muscle is
stretched. The GTOs are multi-branched endings of sensory axons woven among the zigzagging collagen
fibers. The GTOs are highly specific and reflect the activity of only 10 to 15 fibers in the skeletal muscles.
The GTOs carry information to the ganglia of the brain stem, with a few direct connections to the
conscious cortical areas. Most of the information from the GTOs is processed unconsciously in the brain
stem.
The anulospiral receptors and the GTOs are closely paired but measure different aspects of movement.
Where the anulospsiral receptors measure the length of the muscle fiber and the speed with which the
length changes, the GTOs measure the tensions that are developing as a result of the changing lengths.
The degree of distortion in the parallel zigzags of the collagen bundles is a precise gauge of the force
with which the muscle is pulling on the bone to which it is associated. If these seem redundant these
differences allow the same degree of movement of my arm lifting either a book or a feather the same
distance and at the same speed. The GTOs assess the exact amount of resistance which is overcome in
order to contract a given distance in a given time.
GTOs and anulospirals together measure the pure mass of an object, that is, the measure of the object’s
resistance to movement. Importantly we can have no idea of the value of mass until we are actively
engaged in moving the object or connecting with it through movement. And we can begin to see that
we cannot even know ourselves as moving bodies apart from the combined experience gained through
the proprioceptors as we physically encounter our bodies in connection with the world through
movement.
Like the anulospiral receptors axons that synapse with the motor neurons of the skeletal muscles in the
spinal cord, so too do the GTO axons. However, they perform complementary functions. The
anulospiral receptors have an excitatory effect on the alpha motor nerves, while the GTOs have an
inhibitory effect on the alpha motor nerves. The anulospirals initiate movement and the GTOs inhibit
movement in part to prevent the tear of muscle fibers or ligaments but certainly to adjust movement to
the precise demands of the task at hand.
[discuss the integration of alpha and gamma … to create skilled and smooth movement … associated
with tonus, posture, gesture, skill, etc.]
So what observations might we make about this barest of introductions to proprioception? Certainly we
must be amazed at the nearly overwhelming complexity of a system that is fundamental to our
existence as animate organisms. Proprioception is the conjunction of the nervous system and the
musculature and has no other interest than movement. Yet, by proprioceptors being the
interconnection between the afferent and efferent, nervous and musculature system, they are also at
the heart of the connection between a person and environment, self and other, person and condition.
Proprioception is the inner touch that allows us to transcend the skin-encased physical boundaries of
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our bodies. Through the conjunction of movement and touch, proprioception connects us with
ourselves and our worlds.
With regard to movement proprioception does many things: it refines the physical movements during
the movement based on environmental connections. It provides sensation of movement to both the old
parts of the brain and to the sensorimotor cortex so that the experience of movement registers on
sensorimotor patterns that create gesture, posture, skillsets, engrams … all of which are inseparable
from our personal identity because it embodies/embrains our movement experience. Proprioception is
at once the monitor for the nervous system regarding the behavior of muscles as well as an active force
in the refinement and control of skeletal muscle movement. Without proprioception we would lurch
and rip about, if we could move at all. Proprioception engages the borderland of the conscious and
unconscious dimensions of our lives. While we may consciously direct our movement and action, the
actual effecting of what is consciously directed would be impossible without the unconscious
proprioceptive functions. Proprioception is what turns mere biomechanical movement into living
movement. And as living movement it is inseparable from feeling; feelings enter into the internuncial
network that impacts the values in the proprioceptors; the ease and efficiency of the movement
monitored and effected by proprioceptors is experienced as feeling. Proprioceptors are conditioned by
the development of sensorimotor patterns in the development of skill, gesture, habit, engram, posture,
and tonus [all to be considered in fuller detail later] functioning as the foundation for that general sense
of being, a sense of normalcy, a sense of the rightness. Proprioception is connected to the pleasure of
skilled movement, to the flow when movement activities are identified with the proprioceptive
immediacy of the performance of movement. Proprioception is that feeling kind of knowing that is not
backfilled or territorialized which is why it cannot easily be described even on reflection in terms other
than the vague references to “rightness” or “pleasure” or “flow.” Proprioception is sensation and
movement, monitor and initiator, exciter and inhibiter, muscle and nerve, conscious and unconscious,
inside and outside, self and other, reflexive and directed, creative and traditional, inquiry and skill, habit
and innovator, …
Neonatal Movement; Phylogenesis, Evolution, Ontogenesis
February 3, 2012 Lecture Outline
1. Cognitive Science:
a. Minimal criteria: resolve mind/body problem
b. Enaction
2. Project Possibilities:
a. Any sensory rich topic with cultural and historical specificity; a cultural practice, a ritual,
an event, a place, a work of art, music, etc. even writing or a text
b. Essential will be to attend especially to how to reverse the movement/vitality destroying
effects of territorialization (backfilling)
“Religion and the Senses” 32
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c. Essential to understand the processual, moving, worlding, gesturing, posturing aspects
of your topic; how it creates self and world, how is retains tradition while being
agentive, and so forth.
d. Essential to see that identity (self), environment or world (other), cognition, connection,
transcendence (of self and thus the basic model for religious transcendence), reason,
reality, sensuality, pleasure, pain, and so on are all discovered and created and given
valuation in the experiential perceptual neurobiological life where there is a primacy of
self-movement.
e. Essential to apply principles and ideas being developed in the course.
i. Eg. Distance. Religion and aspects of religion related to the defining movement
generated by the desire to overcome a gap/distance that cannot be overcome.
Prayer, pilgrimage, ritual, etc. This is a huge one since synapse/gap distance
desire are all ways of comprehending self-moving, living moving.
ii. Eg. Paradox. The fundamental paradox of the Christ event … vertical
(transcendence) and horizontal (immanence) … god is both spirit and in heaven
and embodied and on earth. This is a fundamental Christian paradox that might
well drive the movement of Christian history. It is not to be solved! It is to fuel
the movement that is everlasting life. Notice the active character of such things
as blood … how it evokes strong emotion, how it is ambiguous (blood of life of
murder of sin of sacrifice), blood cannot be passive even if dried. All sensoryrich materials have this active quality, drawing out action and reaction, engaging
emotion, and so forth and these effects/affects are their vitality and to
understand the dynamics of their movement is more insightful than dismissing
them with a backfilled description or a dry statement of what they mean.
iii. Eg. Network or self-adjusting network. We often understand history as point to
point, cause and effect, as one cause and an effect. Yet, clearly any event that is
marked by history is simply a backfilled point in the circulation of endless
circulating influences. We can emphasize the dynamics of these movements,
how their interactions excite or inhibit further movement, etc.
f. As we continue in the course we will find that all thought, all the common senses, have
their base in movement/touching and thus share the qualities I’ve just suggested. We’ll
certainly see that even sight (the sense we feel most objective) is deeply entwined with
movement and touching … and so with the other senses.
3. Neonatal Movement
a. Setting for concern with neonatal movement … why it is important. Groping to
grasping.
b. Neonatal imitation capabilities: Body schema vs body image. Primitive proprioceptive
system. Primitive sense of self. Issues of cognition.
4. Correlation of ontogenetics and phylogenetics
a. Evolution of humans … upright posture, use of hands, focus on face (eyes and speech) …
all centered on changing form of motility
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b. Human development … quadrapedal movement to bipedal movement, …
c. Longer developmental time than other animals … leads to the creation of distance (and
longer time required for neurotransmission) that Barbaras identifies with the more
advanced animate organisms. Our distinction as animals comes from the slow speed of
our human development and the slow speed of our neurotransmission.
Touching and Moving
1.
Camera Obscura Analogy of Perception
a. Characteristics: objectivist, separation of observer and observed, hierarchy of sensorium
(sight/hearing superior to “animal senses”), distrust of feeling, movement is primarily a
concern of grids.
b. Intro to shifts initiated by Merleau-Ponty
“We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer
in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box.” M-P Visible
and Invisible, p. 138. Reverses all of the valences associated with camera obscura.
2. Implications, restrictions, alternative
a. Manning’s approach in Politics of Touch (she doesn’t explicitly reference M-P, yet is in
the lineage of his work)
i. Against mind/body, reason/senses distinctions
ii. Against stable body as point of departure, i.e., pre-given in time and space
iii. For relational body
1. Process is foregrounded
2. Thinking the processual body is a way we articulate and live the political
b. Implications from my point of view
i. Impact on our understanding and appreciation of culture, religion, life
ii. Impact on the way we live our lives in the world and relate to others
iii. Emphasize process, becoming, moving, vitality … not static, grid, being, dead
iv. Meaning is understood in terms of generative/ energizing force of structuralities
like play, paradox, gap, distance, desire, grasping, etc rather than meaning that
fixes, that terminates
3. Touching and Movement
a. Manning’s insights
i. Early life is linked to touch (groping)
ii. Touch is the way to locate body-in-movement
iii. Touch is not simply the laying on of hands, but an act of touching, that is,
reaching toward something (grasping) that is not reached or reachable, like
axons-dendrites
iv. Touching is creating space through worlding (Manning’s and Massumi’s term)
1. Proprioceptors measure speed, length, and tension as characteristics of
movement and register these on sensorimotor programs in the
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neuromuscular system or where they hone and refine and revise
existing sensorimotor programs
v. Touching and the other
1. The political (in Manning’s account; I think of it more in Mauss’ terms of
cultural, historical, psychological) context of touching/movement makes
movement/touch into gesture.
2. There is an interdependence of the touch and the touched, the subject
and object. This is what we will soon see that Merleau-Ponty referred
to as reversibility, as chiasm, as flesh
b. Examples of touching and movement becoming gesture with political, cultural, religious
value
i. Schools: restriction and prohibition of movement and touching. Explicit way of
politicizing bodies, making fixed bodies (students). Serves the purpose of
controlling the body politic in order to insinuate values and in much deeper
ways than the content. Shapes the behavior and the values associated with
behavior. Interesting that the restriction of movement and touching in schools
is not unlike that for prisons. It is only in terms of degree and the content that
distinguishes them. Michel Foucault did extensive studies of the political
significance of imprisoned bodies.
ii. Cultural Identity: practices associated with movement and touching and body
proximity correlate closely with cultural identity. E. T. Hall The Hidden
Dimension outlined a study of this aspect of culture he called proxemics.
c. Manning and touch continued:
i. Incorporeal/corporeal
“The incorporeal is like a smudge that emanates from your body’s potential
movement. The smudge exfoliates in all directions, leaving traces of the
potential of the animated body as it moves from here to there, from the now to
the not-yet, from the after to the before to the will-have-come. The incorporeal
is not the opposite of the corporeal. It is a stage of corporeality that reminds us
that the corporeal is only ever vitually concrete. The body is always what it has
not yet become. The body is in metamorphosis.” Manning Politics of Touch, pp.
xviii-xix
ii. Body without Organs (BwO)
1. Image is from Antonin Artaud developed by Giles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari. Their point is to use this shocking construction BwO to kick us
into remembering that the corporeal is always the becoming-body, the
body that will-have-come. BwO means you “have to divest yourself of
your biology” … “Bodies interrelate, extending form into matter, matter
into form. BwO not only create relational networks with the world and
with each other, these relations themselves become embodied. Bodies
“Religion and the Senses” 35
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incorporate by becoming more than them-selves.” Manning Politics of
Touch, pp. xix-xx
2. There is a possibility that, while this idea is important, there is a lack of
understanding and appreciation of the “organs.” My description of
neurons (with their axons, dendrites, and various mechanisms of
movement that transcend the limitations of the body of the cell) and
the proprioceptors (which are of value only in terms of the touching and
moving body in an environment that extends beyond the body)
demonstrate that these “organics” surpass their bodies by design. The
architecture of the organic body is an architecture of movement,
touching, and transcendence.
d. Manning, Tango, and important issues: Manning’s consideration of the
touch/movement aspects of Tango lead her to discuss topics of enormous importance:
i. Gesture: She depends largely on Italian Giorgio Agamben particularly since he
places gesture in the context of the political, yet this view is articulated largely
in terms of the relationship of gesture to language (this strategy is twd poor
gesture). Manning could have developed a richer understanding of gesture that
would have been totally consistent with her general intent. Gesture is not
simply expression (agentive), but also interrogative (grasping). Gesture occurs
in a looping complex auto-adjusting interactive network.
ii. Double-touching: that to touch is to be touched is a core issue that was at the
heart of Merleau-Ponty’s development of his “ontology of flesh” and in his
efforts to develop language to fly in the direction of this complex image such as
reversibility, chiasm, and many others. The topic is taken up further in
important works by Jean Luc Nancy and Jacque Derrida’s discussion of Nancy’s
work. Here are some things that Manning says on this topic: “Touch functions
through a double genitive. I touch you twice, once in my gesture toward you
and once in the experience of feeling your body, my skin against yours. You
con-tact me. I cannot approach you tactilely without feeling that approach. I
touch (you). From your body, I elicit a response, a response not necessarily felt
or acknowledged through words, but through a return of the touching I initiate.”
Manning Politics of Touch, p. 11. And, “Touching is directionally toward a body
which has-not-yet-become, not a body in stasis, but a body moved and moving.
I touch what I cannot quite reach, I am touched by an other I cannot quite
comprehend, I abstain from touching what I touch with an abstinence that holds
within itself the desire to touch, to feel, to sense you.” Ibid., p. 12.
Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Flesh; Touch & Pure Depth
Feb 8 & 10, 2012
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French existential phenomenologist whose understanding
“Religion and the Senses” 36
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of human perception reshaped traditional philosophical positions. He denied the body-mind split
that has for centuries shaped the way we understand not only perception and body, but also what
it means to be human. His conjunctive constructions of the lived-body and the minded-body
seek acknowledgment of the traditional distinction without the radical separation.5 He defined
the mind as “the other side of the body” holding that
we have no idea of a mind that would not be doubled with a body. . . . The ‘other side’
means that the body, inasmuch as it has this other side, is not describable in objective
terms, in terms of the in itself–that this other side is really the other side of the body,
overflows into it (Ueberschreiten), encroaches upon it, is hidden in it–and at the same
time needs it, terminates in it, is anchored in it.6
There can be no mind without body. At the time of Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961 he was
working on a manuscript that was to broadly expand his earlier ideas, specifically through his
development of what has come to be termed “ontology of flesh.” The manuscript was edited and
posthumously published as The Visible and the Invisible and the ontology of flesh is developed
most fully in the complex often opaque essay “The Intertwining–The Chiasm.”7
Merleau-Ponty does not limit his understanding of flesh to skin and meat, nor are these its
primary reference, yet his most enduring and inspiring analogy and example of what he termed
flesh8 is developed in his reflections on our experience of touching one hand with our other hand.
If my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for
my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among things it touches, is in a sense one
of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part. Through this
crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate
themselves into the universe they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it; the two
5In very general ways these ideas are explored in terms of dancing by Sandra Fraleigh in her book Dance and the
Lived Body (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987).
6Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 259. “In itself” or “being-in-itself” is a Sartrian term referring to
nonconscious being. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966),
especially the glossary by translator Hazel E. Barnes.
7Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 130 155. The predecessors to this theory are found in “The Philosopher and his Shadow,” trans. Richard C. McCleary,
in Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
8I believe this example provides the “flesh” terminology Merleau-Ponty adopted. The difficulty with this
terminology lies in its inevitable identity with substantive banal flesh, an identity we have constantly to deny even
though it is the basic bodied experience we must always depend on as the basis for our understanding. There is a
certain irony in the need to disembody, even dematerialize Flesh, in order that it help us more fully understand our
being lived-bodies. Some more philosophically focused discussion of this, at least more than what I want to do
anyway, would be interesting.
“Religion and the Senses” 37
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systems are applied upon one another, as the two halves of an orange.9
There are at least two things here: a hand touching an object and a sentient object being touched,
but in this case the object touched is the other hand of the person, the subject, doing the touching.
There is a complexity here, as Merleau-Ponty shows, that denies the simple division between
object and subject, between the perceived and perceiver. What is doing the touching is also
being touched and vice versa. Merleau-Ponty points out the crisscrossing in which the touching
and the tangible are but two sides of the same thing as are the two halves of an orange. The
unifying structure of two hands touching is the inarguable singularity due to both being of the
same human body. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “My two hands touch the same things because
they are the hands of one same body.”10 “The body unites us directly with the things through its
own ontogenesis, by welding to one another the two outlines of which it is made, its two laps: the
sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible within it is born by segregation and upon which,
as seer, it remains open.”11 “Our body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing among
things and otherwise what sees them and touches them; we say, because it is evident, that it
unites these two properties within itself, and its double belongingness to the order of the ‘object’
and to the order of the ‘subject’ reveals to us quite unexpected relations between the two
orders.”12
This image of the body that is two yet one is clarified with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of
chiasm (a cross piece, crossing place, or to mark with the letter chi), that is, a crisscrossing,
intertwining, folding that he calls “flesh.” Flesh is not stagnant or inanimate matter, but rather it
is on the order of an element (in the same sense as fire, air, earth and water) in the sense of being
constitutive of reality.13 I might prefer the term “structurality” to indicate a dynamic
relationality. It is a texture, he says, (a woven fabric) that expresses the fundamental unity and
continuity, yet allowing diversity, division, and opposition, that permeates all interrelated and
interwoven pairings. It is no thing, but the formative medium of the subject and object. As a
skin or fabric, flesh is two-sided–the sensitive and the sensed–yet where the two are not entirely
separable from one another. The hand being touched is also capable of touching. The sides are
reversible as are the insides and outsides of a jacket or glove or, to suggest a metaphor MerleauPonty did not use, the windings of a möbius strip. A möbius strip is a single-sided geometrical
9Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible., 133.
10Ibid., 141.
11Ibid., 136.
12Ibid., 137. The leaves metaphor is interesting. Leaves, as of a tree, are all different yet all connected to the
same species (we know a tree by the shape of its leaves) and even of one entity. Leaves of a book carry on the
structurality and include a sense of the two sides, as in turning over a new leaf, meaning I suppose in the
behavioral analogy that one side of a leaf differs from the other while still being the same.
13The shift of flesh from the gross matter of the inspiring analogy, that is, two hands, to the elemental is a difficult
one largely because of the gross physicality, the bloodiness, that is almost inseparable from the word “flesh.”
Dancing, I’ll suggest, is an important alternative.
“Religion and the Senses” 38
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structure. It can be modeled by taking a thin strip of paper, twisting it a half turn, and joining the
ends together. At any point on the strip one can turn it over to confirm that is has a second side.
By holding the paper between one’s finger and thumb it is clear that the finger is on one side, the
thumb on the other. Yet, when one traces the extent of one side, say by marking a line along the
length of the strip, it is continuous and single, the line meets itself without any break to move
from one side to the other. The endless conjunction and continuity of inside and outside is also
captured by the infinity sign this form takes as a three dimensional object.14
For Merleau-Ponty, the essential feature of flesh is its reversibility (a description of a
structurality), the exchange between the inside and outside, the subjective and objective, the
touching and the touched, the seeing and the seen, and so on. Which hand is touching; which is
being touched? Which side of the möbius strip is the outside? The structurality that MerleauPonty calls flesh is characterized by reversibility, a capacity to fold in on itself, a reflexivity, a
fundamental gap or dehiscence that is also continuity and connection of being that MerleauPonty shows is the operative relationality that makes possible perception, language, and thought.
Merleau-Ponty did not explicitly give primacy to movement in his discussion, but there are
plenty of signs he recognized it. And, of course, Renaud Barbaras, the leading authority on
Merleau-Ponty, has written much on movement clearly developed from Merleau-Ponty. It is in
the separation and division that perception, language, and thought occur; but were there not also
a unity or interdependence among the parts, there would be no connection, no passage, no access
from one part of a structure to the other. It is the reversibility of flesh–“a texture that returns to
itself and conforms to itself,”15—that offers the separation that is also continuity and therefore
motivates movement and makes life possible.
As perception is the intertwining of the percipient and the perceptibles, Merleau-Ponty
extends his notion beyond the boundaries of the human body in his understanding of what he
called the “flesh of the world.” Merleau-Ponty attacks the self-other distinction that usually
survives even those philosophies that interrelate or identify mind and body. He sees that to allow
this radical separation, this dichotomy, would be to stop too soon. “Is my body a thing, is it an
idea? It is neither, being the measurant of the things. We will therefore have to recognize an
ideality that is not alien to the flesh that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions.”16 Merleau14Merleau-Ponty did not refer to the möbius as a model. Elizabeth Grosz did apply it to his work. See Volitile
Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 36. Merleau-Ponty used an
analogy that was quite close, “If one wants mataphors, it would be better to say that the body sensed and the
body sentient are as the obverse and the reverse, or again, as two segments of one sole circular course which goes
above from left to right and below from right to left, but which is but one sole movement in its two phases. And
everything is said about the sensed body pertains to the whole of the sensible of which it is a part, and to the
world.” Visible and Invisible, p. 138. His reference to one sole circular course is but a half twist from being a
mobius and clearly the mobius would have served him as a better metaphor.
15Visible and Invisible, p. 146.
16Ibid., 152.
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Ponty expands the understanding of body to extend beyond that space displaced by the physical
body. The flesh of the world extends perception beyond the physical body, but, as importantly, it
re-conceptualizes the body as extending into the world. As the inner and outer are continuous
(separable, but unified), as the body and mind, subject and object fit the same pattern, so too do
the physical body and the world beyond it.
This development is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception.
Perception, as usually understood, bifurcates the perceiver and world perceived, yet, for
Merleau-Ponty, they are of the same fabric, they are both of the flesh of the world. He writes,
If the body is one sole body in its two phases, it incorporates into itself the whole of the
sensible and with the same movement incorporates itself into a “Sensible in itself.” We
have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the
body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box. Where are we to put
the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?17
Otherwise, Merleau-Ponty argues, we would be in a world he finds impossible, a world divided
into discontinuous paired members isolated from one another. The flesh of the world is the
fabric that at once divides us from and unites us with the world in which we live, the world
beyond the bounds of our physical bodies, the world that we perceive and experience. Here our
sentient bodies are understood by Merleau-Ponty as belonging to the same flesh as non-selfsentient sensibility, as those things outside the body that we perceive as objects sensed.
Merleau-Ponty argues that we are able to perceive that which is beyond us because our bodies
share the same fabric, a fabric he calls the flesh of the world.18
Merleau-Ponty investigates the bond that he calls flesh between the physical and the idea
or internal image, the issue addressed by the title given his book, the bond between the visible
and the invisible. He writes, ideas
could not be given to us as ideas except in the carnal experience. It is not only that we
would find in that carnal experience the occasion to think them; it is that they owe their
authority, their fascinating, indestructible power, precisely to the fact that they are in
transparency behind the sensible, or in its heart.19
17Ibid., 138.
18This understanding of the body as extending beyond the skin into the world is not unknown beyond MerleauPonty. One thinks of Edward T. Hall’s work The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1966)
with proxemics, which explores how our physical bodies are surrounded by domains (bubbles) that can be
characterized differently that extend us into the world seemingly outside of ourselves. However, Merleau-Ponty’s
work is far more radical. Rather than our bodies extending into the world beyond our physical boundaries,
Merleau-Ponty argues that we are continuous with the world, of the same fabric, yet still distinct from it.
19Visible and Invisible, p. 150.
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He says further,
The idea is this level, this dimension. It is therefore not a de facto invisible, like an
object hidden behind another, and not an absolute invisible, which would have nothing to
do with the visible. Rather it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits the world,
sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this
being.20
Merleau-Ponty’s flesh ontology addresses the current most engaging cultural and
intellectual problem: is there intrinsic order in the world. Merleau-Ponty articulates his
understanding of this intrinsic order in the terms of this doubling structurality, this intertwining,
this reversibility, this reciprocity, this flesh that makes possible, that grounds, that both
distinguishes and unifies self and other. For Merleau-Ponty the reversibility of flesh constitutes
“the ultimate truth.”21
Merleau-Ponty begins with a semi-naturalist position, one common to phenomenology, which is
to consider the experience of touch/touching, particularly one hand touching the other. He
describes the experience of this. While M-P has a naturalist base, he does not include a
discussion of proprioception as fundamental to understanding touch. I believe that doing so
would have greatly developed his work, especially in comprehending the interdependence of
movement and touch. Tactility for Merleau-Ponty is the primordial sense in which the body’s
interiority is constituted. There is, for M-P a distinctive structurality to touch/touching which
conveys the relation between self and other as dual elements of a singular incorporeality. That
means that the corporeal arises in this relationship in this incorporeality. Consciousness is not
possible without touch. We have had this fleshed out for us by Manning, though of course she is
dependent on M-P who developed it.
Then, as we have seen, Merleau-Ponty fleshed out this relationship under the broad rubric of
“flesh” which of course was inspired by his fundamental image/exemplar touching. Flesh has to
do with subjective/objective relationships which he understands in terms of the structurality of
touching. It is incorporeal, no thing, nothing named in philosophy, a structurality (structuration
is the word he uses), or as Manning and Massumi would have it, a virtuality. M-P then knowing
that this virutality cannot be nailed down, grasped, set out to offer a variety of images,
relationalities, metaphors that would engage us further in the grasping process, the movement
that draws us toward what cannot be reached. I’ll quickly summarize these terms:
Reversibility: this points us toward the body’s simultaneous status as perceiving subject and
object of perception. It is the two that is one. There is an incompleteness to this reversibility
which M-P referred to as a “fecund negative.” This reminds us Barbaras’s discussion of
20Ibid., p. 151.
21Ibid., p. 155.
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movement which occurs because of a negative that leads to the motivation he called “desire.” It
is this incompleteness that gives movement and the potential for significance to reversibility. It
is an oscillation, a movement across a gap or distance that exists because the one is divided or
split into two (M-P uses the botanical term dehiscence for this), yet the oneness is the movement,
the desire (translating a bit here) that is the oneness.
Chiasm: based on the appearance of the Greek letter Chi, chiasm is a crossing place, a crossover
of two separate things. It is where two things are one thing. It is the Christian cross; the unity of
horizontal and vertical, transcendent and immanent. M-P sees chiasm as a folding back, like
cloth or flesh, on itself. But the important point is not that the crossing place of chiasm closes
the gap and settles the twoness with a unity; rather, it is that the structurality of chiasm is that the
twoness is always there even as it is also one. The chiasm is more a gap that is a distance
without dimension that it allows us to move in the grasping direction.
Mobiatic: M-P did not use this mathematical image but others have suggested it might be useful.
It is a two-sided figure that is also a one-sided figure.
Depth: Turning to vision, M-P discussed the depth perception which is obviously related to
flesh. He discussed the neurobiology of stereopsis where the nerves from one eye cross over to
the opposite side brain hemisphere; a chiasm of vision. The interesting thing is that we literally
see two different images because our two eyes are physically separate, but we perceive one
image. This is again an image to help us comprehend the two that are one, but never quite.
Further it is in stereopsis that we gain the best capacity to perceive depth, that is, distance. The
world takes on dimension through the two that are one.
Pure Depth: Turning from the visual understanding of depth, or distance, M-P contemplated the
idea of “pure depth.” Depth at a naïve level then is understood as that dimension by which we
see something from “here” that is at its place “there.” The “here” and “there” are contemporary
in our experience. Here and there are joined in time through their visibility and this is “depth,” a
space of “copresent implication.” When movement is factored in, as necessary to such
perception, then Merleau-Ponty appreciates depth as a “sensitive space,” as “living movement,”
as “lived distance.”22 Depth, in this progressive consideration, becomes increasingly profound.
It is that dimension that contemporaneously unites and separates. It is “a thick view of time.”
Depth is the “most existential dimension.”23
Depth, or more properly “pure depth,” when taken in this most profound sense, is a dimension
that is primordial, allowing the perception of distance and the value of the distant. Primordial
depth, in itself, does not yet operate between objects, between perceiver and percipient. “Pure
22
Erwin Straus clarifies, “Distance is a primal phenomenon … there is no distance without a sensing and mobile
subject; there is no sentience without distance.” Quoted from his The Primary World of Senses in Cataldi, p. 45.
23
Cataldi, p. 45.
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depth” is depth without distance from here.24 In its thickness, depth preceding perception is
perhaps difficult to grasp. Merleau-Ponty offers an analogy that both depends on vision and also
foils vision to the point of replacing it with touch, with feeling. This lever is “dark space,” the
experience of night or darkness. In darkness seeing is thwarted, yet seeing into the darkness
elicits a feeling of thickness, a density, a materiality, a tangibility, an intimacy. In dark space
everything is obscure and mysterious. Eugene Minkowski, an early twentieth century
psychiatrist, who offered the idea of “dark space,” held that “the essence of dark space is
mystery.”25 The experience of dark space provides a means of trying to grasp pure depth. Pure
depth is depth without foreground or background, without surfaces and without any distances
separating it from me. Menkowski understood dark space, which Merleau-Ponty identifies with
“pure depth,” as “the depth of our being,” as “the true source of our life.”26
Pure depth is key to understanding flesh which, like pure depth, as pure depth, is always already
there as precessive, that is, “the formative medium of the subject and object” and as progenitive,
the “inauguration of the where and when.”27 The moving body is fundamental to flesh, because
through movement flesh begins to understand itself or become aware of itself.28 Flesh, without
the moving body, is only possibility, never actuality, percipience never perception. The moving
body is then, as Merleau-Ponty termed it, a “percipient-perceptible,” that is, an entity possessing
the power to perceive while also being capable of being perceived. The body is an intertwining
of two sides, the adherence of a self-sentient side to a sensible side. The body as an intertwining
blurs the boundary between the flesh of the world (depth) and our own bodily flesh. The body
exists then in an ambience, a primordial given, of depth, the hidden dimension behind
everything.29
This doubling is for Merleau-Ponty a reversibility. Reversibility is a way to express the
interconnection among distinctions. A subject requires an object and vice versa; they are
reversible; they oscillate back and forth among themselves. Movement is essential for
reversibility to be realized, for occlusion to be recognizable, for perception to take place. Yet,
this reversibility is never complete. This is a fascinating phase in this argument, I think.
Complete reversibility would result in identity among the distinctions and a collapse of
perception. Were the touching of one hand with the other to be completely reversible it would
not be possible to distinguish one hand from the other. The images provided by each eye would
be the same and there would be no negotiation and reconciliation between the two, no vision.
The term “chiasm” here identifies this gap or cross-over space. There must remain this
undetectable, in itself, space or gap or hiddenness for reversibility to be incomplete. Incomplete
24
Ibid., p. 48.
Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time, (1933), p. 429, cited in Cataldi, p. 49.
26
Cataldi quoting Minkowski, p. 50.
27
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 140, quoted in Cataldi, p. 60.
28
Cataldi, p. 61.
29
Ibid., p. 67.
25
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reversibility is not some flaw to be overcome in perception, it is rather the very motor that drives
the movement of reversibility that allows for simultaneous interdependence and distance. Since
the chiasm is hidden, since chiasm precedes and makes possible reversibility, it can be thought of
as “depth” or better as “pure depth” as presented through the analogy of “dark space.” Chiasm,
pure depth, this incompleteness is the source or condition of percipience and at the same time
unifies flesh ontology.
Corporeality or Body: The implications for body are perhaps obvious by this point and they
follow on Manning’s discussion of incorporeality/corporeality in a prior lecture. For M-P the
body is not understood as the origin of perception, but rather the origin of the body is in the
relationality of perception. The living body, as M-P calls it, is not the physical body (which M-P
sees as the object of biology). The living body is a contingent/relational body. It is the body that
cannot be properly conceived, adequately thematized or reproduced because it is “flesh.”
Barbaras focused on living movement to characterize the same structurality. Living movement is
always moving and therefore cannot be conceived or reproduced because it is moving, living. I
think there is perhaps less distance between the living body and the physical body than M-P and
others are allowing. Thus my interest in an approach that might be characterized as a bit more of
a “radical naturalism.” I see in the consideration of the architecture of neurons and
proprioception the same structuralities; the flesh that is, acdg to M-P, the “ultimate reality.”
Why should not these structuralities of ultimate reality pertain even more fundamentally to the
most basic level constituencies of our existence?
Tonus and Sense of Effort
Feb 13 & 15
1. Orchestration of Muscle Response
a. Substantia Nigra: ganglia (old brain) responsible for the interpretation and coordination
of overall sensory information coming from muscle spindles and tendon organs. Not
“felt” but essential to smooth integrated movement
b. Globus Pallidus: ganglia (old brain) that sift and select sensory information to brace
parts of our bodies in order to support the desired movement of other parts.
Phenomenon of fixation. This is essential in order to do much of what we do from
writing with a pen to most all movement. “habitual repetition of these preferred
fixations which creates the individualized tension patterns in our musculatures, and
eventually even alters the thickness of our fascia and the shape of our bones in order to
more efficiently accommodate a limited number of positions. As we select postural
fixations and become more and more attached to them, their increasing familiarity
begins to give us a comforting sensory and psychological stability, a constant norm to
which we return as to a favorite jacket or an old friend. … my favorite fixed positions
eventually cease to be something I am doing and become to a large degree what I am.
The fixation becomes dominant, and the release more difficult; person, posture, and
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point of view become firmly welded together, unfortunately limiting all three. … I need
a large repertoire of fixations, so that I am not trapped in the discomforts inherent in
any single position.” Juhan, p. 220
c. Striate Body: ganglia (old brain) that initiate and monitor stereotyped movements, i.e.,
movements that are distinct to our species and our situation, and also the stereotyped
manner in which all movement is done (i.e., style). These are the habitual preferences
built up by compulsions, training, job requirements, dispositions, and culture, etc.
Juhan, p. 221.
2. Tone:
a. Salsa Connection analogy … based in tone
b. Proprioceptors (spindle and Golgi) are at base of complex task of maintaining tone
throughout the body. Between the two they produce a summation of excitation and
inhibition on the alpha (skeletal) neurons which keeps the active muscle fibers within a
narrow range of tensional forces—just the right amount to stand, to lift a book, to hold
a glass. It is tone, just as much as it is connective tissues or bone, that is responsible for
my basic structural shape and integrity. Tone must superimpose on its own stability of
steady rhythmical expansion and contraction of respiration. It must support overall
structure in position (whatever that is … standing, sitting, etc). It must be able to brace
and release any part of the body in relation to the whole, and to do so with spontaneity
and split-second timing so that graceful action may be added to stability, posture and
rhythmic respiration. Juhan pp. 222-23
c. Tone and feeling: The proprioceptive system (gamma) is constantly assessing (getting
the feel, even if not a conscious feeling) length and tension to maintain tone. Something
as simple as lifting an arm out to the side “changes either the length or the tension
values in most of the body’s muscle cells.” Juhan, p. 224 The entire musculature must
learn to participate in the motion of any of its parts. … the entire musculature must feel
its own activity, fully and in rich detail. [feeling here refers to the overall sensation (not
necessarily consciously felt) of the coordination of all of this stuff]
d. Tone as basis for maintaining posture and stability, but also for acquiring new skills,
gestures, behaviors. Everything is built on tone.
e. Repetition (see Juhan, p. 227): the most repeated actions most resemble the feel of the
more primitive reflexes (swallowing) in their automaticity and their regularity. Thus
they come to appear “natural,” to be us not something we do. Question is how does
repetition work? One possibility is the neurological principle of “neurons that fire
together wire together,” even though this principle stated here is based on a “wiring”
analogy that I don’t like. Engrams will help on this. Repetition is so important to
rehabilitate for the study of religion and culture because it is essential to the feeling of
cultural/religious identity (rather obviously), yet it is disdained by the academic study of
religion where it is relegated to a pre-religious sphere like magic. Idiocy.
f. Postural/gestural/habitual/skill comes to play an enormous role in who we are and how
we see and act in the world. Since these have become stereotypical reflex patterns they
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are largely active beneath the level of our conscious control and awareness. Gestures
become postures that become structures that then become mental state. Tone
operates throughout as baseline and as the medium for the “feeling” of this process.
We should be able to see that the accounting of tone via posture/gesture is
fundamental to the study of religion and culture.
3. Sense of Effort (proprioception): “Our most sacred convictions, the unchanging elements of our
supreme values, are judgments of our muscles.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power (Juhan, p. 245)
Sensory and motor nervous systems must be fully blended in order for us to have smooth
controlled movement.
a. Proprioception as sense of effort. While we often consider proprioception as the
kinesthetic sense, how is it that the muscle spindles (anulospirals) and Golgi tendons
account for movement? They do so in a way that we might understand in terms of
effort. Movement is inseparable from a sense of effort as it is the grounding for action
and awareness. “no sense contributes more to our conception of material reality.” The
“organ” of this sense of effort (being our entire musculature system) comprises 70 to
85% of the body.
b. Time, gravity, movement, mass, even our psychological/philosophical feelings are linked
to the sense of effort. “I’m having a hard time these days.”
c. Sitting (often even a slouching which doesn’t even depend on a sitting tonus) disengages
most of our sense of effort (like closing our eyes related to seeing). Consider the impact
on our sensory being as the result of being without the most pervasive and foundational
of our senses. Consider the implications of the academic posture, the business posture,
a slouching sitting kyphotic relatively toneless motionless posture.
d. Feeling effort. Effort is something one feels rather than something one does. Related to
feeling of vitality
e. Aesthetics of effort: The relative ease and difficulty experienced (felt) related to effort
become associated with value: difficult, challenging, enjoyable, etc. Daniel Stern
discussed “vitality effects.” We associate movement with aesthetics and pleasure—
sports, dancing, exercising, etc. We associate achievement of skill and efficiency of
movement also with aesthetics and pleasure. What we recognize as skill is
“effortlessness” as much as results. In teaching dancing I always say that “technique is
inseparable from style” and that “the simplest most efficient way to do something is the
most beautiful, stylish, pleasing way.” Sprezzatura refers to doing the difficult with
apparent effortlessness.
4. Implications: I am making an effort to ground our study of the senses and following that our
study of culture and religion in the nature of our neurobiological human being. Tone (or tonus)
is the ever-present, ever-active, self-adjusting neurobiological network in which the muscle
spindles (anulospiral receptors) and Golgi tendon organs are in constant excitatory and
inhibitory dialogue with the ganglia (the old brain) and to a lesser extent to the cerebellum (the
new brain) to maintain the body as a vital living moving constantly changing system that both
acts on the world and engages the world interrogatively. Tone is the readiness, the incipience,
“Religion and the Senses” 46
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of our movement potential. We are born with basic tone, yet our every action and movement
and experience in life builds on tonal patterns expressed as posture and gesture. Tone bears
culture and religion as certainly as does doctrine and belief. Indeed, tone being so integral to
what feels natural to our identity isn’t a matter of question or choice so it functions as even
more foundational than belief and doctrine that can be questioned and even changed (though
tone will resist). Tone is inseparable from sense of effort, for they are in some sense the same
thing. Tone is the proprioceptive base for the measurance of effort that assesses movement
(the body’s own backfilling) and environment (the body’s own objectification system of
knowledge and action). Sense of effort is present in stereotypical skills and patterns that define
our humanity, our culture, our individuality; that are the basis of our style as well as the
negatively inhibiting patterns we often refer to as habits. The general principles that exist in
tone and sense of effort that are important to the spiraling consideration of personal
(psychological), social, cultural, and religious domains is that a tensional oscillating self-adjusting
system of inhibitory/excitatory forces is essential. In the frame of culture and religion it seems
we might call this tonus system by the name tradition. Interestingly we tend to think of
“tradition” and “traditional” more in the terms of the static, the changeless; whereas, tonus is
constantly in motion. We must also see that repetition is essential to the establishment of the
tonal levels that are necessary for action—movement agency. As I have said, we tend to dismiss
repetition as redundant or mindless or habitual or automatic or autonomic or animal or magical;
thus not only do we ignore the essential importance of repetition, we actually denigrate it.
Aesthetics of effort are key to the appreciation and valuation of skill and gesture and posture. In
the study of culture and religion we rarely consider grace a quality of consideration relative to
our subjects and we also rarely consider that grace should be an essential quality of our own
efforts, resulting in simply being unaware of the most beautiful and pleasing aspects of both our
subjects as well as our own profession/occupation.
Engrams
Feb 15 and 17
Despite the dismissal of “feeling” as of any value at all to human personal, cultural, and religious
meaning and behavior, what C. S. Peirce called a “feeling kind of knowing” is at the very heart and core
of not only our every action and expression (including speaking and writing and thinking) but also our
inferential processes. Throughout his life Peirce, realizing that not one whit of knowledge is gained from
inductive and deductive inference, attempted to articulate an abductive inferential process to explain
how we think something new, how we discover; he understood abduction as a “feeling kind of
knowing.” As we approach a problem or even make the effort to select a problem, we do not robotically
tick through options or steps mechanically selecting and rejecting options without the influence of
feelings/interests; we somehow grasp an idea or an image that evokes or is associated with a feeling
that we somehow know to be connected with a process which we then simply unleash and allow
ourselves to “feel” our way along toward a conclusion. The unleashing is rather like starting a process
that will continue on its own. Swallowing is an example. We can voluntarily initiate a swallow, but the
“Religion and the Senses” 47
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complex sequence of sensorimotor/muscular actions taking up to 5 seconds cannot be stopped midswallow. It is little different than when, in speaking, we begin to talk. There is usually only a feeling of
releasing the sequence of words that will lead to the conclusion we desire, but certainly we do not have
in mind all the words, implications, grammar, style, enunciation, and so on that are required of every
utterance. We have only the feeling that allows us to release or initiate the process by uttering the first
word (and we often hedge this by a filler word like “well”). It is a wonder we do not misspeak more than
we get it like it feels right. It is as much a matter of faith based on past experience of feeling than
anything. It constitutes our style as well as our acumen. Perhaps later we backfill to disguise and hide
this feeling process by presenting reasoning and argumentation, but it is always always backfilling.
So how does this feeling process work? One way to gain some inroads is to consider sensory engrams or
simply engrams. Consider the following: the word signature can refer to our quotidian signing of our
name on documents (checks, leases, papers, etc) and it can also refer to that set of style features that
distinguish our overall movement and even way of thinking or acting. We all have a signature to our
gestures, posture, habits, movements, actions, speech, etc. that is constructed through the history of
our personal experience. There are also species, gender, cultural, occupational signatures. A simple
example is the movement of animal characters in the Lion King. Even though the animals are animated
by human actors, because the signature movements/postures of the animals are understood so well and
repeated in their essential features, the animals have a greater presence than their human animators.
Let’s consider this signature element further to attempt to understand its “naturalist” neurobiological
base, the engram. Consider our signature as it applies to a document. This is the use of tiny finger
muscles against a postural tonus that supports the body to allow this fine motor movement. The
signature is not identical in every replication, but it is distinct and recognizable in each manifestation as
a specific signature. Its distinctiveness is not the arrangement of distinct letters, but the style of the
flow of marking. Now consider this signature applied to the side of a building using a can of spray paint.
It will be recognizable as a the same signature. One does not need to learn to sign one’s signature in
different sizes to be able to do so, nor does a person have different signatures based on the size. This
means then that signature is not simply a muscle memory event. And since we know that specific parts
of the brain are associated with the movement of specific muscles and body parts, it is not simply a
specific sensorimotor program. Further, we know that this is not a consciously directed action. As I
discussed above, we simply initiate the movement of signing our names, or making our signature, and it
just happens. The same feeling kind of initiation engages us whether our signature is a half inch high on
a dotted line or four feet tall on the side of a wall.
Only proprioceptors (anulospirals and Golgi tendons) give us a feel of movement as it is happening. As
we repeat movement we build memory of the feel of certain movements or movement sequences. Skill,
gesture, habit constructs a sensory engram which is a memory of the feeling of doing a sequence of
movements. Neurobiology isn’t all that sure where engrams are actually located or how they are able
to do what they do, but it is clear what they do.
I like to think of sensory engrams as stretchable fluid templates. They are templates in that they
designate recognizable patterns of movement such as a signature, but they are stretchable in that they
“Religion and the Senses” 48
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can engage the proprioceptive neurobiological systems across different muscle groups. They also can
adjust or are fluid in accounting for an infinity of variables such as surface, pen or marking device,
effects of clothing or gloves, and on and on. We can stand on our heads wearing a parka and mittens
and use a cotton swab dipped in mud and still sign our names. Not only that, but engrams obviously
string together dozens of smaller sensorimotor programs and even stereotypical responses and
primitive reflexes (both of which are innate) to create complex skillsets and gestures. These engrams
then are stretchable and fluid in transferring from one skill to another related skill. So if we learn to
dance ballet, then we can learn to dance many other dances more quickly and at a higher skill level.
Sensory engrams also have style signatures. Not only do we write our names with a certain signature
style, but we walk and talk and do many things in our lives in ways that are distinctive to our personal,
occupational, gendered, age, cultural, species style. As new skills, gestures, postures are acquired
extant engrams are applied to them to mark them with the signature style.
Since engrams are feeling based, then they are the mechanism involved in our sense of the “rightness”
of movement. We have this sense of rightness when we learn a skill, when we perform an action, when
we practice behavior. The feeling of doing it feeds back to the memory of the feeling of doing the
action, that is the engram is a looping self-refining system. We simply know by the feel how we have
done a movement. This is easy to confirm. We usually know when we mistype a letter because of the
feel we have before we see that the wrong letter has appeared. We feel the accuracy of a throw before
it arrives at its intended destination. Another interesting aspect of this memory of feeling is in
attempting to remember a movement that doesn’t come readily to mind. I often experience this in
complex dance moves. If I can remember how it starts I simply do the move feeling the rightness of the
movement that is coming forth without my conscious direction. Typically to repeat it concentrating on
where in the sequence it doesn’t feel “right” will eventually lead to that feeling of “rightness” that is the
satisfactory and accurate recall of the move.