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MA ADA 2007 > articles > .Communication , imagination , the web as anastomosis

.Communication , imagination , the web as anastomosis

May 8, 07:26 PM · Penelope Dunbar

Michel Serres has some interesting ideas about communication and our relationship with our world . In his book the Natural Contract he asserts the need to readdress our human relationship with our environment. He puts the ecolological foundations of our human existence firmly and poetically back in perspective . It makes me acutely aware of our present day societies displacement from the world and environment . Latour(1993) accurately encapsulates the problematic relationship between human societies and the natural/material world of things.What is needed is a way to disclose the interactions between the object (the world of things) and the subject ( the human and societal ).(Latour1993)


Pum (2007) Happy Haptic Ritual
Collage
10cm x 7cm

‘ We possess hundreds of myths describing the way subjects (or the collective , or intersubjectivity, or epistemes) construct the object- Kant’s Copernican Revolution is only one in a long line of examples . Yet we have nothing that recounts the other aspect of the story:how objects construct the subject.’ (Latour 1993:82)

Latour (1993) provides a comprehensive explanation for why this division between man and nature has arisen . We have never been modern sets out to show how we must now admitt the hybridity of the subject object relationship, accentuate the role of the mediator and reject the divison or separation of Nature , object and human subject. In an interview Serres discusses why he thinks a metaphysics of the contemporary world still has considerable relevence .He is essentially exploring the dimensions of knowledge in terms of the relationship between the material body and knowledge . developing knowledge through the body’s experience of the world – but not soley in terms of the 5 senses. We can more acurately describe the body as being a fusion of 7 senses – by considering the role of Proprioception ( the perception we have of our own body by means of the billions of captors disseminated throughout all the bodily tissues .) and the vestibular sense of gravitation and spatial orientation. located in the inner ear

The seven senses are interconnected to create a single sense -the sense of movement.(Berthoz 1997) Perception and motricity in a convultion. The body becomes a place where oral and experiential narratives are knitted together – to create knowledge. The artist Marcus Coats who attempts to connect with the animal world by using his body to subsume his subjectivity into animal behaviours – his dawn chorus is a triumph in evoking an extraordinary relationship between human and bird song. communication is perhaps something we need to approach in less conventional and more imaginative ways.

References
Berthoz,A. et al Ed (1993) Multisensory control of movement Oxford; New York:Oxford University Press

Csordas, T. ed. (1994) Embodiment and Experience: the existential ground of culture and Self . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .

Latour, B.& Porter,C (trans) (1993) We have never been modern. Cambridge MA:Harvard University Press.

Serres,M & MacArthur&Paulson(trans)(1995)_ The natural contract_ . USA:University of Michigan Press .

Serres, M & Cowper, P(trans) (1993) Angels: A modern myth. Paris: Flammarion.

 

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