The Body as Tool.
Empathy as Aesthetic Tactility?
Research master thesis by Claartje van Tongeren
Artistic Research
University of Amsterdam 2018
Supervisor: Miriam van Rijsingen
Table of Contents 4
Introducing the subject 5
The concept of empathy 5
The importance of somaesthetics 6
The experience of empathy 13
Tactility and somaesthetics 14
Practical investigation 15
Relevance 16
Methodology 17
Outline 17
Chapter 1 Having an empathetic shared experience 19
Introduction 19
Affect and emotions 19
Sharing an experience 23
Emotional sharing 31
How do we understand empathy? 34
Chapter 2 Touch, tactility and haptics 37
Introduction 37
Touch and neuroscience 38
Defining touch 46
Chapter 3 Embodied experience and somatic reflection 62
Moving and sensing the body 62
Having or being a body 69
Emotion and bodily feeling 71
Awareness 72
Somatic reflection 74
The importance of experience 81
Chapter 4 The somaesthetical experience through the work of Lygia Clark 84
The empathetic experience 86
Tactility in the work of Lygia Clark 87
Concluding Somaesthetics 97
‘The body as tool’ is central to my artistic practice and is related to my interest in somaesthetics. Tactility as a sensory and aesthetic experience has an important emphasis in my work. In my artistic research I question several perspectives concerning tactility, such as: How can our body become part of the work of art? How can the body be felt through works of art? What does it mean to have an aesthetic tactile experience? And can an aesthetic tactile experience lead to feelings of empathy?
During the artistic process I investigate how the awareness of the body and the relation between the work of art and the body can be intensified through tactile perception of the sensory perception.
Tactility or touch can be studied from different perspectives. I will limit my viewpoint to the experience of perception. As I am, in my artistic practice, interested in the relation between tactility, bodily awareness and the concept of empathy, the theoretical framework of somaesthetics will be central. According to Richard Shusterman, somaesthetics “is devoted to the critical, ameliorative study of one’s experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning”’.1 The framework of somaesthetics will be
explained later in this thesis.
The concept of empathy
Empathy is considered to be the most basic form of interpersonal understanding. To get a grip on our life we feel the need to understand others. In having an empathetic experience we depend on others. By this I mean to say that we understand the importance of empathy as there is a need for sustaining the self-other connectedness.
The relation between the self and the other has been a central concern in psychoanalysis, philosophy, in the arts, in literature and in neuroscience. The concept of empathy has been studied from a phenomenological point of view drawing on developmental studies: Dan Zahavi,
for example, a philosopher, and Philippe Rochat, a developmental psychologist, together have researched the concept of empathy. They consider empathy a central precondition for experiential sharing. Their definition of empathy is “the experience of the embodied mind of the other, an experience which, rather than eliminating the difference between self-experience and other experience, takes the asymmetry to be a necessary and persistent existential fact.”2
Hence viewing and experiencing the other is essential for experiential sharing.
I understand by ‘meeting of minds’ the human ability to share mental states such as emotions, intentions, and perceptual experiences.3 Both Matteo Gallotti and Christopher Frith,
who work in the field of social science, cognition and the brain, argue that to be able to understand the nature of social interaction, attention should be focused on the way people align words and thoughts, bodily postures and movements.4 According to them, social
interaction is not always a reciprocal exchange of information. Building on this insight, one could say that when we share experiences we meet the minds of others. But how are having and sharing an experience related to the philosophical framework of somaesthetics?
The importance of somaesthetics
Since classical antiquity philosophers have referred to self-knowledge as one of the fundaments of a good life. Self-knowing requires self-control. Plotinus, Socrates, Augustinus, Pascal, Montaigne, Wittgenstein, Foucault all proposed variations on this theme. The neo-pragmatic American philosopher Richard Shusterman conceives of somaesthetics as a reflective body awareness which is presented as a means for self-cultivation.5 The idea of somaesthetics
emerges in an interdisciplinary approach combining pragmatic philosophy and the aesthetic experience. In Shusterman’s view, the body plays a central role. He describes somaesthetics as an ‘interdisciplinary research devoted to the study and cultivation of the experience and use of
2 Zahavi, D. , Rochat, P. (2015). Empathy / Sharing: perspectives from phenomenology and developmental psychology. Consciousness and Cognition 36:544
3 Ciaunica, A. The meeting of bodies – Empathy and basic forms of shared experiences. 2017. P. 1
4 Gallotti. M, Fairhurst. M.T, Frith, C.D, Allignment in social actions , Consciousness and Cognition, vol 48, 2017 5 Richard Shusterman (1949) is an American neo pragmatist philosopher. Neo-Pragmatist philosophy reintroduces terms and ideas of different philosophers such as Rorty, Dewey, Heidegger and Derrida. Traditional pragmatists
the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-stylization’.6 Somaesthetics seeks to enhance the meaning, understanding, efficacy, and beauty
of our movements and of the environments to which our movements contribute and from which they also draw their energies and significance.7 For this reason, in his pragmatic
approach, Shusterman tries to study and cultivate our body as instrument and puts it as philosophy’s central object of knowledge, which are self-knowledge, virtue and happiness. Somaesthetics is related to different fields of knowledge, social practices and institutions, cultural traditions and values and is aiming through physical discipline to enhance and structure body consciousness. Somaesthetics pursues an interdisciplinary approach where theory and practice are closely related and influenced by each other. Furthermore it seeks a practical orientation in which the individual: people can apply somaesthetics in his or her life through a disciplined and ameliorative practice. In Body Consciousness Shusterman argues that improved body consciousness as our basic medium of perception and action can enhance one’s knowledge, performance and pleasure.8
As mentioned previously, somaesthetics ‘is devoted to the critical, ameliorative study of one’s experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning’. 9 It is therefore both a specific interdicipinary field of study and a method to
train the body. Some of its essential features, may be summarized as follows:
Analytic somaesthetics which studies the basic nature of our bodily perception and practices, as well as the role they play in human life does not confine itself to a Analytic somaesthetics, which studies the basic nature of our bodily perception and practices, as well as the role they play in human life, does not confine itself to a philosophical perspective but also draws on physiology, psychology, neurology, cultural studies and other fields that might enrich our knowledge of corporeality;
Pragmatic somaesthetics is more than the outside body. The cultivation and understanding of the self nevertheless starts with body awareness and focuses on
6 Journal of Somaesthetics, somaesthetics and visual arts, (Volume 1, no 1, 2015), Aalborg University Press. P.4 7 Ibid 6, P. 4
8 Ibid 1 9 Ibid 1
particular somatic practices--such as yoga, Feldenkrais Method, Alexander technique and so on—in order to assess their practical value as a means to enhance our embodied lives.
Another important aspect of Shusterman’s pragmatic plea for somaesthetics is his endeavour, his emphasis on the need to rescue philosophy from the safe, but ultimately narrow confines of academic discourse and to reconnect it, instead, with the sphere of ordinary life. He seeks to treat somaesthetics as a subdiscipline of philosophy as a means to transform the character of the contemporary philosophical discourse.10 Shusterman
criticizes other thinkers such as Edmund Burke, William James, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 11 He has chosen these twentieth century
philosophers because of their interest in some aspect of the soma problem. His interest is in how these philosophers have dealt with the body and how their views lend support to or differ from Shusterman’s account of somaesthetics.
It brings out the importance and value of pragmatic somaesthetics for education in humanities.
In Body Consciousness, Shusterman explains that the aesthetic aims of pragmatic somaesthetics are not confined to the narrow pursuit of pleasure, however valuable such pleasure may be. ‘Somaesthetics implies both the cognitive sharpening of our aesthesis of sensory perception and the artful reshaping of our somatic form and functioning (…) to render us more sensitive to the needs of others and more capable of responding to them with effectively willed action’. This idea of rendering us more sensitive to the needs of others and improving our ability to do so through body awareness inspired me to carry out this research.
10 Malecki, Wojciech. Embodying pragmatism, Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2010.
11 Shusterman engages in Body consciousness with these thinkers by arguing that they are exemplary for not only their influential somatic theorizing but also ‘for the striking way they represent today’s most powerful Western philosophical traditions: phenomenology, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, existentialism, hermeneutics, poststructuralism, and feminism’. Shusterman recognizes that this choice of thinkers does not cover the full
The work of Lygia Clark contributed to somaesthetics in several ways, which will be discussed here. As Clark’s designs were meant to be manipulated and experienced by the participants there is immediately a connection to somaesthetics and bodily awareness. “Pedra e ar” (Stone and air) is one of her ‘relational objects’, made in 1966. Clark used simple, daily life materials such as stones, thread, plastic bags, gloves, plastic bands or nets used for vegetables of fruit and paper. As Clark wanted to treat people with her relational objects, “Pedra e ar” was meant to enhance self-awareness. Participants had to breathe in a plastic bag and were asked to use different speeds of breathing in order to connect with their own bodies. Clark described the instructions of how to use the relational object as a recipe. While creating the plastic bag and manipulating it with a stone the participant was asked to integrate her/himself with “Pedra e Ar”, while moving the stone by using their hands to press the bag together to the rhythm of the breathing.
This way of connecting to breathing is related to pranayama sessions during yoga practice. 12 Pedra e Ar had an explicit goal which was body consciousness and relates to the main goals of somaesthetics. It gives the participant an experience in order to develop perception and self-improvement.
12 Pranayama is the yogic art of breathing and leads to control of the emotions which in turn brings stability, concentration and mental poise. Iyengar, B.K.S. Licht on Pranayama. Pranayama Dipika. HarperCollins. Publishers, India. 2010
Experience of empathy
This thesis is an interdisciplinary study centered on insights derived from somaesthetics regarding the concept of a bodily experience. Obviously, a connection can be made between a bodily experience and neuroscience. Neuroscience helps us understand what happens in the brain when we have an experience of empathy. For several decades now, the brain and neuroscience in particular have been center stage in several fields of study. In the humanities
there is growing interest to relate the arts to neuroscience.13 With new techniques that enable
us to research brain functions we can investigate empirically which brain mechanisms make it possible to communicate with the world around us. This technical development in neuroscience allows us to discuss the aesthetic and symbolic dimension of human existence from a bodily presence. At the latest Worlding the Brain Conference in Amsterdam (November 2017), humanities scholars and scientists shared their views on the relation between the arts and neuroscience.14 The ASCA research Group Neuroaesthetics and Neurocultures claims to ‘be
dedicated to the critical and productive study of the rise of the neuro-turn from a humanities perspective’.15
All kinds of phenomena -from daydreaming, theories on ‘flow’ to the cognitive abilities and skills required for art creation and perception- are current, popular research fields both in neuroscience and the humanities. In this thesis the experience of empathy will partly be explored from a neuroscientific point of view. From the neuroscientific perspective, the focus will be on the role of embodied simulation (ES) and how this mediates our relation to images and their experience. 16 Nonetheless, as this is not my field of study, the neural basis of the
aesthetic experiential experience will only have a minor role in this thesis.
The notion of empathy will , instead, be studied from a phenomenological point of view. There will be less attention to the neuroscientific understanding of empathy. Recent phenomenological insights described by Anna Ciaunica and Dan Zahavi will be part of this exploration on empathy. To explain what happens when we experience empathy we will take a closer look at neuroscience and more specific at mirror neurons. The discovery of mirror neurons has led to the development of new ideas regarding perception, action and cognition. This allows us to take a fresh look at the perception of images and aesthetics.17
13 Goede, Nim. Narrating the brain through neurofeedback art. RMA thesis Art Studies University of Amsterdam, 2016. P. 5
14 Worlding the brain conference, Affect, Care and Engagement, November 2017 Amsterdam, Organized by ASCA Research Group, Neuroaesthetics and neurocultures, University of Amsterdam
15 Ibid 14. P. 87
16 Gallese, V. (2017) Conference Worlding the brain, Amsterdam. Gallese is one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. His research investigates the brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, in particular empathy and its role in aesthetic experience.
Tactility and somaesthetics
As contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems resulting from overstimulation and stress, interest in meditation techniques and bodily awareness practices has increased, as has scientific research on both the physiological and psychological effects of meditation. Somaesthetics will be part of this reflection. I will submit arguments as to how bodily awareness and somatic reflection may have an influence on the tactile aspects involved in an aesthetic experience. As defined by Richard Shusterman, somaesthetics is very much related to my personal yoga practice and teaching resonates in my artistic practice.18
Encountering a work of art, one could argue, causes an ‘affect’, among other things, such as ideas.19 It will be interesting to investigate ‘affect’ and connect it to empathy or the feeling of
empathy.20 What theoretical insights do we get from previous studies of the notion of human
empathy and how relate these insights to the aesthetic experience? And in what sense can somatic awareness be related to the aesthetic experience?
17 Gallese, V. Visions of the body embodied simulation and aesthetic experience. Humanities Future, 2017 https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/visions-body-embodied-simulation-aesthetic-experience/
18 Iyengar, BKS. Light on yoga. Schocken books New York. 1966
Iyengar yoga is a style of yogapractice developed by BKS Iyengar (1918 – 2014). He developed an active, challenging and painstaking form of yoga in which correct alignment of the body is central. Important in his teachings are the development of stamina, physical power and a correct bodily posture. This goes along with physical flexibility and deep relaxation. The Iyengar method uses props and therefor persons of all age and no matter what physical condition can attend the practice. BKS Iyengar taught thousands of pupils from all over the world and made the ancient Indian knowledge of yoga insightful for many.
19 According to Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg ‘affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage of forces or intensities. Affect is in many ways synonymous with the force of encounter. Seigworth, G & Gregg, M. The Affect Theory Reader, Duke University Press, 2016. P. 1-2 20 Empathy as described by Zahavi and Rochat: “the experience of the embodied mind of the other, an experience which rather than eliminating the difference between self-experience and other experience takes the asymmetry to be a necessary and persistent existential fact” Zahavi, D. , Rochat, P. (2015). Empathy / Sharing: perspectives from phenomenology and developmental psychology. Consciousness and Cognition 36:543-553.
Practical investigation
The findings and method of Senselab and research done by Erin Manning and others on the meaning of touch offer a useful counterbalance to the phenomenological and neurological point of view on the tactile experience and notion of empathy.21 The research done by Senselab
tries to connect artistic experiment to philosophical ideas and draws attention to the artistic process. Comparing the method of Senselab to Shusterman’s views on somaethetics is useful as both pursue an interdisciplinary approach where theory and practice are closely related and influenced by each other. Similarly, the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark is worth examining more closely because of her interest in tactile experience. Her artistic process resonates with both the work done by the Senselab, the findings in somaesthetics and my personal artistic practice. The experience of tactility or the notion of a bodily experience and bodily consciousness will therefore be discussed from a somaesthetic perspective. The soma is understood as not only ‘the physical body but also the living, feeling, sentient, purposive body rather than a mere physical corpus of flesh and bones’.22 By engaging in several possible body conscious practices
we improve our perception of, and engagement with, the outside world.
Somatic self-awareness and its practice is meant to activate the whole person, as both subject and object. Even when this only seems to be the awareness of one’s breath when meditating, doing so activates both body and mind perception. This somatic practice might be useful in understanding the shared empathic aesthetic experience and understanding and building the concept of ‘the body as tool’. According to William James: “The body is the storm center, the origin of coordinates, the constant place of stress in our experience–train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view”. 23
Art would not be possible without intersubjective human experience. The essence of art is that it has been made for the other to read, look at, listen to or even touch. It has the intention to be in dialogue (most of the time a one way dialogue …) or to communicate. To narrow the concept
21 Manning, E. The minor gesture. Duke University Press. 2016
22 Shusterman, R. Body consciousness. A philosophy of mindfulness and somaesthetics. Cambridge University Press. 2008. Preface, P. xii
23 James, W. “The experience of activity” in Essays in Radical Empiricism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976, p 86
of experience we will only discuss the perceptual experience or awareness. The perceptual experience can be regarded as the fundamental contact of an experiencing subject with the external environment. To have a better understanding of what it means to have a perceptual experience the ideas of William James and John Dewey will first be explored.
Relevance
As mentioned above, in contemporary society there is an increased interest in understanding the concept of experiencing art or the aesthetic experience from different perspectives. As the results of neuroscientific research, conducted by Gallese and others, show us how the brain reacts to the experiences of feeling empathy, we start to understand what it means to have an aesthetic experience. 24 It will not be the purpose of this thesis to go deeper into neuroscience.
The aim is to connect artistic experience and sharing to philosophical ideas and to experiment with creative techniques for thought in the act. This is the working method of the Senselab and it will be discussed later in this thesis. The Senselab’s product is its process.25 The
process-related experience of the Senselab can be recognized as ‘research creation’ and is therefore valuable in the field of artistic research.
Methodology
The research methodology will first of all consist of an analytical theoretical study, based on several sources, of the concepts of empathy, experience and the sensory perceiving by means of, through tactility. To understand the idea of ‘my body as tool’, I will analyze examples of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. This case study will be used to analyze the research question from different perspectives; the method used by the Senselab will be contrasted with the ideas of somaesthetics as both combine practical and theoretical insights.
Outline
What does it mean to have a perceptual, bodily, aesthetic experience? The concept of empathy will be explored from a contemporary phenomenological view as proposed, developed by Anna Ciaunica, Dan Zahavi and others. Next, the notion and understanding of empathy will be discussed briefly from a neuroscientific point of view using the ideas of Vittorio Gallese and others on ‘embodied simulation’.
The second part of this thesis focuses on bodily sensory perceiving and more specifically on tactility and touch. What does it mean to have a tactile experience with body consciousness and awareness? The empathetic experience will be related to the discipline of somaesthetics as defined by Richard Shusterman.
Finally, the work of Lygia Clark will be used to illustrate how her works of art are examples of research creation on body consciousness. The focus will be on the importance of a somatic experience and on a phenomenological reflection. By doing this I will try to answer the following question: do we get a better understanding of empathy through a shared tactile
Chapter 1 Having a shared empathetic experience
Introduction
There is currently a great deal of interest in interdisciplinary research bringing together disciplines such as neuroscience, philosophy and art. In this chapter I will give a brief overview on these different perspectives on the notion of emotion, affect and the shared empathetic experience.
When we speak about having a shared empathetic experience, we need to understand what we mean by a shared experience? And we need to explain what empathy means. To relate the concept of empathy with experience, I will comment several works by Lygia Clark. I will study specific works, examine and explain them to bring theory in relation to works of art. The selection of the art objects is based on the ability of the objects as to effectively demonstrate the possible relation between objects and the human body. I´ve chosen this particular artist and these specific works because I believe they are particularly useful in shedding light on the ways art objects relate to the human body, which is a central concern, running through Lygia Clark’s entire oeuvre. Especially her later work seeks to develop new ways of connecting participants with her objects, thus exploring different aspects, dimensions of the sensate body of the viewer.
Affect and emotions
The relation between the self and the other has been central concepts in psychoanalysis, philosophy, in the arts, in literature and in neuroscience. Perhaps we can consider that in a way all our experiences are a recognition of something we experienced before.
To be able to understand what it means to have an empathetic experience it is useful to explore the understanding of emotions and the notion of ‘affect’.
When considering emotions the pragmatic philosopher and psychologist William James pointed out that our natural or conventional way to think about our emotions is that the mental perception of some facts excites the mental affection called emotion, and this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression of anger, fear, joy etcetera.
James’ theory on emotions on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the changes as they occur is the emotion. He argues: “common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect… and the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble”.26 Our
emotions are tied in with our bodily felt reactions. We do not feel fear without a rapidly beating heart, an increased breathing, shaking limbs or cold sweat. An emotion without any bodily feeling is non-existent. The idea that a bodily feeling precedes emotion has been researched not only in facial expressions but equally in expressive behavior, automatic arousal, and action.27
With respect to facial expression the evidence seems to be quite evident: people do feel the emotions their faces are induced to express. We may come to the conclusion that facial expressions affect specific feelings.
Nevertheless when a scowl or a certain tone of speech can generate feelings, then we may conclude that the way we interpret speeches and facial expression is a complex process, in which culture and learning play an important role.
Other studies on expressive behavior examined how bodily postures report feeling emotions that fit the specific posture. Different studies on the effects of action on emotional experience showed how people when performing actions that represent emotions, also experience the corresponding emotion. 28
James’ speaks about “coarser” emotions and argues these emotions includes feelings that are different from basic emotions. He writes: “instinctive reactions and emotional expressions shade imperceptibly into each other, every object that excites an instinct excites an emotion as well”. 29
26 James, W. Principles of psychology. Volume 2. New York. Holt. P 449
27 Laird, J.D., Bresler. C., William James and the mechanisms of Emotional experience. Personality and social psychology bulletin, Vol. 16 No. 4, 1990, 636-651
28 Ibid, 28. P. 638 29 Ibid. 28. P. 643
Among these instincts James includes shyness and sociability, cleanliness and acquisitiveness, to indicate that the feelings of emotions extend far beyond the domain of basic emotions. 30
James’ theory on emotions has been studied by several scientists. Their focus differed from facial expression to arousal and to emotional behavior. None of the empirical research generated by neo-Jamesian theories seems inconsistent with James’s general insight that emotional behavior is antecedent to emotional experience. 31 In the previous section, James’
ideas, on how emotional behavior occur before an emotional experience, are made explicit. To be able to understand the difference in the next paragraph the focus will be on “affect”. 32
In their introduction to the Affect theory reader, Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg describe the notion of affect as follows: ‘Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise) in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passage or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves’. 33 They describe affect as a strong force
or several strong forces of encounter that drive us beyond emotion and can drive us to movement, action or thought.
Sara Ahmed,(race and cultural studies), thinks of affect in her essay on happy objects as “sticky”. Affect according to Ahmed is what sticks, sustains or preserves the connection between
30 Ibid, 28. P. 643 31 Ibid, 28 P. 646
32 It was Baruch Spinoza who proclaimed “No one has yet determined what a body can do”. This proclamation gives thought on how our body can (not yet) be affected. For over 330 years now this proclamation gave rise to scholars and scientists to get a grip on the notion of “affect”.
Ibid, 4. P. 646
33 Seigworth, G. Gregg, M. The affect theory reader. An inventory of shimmers. Duke University Press. Durham & London. 2010
ideas, values and objects.34 We can think of affect as a bodily state of being. Entering a room
were we sense a certain tense atmosphere makes one feel bodily tensed. This resonates with James’s ideas on emotion when he posits that our emotions are tied in with our bodily-felt reactions.
Affect has been described by several scholars as contagious. Anna Gibbs, who has published widely across the fields of textual, media and cultural studies with a particular focus on affect theory, mimetic communication, corporeality and feminism. Gibbs describes it as follows : “Bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear- in short communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion”. Her approach to affect seems to differ from James’s ideas on emotions and affect as she emphasizes how emotions can be communicated between people. 35 It was Silvan Tomkins who, a few
decades ago, described affects in terms of “neuro-physiological events”, physical sensations related to thought and emotions. He distinguishes several innate affects. The face is considered as the primary site of communicating affect and plays a crucial part, along with the voice, in the phenomena of feedback, resonance and contagion.36 For Tomkins, central to the working of
affect is the fact that: ‘affects are not private obscure internal intestinal responses but facial responses that communicate and motivate each at once both publicly outward to the other and backward and inward to the one who smiles or cries or frowns or sneers or otherwise expresses his affects’. 37
All this gives us a psychological and physical view on the notion of affect. It gives us examples of how some scientists and scholars are interested in what happens to the human being when experiencing affect and emotions? In this thesis I will emphasize the bodily experience people have encountering or participating in a work of art. The understanding of
34 Ahmed, S. Happy Objects. The affect theory reader, Duke University Press, Durham & London 2010
35 Gibbs, Anna. “Contagious feelings: Pauline Hanson and the epidemiology of affect”. Australian Humanities review 24. 2001
36 Tomkins, S. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. Vol 1. The positive affects. Springer, 1962
what happens in our body when having an emotional experience allows us to explore how a work of art can contribute to this experience. As the aim of this thesis is to research what it means to have a shared empathetic experience, the attention will be shifted from the experience of affect towards the understanding of a shared emotional experience. We might come to the conclusion that a form of sharing is already implicit in defining affect.
Sharing an experience
To understand what it means to have a shared experience we have to look into different theories which have been proposed over the last few decades. Several studies have described the innate social competence of the infant. The moment they are born, babies have the ability to express themselves by means of their hands, voice, and face. These expressions are adapted to “primary intersubjectivity”. 38 Colwyn Trevarthen, a child psychologist, studied
intersubjectivity (mutual understanding) between new-born babies and their mothers or primary caregivers. 39 He showed that a newborn can build up a relationship with an adult
through eye contact and/or smiling and that this is the basis of all human communication and interaction. Bodily self-awareness is the awareness of your own body exploring the environment. Trevarthen argues that human babies are born with the ability of self-awareness, of showing self-awareness to others and provoking interest and affectionate reaction from others. The connection with the other is crucial in order to have a sense of self-awareness. As Ciaunica puts it: “Our presence in the world is not individual, solipsistic, or solitary, but a fundamentally shared experience”.40
38 “primary intersubjectivity”, a set of emotional, perceptual and sensorimotor capacities that allow the infamt to interact meaningfully with others via pre-linguistic bodily mediated “protoconversations”. Trevarthen, C.B. Communication and cooperation in early infancy: a description of primary intersubjectivity. Before Speech, ed. M. Bullowa, 321 -347, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
39 Trevarthen studied successful interactions between infants and their primary care givers, and found that the mother's responsiveness to her baby's initiatives supported and developed intersubjectivity (shared
understanding), which he regarded as the basis of all effective communication, interaction and learning.
40 Ciaunica, A. Basic forms of pre-reflective self-consciousness, a developmental perspective. In Pre-Reflective Self-Consciouness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, eds. S. Miguens, G.Preyer, and C. Morando,
422-As the limits of this thesis preclude a discussion of all aspects involved in having an experience, I will only discuss the perceptual experience. The perceptual experience can be regarded as the fundamental contact of an experiencing subject with environment. I will discuss what it means to have a bodily and an interior experience. Experiencing the environment provides us with the basis on which beliefs, concepts, and knowledge are formed in later life. To explain the concept of a shared experience , I will limit it to the following features, as described by Ciaunica:
1. The experience occurs in a subject;
2. The experience is given to the subject through the body;
3. The experience has a phenomenal property or quality (referring to qualia, the subject experiences a distinct color, taste or tactility).
In other words, an experience, at least as described by Ciaunica, has to do with subjectivity, embodiment and phenomenality.
William James, however, had, in his Essays in radical empiricism, offered a different definition of “having an experience” :
‘The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the “pure experience” (…) but the immediate experience in its passing is always “truth”, practical truth, something to act on, as its own movement. (…) consciousness connotes a kind of external relation, and does not denote a special stuff of way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, which their ‘conscious’ reality is invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations,- these relations themselves being experiences to one another’. 41 James, then, stresses
the here and now of the experience, a point of view which has a close connection to practical somaesthetics and will be addressed in Chapter 3.
In 1960 Clark wrote: “When man plays with the “Bichos” he identifies himself with it, feeling it in its totality, participating in a unique and total moment, he exists”. 42 Each time the participant manipulated the object there was an awakening of the bodily inhabitation of the participant. The object mimics movements of the body itself. The physical gestures and rituals involved were: grasping, movement, touch, embracing, lifting, looking etc. In the
‘doing’ of the body it recognizes and explores the possibilities of the ‘doing’. It is exclusively personal, precarious and individual. 43
In her later work, Clark selected plastics, stones, strings and her own breath as materials, ensuring that the object’s life was dependent upon the subject’s.
Bicho, creature or bug 1960, aluminium
43
Harper, E. Restoring subjectivity and Brazilian Identity Lygia Clark’s therapeutic Practice, Ohio University 2010What about sharing an experience of self-awareness? According to Zahavi, our experiential life is from the beginning characterized by pre-reflective self-awareness.44 This can be seen as a
first-personal subjective embodied experience:45 “experiential self is not something that exists
independently of, in separation from, or in opposition to the stream of consciousness, but is rather to be considered an integral part of the experiential life”. 46 According to Ciaunica,
phenomenologists are in close agreement about the idea that an experience always involves a kind of implicit pre-reflective self-awareness. 47 She states: ‘Whenever we consciously perceive
something or feel an emotion, these perceptions and feelings are somehow given to us as our own’.
To give an example of a real-life shared experience, Zahavi describes a personal one:
“there are cases where rather than ascribing an experience or an action to myself or to you, I ascribe it to us, that is, to a we, as in the case where my son and I return from a trip and when seeing a common friend, I shout ‘We saw it! We found the hedgehog!’ In such a case, the experience isn’t simply given as my action, but as our action…If we found the hedgehog together, and if each of us was aware that the other was also seeing it… then the use of ‘we’ is intended to capture more than simply the fact that there was a common object. We found the object together, and although I didn’t see the animal through my son’s eyes, it’s having been seen by him is part of the experience I have of it”.48
We can perceive this experience as a high-order kind of experience. Ciaunica describes how shared experiences start from within the lived body of another subject, for example during
44 By pre-reflective self-consciousness is understood by Zahavi and Gallagher (2010) as: 1) an awareness we have before we do any reflecting on our experience; 2) an implicit and first-order awareness rather than an explicit or high-order form of self-consciousness. An explicit reflective self-consciousness is possible only because there is a pre-reflective self-awareness that is an on-going and more primary self-consciousness. Zahavi, D., and Gallagher, S Phenomenological Approaches to self-consciousness. Available on line at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/.
45 Ciaunica follows Zahavi’s point of view on pre-reflective self-awareness. “In pre-reflective self-awareness, experience is given not as an object, but as a fundamentally first-personal subjective experience”. Ibid 15, p. 46 Zahavi, D. , Rochat, P. (2015). Empathy / Sharing: perspectives from phenomenology and developmental psychology. Consciousness and Cognition 36:543-553.
47 Ibid 15, P. 423
48 Zahavi. D. Self and Other: exploring subjectivity, Empathy and Shame- Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. p. 243
pregnancy. To understand an experience we have to explain how the experience gets to us. The perceptual awareness of the world can be described by different sensory perceptions. Vision and more in particular eye-to-eye contact has generally been seen as the most important model for establishing self-other awareness. But by looking at each other we do not yet understand the unobservable feelings. The first sense humans develop is touch and not vision. The intersubjective touch has been shown to play a crucial role in establishing mutual awareness. Close physical contact between infant and parent leads to more secure attachment. 49 There is a
mammalian need for social proximity, attachment and belonging. We can even say there is an evolutionary value in terms of survival and reproductive success related to attachment and belonging. Being ostracized induces causes of negative feelings of social exclusion and enhances negative mood effects. Recent studies suggest that slow, affective touch modulates the perception of physical pain. It is unknown, however, whether slow, affective touch also can reduce feelings of social exclusion.50
Ciaunica ends her article by arguing that “we share experiences by ‘meeting’ other people’s minds distally via vision, we literally ‘meet’ them via proximal channels such as intersubjective touch”. We can share each other’s sadness by holding hands, stroking someone’s hair or putting an arm around someone’s shoulder well before we can achieve more sophisticated forms of empathy or experiential sharing of our feelings. We don´t shape our experiences individually but they are already built from within, when mother and child are “sharing bodies” from the very beginning of our life.
Emotional sharing
Dan Zahavi researches ‘emotional sharing’ from classical phenomenology and contemporary research on social cognition. 51 Intersubjectivity is one of the main themes of transcendental
49 Duhn, L. The importance of touch in the development of attachment. Advances in Neonatal care 10 (6): 294-300 50 The negative feelings of ostracism while playing a Cyberball task were reduced by the provision of slow-affective touch. It led to a specific decrease in feelings of social exclusion, beyond general mood effects. These findings point to the soothing function of slow, affective touch, particularly in the context of social separation or rejection, and suggest a specific relation between affective touch and social bonding. Mohr, von, M. , Kirsch, L,P., Fotopoulou, A. The soothing function of touch: affective touch reduces feelings of social exclusion, Scientific reports, 2017 51 Zahavi, D. You, me, and we: the sharing or emotional experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, January
phenomenology. The contributions from phenomenology explore the ways in which individuals are interrelated and make us understand interpersonal understanding and reciprocal recognition. The phenomenological perspective is therefore meaningful to understand what it means to have a shared emotional experience and, having an empathetic experience. One might say intersubjectivity comes in when we undergo acts of empathy (or when having an emotional contagion). It occurs when we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
As we saw previously, Sara Ahmed described ‘affect’ as emotionally contagious. This distinctive feature known as emotional contagion is transferred to us, it becomes our emotion and is lived through personally. Emotional contagion is to be distinguished from empathy. To feel something yourself and to feel for someone are two different things. According to Zahavi, “for phenomenologists, empathy is the label for our experience of the embodied and expressive mind of the other, an experience which, rather than eliminating the difference between self-experience and other-self-experience, takes the asymmetry to be a necessary and persisting existential fact”.52 According to Husserl, what is distinctive about empathy is that it is a form of
other-directed intentionality, which allows foreign experiences to disclose themselves as foreign rather than as one’s own. 53 Zahavi stresses that “the specificity of the empathic access is rather
due to the fact that it is basic and intuitive, i.e., the empathized experience is given directly as existing here and now.” 54
To share an emotion is different from having emotional contagion or a feeling of empathy while empathy does not mean we feel the same emotion. One does not have to feel the same joy or sadness to feel empathy. To be able to share an experience there has to be a plurality of subjects. Having the same experience, for example, does not mean we have a shared experience. To have a shared experience, Zahavi argues, it has to be co-regulated and constitutively interdependent. Emotional sharing must be an experience, an experience shared between two or more persons. The emotion is no longer mine but ours. There has to be a sense of togetherness for it to be shared. Is this sense of ‘togetherness’ sufficient to experience empathy? Gerda Walther, who studied with Husserl, explained what it means to have a ‘feeling
52 Ibid, 48. P. 6
53 Husserl. E., Erste philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter teil. Theorie der Phänomenologischen Reduktion. Ed. R. Boehm. Husserliana 8. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. p. 176
of togetherness’, and the importance of sharing an experience to be able to feel empathy. 55 This
feeling of togetherness is problematic if collective intentionality is analyzed in terms of a combination of individual intentionality, as Walther suggests, and mutual recognition of each other’s intentionality. How could there be a shared experience between two people if one of them is unaware of the empathetic awareness of the other’s experience? Walther claims that for A and B to share the experience of x, i) A has to experience x, and B has to experience x, ii) A has to empathize with B's experience and vice versa, iii) A has to identify with B's experience and vice versa, and iv) there has to be mutual empathetic awareness of the other's identification. If collective intentionality is analyzed in terms of a combination of individual intentionality and mutual recognition of some sorts, it seems that an infinite progress of reciprocal attitudes is immediately set off. The idea of togetherness or so-called we-relationship has already been studied by Husserl. Husserl emphasizes the centrality of dialogue and communication and underscores, the sense of reciprocity in order to understand the emergence of a we-experience. 56
According to Zahavi, there has to be some affective bond or connection, some unification or identification with each other. To stress this point Zahavi, considers joint attention and perspective taking as important features for having a shared experience: : ‘For joint attention to occur, the attentional focus of two (or more) persons shouldn’t merely run parallel; it must involve an awareness of attending together, that is, the fact that both persons are attending to the same object must be “mutually manifest”. 57 It is telling in this regard that it is
Zahavi, not Walther, who provides the anecdote of the found hedgehog to illustrate and stress the point of the awareness of attending the same object together.
Speaking of ‘joint attention’, Zahavi makes a distinction between having an experience involving a third object having an experience involving just the two individuals themselves, a so-called face-to-face exchange where both individuals feel the attention of the other. 58 So
55 Walther. G. Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. P 1-158. Halle: Niemeyer
56 Husserl, E. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität III. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil 1929-35 . ED. I. Kern. Husserliana 15. Den Haag: Martinus Nyhoff 1973b:472, 1952: 192-194
57 Ibid, 48. P 10 Zahavi refers with “mutually manifest” to a phrase from Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
emotional awareness presupposes an awareness of the other. When two people have a shared feeling, there has to be a preservation of plurality and a certain self-other differentiation, but when the difference between the self and the other is too manifest, there will be less or no experience of togetherness. To have a shared experience we need to distances ourselves a little from ourselves in order to reduce the difference and distance from the other. Zahavi puts it like this: “you need to experience the others’ perspectives on you, you need to be aware of them as being aware of you and to see yourself through their eyes, so that you can come to experience yourself in the same manner as you experience them”. 59 Peter Hobson has described this
process of the emotional shared experience as follows: “to identify with someone else is to relate to the actions and attitudes of someone else from the other’s perspective or stance, in such a way that a person assimilates the other’s orientation toward the world, including toward the self, so that this orientation becomes a feature of the person’s own psychological repertoire.”. 60
Writing in the 1920s, Husserl had already stressed the importance of the centrality of communication and dialogue and the importance of reciprocity for the emergence of the we. 61
To have a we-experience there must be a mutual engagement where we affect each other.
In the previous section, I examined the notion of a shared we-experience from a phenomenological perspective. This does not mean, of course, that there are no other forms of shared experiences. People can experience themselves as a member of a group and can identify with other members of the same group, without being together. Being part of a victim aid group can give us the understanding of a certain experience without having experienced the specific event or trauma the other participants have experienced because we ourselves may have undergone a similar event or trauma. Zahavi underscores the fact that there are several processes of identification, so that we-intentionality, for example, can also occur through an internalization of the other’s perspective. 62
59 Ibid 48, P. 13
60 Hobson, J.A., & Hobson, R.P.. Identification : the missing link between joint attention and imitation ? Development and Psychopatology 19, 411-431. P. 415
Hobson finds identifying-with to be crucially involved in affective sharing. 61 Ibid 53, P. 192-194
How do we understand empathy?
In the previous paragraph I discussed the concept of affect and what it means to have a shared experience from a contemporary phenomenological perspective. In this section I will focus on “empathy”. Empathy has become in the last decade an intense subject of study in both philosophy and neuroscience as well as in psychology and developmental studies.63 The
discovery of mirror neurons gave us insight in the way we are able to understand another person and in the phenomenon known as social attunement. 64 The discovery of mirror neurons
the explains part of our physiological understanding of human intersubjectivity. The mirror metaphor stems from the fact that, when two people having an intimate conversation adopt similar postures. Looking at the other can feel as if you are looking at yourself. The likeness can be felt by the other. Most of the mirroring is unconscious. The discovery of mirror neurons shows us how we connect to others in a neurological way, but how does this relate to affect and more specifically to feelings of empathy?
In, ‘Understanding empathy: its features and effects’, Copland gives the following definition of empathy: ‘a complex (simultaneously cognitive and affective), imaginative process, in which the observer stimulates another person’s situated psychological states while maintaining clear self-other differentiation’.65
This definition, however, fails to explain why someone feels empathy at any given time, with any given person, at all. To understand why people experience empathy we should first have a look at what empathy entails. When you are sitting across from a crying person in the
63
Relevant fields of study to study “empathy” are namely philosophy and psychology; ‘phenomenology and hermeneutics’, ‘clinical psychology’, ‘developmental and social psychology’, ‘care ethics’, and ‘neuroscience’ and ‘ethology’. Maibom, Heidi LeneMind, 2014, Vol. 123(491), pp.880-882
64 The Italian scientists Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassiand Rizzolatti found in 1996 neurons in the prefrontal cortex of maqaque monkeys. These so-called mirror neurons fire when a maqaque monkey performs an action like picking up a peanut. The neurons also fire when one monkey watches another picking up a peanut.
Gallese, V. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, L., and Rizzolatti, Action recognition in the premotor cortex, Brain, 119 (1996): 593-609
train you probably feel empathy for that person. But how do we relate to invisible feelings? We are just observing someone who seems to be sad, judging by their distorted face.66 All visible
signs of sadness like tears and a red nose affect us by just looking at them. In recent years there has been a focus on the so-called meeting of minds problem. We understand by meeting of minds the human ability to share mental states such as emotions, intentions, and perceptual experiences.67 Both Matteo Gallotti and Christopher Frith, working in the field of social science,
cognition and brain studies, argue that in order to understand the nature of social interaction, attention should focus on the way people align words and thoughts, bodily postures and movements.68 Social interaction, according to them, is not always a reciprocal exchange of
information.
From a phenomenological point of view and drawing on developmental studies, Dan Zahavi as a philosopher and Philippe Rochat as a developmental psychologist, jointly researched the concept of empathy. They consider empathy as a central precondition for experiential sharing. Their definition of empathy is “the experience of the embodied mind of the other, an experience which, rather than eliminating the difference between self-experience and other experience, takes the asymmetry to be a necessary and persistent existential fact”. 69Hence
viewing and experiencing the other is essential for experiential sharing. Anna Ciaunica, while researching the concept of empathy, summarized their arguments as follows:
o Empathy is a basic form of understanding other people’s minds; o Empathy entails the preservation of the self-other differentiation;
o Self-other differentiation (and its inherent self-individuation) must be considered a basic precondition for the emergence of experiential sharing in general. 70
66 Judging someone is sad by a distorted face is very generally speaking. This may not be the same conclusion for everybody.
67 Ciaunica, A. The meeting of bodies – Empathy and basic forms of shared experiences. 2017 P. 3
68 Gallotti. M, Fairhurst. M.T, Frith, C.D, Allignment in social actions , Consciousness and Cognition, vol 48, 2017 69 Zahavi. D, Rochat, P. Empathy/Sharing: Perspectives from Phenomenology and Developmental Psychology. Consciousness and Cognition 36. P.544
Ciaunica stresses the point that empathy does not eliminate the boundaries between the self and the other but, rather, maintains the self-other preservation. She examines the idea how, well before humans develop empathetic abilitiessubjects can get perceptual access to the life of the body of others and what implications this has for notions of empathy. To understand this, we first have to understand the notion of shared experiences. In short, we might consider the notion of empathy not only as a meeting of minds but also of a meeting of our bodies.
Chapter 2
Touch, tactility or haptics?
What does it mean to have a tactile or haptic experience with body consciousness and awareness? In this chapter, I will discuss the experience and understanding of touch and tactility from a neuroscientific perspective, but, in addition, will use a phenomenological mode of analysis to clarify the understanding of touch specifically. I will conclude this chapter by discussing the meaning and relevance of the work of Lygia Clark from a somaesthetical point of view.
We can distinguish different types of touch. Haptic or active touch refers to the ”sense of touch”, which involves movement, and in most cases, more specifically the awareness of movement (kinesthesis) and the awareness of the bodily position (proprioception). 71
The term “tactual” is used as a broad term to refer to any form of touch experience (in the same way that “auditory” and “olfactory” are used for hearing and smell ). The sense of touch is closely connected to bodily awareness. The connection of touch to body awareness seems to be closer than what we find in the other senses. This seems logical, since, when we touch someone or something, especially when we engage in active (or haptic) touch, we need to use our bodies, and, often, even our whole body, or large parts of it, such as our skin, muscles, joints etc. Setting aside the worries about defining the organ of touch. 72 Armstrong’s view, discussed
above, suggested that touch was always a felt relation between our bodies and some objective feature connected directly to us. Touch is, in a physiological sense, a modality that results from combined information of receptors that have to do with pressure, temperature, pain and movement. 73
Touch is a form of communication and one of the things it can communicate is empathy. And even when it doesn´t communicate empathy, touch does bring objects and people into proximity. Mark Paterson writes in his introduction of The senses of touch: ‘So touch, like vision, articulates an equally rich, complex world, a world of movement and exploration, of non-verbal social communication. It is a carnal world, with its pleasures of feeling and being felt, of tasting and touching the textures of flesh and of food. And equally it is a profound world of
71
Loomis, J. and S. Lederman, 1986, “Tactual Perception”, in K.R. Boff, L. Kaufman, and J.P. Thomas (eds), Handbook of Perception and Human Performance, Ch. 31, New York: Wiley and Sons
72 Armstrong, D.M., 1962, Bodily Sensations, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
73 Touch , from a psycho-physiological point of view, is as much to do with temperature (thermoreceptors), pain (nociceptors), and position (proprioceptors) as with straightforward pressure (mechanoreceptors).
philosophical verification of the communication of presence and empathy with others, of the co-implication of body, flesh and world’. 74
Touch is often used in a metaphorical sense as, being touched by someone or by something. Touch thus encompasses the affective and the emotional. Since bodily sensations such as kinaesthesia and proprioception have been studied by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is an appropriate mode of analysis of touch. As Paterson stresses that phenomenology “allows other qualitative factors such as the feelings of proximity or distance that accompanies touch experiences, the affective charge that prompts cathartic release through therapeutic touching, or the empathetic component that arises when touching-as-feeling” it therefore seems an appropriate philosophy to apply to a dicussion of ‘touch’. 75 First, I
will try to shed some light on touch and developments in neuroscience.
Touch and neuroscience
The perceptual awareness of the world can be described in terms of different sensory perceptions. As discussed in Chapter 1, vision and more in particular eye-to-eye contact, has generally been seen as the most important model for establishing self-other awareness. Close physical contact between infant and parent leads to more secure attachment and has essential value in terms of survival and reproductive success. 76
From a neuroscientific perspective, the investigation of interpersonal coupling provides an interesting opportunity to understand human behavior in a natural social environment. There is a widespread consensus that empathy for people who experience pain recruits brain structures that are usually involved in a first space hand experience of the kind of pain the other person is suffering. 77 Holding hands during pain administration increases brain-to brain coupling in a
neural network that mainly involves the central regions of the pain target and the right
74 Paterson, M. The senses of touch. Berg, Oxford-New York. 2007. P. 2 75 Ibid 78, P. 155
76 Duhn, L. The importance of touch in the development of attachment. Advances in Neonatal care 10 (6): 294-300 77 Goldstein, P. Brain-to-brain coupling during handholding is associated with pain reduction. Proceedings of the
hemisphere of the pain observer. 78 In this study the so-called social touch leads to empirical
neuroscientific results.
The ability to differentiate one’s own body from others is a fundamental aspect in social perception. In human adults, neuroimaging studies have demonstrated the recruitment of a specific set of brain regions in response to body-related multi-sensory integration. Recent studies indicate that multisensory integration is a key factor in producing awareness of one’s own body. 79 In her study on neural mechanisms of body awareness, Fillipetti suggests that
common neural mechanisms support infant and adult processing of body-related stimuli. Previous studies that investigated body perception in infancy have been unable to provide evidence that infants attribute body-related multi-sensory integration as belonging to the self. The current findings are the first to demonstrate that infants’ specialized cortical activation is similar to brain activation seen in response to body awareness in adults. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the development of body awareness. As explained in the introduction, according to Gallese, mirror neurons gave us an empirically founded notion of intersubjectivity understood as intercorporeality – the mutual resonance of intentionally meaningful sensorimotor behaviours. Intercorporeality or the relation between one’s own body and that of the other becomes, according to Gallese, the primordial source of knowledge that we have of others. 80 He adds, however, that action, constitutes only one
particular dimension of the rich and diverse experiences involved in interpersonal relations. The ‘mirroring’ mechanisms allow intersubjective communication and a basic level of mutual implicit understanding. It is at the root of our ability to empathize with others. Gallese concludes that ‘we understand the other starting from our own bodily experience’. 81 On the
78 The conclusion of this study is as follows: ‘partner touch (social factor) may help in empathy sharing
(psychological factor) with the target of the pain, resulting in analgesia and accompanied by interpersonal central neurophysiological coupling (biological factor). This study demonstrates that interpersonal coupling plays a key role in analgesia during social touch.
79 Filippetti. M,L., Lloyd-Fox, S. Longo, M. R, Faonni, T. , and Johnson, M. H. Neural mechanisms of body awareness in infants. Cerebral Cortex Advance Access, 2014,1-9
80 Gallese, V. A neuroscientific grasp of concepts: from control to representation. Gallese, V. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London B., 358, 1231-1240
The “conscious” dorsal stream: Embodied simulation and the neural correlates of social cognition. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London B. 362, 659-669
81 Gallese, V. & Cuccio, V. The paradigmatic body. Embodied simulation, intersubjectivity and the bodily self. In Open MIND, eds. T. Metzinger and J. M. Windt, 1-23 Frankfurt: MIND group.
basis of this knowledge we identify similar elements in our experiences as well as in those of others. Our experiences are therefore the measure from which we understand others and their experiences. 82
In 1992, a seminar on Clark’s work was held in Rio de Janeiro. Lula Wanderley, the organizer of the seminar, noted that the objects Clark used “always had a film covering something inside. . . . Always that material and inner motion which produced a sensory feel, as though the sensory was not something superficial, but rather internal. . . . It reminds me a little of the body, too; our skin, motion. . . . There is a certain analogy with this thing that envelops people, but in a primitive way.” 83
In the Manifesta journal, Suelny Rolnik emphasizes the fact that Clark’s work was meant to be a “sensorial experience” or a “bodily expression”. 84 Her work “Arquitecturas Biologicas II”, created in 1968 and practiced with variations until 1970, was realized through the exploration of approaches between the bodies, different from everyday experiences.
83 Wanderley, L., O mundo de Lygia Clark. Museo de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 1992. Translated by Mazel. C, 84 Rolnik, S. Archive for a work-event: activating the body’s memory of Lygia Clark’s poetics and its context, part 1. Manifesta Journal, around curatorial practices, no 13 Fungus in the contemporary ,
http://www.manifestajournal.org/issues/fungus-contemporary/archive-work-event-activating-bodys-memory-lygia-clarks-poetics-and-its
In her treatment, Clark also worked, in her own words, on “body memory . . . the affective memory . . . bringing experiences which the verbal aspect cannot detect.” 85
This idea of the body’s unconscious memory has been the subject of a great deal of joint research conducted by psychoanalysts and neurosciencits, which only managed to pinpoint its existence in the late 1990s. The implicit memory is located in the amygdala, the often dubbed the “emotion organ”, one of the key organs involved in emotions, and allows for “the return of the non-repressed by other paths than memory,” paths that Clark widely explored. Implicit memory is written inside the body. 86
85Clark, L. Memory of the body. Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona. 1984. P.326
