Alexis' Response to TAE (sorry only one quote)

[Larsson, Anna]

#717

I am thinking of a question for which I still do not have an answer. But first: I’m not sure anyone has arrived at what feels to them or me to be a satisfying description of a link between Focusing and mindfulness. They are each a practice of thinking and knowing with our whole bodies, and both seek to problematize the idea (rooted—as in stuck–in common language) that our bodies are separate from an environment/world in which the body knows (or implies). In the framework of mindfulness/awareness meditation, there is no (Kantian) transcendental self to experience, but remain ultimately unaffected by, the feelings, sensations, dispositions, motivations, etc. of life–no ego that remains constant in contrast to someone’s circumstance of flux. The ontology underlying Focusing doesn’t seem all that different. Gendlin puts emphasis on the body’s “fresh forming” out of its present, its experiences becoming part of it, and this includes language. In Focusing, the murky area of confusion that becomes fresh language moves the body forward and is found by listening to the body, listening to the murky and confusing sensations and allowing the language to emerge from it. There is more to meditation than this aspect of listening, but in one form of mindfulness/awareness meditation, the murkiness or confusion is also attended to, but as part of a practice of watching it arising and passing away. A meditator’s attention is on the flux itself, whereas Focusing is used to move forward. Nonetheless, the epistemological similarity is striking. Both insist that concepts fail, and that, at their limits, the thinker cannot attain the knowledge she senses that she lacks until she consults her direct, lived, physical, sensual experience.
The most significant difference, for our purposes, between mindfulness/awareness meditation and Focusing lies in Gendlin’s emphasis on the new. The body in its implying will sense a newness, a new situation, and we can “listen” or “tune in” to the felt sense to develop new ways of maintaining the meanings important to us. Gendlin’s example, in last week’s reading , was raising a family in a changed world, a new situation. Moving forward, then, also depends on our knowing what we wish to conserve. This can present us with some anxiety. It’s that anxiety–that experience of the tension between the wish to know what to conserve and the need to act within a new situation–that makes mindfulness/awareness meditation appealing, but the aim of meditation in the Buddhist tradition is, ultimately, to stop the conserving*. To let go of the will to conserve means letting go of the “I”-ness that is maintained as the body moves forward into its new situations. Without some conservation, change can’t have significance, and “the new” thus fails to be distinguishable as “new.”
To get back to the situation: Gendlin writes, “The situations in which we find ourselves, the body, and the language form a single system together.” It may be tempting to consider the “murkiness” to which we attune ourselves as a body that contains, in its knowing, its processes of knowing. However, if the body is part of a system, wouldn’t it make sense to think of it (or of ourselves) more as organs than as containers? We think, we tap into the new situation and our felt sense, and we thus attune ourselves to something. It is something too complex for the linearity of representational discourse and yet seems to be part of our knowing and thinking.** It is not so much within us as it is within us that we sense it and make sense of it in language. This is where I had to go in my thoughts in order to begin thinking up a connection between the themes of this class: experiential phenomenology, composition, and new media. If we have always already been thinking within a system, that is, if our bodies, language, and situations have been the system out of which new meanings emerge and bring us forward—what changes when that situation includes the expansive digital cyberscape?

*Here, I am drawing from something Humberto Maturana said about conservation, namely that everything is always changing and that it is what we decide to conserve that can determine what we end up calling “change.”
**It’s hard to conceptualize, and a major obstacle obtains in what Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” “The first decision is that all of correlationism—it is the thesis of the essential inseparability of the act of thinking from its content. All we ever engage with is what is given-to-thought, never an entity subsisting by itself” (36). I’m not that interested in discussing correlationism, but I felt it was important to mention it, because it is an extreme form of a reliance on the constitutive function of language.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.

[Sondra Perl]

#731

Alexis: I really appreciate the fine thinking you are doing here both in relation to mindfulness practices and how they differ from and are similar to focusing and what our task is in the seminar. Your first two paragraphs are excellent restatements of Gendlin’s thinking (and deserve rereading) and your last part points us to where the seminar is attempting to go:

“This is where I had to go in my thoughts in order to begin thinking up a connection between the themes of this class: experiential phenomenology, composition, and new media. If we have always already been thinking within a system, that is, if our bodies, language, and situations have been the system out of which new meanings emerge and bring us forward—what changes when that situation includes the expansive digital cyberscape?”

What does change when the situation includes ‘the expansive digital cyberspace’? How then do we experience body, language and situation in a complex whole?

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