Hilarie's Response: emBODYment

[Website Services Admin]

#391

Wysocki’s definition (or, perhaps more accurately, qualification) of embodiment as something that “calls us to attend to just what we do, day to day, moving about” (3). The connotation I tend to draw from the word embodiment is one of being inside, but Wysocki’s additions (with Heidegger!) help me to conceptualize embodied personhood more broadly, as a user and shaper of space that would be empty without us in it. She goes on to call our bodies “our primary media” (4), which signals another shift for me, from thinking of bodies as tools (perhaps, in McLuhan’s sense, our primary technologies) into bodies as materials.

All of this makes me think that you could graphically represent my assumptions (some of which I’m sure I share with others) as “emBODYment,” privileging the body as object over body as subject, as material for or through the creative process, or as technology in and of itself. In point of fact, it’s all of these things. Dolmage’s worry about abstracting the body from meaning making (125, qtd on 10) speaks pretty closely, I think, to what I’m working in thinking about, (I might post again with some thoughts on that.)

The photo with which Wysocki opens her introduction, with which she introduces the idea of crowds as units made of individual people, opens this out in some ways that I want to explore further. The idea of being “unitedly visible” (3), for instance, draws out the proposing kitties for artistic collaboration. Collaborative writing that I’ve read, however, so often works to excise or hide individual writing tendencies (certain verbal tics, patterns. etc) in order to make one unified voice. Something like Wikipedia shows individual voices but doesn’t tell you to who me they belong, where they were born. How does or could the idea of group visibility change this?

[Anonymous]

#393

Hil — The idea of our bodies as our primary medium was powerful to me to.  That made me think of my body as separate from me, a mediating force between me and the world. You are theorizing more deeply with your sense of bodies as acting within otherwise empty space and bodies as tools or even materials.  Very cool to think about.  –Sean

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