23
Dec
2015
0

philosophical sensory slutting and carnal knowledge

I remember sitting through my historical aesthetics philosophy last fall. Balk I did at the mind sets (ha) in which the mind was/is privileged over situated bodily experiences, as though the body was just a courier for a separate soul. I laughed reading Lakoff and Johnson because deeply ground in me is the like notion that reason, knowledge production and aesthetic reactivity results from the piggyback directly through our neurological network and corollary survival mechanisms. Or as Elizabeth Grosz would say, art hijacks survival mechanisms. Reason, knowledge and aesthetic titallation arise from within and are restricted by the foundational bodily structures and experience.

This does not negate for me the paradoxical idea that there is something swimming around me that coalesces to be more than just my parts. That my whole cannot fully be explained by a part analysis alone. Some kind of spark ignites me as a firery living being and not just a mushy water filled rock, nor a desiccated lake bottom. Yet this spark manifests and is intricately linked to my mushy water neurotically fibered being (sometimes typos are so funny in how they reframe my intended meaning, that it is best not to correct them–ha. neurotically). I see all this as a single operating system. Well that is a bit of a lie because though our bodies are bound via a semi permeable membrane (skin…which I happen to know is semi-permeable for just the other day a sliver of countertop laminate slide right through my dermis as though it was no barrier at all…ouchy…it required the aid of superglue to readhere the flap of flesh…yes I am semi permeable) … oh what was I saying …a yes, the lie that I have inferred that I am a desecrate being, whether rock or enlivened flesh. Though the notion of being a desecrate autonomous being is a nice thought which might allow for a feral free will, I do not believe this to be so. I am intricately linked to others. I am both a social and sexual being and I only am recognizable as such within the context, within the web of others and the physical environment. I am a situated being, that cannot be unsituated. Even through death I am situated, perhaps just dissolving into a larger system as a part of the nutrient cycle :)

Situating the soul, reason, aesthetics, etc as embodied, does not deny the possibilities of a supreme being who creates via iterative systems.

Reason, aesthetic, and the social is all embedded in the sensory. Of course I don’t actually believe we are overly reasonable, but that is a whole other topic. For now I just will say that philosophical discourse that disconnects us from our sensory slutting doing of life and mind appears faulty at a very base level. Knowledge is carnal.

Of course I don’t just laugh, I wickedly grin at being such a pansy ass chicken with my aversions to public textabations (writing and scholarship). I never considered processing my thinking through writing or scholarship in my twenties or thirties. It was not until the first graduate degree that writing began becoming a mode of unpacking my thinking. Perhaps I had to wait for a less patriarchal system of writing to be embraced by the academy as even in my forties (and now). I still lick my elementary and high school scars generated by prejudices and sufferings enacted as a result of difference, of language processing norm anomalies.

 

0