Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France
01 Nov 2004-Vol. 8, Iss: 3, pp 698-700
About: The article was published on 2004-11-01. It has received 137 citations till now.
Citations
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TL;DR: In this article, a practice-oriented re-reading of phenomenology can contribute to a new humanism after anti-/posthumanism, which has a troubled relationship to the comprehension of lived experience, notions of agency and politics.
Abstract: During the last 20 years anti-humanist and posthumanist thinking have gained a strong foothold in human geography. This development has indisputable benefits regarding our understanding of the power-knowledge complex, representation and ‘new materialisms’, respectively, but it has also had a troubled relationship to the comprehension of lived experience, notions of agency and politics. This paper aims to explore how a practice-oriented re-reading of phenomenology can contribute to a ‘new humanism’ after anti-/posthumanism. The paper starts from a research study on ‘The Stranger, the city and the nation’, which I have recently completed with my colleague Lasse Koefoed. The purpose is to embed the subsequent philosophical discussions in their consequences for the empirical analysis of social life. The re-reading of phenomenology revolves around three issues: thinking the body as a phenomenal, lived body; orientation and disorientation in the directions and possibilities of social life; and the phenomenologi...
158 citations
Cites background from "Nature: Course Notes from the Collè..."
...In particular in his courses on nature, he (like, later, Deleuze and Agamben) takes inspiration from the zoologist Jacob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory in developing this connectivity (Merleau-Ponty, 2003)....
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...Merleau-Ponty is more sympathetic to romantic and vitalist approaches (see Merleau-Ponty, 2003)....
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...In particular in his courses on nature, he (like, later, Deleuze and Agamben) takes inspiration from the zoologist Jacob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory in developing this connectivity (Merleau-Ponty, 2003)....
[...]
Book•
29 Sep 2020
TL;DR: In this paper, Traisnel argues that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction.
Abstract: From Audubon’s still-life watercolors to Muybridge’s trip-wire locomotion studies, from Melville’s epic chases to Poe’s detective hunts, the nineteenth century witnessed a surge of artistic, literary, and scientific treatments that sought to “capture” the truth of animals at the historical moment when animals were receding from everyday view. In Capture, Antoine Traisnel reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural canon. Capture offers a critical genealogy of the dominant representation of animals as elusive, precarious, and endangered that came to circulate widely in the nineteenth century. Traisnel argues that “capture” is deeply continuous with the projects of white settler colonialism and the biocapitalist management of nonhuman and human populations, demonstrating that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction. Tracking the prototyping of biopolitical governance and capitalist modes of control, Traisnel theorizes capture as a regime of vision by which animals came to be seen, over the course of the nineteenth century, as at once unknowable and yet understood in advance—a frame by which we continue to encounter animals today.
71 citations
Cites background from "Nature: Course Notes from the Collè..."
...disappear as the nineteenth century dawns, yet Cooper can write two more installments portraying Bumppo in the prime of life: The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841), set squarely in the eighteenth century....
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...”40 Captured, animals have become “immunized to encounter.”41 And indeed, zoos in modernity traditionally perform the immunitary function of protecting endangered animals from disappearing at Man’s hand. Although modern zoos inherit from earlier menageries a residual sense of colonial pride, exhibiting rare and “exotic” specimens as trophies— including both animal and human specimens— they primarily justify their existence as educational institutions and as sanctuaries for endangered figure 2. The dynamic of capture is already apparent in this image that accompanies the entry for “Approcher” in Chomel’s Dictionnaire œconomique (1732), which stages the hunter’s disappearance behind the apparatus facilitating the animal pursuit....
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06 Sep 2018
64 citations
TL;DR: This paper addresses the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present and introduces the skilled intentionality framework as conceptualizing a special case of an animal’s informational coupling with the environment namely skilled action.
Abstract: In this paper, we address the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present. A simple example is how an animal can relate to a food source while only sensing a pheromone, or how an agent can relate to beer, while only the refrigerator is directly sensorily present. Certain cases in which something is absent have been characterized by others as requiring ‘higher’ cognition. An example of this is how during the design process architects can let themselves be guided by the future behavior of visitors to an exhibit they are planning. The main question is what the sociomaterial environment and the skilled agent are like, such that they can relate to each other in these ways. We argue that this requires an account of the regularities in the environment. Introducing the notion of general ecological information, we will give an account of these regularities in terms of constraints, information and the form of life or ecological niche. In the first part of the paper, we will introduce the skilled intentionality framework as conceptualizing a special case of an animal’s informational coupling with the environment namely skilled action. We will show how skilled agents can pick up on the regularities in the environment and let their behavior be guided by the practices in the form of life. This conceptual framework is important for radical embodied and enactive cognitive science, because it allows these increasingly influential paradigms to extend their reach to forms of ‘higher’ cognition such as long-term planning and imagination.
64 citations
01 Jan 2019
TL;DR: The book is open acces and can be downloaded from: https://www.mdpi.com/books/pdfview/book/1331 as discussed by the authors, and it can be found on Amazon.
Abstract: The book is open acces and can be downloaded from: https://www.mdpi.com/books/pdfview/book/1331
52 citations
References
More filters
TL;DR: In this article, a practice-oriented re-reading of phenomenology can contribute to a new humanism after anti-/posthumanism, which has a troubled relationship to the comprehension of lived experience, notions of agency and politics.
Abstract: During the last 20 years anti-humanist and posthumanist thinking have gained a strong foothold in human geography. This development has indisputable benefits regarding our understanding of the power-knowledge complex, representation and ‘new materialisms’, respectively, but it has also had a troubled relationship to the comprehension of lived experience, notions of agency and politics. This paper aims to explore how a practice-oriented re-reading of phenomenology can contribute to a ‘new humanism’ after anti-/posthumanism. The paper starts from a research study on ‘The Stranger, the city and the nation’, which I have recently completed with my colleague Lasse Koefoed. The purpose is to embed the subsequent philosophical discussions in their consequences for the empirical analysis of social life. The re-reading of phenomenology revolves around three issues: thinking the body as a phenomenal, lived body; orientation and disorientation in the directions and possibilities of social life; and the phenomenologi...
158 citations
Book•
29 Sep 2020
TL;DR: In this paper, Traisnel argues that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction.
Abstract: From Audubon’s still-life watercolors to Muybridge’s trip-wire locomotion studies, from Melville’s epic chases to Poe’s detective hunts, the nineteenth century witnessed a surge of artistic, literary, and scientific treatments that sought to “capture” the truth of animals at the historical moment when animals were receding from everyday view. In Capture, Antoine Traisnel reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural canon. Capture offers a critical genealogy of the dominant representation of animals as elusive, precarious, and endangered that came to circulate widely in the nineteenth century. Traisnel argues that “capture” is deeply continuous with the projects of white settler colonialism and the biocapitalist management of nonhuman and human populations, demonstrating that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction. Tracking the prototyping of biopolitical governance and capitalist modes of control, Traisnel theorizes capture as a regime of vision by which animals came to be seen, over the course of the nineteenth century, as at once unknowable and yet understood in advance—a frame by which we continue to encounter animals today.
71 citations
TL;DR: This paper addresses the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present and introduces the skilled intentionality framework as conceptualizing a special case of an animal’s informational coupling with the environment namely skilled action.
Abstract: In this paper, we address the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present. A simple example is how an animal can relate to a food source while only sensing a pheromone, or how an agent can relate to beer, while only the refrigerator is directly sensorily present. Certain cases in which something is absent have been characterized by others as requiring ‘higher’ cognition. An example of this is how during the design process architects can let themselves be guided by the future behavior of visitors to an exhibit they are planning. The main question is what the sociomaterial environment and the skilled agent are like, such that they can relate to each other in these ways. We argue that this requires an account of the regularities in the environment. Introducing the notion of general ecological information, we will give an account of these regularities in terms of constraints, information and the form of life or ecological niche. In the first part of the paper, we will introduce the skilled intentionality framework as conceptualizing a special case of an animal’s informational coupling with the environment namely skilled action. We will show how skilled agents can pick up on the regularities in the environment and let their behavior be guided by the practices in the form of life. This conceptual framework is important for radical embodied and enactive cognitive science, because it allows these increasingly influential paradigms to extend their reach to forms of ‘higher’ cognition such as long-term planning and imagination.
64 citations
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: The skilled intentionality framework as mentioned in this paper is a conceptual framework for the field of 4E cognitive science that focuses on skilled action and builds upon an enriched notion of affordances, defined as the selective engagement with multiple affordances simultaneously in a concrete situation.
Abstract: The topic of this Oxford handbook is “4E cognition”: cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. However, one important “E” is missing: an E for ecological. We sketch an ecological-enactive approach to cognition that presents a framework for bringing together the embodied/enactive program with the ecological program originally developed by James Gibson, in which affordances are central. We call this framework the skilled intentionality framework. The skilled intentionality framework is a philosophical approach to understanding the situated and affective embodied mind. It is a new conceptual framework for the field of 4E cognitive science that focuses on skilled action and builds upon an enriched notion of affordances. We define skilled intentionality as the selective engagement with multiple affordances simultaneously in a concrete situation. The skilled intentionality framework clarifies how complementary insights on affordance responsiveness from philosophy/phenomenology, ecological psychology, emotion psychology, and neurodynamics hang together in an intertwined way.
57 citations
01 Jan 2019
TL;DR: The book is open acces and can be downloaded from: https://www.mdpi.com/books/pdfview/book/1331 as discussed by the authors, and it can be found on Amazon.
Abstract: The book is open acces and can be downloaded from: https://www.mdpi.com/books/pdfview/book/1331
52 citations