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Part I: Unlearning the Names of Things:
Leri on Irwin
Nancy Galeota-Wozny
I had the opportunity to communicate with Dennis Leri via email and
watch the video of his recent two-week workshop on the art and poetry
of Awareness Through Movement. Leri, philosopher-poet of our culture,
consistently voices the importance and significance of ATM as a vital
component to the Feldenkrais Method. He argues against the idea that FI
is the "jewel" of the method as he reminds us that the actual body of
Moshe’s work is found in the thousands of documented ATM lessons. This
workshop places ATM front and center in our thinking or as Leri
describes it as "an all out ATM intensive but not in the "doing"
category as much as in the tinkering with the heart, soul and poetry of
the things." In his Mental Furniture series Leri brought various
philosophers, scientists and artists to our attention that serve to
place The Feldenkrais Method in a historical context. During this
workshop Leri identifies visual artist Robert Irwin and poet Robert
Duncan as parallel thinkers. Prior to the workshop participants were to
have read Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a
biography of the seminal West Coast artist Robert Irwin by Lawrence
Weschler. Irwin traversed the ground between abstract expressionism to
work that challenged the very nature of perception. Abandoning the
‘art" object as we know it, Irwin went on to investigate new aesthetic
territory based on his own rigorous study of philosophical concepts of
perception. Weschler describes him as "an artist who one day got so
hooked on his own curiosity he decided to live it."
NGW: Irwin’s life,
work, and process are rich in relevance to our own work.
He gives form to the often-elusive mental or cognitive aspects of our
work. How does Irwin’s inquiry shed some light on the ‘how" and "what"
we do? Irwin uses the term "sense threshold" in describing his later
installation work. What value can the concept of a "sense threshold"
have for us? Can you discuss your intention in bringing Irwin in as a
focal point of learning in your recent workshop?
DL: Someone wrote
recently in another context that the truth of the Feldenkrais Method is
the student's experience. In fact, I quite disagree. Both trainees and
graduates need to know how the Feldenkrais Method gives rise to the
kinds of experience that it does. Knowing "how" leads to understanding
"what" it is that we do. The import of a profound experience resulting
from an ATM or FI lesson turns against the student if clarity regarding
means does not follow. In bringing in Irwin I was hoping to link our
work to the work of artists who deal with perceptual and cognitive
processes as processes in ways that appeal to our sense of wonder and
beauty. Philosophy and science find their way into both Irwin's art and
ATM lessons via their edginess and rigor.
The common understanding of a percept is that it is a mental impression
of an object, real or imagined, gained through the senses. The dynamics
of perception ordinarily delineate patterns in a field of perceived
foreground and an apperceived background. However, to understand how
patterns emerge, what they are, and how to change them requires the
proper tools and the diligence of a Moshe Feldenkrais or a Robert
Irwin. In the notion of "sense thresholds" we have the Archimedean
lever we need. Let's begin with the Fechner-Weber principle from my
Mental Furniture article, "WEBER-FECHNER PRINCIPLE: An approximate
psychological law relating the degree of response or sensation of a
sense organ and the intensity of the stimulus. The law asserts that
equal increments of sensation are associated with equal increments of
the logarithm of the stimulus, or that the just noticeable difference
in any sensation results from a change in the stimulus which bears a
constant ratio to the value of the stimulus." By way of example,
lighting a candle in broad daylight at noon produces no consciously
noticeable difference in brightness. Differences become apparent at
midnight. intensities are physically measurable quantities while the
differences between them, being ratios of quantities, are something
metaphysical. I can't understate how important this is when it comes to
consider the consequences for understanding how an ATM effects its
changes. To say one color is darker, or one pressure heavier, is not to
indicate another intensity but is to make a judgement that relates the
two. Such judgements are inextricably entangled with the workings of
our body. Differences are not sensations but fundamental judgements
yoked to the contiguous perturbations that created them. Perturbations
arising external or internal to our selves are not sensations in the
traditional sense. What we call sensations are our reactions or
resistances to perturbations plus their significance to us. A sensation
necessitates via the attention a relation of some differential of
intensity with an inference, that is, a guess at its significance to us
at some level. To shift or alter our ability to consciously distinguish
differences connotes an ability to change our organismic minds at a
fundamental level. But it gets even more interesting.
In the last century, Charles Sanders Peirce, America's greatest
philosopher, confirmed Fechner's work when he asked subjects to compare
and judge the greater or lesser of two pressures and they did so within
the range predicted by Fechner. But Peirce went further: in carefully
controlled experiments dealing with pressure on the skin, when the just
noticeable differences became indistinguishable he asked the subjects
to guess which was greater or lesser. Just guess. His subjects guessed
correctly way more accurately than chance! Peirce demonstrated that
well below the threshold of conscious difference we are still able to
distinguish difference. He also found that the ability to discern
conscious and non-conscious differences could be refined. We must be
careful how we interpret those experiments. Peirce did not prove there
is such a thing as intuition that would conclude some knowledge of a
pre-existing reality. Rather, he demonstrated kinds of inferencing, not
entirely conscious or logical in the formal sense of that word, are
implicated in sensing and in critical and a-critical reasoning.
Reasoning to Peirce includes thinking but is not reducible to thinking.
Peirce's notion of reasoning shows up in every level of our being and
is part of our evolutionary biology. Biological individuation
necessitates the capacity to sense not things but bands of intensities
that come to categorically construct tokens of things. As such, much
more goes into the specification of a sense impression than either the
mapping of an external world or direct perception.
Moshe in ATM says that at some point in our human evolution a simple
turn in one or another direction became a "turn to the left" or a "turn
to right." With schemas of directional reference came also the
bewildering phenomena of an "internal" and an "external" world. That
is, the human world arrived with orientational distinctions predicated
upon subsuming a sequence of motor acts and sensations into left,
right, front, back, above and below plus the strange abstractions
designating inner and outer. Since a sensation and the motor act
generating them is a complex thing in itself, it's mind boggling to
contemplate their organization into reference systems like left, right
or further into 6 o'clock, 9 o'clock. Yet, the incredible elegance of
an ATM or work of art allows us to unlearn our way back to the acts of
drawing the most basic distinctions. We go "back" not to stay but to
"return" more fully human. "Function" and "intention," integral to our
work of unlearning and learning, are tools fashioned by us through
constraining and situating distinctions at many levels at once.
NGW: In order to
arrive at the work that asked the most interesting questions, Irwin
went through what looks like a subtractive process. How does this idea
resonate with ATM? Irwin also talks about setting up a situation where
we "perceive ourselves perceiving." Can you talk about these ideas in
relationship to ATM?
DL: How to situate
Irwin's "subtractive process?" Irwin, in the beginning of his art
career, was just another talented draftsman. I mean, he can draw, he
can entertain, but he's not an artist. Like any of us he can do what it
takes to sneak by. He forms his art out of what is fashionable or
marketable. His concern is with "objects" and artifacts. But soon
enough he sees the piece of art created in his studio will not "work"
in the gallery. He becomes aware of background or context. First, he
changes the gallery to resemble the conditions of his studio. Later, he
designs and creates his works of art for the local, proximate
constraints of the gallery. Finally, he works not with the objects or
even the contexts but rather with the whole nature of perception sans
an object of perception. Like in an ATM, Irwin at first worked within
the constraints imposed upon him. Later he brought the constraints
under his control by shifting his focus from content to content/context
and then to content/context/perceptual process. Irwin read the European
phenomenological philosophers, Edmund Husserl and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. They became his comrades in the quest to get to the core
of perception. Phenomenology, simply and non-technically stated,
invites us think of our self as being in the World and as the World
being within our self. If you hang out with that idea, play with it
some, it will lead you to Interesting places. Technically, Husserl
sought "a return to the things themselves" through what's called the
Phenomenological Reduction. Appearances grasped in their immediacy and
with no regard to whether or not they "Real" become the basis for
inquiry. "Presence" without cultural biases or judgments are the aim.
Operationally, one "brackets," that is excludes, subtracts or otherwise
suspends one's personal and cultural conditioning. That's the first
step. The second step brackets the subject, the cultural ego or I.
Cleansed of the taint of the contingent, culture and history one could
arrive at the "Transcendental Ego," that something according to Husserl
that is essential to us and that is not our history. Merleau-Ponty
reversed the direction of inquiry when he brought the sticky question
of embodiment into the mix. Relying on many of the same sources as
Moshe, Merleau-Ponty brought attention to the fact that "the" body is
not like other objects in the world. It is always "some-body." First,
many strata of history determine some-body: biology, psychology,
gender, class, language, culture and the times in which one lives.
Unlike a mathematical theorem, the living flesh can't be clearly known.
This is so because it is both the source or origin of cognition and
perception and a perceived "thing." You can't see your own face
directly, rather, you see yourself reflected in the faces of others. We
are beings in a world of other beings and that fact is prior to our
perception of things. We can walk around an object but not our embodied
self. So, getting back to Irwin, in his "reduction" he aims to inhabit
perception. Rather than eliminating contingent "data," his art, his
practice of the phenomenology of perception, brings contingency in with
all it's dynamic play, fluidness and fleetingness. Irwin had what the
Phenomenologists really lacked: a practice. He had less and less need
for external standards to evaluate his works and more and more relied
on each work's own internal self-consistent logic or aesthetic. He was
no slave to the fascism of fashion. When he gave up on the art object
he was motivated to create situations where perception "of" is shifted
into perceiving as acting.
We can see perhaps that ATM, by shifting us way from goals or images of
achievement, brings us into perceiving the perceiver. ATM sets up
conditions and constraints that can simultaneously demonstrate to us
the limits of our habits and make available to us the means to alter
them. So, rather than purging ourselves of our habits, we bring into
play the processes that created them. Any moment in a lesson where we
relate unrelated aspects of ourselves "subtracts" the hold habit has on
us. The mechanisms that disallow awareness are subtracted or
diminished. Each lesson has the potential to alter the means of
perception, our selves and to alter the object of perception, our
selves. To understand how a lesson alters us requires, if we are not to
be superficial or unreflective, a very steady and sober use of our
attention and our critical faculties. But it's worth it. It was for
Moshe and it is for Irwin and it is for us.
Page contents Copyright 1999 Nancy Galeota-Wozny
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