Foucault and Embodiment

In the book Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art  Foucault has a great little article dealing with the corporeal body and he plays around with the idea of the body as a utopia, which I interpret as being like a fantasy.  He really helped me to understand the way in which we are our bodies, and also to think about the strange way in which we are both visible and invisible, beings in the world, fleshy, flawed, but perceiving. Of the body he says, 

"It is in relation to it - and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign- that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world."

This idea is very closely aligned with the phenomenological perspective, but I find his notion that the body is also nowhere, very curious.  All in all, I really enjoyed the language of this article, and it has my mind moving about what my body means.  I also like this small quote that puts the body squarely in the centre of any consideration:

"My body is like the City of the Sun.  It has no place, but it is from it that all possible places, real or Utopian, emerge and radiate."

Ihde's Approach

I've been reading Don Ihde's beautiful book "Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound," and am feeling a real connection to it based on my personal interest in sound design, soundscape ecology and music.  His introduction to the book has been extremely helpful to me, because he works through phenomenology as a methodology and begins the book by justifying his focus on sound.  Some very helpful points that I'd like to keep in mind while looking at technological art are:

1) What is Phenomenology?: "... a style of thinking which concentrates an intense examination on experience in its multifaceted, complex and essential forms."

2) Hermeneutical Exestential Phenomenology: "It understands that experience cannot be questioned alone or in isolation but must be understood ultimately in relation to its historical and cultural embeddedness." 

3) Wholistic Character: "...the first gain of phenomenology in regard to sensory experience is a recovery and reappreciation of the fullness and richness and of the global character of experience" ... "The object "primitively" stands before us in all its diversity and richness and unity."

4) Description: "Describe the appearances or phenomena..." and carefully take notes on what goes on in the "flow of experience." Concentrate on the "eidetic" or "structural components of experience," and "make use of the full range of possibilities."  "...philosophy has always used fantasy as its tool."