Podcast Intro to Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Concept of History"

Here's a podcast I made a few months ago. It's an effort to introduce Walter Benjamin to high school students. I'm not sure that it succeeds in that respect, but I really enjoyed the process of putting it together. The soundtrack is all original compositions, minus a few pieces lifted form Satie, Berlioz and various Soviet orchestras.

  Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Concept of History by Power+LightEP

Roger Federer as Embodied Perception

In his 2006 article, "Federer as Religious Experience," David Foster Wallace makes a compelling observation regarding the embodied nature of perception:

"Imagine that you're a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you're playing high-level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it. That is, you won't experience anything like the (empirically real) quickness and skill that the live audience, watching tennis balls move so fast they hiss and blur, will attribute to you."

Wallace's point, which is made with brilliant simplicity, is that perception is embodied. How we perceive time, space and the behavior of objects within these dimensions is a function of our being in and of a body which is always already part of the world we perceive*. In the case of Roger Federer, being possessed of incredible speed and agility means that, conversely, the world appears to move a bit more slowly than it would for the average human being.

At the level of affect, this proposition is familiar. We're used to the idea that our experience of time changes according to our mood. For instance, excitement is typically associated with an acceleration of time, whereas boredom is associated with its slowing down. However, in these cases, our perception of time is gauged against a fixed measurement, such as a clock or, what is more common, an eight-hour work day. We register these experiences of the contraction or expansion of time by suddenly noticing that it's 2:00 am and we've been talking for hours or by periodically checking our watch to see that only fifteen minutes has passed and 5:00 pm is still a long ways off.

These experiences are familiar; Wallace's point, however, is more radical, more obscure. He contends that the actual perception of objects in time and space - not just the passage of time as such - is an effect of our embodied perception. The aspect of embodied experience that he's investigating is more subtle, eluding the conscious reflection that affect typically affords. He's talking about reflex, muscle memory, mute forms of intelligence which develop and operate beyond the periphery of conscious awareness.

Of course, you can consciously decide to train your body in certain movements and develop specific reflexes. Most pro athletes commit to this conditioning early in life to ensure that such movements become thoroughly mechanical. Federer, of course, is no exception. However, as these skills become an effective part of bodily intelligence, they shape our perception as well. Though operating at the level of mute, unconscious knowledge, these reflexes stretch the very physics of the perceived world.

This point does require some qualification. According to another proposition with which we're all familiar, it should be conceded that perception is also a function of context. Consider Federer's comments on being a spectator at Wimbledon:

"'I went to see a match on Centre Court, and I was also surprised, actually, how fast, you know, the serve is and how fast you have to react to be able to get the ball back, especially when a guy like Mario [Ancic, who's known for his vicious serve] serves, you know? But then once you're on the court yourself, it's totally different, you know, because all you see is the ball, really, and you don't see the speed of the ball...'"

So, perhaps, we shouldn't assume that everything in Federer's experience moves a bit slower or seems to pause briefly before passing into contact with his body (or some artificial extension thereof). Instead, we see that this stretching of time and space is dependent on his context: on or off the court. But this merely goes further to illustrate the embodied character of perception. It's not simply that perception and body are fused; body itself cannot be distinguished from the world it inhabits. Our body is part of that world, always and already in and of it. Federer's world on the court is different from his world off the court, and, accordingly, his perception of time and space adjusts. His body and his percpetion have been conditioned to engage in this world off the court as well. Such conditioning is perhaps unconscious: a simple matter of following the customary behavior of a spectator at a tennis match. However, not surprisingly, this conditioning has brought forth a different embodied experience, a different perception of time and space.

This, of course, is where we, the less preternaturally gifted athletes of our species, might begin to consider the concept of embodied perception in our own lives. What are the movements through which we take ourselves every day, passing unconsciously from point to point, context to context, posture to posture, action to reaction? These movements are not incidental, they are the building blocks of our perception, the immanent intelligence of our world. How do we enact our relation to space/time? How do we enact our world? Knowing that perception is not in-itself but always, first and foremost, incarnate, of a body of a world, means that our environment is never alien to us. What happens in the world around us is just as intimate as the thoughts which amble through our minds.

But we shouldn't conclude from this proposition a sort of metaphysical solipsism. The point is not that the perceived world is simply an effect of our bodies. Because perception is embodied, and that body is always, already in and of the world, there is no origin or center of human experience. We are continuous with the world around us, heterogeneous to ourselves. We may perceive ourselves as having an identity which transcends time and space - as spirit, soul or persona - but this perception too is an effect of our world, our body, our conditioning in and through the world.

As Wallace points out, we're not likely to be conscious of the embodied character of perception. Like Federer, we're inclined to consider the tennis ball "quite large and slow-moving" rather than reflect on the immanence of such a perception to a state of embodiment. However, this is not necessarily knowledge that we should struggle to possess with our intellect or infer from every moment of our experience. The joy of this insight is that it means living is deeply experimental. It means that we learn not only through our minds, but through our bodies and, what's more, through the world we inhabit. This is not knowledge to commit to memory, it's knowledge to play with, to experience. Even if there is no transcendental grounding to our status as Subjects, our consciousness and our intention is a means to play, to enactment, to knowing through doing.

*I owe this figure of the body being "always already in and of the world" to Daniel Coffeen. Most of the ideas in this essay originate in his discussions of Merleau-Ponty.