Shifting from within: Boundary making in the Fragility of Presence | 2016

talk /movement performance – presented together with:
Anna-Leena Ryyppö – freelanced dance artist;
Sebastian López-Lehto – dance artist (University of Fine Arts Helsinki), capoeira dancer

Institutions, Cognitive Humanities Conference 2016, 13. – 15. June 2016, Helsinki, Finnland
Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities is an international, interdisciplinary research network. It was originally supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), 2012-14, and continues to bring together researchers at all career stages from fields such as literary studies, narrative theory, poetics, linguistics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, history, the history of art, film, performing arts and theatre studies, and beyond, whose work relates to, informs, or is informed by aspects of the cognitive sciences broadly conceived..
(For further contributions of the event please refer to the conference website.)

Shifting from within: Boundary making in the Fragility of Presence:
This proposal continues my research of the memacism project through a diffractive reading of A.Noë’s sensorimotor based enactivism as applied in his recent text ‘Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception and the Fragility of Presence’ and the subsequent commentary, developed on an social-enactivism account, by M. Kyselo¹ with feminist readings of K.Barad’s Agential Realism as introduced by R.Coleman and P.Hinton² among others.

The latter feminist new-materialist perspective regards subjectivity as dispersed and interwoven defining bodies as objects of knowledge, which are intra-actively involved in the bringing forth of meaning, though not because ‘we do the choosing [..] but because we are an agential part of the material becoming’³. Defining body/matter as having an ‘active role in the generation of perceptual meaning’⁴ and not merely as containers of mediation challenges definitions of a representational rational that is performed by a solitarily existing conscious mind.

A.Noë, equally argues that access to the world emerges in a constant process of fragile presence⁵, though indicates conceptual representation as that what enables us to see with⁶. Such concepts, while marked as fragile, define a critical point, which I would like to approach under the aspects of performativity in exploring R.Coleman’s argument that ‘culture and materiality have reciprocal agentive effects upon one another’.⁷

With reference to K.Barad’s concept of exteriority-within-phenomena8 I assume established boundaries as the one between nature/culture not as fixed, but rather as shifting from within⁹ – an iterative intra-active process that also affects the concepts of a conscious mind.

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