The phenomenological perspective and some underpinnings or our process

Elodie speaks about sensation in the post titled “Thoughts on sensation”. She talks about her experience of sensation as the interface between herself and the object as she stands back, allowing the object to present itself to her. As I understand Elodie’s description and the premise of phenomenology I can propose that through her exploration of the object, she is practising the phenomenological reduction. That is, she is setting aside what is known of the object.

The phenomenological perspective opens up the possibilities for information to come from things in themselves, and as we apply it- from the object. We want to source our physical work from ideas quietly possessed by the object, bringing these to our attention through a method which we are devising in quite a trial and error fashion.

‘My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension”...’ M.Merleau-Ponty in Baggini & Stangroom, 2004 p.159.

Through our method, as through the phenomenological method, we seek to build eventually toward meaning, via some necessary reductions. In January we were working to build a method which could be replicated, we were trying to break down what happens sensually, perceptually, cognitively, physically and imaginatively when we approach an object as stimulus item. Here I think it is important to note that we are not going be stringent with terminology until that terminology has proved sufficient and necessary for naming parts of our endeavour. For example referring as I just have to the sensual, perceptual and cognate etc facets of experience seems clumsy as the parameters of each term are perhaps not mutually exclusive but since we are concerned with the experience of meeting the object, it is useful to both acknowledge as different, and ultimately reconcile the different qualities of information offered by our faculties....

So, hopefully having made it clear that we understand the impossibility of isolating entirely a faculty of investigation, I hope now to elucidate the rationale behind our endeavour to do so.

We have been thinking about “sourcing” in our process- how in all the approaches we might have to taking information from objects, we want to source this information from the experience we have of sensation, and find the methodology required to access a sensual experience of the object. This is experiential, with some differences noted between what is happening neurologically (for exploration at another time perhaps).


We understand sensation as the privileging of information from the object, a relationship which stimulates corporeal memories, a certain felt “something” (but what is the something that that is?). In some ways it is a trick to ask ourselves to attend to the experience of the flesh and nerves as awakened by the object because they are the medium through which the whole message is conveyed.

We were interested in Berkeley’s notion of objects as “collections of sensations” and Locke’s principle that the foundations of our knowledge are ideas perceived by sensation (e.g. in Baggini & Stangroom, 2004). In January we were quite systematic in approaching the objects through each of the senses. The process happened something like this:

-interrogating the object through the sense

-information travels in the body and generates more sensation

- we keep following the sensation to clarify it

-as the exploration takes hold the second layer of knowledge, imagination, association and memory are permitted/ encouraged to have influence on the dancing, carrying with them instances of meaning and ideas...

-as the physical info gets clearer still, we start to identify an embodied essence of the object and the movement tends to become more of a recognisable vocabulary.

We filmed episodes of explorations; interested in noting any consistency across the sense categories or object categories- this needs further development.


To be continued...