Notes on Perception

Through my process I have been learning to trust the experiences of my own body, and the direction of enquiry that these experiences are taking me. In this manner I become Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “body-subject”. For much like him, I am rejecting the disembodied transcendental ego and living "the sensuous and sentient life of the body itself” (Abram 45). In other words, my body, this experiencing self, is continually subject to the affect of its surroundings, and it reciprocates — I participate. Participation, according to Merleau-Ponty (46), is a defining attribute of perception itself. Ecologist and philosopher David Abram elaborates:

“… by asserting that perception, phenomenologically considered,

is inherently participatory, we mean that perception always involves

at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or

coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives.

Prior to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontaneous,

sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists.”

(Abram 57)

In terms of participation, Ann Whiston-Spirn (1998) reminds us that our perception is always informed by our culture. It is important to be cognisant of where I come from, to remember that I am a white, housed, underemployed, middle-aged, queer, able-bodied, neurodivergent, cis-female human of mixed ancestry and working class background, living in a capitalist, colonised country. Whew. What does this mean? It means I am a veritable mess. It means I have been both subject and object and have learned first hand the relativity of privilege. Although I was born in this country, I still find myself far from the land that shaped me and I am perpetually lost. However, I am not a monolith. This mess of markers of identity (and there are many more) are also continually transforming and evolving because this body of mine is intimately connected with and influenced by the rest of the world — a world that is ultimately made up of the same stuff that everything in our universe is.