Embodied experience

With die object of providing a brief advanced course in manipulative organic chemistry embodying experiments scattered as widely as possible over the important types of substances and reactions, the author desires to present this little book in the hope of rendering simpler the task both of the advanced student and his instructor. 

I shall not pursue this point here. I merely observe that if the combined structure is not a psychological subject, or at least is not such a subject initially, then XPi prior to embodiment is not a subject either. But if XPr is not a subject, then XPi cannot have any experiences prior to embodiment. Experiences cannot exist unowned any more than laughs can exist unlaughed or screams can exist unscreamed. For each experience, there must be an experiencer — someone for whom there is something it is like. But if XPr has no experiences, then there is nothing it is like for XPi at all. 

This provides greater scope for connectivity with individuals and for more embodied experiences. Visual art also requires such connectivity and embodied engagement from individuals in order to produce. The artist Paul Klee (1961) describes the period just before art is made as a nowhere existent something or a somewhere existent nothing (p. 4), which, once established by the artist, leaps into a new order. In Cezanne s account of making art, he depicts an assemblage of himself and the world to be painted and from which there needs to be some onergence ... 

The search for a post-symbolist idiom that would adequately convey embodied experience took on an even more organized form with the emergence of the acmeist group of poets in 1911. Acmeism was a poetic revolt of... 

This framework enables us to identify Six Critical Moments of Rhetorical Transformation in large regulatory industries. At these moments, writers must extract information that is presented in one rhetorical modality (oral testimony, for example) and literally change the form so that the information can be re-represented for a different audience (1) when oral testimony and embodied experience are captured in writing (2) when the information in accident reports is re-represented in statistical records (3) when statistical accounts are re-represented as arguments for particular policies (4) when policies and standards are transformed into procedures (5) when written procedures are transformed into training and (6) when training is re-represented to workers at local sites. (Chapter 2 describes the cycle in detail.)... 

The chapters that follow use this framework to examine how agencies attempt to reconcile diverse viewpoints to make sense of accidents (chapters 4 and 5) how embodied sensory experience is rendered invisible in writing (chapter 6) and how speakers gestures help them understand the temporal and spatial complexity of a hazardous environment (chapters 7 and 8). In chapter 9, I analyze 31 oral interviews with miners following the South-mountain disaster in Norton, Virginia (January, 1993), in order to show how embodied experience and gesture are documented in writing at one critical moment of transformation. 

To cite a mine for violations that precipitated the accident, investigators must fit miners experiences and observations into categories of risk defined by the Mine Act. They must create a coherent narrative that captures the complexity of events, decisions, and conditions prior to the accident. And they must transform miners embodied experiences of risk (underground and inside of the spaces they describe) into the language and viewpoint of engineers—above and outside of the experiences they describe. As we shall see in chapters 4-8, investigators draw important information from miners accounts of local experiences, but they do not always systematically represent information encoded in gesture or a speaker s tone and body movements. 

In the final Report of Investigation (Huntley et al., 1992), MSHA transforms Blake s embodied experience into statements of material fact that serve as evidence for MSHA s conclusions. Blake s escape is described from a third-person viewpoint outby the disaster ... 

Fortunately, individuals can draw upon the collective experience of others without risking their own lives in the process, if training helps them re-tran.sform the embodied experience lost in previous transformations within... 

Feminist theory thus raises questions about the practices and costs of documentation and report writing that exclude or silence the embodied experience and local knowledge of workers—male and female. As I have argued in... 

In acknowledging the role of embodied experience as a warrant for judgments about risk, this chapter does not argue for a return to some romantic past when workers learned safety at their fathers knees. Nor does it argue against funding for research to improve engineering controls and. scientific... 

Testimony in the Southmountain disastet demonstrate.s that investigatots value minets tep-resentations of embodied experience as an index of conditions prior to the accident (chapter 8). - Personal interviews, U.K., 1994. 

Embodied Experience Representing Risk in Speech and Gesture... 

When miners talked about risk, the viewpoints that they assumed in speech and gesture differed from laboratory subjects viewpoints in several important respects. These differences reflect the uncertainty of risky environments and the nature of miners embodied experience in local sites. Because laboratory studies of gesture ask subjects to recall events they have observed in cartoons, laboratory subjects cannot describe themselves within the space of the narratives they recount in speech and gesture. When speakers remembered events they themselves had experienced and spaces they themselves had occupied, they could reenact and analyze their own experiences within the spaces they describe in both speech and gesture. 

Analysis of miners speech and gesture suggests, first, that individuals can represent themselves and others as characters in their narrative (mimetic view point) and second, that they can move outside of this embodied experience to observe and analyze events from a distance (analytic viewpoint). When speakers assume a mimetic viewpoint, they enact events directly with no rhetorical distance between themselves and the action. When speakers assume an analytic viewpoint, they place temporal and spatial distance between their current position (as observers or narrators) and the events they describe. 

Analytic Vietvpoint. Although they cannot change their literal position in relation to the events they describe, narrators can move outside of their own embodied experience in their representations in order to analyze events from a distance. When narrators assume an analytic viewpoint, they observe and evaluate action from a distance. Analytic viewpoints help narrators make sense of actions, events, and situations they describe. They can comment on their own action from the distanced perspective of another observer, or they can look back upon and comment upon past actions, events, and conditions. 

To assess risk, workers in risky occupations must actively move outside of their own embodied experience. When workers assume an analytic viewpoint, they can speculate about the causes and outcomes of events they have not directly experienced and assume a viewpoint rhetorically outside of and above their own institutional and geographic location. When miners describe risk, they can employ this viewpoint to reflect upon and make sense of the cause of events and procedures they have experienced. They can move outside their geographic location in order to observe and analyze events and processes from the viewpoint of colleagues, apprentices, and management. The analytic viewpoint in these narratives may thus reveal a miner s perception of the (frequently watchful) social and institutional relationships among management, apprentices, helpers, and team members underground. 

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