The initial project of book blogging Margaret Archer’s last book has spiralled into a plan to cover each of her major books. I was planning to reread them all at some point anyway: I read them all in sequence during the second year of my PhD and have only really looked at isolated sections since then. So given how useful an experience blogging the Reflexive Imperative proved to be, it seems like a good idea to extend this to the rest of them. Given there’s a million other things I’m supposed to be doing at the moment (the reflexivity books are directly relevant to finishing off my PhD but the rest aren’t really) it’ll probably take me a lot longer to do the blogging than the reading. So for the time being I’m going to approach them thematically, blogging about particular ideas I’m thinking about, rather than the books as a whole. On which note, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how adept animals are at manipulating their environment and the continuities and discontinuities it has with the embodied knowledge exhibited by human beings:
Natural relations prompt all sorts of postures, but above all it is through them that we learn the human posture in the world of nature. Thus embodied knowledge acquired through throwing instils the difference between ‘within-reach’ and ‘out of reach’; chasing inculcates relative speeds, approaching or evading animals teaches timing and distances, pulling and swinging give lessons in weight and tensile strength, banging teaches that one substance is harder than another, and digging and squeezing inform about different textures. This knowledge itself is almost, if not completely, impossible to verbalise: we know that some things are possible, that others are ‘not on’; but a texture feels like a texture feels and there is no explaining why the particular feel of impactible snow means that we can build from it.
Yet it is clear that embodied knowledge is real knowledge because misuse is regulative. There is an incorrect way of doing things which indicates that there are such things as embodied rules. We have all had the experience of banging our teeth when we wrongly take an empty vessel to be full and raise it to take a drink – the arm seems to tell us we are wrong in mid-air, but it is too late to arrest the gesture. Similarly our legs get jarred when we jump into shallow water with the bodily ‘assumption’ that it is deep. Again, we all know what a shock it is to the body when we wrongly take an ‘extra step’ at the top of a familiar staircase. What is significant about these examples of every day embodied knowledge is not simply that they are carried in the body, but that errors are bodily registered as bangs, jars or stumbles: we know that something has gone wrong from our bodies’ reactions, and not vice-versa by the mind telling it so – the latter happens after the event when we wonder ‘why our bodies let us down’ […] In short, we do become aware of this embodied rule-following when we make mistakes. Indeed we can speculate that the mess very young children make with their drinks is at least partly due to the fact that they have not yet acquired an embodied sense of ‘full’ and ’empty’.
Misused in nature is regulate in another way, for our natural relations not only supply feedback on error, they spur us to improvement and reward our improvements. Better hand-eye coordination brings the reward of more fish caught or more food gathered: developing a better swimming style gets us to safety more certainly and enables us to traverse greater distances. Out of the bodily experimentation which constitutes our natural relations, the embodied theoretical attitude is born. If the ice crack and we get dunked, or the liana breaks and we take a fall, this does not foster a simple association of aversion (stimulus-response), but rather an accentuated environmental awareness that there is ice and ice and fibre and bride (just as there are parcels and parcels). This fosters the theoretical attitude of tapping-and-testing or hanging-and-feeling. It is, as Popper argued, the start of evolutionary trial and error learning. Yet, it remains embodied rather than being the primitive exemplar of the cognitive hypothetico-deductive method, for what is felt through the foot and fingers is known by them and translates into words badly, because incompletely. We can tell someone to ‘tap and test’, but have difficulty in conveying the feel of the tap which indicates that it is safe to cross the ice.
Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to conjecture that as the theoretical attitude develops through embodied knowledge, then the next steps involves a reflexivity towards it which is the midwife of material culture. After all, the higher primates can and will use sticks to obtain things that are beyond their reach Thus, from using floatables came canoes, from buildables, shelters, from swingables, knots and plaits, from hammering, flints and from murmuring came singing. On this argument then, second generation material culture would involve items like sand shoes, now skis, sledges, stirrups and bridles. The key point is that the sensory-motor skills involved in all of these practices can themselves become embodied as second nature. The good rider ‘feels the horse’s mouth’ and always retains ‘contact through the reins’, constantly communicating without words and with implicit cognitive intent. What this shows is that there is an interface between the natural and practical orders and their respective forms of knowledge (for we all once had to be shown how to hold the reins, just as we first needed instruction in dressing ourselves). (Archer 2000: 164-166)
Mark Carrigan 