David Morris
The Sense of Space. Albany: State University of New York. 2004
K E Y Q U O T E S
TOPOLOGIES OF expression & enveloping - PHENOMENAL GEOMETRIES OF THE BODY
The sense of space is the basis of all social experience and of perceptual experience in general. vii
...from the crossing of body and world to space via living perception. 5
…the geometry of the world, the structure of lived space, is not reflective of a mathematical geometry, but of a living, ‘phenomenal geometry’ of the body… 101
The lived body ‘sums up’ space as lived space. 101
What counts in this expressive ‘geometry’ of the body is the way that life takes up parts spread out alongside one another and envelops them in one another through movement as a unified whole that expresses an attitude towards the world. 102
…body-world movement generates envelopes of perception: an inner envelope in relation to the body as place, an outer envelope in relation to larger place… 126
…our sens of depth ultimately expresses a deep grammar of body-world movement… 126
…the sens of depth is… rooted in the crossing of the body and world, and is labile... discovered only in an expressive body, and in a nature in which movement gives rise to expression. 127
Our study suggests a pre-objective, bodily care, a care in movement. 127
If our being were not fundamentally care, then there would be no world and no objects. 127
…the topology of enveloping stretches our body in space and time [and] roots us in place… 127
The moving body 'translates' things in terms of its own movements… 127
…in the point where world and body cross, we do not quite have complete volumes meeting, but volumes moving together to generate envelopes… 127
If, as Merleau-Ponty might put it, I see the mountain, it is the mountain out there that makes itself be seen in me. 128
…in terms of body-world movement, […] by thinking that this reversibility is a marker of a care in movement, […] body and world give themselves to one another in order to move back and separate. 128
…the cultivation of place "localizes caring," and this suggests an intimate connection between care and place, one that would be rooted in the body. 128
…the topo-logic of a body that senses depth is not merely a topology of functional envelopment but of caring in movement, care in place. 128
...the moving engagement with the world implies earth, something that supports habitual body-world movement. 149
Facing is […] an index of responsibility and care in the deep grammar of our facing bodies. 154
…the topology of residing, and our sens of orientation via our bodies, open into an ethical dimension, and so too does our sense of space. 154
...our basic concerns - sexual, political, ethical, and so on - are often put in terms of orientation. 158
The deep grammar of the body surfaces in our words. 158
Metaphors of depth, solidity, volume, and expansiveness are used to describe someone’s being, whereas metaphors of orientation are used to describe their relation to their being in the world… 158
Our sens of orientation thus involves a moving care for place in the face of others […] habitat is the topic of ethology. 158
[The] ethical dimension of lived space [comes from] turning to developmental psychology and studying how our sens of space develops through moving and growing, by showing how care in movement is integral to development and facing others... 158
…the topology of concern [is] a link between posture, concern an emotion, over the course of development. 159
…the developmental crossing of the body and the social world [is] not simply kinetic, but involves emotional care in movement. 172
…our sense of space sways with changes in our emotional, social, moving, and postural relation to the world. 173
The ethical and spatial cannot be pried apart [they] encircle one another… 176
…ethical relation is textured as a doubled openness: it is an openness to the other through an openness to movement, place, the social, nature. 176
Our articulation of a sense of space is thus a movement away from death, a movement that at once faces death as a limit and turns that limit into something else… 177
…the sense of space […] belongs to a moving being who crosses limits and in doing so has a sense of space that always implicitly signals the limit of death, signals something that is there before us that can be neither encompassed nor sealed off. 178
If we feel death in our hand touching the bench, we also feel life in the hand of the other… 178
Merleau-Ponty detects a circuit of care in the phenomenon of double touch… 178
…insights... into the relation between spatial perception, movement, place, emotion, posture, and development […] suggest specific approaches to this relation that would add to existing investigations. 178
Our sense of space is the living sense that we take away from our movement in place… 179
...place is movement moved, movement spread out and traced in the texture of things. 180
In place the moving sens of living, building, growing, verges toward non-sens by being sedimented, traced, and spread out in unmoving things. 180
Lived space is the sens we make of our movement in place, lived space is the sens of place reanimated in our movement. 180
What we detect in lived space is a deeper complicity between space and the moving body. Lived space is what appears to us when we move in place, the sense we take away from place in moving through it. But this suggests that there is perhaps a different sense of space. When we move through place, we encounter a space sensed by our movement, that is, given sense by our articulating movement. When we do not merely move through place, but move in it, dwell in it, perhaps place senses our movement, that is, place gives our movement a sense, direction, in the way that a partially completed puzzle gives pieces a sense that helps us fit them into place. When we dwell in a place we connect with it in a different way, and that connection makes us re-sense our sense of space. I call space of this sort dwelling space, to contrast it with lived space. We could probably also speak of habitual spaces, spaces whose sense depends on habitual movement patterns that we carry with us, habitual patterns insensitive to places we are in. And we might also distinguish space, a growing sense of space that arises when we are learning to navigate new sorts of places, or to first learn how to move in place. 181
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my observation ultimately – place is embedded within the limits that bound it and beyond which it cannot go – a beyond that marks a crossing point between the knowable and the unknowable – a border that both contains and threatens – defines and defies – a perpetual stand-off, marked with tension and uncertainty – place and space are polarities marking the finite and the infinite that interlace the fundamentals of living and the tension point between life and death, bounded and unbounded, animate and inanimate, real and imaginary – the neutrality, indifference, and unfriendliness of ‘earth/nature’ that culture tries to keep at bay – polarity sits at the core of movement – what assists and what opposes it? – a freedom bounded
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