J. Scott Jordan - Böcker

This book draws inspiration from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of intercorporeality to offer a new, multidisciplinary perspective on the body. By drawing attention to the body's ability to simultaneously sense and be sensed, Merleau-Ponty transcends the object-subject divide and describes how bodies are about, into, and within other bodies. Such inherent relationality constitutes the essence of intercorporeality, and the chapters in this book examine such relationality from a host of diverse perspectives. The book begins with an introductory chapter in which the editors review the current research on bodily interaction, and introduce the notion of intercorporeality as a potentially integrative framework. The first section then offers four chapters devoted to clarifying theoretical and developmental perspectives on intercorporeality. Section 2 contains three chapters that provide insight on intercorporeality from evolutionary, historical, and cross-sectional perspectives. In Section 3, four chapters examine the intercorporeal nature of meaning-making during human interaction. Section 4 then presents three chapters that explore the intercorporeal nature of multi-agent interactions and the role that non-animate bodies (i.e., objects) play in such interaction. Throughout all the chapters, the authors work to integrate research in their specific discipline into the larger, transdisciplinary notion of intercorporeality. This collection provides an indisputably unique perspective on bodies-in-interaction, while simultaneously offering an interdisciplinary way forward in contemporary scholarship on bodies, meaning, and interaction.

This book takes as a starting point, John Dewey's article, The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, in which Dewey was calling for, in short, the utilisation of systems theories within psychology, theories of behaviour that capture its nature as a vastly-complex dynamic coordination of nested coordinations. This line of research was neglected as American psychology migrated towards behaviourism, where perception came to be thought of as being both a neural response to an external stimulus and a mediating neural stimulus leading to, or causing a muscular response. As such, perception becomes a question of how it is the perceiver creates neural representations of the physical world. Gestalt psychology, on the other hand, focused on perception itself, utilising the term Phenomenological Field; a term that elegantly nests perception and the organism within their respective, as well as relative, levels of organisation. With the development of servo-mechanisms during the second world war, systems theory began to take on momentum within psychology, and then in the 1970s William T Powers brought the notion of servo-control to perception in his book, Behavior: The Control of Perception. Since then, scientists have come to see nature not as linear chain of contingent cause-effect relationships, but rather, as a non linear, unpredictable nesting of self referential, emergent coordinations, best described as Chaos theory. The implications for perception are astounding, while maintaining the double-aspect nature of perception espoused by the Gestalt psychologists. In short, system theories model perception within the context of a functioning organism, so that objects of experience come to be seen as scale-dependent, psychophysically-neutral, phenomenological transformations of energy structures, the dynamics of which are the result of evolution, and therefore, a priori to the individual case. This a priori, homological unity among brain perception and world is revealed through the use of systems theories and represents the thrust of this book. All the authors are applying some sort of systems theory to the psychology of perception. However, unlike Dewey we have close to a century of technology we can bring to bear upon the issue. This book should be seen as a collection of such efforts.

As culture looks more and more to science and asks, "What are we?", one encounters an increasing number of deflationary stories about important phenomena such as meaning, choice, and self. Reality is inherently physical and meaningless, choice is an illusion caused by the brain, and the self is really nothing more than a physical brain process. Although some believe such negativity follows logically from science, this book argues that this reactivity reflects a philosophical commitment to a reductive form of naturalism that emerged during the Enlightenment's 17th-19th century struggle with supernaturally inspired worldviews.As a contemporary alternative, Wild Systems Theory (WST) presents a scientifically inspired philosophy that is consistent with non-reductive forms of naturalism that emerged during this same period. These non-reductive narratives were consistent with cultural beliefs in a meaningful reality, the necessity of choice in personhood, and the non-reducibility of the self to the physical brain. WST revitalizes these views and reconciles scientific and cultural narratives by first asserting that all of reality is inherently interrelated. Meaning, therefore, is this ubiquitous web of interrelations, choice is the means by which we navigate it, and selves are the patterns of interrelations we embody and manage over the course of our lives. Because such meaningful selves emerge step by step out of the trajectory of lived life, they are story-like; that is, they are narratives. And because these narratives always reflect a constellation of choices and chance, they are wild. In short, we are wild narratives.