The Godfather is on in the background,

and the horse's head is under the sheets. A mixed response I have to the scene: someone was clever enough to think up the head as a very personal and fitting response within the lives of the movie -- and how seriously frightening and disgusting it would be to wake up within those bloody sheets.

Does that distinction parallel the distinction Richard Shusterman makes in Performing Live between "somatic practices of representation" and "the somatics of experience"?

Per Shusterman, "representational somaesthetics emphasizes the body's external appearance while experiential disciplines focus not on how the body looks from the outside but on the aesthetic quality of its experience." The first chapter of the book is Shusterman's argument that the notion of aesthetic experience has lost "power and interest" since Dewey: with Dewey, Shusterman claims, aesthetic experience was a valued experience of vivid sensuous/emotional/cognitive integration; Shusterman argues that, as analytic philosophers of art have written about aesthetic experience since then, however, Dewey's "transformational notion of aesthetic experience has been gradually replaced by a purely descriptive, semantic one whose chief purpose is to explain and thus support the established demarcation of art from other domains." Shusterman wants to be back, to some extent, with Dewey, to have complex bodily experiences merged through aesthetic experience: "By rethinking art in terms of aesthetic experience [instead of in terms of art works in museums], Dewey hoped we could radically enlarge and democratize the domain of art, integrating it more fully into the real world, which would be greatly improved by the pursuit of such manifold arts of living."

For there to be that reinvigoration of such experiences, however, there has to be a reinvigoration of (the study of and within) bodies. The notion of the aesthetic has to be moved from assuming a primarily visual basis and from assuming a primarily consumptive function: these underlie the representational kind of aesthetics that Shusterman places against the experiential kind. Shusterman doesn't discuss the current emphasis on visuality and consumptive practices much, but it's implied in what he writes about experiential somaesthetics. Experiential somaesthetics is about remembering bodies as media, in the sense that they -- like other media -- are inseparably wound into our constructions of what counts as real; bodies are therefore worthy of care and cultivation, so that their experiences are available for clarification, exploration, understanding.

I need to consider all this against Hansen's work in Bodies in Code, which begins with a focused argument (bringing Steigler together with some Deleuze) that we need practices that help us shift from understanding -- and using -- bodies as observational to bodies as operational. Hansen argues for digital artworks that address bodies on more sensuous levels than the visual. I also need to consider this all against the old arguments that start at least with McLuhan (and wind their way through Jay et al) about the poverty of the visual (at least as it has been deployed in the West).

But that is all for pleasure later. For now, Shusterman's distinction between representation and experiential aesthetics is useful for me (as are the further distinctions among performative and practical somaesthetics). My response to the horse's head ties in with what Shusterman acknowledges, that the representational and experiential feed back and forth into each other: what I see on screen results in feelings, certainly, but what Shusterman wants to encourage is more alertness to those feelings and to their causes and effects. Within this, though, how does one discuss the distinction between the more cognitive response I have to the formal/narrative aspects of the movie and the visceral response to the gore? This is a distinction whose separations and overlaps are so little addressed (to my knowledge) in the two camps that often address aesthetic issues now, that of cultural studies (which speaks of the content of representations) and that of visual literacy and visual composition studies (which speak of visceral responses to formal arrangements). I need to consider more where Burke comes down between these, and I need to return to someone like Williamson's semiotic take on advertising.

But now we are sleeping with the fishes, so it is perhaps time to let this little mess of thoughts rest and bubble.