Paving the Way for Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind in Organizational Communication Studies

The body is a sense-based medium that creates and interprets organizations. Bodies create organization. An aesthetic theory of organizational communication reveals the significance of the body to the organization. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of aesthetics offers a theory of aesthetic organizational communication that is yet to be developed. Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic essay on painting, Eye and Mind, describes the body as the medium through which painters turn the world into painting. His philosophy of painting builds bridges between aesthetics, the body, and organizational communication. In chapter one, four theories of organizational communication are described: communication constitutes organization (CCO), text/interpreter, ventriloquism, and sensemaking. The chapter envisions each theory through an embodied understanding of organizational communication. The lived body experiences organizational communication, texts, human and non-human dynamics, and non-rational ways of knowing through sense. Chapter two discusses, aesthetic organizing, a theory developed in the 1990’s as a response to the predominant rational, cognitive, and analytic models used to understand and theorize organizations. Aesthetics engages senses and therefore our body. Aesthetics integrates cognitive and intuitive ways of knowing. Aesthetic organizing is a holistic way to interpret communication in organizations and reflexively with the body as the research instrument for organizational members, managers, leaders, and consultants. Aesthetic is a way of knowing. Chapter three discusses affective atmospheres. Human and non human affects make an atmospheres. These atmospheres offer a way to interpret texts, objects, languages, and discourses simultaneously intertwined within organizational bodies. Organizations are atmospheres co-created through affective bodies. The invisible structures of atmospheres and affect are made visible by aesthetics. Like architecture, atmospheres and affect are built environments accessible only by sense. Chapter five discusses Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of painting. According to Merleau-Ponty, the task of a painter is to make visible the invisible. His ontology of painting in Eye and Minddescribes the painter’s method of interrogating the world. It is a method of understanding that does not abstract or manipulate the subjects it wishes to study. Body, world, and sense are all intertwined for the painter. Chapter six discusses Wendelin Küpers (2015) book, Phenomenology of the Embodied Organization, which is the sole monograph that brings Merleau-Ponty into organizational theory and practice. In this monograph, Küpers applies Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and ontology by braiding organizations, aesthetics, and bodies. Küpers claims that intertwinement, reversibility, and chiasm operate in organizations because bodies co-create organized contexts. The final chapter, discusses organizational communication as tactile, sense, and tacit embodiment. To teach business communication courses on organizational theory by corporeal experiences, e.g. pottery or painting, students develop a tactile understanding of organizational communication and embodied leadership

Corseto: A Kinesthetic Garment for Designing, Composing for, and Experiencing an Intersubjective Haptic Voice

We present a novel intercorporeal experience - an intersubjective haptic voice. Through an autobiographical design inquiry, based on singing techniques from the classical opera tradition, we created Corsetto, a kinesthetic garment for transferring somatic reminiscents of vocal experience from an expert singer to a listener. We then composed haptic gestures enacted in the Corsetto, emulating upper-body movements of the live singer performing a piece by Morton Feldman named Three Voices. The gestures in the Corsetto added a haptics-based \u27fourth voice\u27 to the immersive opera performance. Finally, we invited audiences who were asked to wear Corsetto during live performances. Afterwards they engaged in micro-phenomenological interviews. The analysis revealed how the Corsetto managed to bridge inner and outer bodily sensations, creating a feeling of a shared intercorporeal experience, dissolving boundaries between listener, singer and performance. We propose that \u27intersubjective haptics\u27 can be a generative medium not only for singing performances, but other possible intersubjective experiences

Agency is molecular: moved by being moved to moving or co-constitution in intra-active knowledge production

This practice-based PhD aims to intertwine theoretical research and artistic practice on the basis of knowledge production by conceptually thinking through motion, with movement informing the methodological counterpart in performative research settings. I argue that movement and the concept of motion, in their immanent potential for in/determinancy, transport possibilities of transversality that have been neglected in western Modernity. Both offer the means of moving beyond the bifurcated exceptionalism of Modernity's epistemology. The project interrogates its own positioning from within by affirming embodied ways of knowing, which are marginalised within the rationalised epistemes in European Universalisms (Wallerstein). In doing so it also takes a stand against appropriation. From a feminist position, new materialism's situatedness (Haraway) and relational objectivity (Barad) are particularly suitable tools for a shift from within. The apparatus definitions of Agential Realism gather insights through agential cuts that provide a transient exteriority-within, allowing modifying the bounds of knowing from within. The primary chapters examine the impact of practicing through theory and coalesce into a final experiment that reverses the process. Applied to the path of thoughts, movement's induction of changes to matter initiates an essential process of creating space for delinking (Mignolo/Walsh) and unlearning (Singh). The foundation of both practice- and theory-based approaches is Barad's notion of intra-active doing-being, which provides an understanding of agential intertwinement by approaching matter through and with interferences. In experiments, electronic devices were set to receive techno-sound-reverberations as diffractional concerns (noise), that transposed mattering (meaning) from co-constitutional forms. These 'voices', enacted in material-discursive experiments of various entangled engagements in different molecular matterings (body-mind, nature-culture, non-human-human, other-self) are typically ignored, denied, or misunderstood by the notorious bifurcation of the western metaphysical matrix (Jackson). Listening to matter’s iterative performativity (Barad) disclosed uneven levels of capacity (Wilderson) within such non-interrogated generalisations as the flattening to 'we' of the Anthropocene discourse. This awareness of interferential reverberations demands a multidirectional pluriverse of capabilities, which compromises any one-world (Law) exceptionality

The Materiality of Text and Body in Painting and Darkroom Processes: An Investigation through Practice

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/567 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)This research study ennploys practice-based strategies through which material processes might be opened to new meaning in relation to the feminine. The purpose of the written research component is to track the material processes constituting a significant part of the research findings. Beginning with historical research into artistic and critical responses to Helen Frankenthaler's painting, Mountains and Sea, I argue that unacknowledged male desire distorted and consequently marginalised reception of her work. I then work with the painting processes innovated by Frankenthaler and relate these to a range of feminist ideas relating to the corporeal, especially those with origins in Irigaray's writings of the 1980s. The research involves three discrete bodies of work. The first, Inscriptions, explores the relation between visual processes and textual ideas. The second, Screen / Paintings, is a re-enactment of formalist decisions that attempts to recover the body in the work. The third, Photoworks, is an attempt to 'jam' vision whilst redirecting process through the unconscious and touch. Each body of work gave rise to a practice text. In these texts, ideas that informed or were triggered by making are unearthed. Material processes are understood as a reiteration of themes (or issues) in relation to the feminine. These include: the relation between text and the visual, corporeality in making, the interplay between conscious and unconscious processes, and control / uncontrol. These ideas are reformulated in each body of made work. My approach maps out a method of working that is non-predictive and deliberately situated on the margins of control

THE VARIETIES OF USER EXPERIENCE BRIDGING EMBODIED METHODOLOGIES FROM SOMATICS AND PERFORMANCE TO HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION

Embodied Interaction continues to gain significance within the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Its growing recognition and value is evidenced in part by a remarkable increase in systems design and publication focusing on various aspects of Embodiment. The enduring need to interact through experience has spawned a variety of interdisciplinary bridging strategies in the hope of gaining deeper understanding of human experience. Along with phenomenology, cognitive science, psychology and the arts, recent interdisciplinary contributions to HCI include the knowledge-rich domains of Somatics and Performance that carry long-standing traditions of embodied practice. The common ground between HCI and the fields of Somatics and Performance is based on the need to understand and model human experience. Yet, Somatics and Performance differ from normative HCI in their epistemological frameworks of embodiment. This is particularly evident in their histories of knowledge construction and representation. The contributions of Somatics and Performance to the history of embodiment are not yet fully understood within HCI. Differing epistemologies and their resulting approaches to experience identify an under-theorized area of research and an opportunity to develop a richer knowledge and practice base. This is examined by comparing theories and practices of embodied experience between HCI and Somatics (Performance) and analyzing influences, values and assumptions underlying epistemological frameworks. The analysis results in a set of design strategies based in embodied practices within Somatics and Performance. The subsequent application of these strategies is examined through a series of interactive art installations that employ embodied interaction as a central expression of technology. Case Studies provide evidence in the form of rigorously documented design processes that illustrate these strategies. This research exemplifies 'Research through Art' applied in the context of experience design for tangible, wearable and social interaction