Managing the Attention of the Audience

Abstract

It is not consciousness but bodies that create the unity of the world. My body both sees and hears, smells and tastes, touches and feels, and creates the world as one world that is both visible and audible and tangible etc., and all at the same time. It is my body that creates the world as an object of perception. However, as Leder (discussed in the previous chapter) remarks, intentionally directed outwards to the world, my bodily investment in this world easily escapes my attention. My body is the blind spot in my experiences, the blind spot that is constitutive of a point of view or ‘I’ inside this world as it is laid out for me by my senses. The senses provide me with information about the world (including my own body), they are my connection to the world. Much more, they produce the world for me, including a sense of self in relation to what I perceive, and yet I tend to experience what I feel, see, hear, smell as my perceptions, that is, as perceptions of a ‘me’ as the origin of perception, a ‘me’ that uses the senses as ‘window to the world’ rather than being itself the product of sense perception. Like the blind spot in perspective, these enabling as well as constraining perceptual capacities of my body need to go unnoticed in order to experience myself as an ‘I’ amidst a world that is not the product of my acts of perception but their reason.