Overview
your gonna write a short paragraph and you need to explain and critically analyze this concept in easy words, do not use difficult words to explain. make it easy and simple to understand and do not use ai I will make you redo it.
Perception as Participation
If we wish to choose a single term to characterize the event of perception, as it is disclosed by phenomenological attention, we may borrow the term “participation,” used by the early French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. The brilliant forerunner of today’s “cognitive” and “symbolic” schools of anthropology, Lévy-Bruhl used the word “participation” to characterize the animistic logic of indigenous, oral peoples—for whom ostensibly “inanimate” objects like stones or mountains are often thought to be alive, for whom certain names, spoken aloud, may be felt to influence at a distance the things or beings that they name, for whom particular plants, particular animals, particular places and persons and powers may all be felt to participate in one another’s existence,
influencing each other and being influenced in turn.18 For Lévy-Bruhl participation was thus a perceived relation between diverse phenomena; Merleau-
Ponty’s work, however, suggests that participation is a defining attribute of perception itself. By asserting that perception, phenomenologically considered, is inherently participatory, we mean that perception always involves, at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives. Prior to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontaneous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists.
[Image unavailable: page21image65147360]
SOME INSIGHT INTO THE PARTICIPATORY NATURE OF PERCEPTION may be gleaned by considering the craft of the sleight-of-hand magician. For the conjuror depends upon this active participation between the body and the world for the creation of his magic. Working, for instance, with a silver dollar, he uses his sleights to enhance the animation of the object, generating ambiguous gaps and lacunae in the visible trajectory of the coin. The spectators’ eyes, already drawn by the coin’s fluid dance across the magician’s fingers, spontaneously fill in those gaps with impossible events, and it is this spontaneous involvement of the spectators’ own senses that enables the coin to vanish and reappear, or to pass through the magician’s hand.
After flourishing a silver dollar in my right hand, for example, spinning it a few times to catch the audience’s attention, I may suddenly hide that coin behind the hand, clipping it between two fingers so that it is no longer visible to their gaze. If, an instant later, I reach into the air on the other side of my body with my left hand, and bring into view another silver dollar that had been clipped behind that hand, the audience will commonly perceive something quite wondrous. They will not perceive that one coin has been momentarily hidden while a wholly different coin, in another place, has been brought out of hiding, although this would surely be the most obvious and rational interpretation. Rather, they will perceive that a single coin, having vanished from my right hand, has traveled invisibly through the air and reappeared in my left hand! For the perceiving body does not calculate logical probabilities; it gregariously participates in the activity of the world, lending its imagination to things in order to see them more fully. The invisible journey of the coin is contributed, quite spontaneously, by the promiscuous creativity of the senses. The magician induces us to assist in the metamorphosis of his objects, and then startles us with what we ourselves have created!
From the magician’s, or the phenomenologist’s, perspective, that which we call imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses themselves; imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so often assume) but is rather the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible. And yet such sensory anticipations and projections are not arbitrary; they regularly respond to suggestions offered by the sensible itself. The magician, for instance, may make the magic palpable for the audience by following the invisible coin’s journey with the focus of his own eyes, and by imaginatively “feeling” the coin depart from the one hand and arrive in the palm of the other; the audience’s senses, responding to subtle shifts in the magician’s body as well as to the coin, will then find the effect irresistible. In other words, it is when the magician lets himself be captured by the magic that his audience will be most willing to join him.
Of course, there are those few who simply will not see any magic, either at a performance or in the world at large; armored with countless explanations and analyses, they “see” only how the trick must have been accomplished. Commonly, they will claim to have “caught sight of the wires,” or to have seen me clandestinely “throw the coin into the other hand” although I myself have done no such thing. Encouraged by a cultural discourse that disdains the unpredictable and puts a premium on detached objectivity, such persons attempt to halt the participation of their senses in the phenomenon. Yet they can do so only by imaginatively projecting other phenomena (wires, or threads, or mirrors), or by looking away.
In truth, since the act of perception is always open-ended and unfinished, we are never wholly locked into any particular instance of participation. As the spectator can turn away from the magician’s magic, we are always somewhat free to break our participation with any particular phenomenon. It is thus that, caught up in contemplation of a blade of grass, I may nevertheless shift my attention to the grove of trees nearby, or my focus may suddenly be usurped by a fly that lands upon my nose. Similarly, we may readily break our fascination with a television commercial in order to notice how it plays upon our emotions and our desires. But we suspend this participation only on behalf of other participations already going on—with the other persons in the room, with
the hard and uncomfortable chair on which we sit, with our own thoughts and analyses. We always retain the ability to alter or suspend any particular instance of participation. Yet we can never suspend the flux of participation itself.