Body Memory and Affectivity

BODY MEMORY AND
AFFECTIVITY
Giovanna Colombetti
Department of Sociology,
Philosophy and
Anthropology
University of Exeter

MY BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH
- Philosophy of cognitive science
- ‘4E cognition’: cognition is embodied, embedded, enactive,
extended
- ‘Cognition is not all in the head’ = the physical basis of
cognition is not just the brain

MY BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH
- My focus: affectivity/affect (emotions, moods, feelings, …):
- Are affective episodes ‘in the head’? Can we think of them as
embodied, enactive, etc.?
- Method: philosophy of cognitive science and emotion,
phenomenology, affective science (psychology, neuroscience)

PLAN OF MY TALK
(1) The notion of ‘body memory’
(2) The relation between body memory and affectivity
Main aim: invite you to think of ‘memory’ in a (perhaps) new
way, and to see its close link to affectivity

- Memory is not just the capacity to explicitly recall
the past
- Memories can also be implicitly ‘engrained’ in our
present bodily skills and actions
- Philosophical roots:
Bergson (1896):
1) souvenir-image: an imagistic form of memory
2) mémoire habitude (habit-memory): the act of
remembering via repetition (e.g., learning by rota;
learning sensorimotor skills such as playing an
instrument)
Merleau-Ponty (1945): the habitual body
2012

MERLEAU-PONTY
I am a bodily being
I can
I am a thinking thing
I think

MERLEAU-PONTY
- The body that I am is not a thing (an inanimate object), but a
subject
(Körper vs Leib)
- The body that I am is subject to a process of habituation
- This process of habituation happens through sedimentation

HABITUATION
Best illustrated by the learning
of skills such as…:
Skills are performed ‘spontaneously’
or ‘pre-reflectively’;
no need for continuous continuous
reflection
or self-observation

SEDIMENTATION
- Habituation happens through
sedimentation:
- The body gradually accumulates
skills
- My bodily skills, at any time, are
the product of my body’s
‘layered’ past

THE BODY AND THE WORLD
- The lived body is also that ‘in front
of which’ the world ‘shows up’ in the
way it does
- E.g.: I experience the cup as
something I can grasp
- As my body changes, its relation to
the world changes too, and relatedly
my experience of the world in terms
of what I can do in it

THE BODY AND THE WORLD
E.g.: learning to climb:
1) One learns a set of bodily
skills
2) One also changes how one
perceives the world: a
previously impassable rock
face now looks climbable

IN SUM SO FAR
- My body is an ever-changing entity that also continuously
changes its relation to the lived world
- The body that I am now is the product of a long process of
sedimentation of skills, and of habits of acting and interacting
with the world
- So, my present body is itself a form of memory: by being as it
is (with its structure and skills), and by acting in the world as it
does, my body remembers what it has learnt, how it has
interacted with the world

ONE MORE: OBJECT-
INCORPORATION
14
Objects can be ‘taken into’ the
experience of one’s own body
The blind person’s cane is
experienced not as an
external tool, but as a part of
the body, as an organ of
perception

OBJECT-INCORPORATION
Relation to body memory?
The body habituates not just in the sense that it learns and
remembers to move in certain ways
It also integrates objects into itself
By taking an object into itself, the body remembers: it ‘retains’ a
certain relation to the object

BODY MEMORY AND
AFFECTIVITY
Part 2

AFFECTIVITY
- Affectivity, affect: the capacity to be affected; lack of
indifference
- A variety of affective states:
- Emotion / emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, envy,
pride, shame, …
- Moods: depression, anxiety, irritability, feeling down/up,
feeling elated, relieved, discouraged, ...
- Motivational states: hunger, thirst, lust, pain ...

BODY MEMORY AND AFFECTIVITY:
A MULTIFACETED RELATION
- No simple relation between these phenomena
- Body memory itself is affective, and at least certain aspects of
affectivity involve body memory
- Some sparse ideas, at a glance:
1) Expressions of emotions and moods are a form of body
memory
2) The body remembers pain and trauma
3) The habitual body is normative
4) Objects can be ‘affectively incorporated’ into the habitual
body

(1) EXPRESSION OF EMOTION
These expressions are forms of body memory
They are the outcome of a process of sedimentation of various
expressive habits:
- from early expressions (shaped by evolution, possibly
pancultural) to those we develop in the course of our lifetime
We develop personal affective styles

(2) PAIN AND TRAUMA
- ‘Pain memory’ and ‘traumatic memory’ (Fuchs 2012): the body
can retain a memory of traumatic experiences (panic and pain
re-enacted in situations related to the originally traumatic one)
- Important: not simply a set of “dispositions”
- Existential dimension:
-trauma affects how the person experiences the world and the
possibilities of action the world offers (“I can”)
-a pervasive sense of vulnerability, a sense of the world as
threatening
- A traumatized person may not always ‘re-enact’ episodes of
panic or pain, but her/his experience of the world has changed

(3) NORMATIVITY
- Our bodily habits are normative: they exhibit
values that have been engrained, via more or less
explicit rules, into our ways of acting and feeling
-The acquisition of bodily habits is affectively
moulded (via encouragement, scolding,
mimicry…)
- We gradually develop a way of doing things and
a sense of the right/wrong way of doing things

(4) AFFECTIVE INCORPORATION OF
OBJECTS
- Back to the phenomenon of ‘object
incorporation’
- The object is experienced as part of one’s
own body
(1) Incorporated objects become particularly salient and valued as
that ‘through which’ we can have certain experiences of the world;
- We come to care about them as objects that have become part of
our subjective, experiencing self

OBJECTS
(2) Objects can also be incorporated into our practices of
affective self-regulation
“Expressive incorporation”; “physiological incorporation”

Relation to body memory?
- The body acquires a certain
habitual relation to an object,
and a certain habitual way of
feeling when ‘coupled’ with this
object
- When the object is not present,
the body seeks to re-establish its
relation to it
- There is thus a memory,
engrained in the body, of a
certain affective relation with an
OBJECTS

THE PICTURE, IN SUM
- The overall picture is that we are not simply biological
entities that grow and change with age, and who experience
feelings (of pain, pleasure, emotions, etc.)
- We are sedimented lived bodies, and as such the ever-
changing product of our activities and interactions with the
world
- How we behave, feel and relate to the world now is the
result of this process of sedimentation
- This is a form of memory - a body memory that is itself
thoroughly affective (normative), and that also characterizes
our affective (emotional, motivational) ways of being in the
world

Body Memory and Affectivity

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