Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In the following paragraphs we will reflect on these approaches to environmental
perception with the help of Merleau-Ponty's (1989) and Ingold's (2000) analyses.
In the year 1945 Merleau-Ponty first published his analysis in which he relates the
theory of perception to a theory of the body. It is not only bodily functions that
enable perception, but the moving body in the environment perceiving with all its
senses and with the awareness of its own body moving through the place.
“Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spec-
tacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a
system. When I walk round my flat, the various aspects in which it presents itself to me
could not possibly appear as views of one and the same thing if I did not know that each
of them represents the flat seen from one spot or another, and if I were unaware of my
own movements, and of my body as retaining its identity through the stages of those
movements. I can of course take a mental bird's eye view of the flat, visualize it or draw
a plan of it on paper, but in that case too I could not grasp the unity of the object without
the mediation of bodily experience, for what I call a plan is only a more comprehensive
perspective: it is the flat 'seen from above', and the fact that I am able to draw together
in it all habitual perspectives is dependent on my knowing that one and the same em-
bodied subject can view successively from various positions.” (Merleau-Ponty 1989, p.
203)
The view from somewhere is contrasted with the view from nowhere, produced by
someone who has experienced different perspectives and who remembers these
(see also Ingold 2000, p. 191)
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. This idea has later been adopted by Gibson, who
interprets perception of the environment as a constant flow, and the moving body
as constituent of perception (1979). Gibson (2002) argued that the possibility of
moving around from one point of observation to the next differentiates space from
environment. “The points of geometrical space are abstract fictions, whereas the
points of observation in an environment are the positions where an observer might
be stationed.” (Gibson 2002, p. 85) Another notion, again picked up by Gibson, is
the affordances of environment and a person's attention to it. A person's attention
is directed towards certain things in its environment. People perceive the environ-
ment differently, because they received a “different education of attention” (In-
gold 2000, p. 190). Ingold illustrates this argument through the example of a nov-
ice hunter who “travels through the country with his mentors, and as he goes,
specific features are pointed out to him” (2000, p. 189), which (s)he would not
have noticed otherwise. Further, the landscape is constituted of past events and
people having dwelled in it, thereby leaving “something of themselves” (Ingold
2000, p. 189). “To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of re-
membrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal
image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is
itself pregnant with the past” (Ingold 2000, p. 189).
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Haraway (1991) criticises the common understanding of perception from a slightly dif-
ferent angle by stating that neutral vision is impossible, and interprets the adoption of a
god-eye perspective as masculinist domination. Haraway further argues that vision is
both bodily and socially shaped (see also Chapter 23 on sustaining waste in this topic).
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