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i dont know if this is still directly relevant, but for some reason i am interested in playing around with this idea and so will put it here.
with regard to art's post above:
a. freedom is not a matter of the absence of constraints---without constraints there is no form and without the possibility of form, there is no coherence.
freedom lay in the relations you adopt to constraints.
so freedom is a relation rather than a state.
so one *is* not either free or not free: one can be simultaneously both depending on the kind of relation to constraints that shapes your interaction with them.
b. say that "body image" is a construct assembled inductively that stands in for the bodily schemata that link dimensions of intentional action in the context of recursive statements--in other words, body image would be formalized when you tried to generate an account of it, either explicitly (via statements that involve the operation directly--"i am thinking of the relation of activity pattern x to a regulative image..." which seems unlikely as a sentence, doesnt it?) or implicitly (any recursive act, any act that involves working out a fit between stuff that you do with or to your body and an image that might explain or condition it)---so in a way there is no "body image" but rather a series of dispositions that shape your relation to your body (which is a type of interaction) that you can treat as if it were a discrete image in particular contexts.
where do these dispositions come from? it seems reasonable that if you were to abstract them and treat them as a discrete assemblage (which they aren't) they'd probably look like a tunnel that would lead you into your past and which would eventually lead you to early childhood and not so much what you parents did or did not do, but more to your reactions to what your parents did or did not do--the confusing thing about this idea is that it would not be reducable to any set of discrete actions by the parental units, but more to them as framing conditions for the process of socialization. so when i wondered above about whether body image was some "lizard brain" function, what i meant was that it leans on dispositions that are probably shaped quite early on in the process and so operate at a level that is mostly unconscious.
what i wonder about is the extent to which media contexts shape not only the content but the form of mental imagery. so if you grew up around television, you adapt features of the medium in the staging of mental operations: so memory can be modelled on television, so dreaming involves images which are brought into resolution across television as a model, that kind of thing. if there is such a relation, then these images that define the beautiful in tvland would have a strange set of relations to images that you might use to think about or orient your own actions.
in other words, i agree with the idea that we are inside a particular type of cultural landscape and that it is not escapable because it IS our frame of reference. but i wonder about how this is true more than about the fact of it. and i wonder about what options that opens up (and forecloses) for thinking about political questions--and freedom is a political matter, not a dispositional one if you understand these dispositions as subjective.
or something.
i wonder if this makes sense.
posting it anyway.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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