Notes
287 introduction. circumnavigation: world/listening/Dwelling 1. Even the notion of art, laden with our long history of aesthetics, could never have been theirs. Indeed, the “art” label also blocks access to the rhetorical dimension of these artifacts, although again, ancient peoples would not have understood rhetoric as we do. 2. A large number of illustrations from Lascaux, with accompanying explanatory text, can be seen at http://www.american-buddha.com/lascaux.3.htm. This website includes maps that are useful in conceptualizing how and why various depictions were placed within the caves, which contain thousands of paintings. Also, it has been noted that many images seem to have extra lines in them of unknown purpose. However, it has been proposed that these extra lines convey a sense of cinematic motion when flickering light is passed quickly over the image. A visual example of the phenomenon is available at http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/ european_cave_art_was_it_the_earliest_form_of_cinema.html. 3. Excellent pictures of the bird-headed shaman, seen reclining, as if dead or dreaming, next to a bird on a stick and a wounded bison, can be seen at http:// donsmaps.com/lascaux.html. This striking depiction, unforgettable even in the context of the thousands of other paintings in the cave, is inseparable from its location, notably the difficulty that would have been involved in lowering oneself several meters in a dark, hazardous cave to see it. Even today, ladders are necessary. 4. Although I cannot follow up on this here, note that Descartes posited a “matière subtile,” a kind of ether suffusing all space and penetrating all bodies, including human bodies. Spitzer rightly points out that this claim undermines an aspect of Cartesian dualism, since the surrounding ether’s vitalist penetration of the body dissolves the distinction between subject and object (Spitzer 34). 5. On this point, see Chien, who critiques Spitzer for overly elevating Greek periechon and setting other attempts to capture ambience within its orbit of warmth, harmony, and embracement. 6. Erik Davis describes how Bonham’s earth-moving drums for “When the Levee Breaks” were recorded: Bonham placed his kit in the Minstrel’s Gallery, a large, open n o T e s stone stairwell in Headley Grange, with two ambient Beyer M160 stereo mics strung up two landings above, ten and twenty feet overhead, their signals then fed through an echo unit. Davis goes on to comment that in this recording process, “the Grange itself awakens . . . and gives up its ghost to the magic circle of the reel-to-reel [tape]” (74). 7. Heidegger writes that we will not understand attunement “so long as we take man as something distinguished from material things by the fact that he has consciousness , that he is an animal endowed with reason. . . . This conception of man as a living being, a living being that in addition has reason, has led to a complete failure to recognize the essence of attunement. The awakening of attunement, and the attempt to broach this strange task, in the end coincide with the demand for a complete transformation of our conception of man” (FCM 62). 8. Aristotle himself never uses the phrase, although it is held to be a distillation of his views. Heidegger, however, claims that this distillation of human beings as the rational animal is a Roman interpretation and that Aristotle and the Greeks can be understood differently (P 68). 9. Heidegger is critiqued for neglecting the body (for instance, both Aho and Chanter do so), but he does to some extent address the body in the world in the Zollikon Seminars, particularly regarding the “bodying forth” of the body (86–87). 10. The term “thing theory” was coined by Bill Brown. For an overview, see Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001), a special issue focused on things and how to theorize them. While the term is far from stable, I use it here to loosely group a disparate body of scholarship on the power or agency of things. 11. Two of the more common ways of asking “How are you?” in German are “Wie befinden Sie sich?” and “Wie ist Ihre Befindlichkeit?” both of which more literally mean “How do you find yourself?” Hubert Dreyfus finds most of the translations of Befindlichkeit, including “state-of-mind,” “where-you’re-at-ness,” and others, to be unsatisfactory. “State-of-mind” is what Macquarrie and Robinson chose in their translation of Being and Time. Dreyfus ultimately settles on “affectedness” in order to convey the sense...
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