Feeling Space: the place between us.

What is feeling? Where is it situated within us? Is it a product of our survival instincts or a condition of habit and socialisation? I have been struggling to pin down my question for some time and this idea of feeling seems to be at the crux of the matter. My reading so far has taken me into anthropological study of space and place, ideas of the ‘lived body’ experience, embodied space and the interaction between inside and outside.

I am interested in the physical nature of feeling and how it is expressed through the body. Whether this physical formation of feeling can be interpreted universally or is distinct to culture, climate, social conditioning. Whether feeling is a unique facet of human nature? In particular, the concept of empathy and our ability or inability for mutual understanding. How has our physical language developed, is it responsive or conditioned, universal or culturally defined?

“The space occupied by the body and perception and experience of that space, contracts and expands in relationship to a person’s emotions and state of mind, sense of self, social relations and cultural predisposition.” Sondra Horton Fraleigh

Body language is the interface between internal and external space. Our internal space affects how we view external space and vice versa. I am looking at Situationist ‘deriver’ and notions of ‘inscribed space’ which focus on how various scholars define the fundamental relationship between humans and the environment they occupy, implying that humans ‘write’ in an enduring way their presence on their surroundings. That we map space through our lived body experience, through our desires and needs and that the landscapes we inhabit also become part of our internal world and affect our physicality.

“People are influenced by the environment that surrounds them and take qualities of that environment into themselves.” ‘The Anthropology of space+ place: Locating culture.’

The Communicating Body:

INSIDE ------ OUTSIDE ------- INSIDE

PERFORMER -------- SPACE -------- AUDIENCE

FEELING ------BODY ------SPACE ------BODY/FEELING - FEELING/BODY


Where is feeling/ emotion sighted? What is its relationship to memory? The physical sensation and the meaning we place in that sensation become inseparable, emotion is sensation although we interpret it. Are the physical signs that we use to express these sensations universal or are they constructed signs particular to culture and creed. Are there still remnants of our primitive instinctive self within our physical language, subtle movements that we perceive in the unconscious mind, but which go unnamed?

In turn we could question the idea of a ‘universal communicating body’ completely. We relate to each other through our own body experience so how is this line of communication affected by gender, age, size and physical ability? What about the blind or the partially sighted? How is feeling communicated and felt? How closely linked is the physical self to our sense of identity? Notions of feeling, what they mean, and their function within society have developed through culture both verbally and physically but after this process how do we start to re-interpret? How far can we then trust that what we think we feel is true?