Abstract
Actions involve bodily and experiential processes and more complex processes, including intention formation, that contribute to the formation of a sense of agency and the construction of self-narratives. We can learn a lot about action by looking at the phenomenology of expert performance, which allows us to see the complex meshing of contributing factors that make performance what it is. In this chapter we consider a set of debates that begin with Dreyfus’s analysis of embodied coping. The significance of situated actions, however, goes beyond the details of motor control and intention formation. We make sense of actions in a narrative framework that allows for evaluation and an understanding of our everyday personal and interpersonal lives.
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Notes
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For example, the individual performer affectively resonates with and through the music. Playing the musical notes initiates a resonance between the sounds one creates and the musical sounds in the environment made by other musicians. This is clear in the case of jazz improvisation. ‘This resonance may be driven by (1) consciously anticipated, and sometimes planned, notes and/or (2) feedback from awareness of the sounds that are actually created during performance. On one hand, as the music unfolds, the performance environment is constituted as a niche of musical affordances. The sounds that a musician produces could thus successfully or unsuccessfully resonate with the affordances in the environment. On the other hand, anticipatory processes and any short-term planning involved while playing suggest intra-organism resonant loops constantly underlying the performance’ (Ryan & Gallagher, 2020).
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Gallagher, S. (2022). Action, Performance, and Narrative. In: Phenomenology. Palgrave Philosophy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11586-8_8
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