Volume 5, Issue Part 2, 2007
Selected Essays from North America Part 2
Richard L. Lanigan
Pages 361-387
The Phenomenology of Embodiment in Communicology
Embodiment is a problematic at the center of philosophic and scientific inquiry where issues of ontology and methodology function in apposition to one another in the study of the human mind and body in a socio-cultural world. A comparison is made between Jakobson’s theory of human communication and the logics offered by Merleau-Ponty and Peirce for analyzing the conjunction of semiotics and phenomenology where the thematic is embodied human conscious experience. In the tradition of Merleau-Ponty and Peirce, the validity and reliability of the eidetic analysis is illustrated empirically using the example of vasospasm (impaired motor muscle function with attending sympathetic stimulation) in the medical research of Jurgen Ruesch. Contextual reference is made to the work of Bateson, Bourdieu, Eco, Erikson, Foucault, Kristeva, and Sapir.