Ep. 248: Racism and Policing (Al-Saji, Merleau-Ponty, et al) (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point sit on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 248 is, is there such a thing as subconscious racism? And if so, how could we possibly root it out and fix our policing problems? Our readings today were chapter one of the End of Policing by Alex Vitale from 2017, and our philosophical treatment is centered around Alia Al Saji's A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing from 2014.

Two of the sources Al Saji draws on for that account that we also looked at are Maurice Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of perception from 1945, specifically the section the Spatiality of One's Own Body and motility, and then Linda Martín Alcoff's Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self from 2006, specifically the sections Identity as Visible and Embodied and Perception. For more information, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, whose poor performance in sports as a child is explained by my movement being in fact thought about movement.

In Madison, Wisconsin.

1:01 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, embodied yet not reduced to my physical determination imagined as existing outside my place in culture and history.

1:08 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

1:12 Phil: And this is Phil Hopkins. I'm in Florence, Texas.

1:16 Mark: Welcome, Phil.

1:17 Dylan: Wow, this is our first dual Texan episode.

1:22 Seth: Is that true? No.

1:23 Dylan: Name another episode in which there was another Texan on the podcast besides you, Seth.

1:27 Phil: Well, we were just talking about. You had an episode on the Euthyphro with Matt Evans, right? He was probably back at UT when you did that.

1:34 Mark: Yes, we should say Phil was part of the entering class in the UTexas grad school when Wes and I came in. So all this stuff is going on in the news about policing. His was the first name I thought of, like, oh, we should figure out what contemporary philosophy is saying about this. And then, Phil, you actually teach a class, right, on embodied Percept, where you address this. Can you tell a little about. You're the one who picked these readings, more or less, right?

1:59 Phil: Yeah, I teach a class on the embodied self, and it's grounded in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception pretty solidly. We read Alcoff, we read Al-Saji in there, and we read some Bergson as well, and some other people. I think the reason you thought of me is that when I joined the department at ut, I had been a cop for about six years in a couple of different departments. And over the years, particularly most recently, it sort of dawned on me one day, hey, I used to do this. I now do a kind of critical theorizing about perception and practice, embodied practice, embodied perception, habits of perception. So why not think and perhaps write about this more directly, which is what I have been doing over the past year.

2:43 Mark: Excellent. Dylan and Seth, what did you think of all this stuff? Can you give us some opening thoughts?

2:48 Seth: I'm approaching this with some measure of caution and apprehension and excitement at the same time. Only because the Vitale that we read points to a lot of structural, sociological type things that I'm not sure we can address in the format that we have. So I'm hoping that what Phil will be capable of doing is helping us kind of bridge the gap. Because I don't want to speculate in an uninformed manner on reform of how the police function to oppressive white establishment without having a strong grounding in the facts that Vitale is referencing. But then, you know, leaping over to phenomenology. So I guess I'm still a little two minded about this. I'm not quite sure how to pull it all together for this conversation. So I'm hoping that to be guided.

3:36 Mark: Yeah, that was partly my fault that Phil suggested all this phenomenology stuff. And that's interesting. But you know, that could be part of just a general episode on racism. It's not, not really exactly related to policing. So Phil, not only were you a police officer, but you said you've done stuff more recently in what, advising the police department, doing some sort of analysis, right?

3:57 Phil: I guess so. Over the course of the same past year, the thinking I've been doing of developing, I guess what you might call a kind of critical policing theory has been deeply informed by some consultation that I've done. I've done work in explicitly undoing racism workshops in communities. And those workshops are often attended by people that work for various governmental agencies, including police departments. And currently I'm a consultant for Austin. As Seth will know, the city council unanimously passed Resolution 66 last year, the end of last year, which was a mandate to examine the way in which the Austin Police Department particularly trains right in the academy, trains cadets, but also operates in ways that perhaps entrench and amplify bias or prejudice or just racist policing.

The part that I'm working on is a review of the training material in the academy, specifically the videos that are used in training. And the goal there is to try to look at the way in which those videos embody, for lack of a better word, attitudes and perceptions or habits of perception that reinforce particular practices in the world rather than disrupt them and redirect them. And so that's been pretty interesting work. I've learned a lot revisiting the way police training happens now, because my experience was from very long ago.

5:24 Mark: Yeah. I had suggested, I put originally a query out on a Facebook group. We're doing this policing episode. What should we read? Got a lot of really good suggestions. But the first one, and I think repeated by a couple people, was this End of Policing book. And so to me, that seemed like, okay, well, for sure. Even though that's basically a work of sociology, Right. And it has a lot of sort of general policy proposals for what we could do. Instead of criminalizing everything, right? Criminalizing drugs, criminalizing immigration, criminalizing gang association.

Are there ways that we can discourage behaviors that we don't want to occur legally without merely saying, if you do them, we're going to charge you and throw you in jail? And we've seen, you know, the massive prison populations and the effect of that kind of invasive policing on communities and what that does to communities, and that's, you know, a lot of what's given rise to what people are protesting against. So I thought having that at least on the table, whether or not we can explicitly discuss it, I think we can discuss the overall ethical bent.

Right. The overall question of is there something fundamental to the attitude of policing, taken as we gotta control these masses like that, that is sort of the default attitude of police. Is there something that could be informed by this phenomenological work? So that was the connecting tissue. Dylan, did you have any opening thoughts about how to approach this whole thing?

6:43 Dylan: There's a bunch of different handles to get on in this. And what's interesting about the subject, I mean, if you just pick policing as a very broad category, you end up having questions of, well, of, let's call just broadly speaking, political philosophy, how bureaucracy and administration works, how the relationship between individuals and communities, how communities enforce or dominate subsections of their communities. Also the question of, you know, the relationships between minority groups and majority groups. And then you also have the individual parts of that, how people interact as individuals and with society.

And that has taken us down this road of embodied perception and phenomenology. And it's really interesting how they're related to one another because, you know, in the Merleau Ponty, he's really focused on trying to understand, you know, it's the phenomenology of perception. And when you read it, you feel like you're reading something in the continuity of epistemology with the Merleau Ponty you do, at least in the sections that we read, you wonder about how it cashes out sort of ethically and politically and what it means to interact with one another.

And then Al Saji, you have some more of that. I think there's a whole bunch of different threads that we can take on. And I really like the Al-Saji article in general and also as a way of getting into this particular thread of right at the interaction between how we understand ourselves and leveraging phenomenology on that, as well as how that sort of cashes out on how we can think about our actions. So for me, if anybody's listened to the episodes for a while, know that I am very interested in habit.

8:32 Unknown speaker: And.

8:32 Dylan: And so I was really interested in all the discussion about habit that happens in here, but from a very different way than I have thought about it before. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to particularly focusing on the Al-Saji and the Merleau-Ponty.

8:47 Phil: Would it help for me to explain a little bit about the reason I read Alcoff and Al-Saji after Merleau-Ponty in the Embodied Self class is because I think Merleau Ponty and Bergson have a lot in common, as you say, Dylan, sort of epistemologically with James and Dewey, right? And their pragmatism. I listened to your James episodes again recently, and I remember Seth talking about the way in which he was kind of seduced by James, right. And the kind of clear way that James lays out what I would argue is his analysis of what it means to have embodied experience and interact with a world that you are always already a part of, right?

Not sort of standing separate from and observing, but in the practice of accomplishing some project, right? And the world is equipment for that, to use kind of Heideggerian language. And you are part of that world. You are. Your own body is equipment for that activity. For James and Dewey, in a sense, it is the activity that matters, right? And it is the activity that shapes perceptions and shapes your. Your own body, in a sense. And that's even before we start talking in sort of Bergsonian terms about the way that we are our histories, right?

That we are the sort of leading edge of patterns of activity that just layer up and build on each other. Merleau Ponty and Bergson both use this interesting word, sedimentation. Right. That we sort of lay down these layers of practice and perceptions and they shape our current practice and perception. Right. And that's one way of thinking about habit, right? Habit is this, this kind of built up schema of action and activity that we employ. And as, you know, one connection with police, as police are often saying, things happen fast. We don't have a lot of time, right.

To think about things, we just have to react. Right. Well, where do those reactions come from? They come from these layers, these sediments of perception and practice. Right. They act out what they have acted. Actually, this is 142 of the Al-Saji. We are primarily receptive to that which has been determined in the past. Right. We are primarily sort of open to and ready to realize that which we have already sort of opened ourselves to and realized in the past. Right. And that's a different way of thinking about habit. But the reason that I teach Al-Saji and Alcoff is because Merleau Ponty does this work at a fairly abstract level.

Right. He's trying to understand perception. He's trying to understand the embodied practice of perceiving its purpose, its function. Right. Its role. And the way that Seth found James kind of seductive. I find Merleau-Ponty the same way, right. When I read him, I get that kind of clear eyed, clear headed feeling that I used to get when I read Thucydides. Right. He just kind of clears the cobwebs away for me and he lets me see things a little more clearly. But he doesn't, as you said, Dylan, he doesn't really sort of cash out. Okay, what does this mean in practice?

He's interested in psychology. He talks about the way in which we sort of, you know, in gestalt psychology, how will we differentially understand our diagnoses and our prescriptions, right. For dealing with people that have these dysfunctionalities. That's where his examples come from. But he sort of begs the question, how do the rest of us sort of live this out in the world?

12:01 Dylan: There's a section in what we read about motility where he's talking about different kinds of physical habits, proprioception, you know, your moving of your hand and driving and stuff like that, all of which is very clear eyed. What's great to me about Al Saji. And there's some of this in the Alcof, though, obviously it's a big book that I only read sections of. But you can see in the section about habitual body that she's reflecting on, Merleau-Ponty, they're bringing in this intersection of pushing us more towards the ethical, intellectual boundary of body.

And this is really, really interesting. And it's where it becomes most hard to handle and most exciting because it is where our bodily activity of thinking is also reflecting back on that body and that the way in which those habits, you know, we most often think of habits like, you know, that are really physically oriented, everything from proprioception of driving, of playing guitar or smoking or something like that as being quintessential habits. But there are habits of mind that also are embodied in that way, and they reflect back on one another.

So there's like they open the door to this. Especially Al-Saji, when she's talking about the more of habit and the less of habit and the constraint of habit and the opening up of habit. And her mechanism of hesitation for that is really being the way in which we leverage our rational intellect or the mechanism of our cognition on that structure within our bodies. There's a lot more to say about that, both about what she says, but also about what she doesn't say. Like to continue to spin that out. But that's, to me, where I found it very, very exciting and a step beyond Merleau Ponty, because in reading him, you don't end up cashing out, like the process for bringing it back to the way in which you're acting on yourself in your own mind and your own body and that sort of feedback

14:00 Mark: mechanism that happens to make that understandable. Can we zoom in a little bit on the section from the Phenomenology of Perception, which was only 10 pages that Phil had picked out for us? Because there's a lot of weird vocabulary that I think Alsaji runs with that just a different way of talking, even different than the way James was talking about habit. So when we had the discussion of James on habit, it's a lot of kind of semi physiological talk, right? Habit is you do something enough times and it kind of gets burned into you as an organism.

It gets burned into your brain. Once you think certain thoughts, it's easier to rethink those same thoughts. And there's obviously a phenomenological correlate of that, and it refers to body. So it's sort of in the same universe as Merleau Ponty. But the way Merleau Ponty talks about it is much more like the way Heidegger talks about it or something like that. Here's a quote from 138. Consciousness is being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body. Or in the action of the hand which is raised towards an object. Is contained a reference to the object.

Not as an object represented. But as that highly specific thing. Towards which we project ourselves. Near which we are in anticipation and which we haunt. So these things, like, haunt obvious metaphors. But that are trying to capture the experience. Right? So it seems like it's not quite an explanation. You know, it's not like a scientific explanation. But it's still some kind of explanation. But just in phenomenological terms. Can we say a little more. To kind of either re familiarize or newly familiarize the audience. With this way of talking.

That we're going to use in the Al-Saji?

15:37 Dylan: At the beginning of this section, I think he's quoting another work by Goldstein thinking about movement. He says, motility is basic intentionality. Movement is not thought about movement. And bodily space is not space thought of or representative. Each voluntary movement takes place in a setting. Against a background. Which is determined by the movement itself. We perform our movements in a space which is not empty or unrelated to them. But which, on the contrary, bears a highly determinate relation with them. Movement and background are, in fact, only artificially separate stages.

Of a unique totality. And then we get to this section that Mark was quoting from. And it's this idea that really. Embeddedness. And so that at one extreme, the habit is complet. I'll call it unconscious. But it's within this embedded realm of movement. And then there's cases where it becomes more conscious. So he says, motility, then, is not, as it were, a handmaid of consciousness. Transporting the body to that point in space. Of which we have formed a representation beforehand. In order that we may be able to move our body toward an object. The object must first exist for it.

Our body must not belong to the realm of the in itself.

16:50 Phil: I think that's where James and Merleau-Ponty come into closest contact. Because although James does talk about habit in the way that Mark was just describing. He has this larger framing context. Of thinking about the body. And thinking about the world itself in general. As sort of evolved patterns of activity, right. That function to affect the world. That function to sort of act in the world and manipulate the world. In order to maintain the survival of that organism. Right. To meet its needs. Dewey, in particular, talks a lot about trying to think of needs in this very direct way, right?

Not a kind of effective psychic way, but an organic way. And Merleau Ponty here is talking about our movements. Right in the same area where you're reading he says, a movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its world. Both of them are talking about the habits we build. The activity that we undertake has a purpose, has a goal, right? Like Aristotle would say, everything aims at a telos, right? And the purpose and activity of the body is to interact with and manipulate a world. All of what we do, our consciousness, our thinking, is a kind of movement toward the world, to engage the world and manipulate the world.

18:09 Dylan: And here we're emphasizing the way in which that is embodied in us and not solely or primarily a cognitive exercise. And so, even though Descartes gets a big knock frequently, we also forget that he wrote a book called the Passions, which you're still going to get mind and body dualism in there, but you have this notion that our embodiment is structuring those inclinations, those desires. I don't want to get off on Descartes, but just the idea that our interaction with the world and our orientation, our intentionality, is embodied.

18:46 Seth: What I would add to that is just to try to tie it to habit. It's the idea that embodiment in some sense determines its habitual movement. There's habits of thought, but there's also habits of movement, habits of being, if you will, that in turn create the habituation that is ultimately going to result in the perception of the world as a certain way. So in other words, habituation, self reinforces by moving in the same direction, doing the same thing over and over again is going to determine how you interact with the world in the future. Not just creating a pattern for you, but a pattern for how you understand how it's possible to interact with the world in the future.

19:27 Dylan: And a perfect example to me is disgust. Reading this, I began to think about disgust as a habit. And it's a great example because it's so bodily. But it also ends up crossing over into moral and ethical and aesthetic realms, where you have a bodily reaction to a cognitive distinction, to something like justice or injustice or a person's race or the beauty or ugliness of a painting. And that is the same kind of physical reaction that you have towards rotten food or towards excrement and stuff like that. And even those things, it's on the fine line between something that is inherent or quote unquote, natural, meaning that it's just sort of in your physicality, to something that is socially nurtured, but also the cultural import of you should find things that are generally poisonous to you disgusting, and that we cultivate that bodily habit in order to survive in the world, but it crosses over.

20:29 Mark: Yeah, you're making me want to jump to Al-Saji talking about basically abjection. But let's hold off and try to finish. I think we've kind of said what the gist of Merleau-Ponty is here. That kind of like in our last episode on Sontag, we're characterizing her views as we are as a society, as a culture, are overly intellectual, as an intellectual culture particularly. Maybe it's Descartes fault, but I'm not sure of knowledge, as always, knowledge that. And so the big lesson of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty is no, no knowledge. How procedural knowledge is primary.

Right. We have way more of that before we even develop the capacity to speak and have knowledge that. So even though cognitive scientists like to think of like, oh, well, to move around the world, maybe they're thinking of like, I'm going to program a robot to move around the world. We have to build up a model of the world. And then we can figure out this is how far I should extend the robot arm in the world in order to grasp the tomato or whatever, the thing that they're trying to do. You know, on some neural level, we may well have that kind of representation of the world.

It's not totally clear that that's happening, but it's definitely not in our experience. That's not. If we're analyzing how we interact with the world and thus with people, and thus with people with particular racial characteristics that we might have a notion of disgust towards. And we don't even know where that's coming from. It's not because necessarily that we have beliefs about those people that we've internalized and then comes out as habit. It might just be something more fundamental than that. And that's what makes this whole talking about racism so difficult.

Because people are like, I'm not racist. I feel, you know, if you ask me, are people of African descent, on the whole, less intelligent than people of European descent, I would say no. So therefore I'm not racist. Well, the whole reason why we're bringing phenomenology here is to say no. There might be something more basic, more bodily. Trying to fix everything through fixing our beliefs, through fixing our intellect is just not going to work.

22:33 Phil: It's clearly not going to work at all. And to connect this back to policing, we have a couple of decades now of efforts to sort of sensitize cadets, right, and reveal their implicit bias and go through various training exercises to get them to see their seeing and become more aware of possible social influences on that, the way that they see. And those are simply not achieving any result that we can measure. Right? I mean, every year, year after year, it's very consistent. The same number of cases of sort of police violence, the same number of cases.

It's not making a difference. To connect it back to what you were just saying, Mark alcoff on page 188 says something very similar right at the bottom of the page. It is just such a modernist account. That would explain why it is commonly believed. And I can't tell you how many times I come up against this attitude myself. Right. It is commonly believed that for one to be a racist, one must be able to access in consciousness some racist belief, and that if introspection fails to produce such a belief, then one is simply not a racist. A fear of African Americans or a condescension toward Latinos is seen as simple perception of the real, justified by the nature of things in themselves, without need of an interpretive intermediary of historical cultural schemas of meaning.

And so the way this plays itself out is knowing that for Merleau-Ponty and even for James, I think is a case of knowing how. Knowing how is not only primary, but knowing that is a particular instance of knowing how, right? Knowing that is a way of interacting with our world and manipulating our world. That's one of the ways that we know how to do things, is by knowing that particular thing, right? And that knowing that gets built, gets constructed. This is the key point for me collectively. So one of the nice things about Al-Saji and Alcoff as well is not only do they try to cash out Merleau-Ponty in some very sort of concrete ways oriented towards racialized and gendered identities.

What they emphasize is that in the way that Wittgenstein, for instance, argues that there's no private language, right? That we are always already sort of communally languaging, collectively languaging, right? That languaging is something we do together, we never do by ourselves. What these people are arguing is that seeing is the same way. Seeing is not as we tend to have constructed it in the history of Western thought, right? Something an individual, isolated soul, atom does, right? Standing separate from the world, looking at the world, seeing is always already communal.

It's always already collective. We see what those around us see. And this is the reason I'm using phenomenology to try to understand what's going on in policing, right? Because as a former police officer, and I can tell you some anecdotes, if you want. I think they might be interesting. But as a former police officer, I can tell you that I saw the world the way the cops around me saw the world. Right? I went into it explicitly saying, hey, I want this to be a helping profession. I've been a social worker for a few years. I wound up being a teacher.

I'm sort of attracted to what I think of as helping professions, but I think a lot of cops that I met were that way. Right? I want to do good. I want to help people. That's how I went into it. And I set a kind of standard for myself. I decided that I would treat, you know, golden rule, right? I would treat people the way I would expect to be treated if I were in that situation. That doesn't mean I'm a sort of turn the other cheek kind of person. It means if I'm robbing a grocery store, but I have some sort of reasonable expectations for how it's appropriate to treat me in that situation.

Right? And I would treat people that way as well. Right. I have to tell you, to my shame, that over and over and over again, I failed to live up to that standard. And I failed to live up to that standard for very, I think now, clear structural reasons that have a lot to do with both the practice and the construction of policing and the shared collective habits of perception.

26:28 Mark: Maybe another point from Merleau Ponty might help here that just what is the mechanism by which this groupthink happens, that he says it's not imitation, because imitation sort of implies, again, an overly cognitive model, that I look at you, I see how you're doing it. I kind of calculate that it's more identification. So he gives us in terms of describing. I was surprised how much Merleau-Ponty gives space to describing people with various cognitive deficits. This is exactly the way that, you know, more modern cognitive scientists talk about these things.

You know, neuropsychologists is they are looking at, if you're positing some structure in the brain or some structure of consciousness that is reflected within the structure of the brain, then you see if you can find individuals who have some brain injury that has disassociated these things. So he's talking about people who, if I'm standing next to you and you're somebody with a brain lesion, and I raise my arm and do some motions with it, and I say, imitate me. Maybe you could do it if you're standing next to me, but you can't do it if you're standing across from me, and that says something about how the connection normally works.

Because if you're imitating exactly what's happening next to you, it's like your mirror image imitating you. In other words, you are moving your right arm and your mirror image is moving its left arm, the one across from you. You can sort of see that as a. I'm looking at your arm and I'm trying to do that thing. If I'm across from you and I'm doing something with my right hand in reaction to you doing something with your right hand, it's much harder to do that on the basis of explicitly mapping. Okay, what is your right hand doing now? My right hand is going to do that.

It is because we more or less identify. I sort of put myself in your place, and it's hard to explain because it is not a verbal thing. It is identification. It's sort of grooving along the way. I was putting it with Sontag in our. That discussion.

28:17 Phil: I think one of the ways that he describes how that works, right, is that, in a sense, I'm not even sort of separate from you, identifying myself with you. We are together. Like the cane becomes a part of your body when you use it to see things, right? You and I become part of the same body when we're engaged in an activity in the world that's trying to accomplish some project. We definitely don't mirror as you are arguing. And I don't think it's even so much that we sort of identify if what we mean by that is we normally stand apart from each other, but we can, through some sort of effort on our part, connect and see ourselves in and through and as the other.

No, we simply be a part of the world together trying to accomplish something in the world. And this is the connection for policing, I think, on page 143, Merleau Ponty argues that grasping significance is never this cognitive conceptual activity. Grasping significance is a motor grasping of a motor significance. And he uses the examples of driving a car, right, or typing on a keyboard that I always think of the example of catching a ball. You guys know that when you're driving a car and you start thinking about driving a car and represent the motions of driving a car to yourself, you get in the way of driving the car, you obstruct your ability to sort of drive that car smoothly.

When you try to turn it into an objective experience that you represent to yourself, you screw it up. And it's not just some sort of physiological burned into you thing, this is the car and you are sort of part of one body that are trying to accomplish a task in the world and you just are connected in that way. So what he's saying here is that the space we act in, it's a motor grasping of a motor significance because there is sort of a meaning of action that is there for us that we enter into. Right. And so to connect it to cops, when a cop sits in his car or he approaches someone, what Merleau Ponty is arguing is that a motor space opens up for him in which he interacts with that space, he makes demands on it, determined by his habits of action and his habits of perception.

30:26 Dylan: I want to make a couple qualifications about it. I agree, but like the case of driving a car or the case of the embeddedness of the cop and the habits involved in that motor interaction is that it's clearly not cognitively empty. The reason I want to emphasize this is that even in Merleau Ponty's account, it doesn't seem to me particularly Al-Saji, it's not that our bodies act as under motility. They're just doing something and just like sent off to do something and completely reactive. And it's not as if there isn't cognitive work that's going on.

And it's the complication of that cognitive work isn't strictly thinking right in front of your brain about what you're doing, but it's also not absent concentration. And so even your act of driving isn't like so. And there's going to be degrees of this. There's the experience of that car just drives itself to my office because I've done it all the time to the point where I might realized I was going along that road and I'm supposed to go to the store and I should have taken a right hand turn, but because I wasn't consciously thinking about it, I just drive to work.

But then there's, you know, the act of really trying to drive. But you go to a track day and you're really concentrating on that driving and there's an activity involved with it or just driving through heavy traffic. The activity of defensive driving and being situationally aware of it's cognitively active and is not merely when I think of overemphasizing the bodily aspect of it, I think it begins to sound like somehow it becomes a kind of reflex, which is certainly part of it. It's important to emphasize that part of it and the embeddedness and the effect of the body on our cells.

But I want to really emphasize the fact that it is our cognition is embodied and our body bodies are cognized. And I really want to avoid us falling into the trap of saying, well, the answer is that it's our bodies, because I think it's just as big of a problem as saying that the answer is our minds. And this is related to a second point that I wanted to make, which has to do with perception and the idea that our perception is mediated by our communal living, which is certainly clearly true. And I like the examples that Phil gave. But it's not going to be sustainable that there isn't something characteristic of perception that is just true of our biology as individuals.

It's not as if a baby picks out this from that because of everything their parents are teaching them. Our bodily abilities of perceiving our cognitive physiological activity, of saying this and that and talking of now and then. Those things are part of what we bring to the table that goes into our refinement of perception that gets influenced by our interactions with other people. They're not separate. And it's not that one trumps the other two things.

33:27 Seth: First off, if I'm tracing the history of phenomenology correctly, I think it's exactly trying to make the first point that you said, which is it's not just about the cognition or the world. There's the fact that you are embodied in this world and that you're embedded in the world. And so you don't just have this cognitive ability to perceive and this manifold of sense perception, and you somehow marry concepts and perception together without a body. So I think the phenomenologists are in total agreement there. With respect to your second point, I hope this actually makes you happy, even though I'm going to kind of contend one of your point is you use the term biology like we can't discount certain aspects of biology.

And that's kind of a trigger, you know, for a lot of people right now, because there's this sense of people want to resist the idea that biology is deterministic or can determine. But I've been listening to some lectures recently just about evolutionary development and the different parts of our brain. And there are definitely physiological responses that we have by virtue of being certain kinds of animals to other things in the world. Like we as mammals, we have a thing about snakes. It's just what apes do. Apes have a thing about snakes. Right.

And there's no way for you to control that. But I would hesitate to use the term biology because really, it's evolution. And evolution is a form of habituation. So it just really is reinforcing the point that we are habituated by virtue of having evolved to this point in the world in a certain way. And one of the things that I think we struggle with is we've evolved over a very long time to respond to things in a very particular way, and the world has evolved at that same pace. And in the last maybe couple 10,000 years, things have really radically changed on one side of the equation, and it's radically disrupted our ability to manage our response to the things because we're just the world and we are not evolving at the same rate anymore.

35:24 Phil: I want to agree with both of those things, Seth. And respond in addition, Dylan, by emphasizing that when these people are talking about, let's recognize the importance of embodiment in part, specifically, Merleau-Ponty is responding to quite long tradition of de Emphasizing the importance of embodiment, of thinking about ourselves as brains in vats. Right. Or ghosts in machines. Right. Thinking about ourselves as engaging the world cognitively first and then somehow marshaling this physicality to sort of engage that world in the way that our cognition predetermines. And they're arguing very explicitly against that. They're arguing that, in fact, like you said, cognition and activity aren't separate. As a matter of fact, cognition is an embodied activity. Right. I mean, it's like digestion.

36:13 Unknown speaker: Right.

36:13 Phil: It's not some separate kind of thing. Right. It is one of the ways that the kind of organism we are acts in the world. And as Dewey argues, what we misunderstand, is that the body is not a tool for our mind. The mind is a tool of the body to do things that the body needs and wants to do in the world. And so what I want to echo with Seth is. Yeah, evolution, Right. Another way of describing that, I think a very good way, I like your formulation. Right. Is sedimentation of layers of habituation. Right. That don't program us. Right. We're not robots.

We don't want to. That's what Al-Saji and Alcoff are arguing about explicitly. We don't want to naturalize this. We don't want to say, oh, well, we've switched the source of the problem, we switched the diagnosis, but it's the same problem. Right. It's just natural. We can't fix this. And I like Seth's example of the snake. I think he's right. I think mammals have a thing about snakes. But when I was in college, I was a zookeeper for a year, right? What haven't you done as a job? Very few things. Right. I've never been an accountant and it's a good thing for the world that that's the case.

But yeah, I was a zookeeper for a while and I was in charge of some of the mammals and there was a herp guy there, right? There was a reptile guy and he loved them. I don't think what happened is that evolution sort of messed up. He didn't get that gene where as a mammal he just had a thing about snakes.

37:35 Mark: I guess there are two points I wanted to bring up here to maybe help finish off Mayor Le Ponty. Dylan, your point about by saying bodily we don't mean it's automatic. I was having a hard time coming up with what is the question of this episode? And came down to something about is there something like unconscious or subconscious racism? But the way that we often think of the unconscious is in explicitly linguistic terms, right? Especially if you're in the sort of Saussure Lacan tradition. But I'm not sure about Freud exactly. But you think that there are thoughts that are floating around there, that even though you don't think negative things about minority groups, there could be those linguistic beliefs that are sitting in the back there and they've somehow gotten programmed and that that's just not how there are other ways of thinking about something being unconscious than having a strings of sentences that are somehow unacknowledged, but acting causally on you and talking about habits in this way.

Now it very well could be that the way that our body communicates internally has some linguistic like elements. You know, basically the neurons are tapping Morse code, something analogous to that to each other by certain chemicals at certain times. But that's not linguistic, you know, or conscious or cognitive in our. Again in the phenomenological sense. Or maybe it's a matter of adjusting, as Phil was saying, sort of getting rid of that dualism in the first place, that trying to understand how something that manifests in our consciousness as linguistic, as imagistic, as cognitive, as conscious as thinking could actually have this bodily root to it.

I don't know. Even as I'm trying to say it, I'm still having trouble with the basic ontology. This is not an accident. This is the frickin mind body problem of how these things relate to each other. But at least it seems helpful in thinking about how we would acquire racialized seeing and how we would peel away at this and thinking of it in terms of habits of attitude rather than beliefs that have gotten subsumed somehow. I don't know any thoughts about sort of the relationship between those two things.

39:36 Phil: I just want to pick a little bit at the formulation of habits of attitude and replace that with habits of bodily comportment. Have you guys read George Yancy's Black Bodies, White Masks?

39:47 Mark: No, we didn't do that one. It's actually black bodies, white gazes.

39:50 Phil: There's a chapter in that on the elevator. And what happens when black people get on elevators with white people, Right? Or he uses the example of walking down the street and listening to the click, click, click, click of people locking their car doors right as he's walking down the street. And I think to understand those experiences, we're on the wrong track when we try to poll those people for some sort of linguistic attitude or concept that's in the back of their mind that is operating, but maybe they're not fully consciously or something like that.

What I think puts us on the right track. What these authors are trying to argue, I think, is that our bodies respond to meanings and significances in the world, and then we come up with the stories to justify that and rationalize that, right, that these are habits of bodily comportment. These are habits of interacting bodies. And they build over long periods of time into sedimented cultural, historical, right, Social, political relationships. And you inhabit those. As Dylan was talking about earlier, I do think young children, I don't know when, I don't know if they're infants, but I do think young children learn to see the world the way their parents learn to see the world, just not the way their parents tell them to see the world.

Right? They learn to see the world the way their parents walk around seeing the world. That's, I think, the beauty of the third example in Al-Saji's article, right, where her husband learned to see the world with a certain sort of collection of people, where certain things became obvious and apparent and clear and important to him. And then she tried to argue him out of that. She tried to say, here, don't see the world that way, see the world this way. Right? And had no effect on him whatsoever. But after a number of years of living with her family and just sort of being with them and seeing the world and seeing them the way they see themselves, he changed and he changed without noticing.

He changed and he changed without reformulating any sort of linguistic attitudes or beliefs.

41:44 Mark: Relatedly, I was trying to figure out where in Merleau-Ponty does the issue of determinism come in. If you're worried we're Overemphasizing bodily embodiment. It sounds like the body is a machine. It's moving automatically, that there's no room for free will to jump in. I don't think in the places we read in Merleau-Ponty that this is present. But both Al-Saji and Alcoff attribute to Merleau Ponty just in his general phenomenology as opposed to the scientific natural attitude. Our past Merleau Ponty episode was entirely about this. How Merleau Ponty and Bergson and Heidegger and all of these folks are arguing against scientism of the sort that would see us as just cogs in a causal chain by using phenomenology that you know, even if we are in fact physiologically cogs in a causal chain, that's not how we see ourselves.

Right? This is even right back to William James. He would say, you can tell me that I'm the result of a causal change, but then if you then try to predict what I'm going to do next, I can just say, ha ha ha, I'm gonna do this other thing instead. And the phenomenologically evident, even if under analysis it might fall apart. Compatibility thesis that we have about free will here. So I might have made this more complicated than it needs to be. About what? Merleau-Ponty's take how his way of talking about things opens us to. We actually can change these habits that it's built into the structure that we're

43:07 Phil: not merely robots to take up that question. Right. I think Bergson is perhaps the most helpful to us there, right. In the way in which I think the Western tradition has sort of been deeply influenced by mind body dualism. Right. And we don't want to blame Descartes for this. Right. It's not like he made this up and foisted it upon us. There's a long sort of history of mind body dualism going all the way back to the Greeks, just as it's been sort of deeply influenced by that. I think Dewey makes one of the best cases for this. We've been deeply influenced by a kind of machine thinking, a mechanistic view of the world.

Descartes had a hand to play in this as well. But the scientific revolution itself, right? This, the Newtonian physics, right? The way that Galileo sort of did some experiments and generalized the results of those experiments into laws of the universe, right. This was very powerful. And so we began to think of ourselves as, as mechanisms. We began to think of the world as a mechanism and I would argue that the question of determinism is particularly a mechanistic metaphysics problem that we think about, worry about whether we're determined or not.

When we think of ourselves as machines. And what Bergson argues is we are organisms, we are, you know, one of the most powerful bits of his thinking, I think, is his emphasis on novelty, that we are patterns of activity that lay down all these sediments, but we're the leading edge of that and we are growing and that growth is not fully determined. Yes, all of this sedimentation pushes us in some directions rather than others. And this is what I think Al-Saji and Alcoff both are really emphasizing, right? This is dynamic, this is open ended. At every moment something can happen that, and this is I think the core of Al-Saji's notion of hesitation can disrupt our habitual response.

Now when that habitual response gets disrupted, there are a couple of possibilities, right? We can sort of insist that we return to the habitual way of seeing, the habitual way of understanding, the habitual way of acting. We can treat the disruption as an anomaly, right? And that doesn't need our attention, doesn't need our work. Or we can allow, we can hesitate, we can allow the disruption to open ourselves up to the very sort of structure and process of our habituation. We can see our seeing, we can see the way in which what they're calling the socio historical sort of influences are at play in us, are at work on us and we can do something about it, right?

It is open ended, it is dynamic. We can do something about it and we can do that even without doing it cognitively, even without doing it at the level of attitudes or beliefs. We can perhaps find ways. And you know, I don't think she's worked this out very fully. I think she's got a lot more work to do with this concept of hesitation. And I think it's very challenging. I'm not sure I see how it all works, but I think the fundamental idea behind it, that living with others in particular kinds of ways opens up a space, not a cognitive space, but as Merleau-Ponty would say, a motor space for a different motor grasping is something worth thinking about.

46:09 Seth: When I read the Al-Saji, it brought to mind two things that are in a, I would call a much more practical sphere, but it's the same strategy and that helped me kind of phrase it. There's a psychological, I guess a therapeutic treatment called cognitive behavioral therapy which is essentially tries to train you to interrupt, recognize when you're having a response and Kind of step back. And one of my favorite books of all time that I recommend to everybody in my professional life is a book called Crucial Conversations, which is very much about how if you're going into a conversation where there's a lot at stake, you want to basically acknowledge, press the pause button and acknowledge everybody's kind of emotional attachment to what's at stake and get it out there in the open.

Because when you name something, when you stop and you say, like, oh, I'm feeling disgust, like a lot of the power of how that drives your habitual response gets drained out of it. It's almost like you interrupt the habitual response where you turn, now you're doing something else. Now you have to build a habit of what to do after that. But the habitual response itself can be interrupted. And that's what she's talking about. It's a really nice and poetic thing, you know, with this idea of hesitation, habituation and hesitation. And it's kind of alliterative as well as nice.

And I want to get back to policing on this particular point after we kind of explore it a little bit. But the idea that you can interrupt your embodied reaction, just like you could, whether you perceive it as being cognitive or more viscerally physical, whichever way it is, if we agree that thought is embodied, you are able to interrupt those habits that you have, some with more difficulty than others. I would say you could probably, like G. Gordon Liddy, prevent yourself from pulling your hand away from the fire, right? You can overcome that habituation.

That's way harder than just avoiding the chocolate cake. And so anyway, I think there's a proven she's tapping into something that's proven psychologically. It's. It's a strategy that's well validated across, you know, in a variety of different spheres. So I totally am on board with that. What I'm wondering is maybe if she's actually trying to point at something even deeper than what we would call psychological.

48:15 Dylan: I think she probably is. I happened to be reading a book by Atul Gawande called the Checklist Manifesto at the same time that I was reading this. And it's about the idea of checklists, and in particular in medicine, but also their deep origin in aviation. But fundamental to the idea is this idea of waypoints, which to me it read like hesitations, where you take a moment and you basically ask whether you have everything you need at that point, do a check on it. But the other really important thing, and if anything, it's one of the most powerful Aspects of the checklist was the way in which it changed the dynamics of the room, Whether it be in a surgical suite or it be in a cockpit where everybody was all of a sudden on the same team.

So on the surgical suite, the big thing was that everybody goes in and introduces themselves. They go around, they talk to one another, and they say what they're there to do. And that immediately had a dynamic of changing the distribution of authority in the room. And that resonated in maybe an obvious way. I was going to say a weird way, but to what Phil was just saying about her solution. And hesitation about changing our bodily comportment immediately changes the way in which we interact with one another. And you can, in fact, consciously make that change of environment that will then act on you in your bodily comportment to open up possibilities of interaction and close down ossified avenues of interaction that lead to the kinds of activity and both in your motility as well as your cognitive activity, that is more along the lines of what you'd actually want to have happen, because you become less subject to sort of ossified habits.

And part of that is developing a habit, a new kind of habit. Like, in this case, it was the checklist habit. In the other case, it might be a habit of thinking about how you arrange your physical environment.