Flesh

This chapter connects the notion of affordances with phenomenological investigation to explore how the human body, with its perceptual and animate capabilities, co-creates time together with the sonic environment. The author employs Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh as an inextricable link between a subjective body and the objective world, and considers how time may be viewed as one of the forms that this link can take. Highlighting the similarities between affordances and flesh—arguing that the former describe the interaction between bodily and environmental capacities, while the latter discloses the structure of the system as a whole—the author returns to his earlier proposal that music, as a social and temporal affordance, allows us to consider the listener-music interaction as the very source of time. Time here is enacted when, engaged in this interaction, the body slips back-and-forth between its appearance as a physical object submerged in the world and its function as the seat of subjectivity.