Niomi Anna Cherney

niomi.cherney@mail.utoronto.ca
Guiding Questions for Discussion and Suggested Terms for Glossary

Week 1: October 5
th
@ Videofag, 4pm
Introduction to phenomenology via infant development
Simms, Eva. Milk and Flesh: Infancy and Coexistence in The Child in the World:
Embodiment Time and Language in Early Childhood. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press (2008): 11-25.
Additional optional reading:
(ibid) The Worlds Skin Ever Expanding: Spatiality and the Structures of Child
Consciousness: 27-55

Just quickly, I want to ear mark that I think we should refer to the role Simms designates
as mother with the word caregiver instead, and assume those things to be analogous.
Though I question the imperative placed on breastfeeding as crucial to an infants
development, in this chapter I would like us to concentrate on the basic structure
(caregiver-infant dyad) that Simms claims allows the child to attain a kind of
independence in the world.

Questions

1) What do we know about how Eva Simms is setting up the relationship between
infant and caregiver in this chapter?
2) Simms, via Gaston Bachelard, asserts that the structure of our experience is to
first be at home : we are housed before we are cast into the world, we are
cared for before we care for ourselves (13). What does she mean by this, and
what structures of care and security is she referring to? In what way is she
deploying the notion of original hospitality (bottom of p. 13)?
3) Can we articulate how Simms is claiming that the passing of nourishment (milk)
from the body of the caregiver to the body of the infant undoes assumptions
about where these bodies begin and end?
4) What does Simms mean when she says, The primary experience of the human
infant is the experience of moving toward a world of things and other that is
already prefigure in ones own body (14)? How is this kind of prefigured
different than a rationalist or idealist account of the world where a template for
experience in a way precedes the actual experience?
5) How does an infants experience of nourishment call it beyond its own body and
into the world? Simms cites Levinas idea of living from (15). Can we unpack this
idea? How do we make sense of the way this idea frames human suffering?
6) The notion of the Flesh, according to Merleau-Ponty is the meeting ground of
the perceiver and the perceived (16). How does milk, for Simms, function as this
structure of the Flesh (which according to Merleau-Ponty) is the structure of all
our engagement with the perceptible world?
7) How is intentionality, as Simms is using the word here, differ from choice? Can
we use the idea of operative intentionality to describe the way the world, too, acts
on the infant? How does time play a part in this?
8) What does Simms mean when she calls the bodies of infant and caregiver
dyadic bodies? How does this relate to Merleau-Pontys notion of the Flesh?
Can we speak of the Flesh through touch rather than vision, and how is this
important to the intertwined relationship between infant and caregiver?
9) Why, for Simms, is the I of identification and independence an offshoot of a
being together that is formative and ontological?
Niomi Anna Cherney
niomi.cherney@mail.utoronto.ca
10) On page 21, Simms cites Merleau-Pontys critique of child psychologist Piagets
studies of infant experience, specifically to do with the phenomenon of imitation.
What assumptions are buried in the way Piaget views the infant body, and why
does Merleau-Ponty think these claims are wrong?
11) The world teaches our senses how to be explored [] Newborns stick out their
tongues not merely because they see but because through their immersion in the
flesh, they become what they see: seeing is action, perception is participation
(22). What is the difference that Simms is drawing on here between reflective
subjectivity, and subjectivity passively drawing us into the world through the very
basic structure of our experience?
12) What can we make of Merleau-Pontys term anonymous visibility (cited in
Simms, 23)?
13) In the final section of this chapter, Identity and the Chiasmic Body, Simms
makes the claim that identity and selfhood are drawn through the fabric of our
relation to others, and that these notions are fluid by virtue of how they surpass
the limits of the body the skin (24). What implications does this claim have for
how we think about our actions in the world and our relations to other people?
14) How is she using the term style here (24).
15) What do we think of Simms emphasis on well cared for? Do you think this is a
narrow idea of caring for an infant? Do you think it connects the act of
breastfeeding to an ethical imperative to care for an infant in this way?

Terms

1) Ontological Status
2) Form
3) Monad
4) Operative Intentionality
5) Flesh
6) Chiasm
7) Cogito
8) Anonymous visibility, anonymous body
9) Style