Seeing What One Sees: Perception, Emotion, and Activity

AbstractIn this article, it is demonstrated (a) how seeing is organized in the spatiotemporal arrangement of bodies and conduct within which the participants display and manage their orientations to the ongoing activity, and (b) how seeing and emotion are mutually constituted in the precise coordination of conduct and how they, can constitute resources for organizing the ongoing activity. The view advanced in this article sharply contradicts the traditional conception of visual perception, according to which the verb "see" names a discrete process, event, or state hidden under the individual's skin. Seeing is rather an organizational feature of an embodied, visible activity.