Perceptual categories are governed by the practical implements surrounding us

Evidence

Such preestablished harmony is likely to hold for the process of perception as well as for that of the making of the object. We have already touched on Heidegger’s essential doctrine of the priority of objects-in-use over objects-in-rest: so it is that the dominant category of substance through which we view the outside world is itself conditioned and governed by the types and the structure of the practical objects or implements which surround us. Yet Heidegger’s model derives from a peasant world, in which the cup and the plow, the axe and the staff mold the natural world that comes into sight behind them. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 751

Categorization

• XREF: Direct line from Heidegger’s implements to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s critique of technological conditions of perception; also resonates with Jameson’s later argument that postmodern perception is conditioned by commodity forms. — connects to: Perception is indistinguishable from the practical organization of the world into instruments — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 860; The experience of home shapes our most fundamental conceptual categories — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1522; Conventions set the perceptual frames by which we experience time, color, and music — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 134
• QUESTION: If Heidegger’s implements are peasant ones, what implements condition our own perception — and can that be made explicit the way Jameson does for Aristotle?

Broader Connections

• Perception is indistinguishable from the practical organization of the world into instruments #corroborates (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 860