Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny

Philosophy in Motion

Philipa Rothfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000079678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny takes the philosophy of the body into the field of dance, through the lens of subjectivity and via its critique.

It draws on dance and performance as its dedicated field of practice to articulate a philosophy of agency and movement. It is organized around two conceptual paradigms - one phenomenological (via Merleau-Ponty), the other an interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy, mediated through the work of Deleuze.

The book draws on dance studies, cultural critique, ethnography and postcolonial theory, seeking an interdisciplinary audience in philosophy, dance and cultural studies.

Part I

1Merleau-Ponty and the lived body

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to set the scene for thinking dance from the point of view of the dancer. It looks to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to offer an account of the body that makes room for the dancer’s perspective. The body is central to Merleau-Ponty’s thought, which is organized around the figure of experience. The alignment of philosophy with experience appeals to subjectivity – how we feel and think – as the basis of philosophical insight. The emphasis on experience leads Merleau-Ponty to take stock of the ways in which mind and body intertwine. Merleau-Ponty’s term for this is the lived body. The lived body offers a way to understand the agency and experience of the dancer. Its existential emphasis allows for a formulation of the dancer’s subjectivity in terms that acknowledge the role of practice in the formation of the dancer’s means and manner of movement.

The lived body begins with the subject. Merleau-Ponty writes:

Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own.¹

The reference to a first-person perspective is a statement about its priority with respect to objective thought. Merleau-Ponty asserts that subjective experience is primary and objective thought secondary. It’s not that the objective perspective is wrong. It is, rather, derivative. Even science must rely upon first-person observation in order to develop its theoretical insights.² For Merleau-Ponty then, “the fundamental philosophical act would thus be to return to the lived world beneath the objective world”.³ This is the task of philosophy, to situate itself in life so as to tease out its features. Philosophical reflection does not withdraw from the world, rather it aims “to match reflection to the unreflective life of consciousness”.⁴

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is thus answerable to the character and content of actual experience. It is distinguished from empiricism, which emphasizes objectivity, and from what he calls intellectualist (Kantian) philosophy, which posits the deployment of the intellect upon sensuous input.⁵ By situating itself within the domain of existence, philosophical reflection privileges the realm of the pre-reflective (as that which occurs prior to philosophical reflection). The appeal to the pre-reflective is an attempt to cleave to the world of actual experience, to faithfully render its character. David Morris writes:

Merleau-Ponty thus radicalizes philosophical method, since his philosophy begins by installing itself and being responsible to a pre-philosophical setting that exceeds it.⁶

Embedded in existence, reflection is not purified of life, it never loses contact with its object. The grounding of reflection in life gives it a rather contingent, provisional character, ever in debt to the nuances of existence. In this sense, reflection is by nature incomplete.⁷ This is not a sign of inadequacy, though, rather a mark of the field within which the philosopher must think. Philosophical reflection is an ongoing task then, oriented towards pre-reflective life, yet critical of itself, acknowledging its own insights as provisional rather than known in advance. It is in short a “style” or “manner” of thinking, a philosophical journey situated in the world, in the life and context of its practitioners.⁸

Phenomenology of Perception identifies perceptual life as that through which we experience and live in the world.⁹ Its understanding of perception as the background for all thought brings the body to light as our pivotal means of connection with the world. It is because we are bodily beings that we are able to live, think, even have a world. Merleau-Ponty distinguished his approach towards the body from those that reduce it to an object. He rejected the Cartesian separation between mind and body by holding to a notion of the body that is both subjectively felt and objectively discernible. It’s not that the body is not objective but that it’s not merely objective. The body is never just an object for Merleau-Ponty because the body is my means of living in the world. The body is the perspectival means by which we encounter the world. Although often implicit within experience, the body is nonetheless the seat of all activity.

Phenomenological philosophy was first established by Edmund Husserl. Husserl’s starting point was Franz Brentano’s notion of the intentionality of consciousness, the insight that consciousness is always a consciousness of something (the object of consciousness). The goal of Husserlian phenomenology is to determine the essence of consciousness in relation to its object, the object of thought. One of its innovations is to ‘bracket’ ontological concerns regarding the status of the object of consciousness, as a means to analyse its key structures. Husserl proposed that we can learn a great deal about the ways in which consciousness relates to the world once ontology is put aside. Bracketing what Husserl called the natural attitude is the first step in the phenomenological method.¹⁰ Husserl called this operation the phenomenological reduction or epoché.¹¹ Once the phenomenological reduction is activated, we must remain neutral regarding the existential status of the object. It matters not, according to Husserl, whether or not the object of thought exists. What matters is the relationship between consciousness and its object, manifest through the intentionality of consciousness, its (noetic) actions and meanings (noemata). A further phase involves what Husserl called eidetic variation, the attempt to consider one’s object of analysis from a multiplicity of perspectives in order to determine that which remains constant. Eidetic variation aims to reveal the invariant structures of consciousness, thereby to produce essential modes of insight. Although Merleau-Ponty did not break with the Husserlian project, and indeed retained the word phenomenology in his title (Phenomenology of Perception), he tended to emphasize the lived rather than manipulate the given towards a conception of the invariant. He also deepened Husserl’s understanding of the corporeal, giving it a particularly perceptual inflection. Rather than consciousness towards its intentional object, Merleau-Ponty depicted a body towards the world (of objects and others). In so doing, he shifted intentionality onto the plane of movement, towards a conception of “motor intentionality” as the corporeal means by which we relate to the world.¹² Motor intentionality acknowledges that intentionality is not merely an interior set of experiences but is expressed in action.

Merleau-Ponty’s work on the body, perception and movement offers a subject-centred account of action and its experience. His attempt to depict the lived character of experience – its existential thrust – leads to a number of general characterizations, aimed to capture how it is that we live as bodily beings. This chapter looks to the ways in which Merleau-Ponty portrays the everyday in relation to the body and its perceptual experience. Shaun Gallagher’s distinction between body image and body schema will be utilized to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of movement and its perception. The following discussion will canvass a number of themes as they are found in Phenomenology of Perception, which emphasizes the everyday character of intentional life. Phenomenology of Perception features a subject at grips with the world. The body is typically in the background here, ‘on call’ but not in focus. Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that not everyone is able to rely on their bodies in this way. His discussion of the medical literature makes the case for acknowledging existential differences between lived bodies. This recognition and Gallagher’s working definition of body image and body schema set the scene for a kinaesthetic treatment of Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual philosophy.

The body towards the world

Merleau-Ponty was a mid-twentieth century philosopher, a contemporary of the existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. He was at times closely aligned with them, co-editing the political journal, Les Temps Modernes, alongside Jean-Paul Sartre. Although he predicated his work on Husserlian phenomenology, there is a strong sense of the existential in his work, manifest in the use of concepts such as milieu, setting and situation.¹³ There is also in his work a commitment to the sensory, encapsulated in his sustained elaboration of perceptual life. While Sartre concerned himself with the exigencies of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty preferred to delve into sensory life as the crucible of thought. His commitment to materiality and its experience elevated perception over and above pure thought, while acknowledging their interdependence.¹⁴ Why perception? Perception for Merleau-Ponty is allied to life. Perception underlies all our thinking, experience, our every move. For Merleau-Ponty, the role of philosophy is not to explain perception but to “coincide” with it, remaining as close as possible to how it is for us.¹⁵ The philosophy of perception seeks to understand the experiential relationship between the subject and his or her milieu. Merleau-Ponty approaches perception through the lens of phenomenological philosophy. He extends the intentionality of consciousness to depict a subject oriented towards the world:

My “psyche” is not a series of “states of consciousness” that are rigorously closed in on themselves and inaccessible to anyone but me. My consciousness is turned primarily toward the world, turned toward things; it is above all a relation to the world.¹⁶

Pre-reflective life reveals a subject towards the world, embedded in life’s undertakings, recalling Sartre’s characterization of human being as a mode of transcendence.¹⁷ The identification of transcendence as the mark of the human is related to a number of Husserlian terms which Merleau-Ponty employs in the context of his discussion. These are, firstl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Hanging out in the body
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion: Between the dancer and the dance
• Index