Dance Techne: Kinetic Bodily Logos and Thinking in Movement by Jaana Parviainen [Part ii]
Improvisation as thinking in movement
…thinking in movement is tied to an on-going experienced dynamic in which movement possibilities arise and dissolve. In improvising, we are in the process of creating dance out of our movement possibilities, exploring the world in movement. At the core of this spontaneous creation, movement and perception are seamlessly interwoven
Find Part i of Jaana’s essay, subtitled Dance technique as a technical operation and technisation, here
It is commonly assumed that thinking is tied to language and that it takes place only via language. It is furthermore common to assume that thinking takes place by means of a symbolic system (mathematical, linguistic, logical) which has the capacity to mediate or convey thought referentially (Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement). To assume that thinking is something only the mind engages in and doing and moving are something only the body does is, in effect, to deny the possibility of thinking in movement.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone seeks to show that thinking in movement is our primary way of making sense of the world. For instance, infants as young as 2 to 4 months of age can track a moving object and anticipate its appearance. Infants even as young as two-and-a-half months have a sense of object continuity and solidity, and at six months have an incipient appreciation of gravity and inertia.
The actual dynamic kinetic event is not reducible to a word or even to a series of words. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us: "My body has its world, or understands its world, without having to make use of my 'symbolic' or 'objectifying function'." (Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception)
There is a richly subtle and complex nonverbal world which subsists from the beginning of all our lives, a dynamic world which is neither mediated by language nor a stepping-stone to language. For instance, when we turn to any basic spatio-temporal or dynamic concept, the concept of distance, say, and recall how we first experienced and thought about it, we realise that we did so nonverbally. Sheets-Johnstone comes to the conclusion that rather than speak of the period before language as the pre-linguistic, we should speak of the advent of language as the post-kinetic.
Sheets-Johnstone finds thinking in movement in improvisational dance without specifying any form of improvisation. She shows that thinking in movement involves no symbolic counters but is tied to an on-going experienced dynamic in which movement possibilities arise and dissolve. In improvising, we are in the process of creating dance out of our movement possibilities, exploring the world in movement. At the core of this spontaneous creation, movement and perception are seamlessly interwoven, with the result that we perceive in the course of that exploration a density or fluidity, a sharpness and angularity of our movement.
Our thinking in movement does not mean that we are thinking by means of movement or that our thoughts are being transcribed into movement. Movement is not a result of a mental process which exists prior to the activity. I am not first mentally exploring a range of possibilities, and then later taking some action in consequence of them. Thinking in movement is an experience in which the qualitative dynamics of movement combine to form an ongoing kinetic happening. The body grasps the qualitative dynamics in which it is enmeshed. "Grasping" implies a kinetic intelligence, as Sheets-Johnstone calls it, a kinetic bodily logos.
Sheets-Johnstone holds that in thinking in movement we discover the fundamental creative pattern of thought which is founded upon a kinetic bodily logos. Logos as a Greek word has a wide range of meaning; it primarily signifies the intelligible principle, reason, structure, or order which pervades something, or the source of that order, or an account of that order. Heidegger also moves backwards to the Greek logos.
Heidegger sees logos as derived from the verb legein, which means, as he consistently maintained, "to gather", "to collect together", "to lay one thing beside another", "to arrange one thing after another" (Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund). In arranging a thing one sets it into the proper context within which it can emerge as the thing that it is. Now that which itself manifests is that which comes to presence of itself (Caputo, Mystical Elements in Heidegger’s Thought). Things are gathered by reason; these are derivative senses of logos.
For Sheets-Johnstone, a dance improvisation as a dynamically evolving situation develops its own logic, its own reasonableness and integrity, and it develops that logic on the basis of a kinetic bodily logos. Such a logos appears in movement improvisation when we have no time to think of the movement conceptually or symbolically. The "rationale" of the kinetic order is not founded merely upon acquired dance or movement techniques as such, i.e. automatic modes of behaviour, but upon movement potentials which lie "beneath" techniques.
I will continue Sheets-Johnstone's discussion of bodily thinking from the vantage-point of Heidegger's thought regarding the related concepts: techne and poiesis. The shift from Sheets-Johnstone to Heidegger requires a different way of looking, thinking and language. Sheets-Johnstone seeks to show how scientific (the cognitive sciences and psychology) and phenomenological research can complement one another, placing the phenomenon of thinking in movement in a phylogenetic perspective.
While Sheets-Johnstone emphasises the post-kinetic aspects of thinking, in the late Heidegger’s philosophy language and poetry take a central role. To be sure, Heidegger rejected the entire symbolic and representative character of language, the instrumental purposes of language in gaining conceptual control over our world. For Heidegger, language is nothing human, instead, human is something linguistic (Heidegger, "Language"). For Heidegger things first come to be, i.e. appear, only through language and when there is no word, there is no thing.
Heidegger's claim that poetry occupies a privileged position among the arts by reason of its close affinity to language should be examined critically (Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works). In fact, Sheets-Johnstone's description of the advent of language as a kinetic period questions Heidegger's conclusion that when there is no word, there is no thing. Concepts such as "near", "inside", "heavy", "light", "open", “close”, all of them created corporeally, are experienced directly any time we pay attention to our body. These differences notwithstanding, Sheets-Johnstone's phenomenology and Heidegger's philosophy may complement one another to some extent. My purpose here is not to resolve their basic controversy, but to show how, by attention to Heidegger's philosophy, we may deepen our understanding of the potentials of bodily movement.
Meditative Thinking
Thinking, for Heidegger, is not psychological activity as it is for psychologists, conceptual as for philosophers or physical activity as for cognitive scientists. Thinking is one's sense of the way of life which conditions all of one's actions (Betros, "Heidegger's Critique of Technology"). Heidegger calls the thinking which corresponds to enframing "calculative thinking" (rechnendes Denken) and the thinking which finds its "free relationship" over against technology "meditative" or "reflective" thinking (besinnliches Denken or Nachdenken) (Heidegger, Gelassenheit).
Calculative thinking occurs in such activities as representation, objectification, conceptualisation, evaluation, in organising, manipulating, planning, economising and rationalising. Heidegger calls calculative thinking "one-track thinking". One thinks in terms of going forward or backward. One is on a track and only forward and backward make sense.
There is no bridge from calculative to meditative thinking: the transition is a leap. Heidegger compares meditative thinking to the tracking of an animal as it follows a scent (Heidegger, Was heiβt Denken?). An animal on the scent gives itself over to the scent. Meditative thinking cannot bring knowledge as does science, or produce usable practical wisdom. In terms of the normal functioning of enframing, meditative thinking is useless.
Heidegger likens thinking to thanking, thinking is essentially receptive. Meditative thinking is conditioned by things. The reality of the tree in bloom cannot be proved, and it is a mistake to try to prove it. In calculative thinking we attempt to make ourselves at home by fully possessing the world, in meditative thinking we dwell in our world.
Calculative thinking categorises any thinking which is not calculative as irrational. For Heidegger this is part of what constitutes calculative one-track thinking. He maintains that we must distinguish both the rational and the irrational from what we could call the pre-rational. He opposes the rigour of thinking to the exactness of the science. This thinking cannot be exact as the science is, but it can be rigorous. Its rigour subsists in remaining in its "element" (Caputo) (see note 1) . As the element of a fish is the water through which it moves, the element of thinking is the unconcealment of Being.
In order to remain in its element thinking must keep clear of calculation. Only in this way can it let "the simplicity of Being's manifold dimensions rule". Thinking must be rigorously faithful to its path. Movement (Be-wegung) is what is essential. Thinking must follow its own path. It does not set up a procedural machinery in advance with which it then attacks its matter.
As Heidegger remarks, the strange thing about thinking is its simplicity. This is not mathematical or naïve simplicity. We should learn thinking by unlearning what thinking has been up to now (Heidegger, Was heiβt Metaphysik?), and what we must learn in order to unlearn calculative thinking is "letting-be", Gelassenheit. Gelassenheit is normally translated as composure or self-possession, and since no English word has similar connotations, the Heideggerian term is usually translated with "releasement" or "letting-be". The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart, to whom Heidegger frequently refers, used the term "Gelassenheit".
Heidegger repeatedly emphasises that letting-be does not mean passivity, indifference or neglect; it is an alternative to a thinking which is a willing. The deepest aspect of letting-be is that it is not just something that man does. It is the structure of what Being does.
We have reason to wonder whether the significance of letting-be reaches as far as Heidegger thinks. It is difficult to relate his thought to concrete reality. Thinking is not supposed to solve practical problems, but to restore a sense for the mystery of being. This is clearly not a sufficient condition for changing the world. Despite the obscure description of meditative thinking, however, it seems clear that there is room for, and a need for, the kind of deep ontological critique of rationality Heidegger has put forward.
NEXT: Techne and poiesis
EDITOR’S NOTE: Bold emphasis is used throughout this essay to highlight key points and help the reader navigate the digital tex. The choices of emphasis are the Editor’s.
NOTES
1/ Heidegger speaks of the strictness of thinking, to be sure, by which he means that thought must stay strictly within its element, which is Being, but such thinking is no longer philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adina Armelagos and Mary Sirridge, "Personal Style and Performance Prerogatives", in Maxine Sheet-Johnstone, ed., Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Explorations (London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984)
Charles L. Betros, "Heidegger's Critique of Technology" (Doctoral dissertation, Fordham University, 1986)
John D. Caputo, Mystical Elements in Heidegger’s Thought (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984)
Susan Foster, "Dancing Bodies", in Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations. Zone 6, (New York Urzone, 1992)
Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Gűnther Neske, 1965)
Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit, 2. Auflage (Pfullingen: Gűnther Neske, 1960)
Martin Heidegger, "Language", transl. Albert Hofstaedter, in Poetry, language, and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971)
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, transl. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)
Martin Heidegger, Was heiβt Denken? (Tűbingen: Niemyer, 1984)
Martin Heidegger, Was heiβt Metaphysik?, 9. Auflage (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1965)
Marian Horosko, Martha Graham: The Evolution of Her Dance Theory and Training 1926-1991, Chicago: A Capella Books, 1991, 2
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, transl. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970)
Joseph J. Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht & Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985)
Randy Martin, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1998)
Marcel Mauss, "Body Techniques", transl. Ben Brewster, Sociology and Psychology (London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, transl. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962)
Joan Schlaich & Betty DuPont, The Art of Teaching Dance Technique (Virginia: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 1993)
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1999).
Ernestine Stodelle, Dance Technique of Doris Humphrey (London: Dance Books, 1979)
Jan Ellen Van Dyke, "Modern Dance in a Postmodern World", Doctoral dissertation (The University of North Carolina, 1989)