Does he not go along like a dancer?
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE1
‘And let that day be lost to us on which we did not dance once! And let that wisdom be false to us that brought no laughter with it!’ said Zarathustra.2 Nietzsche wrote about ‘the joyful science’. Similarly, the Formalist and Russian Nietzschean, Viktor Shklovsky, if in a distinctive way, set out through writing ‘to dance science’ (in our words, using ‘science’, as continental Europeans do, to denote disciplined, systematic knowledge, not necessarily natural science). Certainly, he knew how to do many things: to write, to play the violin, to wrestle – and he even wore the Russian Saint-George Cross for valour in war. Lidiia Ginzburg recalled that Shklovsky was fond of telling how, in the years of emigration, working in some kind of editorial office in Berlin, he taught all the typists to write novels – ‘to dance’ (‘after which the editorial office quickly collapsed’, added Ginzburg).3 Having made a skill or instrument from his theory of poetry and composition, Shklovsky transferred this art to the typists. Writing, for him, was almost a manual craft:
I begin work with reading. When I read I try not to be tensed. To be precise, I do not try to memorize. Tension, to be on guard, disturbs me. One needs to read calmly, looking the book in the eyes.…
I make bookmarks of various colours and width. It would be good to write the page number on the bookmarks, in case they fall out (but I don’t). Then I look through the bookmarks. Make notes.
The typist (the same one who is at the moment typing this article) retypes the parts with the page number. I hang these pieces – they are very numerous – on the walls of my room.
To my regret, my room is small. And it’s crowded.
It is very important to understand the quote, to turn it around, to link it to others. Pieces stay on the wall for a long time. I group them, hang them side by side, and then linking passages appear, abruptly written. Then I write a plan of the chapters, rather a detailed one, on paper sheets and put pieces pinned together in files.
I start dictating the work, numbering the inserted pieces.…
As if I worked on a typewriter with open type-face.4
The Formalists, like Shklovsky, opposed knowledge of another character, knowledge how, to the kind of knowledge that academics had created from philology. ‘The Russian Formalists,’ Sergei Zenkin considered, ‘could serve as a model for the “bricolage” character of the literary criticism which improvises its notions, crafts criticism from the material of the very literature in hand.’5
It was not only writers who took an interest in this. Meyerhold wrote that when a violinist ‘takes a difficult passage, you feel that he suddenly thinks through the musical construction to show us how he looks on the world’.6 Becoming a virtuoso, a person becomes a thinker in her or his craft and in a worldview. Shklovsky spoke in the same way: exposing the construction of his writing, his instrument, the writer shows us his feeling for the world, his feeling for life.
Shklovsky often derived his terminology from movement practices. In particular, he borrowed from free wrestling for the idea of The Hamburg Account, his best-known, innovative and, in a way, autobiographical writing on the life of a writer in the emigrant Russian community in Germany after the Revolution. He used technique (‘defamiliarization’) to distance his language from the reader’s expectations, thus pushing the reader, as it had pushed the writer, to a different way of perceiving and of being. The concept of priem (technique) in Formalist writing came from the sphere of sport. As Shklovsky argued, it was anticipated by the Greek conception of the schema, denoting ‘the gymnast’s anticipatory trial of movement [before actually executing a movement]’.7 This opened up a theory of the connection between poetics, gesture and movement, linking writing to other artistic forms. The historian Yury Tsivian wrote:
[The Formalists] Tynianov and Eichenbaum spoke to us about word techniques, Shklovsky wrote about techniques of establishing the subject and [asked] why one would not grant that art conserves favourite techniques for gestures? If it can be shown that several of the gesticulatory techniques work in different expressions of art, it may be possible to speak about a new region of knowledge, about a general poetics of motion and gesture.8
Shklovsky introduced his conception of technique by adopting the gesture as a model, and Tsivian then, in a kind of retrospective converse operation, thought through the gesture with the help of the idea of technique. Tsivian took the conception of technique, as the Formalists used it, and extended it to expressive gestures. Developing a similar assessment, the contemporary literary scholar Ilya Kalinin turned attention to the fact that, for the Formalists, bodily experience served as a ‘distinctive plastic model for the construction of theoretical concepts’.9
Such an argument has contributed to the stance that we have taken in writing this book: it is necessary to speak about the living body, the person who moves and feels movement, as the source of meanings and techniques. Our book, in its way, by exploring kinaesthesia, confirms Shklovsky’s aphorism: art must be felt.10 (To appreciate the impact of this, one must remember that Shklovsky was a writer, and readers would not, at the time he wrote, have thought of ‘sensing’ language.)
The search to cast off habits acquired without reflection, for renewal, for a celebratory feeling for life, was the inspiration of the avant-garde. ‘Life-feeling’ Dionysian dance was uniquely suited for this. Shklovsky told a tale:
There’s an old story in some Greek classic … A certain royal prince was so impassioned with the dance at his wedding that he threw off his clothes and began dancing naked on his hands. This enraged the bride’s father, who shouted: ‘Prince, you have just danced yourself out of a wedding.’ To which the young man, addressing the would-be father-in-law, said: ‘Your Majesty, I couldn’t care less!’ and went on dancing anyway, his feet up in the air.11
Did Shklovsky really uncover this legend in old Greek books, or did he read it in Nietzsche? In 1916, the same year in which the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIaZ) emerged in Petrograd, with Shklovsky the driving spirit, further West Mary Wigman danced not to music but to a reading of ‘The Song of the Dance’, passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. She also spoke about sensitivity to ‘the fullness of life’, ‘vitality’ and ‘brilliance’ – ‘a heightened realization of life’ – which the experience of dance brings.12
Carnivalesque striving to turn upside down, to throw off the higher and older, the prepared and the completed, to seek in the material-bodily underworld for death and new birth, about which Zelinsky’s student, Bakhtin, wrote, went back to Dionysian dance.13 An attitude of carnival was typical for OPOIaZ as it set out to free language to display its own qualities rather than serve as the slave of meaning. (It was for this that it acquired the soubriquet ‘Formalism’.) Telling his tale about the royal prince, Shklovsky called on artists to make art tangible, to overcome convention (indeed, to turn convention on its head) and to leave automatic expression behind, similarly to the way dance lifts a person out of the automatism of taken-for-granted walking. Dance was to be the exit from automatism; it was to be the movement that finds new, sensitive and emotionally informed being for a person. ‘Dance is movement that can be felt. Or more accurately, it is movement formed in order to be felt.’14
From a physiological viewpoint, there is, all the same, something absurd in the wish to destroy automatism and to feel what was formerly unfelt. Everyone knows some version of the joke about the beast with forty legs, which stops to ponder which leg to step out with and, as a result, fails to move at all. Everyone also knows about the automatic skills people acquire, for example, in learning to play a musical instrument like the violin. As the result of extended exercises, the violinist stops feeling the bow and strings and becomes able to concentrate wholly on the music. For this reason, Shklovsky’s lament that people get stuck in habits and stop feeling the world, like a violinist ceasing to feel the bow and strings, appears misdirected. As to what touches the violinist, however, one can trust Shklovsky, as he himself played and knew first-hand that without making movement automatic, without the loss of conscious awareness of the strings and bow, it is impossible to play something of value.
In order to get over the apparent contradiction here, we have to go further into the understanding of automatism and the acquisition of a skill. According to the Pavlovian theory of conditional reflexes, formulated in Russia in the decades that we are discussing, the acquisition of a skill comes through the repetition, many times, of one and the same movement in response to one and the same stimulus (or, more precisely, a combination of stimuli). As a result of the repetition, Pavlov believed, nervous connections form in the brain, beaten out like well-worn paths, and a durable reflex skill forms. Contemporary critics of Pavlov exposed the weakness of this theory, though it seemed to correspond roughly to common sense and to an everyday understanding of how mastering a skill comes about. The German neurologist Kurt Goldstein and the Russian physiologist Nikolai Bernshtein argued, however, that the education of a movement skill does not take place by repetition; rather, the organism studies the purpose for which it decides on a movement task, not the means for carrying it out. The fact is that the situation in which the training of a skill occurs is a little different each time. Only the task, the purpose, the thought of the movement, remains the same, while the means of completing the movement may change. (As a consequence, educators even recommend varying the conditions of training, for example, completing a movement with the side of the body not used before.) A skill, even an automatic one, is not mechanical but a live human movement, by this means tightly connected with a person’s conscious activity, and regulated by it. This kind of account was noticeably different from the understanding of the automatism of the body built upon the theory of reflex action in the nineteenth century.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, a new understanding of skill began to be available, an understanding which no longer considered a skill to be something mechanical, a habit from which consciousness had departed. There was new interest in how a person, in the process of acquiring a skill, reorganizes movements in relationship to the world. ‘To get used to a hat, a car or a stick,’ Merleau-Ponty later wrote, ‘is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being-in-the-world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.’ The acquisition of a skill, to grasp movements, ‘to incorporate them into … our own body’, is not at all a mechanical process. It is the capacity to carry out a movement that was formerly not natural to a person, formerly other, as one’s own, to do it organically, to appropriate it. So, ‘if habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action what then is it?’ continued Merleau-Ponty. ‘It is knowledge which is in my hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort.’15
FIGURE 10 Cyclography of stroke movement. Central Institute of Labour, Moscow, 1920s.
FIGURE 11 Nikolai Bernshtein in the Central Institute of Labour. Moscow, mid-1920s.
Step by step, scientists began to understand the acquisition of a skill not as mechanical learning, but as ‘a rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema’. As Merleau-Ponty wrote:
before the formula of the new dance can incorporate certain elements of general motility, it must first have had, as it were, the stamp of movement set upon it.… The acquisition of a habit is indeed the grasping of a significance, but it is the motor grasping of a motor significance.16
There is a larger history to this, connected to the notion of ‘the schema’ found in the work of a number of psychologists and physiologists in the decades between the two world wars. The English psychologist Frederic Bartlett, in particular, taking the concept from the neurologist Henry Head, used it in order to name the central plan or framework built up by past ‘active organisation’ that makes possible a well-adapted response to a particular situation in which the organism operates as ‘a unitary mass’.17 We can see that a musician mastering the technique of playing reorganizes the scheme of movement, in the process of which she interests herself in the construction of the instrument. For this reason, for example, an organist does not have to remember all the time where to find which register on the organ:
It is not in objective space that the organist in fact is playing. In reality his movements during rehearsal are consecratory gestures: they draw affective vectors, discover emotional sources, and create a space of expressiveness as the movements of the augur delimit the templum [as the movements of the Roman reader of the auguries defined the open space in which this took place].18
These gestures in space have less relationship to the mechanical construction of the organ than to the source of the meaning of the organist’s movements – that is, the music.
When Shklovsky called for the destruction of technique or the breaking of automatism, he proposed a move from objective space to the space of the body (and writing instruments as its extension). We may use the words of Merleau-Ponty and say that he invited a person to return to ‘primary actions’ and, setting out from them, to seek ‘a core of new significance’, as occurs in dancing. He also wrote that when ‘the meaning aimed at cannot be reached by the body’s natural means … it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world’.19 These ‘natural means’ include the habits of the body, which frame one way of life, and the new ‘instrument’, new bodily skills, which open up a new way of life, cultural achievement. What is considered natural and what is considered cultural, of course, changes over time, through the process by which an acquired skill becomes part of a person’s nature. The artistic avant-garde, in reaction against the socially created norms of not-being-able, the negative limits imposed on the bodily order, turned to new skills, to new bodily instruments, to create a new world. The simplest, most direct exemplification was dance: the new dance freed the body, especially the woman’s body, to do what it had not been able to do before. In turn, the training and achievement of new practice required and promoted a new sensitivity to kinaesthetic perception; conversely, the new sensitivity suggested new work for the body in the creation of art.
This continued to be a pattern in the subsequent development of the modernist arts. For instance, in the middle of the twentieth century, the American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham set himself the same task as Shklovsky: ‘to turn man to experience the world’, to struggle with the mechanism of habit.20 Just as the Russian so-called artists of the absurd had made familiar the notion of the word twisted on itself or, as one might say, the word as such, Cunningham became interested in movement as such, the process of completing a movement for the sake of the movement. In practice sessions he busied himself and his dancers with preparing dance stereotypes and then, in their place, creating new ‘unnatural’ or ‘unconventional’ movements (as ordinary language says). His dancers took it in turn to research the possibilities of different parts of the body, defining a circle of movements achieved by the parts and striving to widen this circle. They repeated unfamiliar steps until the movements became organic, part of the body. In the course of training the new skill, a reorganization of the bodily schema took place. In the words of a dancer from Cunningham’s group, ‘everything becomes different, “a non-human existence” … a second nature grows’.21 In such ways, in the course of the twentieth century, the avant-garde re-founded ‘the ancient human’ and created a new ‘second’ human nature. As our chapters have set out to show, if drawing in only one part of the historical story, this fed over and over again on the seemingly unbounded resources of the kinaesthetic world. ‘The sixth sense’, ambiguously but constructively understood as both muscular feeling and embodied intuition and emotion, was exceedingly fertile everywhere that movement had a place in the arts – and where did it not?
In the introduction, we noted the distinction between theoretical knowledge and bodily knowledge given in the polarities of language, ‘connaissance’ – ‘savoir faire’, ‘knowing that’ – ‘knowing how’, ‘znanie’ – ‘umenie’. In traditional Western societies, certainly for the educated classes in those societies at the beginning of the twentieth century, the relationship between the two kinds of knowing was not symmetrical: capability, or knowledge labelled ‘applied’, technical or bodily, had lower status, and those who possessed it were expected to be socially deferential to propositional, theoretical and formal knowledge. Gilbert Ryle, who introduced the language separating knowing that and knowing how into English-language analytic philosophy, wrote:
To possess knowledge that presupposes knowledge about how to use it, when this demands the solution of a theoretical or practical problem. There is a difference between museum knowledge and a craftsman’s knowledge. An idiot may be full of information but incapable of deciding a specific question. The uneducated public mistakenly equates education with the transmission of knowledge that.22
Part of Ryle’s critique was that people have to know how to use educated intelligence and scholarly knowledge – even highly informed activity may be stupidly executed; conversely, an illiterate person may act with great intelligence in a practical task. This was, and is, well known. Yet knowledge that, certainly when made the subject of formal theory, has traditionally possessed higher status. One reason is surely that knowledge how has often remained unarticulated and un-verbalized, passed down by apprenticeship rather than by formalized training. In a culture where social status went with highly literate education (to the extent of being education in ‘dead’ languages), knowing how was by its nature assigned lower status. This did not mean, naturally, that those with lower status and knowledge how did not have their own repertoire of sayings, sometimes amounting to anti-intellectualism, about the ineptitude of the highly educated. Moreover, as Michel de Certeau suggested, there were ways in which capacity in practice created islands of opposition to power that had succeeded in monopolizing language.23 By focusing on knowledge how in the use of language, the Formalists turned to the gestural, and hence movement qualities of words, and made knowing how into art. Whether they succeeded in subverting power is another matter.
We return to the general themes with which we began. The avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century had a marked interest in dynamics and energy, in physical movement, kinetics, and in the inner feeling of movement, kinaesthesia. Also at this time, sport, dance, gymnastics, the circus, cycling, rock-climbing, the motor car and the aeroplane and other activities that centred on movement developed significantly. All this, much influenced by new technologies of representing motion in photography, cinematography and other visual arts, changed perception. This leads to large and to some extent speculative questions. How new was this stress on the haptic and the kinaesthetic? And, whether entirely new or not, did this stress begin, and are Western societies now in the midst of, a large-scale change towards a bodily, or motor, understanding of perception, intelligence, intuition, imagination, feeling and other capabilities traditionally assigned to what ordinary language names as ‘mind’? Is there a shift from a culture dominated by visual perception, and imagery of the human as observer, to a culture of the kinaesthetic and haptic, in which the dominant imagery of a person is of being moved, and moving, in the world? Is knowing how (being able to move), rather than knowing that (being an objective observer), becoming the dominant model of desired human achievement? And is that what people (which people?) want?
It has been a central preoccupation of the social and cultural sciences to understand what makes the modern age different from the centuries that came before. This interest in trying to delineate modernity hardly needs emphasis. There is, however, one claim frequently found in such studies that we want to highlight. This claim is a staple of cultural history, yet, we suggest, it is often asserted with little reflection or clear empirical content. Writers state that visual culture dominates the modern age (here meaning the West since the late medieval period). Sometimes they go further and say that this is at the expense specifically of touch. There is a theoretical, and at times dauntingly abstract, literature about culture which simply takes the generalization for granted. In part, this may derive from the fact that so much social critique, with intellectual roots in Hegel and early Marx, describes the modern age, driven by the power of capital, as separating human practices, labour, from practices and ways of living that would truly address the ideals of human freedom and fulfilment.24 The Gospels have continued to provide a parallel critique. In the context of such argument, the visual sense, in which the separation between subject and object – the ‘distance’ of a person from the world – appears a natural given, has become an embodied metaphor for the separation of people from their true nature and purposes. Building on this, critics then state or imply that visual media – the printed text, the picture, photography, film, television, video – have each in turn achieved a position of social dominance as the technical means for rendering individuals spectators, not participants, instruments of capital, not self-determining agents. Whatever the importance of such arguments may be (and we are far from denying them), our point now is that, for these or other reasons, the literature on modernity repeats the generalization about the dominance of the visual.
Yet it simply may not be sustainable. Firstly, statements about modern culture at this level of generality all too often have little or no purchase: all the senses play a part in life, and the relative importance attached to one of them, and even the extent to which one sense is distinguished from the others, varies hugely in connection with local customs and particular practical purposes.25 This variation, we might surmise, is larger than the capacity of any one sense to dominate. There seems something almost perverse in talking about one sense ‘in general’, as opposed to recognizing the fabulous richness and variety of sensory life, the multi-coloured and multi-dimensional sensory world, and the mutual influence, or even single system, of the senses. Indeed, in histories of the senses, the history of any one sense inevitably spills over into the history of the others. Common language reflects this, moving unselfconsciously and without any discernible line between reference to a ‘sensation’ (particular) and reference to ‘feeling’ (general). The second objection to belief in the dominance of the visual is a simple one: there are, as a matter of fact, wonderfully rich accounts of touch in the modern age, and the metaphors of touch have appeared in all walks of modern life.
Indeed, our writing is a contribution to a wave of enthusiasm for investigating the life of the touch and movement senses, and inquiry keeps turning up more evidence of how important touch was, and is. Constance Classen, in her history of touch in culture, assumed the modern primacy of the visual and referred to ‘Western visualism’. She wrote:
The second fall of the sense of touch [the first came with the Fall of Adam and Eve] – which was less of a fall than a gradual displacement from social centrality – began in the late Middle Ages. It was at this time that practices of visual contemplation increased in importance, preparing the way for the more eye-minded culture of modernity.26
Yet she compiled a vivid record of the multitude of ways in which touch, as a matter of fact, has had a voice in modern as well as earlier times. Indeed, the very title of her book, The Deepest Sense, implied as much, as she used the phrase to indicate the status the sense has had. The ‘deepness’ of touch is not something that only historians recognize in retrospect, excited as they are by contemporary emphasis on embodiment, but reflects an appreciation repeatedly expressed in earlier centuries.27 Not least, this appreciation appeared in an extraordinary range of metaphors of high significance in everyday life: being in touch (or in contact), being touched (or moved), the common touch or the king’s touch, grasping meaning, taking a grip, and very many more. This does not sound like the language of a culture that has lost ‘contact with’ the tactile sense. Similarly, Dee Reynolds, in a very thoughtful study of aesthetics and early abstract art, discussing Kandinsky and Mondrian, asserted ‘that both are radically opposed to the modernist conception of pictorial space as purely optical’.28 But, one might think, if these artists, so central to everyone’s image of modernism, were so ‘opposed’, there can be no modernist conception, in general, as ‘purely optical’, whatever exclusively visual dimension there may have been in some modernist creations. Reynolds also went on to provide detailed examples of the way in which rhythm, movement and balance, all notions inconceivable without kinaesthetic perception, entered into art. We think our history illuminates major ways in which touch (and movement) were formative in modernist culture. It does not seem necessary to assert that ocular or tactile culture was ‘more’ important, or dominant; rather, we picture the many ways, not always well recognized, in which movement and its perception had a fundamental place. This makes a contribution to cultural studies because even the new historians of touch do not fully appreciate that tactile experience always involves an element of movement and the sensing of movement (kinesis and kinaesthesia).
One possible source (among others) for description of the modern age as an ocular one is widespread adoption of Norbert Elias’s account of ‘the civilizing process’.29 Concentrating on European court culture of the seventeenth century, Elias related the refinement of manners to distancing the body and its functions (using a fork, not the fingers). It is easy to see the place that vision might have had in such a culture. As vision is a sense that conveys distance between subject and object, it became valued over the senses like touch and smell, which remind the subject of the body. In the subsequent two centuries, middle-class life further refined conventions of containing and hiding the body. In considerable contrast, in recent decades, in reaction against over-refinement and denaturalization, there has been a return to interest in embodiment and the sense, the touch sense, which gives irreducible knowledge of it. This links with what we have said about re-valuing knowing how and with the appeal of forms of knowledge, and of practice, breaking with traditional, elite culture.
The setting of Ryle’s discussion of knowing how is relevant. It was his larger argument to oppose both philosophical and common talk about internal operations of mind, notably reasoning, preceding intelligent action. He argued that reference to intelligence is proper in description of the quality with which something (whether philosophy or dance) is done; it is not proper to refer to a preceding mental capacity, ‘intelligence’. Further, he stated:
There are many activities which directly display qualities of mind, yet are neither themselves intellectual operations nor yet effects of intellectual operations. Intelligent practice is not a step-child of theory. On the contrary theorizing is one practice amongst others and is itself intelligently or stupidly conducted.
He then went on to observe, because mental intelligence is treated as a separate faculty, ‘since doing is often an overt muscular affair, it is written off as a merely physical process’.30 This was stated some time ago. The keen appreciation of bodily intelligence among performers, and the interest of scientists in motor cognition, suggests that Ryle’s argument has been well taken. What Ryle said people thought of as ‘a merely physical process’ is now appreciated, as the first generation of modernist artists appreciated it, as a subtle animated world made possible by feeling of movement. In dance, intelligence is the capacity to do what the dancer does; or it is the spectator’s capacity to share some aspect, if in transmuted form, of that capacity. We may call it bodily intelligence, an intelligence involving feeling, kinaesthesia, in both dancer and spectator. That feeling is, in addition, presupposed in the activity of reflecting on and hence, as we are doing, writing about it.
One of the most widely appreciated and generally accessible transitions to modernist art is found in Cézanne’s series of studies and paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Here, observers have said, the painter, in order to think about what was before him in the landscape in front of his house, used ‘the gesture’ of applying his pencil or brush as a guide, using tactile and kinaesthetic feeling in order ‘to see’. As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone wrote, ‘what Cézanne does with hand and brush, the choreographer does with other bodies’.31 The truth Cézanne sought required the collaboration of physical feelings. The many studies he produced along the way show how tentative this modernist experiment was. Yet, when Guillemette Bolens introduced her account of the place of gesture in literature, which she brought into relation with contemporary theories of the motor nature of cognition, she found her illustration in a painting from between 1737 and 1738, over a century and a half earlier, the beautiful painting by Chardin of a boy observing the little top he has set in motion.32 The history of gesture, we are led to understand, has long enacted knowledge of tactile and kinaesthetic perception. We might also look further back, to Velásquez’s magnificent painting Las meninas, the frontispiece of Foucault’s The Order of Things. There the portrait of the painter himself emphasizes to the viewer the long handle of the brush he is holding, the material means for transforming the perception of the eye into a painting. The painting is famously about the gaze; but the painter also signals knowledge of the movement of the brush required to put that gaze onto the canvas, the artist’s knowing how.
Our interest in these examples is not the one which historians are sometimes accused of, of showing that history repeats itself and that there is nothing new under the sun. On the contrary; when we discuss young women breaking out into free dance, or Mayakovsky composing ‘dance poetry’, we share the excitement: new aesthetic forms opened up new life. Nevertheless, we need to be clear in what sense something was new and in what particular ways awareness of the kinaesthetic sense found a new voice. It was not new to point to touch or the muscular sense as the source of knowledge of ‘the real’, or to find in gestural movement, or in rhythmic motion, the symbolic expression of ‘higher sensitivity’. But for girls to find these things in dancing in freely flowing tunics, or for poets to find them in verses marching over the page or across the auditorium, was new.
There is a marked contrast between the popular image of a life of movement and the image of scholarship (whether in the natural sciences or the humanities). Scholarship, for most of history, has been the prerogative of elites, and through much of modern Western history scholars have looked on (not to say looked down on) the human body ‘through a network of thought grills, categories and practice imposed on the body from without, and contrary to it, with the aim of strengthening the body’s power “to become civilized”’. All the same, the human body, ‘this object of scattered meaning’, is ‘a culturally-growing matrix’, taking one form rather than another, having one meaning rather than another.33 As a result, with kinaesthesia becoming the subject of self-conscious attention, both as the subject matter of science and in artistic expression, the body has moved out from the shadows of scholarly regard into the limelight. Not unconnected with this, the whole project of ‘civilizing’ the body has become highly problematic, and at times simply rejected. It was the artists of the avant-garde who were at the cutting-edge, exploring at one and the same time what awareness of the senses of movement means for cultural life and for a heightened sense of personal experience, for the public and private being of a person.
This still leaves open the question of whether, over the last century, there has been a shift, which can be documented, towards social, artistic, sporting, health-oriented and other practices that recognize and deeply value kinesis and kinaesthesia. It would appear to be so. If so, then this parallels a recent shift in science towards understanding cognition not so much as mental thinking but as a set of practices (sometimes called ‘situated’ knowledge) embodied in the motor life of the body.34 This, in turn, signals acknowledgement of the foundational importance of knowledge how rather than knowledge that, knowledge embedded in the capabilities of a person rather than knowledge held ‘in the mind’. We earlier cited Merleau-Ponty referring to ‘knowledge which is in my hands’, and, of course, everyday English says the same in phrases such as ‘hands-on knowledge’ and ‘being handy’. Recognition of the embodied nature of knowledge, the phenomenologists would argue, has its rationale in insight that it is to tactile and movement awareness that a person owes distinctions between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’, owes feelings of activity or agency, and owes existential comprehension of being a person ‘in contact with’ a world and in intimacy with other people.
It is evident that there are very large issues at stake. Whatever one’s judgement about them, we hope this book will help recognition, and celebration, of the avant-garde’s contribution to forming what we might call kinaesthetic culture. The vitality, energy and dynamism of artists – their bodily intelligence, knowing how – helped them to see and value the rhythmic, gymnastic and aesthetic potential of muscular movement and physical activity as a source of meaning and as a source of techniques for rendering meaning in new forms of life and art. Lidiia Ginzburg called the thoughts that the Formalists of OPOIaZ had about the embodied, ‘personal’ knowledge of the poet ‘the scientific idea of the avant-garde’.35 The artists of the avant-garde, in all the variety of manifestations they had in the Russian setting, made a turn to movement in the humanities and in the arts. This indeed had its parallels in the sciences, with the turn (then and now) to the motor side of cognition. But the artists constructed their knowledge as technique, knowing how, and they thereby disrupted the social world in which such knowledge was expected to defer to theoretical knowledge.
We face a choice about the way forward, a choice dependent on philosophical argument. In telling the historical story of the involvement of the sixth sense in the lives of the Russian artists of the avant-garde, we create a kind of narrative, an ordered description of the significance of this sense for their art. When we explain why it had this significance, though, we face their arguments or presumptions, and the arguments or presumptions of more recent writers, that kinaesthesia is a special sense because of its primary place in knowledge of self and world. It is necessary to address a philosophical argument about this sense being unmediated in the way the other senses are not. Elements of such an argument have been powerfully articulated at least from the time of John Locke, through Maine de Biran and others in the early nineteenth century, to the present. Husserl restated such a position in phenomenological terms at the time when the artistic avant-garde was expressing it, through practical exemplification rather than formally and systematically, in new practices and media. And in the present it would not be difficult to find practitioners of modern dance, or artists of movement on the streets, for whom movement of the body has status as the primary statement of being alive. In these settings, and for these people, the sense of movement is not the object of a narrative history but is the living expression of vitality. In the social world in which the arts of movement have developed, from the late nineteenth century to the present, there has been an apparently inexorable rise of a public culture of the body – a focus on the body as the defining framework of a person’s individual identity and on the body as public persona. There are societies in which people have come to have profound concern with individual diet, exercise, sport, appearance, dress and ornament – that is, with the body as if it were the fundamental, even perhaps the only, means to human flourishing generally. If the ideal of wholeness, that is, the integrated endeavour of body and mind, or of body and spirit, has not gone away, the royal road to achieving it, many people would appear to assume, is through techniques of the body, and especially through movement (or its mirror image, stillness). This is most surely so for the contemporary dancer.
Thus the innovative ways of living of the Russian avant-garde have, with time, become the chosen ways of life of many. Whatever the philosophical validity of argument about the primary, or unmediated, character of the movement sense, there can be no doubt that large swathes of modern life take (if implicitly) this argument as a given. We have drawn attention to what may be a very influential social shift towards the elevation of knowing how above subservience to knowing that, a shift associating democratic political culture with individual bodily powers. Or, if we were to make a critical judgement, we could say a shift towards rendering human capacities, interpreted as embodied, more amenable to commodification or expropriation for profit. However this may be, the philosophical questions remain. Is it right to say life is action and the sense of life therefore the sense of movement? Is it correct to hold that kinaesthesia is unmediated in the way that the other senses are not? Some philosophers, like William James, have certainly held that the epistemological question, deciding the grounds on which it can be said people know something, cannot be resolved by attributing knowledge to one sense rather than another.36 Other philosophers, phenomenologists such as those we cited in our introduction, have held that there is an irreducible difference in the significance and meaning of the movement sense, since it conveys a character of embodied being in a world, rather than of being a mental observer of a world.
On these matters there is an ongoing and divisive debate among philosophers about the naturalization of epistemology.37 On the grounds of the logic of reason, are logical and scientific knowledge statements to be kept separate, or is knowledge of science essential to the resolution of the problem of knowledge? (This is only the most general form of the debate. Argument about which science is needed in order to address epistemological questions provokes a large dispute, with supporters of the claims of neuroscience at one end of the spectrum of positions and supporters of the sociology of knowledge at the other end.) A parallel range of philosophical issues troubles the literature of dance and performance studies. Here the framework of discussion is not so much that of philosophy of science and science studies, but the reaction to what some people think to be the reckless relativism of postmodern theory. If it were the achievement of postmodern theory to demonstrate the ways in which any claim about the world, or about truth, art or the self, could be shown to be part of a discourse, and discourses themselves be shown to have content by virtue of other discourses, and so on without the possibility of finding a base, then the reaction against this was to turn to the body as the firm base.38 The claim is, we might say, that the buck stops with the body: the body is real, whatever the discourse about it. Practitioners of the movement arts certainly act as if this is so – and many of them, we think, believe consciously that it is so. Many theorists of performance have gone along with this, even to the extent of being persuaded that brain science is actually the one and true science that provides firm ground for knowledge. The issues remain debated.
The turn to the moving body, to the knowing body, as the immanent ground of knowledge is also, very significantly, an expression of desire for individual agency. This is easy enough to comprehend in public worlds where individual people so often feel powerless to influence events. In the knowing body, and in the acquisition of skills to enhance it, people find, or create, a world in which they do have agency.
An agent who holds sway is a bona fide agent precisely insofar as she/he is aware of her/his own movement, aware not only of initiating it, but aware of its spatio-temporal and energy dynamics, which is to say of its rich and variable qualia [qualitative feels or awareness].39
The sense of agency in movement was certainly of great importance to our Russians. Breaking out from a political and cultural world of confinement, seeking a ‘higher sensitivity’ and, in the radical avant-garde, the embodiment of new ways of life, they found the means, the tools, in movement. Finding movement, the young women in Heptachor found agency. That they and not others achieved this at this time derived from their special, highly educated position in society, as well as from particular force and desire of individual character. But the body was there for everyone as a potential source of agency. ‘The pre-reflective awareness of the body in movement as a dynamic form-in-the-making is inherent in any lived experience of sheer body movement. It is not a special kind of awareness which must be cultivated, or which only a select few may achieve.’40 Dance improvisation has a special place as the language, the gesture, of the free spirit.
Theory in art rests on the back of the practice of art. Twentieth-century aesthetics drew on the practical knowledge of artistic creators. This is perhaps clearest in the theatre, where almost all directors of note articulated their own theory of theatre. In the theatre, the theory of acting was the practice of acting – exemplified in Stanislavsky’s ‘System’. This aesthetics was, of course, informed by contemporary scientific theories; these people studied in good classical gymnasiums which, often enough, offered a broader and better education than that commonly provided later. Yet, to a significant degree, the theories were based on personal practical, sensuous and emotional experience. This is why kinaesthesia, among the other senses, matters. Shklovsky exemplifies the practitioner of literature who theorizes from his own experience. In his words,
People say that one doesn’t have to be a fish to be an ichthyologist.
About myself, I say that I am a fish: a writer that analyses literature as art.41
Clearly enough, there is a great deal here that should be taken further. We have tried to create a vivid picture of ways of life in which they were taken further – but in performance rather than as philosophy or cultural theory. The Russian avant-garde way of life performed the movement sense as the ground of being vital.
It is surely apparent that we would not have written as we have, on the subjects we have, without sympathy for ways of life in which the sense of movement has a primary place. Our descriptive voice as historians is also the evaluative voice of people who have experienced some of the pleasures of movement and, as it may be, an imagination for wholeness or fulfilment in movement. This comes in walking and, in our modest way, in dance, and it comes as spectators of movement from wind in the trees to a running child to an acrobat. Sensitivity to ways of life that emphasize movement, like ways of life generally, must and does go forward while philosophical questions remain there to argue over. (That ‘remaining there’ is itself a central feature, we would say, of the good life; we are not disparaging philosophy.) If questions about the theory of knowledge remain, we may nevertheless think that practice, knowing how, offers routes, open to all, to achieve something of worth. This is tangible in the lives of our artists.