To be is to sense, to feel; in that sensing and feeling, to know, to be aware. All sensing is movement.
A young woman jumps, leaps, takes to the air. We do not know her name, only that she flies in the free dance studio of Vera Maya in Moscow, perhaps in 1927. She indeed flies free, even if the photographer carefully sets up the shot from a low angle to give an impression of height. It may well be that dancer and photographer rehearse over and over again to get the effect they want. The exact place is not important; but it is essential that the flight is in the open air – in nature, as people say. This is not a lady at a ball, but a woman setting out to be her ‘natural self’. She shows the surprising capacity of the human body to lift off. We see this in the back-flip of the high-jumper and the somersaulting spring of the acrobat, and we see it in the arts of dance. We also see it in animals. The eminent physiologist C. S. Sherrington, fascinated by the magic of a falling cat turning to land upright on its four paws, examined the nervous system in order to understand just such feats of bodily organization. In leaping, flight or free fall, a person (or cat) attains for a brief moment the unattainable, life in the air, elevated, higher, ‘trailing clouds of glory’, inspired, closer to perfection, if not indeed to heaven.1 The woman aspires to be yet higher. Her stretched and extended limbs show the force which she puts into the effort. The wind of movement catches her hair and tunic. The force creates the illusion that she flies, and because she creates the force, it is no illusion that her spirit flies. Mind and body transcend what language and philosophy so often keep separate. To achieve this, a person, if not the falling cat, has to train the body, to attain bodily skill, not mental reason. But the leap questions these categories: the woman feels with the body and there is knowledge. The woman holds the artificial and the natural in forceful tension: posed picture and free leap. If mind is to culture as body is to nature, this leap is close to nature. Yet it is cultivated, as it is the art of a studio, and, moreover, the studio is in a large city: Moscow after the Revolution, transforming with chaotic haste. The leap is a modern one, confirmed by the woman’s dress, or relative undress for Russia at this time: her gymnast’s costume and flowing tunic.
Eighty or ninety years later, the photograph has become well known, having appeared in exhibitions on modernism and physical culture and the covers of books. The woman has a public. Yet the image still has the power to undermine and to transcend description. We might be tempted to think that there is no need to say anything: this is a moment of beauty and liberation, performed not stated. The dancer’s jump, however, leads us to a number of large claims, the themes of our book, themes at one and the same time historical and philosophical. Our conclusions must be tentative, especially in a short book of large scope. Nevertheless, we aim to focus attention on and advance discussion of a number of related issues.
First and foremost, we make a large claim for kinaesthesia, the sense of movement, as both a source of personal knowledge and a resource for innovation in the arts and wider culture. We show this was the case in the personal lives and in the public achievements of the artists, poets and performers of the Russian avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century. Further, we set the historical culture we describe in the context of a larger discussion, very much current in the performance arts, dance most obviously, and in philosophy and physiology, about the primacy of movement and the movement sense in knowing and expressing being human, being alive. As some others have done, we name the sense of movement ‘the sixth sense’, intentionally alluding to the associations of this name to intuition, to a ‘sense’ that goes beyond the senses. We explain the historical and conceptual background to this in the first chapter.
The argument starts from what no one doubts: sensing, feeling, knowing and awareness have a breath-taking qualitative variety. There is no definitive separation between what one senses or knows, and what one feels or is aware of. The English language permits using ‘sense’ and ‘feeling’ interchangeably, or saying, ‘I’m aware of that’, meaning ‘I know that’. We feel, and know, our bodies, other people and the world. The flexibility and nuance of language matches the variability and delicacy of awareness. As a result, there has long been, and still is, large debate about proper description of mental states. The everyday being of a person is, so to speak, immersed and then uncovered in the tide of this variety, advancing and receding.
Yet a belief is prominent in contemporary culture: amidst all this variety in sensuous life there is one sense, one form of awareness and one type of knowledge underlying the rest. This, it is said, is the sense of movement, or kinaesthesia. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone wrote: ‘At their most fundamental level, subjective experiences are tactile-kinaesthetic experiences. They are experiences of one’s own body and body movement; they are experiences of animate form.’2 People very often refer to this sense as a dimension of what they broadly call touch or, using the now fashionable term, the haptic sense. Clearly, the sense of movement is of paramount interest in the performance arts of dance, acrobatics or acting, and the arts of film or multi-media conceptual art that go with them. It is also central in sport, climbing, gymnastics and all the varieties of physical culture that have become so large a part of so many people’s commitment to health and well-being. Nor should we ignore ‘simple’ walking.3 All these activities presuppose some sense and knowledge of movement. Once there is recognition of this, it is not a large step to believe that the sense of movement is actually intrinsic to being a living animal. Animals move, and while we can conceive of movement sustaining life without sight or hearing or smell, we cannot conceive of this without the presence of touch in some form. To move is to be alive; to be alive is to move.
Partly as a result of such understandings, contemporary Western culture has taken a large turn towards valuing the body as the foundation on which to build secure knowledge for life, and also secure knowledge for science and for the arts. Language referring to the body and embodiment is everywhere, from cognitive neuroscience to film theory. What is perhaps not so widely appreciated is that this cultural life takes for granted the existence of movement sense. Indeed – and here we state the conceptual, as opposed to historical, theme of our book – belief that the sense of movement of the body underlies other experience, or is the foundational element of experience, has achieved a prime position. We start to ask how and why this has happened, how and why the sense of movement of the body, in many commentaries, has been posited as the most elementary, and secure, element of awareness and knowledge. The formal, philosophical defence of this claim depends on a phenomenological argument, going back in its modern form to Edmund Husserl, elaborated psychologically in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and finding modern expression in such writers on touch and movement as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Jean-Luc Petit and Matthew Ratcliffe.4 Sheets-Johnstone and Petit have also striven to link their philosophical argument with biology, with the empirical, scientific evidence that we can take the body and the body’s sensitivity to (if not knowledge of) its own movement as constitutive of ‘life’. Merleau-Ponty’s work is a reference point, at the basis of contemporary appreciation of the embodied nature of perception, even when writers, like Sheets-Johnstone, criticize his arguments for ignoring the centrality of kinaesthetic sense for the phenomenology of the body.5
It would seem that the contemporary turn ‘to the body’ addresses a longing for some firm base. This may be understandable, as it follows hot on the heels of what many people feel are the relativistic excesses of postmodern culture, not to mention the depredations of capitalist production rendering everything, even ‘life’, in the form of commodities. It is not our view that the body, or the natural science of the body, in a direct way, provides such a firm base, but the belief is powerful and prevalent. Moreover, modern performance surely creates the means with which both performers and audience, via bodily life, feel in re-possession of agency and autonomy. What interests us in this book is the place that kinaesthesia has had historically in the search for the foundation of experience, agency and performance. Put in its simplest form, the claims for kinaesthesis hinge on the argument that this sense gives unmediated contact with the world, while the other senses offer a mediated relationship. The very word ‘contact’ communicates the point: in movement and touch there is contact, a direct relationship with; in the other senses there is not. With touch and movement, a person is at one with the world; with the other senses, so it may be felt, there is subject and object, self and other. In this way of thought, dance becomes the most powerful metaphor, and it also becomes the reality, of unmediated being alive as part of a world. It follows that the implicit knowledge of the body in movement, in action and performance, ‘knowledge how’, may be a person’s most secure knowledge. Many artists have conceived of movement as the unmediated presence of being human in the world; they have sought to transcend the subject-object opposition and to know the self ‘in contact with’ what they have understood to be ‘the real’. We are going to explore this conclusion through its historical expression. Our interest is the claim, at times implicit and at others explicit, that kinaesthesia is the ‘highest’ sense: not so much the sixth sense, but the first and the most important sense.
We would like to suggest that there was substantial precedent in intellectual culture, and also in the everyday discourse of practical engagement with people and things, for a notion of ‘the real’ given by touch and movement senses. There was a long tradition, developing as the analysis of touch and muscular sensation, distinguishing knowledge or experience of the primary, foundational qualities of what exists from secondary or acquired experience and knowledge. It is not that the modernist artists all built on the literature of this tradition; they characteristically did not. But they did live in a cultural world deeply informed by the metaphors of touch, movement and life, that is, by metaphors of bodily sensing thought to transcend social and artistic conventions.6
This takes us to the second theme, reflected in the subtitle to this chapter, ‘exuberant modernism’. We start with ‘modernism’ since this is the heading under which a vast literature has tried to understand and explain innovative changes in the arts in the decades on either side of 1900 and continuing into the mid-twentieth century. The search for an essential definition has surely been misguided. It was led, in part, by the effort, in abstract terms, to determine the politically progressive or regressive content of the arts in relation to modern conditions of life (‘modernity’). For our purposes, however, modernism is a family name (to use Wittgenstein’s phrase) for a host of innovative work. For us, then, for instance, it is not important to argue when modernism began (and, indeed, reference to ‘the new’ in the arts and intellectual culture was a cliché from the 1860s onwards), or to claim that, in essence, the achievement of modernism was abstraction and the complete break with naturalism and realism. Modernism involved controversies and tensions; it required keeping the opposites in the air, in play, making them dance. Thus, for example, modernism was as much about policing the line between mind and body as about bringing them together, as much about disciplining the body as about letting it loose.
Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, there has been an explosion of research on modernism and the body. As a result, it has become widely accepted that ‘early modernism was by, for, through, and about the body’.7 Recently, researchers have reconsidered the thesis, attributed to Theodor Adorno, treating the ‘early modernist concern for the cultivation of the body as a symptom of false consciousness, a quasi-Taylorist discipline masquerading as social liberation’.8 They have also reassessed the position attributed to Clement Greenberg, which held that the essence of modernism was abstraction, understood as a move away from embodied forms of representation. Collectively, this rethinking has established bodily experience and kinaesthesia as highly significant to the arts of the modern era. A number of scholars have drawn out different parts of the picture. Guillemette Bolens, for instance, wrote on kinaesthesia in gesture and literary narrative, Dee Reynolds analysed uses of rhythm and energy in modern dance, and Robin Veder examined ‘the conjoining of physical practices and aesthetic theories’ which she termed ‘kin-aesthetic modernism’, and she linked her study to ‘the economy of energy’, arguing that ‘kinesthesia organized its expressions’.9 Veder’s project was not dissimilar to ours, though her focus was on modern art and body culture practices in the United States in the 1910s through to the mid-1930s. She recognized that ‘while the turn-of-century kinesthetic body cultures [especially where they concerned the cult of the will] most obviously appear to be disciplinary projects of false consciousness … kinesthetic awareness was a cultivated skill with particular meanings and techniques’. Happily, we might say, there was also a brighter side, not disciplined: these bodily cultures involved ‘inquiry into energy, manifested in the human body’s subtle, enforced, and exuberant movements’.10 Our project concentrates precisely on the ‘exuberance’ rather than the ‘discipline’ intrinsic to kinaesthesia. Living art was expressed in exuberant individual lives as well as in the creations of artists, and it is this exuberance in the body that we place in modernist culture.
Recent work on the arts has sought to show that there is a much more direct relationship between physiological science in the second half of the nineteenth century and the arts than has been acknowledged. Indeed, both Robert Michael Brain and Robin Veder, the former discussing mainly Parisian culture in the 1880s and 1890s, the latter modernism in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, have distinguished what they called ‘physiological aesthetics’.11 There are perhaps two pertinent dimensions to this concept. The first is a general shift to naturalism, looking to the physiological or evolutionary nature of human beings in addressing questions such as ‘what is art?’ or ‘what is beauty?’. This certainly had a significant input from experimental science, of which Etienne-Jules Marey’s use of photography to record and analyse the components of movement and Theodor Lipps’s psychological studies of Einfühlung (translated into ‘empathy’ in 1909, introducing this word into English) are famous examples. Marey’s contribution to the new art of the cinema has been extensively documented, while empathy theory has become an important part of dance research.12 A second issue concerns the actual inspiration derived from science in artistic innovation. There are clear examples: Brain turned to the distinctive case of the painter, Georges Seurat, and Veder provided a persuasive account of Georgia O’Keefe’s interest in the psycho-physiology of motor imagery. Such examples, however, do not necessarily diminish the appropriateness of the more established attribution of innovation to the artists’ imaginative reconstruction of existing aesthetic practices.
‘Exuberance’ is synonymous with ‘dance’, and the centrality of dance to the avant-garde is our book’s third theme. The changes in the arts, we write, hinged on a large and special appreciation of the sense of movement. Some scholarship has certainly recognized this in specific instances: for instance, there has been appreciation of the link, through rhythm, of the influence of dancers on poetry, at least since Frank Kermode’s essays in the late 1950s.13 There also is new literature on the sense of touch. In spite of this, it remains the case that writers about modernism have neither done full justice to the place of dance in the changes across the arts nor sufficiently appreciated how kinaesthesia, as a sense, played a central part.14
Innovative artists, searching for new certainties, but painfully aware of the uncertainties of the socio-political world, in the period from the 1880s to the First World War drew heavily on a range of linked polarities: real–false, natural–artificial, insight–convention, deep–superficial, objective form–decoration, true feeling–sentiment and so on. To these we may add life–death, movement–stasis, contact–distance. These were polarities that made a turn to bodily movement significant and highly symbolic. In particular, there was noteworthy artistic activity for which striving ‘to be in contact with’ nature, or with the flux of life, or with cosmic movements and forces, was central. This was very clear in the dance of Isadora Duncan or Rudolf Laban, or in the spectacular new forms of the Ballets russes.15
In the 1880s and 1890s and in subsequent decades, it hardly needs to be said, the arts were transforming, sometimes with great speed, and sometimes radically. What we would argue for is the place of bodily movement, and of sensibility to movement, certainly linked to the other senses, in this.16 The historical content of the later chapters on avant-garde culture in Russia in ‘the Silver Age’, beginning in the 1890s and ending, transformed by the Revolution, in the 1920s, will show just what a rich contribution this was.17 The Russian case is certainly pertinent to larger and more general claims. A central reason why it is hard to characterize the modernist arts in any straightforward way is that these arts took such a range of expressive forms. Indeed, this range of creativity in new forms (tonal music, abstraction, the stream of consciousness in writing and so forth) must be part of any portrait of modernism. Only later was all this range to receive a collective name. Yet all modernist voices rejected a contemporary culture said to have reduced art to academic or bourgeois conventions and to have failed to uphold an art of higher values. Individual artists took it upon themselves to establish what higher values are. Each artist was her or his own authority, though, of course, artists shared lives as well as techniques and inspiration. The cutting-edge of this social world, preoccupied with innovation, became the avant-garde, constantly and self-consciously renewed, dismissing predecessors. In Russia, this self-consciousness had a special quality. The tsarist state claimed divine legitimacy and imposed autocracy. As a consequence, a broad swathe of educated opinion formed itself in opposition and took up liberal, if not radical, causes. It was a context which fostered idealist dreams, often associated with a turn to ‘life’; as a result, many artists were to welcome the Revolution, if many also did not, or quickly turned away in disillusionment.
In the Russian context, we find innovation in technique and expression often very strongly linked to a turn ‘to nature’, the very direction which some later commentators held to be anti-modernist. The turn ‘to nature’ – this is the main point – depended on experiencing and expressing movement, most specifically performing dance, as the vital link between being human, ‘life’ and ‘the real’, thereby breaking with academic artistic conventions, like the classical ballet.18 At the centre of avant-garde groups was a cult of innovation, the declaration of cultural autonomy, free agency for the artist, expressed through new techniques and through new forms of representation, followed by new scepticism about the possibilities of representation, belief in the formal properties of media as the proper basis of art, and so on. In our usage, the avant-garde refers to those Russians who self-identified as innovators in their respective media and grouped together in mutual support, sometimes with political intent, and for social pleasure – not least, to dance together.
Most Russian artists were very well educated and widely read in several languages, and they would have had some knowledge of scientific authors like Wilhelm Wundt (writing on physiological psychology), Ernst Haeckel (evolution and the nature of life), Henry Maudsley (the brain and mental illness) and Pierre Janet (automatism).19 In the case of the Russian avant-garde, we find little reference to experimental science. Where there most obviously is a connection, if indirect, is in relation to the appreciation of breathing and rhythm, an appreciation that linked patterns of aesthetic expression with belief in the underlying wave-like energies of living, if not cosmic, forces. Historians writing about the connection between psycho-physiology and the arts in order to locate both as expressions of modernity have therefore explored ‘the pulse’, economy, speed, technology and urban transformations of modern times.20 Such transformations, we need to note, were also underway in Russia, before the Revolution, and it was a reaction against them, as much as celebrations of them, that motivated the artists we discuss.
Modernist art movements were international; indeed, the way in which innovations broke through the borders of national cultures was intrinsic to modernism. Many Russian artists lived and worked in, or at least travelled to, Paris, Munich and London. Fewer artists made the journey in the opposite direction, though some did, and Isadora Duncan did with great effect. The Russian impact in Europe and North America was well recognized, most spectacularly with the debut in Paris, in 1909, of the Ballets russes. After 1918, there was a strong Moscow–Berlin connection, fostering Constructivism in art, design and architecture. Vladimir Nabokov wrote his first reflexively literary novels, and Viktor Shklovsky his Formalist compositions, de-familiarizing the everyday world, in Berlin.21 Our Russian story is thus part of a larger epic.
The Russian experience also gives us the sources to develop a large claim about why the movement sense has been regarded, as we argue it has, especially around 1900 and now, as the highest, most significant and most authoritative, sense. From ancient times, and in many cultures around the world, there is evidence of a human longing to gain knowledge transcending the everyday senses, senses so apt to deceive. In mystical religious practices, in dreaming, in the life of the imagination, in philosophical reason, there is a long history of search for intuition, sometimes called a sixth sense, to ground knowledge in a higher realm than the one revealed by the mundane, material senses. In Russia, utopian longings, linked to worldviews rich in imagination for the place of humans in the cosmos, were of special importance. We argue that this search for a higher sensibility, at least in part, transformed in the modern age into a range of beliefs about kinaesthesia as a higher sense. It is in this context that we find significance in the belief that the movement sense gives both unmediated expression to being-in-the-world and unmediated knowledge of the world. The sense has been held to transcend the separation of subject and object and to realize the ancient hope ‘to know’ by rendering the knower part of the larger whole, not an outside observer of it. This, we suggest, is a modern recreation of intuition, insight and belief in higher, or most profound, knowledge. The modern dancer is its personification, its celebrant. The belief holds that knowledge is in the body, and the body the vessel of truth. This argument connects our historical story with present debate about the nature and understanding of dance and embodied performance. This reference to performance requires brief comment.
There is a growing body of scholarship on embodiment, materiality and praxis, in which authors argue that texts, architecture and other art forms are not objects or things but behaviours, practices or, in short, performances. This is part of a reassessment of the entire area of inquiries into culture, promoting the view that ‘performance studies start where other disciplines end’.22 The success of the term ‘performance’ is partly due to its multiple meanings. In business, sport and sex, to perform means both to do something up to a standard and to succeed, to excel. In the arts, to perform is to put on a show, a play, a dance, a concert. In everyday life, to perform is to show off, to go to extremes, to underline an action for those who are watching. As one of the most energetic speakers on behalf of performance studies, Richard Schechner, argued, all these usages grow from the same root: in ancient Athens, theatre festivals were simultaneously ritual, art, sport-like competitions and popular entertainment.23 In the twenty-first century, many people have come to feel that they live, as never before, by means of performance. Yet the functions of performance, it would seem, have separated. Dance emphasized movement, theatre emphasized narration and impersonation, sport emphasized competition and ritual emphasized communication with transcendent forces or beings.
As a result of this, at least in part, the contemporary tendency is to seek unification rather than separation of different kinds of performance. Thus aesthetic performances have developed, including performance art, mixed-media, happenings or inter-media, that cannot be located precisely as theatre or dance or music or visual arts. These activities, Schechner claimed, ‘blur or breached boundaries separating art from life and genres from each other. As performance art grew in range and popularity, theorists began to examine “performative behaviour” – how people play gender, heightening their constructed identity, performing slightly or radically different selves in different situations.’24 Linking performance and identity brought studies of the arts close to the social sciences. The ethnographer Victor Turner was influential in this connection, as he wanted the professional discourse of cultural studies to capture the struggle, passion and practical engagement of village life that he had so relished in his studies in the field. ‘The language of drama and performance gave him a way of thinking and talking about people and actors who creatively play, improvise, interpret, and re-present roles and scripts.’25 For such reasons, Homo performans has made his entrance into academia. Recently, the introduction of the category of everyday-life performance (ELP) has made the argument even stronger. Nathan Stucky, for instance, stressed that ‘in ELP, I “become” the other character, but I don’t make it up’. This happens, he claimed, due to ‘deep embodiment’ (a term evoking Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’ and ‘deep play’), ‘total immersion, using all of the evidence available, getting inside’:
As I try to organise my movements, move my mouth, extend my limbs, the body tells me something about what it feels like to move in new ways. My habitual movements become shifted into other habitual movements, to the other’s habitual movements. I in/habit an/other’s space.26
All this has considerably raised consciousness about the place of kinaesthesia and movement in the arts. Some authors, indeed, taking the embodiment argument further, have criticized the founding fathers of performance studies, Turner and Schechner, for stressing vision at the expense of the other senses. Peggy Phelan expressed suspicion of their ‘faith’ in the potentially omniscient standing of vision, and she nursed an alternative, looking to ‘“points of contact” – to take up Schechner’s inviting phrase … [to] sustain the field in the next century’.27 Referencing and understanding embodiment appeared to her, as to many others, to be the way forward. ‘Clearly,’ Catherine M. Soussloff and Mark Franko argued, with the moving body in mind, ‘something is lost when performances and images become texts.’28 The dance scholar Jane Desmond even called for a specific movement-studies methodology, not then available within cultural studies. ‘Much is to be gained,’ she wrote, ‘by opening up cultural studies to questions of kinesthetic semiotics and by placing dance research (and, by extension, human movement studies) on the agenda of cultural studies.’29 Likewise, Dwight Conquergood welcomed a passage ‘from nouns to verbs, from mimesis to kinesis, from the textualized space to co-experienced time’.30 This shift from analysing movement in geometrical space to locating movement in experiential space-time seems to be particularly important (and in this context there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy of Henri Bergson). In an article on ‘the dwelling body’, Suze Adams therefore called for a
new understanding of the relationship between body and place.… It is a matter of paying full attention and shifting that attention away from the known, of refocusing embodied engagement and bodily posture, of (repeatedly) expanding awareness from body to place and from place back to body again … of dwelling simultaneously in the body and dwelling in place.31
Performance studies have the great ambition to capture what tends to get lost on other paths of scholarship: subjectivity, experience and the irreducibly personal aspect of emotion.32 In consequence, there is currently a tendency to speak about ‘the affective turn’ instead of ‘the performative turn’. In the words of Susan L. Foster, ‘when properly cultivated by the choreographies, dance movement can unite both dancer and viewer in the experience of fundamental human emotion’.33 A further large ambition, significant for these arguments reconfiguring cultural studies, is to theorize anew, through kinaesthesia, the relation of aesthetics and politics. This, it is envisaged, is a way to ‘break down conceptual divisions of choreography/improvisation, innovation/tradition, sound/movement, and collective/individual’.34 Soussloff and Franko recalled Jacques Derrida’s saying: ‘No one can any longer separate knowledge from power, reason from performativity, metaphysics from technical mastery.’35 To performance studies is assigned the capacity to transform existing disciplinary formations. This is because embodied knowledge, which integrates cognition, praxis and ordinary life, is assigned to performance. Thus, James Loxely argued that ‘because performance studies attends to our lives as practice, as embodied, in the way that it does, it is well placed to insist on the importance of these other, marginalised, “nonserious” modes of experience, modes whose marginality is a function not of their insignificance but of their repression’.36 The study of performance appears to restore the political to the everyday. The dancer and scholar, Naomi Bragin, for instance, used ‘the idea of (kin)aesthetic politics to ask how street dance might imagine alternative modes of relating that define performances of being connected and dislocated, belonging and dispossession, escape and capture’.37
This returns us to the great hope, to which we allude in referring to the distinction between knowing how and knowing that: by capturing the experiential component of living processes, performance studies may open up a novel epistemology, new ways of sensing and knowing both the world and ourselves. Terms widely used recently, such as ‘embodied cognition’, ‘experiential knowledge’, ‘the cognitive body’ and ‘the learnt body’, also point in this direction. What is at issue is not just knowledge that artistic performers have, but what they gain in performance. Moreover, this is at issue for both audiences and scholars. For Turner and Schechner, action and awareness are one: the action of reflection, or reflexivity, is central to performance – ‘the relationship between studying performance and doing performance is integral’.38 Conquergood argued that ‘the communicative praxis of speaking and listening … demands co-presence even as it decenters the categories of knower and known’. Communication, he claimed, introduces ‘vulnerability and self-disclosure’, the opposite to closure and authority as constituted by the gaze, and it is exemplified by the performance of movement.39 Elsewhere, he brought discussion of varieties of knowledge into the argument, distinguishing propositional knowledge, ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing about’, and ‘active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connection’, that is, ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing who’. ‘Knowing who,’ he explained, ‘is a view from ground level, in the thick of things. This is knowledge that is anchored in practice and circulated within a performance community, but is ephemeral.’40 It is the sort of knowledge the dancer has improvising in a group.
All in all, as Tracy C. Davis playfully wrote:
the performative turn is … a turn that is alternately a technique of dance (pirouette), leads to unconventional routing (detour), championing social change (revolution, social or otherwise), bends for new use (deflection), proudly questions the culturally normative (deviation), like a sail propels us forward yet is obliquely positioned to the wind (tack), and though unsteady is wide open (yaw), depending upon what is apt.41
This brings us back to the realm of the senses and sensuousness, of which kinaesthesia is part, that is, to the feeling of muscular joy, or kinaesthetic pleasure, the exuberance, even ecstasy, brought by free movements. We suggest, talking of avant-garde art, that it is not enough to point to technical matters. It is necessary to think of the engine, or spirit – the choice of metaphor may matter – that moves artists to make radically new art. This is to bring in a teleological cause of innovation. We locate this engine, or spirit, in the affectivity linked to movement, in what the title of this book calls ‘the sixth sense’, the feeling of one’s body moving in a free and creative way. We would like to demonstrate that the deeper, intuitive knowledge the avant-garde artists sought, and sought to perform, was coupled with sensuousness and affectivity, and kinaesthesia was the foundation.
A conception of kinaesthesia has thus not only taken root but has gradually grown in the appreciation and disciplined study of the arts, as it grew in the research of the psycho-physical sciences in the nineteenth century and subsequently. In addition to ‘kinaesthetic intellect’ and ‘kinaesthetic empathy’, there is talk about ‘kinaesthetic perception’, with the help of which a person, freeing herself from normative, habitual means of moving, creates new moving images and ‘happenings’. There is a distinction between the self-perception of movement (kinaesthesia) and the perception of movement of another person (kinesia).42 There is research dedicated to how precisely, with the help of which psycho-physiological mechanisms, the viewer perceives the movements of the dancer.43 And, as we discuss (chapter 5) in connection with the place of movement in esoteric practices, there is considerable interest in the notion of ‘presence’, a special state in which the human person as observing subject (whether performer or spectator) comes to feel, and perhaps to be, one with the world.44 We return to these arguments, which place kinaesthesia in the centre of performance, at the end of our book. This will be after our discussion of the Russian revolutionary arts has shown how kinaesthesia was indeed ‘in the thick of things’.
The Greek root kine is present in both ‘kinaesthesia’, the sense of bodily movement, and ‘cinematography’, the art of moving images. In the early 1920s in Russia, there was in fact an attempt to create a science of kinemalogiia (kinematology) to study movements in activities as various as dance, sport, physical labour, photography and cinema.45 The idea originated with Kandinsky and his colleagues in the State Academy of Art Sciences (GAKhN), who saw the possibility of studying movement abstractly and as abstraction. It was a sign of recognition that, in the words of Jacques Rancière, ‘cinema is not the art of the movie camera – it is the art of forms in movement, the art of movement written in black-and-white forms on a surface’.46 However, the early 1920s attempt to institutionalize ‘kinematology’, movement studies, as a single discipline in Russia was not successful, partly because the disciplinary boundaries between photography studies and dance studies had already been established. Although, later, there were multiple lines of rapprochement between the two, the scope of our research does not include cinematography.47 Owing to the way film represents movement, the gestures and pantomimic performance of actors, the close connections between filmic and other art forms, and the empathetic response of audiences, there is surely a story involving kinaesthesia to be told. It can be said, all too briefly, that public cinema developed in Russia before 1914 as elsewhere in Europe and North America, but there were no significant specifically Russian innovations. The avant-garde artists took an interest, to be sure, but we are not aware that it was a medium of particular importance for them. Later, after the Revolution, this of course changed, once the Bolsheviks understood the propaganda value of film. The 1920s and early 1930s, as is well known, then saw a wave of artistic inventiveness and technical innovation, associated with directors like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov.48 Eisenstein, before he became famous as a film director, moved in the Russian avant-garde circles that we discuss.
Many of the contributions of the artists of the Russian avant-garde are well known, greatly admired and much studied. This attention, however, has extended less to the way movement, and the sense of movement, entered into the content and technique of their creations, and entered into the way they lived. Consider literature. The avant-garde Moscow Linguistic Circle formed in 1915, and a year later the Petrograd Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIaZ); together they gave rise to what is known to history as literary Formalism. A founder of this movement, Shklovsky, wrote about the early years in Petrograd and described how he and his colleagues had the thought that, in general, poetic language is different from prosodic, that it is a special sphere in which the movement of the lips is important. That is, they implied, the world of poetry is a world of dance, a world where the muscles of movement give delight. In the world of art, delight is held back, indulged, re-formed: ‘in fashioning an Art of Love out of love, Ovid counsels us not to rush into the arms of pleasure’.49 The consequence, it would seem, is that only a person who has her or himself experienced this muscular delight can write. The artists were not armchair scholars; young and warm, they fell in love, were active in sport, danced and fought. A happy imprint of energy, vitality and embodiment lies in their works and in their reflections on the avant-garde.
The sheer amount of studies of the Russian avant-garde confirms that it was and remains an influential cultural movement, however diffused and merged with other streams in the arts. Authors have looked for explanations, for the motor behind the burst of creative energy of the phenomenon and for the influence that it had. Nina Gurianova argued that the avant-garde artists were driven by anarchist ideas of freedom, elimination of boundaries and deconstruction of logic.50 By contrast, Sara Pankenier Weld diagnosed the ‘child within’ and ‘the nonspeaking subject “infans”’ that determined some of the distinct features and theories of the avant-garde. She referred to ‘the naïve perspective of the child’ and ‘childish alogism’, while she wrote that ‘infantile primitivism’ accounts for ‘an infantilist aesthetics’, a version of minimalism in art. She therefore suggested that it was ‘the naïve perspective that perceives everything with a defamiliarized eye’ that allowed Shklovsky to establish the fundaments of Formalism.51 Other scholars have concentrated on technicality and materiality as possible sources of innovation. Isabel Wünsche, for example, examined the concept of faktura – literally, texture – a quality to be achieved in a work of art through the successful use of appropriate combinations of materials. In her view, artistic creation is a result of the human desire to work with material.52 Julia Vaingurt argued that ‘technology provided a new cultural framework wherein an artist could redefine knowledge, art, and self, and find new ways of seeing the world and his and her art in it’. She showed that Shklovsky’s uses of the word ‘priem’ (technique) in relation to art is highly relevant: the Greek techne is synonymous with poiesis – ‘bringing forth’ – revealing or delivering something to the world; techne is ‘poetic’ by definition. The triad techne/technique/technology, Vaingurt argued, is responsible for reconfiguring human affectivity in the time of industrial revolutions. Thus, in his epistolary anti-novel of 1922, Zoo, ili pisma ne o liubvi (Zoo, or Letters Not About Love), Shklovsky confessed: ‘It is bad for me to talk about love’, and he suggested, ‘Let’s talk a bit about automobiles.’ Vaingurt commented that ‘Shklovsky’s Zoo does not substitute technology for love as a new aesthetic subject, but rather offers a new technique for thematizing love, underscoring the extent to which thinking and even feeling are conditioned by the technological revolution’.53
Much of the work of Russian avant-garde artists, like Malevich’s Black Square or Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, was to become internationally famous and influential. But such works were only a small part of an extraordinarily brilliant and productive regional culture. Often enough, but not always, the men and women who participated adopted unconventional, or oppositional, lifestyles, reflecting the fact that modernist movements were concerned with remaking humanity and were not just aesthetic in intent.54 In Russia, the class known as the ‘intelligentsia’ denoted (unlike some later English language usages of the term) a large group of people, well educated and highly cultured, but with no particular social status. Though they often belonged to the professions like acting, medicine or journalism, they certainly had no political power in tsarist society. The artists we discuss nearly all came from the intelligentsia, and because of the existence of this class there was no sharp line dividing a radical avant-garde and more bourgeois participants in new art movements.
This is a book about Russian artists, about how bodily kinaesthetic practices invigorated their art, and about the way this made the art innovative, with a lasting influence. We look at the artists and poets of the Russian avant-garde to discover how their involvement with various bodily practices on the everyday level affected their art. Personal movement influenced art. Our subject is the life of this avant-garde world rather than modernism, as if the latter were something that could be studied in itself, or studied as the false consciousness of the modern economy of work.
We conclude this introduction by briefly indicating the arrangement of the book. In the opening chapter, we point out that, by the early nineteenth century, there was a literature differentiating touch and movement senses. It then became a standard feature of discussions to claim that the sensory couple, movement and resistance to movement, gives an unmediated sensory awareness of ‘the real’. This claim was associated with an appreciation of the role of bodily feelings in general in creating knowledge of self and other. The possible epistemological, even existential, significance of hand touching hand, for recognition of which people now cite Husserl, had been the subject of comment since at least the mid-eighteenth century. Throughout nineteenth-century thought, we can find assertions of the fundamental place of touch and movement in knowledge (not least knowledge of the spatial qualities of visual perception). This history leads us to suggest that when modernist artists, including dancers, turned to movement as a source of truth, in their terms turning from convention and society to creation and nature, they enacted in art what had long been asserted in the theory of how people come to knowledge of themselves in the world. Twentieth-century phenomenology recreated the argument in philosophical terms. Subsequently, in recent neuroscience theories of motor cognition, philosophy and science have offered each other mutual support in claiming for movement the prime place in an organism’s knowledge (know-how, if not conscious cognition).
Our story follows general issues as they came to expression in the lives of particular people. So to speak, we read these lives as gestures, all the more lively for their innovative and passionate form, of the human world of movement. In chapter 2, we introduce the ideal of ‘higher sensitivity’ and its exemplification in Kandinsky’s abstract art and the combination of the senses, even synaesthesia, that this involved. This is preceded by a short, historical reminder of the ‘kinaesthetic intellect’. Then we turn, in chapter 3, to the art most obviously and directly expressive of the movement sense, dance, and, in the light of the impact of Isadora Duncan in Russia, sketch in the origins of free dance and, most specifically, a distinctively Russian tradition of what was, and still is, called musical movement. All this activity was closely related to a search for ‘higher sensitivity’ through a re-creation of Hellenic values. The next chapter then takes up the movement that is gesture and language, first in the mobile body and language of the poet Andrei Bely. We take space to argue for what we claim is the creative union of Duncan with the ‘peasant poet’, Sergei Esenin, and for the significance of dance movement to the poetry of the Futurist avant-garde. The modernist arts in Russian flourished through a web of mutual influences. This is also evident in chapter 5, where we show the place of dance and movement exercises in Georgy Gurdjieff’s esoteric circle, which owed much to what Aleksandr and Jeanne Salzmann brought from the theatre and from Dalcrozian rhythmics. Aleksandr Salzmann’s lighting changed the space, more deeply ‘the presence’, that actor and spectator experienced, and ‘presence’ is what embodied movement was thought to achieve. In the last two chapters, we make explicit what is implicit throughout, the world of practices of thinking with the body. This leads to recognition of the importance of popular dances, enthusiastically taken up, we argue, by artists like Mayakovsky, to an account of the way biomechanics passed from being a medical science into Meyerhold’s theatre and to Shklovsky’s experiments with breaking the automatism of conventional language. In conclusion, we come back to the issue of the sixth sense, to kinaesthesia as central to sensuous and affective knowledge, most especially ‘knowledge how’.
The interest focuses on dance but goes well beyond dance. For example, a modern Russian researcher on synaesthesia, Bulat Galeev, argued that ‘the muscular feeling of a person and the perception of heaviness’ is responsible for ‘lexical synaesthesia’ in commonplace phrases like ‘heavy condition’, ‘stunning hum’, ‘high and low sounds’, ‘light music’, ‘sad rhythm of a march’ and ‘fine taste’.55 Certainly, in the twentieth century it became attractive to speak about ‘kinaesthetic pleasure’ and ‘muscular joy’. The American critic John Martin considered that kinaesthetic pleasure from muscular experience of another person, thanks to this experience itself, lies at the base of ‘aesthetic satisfaction which results from contact with completeness of form’ in the appreciation of performance art.56 This directs us to the arts where the muscles of movement give delight, about which Shklovsky wrote, and to the delight with which a young woman leaped through the air.