Abstract
This paper raises fundamental questions about the claims of art historian David Freedberg and neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese in their article "Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience." It does so from several perspectives, all of them rooted in the dynamic realities of movement. It shows on the basis of neuroscientific research how connectivity and pruning are of unmistakable import in the interneuronal dynamic patternings in the human brain from birth onward. In effect, it shows that mirror neurons are contingent on morphology and corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic experience. Accordingly, it poses and answers the overlooked but seminally important question of how mirror neurons come to be. The original neuromuscular research of Parma neuroscientists and the findings of Marc Jeannerod concerning kinesthesia support the answer that the "underpinnings" of visual art appreciation are themselves underpinned. An abbreviated phenomenological analysis of movement and its implications regarding the fact that the making of all art is quintessentially contingent on movement, hence a dynamic enterprise, further bolster the given answer as does a brief review of an empirical phenomenological analysis of the natural dynamic congruency of emotions and movement. In the end, the paper shows that movement and life are of a piece in the creation and appreciation of art as in everyday life.
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Notes
To address a reviewer’s concern as to how scientific studies presented in Section I relate to “how we learn to move ourselves in the course of our infancy”: If synaptic connections are not prespecified in any precise way by our genes, then synaptic growth and selective pruning are necessarily connected with experience, precisely as Baars and Gage implicitly indicate when they write of a fetus beginning to use its senses and to learn around the beginning of the third trimester of pregnancy. As references to researchers of earlier prenatal development show, that early sensing and learning center quintessentially on movement. Obviously, that sensing and learning continue when a fetus is actually born: it comes into the world moving; it is not only not stillborn, but continues to move and in the process, learns on the basis of inchoate reaching movements to reach effectively and to grasp whatever object is attracting it; it learns to turn over in its crib; it learns to crawl and to walk; and so on. Moreover as Baars and Gage point out, synaptic growth and selective pruning is a life-long process, a process that, as concerns movement, depends precisely upon the degree to which movement informs one’s individual life and the degree to which it is curtailed, that is, the degree to which one suffers “[t]he heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1).
For a perspicuous account of what it means experientially to comprehend cultural differences, see dance anthropologist Sally Ann Ness’s descriptive analysis of “what the act of performing a choreographed movement can mean in an ‘other’ culture—that is to say, in a society whose organizing principles, social institutions, and value systems are profoundly unfamiliar or exotic relative to one’s own,” and her fine-grained exemplification of how, in order to have that comprehension, “a person must have some idea of what performing any choreographed movement can mean at all” (Ness 1992, p. 2). Ness in fact clarifies further the centrality of kinesthesia to this enterprise when she adds, “There must be some appreciation of how getting oneself physically through a choreographic moment can affect a human being, and how it can affect one’s own cultural understanding” (ibid.). Her description of her own experience in a repertory class in which she learned a section of a dance by the Bill Evans Dance Company offers ample insights into more and more refined kinesthetic experiences, experiences that at one point she terms “the dynamic mentality of one’s neuromusculature” (ibid., p. 4).
Dancer and teacher Adriana Pegorer highlights the centrality of kinesthesia from a quite different cultural perspective. Pegorer teaches tango to visually impaired people. She writes that all the “glittering drama of courtship that this form of movement entails—with women in high heels and provocative dresses and the dominant attitudes of their male partners—is often what draws people in.” She goes on to emphasize, however, that “if all that [‘that’ meaning all visual trappings] is removed it’s the kinesthetic sense of the dance, its essential aroma, which still remains” (Pegorer 2010, p. 36).
For a descriptive analysis and account of how trust, for example, moves us to move and in fact how “[l]a peur se déplace dans le corps et le fait se déplacer autrement que ne le fait la confiance,” see Sheets-Johnstone 2006a.
To address a reviewer’s concern that I prioritize a phenomenological analysis, I should note that, while I am familiar with Labananalysis as a system of movement analysis, a system that combines Labanotation and Effort/Shape, that is, both the “‘what,’ ‘where,’ and ‘when’ of movement” and the “how” or qualitative dimension of movement (for a lucid account of Labananalysis, see Youngerman 1984), I am not such an analyst myself. I have, however, been told by people who are analysts that the qualitative structure of movement as derived from phenomenological analysis is complementary to that provided by Labananalysis. The complementarity is not surprising: effort and shape are distilled terms encompassing or suggesting tensional and projectional qualities on the one hand, and linear and areal qualities on the other. What a phenomenological analysis provides is a first-person descriptive account of the experience of self-movement; Labananalysis provides a more objective account of movement, that is, an account of the experience of movement from a third-person point of view. It is of interest to note too that there are two further major movement notational systems: Benesh Movement Notation and Eshkol-Wachmann Notation, and that the latter system has been profitably used by ethologists in the study of certain mammalian display behaviors and of kinetic fighting patterns of wolves (see Golani 1976; Moran et al. 1981, respectively).
Our own walk has a certain style too, of course, precisely one that others may readily recognize, but of which we ourselves are commonly unaware.
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A shorter version of this paper was presented in May 2011 as an invited lecture in a four-speaker series on the topic “Observer Effects: Conversations between Art and Science,” a series sponsored by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I thank Emily Bercir, Director of the Center, and Hèlène Listerlin, Dance Coordinator of the Center, for their invitation to take part in the series, and Linnda Caporael, Professor of Science and Technology, for invigorating discussions and for her kind and generous hospitality during my visit at the Institute.
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Sheets-Johnstone, M. Movement and mirror neurons: a challenging and choice conversation. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 385–401 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9243-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9243-x