Abstract
Katan suggests a comprehensive conception of dancing as a means of expression. The chapter discusses existing arguments in pragmatism, enactivism, and aesthetic theories in order to integrate them into a broader understanding of dance as a physical medium of thinking. Following Susanne K. Langer’s definition that the semblance in dance gestures is entailed in the actual motion, Katan specifies the perceptual process of dancing as the embodiment of expressed meaning. The chapter stresses the two directions of embodied philosophy in dance. First, human bodies enact cognition. Second, bodily movements are materializations of knowledge that were activated in the process of their shaping.
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Notes
- 1.
Francisco J. Varela, Samy Frenk, The Organ of Form; Towards the Theory of Biological Shape, in: Journal for Social Biology, 1987, 10, 73–83: “(T)he whole array of disciplines and techniques collectively known as ‘Bodywork’, where shape and posture are seen as being inseparable from consciousness itself and the wholeness of human experience.”
- 2.
John Dewey deals with the interdependence of perceptual processes and expression in John Dewey, Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books, 1980 (1934).
- 3.
Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953, pp. 12–23.
- 4.
Ibid, p. 17: “Feeling and form are not logical complements. They are merely associated, respectively, with each other’s negatives. Feeling is associated with spontaneity, spontaneity with informality or indifference to form, and thus (by slipshod thinking) with absence of form. On the other hand, form connotes formality, regulation, hence repression of feeling, and (by the same slipshodness) absence of feeling. The conception of polarity, intriguing though it be, is really an unfortunate metaphor whereby a logical muddle is raised to the dignity of a fundamental principle.”
- 5.
Frank Thiess, Der Tanz als Kunstwerk: Studien zu einer Ästhetik der Tanzkunst, München: Delphin-Verlag, 1920, p. 67.
- 6.
See: Dewey (1934; 1980), chapter 8.
- 7.
G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans: T.M. Knox, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
- 8.
Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art. In: The Basic Writings, trans: David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins, 1993, pp. 139–212.
- 9.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans: R. Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
- 10.
Dewey (1934; 1980).
- 11.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume One: Language. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955.
- 12.
Aristotle, On the Soul (De anima). Trans: Hippocrates G. Apostle, Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1981.
- 13.
H.G. Gadamer, Play as a clue to ontological explanation. In: Truth and Method. Donald G. Marshall (trans.), New York: Continuum, 2004 (1975), pp. 102–29.
- 14.
Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen - Die Macht des Zeigens, Berlin: Berlin university Press, 2007; Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010.
- 15.
Dewey (1980; 1934).
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Dewey (1980; 1934), p. 47: “Because perception of relationship between what is done and what is undergone constitutes the work of intelligence, and because the artist is controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next, the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly as a scientific inquirer is absurd.”
- 18.
Aristotle, NE (2009).
- 19.
Dewey (1980; 1934), chapter 7.
- 20.
See C.S. Peirce, How To Make Our Ideas Clear (1878), In: The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings. vol. 1 (1867–1893), Nathan Houser and Cristian Kloesel (ed.), Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 124–41; William James, What pragmatism Means. In: Pragmatism: And Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth, New York: Meridian Books, 1960 (1943); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Colin Smith (trans.). New York: Routledge, 2007; H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, Donald G. Marshall (trans.), New York: Continuum, 2004 (1975).
- 21.
H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, Donald G. Marshall (trans.), New York: Continuum, 2004 (1975), p. 107.
- 22.
Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931). Thomas Sheehan Richard E. Palmer (trans.), London: Kluwer Academic publishers, 1997, p. 184: “The phenomenologist, who will only notice phenomena, and know purely his own ‘life,’ must practice an epoche. He must inhibit every ordinary objective ‘position,’ and partake in no judgment concerning the external world. The experience itself will remain what it was, and experience of this house, of this body, of this world in general, in its particular mode. For one cannot describe any intentional experience, even though it be ‘illusory,’ a self-contradicting judgment and the like, without describing what in the experience is, as such, the object of consciousness. Our comprehensive epoche puts, as we say, the world between brackets, excludes that world which is simply there, from the subjects field, presenting in its stead the so-and-so-experienced-perceived-remembered-judged-thought-valued-etc., world, as such, the ‘bracketed’ world.”
- 23.
See: Peirce (1878; 1992).
- 24.
Erin Manning, Relationscapes. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012.
- 25.
Valery, in: Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (ed.) (1983), p. 55: “Let me begin at once by telling you without preamble that to my mind the dance is not simply an exercise, an entertainment, an ornamental art, or sometimes a social activity: it is a serious matter and in certain of its aspects most venerable. Every epoch that has understood the human body and experienced at least some sense of its mystery, its resources, its limits, its combinations of energy and sensibility, has cultivated and revered the dance.”
- 26.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone defines it as “the corporeal turn.” See: Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader, London: Imprint Academic, 2009.
- 27.
See: Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- 28.
Timeo Klemola, Dance as Embodiment, in: Ballet International 1/1991, Cologne: Ballet-Bühnen Verlag, 1991, pp. 71–80.
- 29.
Varela, 1987, p. 83.
- 30.
Edgar Wind: Warburg’s Concept of ‘Kulturwissenschaft’ and its Meaning for Aesthetics (1931). In: Jaynie Anderson (ed.), The Eloquence of Symbols. Studies in Humanist Arts, Revised edition, Oxford 1993, p. 25.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Marcel Mauss, Techniques of the Body (1935), in: Jonathan Crary, Sanford Kwinter (ed.), Incorparations. New York: Zone books, 1994.
- 33.
Aristotle, TS (1981), pp. 19–20.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
See: Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, California: University of California Press, 1986.
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Katan, E. (2016). Dance as Embodied Philosophy. In: Embodied Philosophy in Dance. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60186-5_2
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