Abstract
This paper is about one of the puzzles of bodily self-consciousness: can an experience be both and at the same time an experience of one′s physicality and of one′s subjectivity? We will answer this question positively by determining a form of experience where the body′s physicality is experienced in a non-reifying manner. We will consider a form of experience of oneself as bodily which is different from both “prenoetic embodiment” and “pre-reflective bodily consciousness” and rather corresponds to a form of reflective access to subjectivity at the bodily level. In particular, we argue that subjectivity is bodily expressed, thereby allowing the experience of the body′s subjectivity directly during perceptual experiences of the body. We use an interweaving of phenomenological explorations and ethnographical methods which allows validating this proposal by considering the experience of body experts (dancers).
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Notes
Moreover, this view “seems to replace the unbridgeable dualism between mind and body with an equally unbridgeable dualism between lived body and perceived body. Rather than dealing with different dimensions or manifestations of the same body, we seem to be left with different bodies. And this conclusion is unacceptable...” (Zahavi 1999, 168).
The intertwining of physicality and subjectivity should also lead bodily dimensions to be experienced as such at the pre-reflective level. The subject is thus non-metaphorically bodily, in a double way: on the one hand, the physical body is experienced in its subjectivity (as we will argue for here); on the other hand, the pre-reflective subject is experienced in its physicality (we will not argue for this point here but see Legrand, submitted).
The published translation says here “thisness”. We modified it in view of the original French text which is the following: “[voir, toucher mon corps] doit entrainer nécessairement une cécité complète quant a ce qu’est le corps en tant que possibilité vivante de courir, de danser, etc." (Sartre, 1943, p 344)
Contemporary dance is used as an umbrella notion for primarily western artistic dance complementary to classical ballet.
Theories and methods of Body Mind Centering rely on experimenting, experiencing, and exploring anatomical and physiological mechanisms and principles. The training is also referred to as a re-education of the body (Nygaard 1999, p 21) and a journey through which “we are led to an understanding of how the mind is expressed through the body in movement” (Cohen 2008, p 1).
Butoh dance is an expressionist contemporary dance form which originated in Japan in the late 1950s. The sense of transformations of energy and presence combined with relatively “slow-moving” choreographies are some of the most striking aspects of the expressiveness of this dance form (Ravn 2008, p 115). The dancers′ technique can also be described as striving towards a “hypersensitive” awareness to make the dancer able to “tap into a universal consciousness, bridging a gap between “self” and “other”” (Hassel 2005 p 16).
The following themes were central to the questions asked and exemplified in subjective meaningful ways to each dancer: (1) the dancer′s approach to the body in terms of technique when training. This theme was focused on a physical descriptive approach; (2) consciousness of the body and/or specific body parts when moving; (3) Sense awareness while moving. In this theme, the dancers were asked to give descriptions of how sensing guides movement (Ravn 2008, p 143).
“L’expérience sensorielle est... étrangère à la perception qui se fait avec tout notre corps à la fois et s’ouvre sur un monde intersensoriel” (pp 260-261)
Note that these characterizations of the source of movement (in the three cases described below) contrasts both with the conception of agency as voluntary control and with the conception of expert action as ‘automatically’ performed.
Importantly, this is not to deny the transformative power of reflection upon subjectivity, which is not experienced in the same way at the pre-reflective and reflective levels.
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Acknowledgement
We thank Dan Zahavi, Line Ryberg Ingerslev and Joel Krueger for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. DL acknowledges the support of the European Commission under the Marie Curie Research Training Network DISCOS (Disorders and Coherence of the Embodied Self) and the support of the “European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and the Humanities” grant by the Volkswagen Stiftung for the “Body-Project: interdisciplinary investigations on bodily experiences”.
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Legrand, D., Ravn, S. Perceiving subjectivity in bodily movement: The case of dancers. Phenom Cogn Sci 8, 389–408 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-009-9135-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-009-9135-5