Why We Dance

A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming

Kimerer LaMothe

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231538886
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Deconstrucción en filosofía

Within intellectual paradigms that privilege mind over matter, dance has long appeared as a marginal, derivative, or primitive art. Drawing support from theorists and artists who embrace matter as dynamic and agential, this book offers a visionary definition of dance that illuminates its constitutive work in the ongoing evolution of human persons.

Why We Dance introduces a philosophy of bodily becoming that posits bodily movement as the source and telos of human life. Within this philosophy, dance appears as an activity that humans evolved to do as the enabling condition of their best bodily becoming. Weaving theoretical reflection with accounts of lived experience, this book positions dance as a catalyst in the development of human consciousness, compassion, ritual proclivity, and ecological adaptability. Aligning with trends in new materialism, affect theory, and feminist philosophy, as well as advances in dance and religious studies, this work reveals the vital role dance can play in reversing the trajectory of ecological self-destruction along which human civilization is racing.

1

To Dance Is to Matter

The principal defect of all materialism up to now—including that of Feuerbach—is that the external object, reality, the sensible world, is grasped in the form of an object or an intuition; but not as a concrete human activity, as practice, in a subjective way. That is why the active aspect was developed by idealism, in opposition to materialism—but only in an abstract way, since idealism naturally does not know real concrete activity as such.

— KARL MARX, THESES ON FEUERBACH

• • • • •

If one considers … that a man’s every action, not only his books, in some way becomes the occasion for other actions, decisions, and thoughts; that everything which is happening is inextricably tied to everything which will happen; then one understands the real immortality, that of movement: what once has moved others is like an insect in amber, enclosed and immortalized in the general intertwining of all that exists.

— FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, HUMAN ALL TOO HUMAN

I begin as I always do—on the floor, on my back, knees pulled up to my chest, palms wrapped around my shins. Breathing in, I sink my inner belly down, push my ribs out, and then let go. Air escapes. Tension escapes. Patterns of held energy escape. The buzzing of my brain comes into view. I am ready for it to yield. There are other movements I want to make.

I pull another breath deep into my torso and let go. The rushing air sets off a cascade of awakening sensory cells. New shapes of inner awareness appear. A foot. A lung. A shoulder. My mind finds these forms fascinating and dives down to take a closer look.

All of a sudden I feel the shift I have been waiting to feel. My awareness drops over some internal edge and rushes along paths traced in time and space by my physical form. I am no longer mired in mental muck. No longer circulating old thoughts. Consciousness floats and spreads through my bodily self. I become a field of waves where new impulses arise—new thoughts, feelings, shapes of action. I am this stream streaming through me.¹

I want to be this current right now, for I want to think about movement—my movement, your movement, and the movement of all that is. I want to think about life from the perspective of movement while I myself am feeling it and then I want to write it down.

From years of practice, I already know that dancing makes a difference in who I am. It makes a difference in what I know, how I know, and what I care to know how to do. And it is these differences and their importance for human being that I want my writing to convey. I want to communicate participation in the experience shift that happens as I dance—the shift that enables me to perceive and know myself as essentially movement.² I want to dance chapter and book into being, rooting every word I write in this lived, living experience. How else will I know that what I write is true?

I press my heels toward the ceiling, root my tailbone into the ground, and exhale in search of an inner vibration that will hold these legs aloft. Today, in particular, I want to think anew about one of the primary obstacles in Western culture to acknowledging dance as a vital art: the idea that matter is real. It is an idea that is so common, so matter of fact, that we barely even register the degree to which we believe in it. Regardless of how sophisticated our philosophical or theological thinking, regardless of how abstract or intellectual our spiritual pursuits, most of us still operate minute to minute, day to day, week to week as if matter is real, objects exist, and my body is a thing I call mine.

It is an idea, I know, that the lived experience of dancing proves false, repeatedly. Every time I lie down on a dance studio floor and begin my practice in earnest, the materiality of my bodily self stands revealed as the movement that is making me.

So here I am here, rolling and reaching, scribbling and editing, moving to think, thinking as I move, and hoping that, if I can use my words to communicate participation in the action of dancing, then, you, even if you have never danced or never recall having danced, will remember what at some level I believe you already know: movement matters.

The Matter with Matter

What is matter? How and why is the idea of it an obstacle to acknowledging dance as vital art? In short, if we give matter priority as a cipher for “the real,” then movement is forever its attribute, never itself a subject, and so is dance.

The materialist paradigm that has undergirded modern science, dominated scholarship, and infiltrated all aspects of cultural, social, and personal life for at least the past four hundred years revolves around the idea that matter exists.³ According to this paradigm, matter is a substance. Matter has mass; it has being. Matter resists change.⁴ Matter is atoms and their parts; electrons, protons, neutrons, and their orbital paths; chemical elements and their variations. Matter is solid, liquid, or gas. Matter appears in a variety of shapes or bodies. It appears in tools and toys, ferns and fir; in tigers and tortoises and the toes and tissues of our own human anatomy. Matter, we assume, forms the basis of what is. It is the ground beneath us, the currents enswirling us, and the bodies beside us.

Further, within this paradigm, “matter” is (what is) accessible to our senses and thus to our thinking minds. It abides by universal laws pertaining to bodies in motion and at rest. Matter can be seen and heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. It can be measured, isolated, taken apart, and put back together. It can be amputated, confiscated, polluted, and surgically altered. Matter is something we believe we can shape and bend and move according to our will, for it has no will of its own. Matter is something that our rational, objective minds can theoretically, practically, and perhaps eventually comprehend and control.⁵ Matter, in short, is what is real.⁶

From a perspective for which matter is real, movement is something that happens to matter or something that matter does in response to another material thing.⁷ Movement is what happens as some force, whether internal or external to it, propels matter to change coordinates of space and time. It moves, as Newton imagined, until some opposing materiality slows it down. This movement that matter makes, then, is largely incidental to the essence of what “it” is.⁸ While the location of a raindrop, acorn, or ape may change, its substance does not. While its movements may express its reality, they do not alter it. “It” has an established identity. It is real. In effect, in a materialist paradigm, to claim that some material entity moves—or to claim to make it move—is to admit that it doesn’t move. It stays the same. It simply is. We can move matter and it may move us, but either way, it remains what it is. So do we.

Of course, ever since Newton formulated the mechanical models within which matter functions as a cipher for the real, there have been those resisting both the reduction of matter to mere substance and the dualistic thinking that results from such an assertion. Critics affirm that matter is dynamic, in process, ever becoming.⁹ Over the years and to this day, thinkers have argued that matter appears to be real due to some Presence or process that animates and engenders material forms. Many affirm a monistic worldview in which matter appears as a degree or manifestation or even an idea of the more active “mind.” Yet in most of these accounts, even when reversed, displaced, and embraced, “matter” still stands as a cipher for “concrete reality”; its features still shape the most basic patterns of perception that characterize modern Western thinking, feeling, and acting.¹⁰ “It” remains as what must be explained, or explained away.

Furthermore, this cultural belief in matter as real does not just underlie basic assumptions and perceptions concerning reality. It subtends the scientific and scholarly methods that researchers use to frame problems, gather information, and establish knowledge.¹¹ Presuming that matter is real, we outline procedures for acquiring knowledge about what it is, how it works, and how best to improve upon it. Insofar as matter is real, it can be subjected to experiments that yield converging results, providing us with a ground as stable as matter itself for establishing certain truth. We seek a truth that is constant and repeatable—a truth that will, like matter, remain what it is. Belief in the value and validity of such matter-based methods forms the bedrock on which modern science has been built, including quantum physics.¹²

Following this matter-paved path to knowledge, practitioners of scientific methods identify measurable things and chart relationships among them. We isolate variables that we can manage and define the terms of a causality that we can stage and repeat. We ask: what is the effect of x on y? We set up a control case. We induce the relationship to occur again and again, making adjustments until our results converge—because they must. Because we believe they will. Because matter is real. Because reality abides by laws that we can apprehend—even if we have no idea of what “it” is. So we crunch the data and make generalizations that we presume will hold for similar instances across time and space.

Within a materialist paradigm, in short, matter is a problem to explain that also offers the solutions we seek. We strive to explain its complexity and seeming intractability, its chaotic emergences and processes of becoming, by manipulating it (or what we think “it” is) in various ways to get desired or desirable, understandable results. Using uniform units, we gauge, clock, and predict what matter will do, and our measurements form the basis of the laws and principles whose veracity our experiments confirm. We measure movement as a way to arrest the matter we assume is making it.¹³

While rooted in the sciences, this materialist paradigm organizes the modern university, its fields, disciplines, theories, and methods as well. Abiding by its logic, scholars and scientists have made incredible advances in technology, medicine, and philosophy. We have gathered unprecedented amounts of information about processes and relationships occurring in nature and culture, in our bodily and spiritual selves. Nevertheless, the limitations of this paradigm are becoming increasingly clear. Chief among them, for the purposes of this book, is that this paradigm lacks the conceptual resources needed to appreciate one of the earliest, oldest, and most universal human actions—dancing—as a vital art.¹⁴

Within a materialist paradigm, a human body is a material entity, and dancing appears as a subset of possible movements that “it” can make in response to external or internal stimuli. This general understanding of dance is widespread and common sense. As further chapters reveal, dance scholars who draw on matter-based methods to study particular dance traditions and techniques tend to operate with the assumption that humans are creatures who can choose to move their “bodies” in symbolic patterns that warrant interpretation like any other cultural text. How a person dances may thus perform her culture or race, her gender or age, but it does not matter to her fundamental humanity. She is a human whether or not she dances.

When dancing does appear in contemporary scholarship, it most often does so, across the board from the sciences to the humanities, as a metaphor used to describe the movement of material bodies or material-like entities in relation to one another. Atoms, waves, and dead leaves dance. Ideas, words, principals of logic dance, as do subatomic particles and political parties engaged in conflict or diplomacy. Dance functions ubiquitously as a word whose meaning we assume we already know, referring to material realities we assume we understand. The term rarely appears in an index; it need not be explained.¹⁵

Even while we admit that movement is necessary for human life—a heart must beat, a diaphragm contract, neurons network, and blood vessels squeeze—we assume that dance is different, a matter of personal choice. Humans need not dance in order to exist. So mostly, in Western culture anyway, they don’t, and, given our training in materialist models, scholars do not wonder why.

Movement That Matters

As I breathe and release, my bodily self heaves and shudders into life. Lines of limbs, surfaces of skin, a mesh of muscles and bones all ease into sensory view as an endless inner galaxy. Every spot of awareness is a point of light with the potential to emerge as one star in a constellation of attention, a pattern of action, a potential for coming alive.

I ease into a set of exercises that are as familiar as friends and pay attention to the range of changes that are occurring as my experience continues to shift. It is not just that “my body” is appearing to me as movement. “I” am not the same either. Our relationship is no longer the same. “I” no longer exist over and against “it.” “I” melt into something more akin to a sensory awareness—a lived, felt experience of being a bodily self. I dissolve into a wide-open receptivity. Response-ability.

Suddenly, impulses to move arise in me, coursing through me, enticing me to move. Whether or not they were there before, I do not know. I did not feel them, but I do now. And not only do I feel them, I feel a desire to follow them. I do so before thinking about what I am doing, because that is who I am. I am no longer a material mass of flesh and blood, muscle and bone. I am movement expressing the energy of life.

As my sense of self melts into this sensory awareness of myself as movement, additional impressions come to mind—thoughts and feelings. I am aware that every movement I make i...