Abstract
This chapter (“Movement, Difference, Ability”) considers the issue of corporeal difference in phenomenological and cognitive accounts of movement and movement perception. Whose experience do we describe when we make generalizations about these phenomena, and what bodies authorize these accounts? Advocating a methodological practice that embraces divergence and a strategic use of experiential norms, it offers a phenomenological foundation for engaging what we know and fall short of knowing in the kinesthetic experiences of others. Central to this foundation is the dialectic relationships between Edmund Husserl’s concepts of I can and I cannot, which allows us to navigate the experiential terrains of ability and disability. The chapter concludes with an account of watching two integrated dance performances by Oakland’s AXIS Dance Company.
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Notes
- 1.
Erwin Straus, “The Upright Posture,” 139.
- 2.
Johann Gottfried Herder, quoted in ibid., 164.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Ibid., 157.
- 5.
Ibid., 158. For an example of how Straus’s insights can be applied to a more identity-based phenomenological account, see Gayle Salamon’s excellent account of gender-transgressive walking, “Passing Period: Gender, Aggression, and the Phenomenology of Walking.”
- 6.
Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” 146.
- 7.
Ibid., 142.
- 8.
Ibid., 153.
- 9.
Iris Marion Young, “‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later,” 286.
- 10.
Ibid., 288. Young also critiques her earlier essay’s dichotomous view of immanence and transcendence, its unitary conception of the acting subject, and its presentation of women’s body comportment exclusively in terms of oppression.
- 11.
Ibid., 289.
- 12.
Ibid., 287.
- 13.
Ibid., 288.
- 14.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 247.
- 15.
Jon Foley Sherman, Strange Proximity: Stage Presence, Failure, and the Ethics of Attention, 146.
- 16.
Ibid. In an important article entitled “Differentiating Phenomenology and Dance,” Philipa Rothfield addresses the challenges and opportunities presented by kinesthetic difference: “Phenomenology represents a field, a domain, an axis of corporeality framed in relation to subjectivity. The differentiation of that field represents an epistemological complication, a reformulation, a multiplication. Not a rejection of its adequacy, just a sense of its being slightly out of reach, requiring a stretch, a shift of weight, a roll, perhaps a fall” (51).
- 17.
J. J. Marotta and M. Behrmann, “Patient Schn: Has Goldstein and Gelb’s Case Withstood the Test of Time?” 633–34.
- 18.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 137.
- 19.
Ibid., 139.
- 20.
Georges Canguilhem, quoted in Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, 84.
- 21.
Arguing for what she calls “normalization of the abnormal,” Gail Weiss advocates “deconstructing limited perceptual norms by expanding our available horizons of meaning to include the perspectives of those who have been excluded by them” (“The ‘Normal Abnormalities’ of Disability and Aging,” 212).
- 22.
John M. Hull, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, 180.
- 23.
Ibid., 64.
- 24.
Ibid., 138.
- 25.
Ibid., 145.
- 26.
Ibid., 82.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Ibid., 83.
- 29.
Ibid., 133. As Miriam Helen Hill suggests in her phenomenological analysis of blindness, the vision that is privileged in most accounts of perceptual experience can actually obscure the multimodal body–world interrelatedness that blindness discloses. Raising the question of who is disabled in the sighted/non-sighted hierarchy, she writes: “The visually handicapped have advantages that the sighted do not have. [. . .] People must not let their eyes blind them to the world” (“Bound to the Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Sightlessness,” 109).
- 30.
An impediment to this dialogue is the relative scarcity of mainstream phenomenological and cognitive research on divergent embodiments. Writing in 1998, Simi Linton lamented that “the kinesthetic, proprioceptive , sensory and cognitive experiences of people with an array of impairments” have received little attention (“Disability Studies/Not Disability Studies,” 530). Important phenomenological accounts of disability include S. Kay Toombs, “The Lived Experience of Disability”; Lisa Diedrich, “Breaking Down: A Phenomenology of Disability”; and Kristian Moltke Martiny, “How to Develop a Phenomenological Model of Disability.”
- 31.
Foley Sherman, Strange Proximity, 146.
- 32.
See Thompson, Mind in Life.
- 33.
Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 137.
- 34.
Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 3.
- 35.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 139.
- 36.
Ibid., 103.
- 37.
Husserl, Ideas 2, 270.
- 38.
Ibid., 366.
- 39.
Ibid., 270.
- 40.
Merleau-Ponty omitted the phenomenon of I cannot when he appropriated Husserl’s I can in the Phenomenology of Perception. Edith Stein, on the other hand, appropriated both terms in her Husserl-influenced account of will in On the Problem of Empathy (see 107). Erica Harris argues for the applicability of I cannot in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of painting (“The ‘I cannot, but it can’”).
- 41.
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 109.
- 42.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110–11; quoted in ibid., 109.
- 43.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112.
- 44.
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 138.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Noland, Agency, 9. Nick Crossley compares the concepts of habit and habitus in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Dewey, Marcel Mauss, and Pierre Bourdieu (“Habit and Habitus”). Addressing this issue through Husserl’s notion of “intersubjective normality ,” Joona Taipale writes: “Intersubjectivity serves a normative function: it constitutes the ‘default’ or ‘standard’ manner in experiencing things, world, other people, a manner in which our perceptions, bodily movements, behavior, and action habitually tend” (“Twofold Normality: Husserl and the Normative Relevance of Primary Constitution,” 53). Sociologist Marcel Mauss, who was Husserl’s contemporary, emphasized the play of enablement and constraint in the “body techniques” that individuals assume: “Everything in us all is under command. [. . .] We have a set of permissible or impermissible, natural or unnatural attitudes” (Sociology and Psychology: Essays, 105).
- 47.
I use “radical” here in the sense of “fundamental” or “relating to roots” rather than “original.” Others who have expanded on the notion of I cannot include Leder , Absent Body, 48–49, and Hanne Jacobs, “Husserl on Freedom and Reflection,” 17–18.
- 48.
Jacobs writes: “Just as attending to everything at once within our visual field would not allow us to see much at all, one could wonder whether a creature that could practically effect any possible movement would be a bodily creature at all” (“Husserl on Freedom and Reflection,” 18).
- 49.
Leder, Absent Body, 69–99. Dys-appearance, according to Leder, is the intrusion of bodily awareness during dysfunction, illness, and physical discomfort. This “alien presencing” (82) contrasts with the body’s normal tendency to disappear from awareness during its actions.
- 50.
Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 24.
- 51.
Ibid., 36.
- 52.
Ibid., 35.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
Building on Gallagher’s conceptual framework, Sarah E. McCarroll has introduced a third term—“body map”—to designate the social, cultural, and historical pressures that influence the ways we carry ourselves and move. Originating from the outside, body maps function on and in tandem with body image and body schemas. McCarroll explains: “My contention is that body maps are the pattern by which a society imposes its values on our bodies; maps contain strictures of movement, carriage and gesture which are imprinted upon both body image and body schema, shaping our habitual movements. Body maps are the culturally imposed and heavily value-laden parameters for conscious behaviors that relate to constructing and maintaining a desired body image; these behaviors then impact schematic processes related to aspects of kinaesthesia, proprioception, aspects of movement and autonomic movements” (“The Historical Body Map: Cultural Pressures on Embodied Cognition,” 155).
- 55.
Margrit Shildrick writes: “In rejecting the conservative agenda that disabled people are a distinct group who nevertheless are entitled to all the rights and benefits of their particular society, or at least to compensation where those cannot be accessed, many theorists now subscribe both to the notion of difference, and to the blurring of boundaries at the edges, in such a way that problematizes the whole categorical distinction” (Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality, 8). Lennard Davis offers a trenchant critique of disability as a category in Bending over Backwards, 8–32.
- 56.
One of the remarkable features of John Hull’s account of blindness, for all he cannot do, is the fullness of his sensorimotor accomplishment in negotiating his sightless world. Some of these accomplishments result from an overcoming of inability—developing the ability to read his surroundings using echolocation, for example—but they also reflect a preexisting ability and sense of agency.
- 57.
In an article outlining a phenomenological model of disability, Kristian Martiny writes that “It is a common structure for abled as well as disabled persons that our perspective on the world, our field of action, and our intentions are structured in accordance with our bodily abilities and disabilities—with the ‘I can’ (or ‘I cannot’) as it is defined for each individual” (“How to Develop,” 561).
- 58.
Petra Kuppers, “Dancing Disabled: Phenomenology and Embodied Politics,” 272.
- 59.
Wanda Strukus, “Mining the Gap: Physically Integrated Performance and Kinesthetic Empathy,” 103.
- 60.
A recording of Dix minutes plus tard is available at https://vimeo.com/134027762. A recording of Divide that was previously viewable on the AXIS website is no longer available.
- 61.
In this and other performance analyses throughout this book, I make extensive use of notes that I took during intermission and a more extended series of reflections three days after the performance. Susan Kozel offers useful observations on note-taking and phenomenological writing in “Process Phenomenologies” and Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, 48–55.
- 62.
AXIS Dance Company, “Repertory.”
- 63.
Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity, 286.
- 64.
Vivian Sobchack, “Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs,” 59.
- 65.
Ibid., 60. Sobchack compares this to the “aesthetics of ‘parsimony’ that is one of the criteria for elegant theory: the most being accomplished in the fewest of moves” (ibid.).
- 66.
Ibid., 61.
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Garner, S.B. (2018). Movement, Difference, and Ability. In: Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_3
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