Body & Society
Special Issue: Rhythm, Movement, Embodiment
Thinking in Movement: Response to Erin Manning
2014, Vol. 20(3&4) 198–207 ª The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1357034X14547395 bod.sagepub.com
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone University of Oregon, Eugene
Abstract This review of Manning’s article wonders at the wonder that Manning describes. It does so first in broad terms that question the experience of wonder that Manning describes and goes on to wonder specifically about her understanding of the experienced realities of thinking in movement. In the course of doing so, the review questions her sweeping away ‘the subject’; questions her hard-and-fast distinctions between phenomenology and Whitehead’s metaphysics and voices wonder about her neglecting complementarities between phenomenology and Whitehead’s metaphysics; questions the validity of her claims about ‘where phenomenology goes wrong’; wonders about the absence of kinesthesia and its qualitative dynamics in what she writes of human movement; and finally wonders about her nonsubstantiated claims about ontogeny. Keywords phenomenology, subject, thinking in movement, Whitehead’s metaphysics, wonder
Manning’s article places a big demand upon the reader! Her article presents us with a dazzling new metaphysical vocabulary. The vocabulary urges us to structure our linguistic formulations and understandings of movement – and, in broader terms, our linguistic formulations and understandings of life itself – in radically new ways, ways that are in truth difficult to follow because they are packed with neologisms, difficult too because they do not wholly follow Whitehead, and difficult too because in the end
Corresponding author: Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. Email:
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they seem to ask us specifically to use a different subject in our linguistic determinations and specifications of our experiences of movement – all of which difficulties make me wonder . . . Since Manning quotes from an early article of mine in seminal ways, including the title of her article, I spend some time in what follows clarifying what I wrote by quoting further from that article and later articles. Wonder indeed never ceases, as Manning reminds us in her ending quote from Whitehead: ‘Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains’ (in Manning, 2014). By way of what I will later specify as complementarities, I would like first to note that I voiced a similar thought when I asked the question ‘Does philosophy begin (and end) in wonder? Or what is the nature of a philosophic act?’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011 [1999]: ch. 7). I did not quote Whitehead, but I quoted Sir Charles Sherrington, Edmund Sinnott, Paul Vale´ry and Martin Heidegger in epigraphs to begin with, and later William James, Eugen Fink (an assistant to Husserl) and Leonardo da Vinci. I wrote of the timelessness of wonder and about its far-reaching significance; I described the difference between shallow wonder and deep wonder, and the felt bodily sense in practising philosophy close up. The wonder of which I wrote was definitely not the ‘wow’ that Manning describes, that is: The excitement of the ‘wow’ of wonder may seem to bring a subject back to the event – ‘was that really me!?’ – but this will never have been a phenomenological subject, for being never precedes the event. The subject through which the wonder is felt is always a Whiteheadian superject, the outcome of the ingathering force of the event. (2014)
I must confess a wonder of the wonder that Manning describes, for I certainly did not feel myself to be ‘a Whiteheadian superject, the outcome of the ingathering force of [an] event’ at the time of writing about wonder, nor do I now in re-reading what I wrote. As the questioning title of the chapter indicates, I was – then and now – simply wondering about wonder and its relationship to the practice of philosophy. I wonder now too about my article – ‘Thinking in movement’ (1981) – cited by Manning. The article was actually expanded in its later publications to include our human developmental background, that is, ontogenetical life, and our phylogenetic heritage, that is, Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 10, 2016
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non-human forms of animate life (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011 [1999]: ch. 12; also in Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: ch. 2). After a brief introduction, the chapter focuses on ‘Dance improvisation: a paradigm of thinking in movement’. By way of exemplifying how there is a non-separation of thinking and doing, I note explicitly that: ‘To say that the dancer is thinking in movement does not mean that the dancer is thinking by means of movement or that her/his thoughts are being transcribed into movement’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011 [1999]: 421 [486]). I go on immediately to clarify further: To think is first of all to be caught up in a dynamic flow; thinking is itself, by its very nature, kinetic. It moves forward, backward, digressively, quickly, slowly, narrowly, suddenly, hesitantly, blindly, confusedly, penetratingly. What is distinctive about thinking in movement is not that the flow of thought is kinetic, but that the thought itself is. It is motional through and through; at once spatial, temporal, dynamic. (2011 [1999]: 421 [486])
I note that ‘[t]he description that follows will attempt to capture this motional character’ (2011 [1999]: 421 [486]). In a subsequent paragraph, I emphasize the descriptive nature of the phenomenological account I give of thinking in movement and end the paragraph with the following caveat: If in the course of the description phrases or terms appear precious or fanciful verbal excesses, their successive elaboration should clarify their meaning such that anyone interested in grasping the process of creating an improvisational dance is led to the heart of that experience and to an understanding of its inherent structure: thinking in movement. (2011 [1999]: 422 [486])
I mention the article and quote at length from it because there are in fact awarenesses that enter into what I describe as the ‘process of creating the dance’ (2011 [1999]: 422 [486]) improvisationally. In particular, I point out that ‘I am wondering the world directly, in movement’: I am actively exploring its possibilities and what I perceive in the course of that exploration is enfolded in the very process of my moving – a density or fluidity of other dancers about me, for example, or a sharpness and angularity in their movement. The density or fluidity, like the sharpness and angularity, are not first registered as a perception Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 10, 2016
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(still less as stimuli, and certainly not as sense-data), a perception to which I then respond in some manner by doing something. Qualities and presences are enfolded into my own ongoing kinetic presence and quality. They are absorbed by my movement, as when I become part of the swirl of dancers sweeping by me or am propelled outward, away from their tumultuous energies, or when I quicken to the sharpness of their movement and accentuate its angularity or break out of its jaggedness by a sudden turn and stillness. (2011 [1999]: 422 [487])
‘In just such ways,’ I note, ‘the global dynamic world I am perceiving, including the ongoing kinesthetically felt world of my own movement, is inseparable from the kinetic world in which I am moving’. (2011 [1999]: 422 [487]) These additional quotes from my phenomenological account of thinking in movement in improvisational dance bring to the fore the qualitative dynamics of movement, dynamics that are at the very heart of the ‘process of creating the dance’. Manning’s reading of the account slides over the qualitative dynamics of movement, and this seemingly to give pre-eminence to a particular metaphysics over phenomenology. With respect to this pre-eminencing, it is imperative first of all to read Husserl and to grasp the challenges of phenomenology and of carrying out a phenomenological methodology. Merleau-Ponty does not engage in Husserlian phenomenological practice, that is, he steers clear of a veritable phenomenological methodology. He does indeed veer toward a Whiteheadian metaphysics, but in my view without the rigor of Whitehead’s penetrating and meticulous essays on process. I will return to the imperative of reading Husserl to grasp the essentials of phenomenology and to understand phenomenological methodology, but move on now to a consideration of Whitehead and his specification of the subject, for I wonder about Manning’s absolute rejection of a subject. Whitehead states quite directly that: ‘It is fundamental to the metaphysical doctrine of the philosophy of organism, that the notion of an actual entity as the unchanging subject of change is completely abandoned’ (1979: 29). I agree wholly with Whitehead’s metaphysical doctrine, and from a Buddhist perspective as well (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011). Moreover, Whitehead furthermore proceeds to clarify what properly replaces such a subject. He writes: ‘An actual entity is at once the subject experiencing and the superject of its experiences. It is
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subject-superject, and neither half of this description can for a moment be lost sight of.’ He clarifies the metaphysical doctrine even further when he writes: ‘The term ‘‘subject’’ will be mostly employed when the actual entity is considered in respect to its own real internal constitution. But ‘‘subject’’ is always to be construed as an abbreviation of ‘‘subjectsuperject’’’ (Whitehead, 1979: 29). Thus, when Manning writes that ‘a phenomenological subject’ is not to be countenanced because ‘being never precedes the event’, and that in essence, the subject ‘is always a Whiteheadian superject’, she has bypassed Whitehead’s own finegrained specification. I wonder why. Is there something disreputable about a ‘phenomenological subject’? But then who or what is ‘a phenomenological subject’ in the first place? Moreover, insofar as phenomenology in its original Husserlian formulation is tethered to epistemology, it does not traffic in ‘being’. Thus I wonder too about Manning’s categorical statement equating the phenomenological subject with ‘being’ . . . Certainly there are distinctions to be drawn between phenomenology and Whitehead’s metaphysics, but there are indeed complementarities between the two, hinted at earlier in terms of process and of which more later. There is first, in terms of ‘distinctions to be drawn’, the astonishment over Manning’s categorical judgment of ‘wrongness’, that is, ‘Where phenomenology goes wrong’ (2014). Manning confuses Merleau-Ponty’s problem with phenomenology – his admission of the insolubility of his own problems with his Phenomenology of Perception – with phenomenology itself, that is, with phenomenology as a methodological practice and discipline. It is thus a matter of where Merleau-Ponty ‘goes wrong’, not ‘where phenomenology goes wrong’. Indeed, there is an incredible misunderstanding of phenomenology, stemming from what seems to be a lack of reading Husserl. With all due respect, at least five books should be required reading before one pronounces on phenomenology: Ideas I (1983), Ideas II (1989), Ideas III (1980), Cartesian Meditations (1973), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970). Through these readings, one discovers how deeply Husserl was aware of what he did not investigate fully, well aware of what remained for full phenomenological study, such as, for example, affect and action. Though what he meant explicitly by ‘an infinite task’ might be debatable, an infinite task surely describes his own sense of what remained to be done, of his return over and over to ‘first philosophy’, of the need to Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 10, 2016
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start once more from the beginning, to reiterating such specifics as the ‘co-articulation’ of sense and ‘the kinestheses’ in all perceptions, to correcting what he earlier wrote, and so on. What are the complementarities between phenomenology and Whitehead’s metaphysics? They are anchored generally in the relationship between process and movement, and hence include, from a phenomenological perspective, the process of constitution, internal time consciousness, receptivity and turning toward, movement in the form of ‘the kinestheses’ and in the form of consciousness itself. For example, Husserl implicitly highlights movement in his description of everyday life: We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world; it is from there, by objects pregiven . . . that we pay attention, according to our interests; with them we deal actively in different ways; through our acts they are ‘thematic’ objects. (1970: 108)
Shortly thereafter he observes, ‘consciousness of the world, then, is in constant motion’ (1970: 109). A complementary metaphysical description comes from Whitehead’s description of an actual entity as it is experienced: Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. It is a process of ‘feeling’ the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual ‘satisfaction’. Here ‘feeling’ is the term used for the basic generic operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question. . . . An actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a ‘stuff’. (Whitehead, 1979: 40–1)
The conception of an actual entity as a process and a consciousness in constant motion are distinct but complementary ways of describing experience. Moreover, Whitehead states that ‘[m]ental operations do not necessarily involve consciousness’ (1979: 85), a statement with which Husserl (2001) would agree by way of his own distinguishing between passive and active syntheses. Their complementarity is further evidenced in Whitehead’s statement: ‘Here I am using the term ‘‘mind’’ to mean the complex of mental operations involved in the constitution of an actual entity’ (1979: 85). Constitution, of course, is of pivotal and foundational significance in Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 10, 2016
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phenomenology. I wonder if any of these fundamental complementarities might come to more prominent light. As for references to ontogeny, I must confess to a further astonishment and wonder. Manning’s judgments on infants are authoritative, yet are nowhere substantiated. To write that: ‘In the ontogenetic field of experience, there is not yet a category of self, of body, of external perceiver’ shows a lack of familiarity with research and writings on infancy and child development. With all due respect I strongly recommend the writings of infant psychiatrist and clinical psychologist Daniel N. Stern and infant psychologist Colwyn Trevarthen, and the experimental studies of infant psychologist Andrew Meltzoff. In this context, I might also recommend paying attention to ‘learning one’s body and learning to move oneself’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011 [1999]: ch. 5), and, even further, I recommend paying attention to Husserl’s insight that ‘Originally, the ‘‘I move’’, ‘‘I do’’, precedes the ‘‘I can do’’’ (1989: 273). We indeed come into the world moving – we are precisely not stillborn – but we learn what ultimately become the familiar movement patterns of our everyday lives: walking, talking, brushing our teeth, all of them being complex and intricate patterns, but ones that ultimately become the familiar movement dynamics that inform our everyday lives. Finally, I wonder about the absence of kinesthesia and the qualitative dynamics that constitute kinesthetic experience in what Manning writes of human movement. In support of their foundational significance to our lives as animate beings and specifically their foundational significance to dance, I quote from two articles that underscore their importance. The essential point in both is that ‘the dancer is not moving through a form; the form is moving through her’. That ‘the form is moving through her’ does not mean that ‘movement outruns the subject’ but that movement is the allriveting total of what is being experienced. It is the all-riveting total on the basis of kinesthesia and its qualitative dynamics. The dancer, however, is not simply going through the motions of the learned choreography, but bringing the choreography to life through the movement that flows dynamically in, through, and from his/her body. Accordingly, he or she is not simply moving through a choreographed form – going through the motions, as it were; the form is moving through him or her. (Sheets-Johnstone, 2013: 5–6, emphasis in original)
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Whatever the dance, she or he is kinesthetically present in a thoroughgoing experiential sense to the unfolding qualitative kinetic dynamic that is the dance (see Sheets-Johnstone, 1981, 2009, 2011 [1999] for a descriptive analysis). The sheer quality of the movement, however, has an affective aura of its own. It is somber, bouncy, explosive, smooth – to borrow a term from infant psychiatrist Daniel Stern (Stern, 1985), it has ‘vitality affects’ throughout, and these vitality affects give it an affective resonance, which is to say that its kinetic dynamics resonate affectively. In Langer’s terms, it has ‘vital import’ precisely in the sense of having a dynamic congruent with ‘inner life’, with ‘subjective experience’, with ‘the appearance of feeling’ (1953: 31, 52). While dances may be narrative – while they might be dramatic in nature or tell a story – the drama or story is kinetically engendered in the sheer qualitative dynamics of movement. There may be connotative gestures, even denotative ones, but the dance’s qualitative kinetic dynamics carry the day. They are the ‘stuff’ of the dance, its heart, and, for the dancer, its very breath. The dancer is not moving through a form; the form is moving through her. How, indeed, ‘can we know the dancer from the dance?’ (Yeats, ‘Among school children’;1 see also SheetsJohnstone, 2015 [1980, 1979, 1966]). (Sheets-Johnstone, 2012)
In sum, I wonder whether my original phenomenological account of ‘wondering the world directly, in movement’ in the context of my article ‘Thinking in movement’ (1981; expanded version in SheetsJohnstone, 2011 [1999]: ch. 12), and of subsequent writings over the many years since, has complementarities in Manning’s present-day ‘Wondering the world directly’ (2014). I wonder, in short, whether substantive complementarities as well as substantive distinctions might be recognized and acknowledged between Whitehead’s metaphysics and phenomenology. Note 1. The poem is available at: http://poetry.about.com/od/poems/l/blyeatsamongchildren.htm
References Husserl E (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. Carr D. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 10, 2016
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Husserl E (1973) Cartesian Meditations, trans. Carr D. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl E (1980) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book, trans. Klein TE and Pohl WE. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl E (1983) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. Kersten F. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl E (1989) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. Rojcewicz R and Schuwer A. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Husserl E (2001) Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, trans. Steinbock A. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Langer SK (1953) Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Manning E (2014) Wondering the world directly– or, how movement outruns the subject. Body & Society 20(3&4): 162–188. Sheets-Johnstone M (2015, forthcoming [1980, 1979, 1966]) The Phenomenology of Dance. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Sheets-Johnstone M (1981) Thinking in movement. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39(4): 399–407. Sheets-Johnstone M (2009) The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Sheets-Johnstone M (2011 [1999]) The Primacy of Movement, expanded 2nd edn. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sheets-Johnstone M (2011) On the elusive nature of the human self: Divining the ontological dynamics of animate being. In: Van Huyssteen WJ and Wiebe EP (eds) In Search of Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Personhood. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Sheets-Johnstone M (2012) From movement to dance. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11(1): 39–57. Sheets-Johnstone M (2013) Lessons from Aristotle. Choros International Dance Journal 2(spring): 1–14. Stern D (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books. Whitehead AN (1979) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, edited by Griffin DR and Sherburne DW. New York: The Free Press. Downloaded from bod.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 10, 2016
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Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is an interdisciplinary scholar who began her career as a choreographer/dancer, professor of dance/dance scholar and is now a Courtesy Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Her books range from The Phenomenology of Dance and the ‘roots’ trilogy (The Roots of Thinking, The Roots of Power, The Roots of Morality) to The Primacy of Movement, The Corporeal Turn and Putting Movement into Your Life. She was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University in 2007, an Alumni Achievement Award by the School of Education, University of Wisconsin, in 2011, and honored with a Scholar’s Session at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in 2012. This commentary is from a section of responses to Erin Manning’s ‘Wondering the World Directly * or, How Movement Outruns the Subject’, part of a Special Issue on Rhythm, Movement, Embodiment, edited by Julian Henriques, Milla Tiainen & Pasi Va¨liaho.
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