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The Spiral Dance: Toward a Phenomenology of Somatics

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The Spiral Dance: Toward a Phenomenology of Somatics The College at Brockport: State University of New York Digital Commons @Brockport Dance Faculty Publications Dance 1996 The pirS al Dance: Toward a Phenomenology of Somatics Sondra Horton Fraleigh The College at Brockport, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dns_facpub Part of the Dance Commons Repository Citation Fraleigh, Sondra Horton, "The pS iral Dance: Toward a Phenomenology of Somatics" (1996). Dance Faculty Publications. 8. https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dns_facpub/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Dance at Digital Commons @Brockport. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dance Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @Brockport. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Toward a though .. on that it signifieifofhs. It is the body which points out, and which speaks . Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1 -<'- Phenomenology The Spiral Dance Like somatics, phenomenology holds a My use of "materialization" in the non dualistic philosophy of the body. paragraph above suggests that the Phenomenology develops the inclusive body is less objective material and concept of "the lived body": ourselves more ongoing process than we typical­ as our bodies, experienced as mind, ly suppose-as Judith Butler's text, soul, flesh and spirit. Phenomenology Bodies That Matter, explores.3 Butler is the study of experience-sometimes articulates a feminist, phenomenologi­ called the study of consciousness. It cal, and post-structuralist view. Despite studies immediate awareness as lived this mouthful, her insight can be stat­ whole-body consciousness. ed quite simply in a phenomenologi­ cal context. We are constantly Somatics becoming-thus coming to "matter"­ in ways that we ourselves make come Somatics develops educational tech­ true. And this "mattering" is actualized niques and therapies based on aware­ physically and metaphysically at on ce, ness of our bodies at rest and in as a dance of becoming. motion, the same awareness that phe­ In the above, I am weaving together nomenology describes. Somatic educa­ my worlds of phenomenology, its femi­ tion and therapy affect experiential nist developments, dance, and somat­ materializations of bodymind integrity. An ics. It seems I am forever defining integrity is an unbroken whole; the phenomenology whenever I write or term also refers to honesty, which speak about it, because it is more than points in this case to a bodily lived a word. It is a worldview, in fact-a rec­ soundness. The term affect is used here ognized and much-trodden path in in a twofold sense: "to influence philosophy that seeks to describe the change" and "to move the emotions." self-evidential core of being, and These meanings are also basic to a refutes the notion we inherited from definition of the aesthetic, a theme I Aristotle that there is something non­ develop more fully in Dance and the material called "mind" that moves Lived Body. 2 O ne of my purposes here something material called "body." will be to explore affectivity as a foun­ Modern science does not bear out dational link between somatics and the dualistic notion that we inherited aesthetics. from the father of biology. We gain 14 Somaucs 1998 P-henomenology of Somatics by Sondra Horton Fraleigh, M.A. from Aristotle the double-blind myth of "the lived body," or more currently, tual, physical, emotional, and mental of mind/ male dominance, that the "the living body," and it developed according to their differing affective mind moves the inferior body (the "corpereity" to describe the body sub­ qualities. We might even think of myth of the mind in the machine, as ject. We are not ever just objects; the them as produced through our bodily phenomenologist Gilbert Ryle has body is alive with subjectivity from lived aesthetic, as feeling tones surface studied it in Concept of Mind) ,4 and the head to toe. to color our moods and movements myth of man as superior to woman. I do not hold with all of phenome­ (or otherwise get obstructed). Aristotle's biology teaches that the nological discourse as it developed One of the primary insights of phe­ male is the true parent, the female with Merleau-Ponty,Jean Paul Sartre, nomenology is that the body is a sub­ merely the bearer of the child. His Martin Heidigger, and the first con­ ject, not an object. We can objectify philosophy of human types places man temporary feminist in philosophy, the body, as we necessarily do in med­ in the position of mind and agency. Simone de Beauvior. (De Beauvior was ical research or in learning movement Woman is passive; she is body as vessel, the first to explain the "anti-essential­ (which foot goes forward on step three and further still, an incomplete male, ist" and still-debated thesis that gender in a dance or awareness of the torso distorted.5 is constituted through learned and over the pelvis in a somatic explo­ Phenomenology as it is being writ­ culturally established behavior.) But I ration, for instance). But this does not ten today rejects this double-blind do find a continuum of thought make the body an object. The alive myth, although earlier, especially in extending from these first existential body remains always a subject, even Jean Paul Sartre, phenomenology per­ phenomenologists to more recent though we can objectify it in awareness petuated male normality and female phenomenology. (Butler is also an and in language. abnormality. Sartre saw woman as both anti-essentialist.) It has held consis­ Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of docile and dangerous, the "slimy" tently that mind and body are not dif­ Perception was an explicit refutation of other "in the form of a hole," 6 even as ferent entities; they are merely body/ mind dualism. Like Sartre's and he disputed mind/body dichotomy in different ways we have developed of Heidigger's, his philosophy was a criti­ his existential phenomenology which explaining physical and mental bodily cism of the dualisms initiated by grew as a protest philosophy. phenomena. The living body is the Aristotle that were further consolidat­ Phenomenology did not identify the source of thought and feeling. ed by Descartes. Since Descartes, we body as an independent entity, imply­ Differentiation comes through our expe­ mistakenly suppose that mind and ing that the mind is somehow other rience ofbody and with language. Body matter are separate, even oppositional, and non-physical. consciousness can seem either whole as Descartes carries material/ nonma­ Through new phenomenology and or fragmented . Our awareness is con­ terial dualisms further than Aristotle somatic practices, we understand that stituted out of the whole bodymind in in his Meditations.8 The field of somat­ the body is minded, besouled, and both cases, even though we can ics is not immune to these problems of spirited (the tripartite that classical describe experiences where the body language and their influence on per­ Greek philosophy treated as psyche}. seems absent or even dead in certain ception. The body/mind split is On the physical level, the body has a parts.7 We can describe differences assumed in somatic literature and brain with its nervous system branch­ between reason and emotion, splits of practices that seek to "integrate the ing throughout. Can mind (if we see it attention, altered states, and indeed body and the mind"-as though they arising from the brain) operate "with­ many other states of the body, even were separate to begin with. This is a in" still a separate category called the feelings of disembodiment. And many misleading figure of speech. body? How would one divorce the researches into near-death experi­ "Bodymind integrity" might be a good brain-mind from the body? We could ences indicate that consciousness may substitute, as an expression of the cut off the head. See how absurd it travel beyond ordinary reality in man­ inseparable unity of psyche and soma. gets? ners similar to the dream state. The "Integration" may indeed be accom­ As a philosophical method, phe­ above examples do not imply that the plished in somatic therapy, but it is nomenology pays particular attention body and the mind are metaphysically usually descriptive of structural and to how body/ mind issues are separate. They point to our ability to functional improvement that involves described. Dualism is established or objectify and describe various levels of the bodymind as a root given, with all eradicated through language. experience through language. We the complexities of body conscious­ Phenomenology evolved the concept commonly call such experiences spiri- ness that ensue from this source. Spring/Summer 15 r Body/mind dualism is far from the ducing a psychoanalytic of sexuality these soft boundaries need to state truth of our experience. Without our that conceives of power as penetra- clearly "yes" or "no," in respecting bodily existence, there is no source for tion, "the filling of holes." T he pene- one's own body wisdom. I refer to the the evolution of mental phenomena trating penis is commonly called a power to differentiate and discriminate. nor "house for the soul" (in the Jan- gun; it has power to shoot, and is I guage of dualistic theology). The equated with control and conquest. Natural Powers and the Core Self •I original phenomenologists saw that Sheets:Johnstone shows that in our the body is not an object, not some cultural milieu, "what is not a matter In reflecting a philosophy of nature • "thing" we have as a possession (or a of (phallocentric) control is not a mat- that includes differentiation and burden) to transport through life and ter of power." 12 human development, we can turn to relinquish at death, as though our Beneath the cultural trappings of infant life and its powers of differenti- ~ essential self were other than body.
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