“I will only believe in a god who can dance.”
Friedrich Nietszche
**********************
Extact from Dear Friend, You Must Change Your Life, edited by A.Bronowski, Bloomsbury 2020:
A Philosophy of Dance
On Maurice Béjart’s Letter to a Young Dancer*
By Ada Bronowski
Maurice Béjart (1927-2007) was one of the greatest choreographers and dance innovators of the 20th century. He was also one of its great humanists, a twentieth century Renaissance man, who is the author of a novel, Mathilde or Lost Time from 1963, based on a love-triangle between the composer Richard Wagner and a married woman, the poet Mathilde Wesendock (1828-1902) – and which he would later, in 1965, transpose into a ballet, Wagner Ou l’Amour Fou, (Wagner or the Folly of Love) – he also wrote a series of memoirs, overflowing with anecdotes from his encounters with the most influential and important artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century from the American choreographer Martha Graham to Italian film director Federico Fellini to the actor and theatre director Jean-Louis Barrault, singer-songwriter Barbara, composer Nino Rota or film director Jean-Luc Godard. His memoirs are also filled with deep and insightful commentaries and analyses of texts from writers and philosophers past and present, who nourished his work from Goethe, Nietzsche or Rilke, to Molière, Baudelaire or Jean Genet. He also invented a literary genre, the dialogue with a dead man’s diary, in his book La Mort Subite: Journal Intime (Sudden Death: a Diary)[1], in which he establishes a conversation between himself and fragments of his late father’s personal diary. His own memories serve to reconstruct the background to the entries from the diary which he found after his father, the philosopher Gaston Berger (1896-1960), died, conjuring also, amidst this dialogue with the dead, the imagined contributions of his mother who had died when Béjart was only seven years old.
Death is always at the door in Béjart’s world of curiosity and motion, we extend our arms to it, our fingertips are always just missing it – until of course one day, we seize it, or it seizes us. Béjart is principally a creator of dance, which for him means a thinker in dance. That movement of the extended arm and outstretched fingers is one of his signature gestures, which appears in almost all of his many choreographies, most notably in his Boléro from 1961, set to the eponymous music by Maurice Ravel, considered as one of his masterpieces and which is regularly performed across the world[2]. In it, the extended arms of the dancers encircling a podium expresses unstoppable energy but also directs the gaze upwards towards an ungraspable and foreboding otherness, which in other works is more explicitly spelt out as the other side of death. This is the case for instance in Béjart’s Ballet for Life from 1997, an anguished celebration of those who die young, in direct homage to Freddie Mercury, the founder of the group Queen, and Béjart’s star dancer, Jorge Donn, who both died from AIDS at 45; the ballet is set to a mix of music from Queen and Mozart, who also died at a trailblazing young age.
Béjart’s work is an ever-continued reflection on the possibilities and modes for dialogue: dialogue with death, with past selves, with the audience, between the choreographer and the dancer, between the bodies of the dancers, between the dancer and the floor. Whether in his writing – he also published a series of dialogues, or Conversations with friends[3] – or in his films[4], or exponentially in his choreographies of which there are over three hundred, Béjart’s main preoccupation is with creating the conditions for an original dialogue, between people, between different art forms, between traditions and times.
His uniqueness in the cultural and intellectual landscape of the twentieth century consists in this that his research focuses on putting in contact things which do not or should not or cannot be put in contact. Such a meeting creates a tension which is resolved in a form of transcendence: it is the special event, which is the performance, neither repeatable nor fully describable. The aim each time is to create a unicity in the experience, by drawing on all the art forms to make up a total work of art. However, in contrast to Wagner, the model and inventor of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, for whom it is the music which unifies and justifies all the other participant art forms in the work, for Béjart, it is the dance. Béjart harboured a life-long admiration for Wagner, saying in an interview that he ‘was born Wagnerian’. As mentioned, he wrote a novel about him, and choreographed a number of pieces to music by Wagner[5]. But the shift in centre of gravity from the music to the dance changes everything about the conception of totality in a work of art and of course, changes everything about the kind of dance.
Béjart is the twentieth century’s thinker of the sublime, rebooted to grapple with the weight and horrors but also the astonishing innovations and potentialities of the century’s modernity. His greatest discovery was that dance was the artistic – but also philosophical – form capable of ingesting and expressing this new sublime, through the liberation of the body on the one hand, but also because only the body was capable of taking stock of the twentieth century’s complexity, there to be expressed. This complexity derives from the weight of centuries of culture and thought and the necessity to know all of it because there is no possible excuse not to. Béjart brings to realisation what Lucian of Samosata had theorised in the 2nd century about the role of the dancer, in his On Dance, namely that a dancer ‘must know what is, what will be and what was, in such a way that nothing escapes him, having a faultless memory (…) He must know everything.’[6] To know everything in the 20th century is to accept the impossible clash between the capacity for natural beauty of the body and the ineffable horrors of the tragic human condition. The sublime in Béjart is the expression, in dance, of that impossible, unutterable meeting. This is why it is so important for him, as he explains in the letter presented here, that the experience of a performance be unique and ephemeral.
His task, he says, is that of creating an unrepeatable event; he speaks of the creation of a ‘fête’, a party, which he defines as the opposite of anything that all forms of media have to offer, which he describes as a ‘diarrhoea of the senses’. This is not so much a critique as it is the incitement to the challenge of creation in the age of the reproducibility of art, which Walter Benjamin had captured so matter-of-factly in his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, from 1935[7]. The consumerist means by which a work of art or a performance can be repeated only means that the new art must overcome those pitfalls. Ultimately, modern technologies which regiment and make more extensively available the range of sights and sounds, merely up the game for the artist. Béjart thus gives a more profound sense to the word ‘party’, as an experience not only for the senses but also one that makes us intellectually aware of its unicity. Dance is the art form capable of producing this double effect, in which the physicality of the mind is made manifest on stage by the dancer and in their seat, for the audience.
In the year 2000, a new dancer entered Béjart’s Swiss-based company, the Béjart Ballet Lausanne, by the name of Octavio de la Roza, originally from Argentina and whom Béjart had spotted a few years earlier on tour in Argentina. He had invited the young dancer to join his dance school first, the Ecole-Atelier Rudra, before making him one of the principal dancers of his company. Béjart, at 73, is thus a mentor and Pygmalion to this burgeoning and still raw dancer whose Argentinian roots perhaps also reminded him of Jorge Donn (1947-1992), a pivotal figure in the life and work of Béjart, who had joined Bejart’s then Bruxelles-based company Ballet du XXe Siècle in 1963 never to leave Béjart until his untimely death. At the dawn of de la Roza’s career, and at the twilight of the great master’s life, Béjart writes a series of letters to a young dancer, dedicated to ‘Nahuelt’, an Amerindian name which is both a nickname of endearment for Octavio de la Roza, but which also echoes his other South American muse, and beyond both these figures, addresses not one real person but an idea of an addressee, in whom inexperience is mixed with the desire to learn. It is, in other words the prototypical setting for the unequal exchange nurtured by trust and familiarity, between an experienced wise figure and a disciple, in yet another configuration of Béjart’s cherished form, the dialogue. And it is precisely to that kind of dialogue which Béjart refers to in the first letter of the correspondence, presented here, in which he evokes with ironic nostalgia, the bond between the craftsman and his apprentice at a time where there were no artists but only craftsmen.
How to pass down knowledge? How to share experience? Béjart’s Letters to a Young Dancer are just as much a nod to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in which finding one’s voice is intrinsically related to learning to engage with the world (see chapter 17 in this volume), as they are to the premises of that tradition, begun in ancient Greece with Epicurus, and the latter’s humble summarising of doctrine for the benefit of the philosophical novice (see chapter 1 of this volume), and amplified with Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, which are written for posterity (see chapter 2). But Béjart reimagines the problem of transmission not as what there is to know, but rather, as how to work, when there is so much learn. The letters become for him, the format in which to discuss his philosophy of dance.
Béjart begins his letter to Nahuelt with a Socratic declaration, that the more he searches for answers, the more he realises he does not know anything. It is dance which brings this constant unquenchable desire for knowledge and which also makes it impossible to satisfy. The solution then is to cling to the basics, to what one can grab hold of: in dance the answer to that is, in a way, easy, it is the body. Where the tools of abstract thought are themselves abstract – Socrates’ famous and elusive ‘dialectic’ – dance has this advantage, that its primary material is supremely malleable. But the difference is purely superficial: just as for Socrates, the problem and the solution lie in one and the same tool, namely language, so it is for the choreographer, for whom the problem and the solution are to found in and with the body. The body is thus both the mystery and the basic material from which questions arise.
Socrates famously roots his inquiries in the simple questions, so as all the better to explode conventions and truisms: what does shape mean? doesn’t everyone want good things? is justice good? – are some of his famous ‘innocent’ questions. But it is the same with the choreographer, who appeals to the simple things about the body. Dance has a routine and a discipline which are the essential conditions for its development. Is this a truism, a ‘common-place’ as Béjart says self-deprecatorily? To get anything done, one must go back to the basics and do the everyday, seemingly uninspiring work. In dance, this is epitomised by the daily exercises at the bar. Béjart thus turns around the notion of a common-place, by making its literal meaning re-emerge – in true Socratic fashion: the bar is a common place, a shared place where all dancers come to, and from which all work evolves. The abstract common-place, which one forgets to remember, becomes concrete: it is a place, the bar, a time, the routine where the primary material, the body, is shaped and kneaded. 
Béjart says there is no difference for him between life and dance, and to understand what this means beyond a mere declaration of the artist’s commitment, body and soul, to his art, we must delve deeper into his analysis of what the work of dance-making involves. He says that he does not see himself as a choreographer, that is, as the creator of a particular sequencing of steps which makes up a beginning, middle and ending of a dance piece; rather, again in an uncanny echo to Socratic thought, he says his work is more akin to that of a midwife of the dance. But, whereas Socrates had used refutation, and Socratic irony, to help his interlocutor find in himself the means to reach truth, Béjart’s midwifery consists in a discovery through dance of what is inside the dancer, bringing him or her to a higher realisation of themselves.
He writes humorously that dance-making, like love-making needs two people, and is perhaps even orgiastic when the audience comes into the game as well. Joke aside, there is here too, a deeper insight into the kind of dialogue established between a dancer – and through him or her, the choreographer – and the audience: for unlike in a performance where there are words (opera or theatre or a traditional ballet based on a story) around which everyone will agree the piece is about, what is communicated in dance is dependent on the means of reception which are necessarily individual and personalised for each member of an audience. Each of us is called upon to tie a personal relationship to the dance, intensifying thereby the unicity of the event. That something does get communicated is part of the mystery of dance.
There is, in Béjart’s writing generally – and all the more so in the benevolent effusion in his letters to Nahuelt – a tone which is always light-hearted, full of cheekiness and fun, all the while harbouring a deep reflection about the always-almost seriousness of life, art and dance. He encourages Nahuelt to open his mind and his dance to all forms of dance across traditions. For wisdom lies in the hybridization of cultures. He says of himself in another letter to Nahuelt (n.7 in the collection) that he is: ‘contemporary, post-African, pseudo-classical, Japo-minimalist, Argentinian-modernist, folk-retro, and Indo-Petipatist’. It is not only inspiration that Béjart draws from the different cultures he had life-long fascinations with: going regularly to India to learn more about ‘real yoga’ and Indian dance, spending time in Japan, deepening his practice of zen and his love of kabuki dance-theatre, cultivating his Senegalese roots (his great-grandmother was Senegalese), all the while broadening his knowledge and practice of classical dance, placing Marius Petitpa (1818-1910) at the forefront, with his neologism ‘Petipatist’. In one of his many brilliant verbal portraits, Béjart describes Petitpa, his ‘colleague’, as ‘the Meliès and the Griffith of choreography’[8]. Born like Béjart in Marseille, Petitpa ended up in St Petersburg, via Bruxelles, to create the great ballets of the classical canon together with Tchaikovsky. Béjart’s fraternal apostrophe to ‘his colleague’ Petitpa is just one of a myriad of such emotional and intellectual identifications he expresses with all practices and traditions, art and cultures, which Béjart cannot but embrace fully.
It is these capacities for love and curiosity, and the humility that comes with them which Béjart infuses his letter to the young dancer with. He ends with a quotation from his father, the philosopher of human nature Gaston Berger, on the state of this poor humanity of ours which is torn between thinking that it knows and realising, through science, that it still has everything to learn. It is at heart Socrates’ mantra revisited, that he knows he knows nothing, turned now into a scientific discovery which, ‘backed by science’, is harder than ever to brush aside. Though Béjart leaves it open, he intimates with a causal ‘it is not without relevance’, that one way to face the crisis is to pretend it does not exist – the age old reaction to Socratic admonitions – but another way is to open our minds to a philosophy of reciprocal mixture of all forms of expression, of all culture. Dance does not accompany this realisation but rather is the place in which such a mixture can effectually occur.
* In Maurice Béjart, Lettres à un jeune danseur, Arles: Actes Sud, 2001, translated into English in Dear Friend, You Must Change Your Life, ed. A.Bronowski, Bloomsbury 2020, p.207-8. (here)
[1] M. Béjart, (1991) La Mort Subite, Paris : Librairie Séguier.
[2] Filmed versions of the dance are easily found on YouTube performed by some of the greatest dancers of the last quarter of a century.
[3] With the writer, artist, and Belgian politician Michel Robert in M. Robert, (2000), Conversations avec Maurice Béjart, Tournai : Paroles d’Aube-La Renaissance du Livre; M. Robert, (2006), Ainsi Danse Zarathoustra, Paris : Actes Sud ; M. Robert, (2009) Maurice Béjart : Une Vie, (derniers entretiens), Bruxelles : Luc Pire. As also with René Zahnd, (2000), Maurice Béjart- L’esprit Danse, Lausanne: Bibliothèque des Arts.
[4] Béjart’s filmography can be found on the website of Fondation Maurice Béjart, at: http://www.maurice-bejart.ch/03_work_03.html.
[5] At the Bayreuth Festival in 1961 where he created the Bacchanal dance to Wagner’s Tannhaüser with the Ballet du XXe Siècle, as also a whole ballet devoted to the Ring cycle, entitled Ring Um den Ring, (Ring around the Ring), in Berlin in 1990. On Béjart’s relation to Wagner, see M-F. Christout, Maurice Béjart, Paris: Editions Chiron/Association-Danse-Sorbonne, p.160-2.
[6] See Lucian, Of Pantomime 36-37, in The Works of Lucian of Samosata, H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler, transl., (1905), Oxford, (repr. by Forgotten Books in 2007), vol 2. On Lucian see chapter 4 in this volume.
[7] On Benjamin, see more in chapter 18 in this volume.
[8] M. Béjart, (1979) Un Instant dans la Vie d’Autrui, p 192.
**********************
The Logic of the Body
An essay by Ada Bronowski, draft from 2017
Movement and Meaning from the Ancients to 21st century Dance
Abstract
The paper gives an analysis of ancient materialist theories of motion and rest from Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, to then apply them to considerations on dance and choreography in antiquity and in the 20th-21st centuries. The body has the capacity to express relations between other bodies and itself, and states-of-affairs relative to bodies. Relations and states, which spoken language has not got access to. In this perspective, Lucien of Samosata (2nd century AD) declares that dance is superior in knowledge than philosophy. The extent and depth of Lucien’s analysis comes to its fullest appreciation in contemporary so-called ‘abstract’ dance. This is shown through an account of the works of Nijinsky, Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe et Wayne McGregor, who contribute to set out a comprehensive logic of the body.
֎
In a treatise on dance from Late Antiquity, dating from the mid-2nd century AD, the essayist and all-round cultural critic, Lucian of Samosata, writes about dance that:
“it is the peak of all knowledge, above even philosophy”.
The treatise is one of the first extant analytical and critical texts about dance[1], about the way dance forms a language which “needs no additional interpretation or explanation over and above what is shown”. The claim therefore that dance is not only a path to knowledge but constitutes itself a kind of knowledge, above even the knowledge brought about by philosophy, is a serious claim: serious about dance and serious about philosophy.
Which dance and which philosophy?
There is a bridge between philosophy, in the way the ancients thought of it, as a way of life based on the study of logic, physics and ethics and dance[2]. If Lucian’s claim makes any sense, then dance must be shown to encompass all the results from the study of logic, physics and ethics. Developing this holistic view of philosophy should enable us to ground the notion of the language of dance through what I hope to show to be a logic of the body.
Contemporary ballet, furthermore, exacerbates the discoveries of that bridge between the holistic view of philosophy and its expression through dance so that meaning and movement will be shown to be, in dance, not two separate notions but one and the same.
A quick brush through some key moments in the history of 20th century ballet culminating in Wayne McGregor’s work the Raven Girl, will provide an exemplary basis for this line of thought.
Part I : What is language: Logic of the Body
I take Lucian’s claim about dance, namely that it is one step beyond philosophy, to epitomise a line of thought about ontology – what there is in reality – based on materialistic views about our surrounding world.
Lucian writes at a moment when the great systems of philosophy developed in antiquity are established institutions: there are the spiritualists/ dualists (Platonists and Aristotelians) who are in stark opposition to the materialists (Stoics, Epicureans).
The spiritualists and dualists have not as yet dominated western culture and thought as they will through their integration into Christian dogma less than a century after Lucian’s time, and the materialist option is very much alive and discussed. Lucian’s claim about dance being above philosophy, begins to make sense I believe, once the implications of those materialist options are developed – which is what I propose to do here.
It is not by chance that since the Modern Era, grosso modo our 20th century, once these materialistic options get re-considered in the light of scientific discoveries, (theories of perception, the half-second delay, quantum mechanics and so on.) dance reconquers a status closer to that of philosophy, insofar as philosophy is concerned with analysis and concepts defining reality. For dance in the 20th century, symbolically reborn with Nijinsky’s explosive choreography for the Rite of Spring (in May 1913), reaffirms its propensity to conceptualism, abstraction and rationality. It is freed from centuries of being codified, ritualised, compartmentalised and subordinated to a pre-established language and cultural context. In the case of classical ballet, this comes down to pre-written and pre-known stories or fairy-tales[3].
So I propose to make a leap from a re-assessment of an ancient philosophical tradition of materialist thought to contemporary dance which is thriving on the input of those materialist views, now up-to-date with modernity through scientific discoveries.
The philosophical tradition I am conjuring up focuses on motion and how considerations about motion lead to a complete map of all there is in reality.
I will flag down three moments of this line of thought which I identify as follows:
1) No rest without motion, no motion without rest
2) Potential vs. Actual
3) Only bodies are either at rest or in motion
- A Platonic notion: No rest without motion, no motion without rest.
The first point draws on an Platonic view ( from Plato’s Sophist) that at any given moment, a moving body is not wholly in motion but rather that being in motion relies on one part of the whole body being at rest whilst another is in motion. For example when you walk: for your legs to be moving, your torso or head must stay put; or, for the stars to move around the earth, the earth must be at rest (other kinds of rotational motions notwithstanding).
So: for there to be motion, there also must be concomitantly rest. No rest without motion, no motion without rest. It is a theme which is properly articulated by Plato in contrast with Pre-Socratic views about motion which divide roughly in (i) the defenders of a constant flowing continuum in which the notion of rest plays but a misleading surface appearance (e.g. Heraclitus in Aetius, I, 23,7, or Aristotle Met. G.v, 1010a12) – against (ii) the One-ists (e.g. Parmenides), for whom it is motion which is but a mere appearance and all there is, is endless and ceaseless immobility. Plato’s move broaches a new line of thought about the complementarity rather than exclusivity of motion and rest – this is in effect, a characteristic mark of Platonism throughout its transformations over the centuries, as witnessed for instance in the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus (Enn. IV,8,1) in a discussion of change as relying on rest.
- An Aristotelian distinction between a capacity and the actualisation of that capacity
The Aristotelian contribution to the complementarity of motion and rest comes in at different levels of complexity, the more famous being his distinction between an object’s substratum and that of which it is the substratum: the substratum changes though the object itself can be said to stay one and the same.
The distinction is otherwise also analysed as what an object can become potentially and what it is actually. And this is the second point to add to our investigation into meaning and movement drawn from this Aristotelian view. Namely that there is a distinction between a body’s capacity to be in motion and it’s actually being in motion. So it is the distinction between being able to move potentially but not actually moving, and actualising that capacity.
This view makes for three different kinds of bodies: for there is a difference between, say, the author of this paper who has potentially the capacity to do a pirouette and this table which has no such capacity and the ballerina who is actually pirouetting.
The actualisation displayed by the ballerina relies both on having the capacity (so not being a table) AND know-how, a form of mastery of one’s body over surrounding space and time – which, the author of this paper in effect, lacks.
Neither the Platonic view referred to, nor the Aristotelian notions of potential vs actualisation concern specifically bodies and in effect they neither imply nor rely on any familiar or less familiar notions of a body. They are specifically notions pertaining to motion and change which cover a far more extensive and complex set of relations between items which are more or less body-like and incorporeal, or certainly non-material, items such as Forms – the Platonic Ideas – or souls. But these views about motion and change crystallise and are developed once they are exclusively applied to material-based ontologies as with the Stoics. Indeed it is developments of such views about motion and change which enable the Stoics, but also atomistic theories like Epicureanism to provide proofs for their claims about the sole existence of matter or body.
In contrast to the atomistic view of the early Atomists such as Democritus, or the later developments brought forward by Epicurus, the Stoics take as fundamental material constituents of reality not the atoms, but bodies defined as being either (potentially) active or (potentially) passive. Size has no importance here, nor does discrete divisibility. It is thus properly a corporealist view which sets out at once a less reductionist ontology than the atomistic account which turns out to be more deterministic. For it will turn out that the potential to act or be acted upon is consistently solicited, i.e. actualised, in order for the bodies in question to exist. Thus there are forces within even say a stone which continuously act upon it to keep it in the shape and place it is in[4].
The major contribution the corporealism of the Stoics makes to our brief history of matter in motion is thus to determine the kind of objects we are actually dealing with: namely bodies. Motion is of matter which is a specific body whose motions and capacities for motion are determined by the kind of body it is[5].
3) Our third point is thus gleaned from the Stoic view that whatever is at rest necessarily has the potential to move or be moved and in virtue of that potential, is a body.
The term ‘corporealist’ here has metaphysical purport: the Stoics push towards an existential claim that whatever moves and can be moved – (including in this way the potential capacity introduced by Aristotle) exists as a body. So all that moves exists, and all that exists is a body, therefore all that moves is a body. We arrive in this way at a properly corporealist account of existence[6].
The merging of these 3 points yields the following schema:
What is at rest is necessarily, potentially in motion and thus necessarily also a body.
Bodies are what is either at rest or in motion.
What is at rest is complementary to what is in motion: in other words, it is reliant and inter-dependent with what is in motion and thus enables motion.
What is at rest and what is in motion are in contact.
Thus: what is at rest and what is in motion are connected such that the moving of the one is limited by the rest of the other and vice-versa,
Where the moving body ends is the beginning of the body at rest and where the moving body begins is the limit of the body at rest.
On the perceptual side: that is also how we detect one body or body-part from another: where motion begins and where it ends. That is what perception comes down to: the detection of the movement of bodies, according to their limits.
The corporealisation of what has the capacity to move or be moved points towards a usage of the word ‘body’ which is rather different from the common everyday way by which we usually refer to living sentient bodies (or corpses which used to be alive). The word ‘body’ is used here to refer to any kind of thing which minimally satisfies the requirements we are talking about here: namely the capacity to move or be moved.
Crucially though, if the capacity is enough to determine the criterion for corporeality, the necessary actualisation is determinate for the existence of bodies: so that in effect, existence comes down to a complementarity between constant rest and constant motion.
What I am describing is a theoretic push-me-pull-you schema: the relation between the body at rest and the body in motion is a relation according to which when the one pushes, the other gets pushed and vice-versa.
What is more, this schema saturates the account of all there is: through an exploration of motion, we have mapped out the whole of reality.
For the upshot of this picture is a highly textured – densely textured – framework of what reality is constituted by: a sequence of correlated bodies constantly either pushing or pulling on each other.
I’m not merely pointing out here the existence of tables and chairs, human and animal bodies; we are talking about body interacting with adjacent body:
e.g. : legs against air when we walk, or jump
or: air against the table which stays put by exacting a neutralising counter-force, – but if the air becomes stronger, and we call it the wind, the table might start being moved after all.
There are two crucial conclusions to be drawn from this short survey:
1) Almost everything is body – almost? Yes, almost because to complete the theory, we have yet to explain, what this interactivity consists in. There is something more to be said in addition to having now described the kind of items we are calling bodies and which are fundamentally involved in motion. We are, in other words, yet to spell out their correlation.
2) Secondly: there is no stillness properly speaking. A moment of apparent stillness is actually an interaction of two bodies whose potentialities for motion are neutralised: it’s the table against the air or the air against the table – the one resisting the pull of the other. But they are constantly potentially in motion – for indeed, there can be no rest without concomitant motion.
Stillness is broken apart; it dissolves into a continuous confrontation of opposing forces.
But, we are not talking here about an atomisation of the world, that is to say a view according to which all is just a continuous and constant flow of atoms. No, the view we’re exploring here is very different from that: it is a view according to which bodies are identified and recognised through their role in motion, pushing or pulling, resisting or giving in, in accordance with their capacities to set another body in motion or rather be moved, or give in to it. So, if you will, Epicurean atomism against Stoic corporealism: two different views of materialism. The uniform motion of a unitary ontological measure (the atom) governed by chance encounters in contrast with individual motions of individual bodies determined by the specificity of the bodies in question.
The crucial questions about these bodies are therefore not what colour they are, or what shape. But first and foremost: what can this or that body do? What are the limits of its activity? What can it not do? What other body can’t it resist? The answers to these questions will presumably also yield details about colour, shape, weight and so forth.. none of these however define the body in question[7].
If I want to know what there is, I have to know what is done to what by whom. And this is necessarily something separate and additional to the bodies involved.
With this additional element, namely that which is done to body X by body Y, we can now give a complete account of what there is in reality: there are bodies on the one hand and there are, on the other, the things that bodies do to each other by way of motion.
These things, let us call them states-of-affairs: the way things are (as opposed to what they are, e.g. bodies). Since we’ve seen that the way things are is to be in motion, these states-of-affairs consist in the way bodies are moving.
What there is to communicate, what there is to say are these states-of-affairs and this is what language fundamentally does, it expresses what one body is doing to another: from sentences like ‘The sun is shining’ describing the sun moving in the air, to sentences of the kind E = mc².
What has all this got to with dance? and how are any of these metaphysical considerations contributing to a bridge between philosophy and dance?
The account I have just set out gives a physical account of bodies as the totality of the components of reality; but it has also provided the basis for the logical analysis of this reality by framing that analysis in terms of states-of-affairs: if we want to make sense of this reality, we must grasp these states-of-affairs.
In addition, the account also provides the direction for the ethical concerns of a philosophical system: they will concern the effects of the motions – properly speaking, the value or moral worth of the states-of-affairs which we have seen are precisely what has been done by one body to another. And there will be good effects and bad effects, good states-of-affairs and bad states-of-affairs. So Ethics is that part of philosophy which sets out rules and attempts to regulate the state-of-affairs: by indicating which body should interact with which to guarantee the best possible outcome.
Speech as we know it plays a main role in articulating logical analysis: speech aspires to reflect the way things are; it articulates states-of-affairs through an ordered and regulated use of words, what we call grammar and syntax . It tries to reveal the truth. It is also famously and infamously, the instrument of falsity, lies and misinterpretation.
Plato had been one of the first philosophers who tried to explain how and why speech is the only tool we have to grasp the truth, and that philosophy’s task was to bend speech to that goal; but he immediately was faced with the problem that speech is what produces falsity[8].
Already in Plato it would seem that speech is conceived as derivative on the way reality is, it reflects it but does not change anything about reality[9].
But it follows from this that speech is not the only means to articulate and express the states-of-affairs. Anything, in principle, capable of reflecting the structures of reality can do so. It is thus now that the initial claim about dance properly fructifies: the idea behind it is that dance which is the language of body par excellence can and should be the best equipped language to express what there is. What is more, the chances that dance should get it wrong are much slimmer than speech given that unlike speech, dance does not map onto the corporeal constituents of reality but is itself the ordering of those constituents.
Dance is the epitome of regulated, controlled motion for the sake of beauty grace and order, it thus has an eminently ethical goal: that of order and reason and so can express an ideal view of humanity. Dance is the ordering of the energy and motion of the body, precisely a negotiation of the complementarity between rest and motion – the complementarity which defines the body and determines its individuality. In effect, if it is the case that motion and rest constitute the key to all there is – that all there is the motion and rest of bodies pulling and pushing at each other – then dance is what brings sense, order and direction to the pushing and pulling of the constitutive bodies. Dance thereby incorporates energy and motion, in the etymological sense of ‘incorporating’, namely directing, controlling the body. Through this control it is the effects of motion vs. rest, the pushing and pulling, which are being taken charge of. Dance regulates those effects, and takes control of the states-of-affairs which are what bodies do to each other.
Dance thus takes the place we saw speech has as it latches onto the states-of-affairs for its meaningful content. Dance does this too insofar as it is concerned with states-of-affairs – but it does more, given that it regulates motion in a certain direction to have certain effects. Good effects: both morally beautiful because they are true to reality, enunciating the structures of reality as they are, and pleasing to the eye as a result. Thus perception from the audience is properly a suspension of belief (and not disbelief) because what is depicted articulates rational truths through the production of meaningful and communicable content. So it is not true or false, but meaningful – or simply is not. It is the logic of the body.
Philosophy’s tool to express knowledge is speech which by nature is alien to the reality it reflects. Dance’s tool is the body, whose energy and motion are the very furniture of the reality it depicts. We are now in a better position to follow what at first blush might seem a provocative and sibylline suggestion, that of comparing dance with philosophy and furthermore ranking dance above philosophy. Dance’s aspiration to knowledge, its superiority over philosophy is not utterly outlandish once we realise that dance is the logic of the body on an ontological view in which all there is, is body.
Part 2: 20th century dance
The ontological framework based on corporealist principles did not convince and was certainly never mainstream neither in the 2nd century AD nor for many centuries to come for various and sundry political, religious and societal reasons[10]. But modern science, whilst not specifically restoring that kind of philosophical account has made many of its more difficult elements more credible and creditable. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics and more recently, in the last thirty years M-theory, string theory and super symmetry with phenomenological proofs being sought for using atom colliders, are all theories and lines of inquiry which are concerned with measuring time and space and the relation between them. What seems – and certainly seemed until the beginning of the 20th century – to be immeasurable (namely the ungraspably immense universe, the gravity pull of black holes, or the unimaginably small at the level of quanta) is not only measurable and measured, but also expressible through the relevant algorithms. It is also thereby perceptible, or should be, through experiments of increasing sophistication through technical inventions. The materiality of the contents of the world is thus more solidly established and richer than ever before.
And indeed, in parallel, our capacity to grasp and perceive the folds of reality has sharpened: starting from the experiments carried out by von Helmholtz proving the measurability of the time-span between a stimulus and its perception which led to distinctions between conscious and pre-conscious perception[11]. A measurable, that is to say, controllable gap for communication arises, becomes palpable. It is on this gap that expressivity of the body, properly speaking the language of the body can thrive, precisely where speech is bound to fail and mathematical or other logical languages may seize only one aspect[12]. Contemporary sociologists theorise over this gap, or “minimal space” conceived of as an interstice between action and consciousness which is by its very nature vulnerable to intrusion and manipulation – thereby constituting a fertile terrain for media manipulation and for publicity[13]. But such a concern merely highlights the discrepancy between speech based media and a, properly speaking, language of the body which has its own logic in accord with the physical account of reality. And indeed it is a mastery and knowledge of the small times and spaces which can anchor that kind of logic[14]. This opens up new horizons of expectation from what a body can do and how well it can do it – both insofar as choreographic creativity is concerned as also from the point of view of audience reception.
The solid grounding of a physicalist ontology thus gives a renewed authority of expression to the body. But, from a schematic point of view, we are firmly back on track with the ancients’ account of motion and corporealism we sketched out in the first part of this paper. Dance is at the forefront of these renewed possibilities of expression as it is the proper form the language of the body must take.
In principle, the ethical role of dance as the expression of the order of the physicalist account of reality remains the same as suggested above. But with the more complex scientific discoveries brought to bear on the physicalist account, the order expressed by dance itself adapts to the reality it has to tell us about.
Now this is not the explanation for the difference between, if we stick to ballet, classical ‘traditional’ dance, and contemporary dance. For sure, contemporary dance to the eyes and ears of people living but a hundred years ago would be the most extraordinary distortion of one’s expectations. Classical ballet is a codified, ritualised accompaniment of a story and music. An art form which belongs to the mimetic or representational arts, that is to say, arts which represent actions and emotions familiar to us from speech[15]. And this, exponentially so in classical ballet where typically the representation is one of a narration, be it fairy tale or mythology. This is a very different conception of dance from the one put forward here which takes its root in the sisterhood between dance and philosophy suggested by Lucian’s analytic description:
“Dance is the peak of all knowledge, higher even than philosophy which it uses and is based on – physics and ethics mostly” (Lucian, On Dance, 35)
Dance does not represent anything, it is the thing itself. 20th century dance in this manner, does not so much rebel against the codes of classical ballet but rather reconsiders the place and contribution of dance: not telling a story through movements and gestures which are pre-agreed representational symbols. But it is itself the story. Movement expresses states-of-affairs just as speech can. Dance is moreover not any kind of movement just as philosophy is not any kind of string of words. But rather, it is order and rationality which – just as they shape a philosophical discourse – also determine the movements of dance such that a successful, that is to say compelling, dance need no further interpretation or explanation apart from the dance itself. It is then parallel to a philosophical argumentation which, when successful, i.e. compelling or convincing, need nothing in addition to make its point. This is indeed the purport of a remark found already in Lucian, namely that “the spectator must understand the mute and hear what is not uttered” (Dance, 62) – precisely because there is nothing more than the dance itself which the choreography has to express.
The great historical re-affirmation of regained independence of meaning for dance is famously Nijinsky’s choreography for the Rite of Spring performed for the first time on the 29th May 1913. Yet, however shocking the dance in particular was to the 1913 audience[16], it is only a catalyst for the kind of change I am talking about here. Nijinsky’s choreography (from what has been reconstructed[17]), – though in effect this is the case for most of the great choreographies set to the Rite – is very much dependent on the powerfully charged music which itself, through the titles of its different parts relates a story. The dance here breaks with traditional codes, and revels in that breach giving dance the tools for independence. But the proper emancipation we are concerned with here will need to take further steps towards abstraction to reach its full philosophical maturity.
In the 20th century history of dance-criticism, two main strands stem out from the kind of breach the dance of the Rite allowed for.
A first strand picks up principally on the breach with the classical tradition as a pathway to understand dance as a more authentic expression of a culture. This socio-anthropological approach originates with thinkers like Bourdieu. It takes dance seriously but as a cultural embodiment – dance is considered as a tool for the analysis of a culture[18]. The overall outcome however does not yield a universal decipherment of a language of dance. Dance remains on this view supernumerary, context-sensitive and an interpretation of pre-established norms of communication and ethical aspirations set out by the given cultural context.
It is not down the sociological path that I wish to go here, but rather following Lucian, push further the universalist truth-seeking account of dance. For there is another strand of analysis triggered by the liberation of movement inspired by the Rite. It consists in considering that both the perception and the creation of dance should be fuelled by the aspiration to grasp universally communicable meaning through movement.
The essential break-point consists in the dance being the sole object of analysis. There is thus a shedding away of any information external to motion. The move is thus towards a tightening of focus –a focalisation on the meaning of movement. This heightens significantly the demands on the control and order of motion so as to truly satisfy the requirement that no interpretation be needed over and beyond what is shown in the dance.
No interpretation means that all should be clear. So audience perception and the dance-language must tap into what things are in reality, through an explicit and expressible access to the states-of-affairs. No faking, no falsity or the dance fails just as we fail to speak when we pronounce nonsensical sounds like blablabla .
George Balanchine’s Symphony in C for example (premiered in 1947[19]), is a grounding model for the discovery of the intrinsic meaning of movement: the ordered sequences of movements are enough, are all that is needed in order to express drama and emotion; no external signifiers of context, plotline or indeed costume – as the dancers are sartorially but schematically distinguished in an ironic twist on traditional ballet with white leotard for the girls and black bodysuit for the boys.
It is the total absence of external markers which enables to clasp at emotions and truths about the relationship between human beings which speech fails to capture.
This ballet is flaunting the campaign of affirmation of authority for the language of dance. It does so in explicit rebellion against classical ballet. A great deal of the innovations and boldness of Symphony in C is in the dialectic with the codes of classical ballet which it constantly uses and distorts.
Many choreographers and creations since Balanchine have deepened ever further the articulation and syntax of dance in the exploration of freedom not of speech but of dance-talk: the grasping of ever subtler and precise states-of-affairs.
Speech, in line with scientific and technical developments, also undergoes alterations to supplant expressive needs: think of mathematical language, think of scientific language or jargon as we call it because it is so far removed from ordinary everyday speech; think of the difficulties of translation which essentially come down to the inability of language A to capture exactly the state-of-affairs a sentence in language B seems to manage to express.
Dance has followed a similar road: in line with technical developments, the ever more precise measurability of speed also at the infinitesimally small scale, opens the possibility in dance to articulate the infinitesimally small motions which calibrate and constitute the world. Hyper-extension of arms and legs, speed of turns and height of jumps: none of these elements have anything to do with acrobatics – and if they do, this is not dance anymore. It is dance when all of this technical prowess is at the service of conceptual communication. This is what constitutes the ethical dimension of dance: the order and the completeness of the communicated content.
William Forsyth’s In the Middle Somewhat Elevated from 1987[20] is exemplary of that inquiry into motion at its infinitesimally small-scale: what Forsyth creates is a sense of time and slowness, freezing the motion to explain it in every detail – like a philosophical treatise painstakingly going through every stage of a thought construction which in real life takes nothing more than a few seconds[21]. In dance, the technical prowess required by this choreography for instance, gives the audience time to begin to understand some fundamental truths which the dance reveals: it is dance’s way of suspending our attention through the suspension of perception. Where we didn’t think there was still something to pay attention to, that’s where the dance draws our focus.
This is precisely the dissolving of stillness I mentioned earlier: there is no such thing as stillness. Dance needs to show us what that means – and it does: by articulating truths through motion which appeared at first to be inexpressible or inaccessible through speech.
A hundred years after the Nijinsky’s explosive choreography to the Rite of Spring, Wayne McGregor created the Raven Girl (2013) – a ballet which marks the emancipation and affirmation of the non-representational, self-sufficiently meaningful status of contemporary dance. It is a dance which plays on similar themes to those of the Rite: a girl isolated from a group who undergoes violence but who no longer must be sacrificed to the diktats of rites and rules. She cannot fly, but she can dance – and that is not an escape from a predicament, but rather all there is to say, i.e. meaningfully communicate. McGregor’s choreography thus encapsulates the claims made here about dance.
McGregor plays up to traditional ballet in basing his work on a contemporary eponymous fairy-tale (by Audrey Niffenegger, 2013). But it is all the more to break from a tradition of narrative and description. The ballet shows the struggle of the child of a raven and a human to fit into a world she has no place in: half-human and half-raven means she can neither speak like humans nor fly like ravens. It is dance which shall be her mode of communication: the language which does not speak and the flight which does not fly. The ballet is thus eminently about ballet, about what movement says about what a person is feeling and wants. This is a strong, philosophical sense of ‘to say’, namely that of getting a meaningful content across to others; not the meaning of this or that word – that is a problem for linguistics and the structure of spoken languages – the problem of which words go together to express a state-of-affairs[22]. Dance does not use words, so its concern with meaning is directly that of accessing states-of-affairs – these are the meaningful contents the raven girl dances out until she finds someone who can understand her language, understand her dance.
In the second act of the ballet, the raven girl rushes into a crowd of human-faced dancers who form a random moving chorus whose strength is in numbers and unified movement. Their to-ing and fro-ing is measured to the millimetre to a synchronised pace which screams out in their muted silence the limits of their capacity for refined expression. Their locomotion is awkward because they are not dancing, but speaking words – how do we see this? Because the Raven Girl in their midst is desperately trying to communicate with them: standing in an oblique line, extended at an 80 degrees slant on the verge of falling, she has her profile to the audience with her mouth wide open in a Munch-like howl. The chorus of humans however does not so much as blink at her presence. Her pose is already alien to their bedraggled wobble: she, straight as a lance, immobile at a more than human tilt, extending all her attention and desire to them but already ready to shoot away far above them; they, straight faced and moony, incapable of even acknowledging her presence, blind and deaf to her call. They are the speakers, not the dancers. Their bodies follow no clear line, they have no awareness of the laws of geometry, they hobble past the essential structures, i.e. the essential truths of the world around them. Speech is limited and the ballet prefigures those limits in an absence of clear and distinct movements.
Clarity and distinction bring a direction to movement – a direction which creates lines and figures which capture the order of reality. That is where the Raven Girl is tending to. At this stage at which she is still trying to communicate with the humans, her movements are timid and few. She has not yet discovered, as the choreography subsequently develops, the versatile and infinite variety of extension in movement, which will enable her to say things neither humans nor ravens can understand or even begin to imagine exist. But who will understand her? Are humans doomed not to? Surely there is an audience and it is made up of humans?
In the ballet, there will be only one person capable of going beyond the radical opposition between set categories of human-talk versus raven-flying; he is the Raven Prince. It is his love and appreciation of her unicity which drives him to go beyond his contained mode of communication. Love leads to understanding and especially to the unfolding of the possibilities of communication in motion. The Prince learns together with the Raven Girl to figure out the figure in the carpet – the real thing where ‘real’ stands for the truth, what there really is. The real thing is thus danced out, line by extended line where each new shape draws out more precise and subtle possibilities of meaning. The direction of movement is the sense of the thought. The movement is the meaning precisely when it continuously, rapturously, extends ever beyond the seeming limits of the body – tapping into something greater than those limitations which are the fundamentals of reality. The body thus holds the keys to those basic structures, if only it lets itself slide out and in towards them.
Beyond the characters of the dance, beyond the communion in meaning and movement of Raven girl and Raven Prince, there is ultimately the audience who witnesses the different stages of liberating expression and meaning from limited set languages: the Raven Girl reaches out through extension and idiosyncratic movement to articulate a language of bare rationality expressed through the dance. She leads the audience in this way, out of the set languages of traditional dance through her own experimentations, trials and errors to another sphere of expression through dance. It is the earnestness and integrity of the path upwards which validates her story and makes it comprehensible and followable to the audience. Rationality justifies and supports the discovery of new things to reveal about reality which themselves are not new to existence but rather have always been embedded in reality. They get unveiled now through letting movement loose.
Bare rationality is the order of the world when it is stripped from customs and codes. Every movement has meaning. Every movement is meaning. Such is the logic, physics and ethics of a world made up of bodies in which dance becomes the culmination of philosophical enquiry.
Bibliography
Ancient Authors:
Aëtius, Placita, reconstruction in Diels, H. (1879) Doxographi Graeci, Berlin. (Plac.)
Aristotle, Categoriae et Liber de Interpretation, Minio-Paluello, ed., (1949) Oxford. (Cat.; Int.)
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Ross, W.D., ed. & comm., (1924) Oxford. (Met.)
Aristotle, Poetics, in Aristote, Poétique, Hardy, J. (1995) Paris: Les Belles Lettres. (Poet.)
Cicero, Academica Posteriora – Academica Priora, (Academicorum reliquae cum Lucullo), Plasberg, O., ed. Leipzig:Teubner 1922, repr. Stuttgart 1980. (Acad. Post. – Acad. Pr.)
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Dorandi, T. ed. (2013), Cambridge. (D.L.)
Epicurus, Epistulae, Kyriai Doxai, Fragments, in Arrighetti, G. ed. (1973²) Epicuro Opere, Turin. (Ep. Her., Men., Pyth., KD, Fr.)
Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, in K. vol.5, referred to here in De Lacy, Ph., ed. (1978-80) Galen on the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato. Edition, Translation and Commentary), parts I-II, CMG IV,1,2, Berlin. (PHP)
Lucian of Samosata, On Dance, De Saltatione, ed. A.M. Harmon, Lucian, vol.5, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1936, repr. 1972 (Salt.)
Plato, Sophist, in Platonis Opera, vol. i, Duke E.A. et al., eds. (1995), Oxford. (Soph.)
Plato, Cratylus, ibidem (Crat.)
Plato, Symposium, ibidem (Symp.)
Plutarch, De Communibus Notitiis, De Stoicorum Repugnantis, in Cherniss, H. ed. (1976) Plutarch’s Moralia vol. xiii.2, Cambridge, Mass. & London. (De Comm.Not., Stoic. Rep.)
Seneca, Epistulae Morales, Reynolds, L.D. ed, (1965) 2 vols. Oxford. (Ep.)
Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhonei Hypotyposes in Mutschmann, H & Mau, J., eds. (1954-61) Opera, vol. 1, Leipzig. (S.E. PH)
Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos in Mutschmann, H & Mau, J., eds. (1955-61) Opera, vols. 2&3, Leipzig. (S.E. M.)
Modern Authors:
Austin, J.L. (1962) Sense and Sensibilia, London.
Badiou, A. (1998) Petit Manuel d’Inesthétique, Paris: Seuil.
Bronowski, A. (forthcoming), ‘The Pant in Panto: pneuma, and corporeal thought of movement’.
Browning, B., (1995) Samba: Resistance in Motion. (Arts & Politics of the Everyday) Indiana University Pres.
Deleuze, G. (1969) Logique du Sens, Paris : Editions de Minuit
Everson, S., ed., (1994) Language, Cambridge.
Frede, M. (1994a) ‘Stoic notion of a lekton’ in Language, ed. S.Everson, (1994), pp109-128.
Frege, G. (1892) ‘Über Begriff und Gegenstand’, in Vierteljahresschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie
16, p 192–205, translated as ‘On Concept and Object’ in Geach, P. and Black, M. 1960, p42-55.
Gaskin, The Unity of the Proposition, OUP 2009.
Gaukroger, S. (2006) The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685, Oxford.
Hall, E. & Wyles, R. (eds.) (2008) New Directions in Ancient Pantomime, Oxford: OUP.
Niffenegger, A., (2013) The Raven Girl, Jonathan Cape: London.
Novack, C. (1990) Sharing the Dance: Contact improvisation and American Culture, University of Wisconsin Press.
Sabisch, P. (2011) Choreographing Relations. Practical Philosophy and Contemporary Choreography, epodium Verlag, Munich.
Taruskin, R. (1996) Stravinsky and the Russian traditions: a biography of the works through Mavra, Berkeley: University of California Press.
.
[1] Aristotle talks about dance in his Poetics, A, 1447a26-8, considers it a mimetic art, “representing character, emotions and actions”, he is presumably thinking of dance as closer to our pantomime) not as an independent analytic act of meaning – see my forthcoming piece on dance from mimesis to language: ‘The Pant in Panto’.
[2] And this is certainly the general conception of philosophy Lucian was born into, the norm since the early Platonists, formalised by the Stoics and broadly accepted across the schools, cf S.E. PH II,13, D.L. 7,39ff.
[3] But indeed, pursuing further the Aristotelian description of dance as mimesis, cf n.1, such an approach to dance which is indeed more akin to pantomime (cf. Hall & Wyles (2008) ‘Introduction’) can thus be traced down to its first regulated and normalised usages in Classical theatre.
[4] Cf. D.L. 7,138; Plutarch, Stoic Rep. 1053F.
[5] Stones stay put, corporeal animal souls cause animals to live, breathe, move about, wisdom causes some select individuals to be wise (D.L. 7,157; S.E. M. IX, 76, Stobaeus, Ecl. I,138,21-2, Galen, PHP, III,1,10 ,Cic, Acad. II,??, Seneca, Ep. 117,3-4, and
[6] The materialist, reductionist view of the Atomists and Epicureans has motion only as a consequence of the fundamental, defining characteristics, namely indivisibility and resistance, cf Epicurus Her. 41f.
[7] In direct contrast with the atomistic account of body as an aggregate of atoms whereby colour, shape and the like are parts of the aggregation so essential to the aggregate whose dissolution indeed entails the disappearance of those properties, see Epicurus, Her. 68-9.
[8] With special reference to the Sophist, 252 ff., but of course also the Cratylus.
[9] This is the big break which analytical philosophy operates turning the whole order of analysis on its head, stating that language and speech are the foundations of metaphysics, e.g. in the landmark and now classic Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (1962) Materialism is thus not only the main rival of Christian dogma, it also is opposed to the whole 20th c. analytical philosophy of logic and language.
[10] See for an overview, S.Gaukroger, Emergence of a Scientif Culture (2009), esp. parts II and III setting out a history of cosmology and theology from antiquity to the Early Modern period and the awakening to scientific spirit in the form of a rooting of cosmology in mechanistic views of causation which mark a shift from the priority of formal causes to efficient and final causes which bear corporealist or materialist influences.
[11] Developed into the distinction between perception and apperception articulated by his student Wilhelm Wundt Cf. Crary Suspensions of Perception (1999).
[12] Thus for instance at the level of quanta, the randomness of motion, which is actually uncaused poses a limit to axioms in physics, but there are other expressible elements to reality at that level which are not the concern of physics and yet are true and part and parcel of the structures of these uncaused motions.
[13] See Nigel Thrift, for eg. in his ‘Bare Life’ 2004 in Cultural Bodies, eds H.Thomas & J. Ahmed (2004).
[14] This is indeed suggested for instance in Shapiro (1999) “Cinematic Political Thought” who analyses performing arts including contemporary dance as reliant on this kind of knowledge.
[15] See for instance Plato’s Symposium when Alcibiades says to Socrates that he does with words alone (“psiloi logoi”) what the flute player does through music and dance.
[16] It is the dance rather than the music that was most of all criticised, see Taruskin, (1996) pxx.
[17] See in particular the Joffrey Ballet reconstruction from 1989: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewOBXph0hP4 .
[18] I’m thinking here of people like Cynthia Novack, Sharing the Dance (1990), or Barbara Browning, Samba: Resistance in Motion.
[19] Clip of the austerely almost satirical beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1bcm6WJvtY
[20] For a clip and see others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StL-TIzW9vQ
[21] E.g: should I or shouldn’t I jump into the water to save the drowning child?
[22] This is the basis of the question of a proposition as a unit of meaning, it troubled the Ancients (cf. Plato, Sophist, 262; Aristotle, De Int. 4; the Stoics in D.L. 7,62?, S.E. M. viii,12 on which M.Frede ‘The Stoic Notion of a Lekton’ (1992) and it is the major trigger of analytical philosophy since Frege’s ‘On Concept and Object’, see R.Gaskin The Unity of the Proposition (OUP, 2008).