Aida F. Cotarelo

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Two uses of the term “kinesthetic”

 

The appeal to “kinesthesis” (along with related terms like “proprioception”, or more generally “embodiment”) abounds in dance appreciation accounts (e.g. Bresnahan, 2017; Montero, 2013; Carroll and Seeley, 2013; Davies, 2011, 2013; McFee, 2011), but it is often unclear how to understand it. My aim is to critically consider the notion of “kinesthetic” that operates in the main accounts on dance appreciation, and propose a distinction to hopefully shed light into the debate on the role of that notion in dance appreciation. I analyze how various readings offer different explanations for aesthetic disagreement based on perceptual descriptive features (namely sensitivity-based disagreements; disagreements based on the differences in the capacity to react to certain properties or magnitudes; Bender, 2001). I consider two uses —broad and narrow— of the term kinesthetic. The broad use of kinesthetic, or metakinesis in Martins’s terms, involves bodily experiences of movement (the phenomenal impression of movement) and the faculty of perception through which information of one’s own movement and position is gained. The term characterizes both the perceiver’s cognitive and perceptual abilities (e.g. “, “metakinesis”, “kinesthetic sense”…) and any information related to bodily movement acquired via this sense. In its broad sense, “kinesthetic” is applied to a kind of information and awareness (i.e. any movement-related bodily information and bodily awareness of this information), and the perception (information gathering) of such information. The narrow use takes the term “kinesthetic” as relative to movement features, “kinesthetic properties”. Among bodily movement-related experiences, there are sensations (experienced as being located in a particular part of the body, like the weight of the pelvis while bouncing), feelings (not located in a particular part, like feeling physically excited, exhausted, or “moved”), and features of the bodily awareness related to movement (like when you attend to the space covered or the shape created by a particular bodily movement). These two uses of the term are not incompatible, and neither of them implies a commitment with a particular model of artistic appreciation. Using it one way or the other, however, has implications for an account on dance appreciation. In this work, I look at the implications of each use in aesthetic issues, looking particularly at cases of aesthetic judgments based on first-person reports of kinesthetically perceived aesthetic properties (e.g. “the bouncing of Royal Danish ballet” as something bodily “felt” and not simply “seen”), and how each reading of kinesthetic applies to cases of sensitivity-based aesthetic disagreement. To sum up, the broad use does not allow posing a kind of “sufficient sensitivity” to make adequate judgments. The many sources of variations of kinesthetic sensitivity (e.g. between times, contexts, or individuals) predicts there can be aesthetic disagreement even for descriptive features of movement (e.g. one considering a dance is rhythmic and the other arrhythmic), as they depend on the actual experience of the perceiver. This is responsive to actual dance practices and folk aesthetic talk, but this generality has implications for our warranted ascriptions of aesthetic properties. Namely, it prevents aesthetic justification even in cases where the ascription of descriptive properties is at play. On the other hand, talking of kinesthetic properties allows a distinction between sensitivity-based apparent disagreements (e.g. misperception on movement properties) and proper disagreement. Bender, John W. (2001). Sensitivity, Sensibility, and Aesthetic Realism. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59(1), 72-83. Bresnahan, Aili W. (2017). Appreciating Dance: The View from the Audience. In Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts. D Goldblatt, L. Brown, S. Patridge (eds.), New York : Routledge, 347-350. http://works.bepress.com/aili_bresnahan/13/ Carroll, Noël and Seeley, William P. (2013). Kinesthetic understanding and appreciation in dance. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71(2), 177-186 . Davies, David (2011). I’ll Be Your Mirror? Embodied Agency, Dance, and Neuroscience. In The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, E. Schellekens and P. Goldie (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 346-356. Davies, David (2013). Dancing Around the Issues: Prospects for an Empirically- Grounded Philosophy of Dance. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Crisiticism, 71 (2), 195-202. McFee, Graham (2011). The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance and Understanding. Hampshire: Dance Books Ltd. Montero, Barbara (2013). The Artist as Critic: Dance Training, Neuroscience, and Aesthetic Evaluation. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71 (2), 169-176.

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Francesca Forle

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What Kind of Enaction in Music? Motility and Spatiality in Music Perception

 

This paper aims at developing Krueger’s enactive theory of music perception by means of the analysis of the performed movements and the experienced spatiality involved in our enactment of music. Krueger (2009, 2011) maintains that music perception is a form of active perception, in which our body and our ability to move with music act as vehicles to draw out certain features of the piece and to respond to the affordances it presents. However, the author does not specify what kind of movements are involved in the enactment of music perception. Indeed, even though he mentions the most common movements we perform while listening to music (tapping fingers, bobbing one’s head, swaying back and forth), he does not pay attention to the features these movements have in common and to what distinguishes them from other kinds of movement and action, such as walking, grasping a ball, opening a door. Therefore, the first aim of this paper is investigating such a distinction, using Straus’ characterization of goal-directed movements and expressive movements (Straus 1930). The first ones will be described as motivated by practical goals to achieve. In this kind of movement, distances and directions have a fundamental role, since we need to move from a spatial point to another one in order to fulfill our practical purposes. On the contrary, expressive movement does not aim at realizing practical goals but, rather, at expressing our affective life and ourselves. Let us think of dancing, for example. In dancing, we do not primarily move in order to reach a different point in the surrounding space: in this sense, the role of directions and distances is completely redefined and subordinated to the expressive features movements are planned to convey. The hypothesis is that the ones involved in the enactment of music perception are not movements of any sort, but different occurrences of what Straus called expressive movements. The second aim of this paper is investigating how spatiality is experienced and lived while performing expressive movements such as dancing. In contemporary enactive accounts of cognition, little attention has been paid to the space where our ‘en-actions’ take place (Noë 2004, O’Regan & Noë 2001). In his enactive theory of music perception, Krueger seems to do the same and does not investigate how spatiality is lived in our enactions of music. 2 My thesis is that, particularly in expressive movements such as dancing, spatiality is not lived as the metrical space that physics and mathematics describe. Metrical space can be defined as the tridimensional dimension that can be measured by us, and the one in which we can evaluate the orientation of things and the direction of movements. In the metrical space, we can say whether an object is up or down, on our left or our right, whether it is stationary or in movement, and so on (Straus 1930, 36-39). However, in dancing, it seems that we are not primarily interested in the metrical aspects of space, or in the positions and orientations of things, because we are not practically oriented towards them. So, how is space lived in dancing? My hypothesis will be that in dancing we live space as the dimension where we can freely express ourselves. In doing so, we are confronted with the affective and aesthetic qualities that space offer us (e.g. oppressive or relaxing spaces, peaceful or distressing places) and we try to exploit and manage such qualities in order to allow the best dance performance. In this way, dancing will be shown to be influenced by the aesthetic qualities of space but also to be able to exploit, shape and re-define them. 

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Salomé Jacob

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States and Stasis in Ligeti’s Apparitions

 

The concept of musical movement has been widely discussed in the philosophical literature (see for instance Scruton 1999; Budd 2003; Clarke 2005; Kania 2015).  By contrast, the notion of musical stasis has been neglected. By stasis I mean the absence of change – movement being one kind of change, i.e. change of position in space. The final section provides a more fine-grained definition of stasis.

This paper focuses on Gyorgy Ligeti’s Apparitions. Commenting on his works, Ligeti writes that some pieces – Apparitions (1958-9), Atmosphères (1961), Volumina (1961-2; revised in 1966), the second movement of the Requiem (1963-5), and Lontano (1967) – share “the same formal characteristic […], that is, that [the music] seems static” (“Interview with Joseph Hausler” 1983).

The aim of this paper is to question the relation between states and stasis, through an examination of Ligeti’s Apparitions and his comments on the piece. In a paper entitled “States, Events, Transformations” (1987), Ligeti characterises Apparitions as an interaction between states and events. The assumption he seems to make is only states induce a static musical quality.  

There are reasons to doubt however that the distinction between static and dynamic qualities maps onto the ontological categories of states and events. I argue that we should leave out the concept of state to characterise Apparitions. A much more promising way to make sense of the piece is to appeal to static processes.

First, I introduce the ontological distinction between states and events. One fundamental difference is that states obtain through time whereas events occurs/happen in time. Although a state can be affected by a change, it cannot be composed of changes for it does not have temporal parts (Soteriou 2011; Steward 1997: 100-1). I rely on Roberto Casati (1992) and Helen Steward (1997)’s claim the difference between states and events cannot be articulated in terms of the static/dynamic distinction.  

Secondly, I turn to Ligeti’s characterisation of Apparitions as an interaction between states and events. Ligeti does not specify what exactly he means by the category of state. He draws an analogy between Apparitions and a dream he had in which a room was filled with a cobweb and insects were trapped in it. Sometimes, insects would fall onto other threads, thus disrupting the whole arrangement of the web. By ‘state’, Ligeti seems to mean here a particular arrangement, the overall condition of the web. Note that this use of the locution ‘state of the room’ differs from the locution ‘state of greenness’ or ‘state of solidity’. In the first case, what follows the locution ‘state of…’ is not a state type but rather something that is ‘in’ this state (other phrases such as ‘one’s state of health use the term state in the same way). In the latter use on the other hand,  what follows is the state type (see Steward 1997: 116-7). This distinction suggests that the category of states may be quite a mixed bunch.

Can this analogy between states and events in the dream apply to the musical work? I question three possible ways to understand the concept of state in Apparitions – a. state as arrangement of the sounds in the piece, b. state identified with the tone clusters (to be explained), and c. states as arrangement of the sound at any time in the piece. Only c is convincing as a. fails to make sense of the alteration of states and b. requires a state to have temporal parts (which I argued in section 1 is not possible). However the concept of state ( understood this way) does not say anything about the sense of stasis in the work.

The category of process is I suggest much more promising. What appears to be static are not states but processes. I conclude with a more nuanced conception of musical stasis by distinguishing between what is static (without any change, including change in dynamics and timbre) and what is stationary (absence of spatial movement).

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Eleni Lorandou 

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Intercultural aesthetics: movement and emotions in a dance performance

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This paper aims to explore how the kinetic dynamics of dance articulate the appearance and experience of emotion from a Western and an Eastern perspective. The key to understanding the relation between dance movement and emotion can be traced in apprehensions of how emotions are essentially bodily generated and bodily expressive affective dynamics (Sheets-Johnstone 2011). Scientific studies (Jacobson 1929, 1967, 1970; Bull 1951; de Rivera 1977) show in different ways how emotions that are essentially felt and expressed bodily feelings flow through the body in dynamic ways. Sheets-Johnstone’s (2009a) phenomenological analyses present experiential evidence in support of the claim that emotions are dynamic in nature, “they both move through the body and move the body to move in highly differentiated ways”(Sheets-Johnstone 2011). These discussions show that there exists a dynamic harmony between movement and emotion. However, there is also a divergence between them proven by the fact that one can kinetically feign an emotion but can also restrict movement in relation to it. This shows that the movement-form of an emotion is not identical with the emotion itself, although it is congruent with it. While in everyday life, emotions and movement conform to each other, it is not the case in dance. According to Sheets-Johnstone (ibid.), the dancer is kinesthetically present to the dance and its unfolding qualitative kinetic dynamic. However, a dancer does not mime emotions. Although the dance might be emotionally charged, the dancer, entirely engaged in the kinesthetic unfolding of the movement, refrains from getting emotionally involved. He/she keeps an aesthetic distance (Bullough1 1959). As Croce indicates, the spectator’s experience of the dance is clearly affective. In contrast, the dancer is not formally affected by grief or joy - he/she merely elaborates their felt dynamic quality in movement. While dances may be dramatic in nature and they may involve some connotative/ denotative gestures, the story is kinetically engendered in the qualitative dynamics of movement (Sheets-Johnston 2011:52).

 

On the other hand, Indian classical dance, inscribed in the tradition of Bharata’s Natyasastra, employs a codified use of movement of the different body parts (aṅga)  including facial expressions which, in their various combinations, are linked to the portrayal of particular emotions (bhava). In fact, they are what Stanislavski calls the Given Circumstances, that “create a corresponding mood inside, which then acts upon the mind and evokes matching experiences” (2008:74). These kinetic-images, assumed by the dancer, have the mission to inform the creation and the development of a corresponding mood within him/herself. Nevertheless, it is only the dancer who has access to his/her mental states generating any specific emotion within. As the dancer depicts different emotional states, the audience experiences rasanubhava, that is, the aesthetic flavour of the universalised emotion(s). Yet, there is no question of mimesis. This array of highly sophisticated gestures and body movements is supposed to transform any emotion into a kinetic form that transposes movement into the realm of aesthetic imagination. Abhinava compares the experience of rasa to ananda, spiritual ecstasy. He suggests that while a practitioner can achieve and maintain continuous focus with no support, ordinary people need some object to contemplate that will awaken and channelize a continuing stream of attention; performance is meant to offer this. Thus the dancer needs to perform the emotions so that he/she can compel engagement. Because the aesthetic experience presupposes the idea of impersonality or transpersonality[1] (sadharanikarana) for the experience of rasa to take place, the dancer needs to remain detached from the emotional states he/she portrays and what is performed must be clearly unreal so that the viewer does not drift into a “non-discriminating sentimental haze (Gnoli 1985:64).                                                                                               

                                                                                                  

[1] Alternative translation of sadharanikarana by A. Braembussche in Intercultural

  aesthetics:A worldview perspective, 2009.

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James Matharu

 

Aesthetic Gesture:    Movements as the Criteria of Aesthetic Qualities and Objects

                     

I argue that the concepts of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects are internally related to the concepts motion and gesture. If so, then what Aristotle calls movement – substantive change continuous in time – is the foremost criterion for the identification of aesthetic qualities and objects.

The main argument is developed from two ideas concerning criteria for identity. These are associated with a ‘fourth way’ in philosophy of perception beside Idealism (there are only mind-dependent objects of experience), Representationalism (all that is consciously experienced are representations) and Direct-Realism (perceptual objects are only mind-independent existents). Call the fourth way Grammatical-Intentionalism; the paper outlines its approach.

The first idea is in a remark from Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Aesthetics, §5, that the criteria for having mastered the words ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ in childhood are one’s substituting certain facial and body movements with utterances. The second idea (mine) is that there are at least two sorts of ‘identity’ to distinguish in speaking of objects of thought and perception. This proposal is a development of remarks by G.E.M. Anscombe on intentionality of mind (cf. Anscombe 1981). The grammar of language marks these conceptual differences. I put these ideas to work together.   

The argument in summary:

1. One counts as seeing an existent object (call this materially-seeing something) by having a certain object of perceptual experience. Call the latter an intentional object of perception. The intentional object need not be an existent (call such objects pure-intentional), and in such cases is logically-distinct from the material-object. Thus, I can materially-see a grey-squirrel by intentionally-seeing an ochre blur among the shrubbery, despite the squirrel not materially-being an ochre blur. Call such a pure-intentional blur access-identical to the material-object of perception.

2. One can have a pure-intentional object of thought, the thinking of which counts as having an object of thought describable in different ways. Suppose you are new to the Superman comics and start reading in the false belief that Superman is a distinct person from Clark Kent. Superman and Kent are distinct intentional objects of thought. If they weren’t, you could not suffer such a false belief. Nonetheless, in thinking of merely one, one counts as thinking of the same object of thought as you do in thinking of the other. Call such a pair or more of intentional objects think-identical with one another. Intentional-objects, I claim, are thus logically distinct from what I call objects of thought.   

3. There are criteria for the ascription of an object of thought, perception and experience. These criteria are materially-perceptual (on pain of invoking the possibility of a purely private language). The criteria are movements and changes of the body in context over time.

4. Aesthetic terms like ‘beautiful’, ‘graceful’, ‘eerie’, ‘cute’ are taught by teaching the substitution of terms for facial and bodily movements that can be materially-perceived. The student learns the criteria for ascribing the relevant aesthetic-quality’s experience insofar as they learn to conceive the quality.

5. The perceptual-criteria for ascribing distinct aesthetic experiences of objects are thereby motions and gestures. But crucially, unlike with mere objects of thought or perception, there need be no description of the experience’s object that marks it apart from objects non-aesthetically experienced. Nonetheless, the criteria for distinguishing the distinct experience’s object are public and objective.

6. This indicates how specific individual objects of aesthetic experience, whether pure-intentional or material, can be thought of by multiple people even if no one besides the sole person who has the distinct experience enjoys the intentional-object. Intentional-objects aren’t objects of thought. The intentional-object can indeed be the first-personal presentation of one’s inclinations toward movements, real or fantastic.

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Lars Dahl Pedersen

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Presenting a case of a specific dance practice of recognition

 

Seeking to bring to light the connections between movement-based choreography and academic thinking, this paper investigates the relationship between theoretical philosophy and the exercise of recognition in a specific dance practice. The research is highly motivated by the ambition to generate new knowledge concerning the moving body as a critical agent. The recent political turn in Dance Studies (Lepecki 2006, Cvecic 2017, Andersson, Edvardsen & Spångberg 2017) seems to suggest that recognition, questioning, and critical action to some extent is defined as an action which excludes body-movement in a flow. A similar analysis is made in analytical philosophy by Hubert L. Dreyfus with his notion of ‘mindless absorbed coping’ (Dreyfus 2013), which implies, that we are not thematically aware of our own movements. In contrast, this paper seeks to show that a dancer is in fact able to access a kind of reflective consciousness while dancing. The practice used in the paper lies within contemporary dance and choreography, a field that I have myself been a professional practitioner of for several years. However, the specific practice, or case, is not equal to all kinds of contemporary performance practices. Rather, it is a specifically developed practice where the purpose for the practitioner is to try to access and stay in a certain mode of being where both a creative and critical awareness is always present. This is done in order to be able to remain open to change and to show how it is possible to challenge oneself in the action. By doing the practice, the idea is that the unconscious will lead the dancer while at the same time, the dancer tries to seize ‘the moment of recognition’. In addition, the dancer will talk and dance at the same time to illustrate the process. Above all, as a training of the ability of being both thoughtful and instinctive with the body, the practice is an end in itself. An inspiration to the development of this specific movement-based practice comes from an interview with Michel Foucault, where he talks about his own practice of thinking: I don’t say the things I say because they are what I think, but rather I say them with the end in mind of self-destruction, precisely to make sure they are no longer what I think. To be really certain that from now on, outside of me, they are going to live a life or die in such a way that I will not have to recognize myself in them. (Foucault: 1971). Thus, the ambition is to show, and benefit from, a structural resemblance between philosophical thinking and movement-based practice. The idea of comparing different disciplines is not to insist upon finding methods similar in every detail. Rather, finding structural resemblances can make the one who is skilled in one domain more capable of understanding the related practices in other domains. Further qualification and deepening of the findings could benefit from engaging with specific qualitative research methodologies as well as phenomenological analysis. Notwithstanding, the paper will end with a bold suggestion, that it is in fact possible through a practice of dancing to ‘problematise the obviousness of the world’. In other words, a movement-based choreographic practice can serve as means to gain recognition about one’s own actions, which is a necessary condition for being a critical agent. 

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Jack Shardlow

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No Time to Move: Inertia on the canvas

 

Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Gottlieb and Gombrich – in separate articles – address how time and the representation of movement in painting “has been strangely neglected” (Gombrich 1964, p.293). Gottlieb is concerned with how movement is represented, while allowing: “Usually movement in painting is merely visualized, not actually seen…” and that what is presented in the painting “proved a fruitful field for man’s imaginative powers.” (Gottlieb 1958, p.23). In contrast, Gombrich is concerned with rejecting the idea – which he takes to be accepted as orthodoxy – that paintings represent “of necessity a punctum temporis or instant” (Harris 1744, quoted by Gombrich 1964, p.294). Insofar as he takes himself to be rejecting some aspect of orthodoxy, Gombrich goes further than Gottlieb, arguing that there is a sense in which movement is seen in paintings, not merely visualized. In a series of recent articles Le Poidevin (1997, 2007, 2017) has sought to clarify and resist some of Gombrich’s claims. With reference to Currie (1995), Le Poidevin first distinguishes the broader notion of representation from depiction, the latter being representation by means of resemblance. Taking from Currie that an image depicts an object by virtue of the fact that it triggers a recognition capacity for that object in a normal observer, Le Poidevin agrees with Gombrich that paintings can represent movement over temporally extended intervals of time, while maintaining some degree of orthodoxy in holding that paintings cannot depict movement. In this talk, I both agree and disagree with parts of each Gombrich and Le Poidevin. Like Gombrich and Le Poidevin, I lend on the philosophy and psychology of perception. Reflecting on what we can say about our visual experience of motion, I demonstrate that there is more to the experience of movement than experiencing a body at successive locations at successive times, demonstrated by Broad’s (1923) distinction between our experience of the hour- and second-hand of a clock. We experience the second-hand’s movement, but not the hour-hand’s; it is just this experienced dynamism which is lacking in our experience of paintings. I also argue that over a period of time in which a body is perceived in continuous motion, such as the second-hand, we are not perceptually/introspectively aware of any sub-interval at which the body lacks this dynamism. Building on these points, I can agree with Le Poidevin, contra-Gombrich, that paintings do not depict intervals of time or the motion of bodies: the image itself – any body depicted – does not seem to be moving in this sense. I can also agree with Gombrich, contra-Le Poidevin, that paintings do not depict instants: the smallest intervals we have perceptual recognitional capacities for are non-zero and can feature the dynamism of motion, unlike paintings. This appears to leave us at an impasse. How can it be that paintings depict neither intervals of time nor points of time? To answer this question I argue for a position somewhat like orthodoxy. I do not claim that paintings depict a point of time, I argue that paintings do not depict time – or movement – whatsoever. While paintings can represent time and movement – and Gombrich, Gottlieb, and Le Poidevin demonstrate some of the ways in which they do so – paintings are not in the business of depicting temporal phenomena such as movement and change. Gombrich claims “as with reality, so with its representation” (Gombrich 1964, p.301); while there may be a sense in which this is true, we cannot similarly say ‘as with reality, so with its depiction’. At least in the case of painting, the temporal phenomena we perceptually experience are not depicted. There is inertia on the canvas. BSA Postgraduate Conference 2018: Movement and Aesthetics 598 words References: Broad, D. B. (1923) Scientific Thought. London: Kegan Paul. Currie, G. (1995) Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge University Press. Gombrich, E. (1964) ‘Moment and Movement’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 27, 293-306. Gottlieb, C. (1958) ‘Movement in Painting’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 17 (1), 22-33. Harris, J. (1744) Three treatises: The first concerning art. The second concerning music, painting, and poetry. The third concerning happiness. London: J. Nourse and P. Vaillant. Le Poidevin, R. (1997) ‘Time, and the static image’, Philosophy, Volume 72 (280), 175 - 188. Le Poidevin, R. (2007) The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Poidevin, R. (2017) ‘Motion and the Futurists: Capturing the dynamic sensation’, in I. Phillips (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Temporal Experience. Routledge.

 

 

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