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Consciousness Matters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Sondra Fraleigh
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Phenomenology is a method for studying experience. I employ this method in my research because it provides a first-person voice for the dancer, the choreographer, and the teacher/therapist in me. Oddly enough, the critic in all of us already uses a first-person voice when describing and interpreting the dance from our immediate experience of it, and telling others what we think about it. Written criticism formalizes the critic's sensate proximity to the dance. But what about the voice of the dancer in valuing the experience of dance, and the consciousness of the choreographer in making the dance? Where are they accounted for in the formulas for dance research and writing? The objective third-person voice necessary to a particular historical or social angle is more common. Phenomenology has given me a method for intuitive and theoretical reflections on dance from multiple perspectives. Eventually, I contextualize these within the larger framework of phenomenology as a branch of modern philosophy.

I began to write using the tools of phenomenology in 1970 when I became aware that aesthetic discourse on dance was distanced from the actual experience, and that the writers in dance aesthetics, with the notable exception of Susanne Langer, were mostly men. I wanted to use an embodied voice and to see if a woman in dance might add to the field of phenomenology. My interests eventually led me to developmental psychology, a field that has much in common with phenomenology (2). Maxine Sheets-Johnstone had already broken the ice in The Phenomenology of Dance, but she had written more analytically than descriptively, clarifying the formative (creative) basis of dance with values intrinsically located in the moving self (3). I built upon this, but I wanted to weave the intuitive voice of the dancer into a descriptive aesthetics, slipping from the first-person experiential voice to analytical third-person theory, as phenomenology does. These were the goals of my descriptive aesthetics: Dance and the Lived Body (1987) (4). Later I began to explain phenomenology as a research method for dance in my article for Dance Research Journal, “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance Through Phenomenology” (1991); and in “Witnessing the Frog Pond” (1999), I developed this more explicitly (5).

Type
Trends in Dance Scholarship
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Summer 2000 , pp. 54 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2000

References

Notes

1. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), “the preliminary conception of phenomenology,” introduction #7, pp. 62-63.Google Scholar

2. Fraleigh, Sondra “Good Intentions and Dancing Moments: Agency, Freedom, and Self-knowledge in Dance,” in The Perceived Self, ed. Neisser, Ulric (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 102-11.Google Scholar

3. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, The Phenomenology of Dance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966).Google Scholar

4. Fraleigh, Sondra, Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987).Google Scholar

5. Fraleigh, Sondra, “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance Through Phenomenology,” Dance Research Journal 23, no. 1 (1991): 11-16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Witnessing the Frog Pond,” in Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Inquiry, eds. Fraleigh, and Hanstein, Penelope (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), pp. 188-224.Google Scholar

6. Wilshire, Bruce W., Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998)Google Scholar; Lingis, Alphonso, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1997).Google Scholar

7. Phenomenology today is often subsumed in contexts of cognitive science, movement studies, ethnomethodology, sex/gender studies, and feminist critique. See Varela, Francisco, Thompson, Evan, and Rosch, Eleanor, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sudnow, David, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar

8. For a phenomenology of linguistics in relation to politics, see Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).Google Scholar

9. See Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies (Chicago and La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing, 1994)Google Scholar; also “What is it like to Be a Brain,” in The Primacy of Movement, pp. 451-482. She studies how matters of fact having to do with neuron firing show clearly that to be a brain is to do brain types of things (neuron firing), not person or creaturely kinds of things (p. 469). She demonstrates that mental powers cannot be explained in materialist terms, and may not be exclusively human.

10. Pert, Candace B., Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine (New York: Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster, 1997).Google Scholar

11. Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999), p. 287.Google Scholar See also his book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994), p. 12.

12. Ricoeur, Paul, “On Interpretation,” in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Montefiore, Alan (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

13. Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1993), pp. 31-43.Google Scholar

14. For an exposition of the relationships between phenomenology and hermeneutics, see McNamara, Joann, “Dance in the Hermeneutic Circle,” in Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Inquiry, pp. 162-187.Google Scholar

15. I use the terms “movement facilitation” and “contact facilitation” to distinguish somatic education and therapy from massage—rubbing, tapping, etc. Contact facilitation employs a full spectrum of body contact, not suggested by the term “hands-on”: back-to-back contact, for instance, matching a gait in walking alongside, stabilizing a stance through foot contact, etc.

16. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith, Colin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).Google Scholar

17. Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1963), pp. 12-43.Google Scholar

18. Damasio defines the relationship of core consciousness and extended consciousness throughout his book The Feeling of What Happens (1999). Extended consciousness as articulated in language and other forms of expression depends on core consciousness, our bodymind axis.

19. Hanna, Thomas. “What is Somatics,” in Bone, Breath & Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, ed. Johnson, Don Hanlon (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1995), pp. 339-52.Google Scholar

20. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi takes up the topic of intrinsic pleasure. His is a phenomenological psychology that uses a model of consciousness based on information theory that he says deals directly with events as we experience and interpret them. He finally moves from the descriptive to the prescriptive, providing steps toward enhancing the quality of life.

21. Subliminal consciousness arises semantically through the mind/spirit/soul nexus encoded in our word “psyche.” For a discussion of the linkage of these words through the Greek word psyche, particularly in the work of Plato, see Huntington Cairns, introduction to Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. xx-xxi.

22. Heidegger, Martin, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Hofstader, Albert (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 15-88.Google Scholar