Abstract
Recently, in cognitive science, the enactivist account of cognition has been gaining ground, due in part to studies of movement in conjunction with thought. The idea, as Noë (2009), has put it, that “cognition is not something happening inside us or to us, but it’s something we do, something we achieve,” is increasingly supported by research on joint attention, movement coordination, and gesture. Not surprisingly, therefore, enactivists have also begun to look at “movement specialists”—dancers—for both scientific and phenomenological accounts of thinking with and through movement. In this paper, I argue that a serious exploration of dance and movement does not merely bolster the enactivist view, but rather, it suggests a radical enactivism, as envisaged by, e.g., Hutto (2011). To support this claim, I examine an account of “Thinking in Movement” provided by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1981, 2009) in order to highlight the ways in which intentional agency and meaning-making occur in improvisational dance. These processes, I further argue, closely mirror some of the key components of participatory sense making, as described by De Jaegher and Di Paolo (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4):485–507, 2007). This is beneficial to my case, because it permits a discussion of “thought-full action” that does not depend upon standard cognitivist frameworks for explanation. By carefully focusing on how agency can help to separate mere “thrashing about” from meaningful movement, this paper aim to strengthen the position of radical enactivism from the unique perspective and dance and sense-making.
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Notes
A caveat: At times, Sheets-Johnstone (cf. The Corporeal Turn (2009), specifically chapter 13, but also pp. 215, 220) explicitly renounces the use of terminology from the embodiment/enactive camp. For instance, she resists the body image/schema distinction because she finds concepts like this too static, or refers to such terminology as “lexical bandaids.” However, there are several responses to such criticism (cf. Gallagher 2005b) that seek to modify the conceptualization such that the embodied view captures more of the dynamism of her movement-based theory. I leave it to the reader to decide whether such reconciliation has been successful because, as I think will be clear throughout my paper, my interpretation of Sheets-Johnstone very much retains the dynamism she intended and thus, any yoking together I attempt between her work and the enactivist or embodied camps, will insist that one interpret those accounts of thinking in a similarly movement-based fashion (hence, my conclusion that her work really supports a radical enactivism).
Sheets-Johnstone (2009, 36).
More specifically, a radical enactivism, because, as I have begun to argue, even the notion of agency and goal directedness—phenomena that seem to mark higher forms of cognition—might best be explained in the movement. That is to say, these phenomena emerge through the interactions of agents and their world, a world that is already meaningful to the agent, but not necessarily because of explicit, symbolic, or representational modes of thought.
More specifically, as it turns out, Uzzi and Sprio found that there is a “sweet spot” when it comes to whom one collaborates with—as their study shows, Broadway musical productions were the most successful when created by groups of people who were familiar with one another in some way, but had not worked together so much that their interactions had become redundant and overly routinized. Collaborators who did not know each other at all, on the other hand, faired even worse producing quality musicals.
Note in Hutto, see also Hutto (2005).
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My analysis will draw mainly from the updated and expanded version of this paper, found in “The Corporeal Turn,” though I am familiar with the original 1981 paper. The reasoning for mainly utilizing the newer paper is that I think my more contentious points regarding tying Sheets-Johnstone’s account to a radical enactivism can be made more easily based on her expanded treatment of the nonsymbolic/nonlinguistic nature of thoughtful movement.
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Merritt, M. Thinking-is-moving: dance, agency, and a radically enactive mind. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 95–110 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9314-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9314-2