From Shusterman’s Somaesthetics to a Radical Epistemology of Somatics

From the precepts of civility and physical deportment in the early modern era to modern gestural routines found in physical therapy and gymnastics, cultural historians of the body have studied the physical practices of hygiene, sports, and medicine.¹ The history of dance is marked by these dance-related practices, which are peripheral to dance itself. One set of contemporary peripheral practices sought out by dancers themselves has been called “somatics,” a term Thomas Hanna proposed in the 1970s (1995).² Somatics has since made its way into the dance world, where by now it has achieved widespread recognition as a form of bodily knowledge. This article is concerned with the epistemological status of somatics and, therefore, with the discursive production characteristic of its methods and practices.

The first value that we usually attribute to these practices is prophylactic: they serve to prevent professional accidents or provide functional rehabilitation following injuries. Although increasingly integrated into dancer training and dance pedagogy, somatics first found its way into dance as a means to limit accidents. Somatics is also often a resource for the improvement of virtuosity in dance. But it has nevertheless transformed pedagogy into a more “active” and exploratory experience for the student, in which physical sensations are more important than the mirroring and reproduction of forms (Fortin 1996, 2005; Fortin, Long, and Lord 2002). We often see it presented as a “counter power,” an antidote to dominant dance practices. This point of view is poorly documented—possibly because it would not hold up against a strong argument—but it is common knowledge that somatics stands opposed to virtuosity and the “perfect” body image, as seen, for example, in the role these techniques played in the early part of Trisha Brown’s choreographic career.³ Somatics can thus be considered a conceptual apparatus that enhances our understanding of pedagogy, dancer’s health, and corporeal and gestural aesthetics.

Dance studies has begun to approach these practices and to define them as objects of research by privileging two axes: (1) documentation and evidence; and (2) efficacy, particularly in the pedagogical domain.⁴ The point of view I will grapple with here, however, is of a different nature. Rather than considering the question of the pedagogical, preventive, or aesthetic efficacy of somatics for dance, I want to examine the epistemological status of somatics. How is the bodily knowledge of somatics elaborated and circulated? Somatics, after all, presents itself as an empirically based mode of bodily thinking whose discourse relies strongly on oral tradition.

I. Somatic Discourses

Somatics, much like almost everything associated with practices of the body, suffers from undertheorization, and it is not entirely free from a tenacious doxa that physical sensations must irrevocably elude language. Undertheorization, however, does not entail the absence of language or discourse. On the contrary, the necessities of publicity, teaching, and exchange amongst practitioners are sites of intense discursive production. I will use the word “endogenous” to refer to these discourses of the professional world. Let us consider three main spheres where endogenous somatic discourse is produced:

• • At the sites of therapeutic practice aimed at students, patients, and the general public the discourse is oral. However, there is also a written element, found in promotional texts for recruiting clientele.

• • At the sites of practitioner and teacher training we find a crucial if not principal resource for our study of the epistemological status of somatics. Knowledge is developed and transmitted in schools, workshops, introductory training courses, continuing education programs, and professional conferences. Transmitting knowledge is inseparable from imparting the ethics of the profession, its beliefs and explicative models, as well as its objective training methods. This knowledge is also predominantly oral, although not all methods and training centers are consistent with each other: certain methods generate written documents reserved for active or training practitioners.

• • Finally, of course, there are published texts: notably those of the method’s founders, as well as numerous reviews and professional publications whose standards, genres, and distribution vary from one method and country to another.⁵

I will not undertake here an exhaustive linguistic description of these discourses, but...