Agency & Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (review)

Agency & Embodiment is an extraordinary text, full of unforeseen revelations and startling results. Its subject matter does not appear, at first glance, to be focused centrally on dance. Yet, it is a text whose every page is filled with theoretical moves that deal with issues of central importance to dance inquiry. It is so consistently and deeply concerned with what might be called the central choreographic problematic of all things modern and their progeny, that it leaves one wondering how such a dancerly work could have been produced on topics so seemingly "outside" the field of Dance Studies proper (digital poetry, photography, pseudo-calligraphy, video installations, cave painting, graffiti, even swimming). Yet, in page after page, in chapters focused on film, writing, philosophy, and even science, Carrie Noland delivers the same intellectual goods, and they are of an ilk dance scholars should find to be to their liking. They champion perspectives that move dance into the limelight of contemporary cultural theory. They give to dance, not only a seat at the table of High Theory, but a position of leading significance and influence. Noland acknowledges this in her Introduction, declaring that her ultimate ambition is to seek new support for insights dance scholars "have been developing for decades" (5). There is no question that dance is leading the way in this particular interdisciplinary project, and that it has done so for quite some time.

The debate into which Noland enters through the various artists, philosophers, and scientists she interprets boils down to a debate between phenomenology (in the main a French phenomenological tradition, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty looming large) and constructivism (post-structuralism being the most prominently featured orientation in this larger philosophical camp). It is a well-established debate, over basic issues of command and autonomy in relation to human thought, expression, and experience. Its main issue might be reduced to a simple question: Who is in charge, philosophically speaking, when it comes to the creation and transmission of something—anything—humanly meaningful? Are societal and cultural institutions ultimately calling the shots (as the constructivists would have it)? Or do individual human beings have any decisive or instrumental role to play (the phenomenological position)?

This question of agency—of who or what possesses the ability, power, and freedom to make any kind of difference in the way human experience is made sense of—motivates each of Noland's various essays. The overall project to which each contributes is the articulation of a new model of human agency grounded in a phenomenon that Noland contends has been unduly neglected by both sides. That neglected phenomenon is human motility—a phenomenon that is seldom, if ever, neglected in dance. "The hypothesis I advance in this book," Noland writes, "is that kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in performance that account for larger innovations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained" (2-3). Noland's focus on the knowable and knowing consequences of kinesthetic experience, on "kinesthesia," the human experience of movement per se, enables her to navigate the phenomenological-constructivist divide. Her recognition of kinesthesia as the missing link in the debate also sheds light on why dance—the quintessential art of human movement—is accorded such a prominent place in Noland's analytical and theoretical discussions.

Key to the success of Noland's navigational exercise is the recognition that the "pressure" of kinesthetic experience is not simply a physical or mechanical phenomenon. Rather, intelligence inheres within it. Kinesthesic pressure produces kinds of awareness and understanding that are basic to learning what it means to be a human subject. "The knowledge obtained through kinesthesia," Noland argues, "is . . . constitutive of—not tangential to—the process of individuation" (4, emphasis in text). Kinesthesia, in other words, is individually enabling. "Subjects," Noland asserts, taking up the ethnographic mantle of Marcel Mauss, "make motor decisions that challenge cultural meanings in profound ways" (3...