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  • The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression
  • Carrie Noland (bio)

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Merce Cunningham in his Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1952). Photographer: Gerda Peterich.

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Where is expression in Cunningham’s choreography? Are the moving bodies on stage expressive? If so, what are they expressing and how does such expression occur? Several of the finest theorists of dance—among them, Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko, and Dee Reynolds—have already approached the question of expressivity in the work of Merce Cunningham. Acknowledging the formalism and astringency of his choreography, they nonetheless insist that expression does indeed take place. Foster locates expression in the “affective significance” as opposed to the “emotional experience” of movement (1986, 38); Franko finds it in an “energy source . . . more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated” (1995, 80); and Reynolds identifies expression in the dancing subject’s sensorimotor “faculties” as they are deployed “fully in the present” (2007, 169).1 Cunningham himself has defined expression in dance as an intrinsic and inevitable quality of movement, indicating that his search to capture, isolate, and frame this quality is central to his choreographic process.2 As a critical theorist (rather than a dance historian), I am interested in expression as a more general, or cross-media, category and therefore find the efforts by Cunningham and his critics to define expression differently, to free it from its subservience to the psyche, refreshing, unconventional, and suggestive. I have become increasingly convinced that Cunningham’s practical and theoretical interventions can illuminate more traditional literary and philosophical discourses on the aesthetics of expression and that they have particular resonance when juxtaposed with the approach to expression developed by Theodor Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory of 1970. Similar to Cunningham, Adorno complicates the category of “expression” by shifting its location from [End Page 47] subjectivity, understood primarily as a psychic phenomenon, to embodiment, understood as a function of locomotion and sensual existence (in Franko’s words, “something more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated” [1995, 80]).

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, at once rough around the edges and sparkling with insights, is arguably the most important book on aesthetics since Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1835), the two works that serve as Adorno’s point of departure. The German-born musician and philosopher advances along the lines established by Kant and Hegel, but he consistently raises questions about art’s function in society. Adorno belonged to a group of early to mid-twentieth-century philosophers who submitted the classical Enlightenment tradition to Marxist critique. Along with Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, and Bertolt Brecht, Adorno entertained suspicions with regard to the notion of subjective expression; he wondered if the artistic languages identified as “expressive” hadn’t become conventionalized to the point where it was necessary to break them down, subject them to permutation, distortion, or “dissonance” by means of practices he associated with the category of “construction” (Adorno 1970/1997, 40–44 and 156). Traditionally, “expression,” he argued, presupposed a self-identical subject to be expressed; but if the subject were in fact a reification of something far more volatile, responsive, and delicate, if the subject were, as he put it, something closer to the “shudder” of “consciousness,” then the nature of “expression” in artworks would have to be rethought (331).

It is not my intention in this essay to conduct a full analysis of Adorno’s theory of expression, nor do I intend to “apply” Adorno to Cunningham, thereby implying that one is more theoretically sophisticated than the other. Instead, I want to initiate a dynamic engagement between the two in an attempt to discern and highlight what I believe to be an incipient theory of expression that is embedded in Cunningham’s practice and that secretly informs Adorno’s account of modernist aesthetics as well. The theory of expression I am referring to is one that is not fully articulated in Adorno’s aesthetics. However, implicit in his debate with the Kantian tradition is an incipient...

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