What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research by Ben Spatz (review)

What a Body Can Do is an important and ambitious contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on embodiment and how embodied practices generate knowledge. Via Gilles Deleuze, Ben Spatz finds his way back to Baruch Spinoza’s fundamental question: “What can a body do?” Spinoza’s question is the reference point for Spatz’s theorization of embodied knowledge and analysis of “embodied practice through the epistemological lens of technique” (217).

Spatz represents his book “as a work of performance philosophy and the philosophy of practice” (14). His primary interpretive framework is the sociology of knowledge with reference to Marcel Mauss, Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Nick Crossley, with selective use of phenomenology, cognitive science, dance studies, and gender studies.

Spatz calls for a more comprehensive approach to the study of how embodied practices contribute to self and social formation, and how research and pedagogy might be undertaken and improved in the context of higher education. Embodied practices serve a fundamentally constitutive role in that “we come to know ourselves, others, and the material world through the myriad pathways of technique” (180). Our embodied practices in everyday life and specialized modes of practice together constitute a set of sites for “taking hold and gripping the world” (180). Spatz addresses methodological, theoretical, and definitional fault lines in how we think, talk about, and analyze embodiment and “knowledge” across contiguous practices within a single book; therefore, it serves a very different function from most books on systems of training such as acting. John Matthews’s Training for Performance (2011) is closest to Spatz’s in looking across training systems, but does not display the rigor Spatz offers in his examination of a taxonomy of key terms.

In chapter 1 (“An Epistemology of Practice”) and throughout, epistemological issues and key terms central to embodied practice—technique, practice, training, transmission, discourse, and agency—are carefully interrogated. In his discussion of the relationship between “practice” and “technique,” Spatz argues that “embodied practice [...] is structured by and productive of knowledge”; thereby, one “encounters and come(s) to know reality through technique, rather than simply producing or constructing it” (26). Spatz’s recuperation of technique as constitutive of training and generative of knowledge is evidenced in how technique structures “our actions and practices by offering a range of relatively reliable pathways through any given situation”; i.e., one “gains knowledge of what a body can do—through technique” (26). When considered as “research,” embodied practices become a set of open-ended possibilities for further discovery of what a body can do; i.e., “technique [...is] a network of frac-tally branching pathways that vein the substance of practice” (44).

In chapters 2, 3, and 4, Spatz examines three examples of embodied practice, focusing on yoga from among physical culture practices (somatics, sports, martial arts); on acting (Konstantin Stanislavsky and Jerzy Grotowski) from performing arts; and on the formative practices of gender from our myriad everyday practices. He argues that all embodied practices should be viewed as open-ended “epistemic field”(s) for the generation of “knowledge” arising within that field, and existing in relationship to one another as “contiguous fields of knowledge” (154).

Spatz analyzes how an epistemic field transmits and produces “knowledge” in the “dynamic interplay between training and research” within that field. A “weak sense” of “knowledge” occurs anytime an individual experiences a new “area of technique”; a “stronger sense of research” arises where “the criterion of newness pertains to an extended community of knowledge”; and the “strongest sense of research” pertains only to discovering “new technique”—“a pathway that had never previously been known to anyone” within that field (60–61).

In chapter 5, “Embodied Research in the University,” Spatz attempts some “blue skies” thinking in relation to the complex and problematic issues of “practice as research” or “research through practice,” and the forms of dissemination of “knowledge” as they exist within higher education...