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DARKNESS IN THE THEATRE:
THE PERCEPTION OF THE EMBODIED SELF IN ACTION
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David M. Mills
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The Performance School, Seattle, Washington, USA
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Abstract
Drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty,
especially his concept of bodily space, the author elaborates the
parallel
between the actor on stage, inhabiting many characters, and the person
in the
world, acting in within alternative sets of meanings. By juxtaposing
Kelly’s geometric model of
personal
meaning with Merleau-Ponty’s basically theatrical view
of the bodily situational space in which we each find ourselves, the
paper
explores the dimensionality of that lived space from which our ideas of
geometric space are abstracted. While the two views may seem at
odds—with Kelly
making our meaning construction accessible by giving our attentiveness
to it a
geometric structure, and Merleau-Ponty emphasizing the fundamental
inaccessibility of the mystery of how meaning derives from bodily
experience—taken together they point us toward a deeper understanding
of what
Kelly might have meant by saying that a person “lives in anticipation.”
This
consideration of the actor as person and vice versa leads to a
theatrical view
of bodily experience in which the person is seen to inhabit multiple
spaces of
meaning, navigating among them as an actor would set aside a character
and take
up or ‘become’ another. By showing how spatial movement and meaningful action
are intricately intertwined, the paper points toward a consideration of
a
person’s kinaesthetic sense as much more than a sense of movement—in
fact as
the perception of the meaning of their own embodiment in action.
Key words:
personal constructs, embodiment, acting, phenomenology
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In pointing to dimensionality as a significant quality of
all
experience, the Psychology of Personal Constructs is asserting an
essentially
spatial or geometric conception of meaning. But this "geometry of
meaning" is
not a static geometry. Within its framework any change can be viewed as
a kind
of motion. Indeed, as George Kelly said, "Our emphasis, if anything, is
even
more strongly upon the kinetic nature of the substance with which we
are
dealing. For our purposes, the person is not an object which is
temporarily in
a moving state but is himself a form of motion" (Kelly, 1963,
p.48). He later
said that, "One way to think of the construct is as a pathway of
movement."
(Ibid. p.128) My own practical work is built upon a synthesis of PCP
with the
work of FM Alexander, which he termed "psycho-physical re-education."
What I
want to do here is to draw on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to
explore the
foundations of my work, and also to make some fundamental points about
the
special significance of the kinaesthetic sense as the sense of our own
selves
in action.
SPACE AS A WAY OF RELATING TO THINGS
A
central premise of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is the primacy of
perception,
the claim that original experience is prior to any abstractions which
we may
draw from it. It is whole individual experience from which all
other understanding
derives. All of our theoretical constructs, all models of material
reality, all
principles which we may use to account for the events we
experience—all of
these are abstracted from that
original personal experience, and are thereby secondary to it. Whether
in the
case of my perception of a world or of my perception of my own self,
the whole
is in an essential sense prior to the
parts because it is the context within which they are
parts. Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the primacy of perception
has much in common with the views of John Dewey, whose philosophy and
psychology Kelly said, "can be read between many of the lines of
the
psychology of personal construct"” (ibid, p.154).
In
a series of papers, Trevor Butt has discussed various points at which
Merleau-Ponty’s work has much to contribute to the psychology of
personal
constructs—particularly in emphasizing the bodily dimensions of
construing. In
this paper I want to give particular emphasis to the bodily
spatiality that Merleau-Ponty finds at the root of
perception. An exploration of this spatiality can help lead us to a
consideration of personal meaning for a whole person—meaning that is
constructed, and also embodied.
Merleau-Ponty’s
idea of spatiality is derived directly from his idea of the primacy of
perception for the incarnate subject. The spatial quality of an
individual’s
situatedness is bound up both with the pre-objective roots of his
perception
and with his embodiment as a perceiving subject. As a conscious
subject, I
project space around myself, locating objects in it. This space has as
its
origin that irreducible "here" of the incarnate subject, and, in
Merleau-Ponty’s words, it "...is not a spatiality of position, but a
spatiality
of situation" (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.100). "Space is not the setting
in which
things are arranged, but the means whereby the positing of things
becomes
possible...we must think of it as the universal power enabling
them to be connect"d”
(ibid, p.243). Thus at root spatiality is not a property of an
arrangement of
objects, but rather a quality of my relationship to them; indeed
it is the
power of the perceiving subject to perceive objects as
connected. But in
common experience things can be "connected" in many ways; the
connection of
geometric distance and direction is only one way. The ordinary space of
geometry—the
space of position—can be seen as a subset of the more general space of
situation. It is the prototypical space precisely because it is the
most
abstracted from whole experience. But all perception has a "space-like"
structure. If we consider the ordinary visual experience of, for
example,
looking at a lamp on a table, or of a more general experience of
construing the
shape and position of the lamp in physical, aesthetic, cultural or
political
terms, we find ourselves speaking of the "perspective" from which we
observe
it.
The
spatiality from which we derive these perspectives is, however, more
than a
passive framework for perception, more than an empty space in
which
perceivable events happen. Both ordinary geometrical space and the more
general
space of meaning are grounded in what Merleau-Ponty called "bodily
space," and
thus have a "kinetic nature." Spatiality has everything to do with
motility. It
is because it is a space in which I move
that it can be one in which I perceive. When I view an object from
a given
perspective, I do not perceive merely an image bound to that
perspective. I
perceive a whole object, and part of what makes it possible for me to
perceive
a whole object as such is my ability to move in relation to it. The
appearance
of an object as it does under present conditions, viewing the lamp from
a
particular angle under particular lighting conditions, for
instance, is
inseparable from the context of the other ways it would appear under
other
conditions. I may literally move to a different part of the room to
view the
lamp from a different angle, or I may change the lighting. I may or may
not
actually do so, but it is, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, the possibility
of moving in relation to the lamp that makes it
possible for me to perceive it as a
lamp, with such and such shape, colour, etc. But I could go even
further. I
could view the lamp, or in some other way interact with it, from a
political
rather than a physical "perspective." Not only what attributes, but
what kinds of attributes I notice are
themselves conditioned by the perspective I take, and again it is the
possibility
of taking different perspectives that is the root of my ability to
perceive the
lamp as such, and to include it in meaningful experience. So while
perception
holds a primacy over all abstractions that may be drawn from it,
perception
itself is possible only in a context of action. From a physical,
aesthetic or
diplomatic perspective, I may perceive the lamp to be cylindrical
or
pleasingly textured or in an insulting location. These attributes
of the lamp
are meanings for me from my perspective, and in the context of the
other
perspectives I might have taken. To perceive it as cylindrical is to
know the
shape beyond the rectangle I see from the side and the circle I would
see from
above. To perceive it as inviting is to anticipate reaching out to
touch its
surface. To be insulted by its position is to appreciate what it would
mean to
be sitting on the other side of the table. In each case the
"taking of a new
perspective" is a kind of movement in a space of meaning, and it is
fundamentally a bodily movement. As we will see later, the kinaesthetic
sense,
as the sense of a person’s own bodily movements, has a special status,
and
special limitations, in relation to all of the senses by which we
perceive the
world outside ourselves.
FROM OBJECT SPACE TO MEANING SPACE
How
then do we get from a space in which I grasp objects to a space in
which I
grasp meanings? And from there to inhabiting a world that has meaning
for me,
and in which my own movements can bear meaning? The answer, I believe,
lies in
the interplay between the dimensionality of my experience and its
continuity. The
spatiality of my own body and that of the external universe—the inner
and outer
dimensions of meaning—are woven together in the continuity of
ongoing bodily
experience. It is that continuity, that ongoing unity of bodily action,
that
makes them not merely the dimensions of a space in which I observe, but
those
of a world in which I act. And their interplay within that continuity
gives
life a dramatic quality. Both Merleau-Ponty and Dewey emphasize the
dramatic
quality of personal experience. If, as George Kelly has it, persons are
essentially scientists in their anticipating and interpreting of
events, then
they are also actors in their dramatic engagement with
events. We can illuminate this bodily spatiality by examining
the actor on stage as a specific example of a person in a role.
All
existence is situated existence. I exist as a subject insofar as I
maintain
myself in distinction from the objects of my world. And there can only be objects in a world at all because I,
as the subject, can say, "I am here" in relation to them. Every
possible set of
connections among meaningful objects by the situated
body-subject is a
possible world which that subject may inhabit and with reference to
which she
can define herself and her actions. According to Merleau-Ponty, "The
essence of
consciousness is to provide itself with one or several worlds, to bring
into
being its own thoughts before itself as if they were things
(Merleau-Ponty,
1962, p.130)...and the possession of a body implies the ability to
change
levels and to ‘understand’ space" (ibid, p.251). Thus the existence of
the
incarnate subject consists in constituting for itself at any given
moment one
specific world or combination of worlds, and the continuation of
that
existence depends on the ability to shift from one such world to
another. Questions
of meaning are always questions of relationship between knower and
known. "I
am" is a simple assertion; what I am
is only definable in relation. But if
space is "the universal power enabling [things] to be connected," then
meaning
is not in relation to what is, but rather to the ways in which things
might
have been otherwise. As Kelly says it,
So any statement
we make can well be regarded as the answer to a question we ask–a
biased
question–and emerges as an indicated choice between alternatives
previously
posed. Furthermore any act, or experience, can be regarded as having
such
dimensional properties.... Any act, or feeling, or statement bears
equally
upon its subjective antithesis without which it has no
psychological
significance to the person involved. (Kelly, 1979, p.116)
What
I think Kelly is reminding us of in this statement is that cognitive or
verbally expressible constructs are in no way primary. Indeed it is
quite the
opposite; such constructs are themselves drawn from the wider
"dimensional
properties" of experience. Even more than that, meaning is always in
relation
to intention. For my personal meaning is not only a relationship
between myself
and an environment that I "know," it is a relationship inescapably
bound up
with my actions and purposes within my environment. Such attributes as
the
"steepness" of a mountain only have the significance they have for me
in
relation to, for example, my intention to climb it. Any given level of
situatedness, any given level of a space of meaning may be abstracted,
but the
whole only occurs in relation to the embodied intentionality (in
Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, the "incarnate subjectivity") of a person in a situation. Through examination of
pathological cases in which the patient lacked precisely this ability
to move
easily from one "setting" to another, and of experiments in the
alteration of
the perceptual field, Merleau-Ponty found that "what counts for the
orientation
of the spectacle is not the objective body but a virtual body with its
phenomenal "place" defined by its task and situation" (Merleau-Ponty,
1962,
p.249). Later he concludes that "our body and perception always summon
us to
take as the centre of the world that environment with which they
present us. But
this environment is not necessarily that of our own life" (ibid,
p.285).
WHAT ACTING REVEALS ABOUT ACTION
It
is here that we may draw the parallel between the ordinary person
and the
actor on stage. The ability to act and to function as an
integrated
“body-subject” depend on the freedom to choose the level of situational
space
in which we are to operate, to choose our task and select a set of
meanings
from those possible for the objects around us. Referring to the actor
on stage
as a model for the normal person acting in life, Merleau-Ponty says
that, "To
act is to place oneself for a moment in an imaginary situation, to
find
satisfaction in changingone's 'setting' (ibid., p. 135) ...the normal
man and
the actor do not mistake imaginary situations for reality, but
extricate their
real bodies from the living situation to make them breathe, speak and,
if need
be, weep in a realm of imagination" (ibid., p. 105). To act, whether in
this
sense, on stage, or in life, is an act of reconstruction of meaning. It
is not
to represent the world but to create a new world that we may inhabit
for a
time. It is to "take on" dimensions of meaning within which we go
beyond
attempting to reproduce what we know toward the creation of new
experience
that is similar to what we know in certain ways. In Kelly’s terms, we
are free
not only in the dimensions of our construction of meaning but also
in the
level of its dimensionality. Indeed, we seem to find ourselves free at
levels
of construction below that at which our conscious attention
resides and at the
same time determined with respect to levels above it. True freedom
then,
includes the freedom to move among the levels themselves. This is very
close to
Merleau-Ponty’s "the ability to change levels and to ‘understand’
space." It is
important to note, however, that since bodily space is the ground from
which
all other spaces spring, this ‘extrication’ of my real body is never
complete.
It
is further notable that I can freely take up any of the possible
levels of
situational space only because I can never fully be an object for
myself. This
is one sense in which Merleau-Ponty can describe the spatiality of the
body
itself as "the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the
performance"
(ibid., p.100).
It
is the constant task of consciousness to establish and maintain the
boundaries
and contours of a given world, to shape the forces by which that
world’s meanings
arise, to maintain the global setting always in the explicitly possible
grasp
of the subject, and thus to continue to give meaning to the self in
relation to
that world. Indeed, one might want to say that consciousness is the performance of this task. This is
analogously the task of the theatre and specifically the actor on
the stage. A
major aesthetic and ontological question has long been, just what is
produced
on the stage? What do actors do? It
can be seen in this frame that what they do is precisely to take
on a virtual
body that is different from (though grounded in) their own habitual
body, and
it can be further seen that drama consists of creating a world that
such virtual
people inhabit. A theatrical world is thus not a representation of
reality but
a reality in and of itself. But it is a world intended to have
objective
existence for-an-audience. This may be clarified by considering the
real
"darkness in the theatre" and how it is that Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor
can
express what it does. In the theatre, the whole world of the play is on
the
stage; it is a world set off by the rapid transition to the zone of
indeterminacy
that is the darkness. This world on stage can only be a world
by being
contained within the darkness in the theatre. So also in the life of
perception; to cast our gaze anywhere invariably precludes us from
seeing
somewhere else. To construe our world according to a given set of
dimensions
makes other dimensions of construction unavailable in that moment.
To follow a
particular "pathway of movement" renders other pathways inaccessible.
WHAT IS PERFORMANCE?
If
we define performance in a general sense as engaging in an activity as
if the
quality of the activity matters to us in some way, whether or not
anyone
happens to be watching, then Performance, in the theatrical sense,
is activity
in which the quality matters precisely because someone is
watching. It is a performance "for" that someone. The audience
"stands for" the perceptual subject; the stage is a world for them, and
they,
in darkness, are not objects for themselves. Traditionally, an
added aspect of
this theatrical darkness has been that it conceals the spectator from
the
characters of the play; they are the unseen viewer–safe from the gaze
of the
other–subject, but not object. They are perceptually "on stage," that
is, they
are in the world of the play–but are not present to the other in the
characters’ world. They can see and hear that world, but they cannot
"act" upon
it. Each audience member is a discarnate being, a presence having
no body. In the last half-century or so
several theatrical experiments have been directed toward breaching that
protective darkness—as it were, illuminating the viewer from behind and
making
them potentially object-for-the-character. The darkness is
commonly breached
in a particular limited way when one goes to a play "with
someone." The
transition to darkness is rapid, but it is neither instantaneous nor
total.
Having
defined the space of the play as the area of the stage, we then proceed
to
build an environment in that space and characters begin to inhabit it.
This
discloses another essential distinction between the two kinds of space.
Space
of position is itself taken to be empty; objects are merely in
it and it is thus independent of
them. But the space of situation, whether as given for-the-audience or
for-the-character is wholly wrapped up with those objects which are in
it–the
set, props, lights, costumes, etc.–and with the movements of the
characters
which inhabit it, and the very structure of its spatiality is
determined by
them. The space projected onto the stage by a body-subject (for
example, the
director) is on one hand an empty area to be filled, and on the other
hand an
infinity of possibilities to be shaped and formed into the world of the
play.
"ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE..."
Just
what is the actor’s stance in this world, both as actor and as
character? The
actor takes on the phenomenal body of the character and situates it in
the
world of the play just as in "real life" a person as body-subject takes
up a
particular task or a particular environment of meaning. Just as we
may speak
of the musician assimilating her instrument into her body,
literally
“incorporating” it for the task of expressing her musical
intention, so the
actor, in shifting levels, slips his real body into the new
phenomenal body
of the character and moves as if it were an instrument that has been
assimilated
to itself. This is the root of the great concern on the part of
actors for the
flexibility of their “instrument,” for if an actor has a certain
fixed
habitual way of moving he will be incapable of fully portraying any
character
whose habits are inconsistent with that fixed pattern. The classic case
is the
film star who in role after role basically plays himself. If a
large enough
audience likes his habitual character he may make a great deal of
money, but he
is in only a limited sense "acting." The often-overlooked issue, which
incidentally, accounts for the consistent interest in the
Alexander’s work
among actors, is that it is not enough to cultivate greater access to
one’s
habitual repertory. One must be able to set aside aspects of one’s
habitual
self. It is not enough to be able to play characters who have habits
that I
lack; I also want to play those who lack habits that I have. But this
latter
task is much more difficult, and this difficulty is a model for the one
we all
face when we find ourselves unable to respond to our situation as
we would
like. We find ourselves literally unable to embody the meaning
that we wish to
convey when the pattern of that embodiment is inconsistent with
our general
habitual patterns of action. It is as if we find ourselves free, in
bodily
form, to move in one direction among the levels of construction, but
not the
other.
On
stage this is the crux of the technical problems of motivation and
appearance.
When actors speak of their character’s "motivation" or of their actions
as being "motivated," they are referring to the ways in which those
actions—or
rather
how those actions are carried out—relate to their characters’
objectives. That
is, how well do the characters’ intentions, the actions that express
them and
the situation in which the characters find themselves fit together. In
Kelly’s
terms, if the characters are "living in anticipation" then so will the
audience
be. The world of the stage is a replication, and not a duplication of
the
everyday world. The task of the theatre is not to be realistic but to
be
convincing, not to be complete but to be global. Thus, for example,
what would
normally be a ladder may be a tree–not a representation of a tree but a
"tree"
in the world of the play. It is, as object for-the-characters, a tree,
and they
will react to it accordingly. The audience must at once be able to know
the
ladder objectively as a ladder and see it through the eyes of the
character as
a tree.
In
life we face a similar need to recognize that an object can have very
different
meanings simultaneously in different contexts. Just as the actor
must have the
flexibility to live in more than one reality at a time, the rest of us
need the
flexibility to live with an openness to multiple interpretations
of reality. Dewey
repeatedly pointed out that the more we learn, the greater our need for
flexibility, but that, unfortunately it is often the case in
habitual practice
that the more we know the greater the tendency for routine and
rigidity.
Every
figure presented on the stage including the characters’ actions must
have
sufficient and proper background—must be "motivated" in the space of
situation.
The actor-as-character acts within the situation of her world and at
the same
time the actor-as-actor is aware of herself as object for the audience
and for
the other actors. Maintaining the balance between the sincerity of
motivation
of the character and moving so as to be seen as the character is the
skill of
the great actor. This is accomplished by situating the character
as firmly as
possible in her environment. One typical method is to invent an
autobiography
of a character which has at least as many details of her past life as
are
needed to motivate her action as given in the script. The more detailed
this
work is, the more complete will be the character’s "history," the more
dimensions of meaning will be evident in the world the character
inhabits, and
thus the more real their situatedness. Every word the character
says, every
gesture she makes, embodies meanings from the character’s world. For
that is in
a sense what history is–the flow of the situatedness of the subject.
Once they
have assumed the characters’ pasts, the actors can fully locate
themselves
within their characters’ present situation, and fiction then counts as
much as
reality.
"... AND ONE MAN IN HIS TIME PLAYS MANY PARTS"
In
"real life" of course, we each already have our history fully worked
out, and
thus every word and gesture is already the embodiment of personal
meaning. The
point of this discussion is that we are each actors in the worlds of
our own
experience, and we inhabit the world that we think of as our reality in
just
this way. Living is a matter of taking on virtual worlds that we
in-habit (i.e.
engage with our habitual bodies). "All the world’s a stage..." has
become the
cliché that it is because we recognize that, just as science is
the refinement
of the anticipatory quality of experience into a formal
endeavour, so the
world of the stage is the distillation of the dramatic quality of
ordinary life.
The act of reconstruing, of choosing other dimensions along which to
make sense
of things is also an act performed by a person as a whole. It is also
the
taking on and inhabiting of a new world with just these dramatic
qualities. Beneath
the dispositions toward certain patterns of action that we
call habits lies
the dimensionality of the habitual space of meaning out of which
we construct
the world in which we act. For us as for the well portrayed
character, there
is a continuity between the unquestioned dimensions of
meaning that we fail
to see as the framework of our interpretation of events and those
dimensions
of action that are the structure of our habitual routine
reactions. Just as a
good actor is free to “inhabit” a wide range of possible roles, living
in many
worlds on the same stage, so every human individual has the capacity to
step beyond
the world of his habitual construction to inhabit, not just to view,
but to
live in alternate constructions. In life every event that
might be termed a
stimulus is a perturbation of the balance in the organization
of the whole
web of a person’s embodied meanings. It produces a moment of
“drama” in which
the whole system of the person’s habits must reorganize to produce
the
person’s "response," that is, his answer. If the person is too
ill, too tired,
too rushed, or too bound by routine, then one of his habits may
dominate, as if
in an attempt to maintain the balance, and the moment collapses
before any
substantial reorganization can occur. What follows is a linear
product of the
stimulus and the dominant habit, a mechanical "reaction" rather than a
"response." This is like a novice actor who tries to "act" old by
hunching over
and shuffling. What the audience sees is these specific choices
filtered
through the young actor’s own habitual efforts and tensions. However,
if the
web of habit and meaning is complex and flexible enough to allow
the drama to
continue for a time, then what follows is a dramatic response of the
whole
person. This is more like the actor who directs his attention toward
the task
of not interfering with his own natural coordination, giving him the
flexibility to step outside his own habitual patterns in such a way
that what
the audience sees is a whole person. Then the mere thought of age makes
him
appear older to the audience without the need to "do" anything in
particular. Dewey
argued that the significance of experience, and its aesthetic
value, lie not
so much in the maintaining of a balance as in the qualities
embodied in how
balance is repeatedly lost and restored. Thus his support for
Alexander’s work,
which he saw as a means for insisting
on that small dramatic space in which a richer restoration, and a
fuller
response can be achieved.
There
is one more apparently technical point that turns out to have great
practical
significance. We may think of space as a sort of pre-existing emptiness
in
which objects are located, just as we may think of a stage as an empty
space
prior to and independent of all of the various plays that will
come to be
produced upon it. But the stage is only a stage in
relation to those plays that are on it. It is only
prior to them in
retrospect—only empty in anticipation of them. In just this way the
space of
meaning, the dimensions of experience, may seem to be an empty
space that
waits to be filled with the events of my life. And indeed, dimensions
that I
have made explicit, or those that I have come to habitually use, do
pre-structure subsequent perceptions and actions. They become the
coordinates
of a space which I in-habit, and which predisposes me toward seeing and
doing
things in familiar ways. This space is not prior to my experience; its
dimensions are drawn from it. It is only empty in anticipation
of future
events, and even future events will remain open to new interpretation.
In the
case of ordinary geometry, certain relationships obtain within a set of
orthogonal xyz-coordinates. Yet these dimensions are not prior to
the space in
which I draw my figures. I am free to set my origin where I will, and
choose
which way the x-axis shall go, or indeed even to use cylindrical
coordinates
instead. It is only if I come to routinely make the same choice that it
comes
to appear to have priority. Just so with meaning in general, and
especially the
"felt meanings" of my kinaesthetic construing. What characterizes
experience is
not its dimensions but its availability to be understood dimensionally.
Just as
it is the presence of the actors—their movement on stage—that creates
the space
in which the play takes place, similarly, it might be said that natural
actions
create the space in which they occur. But just as an actor in a
production of a
play that has gone on too long may go through the same motions in a
routine
way, so the person whose actions have become habitual performs them in
the way
that has come to feel "normal."
MOVEMENT AS A THEATRE OF EMBODIED MEANING
In
one of his last works, The Visible and
the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty returns to these matters again,
drawing a
connection between knowing and what he calls the "I can." In the
process he
elaborates a quite distinct, kinaesthetic context. What is true for the
relationship
between my sense of sight and the visible is also true for my sense of
touch,
in perhaps an even deeper way. I can at one level feel texture,
roughness,
smoothness, etc. At another level what
I touch is not textures, but objects. But I do not simply touch them in
the
abstract, nor do I cast a tactile "gaze" on them. To touch a thing I
must reach
for it. To feel its shape and texture I must move my hand across its
surface. And
this is not potential movement, the projected act that I might make. To
touch a
thing is to engage in actual movement in relation to it. What may be
the
implicit ground for the spatiality of visual or auditory perception is
always
explicit in touch. I must move myself to touch the thing. Whether I
turn my
head to look or reach out my hand to touch, as I move to perceive an
object, I
find my knowledge of it already in a context of action. But there is
more. There
is something peculiar, even paradoxical, about reaching out to
touch an
object. As I reach out with my right hand to touch something, I can
feel my own
hand–a touch, as it were, from the inside; I can also see my hand
moving toward
and over the thing touched. I can even touch that right hand with my
own left
hand. I am a part of the visible even as I am the one who sees. I am
both the
one who touches and am open to my own touch–in both internal and
external ways.
My left hand touches my right as it might touch any other object,
except, of
course that my right hand returns the touch. And also, as my right hand
moves,
I "feel" the movement. In a sense my right hand touches itself in
movement. The
practical consequence of this for-itself/in-itself distinction is that
although
I am open to my own touch, although I am at least in part visible to
myself,
although I can hear my own voice, I do not feel or see or hear
myself in quite
the same way that I perceive the rest
of my world. The difference has everything to do with the kinaesthetic.
I may
make a video or audio recording of myself performing some act and then
later
watch or listen to it and have an experience something like that of
other
people observing me in action. I may even make use of these
observations to
learn to improve the quality of my performance. But watching myself on
a video
monitor while I perform some action
is a very different experience from watching a videotape of that same
performance later. There is a story about how the author, Arthur
Koestler,
after having lived in the U.S. for some forty years, chanced to hear a
tape
recording of his own voice and was surprised to hear that he still
spoke with a
distinct accent. For years he had “heard” his own voice as sounding
just like
the American voices around him. Koestler speculated that all that time
he had
had an habitual expectation of how his voice sounded which he had
been
perceptually comparing with itself. Of course the expectation always
matched
itself and thus he never recognized that his voice actually sounded
different. It
was only when he heard the sound of his voice while he was not at the
same time
producing it that he was able to make an "objective" comparison and
hear his
own accent. We have no way, however, of recording kinaesthetic images
for later "feeling" separated in time from the action itself. As
Merleau-Ponty
says,
"Just as it is necessarily ‘here’, the body necessarily exists ‘now.’"
(Merleau-Ponty,
1962, p.140) So it may be difficult to test the hypothesis that all of
our
inner experience of feeling ourselves in action exhibits this kind
of
characteristic distortion.
It
is in this kinaesthetic realm of self-perception where the relation of
the
person in everyday life and the actor on stage becomes most concrete.
It is in
the kinaesthetic dimensions of meaning that the problem of the person
who is
unable to embody a reconstruction of himself finds its paradigm in the
actor
whose habitual movements narrow the range of characters he is able to
faithfully portray. As Butt points out
in relation to enactment,
… the bodily
involvement in playing a
role, along with the
interactions it entails, leads to a knowledge of that role-position
which may
or may not be spelled out in language. Perhaps fixed roles could be
written so
as to place more emphasis on posture, movement and comportment. When we
see
psychological processes as not just cognitive reflections, but
embodied, it
opens up new ways of moving into and experimenting with new roles. (Butt, 1998, p. 112)
What
I am arguing here is simply that while it is important to recognize
psychological processes as embodied, we may fruitfully go beyond this
to
consider posture, movement etc. in their own right. For
each of us in everyday life, as for the
actor on stage, our own bodies are the 'instruments' of our actions,
and what
each of us can express with this instrument depends on how we use it.
This
brings us back to FM Alexander, whom I mentioned at the beginning. His
work was
basically the development of an educational method for exploring, in
practice,
what Dewey called the "continuity of mind and body in action." The
hidden
dilemma in everything I have discussed so far is the problem of habit.
Because
kinaesthetic perception is the perception of my own movements, then as
Alexander put it, "The act and the particular feeling associated with
it become
one in our recognition." (Alexander, p.131) What Alexander found was
that often
when we act habitually, using what he called "unconscious direction" of
ourselves, we initiate the act in a way that interferes with the
natural
coordination of ourselves as moving organisms. But this way of acting
comes to
"feel normal" to us. From a Kellian perspective we might say that our
acting as
we do embodies a commitment to a certain fixed kinaesthetic construal”
of the
task at hand. This, of course, makes change problematic. The more I try
to be
right, the more I am driven to the very construal that led me wrong in
the
first place. And because my construing is "felt" rather than "thought,"
it
never occurs to me that a reconstruing is possible. What Alexander’s
technique
amounts to is a means for holding open that small "dramatic space" I
spoke of
earlier long enough to allow for just such an embodied reconstruing of
kinaesthetic meaning. As Alexander developed his method for
re-educating
ourselves in the continuity of bodily action—and our perception
of
ourselves in action—what he did not do, and why I have worked to bring
his work
and Kelly’s together, is to fully enough appreciate the dimensionality
of
meaning. This interweaving of the continuity of perception and action
with the
dimensionality of personal meaning embodied in action is what I
have
called "conductivity" or sometimes "conductive reasoning." To quote
Merleau-Ponty one last time,
“Man taken as a concrete being is not a
psyche joined to an
organism, but the movement to and fro of existence which at one time
allows
itself to take corporeal form and at others moves towards personal
acts.”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.88)
Whether
I consider myself as a 'corporeal form' in ordinary physical movement,
or as a
'form of movement,' in Kelly’s sense, engaged in meaningful personal
acts, the
kinaesthetic sense is my means of my own perception of myself in
movement. It is thus a central, and as yet largely unexplored, factor
in all
human meaning.
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REFERENCES
Alexander, F.M.
(1923). Constructive Conscious Control of
the Individual, Dutton, NY (Reprinted by Centerline, Long Beach, 1985).
Alexander, F.M.
(1932). The Use of the Self, Dutton,
NY (Reprinted by Centerline, Long Beach, 1984).
Butt, T. W. (1997). The existentialism of George Kelly, Journal for the
Society for Existential Analysis, 8, 20-32.
Butt, T. W. (1998) Sociality role and embodiment, Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 11,
105-116.
Butt, T.W. (1998) Sedimentation and
elaborative choice, Journal of
Constructivist
Psychology, 11, 265-281.
Dewey, J. (1927). Body
and Mind. Read at 81st Anniversary Meeting, NY Academy of
Medicine,
Reprinted in Philosophy and Civilization, NY: Minton, Balch and Co., 1931.
Kelly, G.A. (1963). ATheory
of Personality: The Psychology of
Personal Constructs, New York: Norton
Kelly, G.A. (1979). Clinical
Psychology an Personality: Selected
Papers of George Kelly, B. Maher (ed.), Huntington, NY: Krieger Pub.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology
of Perception, London:
Routledge &
Kegan Paul,
Merleau-Ponty,
Maurice (1968). The Visible and the
Invisible, Evanston, IL.: Northwest University Press,
Mills, D.
(1996). Dimensions of Embodiment:
Towards a Conversational Science of Human
Action, Doctoral dissertation, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK.
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
David M
Mills, Ph.D.,
is a founding member of The Performance School in Seattle, Washington. He has
been investigating how personal constructs are embodied in performance,
theoretically and in practice with performers for more than 25 years.
Email: davidm@performanceschool.org
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REFERENCE
Mills, D. M.
(2005). Darkness in the theatre: The perception of the embodied self in
action. Personal
Construct Theory & Practice,
2, 1-9
(Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp05/mills05.html)
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Received: 14 Dec 2004 – Accepted: 19 March
2005 -
Published: 1 May 2005
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