The Thinking Body: Philosophy, Dance and Modernism

DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY/DANCE AS PHILOSOPHY 35 13. The thinking body: dance, philosophy and modernism Kristin Boyce Introduction There are two different ways to understand the phrase ‘philosophy of X,’ understandings which depend upon two different ways of construing the genitive ‘of ’. The ‘of ’ can be construed as an objective genitive or it can be construed as a subjective genitive.1 Consider, for example, the phrase, ‘philosophy of Kristin,’ if the ‘of ’ is construed as an objective genitive, the phrase refers to the philosophy which takes Kristin as its object. If, on the other hand, the ‘of ’ is construed as a subjective genitive, the phrase refers to the philosophy that belongs to Kristin: Kristin’s philosophy. It is worth noting that these two senses of ‘the philosophy of Kristin’ are not incompatible. Kristin’s philosophy might be a philosophy which takes Kristin as its object. In this case the ‘of ’ in the phrase ‘the philosophy of Kristin’ is doing double duty: it is functioning as both a subjective and as an objective genitive. There are two corresponding ways to understand the phrase ‘philosophy of dance.’ If the ‘of ’ is construed as an objective genitive, the phrase refers to the philosophical reflection that takes dance as its object. This is how the phrase is usually understood. But if the ‘of ’ is construed as a subjective genitive, the phrase refers to the philosophical reflection that belongs to dance itself: dance’s philosophy. When the ‘of ’ is construed in this second way, dance is understood not simply as material for philosophical reflection (material which might occasion new or revised theories about the relation between mind and body, for instance) but rather as in some sense the subject of such reflection. The overarching aim of this essay is to investigate the possibility of ‘philosophy of dance’ understood in this second sense. Its scope is, for the most part, limited to dance’s philosophy of dance – that is, to philosophy of dance in which the ‘of ’ functions as both a subjective and an objective genitive2 – and it will be concerned only with dance considered as a fine art (not with forms of ritual or social dance). When I speak of a form of philosophical reflection that belongs to dance that is art, what I will mean is that there is a necessary relation between 1 Paul Griffiths makes this point with respect to the phrase ‘philosophy of religion,’ (Griffiths 1977, pp.615-620). 2 For indications of how dance’s philosophy might be extended to topics other than dance, see Elgin 2010 and Noë 2007 . 36 THINKING THROUGH DANCE the philosophical reflection, which is in some sense ‘present in’ the dance, and the artistic value or power of the dance. So what I will be exploring is the possibility that for some dance such a necessary relation obtains. A subsidiary aim of the essay will be to clarify the strongest possible sense in which such a relation could obtain – the strongest possible sense, that is, in which a form of philosophical reflection could belong to dance. The strategy of the essay is to focus on one resource for those who have sought to illuminate the cognitive ambitions and value of certain forms of dance: conceptions of modernism that were developed in the first instance by Clement Greenberg in order to explain changes in the visual arts.3 Scholars such as Sally Banes, Noël Carroll, Roger Copeland and David Michael Levin have all sought to adapt these conceptual resources to dance. In the first half of the essay, I make explicit an approach to philosophy of dance that I take to be shared by and implicit in these writings. I call this the standard approach to philosophy of dance. I argue that this approach fails to fully clarify a sense in which philosophical reflection might genuinely belong to dance and that it fails in part because of the particular way these writings both elaborate and criticize Greenberg’s framework. In the second half of the essay, I develop an alternative approach to philosophy of dance by taking my bearing from a very different way of elaborating and criticizing that framework – that which is found in the writing on modernism that Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried developed together. I argue that the alternative approach clarifies not just a sense in which philosophical reflection might belong to dance but also the strongest possible sense in which this might be the case. In seeking to clarify the salient differences between the standard and alternative approaches, a helpful organizing metaphor will be that of ‘direction of fit. This metaphor is often used to illuminate the difference between two mental states, belief and desire. Belief has a world-to-mind direction of fit: the mind fits itself to the world by tracking the way things are in the world. Desire, by contrast, has a mind-to-world direction of fit: it aims to fit the world to itself, to make it the case that the way the world is conforms to the desire.4 3 It is no reach to suggest that these conceptual resources should have application to dance. From its earliest dialectical unfolding, western theatrical dance has been shaped by developments in the visual arts. For choreographers as foundational to the development of the art form of classical ballet as Jean-Georges Noverre, for example, painting served as the model of what ballet must become if it were to develop into a serious art (cf. Carroll 2003). The relation between dance and the visual arts is no less intimate by the 1960s. Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and the Judson Church choreographers collaborated with many of the visual artists with whom Greenberg and his successors were centrally concerned. 4 This metaphor was introduced as a (perhaps inadequate) way of glossing the point of a thought experiment that is introduced at the beginning of Elizabeth Anscombe’s DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY/DANCE AS PHILOSOPHY 37 The metaphor of ‘direction of fit’ helps to illuminate the standard and alternative approaches to philosophy of dance in the following way. The picture that guides the standard approach is one of a philosophy-to-dance direction of fit that is of dance as in some way fitting itself to philosophy. There are multiple variations of this approach but in its baldest form, the ‘necessary’ relation between dance and philosophy is spelled out in terms of a sense in which dance is understood to depend upon (or follow as a consequence of) an explicit and accompanying activity of theorizing about dance. This suggests one alternative to the standard approach: reverse it so that the guiding picture is one of a dance-to-philosophy direction of fit. On that picture, philosophical conclusions derive from (or follow as consequences of) the artistic value or power of certain dances – from the style of the movement in Graham’s Appalachian Spring5, perhaps, or Crystal Pite’s The Second Person6. This picture is compelling, but I think it is nevertheless inadequate. The alternative that I propose rejects the metaphor of direction of fit altogether. It seeks to clarify the possibility that for some forms of dance, there is a reciprocal relation of mutual dependence between artistic and philosophical achievement. Modernism and the standard approach Until recently, it might have been hard to imagine how dance could fruitfully be conceived as involving any form of reflection, let alone a form of philosophical reflection. Copeland, for example, argues that for much of its history, dance has suffered the effects of a deeply entrenched Cartesian dualism: because its medium is the human body, dance has been conceived (and often conceived itself) as ‘mired’ in the body, feeling and subjectivity – more suited to serve as a therapeutic antidote to the ‘abstractions and deceptions’ of reason than as a medium of thought (Copeland 2004, pp.13, 89, & 122). For scholars who have sought to bring out the cognitive ambitions or value of certain forms of dance, Greenberg’s writings on modernism in the visual arts have been an important resource. Greenberg motivates the cognitive turn that he takes to be constitutive of modernism in the visual arts in terms of the Enlightenment. In the wake of newly developed scientific methods, the arts (along with religion and philosophy) were denied the kind of seriousness they had traditionally been taken to have – seriousness as sources of knowledge. They were therefore faced with the task of demonstrating that Intention. For a summary of this thought experiment and a critique of common readings of it, see Vogler 2001, 5 First performance: 30 October 1944, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. 6 First performance: 15 February, 2007, Lucent Danstheater, The Hague. 38 THINKING THROUGH DANCE they were necessary, to show that they afforded a kind of experience that was ‘valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other form of activity,’ (Greenberg 1993, p.86). As Greenberg understood it, this involved each art turning inward, using its own procedures to 1) produce the kind of experience or effect that it alone could produce, and 2) show that it alone could produce it by demonstrating that the conditions for the possibility of that experience were the possibilities unique to its medium. Establishing the limits of a given art (or of art more generally) involved eliminating from art any effect that was proper or more natural to another – that is, ‘any effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art,’(ibid., p.86). Consider, for example, Greenberg’s explanation for modernist painting’s turn to abstraction. He argues ‘some of the greatest feats of Western painting’ have been due to its efforts to eliminate effects borrowed from sculpture – the art form to which Western painting owes perhaps the greatest debt – and to realize the possibilities that are unique to its particular conditions of possibility, namely, the flatness of the painted surface. Modernist painting becomes increasingly abstract ‘not because it has abandoned the representation of the recognizable objects in principle’ but because doing so is necessary in order to free painting from its dependence on sculpture: All recognizable entities . . . exist in three-dimensional space, and the barest suggestion of a recognizable entity suffices to call up associations of that kind of space . . . and by doing so alienate pictorial space from the literal two-dimensionality which is the guarantee of painting’s independence as an art. (ibid., p.88) As Greenberg puts it, modernist paintings shifts from the ‘tactile’ (from paintings which give the impression that one could walk through them) – to the purely ‘optical’ (to paintings that one can ‘travel through only with the eye)’ (ibid., p.90). Understood in this way, modernism does not, as it is often thought to, represent a radical break with tradition. It represents instead an effort to clarify and inherit what is best and most vital in the tradition of a painting, ‘continuing in the direction’ of traditional painting while rendering more explicit the conditions for the possibility of its value. Three theorists who draw on different aspects of Greenberg’s work in order to illuminate the cognitive ambitions and achievement of certain choreographers – namely, Merce Cunningham and the Judson Church Choreographers – are Sally Banes, Noël Carroll and Roger Copeland.7 For Banes and Carroll, what is most important is Greenberg’s conception of modernist art as engaged in investigating its own conditions of possibility. 7 Because Levin draws not just on Greenberg but also on Fried, I postpone consideration of his work on until Part Two. DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY/DANCE AS PHILOSOPHY 39 Carroll makes this especially explicit in his article, ‘Art History, Dance and the 1960’s.’ As he understands it, such investigation is one project among many that a given art might undertake. Drawing on Arthur Danto’s developmental history of painting, Carroll describes the history of dance as a succession of such projects. In the early stages of its development, he argues, dance, like painting and drama, devoted itself to a ‘mimetic project’: that of approximating, with ever-increasing verisimilitude, significant dramatic action. For various reasons, the mimetic project came to a close and the ‘authority of the view that representation is the essence of art eroded’ (Carroll 2003a, p.84) This created a problem: the arts, including dance, needed a new ‘project’ or ‘vocation’. Artists and philosophers, aiding and abetting each other at the levels of theory and practice, identified several different options: formalism, expressionism and modernism. Dance that devoted itself to the formalist program sought to create works that afforded a species of ‘aesthetic experience’. Dance that devoted itself to the expressionist project developed forms of movement that were ‘dictated by the logic of inner feeling,’ And dance that devoted itself to the modernist project undertook the theoretical or philosophical task of ‘defining its own essence’ or ‘interrogating its own conditions of possibility,’ It is in terms of this latter project that Carroll seeks to do justice to the achievements of the Judson Church choreographers in particular (ibid., pp.87 & 90). Although Carroll takes his conception of the basic cognitive project that is constitutive of modernism from Greenberg, he argues (following Danto) that the historical development of both the visual arts and dance showed Greenberg to be wrong about what the essential conditions for a given art are, as well as how far the project of investigating those conditions could be taken by the arts themselves. Greenberg assumed that the essential conditions for the possibility of a visual art like painting were ‘perceptible properties’ – e.g., ‘flatness’ – and that ‘interrogating its own nature’ involved an art in ‘deploying . . . its perceptible properties reflexively,’ (ibid., p.89). But the Judson choreographers showed that there were no such properties – that in the case of dance, there were no perceptible properties that distinguished dance from ordinary movement. In so doing, they brought the modernist project as close as dance could bring it to completion.8 They also returned dance to the real world. As Banes and Carroll characterize it, adoption of the ‘modernist project’ had represented a sterilizing and elitist inward turn: it ‘advocates that art be about itself – that art is a practice that is separate from other social enterprises.’ The Judson Church choreographers, part of 8 Since there were no perceptible properties that distinguished dance for ordinary movement, the problem of determining the real conditions for the possibility of dance – i.e., contextualization within the art world – could not be completed within the arts themselves, but only in the medium of philosophy (Carroll 2003, p.89). 40 THINKING THROUGH DANCE the ‘integrationist avant-garde,’ by contrast, ‘agitated for the blurring of the boundary between art and life,’ (Banes & Carroll 2006, p.52). In other words, they returned dance from its self-preoccupation to an engagement with the world and human concerns. Copeland, too, builds upon (and distances himself from) Greenberg in order to illuminate the distinctively intellectual aspirations and achievement of the Judson Church choreographers as well as their predecessor, Merce Cunningham. In Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance, Copeland argues that modern dance prior to Cunningham, especially that of Martha Graham, embraced a form of Cartesianism about the mind and body. Because dance is so intimately related to the body, Graham and her predecessors in effect saw it as the art form most advantageously positioned to resist the ‘cerebral excesses of technocratic civilization and its Cartesian habits of thought’ (Copeland 2004, p.207). Dance, as they conceived it, freed a spectator from such excesses by immersing her in powerful and immediate emotional and bodily experiences. To this end, they developed forms of movement that reduced the distance between audience and dance, emotionally and personally involving the viewer by eliciting powerful tactile responses. Ironically, Copeland argues, the effect of such intrusive stimulation of the viewer’s emotions and bodily sensations was not to free her but instead to reinforce a kind of passivity and vulnerability with respect to the many other forms of stimulation and manipulation to which our feelings and desires are routinely subjected in contemporary life.9 Cunningham, by contrast, put dance on the other side of the Cartesian divide by creating dance that left the feelings and bodily experiences of the viewer ‘out of the equation’ and instead created a ‘purely conceptual experience,’ Cunningham’s choreographic ambition, as Copeland understands it, is captured in the following question: ‘Can the artist ... function principally as a Cartesian mind pried loose from a body?’ (ibid., p.206). Instead of drawing a spectator nearer, Cunningham strove to facilitate the capacity for critical, analytic distance in the face of the forms of stimulation that assault the senses.10 In making this argument, Copeland both acknowledges Greenberg’s importance and distances himself from what he takes to Greenberg’s ‘overly narrow’ conception of modernism. For example, he adapts to dance Greenberg’s discussion of a shift from ‘tactility to opticality’: Clement Greenberg, probably the most important art critic of the period, 9 cf. especially Copeland 2004, pp.87-94. 10 Copeland draws attention to the following remarks of John Cage’s: ‘I wanted art to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. . . . I don’t want to spend my life being pushed around by a bunch of artists’ (Copeland 2004, p.92). DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY/DANCE AS PHILOSOPHY 41 discusses the essentially ‘optical’ (as opposed to tactile) nature of painting in the early 1960’s . . . What Greenberg says of painting applies, mutatis mutandis, to early post-modern [as well as modernist] dance. (Copeland 1986, p.9) But he attributes quite a different purpose and significance to this shift than Greenberg does. As we saw, for Greenberg the shift is important because it is part of how painting acknowledges one of the possibilities unique to its own medium – flatness. For Copeland, the shift is important because it is part of how dance shifts from the wrong to the right side of the Cartesian divide: by shifting to an emphasis on sight, the sense which, Copeland argues, is most closely associated with the intellect and ‘analytical detachment.’11 We can begin to see how the interpretations developed by Banes & Carroll as well as Copeland imply a standard approach to philosophy of dance – that is, one which is characterized by a philosophy-to-dancedirection-of-fit – by exploring a significant way that both interpretations depart from Greenberg’s model, albeit without thematizing that deviation. Like Greenberg, these theorists motivate the philosophical or cognitive turn with which they are concerned in terms of a crisis of confidence and the necessity for justification. But they conceive the form of self-justification at stake differently than Greenberg does. The difference might be summarized this way. While Greenberg argues that the arts take a cognitive turn in order to show the value that they have the standard approach suggests that it is in virtue of taking such a turn that dance comes to have value. Consider Copeland first. By his lights, the crisis of confidence has to do with the medium of dance: because its medium is the human body, dance is the art form which appears to stand at the furthest remove from those human capacities that are presumed to be most important and most distinctively human: our conceptual capacities. Copeland repeatedly highlights the intellectual ambitions (as well as insecurities) of Cunningham and his collaborators. For example, he reads Cunningham’s choreographic ambitions through a comparison with Duchamp: Duchamp . . . seemed to suffer from an intellectual inferiority complex – or at least a fear that the visual arts were perceived as less ‘mentally demanding’ than the verbal arts. In a remarkable burst of candor, he once admitted, ‘the painter was considered stupid, but the poet and writer were intelligent. I wanted to be intelligent’. (Copeland 2004, p.206) 11 Levin, too, adapts this aspect of Greenberg’s argument to dance, arguing that Balanchine’s black and white ballets also effect a shift from tactility to opticality. In his case, though, it is not at all clear what motivates this shift, other than perhaps an attraction and desire to ‘adopt’ the ‘new aesthetic’ that he saw in painting (Levin 1983, pp.126-7). 42 THINKING THROUGH DANCE The ambition, in light of this worry, is to create art (for Cunningham, to create choreography) that had the kind of value it was presumed to lack and which, in their estimation, most dance did in fact lack. Especially in ‘Art History, Dance and the 1960s,’ Carroll highlights a similar crisis of confidence. Since the inception of its ambition to be accepted as a fine art, he argues, dance has sought to gain respect by conforming itself to standards of other, more firmly established ‘fine arts,’ especially painting. This can be seen as early as the ballet d’action of Jean-Georges Noverre, writing and choreographing in France in the 1760s. Noverre, Carroll argues, ‘was a man with a mission. As a choreographer, he was committed to getting dance taken seriously ... he wasn’t interested in describing dance as it was. He was concerned with saying what dance should become – what dance should become in order to be considered art,’ and this committed him to making dance which could be understood to meet the specifications of the ‘presiding theory of art‘ at the time: the imitation theory (Carroll 2003a, 90-1). Fast forward to the 1960s and dance is essentially in the same position: still insecure as an art form, still looking to painting for a model of what it means to be ‘serious’. Only now the prevailing theory of ‘serious’ art (or at least one such theory) is that there are no perceptible differences between art and ordinary life – in the case of dance, no difference between ‘dance movement’ and ‘ordinary movement’ – and that therefore anything can be art (ibid., p.95). The philosophy-to-dance direction of fit that this implies is underscored by the way in which Banes and Carroll describe the choreography of Yvonne Rainer. Like the minimalists in the visual arts and music whom the Judson school claimed as predecessors, Rainer accorded priority not only to the activity of making dances but to an additional and accompanying activity of theorizing about dance. For example, in conjunction with her breakthrough work, ‘Trio-A’, Rainer also publishes a manifesto which attempts to offer an articulation of the theoretical commitments exemplified in this, ‘A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or An Analysis of Trio A’. As Rainer’s friend and colleague Simone Forti puts it ‘You don’t start by experiencing the movement and evolving the movement, but you start from an idea that already has the movement pretty well prescribed,’(quoted from Burt 2009, 9). And as Banes and Carroll put it, the movement ‘implies’ or ‘insinuates’ a theory of dance that is ‘easily stateable in propositions’ and the ‘works in questions can be seen as [the] consequences’ of those theories. (Banes & Carroll 1982, pp.39-40; Carroll 2003a, p.94). This suggests one way of understanding how philosophy might be conceived as necessary to this dance and therefore how such dance could be conceived as providing a paradigm of ‘dance’s philosophy.’ Philosophy, DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY/DANCE AS PHILOSOPHY 43 one might think, is necessary to such dance because it justifies it. Dance is conceived as the conclusion of an aesthetic inference in something like the way action is understood as the conclusion of a practical inference. But can such philosophical theorizing provide this kind of artistic justification? Here is how Cavell puts the point with respect to minimalist musicians: I am not suggesting that such activity [i.e., the theorizing engaged in by the minimalist musician or by the ‘minimalist’ choreographer like Rainer] is in fact unimportant, nor that it can in no way be justified, but only that such philosophizing . . . does not justify it and must not be used to protect it against aesthetic [artistic] assessment’ (Cavell 2003, p.196). If the ‘philosophizing’ that is present in the dance is not ‘justifying’ it, then these accounts have failed to give us the resources to identify a sense in which philosophical reflection is necessarily related to the artistic achievement of some forms of dance. In other words, they have failed to provide a compelling point of departure for something deserving the title ‘philosophy of dance,’ when ‘philosophy of dance’ is understood in the second sense. There are places in Banes & Carroll’s writings in particular where it becomes apparent that it is not in fact clear how, on their account, the philosophical and artistic achievements of Rainer’s choreography are related to each other. For example, there are a number of places where they characterize the artistic value of Rainer’s work in terms of how dance reshapes attention to and appreciation for the ‘everyday’12. But Carroll, especially, often characterizes this value as distinct from and in addition to the theoretical or philosophical achievement of the work. For example, in ‘Yvonne Rainer and the Recuperation of Everyday life,’ he describes Rainer’s commitment to the theoretical project of minimalism as telling ‘only part of the story’ that explains her commitment to exploring everyday movement; it is her second project, that of ‘restoring an appreciation for what was wondrous and simple in everyday movement,’ that tells the rest of the story (Carroll 2003b, pp.72-3). And in ‘The Philosophy of Art History, Dance and the 1960s,’ the independence of these two ‘projects’ is made even more explicit: ‘Everyday work movements are presented in a dance-world context in order to recall to mind the intelligence exhibited by the body in discharging mundane tasks. Theoretically, however, the work also suggests, that movements that do not look like dance can be dance,’ (Carroll 2003a, p.94; italics mine). It simply isn’t clear how, on this account, we should understand the relation between what the dance accomplishes theoretically (demonstrating that there is no perceptible property that distinguishes dance movement from everyday movement) and what it achieves artistically (transforming the quality of our attention to the everyday). 12 Most recently in Banes & Carroll 2006, p.62. 44 THINKING THROUGH DANCE An alternative approach to philosophy of dance In this section, I sketch an alternative approach to philosophy of dance. In seeking to differentiate this approach from the standard one, it might seem most natural to simply reverse the picture that guides the standard approach. In that case, the guiding picture for the alternative approach would be one of a dance-to-philosophy direction of fit. To a certain extent, this is what I do. On the alternative approach, an explicit and accompanying activity of philosophical explication enters, if it enters at all, only to explicate something that is already in the movement. In this sense, an explicit and accompanying activity of philosophical explication can be understood as ‘fitting itself to dance’. In a deeper sense, however, the alternative approach rejects the metaphor of direction of fit altogether. For on this approach, what the explicit and accompanying activity of theorizing explicates is a form of reflection whose medium is, and is necessarily, the movement itself. With respect to such dance, I will argue, there is a reciprocal relation of mutual dependence between the philosophical and artistic achievement of the work. For such dance, two conditions hold simultaneously: •฀It฀is฀in฀virtue฀of ฀what฀the฀work฀achieves฀as art that it achieves something philosophically important. •฀It฀is฀in฀virtue฀of ฀what฀it฀achieves฀philosophically that the work succeeds as art. In developing this alternative approach, I draw on the writings on modernism in the visual arts and music that Cavell and Fried develop together. Like Carroll and Copeland, Cavell and Fried both build on and criticize aspects of Greenberg’s writings, but it is their particular way of doing so that opens the possibility for an approach that succeeds in getting into view a form of philosophical reflection that genuinely belongs to dance as art.13 As we saw in the first section, Carroll and Copeland re-conceive the ‘necessity’ which motivates the cognitive turn that is constitutive of modernist dance. As they understand it, the necessity at issue is external: in order to become valuable, dance must conform itself to an external standard; it must acquire the value that attaches to the cognitive project it takes on. In a certain sense, the necessity that figures in Greenberg’s account is also external: the necessity of showing, in the face of suspicion to the contrary, that dance provides a unique and valuable form of experience. For Cavell and Fried, by contrast, the necessity at issue is internal: dance as an art form reaches a point in its historical development such that in order to remain art, 13 Neither Cavell nor Fried writes extensively about dance, but Cavell acknowledges a role for dance in philosophical reflection in Cavell 2005, p.3. DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY/DANCE AS PHILOSOPHY 45 it is necessary for it to engage in critical reflection upon its own conditions of possibility. Dance reaches this point when ‘the relation between the present practice of [dance] and the history of [dance] has become problematic’: when it is no longer clear whether or how it will be possible to continue to produce dance that, as Fried puts it, is capable of compelling ‘conviction that [it] can stand comparison with [dance of the past] whose quality seems beyond question,’ (Fried 1998, p.17). Cavell puts this point in terms of the capacity to continue to produce work that can matter to us or ‘absorb us in the way that art does,’ that is, in a way that carries with it the conviction that others should care about it, too, and it matters to one that they do (Cavell 2003, p.197). At such a point, the conventions that had hitherto been relied upon in order to produce dance that could matter to us in this way can no longer be so relied on (ibid., pp.xxxii & xxxvi).14 It therefore becomes necessary to discover what, under present conditions, ‘we will accept as [dance] and why we so accept [it],’ (Cavell 2003, p.219). This is not an investigation that could be carried out in a medium other than dance itself: the only way to discover what can absorb us the way great dance of the past absorbs us is to produce work that, when ‘tested against oneself ’, succeeds in doing so. Conceived in this way, the cognitive project that is constitutive of modernist dance is not one which can be ‘brought to a close’ in the way that Carroll suggests – by clearing up, once and for all, what the essential conditions for anything to count as dance are. As Cavell and Fried conceive it, that project is not one of discovering the ‘irreducible essence’ or ‘timeless conditions for the possibility’ of a particular art form. After all, the problem is precisely that conventions, which might have been thought essential to something’s being dance, can no longer be relied upon to produce new work capable of mattering to us in the way that art does. The task is rather, as Cavell puts it, to discover what, under present conditions, will make it possible to produce such work and why. With respect to such dance, there is a reciprocal relation of mutual dependence between the philosophical and artistic achievement of the dance. Its artistic achievement depends upon its ‘entering the condition of philosophy,’ 14 In her exploration of a ‘specific form of knowledge of dance’, Gabriele Brandstetter suggests that clarifying such a form of knowledge in effect requires a kind of Kuhnian paradigm shift in the arts. She asks: ‘Can a pattern comparable to the paradigm shifts described in the history and theory of science be transferred to dance? More precisely: to dance as an art form of body motion in space and time?’ (Gabriele Brandstetter 2007, p.42). As Cavell and Fried conceive it, arts ‘enter the condition of philosophy’ in virtue of undergoing this kind artistic version of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Cavell acknowledges his connection to Kuhn in Cavell 1982, pp.xix, 121 and 164 as well Cavell 2010. See also Fried 1998, p.99. Brandstetter’s question is further evidence that Cavell and Fried offer valuable resources for those interested in dance as forms of knowledge and/or philosophy. 46 THINKING THROUGH DANCE where this means that what dance is – what the present conditions for the possibility of dance are – has become an inescapable subject for dance itself (Cavell 1979, p.14; Cavell 2003, p.xxxxvi). But at the same time, such dance succeeds as philosophy only in virtue of its artistic power: it is only by producing work that can absorb and matter to us that such dance succeeds in showing what its present conditions of possibility are.15 When philosophy of dance is conceived along the lines of the alternative approach, the choreography of Rainer and Cunningham might still be understood to afford paradigmatic instances of dance’s philosophy, but not because their choreography avoids engaging the feelings and imagination (Copeland) or because it abandons an ‘expressive project’ to adopt a ‘philosophical’ one instead (Carroll). From the vantage of the alternative approach, to say of Rainer’s or Cunningham’s work that there is a form of philosophical reflection that belongs to it as art is to say that in order to succeed as art, their work must undertake to discover what forms of bodily movement can, under their respective conditions, matter in the way certain forms of dance were once able to do. One might see an earlier stage of this project in the response of choreographers like Balanchine and Martha Graham to a moment in which the conventions of classical ballet begin to lose their authority, a moment in which: a) ballet movement starts to feel artificial and confining, a denial of the ‘natural’ movement of the body, b) costumes start to register as covering or concealing the body, or c) narratives full of fairies and birds and royalty start to seem silly and distracting. Graham and Balanchine ‘enter the condition of philosophy’ (albeit in very different ways) by finding ways to produce works that, when tested against their audience, ‘compel conviction that [they] can stand comparison with [dance of the past] whose quality seems beyond question’ (Fried 1998, p.17). While the ways of working that Graham discovers require eschewing the ballet vocabulary altogether, 15 In ‘Balanchine’s Formalism’, Levin brings not only Greenberg but also Fried to bear in his interpretation of Balanchine’s black and white ballets. But he does not track the aspects of Fried’s and Cavell’s work that I am arguing are most valuable for the present purpose. Levin does not track their objections to the essentialism that figure at least in Greenberg’s more programmatic essays, nor their corresponding sensitivity to the necessity that figures in the self-reflexive turn that is constitutive of modernist art. By Levin’s lights, ballet takes such a turn because Balanchine chooses to adopt the new modernist aesthetic that had already gained predominance in visual arts and replaced the aesthetic of ‘mimetic connotation and transcendent symbolism’(Levin 1983, p.126). As he sees it, Balanchine made some really beautiful ballets and the interested observer can identify in them many important ‘affinities’ with the aesthetic that ‘defines the paintings and sculptures’, among them a shift to ‘opticality’ and a commitment to ‘reveal, to make present . . . [ballet’s] defining condition as art’ (ibid., p.127). In this way, Levin’s way of drawing on Greenberg and Fried lends itself to a standard approach to philosophy of dance. DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY/DANCE AS PHILOSOPHY 47 those discovered by Balanchine involve working with and transforming that vocabulary. Cunningham and Rainer, then, might be understood to work at a moment when the new possibilities that Graham and Balanchine ‘discovered’ have started to lose their authority, when they have started to appear distractingly overblown and theatrical.16 In other words, while the standard approach holds that Cunningham and Rainer are located at one extreme of a continuum from most to least philosophical, and Graham at the other, the alternative approach suggests a more fundamental affinity. On this approach, Cunningham, Rainer and Graham appear to be working equally, when they work successfully, in the condition of philosophy. One important implication of this alternative way of conceiving both modernism and ‘philosophy of dance’ is that it refuses the dichotomy between dance that is concerned with itself and dance that is, as Banes & Carroll put it, concerned with ‘the world, and/or the devil as he exists off canvas’ (Banes & Carroll 2006, p.52). Part of what the alternative approach clarifies is what is humanly at stake in dance’s philosophy of dance. Dance that enters the condition of philosophy exposes the fragility and partiality of our capacity to understand and be responsive to our own needs. Who are we such that certain forms of bodily movement can matter to us in ways that carry the conviction that others should care and that something is at stake for us in whether they do or not? Why has the life gone out of certain ways of working that were once able to produce work that could matter to us in this way? Will we be able to discover new ways of working that can produce such work? If not, what exactly will have been lost? What do radical changes in what can absorb us (or even whether we can be absorbed at all) reveal about how we have changed or how our world has changed? A second implication of the alternative approach is that getting dance’s philosophy clearly into view provides a vantage from which to reconsider what philosophical reflection is. As we saw, the standard approach attempts to secure the respectability of certain forms of dance by arguing that they have the kind of seriousness that philosophy is generally understood to have. For the alternative approach, by contrast, getting clear about the kind of seriousness certain forms of dance (or sculpture or painting) have makes it possible to get clearer about the kind of seriousness that philosophical reflection has. Philosophy is often understood to have the seriousness it has in virtue of forgoing dependence on anything as tenuous as the subjective response of a reader or viewer. But on the alternative approach, it is not possible to recognize the philosophical work done by some forms of dance as 16 Mark Franko suggests that Graham’s work did not lack the reflexivity that is constitutive of modernist dance, but only a ‘critical witness to articulate its modernism in words’. In fact, he suggests, Graham’s mentor, Louis Horst in effect ‘outlines a Greenbergian reflexivity before the fact’ in his theory of the archaic. See Franko 1995, pp.39 & 47. 48 THINKING THROUGH DANCE philosophical unless one can recognize the dance’s capacity to matter to its viewers – to elicit from its viewers a certain kind of response – as constitutive of at least some forms of philosophical reflection. Part of what is so powerful about Cavell’s work is that he takes this particular form of philosophical reflection to have important implications for our understanding of the character of philosophical work more generally, particularly the work of the ordinary language philosopher. The ordinary language philosopher’s claims about ‘what we would say when’ are, as Cavell puts it, ‘at least as close to what Kant calls aesthetical judgments as they are to ordinary empirical hypotheses’ (Cavell 2003, p.94). What he means by this is that the claims of the ordinary language philosopher call for and depend on being tested against oneself – by being tested against what one is inclined, as a native speaker of English, to say in a certain set of circumstances. Conclusion In this essay, I have explored the possibility of a ‘philosophy of dance’ in which the ‘of ’ is construed subjectively: that is, the possibility of a form of philosophical reflection that belongs to dance as art. Because dance has often struggled to be taken seriously as an art, it can be easy for an interest in dance’s philosophy to register as an effort to secure respectability for dance by associating it with a form of human activity that is assumed to be paradigmatically ‘rational’ and ‘serious’. In the first half of the essay, I argued that implicit in some influential writing about the cognitive value of dance, is a standard approach to the philosophy of dance that makes just this kind of move. On the standard approach, dance is understood to involve philosophical reflection insofar as it fits itself to ends that are traditionally associated not with art but with philosophy and the value of such dance is understood to derive from the philosophy that is present in it. Such an approach, I argued, does not succeed in clarifying a sense in which philosophical reflection might genuinely belong to dance as an art form. In the second half of the essay, I sketched an alternative approach to philosophy of dance, one that I argued clarifies not only a sense in which philosophical reflection might belong to dance, but the strongest possible sense in which this might be the case. On the alternative approach, philosophical reflection belongs to some forms of dance in virtue of a reciprocal relation of mutual dependence that obtains between the artistic power of the dance and the philosophical reflection that is present in it. From the perspective of this approach, dance’s philosophy is not of interest because it appears to secure respectability for dance. It is of interest because investigating a proximity between philosophical and artistic power, which has been poorly DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY/DANCE AS PHILOSOPHY 49 understood, promises to deepen our understanding of both philosophical and artistic endeavour. It is easy to avoid that promise by simply projecting onto dance unsatisfying (though familiar) assumptions about philosophy. But Cavell and Fried’s work, I have argued, stands as a reminder that it is possible not to take this form of the easy way out. In exploring dance’s philosophy, I have limited the scope to dance’s philosophy of dance. This might seem to have arbitrarily excluded the forms of dance’s philosophy that are most interesting. Consider, for instance, Alva Noë’s discussion of what Karen Nelson’s Tuning Scores might teach us: A first answer is that Tuning Scores cast light on dance itself. They inform us of dance possibilities. This may be so. But it is not the answer I am looking for. It does not satisfy. For one thing, it is not surprising to learn that the Tuning Score method will teach us about dance. The question is whether dance, explored by using Tuning Scores, can teach us about something else (i.e., the mind). (Nöe 2007, p.125) Similarly, in seeking to clarify the ‘cognitive value’ of what she calls ‘dance about dance’, Catherine Elgin articulates what she takes to be a common frustration (although she also takes there to be a good response to that frustration): There is something irritatingly self-indulgent about artists’ talk of exploring the limits of their medium. One wants to reply, ‘Yes, yes I can see why artists working in a medium and art students studying a medium need to care about the limits of the medium. But why should the rest of us care? What sort of understanding does such an exploration yield for us? (Elgin unpublished, 12) For Elgin, the interest of such exploration lies in what it can illuminate about topics in philosophy of mind and action: the relation between mind and body and the nature of intelligent spontaneous action. I, too, am interested in how dance might illuminate topics that extend beyond the reach of aesthetics proper. But there is, I think, a connection between the perspective from which dance seems in need of some form of external grounding or justification and the perspective from which dance’s philosophy starts to look interesting only once we can see that its scope extends beyond dance itself. Whatever dance’s philosophy might contribute to reflection upon topics in philosophy of mind and philosophy of action will come by way of working through difficult questions about what dance itself is and why it matters to us in the way it does.17 17 This article was completed with support from an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellowship. Portions of the material were presented at Roehampton University’s 2011 Thinking Through Dance conference, the 2011 meeting of the American 50 THINKING THROUGH DANCE References Banes, Sally and Noël Carroll. ‘Working and Dancing: A Response to Monroe Beardsley’s “What is Going on in a Dance?”,’ Dance Research Journal, 1982, vol. 15 no. 1, pp.37-41. Banes, Sally and Noël Carroll. ‘Cunningham, Balanchine and Postmodern Dance,’ Dance Chronicle, 2006, vol. 29, pp.49-68. Brandstetter, Gabrielle. ‘Dance as Culture of Knowledge’ in Gehm, Sabine, Pirkko Husemann and Katharina von Wilcke (eds.), Knowledge in Motion: Perspectives of Artistic and Scientific Research in Dance, Piscataway, NJ: Transcription Publishers, 2007, pp.37-48. Carroll, Noël. ‘Art History, Dance and the 1960s’ in Banes, Sally (ed.), Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003a, pp.81-97. Caroll, Noël. ‘Yvonne Rainer and the Recuperation of Everyday Life’ in Sachs, Sid (ed.), Radical Juxtapositions: 1961-2002, Philadelphia: The University of the Arts, 2003b, pp.64-85. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed, New York: The Viking Press, 1971. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cavell, Stanley. ‘Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise,’ Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Cavell, Stanley. Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Copeland, Roger. ‘The Objective Temperament: Post-Modern Dance and The Rediscovery of Ballet,’ Dance Theatre Journal, 1986, vol. 4 no. 2, pp.6-11. Copeland, Roger. Merce Cunningham : The Modernizing of Modern Dance, New York: Routledge, 2004. Elgin, Catherine Z (unpublished). ‘Emotion, Expression and Exemplification.’ Access to this article was obtained through communication with the author. It has been published in French: ‘Exemplification et la Dance’ in Philosophie de la Dance, Rennes: Presses Universitaire de Rennes, 2010, pp.81-98. Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Association for Aesthetics,as well as the University of Chicago’s Wittgenstein Workshop, and Practical Philosophy Workshop. I benefited especially from questions raised by Jenny Bunker, Noël Carroll, Renee Conroy and Graham McFee. I am grateful to Aili Bresnehan, James Conant, James Hamilton and Daniel Morgan for helpful comments on earlier drafts. DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY/DANCE AS PHILOSOPHY 51 Franko, Mark. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995. Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Levin, David Michael. ‘Balanchine’s Formalism’ in Copeland, Roger and Marshall Cohen (eds.), What is Dance?, New York: Oxford University Press: pp.123-42. Originally published in Dance Perspectives, Autumn 1973, vol. 55. Nöe, Alva. ‘Making Worlds Available,’ in Gehm, Sabine, Pirkko Husemann and Katharina von Wilcke (eds.), Knowledge in Motion: Perspectives of Artistic and Scientific Research in Dance, Piscataway, NJ: Transcription Publishers, 2007, pp.121-8. Vogler, Candace. ‘Anscombe on Practical Inference’ in Millgram, Elijah (ed.),Varieties of Practical Reasoning, Boston: MIT Press, 2001.