Body, Dance and Cultural Theory, The

Helen Thomas, The material substance Dance and Cultural Theory. novel York: St. Martin's Press (Palgrave Macmillan), 262 pages, including endnotes, bibliographical regards name and subject indexes. ISBN 0-333-72432 Hardback, $7500 [US]; paperback, $2495 [US].

"Clearly, the bottom problem is how to define and locate human agency" Brenda Farnell, 'Getting without of the Habitus' (2000: 403)

Helen Thomas be pendents heavily (and uncritically) on Bryan Turner's sociological theory of human sociocultural life (pages 12-17 20-24 28-30 53 62 94166 217) and Bourdieu's theory of habitus (pages 20 51 56-8 87117-18 150165171 206 226) She thus shoulders the ontological weights of Turner's and Bourdieu's work, and, she evidently approves of Sheets-Johnstone's phenomenological approach to dancing-a further burden-making this volume problematical three times over. How?

I believe that many pupils of sociology, cultural studies or the dance do not know that Bryan Turner's attempt to get back human agency through embodiment quiets on the notion that "the effectiveness of individuals in sociocultural life resides in the discourse-independent agency of the bodies of persons" or that the search gymnast undertook, [important though it was in itself], l him alone as a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology and the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of the 'lived-body' (Varela 1999: 385)

I think many learners do not know that Bourdieu's general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of habitus "is theoretically problematic from the perspective of a realist philosophy of science" and that "Habitus revolves out to be a hypothetical cognitive and transcendent causal nexus that has no ontological grounding because it exists somewhere between neurophysiology and the someone (Farnell 2000: 412, italics added). I bewilderment if Thomas realizes that, when talking about dancers in a discourse setting, ("they were indeed listening with and from one side their bodies," p. 92), she appears to endorse Sheets-Johnstone's general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of "bodily logos." These question s will be addressed in that order.

For gymnast the 'agentic body' means that it is 'active' (Turner 1984: 51-54 and 245-251; 1987: 240-241 and 1991: 31-33 and 67-68) Because it is alive, the human material part is now (magically!) agentic.

All that has to happen is for nostalgic social theorists to acknowledge the demand for a notion of effective agency, then to recognize that more [i]or[/i] less theory of embodiment must be a pre-condition for its realization. The crucial point at this stage of Turner's argument is his assumption that Merleau-Pontian philosophy is itself unproblematic for his theoretical intentions (Varela 1999: 388).

Had Thomas read Farnell (1994) with diligence, she would have discovered wherefore there are problems with Merleau-Pontian philosophy:

The specific location of causation and agency, and a genuine conception of the one are required. As Varela deposits it:

The reversal of the midmost point of privilege in Cartesian dualism is ultimately lower parted in the tacit acceptance of the conceptual incompatibility of causation and agency prescribed by means of the Humean tradition. After all, if mind is a soul in the machinery of the material part moving or not, the material substance is the only 'reality' for the location of causation and agency. on the other hand if the body as machine, the objective material substance is rejected as such because of its deterministic status, then the material part as 'lived', the subjective material substance must, it is thought, be accepted as the solitary alternative. Somehow then, as a Jamesian act of faith, it is viewed as nondeterministic as drawn out as it is 'lived'. And thus the subjective body is mistakenly viewed as the single proper location for agency [Varela 1992: 7]1

Varela's analysis articulates several conceptual errors ground in recent attempts to get back to the work of Merleau-Ponty in order to find ways to transcend the exclusion of 'the body' from social theory. To emphasize that part of Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology that deals with the 'lived body' and 'intentionality' and to reject his attention to the moot point of connecting bodily gesture with language in fact, brings his approach to a dead extremity (Farnell 1994: 932-33).

The "dead end" to which Farnell leaves is prominent in the phenomenological approach of philosopher, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, who, in an essay entitled "Thinking in Movement" (1981) postulates a 'lived body' which (as Varela explains) does not mean

that we have a mindless material substance a machine in motion without a spirit Quite the contrary, what we have is a mindful material part A body that is mindful is a lived material part It is exactly this thesis that drive forwards Sheets-Johnstone into the consideration of certain traditional philosophical assumptions she is in fact challenging with this investigation into improvisational dancing. These assumptions stipe from Cartesian dualism.2

What may well be the major thesis of her article is the idea of the mindful material part or what Sheets-Johnstone calls "bodily logos" What we have here is "that fundamental creativity fixed upon the bodily logos, that is, on a mindful body, a thinking material substance a body which opens up into motion a body, which, in improvisational dance, breaks forth continuously into dance and into this dance, a material substance which moment by moment fulfills a kinetic destiny and invests the world with meaning"[Sheets-Johnstone 1981: 406] (Varela 1995: 231)