Bodily Schemata and Sartre's I and Me: Reflection and Awareness in Movement

Dancers who stop relying on mirrors face the same problem philosophers have long grappled with: how to become aware of the inner, nonconscious structures that organize movement (bodily schemata). This article uses Jean-Paul Sartre's challenge to Edmund Husserl's pure ego—specifically his notion of object transcendence—to propose that dancers can access bodily schemata not by turning attention inward, but by focusing on a site of interaction where objects or materials (clothing, costume, digital representations) extend or supraextend the body. In this view, the dancer becomes an audience to these distally extended bodily reflections, making the hidden structures of movement perceptible through external, interactive technologies.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Philosophers have faced the problem of self or inner awareness since the self, itself, became something to be known and/or understood. Once dancers ‘let go of the mirror’ (Emily Claid 2006) they too began to face the problem and limits to bodily awareness, developing specific reflective practices to obtain access to their inner bodily selves. But for the phenomenologist, reflection requires an active process of perception, which problematises our grasping of the so-called hidden, organising structures of movement that are unable to be perceived (bodily schemata). For the dancer, then, how is it possible to access and have a deeper understanding of these nonconscious bodily structures? What are the limits to inner bodily awareness? In this article, I draw upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s challenge to Edmund Husserl’s pure ego with his notion of object transcendence in his essay of 1937, Transcendence of The Ego: An existentialist theory of consciousness. I do this as a possible means for understanding bodily schemata and its expression through interactive dance technologies. Using examples from dance, I suggest how bodily schemata can be accounted for if our attention is not directed towards an inner sensing of the body, but towards a site of interaction where objects or materials extend or supraextend our bodies in the form of clothing, costume and digital representations, and where the dancer becomes audience to these distally extended bodily reflections.