I§

Introduction

Dance is inherently political; historically, it has been conceived of, and repeatedly enacted as, an effective means of public protest.  In an age of extreme and agitated social discord, the recovery of dance as a public good for public political contribution may provide a mechanism for bridging divides.  The success of performance arts as forms of political resistance, and the intrinsic and extrinsic value accorded to the arts in social democratic countries, lends itself to a promising outlook for its reclamation in the US and other liberal democracies.  Because art is already so minimized as a social good, very little public attention is directed towards expressive bodies and the kinds of stories they tell.  Outside of sports, the body is largely ignored; and even in sports, the body is objectified—often as a site deserving of violence—and afforded no subjectivity.  The reintroduction of dance and other performing arts into the bedrock of social education and interaction could redirect the public eye towards the meaning of the body as itself a political interlocuter.  Regarded as a legitimate source of deliberative contribution and collective reasoning, purposefully politically moving bodies could shed light on the unintentional political being of all moving bodies.  To demystify the constant discursive interaction between bodies in society could help counter implicit biases that protect systemic forms of oppression from penetration by traditional modes of political opposition.  Performance art may not be able to resolve our public crises of political polarization, but its reason-giving powers can rend small fissures into the seemingly impervious barrier between our shared understandings of public interests.    

Most contemporary democracies—specifically, neoliberal democracies endorsing some admixture of Lockean and Rawlsian individualistic values of the reasonable and the rational—provide little space for, and assign minimal value to, political artistic interventions.  This debasing of art and movement in the public sphere has deep democratic consequences.  It’s not hard to see that as the identification of art as a social good declines, liberal democratic societies become increasingly more politically polarized.  And though the absence of public performance art may not be the principal downfall of liberal society, the eradication of embodiment and bodied narratives from democratic consideration pulls at the very weave of social life and the continuance of culture itself.  

Artists within, and beyond, fine arts institutions continuously call on social and political institutions to support and promote the arts as a social good, but often receive little, if any, uptake.  Public universities are cutting programs and funding, arts venues are becoming elitist and unaffordable with little regard for public decay, and various forms of local and national governments disparage the arts as wasteful and indulgent.  Many individuals have lost sight of the meaning of citizenship as participatory engagement with others through diverse communicative mechanisms.  As such, recognition of art as having any social and political intrinsic or extrinsic worth has virtually vanished. Currently, the average citizen conceives of artists as either free riders or trust fund babies—and in both instances, narcissists.  But with the rise of gross dismantling, artists press on—and with good reason and great need.  If key democratic aims are to ensure social and political equality, expressive and narrative performance art needs to be welcomed discursive practices to expand the public imaginary.  The political power of performance art to counter social beliefs that sustain systemic forms of oppression may very well drive its erasure from democratic spaces.  Neoliberal democracies may have grown apathetic, or even hostile, to the performance arts, but democratic models beyond liberalism do possess foundational principles able to promote artistic expression as a vital lifeforce for the public imaginary.  My purpose in this project is to shorten the distance between the political reality of US political polarization and democratic ideals for cultivating shared understandings by revealing just how agentic the body can be.  

I aim to show how new moves in the Enactivist camp of embodied cognitive science provide the biosocial empirical work, and concomitant theoretical frameworks, for explicating the real—rather than metaphorical— communicative potential for successful embodied communication in the public sphere through dancing.  Generally speaking, embodied cognition is the philosophical and scientific framework that rejects mind/body dualism and holds that the body is central to cognition (e.g. Damasio 2010; Gallagher; Johnson 1987, 2017).  Scholars hold varying degrees of embodiment in relation to cognition but all hold that the body, in relation, cognizes.  Some suggest that the body merely plays a causal role in cognition and others maintain that the body is constitutive of cognition, with a plethora of positions in between.  Enactivism is the strongest theory of embodiment, which positions the body and affect as constitutive of cognition. Coming from the rich intersections between embodied cognition, dance, politics, and phenomenology, I argue that dance can have an ameliorative democratic impact through embodied narrative contributions to the realm of public reasons.  

More specifically, I argue that moving political bodies can be directly deliberative at the level of collective reasoning.  Using the enactivist model of linguistic bodies, I substantiate dancing as a particularly participatory mode of democratic participation vis-à-vis its function in participatory sense-making.  When I speak of dance here, I speak of the open-ended creative, artistic, expressive, and inquiring mode of movement that could be identified as dancing.  I do not presume that any one form of dance is better positioned to be communicative in political ways because dance is imbued with embodied intentions and meaning.  For this reason, everything from modern dance to hip hop—even ballet and line dancing—has the capacity to be political.  I look into this role of dance, however the dancers conceive it and moves it, as a participatory democratic operation to analyze how dancing bodies operate linguistically, such that their role in meaning-making extends beyond communal sense-making into the realm of collective reasoning via reason-giving and reason-sharing.  I argue that dancing is a reason-giving practice that can proffer explicit communication from the body to be given uptake by another body.  

I am situating my argument regarding the possibility of meta-linguistic acts against democratic models of participation and reasoning that are most closely identified with social democracies.  Social democracies promote a larger set of social goods, and consider more forms of expression as, politically advantageous, which can help us recognize that the use of art as a public and political good is not entirely fantastical.  I merely summarize these frameworks to reveal the greatest potential of linguistic bodies to function democratically.  If my point that bodies carry communicative power across time and space in deeply meaningful and explicit ways, then this gives us good reason to work to revitalize public forms of dance and performance art within the current, non-ideal political society of the US to move towards more ideal modes of public reason.  

§1

Deliberative democracy

Broadly speaking, a fact of sociality is that community members largely possess shared social meanings and sets of socio-political practices.  These practices include linguistics, non-verbal perlocutionary gestures, or embodied communications, which are all facets of interdependence and intersubjectivity (McMahon 2009, Pettit 1993, Wahman 2008, Walker 1998, 2003). Communities use these concepts and practices to manufacture shared understandings and shared moral concepts through discursive engagement. To do so, individuals must negotiate the meanings of such concepts through formal and informal mediums of interaction. Subsequently, those concepts then configure into shared moral understandings vis-à-vis corresponding social arrangements and provide individuals with a picture of how they do, and should, live as a community (Walker 1998; 2003, 106, 109).  The historically dependent, causal interdependence between individuals, moral concepts, and social arrangements is a method of world-making since changes individuals make in either concepts or arrangements cause shared understandings to evolve (f1).

One key objective of normative political philosophers is to alleviate the problem of oppressive forms of exclusion in the public sphere.  This is why there are so many proponents of deliberative democratic models.  Seyla Benhabib (1996, 70) characterizes deliberative democracy as one that involves equal and symmetrical participation governed by norms for interaction.  Benhabib advocates for this discursive model because individuals do not possess sufficient knowledge apart from others for reasonable and rational decisions-making about socio-political arrangements. Discursive processes function dynamically, and make contributions to the inputs and outputs of communicated exchanges. Participatory, discursive practices construct individuals’ shared understanding of the common good and also generate principles for reasoning about their collective interests.  These shared understandings are constructed by and, in return, feed back into, communicative activities that keep community members incessantly connected even when they are not in direct interaction (f2). 

Discursive, deliberative democratic practices facilitate collective shared understandings since the logic of participatory processes has an educative effect (f3).  Dialogical interaction formulates a public interest that differs from private interests since individuals must hear from others what is of value from community members who occupy differing social roles. And when interpersonal exchanges transpire, people manufacture a public interest that stems from the resultant pluralist perspective.  Individuals’ incorporation of others’ perspectives into their own is important because a diverse perspective more accurately represents community needs that emerge from shared understandings.  Individuals navigate their sociability in terms of their ability to properly contribute to, and construct, their socio-political arrangements and relations with, through, and in conjunction with others.  Moreover, the interactive relations between community members dialogically constructs the individual herself since the concepts developed and shared together shapes individuals’ public and private preferences. 

The processes through which communities construct their interests, moral concepts, and social arrangements pervades all relevant aspects of identity, preference, and value construction at the individual and collective level.  Collective reasoning is an important dialectic in deliberative democracy; it is a process of deliberative cooperation by which individuals develop collective, “we” intentions (f4).  Christopher McMahon defines collective reasoning as a shared deliberation that marks mutually beneficial cooperation (f5).  This reasoning differs from individualist versions of reasoning in that decisions are products of input from each deliberator rather than an aggregate of each individual’s own preferences.  Collective reasoning begins with individual opinions concerning the target and then moves to meld them into one choice—or shared understanding—by adjusting, repairing, or reordering preferences by taking all reasons for those preferences into consideration.  When individual judgments, as options, are deliberated upon collectively, the result is more substantively fair and reflective than liberal democratic practices.  The aim of deliberative democratic collective reasoning is not to eliminate or ignore self-interest; rather, the fact of interconnection reveals the extent to which purely atomistic self-interest goes against the grain of freedom in community.  

§2

Linguistic bodies

Embodied cognition theory is a framework that uses empirical work and interdisciplinary theorizing to move our understanding of the body as a mere vehicle to the more accurate understanding of the body as constitutive of the mind.  The enactivist version of embodied cognition theory makes the more radical—and accurate—claim that the body is the mind; we are a bodymind.  From an enactivist perspective, cognition itself emerges from sensorimotor life, which is a life lived in interaction with the world and others.  Through bodied movement, we enact the world through perceptually guided actions; cognitive processes emerge from movement repetition.  Our cognitive system is constituted, then, by the ways in which we are able to be sensitive, and adapt, to motor variations that bring about changes in our sensations and/in the environment.  Cognition is an emergent property of the body in action.  We perceive objects when we are able to finally recognize the sensory and motor patterns associated with them and, further, to anticipate the changes in our own sensorimotor activity as a result of perceiving (Di Paolo 2017, 19).  These sensorimotor processes spawn our sensorimotor contingencies, which guide us through our daily lives imbued with perpetual activity.  As the environment changes and offers new affordances for action, we select various sensorimotor contingencies to coordinate together—a kind of mutual accommodation—as a means of responding to these changes in accord with one’s situational needs and desires (108).  Importantly, affect is a form of movement and perceptual stimulation and so shapes our sensorimotor contingencies and motivates our selection of which combination to enact when enacting the world.  Di Paolo, et al. explain that emotions are emergent higher order cognitive constraints on the dynamics of muscular neural and autonomic processes that integrate the body’s affect (177).        

Generally speaking, the act of enacting meaningful sense in, and of, the world is the overarching normative objective of a sensorimotor agent.  Perception turns out to be inherently meaningful in terms of our relationality to our environment and other people.  We go about selecting sensorimotor schemas by assessing and evaluating our relations to others and we do so by selecting those aspects of our circumstances that are meaningful to our actions vis-à-vis our needs or desires.  The normativity of the lived body is grounded in the physiological, biological, neurological normative conditions for the biological and phenomenological body.  These normative constraints for sense-making at the sensorimotor level include adaptability, coordination and harmony, success and failure, sensitivity, but also: efficiency, robustness, adequacy, dexterity, elegance, coherence, and the affective, felt enjoyment of movement and flow of action (156).  Further, because sense-making is inherently relational, the normativity of sensorimotor agency always contains a social component.  The social norms associated with sensorimotor agency are, primarily, harmony, assimilation, and accommodation.  These are the norms that guide individuals in their actions with others.  For individuals to succeed in their action goals, they must use motor-linguistic social cues to determine how to establish equilibrium between themselves and the others—people, places, things—involved in the affordances of the circumstance.  As Di Paolo, et al. rightly assert, we identify and describe people according to their behavior in, and through, action; this is normative phenomenological agency at the sensorimotor level (142).  

According to Di Paolo, et al, persons have a linguistic agency that is grounded in a linguistic body.  This is why enactivism is a cross between sensorimotor sense-making and participatory sense-making.  As sensorimotor agents who are in a dynamical system with our environment, this puts us in a constant readiness to act; we exist in relation to the world in a participatory readiness to engage others through enactive practices.  When we think about how language is embodied, we must think about how our bodies language.  An enactive theory of embodied languaging practices places the focus on our basic corporeal sensorimotor logics (133).  Our linguistic relations to the world emerge from our social interactions with others, which provide the parameters on individual goal construction and action affordances.  Thus, a linguistic body is a body that is socially situated and performed qua movement and from which others’ agency can be incarnated (195).  We have a linguistic agency, that is a sensorimotor agency, because we must incorporate the acts and utterances—embodied and verbal—of others into our assessment of opportunities for action.  Utterances, as a communicative medium, entail and engender the relationships between people and acts.  Our agency necessarily depends on the kinds of goals others have as well, since their cares and concerns contribute to, and shape, my own choices.  Linguistic bodies are bodies that navigate the constitutive tension between how I choose to act and how I incorporate other’s agency into my own (217).  Therefore, all of our actions in the world are part of a shared corporeal relationality and consists of the coregulation between oneself and others that grounds participatory sense-making.  They explain that interactive situations of participatory sense-making, even when they are not recognized as such, are the entry points into the categories that develop and describe a deeply embodied approach to languaging (137). We develop and enact cognitive powers via linguistic agency through social practices of coregulation in participatory sense-making.  While we have autonomous control over how we make sense of the world, our ability to make sense requires that we must allow for others to engage with us as linguistic bodies in joint social acts (149).   

The enactive view of sense-making is social and dialectical in nature precisely because it is dynamic and embodied.  Both dynamical systems and dialectical practices are constituted by norms such as circularity, narrative, relations, tendencies, non-linearity, and emergence.  Thinking about the world dialectically, they claim, just is a means of thinking about the world enactively (109).  The dialectical, dynamic components of participatory sense-making reveal how we make ourselves by making ourselves out of others as perpetual bodies in action.  Consequently:

In the enactive view, in other words, an authentic human self is one that understands her own constitutive dependencies and her own incompletion, and in so doing contributes creatively to—and struggles critically against—the framing that community processes impose on herself and her people (257).

The creative responsiveness of enactivism drives linguistic bodies to be responsive to one another in ways that bolster autonomy and secure relationality.  How we choose to incorporate others’ actions is a function of how we perceive their actions in relation to our own desires.  They exist, in part, as an intentionality we have “over there”.  Intersubjectivity, then, rests on a synergy between bodies in daily encounters in the world (63).  Sense-making is intersubjective and participatory sense-making evolves from coordinated interaction patterns between the self and other, even if not noticed and even if outright rejected.  No matter the explicit desire of an actor, patterns of social interaction produce entanglements between the bodies of participants that create and refine social meanings and understandings (77).  The joint social practices of frame-building and sense-making involve our expertise in ethical know-how that follows from being a linguistic body.  Our implicit know-how resultant of interactive relationality imbues the acts we perform as linguistic bodies with this normativity.  Our social powers qua linguistic bodies is our ability to bring into effect, or question, norms and attitudes.  Linguistic performances always carry ethical content since linguistic performances always carry deeply embodied risks in how we incorporate them into our sense of self and how we incarnate others (314).  

Linguistic bodies contribute partial acts and utterances to the grammar of embodied, participatory sense-making.  Our linguistic agency consists of making these embodied utterances coherent.  Di Paolo, et al. define utterances as acts—embodied, material patterns—enacted by sensorimotor bodies.  They have an inherently dialogic structure that orients people towards each other; uttering in interaction is taking one’s turn in the interaction, as it were, and opens the space for meaningful responses.  As such, they engender the necessary social meaning-making norms of recognition and interpretation.  “They are acts that demand, and create, participants” (2).  Partial acts are partial because they are initiated by one actor and must be completed by the other in order to create a whole act (154).  They are used by actors who—knowingly or not—work together to codefine and coenact mutually defined sensorimotor schemes to facilitate coregulating enactments.  Each newly developed and enacted schema contributes to our embodied repertoire of schemas for interaction; if we have a large repertoire of partial acts available to choose from during interactions, they can be chosen to start new interactions and potentially spawn newer modes of coordination.  I may introduce my hand as a partial act of greeting but this creates a new opportunity to contribute a wholly new and unanticipated greeting return, since my open hand allows for plenty of affordances for completion.  For this reason, gestures—like sticking one’s hand out as a greeting—function as regulating partial acts to help interactions sustain coregulation by making choices amongst affordances more obvious and easier qua social repetition.  This ease provided by gestures shores up our social know-how with respect to interaction.  

One of the reasons why their account of linguistic bodies is central to my project is in how they construe movements and gestures as utterances.  That partial acts within interactions function as linguistic contributions in a deep, rich, and technical sense helps one better understand how understanding, and participating with, dancing bodies is sensical.  Enactivism allows embodied cognition to go further than the cognitive linguistics of Lakaff and Johnson (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). According to Lakoff and Johson, conceptual embodied metaphors originate in our embodied image schemas when we pair up a physical experience with a subjective experience.  These embodied metaphors constitute our primary embodied metaphors that carry our embodied logics and are then extrapolated and applied to the world conceptually.  The repetition of patterns between physical sensation or orientation and the conceptualization of the experience produces neural maps from the physical to the conceptual. In the “affection is warmth” metaphor, warmth is the source domain and affection is the target domain. When one experiences affection, the neural cluster for warmth becomes activated. Our use of conceptual embodied metaphors occurs naturally and automatically and become ingrained into our linguistic understanding of the world as they become systematized through use. Sure, our language is amply constituted by, and through embodied metaphors.  But recognizing the body as a linguistic bodies reveals that the languaging relationship between the body and movement is bi-direction.  The body yields dynamic and thick meanings and verbal language is a sort of fast pass to getting at that meaning.  However, verbal language fails to capture all of the dimensions of lived life because it is impossible for a static medium to capture the languaging of the body in movement and interaction.  

What enactivism can help us understand, especially with respect to better understanding the feasibility of participatory models of democracy, is that we are already inherently engaged in participatory sense-making at the bodied level and our entrainments are an instance of embodied collective reasoning.  When we try to understand something as explicit as democratic collective reasoning at an enactive, embodied level, it becomes necessary to recognize partial acts as embodied reasons in participatory meaning-making.  Partial acts are the joint facets of shared know-how that ground the pragmatics of interaction (Di Paolo et al 2018, 151).  Generically speaking, interactions involve and require an exchange between individuals, where each person plays their own unique role in the sensorimotor sense-making.  We both approach a door—when you open it, I step to the side, I walk through around you, you sneak around me.  We have collectively deliberated the best way to navigate a conflict of personal interest.  Sensorimotor contingencies are generally set and we follow them like a script.  But because we are autonomous in the thin sense of the word, we have ample opportunity for originality in communication to push—and potentially even change—shared understandings.  Partial acts are regulatory in the way norms are, but they are also one communicative piece of a dialectical interaction comprised of embodied participatory sense-making through embodied reason-giving in, and for, action.  

§3

Linguistic bodies and narrative

Much like community and interpersonal interactions generate shared understandings regarding beliefs and norms, bodies also generate shared understandings through the interactions of their sensorimotor agency.  Linguistic bodies develop shared understandings through shared implicit recognition of the meanings that come from sensorimotor agency, both through meta-linguistic partial acts and the embodied metaphors resultant from a shared syntax based on our sensorimotor affective patterns and body schemas.  As I have argued in other places (2019), embodied metaphors are readably by others because they are shared physiologically and culturally.  Embodied metaphors can be understood communicatively as connotations, denotations, and declarations.  Partial acts operate a connotations, denotations, and suggestions.  For this reason, embodied metaphors are complete ideas within narrative communication and partial acts are contributions to dialectics that require bodied dialogues qua participatory sense-making.    

It is important to point out how the role of linguistic bodies in decision-making are legitimate coregulatory and cooperative communicative contributions.  However, mainstream forms of deliberative democracy are grounded in ideals of rationality, universality, and individualism that are antithetical to models of embodied participatory sense-making and knowing.  Thus, the account of linguistic bodies, and enactivism itself, must be situated within feminist frameworks for it to be sensical within socio-political applications.  Iris Marion Young offers the ideal framework for linguistic bodies: Communicative Democracy.  The democratic schema recognizes the centrality of embodied knowledges and interactions and values styles of “speech” that are tentative and exploratory.  In this model, the body, affect, informality, and intersubjectivity take precedence as the normative modes for participatory sense-making in shared understandings.  Significantly, Young emphasizes the necessity of recognizing pluralist modes of communication, including greeting and storytelling (129).  

Narrative connotes one’s subjective particularity through the uniqueness of one’s story.  And while narrative proves central to demonstrating the particularity of “others”, it also depicts one’s own particularity and difference through the process of distinction.  Moreover, narrative can exhibit subjective and social group interdependence because the process of distinction edifies how entrenched community members are in relations of mutual effect; stories, rather than claims, reflect how they are shaped by and through one another as a result of their motley social relations.  Narrative, then, has the capacity to cultivate the positive valuation of difference within the demos since it abrogates misconceptions of an objective, universal standard for both subjectivity and personal trajectories. Any conception of a public must take as a foundational assumption that the community is constituted by many, as portrayed through difference, rather than one, or sameness (Young 1990, 111).  

A deliberative, communicative democracy highlights the factual and normatively significant role of difference in collective reasoning.  Narrative makes it possible for community members to discern at least some shared premises from which to build and sculpt dialogical understanding because narratives target underlying false assumptions (53, 74).  When values and priorities are not only communicated, but also shared, through experiences and histories in narrative form, listeners can grasp more meaning behind the values being invoked than they would if the values had been presented as uncontextualized, impartial final claims. Narrative as a performative practice fosters the creation of shared understandings that Young posits as central to communicative forms of deliberation.  This is because stories are unique interpretations excavated through ethical discursive relations.  Narrative is not merely important to deliberation; it is essential to establishing shared understandings and norms for democratic communication and equality (Young 1996, 120).  

When thinking of linguistic bodies as deliberative, democratic interlocuters, the tensions negotiated via partial acts can be seen as purposefully negotiating the tensions of agonistic individual socio-political interests and desires.  These tensions result from the interaction between autonomous persons; but more importantly, these tensions are a result of the difference that emerge from autonomy qua individuality. So, when bodies negotiate tensions, they are negotiating the tensions of difference—of bodies and perspectives.  Partial acts cannot move in the direction of competing individual interests because this would cause a break-down in the participatory sense-making.  But they are agonistic insofar as sense-makers maintain autonomy to create shared understanding through participatory sense-making bodied interactions.  As such, partial acts are inherently deliberative and democratic by their very nature.  Sense cannot be made or shared, which is necessary given the fact of social dynamical systems, if one attempts to control and erase the autonomy of another to “win”—through action—the interaction.  This is exactly what a liberal democratic model implies since it rests on an understanding of socio-political interaction as a competition between individual desires and interests.  And just as feminist political philosophers have shown, liberal democratic models fail to produce shared understandings and so fail to create effective, successful communities.  Liberal democratic models preclude cooperation and eventually facilitate, rather than prevent, socio-political breakdowns because there is an absence of participatory engagements and therefore, an absence of community entrainments.  Liberal democratic models grounded in competition do not contain normative prescriptions suitable to ensuring universal autonomy; and it certainly cannot sustain universal autonomy.  Deliberative democratic models are based on discursive modes of partial acts, broadly construed, to ensure equality, freedom, autonomy, participatory sense-making, and therefore individual “autopoiesis” within a harmonious dynamical community.   

Partial acts on linguistic bodies can be construed as a form of ethical bodied asymmetrical reciprocity within Communicative Democracy.  Young offers this notion contra Benhabib’s (1991) conception of egalitarian reciprocity, which prescribes individuals see others’ perspectives as reversible to bolster reciprocal recognition and relationality.  Young argues that perspectives need not and should not be viewed as replaceable in this way.  She agrees with Benhabib that moral respect requires reciprocity and mutuality but counters that individuals cannot see others’ subjectivity if they do not also recognize the uniqueness of their social locations, narratives, and histories.  She argues that if reciprocity is about a willingness to listen then an assumption of sameness in perspective would undermine the importance of question asking and attentiveness that signifies moral respect.  Instead, she argues, individuals should pursue an asymmetrical reciprocity that prioritizes difference and plurality in perspectives.   This notion of asymmetrical reciprocity does not undermine the anti-domination condition of participatory sense-making; actually, it more accurately signifies the fact of the normative negotiation of tensions.  The construction of shared understandings does not require a symmetrical tit-for-tat style of interaction because sense requires plural perspectives and everyone’s perspectives have more to offer in some situations than others. This holds for embodied-bodied participatory sense-making as well because, often, interactions will necessitate the leading of one partner; and one’s leading—or carrying the weight—of an instance of discourse does not equate to domination.  Many interactions require one to defer to the other for the interaction to be successful at multiple normative levels.  Strict symmetry can result in inefficiency, inequality, inadequacy, and injustice in linguistic sense-making.    

§4

Dancing as reason-giving

Dance theorists and dance philosophers have made great strides in evidencing the ability of dance to create and communicate meaning.  Now, when we think about dance, we can think about the capacity dance has as a mode of meaning-making. Creative, artistic dance is now conceived as a proper form of expression and an effectual and valuable vehicle for narrative.  Dancing as narrative contributes to deliberative democratic procedures since narrative storytelling, of one form or another, is how communities go about constructing dominant norms and shared understandings.  Dance, as such, is a performative mode of storytelling that functions as a component of dialectical praxes.  Performative storytelling functions within democratic deliberations as a mode of worldmaking since stories yield, reveal, and embody the ideas of the world and their dynamics within it; ontology, particularly political ontology, is a form of enacting a reality. As Jaana Parvianien astutely avows, “…[C]horeographing and dancing are…an art of revealing the world through the moving body” (Parviainen 1998, 134).  Storied performativity elucidates the specifically political nature of worlding qua dialogical praxes; and in this case, movement-based dialectics. Thus, narrative not only operates as a key mode for coming to know, it also aids and contributes to ethico-political deliberative practices. Dancing is an operation that allows for an intentional, political embodied engagement—via embodied utterances qua partial acts—with others as a natural extension of our languaging bodies.  Therefore, dance purposefully created and shared so as to be used as a mode of (re)negotiation is a practical, ordinary incidents that can take place in public forums and help deliberators better understand the importance of reasons in communities.  

The idea of dance as a mode of deliberative reason-giving via bodied utterances follows from the very nature of movement itself.  For example, dancer-scholar Thomas Defrantz (2006) rightly argues that diasporic dancing is a corporeal orature. Defrantz defines black performativity as gesturing towards black expressive culture qua performative, actionable assertions (66), where diasporic dancing is a mode of “talking by dancing” (67). What this means is that dancing gestures, rather than describing dancing or blackness, are embodied metaphors that combine to create a distinctive communicative form of corporeal orature (ibid). The foundation of corporeal orature qua gesturing speech act lies in its distinguishing embodied discursive practice of call and response.  Dance can function as a form of deliberative reason-giving because dance’s nature as a discursive call and response helps it succeed dialectically with a public “witness”. Communications of embodied forms of knowing through narrative-based storied performativity, and concomitant ethical practices, generates recognizable articulations and expressions of embodied procedural knowledge that can receive uptake by communal witnesses. Public displays of dance can be given uptake because performed stories can be received and realized indirectly through shared phenomenological activities. The implicit and explicit interactive nature of narrative storytelling ensures that the embodied procedural knowing dynamically manifests bilaterally (or multilaterally) between storyteller and story-hearer. The procedural nature of this interactive embodied knowing of dancing narrative is consequent of the skillful knowing-how on the parts of participants involved in the coming to know through deliberative practices in the ongoing construction of shared ethico-political understandings. 

But the more pointed question is how, exactly, the call and response nature of dancing operates as literal reason-giving for uptake and negotiation rather than as a declaration of a position.  There are a couple of ways to think about this.  First, if the performer’s intention is to educate or “display”, then the dance, as an entity, can be viewed as declarative.  If, on the other hand, the intention of the performer is to “connect” with the audience through moving ideas, then the dancing, the pieces of choreography, can function as specific reasons for consideration, with the piece as a whole constituting something of a deliberative claim.  I note above that an embodied metaphor can be conceived of as connotative or declarative.  This is correct.  How pieces of choreography constituted by a series of embodied metaphors moves away from strict declaration to a series of ideas that are denotative and connotative is through the transitions.  Transitions link the concepts inherent in embodied metaphors together dynamically; and these varying dynamics turn the concepts from blunt instruments into an affective dialogue with the witnesses.  One can think about the dancing phrases comprised of dancing metaphors (Welch 2019; Katan-Schmid 2016; 2017) as a range of differing levels and kinds of partial acts that must be completed by the public.  The choreographic sequences send out a call via sensorimotor patterns and then public must complete the sense-making in a participatory manner through a response.  

This idea raises another conundrum: given that linguistic bodies must complete action through interaction for sense to make sense, how do audiences to dance performances complete their side of the interaction in a way that is deliberative.  This is possible in one clear cut sense: uptake, when given seriously, it a participatory act.  It is not the case that every communicative act must be resolved immediately.  Sometimes, we feel as if we’ve been given just the right amount of uptake if the other walks away with our ideas to engage in thoughtful contemplation.  But this is a bit of a cheat as far as responses go.  Communicative democratic models are certainly about securing and prioritizing inclusive norms and praxes of rich uptake to promote equal consideration of plural ideas and diverse perspectives.  A communicative democracy will also call for action in a thicker sense in some time because cooperation does demand substantial interaction vis-à-vis asymmetrical reciprocity.  The second sense in which the public can provide a response is in perceiving and walking away with action affordances afforded by the reasons within the dance to act on in other spaces and places.  One of the aims of communicative democracy is to continually shore up its normative practices for generating just shared understandings.  When witnesses go away with reasons given to them and then incorporate those reasons into their own and then act in accord with that deliberative negotiation of their understanding, then they can be said to be completing the interaction later with their own partial act—the behavior that the performers invited them to enact.  Moreover, affordances for action can yield praxes of questioning as action, which furthers and enrichens democratic deliberative cooperation.       

Additionally, sensorimotor affect patterns bridge self and other and the discrete individuals are able to conjunctively cultivate what Braude et al term “empathy in the flesh” (Braude et al 2015, 130).  Embodied affect theorist Margaret Wetherell (2012) situates affect within a social context; she refers to this social experience of communicative affect as a contagion and Giovanna Colombetti identifies it as a sympathetic sociability (Colombetti 2014, 172).  Wetherell explains that affective experiences and existence help us keep the world close to our skin (Wetherall 2012, 9) (f6).  Our affective practices are coordinated and relational; they are, thus, distributed across this relational field, which one can equate with flesh, and each partner’s contribution becomes meaningful—but only in relationship to the whole “affective dance” (87).  The similarity between affect and flesh brings out her claims that affective practices are communicative and organized; she explains that they take shape and adjust as they “flow” in the discursive realm (15).  To help clarify the social communicative efficacy of affect, Wetherell offers the notion of an affect loop, but her loop concerns how affect becomes narrated through the spirals of the normative social flow to contribute to, and constitute, cognitive practices.  Similarly, enactivist affect theorist Colombetti regards affect as a sort of flesh ontology where affect can be passed on to others.  

These ideas reveal that something like Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh can help carry affect across distance; and, therefore, help the reasons of dance extend temporally. Flesh is that which binds us all to each other and to all things.  Flesh is the glue that holds us all together, for each one is the side of the other.  Flesh is what binds our embodied consciousness to others and the world and through which our skin sops up the vast array of knowledges that become embedded in our bones.  But movement moves meaning because it moves us across, and into, the flesh (Morris 2008, 118).  Our body moves us into meaning and actively takes up the knowledge into an embodied residence. It is through our skinned movement through flesh that we absorb knowledge, and back through our skin through our movement that we can expel it.  Much like affordances, then, affect—as constitutive of dancing utterances as reasons—can be carried over time and space through the body.  Stripping works in a similar manner and one can think of that embodied interpersonal deliberative exchange of partial acts and created, offered affordances as a scaled down version of dancing as a democratic deliberative contribution.  

Ultimately, it is the two conditions unique to a communicative democracy that helps collective reasoning succeed between bodies across distance: asymmetrical reciprocity and respectful wonder.  First, Young identifies asymmetrical reciprocity as gift-giving practice, which dance clearly satisfies (Young 1997, 355).  Asymmetrical reciprocity is a mode of gifting because the other is not expected to reciprocate right away.  As such, it creates a social bond between giver and receiver; this social bond harkens to the notion of flesh, across which affect and affordances can be carried.  Second, asymmetrical reciprocity not only allows for there to be differential contributions in interaction; this also further clarifies why a witness is permitted to walk away with a reason for further contemplation.  Any normative prescription of immediate response violates a democratic norm of reasonableness because reason cannot accurately be ascribed to ideas sans reflection.  People who make swift responses to significant moral exchanges rarely have given themselves the time to be reasonable in their deliberation of reasons and decision-making.  In any case, it is also just plain disrespectful—and undemocratic—for one to demand an immediate response.  Respectful wonder works similarly.  Young describes respectful wonder as taking the stance of awaiting new insight about the others’ perspective and values (358).  This is significant not only for the purpose of satisfying a generic norm of reasonableness, but because this is the perspective that is necessary for generating authentic participatory sense-making to create shared understandings across difference.

§

Conclusion

Social democracies promote a larger set of social goods, and consider more forms of expression as, politically advantageous.  Philosophically speaking, because they advocate for broad community inclusion, deliberative democracy frameworks seem apt for accommodating assorted blends of discursive contributions.  Regardless of the social structure, public political embodied artistic narratives can be invaluable methods for achieving the values across all democratic models, such as equality, inclusion, participation, representation, and citizenship.  Performance arts, such as dance, does not stand apart, or possess a separate political voice, from traditional discursive practices of collective reasoning.  

Embodied communicative acts proffer as much political power of expression as formal expressions regarding divergent perspectives and the public interest.  Performative storytelling functions as a component of dialectical praxes because they embody the world and reflect the values of the community back to itself.  The implicit and explicit interactive nature of narrative storytelling ensures that embodied dialectics manifest between storytellers and public “witnesses”. Public performance art not only makes political claims about lived experience in the community, it can make political demands on the community by engaging in public forms of expression for recognition that cannot be refused.  

For example, we see daily examples of North Native American efforts to utilize dance as a praxis of decolonization in Native feminist efforts towards recreating communal relations.  Native women have been able to move to the fore of critical consciousness raising through contemporary cultural production practices, especially in the performance arts arena.  Through this visible productivity, Native women in dance have initiated processes that call for the reclamation of traditional practices.  They do this, in some respects, through indigenizing dance methodologies; artistic cultural production can revitalize spiritual, epistemological, and ethical values from the role of ritual dance in Native feminist praxes.  Indigenizing methodologies and approaches are about reclaiming, restoring, and reinstating the traditional knowledges, languages, land, and cultural practices that were colonized.  The revitalization of traditional ceremony and ritual is itself a decolonial praxis given that it is a way to return to, and reinvent, traditional epistemologies that can be used to engage the world.  This activist movement for the revitalization of traditional dances through contemporary approaches is a mode of performance art in virtue of its ability to enact political change in ways that, today, cannot be intercepted, as it was in the past.  It is public and community-centered; it has significant intracultural and intercultural meaning and meaning-making power.  

Though the US may not consider the arts to have much, if any, political value, the understanding of moving bodies as inherently political and communicative can motivate communities and activists to vigilantly disrupt the public narrative surrounding the significance of the arts, especially in public spaces.  Understandings of dancing bodies as discursive and participatory provide reasons for revitalizing the arts in the hopes of closing the gap between political extremes that preclude shared understandings between citizens as cooperative community members.   

citations

1. Ibid., 61, 165. Worldmaking is also a common notion in feminist theory and narrative ethics.

2. Walker, Moral Contexts, 77

3. Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory, 156. Pateman adds that this educative process is part of what “strengthens” individuals since the participatory process yields a gradual transformation in their consciousness.

4. For various approaches to collectivity, see: Michael Bratman. “Shared Cooperative Activity”. The Philosophical Review, 101, no. 2 (1992): 327-341; Margaret Gilbert. Living Together: Rationality, Sociality, and Obligation. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1996; Martins Nuno. “Rules, Social Ontology, and Collective Identity”. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 39, no. 3 (2009): 323-344; Searle, John. “Collective Intentions and Actions”. in Intentions in Communication J. M. P. R. Cohen, & M. and E. Pollack. MIT Press, 1990: 401-416; Tuomela 2000; 2002; Andrea C. Westlund. “Deciding Together”. Philosophers’ Imprint, 9, no. 10 (2009): 1-17.

5. Ibid., 104

6.  See also:  Suzanne Cataldi.  “Affect and Sensibility”.  In Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts. Diprose, Rosalyn and Jack Reynolds (eds.).  Stockfield: Acumen Pub, 2008: 163-173.
   

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