This week’s readings ask us to consider the embodied practices involved in understanding protein molecules. We begin with a man trying to describe, through language, how protein molecules breathe–when somewhere, mid-explanation he mobilizes his own body’s gestures to supplement his explanation. He animates his body in a kind of sympathetic mimicry to help illustrate the movement of a molecule, and convey how he both feels and understands that movement, and in the end, the molecule itself.
This got me thinking about the ways in which we use our bodies, and the movement of our bodies to make sense of the phenomena around us.
Ann Daly remarks that although dance has a visual component, it is nevertheless “fundamentally a kinesthetic art whose apperception is grounded not just in the eye but in the entire body” (307). In this sense spectators of dance experience a kind of kinesthetic empathy when they watch a dancer. Even as they sit in the dark cradled in some old rusty-springed chair in a dusty auditorium, they are nevertheless bodily engaged, internally simulating the movements they are witnessing.
But there is no need to limit such notion of kinesthetic empathy to dance–why not extend it outward to include movement in general?
The videos posted below all illustrate to some degree the existence of a kind of kinesthetic sympathy between bodies. That these videos involve adorable animals only serve to deepen the affective charge of such embodied practices. Animals have long been considered great communicators of affect, and the sheer proliferation of cute animal videos circulating at any given time on the Internet is certainly a testament to that.
Take for example, this tragically cute video of a kitten attempting a daring aerial feat, only to fail, epically:
People fawn all over this video. They are affectively moved by the poor kitten’s miscalculation and its inability to see the gesture to its close. We fawn all over it because we’ve all been there, hesitating at the brink of a chair, or the tip of a puddle unsure if we can make it across the distance, unscathed. This is an emotional sympathy we feel, but one that is also animated by a kind of kinesthetic empathy. We can imagine a similar embodied feeling.
But kinesthetic empathy is not limited to humans. Or at least, we delight in thinking that it is not. I present you another variations on this kinesthetic empathy:
This video made its way through cyberspace some months ago, disarming the masses with its interminable cuteness. Why does it captivate us so? Because it communicates an affective charge, inspiring within us feelings of kinesthetic sympathy.
Here we have a woman playing with a kitten, and the kitten is in turn mimicking the woman’s movements. The woman and the kitten are involved in an affective entanglement. The woman reaches out in a communicative gesture towards the kitten, and the kitten returns the gesture by mimicking her movements. Though we can never know why the kitten is behaving in such a way, it certainly appears as if the kitten is trying to understand this woman in some way through kinesthetic sympathy, moving with her, performing her.
One way to read this video is that knowledge (in its most primitive form) comes from visualization, and the power of visualization comes from performance, or embodied practice. In order to know the woman, the kitten must engage its body. It feels out the human through its form and movements, performing its cadences, implementing its rhythms.
Meanwhile, returning once again to humans and their potential for kinesthetic sympathy, I present you with a very special duck who has apparently inspired a wheelchair-bound boy to walk, presumably by a similar affective entanglement. Affectively taken with the duck, the child watches it intently, and mimics its movements. In performing the duck, he thereby learns to walk.
http://www.allvoices.com/s/event-5234607/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5yZXV0ZXJzLmNvbS9uZXdzL3ZpZGVvP3ZpZGVvSWQ9NDE3ODg2NzE=
Either way all three of these videos illustrate the affective entanglements that exist between living things, albeit dramatized differently. We empathize with a kitten who tries a daring jump and fails; a kitten physically empathizes with a human being as he gestures towards it; and a baby learns to walk by physically sympathizing with a duck. If anything all of these videos render life as something irrefutably embodied and something that is always apprehended, experienced and understood through movement.
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Daly, Ann. Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
What a great assemblage of videos attesting to the role of kinaesthetic mimicry in learning. This is something I have thought about repeatedly throughout the last couple of years while working on my masters on Ballroom dancing. I found myself every few months, perched on the edge of a chair charged with guarding the door to the ballroom from sneaky intruders with one eye while watching a professional dance performance with the other. Frequently throughout dances, I would find myself going off-balance and have to grasp the nearest surface to right myself as I regained my sense of self. I would become so involved in the dancers’ movements that I moved with them, perhaps, a little too much.
In the summer I chanced upon this article on mirror neurons in dance education: http://www.ballet-dance.com/200806/articles/mirrorneurons20080600.html. Mirror neurons are usually defined as neurons that fire both when we perform an action, and when we see someone perform an action, and are used to explain our affective responses to others’ experiences as a mode of learning. Unlike your lovely descriptions, or those provided throughout Natasha’s text (which I’m sure got many of our mirror neurons firing through sheer description alone), this piece, which says nothing that every dancer does not already know, drained all the life and affectability from movement. In this call for science to lend authority to kinaesthetic knowledge, we find exemplified the difference between life itself, and liveliness.
This rendering reminds me of the work of Eduardo Kohn, who in this paper draws on the semiotics of Peirce in order to develop a framework for an ethnographic study of dog-human interactions: http://www.mcgill.ca/files/anthropology/Kohn_2007_How_Dogs_Dream.pdf
Interesting article on the anthropology of non-human animals Brian, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
In reading this post it made me think of Brian’s rendering on anthropomorphism from a few weeks ago. I am generally suspicious of the interpretation, and perhaps projection, of emotions and motivations onto non-human animals. Although I agree that it is through some sort of kinesthetic empathy that we believe that we ‘feel’ what the animal is experiencing (by reversing the situation and placing ourselves in the place of the animal), but I am curious about the kind of ‘violence’ (if I’m even using the term correctly) that is placed upon these creatures by interpreting their behavior as we would our own. For example, the kitten with the paws in the air: due to the human’s side of the interaction (laughing, amused) we intuitively render a sympathetic interpretation of the kitten’s behavior. However, to me, this kitten looks absolutely frightened. Is this display mimicry (as we’d expect in an infant perhaps) or a defensive posture? In the case of the duck, the question of domestication falls by the wayside as the duckling become an object of extension for the child’s physical therapy (I’m not actually objecting though, just trying to make a point). I think this sympathetic embodiment is highly suggestive of the sorts of cognitive bonds we create with living (and non-living presumably) being, but I wonder about the sort of things this form of empathy possibly overlooks by highlighting the kinesthetic aspect.
I too am suspicious of projecting emotions and motivations onto non-human animals. You make a good point, the kitten in the video might very well be performing a defensive posture (I didn’t think of that!). But it’s still mirroring the human’s movement. I meant only to draw attention to the bodily responses, not the emotional or cognitive ones. Surely people do feel an emotional response to movement, and interpret movement in different ways, and that’s something that the kinesthetic doesn’t really account for. But what the kinesthetic aspect does illuminate, is that there is a moment of bodily response that occurs before cognition/interpretation and if we recognize that, we might be less inclined to jump to certain conclusions when it comes to non-human animal behaviour.