ABSTRACT
We can argue that, so far, all of these developments have moved us progressively further away from the social, situated and embodied skills of ‘presence’ that are so crucially important in oral cultures. For many creative practitioners in the traditions of studio and stage it is here, at the level of embodiment itself, that we are likely to confront the rational limits of the intellectual tradition. The task of learning to ride a bicycle is often used to illustrate the gulf between text-oriented disciplines of theory and the practice-oriented disciplines that we find, for example, in the plastic arts. We all know that bookish knowledge alone cannot teach us how to ride a bike. Similarly, once we have learned to ride it, we cannot ‘say’ what we have learned, even though we may be able to say things about it. This example is not too distant from more intellectual pursuits, such as reading and writing, in which we unconsciously scan alphabetical characters with our eyes and make writing gestures with our hands.
