ABSTRACT
Can there be an aesthetics of the moving body outside of the static, visually attentive audience, attending instead to sensations that arise within the moving body itself? The idea of movement has been of interest within phenomenologically-influenced studies in cognitive science and embodied cognition (e.g. Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 2010, Gallagher 2005, Berthoz and Petit 2008). But what about the feeling of movement, that subjectively-felt qualitative dynamic, involving various neurophysiological discoveries such as the ‘muscle sense’, the somatic senses that include kinaesthesia and proprioception? For aesthetic studies in general, and geographical aesthetics also, the usual mode of encounter typically involves an aesthetic ‘object’ as such, or even an observed moving body. However, this chapter removes this focus to consider, firstly, historical articulations of the sensations that arise within moving bodies (in Greek, aesthêsis), and secondly, whether such sensations can be categorized as having distinctly ‘aesthetic’ content or value. In recent years, explorations of sensations of movement occur unsystematically across the humanities and social sciences, in areas like cultural studies (e.g., Massumi 2002, Manning 2006), dance and performance studies (e.g. Foster 2011), philosophical aesthetics (Montero 2006a, 2006b), sports science (Sparkes 2009) and of course cultural geography (Wylie 2002, Spinney 2002). Meanwhile, the Canadian phenomenologist David Morris (2010) has noted how interest in the philosophy of embodied cognition has met with empirical validation not only through conventional TMS and fMRI scanning techniques, but also through artsscience collaborations in dance and the performing arts, borne out by large funded projects like Dee Reynolds’ ‘Watching Dance: Kinaesthetic Empathy’ (20082011). In other words, the arts and sciences of bodily sensations of movement are coming together in unusual and experimental ways.
