Physiologically, the sense of kinaesthesia arises through the stimulation of sensory receptors located in the tendons and fibres of the muscles. These provide feedback about muscle tension and extension, allowing the brain to make sense of how the body exists within and moves through the world. The term was first defined in 1887 by anatomist Henry Bastian as ‘the body of sensations which result from or are directly
occasioned by movements’.1 In 1907, physiotherapist Charles Sherrington argued that muscular sensations were ‘not motile, but postural’, predominantly communicating information about the body’s spatial position rather than its movement.2 Here,
Sherrington drew a distinction between the way the body senses movement and the way it senses its position – namely, between kinaesthesia and what he termed ‘proprioception’. This definitional slippage continues to structure the field: sensations of movement and sensations of space are sometimes folded together, and sometimes isolated as two distinct processes. Barry Stillman argues that because movement sensations do not preclude the sense of position or balance, the two concepts may as well be synonyms; conversely, Uwe Proske warns against completely blurring the two together, citing recent neurological research that suggests movement and position sensations may be processed differently by the central nervous system.3 This scientific debate lies beyond the scope of the thesis, and for the purposes of my argument, I follow James Gibson’s assertion that kinaesthesia is an integrative sensory mode, combining notions of both movement and space.4 To sense the movement of the body is also to grasp its orientation, and the awareness of one’s position in space also includes sensitivity to the potential for movement through space. My use of the term thus encapsulates the embodied dynamics of both the body’s position within space, and its movement through that space.
Yet kinaesthesia has been strangely neglected within most scholarly and popular accounts of sensory experience; as Alain Berthoz wonders, ‘by what twist did language
1 Henry Charlton Bastian, ‘The “Muscular Sense”: Its Nature and Cortical Localisation’, Brain, 10 (1887), 1-89 (p.5).
2
Charles Sherrington, ‘On the Proprio-ceptive System, Especially in its Reflex Aspect’, Brain, 29 (1907), 467-482 (p. 474).
3 See Barry C. Stillman, ‘Making Sense of Proprioception: The Meaning of Proprioception, Kinaesthesia and Related Terms’, Physiotherapy, 88 (2002), 667-76; and Uwe Prose, ‘Kinaesthesia: The Role of Muscle Receptors’, Muscle and Nerve, 34 (2002), 545-58.
4 Gibson states that ‘spatial behavior and spatial perception are coordinate with one another’, by which he means that our sensations of space are inextricable from our sensations of action. See James Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1950), p. 223.
suppress the sense most important to survival?’5 This ‘twist’ is most likely the neat categorisation of five senses with five clearly defined, externally oriented sensory organs, a correspondence that kinaesthesia, involving undifferentiated sensory inputs and sensations, cannot be neatly slotted into. This classic categorisation is often traced back to Aristotle’s work on the senses. Although he only identified four senses, merging taste and touch together, he established a value distinction between the human senses (the
distanced senses of sight and hearing) and the animal senses (smell, taste and touch) that has remained largely unquestioned in much Western cultural theory, particularly with the dominance of the Cartesian mind-body dualism.6 Kinaesthesia, suffused as it is across (and within) the whole of the body, thus falls squarely at the bottom of every sensory hierarchy. It is thus unsurprising that despite a resurgence of scholarly interest in re- valorising the sensorium (particularly within the affective and corporeal turns of the humanities), kinaesthesia remains largely forgotten. Sensory historians David Howes and Constance Classen undertake an excellent critique of historical understandings of the senses, yet only give a cursory mention to kinaesthesia as a passing interest of the nineteenth century.7 Kinaesthesia remains relegated to the footnotes of academic scholarship, dismissed as too vague or too historical to be worthy of interest in its own right.
Dance and performance studies have been more successful at exploiting the methodological potential of kinaesthesia. The communicative medium of dance is the moving body itself, and thus meaning in dance is always an embodied process, created and interpreted through the sensate, material body. Importantly, the body in dance – of performers and observers alike – is understood as both visually perceived and
kinaesthetically felt. John Martin’s influential theory of metakinesis, or how dance
communicates meaning to audiences, is entirely based within kinaesthesia. Martin argues
5 Alain Berthoz, The Brain's Sense of Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 25.
6 See Aristotle, De Anima, trans. by Christopher Shields (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 7 David Howes and Constance Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 171-72.
that movement acts as ‘a medium for the transference of an aesthetic and emotional concept from the unconscious of one individual to that of another’, and that such transference occurs through the ‘kinaesthetic sympathy’ we feel with the moving body. 8 ‘Movement,’ he claims, ‘is the link between the dancer’s intention and your perception of it’, 9 clearly setting up kinaesthesia as the preferred reading strategy for the medium of dance. More recently, dance theory has been particularly interested in questions surrounding kinaesthetic empathy.10 As a concept, kinaesthetic empathy is poised between Martin’s metakinesis and neuroscientific work on mirror neurons – groups of neurons that fire identically whether an action is being performed or observed. I will return to explore the literature surrounding kinaesthetic empathy in more detail in chapter four of this thesis; for the time being, I simply want to note that dance studies’s interest in kinaesthesia – particularly kinaesthesia as both an aesthetic property and a mode of audience engagement – has much to offer studies of other art forms that also foreground the body in motion, such as screen media.
Work within dance studies also provides a useful vocabulary for describing the qualities of the moving body, and has clear potential for the close analysis of moving bodies on screen. Rudolf Laban and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone both present categorical systems for movement analysis, in which movement is broken down into different components. For Laban, movement can be understood in terms of body, effort, space and shape. Body and space refer to the structural components of the movement – the
trajectories that movement takes across the form of the body, and the relationship between the body and the space around it. Effort and shape refer to more qualitative dimensions of movement – the dynamic nature of the energy involved in the movement, and the shapes the body makes, both in isolation and with the surrounding space and
8 John Martin, The Modern Dance (Princeton: Princeton Book Company, [1933] 1989), p. 13. 9 Ibid., p. 12.
10 See the essays in Kinaesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. by Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason (Bristol: Intellect, 2012); and Touching and Being Touched: Kinaesthesia and Empathy in Dance and Movement, ed. by Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert, and Sabine Zubarik (Boston: De Gruyter, 2013).
objects. Sheets-Johnstone defines movement according to its spatial and temporal qualities. Spatial qualities of movement include amplitude (degrees of expansion and contraction) and linearity (direction and trajectory); temporal qualities include tension (the effort involved in a movement) and projection (the way energy is released in any given movement). Both Laban and Sheets-Johnstone’s categories of movement revolve around the same basic principles, perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the universal laws of physics that structure human movement. However, their work serves slightly different purposes – Sheets-Johnstone’s work is based in phenomenology and so is more
encompassing and theoretical, whereas Laban’s were specifically designed for practical application, and continue to be used for performance training in acting and dance schools, and in the fields of game design and artificial intelligence. Yet both suggest that the descriptive language of dance theory enriches our understanding of how the moving body speaks to us, and would facilitate a more fine-grained analysis of the mechanics of movement and performance in other media.
More recently, a number of scholars have sought to extend this body of scholarship on the communicative power of the moving body, considering how kinaesthesia might work in other kinds of systems of meaning. For Maxine Sheets-
Johnstone, ‘animation is at the very core of life’, and so all human experience is essentially an experience of movement.11 Discussing topics ranging from dance to evolutionary biology to phenomenological philosophy, Sheets-Johnstone constructs a compelling argument that movement is absolutely central to our experiences, thought-processes, aesthetic forms, and structures of communication. Other theorists similarly make a case for the centrality of movement, but situate this idea in relation to systems of power, rather than seemingly ‘natural’ qualities of embodiment. Both Susan Leigh Foster and Carrie Noland frame kinaesthesia as an experience conditioned by particular normative ideas of
corporeality, and a tool through which such norms are produced and policed.12 Erin Manning’s work usefully synthesises these two strands of scholarship – movement’s primacy and its politics – presenting a philosophy of movement based in the political potential of unfolding action.13 She believes that ‘movement tells stories quite differently than does a more linear and stable historicisation’,14 by which she means that thinking through movement – as something always on the verge of becoming something else, always in a process of transformation – has the power to disrupt particular corporeal and scholarly norms and narratives. It is this methodological potential that I find so
compelling and productive: attention to kinaesthesia brings together questions of aesthetics, experience, and power structures in a way that has much to offer theories of screen media.