Body/Mind
I have been reading Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy for the first time. No, I can not believe that this is the first time I have read Descartes directly. I have spoken and read about a potential mind/body split via dance scholars and other philosophers since the beginning of my training in dance. Of course, dance studies has regarded such a split as contentious since its beginnings and the concept has long since been discredited.
Working on dance and technology I have come up against the critique that technology gets away from the corporeal focus of dance. I often find myself questioning the importance of the body and corporeality altogether, rather than trying to defend my work with the digital by anthropomorphizing digital media, or by defining the digital in terms of and as corporeal qualities.
Recently, it seems that several scholars are articulating the central importance of the body to dance studies. In the summer 2009 issue of Dance Research Journal, for example, Gay Morris presented the historical trajectory of interdisciplinarity in dance in relation to the interdisciplinary basis of cultural studies. Coming to the conclusion that dance scholars can ground themselves in a focus on the body, Morris suggests that dance scholars can use the common ground of the body to stabilize the field while diversifying its implications. Where does this take us when we think about movement in the digital realm? Must we only work on movement as digitally fragmented space-time when it exists in terms of the body? And, must this body exhibit corporeal qualities? If I work on the movement of digital communication networks as dance practice must I define my experiment in terms of the bodies that are connected via digital communication systems? I ask myself, is dance really always defined by the body? And, although this has historically been a seemingly common ground in dance studies, can the body continue to be that grounding stable entity?
Answers to these questions become increasingly clear as I read Descartes’ thoughts on the mind/body relationship. Although he presents a split, his argument performs relationships in the mind/body entity, or between mind and body as more complicated than the simplicity to which the “mind/body split” is so often referred. In fact, Descartes argument performs the very movement, fragmentation and multiplicity that digital networks and systems so aptly exhibit. Thinking the mind and the body in various temporal and durational situations, Descartes works through the complications that might perform the fact that there is no split between the mind and the body. In the case of Descartes’ meditations, it seems impossible that a whole field define and ground itself on the “body,” since this subject/object is such an unstable entity.
