Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance ii: audience and embodiment 193
through her performance, where this involves an interest in her achievement
in so doing, the bearing of this kind of empirical work on the philosophy of
dance seems clear.
More controversial, however, are recent philosophical explorations within
this tradition that draw upon a particular strand in contemporary research
in cognitive neuroscience. Richard Shusterman (2009), for example, raises
questions similar to the ones canvassed above about how the phenomeno-
logical picture of the lived body can accommodate the kinds of demands
made upon the performing artist both in training and in actual perform-
ance. He acknowledges that, in our everyday dealings with the world, it is
the spontaneous bodily intentionality of the lived body that enables us to
successful negotiate our way around. In such contexts, explicit attention to
our movements can get in the way of ordinary functioning, as when the bike
rider thinks about exactly how she is propelling her vehicle and promptly
loses her balance. But, Shusterman insists, while the habits comprised by the
lived body play an essential part in human agency, these habits sometimes
need to be corrected or refined if we are to flourish in our projects. The golf
player, for example, needs to relearn his swing when his spontaneous activity
leads him to shank the ball to the left. In the same way, the dancer needs to
train her body so that its spontaneous activity achieves what she desires. This
requires that she explicitly attend to the movements that her body is making
in order to change the bodily intentionality that enables her to spontaneously
generate such movements. Then, once she has retrained her body, she can
once again rely on spontaneous agency.
Shusterman raises an interesting question, however. Is it possible to
achieve such an explicit awareness of what one’s body is doing – to in this
sense treat one’s body as an object – at the very same time that one exercises
the sort of embodied skill involved in the performing arts? Merleau-Ponty
thought that such explicit awareness would hamper the exercise of the skill
in question. Shusterman disputes this, however. He looks at the kind of train-
ing given both to dancers and to performers in Japanese Noh theater. He
argues that, for the skilled performer who trains herself properly, the best
performances may involve both the exercise of a spontaneous embodied skill
and a simultaneous explicit awareness of what one is doing.
His argument however, as he acknowledges, draws speculatively on recent
work in cognitive neuroscience on so-called “mirror neurons.” We should
briefly say something about the latter before sketching Shusterman’s argu-
ment.^14 Mirror neurons are neurons, primarily in the pre-motor cortex, that
are activated both by my execution of certain types of movement and by my
observing another person executing the same types of movement. They play
a crucial role in the explanations that some have offered of puzzling phe-
nomena, such as the neonate’s apparent ability to mimic facial expressions