Responsibility as Responsiveness: Enacting a Dispositional Ethics of Encounter

Response-Ability: A Dispositional Ethics of Encounter

What does it mean to be responsible?

To be accountable; answerable. Put differently, it is the ability to answer when called. From the Latin respondere, “to respond.” Bound up in the term is a notion of responsibility-as-responsiveness: ethics borne of situated response, ethics enacted in the pulse and pause of attentiveness.

This is far removed from traditional notions of responsibility, which tend to link accountability to the cementing of both moral and epistemological terms. Responsibility is to be held to account, to be found and fixed in place, while irresponsibility is to slip the grasp of culpability. To remain a moving target, to entail ambiguity, multivalence, and uncertainty, would—according to most theories of responsibility—introduce irresponsibility to political and social life by dissolving the terms with which we may justify ourselves and demand justifications of others. This is the root of Seyla Benhabib’s famous rebuke of aesthetic-affective modes of speech in democratic processes; in the absence of such distinctions, she cautions that the

attempt to transform the language of the rule of law into a more partial, affective, and situated mode of communication would have the consequence of inducing arbitrariness. . . . It would further create capriciousness. . . . It would limit rather than enhance social justice because [it] moves people and achieves results without having to render an account of the bases upon which it induces people to engage in certain courses of action rather than others. ¹

Yet this traditional conception of responsibility as “fixed in place” not only fails to exhaust the ways in which responsibility might be conceived, but in fact can prove irresponsible insofar as it fails to account for the complexity, dynamism and interrelation of identity and encounter. When we take seriously the demands of social difference—that in always-already exceeding our terms of knowing and valuing the world it presents not only an obligation to listen but profound difficulty in doing so—to act responsibly towards others is at core to learn to hear what is yet white noise, yet-emergent; it is to critically engage with difference’s excess even as the terms of critique shift and change in the course of such engagement. Responsibility, in this light, is thus necessarily conceived in affective rather than epistemological or metaphysical terms, where to be responsible is to remain receptive and responsive within the encounter, despite the challenges it might present to one’s worldview and implication of one’s role within it.

This is arguably where recent theory has taken the term—back to its etymological roots that refuse epistemic or moral certainty as ethics’ starting point. Whether James Tully’s call to move from a pre-given moral code to a practice of deep listening, Judith Butler’s account of corporeal vulnerability as the precondition for politics, Jade Larissa Schiff’s work on the sensibilities and conditions of acknowledging responsibility, or Ella Myers’s survey of prevailing ethical approaches as forms of care, we see a recurrent turn to ethics as praxis, enacted through the daily practices of receptivity and responsiveness. Rather than rule-governed behaviour, such an ethics acknowledges—indeed, is premised on—the inherent ambiguity of encounter, and the violence enacted through its denial via pre-given codes.

This reframing of ethics as responsiveness is itself a response to two recent and interrelated developments across disciplines. Firstly and foundationally, it has become outmoded, indeed counterproductive and ethically suspect, to maintain the illusion of the Cartesian sovereign subject. We have, put simply, the notion of the relational subject, wherein social difference is not something encountered at the boundaries of the self-contained, self-aware individual—and thus so often construed as threat to the stability and self-assurance of such a self—but rather what constitutes as much as disrupts identity’s closures. As such, the relational subject is also a multiple, dynamic, and ever-emergent position, as identity is perpetually drawn from, and never exhaustive of, the excess of difference through which it is constituted. Secondly, to acknowledge interdependence, dynamism and co-constitution as preconditions for identity and politics is also to acknowledge the ever partial and situated nature of understanding. The relational self is also situated, as there is no universal position outside the dynamic relations of meaning-making and subject formation from which to encounter and interpret the world. Consequently, to posit fixed and universal codes of conduct apart from the particulars of practice will always be, as Richard Rorty writes, “more or less disingenuous.” ²

While the Cartesian subject encounters difference as somehow “out there” and ever in opposition to the self, the relational and situated subject introduces a normative demand to attend to social difference and respond to the challenges it necessarily implies. As relational, we are indebted to difference as the continual font of both our own identity and possibilities for affiliation and coalition. As situated, we owe a debt to difference insofar as it signals that which presently exceeds salient yet partial interpellations of identity and meaning that might prove fertile ground for as-yet unrealized possibilities for thought, action and relation. Finally, this normative demand to attend to social difference stems from the violence enacted by the failure to do so, whether in dominant responses of defensiveness, denial, resentment, or vilification of what unsettles our particular horizon or forms of epistemic violence that in welcoming difference dismiss, absorb, or flatten it into preexisting terms. The latter responses, however well intentioned, enact the imperialism Spivak identifies in certain forms of benevolence, the hostility Derrida sees at work in models of welcome that still presume the position of host. And they are all the more likely among those bodies able to obscure their own markers and presume the colonial gaze of the unseen seer. ³

At once, then, we have the normative demand to attend to social difference, and the questioning of the subject position from which to do so. Uncertainty, and the violence that moral or epistemological certainty can produce, refocus the ethical project from particular codes of conduct to the conditions that lend themselves to hearing what is as yet white noise or distant murmur, understanding what we lack the terms to presently grasp, and allowing for what exceeds one’s frame to unsettle and possibly reconfigure such framing. Such a stance is deeply affective—one must remain open within uncomfortable moments and the uncertain ground they present, invite challenge, and risk transformation, to encounter difference as difference. To propose interrelation as the social ontology of politics is thus to shift the ethics of encounter from moral to affective terms: to ground ethics in the moving ground of attentiveness and responsiveness to difference. In a word, it demands a dispositional ethics that construes responsibility as responsiveness.

This has been a quieter strain in the study of ethics—it is what Levinas describes when he talks of communication as a “fine risk”—the fragility of openness that makes encounter possible and yet can collapse so quickly into defenses and denials; the risk involved when we expose ourselves to ambiguity. ⁴ Contemporary political theory has seen a resurgence of such terms, from poststructuralism’s emphasis on “ethical sensibility” over morality ⁵ to global politics’s exploration of embodied and reflexive forms of accountability. ⁶ In theorizing the politics of interpersonal encounter, Susan Bickford and Iris Marion Young catalyzed the crucial shift from questions of voice to the attendant demands and dynamics of listening. ⁷ This focus on reception in political communication was deepened and nuanced by theorists who understood listening to be always-already embodied. These scholars explore how listening-as-receptivity is at once structured by the body and its affects, and entails attention to far more than the mere verbal: physical, acoustic, affective, rhythmic, spatial, and aesthetic dimensions of engagement inform not only what is available to perceive but one’s capacity to do so. This has led to a growing literature on the affective dimensions of political attention—what Romand Coles calls “receptive generosity,” Jane Bennett calls “presumptive generosity,” and William Connolly calls “critical responsiveness.” ⁸ Where political theory has directly engaged the question of ethics in recent years, we see this affective language of receptivity and responsiveness—and, though less ubiquitous, embodiment—come to the fore despite the inevitable diversity of this scholarship.

Ella Myers highlights this dispositional focus of prevailing schools of ethical thought by characterizing each as a different form of “care,” whether construed as care for self (a Foucauldian approach), care for an Other (the Levinasian strain), or care for what she calls “worldly things.” In each case, attention and responsiveness rather than fixed moral code grounds and guides political action. While Myers does not explore why “care” comes to the fore as the key ethical term across such disparate schools of thought, this is arguably because the world(s) we attend to and bring into being through such practices cannot be known in advance or fixed in place; they are situated, partial, and contingent, always slightly opaque in their framing and ever open to reconfiguration. Foucault, of course, was adamant that a perpetually open and contextually responsive ethos of self-overcoming was the only sure dictum in a world where no objective universal can be assured; for Levinas, this ethos of responsiveness prior to normative commitments emerges instead from the material reality of another’s alterity. Myers’ own articulation of ‘care for worldly things’—the collective caring for the world that at once connects and divides us in our contestation over what such care should entail—also proposes an ethics grounded in a situated sensibility if from a more Arendtian frame: care for specific worldly things, rather than the world per se as either given or whole, means that such an ethos is never abstracted out of context; it is enacted by attending to the channels and distinctions that enable pluralist thought and action in the collective care for “multiple, fluctuating, and contested” worldly conditions. ⁹

Though an implicit connection in Myers’ work, James Tully’s recent writing on “non-imperial dialogue” among traditions explicitly makes the link between a contingent, opaque, and dynamic world and a dispositional ethics. Non-imperial dialogue—what he calls “the most difficult and important task in the world” ¹⁰ —requires understanding that which exceeds one’s own traditional terms of disclosure, and concern for that which is not wholly intelligible in such terms. Such understanding and concern is grounded not in abstract moral principles but in deep openness, receptivity, and reciprocal responsiveness to the otherness of others—“a readiness to detach from habitual attachment to [one’s] forms of political thought.” ¹¹

While emphasis as to the focus of such an ethos varies, in taking contingent interrelation as the precondition of politics these theorists promote a dispositional ethics as the means to hear what is yet white noise and care for—be affected by—who is currently out of view. We have moved beyond a model of encounter with stable and autonomous parties apprehending one another through shared terms, to one that presumes neither the distance of firm distinction nor merging through epistemic grasping. We cannot base our moral compass on having the answer—the answer is in formation, a co-creation of any given encounter. To acknowledge the situated, contingent, and ever-changing relations of identity and difference is to move to the language of dispositional praxis. It is to understand responsibility as responsiveness.

A dispositional ethics makes responsiveness a primary norm, but it also draws attention to the dispositions that obstruct such responsiveness. Jade Larissa Schiff has identified three such dispositions of disavowal—thoughtlessness, misrecognition, and bad faith—that inhibit acknowledgment of our implication in others’ suffering and thus responsibility. These, she argues, are all “anxious responses” to the relational, situated, and contingent nature of the world and our place(s) within it—what she calls “the ontological conditions of plurality, freedom, and contingency”—and the profound cognitive, affective, and ethical demands such conditions make upon us. ¹² Judith Butler’s recent work argues that dispositions of receptivity or closure are always-already embodied and structured by such embodiment: our openness to the world as particular bodies—that we survive not as bounded and independent beings but through our reliance on networks of relation beyond our own skin—demands an ethos of responsiveness to others, makes such an ethos possible, and yet also provokes defensive and ultimately violent responses of projection, denial, and revenge. ¹³ Such common and well-entrenched pre-dispositions to reassert autonomy, certainty, and fixity in response to an inescapably contingent and opaque world draw attention to the challenges entailed in realizing a dispositional ethics, and thus raise the question of how such responsibility becomes sensed and known for us.

A care for the situated nature of ethics has thus also provoked, in several instances, a distinct attention to the particularities and practicalities of enactment—the question not only of if and why, but how to act ethically. For Butler, if we are to enact “responsiveness—and thus, ultimately, responsibility—” we must critically engage the interpretive frames that inform our affective responses to some bodies over others, and develop the affective conditions for social critique and potential transformation of these very frames. ¹⁴ For Schiff, we might foster the conditions of receptivity and response-ability by employing forms of narrative that make the most of its mimetic capacities. ¹⁵ For Tully, this responsiveness is developed through meditative practices of “deep listening” that prepare interlocutors for engagement. ¹⁶ While abstracted normative prescriptions undercut the capacity for responsiveness, these initial strategies focus not on particular codes of conduct, but—in keeping with a dispositional ethics—on the practices that cultivate the very responsiveness undercut by traditional moral codes. As such, they are designed to provide direction in the absence of certainties: they work to establish the conditions for rather than substance of the ethical encounter, the experience and outcome of which is understood to be at base undetermined, unknown, and perhaps unknowable. In so doing, a dispositional ethics offers a means to prepare oneself for what is currently beyond one’s grasp; to negotiate the ever-shifting balance between reliance on established terms with which to make sense of and evaluate the world, and the need to call these frames into question to truly encounter what is “other”; to perceive and respond with care within even the most difficult moments of encounter that result too often in disavowal, defensiveness, and revenge. This refocusing of the ethical project opens possibilities for investigating not simply the sensibilities a politics of difference requires, but how they might be developed within a situated praxis.

Some of these proposed strategies rely on the verbal, perhaps because of the persistence of cognitive and disembodied paradigms for political communication even where receptivity is front and centre. And yet where scholars grapple with the embodied and affective dimensions of receptivity, we see investigation of a far broader range of factors as potential resources for ethics. From Coles’s proposition of traveling and tabling to Connolly’s cinematic and musical tactics to engage pre-cognitive processing, ¹⁷ political theory concerned with cultivating such dispositions has explored—more extensively than hitherto seen in the study of ethics—how the specific body is involved in, and might be employed to cultivate the conditions for, our ability to listen and respond within the encounter. The turn from fixed moral code to situated ethos has occurred simultaneously with a rediscovery of the ever-present, ever-distant body in western thought.

Indeed, it is no accident that a prior emphasis on the mastery of certain knowledge was accompanied by a denial of the body. Only one organ regularly appears in traditional philosophy, and the very imagery of enlightenment that equates the “I” with the eye, the privileging of sight in western theorizations of understanding gives something away of the underlying desire to both loose oneself from the impressionable body and master the world beyond it. Both of these impulses in western philosophy indulge in the delusions of disembodied reason and clear and distinct knowledge; both lie behind the historical “queasiness” in academic circles at the mention of material bodies which exposes that we are, in Susan Bordo’s terms, “most definitely not masters of our own lives, let alone the universe.” ¹⁸ To acknowledge there is no “view from nowhere” ¹⁹ is also to acknowledge the embeddedness and embodiment of knowledge-production, the sensory nature of sense-making. With the body in view, emphasis shifts from the mastery of certain knowledge to responsiveness to the as-yet unknown and perhaps unknowable by specific, situated bodies and practices.

How differently the ear from the eye/I, for instance, in its relationship to sound. Where the eye roves according to the will, the ear absorbs, open and impressed upon; where sight captures instantaneously as pre-given and intact vantage, sound traces its way through physical media to reach us; where the eye takes in the scene entire relatively untouched, the ear is invaded, open to a hemispheric scape of possible sounds—we hear at the mercy of the world around us, in the shape of impressions via the quiver of and reverberations on the drum. When we speak of responsibility as responsiveness, it is this form of attention being asked of us, for we are asked to open ourselves to the unfamiliar if we are to hear at all. Particularly in this body, a white, able body; a tongue accustomed to Anglo-Saxon acoustics; inheritor of a sense of place in the world rooted in historical taking that too easily slips from view—particularly for bodies such as this. Behind every call to include currently marginalized voices is the demand to learn to listen, and to listen—to open oneself to being affected by the world—is to be in one’s body, always.

Given the situated nature of a dispositional ethics, our best and most overlooked resource for locating its conditions resides where bodies actually meet—where the praxis of responsibility as responsiveness is enacted, and can be observed. I seek to site/cite such practices through an engagement with the embodied expertise of thirteen experts across therapy and performance sectors whose primary vocational and intellectual field is the body itself—contemporary, contact, and salsa dancers, physical improvisers, theatre artists, yoga and body therapists, massage practitioners—regarding the question of listening in their practice. Performance and therapy hold particular promise as resources for a dispositional ethics of encounter, as sites of interpersonal communication and negotiation that are designed to cultivate and maintain receptivity even as they engage sensitive and challenging matters, and whose procedural form and creative or therapeutic outcome, as co-constituted, are largely undefined and undetermined in advance. Specific experts were chosen to represent a wide range of embodied modalities, genres, and interrelational dynamics (instruction, direction, collaboration) within these sectors, and because of their reputation for and record of excellence and innovation in these fields. ²⁰ To take seriously the role of the body and the significance of the concrete, specific encounter is also to move concepts like “attention,” “responsiveness,” and “care” from the realm of well-worn metaphor or abstracted norm; to learn to practice ourselves differently in concrete and specific terms. A first step—to borrow another physical metaphor—is to learn to hear from those whose expertise in the daily practices of relational bodies means they are both poised to inform such an ethics yet rarely explored as such a resource.

Listening through the Skin: Lessons from the Field

The artists and physical therapists with whom I spoke—and whose practice, in many cases, I experienced first-hand ²¹ —repeatedly construed their practice as an art of listening and enabling others to listen, whether the artistic impulse to invite audiences to reconsider the ostensibly familiar or the therapist’s task of creating a container safe enough to attend to vulnerable and guarded aspects of affective and embodied experience. ²² What is listening, then, for such practitioners? Despite a remarkable diversity of modalities, sites, and projects, each expert’s account of what listening both entails and requires echoed recent theorizations of a dispositional ethics of encounter. Far removed from Cartesian pretensions to either separation from or stability of the self, here listening was construed as a task of responsiveness from a relational, situated, and dynamic subject position. Here was the Cartesian self turned self in situ, where the self who is listening is not something to be guarded and asserted at the expense of internal and external difference, but rather multidimensional and in continual formation—who can listen, in fact, only by virtue of this fact and acknowledgment of such.

And yet, in materializing or concretizing such an ethics, these experts did more than merely echo recent scholarship. Their contribution to this literature is twofold: they offer a greater specification than hitherto articulated of how such an ethos is to be conceptualized as well as practiced as relational, situated, and processual actors. How is such an ethics of encounter conceived and enacted, for these practitioners? On both counts, key commonalities were apparent despite profound diversity in genre or context. Taking these accounts together, the practice of receptivity and responsiveness that characterizes a dispositional ethics may be said to have three dimensions, each of which entails and is fostered by specific embodied practices: (i) in place of a bounded self encountering “others,” a relational ethics involves attention to self in/as context—to the sensations, affects, and cues both within and beyond the body’s bounds; (ii) in place of a coherent self who encounters via established codes, a situated ethics involves attention to the rhizomatic multiplicity of one’s own subject position and the contestability of the terms of engagement; (iii) in place of a stable self who walks away from the encounter unmoved, an emergent ethics entails attention to temporality and the changing conditions of the self-in-formation.

While current theory may describe identity and ethics in similarly situated, relational, and emergent terms, these experimentations in enactment make direct links between such ontological claims and specific forms of (ever corporeal) attention that are ethically required and, via corporeal strategy, possible to cultivate. Moreover, each of these dimensions of a dispositional ethics, in the very practical ways it was described and achieved by practitioners, maps onto and thus yields specific resources for three distinct aspects of uncertain and challenging encounters: what precedes and prepares us to be receptive before they occur; what we might do in unsettling moments to remain receptive when triggered and inclined to retreat; and how one might, via contextual and procedural considerations, encourage receptivity and responsiveness in others. A dispositional ethics as described here offers the promise of holding the self ever responsible and response-able even as it moves in relation to the difficulties, excesses, and challenges of each encounter. In what follows, I unpack these three dimensions of a dispositional ethics that are apparent as the embodied theory of such practices in the field, offer some of the concrete strategies that these experts use to cultivate them, and signal the challenges and refinements they present to current theory.

Embodying a Relational Ethics: Attention to Self in/as Context

These experts articulated a relational ethics in emphasizing the importance to their practice of attention to self in/as context. In contrast to a given subject position as the taken-for-granted precursor to the encounter “out there,” listening here was construed as a process of attending simultaneously to what is both internal and external; artists and therapists alike identified such attention-in-the-round as the core and ideal state of creation and collaboration. This was deemed vital for many reasons, all of which unravel notions of autonomy and separation of self from broader context. As such, the explicit practice of attention in these embodied encounters makes visible a multidimensional, ever-relational model of listening that political theory has begun to explore. In doing so, they both clarify the practicalities of enactment and redefine key terms of engagement.

Firstly, such attention to self in/as context was seen to be necessary because in the ever-embodied act of attention, the body is our primary channel and obstacle to the world in which we are embedded. As Butler, Tully, and others have noted, perception and response are shaped by habits of the body as well as mind; yet for these practitioners, this not only demanded concerted attention to the physical dimensions of a given encounter, but also redefined how self and broader environment, as physical context of such attention, are related. For so many experts, receptivity and responsiveness to another require self-awareness: to clear away the distractions of our own mental and affective landscape—what contact and clown artist Kat Single-Dain calls “what comes from some other trigger”; to perceive all available sensory information, turning the body into what one contact improviser calls a three-dimensional camera that “listen[s with] eyes . . . fingers . . . ears”; to discern the subtle physical and vocal cues that signal when others are ready or unable to listen; ²³ and to develop an intuitive and kinesthetically based empathy regarding others’ affective and physical states—a “muscle we don’t use very often” that requires an awareness of one’s own bodily states and a clearing of such affects so as to empathize without identification or projection. ²⁴ Learning to identify and understand one’s own complex and often opaque impulses and affective states was also said to be vital to the challenge of taking responsibility for one’s own cues and “learning to hear when you’re not listening,” as so much of perception and impulse is physical before it is conscious. ²⁵ As many experts noted, often we suppress, dismiss, or distrust our basic capacities to perceive both sensory cues and our own affective and cognitive impulses, those “parts of [our]selves that actually are seeing the whole picture.” ²⁶

The inverse relation also holds, according to many of these practitioners: such attention-in-the-round is also necessary as receptivity to others is essential for self-care. In practices that are foundationally relational, protection of the self and openness to others were seen to stem from the same source. Whether in improvised or choreographed movement, attention to one’s partner and the collective image one is co-creating “will always save you,” in the words of one dancer, ²⁷ preventing injury and helping to overcome personal fear; in fact, dancers noted that most injuries happen when one withdraws from this investment in the collective image. And yet such openness to others is not to be mistaken with self-effacement: theatre and dance artists observed that attention to one’s own physical and affective state lies behind both the ability to listen to others and personal safety, in contrast to the tendency to “leap out of [oneself]” in unsafe forms of contact dance. ²⁸ This unravels the distinction between self and other in the act of listening—not as unity, but as a complex and relational field to which one must attend.

Thus the goal is listening in balance: to overshadow others is not an assertion of strength but a disproportionate responsiveness to merely one aspect of self in/as context; to be overpowered by the external is not proof that receptivity equates with passivity or weakness, but a disproportionate attention to a different aspect of the same field. ²⁹ Though conventionally we perceive such dominance and passivity as the reciprocal exchanges of expression and attention, both of these modes of interaction belie a failure to listen properly; in the context of full presence, as physical theatre artist Raina von Waldenburg notes, “the out here and the [in] here are the same.” It is in this light that salsa dancers Maria Lorenzi and Michael Rosen’s inversion of conventional understandings of lead and follow roles becomes salient: to lead is a “constant practice of openness and presence” in response to the follow’s cues, while to follow is to actively communicate to the lead through the play of pressure and momentum.

This means that to engage another fully, one must attend to the sensations, affects, and cues both within and beyond the body’s bounds: to acknowledge and address the complex and often opaque influence of our own mental and affective landscape; to perceive the vast amount of sensory information in any given moment; to take responsibility for one’s own cues and variable capacity to listen. With a historical presumption of both self and evaluative terms as a priori and ostensibly stable, we have underestimated the role that our own somatic and affective terrain plays in constituting the dynamics of encounter, as both common obstacle and vital resource. Such practices show this tension in its dynamism—that every encounter is alive and moving, and requires attention to both internal and external realities, as well as how these respond in the light of such attention.

Concrete Strategies for Attention to Self in/as Context: Preparing to Listen

The embodiment of listening within such practices widens our sense of the field to which we must attend in a dispositional ethics, but it also provides a host of concrete strategies that rely on the most readily available and influential factor in such moments. To create the conditions for receptivity and responsiveness, one must develop somatic awareness through repeated and intentional sensory experience of both internal and external realities. Every dancer and theatre artist with whom I spoke noted that training or collaboration always begins, whether in sum or on any given day, with attunement to sensory experience to heighten perception and generate a state of readiness. Likewise, it is through deliberate sensory engagement that all therapeutic body workers with whom I spoke identify and “clear” their own mental and emotional state to prepare themselves for clients.

What does such an embodied inventory or clearing entail? Massage practitioner Therese Bouchard noted that despite the resistance to such moments borne of a feeling of their enormity or difficulty, it only ever takes a moment to become receptive. In fact, many techniques for attaining this state are easily integrated into or adapted for the most conventional of settings. Often practitioners mentioned the pivotal role of attention to the breath, as it is an ever-available and ceaseless experience that can easily draw attention into the present moment. Moreover, consciously relaxing the body while deepening the breath through the nose, or coordinating the breath with forward folds or other movement sequences—among the cooling “langhana” techniques in the yogic tradition—are used to activate the parasympathetic nervous system to calm physical and emotional state. ³⁰ To clear assumptions and prepare for the as-yet unknown in any process, choreographer and dancer Heather Laura Gray draws on a range of mental and physical strategies while connecting with the breath, from releasing the diaphragm to visualizing the whole surface of the body as open to information.

Others attend to common, yet often unnoticed, physical sensations from the particular pressure and contours of the body in contact with the chair or ground, the unconscious tensions held in the throat or jaw, or the dimensions of negative space one’s position creates in a room. As a whole, it is a practice of carving time to simply notice, and learn to notice, aspects of embodied experience that are usually occluded by assumptions they are already known. From Chase’s use of guided abstract movement with creative writers and conflict practitioners to Rosen and Lorenzi’s use of incrementally less touch among early salsa dancers, from von Waldenburg and body therapist Fiona Black’s continual shift of clients’ or students’ language from judgmental to observational terms, to Kate Franklin, Billy Marchenski, and Darcy McMurray’s note of the power of pausing within improvised dance, such practices seek to develop the capacity to listen to subtler and more varied cues from one’s environment. These are on the whole, as Bouchard cajoles us, “very simple tools . . . it takes about a minute and there we are,” each preparing the body like a tuning fork to attend to internal and external cues.

Embodying a Situated Ethics: Attention to Self-as-Multitude

The second dimension of a dispositional ethics in practice is attention to the multiplicity of one’s own subject position and the consequent partiality of any one response or impulse. This is not a model of encounter composed of only two parties; in the place of a coherent subject who encounters difference beyond its bounds, a dispositional ethics acknowledges the never-ceasing process of encounter even within a given subject position, the self-as-multitude. Though this claim follows from a relational ontology, it also holds significance as it is this multiplicity and contestability in any given moment that provides the means to expand the range of perceived possibilities for thought, action, and relation. This is the elusive point Butler makes at the end of Gender Trouble: social construction is not anathema to but the precondition of agency. In the context of encounter, to loosen the hold of one’s particular narrative and personal agenda is also to open oneself to what might exceed such bounds in productive ways.

Agency does not, in this light, appear as sovereignty—the ability to assert one’s will over and against what is encountered—but rather as the ability to act in response to what one encounters, to revise in light of new information and the impulses this provokes. As always-already interrelational, “survival in fact,” as Edward Said and others argue, “is about connections between things.” ³¹ Dancers and theatre improvisers repeatedly identified this openness and responsiveness—the ability to “let go, and either make a virtue of not working or find another way”—as a key component to an effective creative process. Moreover, several noted that in the most creative—agentic—moments one loses a sense of self in the act of creation. Conversely, to indulge in one’s own internal experience at the expense of the broader environment—at times mistaken for the very definition of artistic expression—was said to confuse freedom with the truncated experience of “wanking about,” as it requires shutting oneself off to sustain an affective moment that is always, by definition, in motion. From this perspective, to be “authentic” or truthful is not to commit to the unbridled divulgence of a unified, stable interiority—this would, as several dancers and theatre artists noted, create an unsafe environment for artist and audience alike—but to fully attend to what is true in the moment, as it moves and changes. ³²

Artists across physical genres, by virtue of the practice, were vocal about this need to relax the grip of expectation and agenda as the means to be present with what was emergent within the encounter, whether Rosen and Lorenzi’s redefinition of “success” in salsa from “getting it right” via “a laundry list of moves” to “when you’ve actually had a conversation with the person,” Black’s efforts to enable clients to listen to what is muffled by the “left brain, [the] goal-driven . . . list-making” mind, or von Waldenberg’s distinction between Method Acting “living in the past . . . and result-oriented future” and physical theatre “being in the present—it’s alive, there are no old associations.” To be tightly wed to one’s narrative, whether the weight of the past or a rigid projection for the future, is to be held captive in two senses: one lacks choice or is in a sense (ironically) out of control because these impositions stunt the ability to perceive both what is occurring beyond these set terms, and the range of resources and possibilities for response available within it. ³³ As von Waldenburg observes, “Ego does not want to be exposed to new experiences, the ego just wants to survive,” and yet this tendency obstructs avenues and means for keen vision and intentional action. From the perspective of such practices taking shape in an explicitly situated and complex field, receptivity is not in opposition but rather the necessary precursor to agency.

Such surrender of the sovereign subject position is thus not the erasure of the self, but, as theorists in the politics of difference have demanded, the act of radically situating one’s subject position as multiple and in process—one is many selves, each instantiation and the perspective it yields ever partial, as it is constituted from the “dilemmatic spaces” ³⁴ of multiple axes of affiliation and differentiation in response to ever-changing and multiple contexts. von Waldenberg describes this attention to multiplicity as an acceptance of the “dynamic between suppression and release [that] is the pulse of life”—an acceptance of what is occurring that in itself invites choice and allows the next moment to take shape. It is this attention to self-as-multitude that, in concrete terms for these artists, leaves room for possibilities of being, thinking, and relating that are not yet known, not yet salient, yet-emergent; that are otherwise occluded by prevailing narratives and agendas, and presumptions regarding the subject position who enacts them.

Concrete Strategies for Attention to Self-as-Multitude: Remaining Receptive

These artists and therapists emphasize, akin to Butler and others, how receptivity and responsiveness are in fact integral to agency. And yet the way they do so also reveals how acknowledging and working directly with one’s multiplicity is also connected to one’s capacity for these ethical sensibilities. By softening the grip of identification with any one affective response and enabling various possible routes of action, attention to this internal complexity provides the means to remain receptive and responsive even in intense and challenging encounters.

To attend to the complexity of a given encounter and remain receptive and responsive despite the challenges it presents, Bouchard and von Waldenberg both consciously fragment the subject position into multiple selves. Echoing Bouchard’s personal mantra in moments of difficulty of “I am here for me, I am here with me,” in physical theatre where the “authentic” is ever contextual and contingent, von Waldenberg invites students to separate themselves into composite parts when they experience a volatile reaction, as there is always a part one oneself who is witness to the affect, perhaps another who feels differently, such that any given affect, however strong, does not define the self in its entirety. Indeed, our internal complexity is what enables various possible routes of action, often—if one is listening—as responses to previous expressions of the self. ³⁵ von Waldenberg offered a host of techniques to develop this multidimensional approach to the self, from mapping expressions, responses, and opportunities to re-respond in light of earlier expressions to having students step out of the physical space of the initial expression and describe to their audience what occurred in anything but the first person. She and Single-Dain noted that situating a given response in the broader spectrum of the whole self through such theatrical devices also lowers the stakes such that people are more poised to acknowledge troublesome or ostensibly shameful dimensions of their experiences and positions, as well as communicate these more clearly. Chase and Single-Dain’s tactic of assigning complex repeated physical tasks to listeners also makes use of the fragmented self to foster receptivity, as this distracts the “busy mind” with its host of established signifiers and well-worn paths and leaves listeners “only [with] the space to listen . . . [not] the space to prepare [their] well-entrenched response.” ³⁶

To return to the present from the ricochet of mental trajectories into past concerns and present agendas, again the body proves central. As yoga therapist Nicole Marcia notes, proprioception—the somatic awareness of one’s body in place—is key to “continuing to come back” to attention on present experience. Whether the strategic use of an elevated voice, regulating long breaths, the repetition of complex physical sequences, or an invitation to notice tactile, visual, or auditory cues, a return to sensation—called “re-sourcing” in somatic therapy—was the primary means identified to return to a state of receptivity, particularly when mental associations provoke dissociation or volatile reactions. ³⁷ When we are affectively triggered by what we encounter, the task for these practitioners is to identify “not what it is, [but] where it is in the body”; for Gray, who articulated this so beautifully, this is achieved by locating where tension is held in the body as she exhales, and continuing to breathe into this place while visualizing the release of this tension into the floor.

This highlights an incredibly potent aspect of responsiveness to difficult moments: in almost total opposition to most approaches to political impasse or conflict that see the substance of an issue as the content of meaning-making, repeatedly these experts recommended a focus on the sensation of encounter. This we might call a form of “immediate abstraction,” where attention to one’s responses in physical rather than conceptual terms provides a crucial aesthetic mediation that enables one to resist the mental distancing of rationalization, defensiveness, or projection. Affects of perception and response are aestheticized in order to observe experience apart from the distortions borne of personal attachments. “Approached as choreography,” such responses are embodied in a focused practice where they can then be simplified, repeated, extended, made deliberately absurd, and ultimately where through such acknowledgment, expression and release, “like alchemy,” they “can become something else.” ³⁸ In short, not analysis of narrative or context but direct engagement of the sensations they produce provides the means to remain within the most difficult moments of encounter and, in response to such attention, catalyze alchemical shift. ³⁹ This is arguably one of the most provocative interventions in the study of a dispositional ethics: the body, as primary channel and obstacle within the encounter, is more than merely something to decipher or decipher through. Direct and strategic engagement of physical sensation offers a means to change the terms of the encounter in a very real sense, as affects might be worked upon until they soften calcified responses and yield previously foreclosed alternatives.

Embodying an Emergent Ethics: Attention to Self-in-Formation

This brings to the fore the final dimension of a dispositional ethics in practice: an attention to temporality and the processual nature of the self. Just as receptivity and responsiveness entail an attention to self in/as context and self-as-multitude, to learn to hear what is currently white noise also requires an attunement to the self-in-formation so that the terms with which one perceives, evaluates, and responds to others remain open to contestation and reworking. Improvisation makes an intentional art out of our daily experience as processual creatures, where artists practice a state of receptive and critical curiosity about the changing terms of experience and the possibilities it holds for creation, inquiry and expression. As von Waldenburg described it, to be responsive to the world as an artist and individual “I’m tracking, I’m smelling, I’m curious. What is this environment? What is this universe? Because the universe is constantly changing.” To acknowledge the relational and situated nature of identity and politics is, as Tully, Butler, and Myers emphasized, to embrace an agonistic approach to their limits and closures—for any such instance, whether personal meaning or diverse coalition, is the product of work and struggle—and remain open to contestation and change as the terms with which we interpret salience, legitimacy, and significance shift in response to such processes. ⁴⁰

Practitioners highlighted a number of changes that they have experienced or witnessed in the course of their work: dramatic shifts in mood and behavior with a simple change in posture; greater clarity, vividness, and creativity in analysis and communication through the collective practice of repeated complex physical tasks; a greater sense of connection with others “that I have in almost no other kind of activity”; less reliance on external forms of self-regulation such as addiction and overeating in times of distress; and above all a greater capacity to listen and express oneself from a position of presence. ⁴¹ These are precisely the kinds of tangible changes a politics of difference demands of us, made possible through continual embodied practice.

Concrete Strategies for Attention to Self-in-Formation: Cultivating the Conditions for Listening

A dispositional ethics thus entails attention to the changing conditions of receptivity and responsiveness, for what is required to stand to hear another is ever affected by what has already emerged and our responses therein. There are three aspects of embodied practices across artistic and therapeutic genres that reveal such an attention to the self-in-formation, and what that both yields and requires. The first of these are innumerable procedural considerations that have been found to foster receptivity and responsiveness throughout such changing conditions: the need to begin with activities that foster awareness of one’s own body and affects before working with others; the use of slower pace or closer proximity with each new encounter to provide time to “sync up” or tune into sensory cues; or the clear demarcation of a “contained space”—whether via clear parameters in terms of directives, intentions, and length of activity, or the use of formalized rituals to enter and exit the space—to provide the safety with which to delve deeply and return to the surface with a sense of closure. ⁴² As von Waldenburg observed of her decades of work as an actor and instructor, the strict rules and boundaries of a highly structured process can facilitate release, expansion, and expression, for when people are “not as responsible, they can then become response-able.” Several also noted certain physical factors that can affect individual behavior or group dynamics, recommending sitting in a circle (“one of the safest configurations”) or on the floor (which “brings us out of our socialized body”), and refraining from sitting too close, higher than, or directly facing others to facilitate a state of openness to the process. ⁴³ There is sensitivity, here, to the temporal limits of purview, to the validity of moments of closure, to the changing demands for proximity or distance, to the spatio-temporal dimensions of safety, risk, curiosity, and trust. Moreover, these procedural features entail attention to the duration involved in gestation and percolation, for the softening of reactivity and reworking of habitual routes of thought and action. Chase, whose workshops are designed to “open up new pathways of thinking” and communication, noted in particular that “duration is important . . . some things percolate” and ideally these structured encounters should take place over several days so there is opportunity to “integrate [the experience] on a different level and then get a chance to respond to that.”

Secondly, practitioners noted that beyond such procedural designs, above all effective creative or therapeutic processes demanded receptivity and responsiveness by those implementing them. This was emphasized for two reasons. Firstly, these dispositions were said to facilitate one’s own capacity to respond appropriately to changing conditions that are inevitably entailed in any given encounter. The process, and the processual self within it, matters, and one must be open to adapting in light of the variable capacity to remain open or require retreat. Gray notes that as a choreographer she continually observes the level of energy in the room (“concentration is a low vibration, it’s heavy”) and moves between questioning techniques and physical tasks, or introduces tonal shifts in her own speech, whistling, or yelling as a group (“it’s amazing to see how that changes the space”), when inattention requires a shift in strategy.

Experts across sectors recommended modeling the very dispositions one demands of others—attentiveness, curiosity, vulnerability, a sense of play—because this was also said to enable such dispositions for others. There is a profound insight in this embodied version of Kant’s categorical imperative, grounded not in normative but in practical terms that acknowledge the contagion of affective state: as Bouchard notes, “modeling . . . is contagious. If I’m in my body and I’m relaxed and if I’m in an open space it will spread.” Practitioners thus provide the conditions of learning for their students or clients by practicing the embodied techniques that signal that they are “holding the space . . . so that they can expand,” or, when confronted with others’ volatile affects, allowing them to pass through and dissipate, so that they “ha[ve] nowhere to go . . . it gives them the opportunity to respond in the same way.” ⁴⁴ As Single-Dain observes in her work as both teacher and collaborator, “it’s kind of a full circle, because it depends on my ability to listen” and model such responsiveness for others. Here, encounter appears as ecosystem, where the capacity for receptivity and responsiveness also constitutes and impacts communication: in Gray’s terms, to listen is to “enter . . . the same field at the same time,” rising to meet the other to shape the very form that their expression and attention may take.

Finally, attention to self-in-formation entails acknowledgment that such dispositions take time and extensive practice. Embodied learning tends to more profound impacts on thought and behavior, but it also takes time to integrate such learning. ⁴⁵ Perhaps this lies behind Tully’s skepticism of academic contexts as sites of deep listening: while the “shallow” understanding of cognition might occur quickly, many noted that to develop the dispositions an ethics of encounter require, one must absorb such learning “until every cell has understood . . . and can speak it without speaking,” something that takes “perseverance and effort” over many years and remains a lifelong process. ⁴⁶ As one yoga therapist recalls,

to just address the mind is not as effective as addressing the mind and body . . . for a long time I got that philosophically but the more I do this work, the more I get it . . . sort of in my bones, I see it. ⁴⁷

Concluding Remarks: The Active Role of Receptivity

For some time now, we have been faced with the material challenge of how to respond in theory and practice to the relational, situated, and emergent nature of identity and politics. A burgeoning scholarship in what I’ve called here a “dispositional ethics” has been integral in this project, in its ongoing investigation of how ethics might be grounded not in fixed and certain moral codes but in particular affective stances to inescapably embodied, wholly embedded, and ever-changing conditions of everyday life. This has provided the terms for a more attentive and response-able ethics, and yet despite its attention to embodied strategies to cultivate such sensibilities this scholarship has yet to explore how those who take the body as their primary mode of encounter might contribute to this endeavor. Among such practitioners across performance and therapy sectors, we find both well-developed if tacit theorizations of encounter in relational, situated, and emergent terms, and specific practices that provide a rich set of resources for cultivating the dispositions requisite for an ethics of encounter. As such, they show how a dispositional approach can meet the normative demands of a politics of difference to at once ethically respond to moments of encounter and refrain from prescribing what these responses will be in advance.

In the particular ways that they do so, they challenge some of the prevailing conceptions of identity, receptivity, and agency that lie behind common hesitations at the edge of and missteps within the encounter. In reworking such terms, they potentially mitigate those very defenses that prevent the very ethics they seek to enact: they remind us that in the absence of the bounded self, one is not dissolved but integral to context; that in the absence of cohesive identity one is not effaced but multiplied with greater possibilities for thought and action; that in the absence of the stable self, one persists in a state of continual emergence, in response to what is encountered. A dispositional approach to ethics thus not only opens us to possibilities for response-ability demanded in critical theory and foreclosed by pre-given codes, but also the means with which to address some of the anxieties that lie at the heart of unethical responses to social difference.

Seen this way, receptivity is no longer a passive state—a submissive compromise of one’s usual autonomy, a concession that admits weakness—but an active and interactive process, in three ways: because it demands a vigilant and ceaseless engagement with emerging internal and external cues by the entire body and its alert repertoire of senses; because the act of listening is constitutive of the capacity and experience of expression and attention for others in radical ways; and finally, because our very agency—the ability to create and act with clarity of vision and intention—is connected to our capacity to open ourselves to the full context, internal complexity, and temporality of our impulses, desires, and subject position(s) as they take shape in response to the world. As relational, situated, and emergent selves, we are only ever in response. The challenge is not to reassert the “foundational fantasy” ⁴⁸ of clear boundaries, fixed codes, and stable subjectivities over and against such interrelation, but to find the language and, perhaps more importantly, the practices that cultivate the conditions for a more alert, reflexive, and response-able disposition in such relations. Only through such practiced attention do we find the tools with which to resist recourse to familiar strategies of self-preservation against the intrusion of the foreign, and open ourselves to the “fine risk” of encountering what we do not yet perceive or understand.

What might this mean for deeply entrenched and polarized political contexts, where dominant groups benefit from long histories and habits of inattention and, when enlisted, unethical responses of denial, defensiveness, and resentment? For xenophobic backlash against refugees in Europe and Australia? For police and community reactivity to the call that “Black Lives Matter”? For state legislatures actively working to prevent LGBTQ rights and protections? For the sense of victimhood within white privilege that fuels support for Trump’s promise to “make America great again”? How might such strategies be integrated to soften the calcified dynamics of race, class, and sexual privilege that persist among even those who wish to be accountable and answerable, and even more so among those who do not?

There are, of course, limits to the application of these insights to such charged political contexts. While practitioners also contend with power imbalances and work across social difference in conditions of uncertainty, therapeutic and artistic collaboration’s clarity and acceptance of roles by willing participants are a far cry from the political sites where receptivity and responsiveness are most needed. Indeed, while a focus on the body’s role in relative receptivity or closure helps to radically situate actors in material terms, taking these insights from therapy and performance disciplines risks reducing politics to physiology if we fail to consider how power and history shape such moments and capacities therein. Embodied strategies identified here must, therefore, be informed by rigorous interrogation of other contextual factors that structure encounters and parties’ habitual responses within them, if they are to be usefully—and ethically—employed in political life.

And yet these practical and conceptual insights regarding the embodiment of ethical encounter, working in tandem with more conventional lines of political critique, nuance these critiques in novel and promising ways. If dispositions are always-already embodied, the body will always have a role to play in obstructions to, capacities for, and the ultimate shape of attention and response. Each of these three dimensions of a dispositional ethics helps to focus analysis of and action within the encounter in three significant ways, and yields countless strategies shown to cultivate these sensibilities that might be applied or adapted to more politicized or conflictual contexts. Granted, the first two dimensions of a dispositional ethics rely on personal awareness of and commitment to this ethos—yet they specify the corporeal nature and resources of such sensibilities for those seeking to enact them, equipping interlocutors with the means with which to prepare to be and, when challenged, remain receptive within encounters. As William Connolly argues, while it might be unrealistic to expect all to adopt ethical dispositions, cultivating them within even a few crucially contributes to greater tolerance and capacities for co-existence in the most challenging of political contexts. ⁴⁹ It might also, in light of the activity of receptivity via affective contagion as described by somatic practitioners, at times even create the conditions for the “fine risk” of such dispositions for others.

For contexts in which such dispositions are sorely lacking, these personal strategies might be supplemented by consideration of contextual and procedural factors that have been found to encourage receptivity and responsiveness in others. We have yet to see how experimentation with proximity, placement, and posture might affect dynamics between adversaries; how attention to duration, tempo, and pause of a given process might enable reflection or revision; how tailored ritual, spatial delineation, or acoustic variation might provide safer contexts for self-risk and maintain attention despite the strain it entails. With so much recent work on the ethical demand for receptivity and responsiveness, forays into how these might be fostered and maintained in politics have yet to explore to any great extent how such factors might be harnessed for this purpose. It is beyond the reach of this article to experiment with translating such practices to more fraught political contexts, but my hope is that this articulation of embodied approaches to ethical encounter as they present in these sites might invite and offer novel resources for just such a line of inquiry.

The greater limit to such strategies has less to do with the translation of therapeutic or creative processes to political sites, or their (potentially depoliticizing) focus on the body, than it does with an ethical approach to politics per se. Politics exists, is reinforced and challenged, in the capillaries of the everyday and at the level of gestures, practices, and bodies. Acknowledgment of such micropolitics is arguably one reason an ethical approach to politics, and a dispositional ethics in particular, has grown as a field of inquiry in recent years, given the role of the interpersonal and, more specifically, the body in structuring relations across difference. Moreover, an ethical lens works to disaggregate political collectives that, as collective, must actively work to stave off cohering and reifying tendencies; with its interpersonal emphasis, ethics highlights power dynamics and provides the terms for greater accountability within such groups. And yet, while connected to the political, ethics will never be a substitute for structural or collective approaches to political redress—indeed, such interpersonal emphasis, when taken alone, can reinforce individualizing and entrepreneurial discourses of personal responsibility that veil systemic or collective sources of injustice. A dispositional ethics, ever incomplete in isolation, may be seen as a vital counterpart to structural and collective approaches, by cultivating the sensibilities that precede and support just relations, laws, and institutions, as well as providing the terms with which to hold these ideals and practices to greater account in the moving and ever-opaque terrain of political life.

. . . moving slowly and . . . reading the response. I think that’s almost the only tool that we have.

—Michael Rosen, salsa dancer