Distributed corporeality: Anatomy,knowledge and the technological reconfiguration of bodies in ballet

Abstract

Various specialist cultures configure bodies as complex technological devices. We know little about how exactly this is done. I focus on one of these cultures, classical ballet, to praxeologically reconstruct the conceptual, situational and material configuration of bodies as particular instruments. The technologization of the body is closely intertwined with the scientification of the practice – its ladenness with scientific knowledge about the body and an elaborate apparatus for the production of bodies. When anatomical knowledge and didactics intertwine in ballet class, this facilitates an opening of the black box ‘body’ for technical improvement. ‘A body’ becomes a plurality of (in this case, anatomically distinguished) actants. This distributed corporeality suggests that ‘the body’ is an assemblage that becomes apparent as such in moments of its modification. The empirical case as well as the analytical approach here give reason to reconsider the distinction between humans and non-humans that still prevails in actor-network theory and elsewhere.

Keywords

anatomy applied science assemblage ballet body movement technology reconfiguration technical improvement

Body technique and body technologies

‘[M]an’s first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body’, Marcel Mauss (1973: 75f) writes.

This article is concerned with taking Mauss at his word. In research on material sociality and knowledge, (extracorporeal) technology often stands on one side and (body) technique, in the form of skills, on the other. Yet, if there are bodily techniques, then the body must receive consideration as technology. This means considering the body as a carefully manufactured product designed to carry out particular practices and specific technical tasks.

In science and technology studies (STS), the body has received growing attention. Some studies have scrutinized the body as an object of scientific practices, in, for example, fatigue research (Johnson, 2013) or surgery (Hirschauer, 1991; Leem, 2016; Prentice, 2005). Key texts in feminist STS have conceptualized embodiment as hybrid; with the metaphor of the cyborg, Haraway (1991) emphasizes how ‘human’ and ‘machine’ are intertwined. In the field of modern biomedicine, studies have shown how bodies are enacted in medical-technical procedures (e.g. Mol, 2002). Latour (2004) has pointed out that body techniques are built in interaction with technologies and vice versa. Other studies focus on the embodied skills needed and tacitly shaped in scientific practices and interaction with technological objects (e.g. Collins, 2001; Delamont and Atkinson, 2001; Myers, 2008).

The body itself, however, is usually not scrutinized as a technical object. Rather, it remains something different from technology in that it is subsumed under the ‘human’ side of things – our ‘old basis of primate sociality’ (Latour, 1996: 239). Nevertheless, in speaking of bodies as ‘resources’, Strum and Latour (1987: 790) already describe the body as a socially shaped and employed tool. In his study of surgery, Hirschauer (1991: 284), portrays trained surgeons as ‘instruments’ and their skilled hands as their main tools. Downey (2007: 221) draws on Mauss, pointing out that ‘the naked human body … is also a “technological” object’ that has to be employed for solving ‘even the most basic problems’ (Downey, 2007: 220).

Beyond the body’s implicit shaping and functioning as a ready-to-hand tool not further reflected upon as such, there are specialist cultures that explicitly manufacture highly specialized bodies as complex technological devices. In these cultures, the construction of bodies as technologies is not only about skills, about the acquisition, adaption and innovation of body techniques. It is also about the material and conceptual reconfiguration of bodies as particular instruments, which draws on scientific knowledge. So far, we know little about how exactly highly technologized bodies are constructed. And we know little about what kind of difference it makes that, unlike with other instruments, there is a person that is the body that is worked on. This article takes up these questions focusing on the empirical case of ballet training, with the intention to further blur the boundaries between ‘technology’ and ‘body’ and their respective lines of study.

Investigating the body as technology in ballet

My interest in bodies as technology did not originate from a theoretical quest but from ethnographic curiosity. This article is based on an ethnographic study of ballet classes in professional training settings. I was reminded of Mauss when I was trying to take somebody else at their word: In the world of ballet, there is a lot of talk about ‘technique’ in reference to the body. Sociologists have taken up this talk in interviews and their analysis, asserting (and criticizing) that ballet dancers attend to, exploit and shape their bodies as technical objects (Aalten, 2007; Alexias and Dimitropoulou, 2011; Gugutzer, 2002; Pickard, 2013; Turner and Wainwright, 2003; Wainwright and Turner, 2004).¹ These sociological studies are concerned with overcoming Cartesian dualism and pointing out that dancers are embodied agents; they draw on the phenomenology of the body or on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Yet, they leave the subjects at the centre of the (sociological) stage. My intention here is to bring practices into focus, describing the performative construction of social reality. I would regard both embodied ‘wholeness’ and a dualism between a social person and her body parts as practice-bound empirical phenomena that arise from how agency is situationally attributed.²

In the tradition of the microsociological laboratory studies (Knorr-Cetina, 1981, 1999; Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Lynch, 1985), I take the talk about the body technical as providing an analytical perspective: It can help render unfamiliar what, in the established view, seems to be just one more setting where subjects acquire embodied skills through meticulous work (e.g. Crossley, 2005; Sudnow, 2001; Wacquant, 2006). When employing this analytical lens in ballet classes I observed practices of intense instrument care, development and study. Dancers were tinkering with their bodies, improving the arch of a foot here, experimenting to realign a pelvis there, finding new ways of how to strengthen a back, making a thigh slimmer and improving the turn-out feature of a hip. But how does it work, I asked myself, that bodies can be taken as things that are treated in this way? I thus turned to the historical, situational and constant practical reconfiguration of bodies in ballet class.

Starting from a viewpoint of methodological situationism (Knorr-Cetina, 1988), the main question is: How are balletic bodily instruments reconfigured as such in practice? How is specific knowledge about the body woven into and, at the same time, given material anchors of ratification in these processes of reconfiguration? And what can we learn about embodiment and technology when looking at a ballet class as a body workshop?

The technologization of the body is closely intertwined with the scientification of the practice of ballet. Balletic practice is laden with scientific knowledge about the body and draws on an elaborate apparatus for the production of bodies. As ballet draws heavily on anatomy and kinesiology, I regard it as an applied science. Of course, even though I latch onto the tradition of laboratory studies, there are significant differences between the laboratory and the ballet studio. In the laboratory, epistemic objects are created in the course of producing new knowledge in general (Rheinberger, 1997). The ballet studio makes bodies into epistemic objects in the course of producing practical knowledge that is new to the dancers. And while laboratories are concerned with docile apparatuses for generating plausible images and measurements (Knorr-Cetina, 1981), ballet classes are workshops concerned with producing docile bodies that display appropriate images and measurements. In that sense, ballet training can be likened to surgical practices (Hirschauer, 1991). Again, there are differences: Ballet bodies are not shaped with a scalpel, but with exercise, and the work relies on the embodied person’s vigilance, rather than that person’s (anaesthetic) evacuation. Also, while surgery (and medicine in general) aims at making broken bodies whole again, ballet is interested in constantly (and never-endingly) improving already very able bodies. Nevertheless, there is good reason to take ballet seriously as an applied science of body crafting. Though often only considered an art form and aesthetic, its emergence as a cultural practice in early modernity is inseparably intertwined with the emergence of anatomical knowledge (Zur Lippe, 1979). Long before sports became a social field that concerned itself with physiological principles, ‘academic dance’ – as ballet is also called – shaped not only physiques, but also theories about the body as a ‘movement apparatus’, as the German scientific term for the locomotor system has it.

On a more conceptual level, I argue that when anatomical knowledge and didactics intertwine in ballet class, this facilitates an opening of the normally black boxed ‘body’ for technical improvement. ‘Body’ becomes an assemblage of (anatomically distinguished) actants struggling to work together in the ‘organic solidarity’ – to take up Durkheim in a literal sense³ – of the one biological body that is usually taken for granted and is the blueprint for the notion of balletic perfection. Building on my analysis, I put forward the notion of distributed corporeality to apply to decentred bodily agency. While Latour and others have worked on showing that what is packaged as ‘an action’ by a human agent is actually distributed between humans and non-humans, this case presents ‘the body’ itself as an assemblage that becomes apparent as such in moments of its technological modification.

My objective is to provide a praxeological reconstruction of the technological reconfiguration of bodies in ballet classes by means of thick description. My descriptions derive from a four-year field study (2011–2015) during which I was also involved in a professional training program in Germany as an apprentice. The scenes that provide a backbone for my analysis are fictional in the sense that they are edited towards a condensed display of what is at stake and make use of composite characters. However, they are by no means fictive, since they are careful compositions from various kinds of data collected over a long period of time in the highly standardized and ritualistic situation of ballet class, and are products of the analytic refinement processes of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967).

The section following this introduction contains a historical reconstruction of the co-emergence of ballet and anatomical knowledge. From there, I describe in detail the step-by-step reconfiguration of a student body in a particular case. My discussion depicts the disciplining of corporeality into a distinct balletic technology as a question of agency distribution, rendering the ‘body’ a black box unpackaged in modification. Ballet is a practice that manufactures hyper-able movement instruments – bodily technologies – on the scaffolding of anatomical knowledge. At the same time, ballet acts as a stakeholder in ‘the body’ that is the human organism we know from biology lessons, naturalizing medical-anatomical knowledge.

Human anatomy and geometry: Ballet as an applied science

Dance master John Weaver’s Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing, published in 1721, is a good example of the growing body of scientific literature on ballet emerging during the 18^th century. The work demonstrates the emergence of ballet as a discipline. Ballet is professionalized as a disciplinary practice as described by Foucault (1995). Before even instructing his readers on how to stand correctly – in accordance with the ‘Principles of Mechanicks’ (Weaver, 1721: 97) – the text begins with ninety pages of unfolding roughly distinguished body parts (head, torso, arms, legs) into various anatomically distinguished bones and muscles. It defines common ‘Defects’ and ‘Ill-habits’ that have to be corrected in the pursuit of ‘Beauty’, defined as ‘the Symmetry, and Harmony of all the Parts of the Body, of a regular Proportion’ (Weaver, 1721: 89). The treatise points towards the two cultural pillars upon which the construction of ballet technique rests: the discovery of anatomy (Foucault, 1973) and the geometrization and mechanization of space and bodies (Zur Lippe, 1979). The genesis of the body as a dance technology thus plays out on the two registers of ‘discipline’ that Foucault (1995: 136) calls ‘anatomico-metaphysical’ and ‘technico-political’. How does anatomy become intertwined with (a technical/mechanistic understanding of) geometry? What kind of apparatus emerges through which bodies are made into instruments to fulfil balletic demands?

Ballet emerged as part of the European process of civilization (Elias, 1978 [1939], 1982 [1939]). Its roots are in the court dances of the Italian Renaissance. Even before ballet became a distinct dance style with its own repertoire of steps, aristocrats practiced a particular ‘balletic’ body technique. As early as 1463 Guglielmo Ebreo, a dance master, asserted that even already ‘noble’ (i.e. well-equipped) bodies need to be shaped ‘through liberal study’ of dance (Ebreo, 1993 [1463]: 99). This kind of body work is part of the pursuit of social distinction that fuels this process of civilization: There was distinctive capital to be gained in exercising with the goal of ‘Naturbeherrschung am Menschen’ (Zur Lippe, 1979), or ‘the mastery of human nature’. Maximal control over ‘natural’ bodily affects was at the core of this process. The study of dance at the courts was thus aimed at not letting the body just succumb to gravity: Slouched backs, buckled knees or stiff, crude or gawky movements revealed a person as low-order (Rameau, 1967 [1725]: 2–4).

The results of such distinction work are described in various treatises of ballet masters (Blasis, 1976 [1820]; Rameau, 1967 [1725]; Weaver, 1721): an upright, steady posture, lifting head and chest away from the ground, and a graceful, controlled and fluid quality of movement. The physiological issue of working against gravity, which was considered the anatomical ideal, was paired with the classical western aesthetic ideal that – since Plato and Aristoteles – constructed beauty along vertical lines, also symbolizing the morally good. In a mutual system of reference, anatomical and geometrical moments played together, ‘disciplining muscles, bones, tendons and joints to push outwards and upwards from the ground’ (Claid, 2006: 20).

From the 16^th century onwards, starting with the marriage of Catharina de Medici and Henry II in 1533, dance lessons were institutionalized as a mandatory part of education at the French court (Homans, 2010: 11). Louis XIV, who became king in 1661, established dance as an indispensable ‘symbol and requirement of aristocratic identity’ (Homans, 2010: 12). Consequently, by 1670 more than two hundred dance schools were established in Paris alone. While before the 1670s, the art of la belle danse had been the privilege of nobility, it now became a mechanism to produce noble bodies that could demonstrate their physiologically and aesthetically superior way of moving (Homans, 2010: 30). Central to this development is the discovery of the body as docile, as material that ‘may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (Foucault, 1995: 136), like any other material that may be shaped into an instrument. It is, nevertheless, a particular material in that it not only can be manipulated and shaped, but also can be trained so that it ‘becomes skilful and increases its forces’ (Foucault, 1995: 136). Even though this kind of improvement of the body was not aimed at technical work, it was nonetheless work on a tool – on an advanced movement technology as an instrument for distinction.

Towards the end of the 17^th century, ballet became increasingly professionalized. Ballet’s hard work on and with the body was delegated to professional dancers; the nobles withdrew to the audience (Homans, 2010: 40ff). In the context of a profession, however, complexity of technique and rigidity of training became even more reinforced. When a professional school with a standing syllabus was founded at the Paris Opera in 1713, the institutionalization of ballet class as a body forge was completed. Ballet as a body technique became systematized, refined and furthered through innovation. Ballet masters played a crucial role in this process (Bourdieu, 1992: 204): Their categorizations and codifications distinguished right from wrong and good from bad. At the same time, they developed instructions on how to build the bodies demanded (Homans, 2010: 15–31).

Drawing on anatomical information, dance masters found that even the most ‘natural’ body movements, such as walking, were complex tasks; hard work was required to accomplish them in a physiologically ‘good’ way (De Lauze, 1952 [1623]: 100). It is worth noticing here that the distinctively advanced was regarded as the anatomically correct (and vice versa). The quest for improvement was less an artistic than a scientific endeavour: to find, define, pursue and unlock the potentials of the posture and way of moving that were most adequate to the natural design of the human organism. Refining body techniques thus meant making better use of the body as movement material. In these practices of cultivating the body, the body became naturalized as an organic, ‘natural body’ (Foucault, 1995: 155), like the bodies of soldiers described by Guibert in 1772⁴: ‘If we studied the intention of nature and the construction of the human body, we would find the position and the bearing that nature clearly prescribes for the soldier’ (in Foucault, 1995: 155). Accordingly, many 18^th-century physicians recommended the exercise of ballet (Weickmann, 2002: 101).

At the same time, the pursuit of the physiologically ideal – finding out what a body should do – led to constant innovations of what bodies could do. In responding to the anatomical potential to strive even further away from the ground by standing on the balls of the feet, ballet masters now formed bodies towards maintaining a stable axis on an even smaller standing surface. This feature, however, could only be developed when not constantly falling over. Therefore, in his 1623 teaching book De Lauze (1952 [1623]: 87) suggests holding onto a table in order to develop balance employing the correct posture. This practice was the first step towards the development of an apparatus designed to advance bodies. Today, the ‘barre’, a wooden bar affixed to the wall, is such an integral part of balletic body work that it has become almost emblematic of ballet class. Barres and hyper-able balletic bodies, then, emerged in a co-construction. Only together with this ‘mundane technology’ (Michael, 2000) could new bodies evolve – bodies that could stand on their toes more stably than many could stand on their flat feet. Over the centuries, the introduction of mirrors as a tool for self-correction further complemented the apparatus – producing bodies with geometrically more refined lines that avoid all anatomically ‘inferior’ and ‘unsound’ movements (Blasis, 1976 [1820]: 97). The invention of pointe shoes in the 19th century, designed to even further expand the bodily options created by the use of the barre, brought forth even more improved bodies; in response to this innovation, bodies had to be trained to be able to use the shoe. Footwear and bodies melted together as a new movement technology (cf. Hoogsteyns, 2012).

It was not only material inventions that brought bodily innovations. In 1700, the ballet master Raoul Feuillet defined five anatomically ‘good’ foot positions for dancing, which are still the basis of ballet technique today. He distinguished them from ‘wrong’ foot positions, which are characterized by the toes pointing inwards instead of outwards: This is deemed gawky and physiologically unfavourable. Rameau reinforced this point of view in his 1725 treatise. In all positions, the feet are turned outwards from the hip, but never crossed beyond the toes, for the reason that otherwise, ‘the Body would not find its Centre [sic]’ (Rameau, 1967 [1725]: 11). In being drilled to move employing these foot positions, bodies were not just formed to have greater stability in moving in all directions. Over the centuries, through this training, bodies technologically exceeded the original aim of a 45-degree turn-out, so that today a 90-degree turn-out of the legs is the standard for ballet dancers.

How are the bodies worked on? Already early in the development of ballet as an art form, an ‘organization of genesis’ (Foucault, 1995: 156) was established, with exercise as the ‘only true important ceremony’ (Foucault, 1995: 157). In his treatise published in 1820, the ballet master Carlo Blasis classifies steps into families (e.g. into ‘battements’ or ‘arabesques’, jumps or turns). In doing so, he also compiles them into a standing daily training plan and into a syllabus according to which the steps are executed with increasing tempo, range and complexity. Over the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the systematization of steps into syllabi became more and more elaborated. The steps are what to direct a body towards – the tasks dancers are supposed to be able to accomplish – and also comprise the technique to produce bodies as balletic movement instruments. According to a logic of immanence, the formation of an adequate ballet instrument is embedded in the systematic ordering of steps: ‘[The] exercises tend to form a good dancer, and afford him means of obtaining success’ (Blasis, 1976 [1820]: 102).

Ballet, we can conclude, becomes differentiated as a distinct field of practice over the centuries by a twofold process right on the divide between science and art: knowledge about functional anatomy is interpreted as, and infused into, aesthetical-geometrical concerns – and vice versa. While in its stage productions, ballet evolves as an art form, its production of artistic materials – of ballet bodies – becomes the applied science of anatomically remodelling bodies according to locomotory requirements.

Ballet class as a body forge

Over the centuries, both anatomical knowledge and ballet as an art form have evolved and become more diverse. Today, different ballet schools and styles shape bodies according to slightly diverging aesthetic ideals. At the same time, a diverse spectrum of dance medicine literature and training has become part of professional dance programs; companies employ physiotherapists to work with their dancers. Different medical beliefs and physiological concepts thus enter the remodelling work on ballet bodies. Yet to this day the connection between functional anatomy and aesthetical-geometrical concerns remains the pivotal point of the balletic setting for reconfiguring bodies: the daily ballet class.

Dance apprentices and professional company members spend at least ninety minutes per day in ballet class, where the canon of exercises is executed in a way that, in its overall structure, does not differ much from what Blasis recommended in 1820. As we have seen, ballet training historically emerged as a professional ‘applied science’ designated to forge bodies as movement instruments. Nevertheless, from a micro-sociological perspective, every ballet class has to reconfigure human bodies situationally into perfectible, anatomically defined objects to be modified, just as laboratories have to transform ‘natural’ objects into scientific objects (Knorr-Cetina, 1992; Lynch, 1988).

Before entering the dance studio, dancers pass through the sluice of the changing room. Here, they strip from their bodies most of their personalized layers and dress them with standardized tights and formfitting leotards, to a twofold effect: The bodies are made more uniform, as they are styled to look alike, and made more visible, as their contours are emphasized (while the surface stays decently covered). Through this operation, they become highly comparable with respect to a limited scope: their physiques and their movements. They become visually reduced to their shapes.

Prepared in this way, the bodies enter the ballet studio, a large empty space with mirrors on at least one wall. Here, they are spatially and temporally ordered in a way that allows for their simultaneous processing. In the first part of a ballet class, this means attaching them with one hand to the ‘barre’. In the second half of a ballet class, the bodies are arranged facing the large wall mirror. With the help of music, they are synchronized and plugged into the balletic movement program, moving, for example, the same leg to the side in the same number of beats during a battement tendu exercise.

The body is involved here as both a product and tool for its manufacture. The situational focus is on forging a balletic instrument, similar to processes of building musical instruments; a specific materiality is fashioned in a way that allows for artistic practice, drawing on scientific knowledge about this material. Nevertheless, because the material is also a social self there must be particular conditions for the manufacture process. A Goffmanian perspective that takes persons and their bodies as not necessarily identical situational participation units (in terms of attendance and agency) helps to grasp the specifics of this kind of body work. When the bodies are situationally relevant as malleable material, the social persons have to be dealt with somehow, to protect them from being reduced to mere corporeality. In some practices, this combination is solved by addressing persons conversationally while handling bodies manually (in hair salons, during massages and in clinical situations). Other practices exclude persons completely, as in surgery, where the anaesthetised bodies are only bodies (Hirschauer, 1991). In ballet classes, persons are protected by reconfiguring them as (co-)workers in the body forge, giving them responsibility and rendering their own bodies their main tools. It is not by accident that the way the bodies are lined up at the barre specifically evokes the image of pre-Fordism manufactories: Workers at identical stations work on identical products in synchronized steps of procedure. The persons of the forged bodies are thus engaged in a collective ‘auto-involvement’ (Goffman, 1963: 64), manufacturing their dance instruments.

Ballet masters play a crucial role here. Not only are they responsible for setting the exercises, but during or after each exercise, they walk around like technicians calibrating production machines. They do not only adjust a derailing body part here and there – more often, they tell the respective body inhabitants to do so, thus enacting them as workers. Possessing a particularly trained ‘professional vision’ (Goodwin, 1994) and being positioned outside of the to-be-optimized body material, dance masters call to attention perfectible aspects that escape the dancers’ focus or knowledge and hasten to correct them and to show them how things are supposed to be. Therefore, the masters’ intrusions into a dancer’s ‘territory of the self’ (Goffman, 1971) are legitimized, and they can lay hands on bodies if necessary.

The situational setup thus reconfigures the body into material that is to be shaped and modified according to specific knowledge of and standards for balletic instruments. However, to understand how this ‘knowledge culture’ (Knorr-Cetina, 2007) re-makes bodies in a way of technological improvement, we have to take a closer look. How does a body become anatomized by physio-balletic distinctions and, through that, modified into a ‘better version’ of human anatomy?

Making muscles: Dissecting the body

When a structural discrepancy between a body and the anatomical-geometrical ideal is noticed in ballet class, the body often becomes conceptually dissected by means of medical-physiological distinctions. In these situations, the dancer enacts their body – quite naturally – as a ‘locomotor system’ made up of bones, joints, muscles tendons and so on. ‘False posture’, a common diagnosis in ballet class (not only with beginners, but also with professionals), is consequently understood as a problem rooted in the flexibility, strength and coordination of muscles. Let us consider a scene from a ballet class in the context of a professional training program:

The battement tendu exercise has just ended. When the music is over, Lara assumes the final pose of the exercise, balancing on one foot while the other is pointed and pulled up to the knee of the standing leg. Trying to turn out more, she tries to sense tension in the area where the deep outward rotators are supposed to be. The teacher, Helen, passes by, frowns and stops. She feels Lara’s stomach and then taps the back of her standing leg thigh with her index finger. When nothing happens, she lays her hand flat on the thigh and pushes Lara’s weight forward. ‘Now your pelvis is on top of your leg. Keep it there’, the teacher says, removing her hand. Lara’s butt muscles flex automatically; she can feel them contract. Nevertheless, she cannot hold the position, and her weight shifts back again. The back of her thigh stays soft and indiscernible to her. ‘Use your hamstrings, not your butt!’, the teacher intervenes. ‘You gotta pull your seat bones down, otherwise you overuse your quads. Use the back of your thigh. And your abdominals!’, she adds, quickly glancing at Lara’s front, where a slightly convex contour betrays her not-fully-contracted abdomen.

In this little sequence, Lara’s body is staged as an object that is not seamless and homogeneous, but – informed by Western anatomy – a conglomerate of functionally interdependent components collected under the same skin. How is this situational enactment of body parts achieved? Even in the beginning of the scene, the dancer Lara already mentally evokes some anatomical parts in relation to balletic tasks – the ‘deep outward rotators’. In the interaction with the teacher, other parts are called upon. The scene begins with the teacher bringing Lara in position and then entrusting the positioning work to her (‘Keep it there’). Even though the teacher applies surface techniques – gaze, touch and talk – the instruction gets under the skin: Scrutinizing Lara’s contour and posture, Helen deciphers them as indicators for normatively connoted ‘inner’ (in)activity of muscles. To do so, the teacher draws on what can be described as balleto-anatomical knowledge. With her diagnostic intervention, Helen injects anatomical knowledge into balletic didactics and ballet-derived norms about ‘good posture’ into anatomical facts. The results are ‘good muscles’, like ‘hamstrings’, and ‘bad muscles’, like the ‘butt’ or the ‘quads’.

Since muscles are anatomically conceived of as controllable, they underpin the folk theory of the body as a tool subordinated to the will of an (adult) subject. Everyday belief has it that muscles can be deliberately engaged by persons – and that body parts cooperate if a person wants to do a particular task. However, this musculoskeletal fiction is shattered in this scene. The situationally evoked ‘hamstrings’ obey neither the teacher nor Lara.

Lara relaxes and turns around to Helen. ‘Erm, where am I supposed to pull down?’ She looks confused. No idea what ‘seat bones’ are. The teacher explains, tracing her index finger down her thigh: ‘The hamstrings are a muscle group here, the back of your thigh basically. Where I just pushed your weight forward. They attach below your butt and anchor your pelvis down’. Lara resumes the ballet pose and shifts around, using the barre. She just doesn’t sense anything there, even if she pulls her pelvis forward and upright with the help of pushing against the barre …. Helen, who has watched her, now taps Lara’s leg back with her fingers. ‘Somebody at home?’, she asks, putting on a voice. Still, Lara stands with her weight shifted back too far and her pelvis slightly tilted. Helen withdraws her hand and straightens up. ‘Nothing, they’re lazy!’, she mutters with a grin, before turning away from Lara and giving corrections to another student.

Even when provided with the relevant anatomical facts (where hamstrings are and what they do) through a reflexive combination of touch and talk, Lara cannot convert this knowing that into respective knowing how (Ryle, 1945). Her physical problem – not standing ‘correctly’ – is transformed into a communicative problem. She is unable to contact and command these foreign entities that are supposed to exist inside her. Taking up this problem, the teacher stages the ‘hamstrings’ as resistant, unwilling actants reluctant to respond in the first place. No only Lara’s, but also Helen’s attempts to make them work are in vain.

During the whole sequence, both Helen and Lara take ‘the hamstrings’ for granted as material muscle fibres under the skin where Helen traced her finger. For Lara, that means that ‘hamstrings’ denotes things that have to belong to her body because anatomy says so, but must have so far resided there unnoticed and are so far still completely foreign, even though they belongs to her. The dancer’s problem is that, according to their biomedical definition as ‘muscles’, she is supposed to be able to make her hamstrings comply.

From a perspective of micro-sociological situationism, however, Lara’s body is only getting these muscles – as relevant entities – by the practical-discursive dissecting we can observe here. In working on crafting a body into a ‘more perfect’ movement technology that can, for instance, balance in a stable way on the ball of one foot, the body becomes reconfigured as an object of epistemic practices. It is scrutinized to find (and thus enact) the reasons for a particular ‘false posture’ problem. In the process, the body becomes populated with ‘muscles’ that – in their recalcitrance – become relevant as ‘epistemic things’, to borrow from Rheinberger (1997). Since the ‘muscles’ cannot be employed as reliable, stable and available objects in the production of balletic posture, they become objects that the dancer first has to get to know. Of course, muscles have long been established as medical or sportive everyday phenomena. The epistemic uncertainty is thus not directed at their existence or nature per se. Their vagueness is more one of a missing readiness-to-hand (Heidegger, 1962). Not only are muscular (in)activities not directly observable and thus have to be figured out by means of special surface-related techniques; the dancer might know of the muscles, but not know enough about them to produce performances that indicate ‘correct’ muscle activity.

Studying muscles: Figuring (out) the body

The diagnosis of a ‘false posture’ draws on the surface and contours of a body. To scrutinize the assumed underlying muscular deficiencies, however, dancers often take a detour away from their individual body. In contrast to diagnostics in medicine (or surgery), the ballet studio offers no direct means to peek inside the body – a problem for a culture centred around the visual (Bull, 1997). Consequently, especially in professional ballet education programs, means are provided to substitute for that lack with general visual information on a how ‘a’ body is anatomically constructed and how muscles ‘ideally’ work. Often, there are several sources accessible to the dancers: Beyond the verbal comments of ballet masters in class, some programs include obligatory dance medicine classes in which dancers are confronted with an anatomical atlas. Dance medicine organizations offer seminars for dance instructors and issue publications for dancers. There are also dance anatomy books (Clippinger, 2007) and handbooks on ballet technique, ‘separating anatomical fact from fiction’ (Grieg, 1994). And one studio where I observed class during my field work featured two large posters of ‘human musculature’ depicted in front and back view; the teacher regularly took the chance to point at muscles that were especially ‘important’ for something or at the ‘evil’ ones ‘overused’ because of everyday habits.

These references to anatomical ‘natural laws’ and ‘scientific realities’ (Grieg, 1994: xiv, xiii), as one ballet technique manual puts it, are framed as a kind of organology intended to improve the dancer’s technical knowledge of his instrument and, therefore, facilitate its use for expression in movement. In this way, individual posture problems are anchored to an assumed common ground, human anatomy. To the balletic eye, the anatomical pictures of muscles in these and other documents are doubly normative. They are models in an anatomical sense, since they issue a picture of how a normal, fit body is supposed to look (cf. Hirschauer, 1991); dancers look at the depicted muscles relating to their biomechanical function, discriminating them as bodily actants that, for example, (normally) straighten the knee or keep the pelvis upright. Furthermore, the muscles are coded as good or bad, as those which should be active and strong but still ‘beautifully lean’, or as those which should be relaxed.

How do dancers work with anatomical figures? Most basically, they rely on a presumed likeness between their own body and the images. The anatomical drawings are, so they assume, created as representations in the image of a living human body. When they use the figures to work on their body, they assume that by studying the images, they can learn how to control and to modify their own body. The balletic docility inseparably ‘joins the analyzable body to the manipulable body’ (Foucault, 1995: 136). For dancers, the images are instructions for proprioception, as the following quotes from dance students show:

Well, it helps me to imagine where exactly I am supposed to feel tension. I can see it in front of my inner eye during the barre, and then… well, it helps me to conceive of it. (Julie)

Often I sense tension, or strain, but I don’t know what it is that I sense there. And then, when I look up which muscles it could be, then I see, oh, it could be this or that, and I can figure out if it’s good or bad. (Dan)

When I can really look at the muscle, then I see everything at one glance. Like here, I can see, okay, the iliopsoas connects here and there, and so it’s pretty logical that it inhibits my turnout if it’s foreshortened… okay, some of the pictures are really confusing, but, see, this one, if it’s done so … simplified, and with different colours for the functions of the different muscles … that’s really great …. (Joshua)

Like, my abs [abdominal muscles], I don’t know, it feels like there is just nothing there! That’s what I like this book for, I can just look it up, to get a picture of, like, where should I feel something when I try to contract. Then I know, theoretically, there are abs, and I can go look for them (laughs). (Lara)

Considering one’s own muscles from a distanced visual angle, looking at representations of human anatomy, thus seems to have the paradoxical effect of getting in touch with one’s body, a body now observed as a specimen of human anatomy. Drawing on Burri (2012), this phenomenon can be understood in three dimensions. First, the dance students address the ‘visual value’ (p. 49) of images, namely ‘the possibility of seeing things at one glance’. For Julie, the figures act as a template for mental images and thus allow her to ‘see’ her muscles in training, while for Dan they visualize, define and explain his proprioceptory sensations. The value does not necessarily lie in detail and accuracy, but more in ‘simplified’ (as Joshua put it) depictions of the practically relevant information. Second, the statements refer to the ‘visual performance’ (Burri, 2012: 50) of the figures. In their presentation, the pictures adhere to a particular ‘cultural tradition of seeing’ and respective ‘skills of reading images’ (p. 51). Dan can only use the images as a lexicon for his sensations because the images are already designed in a way that caters to that. Most of the images show not an isolated muscle, but also sketched body parts around it that users know from their everyday experience, e.g. the contour of a leg. In that way, the anatomical drawings imitate (idealized) x-ray pictures and function as their equivalent. Third, the dancers talk about the ‘visual persuasiveness’ (p. 52) of the anatomical figures. Burri remarks upon an ‘authoritative’ component of this persuasiveness: Being medical (and thus scientific) images, the dancers expect the depictions to show ‘objective facts’. Because the images are taken as ‘scientific evidence’, they can ‘explain’ to Joshua his own body and can convince Lara of the ‘theoretical’ existence of abdominals behind her skin (even though her subjective experience contradicts that).

So, in the context of professional ballet, anatomical drawings are actants in practices of figuring out a dancer’s body. They flesh out the body with anatomical facts. With the help of the images, the ‘muscles’ evoked in class as (recalcitrant) situative actants gain transsituative stability for the dancers. Studying the muscles as scientific objects produces these objects as part of one’s own body – one’s own body is taken as the ‘original’ represented in the drawings. In this reflexive use of anatomical knowledge, the body work in ballet class parallels the ‘sculptural practice’ in surgery (Hirschauer, 1991: 280), for ‘it is not “docile images” (that is, data), but the practical use of images (anatomical drawings) in the production of “docile bodies”, that is at stake’. In both settings, the blueprint of ideal anatomy that is read off of bodies is layered over bodies as a ‘style sheet’. However, while surgeons modify by cutting a highly passivized body, producing the images they find in the anatomical atlas, ballet dancers shape their bodies by training a highly activated body, producing ideal kinesiological functionality of the muscles depicted as bodily agents with specific abilities and strengths. For this reason, it is crucial for the dancers to transform the visually studied images into experienced own body parts and thus transfer them into their realm of manipulation.

Animating muscles: Glossing the body

The anatomical images of muscles come with the implication that what is depicted can (and should) be able to be sensed in one’s own body. In contrast to inner organs or connective tissue, muscles are generally conceptualized as body parts whose activity can be experienced (as proprioceptory sensation, palpable hardness or visible bulk). This implication makes the visibility of muscles in pictures facilitate a sensibility for certain body sensations, or rather, an enhanced sense-ability⁵: With the help of the images, dancers are then able to sense ‘muscles’ they did not even know that existed before, thereby enacting them – a model case of the reflexivity of accounts ethnomethodology has long pointed out. Anatomical knowledge and body experience are deeply intertwined here in co-construction.

During the frappé exercise, standing on one leg, the image of the hamstrings rises before Lara’s inner eye. Her seat bones … she imagines her hamstrings pulling them down, like a rope tied around the bones and fastened behind her knee. She shifts her pelvis to the front as much as she can. There! Suddenly she senses something like a vertical connection down the back of her thigh. That has to be them …. They are working …. The sensation fluctuates; sometimes she loses it again. When the music stops, and the exercise is over, she feels like awakening from a trance. She has been so immersed – feeling ‘on top of her leg’ more than ever before, she did not ever know that was possible. A triumphant smile flashes over her face. She assumes the final pose of the exercise and focuses again on the ‘rope’ in her standing leg.

Lara is deliberately searching for proprioceptory manifestations of what she remembers from the figures in the books, transforming them back into situational figures in the form of actants that can be felt ‘working’. She expects to sense something like a ‘rope’, and elicits sensations that match that expectation – by shifting into a likely position and intensely focusing on the area in question. The ‘vertical connection’, then, is a verification not only of the activity of these particular muscles (the hamstrings), but also of the desired activity of these muscles.

What can we conclude from this? In the perspective developed here, the ‘body building’ in ballet classes is not just the fabrication of a balletic physique through repetitive training or the acquisition of new knowing how by an apprentice. It is a constant process of reconfiguration and innovation. During this process, relevant body parts are established as existing entities through an intertwining, reciprocally enhancing formation of the hands of the teacher, sayings and writings, images, bodily contours and sensations that an ambitious dancer mobilizes. This scientifically informed reconfiguration of the body into an assemblage of muscular agents is the leverage point of the training and material forming of the dancer’s physique.

With every balletic dissection, the body of a dancer becomes more complex and ‘full’. The ‘apprehension of the body’ (Williams, 1998: 62) demanded by working toward perfection requires eliciting and differentiating more and more bodily sensations with the help of anatomical instructions, in order to control and shape the muscles evoked. The dancers, however, have to accept that in this process they are ousted from the position of a sovereign actor commanding over an obedient body. Their smallest ‘territory of the self’ (Goffman, 1971: 28) becomes increasingly inhabited by a whole squad of muscular actants that are more or less cooperative. The less a dancer is able to conform to balleto-anatomical ideals, the more body parts are socially enacted in compensation.

Nevertheless, the continual work of dissection is geared to a (balletically improved) reassembly, a smoothly working ‘whole’ embodiment. As dancers make their muscles work more and more in the desired anatomically ideal way, the unpackaged body becomes glossed again as ‘a body’, to put it in ethnomethodological terms (Jefferson, 1985). The more disciplined the muscles behave, the less they are situationally present as actants; actions like moving with ‘good posture’ as well as the competence to move with ‘good posture’ are increasingly attributed to the dancer as a subject. Then, for the dancers, the meticulously produced muscles become less and less present – even though they might be referenced in talk, as when a curious ethnographer urges a dancer to reflect upon how she manages to do what she does so competently:

Well, most of the steps are already in my repertoire …. For example, I know how to do a battement tendu. It’s been in my muscle memory for forever because I have done tendus a thousand times. My feet can do tendus on their own. That was not always like that (laughs). And, like, in general, the posture, how we stand in ballet – when I, with the first step, my muscles tense up, I am aligned automatically, that’s just internalized. (Julie)

To explain that she does not consciously steer every detail of her highly skilled performance, the dancer mobilizes vocabulary like ‘muscle memory’. While much of the dancer’s description reminds us of notions of tacit knowledge in the sociology of the body, the dancer clearly separates ‘body’ from ‘herself’ as different agents, yet with a special relation. The once recalcitrant feet have advanced into a serviceable and reliable movement technology. ‘She’ (taking herself as sovereign, rational actor) can now delegate the task of artfully dancing the steps of a stage performance while not even noticing the feet in their thingness as cultural artefacts. When she moves, the muscles spring into action like compliant staff, producing the appropriate ways of the feet – to paraphrase Sudnow (2001) – even without any explicit command.

What we have observed in this section is, I argue, a process of building technology. Scientific knowledge – about the body as human anatomy – is applied to fashion material to serve a specific function. Once manufactured, the scientific knowledge is implicit in the function(ing) of the technology without being thematised or even noticed.

Unfolding and packaging bodies

The application of scientific knowledge in ballet class suggests a reading of what is going on there as a process of building movement technologies. However, it is also the mechanisms of this kind of process itself that suggest this reading. When anatomical knowledge of the body and didactics intertwine in ballet classes, the body’s reconfiguration as a technico-anatomical object facilitates, as this section discusses, an opening of the black box ‘body’ for technical improvement.

Following the details of the reconfiguration of bodies in ballet, we have observed that ‘the body’s “organic wholeness” is no longer self-evident’, as Mol and Law (2004: 57) have claimed on a conceptual level for praxeological research. In ballet class, the smooth functioning of body parts as ‘one’ functional organism first has to be deliberately produced by careful body work. To modify her body in order to optimize technique, the dancer Lara throws herself into a specific problematic situation, assisted by the setting and by the ballet master. Lara’s hand might push against the barre to make the unwilling muscle contract, while a foreshortened tendon prevents a joint from fully straightening, which in turn inhibits the muscle from working. These body parts, however, are not just ‘there’ to begin with, even though the material resistances and Lara’s sensations might be. Nor are they descriptively superimposed on the empirical scene by me as the analyst. They are enacted in practice, in turn eliciting sensations and material formations.

The practices in ballet class and the way participants attribute action and agency suggest a perspective that goes beyond the conception of ‘embodied selves’ that the sociology of the body has successfully established. In Lara’s dealings with her hamstrings, we have seen that the body and thus corporeality, as well as agency, is radically pluralized. From there, the dancer’s problem is transformed into one of disciplining these muscles so that they form a reliable team to which tasks can be delegated. Body parts become carriers of movement actions, and, in the successful case, this is precisely what makes them become less addressed as actants. In other words: The ballet body is unfolded into a network of plural actants and then repackaged as a technologically advanced essence. While during the improvement process agency is explicitly spread over different actants, the ‘acquisition of technique’ (as an attribution of skill or as subjective experience) (re)centres the attributed bodily agency to the person.

This process recalls the concept of technical innovation as modification in a chain of associations, as developed by Latour (1995) in the framework of actor-network theory. The body can be understood as a black box that, like all black boxes, is opened in processes of modification and improvement. The five steps of modification that Latour describes are helpful to systematize what happens to bodies when dancers are working on improving their body technique.⁶ First, there is an ‘addition of new beings’ (Latour, 1995: 279): A pelvis is isolated as a positionable object, muscles are distinguished and didactically dramatized. Second, a ‘passage of one actor from a program to an anti-program’ takes place: While before, Lara was just accomplishing the exercise by means of her body, now her body becomes the locus of resistance. Third, there occurs a ‘change of state of an actor that finds itself endowed with new properties’: Muscles are fleshed out in their qualities by informative images while Lara becomes knowledgeable. Fourth, there is a ‘substitution between beings’: The new muscles are integrated into the body and take over the work required for standing, thereby changing what ‘standing’ now means. Fifth, a ‘packaging’ happens, ‘a routinization of the actors who have become faithful to each other’: Lara becomes used to standing on her leg differently, not even noticing her bodily doings as the work of individual muscles anymore. Thus finally, ‘[f]ragile existences become stable essences again, black boxes’.

The distinction of essence (the unquestioned, stable, coherent) and existence (the processual, developing and intricate) is crucial to this framework. Latour (1995: 278) criticizes the fact that this distinction is usually placed in parallel with the distinction between things and humans. Instead, he states, they should be construed as mobile positions that are always occupied only provisionally. As we have seen, in being perfected a dancer’s body provisionally becomes an existence, while in everyday situations, a body might just serve as a taken-for-granted tool, an essence. Generally, the body is taken as the material aspect of human actors (including in Latour, 2004). However, when this material becomes questionable – existential – in its functional unity, the binarism of this becomes problematic. As Hirschauer (2004) has pointed out, the body does not fit in the distinction of human and non-human. Which side would it be on, as it clearly carries situational agency that differs from its person’s, but nevertheless is a humanly animated entity?

The technologized body in ballet constitutes a phenomenon that empirically undermines any speciesism and emphasizes essence and existence as practice-bound categories. It also points towards the limitations of approaches that leave the ‘human’ unquestioned as a whole (to oppose it to, or to complement it with, the non-human) and thus overlook the differentiation of different body parts or attributes or of persons and bodies as distinct situational agents. Furthermore, we learn that, in regard to processes of technological innovation and optimization, the body does not differ much from other artefacts. Of course, body material has particular properties. It is endowed with limited durability, so that its shape and features need to be constantly maintained by practice and training. It needs time to be shaped in repetitive procedures or time to heal when altered by cuts and stitches. But even though the practices of working on bodies as technologies might greatly differ from practices of working on other materials, the general logic of technical modification still applies.

What kind of notion of the body derives from this analysis? Applying Latour’s concepts here has a rather radical consequence: We will have to conclude that ‘a’ body, like any essence, is always only a practically achieved black box. The empirical case suggests a distributed corporeality that grasps the body as an assemblage of decentred, plural bodily agency. Mechanically, the limbs of a dancer might hang together; organic solidarity as one (naturalist) body attributed to the person has to be meticulously manufactured here. The ‘organic movement’, as dancers describe a smooth flow of motion, emerges from the technologization of the body and anatomical fragmentation. The anatomy of Western biology, however, is only one possible repertoire with which this black box gets (more or less regularly) opened: the enactment of meridians, intestinal bacteria, cells, energies or body islands (‘Leibesinseln’ [Schmitz, 1965: 27]) unfolds different agents in different contexts and sites.⁷ Paraphrasing Latour (1993), we have never just been ‘one’ – and cases like the bodily technologization in ballet make that apparent.⁸ They can, therefore, teach us something about distributed corporeality as processual bodily association.

Movement technologies, naturalistic bodies and open perfectibles

In ballet, the body is often referred to in technical terms both by dancers and researchers who interview these dancers. I have taken them at their word, looking at ballet as a professional knowledge culture that technologizes bodies in a particular way. Mauss pointed out long ago that our bodies are employed as tools in everyday practices. Beyond that, various specialist cultures reconfigure bodies explicitly as highly complex technologies. Ballet is laden with Western scientific knowledge about the body and has developed an elaborate apparatus for the production of bodies as complex instruments. The technologization of bodies is closely intertwined with the scientification of a practice.

Tracing contemporary ballet practice back to its emergence, we have seen that it evolves together with modern medicine and anatomical knowledge. Ballet is constructed as a way of transforming bodies into how they are anatomically ‘meant to be’, into the functional ideal carved out for the defeat of gravity, signifying social distinction and discipline. To accomplish this work, ballet class is instituted as a body forge and syllabi are developed to ensure the successful moulding of body material. This situation reconfigures bodies as not only formable, but perfectible objects. The practices of perfection are drenched with anatomy, which in turn becomes normatively infused. In ballet class, a body becomes conceptually dissected and is then studied as a conglomerate of muscles, which – as abstract entities – then have to be incorporated and animated in order to eventually immerse into an improved ‘whole’ movement apparatus. With Latour (1995), this process can be understood as technological modification: I have suggested that we conceptualize ballet’s bodies as black boxes that are unfolded as associations of bodily agents and repackaged over the course of their balletic reconfiguration.

Against this background, what exactly is the body reconfigured into in ballet classes? The ballet body, it seems, is produced as three phenomena that depend on, but also clash with each other. It is a movement technology, but through that, it is also a naturalistic body as a medical-anatomical artefact and an open perfectible:

Even though in ballet the bodies are manufactured as advanced technologies, they are not taken as artificial, but as essentially natural. Not only is the bodily ‘composite object whole’ (Mead, 2011: 31) assembled in ballet class worked on to be an ideal means of expression of an embodied person. On stage, we wish to see dancers moving ‘naturally’ and ‘on their own’ (without a barre, mirror, or other ‘non-bodily’ support) at a high performance level. More importantly, ballet bodies are moulded according to the presumed anatomical endowments and potential of human bodies. In other words, they are formed to arrive at their ‘most natural’ shape – a shape usually not achieved by everyday bodies. In this exceptionalizing and technologically optimizing orientation, they become hyper-anatomical bodies. They turn into the ideal after which they were constructed, naturalizing medical-anatomical knowledge. They also exaggerate and push the boundaries of what human bodies can do – lifting the leg 180° to the back and performing thirty-two fouetté turns in a row. However, in pursuing ever greater (physiological-aesthetic) perfection, a ballet body has to be constantly enacted as a perfectible existence. Even though with respect to single improvements a body might become essentialized again, in the larger framework, long-term transformation is only possible if a body is regarded as always improvable. The ballet body is never a closed case; it is always open to more optimization. Practices of perfecting hold the black box of ‘body’ open.

These findings about ballet bodies shed interesting light on the recent research focus on biomedical (self-tracking) devices and other ‘hybrid’ constellations. The debates highlight the paradoxical biologizing effect of technical body supplementations and improving modifications (Williams et al., 2015: 1048) and consider the body as a site of optimization to be a typical postmodern phenomenon. However, already long before the new, postmodern fascination with pairing bodies and technology these phenomena also occurred in practices that take bodies as technology. Two conclusions can be drawn from this. First, optimization seems to be a phenomenon that strikingly blurs the boundaries between ‘body’ and ‘technology’. Second, the somewhat anachronistic practice of ballet can provide a worthwhile ‘perspective by incongruity’ (Burke, 1964) on our contemporary social world, offering a different analytical angle on material complexity.

This analytical angle gives reason to reconsider the dichotomy between humans and non-humans that still prevails (not only) in actor-network theory. It means testing out a new understanding of bodily agency, challenging the body-person-unit that is the basis for concepts like embodied human agents, who acquire bodily techniques and interact with external technologies. A decentred ‘nano-sociology’ of the body allows for a more detailed sociological reconstruction of how social networks keep bodies together and how bodies are woven into the networks of the social. If we consider bodies in terms of distributed corporeality, we can observe how this assemblage becomes packaged and glossed as ‘a’ body or even a ‘whole’ embodied subject, and unfolded and modified in situations in which the body is tinkered with. The talk of assemblages does not stop at the borders of the skin, then. It permeates into the body, further blurring the seemingly clean-cut boundaries of humans and rendering them an empirical phenomenon.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Marion Müller, Larissa Schindler and the reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and to Stefan Hirschauer and my colleagues at the Department for Sociology at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz for inspiring discussions about the data and analysis on which this paper is based.

Notes

Author biography

Sophie Merit Müller works as Research Assistant at the Institute for Sociology, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. In 2015, she completed her PhD on body work towards the ideal of perfection in ballet classes. With her interest in the body and knowledge practices, she is currently involved in a research project on processes of gendering and the fabrication of ‘mothers’ during pregnancy with the first child.

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