Why Kinesthesia,Tactility and Affectivity Matter: Critical and Constructive Perspectives

Abstract

This article offers critical and constructive perspectives essential to understanding living bodies, and, in effect, to showing that kinesthesia, tactility and affectivity matter because they are central to animate life. Critical perspectives focus on practices that distance us from the lived realities of animate nature, on insights into those realities, and on ways in which language is intimately related to those realities. Constructive perspectives focus on ontogenetic studies that empirically testify to our being animate organisms from the start. The studies validate Husserl’s insight into the developmental progression from ‘I move’ to ‘I do’ to ‘I can’. On the basis of these perspectives, concluding observations focus on the mutual validation of empirical and phenomenological research, on the distinction between movement and objects in motion, on the distinction between perceiving and feeling one’s body, and on the distinction between having a body and being a body.

Keywords

being a body having a body mutual validation objects-in-motion ontogeny qualitative dynamics silence of movement spontaneity

Critical Perspectives

Perspicuous observations were made about humans by highly esteemed persons of the past who in one way and another assiduously studied human nature.¹ Their observations provide a succinct introduction to critical perspectives. In particular, their observations raise serious questions about the ways in which kinesthesia, tactility, and affectivity are conceived and written about in contemporary research.

When Aristotle wrote De Anima – On the Soul – did he write about an ‘embodied’ soul? No. He wrote, among other things, that the modality of touch is ‘indispensable’, that ‘the loss of this one sense alone must bring about the death of an animal’, hence that without touch, an animal would not be (434b11, 435b4–5). Moreover, he wrote not only that ‘Nature is a principle of motion and change’ but that ‘We must therefore see that we understand what motion is; for if it were unknown, nature too would be unknown’ (Physics, 200b12–14). Are we as insightful as Aristotle? Do we commonly recognize the foundational significance of touch and movement? I doubt it, but are we smart enough to take Aristotle’s insights seriously?

When Leonardo da Vinci wrote about his experience at the entrance of a great cavern, did he write about being ‘embedded’ in the world and about the cavern being an aspect of his ‘extended mind’? No. He wrote directly of experience, giving a descriptive voice specifically to immediate affective experience. He wrote, ‘I was suddenly struck by two things, fear and longing: fear of the dark, ominous cavern; longing to see if inside there was something wonderful’ (da Vinci, 1959: 19). Are we as affectively lucid as da Vinci? I doubt it, but are we smart enough to take da Vinci’s recognition of bodily reverberating affective experience seriously?

When English writer D.H. Lawrence wrote: ‘We ought to dance with rapture that we are alive and in the flesh and part of the living incarnate cosmos’, did he write about ‘enaction’ and about enactive selves? No. He wrote not only of Nature and our being part of Nature – ‘part of the living incarnate cosmos’ – he wrote about our intimate relationship to the living incarnate cosmos. He wrote, ‘that I am part of the earth, my feet know perfectly’ (Lawrence, 1932: 200). Are we as eloquent as Lawrence in our descriptions of being alive and of being moving bodily beings who are part of Nature? I doubt it, but are we smart enough to take Lawrence’s description of our foundationally animate bodies and their foundational subject–world relationship seriously?

We come into the world moving – kicking, flailing, crying, waving; we are precisely not stillborn. We are indeed animate beings, beings that are not just alive, but moving, touching, feeling beings. If we have lost touch with being animate – not to mention if our socio-political world lacks bodily resonance – it is surely in part because in a zest for packaging by ‘embodying’ and then by expanding the packaging into ‘the four “E”s, i.e. cognition (the mind, perception, and so on) is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive’ (Gallagher, 2008: 163), we have overlooked or even forgotten the tactile-kinesthetic-affective body and its inherent qualitative dynamic realities. It is surely in part too because a reductionist science sublimates experience to brain events and in fact identifies the brain as the source of judgments, insights and feats of all kinds. An advertisement for a course offered by The Teaching Company in the bimonthly journal Science News (2009: 3) succinctly validates the brain as sage and oracle. The course, titled ‘How Your Brain Works’, is taught by a neuroscience professor at Vanderbilt University and is described as follows:

Everything you hear, feel, see, and think is controlled by your brain. It allows you to cope masterfully with your everyday environment and is capable of producing breathtaking athletic feats, sublime works of art, and profound scientific insights. But its most amazing achievement may be that it can understand itself.

Finally, too, it is surely in part because technologies have overtaken the basic realities of being a body: in a word, texting, twittering and facebooking have overridden the immediate tactile-kinesthetic-affective qualitative dynamics of everyday life.

Edmund Husserl and Carl Jung recognized these dynamics in complementary ways. Husserl recognized them when he wrote:

The Body is, as Body, filled with the soul through and through. Each movement of the Body is full of soul, the coming and going, the standing and sitting, the walking and dancing, etc. Likewise, so is every human performance, every human production. (Husserl, 1989: 252)

In effect, Husserl wrote not about embodied souls but soulful bodies, precisely the bodies that Aristotle describes in De Anima, bodies that can readily be described as mindful bodies (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2015). It should not be overlooked that Husserl’s description of bodies as dynamically engaged bodies, soulful bodies, was made possible by an adherence to phenomenological methodology, a methodology devoted to a precise and detailed analysis of experience, a methodology as rigorous as that of empirical science and, furthermore, open to verification as empirical science is open to verification. Moreover, we see over and over, both in everyday live encounters and in readings, that animate forms of life – crows, spiders, wolves, tigers, gorillas, penguins – even ants and worms, as Darwin shows (Darwin, 1976 [1881], 1981 [1871]) – are mindful bodies, engaging in the world in ways commensurate with their morphology. Indeed, when we take an evolutionary point of view, we see that what evolves are morphologies-in-motion, morphologies engaged in synergies of meaningful movement on behalf of their survival (for more on this topic, see Sheets-Johnstone, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2016). Humans are uniquely gifted through the practice of phenomenological methodology to elucidate the experienced foundational dynamic realities of being a body, hence of elucidating the qualitative dynamics of morphologies-in-motion creating synergies of meaningful movement, both their own qualitative dynamics and the qualitative dynamics of others in their surrounding world (for more on phenomenological methodology, see Sheets-Johnstone, 2015, 2017).

Jung obliquely recognized the qualitative dynamics of tactile-kinesthetic-affective bodies when he wrote, ‘learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul’ (Jung, 1999: 22). He specified them directly and unequivocally when he observed, ‘The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima’ (Jung, 1968: 173). He in fact later observed: ‘The more archaic and “deeper”, that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more “material” it is’ (1968: 173). In effect, Jung wrote not about embodied minds but mindful bodies, bodies that are the foundation and generative source of symbols, bodies that, barring pathological disturbances, are of a universal human character.

It is relevant, even critically relevant, to point out in this context that language – what humans commonly esteem the uniquely distinguishing ability of humans – is typically associated not with the dynamics of articulation and the dynamics of sound but with naming, or in other words, with the ability to say what this or that is. Yet, as linguistic anthropologist Mary LeCron Foster details in her exacting studies of the origin of verbal language (Foster, 1978, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996), in the beginning, language did not name things, but related the meaning of a sound to its articulation, specifically, to the tactile-kinesthetic experience of articulating a particular sound. The meaning of the original sound elements of primordial languages, regardless of the geographic location at which the languages arose and developed, was thus the analogue of the articulatory gestures composing the sound. Foster shows that all reconstructed root forms of the sound m, for example, refer to bilateral relationships that are spatio-kinetically analogous to the act of bringing the lips together: ‘the fingers or hands in taking or grasping’, for instance, or ‘two opposed surfaces in tapering, pressing together, holding together, crushing, or resting against’ (Foster, 1978: 110). In effect, in primordial languages, the sound m referred to what Foster terms a particular ‘motional-relational complex’ (1978: 110) – resting against nest materials as in sleeping or against the earth as in standing, to pressing together as in copulating, to crushing as in chewing food, or to the pounding of one thing with another. In effect, what the linguistic reconstruction of the symbolic structure of primordial languages shows is that articulatory gestures were of primary semantic significance, which is to say that the tactile-kinesthetic body and its qualitative dynamics, the felt moving body, was the focal point of symbolization.

The confluence of Foster’s research into primordial forms of language with Jung’s observations concerning symbols and matter and his thesis of a collective human unconscious is unmistakable and certainly worthy of further research. We might furthermore note that, though limited to observations of the English language alone, Alfred R. Wallace’s thesis that the origin of verbal language is rooted in ‘mouth-gestures’ warrants attention not only in terms of its recognition of the motion of the lips, but in terms of its focal awareness of breath, namely, the inwardness or outwardness of breath in relation both to certain pronouns and to the attenuation or abruptness of certain sounds (Wallace, 1895: 529). In short, our ability to speak and speak meaningfully in a verbal language is not just a matter of hearing but of a tactile-kinesthetic ability. Though we speak different languages, whatever the language, it is comprised of words that tumble out of our mouths and that involve our tongue, our lips, our breath. Our words are an expressive dimension of our orally attuned tactile-kinesthetic bodies, however different the languages we speak.

While we form and make sounds expressing thoughts, feelings, perceptions, ideas, beliefs and so on, our tactile-kinesthetic bodies are expressive in and of themselves, that is, in moving and gesturing in addition to uttering words. In fact, when our point of departure in communicating or in simply being with others is anchored in movement rather than in words, we are related to one another by way of a common heritage, a kinetic heritage that is both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. In a word, movement is our mother tongue from both an evolutionary and developmental perspective. Moreover, that essentially kinetic mother tongue is affectively expressive. We are indeed moved to move in feelings of trust, feelings of fear, feelings of joy, feelings of disgust, longing, curiosity, and so on and so on, all such feelings being differentially felt. Indeed, fear moves through the body in ways different from trust; joy moves through the body in ways different from disgust. In virtue of its qualitative dynamics, movement articulates distinctively felt dimensions of our affective bodies (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999, 2006).

Psychiatrist Nina Bull’s experimental studies document the distinctiveness of these differentiated qualitative dynamics. Bull first hypnotized subjects into a certain affective feeling and then asked them to describe that feeling. Of the experience of fear, for example, one subject stated, ‘First my jaws tightened, and then my legs and feet…my toes bunched up until it hurt.’ Of the experience of disgust, another subject stated, ‘I tried to back away, pushed back on the chair, straight back. All the muscles seemed to push straight back. I could feel that rather strong’ (Bull, 1951: 53). Bull then used her subjects’ specific descriptions in a second series of experiments. She asked them to feel a previously described emotion while being hypnotically locked in a different one. With respect to being locked hypnotically to the feeling of joy and asked to experience depression, one subject reported, ‘I feel light – can’t feel depression’; another who was locked hypnotically to the feeling of depression and asked to experience joy reported, ‘I reached for joy, but couldn’t get it, so tense’ (1951: 85, 84, respectively). Qualitative dynamics clearly reverberate through the body in differential ways, ways that do not simply correspond to certain affective feelings but that constitute certain affective feelings, feelings that both propel us to move in certain ways and that restrain us from moving in certain other ways. Indeed, emotion and movement go hand in hand, as shown at length in an article that analysed their empirical-phenomenological relationship (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999, 2009). We might ask not only why we would otherwise be inclined to feign a smile or to restrain one, but also how we would otherwise be able to feign courage, for example, when we are in fact trembling in our boots, or how we would otherwise be able to restrain an impulse to strike someone – or to hug someone. The fact that we can feign and restrain the bodily kinetic dynamics of our emotions readily validates the wholly natural dynamic relationship of emotions and movement. Their natural dynamic congruency is furthermore readily evident in examples given by Darwin in his book The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1965 [1872]).

Clearly, the qualitative dynamics of tactile-kinesthetic-affective bodies are basic to life. Meanings unfold in the silence of these qualitative dynamics, which is to say in the silence of movement. The power of this silence is of course strikingly evident in the art of dance, but it is also strikingly evident in the soft cradling of a newborn, in love-making, in consolations following upon the death of a loved one, and in other interpersonal experiences. The power of this silence has the potential to be strikingly evident as well in the context of socio-political power relations, as demonstrated by historian William Polk who organized the twentieth Pugwash conference on nuclear arms that took place at the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Pugwash conferences engage scientists to come together to discuss the threat that nuclear weapons pose to civilization and were first convened by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in 1955. Polk briefly describes the twentieth Pugwash conference as follows:

We assembled 109 representatives of most of the Academies of Science from around the world, including a number of Nobel laureates. The exchanges were predictably difficult – the cold war was then in full blast – so in an attempt to relieve the tensions and to urge understanding, I arranged for the National Theater of the Deaf to put on two short skits: Anton Chekhov’s spoof ‘On the Harmfulness of Tobacco’ in Russian and in sign language and Dylan Thomas’s ‘Songs from Milkwood’ in English and in sign language. (Polk, 2013: 74)

Polk’s innovative approach to political strife is a moving testimony to the power of kinetic silence. He specifies his original awareness of this power in ‘What it means to be deaf’ (2013), a piece of writing in which he describes differences between being born deaf, as his daughter was, and becoming deaf. He writes, ‘In my daughter’s experience, this meant that she missed what appears to be the crucial year or two during which hearing children begin to learn spoken language.’ He goes on to point out that ‘what we learn early in life is “causal”’, causal in the sense that ‘children absorb what happens around them.…The deaf child is thus cut off from knowledge that the rest of us get just by being there’ (2013: 74). After further insightful observations and descriptions of a range of experiences he created to expand his daughter’s knowledge of the world, he goes on to point out that sign language ‘can be both beautiful and remarkably evocative’ (2013: 74). The example he gives in evidence of the beauty and evocative power of sign language is precisely the twentieth Pugwash conference. He states that he introduced the evening by saying that he hoped ‘that in our troubled times the direct visual language of the deaf can perhaps communicate more effectively across the world boundaries’ and then clarifies that hope, stating:

What I really meant, of course, is that if the deaf can manage to ‘hear’ one another across the barrier of enforced silence, there is no excuse for the rest of us not to communicate. The plays changed the mood of the gathering and, many participants subsequently told me, their own approach to international understanding. (2013: 74)

Polk’s innovative approach to political strife was – and remains – a moving testimony to the power of kinetic silence. Indeed, if society is disembodied, perhaps it is also because there is sole reliance on talk and an absence of relating to each other in the silence of movement.

Given the power of kinetic silence, the famous question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ might well be reformulated into the more basic question: ‘why is there movement rather than stillness?’ Movement is the continuing presence of silence without stillness, a silence that is inherently dynamic. In animate forms of life, the dynamics of a whole living body pulse through it. The dynamics of breath pulse through it. The dynamics are alive with meaning, with import. Is it thus not high time we recognize the foundational reality and import of bodily movement? When we do so, we immediately and directly recognize the foundational reality and import of kinesthesia, a largely forgotten sensory modality.² We think of ourselves as having five senses. Textbooks commonly tell us that we have five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell constitute our sensory systems. If we were composed of just those sensory systems and no more, we might as well be statues. We would have no experience of our movement. We would have no awareness of our initiating movement, no awareness of the spatio-temporal-energic dynamics of our movement, and no awareness of the qualitative nature of those dynamics, nor would we have any awareness of our terminating movement. Clearly, were we composed of just those five sensory systems, we could hardly accomplish anything in an efficient and effective manner except by the most miraculous of accidents. The more attention we properly focus on the sensory modality of kinesthesia the more insight we gain into its experiential realities, that is, into its inherent qualitative dynamics, and the more insight we gain into those experienced qualitative dynamics, the more insight we gain into the foundational, integral and pervasive significance of thinking in movement (Sheets-Johnstone, 1981; expanded version in Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: ch. 2 and 2011c: ch. 12), a thinking that is there not only in our own human developmental histories in learning our bodies and learning to move ourselves, but that is also evident across an extensive domain of animate life.³ As Darwin at one point succinctly observes: ‘Animals may constantly be seen to pause, deliberate, and resolve’ (Darwin, 1981 [1871]: 46).

R.D. Laing was perhaps the first psychiatrist to use the term ‘disembodied’ in the course of writing about The Divided Self. Though he wrote of a personal rather than a social disembodiment – in particular of schizophrenia – his insights are applicable to social pathology to the extent that, in Laing’s words, ‘The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individual’s own being’ (Laing, 1965: 69; italics in original). We might in fact add to those words: ‘The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world not only than as the core of the individual’s own being, but than as an animate form of life integrally bound to other forms of animate life, other forms that bind one in both a common creaturehood and common humanity.’ The ties that bind us in a common creaturehood and common humanity are evident in the fact that, as noted earlier, we come into the world moving; we are precisely not stillborn. The ties that bind us specifically in a common humanity are evident in the fact that around three months of age, and barring pathology and/or deprivation, we all smile. Indeed, one does not learn to smile: smiling, like laughter and crying, is a spontaneous movement pattern that arises on its own. Such spontaneous human movement patterns are in fact quite remarkable – as are Darwin’s ontogenetic observations about them. Darwin writes, for example, ‘Seeing a Baby (like Hensleigh’s) smile & frown, who can doubt these are instinctive – child does not sneer’ (Darwin, 1987, Notebook M, No. 96: 542).

The ties that bind us in a common humanity are furthermore evident in the fact that we are all bipedal. Moreover we learn to walk all by ourselves, without an owner’s manual and without instruction from others. We furthermore learn to move in concert not only in dancing together, in playing in an orchestra, and in playing soccer and other team sports, but in everyday ways when, for instance, we avoid a collision on a crowded sidewalk. In all such instances, the qualitative dynamics of movement hold sway, and with these dynamics, the silence of movement. Indeed, we experience not only the silence but the power of movement to unite us. We can justly recall William Polk’s introduction of sign language in this context. In essence, Polk diagnosed ways in which we fail to move together in concert by tethering our meetings wholly to language and by suggesting that there are practices that encourage and engender moving in concert. In short, the pathological condition of the body politic is a condition that body psychotherapy might help cure. It has the resources in the form of movement.

We might furthermore in this context single out Adrienne Rich’s poem titled ‘Cartographies of Silence’, a poem in which such things as lies and the value of words are poignantly and eloquently highlighted. At one point, two lines of the poem read ‘[Silence] is a presence/ it has a history a form/ Do not confuse it/ with any kind of absence.’ At a further point, after lines of the poem describe the uselessness of words in an attempt to answer to someone, the poem reads, ‘It was an old theme even for me:/ Language cannot do everything’ (Rich, 2016: 233, 235, respectively). So, even a poet, who is immersed in words, finds language is not the be-all and end-all of reality. Silence is eloquent in its own right: it can speak reams and is indeed a presence, not an absence.

Rich’s insights into the relationship of language to silence are reminiscent of Husserl’s comment made in the context of describing or trying to describe the temporally constitutive flux of absolute subjectivity. With reference to that ‘flux’ he states: ‘In the lived experience of actuality, we have the primal source-point [that is, the “now”] and a continuity of moments of reverberation. For all this names are lacking’ (Husserl, 1966: 100). In short, naming is not the ultimate source of knowledge, let alone the ultimate source of truth.

From the range of perspectives described and proposed thus far, it should be clear that forms of embodiment that spawn such entities as embodied minds (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2012; Varela et al., 1991), embodied subjectivity (Hanna and Thompson, 2003; Jensen and Moran, 2013; Zahavi, 2005), enactive perception (Gallagher, 2008), enactive sensorimotor theory (Buhrmann and Di Paolo, 2017), embodied, enactive, embedded and extended cognition (Gallagher, 2008) and embodied experience (Gibbs, 2006) are lexical band-aids that do not do justice to real-life, real-time human experience (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011c: ch. 13, 2015). Such band-aids cover over a still suppurating wound generated by a failure to give the body its due and, in giving the body its due, to recognize precisely what Husserl and Jung recognized, namely, that the body is full of soul, that corpus et anima, symbol and matter are of a piece.

Spelling out the ways in which the body is full of soul, that is, the ways in which body and soul are of a piece, is a task that should challenge us to plumb the depths of experience. When we do so, we find ourselves back to Aristotle, da Vinci, and Lawrence. In other words, in plumbing the depths of real-life, real-time experience, we find that bodily dynamics are at the forefront. They are apparent in the realities of touch; they are apparent in the realities of movement and its integral ties to Nature; they are apparent in the realities of emotion, as in fear and longing. In short, kinesthesia, tactility and affectivity matter, which is to say feelings matter. It is important to note explicitly that while people speak and write at length of embodied cognition (Varela et al., 1991), embodied action (Noë, 2004; Varela et al., 1991), embodied language (Gibbs, 2006), embodied self-awareness (Zahavi, 2002) and even embodied movement (Gibbs, 2006: 127, 130, 134; Varela and Depraz, 2005; Gallagher and Zahavi, 2012: 109), no one speaks or writes of embodied feeling. This is undoubtedly because feelings do not need packaging. They are not just present in living bodies but are experienced directly and immediately by living bodies. Feelings move through bodies and move them to move, and that movement is kinesthetically experienced in distinctive ways in virtue of the inherent qualitative dynamics of movement. Given these bodily realities, it is surely time we plumbed the depths of bodily being in the manner of Aristotle, da Vinci, Lawrence, Husserl, and Jung, and realized their integral ties to being ‘alive and in the flesh and part of the living incarnate cosmos’.

Constructive Perspectives

The foregoing critical perspectives offer sizeable clues that span a range of disciplines, all of which in distinctive ways prompt us to think about the bodies we are and the bodies we are not. They are indeed indispensable to understandings of what it is to be a body. In particular, they awaken us to the possibility of constructive accounts of kinesthesia, tactility and affectivity, accounts that are properly anchored in ontogeny, a period in the lives of all humans that involves not only learning one’s body and learning to move oneself, but doing so in ways congenial to, and effective in, the social worlds in which one finds oneself. In the course of such learnings, infants progress precisely in the manner Husserl indicates when he observes, ‘Originally, the “I move”, “I do”, precedes the “I can do”’ (Husserl, 1989: 273). A real-life, real-time experimental study by infant psychiatrist and clinical psychologist Daniel N. Stern and colleagues exemplifies the progression at the ground level, that is, at the spontaneous level of ‘I move’. It in fact quite specifically validates spontaneity as the elementary form of agency and implicitly highlights affectivity in the elementary sense of motivation. The study involved near 4-month-old Siamese twins who were joined ventrally between umbilicus and sternum and thus faced each other (Stern, 1985). It focused on the response of each twin who, while sucking her own fingers or the fingers of her twin, experienced the fingers being pulled away, the psychologist pulling on that particular twin’s arm. When the twin was sucking her own fingers, she resisted her arm being pulled away and thus resisted her fingers being dislodged from her mouth; when she was sucking the fingers of her twin, she strained her head forward in pursuit of the withdrawing fingers, but made no resistant movement with her arm. The movement of the twins was an immediate and direct response, what Husserl would term an ‘instinctive’ response (Husserl, 1989: 271). In short, each twin’s foundational ability to move herself was the basis of her spontaneously either resisting or straining in pursuit. It is important to clarify that her distinctive movement in resisting or straining in pursuit were not a matter of her claiming or disclaiming ‘ownership’ (cf. Gallagher and Zahavi, 2012: 44, 179–82). Her distinctive movement was a matter of tactility and kinesthesia, a matter of a tactile-kinesthetic felt and feeling body that modulates basic subject–world relationships. Indeed, what Husserl identifies within the abstractive epoché of the ‘sphere of ownness’ is not a matter of ‘ownership’ but of separating what is ‘“alien” or “other”’ from first-person experiential realities (Husserl, 1973: 96–8).

The findings of Stern and colleagues empirically complement the phenomenological findings of Ludwig Landgrebe, a student of Husserl, as well as those of Husserl himself. In the course of elaborating Husserl’s insights into ‘I cans’ and their anchorage both in ‘the freedom of this “Body”’ (Husserl, 1989: 158, see also 73, 167) and in the ‘instinctive’ and ‘involuntary’ (1989: 270, see also 346), Landgrebe succinctly states, ‘[the] ability to move itself is the most elementary form of spontaneity’ (Landgrebe, 1977: 108; italics in original). Moreover, a sterling empirical example of the progression of this elementary form of spontaneity is documented in J.A. Scott Kelso and Armin Fuchs’s reformulation of a classic infant experiment conducted by Carolyn Rovee-Collier and colleagues. The experiment – Mobile Conjugate Reinforcement (MCR) – has to do with an infant’s spontaneous kicking movements. Kelso and Fuchs’s reformulation warrants not simple mention, but detailed specification, and this because its significance lies not only in its discerning expanded insights into infant movement, but in the precise way it complements the natural progression from ‘I move’ to ‘I do’ to ‘I can’, a progression apparent not only in infant learning but in forms of adult learning: in playing an arpeggio on harp or piano, in cracking an egg and separating yolk from white, in developing carpentry skills necessary to building a wooden house or surgical skills necessary to removing a tumour, in making love, in throwing a ball effectively to someone who is waiting to catch it, in dancing with someone, and so on, and so on.

The set-up of the MCR experiment involved tying the foot of an infant to a mobile above the infant’s head by means of a ribbon.⁴ While the original experiment showed ‘the infant’s ability to control, learn and remember’, as Kelso and Fuchs state, those findings were not related to experience, namely, to the infant’s experience (Kelso and Fuchs, 2016). What Kelso and Fuchs’s reformulation shows in terms of coordination dynamics (Kelso, 1995) are transitions from spontaneous movement – kicking – to an awareness of a connection between kicking and movement of the mobile and, in turn, from such an awareness to the realization of an ability to make something happen – what Kelso and Fuchs term a ‘eureka’ moment (Kelso and Fuchs, 2016: 11). Kelso and Fuchs thus describe the experiment as having three phases, each one measured by observations of the nature of the infant’s kicking movements. In particular, and in Husserlian terms, ‘phase 1’ of the experiment was simply ‘I move’; that is, no ribbon was yet attached to the infant’s foot, its kicking movements simply being recorded. Phase 1 lasted 2 minutes, after which a ribbon was attached linking the infant’s foot to the mobile. Kelso and Fuchs begin their discussion of phase 2 as follows (Kelso and Fuchs, 2016: 6):

After a delay of two minutes during which a cord was looped around the baby’s left ankle and hooked to the suspension bar of the mobile, phase 2 starts where each kick of the baby causes movement in the mobile. Even though there are no quantitative measures of the mobile movement nor any estimates of force produced, it is stated in Rovee and Rovee (1969: 35): ‘…it was apparent that the variety of figure movement increased directly with the force or rate of response. Very rapid responding produced auditory feedback from colliding wooden figures, such that effectively more intense responding produced a more intense reward.’ As a consequence, during a period of about five minutes the kicking rate increased monotonically, saturating at 30 to 40 kicks per minute, 3 to 4 times the uncoupled rate.

As Kelso and Fuchs later comment, ‘A remarkable feature of mobile conjugate reinforcement (MCR) is that within minutes, infants recognize the correspondence between their own movements and the motion of the mobile’ (Kelso and Fuchs, 2016: 11). In essence, their recognition constitutes what Husserl describes as an if–then relationship. Husserl states, for example, ‘If the eye turns in a certain way, then so does the “image,” if it turns differently in some definite fashion, then so does the image alter differently, in correspondence’ (Husserl, 1989: 63). He furthermore specifically emphasizes the correlation or ‘twofold articulation’ (1989: 63) of kinesthesia and perception when he states,

Clearly the aspect-exhibitions of whatever body [i.e. whatever object] is appearing in perception, and the kinestheses, are not processes [simply running] alongside each other; rather, they work together in such a way that the aspects have the ontic meaning of, or the validity of, aspects of the body [i.e. the object] only through the fact that they are those aspects continually required by the kinestheses…and they correspondingly fulfill the requirement. (Husserl, 1970: 106)

In addition, he points out that an ‘intentional “if–then” relation’, i.e., a ‘twofold articulation’, is operative in expectations as well: ‘Kinestheses here lie within the system of kinesthetic capacity, which is correlated with the system of possible following events harmoniously belonging to it’ (1970: 160–1). In short, if–then relationships are rooted in a causal kinetic sequence: if I do such and such, then such and such happens.

As for phase 3, Kelso and Fuchs state,

After about 15 min. of the baby being connected to the mobile, the ribbon is removed in a two minute period after which phase 3 starts. Now the baby can no longer trigger movements of the mobile and within about five minutes the kicking rate decreases to the initial level observed during phase 1. (Kelso and Fuchs, 2016: 6)

As noted earlier, Kelso and Fuchs describe phase 2 as a ‘eureka’ moment, the moment at which the infant realizes that its kicking movement is making the mobile move, the moment at which the infant realizes itself as an agent. This moment is a kinesthetic-kinetic moment. The bedrock of the infant’s discovery is indeed a dual kinesthetic-kinetic awareness: it is aware of its movement and how its movement can make things happen. In effect, it is building upon its repertoire of ‘I cans’.

Husserl’s insight into the relationship of spontaneous movement to agency – of the progression from ‘I move’ to ‘I do’ to ‘I can’ – is the phenomenological complement of Kelso and Fuchs’s empirical findings with respect to ‘positive feedback’, that is, to kinesthesia. Husserl in fact everywhere ties the Ego’s freedom to ‘the kinesthetic’: to the ‘freedom of the kinesthetic processes’ (Husserl, 1989: 158). In a section of Ideas II titled ‘The Body as organ of the will and as seat of free movement’, he points out:

Sheer material things are only moveable mechanically and only partake of spontaneous movement in a mediate way. Only Bodies are immediately spontaneously (‘freely’) moveable, and they are so, specially, by means of the free Ego and its will which belong to them. (1989: 159, italics in original)⁵

In short, the import of kinesthesia – ‘positive feedback’ – is clearly recognized both by Husserl and by Kelso and Fuchs. Kinesthesia grounds ‘the most elementary form of spontaneity’, namely, ‘I move’, and the subsequent realization of an if–then relationship, namely, if ‘I do’ such and such, then such and such happens. Kelso and Fuchs (2016: 11) explicitly point out:

A spontaneous ‘kick’ moves the mobile, the perceptual consequences of which lead to more forceful kicks and a (tripling) increase in the kick rate. In this respect, evidence suggests that the baby’s attention to self-generated movements and the kinaesthetic, visual and auditory consequences they produce is a crucial factor.

Husserl furthermore states – and emphatically – that ‘I cans’ specify abilities by way of ‘the kinesthesias’ to ‘“act” somatically’ (Husserl, 1973: 97; italics in the original). The phenomenological realization ‘I can’ and the empirically described ‘eureka moment’ are thus indeed dynamically related; they are complementary ways of describing the same phenomenon. The motivation to ‘act somatically’ is affectively generated. The instinctive movements of the Siamese twins described earlier were affectively generated in just this way. The movements of the infants in the MCR experiment were similarly affectively generated, but because movement in phase 2 was voluntary rather than instinctive, the distinction between the two kinds of movement warrants clarification.

What is kinesthetically instinctive – resisting, straining in pursuit and kicking – emanates from the primal animation (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011c) or intrinsic dynamics (Kelso, 1995) of animate life.⁶ It is in other words spontaneous movement that is affectively generated simply on the basis of ‘I move’. In the case of the Siamese twin study, the motivating desire of the twins to move might well be described as the desire for self-satisfaction, that is, the desire to continue sucking. The movement of the infant in the infant-mobile study might similarly be plausibly described in terms of self-satisfaction, but self-satisfaction that in this instance is complex: while it is anchored in ‘I move’, hence in a tactile/kinesthetically anchored self-awareness, it is further anchored in something other and more than self-awareness, namely, in something in the world, something in the world that captures the infant’s attention by virtue of its movement and by virtue of the relationship of that movement to its own movement. In short, it is not just a matter of ‘I move’ and ‘I do’, but of having the power to move something apart from oneself, something Other. The motivation to ‘act somatically’ is affectively generated in the desire to perseverate that relationship. Voluntary kicking is in other words affectively generated in feelings that may be described in terms of excitement and fascination – the excitement of discovery and the fascination of movement⁷ – and in the desire to continue to make something exciting and fascinating happen.

A further distinction between the voluntary and the instinctive lies in the fact that different sense modalities are involved in the two experiments. The Siamese twin experiment focuses on the tactile-kinesthetic body – on the direct and immediate experience of that body. The MCR infant experiment focuses on the tactile-kinesthetic body in relation to a kinetic-visual and kinetic-tactile object⁸ – and on the direct and immediate experience of that kinesthetic–kinetic relationship. The two infant experiences are thus markedly different in sensory-kinetic terms. Their sensory-kinetic difference generates different affective motivations to move, the one to retain what was felt as pleasurable in both a tactile and kinesthetic sense, the other to continue what is experienced as both kinesthetically and kinetically pleasurable. There is thus a further motivational distinction between ‘I move’ and the progression from ‘I move’ to ‘I do’ to ‘I can’. No realization of agency would in fact be possible short of the progression. An infant’s realization that its movement has consequences, hence its realization of an if–then relationship, is critical to its realization of itself as having the ability to make something happen. The distinction between instinctive, spontaneous movement and voluntary, wilful movement is thus not just evident, but cognitively and even existentially significant in a developmental and social sense.

Concluding Observations of Conceptual and Theoretical Import

The respective phenomenological and empirical validations of the import of movement are notable not only in themselves but in their reciprocal validation of each other. Mutual validation is rare between phenomenological and scientific studies. It is particularly rare in this instance because neither movement nor the tactile-kinesthetic body is commonly recognized as central in today’s neuroscience and cognitive science. Indeed, apart from neuro-physiological studies, a distanced stance is commonly taken with respect to the body, and that distanced stance is not uncommonly exacerbated if not augmented by an adultist perspective, of which more presently. A third obstacle is less readily apparent but is no less critical, namely, a lack of understanding of the necessity both of distinguishing between movement and objects in motion and of recognizing their common ground in a qualitative dynamics. That lack of understanding may perhaps stem from the writings of Merleau-Ponty and those following his line of thought, as for instance Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi when, in claiming that ‘the sense of agency is not reducible to awareness of bodily movement or to sensory feedback from bodily movement’ and that in ‘everyday engaged action’ ‘a recessive consciousness of our body’ obtains, they precisely reference Merleau-Ponty (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2012: 185). Merleau-Ponty’s emphatic declaration that ‘Movement is nothing without a body in motion which describes and provides it with unity’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 272) lacks phenomenological anchorage and is thus an undocumented claim. Its attempted anchorage in posture is in fact static in the extreme:

I am never conscious of…composing the movement through which I live, I have the impression that it is the mobile entity itself [i.e. ‘the moving object’] which changes its position, and which effects the passage from one instant or one position to another. (1962: 276)

Merleau-Ponty seems indeed to have been led astray by Zeno’s concluding description of his arrow. Moreover, his lack of attention to the qualitative dynamics of movement is near astounding: ‘The consciousness of my gesture, if it is truly a state of undivided consciousness, is no longer consciousness of movement at all, but an incommunicable quality which can tell us nothing about movement’ (1962: 276).

Among other notable phenomenological omissions, such an authoritative assertion about movement bypasses experienced differences precisely in the quality of movement – the difference between the felt qualitative dynamics of a hesitant step forward and a determined step forward; the difference between the felt qualitative dynamics of an expansive opening gesture of arms and torso and the felt qualitative dynamics of a contractive folding of arms across the chest; the difference between the perceived qualitative dynamics of a leaf fluttering to the ground and the perceived qualitative dynamics of a wave hanging momentarily in suspension, then folding over and crashing downward; the difference between the perceived qualitative dynamics of a cat stealthily creeping toward a prey and the perceived qualitative dynamics of a cat arching its back and backing away. The difference between a felt qualitative dynamic and a perceived qualitative dynamic is in fact a further essential difference, but just as essential is recognition of the qualitative dynamics that essentially constitute any and all movement, whether felt or perceived.

To get at the essential qualitative dynamics of movement and differences between felt and perceived dynamics, one could, oddly enough or even reasonably enough, begin with a later observation of Merleau-Ponty: ‘This relative and prepersonal I who provides the basis for the phenomenon of movement, and in general the phenomenon of the real, clearly demands some elucidation’ (1962: 278). Such an elucidation would necessarily focus on a veritable phenomenology of movement – a phenomenological analysis of its inherent qualitative dynamics – together with an elucidation of the thinking in movement that is generic to animate forms of life, not to mention generic to becoming adult humans who move efficiently and effectively in the world, thanks to having learned their body and to having learned to move themselves (Sheets-Johnstone, 1981, 2011c). Moreover, such an elucidation would require recognition of the difference between a linguistic, hence conceptual, specification of the body as a possession and a linguistic, hence conceptual, specification of the body as an existential reality, thus recognition of the difference between having a body and being a body. Clearly, infants do not experience themselves as having a body: no superordinate I, self, or consciousness reigns that regards the body as a possession, much less identifies it linguistically as something it ‘owns’. Infants are first and foremost animate, which means they are not simply alive but moving. Movement is indeed their mother tongue. They are basically tactile-kinesthetic-affective bodies – and not anatomically segmented bodies, but whole bodies from head to toe. In this respect, they are akin to Kanzi, a human-raised bonobo chimpanzee, who comprehended spoken English and whose sign vocabulary was equivalent to that of a two-and-a-half-year-old child (Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin, 1994), but who had no interest in learning to name body parts. Interestingly enough, his caretakers and trainers remark that while Kanzi is ‘asked about body parts…he does not know them well, even though these are words that have been on his keyboard for some time’ (Bonobo People, n.d. ‘Data Base’: 7). His non-interest says something about his sense of his body. As pointed out elsewhere:

This sense may be glossed in terms of the having or not having a physical body as such.… To have a physical body as such is to be capable of analyzing one’s body as a composite of such and such body parts together with a knowledge of their practical and kinetic possibilities.…Nonhuman animals do not have physical bodies as such. Their physical bodies are inseparable from their living bodies. Their living bodies are felt.… [They are] dynamically engaged in the world in some way or other – fighting, snarling, exploring, eating, pulling, resting, pursuing – or dynamically self-engaged – scratching, grooming, or turning, for instance, or crouching, reaching, or stretching. By this very token, the living bodies of animate creatures are coterminous with the animals themselves. (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011c: 338)

Human infants are just such living bodies. They do not have physical bodies as such, for they do not objectify themselves in part or in whole. Their physical and lived bodies are all of a piece in the dynamic realities of movement, as the two infant experiments attest.

Having a body means precisely experiencing the body as an object in motion, in effect, perceiving the body rather than feeling the flow of its qualitative dynamics in moving. Gallagher and Zahavi’s notion of ‘a recessive consciousness of our body’ foregoes this phenomenological distinction altogether. When they write, ‘I do not stare at my hands as I decide to use them; I do not look at my feet as I walk; and I do not attend to my arm movements as I engage the joystick’ (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2012: 185), they could be on the way to describing the dynamic realities of being a body – feeling the qualitative dynamics of reaching, walking, shifting and so on. Instead, they relegate such common movements of body parts to what is ‘non-conscious and automatic’ (2012: 185). In doing so, they bypass the very learning that makes such everyday movements possible, namely, learning the distinctive qualitative dynamics of reaching, walking and shifting, and their variations in dynamics according to circumstance, the very learning that makes efficient and effective adult movement possible. Their perspective is indeed adultist. Most critically too, they bypass the sense modality of kinesthesia that is the basis of such learning, which is to say the tactile-kinesthetic body and the inherent qualitative dynamics of movement through which a repertoire of ‘I cans’ is constituted and inscribed in kinesthetic memory. While it may seem that ‘my’ hands, ‘my’ feet, ‘my’ arms rightly identify my hands, my feet, and my arms as possessions of one sort and another – things that I own – my body in part and in whole is essentially a linguistic convention that allows distinguishing between I or self and other.

While perceiving the body as an object in motion is clearly related to the having of a body, hence to a conception of the body as a possession, feeling the body-in-movement is clearly related to being a body, hence to a conception of the body as an existential reality – an animate organism in Husserl’s words – and in particular and most saliently, to experiencing in a felt sense the inherent qualitative dynamics of movement. These dynamics – whether of reaching, walking, or shifting – may indeed be ‘recessive’, but only because the dynamics have been learned and inhere in kinesthetic memory, not as invariable dynamic patterns but as kinesthetic themes constituting a repertoire of ‘I cans’, themes that as noted vary according to circumstance.

The themes are in fact dynamically variable not only in terms of circumstance but in terms of their affective motivation. Leonardo da Vinci’s experience of fear and longing before the great cavern testifies to the dynamic significance of affect, to the centrality of its directional pulls, hence to whether da Vinci ventures forth into the cave or turns away. We are indeed moved to move, from infancy onward, and in moving, are never out of touch with something – precisely as Aristotle’s and Lawrence’s observations and basic insights into tactility attest. Moreover Aristotle’s injunction concerning the necessity of understanding motion in order to understand Nature testifies to the necessity of recognizing kinesthesia, a necessity implicitly but affirmatively underscored 2500 years later in Marc Jeannerod’s conclusion following his extensive research concerning ‘conscious knowledge about one’s actions’. Jeannerod augments the significance of Aristotle’s injunction when he states: ‘There are no reliable methods for suppressing kinesthetic information arising during the execution of a movement’ (Jeannerod, 2006: 56). The sensory modality of kinesthesia does indeed not turn on and off like a light bulb. In sum, kinesthesia, tactility, and affectivity are not only integral to human life but essential dimensions of human experience. They do indeed matter.

Footnotes

Notes

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