Pragmatic and Critical Somaesthetics

Somaesthetics as it is announced by Richard Shusterman is a philosophical discipline that considers aesthetic experience in terms of the body. There is more than one radical shift in this formulation. For it is not only that we move towards a new focus on the Soma. It is also that we move towards a new focus on aesthetic experience. This move is characterisically pragmatist, rooted in Shusterman’s reading of Dewey’s insistence on the importance of experience. This focus on experience is further problematic in that is challenges the characteristically post-modern concern with language and the putatively interpreted or linguistic character of all experience. It thus poses questions about the possibly foundational character of Dewey’s conception of experience and its connection to knowledge. The focus on practice, sensuality and the body threatens to provide a reconception of a foundational empiricism that grounds knowledge is bodily sensuousness. Shusterman on the one hand questions the denial of non-linguistic experience and insistence on language and interpretation in every form of experience, and on the other hand rejects that Dewey’s insistence on and conception of non-linguistic, or even pre-linguistic, experience leads to an epistemological foundationalism, pointing out that Dewey is concerned with reconstruction and hence transformation that is incompatible with foundationalism. Likewise, critical theoretical approach such that in Marcuse likewise rejects the foundationalist concern with knowledge grounded in a basic given and is aimed towards social tranformation, viewing positivism as attached to the prevailing established social order without truly questioning it. Foundationalism from this perspective is grounded in a reifying consciousness, a quantifying view of science that fails to encompass the economically determined social totality. Such a knowledge, while based in sensory experience, fails to penetrate beneath the appearance to the socially constructed and reified character of the object. It fails to be comprehensive in its conception of reality. Thus, analytic philosophy provides linguistic analyses that fail to exhibit the wider social and economic reality that underlie the discourses it considers. Such a science fails to penetrate beneath the reified character of things as socially constructed within the estalished social order.

The question then is on the reconstructive and critical potential of experience, in particular, aesthetic and somaesthetic experience. Critical theory’s concern with the issues relating to social transformation and the abolition of forms of injustice, repression, and oppression, include the concerns with forms of language and communication and the reconstruction of an ideal authentic form of political discourse. The problem however remains whether free and non-systematically distorted communication, communication that is one-sided and manipulated is adequate to the problem of the liberation of the individual in a society that is increasingly decentralised and the political and public domain increasingly detached from the life of the individual. The fundamental problem seems to be no longer psychological repression so much as a systematic desublimation and dominance of the forms of mass communication which, however, have wihtin them the seeds of their own dissolution as the means of communication become fragmented and the one-sidedness of the process is eroded. Within such a situation the question arises why there is no more radical move towards personal liberation and the answer seems to be the processes of repressive desublimation and commodity fetishism that were indicated by Marcuse. The problem lies in the failure of the realisation of the potential for liberation, the potential for oppositional and critical movements.

The issue seems to relate to the possibility of action and movement in the realisation of the potential that is there …

Reification, liberation and transformation: the revolutionary potential of body practices

What is the connection between movement and liberation? A number of body practices are claimed to be liberatory and transformative. What is the connection between movement on the one hand, and liberation and the transformation of consciousness on the other. Critical theory argues that individuals bred in a competitive, antagonistic society lose the revolutionary consciousness, that is, they lose the consciousness of their own oppression and repression. Critical theory therefore seeks a theory of the subject, that is, a psychological theory that explains why the proletariat as well as the now disenfranchised middle class has failed to demand social transformation and the abolition of an oppressive economic system. To this end critical theory looks to psychoanalytic theory which sees the individual’s instinctual needs repressed by the oppressive moral social order. The satisfaction of these instinctual needs is, within the nineteenth century European culture, associated with guilt, established morality, and repression. When these needs are satisfied, they are satisfied in a repressed form, hence incompletely.

The early Freudian psychoanalytic theory sees civilisation as demanding the repression of the institual needs of the individual. However, Reich’s discovery of the somatic basis of neurosis suggested that the complete satisfaction of the instinctual needs does not necessarily threaten the social order, but only an established society and a false community, that is, a community not based on the true interests of its members. Reich posited that repression is manifested in body tension and blocked energy, what he calls, the body armour, and not instinctual release, leads to aggressiveness and destructiveness that demands further moral prohibitions. The repressed individual is comfortable with his or her body armour and sees not other way of functioning. He has lost the awareness of the body tension and lack the sensitivity to his institual needs. Body psychotherapy proposes to deal with the body armour and the energy blockages. Reichian therapy therefore proposes to render the individual more sensitive to the way of relating to others and to the injustice of the competitive and antagonistic society. By contrast, the mass market and mass culture, consumerism, commodification, and the breakdown of social morality or commitments, the levelling that is associated with the liberal bourgeois culture, lead to forms of repressed liberaton, satisfaction and pleasure, that is, forms of satisfaction that are incomplete and permeated with social morality, the unquestioning rule of the commodity market. Individuals relate to each other and to all things not as humans but as things or commodities. Such pleasures can be satisfied in a repressed form, that is, in a way that do not in any way impinge on the established totality of the commodity market.

From this perspective it is possible to assess the claims of somatic and body practices that claim to be liberating, such as Roberto Freire’s Somatherapy, a system of therapy that is that specifically intends the education of the individual towards self-liberation and revolutionary consciousness, towards the sensitivity to social injustice and the repression of instinctual needs. There are other similar practices that deal variously with inner-directed or authentic movement, ritual arts, and somatic education, that draw on ancient as well as modern body and movement practices. These practices reconceive the sacred in terms of a space that is removed from the reifying and repressive effects of the market economy. It is by rendering individual’s sensitive to their instinctual needs, by the direct and satisfaction of these needs, and by way of unmediated sensual pleasure, that body practices confront the injustice, and render individuals conscious, of the totalising, reifying and levelling tendencies of the market economy.

Pleasure, Flow and Transformation

Herbert Marcuse’s constant concern is the social transformation towards a happier society that appears utopian from the vantage point of the established order. There is the underlying view that that social transformation is rooted in the psychology of the individual, especially in his sensual or instinctual apparatus. There is an ongoing struggle between interests of the individual and those of the wider society, and this is manifests in the need for societal prohibitions on pleasure, of repression. There are various conceptions of social transformation in Marxist and Pragmatist thought. Marcuse wants to relate historical views of pleasure and happiness to the concerns of critical theory (Marcuse ‘On Hedonism’). His conceptual scheme is conditioned in an unacknowledeged form by Heideggerian views about how the dominant economic modes of production and the interests of certain interest groups condition philosophical attitude to pleasure and happiness. He tries to avoid a ’sociological’ approach to philosophy as ‘merely’ a function of the social background but insists on the autonomy of philosophical thought. He thinks that the truth in philosophical thought can be separated from the ideology only by acknowledging the background interests. Philosophical thought is either revolutionary and dissenting, or it is acquiescent and conformist.

Pragmatism offers a conception of social transformation in Dewey’s educational model which places heavy emphasis on practice and experience. A central concept in pragmatist thought is that of the taken-for-granted background of social practices. The objects and the reality of the individual are the products of socialisation into the prevailing social practices. Cognition is a matter of the reflection upon and reconstruction of social practices in the context of immediate concerns. A critical theoretical conception of social transformation is conditioned by the view of the controlling tendencies of dominant economic classes. A reconstruction that does not challenge these tends to support and maintain the status quo and its destructive tendencies. This limits the possibiliteis of human liberation and tends to sustain the oppressive and repressive tendencies of the entrenched social interests.

The psychology of flow or optimal experience can provide a perspective on the pragmatist model of reconstruction. The psychology of optimal experience ‘absorbed coping’ in which the individual solves problems in a particular sort of a way. It provides a concept of the failure of coping when the individual remains at the level of ‘anxiety’ whereby he or she is blocked from moving to the stage of absobed coping and remains at the level of competence, that is, at the level of following rules in analysing the situation and selecting choices of actions in accordance with explicit social rules without moving beyond rules and moving towards a practical or intuitive understanding. This can lead to a malfunctioning of the system and can provide a perspective on neurosis, anxiety and tension.

Does absorbed coping and Hubert Dreyfus’s phenomenology of skill acquisition provide a perspective on repression and neurosis? Is pleasure, especially sensual pleasure, a matter of optimal or flow experience? Failure in the sexual sphere, eg., failure of intimacy, can be understood in terms of the failure of the proper or full development of the individual. Marcuse thinks that the release of sexual relations from the repressive tendencies of mass society would lead to social tranformation, especially, the abolition of labour. He thinks that people tolerate the condition of work and enjoy pleasures in a repressed, that is, ‘guilty’ form, because their sensual capacities are repressed. That must mean at least that societal prohibition leads to a repressed sensuality. He argues however that pleasure must not remain subjective and particular, but must be rendered objective and general. Plasure and happiness must not be a matter of chance, but instead society must be reorganised so as to maximise sensual pleasure an a non-repressed, and non-internalised form.

As I had noticed earlier, sensual pleasure plays a much more central role in Marcuse and critical theory with its Freudian orientation than it seems to in Pragmatist thought which seems to be more cognitively oriented, although Pragmatism does recognise and acknowledge the central function of the institual apparatus. A central thought in pragmatist view of this seems to be that social complexity demands that the socially useful functions must be rendered ‘immediate’, and that would mean something like that the abolition of labour would require that the socially useful tasks be brought in harmony with an individual impulse. The individual must not be merely an appendage to an industrial economic superstructure, but the two must be brought into harmony or agreement. The experience of true pleasure and happiness in sexuality, then, would bring to the fore the suffering and displeasure endured by individuals enslaved by the labour process. We can see the conceptual move between the performance of any task and the operation of the institual apparatus, and it can be seen in the close relation between the somatic conception of the body with the central role of the autonomic system on the one hand, and the Reichian conception of the psychic release in the orgasm and the objectified, released body, on the other. In Freudian psychology the pleasure principle operates in the instinctual apparatus.

From one perspective, sexual competence might be one form of optimal experience among many, an ‘art of loving’. But from another all of the sensual capacities are rooted in the basic institual apparatus of the autonomic nervous system so that optimal experience of any sort has that instinctual dimension, it must lead to sensual release and must be free of guilt, repression, or prohibition and the associated sado-masochistic tendencies, that tendency to dominate or be dominated, to control and objectify, or to be controlled and objectified. In that sense, in Marcuse’s thought, the instinctual apparatus and its release in sexual relations in a non-repressed, guilt-free form would serve a critical function in that it would bring to consciousness the prohibitions and renunciations demanded in the labour process. It would also bring forth the demand for justification for these renunciations. There is also the further question whether this ‘psychology of sensual release’ a kind of foundationalism, that is, whether it renders the role of experience in knowledge foundational.

Aesthetic and Optimal Experience

In the aesthetics of idealism art is the objectification of feeling. Is optimal, flow experience correlative with pleasure, or is it a part or an aspect of pleasure? Is it correlative with aesthetic experience? Or do they occasionally coincide. We need to see what are the pleasures, what are the aesthetic experiences, and what are experiences of flow. The paradigm experience of flow are gaming and sports. As such they are also most closely related to movement. Pleasures are associated with direct bodily sensations as well as satisfactions. Neither sport, game, nor movement are directly related with satisfactions since presumably they may be satisfying or not. Failure is possible. Pleasure may involve displeasure, it may exist in a mixed form. Still, pleasure is pleasure. It is also an experience, as is aesthetic experience. It seems possible to conceive of aesthetic experience as somewhere between sensory or sensual pleasure, that is, it has the sensory or sensual aspect, and flow experience, that is, it has the complexity and temporal aspect of flow experience. It seems that the pragmatist concept of immediacy and instrumentality provides an adequate framework for conceiving of aesthetic experiences as involving coping and satisfaction, thus also allowing to broaden the concept of aesthetic experience beyond art while giving the artwork, whether autonomous or not, its social function.

The idealisation and internalisation of aesthetic experience in affirmative culture means that all other forms of aesthetic experience must have a social justification. Pleasure, says Marcuse, cannot be a value in itself. Value is a function of the labour process and so pleasure must be mediated. The internalised and idealised aesthetic experience relegates material reality to the abstractions of the economic system and its notion of value. This poses a problem for thinking about somatic or somaesthetic practices, namely, whether they provide aesthetic or somaesthetic experiences that are internalised and idealised. The fact that they involve movement does not preclude them from being rendered forms of affirmative culture. We are confronting the whole realm of imported culture and what some see as the colonization of passion. Is imported and putatively “colonized” culture a form of real liberation or merely inner liberation, affirmative culture, or repressed pleasure, what Marcuse calls repressive liberation, the form of liberalism that is manifested in a hedonistic consumer culture that ultimately gives free reign to the status quo and the dominant interest groups. Arguably the imported ‘exotic’ somaesthetic practices are reified and provide for only repressed pleasure. In its retrospective assessments of its cultural impact the 60s counter-culture movement tends to uncritically view the importation of a variety of ’spiritual’, aesthetic, or somaesthetic practices and lifestyles as the crowning achievement of that era and a positive force in the social transformation of the West. From a critical theoretical perspective the question is whether such practices provide for a critical and transformative or an acquiestent conscousness, that is, whether these cultural products appear in a reified, commodified, or authentic form.

Marcuse argues that the release of sexual and sensual relationships would lead to a transformation of consciousness that would render the labour process unbearable (Marcuse, ‘On Hedonism’). He thinks that sensual relationships have a certain primacy here. Arguably then those somaesthetic practices that provide for objects of sensual satisfaction are transformative and critical. Such practices are not sustainable in a reified and commodified form. In a reified form they cannot produce aestheic experiences in the sense that the pleasure are unmixed and unrepressed. The realisation of their potential to produce aesthetic or somaesthetic experiences depends on their appearance in a pure form. In that sense they are essentially liberatory. Some practices make the claim to being liberatory in their history and their content, for example, Capoeira Angola, Reichian Therapy, Argentinian Tango, and Contact Improvisation. Certain eastern practices also make the implicit claim, namely, yoga, meditation and Eastern erotic arts. The question then is whether there exists a critical theoretical perspective for assessing these implicit or explicit claims of liberatory potential, and of ascertaining whether these provide for a transformative or affirmative forms of cultural and aesthetic experience, whether they provide for authentic forms of dissent and resistance to the totalising tendencies of the commodity market. It seems that such practices, in order to provide forms of transformation, must have an effect on the individual’s sensual capacities (Marcuse). Reichian Therapy as well as somatics make explicit claims to doing just that. …

Foundationalism

Wikipedia

Anti-foundationalism (also called nonfoundationalism) as the name implies, is a term applied to any philosophy which rejects a foundationalist approach, i.e. an anti-foundationalist is one who does not believe that there is some fundamental belief or principle which is the basic ground or foundation of inquiry and knowledge. Anti-foundationalists use logical or historical/genealogical attacks on foundational concepts (see especially Nietzsche and Foucault), often coupled with alternative methods for justifying and forwarding intellectual inquiry, such as the pragmatic subordination of knowledge to practical action.

Somatics and Social Criticism

Somatic education is connected to psychoanalysis through practices such as body psychotherapy. Nonetheless, it is much more grounded in pragmatist psychology than psychoanalysis. This seems to limit how far it can draw on European critical social theory for wider philosophical and critical (ie., political) implications. Psychoanalysis acquires its critical function through the concept of sexuality, repression and sublimation. But it seems to depend on a ‘hydraulic’ model of psychic energy. Feldenkrais rejects such a conception and insists that the system does not allow for a conception in terms of energy, but only in terms of action and tension. There is no energy to be expelled. Rather, there is only tension and the release from tension.

This creates a problem in so far as Feldenkrais and somatic education in general seeks to acquire political and philosophical significance, in that it moves towards the pragmatist conception of action that has not generates the critical edge of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Marxist and social theoretical analysis of capitalism draw heavily on the notions of economic oppression and sexual repression in the production of the historical forms of capitalism and repressive forms of bourgeois liberation and individualism. Marcuse fundamental contention is that Western art provides the main means of reconciling the bourgeois concepts of individual liberation with the unfreedom and repression that is the reality of the capitalist system of production and distribution.

The Marxist credentials of critical theory are much stronger than those of pragmatism, it seems. So the question is then how can somatic education draw on the psychoanalytic model for its critical edge when it rejects what apparently is its critical tenet, namely, the conception of sexuality in terms of psychic energy, and its insistence on the centrality of sexuality. Somatic education does not seem to focus on sexuality over and above other forms of expertise. Yet the Reichian model of sex economy at least claims to offer the possibility of a historical analysis of patriarchy, repression, and therefore a historical analysis of the sources of capitalism and its forms of sexual repression, in the history of patriarchy in general, as the history of sexual repression within the family. Alternatively, it offers, in Marcuse, the possibility of an analysis of the contradictions and psychological basis of the maintenance of capitalist forms of domination in Western forms of art that enable the reconciliation of the bourgeois values of liberation and the repressive realities of capitalist modes of production.

The question then is whether these putative gains can be retained or reconstructed within a psychological model that dispenses with the energy metaphor in favour of a tension-reduction model of the psychosomatic system. Certainly Feldenkrais as well as the other somatic educators seek to cover the ground that has been traditionally claimed by psychoanalysis, including neurosis and sexuality. But it seems at least on the surface that neither pragmatism nor somatic education necessitate the viewing of sexuality and sexual repression as a central function. Nonetheless, it does seem that the Reichian move from the orthodox Freudian model of the psychic system towards one in terms of the body or soma does move in the direction of the somatic education model, the question then being whether it is necessary to retain the hydraulic/energy metaphor in order to retain the insights and in particular the critical edge of psychoanalysis.

Well, one response that does seem to invite itself is that in fact critical theory does need to broaden its concept of psychic energy such that it generalizes being genital sexuality, as is clear in the case of Marcuse, so as to account for the significance of art in the maintenance of the capitalist forms of repression and domination. Here it is the desexualisation, or desensualisation, of the body, that is, removing bodily or sensual pleasure as a precondition of happiness, and its replacement with a disembodied or non-embodied forms of happiness that are found in the cognitive-aesthetic relation to art, providing the individual with momentary and transient bouts of liberation and happiness within an unhappy reality, that forms the central historical mechanism for reconciling the ideals of liberation with a repressive reality. The question then is whether the hydraulic model with its energy metaphor does not become redundant and unnecessary, that is, whether it is possible to make that argument without the conceptual baggage of psychoanalysism, that is, whether the tension-release model might not do just as well.

There are really two connected claims being made by critical theory, namely, the insistence on the quantitative model of sexuality, and the insistence on the centrality of sexuality in social repression. These seem to be connected in some way. But fundamentally sexual energy becomes generalized as being psychic energy in general. Culture provides for the sublimated means of releasing this sexual energy, but in the end it is simple genital sexuality that provides the ultimate means of sexual gratification and release of the dammed up psychic energy. Pragmatism, and even somatic education, accepts the centrality of sexuality in a certain sense which at least superficially seems weaker, in the sense that sexual differentiation is quite fundamental to the human species and a basic instinct.

There are a couple of issues that arise for psychoanalysis: the question of accounting for the neuroses; and the attempt to explain neuroses in terms of the need to repress sexuality in civilized society. In this respect somatic education, and Feldenkrais in particular, seek to provide a developmental model, suggesting that failure of development, which we may view in terms of the failure to acquire competence or expertise in some critical domain of life, leads to regression or immaturity. On the other hand, there is the question whether the quantitative model of sexuality really makes that much difference, or whether in fact the two models are incommensurate. Both seek to account for sexual dysfunction within the current social context. What the psychoanalytic model seems to offer is a broader philosophical framework which places sexuality at the centre as an explanatory construct. Somatic education on the other hand tends to emphasise movement in general, rather than specifically sexuality, as the domain of inquiry and improvement. Still, Feldenkrais seeks to draw conceptual connections between somatic education and psychoanalysis, so lets look at that.

Reconciling somatic education and psychoanalysis

A good amount of Feldenkrais’s writing seems to be concerned as much about somatic practice as with reconciliation with psychoanalytic and critical thought. Wilhelm Reich and the body psychotherapy paradigm would be figure in this respect. Somatic education points to the idea that the body psychotherapy model can be adopted with all of its critical substance but without the dubious science (esp., the psychic energy metaphor). The strategy seems to be to take the pragmatist psychological model and to develop it (esp. the tension-release metaphor) as an alternative basis for the somatic reconception of psychoanalysis. What psychoanalysis and critical social theory gains is a more scientifically respectable basis in pragmatist behaviourism, and what somatic education and pragmatism gains is the resources of critical theory. The question is whether this can succeeds, that is, whether Feldenkrais’ attempt at downplaying the differences are in fact convincing.

There seems to be at least two critical elements that need addressing. The first is the practice side of psychoanalysis that deals with neuroses. On this side somatic education needs to show how it deals with the problem of neurosis, and the proposal is to look at this in terms of development and regression. The second is the theoretical side of psychoanalysis, which gives it its critical edge. On this side psychoanalysis posits civilization as emerging out of the repression of natural impulses, in particular, the repression of sexuality. Now, here we need to look at the theoretical side of orthodox psychoanalytic theory against the background of interpretive social psychology or Volkerpsychologie of Wilhelm Wundt. Freud sees psychoanalysis as essentially social psychology, that is, as interpretive. His emphasis on sexuality is drawn from his psychoanalytic practice and generalized in terms of an interpretation of art and literature. In this he moves in the direction of anthropology.

On the other side of the divide we have people like the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who sees social structures in essentially functional terms. Dewey’s paper on anthropology reflects this and draws further implications for the processes of education. The tone of these writings is that the survival of the group demands the reproduction of certain predispositions and in particular certain forms of expertise that ensure the preservation and survival of the group. Malinowski makes a strong distinction between the religious or sacred and the non-religious or profane social function. In matters of expertise the native is pragmatic and exercises quasi-scientific modes of reasoning. It is possible to clearly distinguish the spiritual domain and the pragmatic domain. In the latter the native needs to exercise practical reasoning and ensure the reproduction of expertise, something that would not presumably be compatible with the sacred domain which demands unquestioning commitment to the group.

Feldenkrais perhaps is equivocal in his approbation of social criticism on the sort of grounds that we might find in say Marcuse. If we for example take Marcuse’s strategy for explaining the psychological basis of capitalism in terms of bourgeois aesthetics, the theme is that the psychological basis of capitalism is illusory inner liberation without real outer freedom. Marcuse develops the Marxist interpretation of Hegel in terms of the idea that outer freedom demands that the inner impulse is reflected in social institutions, whereas liberalism provides for inner liberation through bourgeois forms of cultural production within the context of the chaos of the marketplace which destroys the human ecology and the possibility of guarantees of outward bodily satisfaction. Real bodily consummations are vitiated by the tyranny of the marketplace that opposes the interests of the individual to those of the market place and of the requirements of mass consumption, that is, to the need of the market to sustain overconsumption. The market has no interest in the attainment of bodily satisfaction and the destruction of striving, but rather the opposite, its interest is in sustaining social mobility and the creation of artificial needs. It is only in the sphere of high art that the individual achieves immediate yet momentary satisfaction, or at least its promise.

The conception of freedom in Feldenkrais is primarly based in the notion of the soma, movement, and the anti-gravity righting mechanisms. It is articulated in terms of spontaneity and choice of action. It is based around the notions of posture and motion or movement. Spontaneous movement is defined in terms of freedom from compulsion, and compulsion is associated with the notions of culture and society. So Feldenkrais seems to imply a kind of foundationalism in that he invokes the notion that there is a basic system that provides from free action and free choice, and that freedom here implies freedom from social compulsion. Social compulsion is associated with anxiety, and hence with the fear of falling. Freedom and spontaneity are further associated with achievement, which is exemplified in the arts.

The question then is whether there is any relation between the two frameworks for thinking about art and cultural mediation in relation to freedom and spontaneity. There are parallels, points of contact, and some overlapping areas of concern, but there remains the question as to the motivation behind Feldenkrais’s interest in psychoanalysis and issues of freedom. On the surface at least he seems to be grounded firmly within the framework of pragmatist empiricism. So the question is whether there is any interest in Marxist social criticism, or whether there are other reasons for reconstructing the relation with psychoanalysis. Certainly the concern with the issues of freedom form a significant point of contact. But the critical theory’s concern with freedom concerns primarily the historical analysis of the processes whereby a society built around the overt ideals of freedom and happiness leads to an actual unfreedom and unhappiness due to the enslavement by market forces, and the concern here is the role that art and cultural production plays in the creation of the contradictions of capitalist society. There is the question therefore whether somatic education is critical and therefore revolutionary or not, and whet this is Feldenkrais’s concern at all.

Whatever the case may be, it is clear that Feldenkrais wants to see somatic education as continuous with psychoanalysis, as providing a further elaboration of that, rather than viewing it as a competing alternative paradigm. This may help its Marxist and critical credentials as a revolutionary technique. Viewed in this way somatic education provides a further elaboration of the psychoanalysis rather than a complete paradigm shift. If that is the case then, in so far as psychoanalysis is viewed at the level of theory as revolutionary and critical, then presumably somatic education must also accept this burden. The means of achieving this reconciliation is in terms of the notions of growth, development, and of regression due to failure of development. Neurosis is identified in terms of anxiety, growth and development are idenfied with art and spontaneity. The question then is whether this succeeds in connecting the two traditions. At least we can say that in so far as the Reichian body armouring and repression are critical concepts, the somatic education in terms of tension and anxiety ought to be able to inherit this theoretical function, so that tension can be associated with repression and oppression. I would further suggest that this can be elaborated in terms of the concept of a ‘politics of uncertainty’.

immediacy, tension, gravity

Pragmatist theory conceives of the act as a unity that has temporally distinguishable phases which however are not proper parts because the latter phases are already present in the initial ones. Somatic education is primarily concerned with the question of posture, righting mechanisms, and the proper and efficient deployment of the organism to the task (Use). The critical dimension of somatic education lies in its accusation of forces towards end-gaining. The individual fails to come to execute an action from a proper stance and with proper comportment. This insight is further elaborated in terms of the idea of postural sets and tension patterns that appear whenever the organism is placed in a tension situatit on. The tension responses are natural but, the reasoning goes, they are not ideal for the proper execution of actions. Instead, there are natural righting responses that allow for the proper positioning for an action, at least in situations such as standing, sitting, or walking, but ideally all action requires the proper coordination which involves the natural righting systems.

This broader educational outlook of somatic education allows us to begin relating this to the pragmatist theory when the latter is extended to education by Dewey. Dewey’s basic outlook is that any society must reconstruct the learning situations in a way so as to render them immediate, in particular, that it must do so in order to assure expertise in those areas that are crucial to the survival of that society. Societies must ensure both, commitment and expertise, but these two are not always the same or even compatible. Societies ensure commitment by means of taboos and prohibitions, that is, by means of threat and anxiety. On the other hand, they must ensure expertise in certain crucial areas, and expertise is arguably incompatible with anxiety.

So now if we think of efficient or effective action in terms of expertise then on the kind of analysis that we have recently got from Hubert Dreyfus this involves involvement in the situation and a tension-release kind of mechanism. Now, presumably this tension and release is muscular tension and release of some sort. Involvement implies anxiety and presumably also euphoria, it involves success and failure, these being associated with tension-release states of some sort. Alexander’s point about end-gaining is that this leads to failure by generating excessive tension, improper use, and improper posture for success. Emotional problems are analysed as problems of achievement, that is, they are problems of expertise in the social and sexual sphere. Failure leads to a regression to an earlier infantile stage of responding (Feldenkrais).

So from the point of view of SE the fundamental issue concerns the attainment of expertise. According to Feldenkrais potent action involves the a monomotivated competent performance in which there is no ‘cross-motivation’, that is, in which there are no underlying motives related to anxiety. That means that expertise demands the achievement of the appropriate stance, posture, or ‘acture’ for the effective performance of that action. It provides a theory of learning, and in particular, a theory of the role of the body, body tension, and body position, posture, or acture, in learning.

Now, the crucial juncture concerns immediacy and instrumentality, in other words, the connection between SE and PTA seems to be Deweys exploration of the concepts of immediacy and instrumentality in relation to language. Dewey seems to be broadening out the concepts of immediacy and instrumentality in a way that might allow us to connect the PTA and SE. For Dewey’s distinction seems to allow a value judgement, and therefore criticism, with respect to effective action. Dewey argues that language needs to be both, immediate and mediate, instrumental and consummatory.

That means that it is possible for language to lack either of these two characteristics. Language can either lack immediacy or it can lack instrumental function and be purely immediate. This too, it seems, can be said of action in general. Thus, we can read Alexander say seeing end-gaining as a matter of instrumental action lacking immediacy. Action can then also be said to lack immediacy in some sense. Immediacy can be identified with tension release. The tension-release model of competence acquisition seems at least consistent with the pragmatist theory of the act and at least provides a further elaboration of the concept of immediacy and consummation. Somatic education can then be viewed as a further elaboration of the model in terms of embodiment and the systems underlying motion and the righting function, that is, tension release is now conceived in relation to the innate righting functions of the system.

spontaneity, action, inhibition

Somatics is continuous with pragmatism in its conception of choice. In The Potent Self Feldenkrais tries to elaborate Alexander’s paradigm in terms of a conception of the freedom to choose. He is, in effect, presenting a somatic theory of freedom in terms of spontaneity and of a somatic choice. He focuses on the idea of compulsive behaviour on the one hand, and learning to learn on the other. Compulsion means that we do not respond to a situation such as it is, and we do not respond to a single stimulus effectively but instead suffer from ‘cross-motivation’. In particular, we are afflicted by anxiety which is essentially the physiological response that manifests our innate fear of falling, in other words, it is a response in relation to gravity. Our ideal position with respect to gravity is that of an inverse pendulum and in that position we exhibit the ideal position to movement. Moreover, Feldenkrais seems to conceptualise embodied immediacy in terms of gravity and in particular, anti-gravity righting mechanisms.

The connection with PTA lies in the idea of choice. This idea seems to be very close to that in PTA. It basically posits that we are able to break down both, the stimulus configuration, and the response configuration, and respond selectivel to different stimuli in terms of a different response configuration. Freedom from compulsion means that we are no longer bound to response in the same way, but that we are capable of learning or adapting by adapting different responses. So Fs/SE conception of freedom is in terms of the ability to learn or to adapt.

Now, the ability to learn is connected to the idea that in any situation we are in a state of equilibrium. Human posture is somehow important or central to our higher level capacities, namely, the ability to respond with the full range of movement is somehow pivotal and differentiates the human capacities to learn from those of the lower species. And it is also limitation of movement, loss of posture due to anxiety and other tensing reflexes that form into a behavourial habit, that results in the loss of spontaneity and therefore of freedom, that is, in the loss of the ability to learn, to adapt to the situation in non-habitual, spontaneous, adaptive manner.

Now in terms of immediacy, the second major correlation here concerns the idea of action and reaction, and their inhibition, and the idea of contradictory responses inhibiting one another. In PTA it is language that provides the possibility of resolving the contradictory responses because language provides the means of abstracting a stimulus such that the different aspects or descriptions can be brought together. The idea of different stimuli eliciting contradictory reactions of course is in a sense central to the SE model, most clearly in Feldenkrais’s elaboration of Alexander’s idea of use and misuse, and his contention that misuse is the result of cross-motivation, of an action not being mono-motivated, but in fact being motivated in contradictory ways, such that the individual both acts and inhibits the action (The Potent Self). We can see Feldenkrais seeing the Alexandrian somatic education model as a basis for reformulating the concepts of freedom and spontaneity, in terms of the features of the soma or embodiment. Immediacy here is connected to the features of the soma, and in particular, the underlying righting anti-gravity mechanisms that are the underlying basis of both, efficient action and posture, and the mechanisms of anxiety.