Letting the body find its way: skills, expertise, and Bodily Reflection

Abstract

What forms of consciousness can the subject have of her body in action? This is a recurrent issue in contemporary research on skilled movement and expertise, and according to a widespread view, the body makes itself inconspicuous in performance in favour of the object or goal that the activity is directed to. However, this attitude to consciousness in bodily performance seems unsatisfying for an understanding of skilled action, and the work of several researchers can be seen as responding to this view: Montero, Legrand, Ravn and others in the philosophy of expertise and of dance have developed various notions of consciousness and cognition to account for the mindful processes at play in performance.Two related questions can be distinguished here: (1) Is there an inherent conflict between skilled action and at least more than marginal awareness of that action, or is it possible – and even desirable – to reflect on our own performance without considerably impeding on it? (2) What forms of consciousness pertaining to the body in action must we distinguish in order to answer the first question?This paper gives an overview of this discussion, focusing on the second issue, although the first will come into play in so far as it is linked with the latter question. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of bodily reflection and on dancers’ descriptions, I show that there is, in phenomenological terms, a bodily level of reflection: a fully conscious and exploratory activity that is led by the skilled body, and that is explicitly aimed at by many performers.

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“…From a practical standpoint, this position is consistent with training interventions that utilize mindfulness-based methods aiming at developing selfawareness and cognitive flexibility (e.g., Gardner and Moore, 2017;Carraça et al, 2018). As the debate continues on the relation between consciousness and skilled action (e.g., Foultier, 2023), we claim that further exploration of these pre-reflective dimensions of consciousness is a fruitful direction for future research and applied implications in the domain of human performance in cognitive sciences. In this perspective, the course-of-experience framework offers researchers theoretical and methodological tools to conduct empirical investigations according to enactive and phenomenological assumptions.…”

Documenting and analyzing pre-reflective self-consciousness underlying ongoing performance optimization in elite athletes: the theoretical and methodological approach of the course-of-experience framework

“…From a practical standpoint, this position is consistent with training interventions that utilize mindfulness-based methods aiming at developing selfawareness and cognitive flexibility (e.g., Gardner and Moore, 2017;Carraça et al, 2018). As the debate continues on the relation between consciousness and skilled action (e.g., Foultier, 2023), we claim that further exploration of these pre-reflective dimensions of consciousness is a fruitful direction for future research and applied implications in the domain of human performance in cognitive sciences. In this perspective, the course-of-experience framework offers researchers theoretical and methodological tools to conduct empirical investigations according to enactive and phenomenological assumptions.…”

Aesthetic and Philosophical Basis of Contemporary Dance

“…Аналіз досліджень і публікацій. Питання філософії танцю та тілесності є предметом дослідження низки таких науковців, як-от: О. Чепалов [7], О. Шабаліна [8], Л. Волотко [1], Л. Лаврова [5], А. Осипов [6], І. Герц [2], Є. Калюжна [3], E. Mullis [15], Joshua M. Hall [12], Anna Petronella Foultier [11], Aimie C. E. Purser [9], B. Cvejic [10], M. Mascolo [13], R. Shusterman [19]…”