Pragmatism and the Somatic Turn: Shusterman's Somaesthetics and Beyond

REVIEW ARTICLE

PRAGMATISM AND THE SOMATIC TURN:SHUSTERMAN’S SOMAESTHETICS AND BEYOND

CHRISTOPHER J. VOPARIL AND JOHN GIORDANO

Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. By RichardShusterman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii + 368.(Cited as TB.)

Shusterman’s Pragmatism: Between Literature and Somaesthetics. Editedby Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Małecki. Amsterdam: Rodopi,2012. Pp. 238. (Cited as SP.)

Embodying Pragmatism: Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and LiteraryTheory. By Wojciech Małecki. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010. Pp.202. (Cited as EP.)

1

Evidence of a somatic turn in contemporary thought is increasingly diffi-cult to ignore. There is the “embodiment movement” in philosophy, mostassociated with the writings of Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, EugeneGendlin, and others.1 Earlier, rather different, attention to the body wasgiven by feminist theorists, including Elizabeth Spelman, and, in the wakeof Foucault’s genealogies of the body, Judith Butler, among others.2 Morerecently, work being done under the sign of “the affective turn” attends tothe body in novel ways, as do thinkers elaborating various “new materi-alist” and posthumanist positions.3

Our particular focus here is on the distinctive pragmatist versions ofthis recent turn to the body. While Dewey’s critique of mind-body dualisminforms many in the embodiment movement, the most direct claim to apragmatist perspective on the body is Richard Shusterman’s notion of“somaesthetics.”4 Broadly defined, somaesthetics is “a framework topromote and integrate the diverse range of theorizing, empirical research,

1 See, e.g., Johnson 1987; Gendlin 1992; and Lakoff and Johnson 1999.2 See Spelman 1982 and 1988; Butler 1990 and 1993; Bordo 1993; and Grosz 1994.3 See, among many works, Clough 2007; Barad 2003; Bennett 2010; and Malabou 2011.4 See also the work of Sullivan, esp. Sullivan 2001.

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and meliorative practical disciplines concerned with bodily perception,performance, and presentation” (Thinking Through the Body, hereaftercited as TB, 8). As “an ameliorative discipline of both theory and prac-tice,” somaesthetics “concerns the body as a locus of sensory-aestheticappreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning” and “aims to enrichnot only our abstract, discursive knowledge of the body but also our livedsomatic experience and performance” (TB 27).

Recognition of the role of the body is of course not new. Indeed, for hispart Shusterman has devoted nearly two decades to scholarly articulationof this theme in the classical pragmatists, as well as in Wittgenstein,Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Beauvoir, and, most recently, Fanon(Shusterman 2008 and 2014b). In Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992) he attendedto Dewey’s “somatic naturalism,” and in Practicing Philosophy (1997a) hewrote of the “somatic aesthetics” of Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Foucault,before introducing, near the end of that book, the notion of somaestheticsas a philosophical discipline that would “pay more critical attention to thevariety of somatic practices through which we can pursue our quest forself-knowledge and self-creation, for beauty, potency, and pleasure, forthe reconstruction of immediate experience into improved living” (1997a,177). The time since has seen the emergence—elaborated in Shusterman’sown books and many articles (and their numerous translations), and thesecondary literature around them—of a vibrant and growing interna-tional, interdisciplinary scholarly discourse, accompanied by a wide rangeof diverse practices and applications across many fields. Taken as a whole,this work constitutes one of the most alive and exciting quarters ofcontemporary pragmatism.5 In it are embodied some of pragmatism’smost promising ideals and commitments, as well as its ineluctable limita-tions. To take stock of this state of affairs, this review article discussesShusterman’s latest book; a significant new critical anthology on his work;and the first monograph devoted to his thought.

In framing his approach to the genealogy of somaesthetics and itsbroader reception, Wojciech Małecki invokes William James’s reflectionson “the classic stages of a theory’s career”: after being attacked as absurdand then admitted as “true, but obvious and insignificant,” a new theoryis “seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselveshave discovered it” (James 1987, 572). If indeed somaesthetics isapproaching this third stage, as Małecki suggests, we must also bear inmind the wrinkle that he thoughtfully adds to James’s account of thisstage: “It is exactly then that the idea begins to fully reveal its limitations,which need to be subsequently addressed by its sympathizers if it is to

5 Two additional volumes have appeared (containing Shusterman 2014a and 2014b), anda peer-reviewed, online research journal, the Journal of Somaesthetics, has been launched:http://journals.aau.dk/index.php/TJOS/index

142 CHRISTOPHER J. VOPARIL AND JOHN GIORDANO


thrive” (Embodying Pragmatism, hereafter cited as EP, 168). The contri-butions in the volumes reviewed here meet—and exceed—this challenge.Yet the broader importance of the somatic turn, for pragmatism inparticular and philosophy more generally, remains untenably under-appreciated, especially on American shores. Rectifying this situationentails transcending parochialisms of various forms and learning fromwork going on abroad. These new works are a good place to start.

2

Thinking Through the Body is Shusterman’s most accessible and wide-ranging collection to date. Having provided an in-depth philosophicalarticulation of somaesthetics in Body Consciousness (2008), with particu-lar attention to Wittgenstein, James, and Dewey, but also Foucault,Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir, the new volume exhibits the broaderinterdisciplinary relevance of somaesthetics, charting its impact andextending its use into new areas, both via the interventions of its authorand via places where others have taken it. There are deeply philosophicalchapters, like the lead essay from which the book takes its title, as well as“The Body as Background,” “Self-Knowledge and Its Discontents: FromSocrates to Somaesthetics,” and “Somaesthetics and the Limits of Aes-thetics.” There also are extended critical treatments of particular thinkersfrom the vantage of somaesthetics, like Edmund Burke and RichardRorty. Shusterman’s early won analytic instincts for classification anddemarcation repeatedly come to the fore in essays like “Somatic Style”;others are more personal and revealing, like his affecting account in“Somaesthetic Awakening and the Art of Living” of his time at a Zendojo on the Inland Sea in rural Japan. Shusterman distinguishesthree flexible and overlapping branches of somaesthetics: “analyticsomaesthetics (essentially descriptive theory), pragmatic somaesthetics(comparative evaluation of methodologies of practice), and practicalsomaesthetics (actual performance of somatic disciplines” (TB 142,41–45).

While already interdisciplinary in the diverse intellectual traditions andmultiple areas of scholarly inquiry in which Shusterman himself is versed,the application of somaesthetic insights and practices to the contextsof architecture, photography, and Japanese Zen practice expands itsreach into new territory. Focusing on the somatic dimension of “theperformative process of making a photograph of a human being” enablesShusterman to see that the somatic process of photography—the “aes-thetic experience” of photography—has been occluded by “our one-sidedconcentration on the photograph itself” (TB 241, 244). In “Asian ArsErotica and the Question of Sexual Aesthetics” Shusterman takes on“philosophy’s traditional hostility and neglect regarding erotic arts” andthe tendency of modern Western thought to define aesthetic experience by

143PRAGMATISM AND THE SOMATIC TURN


contrast to sexual experience, in order to clear space for his case for theaesthetic potential of lovemaking (TB 263). Although the dominant“antisexual aesthetic tradition” has a somewhat surprising exception inEdmund Burke, as chapter 7 establishes, the refusal to recognize theaesthetic character of erotic experience is fully entrenched in writings fromShaftesbury and Kant to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. “SomaestheticAwakening and the Art of Living” develops the striking parallels betweenthe accounts of everyday aesthetics in Emerson and Thoreau, on the onehand, and Japanese Zen practice, on the other. Especially enlightening isthe chapter that examines how the soma “fundamentally shapes some ofthe most basic concepts of architectural design” (TB 224).

At its best, this volume exemplifies what it means to intellectualizepractice in Dewey’s sense. Shusterman’s treatments of muscle memory,somaesthetics in the philosophy classroom, and sexual aesthetics illumi-nate and impress in consistently refreshing ways that promote his project’scentral aim of not only enhancing one’s body consciousness but develop-ing critical somatic reflection. The concerns of somaesthetics “go beyondthe soma’s external forms and norms and the ways it can be beautified andemployed to express our personal and social values” to foster a criticalsocial consciousness capable of advancing the meliorist project at its core(TB 113). To take just one example, our bodies often have an “orientationbias,” Shusterman explains, that makes us feel more comfortable facing ortilting slightly in one direction rather than another. As a result, a teacherin front of a classroom with a left orientational bias may “often uninten-tionally turn his side or even back to those people in the audience who areseated to his right, without even knowing that he is excluding them fromeye contact” (TB 105).

One of Shusterman’s fundamental claims is that heightened attentionto the soma is central not only to somaesthetics but also to “philosophy’straditional goals of knowledge, self-knowledge, virtue, happiness, andjustice” (TB 197). As we shall see, some are less convinced than others onthis score. Nevertheless, this volume teems with somatic-derived insightsof interest to philosophers of all stripes, especially pragmatists, to whichwe cannot do justice here: a notion of the “bodily subjectivity” of thesoma—“the soma as body-mind or embodied intentionality that canexperience itself as both subject and object” (TB 301)—that offers a fullerconception of embodied critical self-reflexivity capable of getting tractionon the feelings and forces within us that operate largely below consciousawareness; an understanding of “senses that are distinctively bodily—namely, our proprioceptive, kinesthetic, vestibular, tactile, senses”—thatby and large has been overshadowed by philosophy’s privileging of theoptical over the tactile (TB 235–36); a way of integrating the discursiveand nondiscursive, the reflective and the immediate, thought and feeling(see also Shusterman 2007a); a spectrum of levels of consciousness thatruns from “primitive body intentionality”—what Shusterman calls



“unconscious consciousness,” like the kind we exhibit while asleep—through inexplicit and explicit somatic awareness to reflective somaticconsciousness that is not only aware of our own awareness of somaticexperience but also conscious of how this reflection itself influences thatexperience (TB 198); and a recognition, generated through his engagementwith the Daoist tradition, both of the limits of critical self-reflection and ofthe importance of unreflective spontaneity of action and release fromwillful self-consciousness for bodily performance, while at the same timeunderscoring the need, in the spirit of Deweyan problematic situations, for“redirecting explicit attention to our somatic behavior” when experienceexposes the need to either acquire new habits or reconstruct existing ones(TB 205).

Shusterman marshals these insights to generate novel readings ofparticular thinkers in the history of philosophy. His response in“Somaesthetics and Architecture” to the problem of treating the bodilysenses as “too elusive for the exercise of criticality,” which can be traced toWalter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-tion,” offers an important corrective to Benjamin’s reduction of the tactileto “an unfocussed, absentminded, uncritical reception through the mecha-nism of habit” (TB 236–37). Shusterman’s account of the erotic arts inancient Chinese and Indian traditions provides an emendation to Fou-cault’s reading in the first volume of his History of Sexuality of the Chineseelevation of pleasure as an alternative to the modern Western scientiasexualis. Although not monolithic, the Chinese ars erotica was more deeplymotivated by health issues and “good management” of self and householdthan Foucault allows (TB 274–75). Of particular interest to pragmatists isShusterman’s call for a “post-puritan pragmatism” that remedies the rela-tive lack of attention to the erotic in the classical pragmatists—James evenaffirmed the role of an “anti-sexual instinct”—by recognizing the sexualdimensions of self-realization and “that sexual performance provides arealm of human artistry and aesthetic experience that can be practiced andenjoyed in real life and real love” (TB 268–69).

The primary narrative in Shusterman’s take on the Western tradition,advanced in the key essay, “Somaesthetics and the Limits of Aesthetics,”is that, historically speaking, aesthetics has been defined through its trans-gression of boundaries and surpassing of limits. Beginning with AlexanderBaumgarten’s founding of the field, aesthetics sought “to extend philoso-phy beyond conceptual knowledge and into the sphere of sensory percep-tions,” or what Baumgarten called “the lower cognitive faculties” (TB129). This “limit-defying trend” continues in Hegelian aesthetics’ movebeyond the bounds of nonconceptual experience to advance art’sconnection to the highest spiritual truths, and in Benedetto Croce’sall-encompassing, though essentialistic, conception of the aesthetic.Shusterman amply catalogues the demarcational efforts of mid-twentieth-century analytic aesthetics to reinscribe a distinction between the aesthetic



and the nonaesthetic and to cordon off the aesthetic from the ethical.Aiming to “preserve rather than transform,” these limiting effortsshare the same inefficacious fate in the face of the transgressive spirit ofaesthetics (TB 134).

In a new essay written for the Shusterman’s Pragmatism collection,Shusterman traces the development of his own work from the analyticphilosophy of literature to somaesthetics through this same notion of“limit transgression.” He highlights how his “bi-national, transculturalbackground” as “a wandering Jew who had left America for Israel at agesixteen, and who then experienced outsider status there and again atOxford before returning . . . as an academic stranger to the UnitedStates,” made “boundary crossing (and pluralistic vision) a necessity oflife” (Shusterman’s Pragmatism, hereafter cited as SP, 14). Though heinitially regarded pragmatism as anemic relative to analytic and Conti-nental perspectives, Shusterman’s pragmatist turn ultimately emerges as away to transcend the limits of the traditions in which he was trained bybringing the mind and body together. In his earliest writings, he mobilizedhis training in analytic aesthetics at Oxford to critique monistic theories ofinterpretation and evaluation in the philosophy of literature, in favor ofmore pluralistic alternatives that recognize the influence of historical andsociocultural factors on practices of criticism. Developing this importantattention to the sociohistorical shaping of intellectual practices led himbeyond the bounds of analytic philosophy into Continental traditions,including hermeneutics, the Nietzsche-Foucault line, and ultimately,by the last chapter of his second book, T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy ofCriticism (1988), to philosophical pragmatism. His full-fledged turn topragmatism shortly thereafter is not surprising given the contextualist andhistoricist bent, the embrace of pluralism concomitant to his boundarycrossing, and the central themes of antiessentialism, antifoundationalism,the primacy of practice, interest in dissolving dualisms, and “an empiricalspirit in theorizing that looks at language and action in their actual(socially embedded and historically changing) contexts rather than insome pure ethereal world of abstraction” (SP 11; EP 15). His early fluencyin analytic approaches oriented Shusterman to the pragmatist perspectivesto which he initially was most drawn: those of Nelson Goodman, RichardRorty, Hilary Putnam, and Joseph Margolis (SP 13).

In his engaging forays into non-Western traditions of thought, practice,and culture, Shusterman is an able guide from whom readers undoubtedlywill learn much. For the most part, his reports from these welcome excur-suses are oriented toward and offer the most benefit for those unstudied inthese traditions. Perhaps this is the most appropriate—even the only—form for the reflections of a self-described passeur culturel to take.Shusterman’s efforts to develop a somaesthetic perspective in the volume’swide array of fields generate insightful reflections—even if they occasion-ally feel forced and perfunctory, the dutiful depiction of any and every



aspect of a topic or experience that involves even the remotest somatictwinge. Nevertheless, Shusterman’s treatments are never dull; his prose iseminently readable and ceaselessly enlightening, in matters both large andsmall.

3

Wojciech Małecki’s Embodying Pragmatism is the first—and as of thiswriting, only—monograph in English devoted to Shusterman’s work. APolish philologist trained in literary theory and versed in contemporaryanalytic and pragmatist philosophical debates, Małecki is well positionedto grasp and illuminate all facets of Shusterman’s intellectual trajectoryfrom analytic approaches to the philosophy of art and aesthetics of litera-ture, to Continental philosophy and theories of interpretation, and, ulti-mately, to pragmatism and somaesthetics. Małecki’s book is organizedaround four core dimensions of Shusterman’s project: aesthetic experi-ence, interpretation, popular art, and embodiment, with an in-depthchapter on each. Though Małecki is by and large a sympathetic reader—each chapter follows a symmetrical structure of roughly three-fourthsinterpretation and exegesis, concluded with summary criticisms—his over-riding interest, appropriately, is in evincing a pragmatic evaluation ofShusterman’s philosophical conceptions and positions as responses toparticular problems diagnosed in the historical antipathy toward the bodyin the Western tradition, and the misguided somatic and somaestheticattention in contemporary culture—in short, “But will all this work?” (EP56). While it has its own blind spots and limitations, Małecki’s accountis illuminating both about the strengths and urgent usefulness ofShusterman’s perspective and about where it “needs to be significantlycorrected” to realize its aspirations, particularly those that seek to trans-cend the walls of academia (EP 173). Accordingly, Małecki’s book hasearned itself a lasting place in the crucial third stage of the development ofsomaesthetics, and in the ongoing conversation about the future of prag-matism itself.

Małecki’s even-handedness and widely—and carefully—read familiar-ity with all quarters of the pragmatist tradition exemplify the ecumenicalorientation essential to the tradition’s ongoing vibrancy and relevance.This allusion to the future of pragmatism is intentional; like Rorty’s,Shusterman’s pragmatism is pluralistic and multiperspectival, bothforward looking and backward looking, adept at engaging theneoperspectives of Putnam, Fish, Cavell, and Margolis as well as theclassical sources of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Locke. A quirk ofMałecki’s consideration of Shusterman is that it is presented against thefoil of Rorty’s linguistic neopragmatism, propelled by Shusterman’s criti-cal dialogues with Rorty and attempts to distinguish his own somaticpragmatism from what Shusterman sees as Rorty’s language-centered



textualism. This continual looming of Rorty in the background ofMałecki’s reading occasionally seems unnecessary, even gratuitous, givenMałecki’s own standing as a leading interpreter of Rorty’s work. Yet thisapproach, despite having been written before the publication of ThinkingThrough the Body, turns out to be keenly perceptive, in ways thatShusterman himself only very recently has come to articulate.6

While we don’t have space here to capture the depth of Małecki’sdiscussion and the many questions and issues worthy of reflection itprovokes, several insights should be noted. Małecki’s account is particu-larly helpful in its elucidation of the wider normative perspective guidingShusterman’s work. Shusterman’s “theoretical activism,” beginning withhis interest in pragmatist aesthetics and running through his somatic turn,emanates from its transformative, melioristic orientation. Somaesthetics isfor Shusterman a natural extension of his turn to pragmatism followinghis disillusion with the demarcational projects of analytic aesthetics.As Małecki ably recounts, these demarcational and transformationalimpulses continually struggle against each other in Shusterman’s ongoingarticulations and refinements of somaesthetics and somaesthetic practices.He depicts, across the four core areas, how a philosophical inclinationtoward typologies and preformed taxonomies, traceable to Shusterman’sanalytic period, competes with and occasionally threatens Shusterman’slarger pragmatic aims and melioristic interventions, includingShusterman’s defense of a definition of art that seems surprisingly close tothe wrapper theory he himself so powerfully criticizes (chapter 1), thereduction by his otherwise attractive “metatheoretical interpretive plural-ism” of all consequences to logically entailed ones (chapter 2), and his“overly philosophical” conceptions of emancipatory political practices(chapter 4). Małecki’s attention to Shusterman’s writings on rap music aspart of his effort to legitimate popular art and to effect a reevaluation ofthe ordinary (chapter 3) is particularly helpful, given the reactions ofShusterman’s critics to this strand of his thought.

The downside to Małecki’s focus on popular art and the problems withShusterman’s “directional” definition of art is that his account tends toinflate the status of art objects in Shusterman’s work relative to his interestin ethics as an art of living through enhanced somatic consciousness.While Shusterman certainly seeks to develop “a somaesthetic perspec-tive on art” (TB 241), Małecki’s interpretative lens may put too much

6 See Shusterman 2014a, where Shusterman establishes, much to his own surprise, that“the original roots of my interest in pragmatist aesthetics do not lie in Dewey but rather inneopragmatist philosophy of language and literary theory” (22). While Małecki himself doesnot arrive at this full insight, the juxtaposition of Shusterman and Rorty helps fill in thepicture considerably if read in light of this more recent development. For Shusterman’s owntake on his long-standing relation with Rorty, see “Pragmatism and Cultural Politics: FromTextualism to Somaesthetics” in TB. Rorty’s presence as a foil in Shusterman’s own workcan be seen as early as Shusterman 1988.



emphasis on a pragmatist view of art in the sense of the artwork, exag-gerating the role of art beyond its value to his overall philosophicalproject. As a result, the common ground occupied by Shusterman andDewey in their pragmatist understanding of art as experience is somewhatobscured; for Shusterman, aesthetic experience closes the gap between artand life by centering the aesthetic on the experiences of the body in itstransaction with the social and cultural contexts that constitute it.7

Małecki’s achievement is situating Shusterman’s work in relation tovarious currents of contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, and literarytheory. The vital side of Shusterman preoccupied with what we might callthe street level of pragmatism as a way of working through the conflictsand opportunities of everyday existence, exemplified in his treatment ofrap as “street-smart moral fables” that offer “practical advice on prob-lematic seductions of crime, drugs, sex, and money,” is harder to discernhere (Lott and Pittman 2003, 377).

A primary aim of Shusterman’s Pragmatism, Małecki and his coeditor,Dorota Koczanowicz, tell us, is “to shed light on why Shusterman is sowidely read not only in different cultural contexts”—translations of hismajor works exist in many (more than a dozen) languages—but also in somany different disciplines, “including literary, gender, education, andperformance studies, philosophy, musicology, physiology and sportsscience, art, design, and architecture theory, and human-computer inter-action studies” (SP 1). The contributions to the volume range beyondsomaesthetics to engage dimensions of Shusterman’s broader pragmatiststance, including his prepragmatic turn work in analytic aesthetics andliterary theory; his work on somaesthetics roughly through Body Con-sciousness (2008) receives its own section, though Shusterman himselfbrings in his more recent work in his own contribution and in his responseessay. Because he responds individually to each of the volume’s dozenessays, Shusterman’s closing piece is particularly useful for clarifying andsharpening his stances, demarcating lines of fruitful disagreement, andgenerating the kind of critical dialogue essential for advancing the schol-arly and intellectual discourse around somaesthetics and Shusterman’sdistinctive contribution to pragmatism more broadly.

The volume is divided into three sections: “Literary Theory and Phi-losophy of Art”; “Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics”; and“Somaesthetics.”8 In the first section, Anna Budziak’s essay establishes thecommonalities shared by Shusterman and T. S. Eliot, who wrote hisdissertation under Josiah Royce’s direction, in their views of emotion:

7 A good example of this is Shusterman’s discussion of “Photography as a PerformativeProcess” in TB.

8 While we treat some of the issues raised in the dozen contributions to this volume inwhat follows, for reasons of space we regret that we are unable to give a comprehensiveaccount of all the fine work included in this collection. For more in-depth and detailedreviews, see Magada-Ward 2013 and Stroud 2014.



respect for biological naturalism, an optimistic conviction that emotionscan be ameliorative and ameliorated, and an appeal to discipline andtraining for increased richness and refinement of feeling (SP 45–46), muchto Shusterman’s own surprise, since he confesses to having regarded hiswork on Eliot as part of his “analytic, pre-pragmatist period” and “neverthought of connecting Eliot and somaesthetics” (SP 219). KacperBartczak probes the “alternative models of subjectivity” found in the“neo-pragmatist aesthetics” of Shusterman, Rorty, and AlexanderNehamas, with a focus on the later poems of John Ashbery as representing“aesthetic embodiments of the paradoxes of self-creation described byShusterman” (SP 67). Exploring the frontier between philosophy andautobiography in Shusterman’s work, Wojciech Małecki identifies in “thepragmatic aspect” of Shusterman’s philosophic-autobiographical narra-tives “a conscious strategy of securing the proper understanding of theseinsights by his audience” that is Deweyan in nature, despite findingShusterman’s theoretical defense of the idea of philosophical autobiogra-phy “largely unsuccessful” (SP 80). Dorota Koczanowicz’s contributionestablishes art as an alternative to the scientific mode of cognition andargues that the respective projects of Dewey and Shusterman for rehabili-tating art and the aesthetic do not exactly square; “Dewey’s project is thebolder one,” in her view. Shusterman’s dual aims of legitimating popularart and extending the boundaries of art to include “the ethical art of theformation of one’s own life” narrow the scope of pragmatist aestheticsrelative to Dewey’s introduction of the aesthetic into all spheres of humanactivity (SP 95–96).9

In the wide-ranging section “Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, andPolitics,” Sami Pihlström reads the idea of philosophy as a way of life intoa tradition of pragmatist metaphysics that involves “transforming meta-physical questions from merely intellectual exercises disconnected frompractice into genuine, humanly deep questions about how the world oughtto be construed in order for us to be able to live in it” (SP 104), promptingShusterman to offer in his response a useful distinction between metaphys-ics (“used pejoratively to indicate vague transcendental speculations”) andontology (“used positively to indicate good metaphysical reasoning basedon logico-linguistic arguments[,] some of them being transcendentalin character”), confining his own interest to the latter (SP 214).Adam Chmielewski critically examines Shusterman’s (2007b) advocacy ofPeircean fallibilism in his missive to Cardinal Ratzinger on “Fallibilism andFaith.” In his piece on the possibility of an “erotic pragmatism,” DonMorse argues that emphasizing “the erotic dimension to bodily experience. . . in which we go out towards others, allows Shusterman to expand andtransform Dewey’s organism-environment model of what constitutes

9 Shusterman’s more recent work (e.g., Shusterman 2013) has moved into the realm ofcognition in ways that may mitigate this difference.



human experience to include much more than Dewey himself can include,”though Morse worries about the tension between Shusterman’s recognitionof the boundedness of problematic situations and the expansiveness ofsomaesthetics’ aim of cosmic unity. This in turn leads Shusterman to clarifythe limits of the self’s transactionalism with its environment as “boundedattention that includes some proximate environment but never too muchof it” (SP 217). Jerold Abrams pursues the paradoxes of somatic self-styling for enhanced “superhuman” beings in a future state of humanity“enhanced by genetic engineering and nanotechnology,” to generateinsights about the need to maintain, both then and now, the dialogicallymediated “normative intersubjective architecture of the mind” necessary toforming “essential communicative bonds” (SP 157).

The section dedicated to somaesthetics includes Monica Bokiniec’scompelling inquiry into somaesthetics’ emancipatory potential through anengagement with Shusterman’s (2008) reading of Simone de Beauvoir froma somaesthetic perspective. Bokiniec finds that “Beauvoir is wrong andself-contradictory and Shusterman is right and consistent,” but alsoworries, when it comes to “the public sphere of social practice,” that“applying somaesthetic techniques in order to transcend the physical obsta-cles and therefore social and physical weakness that worsen women’ssituation” may target a false enemy: “the actual weakness and passivity ofthe woman’s body” rather than the “social structure and institutions thatattribute negative value to women’s bodies” (SP 168–69). Krzysztof Skow-ronski examines “the axiological dimension of the body” with an eye to therealization of values, including everyday values implicit in social practicesassociated with participation in “non-professional sports in daily life” andthe moderated stimulation of the senses in “the culture of drinking” (SP175, 178). Robert Dobrowolski reads somaesthetics’ self-critical reflectionon somatic activity as “a practice of rational corporeality” (SP 183), and hesuggests that Shusterman’s meliorist aims demand a more critical engage-ment with hip hop. Martin Jay’s reflections in “Somaesthetics and Democ-racy,” the only previously published piece in the volume, hold that a fullrealization of “the role of aesthetic experience in building a democraticculture” requires inclusion of the agonistic, “darker, more troubled side” oftransgressive body art that Jay contrasts with “the wholesome vision ofintegrated, consummatory artistic experience defended by Dewey and stillinforming Shusterman’s somaesthetics” (SP 202).

Before taking up these issues around the emancipatory potential ofsomaesthetics in the next section, let us interject a comment about thebroader international reception of Shusterman’s pragmatism. In explain-ing why Shusterman is so widely read across so many different culturalcontexts and disciplines, the volume’s editors cite the “remarkable flexi-bility” that is a function of his pluralism toward particular philosophicalschools, his unwillingness to be confined within the walls of academia, andthe fact that his thought is “simply original” (SP 7). While this strikes us



as largely right, one thing that it does not explain is the relativelyrestrained reception of Shusterman’s work within the United States.10 Inhis response essay, Shusterman briefly addresses “the structures and con-straints that shape the international circulation of philosophical ideas,”noting the challenges associated with the “hybrid nature” of histheorizing—that his theories “seem so intimately to combine differentphilosophical areas (ethics, aesthetics, political theory, etc.) that it is some-times difficult to assign these theories a clear philosophical category” (SP212). For instance, “Does somaesthetics belong to aesthetics or to phi-losophy of mind? . . . Is my research on rap really aesthetics or instead adisguised form of politically motivated cultural criticism? Is my paper onfaith and fallibilism . . . an exercise in epistemology or philosophy ofreligion or indeed in ethics or philosophy of education? When I argue forphilosophy as an art of living, am I doing aesthetic theory, ethics, ormetaphilosophy, or indeed even metaphysics?” (SP 212). That the firstcollection of essays on Shusterman in English has come to us out ofPoland, with only a trio of voices from the United States, may tell us asmuch about the state of professional philosophy and the Americanacademy more broadly as it does about the nature of Shusterman’s schol-arship, as “flexible” and disciplinarily ecumenical as it is. Lamentably, thevery qualities that Koczanowicz and Małecki highlight as responsible forShusterman’s wide international reception may be what has limited it inthe United States. What the works reviewed here make clear is that thisneglect is mainstream North America’s loss.

4

For all that it elucidates about Shusterman’s pragmatism, the notion oflimit transgression leaves two fundamental dimensions of his thoughtunexplained: its deep experiential orientation and its underlying commit-ment to meliorism. Absent the abiding aim to improve experience, thesignificance of Shusterman’s turn to the body cannot be appreciated fully.As we have seen, the turn to somaesthetics can be understood as anextension of Shusterman’s work in pragmatist aesthetics. As Shustermanexplains, “Somaesthetics was thus conceived to complement the basicproject of pragmatist aesthetics by elaborating the ways that a disciplined,ramified, and interdisciplinary attention to bodily experience, methods,discourses, and performances could enrich our aesthetic experience andpractice, not only in the fine arts but in the diverse arts of living” (SP 23;

10 Shusterman’s own reflection on this matter highlights “the value of trying riskier ideasin international contexts and especially in foreign languages that one’s home community islikely not to notice or focus on for criticism”; Shusterman notes that this “greater freedomto experiment in distant lands and foreign languages has an anatomical parallel I learnedfrom my work in somatic education—one usually has greater ease and freedom of movementin one’s distal than proximate parts of the body” (2007a, 136).



TB 140). Also central but not apparent in the motif of limit transgressionis his interest in the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life that hasfound recent articulation in the work of Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault,Martha Nussbaum, Alexander Nehamas, and Stanley Cavell, amongothers (EP 19). In Practicing Philosophy (1997a), where the idea ofsomaesthetics is first mentioned, Shusterman highlights “the body as ourprimordial mode of experience and instrument of action” (SP 24), locatinglived philosophical practice in the context of political issues of democracy,justice, and freedom.

It is precisely in this social and political context that somaesthetics hasmuch undeveloped potential and contemporary relevance; the somaticturn, at its most fertile and necessary, is also a turn to the social andpolitical, a recognition of the background of social relations that Deweycalled the “cultural matrix” in which all inquiry proceeds. The centraltheme of Shusterman’s narrative, the “limit-defying” character of theaesthetic in the face of successive attempts to contain it, also could berendered as a lesson about the importance of attending to context and theineluctable role of historical, social, cultural forces. Even Plato’s aesthet-ics, Shusterman rightly points out, “was clearly a politically motivatedresponse to the pressing problems of . . . Athenian society at a time oftroubled change, political dissension, and military defeat” (TB 138).Importantly, Shusterman’s pragmatist aims in the context of recognizingthe contingent and changing history of art and the aesthetic are less aboutaccurate representation and more about intervening, both theoreticallyand practically, through defining, encouraging, and implementing strat-egies for transformation and change within this ongoing, contingent his-torical context.

Somaesthetics, then, seeks to improve and reshape not only the self andits experiences but also the larger social and cultural milieu in which thesetake shape.11 Shusterman’s understanding of aesthetics has long centeredon the notion of aesthesis (perception) that is at the core of the idea of a“body-mind” or soma as “a living, purposive, sentient, perceptive body orbodily subjectivity” (TB 141). Shusterman’s most recent work more fullydevelops the conception of critical somatic consciousness implicit here:“Somatic self-examination provides a model of immanent critique whereone’s critical perspective does not require being entirely outside the situa-tion critically examined but merely requires a reflective perspective on itthat is not wholly absorbed in the immediacy of what is experienced” (TB231). This project of fostering critical somatic consciousness has two keydimensions. One is the individual somaesthetic awareness achievedthrough “sharpening a person’s awareness of her bodily feelings.” This

11 For Shusterman, “somaesthetics is not simply aimed at improving the body for its ownsake but for its contribution to the flourishing of the whole person and eventually to thesociety in which that person is situated” (2007a, 146).



dimension involves not only our moral feelings and dispositions, whichShusterman reminds us are “always already somatic,” but also the “sen-tient or cognitive aspects of our body’s intentionality and physiologicalresponse,” including “all the entrenched bodily dispositions that consti-tute our unreflective habits” (TB 106, 301). That is, the soma “implicitlyreacts proprioceptively to the changing kinesphere without one usuallynoticing it; and such reactions often have an affective dimension with realaesthetic significance and sociopolitical import” (TB 235).12 The seconddimension of this critical somatic consciousness is more directly social,attuned to perceiving the “internal tensions or coordination breakdownsbetween diverse ideals embedded in the society’s traditions and actualpractices” (TB 231).

The implications of this conception of critical somatic consciousness forhow we understand and approach issues of justice, freedom, agency,resistance, and democracy are wide-ranging and profound. Any melioristicprogram for social change that does not address this somatic dimensionnow seems deficient.13 Some of the best moments in the books under revieware those that flesh out these implications, though much additional workneeds to be done here. One implication involves the novel project of“sensory reeducation” that Shusterman outlines, which has particularrelevance for addressing deep-seated racial and ethnic prejudice.14 Since“most ethnic and racial hostility is the product not of rational thought butof deep prejudices that are somatically marked in terms of vague uncom-fortable feelings aroused by alien bodies,” the work of “sharpening aperson’s awareness of her bodily feelings” can help identify the roots ofprejudices whose visceral basis resists logical or rational arguments forchange (TB 29, 106). Shusterman also recognizes that there are no guaran-tees here, noting that heightened somatic awareness also might “strengthenthe feelings of discomfort provoked by certain markers of difference,thereby reinforcing the prejudice by making it more conscious” (TB 106).

For all of the positive potential of somaesthetic diagnoses and rem-edies, there remain issues and concerns for future work to address. Thereviewed works are especially useful in highlighting such problematics.Bokiniec worries the conception of the soma in somaesthetics may not be

12 Even our physiological responses are “always somehow culturally conditioned, so thatour natural reactions in this area always involve the second nature of habit or custom” (TB163).

13 As Shusterman explains more fully, “Any successful challenge of oppression shouldthus involve somaesthetic diagnosis of the bodily habits and feelings that express the domi-nation as well as the subtle institutional rules and methods of inculcating them, so that they,along with the oppressive social conditions that generate them, can be overcome” (2008, 22).For a very good account of somaesthetic remedies for racism, see Granger 2010.

14 Shusterman suggests that somaesthetics can be construed as “a pragmatist philosophyof education—a discipline concerned with improving our ability to learn by improving theuse of the soma (in perception and performance) as the indispensable tool, general site, andsubject of learning” (TB 286–87).



adequately attuned to difference and risks harboring unchallenged,implicit privilege: “If we abandon thinking in terms of sexual difference,we go back to the abstract man, who is not sexless. We go back to the malenorm and female ‘other’” (SP 171). Skeptical of some of Shusterman’sclaims for the practicality of somaesthetics, Małecki questions whetherthis remedy for racial prejudice doesn’t presume the antecedent melioristicdisposition it needs to cultivate; for heightened body consciousness toassist in discerning and controlling visceral biases, he asks, “don’t I needto cease being a racist in the first place in order to want to repress orremove them?” (EP 171). For his part, Shusterman recognizes the practi-cal limitations of somaesthetics and insists that “its work of socioculturalcritique and self-cultivation needs to be combined with other more dis-tinctively political, economic, and social reforms” (SP 223). Social struc-tures and institutions must be targeted as well. Yet the tension thatBokiniec identifies between emancipatory projects organized aroundgroup interests in the public sphere and the focus of somaesthetics onindividual practices and internal self-awareness remains. Certainly bodiesare, first and foremost, singular. There also is truth in the insight, whichShusterman shares with Emerson and Foucault, that self-reform is anecessary prerequisite for effective social reform. That said, Shusterman’sproject might take up more fully Dewey’s interest in the role of aestheticsin forging robust communities of human association. When, where, andhow to balance appropriately efforts to improve social conditions as thebasis for improving an individual’s life, versus the empowerment of indi-viduals as a basis for creating a more just society, needs to be worked outas more voices, particularly those of excluded groups, enter the conversa-tion about the emancipatory potential of somaesthetics (SP 163).

There also is room to develop somaesthetics as a form of democraticprotest and resistance.15 In his treatment of transgressive body art, Jayprovides examples of artistic thematization of “the body in pain” ratherthan “the body in ecstatic pleasure,” which aim to “shock their audiencesout of the anesthetic complacency into which they had fallen” rather thanattempt to create “an ecstatic community,” where it is “not the sublimatedbody, the beautiful body, the body of grace and proportion, but the abjectbody, the body of base materiality, the body invaded by technology,ravaged by disease, and unable to maintain its normal boundaries” (SP203–4). It may be that Shusterman, like Dewey, is temperamentallydisinclined toward such intended radical transgression. Nevertheless,Shusterman does concede a place for fragmentation in contemporary artpractice, though he resists forgoing beauty and the pleasure it inculcatesfor the kind of transgression Jay finds plausible in the context of pluralismand the resistance to normativity it demands. Jay’s point about the value

15 For two existing attempts to develop somaesthetic models of embodied resistance todisciplinary normalization, see Heyes 2007 and Jolles 2012.



for social change of “aggressively forcing us to confront on a visceral levelissues that the most advanced thinkers in these areas have only been ableto raise in theoretical terms” should not be underestimated (SP 205). Attimes, the broad meliorative aim of “the improvement of life” or experi-ence seems to limit unnecessarily the potential of the aesthetic as demo-cratic protest and a form of resistance to forms of domination. Developingthe social or collective dimension of somaesthetic meliorism and theproject of cultural transformation is but one program for more work thatwe hope will be taken up.

5

Shusterman’s boundary crossing and disciplinary pluralism exemplify themulti- and interdisciplinary character of the reading, writing, and interestsnot only of Peirce, James, and Dewey but also of W. E. B. DuBois, AlainLocke, and, more recently, Richard Rorty and Cornel West. When com-bined with an ardent meliorism and commitment to social, political, andcultural problems of the day, the deep dissatisfaction with the limits ofmainstream professionalized academic culture in the face of pressing issuesthat animates this disciplinary claustrophobia remains one of the signalcontributions of the pragmatist tradition. As we have seen, this pluralisticand transformative bent is intentional; somaesthetics seeks “to reorient itsoriginal disciplinary domain of aesthetics and philosophy” (TB 1).16 ForShusterman, “aesthetics and philosophy will thrive better through collabo-rative engagement with other disciplines rather than through a puristpolicing of disciplinary borders” (2007a, 140). The lengths to which he hasgone, both personally and professionally, to ensure that somaestheticsindeed is “a field of practice as well as theory” (TB 188) are extraordinary—exemplary of the pragmatist spirit in the highest sense. Importantly, inShusterman’s view somaesthetics “is not a single theory or methodadvanced by a particular philosopher but an open field for collaborative,interdisciplinary, and transcultural inquiry” (2007a, 140).17

16 As Shusterman explains, “Although I initially conceived it as entirely nested withinphilosophy—most likely as a subdiscipline of aesthetics—I soon realized that it would bemore fruitfully pursued as an interdisciplinary field, enlisting a variety of disciplines . . . thatenrich our understanding of how we experience and use the body in appreciate perception,aesthetic performance, and creative self-fashioning, and for examining the methods ofimproving such experience and use” (TB 142). For his initial view, see Shusterman 1999.

17 Shusterman has gone as far as issuing explicit, open invitations to “researchers inter-ested in the somatic dimensions of aesthetics and the arts” to “relate their research to thedeveloping somaesthetic project” (2007a, 140). Already somaesthetics is an interdisciplinaryfield that has been taken up in history, sociology, cosmetics, anatomy, meditative and martialarts, physiology, nutrition, kinesiology, psychology, and neuroscience (SP 25). In addition,“Its applications already extend beyond the traditional arts, to fields as diverse as computerdesign and tattoos to health and fitness and the use of hallucinogenic drugs in education”(2007a, 140).



With this growing field of inquiry in mind, we shall close by identifyingthree sets of issues and questions of moment to the next stage ofsomaesthetics’s “career.” The first is metaphilosophical in nature. Theprecise character and limits of the relationship of somaesthetics toprofessionalized academic culture remain an ongoing challenge that bothsomaesthetics and pragmatism more generally must face. What degree ofengagement with other disciplines is necessary for it to be “collaborative,”and how, given the obstacles within existing structures and practices of theacademy, might this be achieved, practically speaking? And to what extentmust this involve, if at all, existing professionalized academic discourses?18

The case of somaesthetics prompts us to consider whether to inaugurate atheory, foster an open field for its development, and encourage its practicalapplication is all to which a theory should aspire. Maybe it is. Perhaps thisis the full realization of a pragmatist project; entrenchment within profes-sionalized academic culture may well spawn greater dangers than benefitsfor an ameliorative project like somaesthetics. Nevertheless, somaestheticsraises the fundamental metaphilosophical question of just how “meta” onecan get before what one is doing ceases to be philosophy. (Should thisquestion even matter to committed meliorists?) Not to be lost here is thefact, made clear by the international character of the works reviewed, thatthe disciplinary orientations, values, and structures within the UnitedStates have been less hospitable to this open field than those encountered inother parts of the world. We hope that critical metaphilosophical self-reflection on the international and interdisciplinary character of philoso-phy, especially among pragmatists, will take up this concern.19

Second, we encourage additional development of the emancipatory andsocial critical potential of somaesthetics, particularly by incorporating theexperience of the marginalized. For Shusterman, somaesthetics is “a wayof realizing the pragmatist aesthetic agenda,” one that is primarily a“transformative cultural agenda” (TB 19, 167). Since Pragmatist Aesthet-ics he has advocated (and practiced) the “activist role in rethinking andreshaping art” exemplified in Dewey’s own “theoretical activism” in defin-ing art as experience (1992, 45). Thinking Through the Body reaffirms theimportance of “theoretical interventions,” with philosophy “joining thestruggle” to not only analyze but also extend and improve art andsomaesthetic experience (TB 138). Such activism, Shusterman has longheld, does not mean abandoning philosophy, since—as we know fromDewey—beginning with Plato, philosophy’s theories and chosen problemshave been “politically motivated” responses to “the socio-cultural condi-tions and perplexities of the day” (1992, 45). Appropriately, Shusterman’s

18 One reviewer has suggested that the aims of somaesthetics would be best served byleaving both philosophy and meliorism behind to advance its experimental dimensions. SeeSarbanes 2013.

19 For some initial work in this area see Hansson 2008, Pihlström 2011, and Shusterman1997b.



insightful, revealing chapter on his own debts and disagreements withRorty establishes somaesthetics as “an expression of pragmatist culturalpolitics” that “aims more generally to improve humankind’s ongoingconversation about how to improve our lives and practices” (TB 167, 169).

Gauging the book’s success in these terms reveals the extent anddepth of the tradeoffs that accompany any melioristic pragmatism.Shusterman’s somaesthetics moves beyond theoretical debates and eventheoretical activism by tackling “somaesthetic pathologies of everydaylife,” like obesity, insomnia, and chronic back pain, even examining theeffects on our somatic style of bodily comportment of heart, bladder,hormonal, and blood problems. Bringing the bodily background intothe foreground in this way expands the frame of problem-centeredsomaesthetic meliorism to include the physical and social environments inwhich the soma is situated, such that we are led to confront social prob-lems of environmentalism, labor conditions, and racism from novel van-tages (TB 65–67). Yet for all its innovative contributions, ThinkingThrough the Body seems somehow less activist and culturally engagedthan Shusterman’s earlier work in pragmatist aesthetics. Or better,the transformative agenda that it serves, oriented toward everydaysomaesthetic pathologies, is differently situated. Previous theoreticalinterventions in the context of rap music’s “aesthetic of deeply embodiedparticipatory involvement” (1992, 214), in issues of embodiment and eth-nicity surrounding Jewish identity (1997a), and with an eye to AlainLocke’s “cultural agenda of aesthetic activism” (2002, 129), for instance,seem to better realize the emancipatory and social critical potential ofsomaesthetics than do explorations of architecture, photography, andsomatic style, interesting as these are.

Third, the somaesthetic project of fostering humankind’s “ongoingconversation about how to improve our lives and practices” needs moreinterlocutors, particularly in the U.S. Inevitably, the enterprising efforts atexpanding the field of somaesthetic inquiry come at the cost of conversa-tion partners and collaborative engagement with thinkers who shareShusterman’s interest in the performativity of the body—not only inacademic debates but also around its broader ameliorative aims—including the contemporary traditions of embodiment and discoursesaround them noted at the outset of this review. This is less a criticism thanunderscoring the program for more work that the reviewed works suggest.Clearly, there are ineluctable tradeoffs here. As somaesthetics’ melioristicconversation expands to include more voices, it also will benefit from anengagement with the experiences of marginalized groups. To paraphraseCornel West, the difference pragmatism makes is always the differenceparticular people make with it (1989, 181). Like pragmatism morebroadly, the emancipatory potential of somaesthetics will only increasewhen those who take it up are differently positioned by gender, race,sexuality, and/or class.



To be sure, the efforts of “an analytically trained philosopher strivingto blend analytic and French thinking to develop a new style of cosmo-politan pragmatism” are to be welcomed, lauded, and critically engagedand developed (TB 256). Alas, it remains needful to reaffirm the call issuedmore than two decades ago by Shusterman himself that we must no longeravoid, as philosophers and theorists of other stripes, the “darkly somaticneighborhoods of town” we have grown accustomed to overlook (1992,128). We also must work to create a space for the residents of theseneighborhoods to join the conversation.

Christopher J. VoparilUnion Institute & University440 E. McMillan St.Cincinnati, OH [email protected]

John GiordanoMerrimack College315 Turnpike StreetNorth Andover, MA [email protected]

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Pragmatism and the Somatic Turn: Shusterman's Somaesthetics and Beyond

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