Critical Somatics

Critical Somatics: Theory and Method 2
Running Head: Critical Somatics: Theory and

Method
Critical Somatics:
Theory and Method
Nicole Anderson
Marylhurst University
Abstract
Critical Somatics: Theory and Method is a proposal for a new

discipline designed to thematize the body—the experiencing,
performing, culturally and socially productive body—as the
locus of both limitation and novelty, habit and creativity. This
paper offers the theoretical bases for such a discipline, as well
as methodological suggestions designed to integrate critical
awareness with experiential attunement for the student enrolled
in a Critical Somatics program. The main objective of a Critical
Somatics discipline is for each student to develop an increased
awareness of the relationship between his or her mode of
bodily comportment, social and cultural institutions, and the
limitations and possibilities for choice and change on both
personal and social levels.
Introduction
What is critical somatics?
For much of the twentieth century, and

even before, philosophers of all stripes
have struggled to come to terms with
problems that arise when we insist on a
rigid distinction between the human
subject, "in here," and a world of ready-
made, distinct objects "out there," –
between interiority and exteriority, self
and other, spirit and matter, mind and
body. Yet here we are, a decade into the
twenty-first century, and the problems
still persist. There have been many

unique, brilliant attempts to resolve this
dualism, both inside and outside of
academia, and they have emerged in
almost every field imaginable:
neuroscience, physics, ecology,
sociology, philosophy, religion, cultural
anthropology, feminism, and more.
These projects have brought to the fore
aspects of life that have been neglected,
benignly or otherwise, in traditional
western thought: gender, emotion,
sexuality, ecology, consciousness as an
historical process, human labor, and
again, more. Why is it, then, that the
problem of the relationship between
subject and object--
There is no simple answer to this

question. I propose that the primary
reason for the lack of a clear resolution
to this problem is simply that no one has
yet compiled the findings of these
various disciplines into one coherent
project. Critical Somatics is designed to
illuminate the psychological, social, and
ecological interface, and to describe the
complex and dynamic inter-relationships
of the constituent elements of this
interface. The most salient of these
elements are: our organismic, embodied,
lived experience; culturally varied
performativities and body
techniques/habits; social and economic
processes and one's location within
them; and metaphor, broadly understood
(all terms will be defined, at least

tentatively, in chapter one and
explicated throughout the text). Put in
disciplinary terms, Critical Somatics (CS)
could be seen as an incorporation of
phenomenology and hermeneutics;
poststructuralism; sociology; cognitive
psychology, and importantly, the
sciences of fascial anatomy, physiology
and kinesiology (and others related to or
derived from these sciences).
Critical Somatics, however, is more than

a methodological mix-and-match, more
than the summation of knowledge(s)
produced by these disciplines. First, it is
an integrative discipline whose goal is an
increased understanding of an interface
among multiple processes—an interface
that has yet to become the focus of any
one discipline, but whose constituents
are scattered across a host of disciplines
and projects.
Second, It is an experiential and activist

discipline, which requires that its
students are also practitioners. It adds a
crucial element which other academic
disciplines lack—practices which are
aimed at enhancing the student's
attunement to his-her own embodied,
organismic experience, and his-her
awareness of the relationship between
the quality of that experiencing and the
larger social and ecological environment.
The Critical Somatics student would have
much freedom to choose the practice

that speaks to him-her most
resoundingly, but a few possibilities, to
offer examples, would be modern dance,
capoiera, yoga, Trager, Alexander
technique, and Authentic Movement,
among others.
Third, the disciplines most notably

missing in other attempts to bridge the
interface between interior and exterior,
subjective and objective, are the
disciplines of physiology and, even more
importantly, kinesiology, or the study of
movement. The only explanation I have
to offer for this omission, especially when
the work in question presumably aims to
illuminate and/or deconstruct the
subject/object distinction, is the author-
in-question's own bias against
scientifically produced knowledge.
Because it integrates practice with a
critical analysis of the role of social and
technological organization in shaping
both consciousness and the quality of
one's experience, CS requires a
methodology that bridges mind and
body, theory and practice, and the
human and social sciences, not by
reduction or some kind of parallelism, but
through the dynamic integration of each
discipline’s unique assumptions and
methodologies into a discipline that
transcends their limitations precisely by
inhabiting the orientation of each one,
and drawing out / allowing the relevant
knowledge to emerge that would

broaden and deepen our understanding
of the many dimensions of somatic
processes.
Critical Somatics is explicitly materialist—

to be understood as a methodological
statement as opposed to an ontological
one. A materialist methodology
centralizes embodied, organismic, and
ecological / economic dynamics in both
their experiential and observable /
measurable (i.e. "objective") aspects.
The discipline would never survive
without traditional scientific
methodology, but it must expand beyond
this tradition to include the perceptual
and social processes whereby scientific
objects come into being in the first place:
thus the methodologies of both gestalt
psychology as well as phenomenology
are indispensable to this end, as is a
sociology of science, most famously
delineated in the work of Thomas Kuhn.
Hermeneutics could also be useful here,
especially its Heideggerian notions of
attunement and disclosure. This
materialist methodology is not to be
confused with reductionism or
determinism of any sort (atomistic,
economic, etc…). We are not seeking
first or final causes, but an understanding
of a dynamic process. Nor should it be
assumed that the discipline's
methodology would ignore questions of
"interpretation" or "textuality." As stated
earlier, metaphor is one of the most

salient and important aspects of the
discipline. But its salience lies in the role
that metaphor plays in shaping the
experience of the organism, and the
feedback-relationship that exists
between conceptualization and
experience.
Finally, such an integrative, dynamic, and

complex discipline would be severely
lacking if it did not employ the methods
of systems science. The inclusion of
economic and ecological processes alone
should make the need for systems theory
quite clear. Concepts such as feedback,
non-linearity, emergence, organization,
and others, as well as the visual tool of
flowcharts, are indispensable for keeping
the academic model, as well as both the
student and the teacher of Critical
Somatics, organized.
In his study of the creation of material

wealth, Karl Marx, paraphrasing William
Petty, stated, "Labor is the father of
material wealth; the earth is its mother"
(1867). This is not only an economic
statement but an ecological statement as
well. The interaction between human
behavior and "nature", mediated by
technology and organized through
relationally-structured social institutions,
is the basis of a particular type of
relationship to the non-human elements
of the planet, economically and psycho-
culturally speaking. Marx's statement is,

less directly, a psychological one: it is
from the interaction of human and non-
human nature that consciousness
emerges and takes shape; and, that
consciousness leaves behind
archeological records of itself in the form
of arts, crafts, and commodities, each of
which is the outcome of labor and earth
and is the substrate of wealth creation
and distribution. Thus, the interplay
between the experiencing human
organism, his-her location and role in a
socially organized economy, his-her
technologically mediated interaction with
"nature," and his-her metaphorically
constructed explanatory narrative of his-
her experience, creates the “world”
within which any given socially
organized, economically active people
live, worlds with efficacy and
consequence on organismic, social, and
ecological levels. The dynamic
integration of worlds into both
organismic-psychic strucure as well as
environmental design and impact
explains the need for incorporating both
the "critical" and the "somatic" elements
of experience into one discipline: Critical
Somatics.
That there is currently no academic

discipline that takes these dynamics, and
their psychological, organismic, social,
and environmental interface, as its
primary locus of study reveals the need
for the Critical Somatics discipline at this

time.
Part 1: Theory
Chapter 1
Alienation and the History

Of Consciousness.
A new way of thinking about human

consciousness arose in Europe in the
middle of the nineteenth century. Rather
than seeing it as something divine,
eternal, and unchanging, philosophers
and theorists instead began to treat
consciousness as a natural and
historical / evolutionary entity—as
something with an origin and a
development over time.
In the early part of the century,

philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm
Hegel proposed a dialectical,
evolutionary view of “spirit/mind” (Geist)
as an entity that progresses through
history via human action on both
individual and social levels, and that
culminates in absolute knowledge and
freedom. According to Hegel, it is

alienation, and the overcoming of
alienation, that is the driving force that
animates historical movement and
transforms spirit through the vehicle of
history. The notion of alienation, and the
human ability to transcend it, is a crucial
one for the development of a critical
somatics practice; therefore, its
explication is necessary to illuminate the
motivation driving the creation of the
critical somatics discipline.
Hegel’s concept of alienation is complex.

It begins with the material manifestation
of Spirit in and through history, which is
not recognized as a part of the Being of
Spirit but is instead assumed to be
separate from it. Likewise, the individual
minds perceiving this manifestation are
alienated when they fail to recognize
themselves and their own consciousness
as manifestations of this same Spirit.
Mind and materiality are both
manifestations of Spirit, and neither can
exist independently of the other. Thus for
Hegel, the notion that material objects
exist independently of the minds
perceiving them is a symptom of
alienation. The positing of an “objective”
world “out there” that is independent of
our perceptual processes is similar to
positing a “heaven” that is independent
of earth—it denies the interactivity of
perception and being in the creation of
worlds.
It is the task of the philosopher to

identify this alienation for what it is—
ultimately, Spirit’s separation from itself
—and to embody a new, greater
consciousness that embraces both
subject and object within a higher stage
of a progressively evolving
consciousness that recognizes the
material world as Consciousness
manifest.
Hegel also describes alienation as a kind

of ‘deadness,’ a being-dominated by
social forms that one forgetfully
participates in making, an acceptance of
authority because it is authority, rather
than because it agrees with one’s own
reason (Gouldner, 1980, p. 177). This
state of alienation, according to Hegel,
can only be overcome by asserting one’s
agency, reason, and will in the face of
oppression and irrationality, and by
transcending enlightenment solipsism
through the practice of dialectical
philosophy.
Hegel’s politically engaged students—the

Young Hegelians—felt that Hegel’s works
needed to be reworked and given an
anti-metaphysical, materialist
orientation; they located the source of
human alienation and unfreedom in
religion and the state, and believed that
if humanity could eliminate these notions
and institutions, it would overcome
alienation and live in full consciousness

and freedom. Their contemporary, Karl
Marx, critiqued this view and accused the
Young Hegelians of falling into the same
metaphysical trap as Hegel did—they
located the source of alienation in
structures of consciousness (Marx
included political ideologies and
structures in this realm), rather than in
the actual world of material relations and
processes of production. Marx did not
believe that religion caused alienation;
rather, he saw it as a symptom that
emerged from an alienation that existed
within material reality itself—an
alienation of humanity from both non-
human nature, and from its own creative,
productive, and active social nature
(which reached its greatest intensity
under the capitalist mode of economic
production). Like Hegel, Marx took
historical movement seriously; however,
he did not see history as a vessel for the
self-realization of “Spirit”. Rather than
emphasizing the political, religious, and
intellectual products of society, he
brought into focus that area of human
existence that was either ignored by
most philosophers of his time, or that
was seen only through a lens tinged with
unquestioned ideological premises—this
area of focus was the basic human
activities of production and reproduction.
Only once these basic relationships and
practices are studied and understood,
can we consider consciousness as it
emerges through and becomes a part of

these activites, not as an ontologically
primary entity that creates time and
animates otherwise inert matter:
Men are the producers of their

conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active
men, as they are conditioned by a
definite mode of development of their
productive forces and of the intercourse
corresponding to these, up to its furthest
forms. Consciousness can never be
anything else than conscious existence,
and the existence of men is their actual
life-process. If in all ideology men and
their circumstances appear upside-down
as in a camera obscura, this
phenomenon arises just as much from
their historical life-process as the
inversion of objects on the retina does
from their physical life-process…. (Marx,
1845, pp. 74-75).
To understand consciousness, Marx

believed it must be studied as an
emergent result of both social and
environmental (i.e. material) activity.
Consciousness evolved, but this
evolution did not result from “Spirit’s
drive to absolute knowledge;” rather, it
resulted from shifts in the development
of industry, which included technological
advances as well as changes in
population and social organization. The
more humans transformed the natural
environment through industrial
development, the more the yoke of

identity between human awareness and
the natural environment stretched. As for
Hegel’s state of absolute knowledge,
consciousness could only evolve from an
alienated state to a state of freedom if
the material conditions causing that
alienated state were abolished and
replaced by conditions that honored
nature—human and non-human—and its
movement and development through
time via an ecologically and socially
conscious mode of human industry.
There are some intellectual and political

dangers in understanding human
consciousness as evolutionary.
Materialist philosophies emerging from
Britain (empiricism and/or classical
liberalism) as well as from American
anthropological perspectives usually
combined some sort of evolutionary
theory of human civilizational
development with an ethnocentrism that
treated modern European culture in all of
its aspects—its art and architecture, its
political forms, its economy, as well as its
form of consciousness, “Reason”—as the
epitome of human cultural development.
This ‘progressivist’ view placed cultural
groups along a continuum from the
“primitive” to the “civilized” and
assumed a unilinear (one, universally
applicable, step-by-step) progression
from one stage to the next until all

cultures eventually reached a European-
like civilization with an enlightenment
consciousness and sensibility. It is worth
noting that, though slowly changing, this
understanding of development governs
much of today’s international investment
and lending policies aimed at so-called
“third world” or “peripheral” nations’
economic development.
Being mindful of the pitfall of racism in

discussing any evolutionary theory of
consciousness, we can retain the view of
consciousness as having an origin and
development, without requiring that it
develops through particular stages
toward particular ends. If we remove the
teleology that takes “Enlightenment
Man” and his notion of reason as the
pinnacle and standard of consciousness
development, and if we remove the
notion that culture and consciousness
progress in a linear and predictable
fashion, then viewing consciousness as a
historical phenomenon can provide
profound insights into heretofore
neglected elements of being, including
the role of embodiment and its
relationship to social organization,
environmental exploitation, and
psychological well-being.
Practice
There are several other nineteenth-century

figures whose theories could be called
materialist that might serve as a starting point
for critical somatics theory; however, Karl Marx
recognized a deep flaw in their works, a flaw
that unintentionally reinforced the idealism
against which those materialists reacted. The
materialist theories before Marx were in some
cases ahistorical, in others reductionist, and all
took the subject-object distinction for granted,
thereby leaving the problem of human
alienation in tact. In Marx’s words:
The chief defect of all previous

materialism… is that things, reality, the
sensible world, are conceived only in the
form of objects of observation, but not
as human sense activity, not as
practical activity, not subjectively.
Hence, in opposition to materialism, the
active side was developed abstractly by
idealism, which of course does not know
real sense activity as such…. [This
materialism] therefore does not grasp
the significance of ‘revolutionary,’
‘practical-critical’ activity (Marx, 1845, p.
67).
Marx sought to create a much deeper and

more thorough materialism that did not assume
pre-given, purely external (and static) objects
“out there” waiting to be empirically observed
and measured by a blank, tabula rasa sort of
consciousness; nor did it assume an active but
solipsistic consciousness “in here” whose

categories and abstract mental operations
alone would lead to truth. Instead, Marx
dynamically interwove subject and object in
“practical, human sense activity” or “practice,”
a dynamic process that would later be
described by Marxist sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu as a “dialectic of the internalization of
externality and the externalization of internality
or, more simply, of incorporation and
objectification” (Marx, 1845, pp. 67-68,
Bourdieu, 1972, p. 72).
Incorporation, for Marx, means that humans

internalize their material conditions, in the form
of moral “values” as well as mental sublimates,
fantasies, and so on:
[W]e demonstrate the development of

ideological reflexes and echoes of this
life-process. The phantoms formed in
the human brain are also, necessarily,
sublimates of their material life-process,
which is empirically verifiable and bound
to material premises (Marx, 1845, p.
75).
Later Marxist theorists elaborate much further

upon the incorporation of material conditions
not only into the “psyche” but into the body
itself; these theorists are crucial to the
theoretical foundations of critical somatics, and
will be explored below.
Objectification can be understood in several

ways: as the creation of physical objects, such
as tools, handicrafts, and manufactured goods;

as the creation of mental objects such as
concepts and ideas, or any of the intellectual
products of society, including legal categories,
aesthetic standards, scientific analyses, and so
on (in which case it overlaps with the concept
of incorporation); or it can be interpreted
through the lens of Gestalt psychology, as the
perceptual ‘drawing out’ of a distinct figure or
object from a field of potential stimuli, the rest
of which settle and recede into a more-or-less
inert background (Sternberg, 2006, p. 125).
Objectification in any of these senses does not
occur independently of the “sense perception
and sensuous need” of active human beings;
rather, those elements of the world that
become objects do so as a result of the needs,
desires, and problems that arise out of specific
social and environmental conditions (Marx,
1844, p. 70). When the practical activities of
socially organized production and reproduction
are not themselves conceptually objectified
and included in the theoretical constructs of
science, then science remains incomplete and
divided between human science and natural
science (pp. 72-73). Human social and
ecological relations and the subject-object
dialectic remain concealed by, even as they
continue to generate, the concepts that
theorists take as their point of analytic
departure. Yet it cannot be repeated enough:
even this failure to incorporate the material
basis of human social life into our scientific /
conceptual structures—and thus into our
understanding of “reality”—is the outcome of
historically specific material conditions.
Importantly, it is not only conceptual

objectification that is psychologically relevant.
Marx recognized that the products made by
human beings, and the mode of their
production (i.e. “industry”), are “an open book
of the human faculties, and a human
psychology which can be directly
apprehended” (p. 72):
Everyday, material industry… shows us,

in the form of sensible, external, and
useful objects, in an alienated form, the
essential human faculties transformed
into objects. No psychology for which
this book, i.e. the most tangible and
accessible part of history, remains
closed, can become a genuine science
with a real content….
Industry is the real historical relation of

Nature…to man. Consequently, if
industry is conceived as an exoteric
form of the realization of the essential
human faculties, one is able to grasp
also the human essence of Nature of
the natural essence of man” (pp. 72-73).
Industry—its process and its products—is

human psychology objectified and
materialized. The way in which we utilize
earthly materials, the items that we produce
with them, and the manner in which we do so
—all of this shapes our “psychological”
orientation, which in turn shapes the way we
relate to nature. If our orientation toward nature
is alienated—if we are not relating to it with a

systemic understanding of our interconnection
and ‘identity’ with it—an identity that is not
necessarily mystical but that amounts to our
role in the sum of ecological relations—our
products and our mode of industry will reflect
this orientation and produce outcomes that
amplify and reinforce it.
In order to demystify intellectual concepts and

institutions and root them in observable social
practices, Marx begins with a deeply
embodied, human-ecological understanding of
the production process which serves as the
locus of “the dialectic of incorporation and
objectification”:
Labour is, in the first place, a process in

which both man and Nature participate,
and in which man of his own accord
starts, regulates, and controls the
material reactions between himself and
Nature. He opposes himself to Nature
as one of her own forces, setting in
motion arms and legs, head and hands,
the natural forces of his body, in order to
appropriate Nature’s productions in a
form adapted to his own wants. By thus
acting on the external world and
changing it, he at the same time
changes his own nature (1867, p. 88).
Marx calls these transformative “material

reactions” between humans and nature
“metabolism” to emphasize their nature as
simultaneously consumptive and productive
forces (Foster, 2000, p. 141). He locates the

generative source of this metabolism in the
kinesiology of human labor (“…arms and legs,
head and hands…”), which, together with the
human will, effects and mediates the mutual
human-nature transformation. Of course, it is
not individual kinesiology alone, nor is it merely
an aggregation of individual kinesiologies, that
transform Nature:
In the process of production, human

beings do not only enter into a relation
with Nature. They produce only by
working together in a specific manner
and by reciprocally exchanging their
activities. In order to produce, they enter
into definite connections and relations
with one another, and only within these
social connections and relations does
their connection with Nature, i.e.
production, take place. (Marx, 1849, p.
146).
Though his analysis describes quite clearly the

way in which human social relations affect and
transform Nature, he is less clear about how,
exactly, humans are transformed by their
transformation of externality. We can
extrapolate, however, from Marx’s emphasis
on language as the material and practical form
of consciousness and demonstrate the way in
which language contributes to the
internalization of social and material conditions:
From the start the “spirit” is afflicted with

the curse of being “burdened” with
matter, which here makes its

appearance in the form of agitated
layers of air, sounds, in short, of
language. Language is as old as
consciousness, language is practical
consciousness that exists also for other
men, and for that reason alone it really
exists for me personally as well….
Consciousness is, therefore, from the
very beginning a social product….
(1845, pp. 70-71).
It is language that generates the metaphorical

mind “space,” where “phantoms” of what
actually exists in the practical world dwell
conceptually (Marx, 1845, pp. 70-71; Jaynes,
1990, pp. 44-45; Lakoff & Johnson, 2004, p.
45). The cognitive (neuro)science of metaphor
will be elaborated upon later in this work, as it,
too, plays a very important role in the
theoretical foundation of critical somatics. For
now, it is enough to argue that, according to
this theory, any transformation of
consciousness can only occur when certain,
definite material conditions engender that
transformation; specifically, an alienated
consciousness cannot transform itself into an
unalienated consciousness without such a
material transformation.
That consciousness can begin to mistake itself

for something other than conscious existence,
something that is independent of or even
superior to materiality, is again the product of a
particular development in human social
organization; historically, Marx argues, it is
when “a division of material and mental labour

appears,” with the rise of a priestly class of
knowledge-keepers who are given much higher
social status than non-literate, non-priestly
members of society, that this valuation and
reification occurs.
Marx’s dialectical materialism provides a solid

starting point for understanding the mechanism
whereby social and material interactions affect
human ‘nature’ and generate consciousness,
as well as understanding the material nature of
consciousness. However, it does not provide
enough detail or nuance toward this end. To
get from (a specific mode of) socially organized
productive movement to (a specific mode of)
consciousness, we must look to Marx’s
theoretical successors and also incorporate
theory derived from several other disciplinary
methods, in order to explicate and deepen our
understanding of the subject-object dialectic
embodied in human practice.
In his essay “Les Techniques du Corps,”

anthropologist Marcel Mauss sought to
explicate the social and educational, or
“traditional,” nature of bodily usage and
comportment. Things like swimming, digging
with a spade, and even walking and sleeping
“form a social idiosyncrasy, they are not simply
a product of some purely individual, almost
completely psychical arrangements and
mechanisms” (Mauss, 1934, p. 48). Bodily
motor habits that we often think of as “natural”
are, in fact, techniques—that is, they are
demonstrably social, and they take on
particular characteristics specific to a given

social group, class, gender, and so on. These
forms of embodied comportment, to which
Mauss referred using the Latin term habitus,
are passed on educationally or traditionally (via
instruction or ritual), but not always explicitly;
they are often learned implicitly, through
imitation. As Mauss puts it, “In all these
elements of the art of using the human body,
the facts of education are dominant. The notion
of education could be superimposed on that of
imitation” (p. 49). This imitation occurs in an
uneven power relationship as well, and in this
way, one’s habitus also embodies his or her
location in a larger social order:
What takes place is a prestigious

imitation. The child, the adult, imitates
actions which have succeeded and
which he has seen successfully
performed by people in whom he has
confidence and who have authority over
him. The action is imposed from without,
from above, even if it is an exclusively
biological action, involving his body. The
individual borrows the series of
movements which constitute it from the
action executed in front of him or with
him by others. It is precisely this notion
of the prestige of the person who
performs the ordered, authorized, tested
action vis-à-vis the imitating individual
that contains all the social element (pp.
50-51).
After recognizing the sociological or

“educational” aspect of body usage, Mauss

raises the question of whether there is any
room in the analysis of body techniques for
“the psychological mediator,” or whether there
is no gap at all between biological and
sociological phenomena (pp. 53, 66). His
conclusion is that psychology—the interior
mental and motivational life of the individual—
somehow “links” the biological and the
sociological, but does not play a causal role in
human behavior “except in moments of
creation or reform” (66). But how much “depth,
breadth, and height,” as Nietzsche put it, does
this psychological “link” maintain, and to what
extent does it create “distance” between the
biological and the sociological and allow for
individual choice and freedom?
Mauss’s reply is interesting: it is the

educational transmission of yet another
technique that creates the ability to choose the
way in which we will use our bodies—this is the
technique of “composure”:
[Composure] is above all a retarding

mechanism, a mechanism inhibiting
disorderly movements; this retardation
subsequently allows a coordinated
response of coordinated movements
setting off in the direction of a chosen
goal…. It is not thanks to
unconsciousness that there is an
intervention of society. It is thanks to
society that there is an intervention of
consciousness” (67).
Mauss follows his discussion about the

technique of composure with his thoughts on
Taoist and Yogic body techniques, especially
breathing techniques, and argues that “at the
bottom of all our mystical states there are
techniques of the body…. I think that there are
necessarily biological means of entering into
‘communication with God’”(67).
So far, Mauss has identified the

social/educational transmission of body
techniques, of power relations along with body
techniques, and of the psychological ability to
control bodily movements and exert some
degree of choice and direction over them. All of
these elements of body technique together
create a cultural repertoire of embodied motor
performances that manifest the social order
through the individual’s habitus. In addition,
Mauss recognizes that these “assemblages” of
motor performances are amenable to
thematization and sociological classification.
He also recognizes that, like the objects of
consciousness, the techniques of the body are
symbolic, and together comprise a system of
signs that convey information about social
status, gender, ethnic identity, etc., and about
the social order as a whole—i.e. they can be
understood as meaningful.
Mauss does not elaborate further upon his

insights regarding the classificatory and
symbolic nature of the techniques of the body,
specifically upon how they come to function as
social signifiers with an experiential content. It
should be noted that Mauss was a structuralist
anthropologist, and so believed that the source

of meaning was the differential relationship
among the signs that comprise any particular
system—sign A means “A” because it is
different from sign B, and because it is related
to sign B in a particular way or set of ways, as
constrained by the system of which both sign A
and sign B are a part. However, this
structuralist interpretation of the system of
body techniques is limited: while the
objectification of body techniques illuminates
their systematic and social nature, it does not
explain how the meaning itself becomes
internalized, or how this internalization, in turn,
goes on to reproduce the external social
structure. For such elaboration we must turn to
the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
Bourdieu examines the physiological
incorporation of cultural meanings as they arise
out of material relations, and how these
incorporated meaning systems are not merely
the products of the social order, but are
generative of that order and of its symbolic
meaning systems.
In his book Outline of a theory of practice,

Bourdieu seeks to develop a method of
analysis that incorporates but goes beyond
objective sociological classifications, such as
those of body techniques created by Mauss.
Such “methodological objectivism” is “a
necessary moment in all research” because it
allows the sociologist to map social relations
from a perspective not available in the ordinary
experience of an agent located within the
social structure (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72).
However, it is precisely this “break with primary

experience” that often leads the sociologist to
reify or “hypostatize” his or her social models,
to accept the conditions they represent as
given, without asking how they are generated
and reproduced. For this reason, sociology
must “pass from the opus operatum to the
modus operandi, from statistical regularity or
algebraic structure to the principle of the
production of this observed order, and to
construct the theory of practice, or, more
precisely, the theory of the mode of generation
of practices, which is the precondition for
establishing an experimental science of the
dialectic of the internalization of externality and
the externalization of internality, or, more
simply, of incorporation and objectification” (p.
72). Bourdieu’s theory of practice is perhaps
the most important sociological framework for
the critical somatics discipline, which seeks to
be precisely the sort of “experimental science”
mentioned above.
Bourdieu elaborates on the inner-outer

dialectic using Mauss’s term habitus and a
related partner term, hexis. He iterates many
versions of his definition of habitus, but an
amalgam might be something like this: the
habitus is a system of internalized, socially
constituted and structured dispositions that
themselves generate, structure, and classify
embodied social practices and products. Hexis
is also a internalization of social conditions, but
the concept refers primarily to bodily
comportment, posture, and carriage, or “body
schema” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 190). Bourdieu
defines hexis as “a pattern of postures that is

both individual and systematic, because linked
to a whole system of techniques involving the
body and tools, and charged with a host of
social meanings and values” (1977, p. 87).
Hexis is “political mythology realized, em-
bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a
durable manner of standing, speaking, and
thereby of feeling and thinking” (p. 92). One of
the main questions in Bourdieu’s work is, how
do bodily hexis, and the other social practices
generated by the habitus, come to take on
symbolic meaning? How do these dispositions
signify one’s social location in a given society
and thus reinforce the social order as a whole?
In Distinction: A social critique of the

judgement of taste, Bourdieu begins with the
fact of “objective social conditions,” conditions
which are determined, on a social level, by the
distribution of capital, and individually by ones
share of that distribution, i.e. ones relationship
to capital, i.e. ones class location in a capitalist
economy (1984, pp. 169-170). It is important to
note that, for Bourdieu, economic capital is
only one type of capital. He also posits cultural
capital, and social capital (1984, p. 114).
Cultural capital includes things like, one’s level
of education, exposure to and mastery of
discourse regarding artistic or popular works
and practices, and so on. For example, in
Bourdieu’s study, he found that teachers and
skilled workers have the same income, but
teachers prefer different social activities and
have different tastes than machinists, say, due
to differential exposure and access to cultural
capital (1984, p. xxx) – check for accuracy.

Different conditions create different overall
environments within which social agents are
immersed. Of course, no two individuals share
precisely the same conditions, so there is
some individual variation amongst agents in a
shared environment; however, there are
enough shared characteristics to create what
Bourdieu calls a “stylistic affinity” in the habitus
and hexis of those in the same social class.
These common styles—what Bourdieu termed
lifestyles—are identifiable and classifiable not
only to sociologists but to agents within the
social system in question, although there is a
difference between the former and the latter in
both significance and method. For the
sociologist studying lifestyles, their connection
to particular social classes is a statistical and
objective fact; for the social agent, the
relationship between lifestyle or taste and class
is obscured, and taste is seen as a more or
less individual phenomenon. They become the
basis for judging the quality of an individual’s
social, aesthetic, and behavioral choices, and
for creating systems of social value based on
such evaluations. But social classes and their
styles—or lifestyles-- are not independent of
the whole society of which they are a part—the
social conditions of each class are
systematically related to those of other classes
precisely to the extent that they differ from
those conditions. Hence, class forms a
differential system in a society objectively
structured by the unequal distribution of capital.
In this sense, the habitus shaped by the
specific class conditions of one group
embodies the whole social structure; the

context for any meaning that arises from these
differential social conditions is the social
structure itself.
It is the habitus which transmutes the objective

conditions of class into symbolic signifiers of
what Bourdieu calls life-style. In order to do
this, though, the practices generated by the
habitus must be able to be “read” by social
actors as signs—that is, they must be
classifiable. For Bourdieu, taste functions as
this “classifying operation,” as the means of
differentiating, judging, and appropriating social
practices and products. Additionally, taste, like
the practices it judges, also arises from the
habitus, which in turn arises via the
internalization of class conditions.
People in different classes have different

propensities, different life-styles, different
tastes, while people in the same class tend to
share similar tastes and lifestyles—they have
what Bourdieu calls “stylistic affinity” (p. 173).
We usually think of taste as an expression of
one’s individuality, of one’s unique aesthetic
sensibilities, but Bourdieu challenges this
assumption by demonstrating that, actually,
taste is an expression of our particular but
objective location in a capitalist system where
capital, and the power associated with capital,
is not distributed equally.
Bourdieu emphasizes Mauss’ recognition of

the classifiability of body techniques, and
reminds sociologists that “the ‘objects’ they
classify [namely, social agents and their

location in social ‘space’] produce not only
objectively classifiable practices but also
classifying operations that are no less objective
and are themselves classifiable” (pp. 169-170).
In other words, it isn’t just the sociologist who
classifies social practices. Agents classify
social practices too, only they do so from a
particular location within the social space.
These acts of classifying are practices which,
like other social practices, are classifiable (pp.
169-70). Both social practices, and the
classification of social practices, are generated
by the habitus, which Thus this habitus is not
like a psychological “archetype” that precedes
social conditioning, but is the product of social
conditioning at the same time that it generates
practices which adapt to those conditions.
Further, because the habitus is shared by
those who share the same social conditions, it
serves as a signifier of those social conditions,
separating in-groups and out-groups based on
class. These class signifiers are embodied in
the way an individual carries him or her self, as
well as in his or her taste. Together, habitus
and taste determine an individual’s lifestyle,
which is essentially their class position
symbolized.
From a rather different angle than Marxist

materialism, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
also approached consciousness as a product
that evolved over time, centered in language,
and was largely the outcome of the needs of
the social group, which he condescendingly
called “the herd.” However, the aspect of
Nietzsche’s thought that is most relevant for an
introduction to Critical Somatics is his unique
view of what we call the human soul. I find it
important to approach much of Nietzsche’s
work as a thought experiment rather than as an
accurate historical record. As in the work of
other dramatists, the truths hidden in
Nietzsche’s work are not factual.
In the second essay of A Genealogy of Morals,

Nietzsche offers a meditation on guilt and bad
conscience. He asserts that guilt as a moral
trait derives from the material experience of
being in debt. The evidence he offers is
philological: “guilt” from the German schuld
(‘should’), “debt” from German “schulden”

(xxxx, p. xx). According to Nietzsche, the act of
exchange is the first human experience of
promise-making—of owing something to
someone, whether payment or trade. It is this
situation of owing, he argues, that generated
the human capacity for memory. The debt is
carried as a promise—a pledge borne by his
person and sustained by trust.
Likewise, “bad conscience” emerges from a

material situation—namely, the violent
transition from nomadism to sedentarism,
when “wild, free, and roving man” became
“locked within the walls of society and peace.”
Nietzsche argues that society under the rule of
the state was repressive of all the “ancient
instincts of freedom.” These instincts, no longer
able to “discharge themselves outward turn
inward,” a process Nietzsche calls “the
internalization of man:”
It is only by this process that man

developed that which is later called his
‘soul.’ The entire inner world of man,
being originally thin, as if it were
stretched between two hides, expanded
and extended, received depth, breadth,
and height, in the same measure as
man’s outward discharges were
checked (p. xx).
Nietzsche associates these drives with love for

the earth—for this world, for ‘reality’ (as
opposed to some projected imaginary realm
such as the Christian notion of heaven). For
Nietzsche, a genuine affirmation of life must

breach through the disgust toward nature
created by Christianity’s projection of evil onto
that which is earthly, sensual, and vital-- its
shaming and devaluing the instincts of
freedom, wildness, and joy that have no
legitimate, socially sanctioned outlets. His goal
is to resurrect reality and re-train “bad
conscience” to attach itself to those qualities
which are life-denying, and re-valuing those
traits that have been repressed through
centuries of living in statist unfreedom (xxxx, p.
xx).
The Cognitive Science of

Metaphor
Jaynes is not a contemporary of Marx or

Nietzsche—he is a late twentieth-century
philosopher and theorist of consciousness.
Like Nietzsche, Jaynes also believes there was
a process of “internalization” undergone by
humans; however, unlike Nietzsche, he
believes that internalization is constructed
primarily through metaphor:
Where does consciousness take place?
Everyone, or almost everyone,

immediately replies, in my head. This is
because when we introspect, we seem
to look inward on an inner space
somewhere behind our eyes. But what
on earth do we mean by ‘look’? We
even close our eyes sometimes to

introspect even more clearly. Upon
what? Its spatial character seems
unquestionable….
And this is the very heartbeat of the

matter. For we know perfectly well that
there is no such space in anyone’s head
at all! There is nothing inside my head
or yours except physiological tissue of
one sort or another. And the fact that it
is predominantly neurological tissue is
irrelevant.
Now, this thought takes a little thinking

to get used to. It means that we are
continually inventing these spaces in our
own and other people’s heads, knowing
perfectly well that they don’t exist
anatomically; and the location of these
‘spaces’ is indeed quite arbitrary….
(Jaynes, 1990, p. 44-45).
Chapter 2
Physiology
In the previous chapter, we examined various

theoretical sources that discussed the role of
social conditions in engendering particular
ways of inhabiting the body, and how these
embodied dispositions generated awareness of
symbolic systems, or consciousness, whose
meaning both derived from but masked social
conditions. We have examined the way in
which our comportment, our taste, and our life-
style reveals, symbolically, while concealing,
actually, our material position vis-à-vis capital.
We have seen the role that metaphor plays in
the transubstantiation of matter into meaning.
In this chapter, we are going to examine the
physiological mechanisms that, when
understood, will explain more thoroughly how
something like an “embodied disposition,”
orientation, or “attunement” shapes our
perceptual structures, our reception of linguistic
and symbolic information, and our ability and
drive to communicatively and symbolically

express our experience.
Throughout chapter one, we used terms like

“habitus,” “disposition,” “orientation,” and
“attunement” to describe a certain way of
inhabiting a socially constructed, symbolically
meaningful space. But we have never been
able to discuss the materiality of these
concepts, or of the way in which embodiment
produces meaning. For this endeavor, it is
necessary to turn to the sciences of physiology
and kinesiology, the study of movement, to
understand the complex transfer of what
Bourdieu called “body hexis” into symbolic
meaning systems.
The Learning Flesh
The body is a holistic system. Understanding it

in a mechanistic way, without exploring the
relationships and patterns that create one’s
overall organism, will prevent us from seeing
the interface between the material conditions
within which we are immersed, and the
meanings that we give to those material
conditions.
According to Deane Juhan, bodywork

practitioner and author of Job’s Body: a
Handbook for Bodywork:
It is the touching of the body’s surfaces

against external objects and the rubbing
of its own parts together which produce
the vast majority of sensory information

used by the mind to assemble an
accurate image of the body and to
regulate its activities….
Not only is it true that the nervous

system stimulates the body to move in
specific ways as a result of specific
sensations; it is also the case that all
movements flood the nervous system
with sensations regarding the structures
and functions of the body. Movement is
the unifying bond between the mind and
the body, and sensations are the
substance of that bond.
Friction on the skin, pressure on the

deeper tissues, distortion of the tissues
surrounding the joints—these are the
media through which the organism
perceives itself and through which it
organizes its internal and external
muscular responses….
[S]ensations to a large degree organize

the mind. They do not simply give the
mind material to organize; they are
themselves a major organizing principle
(Juhan, 1998, p. xxv-xxvi).
To understand how sensations take on this

organizational role and mediate the mind-body
interface, we must describe briefly the anatomy
of sensation, beginning with the sense of
touch, which includes “hot, cold, itches, tickles,
all degrees of pressure, vibration, and an
enormous variety of pains and pleasures” (p.

28). The sensory receptors of the skin vary,
and register different types of sensory
information in different layers of the dermis.
(Ruffini organs etc). The nerve cells that trail
from these sensory receptors bundle into a
nerve trunk in an orderly manner—the spatial
relationship among the locations of tactile
stimulation is preserved as the nerve fibers
bundle into the nerve trunk, and as they
terminate in the sensory cortex, where these
relations are “mapped” in a way similar to fiber
optic cables (pp. 37-42).
Further, organization seems to begin at the

dermal sensory receptors, with each receptor
“tagging” the nerves with neurotransmitters that
dictate how the information is received by the
cortex. The research Juhan cites involves a
frog who had a patch of skin from his belly and
his back switched. The stimulation of the ‘belly’
patch, on the frog’s back, still caused the frog
to scratch his belly. This indicates that
something in the dermis dictates how the
information traveling through the nerves will be
received by the sensory cortex, and will in turn
affect the motor response. This “suggests that
the use of touch and sensation to modify our
experience of peripheral conditions exerts an
active influence upon the organization of
reflexes and body image deep within the
central nervous system” (p. 40). organization of
the nervous system does not appear to be
dictated by the brain—it is not top-down; rather
it is the periphery that organizes the center (p.
40).
For this reason, Juhan calls the sense of touch

“The mother of all senses” (p. 29). This sense,
unlike the others, is not confined to the head
but spread across the surface of the entire
body, and in fact, the other senses can be
considered highly specialized versions of the
mother sense (p. 28). Additionally, in the
budding embryo, which is made of three
distinct layers which have a specialized role in
its development, the skin, brain, and nervous
system all emerge from the same embryonic
layer.
Fascia
Fascia is the most pervasive tissue in the body

—it surrounds every bone, muscle fascicle and
fiber, and organ in the body.
Proprioception
Fascia
Muscle Tension / habit
Semiconductive properties of Fascia
Hyaluronic Acid
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Critical Somatics: Theory and Method 2

Running Head: Critical Somatics: Theory and

Theory and Method

Critical Somatics: Theory and Method is a proposal for a new

What is critical somatics?

For much of the twentieth century, and

still persist. There have been many

There is no simple answer to this

(all terms will be defined, at least

Critical Somatics, however, is more than

Second, It is an experiential and activist

much freedom to choose the practice

Third, the disciplines most notably

knowledge to emerge that would

Critical Somatics is explicitly materialist—

earlier, metaphor is one of the most

Finally, such an integrative, dynamic, and

In his study of the creation of material

culturally speaking. Marx's statement is,

That there is currently no academic

for the Critical Somatics discipline at this

Alienation and the History

A new way of thinking about human

In the early part of the century,

freedom. According to Hegel, it is

Hegel’s concept of alienation is complex.

It is the task of the philosopher to

Hegel also describes alienation as a kind

Hegel’s politically engaged students—the

alienation and live in full consciousness

emerges through and becomes a part of

Men are the producers of their

To understand consciousness, Marx

development, the more the yoke of

There are some intellectual and political

from one stage to the next until all

Being mindful of the pitfall of racism in

There are several other nineteenth-century

The chief defect of all previous

Marx sought to create a much deeper and

solipsistic consciousness “in here” whose

Incorporation, for Marx, means that humans

[W]e demonstrate the development of

Later Marxist theorists elaborate much further

Objectification can be understood in several

as tools, handicrafts, and manufactured goods;

Importantly, it is not only conceptual

Everyday, material industry… shows us,

Industry is the real historical relation of

Industry—its process and its products—is

is alienated—if we are not relating to it with a

In order to demystify intellectual concepts and

Labour is, in the first place, a process in

Marx calls these transformative “material

forces (Foster, 2000, p. 141). He locates the

In the process of production, human

Though his analysis describes quite clearly the

From the start the “spirit” is afflicted with

matter, which here makes its

It is language that generates the metaphorical

That consciousness can begin to mistake itself

when “a division of material and mental labour

Marx’s dialectical materialism provides a solid

In his essay “Les Techniques du Corps,”