Sporting bodies: a phenomenological concept of bodily expression

by Katalin Vermes
Introduction
In contemporary, postmodern, consumer culture, a ‘corporeal turn’ is taking place (Sheets-
Johnstone 2009); bodily practices have gained an extraordinary, yet precarious, significance.
Bodily expression offers new forms of identity in an age in which traditional and communal
forms of identities have collapsed (Featherstone 1982). Preoccupation with fitness and
wellness, piercings and tattoos, Palaeolithic diets and yoga, among other things, are symptoms
of this special cultural dynamic. In the ambivalent process of ‘corporeal turn’, sporting
activities, in the form of both recreational and competitive sports, play a central role.
If we would like to understand the cultural dynamic in which recreational and competitive
sports are involved today, we have to go through the following questions:
- What does “corporeal turn” of present culture mean in a wider cultural context? Here we
rely on the phenomenologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and on some cultural theory
works/authors.
- Why is bodily expression so essential in creating cultural and personal identities, and how
does it function as a core of other, “higher” forms of personal and cultural expression? Here
we have to refer to the phenomenological philosophy of the body (especially on Maurice
Merleau-Ponty).
- In the end we ask the question: What role does bodily expression play in sport? Is it a
supplementary aspect, or an essential part of sporting activities? Here we touch on some
problems in contemporary sport philosophy (Elcombe).
Although these questions are interrelated, they lead us to a wide field of investigation –
certainly too wide for a 15-minute lecture. So, here I can just delineate the problem.

Corporeal turn
It was Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (phenomenologist-biologist and dancer) who first used the
phrase “corporeal turn” as a title of her remarkable book published in 2009 (Sheets-Johnstone
2009). She declared, that in the culture of the last decades a corporeal turn is going on: “The
body has come of age: not only is it permissible (one might even say that it is popular
nowadays) to be a body, but much time, energy, and money are being invested in it, all the
way from T’ai Chi to massage parlors and then some” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: 17).
The corporeal turn is not confined to everyday culture; it is part of human sciences as welli:
Over the course of the 20th century in the humanities, two fundamental conceptual shifts
occurred: a linguistic turn based on the theory of Saussure, followed by a corporeal turn in the
humanities, the latter of which is present now in several disciplines. The conceptual basis I am
relying on is the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: 2).
The expression “corporeal turn” means a change of present culture; it refers not only to
attending to something heretofore largely ignored, but correcting something misrepresented
for centuries.2 In western tradition the body has been consistently understood “as a mere
material handmaiden of the all-powerful mind; a necessary, but ultimately discountable aspect
of cognition, intelligence, and even affectivity.”2
Dualistic tradition
The “corporeal turn” represents a complex answer to the traditional body-mind split which
has determined the western cultural tradition. Western thinking inherited two forms of body-
mind dualism: Platonic-Christian and Cartesian dualism, both of which remain present today
– the former as the cultural era of Christianity, and the latter as the cultural consequence of
modern scientific thinking.
Platonic-Christian dualism associated corporeity with the qualities of finitude, crime and
shame, opposing it and subordinating it to a ’higher’ reality of the infinite and divine soul.
Platonic tradition taught the despising of the body and the living world, casting them as mere
obstacles to spiritual development (Platón: Phaidon … ; Plumwood, 1993).
Cartesian dualism, which originated in the philosophy of Descartes (1596–1650), determines
the modern model of personality and scientific thinking up unto the present day. iiThrough its
Cartesian legacy, the body was consistently presented as a secondary part of humanity, as an
object, a machine, a mere instrument of a powerful mind (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: 2). This
attitude reveals itself in several ways today – such as in the excessive medicalisation of the
body, doping in sport, and in other alienated and mechanic usages of corporeity.iii
Authentic sport and reflective practices of body culture: body-mind integration
We are positive that authentic sports, as reflective practices of body culture, do have the
capacity to release us from the destructive cultural inheritances of dualism. They absolve the
traditional sense of guilt and shame surrounding corporeity for medieval Platonism, and they
humanize the alienated, depersonalized mechanistic use of body by modern Cartesianism. In
restoring a harmonic relation to our bodily self, realizing our personal existence in our
movement, recreating that never ending intersensory and intercorporeal attunement by which
we are embedded in nature and in society (Vermes, 2011; Burns, 2014), sportive activities are
able to liberate us from the dreariness of body-mind dualism. iv
Corporeal turn of consumer culture - compensation
However, the cultural role body-culture plays in the present era is much more complex. In
postmodern consumer society, preoccupations with the body have gained an extraordinary,
yet precarious, significance. The body itself has become a fashion. Body painting, make up,
fitness fads and body jewelry “all affirm self-identity on the very corporeal level” (Wachter,
122). In the last decades, emotional and bodily well-being and fitness have become the
Narcissistic center of consumer culture (Lasch, 1991).
For several culture critics (Lasch, 1991) all this excessive preoccupation with personal body-
feelings and bodily appearance can become an “escape” and a “compensation” for unsolved
cultural or social problems. Consumers are searching for intense sensual experience in order
to compensate for the growing sense of alienation and homogeneity of mass society.
Ambivalences of “corporeal turn”
We do not need to go into the details of the complex cultural phenomena to see how
ambivalent and how precarious the corporeal turn process is in the present age. On the one
hand, consumers’ growing interest in body culture works as a process of emancipation; it can
be understood as a cultural recovery from the Cartesian split of modernity. The body’s wishes
and the body’s instincts have become central issues of contemporary culture; the fitness and
well-being of the body have never gained so much attention during the history as in our
present age.
But, on the other hand, the rising popularity of bodily culture has a destructive meaning for
the larger scene of consumer culture. The never ending preoccupation with the body functions
as compensation for heavy cultural losses: for the deflation of communal and spiritual values
capable of superseding individual feelings (Yates, 2011). Expanding but unreflected body
culture can become a kind of cultural defense mechanism, a compensation which does not
diminish, but rather increases the cultural and social crisis.
Featherstone on the ambivalent situation of body culture
For Featherstonev the strength of consumer culture resides in its capacity to express corporeal
desires as had not been expressed before the appearance of consumerism, but at the same time
it puts bodily desires into such an instrumentalised, commercialised form that it makes their
realisation impossible (Featherstone, 1982).
So, in the era of consumer culture, not only have extreme bodily performances become
mechanised, but bodily desires are often now satisfied by alienated, instrumental means. It is
not just competitive sports which are endangered by an instrumental model of personality, but
recreational sports are also exposed to the alienating processes of consumerism.
In the first case we have to face the extremities of the mechanistic performance principle, and
in the second case we confront the extremities of an instrumentalised consumer principle. The
alienated performance principle and consumer principle go hand in hand: neither of them
supersedes the Cartesian split, and neither of them realize the existential importance of bodily
expression. Both of them use bodily expression as a tool and compensation, and fail to realize
the existential significance of corporeity.
Merleau-Pontyabout bodily expression
At this point we can see the importance of an integrated theory of corporeity and a coherent
theory of bodily expression. It was phenomenological philosophy, which, transcending
dualistic tradition, systematically built up a new model of thinking. The philosophies of
Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Michel Henry and others built up an integrated model of
personality during the 20th century. From the complex world of phenomenological thinking,
here I highlight only one thought: Maurice Merleau-Ponty ‘s conception of bodily expression.
In the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, the moving, perceiving, understanding body presents
itself as an existential modality. We do not have our body; we are our body. We live the
meaningful life of our body. It is an original field of creativity, a primordial source of all
higher expression (Merleau-Ponty, 1965: 150). Corporeal expression is similar to the
expressivity of the arts. As in the case of the arts, the content of corporeal expression is
inseparable from the expression itself; and what is more, the expression is inseparable from
the person who is being expressed.
“The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.”150 We are
not able to explain the essence of a Cezanne-picture to someone who has never seen it, to
express a Beethoven symphony to someone who has never heard it. ‘In a picture or a piece of
music the idea is incommunicable by means other than the display of colours and sounds.”
150
"A novel, poem, picture or musical work are individuals, that is, beings in which the
expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed, their meaning accessible only
through direct contact…vi”151
Similarly, the expression of a face or a moving body bears a certain style, an implicit
meaning, which we are not able to translate to other languages. Moreover, in the case of
bodily expression, not only is expression and expressed content the same, but the individual
who is expressed coincides with the expression itself. While the works of arts as a poem or
a sculpture express the artist symbolically and indirectly, bodily expression and movement
express the person immediately and directly. This fact gives a special strength to corporeal
expression: when more abstract cultural forms of expression lose their meaning, people return
to this primordial cultural experience. That is why human body and movement carry an
original expressive character (146).
Bodily expression and style in sport
This immediate expressive character of the body is of crucial importance in sport. “We can
all remember that shot, that play, that struggle” (Elcombe, 207). We are not able to explain it
with other words, we have to see it, or to perceive it, immediately. This special and unique
quality, as an integrated and immediate expression of the person who plays, makes sports
enjoyable both for players and spectators.
The integrative nature of bodily expression creates a special quality, a set of ‘qualia’, which
emerge in all sporting activities. Rules and special objectives not only limit, but also open
space for this primordial corporeal expression.vii“Aesthehtics” influence on sport goes much
deeper than as a contingent by-product serving to create intrinsic satisfaction through athletic
engagement” (Elcombe, 206).
(Following the pragmatic John Dewey, Tim L. Elcombe argues that a “wider conception of
aesthetic experience functions as the pivot around which the good life and, by extension,
“good sport” turn.) Recognizing the central role aesthetic experiences play in sport is
therefore key to elevating and realizing its role as a meaningful and valuable human practice”
(Elcombe, 206).
Elcombe’s wider conception of aesthetic experience in sport not only meets with
phenomenological theory, but gets strong philosophical support from it. From a
phenomenological perspective corporeal expression and “‘movement’ is not something added
to the human being (as is the case with mechanical movement), but is indivisible from what
the human being is… Partial human movements cannot be abstracted from the whole, but
need to be viewed within the whole direction of one’s existence, together with all its partial
aims” (Martínková, 2012: 44).
However, the excessive instrumentalisation of sports endangers the creative capacity of bodily
expression and movement, which are expected to recreate personal and cultural identities.
Therefore, for both competitive and recreational sports, we have to cope with the
objectification of the human person: body as a mere instrument of performance enhancement,
or body as a mere instrument of consumption break the primordial integrity of bodily
expression. The method of expression in both cases becomes alienated from the subject
expressed.
Integration through struggle
Sport has an agonic character (Caillois, 2001): it is a struggle with nature, a struggle with
other people, and a struggle with ourselves. Moreover, in authentic sport the last form of
struggle is the most important – it takes sport to be human, to be a form of self-reflected
human activity. But the struggle with ourselves does not mean a bare oppression of ourselves,
nor does it mean an excessive instrumentalisation and alienation of ourselves. The struggle
with ourselves involves a deeper expression, an aesthetical manifestation of our dynamic but
unique living self: the expression, the expressed and the one who is expressed are not
disrupted, but rather dynamically interconnected in one human movement.

Conclusion

In postmodern consumer culture a ‘corporeal turn’ is taking place. This turning can mean
several things: it could lead us to a nightmare of highly effective, but mechanistic, alienated
bodies; to the human machine – to the world of “Darth Vader”. Or it could lead us to a more
human world, to an integrated style of living where body and movement express primordially
who we are. The task of philosophical reflection is to fight for the latter direction.

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i
.
ii
It opposed “cogito”, or individual consciousness as the very essence of personality to the external
world: the body, nature and other people. The latters are mere objects of scientific thinking, so we
have to control them.
iii
.

Being nurtured by the energies of our bodily self both our personality and our culture become more
iv

integrated.
v

vi

vii
(Elcombe 2012, 18)