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The Corporeal Turn

Article in Journal of Consciousness Studies · January 2011

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 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

The Corporeal Turn

Reflections on Awareness and
Gnostic Tactility and Kinaesthesia

Abstract: Animation is by definition the basis of animate life. Move-

ment is thus of prime significance and its dynamics warrant close
study in terms of the tactile-kinaesthetic body, its relation to cognition
and affectivity, and its anchorage in ontogeny and phylogeny. Riveted
attention on the brain deflects attention from animate movement, as
does the degeneration of movement into a motorology and the exten-
sive and broadly indiscriminate use of the lexical band-aid of embodi-
ment and its derivatives. Critical attention is paid to just such
present-day practices in neuroscience, and in cognitive science and
philosophy, practices that, by impeding investigations of the tactile-
kinaesthetic body, impede understandings of how kinaesthetic experi-
ence is at the core of those synergies of meaningful movement that
constitute animate life.
I
A veritable and trustworthy corporeal turn rests on fine-grained phen-
omenological analyses of the tactile-kinaesthetic body that do not
neglect either its ontogenetic development or its phylogenetic heri-
tage. Such analyses elucidate the qualitative dynamic structure of kin-
aesthetic experience, and in turn, both the origin of fundamental
spatio-temporal-energic concepts, concepts that are non-linguistic
corporeal concepts, and the dynamic congruency of kinaesthetic and
affective forms of feeling. Critical attention will be paid to present-
day studies of the brain in this context to show how joints at which
humans carve may not only be unnatural ones, but ones that deflect
Correspondence:
Email: msj@uoregon.edu

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18, No. 7–8, 2011, pp. 145–68

146 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

attention from the living realities of animation — the fundamental and

essential characteristic of all forms of animate life — such studies
commonly dissolving into a motorology and relying on the lexical
band-aid of ‘embodiment’.
I begin with three quotations from earlier periods in which scien-
tists attempted to understand the brain. The quotations are from nota-
ble, highly revered researchers whose empirical methods were and
still are unquestionable and whose major findings remain to this day
unchallenged (see, for example, Baars and Gage, 2010, on Darwin
and Sherrington; Kelso and Engstrøm, 2006, on Darwin, Sherrington,
and Sperry). The first is from Charles Darwin, who, on the basis of his
world-wide first-hand study and experiences of animate life, wrote,
‘Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by
attacking the citadel itself — the mind is function of body — we must
bring some stable foundation to argue from’ (Darwin, 1987/1836–44,
p. 564). The second is from Charles Sherrington, who, on the basis of
his own extensive neurological and biological studies, begins his
chapter ‘The Brain and Its Work’ in his book Man On His Nature with
an epigraph from the writings of physiologist and Nobel prize-win-
ning medical doctor E.D. Adrian. The epigraph (from The Mechanism
of Nervous Action) reads: ‘The chief function of the central nervous
system is to send messages to the muscles which will make the body
move effectively as a whole’ (Sherrington, 1953, p. 172). In that same
chapter Sherrington emphatically underscores the importance of an
evolutionary conception of ‘the brain and its work’. He states, ‘For
Fernel [Jean Fernel, physician to sixteenth century King of France,
Henri II] man’s mind was another order of mind created by heaven
and placed above the rest. For us man’s mind is a recent product of our
planet’s side, produced from mind already there long previously,
yielding man’s mind by gradual change of previous mind’ (ibid., p.
179). The third quotation is from Roger Sperry, who, on the basis of
his extensive psycho-physiological studies, wrote that the ‘primary
function’ of the brain ‘is essentially the transforming of sensory pat-
terns into patterns of motor coordination’, that ‘support’ for this claim
‘is found in phylogenetic considerations which indicate that the verte-
brate brain was designed primitively for the regulation of overt behav-
ior rather than for mental performance’, and that ‘in man as in the
salamander the primary business of the brain continues to be the gov-
erning, directly or indirectly, of overt behavior’ (Sperry, 1952, p. 297).
Later scientists affirm, as did Sperry and Sherrington, the impor-
tance of honing in on movement, or as they put it, on ‘motor activity’.
H.L. Teuber, for example, states, ‘We always start at the sensory end
 THE CORPOREAL TURN 147

and try to come out at the motor side. I very much agree with the late
von Holst when he suggests that we start at the other end and work our
way back toward sensation… It requires some different way of look-
ing’ (Teuber, 1966, pp. 440–1); E.V. Evarts states, ‘The implications
of these studies [of “brain mechanisms in motor control”] also extend
into the areas of psychology and psychiatry. Indeed, it seems possible
that understanding of the human nervous system, even its most com-
plex intellectual functions, may be enriched if the operation of the
brain is analyzed in terms of its motor output rather than in terms of its
sensory input’ (Evarts, 1974, p. 1398). In brief, if the brain is an organ
of and for animate movement, then animate movement and the tac-
tile-kinaesthetic or proprioceptive body that is its foundation should
be at the forefront rather than the hind end of scientific investigations,
and the inherent spatio-temporal-energic qualitative dynamics of
movement should be properly understood at the experiential level
where they originate, as when a fan worm, in response to a shadow
across its filtering crown, ‘ducks very quickly’ down its tubes, ‘only
emerging with great caution and very slowly, after a matter of several
minutes’ (Wells, 1968, p. 80), or as when an opossum, when overpow-
ered, ‘will go completely limp and apparently lifeless for several min-
utes, then suddenly bound to its feet and escape if it is no longer held’
(Scott, 1963, pp.70–1). ‘Responsivity’ is indeed a basic ‘sign of life’
(Curtis, 1975, pp. 27–8).1 When we give it proper attention, we
readily see that it is grounded through and through in the spatio-tem-
poral-energic qualitative dynamics of movement. Moreover if think-
ing is fundamentally a ‘motor act’ as Sperry suggests, and if tactility
like movement itself is a basic way of exploring the world and coming
to know it, as studies of non-human animals and human infants clearly
show, then the evolutionary basis of a gnostic tactility and kinaesthe-
sia should be transparent and its evolutionary importance should be
equally so. A paleoanthropological example will illustrate the point
and in the process will exemplify the import of non-linguistic corpo-
real concepts.
[1] Indeed, it might be noted with respect to U.S. representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was
shot in the brain in Tucson, Arizona in January 2011, that medical personnel were con-
cerned not with whether she had a continuing ability to read, write, or do arithmetic, or
even to speak. They were not concerned with linguistic or symbolic faculties but with
movement: with her squeezing another’s hand; with her opening her eyes; with her smil-
ing; with the tearing of her eyes and her taking the ring off another person’s finger. Con-
cerns were formulated in terms of questions such as: can she swallow?; can she stand on
her own?; can she move her right arm? In short, focal attention was on fundamental
aspects of animation, precisely those grounded in responsivity and indicating or eventuat-
ing in agency, a fundamental animate faculty rooted in movement through and through, as
the examples of the fan worm and the opossum clearly show.
148 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

A long-standing but evidentially unsubstantiated anthropological

truth is that stone tools replaced teeth. In The Roots of Thinking
(Sheets-Johnstone, 1990), I pointed out that an awareness of the hard-
ness of teeth is a simple but far-reaching example of a gnostic tactility
and kinaesthesia that is fundamental to understandings of how early
hominid stone tool-making originated. In particular, the fully detailed
paleoanthropological case study of early hominid stone tool-using/
tool-making in the first chapter of that book demonstrates the relation-
ship between teeth and early hominid stone tools on many levels,
including but going beyond a similarity in hardness to consider the
experienced power of teeth to transform objects — to grind objects to
pieces, to tear them, and to scrape them, for example — and the expe-
rienced differences in the spatial qualities of teeth — differences such
as that of grooved and ridged from smooth and even, for example, of
squat from vertical, of thick from thin, and so on, all such distinctions
being distinctions between molars and incisors. The experienced spa-
tial differences in teeth are obviously contingent on movement of the
tongue as well as on the tongue’s tactile sensitivity, yet tongues are
hardly considered a spatially gnostic organ, Meltzoff and Borton’s
experimental results showing infants capable of distinguishing
between knobby and round pacifiers notwithstanding (Meltzoff and
Borton, 1979), and the literally lingual linguistic competencies of
humans notwithstanding either. In fact, apart from taste, a certain
grossness not uncommonly attaches itself to the tongue. It seems like
such a clod of an organ. But only because we have lost sight in our
adult life of its delicate capacities and qualitative powers as an organ
of movement and touch, and have literally taken it to be an object of
sight — something that is looked at in the mirror for signs of a fever,
for example, or of a hangover. What a tongue discovers, however, in
passing across the dental arcade is a complex variety of edges. In par-
ticular, starting at molars and passing frontward toward anterior teeth,
one finds a discontinuous array of edges that go from unevenness to
evenness and thick to thin. Just so, an early hominid cobblestone core
tool, like a molar, is relatively thick and has several protruding edges
that can grind and shatter; an early hominid flake tool, like an incisor,
is relatively thin and its single edge can cut through objects. In short,
the spatial qualities and the transforming power of teeth and early
hominid stone tools are analogically coincident: analogical thinking
undergirded early hominid stone tool-making. As I concluded in the
chapter, ‘analogical thinking is both basic to hominid thinking and basi-
cally corporeal. Its roots lie in a gnostic tactility-kinesthesia. The think-
ing and the gnostic system together attest to the origin and elaboration
 THE CORPOREAL TURN 149

of concepts’, precisely concepts such as hardness, smoothness, thick-

ness, and so on (Sheets-Johnstone, 1990, p. 63).
The analogy between teeth and early hominid stone tools shows
that, in the most elemental sense, thinking is modelled on the body.
The body is a semantic template. It is recognized as such, however,
only in so far as it ceases to be conceived exclusively as a mere mor-
phological specimen, an object of such and such parts, including the
brain. Its reality as a semantic template is recognized when the reali-
ties of self-movement and kinaesthesia are recognized. A moving
body discovers not only aspects of its surrounding world, as a human
infant does in feeling the hardness of the rungs on its crib when it
grasps them, for example, but aspects of itself that feed into under-
standings and discoveries with respect to a surrounding world, pre-
cisely as a human infant does in closing and opening its hand,
watching it make and unmake a fist.
A psychology textbook — a third edition no less — aptly exempli-
fies the all too common slightings, and even distortions, of the experi-
enced and experiencing tactile-kinaesthetic body in understandings of
animate life when it tells its readers, ‘The somatic senses include the
skin senses of touch, temperature, and pain as well as kinesthesia, the
sense that tells the brain where the parts of the body are’ (Bernstein et
al., 1994, p. 161; see also Weiten, 2007, seventh edition, p. 160: ‘The
kinesthetic system monitors the positions of the various parts of the
body. To some extent, you know where your limbs are because you
commanded the muscles that put them there’). In short, animate forms
of life are animate. They are not static positional morphologies but
morphologies-in-motion, which, in virtue of their in-the-flesh experi-
ence of movement, create — and are able to create — synergies of
meaningful movement, synergies in which, in a fundamental sense, a
semantic congruency obtains between movement and meaning, as
when an infant, quite without instruction from others or having read
an owner’s manual, spontaneously closes its mouth and turns its head
to avoid being fed a food it does not want. We can in fact trace recog-
nition of the foundational importance of movement to Aristotle who
not only affirmed, ‘Nature is a principle of motion and change’, but
went on immediately to affirm, ‘We must therefore see that we under-
stand what motion is; for if it were unknown, nature too would be
unknown’ (Aristotle, Physics 200b12–14). Surely, had Aristotle devel-
oped his understanding of animate movement pointedly in terms of
proprioception and kinaesthesia rather than more generally in terms of
a sensu communis (the latter conception seemingly related to, but size-
ably shrunk, in J.J. Gibson’s kinaesthetically-impoverished notion of
150 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

‘visual kinaesthesis’ — Gibson, 1979), he would have recognized

their seminal importance to understandings of Nature and animate
life.
How and why do embodiment and a motorology, together with their
respective linguistic derivatives, fall short of kinaesthesia? They fail
utterly to capture — much less to recognize to begin with — the com-
plex spatio-temporal-energic qualitative dynamics of movement in
their talk of ‘motor embodiment’ (Varela and Depraz, 2005; Thomp-
son, 2007), ‘sensorimotor skills’ (Noë, 2004), ‘embodied simulation’
(Gallese, Keysers and Rizzolatti, 2004; Gallese, 2005; Gallese, Eagle
and Migone, 2007), ‘sensorimotor knowledge’ (Noë, 2004), ‘embod-
ied subject’ (Zahavi, 1999), ‘embodied mind’ (Thompson, 2007),
‘embodied experience’ (Gallagher, 2000), ‘embodied language’
(Gibbs, 2006), and even ‘embodied movement’ (Gibbs, 2006; Varela
and Depraz, 2005). Short of recognizing the sensory modality of kin-
aesthesia and the qualitative dynamics of movement that modality
engenders, researchers can hardly achieve veridical understandings of
animate movement and, ultimately, bona fide understandings of either
the source of fundamental human concepts, concepts that are, as
noted, non-linguistic corporeal concepts, or the dynamic relationship
between movement and affect — not to mention understandings of the
underpinnings and significance of kinaesthetic memory (Sheets-John-
stone, 2003; forthcoming 2012a). Moreover veridical understandings
of animate movement are not achieved via common wisdom that
defines movement as a change of position; they are not achieved via
common wisdom that declares that movement simply takes place in
time and in space; and they are not achieved via common wisdom that
describes the experience of animate movement in terms of sensations
rather than dynamics. Common wisdom in all three instances is noth-
ing other than received ignorance. It should be noted that the charge of
received ignorance is meant pejoratively not toward individuals but
toward habits of thought that pass for received wisdom. In particular,
it is meant to call attention to the habit of not questioning common
understandings of movement and common ways of thinking about
movement, understandings and ways that fail to recognize kinaesthe-
sia and proprioception much less capture the dynamics of those facul-
ties, and indeed perseverate misconceptions about the very foundation
of animate life.
We can indeed admit that movement is difficult to analyse. Who
wants to study movement? It won’t stay still! But it should not on that
account be ignored and attention diverted to solid, packaged things on
the order of embodiment, action, purpose, and the like. On the
 THE CORPOREAL TURN 151

contrary, in spite of the fact that it won’t stay still, it is precisely the
stable foundation on which to show that ‘mind is function of body’.
Proprioception and kinaesthesia are elementary facts of animate life
as shown by fine-grained studies of insects, arthropods, fish, birds,
mammals, and more (Laverack, 1976; Lissman, 1950; see Sheets-
Johnstone, 1998; 1999/2011, for a full account and discussion). It is
unfortunate that no one in present-day science pays attention to earlier
studies such as those of Laverack and Lissman, or even to later ones
such as that of Eckart Scheerer (1987) that focus on proprioception
and kinaesthesia, all the more so given riveted contemporary attention
on consciousness and the brain. Indeed, the astoundingly varied and
intricately detailed biological faculty that allows awareness of one’s
own body and body movement and that, in turn, in the most basic
sense allows knowing the world is a dimension of consciousness.
Inversely, consciousness is a dimension of living forms that move
themselves, that are animate, and that, in their animation, are in multi-
ple and complex ways engaged in the world. With respect to the brain,
that preened-over present-day human organ of choice, it is notable that
Darwin observed:
It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an
extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully
diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are generally
known, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a
small pin’s head. Under this latter point of view, the brain of an ant is
one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more
marvellous than the brain of man. (Darwin, 1981/1871, Vol. 1, p. 145)
The all-too-human practice of axiologically elevating what is at the
top precludes recognition not only of what is at the bottom, namely,
complexly varied and variable modes of locomotion, but of every-
thing in between, including the full and complex brain itself in the
form of the cerebellum and brain stem, not to mention the body as a
whole, the body in which everything is dynamically as well as mor-
phologically connected to everything else and that kinetically moves
as a whole. The brain stem is central to being awake and alert — obvi-
ously a basic requirement for cognition; the cerebellum has been and
is being recognized as something more than a lower-case brain entity
having to do only with movement, and thus a seemingly trivial if not
disposable item with respect to human sapience (see Schmahmann,
1997; 2000). Being awake and alert and moving are all in fact at the
heart not only of being alive but of staying alive. A further observation
by Darwin is notable in this context. In his chapter comparing ‘the
mental powers of man and the lower animals’, he wrote, ‘Animals
 152 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

may constantly be seen to pause, deliberate, and resolve’ and followed

that observation with the comment, ‘It is a significant fact, that the
more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the
more he attributes to reason and the less to unlearnt instincts’ (Darwin,
1981/1871, Vol. 1, p. 46).2 As I elsewhere observed, ‘no matter what
the particular world (Umwelt) in which an animal lives, it is not an
unchanging world. Hence, whatever the animal, its movement cannot
be absolutely programmed such that, for example, at all times its par-
ticular speed and direction of movement, its every impulse and stir-
ring, its every pause and stillness, run automatically on something
akin to a lifetime tape’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999/2011, p. 62).
The moral to be drawn from bona fide studies in natural history,
such as those of Darwin and field researchers of the past fifty years
and more, together with biology texts detailing both the quintessential
importance of the reticular system in the brain stem that is central to
arousal and attention, and thus to consciousness, and of the coordinat-
ing functions of the cerebellum that enter into cognitive as well as
kinetic capacities — capacities such as verbal language, for example
— is that the joints at which many a present-day scientist carves are
not necessarily the joints of nature or even joints at all. Artificial joints
can in fact give rise to conceptual arthritis in the sense of enlarging the
significance of a part, arthritically hardening it and distorting the struc-
ture of the whole in the process, which is why, in turn, artificial joints can
give rise to linguistic surgeries and therapies on the order of embodi-
ments and motorologies that attempt to sew the whole back together, in
effect, to reconstitute the original, wholly natural holistic form. With
respect to these linguistic stop-gap measures and operations, research-
ers would do well to heed, and heed from the beginning of their
labours, the long-ago cautionary words of Socrates , who stated (in the
context of discussing kinds of knowledge) that ‘division into species
[should be] according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not
breaking any part as a bad carver might’ (Plato, Phaedrus, 265E).
The combined moral from biology, natural history, and from Socra-
tes is succinctly illustrated by a fundamental and enduring concept in
Edmund Husserl’s writings. Husserl wrote of bodies, but he did not
write of embodied organisms; he wrote of action, but he did not write
of active or enactive organisms; he wrote of the world, but he did not
write of organisms being embedded in the world. He wrote simply,
directly, and throughout of animate organisms. Animation is the

[2] Though it should be noted that Darwin certainly did not underrate ‘the power of Instinct’;
see Darwin (1981/1871, p. 46, note 15).
 THE CORPOREAL TURN 153

ground floor, the ontological and epistemological bedrock of human

self-understandings and indeed of human pan-animate understand-
ings, understandings that include, but do not separate out in exclusive
and privileged ways, either the brain or cognition as the point of entry
to those understandings. A striking correspondence in methodological
priority in fact exists between Socratic and Husserlian investigations
in their mutual call to turn to the experienced realities of life itself. In
the Cratylus, Socrates asks Cratylus whether one can learn things as
readily through names as through ‘the things themselves’, and later
states, ‘How real existence is to be studied or discovered is, I suspect,
beyond you and me. But we may admit so much, that the knowledge of
things is not to be derived from names. No; they must be studied and
investigated in themselves’ (Plato, Cratylus, 439A; italics added).
Husserl’s classic dictum, ‘to the things themselves’ is a reiteration of
Socrates’ earlier dictum. In particular, Husserl states, ‘to judge ratio-
nally or scientifically about things signifies to conform to the things
themselves or to go from words and opinions back to the things them-
selves, to consult them in their self-givenness and to set aside all prej-
udices alien to them’ (Husserl, 1983, p. 35).
Clearly, we would do well to attend to the fundamental animate
realties of life itself that are ontogenetically and phylogenetically
grounded in movement. In what follows, I will continue to highlight
the fundamental reality of non-linguistic corporeal concepts and will
highlight in addition the fundamental dynamically congruent reality
of movement and affect. A major part of my effort will be to single out
divergent ways of thinking that occlude recognition of these realities,
and this as a way of showing the perils of construing the brain as the
oracle at Delphi, the shrine to which all questions concerning humans
are addressed and from which all bona fide explanations of humans
emanate. To set the stage concretely, I will in fact begin with an
example.
II
An advertisement in a science journal of a course offered by The
Teaching Company succinctly validates the way in which present-day
scientists conceive the brain as oracle. The course, titled, ‘How Your
Brain Works’, is taught by a neuroscience professor and is described
as follows: ‘Everything you hear, feel, see, and think is controlled by
your brain. It allows you to cope masterfully with your everyday envi-
ronment and is capable of producing breathtaking athletic feats, sub-
lime works of art, and profound scientific insights. But its most
amazing achievement may be that it can understand itself’ (The
154 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

Teaching Company, 2009, p. 3; 2010, p. 17). Of course, the idea of

controlling and predicting is an enduring scientific precept, so interest
in a controller — whatever the controller is deemed to be — is not
unusual nor, presumably, is the desire to teach people how a particular
controller controls. The problem comes with outlandish claims, such
as the brain controls ‘[e]verything you hear, feel, see, and think’, as if
brains thought a conference in Copenhagen on the brain featuring
neuroscientists and philosophers was a marvelous idea and made
plans accordingly, or as if the brain of any reader reading this article
feels now like having a chocolate bar. Such outlandish claims obvi-
ously make brains rather than people the subject of experience, a prac-
tice not in the least uncommon in neuroscience, but on the contrary
and lamentably, an engrained practice. In 1992, for example, Francis
Crick and Christof Koch declared, ‘If you see the back of a person’s
head, the brain infers that there is a face on the front of it’ (1992, p.
153). Antonio Damasio, Patricia Churchland and Terence Sejnowski,
Semir Zeki, and hosts of others have made similar experiential ascrip-
tions, as have hosts of present-day science writers who, on the basis of
cited present-day research inform us, for example, ‘How your brain
knows what you want’ (Gaidos, 2011), and ‘how the brain chooses to
overcome fearful impulses’ (Sanders, 2010). The practice has indeed
grown considerably over the past twenty-five years and more. Con-
sider the following examples taken from an article titled ‘What Do
You See?: Emotion May Help the Visual System Jump the Gun to Pre-
dict What the Brain Will See’ (Lee, 2009):
· ‘Studies show that the brain guesses the identity of objects
before it has finished processing all the sensory information
collected by the eyes’ (p. 23).
· ‘The brain pays more attention to objects that evoke an affec-
tive response than it does to objects that don’t have that “extra
juice”’ (p. 23).
· ‘Affect could help the brain make predictions… [Many scien-
tists think] [y]our brain is constantly making predictions’ (p.
24).
· ‘It takes a few hundred milliseconds for the brain to come to a
final decision about what the eyes see’ (p. 23).
An older ascription made by a primatologist is also notable. Robert
Harding in 1975 (p. 255) wrote, ‘Nonhuman primates have brains
capable of cooperative hunting’, as if when summoned by hunger,
brains roll forth in concert to do battle on the savannah.
 THE CORPOREAL TURN 155

Experiential ascriptions to the brain are indeed pervasive in pres-

ent-day neuroscience. What this unchallenged practice does is nullify
the actual experience of living subjects, both human and non-human.
Animate forms are reduced to lumbering robots, robots in this sce-
nario being not genetically run ones — though they might certainly be
that too — but cerebrally run ones. The controller-in-chief is clearly at
the top and cannot be unseated. Being thoroughly and utterly autono-
mous, what it says goes — and goes incontrovertibly. One cannot,
after all, argue with one’s brain! There are no means of communicat-
ing with it to begin with. But caveat emptor! Surely those who buy
into making experiential ascriptions to the brain should consider the
risks, some of which have been recently laid out by scientists them-
selves who point out liabilities both in methods and in thinking or rea-
soning. The liabilities warrant our attention and are well itemized in a
recent article on fMRI.
In ‘Trawling the Brain: New Findings Raise Questions about Reli-
ability of fMRI as Gauge of Neural Activity’, science writer Laura
Sanders points out that ‘many scientists say that serious issues have
been neglected during fMRI’s meteoric rise in popularity’ (Sanders,
2009, p. 17). She goes on to point out that ‘chains of assumptions’
underlie complex analyses with the result that, according to some
experts, ‘many results claimed from fMRI studies are simply dead
wrong’ (ibid.). She quotes a neuroscientist who pointedly states, ‘It’s a
dirty little secret in our field that many of the published findings are
unlikely to replicate’ (ibid.). She furthermore points out that ‘flawed
statistical methods’ are also an issue in that some of the methods used
‘practically guarantee that researchers will seem to find exactly what
they’re looking for in the tangle of fMRI data’ (ibid.). The most telling
criticism to my mind, however, a point of fact that I have been uneasy
about for a number of years, turns on the assumed relationship
between blood flow and what amounts to ‘meaning’, meaning in the
form of conclusions researchers draw from the imaging. The tenet to
which they adhere is that oxygenated blood tracks brain activity, or in
other words, where ‘neurons are working hard’, oxygenated blood
will be pouring in (ibid., p. 18). The guiding rationale is that changes
in oxygenated blood signal brain activity, and such signals are ‘the
best approximation to neural activity that fMRI offers’. The guiding
rationale is termed ‘BOLD’, which stands for ‘blood oxygen level-
dependent’. Yet as Sanders goes on to point out, ‘imperfect correla-
tions between blood flow and neural firing can confound… signals
and muddle the resulting conclusions about brain activity’ (ibid.).
Moreover blood flow gives no indication of what neurons are doing,
156 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

whether they are inhibiting or activating, whether there is synaptic

activity, or what. As Nikos Logothetis of the Max Planck Institute for
Biological Cybernetics states, ‘It would be nice to know what the neu-
rons are doing, but we don’t with this method. And that’s life’ (ibid.).
As if these problems were not enough, there is also the issue of
‘non-independence’, meaning that the answer one comes up with is
influenced by how the question is asked. Nikolaus Kriegeskorte of the
Medical Research Council in Cambridge found that in 42 percent of
the papers published in 2008 in Nature, Science, Nature Neurosci-
ence, Neuron, and the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers ‘do very
complicated analyses, and they don’t realize that they’re actually
walking in a very big circle, logically’ (ibid., p. 19). Criticism has like-
wise been strong of Marco Iacoboni’s claims about the viability of
what he terms ‘reverse inference’, a ‘probabilistic measure’ meaning
that if fMRI shows increased blood flow in a certain area, one may
surmise that the person is feeling a certain way in an emotionally
charged sense. Indeed, this kind of thinking constitutes perhaps the
most egregious problem, namely, the conceptual practice of equating
a particular area of the brain with a particular mental function. I have
elsewhere pointed out this liability, recalling the words of a nine-
teenth-century British sea captain — and the later words of British
writers Mary Beeton in her 1861 book The Book of Household Man-
agement, and Samuel Smiles in his 1875 book Thrift. In his book
Masterman Ready; or, The Wreck of the Pacific, nineteenth-century
British sea captain Frederick Marryat affirms, ‘a place for everything
and everything in its place’ (Marryat, 1904). This spatially pointillist
way of construing the brain not only fails utterly to recognize the
dynamically interconnected manner in which the brain functions as a
whole, but fails to recognize what famed neuropsychiatrist Aleksandr
Romanovich Luria wrote of and emphasized as the temporal flow or
temporal dynamics of neuronal activity, a dynamics palpably evident
in his descriptive accounts of kinaesthetic afference and kinaesthetic/
kinetic melodies (Luria, 1966; 1973). It similarly fails to recognize
what Pierre Fermat laureate and founder and former Director of the
Center for Complex Systems (Brain and Behavior), J.A. Scott Kelso,
puts before our eyes in his research on coordination dynamics;
namely, fine-grained analyses of the spatio-temporal coherence of
brain patterns in the course of behaviour (Kelso, 1995, pp. 275–8).
No experiential ascriptions to the brain are found in Kelso’s work,
any more than they are found in Luria’s. In both research programmes,
the dynamics and dynamic patternings of brain activity are recognized
as the basic phenomena they are, basic in their correlations with real
 THE CORPOREAL TURN 157

life experience and basic in the sense that dynamics are the ground
floor of animate life. For such research scientists, the brain does not
function within a framework of reductionist thought. Reductive think-
ing decrees that humans are properly describable only in point-by-
point, localized ways. The living dynamic world of animate beings is
virtually off-limits in such research: that world is precisely unpredict-
able, uncertain. Who knows when a baby will wake or cry, or a crow
fly off to another perch? Who knows in exactly which direction a
whale will turn or when it will sound? Such knowledge would be akin
to knowing the exact patterns and shifting shapes in which clouds will
form and re-form. Unpredictability aside, an ordered and orderly
world in which there is ‘a place for everything and everything in its
place’ is a material world that leaves out meaning or makes meaning a
pure and simple neurological phenomenon, a world that not only pres-
ent-day cognitive scientists conjure in their experiential ascriptions,
but that philosopher Evan Thompson straightforwardly instantiates
when he states, ‘[t]he nervous system… creates meaning’ (Thompson,
2007, p. 13).
In sum, experiential ascriptions to the brain, together with the
reductionism it commonly upholds, compress life into a neurological
caricature of life. With not a full-bodied living animal in sight, neither
fine and painstaking observations and descriptions of the gnostic tac-
tile-kinaesthetic dynamic realities of animate life can be made nor, in
consequence, can the topic of evolution rise to its proper prominence
within human self-understandings, self-understandings that include
the relatively lengthy ontogeny of humans.

III
If we ask specifically what corporeal-kinetic knowledge we glean as
maturing infants, we readily see that, in the beginning, movement is
not a pre-given programme of proficiencies and capacities, but some-
thing we must actively learn — precisely by learning our bodies and
learning to move ourselves (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999/2011; 2010).
Kinaesthesia — the experience of self-movement — is the ground on
which we do so. In reaching and kicking, we discover particular
kinetic possibilities of our bodies and correlative spatio-temporal-
energic dynamics in the process. In each instance, our movement has a
particular flow, the dynamics of which are kinaesthetically felt. When
we learn to turn over, we experience a spatio-temporal-energic dynam-
ics quite different from reaching and kicking, a kinaesthetically-felt
coordination dynamics (Kelso, 1995; see also Kelso and Engstrøm,
158 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

2006) that grounds our capacity ultimately to turn over any time we
wish. The phenomenological analysis of movement shows clearly
through its specification of the dynamics of movement, its spatio-tem-
poral-energic qualitative structure, that direction, range, intensity, and
duration are all inherent dimensions of movement, or in more precise
terms, that tensional, linear, areal, and projectional qualities are inher-
ent in movement (Sheets-Johnstone, 1966 [1979/1980]; 1999/2011).
It is hardly a wonder, then, that in reaching and grasping, for example,
an infant is kinaesthetically aware of how far away something is and
how big it is, how in pushing something away, it is kinaesthetically
aware of the effort or intensity of its movement, or how in stretching,
it is kinaesthetically aware of the sustained character of its movement.
Everyday movements such as reaching and grasping, pushing and
pulling, bending and stretching, and so on, are obviously dependent
on, and a measure of, human movement capabilities and dispositions,
but they are also, and are from the beginning, generative of concepts:
of near and far, up and down, weak and strong, straight and curved,
slow and fast, large and small, abrupt and attenuated. Experience —
actual, in-the-flesh kinaesthetic experience — is the spatio-temporal-
energic ground on which fundamental human concepts — non-linguis-
tic corporeal concepts — originate. As shown at length in earlier analy-
ses of thinking in movement and of the primacy of movement
(Sheets-Johnstone, 1990; 1981 [1999/2011]), in so far as concepts are
generated in movement, cognition is not separate from perception, per-
ception from movement, nor movement from an environing or sur-
rounding world. These inherently interrelated aspects of animation
constitute the complex and often subtle whole of any actual ‘real-
time’, ‘real-life’ self-movement as it unfolds (Sheets-Johnstone,
forthcoming 2012a). Synergies of meaningful movement, as noted ear-
lier in terms of their semantic congruency, are indeed consistently
informed by these inherently interrelated aspects of animation and by
non-linguistic spatio-temporal-energic concepts pertaining thereto.
Such synergies could not in fact develop from infancy onward in
default of the interrelated aspects or concepts, hence in default of a
consciousness of one’s own movement, which is to say in default of
kinaesthesia.
Clearly, what is of moment to living creatures from birth onward
are real life bodily happenings that resonate tactilely and kinaesth-
etically, which is to say experientially; what feels and what is moved to
move is not a brain but a living organism (Sheets-Johnstone, 2006a;
2008). Indeed, as pointed out elsewhere in a chapter titled ‘What Is It
Like To Be A Brain?’, ‘the brain is an organ, not an organism… it does
 THE CORPOREAL TURN 159

not have a life’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999/2011, p. 453). In effect,

brains do not issue forth behavioural directives on the basis of their
experience of the world. In fact, talk of ‘behaviour’ — eating, reach-
ing, standing up, walking, hugging — oftentimes amounts simply to a
naming and ignoring study of ‘the things themselves’. In such talk, the
progressive formation of synergies of meaningful movement and the
actual, in-the-flesh kinetic dynamics of life commonly pass unnoticed.
In what Darwin at one point designates as the ‘after life’ of adults with
respect to infancy (Darwin 1965/1872, p. 13; see also below, this
text), attention is commonly not on one’s bodily movement. Indeed, it
is commonly on a task, an exploration, a conversation, a project, and
so on. Accordingly, it is not unusual that the actual, in-the-flesh
kinetic dynamics of life commonly pass unnoticed. Yet the dynamics
are not on that account either non-existent or ‘unconscious’. On the
contrary, they remain at what we might designate ‘the foreground of
the background’ (see Sheets-Johnstone, forthcoming 2012b), margin-
alized in our awareness in the form of familiar dynamics, familiar
bodily attitudes, familiar kinetic dispositions, and so on, with respect
to a focal attention elsewhere. It is indeed notable that neuroscientist
Marc Jeannerod comments on the insuppressibility of kinaesthesia.
He does so in passing, but we should definitely not do so here. Unlike
Jeannerod, our concern is not with the controversy between Wilhelm
Wundt and William James concerning a priori or a posteriori ‘knowl-
edge about one’s actions’ (Jeannerod, 2006, p. 56). Our concern here
is with Jeannerod’s explicit affirmation: ‘There are no reliable methods
for suppressing kinesthetic information arising during the execution of a
movement’(ibid.). ‘Information’terminology aside, Jeannerod’s declara-
tive finding speaks reams about the foundational ongoing reality and sig-
nificance of kinaesthesia, reams that should certainly lead investigators
to take seriously the challenge of understanding the insuppressible living
dynamics of kinaesthetic experience.
A similar awakening should readily follow Jeannerod’s question of
‘whether we consciously monitor our own actions and how we even-
tually become aware of them’, and of his answer: ‘[W]e remain
unaware of most of our actions, unless an unpredicted event interrupts
their course and brings them to consciousness’ (ibid., pp. 58–9), that
is, unless ‘something goes wrong’. Clearly — and particularly in light
of the insuppressibility of kinaesthesia — we do not have to wait until
something untoward occurs that awakens us into awareness and deters
us from continuing on our way. On the contrary, precisely because
movement is a dynamic happening and because the dynamics of our
everyday movement are commonly habitual, and thus within our
160 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

everyday repertoire of what Husserl terms our ‘I cans’, we can consult

them any time we wish in the course of moving. In short, and as I have
elsewhere shown (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999/2011), any time we care to
pay attention to our own movement — our own so-called ‘action’ —
there it is. Not only this, but when we all learned our bodies and learned
to move ourselves as infants and young children (ibid.), we did so by
attending to our own movement, and in the process forged an untold
number of dynamic patterns that became habitual. Familiar dynamics
— brushing one’s teeth, tying a knot, buttering one’s toast, writing
one’s name, pulling weeds, sweeping, typing, waltzing, playing a
Mozart sonata, reciting a nursery rhyme, and so on — are woven into
our bodies and played out along the lines of our bodies; they are, to use
Luria’s eloquent and exactingly descriptive phrase, ‘kinaesthetic/
kinetic melodies’. Indeed, were someone else to brush our teeth, we
would immediately recognize that someone else was brushing our
teeth, not just because we were not holding the toothbrush ourselves
and not only because we could actually see someone in front of us
holding and moving our toothbrush, but because we would feel a for-
eign dynamics inside our mouth. In sum, when we turn attention to our
own coordinated dynamics as they unfold, we recognize kinaesthetic
melodies; they bear the stamp of our own qualitatively felt movement
patterns, our own familiar synergies of meaningful movement
(Sheets-Johnstone, 2009; forthcoming 2011 [1999]).
The progressive formation of synergies of meaningful movement
and the actual, in-the-flesh kinetic dynamics of life commonly pass
unnoticed equally in talk of emotions. In particular, that the dynamic
congruency of affect and movement goes largely unrecognized testi-
fies to the neglect and ignorance of animate movement. Again, I will
give a concrete example from recent literature.
Facial expression has certainly been investigated by psychologists,
but alas! as with study of the brain, recognition of the whole animal is
nowhere in sight. A provocative observation made in a panel discus-
sion on ‘Expression’ during a conference titled ‘Emotions Inside Out:
130 Years after Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals’ (Ekman et al., 2003) aptly captures the muted kinetic charac-
ter of adult emotion and commonly muted adult kinetic understand-
ings of emotion. The muted kinetic character was in fact remarked on
by both Darwin and Sir Charles Bell. In his ‘Introduction’ to The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin voices con-
cern that his analyses have a sound foundation and in this context calls
attention straight away to infants. He states:
 THE CORPOREAL TURN 161

In order to acquire as good a foundation as possible, and to ascertain,

independently of common opinion, how far particular movements…
are really expressive of certain states of the mind, I have found the fol-
lowing means the most serviceable. In the first place, to observe infants;
for they exhibit many emotions, as Sir C. Bell remarks, ‘with extraordi-
nary force’; whereas, in after life, some of our expressions ‘cease to
have the pure and simple source from which they spring in infancy’.
(Darwin, 1965/1872, p. 13)
The ‘after life’ adult shift away from the ‘pure and simple source’ of
emotional expression in infancy can surely be described as a shift away
from the animate body, in more precise terms, as an espousal of mea-
sured intellect over spontaneous feeling, a definitive dichotomized pre-
dilection for mind over body. The observation of an unidentified
audience member at the ‘Emotions Inside Out’ conference makes the
point unequivocally: ‘I’ve been so excited by this whole presentation
of this session because everybody is coordinated into one unit, but
what has fascinated me is the absence of the body below the neck
[laughter]’ (Ekman et al., 2003, p. 273). He or she goes on to explain,
‘I was fascinated by hearing the words, by seeing the faces, but I did
not see the talking by the fingers, by the hands, by the movement,
poise, and pattern of the people that were moving, sitting, or shifting’.
He/she then asks ‘if there is any further matter going on with the body
as a Gestalt when you are communicating with your voice and your
face’ (ibid.). Psychologist Paul Ekman responds first by citing the ‘pi-
oneering work’ of David Efron on gestures — what Efron referred to
as ‘emblems’ — and comments, ‘They are the only body language’
(ibid.). He mentions Efron’s specification of ‘speech illustrator move-
ments’, and then alludes to his own research on ‘bodily movements
that we called self-manipulative movements’, movements such as
playing with one’s hands or scratching one’s face (ibid., p. 274). He
concludes his response by stating, ‘There are other approaches that
aren’t looking in this formalistic way, but are looking at the flow, or
quality, of movement’, and goes on to remark, ‘These are people who
primarily come out of dance. It doesn’t appear that these body move-
ments are as direct a signal source for emotion, in humans at least, as
the face and voice. That’s why we couldn’t have found someone able
to give a scientific talk on the body movements of emotion’ (ibid.).
Ekman’s notion of a ‘scientific talk on the body movements of emo-
tion’ is purely and wholly from the outside and will never attain to
understandings of ‘emotions inside out’. Understandings of ‘emo-
tions inside out’ require first-person, experienced-based studies of
emotion. Certainly recognition of emotions in others is of moment,
162 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

but emotions are not snap-on, momentary expressions. Darwin under-

stood this well: his descriptions of emotion are kinetically etched. In
his final chapter on the expression of emotions, he emphasizes ‘the
intimate relation which exists between almost all the emotions and
their outward manifestations’ (Darwin, 1965/1872, p. 365). Indeed,
both implicitly and explicitly throughout his text, he validates the inti-
mate bond. With respect to rage, for example, he observes that,
respiration is laboured, the chest heaves, and the dilated nostrils quiver.
The whole body often trembles. The voice is affected. The teeth are
clenched or ground together, and the muscular system is commonly
stimulated to violent, almost frantic action. But the gestures of a man in
this state usually differ from the purposeless writhings and struggles of
one suffering from an agony of pain; for they represent more or less
plainly the act of striking or fighting with an enemy. (Ibid., p. 74)
Even as concerns speech, he observes, ‘The movements of expression
give vividness and energy to our spoken words. They reveal the
thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which
may be falsified’ (ibid., p. 364). Sir Charles’s descriptions of emotion
are equally illuminating and perspicuous ‘inside out’ (Bell, 1844):
they too recognize the ‘intimate relation’ of ‘emotions and their out-
ward manifestations’.
The ‘absence of the body below the neck’ might well be character-
ized as a chronic metaphysics of absence in ‘scientific talk on the body
movements of emotion’, just as the absence of ‘flow, or quality, of
movement’ might well be characterized as a chronic absence of both
dynamics and first-person experience in ‘scientific talk on the body
movements of emotion’. The absences conceal ‘the pure and simple
source’ of emotions that infants enjoy, a source that is quintessentially
defined by animation, and that is not only typically lost in the ‘after
life’ of adults but typically unrecognized in the qualitatively blinkered
life of most scientists and philosophers, if not of academic and non-
academic adults generally. The deficiency of our ‘after life’ and of a
blinkered science notwithstanding, we can nonetheless clearly recog-
nize that the absences constitute an absence of whole-body qualitative
dynamics. Our voices and faces are part and parcel of those dynamics,
part of the qualitative affective-kinetic dynamics created by otherwise
spontaneously whole moving bodies. Animate bodies are indeed ones
from which movement flows, and in flowing, creates a qualitative
dynamic that can be elucidated in fine phenomenological detail, a
detailing that in truth is far more kinetically elucidating and exacting
than scientific disquisitions on emblematic gestures, illustrator move-
ments, and self-manipulative movements. It is pertinent to recall in
 THE CORPOREAL TURN 163

this regard that phenomenological analyses are open to verification

within a methodology no less demanding than that of western science,
which means they can be brought rigorously to self-evidence by any-
one caring to examine experience. Emotions do indeed ‘spring’ from
the body and in their own distinctive qualitative kinetic dynamics as
Darwin and Bell demonstrate not only descriptively but graphically
(Darwin, 1965/1872; Bell, 1844). Infant psychiatrist and clinical psy-
chologist Daniel Stern aptly terms these kinetically-charged affective
dynamics ‘vitality affects’ (Stern, 1985). Obviously, to appreciate
them, we need to regain touch with our primordial animation by
affectively and kinetically interrogating our ‘after life’ as adults.

IV
Recent critical reviews of experimental brain research such as those
cited above testify eloquently to the need to de-elevate the brain and
to begin seriously considering the ontogenetic heritage of adult
humans. That heritage is rooted in movement, that is, in the tactile-
kinaesthetic body and in the dynamic congruency of that body with
expressed emotions, and in the semantic congruency of that body with
expressed meanings. That body is precisely responsive — like all ani-
mate life is responsive — because it is attentive to something, curious
about something, apprehensive of something, motivated toward
catching something, explorative of something, fearful of something,
and so on — responsive because it is, in short, engaged in the world —
in the Umwelt in which it finds itself to begin with. Given the realities
of responsivity, it is clearly misguided to deny or doubt that animals
are conscious and conscious from the beginning of their lives: animate
beings have a proprioceptive and/or kinaesthetic consciousness of
themselves from the beginning. Contrary to being puppets in a motor-
ology drama, animate beings in their everyday lives create particular
movement dynamics and know straight away kinaesthetically and/or
proprioceptively that kinetic dynamic and its possible variations. Not
only a slip of the hammer but a slip of the tongue discloses an unfamil-
iar dynamic, a lapse in semantic congruency, a lapse in an everyday
synergy of meaningful movement. Indeed, human tongues are
waggable, not in the same way that dogs’ tails are waggable — human
tongues are waggable in far more complex ways, including being
mis-waggable and disingenuously waggable — but their dynamic and
semantic patternings, their synergies of meaningful movement, are
articulations on par with anthropologist Stuart Altmann’s concept of
‘comsigns’ (Altmann, 1967) in the animate world at large: synergies of
 164 M. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

meaningful movement articulate ‘signs’ — including ‘signs’ in the form

of words — that virtually all in the species are capable of performing
and understanding, hence, ‘comsigns’.
Certainly neuroscientific studies of the brain are of value, and
indeed, instrumental in understanding pathologies and in treating
pathologically impaired individuals. However, as Sperry long ago
affirmed on the basis of his studies of its neurophysiology, the brain
functions basically as an integrated whole on behalf of a ‘preparation
to respond’ (Sperry, 1952, p. 301), that is, precisely on behalf of what
biologists generally term a defining feature of life: responsivity
(Curtis, 1975). As such, the brain is a dynamic organ. Research studies
in coordination dynamics address the brain in just such terms, produc-
ing findings that show it works in both localized and integrated ways
(Kelso and Engstrøm, 2006). The field of coordination dynamics, an
elemental and critically significant domain within dynamical systems
research, in fact aims not at reductionism but at an illumination of the
complementary nature of Nature, indeed, the complementary nature
of brain and behaviour as complex dynamic systems (Kelso, 1995;
Kelso and Engstrøm, 2006): ‘In coordination dynamics, the real-life
coordination of neurons in the brain and the real-life coordinated
actions of animals are cut, fundamentally, from the same dynamic
cloth. Integrity is in turn preserved because it is never threatened.
Psychophysical unity is undergirded at all levels by coordination
dynamics’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 2004; Kelso and Engstrøm, 2006, p. 9).
Coordination dynamics is thus not just a necessary but a founda-
tional correction to reductionist microphrenological thinking. We can
appreciate this fact in the fact that familiar dynamics are, as indicated
earlier, woven into our bodies and played out along the lines of our
bodies; they are indeed kinaesthetic/kinetic melodies.3 In writing
one’s name, or pulling out weeds, or skipping down stairs, one’s cre-
ation and constitution of a kinaesthetic/kinetic melody are phenomen-
ologically concurrent (see Sheets-Johnstone, 1999/2011, Chapter III;
2006b, pp. 371ff.). The melody is kinaesthetically felt and has an affec-
tive-cognitive aura generated in and by the very movement that produces
it at the same time that the very movement that produces it is kin-
aesthetically and affectively-cognitively constituted as an ongoing quali-
tative kinetic dynamic. It has, to paraphrase Stern (Stern, 1985), ‘vitality
cognitive affects’: cognitive-affective-kinetic shifts in momentum, for

[3] It is worth noting that melodies are to begin with qualitative phenomena, qualitative in vir-
tue of their spatio-temporal-energic character. Varela’s description of his ‘exaltation’ at a
concert is testimony to the fundamentally qualitative character of melody and its qualita-
tively experienced dynamics (Varela and Depraz, 2005, pp. 67–8).
 THE CORPOREAL TURN 165

example, and cognitive-affective-kinetic crescendos and diminuendos.

Indeed, the qualitative dynamic of a melody might at times be felt not
only affectively as rushed, attenuated, awkward, abrupt, delicate, jag-
ged, fluent, and so on, but cognitively as confused, transformable,
assured, problematic, flawless, questionable, and so on, all of such felt
cognitive-affective-kinetic qualities entering into the overall dyna-
mic, the cognitive tonalities of the melody modulating the kinetic-
affective patterning throughout, and the kinetic-affective patterning
modulating the cognitive tonalities throughout. It is surely clear then
that familiar dynamics are not embodied; like emotion and movement,
they are through and through already a bodily phenomenon. They are
pre-eminently kinetic-affective-cognitive forms of animation.
In sum, dynamic congruency and semantic congruency are inte-
grally linked through the tactile-kinaesthetic body. Kinaesthesia is, in
effect, paramount affectively as well as perceptually, conceptually as
well as environmentally, which is why synergies of meaningful move-
ment anchor our animate presence in the world. They are what learn-
ing our bodies and learning to move ourselves are all about. They are
what social communication is all about. They are what survival is all
about.
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