Embodiment: a cross-disciplinary provocation

Thirty years ago this provocation would not have been written. Embodiment has grown rapidly throughout the course of the past three decades into a relevant and challenging concept intersecting a range of disciplines and research programmes responding to its development. This provocation explores select theories of embodiment from the embodied cognition research programme as well as some practical processes and conceptual applications of embodiment from the field of actor training and actor-based performance training. I am largely responding to the work presented at the Embodied Cognition, Acting and Performance Symposium for which this Special Edition of Connection Science is an outcome. The articulations of the term embodiment currently inform two separate disciplinary understandings of this concept. Here, I highlight a move towards cross-disciplinary approaches to the concept of embodiment and offer an integrative new articulation of the term, bridging received divided between these two distinct and ever developing fields. This provocation argues that embodiment offers a valuable and challenging dimension to our emerging interdisciplinary discourse and that embodied processes are central to the ongoing integration of these two disciplines. This focus on our ongoing interdisciplinary strategies subsequently invites the proposition that embodiment, as an issue of central importance to both disciplinary spheres, may indeed be the key to any future transdisciplinary developments in research and practice occurring between the distinct fields of embodied cognition and performance practice.

Defining embodiment

The fact that embodiment has emerged as a primary issue for consideration in both cognitive science and actor training (and actor-based performance training) as just two examples of a wider range of disciplines and research programmes grappling with this concept reflects a concrete change in thinking about the nature of the mind and cognitive processing which extends beyond individual disciplinary projects. In many ways, the concept of embodiment has served as a pivotal catalyst or fulcrum between various disciplines within the sciences, arts, and humanities, from early work on embodied cognition and metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), enactive perspectives of cognition (Varela,~Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), and more contemporary approaches to philosophy of mind (Shapiro, 2014). This special edition includes a contribution by our esteemed collaborator Shaun Gallagher whose seminal How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005) has served as a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, exploring embodiment across a variety of disciplines, including neuroscience, behavioural psychology, artificial intelligence and robotics, and phenomenology and philosophy of mind, arguing for the development of a common vocabulary as well as a conceptual framework from which we might determine the extent to which our consciousness and cognitive processes are shaped and structured by our embodiment. This is a position shared by this provocation whose specific approach is developed at the intersection of the embodied cognition research programme and actor training.

In his contribution to The Cambridge handbook of cognitive science (Clark, 2012), Clark, a key player in the development of embodiment in the cognitive sciences (1997, 2010, 2016), addresses some of the philosophical issues which underpin the fast emergence of embodiment as a primary concept under consideration within the development of the embodied cognition research programme that additionally function across a variety disciplinary fields.

Flesh and world are surely flavors of the moment. Talk of mind as intimately embodied and profoundly environmentally embedded shimmers at the cusp of the cognitive scientific zeitgeist. But beneath the glamour and glitz lies a still-murky vision. For this view of mind can seem by turns radical and trivial, interestingly true and outrageously false, scientifically important and a mere distraction, philosophically challenging and simply confused … [and yet we must] attempt to locate some footholds in this new and at times treacherous landscape. It is comforting to begin with a seeming truth. Human minds, it can hardly be doubted, are at the very least in deep and critically important contact with human bodies and with the wider world. Human sensing, learning, thought, and feeling are all structured and informed by our body-based interactions with the world around us. (Clark, 2012, p. 275)

This allure of the embodiment as a concept extends beyond the cognitive sciences, and while its theoretical underpinnings within the arts may have a similarly “murky” vision in terms of their linguistic application, attempts to identify clear footholds within many of our actor training systems remain. Furthermore, while the identification of enactive and environmentally embedded approaches to cognition may on the surface appear to be limited to a small score of performance theorists, including the likes of Blair (2007), Kemp (2012), Lutterbie (2011), McConachie (2008, 2013), and McConachie and Hart (2006), the conviction that cognition “is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs” (Varela et al., 1992, p. 9) is exhibited within a wide range of actor training systems and techniques which privilege “the process of experiencing” (Stanislavski, 2008, p. 23) and “organic acting” (Gillett, 2014) with its focus on action and the recreation of human experience within a set of given circumstances (i.e. “a pre-given world”) over representational acting and its dependence of pretending, imitation, and creating physical and emotional states.

As conceptual applications of embodiment remain the focus of this provocation, it is important to note that some commentators, including contributors to this special edition Shaun Gallagher and Mark Bishop, view Andy Clark’s “extended mind” position as effectively subscribing to an etiolated notion of embodiment – a so-called weak embodiment. As a contrast to weak embodiment, Sharkey and Ziemke’s (2000) identify “strong embodiment” as the position that not only does the body shape cognition, but the matter of the body is constitutive of cognitive processes. This argument is shared by Nasuto and Bishop (2011) who forcefully make the case that the actual substance of embodiment matter greatly to the grounding of our cognition. Conversely, weak embodiment is “the view that concepts are not represented only by sensory/motor processes, but are also represented at an abstract or modality-independent level” (Mahon, 2014, p. 1), a position which may be viewed effectively as computationalism revisited though the back-door. In his contribution to this special edition, Shaun Gallagher states that “Clark’s (2008) conception of the extended mind builds on a functionalist view that downplays the role of the biological body – cognition could be instantiated in a robotic body, for example” (Gallagher, 2017). However, Clark’s inclusion in this dialogue is to provide a specific insight into his framing interdisciplinary conceptualisations of embodiment rather than to argue directly or indirectly for the application of his view of extended cognition.

Clark continues his inciting call to further the landscape of embodiment studies by drawing on Esther Thelan’s popular framing of the embodied perspective in which she states that “to say cognition is embodied means that it arises from bodily interactions within the world” (2000, p. 4). Clark posits that while it is unlikely that many would disagree with Thelan’s statement given current trends in discourses surrounding embodiment, it is essential that we further interrogate this frequently cited position in order to gain a more comprehensive view of some of the “radical” arguments which underlie it. To provide further context for consideration, Thelan goes on to state that:

From this point of view, cognition depends on the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with particular perceptual and motor capacities that are inseparably linked and that together form the matrix within which memory, emotion, language, and all other aspects of life are meshed. The contemporary motion of embodied cognition stands in contrast to the prevailing cognitivist stance which sees the mind as a device to manipulate symbols and is thus concerned with the formal rules and processes by which symbols appropriately represent the word. (2000, my italics)

The key point which Clark aims to highlight here is not that cognition is body dependent or informed by the experience of our individual perceptual and motor capacities, but rather the implications of the word “meshing” as signalling an “intermingling of cognitive activity” (Clark, 2012, p. 276). It is this intermingling, or meshing, of mind, body, and world that is perhaps the most radical offering of the embodied cognition research programme, the argument for cognitive processes to be framed within an “embodied dynamism” which focuses on agents as self-organising dynamic systems and “maintains in addition that cognitive processes emerge from the nonlinear and circular causality of continuous sensorimotor interactions involving brain, body, and environment” (Thompson, 2007, p. 10–11). The emergence of embodied dynamism and the development of an enactive approach marked significant shifts in the development of cognitive science and our shared conception of embodiment which would later receive popular applications within research in performance practice and actor training – and yet, when given a more detailed look, it is these dynamic developments within the embodied cognition research programme which have been central to the practical doing of acting and actor training, as one specific example of performance practice, for over 100 years.

Embodied cognition and actor training: a cross-disciplinary approach to embodiment

In contemporary actor training discourse, it is in currently quite fashionable to examine embodiment and embodied phenomena as they relate to the actor’s process. To be fair, it is in fashion within many performance disciplines, but to focus my point, I have chosen to concentrate here on acting and western actor training techniques and systems as they provide a productive point of departure for exploring the nature of embodiment as a system for understanding human experience and cognition. Rick Kemp, performance maker, scholar, and contributor to this special edition, argues for the ongoing development of a cross-disciplinary dialogue between cognitive science and performance practice in his 2012 text Embodied Acting.

The scientific investigation of the mind and brain offers theatre people better ways of understanding the psychophysical processes involved in performance. Cognitive science also offers us tools with which to describe the distinctions between different approaches as well as to recognize fundamental similarities among them … Furthermore, the understanding that cognitive science offers us is one that acknowledges the central role of the body, and helps us to better understand the relationships between thought and expression, a subject that is hazily expressed in most theories of acting. (Kemp, 2012 p. 15)

Kemp acknowledges that while the recreation of human experience is central to many technical systems of acting, making them fertile ground for theoretical applications of cognitive science and more specifically, embodied cognition to this performance practice, how these are expressed within articulated theories of acting remains at best hazy. This is in part because most of the writing which exists on the acting process is split between two distinct camps: practical guides to acting technique and theoretical views on acting and performance employing scientific, philosophical, cultural, political, and historical perspectives. Indeed, it is in this division of practice and theory whereby conceptions of embodiment within actor training have had the tendency to become confused as the nature of their embodied processes and their “meshing” becomes challenging to frame without an engagement across these fields of research and practice.

The concept of the embodied mind is one that fundamentally alters the mind/body split on which twentieth-century approaches to actor training are based … Many practitioners have been working psychophysically – but the concepts and terms that they use to describe this work have been bound by the “internal/external” dichotomy. Creating a cognitive vocabulary for theatrical activities would support a language of theatre that applies to a variety of styles because it is based on foundational cognitive activities. (17–18)

At first glance, this idea is far from new and the argument for an embodied mind holds strong resonances for existing performance and actor training practices. Historically, virtually all post-Stanislavski systems of actor training identify directly or indirectly the dynamic relationship between the actor’s mind, body, and world using terms such as embodiment, psychophysical, and integrated processes. However, these systems have been largely bound by training languages which have not developed with the same sense of immediacy as many of the theoretical fields from upon which they draw. Thus, their concepts and language do not always reflect the advancement of knowledge which can be located within their practice. This may be one reason why some performance researchers have received criticism for using cognitive science to “justify” their practice, when in fact they may fallen into this hierarchical exchange whereby cognitive science is used as a means of validating thinking around and through performance due to the limits of the language surrounding their practice. The limits of technical training languages aside, the reoccurring problematic of embodiment as a potential unifying concept which may be the key bridging these two disciplines across theory and practice remains at the forefront of this cross-disciplinary provocation and in order to move forward, the next step in this collaborative exchange must be determined.

A move towards transdisciplinarity

As a research effort aimed at drawing connections between disciplines through unifying issues or concepts, transdisciplinarity “takes us beyond disciplines by weaving a new kind of knowledge” (Nicolescu, 1997, p. 12–14). The prefix ‘trans-’ indicates that which is at once between, across, and beyond all disciplines: “its goal is the understanding of the present world, one of the imperatives of which is the unity of knowledge” (Nicolescu, 1997). As a founding member of the Embodied Cognition, Acting, and Performance Symposium at AISB, I entered this new research community as a participant within an exchange of disciplines which aimed to promote interdisciplinary discourse and practice. But this community of researchers and practitioners notably began with an initial and hopeful call for a shift from the interdisciplinary to the transdisciplinary – a move in which performance, and specifically actor training, might serve as a valuable partner to the embodied cognition research programme in undertaking a forward momentum within the development of our shared research and practice towards newly formed models of research and practice. As organisers of this symposium and its corresponding community of researchers, how we approach the concept and practice of embodiment has been explored as a unifying mode of enquiry. The transdisciplinary potential of this enquiry is evident within many of the contributions to this special edition and is indicative of the three-year research journey that many members of this community began together back in 2014 when we first proposed a space to explore the interrelationships between cognitive science, acting, and performance. If there is one position that we share, it may be an intensifying interest in applications cognitive science within performance practices and a growing awareness that embodiment and the enactive approach in cognitive science offers a unique opportunity for a transdisciplinary discourse or practice to explore the shared synergies between these individual disciplinary fields.

Historically, many disciplinary exchanges between actor training and cognitive science have been largely pluridisciplinary, meaning that there was an implied “cooperation between disciplines, without coordination” wherein “compatible areas of knowledge” (Max-Neef, 2005, p. 6), such as action, emotion, and empathy, were integrated on a hierarchical level where cognitive science served as a theoretical method for reinforcing and validating the practice of acting. Furthermore, as a linguistic concept, embodiment has not always featured heavily within the field of actor training, and in that regard it remains a relatively new guest in within our specialist discourse. Unlike cognitive science, the field of actor training does not have an ongoing tradition of engaging with embodiment as an analytic problematic in a way that has advanced us from one stage of theoretical development to the next. (Our central analytic problematic may perhaps be meaning. The making of it, the acting of it, the creation of it, the construction of it, the act of it – all possibly bracketed as the presentation and representation of meaning.) However, many of us in the world of performance, and specifically acting and actor training, have intimately worked with and repeatedly lived through the embodied processes and practices of the actor and performer within various framing and practical systems of experiencing within our own disciplines, largely undertaken within a dynamic and unapologetically subjective web of operations, a system of experiencing. It is from this position of embodied practice that many of us make our offerings of synergy to the theories and positionings offered by the embodied research programme.

Where do we go from here?

Within this provocation I have focused on perspectives of embodiment drawn from both embodied cognition and actor training which invite us to view the mind, cognition, and human experience in an increasingly illuminating manner when situated within a cross-disciplinary exchange. The discourses examined provide a brief overview of the ongoing progress that has been made within both disciplinary fields as well as within some current interdisciplinary exchanges, with a larger aim to avoid the privileging of either discipline’s mode of theoretical or practical enquiry as hierarchically superior (an issue of concern which is discussed in greater detail within Experience Bryon’s contribution to this special edition), and proposes that a crucial contribution may be found through a sustained and unifying exploration of embodiment which aims to heighten our understanding and experience of embodied processes and embodied phenomena through a complex coupling of disciplines which foregrounds the potential to develop this ongoing work further into future transdisciplinary research and practice. In conclusion, I would like to propose some key questions which may give rise to new perspectives and practical undertakings within this cross-disciplinary exchange: How might we utilise or implement a unifying conception of embodiment across, within, and beyond our disciplinary practices? How might this cross- disciplinary discourse support us where others may have failed? To what extent might these findings give way for the emergence of a new discipline or practice through the lens of embodiment? Within the answers to these questions, strong possibilities for transdisciplinary undertakings are merging within early stages of development and creation, representing the possibility for future fascinating connections derived through advanced research and practice within explorations of embodiment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.