A Moving Moment

Abstract

2020 was marked by prolific mobilization, with mass protests contrasting the now-normalized shelter-in-place policies of pandemic policy. Global participation for racial justice reached an historic scale and empathy emerged as the word du jour. Written during a moment of isolation and anticipation, this article articulates the unlikely intersection of (physical) rest and (political) unrest as a rise in the critical consciousness of the public (Said: 1983) alongside ‘modernity’s kinetic being’ (Lepecki: 2006). In contextualizing the current political moment as a collective experience of precarity that generated new activism, this article translates the development of critical consciousness from the realm of the discursive and literary to that of the embodied and performative. Yet how do we maintain collective repair without crossing the precipice of exhaustion so that this movement does not fade into a moment but rather remains a refrain repeated once no longer in vogue? To imagine a response, this article moves through critical theory and dance studies in a return to debates on kinesthetic empathy as a source of sustainable repair.

Notes

1 I hesitated whether or not to print George Floyd’s name here, not wanting to unconsentingly co-opt it into academic space and my own production, but also not wanting to leave it behind, erased. I chose to privilege the latter, while still fearful of the former.

2 One need only recall that the Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013. In 2015 Princeton University, influenced by student activism, considered the renaming of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, but ultimately decided against the name change in spite of recognition of the former president’s racist views. Yet in 2020, under the same leadership, it finally renamed the school and residential college.

3 For more on my intentions behind the word precarity and the paired concept of responsibility, see Butler (2015).

4 An additional correlation worth noting is that during the pandemic, due to the shelter-in-place policies, arts production was largely halted, including media giants that saturate popular network broadcasting and create background noise for daily living. John Dewey has reminded us of the danger of a public distracted by superfluous content and this summer saw a momentary correction to this balance. This is not to call into question the value of art as experience; the contrary. It is to affirm Dewey’s writing and call for continued creative, not commercial, production (Dewey 1934).

5 Critical conscientization should not be conflated as decolonization; at best it is a primer in this direction (Tuck and Yang 2012). Rather, ‘conscientização is the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all emergence‘ (Freire 2018[1968]): 109).

6 So read the two jumbotrons flanking the stage when US Presidentelect Joe Biden and US Vice President-elect Kamala Harris offered a victory speech in Wilmington, Delaware, 7 November 2020.

7 As Foster acknowledges, Obama’s remarks correspond to a publication by neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: ‘Our study shows that we use the feeling of our own body as a platform for knowing how to respond to other people’s social and psychological situations. These emotions are visceral, in the most literal sense—they are the biological expression of ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you‘, yet another adage emphasizing empathy as action not feeling (Foster 2011: 127, my emphasis).

8 This remainder is closer to Doomsday than ever before, as calculated by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist.

9 Such etymological origins that chart across most of the literature on empathy and kinesthesia include the Greek origins of kine, aethesis and aisthêsis. John Martin’s prior contribution of ‘metakinesis‘ as a dance critic should not be omitted from this line-up.

10 The notion that Covid-19, and disease more broadly, does not discriminate is false, and I do not wish to perpetuate such neutrality. For example, in the US, Black people are four times more likely to die from the disease than White people, according to the American Heart Association. Put otherwise, if the virus does not discriminate, the healthcare system most certainly does.

11 The death of George Floyd indexed a history of state killing beyond his individual life and it was this cumulative and continual violence that was protested. However, as the video itself did not consolidate these deaths specifically, I treat it as separate from the summed population deaths tallied during Covid-19.

12 I recall taking class from Whelan when I was 18; her signed poster is now framed in my apartment. My greatest memory was of her generosity towards us ballet dancers who knew we would never ‘make it’ but still needed to move.

13 In future writing, it may be worth further exploring the relationship between empathy, sovereignty and (bio)politics through a dialogue of Foster, Mbembe, Foucault and others.

14 Indeed, Freire later walks back from this claim: ‘the only effective instrument … establishes a permanent relationship of dialogue with the oppressed‘ (2018 [1968]: 68).

15 Pedagogy, Empathy and Praxis: Using theatrical traditions to teach (2020) begins this entanglement from a teacher-training perspective, but here I want to shift beyond the educational walls of a classroom to more pedestrian considerations.

16 For more, see Condillac’s treatise on the sensations (1930 [1754]) or Foster’s detailed account of this work in her 2005 essay ‘Choreographing empathy’.

17 ‘Cultural synthesis does not deny the differences between the two views; indeed, it is based on these differences. It does deny the invasion of one by the other, but affirms the undeniable support each gives to the other’ (Freire 2018 [1968]).