Dancing bodies as impulses for democracy: A Dance Philosophical Approach on Body-Thinking
Dancing bodies as impulses for democracy: A Dance Philosophical Approach on Body-Thinking

Summary/Abstract: In my paper, I discuss the question whether dancing bodies might be relevant for democracy. I will refer to the recently created performance, Dancing bodies as impulses for democracy? (Subsidized by the city of Starnberg and premiered in April 2019 in ‘Schlossberghalle’ Starnberg, Germany). I explain my approach with reference to the semiotic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, relating Peirce’s categories to that performance. I discuss whether dancing bodies open a path to a pre-symbolic area. In this pre-symbolic area, the image of bodies does not pose relevance yet. I explore the idea that this pre-symbolic area opens a space for communication and a mode of imagining as well as thinking. Communication, the mode of imagining and thinking are thereby possibly not yet influenced by final categories. This opens the opportunity for images, habitually coded by pre-fixed structures, to become intangible, blurred and therefore deconstructed. Moreover, the pre-symbolic area I am exploring opens the possibility for disciplinary structures to be recognized and dissolved. The subject thereby gets access to a mode, which I call transversality, where transversality here is a realm open to differences and thereby to ‘transversal freedom’. More importantly, I discuss my approach to dance philosophy as well as to performance philosophy, which I have been researching and developing over a long period of time. This approach I call body-thinking (Baumgartner, 2016, pp. 8-13). Body-thinking is not my invention: it is mentioned in many contexts concerning body intelligence. However, as I am using it, body-thinking, on the one hand, is meant to be body intelligence, but on the other hand there is emphasis on a semiotic structure of quality of feelings as firstness, impulse-resistance as dyadic relation (called secondness), and structure as thirdness. It means to thematize the body as sign creating entity by a mode of moving, feeling, perceiving to realize thinking – as a thinking-in-motion with enhanced perception, and its structure is an open creative process in the transversal of differences. Body-thinking can be experienced as well in the art of performance, as in dance and in other modes of a creative interacting with the world where body and mind are integrated.

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