Review Essay Political Theory

Volume 35 Number 6
December 2007 816-824
© 2007 Sage Publications
Politics and Moving Bodies 10.1177/0090591707307607
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Social Choreography: Ideology and Performance in Dance and Everyday

Movement, by Andrew Hewitt. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
254 pp. $22.95 (paper).

Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, by Mark B. N. Hansen.

New York: Routledge, 2006. 327 pp. $24.95 (paper).

Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty, by Erin Manning.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 195 pp. $22.50 (paper).

The body is something without which politics is unthinkable while also

something political theory finds particularly elusive. When making con-
ceptual sense of this most volatile and fugitive of entities, political philoso-
phers and others have generally been faced with three options. First, buy
into the familiar Cartesian thought-experiment which foregrounds a ratio-
nal subject to which the body is at best a necessary support system: this is
the option embraced by much of western liberal political theory. Or, and
second, examine the processes and practices through which bodies materi-
alize as contested political objects. This is the option most often associated
with the work of feminist scholars such as Judith Butler, and with elements
of the work of Michel Foucault. A third option rejects the dualism of the
first while also going beyond the more critically acidic incarnations of the
second. And it does so by taking seriously the wager that any attempt to
think politically is necessarily layered by the perceptual, affective, and
kinesthetic forces of the body. Thinkers who have taken this option, or at
least to have encouraged others to do so, include Benedict de Spinoza,
Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dewey, and, more recently, Luce Irigaray,
Richard Shusterman, William Connolly, and Brian Massumi.
Of the three options, the third is arguably the most politically difficult to
carry off because it raises a number of particularly challenging questions.
How is it possible to affirm the body as a source of political sense-making
in the wake of its implication in the choreographic politics of various forms
of totalitarianism? How does one apprehend the body as a source of politi-
cal thinking without placing primacy upon representation, when represen-
tation so often provides the political frame within which bodies are defined

816

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 McCormack / Politics and Moving Bodies 817

and contested—conceptually, aesthetically, and critically? In such a con-

text, claiming bodies as political in more than representational terms—for
instance, through their affective resonance—can appear to undermine much
of the political purchase of theory. And, finally, how can one apprehend the
political force of bodies when the stuff of which they consist always threat-
ens to exceed the capacities and categories of cognitive thinking?
In each of their respective books, Andrew Hewitt, Mark Hansen, and
Erin Manning provide a series of provocative pathways along which to
think through these questions. Hewitt seeks to revisit and revise the ideo-
logical dimension of the aesthetics of dance and movement, Hansen
explores how new media and digital technologies afford opportunities for
rethinking the politics of affective embodiment, and Erin Manning experi-
ments with the sensing body in order to exemplify a politics of invention.
Despite their differences, each serves to foreground the political problems
and promise of bodies moving in at least three senses: physically, insofar as
they feature human bodies dancing, walking, touching, and gesturing;
affectively, in the sense that their lines are animated by encounters with the
intensity of relations operating prior to the identification of bodies as indi-
viduals; and ontogenetically, insofar as they unsettle any conception of
bodily movement defined in terms of the spatio-temporal displacement of a
self-contained entity.

What is the relation between the aesthetics of choreographed bodies and

political ideologies? This is the question posed by Andrew Hewitt in his
discussion of critical responses to the aesthetics of dance and movement
practices during a period from the middle of the nineteenth century until the
early decades of the twentieth. Hewitt’s answer is that such practices are not
ideological to the extent that they reflect preexistent aesthetic forms whose
political content is already over-determined. Rather, aesthetics, and there-
fore also the aesthetic element of ideology, is immanent to the performative
enactment of bodies in movement. And dance is a particularly privileged
practice in this regard, having “served as the aesthetic medium that most
consistently sought to understand art as something immanently political”
(p. 6).
The social choreography in the title of Hewitt’s book does more than to
denote the fact that all choreography takes place within a socio-political
context. Rather, it provides a conceptual vehicle through which Hewitt

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818 Political Theory

works to understand ideology as the dynamic, corporeal enactment of a

political unconscious to which aesthetics is immanent rather than some-
thing from which aesthetics is abstracted. Aesthetic practices are positioned
here along a continuum ranging from unformalized somatic activities—
such as walking and stumbling—to highly codified and obviously choreo-
graphed practices such as theatrical dance. The key point here is that social
choreography is not simply the imposition of order from without, but is a
kind of kinesthetic ideology: a performative articulation of, and experi-
mentation with, the relation between aesthetics and politics, a “space in
which social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed” (p. 4). As
such, social choreography can be said to reveal the immanence, following
Jacques Rancière (a figure notably absent from Hewitt’s discussion), of dis-
tributions of the “sensible that structure the manner in which the arts can be
perceived and thought of as forms of art and as forms that inscribe a sense
of community.”1
Writing critically about the historical transformation and political reso-
nance of a practice resistant to textual models of criticism is particularly
difficult, a fact of which Hewitt is all too aware. Even if he seeks to avoid
rehearsing these models, of necessity Hewitt’s discussion focuses on writing
about dance and movement: by nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics
such as John Ruskin and John Martin, and by dancers including Ted Shawn
and Isadora Duncan. Such writing is political in one sense insofar as it
polices the limits of the aesthetics of movement. But in such criticism,
debates about the possibility of an authentic gesture, about the universality
of expression, about the relation between the rhythms of dance and work,
provide dynamic critical vehicles through which broader questions about
social order and organization could be posed, rehearsed, and sometimes
answered. Hewitt’s discussion of the critical articulation of such questions
is rich and tightly woven, and he moves deftly between a range of thinkers,
critics, and dancers. For instance, drawing upon and extending Giorgio
Agamben’s notes about the politics of gesture, Hewitt argues that the col-
lapse of a system of bourgeois gesture in the nineteenth century and the
subsequent emergence of a systematic interest in the legibility of gesture
were both indicative of a concern with hegemonic rather than coercive
forms of social choreography.
Elsewhere, in a chapter titled “America Makes Me Sick,” Hewitt explores
the relation between aesthetic embodiment and ideologies of the nation
through a discussion of the emergence of modern dance in the United States
in the early decades of the twentieth century. For contemporaneous critics
such as John Martin, dance offered an aesthetic praxis that cut through the

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 McCormack / Politics and Moving Bodies 819

artifice of a text-based model of national culture that valued literacy above

all else. This claim had geopolitical resonance, and not just because it
championed modern dance as an authentic expression of the enthusiasm of
the American national “body electric.” Rather, what American modern dance
“pioneers” had discovered was a universal form of extra-literate cultural
expression, through which national consciousness could finally be actual-
ized in its fullness. Thus, the ideological power of modern dance, argues
Hewitt, is precisely a function of the claims by its critics and champions to
have revealed an extra-ideological form of universal cultural expression,
one undetermined by any previous cultural practice. Yet this, the point at
which Hewitt’s analysis is most perceptive, is also the point at which the
limits of his analysis are revealed. For in his suspicion of any attempt to
“ground” identity and/or community in a pre-discursive or pre-ideological
context, it becomes impossible for Hewitt to affirm any political sense or
sensibility that might operate prior to ideology, however immanent. The
result is a critical narrative whose details are interesting but whose political
punch line consists of what is by now a well-rehearsed effort to reveal the
duplicitous nature of both affect and aesthetics.

II

How then might we begin to develop a politics that takes seriously and
indeed affirms affective and aesthetic processes operating prior to ideology
while at the same time holding on to a sense of what is at stake in terms of
the wider relations within which these processes are always articulated?
One way is to consider the politics of bodies in relation to questions of tech-
nology. This is what Mark Hansen does in his discussion of how digital
technologies and new media complicate the matter and experience of
embodiment. In contrast to earlier, hyperbolae-fuelled accounts of digital
technologies in which bodies were rendered redundant in virtual worlds,
Hansen argues that the proliferation and ubiquity of digital technology fore-
grounds the fundamentally “mixed” nature of experience and reality. Put
another way, digital technologies have revealed the infra-empirical and pre-
personal technicity of sense-making: the fact that experience is always
facilitated through the primordial relation of organism to environment. In
foregrounding the constitutive technicity of embodiment Hansen turns to a
range of thinkers, including Brian Massumi, José Gil, and Gilbert Simondon
(each of whom also figures prominently in Manning’s book). His key
source of theoretical support is, however, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: indeed,

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820 Political Theory

one of Hansen’s central aims is to demonstrate how, in its later stages,

Merleau-Ponty’s thinking was beginning to move toward what might be
called a post-phenomenological approach to embodiment. Crucial to the
credibility of Hansen’s championing of Merleau-Ponty in this way is the
latter’s distinction between body-image and body-schema. If the former can
be understood as the visual apprehension of the body as external object,
body schema is a moving, pre-personal, and non-intentional mode of pri-
mordial tactile sensing of the world, from which body-image is a derivative
“emanation.” This body-schema is not self-contained, nor is it self-coinci-
dent, but achieves a dynamic consistency through relations of exterioriza-
tion. The sensory technicity of the body is akin to an ongoing generative
spatialization, of which discrete sensory registers such as vision and touch
are therefore understood as second-order differentiations.
Digital and performance art provide particularly privileged spaces of
aesthetic experiment within which the question of the originary technicity
of embodiment can be properly posed. In this sense digital art functions for
Hansen in the manner of what William Connolly calls a technique of think-
ing: an activity or practice which reveals the nature of the mixed reality
from which thinking—and politics—is emergent, while also expanding the
range of ways in which it might be possible to work upon and modify ele-
ments of that reality.2 The particular provocation of Hansen’s argument in
this respect is revealed in his deployment of “race as a privileged topos for
experimenting with the radical potentialities afforded by new media for
transforming how we conceptualize identity in general” (p. 140). For
Hansen, the political import of technologies such as the Internet is not the
degree to which they efface or erase the category of race as part of a post-
identity political culture. Rather, by decoupling identity from visual signi-
fication, they generalize the necessity of performing, or “passing for,” as a
technique of identity maintenance. This becomes not so much an opportu-
nity for discarding the off-line body but for drawing attention to how any
form of identity politics involves a common impropriety: the erasure of the
singularity of lived experience as a kind of constitutive excess irreducible
to the categories of the social.
For Hansen, the politics of racialization is not therefore to be apprehended,
or indeed challenged at the level of socio-culturally coded identification, but at
a more fundamental, universal level of embodied differentiation: affectivity.
Through affectivity it becomes possible to affirm a kind of pre-individual
commonality operating or “resonating” prior to identity, and to refigure
resistance—to the social categories of race and/or to the commodification
of social life—in terms of the potential to amplify this commonality. The

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 McCormack / Politics and Moving Bodies 821

political value of certain kinds of digital technologies and, indeed, of vari-

ous modes of architectural and textual experimentation is, therefore, pre-
cisely the opportunity they afford for generating contexts within which this
affective commonality is registered and potentially reworked.
If a future Hewitt were to look for a critic through which to get a sense
of how late twentieth- and early twenty-first century concerns about the
relation between technology and embodiment became the occasion for
political experimentation, then he would not need to look much further than
Hansen. Read alongside New Philosophy for New Media and the forthcom-
ing Politics of Presencing, Bodies in Code provides an excellent reference
point for any attempt to orient political thinking in contemporary mixed
reality.3 Yet a future Hewitt might remark upon the following assertion
made by Hansen in the context of a discussion of the work of Franz Fanon:
“Racial difference, indeed racism, is lived at a deeper level than gender dif-
ference (at least as contemporary feminists tend to conceptualize it): it does
not concern cultural intelligibility, but rather the embodied preconditions
for acquiring such intelligibility in the first place” (p. 153). The contempo-
rary feminists to whom Hansen refers here include Judith Butler and Gail
Weiss—but not, interestingly, Donna Haraway, a figure whose work might
complicate Hansen’s rather broad-brush categorization. For Hansen, thinkers
such as Butler and Weiss can only conceive of gender in terms that leave
the technicity of embodiment unexamined. While there is something to this
critique, by dismissing such theorists Hansen fails to account for how
gender might be understood as anything other than a second-order socio-
cultural epiphenomenon. A more adequate response to the critique of the
linguistic materialism of thinkers such as Butler might be to ask how
gender emerges from the very technicity of moving bodies.

III

Erin Manning provides a possible answer to this question as part of her

articulation of an exemplary account of the political potential of sensing-
moving bodies. For Manning, the question of “what a body can do is a
question of engendering” (p. 85). Acknowledging the limitations of Butler’s
work, albeit in a more generous manner than Hansen, Manning displaces
questions of gender in favor of the process of engendering: a kind of trans-
ductive individuation, an ongoing qualitative transformation of material
operating prior to the individual organism, prior to gender, but from which
new configurations of gender, irreducible to socio-cultural legibility, have

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822 Political Theory

the potential to emerge. In articulating this version of engendering as the

processual materialization of genderings to come, Manning shares with
Hansen the claim that sensing discloses the originary technicity of moving
bodies rather than returning us to some state of experiential purity. But
where Hansen develops this argument through a re-reading of Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology of the flesh, the style and energy of Manning’s
argument is a compelling demonstration of how, following Spinoza and
Deleuze, it is possible to put political thinking in motion by working
through the relational capacities of moving bodies.
Manning’s aim is to use these capacities in order to unsettle those state-
centric theories that grid, fix, bound, and border corporeality, and that
locate certain choreographic forms within national territories and cultures.
Such attempts to spatialize the body politic have obvious risks: a point also
well made by Hewitt in his discussion of how modern dance resonated in
different ways with the geopolitical imaginaries and aspirations of the
United States and Germany. Yet, while Manning is certainly right to ques-
tion the sovereign territorial logics of efforts to define the essence of bod-
ies, there is a risk here that any attempt to theorize the state becomes
understood as mutually exclusive of the effort to develop a corporeally
charged style of thinking. Thus, in a brief reference to Thomas Hobbes,
Manning claims that his “citizen becomes the rational modern subject who
is represented as anything but a sensing body in movement” (p. 159). While
I would not want to mount an unqualified defense of Hobbes, there are at
least hints that his thinking is open to the importance of the kind of body
affirmed by Manning. As Samantha Frost has argued, while the Hobbesian
subject has often been conceived of as a rational actor, he also suggests that
“we must conceive of our bodies as bearing and generating political mean-
ing and consequently as having important effects on the environment within
which we engage with others.”4
Manning can be forgiven for not expending much effort contributing to
the emergence of a new Hobbes: she does more than enough by making a
powerful case for the importance of the new Spinoza, and his familiar
question—what can a body do? As Manning demonstrates, this question
needs to be understood in terms of the generative, or ontogenetic quality of
bodies: the fact that bodies do not simply move in a pre-constituted space,
but rather in moving are generative of space-times. Bodies, as modes of
inventive spacing and timing, have the potential to disclose individuations
operating prior to identity—a point at which Manning’s politics of touch
resonates with Hansen’s claims about the political potential of digital
technologies. If digital technology and new media provide the sphere of

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 McCormack / Politics and Moving Bodies 823

experimentation within which Hansen thinks through this potential, Manning

turns to dance and, more specifically, to Tango. Tango works particularly
well as vehicle through which Manning’s argument is exemplified. First,
Tango is implicated in a particularly interesting geography of displacement:
ostensibly rooted in the cultural space of Argentine identity, it is also the
product of the movement of choreographic practice across time and space.
Tango therefore discloses the ongoing excess of moving bodies, their
capacities to resist fixing through ongoing “transculturation.” Then, and
second, as a choreographic form, Tango is particularly well suited as an
exemplification of the kind of micro-politics of invention enabled by touch.
Tango foregrounds the importance of gesture as the politics, following
Agamben, of touch as pure means without end. Touch is never an opening
onto a moment of pure, authentic communication, but a “reaching towards”
involving bodies that are never coincident with themselves in the first place.
Nor is touch offered as an antidote to modes of political violence. As
Manning is careful to insist, this is no warm fuzzy vision of happy togeth-
erness, but an ongoing acknowledging of how touch carries within it the
potential for violence: touch always involves the generative production of
time-space in ways that might impinge upon or disrupt the “relational
matrices” of moving bodies. Yet even if it is always potentially violent, the
violence of touch is “productive rather than policing” (p. 63).
As her vivid descriptions of the practice of Tango reveal, the political
moment of this dance does not so much involve the transcendence of cer-
tain techniques and roles within a choreographic tradition, but the negotia-
tion of this tradition through an inventive modification of space-time prior
to individual identity. This is related to a third, and final way in which
Manning’s account of the politics of Tango is exemplary: the fact that she
herself is a dancer. Participation is not a precondition for thinking or writ-
ing about this, or any kind of dance practice. But it demonstrates a (still all
too rare) commitment to the cultivation of thinking-spaces in which mov-
ing bodies are generative of movements of thought that resonate across time
and space. Such participation, and the radical empiricism from which it
draws support, amplifies the force of Manning’s repeated assertion that
affirming the moving body as becoming in excess of itself both precipitates
a politics of invention and experiment, and requires the production of con-
ceptually and empirically rich environments within which such invention
and experiments might take place.
Manning’s persuasive affirmation of a politics of inventiveness serves to
intensify one of the key points to emerge, albeit in different ways, from
each of these three texts: any attempt to think through moving bodies is

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824 Political Theory

inevitably entangled in processes operating prior to webs of socio-linguis-

tic signification. This claim is not necessarily new, but it is a particularly
insistent refrain within these texts. Where Hewitt responds to it by rework-
ing the political purchase of ideology, Hansen and Manning offer elements
of a conceptual vocabulary for a politics more open to the generative capac-
ity of moving bodies. Their respective contributions do not claim to offer a
fully choreographed map of what a political body can do: but they remind
us that bodies do politics in more ways than we think.

Derek P. McCormack
Oxford University, Oxford, UK

Notes
1. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004), 14.
2. William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002).
3. Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
4. Samantha Frost, “Faking it: Hobbes’s Thinking-Bodies and the Ethics of Dissimulation,”
Political Theory 29 (February 2001): 48-49.

Derek P. McCormack is a lecturer in human geography at the Oxford University Centre for
the Environment, where he is a member of the Technological Natures research cluster. He is
also a fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, and his work focuses on the questions of affectiv-
ity, the moving body, and philosophies of spatiality.

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