Social Choreography

Hewitt Andrew Hewitt

Description

Through the concept of "social choreography" Andrew Hewitt demonstrates how choreography has served not only as metaphor for modernity but also as a structuring blueprint for thinking about and shaping modern social organization. Bringing dance history and critical theory together, he shows that ideology needs to be understood as something embodied and practiced, not just as an abstract form of consciousness. Linking dance and the aesthetics of everyday movement-such as walking, stumbling, and laughter-to historical ideals of social order, he provides a powerful exposition of Marxist debates about the relation of ideology and aesthetics.Hewitt focuses on the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth and considers dancers and social theorists in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States. Analyzing the arguments of writers including Friedrich Schiller, Theodor Adorno, Hans Brandenburg, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer, he reveals in their thinking about the movement of bodies a shift from an understanding of play as the condition of human freedom to one prioritizing labor as either the realization or alienation of embodied human potential. Whether considering understandings of the Charleston, Isadora Duncan, Nijinsky, or the famous British chorus line the Tiller Girls, Hewitt foregrounds gender as he uses dance and everyday movement to rethink the relationship of aesthetics and social order.

Sujets

• Social theory
• Dance

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 08 avril 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386582
• Langue: English

Extrait

S O C I A L C H O R E O G R A P H Y

P O S T C O N T E M P O R A R Y I N T E R V E N T I O N S

SeriesEditors:StanleyFishandFredricJameson

Social Choreography

I D E O L O G Y A S P E R F O R M A N C E I N D A N C E

A N D E V E R Y D A Y M O V E M E N T

Andrew Hewitt

Duke University Press

Durham and London

2005

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Contents

Introduction: Social Choreography and the Aesthetic Continuum 1

1 The Body of Marsyas: Aesthetic Socialism and the Physiology of the Sublime 37

2 Stumbling and Legibility: Gesture and the Dialectic of Tact 78

3 ‘‘America Makes Me Sick!’’: Nationalism, Race, Gender, and Hysteria 117

4 The Scandalous Male Icon: Nijinsky and the Queering of Symbolist Aesthetics 156

5 From Woman to Girl: Mass Culture and Gender Panic 177

Notes Index

213 249

Introduction

S O C I A L C H O R E O G R A P H Y A N D

T H E A E S T H E T I C C O N T I N U U M

In 1796 Friedrich Schiller—arguably the nineteenth-century’s leading proselytizer and disseminator of an idealist aesthetic of bourgeois humanism—chided the tardy contributor of an essay on dance to the following year’s issue ofMusenalmanach for not profiting from ‘‘the ∞ newly awakened interest in this art.’’ In contrast, by the beginning of the twentieth century Havelock Ellis—a significant champion of dance—could cite as characteristic a contemporary’s 1906 evaluation that ‘‘the ballet is now a thing of the past and, with the modern change ≤ of ideas, a thing that is never likely to be resuscitated.’’ The historical arc traced between these two aesthetic assessments serves nicely to map out the field of the central arguments in this book. A dance histo- rian might wish to demonstrate what ‘‘went wrong’’ with theatrical dance in the years that separate these assessments—and, indeed, to explain why Ellis, a fervent amateur and promoter of dance, would himself in turn so quickly and definitively be proved wrong. This book is not a work of dance history in that sense, however—although it does seek to suggest new interpretive paradigms of interest to dance histo- rians and critical theorists alike. When my consideration here of social choreography does focus on dance in the stricter, or theatrical, sense of

2 Social Choreography

the word, the aim is neither to produce an immanent dance history— examining the emergence of certain forms and codes according to an internal logic—nor, indeed, to locate dance within a broader social history. The historical claims I make in this volume might be said to work in the opposite direction: they are claims for the historical agency of the aesthetic as something that is not merely shaped but also shaping within the historical dynamic. By attempting to reconnect to a more radical sense of the aesthetic as something rooted in bodily experience, I use the category of social choreography as a way of examining how the aesthetic is not purely superstructural or purely ideological. Social cho- reography is an attempt to think about the aesthetic as it operates at the very base of social experience. Substantiating such claims might begin by returning to Schiller. Even though the general ‘‘newly awakened interest’’ of which he writes was aroused by performances of theatrical dance, Schiller’s own interest lay primarily (although not exclusively) in dance as asocialphenomenon. In a famous passage from a letter of 1793 to Christian Körner, he writes:

I can think of no more fitting image for the ideal of social conduct than an English dance, composed of many complicated figures and perfectly executed. A spectator in the gallery sees innumerable movements inter- secting in the most chaotic fashion, changing direction swiftly and without rhyme or reason, yet.gnediniocllevris so ordered Everything that the one has already yielded his place when the other arrives; it is all so skillfully, and yet so artlessly, integrated into a form, that each seems only to be following his own inclination, yet without ever getting in the way of anybody else. It is the most perfectly appropriate symbol of the ≥ assertion of one’s own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.

In a sense, it is the history of Schiller’s observation that I trace in this book; that is, dance not simply as a privileged figure for social order but as the enactment of a social order that is both reflected in and shaped by aesthetic concerns. The English dance, for Schiller, is not just an exampleof the existing social order but rather amodelfor that order. For him, the force of his observation lies not in the description of an En- glish aesthetic and social phenomenon but in the prescription it entails for his German contemporaries. Schiller gazes at a social dance from the gallery, as if observing a theatrical performance, while with the same regard looking across to England for a model of social organiza-

Introduction 3

tion. My central presupposition in this book is that Schiller’s project of what I will call social choreography has been dehistoricized and de- politicized by a prevailing modernist understanding of choreography as an essentially metaphysical phenomenon oriented around questions of transcendental subjectivity rather than social and political intersub- jectivity. What is at stake in proposing an analysis of social choreogra- phy is a threefold determination of the modern: namely, a redefinition of modernism as an aesthetic program; a rethinking of modernization as a social process of rationalization that would not, as is generally assumed, compartmentalize and trivialize aesthetic experience; and, finally, a rethinking of the relationship of two terms—aesthetic moder- nity and sociopolitical modernity—that have either been taken to be irremediably at odds or assumed to be reducible to each other. Certainly Schiller’s own writing on dance elsewhere—specifically the famous poemTanDerz—does use dance as the figure for a self- transcending aesthetic in which spirit and body are taken up into each other and the subject completed/annulled. This sublation, however, is not itself one that negates historical time. It was only with the symbol- ists of the late nineteenth century along with their international ava- tars that the figure of the dancer would be most definitively removed to the realms of the metaphysical. In the writings of Théophile Gautier from the mid-nineteenth century—but most markedly since the end of that century, with Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous essays inspired by the dances of Loïe Fuller—the figure of the dancer within the project of aesthetic modernism has generally served to invoke aesthetic experi- ence in its most self-enclosing and immanent yet transcendent aes- thetic form. In the moment of the dance, the possibility of a movement beyond the limitations of the body is paradoxically embodied; human potential supposedly resides as much in the vital energies that move and displace the body through space as it does in the contingent mate- ∂ riality of the body itself. In this study, by contrast, I use the term social choreography to denote a tradition of thinking about social order that derives its ideal from the aesthetic realm and seeks to instill that order directly at the level of the body. In its most explicit form, this tradition has observed the dynamic choreographic configurations produced in dance and sought to apply those forms to the broader social and politi- cal sphere. Accordingly, such social choreographies ascribe a funda- mental role to the aesthetic in its formulation of the political.