This article was originally published in Dance Research Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1, Summer 2002

1. INTRODUCTION
This article is concerned with epistemological questions of dance, more specifically, the nature of dance knowledge. The aim is to address the question of the role of our bodily activity and the tactile-kinaesthetic sense in epistemology and to clarify the concept “bodily knowledge”, knowing in and through the body. First, it reflects on the standpoints of traditional epistemology and a feminist critique of it. Next, extending the concern with epistemological inquiry of dance knowledge, it explores Sondra Fraleigh’s and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s notions of cognitive capacities of the moving body. Then, setting out from the groundwork of Edmund Husserl’s, Edith Stein’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, the paper uses some key concepts from Michael Polanyi’s epistemology to describe the nature of bodily knowledge. It will be argued that there is a distinction and a connection between ‘skill’ and ‘knowledge’ in respect of the body’s movement. Gilbert Ryle’s “know how” implies abilities ranging from bodily skills to abstract contemplative cases, but it cannot explain know how in the absence of skill. Thus, the rationale underlying this discussion can be put more clearly by asking why dance teachers are able to teach to dance students’ movements they can no longer execute themselves.

2. TRADITIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND FEMINISM
Epistemology typically addresses issues like the role of sensory perception in knowledge development, types of knowledge, the difference between knowing and believing, and the degree of certainty in knowledge. Since Plato the traditional philosophical account of knowledge has defined knowledge as “justified true belief”. The definition of knowledge has been called propositional knowledge in the twentieth-century Anglo-American analytic philosophy. To understand any proposition is to know under which conditions it is true and under which it is false. A justified true belief can be knowledge when it is derived from a reliable method. The major question occupying traditional epistemology concerns necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge: a set of conditions that would be logically structured so as to prevent the possibility of a knowledge claim’s being shown to be false. This has anything to do with how one knows, if one does knows. In fact, the question has been whether we can know at all (Duran 1994, 89). Thus, traditional epistemology is focused more on epistemic justification than on the nature of knowledge (Pollock 1986, 7).1
Another traditional area of inquiry for epistemology has been the debate over the extent to which our knowledge stems from the senses or whether we ought to think of its foundations as being nonsensory. According to empiricists, knowledge is derived from what is given in perception. Rationalists, in contrast to perceptual or empirical knowledge, tend to assert the possibility of innate knowledge: the source of knowledge is usually defined as “what is known independently of experience”, or perhaps as “what is known on the basis of reason alone”. The traditional analysis of empirical knowledge claims that a person has empirical knowledge of a proposition, p, if and only if that person has empirically justified true belief in p (Moser 1986, 3). This analysis suggests that what perception provides is not itself knowledge, but becomes knowledge after some “transformation” (Dancy 1985, 2). This transformation entails conceptualising perception, formulating “propositions” regarding perception. This implies that traditional epistemology with its notion of propositional knowledge does not recognise as knowledge, for instance, knowledge of how to ride a bicycle unless it can be shown to be reducible to propositions (1985, 23). In other words, knowledge must be clearly articulated in order to count as real knowledge. Epistemology, on this showing, is explicitly normative and formal, it is concerned with whether we have acted well or badly, responsibly or irresponsibly, in forming the belief we have.
Feminist work has criticised the primary interests of traditional epistemology, which seem to allow no role for subjectivity in the formation of knowledge (Lennon & Whitford 1991, 2). In traditional epistemology, being has been divorced from knowing and both have been separated from either ethics or politics. Jane Flax points out:

“These divisions were blessed by Kant and transformed by him into a fundamental principle derived from the structure of mind itself. A consequence of this principle has been the enshrining within mainstream Anglo-American philosophy of a rigid distinction between fact and value which has had the effect of consigning the philosopher to silence on issues of utmost importance to human life. Furthermore, it has blinded philosophers and their interpreters to the possibility that apparently insoluble dilemmas within philosophy are not the product of the immanent structure of the human mind and/or nature but rather reflect distorted or frozen social relations (1983, 248).”

The traditional epistemology yields a perspective that is a “God’s eye view” or a “view from nowhere” (Lazreg 1991, 83). The conception of knowledge does not reflect on the subject who produces it. As Flax asserts, knowledge is the product of human beings. Since all knowers are situated, –historically, culturally, socially, spatially, temporally, kinaesthetically– these dimensions of situation all become part of the epistemological context. Each being has its own life history and perception, its own pattern of structurally coupled interaction with the world. This implies that knowledge is always self-referential and reveals something about the knower. In other words, knowledge bears marks of its producer. And because knowing has bodily roots, it is also to some extent unique. Although the significance of uniqueness and the knowing subject is here emphasised, it is difficult simply to abandon objectivity entirely or the referential claims of knowledge as conceived in traditional epistemology.
Feminism’s most compelling epistemological insight lies in the connections it has established between knowledge and power (Lennon & Whitford 1991, 2). Many feminists, drawing on Foucault’s account of the practice of self, argue that power not only prevents, it also enables (Martin 1992, 284). Knowledge enables us to perceive, act, and move in a world, and as we act, perceive and move, the world comes forth as a result of our actions and observations (Krogh and Roos 1995, 51). Epistemological objectivity with its anonymity, impersonality, detachment and impartiality may lead to the constitution of knowers as mere objects of knowledge rather than as subjects acting within a historically changing environment and reflecting back on the knower. Epistemological considerations in feminism no longer mean merely developing knowledge about women, in which women feature as the objects of knowledge; they also involve an understanding the subjective process whereby women understand, create and use knowledge. This implies understanding women as the subjects of knowledge, subjects both in the sense of being subject to and shaped by the social forces constituting particular forms of knowledge, and in the sense of intentionally creating and using new forms of knowledge to transform those social forces (Crowley and Himmelweit 1992, 1).
Nevertheless, feminist epistemology is neither a specification of a female way of knowing nor simply the articulation of female subjectivity (Lennon & Whitford 1991, 13). Feminist epistemology consists rather in attention to epistemological concerns arising out of feminist projects, which prompt refection on the nature of knowledge and our means of attaining it. Some feminists have surmised that a feminist epistemology might be an answer to a “masculinist epistemology”, but it does not seem to be an answer to the current “western” crisis of knowledge (Sartori 1991, 58).
The growing recognition in many human disciplines is that the traditional conception of cognition, equating it with verbal and symbolic conceptualisation and its focus on the criteria of justification, is inadequate to describe or explain the varieties of modes in which human knowing occurs and by which human knowing may be represented (Reimer 1992, 27). Not only philosophers and feminists, but also social scientists, historians, organisation researchers and aestheticians have been urgently addressing epistemological questions why not dance scholars?

3. TOWARD AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL INQUIRY OF DANCE KNOWLEDGE
The dancer wrestles with sensations and images of movement, its meaning, quality, shapes, textures, struggling to capture some half-grasped or intuitive complexity of visual-kinetic form. As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone states, thinking in movement we discover the fundamental creative pattern of thought that is founded upon a kinetic bodily logos (1999, 491). Dancing is hardly less rational than conceptual thinking, although the medium is different. Some dancers are more talented than others; however, all of them have knowledge of movement. Knowing in dancing has always something to do with verbal language; nevertheless, it concerns essentially the body’s awareness and motility. If we acknowledge that dancers know something and that for the most part their knowing is nonverbal, it leads us to ask: What do they know, and even more importantly, How do they know?
The often stated but rarely analysed issue of dance studies concerns the question of the knowing in and through the body. Although the intuition of “bodily knowledge” has been around for a long time in dance practice and dance research, the intuition of bodily knowledge is not yet articulated adequately. In exploring issues related to knowing in and though the body, both Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Sondra Fraleigh have appealed to cognitive psychology and phenomenology. Fraleigh says:

“Indeed, we commonly speak of skill in dance as a form of knowledge and also speak of kinesthetic intelligence as an aspect of skilful dancing. But dance involves more than just knowing how to do a movement. It also involves knowing how to express the aesthetic intent of the movement and how to create aesthetic movement imagery. All of these forms of knowing how are forms of bodily lived (experiential) knowledge. As such, they are avenues for self-knowledge (1987, 26).”

Fraleigh argues that dance knowledge involves more than bodily skills or knowing how to do movements. She comes to the conclusion that all forms of knowing-how in dancing are forms of bodily lived knowledge. It seems obvious that her “bodily lived, experiential knowledge” refers to bodily knowledge, but she has already denied that possibility previously. She has reminded us that only the body-object can be known, in the sense that the body itself can become the object of our attention, but the body-subject can only be lived (1987, 15).
Fraleigh has discussed self-knowledge acquired through dancing related to Ulric Neisser’s five different kinds of knowledge that we may have of ourselves (Neisser 1988). She argues that that dancing depends on realisation of intent. For intending to dance is intending to do something more than just move. Fraleigh suggests that what we can know of ourselves through dance depends on the fulfilment of our intentions in movement. Such dancing movements provide the basis for a certain kind of self-knowledge that can be described as something known by the dancer through experience (1993, 102-103). Fraleigh discusses dance as a source for self-knowledge, but she does not analyse the ways how dancers acquire and develop knowledge for dancing (1999, 12). Furthermore, Fraleigh does not assimilate her phenomenological description of cognitive aspects in dance into a theory of knowledge. This needs to be done if the triviality and contradictions of epistemological discourse is to be overcome.
Sheets-Johnstone argues that movement is the mother of all cognition: it forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement. Her purpose is to show how our tactile-kinesthetic bodies are epistemological gateways (1999, 253). These epistemological gateways open a way to understand ourselves and the world through the movement. Through our kinesthetic consciousness we constitute ourselves as epistemological subjects. Criticising terms “embodiment” and “lived body”, her analysis goes on to show how the term “animate form” captures what we experience when we experience our own bodies and the bodies of others: animation, aliveness, dynamically changing conformations and contours, qualitatively meaningful forms. Animate form attempts to place the discussion of the living body in the context of a natural history (1999, 365). She argues that genuine understandings of consciousness demand close and serious study of evolution as a history of animate form. Focusing on animate organisms as living, moving things she attempts to show that there is no fundamental break between nonhumans and humans (1999, 133). Discussing the human body, Sheets-Johnstone attempts to adumbrate by animate form (Leib) the body’s physical matter of fact and possibilities, such as the body moves more easily forward than backward.
Sheets-Johnstone emphasises the notion that movement is foundational in an epistemological sense, addressing that an infant’s first mode of knowing is in movement. She says:

“[P]recisely in the way we intuitively knew as infants on the basis of our tactile-kinesthetic experiences, and knew without the aid of scare quotes, of qualitative happenings and vitality affects. Such knowing is a manner –or perhaps better, a style– of cognition that may be difficult for some adults to acknowledge since it is nonlinguistic and nonpropositional and, just as significantly, has no solid object on which it fastens (1999, 270).”

By “physical knowledge” she refers to a mode of a nonlinguistic and nonpropositional knowing in and through movement. Focusing on infants, she does not go on to consider how adults, for instance dancers, gain this physical knowledge in general.
My purpose is to show how this physical knowledge or bodily knowledge forms a source for dance knowledge, although the main effort concentrates on giving an evidence of the existence of bodily knowledge. The purpose is to contribute to the development of “epistemology of dance”, although it is my intention to argue that there is no autonomous domain of artistic or aesthetic knowing, but that the theory of knowledge should cover artistic production, including dancing, as well as any other human activity. I seek to consider a theory of knowledge which could explain a mode of knowing in terms of bodily movements. While concentrating mainly on contemporary dance, it is necessary to stress here that dancers as a group are not homogenous; they have very different experiences, perspectives and problematics, depending on variables such as class, country, age, culture or sexuality. Thus, the purpose is not to define dance knowledge but to approach an epistemology which can recognise the element of knowledge in a dancer’s skill. This implies that dancers are not only objects of knowledge, but subjects of knowledge, understanding the subjective process whereby they create and use knowledge (Martin 1998, 204-5).

4. A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE BODY AND EPISTEMIC OPENNESS
Edmund Husserl, in his late phenomenology, stressed that the physical body (Körper) and the living/lived body (Leib) are essentially different (1960, 97; 1970, 107). The living body is given to me in perception as my own body, not as a thing but a “phenomenon”. The physical body is a corporeal entity, properly defined as a complex of brain waves, neural pathways, circulation and muscular fibres. The physical body and the living body are on different incommunicable levels of being, they cannot be reduced to one another.
Discussing the living body given to me in perception, the German philosopher Edith Stein wishes to demonstrate that the living body is constituted in a twofold manner. Sensations are given at the living body to the living body senser. The living body perceives and is perceived by itself. Stein calls this double mode of experiencing the body the phenomenon of “fusion” (1989, 47). When I touch my left hand with the right hand, my right hand feels the cool surface of my left hand, but at the same time my left hand feels the warm surface of the palm of right hand. I am touching and touched, a twofold but one. I can transfer my awareness of the toucher and touched on the hands. According to Stein, this fusion implies that I can also see my hands, while I can feel the double given-ness of touch.
There are similarities between Stein’s dissertation of empathy (1917) and the Visible and Invisible (1964) by Merleau-Ponty, who also had access to the same unpublished manuscript of Ideas II, wherein Husserl places great emphasis on the fact that tactile sensations of my body is double (Blazer 1991, 272). For Husserl, there is a touched-touching, but not seen-seeing, since the eye cannot be seen by the seer. Merleau-Ponty restores the parallelism between touch and vision, detecting in both of them the same reversibility. However, he wants to emphasise that neither in touch nor in vision is there a complete reversibility: what touches is never quite what is touched; what sees is never quite what is seen, what sees is never quite what touched (Dastur 1984, 123). The living body’s reversibility of touching and touched, seeing and seen, seeing and touched do not coincide with each other easily, rather they escape each other in what Merleau-Ponty calls a ‘divergence’ or ‘écart’ (1968, 257). “The point” where they interweave Merleau-Ponty calls ‘chiasm’ (le chiasme). The living body is the other also to itself, since the body-self is never entirely known and perceived by itself.2 In addition, the way in which I perceive my body must be different, at least in some cases, from the way in which I perceive other creatures and things.3
For my heart, brain and liver function whether I am aware of them and their functioning or not. The same is true of my retina or my iris, but it is not true of my eyes (Schmitt 1970, 160). I can move my eyes, close my eyes, look at/on/out of/in/into/away, watch, gaze, stare at, glance. In Krisis Husserl comes to the conclusion that my kinesthetic sensations under the heading of the constitution of the living body is the “subject of the will”. The living body as executor of my choices and decisions is experienced in kinaesthetic sensations. However, the living body is nor a mere instrument of action, neither an object of action, but both the mover and the moved. What becomes increasingly important with regard to the living body in Husserl’s Krisis is the fact that the subject is intentionally related to things “through the living body”. This means that I am related to them neither as a pure ego, nor as one physical object is related to another; rather, the expression “being related via the living body” refers to the body’s motility and kinaesthetic sense (Bell 1990, 209-210). The pure ego of Husserl’s Ideas I has been transformed into the living body of Krisis; the Cartesian cogito has been replaced by something capable of ‘kinaesthesis’, that is, the original phenomenological method has been broadened to become something Husserl at one point calls ‘the phenomenological-kinetic method’(1990, 215).
Compared with Husserl’s phenomenological-kinetic method, both Sheets-Johnstone and Michael O’Donovan-Anderson discuss our tactile-kinaesthetic sense as a central organising role for perceptions as a whole (O’Donovan-Anderson 1997; Sheets-Johnstone 1999). As Sheets-Johnstone points out, we learn by moving and by listening to our own movement. We can feel, for example, the swiftness or slowness of our movement or its tensional tightness or looseness that evolves on the basis of the bodily awareness. This particular epistemic sensitivity afforded us by bodily motion allows the world to limit and guide our organisations of sensation. ’Donovan-Anderson argues that much of our knowledge is gained in the course of “our bodily negotiations” with the world, and that much of our knowledge is, indeed, constituted by these interactions, and lays the groundwork for absorbing and interpreting knowledge gathered by other means. Epistemic openness requires bodily sensitivity and responsiveness to the world, but also the living body’s awareness of itself.
Husserl sought to show that knowledge about the (physical) body and knowledge of the (living) body are of two categorically distinguishable sorts (Bell 1990, 211). Knowledge about the body is little different in kind from the knowledge I have of any arbitrary physical object. Such knowledge is based on observation, and is justified provided the observation is made responsibly and in appropriate conditions. The resulting knowledge is contingent and empirical, and can be conceptually articulated. However, there is another form of knowledge which stands in sharp contrast to knowledge about the body. I can reach out, grasp a coffee cup with my hand, pick it up, and put it down in another place. I do not need first to locate my hand, to ascertain its position in objective space on the basis of observation, in order to go about moving it or using it to perform some task. This implies that in normal circumstances I know where my hand is, that its position is given to me. This sort of knowledge cannot be assimilated to the conceptually articulated or empirical mode. When I move my hand normally, I do not first judge or acquire a belief that a certain state of affairs obtains, namely, that my hand occupies such-and-such a position in space.
O’Donovan-Anderson reminds us that the motions of the disabled are no less epistemically valuable than are the more predictably smooth bodily motions of the “fully-abled”. In the case of cerebral palsy the range, for instance, the fluidity and predictability of muscle movement is severely restricted, so that in the course of reaching for a coffee cup, a muscle spasm might cause one to reach through, instead of to, knocking the cup over. Such a mishap is hardly grounds for the claim that the person was mistaken about where the cup was, or what actions were required to reach it (O’Donovan-Anderson 1997, 123). If we agree that the knowledge of a disabled person’s lived body is epistemically valuable, we should ask what the disabled know of the moving body, of which fully-abled bodies do not?
Before I continue this discussion of bodily knowledge in terms of dancers, I turn to consider two of Michael Polanyi’s epistemological concepts which offer an epistemic openness to bodily knowledge on the basis of the reversibility of the living body.

5. TACIT AND FOCAL KNOWLEDGE
Michael Polanyi ponders why we are able to identify a human face among a thousand without being able to tell quite how, or on the basis of what, we do this.4 How can we recognise the moods of the human face, although we are unable to tell, except quite vaguely, by what signs we know it (Polanyi 1966, 4-5)? Or how can we distinguish the taste of wine from the taste of coffee or the different blends of tea? Reflecting on these questions, Polanyi came to the conclusion that “we know more than we can tell”. He argues that there is a kind of knowledge that is not explicit and articulated, but unspecifiable, implicit and tacit, and this kind of knowledge is epistemically relevant (Sanders 1988, 2).
He argues that in any activity there are two different levels or dimensions of using and acquiring knowledge, which are mutually exclusive. Knowledge about the object or phenomenon in focus he calls “focal knowledge”. Knowledge that functions as a background to what is in focus is “tacit knowledge”. The focal and tacit dimensions are complementary. Tacit knowledge assists in accomplishing a task which is in focus. For instance, reading a text, words and linguistic rules function as tacit subsidiary knowledge, while our attention is focused on the meaning of the text (Sveiby 1997). Tacit and focal are not categories or levels in a hierarchy but more like two dimensions of the same knowledge. We are switching between tacit knowing and focal knowing every second of our lives, it is a basic human ability to blend the old and well-known with the new and unforeseen, otherwise we would not be able to develop our potentials.
Polanyi stresses that tacit knowing achieves comprehension by indwelling. He insists that all knowledge consists of or is rooted in such acts of comprehension (Polanyi 1966, 55). In all our waking moments we rely on our awareness of contacts of our body with things outside in order to attend to these things. When we make a tool function, as in riding a bicycle, we incorporate it in our body –or extend our body to include it– so that we come to dwell in it (1966, 16). In this case, indwelling awareness as in cycling and focal awareness as in observing traffic and route are mutually exclusive. As a pianist practises a new piece, it moves from fumbling incompetence, from being “all fingers and thumbs”, towards a fluency which not only permits but demands that the fingers be left to themselves. Reading a piece of music, the pianist is not in general thinking his fingers on keys; that only becomes necessary when a piece requires unusual dexterity which stretches existing technique. A piece within one’s compass will take shape under the control of our vision of the meaning of the music as conveyed to us by indwelling and tacit integration (Puddefoot 1996). If a musician shifts this attention from the piece he is playing to the observation of what he is doing with his fingers while playing it, he becomes confused and may have to stop (Sveiby 1997).
Stein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of the doubleness of the living body clarifies Polanyi’s idea of tacit and focal aspects of knowing in respect of the body. When I touch my hand, I am both the toucher and the touched. The reversibility of the living body means that I can transfer my awareness of the toucher and touched on the hand. This is the almost identical idea with the musician who may shift his attention from the piece he is playing to the observation of what he is doing with his fingers. This is the living body’s reflectivity wherein it shows itself to be a being with two sides.
Polanyi emphasises that the human being’s activity is knowing as dwelling all the time. That which is tacit varies from one situation to another. Tacit knowing operates on an internal action which we are quite incapable of controlling or even feeling in itself (Polanyi 1966, 14). For Polanyi, knowledge is an activity which would be better described as a process of knowing. Polanyi thus regards knowledge as both static “knowledge” and dynamic “knowing”. When the dynamic properties are emphasised, he uses verbs like knowing or learning (Sveiby 1997).
Using the term tacit knowing, Polanyi seems to come very close to the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle`s concept “knowing-how”, but in fact he argues against Ryle. Ryle`s knowing-how does not imply a subsidiary, indwelling awareness as Polanyi`s tacit knowing does. Polanyi does not use the label at all, probably because he argues against his contemporary Ryle. “Knowing-how” is characteristic of an expert who acts, makes judgements and so forth without explicitly reflecting on the principles or rules involved. Experts work without having an explicit theory of their work; they simply perform skilfully without deliberation or focused attention.5 Ryle points out that the boxer or the surgeon or the poet all apply their special criteria when they accomplish their special tasks. They are regarded (by others) as good or bad or creative –not because of their ability to reflect over what they are doing but because of the result of their performance. Rylean “know-how” involves the skill and ability to act in social contexts, consequently, ‘how’ in the concept implies problem-solving, but not an ability to reflect on the rules.

6. BODILY KNOWLEDGE
In Polanyi’s view, all skills exhibit the structure of tacit knowing, not only bodily skills such as running, swimming, or those involving the use of tools as in cycling, but also linguistic skill as in speech and the abstract logical thinking skill required in playing chess. If we discard Rylean notion of knowing-how, we need to explore the correlation of bodily skills and the body’s reflectivity. It is the body’s reflectivity that turns back toward what living bodies can do, preceding doing, it is the possibility of doing. In this context, bodily knowledge aims to describe the living body’s movement ability, which is not doing itself, however; this learning evolves on the basis of bodily awareness, kinesthesis and perception. As mentioned above in the example of the pianist who practises a new musical piece, bodily knowledge is developed with the doubleness of tacit and focal aspects in practising the piece, but it differs from actual doing, playing the piece skilfully. The pianist’s bodily knowledge is the realisation of her/his living body’s movement ability to push and release fingers on keyboards with a certain intensity and rhythm producing sound the piece demands. Bodily knowledge does not involve a mere technique or the production of a skill; together with the body’s reflectivity it offers possibilities to choose manners to move.
In this epistemological analysis, the definition of the bodily skills is restricted, roughly speaking, in the body’s muscular acts such as playing the piano, and much more simple acts like chopping wood, typing on a typewriter, swimming the crawl. The actor him/herself is able to access whether the action has been successful or not. Since the criteria of skills are culturally, historically and socially shaped, they are usually judged by others from the results of the actor’s performance. Swimming is a skill accessible to almost anybody, and two individuals may both swim using the same technique and producing the same movements, so that their performances look the same. However, their methods of acquiring the skill, swimming, may have been different, as may the bodily schema or the body’s topography in swimming.
Thus, what is actually happening when I learn a bodily skill such as swimming? One way of viewing this is to say that I am reviving, and also reshaping, bodily schema – where “schema” implies not just form or pattern but something much more dynamic: a basic way of doing something, a manner of proceeding, a mode of acting. A schema for bodily action, such as that for doing the crawl stroke, is intermediary between image and rule, thus between the specific and the general (Casey 1996, 27). Ultimately, the water I place myself in and the body placed there teach me more than any set of words I read or hear. Our understanding of a thing is not a conceptual covering up of the real, but a revelation of the given essence of the thing by the moving, sensuous body. We are in epistemic contact with the structured world, from the very beginning, in exploring an object, in its gradual transition for us into a tool, changing constantly our focal and tacit awareness. The crawl stroke schema itself, that which I embody as I swim this stroke, is socially transmitted –and thus to some extent socially determinate. Unlike a text, the bodily schema is intrinsically indeterminate, oscillating as it does between image and rule. It is indeterminate because the body as lived and experienced is itself indeterminate: the body is the “general medium of my existence”. Not surprisingly, then, corporeal schema have no final or definitive formulation (1996, 29).
Seriously injured persons whose bodies change as a result of injuries typically need to relearn a skill, for example the ability to walk or speak. The skills which sufficed for their previous bodies are not sufficient for the production of the same external performance with their changed bodies (Turner 1994, 58). By the same token, one would suppose that if their skills could be transplanted to the bodies of another person, they would have the same kind of difficulty with the production of externally similar performances: they would need to relearn, or adapt, the habits acquired to fit with their new bodies. For bodily skills, then, sameness of external performance is not necessarily a result of sameness of internal structure (1994, 59).
As stated above, bodily knowledge does not imply the exposition of bodily skills, though there is an intimate correlation of bodily knowledge and body’s skills. The living body acquires knowledge by doing, moving itself, not only by aimless wandering, but practising socially and culturally shaped skills. Knowledge of executing movement is sedimented in the bodily schema, which oscillates between image and rule producing varieties of choices to do movements in particular situations (Tiemersma 1989, 2912). The body chooses an appropriate movement in a situation, not automatically, but “reflectively”: by negotiation with the environment the body if necessary modifies the movement. For instance, I walk differently or I as the living body choose a different way of walking on different surfaces of the ground. When a road is slippery, there is a reflectivity between focal awareness and tacit awareness of walking. Although I can normally rely on my tacit knowing of walking as indwelling, now, I must concentrate on each step of my walking so as not to fall down on the slippery surface. I do not transform from movement discoveries in walking to literal; the body is itself capable of a knowing which is closely related to a “corporeal intellect”. Speaking of corporeal intellect, the computer could never be as “smart” as a human being not only because of its limits in simulating the behaviour of the human mind or movements, but also because it could not replicate the living body’s reflectivity.
Dancers learn to move with the result that their movements do not take place coincidentally; they acquire knowledge as indwelling awareness to produce in their bodies movements of a desired form and meaning. As Susan Foster remarks, dancers can learn curves or angles that the body can form, and place these in a particular shape at a give time (Foster 1997, 239). Bodily knowledge enables them to make distinctions in motion. They can distinguish kinetic bodily feelings as smoothness and clumsiness, swiftness and slowness, brusqueness and gentleness, in a word, they make bodily-felt distinctions (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 57). Making bodily-felt distinctions is a process of categorising movement elements of the world. This requires sensitivity to the different qualities of movements. Learning dancing means becoming bodily sensitive in the respect of the kinaesthetic sense and one’s own motility.6 Thus, bodily knowledge is not about performing a movement skill, such as a pirouette, correctly, but the ability to find proper movements through bodily negotiation, variations of the pirouette. If dancers learn by doing, as Martha Graham has said, they not only learn to perform a movement vocabulary, as she would argue, but in becoming skilful movers, they acquire a knowledge of the human body’s motility. While dancers learn to perform a movement like a simple pirouette, they usually simultaneously have a bodily knowledge of circular motion and the balance of the body.
As we know, movement skills may disappear because of an accident or the ageing process. If we assume that knowledge of the moving body and performance of a bodily skill do not mean the same thing, then we can argue that ageing or injured dancers still have bodily knowledge. Though dancers can not perform skills any longer, they have their corporeal schema to comprehend movements in their own bodies and –through “kinesthetic empathy”– other bodies’ movements. Kinesthetic empathy means that they not only perceive, but feel the motion of other lived bodies in their corporeal schema without moving themselves (Stein 1989, 5868). This implies among other things that they (ageing or injured dancers) can teach dancing, transmit a knowledge of the moving body to dance students using smaller movements and verbal guidance, although they are unable to execute those movements themselves. In addition to bodily knowledge, of course, the teacher should have pedagogical skills to pass on knowledge and ideas of movements to students.
Polanyi identifies three mechanisms by which tacit knowledge is usually transmitted: imitation, identification and learning-by-doing. Contemporary dance teachers seem to favour learning-by-doing, avoiding mere imitation or identification in transmitting knowledge of dancing. For instance, in release technique classes a teacher does not expect that students should learn to execute a movement as the teacher does it or identify themselves to the teacher’s personal style of moving. Teaching is indirect: the focus of learning is not on the movement as such, but the quality of motion, such as the diversity of flow when the body is falling. Thus dancers learn to release the body, not only in this particular movement but in other movements as well. Teachers’ speech and linguistic expression frequently complete their bodily performance, that is, they do not try to translate their knowledge into literal form.
In describing the correlation of bodily skills and bodily knowledge, it becomes obvious that contemporary dance as an artistic activity is not a mere collection of skills which we could learn and then repeat automatically over and over again. If dancing were a simple matter of steps and turns, mere movement skills or tricks which we could learn by imitation, then a long-term dance education would not be needed. The evidence about what is learned is more than the evidence of correct behaviour; however, I do not underestimate the significance of performing bodily skills. Dance practice is not a visible object, nor is it a linguistic object such as a sentence. One cannot get a degree in dance education without acquiring some deeply rooted intellectual allegiances along the way. Clearly, it shows that dance practice is not directly accessible, and the means of accessing it indirectly is fraught with difficulties (Turner 1994, 43).
Though a dancer may have completed a formal dance education, dancers produce a new knowledge of the moving body by dancing in a choreographic process or in teaching the dance. In the choreographic process, dancers and choreographers use their previous skills and knowledge of movement and produce a new bodily knowledge of movements usually by improvisation. Making a dancework, artists acquire knowledge of movement material, how it “behaves”, and in consequence, they may incidentally discover procedures for handling the material in a new manner. In a working situation, searching for appropriate movements is also a trial-and-error process; nonetheless, we can only partly capture its internal logic. As Bourdieu argues, we tend to forget all the details of a messy, nonlinear learning process, interpolating and generalising about our own skills development (Bourdieu 1986).
Dancers and choreographers acquire knowledge of movement gradually in the process of doing dance work; thus, they cannot possess knowledge and skills of the moving body immediately, only through the path of practising dance. In other words, the dancer’s bodily knowledge is a path, developed and formed gradually during his or her career. A new skill learnt yesterday is sedimented in the dancer’s body, becoming his or her indwelling tomorrow. This sedimentation of skills, knowledge and experiences in the body can be regarded as a path, also a personal choice, to learn a certain movement style and to habituate the body to this vocabulary, studying and living through it (Parviainen 1998).7

7. ARTICULATED KNOWLEDGE
The paradox, in discussing bodily knowledge, is that I am trying to articulate a phenomenon that happens only in bodily awareness. This articulation cannot translate bodily knowledge to a literal form, it can only indicate the existence of bodily knowledge. As a Zen philosopher would say, the finger which points at the moon is not the moon. In a sense it is living knowledge, transmitted from a body to a body very often learning-by-doing.
Although I have emphasised here the significance of the bodily knowledge of dancers, I do not wish to underestimate articulated knowledge about dance. By articulated knowledge I simply mean a mode of knowledge, expressed in words, numbers, formulas and procedures, communicated in an exact manner, though never exclusively so. While bodily knowledge differs from “knowing-how”, articulated knowledge does not mean Rylean “knowing-that” (Ryle 1949/1984, 25-61). Ryle’s concept, “knowing-that”, involves consciously accessible knowledge that can be articulated and is characteristic of the persons learning a skill through explicit instruction, recitation of rules, attention to their movements. While such declarative knowledge is used for the acquisition of skills, it no longer becomes necessary for the practice of those skills once a student becomes an expert in exercising them.
Articulated knowledge about the body’s movement cannot replace its tacit counterpart and bodily knowledge. As Polanyi has argued, when we acquire a skill, we acquire a corresponding understanding which defies articulation. For instance, the skill of a driver cannot be replaced by a thorough schooling in the engineering of the car, or again, the knowledge I have of my own body differs altogether from the knowledge of its physiology and anatomy (Polanyi 1966, 20). When speaking of bodily knowledge of specific practices –such as dancing, playing the piano, or medical care– expertise involves bodily knowing which is not verbalisable. An expert in knowing how to do something may or may not be an expert with respect to associated articulated knowledge. For instance, an accomplished dancer may know little about the history of the Western dance. Conversely, a dance historian’s knowledge of choreography does not make her a professional choreographer. Dance researchers who are aesthetically educated to degree level, may have a great deal of articulated knowledge about dance, but that education about dance in the sense of verbal learnings about the art, does not replace education in dance (Reimer 1992, 42). Nevertheless, articulated knowledge and bodily knowledge of dance should not be treated as competitors, on the contrary, they are usually interwoven or complementary modes of profound dance knowledge.

8. CONCLUSION
I have attempted to clarify the notion of bodily knowledge that seems to have some of the interest and potential for further development, as these appear at the intersection between dance studies and epistemology. I have suggested that the traditional epistemological idea of knowledge as propositional knowledge is insufficient to explain the modes of knowing in the dance. The traditional epistemological inquiry has difficulties to explain the meaning of the bodily movement to human cognition, as Sheets-Johnstone has shown. Turning to a phenomenology of the body, I have tried to address an epistemological inquiry which is concerned with the role of the kinaesthetic sense in cognitive powers. Drawing on Michael Polanyi’s epistemology, I have analysed focal and tacit aspect of knowing and the difference between ‘skill’ and ‘knowledge’ in respect of the body’s movement.
The deepest question addressed in this paper –one which is persistently present even if seldom stated and analysed– concerns the place and meaning of bodily knowledge in the “epistemology of dance”. To attempt to epistemologically analyse bodily knowledge and its relation to bodily skills, techniques, and articulated knowledge is a central task of epistemology of dance studies, a task that points toward a synthesis of different modes of knowing in the dance field. Based on a phenomenology of the body, this epistemological consideration in dance does not mean merely developing knowledge about dancers, in which dancers feature as the objects of knowledge; they also involve an understanding of the subjective process whereby dancers understand, create and use knowledge. Nevertheless, epistemology of dance is neither a specification of dancer’s way of knowing nor simply the articulation of dancing subjectivity. The epistemology of dance consists rather in attention to epistemological concerns on the nature of dance knowledge and our means of attaining and communicating it. But a great deal of work still remains to be done in this domain. In pursuing this epistemological inquiry, we should, of course, examine ways to communicate bodily knowledge. Phenomenological studies of intersubjectivity, Stein’s notion of (kinaesthetic) empathy, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility, Emmanuel Levinas’ discussion of ethical responsibility, and with some newer findings in cognitive psychology and dance studies seem to be promising manners to continue this inquiry.

NOTES
1 It is commonplace to cite the origins of “traditional epistemology” in Plato and then Descartes, but mere citation of the relevant thinkers from the past is hardly enough. In fact, the type of theory of knowledge that we examine here is no more than approximately a century old. The epistemology is the product of the turn of the century thinking by several British thinkers most notably Bernard Russell and G. E. Moore and later work of the 1930s and 1940s by thinkers usually labelled positivists (Duran 1994, 85).

2 Merleau-Ponty 1962, xii. The phenomenological notion of the body presented here differs from Fraleigh’s idea of the body-subject as a “complete wholeness” (Fraleigh 1987, 13). However, her descriptions of “body-object” and “body-subject” follow Husserl’s distinction between the physical body and living body. The way how Sheets-Johnstone understands the living body is parallel with Husserl’s, but she hardly agrees with the centrality of reversibility in this notion of the phenomenology of the body (See Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 304).

3 Merleau-Ponty wants to generalise the phenomenon of reversibility discovered by Husserl and to think the intertwining of self and world. Reversibility characterises the body’s interactions with self, with others and with the world. The intimate relationships which reversibility makes possible between humans and humans, humans and animals, humans and things, animals and animals, animals and things are themselves grounded upon what Merleau-Ponty calls écart. Contrary to what Sheets-Johnstone states, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body does not isolate us from animals and things, on contrary, opens doors to understanding creatures other than we are (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 362-368).
There is never a total reciprocity between the others and me, but the inevitable asymmetry of the I-Other relation. Ècart precisely makes all forms of bodily differentation possible (Parviainen 1998, 67-73; Weiss 1999, 128). Merleau-Ponty wants to show us that the material world and the spiritual world are not opposed to each other, the differentation exists as a bond, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us, there is “the bond between the convex and the concave, between the solid vault and the hollow it forms” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 232). Starting from the idea of reversibility, he has elaborated a complete new idea of philosophy.

4 Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was a Hungarian medical scientist whose research was mainly done in physical chemistry before he turned to philosophy at the age of 55. He accepted a personal chair in social studies at the University of Manchester in 1948. His lectures were collected in Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post Critical Epistemology in 1958. Inspired by Gestalt Psychology, Polanyi regards the process of knowing as senso-motoric. His conception of knowledge has been particularly influential; nevertheless, he was never recognised as a “true” philosopher by his contemporaries. Although in his writings Polanyi alluded briefly to Merleau-Ponty’s studies of the body, he did not discuss parallel ideas in his epistemology.

5 Barbiero 1999. Ryle brought the notion of “know how” to the forefront of philosophical thought in epistemology and philosophy of mind. In his book, The Concept of Mind, Ryle claimed that all human behaviour relevant to psychology could be explained exclusively in terms of knowing-how.
Ryle offered a dispositional account of knowledge how, which is now widely discredited. In Ryle’s philosophy, knowing-how implies abilities ranging from simple motor skills, such as knowing how to walk or how to ride a bicycle, to abstract highly contemplative cases, such as knowing how to prove a mathematical theorem.

6 Dance education does not necessarily make bodies sensitive, it can also “numb” bodies.

7 Sheets-Johnstone states that we share a common fundamental kinetic repertoire, for we all are the same kind of animate form (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 225). Although all humans share a common background of motility, we evolve our own personal movement repertoires. Although almost all of us can walk, jump, hit, shake and tremble, depending on the cultural and social context and individual motivations, the cultivation of our movement potentials varies drastically. There are no identical movement repertoires, in fact, some movement repertoires can be exclusive. As Susan Foster has pointed out, ballet dancers cannot assume to perform the vocabulary of movements found in the contact improvisation, and visa versa, (Foster 1997, 241). Learning to move is also choosing some movements and excluding others, since it is the individual body schema that enables us to comprehend new movements and to reconsider familiar ones.

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Published by
Dance Research Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1, Summer 2002, pp. 11-23.
Copyright © 2002 by the Congress on Research in Dance