Blog 17 (Cody): The Sublime or the Stuplime in Dance?

One of the questions raised in Thursday’s discussion of Ngai’s essay was whether the demarcation of the Kantian sublime as concentrated on the “natural” (the perennial reference to the ocean, for example) from the stuplime as concentrated on “art” (in Ngai’s case, within language and literature) is inexorable and total.  Of course, if we stick with the examples of the sublime ocean and the stuplime The Making of Americans—the “natural” versus the “sociocultural”—this dichotomy, indeed, seems tenable.  However, in the case of dance, the body, as the artistic medium, could potentially challenge this sublime/stuplime delineation as equally a nature/culture delimitation.  My primary presupposition in this instance is that the body, to use the metaphor of the cyborg, is both a natural and socially designed entity.  In Foster’s outline of eighteenth-century French philosophy, the movements and kinesthetics of the body (or Condillac’s statue) can function as a sort of epistemological facility before the acquisition of a spoken language (86).  In other words, before the individual has the linguistic capacities required for thought, the “natural language” —and here I am using language as synonymous with "epistemological facility"—of bodily movements (as influenced by the sensorium) works as a means of producing knowledge. It would then seem to follow that with the individual’s assimilation into a social matrix the body then develops the language(s) of the society—the socialized body constantly “speaks” both a natural and a social language. And, insofar as my limited knowledge of dance allows for me to surmise, the performance of dance would seem to take upon advantage of and reveal these natural and social languages.  Obviously choreography is scripted and influenced by sociocultural apparatuses; even in extemporaneous dance, the body still moves to certain social constructions and limitations.  At the same time nonetheless, the scripted-ness of the choreography equally reveals this “natural” language as the dancing body displays its kinesthetic ranges and limitations.  I guess what I am trying to get at with this deduction is, if the body “speaks” both a natural and sociocultural language, could we ever simply define a dance performance as either sublime or stuplime? And, more importantly, if we find ourselves stupefied or bored with a dance performance, is this reaction a consequence of failing to understand the natural language or the sociocultural language of the dancing bodies?