Course Blog #17 (Justin): I'm feeling (em)pathetic

Susan Leigh Foster is engaged in looking at how a culture’s definition or understanding of a term like ‘empathy’ can be used as a means to mask oppressive actions and justify unjust power relations. Foster uses a rather surprising approach in exploring empathy and its relation to dance and choreography. Instead of mining current dance practice for perceived audience reception (what one may describe as sociologic or ethnographic study) or surveying critical reviews of past dance performances (an examination of previous semiotic and phenomenological response), Foster relies on philosophic writing and highly structured dance notation as the foundation for a postcolonial exploration. Specifically, she is interested in the Enlightenment era works of Etienne Bonnot, Abbe de Condillac, and the famous iconographic system for recording dance developed by Raoul Auguste Feuillet. Foster explores Condillac’s philosophy regarding the potential role gesture and movement played in the initial development of language. She summarizes the philosopher’s ideas by stating, “Originating in an instinctual and spontaneous capacity for expression, language emerges as the conscious implementation of both vocal and gestural actions” (83). By grounding language’s evolution in the body’s physicalizations, Foster suggests that Condillac was able to put forth a notion that choreographed movement could elicit an inherent human response, a common reception based on ‘universally held sympathy.’ The Other may be seen to “implement different gestural as well as vocal vocabularies,” but due to a common sympathy [a term Foster translates as today’s conception of empathy] their actions are neither “unknowable or impenetrable” (85). Thus, colonial motivations could be masked; “The fact that the colonial body…was seen to passively receive an other’s cultural information meant that it was not responsible for helping to produce that information, but instead it could simply respond in the manner deemed appropriate” (86). For Foster, how a body is perceived or constructed in its historical moment can have enormous effects – cultural, political, and personal. Early 18^th century conceptions of empathy in France evidence this notion quite well.

Much like the other terms in our pantheon, ‘empathy’ is a troublesome word that must be well-defined in any attempt at its successful deployment. Hence the footnote in Reason and Reynolds article stating, “Note that Martin associates ‘inner mimicry’ with active response, whereas Bertolt Brecht famously argued that empathy rendered spectators passive and uncritical” (72). Given different operational settings, empathy can be perceived to carry quite opposite effects. Unlike many of the other terms discussed in this course, which seem to be bound to the entire spectacle presented by the performance (i.e. theatricality, performativity, trance, stuplime, etc.), ‘empathy’ is the only term that appears to be wholly tied to the individual performers who act as the spectated. Note, Reason and Reynolds point out the importance that music has when it is connected to the actors’ movement (a point Ming touched on in our previous class discussion of the stuplime), but the final emotional investment is still bound to the performer. The music aids in eliciting kinesthetic empathy, but it is not the sole recipient of the conjured emotion.