Hello brains and bodies!

I recently participated in 5 days of what we call Shapes Camp. Shapes Camp was an intensive training in physical theatre hosted at and by Double Edge. Double Edge Theatre is a company and ensemble that has a deep connection to the land that they are on in Ashfield, MA, engages in many forms of research (embodied, visual, archival) in making their pieces, and believes in these ideas of “living culture” and “art justice.” Their training is more of a search than a methodology. They prompt and propose searching through physicality.

Being at Double Edge was challenging and generative. The first day and a half I felt like I was just confronting over and over again the feeling that I was back in middle school being the last person to finish running the mile while everyone watched me. I had to move past that in order to understand why the Double Edge training required us to push ourselves physically to see what arose. In some ways (but definitely not all), their training practices are in conversation with somatics or other embodied practices that try to understand feeling and knowledge as being based in the body as opposed to solely cognitively. To me, this feels like a reaction and/or solution to the fact that our society is deeply disembodied. But sometimes the reaction to turn to the body takes on what I read as an anti-intellectual valence.

This is a problem because it reinforces the brain/body divide further, it is reactionary. Instead, what if disembodiment and anti-intellectualism are actually two branches that come from the same tree with the same roots? Let me explain.

First, in a slightly annoying academic fashion, let me start with definitions. Anti-intellectualism and disembodiment. Intellectualism and embodiment.

Anti/Intellectualism: What I mean by intellectualism is an intentional building and prioritizing of skillsets that support critical thinking, historical literacy, and original thought. I do not mean the sort of faux intellectualism that is rampant in US schools. School can often be incredibly anti-intellectual. What I mean is reading, researching, studying, and using our brains to create, to imagine, and to be critical about the things we ourselves are doing, to recognize patterns, to think systematically, to make connections.

Dis/Embodiment: What I mean by disembodiment is, for example, the way that consent education teaches us that yes means yes and no means no but doesn’t really help us understand what a yes or a no feels like in our own bodies. I mean the way that sometimes we make ourselves so busy that we forget to eat. Or the way that we hunch over our computers and learn to ignore the aching that creates. The way that we sometimes feel so freaked out and have no idea why and can’t imagine that maybe it is the fact that our cities are operating at a constant din. It’s not understanding or feeling our own needs and nervous systems.

Often people will say things like “stop intellectualizing” or “don’t intellectualize your emotions.” I understand the impulse here - it is important to feel our feelings, to process them in a variety of ways, to craft more holistic experiences and narratives. But intellectualizing can also be a part of feeling. In reality, being embodied and intellectual can support each other. An example of how: sometimes when I am doing research in the archive I get this gut feeling that I’m looking at something that is on the right track. I am learning to trust this feeling both because I just have good instincts and because I know that I have done the precursory research and studying to be able to pick up on these things. My gut then guides my intellectual pursuits and my intellectual pursuits make my gut instinct stronger. The relationship between intellectualism and embodiment is up to us to establish, and it definitely does not HAVE to be one of animosity or competition.

I often think back to lessons from organizing and power mapping like always asking the question “who benefits from this?” That in part is what led me to think about disembodiment and anti-intellectualism as branches of the same tree, who benefits from us being disembodied and anti-intellectual? I think capitalism and the state does. I’ll explain. When we are disembodied and unintellectual we are so much more easily convinced of things, and we are so much more likely to just consume, consume, consume the things that are being sold to us. If we “feel off” but we don’t have the sensitivity to understand why then of course we are going to buy whatever miracle cure is being pushed on instagram. If we don’t believe that we can have original thoughts then of course we are going to be more likely to trust so-called experts uncritically. Discernment both in the body and in the brain is a threat to the powers that be.

So what do we do with this shared undichotomous framework? I don’t know, I haven’t gotten that far, you tell me? But probably the more we can hold the tensions and the symbiosis between the two as opposed to seeing them as a dichotomy or binary, the richer and more textured our lives and movements will become. What do you think? What do you feel? I’d love to know.

Yours in thought and feeling,

Yael