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Shared embodiment Intercorporéité

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Definitions

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Quotations

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Perspectives

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Bibliography

Bibliographic citations for further reading

Definition

Shared embodiment refers to the relationship established between two bodies – usually human bodies, although the concept could be expanded to include human-animal and human-object relationships. More specifically, shared embodiment refers to phenomena of continuity – even of confusion – between one’s own body and the body of another.

Cite: “Shared embodiment”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177913

⇆ Related terms :

Created : 2021-06-14.

Last modified : 2022-06-29.

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Perspective

Quotation

Bibliography

« Si en serrant la main de l’autre homme, j’ai l’évidence de son être là, c’est qu’elle se substitue à ma main gauche, que mon corps annexe le corps d’autrui dans cette « sorte de réflexion » dont il est paradoxalement le siège. Mes deux mains sont « comprésentes » ou « coexistent » parce qu’elles sont les mains d’un seul corps : autrui apparaît par extension de cette comprésence, lui et moi sommes comme les organes d’une seule intercorporéité. »

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes, Paris : Gallimard, 1960, p.274


« This intercorporeality simultaneously foregrounds the material and socio-cultural nature of the performing body and the bodily and tangible nature of performing relationships in practice. Part of the relationship is also including non-human physical and artefactual dimensions or as ‘boundary-objects’ that call, afford or disclose co-constitutive meanings and responsive relations of a nexus of “self-other-things” »

Küpers Wendelin, « Critical Performativity and Embodied Performing as materio-socio-cultural Practices – Phenomenological Perspectives on performative Bodies at work », M@n@gement, 20,1, 2017, p.99


« Intercorporeality is constituted through bodily intentionality and corporeal dispositions that acquire an orientational function in the interaction. At the same time, the enabling conditions of bodily action are mediated with the normativity of presymbolic relations of cooperation. Without the social dimension of reciprocal expectations, this intercorporeality would merely be an impressionistic structure. »

Jens Loenhoff, « Intercorporeality as a Foundational Dimension of Human Communication», in Intercorporeality. Emerging Socialities in Interaction, Christian Meyer, Jürgen Streeck, J. Scott Jordan dirs.., Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2017, p.35

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Installation and Performance
Rachel Gomme, Independent Artist-Researcher and Performer, London, United-Kingdom

Shared embodiment

Tongue. Hips. Liver. Cell.

Breathing. Pissing. Weeping. Sleeping.

Bodyness in common. We are all. We know ourselves only as. We cannot be without.

First sharing:

This is how I know me. It’s how I recognise you. It’s how we come to say “we”. A form in common (more or less). Processes, movements we understand together. Mouth, tongue, ears or hands that shape a language, messages sent back and forth. I am me and you are you and we are of the same (more or less).

Second sharing:

I am me and you are you and you are me and I am we. My body does not end at my skin. My body is my breathing, the magnetic resonance of my heart, the pheromonal signals I emit and you receive, like it or not. I take in your breath, my menstrual rhythms align with hers, I vibrate in resonance with their vibrations. Bodies together body together.

Third sharing:

I am one and I am many. I understand my self as self but many selves are in and on that self. They are them and they are also me. Trillions of bacteria are “me”. Myriad organisms organising with one another, through my organs. We share this bodyform, we together make it.

Fourth sharing:

There are other bodies that are not the same. Still, I understand them as of the same. With some I share running, rolling, sleeping, eating through my mouth, breathing into lungs. Others are stranger yet of this livingness. All of us, cells breathing, taking in and letting out, multiplying and dying in cycling cycles.

Fifth sharing:

Relations of time and space and gravity. I am matter in a matter-world, a universe of leaps, vibrations, particles that are and aren’t as they shift through one another. I am one shifting constellation within a chaos-flow of change. Bodies are dust of distant stars but stars are also, right now, our body.

This body-mind now:

I am a practitioner-researcher in movement and performance. In both my performance and my academic research I explore what it is to be present, how (human) body and environment meet and mingle, and how bodies come together in performance, particularly through site-specific and interactive performance.

To extend :

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980)

Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London, Routledge, 2000)

Ingold, Tim, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London, Routledge, 2011)

Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, The Primacy of Movement (expanded second edition) (Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011)

Cite this item: Rachel Gomme, “Shared embodiment”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177913

Elizabeth A. Behnke, « Interkinesthetic affectivity : A phenomenological approach », Continental Philosophy Review, 2, 41, 2008, pp.143-161

Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, Londres : Routledge, 2011

Christian Meyer, Jürgen Streeck, J. Scott Jordan, dirs., Intercorporeality. Emerging Socialities in Interaction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (expanded second edition), Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011

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