Movement and action: between life and discursive knowledge

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, philosophers, psychologists, and social scientists in the United States and Europe paid substantial attention to experiences of movement and action, placing them at the core of new ways of thinking about the human being, society, and reality and using them as instruments for reconfiguring fields of knowledge. This session follows discursive conceptions and techniques of movement and action as they crossed boundaries between academic and popular discourses, different fields of inquiry, and public and private spaces in the hands of rhetoricians, scientists, artists, poets, and men and women busy negotiating their everyday lives.
Susan Lanzoni’s paper examines Jewish neurologist Erwin Straus’s phenomenological psychology, the challenges it posed to behaviorism, and the ways it informed experiments at the Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, and the work of musicians and artists associated with the institution.
Daniel Huebner’s essay, “Language as Social Action: Gertrude Buck, the ‘Michigan School’ of Rhetoric, and Pragmatic Philosophy,” unearths the approach to communication and rhetoric developed by Gertrude Buck, a professor of English and Rhetoric trained in John Dewey’s pragmatist functional psychology. It recovers Buck’s understanding of language as a dynamic action human organisms carry out to engage in necessary cooperative relations and explores some of the implications of Buck’s “social-pragmatic theory of literary action.”
Francesca Bordogna unpacks a regime of action crafted in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century by Italian philosophy student journalist Giovanni Amendola, placing it in the context of his relationships with his wife, Eva Kuhn. It shows how Amendola repurposed William James’s psychology of movement and the will to confine action to the inner core of the psyche and make himself and his wife into ethical subjects, and how Eva, in response, transformed herself into a futurist woman, committed to the equation of life with art and the bodily expression of the will.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Francesca Bordogna, University of Notre Dame

Commentator

• Robin Veder, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Individual Presentations

• Between the Inner and the Outer: Giovanni Amendola and Eva Kühn - Francesca Bordogna, University of Notre Dame

• Language as Social Action: Gertrude Buck, the ‘Michigan School’ of Rhetoric, and Pragmatic Philosophy - Daniel Huebner, University of North Carolina Greensboro

• A Psychology of Movement at Black Mountain College: The Phenomenology of Erwin Straus - Susan Lanzoni

Session Organizer

• Francesca Bordogna, University of Notre Dame