Of the many works that have promised to bring the body back into the fold of philosophical practice, Carrie Noland’s Agency and Embodiment is, without a doubt, among the best of them. Pitching itself against the prevailing post-structuralist distrust of ‘self-experience’, Noland argues for a much needed reconsideration of the place of kinaesthetic experience - the feeling of a body-in-motion, ‘animate form’ - in our approaches to theorising agency. After all, Noland contends, it’s the experience of bodily ‘interoception’ (not, mind you, mental ‘introspection’), that affords us our first brush with agency, the first realisation of a capacity engendered from within to resist the imperatives imposed from without. And of course, I’m simplifying here: among the merits of Agency and Embodiment is a keen awareness of the degree to which our very physiology is saturated through and through with the ordinances of the social which shape us not simply at the level of culture, but right down to our gait, our gestures, our movements, and even - or rather consequently - our feelings.
Indeed, it’s just out of this paradox - wherein our most intimately felt experiences afford us a glimpse into the possibility of being otherwise - that Noland proposes to ground a theory of agency. By treating kinaesthesia as nothing less than a sixth sense - a finding affirmed by both neuroscience and anthropology - Noland proposes that attention to our respective proprioceptive backgrounds can allow us to contest and even refigure the very sensory-motor practices out of which we are composed. Central to Noland's account - one drawing on the resources of Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, and Henri Michaux - is the role of gesture: residing at the intersection of movement and meaning, gesture crystalizes the manner in which meaning operates at the level of the body, crossing the threshold of both nature and culture while at the same time singularizing one's body as precisely one's own.
As Noland writes, "gestures... have a definite direction, a specific velocity, rhythm, scope, tonicity" - in short, a quality of sensation whose contours are intimately felt, and consequently, available to modification. Ultimately, it's this attention to the qualitative nature of movement and sensation which allows Noland to traverse the vast expanse of trans-disciplinary scholarship that she does: from art to philosophy, performance studies to sociology, science and anthropology, Agency and Embodiment leaves few stones unturned in its quest to bring meaning back to the body, and in turn, free it from the muted half-life of meaningless corporeity so often attributed to it. If the question of freedom always seemed a little too abstract, a little too spectral, it's among these pages that it's fleshy possibility is given body in spectacular fashion.
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