Abstract
What role does the aesthetics of bodily movement play in the understanding of attention among children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)? This article animates a phenomenological approach to attention and embodiment with a special focus on the relation between aesthetic or expressive bodily movement and behavioral awareness in children diagnosed with ADHD. However, beyond this it is argued that the aesthetic aspect of movement calls for an expansion of the phenomenological perspective. In this context Gilles Deleuze’s notion of aesthetics as a “science of the sensible” is activated and discussed in relation to the phenomenological concept of perception. Empirically the article takes point of departure in a qualitative study conducted with a group of children with attention-deficit practicing the Afro-Brazilian marital art, capoeira. Combining ethnographic and phenomenological methods, it is demonstrated that capoeira can be considered a form of aesthetic movement that offers a transition of attention-deficit into a productive force of expression that changes the notions of sensation and movement in ADHD.
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Notes
There are exceptions to this overall claim. Phenomenological scholars as Alva Nöe (2000, 2012), Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1966, 2011), Dorothée Legrand (2007; Legrand & Ravn, 2009), and Joel Krueger (2009, 2011, 2014) all write on phenomenological issues related to art, aesthetic experience or different artistic practices. However, these theorists more or less introduce art or aesthetic practice as paradigmatic or exemplary for perception in general. In Alva Nöe’s words, “what is true of the experience of the work of art is true of human experience quite generally” (Noë 2012, p. 2). In this image art or aesthetic experience is proposed as an expression of lived experience or “perception in general,” and thus remains within a representational image of art in the sense that art is described as a representation of a presupposed “natural” activity of perception – presupposing a fundamental nature behind “natural” perception. What is not in focus is an account of the genuinely creative, productive or expressive aspect of art. For a more in depth treatment of this see (Levin 2016a)
In this sense the notion of an aesthetic system is associated with the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s notion of art as a cultural system. As he argues The artist works with his audience’s capacities – capacities to see, or hear, or touch, sometimes even to taste and smell, with understanding. And though elements of these capacities are indeed innate – it usually helps not to be color blind – they are brought into actual existence by the experience of living in the midst of certain sorts of things to look at, listen to, handle, think about, cope with, and react to; […] Art and the equipment to grasp it are made in the same shop. (1976, p. 1497)
The terms emic and etic are derived from the linguistic notions of phonemic and phonetic, which refers respectively to sound differences that are consciously perceived by listeners or speakers as belonging to the language, and to physical sound differences that that can be observed by a listener, but are not necessarily part of the language’s repertoire.
In anthropology the terms emic and etic were coined by the linguist Pike (1967) and have been used to describe the contrast between the insiders’ indigenous explications in contrast to descriptions according to the observer’s outsider’s perspective.
The triangular footwork and rhythmic swaying from side to side considered as one of the basic foundational elements of capoeira movement.
A cartwheel
Such as an acrobatic game, an aggressive fight oriented game or more playful or trickery game.
However, as I have pointed out elsewhere expressive movement in Sheets-Johnstones conception does not consider the pre-individual aspect of expression, thus she reduces expression to a particular subjective body of movement. Based on introspection and kinetic free variation Sheets-Johnstone reduces self-movement to four primary experiential structures of self-movement in tensional, linear, amplitudinal, and projectional qualities.
In fact, as I have described elsewhere(Levin 2017) the neuropsychological theory of ADHD relies on its own aesthetic model of the mind in the image as a conductor of a symphony orchestra.
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Capoeira is a practice that combines fighting techniques with dance elements and comprises music and ritual aspects. In this sense, capoeira surpasses the common notion of martial art as a combat or self-defense system and is notoriously difficult to classify. Some scholars have suggested the more descriptively precise category of a ritual dance-fight-game (Capoeira 2002).
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Levin, K. The Dance of Attention: Toward an Aesthetic Dimension of Attention-Deficit. Integr. psych. behav. 52, 129–151 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-017-9413-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-017-9413-7