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Initially I thought of the somaesthetic project as being fully nested within the discipline of philosophy, perhaps as a branch of aesthetics. But I soon realized that somaesthetics should be an essentially interdisciplinary field, even if grounded in philosophy. As all human perception and action goes through the soma, many different academic disciplines can contribute significantly to the study and improvement of somatic experience and performance. It would be foolish, therefore, to limit somaesthetics to the methods and concerns of philosophy. Engaging a wide variety of knowledge forms and disciplines that structure our somatic experience or can improve it, somaesthetics is a framework to promote and integrate the diverse range of theorizing, empirical research, and melioriative practical disciplines concerned with bodily perception, performance, and presentation. While originally rooted in my philosophical research, it is not a single theory or method advanced by a particular philosopher but an open field for collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transcultural inquiry. Its applications already extend beyond philosophy to a broad array of topics ranging from the arts, product design, and politics to fashion, health, sports, martial arts, and the use of hallucinogenic drugs in education (footnote 4). Somaesthetics’ most notable developments thus far can be grouped into three general areas: arts, politics, and design of technology.

Somaesthetics as performance art and photography: From Yann Toma's Soma Flux series at Cartagena, Colombia

Author/Copyright holder: Yann Toma. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.

Figure 21.5: Somaesthetics as performance art and photography: From Yann Toma's Soma Flux series at Cartagena, Colombia

Though dance may be the most paradigmatic of somatic arts, somaesthetics has been equally applied to theatre in analyzing the somatic styles of movement and posture of actors on stage (footnote 5).

Somaesthetic concepts and theories have been even more extensively deployed for understanding music and music education (footnote 6). In visual arts, somaesthetics has been used to explain not only how artists use their bodies in making artworks but also how observers deploy themselves somatically to perceive such works. Many works of visual art (whether paintings, sculptures, photographs, or installations) consciously presuppose and play with the viewers’ somatic standpoint, so that the soma can be powerfully thematized in a work without a body being visually represented in it (footnote 7). The body (with its multiple senses and movement through space) likewise plays a formative role in architectural design and experience. Performance art presents a distinctive case in which the body is not only a tool of creation and means of perception but also the expressive medium and visual end-product or art object. Building on my somaesthetic theory, Martin Jay shows the political import of body-centered performance works that challenge the prevailing norms of bodily form and comportment with their attendant sociopolitical hierarchies of domination (footnote 8).

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Somaesthetics has begun to have an impact not only on the analysis of visual art, but also on its practice. One prominent example is its use as a generative theoretical background for Peng Feng’s curatorial project for the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale. Entitled Pervasion, this show of five installation pieces (including clouds with tea fragrance; pipes dripping with Chinese schnapps; fragrant porcelain pots of herb medicine; fog of incense; and lotus-scented virtual snow) sought to emphasize that our appreciation of even visual art is always much more than visual and to highlight the soma’s role as transmodal perceiving subjectivity by engaging also the pleasures of other bodily senses (footnote 9). Somaesthetics has also been used as a creative framework for a series of photographic and cinematic works that the Parisian artist Yann Toma has realized in close collaboration with me (footnote 10).

Picture from the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

Author/Copyright holder: Peng Feng. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.

Figure 21.6: Picture from the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

Picture from the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

Author/Copyright holder: Peng Feng. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.

Figure 21.7: Picture from the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

Picture from the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

Author/Copyright holder: Peng Feng. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.

Figure 21.8: Picture from the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

Picture from the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

Author/Copyright holder: Peng Feng. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.

Figure 21.9: Picture from the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

Picture from the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

Author/Copyright holder: Peng Feng. Copyright terms and licence: All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission. See section "Exceptions" in the copyright terms below.

Figure 21.10: Picture from the Chinese Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

Among political applications of somaesthetics, feminist interventions loom large. This should not be surprising since women are traditionally identified with body and thus negatively contrasted with what our culture deems to be the superior male principle of mind. As Shannon Sullivan uses somaesthetic ideas to critique the devalorization of bodily practices associated with women and to insist (through notions of somaesthetic teaching, caring, and dialogue) that working on the body is not a merely selfish, unsocial project, so Cressida Heyes deploys somaesthetics as a model enabling “political resistance to corporeal normalization” that subjugates women and men. Since race, like gender, is perceived through somatic appearance, racism provides another political issue in which somaesthetic strategies have been proposed both as explanations and as therapeutic remedies (footnote 11).

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For me, the most surprising extension of somaesthetics has been in the arena of high-tech design, particularly with new information technologies. I did not expect this because the somaesthetic project was initially inspired by ancient ideas of the embodied philosophical life and by traditional Asian somatic practices such as yoga and zazen or contemporary Western counterparts (such as Alexander Technique or Feldenkrais Method) that preserve a similar organic character by not treating the body with electronic appliances. Although my work addressed the new media’s challenge to embodiment, I did so mainly by arguing two major points: First, no technological invention of virtual reality will negate the body’s centrality as the focus of affective, perceptual experience through which we experience and engage the world. Second, that cultivating better skills of body consciousness can provide us with enhanced powers of concentration to help us overcome problems of distraction and stress caused by the new media’s superabundance of information and stimulation. But I made no effort to envisage positive ways that our newest technologies might reshape somatic experience. How, for example, could future developments in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, and experimental drugs yield significant changes in our somatic powers either by changing the bodies which nature gives us or complementing them with prosthetic or chemical enhancements that dramatically augment the soma’s perceptual, cognitive, and motor capabilities? How should somaesthetics prepare to deal with these changes and their corresponding new capacities for somatic self-cultivation, self-stylization, and social interaction?

Philosopher Jerrold Abrams has helped remedy this omission by exploring, in a speculative way, issues in what some might call posthuman somaesthetics because these issues involve significant alterations or enhancements to the traditional biological human soma (footnote 12). Of course, the human soma is already a product of considerable evolution, and it seems plastic enough to absorb significant change and prosthetic devices without condemning us to being posthuman cyborgs. That we can sometimes be considered human cyborgs by having manufactured enhancements incorporated into our embodied selves (contact lenses, pace makers, false eyelashes, wigs...) seems more or less evident. Questions such as the possible limits of the human soma and whether or how should we should speak of nonhuman somas are interesting topics for somaesthetic analysis that I cannot properly address in this article. They depend not simply on the future of technology but also on the evolution of our conceptual schemes concerning the human and concerning the notion of soma (footnote 13). But putting aside futuristic speculations, I will discuss some recent work relating somaesthetics to human-computer interaction research after the following section on the structure of somaesthetics