Abstract

In this thesis I use an ethnographic study of dance improvisation to describe the conditions for existence arising from innovative activity. Improvisation is the creative process embodied; it situates individuals in the body and world as actors amongst actors, rather than as instrumentalized subjects. If oppression typically involves the control of the bodily movement powers of individuals, then resistance is tied to a cultivated release from capitalist rationalizing procedures. The focus on innovative dance movement fills a gap in sociological knowledge of human activity, which typically draws upon a modern and Marxian analysis of labouring activity, relations and forms. Because "action theory" is primarily about task-oriented activity, we have an incomplete understanding of what constitutes the material conditions of history, biography and politics. I call on a critical understanding of Arendt's philosophy to provide a new foundation for sociological approaches to action. Arendt's model of action offers a means of thinking beyond Marxian theories of human activity, but she refused to politicize the creative process. As a point of disagreement, I hold that the shifts in posture, alignment, speed and sense-attention of dance improvisation enable both a physical experience of "free" action, and a re-organization of the somatic dimension of action. Consciousness raising techniques are used to re-habilitate the world of common sense such that tactile sensation replaces the internalized "eye" of analysis and surveillance as the primary organizing principle of reality. The unexpected reward is a self-affirming and positive sense of active existence. Socially and politically, the dance analysis reveals a material means of re-covering creative "species-being" in late capitalism, and it underscores an important comparison among Marx, Arendt, Foucault and Merleau-Ponty on questions of power, embodiment and action. Showing how action re-covery schemes enable performative individuality, and creative agency, is crucial to the resistibility question in feminist social theorizing