Sovereign Movement
November, 2023
If you've had an opportunity to listen to me wax poetic about how I think about movement (either in the WhatMovesUs podcast or in person), it is quite possible you've heard me bring up the name Georges Bataille. Georges Bataille was a man whose work has meant many different things to many different people, and if you're hoping a quick google search will point to an easily digestible explanation of his work, you're out of luck: any single-sentence (or even paragraph long!) description of what the man explored throughout his life is going to severely miss the forest for the trees.
I bring up Bataille not to needlessly name-drop and obfuscate a point, but rather to invoke a body of work that I have found to be rewarding to continually engage with since I discovered the name some 20 years ago. Upon reading a recent essay by Kevin Kennedy called "Useless Practices in Sacred Spaces: Bataille's Elegance and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty," I encountered an echo of a core part of my beliefs, especially about movement, articulated in a way that gave me access to something I've been struggling with lately. I have often bemoaned my incapacity to fully allow what I practice, as well as what I teach, to be fully absorbed into the machinations of the wellness-industrial complex of late-capitalism. I understand how the "fitness" world works, but there's an inherent dishonesty that I'm not able to entertain, which often undermines working towards the level of visibility that my financial security is dependent upon.
What I'm about to suggest may sound odd. I'm not one to insist that a movement practice can only be this one thing (in fact, I refuse binary suppositions in general, so again, to reiterate, this is not to imply that a movement practice cannot be anything else), but to me, it is perhaps the most important thing that a movement practice can be.
I believe, ultimately, that a movement practice should not insist upon utility: in fact, it should be useless in the face of capitalism; within this container, it should remain non-productive. Why should a movement practice be useless? By insisting upon doing something beyond the realm of utility, we can encounter what Bataille conceives of as a Sovereign experience.
Sovereignty (to over-simplify a complex line of thought) requires a "sacred act… based on a rupture with the existing state of affairs, without however providing a rational [...] alternative. For art to provide such a sacred dimension in life it must in some way break with the ideas that govern it, i.e. art must in a fundamental sense appear strange or unassimilable to the demands of the everyday. A truly sovereign art can never be reduced to the use we can make of it in the real world." The necessity for sovereignty lies in the human need for glamor, excess, elegance and (perhaps above all else) magic. Without these things, the world becomes rote. "[A] world completely devoid of sacred sovereignty lacks the essential: 'This miracle to which the whole of humanity aspires...the anticipation of a suspended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment.'"
It might sound dramatic, but when faced with what often feels like the inescapable impossibility of the world, I can find recourse in nothing but the capacity for art to offer that "suspended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment." Movement gave me my first consistent access to this when I started to explore handstanding. The handstand is a wonderful example: it's an ultimately useless skill in the grand scheme of things. Many folks in the uncodified sphere of "Movement Culture" have proselytized the utility of sticking to a handstand practice and the lessons that this persistence can teach you, but to me this misses the mark: it is a miraculous thing to suspend yourself upside down. This initial appeal to wonder, what often is the initial impetus to work towards this sort of skill at all, is to me what it is all about. It's the capacity to enter that elegance, that magic.
My soft-acrobatics practice works best when I let it follow the same path: ultimately useless, but capable of giving me the sovereign experience of wonder that makes living in the world just a little bit easier. This idea of living, this capacity to let life be sovereign in Bataille's sense, calls to mind what my friend Danielle remarked was her mantra, a mantra that would allow herself to feel an honest sense of sadness about current events but also remember that we are connected, as humans in the world: "I will live for those who couldn't." The utility here comes from beyond this "action." In order to find this utility, we must first allow ourselves to abandon it, in order to access the sovereignty of the miraculous. Only then can we allow ourselves to truly live.
Return to Writing
I bring up Bataille not to needlessly name-drop and obfuscate a point, but rather to invoke a body of work that I have found to be rewarding to continually engage with since I discovered the name some 20 years ago. Upon reading a recent essay by Kevin Kennedy called "Useless Practices in Sacred Spaces: Bataille's Elegance and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty," I encountered an echo of a core part of my beliefs, especially about movement, articulated in a way that gave me access to something I've been struggling with lately. I have often bemoaned my incapacity to fully allow what I practice, as well as what I teach, to be fully absorbed into the machinations of the wellness-industrial complex of late-capitalism. I understand how the "fitness" world works, but there's an inherent dishonesty that I'm not able to entertain, which often undermines working towards the level of visibility that my financial security is dependent upon.
What I'm about to suggest may sound odd. I'm not one to insist that a movement practice can only be this one thing (in fact, I refuse binary suppositions in general, so again, to reiterate, this is not to imply that a movement practice cannot be anything else), but to me, it is perhaps the most important thing that a movement practice can be.
I believe, ultimately, that a movement practice should not insist upon utility: in fact, it should be useless in the face of capitalism; within this container, it should remain non-productive. Why should a movement practice be useless? By insisting upon doing something beyond the realm of utility, we can encounter what Bataille conceives of as a Sovereign experience.
Sovereignty (to over-simplify a complex line of thought) requires a "sacred act… based on a rupture with the existing state of affairs, without however providing a rational [...] alternative. For art to provide such a sacred dimension in life it must in some way break with the ideas that govern it, i.e. art must in a fundamental sense appear strange or unassimilable to the demands of the everyday. A truly sovereign art can never be reduced to the use we can make of it in the real world." The necessity for sovereignty lies in the human need for glamor, excess, elegance and (perhaps above all else) magic. Without these things, the world becomes rote. "[A] world completely devoid of sacred sovereignty lacks the essential: 'This miracle to which the whole of humanity aspires...the anticipation of a suspended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment.'"
It might sound dramatic, but when faced with what often feels like the inescapable impossibility of the world, I can find recourse in nothing but the capacity for art to offer that "suspended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment." Movement gave me my first consistent access to this when I started to explore handstanding. The handstand is a wonderful example: it's an ultimately useless skill in the grand scheme of things. Many folks in the uncodified sphere of "Movement Culture" have proselytized the utility of sticking to a handstand practice and the lessons that this persistence can teach you, but to me this misses the mark: it is a miraculous thing to suspend yourself upside down. This initial appeal to wonder, what often is the initial impetus to work towards this sort of skill at all, is to me what it is all about. It's the capacity to enter that elegance, that magic.
My soft-acrobatics practice works best when I let it follow the same path: ultimately useless, but capable of giving me the sovereign experience of wonder that makes living in the world just a little bit easier. This idea of living, this capacity to let life be sovereign in Bataille's sense, calls to mind what my friend Danielle remarked was her mantra, a mantra that would allow herself to feel an honest sense of sadness about current events but also remember that we are connected, as humans in the world: "I will live for those who couldn't." The utility here comes from beyond this "action." In order to find this utility, we must first allow ourselves to abandon it, in order to access the sovereignty of the miraculous. Only then can we allow ourselves to truly live.
Return to Writing
Mike Kitchell, 2020-2022