Dancing With Marionettes

Kleist's oblique and sometimes enigmatic dialogue on the marionette theatre (1810) may helpfully be approached, it is argued here, within a cognitive perspective. Together with the essay ‘Von der Überlegung’, published a few days earlier, this dialogue explores the distinction between automatic and reflective response. It presents the dancing puppet as an extension of the puppeteer's mind, that is to say of the cognitive activities that govern its movements. Drawing on contemporary mathematics and notions such as Hogarth's ‘line of beauty’, it even imagines the possibility of constructing an automatic puppet that could dance gracefully without the immediate intervention of the puppeteer. Its anecdotal examples (the graceful adolescent who becomes fatally self‐conscious, the fencing bear) probe the critical borderline between the unreflective and the reflective. Such arguments and anecdotes may be understood in relation to notions drawn from modern cognitive neuroscience and psychology, such as motor resonance, kinesis, intentionality, and the perception of ‘life’. Kleist's intervention in the prehistory of these questions, however, remains essential: his imaginative way of approaching them induces the reader to see the problem, to encounter it as already embodied, rather than as the result of a set of scientific or indeed philosophical propositions

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Cognition · Cognitive science · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Fidelity · Intentionality · Perception · Perspective (graphical · Relation (database · Visual arts · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Diversity and Impact of Dance · German Literature and Culture Studies · Philosophy · Psychology