nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

enable a dynamic and transformative process to affect both one’s own bodyimage 4 and one’s functional abilities.Somatics was first formalised in the United States during the 1970s,through the initiative of the philosopher (and, later, somatic practitioner)Thomas Hanna.His first essay, symptomatically entitled Bodies in Revolt, gives a new etymologicalfoundation to the notion of the ‘soma’ involved in these methods:‘the body observed from the first-person viewpoint’, the body ‘felt from within’,‘the body of experience and not of objective science’. 5The revolution is from the outset both perspectival and paradigmatic,announcing a shift in sensibility and knowledge, and a specific form ofself-learning which relies fundamentally upon an holistic awareness of theself and the environment.The constitution of this field of practices, along the entire twentieth century,often passes through an exemplary narrative of alternative strategies thathave been elaborated and designed at a given moment, by certain individuals,towards the resolution of problems that traditionally available methodsin medicine, dance, physical education and psychology could not offer. Fromthose first, empirical researches, self-trained founders – often drawing from awide background and formation in traditional therapies, dance, movementand the performing arts – came to develop specific training programs andschools, most often refusing to frame their methods as therapies, and preferringto highlight their self-educational and pedagogical dimension. In fact, inorder to preserve their autonomy with regard to the institutional field of care,somatic schools developed a self-sustained economy, based on trademarking,copyrighting and licensing fees – with evident repercussions on the costs oftraining.Despite the feeble institutional recognition they encounter today in somecountries, where they are beginning to be affiliated with paramedical practicesof functional rehabilitation, investigated in clinical research protocols or integratedin some university curricula, somatics are very unequally distributed,which is also a sign of their complicated genealogical mix: while informed, insome aspects, by ancient eastern traditions (meditation, yoga, martial arts…),or gravitating towards the constellation of New Age philosophies (due to geographicaland historical contiguity), they have been massively appropriatedby the markets of wellbeing and personal development, with their paradoxicalmontages of esoteric spirituality and consumption, consistent in the endwith the neoliberal rhetoric of post-capitalism.So how to orient oneself in this jungle of ambivalence? And how to understandthe catalytic role that the aesthetic revolution of somatics brought about120