One thing that annoys me about a great deal of contemporary materialist approaches to mind is an overemphasis on brains. Far from substantiating the materialist position however, I think the obsession with brains does materialism a vast disservice to the degree that it attempts to paradoxically do away with matter, or rather, corporeality altogether. 'The brain', in many of these discourses, stands less for the pulpy, folded-over flesh that resides in a cranial cavity than it does a set of functions or computational algorithms that are throughly incorporeal and ridden of any tangibility whatsoever. We hear this rhetoric in everyday speech too, as when pop-science articles speak of how ‘the brain’ does this or that, how ‘the brain’ - practically an agent endowed with autonomous power of it’s own - goes about perceiving the world, or ‘directs us’ in doing this or that activity. The body here is reduced to a vessel, a substitutable life support system for a neurophysiology that ultimately, can explain everything about who and what we are.

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone makes this point forcefully in her magisterial The Primacy of Movement when she writes of how “our present-day love affair with brain neurophysiology is leading us astray. It blinds us to the fact that in the most fundamental sense, we are living bodies and that where goeth living bodies, so also goeth minds, not in the sense of a twosome, but a onesome.” S-J’s own argument for this takes place by way of attending to the developmental-evolutionary status of the human being: "The living body and its tactile-kinesthetic correlates are the basis of our ontogenetic conceptual and comportmental histories as well as of our phylogenetic ones. We learn to reach, and in the process measure shapes and distances; we learn to stand alone, and in the process gauge new spatial relationships, bodily alignments, balance, and weight”. She concludes: "brains do not think any more than brains perceive or judge. Such possibilities are the province of living bodies, of animate forms.”

I think this analysis is exactly right. Too often thought is conceived of as an immaterial happening, taking place ‘inside’ a body, with the body here considered as simply something of a passive ‘material substrate’ or some such. Yet it is clear that thought operates not merely ‘in’ a body, but with a body; we situate ourselves in an environment among which we orient ourselves though moving about though it and with it; there is a sense that coheres in the very upright stance of my body, poised for movement, on the threshold of action. Distance, balance, weight, pressure and light are elements which we think with and not just of. They play an ontogenetic role in the becoming-thought of thought. In the words of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, “what moves as a body, returns as a movement of thought.” Thinking here is always a thinking-with, a relational coupling which abjures the usual manners of speaking about 'thought' as a self-sufficient activity.

Manning gives an example of this in terms of a certain phenomenology of dance. She writes: “Two dancers take a step forward. [They] begin to feel the dance take over. They feel the openings [of movement] before they recognize them as such, openings for movement that reach toward a dance of the not-yet. As [the dance] takes form, the intensity of moving together translates into a step, this time to the front and around. She moves around me, urging my moving body-form to propel her shifting axis into a turn as I step back, repositioning my axis in direct relation to hers. The interval moves with the music, with the shifting axes, moving us, creating a shared body. We move the relation" (Manning, Relationscapes). There is thinking here that takes place at the level of the body, a thinking with the movement of the steps, the shifting relation between bodies. Thought-as-movement: what must be considered to break the ‘neurological mecca’ (S-J’s term) that holds such disproportionate sway of contemporary approaches to mind.