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Kime and the Moving Body: Somatic Codes in Japanese Martial Arts
Einat Bar-On Cohen Body & Society 2006 12: 73 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06070885 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bod.sagepub.com/content/12/4/73

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Kime and the Moving Body: Somatic Codes in Japanese Martial Arts
EINAT BAR-ON COHEN

But I should be playing this, I think anxiously. It is the minuet. I should have joined the others, I should be playing again. And, oddly enough, I can hear myself playing. And, yes, the ddle is under my chin, and the bow is in my hand, and I am. An Equal Music (Seth, 1999: 11011)

Introduction1 Keep your kime2 quiet inside your stomach, instructs the karate teacher; put your hand on your abdomen, thats where the kick begins. What is kime? How can it be hidden inside the body or felt by placing a hand on the abdomen? And why does a kick start from that hiding place? These are somatic conundrums that karate students must solve in order to master karate practice. The meaning and the tactical use of kime, which is of crucial importance to karateka (karate students3), are concealed inside their bodies, to be revealed through movement. At rst they do not know what kime is because they cannot discern it in their own or in their opponents bodies. The meaning of this un-translated Japanese word and its practical use unfold through years of practice.
Body & Society 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 12(4): 7393 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06070885

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Students of all martial arts learn how to move quickly and take aim precisely. They attain skills of perception that allow them to anticipate where their opponent is moving and what she intends to do. As they repeatedly practice in an effort to attain these skills, their bodies are also constructed anew. The way a karateka thinks and understands what body means, or what it contains, changes over time (Ots, 19944) as does the body itself: muscles grow stronger and more exible, perception and reaction become quicker and more accurate. The practice of martial arts entails more profound changes in the practitioner as well, because new potentialities, such as kime, are discovered and honed into nely tuned instruments. Karate, the Japanese empty-handed martial art from the southern islands of Okinawa, was modernized and transformed into a neo-tradition by Master Gishin Funakoshi (18681957). Traditionally a farmers way of opposing the Samurai, karate included the use of agricultural tools as weapons (still taught by some schools). Funakoshi was the rst Okinawan to demonstrate karate in Tokyo, changing the name and practice of the traditional martial art signicantly. Without shifting its pronunciation, Funakoshi replaced the kanji (ideograms) used for the original word, Chinese hand, into empty hand, hinting at the Zen ideal of emptiness. The sufx do the way was added to further stress the Japanese Zen spirituality, simultaneously equating it with the other Japanese martial arts, which were the exclusive purview of the Samurai caste of warriors. Changing the name rendered karate more Japanese, more spiritual, and more noble. Funakoshis students developed in different directions and today many karate schools exist. Some train mainly for competition, others emphasize efciency in battle, and yet others such as Shotokan, headed by Tsutomu Oshima5 eschew the use of weapons and stress the spiritual-practical facet of training (Bar-On Cohen, 2005; Habersetzer and Habersetzer, 2000; Hurst, 1998). Karate is a culturally transmitted practice without any text, discourse, or verbal exegesis between and among teachers and students.6 The meaning of the teachers words, the ways in which an exercise is carried out, and ultimately karate itself, emerge from within an individuals body. But how can the body, perceived and operated as it is from within, be culturally transmitted? How can internal somatic experiences originate from without? How can the words and body of one person be embodied in another? And how can adults learn complex, foreign (for Westerners, at least) and intricate ways of using, understanding and constituting their bodies through non-verbal, non-symbolic and non-dualistic means? More generally, how is the body objectied, and what are its relations with words, specically with those words I call somatic codes words hanging, so to speak, on somatic experience?
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Learning karate means discovering it inside ones own moving body. Certain modes of movement are conditions for achievement and for intentionality in the martial arts world-of-meaning. Having acquired those capacities of movement, the karateka can design the karate training, and also his/her own body, to suit the goals, in that way embodying karate. Only a karateka who is procient in the use of kime and other somatic abilities developed through training, can be active and successful in the world of karate. Moreover, the signicance of using kime goes beyond its practical value in combat; the very essence of karate training, of its interactive sociality, is to develop kime,7 as the revelation of potentialities hidden within is the essence of karate. The long process of discovering karate inside ones body also involves words for instance, kime which enable concise communication between students and teachers. Those words are meaningless to a beginner, but they become gradually loaded with signicance, and their meaning shifts as the students understanding of them is modied through somatic experience. I call such words, whose deciphering depends on somatic experience and whose meaning varies accordingly, somatic codes. Somatic codes verbalize interior body dynamics, and their signicance emerges together with these dynamics. The codes have the capacity of succinctly focusing the participants awareness onto a certain aspect of training, thus engendering an alternative possibility, supplemental to the exercise itself, of rendering these somatic interiorities social. These words, located in the interface between the innerness and the outerness of the body, are subordinated to the somatic. In contrast to other words, somatic codes do not designate an object that can be grasped by the senses, put to use and xed by logic; they designate ambiguous things, notions that are neither object nor subject, and also both object and subject. Somatic codes are neither out there nor in here; they are both in the world and part of me, of my body. In phenomenological terms those codes, like the body itself, are both on and within the horizon-of-being. They are both tools of apprehension and of action, as well as designated object (Csordas, 1994a; Merleau-Ponty, [1945]2002). Somatic codes have the capacity to draw the karatekas awareness to things that emerge from inside the body. Kime, as an example of a somatic code, is not located in any certain part of the body; it emerges from a place unrecognized by the person who is that body (Plessner, 1970). Its emergence depends on interaction, and it is also a tool of interaction, a social instrument that can be put to use inter-subjectively.

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Like Latours Nose The body itself changes as new potentialities of kinesthetics and of perception develop where none existed before. Such change can be seen much in the sense used by Latour, who claims that to have a body is to learn to be affected (2004: 205). The body is an interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected by more and more elements . . . By focusing on the body, one is immediately or rather, mediately directed to what the body has become aware of (2004: 206, emphasis in original). Latour, referring to the perfume industry, asserts that the body is constructed through the constant reiteration of articulations by comparison; it learns, through memorizing differences, to be a nose an expert in the perfume industry by acquiring the capacity to identify subtle differences in odor. The body is made up of what it learns to discern; and, I would add, the body is also made up of what it learns to do. Learning to master martial arts is more complex than training to become a nose, as it involves immersing oneself in an entire world-of-meaning, a new cosmological order composed of movement, senses, emotions and inter-subjectivity (Bar-On Cohen, 2005). Nonetheless, becoming a karateka, embodying the practice and ultimately becoming karate itself, since karate has no abode other than the karatekas body, depends like Latours nose on the endless reiteration of articulations by comparison. The Active Body The issue of social learning for the use of our bodies is not new and touches on notions such as how we are the apprentices of our bodies (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999), how it is shaped through practice, learning and culture, and so on. But the subject has not been widely addressed in social writing. The mindful body (Scheper-Hughes and Lock, 1987) was one attempt to resolve the Cartesian dualism of mind and body (Strathern, 1996). Other scholars have followed their lead, concentrating on the body as symbol and on demonstrating its subordination to societys will. The body has been portrayed as a passive billboard on which society, and particularly consumer society, pastes its dictates (Featherstone, 1991). Following Foucault, stress has been placed on the ways in which our bodies are shaped by discourse, focusing on what is done to the body rather than what the body does, and leaving the origin of agency (and, by the way, also of social oppression) unaccounted for (Turner, 1994). Feminist interest in the body has also centered on the disciplined, docile body as subjected to its gendered form. And much of the writing on disease and medicine as social
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phenomena concerns the consequences of modern medicines transformation of the body (Frank, 1991), positing the body as passive and leaving the active role to discourse, symbols and words. Yet it is insufcient to see the body as merely a surface to be inscribed, as a carrier of social signs. The body is clearly a potential, in process and movement, something which goes beyond itself (Featherstone, 2006: 213). Moreover, viewing the body as exclusively subject to discourse does not explain away the Cartesian split but leaves it nonetheless ethereal, a vanishing body (Shilling, 1993: 79). The body rst presents itself as that which will remain solid, but then it does melt into air (Frank, 1991: 133). Hence Lyon and Barbalet call for a new model whereby the body is understood not merely as subject to external agency, but as simultaneously an agent in its own world construction (1994: 48).8 I too would like to take a step toward taking up this challenge and posit the active body as it is shaped and while it shapes its social environment. Nondiscursive ways of making cultural sense of the world are neither mystical nor infantile; like words, they too follow logical operations of comparison, conclusion and so forth. The work of philosophers Suzanne Langer and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone has drawn attention to these non-discursive modes of body knowledge (Langer, 19799), which have trajectories of their own: parallel, intersecting, chiasmic, or simply constructed with language and other semiotic representations. The somatic potentialities that unfold and turn into sources of agency and communication are made of kinesthetics and are intimately connected to the potentialities that movement engenders (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999, 2000). In Sheets-Johnstones words, [t]o have meaning is not necessarily to refer and neither is it necessarily to have a verbal label. Movement animation can be in and of itself meaningful (1999: 491). Like other Japanese martial arts, karate is a system of elaborate ghting skills; at the same time, however, it is also a Zen practice actively forming non-dualism (Hurst, 1998; King, 1993). The names of most Zen arts calligraphy, paper folding, seated meditation (za-zen), ower arranging, pottery and more including the Japanese martial arts, have the sufx do. Do the way the way to discovering something profound and extraordinary about the world and about oneself, the way to enlightenment. That way is training: repeating movements over and over again until perfect praxis can be approached, while progressing smoothly, without high points, interruptions or intervals within the body. After some time, martial arts students might notice that their body-self has changed; they have discovered out-of-the-ordinary ways of moving and of using their senses. They nd themselves in a new place, whose existence they had not been aware of, and still on the way. As the goal of Zen practice, the objective of
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training is to achieve non-dualism through practice (Parker, 1992). The Eastern non-dualist worldview adds a new meaning to the martial arts students understanding of their bodies, of the profound and the out-of-the-ordinary, and of how to seek spirituality inside the body. The Japanese philosopher Yuasa has explained these processes (1987: 25):
To put it simply, true knowledge cannot be obtained simply by means of theoretical thinking, but only through bodily recognition or realization (tainin or taitoku), that is, through utilization of ones total body and mind . . . this is to learn with the body not the brain.

The non-dualistic possibilities lie within the body. This, however, has not explained how karate practice can achieve non-dualism; it must still be described. Western karate trainers are immersed in dualistic worldviews, yet fully capable of learning and mastering, even understanding, the nondualistic practices. Most karateka embrace the new way of using their bodies without renouncing their ordinary lives. Unlike a cult, for example, practising martial arts does not remove the practitioner from his/her family, surroundings, religion and so forth (see, for example, Beit-Hallahmi, 1991, 1992). The newly acquired non-dualistic way of using the body is not exclusive; it exists alongside the more dualistic fundamental understandings in the Western and modern world. This concurrent approach to the body is clearly evident in the case of religious Jews training in the Japanese martial arts. While they advance in their apprenticeship of the martial art, they retain the strict dualistic categorization and separation between various body parts, between the sacred and the profane, the body and the mind, as demanded by the Jewish religion (see Goldberg, 2003), maintaining two seemingly opposing views of the body simultaneously. Kime in Training During training sessions, kime is not explained in words, it is only practiced into existence, so perhaps the best way to look at it, short of training itself, would be to go to the training hall and describe how kime is practiced there. I observed the training session from which the quotation that opens this article, as well as the following descriptions, are taken, in November 2003 in Jerusalem.10 However, much of my understanding also stems from more than 20 years of practice in training and learning from my Shotokan karate-do11 teachers. The following descriptions include detailed positions and body movements that might appear technical and perhaps tedious but, as the issue here is the moving body and not its representations, only such detailed accounts may elucidate the meaning and use of kime.
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This particular training session, held in a school gymnasium, is a special occasion, a farewell for the head of Israel Shotokan, Eli Cohen, who is leaving the country to become Israels ambassador to Japan. About 60 experienced karateka are participating. Like all sessions, it opens with a short ceremony of bows and then the participants spread across the hall and begin a familiar series of warm-up exercises. Instructor Eli Cohen very softly counts out the rhythm in Japanese: ich, ni, san.12 He stresses the importance of a stretching and breathing exercise developing the pelvis, the tanden, which is good for strengthening the kime the hara13 he says using the two Japanese words. The participants sit on the oor, legs stretched out straight, hands planted on the oor on either side of the buttocks. They lift their bodies up slowly, abdomens pointed at the ceiling, weight resting on the hands and ankles, all the while inhaling, lling the lungs through the nose. They stay in the fully extended position briey, then return slowly to the sitting position, exhaling until no air remains in the lungs, and again lifting the abdomen. There are ve corners, says Eli, the two hands, the two legs, and the fth corner is the abdomen. Concentrate only on this fth corner,14 forget the other four. Eli wants the participants to feel as if they are hanging by their belts in mid-air, suspended from the ceiling as if this central corner the abdomen is what is holding them in that extended position and not the four other points which are, in fact, planted on the oor. Eli does not explain what kime is, nor does he say how the karateka should proceed in order to achieve this feeling of hanging from the ceiling while disregarding the points of contact with the oor. He is talking to seasoned karateka who already have an inkling of what kime is, having already sensed it in their bodies. They understand what he is talking about; his words are neither metaphorical nor mystical. They actually feel the oor disappearing; the knots of their belts are extended toward the ceiling, the lungs open and suffuse with air the tanden holds their bodies in position. Later in the training session Eli refers again to the feeling of being suspended by the belt from the ceiling, this time in combat. He proposes another exercise aimed at the perception and the strengthening of kime.15 Now the participants spar; the attacker uses a kick and the defender reacts with a st. Eli explains and demonstrates: the defender does nothing but strike with the maete to the eye, he says, and he must be cut by the mawashigiri. Maete is a short striking movement of the st of the extended hand; mawashigiri is a circular kick of the back leg, creating a cutting effect much like that of a sickle. The exercise is a very unbalanced one; the attackers movement is a long and difcult one, while the defenders move is very short and relatively easy. It does not seem reasonable for the exercise to work, namely, for the attack to be successful and for the leg to
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reach its target before the st reaches the eye; for the leg, moving in a long, round trajectory, must move some two meters from its position in the initial stance to the point of impact on the opponents body, and the st need only move some 40 centimeters before contact with the opponents eye. But Eli insists that it can be done, posing a tactical riddle, a somatic conundrum to be unraveled in a precise somatic manner. Eli demonstrates and explains at the same time. His movements are long, precise and calm, and although he must reach his target quickly, he does not seem to be in a hurry, and the tone of his voice is equally serene. This exercise demands great precision and composure.
The leg starts out without a sign. If your movement is too strong, its too late; if your movement is too rapid, its too late. Its very simple: [the defender] understands that [the leg] has started out only after it has already moved. Do this as if there was no kime thats right, the mawashigiri is in. Dont think about the leg, your body has done it thousands of times, it knows mawashigiri.

Elis remarks on the demonstration he has just performed with another karateka show how to attain this tricky goal. When facing a skilled adversary, a squint of the eye, a twist of the front leg, a shift in balance, a shrug of the shoulder, a slight pulling back of the hand any of these can indicate to the opponent that the attack has begun. The slightest change will lead the opponent to react with a counter-attack and consequently to undermine the exercise. The initial stance must therefore be perfect, a stance verging on movement yet extremely stable, as the leg is lifted and swayed in one strong swoop without correcting the body balance for that motion and without any preparatory movements. Already encompassing the potentiality of movement, ready to disclose the movement it contains, like the participants held by the knot of their belts, the stance has the karateka standing immobile in mid-motion a very practical illustration of Husserls claim that holding still is [also] a mode of I do (1970: 106). It is not only muscular movement that can be detected by a trained karateka; the attackers decision to move may also be perceived and thus undermine the attackers chances of success.16 Hiding kime, performing the exercise as if there were no kime, means complete control over both movement and thought. In this situation, a thought (a decision) or an emotion (the will to win, for instance) is a somatic activity that can be detected by the other, a corporeal mode of intersubjectivity: the mind too is a movement. For the attack to surprise the opponent it should be void, it should start out without betraying a signal. The attacker himself should forgo the decision; he should let his body decide when to attack, and he should let his body carry out the attack perfectly, as it was trained to do. Anything not directly connected to the task at hand can be perceived by the opponent; non-dualism is a ghting technique.
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To hide kime means that the attacker must not reveal his strength; on the contrary, his opponent remains unaware of the impending kicking movement until the attack is already on its way, gaining distance and making up for the imbalance in the roles of the two opponents. Only if the attacker succeeds in hiding the instant of attack, does his long circular movement have a chance of overtaking his opponents short simple one. For this, Eli insists, the motion must begin from the pelvis: keep your kime quiet inside your stomach . . . remember the fth point, the knot of the belt, that is the point that is moving, everything else will follow. The technical solution for this exercise is to move as if being pulled by the belt. The sensation of hanging from the ceiling is recaptured in the attempt to surprise the opponent, almost as if the attacker himself is surprised, as if he is being pulled into movement from the knot of his belt. Hiding strength, speed and effectivity in battle makes for a stronger warrior and at the same time avoids boasting or any other expression of power.17 Moreover, it precludes any emotion that might give away the incipient movement, because a skilled opponent would surely perceive the signal and the exercise would fail. Eli could have chosen a more balanced exercise that would allow the participants to engage in a freer, more expressive combat, but he chose the hiding the kime exercise that presents the karateka with a challenge to his person, his entire body-self: a practical-spiritual exercise demanding meditation-like18 serenity. The sensation of being suspended from the ceiling, however, cannot be demonstrated; nor can the feeling that the movement begins with the tanden, that it starts out from the belt knot. The training exercises can only turn the karatekas attention to the kime. Kime is not taught; it can only be attained indirectly through motion in relation to the opponents19 moving body. Kime is enhanced by certain movements and perceived by its workings, by its success in combat. A karateka can know if his/her kime works, only through his/her opponents reaction. If the attack allows the opponent to retract without her controlling that retraction, namely if the opponents tanden moves backwards, then kime has proven itself. In the exercise above, in which a long lunge attempts to outpace a short blow, if the defender does not react in time, then the attacker knows that she has hidden her kime well. Kime can only be revealed within social interaction, a potentiality to be played out inter-subjectively. More phenomenologically put, in terms of body philosophy it can be argued that there is a deeper form of memory than that which uses symbolic codes (Jespersen quoted in Sheets-Johnstone, 2000: 361). Kime is located in the bodys imagining in habits, in the bodys memory of what it is capable of. Thus kime can be quiet inside the stomach, as Eli says, it can hide itself. Like the senses and the muscles, the kime too is ready to be activated. The karateka knows it is there and knows he/she can hide it or use it just like any
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other part of his/her body, and just like he/she can use speech or, perhaps, even his/her self. In the effort to crack the somatic riddle of the long circular movement attempting to outpace the short one, Eli asks the participants to hide their kime long enough to make the opponent unaware of the moving leg. At the instant of impact, however, when the mawashigiri reaches the opponents body, kime must display itself fully. Kime is masked and then reveals itself when it is too late for the opponent, who must react to the moving leg and whose st can no longer be effective. Kime implies a smooth passage that does not allow for the instant of transformation from hiding to full disclosure to be pin-pointed, since the hiding is embedded in the disclosure and the disclosure in the hiding (see Handelman, 2005b20). The shift from concealment to presence is uid and non-detectable. If there is no kime, if it is absent and not just hiding, it cannot reveal itself; the attack is then inefcient and not dangerous. Kime is created, hidden and disclosed simultaneously through the exact positioning of the body, and of the pelvis in particular; it is how the karateka advances, how the initial stance unfolds its movement. At the same time, however, it also is a state of emotion. Kime from a Sino-Japanese Perspective So, what then is kime? As already noted, the word kime cannot be dened statically; its meaning is formed through experience. It is demonstrated, used, pointed at, but it is not and cannot be explained in words in the framework of karate training. This attempt to formulate the innerness of the body as it is formed is perhaps perplexing, but it should be borne in mind that kime is intersubjective and also as much a characteristic of the body every body as is breathing or moving ones limbs. Attack and defense cannot be effective without kime. Having strong kime means being dangerous, not just throwing limbs at the opponent but really menacing him/her. Kime can therefore be described as the interior potentiality of strength and speed, of warriorship growing inside the trained body, of the transfer of explosive energy (Habersetzer, 2000: 342). It is a somatic characteristic that a trained warrior can use at will. A karateka uses kime like Vikram Seths violinist uses his body to make music: in the middle of a concert he nds himself thinking, I should be playing again. And, oddly enough, I can hear myself playing. And, yes, the ddle is under my chin, and the bow is in my hand, and I am (1999: 11011). The violinists trained body can perform the very complex task of playing an instrument with other members of the quartet, starting at just the right moment and in the correct manner, without thinking about it, or even when he is busy thinking about something else.
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The martial arts student encounters a new world of meaning whose notions are not formulated verbally. On the contrary, training dismantles notions designated by words and replaces them with other notions understood somatically, notions from the Sino-Japanese world such as ki (chi in Chinese) that are translated (inaccurately) as life energy. Martial arts students talk of enlarging their ki, their kime, their kiai (the expletive sound or cry of the warrior at the moment of impact). The students are not provided with any translation for these words; the notions they indicate exist only as part of the understanding of the body (and mind) in Sino-Japanese medicine and culture. In order to grasp and use such notions and to carry out the practices they entail, the students also need to unlearn what they already know, to discard the dichotomous categories they normally use outside the training sessions. In the martial arts, and in the Sino-Japanese view of the body and its working in general,21 the interface between the body and that which is outside it is not clear cut. The body is sometimes understood to include not only that which is circumscribed by the skin but, during battle, the ma22 as well, the empty space between the two warriors facing one another, and the opponents body as well. The sensation of being inside the opponents body when the opponent has strong kime has been described as the feeling of being surrounded and trapped like the prey enveloped by an octopus many arms (Masciotra et al., 2001: 119); I literally shrink into myself, lose control; I become unable to release a decisive action although my opponent is within reach (p. 127). Kime emerges from the Sino-Japanese way of looking at the body, at the way it is constructed and operates, contracts disease and heals; this way may not be compatible with the usual Western (and modern Japanese) understanding of the body. The Sino-Japanese view is that the body holds the potentiality of including more (and sometimes less) than that which is inside its skin and it is, consequently, permeable to exchange with other bodies, objects and, ultimately, the entire cosmos. Unlike the scientic view, the body can be apprehended not only from an objective, exterior viewpoint, but it can also be grasped from within, by our sensation of the condition of our own body, the sense of knowledge the body provides from within23 (Yuasa, 1993: 72). Neither ki, the vital energy or inner power, nor kime can be used, reached or sensed through any part of the body, but only used, adjusted, hidden, or made to appear through practice. Like ki, kime is grasped as a whole, but there are zones where ki is concentrated,24 and the tanden (hara) a point beneath the navel, exactly under the knot of the belt is considered to be an ocean of ki (Yuasa, 1987). The kime is concentrated there as well, and can be perceived, as Eli proposes in the training, by placing a hand on the tanden while moving. Every karate movement should begin from the tanden, the most stable region of the body. Thus the kick starts out from the
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tanden, the movement emerges from the pelvis, exteriorizing the kime as the leg is hurled forward. Kime has at least two explanations in Japanese (see note 2), one designated by the kanji (ideogram) meaning extremity or polarity, indicating that kime is the extremity of the warriors potential to ght effectively: beyond his/her kime he/she cannot ght or deter an adversary. That extremity is pushed further, making kime grow as the warriors ghting capability improves. The other explanation of the word kime comes from kanji for the verb to decide. That sense of the word connects physical strength, alertness and effectiveness to the mental capacity to decide. A karateka aims to conceal his/her decision to move; by hiding his/her kime, he/she can surprise an opponent and move without the opponent sensing it. In this way, kime is a decision taken by the body itself, as it were. This point can perhaps more tellingly be formulated in the negative: kime is the decision to renounce decision, to allow the body and its ghting experience take over the decision. Kime is also used to detect the opponents decision to move; it helps a warrior feel an opponents decision to take action and thus attack even before the attacker is aware of it. Kime is used to ght more effectively, and also to collect information from the environment, such as information about the opponents intentions. Obviously this is of great tactical advantage, but this version of kime, of warriorship, also molds the correct emotional attitude a karateka should embody: that of emotional distance or emotional emptiness. A genuine karateka should not boast about his/her ability and must avoid recklessness, but also ought not to display cowardliness. It is not enough to somatically display the absence of emotions; for the display to be credible in an extreme situation like battle, emotions such as fear, anger and vengefulness themselves, which are considered part of the body (Ots, 1994), must be overcome and must cease to exist. This demands strenuous training from the karateka, and thus karate is also an emotional endeavor. In this context, emotions as a source of action, of volition, can be detected as movement and are, indeed, movement. Hence the capacity to control the kime, to hide it or to use it, is also the capacity to avoid emotion in battle. An attack can succeed if the attacker renounces the will to win. In karate, volition must cease to exist so that, paradoxically, intentionality can emerge where volition lets off. Semiotic Semantics Somatic Codes Kime is a somatic-emotional experience and, like other sensed and felt experiences, it cannot be accounted for solely in words. Langer (1979: 1001) powerfully expresses the inadequacy of words in capturing emotion:
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Everybody knows that language is a very poor medium for expressing our emotional nature. It merely names certain vaguely and crudely conceived states, but fails miserably in any attempt to convey the ever-moving patterns, the ambivalences and intricacies of inner experience, the interplay of feeling with thoughts and impressions, memories and echoes of memories, transient fantasy, or its mere runic traces, all turned into nameless, emotional stuff.

Nonetheless, by looking at the non-discursive in experience, Langer reaches the conclusion that also the world of sensation operates in a logical semantic way, that feelings have denite forms, which become progressively articulated (Langer, 1979: 100, emphasis in original), and that, as Durig glosses Langer, we can think with feeling (Durig, 1994: 262). The senses collect data and their impressions of the world inform cognition. The only way they can make sense of the world is for the eyes and ears [to] have their logic their categories of understanding (Langer, 1979: 89); they too must sort things out through logiclike operations in order to inform cognition. These logic-like operations are nondiscursive because they are non-linear and non-objective and thus stand in contrast to the formal logic that is characteristic of language, mathematics and so forth. Non-discursive logic does not discern separate named objects, which can be organized linearly, one after the other; rather, non-discursive logic can grasp a full, undetailed, unnamed picture at one glance. This way of making sense and of attributing meaning to the world is accomplished though logic-like operations such as comparing, categorizing, correcting, iterating, correlating and thus learning from experience. Langer further argues, says Durig, that [d]enial of emotions is a classic symptom of dualistic thinking (Durig, 1994: 256): because words and other representations are central to Western thought and are accorded primacy over emotion and other felt experiences. Consequently, the non-dual in our lives is consequently subdued, even neglected. According to Langer, non-discursive semantics as a way of conveying complex understandings is found in art, myth, ritual, music and, I would add, movement in general. Kime as movement is a means of both collecting data and of doing, perhaps a condition for intentionality as Kapferer uses this notion in anthropology (2000: 28, note 1; see also Kapferer, 1997):
I use the concept of intentionality minimally as referring merely to the directedness of human beings into the world of their existence. Such a directedness is a faculty of human existence. Human beings are already immersed in the world and come to a self-consciousness within it. Consciousness is emergent from this directedness and not vice versa. It is as a consequence of this directedness that human beings become reectively conscious of the meaning and motivations of their activities.

The notion that [c]onsciousness is emergent from this directedness and not vice versa recalls Langer, again as glossed by Durig who states, Language is not a
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medium of meaning; meaning is the medium of language (Durig, 1994: 258, emphasis in original). As I understand it, Kapferers emphasis on directedness indicates movement. Kime perceives while it is enacted and unfolds while it is informed. It exists in the interactive body un-detailed, un-located, a fully mature, whole entity encompassing both perception and action un-differentiated. Eli the karate instructors conundrum for the students was how to achieve the seemingly impossible exercise. Using meticulous verbal as well as somatic instructions, he demonstrates the solution following a logical pattern: if the instant of attack is hidden, that fraction of a second while the opponent is unaware will allow the attacker to gain time and thereby redress the imbalance between the long and the short movements. This is purely physical, objective, almost scientic. The actual implementation of this logic, however, its practicality, depends on construing the body as an un-detailed whole, as a non-discursive entity following a non-linear, non-objective logic. The word kime designates just this, an undened entity that is actualized through somatic experience, setting representation on its head, as it were, because (Young, 2002: 28):
What we think of as mental phenomena: thoughts, memories, emotions, turn out to be corporeal phenomena; what we think of as bodily phenomena: postures, gestures, body habits, turn out to be emotions, memories and thoughts . . . The body is the medium of both thoughts and things.

Furthermore, somatic codes challenge the relation between the felt and the said. Somatic codes undermine the dichotomy between body and word, sense and thought, perceiving and doing; they present a non-dual potentiality that permits smooth passage from sense-data to thought to action, from body to mind and vice versa. They emanate from the foundation of a somatic understanding of the body-self and of the potentialities within it, connecting muscle to eye to emotion, blending kinesthetics with perception and self-perception, fusing somatic and emotional control into one. Their existence is embodied in movement, in the initial stance and in its actualization. Turning thought into movement and movement into a sensory tool collecting information from the environment all this in an intricate culturally transmitted practice. Kime is fundamentally a social capacity, learned, concealed and revealed though interaction; what, then, is kime saying about the potentialities of the social body?

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The Body in Movement Mind the Gap The body, claims Merleau-Ponty ([1945]2002, 1968), is already in-the-world from birth. It is the tool of perception, the pre-condition in the pre-verbal, preobjective infantile state. The body enables discernment of objects in its environment, through the world-building process of objectication (see also Csordas, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c). At the outset, the horizon-of-being everything a person knows and can imagine is restricted to the tool of data collection she was born with, namely, the body. The world is void, so to speak, it makes no sense, it is ungraspable but, immediately, a gap is created between the body-self and the world of objects as it begins to make sense of the world, name the objects it discerns, imagine how they are organized and so on. This growing gap between the body as a tool of perception and the world of objects, this enlarging of the horizon-of-being, is the process of objectication, including the objectivization of the body itself, making it an object among objects. The horizon-of-being, the limit of a persons objectied world of reality and potentiality or imagination, comes to include increasingly more objects, words and representations. Thus the body itself has a double identity: as the rst tool of perception, it is on the extremity of a persons objectied world, the horizon-of-being; but the body is simultaneously in the world as a discernable object within the horizon-of-being, a representation, since the body can be looked at and spoken of from an outside objective point of view. Kime, like the body itself, is both on and within the horizon-of-being. Both kime and the body are tools of apprehension as well as of action and, at the same time, named, designated, apprehended objects (Csordas, 1993, 1994b; MerleauPonty, [1945]2002). Merleau-Ponty understands this gap of objectivization to include all the world in its entirety. Csordas (2004) adds that it is the source of our sense of alterity and of religion in general. Accordingly, the somatic preverbal abilities of perceiving the world become redundant and primitive compared to words, representations and objects. In a world where alterity is so intimately within ourselves, as Csordas indicates, duality is the only possible way of grasping the world. But this is, in fact, not the case. Unlike the process of objectication described by Merleau-Ponty and Csordas, in kime no gap opens between the body which comprehends the characteristic of kime and the understandings it actualizes. There is not even a gap between kime itself and the word kime, the somatic code used to indicate the phenomenon. The gap by which words and other representations are created is not the only option for understanding the relation between soma and words. The non-verbal and the non-representational

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are not only pre-verbal and pre-objective, they continue their rich trajectory throughout life as interactive, social and cultural options alongside representations. And they too can lead to spirituality, albeit one of a different kind (see, for example, Handelman and Shulman, 1997). Karateka practicing kime are using their body movement to grasp the environment and to form the world-of-meaning of karate. Their bodies are not merely tools to glean information; they are not receptacles that permit the storage of some other content made up of ideas and words. Kime is a body-object: not idea and not esh, yet both idea and esh. It pulls the karateka towards the extremity of her somatic potentiality and pushes that extremity even further to somatic capacities she could not imagine existed. The somatic horizon-of-being is no longer xed in the esh we happen to have and to be; the body and its potentialities both of perception and of action enlarge and with them the world itself. Perhaps this is the more profound meaning of the word kime as represented by the kanji meaning extremity. Conclusion The Sino-Japanese way of viewing the body coincides to some extent with the phenomenological view: the body as it is experienced. The Japanese philosopher Yuasa (1993) elaborates on this comparison in detail, and Ozawa-de Silva (2002) suggests that a new anthropological view of the body can stem from Yuasas philosophical perspective. The present article is an attempt in that direction. Ultimately, kime is a tactile-kinesthetic entity born in and of practice, coming into being in a social setting through the specic organization of the body-self, fusing body and self into one stance and movement. Kime is entirely embodied, yet can only be used and recognized inter-subjectively. While tactically performed in combat, kime also embodies a new spiritual potentiality that depends on the eradication of emotion and volition, perhaps annihilating the self itself. If volition is menaced by anothers act of violence, the somatic answer is to renounce volition altogether. Here the word kime in fact functions as a non-verbal utterance.25 Movement is the prime way of making sense of the world, claims SheetsJohnstone, following Husserl. Movement is the rst and basic means of perceiving the world, encompassing verbal potentiality as well, since In discovering ourselves in movement and in turn expanding our kinetic repertoire of I cans, we embark on a lifelong journey of sense-making (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999: 136). Furthermore, she claims that (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999: 253):

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We are a moving-in-the-world being . . . Whatever the initial way of motivations and incipient intentionalities might be, they develop by way of a tactile-kinesthetic body. That body is itself the object of motivations and intentionalities in the form of head turning, stretching and so on. In such ways the tactile-kinesthetic body is itself constituted: we put ourselves together; we learn our bodies. We do so through movement.

The practical philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari also points at the social, non-dualistic use of the body; they pose the question How do you make yourself a body without organs? (2005: 149).26 What they mean can be understood as the holistic body, that which is left when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signicances and subjectications as a whole (p. 131). Gil describes the coming into being of the body without organs through the choreography and dance of Merce Cunningham, a dance of pure movement with no other referend but itself. Gil proposes a new osmosis whereby thought and body become one, and whereby a new uidity, a new kind of movement, may circulate on this plane of immanence that is dance. This new osmosis comes about through body consciousness, or through a body of thought (2003: 122, emphasis in original). When thought and body are one, words become somatic codes, echoing the body in movement, deferential to its dynamics. So if movement is the source of I cans and I dos, and if we can and do make a body without organs, then somatic codes are central to the way we discover the world and act in it. They link our bodies together and permit the social passage of body, form, culture, and meaning; they thereby also uidly link the qualities of innerness and outerness of our somatic existence. Potentialities such as kime and many daily somatic attitudes have a complete life informing us of our social and physical environment, inducing action and intentionality. Furthermore, as unlikely as it may seem, dual and non-dual points of view are not mutually exclusive; we can (and do) hold both views at one and the same time. Both duality and non-duality it would seem are culturally constructed. The body, with its potentialities of perception and of action, is formed throughout life, enabling a non-objectied process of discovering the world through the body and of learning to be that body: a lifelong apprenticeship to become our own body set in movement. Notes
1. Although Don Handelmans work is not widely cited in this article, his thinking stands at the outset see for example Handelman, 1998. I would like to thank my teachers Erik Cohen, Michiko Ota and Asaf Hazani for their most valuable help, and the readers of Body & Society for their remarks and encouragement. I would also like to dedicate this article to my karate teacher Meir Iahel.

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2. Kime even in Japanese, the origin of the word is not clear. One explanation is that the word comes from the verb kimeru to decide ( Habersetzer and Habersetzer, 2000); the other explanation was sent to me by the main dojo (school) of Shotokan-karate-do in Santa Barabara in the form of a kanji (Chinese ideogram used in Japanese) denoting extremity or polarity see below. The quoted text is from eld notes describing a training session held in Jerusalem in November 2003 (translated from Hebrew). 3. Karateka both plural and singular. 4. Ots describes the subversive potential of Chinese cathartic healing. In Chinese understanding, emotion is understood as residing in the body and not in the mind, so students of oriental practices may change their view of the location of emotions. 5. Shotokan means the house of Shoto, which is the pen name used by Funakoshi when he composed Chinese poems, and also the name of the rst karate training site (dojo ) in Tokyo. At least two schools are called by that name; my ethnography concerns the teaching of Oshimas school of karate. Oshima himself continued the trend of introducing into karate elements from other samurai martial arts, especially kendo (sword play). A student of kendo in his youth, he switched to karate and studied with Funakoshi after the Second World War, when kendo was prohibited under McArthurs administration (private communication). 6. Some karate schools include bunkai (verbal explanations of the tactical reasons for each movement) in their training. Those are mainly used in order to detail the meaning of kata movements, exercises that are preformed against imaginary opponents and therefore need explanation. However, those do not explain the more profound meaning of the somatic experience or the spiritual potentialities embedded in the martial art and are, in that sense, not exegesis. 7. This could be said to be a spiritual aim, especially since karate, like other Japanese martial arts, is a Zen practice. 8. This has been addressed by the contributors to Embodiment and Experience (Csordas, 1994b), as well as by others. 9. Langer calls them non-discursive semantics, but that notion might be confusing. 10. Conducted as part of my doctoral research (in anthropology) on Japanese martial arts in Israel (Bar-On Cohen, 2005). 11. I hold a black belt, second dan (out of ve), in Shotokan. 12. One, two, three. 13. Hara as in harakiri the location used for disembowelment in the ritual Samurai suicide, situated a few centimeters below the navel, also called tanden. 14. It is a corner because it is at the angle created between the upper and the lower stretched body, thus forming a new limb comparable to the hands and feet. 15. Note that the perception and the strengthening of kime is one and the same thing. Being able to feel it cannot be separated from its constitution. 16. Although in actual training the word see is used in a general sense, I use the word perceived, because not only do the eyes perceive these slight signs, but movement itself is used for data collection (see also Zarrilli, 1995, 2000a, 2000b). While the limbs change position in space, that space is learned and this potentiality is developed over years of training. In this sense, movement is also a sensory organ. Karateka can train to perceive an attack coming from behind, and at times also train blindfolded. 17. According to Bateson (1972), boasting can be a source of symmetrical schism, of schismogenesis. Karate and other ghting arts encompass a non-belligerent end; they are constructed in such a way as to eradicate violence, refraining from boasting is part of that effort. However, the topic of the martial arts and non-violence is beyond the scope of this article. 18. There are two sorts of meditation in Zen: seated meditation, and meditation in constant walking. The Zen aspect of martial arts is a development of meditation in constant walking (King, 1993).
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19. An important part of karate training the kata, a set series of combat movements is performed against imaginary opponents. Even in kata training, kime is exteriorized against a moving opponent, albeit an imaginary one. 20. The passage of the kime from concealment to revelation is, in Handelmans terms, braided (Handelman, 2001, 2005a). 21. Chinese medicine is based on this way of looking at the body (see, for example, Yuasa, 1987, 1993; Ots, 1994). 22. Ma is the empty space between two opponents, the exact amount of space needed for them to attack each other without taking a preliminary step. In general in Japanese culture, the ma is the empty space that gives signicance to objects, the white of the paper in a drawing for example. OhnukiTierney (1994) calls the ma a zero signier. It is not a somatic code but a semiotic notion putting things in relation. 23. Yuasu calls this capacity coenesthesis. 24. The sites of concentration are used for healing in acupuncture and in shiatsu. 25. Like the words of Japanese master Awa, who taught archery to German scholar Harrigel (perhaps the rst Westerner to ever learn a Japanese martial art, at the beginning of the 20th century), the masters words, through their practice together, which serves as a nonverbal channel of communication (Shun, 2006: 210). 26. Deleuze and Guattari take this discussion beyond the purview of this article. See also Featherstone, 2006.

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