Conversations on Embodiment Across Higher Education

Teaching, Practice and Research

Jennifer Leigh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351970778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

"Embodiment" is a concept that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. However, it is a contested term, and the literature is fragmented, particularly within Higher Education. This has resulted in silos of work that are not easily able to draw on previous or related knowledge in order to support and progress understanding. Conversations on Embodiment Across Higher Education brings a cohesive understanding to congruent approaches by drawing on discussions between academics to explore how they have used embodiment in their work.

This book brings academics from fields including dance, drama, education, anthropology, early years, sport, sociology and philosophy together, to begin conversations on how their understandings of embodiment have impacted on their teaching, practice and research. Each chapter explores an aspect of embodiment according to a particular disciplinary or theoretical perspective, and begins a discussion with a contributor with another viewpoint.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students from a diverse range of disciplinary areas, as evidenced by the backgrounds of the contributors. It will be of particular interest to those in the fields of education, sociology, anthropology, dance and drama as well as other movement or body-orientated professionals who are interested in the ideas of embodiment.?

Part I
Theory and practice

1 Embodiment as embodiment of

Paul Bowman

Preface: trigger warning: autobiography alert

Please beware: in what follows, I am at times going to be shamelessly autobiographical. But this is not mere self-indulgence. Rather, it is because I think that personal anecdotes can offer an economical way of getting a lot of concerns on the table quickly, by conveying the ways that some key problematics around ‘embodiment’ have arisen in relation to my research and thinking, and the ways they have both vexed and stimulated me.¹ But not just me as some kind of unique, isolated individual; rather me as an academic who has searched for theoretical and/or practical academic ways out of many of the problems. So, my hope is that when you read about ‘me’ here, you will think less about me and much more about ‘we’. Either way, please have patience with the autobiographical elements of what follows. They are doing some heavy lifting.

Introduction: a brief history of no body

I have always loved martial arts and I have always loved writing. I loved martial arts films as a child. As a teen I tried to learn how to do the flashy moves that I saw on screen. At the same time, I found writing essays for school to be one of the easiest things I had ever been asked to do. Hence in the school system I became what was called ‘good at English’. In fact, although I far preferred other subjects (economics, geography, art), it transpired that, with no effort at all, for some reason, I started to come top in English. In due course, without really knowing anything about it, I was given the chance to go to university. Following a path of least resistance, I pragmatically elected to take a subject I was ‘good at’ and found easy, simply because I was good at it and found it easy (and because it had the added attraction of minimal contact hours and maximal assessment by essay). So I studied English. The irony was that I came from a barely literate working class family in which no one had ever passed a written exam and I myself did not particularly like reading. Writing, yes. Reading, less. Either way, I was regarded as a kind of freak by my father and brothers, because I would read and write, I was left handed, and I spent most of my time doing things that they did not understand or regard as ‘proper activity’, because they did not visibly involve making, fixing, moving and visibly doing.²

At university I genuinely loved literary theory from the moment I met it (formalism first, then structuralism, poststructuralism and – my favourite at the time – semiotics) but I was increasingly bored by literature. After my degree, a friend told me about a subject called cultural studies. I looked into it. I did an MA, using erstwhile ‘literary’ theory (now redubbed ‘cultural’ theory) to look at more interesting things than literature – such as martial arts films, music videos, the rise of body consciousness in men via bodybuilding, and the political possibilities of standup comedy. I was invited back to do a PhD. I chose to interrogate the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (primarily Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). There was no ‘body’ there. Just words, institutions, mechanisms, political processes, hegemonies, relations of articulation, power/knowledge, semiotics, interpellations,³ conflicts of interpretation and so on.

Throughout my PhD studies and in the years immediately thereafter, I kept writing about problems in political and cultural theory using poststructuralist approaches (see Bowman, 2007). But all the while what I wanted, more and more, was to write about a completely different thing – martial arts – in terms of what we are here calling ‘embodiment’. However, the problem was that I was immersed in the world of problematics and approaches and paradigms that were primarily kitted out to deal with very different things – principally, the philosophical critique of logocentrism and what Jacques Derrida called the ‘metaphysics of presence’, conceived as key parts of the wider ethico-political deconstruction of essentialisms of all kinds.

Being haunted by the body

It is probably worth remembering that Derrida (the so-called father of deconstruction) was always widely denounced and defamed by opponents as someone who did not believe in or who tried to deny the existence of reality, or the reality of existence (for discussion see Derrida and Weber, 1995). I mention this unfair critique here not because it is correct but because there is something close enough to a spectral or chimerical grain of truth in it to illustrate the predicament I was in. For, if deconstruction does not simply deal with ‘things’ – ‘real things’, like, say, our bodies – then surely trying to use Derrida to think about embodiment is a bit like trying to use a chocolate teapot to make tea. Nonetheless, when I did eventually, tentatively, (re)turn to trying to write about embodiment, I did so via the only means I knew: Derridean deconstruction, poststructuralist discourse theory and Barthesian textual analysis (Bowman, 2008, 2010).

This may sound a bit like trying to dig your way out of a hole, or like Slavoj Žižek’s joke about searching for a lost key under the light of a streetlamp rather than in the surrounding darkness where you actually lost it, because you can’t see anything over there in the dark. But you start from where you are, you think with the tools and in the terms you have learned to think with, and you write the way you know. I was going to say that you write about what you know about, but I do not think that’s entirely correct. I think I am more inclined to write about what I wonder about. So my first attempt to deal with the impact and importance of martial arts on the lives and minds and bodies of people (like me) took the form of using the approaches of Derrida, Ernesto Laclau and Stuart Hall (Derrida, 1976; Laclau, 1994; Hall, Morley and Chen, 1996) to account for the emergence and to assess the significance of the ‘kung fu craze’ of the 1970s. My very first attempt was a conference paper called ‘Enter the Derridean’ which reflected on the impact and enduring significance and effects of Bruce Lee films on people’s imaginations and activities and lives and loves.

At the same time, however, it was important to me not to consign ‘Bruce Lee’ and ‘martial arts’ to the status of being treated as mere examples, to be (ab)used only in order to unproblematically ‘prove’ a certain theory – in this case, the theory of ‘discourse’ as developed by the likes of Laclau and Hall, following on from Michel Foucault (1978) mixed with a lot of Antonio Gramsci (1971). So, as my title, ‘Enter the Derridean’, hopefully suggested, the work was attempting to assess the emergence not of what might be too easily dismissed or categorised as the kung fu ‘craze’ – or some kind of ‘subculture’ – but rather the emergence of the ‘discursive formation’ of cultural studies, cultural theory and deconstruction. After all, all of these things took off during the same kind of period – yet we tend not to regard academic movements as being crazes or subcultures, do we? We tend rather to connect them to wider issues and problematics and to dignify them with labels like ‘intellectual developments’. Reciprocally, I wanted to accord the same dignity to figures like Bruce Lee and developments like the uptake of ‘Asian martial arts’ in Western popular culture. These were not mere crazes, nor should they be categorised as ‘subcultures’. Such designations keep the scholarly gaze that creates the categories safely free from the same kind of scrutiny that it applies to everything else.

Papers like that (which was eventually worked into the first chapter of my book Theorizing Bruce Lee [Bowman, 2010]) were my first baby-steps into working towards matters of embodiment. I suppose I followed an eccentric route into such waters. Or maybe I wasn’t even in the waters yet, but still stuck on a rock, looking for a viable route down to the sand and sea: my approach was textual (principally organised by looking at films, books and magazines); it was self-consciously part of a tradition (cultural studies) that had a strong commitment to redeeming so-called popular culture from the stigma of being branded trivial and inconsequential; and it was informed and organised by paradigms that focused on macro-political discourses. While Barthes’ approaches extended to audiovisual culture (Barthes, 1977), Derridean deconstruction and much poststructuralism principally critiqued philosophical ‘logocentrism’. My approach, despite my best intentions, was arguably very much focused on words and pictures.

In the beginning was the word – and pictures

Of course, things are not so simple. In the history of the notion of ‘discourse’, the work of Foucault looms large. There are two obvious sides to Foucault: first, his studies of the effects of arguments, ideas, texts, legislations and institutional operations on, second, the human subject, in mind, body, flesh, blood, muscles, skills and disciplines. So there are clearly at least two directions that a Foucault-inspired or informed ‘discourse approach’ could go. One is macro-historical and/or institutional. The other is focused on minds and bodies, and persons and people. All of my prior training (indeed, all of my disciplining) had been in the world of the first orientation. So, my efforts essentially took the form of conceiving of embodiment as embodied discourse. That is, I understood embodiment as always and necessarily involving discursive factors and forces (words and pictures). These forces found their actualisation in and as aspects of embodiment via what may be called ‘performative elaborations’ or ‘performative interpretations’ (I take these terms more from Derrida (1994) than Judith Butler (1990).) Accordingly, embodiment in my thinking was always likely to be associated with wordy or audiovisual discursive injunctions, imperatives, ideals and so on.

So, my approach could be accused of believing that ‘in the beginning was the word’ – and pictures, but pictures translated into words and actions. It is definitely the case that I have always read many ‘words and pictures’ as being – or becoming – injunctions (or Foucauldian discursive statements), such as: ‘aspire to be like this’, or ‘desire this’. Doubtless this orientation is a residue of the influence that Barthes’ arguments in Mythologies (Barthes, 1957) had on my thinking. Indeed, I still regard almost any deliberately selected and crafted audiovisual textual images of people, places and things to be injunctions (aspire to this, desire this, be like this) or their obverses (avoid this, reject this, be disgusted by this, and so on).

This is hardly a radical position to take. Many others go much further. In a different context, and in a slightly different direction, Andrew Barry goes significantly further than this, for instance. In Political Machines, he notes that even the ‘factual’ world – the world of ‘facts’ – is constructed and works in terms of injunctions. Neither ‘data’ nor ‘information’ are ever neutral. As he puts it: the existence of data about, say, smoking and mortality, or diet and diabetes, and so on, implies a subject who ‘needs’ that ‘information’ and who should respond to its implications and act accordingly because of it – give up smoking, lose weight, etc. (Barry, 2001). This is relevant to embodiment because it would mean that any subsequent actions undertaken in light of the ‘facts’ or ‘information’, leading to body modification or enskillment (running skill, say, or the production of a ‘yoga body’ [Singleton, 2010]) would amount to the embodiment or performative interpretation or articulation of a certain kind of discursive injunction.

In my approach to bodies, embodied knowledge and bodily practices (specifically, martial arts), I have tended to prioritise cases of the ‘translation’ of visual material (say, moving or static pictures of someone like Bruce Lee) into being a kind of injunction (‘Be like this! Desire this!’) or indeed a Foucauldian ‘statement’ (Foucault, 1970). This can lead to the transformation of lived practices, and hence the transformation of bodies, skills, lifestyle norms, values and sensibilities, and so on (Bowman, 2010, 2013b, 2016a, 2016b).

The key point has always been that in the case of moving or static pictures of Bruce Lee, such ‘messages’ were – are – not solely translated into words. Rather, in the case of words and pictures about martial arts, such cultural ‘messages’ are often translated by people into physical practices – the taking up of new activities or living life according to new values and different orientations. The ‘creation myth’ image here is one of children and teens seeing a martial arts movie for the first time and leaving the cinema making Bruce Lee catcalls and trying to do flying kicks (the exemplary work on this creation scenario is Brown, 1997). Over the coming days and weeks and months, how many of such erstwhile spectators went on to seek out a martial arts class? The evidence (or at least the accepted narrative [BBC4, 2013]) says many. This means that embodiment is also often supplemented by media spectacles – or, in other words, mediatised (Bowman, 2017).

In turning to the impact of martial arts films on people and on popular culture, I was trying to step away from the world of institutionally and macro-politically focused poststructuralism. I wanted to think and research the ways that cinematic images have functioned effectively in and fantasy identifications and other forms of psychic/psychological processes. They inspire and induce certain embodied practices. My first focus was Bruce Lee and I was interested in martial arts practices, specifically. Of course, this means that I was still entirely subjected to thinking of ‘culture’ and ‘subjectivity’ (embodied or otherwise) in the terms of poststructuralist semiotics, in which everything becomes signifiers sending messages and pointing to other signifiers, and so on (see Silverman, 1983). Consequently, I don’t really think that any of this work actually (or straightforwardly) got to the matter of ‘embodiment’. It focused on the nexus of media representation, identification and fantasy, conceived as a kind of motor that inspires and/or sustains physical practice.

Phrased like this it all sounds very technical and grand. Yet maybe we don’t really need the trappings and baggage of the language of psychoanalytical cultural theory to describe it. Maybe we could just as easily talk about people’s beliefs or hopes or ambitions being the things that generate and sustain their practices. If we think of running, for example: people can (and do) talk a lot about why they run (for health, to lose weight, to raise money for charity, for a sense of wellbeing, because they are ‘addicted’ and so on). But none of these words give us any insight into any matters of embodied running, from anything about the experience to any other kind of (non-wordy) insight. When we try to probe the experience of running itself, our words often come up short. There are shared ‘technical’ phrases, and shared descriptions: we can speak of muscle cramps, how we might feel like we can’t get enough air into our lungs, how we hit the wall and so on. But other than this, the experience of running often seems to fail to find its way out into speech and language. The experience of a run was great or terrible or hard or easy or exhilarating or harrowing, and so on. But what was the ‘that’ that we are saying was good or bad or hard or easy or fun or challenging?

How to do things with guts

What we are facing here is a general problem of signification. To translate something from an individual experience into words and meanings always requires a move away from the perceived essence or heart of the matter, via a necessary (invented, poetic) connection with another coordinate. An experience is like one thing, and not like another thing; it can only ever be evoked through comparison, analogy, metaphor, contrast and so on. Admittedly, the communication of a non-linguistic event, phenomenon or experience is a particularly knotty semiotic problem, but it is a semiotic problem nonetheless. Like everything, attempting to signify ‘that thing’ will always involve composition, construction and a perhaps ultimately impossible or forever unsatisfying effort of translation.

All of this has been reflected upon since at least the time of Charles Sanders Peirce. People have found fascinating ways out of this abyss, or ways to bridge it or bypass it. But I have always felt the need to hold onto the tensions, gaps, disjunctions, aporias, absences and irrelations between experiences and words. This is because trying to keep hold of this tension imposes a gnawing, generative problematic. Loïc Wacquant expressed it well, I think, when he wrote, on the subject of learning boxing:

How to go from the guts to the intellect, from the comprehension of the flesh to the knowledge of the text? Here is a real problem of concrete epistemology about which we have not sufficiently reflected, and which for a long time seemed ...