The Body

A Reader

Mariam Fraser, Monica Greco, Mariam Fraser, Monica Greco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000143188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The body has become an increasingly significant concept in recent years and this Reader offers a stimulating overview of the main topics, perspectives and theories surrounding the issue. This broad consideration of the body presents an engagement with a range of social concerns, from the processes of racialization to the vagaries of fashion and performance art, enacted as surgery on the body. Individual sections cover issues such as:

• the body and social (dis)order
• bodies and identities
• bodily norms
• bodies in health and dis-ease
• bodies and technologies.

Containing an extensive critical introduction, contributions from key figures such as Butler, Sedgwick, Martin Scheper-Huges, Haraway and Gilroy, and a series of introductions summarizing each section, this Reader offers students a valuable practical guide and a thorough grounding in the fascinating topic of the body.

PART ONE What is a body?

INTRODUCTION

THE BODY READER OPENS with Elizabeth Grosz’s summary of the some of the principal ways in which Western philosophical traditions have shaped contemporary conceptions of the body. Each of the texts that follow in this section are informed by that inheritance but also, importantly, seek to challenge it. Grosz’s piece begins by addressing the somatophobia that underpins the distinction between bodies and minds, and which constitutes the body as a ‘danger’ to reason. She briefly traces this legacy in Plato, Aristotle and in the Christian tradition. In each case, the body/mind dualism maps onto other binaries, such as mother (woman) and father (man), matter and form, mortal and immortal. Importantly, Grosz also shows how Cartesianism, by separating the mind from nature and the world, established a scientific discourse premised on impersonality and objectivity.This premise continues to shape the biological and medical sciences, as well as the human and social sciences. It is an assumption that makes it particularly difficult to address the important question of the relations between ‘two apparently incompossible substances’, the body and mind. Reductionism cannot help here, Grosz argues, for it only inverts the hierarchy such that the mind is understood in terms of the body (most commonly, today, in terms of the brain). In this way the interaction between the two is explained away, rather than explained. Indeed each of the heirs of Cartesianism that Grosz examines fail, she claims, to account for the complexity of the body, its corporeality and its agency.This is a piece that lays down the gauntlet.

Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is fundamental, for he seeks neither to privilege body over mind, nor to unify them in an overarching theory. Instead, he exploits the concepts of experience and perception in order to illustrate that the body is never either a subject or an object, mind or body, transcendental or immanent. For Merleau-Ponty, knowledge of one’s own body and knowledge of the world can be accessed only through the body.This is what he seeks to address: the experience of the body, and the way that the body shapes experience. In the extract we have chosen here, taken from the classic text Phenomenology of Perception (originally published in 1945), Merleau-Ponty pursues this issue by exploring and contesting the notion that the body is an object like any other. For the body is not an object, he argues, but is rather the condition through which it is possible to have relations with objects, with, that is, the world. Importantly, this conception of the body also changes the meaning of ‘world’: no longer a collection of determinate things, Merleau-Ponty argues, it is instead a ‘horizon’ that is ‘latent in all our experience’. Or to put that differently: the body’s relations with the world are not those of cause and effect but are rather the result of meanings, meanings which cannot be solely explained by either psychology or physiology. One of the key implications of this argument is that the individual body cannot be considered to be a strictly atomistic and bounded entity; it is not neatly divided off from the world. It is impossible to stand back from the world, and to look at it from ‘the outside’, because it is impossible to stand outside of one’s own body. I cannot get an outside perspective on my body, for it is the vehicle through which my perspective comes into being. Our relationships with objects, and with our own bodies, are therefore always partial. We cannot know them absolutely.

Where Merleau-Ponty interrogates the notion of permanence in relation to objects, Hans Jonas discusses endurance in relation to the identity of a living thing. Both proceed with reference to the relation between the individual body and the external world – or, in Jonas’s vocabulary, the environment. For Jonas this relation, of both independence and dependence, is crucial. It is a defining property of life, marking out the difference between ‘mere’ substance and organic matter. How so? Jonas begins with a question to ontology: ‘How does an ordinary physical thing ... endure?’ And he answers: it does not endure simply by being the same thing over time. On the contrary, if a biologist were to find that a body was the same over a period of time, if it was found to be have identical components, then it would most likely be considered to be a corpse. The question mark that hangs over the difference between a corpse and a living body exemplifies Jonas’s compelling take on issues that theorists have asked of the body again and again: how is it possible to reconcile (if reconciliation is what is required) the fact that the identity of a living entity is not reducible to its component parts, and yet is at the same time ‘grounded in transactions’ among them? Those transactions, moreover, do not occur only within the bounded limits of the body ‘itself’. A living thing, Jonas reminds his reader, is always exchanging matter with its environment. Indeed it depends on this exchange, a fact which serves to qualify or anchor any notion of an absolute independence from matter: ‘the freedom which the living thing enjoys’, Jonas writes, ‘is rather a stern necessity’. This, he concludes, is what is unique to a living entity: its active dependence upon the environment. ‘Doing’ is what is required ‘to be’ – the possibility of doing, a possibility which is always haunted by the possibility of not doing (of ceasing to be, of death). Life, Jonas concludes, is ‘at the mercy of its own performance’.

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the piece we have included by Gilles Deleuze is that it challenges any notion of the body as a bounded corporeality endowed with an origin, interiority and depth. The body, for Deleuze, is not a unified entity, nor is it organised around a central governor. It is not defined by intentionality, biology or by a psyche. It is not a property of the subject, nor is it an expression of subjectivity. It is not a locus of meaning. Indeed, a body is not to be deciphered or interpreted at all. Instead, the convergences between bodies (whether they be human or non-human, organic or not, natural or artificial) are there to be made and surveyed: mapped. For Deleuze is a cartographer, who situates all bodies on the same, flat, ontological plane (the plane of immanence), and defines them by what he calls longitude and latitude. Drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze argues that a body must be understood not in terms of a form or functions, but with reference instead to its relations of speed and slowness (longitude), and to what it can do, by its capacity to affect and to be affected (latitude).

This understanding of bodies cuts across genus and species. On the basis of its affective capacities, the plough horse, for instance, is found to have more in common with the ox than it does with the race horse. A body is not a ‘thing’, but a becoming, a series of processes, movements, intensities and flows. It is a mobile assemblage of connections which might be extended, but which might equally be severed. This is one of the exciting aspects of Deleuze’s ethology. To define a body by its affective capacities means that ‘you do not know beforehand of what good or bad you are capable; you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter’. In a given encounter is a vital qualifier here. For what a body can do will depend upon its relations with ‘the world’ (relations which are, like the boundaries of a body itself, necessarily contingent). In this respect, Deleuze’s ethology is also an ethics, an ethics which turns on the question of whether, in a particular set of circumstances (or rather, a particular set of connections), a body’s capacities will be increased or diminished, and its relations of speed accelerated or slowed down. Importantly, once again, there is no privileged sphere (such as ‘nature’ or ‘culture’ for example) in relation to which that potentiality or capacity can or should unfold.

If Judith Butler and Gilles Deleuze have anything in common, it is perhaps that they both conceive of bodies in terms of processes. For Butler, however, the process of materialisation is highly constrained. It is limited by regulatory norms, and especially by the norm of heterosexuality which ‘ontologizes and fixes that gendered matrix in its place’ (Butler 1993: 29). This is where we end the first Part of the Reader, appropriately enough, with an extract from a book that is in large part a response to ‘those whose patience with constructionist arguments is close to exhaustion’ (Kirby 1997: 105). Interestingly, Bodies that Matter is also intended as a clarification of Butler’s own use of the term ‘construction’ in the earlier Gender Trouble (1990), in which she claims that she ‘overrode the category of sex too quickly’ (Butler in Sandford 1999: 26).The result is neither a theory of the cultural construction of gender, nor of ‘the materiality of sex’. Instead, Butler writes of the ‘sex of materiality’, in which ‘materiality [is] the site at which a certain drama of sexual difference plays itself out’ (Butler 1993: 49).

In order to negotiate the tension between a critique of constructionist positions on the one hand, and a recognition on the other that without direct access to ‘facticity’ any conception of matter is necessarily interpretative, Butler suggests a ‘return’ to a differently figured conception of matter ‘not as a surface or site’, but rather ‘as a process of materialization that stabilises over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter’ (emphasis omitted). Matter will no longer refer to an inert substance or a blank slab upon which discourse inscribes itself, but is instead a process which itself constitutes the static ‘matter’ of bodies. Crucially, as a process, materialization must necessarily be temporal. Matter does not ‘exist’ in and of itself, for all time, but is instead repeatedly produced over time through performativity (performativity is that which brings into being or enacts what it names). While it may therefore seem certain that ‘I am a woman’, this identity is in fact never fixed, and is always unstable. The subject may appear to have ‘an identity’, an identity which is resolutely written on the body, but this is only because reiteration ‘conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition’ (Butler 1993: 12).

The contributions in this section offer demanding and sometimes provocative reformulations of some of the more conventional and perhaps intuitive understandings of what a body ‘is’. If these pieces are challenging, it is surely because they are faced with the hardest of tasks: engaging with and contesting the legacy of dualisms that haunt Western philosophy. Each of these texts, in their different (and more or less explicit) ways, have implications for the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, substance and matter, mind and body, and subject and object. These are among the most important themes that will be recurring in different contexts throughout the Body Reader.

REFERENCES

• Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London and New York: Routledge.
• Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London and New York: Routledge.
• Kirby, V. (1997) Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, New York and London: Routledge.
• Sandford, S. (1999) ‘Contingent ontologies: sex, gender and “woman” in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler’, Radical Philosophy 97: 18–29.

Chapter 1 REFIGURING BODIES

Elizabeth Grosz

From E. Grosz (1994) Volatile Bodies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Philosophy and the body

SINCE THE INCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY as a separate and self-contained discipline in ancient Greece, philosophy has established itself on the foundations of a profound somatophobia. While I cannot here preset an adequate or detailed discussion of the role of the body in the history of philosophy, I can at least indicate in a brief sketch some of the key features of the received history that we have inherited in our current conceptions of bodies. The body has been regarded as a source of interference in, and a danger to, the operations of reason. In the Cratylus, Plato claims that the word body (soma) was introduced by Orphic priests, who believed that man was a spiritual or noncorporeal being trapped in the body as in a dungeon (sēma). In his doctrine of the Forms, Plato sees matter itself as a denigrated ad imperfect version of the Idea.The body is a betrayal of and a prison for the soul, reason, or mind. For Plato, it was evident that reason should rule over the body and over the irrational or appetitive functions of the soul. A kind of natural hierarchy, a self-evident ruler–ruled relation, alone makes possible a harmony within the state, the family, and the individual. Here we have one of the earliest representations of the body politic.Aristotle, in continuing a tradition possibly initiated by Plato in his account of chora in Timaeus where maternity is regarded as a mere housing, receptacle, or nurse of being rather than a co-producer, distinguished matter or body from form, and in the case of reproduction, he believed that the mother provided the formless, passive, shapeless matter which, through the father, was given form, shape, and contour, specific features and attributes it otherwise lacked. The binarization of the sexes, the dichotomization of the world and of knowledge has been effected already at he threshold of Western reason.

The matter/form distinction is refigured in terms of the distinction between substance and accident and between a God-given soul and a mortal, lustful, sinful carnality. Within the Christian tradition, the separation of mind and body was correlated with the distinction between what is immortal and what is mortal. As long as the subject is alive, mind and soul form an indissoluble unity, which is perhaps best exemplified in the figure of Christ himself. Christ was a man whose soul, whose immortality, is derived from God but whose body and mortality is human. The living soul is, in fact, a part of the world, and above all, a part of nature. Within Christian doctrine, it is as an experiencing, suffering, passionate being that generic man exists. This is why moral characteristics were given to various physiological disorders and why punishments and rewards for one’s soul are administered through corporeal pleasures and punishments. For example, in the Middle Ages, leprosy was regarded as the diseased consequence of lechery ad covetousness, a corporeal signifier of sin.

What Descartes accomplished was not really the separation of mind from body (a separation which had already been long anticipated in Greek philosophy since the time of Plato) but the separation of soul from nature. Descartes distinguished two kinds of substances: a thinking substance (res cogitans, mind) from an extended substance (res extensa, body); only the latter, he believed, could be considered part of nature, governed by its physical laws and ontological exigencies. The body is a self-moving machine, a mechanical device, functioning according to causal laws and the laws of nature. The mind, the thinking substance, the soul, or consciousness, has no place in the natural world. This exclusion of the soul from nature, this evacuation of consciousness from the world, is the prerequisite for founding a knowledge, or better, a science, of the governing principles of nature, a science which excludes and is indifferent to considerations of the subject. Indeed, the impingements of subjectivity will, from Decartes’s time on, mitigate the status and value of scientific formulations. Scientific discourse aspires to impersonality, which it takes to be equivalent to objectivity. The correlation of our ideas with the world or the reality they represent is a secondary function, independent of the existence of consciousness, the primary, indubitable self-certainty of the soul. Reality can be attained by the subject only indirectly, by inference, deduction, or projection. Descartes, in short, succeeded in linking the mind/body opposition to the foundations of knowledge itself, a link which places the mind in a position of hierarchical superiority over and above nature, including the nature of the body. From that time until the present, subject or consciousness is separated from and can reflect on the world of the body, objects, qualities.

Dualism

Descartes instituted a dualism which three centuries of philosophical thought have attempted to overcome or reconcile. Dualism is the assumption that there are two distinct, mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive substances, mind and body, each of which inhabits its own self-contained sphere. Taken together the two have incompatible characteristics. The major problem facing dualism and all those positions aimed at overcoming dualism has been to explain the interactions of these two apparently incompossible substances, given that, within experience and everyday life, there seems to be a manifest connection between the two in willful behavior and responsive psychical reactions. How can something that inhabits space affect or be affected by something that is nonspatial? How can consciousness ensure the body’s movements, its receptivity to conceptual demands and requirements? How can the body inform the mind of its needs and wishes? How is bilateral communication possible? Dualism not only poses irresolvable philosophical problems; it is also at least indirectly responsible for the historical separation of the natural sciences from the social sciences and humanities, the separation of physiology from psychology, of quantitative analysis from qualitative analysis, and the privileging of mathematics and physics as ideal models of the goals and aspirations of knowledges of all types. Dualism, in short, is responsible for the modern forms of elevation of consciousness (a specifically modern version of the notion of soul, introduced by Descartes) above corporeality.

This separation, of course, has its costs. Since the time Descartes, not only is consciousness positioned outside of the world, outside its body, outside of nature; it is also removed from direct contact with other minds and a sociocultural community. At its extreme, all that consciousness can be sure about is its own self-certain existence. The existence of other minds must be inferred from the apparent existence of other bodies. If minds are private, subject...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE What is a body?
• PART TWO Bodies and social (dis)order
• PART THREE Bodies and identities
• PART FOUR Normal bodies (or not)
• PART FIVE Bodies in health and disease
• PART SIX Bodies and technologies
• PART SEVEN Bodies in consumer culture
• PART EIGHT Body ethics
• Guide to further reading
• Index