Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory

I move therefore I am

Brenda Farnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415781091
• eBook ISBN: 9781136645259
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents a series of ontological investigations into an adequate theory of embodiment for the social sciences. Informed by a new realist philosophy of causal powers, it seeks to articulate a concept of dynamic embodiment, one that positions human body movement, and not just 'the body' at the heart of theories of social action. It draws together several lines of thinking in contemporary social science: about the human body and its movements; adequate meta-theoretical explanations of agency and causality in human action; relations between moving and talking; skill and the formation of knowledge; metaphor, perception and the senses; movement literacy; the constitution of space and place, and narrative performance. This is an ontological inquiry that is richly grounded in, and supported by anthropological ethnographic evidence.

Using the work of Rom Harré, Roy Bhaskar, Charles Varela and Drid Williams this book applies causal powers theory to a revised ontology of personhood, and discusses why the adequate location of human agency is crucial for the social sciences. The breakthrough lies in fact that new realism affords us an account of embodied human agency as a generative causal power that is grounded in our corporeal materiality, thereby connecting natural/physical and cultural worlds.

Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory is compelling reading for students and academics of the social sciences, especially anthropologists and sociologists of 'the body', and those interested in new developments in critical realism.

1 The primacy of movement

… no [human being] perceives except on condition of being a self of movement.

(Merleau-Ponty 1968: 257)

Among the Nakota and Lakota peoples of the Northern Plains of North America takuṡkanṡkan ‘that which moves’ refers to an intangible power or force that generates movement of all kinds in different levels of reality, including the movement that signifies life itself (Farnell 1995a: 248). Movement is also at the heart of concepts of power among the Kuna people of Panama where burba is the name given to the invisible essence that makes things move: within the eight levels of Kuna reality, each has its own burba.¹ Acknowledging and engaging forces with the power to move seems to lie at the heart of many indigenous American ceremonial practices, where we find power, movement, knowledge and action inextricably linked. I mention these ethnographic facts, not to endorse the anthropological habit of insisting that non-Western peoples stand in some kind of dualistic opposition to modern Western societies, but to make the point that the ‘primacy of movement’ as a causal power and philosophy of being and becoming in the world was articulated long before the topic became of interest to Western anthropologists and scholars of the dance and human movement (e.g. Williams 1975; Farnell 1995a; Varela 1994a; Sheets-Johnstone 1999; Ingold 2011).

Within Western (i.e. European and derived) philosophies too, of course, the capacity to generate movement signifies life itself in plant and animal forms. Alongside related mammals, we move in the womb long before we enter the world outside, and when even the rhythmic movement of our breathing ceases, we are deemed to be no longer living. As human beings, however, we also move our bodies as we move about in natural and cultural environments in ways that provide quintessential features of a distinctly human form of life: we sit, stand, walk and talk long before we realize that this is what we are doing, or that we are signifying anything with our bodies in motion.

Given these rather obvious facts, questions arise as to why, on the whole, since their inception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Western social sciences chose to ignore the body, remaining theoretically disembodied until the 1970s? And why, once ‘discovered’ as something more than a biological substrate, did the body appear in accounts primarily as a static social object, rather than an active resource for making meaningful human worlds?

A number of anthropologists seeking to redress this imbalance have begun to focus on body movement in their ethnographic research as a means to rethinking what being social actually means.² As Tim Ingold and Joe Vergunst succinctly put it:

Amidst the clamor of calls to understand the body as an existential ground for the production of cultural form, rather than only as a source of physical and metaphorical means for its expression … we tend to forget that the body itself is grounded in movement.

(Ingold & Vergunst 2008: 2)

These scholars join anthropological colleagues and others who have long specialized in the study of human movement, the dance, and performance, in recognizing that, if the body is foundational to culture, then moving, and thinking with and through movement, is foundational to being a body that is alive – that is, a dynamically embodied person.³

This broader recognition of the centrality of movement to human lives and hence to our descriptive accounts of them, opens up interesting and important new possibilities for centering dynamically embodied persons at the heart of social theory. Accomplishing this task, I shall argue, requires us to look beyond anthropology and the other social sciences toward philosophy to pay attention to certain meta-theoretical developments in the philosophy of science. This is necessary to clarify some of the ontological and epistemological dilemmas underlying the earlier absence of the body from social theory that were rooted, in part, in a rejection of the biological determinism that came from concepts of the body within the natural sciences. Charles Varela has proposed that we embrace the ‘new realist’ philosophy first proposed by Rom Harré in 1970 to shift the social sciences away from positivist notions of science and toward a new “science for humanism” (2009). It was Harré’s new realism that revolutionized the philosophy of science during the late twentieth century by bringing ‘causal powers’ back to the center of concern in scientific explanation. This is important to a theory of dynamic embodiment because new realism provides an account of embodied human agency as a generative causal power to act that is grounded in our corporeal materiality, thereby reconnecting natural and cultural worlds, and providing a concept of the body fundamentally different from that offered by positivist science, according to which, as part of the natural world, the body is necessarily subject to a mechanistic determinism.

Recovering human agency as one of a variety of causally empowered ‘natural kinds’ in the world, we can now show how it is our materially grounded corporeal or physical human being that makes possible cultural being, enabling a concept of personhood that is simultaneously bio-psycho-social. As I hope to show, this meta-theoretical move allows us to resolve a problematic material/non-material dualism in Western thought and radically revise the persistent Platonic–Cartesian notion of person that underlies the metaphysical separation of ‘person’ into body and mind. Body/mind dualism has long plagued Western philosophy, but for important reasons. Closely related to the material/non-material dualism, it was deemed necessary in order to retain a conception of human freedom or agency against the determinism of the physical world, as Kant argued (see Varela 2009).

Important as the breakthrough to new realist causal powers theory is for grounding a new conception of embodied human agency, it does not, in and of itself, assure a theory of dynamic embodiment that places the activities of moving persons front and center in theories of social action. This requires theoretical enrichment from Drid Williams’s anthropological theory of the embodied signifying moving person – semasiology (Williams 1975, 1982, 1999a).⁴ Metaphysically grounded in Harré’s causal powers theory, semasiology enables a broadly conceived ‘anthropology of human movement’ that deeply informs the approach I take here.

The metaphysical clarification afforded by new realism also allows us to reconfigure relationships between language and the moving body: not only between talk and (physical) action, but also taking into consideration talk as action and action as talk (performativity). In an effort to dissolve another problematic Platonic–Cartesian dualism – the separation of verbal from non-verbal – I here explore an embodied discursivity that embraces a variety of speech-movement relationships. These include not only speech-act systems, sign languages, co-expressive vocal-manual gestures, and movement practices with explicit performative links to language use (such as classical Indian dance forms), but also forms of embodied practice that manipulate and organize dynamic concepts inherent to the medium of movement itself (e.g. rhythm, energy, kinesthetic sensation, spatial patterns and orientations, locomotion, etc.). This has to be understood as thinking with and through movement, not words. I thus seek to expand the conventional notion of discourse, recognizing that the human mind that generates and improvises with vocal gestures (speaking) does not somehow switch off when it comes to other forms of bodily motion. But neither do I wish to subjugate movement practices to a linguistic model that directs attention away from their distinctive properties, of which more will be said later.

This theoretical clarification offered here also allows us to address some important family quarrels within studies of ‘the body.’ For example, instead of artificially separating the semiotic (as necessarily representational, cognitive, or intellectualist) from the somatic (as a wide range of corporeal processes and practices assumed to be non-conceptual and non-linguistic), or opposing the phenomenological (as experiential and individualist) to the social and symbolic (as collective, structural and idealist), we can perhaps walk toward understanding human activities in ways that “bind practice and representation, doing, thinking and talking, and … show that everything takes place, in one way or another, on the move” (Ingold & Vergunst 2008: 3).

Outline of chapters

Chapter 2 outlines the nature and scope of the study of dynamic embodiment. First, I summarize possible reasons for the longstanding bias against the body in Western thought, and the curiously disembodied view of human beings that permeated the social sciences prior to the ‘corporeal turn’ that began in the 1970s. I divide this corporeal turn into two distinct phases: the first moves us from disembodied social science to a focus on ‘the body’ – I call this the first somatic turn. Stimulated by the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, a range of feminist theorists, and an interdisciplinary, postmodern, phenomenological valorization of the sensuous, we find a number of social theorists working on the problem of embodiment and seeking ways of ‘bringing bodies back in.’ A second somatic turn offers a theoretical enrichment of the earlier phase by re-positioning the moving body and the primacy of active, moving persons as central to a theoretically adequate account of embodied social action.

Chapter 3 articulates what the new realist concept of ‘causal power’ means within a post-positivist, realist philosophy of science, and why such metatheoretical clarification is of value and importance to the social sciences. Using the work of Rom Harré, Roy Bhaskar and Charles Varela, I apply new realist causal powers theory to a revised ontology of personhood, and discuss why the adequate location of human agency is crucial to a theory of dynamic embodiment. I maintain that it provides a means to prevent the kind of reifications that have proved misleading in the past. I also suggest, following Varela, that grounding a theory of dynamic embodiment in new realism realizes Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ambitions, recognizing that the central principle that underwrites his concepts of the lived-body, intercorporeity and flesh is the ‘self of movement.’ I then discuss how this dynamically embodied definition of social actors provides the grounds for semasiology and describe selected semasiological principles that inform the chapters that follow.

Once people are conceived as dynamically embodied persons empowered to perform signifying acts with vocal signs and action signs, the way is clear to develop complementary research strategies for the systematic investigation of dynamically embodied action during ethnographic fieldwork. In Chapter 4 I discuss the adoption of the movement script Labanotation as a methodological resource adequate to this task, illustrating the advantages of movement literacy through a critical examination of methods used to record (American) Plains Indian Sign Language.

In Chapter 5 I utilize the new realist approach articulated in Chapter 3 to argue that the invention of ananalytic construct like ‘the habitus ‘became necessary to Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977) because he was unable to resolve his struggle with the exact nature of human powers and capacities and the location of agency. Although certainly moving in the right direction, I suggest that minus the resources from American linguistic anthropology that stem from Roman Jacobson’s linguistics and poetics (discourse, indexicality and performativity), Bourdieu gets stuck on the twin banks of objectivism and subjectivism, despite his desire to transcend this and other conceptual dualisms. As a result, Bourdieu’s theory of practice gives us an ungrounded notion of human action, often separated from consciousness and discourse, and restricted to habituated practices rather than a genuinely generative agentic resource. Using ethnographic data from my studies of the communicative practices of Nakota (Assiniboine) people of northern Montana, I support the theoretical argument presented in Chapter 3, and employ the movement literate methods described in Chapter 4 to illustrate how, once grounded in the ontology of personhood afforded by new realism, (which locates agency in the causal powers and capacities of embodied persons to engage in dialogic, signifying acts) it is the creative combination of vocal signs and action signs in structured spatial environments, not the dispositions of a habitus, that become the means by which humans exercise agency in dynamically embodied practices.

Whereas Chapter 5 offers a counterargument to Bourdieu’s sociological model of the habitus as a mechanism to account for embodied practices, Chapter 6 examines Lakoff’s and Johnson’s cognitive models of embodiment. These authors aim to restructure traditional disembodied philosophical and linguistic approaches to semantics and rationality by forging an embodied account of categorization and cognition. In order to accomplish this, they construct a notion of ‘kinesthetic image schema’ that posits a basic level physical experience that is pre-conceptual, and out of which, they propose, concepts are structured. Using the post-Cartesian position inherent in new realist causal powers theory, I critically examine this concept and suggest that this approach to embodiment compromises the authors’ important goals by restricting body movement to the role of an experiential, preconceptual precursor to spoken concepts. Once transformed into ‘mental images,’ such experience merely assists in the building of a conceptual system from which physical action is subsequently excluded. From this perspective, bodily experience provides only the ground upon which that which really counts – spoken language concepts and categories – can be built into metaphorical schemas. Physical being and bodily actions have thus been denied the status of signifying acts and forms of knowledge. Using ethnographic examples from my own research as well as that of colleagues, I demonstrate how ‘action signs’ (signifying movements) provide a medium other than speech that shares the conceptual stage and systematically employs metaphoric and metonymic conceptions realized in space. This implies that our imaginative capacity is not merely indirectly embodied, as Lakoff and Johnson suggest, but directly embodied because action signs themselves can be imaginative tropes – in other words, human movement is in itself imaginative, conceptual and metaphorical, and thinking with movement is fundamental to dynamically embodied personhood.

In Chapter 7 I further challenge the persistent separation of verbal from non-verbal in conventional linguistic thought, employing new realism and semasiology to challenge the underlying dualistic conception of person and associated disembodied language ideology. This provides a radically different perspective from which to explore how an American-English speaker and a Nakota (Plains Indian) speaker/sign talker consistently and systematically integrate vocal signs (speech) with action signs (gestures) to create dynamically embodied talk in socially constructed, inter-subjective spaces. I here utilize the embodied conception of language shared by my Nakota collaborators and other Plains (American Indian) peoples. Accordingly, linguistic practices are not conceived as verbal utterances located internal to the mind, at best supported by, or, as is sometimes supposed, contradicted by non-verbal outward behaviors of the body. They are instead dynamically embodied signifying acts that simultaneously integrate vocal signs and action signs, both of which constitute ‘talking.’

Building on insights from Chapter 6, I compare the metaphorically laden co-expressive gestures of an American-English speaker with those of a Nakota speaker fluent in Plains Indian Sign language, noting differences in bodily and spatial locations as well as semantic and pragmatic functions. I describe two contrasting conceptions of mind and body relationships that are made visible through gestural means. I also highlight the dynamically embodied grammar of ‘I’ and deictic use of pronouns (Urciuoli 1995) to examine important contrasts in the structure of inter-subjective performance spaces. I suggest that traditional approaches to language (including metaphor and deixis) have failed to see this vocal/visual integration at work in the performance of communicative acts. It remains the case that the dominant disembodied language ideology within linguistics and linguistic anthropology segregates spoken signs and visual-kinetic action signs, despite the ‘breakthrough to performance’ in the ‘ethnography of speaking’ tradition. As such, a disembodied view of linguistic practices along Cartesian lines prevails. The data and my analysis offer an interesting challenge to definitions of language as traditionally constituted in Western thought, whereby only certain aspects of spoken language practices have counted as ‘truly’ linguistic.

The first somatic turn in the social sciences also generated an explosion of interest in the senses. Notably absent from most investigations, however, is kinesthesia, our sensory awareness of the position and movement of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1. The primacy of movement
• 2. The body in social theory
• 3. A new ontology of personhood
• 4. A methodological move: Movement literacy
• 5. Bourdieu’s habitus: A sociological mislocation of agency
• 6. Lakoff’s and Johnson’s metaphors: A psychological mislocation of agency
• 7. Verbal and non-verbal: A linguistic mislocation of agency
• 8. The ab(sense) of kinesthesia in Western thought
• 9. Implications of dynamic embodiment for social theory
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index