On the Corposphere

Anthroposemiotics of the Body

José Enrique Finol

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9783110696936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Études sur la communication

The book presents and analyzes some of the most important issues related to the body seen as a rich and complex anthropological and semiotic object, capable of playing a decisive role in the meaning making processes of cultural and social life. The analysis presented in this book opens a whole set of new venues for the study of body performances and representations, and shows how the embodiment of social and cultural life shape our world. In all of its relationships and in itself, our body works in a sort of corposphere, which is, in turn, part of the semiosphere, defined by Lotman as a continuum occupied by different types of semiotic formations. It is from/in/by the body that all semiosis begins and ends; it is in its presence and absence, in its being and in its presentation amidst the lived situational life where we might discover and shape the senses of the world. Many different academic fields will find in this book deep insights about how the body is at the center of cultural and social processes.

Chapter I The knowledge of the body

Introduction: What is corporeality?

Studies on the body today occupy one of the fundamental, most active areas among the different human and social sciences. From Philosophy to Sociology, through Anthropology and Semiotics, research on the body multiplies incessantly. It is not a gratuitous epistemological phenomenon but a claim from a society in the process of absolute globalization, in which the body fills numerous spaces of what Debord (1967) called the society of the spectacle.

The rich, diverse, and wide-ranging problems related to the body constitute, together with fear and doppelgangers (Silva 2008), one of the fundamental imaginaries of contemporary life. After having suffered contempt, punishment and the most unimaginable vilification for centuries, accused of being the cause of sin and moral hardship, an instrument of little relevance to the soul, spirit, mind or conscience, the body has become, in less than a century, the focus of considerations without limit, a pampered object of unlimited expenses, of weight and height standards, clothing and perfumes, surgeries and prostheses, food and diets, all intended to establish its realm at the centre of social life, personal lives, the media and the economy, medicine and the arts.

We present this book, as a cartography in the sense that geographers give it, that is, as a map, always fragmented, always incomplete, of the numerous and variable meanings of the body and of what we will define as corporeality. Although we start from a perspective in which we try to articulate an interdisciplinary vision, where Anthropology and Semiotics go hand in hand, we believe that this heuristic journey will also be useful for sociologists, philosophers, and psychologists. The body and its multiple presences, its history and its conceptions are as complex and omnipresent as humans themselves are, because, after all, mankind, as Merleau-Ponty said, is, in many respects, their bodies, their meanings, their presence and, in no small measure, also their absence.

Now, what is corporeality? Many authors use this term, most with different meanings. If we start from the basic definition given by the Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary (Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, or DRAE), we will see that in it this concept is described as ‘corporeal quality’, as ‘belonging or relative to the body or its condition as such’. Fuenmayor defines corporeality as ‘semiotization of the body’ and adds:

Corporeality could be understood as the simulation of the body’s own construction and of the texts where a limited number of elements, which are not yet signs but semiotic marks, allow to create the psychic representation of contents and their translation into languages from the same permanent or stable semiotic system Corporeality is not a visible body but the organizing system of the visible, speakable or thinkable and as such, its unconscious grammar with which it was built can be seen.

(Fuenmayor 2005: 125)

The author points out three semiotic processes that would give rise to corporeality, which he calls cenesthetic sensoriality, kinesic corporeality and corporeality of thought. Parra Díaz (2011) raises the question of corporeal mutations, particularly in the case of cyborgs and the possibility of it acquiring new dimensions in what the author calls (post)human bodies. For Rosales Cuevas (2012), although corporeality initially has to do with our physical morphology, it is also marked by the social aspect: “there is a human community founded on the fact that we share a corporeality with similar architectures, with similar performances that is crossed through its entirety by the way the social group in which we live teaches us how to value what is felt and experienced”. (2012)

For our hypothesis in the texts that follow, corporeality is defined from the ‘experienced’, understood as an operational construct that is generated in four directions that are dynamically constituted; the first, in the processes of ‘sensation’ and ‘perception’; the second, in the constitution of ‘significations’ attributed to sensitive and perceptual inputs; the third, in the constitution of a ‘memory’; and the fourth, in the subsequent projection of that ‘memory’ in the ‘interpretation’ of new sensitive and perceptual processes. In this way, experience is not a passive deposit of accumulated information that we update in certain circumstances, but a process that is always in a condition of construction and reconstruction; and, fundamentally, a semiotic phenomenon, we might add, that is significant. Seen in this way, experience is built in the world from the body, which then makes it easier for us to define corporeality as the set of dynamic imaginaries that a society, thanks to the accumulation of its experiences at a given historical moment and in a specific culture, attributes to the body considered as a semiotic object inserted in a world that characterizes it, gives it meaning, and at the same time, the body, thanks to its communicative richness, also characterizes and semiotizes it. Said corporeality, as an immanent semiotic condition, is also a consequence of the ambivalence of the body, of its dialectical, borderline, and transgressive insertion between its condition of natural phenomenon and its construction as a cultural phenomenon.

1 Philosophy of the body

On the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself,

in so far as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing

[that is, a mind], and on the other hand I have a distinct

idea of body, as far as this is simply an extended,

non-thinking thing. And accordingly, it is certain that I am

really distinct from my body and can exist without it.

René Descartes

The Greek philosophers had a great concern for the description of the human body and, in particular, for its anatomical comparison. Such is the case of Aristotle, who in History of Animals opposes the interior to the exterior of the body and then establishes three divisions: the elemental bodies, including fire, earth, air and water; the homeomerous parts, resulting combinations of the elemental bodies and among which we find bones, blood, bone marrow, bile, etc.; and anomeric parts, which are differentiated components such as arms, eyes or face.

Plato also states that “there are four elements of which our body is composed: earth, fire, water and air” (1979: 1171), and radically distinguishes between soul and body: the first belongs to heaven, to the divinity, and the second to the earth: the soul “is the beginning that we have said inhabits the highest part of our body […] This soul lifts us above the Earth, because of its affinity with Heaven, since we are a celestial plants, and by no means earthly”. (1979: 1177)

For Plato, the body must imitate the forms of the entire universe, of which it is constituted, but it must also avoid rest, which can destroy it: “If […] the body is never allowed to remain at rest, if some movement is constantly thrust upon it, it will always know how to defend itself naturally against internal and external movements”. (1979: 1176)

The body is one of the most exciting chapters of Philosophy, both western and eastern. While Plato, Aristotle and other Greek philosophers referred to the issues related to the body, in general, from a dualistic perspective, no one elaborated a more systematic analysis of the mind-body dichotomy than Descartes: res cogitans and res extensa.

First, Descartes, in Treatise of Man, refers to the body as a machine: “I make the supposition that the body is nothing else than a statue or earthen machine, which God has deliberately willed to create, in order to make it as similar to us as is possible […]”. Then he insists on the active separation of body and soul, and makes an effort of logical reasoning and argumentation, systematically developed, that allows him to be consistent with his theistic conceptions of life, of human beings and of the world. This theoretical systematization leads him to conclude in the real possibility of the existence of a being without the existence of a body: “There is a great difference between the mind and the body, while the body is, by its nature, always divisible, the mind is absolutely indivisible […] This single argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different from the body” (in Skirry 2006).

In his acute analysis of the Cartesian vision of the body, Skirry (2006) points out that this reasoning is based on the premises according to which: a) the mind is thinking and non-extensive, b) the body is non-thinking and extensive; from which the French philosopher concludes, c) that the mind is clearly distinct from the body and that, consequently, ‘the first can exist without the second’.

Since the mind has a surface and a capacity for movement, the mind must also be extensive and, therefore, mind and body are not completely different. This means that the ‘clear and distinct’ ideas of the mind and body, of mutually exclusive natures, must be false for the causal interaction of mind-body. Therefore, Descartes has not properly established that mind and body are two distinct substances.

(Skirry 2006)

In his criticism of Descartes, Merleau-Ponty reproaches him for the ignorance of the other and the world, which, consequently, causes him to ignore the dialectic of the ego and the alter ego, two elements that are defined by their historical situation and not only by the Cartesian cogito: “Until now the cogito devalued the perception of the other, it taught me that the Id is not accessible but by itself […]. So that the other is not a vain word, it is necessary that my existence never be reduced to the consciousness that I have to exist”; because, finally, the author adds, “the cogito must discover me in a situation, and it is only in this condition that transcendental subjectivity can, as Husserl says, be an intersubjectivity”. (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2003: vii)

In his radical critique of philosophy, from the Greeks to his contemporaries, Nietzsche fought the separation between body and spirit and in lines reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty called attention to bodily unity and his social conception because, according to the philosopher, our body is, in a way, inhabited by many and is not, as the Greeks and Descartes himself argued, an individuality without any major transcendence, a condition that was attributed only to the spirit or the soul. Against Plato’s claims he ponders, “Will it be easy to find a (practice) better than the one established between us long ago which is to educate the body by gymnastics and the soul by music?” And to Aristotle’s, “As sight is to the body, reason is to the spirit”, Nietzsche opposes with “our body, in fact, is nothing more than a social structure of many souls” (2010a: 46), which reveals an extraordinarily modern vision, revolutionary, yet the works of the German philosopher were unheeded for a period of time.

In Thus spoke Zarathustra, particularly in the essay entitled “Of the despisers of the body”, Nietzsche raises with unusual force the bodily unity and the identification of the being with great unity: “I am the body in its entirety, and nothing else; and soul is just a word to designate something in the body” (2010b: 54), to which, to confirm what was previously stated in Beyond Good and Evil, he adds that the body “is a plurality”: “The body is a great reason, a plurality endowed with a ‘one way’, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd” (2010b: 54). Hence, for Nietzsche, the body is “a social structure of many souls”, which he then calls “a plurality,” a statement that can be interpreted in a double and non-contradictory direction: the body is, at the same time, space, where the social is, it is realized, it exists; and also, in itself, a plurality of voices, a plurality of meanings that is resolved in ‘one way’. That one sense, paradoxically, is not individual but diverse and multiple.

Then Nietzsche makes two transcendental statements. First, he maintains that it is not the spirit which creates, directs and controls the body but rather it is the latter which has created the spirit: “The creative body formed the spirit for itself as a hand of its will” (2010b: 57). Here the philosopher raises the supremacy of the body to re-balance the inseparable relationship between body and spirit. Secondly, he states that “behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, is a powerful monarch, an unknown sage, it can be called it-self. In your body it dwells, it is your body”. (2010b: 56)

It is Merleau-Ponty, whose Phenomenology of Perception (2003) which some authors place among proto-semiotic works, who will decisively reestablish the identity of the subject, body and world, and will conclusively contribute to moving Husserl’s idealism towards a more ‘carnal’ interpretation of the relations of the being with the world: “Mankind is/exists in the world, it is in the world where they know themselves” (2003: v). The phenomenological vision of the French philosopher parts from a principle according to which the understanding of mankind and the world demands to start from its factuality, since it is there, in its existence and in the construction of its experiences, where it is possible to rediscover its essence. It is there where individuals develop their concept of the ‘lived world’, not of the imagined world or of how it should be, but of the world as it is, one that ‘is already there’: “The world […] is the natural environment and the countryside of all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. The truth does not “inhabit” only in the inner world, or, better yet, there is no inner man, man is-in the world, it is in the world that he knows himself” (2003: v). For Merleau-Ponty, the human being is a ‘subject turned to the world’, a world to which he gives life and next to which he forms a totality: “The body itself is to the world as the heart to the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle alive, it encourages and feeds it inwardly, it forms a system with the world”. (2003: 235)

Then Merleau-Ponty addresses the problem of the body as an object, for which he relies on the physiological studies from which he develops his theory according to which corporeality could be defined, at least initially, as the systematization of experiences that constitute consciousness: “Being a conscience, or better yet ‘being an experience’ is communicating inwardly with the world, with the body and with others, being with them instead of being next to them”. (2003: 113)

Later Merleau-Ponty addresses the relationships between body and objective space from a phenomenological perspective and states that “bodily space cannot truly become a fragment of objective space unless in its singularity it contains the dialectical agitation that will transform it in universal space” (2003: 118), but immediately points out that “for me there would be no space if I did not have a body” (2003: 119), which establishes the fundamental bases of semiotic and anthropological relations between space and body, an affirmation that is reflected in recent research such as that of Löw, who states that the study of topological structures in a given culture is no longer “observing the way in which structures are ‘ordered in space’ but in observe how these structures ‘form space’” (2006: 120). It is thanks to the experience of the body itself that the subject manages to place space in everyday existence. It is a dynamic interrelation in which body, space and existence are semiotized to create an experience. Hence, Merleau-Ponty affirms that “the spatiality of the body is the unfolding of its being as a body, the way by which it performs as a body”. (2003: 174)

For Merleau-Ponty the semiotic of the body is also expressed in the relationship between it and customs: “It is said that the body has understood and a custom has been acquired when it lets itself be breached by a new ‘significance’, when it has assimilated a new ‘significant’ nucleus” (2003: 171). In this way, body and movement, a crucial issue in the French philosopher’s corporeality, construct significant structures through which they relate, construct and define the world, at the same time in which the body defines itself in its relationship with others. In his vision of the body, Merleau-Ponty insists, numerous times, on its semiotic and phenomenological conception. Firstly, he affirms that the body is “a knot of living meanings” (2003: 177), to which he then adds “our body […] is a set of lived meanings”. (2003: 179)

Michel Foucault is one of the philosophers who has devoted more efforts to analyzing the situation of the body in modern times. His works Microphysics of Power (1979), The History of Sexua...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: The forgotten body
• Chapter I The knowledge of the body
• Chapter II The Corposphere
• Chapter III Social imaginaries, borders, and limits of the semiotics of the body
• Chapter IV Body modalities: Space and movement, rituals and eroticism
• Chapter V Body, aesthetics, and hedonism
• Chapter VI Body and ritual: The structure of the gesture in public ceremonies
• Chapter VII Myth, body, and beauty: Rituals of the Misses
• Chapter VIII Rite and discourse: Body, disease, and death in two funeral texts
• Chapter IX “Your Body is the Message” On the Corposphere: Body, Absence and Meaning
• Chapter X Body and Identity: Space, places, and territories
• Index