The Body in Culture, Technology and Society

Chris Shilling

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761971245, 9780761971238
• eBook ISBN: 9781446236369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

?Once in a while a manuscript stops you in your tracks... What we are offered here is no recovering of old ground but a step change in perspectives on "body matters" that is both innovative and of fundamental importance to anyone working on this sociological terrain...This text is groundbreaking and simply has to be read? - Acta Sociologica

?This is Shilling at his creative best…these are seminal observations of the classical theories drawn together as never before. Moreover, as a framework [this monograph] provides a genuinely new and fertile way of reconsidering not just classical sociology but contemporary

forms as well? - Sport, Education & Society

?This is a comprehensive, theoretically sophisticated, and ambitious treatise on the body that draws from, and applies, both classical and contemporary sociological theory in a manner that is innovative and thought-provoking. This book is engaging and thought-provoking, but Shilling?s greatest achievement is his ability to illustrate the importance and continued relevance of classical and contemporary sociological theory to real world concerns. It is a book worthy of widespread attention. It reinvigorated my interest in the sociological classics and contained countless nuggets of interesting information that led me to conclude that it would be a worthy book to recommend to a broad sociological audience? - Teaching Sociology

?Shilling?s book (like his earlier The Body and Social Theory) is crucial reading…a further valuable contribution in a field where he has provided so much? - Theory & Psychology

?This is an impressive book by one of the leading social theorists working in the field of body studies. It provides a critical summation of theoretical and substantive work in the field to date, while also presenting a powerful argument for a corporeal realism in which the body is both generative of the emergent properties of social structure and a location of their effects. Its scope and originality make it a key point of reference for students and academics in body studies and in the social and cultural sciences more generally? - Ian Burkitt, Reader in Social Science, University of Bradford

?Chris Shilling is as always a lucid guide through the dense thickets of the "sociology of the body", and his chapters on the fields of work, sport, eating, music and technology brilliantly show how abstract theoretical debates relate to the real world of people?s lives? - Professor Stephen Mennell, University College Dublin

?What I find very useful and without any doubt valuable, not only in Shilling?s The Body in Culture, Technology and Society but in his work in general, is the breadth and profoundness of his discussion about the body…the style Shilling maintains is crucial for further development of the sociology of the body as a discipline, for it provides us with a rich intellectual environment about the body? - Sociology

?For any colleague wanting to have a clear idea of how studies of the body can be empirically grounded as well as theoretically ?rich?, Chris Shilling?s The Body in Culture, Technology and Society , is the book to read. To my mind it offers the best account thus far of not only how social action is embodied and must be recognised as such but also of how social structures condition and shape embodied subjects in a variety of social arenas... This is wonderful insightful ?stuff? – the ideas and intricate thoughts of a scholar such as Shilling who has been immersed in thinking about the complexities of the body in society as well as sociology for a number of years? - Sociology of Health and Illness

This is a milestone in the sociology of the body. The book offers the most comprehensive overview of the field to date and an innovative framework for the analysis of embodiment. It is founded on a revised view of the relation of classical works to the body. It argues that the body should be read as a multi-dimensional medium for the constitution of society. Upon this foundation, the author constructs a series of analyses of the body and the economy, culture, sociality, work, sport, music, food and technology.

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Introduction

Social theories of the body have exerted an enormous influence on the social sciences and humanities in the past two decades. From being a subject of marginal academic interest, the intellectual significance of the body is now such that no study can lay claim to being comprehensive unless it takes at least some account of the embodied preconditions of agency and the physical effects of social structures. In sociology, discussions of embodiment pervade general theoretical works and specialist sub-disciplinary studies. Indeed, a recognition that its subject matter includes thinking, feeling bodies, rather than disembodied minds unaffected by their senses and habits, has become central to the sociological imagination. Despite these advances, however, clear portraits of the body’s status, generative capacities, and receptivity to structural forces, remain frustratingly elusive within most accounts of contemporary society.

It is against this background that this book is intended to be a theoretical and substantive contribution to the study of the body, as well as to social theory and sociological research more generally, and is addressed to the problems that still confront this area. In what follows, I aim to do the following: (a) account for the enigmatic nature of embodiment in social theory; (b) suggest that classical sociological writings converged around a hitherto neglected view of the body as a multi-dimensional medium for the constitution of society; (c) critically examine recent approaches to the subject; and (d) undertake a series of substantive analyses of the body and the economy, culture, sociality and technology. These four aims are related in that this classical convergence, that I characterize as a form of corporeal realism, provides us with a framework that can be used to reduce the analytical elusiveness of the body and overcome some of the theoretical limitations of recent approaches. It also allows us to investigate the strongly held concerns about the subjugation of the embodied subject that characterize these recent approaches. This opening chapter is designed to explore in more detail the enigmatic nature of the body in social theory, before outlining the framework adopted in this study and introducing the reader to the main themes informing the rest of the book.

The Rise of the Enigmatic Body

In accounting for the ubiquitous yet elusive nature of the body in modern thought, the first aim of this book is to examine how the physical subject has come to possess an exceptional academic popularity, yet still seems to fade away when we ask the question ‘What is the body?’. In terms of its popularity, there has been a breathtaking explosion of interest in the subject of the body since the early 1980s. However, academic interest was stimulated initially by social trends and analyses which helped position the body as significant to a range of other subjects of established intellectual significance. Several strands of social thought and analytical perspectives assisted this early rise of the body, and it is important to revisit and re-examine the most important of them here as they help explain why embodiment became so ubiquitous yet remains such a contested and slippery subject. This rise of interest in the body represents the centrifugal stage in the recent development of the area as it attaches the subject to a wide variety of disparate agendas. It contrasts with the somewhat more centripetal trend that has emerged in recent years (when several broad perspectives emerged as dominant resources for examining embodiment) that I examine later in this Introduction, but has not yet receded completely and continues to inform developments in the area.

First, analysts of consumer culture highlighted the commercialized body as increasingly central to people’s sense of self-identity, a shift that was associated with a corresponding change in the structure of advanced capitalist societies in the second half of the twentieth century. During this period, there was a move away from the focus on hard work in the sphere of production coupled with frugality in the sphere of consumption, towards an ethos which encouraged hard work and hedonistic consumption (Featherstone, 1982). The body’s status as ubiquitous sign in advertising culture, and the proliferation of production oriented toward leisure, helped promote an emphasis on the achievement of an appearance and a degree of physical control commensurate with the display of a hyper-efficient ‘performing self’.

Theorists of consumer culture analysed these developments through the related prisms provided by Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction and Durkheim’s mechanical/organic solidarity distinction. Pasi Falk (1994: 12–13, 36), for example, argued that the boundaries of the late modern self had become detached from the bonds of collective physical rituals, and centred around individualizing consumption acts focused on the ‘bodily surface and its sensory openings’; a development clearly associated with the rising influence of consumerism. This distinction between the collectively determined body of the pre-modern era, and the individualized body of the late modern era, also underpinned the studies of Giddens (1991) and Turner (1984); analyses which focus in very different ways on the socio-political contexts in which consumer culture developed. They suggested that the body was increasingly ‘on show’ as the vehicle of consumption, and that social status was linked to the visible exteriors of the physical self. This emergence of a topographical approach to the flesh as appearance was seen as emptying the body of its traditional Christian significance as a container of sin, and promoting it as a form of physical capital (Bourdieu, 1978).

The second perspective that contributed to a flourishing and diverse interest in the body was the rise of ‘second wave’ feminism. From the 1960s onwards, feminists emphasized through a critical interrogation of the biological sex/cultural gender divide that there was nothing natural about women’s corporeality which justified their public subordination (Oakley, 1972). They argued that menstruation and pregnancy, for example, provided no reasonable grounds to discriminate against women in education or politics. Thus, the body uncovered by feminist studies was a biologically sexed body which should have few social consequences, but which had been defined within patriarchal society as determining women’s life chances.

Feminist writings highlighted how the body had been used as a means of discriminating against women. Because of the ‘male stream’ history of writing on the subject, however, feminists did not seek initially to place the body at the centre of social thought. Philosophers had traditionally associated men with freedom and the mind, and women with ‘unreason associated with the body’ (Grosz, 1994: 4). Women were seen as ‘more biological, more corporeal and more natural than men’, and therefore more suited to the world of private than public existence (ibid.). Despite this ambivalent view of embodiment, feminism contributed much towards the popularity of body studies. Eisenstein (1988) and W. Williams (1997) traced the legal history of the female body as male property, while Mackinnon (1989) highlighted the bodily bases of female oppression through the construction of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, and Irigaray (1988 [1977]) and Kristeva (1986) examined the marginalization or ‘erasure’ of female sexuality in male culture. Feminists have also placed on the agenda the project of ‘reexploring, reexamining, notions of female corporeality’ (Grosz, 1994: 14), have interrogated the body within sexuality, ethics and standpoint epistemologies (e.g. Haraway, 1994 [1985]), and have constructed imaginative metaphysical conceptions of the female body as ‘fluidity’. It is the sexually different body that feminists have highlighted, though, and the idea of embodiment as providing humans with certain common capacities and frailties tended to fade in their discussions.

The third set of concerns that increased the prominence of the body involved a growing awareness of changes in modes of governmentality, changes which highlighted human physicality as an object of various forms of control. Instrumental here was Foucault’s (1970, 1979a, 1979b) analysis of how modernity’s creation of ‘man’ was accompanied by a shift in the target of governmental discourses (the fleshy body gave way to the mindful body as a focus of concern); in the object of discourse (preoccupation with matters of death was replaced by interest in structuring life); and in the scope of discourse (the control of anonymous individuals gave way to the management of differentiated populations). The eighteenth century witnessed a large increase in discourses on sexuality, for example, which linked the sex of individual bodies to the management of national populations (Foucault, 1981), while the twentieth century was characterized by a continued shift away from negative forms of bodily repression towards positive forms of exhortation in which embodied subjects were encouraged to structure their lives in particular ways.

This focus on governmentality painted a picture of a relatively passive and undifferentiated set of bodies subject to institutional control. It highlighted the spaces that contained, the rules that constrained, and the forces that operated on and through bodies. Teaching hospitals were instrumental in developing medical norms, for example, and subjected distinctive types of sick bodies to different types of treatment (Armstrong, 1983, 1995). This particular concern with physicality also cast its spotlight on the problems governments faced in dealing with large numbers of bodies in the contemporary era. There are millions more people across the globe for governments to manage today than there were a thousand years ago. Declining infant mortality rates and increasing life expectancies in the West, medical advances, and the rise of diseases such as HIV/AIDS requiring long-term care, have also increased massively the costs associated with controlling bodies. In summary, while issues of governmentality helped stimulate academic interest in the body, the body they resurrected was objectified as a statistic, a problem, or a target of control. It became meaningful when it impinged on the operation of government, and faded away when it lived, experienced and intervened in life outside of nodes and networks of power.

Technological advances which contributed to a growing uncertainty about the ‘reality’ of the body constituted a fourth analytical concern that raised the profile of this subject. Advances in transplant surgery, in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering increased control over bodies, but instituted a weakening of the boundaries between bodies and machines that prompted some to reconceptualize humans as cyborgs. These same developments appear to have thrown into radical doubt our knowledge of what the embodied subject is. The principle of individuality accepted by Enlightenment thought depended on identifying what was unique to a person across the contingencies of date and location, yet the potential malleability of the body threatens such constancies. The Human Genome Project, for example, heralds the start of an era in which all aspects of embodiment are theoretically open to alteration, while (at the time of writing) surgeons are close to being able to carry out face transplants (operations which would further destabilize the notion of any constant visible self). In this context, it is hardly surprising that post-modernist writings have abandoned the modernist project of ‘knowing’ what the body is. The body for them becomes a ‘blank screen’ or ‘sign receiving system’ ever open to being (re)constructed by social forces beyond its control (Kroker and Kroker, 1988). Alternatively, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, it has been transformed into an elusive ‘body without organs’ (Goodchild, 1996). The ‘decentring’ of the subject is, apparently, complete.

If technological advances encouraged analysts to focus on the ‘uncertain body’, this has not always resulted in a post-modern concern with ‘cyborgs’ or ‘disappearing bodies’. These advances have also been analysed in terms of their aesthetic and sensual consequences by those unhappy with attempts to erase the facticity of the embodied subject. It has been suggested, for example, that the destabilization of our knowledge of bodies does not signify a ‘dissolution’ of the body, but a loss of psychological ‘basic trust’ or ‘ontological security’ (Berger, 1990 [1967]; Giddens, 1991: 45–7). Alternatively, the supposed instability of the body has been associated with the revival of effervescent experiences of the sacred in a modern world in which the profane has become banal (Mellor and Shilling, 1997). By placing the ‘uncertain body’ within such social and corporeal parameters, these writings relativize the relativistic claims of post-modern writings. The body may have become more malleable, but it is our feelings about the body, rather than the physicality of the body itself, that have been undermined.

The fifth major analytical concern that continues to both increase the popularity of the subject, and tie the growing interest in the body to other intellectual agendas, involves those academics who viewed the subject as a conceptual resource which could assist them in advancing their discipline. In the case of sociology, theorists used the body to avoid the over-socialized conception of the individual associated with Parsons’s (1991 [1951]: 541–2, 547–8) focus on values (which portrayed the body as merely a sub-system of the action system), and the unrealistic assumptions of rational choice theory (which holds that actors cognitively establish goals before acting, and views the body as a permanently available instrument of action immune to frailty, chance, and epiphany). Conceptions of ‘creativity’ (Joas, 1996), of ‘human being’ (Archer, 1995), and of an ‘embodied interaction order’ (Shilling, 1999), for example, have sought to provide conceptions of embodiment which are resistant to being collapsed into any unidimensional view of social action or structurally determinist analysis of society. In these cases, the body constitutes an overlooked element of social reality whose capacities have important implications for disciplinary analysis.

These five strands of social thought/analytical concerns have done much to stimulate and maintain the rise of interest in the body since the 1980s, but they approached and defined the subject in very different ways. The body was a surface phenomenon which had become a malleable marker of commercial value subject to the vagaries of fashion for theorists of consumer culture. It was a sexed object that had been used as a means of justifying women’s subordination for feminists. It was an object that had been rendered passive by changing modes of control for Foucauldian analysts of governmentality. The body was changed into an uncertain and even a rapidly disappearing remnant of pre-technological culture for those interested in the meeting of meat and machines which had occurred with the development of cyborgs. Finally, it became a positive conceptual category for those concerned with addressing theoretical problems in their own discipline. Within each of these analyses, the spotlight rests on certain aspects of the body, leaving others obscured.

These disparate concerns are reflected in the enormous number of studies to have appeared on the subject since the 1980s.¹ The sheer quantity of this work has been received as evidence of the healthy establishment of a new field of study. Writings on the body have challenged the assumption that ‘society operates upon us intellectually and consensually rather than directly upon our bodies’ (O’Neill, 1985: 48), have established several new sub-disciplinary areas of study, and have made general contributions to social and cultural theory. Nevertheless, ‘the body’ remains one of the most contested concepts in the social sciences: its analysis has produced an intellectual battleground over which the respective claims of post-structuralism and post-modernism, phenomenology, feminism, socio-biology, sociology and cultural studies have fought (e.g. Howson and Inglis, 2001). Tied to competing agendas, and against the background of the huge diversity of body studies, varying aspects of embodiment are foregrounded, allowing others to fade into the background. This has the effect of making the body recede and slide from view, while undergoing a series of metamorphoses that render it unrecognizable from one incarnation to the next. Of course, in any sociological study of the body, attention will at times focus on structures and norms, and the constraining and shaping potential of these phenomena. To this extent we should expect there to be a temporary and justified ‘fading’ of the body within limited portions of such analyses, but this is quite different from the wholesale loss of the body and its generative capacities that we find in so many studies on the subject. More generally, the body appears for many to have become a mere metaphor through which particular concerns can be pursued. In this context, it is increasingly difficult to define the body or to even say what was being examined within the field. In two of the best-known studies on the subject, for example, Bryan Turner (1984: 8) concludes that the body may appear to be solid, yet is ‘the most elusive, illusory … metaphorical … and ever distant thing’, while Judith Butler (1993: ix) admits that in ‘trying to consider the materiality of the body’, she ‘kept losing track of the subject’.

The under-determined body

If we are to account for this ubiquity and elusiveness, we need to understand how it was possible for interest in the body to be stimulated by such diverse intellectual projects, and for the subject to be defined in such different ways. The main reason for this is that the body has not been subject to a strong tradition of positive conceptual appropriation within Western thought. While philosophy had historically imparted the body with a good deal of negative content, this left contemporary writers seeking to invest it with theoretically productive and positive meanings with a high degree of latitude.

The negative view of the physical flesh dominant in Western thought can be traced to ancient Greece. Soma (which subsequently came to mean ‘body’) referred to the corpse, while Socrates argued that lasting happiness came not from the (perishable) body but through the (immortal) soul; a division later mapped onto that between the ‘irrational passions’ and ‘rational thought’ (Snell, 1960 [1948]). More generally, Greek ethics held that the soul’s aspirations should be guided by a self-control termed ‘healthy thinking’ which opposed itself to the inevitable ‘sufferings’ of the bodily instincts and emotions. This philosophical approach marginalized the importance of the body, by suggesting that it was the mind that made us truly human. While there were important exceptions to this denigration of the body, negative views on the subject were strengthened further during some of the key events that ushered in the modern world. The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment were especially important in this respect.

The religious wars which followed the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century created a situation in which the protagonists of modern philosophy faced political intolerance, the dogmatic claims of rival theologians, and views of the body which frequently associated it with irrationality and sin. In this context, a ‘Quest for Certainty’ became increasingly popular among philosophers as a path to establishing truths which were ubiquitous, universal, timeless, and independent of the vagaries of people’s bodily dispositions and emotions (Toulmin, 1990). This Quest was based on the rational, non-partisan powers of the mind, and was exemplified by Descartes. Descartes claimed that the essence of our humanity subsisted in our (noble) ability to think, while our bodies inflicted (ignoble) emotions on us (Toulmin, 1990: 134–5). In distrusting the senses, he argued that ‘I am … only a thing that thinks’, and that ‘my mind … is entirely and truly distinct from my body and may exist without it’ (Descartes, 1974: 105, 156). Hobbes objected to many of Descartes’ formulations and proposed a radically different philosophy based on the body and centred around the problem of order (the problem of how it is that people can live together without social life degenerating into violence). However, even here, the body was conceived of as a liability, propelling people into self-aggrandizing actions which could lead into a war of all against all.

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment did litt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Fm
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Classical Bodies
• 3 Contemporary Bodies
• 4 Working Bodies
• 5 Sporting Bodies
• 6 Musical Bodies
• 7 Sociable Bodies
• 8 Technological Bodies
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index