The Body and Society

Explorations in Social Theory

Bryan S Turner

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781446245507
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Sociología

"This truly deserves to be considered a classic and I strongly encourage my students to read it from cover to cover. Turner?s work on the body needs to be considered in its own right within courses on the sociology of the body."
- Dr Robert Meadows, Surrey University

"Remains the foundational text for courses in the sociology of the body, replete with insights and a depth of analysis that has largely inspired an entire new area of studies across the social sciences."
- Dr Michael Drake, Hull University "This is THE contemporary text for both academics and students exploring the sociology of the body."
- Jessica Clark, University Campus Suffolk

This is a fully revised edition of a book that may fairly claim to have re-opened the sociology of the body as a legitimate area of enquiry. Providing an unparalleled guide to all aspects of the subject, each chapter has been revised and updated while the book contains new material that reflects both recent changes in the field and Turner?s developing position on the centrality of vulnerability.

Assured and innovative, this book provides the most authoritative statement of work on the sociology of the body by one of the leading writers in the field.

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The Mode of Desire

Needs and Desires

Human beings are often thought to have needs because they have bodies. Our basic needs are thus typically seen as physical: the need to eat, sleep and drink is a basic feature of people or organic systems. It is also in social philosophy to recognize needs which are not overtly physical, for example the need for companionship or self-respect. ‘Need’ implies ‘necessity’, for the failure to satisfy needs results in impairment, malfunction and displeasure. The satisfaction of a need produces pleasure as a release from the tension of an unresolved need. The result is that ‘need’ is an explanatory concept in a theory of motivation which argues that behaviour is produced by the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. In Greek philosophy, the Cyrenaics and Epicureans placed great emphasis on the satisfaction of pleasures as a criterion of the good life. In utilitarianism, the notion of the hedonistic calculus became the basis of Bentham’s political philosophy: the good society is one which maximizes the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The problem is that not all pleasures appear to be necessary and many of them appear to be destructive and anti-social. Human capacity for pleasures appears infinite, including self-flagellation, homosexual rape, torture, plunder and pillage. The philosophical solution has been to distinguish between good and bad pleasures, between real and false needs. For example, the outcome of the debate about pleasure and virtue in Greek philosophy was that ‘we should try to live a frugal life in which necessary desires are satisfied, and natural but not necessary desires given some place, while vain desires are outlawed. Such a life would naturally be virtuous’ (Huby, 1969: 67). While a person may gain sadistic pleasure from the pain of others, these pleasure-giving activities are not regarded as conducive to a good society based on companionship and these pleasures are thus regarded as vain and unnatural. There are at least two problems with this position. The first is that I am an authority on my own pleasures and therefore individuals may not be easily persuaded that their private pleasures are somehow false. Secondly, the argument equates ‘desire’ with ‘need’.

Although the analysis of desire has a long history in philosophy (Potts, 1980) and although ‘desire’ is often associated with ‘appetite’, it is important to be clear that a theory of desire is not the same as a theory of need. For example, Freud’s psychoanalysis was primarily a theory of desire and cannot be translated into a Marxist anthropology which is essentially a theory of need. The difference is that need implies an object which satisfies the need, the object of the need being external to it; desire cannot be finally satisfied since desire is its own object. The view of desire provides the basis of Freudian pessimism, because desire cannot be satisfied within society. The Oedipus myth signals this impossibility. The satisfaction of needs can be the criterion of the good society, whereas the satisfaction of desire cannot. Concupiscentia and ira are thus corrosive of that friendship which the Greeks saw as the cement of social groups as well as the basis of individual virtue.

Wisdom and Friendship

Sociology is literally the wisdom or knowledge (logos) of friendship (socius). The task of sociology is to analyse the processes which bind and unbind social groups, and to comprehend the location of the individual within the network of social regulations which tie the individual to the social world. While sociology is a relatively new addition to the social sciences, the notion that friendship is the ultimate social cement of large-scale social collectivities, like the state, is relatively ancient. In The Symposium Plato gave full expression to the Greek ideal of friendship as that social condition which overcomes the anti-social desires for personal possessions and competitive eminence. The aim of the individual and the state should be the cultivation of virtue and happiness rather than the satisfaction of desires which are the springs of disharmony and envy. The order (kosmos) within the individual is necessary to the ordering (kosmios) within the large social world and both are intimately connected to friendship. It was Eros which was the force capable of bridging the gap between the two essential elements of reality – rationality embodied in Apollo and irrationality embodied in Dionysus (Jaeger, 1944). The interior of the individual reflects the anatomy of society as a contest between desires (of which envy is especially prominent), and reason (Gouldner, 1967). Both Eros and friendship are necessary to fuse these disruptive and corrosive features of the psyche and society. We can see then that the roots of Western philosophy lie in two related issues: the struggle between desire and reason, and the opposition between the binding of friendship and the unbinding pressures of individuation.

There is much that separates Plato’s philosophical enquiry into the nature of friendship and the sociological analysis of social bonding, but, as I shall show, there is also much continuity. More importantly, the world in which Plato existed has been transformed by two events which are crucial to this particular study: Christianity and the industrial revolution. Given the strong chiliastic dimension of early Christianity, the primitive church posed a sharp and decisive opposition between the world and the spirit. The cultivation of the body could have no place within a religious movement which was initially strongly oriented towards the things of the next world. Early Christianity may have inherited from gnostic Essenism the view that creation was corrupt and worthy of moral condemnation (Allegro, 1979). After the destruction of Jerusalem and the absence of the Messianic Return, the Christian church was forced to accommodate to the existence of Roman imperialism, but it retained what Weber called inner-worldly asceticism, that is a strong hostility to the things of this world. To some extent the emphasis in Pauline theology on the sinfulness of sex was reinforced by the adoption of Aristotelian philosophy which was similarly hostile to women.

Within the Christian ascetic tradition, sexuality came to be seen as largely incompatible with religious practice. In particular, sexual enjoyment is a particular threat to any attempt to create a systematic religious response to sinfulness. This problem of subordinating sexuality to a rational lifestyle forms the basis of much of Weber’s view of the origins of religious intellectualism and rationalization. The argument is that ‘ascetic alertness, self-control, and methodical planning of life are seriously threatened by the peculiar irrationality of the sexual act, which is ultimately and uniquely unsusceptible to rational organization’ (Weber, 1966: 238). One ‘solution’ to this dilemma of human existence was the division of the religious community as an elite which withdrew from the world in order to abstain from sexuality and the mass which remained embedded in the profane world of everyday society. The laity reproduced itself within the restrictions of organized monogamy. The elite withdrew into celibacy and monasticism, recruiting its members through vocations rather than carnal reproduction. Sexuality, even within the limitations placed upon family life by religious norms, was thus a lay activity, permitting monks and priests to follow a life of rational control over the flesh. As a result of this severity towards sexual sinfulness, the human body was transformed from the occasion for sin to its very cause. The body became the prison of the soul, the flesh became, in the words of Brother Giles, the pig that wallows in its own filth and the senses were the seven enemies of the mind (Black, 1902). To control the body, the ascetic movement in Christianity turned ever more rigidly towards rituals of restraint – fasting, celibacy, vegetarianism and the denial of earthly things.

The Mode of Desire

It is possible to conceive of a mode of desire corresponding to every economic mode of production. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels (n.d.) argued that, within the materialist perspective of history, every society has to produce its means of existence and reproduce its own members. An order of sexuality thus corresponds to an order of property and production. The mode of desire is a set of social relations by which sexual desire is produced, regulated and distributed under a system of kinship, patriarchy and households. These relations of desire determine the eligibility of persons for procreative roles and legitimate sexual unions for the production of persons. The mode of production of desire consequently has social, political and ideological dimensions; for example, sexual ideology interpellates persons as sexual objects with appropriate relations for the consumption of sexuality (Therborn, 1980). It can be argued that the mode of production produces social classes as effects of property relations (Poulantzas, 1973). Similarly, a mode of desire specifies a classification of ‘sex groups’, of which gender is the principal dimension dividing the population into ‘men’ and ‘women’. However, the dominant sexual classification also designates ‘boys’ as subordinates who are not eligible for reproductive functions – they may be, of course, appropriate objects of desire. In modern terminology, we can suggest as an initial starting point that every mode of production has a classificatory system of sexual desire – a discourse which designates appropriately sexed beings and organizes their relations. It is this social discourse which specifies eligible sexuality not the dictates of human physiology.

Marx (1974, vol. 1: 85–6n) argued that in the feudal mode of production it was Catholicism which constituted the dominant ideology of feudal social formations. It is possible to re-express Marx’s view by claiming that in a feudal mode of production there has to be an ideological regulation of sexuality corresponding to the specific economic character of feudal societies and that it was Catholic sexual discourse which provided the dominant mode of desire. Human agents live their sensual, sexual experience via the categories of a discourse of desire which is dominant in given societies, but this discourse of desire is ultimately determined by the economic requirements of the mode of production. The discourse has a grammar specifying who does what to whom and it is this grammar of sex which designates the objects and subjects of sexual practices. It is clear that this rendition of Marx is an attempt to bring together an Althusserian analysis of modes of production (Althusser and Balibar, 1970) and a Foucauldian outline of discursive formations (Foucault, 1972). This study of the body departs from these perspectives in two crucial features. The first is that both Althusser and Foucault have little to say in any detail on the resistance of either individuals or classes to forms of regulation and surveillance, despite frequent reference to resistance to discourse. Secondly, structuralist analysis of discourse either ignores the effectivity of discursive formations or takes their effects for granted. To show that a discourse is prevalent is not to show that it is wholly effective (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, 1980).

Every society has to reproduce its population and regulate it in social space; at the level of the individual, sexuality has to be restrained and persons have to be represented. These four problems may have a different prominence and salience in different societies depending on the nature of the economic mode of production. In feudal societies, especially for the dominant landowning class, the reproduction of the dominant class depended crucially on the regulation and restraint of the sexuality of subordinate members of the household. The conservation of land depended on the stability of inheritance through legitimate male heirs; a discourse of desire was necessary to secure these economic objectives and this discourse was primarily patriarchal and repressive. These features of the discourse were contained predominantly within Catholic morality which aimed to repress pleasure in the interest of reproduction. This is not to suggest that mediaeval attitudes towards women were all of a piece; woman was both Eve (the cause of all our woe) and Mary (the source of spiritual power) (Bernardo, 1975), but the principal feature of the social position of women in feudal society was dependency and subordination within the household. In the seventeenth century, ‘a roving woman causes words to be uttered’ and this pronouncement applied to nuns as much as it did to married, noble women (Nicholson, 1978). A woman’s place was next to the hearth with her master’s progeny. This mediaeval discourse promoted legitimate sexuality and separated it from desire. Within this context, the confessional assumed especial importance (Hepworth and Turner, 1982); it was a ritual for the production of the truth of sex (Foucault, 1981), but to establish the truth of sexuality it had to understand the error of pleasure. Much can be learnt, therefore, about feudal sexual discourses by an analysis of the teaching of the penitentials on marital and extramarital coitus.

For mediaeval Christian theology, any act of coitus which did not result in the insemination of the woman was a ‘sin against nature’. The sexual act was to be devoid of pleasure and therefore if a man enjoyed his wife the act was regarded as equivalent to fornication. These ‘sins against nature’ included not only sodomy, bestiality and masturbation, but also coitus interruptus. These were unnatural because they did not result in insemination and their primary motivation was pure pleasure. The same arguments applied to concubinage and extramarital sexuality, especially where these were undertaken with primitive contraceptive measures. The confessional manuals also proscribed certain sexual positions which increased pleasure and decreased the likelihood of conception. The condemnation of extramarital sex combined a variety of notions; it was associated with pleasure, with contraception and with unnatural positions. In addition, it implied that husbands would unwillingly become the parents of children whom they had not fathered. There was a danger therefore that property would pass to offspring who were not in reality legitimate. The order of legitimate sexuality would not correspond to the order of property relations.

It is very easy, as a result, to discover in these mediaeval texts a discourse of desire which separated pleasure from property The sociological question is, however, to discover whether these discourses had real effects on social behaviour. Since it was impossible to form a household without sufficient capital, there are commonsense reasons for believing that young couples would adopt coitus interruptus for pleasure where procreation was economically precluded (Flandrin, 1975). Marriage was thus regarded as an economic and political contract between families for the conservation of a landowning class; the marriage bed was devoid of pleasure. Since procreative activities were confined to these contractual unions in marriage, desire had to find its location elsewhere.

Asceticism

In mediaeval times, the attempt to create a rational and systematic regimen of denial was largely confined to the religious orders who, as it were, practised asceticism on behalf of the lay man. Expressing this differentiation in spatial terms, reason was allocated to the internal domain of the monastery, while desire ran rampant in the profane world of the lay society. In this respect, we could perceive the principal argument of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) as an account of how the Reformation took the ascetic denial of desire out of the monastic cell into the secular family. Protestantism thus sought to break the distinction between the elite and the mass by transforming elite practices into everyday routines of self-control. Abstinence, the control of passions, fasting and regularity were thus held up as ideal norms for the whole society, since salvation could no longer be achieved vicariously by the labours of monks. The disciplines and regulations of the family, school and factory thus have their historical roots in the redistribution of monastic practices within the wider society. The monastic cell was installed in the prison and the workshop, while ascetic practices spread ever outwards (Foucault, 1979: 238).

Of course, the attempt to impose monasticism as a general secular norm of restraint necessarily led to resistances. The history of English sexual culture can be seen as a pendulum swing between restraints on sexuality and relaxations in moral behaviour. The Puritan revolution of the seventeenth century was followed, with the Restoration, by a new liberalism in sexual conduct. The return to a more rigid sexual life-style in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was followed by a new permissiveness which has been the dominant theme of contemporary society (Stone, 1979). To some extent these restraints on sexuality also corresponded to restraints on the table. From an ascetic point of view, eating and sexuality are both gross activities of the body. Eating, especially hot, spicy foods, stimulates sexual passion. To control sexuality, Protestants attempted to regulate the body through a regimen of dieting. The Puritan Revolution of the seventeenth century was thus also accompanied by a series of restraints on food, cuisine and consumption. Spices were banned and major festivals, such as Christmas, ceased to be occasions for secular enjoyment; the festivities surrounding Twelfth Night were also crushed. With the collapse of the Cromwellian era, the social revolt ‘against Puritanism is shown in the excesses that took place at court. Often important banquets and entertainments were inclined to relapse into dissipated orgies, the honoured guests spattered in cream and other beverages’ (Pullar, 1970: 128). While in the nineteenth century cookery became increasingly the object of domestic science, eating itself was still clothed with a certain Puritan prudery. Like sex, eating for nineteenth-century women was something more to be endured rather than enjoyed.

Max Weber’s sociology of Puritanism is normally interpreted as an argument about the ascetic origins of capitalism. In these introductory comments, it has been suggested that, more widely examined, Weber’s analysis of Christian asceticism is in fact about the rationalization of desire. There were many dimensions to this process of controlling desires. Certain institutions were developed to subordinate internal passions to reasonable controls – monasticism, celibacy, monogamy, castration. Desires were regulated by routines – vegetarianism, dieting, exercise, fasting. The passionate side of human personality was subject to scientific enquiries, and technologies were developed to prevent various forms of ‘self-abuse’, especially in children. Human energy could be safely channelled through vocations. In the world the drive for sexual conquest was directed towards economic triumphs in business and commerce. Festivities, festivals and carnivals which were historically occasions for orgiastic release were originally suppressed by Puritanism and then prohibited by the routines of industrial capitalism. Public and collective festivals were gradually replaced by more individualized and private pastimes. In Weber’s sociology of rationalization, there is the argument that the whole of life becomes increasingly subject to scientific management, bureaucratic control, discipline and regulation.

There are, however, at least two problems with Weber’s analysis of capitalism. Asceticism provided a suitable cultural norm for capitalists who had to deny themselves immediate consumption in the interests of further accumulation. The requirement of investment for future profits precludes full enjoyment of present wealth. For the worker, it is different. Because they are separated from the means of production, they are forced to labour, to live under conditions of what Marx referred to as the ‘dull compulsion’ of their existence. The problem of capitalism as a system is, however, that there also has to be consumption of commodities otherwise the circuit of commodity capital becomes blocked and stagnates. With the growth of mass production, the rationalization of distribution in the department store and the post-war boom, capitalism also had to develop a consumption ethic, which in many ways is incompatible with the traditional norms of restraint and personal asceticism. Weber’s account of capitalism ends with the arrival of early, competitive, capitalism in which desire is still denied in the interests of accumulation. Late capitalism, by contrast, is organized more around calculating hedonistic choices, advertising, the stimulating of need and luxury consumption. Late capitalism does not so much suppress desire as express it, produce it and direct it towards increasing want satisfaction.

The se...