Part I
Theory and practice
1 Embodiment as embodiment of
Paul Bowman
Preface: trigger warning: autobiography alert
Please beware: in what follows, I am at times going to be shamelessly autobiographical. But this is not mere self-indulgence. Rather, it is because I think that personal anecdotes can offer an economical way of getting a lot of concerns on the table quickly, by conveying the ways that some key problematics around âembodimentâ have arisen in relation to my research and thinking, and the ways they have both vexed and stimulated me.1 But not just me as some kind of unique, isolated individual; rather me as an academic who has searched for theoretical and/or practical academic ways out of many of the problems. So, my hope is that when you read about âmeâ here, you will think less about me and much more about âweâ. Either way, please have patience with the autobiographical elements of what follows. They are doing some heavy lifting.
Introduction: a brief history of no body
I have always loved martial arts and I have always loved writing. I loved martial arts films as a child. As a teen I tried to learn how to do the flashy moves that I saw on screen. At the same time, I found writing essays for school to be one of the easiest things I had ever been asked to do. Hence in the school system I became what was called âgood at Englishâ. In fact, although I far preferred other subjects (economics, geography, art), it transpired that, with no effort at all, for some reason, I started to come top in English. In due course, without really knowing anything about it, I was given the chance to go to university. Following a path of least resistance, I pragmatically elected to take a subject I was âgood atâ and found easy, simply because I was good at it and found it easy (and because it had the added attraction of minimal contact hours and maximal assessment by essay). So I studied English. The irony was that I came from a barely literate working class family in which no one had ever passed a written exam and I myself did not particularly like reading. Writing, yes. Reading, less. Either way, I was regarded as a kind of freak by my father and brothers, because I would read and write, I was left handed, and I spent most of my time doing things that they did not understand or regard as âproper activityâ, because they did not visibly involve making, fixing, moving and visibly doing.2
At university I genuinely loved literary theory from the moment I met it (formalism first, then structuralism, poststructuralism and â my favourite at the time â semiotics) but I was increasingly bored by literature. After my degree, a friend told me about a subject called cultural studies. I looked into it. I did an MA, using erstwhile âliteraryâ theory (now redubbed âculturalâ theory) to look at more interesting things than literature â such as martial arts films, music videos, the rise of body consciousness in men via bodybuilding, and the political possibilities of standup comedy. I was invited back to do a PhD. I chose to interrogate the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (primarily Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). There was no âbodyâ there. Just words, institutions, mechanisms, political processes, hegemonies, relations of articulation, power/knowledge, semiotics, interpellations,3 conflicts of interpretation and so on.
Throughout my PhD studies and in the years immediately thereafter, I kept writing about problems in political and cultural theory using poststructuralist approaches (see Bowman, 2007). But all the while what I wanted, more and more, was to write about a completely different thing â martial arts â in terms of what we are here calling âembodimentâ. However, the problem was that I was immersed in the world of problematics and approaches and paradigms that were primarily kitted out to deal with very different things â principally, the philosophical critique of logocentrism and what Jacques Derrida called the âmetaphysics of presenceâ, conceived as key parts of the wider ethico-political deconstruction of essentialisms of all kinds.
Being haunted by the body
It is probably worth remembering that Derrida (the so-called father of deconstruction) was always widely denounced and defamed by opponents as someone who did not believe in or who tried to deny the existence of reality, or the reality of existence (for discussion see Derrida and Weber, 1995). I mention this unfair critique here not because it is correct but because there is something close enough to a spectral or chimerical grain of truth in it to illustrate the predicament I was in. For, if deconstruction does not simply deal with âthingsâ â âreal thingsâ, like, say, our bodies â then surely trying to use Derrida to think about embodiment is a bit like trying to use a chocolate teapot to make tea. Nonetheless, when I did eventually, tentatively, (re)turn to trying to write about embodiment, I did so via the only means I knew: Derridean deconstruction, poststructuralist discourse theory and Barthesian textual analysis (Bowman, 2008, 2010).
This may sound a bit like trying to dig your way out of a hole, or like Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹžekâs joke about searching for a lost key under the light of a streetlamp rather than in the surrounding darkness where you actually lost it, because you canât see anything over there in the dark. But you start from where you are, you think with the tools and in the terms you have learned to think with, and you write the way you know. I was going to say that you write about what you know about, but I do not think thatâs entirely correct. I think I am more inclined to write about what I wonder about. So my first attempt to deal with the impact and importance of martial arts on the lives and minds and bodies of people (like me) took the form of using the approaches of Derrida, Ernesto Laclau and Stuart Hall (Derrida, 1976; Laclau, 1994; Hall, Morley and Chen, 1996) to account for the emergence and to assess the significance of the âkung fu crazeâ of the 1970s. My very first attempt was a conference paper called âEnter the Derrideanâ which reflected on the impact and enduring significance and effects of Bruce Lee films on peopleâs imaginations and activities and lives and loves.
At the same time, however, it was important to me not to consign âBruce Leeâ and âmartial artsâ to the status of being treated as mere examples, to be (ab)used only in order to unproblematically âproveâ a certain theory â in this case, the theory of âdiscourseâ as developed by the likes of Laclau and Hall, following on from Michel Foucault (1978) mixed with a lot of Antonio Gramsci (1971). So, as my title, âEnter the Derrideanâ, hopefully suggested, the work was attempting to assess the emergence not of what might be too easily dismissed or categorised as the kung fu âcrazeâ â or some kind of âsubcultureâ â but rather the emergence of the âdiscursive formationâ of cultural studies, cultural theory and deconstruction. After all, all of these things took off during the same kind of period â yet we tend not to regard academic movements as being crazes or subcultures, do we? We tend rather to connect them to wider issues and problematics and to dignify them with labels like âintellectual developmentsâ. Reciprocally, I wanted to accord the same dignity to figures like Bruce Lee and developments like the uptake of âAsian martial artsâ in Western popular culture. These were not mere crazes, nor should they be categorised as âsubculturesâ. Such designations keep the scholarly gaze that creates the categories safely free from the same kind of scrutiny that it applies to everything else.
Papers like that (which was eventually worked into the first chapter of my book Theorizing Bruce Lee [Bowman, 2010]) were my first baby-steps into working towards matters of embodiment. I suppose I followed an eccentric route into such waters. Or maybe I wasnât even in the waters yet, but still stuck on a rock, looking for a viable route down to the sand and sea: my approach was textual (principally organised by looking at films, books and magazines); it was self-consciously part of a tradition (cultural studies) that had a strong commitment to redeeming so-called popular culture from the stigma of being branded trivial and inconsequential; and it was informed and organised by paradigms that focused on macro-political discourses. While Barthesâ approaches extended to audiovisual culture (Barthes, 1977), Derridean deconstruction and much poststructuralism principally critiqued philosophical âlogocentrismâ. My approach, despite my best intentions, was arguably very much focused on words and pictures.
In the beginning was the word â and pictures
Of course, things are not so simple. In the history of the notion of âdiscourseâ, the work of Foucault looms large. There are two obvious sides to Foucault: first, his studies of the effects of arguments, ideas, texts, legislations and institutional operations on, second, the human subject, in mind, body, flesh, blood, muscles, skills and disciplines. So there are clearly at least two directions that a Foucault-inspired or informed âdiscourse approachâ could go. One is macro-historical and/or institutional. The other is focused on minds and bodies, and persons and people. All of my prior training (indeed, all of my disciplining) had been in the world of the first orientation. So, my efforts essentially took the form of conceiving of embodiment as embodied discourse. That is, I understood embodiment as always and necessarily involving discursive factors and forces (words and pictures). These forces found their actualisation in and as aspects of embodiment via what may be called âperformative elaborationsâ or âperformative interpretationsâ (I take these terms more from Derrida (1994) than Judith Butler (1990).) Accordingly, embodiment in my thinking was always likely to be associated with wordy or audiovisual discursive injunctions, imperatives, ideals and so on.
So, my approach could be accused of believing that âin the beginning was the wordâ â and pictures, but pictures translated into words and actions. It is definitely the case that I have always read many âwords and picturesâ as being â or becoming â injunctions (or Foucauldian discursive statements), such as: âaspire to be like thisâ, or âdesire thisâ. Doubtless this orientation is a residue of the influence that Barthesâ arguments in Mythologies (Barthes, 1957) had on my thinking. Indeed, I still regard almost any deliberately selected and crafted audiovisual textual images of people, places and things to be injunctions (aspire to this, desire this, be like this) or their obverses (avoid this, reject this, be disgusted by this, and so on).
This is hardly a radical position to take. Many others go much further. In a different context, and in a slightly different direction, Andrew Barry goes significantly further than this, for instance. In Political Machines, he notes that even the âfactualâ world â the world of âfactsâ â is constructed and works in terms of injunctions. Neither âdataâ nor âinformationâ are ever neutral. As he puts it: the existence of data about, say, smoking and mortality, or diet and diabetes, and so on, implies a subject who âneedsâ that âinformationâ and who should respond to its implications and act accordingly because of it â give up smoking, lose weight, etc. (Barry, 2001). This is relevant to embodiment because it would mean that any subsequent actions undertaken in light of the âfactsâ or âinformationâ, leading to body modification or enskillment (running skill, say, or the production of a âyoga bodyâ [Singleton, 2010]) would amount to the embodiment or performative interpretation or articulation of a certain kind of discursive injunction.
In my approach to bodies, embodied knowledge and bodily practices (specifically, martial arts), I have tended to prioritise cases of the âtranslationâ of visual material (say, moving or static pictures of someone like Bruce Lee) into being a kind of injunction (âBe like this! Desire this!â) or indeed a Foucauldian âstatementâ (Foucault, 1970). This can lead to the transformation of lived practices, and hence the transformation of bodies, skills, lifestyle norms, values and sensibilities, and so on (Bowman, 2010, 2013b, 2016a, 2016b).
The key point has always been that in the case of moving or static pictures of Bruce Lee, such âmessagesâ were â are â not solely translated into words. Rather, in the case of words and pictures about martial arts, such cultural âmessagesâ are often translated by people into physical practices â the taking up of new activities or living life according to new values and different orientations. The âcreation mythâ image here is one of children and teens seeing a martial arts movie for the first time and leaving the cinema making Bruce Lee catcalls and trying to do flying kicks (the exemplary work on this creation scenario is Brown, 1997). Over the coming days and weeks and months, how many of such erstwhile spectators went on to seek out a martial arts class? The evidence (or at least the accepted narrative [BBC4, 2013]) says many. This means that embodiment is also often supplemented by media spectacles â or, in other words, mediatised (Bowman, 2017).
In turning to the impact of martial arts films on people and on popular culture, I was trying to step away from the world of institutionally and macro-politically focused poststructuralism. I wanted to think and research the ways that cinematic images have functioned effectively in and fantasy identifications and other forms of psychic/psychological processes. They inspire and induce certain embodied practices. My first focus was Bruce Lee and I was interested in martial arts practices, specifically. Of course, this means that I was still entirely subjected to thinking of âcultureâ and âsubjectivityâ (embodied or otherwise) in the terms of poststructuralist semiotics, in which everything becomes signifiers sending messages and pointing to other signifiers, and so on (see Silverman, 1983). Consequently, I donât really think that any of this work actually (or straightforwardly) got to the matter of âembodimentâ. It focused on the nexus of media representation, identification and fantasy, conceived as a kind of motor that inspires and/or sustains physical practice.
Phrased like this it all sounds very technical and grand. Yet maybe we donât really need the trappings and baggage of the language of psychoanalytical cultural theory to describe it. Maybe we could just as easily talk about peopleâs beliefs or hopes or ambitions being the things that generate and sustain their practices. If we think of running, for example: people can (and do) talk a lot about why they run (for health, to lose weight, to raise money for charity, for a sense of wellbeing, because they are âaddictedâ and so on). But none of these words give us any insight into any matters of embodied running, from anything about the experience to any other kind of (non-wordy) insight. When we try to probe the experience of running itself, our words often come up short. There are shared âtechnicalâ phrases, and shared descriptions: we can speak of muscle cramps, how we might feel like we canât get enough air into our lungs, how we hit the wall and so on. But other than this, the experience of running often seems to fail to find its way out into speech and language. The experience of a run was great or terrible or hard or easy or exhilarating or harrowing, and so on. But what was the âthatâ that we are saying was good or bad or hard or easy or fun or challenging?
How to do things with guts
What we are facing here is a general problem of signification. To translate something from an individual experience into words and meanings always requires a move away from the perceived essence or heart of the matter, via a necessary (invented, poetic) connection with another coordinate. An experience is like one thing, and not like another thing; it can only ever be evoked through comparison, analogy, metaphor, contrast and so on. Admittedly, the communication of a non-linguistic event, phenomenon or experience is a particularly knotty semiotic problem, but it is a semiotic problem nonetheless. Like everything, attempting to signify âthat thingâ will always involve composition, construction and a perhaps ultimately impossible or forever unsatisfying effort of translation.
All of this has been reflected upon since at least the time of Charles Sanders Peirce. People have found fascinating ways out of this abyss, or ways to bridge it or bypass it. But I have always felt the need to hold onto the tensions, gaps, disjunctions, aporias, absences and irrelations between experiences and words. This is because trying to keep hold of this tension imposes a gnawing, generative problematic. LoĂŻc Wacquant expressed it well, I think, when he wrote, on the subject of learning boxing:
How to go from the guts to the intellect, from the comprehension of the flesh to the knowledge of the text? Here is a real problem of concrete epistemology about which we have not sufficiently reflected, and which for a long time seemed ...