Perspectives on Embodiment

The Intersections of Nature and Culture

Gail Weiss, Honi Fern Haber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135963989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Perspectives on Embodiment offers multiple ways of conceptualizing human corporeality. These essays collectively defy arbitrary distinctions between nature and culture and reveal the complex ways in which nature and culture interact to produce embodied subjects. A central premise of this collection is that a variety of perspectives is needed to illuminate the fluid, ever-changing features of human corporeality. This book not only explores what it means to be an embodied subject, but also encourages speculation about our future bodily incarnations.

PART ONE

Identifying Bodies and Bodily Identifications

ONE

CRITICAL RESISTANCE: FOUCAULT AND BOURDIEU

DAVID COUZENS HOY

Is the body invariant across history and culture, or is it the product of social constitution? With the exception of Nietzsche, canonical modern philosophers since Descartes usually take the first alternative for granted, if they think about the body at all. In contrast, recent French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu make strong cases for taking the second hypothesis more seriously. Foucault and Bourdieu see subjectivity as extensively constructed by social and historical factors that are below the level of consciousness and thus less transparent to phenomenological introspection. They show to an even greater extent than their phenomenological precursor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that much of our comportment is already built into our bodies in ways that we do not and perhaps cannot attend to explicitly.

Foucault is, of course, directly influenced by Nietzsche. Foucault adapts not only the hypothesis that the body is entirely malleable over the course of history, but also Nietzsche’s genealogical method for investigating this hypothesis. For both Foucault and Bourdieu the philosophical methods of their time were inadequate for the task of investigating embodied social practices. The phenomenological and structuralist methods were too unhistorical to do justice to the radical historicity of the body, and the dialectical method was too mechanistic and eschatological. Foucault prefers Nietzsche’s genealogical method for writing “effective” history precisely because it

places within a process of development everything considered immortal in humanity. We believe that feelings are immutable, but every sentiment, particularly the noblest and most disinterested, has a history…. We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. “Effective” history differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in humans— not even their body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding others.¹

So Foucault and Nietzsche are often characterized as holding that the body is, to use a current but problematic phrase that I shall be calling into question, “socially constructed.” But this is only part of their view. Both Nietzsche and Foucault also see the body as the basis of our being, a basis that has been covered up by the intellectualist philosophical tradition.

In this critical assessment of the Cartesian tradition they are joined by Bourdieu. As a sociologist Bourdieu is more interested in persistence and continuity, in contrast to Foucault, who emphasizes transience and discontinuity. But even more than Foucault, Bourdieu sees comportment as predominantly configured by the social structures (the “habitus”) and bodily orientation (or “hexis”) that individuals acquire through their upbringing in a particular culture or class. “Bodily hexis,” says Bourdieu both in Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1977) and in Le sens pratique (1980), “is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking.”² In the earlier work Bourdieu adds (probably more strongly than he would today), “[t]he principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit….”³

At the same time, however, the recourse to embodiment in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Bourdieu is not a reductionism to the biological. While the term embodiment certainly suggests that there is a biological dimension to comportment, it is not a term that refers directly to the biological phenomenon independently of related concepts and of cultural context. “Body” may seem like an essence, or like what philosophers call a natural-kind term (like “water,” “heat,” or “gold”). But I take these French thinkers to be understanding the body as more akin to “money,” or “love,” or “power,” or “justice.” These terms designate social phenomena that are certainly real, but that depend on their concepts and culture and that are not independent natural kinds.⁴

The particular difficulty that I want to address in comparing these theories of embodiment concerns their normative dimension. These are not simply theories of how the body is formed, but they also imply critically that the social construction of the body deforms it. There are some obvious objections, however, that need to be discussed. If there is nothing natural to the body, then how could one say that it has been deformed? How could any social construction be assessed as better or worse than any other? How could domination even be identified as such? Furthermore, if consciousagents are powerless to change or resist their acculturated understanding of how to comport themselves, of what value is the sociological or genealogical effort to bring this process of bodily construction to light?

These questions show how problematic the hypothesis of the historicity of the body can be. In this essay I will be concerned with the serious ethical and political risks involved in asserting the social and historical malleability of the body. In particular, I will be investigating whether Foucault and Bourdieu can steer safely between the dangers of determinism and voluntarism while also avoiding fatalism and relativism. Given that both theorists are often accused of portraying individual agents as powerless and ineffective in bringing about social transformation, I will be working toward a conclusion about whether their theories of embodiment are internally consistent with their attempts to account for the emancipatory possibility of critical resistance to domination.

FOUCAULT

To set up the problem more carefully, let me first look at Foucault as one way of working out how there could be a history of the body at the same time as the body is asserted to be the basis of our being. Foucault clearly derives his understanding of the critical potential of genealogy from Nietzsche. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Foucault sees the task of genealogical, critical histories as the double one of exposing both “a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (FR 83). Note that historical forces are said simultaneously not only to shape but also to destroy the body. But if the body is always already in history, if there is already a history of the body, was there ever anything the body was before history and that is now destroyed? Or is what gets destroyed never natural, but only the destruction of some previous destruction?

Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow have seen this problem in their book on Foucault. Insofar as the body is the basis to which genealogy ties its interpretations, the body should become the basis for the critical thrust of genealogy.⁵ They are not convinced, however, that Foucault explains adequately how the body functions as the basis of critique and resistance. One of the critical questions about Foucault with which they conclude their book raises the question of whether Foucault has not paid too high a price by abandoning Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological method in favor of Nietzsche’s genealogical method.

Is the main philosophic task to give a content to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of le corps propre? Or is such an attempt which finds ahistorical andcross-cultural structures in the body misdirected? If there are such structures can one appeal to them without returning to naturalism? Is one of the bases for resistance to bio-power to be found in the body? Can the body be totally transformed by disciplinary techniques? Merleau-Ponty sees the body as having a telos towards rationality and explicitness; if he is correct how is it that power and organizational rationality are so infrequently linked in other cultures? If, on the other hand, power and rationality are not grounded in the body’s need to get a maximum grip on the world, what is the relation between the body’s capacities and power? (MF 206; emphasis added)

Dreyfus and Rabinow see Foucault as somewhere between Nietzsche and Merleau- Ponty. From Nietzsche, Foucault has learned about the malleability of the body, but they find Foucault “elusive” about whether the body is entirely malleable (MF 111). The reason for this elusiveness is, on their interpretation, that Foucault is also drawn to Merleau-Ponty’s cross-cultural, ahistorical bodily constants like up-down asymmetry, size and brightness constancy in perception as well as social constancy in response to gestures, facial expression, and sexual signification. But although Foucault has learned from Merleau-Ponty about knowers being embodied, Foucault wants to add the historical and cultural dimensions of the body’s situatedness that Merleau-Ponty ignores (MF 166). They then suggest that following Merleau-Ponty would give Foucault the lived body as a position from which to criticize the practices of manipulation and formation that have also conditioned the investigator: “If the lived body is more than the result of the disciplinary technologies that have been brought to bear upon it, it would perhaps provide a position from which to criticize these practices, and maybe even a way to account for the tendency towards rationalization and the tendency of this tendency to hide itself” (MF 167; emphasis added). The problem they see is that Foucault never actually specifies this “more” and has “remained silent” about what are the bodily invariants that would be needed to ground this critique (MF 112).

This critique of Foucault’s silence about invariants would be devastating if invariants were the only way to fill out the “more” that the body must be for it to supply the point of resistance to the total reshaping of the body through bio-power. I would like to suggest two responses to that critique. The first is a counter-criticism and the second is a more constructive response.

The counter-criticism is simply the negative point that even if there are bodily invariants, they would not be all that is necessary to make an appeal to the body as the basis for critique and resistance. It is not necessary for Foucault to deny that there are invariants. Surely all human beings, whatever their culture or time, have felt pain. The more interesting question is how they have interpreted the experience of pain. And maybe the experience of pain is so conditioned by the cultural-historical interpretations of it that there is little more that can be said about it than that it is generally aversive. The point is that invariance need not be denied altogether, but the very universality of such invariants may be so thin as to make them uninteresting, or too thin to answer the more interesting critical questions. So even if there are bodily universals, and Foucault need not deny that there are, these universals may be too thin to serve as the basis of the more concrete criticisms and resistances.

Thus, in describing his method of doing the “history of systems of thought,” Foucault clarifies what he means by “experience” (which comes close to Merleau- Ponty’s lived body but with the historical-cultural dimensions added) and insists that he is not denying that there might be universal structures involved in experiences, even if experiences are always singular:

Singular forms of experience may perfectly well harbor universal structures; they may well not be independent from the concrete determinations of social existence. However, neither those determinations nor those structures can allow for experiences (that is, for understandings of a certain type, for rules of a certain form, for certain modes of consciousness of oneself and others) except through thought…. [T]his thought has a historicity which is proper to it. That it should have this historicity does not mean it is deprived of all universal form, but instead that the putting into play of these universal forms is itself historical (FR 335).

So Foucault is insisting that the universals by themselves do not determine how they are experienced (or interpreted) concretely. Correlatively, they cannot be the exclusive basis of criticism and resistance, since how they are embodied is also crucial, and criticism must also reveal how these embodied experiences are transformable.

There is a third and final principle implied by this enterprise [of Foucault’s “history of thought”]: an awareness that criticism-understood as analysis of the historical conditions which bear on the creation of links to truth, to rules, and to the self—does not mark out impassable boundaries or describe closed systems; it brings to light transformable singularities. These transformations could not take place except by means of a working of thought upon itself; that is the principle of the history of thought as critical activity (FR 335–36; emphasis added).

Foucault thus construes his own genealogical enterprise as an effective form of critical resistance.

Beyond this defensive line of response, however, lies a second, more constructive line of response. There is another sense in which the body is “more” than any particular way in which it has been “socially constructed.”If the body can be shown to have been lived differently historically (through genealogy), or to be lived differently culturally (through ethnography), then the body can be seen to be “more” than what it now has become, even if this “more” is not claimed to be “universal,” or “biological,” or “natural.” The contrast alone will not make us change, of course, but it will open the possibility of change. We will not be able to go back to the past or to step out of our culture entirely, but we may be able to find the resources in ourselves to save ourselves from the destructive tendencies that the contrast reveals.

To explain this constructive response in more detail would require a lengthy discussion of Foucault’s historical studies. Let me gesture briefly toward two well-known examples from Foucault’s work that come to mind: (1) his study of the normalization that occurs when “docile bodies” are shaped by disciplinary power (as depicted in Discipline and Punish), and (2) his later genealogy of ethics. These examples bring out the point that only when genealogy can show the body to have been destroyed by historical forces does genealogy become effective, critical history in Nietzsche’s sense, but without appeal to a priori principles or universal invariants. As Foucault explains in “What Is Enlightenment?,” criticism will take a different form when it adopts the hypothesis of historicity instead of the assumption of invariance:

[C]riticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying…. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are, what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think (FR 45–46).

To take the first example, normalization is a crucial feature that is revealed in this history of punishment. Foucault is interested not only in how individuals get programmed by the social institutions in which they find themselves, but also why they accept being programmed. He does not want to ask the question of political theory about where the right to punish comes from, but instead, the reverse question about “how were people made to accept the power to punish, or quite simply, when punished, tolerate being so.”⁶ Part of the answer concerns the use of “norms” not only in prisons, but in all other institutions (such as schools, hospitals, factories, or armies) such that perhaps the entire society threatens to become “carceral”:

The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the “social worker”-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements (DP 304).

Contrary to the way his critics often read him, this passage shows that Foucault does not ignore the role of individual agency in the social construction of subjectivity. Social beings are not zombies who have no awareness and agency in their formation (and Foucault should therefore not be called an advocate of the “social construction” of subjectivity, if that phrase is understood in a mechanistic or deterministic way). The point of Bentham’s model prison, the Panopticon, is to train individuals to see themselves as being seen: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (DP 202–203). In general, individuals are complicit in the process of their self-formation and they learn to normalize themselves. Indeed, normalization does not suppress individualization, but produces it. However, what it is to be an individual changes once the disciplinary regime colonizes and supplants the older, juridical regime (DP 192–94).

For present purposes it is important to see that Foucault does not criticize normalization in the name of something universal. That would itself be simply a variant of normalization, of thinking that there is a normal, natural, universal way to exist, and that criticism is possible only of the abnormal, or whatever falls short of the normal as an ideal. The mistake to which Foucault is pointing involves the way the normal is taken as a norm. He is not trying to substitute other norms, but instead is trying ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: Identifying Bodies and Bodily Identifications
• PART TWO: Embodied Mind: Phenomenological Approaches to Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Anthropology
• PART THREE: Rewriting the History of the Body
• CONTRIBUTORS