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Quest. Issue 5. Autumn 2007.
ISSN 1750-9696.
Making Bodies
Liza Griffen
Abstract
Our bodies play an influential part in the production of our society and in the mediation between
society and nature. Yet, despite its importance, a comprehensive theorisation of the body has
proved elusive. The most dominant paradigms in theorising bodies have been those associated
with the linguistic turn and, in particular, discourse studies. This paper argues that, however
persuasive, linguistic theories cannot be used on their own to interpret many of the body’s
practices and expressive powers. For such totalising, purely ‘textual’, philosophies neglect those
aspects of life that actually structure linguistic systems themselves; such as being and
performing in the world. I argue that somatic feeling exists before and underneath linguistic
expression, and is not subordinate to it. The case is made through considering the connections
between textural theories and uninterpretive praxis. In sum, it is necessary to look beyond
linguistic theory to another kind of approach which attempts to theorise what cannot be
represented, that is, non-representational theory.
Introduction
Much research on bodies which uses language texts and discourse as its predominant mode of
analysis has understood them as part of the 'immaterial' world. That is, it has interpreted bodies
as symbolic sites that are docile and inscribed. This highly influential research downplays the
practical moments and rhythms, experiences and praxes that configure our bodies – such as
repetitive work on the factory line or dance. This happens because movements and practices are
not easy to interpret or evoke by using language. Perhaps, therefore, we should put linguistic
theory on one side, and try to theorise these more 'practical' aspects of the social through applied
engagement with the world. In so doing we would hope to add a missing depth of understanding
to the body and help to rebalance the recent valorisation of the body as simply a site of
interpretation. We might do this with the aid of theories of the non-representational, including
performativity and embodiment. In emphasising the usefulness of such non-representational
theory, I also show how the purest interpretations of, and reliance on, textual theories of the body
are insufficient for its understanding.
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But first I outline why the body has become an important and yet contested site in social theory. I
go on to describe how, although textual theories have had much to offer the understanding of
bodies, they have rendered the body into a kind of lifeless, docile ‘cadaver’. I then show how
non-representational theories (such as embodiment and performativity) can help to theoretically
revitalise this cadaver. Finally, I argue that a turn toward non-representational theory need not
imply a negation of textual theory, or a reinforcement of realist-idealist dualisms.
Theories of the Body
The cultural importance of the body has recently been re-emphasised in the light of Western
society’s current individualist preoccupation with the body aesthetic, and also the body’s part in
spiritual pursuits like Yoga and pilgrimage. What’s more, it appears that ‘fleshiness’ is
increasingly evident in popular culture and advertising. However, the body is also significant in
terms of social theory. Here, it has recently been theorised as the manifest and material
expression of the individual self, often being regarded as the container of social identity. But this
has not always been the case. In the 1970s for instance, phenomenologists, tended to conceive of
the body as an ‘experience’ that performed in advance of the conscious mind, and in so doing
they revealed the expressive way that bodies belonged to the world (Kearney 1984).
Phenomenological theory, then, effectively reduced the body and its effects to non-discursive,
non-cognitive ‘experience’. Similarly, pragmatists, like John Dewey, while seeing the need to
take into account conscious cognition, acknowledged that non-cognitive experience was
imperative to the understanding of the body. Dewey however argued that pre-conscious
experiences were given meaning through language: thus they then become cognitive and
embroiled within discourse (see Shusterman 1997).
Later the ‘linguistic turn’ saw this interest in the body renewed, but this time it was conceived as
a largely passive surface inscribed by ‘texts’, i.e. signs and symbolic practices. Here, the body is
important as a site which can be mapped or written upon. However, more recently still, the body
has been theorised in its more corporeal and performative sense (see below).
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These two notions of the body – (i) as a site of inscription and (ii) as an active, fleshy agent
which cannot be represented - mirror the tension between those who champion representational
theories as a way of giving meaning to the world and those who favour more material, nonrepresentational, performative explanations (Seager 1997).
Representational theory: The body as a site of inscription
Philosophy and social theory have long been preoccupied with language. This preoccupation
culminated with the ‘linguistic turn’ and emergence of a totalising ideology in which nothing
appeared to matter outside of textual explanations. For example, Foucault’s (1980) social
constructivist theory of knowledge suggests that the body is textual in origin because it is
constructed primarily through discourses that are based around shared symbols and regulatory
norms. That is to say our bodies are effectively ‘parchment’ for society’s discourses. Discursive
practices get written upon bodies through, for example, disciplines and punishments. This form
of social constructivism limits the extent to which we see ourselves as shaped by our physical
bodies. It simultaneously implies that human physicality, or the pre-discursive body, can never
be directly apprehended, as our comprehension of it is obstructed by the ‘grids of meaning’
placed over it by our linguistic discourses (Shilling, 2000). Cream (1995: 33) asserts that the
“social body constrains the way the physical body is conceived and bodily experience, in turn,
reinforces and mediates the understanding of the social”.
Other theorists within this paradigm would go further, to suggest that bodies can be actually
constituted by discursive practice. So, for example, pregnant women can effectively be forced to
hide their ‘bumps’ or act in a demure fashion (Longhurst 2000). Or, as Cream (1995: 33)
describes it, these practices of the body are essentially interpretive, and “there is no way that a
body can escape its social and cultural setting. There is no body outside of its context”.
Indeed, symbolic practices like initiation ceremonies and ‘cults of physicality’ - for instance
where teenage boys engage in exercises affecting their physical growth, muscular and skeletal
development - do shape bodies (Connell 1995). Furthermore social categorisations can realise
actual behaviour; for instance Victorian women did ‘swoon’ and really did suffer from continual
maladies (Hargreaves 1985). What’s more, as Freund (1990) explains, social comparisons and
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power struggles and the stress that accompanies them may actually produce neuro-hormonal
imbalances which can affect blood flow and body immunity; that is, socially held values do have
material effects on the nature of the physical body. Similarly, beliefs and power relations can
also constitute the body through their effect on posture and muscle tensions (Shilling 2000).
This is illustrated by bodily disciplines like the Alexander Technique, which teaches cognisant
control over posture and movement. In doing so the Technique aims to bring the body’s
movement and bearing into the realm of consciousness and discourse. Hence in performing
Alexander, it is said, we can alter the ingrained habits that our bodies display in the unconscious,
such as poor posture.
But this social constructivism of the body may produce some ideological problems. For
linguistically discursive bodies may be subject to a cultural relativism that could sanction such
‘cultural practices’ as foot binding and female circumcision (Soper 1995). Another worrying
aspect of ‘writing the body’ is that men’s and women’s bodies are essentially products of a
linguistic binary opposition. These categories and laws provided by language (such as the
‘strong solider’ or the ‘nimble seamstress’), and essentialised by discourse fortify the fetters for
socio-political domination .
Texts that write bodies can, however, be more fluid and open ended, rather than merely
recreating those binary and essentialised oppositions that we are familiar with. They can
sometimes transcend them to create more diversity. For instance, while structural linguistics
may have aided the dominance of the dualistic categorisations of ‘woman’ and ‘man’, we are
increasingly familiar with other textual categories that disrupt such dichotomies: the
transgendered, the bisexual, for instance.
So there is room for texts to be less rigid and thus more useful for theorising the body. For
example, Hélène Cixous’s (1994) writing about gender is poetic, non-linear and anti-theoretical.
In it she disorders traditional frameworks and uses what she calls ‘sorties’ or ‘ways out’ of the
language system. However, again there is a problem. The paradox of these ‘playful texts’ which supposedly cannot be theorised, enclosed or coded linguistically – is that they still rely on
formal systems made up of symbols and laws. This shows how some textual philosophers, many
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of which still see the need for a ‘more real’ grasp of the body, cannot completely escape the
matrix of texts through which they construct the world.
Non-representational Theory: In the Flesh
Yet, while arguments for a more playful inscribed body may be compelling, most neglect the
inner and moving body (see Thrift & Dewsbury 2000). This is one of several shortcomings of
the textual interpretation perspectives described above. They may assert that bodies are shaped
by interpretive practices, but they do not explain how the ‘performing’ of these practices might
create the visceral:
Though the human body is surely shaped to some extent by linguistic and
interpretative practices, it has often been identified as the site of more
immediate, uninterpreted experience (Shusterman, 2000: 9).
Additionally, most of the social constructivist/interpretive theories considered above tend to
emphasise the regulatory, oppressive, aspects of body production, neglecting the more
celebratory or expressive components that can be created by social practice. Although
Foucault’s theorisation of the body through, for example, the gaze, the institution and biopower
contains some truth, all these techniques produce the body through normalising regulatory
behaviour. That is, they largely focus on the ‘push’ or negative factors. Such linguistic
approaches give us insight into what ‘is done’ to the body, but say much less about how, for
example, it is to be actually embodied, what it can do, how it is implicated in our agency and
how our experience is mediated through it (Shilling 2000). Bodies as 'parchment' only tell us
part of the story then, simply mapping an abstract representation of the body rather than
understanding it as it does and as it lives.
Another problem is that theorising bodies through deploying fixed, basically linguistic,
discourses tends to ignore uninterpreted 'moments' which we experience in daily activity, such as
the succession of rich multiple potentials that are afforded by the performance of dance, for
example. This leaves us with only the bare bones of an event (see Harrison 2000). Moreover, in
the process meaning is no longer gleaned from the event itself (like the actual dance) but rather
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from ‘outside’ knowledge (i.e. an accepted or conventional term for a dance movement that may
resemble the one actually being performed). Thus language slides into the interstices between
material and fleshy bodies and the immaterial world, and linguistic interpretation loses some of
the meaning produced by the occurrence. This meaning escapes, effectively allowing material
practices to become 'torn from the body' (Lefebvre 1991) and leaving a ‘carcass’ rather than a
living body. Because of this, Schieffelin (1998) argues that when we reduce performances to
texts they are destroyed. For example Labannotation (a code to represent the movements of the
body) does not at all convey the dance, just as the score is not the music.
Foucault himself (1984) acknowledges the possibility of ‘limit-experiences’, like extreme or
profound pleasures, that escape textual interpretation, and which could make or produce the
body (Shusterman 1997). But even this reasoning ignores the potential of more quotidian
performances, like dance, walking or sex, that occur in the ‘now’. This is because an important
dimension of immediate experience is missing from the discursive figuration of the body. It
leaves a void because language always leads us to the past or future , but never the present.
Textual-historical approaches present a body looking backwards at what has already happened
and ignore the potential of what the body might become. But the body acts in the present and is
constantly improvising. It initiates actions which seem to come from nowhere, or which are
created by the intelligence of the body, not the mind - because consciousness is often bypassed
in, for example such practices as Jazz improvisation1 (Thrift & Dewsbury 2000).
Furthermore, creating meaning from outside of the body gives us less sense that we can
intervene in its production (Thrift & Dewsbury 2000). The body as merely a textual site means
that all one can do is to interpret the leftover empty carcass which becomes merely “…a vehicle
for the expression of a reified social rationality” (Jackson 83: 329). Foucault’s notion of
discursive bodies for instance, effectively renders them docile or dissected - a cadaver. It is
restricted to conceptualising the body in relation to social inscriptions of knowledge and power.
To add to what was said above, its surveillance gives us no perception of the sensuous, the
reactive or the possible.
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However, the notion that improvisation bypasses consciousness is rejected by many musicians and musicologists
who instead see cognitive awareness as a fundamental part of the process (see Fischlin and Heble (2004)).
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Hence, linguistic systems are apparently insufficient and problematic for explaining the body’s
living corporeality. And one of the things missing is the realisation that much of what is unseen
and unthought but is still highly significant in our lives, like walking through the city or knowing
where your car keys are, is to do with our ‘embodiment’. Embodiment refers to the idea that
perception, understanding and consciousness are materialised by practice, and exist primarily
within a membrane of flesh and blood (Harrison 2000). The unseen and unthought are, then,
embodied. And they become so through the process of encountering and being in the world,
often bypassing our cognitive senses. To reiterate, the everyday practices that configure our
bodies (that is, our bodies as the fleshy manifestation of practices, encounters and events) are
very often neglected by social theory. And many of these embodiments cannot be theorised
using discursive or representational theories because they relate to the non-cognitive or prediscursive body.
Hence if we are to take these practices seriously we need to look beyond representational
interpretations of the body towards the non-representational and the performative, which
embraces corporeal performances and embodiment. For Nigel Thrift (2000 A), such nonrepresentational theory is a:
radical attempt to wrench the social sciences and humanities out of their
current emphasis on representation and interpretation by moving away from a
view of the world based on contemplative models of thought and action
towards theories of practice which amplify the flow of events (p. 556).
Such a perspective uses the notion of performance to theorise day-to-day improvisations, like
strolling through the park, acting or dancing. The idea of performativity has its roots in speech
act theory and starts from the proposition that textual utterances can actually ‘constitute’ the
objects and subjects that are being referred to. However, this largely representational perspective
on performativity is then extended, e.g. by authors like Butler (1990) to explain how it is not
only words that can be creative of subjects: it is the daily behaviour of individuals, based on their
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social norms or habits (that is, their ‘performances’), that can also constitute social identities,
such as gender and sexuality.
Understanding bodies through non-representational performance theory steers us away from
essences and towards processes which, according to Thrift (1997, 2000 B), do not have a space
of representation. Performance deals with actions more than text and with habits of the body
more than structures of symbols (Schieffelin 1998).
Spaces Between Representational and Non-representational Theory
However, conceiving representational and non-representational theories as opposing perspectives
reveals a paradox. For example, the very act of ‘writing’ about performance requires me to
represent it. What’s more, some visual and textual forms of ‘representation’, like some
performance art, are also ‘performances’ (Nash 2000).
Equally, performances can be representational, as suggested by Butler (1990), who appears to
deploy a linguistic account of performance. For her, bodies are produced or naturalised through
symbolic performances like putting on make-up. And gender differences might be created or
recreated in performing such rituals. These performances show how the reiteration of norms is
produced by socio-symbolic practices. For example, feminists in the 1980s have described how
patriarchal culture is choreographed (i.e. performed). Thus waltz and ballet routines were shaped
by the publicly acceptable distance between men and women’s bodies and thus were interpretive
practices. However through discursive changes modern dance has allowed freedom of expression
and has contributed to the emancipation of women’s bodies without the corset and the
choreographed distances (Barnes 1998).
This difficulty, of cleanly separating representational and non-representational theory is further
illustrated in speech act theory. This holds that some speech or speech acts are also associated
with performing corporeal actions or ‘things done with words’. Here, for example, an utterance
like ‘I pronounce you …’ is not only the speech, it is also the act (see Austin 1975).
This need for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between representational and
non-representational theory is again suggested by Butler, in her discussion of how performances
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can become inscribed upon the body (see also Gregson & Rose 2000). For instance a sequence
of repetitive actions by workers on assembly lines, initially prescribed and orchestrated through a
discourse of production, eventually becomes embodied as performance by those workers
(McDowell 1995).
So Butler argues that although often discursive in origin, habits can become unconscious and
then embodied. But she appears to overlook the many modalities of performance that are
apparently non-discursive, and may belong to the pre-cognitive, and hence pre-linguistic. For a
more complete theory of the production of the body, then, it may be useful to look beyond
performances that are only produced discursively, to those which arise from uninterpretive
moments. Some experiences that configure the body, such as dancing, depression or the sexual
orgasm, resist interpretation because the “…the purely corporeal can be uncanny” (Wittgenstein
1980:50). And attempts to give them linguistic expression result in performative ‘slippage’,
where you are only able to refer to other experiences to represent them. Grief, for instance, ‘is
like drowning’, or an orgasm is like ‘an amazing sneeze’. Words are simply inadequate for
describing these performances, and therefore they cannot be entirely represented.
Nevertheless, perhaps there are ways of resolving some of the tensions produced by this
ontological divide between representational and non-representational approaches to the body.
The resolution might encompass more research taking account of embodiment, that at the same
time still values the insights gained through representational theorisation:
one may wonder what connection exists between this abstract body… and a
practical and fleshy body conceived of as a totality complete with spatial
qualities (symmetries, asymmetries) and energetic properties (discharges,
economies, wastes) (Lefebvre 91:61).
This research could be premised on the proposition that discourses themselves are actually
constructed by the body’s practices and performances. It would hold that discursive forms of
knowledge are not abstract and disembodied: they are instead tied to the hierarchies and
organisation of the body’s senses, such as the privilege of the eye in the discursive theory of the
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gaze (Jencks 1995). It would also acknowledge, for example, the importance of the idea that the
cognitive functions of the brain have been attributed to the prior development of facilities of the
hand in its embodied practices.
Such an approach understands, then, that representational and non-representational processes
may be supervenient, whereby representations may not exist without some action in the world,
but performances may still resist representation. “Long before formal knowledge, there was an
intelligence of the body” (Lefebvre 1991:174). Words cannot exist without hands and mouths to
write them and ears to hear them. Even discursive performances still partly resist representation
because although the basic act may be delineated, the reverberations of the act, the shadows of
lost potentiality or open possibility, and its embodiment, may not.
Following such a line of argument, Massey (1996) explains that it is important that social
practices are recognised as lived:
for philosophical frameworks do not only exist as theoretical propositions or in
the form of the written word. They are both reproduced and, at least
potentially struggled with and rebelled against, in the practice of living life
(p.109).
These practices may become inscribed on the body that can be read, but first and foremost they
are quotidian performances. For instance, the ideology and discourses of an economic system
follow upon the practices of labour on an assembly line. This notion is further exemplified by
Lefebvre (1991) as he explains that the body that smells, listens, and enacts before a long
learning process produces symbolism and representation. That is, for Lefebvre, nonrepresentational and representational theory are dialectically related.
So the body writes as well as being written upon. And therefore we might best understand signs
as they are “grasped in practice” (Thrift 2000 B:217).
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Cognitive structures emerge from recurrent patterns of perceptually guided
action…cognition consists not of representations but of embodied action.
Correlatitively, the world as we know it is not pregiven; it is, rather, enacted
through our history of structural coupling (Varela 1992:336).
Symbols, signs and discourses are made and remade when we act them out; not only when we
passively reproduce them through texts and images. They are realised through embodiment, not
inscribed upon, but acted out from within via the intelligent body-subject – “My dance is my
body and my body is myself” (Fraleigh quoted in Thrift 2000 B). Only in life do words have
meaning (Wittgenstein 1980).
Conclusions
Linguistic approaches to embodiment have offered a 'valuable epistemological break' from
naturalistic ideas about the body (Shilling 2000: 421), but, as discussed they are totalising and
moreover overlook the non-representational. The body, however, is not a pure site of nonlinguistic freedom; it is configured, as I have shown, by linguistic practice. For Foucault,
discourse largely constituted an all-encompassing and pre-eminent matrix, and this notion was
tested only by what he called limit experiences. I have argued, however, that purely discursive,
textual or symbolic interpretations of the body can be further tested by an acknowledgment of
the validity of non-representational theory. Being and becoming in the world is an experience
that we make sense of through discourse, but where there is plenty of room for improvisation.
As discussed, the body is very much an interpretive site, but it is also a place of more immediate
and uninterpretive experiences that we can grasp by looking to non-representational theory. And
we might want to go further and view our lived materiality as the basis of all discursive
representations. For instance, I have suggested here that linguistic systems might be primarily
constructed through the habits of the body itself. So for truly comprehensive appreciation of
bodies, it might be useful to see how bodies are configured superveinently by textual systems
which are first grasped in practice. Hence, let non-representational theory have the ‘last word’.
For the real task might not be to see the true nature of our bodies (we might never know it) and
then represent this knowledge. Rather, it might be to understand bodies in terms of their contexts,
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and, moreover, to “understand how things are because of what we did to bring them about”
(Radley 1995: 5).
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