Structured Visions

In an episode of This American Life, 14-year-old Annie relates middle school to a ‘whitewashed, brick-walled, iron-gated prison’ that she finally escapes from. Annie’s description gives us a good excuse to revisit the use of prison metaphors to describe oppressive social structures. Foucault’s Panopticon will spring to mind for many Structured Visions listeners, but we don’t have to rely upon French social theory to find prison imagery applied to the social world.

What Annie doesn’t do is compare middle school to a body. Human bodies are mentioned several times in the show – Alex Blumberg, for instance, describes middle schoolers as having to learn ‘how their bodies are now working’, and other guests describe ‘raging hormones’. But middle school as a social body doesn’t enter into the repertoire of metaphors. Middle school is understood as a prison or a ‘social order’, but not as a body.

But you may remember that I’ve argued that the social body isn’t merely a metaphor, it’s a real thing. What is reality? we ask each other, trying to remember what we learned in undergraduate philosophy classes. After exploring where there’s any ontological basis for the social body, I conclude that we need less ontology and more alterity (otherness) – and we look to Emmanuel Levinas  for guidance. If ontological questions are a matter of philosophical debate, alterity – a relationship with the other – is a matter of ethical responsibility. For Levinas, the image of the encounter with the other is the face: when we come into relationship with the face of the other, we have the opportunity to encounter worlds beyond those that we currently have the power  to perceive, know or understand.

The reason why I say middle school and other social structures are social bodies is because bodies have faces. Coming face-to-face with the social body of middle school – or any other social structure – makes it possible to for us to enter into new worlds, beyond our current understandings, and to be surprised, challenged and delighted by what we may see there.

Download Episode 46: Middle school, embodied.

More this week on the human body and the social body. What about the self? In this episode I go against the idea that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the self and the human body – that each time we see a human body there’s a singular self/mind/consciousness that is attached to/merged with/inhabiting it.

Did you ever read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy? The characters in Pullman’s worlds each have a ‘daimon’ – an animal form that represents the character’s ‘self’. As fantastical as that idea seems, it reflects back a commonly held understanding of the self: that an integral, intimate part of each human body is a self, which cannot be separated from the body without dire consequences.

The idea I put forward today is that the self attaches/merges with/inhabits/identifies with bodies – but not necessarily with the human body, and certainly not in a sustained, stable way. Instead, the self attaches more frequently to the social body. I explain that looking at conversational data gives me access to the many incipient forms of the social body, and it allows me to see how the grammatically constructed self identifies with it.

Why this particular perspective on selves and bodies? I propose that if we start to see the self as no longer necessarily attached to the human body, we can start to see the human body as something that is in relationship with the human body. We can also recognise those moments – and they’re frequent – in which the human body is co-opted for the social body’s purposes. Situations in which the human body is simply seen as an instrument to carry out the social body’s demands. I compare these types of situations with my experiences of babysitting the grandchildren of a woman who couldn’t see me beyond my role as her hired help.

Is the social body treating the human body as ‘hired help’? What would it see if it were to enter into a more fulfilling relationship with the human body?

Oh, and I look at this transcript again (first seen in Episode 44):

Download Episode 45: Can’t you do something with her?

Today I explore in a bit more detail these two potentially provocative premises: that the social body is real, and that it hasn’t yet been formed. Let’s take them each in turn:

We can spend all day under the influence of our favourite substances (beer, wine, Haribo sweets) what it means for something to be ‘real’, but for my purposes ‘real’ is useful. If I decide the social body is something that’s real, that I don’t know much about yet, then I get to do research about it with a spirit of curiosity and discovery. Curiosity and discovery are more fun for me than argumentation and debate – though there’s plenty of room for argumentation and debate as well (preferably under the influence of our favourite substances).

I’m saying here that no one person will be able to describe the social body, because it is still in an incipient state. It’s emerging, it’s full of possibilities, and none of them have fully concretised yet. So the best we can do is to look at the many prototypes of the social body that are in the process of emerging. For me, that means I’m looking through a microscope at seemingly insignificant bits of language use, like snippets of conversation. This conversation between Maryam, Beth, Andrew and me is one example.

My claim is that the grammatical constructions in this conversation reveal an emergent social body. The body has unique, differentiated constituents – individuals – who are in relation to each other and in relation to the social body. In addition, we can see the social body being wounded here, and we can track how it organises its constituents in order to bring about healing.

Read my forthcoming book with Palgrave to learn more about what I’ve taken from Discipline and Punish: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download Episode 44: We got everything back

There’s a new binary opposition in town! Instead of thinking, as we have been in Structured Visions, about the individual in relation to society, I’ve proposed we begin to think in terms of two types of body. The human body and the social body. The self, as I said in Episode 42, attaches to one or the other of these bodies. More often than not, in my experience analysing conversational data, it attaches to the social body, and the human body ends up oppressed.

Hold on! I can hear you saying. Can we really assume those terms have the same conceptual status? I mean, the human body is a real thing. The social body’s just a metaphor.

To which I reply, fair enough. Let’s play with the idea that they’re both metaphors.

To which you might say, how can the human body be a metaphor?

Good question. I take you back to a time in my personal memory when I didn’t have access to the concept ‘body’. And then to a time when I was imagining bodies lying over the ocean. When the idea of the body for me was similar to Yeats’s idea of ‘an aged man … A tattered coat upon a stick’.

But it might be even more fun to play with the idea that both the human body and the social body are real.

But Jodie, how can the social body be anything but a metaphor? How can the social body be real? I can’t touch it, like I can the human body.

To which I reply, let’s stop associating ‘real’ things with things you can touch. Let’s think in terms of images and prototypes. Let’s think about Beethoven composing when he can’t hear the music he’s writing, and three-year-old Aaron picturing a tree. These aren’t metaphors: they’re images of things that haven’t yet emerged into the world.

Let’s think of the social body as an image of society that hasn’t yet emerged into the world. This way of thinking makes it possible to identify many social bodies, many of them still at the prototype stage – some of them not oppressive. Some of them not bullies. Some of them in a mutually beneficial relationship with the human body.

Download Episode 43: Bye bye body metaphor

Be prepared in this episode for a bit of dramatic irony – a term I learned when I read Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘Charles’. A little boy, Laurie, comes home every day from kindergarten with stories about a classroom bully named Charles. At the end of the book the parents find out that it’s Laurie who’s the bully; there’s no child named ‘Charles’ in the class.

Another way of putting it is to say that Laurie has attached his ‘self’ to a bullying character called ‘Charles’.

Hold that thought.

Now back to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. What this book does for me is make it possible to imagine a different dichotomy to one we’ve been exploring up to this point. Before we spoke of the individual and society. Now we get to think in terms of the social body and the human body and how they relate to each other. For Foucault the social body is the bully, the human body the victim.

In this episode I invite listeners to attach a self to one or the other of these types of bodies. Would you attach the self to the human body, or the social body?

My research involves poring over everyday conversational data, locating the way the self shows up in all its many grammatical forms. Focusing on grammatical construals of the self makes it easier for me to avoid the assumption that the self necessarily coincides with the human body.

In fact, in many instances, the self that shows up through grammatical analysis coincides with the social body. An oppressive social body, at that. One that bullies the human body. Remember ‘you just don’t do that at training’? The self we’ve been trying to protect from the kindergarten bully turns out to be the bully.

So what do we do? Try to get the self to stop bullying the human body? Tell it to detach itself from the social body? I propose instead that we research the possibilities that show up in everyday texts. Lots of social bodies show up when I do grammatical analysis of everyday conversations –  a whole range of possibilities, and not all of them are oppressive. Let’s start putting our attention to these non-oppressive social bodies.  Another possibility: let’s look at some of those instances in which the self attaches to the human body. My research shows that in these instances it’s less of an identification (I am my body) and more a co-creation, an integration that ends up being transformative.

We’ll explore all of this and more in upcoming episodes.

Read my forthcoming book with Palgrave to learn more about what I’ve taken from Discipline and Punish: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download Episode 42: Discipline and Punish, part 3.