Michael O’Donovan-Anderson
Rowman & Littlefield, 1996
The Incorporated Self demonstrates
that although embodiment has long been a central concern of the theoretical
humanities, its potential to alter epistemology and open up new areas of dualistic
inquiry has not been pursued far enough. This anthology collects the the works
of scholars from a broad range of disciplines, each examining the nature of
the body and the necessity of embodiment to the human experience — for our
self awareness, our sense of identity, and the workings of the mind.
“In Search of Real
Bodies: Theories and/of Embodiment“
Michael O’Donovan-Anderson
“Darwinian Bodies: Against Institutionalized
Metaphysical Dualism”
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
“The Ghost of Embodiment: Is the
Body a Natural or a Cultural Entity?”
Edward S. Casey
“Phantoms, Lost Limbs, and the Limits
of the Body-Self”
Stephen Meuse
“Identity and the Subject in Performance:
Body, Self and Social World”
Loren Noveck
“What Meaning in Her Breast? Ambivalence
of the Body as Sign and Site of Identity”
Michele Janette
“Hamlet, Neitzsche, and Visceral
Knowledge”
David Hillman
“Living Words: Physiognomy and Aesthetic
Language”
Colin Sample
“The Mindful Body: Embodiment and
Cognitive Science”
Evan Thompson
“Science and Things: On Scientific
Method as Embodied Access to the World”
Michael O’Donovan-Anderson
Michael
O’Donovan-Anderson
Perhaps
it is the sly, proto-villainous expression of Descartes’ most famous portrait
— just the sort of look we (Americans) expect from an European intellectual
courtesan: a bit disdainful, a bit amused, and most certainly intellectually
detached from the immediacy of his surroundings — which makes it so easy
to saddle him with responsibility for the duality of mind and body which continues
to haunt the theoretical humanities. In
reality, of course, no such simple attribution is possible; Plato at least
must share some credit for his discussion of the immateriality of the soul,
and certainly Christian metaphysics in general deserves recognition for the
tendency towards a devaluation of the body and concomitant identification
of the self with spirit.[1] Descartes’ own arguments for the separation
of soul and body are part of a long legacy of dualistic thinking, and should
always be read against his insistence that although conceptually, and therefore
ontologically distinct, soul and body are nevertheless an empirical
unity. But although we inherit this
ontological separatism only through Descartes, it is fair to say that
we inherit from his peculiar clarity a picture of the epistemic position
of the self which powerfully serves that ontological claim: our only epistemic
contact with the world is to be had through the senses.
Insofar as questions of the nature and reliability of our knowledge
have long occupied center stage, not just in philosophy but also in the disciplines
for which philosophy plays an important role, these two Cartesian tenets have
placed the body at the center of the theoretical humanities. For what better way to encapsulate the nature of the knowing, feeling,
moving self than as an "embodied mind"? Descartes’ famous ontological realization that
he is a thinking thing is conditioned and tempered by the epistemological
admission that all he had accepted as most true had come to him through the
senses. The mind is in contact with
the world only in virtue of the body, which transforms the causal impacts
of material reality into the interpretable data of sense. Yet it is precisely the body’s intrusion between
knowledge and reality which philosophical reason abhors, for it credits Mind
with the certainty of access to eternal truths, and charges the body with
momentary and unreliable flux; the body is a source of betrayal, a cause of
the senses’ deception.[2]
The body is for Cartesian philosophy both necessary and unacceptable,
and this ambivalence tends to drive mind and body apart in a way Descartes
did not intend. For without the theological
underpinnings of Descartes’ entire system, it begins to look as if objectivity
requires us to sift from the data of sense the contribution of the body, to
divide, that is, the data from the sense.
Although all knowledge originates in sensation, we are called upon
to repudiate that origin as personal, unreliable, subjective; as a result
the "knowing" self becomes more ghostly, while the physical body’s
attachment to mind becomes more tenuous.
If the physical body, captured in the form of sensation, is not permitted
to ground the possibility of knowledge, to provide the originary locus and
fundamental content of that knowledge, then that which mediates between the
sensation-causing world and the information-processing mind begins to be defined
in abstraction from the body; for the body itself is a source of sensation,
is part of the sensibly-known world and must, therefore, be mediated in its
contact with the mind by that in which the sensation is caused (and by which
the unreliable physicality of sense can be removed). In order to account for the mediation, and
ensure the objective validity of information about the body itself we need
to posit as mediator something which has no sensible effect of its own; this
something stands between, driving apart, mind and body, transforming the body
into mere known. Descartes’ epistemic
commitments reinforce and exacerbate his ontological stance.
Curiously, although these two Cartesian tenets clearly support each
other in this way, the sustained rebellion against ontological dualism has
generally been waged under the banner of epistemic sensualism.
The efforts to reunite (or more properly speaking un-separate) body
and mind (or body and self) have quite often involved embracing the Cartesian
notion that our senses are surface receptors of object-surfaces, leading directly
to an epistemic shallowness whereby knowledge is limited to and/or grounded
in the obvious. This by no means implies
a history of complacence in the face of skepticism, but our collective refusal
of that doctrine has not generally meant finding a way around it (as has been
the strategy employed against dualism) but rather finding a way through
it, moving forward to certainty with the epistemic premises of skepticism
intact. Thus idealism effects the
unseparation of mind and body by reducing esse to percipi, and
thereby the body to a mental phenomenon.[3] Likewise materialism, as a condition of its
own unseparation, takes bodily surface irritations to exhaust our epistemic
repertoire, and through a cleverly deterministic physical biology roots in
this premise its explanation of our successful negotiation of reality.[4] In both cases we trade knowledge for certainty,
disregarding reality and thought in turn.
The case is not much different even for thinkers more interesting than
such caricatures allow. Derridean
textualism (and its many variations) is a case in point.
Having accepted our epistemic limitation to the visible,[5]
and yet recognizing our capacity to discern meaning in the apparent
world, one can see the theoretical promise in understanding the world in terms
of text, that paradigmatic instance of visible significance. The attraction is, of course, much increased
after the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy.
According to textualism, the world, and especially the ever significant
body, can be understood as essentially, quite literally, legible: the body
is not merely, as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone puts it, a ‘semantic template’ (and
as such readable) but is in its essence a text.
What is interesting about this approach, what has proven both exciting
and frustrating for the cultural theorists who appropriate this epistemic-cum-metaphysical
stance, is its casting of the body not simply as readable, but as written;
since the body as written has not the resources to validate the writing (il
n’y a rien en dehors du texte) we are compelled to ask who dictates the
plot and logic of the body’s story. Here the problems which this valorization of
the visible creates for the invisible come to the fore: for precisely what
has disappeared from this account is the Subject (who is not obvious[6])
and with it the authority to determine the roles in which the body is cast
as (a) self. The more we insist on
obviousness as the only sign of existence or importance the more unreal (apparent,
ghostly, phenomenal) become the things so exhibited.
To extend this metaphysic is to submerge a great deal, to repress the
evidence of that which exists beyond the veil of sense, below the text; it
is to deny that we are writing on, writing over, the already significant. But as we know, the repressed eternally returns
and the body has a way of bleeding through even the thickest of conceptual
overlays.[7] It is important that this return always takes
the form of the irrational, that which is illegible or, often, visible only
as its opposite within enforced interpretive constraints. Thus does the hysteria of the Victorian Woman,
which appears as confirmation and validation of the mantle of illogic and
illegibility which she wears as social role in place of (to prevent) self-determination,
in fact serve as the foremost sign of her psychosomatic articulacy.
Likewise the emotions, which are expressed only by an embodied self,[8] nevertheless appear
as the body’s illogical subversion of the self and will.[9]
It is the nature of these appearances which makes possible the valorization
of illogic as a strategy of resistance and freedom.[10] For insofar as the text is constituted by logos,
then the self which remains submerged by that text can be recovered only as
illogic, anti-logos. But to
take the step, perhaps as a small rebellion, of identifying the self with
the illogical submerged is just to make the materialist mistake of jettisoning
thought[11]
for the sake of unity.
This book is meant to herald a new way of thinking about these issues. Together, the essays gathered here aim to recover
the notion of a fully embodied self by challenging both Cartesian tenets.[12] The hope is thereby to avoid the dualism of
Descartes’ ontology and the reductionism which results from his epistemology.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is perhaps most forceful of all the thinkers
gathered here in calling for a philosophy of real bodies, a philosophy which
understands thought to suffuse the whole of the living body, manifesting itself
in actions far beyond speech production.
Relying heavily on Darwin’s observational biology, it is her explicit
aim to give the body its due by insisting on the intelligence of behavior,
and the continuity of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ in all aspects of our lives. The body is, to paraphrase Evan Thompson’s contribution, a mindful
entity. Even the unlikely field of
cognitive science, until recently apparently unconcerned with the mind’s embodiment,
has begun to recognize the validity of such insights. Thompson details the emerging focus within
cognitive science on "situated action" (as opposed to concept manipulation
or information processing) as a model for and sign of mindedness.
According to this approach perception is not reception but action,
and cognition is an emergent property of this activity, and not an epiphenomenon
of behavior miraculously present only in humans.
The self which knows, thinks and does is quintessentially an embodied
self, and the mind is not merely attached to this body, located at and limited
to some single command center, but is present throughout the body in lived
experience. Thus is thought fully
present in activities beyond the linguistic, and language, we must presume,
once understood as the incorporeal yet worldly repository of mind, must be
more bodily than heretofore imagined. In
this spirit (perhaps more appropriately, in this vein) Colin Sample informs
us that language is not just semiotic, but mimetic; meaning is carried not
only in virtue of the consensus of a given community, but also by the body’s
capacity through gesture, posture, and movements more subtle still, to communicate
mimetically, carrying in the physicality of movement a protoconceptual
significance which in some sense resembles and grounds the conceptual.
In aesthetic language in particular, the body’s ability to grasp onomonapoetic,
physiognomic and other expressive underpinnings of the conceptual (negation
is a pushing away, sadness is blue, a low, slow and heavy musical line, the
downward ‘aww’ rather than the bright, uplifted ‘hey!’) is essential to the
possibility of full and complete communication.
As Sample writes, "Verbal communication is not merely the exchange
of propositional content. It is also
a meticulous dance… envelop[ing] verbal utterances in a felt context of
emotion [and] physiognomic significance…expressed by the bodies of the interaction
partners."
Our bodies, this is to say, are far more important than has generally
been reflected in the canon. Indeed,
Steven Meuse points out that it is a condition of self-awareness to have a
grasp of ourselves as a bodily presence in the world, to know where we are,
and where we are not. The ur-self
takes itself to extend and encompass the entire cosmos, but it is just this
expansiveness which prevents consciousness from being self-consciousness. The formation of a workable ego thus requires the amputation of
those parts of the psyche which extend beyond the limits of the body; the
ego is in fact a body-ego. This basic
thesis in elaborated and expanded by Meuse through a study of an interesting
converse phenomenon: the amputation of a bodily limb which leaves behind its
psychic, or "phantom" counterpart through and with which some amputees
seem still to experience and confront the world. Meuse intriguingly suggests that the rash of
phantom-limb reports and "appearances" in the late 19th century
can be attributed to a socio-historical context in which the body politic
was threatened with amputations.
We should not be surprised to find such a correspondence or affinity
between the individual and social body. As
Ed Casey carefully details, the human body is always everywhere both biological
and psychical, empirical and cultural. The
body, Casey writes, "carries culture and brings it to bear by performing
it outright," an insight expanded and developed in Loren Noveck’s work.
Noveck sets up four scenarios which examine from different perspectives
the demands placed upon the body by the roles into which it is cast by the
life it leads. Insofar as all life is a stage, performance theory offers us an
especially apt tool for analyzing and uncovering the potentials and pitfalls
of freedom and subjectivity in the face of social demand. Casey’s analysis complements Noveck’s by insisting
that the notion of a self-contained socially-saturated self connected to a
culturally-free empirical body is not viable; the opposition of Nature and
Culture is an artifact of the opposition of body and mind which we hope here
to overcome. We cannot without conceptual
if not literal damage divorce the "real" body from some acculturated
body-in-society, and neither can we take the subject, revealed here as a socially-saturated
body-ego, to be transcendentally free. But what is freedom if not transcendental? Noveck suggests that the notion of performance
itself possesses the resources to think free-agency into the subject; she
calls for a real freedom, a situated freedom, to accompany the real body.
But to recognize that real bodies are acculturated bodies is not to
assert their reality apart from the empirical or the adiscursive. Bodies exist both within, and sometimes in spite of, the cultural
categories woven in, through, with and around them by language. As is made apparent in these essays time and
again, the purely textual body is the unreal body. Michele Janette is at particular pains to counter the textualist
tendency in literary theory. For how
shall we understand that text by, through, and within which the body-subject
is identified when it is not the theoretical, analogical "text"
of the hermeneutic encounter, written, as it were, in the epistemic air between
known and knower, but is instead carved from flesh, available not as interpretive
matrix but as scar-healed wounds which both shape and symbolize the self? The body-texts of Janette’s essay are literally
inscribed on the backs of two women in different social but similar hermeneutic
situations; the text is thoroughly owned by and part of the women, and yet
its placement on their backs makes it impossible for the women to read themselves. Interpretation of the text requires the introduction
of another reader. Thus the tension
between self-definition and an externally imposed identity so central to Noveck’s
paper is played out here again on the bodies of the characters Janette investigates,
and her analysis indicates that real bodies are at once more stable, and also
more ambiguous, than the "text" of their identity suggests.
David Hillman inverts Janette’s inquiry in interesting and complimentary
ways, for Hamlet is concerned with the meaning not of surface shape,
but of the interior of the body, the significance of innards. Further, the focus of Hillman’s essay is on the eros of the reader,
rather than on the position of the read, on asexual ingression of the body
of the other, instead of on visual, tactile and sexually charged transgression
from the other. For Hamlet,
to know the other’s mind is essentially to know his innards; gut feelings
and innermost thoughts are played out in the viscera to which Hamlet desires
access. Interestingly, Hillman shows how closely this
desire to know is linked to the desire to be known (as is always the case
with Eros); the (desire for the) revelation of the other, it seems, always
involves the (desire for the) revelation of the self, an insight which problematizes
any reduction of the act of interpretation to the phallic, visual penetration
of the other in which the reader remains closed, unseen, invisible. The hermeneutic encounter may instead imply
a mutual vulnerability; thus was Janette’s woman warrior able to decapitate
(castrate) the baron even as he "feminized" her with his intrusive
gaze.
The concern with the status of the knower and the accessibility of
the known takes different form in Science & Things. There I argue
that the canonical epistemology of science, according to which the information
gathered by the senses is given form and significance by the conceptualizing
mind, fails to account for actual scientific practice and for science’s epistemic
success. This essay is meant to be a direct confrontation
with the epistemic tenet of Cartesianism, and I insist therefore that the
body possesses a nonsensual receptivity to the structure of the world, an
epistemic openness intimately bound up with the active, moving body.
Following Thompson, we might usefully understand our perception-organizing/interpreting
concepts or theories, not in terms of mental constructs working on sensual
material to produce contentful representations, but rather in terms of comportmental
potentials and practices, whose epistemic value and activity cannot be so
easily located in a "mind" considered separately from the body;
this brings the body more fully into the epistemic picture than "perception"
allows. The knowing self is not just the sensing mind, but the living, moving,
intruding, fully embodied interactive self, a self which can access the world
by means other than the epistemic text of interpreted sensation.
This opens the possibility of an epistemology which allows the world
to provide epistemic friction, revealing that skepticism, in those very areas
of scientific knowledge where it seems most plausible, can be subverted by
insisting that the knowing, thinking, interpreting self is more fully and
thoroughly embodied than Cartesianism admits.
It is my hope that this collection will reveal not just that the thinking
self is embodied, but that the embodied self is mindful; not only that a subject
is far more corporeal than we generally have had the courage to admit, but
that a body is a far more rich, complicated and interesting thing to be than
we have seen fit to acknowledge. It
is in this thoroughgoing revisionism, the vision of the full, complicated
reality of the incorporated self, that the strength of this volume lies. For insofar as it is the mark of a successful
work to intelligently challenge the accepted, to open up new vistas for intellectual
progress, I can say with confidence that this is a successful work.
I can only hope that the theoretical challenge it represents will one
day be embodied in the corpus of the theoretical humanities.
[1]. Of course, Plato’s soul-as-harmony
requires the existence of physical parts, and likewise certain strains of
Christian metaphysics insist on the necessity of the body to resurrection.
[2]. The science of mechanics would
do much to temper this image of the unreliability of the physical, thus
making possible the philosophical promise of materialistic determinism.
[3]. This tendency to treat perception
as a largely "mental" phenomenon follows easily from the above
noted tendencies to distance knowledge from its bodily origin. Here the knowing self (the perceiving self)
is not really a body at all, or is a sort of ghost in a machine.
The
further reduction of body to instances of perception has been the source
of some consternation among feminist thinkers, for in a cultural context
which denies subjectivity to female bodies, the woman exists only for the
other (or narcissistically for herself-as-other) as the object of the gaze.
[4].
See, e.g. W.V.O. Quine "Epistemology Naturalized": "Awareness
ceased to be demanded when we gave up trying to justify our knowledge of
the external world by rational reconstruction. What to count as observation can now be settled
in terms of the stimulation of sensory reception, let consciousness fall
where it may." Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1969) p.69.
See
also Joseph Margolis’ commentary on this and other features of recent analytic
philosophy in "A Biopsy of Recent Analytic Philosophy" The
Philosophical Forum, Vol. XVI, no. 3 (Spring 1995) pp.161-188, esp.
p.164.
[5]. Literally, of course, we have five
senses, but sensible knowledge has so much been taken as knowledge of surfaces
that vision has seemed an appropriate metaphor for all of them (and the
senses, as well as knowledge itself, have often been re-conceptualized along
visual lines). See, e.g. Modernity
and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press) 1993.
[6]. Although it is, of course, the
object of certain strains of neo-behaviorism (I am thinking in particular
of Daniel Dennett and Wittgenstein in certain moods), where they wish to
preserve the subject at all, to do so by making subjectivity obvious.
It
should be noted that I am not setting up an argument for an epistemically
inaccessible Subject; rather I wish to argue for an account of access which
goes beyond perception.
[7]. This is how I read one of Foucault’s
central themes, much to the dismay of those who take him to be a prime representative
of cultural constructivism.
[8]. See, e.g. Albert Sheets-Johnstone
"The Bodily Nature of the Self or What Descartes Should Have Conceded
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia" in Giving the Body its Due, Maxine
Sheets-Johnstone, ed. (Albany: SUNY Press) 1992.
[9].
When in fact the emotions are necessary to agency precisely because
they are not "rational". See
e.g.. Ron Katwan’s work on Schopenhauer.
[10]. For a thorough, although critical,
review of this way of thinking see Calvin O. Schrag The Resources of
Rationality. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press) 1992.
[11].
Or, more specifically, what appears as thought given the pre-enforced
dualism, for thought is in fact the embodied unity of structure and content
which the anti-logo-centric and logo-centric theorist equally fail to capture.
[12]. This is to say, the essays were
gathered with their service to this end in mind; they were not necessarily
written for this use. In this sense
I am making the authors speak in one voice without being able to claim that
this voice always speaks for the authors.