Discourse, the body

To develop a detailed understanding of the work of discussing designs or revealing symptoms, the analysis is enriched through examination of the visual as well as the vocal elements of that work. For these activi- ties are truly embodied. Thus, they exhibit embodied solutions to practical interactional problems for par- ticipants — to present a design vision or to demonstrate suffering.

This commitment has been realised in part through an attempt to analyse the agency not only of humans, but also non-humans in a network.

These data, however, expose a rather different approach to the notion of agency. We see how par- ticipants themselves entail action in objects; they construe the envi- sioned or past agency of objects in and through their embodied conduct.

Thus, participants themselves produce a sense of object agency in and through action and interac- tion, entailing action in objects in the course of their presentation of those objects. One aspect of the delight of these demonstrations is the ways in which they are designed with regard to the circumstances at hand and particularly the emerging co-participation of the recipients. To address their design in any detail is beyond the scope of this book but it is perhaps worthwhile mentioning one brief point.

Many of these demonstrations are not simply designed to provide an embodied por- trayal of an envisioned-design-in-action or symptoms of suffering, but rather are simultaneously shaped to establish particular forms of co-orientation and participation. Note, for example, the recycling of the crab mime in Fragment 3.

Jon Hindmarsh and Christian Heath 67 The materials discussed in this chapter raise a further issue of some sociological relevance and certainly a theme that arises in ethnomethod- ology and particularly the lectures of Harvey Sacks.

In his analysis of stories in conversation, Sacks discusses the distinction between describing and witnessing events, and then explores various entitlements and impli- cations of this distinction Sacks, Rather than simply hearing a description, the co-participants are provided with the opportunity to witness, see for themselves, just the ways in which the object might be used or the illness experienced.

An earlier version of the chapter was presented at the Cardiff Roundtable on Discourses of the Body and we are very grateful to all the participants for their valuable comments on the work. The written version of the text has received valuable comment from Justine Coupland and Richard Gwyn, Neil Jenkings, Barry Brown and Dirk vom Lehn and useful contributions have been provided by various members of the WIT research group.

All names have been changed to preserve anonymity. D thesis. Emerson, J. Dreitzel ed. Recent Sociology. New York: Macmillan.

Goodwin, C. London: Academic Press. Greatbatch, D. Interacting with Computers 5 2 : — Heath, C. May ed. London: Sage, 99— Heritage, J. Hindmarsh, J. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 29 5 : — Hirschauer, S. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ix—xvi.

Kendon, A. Scherer and P. McNeil ed. Latour, B. Bijker and J. LeBaron, C. Marx, K. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mead, G. Paterson, M. Haptic Spaces. PhD thesis in preparation.

Sacks, H. Streeck, J. Human Studies 19 4 : — Wieder, D. Turner ed. Wootton, A. Journal of Child Language — I choose to raise this topic because it questions treating the body as primarily the object of dis- course. I also question the notion that the body might somehow lie outside discourse altogether, meaning that it is not subject to how people think and talk about social life. Flirting directly implicates the body at two levels, as it were, as being both the medium and the object of commu- nication.

This sense contrasts this way of doing or not doing? As Adam Phillips has put it: To be committed to something — a person, an ideology, a vocabulary, a way of going about things — one has to be committed, perhaps unconsciously, to commitment itself.

The question need not be: should we dispense with our capacity for commitment? But, what does commitment leave out of the picture that we might want?

This label is treated as a charge to be made and countered by the couple concerned in the course of establishing what is expected and proper in everyday socialising. This situation occurs because this terminology sets apart language and embodied existence in a way that either allocates sepa- rate powers to these two aspects of human existence or else allocates all power to language.

One way of dealing with this is to take apart the rhetoric on which realist arguments are based, so that questions of the body remain always questions of linguistic construction Edwards, Ashmore and Potter, But there is a problem with this approach, for it appears to deny the reality of the body. In order to counter this implication, Potter has argued that the intention is not to deny the existence of bodies, but to decouple the implied equivalence between relativism and lack of political commitment.

Even saying this moves the notion of dis- course on from language to the ordered practices wherein issues of power and resistance are worked through in relationships. To do this one has to break out of the idea that light can only be thrown on discourse by looking at where dis- course is focally illuminated namely on language. I want to criticise the assumption that, because anything done or felt must be spoken to be analysed, these things must not only be know- able within discourse, but as discourse.

This forces the choice either to remove matters of the body to that plane, or to leave them in the sphere of unknowable things. To confuse the two terms — or rather to assimilate embodiment to physi- cality — is to bracket out, from the beginning, the possibility that there are ways of symbolising other than using discourse. By discourse I mean primarily, but not only, the use of language — effectively what might be spelled out in words. Exactly what I mean by things brack- eted out in the course of discursive analyses is the main concern of what follows in this chapter.

Rather than being just an example of individual behaviour, it is more a description of a social activity. This disclaimer is not meant to cloud a common experience, a widely practised capacity.

As a result one might try to say what actions are involved in this activity. He stood with his head on one side, angling the beam, while she groped in her bag for the key. Once she had opened the door he staggered in, still clutching the books. Before switching on the light she took the torch from him, waiting for him to open his mouth, so that for a moment the beam played about the room, giving him a glimpse of her reaching for the switch on the wall.

Speaking to someone in a slightly condescending manner? Hence, what is invited is a reading in terms of socially available schemes or discourses about gender relation- ships as described in novels.

Something here is expressive of the mood of the moment. But what, and how is the body involved in this? To answer these points I want to turn to the work of the nineteenth- century German sociologist Georg Simmel This is not a static juxtaposition, but is con- structed through a mutual interplay of the two possibilities.

Flirting, as with playing, invokes a sense of time and place that con- jures an illusory fragment of experience torn from the broad fabric of everyday life. This is achieved where the action communicates the symbol of an idea rather than the symptom of desire.

One crucial element in this is the way that things might be shown, or be partly revealed, or perhaps concealed. It has the effect of making what is concealed both more noticeable and worthy of attention. As well as by concealment, this operates through utilising extraneous objects — items of clothing, household items — which as the object of attention allow something important to take place. In the course of this, there is a transformation in the meaning of these every- day physical objects, so that articles of clothing, possessions or even trinkets take on a special meaning for the parties concerned.

Here, a pros- thetic technology affords whispers and modulations of the voice that fashion a special presence for the words that are uttered. Flirtation, like play, is fragile, open to the complicity of others who are invited to enter into it, and subject to being terminated by responses that, not recognising it for being what it is, confuse its symbols with signs relat- ing to sexual provocation or denial. How this is achieved will be dealt with at some length below. In effect, to make the question of portrayal into a matter of whether one endorses or denies social schedules of action loses the potential of the idea of expression that Goffman originally drew out see Radley, , for a more extended consideration of this point.

Goodman has, I think, come closest to saying precisely what is going on in performances that are deemed expressive. For him the essential issue is that denotation symbolises by pointing to something as a member of a class, so that the predicate describes by classifying, by inscribing.

This involves, at one time, both having properties and referring to them. These are, instead, the literal symptoms of differ- ent states of physical being. It is not, therefore, merely to act in a way that is constituted as a schedule by those properties, for this would merely be to have and to show them. These fea- tures of gender role behaviour are cultural patternings too, as Mauss taught us long ago. The point is that aligning ourselves with them — endorsing them if you will — in the way we walk, gesture and use our bodies is to be an example of a man or woman walking but is not expressive of anything else.

It is not that walking cannot be expres- sive but that it has to be made to be so. But I make these distinctions for the purpose of clarifying terms: they are not to be found separately in everyday life.

The relevance of the above commentary is that expressive meanings are not isolated from alignments, from denotation. But neither naming nor shaming expressive acts removes them from the plane of embodiment, still less explains them. Flirtation as performance Flirting, like other expressive acts, symbolises through portrayal.

In this it shares something important with playfulness, which activity has at its core the refusal of commit- ment. In the case of the second, this relies upon making differences not only in our gestures but also in the material world that we inhabit.

The kinds of gesture normally understood to be involved e. Flirtation, like ritual, is a way of seeing the world differently, of entertaining it as if it were or could be different. But as with metaphor, it does this only to join them in cre- ating a world of possibility, in which the play of imagination is shown in the fragments of movement or of glances.

It is therefore illustrative of a way of symbolising. It is neither more nor less an act peculiar to the physical body than it is a cultural scheme for inviting intimacy. Clearly, the body can denote by pointing and language can express through poesis , as well as the other way round. Bateson made this kind of analysis with respect to play, where he observed that monkeys initiate play by nipping each other, just as humans signal lightheartedness by giving someone a slap on the back. The question is, how is the nip to be read?

However, this leaves as mysterious the difference in deno- tation, which as a problem arises within the context of an adult human observer looking at simians or children. The other concerns the elusory nature of this way of sig- nifying. We should avoid the idea that this is some ethereal issue, when the point is that, as embodied creatures, we impinge upon the material world.

What is a caress but a touch extended? The present it creates is experi- enced, in spatio-temporal terms, as being a series of particular engage- ments, which nevertheless symbolise an extensive possibility or way of being. This is because it would not be better done or be better shown if one could point directly at its meanings, or if one could render the ambiguous wholly visible.

The concept of gesture is important in pointing up once more the difference between portrayal and naming as ways of signify- ing. Flirtatious gestures are culturally shaped, but their primary func- tion is not to point to things outside the sphere that they create. Instead, they are effective insofar as they display their world all the better.

For a parallel argument in relation to religious painting, see Latour, However, one should not confuse this acknowledge- ment of the elusory potential of embodiment the act that cannot be analysed in full with the elusiveness of the body that escapes discourse Radley, Treated as a text, these gestures can be explained by means of dis- courses of sexuality and gender relations.

We might say that such dis- courses inhabit the text, or that by rendering what is done into spoken or written form makes the concept of discourse appropriate if not central Parker, It suggests that the body is knowable only by being spoken about.

This is an unwarrantable limitation on the possibility that there might be other ways of knowing. They signify by showing forth, not by denotation aimed at naming and the articula- tion of signs. They also depend upon not specifying as a key aspect of communicating a way of being in the world. To some extent we may understand each of these by analysing the detail of the ges- tures or the structure of the writing.

To attempt to do so falls back into a confusion of expression with denotation that tries to reduce all that is known to what can be named. This is not a facile point but a rhetorical one, and is indicative of the primacy regularly given to denotative symbolisation in talk about the body. This, in turn, makes it possible for embodied acts includ- ing talk to become a symbolic veil, the occlusionary character of which is its meaning.

If one attempts to undo this, to privilege one particular medium of communication talk over another the body , then important ways of how we signify as embodied persons are ren- dered elusive see also Hindmarsh and Heath, this volume. If this were not so then how could it be learned? Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Edley, N. Edwards, D. Research in Language and Social Interaction — History of the Human Sciences 8: 25— Geertz, C.

Daedalus 1— British Journal of Sociology 2: — New York: Doubleday. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 3. Goodman, N. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Langer, S. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones and P. Galison eds Picturing Science Producing Art. New York: Routledge, — Mauss, M. Economy and Society 2: 70— Merleau-Ponty, M. Colin Smith.

Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Parker, I. Philosophical Psychology 3: — Potter, J. Radley, A. Simmel, G. New Haven: Yale University Press. Winnicot, D.

For Gullette, the fact that the body changes biologi- cally over time does not explain why ageing into old age should be widely perceived as a condition of psychological and social decline. In her view, biological change and decline are not synonymous: decline is a cultural construct epitomising the prevailing ageism of contemporary Western culture where the discursive consequences include the social marginalisation of older people and subjective experiences of insecu- rity and self-doubt in later life.

The biomedical model and the constructionist critique In Western culture the master narrative of human ageing is biomedical and the biomedical model of ageing is essentially a reductionist model of decline. Sherwin B. Nuland , for example, who teaches surgery and the history of medicine at Yale, argues for the cyclical evolutionary principle within each species of life; a continuous biologically deter- mined process of continual regeneration and renewal.

During the nineteenth century the modern aged body was separated out from the body of youth and other stages of life as a degenerative or dying body: Whereas previous treatments for disease took little notice of age, modern treatments would depend upon it. In his view, the conscious- ness of growing older in a society that fears the association of ageing with decline generates considerable anxiety.

In both cases the student is working with words. Before long, however, they will learn that few old people provide any explicit and direct information about what it is to be old. Few people are able to dissociate the role of being something from the role of observing themselves being that thing. It is both elusory and substan- tial though not necessarily at one and the same time. Kathleen Woodward, and see her chapter in this volume , a cultural critic for whom words are equally important, has analysed the dilemma of the ageing body.

She writes: Ageing and old age are intimately related to biological phenomena. A certain kind of psychological work is implied. This relationship is so close that the three ele- ments cannot ultimately be disentangled. This occurs when bodies encounter some form of physical resistance. The absent body Leder , or the body which has been taken for granted, makes its presence felt when illness or disability occur and individual awareness of this biological change forces a sense of separation of self from body.

The body no longer functions effortlessly to express the self and a pre-existing expe- rience of harmony is dissipated. For Kitwood the bio- medical model of dementia is morally and socially impoverished. Ageing can thus be conceptualised as a process of exchange which crucially includes, as Coupland, et al. The experience of ageing therefore involves complex movements between categories of age-related social activity depending upon the contexts within which individuals in different age groups interact.

It is a matter of social expectations as well as biology. The central concern of her work ; ; ; is a literary and sociological analysis of the processes at work in the social construction of biological ageing as personal and social decline.

In the discipline of social gerontology, as a brief inspection of any textbook reveals see, for example, Bond et al. As the result of changes in age con- sciousness, produced by the transformation of socio-economic life, a preoccupation with middle age became more urgent and more central to personal identity. The biological changes associated with chronological ageing are interpreted within a powerfully negative and pessimistic frame of reference.

The body is real enough to Gullette, who includes references to some of her own bodily problems for example osteoarthritis in the autobiographical pages of Declining to Decline The decline narrative or the story we tell about ageing Hepworth, is a device for establishing connections between a number of essentially diverse and disparate bio- logical processes she cites tooth decay and loss, the menopause, her own menopause in order to construct what is essentially an imaginary story of comprehensive and universal decline.

A good example is the assumption, subtly researched, for example, by Coupland et al. The connections between the biological, psychological and social aspects of ageing are established through a process of learning to asso- ciate the changes taking place in the body with the onset of decline. But it is because many of the negative experiences of the menopause are now understood as the product of the strong cultural association of desirable feminity with reproductive function that changes in the position of women in society are also altering male per- ceptions and experience of middle age.

In other words, the experience of the menopause as decline is causally connected with the degree of social status that is conferred on older women and men: biological change is not necessarily decline. Amongst the negative factors at work she includes the detrimental effects of redundancy on incomes at midlife and a decline in the social status of men whose former career expectations included steady enhancement into matu- rity. The male menopause will, Gullette predicts, follow the history of the construction of the menopause, beginning amongst the more socially advantaged, where codes of perfection are stricter, competition keener and the fear of failure is greater Featherstone and Hepworth, b.

In the process of positive resistance to biologically grounded narratives the concept of decline is detached from ageing and replaced by a concept of change that creates space for personal self-assertion and growth.

Once soci- ological analysis makes it possible to identify the social forces at work in the construction and maintenance of the concept of decline; the imaginary nature of a lifecourse as a one-way process becomes clear. Once it is clear that the causal connections between the biological, psychological and social aspects of ageing are narrative connections, then defensible grounds for optimism about the future of later life emerge.

Her conception of the cultural space which may be created to produce a diversity of positive discourses of mid- and later life is counterbalanced by an empirically grounded awareness of the resilience of the discourse of decline. The mid-life progress novel imagines mid-life as a time for personal reassessment and self-realisation. The reason for the resilience of the decline model is the appeal it makes to realism.

The essentialist illusion blames biological ageing for all the negative experiences of later life, including the decline in literary cre- ativity. As heroes and heroines of ageing they become, as Goffman has observed of celebrities of physical disability, not representatives of a wider popula- tion but exceptions to the rule. Because the self is not a bio- logical entity but a narrative construct it is possible to explore the rich variety of ways in which biological changes can be accommodated in any personal life story.

In this sense ageing as decline is not biological but a cultural script which draws on interpre- tations of biological reality to justify the decline. And yet, for all the vigorous constructionism in this account, the problem of the ageing body is not completely resolved.

It is at this point that the mask of ageing Featherstone and Hepworth, emerges from the shadows to take up a more central position in the analysis of the relationship between the ageing body, and the self. As all empirical research on ageing into old age repeatedly shows, the body in later life just will not go away: it cannot under all circumstances be dissolved into an interplay of postmodern discourses. At the same time, there remains a world of difference between a negative acceptance of stereotypes of ageing as decline and efforts to make positive and radical reconstructions of images of ageing.

Her argument is that the decline narrative is only one amongst a choice of several narratives of ageing — alternatives have been emerging, for example, for some years in literary culture. In her view the time is now ripe for a more positive integration of the biological, psychological and social processes of ageing.

Acknowledgement An earlier version of the discussion of the work of Margaret Morganroth Gullette was published in M. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission of Cambridge University Press to quote extensively from this chapter.

References Bendelow, G. Benson, J. London and New York: Longman. Bond, J. Bytheway, B. Jamieson, S. Harper and C. Different discourses are interrelated to each other. Discourse does not exist in itself, it is related to other discourses as well.

It creates a social boundary for making a remark about a certain topic. At present, there are different notions of discourse in humanity. Recently there has been an increasing interest in the study of discourse.

It is a theoretical device for putting the data in order and analyzing the events. One thing that should be kept in mind is that the social actors that are involved in different social fields perform actions and social practices, and not the discourse itself. Discourse, the Body, and Identity. Editors view affiliations Justine Coupland Richard Gwyn. Front Matter Pages i-xii. Pages Front Matter Pages The author makes four key claims regarding the intersex body.

First, the desensitized post-surgical body cannot be accounted for by a queer discourse in which sexual pleasure is a form of hedonistic. A lot of social debate is about the relationship between the biological and the social. At one end of the debate there are those who see activities such as sexual behaviour entirely based on biology, they are called biological determinists who argue that there is biological.

Discourse of Sex and the Creation of Docile Bodies Subjection is a process that operates in society, and according to sociologist Michel Foucault, can be applied to a multiplicity of discourses.

Foucault explains that the beginning of the nineteenth century marked the age of sexual repression and censorship, which became a time of subjection through exerting disciplinary control over a docile population. Bodies are usually understood through scientific approach where science renders the body as being something natural.