The Body in Theory

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.

Biological Ideas and Their Cultural Uses

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 111-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Benton
Keyword(s):  
Biological Evolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Do So

The topic of my talk is a very ancient one indeed. It bears upon the place of humankind in nature, and upon the place of nature in ourselves. I shall, however, be discussing this range of questions in terms which have not always been available to the philosophers of the past when they have asked them. When we ask these questions today we do so with hindsight of some two centuries of endeavour in the ‘human sciences’, and some one and a half centuries of attempts to situate the human species within a theory of biological evolution. And these ways of thinking about ourselves and our relation to nature have not been confined to professional intellectuals, nor have they been without practical consequences. Social movements and political organizations have fought for and sometimes achieved the power to give practical shape to their theoretical visions. On the one hand, are diverse projects aimed at changing society through a planned modification of the social environment of the individual. On the other hand, are equally diverse projects for pulling society back into conformity with the requirements of race and heredity. At first sight, the two types of project appear to be, and often are, deeply opposed, both intellectually and politically.

scholarly journals Ciała pozbawiane powierzchni. Imago

Schulz/Forum ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Stanisław Rosiek
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Outer Side ◽  
Psychological Study ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
Individual Traits ◽  
The One ◽  
Two Stages ◽  
Made In

Both drawings (the one from the first page of the fascicle and the other from the outer side of the cover) show two degrees, two stages of the decomposition of form. In the same process, bodies lose their integrity. They were shown by Schulz as a series of leaping aspects which are disconnected, hence discontinuous. The drawings were made in the 1930s. The beginning of the draughtsman’s development did not anticipate such a great catastrophe of bodily forms. In his works from the second and in part also third decade of the 20th century Schulz defined human figures precisely and unambiguously. Then, however, the proud poses which he took when drawing himself (e. g., in his narcissistic Lvov portrait) or other figures (Budracka or Weingarten) probably could not be repeated. In the final decade of his life (and artistic activity) Schulz was drawing differently, perhaps because he perceived himself and the others in a different way. The body? The draughtsman presents it as just a cluster of vibrating lines. A self-portrait? It is possible only as a psychological study, an exaggerated caricature that stresses individual traits or an icon of oneself (the big head with a hat on top, a small size). In hundreds of compulsive sketches drawn in the 1930s even those principles were not respected any more. The bodies that Schulz drew then, no matter if it was his own body or someone else’s, often approach a boundary behind which there is only trembling. Displacement and movement. Schulz’s sketches do not search for form. They are testimonies of its destruction or maybe better, its palpitation, solution and scattering. For the eye, the body is a phenomenon of the surface. It is only the reduction of distance in an act of love (or aggression) or even a common handshake that change that state. Perhaps then the problem of Schulz’s representation of the body is reduced to perception. The drawn body has no smell or weight (or taste – it is not “meaty”). One cannot even touch it. A hand that makes an attempt to touch naked women, who in Schulz’s drawings take majestic and provocative poses, touches only a sheet of paper. The drawn body exists just for the eye. Thus the last chance for the existing body is keeping its surface. Why is it then that the body from Schulz’s late drawings loses its integrity, why does it so often fall apart under our eyes? What is the body for Schulz-the draughtsman and Schulz-the writer? How does he experience his own corporeality? How does he see himself? How do others see him?

Univocity, Exhaustion and Failing Better: Reading Beckett with Disability Studies

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-174
Author(s):  
Yael Levin
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Physical Impairment ◽  
Physical Impairments ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
The One ◽  
Figurative Interpretation ◽  
Do So

The emergence of theories of disability in the last decades has rendered figurative interpretation suspect; neglect of literal and material truths has been hailed unethical, the exercising of an ableist bias that utilizes physical impairment as a rhetorical device. Any attempt to reconcile such critical concerns with Beckett's writing must take cognizance of an essential incongruity between the socially conscripted theoretical framework and aesthetic experimentation, between a mimetic fidelity to lived experience and an art of non-relation. The essay suggests that Beckett's poetics of exhaustion and its rejection of substitution and analogy in the interpretation of figures allows us to think beyond the interdisciplinary divide. The body is not imagined as a stand-in or receptacle for philosophical ideas but rather as the substrate upon and with which these ideas evolve and change. The text maintains the materiality of mental and physical impairments at the same time that it loads them with a variety of different metonymical connections. Such a stylization of excess and accumulation serves to release disability from existing stereotypes and predetermined moral judgment. It does so while sidestepping an impasse in disability studies, between the need to valorise overcoming, on the one hand, and the need to support the inability to do so, on the other. Neither extolling the supercrip nor championing inability, Beckett allows his readers to productively imagine what it might mean to fail better.

Ästhetik des Südens. Ästhetik des Nordens. Anmerkungen zur Klimatheorie der Kunst

2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-148
Author(s):  
Konrad Lotter
Keyword(s):  
Life Style ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Reflex Action ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

Die eigentümliche Verbindung geographischer Begriffe wie »Süden« und »Norden« mit dem philosophischen Begriff der Ästhetik verweist auf die sog. Klimatheorie, die die Autonomie der Kunst bestreitet und ihre Eigenart und Entwicklung durch das Wetter und andere Naturbedingungen erklärt. Zum einen werden die verschiedenen Ansätze dieser Theorie z.Zt. der europäischen Aufklärung dargestellt, die das Klima durch den Körper, die Lebensweise oder die Arbeit des Menschen vermittelt, auf seine geistige Produktion bezieht. Das Hauptanliegen des Aufsatzes ist es, die Entwicklungen der Klimatheorie und ihre Aufhebung in die physiologische Ästhetik Nietzsches, die Stilpsychologie Worringers oder die Ästhetik von Marx, die den ideologischen Überbau als Refl ex der sozialökonomischen Basis begreift, aufzuzeigen. Zum anderen wird die Verdrängung der (klassizistischen) Ästhetik des Südens durch die (romantische) Ästhetik des Nordens analysiert, die sich zunehmend von ihrem Ausgangspunkt entfernt und den Begriff des Klimas durch den der Nation und der Rasse ersetzt.<br><br>The peculiar association of geographical terms like »south« and »north« with the philosophical term of aesthetics refers to the so called climatology, which denies the autonomy of art and explains its characteristics and its development by weather and other natural phenomena. On the one hand, various concepts of the European enlightenment are described, relating climate, mediated through the body, the life style or the work of men, to spiritual production. The main objective of the article is to demonstrate the development of climatology, its integration (Aufhebung) into Nietzsche’s physiological aestetics, into Worringer’s Stilpsychologie (psychology of style) as well as into the aestetics of Marx, who interprets the ideological superstructure as a reflex action of the social and economical basis. On the other hand, the repression of the (classical) aesthetics of the »south« by the (romantic) aestetics of the »north« is analysed. Thus removing itself more and more from its starting point, the »northern aesthetics« substitutes the notion of climate with that of nation and race.

Nationalism and the strength of secessionism in Western Europe: Static and dynamic autonomy

2020 ◽  
pp. 019251212096490
Author(s):  
André Lecours
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Time Dynamic ◽  
South Tyrol ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Over Time ◽  
West European

Contrary to the dominant expectations of the late 20th century, secessionism surged in two West European minority national communities, Catalonia and Scotland, over the last decade. Yet, in two others enjoying similar degrees of autonomy, Flanders and South Tyrol, secessionism did not gain strength. This outcome suggests that focusing on the degree of autonomy afforded to minority national communities is misplaced. This article shows that the nature of autonomy is more important than its degree for understanding the strength of secessionism. It demonstrates that the key to autonomy regimes weakening secessionism is their capacity to adjust and expand over time. Dynamic autonomy staves off secessionism while static autonomy stimulates it. The article is based on a controlled comparison of, on the one hand, Catalonia and Scotland, where autonomy regimes have been mostly static during key periods of time, and, on the other hand, Flanders and South Tyrol, where they have been dynamic.

scholarly journals “Each Punishment Should Be a Fable”: Punitive Analytics, The Punitive-City Diagram, and Punishment as Technology of Power in Foucault’s Works of the 1970s and 1980s

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Bruzzone
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Problem ◽  
Extensive Form ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Relations Of Power

Michel Foucault’s Punitive Society lectures make clear that, for him, punishment presents a critical problem. On the one hand, Foucault struggles to develop a conceptual vocabulary adequate to punishment, and particularly to the prison-form as a penal development. On the other hand, the Punitive Society lectures clearly indicate the stakes of punishment. How, Foucault asks, might punishment focalize relations of power? How might it serve as a field of struggle? What does a punitive technology of power look like, if it exists? Indeed, across numerous works from the 1970s and 1980s, Foucault traces the varying place of penalties within penal and punitive tactics, showing how punishment reciprocates historical relations of power and problems of power. Yet it remains necessary to develop Foucault’s account of punishment, which is never formalized. In this paper, I develop punishment as a polyvalent technology. Foucauldian punishment may be an analytic, a technology, and—in the allegorical “punitive city” from Discipline and Punish—a diagram of power. I argue that Foucauldian punitive power seizes the body in the name of an authority or a reified power to subordinate individuals to that authority, and with an objective to correct the individual’s relation to a multiplicity. It operates “above,” at the level of, and in “fragments” of embodied individuals. Further, with Foucault’s account of the “punitive city,” we find a theoretical model in whichpunishment becomes the ordering force of the social, and therein a diagram of punitive power exerted in extensive form across the social field.

scholarly journals Free and freed Afro-descendants and political equality in Portuguese America.Change of status, slavery and Atlantic perspective (1750-1840)

Almanack ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 571-632
Author(s):  
Luiz Geraldo Silva
Keyword(s):  
Formation Process ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Social Representation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Do So

Abstract I propose in this article that free and freed Afro-descendants of three colonial empires of the modern era, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the French, have developed differentiated demands in different procedural steps: the ones that aimed privileges during the old or oligarchic type society, and the ones which demanded political and civil equality during the formation process of the democratic and representative type society. I analyze this aspect from connection plans, structural regularities and recurrences that suggest that the social position of those individuals and their social group in the referred colonial empires is consequence, on the one hand, of diachronic aspects relating to slavery and, on the other hand, synchronous social processes, own to the specific temporality of the 18th and 19th Centuries, such as the transition from one to another kind of society. To do so, I use concepts drawn from sociology and anthropology, such as the social representation and the freedom-slavery continuum.

scholarly journals Modes of participation

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
João de Pina-Cabral
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Social ◽  
Shaun Gallagher ◽  
The One

This paper focuses on the notion of ‘participation’ as it has been used in the social sciences throughout the 20th century. It proposes that there are two main traditions of use – an ‘individual’ one, and a ‘dividual’ one – and it argues in favour of the latter. It does this by examining how Simmel and Goffman, on the one hand, and Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim, on the other, defined participation. Developed by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in the first part of the last century, ‘participation’ in the dividual sense is today being given new life by sociocultural anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins and phenomenologically inclined cognitive scientists such as Shaun Gallagher. The paper addresses the roots of the concept in Scholastic theology and proposes to show how central it can come to be to a sociocultural anthropology that is willing to take on frontally the challenges presently being posed by embodied cognition.

scholarly journals Modernizing the Philosophy of Creative Creativity

Asian Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 141-160
Author(s):  
Jana S. Rošker
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Theoretical Principle ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
Book Of Changes ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Complementary Interactions ◽  
The One ◽  
Chinese Philosophers

Fang Dongmei (1899–1977) is among the most influential Chinese philosophers who lived and worked in Taiwan during the second half of the 20th century. The present article aims to clarify his view on the basic nature of the human Self. This assessment is more multifaceted than it seems at a first glimpse, for Fang’s philosophy is also more complex than it seems. As a member of the so-called neo-conservative streams of thought, he criticized the Western-type modernization and aimed to revive the holistic onto-epistemology of classical Confucianism. On the other hand, he highlighted the importance of its basic paradigm which underlay the Confucian discourses from their very beginning, i.e. since the Book of Changes, namely the principle of creative creativity (shengshengbuxi 生生不息). The alleged contradiction between his advocating of holism and creativity, has been reflected in the apparent dichotomy between the social and relational essence of the Confucian Moral Self on the one side, and individual uniqueness on the other. The paper aims to show that both seeming contradictions are actually parts of the same theoretical principle defining the complementary interactions of binary oppositions.

scholarly journals Two Ways of Constructing Social Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-131
Author(s):  
Valentina Fedotova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Type ◽  
The One ◽  
Opening Up

The article discusses the question of what social philosophy is and how it is constructed. On the one hand, this is an area of philosophy that focuses on a set of social problems and attributes through the lens of the naturalistic research program, which considers these attributes as similar to some type of “things.” On the other hand, cultural-centric program solves the question of how and when philosophy itself became social: starting with modernity and its processional characteristics, i.e. - in the first, in the second and the third modernity, in the processes of globalization and other social transformations, in processionality of identity, ethnicity, etc. Both modes of research are outlined, and emphasis is placed on the advantages of the cultural-centrist research program. The philosophy of the first - liberal modernity of the 19 th century, the second - organized modernity of the 20th century, the processes of the 21 st century, opening up a new type of modernity - new Modernity for non-Western countries, is the social philosophy of processes, paying special attention not to the aspectual, quasi-concrete interpretation of the summable features of social reality but to processes.

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