HIS post actually began as a comment over at Nate’s, in response to his very… evocative piece, [What in the hell] do things look like if we start with the body? and Ms Pepperell’s contribution. As such, it’s a little engaged with that piece… I’ll cite a few bits and pieces from Nate, but I’d point you over to see the whole thing, as it’s intriguing for me. (Oh, and Nate? Email soon, I promise! I blame you, of course, for putting up exciting things for me to respond to 
Actually, the conversation between you and NP made me bounce in excitement.)
Nate says:
… Bologna wrote that
“our analysis of these structural factors will be ineffective unless we can combine it with an analysis of the huge transformation taking place in the sphere of “personal life”. This obviously starts from the breakdown of sexual relations brought on by feminism. It then widens to involve all the problems of controlling one’s own body and the structures of perceptions, emotions and desires. This is not just a problem of “youth culture”. It has working-class antecedents in the cycle of struggles of 1968-69. The defence of one’s own physical integrity against being slaughtered by line-speeds and machinery, against being poisoned by the environment etc, on the one hand is a way of resisting the depreciation of the exchange value of one’s labour-power and the deterioration of its use value, but at the same time it is a way of re-appropriating one’s own body, for the free enjoyment of bodily needs. Here too there is a homogeneity, not a separation, between the behaviour of the young people, the women and the workers.
The question of drugs now arises. Control of drug usage is being re-appropriated by the institutions of the political cycle. No sooner have young people had a taste of soft drugs, giving them a first-hand taste of how much this society has robbed them of their perceptive potential, than the heroin multinational decides to step in and impose hard drugs. A space of political confrontation opens up, between use value (self-managed, within certain limits) and exchange value of drugs, and this involves organisation and instances of armed self-defence. Nor is the mechanism of the production of new needs the exclusive prerogative of the “liberation movements”… it has its roots in the “We Want Everything” of the Mirafiori workers in the Summer of 1969. The “Italian Utopia” has a solid working-class stamp, which no theorists of an American-style “movement” – ghettoised and self-sufficient – will be able to erase.
My response? (Aside from querying the ‘breakdown of sexual relations due to feminism’: I mean, really, this does seem to echo a problematic past golden era when men ‘knew who they were’ which seems to me to be nothing but a somewhat misogynist not to mention inaccurate nostalgia.) With the doubtless too-oft-repeated caveat that I still don’t really know my Marx [gulps at making such a statement in such august company ] there’s a couple of things that strike me here. All of these have to do with the way that bodies figure in political discourse. The Cartesian dualism, I suspect, has a lot to do with this. It is the distinction between mind and body which allows us to talk about ‘the body’ as an object, and is thus heavily implicated in the creation of the body as property (Descartes does actually figure the body as property, and of course Locke gets in on the game to). Interestingly, I think this is part of what struck me about the Bologna quote: the implication becomes that we need to ‘take back’ the body’s powers ‘for ourselves’. I don’t straightforwardly disagree with this. But…
Nate goes on:
While I think there’s a lot of value in – and I would be loathe to attack those who engage in – practices of autonomous self-management in the present, I think it’s not at all clear that these practices help any but their practitioners, which is to say, I’m not sure that practices of autonomy from prevailing hierarchies (evasion, exodus, etc) help undermine those hierarchies. I think conflict against those the mechanisms that create those hierarchies is needed as well (more, to be honest) and that the space for autonomy is created by organized conflict. To put this differently, I think there’s a limit on the degree to which politics can be prefigurative and still be effective with regard to changing prevailing power relations. (I still believe in political transition.)
….There’s continual conflict around whether or not labor power – the body – will be sold and under what conditions, after its sale around whether or not it will be put to use and under what conditions, and outside of the direct sale over the degree to which that particular set of uses of the body (those bound up with valorization) will rule over other uses of the body (that is, the degree to which other practices will be made functional for those involved with valorization, and the degree to and manner in which other practices – those which are less useful for or which inhibit the capitalist use of bodies – continue to exist).
This echoes the difficulty that Bologna’s talk of ‘reappropriating’ the body evokes. The problem with the ‘autonomous self-management’ kinds of things that Nate points to is that they tend to rely, again, on a characterisation of the subject as made up of mind inserted into body-property. This has, historically, been bad for women, positioned as not able to take up a properly proprietary relationship with their bodies (coz they get preggers, you know). (For more on women and the market, check out Irigaray’s ‘Women on the Market’, in This Sex Which Is Not One which also, interestingly, helps to configure psychoanalysis as identifying developments in cultural conceptions of the subject which are associated with capital). In this respect, to borrow Nikki Sullivan’s argument in ‘Tattooed Bodies,’ when, say, subcultural groups use tattoos to mark their resistance, and discursively (and experientially) construct that resistance as an individual (even if that individual is articulating their ‘belonging’ to a group) attempt to reappropriate the body, they retain the very conception of the subject—as individual, cognition-and-intention-based, and as holding property in the body—that capitalism requires. In this sense, their resistance, supposing itself to be based on an ‘outside’ (look at the negation of the self, Nicole; and look at me actually getting your terminology I hope!) winds up reiterating precisely what … well, Foucault would call it power… would require of it. In resisting, such resistance is co-opted back into (bio)power: this is why Foucault argues that relying on the ‘truth’ of the subject is so problematic, and why he suggests that the subject’s production is extending far beyond what we would usually understand as work, and into the production of truths (power/knowledge) which permit the reproduction of labour…
And Foucault’s recommendation, which winds up being caricatured as ‘gay sadomasochism,’ has far more to do with reconfiguring the body. If our embodiment is shaped by assuming the body to be an object with, as he suggests, particular erogenous zones which are the sole sites of a kind of sexualised pleasure (he uses a different term, which is translated as ‘desire,’ but it’s not the same)—a sexualised pleasure bound up, sorry, queer kids, (re)production—then reconfiguring where and how pleasures occur and the subjectivity that is bound up with them, becomes an internal challenge to the intimate networks of power. The embodied subject here produces, bodily (and this is significant for reasons I won’t go into here), not truth, but precisely a challenge to what is permitted to count as truth. And who said Foucault wasn’t a Marxist? (Shush, shush, I know 
) But this is where Foucault’s ethics of pleasure comes into play: it is an ethical challenge to the capitalist/biopower system. I have some questions about this, which I’m planning to write some more about at some stage (building from this post) but, basically, my concern is that the bodily tolerances engendered through contemporary anatamopolitical structures may be far too tight to allow such a reconfiguration of the body and embodiment to occur: what happens when the possibilities of pleasure are reproduced as sources of suffering? But anyway, that’s way off track, and besides, Foucault would probably disagree with my concern, primarily because he (somewhat ambivalently) positions the body as a negation (see, again!) whose essence is a flurry of pleasures, all squeezed down to become productive; in this respect, he doesn’t take his own challenge to the repressive hypothesis anywhere near seriously enough, if you ask me.
And again, out of order, Nate sez:
Second, it seems to me that the frame Bologna offers could be used for other eras as well, like the time during which workers’ comp was passed in the US, a time (depending on how one periodizes) also involved protests against the destruction of bodies in war, protests and strikes against the destruction of bodies at work, claims to support for bodies via welfare and protective legislation on and off the job, as well as (I believe) experiments with sexuality and drugs like those which Bologna notes in a later era.
I’m not positive that I’ve fully understood Bologna’s frame, and so, I’m not sure if this actually works for Nate’s suggestion, but nonetheless. Coming from a disability studies perspective, we need to ask some questions about what constitutes ‘destruction’ of the body. The very concept of the destruction of the body is not a straightforward matter. Disability studies would suggest that disability is produced only because the world does not ‘match’ the embodiment of the particular individual; and that the construction of disability requires that the world in this case is taken as a naturally given thing, such that some bodies are just naturally disabled. This fails to interrogate the concept of the norm at work here.
(Lennard Davis, a disability scholar, echoes the claims made by Canguilhem, Foucault’s old advisor: the norm is not a neutral description of reality, as we always suppose it to be. Indeed, the idea of the norm really came to prominence in and through statistics, and it wasn’t long before Francis Galton shifted into using it as part of the development of eugenics (which, contrary to popular trust, was not the sole purview of Nazi Germany—in fact, there’s a fair amount of evidence to show that Germany adopted its eugenicist policies almost wholesale from the US…).)
What makes a body ‘destroyed,’ then? To what extent is this judgement bound up with the productiveness of the body? Systems of production increasingly required the interchangeability of workers, and thus the idea of the norm was particularly useful to them; but this of course meant that those who could no longer perform in the workplace were positioned as disabled. Intriguing, though, to put my poststructuralist two cents into this kind of question, disabled bodies were, indeed, required, in order to produce other bodies as able: the hierarchy was, in this sense, productive. And I could now rabbit on about the construction of the disabled body as a site of suffering in relation to the loss of productivity, and the simultaneous construction of the normal body as a site of happiness which thereby produced working ways of being-in-the-world as tolerant to systems of exploitation… but I’ll save that for another day, I think!
Thanks, Nate; you’ve offered me a way into ideas that my hesitation over interacting with Marxist stuff due to my ignorance wouldn’t really have permitted me, otherwise. In saying that, though, I apologise if my engagement or critiques are misplaced as a result, or if I’m merely repeating ideas which are old hat in an area I just don’t know enough about yet!
January 8, 2008 at 4:54 pm
hey WP,
Thanks for this, you’re kind, and you’ve set wheels spinning in my head.
Re: destruction of the body, the stuff at the end, I’m not up on any of that literature at all so I’m not totally sure what to say. Clearly disability is relative. My brother in law is in a wheelchair and is very athletic – he can do things (wheelchair specific like his basketball team and other things which aren’t wheelchair specific) that I definitely can’t do. In that sense, I’m in agreement w/ what I think you’re saying here.
On the other hand, re: destruction of the body – I’m committed to a certain sense of that idea. I think destruction of the body would mean something like a forced transformation in the body (like the loss of hand as happened in the women laundry worker cases I looked at), and perhaps also a resultant loss of some previous capacity that the body had prior to the forced transformation. I’m attached to the “forced” part because I want to frame this as a sort of violence. Maybe this isn’t a good parallel, but – I have several tattoos. I like them, I like having them. When I get more money I plan to get several more. If I were to give someone a tattoo who didn’t want one, that would be a sort of forced transformation of their body, and a sort of violence. It’s not clear that it would mean the loss of a capacity, though. (Perhaps an offensive face tattoo might count here, I’m not sure.) I’m attached to the notion of loss of capacity in part because that’s what the women claimed in their cases – they weren’t able to use their amputated hands anymore. Maybe this is obvious, I’m not sure. I’ll leave it off for now as I don’t know any of the literature on disability studies. I’d like to, particularly as workplace injury is now part of what I’m trying to work on.
I hope that another day comes soon where you say more about “the construction of the disabled body as a site of suffering in relation to the loss of productivity, and the simultaneous construction of the normal body as a site of happiness which thereby produced working ways of being-in-the-world as tolerant to systems of exploitation,” as that speaks to the questions I’m starting to ask as I (very, very slowly) start to dig into the literature on workplace injury, workplace safety, workers’ compensation and all that.
By “Bologna’s frame” here’s what I meant – I think what Bologna is doing in the bit I quoted is to gather up phenomena about the new left and social movements, phenomena that are (I think) often narrated as break down and dispersal – fragmentation of the left, groups heading this way and that without any unity – and suggesting an alternative narrative as a set of movements against a set of (ab?)uses of bodies. So, no fragmentation or dispersal, or at least not a simple or straightforward one. I like that. On the other hand, the moment Bologna talks about (late 60s/early 70s) is not the only or first moment for this sort of multi-site general conflict around the body. Is that clearer?
Re: the breakdown of sexual relations, I think Bologna means that positively – breakdown in the sense of abolition, attack on male power over women’s bodies. I don’t think he’s nostalgic. I may be wrong on that. That’s certainly my take. It’s a positive breakdown, a breaking of stuff should be (and stay) broke (and be further broken down).
Lastly, your remarks on the body as property are super interesting and evocative. I wish I had more to say on that. There’s some ties here somewhere to labor power, not exactly sure what or how to dig them out yet… women being identified with nature and body as part of women being property; the body being property as part of the sale of bodies permanently in slavery and in marriage contracts and sold temporarily in waged labor and prostitution; debates around precisely what gets sold and what that sale means and where concepts of freedom and degradation play in here … all those links are really interesting to me, and I feel like the mental/manual labor thing that NP has worked on is linked in here too. I’m going to have to think more about all that and see if I can’t come up with more to say. Anyways, thanks a ton.
take care,
Nate
January 8, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Sorry to post again and so quickly – the last bit, around property, I think your titular term is relevant here – appropriation, the ways in which bodies get figured as property and as subject to/capable of being property, then the ways in bodies made into property (can) get used, in all of which is bound up the expropriation of the preconditions for the maintenance of bodies – access to means of subistence – as well as issues of limits of certain other uses of bodies… (not any clearer, I suppose)
January 9, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Thanks for your response, Nate; it’s such an interesting set of questions!
To start where you started, at the end: the destruction of the body. Well, it’s an interesting question. When I’m suggesting that disability is relative (or constructed, as I prefer: built out of a particular kind of understanding), that’s not to suggest that it doesn’t happen. The point is more that the loss of a hand, already traumatic to the bodily schema of the person (which I’d suggest *is* culturally shaped), becomes a disability because of the response to it: the loss of a job (which of course is more than simply the loss of an income, being the loss of a social network, usually, and other kinds of meaning-making…. things [screws up nose at inarticulateness]). The social model of disability, which is, entirely, problematic, is no less useful: the *impairment* becomes a *disability* because of the significance given it—the inability to do any more work, etc. Erm. I haven’t been overly clear here. But in the end, the point is that we need to pay attention to way that the world fails to *respond* to someone whose body is different in a way that constitutes that body as specifically *disabled* or ‘destroyed.
In relation to destruction… well, we need to be careful of this idea of ‘forced’ness. I’m not at all suggesting that violence is not possible; and I’m certainly not trying to talk you out of this framework! But I do think that there are numerous bodily changes engendered that could be understood as ‘forced’ or at least not willed which we would never configure as violence. Perhaps one of them would be the changes to a woman’s body in pregnancy. Another might be the transformation of a body through extreme dieting (sorry to be so cliched) which one could understand as a response to the force of a culture obsessed with thinness. My point in saying that is not to simply equate them, but to point out that what disability studies wants us to look at is the contextual production of the body. In such an analysis, the violence, then, would lie not simply in the loss of the hand, but in the loss of the hand given that that engenders a) a big disruption to the bodily schema, b) a loss of a means of survival c) a troubling of the individual’s relationship. The violence, then, may become *clear* in the loss of the hand, but actually exists for *all,* in an invisible form, all the time. Ugh. I’m sorry this is so inarticulate.
I like the way you’re thinking about Bologna’s frame. I think that, to some extent, this is what Foucault is trying to get us to pay attention to with the idea of biopolitics and anatamopolitics, and that which binds them together—the norm. The question of productivity is then always understood in relation to the norm; and both the population and the individual are constituted as needing to achieve that norm. This will take multiple forms, of necessity, but all will be obsessed with the body, both the body of the population and the body of the individual. That’s how I understand it, anyway
Oh, and I’ll forgive Bologna the potential misogyny: you know his work, where I don’t; and the idea of breaking and breaking further kinda appeals!
The last section of your first comment definitely makes me want to read more in Marx(ism). It’s also interesting for me because the Levinas-Derridean alterity-based ethics talk a lot about the problems of appropriation, and it feels like they take on a new significance here (though that’s probably just coz I’m a dummy and was too ignorant to see it earlier). In lots of ways I see the concerns you mark in this section and in your second comment as linked fundamentally to what you (and I!) would like to see me write on: the question of tolerances…
And so I dream of more time, and of a thesis completed already… time to go and work at making that a reality!
Thanks again, Nate, this is awesomeness-in-the-form-of-an-exchange.
January 10, 2008 at 5:14 am
hi WP,
Just a short comment – I agree re: the larger context which makes violence what it is – not just physical destruction etc. That’s some of what I tried to argue, and some of what I want to look into further re: the laundry workers I looked at, like with stuff on ‘disfigurement.’
(By the way, I’m not sure I mentioned this or no, here’s the thing I wrote on the laundry workers http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/12/18/happened-in-the-courtroom/)
I also think that your remark offers a good definition of or alternate term for bodily destruction – trauma to the bodily schema of of the person. (Involuntary trauma, like with the women workers whose cases I looked at.) And as you note, that schema is constructed, the damage has effects on multiple levels, etc, all of which is I agree with. Make sense?
Gotta run. Oh yeah the gratitude is mutual, this is super fun!
take care,
Nate
January 10, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Hey Nate,
I’m glad you made sense of my rather convoluted explanation! I think that one of the most useful things about understand disability as constructed is that, for example, in relation to injury compensation etc, it’s useful to be able to see why the compensation itself may be both positive and negative: it helps workers to cope with that particular construction of bodies, labour and disability, but in so doing it reproduces that same, violent (as we’ve been suggesting) construction of the body.
I’ll take a look at the laundry workers stuff: I think it suffered in the great post-holiday cull of ‘07
January 10, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Wildly, I’ve been coming back to this post for a couple days and I read Nate’s as well. I believe that in order for me to fully appreciate your argument, you’d need to elaborate on the theories you mentioned (I hate admitting my ignorance, but that’s the sad truth). But I don’t think you lost me entirely (or I like to think that).
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the body tends to be approached and described as a separate object (yes, our old favorite dualism that you mention too) that can be owned and passed on as property. Erotic discourse is usually couched in such metaphors, making me wonder about the construction of desire in popular erotic texts — can it exist outside the idea that I pass my flesh to you whilst somehow depriving myself of it?
The discourse of beauty production further removes the body from the mind, depersonalizing it even further, it seems to me. The body ready for a “cosmetic surgeon’s” scalpel, with lines drawn on it is already dismembered, ready for another level of butchering. The justification for the practice erases identity from the body. The woman (it is usually the woman) is made to believe that the “imperfect” body is abstracted from her self and that the mind (as a fully separated entity) should have all possible creativity in determining the shape of its flesh encasement.
How was that different in earlier eras? You make an important point about the opening of Bologna’s first (quoted; I don’t know the whole text) paragraph. How deeply are those ideas of owership ingrained in our vision of the body and how “happy” can we be with using them constantly? Those “olden times” before feminism when the body was largely unspoken by women (weren’t metaphors and euphemistic approximations more common then? And wasn’t that a deeper kind of removal?) were not unburdened by the desire to name the body and to “own” it by the woman herself. The many women choosing to live in celibacy took a radical step towards claiming control of their bodies. I’m not sure if it could be understood as an expression of desire for fuller unity of bosy and mind, but certainly self-ownership.
I’m sorry to push it all just towards women and body, but I can’t say much about disability nor am I willing to go into Marxian theory — a lot of reading to be done there… I have been waning to write a post about body ownership for a long time now but I still don’t think I’m ready to come up with a satisfying text. Not without help.
January 10, 2008 at 10:06 pm
[...] In my rushed and perhaps somewhat inconclusive comment to Wildly Parenthetical’s post “The appropriation and normalisation of the body,” I [...]
January 11, 2008 at 2:39 pm
WP,
Just real quick re: the upsides and downsides of workers’ comp … that’s a long term thing I want to look into but I’m actually quite amenable to viewing it negatively at least as done in the US. The literature on it is pretty good sized (a lot to get through though I have a short summary of my short readings on it if you happen to be interested – among the interesting things about that is that it seems like gender is not a lens people use to talk about it, at least not historians in the US) so it’ll be a while before I can really say… but – from what I can tell it’s defintely an ambivalent thing. I beleive it’s indexed to wages (which means women workers get less cuz they tend to get paid less), it often excludes some categories of waged workers (like domestics, again mainly women), and the program took away the right to sue – industrial accidents are I think exclusively or almost exclusively considered no one’s fault legally, unless the negligence is in some way criminal (I’m not super sure about that but I know no-fault insurance was a big part of the push; I believe in the UK folk still retain the right to sue – or at least they did in the early 1900s as some folk in the US pointed to that system as a model.)
I linked to some of recent-ish compensation schedules in a post, if you’re interested. http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/12/16/caused-that-quesy-feeling-in-my-stomach-just-now/
I had some stuff fall on me once at work, saw a lawyer briefly who showed me a chart of what the compensation schedules were, I remember feeling vaguely ill about that. (http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/11/28/is-my-workplace-injury-story/)
Sorry to put in these posts by me, it’s not like I think I’m some genius or whatever, just the posts are a little clearer than I can be in comments sometimes.
Januaries, this body-as-property and metaphors of property in understanding or just thinking about the body stuff that you and WP are onto is really, really interesting. I wish I had more to say than that, some way to grab hold of the idea. I did some reading on recent work by US historians writing on US slavery this fall, one of the interesting turns in that work, at least the stuff I read, was on the nature of commodification – what does it mean to make a body in particular sellable. This discussion reminds me of an article I read, it feels like there’s a step or two between that and this conversation but I think they’re related. Here’s the details –
Stephanie Smallwood, “Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits of Anti-Slavery Ideology in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer 2004), 289-98.
I remember there being a passage in their on the discursive or epistemological conditions of commodification, seems like that’s relevant here.
take care,
Nate
January 11, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Hi guys
First up, Januaries, yes, there’s lots of theory behind what I’m suggesting… unfortunately, not all of it is easy to digest. I am, however, planning a response to your post, specifically in relation to cosmetic surgery. I think you’re right that thinking of it as part of the processes of property is right: as Diprose puts it, “Some bodies accrue value, identity, and recognition,” whilst others do not (Corporeal Generosity, p. 9). In this sense, then, we can think of the body’s presentation as a way of marking the subject’s own value. I’ll say a bit more about this in that promised post
But in relation to questions of the erotic, I think you’re right. Irigaray has to offer one of the most thorough-going challenges to both the mind/body split, the proprietisation (? hey, it’s a word now! 
) of the body and the simultaneous binding together of ownership and the erotic. And I love her for it (or, as she would put it, I love *to* her.) Some find her hard to read; I find there’s a mode that comes: it’s like reading e.e. cummings—you cannot simply read for representational meaning…
Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that you weren’t willing to read it as negative, Nate
I just meant that disability theory requires that we think this body, usually construed as ‘disabled’ as merely different, and pay attention to the structures that engender it as disabled. It isn’t to deny the disability, but it’s a technique for making incredibly clear the violences that all-too-often get cast as simply the result of bodily inadequacies on the individual’s part: ‘oh, we couldn’t possibly keep her on after she lost her hand: I mean, she lost her *hand*!’ But this is obvious and I’m labouring the point now, I’m sorry 
In the end, I suppose the phrase “we are all only ever temporarily able-bodied” gestures to the importance of engaging with ideas of disability; that and the fact that being a poststructuralist and all, I can’t help but see the interdependence of ab/normalcy. This plays through in interesting ways for this concept of legal ‘fault’: it becomes about a body which is naturally inadequate to its context, and who that can be blamed on…
Thank you both; it’s quite exciting to be having an actual conversation on my blog…
January 15, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Wildly, Nate –
I have to say I’m excited about where this discussion might go. Thank you for your observations and responses. It’s a bit like a game of chess — minus the competitive aspect — but with that careful deliberation before each move/contribution.
Wildly, I don’t know what impression I might have given, but I really like how theoretical your posts are. I miss that about uni here–the orientation is very different. I wouldn’t call it pragmatic; I’d rather say there’s a sense of distrust of the abstract. What I meant by my coment is that it can be difficult for someone who isn’t familiar with all the arguments you cite to fully appreciate the connections you make between them. But, well, one could say it’s the reader’s problem…
I will reread your posts and comments, because there are so many threads we could pick up on. Also, I’ll get better acquainted with Nate’s blog
Wildly, do you think you could give me a bit of a reading list for the question of the body and possession? I would be more than grateful.
Thank you both again. Hopefully, to be countinued.
January 15, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Hey Januaries,
I am being a bad blogger. Naughty! Slap wrist! The promised post will come, I swear it. Oh, you didn’t give a bad impression, Januaries, not at all. It’s just difficult to know how to respond to questions about the theoretical background… coz, there’s a lot of it. Where do I begin? Which questions should I answer first? Should I do a schematic post linking to everything I’ve ever written, like a map of what I’ve already posted on?
I’m mostly kidding with that one… I usually try to make what I write a bit more accessible, but it’s the complicated thing of writing for an unknown audience, who so rarely comment. Which is also why it’s exciting to have people contributing…
The question of the body and possession. Okay, well, I’ll definitely get that scanning done for you, as there’s a whole section on concepts of property in relation to women’s reproductive technologies. And I’ll have a think about other bits and pieces. I have to say, though, that embodiment theory thoroughly problematises the very notion of body-as-property, primarily because it challenges the presumption that the Cartesian dualism (mind/body) is what’s in effect. But I think, given your love of literature, that you should have a bit of a read of Irigaray: truly, ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’ is a seductive text.
Thanks again, both of you. Exciting: actual *conversation*
January 20, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Sorry I haven’t been diving into this
I’ve been watching, but too tired to say anything substantive. I couldn’t remember if, in the course of all the mass of the stuff on Capital, I’ve talked about the sort of meta-meta joke operating at the beginning of the text? So the text starts out, and it sounds quite “Cartesian”, trying to explain what a “commodity” is. Commodities are unions of a material substance and a social form. Their material substance is an objects, a “thing outside us” – onto which we project our various desires – and those objects are the real “substance” of stuff, regardless of social form. Social form is arbitrary, contingent, etc., and wraps itself around that material stuff, but has no intrinsic relation to it.
It’s then quite a ways into the text that it suddenly hits that labour power is a commodity, and so the description of the commodity with which Capital opens has always been a description of a way of experiencing self or a form of being in the world – one in which commodities of the human sort experience themselves as split between a material substance and a contingent social form – and experience part of themselves as “an object outside themselves” – as something they possess and can alienate. And then you also realise (this is the meta-meta bit) that the text in those opening passages is meant to have been voiced from the point of view of that experience of self – a subject looking clinically and definitionally in on this “material” reality.
A few paragraphs later, and the text is off into Descartes’ wax (this isn’t explicit – very little in Marx is… *sigh*): what is the common homogeneous substance that allows commodities to be exchanged with one another? It can’t be their sensible material properties – those are too varied – ergo, it must be something supersensible – some kind of essence that lurks behind sensory experience, governing material interactions. Again later in the text, you realise this is also meant as a form of being in the world: and so we have the ghost in the machine
And the form of analysis expressed at this point in the text, again, is meant to be carrying us toward a sort of “transcendental” space, where we infer the the requirements of things we cannot directly perceive, etc.
There’s more – lots of reflections on what it means, how it’s experienced, to engage in practices that involve the… rental of oneself for periods of time… Sorry I’m not connecting this up very explicitly with the discussion – tired and, at the moment, I’m good for very little other than whatever is destined for a chapter… ;-P
June 12, 2008 at 2:17 pm
[...] similar writers). Another way to say this would that someone should explore the links between the appropriation and normalization of bodies and the rhetorical reduction of some humans to being only or primarily bodies rather than [...]
April 15, 2009 at 3:40 am
[...] was looking over my old notes on the blog about this and along the way ran across this post by Wildly which set wheels turning in my head again. She made several points there that I think [...]