Table Of ContentBodies of Thought
Bodies of Thought
Embodiment, Identity
and Modernity
Ian Burkitt
SAGE Publications
London · Thousand Oaks · New Delhi
© Ian Burkitt 1999
First published 1999
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-8039-8849-1
Library of Congress catalog card number
99-073803
For Kathleen, Caroline and Marjorie
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 Prolegomenon to Bodies of Thought 7
2 The Ecology of Bodies of Thought 24
3 The Body as Object: from the Grotesque to the Closed Body 45
4 The Thinking Body 67
5 Feminism and the Challenge to Dualism 90
6 Social Relations, Embodiment and Emotions 110
7 Modernity, Self and Embodiment 129
Conclusion: Relations and the Embodied Person 147
References 153
Index 161
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those who have provided help and inspiration
during the long gestation of this book. A number of friends and colleagues
commented on sections of the manuscript in its various drafts or, in some
cases, on all of it. I have benefited from the advice and encouragement of
Brian Burkitt, Richard Cleminson, Kenneth J. Gergen, Ercument Gundogdu,
Liz Harlow, Jennifer Mackenzie, Joan Pujol and Chris Shilling. A joint
research project with Charles Husband, Jenny Mackenzie and Alison Torn at
Bradford University rekindled my enthusiasm to finish the book, and I thank
them for the many interesting discussions on related topics. Students in a
Capstone seminar at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, discussed an early
paper outlining my ideas for the book and passed comments that made me
rethink aspects of my approach to embodiment. Ken and Mary Gergen were
warm and friendly hosts during my short stay there. Alan Scott, Arvick
Baghramian and Brian and Beryl Burkitt listened to my tales of woe about
writer's block and helped more than they probably know. Karen Phillips, my
editor at Sage, has shown great patience and, as always, given helpful advice
and encouragement. Despite such support, I bear full responsibility for what
is written in this book and thus for any failings within it.
A version of Chapter 6 was first published as 'Social relationships and
emotions', in Sociology, vol. 31, no. 1 (1997), pp. 37-55, and I thank the
editors for their kind permission to reprint it here. In different places
throughout the book I have drawn on parts of a published article, 'Bodies of
knowledge: beyond Cartesian views of persons, selves and mind', in Journal
for the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol. 28, no. 1 (1998), pp. 63-82.
Introduction
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
Walt Whitman, / Sing the Body Electric
It is often thought today that the human person, the nucleus of the self which
is considered to be the soul, is something that can be regarded as separate
from the body. When we think of what composes the self we tend to feel as
though we are made of a non-fleshy essence which is somehow distinct from
our bodily casing, as in the old saying that the body is the temple of the soul.
The seventeenth-century French philosopher, Rene Descartes was so certain
that his own essence as a person was distinct from his physical presence as
a body that he claimed he was what he was despite his body and could still
exist without it. Such certainty is radically challenged in the short extract
from Walt Whitman's poem, I Sing the Body Electric, quoted above. Whitman
asks another question: if we subtract the body from the person (or soul) then
what is left? If the body is not the person, then what is a person?
While it is not my argument in this book that the person can be reduced to
his or her body, I nevertheless claim that it would be impossible to contem-
plate being a person without one's body. How could we ever have become,
or how could we remain, a person with our own sense of identity if we were
not a bodily presence capable of movement and sound, able to attract the
attention of others who could then focus upon us as a distinct being made of
flesh and blood? The answer, surely, is that we couldn't. The person is
centred on his or her body. While this may seem like a blindingly obvious
thing to say, the body has until recently been an almost invisible object for
the social and psychological sciences, which have preferred on the whole to
concentrate upon the realm of rational action and the mind rather than upon
the body. It was only through the work of Bryan Turner (1984, 1992) that
the issue of the body began to be recognized in mainstream social science.
Perhaps the body has been excluded from the social sciences for so long
because it tended to be thought of as unruly and unpredictable, the seat of
the emotions and passions, things which cannot be calculated or represented
in any regular way. Thus a study could never be made of the body, only of
the more regular and lawful processes of the mind and the activities which it
inspires. I disagree with this view and hope to present the case here that it
would be impossible for us to think without our bodies. Rather than sug-
gesting we can neatly divide the mind from the body, it is my view that we
are bodies of thought, a view which I will expound throughout this book.
At the same time, though, it is impossible to reduce us as persons purely
to our bodily presence. It is clear that we can think of ourselves - and
