Communication as Embondiment
Communication as Embondiment
(Rahman)
This chapter will be a discussion of two powerful instrument of communication, body and text, and their long and difficult embrace. By body , I mean our biological res extense the heat-seeking skin packages that all living human beings inhabit. By text, I mean whatever detaches the body from its message. We chiefly think of texts as a graphic representantion of spoken lenguange or number from which the living body is extracted. Visual image, too, can be thought of as texts that keep bodies at a distance, distilling them as analog or digital lines or dots set into a receptacle medium such as stone, cellulosa, celluloid, or ellectrical current. The long process of displacing and concealing bodies by texts that chacratherizeds modernity has been virtually unplumbed by communication scholars, a remarkable omission in our efforts to understand how human societies develop and engage media. But perhaps this is not very suprising at all. The cultural reflex that regards text as mind’s trace divorced from any coporeal arigins reflects an aspiration to transcend bodies that has been centuries in the making. In the modern social imaginary, the body is at best superfluoes to communicative exchange at worst a moral impediment to thought.
A much differend view regards bodies as the stubborn, ineradicable foundation of human communication and a powerful underlying subject of all mediated comunicatin. Proposes that bodies have modified texts in significant ways and have been importantly modified by them in return, notwithstanding a conventionl narrative that assigns them a gradually disappearing role in the historiy of media. This more complicated view takes seriously the fundamental corporeality that undergirds communication and challenges a dominating ethos in which only whatis textualy expressible is socially valued. In the world view of textual dominance, the activity of bodies is often presented in extreme terms-beyond notice on the one hand, pathological on the other. Bodies are burshed aside as ineffectual and decorative until they surface too insistently and become orminously threatening. The notion in both views, that bodily absence is a virtue, is a central assumptions of contemporary communication and greatly influences how we think about and organize social relations.
By contrast, text is presumed to have only strong effects. A tradition that extends from Eric Havelock (1963) to Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979,1980) and Ernest Gellner (1983) attributes tectonic cultural shifts to the assimilation of texts, especially written ones. In broad strokes, these include the destuction of customary social life, rearrangements of the sensory “mix” and the origins of individualism. Printing, writing’s industrial handmaiden, is given credit for launching and sustaning the Renaissance and for laying the foundatiens of modern science and nation-state. The fate of communicating bodies have been mystified, segregated, bunished, buffered, and positioned; and how they have accommodated, resisted, and fougth back as bodies rarely have been explored. Nor has the evolution of structures of feeling that organize relations amongs embodied persons in textualized world.
We certainly think we know about text, the medium scholars swim in. It is, oddly, the body that needs anchoring. Since incarnation is the very condition of human life this seem starling. Gesture, the set of observable signals that coordinate bodies with one another, is our origin communication, however unthinkingly we may dismiss it. Gesturu, which is harder to ignored because it is gloriously axaggerated in dancing, military drill, group festivity, music making religious ceremony, and public assembly, treated as embellishment if we think of it at all. Classic insights about the communicative dimensions of gesture—Marcel Mauss’s notion of a social repertoire of “body techniques” and George Herbert Mead’s (1934) account of lenguange as “vocal gesture” are two—have lain dormant and undeveloped.
But these are stubborns ideas. Robin Dunbar (1998) has argued that spoken lenguange arose to improve the efficiency of social grooming, the gestural communication of solidarity that cements social bonds for the survival of primate groups. Dunbar’s claims offer a useful frame for James Carey’s (1975) well-know distinstion between ritual (which can be describes as gesturally embodied) and transmission (which is textually disembodied) communication. Though widely admired, this distinction never has been seriosly taken up in the field and, as we might say, fleshed out.
The standard historical narrative offer a story of technological and moral advancement that progressively strips bodies from the arenas of important communication and invests all past communication with the dream of bodilessness (Peters, 1999). Textualization is presented as overcoming the material and moral limitations of the human body. Of course, media can never eliminates bodies. In fact, lthough we are at pains to deny it, all media ever mediate are bodies (often in layered fashion by mediating that mediate bodies). In this light, media history appears less a chronology of textual innovations leaping across the finitude of bodies. It appears, rather, as an antogonistic encounter between bodies and texts in a high-stakes struggle to allocate purity, honor, and power. (See Marvin & Ingle, 1999; Marvin 1994,1995, 2004). If the are of Western history looks like an unbroken string of textual triumphs from the first striings of bureucracy in the 11th century, these victories have never been total not secure. This is because the textual class requires bodily power to enforce its dominion, a point that will be developed.
Our own text-centric model of culture does seem provincially modern. In absolutist Europe, peasants were the feet and body of society, mobility its arms, the clergy its head, and the king the embodiment of the whole. Elsewhere and at other times, the communicating world has been a dream, a dance, a chain of being, or a battle. Every model of culture elaborates a relationship of the body to the society around it. To imagine culture as text is altogether different of imagining it as dance. In one, the body remains separate from culture and ontologically distinct entry. In the other, culture is actively constituted in bodily participation.
Its remain hard work to stake out a bodily focus for communication in a field that has its center in text-focused media regimes. Our first task is to reconsider mediation it self. Instead of implying a historical progression of textual artifacts on a one way mission to leave the body behind, mediation is more accurately characterized as any packaging of the communicative body expressed in one of two modes. Dramatization works to enhance the potency of the communicative body. Clothes, ormamentation, masks, perfurne, cosmetics, armor, dancing, singing, feasting, and oratory are dramatizing media that take the communicative power of the physical body seriosly and amplify its aura, the sense of its communicative presence.
Textualizatin work by evacuating the body from communication and impoverishing this aura. It does not get rid of bodies (though this happens as Henri Levebvre says [1991], the text kills) so much as it cover up and disguises them, or attempts to turn them into text. Print, musical notation, film, telephony, and video are textualizing media that fragment and reconstitue the body’s message in simplified form. Sociologically, textualization gives rise to two great classes. One of these commands text the other is comanded by it.
The textual class (it includes, no surprise, academics) is skilled at producing and using texts. It is also the class most entitled to shield and preserve the bodies of its members from physical hardship and danger. This is its privilege, to withdraw the physical body from the fray while deploying those for whom withdrawal is not an option. The body is the emblem of those who lack textual credentials, whose bodies are available to be used up by society, and whose powers of social participation derive from whatever value their bodies wave for cultural muscle work, the most dramatic expression of which is war. In modernity, all bodies are disciplined by texts: some to use them, some to stay away from them (Marvin, 1994, 1995) Textualization is the indispensable act of modern power in which every aspect of our lives is implicated. It confers personhood and social status through textual identification and credentialing. It saturates the imaginative environment with information, advertising, and entertaiment, all of which overwhelm the authority of bodily experience.
To portray the textual class as the seat of modern power may seem ludicrous to academics who find it difficult to imagine themselves in any such position. They are, of course, only handmaidens. In the social ecology of text body relations, academics are textual functionaries who recruit and train new text class members while convicing the body class to hold textual institutions in awe.
What does it mean, then for the textual class to rule? Consider how U.S. presidents, who dress in the uniform of textual professionals and rarely display the emblems of combat familiar to traditional societies, wage war. A president goes to war not by raising his sword, but by signinga text. No guns move without signed orders, though the president’s power lies in the readiness of these guns to respond and in the belief of these who stand behind them in the Constitutional text that authorizes the governmental system. Much cultural energy is devoted to concealing this absolute radiance of the textual class on its bodily substratum and to eliminating opportunities for it to move againts the textual class. This antagonism toward the body class it the deep conradiction at the heart of textual sensibility and power.
The impoversihment and delegitimazition of bodily experience generate nostalgia for the romance of face-to-face communication among some textual class members, but this nostalgia is more self indulgent than serious. To privilege the body genuinely is to embraceits defining power, which is the exercise of physical force. The textual class abhors bodily force, its greatest that and the enforcer of its authority. The remote object of textual class affections is more nearly constituted in mediated bodies, such as those disseminated in the romantic reconstructions of journalists and anthoropologists and in glossy images of advertising and tourism. When, to the everlasting dissapointment of guardians of text-based hierarchy, removing the body altogether from communication turns out to be impossible, whole campaigns are mounted to make it less visible. This is done by restricting and stigmatizing its actions, by making it more like text, by directing attention away from it. Yet bodies fight back, reasserting themselves in bodily spetacles, war, and contests of secular and religious morality.
Body and text are not absolute analytic categories but relative positions on a calssifying continuum in which each may that defer to dictionaries and other artifacts of textually disciplined language present themselves as more text-like than bodies whose colloquial speech bears the oral empress of neighborhood origins. Pornography and popular novels are lower on the scla of cultural esteem than the theoretically driven, relatively more disembodied text of physicists, lawyers, and engineers. In principle, images fall more often than written text on the bodily end of the textual spectrum. The more texts float free of the bodies that produce them, the higher their cultural standing and that of the bodies associated with them. This variable classification calls to mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) division between the grotesque body-overflowing, stinking, fecund, vulgar and the body of calssical sculpture smooth, unorificed, decorous, self-contained. To smooth and cover the orifices of the grotesque body is to narrow its communicative channels, to make it more like text.
How are we to understand the obvious point that posttraditional societies, however awash in rapidly multiplying texts, are preoccupied with sex, fashion, sports, creature comforts, and sensational crime – bodily concerms, all? The bodily melodrama of popular culture constitutes a kind of rebel beachhead againts the discipline and pace of contemporary textualization. In a textual world, of course, nothing is so simple. The popular bodies that command the greatest prestige are the very ones that have been most successfully transformed into texts. Extravagant social and cultural rewards flow to athletes and performers not for their corporeal virtuosity alone, , but to those whose bodily achievements lend themselves to the widest possible dissemination through textual reproduction. This is the licensed carnival of the textual class.
An adequate account of the historical impact of textualization will not be a matter of grand theory. It is not subtle enough. Only extended and patiently detailed investigation can convey how body-based communities have textually remagined themselves again and again. The conquest of the New World and the Inquisition area part of that story. So are humbler smaller scale stories social relationships, and status rearrangements bitterly struggled over. Grand theory can open up directions of inquiry and suggest provocative hyphotheses. But, in the and, it only signals where to begin looking.
With that thought in mind, the Reformation offers it self as a seismic center of the shift from bodily to textual magic that so profoundly marks the modern West. Religion has always addressed bodily experience, especially its most deeply felt moment of suffering and death. The Church Universal, dominant in the West, is a shockingly corporeal faith, its central event the brutal sacrifice of a god who agrees to take on ultimate bodily pain. With the Reformation, the relationship of believers ti the deity ceased to be mediated through the body of the priest and come to be mediated through individual Bible reading. This and accompanying text-body struggles (Muir, 1997; Duffy,1992’ but seek stock, 1983, who traces this process to the 11th century) over the magicaly bodily potency of icons; statues; and rituals of gesture, song, and dance profoundly transformed the West. (Capitalism, the cultural successos of the Reformation, appears as the most spritually ascetic of arrangements, having evacuated material things of their meaningful connections with bodies while transforming both into an etherealized text stripped of experience, connection, love, and existential groundedness the bottom lines).
The 19th century was a great accelerator of textualization. Lawrence Levine (1998) has traced the division of high, and low culture to the segregation of elite and popular bodies in opera, theater, and museum audiences. Where bodily improvisation had been the anticipated proregative of performers and noisy evaluation the norm for audiences, high culture was reimagined as sacred canon of inviolable texts of music, dance, and drama from which performers must not deviate. Audiences for the so called high arts became progressively less sensuous and more intimidated, their responses less confidents and less performed. The mutually constrituted tasks of cultural judgment and participation were severed, the former surrendered to an emerging class of textual critics who took upon themselves the task of maligning the newly distinguished popular arts as well.
Concurrently, Progressves sought to break up urban political machines heavily dependent on the mobilization of bodies and to promote the notion of well-behaved “independent-minded” literates as the only fit civic participants (Marvin & Simonson, 2004). “Informed” and “Deliberative” voters read newspaper and kept their voices down in political discussion, which they favored over an older notion of politics as a team sport. Poor, immigrant, African American, and other bodies that troubled textual elites were disenfranchised for failing to achieve the literacy levels of the educated middle class. Alcohol-laced, physically exuberant rallies; military marches; and bonfires were discredited adn sometimes outlawed. These occasions of broad sensual appeal had regularly drawn the body class together to present it self as a political and physical force to be reckoned with. Increaingly deprived of political muscle and lacking textual credential, the body class became ever more detached from the political process, which is its condition today.
There is an ominous saying that a regime’s success can be measured by how many people survive it. Nothing demonstrates more clearly that bodies are the raw material of society and incarnations of our core moral situation. To this end, the basic job of society is to reproduce, organize, deploy, and dispose of bodies. The job of culture is to justify, cope with, and teach those arrangements. Modern societies seek to sustain the burdens of child rearing, work, and war through a consensus that partly depends on collective denial and evasion of the inequities of any particular distribution of these sacrifices. Textualization is central in making this happen. It encouragers the immaterial accounting of burdens in highly filtered words and images, and in statistics safely received in environments to which those especially burderned the poor, diseased, unemployed, and imprisoned have little access.
Textualization therefore creates the modern dilemma in which the textual class risks losing touch, and everything that term implies, not only with the real conditions that sustain their society but also with their own moral commitments as willing bodies, for which there is no substitue, to the survival of the group. The textual class encounters the world through vicariously distant representation and simplifying abstractions. It is challenged not only to empathize with the real condition of the body class on with it builds it power but by the temptations of a moral relativism that dilute its convictions. The body class places the bodies of those it loves on the line for community. In this sacrificial embodiedness, moral relativity is not possible. Moral dogmatism is the dilemma of the body class. Both views are responsible for their share of the world’s horors and its finest achievements. To understand the complexities that beset these two communicative world views and the consequences of their entwined fate, is a grand sober challenge for scholars or communication.
Addtional readings
Clanchy, M. (1993). From memory to written record: England 1066-1307. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. (Original work published 1979)
Caplan, J. (Ed.) (2000). Written on the body: The tattoo in European and American history. Princenton, NJ: Princenton University Press
Thornton, T.P. (1996). Handwriting in America: A cultural history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Muir, E. (1997). Ritual in early modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Torpey, J. (1999). The invention of the passport: Surveillance, citizenship and the state. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
References
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world ( H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press
Carey, J. (1975). A cultural approach to communication. Communication, 2, 1-22.
Duffy, E. (1992). The stripping of the altars: Traditional religion in England, c. 1400-1580. New Haven, CT: Yale Unversity Press
Dunbar, R. (1998). Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Eisenstein, E. L. (1979, 1980). The printing press as an agent of change: Communication and cultural transformation in early modern Europe (Vols. 1-2). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Havelock, E. (1963). Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press
Lafebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell
Levine, L. (1998). Highbrow/lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Marvin, C., & Ingle, D. W. (1999). Blood sacrifice and the nation: Totem rituals and the American flag. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Marvin, C. (1994). The body of the text: Literacy’s corporcal constant. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 80(2), 129-149.
Marvin, C. (1995). Bodies, texts, and the social order: A reply to Bielefeldt. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81(1), 103-107.
Marvin, C. (2004). Peaceable kingdoms and information technology: Prospects for the nation-state. In M. Sturken, D. Thomas, & S. Ball-Rokeach (Eds.), Technological visions: The hopes and fears that shape new technologies (pp. 240-254). Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Marvin, C., & Simonson. P.D. (2004). Voting alone: The decline of bodily mass communication in presidential elections. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 1(2), 127-150
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self & society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Muir, E. (1997). Ritual in early modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Stock, B. (1983). The implications of literacy: written language and models of interpretation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Princenton, NJ: Princenton University Press.
(Rahman)
This chapter will be a discussion of two powerful instrument of communication, body and text, and their long and difficult embrace. By body , I mean our biological res extense the heat-seeking skin packages that all living human beings inhabit. By text, I mean whatever detaches the body from its message. We chiefly think of texts as a graphic representantion of spoken lenguange or number from which the living body is extracted. Visual image, too, can be thought of as texts that keep bodies at a distance, distilling them as analog or digital lines or dots set into a receptacle medium such as stone, cellulosa, celluloid, or ellectrical current. The long process of displacing and concealing bodies by texts that chacratherizeds modernity has been virtually unplumbed by communication scholars, a remarkable omission in our efforts to understand how human societies develop and engage media. But perhaps this is not very suprising at all. The cultural reflex that regards text as mind’s trace divorced from any coporeal arigins reflects an aspiration to transcend bodies that has been centuries in the making. In the modern social imaginary, the body is at best superfluoes to communicative exchange at worst a moral impediment to thought.
A much differend view regards bodies as the stubborn, ineradicable foundation of human communication and a powerful underlying subject of all mediated comunicatin. Proposes that bodies have modified texts in significant ways and have been importantly modified by them in return, notwithstanding a conventionl narrative that assigns them a gradually disappearing role in the historiy of media. This more complicated view takes seriously the fundamental corporeality that undergirds communication and challenges a dominating ethos in which only whatis textualy expressible is socially valued. In the world view of textual dominance, the activity of bodies is often presented in extreme terms-beyond notice on the one hand, pathological on the other. Bodies are burshed aside as ineffectual and decorative until they surface too insistently and become orminously threatening. The notion in both views, that bodily absence is a virtue, is a central assumptions of contemporary communication and greatly influences how we think about and organize social relations.
By contrast, text is presumed to have only strong effects. A tradition that extends from Eric Havelock (1963) to Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979,1980) and Ernest Gellner (1983) attributes tectonic cultural shifts to the assimilation of texts, especially written ones. In broad strokes, these include the destuction of customary social life, rearrangements of the sensory “mix” and the origins of individualism. Printing, writing’s industrial handmaiden, is given credit for launching and sustaning the Renaissance and for laying the foundatiens of modern science and nation-state. The fate of communicating bodies have been mystified, segregated, bunished, buffered, and positioned; and how they have accommodated, resisted, and fougth back as bodies rarely have been explored. Nor has the evolution of structures of feeling that organize relations amongs embodied persons in textualized world.
We certainly think we know about text, the medium scholars swim in. It is, oddly, the body that needs anchoring. Since incarnation is the very condition of human life this seem starling. Gesture, the set of observable signals that coordinate bodies with one another, is our origin communication, however unthinkingly we may dismiss it. Gesturu, which is harder to ignored because it is gloriously axaggerated in dancing, military drill, group festivity, music making religious ceremony, and public assembly, treated as embellishment if we think of it at all. Classic insights about the communicative dimensions of gesture—Marcel Mauss’s notion of a social repertoire of “body techniques” and George Herbert Mead’s (1934) account of lenguange as “vocal gesture” are two—have lain dormant and undeveloped.
But these are stubborns ideas. Robin Dunbar (1998) has argued that spoken lenguange arose to improve the efficiency of social grooming, the gestural communication of solidarity that cements social bonds for the survival of primate groups. Dunbar’s claims offer a useful frame for James Carey’s (1975) well-know distinstion between ritual (which can be describes as gesturally embodied) and transmission (which is textually disembodied) communication. Though widely admired, this distinction never has been seriosly taken up in the field and, as we might say, fleshed out.
The standard historical narrative offer a story of technological and moral advancement that progressively strips bodies from the arenas of important communication and invests all past communication with the dream of bodilessness (Peters, 1999). Textualization is presented as overcoming the material and moral limitations of the human body. Of course, media can never eliminates bodies. In fact, lthough we are at pains to deny it, all media ever mediate are bodies (often in layered fashion by mediating that mediate bodies). In this light, media history appears less a chronology of textual innovations leaping across the finitude of bodies. It appears, rather, as an antogonistic encounter between bodies and texts in a high-stakes struggle to allocate purity, honor, and power. (See Marvin & Ingle, 1999; Marvin 1994,1995, 2004). If the are of Western history looks like an unbroken string of textual triumphs from the first striings of bureucracy in the 11th century, these victories have never been total not secure. This is because the textual class requires bodily power to enforce its dominion, a point that will be developed.
Our own text-centric model of culture does seem provincially modern. In absolutist Europe, peasants were the feet and body of society, mobility its arms, the clergy its head, and the king the embodiment of the whole. Elsewhere and at other times, the communicating world has been a dream, a dance, a chain of being, or a battle. Every model of culture elaborates a relationship of the body to the society around it. To imagine culture as text is altogether different of imagining it as dance. In one, the body remains separate from culture and ontologically distinct entry. In the other, culture is actively constituted in bodily participation.
Its remain hard work to stake out a bodily focus for communication in a field that has its center in text-focused media regimes. Our first task is to reconsider mediation it self. Instead of implying a historical progression of textual artifacts on a one way mission to leave the body behind, mediation is more accurately characterized as any packaging of the communicative body expressed in one of two modes. Dramatization works to enhance the potency of the communicative body. Clothes, ormamentation, masks, perfurne, cosmetics, armor, dancing, singing, feasting, and oratory are dramatizing media that take the communicative power of the physical body seriosly and amplify its aura, the sense of its communicative presence.
Textualizatin work by evacuating the body from communication and impoverishing this aura. It does not get rid of bodies (though this happens as Henri Levebvre says [1991], the text kills) so much as it cover up and disguises them, or attempts to turn them into text. Print, musical notation, film, telephony, and video are textualizing media that fragment and reconstitue the body’s message in simplified form. Sociologically, textualization gives rise to two great classes. One of these commands text the other is comanded by it.
The textual class (it includes, no surprise, academics) is skilled at producing and using texts. It is also the class most entitled to shield and preserve the bodies of its members from physical hardship and danger. This is its privilege, to withdraw the physical body from the fray while deploying those for whom withdrawal is not an option. The body is the emblem of those who lack textual credentials, whose bodies are available to be used up by society, and whose powers of social participation derive from whatever value their bodies wave for cultural muscle work, the most dramatic expression of which is war. In modernity, all bodies are disciplined by texts: some to use them, some to stay away from them (Marvin, 1994, 1995) Textualization is the indispensable act of modern power in which every aspect of our lives is implicated. It confers personhood and social status through textual identification and credentialing. It saturates the imaginative environment with information, advertising, and entertaiment, all of which overwhelm the authority of bodily experience.
To portray the textual class as the seat of modern power may seem ludicrous to academics who find it difficult to imagine themselves in any such position. They are, of course, only handmaidens. In the social ecology of text body relations, academics are textual functionaries who recruit and train new text class members while convicing the body class to hold textual institutions in awe.
What does it mean, then for the textual class to rule? Consider how U.S. presidents, who dress in the uniform of textual professionals and rarely display the emblems of combat familiar to traditional societies, wage war. A president goes to war not by raising his sword, but by signinga text. No guns move without signed orders, though the president’s power lies in the readiness of these guns to respond and in the belief of these who stand behind them in the Constitutional text that authorizes the governmental system. Much cultural energy is devoted to concealing this absolute radiance of the textual class on its bodily substratum and to eliminating opportunities for it to move againts the textual class. This antagonism toward the body class it the deep conradiction at the heart of textual sensibility and power.
The impoversihment and delegitimazition of bodily experience generate nostalgia for the romance of face-to-face communication among some textual class members, but this nostalgia is more self indulgent than serious. To privilege the body genuinely is to embraceits defining power, which is the exercise of physical force. The textual class abhors bodily force, its greatest that and the enforcer of its authority. The remote object of textual class affections is more nearly constituted in mediated bodies, such as those disseminated in the romantic reconstructions of journalists and anthoropologists and in glossy images of advertising and tourism. When, to the everlasting dissapointment of guardians of text-based hierarchy, removing the body altogether from communication turns out to be impossible, whole campaigns are mounted to make it less visible. This is done by restricting and stigmatizing its actions, by making it more like text, by directing attention away from it. Yet bodies fight back, reasserting themselves in bodily spetacles, war, and contests of secular and religious morality.
Body and text are not absolute analytic categories but relative positions on a calssifying continuum in which each may that defer to dictionaries and other artifacts of textually disciplined language present themselves as more text-like than bodies whose colloquial speech bears the oral empress of neighborhood origins. Pornography and popular novels are lower on the scla of cultural esteem than the theoretically driven, relatively more disembodied text of physicists, lawyers, and engineers. In principle, images fall more often than written text on the bodily end of the textual spectrum. The more texts float free of the bodies that produce them, the higher their cultural standing and that of the bodies associated with them. This variable classification calls to mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) division between the grotesque body-overflowing, stinking, fecund, vulgar and the body of calssical sculpture smooth, unorificed, decorous, self-contained. To smooth and cover the orifices of the grotesque body is to narrow its communicative channels, to make it more like text.
How are we to understand the obvious point that posttraditional societies, however awash in rapidly multiplying texts, are preoccupied with sex, fashion, sports, creature comforts, and sensational crime – bodily concerms, all? The bodily melodrama of popular culture constitutes a kind of rebel beachhead againts the discipline and pace of contemporary textualization. In a textual world, of course, nothing is so simple. The popular bodies that command the greatest prestige are the very ones that have been most successfully transformed into texts. Extravagant social and cultural rewards flow to athletes and performers not for their corporeal virtuosity alone, , but to those whose bodily achievements lend themselves to the widest possible dissemination through textual reproduction. This is the licensed carnival of the textual class.
An adequate account of the historical impact of textualization will not be a matter of grand theory. It is not subtle enough. Only extended and patiently detailed investigation can convey how body-based communities have textually remagined themselves again and again. The conquest of the New World and the Inquisition area part of that story. So are humbler smaller scale stories social relationships, and status rearrangements bitterly struggled over. Grand theory can open up directions of inquiry and suggest provocative hyphotheses. But, in the and, it only signals where to begin looking.
With that thought in mind, the Reformation offers it self as a seismic center of the shift from bodily to textual magic that so profoundly marks the modern West. Religion has always addressed bodily experience, especially its most deeply felt moment of suffering and death. The Church Universal, dominant in the West, is a shockingly corporeal faith, its central event the brutal sacrifice of a god who agrees to take on ultimate bodily pain. With the Reformation, the relationship of believers ti the deity ceased to be mediated through the body of the priest and come to be mediated through individual Bible reading. This and accompanying text-body struggles (Muir, 1997; Duffy,1992’ but seek stock, 1983, who traces this process to the 11th century) over the magicaly bodily potency of icons; statues; and rituals of gesture, song, and dance profoundly transformed the West. (Capitalism, the cultural successos of the Reformation, appears as the most spritually ascetic of arrangements, having evacuated material things of their meaningful connections with bodies while transforming both into an etherealized text stripped of experience, connection, love, and existential groundedness the bottom lines).
The 19th century was a great accelerator of textualization. Lawrence Levine (1998) has traced the division of high, and low culture to the segregation of elite and popular bodies in opera, theater, and museum audiences. Where bodily improvisation had been the anticipated proregative of performers and noisy evaluation the norm for audiences, high culture was reimagined as sacred canon of inviolable texts of music, dance, and drama from which performers must not deviate. Audiences for the so called high arts became progressively less sensuous and more intimidated, their responses less confidents and less performed. The mutually constrituted tasks of cultural judgment and participation were severed, the former surrendered to an emerging class of textual critics who took upon themselves the task of maligning the newly distinguished popular arts as well.
Concurrently, Progressves sought to break up urban political machines heavily dependent on the mobilization of bodies and to promote the notion of well-behaved “independent-minded” literates as the only fit civic participants (Marvin & Simonson, 2004). “Informed” and “Deliberative” voters read newspaper and kept their voices down in political discussion, which they favored over an older notion of politics as a team sport. Poor, immigrant, African American, and other bodies that troubled textual elites were disenfranchised for failing to achieve the literacy levels of the educated middle class. Alcohol-laced, physically exuberant rallies; military marches; and bonfires were discredited adn sometimes outlawed. These occasions of broad sensual appeal had regularly drawn the body class together to present it self as a political and physical force to be reckoned with. Increaingly deprived of political muscle and lacking textual credential, the body class became ever more detached from the political process, which is its condition today.
There is an ominous saying that a regime’s success can be measured by how many people survive it. Nothing demonstrates more clearly that bodies are the raw material of society and incarnations of our core moral situation. To this end, the basic job of society is to reproduce, organize, deploy, and dispose of bodies. The job of culture is to justify, cope with, and teach those arrangements. Modern societies seek to sustain the burdens of child rearing, work, and war through a consensus that partly depends on collective denial and evasion of the inequities of any particular distribution of these sacrifices. Textualization is central in making this happen. It encouragers the immaterial accounting of burdens in highly filtered words and images, and in statistics safely received in environments to which those especially burderned the poor, diseased, unemployed, and imprisoned have little access.
Textualization therefore creates the modern dilemma in which the textual class risks losing touch, and everything that term implies, not only with the real conditions that sustain their society but also with their own moral commitments as willing bodies, for which there is no substitue, to the survival of the group. The textual class encounters the world through vicariously distant representation and simplifying abstractions. It is challenged not only to empathize with the real condition of the body class on with it builds it power but by the temptations of a moral relativism that dilute its convictions. The body class places the bodies of those it loves on the line for community. In this sacrificial embodiedness, moral relativity is not possible. Moral dogmatism is the dilemma of the body class. Both views are responsible for their share of the world’s horors and its finest achievements. To understand the complexities that beset these two communicative world views and the consequences of their entwined fate, is a grand sober challenge for scholars or communication.
Addtional readings
Clanchy, M. (1993). From memory to written record: England 1066-1307. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. (Original work published 1979)
Caplan, J. (Ed.) (2000). Written on the body: The tattoo in European and American history. Princenton, NJ: Princenton University Press
Thornton, T.P. (1996). Handwriting in America: A cultural history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Muir, E. (1997). Ritual in early modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Torpey, J. (1999). The invention of the passport: Surveillance, citizenship and the state. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
References
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world ( H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press
Carey, J. (1975). A cultural approach to communication. Communication, 2, 1-22.
Duffy, E. (1992). The stripping of the altars: Traditional religion in England, c. 1400-1580. New Haven, CT: Yale Unversity Press
Dunbar, R. (1998). Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Eisenstein, E. L. (1979, 1980). The printing press as an agent of change: Communication and cultural transformation in early modern Europe (Vols. 1-2). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Havelock, E. (1963). Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press
Lafebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell
Levine, L. (1998). Highbrow/lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Marvin, C., & Ingle, D. W. (1999). Blood sacrifice and the nation: Totem rituals and the American flag. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Marvin, C. (1994). The body of the text: Literacy’s corporcal constant. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 80(2), 129-149.
Marvin, C. (1995). Bodies, texts, and the social order: A reply to Bielefeldt. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81(1), 103-107.
Marvin, C. (2004). Peaceable kingdoms and information technology: Prospects for the nation-state. In M. Sturken, D. Thomas, & S. Ball-Rokeach (Eds.), Technological visions: The hopes and fears that shape new technologies (pp. 240-254). Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Marvin, C., & Simonson. P.D. (2004). Voting alone: The decline of bodily mass communication in presidential elections. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 1(2), 127-150
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self & society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Muir, E. (1997). Ritual in early modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Stock, B. (1983). The implications of literacy: written language and models of interpretation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Princenton, NJ: Princenton University Press.
Categories:
Communication as Embondiment
Postingan
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar