The Conceptual Structure of the Dialectical Concept of Body Work

The dialectical concept of body work has three factors or aspects: work on one’s own body, work on the bodies of others and the marks made on the body by work. By discarding the idea of emotion management as a separate factor of the concept of body work and instead integrate emotion within my understanding of the body, as represented in the three remaining factors, I come to understand emotion as an abstraction of extension that can be made in relation to body work. By understanding emotion in this way I can demonstrate the inner connection between body work practices. However, before I demonstrate this inner connection, it is important to first set out the historical context of the problematic.

As discussed in chapter one, materialist dialectical abstractions ‘focus on and incorporate both change and interaction’ whilst also recognising continuity.² Social reality is in flux; social reality changes through its interaction with itself through history. Therefore, change is accompanied by continuity. Marx’s understanding of levels of historical generality is, in part, his project to comprehend this. There is a tendency in some of the literature on body work to hypostatise a theory of human nature, examine it solely in terms of people’s subjective experience of how they engage in body work and how they feel about it, and then transpose general theories regarding the relationship between how people interact as bodies within the social across a variety of temporalities, i.e., so as to apply them to class society, to capitalism and to the present historical conjunction of capitalism. That is, there is a tendency to take theories of an ahistorical and universal human nature informed by understandings that proceed from subjective feeling and pertain from the vantage point of a liberal characterisation of the essence of human nature. These theories are transposed onto theories of the body in class society. Thereby, power-laden relations are depoliticised and their consequences naturalised. Shilling and Gimlin transpose a universal human understanding of body work upon capitalism in exactly this way: they take the apparent “naturalness” of body

1 This is what Martin Heidegger calls a movement of conservere, similar to Marković’s characterisation of the dialectical approach to immanent critique, in which the obstacles to the development of understanding are eliminated but the contribution that the obstacle makes, in this case the importance of emotion, is retained.

Martin Heidegger. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Tr. P. Emad & K. Maly. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 28.

2 Ollman Dance of the Dialectic 63

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work as it proceeds outside of capitalist society and impose that conclusion upon their ideas about the politics of body work under capitalism. As such, they are unable to capture the processes of this structuration of the capacities of bodies because they prioritise a ‘social’ that persists more or less autonomously from capitalist production and therefore they do not consider body work from the vantage point of labour. Although labour is a key focal point in Gimlin’s research, her failure to navigate the tension in the emotional labour literature between arguments regarding it as a pernicious commodification of embodied capacities and the idea that emotional labour can be of benefit to the worker’s ‘sense of themselves’ is indicative of a general failure to consider labour as a place where there is an inequality of power.¹ Secondly, while Gimlin limits her vantage point to a liberal characterisation of institutionality, Shilling limits his vantage point to the sphere of circulation. As a result he incorrectly states that the key distinction between body work in capitalist societies and body work in ‘pre-modern societies’ is that, in the latter, body work is a phenomenon intended to realise a socialised, tribal identity whereas ‘the body in modernity is more frequently treated as a phenomenon to be shaped, decorated and trained as an expression of an individual’s identity.’² Finally, he operates the categories of corporeality and technical and social relations within a system, albeit one that is circular, of cause and effect. Within this system the embodied capacities of the subject are a priori: according to Shilling, social and technical relations emerge as a result of the ‘unfinished’ character of the body, which in turn contribute to corporeality’s movement towards an unattainable completion, and so on. As such, he removes the body from labour and production – production in the broadest sense as both productive labour and reproductive work – and thereby reduces body work to ‘lifestyle choices.’³ His theory fails to consider how the logic of surplus-value production qua capital accumulation – that is, as this logic structures power relations that connect social and technical relations – might intervene within this mediation between the body and a “social”, a social that is purported to be disconnected from production. Shilling rightly universalises the idea that what social and technical relations relate to are bodies, but foregoes the idea that social and technical relations also relate to themselves and each other and, as a result, cannot systematically situate these relations within history.

The aim of my conception of body work is to capture historical change and continuity in the relation between people, production, and society, and to produce a political understanding of

1 Gimlin ‘What is Body Work?’ 362

2 Shilling The Body and Social Theory, 2^nd ed. 174

3 Shilling The Body and Social Theory, 2^nd ed. 174

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these obscured relations. To capture historical change and continuity, I begin by stating that all work is performed by the body, but that body work is work that is performed on bodies, regardless as to whether they are the bodies of the person doing the work, or someone other than the worker. This is a universal condition of body work; we can say with some certainty that this is the condition of body work when we consider it as something that is common to humans.¹ Therefore, in order to abstract body works’ fundamental characteristics as they proceed outside of power, it is useful to begin by understanding body work as it pertains outside of the conditions of a class-based society. This way I can consider body work solely in terms of use-value and sketch out the centrality of value within this problematic step-by-step, thereby capturing transformations that result from the historical development of forms of value production and their attendant politics. It has been discovered that body work has been practised in societies as early as the Stone Age. For example, as Marshall Sahlins notes, some stone-age peoples gave gifts of ‘hair-string’, while John W. Hedges records that the males of the Stromness stone-age settlement followed complex finger-nail maintenance practices.² It is important to note that the use-values produced in this universal character of body work are cultural rather than economic.³ Unfortunately, among other unknowns, we are left to speculate as to the social relations and the relations-in-production that structure these tribes’ use of hair-string and maintenance of finger-nails, as well as whether these body maintenance tasks were undertaken individually or as part of a kinship ritual. Similarly we do not know if, for example, the social practices of body work in Stromness involved a sexual division of labour – that it is just the males of Stromness who do this body work already indicates a sexual division – which would offer a different vantage point onto an apparently universal view of the timelessness and permanency of body work, belying any purported normative element.

This kind of power-laden practice of body work would, of course, indicate a class-basis and thereby open out a plane of critique on universalist and relatively depoliticised understandings of body work. I think it is reasonable to conclude that the gender specific character of body work in Stromness indicates the possibility of political relations amongst tribes that include some and exclude others, so as to confer or indicate lack of status or power, and to mark those who are part of and a non-part of political society, in reference to Rancière’s formulation.⁴

1 This is not to say that animals do not undertake work on their bodies, nor is it to say that other classes of the homo genus did not, but is to say that the importance of the distinction between human and non-human activity as discussed in chapter two is recognised.

2 Marshall Sahlins. Stone Age Economics. (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1972). 266.; John W. Hedges. Death and Life in a Stone Age Tribe. (New York: New Amsterdam Books/The Meredith Press, 1987). 141-2.

3 My use of the category “culture” here does not exclude religious sentiments.

4 Rancière ‘Ten Theses on Politics’

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In this speculation however, I am operating with a certain character of abstractions of extension and vantage points. I have begun, for example, considering body work solely in terms of the use-values it produces. As a result of this limited abstraction of extension, the vantage points that are brought into view are limited to the subject of work and person doing the work. However, by thinking in terms of historical development and continuity, I consider this universal aspect of body work as being indicative of continuity but also argue that it would be a grave error to transpose this apparently universal condition onto class society, onto capitalism generally, or onto the present conjunction of capitalism more specifically. I argue that it is necessary to begin with the conclusions that these practices may bring to the fore and avoid transposing those conclusions onto body work under capitalism because it is simply not enough to begin on the premise that ‘all societies require that their members do work on their bodies,’ as Gimlin argues, and to implicate a normative element to body work that proceeds on the basis of a purported “naturalness” or “universality”.¹ Class society results in the intervention of politics and/or an economic logic against any social or cultural recourse to the naturalness of body work.