Bodies, memory and potential
Moves over the past decade or so towards developing a sociology of the body have not gone uncontested. Howson and Inglis (2001) question whether conceptions of embodiment that owe a particular debt to phenomenological philosophies can adequately account for politics (power) and social structure. On the other hand, Witz (2000) has questioned whether the adoption by sociologists of theories of performativity and other theories imported from feminist philosophy
has undercut the concerns of feminist sociologists. Specifically, she reads much feminist philosophy as collapsing the distinction between the corporeality of sex and sociality of gender, hence erasing the latter, through its privileging of the body. Saliently, Butler (1999), one of the feminist philosophers identified by Witz, raises two not too dissimilar concerns in the paper discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Firstly, she remarks warily upon the possibility offered by what she interprets as Foucault's call to 'bodies and pleasures' that bodies could be thought of as unmarked by 'sex'. Secondly, by returning to 'sex-desire' she draws attention to the sociality of sexuality as well as gender, and to the need to investigate the multiplicity of relations between these two concepts. It is at this point that I want to return to Butler's (1999) discussion of 'sex-desire' and 'bodies and pleasures', and to take my own distance from Butler's conception of the body. In doing so I hope I can address some of the specifically sociological concerns that have been voiced surrounding the way that agency and structures of power (Howson and Inglis, 2001), and the sociality of bodies in relation to sexuality and gender (Witz, 2000) are accounted for in theories of the body and the performative.
Although I agree with Butler that we should not turn away from 'sex- desire', I am not so sure that we should abandon what is offered by "a different economy of bodies and pleasures". Butler does not like Foucault's rendering of the body when he gestures towards different 'bodies and pleasures' because she sees these bodies as outside of the time of their own production. That is, Butler sees these bodies as having no ontological status because they are ju s t an idealised excess, always yet to be constructed, a site of resistance conjured up in order for Foucault to stage a break from 'sex-desire'. This reading of Foucault, however, only works within a philosophy of identity where time is linear and where difference is deferral (Baugh, 1997). This is perhaps not surprising in the context of Butler's attem pt to incorporate Derrida's thought, alongside that of Bourdieu, into her concept of performativity (Butler, 1997). Derrida's take on the force of the
performative statement as arising from its iterability, is used by Butler (1997) as a deferring counterweight to Bourdieu's position where the social power of actions is linked to their originary context.
I f one reads Foucault in a Deleuzian way, however, then bodies take on some sort of ontological consistency, although this is always in the process of being worked out. Bodies become their capabilities, their practices, their substances, and, most im portantly, their ability to affect and be affected (Buchanan, 1997). All of these aspects of the body are political because this conception of the body incorporates an idea of a bodily memory of the body's production and constraint, a memory that is a contraction of the body's own time, the body's sociality. This bodily memory is somewhat akin to Bourdieu's notion of the habitus (Bourdieu, 1977; 1998), in that it is a memory of the body's produced capabilities that are brought back to life through its practice. It is a memory of what a body can do: for instance, of what ways and whom a body can desire. As we have already seen, the body incorporates a set of capabilities and affects produced by discursive, institutional and technological machines, machines through which the modalities of normative sexuality or 'sex-desire' become applied. The bodily memory is also the condition of the body's ability to constrain and apply productive power on other bodies, thus popularising these powerful systems of differential relations. Nonetheless, the bodily memory, as the body's capabilities, is also a condition of the body becoming-different, especially in its sociability.
We have also already seen how bodily affects are organised and distributed through social and sociable practice and interaction, and how such distributions are enacted performatively. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) tell us that the force of the performative rests on a social obligation, one that repeats an organisation of orders and transformations. So a performative act repeats a distribution of bodies. But, this repetition is never absolute. I f the sociability of bodies is the instantiation of the organisation of these bodies, then the question arises: how does each event of sociability become actualised?
Immanent to every event is a m ultiplicity of potential outcomes. There are many potential ways that the relations between bodies in sociable situations could become established. But, only one potential organisation is actualised. This organisation is external and immanent. It depends on the bodily memories that bring to the event a m ultiplicity of different ways to connect with other bodies. Furthermore, because we are considering social and sociable situations, the potentials for connecting and organising the relations between bodies are in-between, never actually a property of bodies, and are constantly shifting as the relations between bodies change in the flow of interaction (Massumi, 1997). This external and immanent constitution of sociable events means these events are multiplicitous, and that their outcomes are indeterminate. Yet, this m ultiplicity of potential rests upon the capabilities - the potentials - brought to the encounter by bodies as bodily memory.
So, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari (1988), the body is both organic and faces a body-without-organs, where the body-without- organs is the lim it of the organisation and distribution of bodily capabilities and practices. Thinking in Deleuzian term s allows us to hold together the constraint and the production of the body with becoming-different because these different moments of the body are in the same time. This enables us to think of 'sex-desire' (Desire) and pleasurable desires together because, if we take them to be different ways of bodies entering into relations with each other, then the establishment of these relations can be both constrained (reproduced) and the establishment of something new. In this way, sexuality does not become the only thing that a body can do. As Elspeth Probyn (1999) has suggested, there are other ways of feeling the desire of becoming connected to other bodies than ju s t sexuality. At the very least this presents us with the possibility of thinking sexuality outside of its existing forms and repetitions.
Thinking of bodies and desire in these terms allows a focus on the liminal practices of outsiders, a recognition of the intensity of those not
able to be recognised as sexual subjects with the 'sex-desire' regime, and the ability to be able to think of desire beyond its constraint. It also allows the continued interrogation of the regime of 'sex-desire'. The two political moments that Butler (1999) identifies can be held together. The urgency of addressing the problems and oppressions of 'sex-desire' can be held alongside the gesture towards difference and thinking anew - thinking ethically - that is offered by, as Foucault more precisely puts it, "a different economy of bodies and pleasures" (1979: 159).
Furthermore, thinking of bodies and desires like this allows a new path to be charted through many of the pitfalls of trying to reconcile philosophical and sociological conceptions of the body, power and sociality (Witz, 2000; Howson and Inglis, 2001). The body is not given, nor immutable, but is fully social. It can be made to do different things in its life and its interactions. A body can enter different relations or enter into different machinic assemblages. Its affects and capabilities, the very constitution of a body, are dynamic and emergent properties that become worked out in the process of sociality. The concept of bodily memory invoked here is crucial. This is a social and bodily memory of how to practise - a memory of sociality. It points us to the practical nature of the body. Moreover, it allows power and desire to be held together. By conceptualising bodily memory as something that only becomes encountered in singular events, something that only lives in practice, it does not take on the role of an overdetermination. There is plenty of room for indeterminacy. Yet, the bodily memory allows the recuperation of machinic relations, for it is a material readiness of the body to fit into certain relations.
As such, the bodily memory is a memory of capabilities. But these memories are themselves multiplicitous and can be encountered in many ways. The bodily memory is not proper to individual bodies as such, but depends on how these memories are encountered. It depends on what other bodies and machines a body meets. The bodily memory is in-between and as such, the capabilities for action it offers
are dynamic and indeterminate. This potential field is the immanence of bodily memory to action; it is also the immanence of machines to action. In many ways, bodily memory is the immanence of machinic assemblages of power, as discussed in the second section of this chapter, to practice. This is at the same tim e as bodily memory also becoming immanent to desire, as the set of capabilities from which a tensor is stretched.
As far as bodily memory is the immanence of machinic assemblages of power to practice, it allows for a conceptualisation of power to be applied to a sociology of the body. Invoking immanent machinic assemblages, however, does not return us to the problem faced by Bourdieu (1977; 1998) in his conception of the habitus. A conception of the bodily memory such as the habitus does not need to be overdetermined by ultimately being subject to an economistic structuralism. Although class power is often one of the most im portant ways for organising relationships of force into machinic assemblages of power, not everything can be reduced to it. Moreover, class power is not exactly a determination, but an alignment of relationships of force to work together machinically. Machines must be thought of specifically. They are specific formations of relations of force and power, bodies coming together to work in particular social assemblages, in particular social institutional settings or particular social encounters. Machines can combine in various and singular ways. This is a flexible mode of thought that is adequate to engaging with the multiplicitous nature of power. Nonetheless, the immanence of power to practice, its operation on a field of potential, leaves us possibilities for a desiring and differential politics. There does not have to be a choice between power-as-immanence or desire-as-immanence, as the forces allowing things to happen, to be done. Rather, there is ju st a question: what can a body do?
Corporeal transformations: judgem ent and practice
Desire, then, can become captured. Entering into singular relations with other bodies can become repetitive. This is a problem of the organisation of affect, that is, the organisation of bodily capabilities. This organisation of affect is an emergent property of sociable practices. To the extent that such a process of organisation can enact differences in these capabilities in normalised and systematic ways, one can see that bodies can emerge as racialised, ethnicised, gendered and sexualised through their engagement into specific relationships with other bodies. This conceptualisation, then, is preciseiy concerned with problems of agency and power as they are enacted in social situations. What is at stake with racialisation, ethnicisation, sexualisation, and gendering is, very simply, the ability to act, to do things.
I am going to work through some of these ideas in the context of one specific event, aithough the ideas could be worked through many other parts of my data. The event was the sexual harassment of two women, Pam and Pauline, on a crowded dancefloor in a pub in West London. I was introduced to these women on the evening itself by a friend of group three, whom I had joined that evening. I t was a Friday night, a DJ was playing 'cheesy mainstream' music, and the dancefloor was heaving. Pam was the subject of unwanted attention from the man dancing behind her. This was apparent from the stances, movements and postures of Pam and Pauline relative to each other and to several of the men dancing around them. The man behind Pam, and several of the men dancing around us were of a certain appearance. I couldn't quite piace them. They could have been from the Middle East, they could have been North African. Pam and Pauline were white.
Pam was moving away from the man behind her, her body leaning away from him. The man pursued, his gaze fixed on her, his face unsmiiing, intent and intense. His gaze already enacts a certain relation between them, attempting to transform Pam into a sexual
object. The man put his arms around Pam, and danced pressing himself against her. She attempts to tell him that she is not interested. At first he goes away, and while he is away Pam says to me "Why can't they understand that we ju st want to come and dance in peace?". Soon, however, he returns and starts pressing himself against her again. This cycle of advance and rebuff happens several times and each time the man becomes more physically intrusive and overpowering. This transforms both Pam and himself. He enacts his own overpowering sense of masculinity. Pam resists his advances. She does not want to dance with him. Between his advances and her resistance a potential emerges, a potential for the instantiation of a particular power relation, a distribution of bodily affects. He attempts to constrain and force Pam's abilities to affect and be affected. She cannot escape from his grasp, and she is subjected to an attem pt to force her to desire him, a transformation of her affects. An organisation of her body into a desiring body in relation to his. His hand on her bottom. Another change in bodily affects. A transgression of Pam's bodily bounds, changing her body into a source of pleasure and gratification.
The relevant bodies here are not necessarily ju s t this first man's and Pam's. Considering the other human bodies immediately involved, the organisation of these bodies is reflexively achieved through these bodies acting together as more than individuals. Three of the men gang up and surround Pam and Pauline, transforming the space into one of containment and threat. They play different roles, a second man supporting the first. More than this, however, the men's bodies become-the-Same as particular embodied memories are performed though their interaction with Pam and Pauline.
This becoming-the-Same enacts a gendered and racialised differentiation of bodies through a distribution of these bodies' sexual affects. Those men, for example, encounter and enact their memories in Pam and Pauline's dancing. But this is a social memory, and it is unspoken. These men's interpreting of and acting in response to
seeing these women dance is based on a memory of elsewhere. Seeing female bodies dancing in a certain context, in a certain way, is seen as bodies being open and responsive to one another. The men gaped transfixed by particular movements of the women's dancing, in particuiar as they became tactile with each other. But the memory encountered by the men is of a certain stratification of gender reiations. It confiâtes the openness between female-bodies-just- dancing, with an expectation of an openness to a particular kind of male advance. The openness of women's bodies is closed down to sex. This memory is re-enacted in the sense that the men, through what they do, re-enact a particuiar memory of how to connect to other bodies. Specifically, how to relate to women dancing. How to try to 'puil'. And how to be masculine.
But this is not ju st a distribution into bodies become masculine and bodies becoming feminine. It is also a distribution of bodies becoming- ethnicised. In the context of a specifically racialised dancefloor crowd, it might be suggested that the memories the men were attempting to enact were encountered in what they took to be white women, the whiteness perhaps connoting a certain reiation to sexuality. For their part, the women looked around and thought why can't "the y" leave us alone, gesturing towards the whole group of men who looked a certain way. They were speaking about all of these men - a racialised lumping together of "predatory Arabs". This is despite two out of the five men not taking part in ganging up on them, in fact dancing a coupie of metres away and facing the other way. Pam and Pauline see a way of approaching that is certainly overpowering and that impiicates a whole group of individuals as an ethnicised body. In the interaction, in the distribution of affect, ethnicity emerges: the women become white women; the men become Arab men.
The embodied interactions between the men and Pam performed corporeal transformations of their bodily affects. I want to contrast this with Deieuze and Guattari (1988) because when they discuss perform ativity, they talk mainly about incorporeal transformations
enacted through speech-acts. They do talk about the corporeal transformation of bodies through speech-acts, but this is through a reciprocal relationship with concrete machinic assemblages. Here, however, we see that corporeal transformations have been performatively enacted both instantaneously and directly through the accumulated actions and reactions of the event. The affects of the bodies involved are transformed as the bodies become organised and distributed. In the situation, what these bodies can do, their very capabilities, become constrained. The body is an expression of a relation of forces (Goodchild, 1996: 29), and here forces are being applied. For Deleuze and Guattari (1988) a performative speech-act incorporates a judgement that incorporeally transforms a body much