Symposium on Performative Psychology
APA
New York City, August, 1995

Corpo-(un)reality; Embodied Specie-ous

Mary Gergen

Penn State University

Corpo-(un)reality; Embodied Specie-ous;
 Plays with our status as embodied or corporeal beings.  Bodiliness...
material corpus. Being real, getting real, ? as a body.   Is what we speak
solid or-air-ity?
        How we speak of the body as material, is not immaterial.   For
some, formed by nature, in an unnamed state, it awaits inscription.  Yet,
others argue that in its being, it has already been inscribed, among other
qualities-male and female -  and, if this were not so,  it couldn't be
known at all.   This inscription  pretends pre-description. This is the
sex-trick, we buy into.
          Here we bring up that unquestionable.  What is a body? Is it
sexed?  Is it gendered?  How is a body produced? Through eggs and sperm;
through hormones? through language? There are many options available to the
psychologist.


        The Empiricist asks: What are the facts about a body? and tells us:
objective scientific methods allow us to track it down.  Male vs. female
differences can be tested and resolved.
        The standpoint psychologist: Truth depends on embodied knowlege ...
the essential link of woman to nature. Man is dis-figured by his loss of
nature, and his abstract relation to culture.
        The postmodern psychologist divines the  discourses  of the body as
socially constructed, as deconstructed, as the body politic.
        Bodies are known by the company they keep.  For liberatory ends,
positioning and paradox are all.

Text:


(Stage directions: Two sites with lights on stage.  One Stage L. a podium
on which a cowboy hat sits. The other an open space.) A table with other
hats is located to stage R.
A Woman wearing  an academic hat begins to speak.  During the perforance
she changes hats.


B(e)aring Bodies:  Conversation for a Quartet


        I'll take the liberty of introducing myself first. I'm Postmodern
Prin,  The hat puts me in position, indicating my professional status, at
the moment.  My temporary, partial, and fragmented Being currently under
construction in this reading reeks with the postmodern prose that has been
fluxing and flushing down the halls of the academe of late, leaving behind
quite a stink (in some people's opinions).  I have written myself the
starring role in this piece.
         Of course, I have some stiff competition.  The stiffest, in what
might be considered a true-to-form resistance, is from my character, the
GM, which stands for General Motors, of course, but  in this Case for the
General (Male) Mind.  Being a mind, he is not sexed, in specifics, but the
mind itself is definately male. He set this whole dilemma up, you see:
first carving out this mind/body dualism, and then taking the mind for his
side, and leaving the body, not to mention all that went with it to the
downside of the pairing -the womanly one.


GM's hat is on the podium, which is specifically designed to hide the
speaker's body, while highlighting the significance of his words.   Here it
has not been necessary to  cover the body, given he is without one.  But he
feels more comfortable at the podium all the same.


        The other characters are constructed of feminist voices  that are
embodied, as I happen to be at this time. (You might even notice a rather
striking resemblance, although the hats should make it clear who we are.
Annie has never been much of a dresser. And Sandra prefers the natural
look.)


        First let me introduce  Empirical Annie,   a character who has the
closest affinity with GM, but whose politics set her apart.
        Empirical Annie:  [shift to blue bowlet-type hat] "I follow the
codes of the objective scientific road in psychology, and  very careful to
be unbiased in my research, hard headed--  some might say. I write for the
mainstream statistical journals because its the power voice of the field.
What I say gets referenced... at least, more than most psychologists who
write on the topic of women.
         (I'm a feminist in my off-hours, and frankly I'm rather fed up
with harrangues from political radicals, who couldn't tell a meta-analysis
from a t-test if their life depended on it. ) I have fought my entire
career to refute sex difference research  in which women get the short end
of the stick.
        PP:  Annie has  does a thorough job of discovering facts about sex
and gender differences, and she is quite creative in inventing new
statistical methods -- which sometimes throw a monkey wrench into the
works: especially works that find women deficient in important
intellectual, social and interpersonal skills.


PP: Standpoint Sandra has made a strong showing  in the last fifteen years
in psychology, especially the clinical, developmental, and educational
sets. Her namesake is a well-known philosopher, Sandra Harding, who puts up
with a world of problems in order to defend this position.  Standpoint
Sandy is not, however, a parody of Dr. Harding.  Several others, perhaps,
but not her.


        SS: [switch to soft mantilla looking "hat"]  I don't reject the
body. We live in a material world.  Let's not kid ourselves.  But unlike
Annie, who wants to keep her politics to herself in the psychology lab, I
am my politics, and proud of it.  I leave objectivity and the view from
everywhere and nowhere, the old "god trick" as Donna Haraway called it, to
the men, who invented it, some say, to disguise their own hand in the game.
But I agree with her that feminists should seek for truth, and beware the
postmodern wolves in sheepskin clothing who discredit that goal.
        I bring politics into psychology, and I also bring  my values, and
feeling, empathy, intuition, subjectivity, self-awareness, sensitivity,
subjectivity,   kindness,tenderness,  nurturance, motherhood, and apple pie
to psychology.  And why - and I quote so many of my sisters -- should we
give up our own embodied truths, wrung from our own subjective experiences,
when we've just now claimed it? Sandra Harding  said it:  "Should feminists
be willing to give up the political benefits which can accrue from
believing that we are producing a new, less biased, more accurate, social
science?  ... .   Perhaps only those who have had access to the benefits of
the Enlightenment can "give up those benefits.":
         Only those who have it can flaunt it, and then deconstuct it.
Sometimes they make me so mad!.


        PP: Sandra, please, Your subject position is getting damp.


        But, what to make of this  Body...again I ponder,  how should body
be defined?  The body as contested territory in the struggles of various
camps to make it conform.  Where is the body in the body of psychology?
        Let us come together and give voice to our various views: What to
make of this thing we call body, in an embodied voice.


Male: You can't see me over here.  I am invisible.  I like it that way.   I
am now in the ideal state of Mankind: The disembodied mind, here in
essence, and full calculative power, as Stephen Tyler, might say, but
without the usual Physical incumberences.  I am, in some sense, the perfect
interlocutor for an interchange such as this.  Here, at a scientific
conference, in which rationality, alone,  can be allowed its full
expression.  A path to Truth, capital T, in its glorious, if invisible
splendor.
          I can clarify the nonsense that is bound to be incurred by this
Chorus  of Chatty Cathies.  Pull her string, and a series of repetitive
phrases are released from - I must say- a rather attractive plastic frame.
Damn! mind over matter; mind over matter.


PP:  (Academic hat) Is the probem of the body worth discussing? For me,
yes, the question takes on a fiery tone.  Why? because binaries are being
deconstructed: male/female; nature/culture; mind/body.  Straight/gay;  the
body- as a natural, sex as natural, woman as natural; all are coming under
erasure, just as it was coming into fruition within the feminist fold.
Bodies cannot escape the constructionist ax. And we all fall down.
        In the postmodern stance, nothing precedes significations.   How
shall we wiggle out of this, without losing what we prize? What to do with
these disconnections: accept, reject, affirm, deny, both/ and.  If there no
longer is woman, can ther be feminism?  How can one be, without being
someone, and how can one be a someone if not embodied?  And if embodied,
how can sex not be significant?
        But, some say, that's not just putting the cart before the horse,
that's calling the cart the horse.  Judith Butler has turned it around:
"The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics,
rather, it establishes as political the very forms through which identity
is articulated. :


G.M.: Bodies have their place - as topics of biology, neurology, artificial
intelligence, etc. .  Bodies connect man to beast.  The mind, separates the
two.  And no need to mention the survival of the species and all that.
Procreation, that's what bodies are for.
      But Plato had it right:The body is a betrayer of the immortality of
the soul; a prison for the mind.
        You over there, in the body.  Do not glorify the body; do not tie
us down to this all too mundane flesh; do not instantiate the cognitive.
The mind - in its rightful realm - ruling the body, overcoming its
constraints.


PP: The body is not so simple or so easy to escape.  There are many
definitions: As Peter McLaren has said: The "Body is a promiscuous term ...
a warehouse of archaic instinctual drives, ... a cauldron of seething
lidinal impulses, ... a phallocentric economy waging war on women,... a
lump of perishable matter,... a fiction of discourse." Peter McLaren, in
Giroux. p.150.


E. Annie:  (blue hat) To me, this conversation is rather ridiculous.
Bodies aren't erased, and sex comes with the entire biological package.  As
a psychological scientist, the body is  Not a lump, but an elaborately
constructed system of perishable matter, until, of course, it is invested
with cultural components, which create among other things, one's gender,
and perhaps one's sexual orientation. The biologists are still "out" on
that one, and so with more research we should be able to give a definitive
answer.


Standpoint Sandra:  (scarf) I'm not an orthodox Jungian or a Freudian,
although some of my very best friends are, (and, some of yours, Pryne, are
Lacanians as well).  But, I think there's more than that to say about a
body.  He has forgotten  in his disreputable rollcall anything magical,
powerful, praiseworthy.  I do agree that women's bodies have been
denigrated by  phallocentric hi-jinks, but that's no reason to throw the
body out with the bath water.   A woman's body, and I'm not going to bother
with men's equipment, is a valued, even perhaps, a  sacred, essence, a font
for the creation of women's knowledge of the world, of her power, of the
very nature of her being. Yes, affirm the body, in the body I am.
          Sociologist, Nancy Hartsock has argued that bodies create the
standpoint from which we know the world.  Women's bodies can know it best:


         Within the woman's world  "the ....  experience of continuity and
relation - with others, with the natural world of mind with body - provides
an ontological base for developing... the basis of a feminist science. "
(p.174)



        SS: I am sorry to say, and I hesitate to bring this up here, that
through our bodies, in the name of ourselves as bodies, we have mastered
ways in which to mutilate, to wound, and to kill ourselves.  Whether we are
killed softly in the wars of advertisers for our very beings or slowly,
with the death by anorexia, there are many missing from the women's chorus,
who send regrets. As Adrienne Rich has verified: "I know of no woman for
whom her body is not a problem".




GMM:  Melodramatics, just as I suspected.  What you women don't seem to
understand is that The body is not oneself. Far from it, as Augustine said,
and I agree, "The body is the enemy.  The home of a "slimy desires of the
flesh".  To control, and then to transcend one's body, there's the nobility
of life.



        SS: Our femininity makes us targets.  We become obsessed with our
embodiment.  It takes us over, and yet, we  struggle to regain control.
When a woman buys into the notion that mind should control the body, we
become victimized yet again.  The body becomes a foreigner.  Aligned with
Plato and Augustine, taking on man's words, man's justice, man's truth, we
become susceptible to two hostile forces mangling each other from within.
        As Susan Bordo has argued: "Thinness represents a triumph of the
will over the body, and the thin body (that is, the nonbody) is associated
with absolute purity, hyperintellectuality and transcendence of the flesh."
p.95


PP: The man within the woman. The discourse of will, control, of hard,
male, discipline.  Woman as soft, polluted, desiring, weak, needy,
secreting, make to disappear.  Discourses eating away the flesh, worming
into the core of the pulpy fruit.  turning the pearly flesh to withering
brown.


        Yet, we can despise and resist this rhetoric.  As Iris Marion Young
has declared:  "Discourse we use when we describe our experience is no more
direct and unmediated than any other discourse. ... Often people seem to
assume that if we express our authentic experience we will be free of
ideology.  Ideology operates at the most immediate level of naive
experience.  (1990, p. 12).



C. Empiricist Annie: Control is the issue here, and I ask, where would
psychology be without the ability to manipulate and control.   Let me test
the nature of nature; reaching out with my invisible hands, I can wring the
secrets of the body from the bone.  Each piece is prime for my analytic
gaze, but any bite can be chewed and swallowed. That's my stand.


PP: Annie is in her  vampire mode, the phantasmagoric bloodsucker, living
off the flesh of others. She takes the body for granted.  It is waiting,
solid in space, to receive her inscriptions.
        For Judith Butler: "The 'real' and the 'sexually factic' are
phantasmatic constructions - illusions of substance- that bodies are
compelled to approximate, but never can."(p.146)
        Annie codifies these fantasies, these performances, but if  gender
is, as Butler argues, an 'act' ... that is open to ... self-parody, [and]
self-criticisms, then  Annie's "task .... demands a reconsideration of the
figure of the body as mute, prior to culture, awaiting signification."


PP:  With so much contention,   how shall we go about it?



GM: If we must, let us do it dispassionately.  Let us look for evidence to
support our hypotheses.   What does the body mean to us after all?  At
best, a motor of our wills, at worst, a treacherous companion that lets us
down, either, through its passions, or even worse, by breaking down
altogether.... heart attacks, strokes, all the other evils that the body
can provoke us with.


Annie: We must watch for the biases that the GMM can inflict upon us.
Where would we be without Bem, Deaux, Eagly, Hollingsworth, Hyde, Jacklin &
Maccoby, Sherif, and the rest  fighting male biases in research.


 Standpoint Sandra:  Annie misses the point.  You cannot, as Audrey Lorde
has said, dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.  Giving
psychometric tests, multivariate statistical analyses, standardized
interviews.  The researcher a neutral stranger to the subject. There can be
no Truth found through this enterprise.
        The researcher must be involved.  Sharing the same skin, the same
subjective space.  There must be empathy.   Reaching into the depths of
one's own experience to meet the voices of others;  herein lies the heart
of the psychological truth speaking in one's own voice.   As Carol Gilligan
has described  it:  In my interviews, I'll go after that.  I'll say to
somebody, "But where are you? or "Do you believe that?'     .p. 412-415)


        PP: Standpoint psychologists'  discourses of truth can sometimes
smother as well as liberate.  They have been accused of making  Truth, the
truth of the white academic woman.  This has lead to a serious
philosophical muddle, but good at housewifery, they have swept it under the
rug.  And despite the good intentions of diverse groups to live with  a
lump in the middle of the room, some have begun to address the "lump".
        bell hooks, for one:  "The critique of essentialism encouraged by
postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with
reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed
upon us from both the outside and the inside a narrow, constricting notion
of blackness." p. 28.  "When black folks critique essentialism, we are
empowered to recognize mutiple experiences of black identity that are the
lived conditions which make diverse cultural productions possible". ....p.
29



Annie: Constructionism can only go so far.  Some facts are intractable.
Bodies die after all.  That's hardly ideology, socially constructed or
negotiated.


PP: I'll take you up on that.  What does it mean to die?  Do you mean the
brain, or the heart, or the will, or the soul, perhaps?  What is your
dependent measure?  What about those 27% of adults in the U.S. who
presumably  believe in reincarnation?  Are you so certain they are wrong?
What about living on in the minds of those who know you, or living on
through the books you have written, or through financial estates, or in
video tapes? Or through the chidren who take your genetic materials one
generation further?  Or on the other hand, what about the walking dead,
those whose lives lost meaning many years before their breathing ceased?
        It is not so simple after all.  Death requires a community to say
when, and if, it occurs. Even suicides demand a tribunal. as Garfinkel
stressed decades ago.


 PP: Let me raise this last question? What if the body is not real?  sex is
not real, gender is not real, desire is not real? Where are the politics?
Do our feminisms also go?  Does the study of gender disappear? Does
psychology disappear?  I'll let all my friends have the last words this
time.


Gilligan:  I think that's a dangerous thing for feminist to be saying."


"Rich: "We must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond
with the natural order, the corporeal ground of our intelligence." 1976,
p.11)



Celia Kitzinger: the social world constructs who I am, including my sense
of myself as having an inner, private, core.  I hear myself always speaking
in the language that the culture teaches me, or in opposition to it, which
is nonetheless centrally defined by it.



Elizabeth Grosz:  " Women can no longer take on the function of being the
body for men.... The body must be regarded as a site of social, political,
cultural, and geographical inscriptions, production , or constitution. The
body is not opposed to culture, a resistant throwback to a natural past; it
is itself a cultural, the cultural, product " (p.21-24).


Jeanne Marecek:  Lets think of our embodiment   "as a recurring personal
and cultural accomplishment produced by a complex of social processes-
interpersonal , representational, discursive, and institutional." (p.162).
         "My goal is  ...  to invite [others] to join in ongoing
multidisciplinary conversations about the multiple and conflicting meanings
of gender." (p.163)


 GMM: I'm being shut out of this conversation.