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20 Public Body
- “I call it a scholastic bias—a bias to which we are all exposed: we think that the problems can be solved only through consciousness. And that is where I differ from Foucault, and would draw a contrast with his important concept of discipline. Discipline, in French at least, points towards something external. Discipline is enforced by a military strength; you must obey. In a sense it is easy to revolt against discipline because you are conscious of it. In fact, I think that in terms of symbolic domination, resistance is more difficult, since it is something you absorb like air, something you don't feel pressured by; it is everywhere and nowhere, and to escape from that is very difficult. Workers are under this kind of invisible pressure, and so they become much more adapted to their situation than we can believe. To change this is very difficult, especially today. With the mechanism of symbolic violence, domination tends to take the form of a more effective, and in this sense more brutal, means of oppression. Consider contemporary societies in which the violence has become soft, invisible”
(Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992, 115).The intersection of bodies and public spaces opens a host of potential outcomes. And so much of “history” has been performed and accomplished, determined and demolished (through warfare) in this intersection that it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the calculus of the public body.
In part, I would guess that a legacy of “private” elites (royalties and sacerdotal hierarchies) throughout much of recorded history and in many places where these records were kept has created an unbalance in the reporting of “where the action is”, while also delegitimating the actions of bodies in public. That is, the above imbalance is both an artifact from and desired outcome of the externality of the rulers to an (not fully determined) “public” in both space and body. (So, we cannot simply “shoot” the historian.) And in part, I would also suggest that the more recent, although increasingly global, rise of democratizing institutions has brought increasing legitimacy to actions and bodies in public. This means that we need to be more careful to record public actions, and more rigorous in determining how to best study bodies and public spaces.
Anthony Giddens is one of the recent social scientists who has granted “place” its own place in his work. And while his writings still lack an attention to specific spatial, ethnographic locales, they present locale as a necessary feature of action. For example, take the following:
- “The zoning of the body seems in most—perhaps all—societies to be associated with the zoning of activities in time-space in the trajectories of the day within locales. Thus eating usually occurs in definite settings at definite times, and is usually also 'public' in the restricted sense of involving gatherings of family members, friends, colleagues and so on. The dressing or adornment of the body may not be universally regarded as 'private', but at least in most cultures seems to be so regarded. In spite of Elias's claims that sexual activity was carried on in an unconcealed way in medieval Europe, genital sexuality seems everywhere to be zoned as a back-region phenomenon—with many variations, of course, in intersecting modes of public and private behaviour” (1985, 280).
Giddens’s “zones,” like Goffman’s “frames,” point to a multiplicity of “bodies” determined by—and also determining1—appropriate actions in specific places and times. But where spaces determine actions, the questions are begged of how this comes about? How are these actions taught? Why are they accepted as appropriate? Why is this idea of appropriateness unitary?
body schooling accounts for the training of the body and the recognition of public spaces as having a single mode of appropriate actions. Body schooling, in its aggregate effects, contributes to the sense of “normalcy” we encounter—as if it were something of the place—when we venture onto the street. But normalcy is not cheap. This expense is counted both by the amount of coding required to normalize bodies and street-scapes, and by the increased effort required to counter or resist this coding—as feminists have discovered in their struggle to rearticulate the masculine-coded public workplace as a multigendered space.
The public body is the body we take into the street. It is the bodies we meet there. It is the body that apologizes without thinking for brushing against another on the sidewalk. And, as I mentioned above, it is the body, the presence of which, more than any other feature, that makes a place public.
This last notion is rather foreign to our awareness of our own presence in public. The discursively available part of the public body (our own body) tells us about the “rules of the road.” We can discuss, for example, eye contact, nudity, defecation, queuing for the bus, staring and being stared at, whistling, talking to oneself, picking one’s nose, using a public water fountain, and a hundred other topics where prohibitions and generally expected behaviors are known and knowable.
Why is it that we do all of these things without giving much attention to them? And why do we pay so much attention when others violate these behavioral expectations? Garfinkel’s (1984) ethnomethodology attempted to answer some of these questions for specific practices. But in general we can point to the construction of public space as a pre-determined “game” arena where we enter as players by assuming an orthopostural (SEE: orthoposture) attitude that disattends to the construction of the space. We have learned how to play, and what to do to repair our own mistakes. But how is this game managed? And by whom? for what purpose?
- “ As an example of proprieties of the body we might consider table manners. The topic is addressed in explicit detail in a famous treatise by Erasmus, his De civilitate morum puerilium of 1530. This book specifies maxims of conduct with respect to what Erasmus calls 'outward bodily propriety'; such 'outward' proprieties, of bodily carriage, gesture, posture, facial expression and dress, being seen as the expression of the 'inner' person. The impact of the treatise was immediate, wide and lasting. In the first six years after its publication it was reprinted more than thirty times; it was rapidly translated into English, French and German; and in all there were more than 130 editions, thirteen of these as late as the eighteenth century. The questions addressed in this treatise... gave new precision and centrality to the concept of civilitas.... Since decorum and restraint were essential attributes of civility, it was natural that crucial importance should be assigned to the cultured control of appetite in the most literal sense, and hence to table manners”
(Connerton 1989, 82).This is a question of some enlarged interest of late, as several think-tanks have been recently set up to ponder the “collapse of civility” in the United States. While there may be some argument about presuming that the US federal government has an obligation to reproduce the inputs to notions of public propriety (through school curriculae and other media), there is a more general agreement that this goal needs to be somehow accomplished (in families, through churches, etc.). In other nation-states, such as Japan, the lead role of government in this task is not questioned. And so the state makes its own claims over the construction of the normalized public body.
1Curiously, “public” places are usually seen as places where the former happens, where the place determines appropriate activities. Spaces where an individual’s actions can signal which “body” is appropriate are thereby marked as “private.” I say this is curious, because there might also a presumption of freedom of action in public space. It would not be bizarre to suggest that a public space should be open to multiple frames.
