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eldon@32panix.com [please remove the 32 for the correct address] Please do not quote without the author's Permission. This paper is unfinished
Fairclough(1992) notes the significance of Foucault's view of discourse as constitutive of social life - it contributes to the production, transformation and reproduction of the objects - and subjects - of this social life, and that furthermore, "language signifies reality in the sense of constructing meanings for it, rather than that discourse is in a passive relation to reality" (42). Such a constitutive role for language is further linked to the notion of power, and the methods Foucault outlined in his sense of 'technologies of power' which serve to work upon 'bodies' themselves; techniques affecting the control of bodily dispositions and habits, which are said to be adapted to the demands of modern forms of economic production. One of these technologies, 'discipline', is exemplified as "'normalizing judgement', the ways in which systems of punishment constantly measure individuals against norms. Although discipline is a technology for handling masses of people, it does so in a highly individualizing way, in a way which isolates and focuses in on each and every individual in turn and subjects them to the same normalizing procedures" (52). In exemplifying another technology, 'confession', Fairclough glosses Foucault's analysis as "The compulsion to delve into and talk about oneself, and especially one's sexuality, in an ever widening set of social locations, [...] appears on the face of it to be a liberating resistance to objectifying bio-power. Foucault believes, however, that this is an illusion: confession draws more of the person into the domain of power" (53).
In its fundamental sense, power is constituted through actual bodily threat, but what Fairclough points out is that such bodily threat is linked through language to disciplinary processes which occur in every socially constructed institution. A police force might be seen, for example, as coercing the population, as individual bodies, into obeying the 'law'. But the law, in its turn, is documentary in nature, discussed and eventually laid down in terms of the dominant discourse, shored up, legitimised in talk about 'right' and 'wrong' - in effect, a moral document. If we turn to the institutional processes of a mailing list, constituted entirely in languaging and dependent on a technological code, what representatives of the 'moral order' are evident? I would suggest, along with Fairclough, that it has something to do with the enforcement of norms, via a constant measuring of performance, teamed with threat of punishment, and an encouragement to see personal confession as a means of liberating oneself from the constraints of the body, or 'bio-power' cited above.
However, if the body is 'absent' in a technologically mediated environment, if we accept that this is so in the specific context of a mailing list, how is such a moral order to be effected? If sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, how are moral orders in the context of written-only interaction to have any effect or meaning? Indeed, this feature of the context would mean that anything goes in such a textually-constituted 'community' - that any words would be allowable, since there is no body 'there' to be hurt or offended by such 'actions', and that therefore no threat of punishment - no counter-offensive words - would be effective. That indeed, things are NOT done with words, to paraphrase Austin, Searle, and other similar philosophers of language.
Certain assumptions seems to be in play here. Putting aside the obvious power that listowners have to exclude email addresses from participating, the assumptions on which the above views of list participation rest, seem, firstly, to do with a neo-Cartesian stance that consciousness - 'mind' - can be distinguished from 'body'. To quote one of the participants to Cybermind's discussion on the nature of 'gender consciousness': "I may be present in a female body, but my (mind) inside is completely different." And secondly, there seems to be a common sense assumption that the body ends at the skin, that the individual is primary and its personal feelings more significant and worthy of report than those of the community as a whole, and that the space where list activity goes on is in the machine, on the screen.
In this case, where a division of mind and body is taken as read, it seems a short leap to actually believe the childhood taunt as to sticks and stones, i.e. 'real' physical material objects, being the only means of hurting 'me'...or anyone else. One might reasonably assert that therefore there was no such thing as the violence done by words. One would expect, however, that this would fly in the face of 'experience', phenomenologically-speaking: we are interpellated from birth, as actors in our own dramas, and through these socialising processes, as Foucault amongst others is at pains to point out, affected in every way. Words themselves, and the contexts in which they are used, have the power to evoke strong emotions and associations. Without such associations, there would be no poeisis either, no propaganda, no exhortation to war, and no advertising industry, neither would literature or any text have the power to move us to tears or laughter - to cite a few gross examples. These habits of languaging are inscribed in our bodies, and therefore it seems difficult to describe the boundary which defines the place where physical hurt and mental hurt begins and ends.
Along with the assumptions discussed above, there seems to be a concomitant idea that language is a form of personal self statement, that it has very little to do with social activity. The idea that meaning and knowledge are not embodied in the text, but in the nodes where reading, and interpretation occurs, is not part of such a view, or at least, stands in contradiction to it. The alternative view is that meaning and knowledge is not held in the individual at all, but in the community at the point of exchange of meanings. Anyone in doubt of such a notion, need only experiment by setting up their own personal mailing list with no other subscribers, then sending out posts after setting NOACK and NOREPRO. What meaning have your posts, when there is no _body_ to read them? Gendered or not?
In a community of receptive _bodies_, the power to silence or to shame or to control the whats and the hows of participation in ways analysed by Foucault and touched on above, will be vested in those who are able to wield their words in order to do so - until you have felt the rush of adrenalin in that body which sits attached by vision and active fingertip to the machine as it sits reading the words on a screen, or even spent time weeping over what has been addressed to you, or to others about you, then you may participate limblessly in nowhere in blissful ignorance of the intensely implicated body in all this. In a list of over 300 members, when only an average of 10 addresses (let us not give names to disembodied participants reading what we write) interact on a screen, whither the community of silent members? As they read your words, do they also realise that they do not exist? That their responses to your words are not embodied at all?
The nature of gender is of course, a social construct. A social institution mapped onto bodies in ways which start even before birth in many instances. Bodies and their gender therefore generally coincide, because socialisation practices ensure that this is the case. One reason for this acceptance may be because language and other forms of communication which the young baby needs to master in order to participate in its community, are usually gender-inflected. At every turn, people ask, people act, people speak to either a boy or a girl. Those 'trapped' in a body not of their perceived gender, usually still perceive themselves as 'gendered', and take to adopting the semiotic markers of that sex which they are not, in biological terms. Those participating on Cybermind may be tired of gendered behaviour, type-casting and even the languaging they are used to doing in offline life, but despite such gender fatigue, their social life has nevertheless left them with the legacy of a gendered set of 'orders of discourse' - ways of relating to each other and to the social institutions which constitute the society in which they live. Their very experience of gender fatigue stems from this constant array of gendered expectations.
Those interested in linguistic relativity will find it amusing to note, that in the culture of most socialised women, for example, there is a proliferation of lexical terms referring to the fine distinctions in the description of leg attire - the matter of size is defined to a delicate level, dependent on system choices within the type of leg attire one intends to purchase: whether the signified has the signifier 'stockings', 'pantyhose', or 'tights'. Size systems vary between a numerical ordering on the even (e.g.10, 12, 14, 16), or non standardized descriptives (e.g. small, medium, large, queen). Meaning, is as usual, motivated, and on Cybermind it was pointed out that such a simple question as 'What size pantyhose do you wear?' would function to a great degree of accuracy in discriminating the female from the male, by the female. Other types of question would function similarly for male-based knowledge. The point here was not that such knowledge was unavailable to either gender, but that material culture (including the body), and languaging, are interrelated and highly implicated in social processes: in learning how to mean. For a woman, such knowledge is likely easily called upon, but not for a man: this is not a statement about biological differences, but about the nature of social experiences which are a function of being identified as either male or female.
[[Please do not quote without the author's Permission. This paper is unfinished]]
In an older discussion on Cybermind (August 1997) on the nature of gender and the orders of discourse associated with it, the constitutive nature of discourse was foregrounded by one of the participants. The paradoxical nature of a perceived 'gender-neutral' discussion context was well made. The dominant mode of discussion, and talk in general, was outlined as being very much invested in the individualised "I" as active agent, in which the declaration of one's own position as justification of any point of view, or any ideological stance, is made authoritatively and with little negotiatory space left for other participants to take up other positions without defending them. This was said to be a tendency of male participants, who were said to be used to taking an adversarial stance with respect to other interlocutors, a stance which had been socially encouraged, one in which 'competitiveness' and verbal acumen was highly valorised. Such a stance, it was pointed out, made any other mode of interaction in that context problematic: either one adopted a similarly argumentative, combative stance, or one's argument or point of view would be of necessity, 'howled down'. If it were accepted that females as a gender are socialised differently than males, and are expected to perform differently in different roles, then the constitutive role of languaging practices in this socialisation cannot be entirely denied. So that, if females have not had the opportunity to take up the adversarial role in many areas of their social life, then their skills in playing the competitor would necessarily be underdeveloped. Laying aside the question over whether such adversarial skills are necessarily the most valuable in a competitive world, it can be seen that if females have been socialised in their speech and interaction patterns to strive rather for alignment and solidarity with their interlocutors, if they have been constantly rewarded for being the 'good listener' (e.g. by not interrupting, or by making noises of 'sympathetic circularity' - uh-huh, Mmm, yeah, go on, I see...) then their arguments, will, by their very nature, be dominated, swallowed by the 'male' mode of interaction.
In such a context, if 'identified females' (i.e. those who are gendered as female by whatever means) wish to have their voices heard, they may need to align, or claim solidarity with the dominant modes - by either adopting their discursive practices, or by claiming solidarity through ideational agreement, or both. This also means that the 'female mode' of interaction (if such a thing may be generalized from discursive practices) in a mixed group may be effectively silenced: even if skilled and used to an adversarial stance, by their very status as 'identified female', interactants may be expected by socialised males to adopt the usual good listener, non-dominant position in talk. This may explain the formation of female-only groups on the net and in other places, where such modes of interaction, and the complications of male-female psychological interaction, would be obviated.
Discourse mode is of course, an abstraction of discourse practice in general, and is a learnt mode of activity, socially learnt during a lifetime of embodied experiences. These experiences include the reading of what others have said or written, in turn based on the writer's own embodied experiences - whether 'real' or imagined. The whole notion of knowledge and experience in this sense is envisaged as encoded by chemical transformations which occur in the body as reactions to patterns of events, as 'habitus' to use Bourdieu's term. This means that we each carry about with us sets of habitual ways of reacting to the world, habitual ways of referring to reality, of using language to commune - to set up social relations. In this view, language is not a means of 'exchanging information' in discrete packets of true or false, but essentially a means of enacting relationships. The interaction on an email list a technologically-mediated means of enacting relationships, operating under a social habitus of its own perhaps, but as part of one's other daily activities in which one is hailed constantly, and called to account for one's identity thereby.
My contention, therefore, is that the body is nowhere absent whenever human interaction is involved, that it is in every respect a dialogism, in which each utterance prospects another and is a product of all shared texts which have preceded it, and to which it makes reference. That the utterance has only social meaning, which needs to be read against the twin levels of social (or speech) community - which gives language its allowable meaning potential - and the level 'instantiation', the point at which the exchange of meaning occurs, when the utterance is read or interpreted by another 'consciousness'. Of course, if consciousness can be conceived of as dis-embodied, or transcendent, then my contention will not make sense.
Please do not quote without the author's Permission. This paper is unfinished