IV: (Re)Locating
(Relocating
In what way do eddies, ebbs, and flows of varied, sensuous bodies collectively comprise human sociopolitical organization and spatial distribution? How does the cultural and geographical positioning of bodies stunt or nurture, constrain or liberate, upset or settle them? The essays in this section take up these questions, making the case for incorporation of other-than-discursive processes of human life into multiplex understandings of subordination and dislocation and fresh imaginings of just societies.
How Bodies Become Viscous
Arun Saldanha
The embodied perspective departs from an individualist and men-talist way of understanding the social. The basic argument is that the “body politic” (governments, social movements, corporations) consists of the largely unconscious sticking together of bodies according to their differences.
While sensory perception and bodily location have been extensively conceptualized, what happens when many bodies come together as bodies has mostly escaped attention in social theorizing. This essay discusses four dimensions of human bodies: sensuousness, variation, locatedness, and viscosity. The embodied perspective departs from an individualist and mentalist way of understanding the social. The basic argument is that the “body politic” (governments, social movements, corporations) consists of the largely unconscious sticking together of bodies according to their differences. Viscosity refers to this dynamic emergence, at scales from the street to the planet, of collectivities of people based on corporeal attributes.
Sensuous Bodies
Embodiment has until recently been neglected by social theorists more or less in line with the foundational Western philosophical expunging of emotions and the flesh. Descartes and Newton epitomized scientific positivism, striving for ostensibly objective and disinterested knowledge at the expense of the immediate relationships the senses develop with their surroundings. What difference does it make to call social phenomena embodied? Firstly, an insistence on sensory perception highlights certain crucial components that are more often than not obliterated from purview for ideological reasons. For example, the nation-state is often embodied through physical violence and pain (and their painful recollections). The importance of rape for ethnic cleansing and warfare has until recently escaped attention. Secondly, the cultural reproduction of geopolitical relations and entities (through parades or border patrol) can be more concretely studied if what bodies do and feel enters the discussion. Thirdly, the affective qualities of leaders and rhetoric, circulating within constituencies, can be meticulously analyzed as legible corporeal signs (think of Hitler’s body language). Fourthly, more and more geopolitics itself depends on the biometrical management of bodies through what Michel Foucault called biopolitics. What many are arguing in the wake of Foucault is that the intrusion of the state into the biological being of people (refugees, convicts, citizens) is accompanied by a whole new range of emotions and embodied skills. If it seeks to understand the concrete nature of these political changes, social theory has to take into account their targets and vehicles: bodies of flesh, blood, senses, genes, and memories.
Different Bodies
Embodiment is fundamentally about difference. Feminist politics therefore starts with the difference between women and men. All of Western thought has not only overwhelmingly been conjured by men, among men, and for men, but these men have also always talked on behalf of everyone else: women, children, slaves, foreigners, the Indigenous, the old, and the sick. The philosophy of Luce Irigaray exposes the implicit privileging in European philosophy of the average male body and its particular morphology. The specific characteristics of femininity and masculinity have been consistently ignored in the centuries-old conceptualization of “man.” Irigaray’s ethics and politics follow from what she sees as the irreducibility of sexual difference. Biology is then not destiny, but the playground for ethical and political experimentation.
The sensual and differential nature of bodies needs to be seen as a question of many bodies. How to conceive of collective embodiment from the street to the continental has not been satisfactorily explored. We hear of “the body” but seldom about bodies. This de facto methodological individualism is foreign to the life sciences. In population biology and biogeography species and subspecies groups do not have essences but are dynamic outcomes of many interacting organisms. Evolution itself is understood as the net effects of many organisms adapting to their changing environments.
So both biologically and culturally, embodiment is already differentiated. Every human accumulates tastes, attitudes, habits, and gestures. A human body develops as it goes to certain places and engages with things and other bodies. How does voting behavior differentiate populations through collective fear? How many protesters can move through a street without getting clogged up? Whose senses will likely to be stirred by populist propaganda? The challenge is to think of those populations not as mere “minds,” decisions, or sets of data, but as thinking and feeling organisms continually on the move, mixing with each other in certain physical settings.
Located Bodies
Bodies differ not just anatomically, neurologically, and medically. Bodies always exist somewhere. What bodies can do depends on their location in uneven distributions of resources and media imageries, and deeper, as the Indian Ocean tsunami and New Orleans flood showed, in seismic and climate processes. What matters is one’s position in all the constellations that human and physical geographers map. Feminists have taken up location to describe how uneven development and socio-spatial boundaries delimit choices, and more so for women than men, more so for the poor and the black than for the white and wealthy. Black, immigrant, diasporic, and third world feminists have emphasized the tremendous importance of bodily specificity to the politics of location so that the exploration of location multiplied feminism itself. Doreen Massey argued for decades that space itself is constructed differentially. Globalization affects and is affected by different groups in glaringly different ways, according to what Massey called power-geometries.
It is because bodies vary sexually, racially, and economically that they get differently located in geographies of power and possibility. The sensuous, voluminous materiality of phenotypes should be explored as expressions of global capitalism and colonialism. It is not simply a question of bodies being “inscribed” by geography, but geography materially constituting bodies and their capacities. This is evident in the geographies of food. Anyone’s diet reproduces class- and race-based tastes and health disparities, and there is a growing awareness of the effects of consumption on ecosystems and vulnerable populations both human and nonhuman, especially of meat. But how bodies relate to social space can also be imagined in the geographies of education or religion. When trained as an electrician, one literally incorporates and transports certain skills; when facing Mecca one literally aligns one’s body with millions of others.
It is equally crucial to understand, conversely, that location does not follow deterministically from phenotypic particularity. How a body is intercepted by global flows depends on what bodily features matter in everyday interaction and in the reproduction of social relations and institutions. Sexual and racial segregation shows that it is the materiality of bodies itself that makes particular spatialities endure, though the segregation follows contingently from the interplay of urban planning, architecture, surveillance cameras, urinals, and so on. Bodies are not blank surfaces. Their genitals, hair, and health need to be molded and charged by power-geometries; they need to be pushed and pulled to certain places. There is no social inequality without the affective and monetary investment in the shifting particularities of bodies.
Viscous Bodies
Whether human or not, many bodies together are very rarely chaotic. They are capable of “communicating” movement to each other, becoming sticky relative to one another, even if they keep moving and remain a plurality. This process of becoming-sticky is what I have called viscosity. The concept has an affinity with the better-known term in science of emergence, the spontaneous appearance of coherent group motion irreducible to what the many particles do individually. Viscosity is inevitably about a multiplicity of elements, and one can appreciate the many-ness of viscosity only in physical terms. A classic example is the relative unison of flying birds. The bird bodies stick together as a temporary system, yet remain many, flying in order to avoid their neighbors. Viscosity wants to emphasize this mobile spatiality of togetherness, of coordinated flowing and relative stability. Unlike gases, viscous liquids do not move randomly; unlike solids, they are not static.
Viscosity is more than a metaphor. It does not only apply to fluids or birds. Human flows become viscous in crowds, in large airports, and in traffic jams. Crowds are easily appreciated as being sticky because they are about concentration in one place. But human bodies stick together in more durable ways: packs, crowds, cities, nation-states, social classes, Facebook groups, and racial formations. If thinking the viscosity of bodies on scales larger than the city is difficult, this only proves how unaccustomed we are to thinking bodies as bodies, as shifting and linked masses subject to gravity and expulsion. Viscosity is a quintessentially spatial process, but it need not depend on either geographical proximity or actual deceleration. It is about flows and networks, and how they intersect, before it is about places. Remember that the flock of birds can be both moving erratically in real space and remaining viscous in topological terms.
Philip Ball usefully summarizes recent advances in what he hopes will be a “physics of society.” Strange as it may seem, Ball’s book is in effect a physicist’s answer to Hobbesian political philosophy. While rejecting Hobbes’ bleak assumption of human selfishness, Ball revives the early-modern enthusiasm of approaching human aggregation physically, like grains of sand or droplets of water. Of course, it is today’s powerful computation technology that enables the probing into the mathematical depths of collective behavior. It is far from certain to what extent computer modeling of complex behavior hints at physical laws shared by humans and everything else. What is more certain is that much of contemporary physics, like biology, is less mechanistic and positivist than social theory makes of it. On a par with Irigaray, science after complexity theory can grapple with the creativity of bodies.
If the sticking-together of crowds in public space is relatively easy to appreciate, a brief elaboration on the viscosity of racial formations will allow for imagining what the concept can do for theorizing society. Population geography demonstrates that migration (e.g., during the European colonial era) follows spatial patterns. Indigenous populations remain in a certain region for many centuries, though more often than not were displaced by colonialism. Other populations emigrate in large numbers, go on holiday, or maintain networks of diasporic kinship. Within countries, within cities, these populations furthermore coalesce in certain landscapes, neighborhoods, churches, or camps. This whole host of degrees of movement and stasis is what the concept of viscosity tries to designate. However, the concept demands in addition that we imagine the phenotypic, sensory, and cultural specificity of these masses of bodies: their skin color, diet, health, reproduction rate, religious affects. And there are bodies even more difficult to map: business travelers, for example, who are usually white, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied. Through their high mobility, businessmen keep corporate capitalism and patriarchal power-geometries in place. In the framework of viscosity, the formation of racial difference becomes a literal term, an extremely complex configuration of bodies moving on a range of scales with a range of speeds, with shapes that can only be approximated in maps.
The political upshot of thinking social collectivities and the body politic as sensuous, differential, located, and viscous is that exchanges are possible between the so-called “social” and the “natural” sciences with an eye on bringing clarification to how inequalities come about and sustain themselves. The intellectual resources for such a project are, as this essay shows, multiple and sometimes at odds with one another. The theme of embodiment cannot but raise scholars from their disciplinary slumber.
For Sources and Further Reading
Ball, P. (2004). Critical mass: How one thing leads to another. London: Arrow Books.
Massey, D. (1994). Space, place, and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Saldanha, A. (2007). Psychedelic white: Goa trance and the viscosity of race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Saldanha, A. (2008). The political geography of many bodies. In K. R. Cox, M. Low, & J. Robinson (Eds.), The Sage handbook of political geography (pp. 323-334). London: Sage. Note: The current essay is a strongly abridged and modified version of this chapter.
Slocum, R. & Saldanha, A. (Eds.). (2013). Geographies of race and food: Fields, bodies, markets. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Young, I. M. (1990). Throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
