Embodied practices of freedom (Cressida J Heyes)
June 26th 2007 04:02
Note that this post, a purported summary, won't do the lecture justice. I mostly didn't understand the talk; and, to be frank, I didn't get that much out of what I thought I understood. So anything I write here will be at best a paraphrase; and, generally, will be "inspired by" rather than fair record of.
If Dr Heyes ever read this, no doubt she'd raise a quizzical eyebrow that her words could be so mutilated and misapprehended.
***
The blurb for the lecture went:
| Foucault's work -- and that of its feminist interpreters such as Sandra Bartky or Susan Bordo -- on disciplinary power (and especially his analysis of normalization) offers a sometimes bleak view of the body. As embodied subjects after discipline we have been rendered meek, conformist, unable to imagine alternatives for ourselves and hence (in an important sense of the word) to be free. Although normalization both constrains and enables, the new capacities it develops are often coopted back into its service in ways that do not reflect our most expansive and hopeful values or reflect our commitments to our own self-government -- our capacity to make and act on judgments that are meaningfully our own. Expanding this ethical vision, this presentation presents and defends certain practices that Richard Shusterman has labelled "somaesthetic." In particular, I show how the practice of yoga might have a distinctively different method from the practices of "self-improvement" typically offered up to us by a culture of normalization, and how it might constitute a practice of freedom. |
The blurb for her upcoming book includes:
| Working on the self can both generate new skills and make us more docile; enhance our pleasures and narrow our possibilities; encourage us to take care of ourselves while increasing our dependence on experts. Self-transformation through the body can limit us and liberate us at the same time. To move beyond this paradox, Heyes concludes by arguing that Foucault's last work on ethics provides untapped resources for understanding how we might use our embodied agency to change ourselves for the better. |
***
Okay, some notes...
-- Power constitutes bodies, transforms bodies, the main mechanism being normalizing judgments. For instance, consider the enormous cultural preoccupation with and anxiety about appearance.
Naomi Wolf, says Heyes, was wrong in her take on agency, but correct about constraints of the beauty myth.
-- Through such strategies of bodily management, populations are controlled, and individuals are defined. (I think what's meant by "defined" here is that you're made subject to categorization, and then are treated -- by "the system", by other people, by yourself -- on the basis of that categorization.)
-- There are various embodied practices, "technologies of self-improvement". For instance, there is gym culture. (And perhaps a related example is growing up in Sydney vs growing up in an Amazonian tribe. One culture has an education system that trains bodies to be able to sit at desks for long periods, whereas the other might develop bodies for hunting activities.)
-- There's no natural body. Any purported natural body has its own genealogy. In fact, palming things off as natural is part of the way that normalization operates.
-- Normalization can set up impossible ideals of perfection. Promises are made that can't be kept -- "If you do this, then this, then this, then eventually you'll look like that."
-- And any skills, capacities, insights that are developed are co-opted into pushing you further along the path. (Though I don't think Heyes spelled out how this works.)
-- Secondly, they employ pain, and develop the capacity for new kinds of pain, new forms of control. For instance, weight-loss dieting and cosmetic surgery. Self-loathing is promoted and used. Problems are created, then solutions are offered -- things you didn't know were wrong with you, that can now be fixed (reminds me of the South Park episode on Scientology). You're drawn into limitless cycles of pain.
-- You're trained to experience pleasure. "Qualitative feels are implicated with normalizing practices." Feeling better about yourself in certain circumstances is one of the faces of normalization.
-- The more you involve yourself in the process, the more "docile" you become, and the less you're able to change. The practices that are supposed to lead to autonomy, individuality, self-government instead result in "miserable and earnest meekness".
-- Normalization inhibits freedom. It has directly negative results like impoverished relationships, anorexia, and smokescreens to distract from gender inequality (occupying women with the beauty myth). But also, it's simply undesirable to make everyone the same, and constrain what is possible. Practices of normalization "don't reflect our most expansive and hopeful values"; they "inhibit practices of self-creation", "hold us back from novel becoming".
***
-- In talking about certain subjects, for instance when lecturing on Susan Bordo, body image, and anorexia, Heyes found that she was teaching from the neck up.
-- You can lecture on objectification and normalization. But if it's just lecturing, then there's a disconnect between the theory and the wanted result. You don't solve anorexia by talking about it. Treating anorexia as a cultural phenomenon itself objectifies anorexics.
-- "It wasn't in my day-time lecturing, in highly politicized university courses, that the possibilities for experience increased, but in depoliticized night-time yoga classes."
-- Compare the military drill (we're all drilled in various ways). The soldier can't come to a different form of experience (for instance, a different way of perceiving the world) just by reading and thinking.
The dancer as symbol of freedom... although ballet is perhaps also an example of rigid bodily normalization
-- Freedom isn't purely intellectual, nor just a matter of shifting around economic conditions. Freedom involves embodiment, is to do with the way you sense through your body, the way you move and are able to move, and the body's awareness of itself. (Proprioception, said Heyes, should form part of any account of freedom.)
-- Philosophy shouldn't be considered as the life of the mind, and the mind's overcoming of the body. The body itself is a path towards greater self-knowledge.
-- Philosophy should be about developing different relationships to ourselves and a new art of living.
***
-- Any embodied practice risks constraint (or should she have said, "any embodied practice will constrain"?). But there are some practices -- yoga, martial arts, Feldenkrais, Alexander -- that increase freedom and concretely resist normalization and homogenization. These things aren't "the antidote", but are possible paths to explore.
"We are not resigned, but hope for change in the very contexts in which freedom might be most useful."
Being shown good posture at the Alexander Technique Practice, Essex
They liberate you from achievement-based obligation and exit the cycles of pain -- the psychological suffering, and the capacity for suffering.
They refuse normalization of the body by actively changing it. "I've had students who were unable to take certain poses, because they'd been taught they were ugly. Aesthetic language had been transferred to kinaesthetic possibility."
They resist clear trajectories. They embrace uncertainty about what you're developing into -- which is risky, but interesting. For instance, yoga isn't charted like normalized disciplines, but is ideally taught without comparison between oneself and others. It replaces the impulse to compare with an emphasis on self-awareness and self-exploration.
And they can teach a recognition of what is unchangeable. (Heyes emphasised this last point, talked about Genevieve Lloyd writing on Descartes vs Spinoza; and, perhaps thinking of such folk as the Stoics, suggested a useful ancient ideal whereby one attains joy by accepting necessity. This would hopefully break the fit between external aesthetic ideals and internal experience. And one is, at any rate, "better served" by such an attitude than by endless pursuit of the hyperreal.)
-- (2) They open up new forms of experiencing yourself and the world, new ways of being in the world, new ways of thinking, new ways of understanding yourself. The body becomes a potential source of creativity.
Barbara McCrea of PilatesAfrica perfoming a Feldenkrais movement
Yoga brings with it various types of Indian philosophy -- different conceptions of the mind and body, and different ethical ideals. And you never know how you might be transformed by the physical practice. "When I held certain poses, I wept and wailed. I didn't know why -- but at the same time, my depression lifted." (And, incidentally, this outer-inner connection has long been known in acting. If you make a crying face, the odds are that you do become sad. If you walk confidently, you become confident, etc. Or, for another example, consider animal exercises.)
***
Various Q&A-segment responses (paraphrased, expanded, edited, and changed completely).
-- Is Heyes romanticizing yoga? -- There are different styles, and yoga often is taught as "power yoga", and in a normalizing way. But: (1) there are good reasons for the interpretation of yoga I've given; (2) just as one can try to arrive at the best interpretation of Foucault by considering the many available, one can mediate between the different schools to get a yoga interpretation that provides an interesting alternative to pernicious normative practices; and (3) it's true that yoga isn't lacking in discipline -- there is strategy and structure and technique -- there are right and wrong ways of sequencing and posing and breathing -- but there are important differences -- between the way it's practically taught and what's at the heart of it -- and between this sort of practice and something like... gym culture, where you're on a path to somewhere in particular and are constantly comparing, or something like America's Next Top Model -- do you get that here? --, where you have an extraordinarily detailed, fine-grained aesthetics.
-- Isn't there pain in yoga? -- There's a certain kind of pain cultivated in normalization -- a cyclic pain -- suffer now for pleasure later -- and there is a pleasure at the end that is an escape from all of this, though the pain keeps returning, and you get drawn deeper into the normalizing practice. In cosmetic surgery, there's always a moment where you go back to the suffering. It's like how Buddhists talk about pleasure and pain being part of the same package. Now, in yoga, it's believed that you can have the pleasure without the pain. But the distinction I want to make is that a practice like yoga doesn't make future promises -- it's not connected to normalization in the same way. Yes, yoga is painful, but I'm not against pain per se, but against things like authorities that get to dictate your pleasure and pain.
-- Ethics is more commonly used to refer to dealings with other people. How do you get ethics from yoga? -- I included the word "ethics" in the title of my book to piss people off. There's a certain way ethics is practised in academic departments where you treat it as saying what is right and wrong -- and as long as ethics is rule-governed, you end up with this attitude. Well, I'm not providing prescriptive criteria in the same way. Instead, I want to show through a description of a practice what an ethical life could be like.
Yoga is not practised alone, but has tremendous consequences for relationships with other people -- there is a lot more to say about all this.
There are ethical rules in the yoga sutras, commandments to be truthful or to be non-harming. These are very vague, and it is unclear what their status is. But one interpretation is that they are thin and not spelled out because they're intended to be lived and experienced through life -- explored as a kind of practice. Perhaps one should treat the sutras as a way into a certain art of living, and not as a prescriptive text.
(Incidentally, when Foucault spoke about ethics, I don't think he differentiated matters of self-interest, "prudence", from duties towards others. I blogged some brief thoughts about this a while back.)
-- It's great that yoga has this philosophy behind it -- its own view of mind and body, etc, whereas dieting is mindless. -- Nay, there is a lot behind dieting. The more I looked into it, the more complex it seemed. The history of any normalizing practice is going to be complex. Dieting is bound up with a whole view of the world, of what it is to be a person, or a woman, or happy. It's bound up with a certain philosophy and view of the good life.
-- Can you go to the gym without being drawn into normalizing practice? -- Yes, but it's difficult. There's a constant pressure you have to resist.
-- What about the static, meditative side of yoga? -- When I talk about yoga giving you new possibilities for experience, I include meditation. Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind -- that's what it's all about. In every class we sit still and do mental techniques. But why then do we spend 90 minutes beforehand moving about? Well, this is an answer that I as a Foucauldian scholar will give but which you won't get from most yoga teachers. I want to say that we have bodies that have been normalized. Our bodies are products of drilling by a culture, are constituted by power relationships. So we can't simply sit down and still the mind. The awareness and understanding of yourself that you get through movement is important for meditative practice. Our kinaesthetic sense of ourself needs to be undone before meditative technique can have traction. You get a large variation across the population, but the typical person is constrained through their body.
-- What is freedom to you? -- Existing practices tell us where to go, whereas we should allow ourselves to be open to practices whose outcome we can't predict.
Freedom might be found in recognition of necessity. It should not depend on free will.
Autonomy, self-government, and the ability to express individuality are central to freedom, but the way these things are sold to us often involves a trick whereby you're delivered a false promise.
Like Foucault, I am reluctant to say "Here is freedom." I don't want to tell you what liberation is, but I want you to explore ways of life.
(Three thoughts:
-- I think the extent to which Foucault is prescriptive, normative, is problematic. A lot of the time he's descriptive -- he's a historian -- and he doesn't make recommendations about what to do. But he does have prescriptive moments -- for instance, when he recommends finding new forms of pleasure --, and seems quite prepared to back this or that political position. Perhaps it's a matter of different hats: Foucault the historian, Foucault the journalist, Foucault the activist, Foucault talking informally to the gay press, etc.)
-- How does this concept of freedom, or Foucault's concept, map onto (or does it map onto?) the sort of "negative freedom"/"positive freedom" framework from the English tradition?
-- Heyes seems to be saying (but might not be) that "Yoga culture is better than gym culture" or "Yoga culture is more free than gym culture". But I wonder if Foucault would have made this sort of comparative evaluation. In his 1983 interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus, "On the genealogy of ethics", at one point he mentions that everything is dangerous; it's not possible to escape from dangers. Instead, every day one makes a choice about what the biggest danger is.)
-- "Does your diet make you feel good?" doesn't do very much when subjective experience is produced by regimes of normalization. But can we dispense with subjective experience so easily? -- (Not directly answered.)
-- Does yoga really foster an openness to the world? How much capacity for experimentation is there? -- I'm committed to possibilities for self-making. In the literature on extreme body modification (I gloss over this in maybe two pages of my book), one argument I've found compelling is that this is a means of radical experiment, a search for new possibility. You embrace the possibility of novel future experience without knowing what the results will be. The philosophical and political value of experimentation is clear in this example.
Yoga properly taught should not foreclose experimentation. It should be able to adjust. I want there to be experimentation. At any rate, it's the type of practice that is more likely to lead to what I call freedom.
I haven't had guidance in how to teach yoga in a way that is friendly to these insights. The ideal of experimentation is hard to get a handle on practically, let alone relating it to an art of living and to experience of your subjectivity. I give and follow instructions in routine and mechanical ways. But, to me, when I'm in a yoga position, there is value in simply thinking about what it would mean if I changed my posture slightly. You want people to have an experience of their body that is open to a kind of playfulness and new experience.
(Incidentally, the Foucauldian examples are relationships, sex, and drugs. In a 1981 interview with R de Ceccaty, J Danet and J Le Bitoux entitled "Friendship as a way of life", he speaks of a project of making ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure and escaping the readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter on the one hand and the lovers' fusion into a "we" on the other. In a 1981 interview with James O'Higgins entitled "Sexual choice, sexual act", he speaks of "laboratories of sexual experimentation" in San Francisco and New York where people are developing new ways of experiencing pleasure. In a 1982 interview with B Gallager and A Wilson entitled "Sex, power, and the politics of identity" he declares that we have to study and experience drugs. The puritanism that implies that you have to be either for or against them is mistaken. There are good and bad drugs just as there is good and bad music.)
Is yoga itself bound up with normalization -- going to yoga classes is the mark of a certain sort of lifestyle? -- for white middle-class women? -- Material conditions mean that yoga is white and middle-class but the practices of yoga are valuable to everyone and should be made available to as many people as possible.
Tony Eason in a yoga pose
***
The Feldenkrais image came from this website.
The Yoga image came from this website.
The Alexander image came from this website.
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Comment by Damo
In it he answers every question with something about gardening. Everyone thinks that he is brilliant and read their own meaning into it.
I just wonder if the good Dr had taken up table tennis instead of yoga how her answers would be different.
Comment by Fashion
Fashionista Files
the word "ethics" in the title of my book to piss people off.
Heyes raises an interesting question of how to rationally engage with the normalising process without confining the issue to the mind. On the most basic level I think this is a question of chemistry, when I swim on a regular basis and am fit then I am more confident, relaxed and simultaneously stronger intellectually.
The problem arises with the connection between swimming or any exercise and the perceived link between the act and some sort of societally condoned self improvement like losing weight - which is consistent with the point you raised about gym culture.
The other thing I gained from your post was an even stronger belief that Foucault (like Heidegger and some of those other 20th Century European philosophers) is better when interpreted which I think raises interesting hermeneutic questions about Foucault's philosophy in itself.
All a roundabout way of saying I found your post engaging.
Comment by Miswanderlust
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I need to process this post. You raise some interesting arguments. I work with many men and women who have not only body image issues but eating disorders as well.
As you know this is a complex issue and I wished I had been in attendance
I really liked this
You can lecture on objectification and normalization. But if it's just lecturing, then there's a disconnect between the theory and the wanted result. You don't solve anorexia by talking about it. Treating anorexia as a cultural phenomenon itself objectifies anorexics.
What about the growing trend of men across our global societies that are increasingly concerned with body image. Studies have found that dissatisfaction with body image among men is on the rise. Many males are facing eating disorders in order to keep up with societies perfect body image. I see disorders, such as "dysmorphia" reaching a high point within the male population. Dysmorphia focuses on a "obsessional preoccupation" (of one's body image. A patient suffering from this type of disorder would see a part of the body as "ugly". In males a certain type called muscle dysmorphia, is seen, that has come of great concern. Muscle dysmorphia is induced by an obsessive-compulsive image of ones muscle tone. With this type of disorder, one might go to great lengths to fit the image they are looking for. Going to these lengths often causes harms to the body creating damage physically and mentally (e.g. one will take steroids). When looking for answers to why this occurs research points at "magazines, motion pictures, toys and other media.
I was thinking the other day about how action toys have played a part in creating negative body image. toys such as G.I. Joe figures, and Superheroes.
My concern is that action toys present ideal body image setting an example that you must look like a superhuman body builder. The images portrayed exceed the level of muscle tone that can safely be achieved. These extreme measures are dangerous causing many to not eat right and take drugs. Males find that looking this way is the only way to fit within society. Although getting to this level is unsafe, the consequences are often overlooked.
The GI Joe toy, when first introduced measured eleven and a half inches and although changed in 1973 to 1976, kept a reasonably life like body. A new figure was put out discontinuing the eleven and a half-inch figure, by a series of three and three fourths inched figure in 1982. Ten years later a four and a half-inch action figure came out followed by a five inch during 1995. As the year passed the difference in the actions toys varied, since now they were more muscular. The toys were supposed to demonstrate more powerful behavior now that they were larger. This gives young boys the notion that in order to feel any sense of control you must be larger then others.
The GI Joe figure has not only grown bigger but also more muscularly defined. GI Joe. The earliest figure has no visible abdominal muscle: his 1975 counterpart shows some abdominal definition; and the 1994 figure displays the sharply rippled abdominals of an advanced bodybuilder. The bodybuilder image has replaced the life like body causing many to feel inferior if they do not fit this image. While early G.I.Joe figures may have resembled a little boy's father, or older brother, present figures depict a physique, which is virtually unattainable by the human body.
The same discovery was made with Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo. These plastic figures are supposed to seem strong and powerful. The image being projected is that muscle makes you tougher; ordinary human bodies are not good enough.
Although one can not be sure that young boys will be affected by playing with these toys, it can be observed that a change in society has occurred.
Sorry about the long response. Thanks for the food for thought.
Mis
PS Treating it with yoga.... hmmmm
Comment by postmoderncritic
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Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
*lol*
There's probably plenty of cases in philosophy where people have done the same thing. Eg Schopenhauer praises and recommends his passion, going to the theatre.
And there's also the common case where philosophers praise and recommend philosophy.
Dear Fashionista,
Thanks for the comment!
A lot of interesting issues here... for instance, about why to prefer any interpretation (including the author's) over any other... It may come down to a simple matter of purpose -- whatever interpretation is more useful or most fruitful for you with respect to some particular purpose. And perhaps one need never be ashamed about "creatively appropriating".
It's often said, the great artist isn't able to see all that they're doing. That's why it's great art. At the very least it's unconsciousness-driven.
And it seems, in any case, that many of the texts considered the "richest", derive that quality from the number of interpretations that can be read into them -- Shakespeare, Garcia Marquez, Plato, Nietzsche, etc. The quality of giving you something new each time you return to it...
You remind me of an anecdote about Richard Rorty I read recently:
Dear Miswanderlust,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment!
Some random thoughts in reply:
-- It might be possible to differentiate two related processes: (1) normalization (where something that could have been otherwise is treated as necessary); and (2) valorization (where something is held up as good, to-be-admired, etc).
Don't know which the action figures would fall into. If there's only one action figure, then perhaps valorization -- or if you're constantly surrounded by these images, then normalization...
-- Most ideals will be impossible, and that may be part of the point of them. For instance, people sometimes talk loosely about wanting to be "the best x I can be" -- the best mother I can be, the best writer I can be, the best sprinter I can be, etc. Or people pursue "happiness". But there are no clear criteria of completion in these sorts of cases: rather, what you have is a direction to move in. The ideals that are actually attainable might be anticlimactic when you get them. What would it be like to reach a point in life when you say, "There is nothing more that I want. No more books I need to read. No new experiences I need to experience. I'm Buddhistically content right now, and will forever be..."
If one accepts ideals like happiness as not bad things, then it's not the impossibility of an ideal per se that tells against it -- but rather what pursuit of that ideal costs you along the way.
Dear Epiphanie,
Thanks for visiting, and glad you lked it! Incidentally, I noticed you signed up to philosophy groups at meetup.com -- so hopefully see you round the tracks one of these days.
Comment by D. Armenta
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I'd like to make an educated guess at the meaning.
I think she's tieing in body language with personal experience, which in turn ties in to how we move, consciously or unconsciously. For instance, a person who has been raised in a demonstrably affectionate environment might subconsciously distrust or dislike someone who was unwilling to shake hands or otherwise be touched.
Another example of this could be someone who spent time in military training and equated good posture with, say, self-discipline. Someone with poor posture could then give that person the subconscious impression of lack of self-discipline.
..If one is forced to label one's "school of thought" I suppose the closest description of my own is "objective pragmatist".
I have not accepted anyone's words or actions blindly since I was a toddler; I'm always digging for knowledge and qualifications and experiences, i.e. what makes some other person's perception of something better than my own? What makes the opinion or appearance of some stick in heavy makeup better than my own? T.V. popularity? Not enough.
The pragmatist part is because I'm more interested in getting an end result, not so much the means..unless the means are unethical (by my OWN high standard).
Sorry, didn't mean to ramble..this post piqued my interest. Thank you for it!
The "pragmatist" comes from
Comment by Anonymous