Qual Sociol DOI 10.1007/s11133-014-9298-4

A Feminist Carnal Sociology?: Embodiment in Sociology, Feminism, and Naturalized Philosophy Victoria Pitts-Taylor

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract Wacquant’s vision of carnal sociology and enactive ethnography draws heavily from embodied mind theories in neurocognitive science and philosophy of mind. However, it also resonates with feminist epistemologies, such as sociologist Dorothy Smith's view that sociology should begin with and from the body. While both carnal sociology and the neurocognitive traditions it draws from ignore decades of feminist contributions to embodied epistemologies, I argue that feminist thought has much to contribute to materially grounded accounts of corporeal knowledge. Attention to feminist thought should also help enactive ethnographers consider the limits to the method, and the ethical and political complexities of embodied, situated knowledge. Keywords Ebodiment . Epistemology . Neurocognitive science . Carnal sociology . Feminism . Situated knowledge Wacquant’s account of carnal sociology offers a vision that is profoundly, rather than superficially, embodied. He gives a highly persuasive depiction of bodily practice as generative of meaning, a view buttressed by his ethnographic work. He makes disciplinary border crossings, toward naturalized philosophy and neurocognitive thought, to find resources for thinking carnally. Sociologists of the body (not to mention feminists across the disciplines—I’ll get to that) have expressed a similar call for a deeper, more fleshly grasp of embodiment, and a more embodied sense of sociality. They have described various features of embodiment— including the phenomenal (Crossley 1996), the elusory and affective (Radley 1995; Watson 1998; Clough 2010; Blackman 2012), and the sociomaterial and biopolitical (Fujimura 2006; Rose 2006)—to get at aspects of sociality that cannot be addressed through discourse or cultural inscription alone. Many sociologists, though, have been circumspect about drawing from biological, and specifically neurobiological, paradigms (Cerulo 2010; Lizardo 2014). Nonetheless, Wacquant’s move resonates with broadly aired concerns about the limits of social constructionism, with its nature/culture dualisms, de-fleshed sense of the body-subject, and its tendency towards anti- (rather than merely critical) empiricism (Latour 2004). It is also compatible with the post-genomic thinking of biological matter as agentic, dynamic and flexible, and (in the case of humans at least), as inextricably social. Finally, it can be seen in the context of the neurocognitive turn that has influenced many other disciplines outside of V. Pitts-Taylor (*) Wesleyan University, Allbritton 218, 222 Church Street, Middletown, CT 06459, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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sociology. In other fields—philosophy, cultural studies, literary studies and performance studies, to name a few—neuroscience is being embraced not for its tradition of biological reductionism and determinism, but on the contrary, for its amenability to biosocial theorizing. The subfield that Wacquant draws from, with its roots in pragmatism and phenomenology as well as neurocognitive science, has been embraced elsewhere as enabling a biosocial, experientially rich view of the mind and experience (Glannon 2002, 2009; Fuchs 2005, 2009; Solomon 2007; Connolly 2010, 2011; Protevi 2013). Yet in his account of carnal sociology, Wacquant indicts the social sciences too generally, overlooking embodied traditions within sociology and other fields close to home, while more generously (that is, uncritically) citing the work of naturalized philosophers and neurocognitive scientists who inform his idea of the fleshly. This may be a rhetorical strategy for interdisciplinarity, to urge us to go beyond our own fields and find resources elsewhere. But it has the unfortunate effect of erasing feminist work in the social sciences that has diagnosed precisely the state of affairs he describes—the overly intellectualist, mentalist, disembodied approach to mind, knowledge, subjectivity and agency—and misses their efforts to contest these tendencies. His description of the social sciences is essentially untouched by feminist writings on the body, emotion and affect, desire, embodied epistemology, and ethnographic methods. To be clear, I am not claiming feminists have offered conclusive accounts of embodiment (they have not), or that carnal sociology does not offer something new to sociology (it does). Rather, I am claiming that even while it takes a more physically materialist turn than many feminists have allowed, the project of carnal sociology has an unacknowledged legacy in feminist thought. More importantly, in my view, its execution should dialogue with feminist efforts to theorize the mind, self and social as inextricable from embodiment, and to grasp the importance and difficulties of generating knowledge through deep, observant participation. The argument outlining the need for carnal sociology, in particular, is hard for me to conceive separately from feminist efforts to articulate the body as the primary ground of knowledge. Wacquant calls for challenging overly intellectualist or mentalist accounts of the subject, contesting the hierarchical valuing of propositional thinking over feeling and emotion, and exploring embodied and situated, practical, felt knowledge. Feminist sociologists (along with feminists in other fields) have been making such claims since at least Dorothy Smith’s The Everyday World as Problematic (Smith 1988). Smith, it can be said, argued strenuously for what Wacquant calls a “bottom-up, visceral grasp of the social world.” Like the embodied mind theorists that interest Wacquant, feminists drew from phenomenology, pragmatism and naturalism to make a case for the inherently embodied and enactive character of perception (Rouse 2009). Beyond this, feminists have addressed the underlying gendered (and racialized) logic at work in the epistemic privileging of mind over body, rationality over feeling, and abstraction over practice. They have also grappled with the aspects of embodiment Wacquant says sociologists must attend to. For example, they have addressed the sentient body through arguing for the significance of emotions and affect, and for the ways these are implicated in and targeted by social structures. They have addressed the suffering body through unwavering attention to vulnerability, trauma, victimization, and also illness, pain and dis/ability. They have consistently addressed the sedimentation of experience, by trying to grasp the long-term effects of power on bodies and subjects, in tension with hopes for the possibility of agency and transformation. They have also explicitly theorized the concept of situated knowledge, a term now used in embodied mind theory but conceptualized earlier by Donna Haraway (1988). Feminists have applied this concept not only to social actors, but like Wacquant, also to scholars who observe them in the field, and to scientists who observe them under the microscope or brain scan. Of course, a carnal sociology is not one that takes carnality as specific to any group of people, but rather as a universal condition of (human) experience. Therefore, readers could

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rightly object that Smith’s sociology was not a carnal sociology, but a sociology for women. It was as women that early feminist epistemologists argued, “our direct embodied experience of the everyday world [is] our primary ground of knowledge” (Smith 1991, 22).1 The treatment of embodiment as specifically female was quickly shown to be enormously problematic, not in the least because it was essentializing. Haraway’s situated knowledge was in part a response to these limitations. In sociology, Patricia Hill Collins (1990) argued that African-American women have historically different experiences than both white women and black men, and claimed that their embodiments offer a distinct epistemic ground. She utilized Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality, which is now a preferred feminist framework to address how complex and multiple social locations inform any actor’s perspective. Intersectionality resists essentializing body-subjects based on sex/gender and allows for the inclusion of many possible configurations of experience and subjectivity. The result is heteroglossic; that is, the local and situated character of embodied knowledge results in the multiple and conflicting nature of epistemic truths. Despite Haraway’s description of situated knowledge as materially embodied, feminist thought has, admittedly, eschewed some aspects of the fleshly. Feminists thought has been heavily influenced by poststructuralism, with its emphasis on discourse and representation, and by a historical suspicion of biological materialism. Thus Wacquant’s warning against “fall[ing] back into the textual or hermeneutic vision of the social world” describes feminism as well as it does sociology. Nonetheless, feminists have explicitly addressed the limits of representation, and also engaged with pragmatism, phenomenology, and theories of affect to address how social structures can become embodied through feeling and intercorporeality. They address the sorts of questions Wacquant identifies as carnal: How do embodied practices and skills inform individual and collective identities? How do stigmas and vulnerabilities shape embodied knowledges? To some degree, they even address how social structures are enfolded into the body’s “perceptual grids, sensorimotor capacities, emotional proclivities, and indeed desire itself.” Most helpfully, the feminist literature has grappled with many of the methodological and ethical questions raised by Wacquant’s call for enactive ethnography. These include the aforementioned risks of essentializing body-subjects, the impediments to researchers’ ability to experience the world as their subjects do, the limits of empathy and shared, visceral understanding, and the need to grasp alterity, or irreducible differences that exist even within seemingly collective experiences. Thus when Wacquant notes the remarkability of a petite, white, female researcher gaining access to the world of “hulking black ex-convicts,” he rightly insists that the knowledge she generates from her observant participation is selective and situated. Feminist thought has much to say about this selectivity and situatedness, and can help to elucidate the gendered, racialized, and classed dynamics of research practices and knowledge claims. 1

The insight, in fact, came to Smith partly through her participation in feminist consciousness raising groups. For Smith, “The Cartesian subject escapes the body, hence escaping the limitations of the local historical particularities of time, place, and relationship. When we began with our experiences as women, however, we were always returning to ourselves and to each other as subjects in our bodies” (1992, 89). Smith drew from Marxism and Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology to situate embodiment in an institutional context. She argued that men could partake in abstract rationality, the dominant logic of the public sphere, by relying on women’s labor to take care of bodily needs, while their location in the domestic sphere meant that women had no choice but to attend to the everyday, actual, practical constraints of living. Nancy Hartstock (1983) argued from a Marxist-feminist perspective that men and women are differently positioned in relations of ruling through the gendered division of labor, which gives them divergent experiences and vantage points. Iris Marion Young (1990) argued that bodily engagement with the world enacts social differences, and thus there is no generic, ungendered phenomenological body. Later feminist phenomenologists address the differences that not only gender, but also race and sexuality make to perception and embodied experience more broadly (Ahmed 2006; Alcoff 2006).

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If the feminist social sciences anticipated carnal sociology, Wacquant’s argument is more exceptionally marked by his willingness to take up the body as a biological system embedded in its environmental context. The carnal sociology he describes, to be sure, is not only one of flesh and blood, but also of nervous systems. The works he cites of Damasio, Lakoff and Johnson, Varela, Chemero, and Clark each ground carnality in neural representations, sensorimotor systems, and other neurobiological correlates of perception, feeling and thinking. Embodied mind theories are not monolithic—they variously address memory and emotion, the sensorimotor system, enactive perception, and the use of cognitive prosthetics, for example. Collectively, though, they argue that the mind is not abstract and symbolically representational, but rather material and embrained, while being irreducible to any organ or system. The mind is dependent upon “the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities” (Varela et al. 1991, 172), which “are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context’” (173). In the context of neurocognitive science, embodied mind theories are offered partly as a counter to neuroreductionism (as in Alva Noe’s “You are Not Your Brain” [2009]). In the context of social theory, they are often aimed at rationalist or representationalist accounts of the subject, because they address mechanisms of cognition below or before, or even without, symbols and abstractions (as in Lakoff and Johnson’s claim that “there is no poststructural person” [1999, 5]). We need interdisciplinarity to better grasp embodiment, and this corpus is particularly amenable to sociological engagement. In fact, for my discussion it is also relevant to note its amenability with feminist approaches, which is perhaps not too surprising given what I said above. Miriam Solomon (2007) argues that feminist and neurocognitive ideas of the embodied mind are not only compatible, but can even be counted as part of a broad transdisciplinary intellectual movement advocating situated cognition. The term situated here refers to the embeddedness of “representations of the world, learning, memory, planning, action and linguistic meaning in the body’s environment, conceptual structures, tools and social arrangements” (413). Solomon argues that feminist insights (including Smith’s and Haraway’s) can extend what gets included as situatedness, such as the relations of power that affect experiences and lives. (Note that in Solomon’s account, feminism does the work of attending to social inequality, the stuff also of sociological inquiry). But while feminist and neurocognitively-minded efforts to address embodiment have a lot in common, Solomon obscures a serious rub, one that I think has relevance for sociologists seeking to incorporate this literature. Chris Shilling (2003) has described how naturalized perspectives commonly assume a universal model of the body, and treat outliers as abnormal, pathological, or less developed in some way. The embodiment that appears in neurocognitive, naturalized philosophy is often (but not always) tied to a generic, ideal model of the body, or its difference is treated as a special case that can put normal embodiment into relief (Martin 2000; Scully 2008; Bluhm et al. 2012; Protevi 2009, 2013; Pitts-Taylor 2013, 2014 and 2013, 2014, forthcoming). Some of this work conceptualizes both cognitive processes and knowing agents as radically relational, and thus as wide open for thinking about race, gender, class, dis/ability and other differences in embodied experience. John Protevi (2013) makes such a case for Varela et al. (1991), whose account of enactive perception sees body-minds as relationally open, creating their own “micro-worlds,” but also marked by the traces that experience leaves in its wake. At the same time, efforts to explain cognition in phylogenetic terms can have the effect of obliterating such onto-epistemic multiplicity. For example, in their debate over multiple realizability, contemporary philosophers of mind are concerned to address whether the same cognitive outcome can result from different bodily forms. Andy Clark (2008) notes that Lakoff and Johnson, Noe and others claim an embodied realism that depends upon physiological

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universals, and emphasizes biological constraints on thought.2 Clark’s extended functionalism, by contrast, requires no particular kind of body. He argues instead for epistemic commonality across different configurations of body-minds and worlds. My point in mentioning this is not only that neurocognitive accounts of the embodied mind vary in their ideas of the body and cognition, but also that sociologists will have something to say in these debates. To what extent are physiology and motor schema universal? What role should morphological variances and dis/abilities play in theorizing the flesh and blood, and nervous systems? When, and how, do experiences make a trace, and do they do so intergenerationally? Are precognitive processes fully distinct from higher-order cognition, and can symbolic meanings ever make their way into them? There is a lot for sociologists to consider. The rub I mentioned between feminist and neurocognitively-minded thought is relevant to such inquiry. Heidi Bluhm et al. have recently claimed that feminist thought on embodiment is “far ahead of mainstream philosophy” (2012, 8). This is, they say, because it is more social. If embodied mind theorists are concerned to debate the bodily requirements of epistemic universals, in feminist thought both bodies and their epistemic outcomes are treated as heterogeneous. Feminists have argued that an embrace of epistemic multiplicity is valuable not only as a corrective to scientific assumptions of objectivity, but also to challenge universalizing claims about human experience. As Helen Longino puts it, “with the embodiment of the subject, experience must be rethought, as it can no longer be understood as the parade of sense data whose character is the same for all perceivers” (2010, 734).3 Carnal sociology is not susceptible to the same criticisms; in fact, its ethnographic approach to embodiment would be a serious resource for naturalized philosophy. Sociologists beginning from the body do not assume the uniformity of either the body or epistemic experience. The point, rather, is to find the particularities in how minded bodies and worlds fit together, and to attend to the differences between the embodiment one begins with, and the one generated by acquiring the skills and competencies of others. Thus I would argue that naturalized philosophy needs carnal sociology, or at least enactive ethnography, as much as sociologists need to think in more fleshly terms. Yet the practice of “turning yourself into the phenomenon you are studying” must be particularly sensitive to the limits of the embodiment to be universal or collective, and should take into account hard-won feminist insights about these limits. As N. Katherine Hayles has written, “Embodiment can be destroyed but it cannot be replicated” (Hayles 1993, 91).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Orientations: Toward a queer phenomenology. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12(4): 543–574. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2006. Visible identities: Race, gender and the self. New York: Oxford University Press. Blackman, Lisa. 2012. Immaterial bodies: Affect, embodiment, mediation. London: Sage. Bluhm, Robyn, Anne Jaap Jacobson, and Heidi Lene Maibom (eds.). 2012. Neurofeminism: Issues at the intersection of feminist theory and cognitive science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2

For Lakoff and Johnson, while neural maps are learned, a biological body, with universal properties selected by evolution, makes them possible. Because they are based on human physiology, the range of basic human concepts is limited: “Our sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied interactions in the world” (1999, 5). Because they are neurally instantiated, conceptual systems cannot easily be changed. This is one reason why “we are not free to just think anything”—that is, “our conceptual systems are instantiated neurally in our brains in relatively fixed ways” (ibid). 3 Further, inequalities can generate cognitive and affective dissonance (Hemmings 2012), involving a sense of the fractured character of perception, feeling and knowing.

Qual Sociol Cerulo, Karen. 2010. Mining the intersections of cognitive sociology and neuroscience. Poetics 38: 115–132. Clark, Andy. 2008. Pressing the flesh: A tension in the study of the embodied, embedded mind? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXXVI(I): 37–59. Clough, Patricia. 2010. The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia, and bodies. In The affect theory reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, 206–228. Durham: Duke University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Harper Collins Connolly, William. 2010. A world of becoming. Durham: Duke University Press. Connolly, William. 2011. The complexity of intention. Critical Inquiry 37(4): 791–798. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–167. Crossley, Nick. 1996. Body-subject/body-power: Agency, inscription and control in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty. Body and Society 2(2): 99–116. Fuchs, Thomas. 2005. Overcoming dualism. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12(2): 115–117. Fuchs, Thomas. 2009. Embodied cognitive neuroscience and its consequences for psychiatry. Poiesis Prax, published online Jan 23 2009. Accessed Jan 1 2012 Fujimura, Joan. 2006. “Sex genes”: A critical sociomaterial approach to the politics and molecular genetics of sex determination. Signs 32(1): 49–82. Glannon, Walter. 2002. Depression as a mind-body problem. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 9(3): 243– 254. Glannon, Walter. 2009. Our brains are not us. Bioethics 23(6): 321–329. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599. Hartstock, Nancy. 1983. The feminist standpoint: Developing a specifically feminist historical materialism. In Discovering reality: Feminist perspectives on epistemology and methodology, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, 283–310. New York: Kluwer. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1993. Virtual bodies and flickering signifiers. October 66: 69–91. Hemmings, Clare. 2012. Affective solidarity: feminist reflexivity and political transformation. Feminist Theory 13(2): 147–161. Rouse, Joseph. 2009. Barad’s Feminist Naturalism. Hypatia 19(1): 142–61. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy In The Flesh. Kindle Edition Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why has critique run out of steam?: From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry 30(2): 225–248. Lizardo, Omar. 2014, Forthcoming. Beyond the comtean schema: The sociology of culture and cognition versus cognitive social science. Sociological Forum 29 (4) Longino, Helen. 2010. Feminist epistemology at Hypatia’s 25th anniversary. Hypatia 25(4): 733–741. Martin, Emily. 2000. Mind/body problems. American Ethnologist 27(3): 569–590. Noe, Alva. 2009. Out of Our Heads: You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. Hill and Wang Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. 2013. I feel your pain: Embodied knowledges and situated neurons. Hypatia: a Journal of Feminist Philosophy 28(4): 852–869. Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. 2014. The mind in the body: Feminist and neurocognitive perspectives on embodiment. In NeuroCultures, neurogenderings, ed. Schmitz Sigrid and Hoppner Grit, 187–201. Zaglossus: Referat Genderforschung, University of Vienna. Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. Forthcoming. The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics. Duke University Press. Protevi, John. 2009. Political affect: Connecting the social and the somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Protevi, John. 2013. Life, war, earth: Delueze and the sciences. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Radley, Alan. 1995. The elusory body and social constructionist theory. Body & Society 1(2): 3–23. Rose, Nikolas. 2006. The politics of life itself: Medicine, power and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scully, Jackie Leach. 2008. Disability bioethics: Moral bodies, moral difference. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Shilling, Chris. 2003. The body in social theory. London: Sage. Smith, Dorothy E. 1991. The conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Smith, Dorothy E. 1992. Sociology from women’s experience: A reaffirmation. Sociological Theory 10(1): 88– 98.

Qual Sociol Smith, Dorothy E. 1988. The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Solomon, Miriam. 2007. Situated cognition. In Philosophy of psychology and cognitive science, ed. Paul Thagard, 413–428. NY: Elesvier. Varela, Francesco, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT press. Watson, Sean. 1998. The neurobiology of sorcery: Deleuze and Guattari’s brain. Body & Society 4(4): 23–45. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Throwing like a girl: And other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Victoria Pitts-Taylor is Professor and Chair of Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University. She is author of three books, including In the Flesh: the Cultural Politics of Body Modification (Palgrave 2003), Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture (Rutgers 2007), and the forthcoming The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics (Duke University Press). Her books and articles address the body and embodiment in relation to culture, medicine, science and technology.