Event Title
The body as site of pleasure and surplus value
Start Date
27-6-2010 1:00 PM
End Date
27-6-2010 2:30 PM
Description
This presentation is part of the Value and the Body track.
Natural sciences and epistemologies are narrations about nature and knowledge, especially about the knowledge of nature and the nature of knowledge. In these narrations we are also told about the nature and meaning of social relations. Biology as the science of life, most prominently, tells about the function of human intimate relations, as one of the most fascinating but never fully understandable sites of life, the one which escapes logical structuring and causal explanation, the domain of poems and novels. Insofar as human intimate relations are based on erotic attraction and interaction they have always been both a matter of high delight and devastating trauma as well as a matter of economic value and political control. In this context, biology as the science about life has taken a crucial and critical position in explaining processes of and between bodies within changing but powerful economic and political regimes.
In my research project on “the erotic in historical accounts of science” I am studying the historical interconnections of science and the erotic. I analyse these interconnections as a multifaceted relationship of “natural” explications for cultural processes on the epistemic level of science. The significance of the erotic in connection with the development of categories of gender and race in the discourse of and around the emerging European natural sciences in the era of colonialism and gender segregation is in need of systematic clarification. This is particularly the case if we want to better understand the contemporary meaning of life sciences on the one hand and erotic desires and pleasures, practises and relations on the other hand. The leading hypothesis of this study is that the changes, specifications and regulations of the meaning of science are deeply interwoven with the changes, specifications and regulations of the erotic during this period. The goal of this research project is to find out in detail how these two important social fields were interwoven, to look for interdependencies and to demonstrate resulting attitudes and cultural beliefs.
The paper addresses the following questions: What kind of stories are told, and which is the way they are legitimised? What do they lay out and what do they miss? One part of critically work is to deconstruct the stories that natural sciences of the of the body tell, but the other is to change the stories or to tell different stories. As an example for an attempt to do so, I will focus on Catherine Gallagher's work on Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew.
The story about bodies in the nineteenth century, that Catherine Gallagher tells us in her very illuminating essay ”The Body versus the Social Body in the works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew” (1987) is a rather devastating one: She points out to a growing tendency in the political literature of the nineteenth century to see healthy individual bodies as a problem for the social body, which means for her the state. Until then, following Gallagher, it had been, for two millennia a sign for the health of the larger social body. This meant especially that ”rapid reproduction [was] simply an index of a healthy state”. (83) She shows this development of the discourse mainly by two texts on population of 1798 and 1861.
Gallagher illustrates the Victorian disgust of the human body with what she calls the ”maybe most famous Victorian work of social investigation” (90), a book published by Henry Mayhew in the year 1861 with the telling title ”London Labour and the London Poor; A Cyclopedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work”. In her view the healthy and strong individual body became a social problem and opposed to the healthy social body as well in Mayhew’s book and in society as a whole. Following Gallagher, the main target of Mayhew are the ”urban wanderers” he could see in the street and on the marketplace. They become the symbol of the nomadic subjects, who earn their living not out of productive labour in the growing industries but out of the circulation of goods, products and services, mainly food: the prostitutes, the street-sellers and street-performers. Mayhew describes them as the ones profiting from productive work without contributing. They embody in Gallagher's analysis the contradiction and the tension between productive labour and circulation of exchange value on the marketplace. And the social body is seen as suffering from an overgrowth of its system of circulation: ”Far from elevating the body to the standard of economic and social value, Mayhew’s physicalization of the marketplace creates the fear that society is in danger of reducing human value to its most primitive biological needs.” (104) She quotes Mayhew describing his protagonists in the struggle to live in the street: ”Mind, heart, soul, are all absorbed in the belly.” (43/104)
In her essay Gallagher argues that this what Mayhew denounces as the most primitive biological needs a society has to control was the same as Thomas Malthus celebrated more than 60 years earlier as the most exquisite human pleasure.
The body as site of pleasure and surplus value
This presentation is part of the Value and the Body track.
Natural sciences and epistemologies are narrations about nature and knowledge, especially about the knowledge of nature and the nature of knowledge. In these narrations we are also told about the nature and meaning of social relations. Biology as the science of life, most prominently, tells about the function of human intimate relations, as one of the most fascinating but never fully understandable sites of life, the one which escapes logical structuring and causal explanation, the domain of poems and novels. Insofar as human intimate relations are based on erotic attraction and interaction they have always been both a matter of high delight and devastating trauma as well as a matter of economic value and political control. In this context, biology as the science about life has taken a crucial and critical position in explaining processes of and between bodies within changing but powerful economic and political regimes.
In my research project on “the erotic in historical accounts of science” I am studying the historical interconnections of science and the erotic. I analyse these interconnections as a multifaceted relationship of “natural” explications for cultural processes on the epistemic level of science. The significance of the erotic in connection with the development of categories of gender and race in the discourse of and around the emerging European natural sciences in the era of colonialism and gender segregation is in need of systematic clarification. This is particularly the case if we want to better understand the contemporary meaning of life sciences on the one hand and erotic desires and pleasures, practises and relations on the other hand. The leading hypothesis of this study is that the changes, specifications and regulations of the meaning of science are deeply interwoven with the changes, specifications and regulations of the erotic during this period. The goal of this research project is to find out in detail how these two important social fields were interwoven, to look for interdependencies and to demonstrate resulting attitudes and cultural beliefs.
The paper addresses the following questions: What kind of stories are told, and which is the way they are legitimised? What do they lay out and what do they miss? One part of critically work is to deconstruct the stories that natural sciences of the of the body tell, but the other is to change the stories or to tell different stories. As an example for an attempt to do so, I will focus on Catherine Gallagher's work on Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew.
The story about bodies in the nineteenth century, that Catherine Gallagher tells us in her very illuminating essay ”The Body versus the Social Body in the works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew” (1987) is a rather devastating one: She points out to a growing tendency in the political literature of the nineteenth century to see healthy individual bodies as a problem for the social body, which means for her the state. Until then, following Gallagher, it had been, for two millennia a sign for the health of the larger social body. This meant especially that ”rapid reproduction [was] simply an index of a healthy state”. (83) She shows this development of the discourse mainly by two texts on population of 1798 and 1861.
Gallagher illustrates the Victorian disgust of the human body with what she calls the ”maybe most famous Victorian work of social investigation” (90), a book published by Henry Mayhew in the year 1861 with the telling title ”London Labour and the London Poor; A Cyclopedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work”. In her view the healthy and strong individual body became a social problem and opposed to the healthy social body as well in Mayhew’s book and in society as a whole. Following Gallagher, the main target of Mayhew are the ”urban wanderers” he could see in the street and on the marketplace. They become the symbol of the nomadic subjects, who earn their living not out of productive labour in the growing industries but out of the circulation of goods, products and services, mainly food: the prostitutes, the street-sellers and street-performers. Mayhew describes them as the ones profiting from productive work without contributing. They embody in Gallagher's analysis the contradiction and the tension between productive labour and circulation of exchange value on the marketplace. And the social body is seen as suffering from an overgrowth of its system of circulation: ”Far from elevating the body to the standard of economic and social value, Mayhew’s physicalization of the marketplace creates the fear that society is in danger of reducing human value to its most primitive biological needs.” (104) She quotes Mayhew describing his protagonists in the struggle to live in the street: ”Mind, heart, soul, are all absorbed in the belly.” (43/104)
In her essay Gallagher argues that this what Mayhew denounces as the most primitive biological needs a society has to control was the same as Thomas Malthus celebrated more than 60 years earlier as the most exquisite human pleasure.