Episode 43 Bye bye body metaphor

There’s a new binary opposition in town! Instead of thinking, as we have been in Structured Visions, about the individual in relation to society, I’ve proposed we begin to think in terms of two types of body. The human body and the social body. The self, as I said in Episode 42, attaches to one or the other of these bodies. More often than not, in my experience analysing conversational data, it attaches to the social body, and the human body ends up oppressed.

Hold on! I can hear you saying. Can we really assume those terms have the same conceptual status? I mean, the human body is a real thing. The social body’s just a metaphor.

To which I reply, fair enough. Let’s play with the idea that they’re both metaphors.

To which you might say, how can the human body be a metaphor?

Good question. I take you back to a time in my personal memory when I didn’t have access to the concept ‘body’. And then to a time when I was imagining bodies lying over the ocean. When the idea of the body for me was similar to Yeats’s idea of ‘an aged man … A tattered coat upon a stick’.

But it might be even more fun to play with the idea that both the human body and the social body are real.

But Jodie, how can the social body be anything but a metaphor? How can the social body be real? I can’t touch it, like I can the human body.

To which I reply, let’s stop associating ‘real’ things with things you can touch. Let’s think in terms of images and prototypes. Let’s think about Beethoven composing when he can’t hear the music he’s writing, and three-year-old Aaron picturing a tree. These aren’t metaphors: they’re images of things that haven’t yet emerged into the world.

Let’s think of the social body as an image of society that hasn’t yet emerged into the world. This way of thinking makes it possible to identify many social bodies, many of them still at the prototype stage – some of them not oppressive. Some of them not bullies. Some of them in a mutually beneficial relationship with the human body.