Episode 44 We got everything back

Today I explore in a bit more detail these two potentially provocative premises: that the social body is real, and that it hasn’t yet been formed. Let’s take them each in turn:

We can spend all day under the influence of our favourite substances (beer, wine, Haribo sweets) what it means for something to be ‘real’, but for my purposes ‘real’ is useful. If I decide the social body is something that’s real, that I don’t know much about yet, then I get to do research about it with a spirit of curiosity and discovery. Curiosity and discovery are more fun for me than argumentation and debate – though there’s plenty of room for argumentation and debate as well (preferably under the influence of our favourite substances).

I’m saying here that no one person will be able to describe the social body, because it is still in an incipient state. It’s emerging, it’s full of possibilities, and none of them have fully concretised yet. So the best we can do is to look at the many prototypes of the social body that are in the process of emerging. For me, that means I’m looking through a microscope at seemingly insignificant bits of language use, like snippets of conversation. This conversation between Maryam, Beth, Andrew and me is one example.

My claim is that the grammatical constructions in this conversation reveal an emergent social body. The body has unique, differentiated constituents – individuals – who are in relation to each other and in relation to the social body. In addition, we can see the social body being wounded here, and we can track how it organises its constituents in order to bring about healing.

Read my forthcoming book with Palgrave to learn more about what I’ve taken from Discipline and Punish: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.