BODY, POWER AND IDEOLOGY

Introduction

There is no obvious connection between the body as a category and the categories of power and ideology. The obscurity of this connection is the symptom of a not so hidden assumption regarding the 'body'. A belief – that the body is only a concrete, immediate presence in three dimensional space – prevents the understanding of the links between the body and the ostensibly abstract notions of power and ideology. This book does not rest content with the knowledge that power and ideology are as palpably concrete as any other formation. Nor does it constrain itself to the insight (acquired through decades of painstaking critical scholarship now available in monographs, articles and commentaries) that the body is always and already mediated through categories of meanings and power. If mediations of power and ideology produce the body as something unmediated, then some form of ideological work has to be performed in order to produce this leap from the mediate to the immediate, to make the shift from the abstract to the concrete. This book tries to trace the itineraries of this work. It tries to observe and make visible the processes at work in producing the concreteness of the body from the abstract workings of meanings. One way of doing this is to describe different concrete modes of producing the category of the body through differentiating it from other categories like death and sexual difference. I try to do that in the following chapters. In the present chapter, I indicate certain ways of conceiving power and ideology that make it possible to speak of their role in producing the 'body'. The ideas of power and ideology I thus deploy are counter-intuitive yet, as I hope to show, possible logical extensions of the classical enunciations of these notions.

In philosophical parlance, reification (or hypostasis) is the process in which abstract categories seem to be concrete. If one is ready to question the security of the division between seemingness and real existence, reification may very well be used as a category that makes sense of the production of concreteness from abstraction. As would probably be evident from the later sections, I have such a use of reification in mind when I try to describe the production of the 'body' through deployments of power and ideology. There is here a congealment, a transformation which is akin to the processes of commodity fetishism at work. This association will appear later in the chapter. For now, it is sufficient to point at the possibilities opened up by the use of my approach to the question. One such possibility is that of addressing the problem of embodiment of knowledge. Is embodiment to be thought of as a positioning of knowledge processes in the body, where the body is extraneous to those processes? If not, there has to be some commensurability between the register of the body and the register of knowledge. Reificatory processes let one think of such transformations across registers.

To think about 'embodied knowledges' as ways of knowing that might be part of the move to resist dominant modes of thinking, one has to think through the very important category of hegemony. Thinking about 'knowledge' and ways of knowing in terms of hegemony indicates a concern with the relations of power that act in the process of knowing. To speak about 'power' or fields of force active in the processes of knowledge is to question the notion of a value-free neutral knowledge as a 'view from nowhere'. As such, to go into an analysis of power relations in a discussion on knowledge would seem to be an act of pre-supposing one's conclusion – assuming what one has to prove – of the implication of power in knowledge. In this chapter, what I am dealing with is the multiple ways in which processes of power may act between two or more spaces. This conceptual exercise is needed to unravel the workings of power in processes that seem to avoid hierarchy and avowedly work in a neutral setting. To discern the gradients of hierarchy operating in confirmedly disinterested spaces like that of knowledge, one has to forge tools perceptive enough to sense the different and complex ways in which differentials of power can work. One has to remember that this conceptual excursus, of making oneself aware of the complexities of the hegemonic process, is necessary but not sufficient to affirm the workings of these processes in the ways of knowing. This encounter with hegemony is but a prequel to a countering of hegemony. Such a countering may not take the form of a charting of counter-hegemonic moves. Instead, it might call for a responsibility in the face of the violence of violations. I will go back to these questions at the end of the book.

Power and ideology are concepts that purportedly belong to two different theoretical narratives. These two narratives, as the received wisdom in humanities disciplines goes, do not meet. Foucault, thinking in terms of power, seems to be suspicious of using ideology as a productive theoretical category. For a Zizek on the other hand, the notion of power only serves to blunt and dissipate the theoretical rigor and effectivity of the tensions in ideology critique. In this chapter, I argue that the two can productively be used to complement each other. But for that, each of the notions has to be thought of in a certain register. Not that these registers are novelties that I invent to articulate the conjunction of the two categories. As I hope to show, these axes were there – necessary to the very structure of the notions – in the classical articulations of these concepts. Yet, as is the wont of many categories, even attentive later enunciations often passed by these registers. The ontology of the subject is the register where I see the notions of power and ideology interacting to produce 'hauntology', the displaced ontology of the specter. This in its turn enables one to think of possibilities of change in the repetitive structures of the subject, a politics that takes into account the relations of power and the working of ideologemes in performative enunciations.

The question of the body emerges at this juncture. 'Body' and 'subject', evidently, are not interchangeable categories. The 'subject' is often treated as disembodied in the philosophical literature. The 'body' is oftener treated either as an object of intervention or as the passive receptacle – the object that contains – of the subject/soul/mind. These notions of the body and the subject are parts of a theoretical structure that I intend to interrogate. As already stated, I tend to figure ways in which the universality of knowledge claims – claims that pre-suppose a clear distinction between the body and the mind or the subject and the object – could be questioned. As such, my intentions are to probe the possibilities of thinking the body and...