Anatomising Embodiment and Organization Theory

Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory Karen Dale

ANATOMISING EMBODIMENT AND ORGANISATION THEORY

Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory Karen Dale

# Karen Dale 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP OLP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0±333±67465±0 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dale, Karen. Anatomising embodiment and organization theory/Karen Dale. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0±333±67465±0 1. Organization. 2. Industrial organization. 3. Body, Human. I. Title. HD31 .D185 2000 302.3 5Ðdc21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

00-059123

This book is written in memory of and dedicated to my sister and friend, Suzy Dale, 1969±96

Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Body Politics

1

1

The Body and Organisation Studies

8

2

Written On the Body: Social Theory and the Body

32

3

Bodily Knowledge: An Approach to `Embodied Subjectivity'

57

4

The Scalpel: An Introduction to the `Anatomising Urge'

83

5

Under the Knife: Anatomising Organisation Theory

114

6

The Mirror

153

7

Replicating Organisation

174

8

Conclusions

203

Notes

216

Bibliography

227

Index

246

vii

List of Illustrations I.1

Arno Breker working on `Prometheus', 1937

2

I.2

`Magic Wand Cartoon/Kimono Burns Tokyo/Nagasaki' by Paul Graham, 1991

6

1.1

Title page from Julius Casserius, Tabulae Anatomicae (1627)

24

4.1

Valverde, self-flayed figure, from Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano (1556)

89

6.1

Ultrasound picture

166

8.1

Flowering foetus, Spigelius, De formato foeto (1627)

214

viii

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my colleagues Martin Corbett, Linda Dickens and Karen Legge, who commented on endless drafts of the text, giving me the benefit of their insights and expertise. It is important for me to acknowledge the contribution of several people who shaped the course of this work, often without them being aware of their influence! Thus I am grateful to Sonia Liff for asking difficult questions, Hugh Willmott for pointing me to Bauman's Modernity and Ambivalence and Nick Crossley's work; Rolland Munro for comments and discussions on the chapter in Ideas of Difference; and Carolyn Steedman for lending me the Figlio paper. Zelah Pengilley and Stephen Rutt at the publishers have been most encouraging and helpful. I would also like to thank Heather Ward for friendship and for her astute political and personal insight. My family is very supportive about my work, so I thank Lilian Slocombe; Duncan, Gavin, Claire and Ellie Dale; my precious nephew Matthew Dale; Clare, Anna and Katy Burrell; and particularly my parents, Lilian Payne and Howard Payne, for their love. My mother continues to be my inspiration and the constant rock on which I can build. Although my father died in 1987, well before this project was conceived, the memory of his encouragement still sustains me. My partner Gibson Burrell has continued to be enthusiastic about the book and to believe in my ability. He provided the practical possibility for me to finish it, but much more than that he inspires creativity and gives me happiness throughout our life together. Thanks are especially due to Rosie and Owain for lighting up my life and reminding me that there are more important things in it than writing. Ka r e n Da l e In relation to the pictures, Natalie Rudd at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool and Michelle Minto of the Wellcome Institute Library have provided invaluable assistance in tracking down the Paul Graham photograph and the Valverde print respectively. The author and the publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce the illustrations: AKG, London, for Arno Breker's Prometheus; Tate Gallery, London, for Magic Wand Cartoon/ ix

x

Acknowledgements

Kimono Burns Tokyo/Nagasaki by Paul Graham (1991); the British Library for the title page of Julius Casserius Tabulae Anatomicae (1627) and Spigelius De formato foeto (1627); and the Wellcome Institute Library, London, for the Valverde self-flayed figure from Historia de la Composicion del Cuerpo Humano (1556).

Introduction: Body Politics In a recent exhibition, `Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930±1945', at the Hayward Gallery,1 contrasting images of the body forcefully brought home to me the significance of the social, historical and cultural construction of the body and the meanings attached to its representation. Two statues in particular caught my eye through their different readings of the body. The first was an idealised male form, nude, drawn from mythology ± Prometheus returning with fire from the gods. With bulging muscles, the sinews marked out in detail, and taut stomach, he carried a torch held high above his head, his bearing suggesting dynamism, one moment of which had been captured in the image. The other statue was a male form clothed from the waist downwards, a miner, his arms and chest obviously strong and developed, but the muscle tone was not emphasised as in the first statue. He carried a drill connected to a hose, which was draped over one of his shoulders. His was a stationary posture, of stillness after exhaustingly physical exertion. The first was a product of Nazi Germany (`Prometheus', Arno Breker, a 1937 bronze: see figure I.1), the symbolism of the pinnacle of Aryan perfection which so emphasised the body ± the outward expression of genetic `purity' (an influential book linking body types to the notions of racial purity was Nordic Beauty by Paul SchultzeNaumberg,2 1937). The second was from the former USSR (`Miner', Sarra Lebedeva, another 1937 bronze), indicating the subject of the worker ± here portrayed as an ordinary man, but with heroic qualities echoing the vaulted achievement of Stakhanov3 who produced fourteen times the target output in one shift. The body of each becomes the vehicle of the cultural values embodied in the representations. But these do not merely remain cultural artefacts in the sense of a realm which is apart from the social, material world. They do not even simply stand as propaganda for two particular political regimes. The bodies shown in these statues are implicated in very real social and historical actions: the systematic destruction or discipline of bodies which did not correspond to the ideal in each. Indeed, Elaine Scarry (1985) argues that the state is imprinted on to the body in such a powerful way that only war can unmake that material memory through the acute disruption of the body ± the scarring, 1

2

Figure I.1 Source:

Arno Breker working on `Prometheus', 1937

AKG, London

Introduction: Body Politics

3

maiming and ultimate dissolution of the body through death ± that the weapons of war accomplish. The multiplicity and political potency of images such as these provoke doubt about the predominant assumption of the body as the natural biological material on which all human society and culture is built. Over the last two decades or so of the twentieth century there was an outpouring of academic work on `the body' throughout the social sciences and humanities. A major theme of these studies is that the body is not ahistorical and asocial material, but that it is, in a variety of ways, socially and culturally constructed; indeed, that `we invent the body and the nature which suit our world' (Romanyshyn, 1989, p. 111). In relation to the bronze statues, these particular constructions are also, significantly, of the male body. (Of course, Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR had their own constructions of the female body, too, and other countries and regimes have different cultural representations of male and female bodies.) We might note that, despite their differences, these male bodies emphasise strength, endurance, dominance and the subordination of nature (respectively, fire or earth). In other words they incorporate characteristics which, in `western' cultures at any rate, are perceived as masculine. Yet I find that an interesting feature of both, in relation to the cultural construction of bodies, is the subordination ± or perhaps sublimation ± of the penis (although, importantly, not the phallus)4 itself. Prometheus is shown in his uncovered male splendour, but although unmistakably present the penis is the only part of him `at rest' ± here masculinity is put to use for other means, for the achievement of `progress', which the torch represents. In the figure of the miner the penis appears to have been subsumed by the large drill ± the symbol of work. It might even be interpreted that the length of hose over the miner's shoulder is much more significant than the tired phallic symbol of the drill. Here the hose becomes a symbol of a massive `vas deferens', the potential for an abundant and fertile ejaculation, but here in relation to the libido being subverted into labour power (Burrell, 1992). This indicates a pervasive occlusion of (sexual) reproduction ± associated with the body, women and the private sphere, by and into production, associated with the rational organisation of resources and the economic sphere. I shall return to this theme in Chapters 6 and 7. Here I am reminded of Cynthia Cockburn's observation that `Men in patriarchy castrate men, literally and symbolically, in the interests of phallocracy' (1991, p. 8). Men have to subordinate some aspects of their masculinity ± emotional, sexual and individual ± to the demands

4

Introduction: Body Politics

of another masculine construction. This is production: the rational organisation of resources and people. `Western'5 knowledge, science and the organisation of production are all closely connected, and they all have a common foundation in a particular conception of rationality, one which has been separated off from the body, emotions, and women (Lloyd, 1984; Seidler, 1994). The dream of the Scientific Revolution, in the words of its great populariser, Francis Bacon, was to achieve `the dominion of man over the universe' (Bacon, 1964 [1653], p. 62, emphasis added). I stress the masculine in this for, even though `man' may be taken to refer to humankind in Bacon's statement of intent, many writers have discussed how the culture of science has developed in opposition to nature, which became not only the object of scientific investigation, but also open to its exploitation and `reengineering' (see, for example, Plumwood, 1993; Keller, 1992). Science becomes associated with the masculine principle; nature with the feminine, and this relationship of opposites plays out the social relations between the genders from the Scientific Revolution onwards (see, for example, Jordanova, 1989). Bacon, again, epitomises this attitude when he says of science: `I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave' (Bacon, 1964 [1653], p. 62). These relations often become focused on the female body. Jordanova discusses the significance of the nineteenth-century statue in the Paris medical faculty, `Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science': `It implies that science is a masculine viewer, who is anticipating full knowledge of nature, which is represented as the naked female body' (1989, p. 87). In the statues at the Hayward exhibition, we see the other side of this particular coin: the masculine exploitation of nature, seen as the progress of civilisation. The masculine6 has also become associated with the rational ± where reason is dissociated from emotion, located in the mind, which is dissociated (via Cartesianism) from the body. As Bacon's statements indicate, the purpose of `western' science and rationality was not simply to gather information, but to put this knowledge to use to manipulate the world for the benefit of mankind [sic].7 The binding together of knowledge and its use has been developed to such an extent that Hilary Rose has characterised their relationship as indivisible `technoscience' ± `that iron-bound marriage of science and technology in the West' (1994, p. 11). Indeed, faced with social science critiques of scientific work, the main line of counterargument is `but it works'! The overlap of laboratory and factory leads to important questions about the `production of science'. As will be

Introduction: Body Politics

5

discussed further below, science can no longer be thought of as pure knowledge, disconnected from its methods of material production. Although many of us retain images of the lone genius at work in their home discovering the secrets of the universe in a moment of inspiration, craft production has given way to `big science' ± the amassing of huge resources, research teams, grants and sponsorship, and large institutions, with all this entails in terms of organisation, formalised relations, procedures and hierarchies. Management has entered the laboratory in no uncertain terms. Thus there is a cluster of relations around the development of science, industrialism and organisation that centres around the discourse of rationality. And the applications of this rational principle have been argued variously to have been the basis of the managerial `success' of the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989) and of the scientific `success' of the atomic bomb (Easlea, 1983). In each of these, bodies are destroyed systematically by the powers of reason and science. Thus the triumphant masculine bodies of the statues with which we started might be seen rather differently with historical hindsight, after the `progress' of five years of world war, the pogroms of Germany and Russia, and the attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This brings to mind another image of the body that is both powerful and painful. Again, an art gallery ± this time the Tate in Liverpool (see Figure I.2). Here is an image of a woman's body: the upper back and back of the head. The back is naked, with irregular striped patterns on it evoking a colourful garment ± the burn marks on a survivor from Nagasaki, reflecting the pattern of her kimono, the traditional dress symbolising Japanese femininity. The contrast and yet identification between the `choice' of adornment and the `adornment' of violence and destruction is stark. The body is subjected; the subject is objectified. In some ways it seems that it is not significant whether this image is of a woman or not: those who suffer in an atomic attack are hardly discriminated in terms of gender. Nor, for that matter, are women the sole targets for the commercialisation and commodification of the body (see, for example, Mansfield and McGinn, 1993; Morgan, 1993). However, in so many ways, women's bodies are the subject of stringent discipline from `inside' and `outside'.8 For example, control and selfcontrol of women's bodies can be seen in terms of space, geography and the built environment (for example, Sibley, 1995; Wajcman, 1991); through dieting and fashion (for example, Bordo, 1989); through discourses around sexuality as well as harassment (for example, Ring, 1994; Collinson and Collinson, 1989, 1996); in medical discourses and

6

Introduction: Body Politics

Figure I.2 `Magic Wand Cartoon/Kimono Burns Tokyo/Nagasaki', Paul Graham, 1991 Source:

Tate Gallery, London.

1994; Collinson and Collinson, 1989, 1996); in medical discourses and through control of childbirth (for example, Martin, 1987; Lupton, 1994); in public life, employment and politics (for example, Cockburn, 1991). In other words, although the dualisms female/male, nature/ science and body/mind are discursive devices, they still have their own material consequences. The female body is marginalised and subordinated. *

*

*

*

This discussion may appear to be only tangential to organisation theory and modern organisations; bringing totalitarian regimes, war and death into view may even seem a little over-dramatic. Yet I want to suggest that the themes sketched out here, centred around these dualisms of body/mind, male/female and nature/science, offer a different dimension to understanding the development of the discipline of organisation theory. In this study, I argue that the body is an `absent presence' in organisational theory (see Shilling, 1993, on sociology).

Introduction: Body Politics

7

However, this book is not simply about adding the body back on to an understanding of organisations. The objective, rather, is to understand how particular assumptions about the body have shaped the area of organisation studies, as part of a wider tradition of `western' knowledge and rationality, and as part of the development of social theory. I now turn to examining this objective in more detail.

1 The Body and Organisation Studies ...friends, we are organized bodies. (Saint-Simon, 1966 [1813], pp. 28±37) The aim of this book is to examine the interrelationship between the (human) body, embodiment and the development of organisation studies as a disciplinary field. Obviously, the body is present in organisations and in organisation studies ± after all, how could workers, even managers, do anything without bodies! It is argued here, however, that on the explicit level the body is not theorised and rarely seen as being relevant to the development of knowledge about organisations. Yet, while the body is not theorised in its own right, the discipline is riddled with implicit assumptions about the nature of the body, which have significantly shaped the course and approach of organisation studies. These assumptions affect even some of its fundamental preoccupations, such as the conceptualisation of `the organisation' and dominant perspectives on the relationship between people and organisations. Thus it is in the sense of an `absent presence' (see Shilling, 1993, on sociology) that the human body has been influential in organisation studies. In this book I intend to demonstrate how these assumptions about the body have shaped the discipline and draw out some of the consequences for the study of organisations. However, none of the elements of this aim is uncontroversial, so it is necessary to examine them before we turn to the relationship between them in more detail.

`THE BODY' AND `EMBODIMENT' It is a foundational argument of this book that bodies are constructed and lived differently and can be `known' in different ways. The discussion of bodily politics in the Introduction illustrates the specificity of bodies in their cultural and historical situations. Yet the most characteristic assumption of `western' cultures lower case is to denote `the body' as a singular definite article. This is a significant distinction, with material and social consequences, not merely a grammatical habit. The 8

The Body and Organisation Studies

9

assumptions incorporated into the notion of `the body' are those that have shaped and underpinned not only scientific theory, but also social science, philosophy and, indeed, organisation theory. Thus it is important to examine `the body' as a particular way of looking at the bodily experience of humans. `The body' is predominantly that body as known by biological and medical science. These forms of knowledge have constructed the body as an object in the world about which there can be objective knowledge of a universal kind. Physiological and anatomical differences are admitted, although the models that are created in biological science are predominantly generalised ones intended to be used despite differences. This creates a distinction between the `normalised' model of the body and potentially `abnormal' or `pathological' specific lived bodies. Where differences are acknowledged they tend to be assumed to be `natural', with the implication that these are `given' or biologically determined, and therefore immutable. `Western' science and medicine tend to understand the body in a particular way. They generally `anatomise' the body into distinct constituent parts and systems, trying to understand it explicitly as a series of structures that perform definite functions.1 The implications of understanding the body in this way form the basis of this work, since it is this body ± the body-as-organism ± that has been implicitly incorporated into organisation studies. This construction of the body entails a characteristic ontology and epistemology. In construing `the body' as a definite article it becomes a natural, universal given (assuming a realist ontology of the body, that is, that there is a `real' body which can be known objectively and neutrally), which can thus be understood as an object of natural science and its method (a positivist epistemology of the body ± that is, that knowledge of the body can be gained which explains and predicts its workings). Since it is a given object it is already made, rather than something in process. The body therefore tends to be seen as a fixed, stable state, with little emphasis on birth and death. As a singular article, `the body' is reduced to a normative type: it is neither specific nor lived. This reduces the significance of gender, race, age, and different or changing abilities. It is an implicitly neutered and normalised body. The basis for understanding the body as an object of knowledge is found most thoroughly worked out in the Cartesian separation of `mind', which is seen as the source of knowledge and reason, and `body', which becomes a passive, material container for the active

10

Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory

mind. Here lies the philosophical basis for seeing knowledge as being unconnected to the body, which can therefore become the object of the knowing mind. However, recent work in the social sciences, humanities and philosophy has questioned the notion of the body-as-organism that was constructed by the natural sciences. Biology can no longer simply be understood as an objective and `truthful' knowledge of the body. Biological metaphors have been used frequently in organisation studies, but these biological metaphors and models have been taken as objective science in the sense that they are understood to have a transparent relationship with the `real' world ± and body ± that they are taken to represent. Thus the use of biology as a resource for organisation theory needs to be reappraised critically from the perspective of the social studies of science, which argue that science is itself socially constructed, based on the consensus of the community, not cumulative but subject to disjunctures, and used as an ideological basis within society rather than being neutrally rational (see, for example, Kuhn, 1970; Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984; Latour and Woolgar, 1979). For example, Gilbert and Mulkay's (1984) study of biochemists analyses two different sets of discourse that scientists use about their work. They characterise these as the `empiricist' or official discourse, which stresses the objectivity and neutrality of science as a universal truth claim; and the `contingent' or social discourse, which recognises all the social and material factors that mean that `the operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not ``the given'' of experience but rather ``the collected with difficulty'' ' (Kuhn, 1970, p. 126). Significantly, it is the embodied nature of doing science that is written out in the final `inscription devices' (scientific books and papers), which Latour and Woolgar (1979) argue are the ultimate product of the laboratory. Yet in informal dialogue scientists are willing to debate the way that all scientific work departs from the ideal of the formal method: `there are all sorts of things that you don't know about, like the ``finger factor'', the local water, built-in skills, which you have taken for granted' (Gilbert and Mulkay 1984, p. 53). This points to the way that practical science is, as both studies comment, a craft skill in which lived experience and a `feel' for the work is often more important than theoretical knowledge. As another of Gilbert and Mulkay's biochemists remarks: ` ``recipe'' is the right word. It's like cooking' (1984, p. 54). Biological language has been shown to be infused with cultural ideology, such as the Cartesian legacy. For example, Lewontin, himself

The Body and Organisation Studies

11

a biologist, comments that: `Isolating the gene as the ``master molecule'' [and elevated above the complex system of chemical production to make other proteins] is another unconscious ideological commitment, one that places brains above brawn, mental work as superior to mere physical work, information as higher than action' (Lewontin, 1993, p. 48). In another instance, Martin (1991) has described how the narrative of human fertilisation is governed by cultural gender stereotypes which characterise the sperm as active and the egg as passive, despite the process being much more complex than this would suggest. Since the mid-1980s there has been an explosion of interest in including the body as a relevant issue in social and cultural theory. Aspects of this literature pertinent to the present argument will be discussed in Chapter 2. This interest in the body marks a different approach to understanding the body from that of biological science, this has also meant that a common-sense denotation of `the body' can no longer be taken for granted. Broadly speaking, two other ways of conceptualising the human body can be distinguished from recent literature. These are, first, the historical body ± a body that is recognised as being constructed differently over time through social and cultural forces; and, second, the phenomenologically lived body ± the body we experience in our everyday lives as the medium through which we `know' our world. Taken together, these approaches to the body may be distinguished from the body-as-organism of biology by using the term `embodiment'. Embodiment emphasises the `lived body', but not simply in the sense of presenting the body as the subject who knows the world through bodily perception in opposition to the body as object of scientific knowledge. Rather, `embodiment' rejects the dualistic separation of subject and object along with the basis for this dichotomy ± the Cartesian split between mind and body. The burgeoning interest in the body can be seen to be closely connected with the challenge that theoretical developments in the social sciences have made towards these traditionally dominant dualistic formations. Here the body has become both subject and object, knower and known, nature and culture. Williams and Bendelow (1998) usefully draw a distinction between `a sociology of the body', which tends to take the body as one more topic for sociologists to `add on' to their analysis of society without necessarily questioning the Cartesian dualistic perspective, and an `embodied sociology' which takes `the embodiment of its practitioners as well as

12

Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory

its subjects seriously through a commitment to the lived body and its being in the world, including the manner in which it both shapes and is shaped by society' (1998, p. 23). It will be apparent that these different approaches to the body are premised on very different models of ontology and epistemology. In this text, two forms of knowledge of the body and of the world (that is, two broad epistemological paradigms) are contrasted. These can be characterised as objectified disembodiment and embodied subjectivity. The first takes the science of anatomy as its exemplar. Here, the body is seen as an object to be fragmented into parts which are then used as the basis of a body of knowledge. The rest of the book will be organised around this model of knowledge. This, it is argued, forms the basis of the implicit understanding of the body that is incorporated into mainstream areas of organisation studies and of the dominant form of knowledge about organisations that is valued. The second suggests that the world and knowledge about it are constructed through our embodied experience, thus challenging the notion of an external separate world which is `real' and which exists objectively outside our knowledge of it. However, this is not a model that takes our physical experience of the world as being `truth' instead of reasoned knowledge (what might be described as an empiricist approach compared to a rationalist one). Rather, it sees that our relationship with the world is an inextricably social and cultural one ± that is, it stems from not only our corporeal nature but also from our intercorporeal character. In other words, our `selves' and `the world' can never simply be separated into these distinct fields: they are intertwined. These epistemological positions will be further explored in Chapter 3. These different `bodies' ± the body-as-organism, the social body and the phenomenological body ± are not, of course, separate from each other. The way in which we experience our bodies is influenced by the societal norms around us, so that, for example, the lived experience of being a young white woman is shaped significantly by the cultural expectations and ideals of a female body, in relation to the acceptable size and shape of the body, its comportment, adornment and so on. How we experience our bodies is also influenced by what we `know' of anatomy and physiology, so that we identify particular feelings and changes of our bodies in relation to medical constructions of what is `normal' or `abnormal'. And, as social scientists have demonstrated in more recent decades, medical understanding of the body is itself constructed through cultural norms and expectations. As has already been discussed, science is not a pure and neutral factual knowledge, as has

The Body and Organisation Studies

13

traditionally been portrayed (see, for example, Martin, 1987, 1991, 1994). ORGANISATION THEORY AND DISCIPLINARY FORMATION This point about the cultural nature of science is also relevant for looking at the knowledge that is constructed about organisations. In many ways, the social sciences, as they coalesced into distinct disciplines, attempted to emulate the success of the natural sciences in carving out their own intellectual territory in terms of content and method, and in seeing the knowledge they produced elevated to the position of objective, neutral `truth' (Heilbron, 1995). However, the nature of the social has always been contested and perhaps, over the last few decades of the twentieth century epistemological questioning increased, influenced by a number of social and academic trends, including the so-called `postmodern' critique of metanarratives (Cooper and Burrell, 1988; Gergen, 1992). In this section I shall consider the different ways in which organisation studies has been defined. The academic field of `organisation studies' has been characterised by various designations in common usage, including `organisational behaviour', `sociology of organisations' and `organisation theory', as well as `organisation studies'. What each of these delineates is debatable. Some definitions are predominantly linked to levels of analysis ± individual, group, organisation, and environment ± where others are linked to the theoretical assumptions or traditions to which they trace an allegiance. For example, the `sociology of organisations' is usually linked to the Weberian tradition (Donaldson, 1985, p. 6), and `organisation theory' has sometimes been taken as the `orthodox approach' which `tends to adopt theories and models of organisational functioning, and to focus on areas of empirical investigation, that are highly oriented towards managerial conceptions of organisations' (Salaman and Thompson, 1973a, p. 1). For the purposes of this book I intend to take a broad and open understanding of what is relevant to understanding the development of organisation studies as an academic field which has `organisation' in its widest sense as its subject, rather than try to define what should be included or excluded. There are three reasons for this stance. First, I wish to look at a number of ways in which organisation studies, social

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Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory

theory and other disciplines are interrelated, including looking at historical connections between constructions of the body and notions of `organisation' across disciplines. To close down the borders of the field would hamper this tracing of a history of ideas. Second, I am interested in the very processes of the creation and maintenance of boundaries around an academic discipline; the debates about the openness of the field; and the attempts of some members to `discipline' others who will not respect closure of the field. These dynamics in themselves can be seen to be related to dominant conceptions, both of the body and of what constitutes a `body of knowledge'. Third, to accept the notion of `a discipline' is an ahistorical view of how knowledge becomes organised. It takes for granted the notion of the division of knowledge into distinct areas and therefore does not recognise that knowledge is produced within a context that is social and political, and not simply a natural progression or accumulation of `facts'. The formation of modern `knowledge' into disciplinary areas is an organised and organising process of differentiation. Heilbron, in his study of the development of social theory, argues that from about 1600 to the mid-nineteenth century can be characterised as a `predisciplinary stage' (1995, p. 3), where ideas were fluid across intellectual areas which were themselves very generally described as `reason', `nature' and `philosophy'. The organisation of disciplines is not only apparent from a different view of the frameworks of knowledge ± that these should progress in distinct areas ± but from the growing organisation of the institutional environments that were becoming increasingly influential in the creation and transmission of knowledge. Thus modern universities developed with separate curricula for different subject areas, specialist learned journals and professional bodies. The organisation of knowledge within these institutions became more structured and regulated, with the disciplining of people into their subject fields through such control devices as career progression for academics, examinations, set syllabuses and peer assessment (see also Foucault, 1977).2 Each disciplinary area carries with it the history of its own development, which is often taught and invoked through such cultural and symbolic devices as `classical' theories or the `founding fathers'. But Heilbron comments that these are usually from the disciplinary stage (1995, p. 2) and the pre- or early disciplinary history is forgotten. This means that what is covered in a disciplinary area, including its `history', comes to shore up a sense of its consistency and coherence. Members are socialised into a shared heritage, which provides a

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common sense of interest. This `common sense' becomes a takenfor-granted understanding, not only of the legitimate content of the discipline but also the `fact' that it is a discipline in the first place. The process of differentiation that created the discipline has itself become hidden. However, as Heilbron argues, many significant assumptions of the discipline stem from before this disciplinary formation proper (1995, p. 3). This is the case, I suggest, with regard to many of the assumptions about the body that have become incorporated into the `common sense' of organisation studies. Therefore this book will look at themes from beyond the usually accepted borders of the discipline. Not only is there the historical dimension to the separation between what is legitimately part of a discipline, there is also the continued drawing of boundaries around the field. These are not impermeable boundaries, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, and there is a certain amount of tension between those who want greater or lesser degrees of closure of these borders. However, again, these function as a disciplinary mechanism. This reminds us that we need to be careful about characterising a discipline as being too internally homogeneous. By dividing off one area and defining it in opposition to others, what is included within that area comes to appear identical, while that from which it is separated becomes entirely different. In his introduction to Rethinking Organization (1992), Reed describes how organisation studies has changed since the 1960s, from `orthodox consensus' (characterised as the dominant functionalist paradigm, as outlined by Burrell and Morgan (1979)) to `pluralistic diversity'. He charts the changes, starting with the systems-based contingency approach of the late 1960s, later challenged as having too static a view of `organisation', and a problematic conceptual separation between `organisation' and `environment'. This is replaced by an approach which looked at the construction of organisations, stressing processes of power and politics, and the significance of culture and symbolism. This also marks a move away from the acceptance of organisation studies as being dominated by the influence of `objective' science (Brown, 1992). By the late 1980s and 1990s, organisation studies were marked by a much greater openness to theoretical work and issues from a range of disciplines (for example, the influence of Foucault, Derrida and that work that is sometimes described as the `postmodern turn'), often a world away from traditional managerial interests in the structure and design of organisations. Some of these more recent developments have epistemological stances commensurate with my own views in this study, and indeed have influenced my

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approach to organisation theory. However, even in these works there is still very little explicit exploration of issues of the body and embodiment and therefore, given the constraints of space, I have reluctantly had to forgo the detailed consideration they warrant. Although I wish to take a broad view of what material is relevant to understanding the ways in which certain constructions of the human body underpin key assumptions in organisation theory, in order to bring together relevant subject matter from a number of fields it has been necessary to be selective. In relation to organisation theory, I have chosen examples from a diversity of approaches to the subject to illustrate the different themes of the anatomised body which can be seen as woven through them. Since I am interested in the formation of the discipline and its predominant `discursive formations' (see discussion in Chapter 3), these perspectives tend to be mainstream ones which have influenced key debates in the field. In this I have been guided by the material which has been seen to be the most relevant by a number of texts that have sought to define and shape the discipline, and which are discussed below. For the purpose of understanding some of the dynamics of the development of organisation studies in defining its disciplinary borders, it is useful to consider briefly some texts which started to reflect on the discipline (Silverman, 1970; Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980; Pfeffer, 1982).3 These not only discuss the content of the discipline, they also seek to organise it themselves. They cannot escape from the effect they have in actively constructing the field while they are in the very act of analysing it, since no academic work is ever external to that which it examines. It is noticeable that these come from a particular period in the disciplinary formation where the subject matter and approaches to the field are in flux. Thus they are interesting since they show the discipline self-consciously in process. They also reflect, to some extent, wider academic concerns around the nature of knowledge and its relationship to social and political issues. Although none of them completely rejects all elements of their scientific patrimony, they do show a questioning and a reflexivity about the field, and how knowledge in it has come to be so constructed. Silverman's The Theory of Organisations (1970) was influential in initiating discussions on the constitution of the field. Despite his development of an `action frame of reference' with its interpretative approach to organisational activity (set against his critique of the prevailing systems approach), some of his discussion of the nature of

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theory on organisations illustrates a continued espousal of the assumptions of scientific rationality. For example, he proposes that `A theory is a statement in general terms about the likely relationship between two or more phenomena. It suggests hypotheses that it is possible to test and, where necessary, refute. A theory of organisations would explain why organisations are as they are and examine the factors that make them change' (Silverman, 1970, p. 169). However, he does question that there could be a single theory of organisations, seeing the field as multiple and thus paving the way for greater acceptance of diversity and questioning of orthodoxy. In relation to typical theorising about organisations, he argues that `most attempts to construct such theories have tended to take both the definition of organisation to be used and the theoretical perspective as non-problematic' (1970, p. 170). He argues that early work in the discipline came from managerial interest in techniques (perhaps we can compare this to Reed's (1985, p. 6) statement that the `true ``founding fathers'' ' of modern organization theory were Barnard and Simon), that it only tended to look at a single aspect of organisations at a time and ignored the wider social context (Silverman 1970, p. 2). This tends to take the beginning of the discipline as being around the start of the twentieth century, implicitly disregarding prior sociological studies of organisations, and drawing a particular line around the field, which contrasts with his own arguments about the importance of bringing sociological work back into the field. Silverman ostensibly has sympathy for theoretical diversity, although he argues for a radical break with previous functionalist approaches. Similarly, Pfeffer welcomes multiple approaches on the one hand, but his language closes down this openness on the other (and indicates his later, more explicit, calls for disciplinary consensus (Pfeffer, 1993)). He describes `The domain of organization theory [as] coming to resemble more of a weed patch than a well-tended garden' (Pfeffer 1982, p. 1) because of the proliferation of different theories and approaches. He goes on to recommend weeding and pruning the field, since the diversity makes it `often difficult to discern in what direction knowledge of organizations is progressing ± or if, indeed, it is progressing at all' (1982, p. 1). Pfeffer (1982, pp. 26±33) links the development of the discipline to the growth of industrial capitalism since the beginning of the twentieth century (to economic and political influences predominantly in the context of the USA), and its expansion both in extent and in the multiplicity of approaches to the rise of the business school and the

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teaching of organisation studies on undergraduate and MBA programmes. He estimates that between 125 000 and 200 000 students would be following courses in the discipline in the early 1980s in the USA alone (1982, p. 25). It is interesting that these two studies in the field emphasise the development of the discipline from managerial interest in techniques for managing organisational behaviour. Other texts which consider the development of the discipline take their intellectual roots from the development of sociology in the nineteenth century. Both Burrell and Morgan (1979) and Clegg and Dunkerley (1980) look to the thoughts of `classical' theorists such as Weber, Marx, Durkheim and SaintSimon to trace the influences on the discipline. This history fits with their own agendas in organising the field. For Burrell and Morgan, looking towards sociological theory gives them the intellectual material to analyse different research paradigms in organisation theory; for Clegg and Dunkerley, these theorists provide an understanding of the wider political and social nature of organisations which is the foundation of their argument that organisations are centrally about class and control. In this brief discussion it becomes apparent that drawing boundaries around organisation studies is in itself a political act intended to orientate the field in a particular direction. This is a point from which my own work here also cannot escape. Indeed, as will be discussed below, this is an explicitly political project. Theoretical considerations of the field since this time have continued to try to make sense of the diversity of organisation studies (for example, Reed, 1985, 1991, 1996) or to close down the multiplicity as threatening the coherence of the field (for example, Donaldson, 1985, 1996a). There has also been a growing recognition and interest in a greater multiplicity of forms of organisation, away from the rationalbureaucratic to embrace especially concepts around networks, flexibility and adhocracy (see, for example, Clegg, 1990). In theoretical terms, and certainly as a significant influence on this project (which does not in any way claim to stand outside the social and academic currents of its time, nor the power relations of the discipline), some parts of organisation studies have become open to a more fundamental questioning of its common-sense terms and processes. Thus there has been a reconsideration of the taken-for-granted nature of `the organisation', as suggested by Silverman in 1970 (1970, p. 170). The emphasis of the discipline would seem to have moved somewhat away from the conception of the organisation as a distinct entity and more to processes of organising and ordering. Indeed, it has been argued that `organizing

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needs to be seen as a verb not a noun, since it is incomplete, precarious, plural and heterogeneous' (Law, 1994, p. 2). The foundational processes of differentiation and organisation have themselves been questioned (for example, Cooper, 1989, 1992; Munro, 1997). Thus there is a tension between the multiplicity of ways `organisation' can be understood, and processes of power that seek to define boundaries to the subject. As I mentioned above, the subject of this book focuses on the dominant and more sedimented approaches to organisation studies (those approaches which, in the terms of Chapter 3, will be designated as the more practised and habituated discursive formations as distinct from those at the fringes and interstices of the discipline that are more fluid and in process). However, there are three points of exit from the main argument of the book which look to the future and towards these departures from mainstream organisation theory. These are to be found in the conclusions to Chapters 5 and 7, and in Chapter 8. THE BODY AS AN `ABSENT PRESENCE' IN ORGANISATION THEORY Organisation studies is not alone in its neglect of the human body. As will have been seen from the discussion above, it is an important aspect of this argument that organisation studies is part of a broader trend of intellectual development that encompasses the dominant tradition of `western' social science and philosophy. Throughout the book, organisation studies as an intellectual field is related explicitly to social theory, although it is also recognised that organisation studies has attempted to mark out a distinct area of concern centred around the theoretical object of `the organisation'. A considerable weight of interest in the human body has developed in social theory since the 1980s (discussed in Chapter 2). Organisation studies has so far largely ignored this subject and the burgeoning literature in commensurate disciplines (but see Hassard et al., 2000). This myopia is in itself interesting. It suggests that while organisation theory owes a great historical debt to social theory, large parts of it have become somewhat detached from this heritage. This may stem from the continued institutional connection of organisation studies to business education, or from the twin pressures for `relevance' and high levels of publication in accepted journals, both related to funding issues. However, there is not space in this text to explore these potential reasons in more detail. Here I shall turn to

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consider how the body is an absent presence in organisation studies, which may itself suggest reasons for its continued neglect. There are two ways in which the body is an `absent presence' in organisation theory. The body is present in two implied modes. The first implied body is that of the individuals who are the members of organisations. The second is the body as biological organism, which goes to construct the discipline's dominant image of the organisation as a distinct entity. The body's absence is also twofold. In relation to the first implied body of the individual subject, the body itself has disappeared under the weight of a tradition of mind/body dualism that has centred value, meaning and knowledge in the mind and largely dismissed the body as mere material ± a container for the mind or soul. In this, organisation studies has followed other social sciences. In relation to sociology, Williams and Bendelow (1998) argue that there has been a tendency `to define human actors in disembodied terms as rational agents who make choices through means/ends formulae, based on ``utility'' criteria or ``general value'' orientations (Turner, 1991) . . . The body, in effect, became external to the actors who appeared, so to speak, as a rational, disembodied, decision-making agent (Turner, 1991, p. 9)' (Williams and Bendelow, 1998, p. 10). The second level of absence is in relation to the scientifically constructed organism, the dead piece of meat that is all that is left of the physical material from Cartesian dualism. This dissected corpse has been laid out for the superior, living, active mind to examine and utilise. In this book I consider that one important reason for the lack of explicit theorising stems from the approach which sees the body merely as the biological container of the person. As has already been discussed above, the `western' intellectual tradition is largely built around this mind/body dualism. Three major assumptions come from this Cartesian heritage (Grosz, 1994). The first is that the body is perceived as an object of investigation. The body is objectified and commodified, ripe for classification; it becomes a generalised body, trampling rough-shod over the specificity of individual bodies. In the second, the body is regarded in terms of metaphors which construe it as an instrument, a machine at the disposal of consciousness, a vessel occupied by an animating, wilful subjectivity, which requires careful training and discipline. For example, in Locke and the liberal tradition of the Enlightenment generally, the body is conceived of as a possession, the property of the subject, who can therefore make decisions about how to dispose of it. Third, the body is seen as a signifying medium, a vehicle of expression, a mode of rendering public and communicable

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what is essentially private (thoughts, ideas, beliefs, emotions). Underlying this is the belief in the transparency and passivity of the body. Again, it must be pliant so that information is not distorted. The Cartesian split between mind and body has been incorporated into the very heart of the discipline of organisation theory. The need to control the body has been seen as a problem within organisation studies, especially in its more managerialist parts. Solutions to the `problem' of the body have generally been concerned with appealing to the mind and rationality. For example, two of the cornerstones of the discipline ± scientific management and the Human Relations School ± are both concerned with the role of the body in production. Frederick Winslow Taylor aimed to standardise the movements of the body in the execution of work tasks, which eliminated workers' freedom of choice over their bodily actions. To do this successfully he also had to extract the tacit (bodily) knowledge that the workers had of the job and transfer this to the cognitive, systematised and codified (that is, organised) knowledge of managers. Thus the division of body and mind was institutionalised through the division of labour, of `execution' and `conception'. The Human Relations School developed out of an original preoccupation with the physiological conditions that would optimise production output. Again, we can see the attempt to extract knowledge from and about workers' bodies that will be used for their greater control. The `fatigue studies' looked at the physical effects of ventilation, lighting, and the number and duration of breaks. As this emphasis gave way to an interest in the motivational and social aspects of work, we see the development of an approach to controlling workers' bodies which utilised their own minds. This continues to tap into the tradition of Cartesian thought, since the mind/body split is also a hierarchical relationship whereby the mind is seen as the living, active principle, and the body merely material that is only animated by the indwelling mind. It is therefore for the superior mind to control and subordinate the body. These are studies that take the body as an object for granted; its control is a problem but reason prevails. The tradition continues in a multitude of initiatives and schools of thought geared to capturing the `hearts and minds' of employees ± for example, the `soft' dimension of human resource management (Townley, 1994), employee involvement initiatives, `empowerment', and the `learning organisation'. It also constitutes a fundamental assumption in various theories of the labour market such as Human Capital Theory, which proposes that individuals will make `rational' choices about whether to invest in developing their skills and education depending on what return they

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believe they will get for investing in themselves (see, for example, Mincer, 1958; Mincer and Polachek, 1974). The Enlightenment ideal of the individual citizen possessing rights has turned into a living commodity, the indwelling mind deciding how the biological container should be shaped and utilised in its own self-interest. The control of the body is closely linked to the principle of `panopticism' which Foucault (1977) sees as the definitive mode of discipline in modern times. Although many writers focus on the surveillance aspect of this principle in these days of electronic tagging, hidden cameras (including those inside the VDUs of workers), bugging, and the myriad ways that IT can be used to `observe' and measure (see, for example, Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992), it is the effect of this in terms of the internalisation of self-discipline that might be seen as being of the greatest significance. I shall return below to the link between this mode of discipline and the ways in which identity becomes `normalised'. The body as a passive signifying medium has been considered in some areas of organisation studies. Since a concern with the representation of the body has often been found in studies of gendered work, it tends to be maintained as peripheral to the mainstream of the discipline. It is interesting that it is predominantly in relation to women in organisations that issues of stereotyping and the appropriation of particular physical characteristics as part of labour ± the visible surface of bodies ± has come more to the fore. The tradition of ethnographic industrial sociology mainly researched manufacturing workers, where the dominant white male body would have been the norm, and which became invisible through its very ubiquity. The gradual percolation of feminist thought into the discipline and a growing emphasis on service occupations are likely to have brought the body more into focus. In Hochschild's (1983) pathbreaking study of the `emotional labour' involved in the job of an air stewardess she talks of the control of expressions and the relationship to stress, but still it is defined in largely cognitive terms and not as the embodied experience of controlling emotions and appearance. Here, the problematic relates to the commodification of the body and emotions. Hochschild argues that the `emotional labour' that is a central part of much service work requires that manufactured emotions are displayed through the bodily medium. It is assumed that outside the capitalist use of these emotions/ displays the body would `naturally' show `genuine' emotions which would constitute the real, not manufactured, self of the individual. It is interesting that the body is seen as a vehicle through which the self can be expressed (or not), although Hochschild does consider some

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corporeal consequences of this separation in the air stewardesses' experiences of distance from their own sexuality in private relationships. However, on the whole there is a separation of embodiment from identity which maintains the Cartesian tradition. THE `ANATOMISING URGE' In pursuing my objective, to understand the way that assumptions about the human body have become incorporated into and shaped the development of organisation studies, I have taken the science of anatomy as a model. We now take for granted that scientific and medical knowledge of the body has been gained through anatomy: the practice of dissecting the dead human body in order to see what is hidden below the surface. However, anatomy developed slowly from about the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, disrupting many societal taboos before becoming accepted as an organised, `rational' discipline. At face value this seems ± historically and substantively ± far removed from the concerns of modern organisation theory. However, it is argued that anatomy can be seen as the predominant construction of the human body and as such its assumptions have become embedded in organisation studies. Furthermore, anatomy can be seen as the dominant model of knowledge production in the `western' intellectual tradition, and therefore also the pattern of the dominant modes of knowledge about organisations. Sawday (1995) has argued that the `culture of dissection' that gave birth to anatomy can be characterised by two tools or symbols. These are the scalpel and the mirror. The scalpel has had a key role in creating the human body as a place for invasive investigation, fragmentation and reorganisation. The mirror is a less obvious but still central tool. Dissection is part of a quest for knowledge not only about the body but also about what it is to be human. Pictures of anatomy theatres include the inscription `know thyself' and the title-page of Casserius's Tabulae Anatomicae (1627) (Figure 1.1) shows the seated figure of Anatomia, the personification of the science, holding a mirror. Sawday comments that this is `a reminder of the self-knowledge gained through the reflective discipline of anatomy' (Sawday, 1995, p. 73). The book is organised around these two tools of anatomia. As well as being the tools used in the practice of the science, they are endowed with many threads of meaning which are significant to the development

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Figure 1.1 Title-page from Julius Casserius, Tabulae Anatomicae (1627) Source: British Library.

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of the `anatomising urge'.4 These are inextricably linked and will both be explored. The first half of the book is centred around the symbol of the scalpel. It is concerned with anatomy as a paradigm of knowledge ± the `anatomising urge' ± which is described by Sawday. Here he links together the body and wider forms of knowledge, arguing that the `incisive recomposition of the human body . . . entailed an equivalent refashioning of the means by which people made sense of the world around them' (Sawday, 1995, p. xi). With the `anatomising urge' came an impetus to split the body into its component parts and a desire to classify and define their structure and function in the minutest detail. This is a quite different mode of organising knowledge from that which preceded it, which Foucault (1970) argues was based on resemblance, analogy and similitudes. Dissection is not an end in itself but, as Sawday suggests: `anatomisation takes place so that, in lieu of a formerly complete ``body'', a new ``body'' of knowledge and understanding can be created. As the physical body is fragmented, so the body of understanding is held to be shaped and formed' (1995, p. 2). In relation to the body, anatomy can be said to have produced a uniquely organised body: a body that is organised by science and rationality rather than by nature. In the introduction to Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Bauman teases out this `quest for order' which is built on division and difference: `To classify means to set apart, to segregate. It means first to postulate that the world consists of discrete and distinctive entities; then to postulate that each entity has a group of similar or adjacent entities with which it belongs, and with which ± together ± it is opposed to some other entities . . . To classify, in other words, is to give the world a structure' (1991, p. 1). This is the dualistic structure of knowledge that has already been debated above. The `slash' or oblique marks out the processes of division that create the two `sides' into categories presumed to be mutually exclusive and defined in opposition to each other. There is also a hierarchical division between the categories, where one is given superiority over the other (Plumwood, 1993). The `anatomising urge' (Sawday, 1995) has become incised deep into the heart of what is understood by both scientific method and philosophical rationality, the twin foundation stones of the `western' intellectual tradition. Thus Chapter 4 considers in more depth the characteristics and development of the `anatomising urge'. Chapter 5 relates this form of knowledge to the development of organisation studies as a discipline. It also examines how assumptions of the anatomised body have

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become embedded in some of the central concepts of the discipline, such as the elision between `organisation' and `organism', and the use of organic models applied to organisations. The second half of the book is organised around the other tool of anatomia: the mirror. Although the scalpel cuts to the bone, the mirror reflects back the `knowledge' of the dissected human subject, our own selves, which have been thus created. The anatomists' obsession with making visible the hidden secrets of the body is a model of a preoccupation with self-understanding, of creating Man (sic) as the central subject of knowledge, as Foucault describes it (1970, p. xxiv). This is a key feature of this epistemological tradition (Foucault, 1970; Bauman, 1991, p. 5). Thus the `anatomising urge' is characterised by an interconnection between the creation of divisions and categories, reordering knowledge, and (self-) identity. This formation of a preoccupation with the self-identity of mankind (sic), leads to two opposing trends. The ideal of identity that the `anatomising urge' focuses upon is one based on the wholeness and coherence of the self (as opposed to the fragmentation of the matter that is the body). And this coherent self is characterised by reason and rationality (again, in opposition to the association of the body to nature and animality). In the blossoming of the Enlightenment this was to lead to the call for individual political and civil rights, in so far as individuals possessed a capacity for the reasoning ability necessary to make moral and political judgements. This is based on an idea that right-thinking rational minds would reach some transcendent and universal objective truth and therefore intersubjective agreement on moral and political issues would not be a problem (Benhabib, 1992, p. 4). The second trend of this construction of identity is based on the same assumptions, but denies the rights as self-determining individuals of those who are not `identical'5 with the ideal of the rational individual. In effect, those whose identities are associated with the body, emotions or nature ± for example, women, the `lower' classes, people from other racial groups, people with mental or physical `abnormalities' ± are excluded because of assumptions based around the dualism of rational mind/irrational body. In relating these assumptions of the `anatomising urge' to organisation studies, I have chosen to focus on two consequences which stem from the dominant conceptualisations of the body and knowledge. The first centres around this marginalisation of those who are associated with `the body', which has been incorporated into the discipline. The

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second is the devaluating of human reproduction compared to the valuing of production in the construction of knowledge about organisations. I would argue that production is related to the replication of many copies of the same: the production of the identical. Human reproduction is associated with many subordinated and occluded categories: woman, the private sphere, nature, fluidity and, of course, the body. Replication, on the other hand, echoes the dominant features of the intellectual tradition. It invokes the machine metaphor, the production of the identical and the `clean' incisions of the scalpel into the corpse compared to the messy, fluid, noisy process of giving birth by a living body to a living body. Replication is also a valued aspect of scientific method: verification of the `truth' demands that it can be repeated over and over in the same way. Thus Chapters 6 and 7 develop a response to the `mirroring' characteristics of the `anatomising urge'. They consider how organisation theory replicates dominant forms of knowledge, writing out difference, marginalising (particular) bodies, focusing on `production' to the exclusion of `reproduction', and excluding all but a normalised identity. THEORISING THE BODY Thus it is not simply the divisions and differences which anatomy creates that are significant. What is important is where the cuts and incisions are made, and how the resulting parts are reorganised and reordered. Power, discipline and hierarchy play major roles in the `culture of dissection'. We need to ask significant questions. What knowledge is legitimised and valued? Whose identities predominate over others? We need to consider why there have been cuts between certain relations, categories, concepts and what power relations have been invested in them. We also need to consider what differences have been emphasised while others have been occluded. Who or what have been forced into sameness or marginalised as Other? These are questions that need to be borne in mind when considering the assumptions and consequences of the relationship between organisation studies and the human body. It will have become apparent from this introductory chapter that diverse threads and themes are being woven together. Even though the conventional linear progression of chapters following a line of argument has been used, there is also a sense in which there is a weft

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of themes that interleave this warp and constitute the material of this text. These are about the patterns of division and separation, boundaries and the creation of inside/outside, the critique of scientific and philosophical rationality, and the associated valuing of mind over body. Weaving can be seen as a challenge to the traditional methods and tools of the `anatomising urge'. Rather than being a method of division it is a means of creating and fabricating. It does not produce the identical, but rather can make unique patterns and pictures, from previously unassociated elements, in a similar way that patchwork brings together scraps which have been discarded from elsewhere. Weaving and patchwork have been closely associated with women's work and frequently been used as metaphors of interconnectivity and creativity within the feminist movement. Sadie Plant (1997, p. 24) has described how Freud characterised weaving as the only original female skill, and even then he debased it by arguing that it stemmed from the matting of the pubic hair to cover up women's lack or negativity! It is perhaps then as a subversive tool that feminists have reclaimed it.6 Weaving is a way of challenging traditional linearity. Linearity is another way of knowing that splits the world into manageable parts, especially dividing them into two and finding a straight path between them. It is also a key tool of academic writing. If we weave with the story of the minotaur we might fabricate something new that depicts the relationship of power between the straight line thread of the argument and the fabrication of weaving. Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos and the lover of Theseus ± as is traditional, we define women by the relationships they have with men ± gave a woven thread to Theseus. This he used, drawn out into a straight line, to find his way out of the labyrinth. He was thus able to kill off the bull-headed minotaur, the monster who does not fit the scientific and rational world (Shildrick, 1996). Ariadne's thread of weaving and creation is appropriated by Theseus in pursuit of death, glory and re-entry into a male-dominated world. It is a cautionary tale that he then left her for further adventures! This illustrates both the possibilities but also the dangers of attempting to weave a different cloth from the traditional academic form. There are two main ways in which I am weaving together areas of difference. The first is in intertwining the recent social science literature on the body and embodiment with organisation theory. The second is in the epistemological approach, which seeks for an interconnectivity between theorists whose work is sometimes seen as incommensurable when considered along traditional lines of demarcation. Foucault and

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Merleau-Ponty are both considered to be theorists of the body, and their work is woven together with that of feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray. Foucault and Merleau-Ponty, although differing in many ways in their intellectual frameworks, are both interested in the nature of dualism, and in reconceptualising the world from a nondualistic perspective. Foucault challenges separations between society and individual, discourse and practice within what might be considered a post-structuralist perspective (although Foucault was anxious to avoid classification), Merleau-Ponty challenges the separation between mind and body, the world and our perceptions of it (within what might be characterised as an existential phenomenological tradition, although, again, his work is also a critique of the transcendentalism of Husserl). This, then, is a theoretical piece of work, and theory has traditionally been linked with the excision of the body and the pre-eminence of the most abstract mental work. `The body, then, if not irrational is non-rational. It can become an object of theory only through being disembodied. Theory remains a central and rational enterprise. Theory may admit the body but the theorist remains disembodied' (Morgan and Scott, 1993, p. 12; see also Bologh's (1990) discussion of Max Weber). Of course, this neglects the way that even the most abstract theorist cannot escape the corporeality of their own breaths, heartbeats and brain impulses, even if they manage without the muscle tension of sitting at a desk! So it may be argued that in theorising I continue to reproduce the devaluation of the body. I hope that I have shown in this chapter how assumptions and values are written into the `western' intellectual tradition and into organisation theory and seldom questioned or even recognised. Hyman argues that `those who glory in their pragmatism and insist that they are immune from theory are simply unaware of their own preconceptions and presuppositions' (1971, p. 2). Theory is not separate from practice: this is another division created by the `anatomising urge' (Marsden and Townley, 1996). Rather, theorising can be a subversive political act. This might be achieved through reconnecting threads cut by the `anatomising urge' and by reflecting the dominant back on to itself through the tools of recursion, repetition and mimicry. Theory is sometimes set up as a totalising narrative which attempts to give a complete explanation of a problem. From my epistemological position (given in Chapter 3), this piece of writing is another narrative. It is not intended to rival the `anatomising urge' for `objectivity' and `truth'; rather it is located in historical and

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textual analysis. Totalising theory in the rational tradition is located in a realm of objective knowledge that is somehow transcendent from the person who knows and develops that theory. The argument of this book is located in a perspective that emphasises the embodied subjectivity of those who know and theorise. In this spirit, then, I want to place my own embodied identity within this piece of theory. Since `scientific' knowledge writes out the body and the identity of the person who knows as part of the hidden but none the less political use of rationality to give a seemingly objective and neutral gloss to inclusions and exclusions of knowledge, it is as a deliberately political act that I critique the absent-presence of the body in organisation theory. It is also a political act to rewrite myself into this introduction. This research has been shaped and prompted by commitment ± again, something that is seen to have no place in rational knowledge, and which is even despised as creating subjective and therefore `poor' knowledge/`bad' science. This is a commitment to feminism and to other political movements against the oppression of those who demand assimilation and deny difference. It can be a further divisive strategy to atomise these politics by classifying and defining them ± race, class, disability, sexuality, age . . . It is part of the `anatomising urge' to separate these from each other as if they could be located independently when the political movements and the identities of those involved intersect, overlap and are interdependent. Although I am committed to engaging with these subordinated perspectives, I also do not want to perform `cultural tourism' (Griffiths, 1995, p. 43). I need to recognise the perspective from which I write ± as a white, heterosexual woman, not proposing my own narrative as an alternative `truth', as this would be to act in the same way as traditional rationality. I want to acknowledge `other' positions but without consuming or appropriating them. This project has been built upon a whole embodied existence, inextricably combined with it. This involves the everyday mundanities of existence as well as events that have had a huge impact on my whole life, body and identity. During its formative stages, I spent five weeks of hell in London hospitals while my sister struggled for her breath and for the baby growing inside her. Although she eventually lost her lifelong battle with the limitations of her body, she gave life to the tiny, 25-week foetus of my nephew, now celebrating his third birthday. The pregnancy and birth of my own daughter in 1997 brought me embodied experience of the force of patriarchal society and medical authority that have long been part of my feminist consciousness.7

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I could have written these out, in classic academic style, and kept this text strictly in the comfort zone for both myself and the reader. But the whole piece of work centres on the way that, although these experiences took place in organisational and (highly) organised contexts, organisation theory itself pays very little attention to the issues they raise.8 Since these issues are significant ones of life and death, does this mean that theorising about organisations generally involves a complete disjuncture between personal identity and experience, and professional work? This, of course, echoes yet again the public/private and mind/body dualisms that are incorporated into the intellectual tradition. But feminism has raised the spectre of an interdependency and interweaving of these realms: the personal is the political. This is a challenge I would like to bring to organisation studies through this work.

2 Written on the Body: Social Theory and the Body If we were to render the savage world safe for Western, verbalizing man, we would have to bring the mysteries of the human body within the bounds of Western rationality. (Polhemus, 1975, p. 15) Part of the impetus for considering the relationship between organisation studies and the human body is the massive growth of literature about the body in the social sciences and humanities over the last couple of decades of the twentieth century. This not only encompasses the newly marked out territory of the `sociology of the body', but also work across anthropology (see, for example, Haraway, 1990b; Martin, 1994), psychology (Stam, 1998), geography (Ainley, 1998), cultural studies (Featherstone, 1991), art history (Callen, 1995) and feminist theory (Butler, 1990, 1993). In this chapter I want to draw together some relevant threads from this literature to form a brief historical, social and theoretical context for the present work. Through exploring some of the changing academic approaches to the body and some of the reasons for the increased interest in studying it, I hope to prepare the ground before developing a more specific methodological and epistemological framework for the text in the following chapter. I shall consider first how the nature of the body has been considered by the social sciences over time. There has been a somewhat ambivalent relationship between the social sciences and the body, but it is largely marked by a move from a naturalistic view of the body to a socially constructed perspective. Second, I shall consider some of the societal reasons for the explosion of academic interest in the body, look at some academic responses to these, and try to link them to some emerging themes and images around changing issues for organisations. Finally, I shall look at the work of a number of writers who have attempted to theorise the interconnected nature of the individual, the body and society. 32

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THE BODY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE: FROM BIOLOGICAL MATTER TO SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION The `natural' body and the social sciences The body had already been made the central concern of the biological discipline by around the beginning of the nineteenth century (Heilbron, 1995). This is linked to the objectification of the body through anatomy, following its detachment from the mind through the Cartesian tradition. In the construction of social science disciplines the nature/culture dichotomy also marked out a line of separation between `natural' and `social' science (although social scientists sought to elevate their side of this dualism to a more respectable position via their adoption of natural science methodology and rhetoric). Thus the study of the `natural' body was predominantly located in the natural sciences and not seen as being of relevant interest to social scientists. Sociology, for example, centres on the human actor, with their motives and reasons, which, given the prevailing Cartesian dualism, tends to construct an individual who is a bundle of cognitive processes rather than as an embodied subject (Williams and Bendelow, 1998, p. 10). Anthropology is somewhat different. Where there are language differences, and often considerable difficulties in access to a language (with perhaps no written forms and dictionaries), bodily expression becomes more `visible' and important. However the ways in which the bodies of people from different cultures have been defined and appropriated by the discipline suggests a more political reading. In the quotation from Polhemus (1975, p. 15) which heads the chapter, we can see that even though the body is paid more attention in anthropological studies, it remains the body as constructed through the lens of `western' science and rationality. This often means applying scientific principles to `tame' the body of the colonial subject, in the same way that the missionary and governmental presences from the west sought to control these `native' bodies and to teach the `natives' to be ashamed of their nakedness, bodily adornment and movements. Darwin's work has been influential in the social science approach to the body. It confirmed the body as part of the natural world, and therefore also subject to natural processes of inheritance and evolution (Turner, 1991, p. 3). In 1872, Darwin wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, where he argues that there are universal facial expressions between people in different cultures and throughout the animal world. He proposes that these are transmitted between

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generations by inheritance. Obviously, this would fit closely with his totalising theory of evolution, since it would help to establish a common ancestry for all races. Darwin's methodology was to send questionnaires to missionaries and (British) government officials around the world to ask them whether the `natives' showed particular expressions. Therefore the question of the interpretation of the gestures and expressions is one that is very much open to critique. However, the potentially equalising notion of one line of descent for all humans (compared to previous racialised theories of inferior and superior lines of descent, often derived from particular interpretations of the Bible) was subverted into other forms of evolutionism that provided a `scientific' gloss to cultural stereotypes based on the features of the `natural' body. During the nineteenth century `physical anthropology' emphasised the importance of the body. The focus was on comparing measurements of parts of the body across groups and populations, and debating their social significance. There was a pretty clear political agenda in this, although partly obscured by the language of science and rationality. For example, craniology developed the study of the link between skull size and brain volume to notions of intelligence. The American craniologist, Samuel Morton, intent on proving a scientific ranking of races by measuring the cranial capacity of the skull, had collected over a thousand skulls by the time he died in 1851. His ranking of their measurement had whites at the top, native American Indians in the middle, and blacks at the bottom.1 In France, Gustave Le Bon felt he only needed to measure thirteen skulls in order to conclude in 1879 that women `represented the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult civilised man' (Le Bon, 1879, pp. 60±1). He used this research to argue that trying to educate women in the same way as men was misguided and dangerous. As well as indicating the cultural assumptions embedded in the so-called scientific study of the body, it also illustrates the political use of the connection between women, the body and nature discussed in the Introduction.2 It is a salutary lesson that these approaches to the body could even end up being used against Darwin. Physiognomy, which believed that from the study of the characteristics of the face one could gain objective knowledge of the person, was hugely popular. Lavater's On Physiognomy ran through eighteen editions from 1775 to 1885. The captain of the Beagle, a disciple of Lavater, was very reluctant to allow Darwin on the expedition to South America because he doubted whether anyone with Darwin's nose could have sufficient energy and determination

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for the voyage (Darwin's own account of it in 1887, vol. 1, pp. 59±60, Synnott, 1993)! By the end of the nineteenth century, anthropology had largely changed from measuring and classifying to listening and watching, although it is still possible to see in twentieth-century anthropological work interest in the body linked with a particular `western' perspective on knowledge and control, which was discussed briefly in the first chapter and which will be developed in Chapter 4. However, naturalistic perspectives on the body such as these have continued to be used to justify `social engineering' such as the eugenics movement based on the justification that qualities are fixed through `natural selection, so those individuals in society who do not possess the desired characteristics should not be allowed to reproduce. As the geneticist, Steve Jones, comments, the social philosopher Herbert Spencer used his version of Darwinism `as a rationale for the excesses of nineteenth-century capitalism' and Galton's eugenics centred on `the survival of the richest' (Jones, 1993, p. 7). It is the same notion of the natural and inevitable body that was encapsulated in the state eugenics of Nazi Germany. For those whose body fitted with the ideal there was to be control, as illustrated in the first commandment of the Hitler Youth: `Your body belongs to your nation' (Kern, 1975, p. 233), and the medals given to women who produced sons to carry on `Aryan' characteristics. For those whose bodies were seen as being defective there were to be the laws prohibiting interracial marriage, forced sterilisations and the `final solution' (Kern, 1975, p. 232). The links with the scientific study of the naturalistic body is illustrated by the request made by the professor of anatomy of the `Reich university' at Strasbourg to Himmler in 1942 for Jewish skeletons to use in the university collection as an example of an inferior race (ibid.). Armstrong (1987) argues that sociology has constantly fought off encroachments by biology on to its disciplinary territory. Some biologists have discussed human behaviour as an extension of animal behaviour and as a phenomenon which can be understood in the same way as that of animals. The popularity of the work of Desmond Morris ± from naked ape to manwatching [sic], sexwatching and babywatching ± indicates the powerful nature of these sorts of argument. In the 1970s, sociobiology became influential as a way of establishing a biological basis for all human behaviour. It was popularised through E. O. Wilson's 1975 book on the subject, which aimed to `codify sociobiology into a branch of evolutionary biology' (Lewontin and Rose, 1984) and had a vision of neurobiologists and sociobiologists as the new leaders of a planned society of the future. Sociobiology puts an

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academic gloss of genetic determinism on neoconservative ideologies, such as positing a biological theory for women's subordinate position in society.3 Here, women's unique abilities to bear children have been used as a means of imprisoning them in the body, by defining them as being purely biological and close to `nature'. Such a position reinforces the status quo since it claims it is `natural' and therefore inevitable. Thus we can see that the presentation of the combination `science' of biology and society can be a political tool which seeks to justify certain power relations by appealing to a discourse of objectivity and neutrality based on a `natural' body. Changing bodies: the historical and social construction of the body The naturalistic view of the body and the Darwinian tradition are not the only perspectives of the body in the social sciences. The work of Mauss (1973) on `techniques of the body' was perhaps the earliest conceptualisation of the body and its actions as learned behaviour which becomes habitual, differing over time and between cultures (he argues that manners, walking and digging styles differ even between France and Britain). He produces many examples of differences and makes some attempts to classify them. Mauss describes bodies and the `techniques' they develop as ``physico-psycho-sociological assemblages of series of actions'' (1973, p. 85). This indicates his conceptualisation of the interconnectivity of both the embodied subject and the need for an interdisciplinary study of the body. The paper ± originally presented to a meeting of the SocieÂte Psychologie in 1934 ± is something of a manifesto for the socially constructed body, and as such has had a significant impact far beyond its length and scope might suggest. Many aspects of the socially constructed body have been demonstrated by ethnographic research since Mauss's paper. One such study (Bateson and Mead, 1942; Mead and Macgregor, 1951) analyses photographs of the different bodily development and bodily socialisation of Balinese and North American infants. However, as Polhemus (1975, p. 19) comments, anthropologists have sometimes merely collected data that illustrates the diversity of the body, rather than theorising about it. Despite the social constructionist framework, some work maintains a scientistic approach by assiduously measuring body differences (ibid., p. 20). Another problem with the development of social approaches to the body is that they often leave the assumptions of the naturalistic body intact, merely overlaying them with a social body, or trying to

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denigrate them as insignificant. In other words, they do not challenge the dualistic nature of knowledge constructed about the body, as discussed in the Introduction. This can be seen in some of the work around the gendered body, which has provided one of the main stimuli for developing a more social understanding of the body. In the `second wave' of feminism in the 1970s, the assumptions about women's biological destiny began to be questioned fundamentally. Early theories about women's subordination tried to substitute social explanations for the traditional biologically-based ones. However, feminism often found other ways of discussing gender that left the conventional understanding of the body unchallenged. A distinction was made by theorists between `sex' which related to the biological basis of the body, and the idea of `innate sex differences' and `gender' which referred to the social structures and cultural values overlaying these differences and into which children are socialised (Rubin, 1975). In doing this, feminist theorists followed the same sort of pattern as other social scientists. They sought to put biological reasons for women's subordination to one side and move forwards emphasising the other side of the science/ culture dualism ± that is, towards social reasons for women's oppression. The female body was left as being natural and inevitable, and therefore still the rightful province of the natural sciences. But a critique of the assumptions of a biological reality underpinning social categories began to be developed through the 1980s. By 1990, Jacobus et al. could argue, when introducing an edited collection of papers focusing on the multitude of ways that (female) bodies are socially constructed: `We cannot speak of the female body as if it were an invariant presence through history. There is no fixed, experiential base which provides continuity across the centuries' (Jacobus et al., 1990, p. 4). Not only has the biological been questioned and seen as pertinent to sociological understanding, but these critiques have been turned back on to biology ± and other sciences ± to show that they themselves are constructed via a socially and linguistically shaped view of the world. Women historians and scientists have shown that cultural stereotypes about men and women are significant in shaping scientific theories (see, for example, Bleier, 1984; Birke, 1986; Jordanova, 1989; Keller, 1985). There is a wealth of material that can be characterised as social constructionist ± too much to summarise adequately. It incorporates quite diverse positions on the nature of the body. As Shilling observes, it is an umbrella term which suggests a common ground in opposing a view of the body as simply being a biological entity, but otherwise

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social constructionist theories differ on how much of a social product the body is, and whether it has any material foundation (1993, p. 70). CORPORATE BODIES AND PLASTIC BODIES During the academic movement from the naturalistic to the socially constructed body, `western' societies' relationship to and construction of the body have also altered. The assumptions about `the body' which solidified from biological science into the `anatomising urge' are being disrupted by contemporary societal and technological changes. The marriage of `new' technologies (for example, cosmetic surgery, genetic engineering and information and virtual reality technologies) and the consumer culture emphasis on choice highlight the potential for reshaping the body. The construction of the body seems to have moved from the structured, bounded body of anatomy to the plastic, hybrid body of the cyborg or the shapeshifter in the `Star Trek' spinoff, `Deep Space 9'. The desire to cut beneath the skin to find out the hidden make-up of the body-parts seems to have shifted to what is made visible, presented and re-presented on the surface. The upsurge of academic interest in the body is in part a response to these changes. In this section I shall look at the two elements of the `anatomising urge' ± the scalpel and the mirror ± in relation to these changing constructions of the body and their relationship to images of organisations. As will be discussed further in Chapter 5, organisations within organisation theory have predominantly been seen as definite, bounded entities. Yet they are also part of our cultural understandings of the world around us, and as such have a place in our imaginations (compare images of organisations in the novels of Dickens and Kafka). Thus one of the vehicles for looking at these changes will be that of popular culture, which indicates interconnections between society, the body and organisations that are only beginning to be explored in academic literature (see, for example, Hassard and Holliday, 1998; Hassard et al., 2000). There are two main ways in which these technologies are said to reshape the body, making it more fluid. The first is through the disruption of the lived experience of the physical body and its relationship to space and time, and is usually related to information and communication technologies, virtual reality, video conferencing and the Internet. The second is in enabling the physical reconstruction or reorganisation of the body, through genetic engineering, cosmetic,

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plastic and transsexual surgery, and the `new reproductive technologies'. They are both tied in to notions of the relationship between the body and the identity of the individual. In the first of these reconstitutions of the body, computer and virtual reality technologies are argued to produce disruption or even transcendence of somatic knowledge of place, space and time. In other words, they conquer the physical limitations of the body, where it is able to be `present' in only one place and in one time zone. This is related to a presumed change in the lived experience of being-in-theworld, rather than to scientific conceptions of location with their `objective' measurements. Giddens discusses this theme in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), where he argues that large modern organisations are predicated on this `disembedding' of time and space, through the now necessary ability to co-ordinate the activities of many people in different times and spaces other than through their immediate location. (This is interesting, since one of the original rationales for the `manufactory' was to bring together these activities for greater control of time and space, exactly through their being located in the same place (Thompson, 1967; Marglin, 1974; Berg, 1994).) However, it is arguable that if one were to take an historical perspective, this would not be as novel as it first appears. It could be seen as a continuation of a long history of `technologies' that have been used to communicate over a distance and to collapse the time differences involved (from mail to the telephone), to organise dispersed information (for example, the genesis of the `form' itself ± see McLean and Hoskin, 1998), or to gain a relative perspective on the interrelationship of time, distance and position, from the clock and map to the chronometer (Sabel, 1996). It could even be argued that people have projected `virtual' selves in the past. For example, sailors in the eighteenth century had clocks that were set for the time `at home'. These new technologies also promise a replacement of the material world with artificially created `virtual' worlds. This includes a `total sensory immersion in the artificial environment' (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995a, p. 3), where the body and senses themselves experience the created world through the technology of `eyephones', `datagloves' and `datasuits' (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995, p. 6): `VR is a computer-generated visual, audible and tactile multi-media experience . . . [it] aims to surround the human body with an artificial sensorium of sight, sound and touch' (ibid., p. 6). In the second reconstitution of the body, there is again the argument that the physical body can be reshaped and its limitations transcended via technology. For example, genetic engineering, at least in its

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popularised version, promises the potential to choose and manipulate the features and personality of children before they are even conceived. These sorts of technologies can be seen as liberating people from feeling that they are trapped in the `wrong body' via sex-change operations. They can also disrupt the bodily signifiers of `race' (one thinks of Michael Jackson) and disability (by the use of artificial limbs, eyes, and plastic surgery, for example, although prosthetics also have a long history). While these technologies reshape the body, making it more malleable, `better', and less structured into a fixed ordering, they can also be seen as the logical extension of the Cartesian dream. Technological developments `point towards the possibilities of post-bodied and posthuman forms of existence' (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995, p. 2). The ultimate `post-human body' is not a body at all, but a mind or subjectivity released from the constraints of the physical body. This is the vision held up by Demi Moore's character in the film Disclosure, from the novel by Michael Crichton (1994), when she speaks of the company's vision: `What we're selling is freedom. We offer in new technology what religion and revolution have promised but never delivered: freedom from the physical body. Freedom from race and gender, from nationality and personality, from place and time. Communicating by cellular 'phone and handheld computer, PDA and built-in fax modem we can relate to each other as pure consciousness'. These technologies are also seen as opening up the possibilities of new sorts of organisations and communities. The freeing of people from their physical bodies and visible signifiers has been argued to create communities that would not have been possible in geographical terms. Thus Whittle (1996) has described how a cyberspace `transsexual' community was mobilised over the murder of Brandon Teena, a female-to-male transgendered person in Nebraska. Whittle argues that the Internet provides a space where, ironically, transgendered people do not have to live out the `virtual identities' they have to put on to `pass' ± to perform `some notion of feminine or masculine ``realness'' ' (ibid., p. 4), which is expected of them when their bodies are present as visible signifiers of gender. Rather, he argues, in cyberspace they can escape the problems of `passing' and present their `real' identities, which are dislocated from their physical body. Yet, in many ways, the dream of escape from the physical body turns out to be an illusion. The lived body resists and reminds the would-be transcendental ego of its constant and inevitable presence. While the mind is surfing the Net, finding its transcendental ego identity in

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cyberspace, the physical body develops eyestrain, repetitive strain injury, aching limbs and poor posture. At the very least there are the periodic needs to eat, drink and excrete. The physical denigration of the body is illustrated in popular caricatures of the `computer nerd', who is seen as unattractive and unhealthy (Lupton, 1995). Virtual reality technologies also extract their physical price in a cluster of symptoms known collectively as `alternate world syndrome' ± dizziness, disorientation, and headaches (Heim, 1995, p. 67). Attempts to mould the body to fit some ideal or conception of identity are often fraught with the experience of bodily pain and even injury. Whittle cites a transsexual newsletter which describes in graphic detail the pain and permanent disfigurement that female to male transsexuals suffer in an attempt to gain the ultimate signifier of the male body: the phallus (Green and Wilchins, 1996, p. 1, in Whittle, 1996, p. 6). Even going through all this, they only ever gain a penis which they cannot `get up'. The erect and powerful phallus remains elusive. In what I think is an extraordinary piece of writing, Sobchack (1995) describes what it is like to be a `cyborg' woman through the amputation of her left leg above the knee, from cancer, and its replacement with a prosthetic limb. Her lived experience is one of pain, phantom sensations, the screwing in of the new leg, the loss of weight involved, and the intense exercise needed to learn to move as a cyborg. She contrasts this with `techno-science transcendence', `the self-exterminating impulses of the discourses of disembodiment suggested by Baudrillard's porno-graphy of the body on the one hand and the Mondo 2000/ Wired ± let's download into the datascape and beat the meat4 ± subculture on the other' (1995, pp. 207, 209). Thus there are a number of sources of anxiety and disquiet around the disruption of the body produced through these technologies and discourses, which often echoes the hatred of the early anatomists. Whereas the original taboo centred mainly, although not exclusively, around religious beliefs about resurrection, modern criticism is predominantly related to the capitalist context, where body parts are exchanged or patented as part of the cash nexus. Indeed, the continued fragmentation of the body, either literally as in the technologies which physically reshape the body, or figuratively in the information and virtuality technologies, evoke the `anatomising urge' very strongly. In relation to this, it is worth looking at some aspects of the film Disclosure in more detail. Although the organisation in question sells the Cartesian dream of disembodiment quoted above, the firm's survival

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in its capitalist context depends on the successful material production of those computer chips which enables this dream to be put into practice. In a way that is probably now typical of multinational companies, it has relocated its production to a place where labour is cheaper, regulations are minimal or more favourable to organisations than in its native USA. In other words, where the worker's body is mere body to be used and exploited. The very technologies the company makes are also used to manage the `disembedding' of time and space that this has caused. The manager, played by Demi Moore, has ordered the lowering of costs in the production of the chips, which means that they are not of a standard that enables the virtual technologies she has been eulogising to work. In an interesting twist to the conventional thriller, she and the hero, Michael Douglas, meet each other in cyberspace as she completely erases the records of her actions, which would be so disastrous for the reputation of the company, while he manages to get access to these through the more `conventional' technologies of the telephone and fax machine. Thus it is clear that the disembodied nature of the records poses a threat to the material object of the firm ± the production of computer chips in `real time' and space. This film illustrates how in the modern organisation the disembedding mechanisms can cause uncertainty and anxiety, often because the traditional managerial assumptions about control and visibility have been sliced apart. Another source of anxiety concerns fluidity. For example, AIDS is a particularly cogent symbol of the `panic' about the breakdown of the body's boundaries. It links together images of invasion of the body by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), together with the fear of death through contamination by `unclean' body fluids (Kroker and Kroker, 1988). In `western' societies, the male bounded, contained body is predominantly seen as being superior to the female, `leaky' body. Denigration of `leakiness' is also seen in the imagery of the computer virus and the lack of structure of the Internet itself, compared to the `penetrating' power of the (male) computer hackers (Lupton, 1995). The `cyborg', the hybrid between human and machine, became a major symbol in late-twentieth-century society and culture. It embodies these anxieties in the different ways it has been conceptualised. One side of the cyborg dreams of fluidity, multiplicities and the blurring of boundaries between self and other. This is one that derives particularly from feminist readings of technology (Bordo, 1993, p. 225; Haraway, 1990a). The other ± the one most dominant in popular culture such as

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science fiction films ± is derived from the image of the male body (although it is not necessarily male in all its forms). It is aggressive, strong, bounded, protected but penetrating, contained within itself and its identity even when it is able to change physical shape. It is the image portrayed in Terminator and Robocop (Lupton, 1995). Thus I would like to conclude this brief examination of some of the issues surrounding the relationship between technology and the body, with a cyborg from what is commonly acknowledged to be the first cyberpunk novel: Neuromancer by William Gibson (1993). Molly is one of the book's two central characters. She is a `street samurai', a postmodern `heavy', sent to pick up Case, the other main character. He is a burnt out `cyberspace cowboy' who `jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix' (ibid., p. 12). He is employed to thieve, `required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data' (ibid.). When Case first sees Molly, he thinks she is wearing mirrored glasses. Then he realises that `the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets' (ibid., p. 36). These mirrored lenses have extra-human powers, and can be turned into something almost like a computer screen for a reconfigured Case to see through these `eyes' as a passive `rider' within her. As a cyborg she has been turned from a vulnerable female body into an engineered fighting and intelligence machine: `She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails' (ibid., p. 37). She tells Case that she does not want to hurt him, although she does hurt people sometimes, but this is `just the way I'm wired' (ibid., p. 37). Molly is a cyborg who (which?) incorporates the scalpel and the mirror within her very body. If Anatomia is the Renaissance representation of the `anatomising urge', then Molly is its contemporary personification. A third anxiety relates to the close links between the body and selfidentity which is argued to be part of the modern `project of self' (Giddens, 1991; Shilling, 1993; Sennett, 1976). `With mass culture and consumerism came a new self, a more visible self and the body comes to symbolize overtly the status of the personal self' (Turner, 1996, p. 195). Not only the body, but also the self, have become commodities. The body image is used to achieve what Featherstone has described as the `marketable self' (1991, p. 171). The body is central to this self-directed `calculating hedonism' which produces pleasure, makes one feel attractive, gains positive attention from others

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and is ultimately felt to make one more lovable. The modern `western' conception of the subject is one that is whole, coherent and selfsufficient. If the body is seen to project to the `outside' world an image of that self, there will inevitably be a tension between the possibilities of reshaping the body to present the identity the person chooses, the dislocation between a whole and complete identity, and a body which is flexible, with interchangeable parts, potentially a hybrid with technology. As with the technologised body, the project of the body-self is related to the prevalent capitalist context. Although the projection of identity through the body is bound up with consumption, this cannot be severed so easily from the industrial processes of production and manufacture. It has been argued that `Mass consumption has been referred to as the necessary ``other'' of mass production (Alt, 1976, p. 71)' (Featherstone, 1991, p. 172). Yet workers had to be re-educated to consumption. Workers' bodies have long been disciplined, trained and controlled ± but by the needs of production. For example, through his notorious `sociological department', Henry Ford attempted to control any bodily excesses of his workers. His dominion extended to consumption of alcohol, drugs, gambling and any `inappropriate' sexual relations outside of work space and time (Corbett, 1994). It was believed that bodily energy was dissipated through these activities, and therefore was not available for the employer's use (Burrell, 1984, 1992). But with the turn to mass consumption as `an aggressive device of corporate survival' (Ewen, 1976, p. 54), workers had to be encouraged to `spend, spend, spend'. The mass media, as well as Hollywood, had a starring role in this world of image. As Featherstone notes: `Advertising thus helped to create a world in which individuals are made to become emotionally vulnerable, constantly monitoring themselves for bodily imperfections which could no longer be regarded as natural' (1991, p. 175). Thus, while the body of the worker had itself been a commodity to be used and exploited in production, the body had now become a commodity in a rather different way. It had come to stand for the whole lifestyle of individuals, their status and cultural capital, and, of course, their (financial) ability to consume. During the twentieth century, under the influences of mass consumption and the images of Hollywood, the body has become no longer a `natural' entity, living but a product one has to work at. Turner argues that `consumer culture requires not the suppression of desire, but its manufacture, extension and detail' (1996, p. 56). He compares this to the control of the body in

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asceticism to indicate the extent to which the consuming body is formed by managing desire. The body is denied and controlled (for example, through diet and exercise) but in order ultimately to increase pleasure, rather than for spiritual betterment. Perhaps, in modern society, production and consumption have been collapsed into one mode, via the economy of the body: `We find a new mode of investment which presents itself no longer in the form of control by repression but that of control by stimulation. ``Get undressed ± but be slim, good looking, tanned!'' ' (Foucault, 1980, p. 57). But this manufacturing of the body image leads to all sorts of social dysfunctions which also create anxieties about the body. These include the disparagement of the elderly, the disabled and the `obese' or `ugly' person, or to bulimic and anorexic conditions ± the body simultaneously in and out of control. Also, the possibility to consume in order to achieve the bodily ideal is not equally available. As Featherstone writes, `for those who inhabit the dark side of consumer culture, consumption is limited to the consumption of images' (1991, p. 177). Bourdieu's work on the way bodies are socially produced through the learning and labouring acts of an individual from babyhood is useful in theorising how these inequalities are inscribed on the body. He suggests that bodily movements, posture, gestures and so on form a `habitus' of deep-seated and automatic `techniques of the body' which reproduce existing social structures. He links this to how the body is formed differentially according to the social location of the individual ± that is, the class-based material circumstances in which they are situated. The body is also shaped by the development of `taste' ± the lifestyle `choices' individuals make and preferences they acquire. However, the rhetoric of choice hides the material constraints that limit what is available to individuals, and which then shape these choices (Shilling, 1993, pp. 128±30). Consumption, then, as with technology, still retains the shape of the `anatomising urge'. It is centred around the inclusion and exclusion of certain bodies. And in its relationship to the `project of self ' can also be seen as fragmenting and dissecting the body, and cutting between the presented body image and the lived body, and the lived body and identity. Modern consumption is also related to the mirror, since `modern sensibility and subjectivity are focused on the body as a representation of the self, such that the body is in contemporary society a mirror of the soul' (Turner, 1994, p. xii). This itself can be argued to lead to a

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dysfunction of society described by Cooley (1964). This is the `looking glass self ' which cannot exist outside the gaze of others: `All of us, actors and spectators alike, live surrounded by mirrors. In them, we seek reassurance of our capacity to captivate or impress others, anxiously searching out blemishes that might detract from the appearance we intend to project' (Lasch, 1979, p. 92). Indeed, the surface of the body may be said not to reflect out the `inner person', whatever that entity might be, but merely reflects back the replicated images of the identical. In J. B. Priestley's English Journey published in 1933 he comments that women throughout the country dressed alike, under the influence of Hollywood fashion, whereas twenty years earlier there had been regional variation (Featherstone, 1991, p. 180). Falk analyses a phenomenon he calls `mimetic consumption' (1994, p. 121). This is the desire to possess and use the similar, and therefore to identify with the particular lifestyle, status or social identity associated with the object or service consumed. He argues that in modern consumption the individual pursuit of happiness is a process of self-building which is aimed at the pursuit of selfcompletion (Falk, 1994, p. 130): `The logics of modern consumption ± both introjective and distinctive ± are rooted much deeper in the existential conditions of individual self-construction involving an historically specific mode of the reproduction of lack ± and desire. More precisely, it is constituted by the reciprocal effects of the two moments of self-construction: the pursuit of separateness and distinction on the one hand, and the pursuit of introjective self-fulfilment on the other' (1994, p. 144). Thus `self-building is simultaneously an act of separation or an articulation of self boundaries in relation to the outside, being thus both an ``addition'' (complement) and a ``subtraction'' with an effect of lack' (ibid.). Consumption, then, like the cyborg figure, is aimed at completing the boundaries of one's self and one's body, of building a bounded, contained entity and identity. THEORIES OF THE BODY AND SOCIETY In the literature discussed above, social scientists have considered the body in relation to society. In this section I shall examine five key theorists who have attempted to produce theories of the relationship between individual, body and society, which try to encompass all three elements in an explanatory schema. These theorists are Mary Douglas, Bryan Turner, Arthur Frank, Pasi Falk, and Chris Shilling. For the

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purpose of this book it is most useful to consider these theories from the conceptualisation of the body that they construct. This forms a preliminary basis for the development of an epistemological approach to embodied subjectivity in Chapter 3. The work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970) has had a huge influence on theorising the body, which has extended beyond her own disciplinary boundaries. Although there are other traditions of studying the body within anthropology, as Richard Fardon points out (Turner, 1992, pp. 250±1), it is Douglas's development of a theory of the links between the structure of a particular culture and its construction of the human body that has been taken up within sociological work. Here it has provided a useful antidote to the biological reductionist theories of the body, or the sociobiological ones that use biology to argue for a universal understanding of society. Key to Douglas's theory is her belief that `the human body is the most readily available image of a system' (1970, p. 17). In Natural Symbols (1970), Douglas argues that there are two bodies: the physical body of the individual and the social body of the community. The two interact with each other, so that `The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived' (1970, p. 93). Thus the movement, gestures and body imagery are all interrelated to the form and beliefs of the social body. However, she goes much further than this straightforward social constructionist perspective to try to delineate a theory of how the physical body and the social body interact. Douglas argues that Mauss (1934) was looking for a general sociological theory of the body when he suggested that there was no such thing as natural behaviour. She criticises Hall's (1973 [1959]) thesis of The Silent Language and Levi-Strauss' theories for failing to link types of social structure to social variables. Since they do not do so, Douglas argues, their work falls back into a series of structured oppositions based on the dualism between culture and nature. This she ultimately links back to Mauss's denial of natural behaviour, since this sets up a relationship between culture and nature as part of the study of the body and society right from the outset. In contrast, Douglas posits that it is possible `to identify a natural tendency to express situations of a certain kind in an appropriate bodily style. In so far as it is unconscious, in so far as it is obeyed universally in all cultures, the tendency is natural' (1970, p. 97). Douglas suggests four different ways that the body is used to reflect society. The first is as an organ of communication. This is not simply in

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terms of speech and gesture, though, but also encompasses the communication of the metaphorical as it relates to a particular society. Thus, she argues, the conceptualisation of the relation of the head to the limbs will be a model of the central control system of society. Second, the body is a vehicle of life. The boundedness of society will be expressed in whether the body is seen as vulnerable in what it takes in through orifices, and whether its boundaries are seen to require protection. Third, images about the use of bodily wastes signify the extent of distinction between spirit and matter. If bodily wastes are recycled without qualms, the body is not seen as tainting the pure spirit. The fourth area of reflection about society is related to this, and concerns the extent to which life is seen primarily as spiritual and the body as irrelevant matter. It has to be noted that it is not easy to see why these four aspects should be specifically distinguished, and how they fit together to express a system. It would seem to me that these particular concerns reflect Douglas's conception of a society as a bounded entity, indeed, in the form of the organism: `The physical body can have universal meaning only as a system which responds to the social system, expressing it as a system. What it symbolises naturally is the relation of parts of an organism to the whole. Natural symbols can express the relation of an individual to his [sic] society at that general systemic level. The two bodies are the self and society: sometimes they are so near as to be almost merged; sometimes they are far apart. The tension between them allows the elaboration of meanings' (1970, p. 112). Douglas's main thesis is that `the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex systems' (1970, p. 115). Even though Douglas is concerned with the social construction of the body, her language reflects the `anatomising urge', with its imagery of structure, function and boundary maintenance. It is interesting to note the tenacity of this world view even where the explicit approach is one quite different from that of scientific rationality. Polhemus makes an observation which, while not specifically about Douglas's work, is pertinent to it: `We have tended to supply our own would-be objective definition of the boundaries of the body and its peripheral media; we should in the future be more sensitive to native definitions of the body as a system of meaning' (1975, p. 33). It is interesting to consider whether the images of invasion and containment, boundaries and structures that predominate in

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these studies say more about their `western' origin than they do about the cultures to which they relate. This point is reinforced when Douglas's work is compared to Martin's study of body imagery in North America. In Flexible Bodies (Martin, 1994) she argues that the imagery of the body has altered since the 1960s, from a militaristic language about the protection of the body from `foreign invaders' through the skin and good hygiene, to an equally militaristic language focusing on the body's defences through the immune system, where white blood cells exterminate anything are not recognised as part of `self'. Bryan Turner (1992, p. 51) characterises Douglas's work as not being about an anthropology of the body but rather one of the symbolism of risk where the body provides a metaphor for disorder or coherence. He also argues (1992, p. 250) that her interest in the body is one of discourse ± the body as a means of thinking about the world which neglects the phenomenological lived body. Shilling (1993) also takes this approach. He comments that `Douglas' work contains many valuable insights about the relationship between the social body and the individual body. However, at times it threatens to collapse these two bodies together by reducing the phenomenology of the individual body ± the ways in which people live, experience and perceive their bodies ± into the positions and categories made available by the social body' (1993, p. 73). If Douglas's work has been influential on recent literature on the body, that of sociologist Turner has been at the centre of the current upsurge of interest. Not only has he made the most extensive attempts to theorise the relationship between body and society, he is also personally very influential in the development of the area through the journal Theory, Culture and Society, its spin-off books on the body, and the newly developed journal Body and Society (started 1995). As Turner has explained (1992, p. 230), his interest in the body stemmed from his writings on the sociology of religion and medical sociology, because within both of these the body becomes problematised. In The Body and Society (1996, first published in 1984) Turner made what was the first attempt within sociology to provide a systematic theory of the body (although he argues that it is one of a trilogy of works on the body, with Religion and Social Theory (1983) and Medical Power and Social Knowledge (1987)). He proposes that the body is `a problem of regulation' (1996, p. 107) for society. He draws on Parsons' use of Hobbes' concept of the problem of social order and social contract. He considers that society has four problems it has to solve to do with regulation of the body. These are `the reproduction of

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populations through time and their regulation in space, the restraint of desire as an interior body problem and the representation of bodies in social space as an issue concerning the surface of the body' (1996, p. 107). He puts forward a typology of these problems, a key writer who considered each of them, and a characteristic `illness' associated with each dimension (this latter echoes the Parsonian idea of `the sick role' with its link between illness and society) (ibid., p. 108). Turner's theory has been highly influential in the field of work on the body, partly because of its synthetic quality, but it has also been the subject of much criticism. In particular, and not surprisingly given the Parsonian influence, it has been criticised as being a functionalist approach (Frank, 1991, p. 43; Shilling, 1993, p. 89). In an interview between Richard Fardon and Turner about Turner's work (Turner, 1992), Fardon's critique is based on the accusation that ` ``society'' is seen to respond to various needs, or requirements of human existence which are pre-cultural, pre-social and therefore natural' (ibid., p. 245). Turner defends himself by arguing that he put forward the typology as an heuristic device, which is also his original statement in The Body and Society (1996, p. 107). However, it is clear that it does suffer from the limitations of this approach. Fardon argues that this functionalism means Turner's approach to the body is ultimately foundationalist or essentialist, seeing the body as natural fact (1992, p. 251). Turner agrees that he does believe in a `shared ontology of embodiment' (1992, p. 252). Yet because his focus is on what tasks society performs on the individual body, he is also open to the criticism that he holds a `relatively disembodied view of the individual in society' (Shilling, 1993, p. 93). These criticisms taken together mean that Turner's theory is unable to deal with historical change, nor able to explain how and why different societies deal differently with these problems of the body (Shilling, 1993, p. 93). Turner's later work seeks to take a more phenomenological view of the body, perhaps in response to some of these criticisms. In the preface to Regulating Bodies (1992), he argues that he is trying to find some integration between structuralist, poststructuralist and phenomenological approaches, to `comprehend the historical evolution of the discourse about the body, to acknowledge how our perspectives on the body are the product of social constructions and to retain an appreciation for the phenomenological nature of the lived body' (1992, pp. 8±9). In one of the papers in this collection, `The Epistemology of the Hand', Turner seeks to bring these perspectives together by

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following Berger and Luckmann (1971) in linking a foundationalist ontology with a constructionist epistemology (Turner, 1992, p. 117). However, Turner does not deal with the different and potentially incompatible assumptions that underpin the social theories he uses in different places ± and he is a most prolific writer! ± to consider the body and society. Indeed, he prefers a strategy of `epistemological pragmatism' (1992, pp. 61, 239±42) to the theories he borrows ± using what seems appropriate to a particular level of analysis, interpreting them through his own lens without concern for their own contextualisation. Both Douglas's and Turner's work can be described as functionalist in orientation. Douglas's theory can be characterised as structural functionalism (Burrell and Morgan, 1979, p. 49) as it draws heavily on the biological analogy of the organism which consists of structures which perform a function, with the parts relating to the whole through this schema in a way that characterises the `anatomising urge'. This is despite the fact that she is talking about cultural symbolism. Turner's typology can also be characterised as functionalist, this time following the approach of functional imperativism developed by the later Parsons (Burrell and Morgan, 1979, p. 54). Both are examples of a sociology of regulation, in that they focus on social order and how this is maintained. The next two theories considered, those of Frank and Falk, attempt to break out of this functionalist paradigm. Frank proposes that his typology of body uses starts from the experience of the lived body. However, it is debatable how far he goes into a consideration of subjectivism. By drawing on Giddens' theory of structuration, Frank is unable to realise his goal of a fully phenomenological approach to the body, since Giddens' is a more structuralist than a process-related view (Turner, 1996, p. 25). Frank's theory of the body and society takes Turner's typology as its starting point. He accepts the criticisms of Turner's functionalism, yet argues that it can still be useful if one reconceptualises it as not only tasks a society must solve in relation to the individual, but also as four problems a body must solve in relation to society (1991, p. 45). In other words, this attempts to bring the phenomenological perspective back into the theory by starting from the experience of the embodied subject in a social context. This is seen as an action problem rather than a system problem (1991, p. 47), for `bodies alone have ``tasks'' ' (ibid., p. 48, original emphasis). Drawing on Giddens' structuration theory in order to conceptualise the relationship between body and society,

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Frank suggests that bodies exist among discourses (`cognitive mappings of the body's possibilities and limitations, which bodies experience as already there for their self-understanding' (ibid.)) and institutions (which have a specificity in time and space). He includes a third dimension, the corporeality of bodies ± the `flesh which is formed in the womb, transfigured (for better or worse) in its life, dies and decomposes' (ibid., p. 49). Frank proposes his own typology, which he describes as one of `body use in action' (ibid., p. 54). Here he makes an attempt to bring together a view of the body as being socially constructed as a corporeal, lived phenomena. In relation to this he concludes his paper with the statement that the body `is not an entity, but the process of its own being' (1991, p. 96). However, the development of typologies, as Shilling points out, inevitably fails to bring a level of understanding that is processual: `it gives us little explanation as to why people should choose to adopt particular relations to their bodies, how individuals are able to change between styles of body usage, or what wider historical conditions could influence their adoption of certain styles rather than others' (1993, p. 98). Pasi Falk's model of the body and society in The Consuming Body (1994) is highly complex and interrelated, forming a dense network of concepts and arguments which will necessarily be simplified in what follows. Falk's concern is to develop a theory of how bodily experience is related to a cultural Order (which he does not define very clearly, but links to Foucault's idea of the simultaneous operation of the practical and the discursive (Falk, 1994, p. 1)) and the construction of subjectivity. He conceptualises this through the way the boundaries of the self and the body are constituted ± through social categorisations acting simultaneously and inextricably with the sensual experience of the body ± by a reciprocal exchange of substances and concepts taken into the body, and substances and concepts also expelled or expressed from the body. This is a theory of both subjectivity and embodiment which is historically and culturally constituted. Falk's specific focus of attention is this reciprocal interchange of body and society within the modern period's emphasis on `consumption'. Consumption here encapsulates a range of meanings from eating to the material consumption of goods and on to the cultural consumption of images and representations (especially focusing on advertising and pornography). In this context Falk centres on the mouth as the main organ of consumption (eating) and expression (speech). This approach is located in a historical examination of how the `sensory

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organization' (1994, p. 11) of the body has changed. Falk suggests that `eating constitutes a receptive relationship to the outside world in terms of representations, and so does seeing ± though in different ways' (1994, p. 11). This relates to Douglas's work on pollution ± what is acceptable to be taken into the body and what is not. It also relates to Bourdieu's work on the formation of `taste' (see page 45 above). Thus the mouth is an intermediary between what is `inside' and what is `outside', and it is also a `site of judgement' (ibid., p. 15). It is, moreover, bidirectional. Here Falk means the social exchange process of sharing. This can be seen in terms of sharing food in a meal, which is symbolic of both the material body and the creation of community (the root of the word `companion' means eating the same bread (ibid.)). Thus cultural representations are consumed along with the meal. Here Falk is also making a link with a central anthropological concept, `the gift', which has been used to encapsulate the social processes of reciprocity. Falk suggests that the pre-modern body was a (relatively) `open' one, where boundaries between a fairly undeveloped self and society were open. Indeed, he suggests that here the individual body might be more conceptualised as a second `inside', within the `inside' of the community ± the collective body, which confronts the `outside' along with the community (ibid., p. 12). This can be illustrated through the communal bonds of the ritual meal. This body has been replaced with the much more `closed' modern body, which is derived from the `idealized anatomical description of the Renaissance' body (1994, p. 25). Here the overdeveloped self is privatised, bounded from the `outside'. Shared meals have also become privatised within the family and shared eating `out', in restaurants, has become the focus of individualised choice, the expression of highly developed `taste' (the way Bourdieu defines this in relation to distinction expresses social distance and hierarchy rather than sharing) and is based on the capitalist exchange relationship of goods/services for money. The construction of `inside' and `outside' are fundamental to Falk's theory of the body and society ± a `basic condition' his theory requires (1994, p. 11). He explains this in the following way: `insofar as the inside/outside difference and the mediation between these are conceived of in representational terms, the distinction involves already a notion of a subject which relates itself to the environment as culture (Order)' (1994, p. 12). This seems to me to be potentially problematical, since it places this difference as being present before its construction. This would suggest a pre-given body which already has this

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difference marked out in this way. This in itself would have problems, but is in any case an approach that Falk rejects. Indeed, as we have seen, in his thesis, inside and outside are not necessarily boundaries drawn around the individual body. Thus we are left with a particular set of differences that are representational but seem to exist externally to the historical and cultural processes that construct representations. Although Falk claims to start with the body as being both sensory and sensual, with corporeality, there is no discussion as to how this might be theorised and it seems to slip from sight rapidly under the pressure of the representational Order on which Falk tends to focus. The capitalisation of the term `Order' seems to me to indicate that the sociology of regulation (of the body) underpins Falk's work as it does that of the other theorists discussed above. In The Body and Social Theory (1993), Chris Shilling is mainly concerned to analyse the `absent presence' of the body in sociology (1993, p. 11) and to evaluate the literature that has developed on the body and society. However, he does explore what he describes as an outline theory of the body. His approach is via a critique of both the naturalistic (scientistic) and the social constructionist approaches to the body. He argues that both these approaches maintain the nature/ culture split with regard to the body; each taking one side of the dichotomy and dismissing the other. Thus he proposes a view of the body as `an unfinished biological and social phenomenon' (ibid., p. 12) and argues for `a view of the mind and body as inextricably linked as a result of the mind's location within the body' (ibid., p. 13). Hence Shilling agrees with Turner (1992) when he argues for a foundationalist view of the body: `To begin to achieve an adequate analysis of the body we need to regard it as a material, physical and biological phenomenon which is irreducible to immediate social process or classifications'. Shilling draws on the work of Elias (1978) and Bourdieu, previously not used within the sociology of the body, as a way of overcoming the dualistic accounts he sees elsewhere. Shilling takes the view that in late modernity the body has become a `project which should be worked at and accomplished as part of an individual's self-identity' (1993, p. 3). This is the product of the `privatization of meaning' (ibid., p. 2) and the growing ability to control and change the body. From this viewpoint, he argues that death needs to be analysed as being centrally important to understanding the body in modern society. Such a perspective as this emphasises the body as process, and fits with the focus of both Elias and Bourdieu on the body as an unfinished entity (ibid., p. 127). Elias's (1978) work is concerned

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with identifying the historical processes involved in the regulation or `civilising' of the body. Bourdieu sees the body as `physical capital', which means it has become commodified but also has power and symbolic value. In particular, Bourdieu's work is concerned with the social reproduction of inequalities, and here his concept of `habitus' is significant since it encapsulates the way `body techniques' are formed in articulation with the social location of individuals. Shilling does, however, note several disadvantages of Bourdieu's work. These are that his theory is unable to deal with social and historical change; it does not include a phenomenological understanding of the `lived' body; and it has no account of gender or ethnicity. Shilling has two main criticisms of the literature on the body that he reviews. The first is that the social constructionist approach that characterises most of it does not have a material or physical account of the body because it has rejected biology and the essentialist view of the body. The second, related point, is that there is very little room in existing theories for considering the lived, sensual, phenomenological body. However, Shilling does not anywhere define what he means by a phenomenological account, and he does not refer to the philosophical tradition of phenomenology to locate his criticism. One senses a frustration that the written word ultimately cannot convey directly to the flesh the physical sensations of an other. In relation to his criticism of the dualism maintained by social constructionism, there are several problems with the way in which he reinvokes the biological body. He argues that the body has `species-specific capacities', although these change over the life cycle and the body is also open to social relationships and technical interventions that can change it. However, he argues that there are fundamental physical limitations that cannot be overcome, such as human beings not being able to fly and not being able to be in more than one place at a time. This, to my mind, does not take adequate account of differing social beliefs and constructions of the body. For example, in the witchcraft trials in western Europe, those accused of witchcraft could not rely on the defence of an alibi, since there was a common belief that while the physical body of the individual was in one place, its `familiar' could be elsewhere carrying out evil deeds. In addition, while Shilling writes about the lived body, he does not seem to take adequate account of anthropological studies which have illustrated how people use and experience their bodies very differently depending on their socialisation (see the discussion of Mauss on page 36 above). Any appeal to the biological body, in my view, also needs to consider that there is no description and `knowledge' of the

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material body within biological science which is itself not constructed through the language and lens of the `western' intellectual and scientific tradition. What Shilling inevitably falls into is speaking from a modern rationalistic, scientific perspective as if this were a `real', objective basis for understanding the body. CONCLUSIONS In this review of literature on the body I have tried to provide some contextualisation as to why there has been an explosion of interest in the body. In selecting some aspects of this body of literature to discuss, I have attempted to indicate an outline history of the study of the body, to try to show the diversity and wealth of material on the body, and how theorising about the body has itself altered over time. The debates in this chapter indicate the difficulties involved in any attempt to theorise about the body. Frequently they fall between using social constructionist arguments to demonstrate the historicity of the body, and then losing the materiality, or perhaps rather the corporeality, of a more phenomenological approach to the lived body. This illustrates the problem of cross-disciplinary dressing. Social constructionism is familiar ground to most social theorists. They are comfortable with either using it or criticising it, since it comes from within the same disciplinary field. Phenomenology comes from the field of philosophy. It has its own history, conflicts and debates (where are its borders with existentialism, structuralism and transcendentalism?). It was not developed to be linked to the social. (And on the whole not developed with more than a quick glance at the embodied subject.) Those theories that try to establish a schema for understanding the body in relation to individual and society seem to me to be based on a desire to develop a totalising theory that can encompass the parts within a whole, so that each of the parts has a function within the larger `body' of knowledge. A strong desire to organise, categorise and incise the field into classifications is apparent in these theories. This seems to be highly characteristic of the `anatomising urge'. Given these constraints, then, the above theories should be given due respect for tackling complex issues and not be criticised for not having reached a simple solution to all the problems of theorising the body. These epistemological problems and some attempt to develop a working approach for my own argument will be made in the next chapter.

3 Bodily Knowledge: An Approach to `Embodied Subjectivity' . . . we should think in terms of transforming both the social relations of knowledge production and the type of knowledge produced. To do so requires that we tackle the fundamental questions of how and where knowledge is produced and by whom, and of what counts as knowledge. (Weedon, 1987, p. 7) . . . the perceiving mind is an incarnated mind. (Merleau-Ponty, 1989, p. 3)

INTRODUCTION There are two main parts to this chapter. The first is the development of a methodological framework to understand the political production of knowledge. This is a framework from which to examine the different threads of the `anatomising urge' and the influence of this form of knowledge and construction of the body on the development of organisation studies as an academic field. This methodological framework is largely based on Foucault's genealogical method. The second part of the chapter is the development of an epistemological framework to understand the formation of knowledge about organisations and its relationship to the body. It will be apparent from the argument of the book thus far that a close connection is perceived between theories about how one might know and understand the world, and theories about the nature of the person who knows, especially in respect to how the mind±body relationship is conceptualised. It has been argued here that the dominant and valued forms of knowledge, based on `western' science and rationality, are related to a conceptualisation of the individual `knower' which can be characterised as `objectified disembodiment'. In other words, only the individual's mind (seen as transcendental and separate from the immanent 57

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body) is seen as being relevant to their knowledge about the world. The body is merely a passive container for the mind. Knowledge ± `true' knowledge ± itself is seen as being `objective' and thus not associated with the (embodied) person who knows: it stands apart from the individual. The epistemological framework in this chapter sets out to suggest an alternative approach to knowledge ± knowledge of the world, of the self and of others ± which is thoroughly located in our embodied selves. It can be characterised as `embodied subjectivity'. This framework draws mainly on the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1973); Foucault (1970, 1977, 1980, 1982); Irigaray (1985a, 1985b, 1993); Young (1984, 1989); and Butler (1990, 1993). It illustrates that the `anatomising urge' is not, nor can it be, a totalising force or tradition of knowledge, despite the claims of science and rationality to universal knowledge. This epistemological framework forms the basic standpoint in the book from which the critique of the `anatomising urge' in organisation studies is made. It is hoped that it can be taken further in future work, to be operationalised in studies of embodiment and organisations, in order to further subvert the prevalence of `objectified disembodiment' in the field. FOUCAULT AND THE GENEALOGICAL METHOD The work of Michel Foucault (1926±84) has had a powerful influence on organisation studies in recent years (for example, Burrell, 1988; McKinlay and Starkey, 1998). The main thrust of this influence has been around his conceptualisation of power, especially the notion of `discipline', and the connections seen with institutions, as evidenced in Discipline and Punish (1977). In this text, two aspects of Foucault's work which have not been so thoroughly developed in organisation studies will be considered. These are, first, his historical approach or genealogical method; and, second, his stress on the human body as the focus of social techniques and power. Before looking at the genealogical method in more detail, it is important to make some cautionary points about the use and discussion of Foucault's work. This work is subtle and complex. His writing style is dense, making much deliberate use of tropes (White, 1979). At times it can be ambiguous, impenetrable and contradictory (Sawicki, 1991). In reading English versions of Foucault's writings (as with those of Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray, discussed below) I am obviously subject to the difficulties inherent in any academic work that uses sources

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in translation. Much academic effort has been expended in the debate on, and the attempt to elucidate, the meanings of Foucault's key works, and many commentators have taken it upon themselves to classify this work, dividing it into different `periods' and assessing the consistency of thought between different writings (Burrell, 1988; Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982). This is despite the fact that Foucault himself explicitly aimed to avoid this sort of academic categorisation.1 Given this background it would be naõÈve to suggest that it is unproblematic to interpret or use this work. For the purposes of this argument, I draw on related themes across Foucault's work which I choose to weave together. I will therefore not dwell on the differing interpretations that are made between, for example, Foucault's comments on discourse in his `archaeological' and his `genealogical' periods. The objectives of this project centre around the sort of knowledge that is produced about organisations and organising. Specifically, the research questions assumptions about the human body that have been incorporated tacitly into the discipline, and which mean that the body itself is an `absent presence': prevalent through images of the anatomised organism but almost entirely absent in relation to embodied identity and experience. Thus Foucault's concern to understand the conditions of knowledge production, a concern that underpins the diversity of his work, is also one that is central to this book. Foucault believed that, rather than there being objective and universal knowledge or `truth', there are only constructed truth claims. For Foucault, ` ``truth'' is a historical product and therefore no knowledge is absolute' (Hollway, 1989, p. 41). However, because it is constructed does not mean that it has no material effects. On the contrary: `the exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power' (Foucault, 1980, p. 52). Thus, for Foucault, knowledge formation is inextricably bound up with power: hence his common use of `power/knowledge' as a key concept. However, Foucault is unhappy with the way that power is generally conceptualised in social theory as `repressive, as emanating from the top downwards, either through governmental and social elites, state and/or class interests' (Fitzsimons, 1994, p. 124). Foucault indicates that the problem with this is that `it allows power to be only ever thought in negative terms: refusal, delimitation, obstruction, censure. Power is that which says no' (1979, p. 53). Rather than this formulation, Foucault works from the need to understand how power `produces things . . . induces pleasure . . . forms knowledge . . . produces

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discourse' (1979, p. 36). In Foucault's theory, power is exercised (not possessed) in all social relations, and is analysed from the bottom up. From a feminist perspective, McNeil (1993, p. 169) notes it is important that this formulation is not taken at face value but, in order for it to be meaningful, the precise relationship of power and knowledge are investigated in any specific context. Thus it is imperative that we study how knowledge is produced, by and for whom, and how this knowledge becomes legitimised (Weedon, 1987, p. 7, chapter heading). It is this challenge I intend to take up in analysing the construction of discourses around organisation theory and the body. The focus Foucault puts on knowledge formation has sometimes been taken as a failure to engage adequately with practice. This reading of Foucault is exacerbated by his use of `discourse' as a central concept, which has led to the classification of him as a post-structuralist, and a critique that he focuses on language rather than materiality. This, to my mind, is a misreading of Foucault. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), he talks of `no longer treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak' (1972, p. 49). What he is concerned to do is to remove the assumptions that we have about how things are, to question how certain relationships, objects and definitions have come to seem as if they are natural and inevitable. In describing discursive formations, what Foucault at this point was to call the archaeological method was `always in the plural; it operates in a great number of registers; it crosses interstices and gaps; it has its domains where unities are juxtaposed, separated, fix their crests, confront one another, and accentuate the whitespaces between one another' (1972, p. 157). As well as the discursive formations, the archaeological method is concerned to look at the non-discursive practices surrounding them, that might include, for example, `an institutional field, a set of events, practices, and political decisions, a sequence of economic processes' (ibid.). McNay (1992) argues that Foucault changes the emphasis of the relationship between the discursive and the non-discursive in his later `genealogical' method, but the important point is his challenge to the dualism of language and `reality', in that `the discursive and the material are linked together in a symbiotic relationship' (1992, p. 27). As Braidotti puts it: `What really interests Foucault is the materiality of ideas' ± the fact that they exist in an in-between space caught in a network of material and symbolic conditions, between the text and

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history, between theory and practice, and never in any of these poles' (Braidotti, 1994a, p. 126). Since organisation theory is the production of discourse or knowledge about organisations, work and workers, in Foucault's terms it is not simply the production of words about these objects, separate from and merely descriptive or reflective of them, but is also the construction of the objects themselves. The production of the knowledge simultaneously produces the object of that knowledge. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Taylor's `scientific management' which, using the privileged language of science and rationality, has shaped and continues to shape the contours of factory organisation in ways that are certainly not experienced as `neutral' or `objective' in their power effects. However, even work that is not so directly connected into constructing the knowledge and practice of managers has a similarly material effect. Two effects of this that are central to this book are that organisations are constructed as entities which mimic the characteristics of organisms, and, second, that organisations are constructed using the language of the mind and of rationality both of which exclude the body and embodiment. Foucault's genealogical method, then, is `a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history' (Foucault, 1980, p. 117). However, it is important not to characterise Foucault's method as a traditional historical approach, since it is quite distinctive and different from conventional history. Indeed, he eschews the `naivete of chronologies' which search for the `secret origin' of a particular aspect of history (1972, p. 25). For history itself is a form of discourse with its own effects. He distinguishes his view of history as being `effective history' (following Nietzsche). Rather than looking for a comprehensive picture of continuous linear development, Foucault argues that `History becomes ``effective'' to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being ± as it divides our emotions, dramatises our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. ``Effective'' history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting' (Foucault, 1984, p. 88).

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Several comments can be drawn from this exposition of Foucault's view of history. The first is that, in view of the arguments developed here, Foucault's language has much in common with that of the `anatomising urge'. The wish to dismantle and the concern with discontinuities could be read as a desire to divide and categorise. Indeed, specifically referring to this metaphor among others, Barker comments that `often at the level of metaphor there are signs of Foucault's entrapment within theoretical perspectives that were the object of his genealogies' (1993, p. 75). However, in the context of Foucault's challenge to enlightenment thought, this perspective on knowledge is transformed into something much more transgressive. The reason Foucault wishes to cut up knowledge is because it is the `false unity' (McNay, 1994, p. 88), the `transcendental teleology' (Foucault, 1984, p. 89) of conventional history, that disguises the operations of power/knowledge. Because `the world we know is not this ultimately simple configuration where events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, or their initial and final value. On the contrary, it is a profusion of entangled events' (ibid.). Thus Foucault wants to make us aware of the complexities, diversities and differences that are usually obscured by a totalising or singular discourse of history as a true representation of the past. In this, Foucault focuses on the body as an important subject for `effective history': `We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is moulded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values; it constructs resistances' (1984, p. 87). In fact, Foucault's work examines the influence of anatomy and biology for the development of the dominant intellectual tradition (as seen in The Birth of the Clinic (1973) and The Order of Things (1970)). He is highly critical of this intellectual tradition and his work seeks to illustrate the relations of power embedded in its supposedly neutral and rational discourses. Thus in his genealogical method he is looking for the field of relations around a discourse, but not accepting the conventional boundaries to any discourse that assume it to be a unity. Thus genealogy is distinct from history in that it does not seek to reconstruct the past, or rather, portray the illusion that this is what it does. Rather, it is directed towards finding traces of the present in the past (Burrell, 1988, p. 225) or, as Barker puts it, genealogical analysis is carried out `on the basis of a present question' (1998, p. 22).

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It is worth considering briefly one criticism that has been made of Foucault's method, by Fraser (1989), among others. This is that he claims to critique humanism, yet from what standpoint can he do so without the problem of cutting away his own ground from underneath him? I suggest that Foucault's point would be that there is no external standpoint from where he can conduct his critique, for that idea itself continues to ascribe to the view that there can be neutral and transcendent knowledge divorced from the person who knows. Thus Foucault's work is inevitably another example of the operation of power/knowledge: `the knower, far from being outside of all contexts, is produced by the practices he [sic] sets out to analyse' (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 166). `Internalist' and `externalist' accounts of knowledge production are therefore based on a false distinction: in the one case, the development of constructs is reduced to a non-social sphere of texts, ideas and discourses, and in the other to extra-intellectual factors and structures' (Hoy, 1986, p. 10). To criticise Foucault for not producing an objective standpoint is to miss the point of the critique of the discourse of rationality and to ignore Foucault's explicit aim to examine the conditions of the production of knowledge. Other commentators, such as Dean (1994) and Hoy (1986), see this as a strength rather than a weakness of Foucault's thought. Dean comments that, `the history of the present is, above all, a new form of criticism, able to induce critical effects and new insights without grounding itself in a system of values exterior to the domain and object under analysis' (1994, p. 36). Hoy adds that genealogy is `a plausible method of immanent social criticism, one that can work without presupposing an independent, utopian standpoint. As a genealogist Foucault is able to diagnose the organizing trends of our culture only because he, too, is subjected to them' (Hoy, 1986, pp. 13±14). In this text I also propose that I cannot stand outside the relations of power/knowledge which constitute the discourses of organisation theory. Indeed, one fear I have in centring this work on a descriptor such as the `anatomising urge' is that it also becomes a unitary, totalising discourse within which all aspects of the argument, all facets of organisation theory, are subsumed as if they were the same. This is also one of the difficulties of the image of weaving, since it can evoke the picture of disparate materials being drawn together and woven into a homogeneous cloth. What I would like to retain is some sense of the differences of texture and pattern of each of the fabrics within the present work. So perhaps patchwork is a more appropriate metaphor? But this uses fabrics made by others, whereas weaving uses a homespun thread.

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The problem this discussion highlights is that all attempts to construct discourse contain the `other' of their intention. Language is not innocent, nor can it be separated from the conditions, material and ideational, of its own making. This is something Foucault recognises, and the convolutions, recursions and inversions of his style of discourse are some attempt simultaneously to both catch and evade this point. Foucault's genealogy is focused on the reactivation of subjugated knowledges ± those pushed aside by that which has come to be accepted as `truth'. This is not to imply that these marginalised knowledges are superior in any way, but rather that there are other ways of thinking, doing and saying. As we have seen, Foucault does not believe it is possible for the theorist to speak from a position that is exterior to power/knowledge; thus, for him, `all the intellectual can do is focus on the possibility of transforming their own thought and perhaps the thought of others' (Barker, 1998, p. 31). Finally, to sum up the salient features of the methodological framework drawn from Foucault's work: first, there is the emphasis on conditions of knowledge production and the operation of power involved in this; and second, there is the method of studying power/ knowledge through considering `discursive formations' in the field of organisation studies. However, this is taken to include the interconnections between events, practices, institutions and language ± `the materiality of ideas' (Braidotti, 1994a, p. 126) ± not only the last of these. Third, there is the significance of history in understanding the conditions of knowledge production, not in the sense of reconstructing historical `truth', but rather using history in order to understand the `present question' (Barker, 1998, p. 22). `EMBODIED SUBJECTIVITY': A FRAMEWORK In the Introduction and Chapter 1, I have discussed the prevalent use and assumptions embodied in the phrase `the body'. Here I want to start to develop an alternative view, centring on the lived embodied experience of the social subject. It seems to me that three elements need to be considered in developing a model of embodied subjectivity. First, there is a consideration of lived embodiment. This means that the materiality of human existence must be recovered from the Cartesian split between body and mind, and from the philosophical dualism between immanence and transcendence. However, understanding embodiment as material corporeality also needs to avoid falling into

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biological determinism or essentialism, which stem from scientific positivism and the prevalence of that approach to knowledge (of the body) I characterise as the `anatomising urge'. Second, there is the need to recognise a politics of the body, which emphasises that corporeal and material embodiment are themselves irreducibly intercorporeal and social. Third, there is a need to acknowledge the specificity of embodiment. This challenges the unitary idea of `the body' as a universal material object (yet a universal which tends to cloak the dominant norm of the white male body) and recognises a multiplicity of differences while also allowing that embodied experience is socially and culturally mediated. In what follows, a model of embodiment is constructed from the intersection of the work on body image by Schilder, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, Foucault's micropolitics of the body, and feminist theorising around the construction of bodily differences. None of these theories is taken uncritically. None is wholly immune from the objectification of the body, the privileging of the mind or the construction of a bodily norm that excludes different bodily identities from that of the white male. However, each has a different contribution to make to our understanding of embodiment and to the development of a means of theorising knowledge centred on corporeality in a way that is radically different from the disembodied assumptions of Cartesianism. Body images The conceptualisation of `body image' in the work of psychology and phenomenology (especially that of Schilder and Merleau-Ponty) is a way of describing the experience of embodiment so that `mind' and `body', or `body' and `self ' are not separated in the traditional Cartesian format. It also challenges conventional dualisms in that embodiment is seen as being simultaneously individual and social: a mode of `being-in-the-world' as expressed by Merleau-Ponty. Body image refers to our experience of our own bodies in space. It is related to the co-ordination of our body movements, bringing the parts of the body together into an integrated whole which anticipates and responds to other people, objects and our environment. The neurologist, Sir Henry Head, first introduced the expression `the postural model of the body' and drew attention to the functions of this body image in providing both stability and adaptability (Weiss, 1999, p. 9).

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Freud's concept of the `ego-ideal', as an idealised image of the self, can be seen as contributing to the development of subsequent work on body-image. Freud's ego-ideal is not purely a cognitive phenomenon (an unconscious projection), as Freud suggests that it should `be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body', a projection that is `ultimately derived from bodily sensations' (1961, p. 26). Freud also notes the social rather than individual nature of the egoideal: `in addition to its individual side, this ideal has a social side; it is also the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation' (1957, p. 101). However, it is work by Schilder and Merleau-Ponty which develops the concept of the body image in such a way that it may be useful for a model of embodied subjectivity. Although both Merleau-Ponty and Schilder wrote much on notions of disturbed body image ± such phenomena as aphasia (loss of speech or understanding of language caused by brain damage) and phantom limbs (the continuing somatic experience of a body part that has actually been removed) ± their work has much to say about the experience of embodiment in everyday life. Merleau-Ponty and Schilder both emphasise that body image is not simply a mechanical response to the need to relate one's body to the demands of living in physical space. Both see body image as being closely related to the development of the self (discussed below in relation to the `mirror stage'), to past experiences and future projections, to fantasy and imagination, and to intersubjective relationships with other people and to society more broadly defined. In this way, body image can be seen as connecting the physiological, psychological and social aspects of personhood. It leads us to an appreciation of lived experience as embodiment in its fullest sense. Body image is developed as a child gradually becomes aware of his/ her body as an integrated experience, differentiated from an `external' world. Yet, paradoxically, it is the experience of seeing one's body `from the outside', in the mirror, that facilitates this awareness of the body `from the inside'. In this `mirror stage', Merleau-Ponty argues that the child has to solve the spatial problems involved in the recognition of the mirror image as being of him/herself but not in fact being the self. Thus there is the experience of distance, even of alienation, between the self and the mirror image, yet at the same time this sense of distance about one's own body image also facilitates the ability to be able to identify with others who are also at a distance from one's experience of self. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, the mirror stage is not only a subjective experience but also, and significantly, an intersubjective one. Merleau-Ponty's account of the mirror stage thus provides a

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way of understanding Schilder's statements of how `the body image is a social phenomenon' and that `there exists a deep community between one's own body-image and the body-images of others' (Schilder, 1978, p. 217). Because body image is developed in relation to self and others, social representations and psychological projections, it is multiple and processual. In Schilder's view, constant interaction between the body images of different people make it difficult to distinguish rigidly between body images. Through his work, a picture is built up of a process of construction/destruction/reconstruction of body image, although Schilder also stresses that we aim to keep our body image (at least partially) constant. Weiss (1999) further develops an approach to the multiplicity of body image. She argues that `the multiplicity of body images that we possess, rather than signifying a fragmented or dispersed identity, is, paradoxically, precisely what helps us to develop a coherent sense of self. More specifically, insofar as these multiple body images are themselves generated out of the variety of situations in which we find ourselves, they enable us to develop fluid and flexible responses to them. Moreover, I would add, it is the ongoing exchange that occurs between body images, an exchange that unfolds at the very moment that one body image imperceptibly gives way to another, which provides us with a sense of intercorporeal continuity, a continuity that is reinforced through our concrete relations with others' (Weiss, 1999, p. 167). Here Weiss is pointing to a complex interplay between a desire to maintain structure and coherence, but also the fluidity and multiplicity of our corporeal experience and relationships with others. Weiss uses the notion of multiple body images to argue that the obsession of the anorexic person with having a thin body is related to a too fixed and static body image, rather than in a failure to have an accurate or stable enough body image, as is often assumed. The problem is instead one of not being able to deal with multiplicity, fluidity and ambiguity. This understanding of body image as fluid and multiple is thus a view of the body that is quite different from the emphasis of anatomy and scientific rationality. However, the centrality of maintaining coherence, structure and boundary through processes such as `abjection' (Kristeva, 1982) to the construction of our `western' sense of selves, is one that is not limited to the anorexic body image. The prevalence of these processes will be discussed in more detail in Chap-

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ter 5, as a social process rather than as a universal or natural feature of body image or subjectivity. Neither Schilder nor Merleau-Ponty pays much attention to the social and political consequences of the interaction between body image, subjectivity and social influences. Weiss develops the concept of body image in such a way as to consider these issues, starting from the insights given by Fanon's account of the corporeal experience of being black in Black Skin White Masks (1967). Fanon argues that black men and women (although he does not address the specifically gendered experience of black women's embodiment) face constant conflict in their attempt to create their own coherent body schema from the construction of them by an imposed `historico-racial schema' (1967, p. 111). Through this structured social schema Fanon describes himself as constructed as `The Black Man', which makes him `responsible at the same time for my body, my race, for my ancestors' (1967, p. 112).2 Thus black people learn to internalise the `myth of the negro', where they are perceived as `savages, brutes, illiterates'. The consequence of this is a feeling of `shame and self-contempt. Nausea' (1967, p. 116), so that he experiences his own body, `his own blackness as the not-self, as that which resists all attempts to achieve corporeal closure' (Weiss, 1999, p. 29). There is a profound alienation from his own body, which Weiss argues is because of the fixity or overdetermination of one part or aspect of the body, in this case skin-colour (ibid.). Weiss (1999) makes what I see as an extremely important point when she argues that: `Without an adequate understanding of the crucial role that the body image plays in reflecting and sustaining individual, social, and political inequalities, there is a danger that positive social and political changes will not address the individual's own corporeal existence in the intimate manner necessary to move successfully towards the eradication of sexism, racism, classism, ageism and ethnocentrism' (1999, p. 10). This is of central concern to the development of an epistemological framework for my argument and one that will be returned to in detail in the final section of this chapter. Phenomenology of the body Some aspects of Merleau-Ponty's work have been discussed in relation to the concept of `body image'. However, his significance is more farreaching than this and his phenomenology of the body can be seen as the most comprehensive basis for an alternative perspective on the body and knowledge to the `anatomising urge'. Indeed, Williams and

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Bendelow argue that `of all the figures in the history of western thought, it is perhaps the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty who has done the most to overturn the Cartesian dualist legacies of the past' (1998, p. 51). Exploring Merleau-Ponty's work in more detail enables further development of the conceptualisation of `embodied subjectivity'. In critiquing Cartesian dualism, Merleau-Ponty3 also formulated phenomenology in a quite different way from those of other phenomenological philosophers such as Husserl. Husserl saw the important work of phenomenology as describing the structures of consciousness that are the universal, absolute meanings constituted by the `transcendental ego'. He bracketed off (epocheÂ) the world, or the objects of consciousness.4 In relation to the subject, Merleau-Ponty disagrees fundamentally with this approach, seeing rather `lived experience' as being central to phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty sees phenomenology as a radical philosophy which should `alert us, for example, to the fact that ideas are never absolutely pure thoughts but rather, cultural objects necessarily linked to acts of expression whose source is the phenomenal body itself as already primordially expressive' (Langer, 1989, p. xv, my emphasis). Although Husserl would argue that his approach was not intended to deny the world of objects, MerleauPonty saw this phenomenological reduction as remaining within the terms of the Cartesian cogito, where that which thinks is entirely separate from the material world and the body, that which is merely extended. For Merleau-Ponty, `to be a body is to be tied to a certain world' (1962, p. 148) for perception of the world is always embodied perception, since `the perceiving mind is an incarnated mind' (1989, p. 3). Unlike Descartes' dream of a consciousness and therefore a knowledge that is divorced from the individual subject, which is timeless and universal, Merleau-Ponty argues that there can be no perception in general, because the body is not separate from the world. This is an especially important point in relation to the present argument. It indicates a view of the world that is different from the dominant perspective within the `western' intellectual tradition, which insists on creating incisions between mind and body, individual and the world, scientific knowledge and lived experience, which then lead to the pattern of dualisms already discussed in the Introduction. MerleauPonty's conceptualisation of the relationship is rather one of connectivity and symbiosis. Langer gives us a succinct explanation of Merleau-Ponty's embodied epistemology compared to either Cartesian idealist or positivist philosophies. In doing so, she also encapsulates his position on the

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relationship of the embodied subject to knowledge of the world: `Existential philosophy . . . rejects the Platonic±Cartesian±Hegelian ideal of eternal truth or absolute knowledge on the one hand and, on the other, the positivistic levelling which insists on objectivity and calculation. Contending that both approaches are abstract and inadequate for an understanding of our being-in-the-world, existential philosophy seeks to awaken us to an awareness of our fundamental involvement in a natural±cultural±historical milieu. It stresses that we are not neutral observers but rather, situated participants in an ongoing, open-ended, socio-historical drama. It claims that truth comes into being in our concrete co-existence with others and cannot be severed from language and history' (Langer, 1989, p. ix). In many ways this resonates with Foucault's approach to history and discourse, discussed above. Another way in which Merleau-Ponty's thought defies dualisms is through his conceptualising the body as `reversible'. This emphasises how the body is both sentient and sensible, sees and is seen, hears and is heard, touches and is touched. These interconnections are intrinsic to the body-subject, which has an active, embodied, habitual relation to the world of which it is always already a part (his use of the phrase `being-in-the-world' encapsulates this position). In his last major work, the uncompleted The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty designates the unity of this body-subject which defies dualisms as `flesh'. This is neither idea nor matter, subject nor object. Since it is `reversible' there is no meaning that is not embodied, nor any matter that is not meaningful ± a direct critique of the Cartesian position. This also means that there is no `outside'. This is a radical suggestion, which is useful in conceptualising an `other' to conventional philosophy. Within this book it can also be seen as providing a counterpoint to the creation and maintenance of boundaries, which is one facet of the `anatomising urge'. Merleau-Ponty argues that there is no separate `mental' realm distinct from bodily action ± intelligence, perception, purpose and so on are all embodied actions. This contrasts to the Cartesian position which `defines perception as an inner representation of an outer world of given objects, thus giving rise to the subject/object dualism and all the problems this involves' (Williams and Bendelow, 1998, p. 52). Merleau-Ponty points this out in relation to the embodied act of seeing: `For there to be perception, that is, the apprehension of an existence, it is absolutely necessary that the object not be completely given to the look which rests on it, that aspects intended but not possessed in the present perception be kept in reserve. A seeing which

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would take place from a certain point of view and which would give us, for example, all the sides of a cube at once is pure contradiction in terms; for, in order to be visible all together, the sides of a wooden cube would have to be transparent, that is, would cease to be the sides of a wooden cube' (1967, pp. 212±13). However, it seems to me that this is exactly what the `anatomising urge' attempts to do ± it tries to render the body visible, inside and out, thus attempting to deny the impossibility the body gives of seeing everything at once, of knowing an unencumbered `truth' by fragmenting it, killing it and turning it into an object rather than a subject. Merleau-Ponty recognises the historical and social bases of embodied actions. He discusses the concept of `habit' ± acquired and socialised skills, gestures and techniques ± and says that they are derived from a social `habitus'. In The Phenomenology of Perception he provides some examples of culturally variable forms of affect and expression (1962, p. 189; Crossley, 1995, p. 53). In addition, Merleau-Ponty `identifies social, embodied action with the production of meaning. Meaning is not produced by a transcendental or constituting consciousness but by an engaged body-subject' (Crossley, 1996, p. 101). The development of the habits, routines and regimes of the bodysubject is an intersubjective process. It requires communication between body-subjects and thus becomes involved in language and symbolic processes. Again, these are not distinct processes, but, rather, are intertwined with each other. Thus Merleau-Ponty argues: `If I am only a cogito, I am absolutely alone; if I am only mechanical meat, I cannot be alone because the concept has lost all meaning' (Dillon, 1988, p. 128). Thus intersubjectivity can only be achieved through an embodied subjectivity, never through the transcendental Cartesian cogito. Merleau-Ponty's intersubjectivity recognises that the body of the self is separate from the body of the other person, and therefore there is a difference in the way each experiences his/her own body and that of the other person. Thus a person cannot feel the same pain as the other, cannot share the same space, and the death of one does not presuppose the death of the other. This embodied ontology allows the possibility of brutality and dehumanisation of the other, but it is also, argues Merleau-Ponty, the only possible basis for human exchange and love across the space that separates people (Dillon, 1988, pp. 128±9). However, Merleau-Ponty recognises that Cartesianism is not simply the dominant philosophical tradition, but that it has also had a con-

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siderable impact on how we develop understanding of our selves as subjects and as bodies. `Since the living body has ceased to be the visible expression of our being-in-the-world and become instead a machine, subjectivity lost its anchor and became a disembodied consciousness surveying the world. Perception of others and co-existence with them became impossible. Since the body of the other, like our own, had been converted into an automaton, we could at best infer the existence of another consciousness which, like ours, was disembodied (and hence lacking particularity). But this meant constituting the other consciousness ± thus reducing it to the status of an object in our world. Solipsism was unavoidable and the consciousness of the scientist became the universal constituting subject for whom the entire world lay spread out. In short, intersubjectivity and perception collapsed into solitary thought: the self dissolved into the transcendental subject' (Langer, 1989, pp. 16±17). In other words, the pure universal consciousness so valued in the Cartesian world view cannot adequately conceive of difference, only of the same, and the same eventually collapses into the self-same: solipsism. This normalisation of the identical will be further discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. Social bodies Before turning to the work of Foucault on the body ± widely seen as the most significant theoretical influence on the burgeoning interest in the body in social theory ± the relationship between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault's theories should be considered, since they have often been considered to have incompatible approaches to embodiment. Turner, developing his own theoretical perspective on the body, has said that `these two traditions ± structuralist5 and phenomenologist ± need not face us necessarily with an exclusionary theoretical choice' (1992, p. 95). However, his means of combining them is one of `epistemological pragmatism' (1992, pp. 61, 239±42). Crossley (1994, 1995, 1996) has produced a more theoretically sound account of the relationship between the two. Crossley's work on intersubjectivity does not gloss over the differences between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty, but creates a space where each can be used to inform and develop the other. The main aspects of their different perspectives on the body can now be looked at, utilising Crossley's approach to a common theoretical space. One of the relevant debates about the body has been whether it is the `inscribed body' (associated with Foucault) or the `lived body' (asso-

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ciated with Merleau-Ponty). Crossley argues that we do not have to choose ± either between views of the body or between the two theorists, since they are two sides of the same coin, instead of being completely incommensurable.6 He suggests that both Foucault and MerleauPonty see the body as being `both active and acted upon (by other bodies) . . . The body as a mastered and self-aware being is . . . formed in this interstice' (1996, p. 114). Foucault tends to be weaker on seeing the active body, and Merleau-Ponty tends to be weaker on seeing it as acted upon. In terms of the former he argues that Foucault's focus on resistance depends on the active body: `it is because body-power (as a spatial phenomenon) harnesses the action of those whom it subjects, that those subjects are in a position to resist' (1996, p. 107). As he comments, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault are united in their articulation of the neglect of the body in philosophy and in their opposition to the idea of the body as mere object. The differences between MerleauPonty and Foucault, according to Crossley (1994, 1996), are ones of emphasis, and not of incommensurability. I find his argument persuasive. He suggests that Merleau-Ponty understands historical behaviour or `habitus' in relation to existential functions, as ways of `being-inthe-world', whereas Foucault sees them in terms of being political functions. He also suggests that there is a difference in their temporal focus which tends to produce differences of emphasis. Merleau-Ponty is interested in the constitution of the body-subject on a day-to-day basis, while Foucault considers a much longer time-frame. It may be that Crossley underplays the differences between the two theorists, but it can certainly be seen from this discussion that, by bringing together some aspects of their work, a rich theoretical approach to the conceptualisation of `embodied subjectivity' can be attained. We now turn to look at Foucault's contribution to an understanding of embodiment in more detail. Foucault sees the human body in a radically non-essentialist way. He argues that `nothing in man [sic] ± not even his body ± is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or understanding other men' (Foucault, 1984, pp. 87±8). Thus there is no biological entity that determines the nature of the individual, and there is certainly no connection between `anatomy' and `destiny'. Rather, the body is `the inscribed surface of events' and thus `totally imprinted by history' (Foucault, 1984, p. 83). This is a power that is productive as well as potentially repressive, thus pleasure can produce power effects as much as pain, and probably more effectively. Indeed, the operation of the `microphysics of power' can be seen as clearly in Foucault's History of

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Sexuality (1981) as it can in Discipline and Punish (1977). Foucault characterises these operations of power on the body as `biopower', of which there are two main axes: the anatomo-politics of the individual body and the biopolitics of the social body. One of these poles ± the first to be formed, it seems ± centred on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimisation of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all of this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterised the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the speciesbody, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. (Foucault, 1981, p. 139) The relevance of these ideas to organisation theory is clearly apparent. Certainly, disciplinary power, the production of docile bodies trained through the continuous performance of physical routines and techniques (`dressage'), is central to the capitalist labour process. Some aspects of this have been brought out in a paper by Jackson and Carter (1998). However, the important departure in Foucault's work is the internalisation of this physical discipline, so that there is not the separate Cartesian body and mind ± the two are bound up together: the operation of power simultaneously producing subjectivity. This is seen in `panopticism' through the self-discipline of `the gaze' (Discipline and Punish, 1977). These arguments are developed and extended in The History of Sexuality (1981) and the later work on `technologies of the self' (1988). Here, notions of the `confession', whereby the characteristics of the self are spoken aloud and compared to a normalised version of the self and the body, are significant. The contemporary operation of the Christian pattern can be seen in psychoanalysis, sex counselling (and its DIY versions in manuals and videos), child-rearing advice and expertise,7 and health and hygiene advice (even advertisements can create an internalised feeling that one `ought' to lead one's life in a particular way). Townley (1994) has applied these insights in relation to human resource management techniques, although with much more emphasis on the production of

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subjectivity than on the body. Burrell's (1984, 1988) work contributes an application of Foucauldian understanding of the control of the body to organisation theory, although he does not develop an explicit theoretical approach to the body. It could be argued that so far work in organisation theory that has taken the body as its subject, has taken it for its object, since the focus has been on the body as an object of control. Where the work of Foucault has been drawn upon, it too has been emphasised in such a way as to reinforce this perspective. However, the present work does not try to do any more than briefly sketch out a possible approach for organisation studies to take to a phenomenological view of bodies, or rather embodiment. `Embodiment' suggests an emphasis on the lived, active body-subject rather than the `body' as inert matter ± an object. What I have chosen to focus on, perhaps as a precursor to work on a phenomenology of the body in organisations, is the history of the discipline as one that has systematically written out the experience of the body. It is not surprising that this accusation of treating the body as an object of control can be made of Foucauldian organisation theory, since it is also frequently made of Foucault himself. For example, Turner (1996, pp. 73±4) argues that there are contradictions in Foucault's treatment of the body. He says that sometimes he treats it as if it were a `real' object, continuous over time and culture ± for example, in the effects of population growth on scientific thought, or the effect of penology on the body. At other times he argues that the body is constructed by discourse. Shilling also criticises Foucault's approach to the body, classifying him as part of the social constructionist tradition, for seeing the body as a product of discourses. He says that this, despite Foucault's wish to see the body as an historical construct, means that the body becomes `a transhistorical and cross-cultural unified phenomena' (1997, p. 79). This is because what Shilling means by discourse is limited to language and classificatory systems, which he argues are not important in other cultures or historical periods that are not so `logocentric' (here he invokes Elias). However, as we have seen, Foucault's use of discourse is much broader than this, and is centred on material effects and the differences of different historical and cultural traditions. Shilling also argues that Foucault's epistemological view of the body means that the material body disappears. He argues that `the physical, material body can never be grasped by the Foucauldian approach as its existence is permanently deferred behind the grids of meaning imposed by discourse' (ibid.). Again, I feel that this is a partial reading of Foucault. I cannot agree

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that Foucault fails to show the lived power that marks and shapes sensory experiences, and would take the execution of the regicide and the dressage of the body in Discipline and Punish (1977) as examples of this par excellence. Bodies and differences One pertinent criticism that can be made of both Foucault and Merleau-Ponty is that they fail to go far enough, or perhaps to be specific enough, in their recognition that there are multiple bodies that are historically and socially constituted.8 The final section of this chapter looks at the contribution feminist theory has made to understanding embodied subjectivity in a way that does not continue to treat the body-subject as a `non-gendered' generic individual, as Merleau-Ponty and Foucault tend to do. Although gender may seem to be just an optional add-on to the idea of `embodied subjectivity', certainly given the attitudes of most (male) philosophers and social theorists, it illustrates the last vestiges of Cartesianism in their thinking. For, as has already been discussed in the Introduction, the female is associated with the body to the exclusion of their participation in any of the spheres that philosophers have deemed to be of the most value: the mind (as split from the body via the Cartesian cogito), thus the transcendental subjectivity still apparent in Kant, Hegel, the idealist strand of Weber's thought, and the phenomenology of Husserl. With their exclusion in multiple discourses of the `western' intellectual tradition, women have also been excluded materially from political and social rights as reasoned citizens, and from the worlds of science and knowledge. From this it will become apparent that the failure of MerleauPonty and Foucault to consider the specificity of the gendered body is a fundamental critique of their own positions in reconceptualising `western' thought. Some feminist writers have dismissed them out of hand because of this omission, where others have sought to develop their work in such a way that it can be used to inform both feminist scholarship and practice. In relation to the development of a feminist phenomenology of the body, I will discuss some aspects of the work of Iris Marion Young. I will also briefly consider the relevance of the writings of Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler in developing a feminist critique of the `western' intellectual tradition and an approach to embodied subjectivity. Young has tried explicitly to develop and extend Merleau-Ponty's work on embodiment in relation to the lived experience of women.

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Two papers are of particular interest: `Throwing Like A Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality' (1989 [1980]), and `Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation' (1984). In the first, Young implicitly criticises Merleau-Ponty's understanding of transcendence and immanence, while in the second this critique is more explicitly developed. In her paper `Throwing Like A Girl' (1989 [1980]), Iris Marion Young seeks a theoretical path through the difficulties of acknowledging that there are differences between the genders in physical comportment and movement (illustrated by the differences seen in girls and boys throwing and catching a ball)9 and yet not reducing these to ahistorical biological essentialism or anatomical determinism. She develops an understanding of the lived experience of female embodied subjectivity. In doing this she describes how the typical (untrained) woman's body is conducted in sports activities. A woman's movements are less fluid and directed, less extended and responsive, and use only a part rather than the whole body compared to those of a typical (untrained) man (1989, p. 57). She also notes that women do not expand their bodies into the physical space available to them, and that female existence is experienced as being more confining and enclosed. Merleau-Ponty, in contradistinction to the dominant trend of philosophers before him, posits the body as the transcendental being-foritself, the place previously reserved for consciousness. In this, the `transcendence of the lived body . . . is a transcendence which moves out from the body in its immanence in an open and unbroken directness upon the world in action. The lived body as transcendence is pure fluid action' (Young, 1989, p. 59). But the female lived bodily experience is one of hesitation, of not quite trusting the capacity of her body. Young argues that `according to Merleau-Ponty, for the body to exist as a transcendent presence to the world and the immediate enactment of intentions, it cannot exist as an object' (1989, p. 61). However, she maintains that women often live their bodies as things that are like other things in the world ± objects ± and thus remain (at least partially) in immanence, inhibited and distanced from them. Young holds that women's experiences of comportment, movement and spatiality are common, to greater or lesser degrees, to women in contemporary urban societies because `women in sexist society are physically handicapped' (1989, p. 65). There are innumerable ways in which culture and socialisation produce the objectification of the female body, from the games and toys that girls (are encouraged to) play with, the cautions

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not to hurt themselves or to dirty clothes, and to present themselves in a `ladylike' manner. Women are subject to the constant `gaze' of patriarchal society and the fear of spatial and bodily invasion. Young's work is significant in showing how embodiment is differently gendered. However, Weiss has criticised her for maintaining implicitly the valuing of transcendence (associated with the mind in Cartesianism) over immanence (associated with the body in Cartesianism). Weiss argues that even though `Merleau-Ponty departs from the Cartesian tradition by claiming that the body is transcendent rather than immanent, yet he continues to understand transcendence in Cartesian terms, that is, as freely motivated, intentional activity' (1999, p. 45). Young, too, reinforces this hierarchical relationship, since she tends to see the self-conscious focus of the girl in throwing as being immanent, since it interrupts the transcendent flow of intentional activity (ibid.). Weiss suggests that this creates a false dichotomy between men and women's actions, since both `have a socially-referred character insofar as they arise in response to a social situation' (ibid.). Young's account therefore tends to emphasise the self-reference of women towards their bodies as an individual problem rather than bringing out the full force of the societal basis of the objectification of women's bodies (Weiss, 1999, p. 47). To some extent, these criticisms can be seen as being overcome in the second paper, on pregnant embodiment. Here, Young argues that the experience of the pregnant woman challenges the implicit assumptions of phenomenologists of a unified subject, and the sharp distinctions that are made between transcendence and immanence (1984, p. 46). She describes this process as `split subjectivity', a subjectivity that is decentred, so that the woman experiences `myself in the mode of not being myself ' (1984, p. 48). This experience is particularly produced through the sensations of the foetus moving. In a mode of being drastically other than that described here as the `anatomising urge', pregnancy affronts conventional dualisms and boundaries. `Pregnancy challenges the integration of my body experience by rendering fluid the boundary between what is within, myself, and what is outside, separate. I experience my insides as the space of another, yet my own body' (1984, p. 49). Further, the experience of pregnancy is that one can be focused on one's body ± for example, the flutterings or kicking of the foetus on one's inside ± whilst simultaneously focused on what one is trying to achieve ± for example, working. Phenomenology has tended to see these two aspects of lived experience as being separate. For example, Leder's book The Absent Body (1990) is premised on the

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argument that the lived body is characterised by the body itself being absent to our attention, unless we are in pain, in which case it is seen as being focused completely on the body. In this mode, he argues that the Cartesian dualism is consistent with our phenomenological experience. Again, the question needs to be asked about upon whose embodiment these theories are based. I turn now to the work of Luce Irigaray for a further exploration of the critique of the exclusion of women's experience in the `western' intellectual tradition and an approach to challenging this which disrupts the operation of both scalpel and mirror. Irigaray's thought is diverse. Her `philosophical' works engage with, mimic and subvert the ideas of the major `western' philosophers. She has also conducted empirical work on the symbolic and linguistic structures of those with senile dementia and mental illnesses, and is a practising psychoanalyst. Whitford has characterised her work as `philosophy examining its own foundations and its own presuppositions' (1991, p. 2). Whitford is useful in elucidating Irigaray's critique of phenomenology: `The categories with which we describe our experience are derived from a collective and shared discourse which we have inherited, and it is essential to understand our inheritance critically. Even such apparently basic understandings as those of space and time may be masculine in their construction. Categories construct the symbolic division between male and female. The phenomenological account of the lived body and the lived world needs to be complemented by the awareness that there is an interaction between the lived experience, the imaginary, and the discursive and social construction of both. Although Irigaray is sympathetic to certain phenomenologists (particularly Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas), because they do stress language, the body, and ethics, she points out that in each case, their philosophy reproduces in one form or another the morphology or imperatives of the male body' (1991, p. 152, emphasis added). Thus, despite her sympathy with the work of Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray criticises him for his `labyrinthine solipsism' (1993, p. 157). She notes that `without the other, and above all the other of sexual difference, isn't it impossible to find a way out of this description of the visible, doubled with that of the tactile of the touching hands?' (ibid.). This is central to the critique that Irigaray makes of `western' philosophy, although perhaps to suggest that there is a thread through it is to reduce the diversity and complexity of her work to the linear. Irigaray's critique of `western' philosophy brings us back to the `anatomising urge', with its tools of scalpel and mirror. Irigaray is

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concerned with boundaries, especially the one cut between `inside' and `outside'. `When Irigaray sets out to reread the history of philosophy, she asks how its borders are secured: what must be excluded from the domain of philosophy for philosophy itself to proceed, and how is it that the excluded come to constitute negatively a philosophical enterprise that takes itself to be self-grounding and self-constituting?' (Butler, 1993, p. 37). She argues that `western' thought is `phallogocentric', and founded on the production of the `feminine' as its constitutive outside. She also characterises it as a `spectral economy'. Since the feminine is totally outside it, that which is included is based on the operation of the `mirror, most often hidden, that allows the logos, the subject, to reduplicate itself, to reflect itself by itself' (1985b, p. 75). Irigaray argues that there is only one sex ± the masculine, and one discourse ± the philosophical logos. The domination of these come from their power to reduce all others to the economy of the Same (1985b, p. 74). Thus women are `this sex which is not one', for `women can never be understood on the model of a ``subject'' within the conventional representational systems of Western culture precisely because they constitute the fetish of representation and, hence, the unrepresentable as such. Women can never ``be'', according to this ontology of substances, precisely because they are the relation of difference, the excluded, by which that domain marks itself off. Women are also a ``difference'' that cannot be understood as the simple negation or ``Other'' of the always-already-masculine subject . . . they are neither the subject nor its Other, but a difference from the economy of binary opposition, itself a ruse for a monologic elaboration of the masculine' (Butler, 1990, p. 18). But within this system women are the `duplicating mirror' for the masculine, which allows the logos, the subject to reproduce itself (Irigaray, 1985b, p. 75). Within this phallogocentric order, Irigaray argues, it is not sufficient that women demand a redistribution of power, since this leaves in place the power structure itself. Instead, she suggests that `mimicry' might be more subversive, by `convert[ing] a form of subordination into an affirmation', `to make ``visible'', by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language' (1985b, p. 76). Thus replication may be turned back on itself in order to show the mechanisms which produce the assembly line of identical images. Similarly, Judith Butler argues that: `Gender should not be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time,

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instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts', thus it is `a construction that regularly conceals its genesis' (1990, p. 140). But, as with Irigaray's mimicry, by a `parodic repetition' (ibid., p. 141) of the performativity which is gender, it is revealed as a `regulatory fiction' (ibid.). Butler suggests that this false relationship between simulacrum and `original' can be expressed through such gender transgressions as butch/femme and transvestite performances. A subversive reversal of the conflation between replication and reproduction can be illustrated through Angela Carter's The Passion of the New Eve (1982). Here, the male subject, Evelyn, is surgically reconstructed as a woman and becomes pregnant, thus retelling the story of Eve, but simultaneously parodying the incisions between male and female, disrupting the assumptions of the body derived from the `anatomising urge'. CONCLUSION To summarise, then, the first purpose of this chapter has been to draw on the work of key social and feminist theorists in order to propose a methodology which echoes that of Foucault's genealogy. In this it seeks to understand the conditions of the production of knowledge, with regard to this limited objective of how the body of knowledge that is organisation theory has developed a particular discursive formation which implies the human body as a coherent biological organism, but which excludes the recognition of the experience of embodied subjectivity for individuals within organisations and ignores the bodies of researchers within the discipline of organisation theory. To this end the text considers a number of historical discursive formations. The aim is not to reconstruct the past nor to derive a unity of narrative that explains the origins of this aspect of disciplinary formation, but rather, following Foucault in `seeking the present in the past'. The second aim of this chapter has been to construct a theoretical approach to a gendered and embodied subjectivity in opposition to the split subject with its supposedly neutered and neutral cogito and its separate (sometimes feminised) inert body of Cartesian legacy. The remainder of the book will use the method and epistemological framework developed here to try to understand some aspects of organisation theory and its relation to the human body. From the focus of this chapter on genealogy and embodied subjectivity we move to a very different mode of knowledge and construction of the human body: those which I argue are based upon the pattern of

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anatomy. The next chapter looks at the characteristics of this `anatomising urge'. It argues that the creation of division, boundaries, hierarchies and thus organisation is central to the `western' mode of knowledge. It shows how this is related to a way of knowing and constructing the body that is based on death, the penetration and invasion of the body with the scalpel, and the division of the body into fixed structures and parts. This creates a standardised and anonymised model of the body. I suggest that two valued aspects of knowledge creation, analysis and rationality, are closely associated with the `anatomising urge'. This mode of knowledge stresses that knowledge and its objects are to be split into their component parts before they can be studied, it also elevates knowledge that is presumed to come from the mind over and above the body and emotions, hence the value placed on `objectivity' rather than `subjectivity'.

4 The Scalpel: An Introduction to the `Anatomising Urge' Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:We murder to dissect. William Wordsworth (Thomas, 1971, p. 34) Faith is a fine invention When gentlemen can see, But microscopes are prudent In an emergency. Emily Dickinson (Reeves, 1985, p. 12) In Chapter 1 I argued that the practice of anatomy has both significantly shaped the dominant `western' conceptions of the body and has acted as a pattern for the main mode of knowledge. In this it has become institutionalised and valued as a model of knowledge, particularly in scientific method and philosophical rationality. The practice of anatomy has become a taken-for-granted part of science and medicine, as well as a practice that marks out the professional understanding of the body from the lay one. But it is much more broadly influential as the basis of the intellectual tradition. In this, although much of the material in this chapter is historically-based, the `anatomising urge' is of contemporary significance. While it may be founded on the death of the body, as a mode of knowledge it is alive and well. In this chapter I want to explore this argument in more detail, thus providing the context for applying it to organisation theory in Chapter 5. In the first section I shall explore the social and institutional development of anatomy, then turn to the ways in which practices of anatomy have constructed the human body. Following this I shall look at anatomy as a model for the development of a valued form of knowledge ± the `anatomising urge'. Here I shall be considering the influential part that Descartes has played in bringing together a theory of knowledge and a theory of the body, wider issues in the develop83

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ment of science and rationality, and finally looking at the place of `organisation' in this tradition of knowledge. The diverse issues brought together in this chapter are linked through the use of Foucault's concept of the `discursive formation': the coalescence of the material, institutional, cultural and symbolic. In organising the material of this and other chapters, it is interesting to reflect on how deeply embedded the `anatomising urge' is in the academic form. I found it impossible to escape from the need to cut up the body of the material, and rearrange it in sections that together form a reorganised body of knowledge. The use of terms that invoke anatomising the body are very common in academic parlance. In one article on how anatomy became respectable I found the author stating that she was going to `open up epistemological and social connections between dissection and the effective deployment of a technical anatomical vocabulary' (Lawrence, 1995, p. 201, my emphasis). `Have a stab at it' suggests an amateur attempt at anatomy, while an `incisive point' evokes the professionally performed dissection. Many terms that indicate approbation of academic research ± such as `penetrating' ± suggest the work of anatomy, especially in seeking the `truth' below the surface. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANATOMY The science of anatomy and the culture of death The development of anatomy cannot simply be seen as the progress of an objective scientific discipline accumulating greater knowledge of the human body; rather, it created a particular understanding of the body and a new form of knowledge about the body: `The body anatomized as corpse upon the stage of the dissecting table is as much a piece of created fiction as it is discovered fact. The body observed on the stage of the dissecting table belongs as much to the realm of art as it does to science' (Romanyshyn, 1989, p. 119). As Romanyshyn argues: `we invent the body and the nature which suit our world' (1989, p. 111). Thus the anatomised body was part of a complex web of changing social, spiritual and cultural meanings (Turner, 1990, p. 11; Sawday, 1995). The first known dissection took place about 500b c by a Greek, Alcmaen, who described the nerves of the eye and the tube between the mouth and the ear (rediscovered 2000 years later and named by

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Eustachi, a doctor and anatomist in Rome). Leonardo da Vinci (1452± 1519) also carried out over thirty human dissections, but he was denounced by Pope Leo X for these, forbidden access to Rome's hospitals, and his work on anatomy remained unpublished. Dissection had long been forbidden by the Church, but there was a marginalised tradition of anatomy. From the thirteenth century, in continental Europe, corpses were occasionally dissected in order to ascertain the causes of epidemic diseases and confirm cases of poisoning. Dissection for scientific purposes was much rarer, because of the societal and religious taboos surrounding it. One exception was Mondino at Bologna,1 whose Anathomia was written in 1316. He dissected corpses to see for himself whether the textual accounts of Galen (a d 129±199) and other authorities were accurate. He read from the text, while an assistant dissected the body and demonstrators pointed to the structures described (Sinclair, 1997, p. 44). But, generally, scientific knowledge of the body was passed down through the authority of the text. The main authority was Galen's On the Conduct of Anatomy. However, Galen never carried out a dissection on a human corpse, using only monkeys and possibly marine animals (Turner, 1992, p. 202). Renaissance science in the main relied on observation and the classification of surface features. Sawday (1995, pp. 39±40) argues that the influx of Greek scholars, the recovery of the original Galenic writings and the extension of the Greco-Arabic tradition of scholarship after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 caused a tension within medical knowledge. On the one hand there was better access to the original work of the historical authorities, but on the other there was the extension of a tradition of testing out textual knowledge with the experience of the body. The humanist scholars first associated with the `anatomical Renaissance' were Gunther of Andernach in Paris, John Caius in Cambridge and Vesalius in Padua. The latter carried out his own dissections in lectures, bucking the trend for professors to read out their lectures while demonstrators carried out the dissections, as tradition had indicated the superiority of the text over the manual craft and direct observation of practical anatomy. His own anatomy textbook, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, was published in 1543. This was significant in its willingness to question the work of Galen and in publishing the results of his own experiments. Even so, dissection was not generally accepted as a legitimate scientific technique until the nineteenth century (Lupton, 1994, p. 45), as it not only disrupted the physical body but also disarticulated beliefs

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around life and death, the nature of the soul, and the fear of the bodily interior (Lupton, 1994, p. 45; Sawday, 1995). The body `was seen not only as a ``little world'' (microcosm) but also as a reflection and model of human society . . . If the members and organs of the microcosm were dispersed, disturbing the order of the world, would not the ``body politic'' fall apart as well?' (Pouchelle, 1990, p. 83). More than this, intervening in the body might be seen as interfering in God's creation. Richard Turner makes the pertinent connection, which illustrates the ambivalences around the body and especially around body fluids, that `to cut open a body was to draw blood both sacred and profane ± the blood of Christ, but also the blood of menstrual flow' (1995, p. 197). Initially, anatomy was closely bound up with criminal investigation, execution and public dissection. The infamous `murder act' of 1752 in England could be seen as part of this process of cultural location, instituting `penal dissection' where, as an alternative to the body being gibbeted, the dead body would be taken to the surgeons and anatomised. It was intended to evoke horror in the viewing public at the violation of the body and the denial of burial. As well as prolonging the execution, it symbolised the criminal's transgression against and separation from the body of society. Where there was a belief in resurrection, the anatomised criminal had suffered a double death, with them being separated from any future spiritual society as well. There had been public dismemberments before, but Foucault argues that the point of departure was that it was now linked to the idea of a greater public good in keeping with the rational philosophy of punishment (1977, p. 48). Dirty work is often associated with those who have dealings with the dead, and those who murder and cause death are often vilified (see Ackroyd and Crowdy, 1990, on workers in abattoirs). Anatomists had to obtain corpses on which to work, and as the discipline grew, so did the requirement for fresh dead bodies. An act of the London town council in 1694 provided for corpses for anatomy from new sources of supply: foundlings that had died; infants stifled at birth; those found dead in the street; those who died violent deaths; and suicides ± wherever there were no relatives to claim the bodies and reimburse the town for its costs (Sawday, 1995, p. 58). But it was not only for scientific research that corpses were required. As medical training moved from an apprenticeship system to one based around collective teaching methods, and practical anatomy became central to the curriculum, there was a corresponding rise in the need for corpses for dissection

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by both private and hospital medical schools. Thus a free market developed in corpses. In 1746 William Hunter introduced to London the `Paris manner' of allocating a corpse to each student. There were only a small number of corpses available in Britain through legal routes, so grave-robbing was rife. The general public became deeply suspicious of grave robbers and the representatives of the anatomists: with some good reason. If the hanging proved inefficient and a body began to revive, anatomists would often commit murder themselves because of the body's value to science. In 1828 the bodies of people murdered by Burke and Hare were found in Dr Knox's private anatomy school in Edinburgh (Sinclair, 1997). This fear of the anatomists sometimes inspired riots at gallows (Lawrence, 1995, p. 199). The `Irish Giant', Charles Byrne, was so horrified at the prospect of his body being stolen by science that he attempted to bribe his family and his local undertakers to prevent his corpse being sold for anatomisation but rather to bury it at sea. Both parties agreed, but after his death they reneged and his body was indeed sold for dissection. It still occupies centre place in the collection of the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a reminder of the murky history of science. A parliamentary select committee was appointed to look into the unhappy situation surrounding anatomy. Giving evidence, the surgeon and anatomist of Guy's Hospital, Sir Astley Cooper, stated `there is no person, let his situation in life be what it may, whom if I were disposed to dissect, I could not obtain' (Richardson, 1989, p. 63). In 1832, a regulatory Anatomy Act was passed. This provided for the legal supply of corpses, by appropriating the dead bodies of the poor and destitute. The Act particularly benefited hospital medical schools since, while there was to be allocation of bodies to both hospitals and private schools, hospitals could also obtain them illegally from their own mortuaries and made deals with parish authorities where they exchanged hospital beds for the sick in return for the dead bodies (Sinclair, 1997, p. 57). Here bodies of people who were not protected by their relatives ± or their relatives' money ± were made available to anatomists. Thus the dissected body was most usually the marginalised body of society: the criminal, the prisoner, the poor and destitute who died in workhouses or charitable institutes. The trade in bodies and body parts is alive and well today. In 1994 a scandal arose around Copenhagen University's forensic laboratories charging members of the public to look at corpses (Sawday, 1995). In Sinclair's 1997 study of medical students, one of the anatomy demon-

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strators commented: `Up till five years ago we used to have good specimens, fresh from the post-mortem room; we slipped them £5. Then the Sunday Times got hold of it and, because there was no permission from the relatives, it was stopped' (1997, p. 175).2 The commodification of body parts has joined other aspects of the `new international division of labour', giving the phrase a somewhat different connotation. A trade exists where people in developing countries can sell their organs to `western' medicine, having had parts such as kidneys, eyes and pieces of skin removed while still alive (Lupton, 1994, p. 48). Thus the early anatomists anonymised themselves in their diagrams for fear of the public outcry against their transgressive invasion. Valverde's picture of 1556 of the self-flayed body (see Figure 4.1) is of central relevance here, because it shows the need to hide the identity of the anatomist from the public, who saw anatomisation as an anathema. In this picture the dissected corpse participates in its own dismemberment, eagerly holding up its own skin to display the secrets beneath. But this also indicates to us the simultaneous fascination and repulsion of dissection ± the desire to know what lies under the skin, but also the fear of it being one's own skin. To see ourselves from the inside is a profoundly disturbing activity, because to observe our insides ± intestines and other organs ± often heralds death and disorder (Sawday, 1995). The other side of the fear and horror invoked by dissection, is the fascination with it as demonstrated in the popularity of the anatomical `theatres' that gained fashionable success throughout seventeenth-century Europe. In many ways anatomy theatres are an institutionalisation of the `anatomising urge'. They show the widespread nature of the new mode of knowledge and understanding of the body, not restricted to a small number of scientists but made available to the general public. Public dissections were initially performed in churches, but later acquired their own specialised buildings. Particularly after Vesalius, these were arranged in a circular or semi-circular fashion, having tiered seats and with the dissection taking place centre stage. The anatomy was a theatrical spectacle, combining education and entertainment. Sinclair notes that tickets for the annual public anatomy in Padua in 1497 were sold before those for the plays (1997, p. 48). These public demonstrations were `ritualistic expressions of often contradictory layers of meaning' (Sawday, 1995, p. 63) involving a confrontation between the living and the dead, the symbolic power of scientific knowledge over the individual, the representation of society's progress

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Figure 4.1 Valverde, self-flayed figure, from Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano (1556) Source:

Wellcome Institute Library, London.

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where the criminal is subordinated to the good of the community, and the structural coherence of the universe. In understanding the cultural nature of this process of fragmentation of the body and its subsequent reordering into a more coherent and manageable whole, it is useful to look at more recent accounts of the practice of anatomy. These indicate that, as Kuhn argued, scientific work is not `the given' of experience but rather `the collected with difficulty' (1970, p. 126). In their classic ethnographic study of how medical students become doctors, Becker and his colleagues describe the (practical) difficulties facing the student in the anatomy class: Aside from the difficulties of learning to recognise and name the thousands of structures of the body, their function and clinical significance, students of gross anatomy have certain technical problems. There is so much variation from the `normal' in cadavers that identification of structures is often difficult. A part may be missing, oddly placed or so distorted by use during life that it bears little resemblance to the idealized diagrams of the textbook. A student may also destroy the very structure he [sic] is trying to study. If peripheral nerves and blood vessels are to be preserved, initial skinning and reflection of subcutaneous fat must be done with great care. It is a laborious process. Even on deeper levels of dissection, if the student is not careful he will accidentally cut muscles, nerves, or blood vessels. If he cuts more than one such structure, he is faced with an identificatory problem. For example, a student ordinarily recognizes a muscle by its position in relation to adjacent structures, or by tracing it out to its junction with other structures ± its origin and insertion. (1961, p. 83) The description of the problems of anatomy in this study considers neither the emotional and psychological experience of the students in having to relate to corpses, nor the disjunctures between what is found in the dead body and what is found in the textbooks, except where it causes difficulties to students who are trying to become qualified. In other words, it appears to take for granted the assumptions of the medical school and students in prioritising the passing of exams, and of learning the amount of material required. However, the dissection also has significant symbolic status in marking out the medical world from the lay one (Sinclair, 1997, p. 170). Other studies show how it is a `rite of passage' for students, giving them what is often their first encounter with death, and an initially emotive experience to

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which they have to become accustomed (Sinclair, 1997; Hafferty, 1991; Druce and Johnson, 1994). In this discussion of the changing relationship between society and the science of anatomy, we can see the complexity of the relationships surrounding the management of the human body in different time periods. It is not simply that the `body' is disciplined by social forces. Society itself is being (re)organised simultaneously through the cultural construction of what is understood by the human body. Anatomy, professions and institutions As we enter the twenty-first century, the practice of surgery is firmly incorporated into the medical profession; indeed, surgeons are accorded the highest status. But, as with the science of anatomy, its practice in medicine was also once regarded with suspicion. The separation of surgery and anatomy from the mainstream of the medical profession can be illustrated by the work of the eighteenthcentury French anatomist-surgeon, Rene Croissant de Garengeot (1688±1759). He was Master of Arts and Surgery, Royal demonstrator at the Academie de Chirurgie in Paris and Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He trained a generation of French and English dissectors. In his Splanchnologie, ou l'anatomie des visceres (1728) he defended his art in terms of its practical, manual skills, where `the work of the hand' is sensitive and intelligent. This is in relation to medicine, which had been separated off from surgery since the time of Hippocrates. Garengeot lamented that the separation between the two had widened because of specialisation, and that knowledge coming from direct experience of the body, manual skills and close observation had become subordinated to the `theoretical' physicians. This had been aided in France by institutional factors: when the University of Paris was founded in 1140, surgeons were not admitted, whereas physicians were incorporated into the Faculty of Arts, later forming their own autonomous faculty: `physicians could now give themselves up to lofty speculations propounded disembodiedly in universities' (Stafford, 1991, p. 52). Garengeot argued that this separation was not only the case in France, but was widespread. Historically, in England, medicine was founded on the guild system. There were three quite separate, all-male, corporations: the Royal College of Physicians ± the learned profession, since only university graduates could attain entry; the Society of Apothecaries, the trade part of medicine ± originally shopkeepers who had separated from the

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Mystery of Grocers; and the Royal College of Surgeons. The last was the craft end of the profession. Surgeons had joined barbers as a guild in 1540, breaking away to form their own association in 1745. Surgeons and apothecaries ± usually combined as practitioners outside London ± learned their profession through apprenticeship. However, medicine was not regulated and there were many other sources of treatment ± hospitals, charities, quacks. A large part of medicine was probably practised by women, completely outside the formal professions and their settings, based on tradition and experience (Sinclair, 1997, pp. 39±41). During the nineteenth century the profession changed considerably. Anatomy came to be of central importance to the training of doctors in the teaching hospitals that grew up in the eighteenth century. This indicated the breakdown of the traditional master-and-apprentice system of medicine. Hospital surgeons could earn a fat fee for teaching, so would take on multiple students (Sinclair, 1997). In Britain this private teaching system was common, while in France there was a rise of more bureaucratic institutions (see Foucault, 1970). One of the methods of teaching was through the lecture, enabling multiple students to be taught at a time. This was essentially an extension of the demonstrations given in the anatomy theatres of the previous century. New anatomy theatres were built at St. Thomas' Hospital in 1813 and St. Bartholomew's in 1822. During this period hospital medical education seems to have taken over from private teaching. Sinclair (1997) makes some useful points about the organisation of this new form of medical teaching. He argues that anatomy was central to the new professionalisation of medical teaching as opposed to the older method of apprenticeship training. Since students were now taught in large groups, the form of the anatomy theatre came into its own in a pedagogic sense in medicine as it had in science (although the public were still allowed into lectures, as they had attended the anatomy theatre as public spectacles). Sinclair also links this to the Chrestomathic principle of Bentham. This is related to his panopticon, but was a form of schoolroom designed for the greatest efficiency of the teacher. Like the panopticon, it facilitated the visibility of students to the master. Sinclair points out that the reverse principle of the panopticon had already been highly significant in the well-developed form of the anatomy theatre ± that is, that all can see the spectacle of dissection laid out in front of them (1997, p. 60). Thus the anatomy theatre could be said to be the forerunner of both lecture and operating theatres.

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The construction of the anatomised body The practices of eighteenth-century anatomy transformed the body into detachable pieces. Medical men dissected the body into smaller units that were subsequently renamed and classified. These `organs without bodies', to use the words of Rosi Braidotti, came to replace the body as a unity (Braidotti, 1989). Since the late nineteenth century, medical research has gone well beyond the organs. (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 4) And then there is the very different body seen in terms of science and medicine, a body measured, analyzed, probed, treated, incised, dissected. It is the body as object of physical investigation and explanation, a body that we understand well enough in our minds, but a body wholly alien to the particular one that we experience in our daily life. (R. Turner, 1995, p. 192) Part of the emphasis on visibility of the interior of the body also relates to the requirement to represent the structures of the body in clear, visible ways. This is, of course, explicitly said to be for pedagogic reasons, but it is also a fundamental part of the cultural construction of the anatomical body as the dominant understanding of the body in `western' societies. Romanyshyn argues that the portrayal of the body has moved from the `pantomimic' body of medieval art, where `gestures are inseparable from the emotional situation and the story they enact' (1989, p. 108), to the `anatomical' body of our technological society. The `pantomimic' body can be illustrated through such forms of art as the detail of Joseph offering his gift at the temple, as portrayed on the bronze doors of St Michael's at Hildesheim, Germany, dating from about 1015 (Romanyshyn, 1989, p. 106). To the modern eye this picture looks peculiar, since the arm with which he is offering the gift seems to be stunted and out of proportion with the rest of his body. However, Romanyshyn argues that this is because the figure is represented as being at one with the emotional situation he is involved in: here it is the act of giving into which the emotional intensity of the picture is invested. This is quite a different representational framework from the one that derives from the practice of anatomy, and from Alberti's development of perspective. These two devices led to a standardised portrayal of the body, where each body is portrayed in the same way, and understood to have the same underlying structures and functions.

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Romanyshyn argues that this `anatomised' body is `immutable, anonymous', `a body of technical functioning' (1989, p. 114). In seeking to understand this functioning, from the interior, Romanyshyn suggests that we fragment and dismember the body, creating a distance between it and ourselves. This argument also applies to the body as portrayed in science. The body is dismembered in two ways: cut off from its context; and imagined as being fragmented within itself. The body, in Romanyshyn's account, has also become an interior space; a collection of `organs which define the mechanisms of life' (1989, p. 128). It is this interior space that has to be mapped to tell us about the outside, and is part of the process of universalising the anatomised body, because these fragmented elements become anonymous. He cites Van den Berg as commenting that these inner dimensions are `manufactured': they `only come into existence through dissection . . . They acquire their shape when the dissecting knife penetrates the body' (1978, pp. 79±80). Indeed, the fragmented, anatomical body on display `rests upon a disruption of the human body's ongoing relations with the world' (1989, p. 132). The work of Leonardo da Vinci illustrates the intersection between anatomy, art and mechanism. Leonardo began anatomical investigations in 1485 in Milan (Petherbridge, 1997, p. 44). He was interested in how the body worked and invented ingenious ways to represent the dissected body so that the complexity and functioning could be represented and understood as systems. He would inject wax into dissected body parts to preserve and isolate the different forms. The diagrams he produced used the principles of perspective and geometry he had also studied, and he invented `thread' drawings showing muscles as single lines, to better illustrate how they worked. Leonardo also looked for connections between his interest in the human body and his fascination with engineering principles and mechanical inventions: `he constantly drew analogies between the (hidden) forms of the body and principles in physics, particularly hydrodynamics in relation to the movement of the blood' (Petherbridge, 1997, p. 48). He described the body as `this machine of ours' (R. Turner, 1995, p. 198). Petherbridge argues that Leonardo's interest in the anatomy of the body came from his view of the human body as the `measure of all things'. He saw the body as a microcosm of the physical world, describing it as the `terrestrial machine' (1997, p. 44). Sawday argues that the period 1540±1640 was that of the discovery of the Vesalian body as opposed to the later invention of the Harveian or Cartesian body. At this point, the body was a geographical territory,

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which required an explorer's skill. The belief that guided the followers of Vesalius was that the body expressed in miniature the divine workmanship of God, and therefore corresponded to the macrocosm (1995, p. 23). The project of mapping the body was anticipated with boundless optimism ± the task of the scientist was to travel within to force the body to reveal its secrets. Once uncovered, the body-landscape could be harnessed to the service of its `owner'. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the body became established as being `useful'. Sawday argues that in this there is an intersection between the language of colonialism and the language of science, which depends on the conceptualisation of the body as property. Just as land could be seen as property and exploited, so too could the body, and its features became mirrored with systems of production, distribution and consumption, in perpetual movement. The woman's body, in particular, is ripe for this exploitation/property metaphor. In both the art and literature of the time, and in the symbolic portrayal of anatomy, the discourses of knowledge ± discovery, exploitation, sex ± can be seen as flowing into each other (Sawday, 1995). During the Enlightenment, the body was reconstituted as a machine; a reinvention of a body which fitted with the world view that developed from the Copernican revolution. Romanyshyn comments that to see the Earth in motion around the Sun, Copernicus had to `forget the evidence of his sensuous body' (1989, p. 135). This is the beginning of the reconceptualisation of the body as machine, prefigured by da Vinci. In the same way that the movement of the planets becomes understood as a mechanistic process, so too do the elements of the human body: in 1628, William Harvey3 announced that the blood is circulated around the body through the pumping motion of the heart. Thereafter the major conceptualisation of the organ is that the heart is a pump. And, indeed, twentieth-century surgeons have developed the ability to replace the heart entirely with an electrical pump (see Sunday Times 29 October 1995). The body is seen as a mechanism endowed with functions that provide its raison d'eÃtre. Whereas the geographic body was a static landscape without dynamic interconnections, the machine body was dynamic, with the parts interconnected ± but they operated according to the laws of mechanics and the body did not need an intellect of its own. Thus the body became objectified, a focus of intense curiosity, but entirely divorced from the world of the speaking and thinking subject. The division between Cartesian subject and corporeal object ± between an `I' that thinks and an `it' in which `we' reside ± became absolute.

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Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory The development of the machine image dramatically transformed the attitude of investigators towards the body's interior, and towards their own tasks of investigation. They no longer stood before the body as though it was a mysterious continent. It has become, instead, a system, a design, a mechanically organised structure, whose rules of operation, though still complex, could, with the aid of reason, be comprehended in the most minute detail. (Sawday, 1995, p. 31)

In this way, fear of the body and particularly its dysfunctions, could partly be offset against the belief that it worked to a rational set of laws. Anatomy also provided the representation of the body machine as a system of interchangeable, standardised parts. Description and measurement are the key to this world view, and the further development of knowledge was particularly founded on making more of the world visible to the human eye, and thus to the mind. In anatomy we see the movement to practical dissection replacing the authority of the text: in this, the scalpel is essential to penetrating beneath the surface and rendering visible that which is usually hidden. Perhaps indicative of this is Descartes' work on optics in his philosophical essays of 1637.4 In 1801, Bichat, the prominent French biologist, linked dissection and the enlightenment of seeing below the surface with one's own eyes: `Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that observation alone could not dissipate' (1801, p. xcix, in Foucault, 1973, p. 146). The significance of the visual is a theme of continuity from Renaissance natural history, which was based on the detailed observation and description of animals and plants. At this point there is an emphasis on the structures of things as observed, with the qualities of the inner being deduced from observing the outer. Anatomy is the process of taking this observation and categorisation within the body. A variety of technologies have been developed in order to aid this process of visualisation, from Kepler's compound microscope of 1611 to present-day electronic and laser imaging techniques (Stafford, 1991, p. 24). The predominance of the visual assumes a directly transparent relationship between what we see and the `reality' of the world. But sometimes a value is put on seeing with one's own eyes because of suspicion about intervening technologies ± neither Harvey nor Bichat used a microscope! Despite the emphasis on anatomy as truth and enlightenment, there still remains the other, shadowy side of the anatomised body. Romany-

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shyn argues that this still exists as `the unconscious side of our technological age made visible' (1989, p. 148). Romanyshyn traces some of these shadows to particular marginalised bodies. There is the body of the witch ± the feminine body associated with sexuality, the flesh and the devil. It is suppressed, punished and burned, but cannot be completely silenced. Romanyshyn advances the idea that the `discovery' of the anatomised body was an essentially masculine project, and the witch may be part of the repression and subjugation of the feminine. Then here is the body of madness, which is seen as animality not yet tamed by the powers of reason: `in shutting away this animal body, we take another step toward the body's mechanisation. The madman and madwoman in their cells are the shadows of the workers in their factories' (1989, p. 153). There is also the powerful myth of Frankenstein ± `the frightening shadow of the abandoned body' (1989, p. 160). This is the body of the man-made monster that would master Nature. It is manmade in the sense of being created entirely without the feminine. Another shadow related to that of Frankenstein is the robot or industrial worker run wild; the controlled body that might at any moment break free of its forced labour. Finally, there are the hysterical body, studied by Freud (the inevitable breakdown of the body forced to deny desire); and the anorexic body (which mocks our ideal of `mind over body' (1989, p. 173)). Although, to some extent, Romanyshyn sees that the feminine body has been `charged with the burden of remembering what the culturalpsychological dream of refashioning the body would forget', he also sees that the construction of the female body as associated with `Nature' has allowed both `the scientific subjugation of nature and the cultural subordination of women to proceed hand in hand' (1989, pp. 219±20). The pornographic display of the female body is very much the anatomised, abandoned body. It is a way for the male observer to be a voyeur, to look but to keep a distance from the female body.5 Sawday recounts various occasions where male and female criminals were executed, but the anatomists chose only the females to dissect (1995, pp. 60±1). Although no general characteristic can be deduced from this, Sawday also argues that the fascination with dissection `corresponds to an attraction to certain ill-defined things at the outer limits of life and death, sexuality and pain' (1995, p. 43), and is therefore akin to pornography. It would seem but a short step from the male investigation of the female interior to the commercial pornographic exploitation of this hidden `knowledge' ± and in the `harder' versions of pornography the violent disarticulation of `soft' (female) flesh

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becomes explicit, in the worship of parts that is integral to the `anatomising urge'. Fragments continue to have cultural significance into the modern age, which Nochlin (1994) sees as being marked by the transformative event of the French Revolution. This, she believes, `constituted the fragment as a positive rather than a negative trope' (1994, p. 8). The guillotine also seems to move the scalpel into public life in a way that further depersonalises the act of fragmenting the body and distancing the individual who carries out the cutting. Indeed, the guillotine was designed to technologise execution, making it standardised and efficient. Nochlin details how various artists have used fragments of the body in their work: `The dispersed fragments are then reconjoined at the will of the artist in arrangements both horrific and elegant . . . The mood of these works shockingly combines the objectivity of science ± the cool, clinical observation of the dissecting table ± with the paroxysm of romantic melodrama' (1994, p. 22). She argues that in the `joining up of unrelated fragments in a pictorial totality' modernity is not only associated with a metaphorical or actual fragmentation, but also `a will to totalization' (1994, p. 53). Yet Nochlin herself eschews a totalising `theory of the fragment in relation to the concept of modernity' (1994, p. 56), but emphasises that it is a model of difference. Thus the body is constructed through art and culture, as well as through the lens of science. As we have seen the connections are finely interwoven, less isolated from one another than disciplinary ordering might lead one to expect. As well as the body being used as a metaphor for social and institutional organisation (as will be discussed in the next chapter), the body itself has also often been constructed as an industrial organisation. Frederick Gates, the director of the Rockefeller Foundation, explained to Rockefeller that the body is `an infinite number of microscopic cells. Each one of these cells is a small chemical laboratory, into which its own appropriate raw material is constantly being introduced . . . The great organs of the body . . . are great local manufacturing centers formed of groups of cells in infinite number, manufacturing the same sorts of products, just as industries of the same kind are often grouped in specific districts' (Brown, 1980, p. 120). The institutional power, as well as the linguistic, embedded in this example is significant. The funding of a number of scientific and educational foundations, including those of Ford and Kellogg, as well as the Rockefeller, was from industry. The source of much of this money was from the petrochemical industry. Walker (1993) argues

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that this led to the `encouragement' of the strengthening of allopathic6 medicine based on the treatment of illness using mass-produced pharmaceutical remedies ± which in turn used the products of the petrochemical industry. Allopathic medicine was also to become institutionalised through the rationalisation of the profession in such bodies as the American Medical Association (AMA) (ibid.). The way that the body was constructed within allopathic medicine echoed the Cartesian split. It was based on a reductionist theory of the person: the body was sick, therefore the body ± or rather the affected part ± was treated without any need to consider the emotions or mental state of the individual.7 Indeed, the first code of practice of the American Medical Association stressed that the patient's view was not relevant and should not be consulted! As Walker comments, this approach fitted well with the material theories of engineering associated with large-scale industry: `From the beginning, the support of scientific medical research by industry meant that the responsibility for disease was placed within the internal biological structure of the individual organism. In terms of illness, at least, the individual became separated from their environment and the industrial process' (Walker, 1993, pp. 9±10). This approach to the body may seem to be a foregone conclusion given the discussions above, but there did exist alongside allopathic medicine a very different view of the body. Homeopathic medicine approaches the person as a whole, not just the body, and the person in context too. Of ancient origin, it continued to coexist with allopathic medicine until the early twentieth century combination of industry, capital, state and the institutionalisation of scientific medicine combined to marginalise and defame it.8 The image of the body portrayed to Rockefeller indicates the modern version of the anatomised body. As the quotation from Oudshoorn (1994, p. 4) at the head of this section indicates, the `anatomising urge' has penetrated even further into the body, reducing it to smaller and smaller fragments, well beyond the organs. Although the idea of `genes' was originally proposed by Mendel in the 1860s, and rediscovered in the 1900s, it is the `discovery' of DNA in 1953 that has precipitated a new upsurge of reduction of the body. There is no space to go into this fascinating construction of the body in detail, except to note that it re-institutionalises the main elements of the `anatomising urge' and has gained a firm foothold in the popular imagination (Nelkin and Lindee, 1995). It facilitates the use of genetic determination as a major explanation of many social issues, obscuring cultural and political factors. It has also been drawn on for images in

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business and organisation studies, especially at the managerial end of the spectrum.9 THE `ANATOMISING URGE' As I discussed in the first chapter, Sawday, in his book The Body Emblazoned (1995), argues that the growing dominance of dissection as the major form of knowledge of the body is by no means an isolated development. He links anatomy to a much wider societal movement in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. `To deploy a phrase such as the ``culture of dissection'' is to suggest a network of practices, social structures, and rituals surrounding this production of fragmented bodies, which sits uneasily alongside our image (derived from Burckhardt) of the European Renaissance as the age of the construction of individuality ± a unified sense of selfhood. But the ``scientific revolution'' of the European Renaissance encouraged the seemingly endless partitioning of the world and all that it contained' (1995, p. 2). Within this `culture of dissection' the body provides the pattern of division, categorisation and a new order. As we have already seen above, it is also a mode of knowledge that is built upon death and the marginalised bodies of those whom society rejects. In the remainder of this chapter I want to outline some of the ways in which this pattern of knowledge became institutionalised and continues to dominate much of intellectual life. Not surprisingly, the `anatomising urge' became incorporated into the natural sciences, and hence into modern biology, thus continuing to shape the constructions of the `western' body. Also, partly through the pervasive influence and valuing of `science' and partly through its incorporation into philosophical rationalism and a much broader conceptualisation of rationality, elements of this mode of knowledge shaped the development of the social `sciences', which created their own disciplinary boundaries by taking the natural sciences as a pattern and yet distinguishing themselves from them. Through these routes, not entirely linear, since historically and intellectually they do contain resistance and reversals, the `anatomising urge' has come to shape the discipline of organisation theory, including its ambivalent relationship to the human body. Through the rest of this chapter, one of the themes I particularly wish to emphasise is the significance of the concept of `organisation' as a way of looking at, understanding and controlling the world in the `anatomising urge'.

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Descartes I begin the discussion of the `anatomising urge' with Descartes who, it is argued, is of paramount importance to understanding the development of `western' science. Along with his formation of a coherent Method of Scientific Inquiry based on the fundamental principle of human Reason, his thought has also significantly shaped the reorganisation of the modern conception of the human body. Descartes' view of the body, like that of da Vinci, is as a machine, as he described in La description du corps humain (written in 1648 but not published in his lifetime for fear of the Church's reaction). He uses the analogy of a watch to draw a distinction between the living and the dead body: the difference being that the `spring' of the dead body is relaxed and broken. In other words, the difference is that of mechanism. As Romanyshyn comments, `With Descartes we have the description of [reflex] action which is divided within itself. It is an action which gives evidence of a split between the person and the body. It is the action of a depersonalized body, the abandoned body, an anonymous body' (1989, p. 139). With the separation of the person and the body also comes a split between the body and the situation. Descartes draws on the example of the reflex action of an eye-blink, which happens even if the movement of a hand towards the face is that of a friend and not an enemy. Thus `the reflex is an action which is indifferent to place' (1989, p. 141). Along with this we get the development of behavioural theories of learning which depend on this conditioned reflex that is `the way of inscribing the memory within the body regardless of its situation' (1989, p. 142). Descartes was interested in anatomy and attended the public anatomy `theatres', where he searched for the source of the soul, looked at animal hearts and studied the development of the human foetus. Bodies for anatomy classes were usually dissected from the bowels upward because this was the area which putrefied first. The brain was left to last. Descartes' search for the soul led him to the pineal gland and the perceived need to dissect a head first before the rest of the body was touched, but this was seen by his contemporaries as being wasteful and expensive. There are two ways in which Descartes' thought is enduringly significant to the `western' construction of the body and the development of the `anatomising urge'. First, in instituting a mechanical view of the body's inner workings, and, second, in splitting mind and body, Descartes provides a body that is structured. To him `anatomy is only

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biological mechanics', and the body is an `organised body' (Carter, 1983, pp. 100±1). In a letter of 1645 to Mesland, Descartes makes it clear that he believes the reason for the life of a body is because it possesses organs, which are made up of `particules' of matter. It is the interrelationship of these parts that gives the living body its disposition to receive a soul ± like a machine which only works when its parts are connected together in a particular way (Carter, 1983, pp. 99±100). To him, each person has the capacity to control his or her bodily impulses through `spiritual mechanics' (Carter, 1983, p. 111). Thus there is the further separation of emotions and passions, which are to be controlled through Reason. This is also central to the development of the rational person and to organisation theory (Bologh, 1990; Fineman, 1993). To Descartes, the greater the degree of organisation or ordering ± and the more complex the machine ± the further down the path of evolution or progress is the entity (Carter, 1983, p. 193). It is interesting that Descartes is only concerned with bodily fluids from the perspective that they `permit coagulating and rarification, so that the finer parts can form masses of relatively heavier matter' (Carter, 1983, p. 198). In other words, he held a very structured view of the body, which also fits with the denigration of body fluids ± often associated with the female body ± in `western' constructions of the body. Descartes had set the stage for the development of the rational self by splitting off the `res extensa' (that which is matter) from `res cogito' (that which thinks). He comes to this position through a method of scepticism. He considers all the attributes of the human and concludes that all could be illusory, including the body, except for thought or reason. This is the only quality that is necessary. He divides off from the mind all that could be associated with the body ± perception, sensitivity, motion, growth and decay. This created the potential for the being who separates thought from action, and is thus able to reflect on his/her own self. Man can now make himself an object of his own study [sic] (Foucault, 1970). The possibility of objective knowledge of the world ± that which is independent of the subject who knows it ± becomes addictive. Everywhere this knowledge is to be brought together and ordered, leading to the age of the great taxonomies and encyclopaedias. Descartes was so sure that science was progression that he thought in time one person would be able to gather together all that could be known of the world (Romanyshyn, 1989, p. 180). These principles through which Descartes conceptualises the body are fundamental to his philosophical method. Together they have had

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a far-reaching effect on the `western' intellectual tradition which still bears their marks. In the Discourse on Method Descartes reveals his interest in how we can develop a method of reasoning about the world. The key to understanding was the recognition that mathematics gave us the secret of the universe. Building on this insight he goes on to develop his four rules of logic: The first was never to accept anything as true if I had not evident knowledge of its being so; that is, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to embrace in my judgement only what presented itself to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it. The second, to divide each problem I examined into as many parts as was feasible, and was requisite for its better solution. The third, to direct my thoughts in an orderly way; beginning with the simplest objects, those most apt to be known, and ascending little by little, in steps as it were, to the knowledge of the most complex; and establishing an order in throught even when the objects had no natural priority one to another. And the last, to make throughout such complete enumerations and such general surveys that I might be sure of leaving nothing out. (Descartes, 1954 [1637], pp. 20±1) This is a complex epistemological system, but Cartesianism (along with Bacon's experimentalism in Novum Organum of 1620) forms a central part of the `western' scientific tradition and is worth analysing in more detail, because it is important in the forming of the `culture of dissection'. What we see here is metaphysical realism, in the sense that reality has an objective structure unaffected by human understanding. It is a form of objectivism too when taken with the belief that this reality is accessible to human knowledge. It also assumes epistemological individualism, because humans gain knowledge of the world as individuals not as socially constituted groups. There is a clear rationalist bias here, as knowledge is gained through reason, and when this reasoning is based upon the senses (especially that of sight) it leads to empiricism. There is a universalistic assumption here too, as reason is available to all human beings (though decidedly not to animals) should they wish to conquer the impediments of value bias. Simple components are seen as providing the basis upon which knowledge develops in what is a variant of foundationalism. Therefore wholes are understood through the analysis of the parts ± which also assumes a functional relationship

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between the two which relies on systems, centralised control, and a hierarchy of functions. From my point of view, it is noticeable that the Cartesian Method relies upon division of the world into small, understandable components. For Descartes, reason proceeds by splitting the whole into the parts. Thus he splits the mind from the body because the use of rationality by the mind internally allows the mind to look outside the body at external matter. This, then, forms the belief that realism, objectivity and truth stem from observation and rational thought. Self-consciousness is the property of the mind and not the body. It is superior to the thought of which animals are capable, because they have no soul, nor any capacity for reason. Animals are machines not blessed with a soul and are therefore automata. It is the possession of mind rather than a body that Descartes sees as being crucial to his Method. In order to develop the powers of pure Reason one must escape the visceral and the irrational, and seek Reason. Thus the fragmenting of the world is accompanied by arranging those parts into a hierarchy and the formation of dualisms, the central one of which is the mind/body split. The scientific revolution At this point, knowledge is gathered and classified, but has not yet taken the shape of the machine ± it is not so far separated into organs which interrelate. The connections between categories are enumerated through superficial resemblances rather than through a system of functionality such as that derived from the development of anatomy (see Foucault, 1970). The work of Bacon and Newton has also been influential to the development of this structured, mechanised universe.10 For Bacon, the purpose of science is `an understanding of the patterns in which matter is organised in accordance with mechanical laws' (Lloyd, 1984, p. 10), and furthermore, the significance of these laws is that they permit Man [sic] to control nature ± the aim of this knowledge is ultimately power. In Newton's world view, too, the soul is an immaterial entity, while the body is made up of matter. Matter is governed by the laws of motion, attraction and gravity, and is essentially passive in response to these laws. Mind, on the other hand, is active and capable of being a direct and causal agent (Rogers, 1979). Again, we see the nascent idea of the rational self, which has the necessary `distance' to examine and control its own material nature as well as that which surrounds and is now perceived as being separate from the individual.

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The machine has been seen as a defining metaphor of modernism (Gergen, 1992). The object under study becomes a bounded whole, a unitary entity. Parts are defined in relation to the overall purpose of the whole, emphasising function and structure, and obscuring difference and contradiction. The better the parts are specified and understood, the more complete the knowledge of the whole object, and therefore the more complete the power over it. The machine has remained a central metaphor for constructing the body, although the form of the machine has itself changed over time. The phrase `cybernetics' was coined in 1948 by Norbert Weiner to describe a new science that combined the human body, the mind and machines through communications theory and control theory. Here we see `the image of the body becomes less one of an engineered body with the key tasks being the transfer and conservation of energy, but more of a communications network based upon the accurate reproduction and exchange of signals in time and space' (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995a, p. 2). Weiner linked four stages of the development of automata with models of the human body: a mythic Golemic age which associates the body as a malleable, magical, clay figure; the age of clocks (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), which has the body as a clockwork mechanism; the age of steam (late eighteenth century and nineteenth century), where the body is seen as being an engine needing the input of energy to function; and the (twentieth-century) age of communication and control, where the body is seen as being an electronic information processor (Tomas, 1995, p. 23). The `pure' information processor of the cybernetic body still owes much to the Cartesian split, where reason is to be privileged over the matter of the body. As Tomas argues persuasively, it paved the way for researchers, such as Clynes and Kline in 1960, to envisage a `self-regulating man-machine', where the limitations of the physical body could be overcome for the purposes of space travel. From here it is just a short step to the post-human body which is in fact a post-bodied human (see Ansell Pearson, 1997)! In contrast to other historians who have seen the scientific culture of England in the eighteenth century as being rather barren after the Newtonian developments, Jacob argues that `the mechanical philosophy was grafted onto the interests of its audience in a way that helped to lay the foundations of an industrial mentality' (1987, p. 135). A commentator on Matthew Bolton suggests that his successful perfection of the steam engine was achieved because `his factory was one huge laboratory of applied mechanics' (Hill, 1969, p. 252). In other words, we begin to see some signs of the coalescence between

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the organisation of the mechanical body and the development of the organisation of mechanical production. But the relationship between the rationalised body and rational organisation had already been formed within the writings of Bacon. Although Francis Bacon (1561±1626) is seen as being a pioneer in scientific methodology, particularly in empiricism, several commentators (for example, Martin, 1993; Woolhouse, 1988) stress that in many ways he was more of a politician than a `pure' scientist. He worked his way up from being a barrister, through Attorney-General to the position of Lord Chancellor. One of his greatest concerns was authority and control in knowledge production (he essentially wished to maintain the status quo of the monarch's power, in accordance with his role within the state). His solution was `an institutional one, with hierarchically organised structures for information-gathering, assessment, and command' (Martin, 1993, p. 77). In his posthumously published New Atlantis, his vision of scientific organisation is set out in the form of `Solomon's House' ± a royal institution with a hierarchical division of labour among the `Brethren' who are state officials. They obtain scientific information from books, travel and experiments, collect this together so it can be assessed as legitimate, or not, by committees ± a plan for the `systematic and collaborative' pursuit of knowledge (Woolhouse, 1988, p. 14). Bacon characterised his method of scientific work as `mechanical' (Woolhouse, 1988, p. 23) the by-word of the times; and took his organisational inspiration for how this was to be a