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ABSTRACT
The dominant thought in the Western Culture, put the soul first and despised the body, generating distinctions and hierarchies in which the spiritual or immaterial was considered superior to the corporeal or material. But the bodies have not allowed themselves to be reduced to these dichotomous patterns. The queer discovered the body, worked with it, but returned to the field of immateriality in which the identity is lodged. The crip has completed the gesture of the queer entering fully into the field of the body, denaturalizing categories (deficiency and disability) and interpreting it as radically interdependent. However, in the absence of tradition in dealing with the body, both in reflection and politics, we are inspired by other cultures that always put corporeality in the foreground. The Native American Indians are explicit in terms of contrast between humans and non-humans, because for them there is a unique culture with multiple natures, as opposed to Western, because we believe in plurality of cultures and in a uniform nature. In order to coexist with this diversity, the West has invented ‘cultural relativism’ and ‘multiculturalism’, while the Native American Indians have developed a ‘multinaturalism’ with their ‘perspectivism’. We propose to denominate perspectivism a modality of science and politics that could manifest the radical influence of bodies.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. This had many consequences. One of them is the separation and later exclusion of animals for not reaching our level of intelligence (Simondon, Citation2008). Descartes closed the operation, depriving them even of instinct.
2. This hierarchical way of proceeding should not be surprising because it happens in more situations. For example, the thought and politics that have made the sexuality hierarchy of the erogenous zones are made from the general equivalent ‘penis’. The same thing happens in the field of moneys with the general equivalent ‘dollar’, and in the field of social organizations with the general equivalent ‘boss’, in the field traditional families with the general equivalent ‘father’, etc. (Goux, Citation2000).
3. It refers to people with different biophysical characteristics and given the environment conditions generated by society, must perform the same tasks or functions as the rest of society in a different way: The same function, but different way of doing it. ‘This term considers the difference of the person and the lack of respect of the majorities, which in their social and environmental constructive processes does not take into account this functional diversity’ (Romañach & Lobato, Citation2005, p. 4). This term was coined by the Independent Living Forum (Spain) in 2005 and is currently used to refer to disability in our context.
4. Companies design norms that regulate subjects and these norms need to be constantly repeated and reiterated in order to materialize. But bodies do not ever completely conform to that imposed norm. Therefore, they need to be permanently cited so that they can exert their effects. These norms also give space for the production of bodies that do not conform, precisely because they strengthen the boundary or the frontier, which is why they are indispensable to the norm (Louro, Citation2001) (following Butler's theory of performativity).
5. It is therefore through these manifestations that the norm and dichotomies are diluted and, as Young (Citation2000, p. 249) expressed, it becomes possible to end discriminatory cultural practices by ‘inciting all subjects to an understanding of themselves as plural, heterogeneous.’
6. For this ‘populist’ body it would be necessary to write inseparable from the body but also ‘populating’, as suggested by De Peretti (Citation2005, pp. 70–76).
7. Although in principle they are different, there are other lines of research that deviate from the spiritualism that has dominated the reflection on language. This is the case of the recovery of writing and the trace that Derrida (1986) makes against phonocentrism (in alliance with the logocentrism) that has dominated in the reflection from the Stoics to Saussure. Bühler (Citation1985) and García Calvo (Citation1991) have made similar analysis in the field of the words when they distinguish the indexicality and the abstraction as ways to give meanings. Neither should we forget McLuhan’s (Citation1985) denunciation of visual hyperesthesia that is behind our experience of language and writing, which has sacrificed the synesthetic confluence of more senses, as with hieroglyphic writing.
8. To position the work of Varela in the wide range of authors influenced by the neurosciences and dedicated to the study of the conscience, see Chalmers, Citation1995.
9. We should not forget, for example, the aggressive body aesthetics that have gone from tattooing to scratching, brandings (burning), the introduction of prosthesis (horns, scales, etc.), amputation (phalanges; cheeks), bifid tongues, etc. (Rojo Ojados, Citation2014). Nor should we forget Fitness and Health, which began in the 1970s but originated in the 1940s, when the army decided to improve the quality of its recruits (Howell & Ingham, Citation2001, p. 335). Sloterdijk (Citation2012, p. 24) says that ‘exercise’ in the twenty-first century (a substitute for the ‘reflexivity’ that dominated the twentieth century and the ‘production’ that it championed in the nineteenth century) is a type of ‘antropotécnica’ of different cultures that have tried to optimize to avoid the risks of life and the certainties of death. One consequence of this is, according to Sloterdijk, the appearance of ‘neo-athletics’, inaugurated by the Olympism of Pierre De Coubertín. With it, the ‘religion of hunger’ disappears and ‘satiety and fitness’ appears (Sloterdijk, Citation2012, pp. 117–18).
10. By the way, Maturana (Citation1995) elaborated his constructivist point of view and his own notion of autopoiesis, central in certain sociology, from his studies on the different vision systems of living beings (pigeons are tretracromatic, we are trichromatic; there are species that see below the red and others above the violet, etc.). He concluded that each system is embodied in different bodies and lifestyles for which such views are functional. This is a perspectivist constructivism very different from the one proposed in multiculturalism, because the latter case is based on internal differences (different subjectivities and cultures), while the other is interested in the body characteristics and the context in which these bodies develop.
11. In the Western world, the popular culture has always maintained a deal with the materiality of the body that is very different from the high culture, as we know from Bajtin (Citation1990).
12. Different theories of fashions underline the imitation that some groups or classes perform on others. See, for example, Simmel, Citation1927.
13. Within our world Sacks (Citation1997) discovered a landscape of representations of the world just as extraordinary and also corporately rooted in its treatment of a wide range of neurological diseases that, however, do not make life much harder for those who suffer from them.
14. For example see Bourdieu, Citation1997.
15. The so-called philosophy of suspicion (Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche) would be a permanent source of inspiration for a multitude of theories and methodologies, from the Frankfurt School to Bourdieu via Foucault and the many families of psychoanalysts. To discover how these theories require specific research methodologies see Bergua, Citation2011, pp. 45–55.
16. But not all other alterities have developed a discourse and activated their own political practices. This is the case, for example, with young people, adolescents and children. If they had done so, it would have been necessary for them to be conceived as subjects. They have not done so because they could not consider that possibility or because it did not interest them. For both reasons they show a different alterity to that exhibited by groups as mobilized as the crip or queer. Aside from this, to see the politics produced by Native American Indians’ animism and other similar peoples, see De La Cadena and Starn, Citation2007.
17. Foucault (Citation1980) says that the West suffers from an atavistic and structural blockade of sexuality. While the East has created an ars erotica to develop and intensify its experience (Kamasutra case), our civilization has blocked it by the procedure (from using the device of confession in Christianity to psychoanalysis afterwards) to speak it or put it into discourse, creating therefore a scientia sexualis. The queer movement seems to have overcome this resistance. Although it seems contradictory, the atavistic resistance to accept sexuality is also behind the compulsive awakening that has occurred since the 1960s with sexual revolutions (Reich, Citation1980), the consideration that sexuality improves existence (and even has a divine character) and the explosion of disciplines and practices related to all this. A good example of these words spoken in the heat of the Sexual Revolution were: ‘Man can only desire the pleasure of woman, that God who slumbers in her and never produces in her body, can only observe it with astonishment, Panic, terror … ’ (Bruckner & Fikielkraut, Citation1989, p 40).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Laura Moya
Laura Moya, Postgraduate I Sociology and Doctoral Student in the Program, ‘Sociology of Public and Social Politics’.
José Angel Bergua
José Angel Bergua, Professor of Sociology, President of the Aragonese Sociological Association and First Researcher of Risk Society Studies.