Harré and Merleau-Ponty: Beyond the Absent Moving Body in Embodied Social Theory1

This paper addresses the absence of the moving material substance in contemporary social theory that claims to be embodied, and tenders ways of going beyond it toward a conception of dynamic embodiment. I do this from one side an examination of Harr?©'s conception of embodiment ground within the "ethogenic" standpoint that informs his 'Ways of Being' trilogy (Harr?© 1984 19911993)

I also examine Merleau-Ponty's conception of embodiment rest within his existential phenomenology and the of recent origin ontology he proposes in The Visible and the Invisible (1968) Merleau-Ponty's conception of embodied consciousness, which entails the "lived body" "intercorporeity," and "flesh" is single of the major sources of the somatic turn round in social theorizing during the past sum of two units decades.2 Instead of regarding the material part as an organism behaving-a deterministic entity-such embodied social theory regards the material part as a phenomenal process-the perceptual experience or feeling of a bring under rule For example, Merleau-Ponty states

Our bodily experience of motion is not a particular case of [theoretical knowledge], it provides us with a way of access of the world and the external reality with a 'praktognosia', which has to be recognized as original and perhaps primary (1948: 104 cited in Harr?©, 1991: 109 emphasis supplied).

In making use of this thesis in an analysis of human skills, Harr?© deliver overs to it as "the feeling of doing" (1991: 106-109) Clearly, in viewing the material part as a phenomenal process (the received view of what phenemenology is all about), it is taken to be active, because human beings are assumed to be agents. Nevertheless, there is a failure upon Harr?©'s part to assume the primacy of human material part movement, and thus a failure to regard move as genuine action.

The point I wish make here is not simply that the material substance is more than an organism, on the contrary that the body is more than the experience and the feeling, or smooth the perception, of doing. There is the doing itself-the move Bodily movement is not adequately accounted for through relying upon Harr?©'s guiding image of several clan cooperating to move a piece of furniture (Muhlhausler and Harr?©, 1990: 12) These combined motions do not constitute a meaning-making proces They be under the orders of as a means to a practical extremity In other words, the central focus of this kind of cooperative action is that of manipulating physical objects

For an adequate account of bodily motion we must explicate further examples of the like kind as several American Indian sign-talkers communicating for lengthy stretches of time without articulate utterance punctuating their sign-talk periodically with uproarious laughter (see Farnell 1995) or the combined actions of celebrant, deacons, subdeacons and acolytes during a Mass (see Williams 1994) or a dance. In these instances, we have collective, cooperative actions of several tribe in which the body is the one and the other the means and the extremity of communicative intentions.

While human beings should not ever be reduced to matter in motion, we should remember that being human is more than physical being-human beings as "physical particulars," as Harr?© calls them (1991: 15-29) We are also moving beings-human individuals in movement.

The primacy of human change entails language and gesture.3 That is, signifying move in the gestural medium that is the manner of its semantic realization. Williams provided exactly this understanding in her semasiological general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of the "action sign" (1979: 178-207) It is the radical idea of human motion as signifying acts that can take us beyond the contemporary situation in which the moving material part remains absent from embodied social theory. Neither Harr?© nor Merleau-Ponty provide us with similar a conception, but I will exhibit that their respective standpoints the pair call for, and internally permit, signifying acts achieved with human movement

Merleau-Ponty and designs of Human Being

It is a commonplace belief that Merleau-Ponty's general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of "the lived- body" is a felicitous antidote to Cartesian mind-body dualism. The philosopher/dancer Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1981) and anthropologist/poet Michael Jackson (1989:1-16119-136) one as well as the other used the concept of the lived material part for precisely that purpose.

In an earlier analysis of their efforts (Varela 1995) I argued that this approach has not suitably challenged the problem of Cartesianism. flat if it were the case that Merleau-Ponty's notion of the lived-body transcends Cartesianism, the crucial point is that mind-body dualism is not the down-reaching issue. The problematical issue is the conception of modern individualism presupposed by means of the Cartesian perspective which entails the los of the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of person. As a symptom of that los Cartesianism can be understood as a rhetoric of individualism. Consequently it has an elective affinity with a "human nature model"4 of human being.

This point brings to the fore a strategy to locate Merleau-Ponty's work within the Geertzian framework of "the way we think now" (Geertz 1983) I will do this by the agency of locating Merleau-Ponty's perspective with respect to the paradigm conflict between the "human nature" and the "being human" originals of human being. My theme is that Merleau-Ponty had renounced the "human nature model" (especially its individualist assumption), and was closing in upon (but unable fully to reach), the "being human model"5 with its assumption of sociality. This observation specifies my thesis that MerleauPonty's conception of embodiment is sensitizing on the other hand not definitive, and that the status of his philosophical perspective is transitional and not final.