DARREN: First and foremost I think phenomenological social psychology is about lived experience. Experience as people live it in their day to day lives. DR LINDA FINLAY: It’s about focusing in on what it, what it means to be human and, and that, that I just find very exciting. LINDA (continued): Very often in psychology people focus in on smaller aspects of people’s behaviour, whether it’s in their brain or whatever, and you lose the sense of what it means to be human. DARREN: Immediately I encountered the phenomenological approach and the philosophy of the kind of phenomenological philosophers, did I merely kind of think: hello, this is, this is something that resonates with me and my understanding of the world, and what I’d learnt and studied so far. DR LINDA FINLAY: My path into this really came from practising as a mental health therapist, because there I used all sorts of theoretical perspectives in my work, but the one I favoured was the humanistic approach, where you’re trying to look at, kind of taking a holistic view of the person, the individual, trying to understand their, their feelings, their needs, their potential. Trying to empower. And these are the kinds of messages that also phenomenologists pick up on. And so it was a very short jump for me really as, as a therapist to then move into phenomenology . DARREN: What I discovered with phenomenology was an alternative psychoanalysis that had that vast scope, that actually sought to kind of deal with human existence kind of as we live it, in its entirety. DR LINDA FINLAY: It asks: well what is that experience like for you? So for example, if you were a depressed person and you had a whole room of psychologists here, every single psychologist would probably look at you differently and understand you differently. And you’d have some psychologists perhaps would be very focused on why is it that you’ve become depressed. Whereas the phenomenologist simply says well, I want to know what is it like for you to be depressed? What is your world? You know, who are you and how are you handling it? What’s your pain? What’s … what are your needs, what are your feelings? What is it that gives you meaning in your life? And for me those are the important questions. And of course there a link there then into how one would then help you with your depression. NARRATOR: Phenomenological research sets out to describe the particularity of people’s experiences. DARREN: My own research has been mostly concerned with understanding the lived experience of sexual identities. A particularly interesting study that I conducted was concerned with understanding the expectations of young gay men for parenthood. As a gay man coming out some years ago, I recall automatically assuming that I’d not be able to have children of my own or give my parents grandchildren. I was interested in exploring whether there was a new story about parenthood and the possibility of this for young gay men. This led me to conduct a study designed to investigate the hopes and fears of young gay men about becoming parents themselves. DARREN: We set out basically to conduct kind of fairly in depth interviews with sort of 20 young gay men, who didn’t have children but had something to say about the topic. DARREN: Hi, James. I’m Darren. DARREN: We recruited from a number of different sources with flyers that we put around various venues, directly approached youth groups in the area, university groups and other people that we knew. We basically were trying to find kind of as many young gay men as we could who were willing to volunteer that didn’t already have children through whatever means, and that had some wish to take part and talk about the topic. Men that sometimes we were interviewing them in my office, at the university, or we’d go to their homes, whatever was most appropriate for them, and they felt most comfortable with. DARREN: Through here? JAMES: Yep. Would you like a drink or anything? DARREN: Yeah, a cup of tea would be great, thanks. JAMES: No problem. DARREN: I wonder if we could begin by just talking a little bit about your expectations for parenthood. And in particular I’m interested in whether you’ve ever imagined becoming a parent at some point in the future? JAMES: I have certainly. Five years ago, before I came out as a gay man, I was in a relationship with a woman and I got her pregnant. I realised I think at that point that I wasn’t in the relationship I wanted to be in to actually bring the child up. It was a mutual decision, but we decided to get rid of the baby in the end and … it was the right decision, I don’t think we could have supported it as I would have wanted to and I think she had the same opinion as me really. I would like children in the future but obviously now, being a gay man, it would be with a different partner, and it would definitely be I think in a relationship that I would want to have that child. DARREN: What we heard from these people were a variety of themes around the way in which having a child was a way of connecting them in with their own families, their own biological families in particular; a way of continuing the generation, the family name through providing parents with grandchildren, linking themselves into the family structure in a way that often heterosexual siblings did. DARREN: And have you thought about the implications of your decision for the child themselves? JAMES: My generation’s a lot more accepting of gay marriage, gay people having babies. And I would hope that in the future, perhaps ten years down the … ten years down the line, sorry, that it’s developed even more, so that it’s become less of an issue. DARREN: And I wonder if you thought about how your friends or family might respond to you in this decision? JAMES: I think my friends would be very accepting. My parents would like grandchildren, definitely, and wanting children myself, I think, I think it would be, it would be a good thing for them and it would be a good thing for me. DARREN: There was often an emphasis on quite traditional notions of families, of needing to be in a couple before having children was actually quite a common theme, and wanting to be a kind of fairly traditional family, where the child had lots of love and affection and support. And these things were kind of clearly identified as common themes for the men involved. DR LINDA FINLAY: I set out to study the lived experience in multiple sclerosis and in my research I actually interviewed several people with multiple sclerosis. Now what was so striking was that they all had completely different stories, and I soon realised that actually it was not possible to do a study on this is what the experience of multiple sclerosis is like. It was clear to me that I needed to focus in on the individuals and kind of honour their story. And Ann was one of the individuals, and I thought she had a really important story to tell. In Ann’s interview she talked about having a numbness in her hands that had spread, spread up her arm, and then it subsided, leaving her with a little bit of numbness in her fingertips. And that’s pretty much all she had wrong in a way. And, and that was what I was thinking: well, it’s not that bad in, in the grand scheme of things. But of course I wasn’t setting aside my understandings of the medical condition not being so bad. Whereas really I needed to tune in to what Ann was feeling about this and what it meant to her. And she did something in the interview which just yanked me back to her life world and really showed, showed me, from her perspective, what it was about. LINDA (continued): She, she described the sense of not being able to feel her babies skin properly, so that she could love them. And she did this gesture, this kind of embodied gesture, which just whoa, and I … and I suddenly got it. I suddenly realised what … whatever the medical status of her hand, that was really irrelevant. For her, having a little bit of numbness in her hand, meant that she couldn’t touch her babies. In medical terms her symptoms were relatively minor, but her entire world was derailed. One of the valuable things that has come out in my research with Ann is, is actually working with health professionals. They do exactly what I did, which is kind of thinking: oh well, she’s just got a little numbness in her fingers, no big deal. And then they switch off. And I say wait a minute, you’ve got a person there with a whole life, look at how her, her whole world has been disrupted. I think phenomenological research in general reminds the professionals to listen and hear what it is like for the individual.Now watch ‘The Phenomenological Perspective Part 2’.
The Phenomenological Perspective Part 2
NARRATOR: There are several key features which distinguish the phenomenological from other perspectives in social psychology. DARREN: We seek to approach things with, with a sense of naivety, with a sense of not coming at it, knowing what we’re going to find. I mean this is, this is actually called epoché, which is kind of a Greek word, which is, which is a kind of … the process by which we try and approach things without preconceptions. DR LINDA FINLAY: The epoché is often a misunderstood process, and people think of it as something about becoming objective and unbiased. And it really is absolutely not that. It’s about suspending the researchers presuppositions and prior understandings. LINDA (continued): But it’s not putting them away forever, it’s just bracketing them, holding them to one side in order to be open to the phenomena or to be open to the person and, and see what emerges. DARREN: So we for instance try and horizontalize. We don’t put things into hierarchies of meaning straight away. So when somebody tells us that their cat died, and that they’re worried about their mother’s illness, we don’t assume that their mother’s illness is necessarily more important than their cat dying. It might not be the case for that person. I don’t know. I need to find out. DR LINDA FINLAY: It’s very important for the researcher to be, to be aware selfconscious of how they impact on the data collection, the data analysis, the writing up, and in the whole research process. Because it’s not simply hearing the person’s story. DARREN: Like the social psychoanalytic approach, we take field notes very seriously, and are very interested in our experience of what happens in relationships with an interviewee, before and after, and our relationship with the subject too. DR LINDA FINLAY: As the person is telling their story, the researchers are part of the story that’s being told. They’re, they’re in a sense co- producing the findings. DARREN: There’s something about an intrinsic interconnection that people have with each other, and that this interconnection is the stuff of phenomenology, this is the material out there between people that is the core of what we do. DR LINDA FINLAY: Phenomenologists are concerned to understand the lived embodied experience of the person and how they relate to others. So it’s about their self identity, it’s about their sense of embodiment, it’s about their relationships with others. But a part of that is actually trying to capture something of what’s called lived, the temporality and spatiality, lived time and lived space. DARREN: We all live in a three dimensional spatial world and that that will have impacts on us. So we might feel in a certain environment closed in, kind of you know, confined, and it might not be because the environment is small, it might just be the experience we have of that space. DR LINDA FINLAY: With lived time, you know how you sometimes feel that time is rushing by, you know, when you’re feeling happy it seems to go very quickly, and then when you’re feeling bored or tired, time goes very slowly. So that’s the kind of thing you try and pick up in a phenomenological analysis. Time’s going quickly, slowly. Is it discontinuous? Is it fragmented? Is it both, fast and slow? DARREN: We describe rather than interpret. The first principle is that we always seek to approach any subject in a descriptive way. We actually try and stay with the thing as it’s presented to us, and describe it, in kind of vivid rich detail. DARREN: Sartre about us being condemned to be free and being kind of an emptiness and that what we’re trying to do in our every day lives is fill that up. So we’re kind of constantly becoming. So human nature is an active process, where we’re meaning makers, we’re kind of machines that are seeking to kind of find the meaning in the world, and that’s what we’re, we’re doing. We don’t have anything kind of core essential, any personality that’s fixed or in traits that, that are there, you know, for all eternity. We’re not inherently extroverts or introverts. It will depend on what’s going on for us and our experience as we live it, day to day. 2 Identity and the bodyIn this section of the course you will look at the idea of a body–mind–social split in relation to the theme of identity and the body. You will then use the case study of pop singer Michael Jackson to explore the ideas of the body as an ‘identity project’.2.1 Resisting a body–mind–social splitTo what extent are you your body? The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes saw human subjective experience (including rationality, thought and spirituality) as separate and fundamentally different from the objective world of matter, that of our bodies and the physical universe. This idea of a fundamental divide between mind and matter (as two different kinds of ‘stuff’) set the stage for centuries of debate on what came to be known as Cartesian dualism. Critics of this way of understanding people point to the way that Western culture has soaked up this mind-body dualism and tends unknowingly to reproduce it.Psychology, too, has not been free from dualist views and practices. Much of the last fifty years of psychology has been taken up with questions of the ‘mind’ and, in the process, the body has often been entirely ignored. Furthermore, where the body has appeared, although the mind-body dualism has disappeared, the psychological and social complexity of the body has also invariably been lost, as biologically-orientated psychologists have tended to reduce psychology to biology (most notably to the brain). That is, they adopt a monist position, where there is only one kind of ‘stuff’ – which, in this case, is physical biological stuff. Indeed, in recent years, there has been a strong focus on the genetic basis of human behaviour: what Joseph Schwartz (1997) rather scathingly referred to as a new ‘genetic fundamentalism’.Many contemporary social psychologists would be critical of any reductionist account in which a person is ‘reduced’ simply to their body or biology or, alternatively, to their mind. Instead, they argue that people need to be viewed in a way that recognises the biological, the psychological and the social. From this point of view, mind-body dualism and simple physical reductionism emerge as both simplistic and unhelpful.The sense of personhood we possess is at least partly based on the feel we have of our own bodies, as much as in the symbols which define our unique social identity … if the body is not the person, then what is the person? The body image and self-image we develop is based on the sense of being embodied and the way in which this experience is mediated by culture.(Burkitt, 1999, p. 147)Although bodily experience is rooted in biology, Robert Connell (1987, p. 84) argues it is also imbued with the social world – a ‘life-history-in-society’. So, for instance, bodily differences between men and women, Connell says, are not just a physical given. Rather, as men and women, we are continually working with, and transforming, our natural, biological selves, intentionally and unintentionally. There is a personal dimension to this process. For example, we bring to it our own particular motivations and understandings. But larger societal influences – relationships, ideology, language, social structures – also play a part. However, there is disagreement about the extent to which our body and our biology shape who we are. If our sense of self or identity comes from our body, to what extent can we choose our identities by changing our bodies? And furthermore, what role does society play in shaping both our bodies and our identities? These questions of individual-social and agency-structure dualisms form the basis of the next sub-section in which we consider the notion of the body as an ‘identity project’.2.2 Body as ‘identity project’In Western culture, television ‘makeover’ shows in which individuals opt for plastic surgery or are given advice on clothes, makeup, diet and exercise have gained considerable popular appeal. It seems that large numbers of people are buying into the idea that lives can be radically changed through such makeovers. Supposedly unattractive people who are unhappy with their lives are transformed into supposedly more beautiful and happy people leading satisfying lives. In reality, however, does reshaping or redefining the body radically change people's identity and experience of the world?Box 1 Michael Jackson's body projectThe pop singer Michael Jackson was an interesting example of someone who has focused on changing his body. In his autobiography Moonwalk (Jackson, 1988), he tells how he was deeply unhappy with his appearance, in particular his wide nose and dark skin. Although he denies he has deliberately lightened his skin and had all the surgery attributed to him, his body has radically altered. Jackson has turned his body into an active project, seemingly designed to blur his identity in terms of sex, race/ethnicity and age. Increasingly, medical and technological advances offer the means for more extreme reconstructions of the body. Jackson's apparently personal body project is both socially rooted and produces social effects. His choice, to become white skinned and narrow nosed, is not, therefore, only due to personal eccentricity, but is linked with the racialised power relations current in Western societies.The fact that we can ‘do’ things with our body and present or display ourselves in different ways suggests that our identity is not entirely fixed or determined by our bodies. In the West, at least, people can make a conscious decision to change their bodies through surgery, dieting, drugs, exercise and the clothes they wear. As people change their bodies in these ways, you could say that they also change how they feel about themselves and their roles in society, and how they're perceived by others (all of which are aspects of identity). In Western societies, people appear to have some measure of freedom or opportunity to choose an identity:Questions of identity, individual and collective, confront us at every turn … We are interpellated and interrogated by a multiplicity of voices to consider and reconsider our identities. How we think of ourselves … is up for grabs, open to negotiation, subject to choice to an unprecedented extent.(Roseneil and Seymour, 1999, p. 1)The sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) has noted how people ‘use’ their bodies – for example, through fashion and exercise – to help them pursue particular ways of life or lifestyles. Here, the body becomes part of an ongoing ‘identity project’. Our body is both something we are and something we have. It becomes the means of expressing our individuality and aspiration as well as our group affiliations. By focusing on our bodies and working on them for public displays, we turn ourselves into our own ‘project’ (Nettleton and Watson, 1998, p. 1).An example of this process is the current Western preoccupation with constructing ‘healthy bodies’. Westerners spend billions every year on gym or health club memberships, on over-the-counter medications, health supplements and on dieting manuals. Chris Shilling (1997) points out the contradictions here:At a time when our health is threatened increasingly by global dangers, we are exhorted to take individual responsibility for our bodies by engaging in self-care regimes. These regimes promote an image of the body as an island of security in a global system characterized by multiple risks. Furthermore, they are not simply about preventing disease, but are concerned with making us feel good about how our bodies appear to ourselves and to others.(Shilling, 1997, p. 70)Body projects can be seen as a way for individuals to express themselves, to feel good and to gain some control over their lives. For instance, people may focus on their bodies in a more sustained way when they suddenly become ill or infirm. Body projects can also be a way to challenge accepted societal ideas about what ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ bodies should look like. In this respect, individuals celebrate their difference and create alternative identities through a range of body modification activities such as tattooing, piercing and bodybuilding (Holland, 2004). As one woman body-builder puts it: ‘When I look in the mirror I see somebody who's finding herself, who has said once and for all it doesn't really matter what role society said I should play’ (Rosen, 1983, quoted in Shilling, 1997, p. 71).The speaker in the quotation above seems to believe she is making a ‘free choice’ and can resist societal pressures to conform to certain norms. However, is this really the case? To what extent are body projects expressions of individual preference? What of the powerful cultural influences all around us: for example, the fashion presented to us on the high street or the messages we get from the media and advertising industries?Although most social psychologists would probably agree that bodies, identity and the social world mutually shape each other, they disagree over the respective weight of these factors. Phenomenological psychologists place the emphasis on our lived experience of embodiment, arguing that because we have the capacity to reflect on our choices, we have some agency to make decisions about who we want to be. Discursive psychologists, however, argue that body projects reflect the pervasive influence of society. They are social practices constrained by the ideals, meanings and identities available in culture. Our bodies are discursive in the sense that they both reflect and express cultural ideals and ideologies. ‘Free’ choices are not as free as they may seem. For instance, in the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe's curvaceous figure was considered the embodiment of femininity in Western culture. Nowadays, women's bodies are subject to the ‘tyranny of slenderness’ (Chernin, 1983) in which a youthful, athletic and slender body is equated with beauty and happiness (Bordo, 1993).Feminist philosophers have been particularly concerned with these issues and have made some of the most important contributions to these debates. This is because, at least in part, where bodies have appeared in psychological and socio-political analyses, these bodies have generally been male – invariably presented through the cover of some notion of universal humanity in which the feminine disappears. The aim for many feminist theorists is to focus on the female body, working with it centrally, in such a way that women's experiences, rather than those of men, are explored and realised.Mind-body dualism, outlined above, crucially has also been associated with other binaries, such as reason and passion, self and other, psychology and physiology. And with all these binaries one element is always subordinate to the other (Grosz, 1994). One association critical to feminist thinking is the correlation of mind with man and body with woman, where man is associated with the rational and knowable intellect and woman the irrational and unknowable body. Feminist philosophers such as Elizabeth Grosz have, as a response, sought to articulate a corporeal feminism, where the female body is placed centre stage and recognised in all its difference as something both material and social. Grosz draws on a number of different philosophical influences to theorise a notion of sexed embodiment using as a model the Möbius strip – an inverted three-dimensional figure of eight (see Figure 1). With the Möbius strip, like the body, according to Grosz, there is no clear distinction between inside and outside and, instead, a unity in which there is an inflection of mind into body and body into mind.
Figure 1 The Möbius strip
Figure 1This image shows the Möbius strip.The body is a most peculiar ‘thing’, for it is never quite reducible to being merely a thing; nor does it ever quite manage to rise above the status of thing. Thus it is both a thing and a nonthing, an object, but an object which somehow contains or coexists with an interiority, an object able to take itself and others as subjects, a unique kind of object not reducible to other objects. Human bodies, indeed all animate bodies, stretch and extend the notion of physicality that dominates the physical sciences, for animate bodies are objects necessarily different from other objects; they are materialities that are uncontainable in physicalist terms alone. If bodies are objects or things, they are like no others, for they are centers of perspective, insight, reflection, desire, agency.(Grosz, 1994, p. xi)Most social psychological theorists would probably agree with the need to resist the mind–body, individual–social and agency–structure dualisms discussed in this section. However, there are differences in the ways that various social psychological perspectives conceptualise the interpenetration of the body, psychology and the social world. Specifically, the views of discursive and phenomenological psychologists on the manner and mechanisms of this merging can be contrasted. This is the focus for the rest of this course.2.3 Summary of Section 2Mind–body dualism has been a pervasive problem since the seventeenth century. One consequence of this dualism is the way in which bodies have been treated in psychology. They have generally either been ignored or reduced to biology. However, our bodies are much more than simply biology; at the very least, they are the interface between the individual and the social world or, more radically, they are inherently social objects. There is growing recognition of the interaction between our bodies, our psychology and the society in which we live. Here, structure and agency, the individual and society are seen to interpenetrate and, as a result, there is now recognition that embodiment is a social psychological issue and not something that should be left to biology alone.You will now go on to look at phenomenological accounts.3 Phenomenological accountsIn this section of the course, you will look at how phenomenologists focus on the idea of a ‘lived experience’. You will then go on to look at this in relation to multiple sclerosis (MS).3.1 Lived experiencePhenomenologists seek to describe people’s lived experience, meanings and consciousness (i.e. the way we perceive, think and feel). They focus on how bodies are experienced at a subjective and intersubjective (relational) level. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), an early existential philosopher, insisted on the primacy of the body, and resisted mind–body dualism, arguing for the unity of mind (or soul) and body:I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body. The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman. Your little intelligence, my brother, which you call ‘spirit’, is also an instrument of your body, a little instrument and toy of your great intelligence. You say T and you are proud of this word. But greater than this – although you will not believe in it – is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say T but performs ‘I’.(Nietzsche, 1961 [1883], pp. 61–2)There are many manifestations of the body and it is because of this that we often think dualistically – separating body and mind – when in reality all we have is an intelligent body: body and mind are one and the same, not simply biology; we are our body and, through this, perform selfhood. This bodily experience is often pre-reflective – we experience and use our bodies before we think. And it is through using our bodies in our everyday activities that we perceive the world, relate to others and, in the process, learn about ourselves.‘The body is the vehicle of being in the world’, says the phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962 [1945], p. 82). It is integral to our perceptions and to any understanding of human experience. It is the ‘horizon latent in all our experience … and anterior to every determining thought’ (p. 92). Our body connects us to the world and – if we tap into our bodily experience – offers us the way to understand that world (including ourselves and others).Two key ideas are highlighted in phenomenological accounts of the body:bodily consciousnessa body–world interconnection.These are discussed in turn before being considered in relation to some phenomenological research findings on the experience of living with multiple sclerosis (MS).3.2 Consciousness of the bodyPhenomenological theorists distinguish between the subjective body (as lived and experienced) and the objective body (as observed and scientifically investigated). These are not two different bodies as such (phenomenologists pride themselves on overcoming dualisms!); rather they are different facets of our experience and consciousness.The body-subject, or subjective body, is the body-as-it-is-lived. I do not simply possess a body; I am my body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [1945]). My lived body is an embodied consciousness which fluidly and pre-reflectively engages the world. So it is that, before I can even think about it, I find myself in the world of my daily activities, projects and relationships: these are encountered as a context for the body's possible action. Food is to be eaten, a child is to be played with, a pen is to be applied to paper, and a lover is to be touched. As we engage in our daily activities, we tend not to be conscious of our bodies and we take them for granted. This is the body that is ‘passed-by-in-silence’ (Sartre, 1969 [1943]).In contrast, the body-object, or objective body, is the body that is known by others. We observe and objectify others’ bodies. ‘We can peer at, leer at, admire, criticise, probe, investigate and dissect another's body’ (Finlay, 2006a, p. 21). In so doing, we become aware of it as a contained, material, physical thing. We also do this to our own bodies. We do this when we become ill and can no longer take our bodies for granted, since they no longer do what we expect them to do. Then we might find ourselves focusing on specific parts of our body: an aching head, an itchy scar or a tiny cut on our writing finger. As S. Kay Toombs (1993, pp. 70–1) explains: ‘Illness engenders a shift of attention. The disruption of lived body causes the patient explicitly to attend to his or her body as body … The body is thus transformed from lived body to object-body.’Having distinguished between the subject-body and object-body, Jean-Paul Sartre draws our attention to a third ontological (i.e. to do with our sense of being) dimension of the body: bodily self-consciousness. Here, the body is constituted through others. This body comes into being when the person becomes aware of the regard of another. ‘I exist for myself as a body known by the Other’, as Sartre puts it (1969 [1943], p. 351).As we become aware of the regard of another we begin to exist in a new bodily self-conscious way:When the body is the object of someone else's gaze, it may lose its naturalness … or instead it may happen that I grow enhanced in its modality of being. For example, under the critical gaze the body may turn awkward, the motions appear clumsy, while under the admiring gaze the body surpasses its usual grace and its normal abilities.(van Manen, 1990, p. 104)Here, Max van Manen is explaining how the objectification of the body results in a disruption of the unity of the pre-reflectively lived body. Our body is experienced as an object somehow separate from the self. At the same time, we are living our body in a more self-conscious way. It is through this kind of interactive relational process, Sartre says, that we gain an awareness and understanding of both ourselves and others.Box 2 Pause for reflectionAre you aware of times when you feel your body is ‘objectified’? How does this happen and what is the effect? Think also of different ways the bodies of men and women might be objectified.3.3 A body–world interconnectionOur consciousness of our bodies remains fundamentally tied up with our everyday embodied activities and relationships. The body thus represents both our particular view of the world as well as our Being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 1962 [1927]). Martin Heidegger (2001) draws a distinction between corporeal things and the body, questioning whether the sense of embodied selfhood that we all possess needs to coincide with the limits of a corporeal body. The corporeal thing stops and is bounded by the skin whereas our sense of embodied selfhood – our bodiliness – may extend beyond this ‘bodily limit’. Heidegger uses the example of pointing, where our sense of bodiliness does not stop at the fingertip but, instead, stretches out beyond the skin to the object captured in our gaze. Perception, action and interaction are interconnected as body and world merge, at least to a degree. Our bodies, phenomenologists argue, are not just contained by what is inside our skin; they reach out into the world.Take, for instance, the experience of a footballer who has just kicked a long ball towards the net. As the ball swerves too far in one direction, the footballer leans in the other direction attempting to pull the ball back. The footballer's body and ball (world) are still in relationship. As another example, consider what happens when our arm (‘body’) reaches for a cup (the ‘world’) to have a drink: for a brief while we embrace the cup as part of our body. Or consider a young gang member getting the gang's symbol tattooed on his or her arm. Both the tattoo and the gang member's reason for getting tattooed tie their body to their social world. In these ways, through our actions, our bodies – our selves – are seen as being intertwined with the world: we are in the world and the world is in us. As mentioned earlier, Grosz (1994) – drawing on Merleau-Ponty – uses the concept of the Möbius strip to capture this interaction between body and world.In his last incomplete and tantalisingly mysterious work The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty (1968 [1964]) offers a radical reworking of the nature of embodiment. He shifted his focus from embodied consciousness to a notion of intercorporeal being – what he termed flesh. Here, he says, we are connected to others and the world in a double belongingness. The example used by Merleau-Ponty is touching – for instance, our right hand with our left – and the way in which this is always reversible: when one hand is touching (that which is perceiving) then the other is touched (the object of perception) and vice versa. Neither is reducible to the other and both are of the same order of meaning. He draws on the metaphor of ‘chiasm’ – from chiasma, the crossing over of two structures – to show that the world and body are within one another, inextricably intertwined: ‘the world is at the heart of our flesh … once a body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body and a ramification of the world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside and my inside and its outside’ (1968 [1964], p. 136). Our embodied subjectivity is never located purely in either being touched or in the act of touching, but in the dynamic intertwining of these two aspects, or where the two lines of a chiasm intersect with one another. Grosz (1994) built on this idea – in her case using the Möbius strip as a visual analogue – to develop a corporeal feminism where the relationship between body and world (individual and social) is fully realised.
Figure 2 Tattooing: the intertwining of body and world