ABSTRACT
The case of the working-class relationship to the body raises a question that has been lurking at the edge of the analysis as it has unfolded throughout the preceding chapters. If the essence of “class” is acquired in a manner that largely eludes conscious description, that is only transmitted by lasting insertion into a specific class of conditions and that is rooted in a profoundly corporeal knowledge of class-position, then how is one ever to produce an adequate account of the experience that is engendered in that position? In fact, the risk of producing an account which, under the guise of an objective description of the working-class condition, is nothing more than a transmuted form of the intellectual relationship to that condition, is perhaps nowhere as real as when describing an aspect of this condition which, like the practical experience of the body, not only shares so much of the incommunicable, but which is also in many ways the antithesis of the intellectual relationship to the world (and the body). Purely interpretative or “qualitative” methods might be of little avail here. In fact, even if one were to place oneself in the working-class condition and expose oneself to the experience of necessity that defines it, fact remains that this experience is always grasped through categories of perception and action that are the product of different social conditions. Here as elsewhere, perhaps the only way to escape from this partial perspective is to fully constitute it as such, that is, to re-construct the space of positions that forms the basis for the different and antagonistic points-of-view on the social world. Such an approach is not a way of submitting before a post-modern relativism or ‘perspectivism’, but, quite to the contrary, hinges on the conviction that only by analysing, classifying and comparing the different perspectives on the body that are engendered in different class-positions, does it become possible to define what is particular to each, including that which animates the “intellectual” perspective. In fact, only by trying to isolate and objectify what distinguishes this particular point-of-view from all others does it become possible to try and transcend the limits it imposes. By doing so, it perhaps becomes possible
to more adequately grasp the central paradox that informs the working-class relationship to the body. In fact, whereas no group depends as closely on the body, its strength and its skills in order to ensure their social reproduction, there is also no group that adopts such a stoic attitude towards its needs, its desires and the general degree of “wear and tear” it incurs through its everyday uses. It is this simultaneous over-valuation and under-protection of the body which Schwartz succinctly captured in the following maxim: ‘One does not protect the body, it is the body that protects’ (1990: 479). In fact, because they are exposed to conditions of existence that force them to work as much with as against their bodies, working-class men and women often tend to credit it with an innate “robustness”, a natural capacity to incur physical “shock”, pain and fatigue and even an intrinsic ability to repair and regenerate itself outside of any deliberate intervention on the part of its owners. This basic belief again underlines how the relationship to the body is part and parcel of one’s relationship to the social world and how, more specifically, the feeling of being able to exert control over, to manage and to influence the state of one’s own body is but one dimension of the more general feeling of being able to exert control over the totality of one’s own existence. At the risk of repetition, it should be stressed once more how this instrumental and quasi-mechanistic conception of the body is at odds with the development of a therapeutic and aesthetic, that is to say, autonomous relationship towards it. In fact, the very reality of manual labour means that agents are forced to expose themselves fully to the forces and frictions of the physical world and hence to the temporary or lasting traces it leaves on the body. To worry about the short-or long-term effects that such exposure might have on the outer appearance or inner well-being of the body is to effectively prevent oneself from fully engaging with the task at hand, to introduce a reticence and reflexivity in an act that demands the complete engagement of the body, its strength and its skills, in short, to reduce its capacity for labour (also see Boltanski, 1971). Conversely, to treat one’s body as an object of care and attention, to pay active attention to its signs and signals and to cater to its intrinsic needs presupposes distance, which is first and foremost a distance from economic necessity. To this also needs to be added (as Chapter 3 already argued) the manner in which economic insecurity tends to undermine the development of the strategic, long-term dispositions towards the body which form the basis for the entire notion of “medical prevention”. In fact, the less the future discloses itself as a field of meaningful possibilities and the more the exigencies of daily life tend to tie agents to an inescapable present, the less they tend to worry about the long-term effects of their present-day actions, let alone to orient such actions in terms of future, abstract and often wholly “negative” gains like health and longevity.
