the multiple bodies of man

7/30/2019 The Multiple Bodies of Man

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The Multiple Bodies of ManProject for a Semiotics of the Body

Gran Sonesson

"To semiotize is (first) to segmentize"

According to one of its principal cultural heroes, Ferdinand de Saussure (1968:168), semiotics

should not be concerned with sign systems that are naturally motivated, or, as latter-day

semioticians would say, iconic,joining a signifier to a signified with which it shares some or,

as in this case, many properties. And he goes on to quote clothing as being a particularly neat

case of such a motivated sign system, in which the limits and conformations of the units, that

is, the garments, are entirely determined by the naturally evolved anatomy of the body. If so,

the body itself may seem even less of a candidate for semiotic study. Indeed, one of Saussure

most direct heirs, Louis Hjelmslev (1943), would even claim that significations the expression

and content of which are organised in a strictly parallel fashion should not even be treated as

having an expression plane separate from the content plane; they are mere "symbol systems",

and as such their study should not be the business of semiotics.

To better the prospects for a semiotics of the body, then, we would have to show, first, either

that the body is really made up of signs, or that semiotics should take upon itself the task of

studying meanings that are not signs; and, in the second place, that those signs or other

meanings making up, not only the garments covering the body, but also the body itself, are not

really as readily explainable from anatomical facts as suggested by Saussure. In so doing, we

will look upon the semiotics of the body as a part of a larger domain, visual semiotics, which

will permit us to profit from work done in the semiotics of pictures (for instance, Sonesson1989a). As we will see, pictorial semiotics may even be one of the possible operators for

segmenting the body, thus making it, as we will suggest, into an object for semiotics. But first,

something will have to be said about semiotics itself.

Semiotics as the science of signification

It may be impossible to establish a consensus among all semioticians on what semiotics is all

about; and many semioticians will not even care to define their discipline. However, if we

attend less to definitions than to real research practice, and if we leave out those would-be

semioticians who simply do not seem to be doing anything very new (those who merely go indoing art history, literary history, philosophy, logic, or whatever), it seems possible to isolate

the smallest common denominators of the discipline (cf. Sonesson 1989a, 1992a).

In the following, semiotics will be taken to be a science, the point of view of which may be

applied to any phenomenon produced by the human race. This point of view consists, in

Saussurean terms, in an investigation of the point of view itself, which is equivalent, in

Peircean terms, to the study of mediation (cf. Parmentier 1985). In other words, semiotics is

concerned with the different forms and conformations given to the means through which

humankind believe itself to have access to the world. In studying these phenomena,

semiotics should occupy the standpointof humankind itself (and of its different fractions).

Indeed, as Saussure argues, semiotic objects exist merely as those points of view which are


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adopted on other, material objects, which is why these points of view cannot be altered

without the result being the disappearance of the semiotic objects as such.

Moreover, semiotics is devoted to these phenomena considered in their qualitative aspects

rather than the quantitative ones, and it is geared to rules and regularities, instead of unique

objects. That is, semiotics, including linguistics, is a nomothetic science, a science which isconcerned with generalities, not an idiographic science, comparable to art history or the

history of literature and most other human sciences, which take as their object an array of

singular phenomena, the common nature and connectedness of which they take for granted.

Just like linguistics, but contrary to the natural sciences and the social sciences (according to

most conceptions), bodily semiotics will thus have to be concerned with qualities, rather than

quantities that is, it should take account of categories more than numbers. Thus, semiotics

shares with the social and natural sciences the character of being a law-seeking, ornomothetic,

rather than an idiographic, science, while retaining the emphasis on categories, to the

detriment of amounts, which is peculiar to the human sciences. Being nomothetic and

qualitative, bodily semiotics has as its principal theme a category that may be termed

bodyhood the nature of which seems so far fairly undetermined.

Semiotics is not restricted to any single method, but is known to have used analysis of

concrete texts as well as classical experimental technique and imaginary variation reminiscent

of the one found in philosophy. Moreover, semiotics is not necessarily dependent on a model

taken over from linguistics, as is often believed, although the construction of models remains

one of its peculiar features, if it is compared to most of the human sciences. Indeed, semiotics

differs from traditional approaches to humanitas in employing a model which guide its

practitioners in their effort to bring about adequate analyses, instead of simply relying on the

power of the innocent eye. After having borrowed its models from linguistics, philosophy,

medicine, and mathematics, semiotics is now well on its way to the elaboration of its proper

models.

Beyond the doctrine of signs

According to this view of semiotics, the sign is not necessarily its central concept, although it

may still retain its importance. No doubt, both the Greimas school and Umberto Eco have

rejected the sign as a pertinent unit, apparently because they believe it to be too static, or to

because they associate it to much with the linguistic model. It may be better, however, to

oppose signs to other meanings, starting out from a more explicit definition of the sign.

Indeed, many semiotic studies (those of Lvi-Strauss, Barthes, the Greimas school, etc.), will

recover part of their validity, once it is realised that they are concerned with meanings, in a

much wider sense than that of the sign, better paraphrased perhaps in terms of wholes and

connections.

Building their models of the sign, both Peirce and Saussure made a set of fundamental

conceptual distinctions, which are in part complementary, yet both of them took if for granted

that we would all understand the import of such terms as signifier and signified, or the

equivalent. A basic understanding of the sign function may however be gained from an

interpretation of Piaget's important attempt to define the semiotic function (which, in the early

writings, was less adequately termed the symbolic function), and from Husserls definition of

the notion ofappresentation. The semiotic function is a capacity acquired by the child at anage of around 18 to 24 months, which enables him to imitate something or somebody outside


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the direct presence of the model, to use language, make drawings, play symbolically, and

have access to mental imagery and memory. The common factor underlying all these

phenomena, according to Piaget, is the ability to represent reality by means of a signifier

which is distinct from the signified (see, for instance, Piaget 1967 ).

In several of the passages in which he makes use of this notion of semiotic function, Piagetgoes on to point out that indices and signals are possible long before the age of 18 months,

but only because they do not suppose any differentiation between expression and content. The

signifier of the index, such as the visible extremity of an object being almost entirely hidden

from view is, Piaget says, an objective aspect of the signified; but when the child uses a

pebble to signify candy, he is well aware of the difference between them, which implies, as

Piaget tells us, a differentiation, from the subjects own point of view, between the signifier

and the signified. It may be objected, however, that the child may just as well use a feather in

order to represent a bird, without therefore confusing the part and the whole, thus employing a

feature, which is objectively a part of the bird, while differentiating the former form the latter

from his point of view. (Cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.2.5.)

According to Edmund Husserl, two or more items may enter into different kinds of pairings, from thepaired association of two co-present items (which we will call perceptual context), over the

appresentative pairing in which one item is present and the other indirectly given through the first, to

the real sign relation, where again one item is directly present and the other only indirectly so, but

where the indirectly presented member of the pair is the theme, i.e. the centre of attention for

consciousness. This property serves to distinguish the sign from the abductive context, which is the

way in which the unseen side of the dice at which we are looking at this moment is present to

consciousness, because in the latter attention is focused on the directly presented part or spans the

whole context. However, there seems to be many intermediate cases between a perfect sign and an

abductive context (the poetic function, ostensive definitions, proto-indices, etc.; cf. Figure 1 and

Sonesson 1989a,I.2.).

Considered in itself, as an object not standing for some other meaning, the body is certainly

not a sign, for whatever the meaning it may possess, there is not differentiation between it and

its vehicle; thus, the questions of which item is foregrounded and which is most directly given

does not even arise at this point.

The term "semiotics of the body" was probably first used by the ethnolinguist Roy Ellen(1977) to describe a study concerned with the different ways in which the bodily continuum is


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segmented and organised into parts by the different languages of the world. In this sense, the

semiotics of the body would be interested in the fact that some languages use only one term to

designate both what Indoeuropean languages call the leg and that prominent part of the leg

which we call the foot; and that other language prefer to distinguish, on one hand, the leg in its

entirety, and on the other what is for us the leg, including the foot, up to the knee. These are

linguistics signs: their expression planes are made up of sounds, and their contents or, perhapsmore precisely, their referents, consist of portions delimited on the bodily surface; at the same

time the sounds are clearly differentiated from the body parts, and while they are directly

given, they are not thematic.

However, semiotics of the body as conceived by Ellen is exclusively concerned with linguistic

meanings, segmentations of the body realised by one or other extant verbal language. Yet,

cultures making use of languages which do not dispose of any terms for distinguishing the arm

and the hand, may well possess dances or other bodily techniques, the execution of which

requires them to construct models of the body which establish demarcations between these

corporal segments. In our view, the semiotics of the body should be devoted to the

investigation of all those rivalling models resulting form the multifarious practices current in aculture, as well as to the determination of such universals which may be found in these

models, in a given community and across cultures.

The arbitrary wrappings of the body

There is certainly a wider sense of meaning, which may be related, as Lvi-Strauss once put it,

to order, that is, organisation, relatedness, indexicality. What is involved is the idea of

connecting things together, and ofselecting elements to connect from a wider field of

possibilities. It is interesting to observe that it is not the sign function but the paradigm, the

feature, and the phoneme, as metaphors for selection, and the syntagm and the index, asmetaphors for connection, which have had an important role to play in the adoption of the

linguistic model in semiotics, notably in the work of Barthes, Greimas, Lvi-Strauss, and

many Peirceans. When Lvi-Strauss presents the myth as a sign function, this interpretation is

contradicted by his own detailed description, which really manifests a second-order texture.

And when Greimas claims that even the phoneme carries meaning, this can only be

understood in the sense of its forming a whole, a category having its own limits.

This kind of meaning of meaning is also present in Hjelmslevs (1943) idea that a "form"

projected onto a "substance" (or, as he would later (1959) put it, onto some kind of "matter",

thereby creating a "substance") is really a much more general phenomenon than the sign: it is

concerned with the establishment of limits in reality, with the selection of some features, to the

determent of others, which are taken account of and then organised. The same phenomenon is

also familiar from Gestalt psychology. In spite of Saussure quoted opinion to the contrary,

clothing will actually furnish us with an excellent way of studying such an organisation.

Garments were discussed in early semiotics, together with the meal, by Barthes (1964), in

terms of syntagms and paradigms. These terms may be used to stand for "chain and choice"

(Douglas 1972:62 ), for "assemblage in praesentia" and "in absentia" (Saussure 1968:278ff ),

for logical conjunction and disjunction (Jakobson 1942); but we should not assume (as Barthes

certainly does) that a syntagm must imply an "enchanement", a linear order (Saussure ibid.).

For clothing, just as the meal and the picture, is, as Saussure (1974:39) says about the latter, amulti-spatial, or perhaps better, a multi-dimensional semiotic object.


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We cannot obtain all the relevant categories of the system, if we restrict our search to what is

worn "sur un mme point du corps" (Barthes 1964:135), since the different paradigms of

pants, long underpants, trousers, sweater, jacket, and overcoat all entirely or partly occupy the

same body spot. But the three dimensions of the body, even as seen in egocentric space, are

not directly relevant (clothing details, not garments, are found back or front, to the left or tothe right); instead, it is distance from the body which counts. The several layers of clothing

may indeed be compared to protective shells, not dissimilar to those ofproxemics, but located

inside the latter (for which cf. Hall 1966; Spiegel & Machotka 1974; Watson 1970 ); they may

be distinguished, on a first approximation, as follows:

O: the skin, nudity; Oa: body decorations, including make-up, tattoo, and hair-do; 1:

underwear; 1a: secondary, optional underwear, such as long underpants; 2: ordinary indoor

clothing; 2a: optional extra indoor clothing or supplemental outdoor clothing, such as

sweaters; 3: outdoor clothing, e.g. coats, jackets (the latter may even be 2a and perhaps should

be assigned to a category 2b; but we will ignore this and other complications here).


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Entering such a double segmentation into body parts and clothing layers on a grid, we can now

proceed to describe the common Occidental clothing system, or at least one its variants

(fig.2a). In order for such an abstract study to be illuminating, the system will be compared to

a variety of the traditional Mesoamerican pattern (fig.2b). A few things must be explained,

before we proceed. Both a quechqumitland a huipilare basically folded pieces of cloth, but

they are folded and sewn together in different manners. Thus, the huipil is made of a number

of stripes sewn up, so as to form rectilinear pieces in front and on the back, which are open on

the sides, and have a hole cut out in the middle for the head. The quechqumitl, on the other

hand, consists a two pieces of squares and two pieces of rectangles, sewn together, so as to

leave a space open for the head, and it is worn with one apex pointing down and the others tothe sides (see Fig.3.). Moreover, the huipilmay have any length, and so sometimes covers the

whole body; it is even used folded on the head, as a headgear. There are also two types of

skirts: the enredo, which is wrapped around the body, and the falda de pretina, which is

suspended from a ribbon around the waist. Thefaja serves to hold up the skirt, and the rebozo

is a large shawl.

Some observations on the diagram itself are also in order. We have not cared to distinguished

levels one and two here, for the simple reason that there is, obviously, no Mesoamerican

underwear, this layer constituting a relatively recent innovation also in the Western world; and

if this whole layer, in addition to many individual garments, is nowadays incorporated into theIndian womans apparel, there is at least no information about this in our sources. It is or at


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least, it was common for the woman to walk around nude, sometimes only to the waist,

inside the dwelling , and even in the close neighbourhood.

Traditionally, the quechqumitl was worn over the huipil, and thus they occupied different

syntagmatic positions; but nowadays, they form part of the same paradigm, as "dialectal"variants, for while the former is predominantly used in Northern Mexico, the latter is most

commonly found in the South. On the other hand, one quechqumitlmay be worn over another

one, and this is also sometimes the case with huipiles, which can, when they are sufficiently

long, substitute also for the skirt. The blouse, which has of course been taken oven from the

Europeans, is often worn instead of a huipilunder the quechqumitl, in those regions where

the latter is used; however, it may also be used on its own. In the case of some Indian groups,

huipiland falda, where the former is long, form a single paradigm, the latter being donned

only on festive occasions. The skirt is often a piece of cloth of enormous length, 5-10 meters

in the case of the purpechas , and thus must be wrapped around the body several times, three

rounds, for instance, among theNahuas ofCeutzalan; thus, the skirt occupies several physical

layers, but, as long as only one garment is involved, there is only one layer which is relevantfrom the point of view of the clothing scheme. If also several faldas de pretina may be put on

at the same time, which is not clear from the sources, it will be necessary to assign them to

different layers, only if the use of a single such skirt is also a significant possibility.

It thus appears that both the difference between the clothing layers one, two and three, and the

distinction between the slots upper trunk and lower trunk may sometimes by neutralised. In

the Mesoamerican clothing system, as compared to the Western one, both the body part

syntagm and the clothing layer syntagm remain pertinent, although the first is segmented in

somewhat different ways and the second does not require as much levels in the former system

(for more details, cf. Sonesson 1988).

The Occidental and Mesoamerican clothing systems may be looked upon as rival

segmentations of the body although they were real alternatives only at some point in the

distant past, before the Western system began to penetrate the Mesoamerican one, while it was

still necessary to change completely from using the paradigms and syntagms of the second to

that of implying the first. Although they offer options and ways of combining them, these

systems are no sign systems, for they do not differentiate any signifiers from any signifieds.

Originally, of course, there were different systems for each one of the Indian groups in

Mesoamerica, and thus each of on these sets of syntagms and paradigms taken together were,

at the same time, global signs for the identity of that particular group of people. In the

seventies and eighties, the wearing ofquechqumitles and huipiles acquired the force of a signagain, when used by the young girls studying at the Mexico City School of Anthropology: it

come to stand for a Marxist world-view, and more particularly, for a radical stance of the

question of integrating the Indian groups.

the multiple bodies of man

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