Social Fluids: Metaphors and Meanings of Society - SAGE Journals

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Social Fluids: Metaphors and Meanings of Society BRYAN S. TURNER

Metaphors of Mobility The dominant concerns and anxieties of society tend to be translated into disturbed images of the body. The fluidity of the body, its origins, maturation and decay, is a generic disturbance. In the mythology of the New Kingdom of Egypt (1539–1075 BC), there was no general word for ‘time’ and creation was understood as a series of ‘first times’ in which the gods created the world through bodily secretions (sweat and tears) or semen through ejaculation. The Egyptians employed the metaphor of the human body to conceptualize the ‘world’ for which they had no single word (Meskell, 2000). The creator gods fabricated other gods through their divine sweat, and they formed humanity through their tears (Hornung, 1992). Mummification and other mortuary practices were attempts to create order against putrefaction and to preserve the embodied person for their journey into the next world. In this phallic culture, the penis might be embalmed as an erect prosthesis for erectile employment in the after world. The dark symbolism of the danse macabre gave horrific expression to the devastation of the social order that had been brought about by the Black Death, and in modern society the scourge of cancer has often been imagined in military metaphors of invading armies. Disturbances in society are reflected in the metaphors by which we understand our mental and physical health. Hence, we live in a modern society that often appears to be out of joint. Body metaphors illustrate the fact that we use the body as a convenient way for talking or thinking about the moral and political problems of society. Our sense of good and evil has

Body & Society © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 9(1): 1–10 [1357–034X(200303)9:1;1–10;032043]

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also drawn heavily on bodily metaphors since what is sinister (sinistre) is related to left-handedness, the illegitimate or evil side. Concepts of social order and disorder are often seen in terms of the balance or imbalance of the body. In the 18th century, when doctors expressed their views about the body in scientific terms through mathematical measurement, the body was understood to be a hydraulic system of pumps, whose motions could be precisely calculated. The heart was the engine that controlled the ebb and flow of the blood. The heart of Harvey’s medicine was an ejaculatory organ, but when the blood was flowing the medical metaphors of circulation were essentially domestic. The phallic heart ministered within an internal patriarchy to the female outer body (Erickson, 1997: 10). In sickness, the pumping of blood through the veins was constrained by blockages and harmful debris, and the therapeutic bleeding of patients was to assist these hydraulic mechanisms of the body, and to relieve pressure on the mind. Severe collective disturbances in society were often reflected in poor digestion of the individual body. These assumptions about social unrest producing disorder in the gut are illustrated in the basic idea of the need for a government of the body. Obesity and melancholy were associated with high rates of suicide in 18th-century England and thus symptomatic of a society that was out of control. In an age when gout and diabetes were already afflictions of the rich, George Cheyne’s The English Malady of 1733 prescribed diet and exercise to regulate the body and the government of society (Porter, 1997: 158). In modern management jargon, a lean and mean corporation needs a healthy management team. The modern idea of government was originally taken from the diverse meanings of diet that stands for both a political regime and a government of the body. Regulating the body, disciplining the soul and governing society were merged in political theories of the state. A good diet is necessary for a body to achieve order and equilibrium, and good government is necessary for a society to be peaceful and stable. In the Hobbesian vision of politics, fear of death was a necessary inspiration of virtue, and the state of nature drove men to create sovereign power. Obesity is a loss of sovereignty over the body and it has typically been regarded as both a measure of moral laxity in the individual and a sign of social corruption. Rationing is part of the basic economy of the body and society (Turner, 1992: 177). The more disturbed the governance of society, the more bizarre the bodily metaphors. Orcagna’s fresco of the Triumph of Death in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, painted shortly after the Black Death, pictures noble men and women at an alfresco feast before open graves, where lepers and the blind plead unsuccessfully with Death to release them from suffering (Ziegler, 1998: 284). The extraordinary imagination of Hieronymous Bosch


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expressed the torments of the 15th century through a series of images of bodily defecation in which the sinful beings of this world are finally expelled in the form of faeces, vomit and spew. In modern art, Francis Bacon’s paintings of screaming popes and hanging meat are manifestations of a disturbed and disrupted social order in which tyrannical regimes have tortured their way into history. Bacon’s art hangs between two undecidable planes – ‘the primal social scene and that of the mobile body’ (Boyne, 2001: 97), in which the undecidability of the body is constantly flooding out of the canvas. Our unease and discomforts are easily translated into leaking bodies (Shildrick, 1997). It is unsurprising that the fluids that pour or seep from the body have been regarded as dangerous, and the medical practice of bleeding has always been an ambiguous art. Its intention was to extract poisons from the bloodstream through an emunctory, but an artless physician might mistakenly drain healthy blood from a luckless patient. The blood that emerged from plague-infected victims was typically black and thick, and often green scum rose to the surface (Ziegler, 1998: 76). That which oozes or secretes from the human body is held to be a vehicle of contamination; we fear the fluid debris from other bodies as the conduit of infection, disease and destruction. We say ‘God bless you’ to somebody who sneezes, but we have forgotten that it is to protect them (and us) from the plague when sneezing was a key symptom of the contagion. The orifices are points of contact and contagion, and Bacon’s fixation with the open mouth speaks to this obsession. The mouth is an instrument of speech, a means of sustaining us at the lactating breast, and a medium for love, but in madness it foams, bites and screams. Our darkest nightmares involve fanged bats that suck the blood of maidens and cows at pasture, while in fairy tales vampires have preyed on the innocent by sucking their lives from gaping wounds. Count Dracula remains an image of sublime horror. We live in fear of slimy contacts with nightly creatures that are warm and viscid. In witchcraft, the evil succubus was a female demon who, through carnal knowledge of men, sucked out their procreative juices. Such medieval narratives have left us in a modern commercial world with the clear image of parasitic exploitation in the notion of the bloodsucker. As human beings, much of our early education is an attempt to inculcate a management of our bodily processes. Over the centuries, the polite management of human deposits – excrement, urine, spit and sperm – is fundamental to the civilizing process. The very cusp of the ‘civilizing process’ was the management of the ‘natural functions’ and, by the late 16th century, the ‘frontier of embarrassment’ was such that a nobleman who had to choose between health (relieving wind) and social decorum (good behaviour in company) would opt for manners (Elias, 2000: 109). Forks were introduced to help nobles to eat food daintily, the


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spittoon was removed from the dining room and the urinal became an essential facility of domestic architectural refinement. Bodily secretions that are involuntary cause us public embarrassment, and hence we fear senility in which we may be unable to control our bodily functions. These bodily betrayals may force us to shun public spaces, because we are threatened by a loss of face, and soiled clothes and bed-wetting haunt us from early childhood (Hepworth, 2000: 42). The common dandelion, with its diuretic properties, has a common name that reminds us of these childhood fears – the pissabed. Human fluids are potent, and they can have both negative and positive effects. A suppurating sore proclaims our vulnerability, but an attentive doctor may perceive commendable or laudable pus. The secretions of the saints were stored by the faithful because they had healing properties. Popular Islam, an object of profound criticism from puritans since the 13th century, produce holy men who brought comfort and hope to the poor and downtrodden. In particular, the Sufi saints of North Africa offered protection from the evil eye for their followers through the fluids that flowed from their bodies. Their disciples would collect their secretions on linen to protect their children from evil spirits (Crapanzano, 1973). In Christianity, the milk of Mary was a symbol of wealth and health, and the blood of Christ carries within it the means of salvation. While the Holy Virgin was, from the perspective of orthodox ecclesiastical authority, subordinate to her Son, she became in the Middle Ages a focus of worship and adoration in her own right (Warner, 1983). She had to be regarded as free from sin in order to shield Jesus from any imperfection. Her eventual elevation in prestige with the full cultivation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception meant that, in practice, her status approximated that of Christ. Because she was spared from human sin, she was also exempt from the physical processes of the female life cycle – sexual intercourse, labour and childbirth. She was removed from basic physical activities except for one – the suckling of the infant Jesus. As a result, a cult emerged around the breast of the Virgin and the milk that oozed from her teat. The theme of the nursing Virgin (the Maria Lactans) became an important part of medieval cultic belief and practice. In the Old Testament, milk and honey had been symbols of the Promised Land, but in medieval Christianity the milk of the Virgin became a symbol of care, humility and sustenance. There was, for the medieval imagination, an obvious parallel between the blood that poured from the side of Christ and the milk that flowed from the Virgin. In the absence of a powerful female figure in the Gospels, medieval Christianity elevated the spiritual status of Mary who, as the Queen of Heaven, became the great champion of procreation and family life, and, in the New World, Our Lady of Guadalupe became the patroness of Mexico in 1754 and of the Americas in 1910.


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As Victor Turner (1966: 82) has demonstrated, mythologies are often constructed upon these generative homologies to form systems of dichotomous classification between red menstrual blood as a symbol of transmission between generations, and white semen and milk as symbols of food, sustenance and reproduction. Mythologies typically combine primary colours in dyadic or triadic combinations to represent fundamental sacred powers. Fire (red) and water (blue) are powerful expressions of divine energy, in which revelation is encapsulated in tongues of fire and burning bushes. The colours of the papal vestments for his enthronement were white and red in imitation of imperial power (imitatio imperii), but they also followed the scarlet vestment of the high priest in the Old Testament (Paravicini-Bagliani, 2000: 88). They were also Christly colours, referring to Christ’s blood (red) and his divinity (white). The origins of the earth are a combination of fire and water; the Virgin Mary is associated with blue and is the Star of the Sea (Lings, 1991: 32). These fluids of blood and milk are also dangerous, and can contaminate and disrupt social relations. There has been an almost universal fear among men of female menstruation, because the leaking bodies of women have been regarded as sources of pollution. Religious systems of gender differentiation contrast the polluting character of the menses (red) and the productive force of semen (white) as basic classifications (Law, 1995). Hunters feared contact with menstruating women, because their monthly menses would alarm the prey. Their blood should also be kept from holy places. Because menstruation and childbirth were ritually unclean, women were frequently precluded in Leviticus from participating in cultic activities. Early colonial speculation about the reproductive processes of native peoples conjured up strange women who could avoid menstruation by having their bodies sliced from the armpit to the knee. By contrast, the consumer societies of the modern world are saturated with advertisements suggesting that menstruating is healthy, harmless, clean and even good fun. The medicalization of menstrual periods can nevertheless be read as an anxious scientific proof that the modern woman can even swim publicly without fear of a mixture of red and blue fluids. The Flows of Modernity We may generalize from these diverse historical examples: the fluids that flow from the inside of bodies to the outside are dangerous and contaminating, because fluids on the outside of the body challenge our sense of order and orderliness. The inside/outside division combines with a wet/dry dichotomy to mark out these borders of social pollution. For example, the study of human anatomy was long banned by the Church as anathema, because it opened to the human eye


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what God had chosen not to disclose but to enclose. Where such diabolical operations took place, they were inflicted on the bodies of criminals as a juridical punishment. The criminal body had a double death – at the hands of the executioner and under the knife of the surgeon. Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp (1632) attempts to convert this penal violence into a moral exhibition. When internal liquids appear on the outside, they are portents of death, disease or change. Leaking things are a warning of an alien annunciation. The recent anatomical exhibition of ‘Body Worlds’ by Professor Gunther von Hagens in the London Atlantis Gallery is interesting not least because his preservative process or ‘plastination’ has totally removed any liquidity from these human remains. We might describe these anatomical exhibits as hygienic and pornographic memento mori in which corporeal flows have been eerily solidified. In this sense, his plastinated figures represent a cool anatomy as opposed to the thick moral meaning of Rembrandt’s representation. These historical examples cannot be conveniently buried in the past. We live in a ‘ somatic society’ in which our present political problems and social anxieties are frequently transferred to the body (Turner, 1992: 1). The social problems of young women are often expressed through anorexia nervosa, a condition emerging in the 1890s that recognized the arrival of consumer society, where the body beautiful carries such a heavy burden of significance. Ascetic anorexia emaciates the body, disrupts menstruation and returns young women to a status of child-like dependency where the home becomes a ‘golden cage’ (Bruch, 1978). The cultural aesthetic of modern society is itself an anorexic one, in which slimming down is morally valuable (Heywood, 1996). By way of contrast, ageing bodies threaten to undermine the economic growth of modern society as compulsory retirement produces a greying society that intensifies the ‘ratio of dependency’. At the same time, cosmetic surgery, viagra and hormone replacement therapy promise to give us the appearance or functions of an eternal and sexy youth. In the United States, the use of daily injections of human growth hormone is widespread as an anti-ageing strategy for improving fitness and performance (Kass, 2002: 261). Our social world is being transformed by genetic and medical technologies that reconstruct social connections, and offer us genetically modified bodies and designer babies. In particular, new reproductive technologies are remaking the generative connections between parents and children, and reconstructing the family as a space of reproduction. These scientific innovations in reproduction and the unintended social changes they produce cannot easily be understood within the vocabularies that are derived from previous generations. The ironic case of Mrs Blood, who sought a legal right to conceive with the beneficial semen of her dead husband whose consent had not been available, has


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become indicative of the problematic capacity of modern science to transform kinship relationships. The cloning of a human being in those societies that have permissive legislation or little professional regulation will be an inevitable outcome of current research ambitions to secure scientific fame. The arrival of the human equivalent of Dolly (the sheep) will reshape human systems of descent and lineage, breaking the flow of human generations. Global tourism and global migration have also exposed us to the revival of infectious disease, especially TB and malaria, and HIV/AIDS has become the symbol of an affluent society that is on the move. By the 1970s it was assumed that the conquest of disease in Western societies would require the development of drugs which could delay or manage old age. As medical attention moved from acute to chronic diseases, preventive medicine and health education were developed to contribute to the containment of diabetes and heart disease. This complacency was shattered in the 1980s by the emergence of the epidemic of HIV/AIDS, which was first reported in 1979–80 and which spread rapidly among the gay and homosexual communities of North America, Europe and Australia. The epidemic has and will have a major economic impact on Third World societies and in those communities which refuse to recognize the presence of HIV-positive communities in their midst. It is now reported in 130 countries, and millions carry the virus. The epidemic has often given rise to hostile moral condemnation of gay men, demonstrating once more the intimate connection between medical and moral discourses. Given the complexity of the condition, it is not surprising that a wealth of social metaphors also opportunistically multiplied. Susan Sontag (1988) suggests that it shares with medieval plagues the notion of an invasion, but it is also organized around notions of pollution resulting from personal perversity. Sexually transmitted diseases have forced health agencies to rethink policies towards infectious disease, but they also demonstrated once more that medical understanding can never be easily separated from moral assumptions about normal behaviour. AIDS has also indicated that the future development of human health will be inevitably and inextricably part of a more general process of cultural globalization. In previous centuries, while migration and trade spread plagues and epidemics, diseases were somewhat specific to geographical niches. With the growth of world tourism and trade, the global risk of infectious disease has spread rapidly. Influenza epidemics now spread almost instantaneously, and there is widespread anxiety about the development of a variety of new conditions that are difficult to diagnose and to classify, complex in their functions and diffusion, and resistant to conventional treatments. The list of such conditions includes the eruption of newly discovered diseases such as hanta virus, the migration of


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diseases to new areas (such as cholera in Latin America), diseases produced by new technologies (such as toxic shock syndrome and Legionnaires’ Disease) and diseases which spread from animals to humans. These problems have generated a concern for ‘the coming plague’ (Garrett, 1995). Because of the interconnectedness of modern societies, epidemiologists have identified the new plagues of Lassa fever, ebola, Ross River virus and Marburg virus. Climate changes are believed to expose human populations to the hanta group of viruses that cause haemorrhagic fevers such as ebola, in which blood oozes from bodily orifices and the victim dies from drowning in their own fluid. To these monstrous threats, we can add the other disasters of BSE, CJD, swine flu, and foot and mouth outbreaks. These global hazards gave rise to a new theory of society in the work of Ulrich Beck (1992), who argued that we have moved with modernization into an uncertain and precarious social condition which he called ‘risk society’. As society becomes more sophisticated, the potential risks from scientific experiment increase, especially where medical innovations are inadequately regulated. Indeed, as societies become more deregulated and subject to market discipline, the scale of risks and hazards increases. Many critical commentators claim that the damage to children from the thalidomide drug, the spread of ‘mad cow disease’ and the speculation surrounding the causes of Creutzfeldt Jacob’s Disease (CJD) are evidence of the arrival of a risk society where medical interventions and experimentations are increasingly out of control. Attempts by both Clinton and Bush to control the spread of cloning is simply further evidence for many that there is no effective political regulation of global, commercial medicine. Science fiction writing on aliens, cloning and biological mutation has already sketched out a chilling future scenario where ‘natural’ human beings would be in a minority. The globalization of disease, the reproduction of people through new technologies, the degradation of the environment, the spread of cyborgs and the mechanization of the domestic environment have in turn given rise to speculation about postmodernization of the human body, which would become a hybrid phenomenon, precariously poised between nature, technology and culture. In short, the more the modern world is economically interconnected, the more we should fear social fluidity. Contemporary sociologists have come to argue, echoing Mrs Thatcher, that society no longer exists; we live instead in a world of webs, networks and flows. Economies, populations and cultures are the nodal points of a global process of endless, uncontrollable flows, a global world of social fluids. Modern management no longer thinks about corporations in terms of fixed categories or functional hierarchies, and they can only be understood in terms of their flow charts, by their liquidity and their global mobility, and their temporal complexity (Urry, 2000). The linear social systems of modernity that were


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conceptualized by Talcott Parsons in the language of functionalism have been replaced by theories of non-linearity and complexity (Lash, 2002: 112; Turner, 2001). Conclusion: Liquid Sovereignty Modern art is typically conceptual – it is a reflection on and of our most serious anxieties. Unlike conventional, representational art, it does not seek necessarily to aestheticize our existence through pleasing images but forces us to think painfully. It brings into expression and conceptualization those social problems that are often buried or hidden in metaphors that have become taken for granted; it opens up things that psychologically we would wish to bury. Through visual puns, it attempts to force us into an awareness of the redundancy of our conventional metaphors, and it makes new metaphors of embodiment. Science fiction films describe an alien world that is already in our midst. Terminator II captured the modern horror of liquidity and contamination as a fluid enemy with a capacity constantly to renew itself through endless regeneration, rather like terrorist networks that can never be completely flushed out. Flows avoid the rigidities and vulnerability of contained objects. The fixed and secure categories of the traditional world now appear to be in flux. The political economy of Karl Marx attempted to describe capital fluidity in terms of the economic circulation of commodities, and capitalism produced a society in which ‘everything that is solid melts into air’ (Berman, 1982). With the rise of the international system of states after the treaty of Westphalia, the specific sovereignty of each nation-state was conceived as a separate body politic. The point of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 was to separate religion and politics, making the former into a private preference, and securing stability by establishing a principle of non-interference. In the modern world, international relations have been transformed by the principle that human rights give the international community a right to interfere militarily in other states in the name of justice and humanity. This political fluidity undermines the Westphalian system of international relations and creates what we might call ‘liquid sovereignty’, where there is no fixed body of power. These political changes perfectly illustrate the emergent social metaphor of flows where the modernist conceptions of linearity and order are displaced by concepts of social fluids and social melting.


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