And we are not far removed from the pathos of the incipitof Anti-Oedipus,
where the body evoked shits and fucks. At this stage, NcNally’s labouring
body is not distinguished from Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs –
that is, the body of desire, in a conception of desire and affects that is neither
phenomenological nor psychoanalytical. Accordingly, we shall not be surprised
to find a chapter on Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian carnivalesque body in his book.
And this body soon becomes more explicitly socio-historical:
To talk about human bodies and the practices in which they are immersed
need not entail treating the body as a timeless object of nature. The human
body, as I hope to show, is inherently historical. True, bodies have a relatively
fixed biological constitution. But the evolutionary history of the human body
also involves the emergence of cultural practices and social history. To talk
meaningfully about the human body is to talk about bodies that are the site
of dynamic social processes, bodies that generate open-ended systems of
meaning. It is, in other words, to talk about relations of production and
reproduction, about languages, images of desire, technologies, and diverse
forms of sociocultural organization. All of these things operate on the site
of the body and its history.^11By comparison with phenomenological and psychoanalytical conceptions of
the body, the advantages for us of this one are obvious: this body is no longer
simply individual, it is a social body fashioned by social forces and relations;
it is an irreducibly historical body, the ‘biological endowment’ – itself the
product of history – being modified by history; it is not only the agent of a
social praxis, but also the product of the processes that constitute this praxis.
We have here an explicitly materialist position, grounded in the materiality
of the human body, with its pathosin the etymological sense (this body is not
only the seat of reason, but also of affects). But, for me, its importance consists
in the fact that it also makes it possible to envisage a broader form of
materialism, that of institutions, of ideas as embodied in discourses – for
example, the slogans that set the masses in motion. We can see how ideology
is material: because it is the force that circulates all along the chain of
interpellation, in which each link is material (material institutions, material
rituals, material practices, material speech acts: buildings, assembled bodies,
Propositions (II) • 181(^11) McNally 2001, p. 7.