The Body Dances: Carnival Dance
and Organization
Natalia Slutskaya
School of Business and Economics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Christian De Cock
School of Business and Economics, Swansea University, Swansea, UK
Abstract. Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty we seek to open up traditional categories of thought surrounding
the relation ‗body-organization‘ and elicit a thought experiment: What
happens if we move the body from the periphery to the centre? We pass the
interlocking theoretical concepts of object-body/subject-body and habitus
through the theoretically constructed empirical case of ‗carnival dance‘ in
order to re-evaluate such key organizational concepts as knowledge and
learning. In doing so, we connect with an emerging body of literature on
‗sensible knowledge‘; knowledge that is produced and preserved within
bodily practices. The investigation of habitual appropriation in carnival
dance also allows us to make links between repetition and experimentation,
and reflect on the mechanism through which the principles of social
organization,
whilst internalized and experienced as natural, are embodied so
that humans are capable of spontaneously generating an infinite array of
appropriate actions. This perspective on social and organizational life,
where change and permanence are intricately interwoven, contrasts sharply
with the dominant view in organization studies which juxtaposes change/
creativity and stability. Key words. body; Bourdieu; carnival; creativity;
knowledge; learning; Merleau-Ponty
DOI: 10.1177/1350508408095817 http://org.sagepub.com
851-868 ORG_095817.indd 851 8/5/2008 4:53:02 PM
Process Black
Process Black
Organization 15(6)
Articles
Must the life of the body be given up on, as the sheer unthinkable other of
thought, or are its mysterious ways somehow mappable by intellection in
what would then prove a wholly novel science, the science of sensibility
itself? ... Nothing could be more disabled than a ruling rationality which
can know nothing beyond its own concepts, forbidden from enquiring into
the very stuff of passion and perception. How can the absolute monarch of
Reason retain its legitimacy if what Kant called the ‗rabble‘ of the senses
remains forever beyond its ken? (Eagleton, 1990:14)
The Body as ‗Absent Present‘ in Organization Studies?
Nietzsche famously suggested in the The Gay Science (1887) that all
philosophy
is, without knowing it, based on an understanding of the body, or
rather on a misunderstanding of the body. He warned against the mistaken
tendency to take grammar too seriously, allowing linguistic struc ture to
shape or determine our understanding of the world and believing that the
structure of language reflects a prior ontological reality (Barad, 2003).
It is
this what Eagleton is getting at in the epigraph to this paper. Yet, in
studies
of the social world and organization the existence of human bodies tends to
be taken for granted and knowledge of the body mediated through abstract
representations. Shilling (1993) thus describes attention to the body as an
‗absent present‘ and emphasizes the particular difficulty of grasping the
material body because its existence is permanently deferred behind the
grids of meaning imposed by discourse. Gabriel (2003: 520) echoes this
sentiment in a recent review of a book aimed at exploring the relationship
between body and organization (Hassard et al., 2000), ‗Many contributions
… while extolling the body, come close to losing it in a discursive din‘.
Shilling (1993: 81) criticizes this ‗discursive essentialism‘ and claims
that
‗the body may be surrounded by and perceived through discourses, but it
is irreducible to discourse‘. Whilst it can be beneficial to break down the
limits between textual and contextual domains, there remains the need
to be constantly suspicious about the extent to which broad domains of
social being can be incorporated within the single conceptual domain of
‗discourse‘ (Boje et al., 2004).
The emphasis on discursive analysis has a number of important implications.
It suggests that materiality can be seen as a product of language or
some other form of cultural representation (Jørgensen and Phillips, 2002),
thus reducing the experiences within organizations to linguistic-semiotic
ones and neglecting the multi-dimensional ways in which we experience
reality. It also sustains a Cartesian ontology where the relation between
subject and object is conceived of as holding between a disembodied and
timeless subject and an external objective reality (Burkitt, 1998a). This
leads to an ‗objectiv ist‘ conception of nature as an ‗in-itself‘ to which
we, as subjects, have access only from the outside. This objective reality,
which includes our own bodies and living matter in general, is seen as
existing in an absolute space and time and as operating in accord ance with
causal laws (Matthews, 2005). Yet, social scientists have now begun to tap
into evidence from the life sciences which suggests that human beings
record experiences and knowledge in ways that include much of the body
besides the brain with skin, posture and gesture all implicated in the
processing
of information (Clark, 2003). In this context MacIntyre (1999: 8)
observed that ‗Human identity is primarily, even if not only, bodily and
therefore animal identity‘.
In this paper we aim to develop an embodied view of organization that
acknowledges the human body as a key entity. In doing so we build on
the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu who tried to
construct
in their own particular but interrelated ways1 a general theory of
practice by exploring how perceptual habits are formed by the embodied
person. We thus depart from the intellectualist, discursive view of
organizations
and bodies and discuss the human body‘s potential for generating
creative and innovative practices. This means that embodied persons are
not simply constructs, but they are ‗productive bodies‘ (Burkitt, 1999: 2)
capable of activities that change the nature of their lives. Following
Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty, the body is to be understood as neither a
biological nor a sociological category, but rather as point of overlapping
between the physical, the symbolic and the sociological. Though it is
widely acknowledged that the inscription of bodies is one of the primary
functions of society, there still exists an urgent need to examine the use
of the body in its immediate materiality and not simply as representation
(Barad, 2003). As Merleau-Ponty (1964: 52) suggests, ‗We must rediscover
a commerce with the world and a presence to the world which is older
than intelligence‘.
Two decades ago Cooper and Burrell (1988) already suggested that a
lot of active and reactive organizational forces are focused on the body;
be they biological, social or political. Indeed, it is the materiality of
the
body, the lived social organism in its physical expression that provides
the perpetuum mobile for social life (Höpfl , 2003). What if we were thus
to explore the silenced areas of the body as a spontaneous, experimental
and creative force that challenges organized ways of life (Sørensen, 2006;
Styhre, 2004) and the embodied desires that can disrupt, undermine and
upset the homogeneity of organizational life (Linstead, 2000; Thanem,
2006)? Much is to be gained by seeking to theorize what Grosz (1994) calls
the ‗lived body‘ rather than simply looking into the techno-administrative
use of bodies in organizations, and this is precisely what we aim to
achieve by working through our ‗theoretically constructed empirical case‘2
of carnival dance.
Carnival Dance
The origins and development of carnival present some of the most
complex and interesting problems in the history of culture and scholarly
attention to the subject has continued to grow. With carnival forms now
being discussed across a range of disciplines, from criminology to cultural
studies, carnival has become the touchstone for a variety of hotly debated
topics like subversion, transgression and popular resistance to authority
(Bernard-Donalds, 1998; Ivanov, 1984; Stallybrass and White, 1986).
From an organizational perspective, ‗carnival‘, has been developing
steadily as an emerging conceptual model and analytical category, yielding
three main carnivalesque themes in organization studies (Boje, 2001;
Rhodes, 2002, 2003): resistance (the tumultuous crowd), hierarchy (the
world turned upside-down) and popular culture (the comic mask). In short,
the carnival metaphor allows researchers to look into issues of power,
hierarchy and order. In this sense carnival is not seen as an embodied
event
but as a mode of understanding. It provides scholars with the necessary
conceptual toolkit to explore the tension between the apparent unmediated
events of ‗real‘ carnival and its dependence on established codes, rules
and conventions. We do not deny the efficacy of such textual
representations
of carnival and fully acknowledge the substantial contribution of
this approach to the understanding and development of the concept, but
we suggest that much can be gained by pursuing an alternative course.
In what follows we will commit to a performative model of carnival
in which basic terms and objects are forged in a manifold of actions and
interactions. As Barad (2003: 802) puts it,
A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the
representationalist
belief in the power of words to represent pre-existing
things … The move toward performative alternatives to representationalism
shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions
and reality (e.g. do they mirror nature or culture?) to matters of
practices/
doings/actions.
A performative perspective suggests that there are important aspects of
our research which cannot be put into words and escape the possibilities
of language, without considering this necessarily a problem. Thus, as Law
(2004: 88) suggests, ‗It might be perfectly appropriate to imagine
representation
in ways that wholly or partially resist explicit symbolisation‘.
What we find particularly striking and compelling about the carnivalesque
event is its treatment of the human body. At any time in history carnival
consistently has taken its energy from the human bodily capacity to
overflow
its own limits and to refuse confinement (Bakhtin, 1984). Carnival
bodies are open to the world, and the emphasis is placed on the body parts
that stretch out into it (Gardiner, 1998). Carnival rejects the tradition
where
the body is seen as a property of a subject, who is thereby dissociated
from
carnality and makes decisions and choices about how to dispose of the
body and its powers. The carnival body is a communal body contained in
the collective mass of the people, not the biological individual (Burkitt,
1998b). In carnival the body is valuable precisely because it is not a
closed
unity. It violates the boundaries between self and other, self and the
world.
Furthermore, the carnival body represents hybridisation, a co-mingling
of incompatible elements, and questions the formation of social groups
through inclusion and exclusion (Stallybrass and White, 1986).
In the organizational world those parts and aspects of the body which
are publicly celebrated in carnival culture have become privatized and
experienced as sources of embarrassment. Sexual life, giving birth, death,
eating and drinking have turned into private acts and lost their public,
symbolic content. That is, they have become what we refer to today as
‗body functions‘, the by-products of the bodily machine, and as such they
have lost their meaningful place in the cycles and rituals of public life.
Bodies here have acquired an individual nature, one that is closed off
to the world and complete within itself. Thus, rather than on the open
and unfinished body, accent is placed on its sealed and fi nished nature.
The emphasis is put on the body parts that create the boundaries—its
skin, smooth surfaces, musculature and, in particular, the face and eyes
(Schroeder, 2004). Bodily surfaces demarcate social and personal limits
and identities are formulated through the experience of a self that is
closed
and literally self-possessed (Michelson, 1999). In other words, the body
has become what Merleau-Ponty (1962) designated as an ‗object-body‘.
Subject-Body and Object-Body
Merleau-Ponty explored in the Phenomenology of Perception (1962)
how human beings as subjects are essentially embodied, so that their
being is ‗in -the-world‘. Influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis, Merleau-
Ponty argued for the body as the agent of experience and the basis for
all knowledge. He was concerned primarily with mapping the various
manifestations of embodiment in terms of relation between perceiving
subject and perceived world (Gardiner, 1998) and prioritized practical
over reflective forms of being, seeing intentionality manifested in our
immediate
perceptions, feelings and actions, rather than our refl ective
thoughts. For Merleau-Ponty the human body is a part of nature, but a very
special part because of the human possession of speech (logos). Our own
bodies are thus no longer seen as objects but as relations to the
surrounding
world, which in turn is defined by its relation to us as embodied and
active
beings (Eagleton, 2004). An embodied being is thus necessarily actively
involved with, and inseparable from, its surrounding world (Matthews,
2005). This is expressed in Merleau-Ponty‘s doctrine that it is our bodies
themselves which are the subjects of experience.
Merleau-Ponty (1962) used the conceptual categories of ‗subject-body‘
and ‗object-body‘ to develop his position. The subject-body is the body we
live from within, understanding it immediately. This body is a basis for
our action; it is always present. In spite of this, or because of this, we
stay
unaware of its presence. In the object-body, ‗we have the body‘. That is,
as long as we remain the subject-body, there is only a potential separation
between the body and ourselves, because our bodies are not objectifi ed.
The object-body, however, divides the body and us by giving the body
a sense of exteriority. We become observers who have bodies, bodies to
which we stand in a relation of possession. Our body is therefore both the
subject that is doing the touching as well as the object that is being
touched.
For Merleau-Ponty the body is neither an internal nor an external
projection.
Things are the extension of our bodies and our bodies are the
extension of the world; through our bodies the world surrounds us. In other
words, Merleau-Ponty transforms the concepts of interiority and exteriority
into the indeterminate surfaces of a Möebius strip. It is particularly
diffi cult to grasp what the body actually is, not only because our body is
so close to us but also because of the complex relation of dependence
between
the subject-body and the object-body:
Neither subject nor object can be conceived as cores, atoms, little nuggets
of being, pure presence: not bounded unified entities, they interpenetrate,
they have a fundamental openness to each other … They are interlaced
one with the other not externally but through their reversibility and
exchangeability, their similarity-in-difference and their difference-
insimilarity.
(Grosz, 1994: 43)
The Body Dances
To give some texture to our theoretical exposition we will look at a
particular
version of Afro-Brazilian carnival dance: the samba. We intend to
show how samba can provide us with an understanding of the possibility
of a corporeal intelligence: thinking with/through the entire body. As we
are not dance scholars, we have chosen Rector (1984) and Browning (1995)
as our guides into the world of samba, both because of their impressive