‘Bone in the Craw of Modernity’

ROUNDTABLE The Making of a Social Body Ian Burn9 Over the past decade Mary Poovey has developed an enviably interdisciplinary following, one that has come to appreciate her subtle and often surprising readings of a remarkably broad range of texts. The essays comprising Making a Social Body continue this tradition, and their impact has already been widely felt. In my contribution to this roundtable, I want to register their effect upon, and assess its significance for, the specific interdisciplinary domain that I tend to inhabit, that of the social and cultural history of science and medicine. This means that my reading of these essays will be a restricted and in some senses an abstracted one. In taking up one thematic strand of this complex textual tapestry, however, I wish not to indulge parochial interest but instead to consider the implications of her treatment of a specific historical problematic for her project as a whole. First, a few orientational observations. The overarching objective running through the essays in Making a Social Body is to provide a critical model that can account for the historical emergence of the peculiar and elusive cultural form characteristic of modernity - modern ‘mass culture’. ‘Modernity’ and the cultural forms underlying it operate, in Poovey’s view, according to a specific, abstract way of knowing and ordering the human and the natural world. This is the totalising epistemology associated with Marx’s critique of commodification, one that, in positing a world of lawful regularities, formal equivalences, and universally applicable standards of comparability, constructs in the social and economic realms inverted and profoundly alienating relations between people and things. This version of modernity - at once too familiar in its general outline to require, and too complex in its specifics to permit, elaboration here - has in Poovey’s judgement compelling theoretical value, but has been ill-served by historical approaches to modernity as a subject in itself. In seeking to improve on 104 ‘Bone in the Craw of Modernity’ Making a Social Body 105 this situation, Poovey explicitly distances herself from what she takes as the two prevailing tendencies adopted by modernity’s would-be analysts. The first of these tendencies challenges from without, reading the historical record for gaps beneath modernity’s ostensibly absolute surface, gaps which are explained by recourse to the complexities inherent in translating theory into practice - especially the challenge posed by historically specific communities of difference and resistance (e.g. class, gender, and race). The other tendency, one that Poovey regards as both paranoiac and ‘[inladequate to the historical record’ (14), attributes too much to the programmatic statements of a totalising modernity, accepting these as either descriptions of an actual present, or an inexorably advancing, reality. Against these two interpretative positions Poovey proposes a critique that takes modernity on its own ground but that, by pointing out its necessarily fissured and ultimately contradictory historical logic, refuses modernity victory on its own terms. The apparatus she deploys in this effort is marked by several intertwined terms, drawn from different theoretical traditions, which capture her sense of the historical processes of cultural formation - terms like emergent and residual, uneven, disaggregation, and domain. Cultural spheres, or ‘domains’ the territorial connotations of which Poovey invokes in order to signal an eternal struggle to demarcate and impose rules, order, and meaning on a terrain that is always shaped by some prior set of rules and that is moreover always more extensive in its possible meanings than any single delineational regime - are created and institutionally embodied through a process of ‘disaggregation’, of carving out of prior domains spaces that seem to cohere around a common logic and practice. This process is inevitably partial, uneven, and tends ultimately to incoherence on its own terms (that is, without the assistance of explicit resistance): ‘because emergent domains develop out of and retain a constitutive relationship to preexistent, or residual domains’, Poovey asserts, ‘the rationalities and forms of calculation that are institutionalised in new domains tend to carry with them traces of the rationality specific to the domain in which they arise’ (14). This explanation of the irreducibly uneven process of separating out new domains from older forms lends theoretical weight to an observation that Poovey makes on the very first page of Making- that ‘culture is never fully formed, never achieved as a unified, homogenous whole’ (1).Neither, according to the terms of her analysis of domain formation, are the myriad of specific, discursively delineated and institutionally embodied micro-cultural forms out of which a broader ‘culture’ is (incompletely) formed. It seems, however, that there is one Roundtable 106 cultural form, one that is moreover absolutely central to the workings of modernity, that in Poovey’s analysis escapes the logic of uneven formation - namely, the culture of science and a cognate ‘scientific medicine’. It is my aim in what follows to demonstrate the exceptional place that Poovey accords this peculiarly modern cultural form, and to assess the significance of this exceptionalism for her main analytical agenda. By positing science as the archetype for modern abstraction, and at the same time excluding it from her analysis of the historical dynamics of uneven and contradictory domain formation, I will be suggesting in the course of this discussion, Poovey paradoxically replicates the very totalising discourse from which she wants to distance herself. Though Poovey engages with a wide assortment of modernity’s constitutive domains, none are more significant than her treatment of science and medicine as the progenitor of a modern form of abstract thought that sought to give life to her eponymous ‘social body’. Since the principles of modern abstraction (as opposed to earlier historical versions of abstract thought, the deductive and scholastic model associated with Aristotle, for one) are in Poovey’s view forged in and embodied by developments in seventeenth century science, a would-be analyst of modernity would do well to start there. This is advice that Poovey takes to heart at key junctures in her own exposition. At the beginning of her most methodologically adventurous essay, for instance, she set about explicating the peculiar nature of modern ‘social space’ and its place in her own account of modernity by identifjmg ‘the representational assumptions by which key conceptual abstractions for example, the idea that space itself is abstract or empty - acquired sufficient authority to influence the treatment of physical spaces and human relations. Historically’, she continues, ‘these representational assumptions are all associated wit (...truncated)