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  • Social Pressure
  • Teresa Brennan

1. Preamble:

It has become habitual to think of the social as immaterial or unphysical, as something which does not enter into or physically affect the body. Despite the strong evidence of psychosomatic disorders, or the logical deductions that follow from the facts that words and images are physical entities as well as conveyors of meaning, social theory continues to think the relation between the physical and the social in terms where either the biological may (some claim) or may not determine the social, but where the social does not have material effects on the body. In other words, the only alternative to sociobiology, 1 which misconceives and reduces the relation at issue to one of biological determination, appears to be a social without physical materiality.

The theory of social physicality I have developed 2 is premised on the notion that the opposition between the social and the biological is itself misconceived to the extent that it conjures up an idea of the social as immaterial, as lacking matter and/or energy. 3 The opposition between the social and the biological was built into sociology’s foundations: Durkheim for instance, as Giddens has it, is concerned with “the specific characteristics of the class of phenomena which may be delimited as ‘social’ and thereby separated from other categories such the ‘biological’ and ‘psychological’” (Giddens 1971, 86). But while I agree that the social is specific to itself and independent of biology, and that it also exists independently of personal psychology, the social as I will define an aspect of it here (which we will call “social pressure”) is nonetheless physical. Moreover it is not that the biological determines the social. It is rather that the physicality of the social enters into [End Page 257] and even determines biology, and for that matter, the environment. It follows that human organisms will have physical differences consequent on their different “socializations.” 4

In this essay I will elaborate on the theory of social physicality in relation to aging. We are all familiar with the discrepancies between those who age “well” and those who do not, between an apparent retardation of aging and its untimely acceleration. Such discrepancies suggest that a social level impinges on the biological level. At the same time, the fact of aging seems to legitimate the distinction between the social and the biological for the very reason that while some of us age poorly and some well, we all ultimately age. The thing that varies (how we age) is not the same as the thing that is varied (the fact of aging). The fact of aging is presented to us as a biological fact. But my point will be that the social variations or accelerations and retardations in how we age, while biological in their effects, have to have a material existence that involves something more than somatic biology. The nature of that material existence, I will suggest here, is physical. Thus it may be that the “social” which affects the body can be understood in terms of physics (this is what social physicality is about); while the body of course belongs to biology. In other words, what I am suggesting is that we reflect on the appositeness of the distinction between the biological and the physical in rethinking an issue which otherwise remains intractable. If I am right in this approach, it would be more correct to say not that a critical dimension of the social is biological, but that it is physical, a force that interacts with and affects the biological body.

The distinction between the physical and the biological, while frequently collapsed in the humanities and social sciences, is long-standing. 5 But the distinction is needed in the social sciences. Apart from its use in explaining changes in the organism that are not consequent solely on biological developments, the distinction is necessary if one is to resolve a paradox: as Ingold points out, “biology” is meant to be about the increasing differentiation of forms, and how organisms grow in distinctiveness (1990, 214). I add that socialization by contrast is about how these organisms conform to common [End Page 258] modes of behavior and...

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