The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History

Our Bodies and Our Histories of Technology and the Environment

Our Bodies and Our Histories of Technology and the Environment Joy Parr A key self-help text of second-wave feminism, Our Bodies, Ourselves,∞ increased readers’ awareness of their bodies and of how their bodies influenced how they lived daily and how they understood themselves. I argue here, with some theory and some examples from work in the histories of technology and the environment, that students and researchers in the histories of technology and the environment similarly have much to gain by attending more closely to bodies. They are a fundamental connection between the people whose histories we read and write and the physical form of their tools and the places where they live, work, and play. Katherine Hayles, in two 1995 essays in environmental history collections, made the case for a more ‘‘embodied’’ historical practice,≤ but historians then were in the thrall of the ‘‘linguistic turn,’’ exploring how discourse made and held meanings. Amid the enthusiasm for Foucault, Derrida, and Latour and celebration of the many useful insights we might borrow from literary scholars, her contribution was neither nourished nor taken up widely by others in our field. It is time to try again, not to turn our backs on the representations of tools and places in language but to open interpretive space in which to study the robust materiality of technologies and environments, to encounter them as directly and fleshly as possible rather than as they are codified symbolically in language. How might we do this, and why? How? I used the unusual word fleshly on purpose in order to focus attention on the body as a way of knowing. Humans know the world by interacting with it. Our Bodies and Our Histories | 27 What they know about it and how they organize and reason with that knowledge is ‘‘marked by the particularities of our circumstances as embodied human creatures.’’≥ What are these particularities? We can assume that some of these persist over long stretches of history and across cultures.∂ Humans stand upright and are a certain distance above the ground when they crouch or sit to rest. They walk and run within a certain range of speeds and can reach to touch within a certain distance. Within a certain range, they can retain their balance while moving on slopes and shifting ground. These characteristics can be grouped as proprioception, the sense of bodily knowing in space; kinesthetics, the gait, pace, and posture with which the moving body encounters its surroundings; and proxemics, the emotional comfort with nearness and distance.∑ Some of these change with the life cycle and over time. A child’s sense of too high is di√erent from an adult’s; the medieval sense of close quarters in a dwelling was di√erent from yours and mine. Some are altered by contemporary technologies. Think of how the phrase an hour away is understood by a walker, a cyclist, and an air traveler, or what clean enough for comfort means in a household with a washing machine rather than a scrubboard, or a vacuum cleaner rather than a broom.∏ Much of the bodily knowledge that comes from interactions with the world is not readily captured in words. Michael Polanyi called it tacit knowledge, what ‘‘we know but cannot tell.’’ Pierre Bourdieu, following on the work of Marcel Mauss, called it habitus. Mark Hansen calls it experiential excess, excess because while it is securely held in bodily experience, it eludes expression through language.π In 1992 the eminent environmental historian William Cronon made a disheartened attempt to make the ‘‘linguistic turn’’ in his own work. Respectful though he was of his literary colleagues’ insights, he found so much tacit knowledge and experiential excess in the world he wanted to know that he concluded that the narrative form was ‘‘dangerous’’ for his purposes. The ecological senses of nonlinearity and randomness that were the focus of his attention were, by their nature, synthetic rather than categorical . In their way of being they were fluxes and fusions, which the strict linear progression of words, what he called the ‘‘rhetorical razor’’ of discourse and narrative, could not adequately convey.∫ These sensuous ways of interacting with the world are best distinguished as phenomenological, or corporeal, embodiments.Ω By their resistance to communication in words, the parts of technologies and environments that were accessible through these senses were those most marginalized by the methodological turn to discourse analysis. Because they are so central to the pro- [18.119.125.94] Project MUSE...