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18УДК 141.319.8
Prospects of Topological Anthropology. Social Topology in Modern Social Science
Sergey A. Azarenko*
Ural Federal University 51 Lenina str., Ekaterinburg, 620083 Russia 1
Received 9.07.2011, received in revised form 13.11.2011, accepted 21.11.2011
This text explores the bodily interactions of the people as far as they create the different configurations of the social Being. The author treats the displacement and replacement of these interactions as the demarcation of social space by means of signs. This latter process is considered to be the essence of the symbolically arranged social world. The human being has been figured since then as the real living being (man or woman at that) which has produced in its placements and communications the social and historical Being. The human being has been pictured as the bodily, social, and communicative agent of the social action. The people live conjointly. The common life is the bodily community proper. It is the community of the body with its specific techniques and practices that reproduces sociality. It is the community of the body while continuing itself beyond its borders into the interactions with the other bodies that produces different forms of the social beings.
Keywords: corporeality, locality, consistency, social space and time, social practices and technique.
In the modern social sciences there is observed universal influence of an ontological or topological way of description. This way of description has appeared at the edge of the 19th and 20th centuries when the integral image of the human being had been raised. It was the epoch of the practical and scientific development of the world when people recognized that a subject was not equal to himself but as a social being was represented on the one hand by his group, his activity, his time, and, on the other hand, by his language, his signs, his communication and, finally, as the natural being he had in his possession his body, his spontaneity, his creativity. Since that time a human being has been figured as a real living being (man or woman),
which has produced in its placements and communications the social and historical Being. The human being has been pictured as the bodily, social, and communicative agent of the social action. Initially in interpretations of philosophers space-time problematics was anyway reduced to objectivism and naturalism until the arrival of phenomenology, which began as a phenomenology of consciousness, but with necessity was transformed into a social phenomenology. In the frameworks of social phenomenology and fundamental ontology there were developed such essential for understanding concepts as “bodiness”, “locality” and “conjointness”, which further defined the topological orientation in the contemporary social science. The problem
* Corresponding author E-mail address: sergey_azarenko@mail.ru
1 © Siberian Federal University. All rights reserved
consisted in the developing of a procedural understanding of the subject not in metaphysical, but in socially-ontological and at the same time in anthropological meaning - as socially-bodily beings, that has place in dynamically functioning conjointness.
In the social phenomenology E. Husserl appealed to the constitutive bases of socio-historical world and suggested to begin with a question of historical consciousness, believing, that from the side of the objective world there is no guarantee of historical duration. But from the side of subject’s consciousnesses there are available conditions of a uniform stream. The consciousness of the subject is historical in its very essence. It is remarkable, that the consciousness, by Husserl, is time, and as it is, it exists. And it exists in the space of human body. Everybody is a carrier of “his alive body” (in the act of self-institutionalization, by Husserl). The combination of these bodies produces community of monads, and their co-existence. One social body, that exists “here”, always assumes other social body, that exists “there”, so it is the space-time placement of social being (Husserl, 1998). The phenomenology tears with classical metaphysics, but at the same time keeps an idea of unity of subjective consciousness. Heidegger, unlike Husserl, does definitive shift to the area of ontology. Our disposition of the world precedes its any comprehension. The first that we should deal with is our own existence (Dasein), this spatially moving life, that organizes all round us (Heidegger, 1997). Things that surround us appear not as just objects with some properties, but as make-shifts. So we have possibility to dispose of future conditions of a thing. To be -for a man - means to exist in a time. A man, by Heidegger, “stretches time and lasts time himself”. This process occurs through event (Ereignis) and conjointness (Mitsein). An event must be understood as indispensable human
aspiration to realization in time. The time of human existence is not a movement from the past through the present into the future. We have our past only from the future, from projects of which we would like to be.
So, Being represents Time. This approach denies the existence of “world history” towards a subject, finding a place to individual human existence in the historical process where one comes true through another. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology comes to social ontology. At the same time there was still a necessity for overcoming of subjectivistic preconditions, that continue to take place in interpretation of social space-time. This required the arrival of the ontology of distinction. Derrida, while deconstructing the ontology of presence and a linear concept of time, offers distinguishing ontology of “trace”, that opens real relationship of “one living being to another living being” (Derrida, 2000). The question of what means “to take place in this world” leads to a conclusion, that it means not to have it as an absolute presence (in the form of an equal subject or object), but to have it as a trace, that has a form of its presence or absence and robs his real self-identity. The first principle of space and time as a breakdown of the trace allows the distinction between space and time to find form and to manifest itself in the unity of experience. This approach is opposed to the popular understanding of time in terms of spatial movement, that is presented from “Physics” by Aristotle to “Logic” by Hegel. Trace as a breakdown, by Derrida, means co-dissection of space and time, formation of space by time and formation of time by space. According to the French thinker, any society begins with the ability to differ, to divide activities and statuses. In this connection the sociality area turns into processes of formation of space and formation of time.
In the history, sociology, social anthropology, sociolinguistics and other social
sciences, there is a tendency for characterization of spatiality to apply to distinction of places and social bodies.
The science of history as retrospective of human life has evolved from studies of large-scale events, activities and characters of the rulers to research of daily life of social groups and ordinary people in modern time. There was in sight a historicity of Being as Being-together or conjointness. History, speaking ontologically, has its place, and this place is conjointness of human existence. The classical philosophy of history evolved to borders of social philosophy. Theoretical underlying the cause of such approach are researches of historians, social phenomenologistsandtopologists.Theyactualized the attention to such ontological aspects of daily life as space and time, social psychology of small groups and such regulators of social interaction as social myths, various sign systems, prestige, etc. In modern researches of the historical there is a prevailed approach, that suppose that the past (as the present and the future) is constructible, so its search, on the one hand, is possible not only in the facts of documentary sources, but also in the imagination of historical novels or oral evidences and live stories of participants of events (N. Devis). And, on the other hand, in the historical process there is opened a mediating role of language, because not only understanding of reality is mediated by language, but also staying in reality is interfaced to the ontology of sign and communication in general (J. White). In modern philosophy the lifetime of human is revealed through the lifetime of human bodies, or, in other words, their bodily co-existence. In this connection there were actualized studying of demographic and sexual (gender) behavior, that are connected with the intimate individual forms of people and the general historical processes in the areas of family, migration, overpopulation, ethical views and systems of values.
Sociology came from the fact that being of people is conjoint, so it began to place emphasis on description of spatial and temporal parameters of social being, that is generated during bodily interaction of people. Being of people is conjoint (P. Bourdieu). Conjointness is carried out through distinctions: social, gender, age, group, class and etc. Here distinctions aren’t deleted, but constantly form various forms of a sociality. According to sociology, distinction of places is a characteristic of any social system, which arises on a field of any social practice. Processes of combination and placing of bodies in various places of a sociality appear in the form of spatiality (that is marked by labels and signs), i.e. in the form of the symbolical reproduced social world. It is possible to admit only limited circle of places of a sociality, that include universal uniforms of a place on gender and age distinction - the places connected with dedication in culture (a place of initiation, church, school and etc.). Even in the traditional society there were fixed separate seats for children, the elderly, women. Transition from one place to another in the process of initiation always occurred in exact locations. Moreover, this transition itself is nothing more than a process of “imprinting” of new practices and techniques (certain ways of behavior and speaking) to the body, and then young men became suitable for a social life.
Since childhood human “body” as a distinguished body is on transition from one “place” of a sociality to another. The concept of “body techniques” was developed in the social topology to understand the body as distinguished (Foucault). Distinction of places is carried out through conjointness and placement of bodies thanks to social practices and techniques, and therefore is connected to time. The last depends on socio-historical conditions of existence, where time can have a cyclic or directed (linear or nonlinear) character. So, speaking about the social
world, it is necessary to see in it space and time of conjointness and placement of certain bodies and production of certain places at the same time. It is a set of social practices and techniques that mediates a generation of social space and time and determines the behavior and reflection of agents of sociality.
In social anthropology the emphasis in research is placed not in sensual bodiness, but in bodily differences and mediating role of bodily practices and techniques, that led to the discovery of its topological dimension. So, J.-L. Nancy rightly observes that “body is a difference. And, being the difference towards all other bodies - while spirits are identical, - it never ceases to differ. It differs from itself too. How to combine the baby and the old man?” (Nancy, 2006: 128) Body is initially divided in half for male and female, and this distinction passes on a way of behavior, and in different cultures it is different and, therefore, it have distinctly social character (G. Butler). The body is essentially fused with gender. And this point is defined as the essence of the relationship to another entity. So, body is essentially defined as relationship, or in relationship. Body correlates with body of the opposite sex, because bodiness touches to its limit through gender distinction (J.-L. Nancy). Gender distinction is just that essential distinction, which is controlled by the social world, because without it its reproduction is impossible. In the same way the society sets also parameters of what is necessary to wish and from what it is necessary to get pleasure. Female body and male body are in fact the result of social transformations, therefore they act as social bodies, presented by bodily techniques. To be a man or a woman means to have “technique” to be a man and a “technique” to be a woman within the society, to which they belong. Because of social and bodily differences between men and women -as a result of their conjointness - generation of social space is created, home is created, and
by that there are arised primary forms of the social world. Nowadays the social anthropology is being developed, and, as we believe, it’s rapprochement with the synergetic anthropology is required (S. Horuzhy). In sociolinguistics and other related disciplines, there are attempts to read the communication as basis, that organizes the whole social system. They rightly reject the classical interpretation of the communication through the idea of “transfer”. And contrary to it, communication is understood as intersystem self-differing space-time process, that consists of three selective processes of information, message and understanding. Traditionally the social scientists connect processing of sense with linguistic communication - but whether recursiveness of sense is provided in exclusively verbal way or sign systems as a whole? Translation of significant cultural senses for a society occurs by communicative techniques, which cannot be understood exclusively as a temporalized system. But a sense also shows spatiality, because a sense assumes a combination of different stretching towards each other social bodies (H.U. Gumbreht).
The basic medium of communication, that guarantees regular self-development of society, is language. On its basis there are possible operations, that link communication and that can be supervised by their participants. As a result of normalization and recursive strengthening of these operations of coupling there is formed its own self-reproducing system of linguistic communication, that operates in self-determined way and at the same time is quite compatible with reflected participation of individuals. This system, by N. Luhmann, exists exclusively on time axis. Placing emphasis on temporal measurement of sense Luhmann believes that it allows to depart from “property” enslaving of a sociality (Luhmann, 2004: 53). However, the spatial dimension must be considered in a
dynamic way as a truly stable dynamics. As for the “enslavement of property,” after this process we should not miss an important process of formation of space by time meanings of culture, which defines the mechanism of formation of samples. The meaning can be reproduced only as an event. We can talk about space-time operational dimension of sense. The emergence of sense is possible only at actualization of some distinction, and on its other party there always can be something unmarked. Classical metaphysics substantivized the real, presenting it in the shape of thing. Time in this case pointed to the “first principle” that with all changes of updated distinctions remained the same. Understanding “the real” as a meaningful world, we are able to open its space-time as a process of combination and placement, folding and unfolding of different elements of sociality, in which physical and communication techniques are fundamental. The last mediate group relationships of people.
The Topology of Body
and Behavior Settings
A human existence is impossible out of body, place and communication in a society. Therefore its consideration is productive from a position of social space and time. Human bodies are not given by nature, but they are constitutive. A human body exists not just in possibility, but it exists in relation or, in other words, represents itself as event. And when we say that a body is in a place we mean that it goes and acts thanks to another body, thus creating its own location and the location of the particular social world. Body formation cannot be reduced exclusively to internal process of self-formation.This process takes place to be, but as a movement of the social process, that is constituted by bodily interactions. Bodies of people are the result of social transformations, and therefore they act as social bodies, presented by bodily techniques. Bodily techniques mediate
connection between natural and social in a body. A human body as a social body does not exist out of bodily techniques.
A feature of sociality is the fact, that it is a multiplicity of different places. The last are connected with this or that public practice and various “conditions” or interactions of bodies. This human sociality is different from any other natural “sociality”, it is a conjointness. The last is a kind of machine for organization of time and space of human existence.
So, speaking about a social world, you need to see in it space and time of location and placement of certain bodies and at the same time the production of certain places. Group of people, that take certain positions, while interacting with appropriate group of people with their positions, forming by time and space, creates appropriate “place”, for example, “place” of Church for a group of parishioners with a priest, or “place” of University for a group of students with teachers.
In traditional society the space-time is formed mainly on a collective and impersonal beginning, although there are exceptions, when, for example, in the yogic tradition chronotope is constructed only on a base of a yogi’s body. In accordance with this there are constructed behavior settings: in the first case - strictly hierarchical and linear, in the second -self-government and self-control. Christianity creates a precedent of social space and time, including the configuration of another. In Protestantism there is developed a type of hard-working, thrifty and prudent behavior, that is more suitable for industrial practice. In Orthodoxy there are behavior settings that are based on love and humility and focus on the existential relations. Historically these two types of behavior were demanded and were crossed. In modern times social space-time is based on a singular social body and produces non-linear behavior models that imply the continuous constructed process.
From the most ancient times in cultures there always were special places (let’s call them “high” or “vertical places,”), that help to keep human in the space of world. These places are the places of gods and rulers. The vertical marking of space assumed also a horizontal marking. The “vertical” of place was presented in a myth; the emergence of geometry in more developed cultures defined the “horizontal” of place. Vivid evidence - the geometry of the pyramids and geometric images of a human by Egyptians, Solomon temple, the Great Wall of China, Russian churches, etc. The geometry of Egyptians or Greeks is a way of mastering space. Tombs, mausoleums, capitals serve for rulers as places of power - power over people and over death. Vertical/ horizontal place in the culture of a society is organized through human body (the body of a ruler in a traditional society), common space-time of life. This is nothing more than a place of power, that is understood as a common space, that connects all vital places of people, helps to unite in their social differences, marks the boundaries of social order and provides people with ontological security. Not some ruler itself, but a place that is specially organized, sets the place of power.
Pyramid erection urged not to perpetuate the name of a ruler, but primarily to provide ontological security for the community, guaranteeing a social order. Speaking of spatiality, we must not forget about time, because there a process of formation of space by time and a process of formation of time by space take place. Really, the past dynamically takes place in the present, and this presence is materialized by things. The antiquity of things accompanies human life. Landscapes, ruins of houses and cities, earth fortification constructions, monuments, antiques, souvenirs, old family photos as well as newly created places, new forms of buildings and cities. All this is a space-time of human existence, which in the particular society and era is formed in a certain
social chronotope. Involvement in the historical time occurs not within active time of the subject, but from all time of certain culture, formed by space. Landscapes, ruins, monuments are given to people not lust for contemplation or as frozen historical memory, but people themselves are primordially involved in them by their bodies.
Ancient Egypt revealed a first attempt to perpetuate a human body, just not by means of embalming, but by a certain way of “stowage” it into surrounding landscape, so there was a kind of doubling or continuing of body, or, in other words, a creation of a twin. This process is a process of generating social chronotope. The valley of Pyramids deformed the “place” of the Nile River though “withdrawing” it from a natural channel and setting “new” prospect of a course organized by human. In this place it ceased to divide the coast and thus to rule over human. A pyramid serves as a gathering point of surrounding space, a point, in which the leading role is given to a human body. This body doubles in a special way in order to become able to stay on the territory of the earth.
Pyramid erection pulled together not only different sectors of landscape, but heaven and earth. The place of construction was leveled in a straight line of stars with an orientation to the North. So when the stars rotating around the pole star, stood in a line, by plummet it was possible to orient precisely to the North. Then, before laying the first stone of a pyramid, it was necessary to ensure that four faces of a pyramid would be exactly at right angles to each other. This required knowledge of geometry. With lace tied to a stake in the leading line the Egyptians drew a circle on the sand and then beside it they drew another circle that was crossed with the first. A line drawn between the points of intersection of these circles is exactly at right angle to a leading line. As we see, there was impossible to manage without “horizontal” action (applied geometry). But
there we also find a logic of generating of social chronotope in a traditional society, which implies the ascent from “bodiness” and “placement” to “conjointness”. Because the production of place for the ruler’s body also produced a specific type of behavior in conjointness. A pyramid was built by several teams of workers which were organized on the basis of competition and under the control of managers. An army of inspectors, tax collectors, clerks and bookkeepers was ten times greater than the number of builders. But the construction of pyramids allowed Egypt to create a complex bureaucratic apparatus, and due to this Egypt became a unified state, which lasted more than three thousand years.
So, in the era of the Ancient Kingdom there was developed a cult of ancestors, who provided an eternal life for Ka of dead. A burial place became a place of transition from a transient state of the human body to the continuing social body. From a social point of view, the main thing inthis process of burial of Pharaoh (as, apparently, in all burial process in early societies) was a formation of a joint practice of a particular group of people, that were united by repeatable and regular bodily interactions which were cast in a certain space and time of human relationships. There community (it is inherent in one form or another to various forms of society, from archaic to modern) formed a type of communication, which contributed to initiation of its members to a given social order with its general ideas, values , etc. There was also a formation of scientific knowledge as a consciousness - knowledge shared between people, in which through the scientific mind was provided social communication - the main purpose of social science. This process of building of social chronotope was inherent to all traditional cultures, but always with its own characteristics.
In the traditional culture there is a precedent of the generation of chronotope at the level of a
separate body. This is the yogic tradition. In this regard a comparison of two largely opposing, but overlapping ways of spiritual transformation of a body - yoga and Christianity - deserves particular attention. Yoga seeks to suppress natural in human, to redefine him, his body-mind through spiritual influence, but through systematic work with a body (from an inert body through action to the cleared and balanced light body). A body is in unity with consciousness that does not give him rest from the external order of things.
Christianity is also ontological in essence. It comes not from the subject, but from its location in the general order of things in the world. And this order, in turn, is supposed to be located to him. This location fills the person with life-giving, light and good energy of the world.
For Christianity the first ontological definition of man is also bodiness. Christianity seeks to transform a human nature by the Spirit of, offering away to work with the body and spiritual path of its transformation.
Both yoga and Christianity agree that the body cannot continually change and develop and the human spirit only exists in the development and self-development, and that it is impossible without adherence to the life-giving energy of the world. Thus both Christianity and yoga come to the understanding that the solution to the problem of true human existence is possible only in an ontological perspective, and this is made through the ontology of body. But Christianity comes to the world with its suffering, and through them it attains true freedom, trusting itself to the healing Spirit. Whereas yoga makes leaving from suffering of the world, pulling away from the “vibrations of consciousness” into pure “I”, that is notidentified with experienced objects and impressions of the world, working systematically with inert (tamasic) forces of the body to ascend to pure “I” in the individual man and his dissolution in God.
In Christianity chronotopical idea is generated through interaction with Another. This contributes to the emergence of social space and time. Unlike yoga, Christianity is focused on Another, which recalls the phenomenon of extended or double body. In Christianity there was formed the cult of the relics of saints, and on this basis was formed the church, which, in turn, is a mystical body of Savior. This way of behavior is based on active love and humility. Verbal behavior involves dialogue and /or nonlinear way of communication.
A fundamental difference is found in the construction of social chronotope: not space but time is beginning to prevail. It happened in the era of Protestant Christianity. M. Weber and E. Troeltsch showed that it is Protestantism that contributed to the development of capitalism. On the one hand, people were guided by the idea of chase of infinitely beautiful time of eternal life, on the other hand, people knew that all time belonged to the Lord and that the day of reckoning was almost there. There was developed a new culture of caring attitude to time. Protestants tried to hold every moment to good use. Reasonable organization of time - the best way to curry favor with God. This attitude to time is observed from Calvin, who did the emphasis on salvation through employment, to Wedgwood, who established the regulated time in the factory. Of course, the economic laws dictated their rules, but they were certainly consistent with the ethical demands of Christianity.
So, in the Christian chronotope we see an increase of the spatial parameter with increase of time parameter. European Protestantism creates a world, in which economism dominated with settings for the benefit, profit and wealth. Another thing is Russian Orthodoxy. From the point of view of Bulgakov, household is a wide phenomenon, it involves the whole world, God and human, where the last is not measured
only in money. Household is a life in general. A mother and a child are a household, a need for money is in fact the economy. According to Bulgakov, household is only possible on the basis of Christian love.
We understand contemporary society as a society of differences, so we need to see it through the distinction of bodily and communicative practices and techniques. Bodily and communicative practices and techniques participate in the constitutioning of social reality. In modern society we can see a lot of different social practices and techniques. Networked society leads people to the assembly-line way of life, where a man attached to various techniques, cannot stay in one body, but is split into many bodies. Jean Baudrillard distinguishes four basic body shape, body as “corpse” (for medicine), ‘”n animal” body (for church), “a robot” body (for industry) and a “dummy” body (for system of political economy of a sign). In fact, these types of bodiness reflect the consumer society, where the significance of a body is higher when it is capable to be sold in a greater degree. Russian culture, where the setting of the Orthodox Church as a setting not on temporality, but on eternity is a defining, estimates merchant ability low. Conservatism of Orthodoxy towards the world of merchantability is clearly read in Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard”. By Chekhov, Russia is a garden, a “smooth” natural space, where everything grows in time. However, there is a need to sell the property, and owners have a choice: to sell a garden and thus to turn the former garden space into “the cut” space of summer cottages, or to reject the act of sale. The hosts of the estate and the garden feel the bitterness of loss of something deeply existential, without which their life has no meaning. The usual limits of their world are destroyed.
Modern society lives in an “unlimited’ communication on the transition, by N. Luhmann,
from the state of “phenomenology of life” to a “phenomenology of communication”, that creates a special order of human existence. Luhmann noted that the evolution of means of dissemination in formation tends to approval of multilevel order and rejection of spatial integration of public operations.
Indeed, human life has become extremely mobile, and even just streaming, but it should be borne in mind that there are always places on the transition from one to another as a combination of various social bodies. During the combination here are generated such configurations as special folds of our national body, there are generated heat of a parental home and paternal landscape. Without the outlines of national chronotope human life is impossible. Territorial parameter still remains an extremely important factor, in spite of the modern technical capabilities, and geopolitical issues, that are facing the world community, are becoming more acute (in Russian society with its resources and open spaces this problem now becomes very actual).
Complication of the structure of sociality, the use of electronic and bio-technologies, transformations in gender relations lead to the qualities of modern world - multiplicity, decentralization, fragmentation, uncertainty and exacerbation of differences.
The behavior of people in the contemporary sociality is fundamentally nonlinear. This behavior is not just in formation exchange, but the intersection of bodily and communicative techniques, and their agents are certain social singularities. Each singularity is a certain set of forces and ways of action, that unfold in a certain space-time. Due to this fact the absolute fullness of the intersection and understanding of the interaction cannot be, it is possible only in certain points of adhesion, which form a pencil of curves. Intersection of singularities occurs in the field, which can be called “topogram” (in opposition to,
for example, “diagram”). An ideal combination cannot be, it occurs only in the constellation of some points and can vary depending on the displacement of positions and dispositions of agents of sociality. Any consistency contains elements of inconsistency. Communication must be understood as a dynamic process of searching for various intersections and linkages between people, represented as a social singularities.
Synergetic Anthropology and Topological Anthropology
Modern philosophy finds itself in the borders of metaphysics, science and anthropology. There are various anthropological schools of thought from philosophical to synergetic and social anthropology. We find acceptable to offer another direction - topological anthropology, which allows to give greater horizon of consideration of existential problems within boundaries of social ontology. Sociality arises through the configuration of its ontological constituents -bodiness, placement and conjointness. The process of reproduction of conjointness occurs during the regular bodily interaction between people through certain social practices, due to which there is generated a certain message, that attaches people to its community with certain ideas and values. As a result of social communication there is created anthropological singularity (bodiness-placement-conjointness), which determines the existence of people in the symbolic space of being.
Social communication generates sign-symbolic systems, which serve not just as a designated objects, but as a social force, which connect, guide and orient human interactions to the result. A sign marks up and delineates social interaction; it serves as interactive force, which helps understanding and coordination of human actions; it finally serves regular reproducibility of social connections. Sign-symbolic systems
can not be interpreted in the spirit of Saussurean unity of signifier with the signified, they represent a social value, where signs determine not area of “meanings”, but area of coordinated actions. Signs and symbols, soaking up the social experience, pull together and stitch together social reality in a single entity. And this single entity appears as a single manifold, because includes a variety of forms of social existence.
At the basis of the diverse social life of people there are different cultural and social practices in which there are presented bodily techniques. Foucault, like Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 2001; Foucault, 2007) doesn’t strictly distinguish the notions of practice and technique, and uses them in many cases as a synonym. Although it seems to be more precise: “practice” is a type of regular interaction between people on the production and reproduction of sociality in general, and without it human survival is impossible. The social sciences we are talking about such practices as spiritual, family, industrial, political, etc. I.e. about such practices that generate the fullness of social and individual human world. “Technique” is traditional ways of use of body in different societies. For example, family practice, according to Foucault, involves such bodily techniques as a sexual technique, a technique of cultivation and a farming technique. Each of them is individually framed by significant way, that’s why we’re talking about communicative techniques in connection with the bodily. Since M. Moss, social scientists use the term “habitus”, which means the specific skills and methods of work in their application to business. For modern society we have to say about the feature of multiple way of existence of practices and techniques. And the importance of spiritual practice is not lost.
In the course of spiritual practice there was formed a holistic man n the unity of body, soul and spirit, whereby he received the science of survival. Pierre Hadot shows that philosophy of
the ancient Greeks played the role of spiritual practice, that gave lessons of life, but not abstract knowledge, presented as an intellectual doctrine. For all the philosophical schools the main cause of human suffering, confusion, unconsciousness was seen in passions: random desires and unreasonable fears. And the philosophy acted primarily as a healing of souls: mobilization of energy and harmony with the fate of the Stoics, relaxation and distraction of the Epicureans, mental concentration and rejection of sensuality of the Platonists (Hadot, 2005). But the same in its essence, but with its own characteristics we find in yogic, Buddhist or hesychastic spiritual practices. They formed a human, but not just informed, as in modern education.
Clarifying the spiritual roots of Russia, we primarily have in mind the spiritual practice of Orthodoxy. It is based on, as S. Horuzhy shows, hesychastic practice as the experience of connection with Christ, experience of the energy connection (Horuzhy, 2005). At some moment the communication with spiritual roots began to be lost in our culture, but their significance was great, because hesychastic anthropology rejects “essences” and metaphysical grounds and refers to the energetic description. Energy is a dynamic reality. Here a person is determined by interaction with God, by the synergy. This allowed Horuzhy to form synergetic principles of modern anthropology on the basis of hesychastic origins. “Spiritual practice - said Horuzhy - is a holistic practice of energy: the practice of self-transformation, in which a man changes “himself a whole” (holism), but himself taken and considered not substantially, but activity-oriented and energetic, as the totality of all physical, mental, intellectual movements and impulses, that Orthodoxy calls “the created energies”. Such complex or configuration of energies is a human ‘energetic image”, his projection on the plan of energy, his measurement of life-actions. Practice
(feat) classifies these configurations on various features, identifies different types of them (although the ‘energetic image’ is constantly changing, its type is relatively stable) - and by specific methods makes a reformation of himself, his own energetic image”(Horuzhy, 2000: 141).
These are not the spiritual exercises of Greeks, that in their essence are not holistic and are addressed primarily to human consciousness. Horuzhy stresses that hesychastic “unseen battle” as an essential element of spiritual practice “directed not only against a particular defect, but to change the very texture of soul in which the passion would not have appeared, but at the same (there is an important difference from the stoic ideal of dispassion as immobility and ataraxia) time there wouldn’t be extinguished and frozen spiritual activities and responses of a man. In this way these activities, becoming free, may be sent for further ascent.” Horuzhy calls the area of higher stages of Spiritual practice as an area of limit, boundary phenomena of human experience - the area of Anthropological Border. Some main examples ofphenomena ofBorder, that occur and are cultivated in Practice, are specific changes of perceptual modalities of human, that can be understood as the appearance of a new system of perception. These new perceptions, marked in all mystical traditions, are called “wise feelings” in hesychasm (Horuzhy, 1999). There is a deep connection between spiritual practice and phenomenon of spiritual (religious) tradition. The decisive element in the structure of the practice is its “higher spiritual state”. And only on the basis of religious traditions there are strategies that hold direction to the meta-anthropological Border. And in this sense we can say, that without a tradition (at the heart of which there is a spiritual practice) an anthropological image of a nation and its history is impossible.
Horuzhy notes that the synergetic anthropology deals with describing of types
of human constitution his personal structures. “The description is made on the basis of topical structure of Anthropological Border, which corresponds to three fundamental types of human opening: ontological opening (to another existential horizon), unconscious and virtual opening. Accordingly, if we look at some anthropological phenomenon, and are able to identify the type of opening, that is realized in it, we thus do what is called an anthropological localization in the synergetic anthropology: we correlate this phenomenon with a certain area of Anthropological Border” (Horuzhy, 2010: 14). In turn, attachment the area defines the structure of personality and identity, and knowledge of personal structures, according to Horuzhy, allows to answer any questions about the appropriate anthropological reality.
Speaking about practices and techniques, we should emphasize that, having in their heart an element of transformation, they, on the one hand, helps to transform the biological body in a really social, filling it with their experience of society, and on the other hand, they act as anthropological practices, mediating the whole network of social relations. The continuation of this body produces all the space-time configurations of the social existence of people.
The practice of production as primarily a practice of cultivating “profane” space (associated with cultivation offields) is conjugated with actions which generate a home. In the beginnings of this process there are social bodies of people, whose gender interaction in family practice requires the energy filling and building of “home”. Extension of bodies grows into a social environment and home. The elements of this process, by Foucault, exist in inter-transitions and inter-openings: the erotic technique turns into economic technique and vice versa in a reverse order. A body, a cultivated area, a home - that are the primary structures that are involved in constructing of
the social world. These structures involve in their orbit other things, that are generated in their connection with the process of manipulating of various elements of the world. The social world is created from objects, produced as a result of operations of objectifications. An extended body produces symbolic space-time, that appears primarily at the intersection of the division of labor and sexual practices between the sexes. An extended skin turns into a dress, a hand - into a weapon or a tool, a leg - into the wheel, a whole body - into a home, and an extended nervous system - into electronic networks. Through male and female, and then through the whole complex of social relations there is a connection between natural and human worlds, there is a social and biological reproduction.
Home is a point of focus for a body, that interacts with the world. Home belongs to the essential and the necessary, without it human life is impossible. Home gives a shelter to a man and a woman, it covers people from the weather, protects from enemies. Home has a special importance not because it is a goal of human activity, but because it is a condition of human activity and therefore it is its beginning.
Mumford reveals the role of ritual and political practices in the emergence of early civilization in the history and a new social organization (Mumford, 1986: 225-240). He introduces the concept of Megamachine, which is used to denote a special kind of socio-technical device - the social organization of the vertical type, which uses power as a social force as a resource of dominance. Megamachine gets a materialized form in the borders of a city - privileged segment of social space, sharply separated from the primitive (“village”) peripherals. The city is the birthplace of the institute of imperial authority (a privileged position of political practice). The appearance on the top of Megamachine the figure of
“king-prime mover” is the final moment of its construction, transformation into the Kingdom.
City and a social organization emerged with it are characterized by new beginnings: structure, hierarchy, social pyramid. The structure of a city involves an allocation of center, that tower above the margin, and consistent differentiation and specialization of activities as a condition for total and rational control. Hierarchy as a principle means of the new organization means a normative and social consolidation of differences between “top” and ‘bottom’ in the structure of a city and finds its material and functional expression in social pyramid. The last is directly related to the hierarchical structure of society and in the geometrically-plastic shape symbolizes the vertical, that connects heaven and earth, whereby the streams of energy and information are distributed and move from the top of the pyramid down to its base, from the king, the prime mover of Megamachine to the mass of subservient, “mortals” (slaves).
The construction of space-time of social world, as we believe, since the traditional society is achieved through two ways of “projection” of body in the world: “linear’ (assignment), and “folded” (development). The last is more inherent to the model of spaciality in traditional oriental culture, uniting its elements in a single scheme. He is an oval figure with an invisible and off-center, filled with “fragments” and linked by voids. The image of this model can be a mountain or onion, cut lengthwise. The dynamics of this model of traditional culture’s reproduction is by the principle of “rolling” or “fold”. The opposite western cultural model has a shape of “centered” triangle with centripetal dynamics, hierarchy, heterogeneity of values, with a tendency to fill voids, separation and distinction. Conventionally, the first model of structuring of the world can be called ‘masculine” (yang), prone to assignment and formed through the formula n + 1, and the
second - “female” (yin), prone to development and formed through the formula n - 1. For example, ancient Greek or Roman temple, a warrior garb or writing system are the products of the linear model, whereas the Japanese temple, kimono or hieroglyphic writing are the products of the folded model.
A construction of the world was made by people through folding the macrocosm into the microcosm (the principle of “nesting dolls”), during which there were such folds of the human world as Home, Garden, Carpet, Hieroglyph (Symbol). House is an extension of human body in space habitats. Garden is a turning-off of the fundamental elements of world “yin” and “yang” with a built-in human body in one single place. Carpet is a turned-off garden, folded and placed at Home. Hieroglyph is a sign-symbolic turning-off of elements of the world. Sacred text is a turning-off of the world into a text with use of metonymy, realized in forms of preaching and confession, that gives images of human fulfillment: a person is endowed with sense of the image and likeness of God.
In general, human life takes place in time, between past and future (between life and death). This between translates itself through the present (in two senses of the word: in the temporary sense and in the true sense). Really to be in the present means to be in such existential dimensions as love, play, work, power, faith and death. In these dimensions a man is taken in its limits and breaks, passion and joy, in pain and pleasure, actually living here and now. The meaning of life is achievable, when we are really living in the present. Spiritual practices lead us to a meaningful existence. They are based on faith.
S. Kierkegaard in “Fear and Trembling” is trying to answer the question, why biblical Abraham did not hesitate and decided to sacrifice his son Isaac on God’s command (Kierkegaard, 1993)? Faith is that recall a man
in his particularity and individuality. Abraham, according to Kierkegaard, trusted contrary to reason, contrary to ethics (in terms of ethics his action is qualified as murder). Kierkegaard rightly notes that Abraham’s faith was real - in the sense that it belonged to the present time. If his faith had belonged to the past or future life, he would have had to leave this world quicker. But Abraham truly believed and truly suffered, and the source of his suffering was faith. Faith makes a human life exceptional, unique, but not insane, as Kierkegaard thought. But the life of modern man is complicated by all sorts of technologies that generate effect of hum of communication. In the mid-seventies of the twentieth century, a remarkable French thinker Roland Barthes wrote about the hum of the language and did not know that the hum would cover the whole multi-channel communication system of accelerating machine of sociality (Barthes, 1994: 541). In SMS, music videos or advertisements we see the dictatorship of spoken language. But spoken language is irreversible. It is impossible to take back what was said once - without adding a new meaning. In our speech we cannot correct, cross out or cancel - “correcting, crossing out, canceling” we continue to speak. Barthes called this fancy abolition by addition ‘stuttering”. According to the thinker, the presence of hum in the language, when communicates are entirely entrusted to signified one way or another is possible because of the fact that beyond this hum there are seen some senses. Due to different electronic tools the current communication is covered by non-stop process of addition, therefore by “stuttering” and noise, but also by erosion of meaning ‘underlying basis” of communication. We live in an era of undercutting, scattering, and dissection of bodiness and meanings, and sometimes just canceling of them. In communication “clip” concepts in the forms of short messages, SMS, advertisements, etc. prevail nowadays. This
process of undercutting of holistic meanings of reproduced cultural tradition is accompanied at the same time by cutting of bodiness, which is subjected to fragmenting the videos or advertisements, or even directly to markets of trading the internal organs. This leads to a narrowing of human semantic horizon, relegating his holistic perception to clip thinking. This is the type of network communication, which began to deform human spiritual world to the fragmented state of consciousness. Clip communication begins to define the behavior of people, and in particular (which is alarming) of youth. This kind of communication is actually working on erosion of cultural tradition, which was based on holistic senses and root relations, keeping and translating them over time. How to survive in this case, when so much communication, but, in reality, it is a noise, when there is an effect of speaking all together, but nobody can hear anything? People do not notice, that they live in the world of simulation and virtuality, where
clipped meanings and bodies are dominated, and souls ... so scarred and weary souls. But the need for holistic senses is not lost. People often seek themselves in increasing of connections, in sliding over the surface, in pleasure, whereas they should look inside themselves. Modern people are covered by illness of soul, alienated from spiritual practices.
The body is in pain already in tension with Another (to be with another is already a pain, because it is different), but there is an illness (i.e. more than pain), when something Other is exaggerated in My Own. Spiritual practices arrange everything for places. Spiritual practices are the ability of systematically reorganization of perceptions and states of body, the ability to change its mind, thus making it “healthy” by advancing it from the negative states (pathos) to positive states (ethos), or rather pushing it to the harmony of these states. Spiritual practices let us be ourselves - it means not just to follow our selfexpression, but to break our borders, our limits.
References
R. Barthes. The Hum of Language. Selected Works. Semiotics. Poetics. (Moscow, 1994).
P. Bourdieu. The Practical Meaning. (St. Petersburg, Moscow, 2001).
J. Derrida. About Grammatology. (Moscow, 2000).
M. Foucault. Hermeneutics of the Subject. (St. Petersburg, 2007).
P. Hadot. Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy. (Moscow, 2005).
M. Heidegger. Being and Time. (Moscow, 1997).
S. Horuzhy. “Notes to the Energetic Anthropology.”Spiritual Practices” and “Rejection of Feelings”: Two Concepts in a Comparative Perspective”, Problems of Philosophy, 3 (1999).
S. Horuzhy. Orthodox Ascesis - The Key to a New Vision of Man // www.wco.ru. Web Center Library “Omega” 2000.
S. Horuzhy. Experiments from the Russian Spiritual Tradition. (Moscow, 2005).
S. Horuzhy. “Analysis of Human Opening as Methodology of Diagnostics of Anthropological Trends”.Chelovek.RU. Humanitarian almanac.Novosibirsk, # 6 (2010).
E. Husserl. Cartesian Meditations. (St. Petersburg, 1998).
S. Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling. (Moscow, 1993).
N. Luhmann. Society as a Social System. (Moscow, 2004).
L. Mumford “Technique and Human Nature”, A New Technocratic Wave in the West. (Moscow:, 1986), p. 225 - 240.
J. - L. Nancy. “Body: Outside or Inside. Fifty-eight Readings of The Body”, Blue sofa. Magazine. Vol. 9. (Moscow, 2006).
Перспективы топологической антропологии. Социальная топология в современном обществознании
С. А. Азаренко
Уральский федеральный университет Россия 620083, Екатеринбург, Ленина, 51
В тексте исследуются процессы телесных взаимодействий людей, порождающие различные конфигурации социального бытия. Процессы совмещения и размещения тел в различных местах социальности предстают в виде размеченной знаками пространственности, составляя существо символически устроенного социального мира. Топологическая антропология человека представляется в качестве реально живущего телесного существа -причем в качестве мужчины и женщины, - производящего в своем совмещении и сообщении социально-историческое бытие. Человек представляется в качестве телесного, социального и коммуникативного агента социальности. Бытие людей совместно. Со-вместность - это и есть сообщество тела - тела, которое воспроизводит социальность её специфическими техниками и практиками, тела, которое, продолжая себя во взаимодействии с другими телами, производит различные формы социального бытия.
Ключевые слова: телесность, местность, совместность, социальное пространство и время, социальные практики и техники.
