The Body as Fiction / Fiction as a Way of Thinking: PhD thesis as companion text

One of the things I keep coming up against in writing and researching this novel – A Short (Personal) History of the Bra and its Contents – whether I’m researching gender and gender variations, breast implants and cosmetic surgery, the history of bottle and breast-feeding, or cancer treatments and theories of disease – is the recurring question: how do we know what we know?

Can anything ever really be proven in a universal and permanent way?

If not, then what is involved in something becoming ‘true’?

These are underlying themes in my novel, and formed the connecting thread with my PhD thesis – The Body as Fiction / Fiction as a Way of Thinking – that was written alongside and around it.

In particular my thesis looked at questions to do with how we derive knowledge of ourselves, or how we represent ourselves to ourselves – whether as individual personalities or gendered subjects (the notion of a self), or as a species (how ‘the body’ is conceptualised in discourses such as science, medicine and spirituality).

And how we negotiate conflicting notions of truth and meaning, and how our bodies figure in this.

If you are interested in these kinds of things -- the theoretical or philosophical back-story, as it were, to this novel -- or if you’re interested in holistic or alternative health and medicine, then you might like to read chapter three of my thesis.

This one looks at the history and the points of convergence of the three great paradigm shifts (or post-structuralisms) of the twentieth century that form part of the discourse of bodies.For me, these are quantum physics (as a shift from the structuralism of Newtonian or classical science), post-structuralism (a shift from philosophical structuralism) and ecological spirituality (as a shift from monotheism or materialist atheism).

These cultural shifts all question the possibility of objective or value-free knowledge, and thus pose important questions not only for science, medicine and philosophy, but about the function of all forms of story-telling and history-making, all forms of evidence, all forms of ‘knowing’.

Chapter four – Thinking Beyond the Mind-Body Split: Thinking With the Heart -- continues this theme, by exploring several ways of challenging the mind/body split by conceptualising the body as an open, dynamic and flexible system inter-dependent with the mind.

This chapter draws on and explores ideas from ecological spiritual traditions (such as Buddhism and Breema), as well as from Silvan Tomkin’s Affect Theory, from psychoneuroimmunology, and from some recent findings in neurology about the role of emotions in decision making (such as the work of Antonio Damasio).

What I want to do in this chapter is explore some of the ways in which our bodies are intelligent and essential participants in the formation of our ideas, beliefs and knowledges, even (and often especially) when we think we are being most rational.

Finally, if you are interested in philosophy in general, then you might like to begin with (or go back to) Chapter two, on Post-structuralist Feminism and the Body.

Chapter two revisits and provides an overview of some of the late twentieth century concerns of post-structuralism, in particular post-structuralist feminism, regarding the relationship between bodies, language, power and knowledge.

This chapter looks, for instance, at the pervasiveness of dualistic thinking and the operation of the mind/body, nature/culture split within western philosophy. Post-structuralism has been a powerful form of exploration and critique of the effect of binary oppositions within culture and philosophy (the opposing of different traits or aspects, and the dominance and privileging of one over the other – the mind, culture, and reason for instance, over the body, nature, emotion).

However one of the chief difficulties for post-structuralism has been trying to rethink these dichotomies without simply reversing them.

This problem of flipping from the old way of seeing nature as predetermining, to seeing it as irrelevant (to seeing it as merely a passive surface for the inscription of culture) is still a significant and unresolved problem with much post-structuralism.

What I have tried to do in this thesis is to suggest some ways of understanding the nature and culture of embodiment that can help not just to reverse the old dichotomies, but to explode them.

You can click on these links to download thesis chapter 3, chapter 4 or chapter 2 as PDFs (and print them to read later if you like), or you can go to the thesis page at my website where you can read or download any parts or all of it.

[Please note, if you wish to reference this thesis the full citation is
Beth Spencer. The Body as Fiction / Fiction as a Way of Thinking: On Writing A (Short) Personal History of the Bra and its Contents. PhD Thesis. Australia: University of Ballarat, 2006. Available at http://www.bethspencer.com/body-as-fiction.html.]