Body Week 6: Who am I? Ask my body.
Dec. 15th, 2004 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusSometimes at university I'd get down. I'd get 'nobody understands me' feelings, or 'I'm not like other people' feelings. Now, you might think that a quick trip to the student union bar to get hammered might have sorted this out, but that's because you don't understand me: I'm not like other people. Instead of heading downtown to the Red Lounge, I'd walk to the big Queen Mother Library -- it stayed open late into the night, a big rational blaze of light and books held together by calm Modernist architecture -- and check out psychology books. I was particularly interested in books about 'the creative personality' and books about the psychology of thin people; I figured my 'problems' -- and also my strengths -- we all tied up with being thin, being introverted, being creative. Rather than dissolving my differences in beer and banal universalist well-being at the Student Union, I wanted to find justifications for my particularities. I wanted to exaggerate and celebrate them. I was, quite possibly, a narcissist ponce and a silly prig.
The books worked. They made me feel better about... well, whoever I figured I was. Their studies of 'the creative personality' told me that it was quite normal for me to shun the Red Lounge. Creative people were, on the whole, introverts. They were 'desurgent', which meant they didn't get loud and excitable, but tended to stay pensive and rather melancholic. And they kept 'an internal locus of evaluation', which meant they measured their achievements by their own standards and didn't seem to care what the people around them thought. I loaded my slim frame with heavy books -- behaviourist psychology, humanist psychotherapy, and existentialist morality -- and staggered home to my hall of residence up on the hill. I became a devotee of existentialist-Marxist-spiritualist Erich Fromm, whose The Art of Loving and To Have or to Be became moral guidebooks for me.
Fromm wrote a lot about creativity. He identified four traits which he said should be nurtured: our capacity to be puzzled, our ability to concentrate, our capacity to accept conflict, and our willingness to be reborn every day. These messages made perfect sense to me. They meshed perfectly with the boho moralism of the lyrics of Ari Up of The Slits, another mentor, who described doped-up uncreative white people in new towns 'sniffing televisino or playing footballino' or declared 'difficult fun is hard to find, but empty fun is easy to find' or 'if you don't make eye-contact stepping down the street / You're one of them and you are safe, sleeping down the street'. It all meshed; the existential stuff meshed with the moral stuff, which meshed with the boho stuff, which meshed with the creativity literature by humanist psychologists like Baron, Rogers and Maslow. Maslow could have been describing my idealised image of Ari Up when he sketched the creative personality as 'spontaneous, expressive, effortless, innocent, unfrightened by the unknown or ambiguous, able to accept tentativeness and uncertainty, able to tolerate bipolarity, able to integrate opposites... a healthy, self-actualizing person.'
If the humanist psychologists of the creative personality made me feel better and focused me on how to become more creative, they tended to present a model of creativity as something rooted in the personality, but not necessarily in the body. William Sheldon was refreshingly different from these 1960s shrinks. For a start, he was a 1940s man. He was also a measurer and a collector, a maker of schemas, a medical doctor who made photographs of thousands of Yale students and classified them by body type, as an entomologist might classify his insect finds by the shape of the thorax and exoskeleton. Sheldon went further -- he linked human temperament to the buzz of the human nervous system, the crackle of synapses, the pumping of the digestive system, the ratio of skin to guts. In Sheldon's schema I was an ectomorph by body and a cerebrotonic by temperament. 'Ectomorph' meant that I was thin, flat-chested, delicate of build, young in appearance, tall, lightly muscled, stoop-shouldered, with a large brain. 'Cerebrotonic', the personality type associated with this build, meant that I was self-conscious, liked privacy, was introverted, inhibited, socially anxious, artistic, mentally intense, and emotionally restrained.
I recognised myself in that all right. I also recognised, between the lines, some of my musical heroes. Reading Sheldon's description of cerebrotonic ectomorphs, I saw familiar faces behind the weird behaviorist ratings. He'd describe a quiet, self-possessed subject as 'high-T', meaning that their skin had high textural quality, and I'd think of David Sylvian. He'd speculate that ectomorphs might be 'hyper-evolute' and I'd think of Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton, or remember that line about children 'in golden rays / They're the start of the coming race'. Yes, I was perhaps a bit of a glam prig.
Sheldon's work had been questioned since the 40s (partly no doubt because it seemed to undermine ideas about free will with a sort of biological determinism, and partly because of PC accusations that his body-measurements of thousands of students had been in some way unseemly or undignified). But his basic point seemed, intuitively, to make sense to me. It didn't trouble me at all to think that my personality was intimately connected to my body type, or that my 'soul' was not, in the end, separable from the shape of my skeleton.
The books worked. They made me feel better about... well, whoever I figured I was. Their studies of 'the creative personality' told me that it was quite normal for me to shun the Red Lounge. Creative people were, on the whole, introverts. They were 'desurgent', which meant they didn't get loud and excitable, but tended to stay pensive and rather melancholic. And they kept 'an internal locus of evaluation', which meant they measured their achievements by their own standards and didn't seem to care what the people around them thought. I loaded my slim frame with heavy books -- behaviourist psychology, humanist psychotherapy, and existentialist morality -- and staggered home to my hall of residence up on the hill. I became a devotee of existentialist-Marxist-spiritualist Erich Fromm, whose The Art of Loving and To Have or to Be became moral guidebooks for me.
Fromm wrote a lot about creativity. He identified four traits which he said should be nurtured: our capacity to be puzzled, our ability to concentrate, our capacity to accept conflict, and our willingness to be reborn every day. These messages made perfect sense to me. They meshed perfectly with the boho moralism of the lyrics of Ari Up of The Slits, another mentor, who described doped-up uncreative white people in new towns 'sniffing televisino or playing footballino' or declared 'difficult fun is hard to find, but empty fun is easy to find' or 'if you don't make eye-contact stepping down the street / You're one of them and you are safe, sleeping down the street'. It all meshed; the existential stuff meshed with the moral stuff, which meshed with the boho stuff, which meshed with the creativity literature by humanist psychologists like Baron, Rogers and Maslow. Maslow could have been describing my idealised image of Ari Up when he sketched the creative personality as 'spontaneous, expressive, effortless, innocent, unfrightened by the unknown or ambiguous, able to accept tentativeness and uncertainty, able to tolerate bipolarity, able to integrate opposites... a healthy, self-actualizing person.'
If the humanist psychologists of the creative personality made me feel better and focused me on how to become more creative, they tended to present a model of creativity as something rooted in the personality, but not necessarily in the body. William Sheldon was refreshingly different from these 1960s shrinks. For a start, he was a 1940s man. He was also a measurer and a collector, a maker of schemas, a medical doctor who made photographs of thousands of Yale students and classified them by body type, as an entomologist might classify his insect finds by the shape of the thorax and exoskeleton. Sheldon went further -- he linked human temperament to the buzz of the human nervous system, the crackle of synapses, the pumping of the digestive system, the ratio of skin to guts. In Sheldon's schema I was an ectomorph by body and a cerebrotonic by temperament. 'Ectomorph' meant that I was thin, flat-chested, delicate of build, young in appearance, tall, lightly muscled, stoop-shouldered, with a large brain. 'Cerebrotonic', the personality type associated with this build, meant that I was self-conscious, liked privacy, was introverted, inhibited, socially anxious, artistic, mentally intense, and emotionally restrained.
I recognised myself in that all right. I also recognised, between the lines, some of my musical heroes. Reading Sheldon's description of cerebrotonic ectomorphs, I saw familiar faces behind the weird behaviorist ratings. He'd describe a quiet, self-possessed subject as 'high-T', meaning that their skin had high textural quality, and I'd think of David Sylvian. He'd speculate that ectomorphs might be 'hyper-evolute' and I'd think of Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton, or remember that line about children 'in golden rays / They're the start of the coming race'. Yes, I was perhaps a bit of a glam prig.
Sheldon's work had been questioned since the 40s (partly no doubt because it seemed to undermine ideas about free will with a sort of biological determinism, and partly because of PC accusations that his body-measurements of thousands of students had been in some way unseemly or undignified). But his basic point seemed, intuitively, to make sense to me. It didn't trouble me at all to think that my personality was intimately connected to my body type, or that my 'soul' was not, in the end, separable from the shape of my skeleton.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 12:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 12:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 12:45 pm (UTC)Thanks for writing this. This whole series of posts has been really edifying, and urged me to examine myself in the same way. Also, to check out some of the authors mentioned.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 01:00 pm (UTC)No, these are some of the core ideas of my whole way of life I'm giving you here. The asides about being a 'prig' are just rhetoric, really. In fact, I'm probably a syncretist. I seem to manage to find connections between all the ideas that have ever appealed to me, and to reconcile their differences. But never entirely. For instance, the existentialist stuff and the creativity literature is all about emphasising individuality, but I find myself arguing for collectivity a lot when I'm justifying Japanese society to its detractors. But even that works at a certain level, because of the following paradox: I justify Japan's groupism by saying that Japan has a culture which is special and different from every other culture, and that no-one understands it. In other words, I use an individualist argument to justify a collectivist society. What a big cheat I am!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 01:11 pm (UTC)I find it interesting that you adapt these modes of thinking to incorporate belief changes, as opposed to just casting them down altogether and going with something entirely new. It's a bit like curving space to accommodate the existence of bodies, perhaps that's a crap metaphor. Still interesting though, as it differs from my own methods of movement.
It's probably some form of voyeurism (other than the standard livejournal kind, I mean), but I kind of wish everyone would make a body journal.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 01:16 pm (UTC)I very much agree. I don't think Suicide Girls (http://www.suicidegirls.com) does it. Too slick. We need people to format themselves more.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 01:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 07:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 02:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 02:43 pm (UTC)'A set of dispositions which generate practices and perceptions; original meaning: a habitual or typical condition, a state or appearance, particularly of the body. Bourdieu's: a combination of 1) disposition, 2) generative classificatory schemes.
1) disposition
a. it is "inside the heads" of actors
b. only exists in, through and because of the practices of actors and their interaction with each other and with the rest of their environment
c. signify the deportment, the manner and style in which actors 'carry themselves': stance, gait, gesture.
2) generative classificatory schemes
-- the practical taxonomies which . . . are at the heart of the generative schemes of habitus, are rooted in the body.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 12:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 02:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 02:39 pm (UTC)being the gender theory slut that i am, i want to ask how you see gender playing out in the ectomorph/cerebrotonic-->body type series of dichotomies (if 'dichotomies' is correct, it being too early for my brain to be fully on. obviously you are entering this corporeal fray situated in a male body. how has that altered your experience, do you think? what do you make of William Sheldon in light of the fact that his studies were limited to male bodies? (or maybe they weren't, and i'm not aware of it...?)
If the humanist psychologists of the creative personality made me feel better and focused me on how to become more creative, they tended to present a model of creativity as something rooted in the personality, but not necessarily in the body.
so how contingent is this on gender? for Sheldon, for you?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 03:11 pm (UTC)I tend to be against 'univeralism' (and even against 'nice' liberal universalisms like 'all men are created equal') in my thinking. That means that I subscribe to the idea that it's essential to situate all statements about, for instance, the body. Certainly I'm talking as a man. The language of Situatedness is called, by some, 'speaking Azza', because you always have to bracket everything with an admission of vested interests. ('Of course, you understand that here I'm speaking as a man...') The trouble with Situatedness, though, is that all of us have multiple identities. Although you can declare vested interests, you can never make a full disclosure. Do I speak 'as a man', do I speak 'as an ectomorph', do I speak 'as a disabled person', 'as an exile', etc etc? It gets very complex, and what tends to happen is that I pick and choose my affiliations according to what suits me at any given moment. If I'm being attacked, I can pose 'azza' victim. If I'm attacking, I can pose as someone invincibly strong. I become a sort of post-identity culture Zelig, a one-man culture which it's not nice to criticize because 'that's his personal culture, and you can't say it's wrong to be 'Momusian'. That's just how they do things in Momusland.'
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 05:06 pm (UTC)Creativity..
Date: 2004-12-15 04:26 pm (UTC)For Fromm creativity is the way to be liberated, to be human. It would be absurd to affix this to body types.
- n'n
Re: Creativity..
Date: 2004-12-15 04:31 pm (UTC)But the moment you started finding explanatory links between physiology and personality, wouldn't you also be in that region made scary by the Nazis' misuse of eugenics? Or does that perhaps give the Nazis' discredited science a longer shadow than it deserves? Perhaps we should talk about medieval theories of 'the humours' instead of always using Nazi eugenics as our cautionary template here?
Re: Creativity..
Date: 2004-12-15 04:39 pm (UTC)Interesting reading...
Does Being a Jock Make a Man Gay?
Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, March 1, 2001, at 11:24 AM PT
The theory that ring finger size is destiny has resurfaced. Faithful Chatterbox readers will recall that a year ago this column asked, "Does A Short Index Finger Make You Gay?" Chatterbox cited a study published in Nature (click here to read a press release on the findings) maintaining that lesbians tend to have ring fingers that are exceptionally long relative to their index fingers, apparently because their mothers had high levels of male hormones in the womb. A less intuitive finding was that gay men also tended to have long ring fingers, owing, again, to their mothers having high levels of male hormones in the womb, though this correlation was more tentative. Mark Breedlove, the Berkeley psychology professor who authored the study, used the occasion to suggest that gay men, far from being feminized men, were in fact hypermasculinized men. Chatterbox himself struck a rigorously neutral pose, then stated Chatterbox's Law of Biological Determinism: Conservatives believe that genes determine everything except homosexuality, while liberals believe that genes determine nothing except homosexuality.
The latest ring finger study comes from John Manning and Rogan Taylor of the University of Liverpool. It states that excellence in athletics correlates with a long ring finger. Interestingly, though, the press release makes no mention of Breedlove's belief that male hypermasculinity correlates with homosexuality. (Chatterbox was unable to access the paper itself, which was published in the January issue of Evolution and Human Behavior.) Neither do any of the news stories writing up the Liverpool study that have appeared in the British press. The reason, Chatterbox suspects, is that the Liverpool study actually names several prominent male soccer players who participated. Presumably they would not be amused by any speculation about their sexual orientation.
Re: Creativity..
Date: 2004-12-15 04:45 pm (UTC)H.
Re: Creativity..
Date: 2004-12-15 04:50 pm (UTC)Re: Creativity..
Date: 2004-12-15 04:50 pm (UTC)Are you implying that there is a true core to Eugenics? Perhaps we should talk about this more.
- n'n
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 04:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 05:05 pm (UTC)The one time my body has changed significantly was when I was on steroids for my eye problem, and I did notice a real change in my temperament. I became much more aggressive.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 05:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 05:34 pm (UTC)'I think "roid rage" is a load of bulldust. I have been taking the stuff for a few weeks now. I will break anyone's neck who says this is true. Just go and do your own thing and leave us alone. We are pumped and invincible. So look out or I will knock your block off you skinny little twerps.'
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 05:45 pm (UTC)What I meant was that it's more likely that steroids would exert two separate (but by no means unrelated) effects - an increase in body mass and a change in brain chemistry etc (aggression). This as opposed to steroids increasing body mass, and the increased body mass produces the aggression. (of course, teh aggression is down to the body, in terms of the steroids [or the testosterone produced by steroids??] affecting the brain chemistry as well as muscle mass.)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 05:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-16 05:35 am (UTC)And I just realized how much this’ll make people yawn, but I already typed it out. :/
In high school, I was very much into psychology as well. Though I never delved into existentialism. Just Salinger novels, like any other North American. However, I did learn a bit about spiritualities and religions, which were like candy for me.
But now I very much am not about those things. I always had a problem with the idea that your soul and body and brain were relatable or even knowable. That deeply annoyed me because it meant I couldn’t and wouldn’t change. Plus the MBTI always had this strange patronizing tone to it.
Yes, the Enlightenment Self and its capitalist spawn began to annoy me. A rational being with an inner core? Sounded more like a lightbulb than a human being. Plus these modernist renditions of man/objective, woman/subjective binaries didn’t allow for my human experience. Nïn began to annoy me for that reason. Did people in the ‘60’s even think there was such thing as gender? Thank god for Butler, that’s all I have to say.
But the thing I am so grateful for is that, no matter how much older gens hate us, it is very, very possible for kids of ‘my generation’ (born in the ‘80’s) to completely live off postmodern ideas such as: a dynamic self, made up of many changing and contradictory identities. Finally, recognizing the rhetoric and contingencies and politics of Other!
Anne Carson said something brilliant in The Paris Review I had a hard time articulating (on God):Ok, maybe it’s not très brilliant, but what the crux of what she’s saying here is we’re not creatures of reciprocity.
x
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 09:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 09:25 pm (UTC)'At times people with well-developed mesotonia can give the surface appearance of exceptional calmness and amiability. This is particularly true of the extreme mesomorphs of above average height who form a kind of mesomorphic royalty. They expect and get special treatment. Sheldon likened them to big cats who go around with their claws retracted, and only when provoked or in the midst of a crisis does their mesotonia show itself clearly.'
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 10:02 pm (UTC)However, when we factor into the mix one's genetic predispositions, upbringing and temperament, we'd get a much less predictable result.
To what degree phenotype determines one's personality (or is an outer expression of one's genetic predisposition) will ultimately be the task of geneticists, not psychologists. There may be a pattern there, but at this point it's just speculation.
But perhaps I'm waxing diminutively Mesomorphic.
W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 10:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-16 01:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-16 03:05 am (UTC)More of a Beerbohm man, anyway.
Back to my log,
W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-18 04:10 am (UTC)Whimsy, I tend to side with your insight that rigor is, as ever, elusive.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-18 04:24 am (UTC)W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-18 04:28 am (UTC)Enneagram
Date: 2004-12-15 10:39 pm (UTC)As a type 4, which is what you sound like as well, I realised as I read through the book why it was that I felt disconnected from my body but so enjoyed things like yoga that reconnected me to it; why I have more nostalgia for places and situations in my past than is probably good for me; why I am forever trying to figure out and express my identity through my clothes, poetry, pictures, etc.; why I can feel so small and separated from other people at one moment and yet ecstatically universal and attuned to the beauty of the world at the next; why I envy people's social ease or ability to express themselves even as I try to emulate them; and so on.
One other thing I found especially interesting was that, unlike many other "personality tests" that just tell you some things about yourself as you are, the Enneagram recognises that different people will be at more or less healthy stages within their personality type. So, similarly to what you mentioned about Fromm listing abilities that should be nurtured, the Enneagram (and this book in particular) gives people of each personality type good ways in which they can steer themselves.
Of everything I've read, this book has been one of the most helpful single sources I've come across in understanding who I am, why I work the way I do, and why others might not work the same way.
Re: Enneagram
Date: 2004-12-15 10:51 pm (UTC)Ooh no, I think I'm a Type 5 (the Investigator) with the moon in Type 7 (the Enthusiast)! (He said enthusiastically, after investigating.)
Re: Enneagram
Date: 2004-12-16 05:47 am (UTC)I'm a 4 w/5. My friend always makes fun of me for sporting an Enneagram book in my bookshelf because not only does it have the cringe-worthy title of The Wisdom of the Enneagram, but it also sports a flying dove on the cover. Very Enya.
Sheldon, Fromm, etc.
Date: 2004-12-15 10:56 pm (UTC)Never spent much time with Sheldon's work.....but am quite familiar with Fromm. Found him to be a precedent for a rather non-academic guy named Leo Bascalgia (if I remember correctly). L.B.'s work was often goofy and cheesy....but I have to admire that guy for teaching a University course in "Love". I loved most of the Post-Freudians (Jung, Reich, Fritz Perls, etc.) but found Sigmund a bit too rational in his search of the irrational (literally he often read like he wished to replace the irrational with the rational...which I found rather sad.
Anyway all this leads up to a recollection of one of the written jewels I remember from this reading period. Have you read anything by your fellow Scotsman, R.D. Laing? Most I've read from him is great.....but I especially recommend the short , lovely, loopy book, "Knots".
Momus have you read it yet? Any thoughts on it? Justin Lincoln
Re: Sheldon, Fromm, etc.
Date: 2004-12-15 11:05 pm (UTC)- Cooper saying in a preface to one of his books that any of us could die at any moment (I think he mentioned some gland exploding or something, but of course it was meant as an existential 'call to attention', a memento mori and a carpe diem).
- Antipsychiatry's basic contention that madness is a correct response to society's contradictions.
- The basic idea of the 'double bind' by which some people deliberately and remorselessly drive other people crazy by presenting them with lose-lose options. I used to use this as a weapon against my first girlfriend when she laid double binds on me.
Never read 'Knots', though.
Re: Sheldon, Fromm, etc.
Date: 2004-12-16 07:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-15 11:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-16 08:33 am (UTC)So what Mr. Sheldon is telling us is that you really can judge a book by it's cover!
Keep up the brilliant essays.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-16 05:42 pm (UTC)Bush: Mesomorph
Bin Laden: Ectomorph
A phenotype civil war?
Less divergent than my last post, but...
Date: 2004-12-17 04:43 pm (UTC)I thought for a moment and found myself with one possible way that he could argue that thesis, although I should probably watch the rest at some point and see what he actually says. It fits with what Mr. Gates said not to long ago, which everyone took as stupid and self centered, which it probably was, but I think was actually very likely true. He said that he saw a future where hardware was free or near free and software was not. I could see that happening, maybe not for the rest of this world life, but I do see it as a possibility that hardware capabilities will equal or surpass everything that 99.9999% of users could want or need from a processing power stand point, thus giving manufacturers time to perfect the production methods. But I don't see people reaching a plateau with what they want to try to make the computer do from a creative stand point.
Both of these say that at some point the construction will become irrelevant(perfected manufacturing techniques, or 3D virtual design of objects and computer production of objects), and at that point all that will matter is what you do with them/they do. The actual physical presence being ancillary, because they are easily reproduced, and common. At this point, or really several hours later when I'd finished not thinking about it, I saw the connection to this wonderful week of blogging you've been up to. People already are easily reproduced. We leave larger trails of searchable data in the world than ever before. We appear to value, when looking back, our actions and their effects much more than the physical thing that might have been involved. We have a whole class, or whatever word fits best, of intellectuals. We, as a culture, value the life led more than the thing doing the living, and for the same reasons as those tech users above predicted. Now I'm not devaluing the body by saying that we don't need it, I'm jest saying that when you point to someone and say "they're great" or "they're F'ing evil" you're talking about they're actions. In other words, the remarkable thing is by definition not the thing that is common and unremarkable, even if it is what makes the remarkable stuff possible.
This is just a little thought, that ,as per usual, I'm not even sure I agree with. But it seemed relevant to your theme week, so I thought I'd shove it in before that was over.
oh, and here's the link to the video on the off chance that someone reading this does not also read boingboing. http://www.iconic-turn.de/staticpages/index.php?page=StreamSterling