Conrad and Masculinity

68 Conrad and Masculinity
it, to dominate it by reducing it to the mind’s idealizing categories’. 5
But Foucault emphatically denies the notion that it has been
repressed:
First of all one must set aside the widely held thesis that power, in
our bourgeois, capitalist, societies has denied the reality of the body
in favour of the soul, consciousness, ideality. In fact nothing is
more material, physical, corporal than the exercise of power. 6
Stallybrass and White regard the body as particularly important to the
ordering of social meaning. They demonstrate that ‘the high/low
opposition in each of our four symbolic domains – psychic forms, the
human body, geographical space and the social order – is a fundamental
basis to mechanisms of ordering and sense-making in
European cultures’ (PPT, 3) and that ‘discourses about the body have
a privileged role, for transcodings between different levels and sectors
of social and psychic reality are effected through the intensifying grid
of the body’ (PPT, 26). Any attempt at a generalized theoretical
synthesis or reconciliation of such theories may be of limited usefulness.
To answer questions about meaning and the body one has to be
specific: about historical context, about which bodies, which
discourses. For example, anthropology, unlike sociology, has paid
great attention to the body ever since the nineteenth century, partly
because anthropology is generally concerned with other societies, and
the body of the Other is more readily given meaning. 7 A comparable
process can be detected in the discourses of Western literature, art,
medicine, science and law: the Other bodies of women, the working
class, the ‘degenerate’, the criminal, have been the subject of attention
but the bodily existence of the dominant middle-class and upper-class
white male has been elided in favour of an emphasis on the power of
his mind and will.
Thus the body tends to occupy a paradoxical situation in relation to
meaning. It seems that desire and power in various ways are always
trying to lay hold of the body, to place meaning upon it, or to extract
meaning from it, yet in philosophical terms the body in some way
seems to elude discursive meaning. There are two obvious reasons for
this. The first is that attempts to consider the relation of body and text
take place mostly within texts (for an alternative, one might need to
turn to performance art). The second is that the writer always has a
body, which is always doing things other than writing. One’s own
body is too close to ignore but also too close to see clearly: as