Bodies in Motion: Part I of II

I've been reading FLESH AND STONE: The Body and City in Western Civilization by Richard Sennett (Norton, 1994), which I suspect is responsible for my focus over the last week on the idea that right-wing propaganda operates by placing the body politic in jeopardy under the sign of liberals and terrorists, and at the same time promises to defend and protect the body under the sign of strong, unflinching moral leadership.

Sennett, a colleague of Michel Foucault's, with whom he began the book back in the 70s, examines in FLESH AND STONE how ideas about of the human body are reflected in the built environments of cities and the behaviors and perceptions of its citizens from ancient Athens to modern New York with stops along the way in Rome, Venice, Paris, and London. It's an extraordinarily rich work, deep in scope, scholarly erudition and insight.

I'm in the third section where Sennett is making the case that "A new master image of the body took form" through the discoveries William Harvey made about the circulation of the blood, that "Harvey launched a scientific revolution in the understanding of the body: its structure, its healthy state, and its relation to the soul" (page 255).

Harvey's discovery in the 1630s that blood flowing through the circulatory system is driven by mechanical means (the heart), and not because of the blood's heat (the ancient Greek notion which remained current until Harvey), were also responsible for "new understandings of the body that coincided with the birth of modern capitalism and [brought] about the great social transformation we call individualism. The modern individual is, above all else, a mobile human being" (page 255-56).

Adam Smith took Harvey's insight into the connection between freely circulating blood and health and used it to claim, according to Sennett, that the "free market of labor and goods operat[es] much like freely circulating blood within the body [and brought] similar life giving consequences" (page 256) Sennett goes on to say that a consequence of human mobility in the service of economic circulation promoting human beings increasingly desensitized to their environment, resulting in cities "which have succumbed to the dominant value of circulation" (page 256). (On this last point, I'm reminded of Robert Moses' destruction of the social fabric of neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens in order to move traffic around the New York metropolis.)

The idea of freely circulating blood as promoter of good health was reflected then and now in urban designs where new "arteries" and "veins" were constructed for the free circulation of people and goods and waste, e.g., new boulevards, underground sewer systems, etc. Similarly, around the same time human skin was discovered to be instrumental in the circulation of air in the body. This resulted in more frequent bathing to open pores clotted with dirt, the loosening of clothing, and in terms of cities, the introduction of "lungs" in the form of parks and the paving and cleaning of city streets.

What particularly strikes me in Sennett's discussion is that the foundational text of neo-liberal free-marketeers, Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" is based on an analogy with the free circulation of blood and its healthful effects. Every neo-liberal economist assents to this powerful mostly unexamined analogy that equates circulation with health. However, the circulation of goods and labor since Smith's time have, in fact, yielded mixed results insofar as the health of people, their cities, and ultimately the earth and its atmosphere. Recently, the supreme value of circulation has yielded the near instant global distribution of deadly local germs on international jet passenger flights.

Also destructive has been the forced circulation of the neo-liberal market orthodoxy by the United States through its organs the IMF and World Bank which have forced Southern and Eastern peoples to swallow the bitter pill of neo-liberal economic reform or be denied life-giving flows of foreign exchange.

Sennett notes that Harvey's discovery also began a medical revolution, a "medical revolution [which] seemed to have substituted health for morality as a standard of human happiness among those social engineers by motion and circulation" (ibid).

Here is the intersection where I locate the primary (and contradictory) program of the reactionary right: the (claimed) promotion of the free circulation of goods and labor on the one hand, and a tightly regulated circulation of bodies and desires on the other. In short, the free circulation of people in pursuit of work is deemed critical to a healthy society, while the social circulation of different people with different desires is deemed unhealthy, immoral, unclean.