Von der Inkorporierung und Verkörperung des Sozialen zur Somatisierung der Umwelt: Posthumanistische überlegungen zum biosozialen Subjekt

Abstract

With the recognition of relational thinking, methodologies approaching spaces as containers were discarded and reconfigured in social geography. However, there are other "containers" still present in these debates - and present as part of the relations in space - such as the "black box" of the human body. In order to advance the opening of the Black Box of the Body (Guthman, 2012), the article discusses social geographical thinking concerning materiality after the Cultural Turn, which concentrates on a post-dualist and thus a post-humanist concept of materiality. The ensuing extension of the epistemological critique of dualistic thinking as part of the cultural turn by an ontological critique refers to radical-relational conceptions of NatureCultures (Haraway) and Posthumanist Performativities (Barad), which comprise discursive as well as material power relations. These conceptions neither romanticize nature (or even interpret it in a reactionary way) nor inflate culture. Rather, such a perspective allows to examine the materiality and intra-activity of social environmental conditions at the micro-level of the embodied subject, considering that matter itself acts performatively and even how such performances are enacted. This article concentrates on theoretical crises within social geography in order to discuss the geography of social crises using the example of environmental injustice and the somatization of the environment with respect to food and health. By extending the "surface"-view on embodied subjects as being socio-culturally encoded and discursively normalized, chemical-biological metabolic processes are also addressed. Therefore, the body is understood as the place where social crises, structures of inequality and discursive categories materialize.