Semantics and the Body

Feeling Bodies: Embodying Psychology

“…An alternative epistemology that places as much weight upon feeling as upon language is provided by Ruthrof (1997), who begins with accounts of meaning that locate its emergence within language (and, indeed, other symbol systems). His account accepts the great significance of language and understands that differences between signs (rather than their intrinsic features) are the basis of their meaning.…”

“…Likewise, all may be qualified in ways that reflect the temporal organisation of their enactment: we might mistrust a written argument because the author moves too fast, feel impatient because writing seems ponderous, feel breathless as a detective novel races toward its conclusion and so on. Thus, any meaningful claim, statement or text is already laden with feeling, precisely because this is how all meaning is coconstituted (Ruthrof, 1997). Repeated articulations between feelings and their associated discursive practices and positions, contingently organised and interpellated by social relations, then develop the immanent and habitual organisations of feeling that characterise believing.…”

“…Chapter 3 described how somatic repertoires associated with sociological distinctions such as class and gender can produce broadly consistent organisations of feeling which then get cross-cut with more local influences such as those induced within specific work or leisure situations. Indeed, the great majority of feelings tend to smoothly align, each with the other, just as they mostly 'run together' with both the signs and symbols we encounter (Ruthrof, 1997) and the 'synaesthetically predictable' (Merleau-Ponty, 2002) textures of the surfaces and objects we occupy and use.…”

Affecting qualitative health psychology

“…Affective qualitative health research requires an epistemological stance that can allow these embodied phenomena to become meaningful in their own right, rather than only by [p.84] refraction through the linguistic. An epistemology that might facilitate this is provided by Ruthrof (1997), who begins with accounts of meaning that locate its emergence within language (and, indeed, other symbol systems). He accepts the significance of language, and understands that differences between signs (rather than their intrinsic features) are the basis of their meaning.…”

Feeling and the Filmed Body: Judy Garland and the Kinesics of Suffering

“…10 Although clearly we cannot speak about the body except through linguistic discourse, Ruthrof reminds us that discursive meaning itself has "ultimately to do with the body" because "linguistic expressions mean anything or nothing at all unless they are activated by haptic, visual, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, and other non-verba l signs." 11 In short, bodies never are "simple objects of thought," but complex corporeal sources as well as manifestations of many levels of meaning. Writing about the body is therefore "intersemiotic," in that linguistic expressions whose meaning originates so often in the body's sensory interaction with its environments are used in turn to translate the represented and perceived body into words.…”