1.Introduction32Corporeal real

First, corporeal realism has at its centre an ontologically stratified view of
the world which insists that the body and society exist as real things, that
cannot be dissolved into discourse, possessed of causally generative properties. Dealing with society first, while corporeal realism positions the body as
central to its concerns, it recognizes social structures as emergent phenomena. Society consists of economic classes, bureaucracies, legally sanctioned
roles, and social norms, for example, that contain properties that are fundamentally different from the desires and actions of embodied subjects. People
do not create anew the society in which they live, but confront it as a given
structure and are ‘always acting in a world of structural constraints and possibilities that they did not produce’ (Bhaskar, 1998: xvi). A nation’s language, demographic structure, housing stock, available sources of energy, and
levels of road congestion, for example, pre-exist each new generation and set
the parameters in which bodily development, action, and health/illness
occurs. This is why Margaret Archer (1995: 135) refers to society as a ‘vexatious fact’, a description of its facticity which draws on Comte’s recognition that the majority of actors are dead and Marx’s argument that thlegacy of past generations weighs heavily on the actions of the living. The
extant features of society do not simply include the structural conditions in
which embodied action occurs, but include cultural norms and values that
can potentially shape the behaviour of the generations that confront them.
If we accept the premise that humans possess a relatively weak instinctual
structure and are biologically ‘unfinished’ to a greater extent than other animals, it is possible to see how we are predisposed towards and require social
norms and structures to survive and prosper (Honneth and Joas, 1988). This
means that the body has to be conceptualized, in part, as a location for
societal structures.