body

ACT I

Thinking Through Flesh

I am not going to lay out a thesis that I will then try to argue and prove ( or disprove), finally coming to a tight and concise conclusion. I don't want to try to explain anything, just to pose a model for contemplation. I am proposing a more Hysterical reading/writing/thinking of a philosophy of the body, a mytho-poetic approach.

"...the function of myth was to reveal a dialectic of reciprocity between society and nature, between cleanliness and dirt, civil and savage, male and female, between the human and the monstrous." 1

My methods are erratic and unconventionaland I hope the capriciousness of my endeavor doesn't cost me with waning attention from the receiver of my oratory. By inditing the ideas I've gathered together in this essay

( Syn: ATTEMPT, COMPOSITION, EFFORT, TEST...all apply)

I'm not trying to usurp any pre-existing theory, philosophy, philology (?).2

There is no direct line, no correct lineage.

The daily life of one's embodied being thus slips naturally into the varied temporalities, textures, and depths of the discussion. Because there is no linear progression in the discussion, no aim in view, there is no need for speed and efficiency, for predictions, or for clockwork precision.3

"Nowadays, few academics engage in general theory-building -an enterprise that has been criticized as universalizing and 'totalizing'" 4

There is a dire need to pay attention to the dependence of universals on particulars, and of theory on bodily experience. Our contemporary practices, for the most part, do not build out of dwelling that involves our embodied and and social experience and the rhythms of phusis but build from the blueprints of constructed idealities. 5

I am writing, thinking, theorizing, Being as a woman. This is the body my psyche lives within and we are intimately entwined in this dance. Because of the long history attached to this gendered ( other ) body, this body that walks before Me, carrying my baggage in a labour of love, I must write from this place, space, time...

" Neitzsche rightly insisted we are always standing someplace and seeing from some where, and thus are always partial and selective thinkers." 6

We are ( I am ) always partial and selective Be-ers too. I make choices on where and how to move ( materially, emotionally...) through this world in order to provide for the opportunity of rich sensory experiences for my body, which in turn enriches my soul. These are my "perceptually guided actions" 7

Our materiality ( which includes history, race, gender, and so forth, but also the biology and evolutionary history of our bodies, and our dependence on the natural environment ) impinges on us - shapes, constrains, and empowers us - both as thinkers and knowers, and also as " practical", fleshly bodies. 8

I had a drean last night ( this is not fiction) that I was talking with Luce Irigaray about philosophy. I've been thinking so much . I can't remember anything that we were saying, just that I had this deep understanding within me, a sort of visceral KNOWING.

For the sake of wisdom we need to think with the weight of the earth, which means in part returning to the immediacy, spontaneity, and contradictions of ordinary embodied experience... 9

Theory. If it can't be shown, it can't be understood. Theory is a proposition, proven by demonstrable argument: evidence, proof. Evidence: demonstrable testimony, demonstration. We are already running into trouble. 10

The social implications and reality of theory are nothing outside of lived experience and the lived body. Somehow though, theory and philosophy developed in such a way as to exclude, deny and denounce the existance of corporeal experience, ignoring it's own integral roots within these experiences.

...in our long western historical search for, and contrl of the "why" of existence, we seem to have become blind in our theories ( from the Greek theoria, meaning "sight" ) to the simple fact of existence even to the earthly ground upon which we live. 11

We need to remain true to our embodied experience that shows us that the world is, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) explains in detail, not what I think but what I live through. We are not separate from the world-earth-home but are of it to the very depths of our sentient being. 12

In philosophy and theory the evolution of the discourse of the body has turned it into a semantic tool, a rhetoric (de)vice, rather than being recognized as the location and the "origin" of or knowledge of the world, not just the material world but also the Platonic world of Forms (ideas). 13

It seems to me that it is not only the ideality of the construction that allows a theory to be understood by all coming generations and to be handed down and reproduced with identical intersubjective meaning, as Edmund Husserl (1970, 37) says, but also the communality of embodied experience. As Merleau-Ponty (1982, 385-86) stresses, formal thought feeds on intuitive thought, and theory on embodied intersubjective experiences. Even the simplest axiom of geometry, for example, depends on notions of up and down, left and right, which refer directly to our lived bodies. 14

As the tool we use to communicate ideas, language has it's very roots in the lived body, not only because it is produced and emanates from the body, but that it probably came about out of the very need for survival of the body and the society within which the body lived. We have been the pro-grammars of our existance. One can see how integral the body is to language if we look at 'body language' and how it helps verbal/aural expression of ideas by poking and waving the space around the body, cocooning it in a visual performance of ideas.

"The primordial gathering of logos is attuned to, not separate from our bodily being in the world-earth-home." 15

...home. house. the site of domesticity. private, inside, dwelling...

We must get beyond the transcendental subject with it's anxieties about unity and certainty and beyond the linear, essentialized, self-certain identity (Cheney 1989, 123) to be even conscious of home as a crossroads of difference. 16

"I am calling this belonging place of transcience and play, this strategy of survival, "home". For many feminist theories, because the notion of "home" is so saturated with patriarchal domesticity, and because, moreover, the concept of home has been taken up by the rhetoric of the New Right, they argue it would be better to go some place else." 17

We know what we are and we see what we are not

My outside being lacks what my inside Being knows is true

ACT II

(Or) the anhilation of either/or

A Question of Property

The Idea of Ideas, alone, is itself in itself. Confusing signified, signifier, referent, Idea holds nothing outside itself. It neither indicates nor indexes anything other than itself, however akin. And needs no heterogeneous vehicle, no foreign receptacle, in order to signify and represent itself. 18

"No brilliance exists outside of the ability of human beings to grasp the brilliance and move with it...No [human] thought is understood outside of humanities interaction" 19

I mourn the futility of Theoria. Can't help but feel that it's all just ether in The End.

"What is the point of presenting the human condition in a language separate from the human experience: passion, emotion, and character." 20

" Letting thought and feeling interplay is an important way to open ourselves to mystery, magic, and the wonder of difference, for passion (rausch) is a rupture in our mood." 21

I am not aiming at idea(l)s of Universals or Objectivity, but for a Pontian intersubjectivity. I will try not to make any sweeping, speculative extrapolations. the Matrix/Labrinth is complex enough. I am enmeshed in the tapestry that is my life, my ideas. the lines of text that stand out for me are the threads that weave my history

HYSTERY/HYSTERIA

I also don't assume to know what I'm talking about. I am

GATHERING, INGESTING, CONSUMING

As a part of my rejection of hierarchical,dualistic,linear order I am chosing to learn and express in a more cyclic and osmotic manner. Each time I revisit and idea it grows in mening. for me.

And if there appears a pretentious use of Words, I hope, wish, pr(a/e)y not to get mired in a bog of sticky vernaculicity (?). I want to find a way to use the master's tools in a manner He never intended.

As the tools get more complex, so too the houses they build.

Every manifestation of a force in any form whatever is to be regarded as its speech ... everything in the universe speaks... If speech is strength, that is because it creates a bond of coming-and-going which generates movement and rhythm and therefore life and action

-Ogotemmeli, a Dogon elder (in Minh-ha 1989, 127-28) 22

Looking at the origins of philosophy and the course it took in western metaphysical thinking we can see a long history of the denigration and denial of the body, from Plato's portrayal of the body as a prison for the soul, to the idea of the "threat posed by the perishable body [which] helped provoke not only Descartes's metaphysical, but his scientific work". 23

"The prime human task, the route to the higher type of life, is to move beyond nature, to rise above ties to the lower realm and to ascend to the heights of reason and contemplation of the Form of the Good". 24

These kinds of nothions of the body have made it possible to vies it as a commodity, and as such, can be bought and sold with irreverence to its intrinsic value as a whole, as a being that carries its own heritag of inscriptions. In western scientific thought, with research into genetic engineering and it's revenue generating potential, the body has instrumental value or none at all. Dr. Robert Hayes, president of the 16th International Congress of Genetics said during a lecture:

For three thousand years at least, a majority of people have considered that human beings were special, were magic. It's the Judeao-Christian view of man. What the ability to manipulate genes should indicate to people is the very deep extent to which we are biological machines. The traditional view is built on the foundation that life is sacred.... Well not anymore. It's no longer possible to live by the idea that there is something special, unique, even sacred about living organisms. 25

The atomism of Descartes describes the body as nothing more in-and-of itself than a machine, a lifeless automaton of biological gears and motors, "a plenum of passive matter driven by mechanical forces. This is a dead universe, devoid of subjectivity and intention." 26

A machine is made to be controlled, and knowledge if its operation is the means to power over it. Through knowledge of the machine of the body, even death itself might be controlled. 27

Perhaps philosophy has tended to favour reason over the body in accounts of what it is te be human because to recognize the body as " the corporeal ground of our intelligence" (Rich 1986) we necessarily encounter the fact of our mortality. 28

Human beings have a special relationship with passing -away. What would seem to mark us as human more fundamentally than reason is that, as Heidegger (1962) says "Being is an issue" for us. In our more authentic, fuller moments, we wonder about existance as a whole, questioning its origins and meaning, and are perhaps struck by the simple fact that it is. Everything passes away, but passing-away for us is a crucial existential issue of owr own being. Although for the most part we hide the facticity of our being, the feeling consciousness of our mortality is an essential characteristic of being human. 29

A Question of Property

the substantial reality is the need for fresh water to drink and clean air to breathe

...and maybe the occasional backrub

ACT III

Plutonia's Repubic

-Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.... they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave....would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? 31

" Once founded and named, the power of truth will enslave the instrument that established its authority" 32

I am struggling to understand when I realize ( real eyes/ true sight) that the expectation

(Her Swelling belly pulls the mother-to-be back to the mystery of origins, and she stands heavy with this mystery) 33

to understand is what hinders me...

Provided They Have a Head, Turned in the Right

Direction

In Plato's cave, men-sex unspecified- gaze at shadows projected opposite them on the back of the cave. The fire behind produces nothing but shadows and gazes fascinated by shadows. And whether it be through their own eyes or through the eyes of their companions, the men can see only the projection of the light of the fire striking "objects", "figures", that are always already manufactured. Behind. 34

They don't see themselves, only the shadows of themselves, and name them as Other. They have no knowledge of themselves. Their role in this shadow-puppet show isn't known to themselves...or is it? They are fetal gods, alone bearing witness within the womb-tomb-cave.

"Do you think they" - any more than ourselves-? - " have seen anything of themselves and of one another, except the shadows which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?" Never have these "prisoners" envisaged anything but the reflections, shadows, fancies of objects that are (always already) made, represented-reproduced (always already) behind them. 35

The path of philosophy is the reversed tunnel (up and out) of the womb-tomb-cave -mother's body) towards the world of three dimentional substance, the Forms.

The sound is soothing

reminds me of my mother's warm womb

cradled baby

reminds me of home

It makes me want to cough (up)

and out I slide

heavy breath caught in my chest

Thumping heart

apart from home

The Avoidance of (Masculine) Hysteria

A Hypnotic Method

How can these prisoners, for whom nothing exists but fakes, but words associated with projected shadows, how can these men hallucinated by voices whose tricks of reproduction-production they cannot hear, fascinated by spectacles whose mimetic techniques they are incapable of evaluating, how can these madmen, these children deprived of all education be freed of their chains and cured of their insanity? And, again, what forms will that insanity take before the men escape the apaideusia that keeps them in the cave, ignorant of the difference between true and false? 36

They are the puppeteers, manipulating their shadows to interact in the world

of (dark) forms. 36.5

Consciously?

Unconsciously?

And suppose further that the prison

(womb-tomb-cave-body)

had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow? 37

Wouldn't they first hear the voices as the sound passed their ears on the way to, before hitting the back of the cave? How would they explain these ghostly voices, the disembodied sounds? Would they not hear the sounds moments before the echo and assume some extra-sensory perception? They then would (already) have reason to suspect something more than the limits of the womb-tomb-cave-body-prison... Given time they might have found their own "natural" way up and out. without the philosopher King. What keeps them chained anyways? Who or what chained them in the first place? Their bodies...?

...the lovers of knowledge are conscious that their souls when philosophy receives them, are simply fastened and glued to their bodies: the soul is only able to view existance through the bars of a prison, and not in her own nature; she is wallowing in the mire of all ignorance; and philosophy, seeing the terrible nature of her confinement, and that the captive through desire is led to conspire in her own captivity. 38

Did any prison ever give such lovely delights as this? Would that I could remain shackled forever in this cave. My eyes are not blinded by the light, they are languishing in the darkness. A darkness that is softly empty, waiting, containing (yet not) potential.This all encompassing Being of darkness. I am not afraid of the dark

ACT IV

phusics of multiplicity

This intersticial flesh that is the boundary between (threshold, joining and separatating)... between what? Inside and Outside? This (gendered) flesh that has so informed Me.

" We make room for difference by creating limits, by creating boundaries, points of departure from which to act, from which to open human and non-human difference." 39

What happens when the boundaries become safety nets, gates of inclusion and exclusion?

The wonder that generates respect for otherness is, indeed, an experience of difference, but unlike wonder in the context of metaphysical desire for sameness that motivates the cancellation of difference, wonder freed from metaphysics is fundamentally an openness to the gifts of becoming that lets the difference be. Difference is not a contradiction between spirit and nature, or self and other. There are differences grasped both between and within entities, as Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989, 90) says. 40

I wonder/wonder beautiful paths of reverie. I get clues in the way the sun shines and the rain falls and hits the grass, but alas, they never give fully of their secrets.

For the love of wisdom (philo-sophia -- the guardian of logos), for the sake of earth wisdom, we need a moment of earthly fluidity and vulnerability in our thinking. We cannot weave ourselves into nearness by engaging solely in rational, calculative thinking that has ignored its own motives and desires and has pretended to be objective. 41

I envision a paradox of sorts...Liminal Ground...