The relationship between the body and the mind is a curious one. Very few of us are able to experience a reality without a body – hallucinogenic and deformative exceptions notwithstanding. And yet we insist on a separation between the two; a crude kind of meta-logic that imbues our post-religious reality with a highly moral bent. The body is the site of decay; it is the site of aging, of wear, of pain and excretion; and thus it cannot maintain a transcendental status. But even so, it is not possible to shelf the mind into an ideological position higher up the hierarchy without admitting that very much of what we are is tied intimately into an awkward position between the two.

Take sex for example. Some feminist critics have voiced the notion that the transcendental aspect of human existence is sexuality. On one hand, this seems absurd. How can something pleasurable, and (usually) private, replace in twenty-first century consciousness the void that products of infinite toil and mysticism like spectacular medieval cathedrals once filled? The distinction between public and private is mirrored here, the first as a site of the divine and the emancipatory, the second as a site of the banal and enclosed. Whilst the veneration of private life began in the conflagration of British industrialism at the site of Lockean liberalism, it was never carried to its perhaps anarchistic end, and in the transition from empire to welfare state, the ritual-rich worship of the polity substituted for the unabashed god-worship of earlier and more distant climes.

Yet on the other hand, the animus toward grand ideas, such as those which brought the historical category of modernism into contact with the ramifications of fascism and communism, leads us to the PoMo conclusion that localised potentials should precede general ones. In the evaluation of what is valuable to us, and not the generic “we”, there is of course the omnipresent criticism raised by Althusser that what our senses and sensibilities may show us is no less ideologically produced. To rely on feeling rather than logic, to substitute unadulterated intuition for alienated thought, is to engage in a new kind of surrender to the elements. And whilst the appeal of rational statements is, in the Foucauldian sense, conditioned by power, the blind and Baudelairean aesthetic escape which he lobbies for merely submits our alterity and discursive queerness (read: non-normativity) to a double bind. In sacrificing the prescience of our awareness, we may conduct a deconstructive operation on one deceptive mode of self-blinding, but in our biblical surrender we take a Kierkegaardian leap into a realm of nothingness, an all-too direct being that disappears the blank spaces and ambiguous middle terms upon which our very thought is built.

This is not to say that a localised appraisal of value is a purely sensate one. Far from it.  In taking lines of flight away from the reason of the state, one does not have to depart from logic, but rather travels towards it in concentric circles, maintaining in ultrasanity a paranormal force of rationality uncultured by the transparency-affixing pedagogies of the state. This is why you can read a Borges story and still enjoy it. But what Deleuze and Guattari touch upon that makes the connection to our bodies all the more tenuous and tenebrous is the desire-capturing framework that is foisted upon us. We do not know whether our affections toward the other are the product of an embeddedness, or of a free feeling. In some sense, they can never be separable. And it is with this deep contingency on property-venerating, extractive, and alienated heteronormativity that we must deal with our sexual relations.

This leaves the body in a complex place. Not only does it occupy a realm of opacity with regard to its interrelation with the non-body (technology, the autonomous other, the shape of consciousness), but it is also beholden to ideas that can never engender its free operation. In Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, the societal places of food and waste are reversed, such that a polite bourgeois evening activity involves sitting around the table with toilets. Through secrecy, food is sacralised as the inverse of decency; its consumption becomes a ritual that minimises the necessity of its requirement for bodily maintenance, whilst maximising the salience of its unpleasant and materially contingent mechanics. No doubt the development of waste taboos is biologically informed – those that disregard their structuration are less likely to survive – but it is not upon the shoulders of evolution alone that the total sum of society is built. We can learn from the contradictory, and yet adjacent places that sexuality and bodily waste inhabit that it is in the interest of impalpable institutions and state organisations to operationalise and multiply natural affects and reactions to mould out of them a specific and specifistic reality.

This is the reality in which the body is a site of hidden intrigue, of alluring counter-revelation, and terse microphysics of control. Nowhere else is there a more visceral example of the extent to which we participate in a regression to an arbitrary mean that the treatment of nudity. To strip naked on the pavement is an abomination, a crime. But to bare oneself in an art gallery might expose one to being mistaken for a sculpture. To wear more on the beach is an odd presupposition. But to wear less in a Westernised public swimming pool is a child-oriented offence.

Where is the place at which innocence jars with sexuality? The two are innately compatible. There are few acts, and even fewer modes of thought that are more simple and naïve than the sexual ones. In sex there is no calculation, unless you want there to be. There is an embrace of subtle and not-so-subtle streams of pleasure that runs aground whenever too much planning, indecision, and reserve come into play. I do not know of any three more adult attributes. There is, undoubtedly, the fact of the literal incompatibility (or perhaps ethical incommensurability) of children with sex, but so long as we do not take Foucault’s complete life works as a guide, it is surely more obvious that the notion of innocence is not in fact one we derive from juvenility. It is for tutelary reasons that we treat the injustices of children against other children as light, not for the inadmissibility of their nature. The cruelty of a bully who gets off on watching the pain in their victim’s eyes, or the glee in the heart of a young kleptomaniac at depriving someone of something deeply valued can attest to this.

In spite of its closure to the world of the legitimately valuable, the denigration of the body does confer a few inimical benefits. For one, the difference in identity from our personal identity our fleshy form instantiates necessitates a corollary separation between degradations in its condition and degradations of ourselves. The mentally unhealthy, and even the neurodiverse, are subject to a degree of discrimination that those with a broken arm or cancerous spleen are hardly privy to. There may be some unspoken beliefs about the persistence of pathologies that interferes here with the distinction – explaining why the permanently disabled may, if unassisted, navigate an interstitial realm – but the hiding of the body also brings about its public exposure, and indeed sanctification of its harm. The cult of the obscure has multiple dimensions.

In truth, contentions over exposure and acceptance raised by those concerned about the economy of objectification, which itself verges on the phenomenon of a societal illness, are contentions over the semiotic role of the body. In discussing the burqa, Žižek postulates that marginality of such disclosure brings about an intensification of sexual reality, and speaks to a heightened audacity for the mise en scène of desire. Yet here, for all his daguerrotypic inversion, he forgets in his analysis that which propels the crude, Western interpretation of the cultural logic at this site. One distances oneself from awareness and artificially interpolates the space between my body and the other’s to minimise the ability of the gaze to extract out of my being an inhumanity that is not mine. The keeping of one’s personal form close to one’s chest is not an act of valuation, but disvaluation: it is to say that the pleasure one gains from gazing upon me is founded upon knowledge of a thing which is not myself; a thing which is flesh and not body. The objectifying gaze decapitates; it transforms components of an impenetrable system such as myself into matter within the visual field suitable for spontaneous consumption. It is here that Baudrillardian semiocapitalism, and Szendy’s iconospherical reinterpretation, have something to say. As we tend toward a greater saturation of market exchange, and a paradoxical privatisation of our acommunal lives as evermore of ourselves is able to be traded, the body, given the strength and terminal insatiability of sexual desire, will necessarily become a commodity. Living amongst things and not spirits, owning items and not ourselves, the optics of our environment replicate themselves sequentially, and the contaminability of the untradeable shows itself. The body cannot, in truth, be possessed, no more than the mind can, but with our eyes we replicate the same process of withdrawal from the secular and transsubjective sphere we perform by picking a cob of corn and selling it. The other becomes ours through a lack of consciousness recognition.

Setting aside Sartre, advocating for a purely negatory depiction of the social implantation of the body fulfils only half of the role of critique. And in this redolent, prolix, truth-courting approach to the praxis, the solutions must come apart from the negation, rather than risk filiation by occurring before or after it. What is needed is not a separate method or an imperative, inane technical solution, but an imagination which lies beyond that which we know. Dider Anzieu co-opts Freud to describe a formation of the body that rests upon identification of the inside/outside distinction with the metonym of the skin. The body of the subject is thus not a natural formation, but a pre-conscious, psychoanalytically conditioned one. If we change the parameters by which our subjectivity is ascertained, so too does the meaning of our skin change. This is what Fanon spoke of when he remarked on blackness. Likewise, if the process of inheritance by which we become beholden to our body can be fragmented and dialectically reassembled with proximity to a novel reconfiguration of the subject/object distinction and the vivacious role within this, the denouement of the sacral mechanics of our material representation may be salubriously abolished.

It is Plato, and not advertising, which enslaves us. The double articulation of being-as-appearance and being-as-form produces for us a plenipotentiary distinction between public and private, artificial and real, unnatural and natural. In the unity of the persistence of essences and identity-forming repetitions with the chaos of inconsistent sites, the ontological imprinting of process onto the schema for existence establishes a comprehension of the body that reflects its systematism as well as its indurate fallibility. Caught between the contradictions of growth and decay, omnipresence and flow-state disappearance, mental dependency and independency, the body as a Heraclitean river makes itself into a zone of the improper and partial grasp. In nudity, its insensate aspect is revealed, and as it recedes into the horizon of perceptibility, this delineation is forever replicated through allusion, illusion, and change. It is the concept of access that drives us to inhibit paths to the body, and drives us away from its proper instantiation. Maybe it is time we reaffirm our opacity.   

Influences

Karl Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
Louis Althusser. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.
Catherine Malabou. Unconscious and Negativity (seminar series, European Graduate School).
Didier Anzieu. Skin-Ego.
Peter Szendy. Supermarket of the Visible: Toward an Economy of the Iconosphere.
Slavoj Žižek. How to Read Lacan.
Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition.
Gilles Deleuze. The Logic of Sense.
Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness.
Søren Kierkegaard. The Sickness unto Death.
Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation.
Plato. The Republic.
Lois McNay. Foucault: A Critical Introduction.
Laura Mulvey. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks.
Luis Buñuel. The Phantom of Liberty (film).
François Jullien. In Praise of Blandness.
François Jullien. The Impossible Nude.
Édouard Glissant. Poetics of Relation.

 

This essay was written in a partly satirical manner.