Chapter 1

Body

Our bodies exist inexorably in the world, in the world of atoms among atoms, parts
among parts and wholes among wholes. Our bodies are of the stars. And when bodies
that moved and had being in the world cease to move they return to the world, to atoms,
to the stars, to the forces that create and destroy in the universe. Death is thus not
extinction but devolution of body to the world. It is a re-formation, a recycling of parts
from wholes. Death defines us as bodies. Death is the periodicity that propels the self.
We, as bodies, hurtle towards a conclusion that creates our narrative and that of our
progeny.

That our bodies exist as flesh that is unique and yet the same is understood, but still
resides as mystery in experience. This collocation of small parts, that grows and spreads
and takes on all the biological processes, is just the same but just as different from all
other bodies. And in that difference, in that stamp of the individual and the unique, lies
the sacredness of the body. It is a once-and-for-all-time collision of the unseen larger and
smaller forces that bring this unique pattern into being, expressed and given form as a
living substance that exists from the coming together of parts and the emergence of body
at birth.

That we are part of the universe, as bodies in the world, seems obvious but is not
always evident. We move as independent entities, stridently individual. But we are tied to
the earth and marked by forces unseen and perpetual. This links us to other bodies,
human and not human. We are tied to the earth like other objects, substance to substance.
Cause and effect, cycles of action and reaction, mold our bodies with other parts and
other wholes. From that instant of beginning these forces have held the stars and caused
them to move apart. They hold our bodies to this planet: cause us to fall as we walk, hold
us to ground. Our bodies are slaves to these forces, no matter how we defy them and try
to transcend them. Our biology is a servant to this physics. In the danger of existing as
body, in the danger of moving among other objects that come and go and fly with us and
against us, we find our mortality as bodies. The earth holds us as an insistent mother. We
who care to see ourselves apart from earth must return to her embrace now and when we
re-form with her.

In the resonance of the moment we exist here-and-now, with our breath as the rhythm
of life, our hearts beating in synchronicity, caught between the 'might' and the 'was'. In
place and in time: located and temporally emplaced as body; aware that we are body.
Being flesh. Bleeding like every other body that bleeds. Yet these moments are tiny parts
of a set of infinitesimal moments that form the historical matrix of being a human body.
This set formed in the evolution of body and of being that goes back to times beyond
memory, goes back to the times that are still written in our bodies. It emanates from eons
of survival whose force as instinct remains as a thread in the essence of being. We are
and always have been bodies-from-bodies, and bodies in bodies. Formed in a body:
dependent, independent and then dependent again.

As bodies this thread of a long and distant past remains immanent in being. It remains
as imminent as it is for non-human beings, with whom we share a past and a future. The
body with its needs, intakes, urges and expulsions, testifies to this thread. Not the least
part of this thread is the urge to procreate and to find sexual expression. Mating is body-
to-body exchange that is woven with this thread of evolutionary force. Its chemicals
surge as they did in ancestral bodies. They remain imminent in us and remind us that we
are but animals among other animals and bodies among other bodies. We are male and
female bodies, and sometimes other. Not so different, yet different. In that difference and
in that sameness all of gender is found. And in those bodies, there is desire: for male or
female or for both. Desire is driven and finds its ground in the body and its seed in the
mind. It finds its essence in an urge to nurture and reproduce, and also in a need for
heightened states of pleasure that are shared with the other as a narrative of fulfillment.

We can neither dispense with body nor forget body. We cannot do that because we
are body. We are flapping pieces of meat whose dispositions are ancient and deeply
rooted. Our fight-and-fight response, our territorialism, our need for touch, intimacy and
place confirm this embodiment and corporeality. It is the starting point for being human;
it is the core essence of being itself. We grow as bodies in an ever changing biological
shifting whose periodicity and course end only with death as a final signature to life. Our
prehension is forged in the flowing and sifting state of body from birth, to childhood, to
adolescence, to adulthood, to middle age, to older age to death. We see our bodies and the
bodies of others through this schema of ever-changing-body and fluidic relation to the
world. Through the cycle of birth, nurture and separation this schema is formed. Through
the signs of age inscribed in the body this schema is insistent, despite attempts to slow it
or subvert it.

The irony is, of course, that in being bodies, in being this mystery of life that begins
with earth and ends with earth, there is a lack of affinity with earth for the modern body,
the same earth that gave us being and sustains our being and cradles us in death. Bodies,
as countless herds with desires, take from earth as a detached process of
commodification. Not at all like the tribal ones that take and give back and protect and
venerate. The body must have its ecosystem. The body is a part of the earth and the earth

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a part of the body. But modernity has taken the body captive from the earth; made body
something other than body, taken it to the realm of ideas. The body is intrinsically
dependent on the ecosystem of the earth that formed it. The earth is womb. The earth
never ceases to be womb. Its sustenance is ever present and always changing.

There is body and there are representations of body. Such representations move the
notion of body away from the meat-and-sinew of the biological body umbilically
connected to earth, to representations that are images of desire, forms of positioning and
politics, and shapes of imagination. The biological body becomes subject to these
transcendent forms that shape and cut bodies to fit the social world of body-among-
bodies. Bodies are sheathed in these representations that suffuse and surround to such an
extent that we may believe that they are part of body. The biological body is the sexual
body. It is the body of needs. It is the body of eating and defecating, laughing, drinking
and farting. It is a body of biological certitude in the world. It is the body of touch and
feeling, intimacy and the texture of skin-on-skin. It is the substrate of existence, a
constant suspended between birth and death. Always changing but the same.

The bodies of representation are culturally lived and imagined bodies. Bodies of
appearance, approval and disapproval, infused with culture and mediated by law. This is
the signified body that is read as part of a larger script. That body then becomes a
mechanism built on intentional action in the world and reaction from the world of cultural
bodies, cultural objects and cultural ideas. It is the body created by and attached to the
referentiality of language. It is a body whose biology is delimited in discourse and
ascribed value in aesthetics. This body is the mask that lives in the realm of the
masquerade or the province of status, positioning and pretense. It is the performative
body of role and subtle gesture.

History attests to the pervasiveness of the represented body. Style, fashion, norms,
morals, class, gender, religion and politics contribute to the substance of this ascribed
body. So, this body is historically conditioned as much as it is culturally contingent. It is
the shroud of the biological body that is read and written on and stays attached all the
way to dusty death. Its structures are locked in consciousness and seep in to the crevices
of awareness and non-awareness, creep in with such attachment that they can be mistaken
for the biological body. The body becomes and is a covered body, covered for practicality
and covered for culture, even covered for belief and custom. This becomes the
normalized body of social control, so ascribed through clothes and in the fashion of
appearance. But this body is also a place of contestation and dispute, where ideologies
shape representations of body.

The represented body is most especially a gendered body. The biological body is the

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point of origin as a body of sex that through function and appearance is differentiated as
male, female or other. But it becomes captive to this pervasive represented body such that
the disposition of life in the world is not determined by the abilities from body but the
overlay of a represented body. In this way the body becomes gendered and in this
gendered liquid shroud that flows in and through body there are states of affordance and
dis-affordance that determine intentional action in the world. This represented body
becomes a performative body. The biological body is enlisted to perform gender. It
responds in a habituated process that is below awareness. It forms in that subtle territory
of learning to perform and to be in the world as gender.

But gender is not in the singular, just as body is not singular. The multi-polarities of
gender constitute a complex array of meanings of being in the world as a body with
gender and as a gendered body. This array precipitates ways that body can be in the
world with other bodies, as a society of bodies that perform actions and take parts,
occupy spaces and control levels of intimacy. The structures and sub-structures of the
world and of society are also suffused with gender that is put on, challenged but never
absent, not always a part of awareness but ever in consciousness.

Not only in gender are we constituted and reconstituted, as a reflexive process seen
and unseen, but also in the body as skin. Colour and shade, touch and distance, intimacy
and estrangement form out of skin emerge. And from this formation, which is closest to
the world, as barrier and connection, touch as primitive sentience moderates relations
with objects in the world, and with others. The touch of the handshake is the touch of the
contractual and the core of the obligational. The touch of the sexual is the touch of the
obligational and the reciprocal. It could be said that touch as an act of self-aware
connection can be read in the politics of gender and in the politics of oppression as much
as in the sensibilities of giving of self as acts for the other.

As sense, skin is felt with pleasure and pain, in graduations that are reciprocal to the
world and to the textures of earth, air and substance. Skin is also reciprocal to the touch
of the other, as giving, receiving, and communicating in nuances that are caught prior to
language and often not in language. Through skin the climate of the terrestrial and the
cultural is sensed with perceptivity. But skin is also the intermediary between the objects
of technology and the sinews and muscles that intentionally drive technology and are
driven by technology. The feel of the technology and the feel to the technology through
skin is the means of adjustment and engagement that enables the artistic and the
pragmatic, the poet and the rudimentary. Thus, if our bodies are that point of existence in
the world, the skin becomes that surface for engaging with the world and with the
technologies that have emerged out of desire to create control in the world.