Body Week 1: The body in crisis

[imomus]

This week on Click Opera is 'body week'. Starting today I want to do seven continuous days of 'body blogging'. I want to do this because I notice a crisis developing around 'the body'... and in my actual body. A few weeks ago, in my Metaphysical Pub Quiz, I asked Click Opera readers 'Is your body going to seed because you're off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world?' Everybody who answered said yes. I said yes myself. I've become one of the men described in this alarming article: a man whose legs serve more often to prop up a laptop than to walk or run, a man who apparently risks permanent infertility because an information machine is heating his genitals. And, what's worse, a man who isn't particularly dismayed at that prospect, because he sees 'reproduction' as something he can do with his laptop rather than his testicles, with memes rather than with genes.



And you may ask yourself, 'Well, how did I get here?' How did I get to this sofa where I sit for hours at a time, crunching digital information, while my body rots and heats and atrophies and becomes, possibly, incapable of making other biological bodies? What demons can I blame for the fact that I don't even seem that worried about this? Well, I could round up all the usual suspects. Plato, Jesus Christ, St Paul, Descartes, the baddies of the Western Tradition, the people who said that reality was elsewhere, the body a prison, a source of corruption, a charnel house. The disembodiers, the splitters of body from mind, body from soul. Yes, I think I'll blame them again. And of course myself.

What are you going to do about it? I'm already doing something about it. The body is becoming more and more central as a subject for me... to blog about! At least, while lying immobile on my sofa, I am thinking thoughts about my body. It's a first step, isn't it? And it's not just lying on my sofa that I'm thinking these thoughts. I'm also sitting in theatre seats thinking them. Take last night. I went to the Sophiensaele and sat for more than two hours watching three contemporary dance pieces, Triple Bill by Christoph Winkler. To music by Devendra Banhart and Ekkehard Ehlers, the dancers revelled in their bodies, measured weight against lightness, worked up sweat, rolled on the ground, executed complex sequences of deft, odd gestures, seemed to make the body into a communication medium in its own right, seemed to invent from scratch an expressive language of gesture and movement which, though vague in meaning, was tremendously powerful precisely because the body is normally repressed and de-emphasised in our culture, and because of the power of sex: we cannot sit and watch beautiful bodies in motion without being moved sexually. The discipline of dance sets the body free. What the vague, visceral language of dance lacks in specific meanings it more than makes up for by the cathartic vindication of 'the return of the repressed'.



But what are you going to do about it with your body? Ah, good point. Well, let's start with little things. Recently, I find that I can be on my computer, in the information flow, yet be moving my body. In other words, instead of reading the screen and holding the laptop in my lap, I can get the machine to read texts to me while I walk about. More and more of the content I'm streaming comes in the form of 'radio' and 'video' rather than text on a page. Video still chains me to the screen and to the machine, but audio allows me to walk around while I listen. Personally, I think audio is the way forward. In fact, I'm thinking about suggesting to the folks at Design Observer that I appear as an 'audio only' blogger. Because what excites me about design is the fact that it's something embodied, something textural rather than textual. And it would be nice to make textural commentary on it, something equally embodied.



Bicycling and bathing. I'm also developing new hobbies, and putting the body right at the centre of them. For instance, if I'm travelling about the city I go by bicycle. I saw a cheap Vespa scooter the other day, and was tempted to buy it. But I've now got a hierarchy of criteria for modes of transport, and high up on the list is the chance to use your body, to be active. My bike demands physical input from me, so it's a superior form of transport to a scooter. From the moment I get on it I'm enjoying the direct connection between my body movements and the sensation of flying through the air. And this year has seen the arrival in my life of a delicious new hobby, a very bodily hobby: bathing. Public bathing. Bathing in Japan. Almost every day over the summer I went to a sento, onsen, rotenburo or spa somewhere. It was bliss embodied. My ambition this winter is to steep in a volcanic hot spring with the snow monkeys of Hokkaido. What kind of bliss beats bodily bliss?

Tomorrow: the complete and utter history of my sex life.

Comments

Daruma

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

You could always claim that your lack of motion is actually an enlightened Eastern thing, like the Bhodidarma meditating for so long in his cave that he lost the use of his legs. I think that's what I'd do (I still just about have the use of them, because I do a lot of walking, I'm still worried about my back, though).

[(Anonymous)]

"...a man who apparently risks permanent infertility because an information machine is heating my genitals."

- I find this problem can be solved by avoiding sites with erotic content.

"And, what's worse, a man who isn't particularly dismayed at that prospect, because he sees 'reproduction' as something he can do with his laptop rather than his testicles, with memes rather than with genes."

- How are they going to care for you in your old age?

"What kind of bliss beats bodily bliss?"

- Eh, spiritual bliss??

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'll be interested to see if all the people taking an anti-body line here are 'Anonymous'. That would make sense -- perhaps having a journal that people can visit (and even attack) is the online equivalent of being embodied. Those with journals are vested, invested, situated, social. Those without are somehow 'Platonic' -- they want to embody a 'truth' that transcends specificities.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Speaking of reproducing memes, what would you think of my adopting one of your children and doing some body-blogging of my own? I've been thinking along similar lines lately - that if I don't make a conscious effort to be aware of my body I lose it and end up feeling like a disembodied brain in a jar. I need to make sure I listen to it and celebrate it.

And with that, I think I'll go for a sauna at my local gym...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What, are you offering to have a child by me, take it away and just let me follow its development through a blog? Wow! It's an interesting idea...

[nickink.livejournal.com]

This touches a nerve with me. For about ten years I have gradually, incrementally, and finally irreversibly come to characterise my body as my enemy. I won't bore you with the details, but the mere mention of enjoying riding a bicycle made me wince with nostalgia and envy as, although a slim, medium-built average mid 30s guy by outward appearances, I am a torn wreck of twinging musculature and creaking bone underneath.

I am very much hoping tomorrow's entry will cheer me up.

[(Anonymous)]

Dear Nick,
I don't know why you pick on J.C. and Plato for being concerned with something "elsewhere". I suspect it's something of a marxist knee jerk, but it tells of misunderstanding. In the case of Jesus for example, in both the the canonised and apocryphal gospels he states that the Kingdom of Heaven is within. For Jesus, goodness (come now, we can agree that love and compassion and lack of anxiety are good, can't we?) can only be realised (literally) here, now and self-specifically (where else do things happen, after all?). The eschatological claims made of his teachings are an unfortunate result of both Jewish messianic expectation at the time and weak exegesis on the part of later Christian theologians.
Become children again, that's what he urged. Why? I leave that for you to work out, but I firmly believe that a little reflection on the disparity between Jesus' ideas and his interpretors' over the past two thousand years might persuade you that you are wrong to dismiss him so readily.

Warm regards,
Benjamin

[andypop.livejournal.com]

Been reading around this issue a lot. Theories about discourse-making-the-body (which it does) vs biology as immutable fact (which I don't go along with, but... well, there is a but attached to that). A certain classmate who is driving everybody up the wall wants to reduce everything to biology, to locate some essential identity in the body (as if a body is an unchanging, unchangeable thing). On the other hand, if a laptop cooks your bits, that is clearly a physical reality: but since laptops and their use are all part of the discourse, clearly cooked bits are still not "outside the text"...

[(Anonymous)]

nick, have you ever though about doing some yoga or aikido? it seems to stand to reason because of your appreciation for everything that is asian. i also plead guilty for neglecting my body over the last years in favour of philosophizing, drug experimenting, desktop publishing and virtual reality. especially when i meet claudia (from the sasha waltz company) or other dancers i feel a lack of self-awareness concerning my body. that's why "the body machine" is also one of my big topics right now and should be something to pay more attention for in 2005. that's why i am looking for someone to show me some simple yoga skills for beginners.
maybe we should start a support group here in berlin right now: rediscover your real flesh - aerobics for "head leg figures".
eRiC

looking forward to dirty details tomorrow

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, Sasha Waltz is a hero in my body-world. Sunday is my 'dance theme' day, and I'll be talking about her (and Claudia) there, as well as the role dance plays in my own work as Momus.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you are spot-on with the audio blogging concept. Provoked by that Hazel Markus link provided by sparkligbeatnic the other day, I went off on a similar line of thought. Because I'm always busy moving things around the screen in one application or another, it's impossible to keep up with the discourse going on in sites like this without having to stop work and read.

When I went to that Markus link, I started watching the video, and quickly realized, Hey! I don't have to watch this, I can just keep working while she talks into my ear! I guess this has nothing to do at all with freeing one's body from the screen though, it just allows for more simultaneous activity while sitting at it. Additionally, by textural commentary I don't think you meant someone simply reading their thoughts.

But I wonder what you would add to make it textural? I would like to propose the Audio Blog Challenge . Try one of this week's body entries in that embodied format!

-shane

[imomus.livejournal.com]

In the venerable tradition of 'dancing about architecture', I would like to sing about design. There are precedents: for instance, Jake Thackray (http://www.imomus.com/dailyphoto271202.html) used to sing a topical song about the news each week on TV when I was a kid.

Sun and steel

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Quoth Mishima:

"I came to understand that beauty and ethics are in fact one and the same thing. One cannot make a beautiful work of art unless one is beautiful oneself."

If you look closely, at the bottom of the picture above, it seems to say, "Strange and intriguing Scotsman."

Ignore me then!

[(Anonymous)]

A poem by Cummings seems apt:

plato told

him:he couldn't
believe it(jesus

told him;he
wouldn't believe
it)lao

tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or

not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn't believe it,no

sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him


We get it where we can, don't we, but ill thought out opinions ought surely to be kept to oneself - for dignity's sake if nothing else.

Re: Ignore me then!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hey, this is LiveJournal, what are you talking about?

We get it where can indeed. Here's another e.e.cummings poem:

O It's Nice To Get Up In,the slipshod mucous kiss
of her riant belly's fooling bore
--When The Sun Begins To(with a phrasing crease
of hot subliminal lips,as if a score
of youngest angels suddenly should stretch neat necks
just to see how always squirms
the skillful mystery of Hell)me suddenly

grips in chuckles of supreme sex.

In The Good Old Summer Time.

was just reading this today

[(Anonymous)]

The Online Body Breaks Out? Asence, Ghosts, Cyborgs, Gender, Polarity and Politics by Jonathan Marshall (http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue3/issue3_marshall.html)

i'm anonymous cos i don't have lj... another service

[augstone.livejournal.com]

do you find any connection between physical activity and creativity? i find just going for a long walk usually gets me all abuzz with new songs or stories, to the point where i've had to carry a dictaphone around with me for the past few years.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I find that ideas always flood in when I'm

a) Ironing
b) Walking
c) Taking a morning bath

The bath is almost spooky in its unfailing idea-midwifery. I will climb into it with a problem and climb out with three good solutions. (And cleaner.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh no, the moment Apple do a HUD wifi laptop that fits the Toyota Walker (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4082301.stm) I can kiss my body goodbye forever!

[(Anonymous)]

hilarious, hilarious, hilarious! :)))))))))))))
Momus you are a genius :))

btw who is the pretty young lady sharing a posh data breakfast with you?

cycling is good, very good! but while you pedal about berlin, spare a thought for poor ex stereolab singer (but then this comment does not make sense in any (any!) possible way, as berlin is far more civilized than london (yes, ok there are many other reasons why it does not make sense))

may I suggest climbing as a possible sport? I think you'd enjoy it;

yours
lsb (http://loscieccobianco.splinder.com) (the white sheik)

[(Anonymous)]

btw is it possible to access the archives?
I was looking for the recent post on tujiko noriko...
cheers :)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You can search Click Opera in a limited way from the Search Box on www.imomus.com (http://www.imomus.com).

By the way, hate to be the one to break this to you, but the blog you link to seems to have been deleted. Since we've already concluded in this comments thread that having a blog is a bit like having a body, that's a bit like saying 'Don't look now, but your body's gone!'

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

That robe can't possible be thick enough to protect your genitals. I need at least a pillow or a thick sweater placed on my lap before I can place my ibook there.

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

I must confess, when I saw the 'laptop on the lap leads to infertility' story, I also thought 'that's great news".

>Tomorrow: the complete and utter history of my sex life.

I assume you're joking, but please don't do a Bill Wyman style, notches -on -the bedpost diary. I dunno what it is, but there's something about the way you talk (and sing) about sex that brings out the total vicar in me!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm not joking, but it isn't exactly going to be a Dennis Cooper novel. Unfortunately.

[chuckm.livejournal.com]

Though I'm new to your blog, it was the audio aspect that first drew me in. I found your sound collages of Japan fascinating mini tours.

I too like the fact that, unlike text or images, audio allows you one of the few opportunities to get close to the mythological "multitasking" we've spent over a decade trying to attain.

Your emphasis of the word "texture" would be critical to pulling this off. Your keen sense of audio texture is what would make an audio blog so engaging -- what made the sound collages so engaging. I think another example of folks with an excellent ear for audio texture are the people who do This American Life (http://www.thislife.org/).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that, it's about time I did a Berlin Grump Diary or something!

[biseinen.livejournal.com]

I agree that audio is a lesser 'stationary' way to go about getting our info. My iPod has been a partial savior on this respect allowing me to listen to my various net streams of choice on the go daily while I'm on my bike or doing the cross-trainer at the gym. There's a handful of mostly independent developers apps out there today (Radiolover, iRecordMusic) which automate these daily tasks of recording scheduled streams - sorting them by date, artist, program, etc.- adding them to playlists that will auto-sync with your iPod every time is docked, a sort of TIVO for the iPod. I now need an 'efficient' text reader app for the textual part of it. :)

[jliv.livejournal.com]

I think I answered one of the questions in your metaphysical pub quiz with a joking reference to the fitness craze in the 80's, but it's an important point. Body dysmorphia and the subsequent rise of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia seem to be a product of this: a generalized detachment from the body in our culture. Straight women and gay men experience the brutality of "body fascism" more acutely. Ironically, this has given rise to a new subculture in the gay community around the "bear" aesthetic, which is an absolute rejection of this "fascism".
Andrew Sullivan made an interesting blog about the "bear" movement recently (http://www.andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20030802). In many regards it's a welcome development, but I also have a lot of "bear" friends with health issues who REALLY need to lose some weight. I prefer the middle ground: a healthy-looking body should be a reflection of a healthy mentality and lifestyle.

Is Derrida really dead?

[(Anonymous)]

By Rod Liddle. Spectator magazine (www.spectator.com).

Jacques Derrida, the famous French philosopher, is ‘dead’. But as there is no straightforward, one-to-one relationship between the signifier (‘dead’) and the thing signified (the termination or otherwise of the actual person, M. Derrida), we cannot be entirely sure what has happened. We are faced instead with an endless multiplicity of truths, a string of infinite possibilities. I suppose it is entirely up to the reader to decide. It would be logocentric of us all to assume that Jakki’s corporeal remains are in a state of decomposition simply because of the unbidden and puzzling presence, in our newspapers, of that signifier ‘dead’ in relation to the name ‘Jacques Derrida’ — a name which is, of course, itself merely a signifier bearing no straightforward relationship with the actual thing which we have come to call ‘Derrida’. The ‘Jacques Derrida’ which has ‘died’ was, or is, merely a refraction of a refraction of reality. So ‘Jacques Derrida’ might indeed be ‘dead’. After all, he was getting on a bit and had been suffering from that thing which we have come to call ‘cancer’. And then again, he might not be ‘dead’, whatever that is. Take your pick. We have to allow for the possibility that, contrary to the doctor’s notes, which are a refraction of reality again, and contrary to the lamentations of family and friends and admirers and the newspaper obits and the undertaker’s report, what has actually happened might well be this: somebody who isn’t ‘Jacques Derrida’ hasn’t ‘died’. Go on, write that headline.

Hell, it’s confusing stuff, isn’t it? I bet it wasn’t like this when a good old dependable British philosopher like Hume, or maybe Bertrand Russell, bit the dust. With them, one minute they were there, alive, without speech marks, and the next minute they were dead, devoid again of speech marks, and indeed breath. You know where you are with British philosophers and, up to a point, German philosophers. Except for Nietzsche, of course. And maybe Habermas. And Hegel.

Our problem comes, as ever, with the French. You think the ‘death’ of ‘Derrida’ is philosophically problematic? Just wait until Jacques Lacan dies. Believe me, we won’t know whether we’re coming or going. Lacan makes Derrida look like Paul Gascoigne.
The thing I always loved about Derrida was that all of those people on the Left who loved him never, ever read anything he wrote. This was about the only thing Derrida had in common with Marx: a huge fan club and a great lagoon of unreadness. University courses dedicated to their work; acre after acre of academic library stuffed to the gills with commentaries and revisions; thousands upon thousands of graduates pinning pictures of them on the mildewed walls of their bedsits. And only nine people in Europe actually read their published work. Well, maybe a few of your more intellectual Trots and commies read a couple of pages of Das Kapital or, more likely, the Communist Manifesto or Grundrisse and then, faced with Derrida, managed most of the preface to Of Grammatology. Then, through the conduit of helpful five-page readers and crib notes they would bandy about terms and concepts like the ‘negation of the negation’ (from Marx) and of course ‘différance’ (from Jakki) and start to Change The World. (Philosophers have hitherto attempted to explain the world: the point, however, is to change it. Remember?)

Is Derrida really dead?

[(Anonymous)]

Continued:

Reader: I read the stuff. Solely out of adolescent intellectual one-upmanship. There were many other more pleasurable things to be doing when you were 17. I wished I’d done them more and Derrida less, frankly. Although Derrida at least was interesting, from time to time. I’m not sure you can say the same thing of Marx.

Pleasingly, Derrida became championed by the leading proponents of late 1970s popular culture. He starred in a strange film during which he insisted that the person at whom the camera was pointing was not, actually, Jacques Derrida. I can’t remember the name of the film but I do recall that the soundtrack was not by Dmitri Tiomkin or even Ennio Morricone, but provided instead by a chap playing the drums on a roof to the accompaniment of the Radio Four Shipping News.

Derrida got into the charts, too. The briefly cool Welsh blue-eyed soul band Scritti Politti recorded a song called ‘Jacques Derrida’. Its first few lines went like this:

I’m in love with Jacques Derrida,
Read a page and know what I needta
Take apart
My baby’s heart.

And after a while Jacques began to spread his wings. There is only so far that you can go with lit. crit., after all. So he moved into architecture. There was a deconstructionist house which looked pretty weird and had all the central heating on the outside. Why had nobody thought of that before? Genius.

So that’s all the funny stuff, the stuff that makes us think the French are suckers where yer bloody intellectuals are concerned. But while the stuff for which Jacques Derrida will be remembered — the death of the author, the absence of such a thing as a single inviolable truth, and an embracing of the beautiful complexity of the linguistic process — may lead to apparent philosophical absurdities, occasional hilarity and the sort of moronic and predictable leader column in the Daily Telegraph which greeted his death, we should not give him up so lightly. Because at the heart of Derrida’s philosophy was a laudable commitment to making mischief and, more than this, a fervent belief in the notion of doubt, something which is intrinsic to our conception of democracy. Without doubt, there’s no democracy.

Nor was Jacques Derrida necessarily a man of the Left. Sure, along with his sulphurous Francophone fellow travellers — Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault — he considered himself a man of the Left. But by his own lights we are not obliged to take him at his word. Certainly there is nothing very left-wing about the people from whom Derrida drew his philosophical inspiration. Sigmund Freud was a bourgeois liberal. Friedrich Nietzsche, I think we have to concede, was somewhat right-of-centre. And Martin Heidegger, whom Derrida adored and was later forced to become an apologist for, cheerfully supported the Belgian Nazi party. I mean, come on, be honest. As mentors go, it’s hardly William Morris, Gramsci and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, is it?

At heart, Derrida was for the individual, and his brilliance was to question everything in which we believe. So, Jakki, rest in peace. If you are Jacques Derrida. And if you are dead.

[queersolitude.livejournal.com]

if you get a chance to see the traveling exhibit body worlds... do so.

bodyworlds.com

[honeychurch.livejournal.com]

I have a rather peculiar relationship with my body; well, it seems peculiar to me, but it's probably incredibly average. I was a heavier ("full-figured") girl from puberty until I was about 23 - I had a lot of trouble getting dates in college, although it did make me really, really learn to appreciate men who seemed to really love the female form (big boobs, small waist, big hips), because that was where I seemed to get a lot of my appreciation (especially from men older than me). At 22, I suddenly started losing a lot of weight for no clear reason, and by 24 I'd lost about 80 pounds, without explanation (medical or otherwise).

*Then* I developed an eating disorder. I've been dealing with bulimia now for a little over three years - it's mostly under control, although stress and a manic desire for self-control can trigger it. I'm on medication for it and my depression; the medication doesn't really help with my issues with my body, especially as I have a crap immune system, and always have had (nothing major, I will just catch any average virus that comes near).

So, in that way, I suppose, I'm more anti-body. I often dislike it. My breasts, my body (and now I'm remembering that 'Gilda' came on my iPod today), and all the issues that go with it are troublesome. I wish I could sleep less, eat less - my body is beyond my intellectual control. Blogging, even in the limited way that I do, is where I can have a space for thought and yet some thread of control (or, at least a sense that I could exercise that control).

On the other hand, my body has done some good things for me. In the past year, prior to my current relationship, I was at a point where I wanted more freedom with my body, and, even before that, I couldn't be happier with my sexual history. Is that a strange thing to say? It's something I was thinking about recently, especially as I'm probably going to do the very down-to-earth and pro-body thing of marrying and having a kid with this guy. I am completely happy for every insane thing I did, and it did a lot to affect the way I viewed myself and my sense of control. It wasn't just a simple case of needing someone else to tell me I was desireable (although it didn't hurt) - it was that, in those cases, I felt like I had complete agency over my body - that out-of-control that is really surrounded by a thread of control. (god, three hours of sleep and I'm not sure I'm making any sense)

I'm still attempting to reconcile mind and body on a more permanent basis. And, like all american women, I'm on a diet.

Tomorrow: the complete and utter history of my sex life.

oh dear.

[xenoglaux]

"Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds."

Everyday I take
time to pick up cold, hard, steel.
Then I put it down.

Beautiful post

[kingfox.livejournal.com]

There's an excellent rant or two in Microserfs (by Douglas Coupland) about geeks in different geographical regions discarding the body or respecting the body.

For over a decade, I've been an online junkie, and treated my body like utter garbage starting about eight years ago. A year or two ago I finally changed all that, it's done wonders for me. Living in an urban area where you're forced to walk, just spending an hour lifting during the day a few times a week, it all adds up to even more energy that can be funneled right back into the computer.