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

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?)