What is the body? To explore this provocation I start first with “normative” assumptions about bodies. Normative assumptions about “our” bodies could include the idea that bodies are static and predictable and are protected by and end at the skin. That taking care of one’s body is separate from how we care for our environments, water, food, and as such, we have complete control over what chemicals we consume either through eating, drinking, or through the skin. It is assumed that we have control over the state of our health and are responsible for the success or failures of treatments of diseases. In short, it might be assumed that a body is individual and bounded/encased by skin. Because I am chronically sick I might have a different understanding of the body. A body for me, chronically ill or not, is a porous and open entity that is affected by surroundings: other bodies human and nonhuman, chemicals, or the environment. Bodies (human and nonhuman) are inherently relational simply by existing in the environment and I think that chronically ill bodies can highlight these relations. Using a personal example, I am often surprised at my excessively embodied reactions to seemingly normal situations like attending a performance where there are lots of scents or randomly feeling nauseous at inopportune times (due to medication), or feeling exhausted by things that “shouldn’t” be exhausting.
Bodies are relational entities. They are affected and changed by their environments and subsequently, environments are changed by the bodies who inhabit them. In the text Staying with the Trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway sees human bodies as relational in order to propose her idea of “staying with the trouble.” “Staying with the trouble” is a relational response proposing a way to face the situation of our impending ecological catastrophe head-on with the recognition that “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations,…we become-with each other or not at all” (Haraway 4). To “become with” as Haraway states, means to take seriously the fact bodies are open and porous to the world and impact and are impacted by its environments, and because of this our survival depends on the survival of our environment. “Becoming with” is a metaphysical state grounded in connections to each other, that challenges notions of individuality and separation. Drawing from ideas that Haraway proposes about relationality and the body, Stacy Alaimo uses the term “trans-corporeality” in the text Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self to illustrate the ways in which the human is always intermeshed with the “more-than-human” world. Alaimo writes, “…by underscoring that trans indicates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality also opens up a mobile space that acknowledges that often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (Alaimo 2).
The body is always in a process of becoming. Instead of being stagnant, solid or stable the body, affected by its environment is always in flux. For Deleuze and Guattari in the text A Thousand Plateaus the process of “becoming” has two main components: 1) there is no origin or destination– one does not start at one thing and become something else, they are always in flux and 2) becoming is imperceptible because it is in between the past and the future and always moving between those two. The process of becoming is a process of removing the expected relationships of an element in order to open up process-based thinking which creates potentialities.
What does this mean for a dancing body? Or disabled dancing body? How might thinking of bodies as relational shift perceptions about care, caring for others, receiving care, or ideas around public and private health? This is especially important to me because in Riverside, CA where I live many people refuse to wear masks to limit the spread of COVID-19. Taking the body as relational and affected by other bodies kind of undoes assumptions about weak and strong immune systems or ideas that “good health” is a result of individual or moral choices. A body is a proof that we are moving with each other and responsible to care for each other.
Keke, I’m bummed because I wrote to you first, earlier, and like your work, like the body you project, it was there, and then disappeared into the world of digital memory. Here is what I remember, a re-membering of my previous thoughts: The keyboard, as a landscape. Hands hovering over a keyboard. Enter, delete, return, shift: the mundane maneuvers of computing, but suddenly existential philosophical ideas about time and motion. Imagining your body without picturing it, hovering, clacking, pressing, on the keyboard. Your breath and rhythms, implied by the images. The present and also past- legacy. Time collapsed, carrying the past into the present. The choreography of the page. Honoring culture and living with complex identities. The keyboard and the page, telling us about the body that is invisible but palpably present.
Keke,
I wish you could hear my screenreader performing this choreography! As I’m sure you know, a screenreader reads everything that’s put before it. And while the voice is mechanical, it is faithful to every keystroke. In the sections where you had repetitions of symbols: [][][][] etc. it spoke with such a rhythm, I felt movement happening. I gather that you create a visual pattern on the page, a kind of concrete poem,but for someone who reads with her ears, you also made a compelling and mysterious aural incantation.
When I look at this work and ask what it shows me about the body, I think it teaches me that the body is ancestral communal and community. It points up the distinctions between our personal bodies at our collective bodies. I feel called upon to make such an examination in my own life and my own practice. What do I know about my body in relationship to my culture and my history and indeed, to others? I feel also a strong pull towards the body as a technological phenomenon. not in the usual way — disability technologies or assistive devices more in a way in which the technology itself is our body embodying and in itself embodied.I feel positioned between two worlds when I look at this one of which asked me to straddle a post that is unknown to me and one of which that asked me to reach into a future that is equally unknown to me. In response to that I feel in my own body a deep call to go to the studio and try and realize the text in movement. I feel a deep slowing in myself, a sensing registering the nature of complex inquiry.
It would be interesting to explore the assumptions of bodily symmetry built into the design of a keyboard. I can imagine movements and haptic encounters with parts of the body not intended to interact with the keyboard, perhaps toes or lips or tongues or even less fine-grained haptic encounters with something like shoulders or knees.
The locus of “body” becomes the page and also can be shaped like a body. Ancestral knowledge and the phenomenon of us “stumbling upon it” (even that phrase – disabled led wandering/wonderment/calling?) that speaks to me as what’s already on the body is already on the body. What struck me most was the transference of written imagery to my brain and how my body remembered, divined, or interpreted the movement. A kind of telepathy – what the body knows? Traveling: never ceasing and the fluids inside us, the tatu on the skin, are keeping us intact, perhaps.
I keep lingering over the line “I, too, have home keys…” This piece is visually stunning and full of movement. I didn’t realize what was possible with our keyboards!
I appreciate the journey of discovering movement in inanimate objects, especially ones that require a response/ reaction from a body that can or cannot be in motion. One thing that really stood out for me was the connection with culture that was weaved into technology. Honestly, Im not sure I understand it so I would like to learn more from Pelenakeke’s perspective. Im curious and my imagination peaks about the spaces in between the strikes. What happens there? I’d also like to learn more about crip time.