“the body is the plan”
-robert creeley
The body is not a metaphor, it is an ongoing project of nature and culture. Its job is to survive and acquire dimensions. To call any aggregate a “body,” means that it has reached the requisite shape of being both visible and semi-autonomous. A “body of culture” is a visible aggregate, as is a “body of knowledge.” These bodies are discrete, particular bodies of a culture, a knowledge. When speaking of “culture” and “knowledge,” we no longer speak of bodies; without the preposition, there is no body. The nonhuman bodies called “bodies” are related to the human body, but are not metaphors; they fold back and out of the human body but have a body-life of their own, distinct from the human and irreducible to it. The essay that follows is about various human bodies past, present, and future and some nonhuman bodies that have constituted themselves into a body, and can be called bodies without quotes.
The Human Body:
the biological machine that produces or receives consciousness, "the car that hatches and carries the soul" (Pessoa). The body's "I" and "self" deal directly with the production or reception of consciousness. "Self" and "I" are not the same thing: "I" is the brakes, "self" is the mirror where the "I" first recognizes itself and gets its instructions for regulating, producing or receiving consciousness. This jury leans to reception.
The Body Politic:
the body of the elector in the voting booth alone
the leading bodies: oligarchy, hierarchy, digibaronies
the representative body: feeble holograms
The Social Body:
patrimony (the museum)
body kulchur (the gym)
the budget body (the fraying rope)
the professor’s body (in loco parentis or just loco)
the idée-fixe body (Freud, Stalin & Co)
The Art Body:
body of art (architecture with art inside)
body art (the painted body, tattooed, inscribed)
the body in art (oracular collage)
art body-games (gymnastics, illusions, cadavres exquis)
the spectating body (the mannequin, the audience)
The Machine Body
the body of the machine (esthetics of the machine)
the machined body (the cosmetic remake)
the bio-cybernetic body (the six-million-dollar man woman)
the billion dollar body (an exercise)
the body on display (the autopsy, the executed prisoner corpses, “Bodies,” the show)
The Foreign Body
the alien body (sleeping with an other)
an alien body plus (the UFO cadaver in the army fridge)
alien in the body (Self)
The Cyberbody
the virtual body (avatars, AI agents, digi-fantasy bodies)
everybody’s body (the statistical body, the future body)
the mnemonic body (body as memory)
The Posthuman Human Body
the in vitro body (social dramas of engineered people)
the ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection body [ibid])
the cloned body (ibid)
The Body in New Orleans
a body of water (geo-body)
the body erotic (sweat)
the body interrupted (corpus interruptus; sex delinked from reproduction)
the literary body (bodies on writerly flats)
The Domestic Body
the body on the clothesline
the worker’s body
mother’s body
father’s body
the all-purpose oedipal body
the tired body
the body in the closet
The Body in Space
neil armstrong
icarus
lucifer
angels (constellations)
The Body in Transit
the motorized body
body passing through other bodies
the aging body
the body in pain
the sedated body
the morphing body
The Ethical Body
a body of laws
the well-behaved body
the instrument-of-justice body (the Terminator)
the penalized body (death row)
the soldier (war-body)
The Body Cosmic
body without borders (psychotropics)
body without organs (cosmic egg)
dissolving body (Jimmy Hoffa)
The Remembered Body
the eulogized body (epitaphs, memento moris, websites, funeral art)
the commemorated body (statues, man on horse, etc)
the preserved body (Lenin, Timothy Leary)
the body with a future (iconography)
the prone stone funerary body (knight history)
The text(ing) body (LLM, SMS)
The texting body is flat, a representation of text, the two-dimensional rendition of DNA. Third fourth & more dimensions develop faster and faster as the text body works overtime to return them to language, to the flat body. Even its verified three-dimensional form, the body’s main conscious work is texting: it texts its reproduction through communication in time, at the end of which it ceases text(ing) and becomes pre(text) language again. More dimensions.
This is a textual body.
