The starting point for Bernadette Weigenstien’s ‘Getting Under the Skin’ was her research into the representation of AIDS in European media. In this interface between the body, medical technology and media technology, the body opens up as site for meaning making not in a way that it stands for ‘meaning’ but rather in a way that it ‘become’ it. Her research gave way to study body discourse with an awareness that it had ‘literally and obviously gotten under the surface of the skin’.
‘Making Room for the Body’ introduces body criticism through some of the key concepts that emerged in movement from modernity to high modernity and the concurrent ideas that emerged in the fields of cognitive sciences, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, feminist theory media and medical technologies. Central to this was how the body became an object of anatomical practices during early modernity. Contemporary medical technologies of imaging that specifically ‘intervene’ into the female body; new reproductive technologies and the ultrasounds; provide a whole new way to imagine the body as a mediated space that opens up through skin, orifices, incisions, nips, cuts and tuck. Meaning making in that sense cannot be a process of situating the body within these processes but rather in the moment of the body’s embodying of processes, time, technologies and the world.
Holism, an interrelation of all body parts-in- pieces as defined by Wegenstein, incorporates the discourse of fragmentation initiated during early modernity. It becomes a celebratory moment in terms of the practices that define the body and its being-ness. It is moving beyond fragmentation and articulating the body as a space with no end. The skin becomes the vulnerable, fragile boundary between the inside and the outside; a surface that is intravenous and can be mediated upon.
In his suggestion of Philosophy being an interpretation of illness, Wegenstein suggests Nietzsche as one of the forerunners of the holistic body concepts. As Blondel suggests, images are metaphors of the body for Nietzsche. Philology, the act of interpretation can be the only way of attaching meaning to the body. The body is priori because “ there is no order or relation or text’ prior to it. It becomes as Blondel suggests the intermediary space between the absolute plural of the world’s chaos and the absolute simplification of the intellect. The body becomes a metaphor for an interpretative space within which the actual creation of meaning is an act of the will to power.
The idea of the body as an interpretative space is further developed through Psychoanalysis that looks at the body as a psychological entity. The idea of auto-perception –the image of the body produced by the body itself, the perception of the world through one’s own skin-moi-peau. This also brings forth one of the most fundamental ways of understanding subjectivities in the 20th century: the idea of representation as a construction that depends on how the body/self is apprehended in its social relations, an image that is created by the subject’s perception of the outer world and the world’s perception of it. Basing his theory on Freud’s theory of Psychoanalysis, Lacan suggests that the only way we can perceive our bodily selves is through a deceptive image that is somebody’s gaze. The frame, the screen, the interface or mirror becomes ways of intervening in the construction of that deceptive image.
The stable concept of the body is replaces by what Lacan calls the fractal body, one that is dispersed and whose identity depends on the process of inscription and semanticization through the outer world. This fractal body, not aware of the images that it is producing becomes one of the key ways of repositioning subjectivities in the 20th century. Freud talks about the body ego as a border surface, a skin sack or skin fold. As post Lacan psychoanalyst, Didier Anzieu suggests that the skin is more like an interface between me and the other, something that envelopes the ego and divides the self from the other.
An engagement with the idea of fragility of the skin, notions of disease and illness become metaphors through which the boundary between the inside and the outside becomes significantly de-stabilized. The idea of placing the body at the center of the experiential world as a way of experiencing it was prompted by Bergson who proposed that the body image has two interrelated sides- L’image du corps is a way in which the subject perceives his or her own body; the image one has of oneself is therefore the center of ones being and perception, an interface to the world. The second is L’image de corps indicates the body itself as a perceptive apparatus through which the world is being processed. This implies the body the body as simultaneously a mirror or screen for the images from the outside and the perceptive center thorough which the world is to be experienced. This proposes the thinking of consciousness only in terms of embodiment.
The phenomenological approach to the body always proposes the consciousness as consciousness of something. Reality then has no independent status but it exists only as an intentionality or intentional appearance. In Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, the body becomes inseparable from the worlds it inhabits. The ‘pragmatic turn’ proposes the body’s presence as impossible without embodiment. Geil Weiss signals a departure in her analysis of the body image leading her to develop her theory of embodiment as incorporeality. She suggests that the experience of being embodied is never a private experience. It is always mediated through processes of interaction with the human and non human bodies in the world outside.
A phenomenological approach of the body most interestingly for me, proposes the body as a site of inscription and semanticization. It becomes a way of being in its own and being in the world with both experiences constantly blurred. Also, the body becomes something more than its physicality-it is something that can be performed. Performativity in itself becoming the means to address the struggle between holism and fragmentation. The idea brings a whole new meaning to transitional, migrational and marginalized identities much in the way we begin to understand gender as a construct and drag as a performative subversion of notions around biological determinism. The opening up of the body and its interface with meditative technology proposes the scattering and dispersion of the body in multiple ways and forms; much like the proliferation of meditative technologies themselves. Opening up that space could lead to all new utterances of the body and the many ways in which it breathes, sighs, gestures and lives on.
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