OPSOMMING
Chapter 23: Concerning the disease of lycanthropy, in which men believe themselves to be turned into wolves
2.2 Bodies and pleasure: From desire as lack to messy, bodily pleasure to queer ecological embodiment
2.2.2 Introducing the body to desire/pleasure: Clusters of biological processes &
with socially outdated political modes of affiliation40 and cliched sloganism, thus making them doubly impotent. At the end of the film, the ‘revolution’ ends in an orgy, a spectacle that remains just that – a temporary (visual) spectacle without any lasting bearing on the world41.
This raises questions as to what exactly our identity-politics-based sloganeerism effect if it is divorced from actualised social change. If desire is simply, in the Aristotlean/Freudian/Paglian sense, a lack of, and pleasure is but a temporary stay of that lack, and intimacy is simply a temporary negation of lack, then how does desire and pleasure and intimacy change things?
our understanding of how sexual desire, amongst other desires, plays out in/on the (corporeal/physical) body. Belsey, again, clarifies this point succinctly:
Desire is the effect of the lost needs: loss returns and presents itself as desire. Desire is not the same as need: analytical experience certainly demonstrates ‘the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character’ which distinguishes desire from anything that could possibly be necessary. The erotic capabilities of the human animal are way in excess of nature’s reproductive imperative. In any case, the needs in
question were a matter of survival, not sex. What returns as desire is quite other than the repressed needs that are its cause. (1994:57-58)
Such a view is almost exclusively characterised by – and expressed in – the negative, loss, lack, a loss of self. More recent theory, however, sees desire as a bridging space/zone between thought and action, between the psychological and the physical, between Cartesian body and mind, specifically as
…a state that sits between cognitive states, such as perception and thought, on the one hand, and action, on the other. This seems to make desire significant not only with respect to our understanding of how cognitive states can be translated into action, but also with respect to the mind-body relation itself, since desire, apparently a mental state, appears capable of issuing in physical output, i.e. action. (Pearson, 2012:2)
Besides, new materialist accounts show that movements are never from one to the other, without being other to the one. There are always a number of flows, desires and processes within an assemblage for a given period of time, and these are always in flux.
Bristow (1997:135), in unpacking Elizabeth Grosz’s seminal work (1990; 1994) on the body, shows how literary theory comes close to admitting that the body is but a (rather abject
sounding) cluster of biological processes43. It then steps back from the brink and re-emphasise the socio-culturality of the body by not simply taking it “for granted as the locus of a conscious subject” but instead “reconceptualising the relation between bodies and desires”. This affords us the “opportunity to imagine corporeality anew” (ibid.)44.
However, we also have to re-see the relation between the body of viewer and the body of text: A renewed understanding of granular-materiality as series of koppelvlakke/interstices between bodies (viewer-screen/viewer-film) reminds us that even the materiality of the material of film – celluloid – “is not a timeless absolute but a cluster of historically contingent materials that happens to be, for the time being at least, the best means for creating cinema” (Walley, 2003:26). In the phrasing of 'material means' I see echoes of a materiality that is not always perfect, sometimes ruffled, sometimes cheap-looking; and in 'cluster of biological processes' I hear flashes of materials and processes and chemical reactions constituting the material nature – celluloid – of the film.
But bodies are not simply passive receivers of social meaning and sensual stimuli. Our bodies themselves affect how we perceive reality and others within that reality, which goes beyond merely being the filter through which reality is received. The material contexts within which we
43 What Camille Paglia would term a “flesh-envelope”; as when she describes consciousness as a “pitiful hostage of its flesh-envelope, whose surges, circuits, and secret murmurings it cannot stay or speed” (1990:7).
44 To illustrate, he quotes Grosz in full: “Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the body as a discontinuous, nontotalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities, and durations may be of great relevance to those feminists attempting to reconceive bodies, especially women’s bodies, outside of the binary polarizations imposed on the body by the mind/body, nature/culture, subject/object, and interior/exterior oppositions.” (Grosz, 1994:193-4, quoted in Bristow, 1997:135) This conceptualisation of the body, as a
“discontinuous, nontotalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities, and durations” (Grosz, 1994:193) will be further discussed in terms of the contours of affect that influence it.
find ourselves also affect our bodies and desires. Johnson (1999:81, emphasis added)
unambiguously writes that it is “through our embodied interaction that we inhabit a world, and it is through our bodies that we are able to understand and act within this world”, and
consequently he links (corporeal) embodiment not only to interaction and inhabitation, but also to modes of being and ‘understanding’ (and acting upon this understanding) of the reality. Paglia (1990:19) concurs when she writes that “[o]ur lives as physical beings give rise to basic
metaphors of apprehension”. Johnson (1999:81) draws on this sentiment, but goes further in arguing that even
…our conceptualization and reasoning are grounded in our embodiment, that is, in our bodily orientations, manipulations, and movements as we act in our world. No matter how sophisticated our abstractions become, if they are to be meaningful to us, they must retain their intimate ties to our embodied modes of conceptualization and reasoning. In other words, we can only experience what our embodiment allows us to experience.
Johnson thereby emphasizes that our conceptual systems are not merely ‘from’ our bodies or linked to our bodies (in some abstract sense), but rather that all schemas of understanding and perception are not only “by means of our embodied, imaginative rationality” (Johnson, 1999:81) but more importantly, are also “grounded in patterns of bodily activity” (ibid.:85). Activity that intersects with flows of bacteria and microbes, with electrical currents and light from film, with the musty ink smell of cheaply printed books.
If this holds true, if both perception and reaction is “grounded in patterns of bodily activity”
(ibid.), then this must apply to schematic acts/reactions of desire45 (and repulsion) as well.
45 Cf. the important role contours of affect play in the erotic-abject continuum, specifically the “speed at which desire raises and lowers its intensities” (Bristow, 1997:139).
Johnson goes on to delineate the specific categories of being that impact on how our
perception-reaction schemas and reason develop, arguing that “[w]e conceptualize and reason the ways we do because of the kinds of bodies we have, the kinds of environments we inhabit, and the symbolic systems we inherit46, which are themselves grounded in our embodiment”
(ibid.:99-100, emphasis added).47 In short: Our bodies are affected by both what is inside and outside – which necessitates a move away from mere embodiment to the new materialisms. (As is clear in Otto; or, Up with dead people and LAZombie.)
2.2.3 Abject desire on macro level: How the social body corresponds to genre