My first ever gif!
“It is part of our condition that the purity for which we strive and sacrifice so much turns out to be as hard and dead as stone when we get it.”
— Mary Douglas - Purity and Danger
In theory and in practice - apply saliva.
“Spittle… through its inconsistency, its indefinite contours, the relative imprecision of its colour, and its humidity, the very symbol of the formless, of the unverifiable, of the nonheirarchized. It is the limp and sticky stumbling block shattering more efficiently than any stone all undertakings that presuppose man to be something – something other than a flabby, bald animal, something other than spittle of a raving demiurge, splitting his sides at having expectorated such a conceited larva: a comical tadpole puffing itself up into meat insufflated by a demigod…”
Michel Leiris Vol. I no. 7 of Documents (December 1929) in Critical Dictionary ed. Georges Bataille
“FORMLESS.- A dictionary would begin from the point at which it no longer rendered the meanings of words but rather their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective with a given meaning but a term which declassifies, generally requiring that each thing take on a form. That which it designates has no claim in any sense, and is always trampled upon like a spider or an earthworm. Indeed, for academics to be happy, the universe would have to take on form. The whole of philosophy has no other goal: to provide a frock coat for what is, a mathematical frock coat. To declare, on the contrary, that the universe is not like anything, and is simply formless, is tantamount to saying the universe is something like a spider or spittle.”
— Georges Bataille
Vol. I, no. 7 (December 1929)
“Contributing to the revitalization of phenomenology is the realization that existing paradigms for research and the construction of meaning need to be expanded.The urge to move beyond existing categories of thought, and codes and conventions of understanding, begins with an unease that is as physical as it is intellectual, like an itch or shoes that no longer fit, crushing our toes and hampering us on a journey. The experiences described in this book are new or at the very least remixed, and they require new, as well as old, ways of understanding. These experiences are of a different register partly because they are increasingly facilitated by ever-expanding computational technologies, but also because human beings seem to be demanding a different range of physical experience. Witness the expansion of people practicing yoga, martial arts, extreme sports, the extreme (or extremely banal) emotional narratives of reality TV, the upsurge in adventure travel, the continued alteration of our moods and physical well-being with diet, alcohol, and drugs, both legal and illegal, and the transformation of bodies through fashion, piercing, tattooing, and reconstructive surgery. All of these indicate either that our current mental and physical states are intolerable and we are desperate to converge them with some sort of norm (the ideal nose, or Orlan’s more sinister take on norms of beauty), or that we are searching for, even craving, something new. These may be the indulgences of an affluent Western middle class, but the basis is the desire for an expansion of perception, of consciousness, and of bodily experience, and a sense that what currently exists needs to be transformed. What needs to go along with these changing experiences are new ways of understanding or interpreting them.”
— Susan Kozel in Closer
In terms of contemporary communication:
Thought in text form is not connected with bodily identity. Our thoughts are abjected now more than ever because they can be completely disembodied, anonymous even, with no physical reference to the writer of the thought. Once it is uploaded the only body it can really be associated with is the reader at and after the time of reading.
Our relationship with the image of the body makes us on object. Our bodies are abjected now more than ever because they can be unbodied. All that makes them (like) a body can be taken away or hidden - the detritus, the flaws. We’re left with a living image, as much object as it is human - abject as a whole.
Over the past few months I have become aware that my heart is sometimes beating louder and stronger. Physically, I feel it. I don’t get why. Like it might almost prefer to live without me and it’s ready to jump out of my rib cage and go and live, beating comfortably, elsewhere. Not too far away because it wants to keep track of me. After all we’re of the same body.
I would like to raise my latest confusion concerning our perception of how we approach our own body in our current time. By all means, I do not speak for everybody but this is my suggestion and maybe I will speak in first person to make it personal but I am hoping that it relates:
I am disconnected from my body because I treat it like an object. I can treat it like an object because I know I can change it however I want to. This is a real possibility that is accessible to me, even though I possess no great finance, there are avenues I can take to secure finances and alter my body completely.
And it is not just about body alteration, it is the degree to which I can fix my body if it is broken, create fantasylands where I can be whatever body I want. I can induce my mind to forget my body. In some ways my body as it is, is escapable but at the same time I can never leave it.
If I treat my body as an object then it is abject. It is abject as a whole skin covering a messy inside. I can treat it however I want to.
If my whole body is abject while I am alive and if the corpse is the most abject form of a body, I think it makes sense that I am a live corpse. Corporeal.
This is old news. But what I think I am trying to get at is the degree to which I experience my body as abject. And also the shame of treating it in such a way. And the misery over the fact that I cannot escape from it.
And this is why it has to be personal because I cannot speak on behalf of another and their experience.
Because of the accessibility of body alterations, reparations and substitutes available, perceiving this through my own relationship with my own body, I wonder if in the last 10-15 years we objectify our bodies in a much more intense way than ever before. And if we are abject, we are more abject than ever before. This is possible because abjection is psychological and not simply material. We impose abjection upon materials. We objectify bodies more, so we abjectify them more.
I think our relationship with abjected material like blood and pus and so on has changed. I wonder, if the more our whole body is abject, is it possible that our materials are less able to horrify us? Bodily material and bodily functions seem to be of wide interest to a huge number of people. I know I still find bodily materials disgusting but I can just as easily use my mind to disconnect these materials from a body and treat them like an object. Is this because I can objectify bodies more easily than those who experienced abjection before we came to objectify our bodies to the degree we do today?
I am still trying to work out the finer points. But here I was, with my heart beating, trying to get out of my chest. While I know that the heart beating must be much more of an emotional thing than anything to do with this, my body reminded me of my self.
“
I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there, the assholes, the flags, the underpants… I’m not going to put on any more puppet shows.
I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.
…The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
”— Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions
