Somatopoetics - Affects - Imaginations

The interpreted body, the interpreting body

One of the important ways in which culture presents the body is the somatisation of the surrounding reality resulting from anthropocentrism. In other words, the body operates as a generator of metaphors, contributing to the somatisation of the world and thereby shaping, describing and interpreting the surrounding reality. The ways in which the body names and conceives the world are subjects that scholars have analysed many times – albeit from various perspectives.⁵ What stands out here is the fact that, by attaching corporeal categories to the world, humans – viewed as the measure of all things – evaluate the reality surrounding them, subjugate it and grasp its meanings.⁶ The metaphorical potential of the body is often attributed to that which is elemental, primary and fundamental in our dealings with the surrounding reality.⁷ Of course, metaphors perpetuated in language demonstrate this somatisation, while also attesting to the bodily experience of the world.⁸

Such metaphors always accompany communities or successive cultural formations. However, not only are they diverse and connected to many phenomena (such as a head of state, founding body etc.),⁹ but they are also associated with the prevailing worldview, concept of time and space, or cultural norms. Therefore, the way a body is perceived and comprehended in a given cultural formation and its discourses as well as abstract thought affects its metaphorical capacity. And so, for example, a society portrayed using the metaphor of a body can be viewed as an organic system or a mechanism (depending on the prevailing theory as well as the view of the relationship between the spiritual/conscious and the corporeal). Or it may be embodied in the convention of medical discourse, for instance through pathologies or epidemics. The same applies to the ethical dimension, or, more broadly, the axiological and metaphysical one.¹⁰ In other words, the medium depends on the subject of the metaphor, and the metaphor of society and the cultural models of bodily metaphorisation of the world depend on the concept of the body. A distinct feedback mechanism can be recognised here. As a result, the body cannot necessarily be reduced to a natural source of metaphors. To reiterate, this naturalness is closely connected to the concept of the body prevailing in a given cultural formation, meaning whether it is treated as an organism as an efficient mechanism, or as a shell or container for the spiritual interior, as an object that is possessed, or – in contemporary times – as constant transcending of the inside and outside, continually new configurations of meanings, etc. Nowadays, it is impossible to talk about an essential body, so to speak, in itself, or a universal one. The body is much more visible in research today as culturally and historically diversified. The body as a source of metaphors – epistemological, social, ethical, metaphysical etc. – is therefore inexorably linked to an image of the world already culturally given, with a world, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase, already discussed.

The heightened awareness of this state of affairs leads to the emergence of what we might call reclaiming responses, generating metaphors to challenge those that have become so engrained that they are treated as utterly obvious and, for example, function as automatisms in the official discourse. Such a need to create new metaphors is particularly visible in feminist discourse, transcending those constructed around the patriarchal system, especially in the writings of Hélène Cixous as well as Luce Irigaray. These counterproposals stand in opposition to Freudian terminology (especially by Irigaray and Nancy Miller). In Poland, meanwhile, the metaphors in the essays of Jolanta Brach-Czaina are similarly inventive and innovative.¹¹

Meanwhile, as scholars have pointed out for some time, culture, institutional discourses, ways of presenting, talking, managing etc. create and construct the body; in other words, they impose cultural constructs on the body. And it is these very issues that have today become the main subject of cultural enquiries, including in literary studies. The topic of research is the body dependent on many systems, described by many discourses simultaneously, the body created by medical, political, and religious discourses, and by specific ideologies; dependent on social systems and systems of power and viewed through the gender constructs binding in a given community (in both a historical and a geographical sense).¹² The following fact therefore emerges: we perceive the body as a result of views on the subject, on nature, and finally, on culture. On the one hand, we interpret and explain it in line with the prevailing worldview, academic discourse, epistemological rules, philosophical concepts of time and space. On the other, it is bound by specific limitations, disciplined, closed in an order of meanings, controlled, and moulded to comply with the requirements of its cultural era – especially in terms of gender, age, social situation, accordance with the social norm accepted in a given situation, etc. Therefore, an important area of somatopoetics becomes research on the body formed by culture and analysis of the ways in which literature reflects it. For example, following Michel Foucault, the supervised, punished body, treated differently depending on gender: in the prism of power, politics, or (also following Foucault), the medicalised body, and, following Erving Goffman, the body stigmatised with certain meanings. “The body that is joined to the world … which it composes and which composes it”¹³ are two arrangements in a state of constant convergence. This continual coexistence and mutual influence is inevitably connected to both cultural representation and culturally mediated ways of experiencing our own corporeality. Therefore, as Bakhtin says, “the body is not separated from the rest of the world.” We can find the unavoidable links and interconnections between the two arrangements – or, in other words, the relationship between the body discussing the world and the body discussed by this world – in the entirety of cultural texts¹⁴ and in literature, although, of course, it plays a unique role. These mutual connections are also reflected by the scholarly discourse itself, which fills the body with meanings, “dresses” it, forms it according to its own assumptions, and only interprets this prepared version.¹⁵ It thereby contributes to a certain form of bodily constructs. For example: Mary Douglas, investigating categories of corporeality in the 1960s,¹⁶ mostly analysed systems, before, from the 1980s, preferring to discuss networks, traces, fragments, and inscriptions on the body. The body is combined with text¹⁷ or with a performative act, or treated as a community act. Structural anthropology read corporeality differently from semiotics, and poststructuralism, feminist criticism, or gender studies all read it differently again. In each case, the research subject becomes a construct and simultaneously an instrument, and as such it is subjected to scholarly analysis.¹⁸ At this point we can therefore say that it is a widespread phenomenon that is quite self-evident in its inevitable character. The thing is, though, that this is where awareness of these intricacies becomes exceptionally heightened.

This multiple incorporation of the body into cultural discourses, including literature, cannot be the only field of research. One might even say that it comprises just a part of the problems. The body’s dual entanglement, firstly in the metaphorical processes involved in cognition of the world, and secondly in the meanings imposed on it, supported the study of what is on the one hand pre-cultural, and on the other, at the limit of utterability. For it was in these phenomena that scholars sought the beginnings of verbal creativity and the poetic.

At this point we must reach to a seventeenth-century tradition from the writings of Giambattista Vico. I cite this tradition because, as Maria Renata Mayenowa once brilliantly described,¹⁹ it forms one of the foundations of the twentieth-century ways of defining poetic language. At the time, literature treated both the anthropisation and somatisation of the world as an effect of unity between the subject and the external, as the condition of primitive man, using his own body to describe the world.²⁰ The starting point here was his identity with expression and with the pre-cultural, and a determinant – a longing for the unity of the world and humans. Without getting into the seventeenth-century understanding of primitiveness, which, after all, would change in later periods, it is important to emphasise that searching for the pre-cultural and finding the nature of the relationship between humankind and the world – again, interpreted differently on every occasion – proves significant for the modern concept of poetic language. Finding the origin of this language in primal corporeality is also visible in emotional or expression-based theories of the emergence of natural language. Scholars identified song, onomatopoeias, unarticulated sounds, and in particular the scream as the nucleus of creativity around the turn of the twentieth century. And here corporeality came into focus: “Primitive man … when he formed the first word, something inside him made a tremendous impression, tore at his larynx; his chest swelled, until in his ears there rang out his own protracted scream … Primitive man was a creator.”²¹ Thus, we can view the body either as the source of primitive naming (and hence primitive metaphorisation of the world), or as the direct source of creativity. Importantly, this path leads here from corporeality to spiritualisation.

This reaching for the original somatisation of the world, and indirectly for corporeality, in the search for poetic language as well as the sources of creativity, comprises an important topic in thinking about literature. One could therefore trace a line from fascination in the primitive and pre-cultural, via theories of poetic language based on expression as well as avant-garde experimentation, all the way to theories reaching into the subconscious and pointing to its manifestations in a poetic text. We would be remiss not to mention that an important role is played by Julia Kristeva’s theory of poetic language, and for example the variants of écriture féminine as seen by Cixous or Irigaray (of course remembering all the significant differences here as well as the conscious interplay with the existing discourses in the latter case).

It would be wrong here to draw the hasty conclusion that might be inferred, which is that we are dealing with a well-understood, tested and familiar category in which we can differentiate firm analytical areas, work out rules of deciphering or investigate ways of expressing the corporeal. In fact, the matter is much more complicated. To get to it, though, first an examination of the current situation is needed.

The rise of corporeality

The category of corporeality in contemporary times is not only increasingly expansive, but has also acquired a transdisciplinary dimension. The intensification of research on this category in fields including literary studies stems from the reformulation of the object of scholarly enquiry and the new roles currently assigned to it. This has resulted in hopes for corporeality, as well as – perhaps most importantly – concerns and fascination. The attractiveness of corporeality is by now something obvious and unquestionable. Admittedly, the somewhat excessive popularity that is sometimes attributed to it in the humanities does not mean that it was previously entirely absent. Yet today’s research is different. And although indeed it sometimes gives the impression of making up for lost time, we should rather appreciate the intensification of this category in research perspectives than see it as being evidence of unreflectively following the crowd.

The primary reasons for the attractiveness of the category of corporeality are somewhat easy to recognise even for first-year humanities students. There tends to be general agreement here that the marketing and advertising situation and the cult of beauty are crucial, but rather in a commercial sense. This is far from the Platonic understanding, for example, of the harmony of the soul and body. What is important today, meanwhile, is self-control and self-realisation (Anthony Giddens), appropriate taming of one’s own body, dependence on the cultural norm, and fascination with otherness. The turn towards the category of corporeality (we are still living in times of turns, and the expression “corporeal turn” often appears today) is also linked to another type of reasons: again, abandoning the so-called metaphysics of presence, departure from dualistic divisions, and especially that into the rational and the bodily.

We also know very well that an interest in corporeality slowly but surely made itself known in twentieth-century philosophy, gradually in the shift in the Cartesian coordinates visible already in the nineteenth century, and then in the increasingly distinct division into reason–body and the departure from the substantial-mechanistic understanding of corporeality. Phenomenology and existentialism played a major role here. The category of the body is present in the theories of Maine de Biran and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others.²² Moreover, scholars emphasise the significance of the body brought out by the promoters of psychoanalysis and by thinkers with a direct impact on the present day: Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Shusterman. We should note that cultural anthropologists began to analyse the significance of the category of corporeality exceptionally early.²³ In literary studies, the frequently described cultural-anthropological turn played a unique role. “The body” became an important argument challenging the dominant twentieth-century edifice of the strong theory of literature, among others thanks to the premeditated emphasis on the corporeality of reading and eroticisation of the literary studies discourse (of course, I refer here to the terms of Roland Barthes²⁴).

I will not discuss the history of these views here, nor present the transformations in the understanding of corporeality in philosophy, sociology or cultural anthropology. Among the reasons why I will not do so is that these issues have already (fortunately) been dealt with at length. However, one cannot stress enough that the aforementioned feminist criticism plays the most important role here. Particularly second-wave feminism was prominent in this respect, both in its reclaiming variant, pointing to the previous reification of the female body depicted from the male gaze,²⁵ and the variant affirming corporeality, most sharply visible in the écriture féminine movement, which dismantled the model of the previous theory.²⁶ Corporeal feminism – proposed by Elizabeth Grosz – has a separate place here, and finally there are gender studies in general. Both in art and in research on it, the body is treated as a reason for affirming one’s own sex, as well as, in recent times, proof of the inextricability of sex from gender roles. It is here (in the field of feminist criticism and gender studies) that the opposition between the biological and the cultural began to lose its focus.

Furthermore, the category of corporeality is inherent in postcolonial studies and is also applied in geopoetics and ethnopoetics. It thus incorporates such terms as power, politics, gender, ethnos, as well as memory and identity; its investigation interacts with the activation of directly related areas until recently enjoying scant interest, such as the aforementioned senses and emotions, which in research perspectives of late have taken a prime position. And to conclude this quick enumeration, perhaps the most important thing: contemporary literature and art themselves make corporeality the main protagonist and an essential element of the experience of the world, oneself and others. As a rule, at the same time corporeality becomes a problem for art, while art problematises and promotes corporeality. Just look at such trends as body art, abject art, flesh-art, or manifestation of the corporeal in contemporary literature.

Of course, by no means can we speak today of a complete mastery of the body, of entirely outlining it with meanings or capturing the unknown. It is also evident that in contemporary times not only can the concept of a subject not be comprehended without the category of corporeality, but one must also not forget that the body, rather, for example, than being a shell for the internal,²⁷ is currently also seen in a fragmentary manner, transcending the division between the interior and exterior as well as impossible to fully record in meanings. The subject may be seen as diffuse, constantly searching for identity, constructing him/herself and being constructed, performative (Butler), nomadic (for example Barthes, and in a slightly different sense Rosi Braidotti), identical through the body (Grosz), taking on many roles and orders suggested by a given cultural system, accepting or rejecting (or both) narrative models. Or alternatively, as with Brach-Czaina, as absorbing and shedding, and stable paradoxically in its corporeality, or even, through its corporeality given in a community and creating a community – which certainly does not mean constituting the centre.

How to embody the body

It is telling how often nowadays in scholarly discourse, literature or art in general – or even more generally, in cultural texts – the problem of grasping corporeality appears. This attests to a certain longing, a desire often referred to as “touching the body.” In his essay “Corpus,” Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “how, then, are we to touch upon the body, rather than signify it or make it signify?”²⁸ In Brach-Czaina we read about touching “raw meat,”²⁹ in Grosz – about fleeting bodies (those which cannot be grasped) etc., and in Ewa Rewers – about the experience of touch. The metaphor of touch, revealing the problem of grasping and expressing corporeality, concurs with the following fact: it is not hard to notice that the discourse on the body constantly revolves around the “articulation of bodily experience.” The term “articulation,” today definitely overused and frequently misused, here seems appropriate. After all, we can associate “articulation” not just with verbalisation, but also with the way we form sounds. And it is these questions that turn out to be important here. What are the reasons for this situation? What causes such problems?

First of all, we might suggest something visible today especially in literature: heightened awareness of the impossible contact with the other, as particularly emphasised by self-conscious corporeality. Secondly, seeing corporeality as the refuge of existence and embedding in being, and not necessarily in the essentialist sense, but, for example, as in Grosz’s case, through historically variable cultural constructs. Paradoxically, although the relationship between bodily metaphors and cultural models of the experience of corporeality is indeed clear, here we should speak rather about the constant evasion of the bodily. As a result of the body creating the world and shaped by it – shimmering, metaphorical, and simultaneously appropriated by culture – the bodily is subject to disembodiment and, so to speak, atrophy. In other words, it is desomatised: as a carrier it means one thing,³⁰ while as a topic, it proves to be purely a record of culture. What is interesting is that the growing interest in corporeality reveals this situation in all its flagrancy.

Such elusiveness has many sources. One of them is the significant, or indeed fundamental fact that we cannot speak of the complete inclusion of the body in cultural codes,³¹ as there always remains a sphere that this code cannot encapsulate³² – that of the inexpressible and indescribable, that which in institutional discourses is unspeakable and which these discourses are unable to absorb. Furthermore, this is an irremovable sphere, causing fear and sometimes disgust, but also fascination. A significant ambivalence arises here: we are dealing with the anxiety of a subject that on the one hand is unable to grasp its own corporeality, but on the other can find in that which is ungraspable not only threat, but also a source of creativity. This is because this elusiveness might be manifested in language in the form of ruptures, cracks, splits, fault lines, and thus might be revealed through disruptions, fragmentariness, song etc. It might therefore take the form of incomprehensible articulation, but also glossolalia, and be manifested in a hidden or disclosed rhythm.³³ Such manifestation of corporeality in language is often identified with resistance to that which is official, with disruption of cultural discourses, and finally – to repeat – with the source of the creative or poetic. At the same time, all means are used – albeit with varying degrees of success – to avoid terms unifying the corporeal, confining it to, for example, eroticism or biologism (also leaving aside the relative nature of these concepts).

The easiest way to identify such relationships is by using the experiments of the twentieth-century avant-garde or forms of écriture féminine, and, within this, body writing. Of course, the latter can manifest itself in many guises: in fragmentary forms, fault lines, via rhythmisation, melodicity, but also disruptions, contradictions, and what punctuates a text in various ways, despite not being entirely manifested and expressed. Here the evident rehabilitation of writing based on sense, working in unison with the requirement for sensory reading (more on which at the end of this chapter), functions by challenging phallogocentrism (as Derrida or Cixous would put it), meaning that which is institutionally dominant.³⁴ The writing of Hélène Cixous, a proponent of writing with the body, is itself an example of écriture féminine, also when it includes analyses of other literary texts³⁵ (for example the work of Clarice Lispector). Through the metaphors they create – “white ink,” “woman’s milk,” “apple of the text”³⁶ – these readings figuratively convey what Cixous sees as an essential sensory reception that differs from the contemplative one.

Again we must reiterate: such an attempt to grasp corporeality is also a certain – characteristic of our era – conceptualisation. After all, the primary issue here is usually the relationship between the text and the body. Without analysing the differences between the scholars at this point (especially those distinguishing Cixous from Irigaray and others), and without getting into the corporal theory of Elizabeth Grosz, who polemicised with them, we should emphasise what is important from the perspective of somatopoetics: that literacy and corporeality (each, of course, in a particular sense) are equal here.

Directing attention to the elusiveness of the body, and at the same time to the resistance it puts up in scholarly and cultural discourse and in literature, stems from the aforementioned desire to reach corporeality. This desire is a consequence of certain historical events: as frequently noted, in the history of thought in the humanities (and especially philosophy) scholars have usually understood the body in relation to that which is incorporeal. This situation has been especially visible when the mind–body opposition played a fundamental role, with the body always as the dependent and subordinate element. This kind of subordination, remember – which contemporary scholars unanimously attribute to Descartes – is treated as the outcome of metaphysical realism and objectivism. This inferiority causes the body to be subordinated to universal rules, unambiguously specified, and thereby, so to speak, annihilated. Undoubtedly, this constant dependence, the lack of sovereignty of corporeality, has had a profound impact on its continual evasion. And yet, of course, in postmodern humanities dualism has no raison d’être, which in turn is connected to actions to restore and regain the neglected corporeality. At the same time, the contemporary escape from the traps of dualism by no means leads to radical monism, to the proliferation, as it were, solely of that which is bodily.³⁷

Boundaries

The investigations cited above have included reflection on the limits and boundaries of corporeality. Here we could mention in one breath the relations between the corporeal and the incorporeal, the living and the dead (body–corpse), human and inhuman, in the sense of a natural and an artificial body – a mannequin, cyborg, or in general a posthuman body³⁸ – as well as between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric or post-anthropocentric³⁹ bodies etc. We must also add here the question of the relationship between the transparent body⁴⁰ – meaning that which is obvious, therefore imperceptible, and consequently not subject to description – and the untransparent body, which loses its obviousness and imperceptibility in many situations, particularly in all kinds of otherness. As a rule, the untransparent includes bodies outside of the norm (such as the gender norm), among them those described as freaks or monsters, whose otherness means that they are put on display,⁴¹ but also sick, suffering, adolescent, ageing, stigmatised bodies, those subject to strong sensory or emotional experiences, and hybrid, injured or idealised bodies.⁴² And finally, last but not least, beautiful, desirable, erotic bodies, bestowed with admiration and love. Above all, though, the search for the boundaries of the body highlights and demonstrates, as it were, the existence of an unrecognisable realm that resists cultural discourses. This problem is particularly evident in the boundary between the subject and the object. That is because we can speak on the one hand of transgression of the dividing line between the subject and the object, in which the bodily is seen as osmosis with the world, as a mutual permeation, as continuity of existence (Brach-Czaina), and on the other of what is at the limit of the body: in other words, the boundary space that disrupts the precise and distinct division into subject and object.

It is in this space that we find everything rejected, unwanted, repulsive, disgusting, related to bodily secretions – that is, to use Kristeva’s⁴³ term, the abject. It is this abject that prevents the formation of a precise boundary not only between the internal and external (even if we assume that these concepts are variable or ambiguous), but also between the subject and the object. That which is disgusting and unclean is both directly associated with corporeality and the result of cultural actions: in other words, it is perceived, defined and simultaneously culturally inassimilable, albeit irremovable, by a given community. We can find the consequences of this phenomenon in the cultural somatisation of the surrounding world; since the body is metaphorically superimposed on the image of the society, it thus – within this image – also indicates what is impure, what does not fit within the boundaries of the society in question, and what is removed or stigmatised (it is usually ethnic outsiders who are marked by impurity, but this stigma might equally apply to women, while ethnic outsiders may also be stigmatised with female characteristics). Spheres of impurity can therefore change in various communities, with regard to both corporeality and, for example, social groups.⁴⁴ However, the abject as Kristeva understands it is situated at the border of the semiotic and symbolic, placed on the periphery (as that which is expelled and on the borderline), and identified with what at a given moment is foreign, unwanted, inassimilable, and repulsive. In contemporary art, the abject – which is manifestly present – is either subject to sublimation or itself becomes the object of the art (for instance abject art).⁴⁵ The concept also proves significant owing to the role assigned to it in literature. This is not so much about literary themes, although these are also important – usually listed in this function are the variants of monstrosity present in the Gothic novel or fantasy literature in the broadest sense. Yet the abject plays a more important role as a certain challenge for literature. According to Kristeva (who gives the abject a firmly ethical dimension), in a disenchanted world, it is literature’s task to explore the space of the boundary between subject and object, of that what is officially denied and yet only seemingly absent and resolved. She states outright: “it is within literature that I finally saw it carrying, with its horror, its full power into effect.”⁴⁶ It is here that the “subject” and the “object” push each other away, confront each other, fall down and start again – inseparable, infected, doomed, on the border of the assimilable and thinkable – repulsive. This is a space in which great contemporary literature develops: Dostoevsky, Lautréamont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Céline …⁴⁷