The tricky thing with bodies is the moment you try to define one, you find yourself always already involved in producing another.
This is, in short, my view on the relation between bodies and the subject.
In contrast to objects, bodies never fully detach, let alone do they stand in a binary opposition to the subject. Hence, my understanding of the subject is in no way a pure (Cartesian) mind. Embodied it is. Yet, I do not first pose the subject and thereafter the body. To posit the subject as embodied is not to say that embodied subjectivity is the only position from which expression, experience and consciousness take place.
My understanding of the body, namely, on the other hand, is radically post-human. There is a bodily consciousness that exceeds the subject. Or perhaps it is better to say, the body has an entirely different ontological mode, a different mode of being. (I was inspired by reading Latour on pluri-modal ontology today[1]). Think of a string quartet: this supra-individual body has the capacity to express as an organic unity, even though individual bodies are at once also expressed.
The I that creates a cartography of a body is itself part of that very body in its subsequent actualizations (very simply: you read my view of a body hence you look ‘through my eyes’ at that body, so you read ‘me-seeing-a-body’) .
I want to explore the idea of different modes of bodies as different ontological modes. That is: of ‘a bodily reality’, distinct to the singularity of each encounter.
Is it helpful to imagine a radically immanent/contingent multimodal plane of continuously shifting ontologies? No, not al the time. But sometimes.
[1] Latour, Bruno. “Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les différants modes d’existence” (translated by Stephen Muecke) in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.). Open access (full text): http://www.re-press.org/content/view/64/38/
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