Bodies – is that all we are?

‘Bodies, is that all we are?’ This was the response from a colleague of mine when I was discussing a monograph I had recently published entitled Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body during and after the Cold War (2016). The wry humour was appreciated. Yet there was also something genuine to the question that stayed with me.

The idea of humans being reduced to our primary physical and material existence—if not altogether denied human status and erased from consciousness and memory—is a very real and repeated dynamic in human history. This notion is prevalent in exploitative and abusive power relations that exist around the world.

As I explored in the book,a technéof power, identified by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben as the ‘anthropological machine’, is premised on an eighteenth century pseudo-scientific episteme derived from early zoology and biology that constructed a taxonomical hierarchy based on a human (bios) – animal (zöē) division.

When applied to human relations in which the human species is conceived to be divided into five main races (J. F. Blumenbach) and scaled according to early pseudo-scientific ideas of biological evolution, scientific progress, and modern industrial development, the European human body (with the elite male as its primary representative) was considered the most evolved and therefore the most superior. Nested within a European knowledge constellation, alongside the primacy of écriture and the cerebral and lexical intellect as conveyed through cultivated and rarefied speech, bodies and landscapes were mapped and surveilled to privilege sight. Meanwhile, the other senses (touch, hearing, taste, feeling) were afforded less value and status, as they were seen as closer to the primal and material body (and to animality and nature).

This knowledge apparatus had already been systematically applied to Indigenous and original owner-occupiers by Euro-American colonial powers in the ‘new world’, who aimed to expropriate the lands and establish extractive economies to build their empires and nation-states. The narrow and almost exclusive concept of humanas part of a wider episteme was refined as a Eurocentric and logocentric techné through which an ongoing regime of control was to be legitimated.

This schemata was then ‘naturalised’ in the nineteenth century under a Cartesian conceptualisation, bolstered by other Enlightenment thought which proposed the discreet, rational, individual subject (cogito ergo sum) with a pre-determined set of common law legal rights in relation to the state (as Sovereign). Those who did not meet these criteria were often categorised as ‘mere bodies’. Under variations of ‘stranger’ or ‘barbarian’, these ‘bodies’ were denied the same rights and opportunities as ‘human’ subjects under common law, and were organised in physical space accordingly—e.g. delimited to the ‘wilderness’, the peripheries, the camp, the margins, the prison, the asylum, the slum, and generally to more unhealthy and unsafe forms and spaces of occupation and residence. Thus this techné,developed both in the middle ages in Europe and in the ‘new world’ colonies, was then further applied within modern Euro-American societies.

This episteme continued to serve in maintaining asymmetrical power relations in the twentieth century when the world was divided at the international level into ‘three worlds’ (Les trois mondialisations). Further divides along class, gender and racial lines were maintained within states, societies, communities, families and individual selves. The results of this bios–zöēdivide were palpable, as it was used to inculcate, structure and animate a master-narrative which induced fear of punishment and exclusion in various forms of social exile (as executable by the state based on a legal variation of ‘outsider’ status). It was also used to mobilise populations of those who more closely met the criteria of ‘body’ to sacrifice their lives and carry out orders in support of cruelty and industrial-scale mass killing of those designated as ‘enemy’ (also characterised in approximations of animal and animal-hybrids).[1]This epistemic system of knowledge-power helped produce the largest and hitherto unprecedented catastrophic wars in human history.

So, for example, while this technéof a bios–zöēbinary was extensively and systematically deployed by Japanese officials and knowledge experts both to inculcate a sense of racial supremacy and righteous subordination of other ‘Asiatic races’ during the relatively short-lived Japanese Empire in the first half of the twentieth century, so too did other Axis powers and American and Allied powers employ biopolitical dehumanisation campaigns to legitimate actions that amounted to atrocities in the war effort against the enemy. The most notable was the use of the atomic bombs on predominantly civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and indiscriminate incendiary aerial bombing of many Japanese cities at the end of the war which breached the existing Hague and Geneva Conventions. To carry this out, it was first necessary to dehumanise the total Japanese population under a simplistic and blunt categorisation of ‘the enemy’. The United States, Great Britain, Japan, Italy and Germany used this method of indiscriminate mass killing yet remained immune from prosecution.[2]

The United Nations institutions as founded in the UN Charter and United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and the humanist and civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s that swept the ‘postwar’ world, were instrumental in establishing and normalising the principles of human equality. They helped enact a plethora of oppositional practices which seek to re-connect the divisions between the human, the body, and nature.

Today, the erosion of these foundational principles of equality—before the law, to vote, to equal pay and opportunity, self-determination, health, education, shelter, well-being, political asylum, fair treatment as a political prisoner or refugee, among others—is evident in the continued illegal and oppressive treatment of human beings, animals and ecologies around the world. This includes the continued use of indiscriminate and disproportionate aerial and remote bombing and other methods of mass killing.

Ignorance and an uncritical and cynical insensitivity towards these foundational principles are burgeoning in the domains of education and public discourse, particularly in the global North and in the wealthier populations which have the means to live by these principles in the global South. The realpolitikand economic drivers that underpin the perpetuation of internal and external neocolonial relations and large-scale (and often genocidal) conflicts continue to be at the root of these conditions.

If we continue to allow the United Nations Charter and its attendant principles to be used as a hypocritical and cynical mask that obscures illegal and inhumane applications of systemic power, primarily through constant manipulation of public opinion in mediated discourse and increasingly instrumentalist education programs, we only encourage the hollowing out and erosion of these principles and a deepening, hardening cultural modality. ‘Everybody knows, that’s how it goes,’ as Leonard Cohen wrote.

To think and write with and from the body, with an attendant sensitivity to its neglected, marginalised and debased aspects, however, opens up an awareness of the lived conditions and relations of exploitation and injustice in the past and present. While this is not to say that there is not great liberating potential in a modern education as based in the secular pursuit of scientific, social and human truths; it is to remind us that superstition and ignorance are not so easily explained away as the lingering residue from the affective ‘lesser senses’ as found in the pre-modern customs of ‘past’ civilisations. In contrast to an assumed episteme which posits the body as governed by ‘base’ emotional, intuitive and genetic drivers as developed through an adulterated understanding of evolution as competition for survival, this approach foregrounds how human behaviours are the product of particular (as opposed to generalised and pre-determined) knowledge structures and contextualised conditions. Such an approach embraces the sensitivity and intelligence intrinsic to the body and to nature itself, much of which has been de-valued, ignored and forgotten by modern societies.

It follows then that in re-evaluating the importance of the body, rather than placing a disproportionate emphasis on the brain as part of our ‘mind’ and part of human thought, we might also become more receptive and pro-active in understanding our ‘minds’ as socially constructed with others and co-constitutive of and within our environments. These relations are reflected in how we touch, sense, feel and interact with our bodies as permanently integrated within our ecological milieu in any given moment. So too can our lived, inter-generational, species, planetary and cosmic history be found compressed in every gesture, movement, utterance, thought, memory, object and lived environment we embody (4.6 billion years of Earth history and 13 billion years of cosmic history). As we are permanently in-flux along with the world, we comprise, reflect and are configured by the sum of all that has come before us. We are part of and belong to what we ingest and release into the environment, how we choose to occupy and live in our bodies, and how we shape and are shaped by the world around us—we contain, embody and reflect it at any given moment.

To embody this history and perspective as well as grasping it as an object of historical and scientific knowledge, is to re-connect with every other living entity in the world. In addition to viewing human or world history through a social, cultural or politico-economic lens, this perspective appreciates the degree to which species overlap within ecologies of the biosphere. While bringing together the inter-personal experience at a material, local and experiential level with the formative forces and pressures of political and historical dynamics, this may help extend our perception beyond formulaic and repeated narratives that unconsciously reinforce and consciously manipulate the bios–zöēdivide.

Importantly, this approach can undermine the political manipulations of state and corporate ideologies that continue to demand collective allegiance and mobilisation for unclear ends and punish and exclude those empirically and ethically justified oppositional voices. On the other hand, it can appreciate situated and multiple experiences of real conditions, as innumerable as they are, to complicate overly narrow interpretations of historical and political events. Complication for the sake of it is of course not enough.

So as to avoid reducing our understanding of the significant problems introduced above to the minutiae of individual lives in the name of amorphous humanity, situating the body within historical conditions and socio-political dynamics is to discern convergences between bodies and their senses, emotions, skills, memories and imaginations, and built, natural and epistemic structures and systems.

This is not just a perspective which improves one’s capacity for imagination, sensitivity and empathy in relationality with the lived experience of others; admittedly an approach that is riven with asymmetries and hypocrisies. It is a practice that cultivates and extends human solidarity beyond the bleak and over-determined concern for oneself in competition with others for material benefit. Rather, it is a modality that can effectively deconstruct this techné,and work with those who experience the most negative impacts from its systematic application in ‘the real world’.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, this approach actually strengthens one’s subjective agency. In enhancing permanent relationality with others and the environment—an ecology of bodies and landscapes—this ontological orientation toward radical inclusiveness applies a strong conviction for human accountability within a codified set of normative behaviours and governing laws. It also invites our orientation in the world to be informed by the entirety of lived experience across all of the senses. Even more, it asks us to re-form from the ground up our organisational and knowledge systems so as to prioritise the perpetuation and improvement of the flourishing of all life in metabolic equilibrium.