David Wolach's blog

David Wolach || The Commons & The Body (Updated, Sustained Reflections)

Submitted by David Wolach on Mon, 06/28/2010 - 23:11

Dear All--

I really wish I could have attended Elliot's talk. The work is fascinating, and this caught my eye, from Michael:

In fact, the most unsettling element of the Superfund sites is how they promote a kind of collective amnesia: no bubbling green goo, no cans of toxic waste, no caution tape or imposing warning signs. In fact, these sites seem to perfectly capture what Smithson calls an "ordinary abyss," because there is absolutely no visual representation of their toxicity. In fact, Elliot's main question hinged on this problem: how can you make the disaster legible if the site obscures its own malignance?

Tho there is a kind of remediation process possible, seems to me, in re-articulating "what the body can do" and in fact what the body is, there's no obviously direct equivalent here. I'm struck, tho, by not only the causal relationship between Superfund sites and Elliot's investigations here, and disease processes. An obvious connection, but so too if the body can be thought as a set of inscriptions of events, there is also the obvious analog here viz. disability and what counts as visible: often there is no visual representation of the body's limitations, scars, marks, capacities, and so forth--caused, often enough, by the "ordinary abyss," the making toxic of the air we breathe, the ground we walk on, etc. And the questions that emerge for Elliot and Elliot's work, those regarding the roles for art practices in making the abyss legible, the way they act as a kind of fulcrum for our conversations, these are certainly very current and longstanding questions for contemp. poetry and a poetics of embodiment, etc. Where Elliot, it appears is well into turning nonsite into site, as it were, and perhaps remediation leading into sustainable site and commons, I'm circling around that group of questions viz. the body & care-taking. Well. What a morbid feedback loop here, yet Elliot's work appears to be among those rare efforts which might help break that cycle of toxicity...

For now, a rough, rough draft (incomplete--ends, maybe appropriately for self-organizing pedagogy ? in mid-section) of a mini-essay / set of notes that I've been working on, in part as reflection on a book that I wrote & was just published, Occultations, which writes thru a series of corporeal procedures & the body in crisis. Just been writing the below, no real editing yet. So, feel free to add, change, re-arrange, FINISH! etc., whatever (hey, if anyone wants to copy-edit?!!). In speaking with Rob, tho, we both agreed this work might help provide some initial thoughts, a temporary frame for next month's discussions.

Links re the body in relation to commoning and starter questions are on the splash page; citations, (bibliography) below, and somatic practice examples (mine & others) to come soon--promise! Ran out of steam tonight, so in the coming days I'll add to this post...

Looking forward to seeing many of you again, meeting the rest of you. Thanks so much for the invite, everyone.

In Solidarity,

David

The Common Body, The Common Wound: Disability is to Work as Poetry Is To…Work

Where the wound meets touch

The body is

In commons

The following is an exercise in extending, with the hope of later enacting further, three pieces of writing by Robert Kocik, two from Overcoming Fitness, the last from a recent post here on Nonsite (see his questions re Nonsite & the commons under the Spatial Practices Curriculum, “Turning Nonsite into Site”). I’m focusing on Kocik here, but am aware that these quotes are enmeshed in the very generative discussion many of you had in relation to the somatic practices curriculum, especially viz. disability/post-abelism. Though the following is at times only tangentially related to what we may end up doing, I hope the tangents are generative anyway. Together I take these writings by Robert as the seeds for drawing out an explicit relationship between somatic practices, (eco)poetic intervention, and commoning. Taken together I think they also draw out commonalities between Amber Di Pietra’s writings on disability and somatic practice here for Nonsite and those which have come from Thom Donovan and several others, two sets of different perspectives in many ways, both of which I find appealing. From Overcoming Fitness:

CLINIC FOR VESTIGIAL ORGAN STIMULATION

DEFINITION Recovery of the senses and physiological functions excluded as the body sealed around itself. Trace physiologies engaging faint physical environments.

BUREAU OF MISSING BEHAVIORS

DEFINITION Just as certain building types remain missing because their functions are yet unknown, certain functions are unknown because their behaviors are still untried. Which way of acting will bring about an unbelievable benefit? All the disciplines of the fictitiousness of theater used to attain real being.

My Notes:

Ranceirean Refresher!

In regard to production and service, the body’s useful systems are often considered useful only in the surplus-value they generate, their capacity to make or be the site of the distributable commodity (hence we are object-enclosures: understood as unitary, normatively fixed and gendered physical units of measure—machines for output and/or instruments of service, with well-defined characteristics and capacities just like portioned pieces of land for the taking). Our affective labors and features, indeed the majority of our bodies’ capacities and interfaces, falling outside market needs (or perhaps under the market radar), are thought, if thought at all, to be either of surplus-value (to be stored and managed for potential use later) or of no value, and thus potentially negative value (if not managed properly). The latter is most often the case, especially as pertains to wage- and contingent laboring, which is to say as reality especially for the working poor, the working class, the homeless, the jobless—the un(der)represented.

In this late capitalist “service economy,” the body is ever more occulted, relegated, or in the way. An aesthetic rediscovery of the body as having proprioceptive, sensory, and kinesthetic potential to inform us uniquely and importantly, opening covered possibles, seems to be a kind of positive articulation of an overall renewed interest in and fear of the occult body. The body’s increasing obsolescence at work and at home (insofar as we often entertain ourselves through digital appendages that allow us to “forget” about our bodies—or that such appendages are our bodies) adds to our alienation a kind of stasis or suspended animation that both fascinates and threatens us. Renewed interest in the potential for aesthetic interaction—poetry, e.g.—as activating otherwise occluded needs and desires, along with the logics of occlusion, appears, in a sense, as an inevitable renewal, as again playing a role in social struggle. The body is not as in need of taming as it was prior to industrialization (though for millions of agricultural and garment workers here and abroad indentured servitude is the reality), nor is the “whole” body “fully” engaged in laboring for as many workers as it was for a represented industrial sector four times larger just 50 years ago. Increasingly, the body is needed as a button presser, an operator, a dis-embodied voice, which differently estranges it from itself in contrast to pre-NAFTA/pre-Right to Work industrial laboring. We’re also increasingly not producing visible products—although a shift to a “service” economy in the United States is vastly overstated due, perhaps, to the sheer volume of manual laborers whose jobs have now become de-unionized, contingent/part time, thus trending many below the poverty line and out of statistical sight. And, due, perhaps, to the increasingly robust status corporations have as persons—their rights as the erasure of the worker or stakeholder’s rights, hence our embodied presence. Whether in the service economy, in the industrial sector, or unemployed, we’re either alienated or alienated and paradoxically vital in our obsolescence.

I am interested in what the effective (cunning) manager is interested in suppressing: the fact and the knowledge of the value of the working body’s (growing) surpluses, its hidden marks and tracks, its sensory and affective capacities and contiguities with other (normatively understood) bodies, hence relational (necessarily social) potentials. I’m interested in features of the body that have become occulted, either suppressed or ignored, due to their perceived uselessness or obsolescence—and/or their perceived (and real) threat. This is not much more than an interest in the relation between the capacities of the physico-socially “unfit” body and the aesthetically trans-gressive body; and this relation here (for a commons curriculum) in the service of unearthing the possibility for both, on a local level, as contiguously and recursively related (individually and in combination), to offer and be offered care, subsistence, make for new, or perhaps suppressed, social formations. Or, as Antwi Akom[1] puts it: forms of gathering that in their substantial and radical existences, might risk an economy of unitary and/or private identity in favor of a field of interdependent uniqueness, one that overcomes the drive for individual enclosure and fitness in favor of an ecological organizational politics, that, e.g., calls for “climate justice” (denoting inter-relatedness and disparities in what parts of an ecosystem get counted) over “climate change” (a system of binaries and partitions).

Neoliberal Wounds

These occulted parts or capacities or surfaces of the body become, by force of managerial rhetoric and need for surplus-value, associated with, while in fact causing, the wound. That is, they can be thought of as sites generated by neoliberalism’s enclosures, those of the market and its police, not least its frontier patrol, militarism. And like the physically wounded or dis-abled subject (the wounded or damaged, mangled producer herself) the wound, if expressed or exposed by the worker, often becomes cause for the worker’s termination (e.g., her “honorable” discharge). Or, to the individual who wants to and can keep her job, any wounds become structures, capacities, divots, imprints, or morphological features in need of covering (no writing at work! No ailing at work!). Once covered, the wounds remain occulted, suppressed, and managed by the subject out of sight, often taken no further, i.e., not overtly shared for the purposes of organizing, archiving, and ultimately commoning. Rather, use and uselessness stand in relation to exchange value to the exclusion of anything else (total market emersion), and so the wound, even as a quasi-positive re-articulation as social imprint upon the body, remains an enclosure, becomes spectacle and/or covered mirror for the subject herself (a fetish). Much conceptual art of the 60s (and some of its reenactments today) exploits this set of moves, and does so, arguably, in a way that (either purposefully or accidentally) recapitulates in microcosm the fetishizing of wounding/woundedness by performing it (in the past, often as protest, hooking in to local civil rights campaigns, as was widespread in the art world of the 70s). Marina Abramovic’s early work, her monologic endurance pieces exploring pleasure and pain, can be thought of as a prime example of this. I take Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 to be “tracing” those “faint physiologies” of Kocik’s call above, this tracing to the economy of woundedness, and tracing that economy’s effects on (affective) behavior.[2]

Furthermore, legibility and illegibility stand in an oppositional relation when the wound is managed: they must, for the legibility of the wound is the subject’s affective weakness, and her making illegible that wound becomes her poetic strategy (it becomes, or is thought of, as representational, as metaphor, and finally, as crisis of representation: as secretive aesthetic blur manufactured for the individual’s felt release, a kind of projected inner code)[3]. The terms themselves crystallize, become sedimented, until they are binaries in what is taken to be—ipso facto—a narrative about (among other things) what counts as poetically viable strategy, what counts as valuable in and for itself (which of these terms), what counts as care taking and what not. In the end, aesthetic “illegibility” itself becomes legible.

The market’s negative valuation of these “poorly operating” and legible (or non-operational) features of the body become, almost in the Nietzschean sense of the imaginary (and certainly Freud’s),[4] internalized as features which can be analyzed in terms of the causal and other relations between their existence or emergence and the damaging features of the market itself (the vital textual-performance work of Cecilia Vicuna, for example, operates at this level, I think, and does so in the face of incredible odds). And yet these features often remain intact regardless, hence articulated, traced out, but not in terms of what managers would deem surplus-value were they to (or when they) feel threatened by them, that is, when further made use of as acted upon potentials, these parts of a machine that has been “exhausted” and thus rendered marked for replacement. For most of us, the wound is not felt as capacity yet to be commodified or expropriated, i.e., exposed or outted as productive outside the wound economy (its inner life), neither legible nor illegible nor both. Lyric, corporeal procedural writing, counter-narrative, and other potentially embodied or anti-representational modes that point towards turning woundedness outward and acted upon, are widely avoided. Why, beyond the well-traveled (and increasingly irrelevant) argument suggesting that these modes are taken to be outmoded viz. conceptions of the self and representation?

Poetry & Embodiment

In poetry and poetics we do often speak of embodiment, or the poetics and politics of the body, or again, of a local ecopoetics with global implications, but rarely is the poem thought to have use value as cybernetic appendage, as contiguous with the body and the body as contiguous with a specific, often toxic environment, or in Robert Kocik’s terms, as a “vestigial organ” of a body or bodies, one that can stimulate others much like a “commoning connector”[5] can (as prosody, e.g.). Or: poems and artworks as pre-occupied territories inside an occupied territory, as it were. The poem, as it enters the space of the body, takes up residence there, and in turn, in various ways, the body now activated reclaims itself through its own estrangement. Nor is the body—as much as the poem—thought to be itself aesthetic site beyond performance art, dance, and somatic practices familiar to most of us but rare as part of social struggle, a site that as Kocik notes has “outsourcing” potential as skilled affective labor, even once no longer transliterated to the normative page, i.e., a site of activation in the sense of being a re-territorializing place (Deleuze), or at least partially pre-occupied territory capable of articulating the futurity of wider de-occupation. As a site where, for example, as Anne Waldman states, “ [T]he body [can] be an extension of energy… [where] we are not defined by our sexual positions as men or women in bed or on the page. ”[6] The interchangeability of “poem” and “body part” becomes obscured by spatio-temporal or categorical etiologies, by the existence of the art object and its economies (and here it can be argued that even much of the somatic practice we study and participate in, especially poetry, generative in itself, is not often outsourced, brought outside itself in the sense I take Kocik to be getting at). Production is then often devalued tout court, as if production itself is the problem rather than the question of what form production takes under what social-economic conditions (cf. the over-determined institutional critique in contemporary poetry of text arts as detritus, language-junk, etc, e.g., conceptual movements in poetry that Stan Apps has recently referred to, a la Richard Rorty, as “a sociology of knowledge”). If the poetic-bodily environment is thought of as inert bi-product, then it will be inert bi-product.[7]

Re-articulation of “the body” and of “a body” and articulation of “what the body can do” is what I’m interested in here as relates to CA Conrad’s (among several others) observation that such local investigations/explorations towards “unanticipated care” (Rob Halpern) have implications for global re-articulations, for and perhaps as sustainable social formations.[8] Aesthetic production will not replace boots on the ground organizing in this regard. But this does not mean that aesthetic production, particularly somatic or corporeal practices, is not in itself part of social struggle, cannot itself be a form of subsistence, commoning. The commons in the usual sense, as shared, self-sustaining environment for public use, its formation, might only be sustainable if the bodies who build and maintain that commons organize to undermine the catastrophic formation of the enclosed body (the body of the ownership society) caused by neoliberal capitalism. Labor organizing as reclamation of public space, as a commons-forming practice, can be thought of as an aesthetic practice in need of poetry and art as sustainable resource to draw upon, in closer proximity to. Perhaps any particular commons besides the body can potentially perform this body maintenance—a “prosody room” a la Kocik’s work I take to have great feedback potential, helping the body of the commons to be a body that maintains the commons. Can the body itself maintain another body likewise? Be such a “place,” advantageous as motional?

“Disability” and Affective Capacities Under Neoliberal Capitalism

There is something passive in our current fragmentary realization that our affective capacities are considered by our managers as every bit as “defective” as our various and variable “disabilities.” That the two are on a spectrum, of a category, for the “competent” manager. As Ranceire notes[9], Derridean and other claims of art and trans-gressive subjects as othered, ghosted, or essentially abject, might serve to recapitulate managerial discourses in their critique of them—which is a sort of passivity, or dialectical insufficiency, at least. Why is there something inevitable, or essential, about the ghost? To noun it fixes it. Maybe these later critiques of managerial discourse serve as evidence that such a realization of one kind of post-abelism requires work to figure out how we are with one another, and for one another, what parts of a body lie dormant (are “vestigial”), where a body is located in relation to and as its environments, and thus (re)defined. This would involve consensual experimentation, a “re-apportionment of parts” and reclamation of codes of possibility, a recongifuration of proprietary relations to events such as disability” while not giving over to a totalizing discourse of opposites: capacity without limit.

Insofar as I’m interested in the body as commons, I am in two senses:

1)   The potential for a body, and the body, to be a site of subsistence, care, for other bodies—as usefully submitting to, and;

2)    The potential for a body’s unique affective potentials/capacities to be outsourced in constellation/collaboration with other bodies

1 is a local interest, an exploration and way of giving oneself over as shared resource, that can and sometimes has been performed by us, or by individuals in community. There’s an open question here: how far can “commons” be pushed from its older sense and still retain its core meaning? What can commoing become? Is the brain, for all it stores and can share, a commons? Is consciousness, as Kocik asks? What about the sexual body? Are sex cooperatives commons’? Can prostitution, under a different economy, be a kind of commoning? It can certainly be a public service (in some cases it is), but a commons? So, 1 is exploration, or collaborative somatic practice, insofar as the body’s functions (its corporeality, capacities, and what it might have knowledge of and can provide—i.e., its post-human appendages) are not necessarily visible to us prior to giving the body over to other bodies in a particular context. 1 is poetic insofar as it is a local reading. It is bodies reading one another, where “poetic” here has both normative and wider meaning. It is also a writing insofar as discovery is, or can be, outsourced as artistic and other modes of production (where the book, e.g., too has at least quasi-commoning potential?). 2 is a community’s (or “aggregate body’s”) discoveries during commoning as somatic practice now taken outside the local environment and the coterie, further submitting to the needs and desires of other aggregate bodies not as of yet in community, but with particular needs and desires that call for care. The foreign language translator is a seemingly banal but vital example of submission analogous to 2. Again, what differentiates commoning with sustained, ecological public service? Some services are obviously not commons, while in other cases (cf. Dominiguez’s “hacktivism”) the distinction is not so obvious. If the body is a commons or can be, insofar as I’m interested in 1 and 2, I’m interested in how we get there—there are countless needs and desires, varying ways to subsist or be provided care, hence there must be countless practices (behaviors and also more directed procedures directed at commoning) available to us (what subsistence means here is part of the question of what the commons is or can be now). That is, I want to tease out what it might mean for all of us under neoliberal capitalism to be “disabled,” as has been discussed here, in particularity, and to use these wounds as counter-managerial. If we are all disabled under neoliberal capitalism—and I take it that we are—then for our bodies, individually and in groups, to be a commons, also means that we are figuring out, along the way, what some of our potentials are and can be as sources of care, as capacities to be outsourced. This is also twofold. As I take it that:

1)   The majority of our affective capacities and their functions are unknown to us, but also;

2)   The majority of our alienated ways of interacting, i.e., the majority of our behaviors and capacities simpliciter are unknown to us, or unacknowledged by us to be “for us.” So the majority of the body is frontier.

1 and 2 here get to the questions of scope in the pair above these; if we often don’t know what we can do and be for one another, what to ask of one another, then “care” is often a matter of discovery, a reclamation of the corporeal body’s capacities and interfaces and its remediation, treatment, for future care-taking. Also, the poem, as archive and extension of our corporeal work, of commons, would thus be a making legible what is occulted and made perceptible by commoning (a reflective apparatus), and also a record of a lived relation that exists beyond, or as trace of, that relation. The work of turning the body into sustainable site for mutual care involves the somatic work of “finding our bodies” in relation to one another and to their contexts, as CA Conrad puts it. Stimulating those vestigial organs, as Kocik puts it. This relates directly to the potential for the poem to activate us with regard to reclamation and remediation; and also to sustaining common sites—structures—we might build or reclaim (thru squatting, thru renovation and reuse, thru organizing at work and elsewhere, exposing and circumventing property law, etc). It relates directly to reclaiming the body itself by doing so through other bodies, which is a sort of appropriation of the mechanics of management (“organizational” theory), only minus the manager and the managerial economy—that is, minus, among other things, alienation. J.H. van den Berg writes that “love removes the distance between bodies, something like adhesion occurs, one begins to occupy one's body and is invited to be that body.”[10] I’m taken by the potential of “occupation” here (a kind of inversion of the normative use of this term). And yet I’d like to remove “love” from this sentence, over time and in collaboration fill that blank in with particular care-taking terms (“missing behaviors”) that get reclaimed and/or discovered in a process of real time commoning, not as an explanatory gesture, but as one that denotes a becoming in this relation, the admission one of an eternal incompleteness of possible ways we can care or offer subsistence, terms we can thus use here, as well as an admission that we have no idea what these terms will be prior to submitting ourselves to alternative uses, performing different behaviors.

Just as the affective capacity and the body-as-organ-of-production are split by capitalism, so too bodies are partitioned (not just socially but physically) in ways often entirely unquestioned, ways that are so pre-coded as to be thought of as common sense (“we are imprisoned in our skin” is potentially as inevitable as “we are, as protestors, within these barricades”). If it is true that “the body is biologically incomplete… a series of uncoordinated potentials that require social triggering, ordering, and long-term ‘administration,’” as Grosz[11] has argued (a claim that gives materialism to Waldman’s), then there is nothing obvious stopping us from asking how the body is triggered in less obvious ways, and by whom, and in what sort of (re)configuration, questions deeply related to what constructs and constitutes the practiced lie of unified selfhood, corporeality, and agency narrated by neoliberal capitalism. This mining is at the core of somatic practice as I understand it.

Market magic, as many have noted in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling on corporations and financing political campaigns, has been the raison d’etre and the excuse for the stripping away of public land rights and the erosion of habeas corpus, all while corporations have gained increasingly robust legal status as bodies, as “persons,” where this legal definition here not only runs counter to the rights of individuals in a “free” society, but does so by means of defining “person”—hence “corporation”—as pseudo-unified enclosure, workers becoming bodily cells without consciousness, a move contra any possibility for such a “body” to be a commons. “Shared” or “limited liability” under current statutes really means the corporations’ right to protection from itself, mainly its subordinates, as evidenced by parallel revisions of the NLRA. The corporate body is Cartesian, the evil demon that only has substantial existence for itself, treats with skepticism what keeps it alive: the rest of us as its mortal flesh. And yet we can imagine other ways of bodies coming together such that they—we—are interlocked, re-narrated as not just contiguous, but each of us a commons, and together a common body, where the notion of “protection” is not “from one another” but “of this body” from forces that would disallow such assembly. Self-organization promotes sustainability.[12]

Degrees of Share-ability of the Wound

Wittgenstein, famous for both a seemingly mystical and yet quasi-behaviorist lifetime of ruminations on what somatics and kinesthetics have to do, if at all, with aesthetics, might figure to be the last person to whom I’d look for any inspiration at all regarding a relation between “the body” and “commons.” After all, Wittgenstein, his political quietism aside, in several texts, not least the Philosophical Investigations, seems to suggest not only that non-propositional language, poetry say, is (usefully) nonsensical, hence its significance inaccessible by any propositional language (critical discourse), i.e., that poetry is “that which we must pass over in silence,” but solipsism is inescapable: only through shared use of language (propositions), normative descriptions and behaviors, can we hope make sense of one another. What is shared appears hopelessly thin if one takes “language” here to be something like “written and spoken sign systems.” Often, Wittgenstein seems to be relegating the status of the affective body to the “occult business” of art (which means beyond discourse or everyday functionality), feelings and sensations to silence, and any “good” descriptions about such matters are thus “roughly here” insofar as they approximate, but cannot replace, the enclosed, absolute limit of the corporeal body’s experience of itself. “It is humiliating to have to appear like an empty tube which is simply inflated by a mind,” he writes in his notebooks (Culture and Value, 11). And yet I want to take one of his notes as a challenge for what follows (and, less interestingly here as refutation of the common reading of Wittgenstein the pragmatist). Or in any case I want to take literally what Wittgenstein writes below, noting ahead of time (not to be his apologist) that his main concern here was to critique the rapid mid- and late-1930s trend in Germany of defining “nationhood” in terms of “homeland,” which, as he saw it prior to his family’s escape from the Holocaust, helped officials frame an argument for what could not be excused. The quote is from Culture and Value:

“Look on this tumor as a perfectly normal part of your body!" Can one do that, to order? Do I have the power to decide at will to have, or not to have, an ideal conception of my body? Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated as circumstantially as their intervention in European affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, and no one wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life [and no one wants to speak of a disease as if it had the same rights as healthy bodily processes (even painful ones)]. We may say: people can only regard this tumor as a natural part of the body if their whole feeling for the body changes (or if the whole nation feeling for the body changes). Otherwise the best they can do is put up with it. You can expect an individual man to display this; but you cannot expect this of a nation, because it is precisely not disregarding such things that make it a nation. I.e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone both to retain his former aesthetic feeling for his body [aesthetische Gefuhl fuer seinen Korper] and also to make the tumor welcome. (Culture and Value, 20-21)

This is a deeply puzzling journal entry. One who takes Wittgenstein to be an ordinary language philosopher, or purely analytical, would find it surprising that he could “expect” an individual body to lay bare to, to re-orient towards or “welcome” a tumor, a disease process. Although, given his tendency to write about mental illness as an almost mystical capacity as opposed to a defect, one he might or might not be endowed with, what is more interesting for me is the obvious question which lingers here and yet is not at all addressed: how might one’s “whole feeling for the body” change to accommodate and welcome as part of itself that which it would under “common sense” consider alterior, potentially irreparably harmful? Another human, perhaps? Elsewhere, Wittgenstein makes it abundantly clear that art, of central importance to becoming (if ineffably so), and embodied life in general, relate to our seemingly occult abilities to “get” each other, do “right” by one another, in fact “inhabit” one another’s pain without so much as saying (another) word.

Is there a sense in which a body (any—unique—body) and by conditional implication, the body is or can be—potentially—a commons (in a sense owned, yet given over to several—a community)? The possibility arises if there is any potential of de-territorializing the body’s triggered potentials or unearthing new ones, to whatever degree, and in doing so, re-defining the body itself (and to a lesser extent, the commons). This is a matter of active making, not conceptualizing, as Kocik notes above. Via “making new behaviors,” is there a sense in which we can manifest a body as a site that is neither subject nor object, self nor other, and that in its relational aspects can be a “self-sustaining” motional space for mutual care, sustenance? If the pre-occupied nonsite of the page inserts a language of futurity into our discourses, and is thus a social triggering, then the question arises as to how to move from that page to what it articulates or activates, how to move from nonsite to site, re-articulation to sustainable activation, radicalization to reclamation. Kocik asks this question for us generally, as a collective. In turn I ask it with regard to our bodies, e.g. in ways not totally dissimilar from his work in Overcoming Fitness.

Without a fixed commons in the more usual sense of the word—physical structures or portioned lands that nourish and help define and sustain a community in the sense Kocik is actively involved in trying to reclaim—we’re left as itinerant caretakers in need of asking rather itinerant questions, where body as commons isn’t unrelated to a sort of squatting in various and varying environments, thus forming constantly shifting ecosystems. I don’t desire to be itinerant, but it does have its strategic advantages, albeit temporarily: we can re-territorialize sites such as the workplace, and we can offer one-another back-alley sanctuaries for desires entirely fulfill-able, many most likely not even acknowledged as such by the desirer. Some entirely acknowledged, and ridiculously illegal. But what else?

Labor Organizing, a Poetics

Here I'm interested in the parts or capacities or surfaces of the “postmodern body” (i.e., the socially constructed set of ideas, linguistic constructions, faultines and power grids the term now denotes), what can give way, contra “the one-dimensional man” and the “hedonistic” resistance to “surplus repression” as put by Marcuse,[13] to the possibility of a non-enclosed, consensually interlocked and yet not completely unified “body,” a body rent not owned, shared and share-abe.

Note regarding the interplay of normative politics and this repositioning of what the body is and can do: I’m not interested in formulations of “the body” or “commoning” that throw out established forms of protest along the way, especially in regard to value, production, and instrumental notions of causation. Quite the opposite. Such forms are not necessarily duplicative of neoliberal capitalism, e.g., notions of the body as site of resistance a la the formation of the picket line, a rare thing nowadays to begin with (where a body is a kind of unit of measure for resistance and causation a kind of axiom rather than part of a contingent discourse). I’m interested in noting these concepts as necessary but insufficient insofar as parts of current organizing strategy (here critiqued from within) are already necessarily parasitic on normative codes and structures of power / possibility that motivate a campaign in the first place, namely the temporary externalization and de-individuation of the body for purposes of “getting in the way” of oppression (here, countability of bodies to form a unit or wall is central to the goal of re-distribution of resources for those who don’t often enough get counted). Thus nearly all macro/strategic moves counting bodies as corporeal engines of power (either as causes, symptoms or effects of the larger environment) perhaps rely on a dominant (managerial) sphere of discourse, and this by itself, without supplemental re-articulation, is corrosive even if temporary (in Lenin’s sense of “temporary”, i.e., instrumental).[14]

We need not throw out materialist conceptions of materiality when attempting to supplement or build on established modes of organizing/gathering, or even when attempting to do away with most concepts of managerial discourse in favor of opening up possibles; that would be to do what Foucault did as archeology, which as far as I can tell, in its crucial observations nonetheless flattens, as system, much of the analysis of the substructures that give rise to discourses in the first place. What we are left with is an historicism that makes no substantial claim as to how paradigms give way to others. I rather want us to wonder how established forms of protest (a very particular form of gathering, and, one can say, at least for certain protests such as squatter rights campaigns, commoning[15]) can be tweaked and torqued and complemented along with other forms of gathering. And conversely, how organizing might be of use to this conversation. For some things, we need look no further than a central tactic in extant (especially labor) organizing practices themselves, the organizing conversation itself, which is decidedly non-normative, though can be taken even further—it entails a body-body inter-relation (and increasing inter-lockedness over time) unlike the environment that is poisonous enough to set the conversation in motion. The ongoing conversation effects a reconfiguration, quite literally, of what a body is, or can be, which re-arranges the lived environment bit by bit. Absent managed bio-power, sustainability of the body in these cocooned moments now relies on affective capacities, and with them, communicable gains and losses of a different value, that of the subject as becoming subject yielding to another subject for purposes of sharing skills, warmth, perspectives, ideas, sustenance, etc., her becoming valuable beyond herself with relative strangers, not just forming trust but interdependence on an affective level. One must, to some degree, feel the other’s toothache, so to speak, then make use of it without using it, in order for the organizing conversation to be dialogic, wandering, yet driven by some eventually shared orientation towards self-organization and self-sustainability. Is the organizing conversation (or relation) driving in the direction of Wittgenstein’s notion of “welcoming” the tumor (the alterior body)?

One can say that the organizing superstructure (its external face) is parasitic on paradigmatic managerial discourses, and yet its central tactic, paradoxically, resists those discourses/economies. It’s often thought within organizing circles that the ends are counter-managerial, as in the formation of the trade union and winning of a contract, however it’s rather the means that are, in this country, due to existing labor law, truly radical/radicalizing. Unions that rely heavily on external, political, campaigns (lobbying) are less likely to sustain themselves; those that rely on the organizing conversation throughout their lifetimes are conversely the most sustainable.[16] Touch rather than wounding, inter-lockedness rather than isolation of bodies, and militant listening over terminal data gathering or production, form the space of the organizing conversation. In this way the organizing conversation (as “infinite” in Blanchot’s terms, here referring to literature) is poetry’s point of departure, and poetry (or aesthetic experience more broadly), a trigger for the organizing conversation. [17]

The two spheres are more deeply related than is often thought, especially by activists with no interest in poetry (see no place for what obviously counts as “art” in protest) and conversely by poets and other artists who see dominant forms of protest as inextricably and negatively tied to the larger hegemonic cycle the protestor is hoping to resist. For what follows, I can only say that I find much (especially Lacanian) discourse in poetics, and the humanities generally, to be largely regressive here, a move away from activism (i.e., Kocik’s from “outsourcing”), giving rise to the emergent “theory” and “practice” split in ways decidedly confused and unhelpful, i.e., by counting these as independent discourses (even fields of existence) rather than as a set of actions in time, less different in kind than in sequence: move, reflection on said move as move, recursive effect of reflection on another move as move, and so forth. And anyway, so often the focus is on reactionary moments in protest, which is a sign of deep and sometimes purposeful inexperience in the field; a look at criticisms of the 68 Strikes in France by Lacan himself, or of the “failures” of the Algerian resistance, are examples of such strategic foci and resultant complicity in the split between activism and theory/criticism, were in this case cause for the foundation of an entire “radical” university in Paris which promptly fired its head when he (Foucault) started hiring radical organizers to teach classes.

The Common Body

Poetry, as nonsite, we say, can initiate and sensuously explore questions about its own (our own) limits and activated potentials: just how is this body (what Amber DiPietra calls in her essay available here a "funhouse mirror") shorn and shaped by neoliberal capitalism (making toxic the air we breathe and the water we drink)? In turn, how does “it” behave under these conditions? Is any body, under neoliberal capitalism, self-sustainable? Even the “corporate body” has a long shelf life, but as a neck-up organism, needs be parasitic on its own subjugated parts to hang on for dear life, must hope that it does not suffer from systemic infection or autoimmunologic response (agitation) and impending pathological rebellion (the worker’s strike). Might the affective resonances of neoliberal capitalism’s shoring and making the subject’s woundedness invisible, as events inscribed on the body (or as the body’s component parts), become Grosz’s potentials, unique characteristics in a potentially transformational process? Codes, features, and experiences to be shared, imprints to be performed with and for other bodies--beyond the nonsite of the page?

One of the most visible example of such shoring of a body by capitalism and making this perceptible is the physical “disability,” or when the disability is not visible on the body itself, the disabled person’s limitations trying to navigate a world made for the “fit” are, at least, clearly on offer. Can these catastrophic effects of our lived and historical habit(at)s, developed and caused by systems of ecological parasitism, can their ensuing felt-constrictions be investigated or shared, then re-articulated as capacities and features available for mutual and consensual benefit in the sharing (commoning)? If so, one would imagine that the body itself, in a particular context, would now be the aesthetic engine as much as unit of contact for social struggle, or nonsite (potential sustainable site), for the triggering of bodies in felt community. The disability/set of potentials itself as both fact of a body and nonsite (counter-narrative) for the body as so often understood.

If the organizing conversation offers us one starting point for drawing closer, coming into proximity with and for one another in common struggle, and this relation is aesthetic, is it a category error to suggest, that by taking the conversation further (or by supplementing it with sensuous modes of interaction, mining of missing behaviors), a body can be given over to other bodies, consensually, forming a commons? And further: is it “crazy” to suggest that in so doing, this plural formation can feel (on a somatic and affective level) its (aggregate) wounds, movements, features, etc (as van den Berg suggests)? If I don’t “own” my wounds as separate from me (if they are sensorial, experiential, locational, and behavioral parts of me and not something like a coat or a hat I can take off), then in giving the wound away, am I not giving myself to you, turning outward that which I am covering so that it might be, in a sense, treated? Phenomenologically this would amount to you rediscovering what you already have, as one can rediscover one’s elbow by suddenly attending to it (or your elbow attending to you). Can I give you my arm without cutting it off, for example, without giving you the rest of me? And is not this “giving,” if the body is not an enclosed structure in the normative sense (i.e., private as opposed to sovereign), a kind of permission to sense what it senses or can sense, an allowance for use of this unique experiential field? Why does it seem impossible that I can have your experiences? Inhabit your wounds, collaboratively re-articulate them, then use them as shared capacities? Pre-coded impossibility of shared phenomenal experience is pervasive. Does that mean it’s just how things are? How bodies operate? If solipsism is as pervasive as it seems, and solipsism is a social construction, then it’s solipsism in addition to a re-orientation of proprietary relations to the body that paradoxically allows me to have your experiences, and you, mine. It’s my (your) dream, after all.

Regardless of just how phenomenologically related we can be, aesthetic practices a la the embodied poem, made by the wounded producer, make sites such as the logic of disability visible in ways complimentary, maybe parallel to, organizing, and yet, despite pushing against the limits of representation, such practices can’t, as representational appendages of the body, cross these limits. The work of turning nonsite into site is only made all the more apparently crucial by poetry’s (the book’s) failure to do so by itself. In trying to push poetic form in the direction of non-representationlism, a book (mine, say) which asks us to consider the body-in-crisis, turns on itself in ambivalence absent its pages read as data or causal map or instruction for further action (as having use value beyond itself): it cannot do the outsourcing work demanded by the nonsite’s wake, cannot itself, as artificially detached from the conditions of its production and its producers (the rest of its body) act any further on re-territorialization than providing some level of subsistence as quasi-commons (as “abstracted” commons). That is, it makes these conditions perceptible, potentially, but somatic practice, and somatic collaboration in particular (a return to the body), seems needed here. How to proceed from the poem’s making perceptible blind spots regarding our own and one another’s bodies, the body in commons (as shared ecosystem)? How might we consensually use any provisional answers to our queries for mutual benefit (consensual, cohabitational poesis)? Again, I come back to the body-cum-poetic relationship, and that relationship’s environment-as-potential for de-territorializing, re-territorialization.

Outsourcing “Aggregate Disability”

Despite an increased acknowledgment of the patient’s status here (since, at least, Foucault), the sociological endeavor of re-articulating identity, body, and agency viz. the (now neoliberal) wound, except in few areas (certain disability rights campaigns, in poetry potentially, or in much 1-1 labor organizing, for example—all involving enactments of language as a kind of tendon connecting site and nonsite), is not yet wholly thought of as a very peculiar form of (non-normative) capacity or identity of identities, let alone shared. The capacities of the wound, internalized as wound, are almost never made use of outside art simpliciter or organized protest simpliciter. Almost never made use for, or better, use as… another. As aggregate capacities to produce with. If the above is asking us, as alternative learners in a small, local environment, to re-articulate and use our wounds as capacities in whatever way possible (to be commons for one another), then if we can do this, what happens when we outsource these behaviors, as, say, poets or artists or alternative learners, beyond the local community? When the book gives way to, or instigates, a non-representational mode of care-taking, gathering, sociality beyond those deeply invested in the book (or the collective) to begin with? Or as performance artists? When the body is taken outside the gallery and re-articulated as dialogic and participatory in real-time environments? Is this not also a sort of potential commoning (where organizing and commoning are nearly interchangeable here)? Or, at least, can’t this be one outcome? What would this look like? We are all, in some way or another, “disabled” by neoliberal capitalism, as Kocik, Thom Donovan, Eleni Stecopolous, and Patrick Durgin (among others) have noted here for Nonsite (and elsewhere). Each uniquely as well as commonly, in ways share-able from the start. If that is so, then outsourcing particular disabilities for larger communal use—whether the poetic capacity or the capacity of using portable fans as bodily appendages (for tinnitus), as in my case—the work should be difficult, but by no means impossible. What diverse capacities must silently exist? And how many lie waiting for aggregation, the output behaviors and found functions one can’t possibly conceive of ahead of time?

Provisos & Parallel Questions

Affective labors and alternate capacities, including physical structures given no societal value (contiguous with Butler’s example of non-reproductive orifices in the case of sex and gender), when covered or merely analyzed as such, become ghettos of the body.[18] In the case of normative valuations of gender and sexuality, the anus is then famously no more considered “functional” (sexually) than is a broken arm capable of lifting. And the broken arm is no more functional—no more an aggregate of capacities and potentials—than is the “bad neighborhood” of the 21stcentury city. It’s no accident that the wounded city and the wounded individual often co-mingle (are forced into cohabitation), one aggregate in fact making up the demographic of the other. Can these ghettos of the body, like urban farms, site-specific communal art (cf. Balkin’s Public Smog or Vanessa Place’s The Guilt Project), or neighborhood coalitions, be the beginning, or at least the site of possibility for, resistance, aggregation? And if yes, then specifically here, for commoning? What role does the written (and other performative enactments of language) play in re-articulating a body, hence the body, as physically, not just socially, aggregate, share-able? What needs be in place for this re-articulation—however it may appear to us—to emerge? Poetry and art, again, as trigger and sensuous resource here, as nonsite or map towards and part of re-articulation, potentially pushing us to share or outsource what we take as owned not rent, what we have a proprietary relation to, in fact hide and hoard: the wounds that have come to define the body, including our “poetic behaviors” themselves.

Just as gender and post-cultural theory stress the dangers of overcorrecting the relative ease in blurring of boundaries, specifically the danger inherent in the myth of performativity cum choice—“I can choose to be whatever gender I’d like!”—as if performative re-articulation is not a life and death struggle born of consistent subjugation, the same caution should be stressed viz. the body’s corporeal or functional capacities and post-ableist theory. “I am/can be thought of as just as disabled as you” sounds patently ridiculous (the “as” here, or the tendency to universalize, becomes the problematic insofar as it potentially equalizes the diversity it hopes to embrace), thus so should its seemingly more benign cousin: “turn that negative into a positive!” Seemingly more benign, this overcorrection (a kind of mythic ableism) implies that re-articulating the body’s affective capacities in regard to woundedness is simply a “matter of how you look at it” as opposed to a strenuous, collective and repetitive act of submission and attention, where re-articulation employs a notion of narrational and linguistic struggle and sharing as full, embodied. Disabilities are no more capacities in isolation, no more potentials if not activated, actively shared, then is language meaningful without someone else to speak to. I know I have particular capacities, but sometimes don’t know what their functions may be. And yet for any number of capacities I can name and consider as such (not causing others harm), there are likely countless others I cannot discover, feel, absent another.

Militant attentiveness to our needs, wants, and desires—through and as an affective endeavor—is what is called for yet again, not tolerance, integration, or attitude adjustment. We don’t need more pain management. Self-medication. Adaptability to a landscape that was hostile long before that hostility branded us, that made “the body” perceptible to us in the first place.

Militant attentiveness, because as with the capacities of the body, I do not know what my needs and desires are—or might be. Some, perhaps, but probably relatively few absent continually trying new modes of interacting in differing environments, even (especially) prima face absurd ones.

If the cunning manager fears our affective (“defective”) capacities, features, and potentials (not just the wound of disability but the wound that is the desire to ghost the disabled), even the dis-abled body’s unusual limits, then why not revel in them, discover and put them to use, before (or as) they too are subsumed, appropriated as biopower? Reveling here, treating the body as commons, is, I think, a kind of mining for “missing behaviors,” or at least an expansion on “vestigial organ stimulation” as a resource-ful, shared endeavor, part of a wider endeavor of submitting the body to others as source of care. If I offer you this body, will you investigate “that Me” (Foucault) with me in a way that performs care taking, that unfetters its (this others’) surpluses, that unearths what our managers would like to stay hidden, which is to say legible, partitioned? If I offer you this body, is it not necessary to need to care for it in order for you to sustain whatever benefits (and behaviors), unanticipated or anticipated, we receive? This is a question I take performance and live art, again, to have, in some ways, accidentally hit upon in the 60s and 70s, as instanced by (for example) Kaprow asking what the institutional aspect—the gallery environment—was doing to the otherwise intimate procedure of the becoming subject, the body itself, performing submission to a public as abject artwork. I don’t think that a world absent the gallery would be any “better” than it is now, in fact think it’d be much worse, but acts of outsourcing need not abandon the gallery for good, maybe not even at all, to be potentially invaluable. As invaluable now (during late capitalism) as they were then (during late capitalism).

Outsourcing I take Thom Donvan to be interested in, in a way entirely related, in asking what the potential benefits might be of a poetry strike,[19] that is, for us to stop writing poetry in the usual sense, for a sustained but temporary period of time. One benefit, he notes, might involve finding different ways to gather, ways that draw on the energies and particular skills we put into writing poetry, e.g., as information gathering and articulating places, places where others can go for information and collaboration, as in Thom’s example of land art’s need to wade through a dense, often hidden thicket of property law, collect it, use it, and helpfully distill it, in order to use those laws for public welfare. If we attended to one-another’s affective capacities, our bodies’ systems and their needs and desires beyond the page, indeed organized around them, what “new” behaviors might result? What emergent behaviors might count as a form of subsistence? “People have been known to subsist on a single poem for days,” notes Rodrigo Toscano in answer to a question he was asked about the use value of poetry (Penn Conference, 2004).[20] If that is so, I want to further ask what unfettering the working body’s affective surpluses can do in tandem with established forms of resistance, organizing? On “strike,” with whom might we affiliate, gather? For whom (in the case of joining up with “non-poets” or the more diverse “non-Nonsite affiliates”)? And conversely: as organizers and workers with “day jobs,” where is the poetry break-room?

In part I’m using Silvia Federici’s analyses[21] of the relation between agricultural enclosures, the subjugation of women, and the expropriate cycle of early capitalism, how one subjugation is microcosmic of another, one form of resistance macrocosmic of another (might not the reverse be true?). It’s well worth making use of her crucial work both to form or maintain alliance with the struggles of those with whom she organizes, as well as to realize that her analysis can equally be applied to the subjugation of many different affective labors, features and capacities, what neoliberalism has counted as the subject’s woundedness, disability; the relation between the wound-as-owned and the wounded worker producing wounding but potentially nourishing environments she has no rights to, macrocosmic of her own laboring body:

It is also encouraging that, over the last two decades, we have seen the growth of urban garden movements, returning agricultural work to the heart of our industrial metropoles. But unfortunately, many in the left have not yet overcome the legacy of class struggle in the industrial era with its unique stresses on the factory and the industrial proletariat, as well as its belief in a technological road to liberation from capitalism.

Our affective labors and capacities, subsumed by the myth of the body as enclosure (private), and wounds as in-capacities rather than waiting surpluses, can equally be counted as a leftist blind spot: how often have I organized white-collar workers—poetry teachers, for example—who take themselves not to be workers? The mass sublimation of the message that affective labor is not production, is not even labor at all, is both a living crisis of super-alienation, as well as an opportunity to invert what is ostensibly treated as a totalizing wound of the aggregate body. The body as assumed-enclosure and the crisis as negatively articulated, once inverted, becomes an opportunity for social re-arrangements that can occur under the cover of managerial ignorance. But how (in addition to, or alongside, established forms of labor organizing and abstracted articulations of futurity—the poem, e.g)?

This is also a microcosmic form of Kocik’s question about /project around how to build sustainable sites: how do we build sustainable aggregate bodies that can inhabit, build, and help to maintain those sites? Both questions are, as Kocik notes regarding Nonsite itself, in a sense, architectural. And both, in use of Federici’s work, are questions that ask whether we can differently outsource our bodies, our wounds, which in fact takes advantage of an analysis of alienation, sees potential in its mechanics, but puts body-as-functional to use in a new context, one in which the body is reclaimed in order to consensually give it away as public good.

We can also take from Lennard Davis, who superbly historicizes the monumental task that re-articulating woundedness entails. The re-configuring of “the body” as aggregate and as, in many ways, shared, re-narrating the wound as thus share-able (on, to put it crudely, a phenomenological level or even on a inter-relational one), is not simply a matter of linguistic-semantic repositioning of these terms alone. With a re-articulation comes reapproriation of all capacities the wound is associated with: “disability,” for example, as has been pointed out by numerous writers (including many of us), is in part defined by (parasitic on) what culturally gets counted by managers as “ability.” For the wound to be re-articulated and yet not simply traded in for its obverse, such a binary, and many others, will to need be replaced, at best, by something like a spectrum of capacities. States Davis (here in relation to “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” as he traces its history): “… there is a continuum between OCD and other kinds of obsessive behavior in our society.”[22] The spectrum is what Davis is centrally arguing for with regard to re-imagining disability rights. Or as Kocik wrote as part of his Nonsite discussion on disability and poetics: “disability is shared because ability is so extremely unexplored that we have no reference… living and working is unaesthetic and terminal. Impractical is the norm. I’m considering calling the norm eternal disability.”[23] We haven’t the faintest idea of what the body is or can be, let alone what it can do. And so those bodies that get counted, like myself, as “disabled,” our shapes and gestures, our treatment and our duress in toxic environments, our very bodies at this moment call attention to and come to represent a problem that’s actually universal, or as Robert puts it, “eternal.” The visibility of “my” disability is, in fact, one of its capacities. As limit case and as metaphor. And yet that we don’t know what we’re capable of, each of us, implies both shared and diverse (share-able) capacities that are now total blindspots. As variably disabled, we’re also variably capable of activating potential somatic / bodily functions we cannot yet describe because we have not yet reclaimed the body and given it over under different conditions.

This frame of post-abelist poetics is straddling the line, yes, but I think productively so, between acknowledging that disability is real and not simply an exclusionary term, one that currently denotes real and particular limitations of a body, while at the same time situates factual limitations as part of a spectrum-like phenomenon of latent capacities, potentials, and features that, if not shared, are share-able, potentially capacities for the aggregate body, the body as motional commons. Such capacities are not like “alien languages” to us, i.e., useless, untranslatable. But showing capacities and features to fall on a spectrum is far from using them to our relational, consensual (organizing) advantage. To do this, the body at least needs to lay bare, or submit to, a form of care to begin with, sharing both the wound as re-articulated (giving up proprietary relation to it), and so to investigation of its uses, which is a collectivizing endeavor, and therefore, a deeply sensitive one insofar as we make ourselves receptive to others in ways that threatens the enclosure of woundedness as a category to be made visible, to be granted rights, and so forth. Giving up proprietary relations need not be a threat to the individual, but the potential sense of erasure (undo harm) lingers without consensual gestures put forth by the uniquely operational individual herself on agreeable terms, as Amber DiPietra has noted here, thus needs be part of the conversation.

Somatic Practices & Outsourcing/Sharing: Forms of Commoning

Insofar as I’m interested in unearthing, then outsourcing our affective capacities through commoning as somatic practice, trans-gressive behaviors and capacities in nearly all environments aside from the ghettos we set up for them (or are set up for us), I’m interested in a kind of somatic practice, that, to use Wittgenstein’s phrase, would allow us to, in some even degraded way, better feel our own and another’s toothache. Through meditative practices, reflexology, somatic enactments a la CA Conrad, body art, and other non-traditional forms of “finding” our bodies, we have a developed—if under-utilized—set of tools for commoning, some practices less directed at the body’s use this way than others.

I want to highlight a couple practices that I think do bridge these curricula, and also to describe and enact some somatic practices of mine that aim more to “prime” us for outsourcing affective capacities, get one body’s “disabilities” talking to another’s, in fact relying on and feeling another’s. If I’ve argued that commoning the body—submitting to another for shared subsistence—is a sort of collaborative somatic practice, then I’m also interested in suggesting that somatic practices tout court are procedures to radicalize the individual through their unearthing/discovering latent capacities, features, fautlines, sensations, bodily knowledges, etc., especially as these relate to, or are triggered by, often occulted social phenomena. These capacities or bits of data, like somatic practices themselves, can then be outsourced as form of commoning. Kaia Sand’s outsourcing Remember to Wave as event (site-specific tour) reclaims parts of a public space, and is one sort of outsourcing. As poets, our poetry skills are obvious capacities (affective wounds) that can be outsourced—but in what other ways beyond the book? The book, as a kind of archive, can be thought of as a form of commons, but like Sand’s work, or David Buuck’s, we can imagine that there are other ways writing as action of a body, as affective capacity, can be opened for public use.

Insofar as somatic practices I take as ways to prime or radicalize the body for commoning, I’m interested in practices of raising the level of discomfort in the room, submitting to various procedures that might activate parts of us, or capacities, not yet felt by the subject prior, via the banality of amplifying already constricting conditions. I’m interested in practices taken from conceptual art and dance, corporeal rituals in poetry so-called that involve consensually submitting the body to another’s use or another’s circumstance, doing so at risk of subjugation, even erasure, where neither subjugation nor erasure, nor the seemingly more benign notion of “integration” are hoped for, but rather is a temporary suspension of propriety in the service of re-articulating the terms of our “uniqueness” and “subjecthood,” where the body is re-articulated as a sort of commons in the most banal or domestic settings (and via these banal and domestic, but deeply oppressive, logics). Modes of interacting contra social entropy, capital’s narrative-as-law that claims the corporeal body dies off as an ever more enclosed, instrumental system parasitic on other systems. These relational exercises can be seen as a kind of performance of commoning when enacted as temporary modes of interaction, where the written input-output (and other aesthetic enactments) serves as archival practice and mapping procedure of moments where the wound and touch meet, sensation bridges bodies, where the body is blurred onto another, made neither legible nor illegible by, perhaps realistically at least, a temporary artificial (collapsible) environment.

I exploit corporeal procedures, a la Abramovic’s work, but taken outside the gallery setting, in/for Occultations to draw out the banality of disability in relation to extreme forms of subjugation that most of us feel completely detached from (torture at Gitmo, e.g). The unacknowledged redundancy of everyday alienation in connection to wider systems of logic becomes so suppressed that merely staging in domestic space crude recapitulations of the violence that is already pervasive, simply framing it, shakes us up, produces rather new feelings and behaviors, not least of which, the acknowledgment that we’ve been enduring such pervasive constrictions for a long time, that this “we” is tenuous (to quote Butler) but available, that we’ve been enduring without giving such endurance (our own and one another’s) that much affective attention. Absent much attention—or data that speaks to particular forms of attention needed—care is not as easily provided; commoning is not on offer. The resulting behavior of simple corporeal stagings is often that of relating to one-another (as collaborators) after the fact as if experiencing alienation or violation for the first time—together. And yet this is an entirely ephemeral, temporary occupation of another’s body, where what remains of the submission to another’s circumstance is the dross of an event, itself an event, but an archival one—poems. It is, however, also a radicalization, a finding systemic sources for the body’s shape and felt constrictions, animating this body’s social imprints, what and where some of the catastrophic social forces are that are shaping this body’s limits, counting it as—while in part causing it to be—disabled. Which arms one, so to speak, for offering care—makes available parts of the body, modes of relating, that otherwise go unattended. Perhaps this is the amplification of the poetic, realizing the poetic as modes of interacting, ways of becoming in an environment?

And so I am left with questions relating to how to outsource what fautlines are unearthed, and how to further discover latencies. How does one feel another’s toothache in a sustainable way? How does one outsource that toothache, or its treatment, as public good? To treat the site of pain as a sort of nonsite, the motional body as mobile metaphor, i.e., as so public and given over to another sensing subject as to abstract itself from itself (oneself from oneself), paradoxically reclaiming a kind of “self” via another? In Wittgenstein’s terms, this would involve active-passive acknowledgment that I do not “have” a toothache, but “I am,” in part, a toothache: it is part of me, not owned but shared, not something one has knowledge of but a state that that “tenuous we” is in. The tactile engagement with a subject’s pain becomes then more obviously possible, such an engagement a kind of reading, reading a kind of touching or overt sharing. What practices might produce a shared, somatic, field of maintenance, then, not just of the toothache, but its treatment? The treatment that which can then be outsourced further? The outsourcing or roving a kind of mobile commoning?

More often than not, when one thinks of the laboring body, one thinks of working for another, or working with another, employment as means of offering the self, and often others, some form care. And insofar as employment involves an employer employing the body as biopower, often the laboring body experiences itself as performing tasks of alienating necessity. Many have noted this—importantly for this conversation—as a modern shift away from the extended family as caretaker to the individual worker as provider. In turn, wage laboring as a necessary condition of the body’s (now other bodies’) maintenance becomes the maintenance and continual refashioning (often to the detriment of our future potential labors) of our lived environments. Tracking how this occurs via attention to the aggregate body’s motional, structural, behavioral, and functional features, doing so by paradoxically performing in miniature tasks of alienation, can be of profound service in not recapitulating the damaging construction of spaces to live and gather in. That is, I’m interested not just in altnerative modes of interaction, but in recapitulating norms in miniature as the individual experiences them, staging them for one another, to paradoxically tease out latent capacities and to discover shared somato-sensory “wounds” caused or effected by these norms.

[1] “Hip-Hop as Liberatory Praxis,” 2008. http://www.havenscenter.org/audio/antwi_akom_hip_hop_liberatory_praxis_using_hip_hop_build_environmental_justice_movement

[2] Were her work taken out of the gallery—as in her “Great Wall” walk in which she broke up with her partner by ritual, each walking half the length of the Great Wall of China, meeting in the middle, and saying goodbye—the question arises as to how, or whether, some of her pieces’ intimate corporeality would differently function, or function sustainably outside abstracting or reified environments.

[3] See again Marcuse, link above, where Marcuse links the strategy of repression to reification.
[4] F. Nietzsche, On the Geneology of Morals (With Ecco Homo), Kaufman trans., 1969 (37).
[5] Definition: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/common-mode+voltage
[6] From “Feminafesto.” http://www.poetspath.com/transmissions/messages/waldman.html
[7] See Stan Apps’ blog, “Freewillapplicator” under “Sociology of Knowledge.”
[8] See, for instance, his introduction to (Soma)tic Midge: “I am constantly having to find my body and find my planet…”
[9] Jacque Ranciere, “The Thinking of Dissensus,” available online as pdf, 2003.
[10] J.H. van den Berg, A Different Existence
[11] Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies-Cities,” from Space, Time, and Perversion, Routledge 1995 (pdf online).
[12] For a less radical but nonetheless extant drive to resist corporate persons as defined, see House sponsorship of a bill that would allow individual stakeholders of a corporation to have one vote apiece about how campaign dollars should be spent. Synopsis here, at “Corporate Persons & Call to Action,” http://davidwolach.blogspot.com/2010/07/corporate-persons-call-to-action...
[13] See Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1964, reproduced here: http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/64onedim/odmcontents.html
[14] See Lenin’s concept of the “temporary dictatorship” in part 1 of What Is To Be Done?
[15] See Aaron Vidaver et al., “Woodsquat,” in West Coast Line, the former being an abstracted commons emerging out of the Vancouver Woodsquat squatter campaign, 2003-4. http://www.econvergence.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/AaronVidaver-West...
[16] The UC organizing campaign, e.g., won union recognition without dependence on lobbying, and without the widespread use campaign literature—fliers, posters, slogans, etc.
[17] From Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation
[18] See Judith Buter, Gender Trouble; and also see Kotz interview with Butler (pdf uploaded here).
[19] See his “Poetry Strike, Anyone?” as Harriet blog entry.
[20] Available online via his Buffalo Poetics page.
[21] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation, for particular analysis, see the chapter: http://www.commoner.org.uk/03federici.pdf
[22] Lennard Davis, Obsession: A History, U of Chicago, 2008, Intro.
[23] Discussion node, on the Discussion on Poetics of Disability page.

Posted In: Nonsite Curricula>>Project on the Commons>>new item

David Wolach & Elizabeth Williamson's Notes from EconVergence

Submitted by David Wolach on Thu, 10/29/2009 - 15:45

Notes from Elizabeth Williamson and David Wolach on Econvergence and the PACE action. David's comments are in italics.

[ This is, in part, a riff on & follow-up to CAConrad & Frank Sherlock's PhillySound conversation, which covers a LOT of ground, but doesn't linger as much on the PACE Action itself ]

Getting there

It is ironic, as David often says, that the folks who most need health care are the ones least able to stand around in the cold at a protest. Even the short trip to Portland took a lot of David, physically and emotionally, due to a painful and unremitting neuromuscular condition.

Gosh, when you put it that way, it sounds horrible! Reflecting back on it, tho, some of the problems or social divisions Rob and others have identified, indeed in part what I think fuels Nonsite Collective and fueled much of EconVergence, seemed – and seem always – to course through this body: this body as metaphor of the neck-up conditionality of “thinking” thru issues of social and economic justice. The head feels lonely in transit, in action. Of divides or lines or separators between systems of identification—the conditions under which we form identifications, as if “this body” were not itself an enunciation that frames thru exclusion, sets a course.

Posted In: Nonsite Curricula>>Spatial Practices

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David Wolach & Elizabeth Williamson's Notes from EconVergence

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