Last Sunday, July 25th David Wolach presented the third event in Nonsite's summer suite on commoning, "The Commons & the Body."
Wolach (like Donovan the week prior) opened with a writing prompt:
"What would giving up a proprietary relationship to one's own enclosed body entail for you?"
I wrote the following:
"Allowing others to help define the boundaries and limits of my body?
Implicating the other in overcoming my own discomfort with it?
Remediating shame like groundwater."
Here are some notes from what followed (I tried to attribute sources when I could remember!):
We must switch the question from what a body is to what a body can do.
Wolach's three points of interest in the body as commons:
1) Labor organizing
2) Illness
3) Poetics of emulation (temporary suspension btw. corporeal body and the rest of the world)
Affective capacities we can share for mutual subsistence...?
Poem as appendage of the body?
the body=concepts/inscriptions
a body=materialized
How can organizing/outsourcing be further radicalized as a set of movements?
The body as usefully submitting to other bodies—to outsource the body to a wider coterie.
Liz Grosz: The body is incomplete...depends on triggers from the outside...
Wolach: Interested in the minor triggers of the body...occluded potential...
Prompt #2: List some things that would have to be in place for the release of a proprietary relationship to the body to be mutually beneficial?
My response:
"A different set of regulatory codes that allow the body to occupy space in a shared manner...
A different relationship to use and operativity..."
Rob Halpern: Prosody as organized pulse...
David Buuck: Permission to fail // to risk having needs met // fear as necessary precondition
Taylor Brady: Possibility of de-skilling
Anne Lesley Selcer: No one is "enclosed"
Chris Daniels: I don't own something I am // I don't "control" my body as it ages, shits, etc.
Brian Teare: Commoning exists outside of systems...the spontaneous...
Yedda Morrison: Difficulty dealing with the body of my body that is still on my body (her daughter was sitting on her lap as she spoke!)