On bodily presence

There’s something about the body, about embodiment, about corporeality, that I want to scratch.

Let’s start with the word ‘corporeality’.  It looks neatly as though it’s ‘corpo-’, the body, and then ‘reality’, but of course that’s just an illusion.  The etymology is, nevertheless, rather lovely: the word ‘corporal’ appears to have its origins in ancient Sanskrit, from a word meaning ‘body, form, appearance’, derived in turn from a verb meaning ‘to appear’.

Appearance.  The process or state of being apparent.  (Plenty of philosophising to be done on this, but not today.)

Today, the body, and not just ‘appearance’: also ‘presence’.  When my body is here, it is not merely an appearance, I am actually present.

I wonder what forms of communication are made possible by, or simply happen through, bodily presence?  And: what is lost in its absence?

Compare, for example: reading this sentence as you sit silently at home; hearing this sentence being read by a sonorous voice emerging from your speakers as you sit on a train; being in a small auditorium as an actor performs the sentence; being in a large open space with thousands of others as a speaker declaims the sentence.

Many of us during the period of the pandemic were reduced to digital rectangles.  For some of us, the return to meeting others ‘in the flesh’ has been a powerful experience.  Have you seen how people twitch?!  And all that postural echo stuff, and the meaning of those glances, up and down and sideways.  And the way people smell, and the heat they give off.

We’re animals, sociable animals.  Look how we behave when we’re in groups!  The things we do, things we would never do ‘on our own’.

Once upon a time a thousand men walked out of their front doors at the same time, and walked down the same streets to the same place of work; and a thousand women lived in the same houses looking after the same families and keeping the same homes.  These people did not need mere words to explain the nature of their ‘lived experience’.  They had no need of theory or rhetoric to persuade them that they had common cause with their neighbours and friends.  They knew it, they felt it: their bodies were it.

And from there it’s easy to imagine other bodies, in other places, in other factories and towns and places of worship.  How do I know I am working class?  Because I fucking feel it, in my limbs, in my lungs.  How do I know there are others like me?  Because I feel them, I see them, I smell them.

Imagine the Peterloo Massacre!  The authorities hated crowds – all those bodies! 

Why do we love marches and carnivals and football and concerts?

We have been atomised.  Our individuality, so precious to us, so Enlightened, has mutated via capitalism into a thing that blinds us.  We can use the word ‘community’, but I think the only people who really use it are commentators and technocrats like me.

Once upon a time it was straightforward to build a sense of collective endeavour – the Chartists, the trade union movement, the churches, socialism – because our bodies knew that we were the same.  We worked together, we lived together, we felt things in our guts and limbs and lungs that didn’t need words. The 'sense of collective endeavour' simply built itself.

And now?  In our cars and our call centres, our fractured housing estates and Amazon-umbilical delivery lives, in tiny little pods and strategically-authorised team units (“Keep that desk area tidy!”), our bodies are little more than the things – as Sir Ken Robinson so beautifully nearly put it – to get us from one experiential setting to the next.

They say that no one ever gets to their death bed wishing they’d been to more meetings.  And that’s fair when the ‘meetings’ in question are sterilised opportunities for power games, corporate positioning and ennui.  But actually, if we want to foster the sort of [insert ambitious progressive terminology of your choice, but actually picture a great big collective hug of care] that we’re going to need to survive the next few decades, then we need to imagine ‘meetings’ as chaotic, creative, messy occasions of convivial physicality.

And we should be hoping for more of that, not less.