Anatomy, Art

and Zeitgeist

Metaphors, veins and orifices

Wounds
Nicole Natri, 2007
By examining how the body has been represented
through time we can gain insight into how bodily
metaphors relate to socio-cultural values.

Body as house
Body as dress
Body as machine

Implications of Cartesian thought for medicine and
medical anthropology






Vitalist monism
Cartesian dualism
Hyphenated inadequacies

1) Animals (pigs) as models for
humans (Galen), and botanical
metaphors for the body and
disease

2) Humans as scientific objects
(Vesalius - Descartes)

3) The house, the machine and
the garment as metaphors for
the body



In defining a work of art as a man-made object demanding to
be experienced aesthetically we encounter for the first time a
basic difference between the humanities and natural science.
The scientist, dealing as he does with natural phenomena, can at
once proceed to analyse them. The humanist, dealing as he does
with human actions and creations, has to engage in a mental
process of a synthetic and subjective character: he has mentally
to re-enact the actions and to re-create the creations. It is in fact
by this process that the real objects of the humanities come
into being.

Panofsky, 1955. The history of art as a humanistic discipline, in
Meaning in the visual arts, Garden City, p. 14.
Philosophical thought confronts all these directions not just
in order to follow each one of them separately or to survey
them as a whole, but under the assumption that it must be
possible to relate them... With all their inner diversity, the
various products of culture language, scientific knowledge,
myth, art, religion become parts of a single great problem-
complex: they become multiple efforts, all directed toward the
one goal of transforming the passive world of mere impressions,
in which the spirit seems at first imprisoned into a world that is
pure expression of the human spirit.

Cassirer, Ernst. 1955 [1923-9]. The philosophy of symbolic forms.
Vol. 1. Language (1923-9). Pp 80-1.

Panofsky identified three levels of aesthetic analysis:

1) Pre-iconographic (i.e. Formal, texture, colour, shape, etc,
empty of meaning)

2) Iconographic: The last supper Can be understood in terms of a
Christian ethos and myths

3) Iconological: a work of art is a possible bearer of meaning
beyond what the creator might have intended
Iconology could be apprehended by ascertaining
those underlying principles which reveal the basic
attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or
philosophical persuasion unconsciously qualified by
one personality and condensed into one work.

Irwin Panofsky. 1962 [1939]. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic themes in the art of
the Renaissance. P. 30.
Iconology becomes a means of getting to the heart
(body metaphors dont go away) of a peoples and
times zeitgeist or ethos

Body imagery, as much as any other form of
iconography, can reveal the spirit of a people in space
and time.
body and zeitgeist
Zeitgeist: the spirit of a time and place; its ideas, objects and
actions

Zeitgeist is becoming.

presupposed potentiality which
brings itself into existence
Different times give birth to different art. Epoch and race interact.

It remains no small problem to discover the conditions which, as material
element call it temperament, zeitgeist, or racial character determine the
style of individuals, periods and peoples.

Wolfflin. 1922. Preface to sixth edition of Principles of art history: The problem of
the development of style in art.

The body in art, as in language, says a great deal about particular zeitgeists.
I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all
sorts... I took them some of the most elaborate
passages in their own writings, and asked what was
the meaning of them... Will you believe me?... there
is hardly a person present who would not have
talked better about their poetry than they did
themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do
poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and
inspiration.

Socrates. Apology in The dialogues of Plato. Vol. 2.
Jowett, B. (ed.). London: Oxford University Press.
1924. P. 114.

Galen (131-200 AD)

In contemplation and
dissecting a pig


The four humours (phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile).

These points of focus relate to a theory of health as balance.

Organicist vision of world and body

Each of these four humours is related to the three principal points of the body:
head (phlegm), heart (blood), black bile (liver) and yellow bile (the liver's
complement, the gall bladder).

The three principal points of the body are also loosely linked to the Platonic
tripartite soul: head (sophia, reason), heart (thumos, emotion or spiritedness), liver
(epithumos, desire).

When one part of the soul/body is out of balance, then the individual becomes ill.
The physician's job is to assist the patient in maintaining balance.

If a person is too full of uncontrollable emotion or spiritedness, for example, then
he is suffering from too much blood. The obvious answer is to engage in
bloodletting (guaranteed to calm a person down).

Dissecting animals 16
th
C Interpretation of human organs from Galens pig studies


A late thirteenth-century
illustration of the venous
system within the body.

According to Galen the venous
system was distinct from the
arterial, and blood ebbed and
flowed through the body.

In the Western art history and history of
anatomy canons Galens anatomical
vision disseminated into the Middle East
where it persisted, stylistically, into the
19
th
century.

Watercolour, Persian, 19th century, based
on the work of Mansur ibn Muhammad
Ilyas, a 14th-century Persian anatomist,
and which are considered as derivative of
Galen.

Arabic medicine spread east with the
advance of Islam. In India it became
known as Unani tibb, meaning Ionian or
Greek medicine. It was based on the
Greek tradition of four humours -
blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile.




The text surrounding the image is
mixed Sanskrit and Old Gujarati and
mainly describes the mystical body of
tantric meditation and the flow of the
life force (prana) throughout the body.
The image shows the combination of
both Unani (based on Greek) and
Indian anatomical knowledge.

Sanskrit and Gujurati; c.18th century.
Wellcome Indic Sanskrit MS 74.
(Image no.L30226)

13
th
C after Galen

Veins within skin
Islamic horse anatomy

A spine and veins with no
organs

Legs in humanoid position

Veins transcend the horses
skin

15
th
C Egyptian horse

Organs but no veins

Splayed legs

Halo head

Standard interpretations have it that animal themes and
aesthetics emerged in anatomical drawings of humans
because there were religious taboos on using human
cadavers.

However, drawing animal into human, or human into
animal, stretches back in time and is consistently
present in Europe , Egypt and the Middle East, as well
as in Amerindian mythology and imagery.

Knowledge and behavioural traits associated with
particular animals from astrology and pagan mythology
and human relationships with the animals made during
domestication and through hunting.

Human pig
Human goat
Human ape
Human beast
The Great Chain of Being
Vitalist monism
English physician and mystical
philosopher Robert Fludd (1574-
1637) portrays his idea of creation's
plan.

God reaches out from a radiant
cloud to hold the chain that binds
Nature, the soul of the world.

Nature holds a chain attached to
the physical world, represented by a
monkey.

Humans, plants, animals, the arts,
the four elements, and the planets
all have their assigned place in what
was known in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance as the Great Chain
of Being.



A naked man and astrological
symbols (Pisces, the fish,
governs the feet)

Specific parts of the body
related to one of the twelve
signs of the zodiac

Medieval medical practices
were bound up in mysticism
and astrology


Zodiac man, Venice 1493 (left),
Lorraine 1533 (right)

Astrological anatomy with
moveable parts

Daniel Ricco 1790



Peter Camper, 1821

The Evolution of Man from
The Works... On the Connexion
between the Science of Anatomy and
the Arts of Drawing, Painting and
Statuary. London, 1821. The
Wellcome Institute Library.

Top: Heads of men and animals compared, Granvdille (pseudonym) 1844
Bottom: Man descending towards the brute, Grandville, 1843

Haeckel: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
(or pig is a stage of human development)
The Botanical Metaphor
vitalist monism

Disease was not the body breaking down and malfunctioning, but something that
came to live in the body with certain observable physical characteristics.

The task of the physician was to observe these characteristics in the way one might
observe the sprouting of a seed and waiting for the seedling's further growth that
reveals it to be this or that plant by the shape of its leaves and/or the nature of its
stem.

The task of nosology or the classification of disease was thus more like the task of
botany or zoology than the task of pathology. One did not dissect the plant or animal;
one watched it grow and noted how it grew better or worse in different environments.

These different environments were the different types of patient distinguished
according to age, sex, social class and physical robustness.

Just as the same plant, say rosemary, grows better or worse in different parts of the
garden (direct sun, semi-shade, winter sun, soil type, etc.), so a species of disease grew
differently in different bodies.

Disease, Anatomy and Autopsy
Contemporary understandings of disease have only been around since
the nineteenth century.

The space of configuration of the disease and the space of localization of
the illness in the body have been superimposed, in medical experience, for
only a relatively short period of timethe period that coincides with
nineteenth-century medicine and the privileges accorded to pathological
anatomy (Foucault 1975: 34).
In most medical degrees, anatomy (and pathological anatomy) is considered
to be as fundamental and preparatory as basic numeracy and literacy in
general science and arts.
Usually associated with anatomy is a class in dissection and a visit to the
specimen library where various body parts are grotesquely displayed in large
glass jars.
This is a way of seeing the body based on:
1) looking at dead bodies and;
2) looking at bodies as constituted of functionally interrelated
components where those components have broken down.




The implicit knowledge in the eighteenth century was different.

People did not conduct autopsies in order to generalise an understanding
of what disease is.

Conventionally, medical histories argue that the Church prohibited the
performance of autopsies.

As 'Man' was made in God's image, the human body was akin to a temple
that could not be desecrated, especially after death. Of course, this did
not keep people from engaging in dreadful acts of cruelty, but refined
science was not going to centre itself on a bad act.

Foucault showed that it was not simply a matter of a Church
prohibition on autopsy that kept scientists from doing them.

Doctors did not need to perform autopsies because their theory of
disease did not require them to do so.

Disease was not defined as a chain of cause and effect or as
something that produced symptoms through which it could be
diagnosed and through which its cause could be identified, but as a
total object that could be observed as a living thing in the body of a
patient.

The redness and swelling associated with pleurisy, for example,
were not symptoms of pleurisy affecting parts of the body, but the
outward and visible signs of the presence of pleurisy in the body.
Pleurisy was thus a living thing that came to be present in the body
in a way analogous to a plant taking root and growing in a garden.

Vesalius (1514-64)
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
Vesalius was the first anatomist to get his
hands dirty in human corpses,
transcending skin and focusing on
humans rather than human-non-human
animal analogies

Human as object of medeical science
VEINS

Veins, 1580 (left),
male anatomy 16
th
C
(right)

Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson, 1632
Below: Anatomical Venus
Clemente Susini
Late 18
th
C

Right: Female bust with open
abdomen
Giovan-Battista Manfredini, 1773-
76


What do you notice about these
women?

From organicist (social)
and botanical to liberal
(primacy of individual)

Vesalius vein man
Veins do not transcend skin,
but skin is transcended
Orifices are now understood as
being oriented inwards

Rise of microscience
corresponds to rise of
liberalism, end of organicism as
dominant notion to being


The advent of microscopy dealt humoural
medicine a great blow.


Humoral medicine-organicism/great chain
of being

Microscopy-liberlaism (self-contained
selves)

From early 17
th
C










Right: Early microscopy

Two opposing views of human nature lead to entirely different conceptualizations
of liberty and rights. The link between the doctrine of the rights of man and
contract theory is the postulate that the individual, and his rights and needs, in
virtue of a hypothetical law of nature, precedes the establishment of society. This
contrasts with the organicist view that has society existing prior to the individual,
or the social whole as taking precedence over its parts (hence emphasis on
relationality).

Contract theory was a major turning point in the history of political thought, and
it set us on a course in which the individual has become ever more central as a
nexus of political and social thought. Contract theorists reverse the relation
between individual and society that had existed, no longer saw society as a natural
fact existing independently of the will of the individual, but as an artificial body
created by individuals in their own image and likeness to promote the satisfaction
of their own interests and needs and the fullest exercise of their rights (Bobbio
2005:9).

The Copernican revolution of political theory and
human nature

Organicism
Universe constituted by parts and wholes constituting a
living organism (society as organism, individual as part
of society)

Individualism: moral stance and political philosophy
emphasising primacy of the individual (individual
prefigures society)





Without this Copernican revolution, which allowed the
problem of the state to be viewed for the first time through the
eyes of its subjects rather than its sovereign, the doctrine of the
liberal state, which is first and foremost the doctrine of juridical
limits to state power, would have been impossible. Without
individualism, there can be no liberalism (Bobbio 2005:9).

Selves and orifices
Orifice orientation affects constitution of self.

If the body needs to flow out into (at play with) the world to
maintain health, you would engage the world as an extension of
self (great chain of being, botanical metaphor)

Inward oriented orifices imply that the maintenance of health is
dependent upon input (medicine, food, etc), and that the self is a
closed unit (to be observed through a microscope rather than a
macroscope).

Orifice in: fear of contamination, pollutants, infection, self-
contained purity
Somatic metaphors
inhabit us


Metaphors relating to body
parts and bodily sensations
are pervasive cross-culturally
and through time

Do you think it is best to
follow your heart, your head
or your gut?

Why would we follow any
of these organs and where
would they take us anyway?


Orifice orientation and the constitution of self
Medieval humoral conceptualisations of the body had orifices
oriented towards outflow rather than inflow
Illnesses developed as imbalances and build-ups of bodily fluids
accrued, requiring periodic drainage
Diseases grew in bodies fed by sick environments

tight ass
Not generous, stuck up, stiff
Inadequate outward flow, lack of good bowel movements
By contrast the person suffering from diarrhoea is literally
spilling out into the world
Bloodletting...

Bloodletting Man

Skin
Protective or imprisoning shelter, encasing the soul or self
Skin is subject or self

Although bodies were much more extensively covered up than
they are now, language was closer to the body

English, German, Italian and French all have numerous phrases
and words relating skin to character of person

Benthien, C. 2002. Skin: On the cultural border between self and the world. New York : Columbia
University Press.
House, dress and machine metaphors

Benthien identifies two overarching body metaphors:
house;
dress

In last two centuries the body as house was largely
replaced by body as dress (I will continue to examine
these two metaphors for body in next weeks lecture,
with particular reference to body as garment or dress
on cyborgs and plastic surgery)

Body as machine

House
The house is the absolute metaphor for the body because it can be
considered (in Western thought) universal and self-referential (Blumenberg
1960).

Absolute metaphors, according to Blumenberg, answer those supposedly
naive, essentially unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in
the fact that they cannot be gotten rid of, because we do not pose them but
rather find them posed at the foundation of existence.

These metaphors are orientation guides and provide an order by representing
the totality of reality which can never be experienced and never fully grasped
(1960:19).
Body as house
The eyes are the windows, the nose the aperture
to the attic...

Tobias Cohen (1652-1729)
Book contains sections on astronomy, geography,
physiology, pharmacology, and medicine.

Freuds genital hollows: house, female genitals and
womb (enclosing a hollow space) (Freud 1963:153
(subsequently all shapes with hollows like chests,
boxes, etc, became symbols of the genital orifice
(156) in dream analysis.

A man complains, in a case of his wifes lost
virginity, that he has found the door open (162).

Introductory lecture on psychoanalysis. The standard
edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund
Freud, trans J. Strachey Vol. 15, London: Hogarth.


Tibetan body house
The two hip bones are like the
foundation for the walls. The spine is
like a pile of gold coins and the life
channel is like a pillar of agate. The
square sternum (breast-bone) is like
the supporting beams whilst the
twenty-four ribs closely resemble the
cross-beams. The costal cartilages are
like (projecting) brackets. The
channels and ligaments are like a
network of roof-laths (struts), whilst
the flesh and skin are like the
plaster....

The Quintessence Tantras of Tibetan
Medicine. 1995, trans. Barry Clark.
Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications. 51.
Body as house of the soul


Body/soul dualism

The soul departs through mouth at
moment of death

Christian medieval iconography, going back
to Classical times

The soul resides in the body until the body
perishes

Things entering the soul-house, then, were
often considered threats (i.e. temptation)
(outward rather than inward oriented
orifices), or could be an insight

Orifices as doors and gateways, venous and
digestive system feeding back into the soul


Homo clauses

Focus on being able to close up the doors (orifices,
senses), impermeability of skin as boundary,
possibility of leaving the static body house (amidst
a dynamic soul interior)

Discrepancy between subject and environment,
doors and windows, skin and senses mediate private
and social worlds, resulting in a glazing over of the
windows to protect from (shrinking orifices)...
Control over senses
(Benthien 2002:27-8).

Self as a private retreat, Homo clauses
a little world in himself who ultimately exists quite
independently of the great world outside
(Elias, N. 1978. The civilising process Trans Jephcott,
E. New York: Urizen, p. 249).

Elias makes the case that experience of inside
and outside is not a basic experience shared by
all humans, but a type of experience associated
with modernity


Problems with body housing
Skin as illusory: beauty is only skin deep

An upright woman in countenance, a bag of rot inside the
skin/Such are many; lasciviousness lies hidden, piety is put on
display. 17
th
C Friedrich Von Logeau Dubious chastity

Skin contact is associated with superficial relations while getting
into someones skin refers to a passionate and intimate
connection, that the loved one is touched and possessed by their
lover.
To hide. Hide as skin, skin which hides.
Skin as prison
uncomfortable in ones skin, a rogue in his
skin, a devil in his skin.
Skin as cover to be cast off in times of extreme
emotion (jump out of ones skin)
If only s/he knew the real me, the one
inside... Imprisoned in body soul dualism
The conceptual skin-wall protecting an inner self
may makes it impossible for an other to know you

A German trilogy (Jahnn, 1929, 1951):

I was so earnest and fulfilled that I wanted to reach
out for his heart. And he kept such a solemn and
saintly silence that I thought he was reaching for my
heart. But it was only skin that we touched, groping
until it was sore...

All I could do was look at him. And all I ever saw
was the boundary of his skin. At most, a silky abyss
would shine forth from the glass of his eyes.

Nobody knew the other. If there were a glass held
before the eyes, one looks through it as deeply as
one desires. The clothes off. The skin off. The
muscles off. The bones remain. Or the heart. The
soul. This something, which unadorned, does not
lie.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

Most clearly formulated ideas of contemporary biomedical
conceptions of human organism

Empiricist (show me the evidence), and devout Catholic

Cogito, ergo sum: from this assertion of faith, Descartes argued
that two classes of substance constitute the human organism
(palpable body and intangible mind).

Passions of the soul: essay in which Descartes tried to reconcile
material body with divine soul by seating the soul in the pineal
gland (later associated with dreaming, near death experiences,)
thus preserving the soul as the domain of theology and
legitimating the body as domain of science.

Cartesian thought

Dualism: the substance of mind is fundamentally different
to the substance of body

Spinzoa, Fludd: Monist (Nature/God) permeates everything

Damasio: Descartes error (that emotion was in the body and
not the mind)

Looking for Spinoza: mind is in the brain, brain is in the body

Descartes vision of a separate mind and body is common
to world religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, as well as
biomedicine and popular culture


The Cartesian legacy

Poor, stressed, family demands but what is the real cause of the
illness?

Real material (in a body)

Unreal social, experiential

The map is not the territory (an fmri is not experience)

body/mind
cognition/emotion
real/unreal
natural/supernatural
natural/cultural
disease/illness
individual/social (the basis of most social science)

Legacy of Cartesian dualism

Body/medicine radically materialist

Mind and social determinants of body recede to the shadows of the
clinical sciences

Mechanistic and individualistic perspective of the body and causation

It is in the mind

It is in the body
Where do I start? Is my mental system
bounded up at the handle of the stick?
Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start
half way up the stick? But these are
nonsense questions (Bateson
1972:459).

Scheper-Hughes and Lock propose three relating
perspectives through which to view the body:

(1) as a phenomenally experienced individual body-
self;
(2) as a social body, a natural symbol for thinking
about relationships among nature, society, and
culture; and
(3) as a body politic, an artifact of social and
political control (Scheper-Hughes & Lock
1987:6 italics original).




Scheper-Hughes, N. & Lock, M., 1987. The mindful body: A
prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology. Medical
anthropology quarterly 1(1):6-41.
It is not true that only the human reason opens the door
which leads to the understanding of reality, it is rather the
whole of the human mind, with all its functions and impulses,
all its potencies of imagination, feeling, volition, and logical
thinking which builds the bridge between mans soul and
reality, which determines and moulds our conception of
reality.

Gawronsky, D. 1973 [1949] Cassirer: His life and work. In
Schilpp, P.A. (ed.) The philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. La Salle. P. 25.


After a long period of sensory denial amidst cold baths of
reason, contemporary body art/technology is intensifying
linkages among senses, affect and reason...

20
th
century: psychoanalysis, social theories of consciousness and psycho-
somatic medicine, beginnings of reuniting the social mind and body

We have yet to link the social with the mind and the body
It is in society (socio-somatics)

We lack a precise vocabulary with which to deal with mind-body-society
interactions and so are left suspended in hyphens, testifying to the
disconnectedness of our thoughts. We are forced to resort to such fragmented
concepts as the bio-social, the psycho-somatic, the somato-social as altogether
feeble ways of expressing the myriad ways in which the mind speaks through the
body, and the ways that society is inscribed on the expectant canvas of human
flesh (Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987:10).

Psycho-somatics





I cant help the way I feel
John Isaacs, 2003
In this work lies an interest in a possibility of the emotional
landscape of the body becoming manifest in its surface. Visually,
the way in which the flesh grows, erupts, and engulfs the body
can be seen as a metaphor of the way in which we become
incapacitated by the emotional landscape in which we live and
over which we have little control. The body also appears to be
suffering from some kind of malignancy, as in cancer, but for
me, the image of the figure, coupled with the title, leads one into
an open contemplation of the plight of the individual.

John Isaacs


Socio-somatics
Guatemalan artist Jorge de Leon
performs Recuerdo (remember in
Spanish) by covering his body with
tape.

The body closes up as it recalls
relatives disappeared during
Guatemalas civil war (1960-96).
Hacking (2007) argues that the rise of organ trading and genetic
research indicates a return to a mechanical view of the body,
edging closer, not farther from the Cartesian dream of bodies as a
series of parts isolated in space.

Replaceability of large parts (organs), and small parts (genes)
New concept of death (brain death) emerged as a result of the
interchangeability of body parts (i.e. when is it ok to harvest
organs from a body?)

We can leave them in our wills to other, usually unknown
individuals who need them. We can buy them illicitly, if we are
rich enough, and sell them, if we are poor enough. We may be able
to grow body part repairs from stem cells or even cells from our
own bodies. Freeze your placenta, some mothers are told; your
child will be able to use it much later in life in order to make
repairs or even to grow its own spare parts (Hacking 2007:79).

Fritz Kahns
body machines


The nervous system depicted as a
complex electronic signalling system,
complete with buttons, charts and busy
workers.

Kahn's books and illustrations explored the
inner machinery of the human body, using
metaphors of modern industrial life.

Kahn turned the brain into a complex
factory with light projectors, conveyor
belts, secretaries and cinema screens;
he showed the journeys of blood cells as
locomotives encircling the globe; and he
compared bones to modern building
materials such as reinforced concrete.



Kahn was writing in the 1920s, a
period in of great industrial and
technological change. The
manufacturing industries were
achieving incredibly high levels of
efficiency thanks to the latest methods
of production: factory assembly lines,
for example, required only a simple
and relatively unskilled input from
factory workers. For these workers the
body was like a piece of clockwork, its
calculated movements acting solely as
a functional cog in the social machine.


A new nature was being constructed.

Man could now fly, speak to people on the
other side of the world, capture voices and
faces that, once preserved, would later
seem to be able to bring back the dead.

It was an era of excitement in which
people believed that technology had the
potential to create a world free from
poverty and hardship - a kind of utopia in
which machines would protect us from
nature's moods, and would provide
enough food and protection for all.

Many believe that the machine-human
utopia is still a future possibility.

From machine age to bio-
computational age
Glomerulus,
the main filter of
the nephron in
the kidney

Jim Stanis 2007,
photoshop

Material systems
Andrew Kudless
San Francisco


Biology, architecture and
computation


Kudless work is seen as
distinct in its conscious
mediation of the mathematical
and the sensual.



The algorithmic basis of the
wall gives way to the materiality
of the plaster, resulting in a
form more like an abstraction
of the human body than the
crystalline field that we have
come to expect from
algorithmic architecture.




Telekinetic Pavilion

The pulsing skin-clad sphere
responds to brain activity.

EEG sensors imbedded in
furniture and fed via processing
unit to a fluid muscle controller
that expands and contracts the
sphere.

People can gain bio-data on their
state of being, and are challenged
to alter it in a state of play with
other people and the pavilion.



Fusing architecture with the mechanics of the
body, wireless prosthetic sensors track
biorhythmic variability and skin conductance,
empowering the inhabitant to take mind-body
wellness into their own hands, literally, triggering
environmental change through fluctuating waves
of mood, thought and body temperature.

Kardashian selfie


Selfie from homo clausus to total
capitalist objectification: digital
communication reduces human to
commodity, and encourages people
participate in their own
fetishisation

Total objectification Peak of
western civilisation?
Vitalist monist and Organicist
(Spinoza/Damasio; botanical, humoral,
astrological, animal): veins pointing outward,
open body

Cartesian: (Vesalius-Descartes) homo clausus,
the Western self, materialist reductionism

individualist (micro-sciences), auto-
objectification and the retreat of the social




The history of the body is also the history of the senses, their denial or embrace, and
equally theories of human nature and the nature of society and the social.

Different understandings of how the skin, the senses, cognition, vitality, morality and
the social world interrelate.

While there is a movement toward understanding links between the senses, thought and
the body, synaesthetic passionate reasoning, we lack both the concepts and the
language to imagine a reality in which the psycho- and the social do not reduce to the
biological, and through the biological to negate the social (political) entirely.