The Second Body
The idea of a body which can reach over to the other side of the world is not one we tend to speak of in everyday language right now. In normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin - it is supposed to be inviolable. The language of the human animal is that of a whole and single individual. You are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself - to be whole, to be one. Move away from this personality, self-expression, and you risk going out of your mind, being yourself, failing to be true to yourself, hearing other voices or splitting your personality: it doesn't sound good. This careful language is anxious, I think - threatening in a desperate way. You need to take care of yourself, it says. You need boundaries, you have to be either here or there. Don't be all over the place.
Climate change creates a new language, in which you have to be all over the place; you are always all over the place. It makes every animal body implicated in the whole world. Pg. 13*.
Every living thing has two bodies these days – you are flying into the atmosphere and back down to the ground right now, but you can’t feel it. You breathe something in, and what you breath out is something else. Your first body is the one belonging to “you”, the place you live in made out of your own personal skin. Your second body is the body belonging to Gina, a body which is not so solid as the other one, but much larger. This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence – it is a version of you. It is not a concept; it is your own body. The language we have at the moment is weak: we might speak vaguely of global connections; of emission and circulation of gases; of impacts. And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another. The concept of a global impact is not working for us, and in the meantime, your body has already eaten the distance…. It understandably difficult to remember that you have anything to do with this second body – your first body is the body you inhabit in your daily life. However, you are alive in both. You have two bodies.
I need to find some place where real life and this global truth – the two bodies – come into one another. I want to make the second body come into the first body. I’m not going to tell you what to do with your second body or how to use it. The purpose of this book is just to find its real life. I want to incorporate the second body with the first. Because the body exists at different scales, I need to close in on it, starting from its most expansive expression. I want to start by talking about the whole world. Pg. 25 – 26*.
(*The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard)

Going Mad and Schizophrenia:

Human subjectivity, in all its uniqueness - what Guattari calls its 'singularity' - is as endangered as those rare species that are disappearing from the planet every day. It is up to us to resist this mass-media homogenization, which is both desingularizing and infantalizing, and instead invent new ways to achieve the resingularization of existence. Pg. 6*

The world is shrinking, and so are we. 'A vast majority of individuals are placed in a situation in which their personality is dwindling, their intentions are rapidly losing all consistency, the quality of their relations with others is dulled' (Guattari, 1 989c: 1 9). For Guattari, ' consistency' is indissociable from heterogeneity, and much of The Three Ecologies is concerned with attaining consistency again, becoming heterogeneous, singularizing ourselves, affirming our legitimate difference both from each other and from a notional ' Self'. It is a question of making a pragmatic intervention in one's own life in order to escape from the dominant capitalistic subjectivity. The objective of the new ecological practices that Guattari outlines is to 'activate isolated and repressed singularities that are turning around on themselves'. It isn't a question of exchanging one model or way of life for another, but of 'respond[ing] to the event as the potential bearer of new constellations of Universes of reference' (1 995a: 1 8). The paradox is this: although these Universes are not pre-established reference points or models, with their discovery one realizes they were always already there, but only a singular event could activate them. Pg. 10

We need to continually reinvent our lives like an artist. ' Life,' as Guattari has said elsewhere, ' is like a performance, one must construct it, work at it, singularize it' (1989c :20). It is an ongoing aesthetico-existential process. 'As we . . .weave and un-weave our bodies . . . from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and from, so does the artist weave and un-weave his image' Qoyce, 1 98 6: 1 59).

The best artists don't repeat themselves, they start over and over again from scratch, uncertain with each new attempt precisely where their next experiment will take them, but then suddenly, spontaneously and unaccountably, as the Francis Bacon has observed, ' there comes something which your instinct seizes on as being for a moment the thing which 1 you could begin to develop'. Life is a work in progress, with no goal in sight, only the tireless endeavour to explore new possibilities, to respond to the chance event - the singular
point - that takes us off in a new direction. As Bacon once remarked, 'I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.

Work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective singularity, construct and in a permanent way re-construct
this collectively in a multivalent liberation project. Not in reference to a directing ideology, but within the articulations of the Real. Perpetually recomposing subjectivity and praxis is only conceivable in the totally free movement of each of its components, and in absolute respect of their own times - time for comprehending or refusing to comprehend, time to be unified or to be autonomous, time of identification or of the most exacerbated differences. '(Guattari and Negri, 1 990: 1 20)

As he makes clear in The Three Ecolo9ies, there will be moments when eco-activists work together, and other times when they drift apart again. The important thing is that they do not have a leader directing their activity.
There is of course a tension at work here between solidarity and dissensus. It requires that a plurality of disparate groups come together in a kind of unified disunity, a pragmatic solidarity without solidity; what one might call, for want of a better word, 'fluidarity'.
Pg. 12 – 15*

have invoked ethical paradigms principally in order to underline the responsibility and necessary 'engagement' required not only of psychiatrists but also all of those in the fields of education, health, culture, sport, the arts, the media, and fashion, who are in a position to intervene in individual and collective psychical proceedings. It is ethically untenable for these psychiatrists to shelter, as they so often do, behind a transferential neutrality supposedly founded upon a scientific corpus and on a perfect mastery of the unconscious. More so given that the domain of psychiatry has established itself as the extension of, and at the interface with, aesthetic domains. I have stressed these aesthetic paradigms because I want to emphasize that everything, particularly in the field of practical psychiatry, has to be continually reinvented, started again from scratch, otherwise the processes become trapped in a cycle of deathly repetition [repetition mortifere].
The precondition for any revival of analysis - through schizoanalysis, for example - consists in accepting that as a general rule, and however little one works on them, individual and collective subjective assemblages
are capable, potentially, of developing and proliferating well beyond their ordinary equilibrium. 30 By their very essence analytic cartographies extend beyond the existential Territories to which they are assigned. As in painting or literature, the concrete performance of these cartographies requires that they evolve and innovate, that they open up new futures, without their authors [ auteurs] having prior recourse to assured theoretical principles or to the authority of a group, a school or an academy . . . Work in progress! 3 1 An end to psychoanalytic, behaviourist or systematist catechisms. In order to converge with the perspective of the art world, psychiatrists must demonstrate that they have abandoned their white coats, beginning with those invisible ones that they wear in their heads, in their language and in the ways, they conduct them
selves. The goal of a painter is not to repeat the same painting indefinitely (unless they are Titorelli, who in Kafka's The Trial always painted identical portraits of the same judge). 32 Similarly, every care organization, or aid agency, every educational institution, and any individual course of treatment ought to have as its primary concern the continuous development of its practices as much as its theoretical scaffolding. Pg. 39 – 40*

(*The Three Ecologies - Felix Guattari)