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)
“We must think! And thinking is a materialist practice. It is not some kind of off into the skies to do theory from above. But that kind of rich, materialist inquiring with each other who and where we are, and so what? The old “What is to be done?” The question of the Russian Revolution. That leads to the Russian Revolution. What is to be done in periods of profound historical earthly transformation that are extremely dangerous. I think, thinking together, reading and write and speaking and performing and dancing and growing and risking and working. Thinking is a complex materialist practice for somehow coming together to be less stupid.” 5:00 - 6:00mins
“At risk together… taking risks is part of life… or another word would be constituting with moving with shifting with the earth… living in a terrestrial way… learning from those that are connected to the earth.”
“Tell the stories of the carrier bags and the ones that are not western history…. We’ve heard the white prick-tale, the dick-tale, story of capitalism long enough…Now it’s time to hear, carry and share other stories that have been around and are ongoing and see how they tell it, have told it, will tell it.”*
“End of history! What arrogance! That somehow…. First of all, that history is Western. Just nuts. That somehow, the profound ways of living and narrating and performing and closing in, as well as spreading, ways of living, the notion that history is Western is the same arrogance that produces “Man”. And the “end of history is a fantasy. Where I go back to Ursula Le Guin and her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. We’ve heard the prick-tale, the dick-tale, long enough, thank you. It’s way past time to make louder and to tell ourselves the stories, the stories of ongoing, the stories of the netbags, of the sharing. Which of course include horrible things, too. And as Ursula Le Guin Says in the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. It’s not that she’s in a good mood, she’s constantly old-ladyish whacking people with her purse. The notion of the End of History is just arrogant!” * 30:00 - 31:25mins
“Living in the terrestrial is being at risk to each in the course of living and dying with all those who make the earth.
Being engaged in a collaboration and conflict that, kind of full of friction and joy, learning from and with each other and tugging each other into places we didn’t originally want to go, for both of us.”* 8:40mins
Take a second, take a little time to find something that you really care about. Something that matters. I don’t care if its big or little but something that matters. And how from that one proposes building a connection for a revolutionary terrestrial subject? How one proposes building the connectivity which can be part of transformation? 50:51 -501:03
Donna J. Haraway
