A body is no longer discernible as it merges with its world. There are no longer distinct forms but only abstract, molecular lines, a cosmic web.

‘By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clan- destine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible.’

‘My ‘own’ body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human. My flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners. We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes.’

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: 280

the tide pushes a little further

shore shifting

thrusting itself

inching closer toward my feet

Fluid licks

cool currents glisten

trying to pull me in

no resistance

one body reaching for another

along the sand

The moving body is a liminal space, a site where narratives can play out at the intersection of history, landscape, architecture and experience. The body is relationality. Affective potentials play through it; the potential of the body to affect and to be affected, to move and to be moved, to feel and to arouse feeling. I am a being-in-the-world, a body of-the-world. The porous, visceral and enlivened experiences of my inhabited world are grounded in embodiment.

Corporeality, coined by Elizabeth Grosz is the understanding that the body and mind smoothly transform into one another. The entangled nature of body and mind is also present in texts by Rosi Braidotti, where she stresses the need ‘to acknowledge the embodiment of the brain and the embrainment of the body’*, thus seeing both as not only interconnected and inseparable, but intra-connected, and impossible to detach from one another prior to their relation. Grosz further develops her notion of the body as corporeality, meaning ‘a system, or series of open-ended systems, functioning within other huge systems it cannot control, through which it can access and acquire its abilities and capacities.’*

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: 112-13

consciousness psyche soma reason instinct unconsciousness logic emotion

This theoretical move points to the fact that the body as bodily, corporeal, material is irreversibly linked to the materiality of the world – it is not only located in the world, but it is of the world. As Karen Barad writes: ‘We are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity.’*

Rosi Braidotti, Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism: 33
Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: 3
Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: 828

‘Things snapping into form can animate expectations, recognitions, judgments, dreams, the stab at a truth. Or they can chafe like a heavy, aching body. The state you're in is the state you're in, and yet it takes such fine-tuning, such hard-won accretion, such a labored, consuming response that it also propels.'

Kathleen Stewart, Attunements: 451

‘Therefore, criticality, is a state of duality in which one is at one and the same time, both empowered and disempowered, knowing and unknowing, thus giving a slightly different meaning to Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘we, fellow sufferers’. So it would seem that criticality is in itself a mode of embodiment, a state from which one cannot exit or gain a critical distance but which rather marries our knowledge and our experience in ways that are not complimentary. Unlike ‘wisdom’ in which we supposedly learn from our experience, criticality is a state of profound frustration in which the knowledge and insights we have amassed do very little to alleviate the conditions we live through (...) the point of criticality is not to find an answer but rather to access a different mode of inhabitation.'

Irit Rogoff, Smuggling: 2

embodiment